Welcome to the After-On podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed.

And this is a series of conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

Take a little time and stretch out because these talks are unhurry and meant to bring you

to a top percentile understanding of something important.

Also, whether you're ready to start up your ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your

time, engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did it.

Especially this week when we'll be talking to...

Naval Rava Kant, a serial entrepreneur and one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and

influential angel investors, Naval is also a profoundly original thinker on many topics,

including the one we're discussing today, which is existential risk.

To repeat my awful joke from last time, existential risk is not the danger of sitting next to

a Nietzsche spouting chatterbox on a cross-country flight, awful as that would be.

It rather concerns a set of dangers which might, in a worst case scenario, impair the existence

of human civilization.

Many of these dangers could be enabled by near-term scientific and technological developments,

and of all and I will particularly focus on risks connected to synthetic biology, which

is ironic because as regular listeners know, I generally think of symbiosis being a profoundly

exciting and promising field, but things could go really wrong here.

Naval and I will also touch more briefly on some of the dangers that could be posed by

superintelligence research.

But before we get into all that, I'd like to welcome those of you who are new to listening

to this show.

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