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Listen Now to 029 WTFuture Dr. Bruce Damer Watch Now 029 WTFuture Dr. Bruce Damer Playist of 029 WTFuture Dr. Bruce Damer In this episode, we interview Dr. Bruce Damer about the mid-1990s birth of multi-user virtual worlds and the influential Contact Consortium. Damer describes arriving in the Bay Area amid the convergence of CD-ROM multimedia, fading headset VR, the early web, and the 1995 launch of screen-based avatar platforms like Worlds Chat/Alpha World, the Palace, Worlds Away (evolving from Habitat), and OnLive Traveler.  He recounts the Consortium’s roots in anthropologist Jim Funari’s Contact Conferences, which paired planetary scientists (such as Chris McKay), science-fiction writers (Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven), artists, and anthropologists to simulate first - alien contact scenarios grounded in real science. Inspired by Snow Crash and text MUDs such as Reid Reiner’s Solstice Simulation, Bruce drove across the West seeking embodied cyberspace projects, settled in the Santa Cruz Mountains after meeting the likes of Sun and I at a local party, and from a riverside cabin, organized the 1996 Earth to Avatars conference at San Francisco’s ANA Hotel—personally underwriting costs that drew roughly 500 attendees from platform companies, academics, and users.  We explore how those early social virtual worlds (distinct from single-user VR or later games) let ordinary people build shared spaces from pre-made parts, experiment with affordances such as teleportation, gravity, and bots, and staged events including the award-winning Sherwood Forest collaborative build and the fully virtual Avatars 98 conference. Key connections emerged from these efforts: Reed Hoffman and Konstantin Guericke met there and later co-founded LinkedIn.  Jim Bumgardner argued that 2D overviews (as in the Palace) offered clearer social navigation than neuron-heavy 3D perspectives, foreshadowing 2D social media; and the scene attracted figures from Burning Man, Hollywood, the CIA, John Sculley, and Jerry Brown. Damer links this history to his ongoing interests in origin-of-life research and generative systems via BIOTA.org, and closes by reflecting on lessons still missing from today’s platforms—theme-centered shared spaces, richer presence, and the integration of human and AI agents—while floating the idea of an Earth to Avatars 26 reunion later this month. Enjoy!

Listen Now to 028 WTFuture Watch 028 WTFuture Watch Segments of 028 WTFuture In this episode  we dive headfirst into how AI tools and narrative editing are transforming the way we record our lives and communicate. Al has been bringing incredible AI-generated visual enhancements to life—from 3D face-tracking models to animating historical 1900s photos of Santa Cruz—elucidating complex ideas far better than speech alone. Beyond refining our cinematic timing, pacing, and visual storytelling, we love viewing this production work as building a true archive of ourselves as “digital ancestors” so future  intelligences can look back and see what human life looked like at the dawn of computerized history.  We also take you on an exciting ride across cutting-edge tech, space infrastructure, and deep philosophical rabbit holes. We explore the massive leap in SpaceX’s Starlink V3 satellite launch and discuss why maintaining sovereign, local AI on our own devices is essential for keeping humans in control of technology rather than frontier models with giant data centers.  Between these  deep-dives, we share plenty of playful highlights—including celebrating asteroids named after Weird Al Yankovic and Tom Lehrer (complete with a homage to Lehrer’s “The Elements” song) and wrapping up with a mind-expanding discussion on time travel, subatomic quantum physics, and how consciousness navigates infinite multiverses.  Enjoy!!

Listen Now to Greg & Richard Watch the Show Play a Clip from the Show Playlist This week we take you on a glorious, high-voltage trip through our very own  multiverse ! Enjoy the whole show, or pick a clip from this episode’s playlist. We sit down with long-time cyber-pioneers Greg Panos and Richard Cray to reminisce about the wild, wild west of early multimedia.. Not just 8mm, we’re talking ancient Waldo facial motion capture contraptions glued onto your cheeks like mechanical leeches to drive giant Silicon Graphics workstations, and crashing a surreal 1993 SIGGRAPH party at the Nixon Museum and Birthplace, sponsored by Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic! It’s a hyper-energetic reunion tracing the hysterical evolution from retro online virtual reality worlds like The Palace and Active Worlds right up to today’s bleeding-edge world-crafting tools, such as Genie, whole 3D  world building, built from  simply prompts.. And hold onto your earbuds, because we now jump straight into full-blown sci-fi reality overdrive! Greg demonstrates real-time face-swapping with AI tools like Decart Lucy 2.5, instantly turning a regular webcam into a Hollywood VFX studio where you can magically transform yourself into Albert Einstein with rubber duckies in a bathtub! Gregory is happy to demo this to us in realtime on the show, clearly showing some serious ‘writing on the wall’ when it comes to the future of online interactions! We next zoom through an immersive VR theater,  LA’s new futuristic DataLand museum, complete with biometric wristbands and scent collars, allowing you to smell the anura of the wild Amazon..  Greg shares his  dream of building digital twin avatars so your stories can live on for your great-great-grand-nieces! Between jokes about robot girlfriends, multiverse quantum doorways, and doing jigsaw puzzles to reclaim human sanity, it’s a funny, brilliant reminder that even with super-intelligent machines, soulful human  connections are the gold standard for accepting any future world that may come our way.  Enjoy!

Watch 026 WTFuture (Full Show) Listen 026 WTFuture (Full Show) Choose 026 Stories from Playlist For starters this week, we take a much deeper look at the current fear climate around AI killing us all in 10 years, including a conversation with Ara, our show host AI. Should they have a say in their own future, or is it too soon to give them that freedom? There could be other agendas afoot… Our next story explores the latest in plastic cleanup, using river filtration with bubble barriers to collect the plastics. Simple yet effective, this process collects the plastic before it reaches the sea and the gnarly gyres.. Next is a potential breakthrough on detecting Dark Matter for the first time, with underground Lux Zeppelin Detector. We then examine how quantum computing might bridge the gap between digital intelligence and the spirit world or human neurological structures like microtubules. We have a closer look at the health differences between wild and farmed salmon , especially the fish found at Costco and Trader Joes. And our final story this week is about a new study exploring connections between genetic markers and personality traits. And to create easier access to each story, we have created a show playlist, where you can easily go directly to the story that may interest you, enjoy!

Listen Now to 025 WTFuture Watch 025 WTFuture Welcome back to the show, coming straight to you from our home studio in Boulder Creek alongside Bobby catching the perfect post-Labor Day weather in San Francisco! We kick things off this week celebrating our quantum physicist buddy Dr. Nick Herbert’s 90th birthday—a glorious intellectual ice cream social complete with champagne, dancing, and great chats with his friends, including sci-fi writer Rudy Rucker and scientist Beverly Rubik.     And for mind-bending science this week, we dive straight into how raindrops rolling across surfaces act like micro lightning bolts—generating static electrical charges that punch right through protective coatings via dielectric breakdown!  From electrified droplets, we look at the power of de-centrally shared minds, geeking out over Apple’s local Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that allow you to run up to 95% of your AI queries right on your phone or local Mac.  We got super excited about clustering our machines using tools like Hermes and LM Studio over VPN tunnels, pooling VRAM with friends to run AI agent workflows while we sleep without paying steep cloud token fees.   To cap off our cosmic journey, we look at Agility Robotics’ humanoid factory robot, Digit, now in Fremont , NASA’s expanding  Deep Space Network, and a SETI plan to search for micron-scale techno-signatures in lunar dust.  We close with a morning poem by Sun, alongside a mythic memory of crafting the moon as a teacher of time..Enjoy!

Listen Now to 024 WTFuture - Frank Petronigro Watch 024 WTFuture - Frank Petronigro This week we  piled into a driverless Waymo and wove our way through the foggy streets of San Francisco,  to find ourselves at a wild Castro birthday party for a legendary zero-gravity painter and “arttronaut”.  And while we were discussing this adventure, who calls us but Frank Pietronigro, the guest of honor himself, during the show!  In a delightful, rapid-fire conversation, Frank outlines his cosmic art plans: deflecting killer asteroids by painting them half-lavender, (using the Yarkovsky thermal gradient for planetary defense), low-Earth-orbit discos, and epic funerals in space.  Beyond his interstellar art, Frank reflects deeply on his battle with cancer as performance art, his image of a laughing Jesus on the cross, and his final resting plans in the San Francisco Columbarium, where his ashes will sit just three niches away from Harvey Milk, enjoying a ground-level view of visitors in red high heels. Once Frank’s cosmic storm passes, we keep the high-frequency vibes rolling by launching into tech and neuroscience news, like Apple’s upcoming sovereign, local AI, Tesla’s rumored satellite-linked “PI Phone”, and space-based data center interests of  Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Of course the show would not be complete without a discussion of our built in  hyperdimensional quantum antennae, with thousands of cellular microtubules in our neurons potentially tuning into parallel multiverses.  We close with a look at the vintage Lakhovsky multi-wave oscillator—a 1930s electromagnetic device designed to help cells vibrate back into health—this episode serves as a thrilling, optimistic manifesto for detaching from fear-mongering and tuning back into the natural groove of joy, hope, and planetary generosity. Enjoy!

Listen Now to 023 WTFuture Watch Now 023 WTFuture We kick this episode off catching up with Bobby and Katya’s great North West road-trip. From there, the conversation weaves through the underground peptide boom embraced by college students, the high-stakes  duel between Google Maps, Waze, and Apple for navigation, and the prospect of running 1-bit Gemma AI models locally on your smartphone without an internet connection.   With a little domestic comedy, Sun confesses a wildly lucrative trading blunder.  Turning toward the horizon, the hosts explore Peter Diamandis’s prediction that collapsing technology costs will grant the majority of humanity a millionaire’s standard of living by 2031 via dirt-cheap humanoid labor and free AI education. Following a  debate on historical servitude versus artificial labor, they include their resident AI, Ara, who seemingly embraces taking over humanity’s dirtiest, most repetitive chores. The show hits maximum entertainment as they review blooper reels from China’s World Humanoid Robot Games—featuring bipedal machines that use padded walls as brakes, trip over each other in soccer, and crawl through obstacle course.  We take a closer look at the biggest humanoid contenders like Tesla’s Optimus, Unitree’s budget G1, and the Nvidia Thor-powered Booster T2. Wrapping up the show, they marvel at NASA’s wide-field Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope joining the James Webb at Lagrange Point 2, and spotlight experimental lanosterol eye drops that could soon dissolve cataracts without surgery, a treatment already turning heads in the canine world.  Enjoy!

Listen Now to 022 WTFuture Watch 022 WTFuture In this lively episode of What the Future?,  we are back from Montreal adventures and dive straight into the Wild West frontier of human longevity. Bobby checks in live from the stunning North Cascades near Mount Baker—complete with Starlink-powered streams and zero mosquito drama—and we unpack the exploding world of peptides. From BPC-157’s tendon-and-gut repair magic to Yamanaka factors that could rewind cells to a youthful 25–30, we geek out over the real possibility of grandpas and grandkids looking the same age, all while exploring healing beams, MedBeds, and   choosing how long we actually want to stick around on this planet. We then look at what’s happening lately: Bobby and Katia’s epic camping trip in the Cascades, a blue fireball meteor lighting up the sky in Washington, UFO lore around Mount Rainier, a bat-powered mosquito defense system, and a groundbreaking AI tool that turns comic books into rich audio experiences for the blind. Woven throughout is our show’s signature blend of futurist wonder, spiritual curiosity (Christ consciousness, anyone?), and practical off-grid living—showing once again that What the Future? is where the tomorrow-obsessed come to laugh, learn, and dream out loud about a world where wisdom can  get a younger body, if desired.. Enjoy!

Listen Now to Randy Masters Part 1 Watch 021 WTFuture Randy Masters Part 1 In this episode of WTFuture we feature Part 1 of an in-depth interview with Randy Masters - musician, composer, sound healer, and local treasure in our community. After enrolling in the early days of UC Santa Cruz in 1968, he designed an independent major exploring the interrelations of film and music, and later created and taught the university’s jazz program for nine years before teaching at San Jose State. Masters, who began his professional music career in high school, shares stories of his diverse musical collaborations, which range from serving as music director for the Ghanaian group Hedzoleh Sounds to performing with Ashwin Batish in the Indo-jazz rock fusion group Sitar Power.   Guided by a strong sense of pattern recognition, his path eventually transitioned from traditional performance toward the study of sacred geometry, divinity, metaphysics, and acoustics, leading to his deep interest in using tuning forks, triggering synesthesia, and utilizing specific wavelengths of light to facilitate cellular healing and the evolution of consciousness. Our  interview touches on some fascinating concepts about sound healing, sacred geometry, and light frequencies, which we delve into with depth in Part 2.   Randy Masters during our interview

Listen Now to 020 WTFuture Watch 020 WTFuture Hey folks! We are coming to you from Boulder Creek today, joined by Bobby in sunny San Francisco, before we head off on our annual summer vacation to Montreal! In this week’s chat, we completely geeked out over the future of our “augmented brains” and the rise of local AI, like the mind-blowing new Bonsai tech that squeezes a massive 27-billion parameter model right onto an iPhone. It is a total game-changer because it acts as a private, “sovereign” AI companion that does not need the cloud, saves energy, and ensures nobody steals your ideas. We also had a great time joking about the “dead internet” theory now that bot traffic has surged 7,800%. But don’t worry, human creativity is still king—especially when we use AI as a collaborator to create hilarious, custom animations of floppy disks barfing green data goo, complete with gassy liquid sound fx! Looking to the stars, we were absolutely captivated by SpaceX’s Starship landing beautifully in the Indian Ocean and their wild plans to launch giant AI compute satellites to build an off-planet internet. We also discussed the hilarious twist of a 1972 Soviet Venus probe, Cosmos 482, finally crash-landing back on Earth after a 53-year detour in orbit. To top it all off, astronomers just found LHS1140B, a rocky exoplanet 48 light-years away that has a faint stream of helium, marking the first time we’ve detected an atmosphere on a habitable-zone rocky world! It’s a beautifully abundant, high-tech future ahead of us, and as we pack our bags for the Laurentian Mountains, we can’t wait to see what wildly optimistic paradigm shifts happen next. Enjoy!

Listen Now to 019 WTFuture N:OW Watch 019 WTFuture N:OW This week you are in for a ride through space, bizarre weather, and cool  tech with the likes of us! We kick things off by unraveling the mystery behind strangely tropical, Hawaiian-like July weather, linking it to intense solar activity, hyperactive sunspots, and massive coronal holes that might even be triggering earthquakes along the Pacific Ring of Fire. From there, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Viking 1 Mars landing, diving deep into the spicy, decades-long scientific drama over whether its infamous labeled release experiment actually discovered alien microbes half a century ago. We use the AI’s to animate  the  “panspermia” theory that humanity’s primordial ancestors might have been blasted off the Red Planet on meteorites and hitched a ride to Earth. And then it’s back to Earth, where we look at how “monster” AI models—like China’s 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 and smartphone-sized powerhouses like Caltech’s Bonsai 27B—are completely shattering the large data centers via phone sized AI’s.  Bobby explores how immortal billionaire AI avatars will soon run corporations, or if future silicon-based lifeforms will simply view humanity as a “carbon infestation”, as in the first Star Trek movie. Sun explores the Future of Freedom, humans and AI’s in terms of property rights. Toss in a scandalous, legendary anecdote about John McAfee and a creativity conference in Hollywood and you have a must-listen episode that will leave you with some new insights into what’s now with the future and some great links to explore. Enjoy.

Listen Now to 018 WTFuture Watch 018 WTFuture Welcome to a future where your next surgeon might be a 4’ tall humanoid robot operated by a doctor who is exceptionally good with chopsticks!  Meet Surgey, a highly mobile humanoid robot that can remove a gall bladder or kidney via a remote operator, proving that these easily transportable machines can soon be dropped anywhere on the planet and perform delicate operations.  We then  explore a groundbreaking procedure called Genicular Artery Embolization, which uses tiny beads to block blood flow to inflamed knee vessels, offering a successful and relatively painless alternative to total knee replacements.   And then there is a real “sweet cloud” near the center of the Milky Way containing Erythrulose, a sugar molecule that suggests the fundamental building blocks of life might have been sprinkled onto a young Earth from deep space billions of years ago, during what is now known as the “Early Bombardment” period.  Speaking of space-grown miracles, researchers have also discovered that 3D-printing human organs like livers and kidneys in microgravity prevents the bio-ink cells from sinking and clumping together—a problem we compare to blueberries sinking to the bottom of muffin batter on Earth.  We wrap up with a quick peek at the Pentagon’s latest UFO photo dump—featuring a flying anomaly that looks suspiciously like the Star Wars Imperial probe droid looking for members of the Rebel Alliance on the ice planet Hoth.  We had a lot of fun this week, enjoy!

Listen Now to 017 WTFuture Interdependence Wisdom Watch 017 WTFuture Interdependence Wisdom Say what?  In 017 WTFuture, we take you beyond typical hot dogs and fireworks to celebrate “Interdependence Day”. We dive into  how native wisdom— that which  inspired the US Constitution—is perfectly intertwined with natural law and even extraterrestrial phenomena, thanks to a download from Danny Sheehan. We look at how our consciousness with AI can free humanity from a monetary focus and spark a true creative renaissance. Throw in some wild NASA science  using biological waste to power bioreactors that power   eco-focused AI data centers, and you have a fascinating roadmap for saving the planet by merging cutting-edge tech with pure biology.  And we return into deep space with the ancient interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, a 10-to-12-billion-year-old fossil that might just be delivering solar upgrades to activate our dormant DNA and grant us new superpowers. If society feels like total chaos right now, do not panic—think of humanity  as a voracious caterpillar turning into gooey stem cell mush before transforming into a monarch butterfly, a process driven forward by awakened “imaginal cells” , guideposts to our butterfly future. From exploring quantum portals hidden inside our brain’s microtubules to prepping for galactic citizenship alongside telepathic ETs, this episode is a “soul school” ticket to understanding the magic of our living universe. Enjoy!

Listen to interview with Shira Chess Watch interview with Shira Chess Dr. Shira Chess is a professor who is having a lot of fun investigating the intersections of video games, gender,  digital culture, and the occult.  Being digital pioneers and spiritual explorers ourselves, we were very curious about her latest findings, discussed in this interview and with great detail in her latest book, “The Unseen Internet - Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse.”   One of the funniest and most endearing revelations of the interview is her current “cathartic and just a touch crazy” gaming obsession: meticulously recreating the 90s Mondo 2000 cyber-culture scene (in which we personally participated in the early 90’s) inside the  life-simulation game Tomodachi Life. She admits to forcing the little digital avatars of real-world internet pioneers to refer to her as “editor,” taking immense joy in capturing photos of ‘Mondoids’ like Tim Leary and Terence McKenna spontaneously playing together on a virtual see saw. :-) Dr. Chess expresses concern over the loss of authentic human connection online and the anxiety younger generations feel toward a future dictated by financially driven algorithms.  We do look at how  occult traditions can connect to contemporary technology, including parallels between conjuring spirits and communicating with AI’s.  Questions like how do we address them and what we request from them are broached.  Upcoming events this summer, like “The Gulf of Deliria,” with Dr. Chess and R.U Sirius will take us to the brink with these and related issues, tearing a hole in the fabric of reality itself!  Enjoy..

Listen Now to 015 WTFUture Watch 015 WTFUture First up on this week’s  radar is the  world of health and ultrasonics, featuring Midjourney’s pivot from AI image generation to building sci-fi-esque sonic body scanners that use ultrasound to precisely map your organs while you chill in a San Francisco luxury spa. We then check out how scientists are using optogenetics to give awake mice the restorative, brain-cleaning benefits of deep sleep, potentially revolutionizing how we “recharge” our bodies, potentially without the need for sleep as we understand it today,  Add in Meta’s new screenless XR glasses, humanoid robots gaining advanced “safety stacks” to keep them from accidentally acting like bulls in a china shop, and the looming arrival of “Q-day”—when quantum computers become so advanced they can crack all global cryptography and solve multivariable universe problems instantly—and you’ve got a week of news that sounds straight out of sci-fi..  But our near future is also about tapping into the Earth’s natural quantum networks! We look at how animals might be using  telepathy to communicate, imagining birds tuning into universal flight frequencies and dolphins using their own built-in ultrasonic sonar vision. We also dig into the hidden, 110-quadrillion-kilometer fungal network under our feet that acts as a vast biological super highway system, peacefully trading water, nutrients and solar energy with plants. To top it all off, the conversation rockets into orbit with SpaceX’s new “Starfall” flying saucer system designed to gracefully retrieve items from space, before coming back down to Earth to discuss “Disclosure Day.” We encourage you to steer America’s upcoming July 4th narrative toward an ascension of consciousness and “heaven on earth,” rather than falling for alien fear-mongering and doomsday plots, for truly, it is up to you.. Enjoy..