What Your BIPs, Gattaca, and DNA Tells Us About You

The Cost of Success and What Spurs It: Loneliness, Impatience and Brilliance

One of the interesting things I’ve learned recently from the genetics work I’ve done is that a lot of who we are is a function of your genes Behavior, Intelligence, Personality (your “BIPs”). 

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but you are essentially a genetic algorithm which combines these bell curve distributions of traits into a rough approximation of who you are.

How the puzzle works together remains to be discovered but these traits can be and increasingly are scored in a thing called a polygenic score. (Read Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who Are We by Robert Plomin for more details.)

With enough sequencing, huge datasets and machine learning you can identify the genetic markets associated with particular traits and abilities. Lots and lots and lots of people are getting partially sequenced.

And yes, that includes China.

So what’s that all mean? Well it’ll soon be possible to affordably sequence you and tell you all these ways you are great or fucked up and in between, Gattaca-style. I suspect we will eventually even predict when people will die using Steve Horvath’s clocks. This world is about to get a lot weirder and a lot more wild and I, being weird and wild, am so here for that. I agree with Bruno Maçães new book, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, that America is becoming a sort of theme park where many possibilities exist for meaning. I hope it’s a freak show where freak flags are raised high. 

Here is one such possibility.

If you don’t believe that Gattaca is coming true, remember that this film is from 1997. 1997! That’s right. A film in 1997 predicted that we would have a private corporation sending people to space and driving around in electric cars. Elon Musk’s Tesla was founded in 2003 while SpaceX was founded in 2002. 23AndMe.com was founded in 2006. 

Fellow Paypal mafiosi David Sacks raved about how prophetic the film was in a 2009 interview with Jason Calacanis, episode number five.

Sacks has made a lot of money in enterprise software – he sold Yammer to Microsoft – and produced Thank You For Smoking (2005) with Musk and Peter Thiel. Sacks launched Geni.com which was eventually sold to MyHeritage.com.

I suspect Sacks wishes he was doing more of these sorts of investments and less in the electric scooter business. This isn’t meant as a dig at Sacks. I want him to do cooler stuff. We haven’t met but have mutual friends. I do know Jason Calacanis and was once interviewed by him. He has taken to pushing the envelope lately and I love to see that. His interview with Hoan Ton-That, co-founder of Clearview, was amazing. 

Sacks and Calacanis are on to something in their discussion of Gattaca. The line between fantasy and reality, between science fiction and science fact is a lot more blurry than we’d like to believe.  There is a sort of reality-fiction dialectic. Palmer Luckey intimidated as much to Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe when he said that science fiction and science fact correspond.  

Watch Ridley Scott’s Prophets of Science Fiction, 2011-2012 documentary television series to see just how right so many of these science fiction writer got it. In the end the brilliant among us can’t see yellow but they can see ultraviolet. The trick isn’t merely to predict the future but to try to make the best of it. Books and films should be judged on their predictive power in much the same way that betters should be. “Were you right?” ought to be the only question that matters. Why isn’t it? 

Gattaca is supposed to be a dystopia but even as a child I wasn’t so sure. We hear music which can only be played with polydactyl pianists. Twelve finger classical concertos? Yes, please. We get routine, manned rocket launches to the furthest corners of the solar system. The rocketry is so routine that only our hero is the one who looks up. He still sees the splendor. There’s no racism and no sexism. There’s no consumer Internet distracting us from our potential by feeding us dopamine hits and infotainment. There’s really no advertising of any real sort.  Hard to imagine Google or Facebook messing about. No, everyone is doing as they should be. Everybody is hot and smart and united in a common purpose. They are all so well dressed. The future seems a-okay to me. 

To be sure there’s an underclass of pejoratively de-gene-rates or favorably God children – that is children conceived naturally – but this underclass seems in some sense fairer than the one we currently have in America. After all Gattaca’s underclass is based on innate ability. Those who complain about this film have seemingly no problem with modern affirmative action (really anti-white, anti-Asian discrimination) in the guise of diversity. Nor do they seem to fret about how we already discriminate against people in car insurance simply because they carry a certain chromosome – that is, they are male.

We wind up rooting for Vincent Freeman and that his genetically selected brother, Anton, is the Inspector Javert to his Jean Val Jean which makes the film all the more memorable. Having cheated chance once you can see how Vincent becomes emboldened. He crosses the freeway even though he cannot see. He takes a leap of faith not in God but in himself and because he’s gotten this far he might as well take one step further toward his goal. 

At the climax of the film he says to his supposedly genetically superior brother who is drowning yet again. “This is how I did it, Anton… I never saved up for the swim back.” There’s something altogether manly about Vincent—whose name comes from the Latin to conquer—cheating chance. Fortune favors the bold and the free man named Freeman. “There’s no gene for the human spirit,” the tag line of the film avers. Maybe not. But there’s probably a constellation of them for stick to it iveness, drive, etc. 

The hero of the film is Eugene Morrow, who sacrifices everything to see his friend, really his brother,  succeed. Without Morrow shedding his genetic detritus Vincent is unable to pass as a genetically superior being. Morrow kills himself—he can’t handle the burdens of being a perfect human being—and literally incinerates himself so that Vincent may continue to pass as Morrow after he returns from his manned mission to Titan. There is the specter here of a sort of reverse eugenics. How to think of his suicide? Well, greater love hath no man than he who laid down his life for his friends.

The only cop out in the film is that the star succeeds in his goal of going into space and duping everyone. He should have died of a heart attack – he has a 99 percent chance of having one by his early thirties – and the mission should have been aborted, unless the models were all wrong. 

I saw the film when it came out on VHS when I was ten. I wasn’t allowed to have a TV when I was a kid though my father made an exception for science fiction movies which he genuinely enjoyed. He studied biology at Harvard before biology got cool – bad timing, pops! – and we would discuss the latest science fiction film or book as if it were all very real. As fate would have it I took my first college course in genetics at Cal Poly Pomona whose library was used in the film as the Gattaca building. Sometimes the Universe winks at you. 

I still remember where I was when my Dad and I listened on the radio and they decoded the human genome. “Son,” he said. “Pay attention. This’ll change everything.” I did pay attention and that has made all the difference.

But I was prepared, too, for this future that was unfolding before me.  I read every single science fiction book I could and ran up record library fees.  Science fiction and working for my parents businesses was my childhood. The few friends I had built rockets and submarines with me. I was not like the other kids. What little money I made I put into science fiction books and comics.  With the exception of the Lord of the Rings—more on that in subsequent writing—I wasn’t much interested in fantasy books. Science fiction always had to have an element of the possible, the plausible, the potentially inventable and investible. This is ultimately how I approach my work. I read so as to save up and weaponize at a later date. I read a lot and I remember nearly everything I have ever read. I worry sometimes that it’s also how I am with people – do I save people up to use on missions? Is this exploitative? – and so I have tendency to be extremely intense and purpose driven. I care. A lot. The rest of the world is not this way.  

For the longest time I asked myself why they are not like me. Instead I should have asked why I am unique. Which brings us back to BIPs. My BIPs are different. 

Prudent governments will allow their people to have self-mastery and self-knowledge even if it comes at a great cost. (Know Thyself!) Imprudent ones will give the hemlock to those who dare to corrupt the youths. Or maybe by canceling them, wish they had drunk it. Most governments will sort of bounce between these two extremes. The smartest government will be those which figure out how to balance the information gleaned from the genes and the state’s core functions for keeping the people healthy while keeping the insurance industry at bay from discriminating against them.   

But until the government steps in and sequences everybody the more adventurous among us will do it themselves for about the same reason as we play with matches or try elicit drugs. The son of God was destined to eat of the tree of forbidden knowledge, after all. So it’s poisonous? Whoops. 

Self-knowledge is an awfully scary thing but it’s necessary part of being free—and part of being free is being honest about who you really are. The man who is slave to his impulses is still a slave, even if he is officially free. Ask any drunk or addict, both of which carry huge genetic components, how free they feel. 

Not all of us are genetically suited to freedom and yes, this does include some of our more successful people. In the spirit of full disclosure I suspect I am one of them. Left to my own devices and vices I would get into a lot of trouble and so I have made my deal with the powers that be, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit but always understood. You help us and we will protect you, they say, and I oblige. I’m proud to help my country when and where I can. That too, I suspect, is genetic given my family commitment. 

To be fair I’m hardly the first. There is a way in which the very smart are in some sense taken advantage of by the powers that be, be they intelligence agencies, the sovereign, etc. This fact of life was well known to Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, one of the first to begin a real study of intelligence, who commented on this sort of nerd-sovereign exchange in his Hereditary Genius (1892):

The qualities most suitable to the ruler of a great nation, are not such as lead to eminence in private life. Devotion to particular studies, obstinate perseverance, geniality and frankness in social relations, are important qualities to make a man rise in the world, but they are unsuitable to a sovereign.  He has to view many interests and opinions with an equal eye; to know how interests to yield his favourite ideas to popular pressure, to be reserved in his friendships and able to stand alone…[A] sovereign does not greatly need the intellectual powers that are essential to the rise of a common man, because the best brains of the country are at his service. (41)

You become the pet nerd. And it isn’t so bad. It would be far better to have a sovereign identify me as one of the bright ones and press me into service. Indeed this is essentially what happens in war time. In peacetime the nerds get pressed into service at tech companies. No, I can’t handle freedom. It’s too much a lot of the times. This, too, is a sort of self knowledge.   Indeed it is a constant struggle to overcome my genetic programming and to appear more normal, especially as I get richer. As I get richer my tendency to give a fuck dissipates and I surround myself with brilliant minds who are interested in solving problems too. I lose the capacity to talk to people. I’m coming up on ten years of self employment and I increasingly lack the vocabulary to talk to normal people because I meet so few of them. 

I do the very best I know how to feign being normal but I am human. I slip up more often than I’d like. The after action reports are a source of humor to my friends but dread to me. It’s very humbling to be so bad at something that comes easily to others. 

In that pursuit of self knowledge I have confronted the questions that a lot of nerds ask themselves. Why am I so different?Why do I have to suffer so much? 

So to whit: I have studied genetics not only because my father told me to pay attention but because I wanted to know what ails me. 

My mother had cancer when I was a kid. One of my better friends in Middle School died of cancer at 16. So did my only real friend in high school, SpaceX engineer, Ryan Sebastian, dead of cancer at 29. 

I’ve done the traditional thing that weird people do: religion, shrinks, self help books, etc., etc. but I keep returning to genetics no matter how hard I try. 

To defeat any enemy you need superior information. My enemy is the demons lurking within my genetic code. We are all our worst enemies.

Fortunately the cost of getting that information gets cheaper and cheaper. There are very few things that are getting cheaper than Moore’s law. When they do pay attention and invest.

The information gets better and better and better and it does so quickly and cheaply. It’s among the most interesting things we aren’t allowed to talk about but like all interesting things it hits us first as a toy or a Christmas gift. Did you first get a 23AndMe kit for Christmas or a birthday?  It’s surely not a coincidence that Margo Georgiadis, CEO of Ancestry, comes from Mattel, a toy company.  Ancestry was recently valued at $4.7B when Blackstone purchased it. Not bad for a mere toy.

Like all drug addicts I want an even more pure form of the drug. Ancestry will only tell you so much about yourself. They use a SNP array and so they get correspondingly less information than if they did a full genomic sequence.

Nebula Genomics gives you 10,000 times the information of 23AndMe for the low cost of between $300-$600. You can even use your health savings account to partially pay for it.

Peering into my genetics I learned that I have the genes for loneliness. (SNP ID: rs613872; SNP ID: rs4465966; SNP ID: rs1966836). I suspect like a lot of builders of companies are lonely too. Are we trying to build the family we never had? 

I also have a tendency to instant gratification. (SNP ID: rs6528024) I want to build things now! Yes, patience is a virtue but waiting sucks. I get bored easily. 

Now these models aren’t perfect (though they are getting better!) Nothing invented by humans ever is but they do provide a good frame on how to think about things. 

I treat them as a little more than highly informed horoscopes which are getting better over time. (Don’t laugh, the horoscope market is supposedly over a few billion.)

But if I am honest with myself I know that little insight and all the others are true. I’m a needy, lonely nerd who throws himself in his work to avoid the complexities and humiliations of everyday life with everyday, normal people. I bought a two seat convertible in large measure to avoid others and because life should be a little fun. 

I love these normal people and think often of them and how I can make their lives better by investing in and inventing the future but I am not one of them. They know this within moments of meeting me. Like Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men I also know when I meet a fellow mutant within moments of meeting them. I seek them out to build companies and maybe even to save the world.  

I excuse my workholism because I rightly know that the things I’m interested in are dangerous—rockets explode, software projects take on a life of their own—and that I don’t want to be persecuted like so many nerds and redheads before me. It wasn’t so long ago that they lit people like me on fire. 

They say honesty is the best policy but I think it’s a way to smoke out heretics. Nobody really wants things to be honest. So I avoid sharing what I think. I self-censor. I keep the circle tight and I regret almost immediately when I expand it. No, it isn’t paranoid if they are trying to get you and there are a number of professionally offended organizations that hunt nerds like me for sport. The prudent thing to do is to shut the fuck up about the interesting things you are working on and focus on getting others around you rich so that they won’t string you up or cut off your head. 

That’s how it works in the professional context. In the personal context I accept that I live alone. 

The business world is wonderfully measurable – there are key performance indicators! – and that is why it is most interesting. Measurement, rankings, detail. There is no rating system for dating ror for how you’re doing with a woman. You just sort of have to wing it and hope for the best. We may, if I am feeling particularly self destructive, return to this in a discussion about machine learning and arranged marriages. The engineer in me wonders if perhaps one could build a system for rating women – a hot or not, say. I jest but only because it looks like others have been there before me. Even Mark Zuckerberg was afraid of offending the daughters and sisters of the Harvard set.