#463 — Privatizing the Apocalypse

Sam Harris speaks with Rob Reid about biosecurity, pandemic risk, and the alarming fragility of our defenses against biological catastrophe. They discuss the controversial USAID program DEEP VZN, the dangers of gain-of-function research, open science norms that could arm bad actors, the role of AI in accelerating bioweapon development, biosurveillance tools, lone wolf bioterrorists, chaos agents, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe .