Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

And I come out of the hut about 2 a.m. in the morning,

and my entire team is sitting around the hut.

And I go, what are you guys doing?

And they're like, oh, we're waiting to see if you're going to live or die.

And I was like, I'm alive.

Go to sleep. And, uh, hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech this week.

Strap in, y'all.

We're going to Afghanistan, Russia, Madagascar, Mars, all with this week's guest, Alex Dagan.

He is the co-founder of Conservation X Labs, which is a nonprofit that invests in startups,

as well as developing its own products, all in service of a simple mission,

which is to prevent the next great mass extinction event, which we're kind of in the middle of right now.

And Alex has just lived one of those lives that when you hear it, you're like, come on, dude.

Really?

So he is an extinction biologist.

He's also a lawyer.

And in his early career, he spent several years in Madagascar, living in tents in the jungle to study lemur populations. He then went on to Russia after the fall of Soviet Union, helped them write their environmental laws.

He headed to Iraq, as you do, working for the State Department to help them restore a kind

of civil scientific community there after the fall of Saddam, which included getting

scientists who might have once been working on biological

weapons to then work on, you know, wetland preservation.

...