The Jordan Harbinger Show - 244: Rob Reid | Synthetic Biology for Medicine and Murder

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

Rob Reid (@Rob_Reid) is a tech entrepreneur, early-stage tech investor, author of After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley, and host of the After On Podcast. What We Discuss with Rob Reid: The potential for synthetic biology to be leveraged by nihilistic mass murderers to wipe out millions. The potential for synthetic biology to be leveraged by altruistic medical pioneers to save millions. What CRISPR is and how its eventual availability to hobbyists may ensure there's a mad scientist on every block. Why the future of synthetic biology may be exponentially more dangerous to humanity than the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War. What we can start doing now to prepare for this future and minimize its risks while reaping its rewards.  And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/244 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Now, lately, we can't even turn on the news without clenching every sphincter in our body just bracing for the next disaster. Whether it's a mass shooting, terrorism, or some other catastrophe of our own making, it's pretty clear that there's a small percentage of the population that just wants to kill as many people as

possible before they leave this world. Fortunately, most nihilistic killers like these don't have access to nuclear weapons. But what if they had access to something equally dangerous? What if everybody did? Today on the show, we're talking to my friend Rob Reed. He's a science fiction writer and recently spoke at TED about synthetic biology. SynBio is the relatively new field of gene splicing and genetic engineering. We're doing this all the time, but it's expensive and complex. Today, we'll discuss the coming advances in this technology and how they can be used to create a superbug that could wipe out millions of people, and how this technology might soon be available to almost any academic institution or even the garage of one of your neighbors. This episode is terrifying and fascinating

at the same time, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed creating it for you. By the way, my guests for this show, they come from the network. I work pretty hard, but only for a few minutes per day, expanding and maintaining that network. I'm teaching you how to do the same. For personal and professional reasons, of course, go to jordanharbinger.com slash course. It's all free. There's no credit card BS.

There's no drama. I just think the more people that have this information, the better. That's at jordanharbinger.com slash course, and it takes just a few minutes per day. In the meantime, here's Rob Reed. Let's start off on a positive note. A certain percentage of the population are suicidal nihilistic killers. Yeah, that's as good as it's going to get in this conversation. Yeah.

Yes. So tell us about kind of where this went, because I watched your TED talk and I went, okay, this is beyond interesting and scary. And you're a sci-fi writer, so I thought, yeah, how true is all this? And then, you know, I started doing research and it's like, oh, he's not just making this up. Yeah, I footnoted the bejesus out of that thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's up with people? I don't know if we have to prove that there's a percentage of the population that are suicidal.

Well, not this week in particular. I don't know when this is going to go up, but we're obviously sitting here in the immediate wake of two horrible mass murders here in the United States. And so the opening premise, I mean, I guess I started the TED talk with a little bit of a ghost story to get people's attention. And the reality is a certain number of people, a very large number of people about, I think it's something like 800,000 people per year, do kill themselves. A tiny, tiny percentage of those people are in such a tormented. place that they come to the decision that they want to go out killing as many strangers as possible. That's a tiny, tiny subset of people, but we've seen how many mass murders there are in the United States. Obviously, suicide bombing is a phenomenon. Is it 1,000 people a year throughout

the world? Is it 500 people throughout the year? It probably defines on exactly how you count them, but there is a certain number of people who become suicidal mass murderers, a grim fact, something that we're all too familiar with. Now, the thing that is even more threatening than that simple stand-alone fact is when people are in that state of mind, technology becomes the force multiply. Right. And so there was this kind of gowlish statistic that I've become familiar with, which was that there was a series of mass killings in China.

The mass killings happen in schools everywhere. These were school killings in China. And there was a series about 10 of them that happened in sort of a rash over the span of a little bit more than a year, I want to say. And by this very macabre coincidence, the last one was just a few hours before the infamous Newtown killing in Connecticut. Yeah. Now, in China, the deadliest things that you can buy at retail tend to be knives and hammers. You can't buy machine guns at retail in China. It's just not what they make available.

And so these are mass stabbings that you have when there is a mass killing in a Chinese school. And that whole wad of 10-ish mass murders in Chinese schools killed fewer people than the Newtown. Yeah. Than the Newtown of Sandy Hook. Newtown is Sandy Hook. Okay. Just making sure. Because I thought so, but also I want to clarify for the audience.

Yeah. They're referred to by both names. Right. Yeah. So the Sandy Hook murder, primarily first graders, a certain number of teachers, 20-something people. were killed in that horrible mass homicide. And it was a slightly larger number than in these 10 incidents because you have a machine gun instead of. And whatever you think about gun control, I'm not trying to make a point about gun control. People have their opinions on that. It's just a statement of fact that if somebody goes off the rails with an automatic weapon, it's going to be worse than with a knife. Now take it up a notch. In 2015, there was a depressive German pilot who decided that he was going to end his life and that of everybody on his plane. He killed 150 people. Same thing happened with this Malaysian jetliner that went missing a few years ago. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Is that what they found out? Yeah, it was a suicidal pilot. Oh, I did not know that. There was a lot of question about it for the first year or so of the investigation. But the overwhelming consensus now is that. And there have been a couple other instances like this in history. And so the grim reality is when somebody gets to that ultimate point, if they've got a knife, it's terrible.

If they've got a gun, it's way worse. If they've got an airplane, it's much, much worse. And the thing that we need to ask ourselves in this era of rapidly expanding, rapidly improving technology is what lethal weapons are average people going to be able to access 15, 20, 30 years from today that they can't access right now? I didn't realize that Malaysian flight was a suicidal pilot. Yeah, it was a complicated investment. investigation and it'll never be at 100% because they're probably never going to recover the flight recorders. But the odds now seem overwhelmingly likely that it was the captain of the plane who did it. And there was also there was something very peculiar about it that the person, basically when the plane left the air traffic control territory, I think of Malaysia and entered that of another country. I don't remember if it was Thailand or something else. There was this instant of handover. Surprising in this day. age of technology that they still use, you know, transponders that go back to the 50s and 60s. But there is this moment when the transponder hands over from one ATC to another one.

And at exactly that moment, somebody turned it off. So it looked mighty suspicious from the beginning. But they ended up digging into the background of the captain, I believe. And they found out that there were a lot of personal problems. There might have been a divorce. There might have been dead issues. there might have been a bunch of other things. And the consensus is overwhelmingly that that was essentially a suicide.

Jeez, man. That is so horrible. Totally horrible. So he knew when the handoff was going to happen or it was just a coincidence that he turned it off. Oh, he knew exactly when it was going to happen. The odds of that happening by sure happenstances is a few seconds in a flight that lasts many hours. That was the first sign that like something deliberate happened. And then once the transponder was off, there was no tracking this thing.

thing. How do we not know where planes are unless they tell us? That's crazy to me. Isn't it astonishing? Well, they do show up on radar. And then there's like, if you want to get into the deep history, I read a pretty involved article a couple months ago. Of course you did. And it ended up going over Malaysia and shame on Malaysia. Like they didn't even scramble their air force. Yeah. Like this is a, yeah, it does show up on radar at some point. And so that's how they were able to track where this sucker went. But it was out in the middle of the sea, not in radar range. They were relying on the transponders. Then he was. takes his hard left, he goes over Malaysia, they don't scramble the jets. Yeah. It's like a passenger plane that's kind of, you know, and then it went way, way out into the sort of the South Pacific. And there's really no telling where this thing ultimately went down. They really spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find it. Like hundreds of millions of dollars.

This was, you know, says something about our human commitment to find victims of something like this. But they had submarines and ships and all this other stuff and finally gave up. That's interesting that we did do that because you're right. It says something about the human commitment. And when you read articles about things like the Kersk, for example, that Russian submarine, where they didn't even really try to do much at all. Really?

Yeah, I don't know the details, so I could be wrong. And if so, I apologize to whoever was in charge of that investigation. But I remember reading about it. And it was like they sent a Russian ship and they went, yeah, that thing's down there and we cannot get them with the gear that we have. And then there was like a Norwegian ship that said, we can get to them, but we got to get them now because they're probably dying. There's no air. And they said, hell no, we're not letting you go down and get a nuclear one of our nuclear ships.

You're not Russian. And so everyone died. Oh, God. And they left them there for a long time. I don't remember if it was days or weeks before they finally accepted international help from the UK and I think Norway. And they went down and sure enough, there were a bunch of people and in a compartmental. that had just run out of oxygen. And they thought it would be an offense to their national pride to allow somebody else to save the lives of their of their countrymen?

That and I think they were like, this is a nuclear submarine that probably has stuff on it that it shouldn't have on it or is against convention or has technology we don't want to share. But at the end of the day, you're really worried about Norway? Yeah, Norway's not exactly very warlike. No. I don't think they've invaded anybody in several centuries. I think they probably had some yes men at the top of the military. military food chain saying things like, we're going to get them, and it's Russia, and we're going to get them, and then eventually went, so we can't get these guys, can we, and they went, uh, not really.

Yeah, gosh, that's awful. Yeah, it was horrible. That's awful. Yeah. Really, really bad. And, uh, I don't know, there's a whole lot of drama that goes along with that, because there was, I think it was, uh, Vladimir Putin or something went to the town where all the people were from, because it's not, it was for some reason, everybody from who was on the boat,

not everybody, but a lot of them, they were all from, like, one place. Well, it makes sense. There's a base. Yeah. Where the boat is. Correct. It's sure. And so, yeah, it makes total sense.

Yeah. They'd be all. So we went there and all these people are crying and they're like, where's our kids? What are you doing to get him? And he's, you know, kind of talking. And these people later on were so pissed. I think some of them spilled the beans and they were like, this is just bullshit.

You know, he went in here and told us, you know, we're not even going to be able to get him out. And then we find out later from the BBC that there was a boat on top of them the whole time that could have just gone and gotten them. Doorway was ready. These are my kids. This is my husband. My kid. You know, my wife, whatever. And you just didn't want.

want to do it, you know, so a lot of those people were just kind of immediately disillusioned with this. That's astonishing. And I got to say in retrospect, I am, I remain astonished by the effort, obviously the opposite case, that went into recovering this Malaysian jet because obviously at this point, everybody is long dead. For sure. Long dead.

And it was an immense operation, mostly carried out by Australia, because Australia was like the proximate country, but even they had to cover thousands of miles of ocean. And it was a really, really touching commitment. to bring these people back, and I'm sure to find the black box recorders if they could, but just to find the mortal remains of these people. And I don't know, that made me, it was such a, I mean, such a tragic story, but it was, it was cool that we tried so hard to bring them back. But we failed.

We failed ultimately. The point you were originally trying to make was that tech is the ultimate force multiplier in his mass killings. And so we see it with planes, of course. We saw it with 9-11. We saw it with a Malaysian airline. We saw it with a German pilot with planes. We see the difference between knives and hammers versus guns versus really big machine, military weapons that people sometimes get their hands on in planes.

But you're hinting at something else that's even worse, and it's not nukes. Yeah, so something that's in the pipeline right now. Now, okay, we'll talk very briefly about nukes. That was something that we did and still do very appropriately worry about a great deal. The one thing that's good about nukes is that it does take generally. speaking, the resources of a nation state to create them and many, many years of highly visible effort. And as a result, there's not a great deal of proliferation. Nonetheless, when you think about how much money we have spent and how many resources and how much heartache has gone in to prevent

a nuclear annihilation, a very good investment, obviously, but we've literally, as a species, spent trillions of dollars over the decades and probably tens of trillions of dollars, keeping tooish people from blowing up the world. Right. You know, and it's like having all of the diplomacy, the mechanisms of diplomacy, the conventional warfare capabilities, all the spies and the monitoring apparatus and the conventional wars that are actually fought from time to time to let steam out of the system so it doesn't go to a nuclear war, trillions and trillions of dollars. And guess what, Khrushchev and Kennedy didn't blow up the world. That's great. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rob Reed.

We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Rob Reed. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show,

just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player of choice so you don't miss a single thing. Now back to our show with Rob Reed. How come we don't have nukes that are built in garages since those have been around for 80 years?

Because that's a very interesting and important question. If you could have nukes in garages, obviously something would have gone off by now. Sure. If you had 75,000 hobbyists, all with a nuke in their garage. At some point, somebody would have lost their mind, gotten pissed off at their neighbor, just screwed up. Even countries are having trouble building this.

Yes, exactly. Because first of all, getting the raw material, getting the plutonium that can go to, you know, critical mass and actually ignite takes a huge amount of work. And you also need to use materials that are very, very closely tracked by the international infrastructure, the IAEA, the UN, other people as well. So, you know, and then you have to put in sand refuges. and spin them a lot of centrifuges for a lot of tens of thousands of hours, which is what Iran was doing over a period of years to get to the point where they enrich their material enough to get nukes. It just takes an enormous effort that you just can't do in a garage.

Thank God for that. Yeah. Now, synthetic biology is a very different matter. And I'm very conflicted talking about synthetic biology, which I'll define in a moment, because I think that it has unbelievable potential to do so much good for humanity to help our health span and our lifespan and so forth. But kind of quick pocket definition of synthetic biology, that is when we basically start modifying the DNA of an actual living critter or even designing from scratch the DNA of a perfectly artificial critter to create something that will do things that we want it to do.

So it might be something as simple as we want it to make a biological agent that will cure some terrible disease. There's lots and lots of science labs that are working on that. It might be something a little more complicated. This is kind of exciting. There's an effort underway right now to make it possible to use pig organs as transplants into human beings. I thought we already had like people who had pig hearts. Do we not have that? No, there was a big effort in the 90s to do that.

Okay, maybe that's why I heard about this. We spent, I think the National Institutes of Health or some organ in the United States spent over a billion dollars in the 90s because the sizing was perfect. And there's a lot about the metabolism that was going to work well for a lot of organs, kidneys, hearts, other things. And, you know, vegans might not like that, but we're already killing a lot of pigs for bacon anyway. If you're going to be killing a lot of bacon, if you can save tens of thousands of human lives while you're at it. it, that's great. The trouble was they ran up against this, this unbreakable barrier, which is that there are 67 retroviruses that are native to the pig genome that don't harm pigs, but every single one of them turns out to be lethal in human beings. And they couldn't ultimately figure out how to edit the genome. There weren't the tools in the 90s to get rid of those retroviruses. Well, now, using a very recently invented technique called CRISPR, a guy named George Church and a couple of his graduates, students at Harvard actually extricated those 67 retroviruses from the pig genome, and there

are now adolescent pigs in both China and the United States that have organs that, at least in theory, can be very, very safely transferred to humans. And they're going to do the first primate transplants, I believe, this summer. That's crazy. Now, when you think about it. So putting a pig organ in like an ape. In an ape. And then in order to find out that, in fact, it's safe to put it into human. And it's a very big deal. You know, If you'd ever talk to somebody who's had to be on dialysis, it is a life of torture and it's a short life. Yeah. And we have tens of thousands of kidneys that were short in the United States.

I'm sorry, throughout the world, you know, and there's tens of thousands of livers and other organs. The amount of human suffering that this could eliminate is really exciting. So that's a good use of synthetic biology. There's a lot of them. But if you're getting in there and you're tangling with the DNA of something, there's really nothing to stop you from taking us. pathogen, something that's really deadly, but not contagious, or something that's really contagious, but not deadly, and turning it into the most nightmarish pandemic that's ever existed.

Yikes. And if the person, if tomorrow's Columbine kid or tomorrow's suicidal pilot or tomorrow's Las Vegas or Orlando shooter has the capability, when I say tomorrow, I don't literally mean next week, I mean, maybe 10, 15, 20 years from now. And we'll get into how fast the technology's curve is moving. But if in the intermediate future somebody who is at that point of misery and that point of violence and that point of nihilism has access to tools that are way more deadly than a Airbus, they're going to use them. Yeah, of course. It's the idea.

And by the way, CRISPR stands for clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. But all you need to know is it means the ability to snip and edit DNA. Yeah, it is a power tool for editing DNA. We've been editing DNA since the 70s. CRISPR is a natural system that a woman named Jennifer Dowdna and other researchers, including George Church at Harvard, basically harnessed to become, it's a little bit of an exaggeration to say a word processor for DNA. Yeah, it's kind of like cut and paste, right?

That's what I'm envision. It's cut and pasty. It's better at cutting than pasting, but that's inside baseball. It is such a giant step forward in terms of enabling the editing of DNA that it is absolutely game-changing. And it really just barely came onto the scene roughly five years ago. And it's still gathering momentum. And by the way, there will be post-chrisper systems that are even more powerful. There are some in the pipeline already.

How did they do that? Is this like a giant, is it like early computers where it's the whole huge room or it's a whole huge laboratory or is it like a machine? It's a pretty, well, there's not really a CRISPR machine. It's a smart lab tech who knows what they're doing that's leveraging a few different tools and techniques. But, you know, radically powerful editing that the entire field of biology would have found impossible 10 years ago can now be done by a couple smart grad students in a room about the size of this studio. That's crazy. Yeah. It really proliferates in a way that nuclear weapons do not. Right. Right. Because, of course, the question then becomes what if a lot of people have access to the big red button that could kill us all. The number you mentioned before that was really stable during the Cold War, it could go off the charts.

Sure. And two was scary, by the way. Anybody unless we remember the Cold War, and by the way, we're still threatened by nuclear weapons today, two is plenty of scary. Right. You know, and so I'll give an example of what could be done by a good guy or a bad guy. In this case, it was done by good guys. Back in 2011. So this is pre-Krisper. This is when it was really, really hard, but possible to edit genomes.

Two different research teams, one in Holland, one in Wisconsin, looked at the same critter, the same bug, very evil bug called H5N1 flu. H5N1, we don't hear much about it. Thank God because it's barely contagious at all. You really have to try very, very hard to catch it. You have to make out with a pig. I think you might even have to do more than make out of this. It's the family show, which you probably cut it right here. But it is highly uncontageous and it's also not transmissible between people.

So it probably, I've got the statistics. In fact, I said it in my TED talk. I believe it's killed fewer than 50 people in the last five years. So everyone would have to bang the same infected pig. We would really, really have to be a very prolific pig. Lightning strikes kill a lot more people than H5N1 because it's so uncontagious. But here's the trick. If you do catch H5N1, mortality rate 60%, 60,000.

Ebola, 50%. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize. More deadly than Ebola, okay? Dang. So what happens in 2011 is virologists, like I said, a team in Wisconsin, team in Holland, decide they're going to do an experiment and see if they can take this thing and make it more contagious than chickenpox. Yikes. And they succeed.

And this is called gain of function. So why do that? Because, of course, people are going, oh, my gosh, you're messing with nature. This is horrible. Why are you making a super pathogen? What are you trying to do? This is idiotic and asking for trouble. That is a very reasonable line of questions.

And a lot of people still ask those questions. So the rebuttal to that would be, and some people rebutted it, was like, oh, no, no, no, that this is science. Right. Science with a capital S. I get that. How can you stand in the way of discovery? Information wants to be free. Now I'm being a little bit sarcastic.

You could also say, well, as a virologist, I really want to understand. a pandemic like this in case it actually does emerge out of nature at some point. Flu is constantly recombining and mutating. Maybe one of these days a bug like this will come along and we want to understand it. That could be a very legitimate robot. Yeah, that's true. You don't want the first time you see a super pandemic to be in the wild. You don't.

You want it to be in a laboratory where you can light it on fire and go, ooh, we don't have a Now that said, the truth is that nature has literally expanded, has carried out literally trillions of recombinant experiments with flu in the wild over the decades, and this thing has never come about. Good point. So they did make something novel and terrifying. And if you go back and read the literature from the time, you had, you know, the head of the U.S.

biosecurity panel, a guy named Paul Kime, say this is the scary. He said, this is the scariest thing I've ever seen. He said, anthrax isn't scary at all compared to this. This guy's an anthrax expert. Oh, wow. So it's not like a guy who knows, who's heard of it. anthrax like he's the anthrax guy or one of the handful and his title at the time was the chairman of the national science advisory board for biosecurity pretty big deal yeah so him saying this is the scariest

thing ever is it holds weight it's not a blogger quoted in science which is one of the two top scientific journals in the world science and nature are the two so this is this is the real deal and that's 2011 so what's scary about this well you know they put it under lockdown. It obviously didn't get out of the air vents. These were good guys with white hats. We can question whether it was sane or stupid to do it, but they definitely weren't mustache twirling villains. Right. The trouble is that which can be done in 2011 can already be done radically easier today because now we have CRISPR, right? And that which can be done easier today, probably hundreds of people could do that today. Maybe let's just

sort of sake of argument say, oh, the only two people in the world are good. pull that off in 2011. Well, there's probably hundreds of people who can pull it off today. And at the end of the day, what did they make? Did they make a bug? Well, yes, they made a bug, but they also made a data file because the genome for flu, whether it's H5N1 or another derivative, is about 10,000 letters long. And that's in a four-letter alphabet. There's about 10,000 base pairs in that genome. the changes that they made in order to make that thing virulent. Now, 10,000 letters, that's going to fit on a few pages. Okay, that's not a huge genome.

Yeah, that's a good point. How many letters fit on a page? Well, let's see. If you figure, I think, you know, it's probably, they say 250 words per page, but it's actually probably more than that with the fonts that we use today. And they say five letters a word, and that's probably undercounting. So I'd say you're good 12, 1,300 pages, characters per page. So we're talking about seven pages.

Yeah. In fact, it says, just to keep in mind, the average one-spaced page contains 3,000 characters. One space, yeah, I always think in double-spaced. So this is a 10,000 character thing. And by the way, it's not a 26-letter alphabet. It is a four-letter alphabet because it's DNA. So that is a sliver of the data. Now, what modifications would they make to that genome in order to make it wildly contagious?

I don't know, but I could pretty much guarantee you that tiny number of modifications would fit on a freaking post-it note. Sure. Okay? Sure. So the ghost story that I worry about is this. I mean, that modification has happened. It's sitting in labs in Wisconsin and Amsterdam and let's, God forbid, that these labs ever get hacked and those changes get out. But let's say several years go by.

And actually, I should give you another point of context, which is how fast this technology is improving. This is a really, really important data way. Let me put a pin in that real quick. Getting hacked if you work at a lab like that and somebody wants to hack you is an inevitable occurrence. Yeah. Because I don't know anything about this. I don't know if you do.

If I work in a lab with you and I'm doing that kind of stuff, how tight is the security? Sure, getting in there and getting out is probably tight. But if I email you, hey, it turns out the modification to this is just a quick. Is that email? Are we talking super encrypted NSA level security? I'm using Gmail. I'm using my university email, my lab email to email you and go, turns out we can modify this, this, this, and this.

Why don't you give that a try? I mean, how much is this research even encrypted on my laptop? When there's only two of you in the world who have done this and you have an enormous amount of respect for it, maybe you're sort of careful about it. When we're at a point where tens of thousands of graduate students can be shuffling information back and forth, like this, they're going to take the same amount of care that they take with selfies and sensitive photographs and anything else that gets hacked thousands of times per day. Yeah.

Right? I mean, was it Equifax? Was one of the, yeah, Equifax got hacked. They were in the business of data security. Equifax was one of the three entities in the world that did credit ratings for Americans and had hundreds of millions of social security numbers. Right. Whatever digital locks they had that were turned out to be putty in the world.

the hands of a hacker. Guaranteed a high school biology lab ain't going to have that. Sure. Now, why am I saying high school biology lab? Yeah. So let's get to the, let's get to the rapidity with which this stuff is advancing. Everybody's heard of the human genome project. It was a 13-year project. This is the project to sequence the human genome. The entire human genome. Okay. Yeah. So very, very big scientific effort throughout the 90s. It costs three billion dollars to do that. And basically, sequencing is a fancy word for reading. That was basically, took a solitary human's genome, one person's genome, and found out what are the three billion genetic letters, AG, C, and T? It's the only letters that our genomes are written from. What are

those three-ish billion letters in a single person's genome? That was a 13-year project. It was money well spent. It cost three billion dollars. It ended in 2003. It involved thousands of the brightest minds in life science. Let's think of that as a unit of work reading a genome right ended in o three now o three a long time ago but you know w was president friends was on the year this isn't like ancient history right it's it's not like fresh prince was on the air no it's like fresh prince was on the air it's not like it's not like the radio much was this is this is recent issue in fact we said on the air it wasn't streaming those services didn't exist but they came shortly thereafter right yeah this is you're right it's not ancient history this is last

decade there are kids that were born then that are they have their learners permit now Yes. They're not in... The kids who were born at that moment are barely driving now, right? This was last decade. Okay, $3 billion. What would cost to sequence a human... $3 billion 13 years?

That would cost you $500 today. And it would probably be done by a lab tech and span. It would probably take about a day, but it would take a few minutes of that lab tech's time. That lab tech could be a smart high school kit. Wait, how much would it cost now? So today, yeah, today I think it's $5.99 with Veritas. Let's round it to 500 because the math is easier. What?

Comparing $500 to $3 million, I'm sorry, $3 billion. $3 billion. That is a price compression of $6 million. Holy crap. 13 years going to a day-ish. That's a comparable price compression. So what we're saying is a smart high school kid today can do what the entire field of life sciences needed 13 years to do last decade. That's crazy.

That's crazy, and that's the speed with which this stuff is working. It's like computing. We got Moore's Law in Computing. Right. Can you tell us what Moore's Law is that a lot of people don't know what this is? Yeah, yeah. So Moore's Law is that thing that makes our computers and our phones and everything else improve at this insane rate. And it's something that basically people in Silicon Valley calculated many, many years ago, I think back in the 60s.

And they basically said the amount of computing power that you get for a dollar doubles, every 18 months. And now it's every two years. But that has been going on decade after decades since the 60s. And that is what has enabled everything that we touch in life to transform over the last 30 years is this thing called Moore's Law, this doubling every 18 to 24 months. Life sciences is going much faster than that. So you look at the crew. Do we have a fancy name for that, though? The Carlson Curr. Oh, good. The Carlson Curr. I was worried for a second. I know. I know. So some call it the Carlson curve. And I've met Rob Carlson, so I feel like I'm met a celebrity. You look at charts, and I could give you one if you want to put it up in the show notes, that trace the speed with which computing gets cheaper. Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. We'll put that in the show notes. And then you put plot next to that, the Carlson curve, and it's so much steeper. And again, that human genome project is an example. So to use that example, imagine, we don't know what it is, but imagine whatever it is that the whole

field of synthetic biology can do over the next 13 years, all the thousands of people, all the magic, whatever it is. We don't know. It's huge, right? Then imagine about 20 years after that a high school kid can do all of that in an afternoon. That's the path. That's scary and amazing. It's scary.

It's amazing. It's exciting when you think about all the things it can do to cure blindness and get rid of the organ shortage and expand lifespans. I mean, there's all sorts of great stuff. But now let's go back to the Columbine kit. Right. Or even just Enrico Fermi saying any civilization given enough time blows themselves up. That's a very, very interesting point because that might explain why we don't see anything when we look out into space. What happens is that thing which two geniuses in Wisconsin and Holland alone were able to do two good guys in 2011 is probably already something that a few hundred smart graduate students could do today.

and with this improvement curve that we're on, it's a matter of time. And I don't pretend to know, but it is not centuries. It's decades. It's a matter of time before capabilities like that are going to be in any college lab and probably any high school. Sure. Yeah, like a good public school. Excellent public school. Brooklyn Science or just a good suburban school.

And the techniques to do things with those base pairs, it's just going to get easier and easier and easier, just like computing it. So an example I used in my TED Talk, which is kind of fun because it was a little playful, is if in the 1950s you wanted to play checkers against a computer, you had to be a guy named Arthur Samuel. He was the only human being on Earth who could play checkers against a computer because he had access to one of about a dozen very high-end IBM computers in the world. He had unlimited access.

and he had like a Nobel adjacent brain that was so goddamn smart, he could teach a computer to play checkers. So that's what it took to play checkers against a computer in 1950 something. Right. Today you just need to know someone who knows someone who owns a phone. Lower bar, right? Yeah, much lower. Much lower bar.

Now, let's say, I'll tell a ghost story now. I mean that playfully. Let's say five years from now. It's just really brilliant woman at MIT. And she's a virologist. And she's going to do the same kind of thing as these people did in Wisconsin and Holland. And she's going to create the most terrifying bug that ever existed. And what it's going to do is it's going to be 10 times as contagious as chickenpox, 10 times as lethal as Ebola, although that's impossible because Ebola is at 50%.

Right. Forget the just. Like 99% lethal. Totally lethal. And then here's the kicker. it incubates in the human body for 10 months so the entire world can be infected with it before the first person gets sick. And she does this for all the right reasons. She wants to save humanity.

She wants to understand disease. All the right reasons. Or maybe she's just getting her thesis, right? Or whatever it is. She makes this, right? And then her computer gets hacked, which, as we know, or she sends the wrong email or she opens the wrong attachment. That data gets out. Now, let's be optimistic and say six years from now, when I'm hypothetically making this happen, it would actually take a genius like her to take the data of that genome, to take the 10,000 letters and turn it into a living critter. That's still hard.

Yes. And let's say six years from now, it's still really, really, really hard. Well, how many years is it going to be before a simple DNA synthesizer printer that you can find in any high school lab comes along? Is it 15 years? Is it 10? Is it 20? I don't know. But again, it's not a century.

And the point is that data file gets out there. She gets hacked. That data file is going to join all the pirated Abbasongs and Breaking Bad episodes in every dark corner. It's on BitTorrent. It's on BitTorrent. It's in the dark web. It's, you know, wherever Silk Road's replacement is, it's where all the child porn is. It's everywhere.

And nobody in, you know, 2026 or whatever the year is, very few people can do anything evil with it, but 20, 25, 30 years later, when DNA synthesizers are as common as paper printers, a lot of people can do something evil with it. Right. That's a good point. It's almost like, hey, if you, no one could buy something like a, the 3D printing weapons now. Now, I don't think, I think they explode after you fire them twice or something, right?

For now, yeah. For now. But if you have a 3D metal printer, the right kind, and then you know what you're doing, you can sort of maybe work out some of the kinks. That's going to be something where anyone will be able to get this. And so this file, having been around for 30 years, is still just as lethal because it's not like we've evolved resistance to it. No, it's a thousand times more lethal or a hundred thousand or a million because all of a sudden

anybody can get access to it. And so then the question is, who do we worry about? And I do worry about these thousandish people who detonate every year. I'll use the word detonate, whether it's the Vegas shooter or the pilots that we've been talking about or omshin recu is a you know example there was 1960 i'm sorry 1990s um uh japanese uh japanese uh japanese that let sarongas go in the tokyos subway because they just wanted to kill a lot of people get that do you know how they got that you know apparently it's just not that hard to synthesize sarongy geez and so we do rely on the goodwill of the people who have

the power to do terrible things not to do them and i'll make the point that in any given day I check this. There's like 100,000 commercial flights a day. Not a lot of pilots are plowing them into the ground. Right. But it really only takes one if we're talking about something that is not a local event. Even a pilot smashing his plane to the ground is a local event. The guy with the machine guns in Las Vegas, local event. Mass murder is a local thing right now. But it ceases to be if it becomes something that's very contagious and that can travel. And so that is the, that is the, that. the concern. How do we stop people from creating terrible pathogens for good reasons are ill? And for those data files, how do we keep them from getting out if we can't keep, you know, we can't keep the plans of the F-35. I know. I mean, literally, the deepest, darkest secrets of the United States military with all of our cyber defenses where the most brilliant hackers that this country can generate couldn't keep foreign powers, couldn't keep China out of stealing the plans for

the F-35. How in the world is a... grad students 17 years from now who can very easily create a pathogen for homework assignment. How are they going to keep all bad actors from getting access to stuff? So I worry about this. Yeah, no kidding. Especially even the anthrax attacks on politicians, that was a senior researcher that did it. That is a very important point. And so do we worry about the Columbine kids or do we worry about somebody who's incredibly well vetted?

And so that attack that happened, it's never quite been proven. But again, it's one of those things that's more or less gone beyond controversy. It's actually strikes a big cord to me. I happen to be in Tom Dashel's office. The only the envelope showed up. Really? Yeah, by sheer happenstance. Jeez.

So this is for those who don't know the story. This was immediately after 9-11. Some weapons-grade anthrax started showing up in the U.S. mail. It was mailed to a number of congressional leaders, including Tom Dashel at the time was the majority leader in the Senate, also sent to the National Enquirer, oddly enough. That's an unusual combination. It was an odd mix of things. They're probably just thinking, you know what, while I'm taking out people I don't like.

Well, that was one to me as somebody who'd spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East. To me, that was sign number one that this was a bitter American rather than some al-Qaeda-inspired operative. Right. Because a lot of people, you know, particularly like 20, 30 years ago, hated the inquire instinctively. It was sort of like, it was kind of like a whipping boy for people who thought that they the American culture was going to the dogs. And I'm sorry, there was no way that Osama bin Laden bore a grudge to the inquirer. Probably not.

Not really. He had other targets. The other thing that kind of tipped me off, of any, you know, not like I'm a big intelligence operative or anything, but they printed what was written on the envelopes. And they had written, Allah is great. Now, as somebody who studied a lot of Arabic and spent a lot of time in the Middle East with Arabic speakers who were learning English, the first. thing if you're a religious Muslim, the first word you want to learn in English is how do you say God?

And the word is God. And so if you are worshipping Allah in Islam, you worship the same God. And when you're learning English, you say, well, how do I say Allah? You say, oh, the word is God. Right. You don't, right. Allah is not an, Allah and God are the same thing. And so Allah is, God is the translation for Allah. Yeah. And so even somebody who spoke very poor English who was a terrorist and was trying to to make their points would say God is great when they were writing in English. And so there was this clearly to me, I mean, it was clearly written by somebody who was trying to act like they were, well, anyway, you got the punchline. It turned out to be a very senior weapons researcher who was in the senior management of

that weapons lab in the United States Army. And so if we can't keep a deadly pathogen that our own army makes out of the Senate majority leaders office. what other things are going to leak? Yeah, good point. And also, it's not just a matter of stopping the tech, right? We can't say, well, look, we managed to rein in nukes because nuclear weapons don't have, like, well, we really need all this plutonium sitting around at a hospital because that's what we use for x-rays. It's like there's a very distinctive use case for weapons grade uranium, plutonium, whatever it is.

We can't stop synthetic biology any more than we can stop smartphones. because the upside is too good. The upside is too widespread. So it's a little scary. And, you know, again, like I said at the beginning, I'm conflicted in that. I'm a big symbiobo fanboy. As you know, I've got a podcast of my own. And I spent a huge amount of time.

You can plug your show if you want. Let's talk about the show. Yeah. So I have a podcast called Afteron, which was named after a novel that I wrote a couple of years ago. It's kind of an odd title. It's called After On. and I mainly interview scientists, technologists and founders as well, but primarily scientists in great depth about what they do with a goal of making very complex and fascinating and important science widely accessible to non-experts. And, you know, my listeners are from very general backgrounds.

They're just smart curious people. I've done a lot of work with synthetic biology because I find it to be electrifying the potential that it has. But there is this dark side to it. And so one of the things that I've been spending time on with the folks that I've been interviewing and actually have some very, very productive relationships. And one of the things I focused on in the TED Talk is what can we do to prevent this kind of a doomsday scenario from happening? What we cannot do, we can't ban the technology. It simply can't be done. Because if you do, then you're basically saying, well, we'll let North Korea and China and Russia and so forth go ahead.

You know, and again, it's not like a nuclear weapon. If you look at, think of how many illegal drug labs there are out there. Biology can be practiced very quietly in very small, secretive places. Yeah, this will eventually be the kind of thing where, I mean, you can make meth in an RV. I saw that show. I saw that show too. So eventually you'll be able to make pathogens in an RV. You probably could already.

You can already. Yeah, I would imagine that the steps that went into making that lethal H5N1 in Wisconsin in 2011 using CRISPR technology, using CRISPR technologies today could be done in a lab about the size of that RV and breaking back. Sure. Yeah. It might just not be an actual RV that they bought from a junkyard. It would be specialized and have gear in it. Probably so.

But it's only a matter of time until you can get this kind of thing, the machinery, and it's small enough. And it's like putting a fridge in an RV. The machinery and the expertise. Yeah. It's just going to proliferate. So the tech ban cannot be done. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Rob Reed. We'll be right back after this.

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please click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our show with Rob Reed. Naval Ravacant, I think, on your show said, Technology is a coin and on one side is immortality and on the other side is annihilation. Precisely. That's what we're looking at. That is what we're looking at.

And how do we engineer this situation so that we get the immortality because there is so much benefit and upside? And again, let's remember that the 100,000 pilots who pilot a commercial flight every day, it's once every five or ten years that one of them downs the plane. Most people are good guys. Yes. Thank God for that. Thank God for that. Yeah. So we know we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

It's like Napster, right? What the, you're the new 50 cent single is out there. It's not going to go back in. All the movie companies, they already tried this with data. Oh, we're going to put a fake copy of Avengers on BitTorrent. Oh, we're going to sue some people that download this one. We're going to monitor it. Great.

I still download movies all the time. I can say it out loud on the show that has hundreds of thousands of people listening and nothing is going to happen as a result. And this is toothpaste we do not want to put back into the tube because, again, the potential for like, for cleaning up the climate. I mean, there's really interesting things that are going on in Sin Bio right now where, you know, there's a project to make corn grow much, much thicker stalk so it sucks more carbon out of the air. Ooh, that's cool. Really interesting stuff. There's a project that's going on on Australia, Seacalp, basically seaweed, grows something like 60 times faster.

than trees. And so it's a really good way to suck. So super long tuby. Yeah. And so there's there's like a notion where you're going to grow seek help, seek help really, really long and then cut it off and let it go to the bottom of like of the ocean in an area where the bottom is pretty desert like. There's a lot of the ocean depths. There really is no ecosystem you'd be messing with. Like there's a lot of things that you could do with synthetic biology to really clean the environment and expand people's lives and to get rid of diseases. And so we don't, this is toothpaste. we really want to brush your teeth with. But even if we didn't, there's no putting it back into the tube, as you said.

Yeah. I'm trying to even think, I'm like, wow, you could drag that kelp up and they'd have rot and create natural gas. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. All kinds of things. And there is also work going on with using bacteria. And if you teach it to sort of like have the right kind of digestion, maybe it exhales, you know, methane that you could end up, I mean, there's lots of potential in synthetic biology and billions of dollars are going into it to do great.

things. When I think about this, I always think about how much plastic is in landfills, and I'm like, okay, we're not digging that out. But what if there's a bacteria that eats plastic and makes, I don't know, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, methane, and maybe there's got to be some other byproducts, but you just set that loose in a controlled environment and it eats, it eats plastic. And all of these things, if again, you think of the guy with the chess machine in 1950, and you think of an iPhone today and you realize that we're at the beginning of an even steeper and faster curve in terms of what we can make biology do, none of those sound even remotely implausible. So there's so much benefit that's going to come from this if we can manage not to annihilate

ourselves. Yes. And it's not just the lone wolf that you worry about. Again, in my TED talk, you know, I had 16 or 17 minutes. I focused on the lone wolf because you can only focus on so many things. But there are really nihilistic groups that are out there, whether they're radical environmentalists, people like Omshin recue. There are groups and groups are more dangerous than individuals because they can pool resources and expertise that might want to do something like this. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff that can go on.

Yeah, you're right. Who knows? You could end up with a group that decides. And we already have things where people. pray or try to expedite Armageddon. Yeah. And these are people that, a lot of them go to church every Sunday. That's the whole point.

So imagine, and like you said, environmentalists, they could say, you know what, they're just too many damn humans. The earth will be better off if there are fewer of them. We can't kill everybody nor would we want to, but we can probably kill 80% or 60% or even 25%. And it's a huge number of people. Or a bitter narcissist who gets a terminal diagnosis and doesn't like the idea of of life going on without them. I mean, there's so many people, then again, if we think about the person with the checkers game and how widespread that technology is and assume that we're going to go down a similar acceleration curve, and we are not going to have that nation state level

of scale that you need with nukes, preventing things. You have to start, we have to start thinking now about how the countermeasures that we can have so that we can benefit from this amazing technology, but not be vulnerable to it. With new tech, I think of things. like Windows or old edition. I mean, remember Windows 3.1? That was like really not a secure OS. I mean, Windows, no Windows is very secure. In fact, what was the first one? Was it Windows 95 when we sort of got internet? Yeah, Windows 95 would have come along. The first commercial browsers came out, Mosaic. Well, Mosaic was pre-commercial, but the Netscape Navigator came out in late 94. And so more or less by definition, you started getting that was the tip of the iceberg of

the World Wide Web being a consumer phenomenon. Yahoo got started. And I was just around then and I also wrote some internet history. So I know these bizarre details. Yahoo got started in 1995. You had some other really important early companies like CNET, I think real networks. They all started around 95. Oh my God, the real player. I got so angry whenever that thing would open up in order to play something and I was like, I don't want to, it was one of those early, hey, I bet we can force everyone to get this. A lot of people have PTSD from the real player. There's no question.

So the earliest days of the commercial internet were 94, 95. So when 95, yeah, that would have been coincident with the real early adopters. But Windows XP, I think, was the one that just stuck around forever because it was pretty stable and a lot of people really, really liked it. But this is a different problem. I mean, like, it's bad enough when you get a virus on your computer. you have to reboot your computer and maybe reform out your hard drive. Get a virus and you're one of us.

You die, right? Yeah, I'm like, how do I defrag my lungs? It's pretty true. My pancreas. Now, so when I decided, I actually was asked to give this TED talk with 11 days notice, which was a little bit intimidating. Humble bragging. No, well, it was. And it was because I did this podcast.

You mentioned it with the Val Ravacant, an episode of my podcast. And then they heard it at TED and they said, we'd like to have this done, but the conference is right around the corner. Yeah. So my challenge was rather than just raise the specter of this, I really, we need to end on an optimistic note and we need to end with some action items because I am convinced we can navigate this. And so I started talking to some of my former guests from my podcast.

And there are a couple of very interesting steps that I believe could be massively curative if we take them right now. And I talked about both of them at the end of the talk. We got a little bit more time here. There's really two sides of this. The first one would be a massively distributed pathogen detector network. So think of basically a smoke alarm, but instead of detecting smoke, it's constantly inhaling all the fragments of DNA and RNA that are cycling out in the air, and it's sequencing.

It's reading. The sequencing is a fancy word for reading it. And trying to find, you know, what's weird, what's dangerous, what is bizarre in the air. Now, if we tried to do this 20 years ago, the response would be like, hey, you knucklehead, it's going to cost us $3 billion in 13 years just to read a single human genome. Well, that cost, as we talked about, is plummeting. And it's plummeting so rapidly. There already are some pretty primitive and pretty bulky and imperfect pathogen dispensers, I'm sorry, detectors that are used in laboratory and other environments. This is something that if we made an R&D priority of it,

we could get to very, very sensitive, very smart pathogen detectors that would probably be as ubiquitous as smoke detectors within well within a decade. And then the long-term goal would be to have them be as ubiquitous as smartphone. Sure. Just have pathogen detection everywhere and have it networked. Right, because in here, in my phone, I'm holding my phone, I've got a barometer in here. You've got a barometer in there already. I've got dark sky, which is a weather app. Yep.

And it is supposed to be more accurate because it's, you're going to be more accurate because it's, It takes barometer readings from everybody who's got it. Exactly. Dark Sky takes parameter readings from millions of phones. It melds that with the commercially available weather data. And yeah, it gives you a minute-to-minute forecast right where you are. It's an amazing app. It's pretty cool because it'll be like the weather will go.

It's 73 and sunny. And I'm like, I'm wet right now. I'm outside and it's raining. And Dark Sky is the only app where it's like, hey, you're getting wet. Yeah, dark sky saying you're getting wet or dark sky says it's going to start rating in seven minutes. And it's usually right. And I go, how does it know that? the forecast doesn't say anything about, oh, better move the laptop.

Yeah, I'm out, you know, it's incredible. So we could get, my point is we have a barometer in the phone. Why wouldn't have a pathogen detector in the phone, especially because it wouldn't be there because, well, we need to be able to crowdsource pathogen detection. It'll be in there because my phone will have an app where I blow into the bottom and it says, hey, you might want to call in sick and go back to sleep. you have the early onset influenza. You should get some rest.

And so that's one of the interesting things is when you get into this. You know, why don't you have a pathogen detector in the phone right now? Because it's 2019 and they're not good enough and they're not small enough. But we are on this steep, steep curve. And if we make a priority of it as a society and we start devoting, you know, a certain percentage of the National Institute of Health R&D budget to pathogen detection, this is very, very important. We go from none of them to smoke detector ubiquity to smart fund ubiquity. And you said exactly a very important thing. There will be a very good reason to have a pathogen detector on your phone because you want to take, why not check your breath every morning?

Yeah. Why not have, you know, the nursery school teacher wave it around in the morning and start saying, you know, this would, what's interesting to me about pathogen detection is although we're, we're pushing this network out there to prevent something catastrophic, it would pay for itself so rapidly by just like snipping flu and other. epidemics in the butt. Oh, man. It's so good at detecting illnesses. Imagine if every time you walked into a school, you know, right before you walk to your seat and say the Pledge of Allegiance or whatever, you just blow into a little tube. You don't even have to change the tube.

You don't have to put your mouth on it. You just blow in the direction of this machine that's by the door. And if it blinks red, Tommy has to go home and go to sleep because he's got the flu or he's got a cold or something else. Tommy blows into it when he's at home. He doesn't even come into school. Good point. I didn't think about that. Or whatever it is.

And so there's lots of reasons to create this technology. And even though in 2019, it's sci-fi, it is not going to be sci-fi in 2029. So we've got a lot of time to get ahead of this. Now, the other side, which is equally exciting and equally feasible, is taking a bio-manufacturing infrastructure and pushing it out what they call to the edge. Now, pushing it out to the edge means that you take something that's highly, highly centralized and you make it ubiquitous. So back in the day, computers all sat. inside of these gigantic building zone by IBM. Now, obviously, we have computing everywhere. We have it in our back pockets and all of our homes. Biomanufacturing, how we've got with

vaccines right now is if you want to create a vaccine, let's look with the flu vaccine, for instance, you make your best guess about what the influenza vaccine or the influenza virus is going to be like in North America in nine months. You spend months manufacturing a vaccine that's targeted at that best guess. Right. Meanwhile, influential is mutating wildly. There's going to be a slightly different strain in Buffalo than there is in Detroit. And you've got to sort of manufacture all this stuff.

It takes months. You've got to ship it. You've got to store it. And we do an okayish job, but we still lose just in the United States alone, something like 20 to 30,000 deaths per year to the flu. Right. Okay. Now, what happens if some diabolical person, you know,

person makes a pathogen and they release it in, you know, the center of Chicago. And we're not going to have six months to manufacture this. We're not going to have all this time to ship it and so forth. But what you can do is take leverage 3D printing technology. And there's already a lot of research that's going into printing medications. And there is no reason that you can't print vaccines. Where do you want to print vaccines? You don't want to print them in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control and then ship them everywhere. I think you want to print them in every single pharmacy. Sure. Right. Right. So you could have the pharmacy deliver the medicine to you. 60,000 distribution points, 60,000 manufacturing points. And then you have it in every doctor's office.

And there's no reason again, if we go deeper into the curve, you have it on every home. Right. Okay. Oh, I'm imagining this right now. Like, so if we have pathogen detectors on the phone, my phone could say, hey, you know, a lot of your neighbors have this strain of the flu. You're probably going to get it if you hang out in your neighborhood with your neighbors or at your office. Yeah. Because it doesn't even have to be around you. It could say you work with Rob, Jordan, Jason, and Jenny, they all have this. And you're about to walk into a room with them or they had it last week.

Right. You should take this medication now. We just send an instruction to your DNA printer that's in your home office or in your kitchen. Yeah. Go and take those pills before or take that injection or whatever it is before you go to work. Precisely. And again, I say this. Obviously, you identified me correctly. I am a science fiction writer in addition to a podcaster and a couple of other things and a science writer. So sci-fi writer talking about the future. But again, these are things that are entirely feasible in the 15, 20-year time frame, which by the way is the time frame in which we really, I think, need to freak out. The Columbine kid is not going to release this deadly pathogen tomorrow. Right. The person who, the first person to do something awful with synthetic biology and there will be such a person someday.

They might not even be born yet. You know, so our advantage is good guys, good guys, I don't number bad guys by an overwhelming ratio. We're thinking about this now. We have decades to start getting ready. And these two very basic pieces of infrastructure, I'm not saying they're an impermeable defense. I mean, there'll be other diabolical thoughts and it will always be an arms race.

But if you have widely distributed vaccine manufacture, widely distributed pathogen detection, you suddenly plug a lot of holes. You know, again, there will be other cunning things that can come along. But this is the kind of investment that I think we should start making today. And we can start making today. And to sort of protect ourselves against the worst case scenarios of these otherwise rather miraculous and exciting technologies that are in the pipeline. Yeah, I think we need almost like a think tank of people that are trying to figure out what's going to go. a red team to go through this.

Absolutely. SynBio has a lot of really cool application. We talked about using it to make organs. I think I saw something about goats, milk, having super strong spider thread in it. Have you heard about this? No, but I have heard about people basically repurposing spider thread, and some of which has unbelievable properties in terms of toughness and portability and lightness and so forth. Yeah.

And then there's also the efficiency with which termites, the gut microbiome in a termite, so basically the gut bacteria and a termite, the efficiency with which it processes wood, with which it turns wood cellulose into energy, if we could figure that out and harness it, and it's a matter of time, wood would suddenly become almost like a super fuel. like the amount of the amount of energy they can get out. I'm not going to get the right, the numbers right, but the amount of energy they could get out of a cord of wood, it wouldn't power a city, but it would power a lot of one. This is all stuff that's being done with biology right now, super materials, super energy efficiency, and we're just in the earliest stages of cracking this stuff.

I found it is, this is from 2010, by the way. Researchers from the University of Wyoming have developed a way to incorporate spiders, silk spinning, genes into goats. Wow. All allowing the researchers to harvest silk protein from the goats milk for a variety of application. From the milk, not the hair.

From the milk. That's cool. Right, because I guess the problem is spiders are territorial from what it looks like here. So when you try to set up spider farms, they just kill each other. They just nuke each other. Yeah. Because goats are social. Additionally, I think it's probably, you wait for a spider to spin a web.

You're just like, oh, my God. Get on with it. You can milk a goat, I think, several times a day. Yeah. And if the stuff, the required stuff is in there. And gets distilled out of it. Right. You have a ton of this stuff.

Yeah. And it says other than their ability to produce the spider silk protein, the goats do not seem to have any other differences in health, appearance, or behavior compared to goats without the gene. And this is a brilliant idea that dates back nine years. This idea was pre-crisper. This idea was when all of the tools of synthetic biology were unbelievably primitive. compared to what they are right now. I mean, the amount of stuff that's going to come out of this field that's positive is reason enough to make sure we don't get annihilated because the future has the potential to be so amazing. I'm interested in what kind of super senses or super abilities humans might get in the future, too.

That's probably a different show. Well, life extension and then also, I mean, there's, you know, what kind of photoreceptors can we get? Sure. You know, there are creatures out there that perceive elements, perceive reaches. of the electromagnetic spectrum, perceived reaches of the sound frequencies that we can't access. There's creatures that are out there that have something called electroperception, which allows sharks to hunt and other kinds of fish to hunt without seeing. There are, they're birds who have something called magnetoporception. Magnetopersception allows them to navigate. So they have a sense

of where the Earth's magnetic sphere is aligned. There are senses that humans lack, actual senses that beings on this planet have. And there are extents to our senses. The term that's often used is called Um-Velt. It's a very interesting idea. It's a Germanic word. It just means environment in German. Well, what it means, the way that it was used by the philosopher who started using the word in the narrow sense, UMW-E-L-T, as you know,

Um-Velt is that sliver of reality that a given critter can perceive. And so right now you and I can probably perceive a vanishingly small percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see infrared. We can't see ultraviolet. And forget about microwaves and radio waves and cosmic rays. Would be distracting, I think. Well, it could be distracting, but there might be people who say that seeing purple would be distracting if we couldn't see purple, right? When we could see ultraviolet, flowers would be a little bit prettier.

They've got patterns on them that bees can see that we can see. If we get C infrared, we wouldn't bump into shit at night. That'd be kind of nice, right? Yeah, that would be nice. So extension of the UMVEL, now this is getting a little bit deeper into what can be done with both neuroscience and synthetic biology. But yeah, there's senses that we'd be able to develop and extensions to the senses that we already have that could be really, really powerful.

What about radiation resistance? Because think about it. I know that sounds ridiculous in comic bookie, but what happens if we live on another planet? Sure. Yeah. More radiation is hitting us, I think, if we're. or different kind, because I don't know this at all, but I assume Mars has a different environment or atmosphere than Earth. Maybe it doesn't filter out all the UV.

Well, the biggest problem, actually, with going to Mars is the journey, because when you were between the planets, Mars has a bit of an atmosphere. It's about a hundredths of size of ours. So, yes, you would get a lot more radiation there. It also be further from the sun, most of the radiation that we get a solar radiation. So the distance might do something for you, But the real danger is in the roughly two years that we currently think with today's technology you would spend. Maybe it's a little less than two years. I think the window opens every two years and it's like a nine-month journey. But when you're out in space without, you know, an ozone sphere or an atmosphere protecting you,

there's a lot of radiation the astronauts would be exposed to, which is a sort of unsolved problem, I believe, still, when people talk about Martian colonization. Huh. Yeah. It's something we're going to have to deal with. And smart people like Elon Musk are thinking about it. But it's not an easy one. I guess once you get one generation up there and you're giving birth, that you don't have to worry about the journey anymore.

You don't have to worry about the journey more unless you want to come back and, you know, go to the World Series of poker, do some swimming, you know, whatever it is. I would imagine that Martian colonization, like colonization of the new world of North America, will become increasingly attractive to people, the easier it is to get back and forth. the early days of colonizing North America, as with Mars, you had to spend months in this really wretched environment in which you might die. Yeah. And now that we're going to have on planes and go back and forth.

It's like the Oregon Trail, man. Yeah. Well, thank you for your time. I don't want to go to far out the reservation. This has been fascinating. Yes, this has been a lot of fun. And thank you for having me on. And if anybody wants to learn more about synthetic biology in general, if I can just repitch,

a podcast is called After On. I've talked to a lot of the top people in that field. I also talked to people about astronomy, quantum computing, lots and lots of fun topics. And the TED Talks about 18 minutes long. Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes. But we've gone into it in greater depth than the talk itself right here. So. Perfect.

Well, thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it. I loved the TED Talk. It'll be in the show notes along with links to Rob's podcast for those of you who are interested. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jordan. Great big thank you to Rob Reed for coming on the show. This Jason was not only surprising, but I mean, it's.

It's scary, but it's scarier because it's not that far-fetched. Like, I can really see how this would go down. The path to this disaster is pretty clear, right? I'm hoping there are people out there that know more about this stuff than I do and go, look, this is much more complex than everyone thinks. But I don't know. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And I like his idea of the sensor net to start, you know, looking for these pathogens. The one hole, you know, this is my security background coming in.

You know, when you have antivirus on your computer, you have to get virus definitions, which means somebody has found the virus and has fingerprinted it and profiled it. And that's how the software knows that this is something that you shouldn't run on your computer. Now, when it comes to a sensor net looking for pathogens, how's it going to know if this is a new pathogen we've never seen before because it hasn't been fingerprinted and sent out to the network? So I think that's kind of a minor hole in the net that is going to keep us safe. But I do like the idea, but I think that there definitely needs to be some work going on there.

That's true. I mean, I guess they would just have to say, hey, there's this weird disease looking thing. Yeah, if we don't recognize it, then maybe alert, run inside, get your duct tape and your saran wrap and put your windows up. Exactly. Like, what kind of organic compound is there that wouldn't be fingerprinting? Because by that point, you'll be able to test for billions of things in just a few seconds, right? So if there's something that just doesn't have a hit at all in the database, okay, you have a mutated flu virus, that's code one.

But if you've got mutated anthrax or swine flu, that's, you know, somebody, they better surround you with hazmat suits and put a bag over you at that point, right? Yeah. You are on lockdown. So it's a little scary. Either way, it's dystopian. We'll link to the TED Talk, of course, in the show notes, and we'll link to some of Rob's other stuff because he is a great writer and very interesting.

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