At 3 in the night at Starmus 2017 I finally managed to get ten minutes with astrophysicist, science communicator, director of the Hayden Planetarium. At it's purest, Wunderdog digs into one or two topics and goes deep, like Vinay's refugee cities, Casey's carbon capture, Ana's cosmic bullet holes, and Eugene's star-based life. This isn't that! This is, me grabbing hold of someone very smart and trying to squeeze fun answers out of them on as many topics as I could.
We talk about CRISPR, Breakthrough Starshot, Ray Kurzweil, Mars exploration and contamination, mind uploads, genetically engineered bacteria and Craig Venter, sci-fi, Bach's Mass in D minor, and how Beethoven's 7th symphony is "high cholesterol" and Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival".
I was reluctant to share it because it was so unfocused, but Neil has such a knack for delivering fun, concise answers on any topic. He did this easily, despite having been CONSTANTLY surrounded by media all weekend. He was the most popular man on a festival where ELEVEN of the guests had won Nobel prizes.
Wunderdog is produced by Nitro Studio Oslo, and music is by Trop1ce / Charky. In this particular episode my ticket was funded by Norway's Research Council, and the interview was originally done for Andreas Kjensli Knudsen, Pablo Castro & my excellent live-podcast "Applied Science Fiction" / "Anvendt Science Fiction".
The people who support this stuff are mentioned on this episode, they did so at www.patreon.com/runde
