Richard Thieme

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." - Frederick Nietzsche

Richard Thieme has been hearing the music for a long time. His track record includes hundreds of published articles, dozens of published short stories, one published book (Islands in the Clickstream from Elsevier/Syngress) with two more coming, several thousand speeches, and – in a former incarnation - hundreds of sermons, all original, all unique.

What is the impact of his speaking? Again and again, people respond: "You made me think."

He moves among multiple constructions of reality, connecting them in unique ways, and links his vision to core human values. His words are liberating ... or radical. It all depends on your point of view.

"Your ability to move people out of their comfort zone," said the Society for Technical Communication, "is a remarkable talent...."

...and necessary for celebrating the shift from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian world. The impact of time dilation, trans-planetary telerobotic colonies, the anticipation of multiple societies of space-faring beings, the engineering of human identity at all levels of existence from the morphing of geo-political structures into clouds of power and the bioengineering of human attributes and platforms ... the twenty-first century will make the twentieth look like the seventeenth. The transformational curve is nearly vertical, and radical change is our daily fare.

Thieme has recently keynoted conferences in Sydney and Brisbane, Auckland and Wellington NZ, Dublin and Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and the Hague, and all around the USA. He has turned down speaking engagements in Singapore, Beijing, Dubai, and Oslo. (That says something, too.) In February 2008, he will present "The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics: Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines" for the International Intelligence Ethics Association at Johns Hopkins University.

At DefCon VIII, he moderated a panel that included the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Dir. of Information and Infrastructure Assurance for DOD, and the Dir. of the Federal Computer Incident Response Team who came to "dialogue" with more than 5000 computer hackers. He was invited to moderate because, according to a National Security Agency officer, "You’re the only one in the room with the acceptance and respect of both the hacking community and the Feds."

Clients include: GE; Medtronic; Microsoft; Johnson Controls; the Pentagon; the FBI; the US Secret Service; Los Alamos National Laboratory; the US Department of the Treasury; Neohapsis; Network Flight Recorder; System Planning Corporation (SPC); Psynapse/Center for the Advancement of Intelligent Systems; MIS Training Institute WebSec, HealthSec, and InfoSec Conferences; Influent Technology Group; Purdue University-CERIAS; the Thunderbird School of Global Management; and the Technology, Literacy and Culture Distinguished Speakers Series of the University of Texas.