Rob Wiblin

You're a bit of a relative pessimist on.

I'm sure we'll get some use out of them, but they're not going to ultimately save us in the long term.

That, I guess, pushes us onto the third broader category, which is defensive acceleration, I guess, like other technologies that can advantage defenders, that can advance our ability to safeguard ourselves relative to the ability of bad actors to harm people.

What is your top DEF ACK, as it's called, a technology kind of recommendation that you think it would be really important for us to pursue and get on top of?

Okay, so the first part is doing environmental surveillance to check, are there new troubling DNA sequences showing up in wastewater, showing up in the air?

I guess one thing that advantageous defenders here is that even if you can't say exactly what a sequence, this is a particularly dangerous sequence, you can say, this is new.

This is quite different than what we've seen before.

This isn't something that we would anticipate as just a slight tweak on a previous flu that we're familiar with that you would expect to be evolving and not be particularly problematic.

Anything that jumps out of nowhere is very different and is increasing exponentially over time.

That's a real warning sign.

It is.

That potentially it's either a natural or an engineered pathogen that you should be concerned about.

I guess we've talked about this.

This is a very natural thing to do.

We've talked about this on the show before.

I definitely talked about it with Andrew Snyder Beattie, I guess, a couple of months ago.

People could go back and find that episode.

So the more distinctive thing here is attribution.

I guess you really want us to be able to say if Russia releases a bioweapon or if, I guess, a terrorist group does so, we can tell that it was them and we can go after them.

And I guess them anticipating that will be less likely to do the thing in the first place.