028 WTFuture Weird Al's Asteroid, Digital Ancestors Speak Down, Time Travel Revisionism

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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!!

027 WTFuture Interview - Greg Panos & Richard Cray - Pioneers in the Virtual Multiverse

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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!

026 WTFuture Full Show- Quelling AI Fears,DarkMatter/ Plastic Cleanup breakthroughs, It's the Salmon

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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!

025 WTFuture - Quantum Birthday, Sparks in the Fog, Agents in the Dark, The Golden Thread of Time

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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!

024 WTFuture - Of Lavender Asteroids and Joyous Celebrations - Interview with Space Artist ARTronaut, Frank Pietronigro

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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!