About Our Guests

• Jeff Hilford is the CEO and co-founder MemeBox, LLC.

  Carrying around a vision of a multi-media network for the future for a number of years, Jeff traveled out to L.A. in 2006 in hopes of recruiting Alvis Brigis to bring this vision to life. As fate would have it, Alvis had similar notions and in April of 2007 MemeBox was formed. Jeff had previously worked in the sports and entertainment business mixing consulting gigs with start-ups. He is an amateur singer songwriter and athlete of extremely local renown. Jeff has an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently resides on the East End of Long Island.

• Garry Golden is a professionally trained futurist who writes, speaks and consults on issues shaping society and business in the 21st century. He is currently Founding Editor of The Energy Roadmap.com* - a futures-focused blog exploring the cross sections where energy meets industry, transportation, design and society.

  Garry has consulted on projects related to:

  • The future of portable power
  • The future of fiction and social media
  • The future of food safety and nutrition
  • The future of mobility and trade infrastructure
  • The future of retail and sustainable packaging

  He has worked with such organizations as:

  • IBM
  • US Army Logistics Innovation Agency
  • Tyson Foods
  • DuPont
  • Texas Department of Transportation
  • Citi Group

  Garry also presents at colleges and companies around the nation on how to approach change and uncertainty. He weaves the foundations of futures studies with more traditional strategic planning concepts used in mainstream business and college environments.

• Alvis Brigis is a media producer, futurist and entrepreneur with a specialty in evolving communications. His diverse background includes roles on projects such as the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search (NBC), MotorMouth (VH1), Virtual Laguna Beach, TheseTunes.com and The Metaverse Roadmap. He is Co-Founder of MemeBox.com, where he writes about intelligence amplification spurred by accelerating technology, communication and information domains.

The Topics:

• Once again, we played "Two to One." Here are the three news stories. Two are true, one is false:
  • First story: MIT project uses nanotech to deliver drugs for fighting cancer, AIDS

    Nanotechnology helps researchers develop new technique for administering multiple drugs

    Researchers at MIT are using nanoparticles, infrared light and self-propelled robotic nanoscale devices as part of a project to develop a more accurate method of delivering multiple drugs to patients battling diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

    The researchers have created differently shaped nanoparticles that are each designed to release their medicinal payloads at different times. According to MIT, the new drug-delivery system is controlled by the molecularly precise electronic delivery mechanism which is used to provide patients with up to three or four drugs at a time.

    "With a lot of diseases, especially cancer and AIDS, you get a synergistic effect with more than one drug," Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, an assistant professor of biological and mechanical engineering at MIT, said in a statement.

    MIT noted in an announcement about the research effort that doctors already use drug-delivery devices but that the existing ones generally can release only two drugs at a time. And the timing of the medicine's release typically has to be built into the delivery device itself, without the flexibility of the programmable robotic system.

  • Second Story: Scientists discover true love

    Scientists have discovered true love. Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.

    The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.

    A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

  • And, the third story, How Crabs Find Their Way Home

    Path integration may not be as widely known as the American Express card, but you'd better not leave the house without it. After all, path integration is the ability of animals, including humans, to return home from somewhere else.

    How animals keep their bearings on hunting trips is somewhat of a mystery. Celestial navigation and electromagnetic fields help ants, honeybees, birds and sea turtles keep track of directions. More puzzling: how animals measure distances. A new study has found the first direct evidence that fiddler crabs monitor their travels by tracking their strides.

    The results, set to be published next month in Current Biology, indicate that fiddler crabs perform sophisticated math whenever they leave home. "We think they're summing steps,"says senior study author John Layne, a biologist at the University of Cincinnati. They know how many strides they've taken and the length of each, and that magic number gives them their distance from home.

    As in the show itself, we'll give the answer to this week's "Two to One" at the end of the show notes.

• MemeBox is a place for future interested persons to congregate online. Its a mix of enthusiastic amateurs and experts. Its also a way to start and promote acceleration informed memes.

• MemeBox is a set of different related sites: Future Blogger- Blog family - Energy Roadmap, FoG, Future Scanner
  Organizes the best future related info on the web.

• Predictions from last year for 2008 (3 examples)
  • Bush predicts Mideast peace pact by 2009 (FAIL)

  • Subprime Crisis Won't Peak Until 2009 (Probably right)

  • Jerome a Paris: Investment Banking Crash by 2009? (spot on)

• Predictions for 2009:
  • Disruptions / Black Swans (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) -

  • China - civil disruption; economic slowdown leads to rural / urban unrest and first major domestic challenge

  • Collapse of old media? Death of many newspapers.

  • Bio Event -

  • Macro Cycles: Generational Dynamics - Strauss and Howe

  • Complex Convergence - Many unexpected dynamics, especially related to the web and social events. It gets harder to predict, but we get better at predicting.

• Garry: Energy + Transportation Policy
  • 2008 - Big Energy Stories from 2008

  • Beginning of End of Combustion Engine - move towards Electric Drive Vehicle
    Every major automaker announces electric propulsion vehicle production around 2010-13 based on integrating batteries, fuel cells and capacitors

  • Motivations? Leaner manufacturing footprint (not carbon footprint); fewer factories, shift revenues to 'after market' and 'mobility services'

  • Beyond 2030- car making could become Cottage Industry with hundreds of brands of vehicles;

  • Design is dynamic- car owners constantly changing shape

  • Implications of electric vehicles - on urban design

  • Skateboard chassis- cars become 'Third Place';

  • Next great landgrab will be parking lots; Only a few people are thinking about Future of Parking

  • Focus on Next Generation Biofuels - 'growing energy' without food (plant) crops tapping power of algae and bacteria

  • Corn ethanol is done; capped mandates

  • Geeks Go Green - 'Smart Energy' - 'Cleantech could be 'Next Big Thing'

  • Google funding renewable energy companies RE

  • Semiconductors and solar - Intel, Applied Materials,

  • Silicon Valley 'guru' VCs $$$

  • Cleantech Missionaries & Visionaries - new leadership and vision for changing energy industry

  • New Science & New business models

  • The rise of important energy personalities: Richard Branson (biofuels/climate), Craig Venter (synthetic biology), Shai Agassi (fueling electric cars), T Boone Pickens (wind/natural gas)

• 2009 - Look ahead at big stories
  • Year of Smart Grid -

    Software, Sensors & Storage; startups (Comvergse, Gridpoint) and software giants (IBM 'Smart Planet') and microcontrol systems (Honeywell, Johnson Controls); Federal 'smart infrastructure' funds; pressure on utilities

  • Electric vehicles - goes global
    as Asian dominates battery industry, and potential sales growth; US plays catch up

  • Energy Storage - is next big thing
    • Storage for grid
    • Storage for renewables
    • Storage for bringing "Bottom Billions" online
    • Alt to 'grid' / wall sockets - are 'Packets' of energy (solid state hydrogen); If you can buy soap from retail store, you can buy access to energy

  • Thin Film solar - factory openings around the world; distributed power

• Problem areas:
  • Confusion over Coal - battle of rhetoric vs reality; carbon solutions (materials / bioenergy)
  • Peak Oil Production - becomes mainstream media topic. This, not climate change, could push 'majors' into non-hydrocarbon age;
  • Focus on Nanoscale Science -
  • $$$ in basic science for production and storage historically downturns push demand for next generation industry platforms; reinventing 'Oil Majors' & Chemical industries

• These founders see MemeBox as a central place to process predictions - have discussions.

• How smart is the planet? Social media making us smarter at simulating the present, past and future, a la MemeBox. How best to do this?

• As usual, in creating "Two to One" Phil took three real news stories and tweaked one enough to make it false.

  Links to all three true stories: MIT Nanotech, Scientists Discover True Love, and Crabs Navigating Home.

  Phil tweaked the first story to make it false. MIT is not presently testing in vivo nanobots. The story describes using nanomaterials in vivo. Congratulations to panelists Garry and Jeff for getting this one right.

• Phil's contribution to the MemeBox Scenario Land:

The Music:

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Mark Emmins. The song is "ATMOSPHERIC." According to Podsafe Music Network Mark Emmins is the...

Ex lead vocalist with UK rockers Blackreign, Mark has returned to music on a solo mission, so far rated uk's no.5 most popular unsigned artist , and getting stronger all the time.

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