To re-introduce myself to you, I’m a podcaster, a New York Times-bestselling science fiction author, a two-time TED speaker, and a writer of thought-pieces and other articles. I’ve written for Medium (of course), giant publications like the Wall Street Journal, great tech news sites like Ars Technica, one time a cover story in Wired, and many other places.

By day, I work as a venture capitalist, focusing on startups that can in some important way make the more world resilient — and increasingly, on generative AI.

My podcast consists mainly of very in-depth interviews with some of the world’s most brilliant people in science and technology — with topics including astrophysics, neuroscience, synthetic biology, oceanography, and much, much more. And my writing is mostly thought-pieces about tech, science and society, and/or analysis of important shifts in tech that I think are being under-explored in the mainstream.

I’m about to start writing and podcasting quite a bit more in a way that dovetails nicely with my work as an investor. In preparation for this, I’ve set up a substack over at robreid.substack.com, and it’s branded “After On,” just like my podcast, and one of my novels.

If you’re not familiar with it, Substack is a hybrid of a blog and a newsletter — in that everything I create will appear on my Substack page, and will also be emailed to my Substack subscribers.

I really like the newsletter aspect, because it’s all too easy for a post on Medium, Twitter, or almost anywhere else to get lost in the shuffle, and not appear in a reader’s or a follower’s feed. Substack makes it really easy for people to subscribe to my posts via email, and never miss anything.

I plan to cross-post everything here at Medium — and it turns out that Medium also has an email feature for subscibers that I’ll be testing out for the first time today.

But if I end up getting a bigger following on Substack, it’s possible that I’ll get lazy or forgetful, and not manage to post everything over here. Also I sometimes have strange technical issues with Medium and it … just won’t publish! So if you like my work, I really encourage you to head by robreid.substack.com and follow me there.

Thanks for being so patient since I last lifted my voice here, and I hope we remain connected

The H5N1 flu strain makes SARS and swine flu look almost cuddly. But though it kills higher percentages of infected patients than even Ebola, this ghastly flu variant claimed just five human lives over the past three years. Happily, it’s barely contagious amongst humans.

In 2011, two separate research teams — one in Holland, the other in Wisconsin — set out to repair this “defect” in H5N1. By carefully manipulating the bug’s genome, they soon had something just as lethal as the classic edition, but also wildly contagious. And if it escaped the lab, scientists believed it “would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths,” according to the news arm of one of the world’s top academic journals, Science.

For his part, the head of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, Dr. Paul Keim, said, “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one.” An anthrax expert, Keim added, “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

Oh yes … it gets worse

2011 was an ancient year in the brief history of synthetic biology, or synbio. Our H5N1 researchers were almost uniquely equipped and qualified for their deeds back then. But technical advances have since made genome-editing projects like theirs far less daunting — and future advances will one day make them trivial.

A case in point: the most celebrated technique in genetic editing, CRISPR, was harnessed two years after the flu hackers completed their work. Progress in the broader synbio field has since accelerated on all fronts. Genetic sequencing is advancing at rates exceeding that of Moore’s law — which itself has already reordered society.

Further breakthroughs in genetic editing are in the pipeline. Meanwhile, the art of synthesizing DNA code from scratch has turned commercial and had its first IPO.

These advances aren’t intrinsically evil or saintly. They’re just astoundingly powerful. I explored them in a TED talk, which released today, and is embedded below. In it, I conjure a little ghost story — one I wish was implausible, but is anything but. Imagine it’s 2026, and a brilliant virologist creates a bug more lethal and transmissible than that mutant H5N1 flu. Hoping to advance science and better understand pandemics, they also design it to incubate for months within bodies before causing outbreaks. This could let it infect much of the world before the first whiff of danger.

These advances aren’t intrinsically evil or saintly. They’re just astoundingly powerful. I explored them in a TED talk, which released today, and is embedded below.

In it, I conjure a little ghost story — one I wish was implausible, but is anything but. Imagine it’s 2026, and a brilliant virologist creates a bug more lethal and transmissible than that mutant H5N1 flu. Hoping to advance science and better understand pandemics, they also design it to incubate for months within bodies before causing outbreaks. This could let it infect much of the world before the first whiff of danger.

2026 is a perfectly safe year. Our virologist has blameless motives and an airtight lab. More important, it would take an extremely rare genius — like our scientist — to actually animate a living critter from the DNA code they’ve created. To anyone less skilled, it’s just an inert string of Gs, As, Ts, and Cs.

Then the scientist’s university, like hundreds every year, gets hacked. And the text file containing their DNA string joins the pirated Abba and Breaking Bad files in countless illicit online stashes.

Time passes, and synbio’s progress continues to make Moore’s Law look pokey. Ever more powerful and simpler tools enable far-less-specialized intellects to modify and weaponize our virologist’s work. Its variants become renowned and ubiquitous. And eventually, the trick of infusing them into living substrates becomes something smart teens can handle. This could take a decade — or perhaps somewhat longer. But best case, this is a mid-century problem.

What could possibly go wrong:

Facing such a problem, we should ask if (and why) anyone would ever want to commit murder on the scale at which a release of this kind of bug would unfold. And asking that, we should consider how many people die each year in the act of killing as many strangers as possible. Digging into this reveals that the darkest nihilists aren’t limited by their consciences or ambitions — instead, they’re mostly constrained by the weapons they can access.

If it’s a knife (as in Japan, last month), two or three victims may die. If it’s semi-automatic weapons (as in Orlando, Las Vegas, or Newtown), dozens might perish. If it’s a commercial plane with a suicidal pilot (as with Germanwings flight 9525 or possibly Malaysia Airlines flight 370) hundreds can die.

Imaginable near-future pathogens could kill millions, or even billions of us. Since existing nuclear and biological or chemical warfare technology has enabled governments to kill at this scale since the start of the Cold War, we might take comfort that no one has yet hit the red button. But governments also spend trillions on deterrence, diplomacy, and game theory — tools that are well suited to moderating angry institutional impulses.

Very different strategies and budgets will be needed to dissuade thousands of teetering loners from Stalin-grade killing sprees. Bioweaponized factions will be even more daunting, whether we’re talking about death cults, racists who train viruses to kill selectively, or eco-terrorists seeking to rid Gaia of humans. And again, all these are mid-century problems. They’re on the horizon.

With all of this doom and gloom, you may not suspect your humble author of being a hot-blooded synbio booster. But I believe this field could be the greatest boon to humanity in all of history. Advances resulting from research in synthetic biology could heal our bodies, our planet, and our often-brutal relationships with other creatures — and that’s just the start.

Now is an exceptionally good time to act

I’ll add that time is on our side, for now. The most virulent dangers are years away. The worst could-be perpetrators may not be born yet. The darkness that led to Columbine and Newtown is exceedingly rare in humanity, and those it afflicts should always be outnumbered millions-to-one.

Our deliverance lies in synbio’s own Promethean labs. And in the spirit of biomimicry, we should use its tools to start building an immune system — one for the entire biosphere. I sketch the rawest outline of such a system toward the end of my talk (starting at 13:04). And while my “ghost story” may stick in more minds, the actual message is one of empowerment and optimism.

Not being a scientist myself, I fact-checked and road-tested every element of my talk with a dozen top synbio experts. Their unanimous consensus is that we can dodge this bullet — if we start architecting our immune system now. And over the next two days, two brilliant thinkers will contribute pieces to Ars exploring this system’s foundations.

George Church just posted this piece about the path to agile, networked, ubiquitous germ-detection systems — systems which can alert us about natural and artificial pathogens alike, promptly after their first emergence (this is mentioned in my talk at 13:22). George is one of the world’s most influential bioengineers, and his Harvard lab has spawned a dizzying range of innovations, techniques, and startups. He has also been advocating for surveillance systems in the synbio field since 2004.

On Thursday, founder & CEO of Humane Genomics Andrew Hessel will discuss the path to a highly distributed manufacturing base for printing vaccines (mentioned in my talk at 13:37). If we prioritize the core technologies, this could easily extend to every pharmacy — and one day, even our homes. In dynamic disease environments, traditional vaccines are crippled by distribution and storage challenges, as well as by their innate incapacity to adapt to new threats and mutations. Coupled with the detection systems George calls for, biomanufacturing at the edge would harden us against manmade scourges, as well as to ancient ones like the flu.

Synthetic biology could yield a level of human flourishing that defies imagination. But to paraphrase my friend Naval Ravikant, technologies this powerful are like a coin with immortality stamped on one side — and annihilation on the other.

This is a coin we must not flip. Foresight and action can plant it firmly on the ground, with the correct side up.

George Goldsmith and Katya Malievskaia are a married couple whose startup — Compass Pathways — will soon launch the largest triple-blind clinical trial ever of a psychedelic drug. The drug is psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. And the condition is treatment-resistant depression. This awful malady plagues over a hundred million people worldwide. And as the term “treatment-resistant” implies, it lacks a cure.

Now, if this whole idea sounds a bit implausible, consider who George and Katya have drawn to their company. Their Board of Directors includes Thomas Lonngren, who spent ten years running Europe’s equivalent of the FDA (the European Medicines Agency). Also on their board is the former Chief Medical Officer of Bristol Meyers Squibb — one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Plus, they’ve raised roughly $20 million for their company from some extremely savvy investors.

As you’ll learn from our conversation, Katya & George are both deeply experienced in medical research. They’re perhaps even more plugged into drug approval process, and have designed their trial in consultation with the top drug regulators of multiple countries. The full interview is right here:

You’ll also learn that Katya and George have a very personal grudge against treatment-resistant depression, because of the way it afflicted someone very dear to them. In our conversation, we talk about their backgrounds & motivations, as well as the trial they’re architecting, and their company Compass Pathways. We also discuss the long clinical history certain psychedelics and other recreational drugs have had, and the major promise several of them are now showing against a diversity of afflictions.

Note: this piece previously ran on Boing Boing

I host a podcast which takes deep dives into science, tech, and sociological topics. I do this via interviews with world-class experts who have the patience to engage in truly unhurried discussions of their fields. My episodes are untethered from the headlines, as they’re meant to resonate with future as well as present-day listeners, ideally over a span of years.

Occasionally, though, things happen to line up with current events. And was that ever the case this week — as today’s episode is about cryptocurrencies, which have been repeatedly dashing price records, even as Bitcoin debuted on the futures markets this past Sunday.

My guest is Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. With over 13 million users, Coinbase stores more cryptocurrency than anyone else, and the total monthly volume of trades between currencies on its platform stretches into the double-digit billions. You can find our interview right here — or you can hear it on your smartphone by typing “After On Podcast” into the search field of your podcast app.

Before we sat down, Fred and I put significant thought into structuring our conversation as both a rigorous introduction to cryptocurrencies (the first half hour or so), as well as an advanced discussion of the more wild and speculative things which could emerge from all this. Our prep, the interview itself, and the research I did in connection with it was a great education, and I’d like to share some of the more intriguing things that emerged from it.

Fred discusses the financial incentives which radiate through crypto ecosystems in more nuanced ways than I’d previously encountered. Those enjoyed by cryptocurrency miners, of course, are obvious. In exchange for running the servers that secure the networks, maintain their ledgers, and process transactions, miners get transaction fees from users, and also collect the new coins which enter money supplies at carefully-metered rates (if you’re new to this, Fred and I discuss miners in detail at timestamp 21:10 in the interview).

What I’d never considered are the massive incentives facing the developers of open cryptocurrency software. The social and psychic rewards of traditional open source are certainly there for them, along with a certain communitarian ethic. But before Fred mentioned it, I hadn’t considered that most of these folks are also deeply bought into the currencies they work so hard on.

In retrospect, this seems head-smackingly obvious. If you pour your evenings and weekends into building something, of course you’re going to use the thing you’re building. And if the thing you’re building is money, you’ll inevitably buy at least some of the currency you’re creating. You hopefully won’t go into debt betting on it (please don’t!). But if you were an early developer on Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another successful project, a minor bet would be enough to make you hugely vested in its ongoing success today.

The diffuse rewards of open source have long created amazing things without this financial dimension. Linux and Wikipedia should rank with the Great Pyramids in the pantheon of human wonders (and as a former Cairo resident, I don’t say this lightly). Now couple that power with hard economics — itself the world’s mightiest organizing force — and you really have something. While there are many reasons why BitCoin is worth $300 billion, a giant one is that it’s the super-sexy open source project that paid.

Fred astounded me by saying that though hundreds have made real contributions to the codebase, BitCoin’s truly core developers number perhaps fifteen. Brilliant newcomers would no doubt be welcome to join their ranks and make major contributions. But that would mean joining a project whose old-timers have all banked fortunes, which your own voluntary efforts could never hope to replicate. This surely helps explain the explosion in new currencies. Because unlike the situation in other open source areas, being established and well-known will reduce, not enhance, a project’s allure to developers in crypto.

Much as I love the ethos of Mozilla and Burning Man, this doesn’t bother me, because I also love Google and the Rolling Stones. Magnificent things — even great art — can be made by folks who are deeply interested in making money. So by extending incentives in subtle new ways, the blockchain and crypto might just create emergent wonders, which the world would not otherwise see.

Tech has always aligned incentives more deliberately and aggressively than any other industry, to its great benefit. Facebook achieves things that Clorox and Ford can’t dream of in part because it can make its employees stupidly rich. And here, it’s worth noting that when a cryptocurrency really succeeds, the upside radiates beyond its developers to include much of its user base (as anyone who got into BitCoin before, say, last week will attest. For now).

And what if Facebook not only cut its employees in on the deal, but its users as well? Of course we can’t know, because corporate structures don’t support such things. Fred — whose perspective on this extends clear back to the Dutch East India Company (timestamp 53:37), and indeed far beyond that — enjoys speculating on how blockchain incentives and governance might enable entirely new methods of organization. We discuss the notion of an Uber-like entity that’s blockchain-based — perhaps collectively owned by its drivers, or even its users (timestamp 1:03:02), and indeed at least one entity is chasing this very dream.

One of Fred’s more fascinating topics is blockchain-based AI (timestamp 1:21:54). The precept is that AI’s lifeblood is great masses of data, for training and honing its output. And however much data Google has, the rest of us combined surely have more. A blockchain-based AI, which takes data contributions from one and all, and rewards data donors when their contributions are used, might therefore become far mightier than any proprietary AI.

I find this notion riveting. But a huge countervailing force will be the vast relative efficiency of proprietary networks over decentralized ones that securely leverage the contributions of unknown (and therefore untrusted) contributors. Bitcoin’s founding genius lies in enabling the latter type of network, by cracking the famous “Byzantine general’s problem” (timestamp 23:30). But this comes at great cost, in terms of the compute cycles demanded by its underlying cryptography and “proof of work” requirements.

How great a cost? Well, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin’s infrastructure is said to rival that of Denmark. And we can safely assume the Visa card network needs far less juice than six million Europeans in chilly latitudes. Yet Visa can handle 47,000 transactions per second, vs. a single-digit number for Bitcoin. And as AI is orders of magnitude more computationally demanding that ledger transactions, an open, blockchain-based AI will have to overcome tremendous headwinds.

That said, Fred’s points about the immense rallying power of financial incentives are spot-on, and armies of brilliant programmers are just starting to explore the blockchain’s potential as a computing platform. Perhaps in the end it will be a horserace between the power of incentives vs. the efficiencies of centralized networks?

If these subjects interest you, you should enjoy our interview — particularly if you’re seeking a rigorous primer on cryptocurrency basics, which we start out with (experts may want to jump to the 30-minute mark, or thereabouts). Topics covered in prior episodes of the podcast include neuroscience and consciousness, drones, augmented reality, Medium itself (an interview with Ev Williams), Fermi’s Paradox, and more. I’ll add that my guests have included Chris Anderson (who runs the TED organization), legendary tech observer and participant Tim O’Reilly, and the ever-controversial Sam Harris.

An Insider’s View of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Future of Money was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And no, I DON’T think Ev has lost his mind

Incumbents who dominate vast markets for decades and then lose their grip echo Hemingway’s depiction of sliding into bankruptcy: they do so gradually, then suddenly. Major network dominance of programming was an eternal fact of life when Netflix launched its first original show in 2013. But next year, the streaming leviathan’s $8 billion content budget will dwarf that of any broadcast network. Similarly, just a few years after launching in San Francisco, Uber eclipsed the revenues of the cab companies which had jointly monopolized that market for decades by a factor of 350%.

Shifts this big only happen when network effects are in play. Which is to say, that virtuous cycle in which more users make a platform more valuable, which draws more users, who make the platform more valuable still, which summons still more users, etc. In the digital era, we’ve seen network effects fuel the rise of messaging apps, social networks, and dating sites; as well as two-sided markets for Beanie Babies, handicrafts, and (of course) short-haul rides, to name but a few.

After a couple hours in conversation with Ev Williams, I wonder if the mass commercial market for the written word might face a similar transformation. One which (like some of its antecedents) will seem laughably improbable until shortly after it’s complete. Now, a few caveats and definitions. I don’t mean all written words, as I don’t believe Ev’s company — Medium— has designs on books or breaking news (at least not yet). By “commercial,” I mean articles whose writers are paid for their work. And by “mass,” I mean aimed at a general audience (as opposed to specialized output, like financial analysis or industry surveys).

So I’m basically talking about magazines — which admittedly fall short of Hollywood and transit on the ginormity scale. But despite declining print circulation and ad dollars, this remains a large industry with immense cultural weight (oh — and it’s still bigger than Beanie Babies). I now believe Medium’s budget for professionally-written articles will soon exceed that of any magazine. Though it’s far from certain, I believe within a few years it could go on to exceed that of every major US magazine combined. And it’s not out of the question that it will one day exceed that of all magazines.

You can hear the interview which lodged this possibly-daft idea in my brain by clicking this link. It’s the latest episode of my podcast, in which I interview Ev-like folks about giant issues in tech and science. My conversation with Ev is wide-ranging, covering all of his major startups (Medium, Twitter, Odeo, and Blogger), plus one that made a Cornhuskers Football CD-ROM back in 1993.

But for me, the most surprising section concerns Medium’s new business model of charging people five bucks a month to access premium content.

Though it was greeted by headlines like “Ev Williams Has Lost His Goddamn Mind” when it launched in March, Ev reports that the system is hitting its numbers. I’ll add that he said this both while we were recording and beforehand, and I know him well enough to be confident that he wouldn’t bluster or dissemble about this. More interesting still is his growth target — which, he revealed to me (I believe for the first time outside of the company) is to reach ten million paying subscribers in five years.

Here’s where things get a bit speculative. Let’s first imagine Ev hits that target. Which is not an insane proposition. He has seven months of data on his new model, five years on Medium as a whole, and has spent his career turning network effects into usership and revenue. In our interview, Ev indicates that he’ll pass 70–80% of subscriber revenues on to writers. Against ten million subscribers, that rounds to $450MM/year.

I’m pretty sure that would exceed the content budgets of the top hundred US magazines combined. I’m not certain of this, because no one can access all those numbers. But I surveyed several people who run, or have recently run magazines, and all agreed that $2 million per year would be a hefty article budget in 2017 — one unlikely to be found much beyond the top hundred-ish magazines, and fairly respectable within those ranks.

Power law curves are common in fragmented media markets. So while budgets at the truly moneyed magazines should exceed this comfortably, budgets should also drop quickly as you exit the very highest echelon. And I’ll stress that I’m talking about budgets for written work. Not central functions like layout or editing, not business or administrative functions, but money spent on freelance work, plus the prorated salaries of full-timers who spend part or all of their time writing. Simply stated: money for articles, or that which Medium traffics in.

I’ll admit that a world in which a website pays out more to writers than all of our best-known magazines combined feels alien enough to belong to a truly distant future. But the thought of non-cabs outgrossing local taxis by a factor of three would have seemed even more remote to me as a San Franciscan in 2009 — yet that was just a few years off.

I’ll add that I’m not an indiscriminate partaker of any Kool-Aid Ev happens to be slinging, having publicly debated him about another element of his new model (the clap system) on Medium itself. But though I wasn’t a fan of that element, I knew it was rolled out after intense consideration, as Ev is a famously deliberate thinker (I’ve also since come around to it a bit). I’m likewise certain that this ten million subscriber target wasn’t plucked out of thin air, its immaculate roundness notwithstanding.

Meet me back in here five years and we’ll discuss the results.

Here’s that link to the podcast again. Enjoy!

Medium Targets 10 Million Paying Members in 5 Years was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fermi’s paradox, and what it could mean for humanity’s future

The embedded player at the top of this page doesn’t feature a vocal reading of this article. It’s rather an unhurried interview with British astronomer Stephen Webb (as well as some intro and outro material) about one of the most fascinating scientific puzzles to ever face humanity: Fermi’s paradox.

Approaching the paradox begins with a detailed appreciation for both the immensity and the age of our galaxy (or — if you want to go huge — the observable universe). The Milky Way contains at least a hundred billion stars, and perhaps four times as many. Over the past few decades, we’ve learned that almost all stars have planets. And since 2009, the Kepler space telescope has established that many stars have planets within with the “habitable zone,” which can support life as we know it (a discovery that surprised many). This means there are billions of life-friendly planets out there. And we’ve long known that life emerged on Earth almost immediately after things settled down enough to allow it.

If you conclude from all this that life is abundant out there (which is a leap, but an entirely reasonable one), other advanced civilizations become plausible. Experts say these could have arisen starting six billion years ago, when enough heavy elements had accrued to support complex life and technology throughout the universe.

And so the time dimension enters our analysis. If spacefaring civilizations could have just as easily emerged billions of years ago as today, some of them should be spectacularly more advanced than we are. We got from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, and will soon be on Mars (talk to Elon if that sounds improbable). So any Milky Way species with a serious jump on us should have gotten here when our ancestors were still prokaryotic bacteria. The most conservative colonization models suggest that a spacefaring civilization would fill the galaxy in far less than 100 million years. Many civilizations could have arisen dozens of times deeper in the past than that — so where is everybody?? Those three words embody Fermi’s paradox. And they’re the title of Stephen Webb’s book, which explores 75 logical answers to this question.

And this is a burning question for all of us — not just science fiction writers like me! Why? Because one of the most powerful answers is that no civilization ever survives the adolescence that humanity entered with the bombing of Hiroshima. It would sure be comforting to know this is not the paradox’s solution — which partly explains why many brilliant people spend their careers searching for proof of alien life.

Stephen and I don’t discuss the full set of solutions to the paradox (our interview isn’t that unhurried). But we do discuss several, as well as the three broad categories that all of them fall into. The first is that aliens are already here — or were here in the past. Fans of UFOs, the X-Files, and tales of spacemen building the pyramids will enjoy these solutions. The next category — the most popular amongst astronomers — is that there are many alien civilizations out there, but none have popped around yet for a variety of reasons. The third category — chilling on the surface, yet arguably optimistic — is that there are no other advanced species. That we’re truly, entirely alone in the galaxy, if not the universe.

This is one of eight recordings that I’m premiering to Medium members, then pushing out to the world (roughly three weeks later) as part of a podcast series that wraps context around my new novel After On (note: it’s NOT necessary to read the novel in order to listen to and learn from these episodes). I’m increasingly likely to continue creating new episodes after the first eight are out there. If I do, all will go out to the public immediately, and the podcast will graduate from its loose affiliation with my novel, to the broader mandate of “unhurried conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.”

If you like the sound of this, you may wish to subscribe to the podcast. To do so, just type “After On” into your podcast app’s search field. Or, to subscribe in iTunes from your computer, click here, then click the blue “View on iTunes” button in the upper left corner of the page (requires iTunes, of course). Alternatively, you can follow the RSS feed http://afteron.libsyn.com/rss

Audiocast: Where are All the Aliens (seriously!)??? was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.