Rob Wiblin

All right, back to the show.

Another question from the audience was someone who asked, I'm interested in the bull case of biological design tools.

How much progress would we forego in virology and other medical fields if we chose to regulate them?

So Andrew Snyder Beattie and his team at Coefficient Giving, who I interviewed a couple of months back, they look at all of this entire picture and they think that the main way in which bio is defense advantaged or the main defensive technology that you can push forward that makes a massive difference is bio.

personal protective equipment and bio-hardening.

I guess it's like a bit more of a dire picture because this is a world in which in response to something going very wrong, we're going to have to wear face masks and I guess be like sanitizing the environment to an extreme degree that we never have before.

But Andrew Snyder Beatty made the case in this episode.

I guess if people want to go back and listen, it's a very good one.

Episode 224, Andrew Snyder Beatty on the low-tech plan to patch humanity's greatest weakness.

He made the argument that the main weakness, I guess, that someone using bio for offensive purposes has is that these things are very small.

They have to spread between people in order to infect them.

And we can simply insert physical barriers between people that make it extremely difficult for viruses to go from the first person who you might deliberately infect to get to the rest of the world.

What do you think of that take?

Because I guess PPE and biohardening hasn't been something that you've flagged as yet.

Are there any important disagreements, I guess, friendly disagreements, perhaps, between you and perhaps the people at Center for Long-Term Resilience and the team, like Andrew Snyder Beatty and his team at Coefficient Giving on these general questions?

I guess one that stands out, I think you've often said that you think, or you said through this conversation and in writing that you think Bayo is offense dominant.

And I guess ASB has been trying to make the case that actually it's defense dominant because of this physical barrier issue.

Is that a real disagreement or just a difference in focus?

Sounds expensive.

Yeah, I should say, I guess ASB was talking about a four pillar plan.