Macroscience Podcast: Ben Reinhardt

Good news: Macroscience is officially starting up a new podcast.

We’ll be interviewing researchers, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other good people working in and around this broad, shifting community that we call “metascience.”

First up: Ben Reinhardt, who is CEO of Speculative Technologies, a non-profit research organization supporting a wide range of exploratory work in the sciences. One program that I’m particularly excited about — BRAINS — is a “Y Combinator for coordinated research programs.”

We talk about the failure of the innovation ecosystem to invest in pre-commerical, exploratory research, and what it takes to get more of it into the world. Along the way, we get into why research groups are effective, the practice of research leadership, and whether wildcat research orgs like SpecTech can shape the incentives of much larger institutions in science.