Wired.com presents the Geek's guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 366 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Rob Reed.

He's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Listen.com,

which built the Rhapsody online music surface

and created the unlimited subscription model since

adopted by Apple, Spotify, and many others.

He's also the author of the non-fiction books Year 1 and Architects of the Web and the New York Times

best-selling science fiction novel Year Zero and

we'll be speaking with him today about his new novel after on and now here's her

interview with Rob Reed. All right so we're here with Rob Reed. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so your writing career started back in the 90s

with two non-fiction books, so tell us about that.

Yeah, the very first book I wrote

was about what it's like to be a first year student at Harvard Business

School, which I was an expert in at the time as I was going through that process.

And it was kind of a meld between memoir non-fiction and a little element of fiction because it was mainly, you know, my own experiences, so that's memoir obviously.

But it was really meant for people who wanted to figure out if business school was something that they wanted to do.

And I decided to populate the book with essentially my five imaginary friends because I didn't

want to write about actual folks because people wouldn't necessarily want that.

And I also wanted to pull together diversity of experiences and be able to cause events

...