Richard Thieme (@neuralcowboy) has established a reputation for edgy thinking, the mindset of a hacker, and radical clarity ("insanity is seeing things as they really are," said Don Quixote). Jeff Moss said of him, "His ability to be open minded. conspiratorial, ethical and subversive at the same time is inspiring." Clint Brooks, Asst. Deputy Director of NSA (ret) said, "Thieme takes us to the edge of cliffs we know are there but rarely visit."

He is an author and professional speaker focused on the deeper implications of technology, religion, and science for twenty-first century life. He has published hundreds of articles, dozens of short stories, three books with more coming, and has delivered hundreds of speeches. A novel, FOAM, is in progress and ìA Richard Thieme Reader,î collecting fiction and non-fiction, interviews and book reviews, will be published in 2013.

Thieme speaks professionally about the challenges posed by new technologies and the future, how to redesign ourselves to meet these challenges, and creativity in response to radical change. He has spoken for numerous hacker, security and intel conferences around the world. He recently spent a day at NSA doing a speech, a panel, and a discussion. His column, "Islands in the Clickstream," was distributed to thousands of subscribers in sixty countries before collection as a book in 2004. When a friend at the NSA told him, "The only way you can tell the truth [that we discuss during a decade-long project on intelligence and ethics] is through fiction," he returned to writing short stories, one result of which is "Mind Games," a collection of nineteen stories. Other edgy realities are referenced in the recently published and critically extolled "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry" to which he contributed, a 5-year research project using material from inside the military and intelligence communities to document government responses to the phenomena from WW2 to the present.