Should I Pick My Kids' Genes?

Rachel Wallis is using cutting-edge gene selection technology to have kids. Wolf Tivy is using traditional methods. Which is better? They debate.

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Transcript

The case for the old way (00:00)

Wolf: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Students. I’m your host, Wolf Tivy. I’m here with Rachel Wallis.

Rachel: Hello.

Wolf: One of my esteemed colleagues who’s at the forefront of reproductive technology. She’s very interested in those things. She ran a Reproductive Frontiers conference recently. We’re going to have a little debate, which is, should you use these cutting-edge genetic reproduction technologies on your own children? Or should you do it the old-fashioned way?

And so I represent the old-fashioned way. I have four children, five on the way. Done au naturel, as you might say. And she’s engaged in full-on embryo selection experiments. So we’re going to have this conversation.

We’re going to figure it out. And let us begin.

Rachel: Fantastic. No, I’m so excited to have this conversation because I know that we’ve sort of danced around the topic a decent amount just in passing. And obviously, I really respect you as a thinker, and so the idea that you’re sort of a, well not potentially anti-reproductive technology, but sort of representing opposing view is very interesting. But so—I’d love to hear from you.

Wolf: Yeah. Okay. I’ll start with the opening argument, which is that our ancestors have been doing this a certain way for 4 billion years or thereabouts. It’s hard to know. You look at the genetic records, it can be a little fuzzy that far back, at least a billion years, for sexual reproduction at least.

And it’s very well proven. It’s very Lindy, as you might say.

So we know it works, and this is my general philosophy with reproduction is we have anti-aging technology, we have immortality technology that actually just works. It’s called reproduction. You can just make more of yourself. And there’s a certain thing you can do to increase variation and quality, which is to mix with someone else. So it’s all very convenient and well-designed.

I am big fan of sexual reproduction—

Rachel: Yeah. Probably the—

Wolf: as a system

Rachel: it’s always going to be the most antifragile of all immortality technologies, because if you simply remain yourself forever, that’s probably not going to be ideal.

Wolf: Yeah. You’re opening yourself up to big wipe outs. This is why, actually, that non-sexually reproducing, asexual reproducing species often get wiped out, or lineages will get wiped out in favor of sexual lineages. But that’s a whole other set of discussions. Now, bringing it forward to the 21st century, and in some ways, the 20th century as well, people started experimenting with chemical birth control and whatnot.

The question is, given new technology, why should we stick with an old technology? And my first argument is I don’t want to be the guinea pig.

Rachel: Fair.

Wolf: Well, on paper, we might be able to do some crazy embryo selection stuff and get an additional standard deviation of intelligence or courage or health or whatever it is that we’re going for. That’s all unproven. Right? It’s speculative at this point. I look forward to the results, but it’s speculative.

And so that’s reason number one is just, okay, out of general caution, I don’t think there’s going to be any take off, winner takes all effect here, so—

Rachel: That’s—

Wolf: general caution, I’ll sit back and wait till we see the results. Point number two is I find it’s obviously very invasive into the whole life cycle of the human being. We’re now inserting this techno capital apparatus into the most fundamental aspect of life, in a way that not only is sort of a little bit questionable, creates dependencies and so on, but it also disrupts... People give these vague kind of spiritual arguments. Like, does it affect the relationship between the parents and the child?

Does it affect the relationship between the parents and each other? I think there’s something to those arguments. I’m not going to say those are fully rational or anything like that. But I think there’s something there. And maybe if I can try to articulate it rationally.

You’re fundamentally changing your relationship to life.

And it’s important to always think through not only how am I doing things and what’s the appropriate thing on the margin, but what kind of society does this imply? What kind of world does this imply? What kind of lifestyle does this imply? If me and my community are doing this, or if I’m doing this differently from the rest of my community, what does that look like? And for those, I find that the reproductive technologies, it’s a little bit, again, it’s speculative.

Right? You’re throwing a lot of stuff up in the air that had previously been quite fixed, and so let’s see where it goes. And then it is my habit to reason into the extremes. This is something that I like to do. And so what is the extreme in terms of reproductive technology?

Well, we start with this embryo selection stuff. We start with some genetic modification. In the limit, though, now we’re talking about like, okay, we’ve got artificial wombs or disembodied wombs where they take some dead girl’s womb and strap it up to a machine and make it produce children. People are doing experiments with things like this. You end up with a totally different nature of what man is.

Right? And combine that with genetic modification, we’re talking an entirely different animal.

There’s no longer any constraints on head size. There’s no longer any constraints on almost any dimension. We start to really explore the wacky stuff, and I’m not against any of that. I find it fascinating. I like the idea of life unleashing itself on all different dimensions and becoming something better.

Well, hopefully something better. However—Again, there’s a lot of risk in these highly speculative technologies, and I’m always curious to know how the advocates of reproductive technologies, and so on, are thinking about those more limiting cases. If not conservatism, then where do you see it going? Right? And so through all of these arguments, and just a general distrust of the medical system, I have chosen to do things the proper way, the old way.

Rachel: Look, it’s a lot of fun. I can’t blame you.

Wolf: Right. And so that’s my opening argument. We’ve set the hostile tone for you to come in here and articulate your views. So let’s hear it. Why should we throw out the old ways and do our reproduction with the machine, so to speak?

Self-experimentation (06:58)

Rachel: Absolutely. I’m just going to take one second to look up a name, or maybe you remember. What was the name of the guy who discovered that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria?

Wolf: I don’t recall, but I do recall the case where people thought, “Oh, stomach ulcers, they’re caused by stress, they’re caused by genetics, something, something toxins,” blah, blah, blah. And it turns out that people who take antibiotics lose the stomach ulcers.

Rachel: Oh.

Wolf: And there’s a whole bunch of other things like this, certain kind of spinal problems, certain kinds of even, I think multiple sclerosis or something may have recently been shown to be a pathogen.

Rachel: Really? Oh, interesting.

Wolf: And I’m not sure if it’s that one or if it’s another one of those sort of mysterious autoimmune kind of nervous system disorders. But something like that was recently shown—

Rachel: But the—

Wolf: similarly to be a pathogen

Rachel: his name is Barry Marshall, and the reason I bring him up is because I remember reading about him in high school. And he was having a whole lot of trouble convincing people of his theory. And so he basically took a beaker full of the bacteria and downed it, and then gave himself stomach ulcers.

Wolf: Oof. Did he then take a load of antibiotics and cure it?

Rachel: He did.

Wolf: I would hope so.

Rachel: But he ended up winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine. But I just remember it just—

Wolf: The self-experimentation.

Rachel: Yeah. It’s so based. I’m just like, “This is exactly who I want to be.”

Wolf: Right. Okay. So you’re into sort of high-risk self-experimentation.

Rachel: And look, I think that when you do any kind of sales or investigation into population psychology, there’s definitely a group called the first adopters, and then there are—secondary adopters—third adopters. And so you kind of have this bell curve, and I actually think it’s probably evolutionary advantageous that you have whenever something new happens, the vast majority of the population is immediately suspicious. And then you have a certain group who are like—

Wolf: You get this—

Rachel: “Oh, hell yeah. I’m going to try this.” And I’m—

Wolf: Yeah. Well, this is necessary to life. You have some variation in how people approach things so that—you try out these experiments, God rolls the dice a little bit—and we see where it goes.

Rachel: I psychologic—

Wolf: But of course, it’s high risk.

Rachel: It is.

Wolf: You know?

Rachel: It is. And look, psychologically, I’m definitely in the early adopter category, and this is—true of basically everything in my life. But as well as that I do have a special interest in biology and medicine. I remember being 10 years old and watching “House M.D.” with my parents, and it was my job in the family that basically every episode they had this thing called the brain drill, where they’d have to probably drill into the patient’s brain, and they’d show it on the screen. And my parents would go—”Oh, God.”

And it would be my job to tell them when the brain drill was over, because I would be like—”Oh, yeah, this is cool.”

Wolf: You were watching it—with great interest.

Rachel: And so I love all things biology and medical—and it doesn’t actually freak me out that much. And so in many ways, I’m sort of the perfect candidate for something like polygenic embryo selection, where I’m excited for the results of the technology, obviously. But actually, the mechanics of it and the drugs and the titrations and the entire process—going into the body

Wolf: yeah, the whole machine. Yeah.

Rachel: It makes me—I find it so exciting.

Wolf: Speaking of brain drills, have you done trepanation then?

Rachel: No, not yet. Never say never.

Wolf: That’s, of course, where they drill a hole in your skull to let out the evil spirits and/or the pressure or something.

Rachel: It was one of—

Wolf: It was practiced by ancient South Americans.

Rachel: In the Near East as well. I think there’s evidence—

Wolf: Is that so?

Rachel: of it in sort of Egypt and stuff. But it’s one of the first surgeries that we did and extremely good for relieving pressure if you’ve got a brain bleed. The ancients, they weren’t dumb.

Wolf: Hmm. Yeah, did they have an MRI system? How do they know what’s in there? I don’t know.

Rachel: I don’t know how they figured it out, but it’s pretty obvious that if a person has a brain injury, they kind of seem fine, and then they pass out. That’s typically a sign that they have too much intracranial pressure. And so the ancients may have figured out that in some cases, if you drill a hole and the blood comes out, they wake up. And so maybe they put it together. Anyway, sorry, that’s slightly off topic.

Wolf: That is definitely a tangent. But okay, so you’re—you’re into sort of biological self-experimentation.

Rachel: And look, hugely into the peptides craze and everything. But so I think I’m almost a perfect candidate to be the sort of the vanguard to try out these technologies. And then if it works for everybody else, then—I think it’ll be great.

Wolf: So you sacrifice yourself for the race by throwing yourself into the biological futurism.

Rachel: And look, some people may say, “Oh, it’s perfectly okay for you to do self-experimentation on yourself, but doing it on your children is potentially a step too far.”

Wolf: Right. So tell me more about that.

Rachel: Well, so one thing I would say is that we already, for the most part, think that the parents are probably the best people to think about what their children would actually want before they reach the age of majority. And I think that that makes sense as a supposition—because those are generally the people who are closest to them biologically. They probably share a lot of the same dispositions.

Wolf: Yeah, we do generally love our children.

Rachel: Also, we love our children. We absolutely have their best interests at heart. But my husband and I, we’re not exactly sort of shy and retiring people. I think we’re both into sort of big experimentation. And so I suspect our children will probably be similar.

And I sort of think if my parents had the opportunity to experiment biologically on me to make me smarter or healthier, and I found out that they didn’t do it, I would be so mad. And so my hope is that my children will have a similar disposition to me.

Wolf: Well, yeah. One hopes. And—

Rachel: I would also say just a little bit about polygenic... I’m saying all of these things like, “Oh, it’s super dangerous, as it poses a risk to the children.” This technology is basically super IVF and doesn’t use any—

Wolf: Yeah. Why don’t you give us an overview of what exactly it is that is the cutting edge and what you are doing?

How polygenic embryo selection works (12:38)

Rachel: Yes. So basically, IVF is where you get a sperm and egg, and you put them together in a dish outside the body. It forms an embryo, and then you put it back in a womb. And so this was kind of invented by a very clever person as a way to bypass primary reproduction because a lot of stuff can go wrong. You can have a blocked tube or maybe the partner’s sperm don’t have enough motility, but actually the genic material is fine.

And so it sort of bypasses a lot of things that can go wrong with reproduction. And then more recently, we invented a way to take a look at the embryo to have a high-level understanding of if it’s genetically viable. And so this is something called PGT-A, or preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy. Aneuploidy being if it has too many or too few chromosomes. And so basically how this works is that once you grow up the embryo in the Petri dish, it’s several hundred cells.

You take maybe a sample of five to 10 cells, and this is completely fine for the embryo, and then you send those away to a lab. You do a very low-read genetic analysis on it. And because it’s so low read and so low resolution, you can’t really make out individual genes, but you can see chromosomes basically. And you can be like, “Well, unfortunately this embryo has four extra chromosomes. It’s probably not going to work out if we implant it.”

But in even more recently than that, we have discovered something called PGT-P, which is basically where you can take the whole genome sequence of mom and dad, so a long-read, very granular look at all of their different genes, and then you combine this knowledge with the low-read PGT-A test, so looking at the chromosomes. And you can basically, because you can see the chromosomes, you can see which chromosome has been inherited from which parent for the baby. And so you can make a prediction as to its genetic makeup. And there’s—

Wolf: And is the inheritance by chromosomes, or are there crossings otherwise than the chromosomes?

Rachel: Yes. And so this is the tricky thing is getting the crossing over. So for the general audience, basically what happens, one of the magical parts of sexual reproduction is that you get in the embryo, the chromosomes from mom and dad line up. You get one set of chromosomes from mom, one set from dad, and then there is a random amount of what’s called crossing over, where the chromosomes literally cross over like this, and they break off and they form actually new chromosomes. And this is part of the reason why you can inherit unequal parts of DNA from your grandparents.

So I’ve done Ancestry DNA, and I know that I share, I think, 27% of my genome with my maternal grandmother and only 23% from my maternal grandfather, I think from crossing over, which I think is really interesting. Anyway, sorry, that’s also a tangent.

Wolf: Yeah, that is interesting.

Rachel: But so it turns out with math and a lot of very clever thinking, you can figure out the crossing over. And so these, the PGT-P or polygenic embryo selection, you can see I think to probably 99.5% accuracy of the embryos, which is enough to be able to then look at the embryos and do the next step, which is actually the most difficult part of the process and is the part where there is the most potential for improvement, which is to make predictions about the future of the child based on its genes.

Wolf: Mm-hmm. Right. And you use the sort of—People have developed statistical methodologies for telling from a genome how tall is this person, what color hair, what color eyes, maybe even some personality dispositions, their intelligence. Obviously health things like various genetic diseases.

Rachel: Yeah. And so, basically you’ll be able to see, for the most part, monogenic diseases, I believe. And so that’s great. You can avoid things like Tay-Sachs or I know I’m a carrier for something called hereditary hemochromatosis—which is sometimes called the Irishman’s disease. Which I’m thankfully a carrier, so a heterozygote as opposed to homozygote, which means if I had two copies of the bad gene instead of one, it means that you don’t get rid of iron properly.

And so the solution to this, it’s not actually a life-threatening disease. It just means that you have to have regular exsanguination in order to get rid of your excess iron cells.

Wolf: You have to give blood more often.

Rachel: Yeah. So I thought that was interesting. And luckily—

Wolf: I’ve heard actually that most people should be doing that, but the—

Rachel: To get rid of the microplastics. The—maybe the ancients, they—

Wolf: But even for the iron.

Rachel: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Actually, for the iron, but also, yeah the two big ways to get rid of microplastics I think are regular exsanguination and sauna. But anyway, sorry, these are also tangents. But basically, where was I going?

But yeah, you can get rid of monogenic disease, and then you can also get rid of what’s called polygenic disease, which is conditions that are caused by either multiple genes or interactions between the genes. And so some of the predictors are now extremely accurate depending on how heritable the condition is and how simple the condition is. So, I have done this for my own embryos, and so I have a little thing on my computer that I can look at from the polygenic embryo screening company, and I can select different embryos, and I can see how tall they’re going to be. And so the height is—

Wolf: If they’re fed well.

Rachel: If they’re fed well. So, height is extremely heritable and easy to predict basically—their maximum height. And obviously it can be lower—if they’re not given enough nutrients—which I think is very interesting. So height is generally very heritable. Certain things like schizophrenia are extremely heritable, and so that’s a wonderful thing to be able to look at.

Thankfully, Jonathan, my husband and I, aren’t very predisposed to schizophrenia. He’s a little bit higher than I am. And then our embryos, I think even our highest schizophrenia risk one is not very likely to get schizophrenia—and so that’s not really something we’re going to select for. But if your family has a history of schizophrenia, that would be extremely important.

Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s an interesting question why schizophrenia sticks around, and this maybe—

Rachel: It is

Wolf: gets into some of the practicalities of do you really want to do these kinds of selections? Because—schizophrenia probably sticks around as sort of an extreme expression of something that’s actually good. And so you have the most extreme expression, you kind of go crazy, you can’t quite hold your life together, you can’t quite tell what’s real. In the less extreme expressions, you’re really, really good at pattern matching, you’re really, really good at—figuring out what’s going on—

Rachel: Yeah. The—

Wolf: piecing together the subtle things. And my family, I think, has a history of schizophrenia, actually, but also a history of photographic memories—

Rachel: Cool

Wolf: and genius-level kind of pattern-matching ability—

Rachel: Oh, sick

Wolf: and so on. And those things, I think, are inseparable. And so I’m just curious how you think about those, let’s say, more...

Ultimately, a lot of these choices are, in fact, value-laden, right? And where do the values come from? What grounding do you have to be able to make that decision? And this is, again, I like to think into the extremes. In the limit of full genetic self-authorship, the actual sort of thing that becomes the repository of the reality of your life is your ideology or your worldview, right?

Which ultimately also comes from your genetics at some level.

Rachel: It’s self-reinforcing, yeah.

Wolf: It’s self-reinforcing. So you get this kind of new feedback loop between genetics and worldview and, yeah, curious how you’ve thought about those issues and—what level of caution or kind of deliberate randomness or versus—do you want to be fully rationalist and go and poke every bit?

Rachel: Something you’re describing is referred to as antagonistic pleiotropy. And so it’s the idea that in trying to select for something good, you might accidentally select for something bad. And so, one of the polygenic embryo screening companies, Herasight, it’s something that they’re really concerned about, and so they recently released a paper on it to be like, “Out of all these traits that we think parents are going to want to select for, are any of these accidentally going to select for negative things?” And I think the big worry is that for selecting for something as complex as intelligence is are you also selecting for other things? There’s a sort of stereotype of the mad professor or the depressed genius.

Does genius come with a certain kind of madness? Who’s to say? But they found that actually when you look into... And look, this is all using the predictors that we have, which are perhaps still in their infancy, but as far as we can tell, intelligence is not really associated with any bad outcomes. In fact, it’s associated with a lot of decreases in bad mental health markers.

So—highly intelligent people are less likely to be anxious, less likely to be depressed. There’s a question of are they actually less predisposed to these things, or is it simply that being more intelligent allows you to live an easier life, and so you’re less likely to get—

Wolf: Yeah. Well, I think—

Rachel: But just to—

Wolf: I’ll make the—case for why intelligence, for, let’s say, background optimism here. Which is that the edge cases I’m talking about with things like schizophrenia, those are the edge cases. The main case is there is such a thing as health, right? And the healthier you are, the smarter you are, the more athletic you are, the more charismatic you are. And the way that shows up genetically—now I’m not an expert in the details here, but what I understand is that there’s a certain level of mutational load, which is to say—random little mutations that run in families that attack certain functionalities in your system—and lead to degraded performance.

And if you have too many of these things, you’re unhealthy, you’re stunted, you’re not intelligent, maybe your brain doesn’t work as well, you have a bit of mental illness. And if you just got rid of that stuff, you suddenly become the sort of back to the Garden of Eden, the perfect man, right?

Rachel: Yeah. This is absolutely true. An interesting thing about this is, so men and women, both their gametes kind of degrade as they age. So we all know as women get older, it can become harder to produce a euploid embryo. So euploid is the opposite of aneuploid.

Euploid means an embryo with the correct number of chromosomes. So if you have the eggs of a 25-year-old woman and you’re doing IVF—she will produce a larger number of euploid embryos. If you’re, say, 40, you’re getting down to maybe 10% to 15% of the embryos that you create will be euploid. But the interesting thing about this is that an embryo from a 40-year-old woman is probably going to be as good as the embryo from a 25-year-old woman. So they’re harder to make.

Wolf: That’s assuming that they pass these tests.

Rachel: As long as it’s got the correct number of chromosomes—they’re basically going to be as healthy with each other. This is not the case with men. So men are capable of producing euploid embryos right up until their old age. But the issue is that sperm gets a lot more mutations as men get older. And so even though men are equally as capable as making children in their old age, the children will be of a slightly worse quality.

And I don’t want to say that because lots of people have old fathers, and they’re functional and happy—members of society.

Wolf: No, but this is—

Rachel: But on average. Yeah

Wolf: it’s just on average, these are the things that build up over the course of generations.

Rachel: Yeah. I thought that was very interesting. And you’re right, so mutational load really does play a factor in things, and there is a sort of a model of health as maybe not so much that you have all of the best genes, but you’re just lacking in the really deleterious ones. And so, oh, but sort of to get back to this idea of antagonistic pleiotropy, they found that intelligence is mostly associated with mostly good things. On the margins, there might be a slight chance of if you’re higher IQ, you have a slightly increased risk of Asperger’s.

So not full-blown, unable to speak autism, but—predisposition towards enjoying trains, that kind of autism.

Wolf: Trains. Yeah.

Rachel: And slightly, it seems that women who are higher IQ are at slightly increased risk of anorexia, which is also another interesting thing. But the one trait that they found that actually has a decent amount of antagonistic pleiotropy is height.

Wolf: Height. Interesting.

Rachel: So it turns out that I think the optimal height is actually something like for men it’s like 5’10” or 5’11”. And men—

Wolf: How do we measure optimal here?

Rachel: So men, basically as you get taller and taller, it puts a greater strain on your cardiovascular system. And so taller men tends to have increased cardiovascular problems, and they don’t live as long.

Wolf: Okay. So for pure longevity.

Rachel: Yeah. And you could say, “Look, I’m here for a good time, not a long time.” And I’d love—you sort of like actually I’d choose to be the 6’6” Chad—and maybe die in my 60s as opposed to, I don’t know—5’9” and make it to 80. But I thought it’s interesting that this corresponds slightly with the fact that I think that Special Forces tend to prefer men who are around that height. And I think it might be more that it has to do with the ratio of body strength to body weight, in that if everyone’s—kind of 5’10”, it’s easy to carry a comrade if they’re hurt, but also they can carry you. Or sort of like that.

Wolf: Yeah, and then so making these value judgements—between what do we actually want here? This opens up all these interesting questions—about like, again—

Rachel: What do you actually—

Wolf: you’re entangling your worldview and so on in—in the genetic process itself. Which is this is itself a very interesting topic. We could go deep on that.

Rachel: Yeah. And I do think that it’s sort of like I totally understand the idea of Chesterton’s fence, and that you should be—sort of wary about taking down fences that you perhaps don’t completely understand. And perhaps assuming that you understand it all is a kind of an act of hubris. But at the same time, I don’t know. I’m kind of excited for a future where people’s worldviews are even more entangled in the way that they live their lives and the way that their children live their lives.

I think it’s like—you want to live your life as an experiment and to have your style and substance in everything you do. And so to me, it sort of feels like a type of self-actualization.

Wolf: Yeah. Well, life definitely is an experiment. That is true. God is running an experiment by bringing you into existence. Is this one gonna work?

Is this one gonna work? Yeah, and it’s sort of like as we take more of an active role in that we are having to kind of elevate ourselves to do those experiments ourselves, to run those experiments and say what’s actually going to be a good experiment to run, right? Because that’s the mindset you have to have with—with children is it’s not, “Oh, I’m trying to create the perfect person.” I mean, obviously you want to move towards creating the perfect person to some degree, but also what kind of experiments do we want to run for which kind of person actually is the perfect person or—a better person for right now in this niche or whatever.

Rachel: And I’d say that this is why I think polygenic... We can get into all the other reproductive technologies later. But I think polygenic embryo selection is kind of the perfect beginning because it’s I currently have 50 euploid embryos, and so I’m hopefully going to do a transfer next month and hopefully be pregnant with my first child. I’m just so excited.

Wolf: Congratulations.

Rachel: Thank you.

Wolf: Or pre-congratulations.

Rachel: Pre-congratulations.

Wolf: Yeah, it all becomes very strange—

Rachel: It does

Wolf: when these things are planned out six months in advance.

Rachel: So far in advance. Yeah, so I’ve sort of been intellectually pregnant with this child for the past nine months, and then there’s going to be the actual pregnancy. But it’s... What was I going to say? Yes, but they are still 50 of my and my husband’s children.

And so it’s not like we’ve genetically modified any of them. It’s simply that we’ve pushed the probabilities one way or the other.

Fifty embryos and moral responsibility (28:43)

Wolf: Yeah, you’ve prioritized them. So yeah, let’s speak about that because when people have these different, let’s call them spiritual attachments to various ways of seeing these things, like obviously if you bring into existence 50 embryos—those are children that you may or may not be able to have. Most probably you will not be able to have all of them. And it makes it very real, and it makes that choice between you have to prioritize between your children now. It’s like which ones do we want to bring into the world and which ones aren’t going to make it?

And how do you see the responsibility of that? I know a lot of people are against IVF and especially these embryo selection things because—it seems to involve the conception of many human beings, if you believe that there’s some kind of implantation of a soul. I don’t really think that way, but—people bring up these arguments, and I wonder how—you think about that.

Rachel: Absolutely. I think I could do the easy argument and say like, “Oh, an embryo is not a child and we shouldn’t accord it the same moral value,” and I don’t think I actually believe that.

Wolf: Yeah, I don’t believe that either.

Rachel: Do I think it’s morally exactly the same as a child? No. But I definitely think that there’s a strange sort of in-between, that it is quite morally fraught. And it’s interesting because going into this process, I was, I think, a little bit cavalier, and I was just like, “Hey, I’m going to make all these embryos, and I’m going to select—the one that I think has the best chance of a fabulous life and it’s all going to be wonderful.” And I remember waking up from my first egg retrieval and getting the egg retrieval results—told to me, and sort of feeling this immense attachment to all these little embryos.

Wolf: Right. Those are my children.

Rachel: These are my and I’ve worked so hard to create them, and I’ve longed for them for so long. I have a thing in my Apple Notes on my phone. It is my embryo list, and it has everything that I know about each individual embryo, and sometimes I’ll just open it and I will look through the embryos and sort of commune with them. I know—this sounds absolutely crazy.

Wolf: No, but it’s, they’re your children.

Rachel: They are. And then, so the—yeah

Wolf: yeah, so, but it puts you in this very tough position as a mother, right, of like, “I have to prioritize between my children.”

Rachel: Yeah, and I would also sort of caveat all of this by saying that I think your relationship to this process is so different for everyone. And so I’m not saying that all women or men who do IVF should have this relationship at all, and I have zero judgment of how anybody else goes through the process. I’m just—explaining my position. But I now have this kind of attachment to all of these embryos, and I think that I would actually quite like all of them to come into existence, if that’s possible. And so I’ve had quite a few discussions with my husband, Jonathan, and it’s like, okay, I don’t know if we can have 50 children and give them the [inaudible] best life.

Wolf: Yeah. That’s going to be just difficult—

Rachel: It’s going to be a lot

Wolf: for various reasons.

Rachel: I would also say that an embryo is not a child simply in terms of probability. So the really sad thing—is that each embryo, depending on the grade, has a chance of a live birth. And so if you have the perfect embryo, so a—4AA perfectly graded euploid—you have the world’s best receptive uterus, the lining—is all perfect, an amazing doctor, you go to do the transfer, the chance of a live birth from that is somewhere between 65 to 70%. So it’s actually not very high.

Wolf: Oof.

Rachel: Which is—

Wolf: Yeah, it’s reasonably high, but—that’s still a lot of attrition.

Rachel: And it’s also extremely, it makes this entire polygenic embryo journey a lot harder when you’re sort of like, “Okay, I’ve done all this work, I’ve spent all this money, I’ve done all these injections, I have got my perfect embryo.” It’s like we’re predicted to be the Kwisatz Haderach who will change worlds. And then you go to implant it, and it doesn’t work.

Wolf: Oof.

Rachel: And it’s just like, “Ah.”

Wolf: Ah, you lost that one. Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah. And so I, we haven’t reached that stage yet, but fingers crossed. But I would say that so we’ve got 50 embryos, and that’s for a perfect embryo. For less perfect embryos, it’s usually under 50%. And so if I’ve actually done the statistical analysis of all these kids, depending, well, embryos, depending on their particular rates of live births, and I think it’s probably going to result in more like 32 live births on average.

That’s still a lot of children probably that my husband and I—are not going to be able to raise ourselves. And so I think we’ve come to the decision that what we would actually like to do is probably donate the ones that we don’t use. And so the interesting thing is that the demand for embryos is actually a lot higher than the current supply. And I think—

Wolf: Because there’s infertile couples or various circumstances where people do want a—

Rachel: Embryos

Wolf: a child, but they can’t get one otherwise.

Rachel: Yeah. And I think for most people, I think it is extremely, they’re uncomfortable with the idea of another family raising their genetic child, which I totally understand. It’s deeply uncomfortable for me as well. And I say that like I’m—I’m smiling, and I don’t want people to think I’m like a psychopath, but sometimes I smile when I’m uncomfortable. But—and I do worry.

I’m like, “Will they do right by these children?” But I eventually come back to the idea that I think I want to give them the chance if it’s possible.

Wolf: Yeah, give them the chance. Right. One way that I’ve sort of thought about this previously is you kind of not just embryos are children, but the counterfactual children you could have had are full moral persons, and you have to consider that. They are at, as we speak, already lined up on the other side waiting to come in. Bang-knocking on the door, “Mommy, Mommy-” “... are you going to let-”

Rachel: “Going to let me in?”

Wolf: “Please, don’t forget me.”

Rachel: Aww.

Wolf: And so you have to think that way as well. I think that’s the most correct. I think the attempts to place ensoulment at some particular material fact—

Rachel: Yeah, I don’t either

Wolf: is a way to avoid responsibility actually for counterfactuals. And I think we do have to take responsibility for things. This is what I find sort of—I’m supposed to be taking somewhat of the opposition here, but I actually find sort of compelling about this whole line of thought is that we are—this is a way to actually take more responsibility for what we’re doing. And I know some—people like to avoid the responsibility, like to say, “Okay, we’re going to leave it in the hands—of nature, in the hands of God. I don’t want to be saddled with that moral weight—of having to make that decision.”

But—

Rachel: And this is—

Wolf: I think maturity as individuals and as a species involves kind of climbing that ladder to be able, some people would call it to play God, right, but basically to take more and more responsibility for the act of creation, right?

Rachel: And this is exactly the way that my husband and I think about it, and we’ve had this discussion of what we’re doing is a kind of, we’ve become morally culpable in a way that we wouldn’t in the way that—if we just did it the old-fashioned way.

Wolf: Yeah. And so you have to be—

Rachel: And I can—

Wolf: very sober about that.

Rachel: You do, and if I chose to discard them, that’s a kind of morally, in some ways like a powerful, perhaps a kind of a violent act. But, and if I choose to give away my children to other families, I can totally imagine that I think it’s going to be really weird for the kids. I think they’re going to grow and they—

Wolf: It’s going to be weird. I mean, a lot of people are going to be, other people are going to be very uncomfortable about that.

Rachel: Absolutely, and my hope is that with the other families who we potentially give these embryos to, and I would absolutely be hands-off and be like, “Look, you are the parents. You’re going to be raising this child.” I do care that the siblings be able to know each other, and so I would really like to potentially have an open relationship with the other families, and hopefully the kids can be like cousins and know each other. But I can totally imagine these kids, one of them growing up and being like finding out about their story and being like, “Wow, I was given away because I wasn’t good enough,” and coming to me and being like—

Wolf: Oh, God. Yeah

Rachel: “Mom,” like or not mom, but “You’re this woman, and you’ve decided to make this choice in the pursuit of sort of the perfect child instead of see me as a super villain.” And I absolutely am like that child should be able to be angry at me. I would probably have—really, really complex feelings about it.

Wolf: Yeah. And you see a lot of this with these various sorts of experimental creative actions. I don’t know. You see obviously the crazy family of Elon Musk or other people like that who kind of do more unconventional things. You end up with these situations where because you have acted out of the norm within social convention, you take on a lot more blame when something goes wrong.

Or if someone grows up to be resentful, I generally don’t think it’s because of whatever they think it is. It’s just some people kind of turn out angry at the world in a way, and then they fixate on something, right? And for a lot of these kids, they’re going to fixate on you, right? And it’s going to be like, “Well, Mom didn’t want me.” It puts you in this really tough position again.

And so this is what it means to take responsibility, is actually to confront those things. It’s like the job of a king, right? In deciding the fate of his people is like, well, sometimes you have to make these really tough choices. That you have to be the one that takes the blame.

Rachel: This is the way that I think about it, is I’m not going to say to, if any of these kids end up confronting me and being angry, I’m not going to say like—”Oh, you shouldn’t think about it that way,” or, “You have no right to be angry.” I’ll be like, “Yeah. I can definitely see why you’re upset.” And I would also say I am a big girl and I have big shoulders, and I’m not afraid of taking on responsibility. And I think I’ve kind of weighed the scenarios, and I am actually really excited for this kind of abundant future where hopefully there are 30 kids running around.

Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s—

Rachel: And they have all of these siblings, and hopefully one or two of them have incredible minds and go on to produce incredible things for the world or—

Wolf: Right. And the sort of counterpoint is I wanted to give you a chance.

Rachel: Yeah. And that’s what I was saying because I’m like—

Wolf: Right. Because again, like you—I think the attempt to avoid responsibility is incorrect.

Rachel: Yeah. I agree.

Wolf: And you may socially avoid responsibility, but you do not in fact avoid responsibility by shying away from these decisions—or choosing not to have as many children or something.

You don’t end up dodging that. Those kids are still there on the other side knocking at the door saying—”Mommy, are you going to let me through?”

Rachel: And if I could kind of do the easier thing of... Oh, it’s terrible because it’s like I should say to our ghostly audience, I am going to live my life as an experiment. But I do not believe that the exceptional person should be the rule of society. And I absolutely—am not saying that I think that this is the path for everyone. Or if you do polygenic embryo screening, it is the correct thing to—donate all these children.

I feel like it is correct for me, because I don’t know. I think people have different relationships.

Wolf: Someone has to pursue the experimental role in society.

Rachel: Yeah. I have a particular relationship to these embryos, which is one of I am absolutely excited and delighted to see how they all turn out. And—maybe one of them that it’s like their super villain or their origin story, and they’re like, “I was given away because I wasn’t seen as good enough, and I’m going to use that fire to become like this-”

Wolf: Some—

Rachel: “... a titan in industry-”

Wolf: Something better

Rachel: or a great artist. And then at the end, they’re going to go like, “And fuck you.” And I’m going to be like, “This is amazing.” I totally understand the—

Wolf: You’d love to sort of by proxy give birth to some super villain somewhere.

Rachel: Yeah. Okay. I know that sounds crazy, but I love drama. I love life. I love vivacity.

I don’t want to live my life making things smaller so that there’s less conflict.

Measuring what you select for (40:49)

Wolf: Right. No, I get this completely. Yeah. And so let’s talk then about how do we judge them to be better or worse. You gave us a little bit of an overview on how these technologies work, but I want to follow through some of those technical things.

So for example, you said, okay, we can get a sort of 99% read on what the genetic makeup of the kid probably is. So one technical question: Why is it easier to sequence the parents rather than those cells that you get from the embryo?

Rachel: The answer is it’s much easier to take a lot of cells from the parents because they have a lot of cells. And so you—

Wolf: And so you just get more rolls of the dice in—these statistical processes.

Rachel: Well, and so basically what you have to do, there’s a process called amplification when it comes to DNA. So when you take the five to 10 cells from the embryo, that’s a really small amount of DNA. And so before you even—take apart the DNA to read it, you have to do this process of amplification where you’re actually like—trying to make more of the DNA.

Wolf: And is there error in that?

Rachel: There’s error, and it’s also just extremely expensive. And so you can actually do... So there is a company that has pioneered doing whole genome sequencing for the embryo, and it’s called Orchid Health. They’re incredible. But it’s expensive.

I think it’s like $3,000 per embryo. Or it might be something more or less. And so—

Wolf: Yeah. Those costs are coming down, I know. Like gene sequencing was a million dollars a—A DNA string some years ago

Rachel: Now I think it’s like 200 or something ridiculous, which is incredible. But for the cheaper end, I think there’s a new machine come out that has brought it down yet again. Actually, I should explain. So basically, there is one way to do it, which is Orchid Health. They do a full genome sequence of the embryo.

It’s a patented way. I don’t actually think anyone else is capable of it, and they have a sort of proprietary system. There’s another company called Herasight, and they do the imputation method, which is the one that I described earlier. And so the imputation method, I think statistically it’s kind of as good as the whole genome sequence or maybe Orchid say that even though their system is potentially more expensive per embryo, they think that they can detect what’s called de novo mutations. So single gene mutations in the genome, which you can’t really do from the imputation method.

So the imputation method, you’re like, “Okay, this baby has inherited-”

Wolf: I see. You’re actually looking at the parents’ genomes. And just how they’ve been mixed around. But you don’t catch the—

Rachel: If there’s a—

Wolf: What is it? I think it’s like 30 base pairs get flipped per generation or something.

Rachel: Yeah, something like that. And look, I think de novo mutations from memory, I think it’s like one in 250 embryos have a dangerous de novo mutation. And so there’s a question of if you have a very—

Wolf: That’s not very many.

Rachel: Yeah. I’ve gone for the slightly cheaper option. And simply because I have so many embryos, I think—2,500 per embryo... And so you’d say, “Oh, that’s for the 50 embryos?” Well, actually, in order to get 50 euploids, I had to get, I think it was 70 embryos, and then not all of them have the correct number of chromosomes, it can be.

Wolf: Yeah. So let’s talk then about how accurately we can measure anything. Because okay, you’ve got this 99% accurate genome, let’s say, and then we’ve got our statistical methodologies for predicting various things about that. Like for example, you can predict IQ, you can predict height, you can predict eye color. So there’s two sort of statistical variances we need to be aware of here.

One is between the embryos, what is the real variance in any of these sort of—

Rachel: Traits

Wolf: dimensions of interest? And the other is in your measurement, what’s the actual error bars? What’s the noise level? Because if you have relatively small amount of actual variation, relatively large amount of error—you’re not actually selecting on anything. You’re just rolling the dice.

And you might as well just roll the dice the cheap way. So why don’t you give me a little bit more on how many standard deviations are we actually talking about in terms of variation between embryos and error bars on—how accurately we can select this?

Rachel: So the answer is that the predictability of different traits is hugely variable depending on what the trait is. We can pretty accurately predict what the height of the embryo is going to be, like the hair color, the eye color, that kind of thing.

Wolf: Mm-hmm. Those ones are easy. Yeah.

Rachel: Those ones are easy. Schizophrenia is more heritable, and so therefore easier to predict. Intelligence, and this is the controversial one, but the one I’m kind of excited about—is that we can predict a little bit, but the predictors are not yet very good. And so I think the current predictors account for 20% of current variance, which is not a huge amount. But—

Wolf: Not a huge amount

Rachel: So to put the—

Wolf: And then how much variation is estimated to actually exist between the embryos?

Rachel: You and I know different families with different siblings, and sometimes siblings are very close to each other, and sometimes you’re like, “I don’t even realize that you people were related. This is crazy.” You can get a huge amount of spread between siblings. And so if you look, I’ve got my little thing on my computer that has my embryos, and they’re plotted on a bell curve as to their predicted intelligence. And I think that there’s three standard deviations of difference between the top one and the bottom one.

Wolf: Yeah. But of course, those variations are multiplied by your error, right? So—

Rachel: And so it’s sort of.

Wolf: Yeah. So it’s—

Rachel: But then if you look at some of the more predictable traits of height, it’s also... I—

Wolf: Yeah, I assume it would be similar actually in the variance. So what’s the sort of measurable variance in height?

Rachel: Oh, I actually don’t know. I would kind of have to go and look it up. I can if you want me to.

Wolf: These seem like crucial numbers to me. Because if you had very large variation between siblings, well, first of all, heredity starts to mean a lot less. But then the selection becomes—

Rachel: Becomes more powerful

Wolf: much more valuable, right? Whereas if the variation in intelligence is like, let’s say you’ve got 10 embryos, 30 embryos, and you’re getting maybe one standard deviation or two.

The standard deviation of the embryos is 10 IQ points or something. It’s like, okay, yeah, that’s interesting, but can we measure it? You say it’s 20%.

I’m not as good enough at statistics to know exactly what that’s going to mean in terms of the standard deviations, but it does sound to me like, okay, now we’re measuring mostly error, right? Again, back to my argument. I remember last year, you and I and your father were talking about this and—

Rachel: Bless my parents. They’re so nice to me, and I sort of tell my family about all this stuff, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s Rachel again with her crazy experiments.”

Wolf: Yeah. Well, what I remember is your father was on my side.

Rachel: He was.

Wolf: Which is to say my wife was not pregnant at the time. You were not pregnant at the time. And I said, “Well, let’s see who gets there first.” And my next child’s going to be born at the end of May.

Rachel: Yes. Wow. You’re going to make me jealous. Don’t say that.

Wolf: No, I have to hit you with this because it’s important. Because my analysis in this has been that okay, you’re getting a certain amount of selectability—out of these things, but you’re also delaying the process. Right? And so it’s like, okay, it may not be this bad, but it’s like on average you’re losing a kid for the sake of increasing the variation—increasing the value of that remainder—by some amount. Right?

And so the question is, is that worth it? And to me, my calculation again is like—you can even do all those calculations and show—like, oh, it’s going to be such and such variations. Well, I don’t know that that’s real. Because, again, this stuff’s untested, right? It’s like even if you did all your math right—there’s still unknown factors.

And so it’s like—

Rachel: I would respond to—

Wolf: Yeah, go on

Rachel: two points. And so the first one, I absolutely agree with you. And so I have also done the math and I’m like, because I want a really big family. The audience is going, “Mm,” looking at me. You’re no spring chicken.

I am 32, and so perhaps starting at 32 if you want eight children is perhaps not the done thing. But—

Wolf: Well, if you’ve got a lot of embryos, things—

Rachel: And so this is—

Wolf: get easier

Rachel: this is the good news is that my eggs and embryos are going to be in the freezer forever. And the good thing is that the womb does not age as badly as your eggs—

Wolf: As the eggs

Rachel: basically. And so if you—have the frozen embryos, you can continue to have children into your 40s. And there are women who successfully give birth through IVF using donor or frozen embryos in their 50s. And so my—

Wolf: Going to have a harder time throwing them around, though.

Rachel: And so this is the thing is I’m like, okay, yes, I can technically have them. Will I have enough energy? And that is something I do worry about. And so look, I would have ideally liked to have started earlier. I think basically, I remember the moment extremely distinctly of I was on a ski field when I was 19, and I met—this woman, and she was there with her tiny four-week-old daughter.

And I just completely forgot about the ski fields, and we just spent the next couple of hours talking about how perfect her daughter was, and I just thinking, “I would love a baby right now.”

Wolf: And it took you another 10 or 12 years to actually make that happen.

Rachel: It is really hard to date in the modern world.

Wolf: No, it is. It’s tough.

Rachel: And it was really finding my husband was just... And I had to literally, it was continents, like hemispheres to find him. And so now we’re here, and it’s incredible. But maybe things work out. If we’d met when we were 20 and started having children, we wouldn’t have probably made use of this technology.

Or maybe we would have. Maybe we would’ve ended up with 20 children as opposed to eight—and that I think would’ve been amazing. But look—these things happen. So yes, I agree with you that you don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it is possible to fall into neuroticism with this kind of process.

Wolf: Yeah. This has been my other criticism of this stuff is reproductive technology generally is new ways to be neurotic about having children. We have many ways to be neurotic about having children. Many people are totally wrapped up in that, not having kids, having excuses, delaying it, getting worried about it, stressing themselves out—like over-optimizing and just totally failing as a result. And so this is what I don’t want to see.

I want to see good people who are into this stuff and have this sort of forward-thinking, take responsibility for life, love life kind of people. I want those people to have more children.

Rachel: I agree.

Wolf: I want them to have more high-quality children. But we have to weigh all the costs. And so when I stack up all these costs, it’s like, okay, there’s the cost in time and number you’re going to maybe be able to have. Again, unproven. Are you really going to be able to have eight?

Well, we’ll see. These are these experiments that we have to actually roll. And then there’s like, do you get as good a selective result such that it’s worth doing that versus just getting a bunch of embryos or getting fewer embryos faster and just implanting those ones, if you were even going to do IVF at all. And then there’s this whole aspect of all these extra moral variables, all these extra ways that this affects the community. You’re saying maybe everyone shouldn’t do this.

It’s not for everyone. A few people should do this. But does that affect the moral background of your community in any way?

To some extent, I discount most of that sort of thinking. It’s usually a bunch of superstition. On the other hand, there is something real to moms have to kind of be able to relate to each other. It has to not be too weird to help each other out and so on. There’s something there, right?

And—

Rachel: And I had a conversation with a woman, and I was sort of blabbing on about embryo selection and being like, “It’s so exciting. We’re going to be able to eradicate genetic disease, and it’s going to be so wonderful for the world.” And then she was sort of like, “Oh, well, this is wonderful.” And she also had her little toddler tottering around in the background. And she sort of asked the elephant in the room of like, “Well, what about the unselected ones? Do you love them as much as the selected ones?”

And I think my response to that is every baby is a blessing, and they’re all fabulous, selected or not. And look, I’m doing all this crazy stuff to get an extra, hopefully seven or eight IQ points per child or something, and the out—

Wolf: We’ll see if that works. Yeah.

Rachel: We’ll see if it works. But Terence Tao, if he was doing embryo selection, his worst embryos would probably be more intelligent than my best ones. And so—

Wolf: Well, yeah. And the key thing with people like Terence Tao is this is another big argument here. It’s like, okay, if we’re ultimately trying to increase the number of good people having good children, overwhelmingly what matters is not the marginal gains or losses in the individual families or in the individual parents.

Rachel: It’s everyone having fabulous big families.

Wolf: Yeah. It’s people like Terence Tao having big families with lots of spares so that, because things are going to go wrong.

And again, this is my old-fashioned style sort of reproductive planning, generational planning as well. Let’s just have a bunch of children—

Rachel: Children. And look—

Wolf: the old way.

Rachel: It’s like, yeah.

Wolf: And let God sort it out.

Rachel: And look, I think that there’s absolutely a good argument for that. Something that does weigh on me a little bit is sort of the dynamics of judgment among people. And as much as I—as much as I say, “Oh, it’s not for everyone, and this is just my choice,” simply me existing suddenly the fact that there is an option means that there is another aspect of judgment for people. And so—

Wolf: Yeah. People can be judged, like, “Oh, you did it the old way,” or, “Oh, you did it this weird new way.”

Rachel: “Oh, you did it the new way.” And I like—

Wolf: And this is what I’m getting at with kind of this fabric of the community. Again, it’s a little bit of a superstitious concern, but also there’s something real to people being able to relate to each other and how do we—

Rachel: Navigate.

Wolf: It’s good to have a lot of unity, right? And it’s good to have a lot of commonality. And, on the other hand, individuality is also wonderful and let’s have lots of experiments. So that one’s a tough one. I’m not going to fall hard on either side.

But I’m aware of it as a—definitely a source of friction, let’s say.

Rachel: It’s so funny because I’m Aspergery enough that when people initially brought up the fact to me, they’re like, “Are you concerned about the fact that it’s emerging technology and there’s going to be pressure on people to use it? Probably not now, but once it becomes more powerful, is that a concern of yours?” And I was originally like, “Why would you ask me that?” And the reason why is because when I do the cost-benefit analysis in my head, it’s like, yes, it’s a true cost of people being pressured into what is now quite a difficult process, but that is completely outweighed of once the technology becomes good enough to the benefits of the child. And so I’m like, “Why are you even bringing this up?”

And the reason I say that I think that was a sort of an autistic misunderstanding is because I think when people bring that up, they’re not asking you to do the purely logical cost-benefit analysis. It’s more like they’re saying, “Have you thought about this?”

Wolf: Are you judging me for this right now?

Rachel: Yeah. And all I can say is that personally, I love experimentation, and I’m like, live and let live. Everyone has different crazy experimental lives. Look, you and I live in the Bay Area. We have—friends who are polyamorous and friends who are—

Wolf: Ooh.

Rachel: I love my poly friends. We have people who are crazy right-wing hippies and trans cat girls, and it’s just we kind of live in a live and let live. And it’s kind of cool.

Wolf: For the record, there’s a lot of wackos in the Bay Area. Most people are insane. I have a hard time relating to anybody, but—

Rachel: Most new experiments don’t work. But I’m still glad that there are people out here experimenting with new ways of life. But at the same time, just to say like, “Oh, I don’t judge anyone,” is not to say that other people... And I literally talking to my cousin about this. And she was just like, “Oh my God, Rachel, what are you doing?”

And I’m just like, “What do you mean?”

Wolf: Right. Yeah. What are you doing?

Rachel: Because she’s a mother, and she was like, “You have no idea when you become a mother, literally every decision that you make is scrutinized and judged. Are you—a working mother versus a stay-at-home mother? Are you doing attachment parenting versus authoritative parenting? Are you doing-”

Wolf: Yeah. But at some level, you have to just not care about that.

Rachel: Yeah, and eventually that’s what—

Wolf: You have to say, “No, you know what? I’m going to do it my way. You’re going to have to call the cops.” That’s our attitude for the most part. But—I want to quibble with something you said—which is people experimenting with new ways of living.

Experiments vs. fundamentals (58:06)

Wolf: And I question whether any of these ways of living are actually ways of living. In the sense, are they in fact viable? Do they actually produce further life? And not just, okay, there’s a lot of experiments, there’s a lot of rolling the dice, but even the general veneration of experimental living that happens around here in California. I think California has a pretty bad record in terms of preserving any actual way of living or never mind preserving, just do you preserve life, right?

California, a generation, two generations ago, was absolute paradise in terms of the people. I think the people have gotten a lot more questionable, let’s say, in California. A lot of wackos moved in from all over the world. And now it’s like, is this even a viable society? Are we just kind of deluding ourselves by being here?

These are real questions. And again, there’s actually these major costs in doing this experimentation. You’re drawing on an implicit subsidy of kind of functionality from somewhere else.

Rachel: Agreed. That’s fair.

Wolf: And so I think part of our responsibility, if we are taking full responsibility for the thing, is also to go and maintain or figure out how to defend that core trunk of what actually is going to work. And so that’s sort of where I stand on these things is what’s the thing that’s actually the core of our civilization, of our society? Or somewhat more open-minded, assume our civilization died sometime in the 20th century, what even is viable for life in the future? And so in that scenario, what I’m looking at is much more like, what are the things we can absolutely rely on? What are the things that are essential to preserve?

And that’s where I’m like, okay—Let’s just have a lot of children. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. I don’t trust the medical system.

Rachel: Fair.

Wolf: I don’t want to be entangled with all that. The minimize institutional contact—

Rachel: Fair

Wolf: in my life is my general strategy. And it works out for me to some extent.

Rachel: So one thing I would say is I think that this is really getting down to brass tacks. And so I think with my understanding of evolution, I think that there’s a common understanding of evolution or of the state of nature that say animals live in the state of constant pressure. You have to be optimized and as good as possible in order to survive.

Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that’s not quite true.

Rachel: That’s not quite true. The majority of wild animals, most of the time are... I wouldn’t say their lives are leisurely, but it’s not like there’s a huge amount of pressure. However, there are usually moments in their lives where there’s basically catastrophe. And so I think that this is the thing about civilization, is that we have smoothed out the catastrophes of life.

Famine, war, plague. If you’re a lion in the savanna and there’s a drought, suddenly life gets really real, and you can basically just be wiped out in an instant. Anyway, so what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of room for basically diversity in the animal kingdom. You do see examples of animals who are maybe a little bit wobbly in some way, but still manage to get along and they’re mostly fine. There’s a story on TikTok—

Wolf: There’s even more people who are pretty wobbly but get along.

Rachel: And humans as well.

Wolf: I think maybe far too many. We subsidize a lot of experiments, let’s say in our society.

Rachel: But so there is a leopard on TikTok who I’m absolutely—obsessed with. And she’s known as the girl fail leopard. And so she’s being watched by these naturalists and she kind of refused to grow up and she just kept making her mother provide food for her until her mother actually just left. And then she had to figure out hunting on her own.

Wolf: Oh, no.

Rachel: And it’s watching her go through life, but she’s kind of figuring it out. But it was so funny all the comments are sort of like, “Oh my God, she’s just like me for real,” and like, “Failure to launch.” But I was like it’s amazing to see—

Wolf: Why is that what we’re identifying with though?

Rachel: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Wolf: This is a bad sign.

Rachel: So why am I going off on this bit tangent about leopards? My point is that I think if animals had to be completely narrowly optimized for survival and reproduction, there wouldn’t be any really room for variation. And so it’s actually very important that animals are not over-optimized in one direction, but instead—

Wolf: No

Rachel: there’s a certain amount of diversity. And there’s also a sort of an understanding that perhaps a lot of adaptions that eventually become very important start off as something perhaps a little bit deleterious.

Wolf: Yeah, they started off as something quite wacky.

Rachel: You can imagine, okay, so we have life develops in the oceans, and then it goes into the land, and then some of the land-dwelling animals go back into the ocean. And you can imagine the proto... Dolphins are an example of this. And so they came from ones that were on the land. You can imagine the first proto-dolphin was maybe a little land-dwelling animal that had slightly webbed feet.

And then all of the other little—

Wolf: And did a lot of splashing around in the water and eating fish. Yeah

Rachel: Yeah, and all of the other animals are like, “That doesn’t seem right. It makes life a lot harder to have little webbed toes or something.” But actually, they were functional enough. Maybe he was charismatic in other ways than the other weird proto-dolphins. And so—

Wolf: The most interesting fact about dolphins and whales and so on is their most closely related land animals—

Rachel: Elephants

Wolf: are cows.

Rachel: Oh, what? It is? Oh. A cow. I thought it was elephants.

Wolf: They’re actually ungulates.

Rachel: What?

Wolf: Whales are ungulates.

Rachel: That’s so weird.

Wolf: Anyway, random trivia.

Rachel: Yeah. But so my point is that I think it’s like you don’t want to over-optimize, and I think it’s good to have—all these experimentation. But you—

Wolf: Well, let’s—okay, I’ll give the other side on that argument, which is now in history or since the sort of 20th century, are we over invested in the fundamentals of life or are we over invested in the weird wacko experiments?

Rachel: That’s

Wolf: And I think the answer’s very clear. I think we’re over invested wacko experiments. Ways of deviating we have had since especially the 1960s—this faith in society that—the old way is not going to work for us. The old way doesn’t need to be preserved. We can just ignore all of that and go do our free love wacky technology experiment things.

We can just totally subsidize all the weird stuff in society, all the people who aren’t really making things working. And it seems to me actually, we’re stacking up an enormous amount of let’s call it civilizational debt or something. And it’s not a good place to be. This is why I want to see more good children from good people. This seems to be the fundamentals, right?

Let’s get the fundamentals in order here.

Rachel: And look, I think that that is as well as me being like I think it’s great to have a diversity of different experiments, and hopefully the ones that are the most successful will eventually go on and reproduce themselves. And I also think that your talk about civilizational debt is true, and it’s true that you can run down the sort of the wealth and treasure of past generations that they built up—and eventually just be sort of in a decaying society.

Wolf: Until you hit one of those catastrophes, right. And when it all comes, all the chickens come home to roost, so to speak.

Rachel: Yes. But look, I think that our civilization is facing many extremely complex issues, which is all the more reason a little bit more intelligence could be good for the world. And look—if you care about things—

Wolf: If it works

Rachel: If it works.

Wolf: If it works.

Rachel: Well, but, and so, yeah, getting back to this, does it work? So the cool thing about this technology is it’s pretty reasonably easy to verify. So what you can do—is you’ll have a bunch of matched phenotype, genotype gene sets that you keep out of the training data. And then you say, “Okay, we’ve built our predictor. We want to predict people’s intelligence from their genomes.”

You go back to this set of genome, genotype, phenotype data, and then you make predictions, and then you can see if you were correct. So it’s a relatively easy thing to check. And so I think that when they say the number of 20% of it is predictable, I think that is probably very accurate. Having said that, each individual is going to be... It’s just a bit of a toss-up of how accurate it’s going to be, obviously.

Wolf: Yeah. And as an engineer, I was trained as an engineer, I’m very amenable to doing the calculations, trying to see how does it out of the numbers actually come out and chase these things as like, “Oh, this calculation looks like it’s actually viable. Let’s go and pursue that.” On the other hand, the other big thing you learn as an engineer is nothing’s real until you’re tested it. Right?

And because you’ve always forgotten something.

Rachel: But you—

Wolf: There’s always these difficulties that you don’t foresee, and—

Rachel: But you think you can test the predictors on adults, and so they gave—

Wolf: Yeah, you can test the predictors, but are you applying the predictors properly in this particular context?

Have you missed some key factor? What’s going to happen with all this extra machinery in there? It’s like you need to demonstrate the technology, right? Which is why I’m excited about what you’re doing at some level. Of course, I’d like you to have more children sooner—

Rachel: Well, we’re getting close. We’re finally getting close

Wolf: so our kids could be friends. But yeah. This is the source of all my caution in these things is like—there is an old way that does just work, and people are totally under-invested in that—relative to, I think, how much we should be. And yeah. So I’m going to continue with the old way, and I hope to see other people also catch up on this.

Rachel: Yes. And look, I think you and I agree on this. Absolutely, I love kids. I think kids are wonderful. I think they’re amazing for ourselves individually.

I think being—a parent is this incredible spiritual experience. I think that having more children around in a civilizational sense is a good thing. I think the ratio of young people to old people is actually really underrated as a—

Wolf: Yeah. Well, there’s more dogs than children in this city, for example—

Rachel: Ew

Wolf: which is very tragic.

Rachel: It is very upsetting. And so I do sort of look around many of my highly intelligent, highly successful friends in the Bay Area, and they’re going like, “Oh, when are we going to have kids? Do we even want kids?” And it’s like, “What are you doing?”

Wolf: Yeah. People come to me and they’re like, “Oh, Wolf, you’re doing such an interesting counter-cultural life experiment.” I’m like, “Bro, this is the basics. You guys are not going to make it. What are you doing?”

Rachel: And I do really admire you and your wife, and that people are like, “Oh, I don’t know. You can’t have... Having a kid in the Bay Area is expensive and difficult.” And you’re like, “It’s actually not. You’re just totally optimizing for the wrong thing in terms of status and wealth and the next master’s degree.”

You’ve already got four, and you’re just like, “It’s not worth it. You’re being silly.” And it’s so funny because with all of this stuff of me saying like, “Oh, I don’t want to be judgmental of people,” and then me being like, “Actually, I do judge people for not having children.” I think that is the only aspect on which I judge my friends, and it’s not like me being like they’re bad people. It’s like, “You are awesome. I want to see more of you. Have babies.”

Wolf: Yeah. Be connected to reality in that way. Anyways, I think we’ve been going on for quite a ways here, and we’ve covered most of what I think is the interesting material here. So if you have any further tangents to go on or—

Rachel: I wish—

Wolf: more angles on this. Should we engage in high tech selection methods for making the next generation better? What’s your final case?

Rachel: I wish I should have brought a notepad because everything you say, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ll come back to that,” and I’ve forgotten—so much of the stuff. But in terms of things, one thing I would get back to is this idea of how much of this is a danger to your children, actually. Polygenic embryo screening is not any more dangerous than doing regular IVF, and I don’t think that there are actually any dangers of doing IVF. So when IVF was sort of originally around, there was some sort of studies that came out, and they were like, “Oh, maybe IVF children are slightly less healthy on average than the sort of the regular children.”

Wolf: Natural children.

Rachel: Natural children. It’s hard to even... Yeah. And it turned out that it’s always selection effects. And basically if you are—

Wolf: There’s a lot of selection effects in these things.

Rachel: Yeah. And so if you and your partner are slightly unhealthier, it’s generally fertility is highly linked to general health, and so if you’re slightly unhealthier, you’re more likely to want to do IVF, and actually when you account for that, it turns out that the entire IVF process doesn’t really have an effect on the kids. And so polygenic embryo screening, I don’t actually think that I’m experimenting on my kids in a way that it would actually cause them harm, apart from the psychological effects that we’ve discussed earlier, which is definitely something that I think about.

Wolf: Yeah. And even that, I would say I sort of doubt that’s even causal. I think some people, for whatever reason, become resentful, and they attach themselves—

Rachel: To

Wolf: to whatever—

Rachel: Is in their environment

Wolf: reason for that is around.

Rachel: Yeah. But that’s not to say that the sort of other technologies in the pipeline, which I’m also excited about, they do carry some sort of risks. And so i.e., we can talk about polygenic embryo selection and how powerful it is, and right now it’s basically limited by, I think, our data sets, and so if we had more data, you would hopefully be able to do better predictors and more—high-quality data as well.

Wolf: Where does that data come from?

Rachel: Mostly the UK is the world leader in sort of providing these data sets. There’s the all of Us data set and the UK Biobank. And so this is another issue with this entire thing is that most of our data sets actually sort of tend towards people of English, Anglo, UK descent. And if I’m going to—

Wolf: Which is good for you.

Rachel: It’s great for me. But if I’m going to lib out for a second, I do care about everyone being able to access the technology, and I’m like, I do think that it would be a wonderful thing. It’s something I’m thinking about doing, is potentially going out into the world and getting more data from basically all ethnic groups.

Wolf: Comprehensive compulsory genome sequencing of everyone in the world.

Rachel: Maybe not compulsory, but more just being like, I want people to have access to this technology if they want it, and I’d love more ethnic groups sort of in the mix. But the data sets we have are all right. They’re not particularly good.

Wolf: How are they selected? Are they approaching random people and saying, “I want your genome?”

Rachel: I actually—

Wolf: Where do they actually do these phenotype inspections and the genotype inspections?

Rachel: You know what? I don’t know. That’s something that I should look into, is it college students? It’s always college students. There is quite a large data set of the Million Veterans project, and so that is in the US.

Wolf: Military, yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, and so it’s military recruitment, and they do a battery of tests of general health, but they also administer an IQ test. This data set is currently not available, and if we could get access to it, it would—

Wolf: We should send a note to our friends in the government.

Rachel: Yes, and be like, “Please, this would really contribute to a healthier, brighter, smarter next generation if you would let us use it for this technology.”

Wolf: Yeah, just please release this information, somewhat anonymized maybe.

Rachel: Oh, absolutely. As anonymized as humanly possible. But the stuff from the UK Biobank, what we call the IQ test that is associated with that is not very good. I think it’s only a certain number of questions. And so it would be wonderful to get more better data with large scale IQ tests, high read genome sets, and then that would make the technology more powerful.

The reproductive tech of the future (1:14:01)

Rachel: But once you have better predictors, it opens you up to the possibility of... Okay, so to go through a list of the technology stack that could potentially come into the future. So there is a thing called IVG, which is in vitro gametogenesis, which is where you can take any cell, like a skin cell, turn it back into a pluripotent stem cell, turn those stem cells into gametes, so sperm and egg.

Wolf: But of course, this has much more error potential in it because the non-gamete cells accumulate mutations faster.

Rachel: So I talked before about why it is that men tend to accumulate more mutagenic load in their gametes as opposed to women. And it’s because the cells that produce the eggs are the slowest life cycle, whatever it’s called, cell rotation cells in the entire body. And that is extremely important because you’re trying to have as few cell divisions as possible, so you introduce as few—

Wolf: Yeah, you want to preserve as much as possible.

Rachel: And so if you’re getting your eggs from a skin cell, it’s possible that you have more mutational load.

Wolf: Yeah, actually, you just got a skin cancer cell.

Rachel: Yes, which would be bad. But there are ways around this. And so IVG currently does work in mice. So I talked to a researcher who’s working on this, and he’s like, we are quite capable of creating what he calls mouse caviar. So basically just an abundance of mouse eggs.

And if we could do that for humans, suddenly you’re not talking about selection from 50 embryos. It’s essentially infinity embryos, and you could get quite a lot of selection from there. There is also the possibility of you could do multiple generations of selection in a Petri dish. And so how this would work is that you would take a skin cell, turn it into eggs and sperm, and then combine it hopefully with another person, because you don’t want inbreeding, into a new embryo, and then turn that embryo back into a stem cell that you could then turn into eggs and sperm. And so you would need a lot of input in terms of parents in the initial generations so that you don’t get inbreeding.

But you could essentially do like 100 or 1,000 generations of selection in a Petri dish.

Wolf: Well, I wonder if you could do—actually, this inbreeding stuff is very interesting because if you imagine Adam and Eve as being genetically perfect at some level, inbreeding would not have been a problem for them because they don’t have the threat of homozygous deleterious mutations, because if there aren’t any deleterious mutations—

Rachel: Then you’re fine.

Wolf: And so maybe this iterated embryo selection stuff, which is I think what you’re talking about there, I guess the fact that it involves this inbreeding problem, actually, I hadn’t thought about. But that means that it would have to be developed alongside, or if it were to be done in sort of the obvious couple-focused way, would have to be developed alongside some sort of technology for wiping out those deleterious mutations.

Rachel: Well, the good news is you wouldn’t really need a new technology because you literally will just not use that embryo. And so you’re like, “Oop, this one got two of them,” and so you just don’t use it.

Wolf: Yeah. This is actually the old way. People report things like Ramses being exceptionally healthy and strong, and intelligent.

Rachel: Really?

Wolf: Yeah. So some of the Egyptian pharaohs were—

Rachel: Well, because Cleopatra famously was inbred and also apparently very intelligent. Yeah.

Wolf: And this is the interesting thing about inbreeding, is that it doesn’t add problems. It reveals problems.

Rachel: But the—

Wolf: Now, most people tend to have a lot of problems, so it’s—generally not a good idea to inbreed. But in certain, I think, historical circumstances, there have been highly inbred lineages that also were very healthy because they’ve purified themselves by wiping out all the really deleterious mutations are gone because they’ve gone through that process.

Rachel: So there’s literally a—

Wolf: And so if you do this artificially—in an embryo selection context, that’s a very interesting possibility, I guess.

Rachel: There’s literally a phrase for it, which is purifying selection, which is exactly what you’ve described. If that if you have a slightly inbred population, they’re under more intense pressure. Because obviously, you’re going from however many percent healthy offspring to much lower than that. And that puts a lot of pressure on the population. But if you manage to survive however many generations, eventually you get a kind of purified mix at the bottom, which has been—the sort of bad deleterious stuff has been—

Wolf: Yeah, they’ve gone through that crucible, and—I think also they’re more likely to be distinct from the original populations. This is where you get new species and so on from as well.

Rachel: Exactly. And so this is a sort of a weird part of polygenic embryo selection is technically it does make sort of inbreeding more feasible. I’m not sure anyone would actually want to do that. But if you are—

Wolf: No

Rachel: if you do want to go Targaryen-maxxing.

Wolf: Yeah, without getting into the sort of social implications of that, the fact that even just iterated embryo selection among a single couple is effectively an incestuous process.

Rachel: If you started off with—

Wolf: Like and—

Rachel: Yeah, with only two people. Yeah

Wolf: Yeah, and it’s an interesting problem to overcome because—you would need some technical solution to that to do that. I guess you can do the population level. You get 100 people together. This is starting to get socially very weird.

Rachel: It’s very, very weird.

Wolf: Where it’s like I’m going to get 100 men and 100 women—

Rachel: And then they’re going to

Wolf: specially selected for being handsome and intelligent and whatnot, and then we’re going to do this very strange 100 generations of—

Rachel: In—

Wolf: of selection and mutation inside of this test tube crucible. And out the other side after 100 generations comes some improved set of children who no longer bear any particular parental relationship to these—

Rachel: It’s going to get—

Wolf: particular people. It sounds like something out of Plato, right?

Rachel: The future is going to get exceptionally weird. If there are any aspiring sci-fi authors out there, basically looking into reproductive technology is such a fertile ground for different sci-fi scenarios because there’s this one—

Wolf: Actually, this is a perfect... Yeah, speaking of sci-fi, if I was going to go write a sci-fi story, this is how Plato’s Republic should work.

Rachel: Oh, yes.

Wolf: The big breeding—

Rachel: The golds. Yeah

Wolf: the big breeding festival. But you always have this problem, which is some of the children actually are more related to some of the parents. And so if you do the breeding festival as this iterated mixture thing—overseen by the philosopher kings doing the selective breeding, out the other side comes a generation that’s actually 100 generations removed from the parental generation and is thoroughly mixed among them—

Rachel: A wolf is—

Wolf: but also thoroughly optimized. It would make good sci-fi.

Rachel: Absolutely. And a wolf is going to come out and be like, “Finally, I have created the breeding festival from Plato’s famous work, ‘Do Not Create the Breeding Festival’” or something.

Wolf: Well, his famous work was you should create the breeding festival.

Rachel: Do the breeding festival. So that’s one technology, and another one is called chromosome selection, otherwise colloquially known as the polycule baby, which is where you—

Wolf: Oh, multiple parents. Oof.

Rachel: Specifically multiple fathers because—

Wolf: Ah, yes

Rachel: as you may be aware, it is a lot easier to get sperm than it is eggs. And so basically what you would do is if you can find a way to be able to separate the chromosomes from each other, you could potentially get a group of 26 men and be like, “All right, you’ve got the best chromosome 11, and you’ve got the best chromosome 12,” and put them together and—

Wolf: And this is what Nick Land meant by a relapse into bacterial sex.

Rachel: Yeah, because you’re getting... Oh, what do the bacteria, they do? I forget the phrase. But yeah, they swap.

Wolf: Yeah, bacteria do lateral genodata transfer—

Rachel: That’s right

Wolf: as he puts it in Meltdown.

Rachel: But so I’m not sure if the world is quite ready for the baby with 26 fathers.

Wolf: No. It’s truly a strange new world out there if you follow these technologies and—

Rachel: To conclusion. Okay, so we’ve got IVG. We’ve got chromosome selection. What are the next ones? Obviously, there’s good old-fashioned genome editing.

And so that one has the potential to be the most powerful of all of them because you’re literally changing individual genomes. And say, if we had—

Wolf: Right, where you have opinions about, oh yeah, this gene, we want this, or this slot, we want this gene.

Rachel: And you could create... We get very excited about—

Wolf: The designer babies. Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah. Look, we get very excited if a person’s 145 IQ, but with this technology, you could potentially 200, 300. At that point, if suddenly there was a breakthrough tomorrow, and we were like, oh, incredibly someone’s been working on this. We can now do amazing gene editing without any off targets, and we can create somebody who’s potentially 300 IQ. I’m a huge experimenter, and I’m very excited about our sci-fi future.

I think at that point it might be good to be like maybe we should try the 200 IQ person first and see how that looks.

Wolf: Yeah. Well, the other thing I’ll bring up in that context is this is where this feedback loop between worldview and social system and reproduction becomes especially important. As we get more fine-grained control, we need to be a lot wiser about what we’re doing because we’re no longer able to rely on the wisdom of nature.

Rachel: And so this is the—

Wolf: And so for example, if we imagine widespread deployment of that technology during the hysteria of 2020, I can imagine terrible things would’ve happened to our genetic stock. Right? If you suddenly get everyone super hopped up about we have to eliminate the racism genes.

You’re going to start doing these targeted edits on hysterical moral fashions that if you look at that, what is that process? That’s a runaway out of control nonsense process that you absolutely cannot allow near your fundamentals.

Rachel: Oh.

Wolf: And the fundamentals have to be, by nature, way more conservatively treated. And so as we get more power in these things, it actually becomes even more important to become more conservative about them. Because we are, in fact, standing on a tower of preservation of a tradition. If you see the blood, the genes as a tradition, almost a literary tradition, there’s things written down in there, right? We have preserved inheritance from 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, that there’s absolutely no cultural transmission, across those kinds of timescales.

But there is genetic transmission across those kinds of timescales. And in other words, the genetic process is vastly more conservative than the cultural process. Which means that insofar as there’s any necessity for a conservatism within society, preserving what is working, a lot of that rests in preserving of inheritance genetically. And so when you start messing with that stuff and you apply high-speed cultural fashions to what is in fact this very old substrate that we are relying on being very old, civilizations are going to be able to erase themselves quite quickly. If you imagine the Romans didn’t just collapse culturally, they also—

Rachel: Collapsed genetically. Which they kind of did

Wolf: Well, they did to some extent.

Rachel: But it could have been worse.

Wolf: But they could leave a genetic crater, the likes of which has been never seen.

Rachel: And I completely agree with you. And so this, we’re getting into the area of reproductive technology that personally scares me the most, and it kind of gets to our last reproductive tech is womb tanks. And it’s funny that that was the one that I’m the most tentative about. Because people are like, “Well, surely it’s not messing with the genomes. It just means that women don’t have to go through pregnancy.”

Wolf: No, but it totally alienates the human from the reproductive process. It’s a totally new species, right? It’s like we’re no longer the same kind of animal.

Rachel: And the thing that I worry about the most is the role of the state—in being able to choose people’s... And so if the—

Wolf: Yeah. And the state is not actually a very conservative institution. It’s—

Rachel: The state is not a conservative institution, and I don’t think it cares as much about its underlings as parents do.

Wolf: No, it does not.

Rachel: And so what the womb tank would allow is for a state to essentially finally get rid of the nuclear family, which I think they’ve kind of been trying to do—at least some of them, for a while now.

Wolf: Yeah. And the thing to notice is that this is actually a self-destructive drive.

Rachel: It’s—

Wolf: Because it has not been able to do that, it has gotten away with having those impulses, right? And so if you imagine the modern institutions, the bureaucracy of the state, the shareholder corporation, getting unleashed on—

Rachel: Oh, reproductive. Oh

Wolf: or the internet cult. Getting unleashed on these fundamental matters of genetics, it’s—

Rachel: Yeah. That’s the thing that scares me the most. Or like you just—

Wolf: The insanity lies that way, is what I would say

Rachel: You sort of think back to the early communists who were extremely invested in creating the new man. They literally called it the new man. Imagine if they could actually create the new man.

Wolf: Yeah. And then you read some of the more speculative extents of what they meant by the new man. Some of them were like, “Yeah, the new man will be made out of replaceable parts in a factory. It will be totally commoditized and abstracted.” “And there will be nothing... You can replace the arms and the legs. You can replace the body. You can replace the brain.”

It’s like they’re imagining sort of this... Now, this is some crazy cosmists, right? Russian cosmism. But that stuff actually becomes plausible—in these technological extremes. And so I think the development of technology is wonderful.

The advancement of life is wonderful. As we get more power in these things, we have to be taking more care of the fundamentals.

Rachel: I completely agree.

Wolf: And it’s like similarly, in the multicellular organism, there’s parts of the organism that are specialized in preserving the genome, right? And we consider the rest of the body disposable. And there’s parts that are, like you say, with the egg stem cells, they’re much—more conservative. They don’t reproduce as fast. They do not mutate as fast.

And we have to become more like that as a society. We have to become much more conservative about some certain fundamentals.

The correct stance towards it is almost that the blood is a revelation from God. We don’t want to touch it too much. I think it’s interesting to take more responsibility for that, but I think in the limit, there’s some amount of recognition that there are—Inheritance is there, there’s wisdom there beyond our own ability—

Rachel: Completely

Wolf: to mess with. And if we mess with it, we’re just going to get whacked.

Rachel: And I think—

Wolf: Wiped

Rachel: taking responsibility for things is not simply being careless and being like, “Oh, come what may.” It’s actually about—

Wolf: Yeah, it’s not just, “I’m responsible,” like Claude, where it’s like, “Whoops. Yeah”—

Rachel: Whoops.

Wolf: “I deleted your files. I guess I’m responsible for that.”

Rachel: Sorry. It’s like, no. It’s thinking about the worst possible outcomes and being like, could I live with this? Could I sleep with this? Am—am I taking the appropriate steps to prevent the worst possible outcomes?

There’s also a question of how do you know what is worth preserving? And I had a—

Wolf: Right, and this is actually epistemically a very deep question.

Rachel: And look, this might be a naive way of looking at things, but I often think about the victors of history. And I’m like, one of the things that is so exciting about genomic prediction is, one, is that we can potentially make our children better. But it also gives us greater insight into our forebears. Because you can look at ancient genomes and be like, what were their schizophrenia risks? How tall were they?

Wolf: Well, yeah. Now we have these wonderful graphs. Have you seen the one of European intelligence over time? Where I think 10,000 years ago with the arrival of the farmers—you get this massive increase of intelligence.

Rachel: And then the Yamnaya takeover and it’s like, “Ooh.”

Wolf: And then the Yamnaya wipes things out for a while.

Rachel: And then the last 1,000 years have been a straight shot sort of up.

Wolf: Well, actually, I think what happened was there was a big increase in intelligence during the Corded Ware era, which is 1,000 years after the Yamnaya invasions. And then it’s more ups and downs in the sort of civilized era.

Rachel: So that stuff, I absolutely love it. I love ancient genomes. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about. But I also look to it for wisdom because I’m like, what have we been selected for over that long period of time? And there’s classic stuff of what are the biggest differences between you and me and our forebears 10,000 years ago?

And there is obvious stuff, like there’s been a lot of change in immune coding stuff. And there’s a question of like, are our immune systems actually getting better? Or it’s more like there’s a constant arms race between us and pathogenic disease. And so you always have to be on the forefront of—immunological change. We’ve probably gotten a little bit taller as more resources became more available.

But then there’s this particular one of intelligence increases over time. And so I—

Wolf: Somewhat. Again, last—20,000, 30,000 years, a little bit ups and downs. I think the sort of dark age was, or the coming out of the dark age was sort of fairly beneficial. Going into the dark age was fairly bad. The modern era, I think we had been going up for a little while there.

Rachel: And then it was—

Wolf: I think we’re starting to go back down.

Rachel: Yeah, and I agree, but it’s interesting, it’s like the stock market where you’re just sort of like, okay, there are ups and downs, but it’s interesting that—there’s a trend upwards. And so I—

Wolf: Yeah. At the long timescale, yes.

Rachel: On the long timescale. And I’m like, I think this makes sense with my intuition of I think that intelligence is so anti-fragile. The more intelligent—a person is... And look, there are things called autist traps where you can have this big brain and it gets like—easily distracted into a crazy area

Wolf: well, a lot of that, just to address the kind of stereotypes around intelligence, I think one of the big drivers of the stereotypes, the actual fact is that intelligence is correlated with everything good.

One of the drivers of the stereotypes is at any given level of social stratification, like a school or a city or an industry, or any kind of class where you’re associating with people of similar social value to yourself, which is usually what happens. What you get is this big spread where at one end you have people who are there because of incredible athletic ability or charisma or handsomeness or whatever, and they are thereby probably a lot dumber because if they were smarter, they’d be in the next level up, right?

Rachel: And it’s sort of funny because you’re like—

Wolf: And then on the other end—

Rachel: “Oh, I look around all my friends and they’re high IQ, but a lot of them have ADHD or other issues.”

Wolf: Yeah. All the—

Rachel: And you’re like, “Why is that?” And you’re just like, “Well, because if they didn’t have those things, they’d probably be running the world.”

Wolf: Yeah. Right, and there are people who are like that—who are above them, right? And at the other end, you have all your intelligent people, they’re super smart, they know all this stuff, and they’re total spergs, they’re unathletic. And this is not because there’s actually—

Rachel: A correlation

Wolf: a correlation between those on the bulk level—it’s because you are living in a selection effect.

Rachel: Yeah. That’s totally true.

Wolf: And that’s a very important thing to note with respect to kind of stereotypes of—what intelligence means

Rachel: it’s so funny when people talk about this sort of stuff and they say, “Oh, we can select for intelligence, but obviously intelligence isn’t all there is, and we shouldn’t get...” I think we underestimate how awesome intelligence is. And how cool it is, and I’m so excited to hopefully be able to give my kids—more of it. I see intelligence as a divine fire and—it exists within all of us.

Wolf: Well, it is—

Rachel: For some of us, it’s a spark. For others, it’s a raging inferno. And I want to see more of it.

Wolf: More of it. Yeah. At some level, intelligence is like an abstracted form of life, right? Life itself is sort of this somewhat intelligent process that seeks out the opportunity in the world, and then now we imagine that kind of abstracted into the realm of information. And that’s intelligence.

And someone put it well, actually, the other day, I saw on Twitter, I think, intelligence is almost by definition insensitivity to initial conditions. Because it’s like intelligence seeks out the—

Rachel: The straight—

Wolf: opportunity—regardless of where it starts. You know?

Rachel: That’s a good point. But yeah. And just thinking in terms of my own life, I’ve gotten so much joy out of the life of the mind and studying philosophy—and math at university, and I was like, this is fantastic. And then getting to a point at university where I’m like, wow, the math is starting to become really hard. I think I might be topping out here.

And so I’m so excited to be able to look at my babies and be like, “Look, I was able to go so far, and hopefully-”

Wolf: They’re going to go beyond us, right? That’s the ideal as parents, is we want our children to go beyond us. We want to—what is it Nietzsche says? “We want to throw the spear of mankind beyond ourselves,” right?

Rachel: And that’s the thing that really excites me. And it’s so funny because—my husband and I sometimes talk about what if some of the stronger technology becomes available and let’s say we’re able to have children who are not just seven IQ points above us, but 30 or 40. And we’re like—how—

Wolf: Again, I start to caution with the conservatism there because—30 or 40 IQ points per generation is like Total revolution per generation. And that’s not sustainable.

Rachel: And I’m just like—

Wolf: We do not have—the preservation frameworks in place for how to have any kind of continuity across that.

Rachel: And I actually do think you’re right there. But also just in terms of what revolution would look like on the scale of the family, what would it be like to raise a child who has 30 extra IQ points than you? And I’m sure those relationships—

Wolf: On the other hand—

Rachel: have existed, but

Wolf: I guess they would in fact figure it out. I guess I’m more worried about you’re massively increasing the intelligence, but you may be starting to Goodhart law, like chasing off some cliff. On the other hand, it is going to revolutionize society every generation. So they’re probably not running whatever initial idea you had after a generation of that.

Rachel: But look, I think that the good ending for me is to be on my death bed surrounded by my many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren are just absolutely giga-brained, and they’re just like, “Oh-”

Wolf: They’re just better than us. Yeah.

Rachel: They’re just like, “Oh, poor old grandma, but it’s amazing what she was able to do with the intelligence that she had.”

Wolf: Yeah. She was the little lunged fish that crawled out of the water.

Rachel: Literally. Yeah. It’s amazing what she did even though she was not selected, and we’re eternally thankful to her, and we’re going to go off into the universe—and do absolutely crazy stuff, which I can’t imagine.

Wolf: Yeah. No, I share this dream. I am just perhaps more cautious about—what it looks like in practice. Anyways, well, why don’t we end it there then?

Rachel: No.

Wolf: This, look, we can go on forever.

Rachel: I have so much.

Wolf: Why don’t we do it next time?

Rachel: Yes. Okay. Round two.

Wolf: But I think this has been a great conversation. It’s been great to have you on, Rachel.

Rachel: Me too.

Wolf: And I’m excited for where all this can go. I’m excited to meet your children finally.

And yeah. Let us exercise appropriate caution and ambition in these things.

Rachel: Hell, yes. Thank you so much for having me, Wolf.

Wolf: All right. Cheers.