The Jordan Harbinger Show - 510: Rob Reid | Why the Future is a Good Kind of Scary

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

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: While COVID-19 has been devastating on a global scale, it's comparatively benign when we consider how bad it could have been with a deadlier, more transmissible virus and a decimated infrastructure without access to basic necessities. What gain of function research is, and why it's so dangerous in a world where even the most secure laboratories can leak pathogens into the general population. The death toll inflicted by society's suicidal mass murderers is limited only by the weapons they have available -- whether they're guns, knives, airplanes, or synthetically manufactured superviruses created by soon-to-be commonplace genetic manipulation technology. The steps we can take as an international community to fend off the malevolent efforts of a few bad actors by creating an infrastructure that can detect and prevent the spread of any potential future pandemic. How DNA printers with the ability to create pandemic-defying vaccines on demand may become as common in the home as smoke alarms. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/510 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.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You find they're always fighting the last war, preparing for the last war. Like the French, you know, right before World War II, who had built walls and trenches and so forth that were very well envisioned for trench warfare, which was what World War I was. But World War II was mechanized. So, no, they didn't envision tanks. They didn't envisage Panzer units, you know, Blitzkrieg, the whole nine.

My worry is that we're going to come out of COVID preparing for the last pandemic, rather than the next pandemic. And all we know about the next pandemic is two things. A, it's coming for sure at some point. And B, it's going to be very different from COVID. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show,

we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional billionaire investor, drug trafficker, or neuroscientist. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episodes starter packs.

These are collections of top episodes organized by topic. That'll help you share the show with other people or find something that you're interested in, that your mom is interested in, your cousin, your friend, whatever. That way you're not just like, hey, subscribe to this feed and then scroll down 17 screens until you see something you like. you can easily find things right there on the website. Jordan Harbinger.com slash start is where you can find that. And of course, I always appreciate it when you share the show with other people. Now, today, my friend and New York Times best-selling science fiction author, Rob Reade. Rob is a longtime tech entrepreneur turned tech investor.

He basically pioneered music streaming. So he founded the company that became Rhapsody Music Service. First company in history to get a full catalog of licenses from labels. This is what Spotify later adopted. This is what Apple Music later adopted. He's a pioneer in his thinking in many ways. So when he told me that he had something major to talk about that might become a big deal, then I'm primed to listen.

We're in the middle of a pandemic now, as you know, depending on when you're listening to this. But lately, we can't even turn on the news without clenching every sphincter in our body, just bracing for the next disaster or just waiting for the current one to turn a new page, whether it's a mass shooting, some terrorism, some other catastrophe of our own in 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?

And what if everybody had access to that? Well, Rob Reid has done a little bit of science fiction thinking and a lot of researching. We're talking about gene splicing, genetic engineering, stuff that we're doing all the time. We're going to discuss the coming advances in this technology, how they could be used to create a super bug that could wipe out millions of people in kind of agonizing and disgusting ways, and how this technology might soon be available to pretty much every academic institution or even the garage of one of your neighbors. This episode is terrifying. It is fascinating at the same time. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.

And of course, we're also going to talk about the upside of synthetic biology as well. So it's not all doom and gloom. In fact, we end on a high note. we always like to do here on the show. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great thinkers, they're all in my network. These are actual friends, many of them anyway. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Again, it's free. There's no reason to enter any payment info. There's no upsells. Just teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests you hear on the show subscribe to the course and

contribute. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Rob Reed. Rob, I know we did a similar show in the past, you and I, but since we did that show about synthetic biology, we not only experienced a real actual pandemic, but the technology around what we discuss has changed quite a bit as well. So I think an update is in order here. Absolutely. I agree. And as you know, I also did almost a thousand hours of research into the question of synthetic biology, pandemic vulnerability, particularly to artificial pathogens, and also ways to prevent the next pandemic, whether it's artificial or natural in nature. And I did that, A, because there was a lockdown going on and what else? You didn't have anything else to do. Yeah. Exactly. But I also did a,

kind of a four-hour version of this conversation with Sam Harris, which people could check out in Sam's podcast feed. And that included basically like a scripted monologue in which I really tightly pulled together. I interviewed over 20 scientists over the course of all this research and pulled together a whole bunch of thoughts. And so as a result of that, I've got a lot more to say about this than when we spoke a couple few years ago. And I'm really honored to be back. So, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. I checked on the old episode we did because I thought, oh, I don't want to redo the same thing or cover all the same points. That was 2019. Yeah. So we were kind of like, oh, yeah, there could be a global disease. And I remember at the time thinking,

gosh, I sure hope that doesn't happen in my lifetime, but you never know. And it was like not even six months later. I think I'd have to check. It might have even been like 90 days. It might have been like November that we did this. And then it was boom, pandemic. And that alone illustrates that we just have no real timeline on when the applicant, like hopefully we don't do this show and things go off the rails in the way that we're talking about. But it just seemed like when we did that show, I thought, I hope this isn't too far out there. I hope it's not too sci-fi that we're talking about potential global pandemics. People might not be interested in that. Kind of like when you say, oh, don't jinx it, because you're talking about something, don't jinx it. I just hope that we're

not doing whatever sort of metaphysical kind of crap that isn't really real. I hope we're not doing any kind of jinxing it by going down this road, because honestly, it just illustrates perfectly that this is not really, it's only science fiction until it happens, and that doesn't mean it's going to happen in a hundred years. It could happen by the time people are listening to this, which is terrifying. And frankly, when we did that last episode,

three to six months, whatever it was before COVID hit, I myself took great comfort from the fact that I'm a science fiction writer. Right. And my job is to speculate about the improbable and the fairly distant future. But just in case, on the very off chance, that what you and I, talk about does influence world events, I'd suggest two things. A, let's not talk about nuclear war

at all. And B, you know, we'll focus a lot. What's great about what I've learned over the past year is there's a ton of stuff that we can do to avoid not just an artificial pandemic, but the next natural one. And we now obviously know the costs of a natural one so intimately. And even if everything on this wish list that I developed over, you know, these countless hours of research and conversations, even if all of it was implemented, it would cost something in the neighborhood of literally 1% the bill that COVID has stuck the world with. And the terrifying thing about COVID and the next plausible pandemic is COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around,

particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed, because it won't. don't have, it's hard to say the words, benign features, but COVID does have certain relatively benign features. And something that's designed to be malevolent certainly wouldn't have that. Right. And when I agree with you and we say benign features, obviously we're not minimizing the hundreds of thousands of people who have died from COVID or depending on when you're listening to this millions. What we're saying is, what if this was 50% lethal instead of single digit percent lethal? And there are diseases that are for sure, that lethal and possibly airborne contagion and don't die within a few seconds of leaving or minutes

of leaving the body. Like maybe they last for hours outside in the air or on surfaces. I think isn't measles one where like you can get it four hours later by just being in an elevator with somebody who had it? Yeah, it's crazy. So what I read on my research is, well, first of all, let's start with what we think we know about COVID. If you get a new elevator that somebody who had COVID, you know, evacuated two minutes ago. And the elevator's made a few stops and the doors have opened and shut and so forth. You walk into that elevator, even without a mask, it is profoundly unlikely and plausibly impossible that you will catch COVID as a result of that inhabitant from a couple of minutes ago. Whereas if you are unvaccinated and a person with measles has been in an elevator four hours before, I believe is a statistic. And world, forgive me, if I got it slightly wrong, but something in the area of four hours before, you're catching measles. Now, that's contagious.

And in terms of, you know, what could be more deadly than COVID, let's look at another coronavirus, which is SARS, which unlike COVID, which killed somewhere between the World Health Organization estimates between a half and 1% of those who catch it, SARS was 10%. Something else called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome is 30%. And something which scares the but Jesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus is H5N1 flu, which kills over 50%, a higher case fatality rate than Ebola. Now, there is no reason why COVID genetically, quote unquote, had to be as relatively unlethal compared to these diseases as it was.

And it's just terrifying to ponder something with, you know, SARS's lethality of 10%. I mean, what would that have done to society? And there's no genetic reason why COVID was, relatively unlethal, and it could have been far more contagious and worse on other vectors as well. The period of asymptomatic infection might well have been much longer. A lot of other diseases have much longer periods of asymptomatic infection, et cetera. Yeah, this is important to note because it's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound callous. But basically, we got really lucky that COVID is kind of infectious and not that lethal

because look at what it did. And everyone goes, oh, that's because everyone overreacted. Well, it still killed a ton of people and we didn't know what we were dealing with. And viruses luckily, typically, and I've done a little bit of research on my own, just reading like Nicholas Christakis books and things like that. Viruses typically mutate to become less lethal over time because it's just a bad evolutionary strategy to kill off all your hosts. Precisely, yeah. But viruses don't care if they cripple you for life or, like, ruin your lungs or

make it so that you can't walk forever or that you die 30 years younger than you should have. they just want to be in someone who's alive and socializing for a long time. So they actually do evolve to become, as far as I understand it, they do evolve to become able to spread asymptomatically so that people are not isolating themselves. They're still going out to baseball games and breathing on everyone or going to church and singing or whatever. Like the virus, if we can sort of anthropomorphize, is that the right word? A little bit.

Yeah, ballpark. Yeah, I'm getting one or two letters wrong and I know it. I just can't get it. I don't know either. Viruses want to be able to fly under the radar, infect as many people as possible, and then keep evolving and keep moving. So they adapt to that, even as humans adapt to become less over a long period of time, over generations, humans evolved to react to them less or die less because of them, right? The evolutionary pressure on viruses is a really interesting thing because their life cycle is so short. And so, God, damn, many of them are alive in the body of somebody who gets infected.

And so, you know, there are gazillions of generations, and gazillions, I believe, is a scientific term. But there are gazillions of generations of viruses, you know, in the span of, certainly in the span of the year that we've had COVID. So that is lots of time to react to evolutionary pressure. And the pressure, precisely, as you said, is not that kill all your hosts as soon as you get in there, but the pressure is to become more infectious. Now, really interesting point about SARS is, you know, sometimes viruses misfire and die out. You know, they're just, you know, they're just, things that evolved in the face of the evolutionary landscape. SARS never broke out wide because people got so symptomatic so quickly. There was essentially no asymptomatic period, and there really wasn't

a mild symptomatic period. And for that reason, SARS ended up burning out. And so viruses can, quote, unquote, screw up from an evolutionary standpoint and burn out. What's scary is to contemplate a virus that misses the part of the script that says don't kill all your hosts, right? Because again, a virus could screw up and burn out and take half of us with it. So we really just don't know what's coming down the pipeline. And we need to take really, really smart and sensible protective steps that are luckily easy to envision and easy to execute on technologically and very easy to afford when we look at the cost of the pandemic, even the annual cost of the flu, very easy to afford. We just need to start taking these steps methodically, diligently, and, you know, with a great deal

of discipline. By the way, it is anthropomorphize. There's no. Anthropomorphize. I think you're right. Yeah. And by the way, for people that don't know what that means, you know, whether you're like me and you just apparently misused words or just make up new words or if you're foreign, it means

attribute human characteristics or behavior to an inanimate or an animal. Non-human. Right. Non-human. So that's what I see. We do it with dogs all the time. Right. Yes. So we say like viruses like to be, viruses don't like anything. Electronics like to be indoors

where it's dry. They don't like anything. They're electronics, right? So that's- The dogs all want to go to Princeton. They really don't care where they go to college, etc. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. A more intense pandemic, going back to kind of what we were discussing before here, before we get into evolution, was a more intense pandemic, this could shut down supply chains, right? We had some supply chain issues because we were stopping supply chains from operating and we were saying, hey, maybe it's not a good idea. What if half the people that run supply chains are hospitalized, dying, taking care of dying loved ones because a disease is 50% lethal or getting you close to it? What happens when you have a power station and 100 or 300, I don't know how many

people work at a power plant? There's 300 people working there and 150 of them are sick and can't go to work because the, and the other 150 don't want to go to work because what if one of them is sick and then they're going to bring that home and kill everyone else in the family. So now what? We don't have electricity. We don't have the internet. We can't shop online. Like this pandemic was brought to you by Amazon and Uber Eats and, you know, like online commerce and being like, wow, good thing. We have this really robust supply chain that recovered fairly quickly because capitalism. And also the internet was rocking and rolling and everyone had broadband and it was working great. And they were upgrading our 5G network outside while this pandemic was going to.

going on. Like, they're out there putting towers up while some of these crazies are burning them down because they think it causes COVID. That's you, United Kingdom. That's looking at you, UK. What happens when all that stuff is gone, right? That is so much worse now because now we don't have clean water. Now we don't have the internet. It's terrible. And one of the things you said really, really important, people not showing up at work. I don't know if people show up at work if the case fatality rate is 10%. Right. You know, I mean, it's like, it's what fear drives you and What makes you say, no, damn it, I'm not going to go work at the grocery store and expose myself to hundreds of people in the course of a day. People ended up and, you know, hats off to them and they were

freaking brave as hell. And, you know, us non-grocery store workers never would have made it without them. But people ultimately did, in big enough numbers, make the judgment that with COVID's fatality rate and with PPE and so forth, I'm willing to show up at work. I don't know if they do it 10% or 15%. It doesn't have to be as high as 50. if the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, or God forbid a worldwide basis, I do believe after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple, just with that because think of everything that depends upon that. If the food supply, the electrical supply, or the law enforcement supply shut off, then kind of all bets are off. And that's what really, really worries me. COVID plus SARS.

death rate might have started pushing us very, very close to those levels. Yeah, it kind of, we don't want to have that John Wickham moment where we're like, uh-oh, plus open the concrete in the garage because there's no cops and now we have to defend. I can't leave the house and go to work or buy food. I'm trying to get people to stop breaking into my house and stealing things like my kids and family members and the food that we have here and the medicine and our medicine cabinet. That's what I'm preoccupied with at that point, if there's anything like that. And I don't know how long it would take for looters to start ransacking things, but how many looters and crazies and

gangs do you really need before you're like, eh, I'm not leaving my family home alone. I'm going to go to work, right? Or the other thing that really frightens me is that there's really only, and this is surprising because you walk in, you just see nothing but abundance. But on the grocery store shelves of the United States, there's really only a few days worth of food there for all of us. We just don't all go at the same time, and they replenish it with incredible efficiency. And so, you know, non-luter, people with non-luter mentalities, but with children that they want to feed or with stomachs that they want to fill, if the grocery stores ain't opening, the supply chains ain't there, I think everybody goes to the local safe way, grabs what they can, and the fact is there's only a few days

worth of stuff there. So it gets really, really terrifying quickly. And again, sorry to be broken record, but like, we can start taking an integrated set of steps now to preclude any future pandemic. And we really need to preclude any future pandemic because it could really be that bad, again, particularly if it's malevolently designed, then you're almost guaranteed it's that bad. Now, you mentioned malevolent design. And that is sort of the next set. here because a pandemic like this could be bioengineered manmade. Some people think COVID is manmade. I'm not sure what the evidence is for that.

I don't really need to go down that road. I don't think we, I think the general consensus is no. But that doesn't really matter because the next one easily could be. And I think people think, well, and this is what I thought before our previous conversation, how the hell are we going to have a, this would be a colossal catastrophe. they have labs. I mean, I've seen those zombie movies where the CDC has doors and it's hermetically sealed and then you can blow it up from the inside, right?

Like, you can't just have something like that leak. Not only can bad stuff leak, it has leaked before. It has. And that was natural stuff. Imagine stuff that's manmade that is not just leaked by accident. This is leaked on purpose. It is taken by a bad actor because a lot of those labs, correct me if I'm wrong, right, they're designed to keep accidental leaks, right? You got to wash off this and you got to

spray that and you got to leave your clothes in here. It's not necessarily designed for, oh, we accidentally hired a nihilistic psychopath and he's had a bad week, so he's going to deliberately circumvent these measures to get a pathogen out of the lab. Like, that could happen. Yeah, you're dead right. And there are a few relatively recent historic examples that prove both of the points that you just made. So first of all, accidentally, the highest biosafety level of that any lab can have is BSL4, biosafety level four. And there aren't a lot of those throughout the world. There's only a handful. And that is the highest level of precaution that's taken. And there's just one example. In the UK, probably about this may be 10, 11 years ago,

I might be off a little bit. There was, as you probably remember, a terrible foot and mouth outbreak that resulted in the destruction of an enormous percentage of the British cattle population. many, many, many billions of dollars lost to the economy as a result of that. So you can now think of the British bioengineering community or just biological safety community being on very freaking high alert for foot and mouth disease, sometime called hoof and mouth disease as well. Despite that, less than a year, I believe, and if it was more than a year, it was barely more than a year, foot and mouth disease leaked out of a biosafety level four lab in England.

And luckily, it didn't cause an outbreak. They caught it, but it leaked out. And they plugged the leak and spun up the lab again. And within 10 days, it leaked again. Wow. This is the highest level of security we can possibly have. And if you start going down to biosefety level 321, not surprisingly, you get more and more accidents. And the second thing you said is unbelievably important.

All of the protections that we take in biosafety level, anything lab, substantially all of them, I should say, are against accidental leaks. But what do you do if there's a malevolent actor? That's not really part of the mentality. That's not the catastrophe they're protecting against. And to give an example of this, which is unbelievable, well, it's actually got a personal cast for me, as I'll mention in a second. Think of the anthrax attacks back in 2011. For those who don't remember them, it's happened right after 9-11. I think it was within a single-digit number of days, and if it wasn't, it was a very low double-digit number of days. And these envelopes containing deadly anthrax spores showed up at a number of government offices,

including that of the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Dashel, and then also some media outlets, including that, bizarrely enough, can't make this up, of the National Inquirer. Now, it turns out these anthrax spores came from a very high-security U.S. Army lab, probably at Fort D. T. Tric, Maryland. It might have been another one. And so think about that. It is very hard to imagine a country at a higher level alert than the United States in the immediate wake of 9-11. Right. And it's hard to imagine an organization more security-minded than the United States military. And our engine, well, not engineered, but kind of like milled and semi-weaponized anthrax spores came from a U.S. Army lab and made their way into the majority

leader's office. And I remember this vividly because I was actually in DASHL's office that week. And remember going to my doctor afterward, you know, asking for Cypro, which is the most powerful antibiotic that you can take without intravenous. That was the thing that could fight off anthrax. And they'd send a member around saying, you should talk to your doctor about this. He's like, oh, my God, I was in San Francisco. That's where I lived. He's like, okay, like, come on. everybody's panicking about this, where it's a Cipro, what symptoms do you have

of having fricking anthrax? I was in the majority leader's office two days ago, and it's like, ooh, hey, here you go. Here you go. So I remember that one. I was right next to the guy who opened the envelope,

but not on the same day that he opened it. Does that count? Yeah, do not come into the office. Here is your script. I'm mainly carrying it over to you. Days before Talaudanin, yeah, exactly. That is crazy.

I've heard of people where was this? I was reading like a Nat Geo article. Apparently anthrax attacks reindeer or it just it occurs, it's in some natural way. And I'm going to. So that's why Christmas didn't happen seven years ago. That's why. Yeah, that's right. The North Pole, that great North Pole anthrax outbreak. That makes sense now. I think they, I've told this on a show before, but it's been years. Apparently they find really, really old, frozen, dead reindeer carcasses in, you know, like Siberia or wherever they have. radio. And some of them have anthrax, and the anthrax spores are fine. They're still totally deadly and infectious. Wow. It doesn't matter how long, or how, you can freeze a spore for hundreds of

years probably. And if you're a reindeer that died in Siberia a thousand years ago or 600 years ago, like, you're still carrying some deadly stuff. And I guess it, oh, I think what it is, is it can live in those animals and they don't die from it. It's kind of like a human carrying, I don't know, mononucleosis or something like that. It's like, eh. Interesting. You know, if you get run down, it does what it does. But apparently it's still super contagious.

So we can find these things naturally. We can leak them accidentally from labs. They can be taken. No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff running out. And they can be taken deliberately from labs, which is even worse. And now next level, or next next next level is now they can be designed by people to be more deadly. Like you can take a flu and make it as contagious.

as the measles and then ratchet up the it's like a role-playing game, right? You roll some and your character's stronger, they use magic, whatever. Now you can mix all of the super-strong, super-deadly, super-contagious viruses together and mutated into one supervirus that honestly probably should never exist. But hey, if you're the guy who shoots people in Las Vegas because you hate your life or you have a brain tumor or whatever the hell was wrong with that guy, or you are the type to crash an airplane into a mountain because you hate your life like the German wings pilot did a few years ago, killing everybody with you, or you're just a regular old

school shooter type of person that has access to this technology. Now you're talking about, or, you know, terrorists. You're talking about that, except for your, we talked about this last time. When you are a nihilistic psycho killer, you're limited by the weapons you have. And I think the example you gave was a Chinese knife attack where like three people get stabbed. Yeah. It's interesting. So there are mass school attacks in China, mass school killings. But because the most deadly, weapons that are available at retail in China are, you know, cleavers and hammers and knives, that's what these attacks are carried out with. And there was a spate of, I remember if it's 10 and 11, 12, something like that, there was a spate of these school attacks in China over a period

of about two years. And by just this very sort of chilling coincidence, the last one was just hours before the Sandy Hook attack. And so you have a dozen-ish attacks in China, which collectively had fewer casualties than Sandy Hook, because Sandy Hook was carried out with a semi-automatic weapon. Sandy Hook had far, far, far fewer casualties than the German Wings pilot, you mentioned, another suicidal mass murderer.

So I use the term suicidal mass murderer for these types of people. The German Wings pilot killed more people than any mass shooter in history because his weapon was an airplane. And so what we see is society just produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year, cross countries, cross societies, who for whatever reason go to such a dark place that they

become suicidal mass murderers. And their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multiplier. And just as whenever the first mass shooting happened, let's say it was before the Wright brothers, I don't know. But whenever that happened, people weren't thinking there's going to be these flying, you know, chunks of metal that are going to take out way more people in the future. And now we live in an era in which there have been at least four commercial pilots who've done what the German wings pilot did that I personally know of. And maybe there are a couple more I'm not aware of. And it's hard for us to imagine the next thing, but the next thing is going to happen. And it's impossible for me to imagine a weapon that could actually be wielded by a lone individual that could be anywhere near,

destructive as synthetic biology. And synthetic biology is an unbelievably promising realm. It has the potential and indeed probably will at some point cure cancer, make the world a much greener place. It's an incredible domain, but it's also an amoral technology. It doesn't care any more than a virus, what happens. And so we do need to exert our imaginations and think about worst case scenarios that could plausibly happen in the 10, 15, 20 years scenario as this 10, 10, 20 years scenario as this technology rapidly, rapidly improves and protect ourselves against that. The thing that you mentioned about taking all the worst aspects of a diversity of diseases and cobbling it into one, at this moment as we're speaking, that may be beyond the capabilities of even the most brilliant

sin bio professors. I'll use sin bio as an abbreviation for synthetic biology. And just a quick definition, synthetic biology is making creatures that have not and probably will never be created by nature by manipulating generally by manipulating nucleic acid, RNA, DNA, right? So what you describe, that nightmare scenario may be within the capabilities of a few extremely brilliant people right now, or may not be, I'm not certain. But what I can tell you is this technology is improving so rapidly and it's proliferating so rapidly that at some point a lot of people are going to be capable of that. And we just need one of them to be somebody who goes off the rails in a Sandy Hook or Las Vegas shooter or German wings like manner. Yeah, that's what's the most terrifying

about it, right? Because you don't need, you explained this before in your, uh, your monologue with Sam Harris, which I guess is a monologue and a dialogue at the same time. You mentioned this is, like, you don't need to be an engineer to use a gun. Right. Right. You don't need to be a, a, knife maker to stab someone, but you also then... You don't need to work at Boeing to crash a plane, all of that. Yeah, but you also won't need to be a virologist to maybe print or create a new disease. And that's kind of what's really scary about this, because, yes, we might only need one of those people, but what happens when the technology evolves another step and we have,

I think last time we kind of were calling them 3D DNA printer or DNA printing or what was the term you used? It was essentially just DNA printing. We can call it a DNA printer. It's a shorthand, and people who are deeply technical in this area might resent it, but let's use it because it's nice common English and we can understand it. What you can do already in certain lab settings is if you've got the blueprint of a critter, you know, this is its DNA.

You can basically synthesize that DNA, crank out that DNA sequence. Now, it's a whole other step, and for now not an easy one, but it will get easier, to take that DNA and use it to animate, you know, the shell of a critter. And again, I'm simplifying a lot, but it's doable. It has been done. It's done a lot. And it's going to get cheaper and easier and more widespread. So I'll use two quick examples here. There is an amazingly cool thing. I'm not going to denigrate this at all, called IGM, which stands for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition or something like that. It's sort of a SynBiojamboree that spun out of MIT and features teams,

of college and high school kids doing really cool things with SynBio. Some of the things that are being done by high school kids today probably couldn't have been done by the greatest minds in life sciences 20 years ago because the tools have gotten to the point. We did things like CRISPR for editing DNA, which is so much radically more powerful than anything that preceded it. And it's only a few years old. And we already have post-Krisper tools that are out there. And these tools are getting better and easier to use. They're proliferating down to the high school level. Now, it ain't possible for a high school kid to do the scary thing that we described, but it is possible for a high school kid to do things that would have alluded even the top scientists just a few decades ago. So that's not one thing to think

about. We think about proliferation. In terms of speed, as you know, an example I always like to cite is the human genome project. That was a 13-year, $3 billion project to sequence, which is a fancy way of saying to read a solitary human genome. And if you really want to be technical, it was kind of half of a human genome, but won't get into that. Three billion dollar, 13 year project ended in 2003. That's not all that long ago. I mean, that's, you know, like Bush was president, like Friends was probably on the air. Like this, we're not talking about something like the Coolidge administration. So in the 18 years since that, it's gone from costing three billion dollars to read out a human genome to costing three hundred.

that is a $10 million to one price compression. That is the rapidity with which SynBiotechnology is improving. We can call it, some call it an exponential technology with another famous exponential technology being computing. And we all know how impossible it would have been to foresee today's society, let's say 30 years ago, with respect to computing. And we're moving that fast with SynBio and other life sciences. You're listening. You're listening. to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rob Reed. We'll be right right back. Now back to Rob Reed on the Jordan Harbinger show. That the speed is incredible. The 10 million to one sort of price drop right now,

spitting into a little plastic test tube from 23 and me and having them do this kind of for me. It's just, I know it's not apples to apples. It's not quite the same thing, but it really is, it really is incredible. And I remember seeing on, I don't know, the news 2020, whatever it was back in the day when I was a kid, like 11, 12. And they're like, this is a video telephone. It's $2,000 and you need special telephone lines to use it. So you can't use it even if you bought one right now from your house. But you can see, and it showed like this grainy little tiny, tiny screen.

It was black and white and it's like, you know. It looked like a proof of life city probably, right? Yeah, yeah. It was like something you would expect to see off of like a crappy Nokia phone from the 90s. in the dark, like those like really, and it's like, this is the future. And now everyone has 1080p, 4K, whatever, filming and wireless streaming capability of their pocket. And we're not that far along. That's the change in technology that we can see and that we can hold and that we use every day. Other technologies are developing as fast as this or faster or around the same rate,

right? So just because we don't use it every day doesn't mean that it's not improving at the same rate. And I think that's important to know because a lot of people think, well, if it took them that long to do this, why would they be improving this much? Well, everything really is, which to me means that this is going to sneak up on us. This is going to sneak up on our society. Now that genome sequences, and by the way, these things, I thought genome sequences were like a million, bajillion characters long. They can fit on pieces of paper if you're handwriting them. You can handwrite it. It wouldn't take you all day. It's like this is just a Post-it note plus size bit of code. And once that gene sequence is created a super deadly virus or any sort of gene

sequence, any idiot soon can print it. And we know that from like Napster and BitTorrent that once you leak the movie, the new Sony release, you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube and the toothpaste always comes out of the tube, right? Yeah, that's an unbelievably important point. And so if we have, let's say, good guy virologists making super deadly pathogens because they want to understand what, you know, bad guys might do, let's just take that as a scenario and it's not an implausible one. And in fact, something very much like that has already happened. But if that happens, or maybe it's an academic, maybe it's, you know, just a postdoc student or a master student doing a thesis in which they sort of amplify the deadliness of a particular pathogen to talk about the metabolic. metabolic pathways and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they do that in a very, you know, secure enough lab. And we're lucky enough it doesn't do what anthrax did in the BSL4 lab. And they publish that genome because it's going to be talking about that.

Every virus is a virus, but it's also a tiny packet of information. And, you know, that's true of any critter, but it's particularly true of viruses because their encapsulation is so simple, whereas the encapsulation of a human body and all off our organs, it's a little bit trickier. But any virus that is engineered to be profoundly deadly and is exterminated and never leaks from the lab, blah, blah, blah, if that data file, and as you said, it's minuscule. Miniscule data file gets hacked. And we know all networks are hackable.

At some point in the intermediate future, it will become a trivial exercise for somebody to reanimate that information. Definitely not today. There are some who could do that today. And they probably number in the hundreds, which is scary, but they tend to be successful careerists in life sciences, and they tend not to take machine guns to hotel rooms in Las Vegas, right? So we're already counting on an awful lot of people to not go rogue on us, but it's a containable group and a sort of self-selected group of folks who are maybe less likely to do that than

the average person. But that information gets out there. And like you said, gets hacked and gets bit tormented. And we know people would find that really cool and sexy. and badass to have that bit of information and may not think it's such a bad thing because today it's unlikely anybody would do something with that. Once that gets out, man, it's everywhere.

And we need to worry about that intermediate future when somebody like the Vegas shooter who probably didn't know squat about ballistics, his equivalent could come across that information, treat it as a bullet, hit print, and send it out in the world. And again, I'm simplifying, but that is the risk we need to think very, very seriously about. And we know we can't contain information

not only because we've all seen a leaked movie at one point in our lives, even if we're not the person who does that bit torrenting in our house. It's like your cousin knows how to do it. And he always gives you the, he always sends you a flash drive with that stuff when he comes over. You can call him and he'll download the latest thing. Didn't someone post the 1918 flu genome on the internet? And it wasn't like a rogue hacker. It was somebody who should know better. Yeah. So there were two disastrous mistakes when it comes to posting. genomes to the internet. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID, tens of millions of deaths, I think worldwide were well into, you know, we're still very much

in the single digits with COVID. And the smallpox genome. Both of those are online and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. And when they were posted, not all that long ago, it was possible for anybody with some foresight to realize that the time would, you know, soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And I'm embarrassed to have forgotten which one it was. I think it was 1918 flu. One of the two was posted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Right? Yeah. Now, talk about an entity like the FDA as part of their empire, the CDC, countless other organizations. They had all the life sciences horsepower necessary to know that this was an absolutely boneheaded idea. And, really,

Ray Kurzweil, who's a brilliant guy and the father of exponential thinking, at the time, put out a press releasing, please don't do this. Life sciences and SynBio is an exponential technology. Within a decade or two, people will be able to do, will be able to reanimate this stuff. And there is a professor up in Alberta somewhere in Canada, and I apologize if I got the city wrong, who ended up partially to warn his colleagues and warn the world that, hey, guys, this is possible. He ended up reanimating or creating from scratch, I should say, something called horsepox. Horsepox is, you know, not something that can infect or, you know, damage people, but for, you know, a low budget, I think it might have been 100 grand or so, and with some essentially

mail-order DNA, and with the tools that a very good academic virologist has at his disposal, you know, dozens, maybe hundreds of people could do this, not gazillions. He created horsepox, which is within an rounding error in terms of the size and the complexity of the smallpox virus. So he didn't create smallpox, but in creating horsepox, he made it unbelievably clear to the entire life sciences community that it is entirely possible for somebody with the right tools and sophistication to create smallpox right now. And that was several years ago. And that capability, if we say at that point was limited to a few dozen, you know, academic virologists, probably within a rounding air, maybe a couple hundred back then. It's definitely something that a larger group of people could do,

probably, you know, several hundred, maybe even thousands of PhD or postdoctoral students, and it's going to proliferate further and further and further. These are packets of information and the ability of the people in the near future to do whatever the hell they want with that information is essentially unlimited. You did get the city wrong because Alberta is a province, So who I blew that? You can tell we're Americans because we don't even know what difference between it. I thought he was in the province of Alberta, one of the universities. Okay, gosh, yeah, the Canadians have every right to land basing for that, and I apologize.

You're an expert on what now? What's that? Not Canadian geography. No. This is just as terrifying as our geography skills. Talk about gain of function research. We sort of skipped over that. It probably should have been mentioned earlier in the show, but this is even scarier because

we think, oh my God, it would take a real psycho to design a really nasty bug or, you know, okay, someone's designing horsepox, but they're doing it to prove a point, which is that nobody should have the tech that's able to produce something like horsepox. But gain of function research is kind of like, we're just inventing this to show, but why don't you describe it? I'm going to butcher it. And also, I'm not even entirely sure here. Yeah, yeah. So gain of function research is sometimes abbreviated GOF, sometimes DOFR. Gain a function is basically taking an existing pathogen and amplifying its mojo. And I'm saying mojo rather than lethality

because you may not be making it more lethal. You may be making it more contagious. You may be extending the asymptomatic period. You know, there's a number of things you could be doing, but basically enhancing the lethality profile of that pathogen. You're adding a spoiler and rims to it, basically. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Got it. And, you know, maybe, you know, gazillions of cc's of engine because you can make this thing really bad, really terrifying. Why is it done? It's generally done by people who say, I'm doing this so we could see what nature might deal us in the future, or I'm doing this because I'm a good guy and bad guys might do this, or, you know, insert your answer here. And I find those justifications reasonable up to a point. I do think that the people who engage in this have been overwhelmingly good guys thus far with motivations that made sense to them and probably make sense to a large portion of the scientific community. it falls down is something we already talked about, which is the impossibility of keeping any lab from leaking, even when everybody has the best of all possible intentions. And we know that a certain slumber of the world doesn't, right? And so the most frightening example of this to me was the amplification, the gain of function of something called H5N1 flu, which I mentioned very briefly earlier.

H5N1 is a version of the flu that infects birds. It does infect people, but it's not at all. contagious between people. So a few hundred people, I think it was the UN, I forget what source I attract, but over a decade, they documented every single human H5N1 death and it was something in the neighborhood of a few hundred, right? So it's like people who are duck farmers or something get it from their waterfowl? Generally chicken farmers. Yeah, generally chicken farmers. People who are incredibly close contact with a population of birds that turn out to have been infected. It can jump, but it's really close contact. It's not aerosolized contacts. I don't know what they're doing with those birds. But it's not, yeah, good question. It's not something that they breathe in. So it's

very, very rare. And I think the time frame under consideration was decade. And I think I found out that during that decade, 500-ish killed by H5M1, 70,000 killed by lightning worldwide. So we're talking rare. Now, what happened in 2011, so very, very long time ago in the world of an exponential technology like Zinbiol is a two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves to do gain a function research on H5N1. And they basically made it transmissible through the air. So we don't know how contagious it would be amongst humans because obviously they didn't infect humans with this thing. But what we do know is that it kills when it infects somebody 50 to 60 percent of the people that it infects. And these two independent teams made it

capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath. Now, again, if you ask them, they'd say we're good guys, we're virologists, we're trying to figure out what might happen with this thing. The big problem is these were BSL level three labs, and we already know that BSL level four labs leak, and this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. There is, in my mind, absolutely no justification whatsoever to create that. Because it's not like you're beating the bad guys to the punch and figuring out how to disable it. There are, when we know how many variants there are of COVID,

there are gazillions of conceivably, you know, configured H5N1 that could be contagious. So by creating one of them in a lab and a BSL3 lab, taking the risk that it gets out, it's not like you're creating the one thing the bad guys can create so you can foil it. No, you're creating something. And when folks say, oh, well, you know,

this is just what nature's capable of. I'm sorry. nature has had X hundred thousand years of human history to create an aeroslized version of H5N1 and ain't done it yet. So there is, in my mind, absolutely no justification for that. Now, these two groups, one of them was about to get their paper in scientists, and one of them was about to get their paper in nature. These are the two leading publications in the entire scientific community. It's like a lifetime achievement to get a paper in either of those publications. And the U.S. government basically stepped in and said, no, okay?

Like, you can't put this out. And there, gosh, it's a long word. It's a long name. And the acronym is even like 20 syllables. But it's something like the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity came out and with like a freak out statement about this. And everybody caught their breath and for a while, this is 2011. What happened since then is these papers did ultimately get published.

And the United States government paused its own funding of gain of function research for a period of a few years. Paused. And also said nothing about private gain of function research. Didn't make it illegal or anything. This is just U.S. only, right? So there was a pause for a few years. That pause eventually gets lifted. And just about a year ago, those two particular projects got renewed United States government funding.

So this stuff goes on. And there are no holds barred on this. And there is, we talked about it briefly, and I don't know the answer to this, so I don't want to speculate on it deeply either. But there is a school of thought out there that is, you know, held by some pretty smart and responsible scientists and others that say that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level four lab, was practicing gain a function with coronavirus. If that is true, or if that was true, it makes sense. Coronavirus is, you know, SARS came out of China. COVID came out of China, you have the animal vectors, the zoonotic virus vectors, that could cause another coronavirus to leap from, you know, critters to humans. It wouldn't be in a world that's

okay with gain of function research, which is the world that we live in. It wouldn't at all be crazy for the Chinese government to experiment with gain of function with coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Is that the origin of COVID? I don't know. I don't want to speculate. There are some we think, no, I think you're, you correctly cited that the consensus seems to be no, but there are smart people who think, yes, whatever that is, we can't have a world that practices gain of function. Whether COVID was a gain of function thing or not, the fact that H5N1 never escaped from those bio-safety level three labs, notwithstanding, we simply cannot be creating pathogens like that because every lab can leak. Right. And at that point, was it Enrico

Fermi, who says any civilization given enough time basically blows? themselves up, like this is kind of how that might happen, more so than the nuclear option. Easily. Yeah, when the Drake equation was originally created by Frank Drake, trying to estimate the number of civilizations that might be, you know, alive in the galaxy, there was a number in that equation, which was represented by the letter L, which is how long after a civilization becomes capable of communicating via radio telescopes, which is how we were hoping to hear from these aliens, how soon after it develops that capability does it end? And that's a chilling thing to think about. And the number that you put into L in the Drake equation has profound impact on how many

civilizations, technologically advanced civilizations, you believe there might be in the Milky Way galaxy. At that time, as you noted, all the thinking was about nuclear war for good reasons is like early 60s. These days, yes, to me, this is a massively, massively more likely. way for us to bite the dust. Because with nuclear war, bad as the Cold War was and terrified as those of us who grew up during it were during our childhood, ultimately, twoish people had the red button. The world spent trillions of dollars deterring those twoish people. You know, Prushchev and Kennedy, Brezhnev and Reagan, pick your pair. I say twoish because there were other nuclear powers and maybe a high general would grab the button. Let's say twoish people. We spent

trillions of dollars on diplomacy, on regional wars like Vietnam, on, you know, detection, things like NORAD, on immense nuclear stockpiles to deter those two people from hitting the red button, thank God it worked. But it was just two people who generally worked their way methodically through society to a very high level and had no interest in destroying the world. We're probably at a point where hundreds, not two, but hundreds of people could recreate smallpox to an end the world, but holy cow, right? So it's the proliferation, the sheer number of people with red buttons that we need to worry about, which is why I personally think sin bio in the wrong hands is a much bigger risk than nuclear war. And we're not necessarily primed to handle things really well.

I mean, look, humanity has done a pretty incredible job getting a vaccine together for COVID-19. Our supply chains held up, as we mentioned before. We have this robust internet and all these other things that might break in the face of a more severe pandemic. But COVID really was our dress rehearsal for something worse. And we politicized it. We ran out of PPE. We went back and forth on masks and created all this vaccine hesitancy because of that and because of other negative disinformation and craziness that's out there. It's not super promising that if we hit something that's worse, we're going to handle it better than we did this time. Right. Right. Right. And it's like, you know, if you go through the history of, you know, significant wars between nation states, you find they're always fighting the last war, preparing for the last war. And the pattern is unbelievably stark. And it's a really interesting thing to read about if you're interested in geopolitics and the history of warfare. You know, my worry is that we're going to come out of COVID preparing for the last pandemic rather than the next pandemic. And all we know about the next pandemic is two things. A, it's coming for sure at

some point. And B, it's going to be very different from COVID in ways that we can't precisely predict, but we need to take very broad spectrum, robust, agile countermeasures and build a very agile and robust and intelligent and tightly coupled anti-pandemic or just anti-dise infrastructure that we're kind of ready for anything, you know, rather than being like the French, you know, right before World War II, who had built. imagine a line because they were expecting the next war to be just like the trench warfare of World War I. We can't go there. Right.

So for people that don't know, the French built a massive system of what, like, anti-tank barricades and trenches so that the Germans couldn't roll in again? Yeah, walls and trenches and so forth that were very well envisioned for trench warfare, which was what World War I was. But World War II was mechanized. So now they didn't envision tanks. They didn't envisage Panzer units, you know, Blitzkrieg, the whole. whole nine. They were readying for the last war, not because they were dumb, but because they were

human and they were military people. And, you know, that's like I said, stretches deep into the history of warfare where people are just so wired by the last war to prepare, when they're preparing for the next one, that they just don't foresee the changes in technology or the changes in deadliness of warfare that have occurred over the last half-generation, generation, or two generations. Yeah, walls aren't that great when you can just fly over them and then roll over the rest your trenches with giant tanks. Yeah. So this makes a lot of sense, right? We're going to go, all right, we need more PPE and we need to make sure that we strengthen our supply chains and do domestic manufacturing. All a good idea, right? All of which we must do, yeah. But like maybe we're

missing something and chances are we are missing something and we just don't know what that is. Right. Like, all right, we have tons of ICU ventilators now. Oops, it's not a respiratory pandemic. Now what, right? Yeah. And I think the biggie that we're most likely to miss is the artificial threat. And that is something that we can do an enormous amount to, if not entirely, there's no way to make it impossible. There's no way to foil it perfectly. But we could make it, you know, 99. Something percent harder. And very often that's enough. You know, and I point to you, like, everybody loves to joke, not everybody. We all have a friend who likes to say, oh, my God, the TSA people are so stupid. I could hijack a plane tomorrow if I wanted to. And it's like, you can say that all you want. But there hasn't

been a single domestic hijacking of an American plane since 9-11. So we didn't make it impossible to hijack a plane with the TSA and at least as important, if not more important, hardening cockpit doors. I'm sure it's possible. We just made us a goddamn hard that most people don't bother. You know, those who might have hijacked a plane in the past don't bother. Interesting analogy there, or just historic fact. In the late 60s and early 70s, in the United States, there were hundreds of domestic hijackings. Like hundreds of them, literally, it staggers the mind. Now, most of them were kind of like leftist activists who wanted to go to Cuba. And it got so bad that the Cuban government literally created a dormitory for wayward American hijackers. Not the passengers.

They set the passengers right back. But for the freaking hijackers, because so many of them were coming to Cuba, they needed someplace to live. And so, you know, things can be done on a whim and get done a great deal. And again, there's somewhere between 100 and 200 hijackings, I think, in the span of roughly five or six years. At some point, you say, you know what? You know, let's do something between performance art and a real deterrent. And in the early 70s, the first metal detectors went into place.

It was nowhere near as well organized or as professionalized as the TSA. but that brought the ambient level of hijackings almost to zero. Now, obviously, it wasn't professionalized or as tightly integrated enough to protect 9-11, but that happened decades later. It just shows you that some common-sensical precautions can do an enormous amount to take something out of the realm of whim by an average person and make it something that has to be a long, methodical plan by a really smart person that just narrows the aperture enormously.

So a lot of people are going to say, all right, I know you probably can't do this, but why can't we just ban it? Right. Why can't we just say, okay, moratorium on all this, it's too dangerous? And the reason is twofold. First, we have so much to gain from Sin Bio. I said it before, and I'll repeat it just because this message is unbelievably important. We cannot demonize synthetic biology because it holds so much, much promise in the war against

disease, in the war against animal degradation. I'm sorry, in the world of environmental degradation, in the world of limiting animal suffering, in the world of wellness. There's just so much promise in CINBio. So we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, A. And B, this genie's out of the bottom. The nuclear anti-proliferation infrastructure in the world worked imperfectly but reasonably well, when it was put into place. There have been a couple countries that have obtained nuclear weapons, most notably, well, probably exclusively, North Korea, Pakistan and India, since nonproliferation became a globally adhered to policy. But it takes a nation state to create a nuclear weapon. It's very, you can't do it invisibly. It requires an enormous industrial infrastructure.

Sinbio can be practiced invisibly. It can be practiced in trailers and tiny labs. And so a ban is impossible for that reason. I mean, how many meth labs are through the world. I was just going to say, it's like the meth lab of pharmaceutical, If meth lab is to pharmaceutical, as CINBio is to actual farm our nuclear programs, yeah. Meth labs are illegal everywhere. I don't know how many gazillions or thousands or whatever it is there are, but the Cynbiolab doesn't have to be any bigger than a meth lab. I mean, it can be, but there are also some giant meth labs out there, they're illegal

and they're still operating. The other thing is, you know, if we think of ourselves as good guys, whatever your country, you know, if you're from, you know, a free market oriented democracy or even another country, you think you guys are good guys, you can't trust the other 200 countries in the world to just suspend synthetic biology because you have. And so to put this through a Feroquial American lens, if the U.S. enacted a blanket ban on Smbio, I can't imagine that China would. I can't imagine that North Korea would. I can't imagine the number of other countries would be, so you're basically disarming yourself unilaterally. Because countermeasures can certainly

be developed and explored with the same expertise that, you know, powers in bio itself. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rob Reed. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more and get links to the great discounts you've just heard so you can check out the sponsors for yourself,

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slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Rob Reed. So what can be done about this, right? There's a lot of upside. We don't want to ban it. Right. What can we do to sort of limit the downsides, right? Early detection of some sort, I would assume, comes into play here. Oh, lots of things. Yeah. So the very first thing that we can do, we already are to a limited degree, well, not to a limited degree, to significant degree, is create a DNA synthesis infrastructure that prohibits the creation of anything that is deadly, unless the person who is creating that potentially deadly thing is extremely well-credentialed, well-known, well-trusted, and is doing it for an exceptionally good reason.

And so most DNA today is produced not in individual laboratories of individual scientists, but it's created in a handful of relatively large service labs that do that and do it exclusively and do it very well. And so, you know, I'll mention a very good one, twist biosciences. Publicly traded company, they have very, very good protective measures. They're a member of an organization called the IGSC. I think it's the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, which has been around for a long time, actually, like 10, 11 years, maybe a little bit more than that.

And IGSE members adhere to a certain set of common practices. to prohibit the distribution of lethal DNA. And so basically, I won't get into all the details, but there's sort of a red, yellow, green flagging of every order that comes into an IGSC member. And the IGSM members claim, and I'll get back to that word claim in a moment, that they represent about 80% of the world's DNA synthesis capacity.

Okay? So if you're ordering from Twist Biosciences and you order something scary and weird, it's either going to get a yellow or red flag. And they're going to go deep into that. And these companies employ very large teams of PhDs and near PhDs in bioinformatics to do this work. So it is a real investment that's being made. The problem is that 80% thing and that word claim.

An analogy I used in the thing with Sam Harris, which I'm fond of because it's funny and it's real, is I grew up in southwestern Connecticut and in my sort of, let's say, six or seven town area, there was precisely one liquor store that very, very reliably sold, to teens. And for a while there, there may as well have been no drinking age. Even though there was 99% compliance with the alcohol laws in our seven-town area, any beer enthusiast under the age of 21 sure knew where to go to get beer, right? Now imagine 80% compliance. You know, if 20% of the DNA synthesis capacity out there doesn't give a damn, that is a hole that is so gaping you might as well not even bother the other 80%.

And the 80%, I talked to a bunch of IGSC members in research. Nobody actually knows where that number came from. It was probably an educated guess back when the IGSC was founded, and it kind of gets repeated because it's a good number. But it's probably way less than that. There's only one member, one IGSC member in all of China.

And China has a lot of DNA synthesis capability. So you need to take that. And instead of making that voluntary, you need to make that absolutely militantly required. In all countries of the world, there needs to be firm agreement that we're going to have this regulated pathogen database, and we're going to make this required. And the reason for that is, A, the one liquor store example, and B, people are increasingly opting out of the IGSC because the cost of screening an order has remained constant. It takes intelligent bioinformaticians to screen an

order, whereas we know the prices are plummeting for this stuff. And so the percentage of the cost of an order is growing and growing and growing. And it's getting to the point where you can't be economically competitive if you actually obey these rules. So we need to make these rules. Your order is 50 bucks, but screening it is $385 and up. And people are just going to go, you know, we can't compete with other labs that aren't screening, so we're just not going to screen. Yeah. And this lab with a post office box and Cayman Islands, and God knows where the lab is, is just charging you 50 bucks, right? So I say this, I got to preface this. I am a really free market foreign. person, and I look at a great deal of regulation with great skepticism. So any listeners who are

rebelling at the idea of government interference and so forth, I'm generally with you, but we can't take that chance here. So that's thing number one. Now, thing number two is really kind of cool and interesting on a certain level, but it's scary on another, but it has a happy ending. Thing number two is that in the history of technology, and not just computer technology, but technology, there tends to be a migration from what I call the center to the edge. Okay, and you use one vivid example, you know, back when our great grandparents were walking around, if you wanted a family portrait, unless you were very wealthy, you went to a specialized place where a specialized technician with specialized expensive gear, cameras and so forth,

and knew how to operate that fussy gear and made the capital investment in it, would take a picture of you. Obviously, we don't even go to places to get photos printed anymore. That migrated from the center, you know, the local photographer to the edge, which is basically anybody with the telephone. There are countless examples. One other that's kind of fun is if you wanted to tend. People have been sending text messages since long before any living person was born. They just used to be called telegrams.

And so if you wanted to send a text message, you could do it. Probably couldn't put an emojis on it. But you would go to this highly, highly centralized infrastructure. And it certainly happened in gazillions of areas with respect to computing. Computing used to be something that happened in a very, very much. very big and expensive academic computing center or private computing center, government computing center, and any computing that needed to be done went to those places. So what we have to worry about with CBIO, I believe, and everybody who's an IGSMC member that

I talked to said, impossible when I floated this prediction by them. But basically, I said, guys, you've got a sell-by date, right? DNA printers, lab-based printers at some point are going to be able to do everything that you do at a hundredth of price. Naturally, the IGC members spell at that, but, you know, this is already starting to happen. So the best DNA synthesizer out there right now is called the BioXP. And Google it's really cool, unbelievably expensive, train in high schools, it's in places that can afford it, and its capabilities lag well below those of a twist bioscience, a great company. But man, that is, the thing of that is the Apple One. That thing is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper and more and

widespread, and it is eventually the descendants of the BioXP, which does DNA synthesis at the edge, in the lab, you know, whatever you want to make, is going to be in high schools, maybe even middle schools. Now, the great news is that the BioXP is made by an IGSC member, and they are very responsible. And before that thing prints anything, it sends a signal back to the mother's ship to make sure that this is not a diabolical code that's being made. What we need to make sure is that Every competitor of the bioXP and every descend of the bioXP does that too and refuses to print something that is lethal. This is all very doable. The IGSC is already out there. It works pretty goddamn well. The bioXP, the printer, already follows this protocol with the right regulation and the right willpower

and the right participation from industry, which doesn't want a deadly pathogen anymore than the rest of us. this could be of like our TSA and hardened cockpit doors, something that makes it not impossible, but really, really, really hard to make something diabolical. Now, the interesting thing to ask ourselves is, what about the horsepox guy? He didn't use a bio-XP. You know, he assembled that thing because he's freaking brilliant.

You know, he's been working with, you know, various microbes for a long time, and he was able to do that. Isn't he going to be able to do that 15 years from now? The answer is, yes, of course. But the future generations, and probably a lot of people who are postdoc students today, will carry forward that capability. But as things like the future bioXP become incredibly widespread, future students, future postdocs and eventually future professors will never have had that weird, fiddly, complicated wet lab experience of creating something from scratch because

that was the only option, that knowledge and know-how and even lab equipment and so far. forth, will die out eventually. And meanwhile, it will be in a limited set of minds. So again, this is like the TSA and Harden Cockpick Doors, doesn't make it impossible, but we've got a great starting point and could make it so difficult for somebody. You have to do something on your own, and that's not going to ever be widespread capability or knowledge. In your longer piece, again, on Sam Harris, and we'll link to that in the show notes,

You mentioned that we can look at Google search data because people search for things like, why is my nose bleeding and I'm sneezing? Or like, why, like, horse cough seven days. You know, we can look at these search results and sort of map diseases. One day we may be able to breathe into our phones for a little checkup, depending on what we have floating around in our respiratory tract. We basically need something like a NORAD, you know, where we were looking for nuclear missiles coming from Russia or wherever else. We need something like a NORAD for diseases. and it's just cool to look at all these systems that may one day, well, unfortunately need to exist. And even special UVC lights that could be LED-based, you know, that can disinfect entire rooms

that hopefully people aren't in. Although it looks like maybe even we will be able to be in there because it can't penetrate our skin. Just really cool tech that germaphobes like me can really get into. But also just the idea that it's not going to be a war that we can't win as long as we sort of like get a head start and realize this might be coming, because by the time the pathogen hits, if it's 50% lethal and it's going to take us two years to come up with the vaccine, we're totally screwed. Yeah, and I'm really glad you brought those precise things up.

So in the long talk with Sam, I basically frame things, and I'll frame them now, in terms of an immune system, our immune systems are unbelievably effective. They fight off countless pathogens that we encounter with hardly breaking a sweat all the time. We get sick rarely, if we're lucky. And they work because, again, they're very, they're multi-layered, they're incredibly agile, and they're very, very, very good at dealing with novel things that the immune system to anthropomorphize it didn't anticipate it. And so I kind of talk about a five-layer immune system, and I won't go into all of that detail here, but one of them is hardening up our sin by our infrastructure, which we just talked about. And another one, a very, very important one is detection. And there's

lots of layers to detection. And this is where it gets kind of cool and things. And fun and exciting because we're talking about, we're talking about agency, we're talking about our ability to fight this thing off. And we're also talking about really cool and interesting science. And so to use the Google search thing that you mentioned, one of the most mind-boggling articles that I read during COVID, I mean, just maybe it wasn't objectively mind-boggling, but it really seized my imagination. It was pretty early in the crisis. I'd say maybe April or May, a guy named Seth Stevens Dividowitz, who's a data scientist and a Google alum and a best-selling author or your bestselling author, he said very well.

He's got a great book called Everybody Lies. He wrote this article for the New York Times, is also New York Times contributor, about the symptom of losing one's smell. And if this was early enough that that symptom, God, I'm sure you might have been the same way. I was reading four or five hours of COVID news per day in the early going. I just couldn't rip myself away from that crap.

And this was at a time, I remember vividly, I Can't Smell was barely hitting the radar. And it was being regarded by epidemiologists with some skepticism because it was kind of weird and it was new. Seth did this incredible data regression where Google is very generous in making search volume and search geography. So the number of times certain queries are typed in and the region, the countries, in some cases, narrow geographies where they're typed in, available to data scientists like Seth. And he plotted this immaculate correlation between. people searching, I can't smell, and the prevalence of COVID. I interviewed him just a quick plug and forgive me. I have my own podcast, as you know, it's called the after on podcast. And after a bit of a

hiatus, long hiatus actually has doing other stuff, I just relaunched it about a week and a half ago. And the first episode is a long interview with Seth. And a part of that interview, not all of it, is how can we use? He's just one brilliant guy using information that Google is kind enough to make it available to him. How could we be really serious on a national or global level to track all kinds of search terms, all kinds of symptoms, connected all kinds of diseases and also symptom clusters? Like, I'm sure I can't smell, you know, dry cough and, you know, pick your other weird COVID symptom. I'll bet there's a trio of symptoms that had never occurred before in any other disease. And you start seeing novel clusters popping up in different places. Yeah, why don't we make

something like NORAD. And with the cooperation of Google and I guess there are their search engines Bing, I don't know, and with a cooperation of China and Russia and all the great small powers of the world to create this kind of monitoring system, there'd be big, big challenges to that. But it could be something that's really, really powerful. And there's another researcher named Bill Lampos. I think it's University College London, who I did an sort of email interview with. He did work where he was able to detect, this is early in COVID, a national outbreaks in countries, on average, 16 days before the public health data indicated that an outbreak was happening by using search data. A 16-day warning could be unbelievably powerful in life-saving if we, you know,

get really good at mastering this kind of technology. So that is one of many layers of detection, all of which are intriguing and exciting science, that we can and should implement. And the budgets are trivial for these kinds of things compared to the costs of bad stuff actually happen. To me, it's interesting that this technology has so many upsides. I mean, it's really exciting, right? Ironically, or coincidentally, I guess, printing, well, no, ironically, printing vaccines at home, or at least printing them at pharmacies and getting the distribution out there. Like, right now we're looking at COVID vaccine and it's like, oh my gosh, we can't make enough of these. We got to ship them. They got to be cold. They've got to be fresh. You've got to line up. You got to do

this, they have at-risk people, and there's only, we need these giant centers and they need to be administered by qualified personnel, and those people have to be in the same place, but we don't want to gather people because it's a freaking pandemic, so that's dangerous. Then it'll be like, actually, every CVS has one of these, every Walgreens has one of these, there's a nurse who can give you the shot at every one of these. There's a pharmacist who's going to make sure the machine doesn't break or attack at every one of these. They're all wearing PPE that maybe even they were able to 3D print on some other machine. You walk in there, they have printed, and did a bunch of these all night or for the past two days or however long these machines

take to print your doors. Maybe they even do it when you walk in. Who knows how fast these things are at that time. And it goes in the machine, comes out into the dose. They throw it in the syringe. They give you the jab and you're out of there and you don't need to refrigerate it. And it doesn't get thrown away. And there's not excess ingredients that end up getting chucked because it's all in the machine. That's what SynBiotechnology is going to bring us while also potentially bringing us the pandemic that is why we need the vaccination from that machine in the first place. Yeah, and that is such a, that's another electrifying, cool, fabulous technology that you just brought up. So thank you for doing that. So the bio XP, the DNA printer that I talked about,

was invented by a brilliant man named Dan Gibson. He co-founded the company that manufactures it. He literally, and he tells the story, he's got a TED Talk, it's worth Googling. In his TED Talk and his interview with me, but I never published the interview, he basically, he basically, reveals that he created this machine specifically with the idea of what he calls teleporting vaccines in mind. That is the end case of the future, future biotspe that he wants to have. And it's exactly that. What if you could print the vaccine that the world needs at every pharmacy, every doctor's office, and eventually in every home, you don't have all those problems that you talked about. And talk about either venture capital investment or public investment.

This thing is already out there. The vision is already there in the brain of the inventor. With a small amount of basic science research and funding and so forth, we could advance, these printers are going to advance at their own pace and the natural pace of the market. We could flood the engine with fuel and advance them much, much more rapidly. And we need to do that so that we not only have a detection network, we've not only hardened our symbio infrastructure, but we have this way to get vaccines out to the edge. You know, not all sitting in Atlanta, but just being generated on the spot in every community

that needs them in great numbers. And, you know, Dan told me in our interview, he could see this happening in homes in 10 years. So, you know, imagine if like, along with the smoke alarm and other, you know, fire extinguisher and other basic protective equipment that every home has, you've got a printer that is going to crank out the vaccine that you need if, in fact, it becomes necessary. And Moderna created, as a lot of people know, creating their, their, mRNA vaccine in something like crazy, like two days, right? So we could collapse the time from detection, early detection, as we've been talking about, to working vaccine to distributed vaccine. If we make a focus of that and our research and development does, we could collapse

that time so tightly that, you know, a doomsday, you know, Sin Bio rogue loon really won't have a chance. I love it, man. I think this stuff is fascinating. I think it's scary. but it's also the good kind of scary, where it goes, okay, we need to focus on this because it could really be a thing. But also, it's not just fearmongering. It could also bring us some of the most cool and impressive breakthrough technology in the field of healthcare and everything else for that matter. I mean, I'm sure as with any sort of military technology where it becomes, you know, we look at it for healthcare, it's going to end up doing a whole bunch of different things like creating fake meat that tastes like meat or has the same properties as meat so we don't have to slaughter animals and destroy

the environment. I mean, there's so many cool things that can come out of SynBio. So thanks for coming on the show. The majority of this is upside as long as we don't actually just kill everyone else in the process. And thank you for saying it's a good kind of scary because that's essential. So those who do ultimately listen or already have listen to the Sam thing, we'll find the first half absolutely terrifying. And the TED talk that I gave that you and I talked about a couple years ago, again, terrifying at the beginning, but terrifying with a purpose, which is motivation. And with this unbelievably optimistic and empowering message that we've got this. And the budgets are minuscule. I mean, the flu cost is $360 billion a year. That's the U.S. alone. In lost economic output

and in health care costs, none of everything I'm talking about when costing we're close to that, right? Yeah. So it's something that's affordable. And I honestly think that one reason why we survived the Cold War was the power of movies like war games and Dr. Strangelove, things that scared the a Jesus out of people, but in a way that really motivated society to get its act together and preclude that kind of outcome. So hopefully, as we ponder these things, and hopefully as this message spreads, and thank you so much for giving me this extraordinary platform to spread the message more broadly. Hopefully, as this gets out there, boy, if any listeners know policymakers, particularly in

health, Department of Homeland Security, if anybody knows people with, you know, gigantic like megaphones, we want to spread this word. Please do, because, you know, we need this conversation to be happening on as broad of a societal level as possible. Rob Reid, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. You're an incredible interviewer, I got to say, just so conversational and fun. It's like a really, like, exciting dinner conversation in the best possible way with somebody who really freaking knows the topic. And it's just like, it's like banter, you know? And it's natural and it's easy and it's just awesome. You're really, really good at what we both do. Yeah, thank you, man. You're fucking good at. Thank you. I appreciate that. It feels good when

my mom says she likes the show, but it means more coming from people like you who are in the same niche. So I appreciate that. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a glimpse of my interview with the son of a Hamas co-founder. Before a change of heart had him working undercover for Israeli intelligence against his former friends and family to thwart terrorist plots and save lives. Check it out. Hamas is an Islamic movement.

My father is one of the founding members of Hamas. Hamas for us was everything, to the point where it became an army. It's a monster. I agreed to work with Israel, with a hidden agenda, to be a double agent. The level of pressure that they had to go through my heart stopped for approximately 30 seconds.

Most of human beings cannot make it back. I was tortured mentally and physically. Everybody in the city knew that I'm a dead man. For more, including what it was like growing up in one of the first families of which many consider a terrorist group and why Masab considers it the greatest school of his life, check out episode 407 on the Jordan Harbinger show. I always love conversations like this, especially with people who know what they're talking about and aren't just pulling stuff out of thin air to sell a book. Speaking of which, I read a Tom Clancy book about this kind of thing decades ago,

where an environmentalist Doomsday Group created some virus to release at the Olympics because they wanted a great reset. Look at these Q&N and other Doomsday cultists here in the USA and elsewhere. You don't have to look too far to find crazies with pretty much nothing to live for or blind faith in some ridiculous fantasy. there was a cult in Japan years ago, I think it was the 90s, called Om Shonrikio, or something along those lines. They attacked Tokyo Subways with homemade sarin gas. So imagine if those people had something worse.

I mean, we don't really have to imagine that there are people that want to shoot, blow up, destroy as many people as possible, which is terrifying. The technology, on the other hand, fascinating, and it's probably, in fact, almost certainly going to save many more lives than it could ever take. as long as we kind of, you know, keep an eye on things. Again, big thank you to Rob Reed. You can find links to his stuff in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy any books from any guests on the show. It always helps support the show. And yes, it works for Kindle.

And yes, it works for Audible as well. Those are general Amazon links that work internationally as well. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. And there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel atjordanharbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free, over at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in synthetic biology or pandemics or virology, anything along those lines, please share this episode with them. I hope you find something great in every episode, especially these emerging technologies. Always so interesting. Please do share

the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think,

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