Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) is an author and professional speaker who addresses 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 published hundreds of articles, dozens of short stories, five books with more coming, and has delivered hundreds of speeches. A novel, FOAM, was published in September 2015 and “A Richard Thieme Reader,” collecting fiction and non-fiction, was published on Amazon Kindle in 2016. His pre-blog 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} is through fiction,” he returned to writing short stories (35 published to date), one result of which is “Mind Games,” a collection of nineteen stories about anomalies, infosec, professional intelligence and edgy realities. More edgy realities are illuminated 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. It is in the collections of 65 university libraries.
Many speeches address creativity, shifts in identities, and technology-related security and intelligence issues. He and Dan Geer, CISO of CIA’s In-Q-Tel, did a “fireside chat” as a keynote for Source Boston and he keynoted SOURCE Boston in 2016. He keynoted the first two Black Hats and spoke in 2016 at Def Con for the 21st year. He has keynoted conferences in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne, Wellington and Auckland, Dublin and London, Berlin and Heidelberg, the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague), Ghent Belgium, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Johannesburg SA, Lodz and Krakow Poland, and Israel. Clients range from GE, Microsoft and Medtronic to the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, FBI, US Dept of the Treasury. Los Alamos National Lab, and the US Secret Service.
His work has been taught at universities in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States, and he has guest lectured at numerous universities, including Purdue University (CERIAS), the Technology, Literacy and Culture Distinguished Speakers Series of the University of Texas, and the “Design Matters” lecture series at the University of Calgary (Alberta). He addressed the reinvention of “Europe” as a “cognitive artifact” for curators and artists at Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, keynoted “The Real Truth: A World’s Fair” at Raven Row Gallery, London, and recently keynoted Code Blue in Tokyo.