Another Think Coming with Mac King

Many shirtless young men and tie-dyed young women, all with unkempt manes of hair restrained by greasy bandanas, dreamily reciting Allen Ginsberg poems and praising the works of Ken Kesey, while riding around in brightly painted VW buses from one Grateful Dead show to another during the counter-culture years of the 1960's, experimented with psychedelic drugs. But they weren’t — and aren’t — the only ones. Dr. George Greer is the president of the Heffter Research Institute in New Mexico and joins the pod to discuss the changing public perception of psychedelics in 2018 and beyond and how measured doses of psilocybin might help to treat PTSD, anxiety and depression in the near future.

Every login for every email address, retail website, fantasy sports league, social network, bank, insurance provider, newspaper, magazine, airline, payroll portal, online bill pay, cable provider, and membership rewards or subscription service, every link we click, website we visit and message we post online, all those saved logins, credit card numbers and addresses: All of that ever-growing dossier of information about us lives in pieces on servers in remote warehouses around the world for all of eternity. And still those 77 words in that rambling open sentence represent only a fraction of a fraction of all the digital information humans produce every day. As the algorithms and software to parse that gargantuan body of data improve so too will the opportunities for various actors to use that data for both good and evil. Johnathan Schwarz is the CEO of the technology firm DVG  ( www.dvginteractive.com )and promises us he's one of the guys working to use some of that data for good. He joins this episode of Another Think Coming to discuss the present and future of big data, particularly as it relates to his specialty : law enforcement and public safety.

A cardboard box in a truck driven by a person, maybe after it flew on an airplane, delivered to an address: This happens tens of millions of times every day and to most of us likely seems not only routine but also extremely low-tech. But every one of those hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers must decide the order in which to make each of their 100 or so daily deliveries, each selecting from literally trillions of possible combinations of routes in hopes of finding the shortest one, allowing them to consume the least amount of fuel, drive the fewest miles, lessen their carbon footprint and save their employer as much money as possible. UPS Senior Director of Process Management Jack Levis joins Another Think Coming to discuss the program his team spent a decade building to optimize those driving routes and the $50 million and counting it saves UPS every year.

Cheap, clean and bountiful: When talking energy, those three adjectives used in harmony describe the holy grail for every consumer — whether commercial, individual or government. But while “clean” or “green” may conjure images of wind, air or water for many, Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory research physicist Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi thinks of a different reaction: nuclear fusion. Dr. Ebrahimi joins the pod to talk about her work to isolate and replicate this explosive reaction found on the sun so we might one day mass produce fusion devices to provide an endless supply of cheap, clean energy for the entire planet.

For those refreshing their Coinbase accounts as they read this, those familiar with the conversion rate from LiteCoin to OmiseGO and those still researching the most secure offline Ripple wallets, this is an Another Think Coming episode they can probably skip. For the rest of this pod’s recurrent, frequent, occasional and/or first-time listeners, if that first sentence read like a discussion of some nerdy computer game, this ep might be worth a listen, as the cryptocurrency craze seizes the planet and debate rages whether crypto investors seem destined for riches or bankruptcy. Morgan Hill and Peter Borovykh founded an artificial intelligence cryptofund. They join the pod to condense a multiple-day cryptocurrency crash course into 25 minutes, while also pontificating on the greater implications of digital currencies and Blockchain technology.

The proliferation of drones in recent years seems to have encouraged hip, innovative leaders in seemingly every field to at least attempt to incorporate this suddenly affordable, conversation-sparking technology into their work, critics might say, sometimes at the expense of efficiency or necessity. But as drones continue their flightpaths into the mainstream, humans seem certain to identify a probably endless number of more revolutionary applications of the technology. Two alumni of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory appear to have done so already. Andrew Aubrey's Seek Ops attaches censors – similar to ones working on the surface of Mars – to drones, to monitor oil and gas lines for vulnerabilities before leaks and spills can occur, potentially saving oil and gas companies and local governments millions of dollars and the surrounding natural environments irreversible harm.

Books — physical, tangible, bound stacks of paper containing all of the knowledge of humanity in ink-printed words — still circulate through every school, homes, store, laboratory and office of power and change in this world, but increasingly man puts his thoughts and discoveries, past and present, into machines, publishing those digital tomes online for any and all to read. In a future world in which all of man’s past musings, his discoveries, his histories, buried deep in musty volumes deep in the great libraries of the old world, exist online accessible from anywhere, and no one ever publishes humanity's present and future writings in analog format, libraries must think differently about how best to serve their patrons and preserve the world's information. Christopher Platt is the chief branch library officer at the New York Public Library and tells us how that institution with its 53 million items, $245 million budget and 3.5 million patrons is planning for the that future.

NASA and Elon Musk want to send enough people, equipment and supplies to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. Every day more satellites join the thousands of man-made hunks of metal orbiting our planet. Dozens of private companies now specialize in spaceflight. At this juncture, the demand for launching humans and things they built and need into outer space seems only likely to grow. ABL Space Systems founder and CEO and Space X alumnus Harry O'Hanley is building rockets to help launch the hundreds of small satellites (smallsats) expected to join the other objects orbiting earth in the next few years and believes our future among the stars depends on a non-sexy, durable, workhorse, F-150 of a rocket we likely already possess the technological expertise to create.

More than four million miles of roadway crisscrosses the United States. These offline pieces of asphalt theoretically allow our vehicles to travel most efficiently but as our roads fall into disrepair and our various levels of government struggle to fund their maintenance, expansion and construction, a company in our nation's heartland offers a solution. Integrated Roadways CEO, CTO and founder Tim Sylvester offers pre-fabricated pieces of roadway that fit together to act as a fiber connection, passing information from one point to another, offering drivers free wifi, communicating with electric vehicles in real time and -- perhaps most importantly -- allowing roads to pay for themselves.

Another Think Coming apologizes for the way this episode may leave listeners feeling. An assessment of the present and future threats of cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare from one of the good guys on the front lines of those battles should do little to allay ones fears for their and our digital privacy and security. Security Scorecard Chief Research Officer Alex Heid is proud to call himself a hacker, patient to answer our basic and often poorly articulated questions and explains to us the vulnerability of our nation's power grid, why hackers hack and how they might commandeer those ID-card microchips we've heard about companies implanting in the hands of their employees to gain access to smart phones and other digital devices.