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 unhurried and meant to bring

you to a top percentile understanding of something important.

So whether you're in to start-up score 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...

Rob Reed. That's right. I'm the one getting interviewed for once.

So this is a very atypical episode, and not merely because my voice is so ragged, I just

got back from a very chatty and sociable conference where I practically talked my voice

out of existence, hopefully it'll be back by the next time you hear from me.

Anyway, this isn't a typical episode, and I'm posting it mainly because my publisher's

doing something fun and unexpected this week, which connects to this interview. So here

we are. Now, I've committed to doing two monthly editions of my normal episodes, in which

I'm the interviewer, at least until the end of June, and today's show won't count

against April's tally. This month we already had that in-depth conversation with the amazing

bioengineer George Church, and later in the month I'll be posting another interview,

with two people who are about to do a large-scale FDA quality, triple-blind clinical trial,

on a potential cure for treatment-resistant depression. This is a horrible condition which

afflicts 100 million people worldwide, and the candidate drug is psilocybin, which, as

some of you may know, is the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. Now this may sound

a little hokey, but recent academic trials at Johns Hopkins University, NYU and other

...