Stephen Euin Cobb is today's featured guest. (This is an experimental episode in which the questions normally posed to others, I direct at myself.) Topics: My opinion that the earth needs a thermostat. That the days in which the temperature of the earth can be left to nature need to come to a close. And that if the fear of global warming gets people motivated enough to pay for an engineering project large enough to regulate the earths temperature on a day-to-day basis then that fear will have se...
Apr 29, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Ringo ( New York Times best selling novelist with over two million books in print) is today's featured guest. Topics: Smart missiles smaller than insects; military tanks becoming robots; personal headup displays for soldiers; experiments with brain implants for soldiers; war going open-source; Chinese experiments with warfare in low earth orbit; the never-ending utility of bayonets; the bizarre fact that there is no such thing as a Chinese journalist; and the possibility that we will develo...
Apr 22, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Ringo ( New York Times best selling novelist with over two million books in print) is today's featured guest. Topics: Specific examples of the tens of thousands of robots in use in war right now and how they are transforming the methods and nature of fighting for the individual soldiers on the ground; how this transformation will change the wars of the future; and the longstanding psychology in the US military that is driving this robotic transformation. Also, anecdotes about the years he w...
Apr 15, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Ringo ( New York Times best selling novelist with over two million books in print) is today's featured guest. Topics: Anecdotes about his appearances on TV for Fox News in the years following The 9/11 Attacks ; how it is that he is the only person to use the term Euro-Wiener on national TV; the terrible affect the economic crisis has had on the publishing industry; rumors that three of his novels are in the works to become major motion pictures, and one is in talks to become a first-person-...
Apr 08, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Shaun Farrell (writer, actor, and award-winning podcaster) is today's featured guest. Topics: online publishing verses paper publishing; the rise in small presses; the number of new readers is increasing; fiction sales are increasing; trends in podcasting and narrow-casting; the economy and personal debt; Connor his new baby; and the closing of Realms of Fantasy Magazine . BTW: A few days after this interview was recorded, the situation at Realms of Fantasy Magazine turned around. Hearing the ma...
Apr 01, 2009•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Shaun Farrell (writer, actor, and award-winning podcaster) is today's featured guest. Topics: Shaun's interview with Ray Bradbury , and others, such as the actors from Stargate Atlantis : Joe Flanigan, David Hewlett and Jewel Staite (who also played the ship's mechanic on the TV show Firefly and in the movie Serenity ). Trends in publishing: both print and electronic (such as involving the Amazon Kindle). Trends in acting, and why your look matters far more to a talent agent than your ability to...
Mar 25, 2009•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Drake (author of over 60 novels of science fiction and fantasy) is today's featured guest. Topics include : his opinion of the Amazon Kindle ; his improving opinion of the future of electronic publishing; the collapse of the Borders Books Store chain, which occurred before the economic down turn; and why he urged Jim Baen into ask Eric Flint to be the first Editor-in-Chief of what has become the widely popular online magazine called Jim Baen's Universe . Working with Newt Gingrich is also ...
Mar 18, 2009•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Drake (author of over 60 novels of science fiction and fantasy) is today's featured guest. Topics include: How blatantly morality and ethics must be depicted in fiction, and which self-appointed thought-police will jump on you if you do not toe-the-line. The unknown risks of the experiment now known as the Baen Free Library , and Jim Baen's other efforts to innovate within the publishing industry. David Drake also talks about: Rudyard Kipling ; Project Gutenberg ; Samuel Johnson , and his ...
Mar 11, 2009•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stefano Vaj (Author, futurist and transhumanism activist) is today's featured guest. (This is the second half of his interview.) Topics include: The state and health of Transhumanism worldwide; his worry that some people are watering down transhumanism to gain acceptance from mainstream culture or to make it more Politically Correct ; his expectations about the future of human longevity, and the political forces needed to bring it to fruition. And he describes some of the powerful political and ...
Mar 04, 2009•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stefano Vaj (Author, futurist and transhumanism activist) is today's featured guest. (This is the first half of his interview.) Topics include : Why transhumanism is taken seriously by the Italian public and the Italian press (as opposed to the American public and American press which often view transhumanism as a delusional fantasy). Why Europeans do not share the American view that Intellectuals are outside the loop in their ivory towers and are therefore unimportant. The influence of the Cath...
Feb 25, 2009•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kim Stanley Robinson , the best selling and award-winning science fiction author is today's featured guest. Topics include : Kim Stanley Robinson describes his reaction to being chosen as Guest of Honor for the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne Australia. He also describes the benefits and challenges of the January 17, 2009 personal appearance he did in Second Life . He also explains his conviction that we will never develop artificial intelligence, or the singularity, or mind-u...
Feb 18, 2009•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jerry Pournelle (author, journalist, editor, technology columnist, and military textbook writer) is today's featured guest. (This is the third and final portion of his two-hour long interview.) Topics today include : Why political debates are not debates, why the U.S. electoral college was devised, and why the 1787 Congress was more successful by being a closed-door session. Comments on the Cray-1 supercomputer ; the remarkable fact that Moore's Law has held so long and still seems to be going s...
Feb 11, 2009•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jerry Pournelle (author, journalist, editor, technology columnist, and military textbook writer) is today's featured guest. (This is the second portion of our two-hour interview. The third and final portion will be provided next week.) Topics today include : How he contributed to President Ronald Reagan 's State of the Union Address in 1980, and became part of Reagan's group of advisers concerning the Strategic Defence Initiative (which Ted Kennedy, by the way, dubbed Star Wars because he did no...
Feb 04, 2009•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jerry Pournelle (author, journalist, editor, technology columnist, and military textbook writer) is today's featured guest. Topics include: Isaac Asimov , Robert A. Heinlein , Larry Niven and other authors he has been friends with; how the downfall of the Soviet Union was an engineered event, planned decades in advance, which worked exactly as planned (and specifically what that plan was); how he orchestrated the political campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Jr. , and Sam Yorty ; his friends and invol...
Jan 28, 2009•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alan Dean Foster (author of over 100 novels of science fiction and fantasy and noted world traveler) is today's featured guest. Many of this interview's topics were made possible only because of Alan's longstanding enthusiasm for traveling to places tourists rarely go. He seeks the places where wildlife is still unspoiled; and where the ancient ways that predate writing still exist. He knows they are fading rapidly, and wants to see them before they are gone forever. Topics include: how cell pho...
Jan 21, 2009•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Doctor Bob Boan (scientist and author) is today's featured guest. Dr. Boan's work has involved US Government space programs for the intelligence departments, but he has also done work for NASA and for commercial communications. He is coauthor (along with Doctor Travis S. Taylor ) of the book: An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion . This book makes a serious and scientifically rigorous analysis of exactly how to defend Earth against ...
Jan 14, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Phillis George and Billy George are today's featured guests. Both Phyllis and Billy have worked in banking for many years, however, this interview is NOT about the current bailouts and other well publicized banking debacles. Those thoroughly examined topics can be left to the army of other interviewers. This interview is about the trends within all of banking, and especially at your neighborhood bank, and how these trends are changing your bank into what it will eventually become. Hosted by Step...
Jan 07, 2009•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rhonda Leigh Jones (author of erotic romance novels, and just back from a year living in and participating in the Eastern European culture of Romania) is today's featured guest. Sex, BDSM , and life in Romania verses American are the general topics of the interview. Specifics topics include: the sexiness of the Joker from Batman ; sexual repression within our culture; surprises from living a year in Romania; how her novels differ from the BDSM movies The Story of O and The Secretary ; other alte...
Dec 31, 2008•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast R.U. Sirius (Editor-In-Chief of the new Transhumanist Magazine called H+ as well as writer, talk show host , and cyberculture icon ) is today's featured guest. R.U. Sirius tells how Timothy Leary (his friend and fellow cyberculture activist) helped him trick William Gibson (the reclusive author of the seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer ) into providing them with an interview for Mondo 2000 (the cyberculture magazine of which R.U. Sirius was editor and co-founder). He also talks about his work w...
Dec 24, 2008•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast R.U. Sirius (writer, editor, talk show host , and cyberculture icon ) is today's featured guest. As Editor-In-Chief of a new magazine called H+ (which is written by transhumanists, for transhumanists) he describes how he was recruited, his goals for its future, and admits (possibly for the first time) that he is a transhumanist and has been one, possibly his whole life. Timothy Leary (who he recruited as a regular writer for Mondo 2000 ) in the 1980s, he points out, wrote about and promoted many...
Dec 17, 2008•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brain Wang (writer, speaker and noted futurist) is today's featured guest. Biases remain strong, Brian says, within government and the scientific community that have prevented the funding of some nanotechnology projects while promoting others. Brian explains how these biases are misused to secure funding for projects which have nothing to do with nanotechnology, at the cost of those that do. Brian also talks about: Bussard Fusion (not to be confused with the interstellar ramjet also invented by ...
Dec 10, 2008•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Orban (futurist, speaker and business executive) is today's featured guest. This is the second half of his interview. (The first half is in the episode dated October 29, 2008.) Spimes , some people call them. What are spimes? What are the benefits and dangers of this new Internet expansion? What will be the uses and misuses? How will spimes impact people's lives? How will portions of the Internet migrate to this Spimey Network . Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the December 3, 2008 epi...
Dec 03, 2008•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Orban (futurist, speaker and business executive) is today's featured guest. The Internet is big and still growing. How it grows and where it grows changes with time. During the next few years one of its massive growth spurts will be into devices that are not physically connected to the net. This transition has already begun. It is moving into the billions of cell phones. But next will come other simpler objects, like shoes and clothes and toys and toasters. Spimes , some people call them. ...
Oct 29, 2008•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Phoenix (nanotechnology scientist, author and researcher) is today's featured guest. (This is the second half of the interview we started last week.) Chris Phoenix is the co-founder and Director of Research for CRN (the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology). He is also a Scientific Advisor for The Nanotechnology Group, Inc., on the Scientific Advisory Board for Nanorex, Inc. and a Senior Associate at the Foresight Nanotech Institute. Topics discussed include: his ideas about the Singulari...
Oct 22, 2008•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Phoenix (nanotechnology scientist, author and researcher) is today's featured guest. Chris Phoenix is the co-founder and Director of Research for CRN (the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology). He is also a Scientific Advisor for The Nanotechnology Group, Inc., on the Scientific Advisory Board for Nanorex, Inc. and a Senior Associate at the Foresight Nanotech Institute. Topics discussed include: an anecdote about the nanotechnology class he took from Eric Drexler ; the state of nanotechno...
Oct 15, 2008•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Julie Grimaldi , president of Police Futurists International , is today's featured guest. The mission of Police Futurists International is to foster excellence in policing by promoting and applying the discipline of Futures Research. Topics discussed include: ways CSI and other TV shows deviate from the reality of police work; inflammatory video clips of police misconduct posted onto youtube; flash cameras at intersections which produce automated traffic ticket; how high gas prices affect police...
Oct 08, 2008•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rudi Hoffman , the world's leading cryonics insurance provider, is today's featured guest. You can too take it with you! How combining cryonics and insurance can let you leave your million dollar insurance death benefit to yourself. It may allow you to wake up a century or two in the future, not just healthy but also wealthy. Cryonics is not just for today's rich. Ordinary people with moderate incomes can afford cryonic suspension by funding it with insurance. Rudi also describes one of the prin...
Oct 01, 2008•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Larry Niven , the award-winning author of Ringworld , The Mote In God's Eye , and many other hard science fiction novels, is our featured guest. He reveals that Robert A. Heinlein was the secret proofreader for his and Jerry Pournelle's novel The Mote In God's Eye . He describes Jerry Pournelle 's personal edit war in Wikipedia , how they and other science fiction writers are helping the Department of Homeland Security, and his own work on Land of the Lost, The Outer Limits , and Star Trek the A...
Sep 24, 2008•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Doctor Adrian Bowyer (inventor of the RepRap machine) is our featured guest. The RepRap machine is the first machine in all of human history that can make most of its own parts. Not all of them (at least not yet) but most. This means that with a good bit of human assistance and intervention it can do two things that for six hundred million years only biologically living things could do: Reproduce and Evolve. What's more, the material the machine needs to make more of itself can be grown in your ...
Sep 17, 2008•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Bostrom (author, lecturer, philosopher at Oxford University, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) is today's featured guest. Topics include: artificial intelligence, the future of civilization, transhumanism, the singularity, mind uploading, human extinction risks including the Toba super volcano, his simulation argument, and much more. Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the September 10, 2008 episode of The Future An...
Sep 10, 2008•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
