Techtonic Creators & Guests

Perry Metzger is a technology manager, consultant, and academic researcher specializing in computer systems and networking issues, especially those connected to software development, system architecture, and security.

Toby Ord is an Australian philosopher. He founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.

Yasha Levine is a Russian-American investigative journalist, and author.

Dr. David T. Courtwright is a historian who specializes in drug history. He writes about violence, political and policy history, aviation, and frontier environments. He is a Professor at the University of North Florida, where he teaches medical, U.S., and world history.Courtwright's first book, "Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America before 1965," was published in 2012. He has published seven books, including his most recent, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business," which was published in 2019.Dr. Courtwright received his B.A. in English from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. in History from Rice University.

2018 Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, with degrees from Tufts and Carnegie Mellon. He worked on neural networks and machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and artificial life, as well as biological approaches to security, architecture and models of computation. With this knowledge combined, he tries to build an indefinitely scalable computer architecture for robust-first and best-effort computing in his "T2 Tile Project".

Dr. BRANDY SCHILLACE (skil-AH-chay) PhD is a historian, novelist, and television show host. Formerly an editor for two journals, Brandy works as a freelance journalist as well as a writer of nonfiction and fiction. Brandy has written about death and dying, Cold War medicine, bioethics, and organ transplant and the history of accidents. Her most recent book, THE INTERMEDIARIES, tells the forgotten, daring history of trans activists, gender affirming surgeries, and the fight for LGBTQ rights in the shadow of the Third Reich. In fiction, Brandy is author of THE FRAMED WOMEN OF ARDEMORE HOUSE, and THE DEAD COME TO STAY, the first two novels in a mystery series featuring a neurodivergent protagonist.Brandy has bylines at WSJ, Scientific American, Globe and Mail, HuffPo, WIRED, and UNDARK. She is host of Wondrium’s Unsolved Mysteries of Medicine (2025) and the popular YouTube livestream, Peculiar Book Club, featuring bestselling authors of unusual nonfiction, from Lindsey Fitzharris and Mary Roach to Ed Yong and Deborah Blum. She has appeared on Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and most recently on the History Channel’s The Unbelievable with Dan Akroyd. Brandy gives regular keynotes and participates in other speaking events, and is a tireless advocate for social justice, disability and LGBTQ+ representation.

Tim Harford is an economist and journalist.

Ava Kofman is a journalist, writer, technology editor, and reporter at ProPublica.

Cory Efram Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and science fiction author. He serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder and CEO at DuckDuckGo.

Ali Latifi is a journalist.Latifi has reported from Washington, Greece, Turkey, Qatar, and Afghanistan. He has covered Afghan refugees in Greece and Turkey, and the Taliban in Doha.Latifi's work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, AJE, DW, VICE, Think Progress, The New Arab, and DAWN News. He has also appeared on CNN, the BBC, the CBC, Democracy Now, and DW.