Past Talks or Interviews

Selected Presentations

I’ve done 175 talks; here’s a few of them.

  • In April 2026 I did a TED talk in the session “Reasons to Listen”; YouTube video forthcoming. I’ve also done TEDxIslay and TEDxLowerEastSide.
  • At Science Foo Camp (SciFoo) at Google, I did a Lightning Talk about how I designed the “hands” of the sapient insect colonies in HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS. I also did an earlier SciFoo in which I was on a panel with the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz and then-NASA Ames director Pete Worden about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
  • I’ve done the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado four times, on panels such as “Our Cyborg Future,” “Looking for God in the Particles,” “Space: The Next Giant Leap,” and (this was a fun one) “Dating for Dummies.”
  • At SUNY Buffalo I talked about how ASL’s use of space influenced my design of the language spoken by intelligent social insect colonies in HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS.
  • At the Library of Congress I gave a lecture titled How To Put Your Brain on the Internet. It’s a bit dated now, but I had a great time with it.
  • At Princeton I gave a lecture titled “Bionic Ears, Bionic Everything Else: The Now and Future of Body Technologies.” I always love talking with aspiring bioengineers about what it’s like to have cochlear implants.
  • At Vassar I gave a talk titled “What It’s Like to Go Deaf and Get Your Hearing Back With an Implanted Computer (And What That Means for Theory).” I was on campus for a week as a visiting lecturer and gave several talks, and that was so much fun.
  • At Penn State, I gave five lectures over three days–a marathon, but super fun.
  • At the Rochester Institute of Technology I gave the Edmund Lyon Memorial Lecture, which was titled “Cyborg Ear, Cyborg I: Writing a Book, Rewriting a Life.” RIT was fascinating because it hosts the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which integrates deaf and hard of hearing students into the curriculum.
  • At the Strelka Institute, a center for the study of architecture and culture in Moscow, I discussed the Russian translation of WORLD WIDE MIND. Strelka was full of bright, young, European-leaning students with big ideas about making the world a better place. Sadly, it is now shut down because of its opposition to the Ukraine war.
  • At the SV Life Sciences CEO Connections Summit, a group of CEOs of biotech venture capital companies, I talked about “the informated body”–that is, a body that both consumes and produces digital information. A cochlear implant delivers about a megabit per second of data to the inner ear, and that data can also be potentially stored and analyzed. I discussed what that could imply for monetization and patient privacy. These are complicated, thorny issues.
  • Other schools I’ve spoken at:
    • MIT
    • Brown
    • Duke
    • Arizona State University
    • Georgia Tech
    • University of Washington
    • Stanford
    • San Francisco State
    • University of San Francisco
    • UC-Berkeley
    • UC-Davis
    • UC-Santa Cruz
    • Gallaudet University
    • University of Pennsylvania
    • George Mason University
    • Gustavus Adolphus College
    • Bard College
    • New York University
    • Georgetown
    • Emory
    • University of Nevada at Reno
    • UT-Austin
    • Weber State University
    • Santa Clara University
    • University of Southern California
    • CUNY
    • UCSF
    • University of Akron
    • University of Minnesota
    • St. Louis University
  • Other organizations:
    • IBM Almaden
    • Boston Scientific
    • Procter and Gamble
    • Google
    • Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society
    • Italian Science Festival
    • World Future Society
    • Futurist Lab
    • No Barriers USA
    • New America Foundation
    • Advanced Bionics
    • Noblis
    • Howard Hughes Medical Institute
    • National Institutes of Health
    • Institute for the Future
    • Sinai Forum
    • Gordon Research Conference on Science and Technology Policy
    • Litquake

Selected Radio/TV/Podcasts

  • Vox podcast, Unexplainable, in which I talked with Noam Hassenfeld on Making Sense: How Sound Becomes Hearing.
  • PBS Newshour did a show on bionic body parts in which I was interviewed beginning at 7 minutes, 43 seconds. I’m partial to this one because my wife was onscreen with me.
  • On NPR I talked about Rebuilt, which had just come out. I’m partial to this interview because I had listened to NPR for hours to help my brain retrain itself. It was delightful to thank NPR…on NPR.

Other Videos

Available to agents