FUTURATI PODCAST

Since the discovery of genetics, people have dreamed of being able to correct diseases, select traits in children before birth, and build better human beings. Naturally, many serious technical and ethical questions surround this endeavor. Luckily, tonights' guest is as good a guide as we could hope to have.Dr. Steve Shu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. He has done extensive research in the field of computational genomics, and is the founder of several startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this interview please help us grow by subscribing to the podcast, leaving us a review, and sharing it with your friends!It's been said that the first trillionaire will either come from cryptoassets or from asteroid mining. The truth is, it's almost impossible to fathom the vast quantities of resources, from plain water to gold, which are locked up in asteroids. Figuring out how to tap into this potential will be crucial to developing cislunar supply chain solutions to service the growing space economy. Tonight we're joined by Joel Sercel, an expert in this field. Joel got his PhD in space propulsion and plasma physics from Caltech, then went on to a stellar career as an award-winning engineer and manager. Today he is the president and CEO of Trans Astronautica, where he works to make asteroid mining and manufacturing in space a reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this interview please help us grow by subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with your friends!Tonight we're doing something different. This is the 100th episode of the Futurati Podcast, and we're going to have a good time reminiscing about our favorite episodes.We're also turning on the cameras for the first time (though we forgot to hit 'record' until 35 minutes in)Stick around until the end for a lightning round with me and Thomas, where we'll weigh in on some of the big themes that have popped up over and over again in these 100 episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this interview please help us grow by subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with your friends!Money has a long history, beginning with barter and leading all the way to your credit card. Kirk Hutchison founded Volt Protocol because he believes the next era of money is deflationary and disintermediated. He studied history at UC San Diego and arrived at a libertarian bent after seeing the similarities between market processes and equilibria in nature. Inspired by the rich theoretical work on free money systems by economists such as George Selgin, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, Kirk is working to put this theory into practice using smart contracts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this interview please help us grow by subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with your friends!Whether it's pondering the mysteries of life while watching a sunrise or reasoning in great detail about how a new technology will change the world, there is something unique about the human capacity to imagine the future. But where does this capacity come from, what does it mean for us, and how can we use it more effectively? Tonight's guest has just written a book exploring these themes. Byron Reese is an Austin-based entrepreneur with a quarter-century of experience building and running technology companies. He is a recognized authority on AI and holds a number of technology patents. In addition, he is a futurist with a strong conviction that technology will help bring about a new golden age of humanity. He gives talks around the world about how technology is changing work, education, and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this podcast, help us grow by sharing it with your friends!It's become commonplace to hear politicians and commentators bemoaning the energy expenditure of bitcoin mining, noting that it consumes more power than certain industries or countries and confidently proclaiming that the bitcoin network performs no useful work. But recently, an emerging group of scholars has pushed back on this narrative, arguing that in fact bitcoin mining has certain special properties that make it ideal for subsidizing renewable energies. If this is true, it could become an important part of mitigating the effects of climate change. Tonight we're joined by one of the original scholars advancing this thesis. Troy Cross is a professor of philosophy at Reed University, where he focuses on questions of knowledge and reality. In addition, he is a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, where you can find his work on energy economics, bitcoin mining, and the environment.#climatechange #crypto #bitcoin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this podcast, help us grow by sharing it with your friends!Since the release of bitcoin there has been a great deal of ink spilled by people trying to imagine the ways in which it could change the world. One such person is tonight's guest, Jack Ronaldi. I met Jack through a bitcoin book club we're both a part of, and I was impressed with his command of the material and his ability to express himself. Like many others, Jack was originally dismissive of bitcoin because of his background in economics, finance, and banking. But gradually he became a true believer, and today he writes and thinks about bitcoin's transformative potential, as well as the ways in which its vulnerabilities can be fixed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you enjoy this interview please help us grow by subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with your friends!As futurists, Thomas and Trent take a great interest in studying the disciplines which best elucidate the major trends shaping humanity's direction, disciplines like economics, physics, and computer science. It's rare to find anyone conversant in two of these fields, and rarer still to find a person conversant in all of them, and many more besides. Well, tonight's guest is someone who has done a remarkable job of uniting disparate ideas into compelling visions of the future, generating concepts like futures markets, the great filter, and grabby aliens which have shaped thinking on problems ranging from the Fermi Paradox to governance. Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from the California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Flow is a well-known and valuable psychological state in which time seems to drop away and you become completely immersed in the present moment. Though its usefulness in achieving individual excellence has been studied extensively, much less attention has been paid to how it can aid in cooperation. Well tonight we're joined by a guest who has tried to fill that gap by writing "The Devil's Dictionary", a fascinating novel which also explores topics around climate change, mass extinction, and the future of humanity. Steven Kotler is one of the world’s foremost experts on human peak performance and the New York Times bestselling author of “The Art of Impossible”, and “The Rise of Superman”. If you enjoy this interview please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends, it’s the best way to help us grow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There has been a tremendous amount of chatter over the past year about NFTs--how they're a scam, how they'll usher in a new era of democratized web3 for the entire planet, and everything in between. Tonight we're joined by someone with an unusual background who is unusually well-placed to help us get to the bottom of this. Michael Maizels is a former professor of art history who made the somewhat non-traditional pivot into crypto. He is now the head of research at Abra, where he works on subjects like bitcoin mining and climate change and the security vulnerabilities of blockchain bridges. If you enjoy this interview please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends, and don't forget to check out our website, futuratipodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices