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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

No housekeeping today. I'm going to jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with Matt McCarty.

Matt is an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at Cornell,

where he also serves on the ethics committee. His writing has appeared in the New England Journal

of Medicine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, and other journals. He's the author of several books,

and his latest is Superbugs, The Race to Stop and Epidemic. That's what we talk about today.

The problem that many of the drugs we use to treat infectious disease are now failing,

and we'll always be failing. We're in a perpetual arms race against evolution,

and the emergence of new bugs that our immune systems have never seen. This, quite amazingly,

is a problem that is receiving very little attention, and yet it's on the short list of things

that could utterly transform the character of human life. Very much for the worse.

It's also on the short list of problems for which the market appears to offer no solution,

as we will discuss. So now with a further delay, I bring you Matt McCarty.

I am here with Matt McCarty. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Oh, thanks for having me.

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