Welcome to the Making Sense podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

Well, Russia has invaded Ukraine, so we have the first major land war in Europe in

decades.

So that seems like a very big deal.

It certainly deserves its own podcast at some point.

I think I'll wait to see how things evolve for a little while here.

It remains to be seen how bad this war will be and what else might happen as a result.

So, I will reserve comment at this point apart from echoing the nearly universal sentiment

that Putin's actions are despicable, as is the support for him that came dribbling out

of the mouth of our former president.

Anyway, as chance would have it, the topic of today's podcast is also scary.

This is another PSA.

And in some sense, the continuation of the podcast that my friend Rob Reed did for me in April

of last year, that episode was titled, Engineering the Apocalypse.

And it was a four-hour examination of the threat that is posed to all of us by developments

in synthetic biology.

In recent weeks, Rob discovered a specific threat along these lines that seems fairly

imminent.

And he's tapped Kevin S. Felt to walk him through the problem.

Kevin is a Harvard-trained biologist.

And he's credited as the first person to describe how CRISPR gene drives could be used to

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