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Making Sense with Sam Harris

#463 — Privatizing the Apocalypse

3/11/202622 min

Sam Harris speaks with Rob Reid about biosecurity, pandemic risk, and the alarming fragility of our defenses against biological catastrophe. They discuss the controversial USAID program DEEP VZN, the dangers of gain-of-function research, open science norms that could arm bad actors, the role of AI in accelerating bioweapon development, biosurveillance tools, lone wolf bioterrorists, chaos agents, and other topics.

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Clips

Publishing Doomsday Virus Blueprints
From Bat Caves To Cities
Seven Outbreaks, One Day
Deep Vision’s Catastrophic Potential
Do-Gooders, Unintended Catastrophe
The Quiet Coalition Forms
Defanged, Then Officially Killed

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Sam Harris· Host0:00

    [gentle music] 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 Reid, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

  2. Rob Reid· Guest0:39

    It's good to be back.

  3. Sam Harris· Host0:40

    So, uh, we've done y- you probably have a better count of the number of podcasts we've done on this topic than I do. I mean, you-- we did one that was a very deep dive that was, you know, more highly produced, where it was almost like your audiobook framed by our podcast conversation. But we share this concern around biosecurity and pandemic risk and bioterrorism. Uh, and you have an update for us on, um, the fate of the Deep Vision project.

  4. Rob Reid· Guest1:06

    Yes.

  5. Sam Harris· Host1:06

    Uh, but, but before we jump into that, just remind people how you got to this topic. What are you, um, how did you come to be focused on this and, and, you know, how much of your bandwidth has it taken up?

  6. Rob Reid· Guest1:15

    Yeah, yeah.

  7. Sam Harris· Host1:16

    Yeah.

  8. Rob Reid· Guest1:16

    Well, my, my full-time job is in venture capital. I run a, a fund that invests in companies that we think will make the world more resilient in some important way.

  9. Sam Harris· Host1:23

    Mm-hmm.

  10. Rob Reid· Guest1:24

    Fabulous job. I do it with a gentleman that you know very well, Chris Anderson of TED fame.

  11. Sam Harris· Host1:29

    Yeah.

  12. Rob Reid· Guest1:29

    So that's

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