Joe Rogan Experience #1294 - Jamie Metzl

1. 0:03 – 2:00

   Sacred cacao ceremonies and “self-declared” shamanism

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:03

      Boom, and we're live. Hello, sir. How are you?

   2. JMJamie Metzl0:05

      Hey.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:05

      Good to see you, man. You look great.

   4. JMJamie Metzl0:06

      I'm great. How are you? Nice to see you. Thanks.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:07

      What? You, you were eating chocolate when you got here, and you told me that you are a cacao shaman. And I said, "Those are strong words."

   6. JMJamie Metzl0:14

      They are.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      What does that mean?

   8. JMJamie Metzl0:15

      So, I was in Berlin last year giving a talk at a tech conference, and somebody invited me to a sacred cacao ceremony.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      Mm. Mm.

   10. JMJamie Metzl0:21

       Never heard of it, and I thought, "Wow, that sounds awesome. I love chocolate." I went, it was so wonderful, and at the end, they were talking about these people, these great cacao shamans. And I thought, "What is that? I gotta be one of those."

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:33

       (laughs)

   12. JMJamie Metzl0:33

       And so I came back, I looked for certification. There wasn't certification. I self-declared, and then I started doing, uh, cacao ceremonies in New York. Now I have hundreds of people who come. It's really wonderful and it's exciting.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:45

       Like, if you wanna be a doctor, you gotta go to medical school, right?

   14. JMJamie Metzl0:48

       Yeah. That, that's-

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:48

       If you wanna be a comedian, you gotta be a, become a professional, you gotta put in your time.

   16. JMJamie Metzl0:51

       Cacao shaman, just show up.

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:53

       (laughs) Just, just declare it.

   18. JMJamie Metzl0:53

       It's like putting up a shingle, "Hey, I'm a cacao shaman." If anybody shows up and they have a good time, then you're real.

   19. JRJoe Rogan0:58

       Now how much do you need to know about cacao, like the nutritional properties of it?

   20. JMJamie Metzl1:02

       Well, cacao is amazing.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:03

       It's great stuff.

   22. JMJamie Metzl1:04

       It's incredible. And, and so definitely cacao, and people have been using it ceremonially for about 5,000 years, um, so it's incredible. Um, chocolate makes people happy. It helps your brain function, your circulation. I mean, there's all these kinds of incredible things. But in the ceremonies that I do, I have two key messages. One is, you are the drug. I mean, we all take, people take drugs, people take ayahuasca or in psilocybin, all these kinds of things. But I also think that we have, for the things that we take drugs for, this kind of release and happiness and joy, we have those things inside of us, and we just kinda get out of our way, we can experience them. And the second thing is, I believe that there are no, and I say this in my ceremonies, there's no such thing as sacred cacao or sacred plants or sacred mountains or sacred people if we don't treat life with sacredness. But if we recognize that everything is sacred-

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:55

       Mm.

   24. JMJamie Metzl1:55

       ... then we infuse life with sacredness and, and meaning, and that's, anyway, that's why I do it. It's a lot of fun.

2. 2:00 – 3:51

   From Darwinian evolution to humans “looking under the hood” of life

   1. JRJoe Rogan2:00

      That's very interesting from a guy who specializes essentially in manipulating life.

   2. JMJamie Metzl2:06

      Well, you know, we have manipulated life as humans for a very, very long time.

   3. JRJoe Rogan2:11

      Oh, for sure. But it's i-, but it's interesting.

   4. JMJamie Metzl2:12

      Yeah, yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan2:12

      You know, the idea of things being sacred, but your specialty is manipulating genetics, right? I mean-

   6. JMJamie Metzl2:18

      Yeah, well, so that is this strange moment that we're in-

   7. JRJoe Rogan2:22

      Hmm.

   8. JMJamie Metzl2:22

      ... because for about four, about 3.8 billion years, our species has evolved by this set of principles we call Darwinian evolution, random mutation, and natural selection, and it's brought us here. We used to be single-cell organisms, and now look at us.

   9. JRJoe Rogan2:35

      Hmm.

   10. JMJamie Metzl2:36

       And there's been a lot of magic in that process, and there still is. But we humans are deciphering some of that magic. We are, like, looking under the hood of what it means to be human, and we are increasingly going to have the ability to manipulate all of life, including our own.

   11. JRJoe Rogan2:52

       Yeah, that is very unnerving to a lot of people. It's, it's-

   12. JMJamie Metzl2:55

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:55

       ... it's uncomfortable and scary. And-

   14. JMJamie Metzl2:58

       Yeah. It is.

   15. JRJoe Rogan2:59

       They, they like things the way they are.

   16. JMJamie Metzl3:01

       We always-

   17. JRJoe Rogan3:01

       "Jamie, I'd like to stay the way I am."

   18. JMJamie Metzl3:03

       We always think that. There's th-

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:05

       Why do we always think that?

   20. JMJamie Metzl3:05

       Because w- there's a built-in conserva- conservatism in our brains. Um, and yet we live these lives that are entirely dependent on these radical changes that our ancestors have created. I mean, we didn't find this building or agriculture or medicine, uh, in nature. We built all those things. Then everybody gets a new baseline when you're born, and you think, "Well, you know, I'm, I want, you know, organic corn."

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:32

       Mm-hmm.

   22. JMJamie Metzl3:33

       "I want whatever." But all these things are creation. We live in an entirely created world, and our ability to manipulate and change that world is always growing. And I think we need to recognize that. But there's, being afraid is, is okay, and being excited is okay, and we need to find the right balance between those two emotions.

3. 3:51 – 4:31

   GMO foods, the meaning of “natural,” and why we romanticize the past

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:51

      I think for a lot of people, they feel like so many changes happened, particularly when you talk about genetically modified foods, so many things happened before they realized they had happened. So when they're like, "Hey, man, I don't want to eat any, eat any GMO fruit."

   2. JMJamie Metzl4:03

      Right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:03

      Well, then you probably shouldn't eat any fruit.

   4. JMJamie Metzl4:06

      Yup.

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:06

      Because everything that you buy-

   6. JMJamie Metzl4:08

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:08

      ... has been changed. Like-

   8. JMJamie Metzl4:10

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan4:10

      ... every orange that you buy, that, that's not what an orange used to be like.

   10. JMJamie Metzl4:13

       Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan4:14

       Go buy an apple. Apples didn't use to be like that. Tomatoes didn't use to be like that.

   12. JMJamie Metzl4:17

       No, I know, uh, that's, we, we reset our baseline just-

   13. JRJoe Rogan4:20

       Mm-hmm.

   14. JMJamie Metzl4:20

       ... from when we were kids. So if you went back 12,000 years ago to the end of the last Ice Age, and you said, "All right, find me all these things that we buy at Whole Foods," most of them didn't exist. We, we've created them.

   15. JRJoe Rogan4:31

       Sure.

4. 4:31 – 7:37

   Entering the era of genetically modified humans—and the public backlash risk

   1. JMJamie Metzl4:31

      And then in the 1970s, we had the ability to do what's recombinant DNA, what people call genetic, uh, modification. And people are afraid because it's, well, that feels unnatural. We're applying science to, to food. Um, and, you know, that's, that's the issue. And now we're, we're entering the era of genetically modified humans, and there's that same level of uncomfortableness. But what happened, the reason why I've, I've written this, uh, this book, Hacking Darwin, is that if we approach genetically modified humans in the same way the, uh, we approach genetically modified foods, which is the scientists say, "Hey, we've got this. We're gonna manage them responsibly," and it just kind of happens to people, people are gonna go nuts. I mean, imagine how agitated people are about GMO foods. If they don't have a say in how the genetic, the experience, the human experience of genetic modification plays out, people are gonna go berserk. So we have this window of time where we can start bringing everybody into an inclusive conversation about where we're going, because where we are going is just radically different from where we've been.

   2. JRJoe Rogan5:34

      Yeah, I think it's an awareness issue, and I also think it's a perception issue. I think that everything people do is natural.

   3. JMJamie Metzl5:42

      Yeah, well-

   4. JRJoe Rogan5:42

      Including cities.

   5. JMJamie Metzl5:43

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan5:43

      I think cities are natural, that's why they're all over the world.

   7. JMJamie Metzl5:45

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan5:46

      I think they're as natural as beehives. And I think as much as we like to think that technology is not natural, it's clearly something people naturally make.

   9. JMJamie Metzl5:53

      Of course, it's-

   10. JRJoe Rogan5:54

       They make it in every culture-

   11. JMJamie Metzl5:55

       Yeah. It's the hi-

   12. JRJoe Rogan5:55

       ... if they can.

   13. JMJamie Metzl5:56

       It's the history of-

   14. JRJoe Rogan5:57

       Yeah.

   15. JMJamie Metzl5:57

       ... our species. And we, we kind of misuse this word natural.

   16. JRJoe Rogan6:00

       Natural. Yeah.

   17. JMJamie Metzl6:00

       'Cause we, 'cause what is natural? I mean, maybe natural was when we used to live, and we were just part of, of nature. And I always say it's like people say, "Oh, I love nature. I love, like, going out and hiking in the woods." The reason you love hiking in the woods is that we've murdered all the predators.

   18. JRJoe Rogan6:15

       (laughs)

   19. JMJamie Metzl6:16

       It's like in the old days, in the y- you stay in your cave, you're not going out and hiking in the woods.

   20. JRJoe Rogan6:20

       Right.

   21. JMJamie Metzl6:20

       There's, there's stuff that's gonna kill you out there.

   22. JRJoe Rogan6:22

       I know, that was a massive luxury to go wander through the forest with no weapons.

   23. JMJamie Metzl6:26

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan6:26

       Like, nobody did that. (laughs)

   25. JMJamie Metzl6:27

       Exactly. (laughs) No, exactly. But he goes, "Oh, I want nature. I want my, you know, my natural corn. I want my, my natural chihuahua," even though, you know, 25 th- thousand years ago, there was no chihuahuas.

   26. JRJoe Rogan6:38

       There was the wolf.

   27. JMJamie Metzl6:38

       There's wolves.

   28. JRJoe Rogan6:39

       Yeah.

   29. JMJamie Metzl6:39

       And look what we've done to them.

   30. JRJoe Rogan6:40

       I know. Well, look what we have done to them.
5. 7:37 – 14:09

   Regulation dilemmas: who governs, and what about China and Russia?

   1. JRJoe Rogan7:37

      Yeah. You, um, when you think about the future, uh, at least me, the, well, let me tell you my concern.

   2. JMJamie Metzl7:45

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan7:46

      I'm worried that rich people are gonna get ahold of this technology quick, and they're going to have massive unfair advantages in terms of intellect-

   4. JMJamie Metzl7:54

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan7:54

      ... in terms of physical, athletic ability, all t- Uh, I mean, we l- we really can have a grossly imbalanced world radically quickly if this happens fast-

   6. JMJamie Metzl8:05

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan8:05

      ... where we don't understand exactly what the consequences of these actions are-

   8. JMJamie Metzl8:09

      Yep.

   9. JRJoe Rogan8:09

      ... until it's too late, and then we try to play catch up with rules, and regulations, and laws.

   10. JMJamie Metzl8:14

       Yeah. That's a very, very real danger. And that's why I've written this book. That's why I'm out speaking every day about this-

   11. JRJoe Rogan8:20

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JMJamie Metzl8:20

       ... this topic because we need to recognize that if we have, if we approach these revolutionary technologies using the same values that we experience today where, you know, we're here and very comfortable, but just down the road, there are people who are just, who are living without many opportunities. There are people in, in parts of the world, like Central African Republic, where there's just a war zone, kids are born malnourished. Um, if those are our values today, we can expect that when these future technologies arrive, we'll use those, those same values. So, it's real, and right now, we have an opportunity to say, "All right, these technologies are coming. Whatever we do, these technologies are coming. There's a better possible future, and a worse possible future. And how can we infuse our best values into the process to optimize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff?" And certainly, what you're saying is a real risk. Think of what happened when European countries had slightly better weapons and slightly better ships than everybody else. They took over the world and dominated everybody.

   13. JRJoe Rogan9:20

       Mm-hmm.

   14. JMJamie Metzl9:20

       And so, yeah, that's, it's very real. That's, uh, governments need to play a role in ensuring broad access and, and regulating these, uh, these technologies to make sure we don't get to that kind of dystopian scenario that you've laid out.

   15. JRJoe Rogan9:33

       Well, it's also the, in terms of governments regulating things, like, why are they qualified? Who are they? Who, who are the governments? They're just people, right?

   16. JMJamie Metzl9:41

       It's true. Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan9:41

       They're people that are either elected or that, uh, you know, are-

   18. JMJamie Metzl9:44

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan9:44

       ... some sort of a monarchy or... You, you're dealing with either kings and queens and sheikhs, or you're dealing with presidents. And we've seen in this country-

   20. JMJamie Metzl9:54

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan9:54

       ... that sometimes our presidents don't know what the fuck they're talking about, right?

   22. JMJamie Metzl9:57

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan9:57

       So, who are they to disrupt science, to s- to disrupt this natural flow of technology-

   24. JMJamie Metzl10:03

       Well, we need-

   25. JRJoe Rogan10:04

       ... and decide?

   26. JMJamie Metzl10:04

       We need somebody to do it. We need some representation of our collective will be- just to avoid some of the things, like you just-

   27. JRJoe Rogan10:12

       Yeah.

   28. JMJamie Metzl10:12

       ... like you just mentioned. That that's the reason why humans banded together and made these kind of, the, uh, made, created governments.

   29. JRJoe Rogan10:19

       Mm-hmm.

   30. JMJamie Metzl10:19

       And the reason for democracy, especially if you have more functioning democracies, is that your government, in some ways, uh, reflects the will of the people. And the government does things that individuals can't do. And I know there are, uh, there are libertarian arguments where everyone should just, like, if you want a little road in front of your house, either go build the road-
6. 14:09 – 17:02

   Gene therapy is already here: CAR-T and the near-term path to enhancement

   1. JMJamie Metzl14:09

      So physically manipulating living human beings, we're there.

   2. JRJoe Rogan14:13

      We're there?

   3. JMJamie Metzl14:13

      So... Yeah, yeah. So the- that's... M- often, it's, it's called gene therapy. So for example, there's a whole class of, of treatments for, uh, for treating cancer, called CAR T therapy. So you have a cancer. When you're younger, your body is better able to fight cancers. Um, what you can do, someone with a cancer, you take their cells, you give their... You manipulate their cells to give them cancer-fighting superpowers, and you put them back into the person's body. And now, the person's body behaves like you're a younger person, you have the ability to fight back. So gene therapies are already happening. A relatively small number of them have already been approved. Um, but there is a list of thousands of them with regulators, uh, in applications to regulators around the world. So the, the era of gen- making genetic changes to living humans, that's already here.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:01

      Like, what can they do with it so far?

   5. JMJamie Metzl15:03

      So, so far, most of it is focused on treating diseases. Um, but a lot more is, uh, is coming. Because when people think about the, the human, the genome, our genome isn't a disease genome, it's not a healthcare genome, genome, it's a human genome. And so we are going to be able to do things that feel like cr- crazy things, like changing people's eye color, changing people's skin color to funky things. I mean, there's a lot of, of re- that we're- stuff that we're not doing now that we will be, uh, be able to do. And then-

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:31

      How far away do you think we are from something like that?

   7. JMJamie Metzl15:34

      10 years?

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:34

      So in 10 years, we're gonna have green people?

   9. JMJamie Metzl15:37

      If in-

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:38

       If someone so chooses?

   11. JMJamie Metzl15:39

       Yeah, if someone so chooses and if it's-

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:40

       What if it sucks, will they be able to go back to normal color?

   13. JMJamie Metzl15:42

       Well, if it's... (laughs) That's a good question. Um, if it's with this kind of gene therapy, and it's a small number of genes, probably, but we are messing with very complex systems that we don't fully understand.

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:54

       Hmm.

   15. JMJamie Metzl15:54

       And so that's why there's a lot of unknowns. And coming back to your point on regulation, that's why we t- I don't think we want a total free-for-all, where people say, "Hey, I'm gonna-"

   16. JRJoe Rogan16:01

       Of course not.

   17. JMJamie Metzl16:01

       "... edit my own genes."

   18. JRJoe Rogan16:02

       Yeah. You don't want some backyard hustler-

   19. JMJamie Metzl16:06

       Yeah, it's true. (laughs)

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:07

       ... to a lab. (laughs)

   21. JMJamie Metzl16:08

       It's true, because like you're saying about the Hulk.

   22. JRJoe Rogan16:10

       Yeah.

   23. JMJamie Metzl16:10

       I mean, I just think that there are all kinds of... You know, we're humans, we're diverse, any kind of thing that you can think of, there is a range.

   24. JRJoe Rogan16:16

       Yeah.

   25. JMJamie Metzl16:16

       And there's th- you know, crazy on the left and crazy on the right and crazy on the top. And so people are gonna want to do things.

   26. JRJoe Rogan16:21

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JMJamie Metzl16:22

       And the question is, with any society, what do we think is okay and what do we think is not okay? And, and maybe there should be some, I, I believe, there should be some limit to how far people can go with experimenting, uh, certainly, possibly likely on themselves, but certainly on their future children.

   28. JRJoe Rogan16:41

       Certainly on their future children.

   29. JMJamie Metzl16:42

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan16:42

       Yeah. But once you're 18, I think do whatever the fuck you want. If you really... Well, maybe 25.
7. 17:02 – 22:53

   Three revolutions: personalized medicine, predictive genetics, and redesigning reproduction

   1. JMJamie Metzl17:02

      So I think that we are, ha- we... The genetic revolution has already begun.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:07

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JMJamie Metzl17:07

      And it's going to fundamentally change our lives in, in three big areas. The first is our healthcare. So we're moving from a system of generalized healthcare based on population averages, so that when you go to your doctor, you're treated because you're a human, just based on average, and we're moving to a world of personalized medicine, and the foundation of your personalized healthcare will be your sequenced genome and your electronic health records. That's how they know you are you.

   4. JRJoe Rogan17:30

      Hmm.

   5. JMJamie Metzl17:31

      And that's how they can say, "This is a drug. This is an int- intervention that'll work for you." When we do that, then we're going to have to sequence everybody. So we're gonna have about two billion people have had their whole genome sequenced, uh, within a, um, within a da- a decade. And then we're gonna be able to compare-... what the genes say to how those genes are expressed, and then humans become a big data set. And that's gonna move us from precision to predictive healthcare, where you're going to be just born and you're gonna have all this information, your parents have all this in- about how certain really important aspects of your life are gonna play out. And some of that is going to be disease-related, but some of that's just gonna be life-related. Like, you have a- a better than average chance of being really great at math, or having a high IQ, or low IQ, or being a great sprinter, and how do we think about that? And then, again, a revolution that's already happening, we're just gonna change the way we make babies. We're gonna get away from sex as the primary mechanism for conceiving our kids. We'll still have sex for all the great reasons, uh, we do. And that's gonna open up a whole new world of, uh, just of how- of applying science, um, to what it means to be a human with a lot of new possibilities.

   6. JRJoe Rogan18:38

      That's what's gonna be so freaky when people-

   7. JMJamie Metzl18:40

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan18:40

      ... stop having sex to make kids and they make-

   9. JMJamie Metzl18:42

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan18:42

       ... kids in a lab, every kid's made in a lab.

   11. JMJamie Metzl18:44

       Well, not only that, I think we're going to move to an era- an era where people who have- who make babies through sex will be seen as taking a risk, kind of like people who don't vaccinate their kids-

   12. JRJoe Rogan18:56

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JMJamie Metzl18:56

       ... where it's natural to not- it's more natural to not vaccinate your kids than to do it, but people say, "Wait a second, you're taking on a risk on behalf of your kids." About 3% of all kids in the world are born with some kind of harmful genetic abnormality. Using in vitro fertilization and embryo screening, that 3% can be brought down significantly. And what happens if you see somebody 20 years from now who has a kid with one of those preventable diseases? Do you think that's fate or do you think, "Well, wait a second, those parents, they made an ideological decision about how they wanted to conceive their kids"? So, I- I think we're moving towards some really deep and fundamental changes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan19:35

       Hmm. Similar- Well, yeah, that's a- that's an interesting conversation of whether or not you- w- I wonder what- if we're ever gonna get to a point where people don't allow people, sort of like people don't allow people to not get vaccinated.

   15. JMJamie Metzl19:51

       Right.

   16. JRJoe Rogan19:51

       And like, there's a lot of that going on today.

   17. JMJamie Metzl19:54

       Right, right.

   18. JRJoe Rogan19:55

       Which is great, right?

   19. JMJamie Metzl19:56

       Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan19:56

       You don't want diseases floating around. But what if that gets to the place where we do that with people, with people creating-

   21. JMJamie Metzl20:04

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan20:04

       ... new life forms? What if you say-

   23. JMJamie Metzl20:05

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan20:06

       ... "Hey, you are being irresponsible, you're just having sex"-

   25. JMJamie Metzl20:09

       Right.

   26. JRJoe Rogan20:09

       ... "and having a kid."

   27. JMJamie Metzl20:09

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan20:10

       "I know that's how your grandma did it. We don't do it that way in 2099."

   29. JMJamie Metzl20:13

       Yeah. I think it's gonna be hard to do that in a society like the United States, but in a country like North Korea?

   30. JRJoe Rogan20:19

       They'll be able to do that.
8. 22:53 – 26:51

   Embryo selection at scale and the ethics of ‘choosing’ future children

   1. JRJoe Rogan22:53

      How long do you think before we have a person with four arms?

   2. JMJamie Metzl22:56

      I think it's gonna take a long time.

   3. JRJoe Rogan22:58

      Couple hundred years?

   4. JMJamie Metzl22:59

      Well, the thing is, he- here's how I see it. So, the real driver, there's two- two primary drivers. One will be embryo selection. Um, so right now, average woman, uh, going through IVF has about 15 eggs extracted. Um, and then in IVF, in vitro fertilization, those eggs are fertilized using the male sperm. And in average male ejaculation, there's about a billion sperm cells. So, men are just giving it away. Women, uh, human female mammals are a little bit- are a little bit stingy. But then the next killer application is using a process, um, called induced pluripotent stem cells. And so Shinya Yamanaka, this great, uh, Japanese scientist, won the 2012 Nobel Prize for developing a way to turn any adult cell into a stem cell. So, a stem cell is a kind of cell, it can be anything.Um, and so, you take, let's say, a skin graft that has millions of cells. You induce those, uh, those adult skin cells into stem cells. So, you use these four things called Yamanaka factors. And so now, you have, let's call it, 100,000 stem cells. And then you can induce those cells into egg precursor cells, and then eggs. So all of a sudden, humans are creating eggs like salmon on this huge scale. So, you have 100,000 eggs, fertilize them with the male sperm in a machine, an automated process, you grow them for about five days, and then you sequence cells extracted from each one of those. And the cost of genome sequencing in 2003 was a billion dollars. Uh, now, it's $800. It's gonna be next to nothing within a decade.

   5. JRJoe Rogan24:36

      (sniffs)

   6. JMJamie Metzl24:36

      And then you have real options, 'cause then you get this- th- this whole spreadsheet, an algorithm. And then y- you go to the parents and say, "Well, what are your priorities?" And maybe they'll say, "Well, I want health, I want longevity, I want high IQ." When you're choosing from big numbers like that, you have some real options. And then on top of that, then there is this precision gene editing, the stuff that happened in- in China last year. I think it will, it will be... And then re- coming back to your question about four arms, I think it's gonna be very... People have this idea that t- tools like CRISPR are gonna be used, someone's gonna sit at a computer and say-

   7. JRJoe Rogan25:07

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JMJamie Metzl25:07

      ... "I'd like four arms and three heads and- and wings and- and whatever." But it's pretty hard because, um, human biology is incredibly complicated and we- we- we always know more, um, but we're at the very beginning of understanding the full complexity of human biology enough to make these big kind of changes. But if you're choosing from 100,000 fertilized eggs, those are all your natural kids.

   9. JRJoe Rogan25:29

      Yeah. And then you would get the best of that and then work on those.

   10. JMJamie Metzl25:33

       Exactly.

   11. JRJoe Rogan25:34

       Yeah.

   12. JMJamie Metzl25:34

       That's exactly the model. You get that, and then you say, "All right."

   13. JRJoe Rogan25:37

       What if you had, like, 20 sons that were awesome and they didn't tell you about 18 of them, and you kept two of them. Then 18 of them, they sh- shipped off to some military industrial complex-

   14. JMJamie Metzl25:48

       Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan25:48

       ... turned them into assassins?

   16. JMJamie Metzl25:50

       Any kind of crazy thing you can think of-

   17. JRJoe Rogan25:52

       That's the problem, right?

   18. JMJamie Metzl25:53

       It's, uh, all this stuff will be possible. And so, in a lot of technologies, you can imagine all kinds of crazy stuff, and that's coming back to your earlier point about regulations. We want to live in regulated environments.

   19. JRJoe Rogan26:04

       Mm-hmm.

   20. JMJamie Metzl26:04

       I mean, so like now, think of the internet. And, you know, in the beginning days of the internet, people thought, "Oh, just let the internet be. Let, you know, just let it play out. It's gonna liberate all of us." And now, China is showing how the internet can be actually, be really actively used to suppress people. Facebook is-

   21. JRJoe Rogan26:19

       Yeah.

   22. JMJamie Metzl26:19

       ... is taking people's information, and Google, in a way that's frightening a lot of people. And people are saying, "Hey, it shouldn't be that these companies can do whatever they want." We have to have some way of establishing limits because not every individual is able to entirely protect themselves. They don't have the power, they don't have all the information.

   23. JRJoe Rogan26:35

       Right.

   24. JMJamie Metzl26:36

       So, we need some representatives helping us with that.

   25. JRJoe Rogan26:38

       The- the real concern is the competition, right? The real concern is whether or not we do something with reg- in regards to regulation-

   26. JMJamie Metzl26:45

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan26:45

       ... that somehow another stifles competition on our end and doesn't-

   28. JMJamie Metzl26:47

       Right.

   29. JRJoe Rogan26:47

       ... allow us to compete with Russia and China.

   30. JMJamie Metzl26:50

       Yeah, that-
9. 26:51 – 28:07

   Privacy, big-data genetics, and who ‘wins’ the genomic economy

   1. JMJamie Metzl26:51

      Yeah. That's exactly right. And so, um, what we need to do is to find that balance. And one of the big issues, uh, for this is privacy.

   2. JRJoe Rogan26:58

      Yeah.

   3. JMJamie Metzl26:58

      So, if you kinda look around the world, let's say, there's, of the, of the, kinda the big countries and groupings of countries, there's three models of privacy. There's Europe, which has the strongest privacy protections for all kinds of data, including genetic d- uh, data. There's China that has the weakest, and there's the United States that has the middle. And the paradox is from an individual perspective, we are all are thinking, "Well, we kinda wanna be like Europe, 'cause I don't want somebody accessing my personal information, especially my genetic information. This is like my most intimate information." But genetics is the ultimate big data problem and so you need these big data pools and you'd access to the- these big data pools in order to unlock the secrets of genetics. So, these three different groupings, everyone's making a huge bet on the future, and the way we're going to know who wins, like right now in the, in the IT world, we have Amazon and Apple and Google and those big companies, but whoever gets this bet right, they will be the ones who will be leading the way and making a huge amount of- of money on these technologies, 'cause we're talking about is- is a trillion, multi-trillion dollar industry.

10. 28:07 – 34:23

    Gene doping, fairness in sports, and policing biological advantage

    1. JRJoe Rogan28:07

       How do you think this is gonna affect things like competitive athletics?

    2. JMJamie Metzl28:11

       Hugely. So, um, right now, um, we have this problem. Someone like Lance Armstrong, who's, who is doing, he's manipulating his, uh, his body. And what he's basically doing is adding more red blood cells so that he can carry more oxygen. And people feel that that's cheating, and it's- it's a different topic that probably everybody (laughs) -

    3. JRJoe Rogan28:30

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JMJamie Metzl28:30

       ... in the Tour de France was doing exactly that when he, when he won. Um, but what if, which will be the case, we're going to be able to sequence the people. Let's say nobody's doing drugs and we sequence all these athletes. Some of them will just have a natural genetic advantage. Their bodies will naturally be doing what Lamse- Lance Armstrong had manipulated his body to do.

    5. JRJoe Rogan28:52

       You know that's happening with a sprinter right now?

    6. JMJamie Metzl28:54

       Y- yeah. Well-

    7. JRJoe Rogan28:54

       That female sprinter-

    8. JMJamie Metzl28:55

       Yes.

    9. JRJoe Rogan28:55

       ... that has high levels of testosterone?

    10. JMJamie Metzl28:57

        Yes.

    11. JRJoe Rogan28:57

        Yeah.

    12. JMJamie Metzl28:57

        Yeah. No, a- and it's, and I feel really sorry for her-

    13. JRJoe Rogan29:01

        Yeah.

    14. JMJamie Metzl29:01

        ... but we have categories. I mean, yeah, you with your world in- in, uh, mixed martial arts. I mean, I think I remember in the past, there was some person who has, who was kind of a- a borderline on the, on, uh, between genders and was just kicking the shit out of all of these women in cage fighting. And it's like we have these categories of man and woman and we know that the gender identities are- are fluid, but how do we think about it when these genetic differences confer advantages? So, if your body is primed to do something, um, maybe you could have like a Plato's Republic world where everybody ha- fulfills a function that you are genetically optimized to do-

    15. JRJoe Rogan29:41

        Mm-hmm.

    16. JMJamie Metzl29:41

        ... and that you could imagine that being a very competitive kind of, uh, of environment. But what do you do for now in something like the Olympics? If somebody has this huge genetic advantage, should we let somebody else manipulate their bodies? There's this thing called gene doping-

    17. JRJoe Rogan29:55

        Mm-hmm.

    18. JMJamie Metzl29:55

        ... uh, in order to change the expression of genes, so your body to act like you're as genet- naturally genetic enhanced as somebody else. It's complicated.

    19. JRJoe Rogan30:03

        D- are they capable of doing certain-... physical enhancements through gene doping right now?

    20. JMJamie Metzl30:09

        Yeah.

    21. JRJoe Rogan30:10

        And pr- like, what can they do right now?

    22. JMJamie Metzl30:11

        Yeah. No, no. So, so the way it works is, so your, your genes instruct your cells to make proteins. That's, that's it's, that's how the whole system works. So you can change genes or you can trigger the expression of proteins. So you can get people's bodies to behave as if they had the, uh, these-

    23. JRJoe Rogan30:32

        Superior genes.

    24. JMJamie Metzl30:32

        ... genetic optimization. Yeah, yeah.

    25. JRJoe Rogan30:34

        Yeah.

    26. JMJamie Metzl30:34

        And so that's why now the, the World Anti-Doping, uh, Agency, I mean, they are now starting to look at gene doping. And this is the first time, uh, that that's, that, that's even being considered as a category. And then there are, a-

    27. JRJoe Rogan30:46

        Have there people that have done that? Are there people that have done that successfully?

    28. JMJamie Metzl30:50

        You know, I don't know the answer to that.

    29. JRJoe Rogan30:51

        Mm-hmm.

    30. JMJamie Metzl30:51

        I know that WADA is looking for it, which makes me assume that it must have done, but I haven't seen. I've looked for it.
11. 34:23 – 49:10

    Exponential change, unintended consequences, and the social media analogy

    1. JMJamie Metzl34:23

       Well, so people misunderstand and they underestimate the rate of change. And the reason that they do that is since the beginning of the digital revolution, we have experienced a thing called exponential change. As, uh, you've heard of Moore's Law, which is basically computing power roughly doubles every two years. And we've internalized Moore's Law, and that means that every new iPhone, we expect to be better and stronger and faster and all these kinds of things. But now we're entering in a wor- a world where we're going to have exponential change across technology platforms. And so we think about, well, what does exponential change mean in the context of biology? Well, at the very, very beginning, it's genome sequencing is, is, is going to be basically, uh, basically free. But we're gonna be able to change life. And because we're on this J-curve, like when you think of what's a 10-year unit of change, looking in the r- in the rearview mirror, that amount of change is only gonna take five years going forward, and then two years, and then one year. And so that's the reason why I've written this book is I, is p- we have to get that this stuff is coming fast, and if we wanna be part of it, we have to understand it, and we have to make our voices heard.

    2. JRJoe Rogan35:36

       What makes you nervous about this?

    3. JMJamie Metzl35:39

       All right. Three big areas. First, humans and all of life is incredibly complex. I mean, we talk about genetic code, which is mind-bogglingly complex.But our genetics exists within the incredible- incredibly complex systems biology. We have all these things like our microbiome, our virome, our proteome, our metabolome. And then that exists within the context of our environment, and everything's always changing and- and interacting, and so we are messing, and we have the tools to mess, and we will mess because we're this hubristic species with these really complex ecosystems, including-

    4. JRJoe Rogan36:16

       Mm-hmm.

    5. JMJamie Metzl36:16

       ... ourselves that we don't fully understand. That's number one. Two, and you mentioned it before, this issue of- of equity. What happens if we have... Every technology has to have first adopters. If you don't have it, you never get the technology, but what happens if a group of people move much more quickly than other people? Whether it's real or not, even if they believe it's real, you could imagine big, dangerous societal changes. And the third big area is diversity. When we think about diversity, we think, "Well, it's great to have diverse workplaces and schools, and- and we're more better people for it, and- and we're more, uh, competitive." But diversity is something much, much, much deeper. In Darwinian terms, diversity is random mutation. Like, that's our core survival strategy as a species. If we didn't have that, you could say we'd still be single cell organisms, but we wouldn't. We would have died because the environment would have changed and we wouldn't have had the- the built in resilience to adapt.

    6. JRJoe Rogan37:06

       Mm. Yeah, that is really important when you think about diversity, right?

    7. JMJamie Metzl37:10

       Yeah.

    8. JRJoe Rogan37:10

       That we- we need a non-uniformity when it comes to our own biology.

    9. JMJamie Metzl37:14

       Yeah, because-

    10. JRJoe Rogan37:14

        We need a bunch of different kinds of people.

    11. JMJamie Metzl37:16

        We have to have it big as... Even if we optimize for this world, um, the world will change. There's no good and bad in evolution. There's just-

    12. JRJoe Rogan37:23

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JMJamie Metzl37:23

        ... well-suited for a particular environment. If that environment changes, the best suited person for your old environment may be the least suited person for the new environment.

    14. JRJoe Rogan37:33

        Yeah.

    15. JMJamie Metzl37:33

        So- so even if we have things that seem real, like really great ideas now, like optimizing health. So if you have sickle cell disease, you're probably going to die and you're gonna die young, and it's gonna be excruciating pa- excruciatingly painful. And so you would say, "Well, let's just get rid of sickle cell disease," which we can do. But if you are a recessive carrier of the single- of the sickle cell, uh, disease gene, you don't have it, you're just carrying it, and you have a pretty significant risk of passing it on to your kids, but you also have an additional resistance to malaria. And so we are prob- We are almost certainly carrying around all kinds of recessive traits, maybe even ones that we don't like that are harming us now. Um, but that could be some protection against some future danger that we don't yet understand or- or haven't faced. And so the challenge is that diversity has just happened to us for 4 billion years. Now, we're gonna have to choose it, and that's a big, uh, it's a big challenge for us.

    16. JRJoe Rogan38:31

        So essentially we- w- we're going to have, without doubt, some unintended consequences, some unintended domino effect things that are gonna take place that we really can't predict. We just have to kind of go along with this technology and see where it leads us as it improves.

    17. JMJamie Metzl38:51

        Well, yeah.

    18. JRJoe Rogan38:51

        Like if you go back and look at surgeries from the 1950s-

    19. JMJamie Metzl38:54

        Yeah.

    20. JRJoe Rogan38:54

        ... comparison to-

    21. JMJamie Metzl38:54

        Yeah.

    22. JRJoe Rogan38:54

        ... surgery of 2019, giant leaps. I mean, I would never advise someone to get their knee operated by a 1950s physician.

    23. JMJamie Metzl39:02

        You need their advice, yeah.

    24. JRJoe Rogan39:03

        Right? Yeah, right? But, uh, that's kind of... Someone's gonna have to be an early adopter-

    25. JMJamie Metzl39:07

        Yeah.

    26. JRJoe Rogan39:07

        ... when it comes to these-

    27. JMJamie Metzl39:08

        Yeah.

    28. JRJoe Rogan39:08

        ... genetic therapies.

    29. JMJamie Metzl39:09

        Yeah, no, so I- I agree with you, but where I would slightly, or I would add to what you're saying is, these technologies, they're going to happen, they're going to play out.

    30. JRJoe Rogan39:18

        Mm-hmm.
12. 49:10 – 50:41

    Religion, transhumanism, and getting everyone a seat at the table

    1. JRJoe Rogan49:10

       How do you think it's gonna play out in terms of how people of various religions perceive this?

    2. JMJamie Metzl49:15

       Yeah. So, we- There's a real variation. So, there are people on one end of the spectrum who believe that this is, quote-unquote, "playing God."

    3. JRJoe Rogan49:24

       Yeah.

    4. JMJamie Metzl49:24

       And if you believe that the world was created exactly as it is by some kind of, uh, of divine force, um, and that it's wrong for humans to change, to, to, quote unquote, "play God," it's hard to explain how you could justify everything that we've done. I mean, we've changed the face of this, uh, of life on this planet Earth. But I really respect people who say, "Look, I think that there's a line. That, you know, that I believe that life begins at conception, and that any kind of manipulation after conception is interfering. That's going too far." And I respect that. Um, and those people need to have a, a seat at the table. Um, and that's... And there's certainly very strong religious views. In Judaism, there's a, an idea called Tikkun Olam, which means that the world is created cracked and broken, and it's the responsibility of each person to try to fix it. And that's a justification for using science and doing things to try to make the world a better place. And then there are now these new kind of, I mean, transhumanism. It's almost like a, a religion. It's this religion-

    5. JRJoe Rogan50:26

       Hmm.

    6. JMJamie Metzl50:26

       ... of science. And so, we're going to have... We're humans. We're so diverse. We are going to have this level of diversity. And the challenge is, um, how do we make... How do we have a process that brings, uh, brings everybody in? But it's, it's tough.

13. 50:41 – 58:42

    Human + AI: implants, chips, and technology moving inside the body

    1. JRJoe Rogan50:41

       So, when we're talking about genetic, uh, any sort of genetic manipulation, we're basically talking about doing stuff to the wetware.

    2. JMJamie Metzl50:49

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan50:49

       Doing stuff to the biology.

    4. JMJamie Metzl50:51

       Right.

    5. JRJoe Rogan50:51

       What do you think about symbiotic interactions-

    6. JMJamie Metzl50:54

       Yeah.

    7. JRJoe Rogan50:54

       ... with technology?

    8. JMJamie Metzl50:55

       Sure.

    9. JRJoe Rogan50:55

       'Cause I, one of the things that I'm concerned with more than anything is this sort of inevitable path of technology getting into our bodies.

    10. JMJamie Metzl51:04

        Yeah.

    11. JRJoe Rogan51:04

        Whether it's through nanobots-

    12. JMJamie Metzl51:06

        Get it.

    13. JRJoe Rogan51:06

        ... to fix diseases or-

    14. JMJamie Metzl51:07

        Yeah.

    15. JRJoe Rogan51:07

        ... through implementation. We, we were talking yesterday about chips.

    16. JMJamie Metzl51:11

        Right.

    17. JRJoe Rogan51:11

        Like, what would, what would they have to do to get you to get a, put a chip in your body? Like, what-

    18. JMJamie Metzl51:14

        Yeah.

    19. JRJoe Rogan51:15

        ... what kind of powers would it have-

    20. JMJamie Metzl51:16

        Right.

    21. JRJoe Rogan51:16

        ... to have before you accepted it?

    22. JMJamie Metzl51:18

        Yeah. Well, people are already doing it in Sweden. Um-

    23. JRJoe Rogan51:19

        Sure.

    24. JMJamie Metzl51:20

        And so-

    25. JRJoe Rogan51:20

        What are they doing in Sweden?

    26. JMJamie Metzl51:21

        Yeah. They're just, they're putting just little chips in their hands and their, and under their skin, and they're using it to open doors and access things. Um, so it's just starting. So, I definitely believe. You know, right now, you look at, we look at photographs of our parents, and you say-

    27. JRJoe Rogan51:34

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JMJamie Metzl51:34

        ... "Oh, my god, look at your hair, your clothes. That's crazy." Definitely, I think that, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, people are gonna look at pictures of us and they're gonna say, "What's that little rectangular thing?"

    29. JRJoe Rogan51:45

        Right.

    30. JMJamie Metzl51:45

        And you're gonna say, "That was a phone." "What?" And they'll say, "What?" It's like, yeah. We used to carry it around in our pocket and-
14. 58:42 – 1:09:45

    Singularity debates: AI self-learning, brain complexity, and AlphaZero as a warning

    1. JMJamie Metzl58:42

       Yeah. So, so, I'm involved. I'm on faculty for, um, one of the programs of Singularity University called Exponential Medicine. And so, we're thinking a lot about that.

    2. JRJoe Rogan58:50

       Mm-hmm.

    3. JMJamie Metzl58:50

       I actually had, uh, an editorial in the New York Times a few weeks ago imagining a visit to a fertility clinic in the year 2045. And again, because we are on this exponential change, it's, it's really hard for people to, to internalize, to kind of feel how fast these changes are coming. I do think, though, uh, Ray Kurzweil, who's, who's a really incredible genius, he thinks that we are soon going to get to a point, um, where our artificial intelligence is self-learning. Because when you think about it, AI, if it gets to the point where it can read something, read and comprehend, like in seconds, it will read every book ever written in human-

    4. JRJoe Rogan59:29

       Yeah.

    5. JMJamie Metzl59:29

       ... history. And then, it's just, uh, uh, when you have all these doublings and all this more knowledge, you can imagine how that would happen pretty quickly. The, the counter argument against, and I think that it, it will, but I don't think that we're, that, that our human brains are... On one hand, they're incredibly complex, and they're also kind of irrational. I mean, we have all these different layers.

    6. JRJoe Rogan59:48

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JMJamie Metzl59:48

       We have our lizard brain. And every decision that we make, there's the rational decision-... but then there's all the other stuff that our brains, that doesn't even rise to the level of our awareness, that our, that our brains are, are processing. And right now, we don't really have one really effective artificial intelligence algorithm, which is for pattern recognition. But you think, if you think of pattern recognition as a core skill of what our brains do, our brains probably have 1,000, 2,000 different skills. Um, but the core thing is whether we reach this singularity moment or not, these technologies are going to become incredibly more powerful. They're gonna become increasingly integrated into our lives and into our beings, and part of our evolutionary process. There's no longer, oh, we just have our biological evolution and our technological evolution. Those are separate things. They're connected.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:36

       It's gonna be that weird question of whether or not if, if an artificial intelligence is gonna be able to absorb all of the writing that human beings have ever done and really understand us.

    9. JMJamie Metzl1:00:46

       Right. Yeah.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:46

        Will they really still be able to understand us just because they get all the writing?

    11. JMJamie Metzl1:00:50

        So, right now, you would say no.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:00:52

        I'd say no, yeah.

    13. JMJamie Metzl1:00:53

        But 20 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now?

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:00:56

        They could come up with a reasonable facsimile. I mean-

    15. JMJamie Metzl1:00:59

        Yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:01:00

        ... they could figure out a way to get it close enough-

    17. JMJamie Metzl1:01:03

        Yeah. I think that, yeah.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:01:03

        ... you know, where it's like her, like the-

    19. JMJamie Metzl1:01:05

        Yeah. Yeah.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:01:06

        Yeah.

    21. JMJamie Metzl1:01:06

        That's an es- essential point because I think when people imagine this AI future, they're imagining, like, some intimate relationship with some artificial intelligi- intelligence that feels just like a human.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:01:17

        Yeah.

    23. JMJamie Metzl1:01:17

        I don't think that's gonna happen because it's, it's-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:01:19

        You don't?

    25. JMJamie Metzl1:01:20

        Well, no, but just because AI, it will be its own form of intelligence, and it may not be... like, frankly, we wouldn't want AIs with these brains like we have that have all these different impulses that are kind of imagining all this, this crazy stuff. We're, we may want them to be more rational than, than we are. So, like, you know, chimpanzees are our close relatives. They don't think just like us. We're not, you know, we're not expecting them to think like... 'cause they're their own thing.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:01:44

        Mm-hmm.

    27. JMJamie Metzl1:01:44

        And I think AIs will be their own things. Will we be interacting with them? Will we be having sex with them? Yes. But if they are, they're... it's not gonna be that they're just like us. We're going to, they're going to be these things that live within us, live with us, and together, we're going to evolve.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:02:01

        Well, they're certainly already better at doing certain things like playing chess.

    29. JMJamie Metzl1:02:05

        Yeah, yeah.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:02:05

        I mean, it took a long time for an artificial intelligence to be able to compete against a real chess master.
15. 1:09:45 – 2:13:28

    Why ‘uploading you’ may not be you—and the VR/AR reality problem

    1. JMJamie Metzl1:09:45

       So, I think he's, I think he's off, um, based on your use of the word your.

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:09:52

       Mm-hmm.

    3. JMJamie Metzl1:09:53

       So, I mentioned that a month ago, I was in Kyoto, uh, and I, I was at this, um, at this stem cell lab, but I also went to another lab of a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, who is the world's leading humanoid roboticist. And so he's the guy who was on the cover of Wired, and he's created these robot avatars, and like, I had a conversation with this, this robot woman, Erica. And it was really interesting 'cause I could see, uh, that like, if I would smile, she'd smile and lean forward, and if I had like a, you know, over-exaggerated sad face, she'd like, change her expression, and she can have like, you know, basic, basic conversations.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:10:30

       Wow.

    5. JMJamie Metzl1:10:31

       But we're still a long way, and so from, from having full robotics, but I, I had this, uh, for robotic human interactions, but I had this, this debate, um, with Ishiguro, and he was saying that he thought that the future of humanity was non-biological, that we were gonna kind of unload ourselves, um, to these non-biological entities, and that is how we would gain our immortality. And I, my argu- um, I argued something very different. I feel like we are biological beings. I think we'll fully integrate with our technology, but if we ever become entirely non-biological, then that's not us.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:11:05

       Right.

    7. JMJamie Metzl1:11:05

       Either we will have com- committed suicide as a species, or these, um, robots, or they will have killed us. Because even if, let's just say that I could download my entire consciousness to some kind of robot, and let's just say that was possible, that robot would be me for that first exact moment when the transfer happened. But then beyond that, they wouldn't be me anymore-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:11:29

       Right.

    9. JMJamie Metzl1:11:29

       ... because there would be a whole other set of, of experience, but we're, but certainly, our interaction, our connectivity with this tech is going to be greater, and so e- even if Kurzweil isn't exactly right, he's directionally right.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:11:42

        Yeah, the problem would be that you would be locked in, like... If they downloaded your consciousness into some sort of a, a bank of computers somewhere-

    11. JMJamie Metzl1:11:50

        Right.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:11:50

        ... where are you? If that's your-

    13. JMJamie Metzl1:11:52

        Yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:11:52

        ... consciousness, your consciousness-

    15. JMJamie Metzl1:11:53

        Yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:11:53

        ... is in these ones and zeros?

Episode duration: 2:29:10