Episode summary

If we can get their cost down to $10, this becomes one of the most cost-effective ways of preventing respiratory transmission. The shelf life is 20 years. That means basically 50 cents per person per year of protection. …

If you’re a government it makes a lot of sense to just stockpile enough to cover your entire population. Right now we spend about $10 billion a year on missile defence. Stockpiling one of these for every single person in the US would be 1% the cost of that.

— Andrew Snyder-Beattie

Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity's single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.

Andrew's job at Open Philanthropy is to spend [...]

---

Outline:

(00:28) Episode summary

(03:59) The interview in a nutshell

(04:25) 1. Two primary classes of biological threats could pose an existential risk

(05:27) 2. The four pillars plan offers a robust, defence-in-depth strategy

(08:22) 3. Other catastrophic biorisks, like agricultural collapse, are less concerning

(09:21) 4. We urgently need entrepreneurial people to execute this plan

(10:17) Highlights

(10:20) The worst-case scenario: mirror bacteria

(15:44) Why antibiotics arent enough to fight mirror bacteria

(18:58) The most cost-effective way governments could prevent respiratory transmission among their populations

(22:17) Why Andrew works on biorisks rather than AI

(26:54) Everyone was wrong: biorisks are defence dominant in the limit

(32:23) The four pillars plan -- and how listeners can help

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.