Nov. 20, 2002 - Art Bell
02:55:09
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Welcome to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| From the high desert and the great American Southwest. | ||
| If you all speaking, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the Cosmos. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this program covers the Cosmos, Coast, Coast, Coast, Coast, A.M. Coming up in a moment, somebody I wanted to interview for years now. | ||
| Mark Burnett is an Emmy-winning producer and founder of the Echo Challenge. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| A series of extreme, very extreme sporting events that have aired on MTV, SPN, Discovery Channel, and the USA Network. | ||
| His CBS series Survivor and Survivor 2 are among the most popular in television history. | ||
| Period. | ||
| In addition to producing, Burnett is an avid extreme sportsman who also speaks frequently on leadership in team building for corporations all over the world. | ||
| Burnett is a former member of the famed British Army Parachute Regiment with active service medals in both the Northern Ireland and Argentina conflicts. | ||
| He is an open water certified scuba diver, level A certified skydiver. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Has completed a whitewater guide course and is Advanced Wilderness First Aid Certified. | ||
| You know who he is. | ||
| I've been just waiting for this one for a long time. | ||
| Coming up in a moment, Mark Burnett. | ||
|
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Shhhhhh. | |
| Rzzzzz You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| Well, I am really honored to have Mark Burnett. | ||
| Welcome to the program, Mark. | ||
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Hello there. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| It really is an honor to have you. | ||
| I mean, I told you on the phone before the interview, my wife and I are really big-time fans of both of these shows. | ||
| So the questions that I'm going to ask you tonight, I guess, are going to come from somebody who really watches the show and has serious questions. | ||
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I love it. | |
| We love it. | ||
| But let's go back. | ||
| I heard you were once selling t-shirts in Venice or something. | ||
| And it seems I just don't understand how somebody gets from t-shirts in Venice to where you are now. | ||
| Is there a short way to say that? | ||
| You know, just the American dream, really. | ||
| I mean, I came to America with $600 in my pocket. | ||
| And that was over 20 years ago. | ||
| And I've only been doing this kind of television for just over 10 years. | ||
| So for 10 years, I had to make a living and move my way through trying to improve myself in America. | ||
| And one of the things I did do along the way was selling t-shirts on Venice Beach. | ||
| And made a lot of money, had a great time doing it. | ||
| Well, that's quite a trip. | ||
| You're personally involved in extreme sports, right? | ||
| I mean, so that's obviously one way you got there. | ||
| Yeah, I actually did compete in contests very similar to EcoChallenge before I produced it on television. | ||
| In fact, made a living and fed my family from sponsorship and prize money in those kind of contests. | ||
| So, yeah, I really like it. | ||
| It's more adventure sports than extreme sports, but I guess they are extreme. | ||
| I heard you won one Eco Challenge, right? | ||
| And then I think that maybe in another one you got lost or something at the end? | ||
| No, I never actually won, but I did very well. | ||
| I did have a very high finish for a number of years in a French contest similar to Eco Challenge. | ||
| It was the highest American finish. | ||
| I think it held for like seven years. | ||
| And, you know, that was very successful. | ||
| But on the other hand, I've also done miserably in some contests in those kind of races. | ||
| I had the good and the bad and probably learned more from failing than succeeding. | ||
| That's it, Trashen. | ||
| I've watched a lot of people on your programs learn a very great deal because I've seen a lot of pain. | ||
| Eco Challenge really is an amazing program. | ||
| A lot of Americans, you know, probably have just seen Survivor, and so that's all they know about. | ||
| They don't know about the EcoChallenge. | ||
| They're very serious, very serious affairs. | ||
| Life-challenging affairs, aren't they? | ||
| Yeah, Eco Challenge really is kind of like an expedition with all the problem-solving elements and exhaustion, but with a stopwatch. | ||
| So it's teams of four racing over 300 miles non-stop, solving expedition-style problems and going a very long way across mountain ranges or through jungles or over deserts, trying to reach an elusive finish line. | ||
| And the great television comes from the human interaction and social dynamics that, as it breaks down, as this team are trying desperately to reach this finish line. | ||
| I've got a lot of questions about that. | ||
| But earlier today on our own newscast here, I heard that in a survey today in America, more people knew because of Survivor where the Marquesas Islands were than knew where Afghanistan, for example, was. | ||
| I mean, that's amazing, Mike. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Number one, Americans don't know. | ||
| Half of them or a tenth of them couldn't even tell where America was on a map. | ||
| But you've at least done something to educate the public about some geography. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| It is and it isn't. | ||
| I mean, let's face it, we've got 20 million people minimum per week watching Survivor. | ||
| You know, one of the greatest characters in Survivor is the location. | ||
| I knew that from the beginning. | ||
| And so in choosing a location, I'm introducing these minimally 20 million people a week to somewhere exotic and fresh to them, almost a vicarious travel experience. | ||
| And if you watch it for three months straight, you're bound to get a clue of where it is. | ||
| Because these days, of course, the internet is a great extension of the television experience. | ||
| And you go on the internet and find out more. | ||
| And one of the things you find out is, here's a map of the world, and where on earth is this thing. | ||
| So that's why it's not so surprising. | ||
| And let's face it, I mean, America is such a powerful, giant country. | ||
| Many Americans don't feel the need to find out what's outside of American shores. | ||
| That is perhaps sadly true. | ||
| But anyway, at least you're showing them some small part of it that they understand or even aren't motivated to go out and get a globe and say, gee, where is that? | ||
| Oh, look, it's there. | ||
| So, good. | ||
| The first survivor that you did, I think a lot of Americans think, or at least I think, that the characters like Rudy Bosch, Richard, Susan, boy, some of those amazingly strong characters in that first survivor just really, I thought, made that show. | ||
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And so what's happened since? | |
| In the latest Survivor, it doesn't seem like the characters come across quite as in as dominant a way as those first amazing characters came through. | ||
| But that's, I'm sure, very normal. | ||
| I mean, it was something that had never been done before. | ||
| That kind of television had never, ever been seen before. | ||
| In fact, if you look at the ratings for what was a summer series, which is where technically, or traditionally, the network air reruns because they don't know what to put on. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And viewers tend to gravitate more towards cable in the summer. | ||
| Well, CBS put this network series of mine, Survivor On. | ||
| It ended up with the highest ratings since Sunny and Share in 1973 in Normandy. | ||
| I mean, 51 million people watched the finale. | ||
| So it was a special experience. | ||
| Since then, of course, we've had less viewers, but still, for last television season, our combined series, The Africa and Marketers, were number one and two, beating Friends NER in number of viewers. | ||
| I thought Africa was also excellent. | ||
| Absolutely excellent. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We've never dropped below 20 million viewers a week. | ||
| With respect to both of the shows, Eco Challenge and Survivor to a lesser degree, are you folks in TV concerned about either serious injury, and I've seen some fairly serious injury, or even death? | ||
| I mean, death must be a very big concern of reality television these days, all days. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah, of course it is. | ||
| No one wants anybody to get hurt. | ||
| But if you look at the two shows, you know, EcoChallenge is far more dangerous. | ||
| Oh, far more easy. | ||
| Far more than Survivor. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Survivor is a very controlled environment. | ||
| Survivor is a game of politics where making them very uncomfortable is necessary to break down the fake veneer of their social structure. | ||
| But it's uncomfortable, not really dangerous, not really surviving. | ||
| No, but it's obvious. | ||
| There are psychological dangers. | ||
| Psychologically, but we do great testing free survivor to make sure no one goes on the game that would be a harm to themselves or to others, no matter what happens. | ||
| Yeah, but you test them to the point of starvation. | ||
| Sometimes in the program, these people, even on survivor, look like they're becoming severely malnourished. | ||
| No, they are very malnourished. | ||
| But, you know, people can deal with that. | ||
| And you'll find, or so they say, you know, like a race horse will go 100% and run, run, run till it dies. | ||
| Human beings will get up after 5% of their efforts been given. | ||
| You can do a lot more than you think, and survivor proves that. | ||
| And so, no, we don't test people while they're starving, but we give them a test called the MMPI, which is the same as given to law enforcement like federal officers. | ||
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Oh. | |
| Very, very reliable testing. | ||
| It takes seven hours. | ||
| And what is a test? | ||
| It tests personality and truthfulness, sticking to it, logic, and integrity. | ||
| And following that, then they had in-person psychologists interview them for hours on end. | ||
| So by the time someone gets to having a chance to be on the show, really mentally, in their mental health at least, cleared them as well as, of course, their background changes. | ||
| But Mark, in some cases, for example, don't you want insincere people, even liars, manipulators, people to really light sparks? | ||
| No, because everybody will do that stuff under the right pressure. | ||
| If you cast someone who is insincere and manipulating to begin with, it would almost become a caricature and be unbelievable. | ||
| Instead, we just merely need to cast 16 people who are very A-type, who are all leaders in their own right, put them in a situation without enough food and put stress and a million dollars at stake. | ||
| All 16 of them will melt down at one point and make great TV. | ||
| And it's more believable taking sincere, logical people, than it would be casting crazy people. | ||
| Yeah, take away food, add the million-dollar carrot, and then just sort of see what happens while you're slowly starving these people. | ||
| That's a serious television show, and it's a different thing. | ||
| It's called Lord of the Flies. | ||
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You guys joke about it a lot behind the scenes, I suppose? | |
| Yeah, kind of. | ||
| I mean, we're all students of human psychology and social psychology. | ||
| Almost, really, survivor is almost social Darwinism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, it absolutely is. | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| I was watching Nikotown in Borneo, and I remember one of the teams, I don't remember which one, but, oh, God, they showed their feet, you know, and it was pathetic. | ||
| I mean, they were just goozing oozing sores. | ||
| you know, no human could walk on those feet. | ||
| And these people were sitting around in the, I think it was a jungle in the middle of the night, and the only way they kept going was by figuring out different ways to curse you and say that you had planned all of this pain and you knew exactly how to inflict just the right amount of pain and torture and get them in the very worst way. | ||
| And those people stay live out there by thinking of ways to get you, Mark. | ||
| It was very funny. | ||
| I remember that clearly. | ||
| And it almost like they tried to turn, and their humor did get them through. | ||
| They turned it into almost the Truman show. | ||
| When a lightning bolt would come or the rain, they would curse that I must be up there controlling the weather. | ||
| And when the mountain became too steep, I had changed the elevation of the mountain just to make it work better. | ||
| And they actually were calling me Christophe, which was the name of the character in the Truman show in the control room. | ||
| Very funny. | ||
| And do you at times, be honest, feel a little like that character? | ||
| A little sometimes. | ||
| I can understand that. | ||
| But the funny thing is, I don't need to be. | ||
| People really are that interesting in and of their own right. | ||
| And if you put enough of a goal ahead of them, give them a group dynamic to overcome, such as eco-challenge, they will have a meltdown. | ||
| And it's so much more believable when rational, logical people have that meltdown, have that social interaction, and argue, cry, laugh. | ||
| It's much more believable. | ||
| Putting truly crazy people in the situation would be unbelievable and you wouldn't buy it. | ||
| It would seem like overacting. | ||
| Remember, no one here is acting, but if you tried to cast for that behavior, it would seem fake. | ||
| Well, I noticed that whether it's Survivor and the interview on CBS the next day, which is not really the next day, or whether it's EcoChallenge and the people who leave like saying never again. | ||
| But everybody, the Survivor, everybody, given a chance, almost every single one of them, save one lately, I suppose, has said, oh my God, yes, I'd do it in a second. | ||
| I'd do it again. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| They keep coming back to do it again and again, don't they? | ||
| Yes, certainly in the case of EcoChallenge, there's at least, I'd say, 30% of teams are repeat teams every year. | ||
| I mean, remember, EcoChallenge is far more of a true event than is a TV show. | ||
| I mean, the EcoChallenge race would occur with or without TV. | ||
| We happen to make a TV show about certain people's experience in the EcoChallenge race. | ||
| It's like the Ididerod, for example. | ||
| That's a genuine race. | ||
| Yes, I've covered that. | ||
| And so you know, those people would do that with or without the TV cameras. | ||
| It's like climbing Everest. | ||
| The EcoChallenge is clearly one of the toughest competitions in the world. | ||
| It is on the par of climbing Everest. | ||
| And it's worse in some ways because it's 12 days straight. | ||
| Teams of four rely upon other people more than just yourself. | ||
| And it's almost a holy grail of adventure sports. | ||
| It's not the money, is it? | ||
| I mean, I forget what it was. | ||
| It's some paltry amount of money to win Eco Challenge, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, between a team of four, the winning team split $50,000 between four of them. | ||
| It's probably cost them that to get there. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So they're paying me $15,000 per team for the privilege of racing. | ||
| That's what they have to pay. | ||
| Yeah, just the race. | ||
| So then, what's the rainbow at the end of the hot for these people? | ||
| Is it only a personal rainbow? | ||
| I mean, do they get to go endorse products or anything? | ||
| They really don't, do they, very often? | ||
| No, it's completely and utterly personal. | ||
| And that's what makes EcoChall so pure, is it really is an inner quest. | ||
| People are doing it because they want to do it. | ||
| But the great thing is, you know, win, lose, or draw, succeed or fail, it tends to be a life-changing experience and gives you some anchoring of hardship, which unfortunately in our modern lives, everything's become so easy. | ||
| You know, it's not like the old days of true expeditions and exploration. | ||
| Eco-Challenge gives you a little taste of that, at least for a couple of weeks. | ||
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Are Americans too soft? | |
| In the whole world. | ||
| Make it easier for you. | ||
| I'll make it easier. | ||
| Australians too. | ||
| Too soft. | ||
| Europeans. | ||
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All of us in the industrialized world are. | |
| Yeah, I rather think that's mostly true. | ||
| So how many people are there that will go for this eco-challenge? | ||
| For example, are you left with many teams who don't get to participate? | ||
| Do you have more showing up? | ||
| What I'm going to tell you, you won't believe. | ||
| Remember, I'm telling you, it's $15,000 a team to enter as a team of four. | ||
| And you have to come with your team of four ready. | ||
| We open registration on the internet only. | ||
| We announce the date. | ||
| Sometimes it's February 1 or March 1. | ||
| We announce the date. | ||
| We don't advertise it. | ||
| In the first 20 minutes of registration opening at like 10 a.m., we have 1,000 teams trying to pay us. | ||
| Oh, my gosh. | ||
| $1,000. | ||
| In 20 minutes. | ||
| If we left the registration open for a week or a month, oh my god, I don't know how many of it would try to race. | ||
| Well, then how do you possibly pick from among such a gigantic group? | ||
| Well, some of them are repeat who we know, and some of it is first come, first served, and a few of them basically put all the names we got in that 20 minutes into a hat and make it into a lottery. | ||
| So there's a number of different ways that people get in. | ||
| Does having won a previous eco-challenge automatically qualify you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or it does. | ||
| Even coming in the top five pretty much qualifies it will invite you back. | ||
| Has there ever been a close incident to somebody either mortally wounded in some way? | ||
| How close has it come? | ||
| Very close. | ||
| In Borneo, the one you mentioned, somebody started to pay attention to our instructions and instead of walking their mountain bike down a jungle track, tried to ride it, I think they knew better, over the handlebars, into a tree and were pierced in the lung with a branch and the lung collapsed and I landed my helicopter. | ||
| My doctor, an Australian Ado, was there and had to re-inflate this guy's lung right there and then in the mud. | ||
| And the guy did live. | ||
| And the guy, I can't wait to race again. | ||
| It's a strange one. | ||
| You know, every year people do get sick. | ||
| We just finished in Fiji and the Fiji race was at Beyond Television on USA Network in April. | ||
| I've heard it's on the way, yeah. | ||
| And during that, a number of people have been in hospital with various tropical diseases following that race. | ||
| I mean, after Borneo race, I think we had 300 people hospitalized with a form of leptosporosis, which is a jungle disease that comes out of some interaction with animal feces in water. | ||
| All right, hold it right there for a sec, Mark. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
| At the comedy hour. | ||
| From t-shirts to survivor, the eco-challenge. | ||
| My guest is Mark Burnett. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
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The Trip Back in Time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | |
| More somewhere in Time coming up. | ||
| Without a cent, get a break and maybe grow up to be president. | ||
| Only in America, land of opportunity, yeah. | ||
| With a classy girl like you, falls for a poor boy like me. | ||
| In America, and a kid who's washing cars, take a giant step and reach right up and top. | ||
| In America, the dream like the come true, a guy like me starts with nothing. | ||
| In America, the dream like the come true, a guy like me. | ||
| To see that girl, watch the sea, begin to dance in green. | ||
| Friday night and the lights are low, looking out for a place to go. | ||
| With a big rock music, getting in the spring, you come to love the king. | ||
| Anybody could be that guy. | ||
| Night is young and music high. | ||
| With a big rock music, everything's high. | ||
| Going to move the dance. | ||
| And when you get the chance, you are the dancing queen. | ||
| Young and sweet, only 70. | ||
| listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| Of the evening or morning, everybody. | ||
| Mark Burnett, Eco Challenge Survivor Survivor 2, is my guest, and we've got a million questions for him. | ||
| so if you'll stay right there, we'll get right back to it. | ||
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| Once again, here is Mark Burnett, and here's a question as a viewer that I've always wanted to ask Mark, and that is, for example, on Survivor. | ||
| I'm wondering if your television show, as Survivor progresses, formulates challenges that are strategic for the game. | ||
| Now, what do I mean to that? | ||
| I mean by that. | ||
| I mean, for example, if one team has been basically decimated in the voting and they're weak as willows and they're physically bereft of even probably being able to slug across the sand very fast, do you make it a mental challenge to make it easier for that group? | ||
| No, pretty much all the challenges are preordained and bring it out on a grit before we ever start the game. | ||
| But what we have learned is that you won't see many challenges these days which are all one thing or all of another. | ||
| I mean, in the very early times, we were quite lucky that we had very physical challenges which seemed to be that it was very balanced in the voting off, week in, week out. | ||
| If we would have been unlucky and had a purely one strong team versus a weaker tribe and had that physical challenge, it could have been an easy win. | ||
| Obviously, you don't want to see that. | ||
| You always want to make it fair. | ||
| But now, all the challenges involve an equal amount of each in each challenge, physical and mental. | ||
| In the show, Survivor, how long is it for a group that begins to get hungry and is having a hard time to begin to forget that the cameras are in their face? | ||
| Does that happen? | ||
| Oh, in Survivor and EcoChallenge, in both cases, it happens. | ||
| within a couple of hours they could care less about the cameras. | ||
| The experience is so real. | ||
| In the case of EcoChalle, it's very, very hard, and they're racing against the clock, so they really don't even think about the cameras. | ||
| In Survivor, the peer pressure situation of the social dynamics is so great, they're far more worried with the other 15 people are thinking about them than some plastic and metal camera happens to be there. | ||
| It's a minor annoyance, and it works beautifully. | ||
| I wonder how many come back and watch each one and have their head in their hands going, oh my God, was that me? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure a lot do. | ||
| And it's because of lack of self-awareness and ability to moderate. | ||
| And the question shouldn't be, is that what I did on TV? | ||
| The question should be, am I doing that all day, every day in my normal life? | ||
| Those kind of behaviors. | ||
| I've got no camera to record it. | ||
| Am I aware of how I behave on a daily basis? | ||
| I wonder if it profoundly changes a lot of people to watch how they acted. | ||
| I'm certain it does. | ||
| If you saw a videotape of yourself for a day at work and saw a reaction to other people to some of your stupid comments and the way you behave, you'd be far less liked to keep making those comments. | ||
| I've had a lot of that. | ||
| I mean, if you listen to audio tapes of the shows you do, you're going up godless. | ||
| Now, those who are voted off in Survivor leave usually skinny, itching their legs with sores everywhere, and they look terrible. | ||
| And I've always wondered, what's life for them? | ||
| You never say much about what life's for those who are voted off. | ||
| I mean, are they flown to some hotel somewhere and sort of catered to, or what's their life like while they're on the jury and waiting? | ||
| Well, there's two different groups. | ||
| There's those that don't make the jury and those that do make the jury. | ||
| And what about those who don't? | ||
| Well, first of all, for the first period of time, they don't go home. | ||
| No one goes home. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And they do spend their time mainly on location, but are, of course, fed normally and don't live anything fancy whatsoever. | ||
| It can be intense sometimes, depending on the location. | ||
| Now those are the ones who are not on the jury? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Oh, I'll be darned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for example, you should know, as far as accommodations, in most cases, Jeff Probst and I have both been in a small dome tent each, similar to everybody else on the 300 or 400 person crew. | ||
| Only with good food. | ||
| Yeah, that's the only difference is food. | ||
| And other times we've been lucky enough to have beach cabins to live in, which has been very, very nice with flushing toilets. | ||
| But most of the time, it's porter potties, showers manufactured, you know, shower boats which are manufactured from just water that heats up in solar, and tents. | ||
| Well, do you and Jeff have an opportunity to go over video from the past days or the past day or whatever? | ||
| Do you have an opportunity to do that, to review what's going on and what you're likely to put on the air? | ||
| Yeah, we do, but mainly it's from our memory because we could, but there's so much video. | ||
| You have to realize that we shoot about 3,000 hours during the filming of the series. | ||
| And so that's something that we do do, but that's not critical. | ||
| What is critical is talking about what's happened during the last couple of days or the last 24 hours or the last hour. | ||
| So we're constantly talking about the live soap opera seeing yourselves before our eyes. | ||
| Are there a lot of things that you wish you could put in, but for one reason or another have not been able to? | ||
| Well, there's many things that have not been on television, and it's not, I don't wish I could, because what makes Survivor greater than the number of viewers? | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| We, even last year, both of our series beat ER, DSI, or Friends. | ||
| Oh, beat Dervis. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because we have a very wide, even though our ratings are not as high, our viewership numbers are greater. | ||
| We tend to have children, parents, and grandparents combiningly around the same television. | ||
| It's a communal appointment television experience. | ||
| The reason is it's appropriate for children. | ||
| We don't want to put nudity or violence or totally gross things on. | ||
| Other shows try that and fail. | ||
| We've realized that what people are really watching is the social dynamics and the drama between the people. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If you do have someone going to pee on another person's hand because of a sea urchin, we don't show the vagina or the penis. | ||
| You get the point. | ||
| Someone squats, you cut to someone's reaction. | ||
| People think that, oh my God, if I show the growth factor, which some other shows would do, it would work better. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I think it works better to be sensitive towards the children. | ||
| And in fact, we've won various family television awards. | ||
| I'm sure the awards. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure you have great debates about that, don't you? | ||
| When that incident happened, for example, you probably said, oh my God, this is great. | ||
| We've got to show it. | ||
| But how? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| In the very, very early time, but not now. | ||
| Now we understand very, very well. | ||
| Don't show graphic sex. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Don't show graphic violence or grossness. | ||
| It's unnecessary. | ||
| People can join the dots. | ||
| The audience are very, very smart. | ||
| They'll figure it out and join the dots if you just show them bits and pieces. | ||
| You don't need to be graphic. | ||
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Absolutely. | |
| I agree. | ||
| There was going to be, there was rumor of in several newspaper articles about the possibility of a survivor mirror. | ||
| Back when the mirror, the space station was still up. | ||
| We heard that you were in negotiations or negotiating with the Russians about perhaps getting somebody up on Mirror, the winner of a Survivor Mirror. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, totally true. | ||
| I did have the rights for that. | ||
| And of course, the Russians had to de-orbit the Mir space station, which therefore, one of the first times ever in a contract that I've been involved in, force majeure or act of God comes into play because the very item that you've contracted for no longer exists. | ||
| The orbit breaks up in the atmosphere and falls into the ocean. | ||
| But I've not stopped pursuing it and I am still in negotiations now for rights to use Soyuz rockets and go to the International Space Station, so I'm still working on it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So in other words, you'd pay, I guess, the $20 million fee or whatever it is, and go through the Russians and get somebody up there, the winner of... | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It won't be Survivor. | ||
| Survivor belongs in an organic survival situation. | ||
| There'll be a whole nother television show, probably called Destination Space, which is about a bunch of Americans going through cosmonaut training with a view to going to space. | ||
| And I may not even pull it off art. | ||
| I mean, I'm trying, but eventually someone will make privatization of space work. | ||
| There will be media projects around going to space. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And I'll just know that I was one of the early people who saw that vision. | ||
| And I'd like to be the person who puts it on television, but it's a very complicated project. | ||
| Whichever one it is, whether it's Survivor or EcoChallenge, when it's over, do they almost go through the same kind of decompression experience? | ||
| Is it really hard to come back after something of that magnitude, whether it would be EcoChallenge or whether it would even be Survivor? | ||
| Just get on an airliner, come back to the U.S., and all of a sudden you're coming from an island and a limited situation, in a stressful situation, right back, boom, into the middle of all the cars and concrete and airplanes and everything. | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| In a totally difficult experience in both cases. | ||
| In fact, in EcoChallenge, even those working on the project go through what they call EWS eco-withdrawal syndrome. | ||
| I'll bet. | ||
| Which means they're just so immersed in nature and the triumph of the spirit and this incredible expedition, they've forgotten about the modern world. | ||
| There's no newspapers, TV, anything to distract you. | ||
| You're just dealing with nature in the raw and coming back to the modern world, or our own, is modern, but our own world is difficult on the senses. | ||
| In either one of the two programs, Mark, have you developed any really favorite contestants or favorite teams that you just sort of you're rooting for personally? | ||
| I never root during, but if I look back on it, some of the experiences I had, you gravitate sometimes to more people than others. | ||
| But during the making of it, I'm just so focused on telling stories, I don't allow myself to get sidetracked by becoming emotionally involved. | ||
| I'm trying to stay focused. | ||
| With regard to future possible locations, I doubt you're going to tell me very much, but I sure would like to take a couple of stabs at possibilities. | ||
| What about, have you ever been up to the Yukon territory? | ||
| No, I've not, but I've looked at the possibility of it for a future location. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Would that be a summertime or wintertime affair? | ||
| It wouldn't need to be summer. | ||
| It's the whole gold rush thing. | ||
| So there's some logical, historical, core value to that place. | ||
| What about general locations around the world? | ||
| Now, you went to Africa. | ||
| I can see sort of how you did that. | ||
| But I guess you always have to worry about the areas themselves. | ||
| For example, you really couldn't go anywhere in the Middle East right now. | ||
| Wars are rumored and brewing and there's trouble. | ||
| And so that's like you've got to X that out almost, don't you? | ||
| Yeah, unfortunately, I was prepared. | ||
| On 9-11, when that disaster happened, I in fact was in the middle of prepping for Survivor Arabia and had 50 people working in Jordan in a place called Wadi Rum on the Saudi border where David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia. | ||
| And I couldn't get them out for over a week. | ||
| There were no flights to America, especially out in the Middle East. | ||
| And I had to cancel that project and went out and only had five and a half weeks to figure out where it would be instead. | ||
| And that's when I chose the Marquesas. | ||
| It normally takes eight months to find a location and choose it and do it. | ||
| We had five and a half weeks and we chose Marquesas and did it. | ||
| You seem to have a propensity for going to that area of the world. | ||
| And you certainly like islands and it's not hard to see why, right? | ||
| No, it just fits the brand pretty well. | ||
| Well, I mean, if you have an island, it's a pretty controlled situation where very nearly the TV crew, for that period of time, anyway, can almost control the entire environment on that island. | ||
| Yeah, but it's more about the fact of being cast away, being marooned. | ||
| Although, as you saw, I did Africa, which was in the savannah and the big lions and that sort of stuff. | ||
| Survivor Arabia would have been in a landlocked area. | ||
| The Australian Outback wasn't an island. | ||
| So I've done a bit of beach, but I do enjoy islands and I do enjoy the tropics. | ||
| There's a lot of secrecy while you're actually doing Survivor, isn't there? | ||
| How many people have tried to find out where and make a trek and get into the middle of your set? | ||
| Has that been an issue? | ||
| It used to be. | ||
| People don't really bother anymore because we now have figured this out so much that, quite frankly, the internet and the public don't really want to guess who wins. | ||
| They like playing the game along week to week. | ||
| And even people like National Enquirer have said publicly, even if they found out who won, they wouldn't publish it because their readers would be mad at them. | ||
| Well, then they've turned over a new leaf, huh? | ||
| Well, I know, they're just smart. | ||
| They're getting stories week in, week out. | ||
| Why kill the golden goose? | ||
| I mean, it just, the readers don't really want to know. | ||
| So the reason they haven't done it is because they think their readers would be angry. | ||
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Yes. | |
| That's excellent. | ||
| What about the contestants themselves? | ||
| I mean, when they get home, you just know that family and friends are hounding them. | ||
| Absolutely hounding them. | ||
| Now, I can understand they're probably worn six ways from Sunday with a million lawyers and 50,000 documents and all the rest of it. | ||
| We've heard stories about it. | ||
| They can't say worry, right? | ||
| But what about family and friends? | ||
| They must get home. | ||
| They also sign the contract. | ||
| So, you know, it goes well beyond the person. | ||
| But beyond the contract, there's a level of integrity where you've given a couple of months of your life to play an incredibly deep-rooted sensory experience game. | ||
| And, you know, why ruin it for everybody, including yourself? | ||
| You can't just keep your mouth shut for a few weeks. | ||
| And we tend to... | ||
| The integrity works better than the contract. | ||
| I suppose that's right. | ||
| What about the future of reality TV? | ||
| I mean, you're almost sort of the father here of reality TV at this level. | ||
| For sure, you're that. | ||
| And so you'd be the one to tell us where it's going to go. | ||
| I mean, what's next? | ||
| Television always has to push the envelope with everything they do. | ||
| And that includes reality TV. | ||
| And I notice it's getting wilder and wilder and wilder. | ||
| Where is it going? | ||
| Well, I don't really know, but I do know that it's hard to beat Survivor. | ||
| The original, and it looks like a movie and the quality of it. | ||
| And it's hard for me to top it. | ||
| A space project would be something pretty fantastic to watch people go through space training and get an ordinary person to space. | ||
| It would. | ||
| That's worth doing. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I'm working on a project where it's about recovering missing children, which is a reality, you know, really recovering them. | ||
| I'm interested in that. | ||
| I'm also working on scripted series out of the reality world, and I'm about to shoot my first half-hour comedy in Spain next February. | ||
| But shooting it not on a soundstage, not traditional sitcom style like Seinfeld. | ||
| Very, very funny. | ||
| A comedy that's shot entirely on location in Europe. | ||
| Much like Chevy T's European vacation style. | ||
| So in other words, you take a few things from reality TV, some of the feeling of it, and move it into a comedy. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Do you think reality TV is a phase that, like I suppose, everything else eventually will pass? | ||
| No, I think that storytelling is what matters. | ||
| And whether it's unscripted drama, which is what Survivor is, or whether it is comedy or drama, or even news these days, it all has the entertainment storytelling value to it. | ||
| And if you can tell good stories and have high production values, you'll stand on TV. | ||
| The audience don't really care whether it's scripted or not. | ||
| They just care whether it's interesting and whether it's compelling. | ||
| And that's what matters. | ||
| So unscripted fare is here to stay. | ||
| It's just about executing it and making it really, really good. | ||
| Well, what about the pushing of the envelope part of it, though? | ||
| I mean, we've got shows like Fear Factor now, and it gets wilder and wilder and wilder. | ||
| And that's going to be on some minds out there. | ||
| I suppose, in a way, that's going to happen with even the shows that you do. | ||
| The challenges get a little harder every year. | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| I mean, if you look at the Fear Factor, for example, the ratings are not even half of Survivor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so it's all stunt-driven, trying to get bigger and bigger and dangerous and dangerous. | ||
| Ours is all about the interaction and the storytelling and the arcs between those people who are building a world with their bare hands. | ||
| Silly slickers is what they are. | ||
| And yet they're ripping apart that same world they've built by voting each other off. | ||
| That's the interesting part about it. | ||
| It's not the stunt level. | ||
| You're right, the way you put it. | ||
| On the one hand, they're building the world and their world, and on the other, they're absolutely ripping it apart. | ||
| That must be something to observe, and you're there for every minute of it, aren't you? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| You just stay there the whole time. | ||
| Yep, I mean, I'm basically directing it. | ||
| Well, okay, then. | ||
| The biggest question of all, is it fun? | ||
| Oh, I'm having a great time. | ||
| I mean, I travel to great places. | ||
| You get paid really well. | ||
| And I'm in the creative arts business, just like you are. | ||
| I mean, I'm having a great time. | ||
| Yeah, that's the whole key to it, if it's fun. | ||
| Well, I can't tell you what an honor it has been to interview you. | ||
| And I think that's a success to anything, is having fun and making lots of money at the same time. | ||
| Mark Burnett, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It was such a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
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Good night. | |
| Good night. | ||
| That's Mark Burnett, Survivor, Eco Challenge. | ||
| And if you haven't seen Eco Challenge, PG is coming up. | ||
| That's something you don't want to miss. | ||
| PG is going to be really hot stuff. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I'm Art Bell from the High Desert. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
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You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM Once upon a time, once when you were mine, I remember your sky. | ||
| I'm going to play it in the background. | ||
| When you think it's a weird harm, it disappears. | ||
| Every movie will hit the side here. | ||
| Some will call it too large, others say that it's a real hat up by your blowsy signal. | ||
| And he's a man and you let it co-play it. | ||
| And the DJ Lee wants to all the followers and make that a home with that one. | ||
| Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Network. | ||
| Ah, there are the sisters. | ||
|
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Those are the girls from Spain. | |
| Single get in your blood, I'm telling you. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
| Listen, coming up, let me announce something that's not announced yet. | ||
| As many of you know, maybe some of you don't know, this Friday there's going to be a television on the sci-fi, a television program on the sci-fi channel that is a pretty serious show. | ||
| It's going to give you the results of an archaeological dig in Roswell, New Mexico. | ||
| They're going to where the alleged crash was. | ||
| No, correction. | ||
| They went to where the original crash was, and the sci-fi channel commissioned an archaeological dig led by a William Dolman, Dr. William Dolman, who was a principal investigator at the University of New Mexico, who went to Roswell and did the dig, and the results are going to be on this Friday night on the Sci-Fi Channel. | ||
| Well, through the good auspices of my good friend Richard C. Hoagland, Dr. Dolman will be here Friday night after the program. | ||
| And so we'll get to talk to Dr. Dolman about what just occurred on TV. | ||
| So, of course, obviously you want to catch Sci-Fi Channel show. | ||
| And I'll tell you what I've heard. | ||
| I've heard rumors that they collected about 50 boxes of stuff at this dig. | ||
| Now, that may or may not be true. | ||
| We're sure going to find out Friday. | ||
| You know, that could be complete bull. | ||
| But that's what I've heard, and they've really got something. | ||
| That's what I've heard. | ||
| We'll find out Friday. | ||
| Coming up in a moment, Harold Rheingold, who was affectionately described to me by one of the staff as a techno-weenie. | ||
| We should have a lot to give you all share. | ||
| Howard and I should have a lot to share. | ||
| Howard Rheingold was writing about personal computers before they were even personal and examining the World Wide Web before it was worldwide. | ||
| One of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. | ||
| Oh, there are many, aren't they? | ||
| He's the author of the Virtual Community. | ||
| We live in that now, don't we? | ||
| Which was named to Business Week's Best Business Books of the Year list in 1993. | ||
| Virtual Reality and Tools for Thought. | ||
| His research for smart mobs, which was just named one of Strategy Plus Business Magazine's Books of the Year, took him around the world. | ||
|
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but he makes his home in mill valley california which is where we're going to be going in a moment Take Coast to Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone. | |
| Coast2CoastAM.com can be conveniently accessed on your iPhone and most Android platforms, which means that you are never without your Coast to Coast AM fix. | ||
| If you're a Coast to Coast Insider subscriber, you can listen to the show live in the middle of the night or previous shows 24-7. | ||
| Plus, you can browse all the great photos, videos, and news stories. | ||
| Keeping up with Coast to Coast AM has never been easier with our Coast Insider service. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
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It's way out there. | |
| The Catholic Church a few years ago came out with a report that the belief in extraterrestrial life does not negate one's belief system in God. | ||
| I found that fascinating. | ||
| Didn't you? | ||
| This is something that is certainly a very plausible event, but nevertheless, what we're saying is it is the setup for the Antichrist. | ||
| And we had better wake up because if we don't, we are going to find ourselves part of that alien agenda. | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| So. | ||
| So here is Harold Rheingold. | ||
| Somebody might often said, techno-weeny, Howard. | ||
| Techno, certainly. | ||
| I hope not too much of the weenie. | ||
| Well, no, listen, I don't shy away from that. | ||
| in a way uh... | ||
| uh... | ||
| we are technically and i mean you know we're not uh... | ||
| And, you know, there's people out there scalding themselves and half-killing themselves on these eco-challenges and things that he does. | ||
| But, you know, frankly, people who spend most of their time on computers, cell phones, the whole thing, we're weenies compared to those folks. | ||
| Well, I think I read today that there are close to half a billion people on the Internet now. | ||
| Oh, there are. | ||
| That's a pretty significant chunk of the world's population in a pretty short period of time. | ||
| It's probably the single biggest thing that's happened to the planet in some ways since I've been alive, maybe long before that. | ||
| I mean, just the formation of the Internet is staggering, isn't it, in its implication and size? | ||
| Well, if you think about it, it was not too many years ago, let's say 10 years ago, this was really just a few enthusiasts, a few, meaning maybe 100,000. | ||
| Now we've got, what, about 10% of the human race are potentially all connected to each other. | ||
| Yes, and a lot of them actually have become addicted to it. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Humans are addicted to communication technologies. | ||
| That's how we've gotten where we are. | ||
| I am addicted to it, Howard. | ||
| I'm addicted to it. | ||
| I'm addicted to the web. | ||
| There's simply no question about it. | ||
| The web has become a gigantic part of my life. | ||
| And I'm still trying to figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I order stuff on the web. | ||
| I shop on the web. | ||
| I don't go out because of the web. | ||
| I communicate on the web. | ||
| I don't send mail because of the web. | ||
| I mean, my God, Howard, look at how it's changed our lives. | ||
| Well, you know, I think every communication technology We're beginning to understand now, connects people in new ways, extends our powers in new ways, and it alienates us in new ways. | ||
| It's really not one or the other, it's both and. | ||
| But I think what we're seeing is the beginning of the third and biggest leap. | ||
| If you think of the PC starting in the 1980s and the internet starting in the 1990s, we are seeing the telephone, the mobile telephone, the personal computer, and the internet merging. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| No, they're definitely merging. | ||
| And what that is going to result in is going to be something that's going to be distinctly different from any of the components. | ||
| Because we've seen this before. | ||
| With the PC, you've got the microchip and the television screen made that technology possible. | ||
| But what you got was not a mainframe computer like the guys in the white coats used that you could look at. | ||
| What you got was a new kind of computer that people who never used computers before used to do things that computers were never used to do before. | ||
| And the Internet, you connect your personal computer to the telephone with the modem, that's how we used to do it. | ||
| What you don't get is a bunch of computers connected by modems. | ||
| You get the Internet, this whole new thing. | ||
| So it's not going to be the Internet as we know it on the telephone as we know it. | ||
| It's going to be something that has its own characteristics. | ||
| And we're really at the beginning of it. | ||
| If you think about the PC in 1980, that was interesting, but not very powerful. | ||
| You can buy a handheld device now. | ||
| It's 1,000 times more powerful than the PC you could buy in 1980. | ||
| It's a fifth the price. | ||
| It's in color instead of light green on dark green. | ||
| Listen, you can run your whole life from a little damn thing you can hold in your hand that's hooked up to the internet. | ||
| That's where it's going. | ||
| And I just, you know, I sort of wonder what that means. | ||
| I know you're not a sociologist or anything, but there are some people who actually say that when they look at this revolution that we're right in the middle of right now, that it actually may prevent mankind from taking the next step. | ||
| Or maybe it is in itself the next step. | ||
| But actually, there are those who argue that because of this, we won't evolve. | ||
| I mean, there will be ten major ideas in the world, and they'll be shared worldwide. | ||
| All information will be shared, and there'll be so little isolation that we just won't move forward. | ||
| We won't take the next evolutionary leap that we're supposed to otherwise take. | ||
| I've heard that mentioned as a possibility. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I would contend that the very opposite is true. | ||
| I'm not a sociologist. | ||
| Maybe it will. | ||
| Well, you know, when I started looking at what does this mean, it led me to what the sociologists call collective action. | ||
| Sounds vaguely communistic, but it's really about how human societies have evolved. | ||
| If you think about it, humans have been physiologically pretty much the same creatures for quite a while, let's say, at least 100,000 years. | ||
| For most of that time, we lived in small family bands hunting small game, digging up roots, and eating berries. | ||
| At some point, family groups began to get together with other family groups. | ||
| People got together with people that they were not related to, and they learned to somehow collectively coordinate their activities so that they can break down large game. | ||
| And they started bringing down these mastodons and these big creatures, and they brought enough meat home so that they could feed everyone, and not just the hunters, and not just the small family groups. | ||
| A form of collective action started that enabled a new level of society, the tribe or the band other than the family. | ||
| And then at some point, agriculture enabled a few people to produce the food for everyone, and people began specializing. | ||
| At every step along the way, now this is where the sociology comes in, it's called solving the collective action dilemma. | ||
| The collective action dilemma is very simple. | ||
| It's that we are the descendants of highly competitive creatures. | ||
| We are self-interested, we're rational, we look after ourselves. | ||
| How do individualistic creatures get together with people they're not related to to cooperate on a larger and larger scale? | ||
| Well, they use speech, they use the alphabet, they use printing presses, now we use the internet. | ||
| I think that when we're starting to carry around with us everywhere we go devices that are quickly evolving, they're becoming much more powerful, they communicate with each other. | ||
| It's not just picking up the telephone and speaking, we can communicate data, we can surf the web, we can connect with devices in the environment. | ||
| We are going to be able to solve that collective action dilemma on a much larger scale. | ||
| And we're just seeing the beginning signs of it. | ||
| So I think that in fact it's the human mind and it's human social contracts and our communications with each other that brings us to the next level. | ||
| But the technologies enable us to do it at a larger scale. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Well, I think it does make sense, and I think it argues that probably it is an evolutionary leap in progress. | ||
| Well, I think the one thing that distinguishes humans from the rest of the biological creation is that we extend our capabilities with our technology and we change who we are. | ||
| And we're doing it at an increasing pace. | ||
| I think we're just beginning to become aware of how we do that. | ||
| And we may have a significant advantage ahead of us in being aware of it instead of just kind of stumbling upon it. | ||
| Isn't it likely that it will have truly a worldwide impact, that it will conceivably even threaten governments, that it will change the face of the globe in many ways, that some governments may be brought down because of it, that the barriers that were once up can no longer be up. | ||
| We've already seen the first signs of that. | ||
| And one of the things that got me to start thinking about writing a book about this was I saw some disconnected events that seemed to me to have a connection. | ||
| There are these teenagers all over the world. | ||
| I've seen them myself in Japan, in Scandinavia, in South America. | ||
| They use this text messaging. | ||
| It's very big in the rest of the world. | ||
| You use your thumb and your keypad, and you send a little text message that goes directly to the screen of another telephone. | ||
| It's like instant messaging on the web. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Except it's wherever you go. | ||
| We're beginning to see television advertisements for this in the U.S. and newspaper ads. | ||
| It's only beginning in the U.S., but worldwide, 100 billion text messages a month. | ||
| Now, normally in the United States, we think of ourselves as ahead of everybody else. | ||
| I mean, we don't even give really much of a thought other than maybe when Sputnik went up and went around and we said, oh, my God, the Russians did it first. | ||
| We don't think about anybody else being ahead of us in these sorts of areas particularly. | ||
| But the truth of the matter is, isn't it, that if a lot of Americans were to go to Japan right now, they would be shocked at what the Japanese carry around with them. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, it's not just the Japanese. | ||
| Brazilians have these devices in their hands that do a lot more than the telephones that we're used to. | ||
| Do they? | ||
| As well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I wouldn't have guessed Brazil, you know. | ||
| I would not have guessed that. | ||
| I knew Japan, and maybe even China in some parts, but not Brazil. | ||
| It's surprising. | ||
| There are literally fishermen off the coast of India get text messages telling them which port has the best price for their catch right now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| People are using telephones to access data who never would have used a PC or never would have thought of using the Internet. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why I think that this next revolution is going to be more profound. | ||
| One in eight people in Botswana have a mobile phone now. | ||
| One in eight in Botswana? | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| I mean, there are some very practical reasons for that. | ||
| Constructing a wireline infrastructure, putting the copper in the ground or putting the fiber optics in the ground, that's a very expensive proposition. | ||
| It doesn't really pay to run it to a little village out in Africa or in India. | ||
| But you can create a little satellite station that can broadcast information inexpensively through wireless radio technologies. | ||
| Installing a wireless infrastructure in an entire country is a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time of building up a wired infrastructure. | ||
| And the handsets themselves, the devices, compared to a PC, for example, are far more affordable. | ||
| They're beginning to talk of disposable telephones pretty soon. | ||
| In the Philippines, the mobile device and the text messaging, that's really the poor person's internet. | ||
| And that, in fact, is where the government was overthrown. | ||
| One of the things that started me thinking about this was reading in the newspaper. | ||
| The president of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, was accused of corruption. | ||
| There was a trial in the Senate there. | ||
| Like the Watergate hearings here 30 years ago, everyone in the Philippines was watching the television. | ||
| Suddenly, some senators associated with Estrada shut down the hearings. | ||
| Within minutes, tens of thousands of Philippine citizens began assembling in the square in Manila, all of them wearing black, because they had sent these text messages to each other saying, go to the square, wear black. | ||
| In a few days, millions of people showed up. | ||
| The military withdrew their support from the Estrada government, and it fell. | ||
| There were manifestos that they sent around. | ||
| If you can imagine manifestos written in 150-character chunks, We Are Generation text was what that famous manifesto said. | ||
| I can imagine governments trying to shut this down. | ||
| Well, you know, when the G8, the eight ruling economic powers, met in Canada, they were very afraid of something similar to what happened with the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. | ||
| Yeah, a real mess up there. | ||
| Well, the demonstrators managed to organize themselves using portable phones and laptop computers and websites. | ||
| They were able to coordinate collective action on the fly in a way that political demonstrators weren't before. | ||
| When the G8 met not long ago, they met in a remote part of Canada where they were able to block out radio communications. | ||
| So clearly we're seeing a kind of arms race between centralized power and decentralized power. | ||
| So when governments or even world organizations want to hide, they have to run away to where there's no wireless communication of any kind. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, this happened again in Venezuela. | ||
| In America, we don't know a great deal about what happened there, but there was a coup recently. | ||
| There were two coups. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Howard, hold on for a second. | ||
| By the way, Howard, have you ever had an email from Nigeria? | ||
| Yeah, every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And I just answered one. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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The trip Back in Time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | |
| More Somewhere in Time coming up. | ||
| All this in an ocean, find another, another day. | ||
| I'm ready every time you do, the secret stage is high. | ||
| I'm walking in so motion as you turn around and play. | ||
| I'm walking in so much better than you do. | ||
| I'm walking in so much better than you do. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'll tell you one more before I get off the floor. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| You wanna see I'm with your fancy friends? | ||
| I'm telling you it's got to see the end. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Ooh, ooh, ooh. | ||
| I'll tell you one more before I get off the floor. | ||
| Don't bring me down. | ||
| What You let your mind up, don't wake up. | ||
| happened to the girl I used to know? | ||
| Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Are you at Chechno Weenie? | ||
| I am. | ||
| And, you know, of course, I'm, you know, I'm on computers all the time. | ||
| I've got like, I don't know, six computers in the house or something like that. | ||
| So I'm far gone. | ||
| And I get, you know, like, I don't know, 3,000 emails a day on average. | ||
| And I get about, I don't know, four or five Nigerian emails every single day. | ||
| And these are really classy emails. | ||
| These emails are always like from some government official in Nigeria who just happens to have about $60 million or $30 million that he doesn't know what to do with, and he's sends your account, you know? | ||
| It's a total BS thing, of course. | ||
| But I got tired of getting them. | ||
| And so, here, about a week ago, I finally answered one of them. | ||
| This one truly tugged at my heartstrings. | ||
| It was the untimely death of the late engineer C.G. Katelo Ono in Nigeria with his $30 million and his widow. | ||
| And, you know, she was all without money and having a hard time needing to get that money out of the country real fast and was going to give me a good part of it if I just let it come to my bank account. | ||
| I answered the letter and in a moment I'll have that and their response. | ||
|
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The End. | |
| End. | ||
| you you Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Music All right, so I get this message from the pathetic widow Ono that her husband has dropped dead. | ||
| I mean, you know, heart attack. | ||
| Dead. | ||
| $30 million. | ||
| Doesn't know where to put $30 million. | ||
| Approaching me on the part of her dead husband is some fellow named Patrick. | ||
| Not exactly a real Nigerian name, but hey. | ||
| Making me the offer, you know. | ||
| So I thought finally I'm going to write back to one of these. | ||
| And I wrote back to Patrick the following. | ||
| I said, my heart cries for poor Mr. Ono, who has died leaving all his money with no place to go. | ||
| My bank account would be a great place for it to, shall we say, hibernate. | ||
| I have my own money. | ||
| And I hope when I pass to the next world, there's someone as kind as yourself to handle my affairs, as you're doing for poor Mr. Ono. | ||
| What shall I do? | ||
| Yours truly, Arthur William Bell. | ||
| Well, here it comes back the answer, right? | ||
| Dear William Bell, first and foremost, how are you and the members of your family doing? | ||
| Thanks for responding to our proposal to you. | ||
| We highly appreciate it. | ||
| Kindly find below one more time for their details on how we are going to successfully accomplish this transaction. | ||
| We on our side here in Nigeria will on your behalf secure all the documents from the Federal High Court of Justice that will stand you as the next of kin to the late engineer CG Katak Ono. | ||
| This regard, the affidavit of trust will be backdated to suit the claim as it's sworn by the late engineer CG Kato Ono before his untimely death. | ||
| And it goes on and on and on. | ||
| And so they're going to backdate this sucker and they're going to send me $30 million and of course they're not. | ||
| Somebody here writes Rickett and Kimberly writes, Nigerian scam. | ||
| Don't let your bank account be part of Nigeria's third largest industry, Howard? | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| In fact, some people are saying that the Nigerian scam is driving the internet industry in Nigeria. | ||
| There's so many people sitting in cyber cafes sending these emails out to unsuspecting Americans. | ||
| So they are actually coming from Nigeria, not Patrick in New York going through a server in Nigeria or something, huh? | ||
| No, this is really something that apparently goes back decades before the internet. | ||
| They sent letters out to people. | ||
| I mean, one of the reasons I called this book Smart Mobs was I wanted to convey the idea that there are going to be opportunities and benefits, but every technology has pitfalls. | ||
| Information, misinformation, and disinformation. | ||
| Scams, crimes, terrorism, people who want to spam you, they are going to have their abilities amplified as well. | ||
| I'm really asking about a world in which we're going to have billions of people carrying devices thousands of times more powerful than even today's PCs, communicating at speeds tens of thousands of times more powerful, all linked together in various ways. | ||
| What are we going to do socially with those? | ||
| That's the question I ask. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you were starting to talk about South America before the break. | ||
| You mentioned the coup in South America. | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| The official coup was backed by the mass media. | ||
| So every 20 minutes on the television, on the radio, go and demonstrate. | ||
| The other side, they only had the text messages, the cell phones, and the email. | ||
| So they were able, through their grassroots, to organize counter-demonstrations. | ||
| The point of this being that we're just seeing the first signs of a kind of decentralized collective action that emerges because we have a new way to coordinate our activities. | ||
| And that got me to thinking, well, we're seeing some other signs. | ||
| Napster. | ||
| Now, there's an issue about stealing music. | ||
| Napster, yeah, with file sharing, right? | ||
| Well, what's interesting about this, 70 million people. | ||
| Not just Napster, but others deserve the limelight as well. | ||
| I mean, there are plenty of others out there, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And, you know, what's important in terms of collective action is that people were A giant musical jukebox. | ||
| I know, but sure, let me ask you about this. | ||
| This is a big deal. | ||
| I mean, here we have people on the internet. | ||
| You can go to these services and you can get any damn song you want to. | ||
| You don't have to go to the store and buy it. | ||
| You can download it in beautiful 128-bit stereo. | ||
| What the hell is going to happen to the music industry? | ||
| I mean, maybe they shut down Napster. | ||
| But they're not going to shut them all down. | ||
| They're never going to shut them all down. | ||
| Howard, is it the end of the music industry? | ||
| You know, it's not the end of the music industry. | ||
| It's the end of the business model of the recording industry as we know it. | ||
| The Recording Industry Association is trying to protect not hundreds of thousands of musicians out there, but Brittany. | ||
| They've got four or five megastars that they put all their money into. | ||
| Less than 1% of the professional musicians in the U.S. make more than $600 in royalties. | ||
| I think that there are ways for musicians to make a living with this distribution system that could give us better music and more music and faster music. | ||
| But is it the end of the record industry? | ||
| As we know it, I think so. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| In other words, folks, so many people are sharing these files. | ||
| You can get any song you want on the internet for free. | ||
| Why go buy it in a record store? | ||
| And it's a big fight I know they're having, and like they got an abstract, but they're not going to get them all, Howard. | ||
| So that does mean it's got to change or else, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, you know, I think that most people, if there's an easy way and a decent price, they will pay for music. | ||
| You click a button and you can play a nickel to hear it once and a quarter to hear it twice and you can buy it for a dollar. | ||
| People will do it. | ||
| And I think that that's really easy. | ||
| Do you think they'll do it even though they can get it for free? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I think there is already evidence that a great many people go out and buy CDs they wouldn't have bought otherwise because they can download the songs and try them out. | ||
| But Howard, as things get faster, as you get more storage now, you know, you can go get an 80 gigabyte hard drive for nothing now, $100 and something bucks. | ||
| That means that you can go on a certain news group, like Overnight if you want to, and you can download movies, Howard, entire motion pictures, sometimes before they come out of Hollywood. | ||
| They're available on the internet now. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, and before the internet, you could go to Hong Kong or Singapore, any number of places, and buy movies before they hit the movie houses. | ||
| I know, Howard. | ||
| But America's number one export may be, or at least right up there near the top, would be movies. | ||
|
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And you know what? | |
| The movie industry tried to shut the VCR down. | ||
| Jack Valenti, the chief lobbyist, said to Congress, and I quote, I remember. | ||
| VCR is to the Hollywood studio as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone. | ||
| Well, wasn't he right? | ||
| Wasn't he right in a way? | ||
| Well, more than 50% of Hollywood's revenues come from video cassettes now. | ||
| He was wrong in a way. | ||
| In a way. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The motion picture did not, the television did not shut down motion pictures. | ||
| You know, Hollywood boycotted the television. | ||
| They did not want to have motion pictures on televisions because they thought it would kill the industry. | ||
| Walt Disney couldn't get the money to start Disneyland, so he broke that boycott. | ||
| Yeah, but Howard, you just told me that the record industry, as we know it, is dead. | ||
| And I agree with you. | ||
| Now, as we know it. | ||
| Yeah, as we know it. | ||
| And the same thing is happening right now with motion pictures. | ||
| The American public is not as aware of it as they are the music with the Napsters of the world. | ||
| I think there's a major difference, and I think that people are always going to want to go to this central place with strangers and sit in the dark and be immersed in this big screen experience. | ||
| And that that's not going to go away. | ||
| And you're going to want to have the multi-million dollar budget to have the big screen experience. | ||
| And there will always be a place for that. | ||
| You know, radio didn't go away when television came along. | ||
| It found a different niche. | ||
| You know, there is also SEVI at home. | ||
| Certainly your listeners must be aware of SEVI at home. | ||
| The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. | ||
| They certainly are. | ||
| Big telescope sucks down signals from outer space. | ||
| Well, of course, American taxpayers are not paying for the immense computing power to look through those signals. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So SEVI at Home has 2 million volunteers. | ||
| Probably many of the people listening now are volunteers. | ||
| When you're not using your PC, you run a screensaver. | ||
| And this screensaver, it goes out to a server, it downloads some of these signals from outer space. | ||
| And they look for intelligence. | ||
| They look for intelligence. | ||
| What's interesting about that, in the way that Napster put 70 million hard drives together, this put the computing power together, these 2 million computers, that's 20 teraflops of computing power. | ||
| Well, that's a very admirable side of the Internet. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| I mean, information storage and processing and transfer. | ||
| But still, I'm not going to let you go on this other thing because the motion picture industry, the record industry, in fact, every form. | ||
| Now that we have digital everything, there's no more, at least with VCRs. | ||
| You know, one person would copy and you'd get a lousy copy and then somebody else would copy and get a lousier copy. | ||
| In the digital age, Howard, the original product is just as good after 17 people have pirated this thing as it was when the first person pirated this thing. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| That's what has them terrified. | ||
| So if the VCR scared the hell out of them, then what are computers doing? | ||
| Well, here's, I think, another question. | ||
| Is curing cancer as important as preserving the music industry as we know it? | ||
| Much, much more important. | ||
| We have people who are contributing their computers not to look for signals in outer space. | ||
| And that's 20 trillion floating-point operations per second. | ||
| That's more computing power than the Defense Department and IBM had not too long ago. | ||
| People are contributing their computing power to help medical scientists solve very difficult problems about the way proteins fold. | ||
| It is true, yes. | ||
| Very important for cancer research, for immune system research. | ||
| Medical researchers generally don't have the computing power themselves to tackle this. | ||
| So we have these peer-to-peer applications where millions of volunteers put their PCs together through the Internet. | ||
| If they shut down all peer-to-peer communication in order to save the recording industry and Hollywood's revenues, we may also stop that kind of research. | ||
| Now, I believe that we have a technology with micropayments in which it's possible for any musician to put out their music on the internet and say, I want to get a nickel for this, or I'm a name brand, I need to get a dollar for this. | ||
| And you can download it and make that payment at the same time. | ||
| It's a technology that would enable peer-to-peer to happen. | ||
| And yes, a lot of people will steal things. | ||
| A lot of people still steal things. | ||
| But I think more people, most people are fundamentally honest. | ||
| If it's easy and it's inexpensive enough, they will pay. | ||
| But the point is, people are able to put their computers together through the internet and do things that individuals could never do before, or even entire governments could never do before. | ||
| What's going to happen when the telephones we carry or even wear, I mean, it's not going to be too long before we're going to have wearable computers. | ||
| What's going to happen when we've got billions of these things communicating at speeds far beyond what the Internet does now? | ||
| Is the Internet Powered an enemy of our government? | ||
| Or is our government, no, let me rephrase that. | ||
| Is our government an enemy of the Internet? | ||
| Well, I think another way of putting it is if the Internet is controlled in a way that it has not before, will we see innovation springing up the way we have the last 20 years? | ||
| You know, the PC, as we know it, it was based on something that the Defense Department created and that IBM built. | ||
| It's their monster. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| Neither of them really made the PC as we know it. | ||
| 19-year-old dropout from Harvard, Bill Gates. | ||
| You know, a 19-year-old dropout from Reed College, Steve Jobs. | ||
| Those guys, they made the PC. | ||
| It was the users who changed the technology, who created new ways to use the technology. | ||
| It really wasn't the traditional vendors. | ||
| With the Internet, we saw the same thing. | ||
| It was, yes, created by the Defense Department. | ||
| Yes, it rode originally on the network created by AT ⁇ T. But you could not create the World Wide Web by going out and telling a major corporation or eight major corporations to do it. | ||
| You need millions of people creating websites and linking them together, collective action. | ||
| Yes, but is it not possibly the monster that they created that will end up eating them alive? | ||
| Well, I think the big thing that national governments are afraid of is the cross-border revenue flows and that aren't taxable. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| I think that, you know, it's not uncontrollable. | ||
| There are points at which the Internet can be controlled. | ||
| And we're seeing particularly the U.S. government using the Internet as we know it as the most massive surveillance mechanism ever invented. | ||
| Well, that just began in earnest, didn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In other words, we just The Information Awareness Office. | ||
| And Admiral Poindexter. | ||
| Yeah, of all people. | ||
| I mean, why did they pick Admiral Poindexter? | ||
| I mean, you know, several felony counts with a round contract. | ||
| And he's going to head this thing up. | ||
| Now, which PR genius thought that up? | ||
| Well, I think that they don't really need PR. | ||
| People are willing to trade their privacy for security. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| 9-11 has gotten people so terrified that they are willing to give up their freedoms to prevent something from happening in the future. | ||
| You don't think they should have done that? | ||
| I think that we need to be careful about whether we are going to give up the freedoms that we enjoy in order to preserve the freedoms that we enjoy. | ||
| What Poindexter is proposing is a massive surveillance mechanism that would scan all email, it would scan every website, the trail that everybody takes when they go to every website that they visit, | ||
| every purchase you make on your credit card, every time you go through one of those automatic toll collection booths, every time you turn on your cell phone and tell the cell tower where you are, that massive amount of information is going to turn computers loose on it to data mine to see whether there are terrorists. | ||
| Now, I think none of us want to have terrorists running around. | ||
| None of us like to have them caught. | ||
| The question is, are we going to trust this government and all future governments to use that power wisely? | ||
| Are we trading in a little security? | ||
| Not only no, but a lot of people. | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| I mean, hell no. | ||
| Of course they're not going to use it wisely. | ||
| And are they going to misuse it? | ||
| Yes, inevitably. | ||
| Well, again, the book I wrote was about a lot of opportunities that I see ahead and a lot of the pitfalls that I see ahead. | ||
| Smart mobs uses a word, mobs, that's a little edgy because not every group of people who coordinate collective action has socially beneficial ends in mind. | ||
| You've got totalitarian governments and terrorists. | ||
| you've got organized crime and you've got Nigerian scammers every time there's a new technology People were so unused to this technology that people could call them at home and toss them out of money. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| If it came on the telephone, it must be real. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| Then there was, well, if Dan Rather said it, it has to be so. | ||
| And now it's going to be the internet, I guess. | ||
| So, you know, ultimately, it's up to people to figure out what's best for them. | ||
| And I think that's a matter of literacy. | ||
| And, you know, we've seen this happen time and again. | ||
| The alphabet was the tool of elites for thousands of years. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Invented by empires. | ||
| Howard, hold it right there. | ||
| We've got to take a break here at the top of the hour. | ||
| Howard Rheingold is my guest. | ||
| And he has a series of books, the latest of which is Smart Mobs. | ||
| And we're talking about Smart Mobs. | ||
| We're all part of the mob, aren't we? | ||
| Don't think of yourself that way? | ||
| Well, you're hooked up, aren't you, one way or the other? | ||
| Radio, television, internet, text messages, telephones, color, with internet and everything. | ||
|
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We'll do it back. | |
| You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM | ||
| Don't you love her badly? | ||
| Don't you need her badly? | ||
| Don't you love her way? | ||
| Tell me what you say. | ||
| Don't you love her badly? | ||
| Wanna need her badly. | ||
| Don't you love her face? | ||
| Don't you love her as she's walking out the door? | ||
| Like she did one thousand times before Don't you love her face? | ||
| What you say? | ||
| Don't you love her as she's walking out the door? | ||
| All your love, all your love, all your love, all your love, all your love is wrong. | ||
| A single long whistle of a deep blue dream, seven hawks seem to be on the mark. | ||
| Yeah, don't you love it? | ||
| Don't you love it? | ||
| It won't be no. | ||
| You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| Toward Rungold written Smart Mobs. | ||
| Are we a smart mob? | ||
| Or are we an informed mob? | ||
| Well, we're an informed mob for sure, getting more so all the time. | ||
| I'm not sure that makes us smart. | ||
| It's an interesting choice of phraseology. | ||
|
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We'll ask them about it. | |
| I'm Arbell. | ||
| is coast to coast AM. | ||
|
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Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night. | |
| But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show. | ||
| The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life. | ||
| For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting. | ||
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| The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners. | ||
| Visit CoastToCoastAM.com to sign up today. | ||
| Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| Music Well, all right. | ||
| Once again, let's begin there. | ||
| It's kind of interesting, actually. | ||
| Howard, you called it smart mobs. | ||
| It's informed mobs. | ||
| But does that necessarily mean smart mobs? | ||
| Well, the smart has to do with the people's ability to coordinate their activities. | ||
| Now, of course, a smart mob is not necessarily a wise mob, and not everybody who coordinates their activities are going to have social benefits in mind. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, maybe they're social benefits, not the greater social benefits. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think when we see political demonstrations in the future, they're not necessarily going to be democratic or nonviolent the way they were in the Philippines or in Venezuela. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But let me add another element here that I think that really raises the notion of carrying these devices around to a level beyond what we have with PCs and the Internet. | ||
| And that's the notion of a reputation system that might be able to tell you who you can trust to do something with. | ||
| And that's when the mob gets a little smarter. | ||
| We've got one of those already. | ||
| It's called eBay. | ||
| eBay, world's largest garage sale. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Economists will tell you eBay is a market that should not exist. | ||
| Howard, I have friends that are making their entire living on eBay. | ||
| Oh, yes, definitely. | ||
| That's how thousands of professional eBayers. | ||
| They stay home, they buy, and they sell on eBay. | ||
| And frankly, Howard, I'm amazed, Howard. | ||
|
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People take stuff that, you know, just stuff, right? | |
| And they sell it on eBay, and they get more money for it on eBay than somebody paid for it brand new. | ||
| Well, there's a problem that eBay solves, and the problem is this. | ||
| A buyer and a seller who have never met before, don't know each other, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, the person who sends the check and the person who sends the merchandise, they each take a risk that if they are the first one to move, the other person is going to stiff them. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Classically, economists will tell you a market cannot exist under those conditions. | ||
| But it is. | ||
| It does because if you're going to buy something, you can go check on the reputation of that seller and see what previous buyers have had to say about that seller. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It works only because of that. | ||
| And now, if you could extend that reputation system to this world in which we're carrying devices around, think of it. | ||
| You're surrounded every day in big cities by strangers, or you're in a train. | ||
| Some of these strangers, they may have common cause with you. | ||
| They may want to ride in the direction you're going, or want to buy something you have to sell, or may be a good candidate for a date on Saturday night, but you don't know who they are and whether to trust them. | ||
| What if you could say to your phone, I'm about to drive to my office now. | ||
| Who along exactly this route is looking for a ride exactly where I'm going, and they are guaranteed by someone I trust to be trustworthy. | ||
| It sounds a little far-fetched, but Napster's far-fetched, eBay is far-fetched. | ||
| Well, or maybe you're wondering about the Saturday night date that you just talked about. | ||
| And so you just dial up www.venerealdise directory.com. | ||
| And probably, I hope there's no such thing. | ||
| And you type in the name of this young lady or man that you're about to date, and you get their record back or something. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's all kinds of reputation systems. | ||
| So it may be, reputation is the lubrication of cooperation. | ||
| Groups of people who aren't related to each other are able to cooperate because there's some kind of trust mechanism. | ||
| Some threshold for trust has been lowered that enables them to deal with each other. | ||
| Markets spring into being. | ||
| The fact that you can go into a store and give someone a piece of paper instead of giving them three chickens and they will give you a can of soup, that means that we are using this symbolic communication system that we trust in some way. | ||
| Well, take your own website, for example. | ||
| I've got Charles in Hawaii, who all the way over there, over the water in Hawaii, is looking at your website, right? | ||
| Your web community, I guess you call it, right? | ||
| And apparently there's something up there about this diode energy system. | ||
| Now, I don't even know whether you're aware that it's on there, but a diode energy system is a radical claim made for free, essentially free energy. | ||
| And a little while ago, we were talking about toppling governments and stuff. | ||
| There's been a great, I don't know, myth, and maybe not a myth, in America that there are these free energy systems out there, but that all the big oil companies and the government, they squish them and they buy them and they suppress them and they keep selling their oil. | ||
| Well, one of these days, one of these systems, maybe not this one, who knows, that you've got on your website, but one of them is going to get out. | ||
| And then it's not going to just topple government. | ||
| It's going to change the whole world. | ||
| Now, can they stop that? | ||
| Well, the interesting thing about the Internet is that an innovation that's broadcast from any one node can suddenly take over the whole thing. | ||
| That's what the web is. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| A physicist in Switzerland thought it would be a good idea if you could link Internet sites together and just click on a link and see what's at that other Internet site. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| In California where I live, there was one website not too long ago. | ||
| It was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. | ||
| It spread through the web. | ||
| People downloaded the software, created websites, they downloaded browsers. | ||
| That's how it happens. | ||
| So here we have a technology that is kind of self-improving. | ||
| If there is somebody somewhere, some kid in Brazil, some physicist in Switzerland, some 19-year-old Harvard dropout in Redland, Washington, comes up with some new scheme, they can broadcast it and the whole technology upgrades itself. | ||
| And up until the recent act, perhaps, you know, with regard to terrorism and our privacy and all the rest of it, nobody could stop it. | ||
| Well, now they're making some moves here, right? | ||
| I think this is worthy of a fair amount of discussion, this invasion of privacy. | ||
| I mean, where is the Fourth Amendment, Howard, in all of this? | ||
| The Fourth Amendment went away a while ago. | ||
| 9-11 was just kind of the last nail in the coffin. | ||
| I mean, there was some problem with the FBI before 9-11. | ||
| They were doing all kinds of things, and some of the things that they're meant to do, they weren't doing as well as they should. | ||
| Now we're seeing all kinds of super-secret agencies being set up that are able to use these technologies to track what people do. | ||
| So, you know, it used to be said that when you use your credit card, you leave a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that people can track. | ||
| Well, now when you were walking around with your telephone, and as I said, these devices are evolving, you're really broadcasting a sphere of electronic information. | ||
| It's intimate information. | ||
| It's about who you're talking to, where you are, what you're buying. | ||
| You know, even today, inexpensive global positioning satellite chips, they can locate a device to within a few feet now. | ||
| But you don't even need one of those. | ||
| Just turn your cell phone on. | ||
| It tells the nearest cell tower where you are. | ||
| I know. | ||
| After 9-11, one of the largest mobile carriers in England is Virgin. | ||
| Virgin revealed something they had not told their customers. | ||
| They said that they had the records of all of the telephone calls that all of their customers had made and where those telephone calls had been made from. | ||
| So we now have devices that not only know who you are, but where you are. | ||
| Now, of course, I think this is, all technologies are double-edged swords. | ||
| Well, so do you either participate in this technology, sort of saying, all right, let me just sign off my Fourth Amendment rights here. | ||
| Give me my cell phone, give me my PDA, give me my 2GB laptop, and let me sign away Fourth Amendment rights. | ||
| Or else do you rebel and not participate and become one of the poor, the information poor, and then in reality the real poor too, because you won't have any money? | ||
| Well, you know, actually the real terrorists, they use encryption. | ||
| They're not going to be so easy to trace. | ||
| They use codes that make it difficult to identify them. | ||
| Ordinary citizens, it's perfectly legal, could use encryption to protect our privacy. | ||
| What we're seeing is a division not between those who can afford to have technology and those who can't afford to have it. | ||
| We're seeing a division between those who know how to use technology to their benefit and those who don't. | ||
| And increasingly, I think that division is based on age. | ||
| Those 15-year-olds in Japan, in Korea, in Finland, in Brazil, in Turkey, they're the ones who know how to use the advanced features on their phones. | ||
| Yeah, fine. | ||
| Well, suppose I made a case to you that if you, Howard Rungold, use PGP to send somebody a letter or an email across the country, maybe your publisher, what do I know? | ||
| And that that's a very anti-American thing to do because that'll make it hard on our Defense Department to decode the damn thing. | ||
| Our computers will get taken up and they're going to be looking for people who are doing bad stuff, but you're sending PGP over and they're having a headache with it and they're thinking, oh, what's this, you know? | ||
| Well, you mentioned the Fourth Amendment, and that's the one that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution that said law enforcement should have the right to search and seize evidence if they have reasonable cause to believe that a crime is being committed. | ||
| And I think that's there's the problem. | ||
| Do we assume that all citizens are criminals in order to catch a few dangerous ones? | ||
| And if we do that, we will protect ourselves, perhaps, against dangerous acts. | ||
| We're already starting to do that, Howard. | ||
| What would that be? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What kind of world are we going to be living in then? | ||
| If I use encryption, that makes me a target. | ||
| If a million people use encryption, again, collective action, then that is, I think, a way of securing some liberties. | ||
| Believe me, the terrorists, they are already using encryption. | ||
| Using encryption. | ||
| Not the kind of encryption that you can detect, but codes that they have agreed upon. | ||
| So get me a dozen eggs and some milk from the corner store. | ||
| So then should we have been screaming bloody murder? | ||
| Stop this before it's passed. | ||
| Don't let this happen. | ||
| It's the end of our personal rights eventually, our Fourth Amendment privileges. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It's the end of it. | ||
| Should we have been shouting? | ||
| You know, here's the irony, is that even if you had a perfect surveillance society, the limits of what any kind of police state can accomplish is the limits of what a human bureaucracy can do. | ||
| We had that FBI agent in Phoenix who said, wait a minute, we've got these kind of suspicious young Middle Eastern guys. | ||
| They're taking flying lessons. | ||
| I think we ought to watch them. | ||
| His superior didn't want to rock the boat. | ||
| So you could have the best surveillance in the world, but if you've got a plain old human bureaucracy, you're not going to be able to prevent disaster. | ||
| And I don't think that we've seen an improvement. | ||
| I don't think that this Homeland Security Department is necessarily going to improve the way human beings interact with each other. | ||
| They're going to have a lot of surveillance capabilities. | ||
| The fear, of course, is that they're not going to use them to stop terrorists, but to stop people whose politics don't agree with the politics of whoever happens to be in power. | ||
| Now, what, for example, would you imagine things would have been like if, let's say, Richard Nixon had had at his disposal the kind of system that's being lashed together right now? | ||
| Well, see, that's the problem, is once you lash one of these systems together, it's in place. | ||
| We don't know whether we're going to trust the government five years from now, ten years from now, or twenty years from now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What I think, we have the technical means for individuals to protect their privacy. | ||
| I think as these devices are designed, we can ask by law that there be a switch on them that gives you a privacy switch. | ||
| The law, the law enforcement authorities, they don't have a means to bypass that always. | ||
| But do we need to tell all the people who want to scam us, all the people who want to send us spam, where we are, who we are, and what we're buying? | ||
| I mean, you know, even on a simpler level, we may be at the end of the era where parents don't know where their kids are at all times, and people don't know where their spouse is at all times. | ||
| And that's going to make them for some significant social change. | ||
| It certainly will. | ||
| I mean, to have like a little personal transponder with you, and that's sort of what it is, and so anybody knows where anybody is at any given time. | ||
| You know, when we have the other element in the book is that I put together the mobile devices, powerful computers connected by wireless technologies, refutation systems. | ||
| There's another element, and that's that we're beginning to see chips with little radio circuits on it embedded in products and places. | ||
| So that these, you know, you see barcodes on everything already. | ||
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| They are being replaced. | ||
| In fact, the Gillette manufacturing company announced today that they are buying 500 million, half a billion of these little chips. | ||
| They're called radio frequency ID tags to install on objects. | ||
| they're smarter than barcodes because they can sense the environment they can sense the environment they're implanting people now or is it with VeraChip or some company like that they're implanting people now with discounts to the first 50,000 people who get implants yes that's right so the generic name for this kind of environment is pervasive computing the the objects around us the places we go are going to have information embedded | ||
| and they're going to send information about the environment. | ||
| Again, I think as well as dangers, there are opportunities here. | ||
| You could take your telephone and say, I just got to town. | ||
| How do I get to Fifth and Main from where I am now, wherever that is, and get a little map? | ||
| And by the way, what's the crime rate at Fifth and Main? | ||
| What kind of businesses do they have at Fifth and Main? | ||
| Or point your telephone down the street and say, is there a good Chinese restaurant in this direction? | ||
| Or is there one that's recommended by Zagatts? | ||
| Or one that's recommended by my friends? | ||
| Or point it at a book in a bookstore and say, well, what does the New York Times say about this? | ||
| What does that Bell say about this? | ||
| And what does my bookstore in Iowa have to say about this? | ||
| Those are all possible today. | ||
| In fact, I had a remarkable experience about two weeks ago. | ||
| A friend of mine had taken a, you can buy a barcode reader, | ||
| about $150 and he connected it to a handheld PC that had a wireless connection on it internet connection on it and wrote a little code that connects the information you get from the barcode there's something called the universal product code database right tells you who manufactured it and what it weighs and what its ingredients are to Google the search engine tickling the tummy of the beast huh Howard? | ||
| Well, it was pretty interesting. | ||
| He said, well, go try it out. | ||
| I went into his kitchen. | ||
| I scanned a box of prunes. | ||
| Oh, hold the prune story, Howard. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Bottom of the hour. | ||
| Mart Bell. | ||
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Damn! | |
| What is it going for? | ||
| Absolutely nothing. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it going for? | ||
| Absolutely nothing. | ||
| Maybe that's what's coming next, you know? | ||
| Computer wars. | ||
| We'll substitute to human flesh and blood. | ||
| We'll have our wars with computers instead. | ||
| We'd be good at that. | ||
|
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This is Premier Networks. | |
| That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Music by Ben Thede | ||
| Music by Ben Thede Turn his life off here. | ||
| With the win. | ||
| is Yeah, I'm so fired on the bed. | ||
| I'm like friends into a present How am I stepping into the twilight zone? | ||
| The head is in that house If I keep going My feet are bent over And the moon has dark Where am I going now that I'm born? | ||
| You are You are gone and grown From the bullet and the bone You look how you know Bring your network presents. | ||
| Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| Where are you going to go when you've gone too far? | ||
| Maybe we've already gone too far with what we're doing. | ||
|
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Anybody out there think about that? | |
| We're so dependent on the wires and now the very air around us and the information that flows. | ||
| Do we tap into it and be part of it? | ||
| Or sign off on the Fourth Amendment and say, no, I'll take it. | ||
| Give me that latest PBA. | ||
|
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PBA. | |
| listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| The Art Bell Tomorrow night, Gordon Michael Scallion, the subject possession. | ||
| Oh, that's a different one for Gordon Michael Scallion. | ||
| We're going to be talking about possession with GMS tomorrow night. | ||
| And then Friday night, the man, the archaeologist who went and dug the ground at Roswell. | ||
| Don't forget to watch that. | ||
| The sci-fi channel is going to have that program on Friday night. | ||
| Check your directory and all that, your TV guide, whatever. | ||
| They dug at Roswell, and they came up with a whole bunch of stuff is what the rumor is. | ||
| And Friday night, if all goes well, I'll have the archaeologist who did that dig here. | ||
| At the moment, Howard Rheingold is my guest. | ||
| We're talking about smart mobs, computers, the internet, the whole world we live in today. | ||
| And we're in the middle of a story about barcodes and prunes. | ||
| Yeah, my friend had this pocket PC, little cheap barcode scanner, a little code that connected the information that you get when you scan something to Google, the search engine. | ||
| So I literally scanned the first object I found in this kitchen. | ||
| It was a box of prunes. | ||
| The name of the vendor came back. | ||
| It's called the Sun Diamond Growers Cooperative. | ||
| Never heard of them. | ||
| I Googled that name. | ||
| Anyone can do it. | ||
| The first two hits I got, the first one was U.S. versus Sundiamond. | ||
| It was a Supreme Court decision written by Anthony Scalia that had to do with their lobbying attempts with legislators. | ||
| What that was about, I don't know, but the second link was by a political advocacy group called Corp Watch that I won't forget the headline. | ||
| It was so surprising. | ||
| It says, bromide barons subvert democracy. | ||
| Well, it turns out that the vendors of this make about $700 million a year, and they are the leading lobbyists against controls on the substance methyl bromide on the local, national, and international level. | ||
| Whatever that means, it's not something you're likely to find on the label of a box of moons. | ||
| Good Lord. | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, the day is coming. | ||
| Maybe it's here now. | ||
| You were mentioning earlier reputations are going to be up there. | ||
| Well, it's really almost there now. | ||
| I mean, I can type in Howard Rheingold, or I can type in my own name, Marvell, and I guarantee you, every little tiny aspect of your life since this stuff has been recorded, it's all in there. | ||
| You go to Google, enter my name, you'll get thousands of returns. | ||
| Howard, you can read about all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's all out there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The question is, which of that information can you trust? | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big problem. | ||
| Now, what's interesting about Google is unlike Yahoo, who first started kind of cataloging the web, when Yahoo started, they actually had groups of people sitting in rooms, going to websites, and deciding which ones were the most important. | ||
| Computers do all that now. | ||
| Well, now, it's not just the computers, it's the collective action of millions of people. | ||
| The first site that Google shows you when you ask for links about a search term is the one that has the most links to it. | ||
| And they weight it so that the links that come to it, they weight more heavily the ones that have the most links that come to them. | ||
| So we've got a kind of implicit reputation system. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Remember I talked a while ago about how you might be able to ask for people who are worth trusting to ride with you in a car. | ||
| Well, you could have an implicit reputation system where you could go see, well, which people have had people who have requested rides repeatedly, and which people only ride with them once. | ||
| And there is information we can glean not by asking what people say, but by looking at what they do, that can give us a more trustworthy picture than what people necessarily write. | ||
| So I think we're really at the beginning of only beginning to understand how these reputation systems work. | ||
| The stock market exists. | ||
| Money exists because a certain kind of reputation system, a certain kind of trust system was established at some point. | ||
| It hadn't always existed. | ||
| You really had to weigh your own gold coins at one point in order to trust that the currency you were using was worth what it said it was. | ||
| I think in the future, these devices that we carry with us might well give us important signals about who we can trust, who we might be able to team up with for five minutes or a lifetime, whether they are next to us or on the other side of the earth. | ||
| You know, that's where nation states came from. | ||
| We may see new forms of organization emerge. | ||
| I'm really trying to look at where we may be going in the future because I think we're moving there very quickly. | ||
| Well, one of the things that looms directly in front of us right now is war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right in front of us. | ||
| And we had another war with Iraq, of course, Desert Storm. | ||
| And during Desert Storm, we really did an interesting thing with computers. | ||
| As I understand it, we introduced virus into the Iraqi anti-air defense system that screwed it up completely. | ||
| So they were just firing blanks, basically. | ||
| Well, not really, but they were firing without computer-assisted direction at our planes because we screwed up their whole computer system. | ||
| And that was some time ago. | ||
| We've come a long way since then. | ||
| Oh, yes, and it's not only we, and it's not only other states, but 14-year-old kids in Bulgaria have come up with viruses. | ||
| There's this Klez worm virus. | ||
| I don't know about you, but I get it three or four times a day. | ||
| Howard, I get it 100 times more. | ||
| I might get, let's see, for every 10 emails I download, I get at least one Kles virus. | ||
| I get various other viruses that I'm not adept at identifying, except that I can see them instantly. | ||
| I don't need some virus program. | ||
| You know, I'm so adept at seeing them, so, you know, they're bats, they're PIFs, they're executables, they're a million different forms. | ||
| They're so easily recognizable, but they're everywhere. | ||
| And a million people must be getting them. | ||
| We have not yet seen the first viruses that travel through mobile devices. | ||
| What's going to happen when we become dependent on these devices that we carry? | ||
| They're powerful computers, they're highly connected to the web, and suddenly we're going to be getting weird viruses, weird worms on them. | ||
| You know, the most powerful worms may be the ones we don't know about. | ||
| What if, let's say, a government agency sent a worm out that went to everyone's hard disk, looked for certain combinations of words, sent those documents back, and then erased itself? | ||
| They wouldn't do that, would they? | ||
| Well, how would we know, is the interesting question, isn't it? | ||
| I'm being facetious, Howard. | ||
| Of course they'd do it. | ||
| We live in a world in which, you know, we may be moving into a world in which nothing really quite works the way it's supposed to, and nobody actually knows why. | ||
| Some of it may be done on purpose, and some of it may just be an emergent property of all of this complexity interacting with itself. | ||
| You know, the spies may be discovering things that they didn't mean to discover, and people who don't mean to spy may be downloading information they're not meant to download. | ||
| When we've got chips in everything, and all those chips are communicating with each other, and we've got these teenagers who spend all day creating viruses, we have this kind of rich environment. | ||
| It's almost like biological evolution. | ||
| So here's a good question, Howard. | ||
| About two or three weeks ago, there was a news story, national news story, which was underplayed, really. | ||
| But what happened was there was a denial of service attack on the main hub routers for the entire Internet. | ||
| The entire Internet. | ||
| They came, it's my understanding, they came within a server or two or so of the entire Internet collapsing because of this DOS attack. | ||
| Do you heard about that? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| And I think that the Internet is more vulnerable than people think it is. | ||
| Recently, there's been these discoveries about the nature of networks like the Internet. | ||
| The Internet and other systems, the immune system, the ecosystem, the English language, they have certain characteristics, you know, the six degrees, the small world networks. | ||
| Yeah, but if we get a nation that is quickly, and we are, becoming absolutely, totally dependent on this, I mean, I heard the Prime Minister of Great Britain, it was years ago, who said, overnight, while you sleep, billions of dollars travel electronically. | ||
| They're bouncing off satellites. | ||
| It's moving around at the speed of light, billions of dollars across the world. | ||
| And one of these days, they're going to get us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, we've already seen a destabilization of the world economic system simply because so much money moves in and out of countries overnight, electronically. | ||
| Nobody really understands what's become of the world economic system. | ||
| What happens when we are able to extend our lives and alleviate suffering and cure diseases by having our biomedical condition monitored, connected to medical resources that can adjust our heart rate or our metabolism? | ||
| I think most people, given the opportunity, would take those technical measures to extend their lives. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| What's going to happen when that system is threatened, becomes vulnerable, whether it's hackers bring it down or worms bring it down or simply the complexity of the system gives rise to some emergent phenomenon that no one predicted. | ||
| All right, so in other words, you think that at the end of it all, somebody rather than die will say, hey, put that Pentium-19 in my chest. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Well, you know, pacemakers already do that. | ||
| Well, what if we get artificial livers or kidneys? | ||
| People will accept these things. | ||
| And I think that we are increasingly vulnerable. | ||
| Our energy systems, our medical systems, moving just the amount of sewage out of a gigantic city like Sao Paulo or Tokyo or New York, those depend on technical systems. | ||
| They break down. | ||
| Civilization is going to break down. | ||
| Well, if you have listened carefully to what Al-Qaeda threatens, they understand how the economic structure of this country, of the world right now, is. | ||
| And I think they actually have a pretty good fundamental understanding of what it would take to bring it down, and they may not be wrong. | ||
| Yes, I think that we're moving into a world in which we're increasingly vulnerable. | ||
| We're moving into a world in which things are simply not going to work and nobody's going to know how to fix them. | ||
| You don't even need to deliberately break it. | ||
| We've already gotten there with automobiles. | ||
| It used to be your automobile broke down, the teenager down the street with a wrench could fix it. | ||
| Now you've got to have an expensive machine that knows how to read microchips in order to repair an automobile. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That big diagnostic computer, actually. | ||
| You know, it used to be a village could pretty much supply itself with what it needed. | ||
| It's not true anymore, is it? | ||
| No, you're connected. | ||
| You need to have a billion-dollar chip manufacturing plant somewhere in the world connected to you in order to keep going, in order to get that electricity from the nuclear power plant. | ||
| Well, I see that normally you are probably a pretty optimistic guy. | ||
| I've been listening to you very carefully during this interview, trying to leap every opportunity at the optimistic side of things. | ||
| But it sounds like I may have turned you a little bit here. | ||
| There are some problems inherent in all of this. | ||
| Very large problems in the direction we're moving right now. | ||
| Great benefits, great dangers, right? | ||
| Yes, I think if you want to be optimistic, you really have to look at the long run and the evolutionary process. | ||
| I think the printing press is a good example when literate populations emerged, instead of just a tiny elite, as it had been for thousands of years. | ||
| We got science. | ||
| Science is a collective enterprise that doesn't depend on a few geniuses. | ||
| It depends on a lot of people doing experiments and reporting the results. | ||
| Democracy emerged. | ||
| For the most part, I think most people would say, 500 years since the printing press, we're better off. | ||
| It didn't make war go away. | ||
| It made war more terrible for more people. | ||
| Poverty and injustice did not go away. | ||
| But I think over the long run, our societies have given more people more freedom, more health, more choices, more education than people ever had before. | ||
| We've suffered enormous losses, terrible wars, terrible plagues. | ||
| So I think if we are able to survive this coming turbulent period, we will reach a phase where it will be possible for everyone on Earth to get enough to eat, to get sufficient health care. | ||
| What we have to do is to pass through a very dangerous period in which the power to destroy this rather fragile, complex civilization is vested not in a few nations, but in many groups. | ||
| Are we going to survive that? | ||
| I don't know, because I'll tell you, it was the day before yesterday. | ||
| I'm dependent on high-speed, and I have extremely high-speed internet here. | ||
| High-speed access. | ||
| I control things, Howard, over the Internet, electronic things that are elsewhere miles away. | ||
| I do things, all kinds of things over the Internet. | ||
| And the other day, the net went down, and I just went, oh my God, the net's down. | ||
| It can't be. | ||
| I have lost control. | ||
| And I had. | ||
| I had no control over the things. | ||
| That's how far into it I am. | ||
| That's why I began this whole thing with sort of saying, hey, don't shy away from Technoweenie so much. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| I am that. | ||
| Maybe it's not you, but it's me, for sure. | ||
| and uh... | ||
| so i'm dependent on that if it were suddenly go away We're back to where humans were for hundreds of thousands of years. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Shivering in the dark and trying to catch a rabbit to live. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Increasingly, the devices we carry, they're not just telephones, they are remote controls for the real world. | ||
| See, nobody knows how to catch a rabbit anymore, huh? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Yeah, well, the few who learn it will be the ones who survive if all the machines go away. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But I don't think that all the machines will go away. | ||
| I think that increasingly we're going to see technologies that have a kind of redundancy in them so that as they break down, they will self-repair. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty remarkable that 747s fly. | ||
| And unless somebody deliberately does it, they crash very, very rarely. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| These devices have millions of parts in them. | ||
| And each of these parts is vulnerable to failure. | ||
| What they've done is they've simply studied what the mean time to failure is for every part in a 747. | ||
| And they replace it before that mean time. | ||
| So you've got a system that's very vulnerable, but there is a way of dealing with that danger and with that vulnerability, and it works remarkably well. | ||
| You are in much more danger getting in your automobile and driving to the airport than you are in getting in a 747. | ||
| As a matter of interest, Howard, if they know that, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then they know when my PV is going to fail. | ||
| They know when my toaster is going to fail. | ||
| They even know when my car is going to fail, right? | ||
| And they also know how long they have to make that warranty. | ||
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Yes. | |
| So that there's a high likelihood. | ||
| How many out there have had the experience of having something fail? | ||
| And you go and you find the warranty and oh my God, it expired yesterday. | ||
| Well, that was no accident. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, an interesting thing about the fact that what we're carrying are control devices is that these 15-year-olds I was talking about, the ones who are very comfortable carrying these telephones around and sending text messages all over the world, 10 years from now, we know two things. | ||
| We know that the 15-year-olds are going to be 25. | ||
| They're going to be citizens. | ||
| They're going to be consumers. | ||
| They're going to be entering The workforce, they're going to be voters, and those devices that they carry are going to be thousands of times more powerful. | ||
| Now, a lot has been written about the baby boom generation and about how that solidarity worldwide of that age cohort was really shaped by the fact that baby boomers grew up with the medium of television. | ||
| And that television medium gave them a shared sense, a shared zeitgeist that gave them a connection with each other. | ||
| But the television medium is really a broadcast medium in which the viewer doesn't really have any control over us, over what is broadcast to them. | ||
| All right, speaking of control, I've got to take a break here, Howard, all right? | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, stand by. | ||
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Get a shiver in the dark. | |
| It's raining in the park at meantime. | ||
| We have that control here at specific times. | ||
|
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We have to deal with the whole everything. | |
| It's called radio. | ||
| And Howard Reingold will be right back. | ||
| We're going to go to the phone. | ||
| So if you have questions about this world we live in, technologically speaking, here we are. | ||
|
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You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| My life has been fine, but you don't eat too many things. | ||
| Coming in out of the rain, they hear the jazz pull down. | ||
| Up to sleep. | ||
| Where were you? | ||
| Hopefully can you? | ||
| We may forget your personal practice updates. | ||
| Just click on the video my phone and we can't wait. | ||
| Navigation. | ||
| Aug ammo! | ||
| Turing it out dog body! | ||
| all of you I cry all of you I cry baby please don't go when | ||
| I read the letter you wrote me you made me mad like mine when I read the words that you told me you made me cry cry cry I still love you though I can't let you go I love you oh baby I love you oh oh oh oh | ||
| oh every breath I take oh oh oh oh oh every move I make Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| I've got a lot of friends who said when computers came out and there shortly thereafter they'd never ever have one of those damn things in their house, not a chance. | ||
| Not in a million years, not in their lifetime. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what? | |
| They've all got them now. | ||
| Every single last one of them. | ||
|
unidentified
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computer guru at least computer users and about half of them computer gurus so Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night. | |
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| You are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002. | ||
| Music Once again, here comes Howard Reingold, and this hour we're going to open up the phones with Mr. Reingold. | ||
| We have covered all kinds of areas of technology. | ||
| Somebody just, Rick just asked last name, hey, Google search for Art Bell 1.8 million hits. | ||
| Results. | ||
| Took exactly 0.5 seconds to tell you there's 1.8 million things to read about me. | ||
| So, Howard, here we are. | ||
| I'm going to let people call in and ask some questions this hour. | ||
| What's a wearable community, Howard? | ||
| Well, wearable computers are something that has existed only in laboratories until recently. | ||
| But as the price of the devices drives down, we're moving from technology to fashion. | ||
| We're going to be able to weave screens into shirts. | ||
| We're going to be able to put tiny chips more powerful than today's desktop computers. | ||
| Not in the pocket, they'll be the pocket. | ||
| And these devices will be able to communicate with each other. | ||
| So wearable community are people who wear devices that will connect them not only with computing power, but with others. | ||
| So not only could you query Google, but you could ask others whether they've got information, whether they've got something for you, what's on their playlist, what do they think is an interesting book or interesting music to read. | ||
| And you don't even need to make a social query, your device will talk to their device. | ||
| So you pass by somebody in the hallway, your device will look to their device and it will see, oh, this person likes a lot of the same kind of music you like. | ||
| What other music do they like? | ||
| What other books do they like that you might be interested in? | ||
| At the end of the day, you get home, you download your playlist, and you'll find, oh, gee, here are three songs and two books that I would probably be interested in. | ||
| So that's kind of the idea of the wearable community. | ||
| And there are actually some experiments in which people walk around wearing computers all day long, communicating with each other, doing this kind of comparison. | ||
| So there comes the world we're going to be in. | ||
| Now, do you think in the end people, you heard a little story I told, I'm sure, about all my friends. | ||
| I wouldn't have one of those damn things. | ||
| Boy, I'll die before I have one of them. | ||
| They're all got them now. | ||
| So, I mean, are people really going to have choices about whether or not they want to participate in this brave new world you've been describing? | ||
| You know, some people are opting out. | ||
| They don't carry the mobile phone. | ||
| They don't have a PC. | ||
| However, to have their garbage taken away, to turn their tap on and have water come in, to flush their toilet anyway, right? | ||
| They're dependent on a technological infrastructure that ties all of these services together. | ||
| All right, let's go to the phones. | ||
| This should be interesting. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Howard Reingold. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Art? | |
| Oh, you're on a cell phone, aren't you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I sure am. | |
| Oh, we need to have a talk about the step backwards represented by cell phones in general. | ||
| But however, sir, welcome to the program. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm in Illinois right now, just about 120 miles out of Chicago. | |
| Yes, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a truck driver. | |
| You guys were talking earlier about, you know, Big Brother, more or less, keeping an eye on everybody. | ||
| And I'm just curious as to whether or not you guys knew about how closely Big Brother's watching the truck drivers. | ||
| Oh, I hear you guys are right at the head of the parade. | ||
| They know exactly where you are, what you're eating, what you're doing. | ||
| They know everything you're doing, don't they? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, sir. | |
| Thanks to Qualcomm. | ||
| Qualcomm, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, from the moment that system's installed in the truck, they know everything the truck does. | |
| How does that feel? | ||
| When you're out there on the road now, there used to be the feeling of, oh my God, freedom. | ||
| You know, I get to drive from the east to the west coast, maybe or wherever, and in between, I'm free as a bird. | ||
| I'm a trucker. | ||
| It's not true anymore exactly, is it? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, it's not. | |
| And it didn't really bother me until I found out just how closely they monitored me. | ||
| I was unaware of the fact that, you know, every minute the truck is hooked up to the thing, they can pull it up and, you know, you left Chicago at 9.15 this morning. | ||
| 9.16, you stopped at the rest area, and you were there for seven minutes. | ||
| I mean, they actually told me that. | ||
| I was like, oh. | ||
| This man is right, Howard. | ||
| They know the rest areas that he visits. | ||
| They will know what he buys. | ||
| They will know whether he's doing good shopping for fuel, whether he's stopping at approved places or unapproved places. | ||
| You know, I mean, they're tracking this man's life. | ||
| You know, and you don't need to have a highway patrol car with a radar gun to detect whether you're speeding anymore. | ||
| With these GPS chips that locate you, all they need to do is do a simple computation of, well, you were at one place two hours ago, and you're 100 miles away an hour later. | ||
| You're a little bit too fast. | ||
| We're automatically going to find you and deduct the money from your accounts. | ||
| You call her, do you think they know how fast you're going? | ||
| They absolutely do. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're doing it now. | |
| And then there are all the cameras at the traffic lights. | ||
| You go through a red light. | ||
| The camera takes a picture of your license plate, automatically recognizes the pattern of the numbers, looks it up in the database, and sends you a ticket. | ||
| You know, they're doing that with faces now, of course. | ||
| The average American, when they walk... | ||
| I went to the Super Bowl last year. | ||
| We'll talk about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Second, Howard. | ||
| We'll talk about that in a second. | ||
| Anyway, listen, caller, thank you. | ||
| The average American people have no idea how closely you guys are tracked now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Don't have a clue. | |
| They don't have a clue. | ||
| But is it bothering you? | ||
|
unidentified
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It does now that I know how closely I'm being monitored. | |
| I appreciate the call. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| See, so that man now understands. | ||
| A lot of truckers perhaps even don't, although I think most of them do these days, how closely they're tracked. | ||
| But they know every little thing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it a better world, Howard? | ||
| Well, you know, people voluntarily trade our privacy for not only security, but convenience. | ||
| How many people? | ||
| Well, how about a paycheck? | ||
| Yes, or simply make it easier to shop. | ||
| I mean, what do you think if that trucker goes in and says, look, this crap's going to stop. | ||
| I'm not going to be monitored like this. | ||
| You can take the transponder out of my truck. | ||
| You can do this. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| I'm out there on the highway and I want to be free. | ||
| How long do you think he's going to have his job? | ||
| Yeah, it's increasingly difficult for us to opt out of being surveilled all the time. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| The average American who lives in a major city is captured by about 200 video cameras a day. | ||
| Yeah, I went to the Super Bowl down in Tampa, in Tampa. | ||
| And when I got out, it was like the next day or the next week, I can't remember now. | ||
| Big news story. | ||
| Everybody went to the Super Bowl, had their face examined by a video camera, which sent the image to a computer, which looked for bad people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Or maybe people who were being sought for minor little felonies. | ||
| Or maybe people, you know, and they didn't exactly snap anybody up, but they were testing the system. | ||
| Okay, here is a smart mob forecast. | ||
| You've got millions of people who wear these computers. | ||
| These wearable computers, they're going to have cameras on them. | ||
| You could have not only governments, but private enterprises who would be able to contract with people to take a look at what they're seeing as they walk through the city. | ||
| You might be able to reconstruct a conversation between two people, neither of which recorded the conversation, simply by the people who walk by. | ||
| Well, I mean, what happens to the boss who's going to have an affair, you know, at 5.30 with his secretary in the back office? | ||
| Well, you know, maybe they can do it in the back office, but they better not go out to a motel because the location of where their devices are is going to be tracked. | ||
| Of course, we're seeing it was revealed that in England a remarkable percentage of people had two telephones, one for their spouse and the other one for their lover, so that they don't call the wrong person at the wrong time. | ||
| People will always find a way to work around these things. | ||
| You may not know where the person is. | ||
| You'll know where they put their device. | ||
| Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Howard Wrangels. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Hi, this is Larry in Fort Lauderdale. | ||
| Yes, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
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I find that the collection plan that the government has is so vast that I don't think that any individual American initially is their privacy is at risk. | |
| But where I see the danger is the long-term collection of this information where if somebody makes even a one-time trip to a radical website or somebody borrows their phone or their computer and goes there and it's not really them even though it's registered in their name. | ||
| Or someone makes a call to a radio show like this and it's cataloged with a voice graft at the Defense Intelligence Agency. | ||
| And down the road, somehow their name comes up and they pull all of this old data and it's not like old paper that decays, yellows, and gets thrown out and burned. | ||
| These ones and zeros stay there forever. | ||
| And that is what I think is the dangerous mark, is that even a one-time lapse or a one-time curiosity by a college student, forever. | ||
| You know, ten years later, he's up for a promotion and somebody says, well, why did you visit that website? | ||
| That's not really in the mainstream of thinking today. | ||
| Do you believe that I actually have a little button here? | ||
| And should I push it right now? | ||
| No. | ||
| cry wouldn't believe this but if i were to push that i could cause your heart to skip a beat what is it uh... | ||
| like a uh... | ||
| i can't talk anymore about it but i mean No, I'm kidding. | ||
| I really don't have something like that, but I mean, that's the kind of world we're moving toward. | ||
| You don't even have to deliberately make a mistake that could be on your record. | ||
| What if your teenager uses your computer while you're out of the room? | ||
| Yeah, that's the point this caller is making. | ||
| I mean, one little trip to one little subversive website, and boy, you could have the suits at your door. | ||
| Or what if you didn't even make a trip to a subversive website? | ||
| What if some spammer sends you some child pornography that you didn't ask for? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You erase it from your hard disk, but the record that it was there remains there. | ||
| And identity theft is a major, majority. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think that is where the controls have to come in, is that stuff is, in fact, deleted. | |
| But then you'll always wonder, is it really, really deleted? | ||
| Or is it going in that mountain out in Nevada along with the other stuff? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No, he's dead on. | ||
| Is it really deleted or was a record made somewhere? | ||
| Well, we just entered the age where probably a record is made somewhere, isn't it, Howard? | ||
| No, it's not just your desktop computer. | ||
| The whole point of wearable communities and smart mobs is that we're carrying this stuff with us in our automobiles as we're walking down the street. | ||
| It's, you know, not just which websites we visit, but where we go, where we drive, where we walk. | ||
| Do you know, I believe it may be Great Britain, but it's some country over there in Europe that two or three days ago said they're going to debate and perhaps put implant chips in child molesters, in people convicted of pedophilia, so that they know exactly where they are every minute of the day. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| You hear about that? | ||
| Yes, yes, that's correct. | ||
| You know, you might not even need to implant a chip. | ||
| These chips are going to get so small that you could simply brush up against somebody and put it in their clothing, and they would not know it at all. | ||
| The technology is literally disappearing. | ||
| It used to be that you had to have a room full of machines. | ||
| Now you can put it on your desktop. | ||
| Soon you can carry it in your pocket. | ||
| In not too many years, if you drop it on the rug, you won't be able to find it. | ||
| Well, that's something, I suppose. | ||
| Invasive computing. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Harold Rheingold. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, Art. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Bob from Kansas City. | |
| Yes, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got to ask, this is an excellent program. | |
| I've got to ask Howard this question. | ||
| Howard, that truck driver, that culp, what happens when our computer replaces him and we don't need a truck driver no more? | ||
| Well, I think we have seen that happen throughout history. | ||
| Our machines replace humans in different tasks. | ||
| Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves, what can humans do uniquely that our machines can do? | ||
| I mean, this guy has a good point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Who's going to be the work-ready force? | |
| Yeah, I've got a good question, Howard. | ||
| Let me frame it this way. | ||
| I've got a really good friend right now that works for a network. | ||
| Well, his network's being absorbed by another network, and this other network is going to begin to use computers, and in doing so, they're going to replace six out of ten people. | ||
| Ten people were doing the job. | ||
| Now computers are going to do it, and there's only going to be four people. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Those four people are going to be mostly sitting watching computers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are we going to have any jobs? | |
| It's a hell of a question. | ||
| Are we going to have any jobs? | ||
| What's going to happen with our economy? | ||
|
unidentified
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Where are all these people going to go? | |
| You know, throughout history, I mean, we used to have people digging ditches that are now dug by machines. | ||
| And I think most people would say it's probably humans can do better things than dig ditches. | ||
| It may be that we will look on some of the jobs that we do today from driving trucks to selling things at supermarkets as things that humans don't really need to do. | ||
| The question is, what should humans do if we're not driving trucks, we're not selling things in supermarkets? | ||
| That's the difficult question. | ||
| But see, now even technological jobs, Howard, aren't themselves falling victim to greater technology, as in the case of what I just described to you. | ||
| And so people are losing jobs. | ||
| And this caller was saying, you know, I mean, what the hell? | ||
| Where are all these people going to work? | ||
| Well, there was a recent strike of the longshoremen on the West Coast. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That was all about whether the jobs that are going to be lost when they have new technology, whether those are going to be replaced by union jobs or non-union jobs. | ||
| So I think probably the biggest labor issue we face is what do we do with people who've been working all their lives and they're going to be replaced by machines. | ||
| And the answer to that is? | ||
| Well, ultimately I think that we're going to have to have some system for educating people because jobs are going to go away faster and faster. | ||
| And if people can't learn a new kind of job, it's no longer you sign up to be a long term when you're 16 and you're doing it when you're 65. | ||
| Jobs go away. | ||
| Entire industries disappear in a decade. | ||
| We simply have to be able to educate people and people need to be able to learn to do things that they didn't start out to do before. | ||
| That's the only thing that I can see. | ||
| So do you think that the government should be a big part of this re-education process? | ||
| inevitable I mean otherwise otherwise I think private enterprise has a huge stake in educating the workforce because But, Howard, private enterprise, for the most part, doesn't look past the next quarter in America. | ||
| They don't look past the next quarter. | ||
| In fact, people's jobs are coming and going about the next quarter. | ||
| That's the big problem. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a really big problem. | ||
| I mean, you remember Henry Ford made his automobiles inexpensive enough that the people who made the automobiles could afford them. | ||
| We're going to see an age in which these highly technical enterprises, they're not going to have a workforce unless they sponsor education to some degree. | ||
| Because I think that the government and the taxpayers are at the limit of what we can do with public education. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hold on, Howard. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you put me down for another. | |
| There'll be a little computer there. | ||
| Because the night has millions of eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | |
| More Somewhere in Time coming up. | ||
| If you are true to me, Oh, remember when you tell those little white lies That the night has a thousand eyes You say that you're at home when you phone me And how much you really care Though you keep telling me that you're lonely | ||
| I'll know if someone is there | ||
| All the times have come We'll put down and down Jesus don't feel the reaper | ||
| No, do the wind, the sun, the rain He can hear I say I'm Come on baby, don't feel the reaper Baby take my hand No, I feel the reaper Will be able to cry No, I feel the reaper Baby I'm your man La, la, la, la, la, la. | ||
| La, la, la, la, la, la. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002. | ||
| Boy, we have a racing across the river of technology tonight. | ||
| Howard Reinhold is my guest, and if you want to know more about all of this, he's written a bunch of books, the virtual community, let's see, virtual reality tools for thought, and now smart mods, and all of it, of course, at artbell.com. | ||
| If you go to rbell.com, you'll be able to follow the path to more information from his point of view on all of these subjects, artbell.com, and then tonight's guest material. | ||
| Just look down there and there it will be. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Once again, technologically, we blast forth through satellites and radio stations and transmitters and right to you with Howard Rheingold. | ||
| Howard, welcome back. | ||
| I'm glad to be here. | ||
| I want to keep raging through these telephone calls, if we can, but there is one thing that I want to ask you about. | ||
| Normally, Howard, now I'm speaking as a radio talk show host who sits here and lives and dies by telephones and telephone connections and all the rest of it. | ||
| And normally, when you get a technological advance, it's a better thing. | ||
| As a general rule, that would be true, wouldn't it? | ||
| Well, it's a better thing for some people and not a better thing for others. | ||
| And it makes things possible for good people and it makes things possible for bad people. | ||
| Yeah, but before you really launch any further, what I'm talking about here is cell phones. | ||
| Now, that's right down your alley. | ||
| I mean, it's wireless city, but I've got to be honest with you, Howard, from my point of view, when I get somebody calling on a cell phone, Howard, it sucks. | ||
| It really sucks. | ||
| I mean, half the time they call, and, you know, it's like I know a cell phone call is coming because you pick up the phone, and the first thing you hear is, and they're gone. | ||
| And you wonder, I wonder who that was calling me on a cell phone. | ||
| And then when they finally do get through, Howard, you've got to listen to this, and despite commercials that say, can you hear me now? | ||
| Can you hear me now? | ||
| Can you hear me now? | ||
| Fact of the matter is, half-time, you can't hear them because it's such a lousy connection and when I get them here on the air they sound like well the cell phones that is not people sound like crap howard just sound awful and to me in some ways the cell phone may be a step forward but it's also a big step in reverse they sound lousy yeah they do I think cell phone technology is pretty primitive well you notice that I say mobile devices and mobile phones because I think cellular | ||
| technology in which you've got these cell towers every few miles that take your signal from your device. | ||
| This is a transitional technology. | ||
| I think we're going to see, we are already seeing new wireless technologies emerge that are going to make it not only possible to have clearer and less expensive phone calls, transmit data at higher speeds, but it may be possible to do away with the network and entirely, in which the devices will simply route messages from one to another without going to some kind of central switch. | ||
| This, of course, scares the telephone operators tremendously. | ||
| I'm sure it does. | ||
| We're seeing a conflict between the new radio technologies and the old ways of regulating spectrum. | ||
| The FCC is really facing a war between new technologies and old business models. | ||
| And if you watch some of the news about the FCC and the radio spectrum... | ||
| I do, Howard. | ||
| I watch that very closely. | ||
| You'll see that there's the vested interest in the cellular technologies and the technologies in which a company buys a portion of the spectrum, as does your radio broadcasting company. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| Yes. | ||
| That is being challenged by radios that are not as stupid as the old radios. | ||
| It's all based on the fact that the FCC was set up in the wake of the Titanic disaster when there were problems with interference to manage the airwaves on behalf of its owners, us, the citizens. | ||
| But now you see the FCC has become a bunch of auctioneers. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| And they're auctioning off Spectrum, which is going to be the new gold. | ||
| Right, Howard? | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Well, over $150 billion has been taken in by governments around the world in the last few years for what they call the 3G networks. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Third generation networks, these are the big telephone operators building these infrastructures to bring us wideband internet. | ||
| Wideband wireless internet is what we're talking about here, folks. | ||
| That's 3G is what's coming. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It turns out, though, that while they're doing this, they're investing all this money, they're servicing all this debt, the stock prices of these telecommunication companies have dropped. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It's unclear whether they're going to be able to afford to complete these networks, and at the same time, new technologies are emerging that allow the networks to grow from the ground up, from the users rather than the operators. | ||
| This is what they call Wi-Fi, or the little card that you put in your laptop that lets you get some wireless communications within a couple hundred yards. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A million and a half of these Wi-Fi cards are sold every month, and it's just starting. | ||
| We've got this grassroots communication network that's bringing up sort of the way the internet did, that's challenging these spectrum auctions. | ||
| The FCC, they're faced with these companies that have invested billions of dollars, and the government has taken in this money, versus new technologies that are thousands or maybe even millions of times more efficient. | ||
| So I have a chapter in Smart Mobs called Wireless Quilts that talks about some of the people who are challenging this. | ||
| You know, we have 450 sovereign nations within North America that are not governed by the FCC. | ||
| They're called Indian reservations. | ||
| And on those Indian reservations, it's hard to get telephone lines. | ||
| It's not cost-effective for the phone companies to run on there. | ||
| Some of these folks who are challenging these regulations are setting up new radio technologies on the Indian reservations, and we're going to see conflicts emerge there. | ||
| You know, I haven't heard about that one yet, but it makes sense to me. | ||
| That'll be another good reason for the Indian reservations to get in trouble with the federal government and other governments, right? | ||
| With the federal government. | ||
| I mean, they're going to come after the Indians for their spectrum. | ||
| I just don't know what they can do for the land. | ||
| I should laugh. | ||
| Back to the phones. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Howard Rheingold. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you hear me? | |
| Can you hear me now? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I hear you, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I wanted to ask you, yes. | ||
| Can you pull up all websites on a wireless device? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I've got one that I carry with me when I travel. | ||
| And at a very high speed, you can surf the web. | ||
| If you can get to any website, you can get to all websites. | ||
| There's a difference between using a cellular modem on your old-fashioned cell phone. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| And these new networks. | ||
| Did you know? | ||
| It's high speed. | ||
| Howard, you travel a lot, don't you? | ||
| A fair amount, yes. | ||
| Did you know that if you take a wireless card with you and you go to a lot of airports, you can sit while you're waiting for a plane, you can surf the Internet, because they've got wireless inside the airport just for that? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Well, you did know that. | ||
| You know, in many cities, you can simply look for a place where you can open your laptop and there are open networks that you can use. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People are out there doing that all the time, just sitting in their cars with laptops. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Anything else, caller? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I try to pull up some websites for my cell phone. | |
| I have the Internet of my cell phone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And sometimes it says to use a different URL. | |
| Uh-huh. | ||
| then other times when i do uh get to a website and i try to you know uh sign on or maybe buy something i can't do it uh well that that is because um you need to have a cell phone that supports the the particular kind of software protocols That enables you to send secure information. | ||
| So when you try to buy something, you're using a somewhat different signal than when you are simply surfing to a website. | ||
| It's the secure communication protocol that enables you to buy things and be reasonably sure that somebody is not picking that signal out of the ether and putting your credit card number. | ||
| So in other words, that's not allowed essentially for your own protection. | ||
| Yes, you need to have a secure connection. | ||
| And some cell phones support that. | ||
| And some don't. | ||
| I understand perfectly. | ||
| And so really that is for our own protection, because if you were to go into an airport and, for example, order over some sort of open system, well, that shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| And what you're saying is essentially it's not. | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| In the web itself, if you want to make a secure connection, you use a slightly different protocol than if you're just surfing the web. | ||
| Many cell phones are not enabled to do that particular kind of secure connection. | ||
| Can you answer a really straight-on question for me, absolutely honestly, Howard? | ||
| I'll do one of them. | ||
| Are you totally comfortable with submitting yourself to the information technology? | ||
| And by that, I mean, would you be willing to put yourself in a position, or have you, Howard, where all your banking is done online. | ||
| Every penny that you use, going, coming, whatever, you manage it all over your PC. | ||
| You don't have a banker. | ||
| You don't have a teller. | ||
| You don't get a slip of paper. | ||
| You just do it all on your PC. | ||
| Have you put that much trust into the Internet? | ||
| A lot of people buy some things on the Internet, but they don't put their life financially on the Internet. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| And I'll tell you, there's one word, insurance. | ||
| If your bank guarantees that they will cover any fraudulent transactions through your Internet connection, then it's worth doing. | ||
| And your bank does that for you. | ||
| My bank does that for me. | ||
| And insurance companies, they know exactly how much fraud is going on out there and how much they need to charge for a premium to cover that. | ||
| So as long as the insurance companies are covering, I mean, after all, how many people go into a restaurant every day, they give their credit card to some teenager who takes it into a back room and disappears for 10 minutes? | ||
| I know. | ||
| You know, that's the point I've tried to make to some of my friends who say, I'll never buy anything on the Internet. | ||
| I'll never do it. | ||
| Well, you pointed out, once you've put that credit card in somebody's hand and they go into the back room to check it out, that's probably less secure than going over the Internet, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, it is. | ||
| We're going to have to get used to this, Howard. | ||
| We're going to have to get used to it. | ||
| That's what insurance companies are for. | ||
| They manage risk for us. | ||
| And we pay a premium for it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we definitely do. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on there with Howard Reingold. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good evening, or I should say good morning, gentlemen. | |
| Right, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Kat from near San Francisco. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The statement was made that anybody who is not into the computer scene is essentially dead and meat. | |
| Yeah, I may have said that in one way or the other. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I've got a scenario that's kind of unique. | |
| A, I've got basically $5,000 going out a month because I have to have a family member in managed care. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| B, I've got a back that's even worse than yours are. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| C, I've got teninitis from shoulders to fingertips and both arms that make using a keyboard impossible. | ||
| What the hell are my alternatives? | ||
| Oh, they're plenty. | ||
| You can get voice-operated stuff. | ||
| You can, gee whiz, you can do it with your nose if you have to. | ||
| I mean, you can peck out stuff with your nose. | ||
| You can be on the internet. | ||
| All those things you just described, they're not going to keep you off the internet, are they, Howard? | ||
| No, speech-to-text systems are finally getting to the point where it's actually working, where you can talk to your computer and text will come out that's reasonably close to what you meant it to say. | ||
| And if it's not just what you wanted, you can tell it what you do want. | ||
| It'll fix it. | ||
| You know, we're beginning to see inexpensive devices that illiterates can use to get health care information or information about employment or even learn how to read. | ||
| So I think we're beginning to see a breakthrough. | ||
| Now, this is going to make automobiles even more dangerous because people are going to begin getting their email in automobiles. | ||
| Yeah, they were worried about the cell phone. | ||
| Here comes a cell phone with text. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, you know, it's not, you can have your email read to you and then you can talk back to it and have that email sent off. | ||
| The point is not that you're reading the newspaper, like I see some people doing in traffic, but that you are distracted if you're using a cell phone or you are talking to it, even if it's a hands-off phone. | ||
| So that's one of the dangers, I think, of that technology. | ||
| But, you know, for someone who has tendinitis, who has physical problems, you can get systems today that will do speech-to-text. | ||
| So in a sense, they are one of the main beneficiaries of the information revolution, aren't they? | ||
| The people who are otherwise handicapped. | ||
| They're one of the main beneficiaries. | ||
| Assistive technologies are making the world available to people who were locked in their rooms before or who are locked in their bodies. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| If you can speak and you can use your eyes, you can use the internet now. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Howard Rheingold. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, my name is John, and I'm in Lakewood, Colorado. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art and Howard. | |
| Very interesting show. | ||
| I was wondering if you guys could respond to this question. | ||
| Do you think that the computer might be here for a spiritual purpose? | ||
| And what I mean by this is I believe humans most likely do have a latent in our DNA, the ability to have telepathic and telekinetic abilities. | ||
| However, in order to prepare us to be able to handle this, huge responsibility, I think the computer age may be here as a mechanism for training the human race to be able to handle this. | ||
| I mean you don't hand a four-year-old a loaded 45. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, you know, there may be a spiritual aspect to what's going to end up being, this is getting pretty far out, but believe me, Howard, I've had plenty of guests on this subject. | ||
| The integration of man with machine. | ||
| Specifically, the integration of man with computers and man then with the internet. | ||
| In other words, directly, instead of punching buttons with your finger, an intellectual direct connection between the human brain and a machine, Howard? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, you know, an awful lot of religious people in the world believe in scripture and the written word. | ||
| The written word is a pretty new technology. | ||
| It's only about 5,000 years old. | ||
| So I think we are seeing an evolution of the means by which we are connecting our thoughts and our spirits together. | ||
| The written word is part of it. | ||
| The telephone is part of it. | ||
| The radio is part of it. | ||
| Now the Internet is part of it. | ||
| I think we're seeing an evolution of the human spirit that is mediated by technology. | ||
| The technology is not alive. | ||
| The technology merely connects our minds and our thoughts in new ways. | ||
| It's not alive, yes, Howard. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Reingold. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good evening, gentlemen. | |
| This is very interesting. | ||
| However, I can't see a connection between reason and any of this, but that's not why I called. | ||
| I didn't call because all of your information is under... | ||
| Tell me why you did call. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All of your information is kept in your registry, in your computer, and I have two concerns. | ||
| One is data mining to be narrowcasted so that any television show you watch, any radio station you listen to, whatever you do will be geared completely to you whether you want it to be or not. | ||
| In other words, you're going to get tagged as having certain interests and then commercials will be aimed directly at you. | ||
| Yes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Profiled. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I got you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Howard, how about he's right on? | ||
| That's the holy grail of advertising. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Advertising is a blunt instrument. | ||
| You send out your message to a million people and hope that 10,000 of them are actually your audience. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Advertisers would love to find out the people who buy liquor, who don't buy liquor, the people who need help walking, the people who don't need help walking, the ones who buy expensive cars, the ones who buy cheap cars. | ||
| So the caller is absolutely right. | ||
| If they get that, that's the pot at the end of the rainbow. | ||
| Yeah, data mining our habits so that advertisements can be tailored to us. | ||
| In Smart Mobs, I describe a laboratory that IBM has in the San Francisco Bay Area. | ||
| They have billboards that have cameras on them. | ||
| So when you're at a point-of-sale display in a convenience market, the billboard is watching you. | ||
| It determines whether you're a man or a woman, what your race is, what your age is, and it displays an advertisement that's suited to who it thinks you are. | ||
| Data mining. | ||
| Oh, Howard, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program tonight. | ||
| That is your latest book, right? | ||
| I've got that up on the, I guess you can get it on, if you're smart, up on Amazon, for example, right? | ||
| Yes, and also I've got a website, smartmobs.com, that has new information about this field every day. | ||
| All right. | ||
| My friend, thank you for being here. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| That's Howard Rheingold. | ||
| Extremely interesting. | ||
| All right, tomorrow night, GMS, Gordon Michael Scallion, is going to be here. | ||
| Gordon Michael Scallion, talking about possession. | ||
| Talking about possession. | ||
| That's a new one for GMS, believe me. | ||
| The following night, the archaeologist who did the dig at Roswell should be here if all goes well. | ||
| For tonight, from the high desert, I'm Mark Bell. | ||
| Good night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been drifting on the sea of heartbreak, trying to get myself ashore for so long. | |
| For so long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listening to the strangest stories. |
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