#463 — Privatizing the Apocalypse

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. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  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.

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  Okay, Rob Reid, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  It's good to be back.

• 0:40Sam Harris?

  So we've done, you probably have a better count of the number of podcasts we've done on this topic than I do. We did one that was a very deep dive, that was 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, and you have an update for us on the fate of the Deep Vision Project.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07Sam Harris?

  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 bandwidth has it taken?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  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 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 CenBio, just to save

• 1:58Speaker 01

  us some syllables, to come up with an omniscidal pathogen that could hopefully do that. And that started me worrying about this particular category of risk.

• 2:08Sam Harris?

  And you gave a TED Talk.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that came, that, there was a couple of dominos 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 an interview with a brilliant person that I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, Naval Ravikant. We talked about that and that was about 10 days before the TED conference. So TED folks called me up, said, would you like to do a talk about this? Usually people have several months.

• 2:37Sam Harris?

  More than 10 days.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, more than 10. 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 rabbitholed into the topics of synbio 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. And said, would you like to come in and present to some, you know, pretty senior people in biosecurity?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  So I did that. I 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 25 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. That's how it was put to me. And.

• 3:42Sam Harris?

  With the best of intentions.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  With the best, 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 Esvelt. Uh, who's I, I would characterize him, I think, as a 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 create an episode of my podcast,

• 4:23Speaker 01

  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 we did just that, you and I. And it was, it was actually, you 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.

• 4:48Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:07Sam Harris?

  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. Because we go into just the larger set of concerns around, you know, Sinbio and pandemic risk. But let's focus on deep vision. What was deep vision and what happened to it?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  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 better, safer place for a pandemic-grade pathogen than a lab that's staffed by imperfect humans. So.

• 6:45Sam Harris?

  This has been a longstanding practice, though. The virus hunting was a thing, I remember, 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 who are incentivized to not recognize that it's a problem. What is the stated motive for going into caves and sampling from the the virome of bats and bringing that out into the open?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tie to the next goal of deep vision, which is 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 seems to make great sense that you would want to find out what the pandemic-grade 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 very, very robustly with traditional public health methods. And the danger that happens is if you find these viruses,

• 7:59Speaker 01

  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 un-inoculated people. If you did this this hypothetical act and you found a deadly virus and you determined that it was really, really dangerous, quite possibly a pandemic virus, you might come up The vaccine candidate, but you're not going to have any knowledge of safety or efficacy.

• 8:45Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And because you're not going to infect a bunch of, you know, healthy volunteers.

• 8:49Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  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 a vaccine candidate.

• 9:00Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:44Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:05Sam Harris?

  Isn't that helpful?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Isn't that helpful? 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 30,000 people and then so what this meant is you were potentially giving. The killing power of a nuclear arsenal to 30,000 completely unvetted strangers throughout the world. Some of them almost inevitably located in islands of stability like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, et cetera.

• 10:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you just. Look at the the mental health probabilities over any population. I mean, just if only 1% of them had brains ready to go haywire with those skills. It's an abiding problem and that was pre-AI. We're going to talk about the contributions that AI is making to this issue. Okay, so we we made a bunch of noise about deep vision. Yeah. So then what happened?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  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 of months of crickets. And then a friend of mine reached out to me, Tristan Harris, who's also been a guest on your show.

• 11:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Along with.

• 11:30Sam Harris?

  Also, if memories are forced to give a TED Talk on like 72 hours notice or something.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. 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 12 or 13 hour brainstorm. Really electrifying conversation.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  People from, you know, who are experts in bio, people who are experts in existential risk. Our friend Le Vori was there, a few other people. And as a result of that, Daniel decided that he was going to 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.

• 12:49Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I know those guys.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 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 my day job. So we have a lot in common. There was somebody there at Helena named Prudik Basu, who in particular spent a lot of time in Washington. He knew a lot of folks. And so Prudik started sniffing around and he very quickly found out that a couple of people were already on the case. Specifically Lindsey Graham and Senator James Risch of Idaho.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  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 Prudik started looking out for, you know, other people he could bring into sort of a loose alliance. He knows people in both parties, people inside the administration, outside of the administration. Inside of the administration, naturally you're going to 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. 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 very, I'd say extremely unpartisan group.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Also Rand Paul, I think was significantly important because he had a hearing the summer of 2022 that Kevin Esvelt 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 of months after, you know, Daniel and Prudik 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, no work was going to be done. It would never be done.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  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 egged 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 Risch sent a, a letter as late as May, very anti-deep-vision letter, probably the third to USAID.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  And it was September of 23 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.

• 15:59Sam Harris?

  What about other countries doing that same work? Were we the only ones playing this game? Or, or do other people go into bat caves and other, you know, go hunting for vectors of awfulness?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  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. USAID had previously funded a program called Predict, which did this at a pretty big scale. I think they've, they discovered something like 1,200 novel mammalian viruses. But I don't believe that there was ever a virus hunting program anywhere near the scale of, of deep visions. And the, 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

• 16:55Speaker 01

  were in a position to have an idea, 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.

• 17:14Sam Harris?

  Probably worse.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably far, far worse.

• 17:17Sam Harris?

  In the scheme of things, COVID was remarkably benign as an infectious agent. Right. I mean, it was, it was super infectious, but it was not super lethal.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Very far from super lethal, yeah.

• 17:27Sam Harris?

  So it could have, um, I mean, again, I really do think of it as a dress rehearsal for something awful. And we appear to fail this dress rehearsal in a variety of ways, but.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Oh, we bashed it spectacularly. There's no question about it. But, but in 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 Amshenri Q 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.

• 18:13Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  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. You know, a complete worst case scenario. I don't know how we survive that. You know, the combined fatality rate could certainly be way beyond COVID. Doctors would have no idea which of these pandemics are, 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

• 18:57Speaker 01

  themselves and their whole family for gig worker wages. 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 riskly 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 a killing at the scale of COVID. And so you're basically left with

• 19:39Speaker 01

  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 to, you know, find, you know, lots of viruses and poke at them. I doubt if even 10 entities in the world could have come up with an idea, let alone implemented that in 2021. And the remarkable thing, and the very important

• 20:20Speaker 01

  thing, is somehow one of them did. And then think about the people who-

• 20:25Sam Harris?

  But again, with the best of intentions. I mean, somehow you, they're missing the fact that this is raising risk of accidents or malicious use that's not intended by the people framing the project. It's just, again, you don't know how many other ideas are this bad and not acknowledged to be this bad, but it's quite amazing to be blind to the downside of this effort.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  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, right? Without any question. So somehow, a very, very, very tiny population of well-placed, highly-placed do-gooders 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 untold thousands of people will be empowered to have ideas as bad as deep vision and worse. And some of them will be terrorist

• 21:27Sam Harris?

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