You've said the future's going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?
I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner eating us. Like we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always—there's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the great flood that was about to come. There was the, you know, the plague. The plague is going to wipe us all out. There's starvation. You know, the late 19th century, population was outstripping food supply and there was this big belief that we were going to run out of food and there was this kind of rush to—and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields off of the South American coast. So, these giant islands covered in poop. And they would—the clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop and they'd bring it back to Europe and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories. So, the islands were kind of diminishing. And there was this big call to action: we're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve. We're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats. Climate change, COVID, there's always—and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing, sort of unbelievable-to-understand kind of technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok, that seem so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it.
Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground: people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a home, everyone has a car, like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have 100 years ago that were really things to struggle to get.
Now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally, digitization of the physical world, and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do this or we could do this, we could make this molecule to solve this cancer, we could do this thing, and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh yeah, we're right. We could do that. Like all of these fundamental tools start to compound and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think—and we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity. So I think that there's a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order.
And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. Like how much is the social order going to break? How hard is it going to be for people to adapt? How much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems? And people's expectations when they shift too much and they have to kind of rethink, what do I have to do? They want to put a break on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in in the West right now. In the East, it's a little bit different. When you go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain.
Oh, that's interesting. A victim of your own success so far.
Yeah. Because it feels like you've climbed pretty high and if you fall, that could be bad. You have more to lose.
And we could pontificate on this for a while, but you could go back to FDR in the United States and we kind of came out of the war with this big effort where we said, 'Hey, we can aggregate all our resources, we can win World War II.' And then we said by aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that again and let's keep doing that. And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises, right? And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last, call it almost a hundred years, particularly in the West.
At some point you could only promise so much. Like there's a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made. Okay, everyone gets a home. That's the American dream. Everyone goes to college and then they get a job. Some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered. They're not being met and that's all they care about and that's all that they want. In the West, we have that problem right now. And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around. If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life. And that's not true anymore.
And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful of the changes ahead. Whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made. They're like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x. And everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities. And the cities are like the future. Like it's been an extraordinary trajectory. So, you know, there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in one set of social systems in the world today and then a bunch of this like, oh my god, tomorrow is scary. It's going to break everything on the other side. And I think, you know, we have that very dangerous kind of choice to make.
I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, that there is a centralizing of power amongst a potential five-trillionaire class of people on the planet. And what sort of control do they have? How much displacement is there of work that didn't happen in the same way as when horses were killed because the automobile came along or because manual labor needed to turn into driving JCBs instead of digging holes—that this is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. What's your perspective when it comes to AI doomersim, AI optimism?
Yeah, all technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion. Meaning they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. Like that's not how the internet started with everyone suddenly benefiting from being able to be an entrepreneur online. It took a couple of generations of technology to diffuse before the idea of Shopify and the high-speed internet all over the country got everywhere and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. The first people on the internet, the first businesses that stood up did very well and so the technology started centrally, but then, you know, initially people are like, 'Oh my god, Cisco is going to dominate the world, right?' Like Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch. That's the technology that's gonna—those guys that own Cisco, those guys are going to run the world. This is not fair. Like they're going to control everything. This is crazy. Nowadays, it's Nvidia to some degree. It's Google. But like eventually every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology is it like it's always diffusing. Like this new innovation finds its way out. Like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer like a dependency on Google or a dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my house. And if you saw recently, there's this auto research thing that went viral on Twitter this weekend where Andrej Karpathy turned on auto research and he ran all of these agents on his computer and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve, make better LLMs, and they just ran 30 of them talking to each other and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model.
And they made a better LLM model than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago in like a weekend on a computer at home. That's how quickly it's diffused. And so I think that there's a—and so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need to be stopped, I actually don't think that data centers are going to have much to do with the benefits we're going to realize. Like so much of AI is going to sit at the edge. It's going to sit in embedded devices. It's going to sit on your desktop computer. It's going to sit on your iPhone. It's going to be ubiquitous. It's going to be everywhere.
And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet. And so it's very hard to envision why I should do this. And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise. But over time, all technologies have like a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on and then eventually everyone's like, 'Oh my god, everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing.' Like when the first CAR-T therapies came out—these are T cells—I totally jumped ship there, but like CAR-T therapy is this amazing technology that was developed where we could take T cells, immune cells, out of the human body, program them to find a specific protein, put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, 'Oh my god, this is incredible.' And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies. But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially. You have to take all these cells out, isolate them, make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in, make sure the person doesn't die. So it became this very expensive initial process. And now CAR-T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost 100% success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to 500 and pretty soon to 50k, 20k, and eventually 5k. And that ends that disease, that whole class of diseases goes away. So all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value. Small number of people get it, small number of people get value, but eventually all technologies diffuse. And so I'm less concerned about there being a monopoly. We're already seeing every single model company getting disrupted by something else the next week. We're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart. There's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by 1,000x. So for every token produced, which is a measure of output from AI, it used to be 10 bucks or whatever, you know, pick your number, $1.50, for 50 cents, 10 cents, it's coming down by a thousandfold because they're figuring out better ways to architect the underlying models, to make distributed smaller models, to use new chip architecture, to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using, etc., etc., etc. And these all compound. So suddenly it's like, are the people that are going to build all these data centers really going to have a monopoly? I don't know, like this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need a big hundred-billion-dollar data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly and every step of the way that's—it's happening so fast. People just have all these reasons to have concern, but I'm pretty optimistic, as history being a predictor here, that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on Earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value.
I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon?
The moon. I think so one of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm going to replace labor, like the accountant's job is going to go away, and we're all kind of swirling our heads around what are we going to do with the accountant's job going away. And you know, we could use the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away and who's going to breed the horses? Who's going to take care of the horses? All the horse stables are going to go away. And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system and then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up and then coffee houses popped up on the highways and new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them and suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate, right? It's several degrees away, several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about, which is the horse company's dying and the horse jobs going away. So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people. People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots and the corporations will replace all the people. Like, but why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything. It works 24 hours a day. That robot's now your employee. And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop. I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like Chrome and people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles and then the robot will build the bicycle. So people—so you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store, whatever, make, sell bicycles and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts. It'll order all the machinery it needs. It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage. It'll make bikes. It'll package them up and ship them out for you. When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it. So, everyone will have a robot. Everyone will be able to have a small business. It's like imagine back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, if you told people, 'Hey, everyone can have an Etsy store. Now, all of the knitting you're doing at home, you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year.' No one would have believed you. But like, now you can do that.
Have you seen these arm farms in India?
Jared, pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world. I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal [__]. Here it is.
And then the robot learns.
Yeah. So, this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self-driving.
That they take the best—I mean, I don't—this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen, but they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on.
It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again just—
Well, just downstream loads of people with creased T-shirts.
Yeah, this is my way to destroy the T-shirt folding industry.
Every—like suddenly in the future everything you buy is completely broken because everyone trains the robot.
But this is everything. This is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge they have? Cracking an egg.
The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever. But yeah, this is the future. Hey, look, if you need extra cash—
Let it watch you fold your pants. And this is obviously transitory. So this is the training phase of the robotics. The real question is what are people individually going to do? So like I know you asked about the moon and we'll get it.
That's fine because there was also that Anthropic report that just got released looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by AI and that doesn't even include robotics.
So I don't think that there's like going to be a successful organized government system to solve this problem to come in and be like, hey, we're going to stop these industries and they're going to try. I mean, New York just passed a law making medical advice, legal advice, all these other things illegal through AI tools, which by the way, you got to ask yourself the question, are they really going to be able to do that? Because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and I can run them locally, why wouldn't I just download a model, put it on my computer, and I can ask it legally?
Going to burst through the door and say, 'David, what is that? What have you got on your computer? You better not be looking at your health reports.'
All of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop historically. Like it's just not going to work except when you have a limited resource like uranium, you know, for like nuclear fuel or something like that. But for like something like this which is self-replicating, it's software. It can go anywhere. It can be anywhere. It can fill any space. It's knowledge work. It's going to be very hard to stop it. So the real question—and this is going to be transitory for now—but the real question is going to be which of the humans that are folding T-shirts today are going to have the spark in their brain that's going to say I should buy five robots and run my own T-shirt folding business. That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency, taking ownership for how do you engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next.
That's going to be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree. I think that previously if you were someone who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan, that job goes away. But there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of 'I am enough of a self-starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing.' That does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are going to fall below that bar.
I don't know if that's true because I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into us as humans. It's just generally been turned off because we've created social systems that have told us, here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes, by the fact that the government's supposed to give me all this [__]. Every step of the way, I'm being told, 'Do this, you'll get this. Do this, you'll get this.' You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. Like, and I think this is fundamentally true with social systems. We've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people. I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy. If you told someone, pick the time frame 15 years ago, that X number of millions of Americans would be making on average tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing, posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments on Instagram with, you know, a sports drink or whatever next to them, or people were making money podcasting like at the scale that they are today—you're the prime example—or people were making money selling home goods and making 300 grand a year selling their custom cat blankets or pick these things. You would have never believed it. But every person has that in them. Every person has that capacity in them to do something unique, to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it and they're not told that you can't do it.
Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminished because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them is also going to be something that reduces their capacity to enact it. And I think that that's one of the concerns. Anyway, the moon.
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Well, so I think that, you know, there's a big discussion obviously, I would say largely led by, pushed by Elon, but many others over time, that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars and that's a good place to set up a colony and yada yada, right? Mars is not very habitable, we need to move a lot of material to Mars, but I think if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to Mars. And the reason is the moon, unlike the Earth, does not have an atmosphere. One of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off the Earth is getting away through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the moon is 1/6th the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the moon than it does the Earth. And there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units.
What's its constituent? What's the constituent part?
It's got aluminum. It's got silicon. It's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should build very large factories on the moon. And the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar very deployable on the moon. Lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, etc. Good continuous energy flow, no clouds. And then you can use kind of battery storage. But the mechanism for moving material off the moon is not propulsion.
It's actually a mass driver. So electric rail gun. So think about like a train track, you know, like these maglev trains, you know, think about like a maglev train. And you know, if you run the calculations, it would take about, call it, a 9-kilometer-long track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to Mars.
So here's the thing. It doesn't actually even have to be at an angle. It just has to clear any craters or mountains.
Of course, it's flat enough and that's escape velocity.
Just escape velocity. So all you have to do is orient it correctly, put it on the right part of the moon and orient it correctly for the moon to basically aim.
The moon's passing around.
And it would take—yeah, it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to push a ton of material down this rail track. It would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit—
Four and a half seconds to move 9 km a ton.
Yeah. So it ends up escaping at roughly, call it, 20,000 km an hour. And that's now—if you're moving one ton of material, you would still need a couple hundred kg, call it about 200 kg of some sort of propulsion—
To slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front because you don't care if it burns away and goes away.
So you need 15 cm of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track. It goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. Gets over there. You slow it down a little bit and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere. The moon rock burns away and you've just delivered roughly 700 kg of material. And you can run that every hour with solar panels that are roughly 500 meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you got to build the rail. The rail, you need about nine tons of material. So, you got to get a lot of material put out to get this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can kind of think about it being self-replicating in the physical sense as well as the digital sense. You can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system, and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So, I actually think the moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies like it's almost like the East India or like, you know, like when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's going to be till this starts. But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low-cost nature of it because of AI now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it and trillions—and you still need some money but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. I think the moon is probably one of these like more under-the-radar and Silicon Valley kind of grand economic opportunities.
Is space the next industrial revolution?
There's a lot that could happen on Earth too. So like I think there's a lot—there's a couple of other big drivers. I think one is dropping energy cost to zero. And I think fusion will have a big role in that this century. So people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time and Elon loves solar and blah blah blah. So everyone pooh-poohs fusion.
So I'll talk about it in a second, but the cost—if you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour, it absolutely expands every economy. Like everything blows up. Like imagine if you—
Well, in the US, we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour off the grid. But nuclear power, best case scenario, is about 5 cents a kilowatt hour. And that's advertised when you take the cost of everything you got to build and amortize it out, and then your runtime cost 5 to 10 cents, but they're going to sell it at like 15. So like imagine if you could take power cost down to 1/100th of what it is today. The cost to make anything drops because now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost because the electricity is what runs the robots. So you could have a swarm of 100 robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like a 10,000-foot crazy house. The cost of energy is nothing. So maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing.
Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week.
Just yeah, 3D printing houses.
Gen one. Now imagine Gen six, right? And imagine energy cost is like zero. And imagine all that material production.
How cool of a house do you want? I want to live in Hogwarts. Fine, get the land.
I want like a Lake Como, but I want to make my own Lake Como, you know, like no one else. Like just like—
Yeah, Lake David. So energy costs, I think, are going to—this will be the era when fusion happens. So fusion is this crazy like principle, like it's this fundamental thing that drives the universe. If the sun is run on fusion—fusion is when protons jam together. Okay. So the sun is so hot because it has so much mass. So when all this mass came together, all the matter starts bumping into each other and that creates kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is heat and it's so dense because of the gravity, because of all the mass, that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma. Plasma means that it's so energetic that the electrons break away.
It's technically a fourth state of matter, right?
It is. Yeah. So there's arguably five states of matter, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and then Einstein-Bose condensate, which is crazy physics.
You always have to one-up me.
No, but it's like I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough, they jam together and they stick together. So one proton, you remember this, like with an electron is hydrogen.
Right. And then it's lithium and then beryllium and so on. So protons jamming together forms a new nucleus, forms a new kind of element, goes from hydrogen to helium all the way up the periodic table of elements. So the more energy you have, the denser these things get. It requires more and more energy to get this to happen. Now when you fuse protons together and form a new element less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process. Anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together. That's like a cool feature of physics which you could get philosophical on why this is the case.
It's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way.
It's actually related to the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a trade-off. There's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater because you have so many more protons. They're pushing each other apart. So they're pushing each other apart more than the benefit you get from getting them together. And so you actually have to put energy in to make all the heavier elements on planet Earth that exploded billions of years ago. Crazy. But so fusion is how the sun makes energy. So every time proton and proton get together, they release some energy and that's the light that we get from the sun. Constant fusion. So the challenge has always been can we do fusion on Earth? Can we just jam protons together and capture that energy? So the technology to do it is you basically spin these protons around in a plasma at 100 million degrees C. Some people are using these like donut-shaped tokamaks. Some people are now using these sort of weird what are called stellarators. They've got crazy shapes. And much of the design of these systems on how do you get these protons to move fast enough? And the problem is when the protons get close and close together they push each other apart. So you got to use a magnetic field to squeeze these protons together so they get closer and closer and then get them to fuse. The problem is as they get closer, the protons make their own magnetic field that pushes back and [__] up the magnetic field that you're trying to use to squeeze them together. And so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem. They just keep breaking and breaking and breaking. And you cannot get a stable plasma at that density. AI seems to be solving that problem because they're now using AI to train the control of the magnetic fields in a way that's working and they're now able to hold these magnetic fields for 30 minutes at a time out of China now. You know, started out it went from like 17 seconds to a few seconds, few longer, to a few minutes to 30 minutes in literally like the last two and a half, three years. Like that's how quickly they're ramping up in the ability to make this happen. There's about 70 startups doing this. Just to give you a sense of what this enables, basically you could think about taking water, putting it into this machine, getting the protons to spin around, and then extracting energy from those protons jamming together. That energy turns into electricity. There's no nuclear explosion. There's no risk of the whole thing melting down. There's no nuclear material. Nothing's radioactive. It's a very clean way of generating energy. So it's been this kind of holy grail since the 1950s when people first thought about it.
It needs a different name.
What would you call it? It can't have the word nuclear in it.
Yeah, maybe some people have said just call it fusion. Some people have said call it L.
It's too close to fission.
People are going to pattern-match it already and they're going to think I've heard even me. Let's come up with a name. What do you think?
I think something to do with the electromagnetic energy element of that. That doesn't feel—that feels kind of green. Yeah, that feels quite safe.
Yeah. I don't expect that to explode. Yeah. Strong power, weak power. Yeah. Protonics, something. We'll come up with something.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it, I think it's just such a contentious topic, right? Because it's everyone thinks branding in history.
Yeah. Like nuclear energy is fission where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy elements like uranium, breaking them apart. They're radioactive. It's the opposite.
And you're getting energy out. Yeah. You're doing the opposite. You're taking the heavier stuff and grabbing the energy when the heavier stuff becomes lighter, releasing that energy that it took to make it. Um, so this is different and this you can, I did the math on this. Basically, you could use a swimming pool sized amount of ocean water to make all the electricity needed for an entire year for the planet Earth. That's what this can do. That's why it's so important that we get it done.
Now, when you do this and it works and we're very close to having this work at industrial scale. Next, everyone's always joked, oh, fusion's always like a decade away. It's the, it's, you know, maybe it's a decade away. Maybe not, but it's going to happen. Like we're progressing up this production curve. It's going to happen.
Are those 30 minute long runs energy positive? Net positive.
They're still requiring net energy in because of the setup and so on. But the next phase will be to capture basically the current systems aren't just protons. They put protons with neutrons and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall to heat up the wall and that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. You know, like other people have other ideas that, hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine.
Isn't it mad that of all of the ways it's still rotate a thing attached to a dynamo? It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it.
Totally. It's just dynamo and a fan. That's another thing that should likely change this century is the move away from that system where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into electricity because you're trying to, you're basically the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons to move through a wire. So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil and you get the magnet thing to spin. The faster it spins the more it moves the electrons through the wire. So that's the basis of that system. But there's other things that people have theorized.
So with this energy system, I think you're going to like drop the cost of energy, unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunity. So that's another kind of technology that I would say is like very kind of future positive on like what's around the corner.
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Just rounding out space, two things. Who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon? And secondly, if we're going to start mining asteroids and mining the moon, what does that mean for the Earth's economy? Because I have to imagine that that's a pretty big dice roll, or at the very least, you're adding dice to the game that you were already playing with, and that's going to make things interesting.
You know, economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively because like if you add chips to a game, like we're playing poker, there's eight of us playing poker and we suddenly increase our chip stack by like 10x. We're still playing poker, but um you know, maybe we could tip more, right? Like maybe the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy $100 bottle of wine instead of $2 Coors Lights, you know, like that's what ends up happening as more chips come on the table. Now, the poker analogy is a very bad one because that's a zero sum game.
Economic growth comes from, should come from productivity growth, not from money printing. Okay, much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue, has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips, put them on the table.
But economic growth means that I went outside and I made something. I made a new, I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mined gold out of the ground. That's worth something because now people can use it. They can trade it. They can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity there is in the system, the more chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff and everyone's labor, everyone's time is worth more. And so everything grows. That's the benefit of true productivity. So productivity is like this best measure I would say of technology's advance on how technology advances social systems. The more productive we are, the more everyone's going to benefit.
It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system. The Earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid, right?
And then bringing it back in, right? That is what happens to the iron price, right? When we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that.
Yeah. So, think, I would say think more about availability of iron versus the price. Like what it does is it makes iron more available, more abundant to everyone. And same with energy, right? When you increase energy through fusion, you make energy more abundant. The price comes down by 10x, but now everyone can use much, much more energy. Meaning because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability and now everyone gets more access. This is why technology...
I've always wanted more iron. I've said I don't have enough.
You're like an iron hoarder. It's funny when we walked in the studio I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the parking lot. Yeah. You're like your iron hoarder. You're like a Minecraft but for iron. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, but yeah, I mean, abundance is the name of the game, right? Like, if we really are moving a productivity curve, energy costs are coming down, we're able to make more stuff with AI. It's not that some people are going to get richer faster. That may happen, but I don't think that's the problem. I think what really functionally happens is everyone has more abundance. You can now instead of working 60 hours a week or 100 hours a week when we all worked, you know, when not we all but like when Americans worked on farms right at the turn of the century it was like 80% of people worked on a farm.
And now it's less than 1% so we don't have to spend the 100 hour work week working on the farm. In fact the guy working on the farm is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning, he's on TikTok while the thing drives itself. Trust me, I work in the industry, like that's, it's awesome. They still work their asses off, not to diminish it, but like it's a very different type of farming.
And yes, it is still backbreaking work, but there's a lot of automation. And so that created an abundance of food, an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability, and we dropped the number of people globally that live on less than 1,200 calories a day for a year, which is how we define malnourished. Um, you know, from billions of people down to 600 million. It's come back up recently because of various supply chain issues post-COVID but um...
Well the number one type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity not starvation.
Yeah, it's abundant, it's excess. There's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity than through their starvation. Uh, final thing, who owns the moon?
The moon, yeah, so I don't know. I think uh that's astropolitics is... Do you know anyone that does astropolitics? I want to bring someone on the show.
That's a good idea. I want to talk about it. I think it's so cool. But do you own because geostationary above the net of your country? It's kind of yours.
Depends on what the treaties say. Kind of. As a country or as an individual, I could say anything I want. If I moved to the moon and put a flag down and said, 'F you guys. I've got lasers and I'm going to protect. This is my part of the moon.' Who's going to stop me? Like, I don't care about being on Earth anymore. You can't arrest me on Earth anymore. You can't take my money out of the bank anymore. That's a frontier.
Have you ever read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson?
Yeah. One of my most reread fiction books and uh in that they go up to the uh space station Izzy and they need to come up with an entire new form of law. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space? Right? And I never thought about the fact that well, especially if you've got people from multiple different countries, well the way that we deal with it is X. The way that we deal with it is Y. And this is an entire new environment to work in. So it needs to be built from the ground floor up. People got different priors.
Right. Right. Right. Totally. You see that movie Ad Astra? There's that scene where he's like and there's like the pirates on the moon, you know, they're like shooting at him and he has to like get away. Like that may be what happens. Moon pirates. There's like a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and so on. But look, there's so much resource availability. That's the thing about abundance. It's like maybe wars go away. I'm very... This is where one of the things...
Because scarcity drives wars. Do I really need to be fighting with Iran if I don't care as much about oil and energy availability?
Look at what happened during 2020-2021 when crypto was on a bull run. Everyone was friends. Look at what happens when the price drops. Everyone hates each other. Same with every resource, right? And so like as resources become more abundant, lower cost, everyone's getting what they want. We're all vacationing in Hawaii working 10 hours a week. That's where things go. This is why I mentioned the 100 hours. It's like you go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30. In France, they like have a law. It's like 30. Now, a lot of the Democrats in the US are like, 'Let's all work 30 hours a week and like let's drop Fridays and all this sort of stuff.'
Didn't a country try a 4-day work week? I think France, doesn't it? I think it might have been France that tried the 4-day work week.
Yeah. Yeah. And um you know, that's one of the measures of prosperity is like how much do you have to work to be able to live a good life? And so if you can take more time with your family and more time to explore your personal interests and you don't have to do labor whether it's on a computer or in a field, uh that's a good way to think about like are we all prospering? Are we being able, are we being given freedom to do more things rather than being caged into doing the things we don't want to do?
Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think?
That's one I'm most excited about. Um so have you looked at Yamanaka factors or have you talked about this on your show before?
Uh David Sinclair's been on and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it but assume no, do the 30,000 foot view of the Yamanaka factors.
So every cell in our body has the same DNA. Okay. Uh we know that and the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis. Every time we make a new cell from the time we're in the womb to today we're making new cells. Both our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell. But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin? If it's got the same DNA, how's it different? How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet? They're all, those are different cells. There's different cells in different organs in the body. Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off.
So there's a bunch of switches and the switches are either on or off and that creates cellular differentiation, which is what makes one cell different from another cell. The eye cell different from the heart cell different from the skin cell or the lung cell. And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches. They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA and they keep that gene from working. It blocks it off. And then the other gene is open. And when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein.
Zeros and ones. And each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines. They're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell. And that's what makes every cell different is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan. So imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan with 500-story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. And every person is a protein. There's 10 billion people living in this 500-story tall building island of Manhattan going in between the buildings up and down all day long building stuff together, never sleeping, always working into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together, working. 10 billion of us. Those are the proteins in the cell in one cell running around doing stuff for 80 years. That's 1 second in one cell. That's how complex this is.
So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot. And then they make stuff. So that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell. As we get older, this is the current science on this. It looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other stuff. As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing it. Goes in, there's a bunch of proteins. They're the worker proteins that are repair proteins. They go in, they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place.
So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell and then that cell stops working right. The eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells. All of the cells, the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled and eventually if enough of those cells have those epigenetic, is what it's called, epigenetic errors, you start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well, you go blind, all these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging and aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules, move around in the wrong place.
That's what we discovered is basically aging. In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell which can then be turned into any other cell in the body. So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for.
In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell, you could put a small amount. And if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does, it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be to make it a young cell. And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell. The skin cell becomes a young skin cell. The heart cell becomes a young heart cell. All of these cells get reset. And they did this in mice and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old. They put it in monkeys, the wrinkles went away. And they've done it in, specifically applying it to retinal cells in the eye and reversed blindness.
This is Sinclair's stuff, right?
Sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now. And there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about. Um they've raised, you know, close to probably $10 billion at this point to pursue these technologies. But basically what this means is we are now discovering not just the four proteins, but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail. Either we're going to drink it, take it as a shot, or take it as a pill. It will get into our cells and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again.
They're starting with targeting diseases like a particular, like blindness or glaucoma in the eye or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue and they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only.
Locally. But over time what'll end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment and they're already doing it in animal models and then you can either do it continuously or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continuously, when I say the word factor I mean protein. These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed.
So we maintain our youth.
And we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed. And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals. We can redose them, redose them, and keep them.
Has it been done systemically yet? You mentioned.
Yeah. This is the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of like having someone live like 200 plus years old, you know, and this is like so early. They haven't even optimized the molecules. They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing. They haven't optimized the method of the dose. Like there's all these techniques that are going to be developed on top of this.
For every one year we can extend average human lifespan, we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP. Right? So this is also another big economic driver. But it's not just how long people live, it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease. You know, theoretically, this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes or reversal in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome, the markers that turn your genes on and off.
So this is a technology category that I am like, I think is one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect: free energy, right? Like AI, automation, um, and you know, infinite labor for people to do all the things they want to do and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kind of compound. That's why I'm excited about the future. Like these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow.
And then again, it becomes a question of abundance. How do you want to spend your time? You know, again, 100 years ago, I don't think people would have had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster or being a wedding photographer or, you know, go down the list. Like, there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time and they can be productive doing it. I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow and it's less of the like you got to go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle or you know in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say hey that was kind of limiting human potential. Like maybe humans could do a lot more and maybe they should and these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that.
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How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage where we can do age reversal? One decade, five decades?
Way less than that. Way less than that. We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails and if there's always a risk in going from animals to humans but we've done it with human cells in vitro in a petri dish and we see the effects that we are expecting to see. So we have a lot of reasons to believe that you know over the next 10 to 20 years more of this starts to proliferate.
You've heard Peter Diamandis' idea of longevity escape velocity, right? That you need to, every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer, but that when you cross a particular threshold, you just need to stay alive until this happens essentially or whatever the equivalent is, whatever the technology is. It allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.
I think it's fair. You just hold on. Hold on. It's probably the best long-termist view for looking after your health.
Yeah. That now is not the time to fuck it up.
Right. Totally. Because in the past there wasn't really any reason to stay alive. Yeah. You're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years, but you know, you're playing around with fives and tens. Whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or 80 and 120.
Yeah. You're like, 'Hey, keep it together.' And by the way, a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise.
Well, fasting helps. Yeah, fasting does have an effect, but exercise, like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. Um, some of, I don't want to be prescriptive on these things. Um but there's a lot of ways that you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and the big, you know, products come out to market.
What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years?
Um, it's hard, it's hard to say. I mean, you know, I could, I think it's very sad that like I love my kids. Like I was with my daughters and my wife, we were doing a, what are the three wishes, if you had a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is, I wish everyone in our family could live forever. Uh that was her first wish. And I was like, such a sweet wish.
But I really do think that there is like this incredible, um, you know, human element to this technology. It's not just like technology for technology embodied sterile. Yeah. It's like it's not a pharmaceutical drug. It's like it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do.
I really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're going to come to at some point. That for a long time maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group but limited ourselves individually and I think that that's what maybe changes in the future is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have like things that maybe we didn't realize we could have because we had to make all these trade-offs to make things work in a social system, in a society.
Yeah. I wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to face more spare time. I know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and a half ago of the two UBI experiments that went on. Yeah. Is that not an indication that maybe there's going to be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people, because those weren't good, right?
No. I mean UBI inevitably like all welfare systems will fail.
Um, two things. One is it creates a system whereby people will always want more. So it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing. It makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency, right? It creates enough of a, if it's giving you enough passivity to explore yourself and your potential and engage the world to find your potential, you're not given that incentive.
Um, but the more fundamental issue is simply inflation. Um, UBI whether it comes about through giving people money as taxes from other people or whether it comes about from money printing inevitably leads to an increase in money supply which makes everything more expensive. So there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy and those things will all get more expensive, right? It's a terrible feature of the economy, of like economic principles, like those things will get more expensive. So, I think that that's why those things simply don't work.
But look, I'm optimistic. I think that again I keep going back to this idea that there's this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build, like Twitch streamers another good example, people going on Patreon, people going on, I mean pick your platform and they're finding ways to explore their interests and they can live on it, like they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing. Massage therapists, yoga instructors and Pilates instructors, dog walkers. I value those people. They're valuable and people like doing that work.
So there's, I think that there's more to come in terms of what's next that we always like want to look backwards and we don't want to think about, hey, the chart, the path is uncharted and you know, we should just get on the ocean and we'll figure out what's over there.
What about transhumanism?
Um, okay let's talk about, so super intelligence I think is a manifestation of AI at scale meaning that there's intelligence, features of intelligence that in isolation or aggregation exceed human capacity. Um, it's just not general yet. I don't know if there's a, I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions. Um, but what do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're going to do next or knows everything you're going to think or has a sense of how to do things better than you do?
Um, I think we're going to be forced to adapt. So this idea of like humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state. It's such a weird thought because we live in buildings, you know, like we don't live under a tree. Even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature. Like there's an aspect of a continuum of like what is nature, what is the human, and what are we doing? So I don't love the term transhumanism, but I do like this idea that like this super intelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans.
I think there's probably two things that happen and the second one I'm going to say is very controversial. The first one I'll say is pretty well described which is this kind of human machine interface. Um, you know Elon's got Neuralink where they put the wires in the brain but the wires, I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak at his company Science Corporation or whatever. You should have him on. He's great. Um, but he worked, he started Neuralink. He was the old CEO at Neuralink.
And he's got this system where they're putting like a digital device in your retina. Put a screen in your eye. Yeah. And it works. And so the screen, it's powered, um, it's solar. He's got this whole power system in it. It's incredible. Um, so when your eye is open, it powers up and then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on the inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain and it passes the signal and you can suddenly see. And it's a very thin, like paper thin kind of device that goes under your retina in your eyeball. It's an outpatient procedure to put it in. He's in clinical trials on this. It's incredible. So, it's restoring blindness.
But you can kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain, which I don't think is going to be where things end up, but I think it's likely going to end up a little bit more like, and people are going to view this as being extremely dystopian. Um, so I'll give you the two versions of it. Some people would say Neo in the Matrix where you kind of connect the digital thing, but the other one is Avatar where they have that ponytail thing that they connect to. Um, but there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just soft neurons, like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain. You don't need to go into the neural tissue.
Um, theoretically. Now I'm not super optimistic and I don't get excited about this. Let me be clear. I'm not like, 'Oh my god, we all need to connect to like we all need to be like the Matrix,' so don't think about me as some dystopian crazy technocrat. Um, but I think my point is someone will do it and then you'll be able to think, I want to fly a helicopter like Neo did in the Matrix and you'll be able to fly a helicopter.
And um you'll want to access information quickly using the super intelligence that exists in the silicon. So, you want to solve a physics problem because you're, you know, trying to build something on the moon and you sort of like access that information. You look up and you're like, 'Okay, you have the answer you need.' You're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so, you're able to kind of tap into and look, do we all want to be connected all the time? I don't know. I don't know if that destroys humanity or like is going to be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate. I don't know. And so I'm not trying to be too like deterministic about this stuff.
Um, but I think that that human machine interface outcome is very likely going to happen. And whether or not people want it or embrace it, you'll have to have the benefits. You'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on, maybe it sits above your ear and it works and it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it to and you can start to think things and get information that you want and so on. And suddenly you become super intelligent and you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one path that we might walk.
Another path that we might walk which is extremely dystopian for most people's points of view but may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places is transgenic humans where basically right now you can look at an embryo and I don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos if you've got frozen embryos for IVF, right, which is a common procedure where you've got effectively an embryo that's frozen. It's not yet fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have.
I'm a big investor in Heritas who is the most evidence-based one of these. Okay. So the ones that have used the PGT test plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in. So you model the genome of mother and dad. Then you take the sample from the embryo and between those they can triangulate with real accuracy what the embryo is. You have here's your 10 harvest or your 15 harvest or whatever. And there's your dashboard. Totally. And we've got immune function. We've got IQ. We've got externalizing behavior. And uh yeah, John Anomaly and Heritas are the best at this. And I don't think it's dystopian at all. I think that embryo genome and if you say that selecting against negative traits is good then it seems to me to be philosophically consistent to say that selecting for positive traits.
So everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation the more you're going to, more people are going to, on the audience, going to say you crossed my line, right? So the first is should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos? We already do, right? We already do because the, and this was what...
Not only prenatal screening, but let's say anybody that's ever done IVF, even if you didn't know, they screen. The doctor gets a microscope and has a look at the embryos and just eyeballs it. Yes. And he goes, 'Yeah, that one, that one looks like the roundest,' right? And we don't, we don't...
You don't want number seven. Number seven, we can't do number seven, or it wouldn't even take. We know that it wouldn't take. It's not going to implant correctly. So he was already doing it. So I'm like, right, okay.
Just taking it from some guy. It's like an umpire in MLB that's just eyeballing it, and then eventually they're going to get removed and it's going to be robots. You go, okay, well, I'm glad that the robot got it accurate 100% of the time.
100%. That is the next line. The next line would be sequencing the DNA and looking at the genome and looking at the genetics and saying, hey, I want blue eyes or brown eyes.
And some people say that's dystopian. That's in the Black Mirror episode. The eyes thing's got a bad rap when it comes to selection.
Right. That's right. Okay. Fair enough. Tall or short, smart, not smart. Suddenly there's a line. Some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing blind, not blind, deaf, not deaf.
The next line is what's going on controversially in China, where they're using gene editing.
Yeah. The enhancement stuff.
Enhance. So they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele, and so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye, or they'll take you from dumb to smart. They're not creating a foreign gene. They're just making a tweak to your DNA to give you the trait that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo, but you just didn't.
Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets?
There was a conversation. I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble.
Correct. Yeah. 2019, I think. Yeah. You know that there was a third one.
I didn't realize there was a third.
I'm pretty sure. Jared, can you just Google, or ChatGPT, how many babies were born from the CRISPR editing in China? Was it two or three? Because I swear that there was a third one. So after all of that, I might eat humble pie here and have completely misremembered it, but you can also edit yourself out. So I'll own my failures. I learned my failures here. I've said worse things on the internet. But yeah, I swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe it and it's the first time this has ever happened and there was two of them and there was a third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared. Prove me right here, brother.
This is like a three babies where there were three babies. A third gene-edited baby was later confirmed through court documents.
Yes. Well, I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I want him celebrating.
You're not celebrating that.
I'm right. Pro-gene editing babies.
And he edited the embryos using CRISPR-Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV.
