In this episode of Executive Connect, Melissa Aarskaug sits down with Jamie Metzl, futurist, author, and biotech expert, to talk about why the future isn’t just coming fast…it’s already here.

Jamie argues that we’re not headed toward human-like AI, but something more powerful: machine superintelligence. From rewriting DNA to reinventing work, Jamie shows how AI, genetics, and biotech are converging into a single, fast-moving force that’s changing jobs, economies, and even global power.

If you’ve been wondering what’s hype and what’s real in AI, or how to stay human in a tech-heavy world, this episode delivers clarity, perspective, and a call to action.

Chapters:

00:00 “AGI is BS”, Jamie’s bold view on artificial intelligence

02:05 Jamie’s journey from government to biotech thought leader

04:42 Making science feel personal through storytelling

07:27 Why this tech revolution is bigger than just genetics

12:42 Superconvergence explained, how AI, genetics & biotech fuse

15:03 Three steps to prepare yourself and your company for the future

21:28 Which industries are being disrupted the most, and why

28:10 The real risk: moving too fast without ethical guardrails

33:50 Global tech races, will they unite or divide nations?

38:12 How to build a future-ready mindset and resilient culture

42:08 Final takeaway: humans at the center of the story

Jamie

(0:00) We are getting these much more powerful technologies. (0:05) But even more importantly, what I say a lot is that the revolution that’s happening now is a revolution of human imagination. (0:12) People talk about artificial general intelligence as if it’s a thing, but I’ve summarized my response in seven letters, which is AGI is BS.

(0:21) AGI is BS. (0:23) Because we’re not going to create machines that do everything that humans do. (0:27) Humans, we’ve evolved for 3.8 billion years. (0:29) We have so many capacities, so many amazing things that humans do. (0:34) We’re creating these machines that it’s not artificial general human intelligence. (0:39) It’s just machine superintelligence.

(0:42) And it can overlap with us. (0:45) But your question is right. (0:46) How do individuals capitalize on it?

Melissa

(0:49) Think the future is coming fast. (0:51) It’s already here. (0:53) And Jamie Metzl is one of the sharpest guides we could have for navigating it.

(0:59) From decoding our DNA to reimagining humanity with AI, Jamie’s work sits at the collision of science fiction and real work transformation. (1:10) He’s been called the original COVID-19 whistleblower, advised the White House, written bestselling books, and now he’s helping us understand how AI, genetics, and biotechnology aren’t just shaping tomorrow, but they’re rewriting today. (1:27) Stay tuned because this conversation is going to challenge how you see your life, your work, and the world around you.

(1:36) Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie

(1:37) Thank you, Melissa. (1:38) Happy to be here.

Melissa

(1:40) Your background is quite literally remarkable. (1:44) You’ve worked in government, advised global organizations, written bestselling books, and even divided into science fiction into making sense. (1:57) So what first drew you to exploring the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and humanity’s future?

Jamie

(2:05) So thank you, Melissa. (2:07) So I’ve always been just like a ferociously curious person, which made me a real pain in the ass when I was a kid. (2:15) Because I realized you could just swallow up all of your classes by asking lots of questions.

(2:21) And your teachers had a hard time telling you to shut up if you were asking legit questions. (2:26) And then when I was in the 90s, I was working for President Clinton on the National Security Council. (2:33) And my then boss, Richard Clark, who later became famous as the guy who had predicted 9-11, he used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life was to try to solve problems that other people can’t see.

(2:46) At that time, I became very obsessed with what the intersecting machine learning at that time, and biotechnology, and the nascent genetics revolutions were going to mean. (2:59) So I started educating myself. (3:01) And then I started writing articles.

(3:03) And they’re kind of boring technical articles. (3:06) And those articles got a lot of attention. (3:08) I was invited to testify before Congress.

(3:12) And I was doing a lot of speaking. (3:15) And when I was talking to people, I felt like they didn’t really get what I was trying to say. (3:19) Because people heard these words, and they just seemed so much bigger than they were.

(3:24) They didn’t see themselves in the story of genetics, or DNA, or this kind of arcane computer technology. (3:32) And so for me, I thought, well, how do I get people to feel like this is a story about them? (3:39) It’s not about technology.

(3:40) It’s about people. (3:42) And I’d already written two books. (3:43) One was a history of the Cambodian genocide.

(3:46) And one was an historical novel set around the Cambodian genocide with the same goal of saying, I need to make people feel in their guts that this stuff is relevant to them, not by policy articles, but by stories. (4:00) That’s how humans learn. (4:02) And so at that time, I wrote two of my near-term science fiction novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata.

(4:10) And I was on the book tours for those books. (4:12) And I would explain the underlying science to people, not in the technical way, but in my way, because I had taught all of these fields to myself. (4:22) And I could just see in people’s eyes, when I explained it that way, it’s like, oh my God, that’s what this is about.

(4:28) Now I get why that is for me. (4:32) And so that was when I realized I wanted to write a book that was telling the story of the genetics revolution. (4:39) But as the story, it’s the story of our lives.

(4:42) It’s the greatest story in human history. (4:44) It is the story of human history over 3.8 billion years. (4:48) And so I wrote that book called Hacking Darwin, and it became a pretty big international bestseller.

(4:54) And a bunch of things happened after that. (4:58) One, I had predicted that the world’s first genome-edited CRISPR babies would be born soon, that they would be born in China. (5:06) And I had a list of five genes that I thought were the most likely genes that would be mutated in these pre-implanted embryos.

(5:14) And when the announcement was made in late 2018 of these first CRISPR babies, in fact, one of the five genes on my list, the CCR5, was the one that the Chinese biophysicist had targeted. (5:29) So I got a lot of attention there. (5:32) I was then invited by the director general of the World Health Organization to join the WHO expert advisory committee on human genome editing.

(5:40) And I was doing a lot of speaking to all kinds of groups. (5:44) In one week, I spoke to the 300 top scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a guest of their director about the future of biology. (5:57) And I spoke to the seventh and eighth graders at the Hebrew Day School of Oredell, New Jersey, where my friend was chairman of the board, and he asked me to do that.

(6:06) And everybody had the same questions. (6:09) Everybody got that this isn’t a technology story, this is a human story. (6:14) And the seventh and eighth graders, these little Talmudic scholars, they got that, well, what does it mean that humans now have these increasing superpowers?

(6:26) And when I give my talks, I never use notes. (6:31) I never stand behind a podium. (6:33) I never use notes.

(6:34) And as a result, my talks are always different, and they’re always evolving. (6:39) And I always incorporate just things that are happening. (6:42) And so what I find is I’ll start giving a talk, and then it’ll be a year later, and I’ll be giving a talk that has the same title, and it’ll be 2% similar to the talk one year ago.

(6:54) So when I was meeting with lots of different groups, and I was saying, the story of human genetics revolution, it’s this big story for us, but it’s just a little piece of this even bigger story. (7:07) And that bigger story is that after nearly 4 billion years of evolution, our one species suddenly has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life, which is not just about human biology, it’s about renegotiating our relationship with the entire living world and even the non-living world. (7:27) And the question for us is, how can we do that with as much wisdom as possible?

(7:34) And so that’s really, so my new book, Super Convergence, is all about that. (7:38) The paperback version is highly revised, is coming out on October 21st. (7:45) My books are in 25 different languages.

(7:47) And now I’m just involved with a whole lot of different things. (7:50) I’m a member of the Lancet Commission on Precision Medicine, deeply involved in healthcare. (7:55) And the big issue is this is one of the most fundamental transformations in all of human history, and it’s going to take everybody, everybody’s engagement, everybody’s wisdom in order to make sure that we optimize the benefits and minimize harms.

(8:10) And as we do it for every single person and every executive thinking about their career, their life, the future of their company, they also need to think very thoughtfully and strategically about this changing environment and what it means for each and all of us.

Melissa

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(9:14) I love that. (9:15) There’s so much in there that I want to unpack, but one interesting point I love that you mentioned is your talks. (9:22) I used to be one of those talkers, Jamie, where I would just talk about the subject and people are like, you got to stay on point, Melissa.

(9:31) You got to have your bullets. (9:33) I love to hear that because keeping it simple and being authentic and just go where things flow, I often find those are the best speeches I give and really unpacking things in a way that are simplified to an audience, whether they understand the subject or they don’t understand the subject. (9:57) It really makes people lean in and want to learn in a way that can speak to everyone.

Jamie

(10:03) I think that’s really wonderful. (10:05) People need to feel that they’re part of it, that they’re part of the story. (10:10) They’re not just being bombarded with stuff.

(10:13) I just think that none of us have all of the answers. (10:17) For me, one of the honors that I have when I’m speaking to big groups and I give a lot of keynotes and big tech conferences is I have so much to learn from really every person. (10:29) If my talk is, well, I know everything and you just sit there and I’m just going to bombard you with stuff, everybody is getting shortchanged because my whole view is, well, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy thinking about this stuff, but it’s ongoing and it’s changing.

(10:48) Everybody is part of it, not just of processing, but a revolution doesn’t happen on its own. (10:56) Everybody plays a role. (10:57) We live in an interconnected ecosystem.

(11:00) I think that’s great.

Melissa

(11:02) The other thing I love that you said and the underlying theme is staying curious, asking questions, being a lifelong learner. (11:12) Some of the most interesting things I’ve done in my life have come out of me just being curious about a subject. (11:19) Your new book, Super Converged, Convergence, thank you for correcting me, explores the fusion of AI genetics and biotechnology, all very different.

(11:33) How do you see these revolutions overlapping and why should organizations, leaders, people pay attention to these areas right now?

Jamie

(11:44) Great question. (11:45) It feels like they’re different because all of these things have different names, just like if you go to your local university and you walk down the halls, here’s the biology department, here’s the physics department, here’s the chemistry department. (12:02) But if you actually go to nature and you say, well, where’s the physics happening and where’s the biology happening in nature?

(12:09) That’s not the way nature works. (12:10) It’s all connected. (12:11) The same is true for technology.

(12:14) We have these shorthands with different names, AI genetics and biotechnology, but the machine learning revolution is embedded in the AI revolution. (12:24) You don’t have a biotechnology revolution without machine learning. (12:29) We couldn’t understand the first thing about genetics without machine learning because the complexity of genetics is so many orders of magnitude greater than the processing capacities of our unaided brains.

(12:42) That’s what the title means, superconverged. (12:45) It’s all one thing. (12:47) Because of that, because every technology weaves into every other technology, what we’re seeing is an exponential change.

(12:58) You live in Austin, Texas, and Austin is built on this idea of exponential technological change, creating whole new industries that otherwise people wouldn’t and couldn’t have imagined. (13:10) But on a personal level, it forces us to think a little bit differently about change because if change is happening linearly, which is what many of our ancestors felt, like your plow was kind of like your parents’ plow, it’s kind of like your grandparents’ plow, that’s not the case at all. (13:27) We are getting these much more powerful technologies.

(13:32) But even more importantly, what I say a lot is that the revolution that’s happening now is a revolution of human imagination. (13:39) People talk about artificial general intelligence as if it’s a thing, but I’ve summarized my response in seven letters, which is AGI is BS. (13:48) AGI is BS.

(13:50) Because we’re not going to create machines that do everything that humans do. (13:55) Humans, we’ve evolved for 3.8 billion years. (13:57) We have so many capacities, so many amazing things that humans do.

(14:02) We’re creating these machines that it’s not artificial general human intelligence, it’s just machine superintelligence. (14:09) It can overlap with us, but it’s really exciting. (14:15) It’s creating all the opportunities that I just described in the book, whether it’s healthcare or agriculture or energy, advanced materials, data storage in pretty much every field.

(14:26) But your question is right. (14:28) How do individuals capitalize on it? (14:30) You already mentioned the first one, aggressive learning.

(14:34) Learning, we all know about line of sight learning. (14:37) They’re the things that you need to know. (14:39) You started your podcast and you had a list of, here’s all the things I need to know in order to have an effective podcast.

(14:46) That’s great. (14:46) We need to do those things. (14:48) But because of the breadth of what’s happening, because of the interconnectivity of everything, if all we’re doing is line of sight learning, that’s not enough because the disruptions are coming from adjacent spaces.

(15:03) It feels like it’s some other field, but it turns out that, for example, what’s happening in the AI world has massive implications for healthcare. (15:13) What’s happening in healthcare has massive implications for the future of agriculture and cell culture and animal products. (15:19) There are all of these things.

(15:20) One is aggressive learning. (15:24) Two, which is really important, is recognizing, and Doug McMillan I thought said this at the Walmart CEO about a month ago, and I’ve been saying this for many, many years, every job is going to change. (15:39) When I hear people saying humans are the new Neanderthals, I just think it’s ridiculous, preposterous.

(15:46) But every job is going to change. (15:48) And every job did change as a result of agriculture, and every job did change as a result of electricity. (15:55) So that is the norm for our species, but things are going to change a lot more quickly.

(16:00) And so what I say is that for individuals and organizations, we should really think of our, whether it’s individuals and our jobs or organizations and the things that we’re doing, to really break it up into subtasks. (16:15) Like a person’s job, maybe there’s 20 tasks that are the kind of core. (16:20) You made a list of me doing whatever requires these 20 things.

(16:24) And then you can just kind of go through that list and say 10 years from now, will this task, this subtask, more likely be carried out by humans or by machines? (16:35) If by machines, your job is to say for this discrete task, how can we make sure that we’re set up so the machines can do that task? (16:45) Because the last thing you want to be or have somebody else be is a human functioning as a second rate machine.

(16:53) And there’ll be tons of tasks, which are uniquely human tasks. (16:58) And this is going to change over time. (17:00) And so what we want to do is invest our time and energy in helping our humans be our best humans and our machines be our best machines.

(17:08) And in the many areas where it’s kind of hybrid, to figure out how to do those kinds of hybridizations. (17:16) And as I go around, there are a lot of people, I think everybody has this where you say, this thing needs to happen in the world. (17:23) And some will say, oh, AI can do that.

(17:26) And what they’re imagining is the magic AI button. (17:30) Nothing will do more harm and nothing will get more people killed than this idea of the magic AI button, because it’s going to screw things up. (17:40) And so the way to do this is to think, what are kind of discrete tasks where AI or whatever machine can do things really well in a starting in a contained environment as exciting as AlphaGo and AlphaZero, we’re playing the game of Go.

(17:58) The game of Go as vast as it is, is a contained environment. (18:02) And so for organizations, if you just say to AI, rewrite all of our code in our tech stack, you’re going to be out of business very, very quickly because there’s going to be errors. (18:16) And it’s going to take more than all of your human staff time to try to find and fix those errors.

(18:22) So it needs to go methodically. (18:24) And the third thing that I tell people and organizations is this is all about values. (18:30) If the starting question is, how do I use these technologies?

(18:34) It’s the wrong starting question. (18:36) The right starting question is, who are I? (18:38) Who are we?

(18:39) What do I and we stand for? (18:41) What are we trying to achieve? (18:43) And what’s the right mix of humans and technologies that can help us achieve those goals?

(18:50) And this is not just nostalgia for humans. (18:53) This is a deep appreciation of what humans bring to bear. (18:58) And we’ve benefited.

(18:59) We’re not all hunter-gatherers. (19:01) We’re not all farmers. (19:03) We get to do these kind of non-job jobs, like both you and I have, Melissa, because of agriculture, because we don’t have to be farmers or hunters and gatherers.

(19:16) So that’s what we do. (19:18) And we will continue to do it. (19:19) But there’s stress because of how quickly this revolution has happened.

Melissa

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(19:56) DavidandAlexisKiwi.org, code EXECUTIVE1. (20:03) And I love it. (20:04) Again, so much to unpack there, but I think, funny, I agree with you absolutely, 100%.

(20:10) AI is not a band-aid to anything. (20:13) It’s a tool to give us superpowers, but we still have to think through what we’re talking to the tool to do. (20:20) I think a lot of times I work in regulated industries.

(20:24) I hear a lot that people are going to plug their regulation in outspits, cleaned-up controls for whatever frameworks they’re using, which is a really bad idea to base it off AI. (20:38) A, it doesn’t know all the answers to everything. (20:40) B, humans are still thinking.

(20:44) And C, we need checks and balances. (20:46) And I love your point about the physics hall, because I really do think that a lot of this is separate domains, like AI over there, genetics over here. (20:58) So let’s talk a little bit about where things are converging today and maybe your perspective on the industries that are either being disrupted now or going to be disrupted more, because I do agree with what you said.

(21:13) All of our jobs are changing. (21:15) And the way I look at it is we’re just getting more time to do other things, because the stuff that we don’t want in our day-to-day is kind of going away if you know how to use these AI tools correctly. (21:28) Right.

Jamie

(21:28) Yeah. (21:28) And maybe there’s even some stuff that we do want that’s going to go away, but humans were always like, when people got disrupted from being farmers, let’s say, because of industrialization, I think a lot of people, it was actually a very painful transition. (21:45) It wasn’t like people’s like, oh my God, I really want to go be a factory worker doing crappy, crappy work.

(21:52) But it was just things change. (21:54) And so we need to make the most of it. (21:56) So I’m not trying to be Pollyannish, but I think there’s a lot of doing that’s required.

(22:02) This is a moment of extreme flux. (22:04) And it’s like I said before, it’s going to change a lot of different industries. (22:08) I mean, some of the ones that are the obvious ones are all of the kind of computer AI industries, which are just emerging.

(22:17) I do think that in a way, this is a bubble, meaning that we’re spending so much money and the valuation of some of these companies is absolutely insane, that there’s no conceivable way that they can live up to this. (22:32) But the internet bubble burst, and we still have the internet, the railroad bubble burst, and we still have railroads. (22:40) And those were revolutionary technologies.

(22:45) And so certainly I’m deeply involved in the world of health care. (22:48) And health care is regulated. (22:52) And we need to be very cautious in health care, because we have a system that’s evolved over a long period of time.

(22:59) And if it’s too radical, and we take away important consumer protections and patient protections, people could get harmed. (23:07) But we certainly are entering a new era of AI-assisted health care, where physicians acting on their own will probably at some point soon be basically committing malpractice. (23:20) And AI, in many cases, acting alone will be committing malpractice.

(23:26) But AIs and humans working together, but recognizing there are some areas where technology, where AIs can do better and humans can do better. (23:35) But we’re going to have to figure out how we work together. (23:38) Agriculture, where we’ve had, over the last 100 years, we’ve had massive increases in agricultural productivity.

(23:46) And that’s why we’ve been able to quadruple the global human population. (23:51) But if we go up to 10 billion humans, and people are wealthier, because the growth is happening in poorer parts of the world that are getting wealthier, and everyone wants to have diets like we have. (24:04) I mean, you’re in Austin, I’m in New York, but I’m originally from Kansas City.

(24:08) And actually, that was what Kansas City was. (24:10) They’d have the cattle drives from Texas, and they’d go up to Kansas City, and they’d put the cattle on the trains to go to Chicago to be slaughtered. (24:21) So it’s like, if everybody wants to eat these things of Austin, Kansas City, barbecue, or whatever their equivalent is, we’re going to have to destroy every wild space in the earth.

(24:32) We have to cut down all of our forests, if our plan is to do it with agriculture like we have now. (24:39) So we have to increase agricultural productivity. (24:42) We have to think differently about how we get the animal products that we get.

(24:49) And so certainly, increasing agricultural yields using advanced biotechnology must be part of our future. (24:56) And I think we can think differently about how we generate the animal products that we use. (25:01) I know it’s controversial in Texas and Italy and a lot of other places, but I’m super excited about cell cultured animal products.

(25:08) If you can have milk or meat that’s biologically identical to the one that comes from a dead cow, and I say with milk dead cow, because average cow lives 20 years, average milking cow lives five years. (25:22) So it’s a big sacrifice on the behalf of those cows. (25:25) But we can get those products just from extracting and expanding a few stem cells from the healthiest cattle we can find.

(25:34) It’s great for everything. (25:35) It’s great for the environment, for the climate, animal cruelty, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, all these kinds of things. (25:45) Data storage.

(25:46) I mean, you’re getting a lot of this in Texas, because Texas actually has a really great situation with your electrical grid that allows for innovation in electricity in Texas. (25:59) But we’re seeing everywhere our need for these massive, massive data centers, and that need is just growing unlimited energy and unlimited data centers. (26:09) So we’re going to have to think about how to do this, generate the energy that we need, and to have a structure for computing that’s just more efficient than what we have.

(26:22) I mean, our brains are so much more efficient in use of energy than our computers. (26:27) So we already have a model for something. (26:30) Our brains are much more sophisticated than our computers, and they work better, and they have lower energy.

(26:37) And so we’re going to need to develop these kinds of new approaches, and certainly this intersection of AI, genetics, and biotech can play a really important role for that. (26:49) And one of the examples is DNA data storage, where DNA is a million times denser than silicon. (26:57) Unlike 30 to 50 years on magnetic tapes, it can store data reliably in the right conditions for two to five million years.

(27:05) So we can just think differently about things, and it scares some people. (27:12) But on the other hand, the structure of our lives of industrialization, industrial agriculture, mass electrification, these are all relatively new things. (27:24) So we change, and then we think about some recent thing as if it’s been from time immemorial.

(27:30) So I’m optimistic that there’s going to be a very, very major disruption.

Melissa

(27:34) Yeah, I agree. (27:36) I was kind of switching gears a little bit with all these breakthroughs happening so fast, leveraging AI. (27:44) I think one of the big discussions I’ve had this weekend at a conference was ethics is lagging behind a bit with the use of AI and kind of how fast we’re moving in the world today.

(27:57) I want to get your perspective on what are the biggest risks of this new era and really how can leaders, companies balance responsibility with innovation? (28:10) We can’t slow the innovation, but we also have to make sure we’re being responsible with the ethics side of it.

Jamie

(28:18) Absolutely. (28:19) So the opportunities are incredible, but the risks are also really high. (28:25) And we’re seeing, certainly in the work that I’ve done, I was deeply, you mentioned in your intro, I was deeply involved in the issue of COVID origins, which I think most likely came from a lab accident in China.

(28:41) But that was a manifestation. (28:44) I think the most likely thing was that they had a secret program to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and there was an accident, and there was all these young people, and they didn’t realize right away what had happened. (28:57) So I’m involved with that.

(29:01) Certainly there’s a lot of these PDoomers who are everywhere talking about the risk of runaway AI. (29:12) And while I’m optimistic about AI, and I don’t think that AIs are going to destroy the world anytime soon, I absolutely think that we need to build these technologies responsibly. (29:25) And because we have these arms race scenarios, like what’s happening in Ukraine with the drone wars, but also we have all these competitions between the United States and China, or between different companies within those two countries and elsewhere, there’s every pressure to charge forward.

(29:46) And I’m all for innovation. (29:49) But if we only charge forward, and we don’t think about governance and responsibility at every step, if the idea is let’s race forward without any consideration of values and ethics, and then when we get to the point like two minutes before, the risk has become so great that now it’s 100% clear that’s when we’re going to do the ethics and accountability, that is guaranteed to fail. (30:15) And so for me, what I believe is that the issues of governance, not just government regulation, but governance, what happens at every level, and ethics and values need to be woven in to the process at every step.

(30:30) That doesn’t mean slower. (30:33) For certain health care applications, actually faster is the thing that’s going to save more lives. (30:40) But that doesn’t mean it’s like driving a car.

(30:42) If you say, well, I want to get to where I’m going faster, and I’m just going to drive the entire route with my foot 100% on the pedal, it may feel in the beginning that you’re going to get there. (30:56) You may be scratching the itch in you of that urgency, but you’re going to crash. (31:01) And so that’s this balance.

(31:04) And it requires everybody to play a role because companies on their own, I mean, we saw it with this open source debate when meta was kind of an also ran in their AI. (31:20) And so they did follow the strategy of what Google did when they were and also ran on with the phones. (31:27) And so like Android, they said, we’re going to release our llama as open source.

(31:34) I mean, it was the exact same strategy. (31:37) And so you get why companies would say, well, we don’t want to go bankrupt. (31:41) We don’t want to lose our company.

(31:43) We’re going to do whatever it takes. (31:44) And that’s why there has to be a role for governments at every level. (31:53) But I just think that it’s very dangerous for people to say, well, there’s no role for governments, governance, or accountability and just let the companies or the research labs do whatever they want.

(32:06) Because if and when the bad things happen, everybody pays the price. (32:11) So we’re all stakeholders in this. (32:15) So coming back to your question about individual companies and individual leaders, I mean, when I say it’s like a George Seurat painting where it’s made up of a bunch of dots and those dots make the painting.

(32:30) Everybody needs to recognize that they are an individual dot, but they also have responsibilities for the painting as a whole. (32:39) So I definitely think that (32:40) for individual companies, associations of companies, people who are interacting with (32:46) governments, government leaders, and people working at the international level, (32:51) we really need to think of what are the frameworks that we can use that balance our need for speed (32:57) and our need for innovation with a recognition that if it’s a no holds barred arms race, (33:04) it’s like driving with our feet to the pedal.

Melissa

(33:08) Yeah. (33:08) And I kind of like what you said. (33:09) It needs to be woven in because it’s the balance of the scientists.

(33:14) It’s the balance of the companies creating those processes and the government regulating it. (33:21) And if it’s just the regulators, we know that at times that comes to a standstill if there’s not so many people supporting it. (33:29) So I do love what you said.

(33:30) I think it’s so true. (33:31) Having it woven in, in all capacities is really what works. (33:35) I want to switch directions a little bit on how do you see AI, genetics, biotech, shaping the power between nations in the coming decades?

(33:50) I feel like, you know, maybe the better question is, do you think this competition will drive more division? (33:59) Will it drive more collaboration? (34:02) Talk to me a little bit about, you know, even I see like space discussion is bringing kind of the countries together a little bit right now.

(34:13) So I guess that’s a big question in itself, but just talk to me a little bit about that.

Jamie

(34:20) Yeah. (34:20) So these technologies don’t come with their own built-in value system. (34:26) These are very, very powerful technologies.

(34:28) We look at any technology in the past and whether it’s (34:32) agriculture or the stirrups on horses, all these things, even what feel like the most benign (34:40) innovations have led to fundamental transformations, including power transformations, (34:46) because without agriculture, you don’t get standing armies or massive wars without the (34:53) stirrups and the Mongols figuring out how to marry stirrups on horses and archery from horses. (35:00) They use that to create cavalries that created the largest land empire that the world has ever known.

(35:08) And so these technologies fundamentally uproot relationships. (35:15) And, you know, it’s not coincidental that when militaries started to figure out how to use gunpower for cannons, things, that’s when Constantinople fell, that’s when all these things, the massive, massive transformations. (35:34) And so we’re going to see that here.

(35:37) There’s just no doubt about it. (35:39) And it’s kind of a race and there’s different races. (35:43) One is the race that we’re going to now, where people are imagining, well, we need to get to whatever AI supremacy, quantum supremacy, which is used in different contexts.

(35:55) Like we, America, we need to be the leader of everything. (35:58) And I’m a patriotic American, and I certainly hope that that’s the case. (36:02) And I’m deeply distrustful of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.

(36:08) And I think that it would be a terrible world where China had dominance in AI and dominance in weaponized autonomous killing machines and all these kinds of things, because I just don’t think that would be as good of a world as this. (36:27) So we’re in this race and it’s an all-of-society race. (36:32) But if we don’t figure out how to balance this race with our need to come together to solve collective problems, there’ll be no winning.

(36:44) That’s the basic issue. (36:47) And so while we have this race that may be just inevitable, we need to balance it with a process of trying to develop some kinds of safeguards that protect us from the worst abuses. (37:02) And we’re moving in a very dangerous direction right now.

(37:08) And there are all these things. (37:09) We’ve just gotten so used to the world as it’s been since 1945 that we started to feel like this is just some inevitable state of nature. (37:18) But it’s really not.

(37:19) I mean, I think that if that structure, which America has guaranteed for 80 years, if it falls apart, really all bets are off. (37:27) I mean, humans in all of our history come together and then we break apart. (37:30) And we come together and break apart.

(37:32) I lived in Cambodia. (37:33) I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. (37:35) I’ve seen what happens when societies that were once together just come apart.

(37:42) And that’s the challenge for us, is how do we optima for everything across the board? (37:46) How do we optimize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff?

Melissa

(37:50) Yeah. (37:50) And when you think of that, like building a future ready culture, a future ready for everyday citizens, I think the world’s moving so fast. (38:02) Change is happening on every day, all the time.

(38:07) And in my experience, people are not so great with constant change. (38:12) There’s a lot of stress with constant change, constant innovation. (38:18) So talk to me a little bit about how can people, cultures, organizations, companies build a mindset in a time when the world is changing exponentially?

Jamie

(38:33) Sure. (38:33) So let’s start with people. (38:35) I mean, I think that right now there’s so much fear of these technologies and it’s not entirely unfounded.

(38:42) And anxieties are actually a healthy part of the human psyche. (38:45) It’s what gets us to say, maybe this bad thing could happen. (38:48) I’m going to do my bit to prevent that from happening.

(38:51) But there’s such an exciting part of this story, like I’ve talked about before for healthcare, for all kinds of things that we really value. (39:00) So one is just getting out of the doom loop, because people are so afraid. (39:06) And yet, if you take a step back, they’re like, wow, how wonderful, all these amazing capabilities that we have and will have.

(39:16) And then two is, but to not feel like we’re just passive victims, and that we’re part of the story, it requires just a lot of learning. (39:24) It requires a lot of learning. (39:26) And nobody, as I was saying before, nobody can do that together.

(39:29) It requires community. (39:31) Everybody has communities. (39:32) So with the new version of superconvergence, there’s a list of questions for book clubs.

(39:39) So it’s like just coming together in your faith groups or community groups to talk about these issues, educate one another. (39:47) And then to think about what are the standards that we want for our families and children, whether it’s relationships to the digital world. (39:55) I feel like there are all kinds of incentives that are kind of pushing, even if you were born with a lot of focus, you’re kind of being forced to be ADHD by all of this stimulus that’s coming at us.

(40:07) It’s like you should take the power back and say, well, what do we want? (40:11) What’s the human relationship that we want? (40:14) What’s the relationship with technology that we want?

(40:17) Because it’s not like Instagram is strategizing about your teenage children’s health. (40:25) Like they’re not saying, oh, we’re going to create Instagram. (40:27) And our goal is to help your teenage daughter become the best person they can be.

(40:33) The goal of Instagram is to turn your teenage son or daughter into an addict who wants to spend more and more time on Instagram. (40:43) So you kind of have to feel that we are drivers of this process and then let that filter up from the individual, certainly on corporations, as I was saying before, really being thoughtful and strategic. (40:58) I mean, these technologies are not panaceas.

(41:00) They don’t change human nature. (41:02) They don’t change our psyche. (41:04) But they do change some things.

(41:06) And really being methodical and strategic and not betting everything on the magic AI button, but to say, what are kind of discrete points where we can do things better, solve pain points that will let our humans be better humans? (41:22) And then you’re in Texas where there’s a long tradition of smaller government and even of distrust of government. (41:32) I was saying before, I’ve lived in societies where the government isn’t functioning.

(41:36) And you do not want to be in those kinds of places. (41:39) I mean, it’s just very, very hard. (41:41) I mean, we in America, our situation is so good.

(41:46) We can’t see it. (41:48) We can’t recognize how lucky we are to have it and how much of a sacred responsibility that we have both to the past generations who built it and the future generations who might inherit it to have responsible governance systems really at all levels. (42:08) So this is like my big message is humans at the center of everything and mutual responsibility.

Melissa

(42:16) Yeah, I love that. (42:16) That’s such a great way to kind of close up here. (42:19) Any final thought, Shami, you want to leave with our listeners?

(42:23) I know we’ve covered a lot here today before we close up.

Jamie

(42:26) I want people to be excited. (42:28) This is an incredible story. (42:30) It’s a story of human imagination.

(42:32) It’s not that technology is happening to us. (42:34) Technology is us. (42:36) And it’s this wonderful story that really everybody can and should benefit from.

(42:41) And so everyone should just experiment. (42:44) I mean, certainly with AI to go to use Gemini or GPT-5 or whatever and just kind of experiment, have fun. (42:53) Don’t be afraid.

(42:55) But just to also recognize that these systems that we, these human systems that we live in are variable. (43:01) They are constantly changing. (43:03) And so the question is, how do we apply our best values in these changing environments?

(43:08) We don’t need a new set of values. (43:11) We have these wonderful values that we’ve developed for thousands and thousands of years. (43:15) We need to say, how can we apply them optimally in this new environment?

Melissa

(43:20) Yeah, well said. (43:21) I love that. (43:23) So true.

(43:24) So, Jamie, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you and learn more about what you do?

Jamie

(43:31) Thank you for asking. (43:32) So easiest way is through my website, jamiemetzl.com, J-A-M-I-E-M-E-T-Z-L.com. (43:40) Super Convergence is out on October 21st.

(43:45) I hope everybody will pick it up. (43:47) Make sure you get, it’s got the blue cover. (43:49) The white cover is the hardback.

(43:51) The blue cover is the paperback. (43:54) You can follow me on Twitter, which is, which I know some people have another name for it, but I’m sticking with the old school. (44:00) And it’s at Jamie Metzl on Twitter.

(44:04) I certainly love hearing from people.

Melissa

(44:07) Thank you so much for being here, sharing your time and your knowledge with our listeners. (44:13) Get the book, Connect with Jamie. (44:15) That’s the Executive Connect podcast.