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 we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to

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please consider becoming one. Okay, Rob Reed, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

It's good to be back.

So 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, we did one that was a very deep dive that it 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. And you have an update for us on

the fate of the Deep Vision Project. 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 band with has it taken?

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 you know very well, Chris Anderson of Ted

fame. Yeah. So that's my full-time job. In this case, I have been, I guess my public service,

you know, 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 send bio, just to make, save us some syllables, to come up with an omnisidal pathogen that could hopefully do that. And that started me worrying about this particular category of risk. And you gave a TED Talk. Yeah, that came, 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 I started a podcast called Afteron, same title. And I explored the topic there, including an interview with a brilliant person, 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 the TED folks called me up, said, would you like to do a talk about this? Usually people have several months for there.

More than 10 days. Yeah, more than 10. But it went well. And you first entered the picture at

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 podcasters, maybe team up.

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