You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Welcome to Spotlight on Seti, produced by Big Picture Science.

I'm Gary Niederhoff.

In this series, we explore the work of the Seti Institute in celebration of its 40th anniversary

through interviews with SETI Institute scientists and staff. To kick off the

series, Big Picture Science Host Molly Bentley went straight to the top.

Hi, I'm Bill Diamond. I'm the president and CEO of the SETI Institute.

So prepare to hear all about the history and the mystery of the SETI Institute and the future of the search.

Hi Bill, I wonder if you could just give us a brief introduction of how you came to be the

CEO at the Institute and then we'll get

into questions about the Institute itself, its past and its future, but how did you

end up as president and CEO? That's a great question. I mean it started with a wrong turn off of

Middlefield Road in Mountain View when I pulled into the wrong driveway, but it turned out to be

the right driveway. In an outburger? Because often people make that mistake. Noger because no no no I actually the the real story is that a

different and colleague from many years ago at Bell Laboratories and I Dan Dan Langford, worked together and Dan became a member of the

Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute. In any case, we had just sold a company to a bigger

company and I was looking to do something different and take a break and my friend Dan reached out and said hey I know you've got some time on your hands and I'm here at the Institute and we could use some help and I think I said I'll be there in five minutes and

that ultimately morphed into well you've helped us a bit you know what you consider

staying on and and running the place and I said you know sign me up.

Had you known much about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

before you came here?

Well I thought I did.

Certainly it's fair to say Well, I thought I did.

...