#463 — Privatizing the Apocalypse

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Okay, Rob Reed, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's good to be back. So uh 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 you we did one that was a very deep dive that it 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. Uh and you have an update

for us on um the fate of the deep vision project. Uh but before we jump into that, just remind people how you got to this topic. What do you um how did you come to be focused on this and And uh how much of your band w width has it taken? Yeah. Yeah. 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. Fabulous job. I do it with a gentleman you know very well, Chris Anderson.

of Ted fame. Yeah. So that's my full time job. In this case, I I have been I guess my public service, you know, side of life, voluntary side of life has been focused entirely on biorisk 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 use synthetic biology, which I'll abbreviate to Synbio just to make you know save us some syllables. Yeah. To come up with a an omnicidal pathogen. That could hopefully do that. And that Started me worrying about this particular category of red.

And you gave a TED talk uh Yeah, that came that that was a couple dominoes later. So I um I started worrying about this category of risk. I interviewed scientists in order to write this book accurately. And then um I started a podcast called After On, same title. And I explored the the topic there, including in an interview with um brilliant person who I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, uh Naval Ravakant. And we talked about that and that was about ten days before the TED Conf.

So the Ted folks called me up, said, Would you like to do a talk about this? Usually people have several months remote. More than ten days. Yeah, we're more than ten. But it went well. And you first entered the 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, you know, 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 uh the White House reached out to me, White House staff, and said, Would you like to come in and present to some, you know, pretty senior people in biosecurity? So I did that and went to Washington. And it was through that I that I learned about this crazy program called Deep Vision, which had just been authorized.

It was growing up inside of USAID of all places. It had a hundred and twenty five million dollar five year budget. And in the words of one very wise person in the field of biosecurity, it had in a worst case the potential to Cancel civilization is how it was put to me.

And uh with the best of intentions. With the best but we actually literally with the best of intentions, but that what a terrible thing to do, right? So I learned about it and decided that that may not have been an exaggeration and decided to do my best to blow the whistle on it.

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 Esfeld, uh, who's I I would characterize him I 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 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 the 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. Yeah. And I think her husband had just been on your podcast and. I had a couple of 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 that deep dive is still in our podcast feeds to be listened to should anyone want to hear it.'Cause we we go into just the larger set of concerns around, you know, uh Syn bio and and um pandemic risk.

But um let's focus on Deep Vision. What what was Deep Vision and uh what happened to it? It was three really bad ideas, arguably each one worse than the one that came before us. So Deep Vision was gonna do three Three things. The first one is called virus hunting.

And virus hunting basically in in this context was gonna involve going out to a dozen developing countries where they're gonna 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 re 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 better safer place. for a pandemic grade pathogen. than a lab that's staffed by imperfect humans. So this has been a l a longstanding practice though. The the virus hunting was a thing I remember uh before I ever heard of Deep Vision or this specific project. And it seemed

a sensible practice on its face. I mean it wasn't obvious what was wrong with it. And probably still isn't obvious to many virologists who's uh who are incentivized to not recognize that it's a a problem. What is the stated motive for uh going into caves and sampling from the uh the virome of uh bats and bringing that

out into the open. Well well I'll I'll tie it to the next goal of deep vision, which is w was going to be characterization, which is a series of four experiments that would determine which of these viruses were most likely to be true weapons of mass destruction, you know, most likely to be pandemic grade viruses. Why would you do those two things?

You know, in theory, you know, it it seems to make great sense that you would wanna find out what the pandemic rate viruses are and where they're living. So you can start monitoring the interfaces between the human population and where those viruses are living. The fact is you can do that kind of monitoring monitoring very, very robustly with traditional public health methods.

And the danger that happens is if you find these viruses, you extract them, you bring them into places, into lab, you know, leak-prone laboratories, and then you do this characterization work. And you find out like, wow, these are profoundly deadly things. There's not a lot you can actually do with that. You can't make a vaccine, for instance.

Because the way that we know if vaccines work is we wait for there to be an outbreak where we start inoculating people and discovering whether the inoculated people are healthier than the uninoculated people. If you did this This hypothetical acting.

and you found a deadly virus and you determined that it was really, really dangerous, quite possibly a pandemic virus, you might come up with a vaccine candidate, but you're not going to have any know knowledge of safety or efficacy. Right. And y because you're not going to infect a bunch of, you know, healthy volunteers with a potentially deadly virus.

in hopes that the half of them who get are not in the control arm and get the vaccine, maybe the vaccine works, it doesn't work. You you you will have the vaccine candidate. Right. And and so that's not useful knowledge. And it's actually very, very damaging knowledge because if it becomes widely known that this pathogen might be a real doozy,

It's going to become the most famous pathogen on the planet or one of them. And the next thing you know, maybe dozens or even hundreds of laboratories are studying it in BSL two or BSL three labs. Because it wouldn't be in a BSL four. And these are the gradations of of biosecurity, because it's of unknown deadliness. And that tends to push it to BSL two or three. And so now you potentially have this dangerous thing that's being studied throughout the world.

And, you know, for anybody who believes that there's a significant probability that the Wuhan virus was a leak, it becomes self-evident that you don't want these things being studied broadly. Now, the third thing that Deep Vision was going to do was to me the most objectively crazy one, which was having found these 10,000-ish viruses,

and established which ones were the most likely to be truly deadly, they were going to publish that list and also the genomes of these viruses to the entire world. Isn't that helpful? Yeah. Isn't that helpful? A a world which it's important to point out. containing at the time roughly 30,000 people, according to Kevin's best estimate at the time, who had the tools and the know-how and the wherewithal to then conjure those viruses, basically make them from scratch.

using techniques that are called reverse genetics and sometimes it's called viral rescue. but about thirty thousand people. And then so what this meant is you were potentially giving the killing power of a nuclear arsenal to thirty thousand completely unvetted strangers throughout the world. Some of them almost inevitably located in islands of stability like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Yeah. Yeah. And uh I mean you just look at the the mental health uh probabilities uh over any population. I mean just if only one percent of them uh had brains ready to go haywire uh with those skills. It's an abiding problem and uh That was pre AI. We're gonna talk about the contributions that AI are m is making to this issue. Okay, so we we made a bunch of noise about deep vision, yeah. So then what happened? What happened was the following. So you and I were hoping to influence

Samantha, we didn't succeed in that. Ukraine invasion, great deal of distraction, couple months of cricket. And then a friend of mine reached out reached out to me, Tristan Harris, who's also been a ghost guest on your show. Yeah. Along with um also full if memories are Forced to give a TED talk on like a s seventy two hours notice or something. Yeah, he's really good at that. I think my record and he seemed so smooth in practice.

He called me along with a person named uh Daniel Schmachtenberger. Do you know Daniel? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very, very interesting thinker. Thinks a lot about existential risk. And so the two of them called me and uh we talked, you know, over Zoom. This is still kind of mid-po-COVID, about this risk. And 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 twelve or thirteen hour brainstorm, uh really electrifying conversation. people from, you know, who are experts in bio, people who are exp experts in in existential risk. Our friend Liv Voy was there, um, a few other people. And as a result of that, Daniel decided that he was gonna really run with the ball.

So he got out and he runs an organization that thinks very deeply about existential risk. He also knows far more people than I'll ever know in Washington. And so he started reaching out to folks and he soon reached an organization called Helena. Um brilliant, brilliant, interesting group of people. They're basically a problem-solving organization. It wouldn't be accurate to call them a think tank.

And what they'll do is they'll they'll they'll identify global problems, they'll spin up groups of kind of cross-disciplinary experts to try to solve them. Sometimes they'll start, you know, a not for profit to tackle the problem. But they also have an investment arm that invests in world positive companies, which is what my day job. So we have a lot in common. There was somebody there at Hell and N named Product Basu. who in particular spent a lot of time in Washington, knew a lot of folks.

And so product started sniffing around and he very quickly found out that a couple of people were already on the case, specifically Lindsey Graham and uh Senator James Rish of Idaho. They and their staffs had become aware of Deep Vision. And I think they'd sent two letters already that were mainly about other topics, but expressed concern about Deep Vision to USAID.

So there's already this tremendous pressure coming from the hill. And then Product started looking out for, you know, other people he could bring into sort of a loose alliance. Um, he knows people in both parties, people inside the administration, outside of the administration, inside of the administration naturally you're gonna tend to be Democrats.

He reached out to people inside of USAID, people in security. One of the people that he reached out to was very helpful was Chelsea Clinton, um, who was, you know, really, really helpful in reaching out to a lot of folks. She has a master's in public health. a big network there, but it became a a very, I'd say, extremely unpartisan group. Also ran Paul.

I think was significantly uh important because he had a hearing the summer of twenty twenty two that Kevin Esfeld testified at, talked about deep vision. And so this is a pretty, you know, unpartisan group. You look at the spectrum of folks. And what happened was just a lot of people started working very quietly, very quietly for the most part, to try to put pressure on this thing. And we learned probably a couple months.

after, you know, Daniel and and Product got heavily involved, that there had effectively, the program had effectively been defanged. That due to the pressure coming in from all these different points, There was not the no work was going to be done. It would never be done. And the problem was more or less passed. And that was great news. And took it at face value.

But then intriguingly and unexpectedly, about a year later, the program was formally killed. And we didn't expect that to happen because that would be egg on various faces and so forth. But 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. I know that James Rish sent a a a letter as late as May Very anti-deep vision letter, probably the third to USAID. Uh and it was September of uh twenty-three. that we found that this thing was was ultimately and completely killed. And with that, I would say an enormous source of plausible risk. Exited the equation.

What about other countries doing that same work? W we the only ones playing this game or or do other people go into Batcaves and other uh you know, go hunting for vectors of awfulness? Yeah. I think that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been doing this for a very long time. So WIV, very heavily into, you know, collecting and understanding coronaviruses. Right. USAID had previously funded a program called Predict.

Which did this at a pretty big scale. I think they've they discovered something like twelve hundred novel mammalian viruses. But I don't believe that th there was ever a virus hunting program anywhere near the scale of of deep visions. And the the the interesting thing when you think about the risk landscape is to contemplate how it's changed. From twenty twenty one 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, you know. frankly, this bad, right? 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, far worse.

An infectious agent. Right. I mean it was it was super infectious, but it was not super lethal. Right. Very far from super lethal. Yeah. So I mean i i again I I really do think of it as a dress rehearsal for something awful and we

appear to have failed this dress rehearsal in in a variety of ways. But Oh, we botched it spectacularly. There's no question about it. But but and think about COVID. Like deep vision And we may or may not get into the numbers, but a a conservative estimate is that they may easily have found, you know, six, seven, eight pandemic rate viruses.

Now imagine a really malevolent actor like an Om Shenri Q deciding that, like, it is, you know, we're gonna 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. It took two months to get here. Right.

Two months to brace ourselves for that, and obviously it knocked us to our knees in the rest of the world. Imagine seven pathogens emerging all at once. from twenty different airports, you know, a complete worst case scenario. I don't know how we survive that. You know, the combined fatality rate could s certainly be way beyond COVID. Doctors would have no idea which of these pandemics

are they're 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 and 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. I mean Osama bin Laden himself never had a whisk.

of that potential destruction. Not the world's worst criminal gangs or 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. And in the world of biology, it's amazing to think of how few entities.

had the capability of marshalling budgets as large as Deep Visions,$125 million, and on top of that, access to scientists. expensive labs and to forge partnerships in a dozen developing countries in which they were going to recruit scientists who, you know, uh find un you know, lots of viruses and poke at them.

I doubt if even ten entities in the world could have come up with an idea, let alone implemented that, in twenty twenty-one. And the remarkable thing, and the very important thing is Somehow we And then think about the people who But again with the best of intentions. I mean somehow you they're missing the fact that this is raising risk of accidents or or you know malicious use that's um not intended by the people framing the project.

It's just again, you don't know how many other ideas are are this bad and not acknowledged to be this bad, but it's quite amazing to be blind to the downside of this.

effort. And the best of intentions is the other side of this. Like I have no idea who was on the USAID committee that came up with this idea, but I am quite confident it included no mass murderers, terrorists, or dictators. Yeah. Right. W without any question. So Somehow a very, very, very tiny population of well placed, highly placed you good. Came up with this idea. So that is a very powerful and grounding lens through which to look at a coming era, a near-term era, in which under

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