ep. 36 - Jamie Metzl: Futurist, Genetics Expert, Global Affairs Specialist, & Author
Bio
Jamie Metzl is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. He previously served as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society, Deputy Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senior Coordinator for International Public Information at the U.S. State Department, Director for Multilateral Affairs on the National Security Council, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia. He is a former Partner and current Advisory Board member of a New York-based global investment firm, a former chief strategy officer of a genetics biotechnology company, and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri’s Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City in 2004. He has served as an election monitor in Afghanistan and the Philippines, advised the government of North Korea on the establishment of Special Economic Zones, and is the Honorary Ambassador to North America of the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy.
Jamie appears regularly on national and international media discussing Asian economic and political issues and his syndicated columns and other writing on Asian affairs, genetics, virtual reality, and other topics is featured regularly in publications around the world. He has testified before Congress outlining emergency preparedness recommendations after 9-11 and on the national security implication of the biotechnology and genomics revolutions. Jamie is the author of a history of the Cambodian genocide and the novelThe Depths of the Sea, both published by St. Martin’s Press, as well as of the novel Genesis Code, published by Arcade in November 2014, which deals with issues of human genetic enhancement in the context of a future US-China rivalry. His most recent novel, Eternal Sonata, was published by Arcade in Fall 2016.
A founder and Co-Chair of the national security organization Partnership for a Secure America, Jamie is a board member of theInternational Center for Transitional Justice and the American University in Mongolia, a member of the Advisory Board of theBrandeis International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life and 92Y's Center for Innovation and Social Impact, and a former board member of Park University and of the Jewish refugee agency HIAS. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow. Jamie holds a Ph.D. in Asian history from Oxford, a JD from Harvard Law School, and is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. He has completed twelve Ironman triathlons, twenty-eight marathons, and ten ultramarathons.
Transcript
ep. 36 - Jamie Metzl: Futurist, Genetics Expert, Global Affairs Specialist, & Author
Gail Davis: Jamie Metzl has been called a renaissance man and reading his bio makes clear why. Not only has he served in high-level positions in the US government, in the White House, State Department and Senate, and with the United Nations [00:01:00] in Cambodia, not only has he ran for Congress and ran a major international affairs organization, not only has he written four books including three high-profile novels, but he's also completed 30 marathons, 12 Ironman triathlons, and 9 ultra marathons.
Jamie is a futurist who appears regularly on national and international media discussing Asian economic and political issues in his syndicated column and other writings on Asian affairs, [00:01:30] genetics, virtual reality, and other topics are featured regularly in publications around the world. He has testified before Congress outlining emergency preparedness recommendations after 9/11, and on the national security implications of the biotechnology and genomics revolution. I met Jamie on a cruise to Brazil about 14 months ago and it's my pleasure to welcome him to today's episode of GDA Podcast.
Welcome, Jamie.
Kyle Davis: Hey, Jamie.
Jamie Metzl: Thanks so much, [00:02:00] Gail. Thank you, Kyle. I have such fond memories of you guys from that cruise and I’m thrilled to be connected.
Gail Davis: Awesome.
Kyle Davis: I think having memories at all from that cruise is probably a good thing.
Jamie Metzl: That’s with you guys, but I support you. It was fun to watch.
Kyle Davis: I will say this. I remember one day when we were in the gym and you’re looking over at me and my brother doing some hardcore plyo workouts and you’re like, “Oh, you guys are getting it like the Navy SEALs,” and I’m like, “Okay. [00:02:30] Thanks.”
Jamie Metzl: That was the Navy SEALSs. It wasn’t fully what the Navy Seals do, but it was partly what the Navy SEALs do. That’s good.
Kyle Davis: It was funny. I think the nail was hit on the head when mom or Gail or whatever we want to call her said you’re a renaissance man. Give some people, the audience or so some insight as to what makes you a renaissance man because you talk about so much and you’ve done so much.
Jamie Metzl: [00:03:00] People call me a renaissance man a lot and I always say that it’s not being like somebody from the renaissance, but it’s like who in the renaissance because as you know, Kyle, during the renaissance, 99% of everybody was shoveling manure. Just being a renaissance man isn’t that great. What I will say in response to your question is, for me, one thing that I feel like I could at least try to do is to put together big [00:03:30] pictures of changes that are happening in the world.
My two big areas are Asia and geopolitics where there’s a big historic change that’s happening with China rising and other Asian countries becoming much more significant at not just in the region but internationally than they’ve been in many centuries and turning on its head a western dominated in many ways international order that [00:04:00] has defined the world for three, 400 years. With the genetics and biotechnology work that I do, it’s the same thing. We’re on the verge of these revolutionary changes that are going to change not only the nature, how we make babies, but the nature of the babies that we make.
I’m doing a lot of work on human life extension and we have this idea that biology is this fixed thing that our grand kids [00:04:30] will be biologically like us and that is now all up for grabs. For me, to understand these big changes in the world, requires pulling a lot of different kinds of pieces together and I’ve always had a very hungry mind in wanting to learn about a lot of things. For me, I think everybody is a renaissance person in one way or another, but what I’m trying to do is to tell a bigger story based on a lot of desperate pieces.
Kyle Davis: I think [00:05:00] being able to find the strand that pulls everything together is something of a skill set that many people don’t have, but they really should. I love how you’re saying that you pull these desperate pieces together, but you make this big picture much easier to view and you frame it in a way that’s very easy for people to digest.
Jamie Metzl: That’s something that’s very important for me because when I first started thinking, I’ll take the biotechnology [00:05:30] issues, I started writing more specialized articles and journals like Foreign Affairs and not everybody reads that and even when people do, it’s not for everybody. I started to think if you have something that you think people should know, you need to reach people in the way that they are prepared to receive that information.
One of the reasons why I write both nonfiction and novels is that there are a lot of people and it’s the history [00:06:00] of our species is that we learn through stories. Stories told around the campfire and the medium has changed. Maybe we’re not around the campfire, maybe we’re in the movie theater, or novels, or cartoons, or comics, or whatever, but we learn through stories and stories help make abstract ideas real.
In my novel writing, in lecturing, I do a lot of lecturing around the world on these big important topics, what I like to do is to have people at [00:06:30] the end of my talk say, “Wow, you know, I get it. Now, I’m not just somebody trying to understand some difficult scientific concept, but I’m recognizing and internalizing the importance of what’s changing in the world and how it’s going to touch me and my responsibility to maybe do things a little bit differently as a result of that knowledge.”
Kyle Davis: I think as somebody who … I have a subscription of Foreign Affairs but then I also have a subscription to Foreign Policy [00:07:00] Magazine online and I look at both. Foreign Affairs is super wonky and long articles and I love it, for me, but the quick read of a Foreign Policy is like, “Ugh, this is so good.” I mentioned this because I want to have you, if you could, do a quick, how did we get here, if you will, with regards to Asia even though there’s so much that we could talk about and then I know one of the questions [00:07:30] that I think my mom will ask is how does this all interact in the geopolitics of the Trumpian era?
Jamie Metzl: Sure. To understand how we got here, we need to go back about 400 years because in 400 years ago, in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. What it did is it established this idea of sovereign states that were above religion. [00:08:00] That world of states held until the Napoleonic wars, ripped Europe apart and then in 1815, the countries came together and established again this congress of Vienna based on this idea of sovereign states but those sovereign states became very competitive with one another.
These ides of hard and fixed sovereignties led to the destruction of the First World War and then these excessive nationalisms [00:08:30] connected to that system led to the other destruction of the Second World War. At the same time, the Europeans in the colonial era, brought these ideas of sovereignty and nationalism to Asia. In Asia, where the colonial empires were established at the end of the Second World War, people didn’t think of sovereignty and nationalism as the root cause of the problem as many in the West did, but they felt that these were [00:09:00] ingredients that had been lacking for them during the colonial era.
Now, we’re in this phase where China particularly is rising, but in many ways it’s not buying in to the western founded postwar international order which is based around ideas of international law and shared sovereignty and transnationalism. China is reaching back in many ways to a traditional European [00:09:30] idea of hard nationalism and then we have President Trump who is in many ways very distressful of these post-war structures like the European Union, like NATO, like the United Nations. All of these institutions that were all created in the aftermath of the Second World War.
What we’re seeing is a rising is a rising China that’s becoming more and more powerful and a United States [00:10:00] that’s becoming less able and less willing, and not even wanting to support the post-war international order that has been the hallmark of peace and security for the last 70 years. That world that we’ve known which has been incredibly successful in many ways is coming to an end and we’re going back to a balance of power structure where China, the United States, Russia and others will all be important [00:10:30] states, but there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world and there’s a tremendous potential for conflict. That’s why I always say that this is probably the most dangerous moment in American history since the Cuban Missile Crisis because the world that we’ve known is in many ways crumbling.
Kyle Davis: I would agree with that. I think we’re also confused as to what to look at. I mean, we could talk about Syria and everything else but we’re … That’s a huge humanitarian crisis [00:11:00] that we’re looking at over there, but Al-Qaeda is not going to be the death by a thousand cuts. It’s going to be something else.
Jamie Metzl: I think that’s a really important point. A lot of people miss it because you open up the newspaper and you feel that the stories that are the top headlines are the most important, but a thousand years from now when people look back today, Al-Qaeda terrorism likely aren’t going to be the big stories, but the big stories certainly [00:11:30] will be that certainly the rise of China and how that’s changed and changing in the world.
It will certainly be that after four billion years of evolution by random mutation and natural selection our species began now guiding our own evolution with gene editing and genome sequencing and all these other revolutionary technologies that are only now [00:12:00] beginning their very rapid process of maturations. We have all these things that feel important but they’re often even bigger stories, more important issues that were not focused nearly the attention on that we should.
Kyle Davis: It’s like the dog and pony show before you head into the big tent.
Jamie Metzl: It really is and now with the spectacle particularly of American politics, it’s like there’s a firework show going on [00:12:30] all the time and you’re looking from one explosion to the other and it’s very hard for people to take a step back and ask what are the really important issues? What are the things that we should be focusing on? That's why I think getting out and speaking and having conversations is really important because we humans, we are a social species. We learn through communicating with each other and having the kinds of dialogues that you [00:13:00] guys organize and others is now more important than ever.
Gail Davis: I find it so interesting that you have the column which is based on facts and then you do the novels. I’m curious how much of what’s really going on in the world, inspires the themes of your novels?
Jamie Metzl: My novels are all based on the very hard science. I start with whether it was Genesis code and genetic engineering or Eternal [00:13:30] Sonata and life extension. My foundation is really getting to understand the hard scientists speaking with a lot of scientists, understanding the science and then from there, if we are on the verge of being able to rewrite the code of life, what will that mean? What will it mean when the first genetically enhanced people show up?
How will people react? Will intelligent services get involved? [00:14:00] What will it mean when there will be a scientist at some point who … And multiple scientists together who figure out, “Wow, if we do this, we might be able to live much, much longer than we currently live or download our brains into some other medium. There’s always that first moment when you think like, “Wow, this crazy thing is now possible and [00:14:30] then what are the implications of that?”
In some ways when I’m writing novels, my non-fiction work gets me to the starting line, but then the imagination to say, “Well, if this is true, if these things are true or will be true, based on the real science, what will it mean? What will it mean on a global affairs level but also what will it mean to be human being? What does it mean?” How would immortality change the way we think of ourselves? How would it change [00:15:00] the way we think about love, about time, about all of these things. That’s why it’s so fruitful for me to bring the worlds of fiction and nonfiction together.
Kyle Davis: One of the things that is popping into my mind with regards to immortality but in a weird, macabre way is a recent piece that CNN was doing talking about the AI, using AI to read through people’s text and then being able to have a conversation with someone who [00:15:30] died and then I keep thinking about that in of itself is crazy but if you watch Black Mirror, you know that that was an episode two or three years ago and so I’m wondering with that, what is that really push or genetic enhancement that’s going to really cause us to really step back and go, “Maybe we can live forever even if it’s just our thoughts, or being, or something else.
Jamie Metzl: I mean [00:16:00] certainly it’s possible today to have an artificial intelligence bot and then populate that bot with the historical experience of a person. That bot could learn speech patterns. It could know some element of that history. That’s very rudimentary, but eventually and whether eventually is 20 years from now or 50 years from now or 100 years from now, we are going to have [00:16:30] more and the ability to download more and more complicated thoughts.
Then now we’re at a spiritual question. If you believe that human beings were created by some kind of divine source and are infinitely complex, you could think how could you ever understand a thought? How could you ever understand this thing that we experienced as spirituality or whatever? [00:17:00] If you think that human beings are single cell organisms that have mutated over four billion years and gotten more and more complex, and if you believe it’s possible to understand pretty well a single cell organism or even a simple organism like a C. elegans roundworm, then you would have to accept that there will come a time when our technology driven by Moore’s Law and [00:17:30] these exponential forces in making our technology ever more complex, that our technology will be more complex than we are, that we’ll be able to create the functional equivalent of a brain and to download our thoughts into some other medium.
The question is, is that immortality? If your body is dead, but your thoughts live on in some other structure or maybe they are downloaded [00:18:00] into a robotic medium or you can walk around but just you’re not physically the same you other than the physicality of your thoughts, it feels crazy but it also is very logical and I think that we will eventually get to that point and it may take longer than we’d imagine. These are really big [00:18:30] issues that force us to ask some fundamental, philosophical questions of ourselves.
Kyle Davis: That would help really, if we could download the minds of the founding fathers so we can ask them, “Hey, what did you actually mean? Was this a secret comma or some other thing like that? I don't know. I was just thinking about that. I was like, “Oh, man. That would be brilliant.”
Jamie Metzl: I think the founding fathers, and this is relevant [00:19:00] to the debate that’s now happening with the passing of Justice Scalia and [inaudible 00:19:06]. I think if the founding fathers were around, they wouldn’t want to answer those questions because they would say, “We laid a foundation not of a constitution set in formaldehyde but our anticipation was with these principles, society will grow and you’re going to have to figure out what that means and [00:19:30] apply these core values to a very different set of facts. I’m not an originalist but it would be interesting to have them around. It will be certainly fun and be good for EPCOT. For EPCOT Center, you go to that hall or presidents, it would make it a lot more exciting.
Kyle Davis: I think it would help. I think if people just understood that there’s an amendment process for a reason for a reason to be [crosstalk 00:19:55].
Jamie Metzl: Exactly. It’s like the Woody Allen movie [00:20:00] when he’s … I can’t remember which one where he’s in line and some guy is speaking pompously about the Marshall McLuhan and then Marshall McLuhan shows up and says, “That wasn’t what I meant at all?” At least the progressives among us might say, “Well, look. I’ve got George Washington right here and he says you’re wrong.”
Kyle Davis: The joy that would be.
Gail Davis: Hey, Jamie. I know recently you were at South by Southwest. Tell us what [00:20:30] was going on in Austin and what you spoke about while you were there?
Jamie Metzl: It was great. This was my first time at South by Southwest. I have a big solo talk on the future of human genetic engineering. South by Southwest is just … That makes me sound un-hip. South By as the people [crosstalk 00:20:47] call it, it was incredible. There were so many incredible people, so many interesting things happening at the same time.
[00:21:00] Just at every hour, 40 or 50 different things between talks, and films, and music and comedy, and gaming. What I had to do, I noticed that in everybody’s talks, everyone had their phone out and they were scrolling through. I think it was FOMO, everyone was scrolling through their phones about different things that were happening, what they could do now, what they were possibly going to do next.
[00:21:30] Before my things started, I put yoga music on the PA system and then we did focused breathing and I said, “All right. If we’re going to be present for this next hour and we’re going to learn about this really important topic. Everyone was great. It was a full house. The talk went really well. It was the kind of environment where you give a little and get a little. I certainly gave me talk which was well-received but I got so much from meeting [00:22:00] such wonderful people and I learned a ton from all the different talks that I went to and just different people contributing in different ways whether through music or art or cooking or all sorts of things. It’s really wonderful.
Gail Davis: That’s awesome.
Kyle Davis: I’m curious when you said you did a session of focused breathing. Have you ever done or do you practice the Wim Hof Method?
Jamie Metzl: I don’t even know what it is but, Kyle, if you would tell us, that can [00:22:30] be an educational portion of this podcast.
Kyle Davis: I have to make sure that … I’m Google’ing it right now so I can make sure I can give the right attribution to it.
Jamie Metzl: You might change that method forever. It could be in a positive way. You could just say what you think it is.
Kyle Davis: It’s the Wim Hof Method. That’s it. It’s this guy, I’m forgetting what country he’s from but I want to say it’s like the Netherlands or [crosstalk 00:22:58].
Jamie Metzl: I’m sure it’s Germany, or Austria, or [00:23:00] Netherlands, or one of those places.
Kyle Davis: He can hold his breath for eight minutes and he does these crazy breathing exercises that you start for three weeks where you breathe and then hold, breathe and then hold. You can Google. It’s the first thing that pops up and you type a Wim, so W-I-M and then space, Hof, H-O-F. Then it’ll pop up. It’s the icemanwimhof.com/method.
Jamie Metzl: Wow.
Kyle Davis: What it does is, it’ll help you start [00:23:30] to breathe and then he start taking cold showers with it. Then you start taking ice baths and then you start to learn to hold your breath like up to 10 minutes or something crazy like that under an ice bath. It does something. If you’re all about the ketogenic diet and focusing. You can do some really crazy stuff with it but I don't know. I was going to ask you something that you were [crosstalk 00:23:54].
Jamie Metzl: I don’t do it, Kyle but I certainly would encourage you to do it and then let’s do another [00:24:00] podcast so we can talk about it.
Kyle Davis: I can be more informed. See, the thing about me is I know a little bit about a lot but not a lot about a little. We’ll have to figure that one out.
Gail Davis: I think we should shift over to all these great accomplishments you’ve had with your marathons and your Ironman and ultra marathons. How did you get into that and how do you fit in the time for that with all the other things you’re doing?
Jamie Metzl: The answer to your last question is I’m the world’s worst sleeper. I’m so envious of [00:24:30] these people who they put their head down and it’s like eight hours later, it’s like, “Oh my god. It’s morning. How did that happen?” For me, it’s like, “Jesus, four o’clock in the morning. Why am I up? I’m kind of annoyed. Oh, heck. Maybe I’ll go running.” The way it started for me is I’ve always been athletic and just when I was a little kid, I’ve always done a lot of sports.
In the early ‘90s, I was living in Cambodia, working as a human rights officer for the UN [00:25:00] and me and some others, we created a Cambodia runners’ club and it was half Cambodians, half foreigners. We trained for the Bangkok Marathon and we flew over on a C-130 UN transport plane to Bangkok and we ran this race together and at that time it was like I didn’t even think I could do it. It was such an exciting thing. Then I was hooked.
I started running more and more marathons and [00:25:30] then I ran so many marathons that it just became [inaudible 00:25:32]. I didn’t even get excited. Then I thought there’s probably a bigger thing. Then I started to learn more. It was relatively the early days of the Ironman and I went. Now, I’ve got all these kinds of gear but the first time I went to the Ironman, I had a $200 bike and I had mountain biking shoes. I mean, it was like DIY Ironman. Frankly, I did just as well. Now that I have this [00:26:00] fancy bike and all the gear, I’m no faster at all, but I loved it.
That was really exciting. I grew up back and forth to Colorado and so I love just being in the mountains and I had this idea. Sometimes you can go for a four, five day hiking trip but what if you could just do that whole trip in one day and other people carry your food. Wouldn’t that be a more [00:26:30] efficient way to do it? That was what got me into ultra marathon but I did an ultra in Taiwan last year some meetings there.
It was this crazy thing in the rainforest. It was 100 degrees over four mountains and through thick jungle and cliff faces and river crossings. It took 19 hours and it almost killed me, but [inaudible 00:26:56] part was a [00:27:00] lot of fun. The answer to your question is, it’s a personality flaw.
Gail Davis: I love it.
Kyle Davis: Have you done the Leadville 100?
Jamie Metzl: Leadville 100. I’ve not done it but that’s a great historic race. Hopefully someday I will do. There’s one that I’m probably going to do in early October but it’s Bryce Canyon, Zion National Forest and the Grand Canyon. [00:27:30] One after the other in early October. I’ve not been to any of those places so I’m really excited about it. Other people is carrying baked … boiling potatoes for you. It’s great.
Kyle Davis: I mean my mom is doing a half marathon. I prepare for one the fizzled out towards the end because I just feel that my body is more adept to cross-fit or something else, but anyways, what’s your mindset when you get [00:28:00] in to really help you and what mile does it click in? Do you know what I’m trying to say? At what point, is it just pain and everything is past here. You’re in flow state [inaudible 00:28:10].
Jamie Metzl: I don't know because you come to think of it all, now you don’t have to. I think of it all as enjoyable. When I’m doing the marathon, certainly, you get your flow state and then at mile like 22, you think, “I guess my flow state is done and my legs really hurt.” Then [00:28:30] you just got to keep going. Having a flow state, it comes and goes. There’s times in the Ironman where 15 minutes will pass by and it’ll just be 15 minutes later. I think I’m on my bike, I’m going really fast but I don't remember this last bit because it’s just like you’re just doing it and not thinking about it. That’s what I like about these sports is I spend a lot of time in my head and [00:29:00] you get out there. Life is a physical experience in many ways and it’s nice just to do it.
Kyle Davis: One of the things I like doing when I run and actually I went for a run last night-
Jamie Metzl: Great.
Kyle Davis: I like the 30, 45-minute run. It allows me to jump in there and get in my thoughts, think about things, running through my head and then come out and then come out and then like, “Oh, that’s the idea,” but I don’t have the ability to write it down. I’m just wondering since you’re [00:29:30] thinking about genetics and stuff, I had this question. This could be a beautiful question. It really was. How is this going to change in like a hundred years or so when people … They’re not thinking about it but when you’re just crushing and someone runs the first sub, two-hour marathon, how is this all going to change once we “genetically modify ourselves” and then where’s the enjoyment going to come from?
Jamie Metzl: Everybody always says that but there’s just a reset. Every generation you begin life with a set of expectations [00:30:00] that they’re not absolute expectations meaning like your expectation of how long you’re going to live or what a healthy lifespan is, is based on this moment in time. If you were 100 years ago, it would be a lot less. If you were 2,000 years ago, it would be way, way less. You begin life whether it’s just a set of expectations, how things ought to work and that’s your baseline. You’re not everyday waking up and thinking like, “Oh my god. I’m so glad I’m not [00:30:30] farming today.”
You just don’t have an expectation that you’re going to farm even though that’s what our ancestors have done for the last 12,000 years and before then, they were wondering around hunting for things and searching for berries. There’s a reset and so when people run, the two-hour marathon which I think will probably happen within the next couple of years just because there’s new shoe technology that’s letting people go faster so there’s a whole thing later this year where [00:31:00] they’re going to try to do it with these new shoes.
Kyle Davis: With the Nike shoes.
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, exactly. Then no one is going to say, “I guess we did the two hours. You know let’s fold up the marathon.” Then there will be some new thing like a 1:55 is the new thing that people want.
Gail Davis: It’s so cool.
Jamie Metzl: I wish I could run like a sub 2:30 marathon and then a 44:40. Sign me up for that. I’m ready to go.
Kyle Davis: You can do it. Just believe in yourself.
Gail Davis: [00:31:30] That’s right. What’s next, Jaime? What’s on the horizon? I know you have the book that you mentioned, Eternal Sonata.
Jamie Metzl: Eternal Sonata came out a few months ago. I’m just starting my process of working on a new book which will be a nonfiction book on the future of genetic engineering and I’m very excited about that. I’m in the early stages of what looks like will be a very big initiative both at a not-for-profit [00:32:00] side and a for-profit side on extreme human life extension. I believe that we are right on the verge of some really fundamental shifts in how we think about aging and life span and most importantly health span and there are new technologies on the horizon that really are going to change the way people think about biology and about aging and about their expectations [00:32:30] of aging.
Just to give one example that right now, we spend a huge amount of money on diseases of aging which you know are of course cancer, and dementia, and heart disease and others but we spend a relatively very small amount. I’m trying to encounter aging itself which happens on a systemic, on a cellular level but there are all kinds of technologies that are working very effectively [00:33:00] on other mammals that are not only extending life by up to 30% but also extending the health span.
It’s not near the equivalent of a [inaudible 00:33:11] person in an old age home for 30% longer than your other life span would have been, but you’re actually living a healthier, more robust life and when you think about that even if we could extend health span by two, three years, think of all the people who’d spend more [00:33:30] time with their loved ones, create more or write more poetry, invent more things and on top of that you would save trillions of dollars in healthcare spending. We’re entering an age where revolutionary technology is going to change a lot of things and we’re going to have to be very creative in how we imagine a future that’s going to be, in many ways different from our expectations to date.
Kyle Davis: If you want [00:34:00] Jamie to tell you about the future of genetic engineering, or Asia, or geopolitics, or-
Gail Davis: How to run a marathon.
Kyle Davis: -how to run a marathon.
Jamie Metzl: Exactly.
Kyle Davis: Maybe whatever fad diet we’re going in for the day, I’m sure you can talk about that too.
Jamie Metzl: It’s true.
Kyle Davis: I’m a big fan … Go ahead.
Jamie Metzl: What I’ll say is if you’re doing a thing and the word diet is part of it, it’s not going to work. Have a lifestyle that works for you, that’s sustainable [00:34:30] and just do that but I guarantee you it’s going to involve exercising and not eating a lot of processed food, and eating a lot of fresh healthy foods and vegetables. That’s the shorthand.
Kyle Davis: What about ketogenic adapted?
Jamie Metzl: I just think that the things that are hard to say are hard to sustain so your thing of like, I know I’m excited for the Kyle podcast when you talk about freezing yourself and holding your breath, [00:35:00] I look forward to hearing about that in that podcast as well.
Kyle Davis: I’m a breather of straw. I like the ketogenic diet but it’s another time, another place and I’m sure we’ve covered it on another podcast. All right, cool Like I said if you want Jamie to speak about all the world’s whispers, you can do so by contacting the GDA Speakers at 214-420-1999 or visiting gdaspeakers.com. For the transcript for today’s podcast, you can go to gdaspeakers.com.
Gail Davis: [00:35:30] GDA Podcast.
Kyle Davis: Or GDA Podcast, thank you. I just went into the zone right there, in the zone.
Gail Davis: Excellent. Thank you, Jamie for joining us. It was great.
Jamie Metzl: My great pleasure.
Kyle Davis: Thanks.
Gail Davis: Thank you.
Jamie Metzl: Take care, guys. Already, bye.
ep. 36 - Jamie Metzl: Futurist, Global Affairs Specialist, & Author by GDA Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.