Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1294 - Jamie Metzl
Uploaded: 2019-05-10T02:00:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1294 - Jamie Metzl' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1294 - Jamie Metzl' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1294 - Jamie Metzl

boom and we're live hello sir how are you i'm great thanks what you do eating
chocolate when
you got here and you told me that you are a cacao shaman and i said those are
strong words they are
what does that mean so i was in berlin last year giving a talk at a tech
conference and somebody
invited me to a sacred cacao ceremony never heard of it i thought wow that
sounds awesome i love
chocolate i went it was so wonderful and at the end they were talking about
these people these great
cacao shamans and i thought what is that i got to be one of those and so i came
back i looked for
certification there wasn't certification i self-declared and then i started
doing cacao
ceremonies in new york and i have hundreds of people who come it's really
wonderful and it's exciting
like if you want to be a doctor you got to go to medical school right yeah you
want to be a comedian
you got to be become a professional you got to put in your time cacao shaman
just show up it's like
putting up a shingle hey i'm a cacao shaman if anybody shows up and they have a
good time then
you're real now how much do you need to know about cacao like the nutritional
properties of it
well cacao is amazing it's great stuff it's incredible and then so definitely cacao
and people
have been using it ceremonially for about 5 000 years um so it's incredible um
chocolate makes
people happy it helps your brain function your circulation there's all these
kinds of incredible
things but in the ceremonies that i do i have two key messages one is you are
the drug i mean we all take
ayahuasca and psilocybin all these kinds of things but i also think that we
have for the things that
we take drugs for this kind of release and happiness and joy we have those
things inside of us and we
just kind of get out of our way we can experience them the second thing is i
believe that there are
no i say this in my ceremonies there's no such thing as sacred cacao or sacred
plants or sacred
mountains or sacred people if we don't treat life with sacredness but if we
recognize that everything is
sacred then we infuse life with sacredness and meaning and that's anyway that's
why i do it's a lot of fun
that's very interesting from a guy who specializes essentially in manipulating
life
well you know we have manipulated life as humans for a very very long time but
it's but it's interesting
yeah you know the idea of things being sacred but your specialty is
manipulating genetics right yeah well
so that is this strange moment that we're in because for about four about 3.8
billion years
our species has evolved by this set of principles we call darwinian evolution
random mutation and
natural selection it's brought us here we used to be single cell organisms and
now look at us and
there's been a lot of magic in that process and there still is but we humans
are deciphering some of
that magic we are like looking under the hood of what it means to be human and
we are increasingly
going to have the ability to manipulate all of life including our own yeah that
is very unnerving to a
lot of people it's it's uncomfortable and scary and yeah it is they like things
the way they are
jamie i'd like to stay the way i am we always think that there's why do we
always think that because
there's a built-in conservative conservatism in our brains um and yet we live
these lives that are
entirely dependent on these radical changes that our ancestors have created i
mean we didn't find this
building or agriculture or medicine uh in nature we built all those things then
everybody gets a new
baseline when you're born and you think well you know i'm i want you know
organic corn i want whatever
but all these things are creation we live in an entirely created world and our
ability to manipulate
and change that world is always growing and i think we need to recognize that
but there's being afraid
is is okay and being excited is okay and we need to find the right balance
between those two emotions
i think for a lot of people they feel like so many changes happened
particularly when you're talking
about genetically modified foods so many things happened before they realized
they had happened so when
they're like hey man i don't want to eat any gmo fruit right well then you
probably shouldn't eat
any fruit yep because everything that you buy has been changed like every
orange that you buy that
that's not what an orange used to be like yeah goodbye an apple apples didn't
used to be like that
tomatoes didn't used to be like that no i know that's we we reset our baseline
just from when we're
kids so if you went back 12 000 years ago to the end of the last ice age and
you said all right find me all
these things that we buy at whole foods most of them didn't exist we we've
created them sure and then
in the 1970s we had the ability to do what's recombinant dna what people call
genetic modification
and people are afraid because it's well that feels unnatural we're applying
science to to food um and
you know that's that's the issue and now we're we're entering the era of
genetically modified humans
and there's that same level of uncomfortableness but what happened the reason
why i've i've written this
this book hacking darwin is that if we approach genetically modified humans in
the same way that
we approach genetically modified foods which is the scientists say hey we've
got this we're going to
manage them responsibly and it just kind of happens to people people are going
to go nuts i mean you
imagine how agitated people are about gmo foods if they don't have a say in how
the genetic the
experience the human experience of genetic modification plays out people are
going to go berserk so we have
this window of time we can start bringing everybody into an inclusive
conversation about where we're
going because where we are going is just radically different from where we've
been yeah i think it's
an awareness issue and i also think it's a perception issue i think that
everything people do is natural
yeah including cities i think cities are natural that's why they're all over
the world yeah i think
they're as natural as beehives and i think as much as we like to think that
technology is not natural it's
clearly something people naturally make of course they make it in every culture
yeah it's they can
it's the history of our species and we we kind of misuse this word natural
natural because what is
natural i mean maybe natural was when we used to live and we were just part of
of nature i always say
it's like people say oh i love nature i love like going out and hiking in the
woods the reason you love
hiking in the woods is that we've murdered all the predators it's like in the
old days in the you stay in
your cave you're not going out and hiking in the woods there's stuff that's
going to kill you out
there i know that was a massive luxury to go wander through the forest with no
weapons yeah like nobody
did that exactly no exactly but feels oh i want nature i want my you know my
natural corn i want my
my natural chihuahua even though you know 25 000 years ago there's no chihuahuas
there's wolves yeah
and look what we've done to them i know well look what we have done to them
made them pugs yeah if you had
natural wheat like or natural corn in particular natural corn used to be a tiny
little thing yeah
it's just a few a few weeds yeah weird gross little yeah grain yep and then now
we made it this big
juicy sweet delicious thing you put butter on which is great but we can't we
can't finish it doesn't
have glyphosate no it's just glyphosate but we we can't we can't fetishize that
there's some kind of
imaginary world where kind of everybody was wearing birkenstocks and eating in
whole foods that imaginary
world sucked for us that's why we left it it's true but there's some sort of a
balance right we
we do appreciate the nature uh aspect of our world and eagles and salmon and
all these wild things and
to be able to see them is very cool yeah but yeah you don't want to get eaten
by those things you don't
want them everywhere you you want to be able to go out and get your newspaper
without being worried about
getting attacked by a jaguar it helps yeah you um when you think about the
future uh at least me
the let me tell you my concern yeah i'm worried that rich people are going to
get a hold of this
technology quick and they're going to have massive unfair advantages in terms
of intellect in terms of
physical athletic ability all i mean we we really can have a grossly imbalanced
world radically quickly
if this happens fast where we don't understand exactly what the consequences of
these actions
are until it's too late and then we try to play catch up with rules and
regulations and laws yeah
that's a very very real danger and that's why i've written this book that's why
i'm out speaking every
day about this this topic because we need to recognize that if we have if we
approach these
revolutionary technologies using the same values that we experience today where
you know we're here and very
comfortable but just down the road there are people who are just who are living
without many opportunities
there are people in parts of the world like central african republic where
there's just a war zone kids
are born malnourished if those are our values today we can expect that when
these future technologies
arrive we'll use those those same values so it's real and right now we have an
opportunity to say all
right these technologies are coming whatever we do these technologies are
coming there's a better
possible future and a worse possible future and how can we infuse our best
values into the process to
optimize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff and certainly what you're
saying is a real risk
think of what happened when european countries had slightly better weapons and
slightly better ships
than everybody else they took over the world and dominated everybody and so
yeah that's it's very real
that's the governments need to play a role in ensuring broad access and in
regulating these uh these
technologies to make sure we don't get to that kind of dystopian scenario that
you've laid out well it's
also in terms of governments regulating things like why are they qualified who
are they who are the
governments they're just people right there are people that are either elected
or that uh you know or
yeah some sort of a monarchy or you're dealing with either kings and queens and
sheiks or you're dealing
with presidents and we've seen in this country that sometimes our presidents
don't know what the
they're talking about right so who are they to disrupt science just to disrupt
this natural flow of
technology well we need decide we need somebody to do it we need some
representation of our collective
will but just to avoid some of the things like you just like you just mentioned
that that's the reason
why humans banded together and made these kind of the made created governments
and the reason for
democracy especially if you have more functioning democracies is that your
government in some ways
reflects the will of the people and the government does things that individuals
can't do and i know
there are a lot of libertarian arguments well everyone should just like if you
want a little
road in front of your house either go build the road or pay some somebody but
there are a lot of
things in even in that model that won't get done there are a lot of kind of big
national even global
concerns that you need some kind of of regulation because what we're talking
about is the future of
life and right life on earth and there have to be some kind of guard rails and
that's why what i'm
arguing for is we really need a bottom up i think we every person and that's
why i'm so thrilled to be
here with you today joe every person needs to really understand these
revolutionary technologies like
genetics like ai and all of our responsibilities and opportunities to say hey
this is really important
here are the values that i think that