Richard Thieme

Bewildering Stories biography

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“Those who were seen dancing were thought 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 articles, dozens of short stories, one book with more coming, several thousand speeches, and — in a former incarnation — hundreds of original sermons.

His sci-fi short story “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark” is included in Subtle Edens, a “slipstream” anthology coming in November 2008 in London from Elastic Press.

With 30 stories published in the past few years, he is looking to bring out a collection (More Than a Dream: Stories of Flesh and the Spirit). His video interview for the Hexen future project on art, technology, mind war, and the occult is showing up on walls in European galleries.

He recently celebrated Einstein’s birthday with a talk for Cyber Kung Fu in Philadelphia on relativity as a metaphor for morphing geopolitical structures and he spoke to deans and professors of engineering schools at the Thunderbird School of Global Management on creativity, innovation, and engineering.

He is working on two novels, The Room, about the consequences of torture for a whole society, the first five chapters of which are published at Combat , a site dedicated to exploring the psychological impact of war; and Multiple Connected Spaces, a romp through the twisted space of counter-terror, new age merchants of altered states, enterprising women on the web, and the windmill tilting of two hackers, Don Coyote and Pancho Sanchez, who can’t help cracking the stegan messages found in porn...

Thieme’s passion for integrating technology and spirituality began in the eighties when he wrote “Computer Applications for Spirituality: The Transformation of Religious Experience,” an essay published by The Anglican Theological Review. He joined Bill Moyers and noted religious scholars in New York to explore religion and technology in the twenty-first century; a book based on that conference includes his 10,000-word essay “Entering Sacred Digital Space.” He spoke for the ARIL conference at MIT on spirituality and technology.

Thieme has spoken for twelve straight years for the Black Hat Briefings (intelligence and corporate security) and Def Con, an annual computer hackers’ convention. He has also spoken for security conferences such as Toor Con, PumpCon, Interz0ne West, SecurityOPUS, Xmas Con (New Orleans 2600), RubiCon, HiverCon (Dublin), ShmooCon, NotaCon and RootFest.

He keynoted AUSCERT in Brisbane, Australia in 2005 and 2006 and returned to deliver a closing speech in 2007.
He keynoted govcert in The Hague in 2007.
He keynoted Wireless Australia 2006 and the ID Management Summit 2006 in Sydney.
He keynoted Microsoft Tech Ed in consecutive years and shared the keynote platform at MIS InfoSecWorld with Bob Woodward and NBC’s Roger Cressey.
In 2007 he keynoted conferences in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand, and will return to keynote a corporatre/government security conference in Wellington in 2009.
He has been invited, in addition, to speak in Oslo, London, Riyadh, Dubai, Singapore and Beijing.

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 5,000 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.”

He is a minor but enthusiastic contributor to the MUFON History Project documenting the response of the U.S. government to UFO phenomena in the 1940s and 1950s. He has explored that world for thirty years, ever since a warden of an Episcopal parish near an Air Force base told his priest as they sat alone in the church basement one night, “We chase the damn things and we can’t catch them.” (Thieme was the priest; the warden was a much-decorated fighter pilot who left the USAF a bird Colonel.)

He manages, in short, to stay busy.

Clients for keynotes, other speeches, and consulting

Publications