Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, Rob Reed, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's good to be back. So we've done, yeah, you probably have a better count of the number of podcasts we've done on this topic than I do.
I mean, we did one that was a very deep dive that was, you know, more highly produced, where it was almost like your audio book framed by our podcast conversation. But We share this concern around biosecurity and pandemic risk and bioterrorism, and you have an update for us on the fate of the Deep Vision project. Yes. But before we jump into that, just remind people how you got to this topic.
How did you come to be focused on this, and how much of your band with has it taken? Yeah, yeah. Well, my full-time job is in venture capital. I run a fund that invests in companies that we think will make the world more resilient in some important way. Fabulous job. I do it with a gentleman that you know very well, Chris Anderson of TED fame. So that's my full-time job.
In this case, I have been, I guess my public service, you know, side of life, voluntary side of life has been focused entirely on bio-risk for about a decade. It started when I was writing a sci-fi novel called After On, and that had a subplot in it about a nihilistic kind of cult that thought it would please God tremendously if they killed every person on Earth. It wasn't the center of the book.
And so they used synthetic biology, which I'll abbreviate to SynBio just to save us some syllables, to come up with an omnicidal pathogen that could hopefully do that. And that started me worrying about this particular category of risk. And you gave a TED Talk. Yeah, that was a couple dominoes later. So I started worrying about this category of risk.
I interviewed scientists in order to write this book accurately. And then I started a podcast called After On, same title. And I explored the topic there, including an interview with a brilliant person that I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, Naval Ravikant. And we talked about that. And that was about 10 days before the TED conference.
So the TED folks called me up, said, would you like to do a talk about this? Usually people have several months. More than 10 days. Yeah, more than 10. But it went well. And you first entered the picture at that point because you were at TED. You came up to me and said, hey, we should do something ambitious on this important topic as podcasters, maybe team up.
And then along comes COVID a few months later, and I really rabbit-holed into the topics of syn-bio risk and pandemic resilience. And you and I did end up doing that magnificently sprawling, almost four-hour episode on the subject. That traveled far and wide, and eventually somebody from the White House reached out to me, White House staff.
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Chapter 2: How did Rob Reid become focused on biosecurity?
So I actually called you at that point, and I told you what was going on. And I told you that I thought the best way to blow the whistle on this would be to have a really extensive interview with a professor at MIT named Kevin Esvelt, who I would characterize, I think, as an evolutionary engineer. And he's very, very deep in this program.
And you made the suggestion, which was an excellent one, that I should interview Kevin because I was pretty deep in the subject already and that we could both, I'd create an episode of my podcast, which we could both then broadcast to our audiences with yours being much, much larger in hopes that somebody would Would hear it and, you know, help, help to do something.
So, um, we did just that you and I, and, um, it was, it was actually, uh, you might remember that. I'm sure you remember this. You and I had an audience of one in mind, which gave us optimism that this might work, which was Samantha power. She was running USAID at the time. And I think her husband had just been on your podcast and I had a couple people in common with her.
But unhappy accident of history, I think just days before we posted this episode, the Ukraine invasion happened and USAID was very busy there. So it was actually a couple of months of crickets, but then things started to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's remind people, first of all, that Deep Dive is still in our podcast feeds to be listened to should anyone want to hear it.
Because we go into just the larger set of concerns around, you know, SynBio and pandemic risk. But let's focus on Deep Vision. What was Deep Vision and what happened to it? It was three really bad ideas, arguably each one worse than the one that came before. So Deep Vision was going to do three things. The first one is called virus hunting.
And virus hunting basically in this context was going to involve going out to a dozen developing countries where they're going to be doing business. I think they wanted five in Africa, five in Asia, two in Latin America.
and going to very remote places like bushmeat markets, isolated bat caves was going to be a very, very big one, and tried to discover roughly 10,000 undiscovered viruses of unknown deadliness and extract them from these remote places and bring them into very leaky, imperfect vessels in dense population centers called laboratories. And I categorize laboratories that way because
Every category of laboratory, all the way up to the highest biosecurity level, demonstrably leaks. There's plenty of history that shows that. And the alarming thing is we do not know the rate at which they leak because there is no uniform reporting system, et cetera.
We just know that they do, and they, in some cases, leak prodigiously, which means that an isolated bat cave that nobody is otherwise ever going to enter is a much safer place for a pandemic-grade pathogen. than a lab that's staffed by imperfect humans. This has been a longstanding practice, though.
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Chapter 3: What is the DEEP VZN program and why is it controversial?
And The interesting thing, when you think about the risk landscape, is to contemplate how it's changed from 2021 when Deep Vision was authorized to today. So you go back to that period of time, and it's remarkable how few entities were in a position to have an idea, frankly, this bad, right? Mm-hmm.
In its worst case, and we can talk about why, and it's probably valuable to you in a moment, but it is, you know, deep vision had a clear potential to cause death at the scale of COVID. Not definitely, but it certainly had that potential and possibly far, far worse. Probably worse. Yeah. Probably far. In the scheme of things, COVID was remarkably benign as a, an infectious agent. Yeah.
I mean, it was, it was super infectious, but it was not super lethal. Right. Very far from super lethal. Yeah. So it could have, I mean, again, I really do think of it as a dress rehearsal for something awful. And we appear to have failed this dress rehearsal in a variety of ways, but. Oh, we botched it spectacularly. There's no question about it. But think about COVID.
Like, deep vision, and we may or may not get into the numbers, but a conservative estimate is that they may easily have found, you know, six, seven, eight pandemic-grade viruses. Now imagine a really malevolent actor like an Aum Shinrikyu deciding that, like, it is, you know, we're going to really delight the heavens if we take down civilization. COVID itself...
emitted from one single point, and it approached our shores at a speed of four and a half miles per hour. That's the back of the envelope. Took two months to get here. Two months to brace ourselves for that, and obviously it knocked us to our knees and the rest of the world. Imagine seven pathogens emerging all at once. from 20 different airports, a complete worst-case scenario.
I don't know how we survive that. The combined fatality rate could certainly be way beyond COVID. Doctors would have no idea which of these pandemics they're diagnosing. People could be afflicted with more than one at the same time.
That's the situation where you don't worry about civilization toppling necessarily because everybody gets infected, but you do if you get to a point where no thinking frontline worker is going to go out the door and risk killing themselves and their whole family for gig worker wages.
And when that happens, the supply of food, law enforcement, eventually electricity, and everything else shuts down. And so that is a profoundly, profoundly risky scenario. So anyway, back to Deep Vision 2021. It's amazing how few people could have thought of an idea with this level of potential destruction. Definitely not terrorists.
Osama bin Laden himself never had a wisp of that potential destruction. not the world's worst criminal gangs or cartels. They only have conventional weapons. I mean, not even a rogue state as gigantic and chaotic as Iran could have dreamt of killing at the scale of COVID. And so you're basically left with nuclear weapons, nine people in that category, I guess, and biology.
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