I had a blast last Sunday during my interview with Ken Goffman, a.k.a. RU Sirius.

RU was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the legendary, visionary and often delightfully mad cyber/counterculture magazine Mondo 2000, and when he heard that I’d published Intervention, he invited me onto the eclectic podcast show that he hosts, called Neofiles, to talk about it. The resulting Show #65: Fear of a Transgenic Planet is the first of a two-part interview.

Even though I’ve known RU for a looong time (I’ve decided to declare a moratorium on explicit shout-outs of how long I’ve known someone or done something), I was a little nervous about going on Neofiles, which bills itself as exploring “the experimental edge of human endeavors.” This tends to include lots of nanotech, life-enhancement, we-made-it-to-be-good-thus-it-is-good, nouvelle Ray Kurzweil kind of stuff. As he warned me before I showed up, “most of our guests would tend to be very pro-biotech.”

But as it turned out, I was nervous for no reason. He totally got the message of the book. Intervention is not anti-biotech. It’s very pro-science — science in the context of reality, that is, of how technologies work and operate in the real world, not just in the controlled conditions of the lab or as viewed through the rose-colored lens of traditional risk assessments.

Update: Here’s Part 2 of the RU interview … enjoy!