Hello listeners, it's been a very long hiatus while I've been busy with other projects,

but I'm so happy to tell you that the After-On podcast is about to return with a new season.

In fact, I've already recorded several interviews that were in the process of editing and assembling

into new episodes. These include conversations with a Harvard epidemiologist,

with a data scientist in Google alum, with my first Nobel Prize-winning guest,

plus a great astrophysicist, an expert in cephalopod cognition, cephalopods being octopus's

cuddlefish, squids, and notallises, and so many others. A meanwhile in the process of completing

a special project with my fellow podcaster and one-time guest, Sam Harris. As many of you know,

Sam hosts a very popular podcast called Making Sense, which is often political, often philosophical,

and also sometimes considers scientific topics of the sort that we tackle here on After-On.

The project Sam and I are working on could be seen as a huge expansion on a TED Talk that I gave

about a year and a half ago, which you can easily find by googling Rob Read TED Talk. We'll be running

our special project in Sam's podcast feed, and I'll announce it here in the moment at debuts.

It'll feature a fairly innovative format, which I'll be vague about for now and let it be a surprise.

What I will tell you about is the topic, which is how to avoid the next pandemic,

which we can and should start thinking very productively about now. Because you don't want to go

through this again, do you? As with my TED Talk, there's a particular focus on the danger of

artificially designed diseases, which could be much much nastier and deadlier than even COVID.

I'll be launching the new season on my podcast at roughly the same time Sam and I launch our

project in his feed. We don't yet have an exact date for that yet, but it currently feels like

it'll be sometime in February, so just a few weeks from now. As part of all this, I'd like to give

my backers on Patreon a heads up that I will soon be accepting support through Patreon again.

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