Starting this Wednesday, July 8, from 6-7pm on 89.3 FM KPCC, the NPR affiliate for Southern California, I start my weekly radio show called SCIENCE TALK WITH MICHAEL SHERMER. KPCC is adding four hours of "intelligent talk radio" per week to its current schedule, with Jonathan Kirsch on books, Brad Pomerance on entertainment, Jill Stewart on politics, and yours truly on science. I'm going to need 50 guests in the next year so if you have some good ideas I'm all ears. The interviews can be by phone, but in-studio is always nice. I'm especially looking for authors with controversial new science books and ideas, cutting edge stuff, and definitely not necessarily of a skeptical bent. The producers do not just want me to have a bunch of my skeptic/scientist buddies chatting amiably (although there will be plenty such guests); they would really like people that are "out there" on the margins in which I'll have to actually do a little homework to ask good, skeptical questions, and have good, stimulating conversation.

The first guest Wednesday night is a good example: Bart Kosko, professor of engineering at USC and the author of Fuzzy Thinking (and three Prentice-Hall textbooks on fuzzy logic and fuzzy engineering) and one of the pioneers of fuzzy logic, machine intelligence, smart machines, etc. He is into nanotechnology, cryonics (he is signed up to have himself frozen and revived at some future date when nanotechnology has advanced enough to inject the body with cellular-sized computers to repair all the cells damaged by the freezing process), e-money, life extension, etc., and has written a novel about all this called NANOTIME, and is just finishing another called HEAVEN IN A CHIP, where you replace someone's brain neuron by neuron with silicon chips, thereby obsoleting death. You get the idea. This guy is "out there."

So if you have some ideas of people who would make good guests, especially authors of recently published science books, please send them my way.