45: Naval Ravikant (part 2) | End Games

At any given time on the planet, there are a few people – and one is too many – if you gave them a button that would end the planet, they would press that button

Technology is a coin. One side of it is immortality, and the other side is annihilation.

At some point, if someone tries to end the world, it will be because they weren’t loved enough

We’re heading towards a society of more connectedness. Whether it’s through spirituality, meditation, parties, social media, or the internet, the more connected we can be as humans, the better off we are.

Synthetic biology will be the first one to deliver world-ending capability to individuals

I think it’s safe to say that a desktop DNA synthesizer from the year 2038 will be capable of things that the entire synthetic biology project is capable of today

It’s insane that we take any substance that’s bioactive, and then when you take it and put it in your mouth it causes a change in your feelings… and we go and ban it. The reality is some of these things make you much better off.

Naval thinks that mediation, over a long enough period of time, is probably better than most drugs or therapy at treating a variety of mental conditions

What we’ve basically done with synthetic biology is we’ve taken designing and hacking humans from the physical domain to the digital domain. It’s a similar problem that people keep creating new computer viruses. But unlike computers, when a human crashes, it’s fatal. There’s no reboot.

If you want to get a message out, you have to brand it and put it in terms that people can easily synthesize, understand, and immediately transmit

It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine our children (or future generations) getting cybernetic implants which will keep them connected to the internet at all times

The main thing that stands between the human species and the creation of a super virus is a sense of responsibility among the individual biologists.

Governments only tend to react to something after it's happened. They're not proactive. Private industry tends to be better at being proactive.

Humans used to find love and longing in our family and our tribe. Now we live in cities, disconnected from our ancestors and our immediate family.

Humans have only existed as a civilization for ~6,000 years, as a species for a few hundred thousand years, and as a lifeform for a few billion years

To create a universe without "enders", we need to make sure nobody goes unloved