Welcome to the AfterOn podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed, bringing you conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists. They're in-depth and unhurried and are structured to bring you up to a top percentile understanding of something important. So, whether you're into startups or ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your time,

engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did.

This is a reposting of an episode I first ran way back in 2022.

It's an interview with MIT's Kevin Esfeldt about an insanely misguided virology research program called Deep Vision. USAID

spun up Deep Vision with a $125 million budget, and it had insane destructive potential. Had it delivered

on its objectives, I find it impossible

to imagine a scenario in which it wouldn't have triggered untold millions of deaths. These awful

consequences may or may not have come quickly, but they definitely would have come over time.

This interview was my attempt to blow the whistle on Deep Vision. I was greatly assisted in this

by Sam Harris, who also posted my episode to his much larger audience. I'm about to appear on

Sam's podcast again to discuss Deep Vision and how it was shut down. And above all, the lessons we

urgently need to learn from this outlandish near miss as we approach a much

more fractured and alarming risk landscape than we faced back then, driven by the collision

of AI and synthetic biology. So I thought it would be useful to repost this interview that

touched everything off. As a context for my own audience, who may want to check out my

appearance on Sam's podcast, and maybe for some of Sam's listeners who might find their way here

to get the full Deep Vision story. Back to the history. After Sam and I first posted this interview

with Kevin, some people reached out to me who, unlike Kevin, me, or Sam, knew how to navigate Washington. They discovered

that some influential people were already sniffing around Deep Vision. Then they quickly assembled a

remarkably diverse alliance, both politically and in terms of professional backgrounds.

Eventually, Deep Vision was defanged before it could do any damage, and quite some time after that, it was fully

and formally terminated. No one person took the kill shot. Instead, lots of pressure, emitting from

...