In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I'm joined by Rob Reed, co-host of the podcast "Deep Vision" and co-founder of the venture capital fund, COVID, to talk about his new book, "Blow the Whistle on it," and the future of the Deep Vision project.
00:00:00.000Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing
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00:00:30.400here, please consider becoming one. Okay, Rob Reed, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
00:00:39.680It's good to be back. So we've done, yeah, you probably have a better count of the number of
00:00:44.280podcasts we've done on this topic than I do. I mean, we did one that was a very deep dive that
00:00:48.540was, you know, more highly produced where it was almost like your audio book framed by our podcast
00:00:53.540conversation but we share this concern around biosecurity and pandemic risk and bioterrorism
00:01:00.180uh and you have an update for us on um the fate of the deep vision project yeah but before we jump
00:01:07.220into that just remind people how you got to this topic what do you um how did you come to be focused
00:01:12.180on this and and how much of your bandwidth has it taken yeah yeah well my my full-time job is in
00:01:18.180venture capital i run a fund that invests in companies that we think will make the world
00:01:21.940world more resilient in some important way. Fabulous job. I do it with a gentleman that
00:01:26.640you know very well, Chris Anderson of TED fame. So that's my full-time job. In this case, I have
00:01:32.520been, I guess my public service, you know, side of life, voluntary side of life has been focused
00:01:38.200entirely on bio-risk for about a decade. It started when I was writing a sci-fi novel called
00:01:43.180After On, and that had a subplot in it about a nihilistic kind of cult that thought it would
00:01:50.460please god tremendously if they killed every person on earth it wasn't the center of the book
00:01:54.440and so they use synthetic biology which i'll abbreviate to synbio just to make you save us
00:01:58.680some syllables yeah to come up with a an omnicidal pathogen that could hopefully do that and that
00:02:04.540started me worrying about this particular category of risk and you gave a ted talk yeah that came
00:02:10.580that there was a couple dominoes later so i um i started worrying about this category of risk i
00:02:15.180interviewed scientists in order to write this book accurately and then um i started a podcast called
00:02:19.820after on same title. And I explored the topic there, including an interview with a brilliant
00:02:24.860person that I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, Naval Ravikant. And we talked about that. And that
00:02:30.100was about 10 days before the TED conference. So the TED folks called me up, said, would you like
00:02:34.380to do a talk about this? Usually people have several months. More than 10 days. Yeah, more
00:02:38.680than 10, but it went well. And you first entered the picture at that point because you were at TED,
00:02:44.880you came up to me and said, hey, we should do something ambitious on this important topic.
00:02:49.300as podcasters, you know, maybe team up. And then along comes COVID a few months later. And I really
00:02:54.540rabbit holed into the topics of synbio risk and pandemic resilience. And you and I did end up
00:03:00.300doing that magnificently sprawling almost four hour episode on the subject. That traveled far
00:03:06.440and wide. And eventually somebody from the White House reached out to me, White House staff,
00:03:11.400and said, would you like to come in and present to some, you know, pretty senior people in
00:03:16.240biosecurity so i did that i went to washington and it was through that i that i learned about
00:03:20.980this crazy program called deep vision which had just been authorized it was growing up inside of
00:03:26.260usaid of all places it had 125 million dollar five-year budget and in the words of one very
00:03:32.460wise person in the field of biosecurity it had in a worst case the potential to cancel civilization
00:03:39.680is how it was put to me and with the best of intentions with the best we actually literally
00:03:44.780with the best of intentions, but what a terrible thing to do, right? So I learned about it and
00:03:49.380decided that that may not have been an exaggeration and decided to do my best to blow the
00:03:55.040whistle on it. So I actually called you at that point and I told you what was going on.
00:04:00.140And I told you that I thought the best way to blow the whistle on this would be to have a
00:04:03.760really extensive interview with a professor at MIT named Kevin Esfeld, who I would characterize
00:04:09.920I think is an evolutionary engineer, and he's very, very deep in this program. And you made
00:04:15.160the suggestion, which was an excellent one, that I should interview Kevin because I was pretty deep
00:04:19.420in the subject already, and that we could both, I'd create an episode of my podcast, which we
00:04:24.040could both then broadcast to our audiences, with yours being much, much larger in hopes that
00:04:28.680somebody would hear it and help to do something. So we did just that, you and I. And it was actually,
00:04:37.740You might remember, 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.
00:05:07.540Yeah, 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?
00:05:29.520It 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.
00:05:49.460and going to very remote places like bushmeat markets, isolated bat caves was going to be a
00:05:54.920very, very big one, and tried to discover roughly 10,000 undiscovered viruses of unknown deadliness
00:06:02.300and extract them from these remote places and bring them into very leaky, imperfect vessels
00:06:09.180in dense population centers called laboratories. And I categorize laboratories that way because
00:06:15.380every category of laboratory all the way up to the highest biosecurity level demonstrably leaks.
00:06:21.740There's plenty of history that shows that. And the alarming thing is we do not know the rate at
00:06:26.160which they leak because there is no uniform reporting system, et cetera. We just know that
00:06:31.780they do. And they, in some cases leak prodigiously, which means that an isolated bat cave that nobody
00:06:37.300is otherwise ever going to enter is a much better, safer place for a pandemic grade pathogen
00:06:42.240than a lab that's staffed by imperfect humans.
00:06:45.540This has been a longstanding practice, though.
00:06:48.320The virus hunting was a thing, I remember,
00:06:50.700before I ever heard of Deep Vision or this specific project.
00:06:54.160And it seemed a sensible practice on its face.
00:06:58.180I mean, it wasn't obvious what was wrong with it.
00:07:00.720And probably still isn't obvious to many virologists
00:07:04.000who are incentivized to not recognize that it's a problem.
00:07:08.320What is the stated motive for going into caves and sampling from the virome of bats and bringing
00:07:16.000that out into the open? Well, I'll tie it to the next goal of deep vision, which was going to be
00:07:21.380characterization, which is a series of four experiments that would determine which of these
00:07:26.000viruses were most likely to be true weapons of mass destruction, most likely to be pandemic-grade
00:07:31.760viruses. Why would you do those two things? In theory, it seems to make great sense
00:07:38.240that you would want to find out what the pandemic-grade viruses are and where they're living
00:07:41.760so you can start monitoring the interfaces between the human population and where those
00:07:46.600viruses are living. The fact is you can do that kind of monitoring very, very robustly with
00:07:53.220traditional public health methods. And the danger that happens is if you find these viruses,
00:07:58.900you extract them, you bring them into places, into leak-prone laboratories, and then you do
00:08:05.040this characterization work and you find out like, wow, these are profoundly deadly things,
00:08:11.880there's not a lot you can actually do with that. You can't make a vaccine, for instance,
00:08:17.420because the way that we know if vaccines work is we wait for there to be an outbreak where we start
00:08:22.480inoculating people and discovering whether the inoculated people are healthier than the
00:08:28.140un-inoculated people. If you did this hypothetical act and you found a deadly virus and you determined
00:08:35.520that it was really, really dangerous, quite possibly a pandemic virus, you might come up
00:08:39.980with a vaccine candidate, but you're not going to have any knowledge of safety or efficacy.
00:08:45.160And because you're not going to infect a bunch of, you know, healthy volunteers with a potentially
00:08:50.880deadly virus in hopes that the half of them who are not in the control arm and get the vaccine,
00:08:56.620maybe the vaccine works, it doesn't work, you will have the vaccine candidate. And so that's
00:09:02.120not useful knowledge. And it's actually very, very damaging knowledge because if it becomes
00:09:07.760widely known that this pathogen might be a real doozy, it's going to become the most famous
00:09:12.900pathogen on the planet or one of them. And the next thing you know, maybe dozens or even hundreds
00:09:18.340of laboratories are studying it in BSL-2 or BSL-3 labs because it wouldn't be in a BSL-4. And these
00:09:24.580the gradations of biosecurity because it's of unknown deadliness and that tends to push it to
00:09:30.340BSL 2 or 3. And so now you potentially have this dangerous thing that's being studied throughout
00:09:36.540the world. And, you know, for anybody who believes that there's a significant probability that the
00:09:42.160Wuhan virus was a leak, it becomes self-evident that you don't want these things being studied
00:09:47.200broadly. Now, the third thing that deep vision was going to do was to me the most objectively
00:09:52.480crazy one, which was having found these 10,000-ish viruses and established which ones were the most
00:09:58.540likely to be truly deadly, they were going to publish that list and also the genomes of these
00:10:03.760viruses to the entire world. Isn't that helpful? Isn't that helpful? A world, which it's important
00:10:09.840to point out, containing at the time roughly 30,000 people, according to Kevin's best estimate
00:10:15.980at the time who had the tools and the know-how and the wherewithal to then conjure those
00:10:22.520viruses, basically make them from scratch using techniques that are called reverse genetics
00:10:27.160and sometimes it's called viral rescue, but about 30,000 people.
00:10:31.400And so what this meant is you were potentially giving the killing power of a nuclear arsenal
00:10:37.160to 30,000 completely unvetted strangers throughout the world, some of them almost inevitably
00:10:42.500located in islands of stability like pakistan north korea iran etc yeah yeah and uh i mean you
00:10:49.360just look at the the mental health uh probabilities over any population i mean just if only one percent
00:10:55.500of them uh had brains ready to go haywire uh with those skills it's an abiding problem and uh that
00:11:01.940was pre-ai we're going to talk about the contributions that ai is making to this issue
00:11:07.700Okay, so we made a bunch of noise about Deep Vision.
00:11:30.280Also, if memory serves, forced to give a TED Talk on like a 72 hours notice or something.
00:11:36.620Yeah, he's really good at that. I think he had no time at all. Yeah. No, he beat my record and he seemed so smooth in practice. He called me along with a person named Daniel Schmachtenberger. Do you know Daniel? Yeah. Very, very interesting thinker. Thinks a lot about existential risk. And so the two of them called me and we talked, you know, over Zoom. This is still kind of mid COVID about this risk.
00:12:00.840And then Daniel curated a group of, I want to say, seven or eight people, really brilliant folks. And then he and Tristan hosted it quite close to my home in Northern California. And we had what was, you know, kind of like a 12 or 13 hour brainstorm, a really electrifying conversation.
00:12:19.980And people from, you know, who are experts in bio, people who are experts in existential risk.
00:12:26.740Our friend Lavori was there, a few other people.
00:12:30.120And as a result of that, Daniel decided that he was going to really run with the ball.
00:12:34.800So he got out and he runs an organization that thinks very deeply about existential risk.
00:12:40.640He also knows far more people than I'll ever know in Washington.
00:12:44.180And so he started reaching out to folks and he soon reached an organization called Helena.
00:13:17.760There was somebody there at Helena named Prodick Basu, who in particular spent a lot of time in Washington and knew a lot of folks. And so Prodick started sniffing around and he very quickly found out that a couple people were already on the case, specifically Lindsey Graham and Senator James Risch of Idaho.
00:13:35.180They and their staffs had become aware of Deep Vision, and I think they'd sent two letters
00:13:39.440already that were mainly about other topics, but expressed concern about Deep Vision to USAID.
00:13:44.460So there's already this tremendous pressure coming from the Hill.
00:13:48.180And then Prodick started looking out for other people he could bring into sort of a loose
00:15:05.200And the problem was more or less passed.
00:15:07.640And that was great news and took it at face value.
00:15:10.640But then intriguingly and unexpectedly, about a year later, the program was formally killed.
00:15:16.440And we didn't expect that to happen because that would be egg on various faces and so forth.
00:15:21.320But this was also a really, really positive thing because the public demise of this program, you know, sent a pretty strong signal that we don't do this sort of thing anymore, hopefully. And, you know, I think, you know, the pressure continued from Capitol Hill.
00:15:36.180I know that James Risch sent a letter as late as May, very anti-deep vision letter, probably the
00:15:42.380third to USAID. And it was September of 23 that we found that this thing was ultimately and
00:15:50.200completely killed. And with that, I would say an enormous source of plausible risk exited the
00:15:58.340equation. What about other countries doing that same work? Were we the only ones playing this
00:16:03.280game or, or do other people go into bat caves and other, uh, you know, go hunting for vectors of
00:16:09.740awfulness? Yeah. I think that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been doing this for a very long
00:16:14.620time. So WIV very heavily into, you know, collecting and understanding coronaviruses,
00:16:20.980USAID had previously funded a program called predict, which did this at a pretty big scale.
00:16:26.700I think they've, they discovered something like 1200 novel mammalian viruses, but I don't believe
00:16:32.580that there was ever a virus hunting program anywhere near the scale of Deep Visions.
00:16:39.120And the interesting thing when you think about the risk landscape is to contemplate how it's
00:16:44.740changed from 2021 when Deep Vision was authorized to today. So you go back to that period of time
00:16:51.740and it's remarkable how few entities were in a position to have an idea, frankly, this bad,
00:16:59.860right? In its worst case, and we can talk about why, and it's probably valuable to you in a
00:17:04.220moment, but it is, you know, deep vision had a clear potential to cause death at the scale of
00:17:09.420COVID. Not definitely, but it certainly had that potential and possibly far, far worse.
00:17:15.000Probably worse. Yeah. Probably far, far worse.
00:17:17.080In the scheme of things, COVID was remarkably benign as an infectious agent, right? I mean,
00:17:23.340it was super infectious, but it was not super lethal, right?
00:17:27.680So 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.
00:17:40.280But 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.
00:17:51.420Now imagine a really malevolent actor like an Aum Shinri-kyu deciding that we're going to really delight the heavens if we take down civilization.
00:18:02.540COVID itself emitted from one single point, and it approached our shores at a speed of four and a half miles per hour.
00:18:13.720Two months to brace ourselves for that, and obviously it knocked us to our knees and the rest of the world.
00:18:18.820Imagine 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.
00:18:43.380that's the situation where you don't worry about civilization toppling necessarily because
00:18:48.860everybody gets infected but you do if you get to a point where no thinking frontline worker
00:18:54.720is going to go out the door and risk killing themselves and their whole family
00:18:58.520for gig worker wages and and when that happens the supply of food law enforcement eventually
00:19:04.640electricity and everything else shuts down and so that is a profoundly profoundly risky scenario so
00:19:11.420anyway, back to Deep Vision 2021. It's amazing how few people could have thought of an idea
00:19:16.920with this level of potential destruction. Definitely not terrorists. I mean, Osama
00:19:21.940bin Laden himself never had a wisp of that potential destruction. Not the world's worst
00:19:27.260criminal gangs or cartels. They only have conventional weapons. I mean, not even a rogue
00:19:31.580state as gigantic and chaotic as Iran could have dreamt a killing at the scale of COVID. And so
00:19:38.080you're basically left with nuclear weapons, nine people in that category, I guess, and biology.
00:19:44.380And in the world of biology, it's amazing to think of how few entities had the capability of
00:19:51.280marshalling budgets as large as Deep Visions, $125 million, and on top of that, access to
00:19:57.560scientists, expensive labs, and to forge partnerships in a dozen developing countries
00:20:02.820in which they were going to recruit scientists to, you know, find, you know, lots of viruses
00:20:08.360and poke at them. I doubt if even 10 entities in the world could have come up with an idea,
00:20:14.740let alone implemented that in 2021. And the remarkable thing and the very important thing is
00:20:20.820somehow one of them did. And then think about the people who...
00:20:26.200But again, with the best of intentions, I mean, somehow they're missing the fact that this is
00:20:30.040raising risk of accidents or, you know, malicious use that's not intended by the people framing the
00:20:37.840project. It's just, again, you don't know how many other ideas are this bad and not acknowledged to
00:20:43.240be this bad, but it's quite amazing to be blind to the downside of this effort.
00:20:49.220And the best of intentions is the other side of this. Like, I have no idea who was on the USAID
00:20:54.340committee that came up with this idea, but I am quite confident it included no mass murderers,
00:20:59.060terrorists or dictators, without any questions. So somehow a very, very, very tiny population
00:21:04.980of well-placed, highly-placed do-gooders came up with this idea. So that is a very powerful
00:21:11.660and grounding lens through which to look at a coming era, a near-term era, in which untold
00:21:18.240thousands of people will be empowered to have ideas as bad as deep vision and worse.
00:21:23.740And some of them will be terrorist mass workers.
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