Australia’s most impressive media entrepreneur, Julian Assange, explains how Wikileaks works and provides some insight into recent events, in this recent interview with Wired’s Chris Anderson at TED.

Assange is trying to use the internet to change the world. He is what Peter Ellyard would call a “Future Maker”. I’m constantly motived and inspired by Julian’s quietly bold approach to tackle world governments and corporations. He’s spot on in this interview when he says a good approach to figuring out what the most important news is, is to discover what corporations and governments are spending a lot of effort and money to keep secret.

Recently I’ve been reading ridiculous suggestions that Wikileaks is a “honey trap” for whistleblowers. The idea seems to be that Wikileaks gets potential whistleblowers to come forward, and then they are arrested, Manning’s recent arrest is taken as being a sign that something is rotten in Denmark. The only problem with this scenario is that stuff is being leaked. It would be seem a bit of a stretch to think the establishment are allowing their dirty laundry to get exposed in an effort to create a temptation for potential whistleblowers to come forwards. As Julian says at the beginning of the video, Wikileaks has released more leaks in the last couple of years than the rest of the world media COMBINED.

A few days ago I had a chance to chat with Jon Dee, founder of Planet Ark and the new Do Something! initiative, about his life and goals. We talked about everything from his involvement in Rock Aid Armenia (where he pulled together a list of top Brit Rockers to perform a charity concert and record a new version of Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” to raise funds for earthquake victims in Armenia) to deciding, with friend Aussie tennis pro Pat Cash, to start Planet Ark, and his new venture Do Something!, which aims to create positive social and environmental change.

Here’s the version of Smoke On The Water that Jon produced back in 1992!

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David Horn works with Microsoft in Seattle and is one of the organisers of the 2009 Space Elevator Conference. What is a “space elevator”, I hear you ask? Only the coolest idea you’ve ever heard! Imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where getting into space involves jumping into something like a luxury train that travels VERTICALLY – up into the air – traveling along a ‘ribbon’ made of carbon nanotubes – for a week until you get outside of the earth’s gravitational pull and THEN you jump in your space vehicle, which is attached to the other end of the ribbon, detach, and get flung into space via centrifugal force!

Links:
Wikipedia entry on Space Elevators.

Book your ticket for the 2009 Space Elevator Conference here.

Music:
Chris Garneau
“Fireflies” (mp3)
from “El Radio”
(Absolutely Kosher)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
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Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody
More On This Album

Today I had the pleasure to catch up once again with G’Day World regular Dr Peter Ellyard, futurist, environmentalist, and author of “Designing 2050: Pathways To Sustainable Prosperity On Spaceship Earth” which is published by TPN TXT. Buy your copy now!

I chatted with Peter today about the recent IPCC report, Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme and whether or not we are all doomed, as George Monbiot is suggesting. Peter told me that our politicians and media are focusing on the wrong thing. We shouldn’t be just thinking about reducing emissions, we should be talking about MINING THE SKY.

As always, I just loved talking to Peter. He never fails to inspire. He’s now on Twitter (I gave him a crash course today), so make sure you follow him. And we also have a Facebook group for Peter call “The Future Makers Club“, make sure you sign up for that as well.

If you are a journalist, blogger, twitterer or podcaster and you’d like a review copy of Designing 2050, please email me.

Subscribe now to the weekly update email (fill in the below box) to get a weekly list of all of the new episodes on TPN in one easy-to-read format!

======================================================

My guest today is Peter Singer.

He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement.

I invited him onto the show to talk about the recent news from Spain that they will soon probably extend basic legal rights to all non-human hominids, an idea that has been driven by an organization that Peter co-founded, The Great Ape Project. We also talk about the basic ethics of utilitarianism and how the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

I had the pleasure once again today to catch up with Dr Peter Ellyard, Australia’s leading futurist, one of our most popular public speakers and, of course, author of the historic first book published by TPNTXT:

“Designing 2050: Pathways to sustainable prosperity on spaceship earth”.

The auction for two signed proof copies of the book can be found here. The auction ends 15-Jun-08 22:11:27 AEST.

You can buy a new copy of “Designing 2050″, either in paperback or ebook format, here.

Watch the video interview:

Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist. He joins me today to talk about our growing reliance on online social networks and the net in general as forms of identity management. What are some of the consequences of putting your personal information online or – perhaps scarier – taking them off?

Links:

• Jamais’ blog at Open The Future.
• My earlier podcast with Jamais from June 2007.
• THE TRUTH MACHINE by James Halperin.
• The all-new TPN Weekly Review – subscribe via RSS or email (fill in the below box) to get a weekly list of all of the new episodes of TPN podcasts in one easy-to-read format!

Today’s Track:

Barry Adamson
“Who Killed Big Bird?” (mp3)
from “Stranger On The Sofa”
(Central Control)

Buy at Official Barry Adamson website
Buy at iTunes Music Store

Today it’s again my pleasure to catch up with Dr Peter Ellyard, Australia’s leading futurist. We caught up for lunch in South Yarra today and chatted about why visionaries often feel frustrated with their own progress, the need for a world democracy and how shareholders can use their voting power to effect political change.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

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Do me a solid and digg the show.

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Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

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• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. His most recent book is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, and he was the founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex, Inc, which is developing a CAD system for nanomechanical engineering, is currently a member of Nanorex’ Scientific Advisory Board, and is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He is also known as the originator of the Utility Fog concept.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Add me to your Twitter account.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Another show with the brilliant Dr Peter Ellyard today. I popped around to his place yesterday without any planned agenda and, as I had hoped, we ended up talking about a whole range of interesting things, including:

What entrepreneurs dream about

Peter’s introduction to the operas of maestro Richard Wagner

How globalism and tribalism are playing out around the world

Why the United Kingdom might break up within five years

What “Australian values” are

Chavez’s activities in Venezuela

The rise of “sustainable individualism” over capitalism and communism

What a great gift this guy is.

If you missed them, check out my other shows with Peter.

GDAY WORLD #204 – Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist

GDAY WORLD #213 – Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist – part two

Now… folks… this isn’t radio. This is podcasting. It’s supposed to be a conversation, not just me talking at you.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Didn’t expect THAT, did you?

I’m prepping for my chat with Vint tomorrow morning and happened upon this recent interview with Kuzweil on CNNMoney where he says:

“These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous,” says the man who once delivered a tech conference presentation as a singing computer avatar named Ramona. (That stunt was the inspiration for the 2002 Al Pacino movie “Simone.”) “They don’t account for anything like the technological progress we’re going to experience.”

I guess he means that accelerating technological progress will allow us to generate power using fossil-fuel substitutes and undo the damage we’ve already done. He might be right. I hope he is. I still don’t think that means we should stop doing what we can do now to change our behaviours though.

By the way… I’ve got something VERY exciting in the works for TPN’s audience regarding carbon offsets. Stay tuned.

Forgive me Father – it’s been at least two weeks since my last podcast.

I figured you guys needed some time to digest my last run of shows. Ready for more yet?

Another show on the coming of the technological singularity today. My guest is Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in California.

I have been aware of Eli for ten years or more. He was featured fairly prominently in Damien Broderick’s book The Spike and was a contributor to Natasha Vita-More’s Extropian mailing list in the mid to late Nineties.

An autodidact prodigy, Eliezer wrote the first version of his Singularity “call to arms”, Staring Into The Singularity, at the age of 15 and has been re-working it continually since then.

On this episode I’ve tried to capture Eliezer’s vision for the different forms that the Singularity might take, the timelines for it, and his motivations for trying to make it happen as soon as possible.

I hope you enjoy it.

If you want to hear more interviews about The Singularity or AI, try these previous episodes of G’Day World:

Dr Aubrey de Grey
Ray Kurzweil
Roger Williams
Dr Ben Goertzel

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
The “War Of The Worlds’ stuff at the beginning of the show comes from Chris Anderson’s POP!tech 2007 speech.

Peter Ellyard and I were talking recently about the field of “biomimicry” and so I was excited to see that episode #2 of our Nick’s new CleanTech podcast on TPN has an interview about that very subject. He interviews Dr. Tim Finnigan, Founder and CEO of Biopower Systems, a distributed ocean power technology company. They are building a machine which looks like seaweed but turns ocean currents into power. You have to listen to this episode.

Wow. I just had one of those whooooooo moments, when the world spins. I was reading Brook Turner’s article on George Miller from last week’s Australian Financial Review magazine. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I admire George. MAD MAX and MAD MAX II are obviously the greatest Australian films ever made and two of the greatest films ever made full stop. On top of that, I’ve always admired Miller’s auteurness, the way he has avoided the Hollywood system, followed his own vision, done it his way. That appeals to the rebel in me.

So just imagine when I read these paragraphs in the article:

“Miller’s first big eureka moment came when he attended a lecture by the maverick American thinker and polymath Buckminster Fuller at university in the late sixties.”

And then, a few paragraphs later…

“Miller’s second great epiphany came when he heard the American writer Joseph Campbell speak on a rainy night in Santa Monica after he had made MM (Mad Max).”

Again, anyone who knows me well knows that Joseph Campbell has been a major influence on my thinking for 20 years. And recently I have been obsessed with Fuller. So weird. I also know that my friend Peter Ellyard has been heavily influenced by both of them as well. As, I guess, have lots of people. It’s just weird when you find out that someone you’ve admired for a long time has had very similar influences to yourself. If the article had said he was also a fan of Napoleon, I probably would have choked on my cereal.

******

Rage Against the Machine reunites! It might have only been for a one-off concert but we can only hope that the boys will put the band back together. God knows we need them now more than ever. I am a HUGE fan of RAtM. I haven’t heard that kind of anger or genuine passion in music since they left us 7 years ago (can it really be that long??). Even Lou and Bruce can only summon a fraction of the heat and intensity of Zack. And now you do what they told ya….

******

I said to a friend of mine today “I was watching a great speech by Vint Cerf today”. The friend replied “Should I know who that is?”.
This person is a webmaster for a pretty big company. When I explained that Vint is the co-inventor of the internet, the friend replied “Does that have anything to do with the term “surfing” the internet?”

Which lead me to think…

Vint Cerf has to be (with Bob Kahn) perhaps the most successful inventor in history, certainly if you measure the success of an inventor as ‘adoption of the invention over time’. Since they invented the internet in 1973, it has grown to over one billion customers. Even Microsoft doesn’t have that many customers. If you stop the average person in the middle of any street anywhere in the world and ask them “Have you heard of the internet?”, I think the response rate will be pretty high, even if they aren’t fortunate enough yet to be a ‘user’. However, I wonder – if you ask the same person “Who is Vint Cerf?”, they probably won’t be able to answer you. I wonder how that feels? I should get him onto the show and ask him. I’ve been watching this speech he recently gave to Hungarian “TV University” and he comes across as a nice guy, a regular human being. Can you even begin to imagine the impact he has had on the future of the human race? Bucky Fuller would have loved the internet. Talk about being a future maker!

******

The Silverlight demo that Microsoft announced last night at MIX07 is pretty cool. Sean Alexander, the product manager, is coming on the G’Day World this week or maybe next to talk to us about it in more depth.

******

I was getting very excited last night about the HUGE increase in audience to my Napoleon podcast during April (400%) until I got the full TPN stats today. It looks like we’ve had a few very naughty people trying to DOS my servers during the month. Fortunately they failed but in the process they completely screwed my stats. Either that or it’s innocent and someone inadvertently tried to download a couple of our shows tens of thousands of times over a couple of days. Either way, it’s ruined my day.

******
Marshall Kirkpatrick and the folks at Splashcast today launched their new application which looks like a very cool media player. Unfortunately, they have chosen to brand it “MyPodcastNetwork”. Obviously I have issues with that. So I have sent them an email requesting a discussion immediately. Hopefully we can resolve this in a polite fashion.

******

No guest today, just a bit of a chat about:

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – Aussies can dial into +613 9016 9699. The rest of you can either pay international charges (cmon, what price can you put on being on my show??) or just start begging me to set up an international number.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

I had the fortune last night to be invited to Peter Ellyard’s 70th birthday party at SOS, a sustainable and ethical restaurant at Melbourne Central with an amazing view over the old Melbourne Museum. I’m guessing there were about 100 people there from different sides of Peter’s life – his family, colleagues and friends. It’s was a terrific night and the tributes to Peter were all heart-warming (even mine). I had a series of engaging and vibrant discussions with a group of intelligent, articulate people from various walks of life I consider new friends, including Lauren (a Rhodes scholar), Felix (a self-described “70-year-old French Jew” who spent 30 years living in a kibbutz in Israel), Felix’s wife Shoshanna who is a philosopher/artist/educator who successfully fought off several of us who wanted to debunk the documentary she recently watched on memories transmitted through heart transplants, Ralph, a surgeon, his wife Patsy, an editor, and many others. My good mate Anthony, the guy who introduced me to Peter, was there, as was Diane, the masseuse at the Como Building in South Yarra who apparently originally introduced Peter to AJ and, coincidentally, has massaged all three of us at one point in time (separately, I might add) over the years.

ANYWAY… many of the tributes during the evening talked about Peter’s overwhelming generosity to everyone in his life. I’ve certainly been touched by this in the couple of months I’ve known him. He seems to operate on the principle that the more you give of yourself, the more will come back to you.

It reminded me instantly of a section in Buckminster Fuller’s book “Critical Path” which I was reading earlier in the day. Fuller described this principle, which I’ve learned to think of over the years as “The Principle of Reciprocity” as “precession”. He defined “precession” as “the effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion”. Precession was his answer to his own question “How do you obtain the money to live with and to acquire the materials and tools with which to work?”. This was the beginning of his mission when he was effectively bankrupt. His examination of the world around him lead him to believe that bodies in motion exert right-angle effects on other bodies around them. For example, the gravitational effect one planet has on another is at right-angles to the direction of motion of the planet (okay, so my simplistic understanding of the general theory of relativity would suggest that it’s actually the other way around… the warping of space-time that the mass of body A has causes body B to travel in a certain directional orbit around it… but let’s leave that aside for the time being, okay?). Drop a stone in a still pond and the concentric rings spread out at ninety degrees to the motion of the stone.

Fuller theorized that while most humans had, historically speaking, spent most of their energy trying to selfishly earn a living for themselves, some of them had, inadvertently, helped “nature” progress by making huge leaps in the standard of human civilization. These advances were “side effects” of the primary objective of being selfish.

He wrote:

“Therefore, what humans called the side effects of their conscious drives in fact produced that main ecological effects of generalized technological regeneration. I therefore assumed that what humanity rated as “side effects” are nature’s main effects. I adopted the prescessional “side effects” as my prime objective.”

What if, instead of working with the objective of your own comfort, you worked purely for the betterment of the human race? Would, perhaps, your own comfort be taken care of by “nature” in some sort of principle of reciprocity?

Fuller wrote:

“”Since nature was clearly intent on making humans successful in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, it seemed clear that is I undertook ever more humanly favorable physical-environment-producing artifact developments that in fact did improve the chances of all humanity’s successful development, it was quite possible that nature would support my efforts, efforts, provided I were choosing the successively most efficient technical means of so doing. Nature was clearly supporting all her intercomplementary ecological regenerative tasks – ergo, I must so commit myself and must depend upon nature providing the physical means of realization of my invented environment-advantaging artifacts. I noted that nature did not require hydrogen to “earn a living” before allowing hydrogen to behave in the unique manner in which it does. Nature does not require that any of its intercomplementing members “earn a living”.”

Now I don’t want to sound all “The Secret” on you, but there does seem to me to be a principle that, put simply, “if you do good things, good things happen to you”. Karma without the reincarnation. From the moment I started TPN, I had this feeling that this was an important mission. I’ve always felt like I had a purpose. And, that if I did it properly, worked hard, was focused, disciplined, and did it with integrity, that “good things would happen”.

I don’t expect miracles. I don’t expect things will always fall into my lap. But I do believe (not very scientific of me, i know) that if I pursue the right vision, diligently, honestly, and work my ass off, that perhaps I am merely fulfilling the purpose the Universe has for me. Now, again, I’m not suggesting that the Universe is “intelligent” or that there is some sort of mystical “higher power” that “has a plan” for me.

But… humans are made from atoms. Atoms obey the laws of physics and chemistry. Could you say that an atom of oxygen, connected to two atoms of hydrogen, has the purpose of being water? At the moment in time when you observe it as a water molecule, isn’t that it’s purpose? And up a level, on a macro scale, what is the purpose of that molecule of water? To make a cell function? To provide life-giving nutrients to an animal or plant? And that plant, what is its purpose? To feed me?

In the great chain of “purpose”, with every component of the Universe fulfilling its individual task, am I not merely a bunch of atoms, each of them obeying the laws of physics and chemistry? Am I, then, not also obeying the laws of physics and chemistry? Perhaps I, like the oxygen atom, have a role to play, determined, not by some mystical being, but by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Peter Ellyard is fulfilling his role, as mentor and futurist and leader. As he has done that diligently over his lifetime, he has obviously been rewarded in a variety of ways.

If I fulfill my purpose, which I see today as being a cog in the human evolution machine, dragging us an inch closer to the realization of our potential as a species, perhaps the Universe will continue to rise up and support my efforts, naturally and effortlessly?

Out of all of the great information in Dave’s recent “State of Technorati” report, I found the last paragraph to be the most impactful:

As always, our credo remains to “Be of Service” – my hope is that we’re delivering on that promise better today than ever, and that this time next year it will be still more true than ever before.

“Be Of Service”. How well does that fit into the Bucky Fuller theme we’ve been discussing of benefiting the human race? This lies at the very core of what I see as the difference between what Peter Ellyard calls “Future Makers” and “Future Takers”. The makers are creating value and being of service. The takers are making money for themselves regardless of the impact on the human race. As an entrepreneur, I really want to combine being a future maker with profit. I don’t think this should be any harder than making money by being a taker – it’s all a matter of where you focus.

Here’s my challenge to each of you today – is what you are doing on a daily basis creating value for the benefit of the human race? Or are you just pillaging someone else’s value creation?