All Episodes
Nov. 20, 2002 - Art Bell
02:54:58
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Howard Rheingold - The Internet
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the cosmos, I'm Art Bell and this program covers the cosmos, Coast to Coast, Coast to Coast AM.
Coming up in a moment, somebody I've 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, ESPN, 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 and 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 sky diver.
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.
tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002.
♪♪♪ Well, I am really honored to have Mark Burnett.
Welcome to the program, Mark.
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.
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.
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, it's 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.
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 Eco Challenge before I produced on television.
In fact, I made a living No, I never actually won, but I did very well.
ship and prize money in those kind of contest yeah i really like anymore adventure sports and extreme
sports but i guess they are extreme i heard you you one
one equal challenge right and then and then i i i think that maybe in another
one you got lost or something at the end now i never actually one by i did very well i did have
uh... a very high finish for a number of years a
french contest similar to the challenge the height american finish
i think uh... helpful at seven years and you know that was very successful but on the other hand
also done miserably and to contest in those car races are the good and the bad
and we learn more from failing them and succeeding
positive griffin I've watched a lot of people on your programs learn a very great deal, because I've seen a lot of pain.
EcoChallenge 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, EcoChallenge really is...
It's 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 But as it breaks down, this team is 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.
That 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-minute 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 Here's a map of the world, and where on earth is this thing?
That's what's not so surprising.
Let's face it, 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 are motivated to go out and get a globe and say, gee, where is that?
Oh, look, it's there.
So, good.
Um, the first Survivor that you did, I think a lot of Americans think, or at least I think, that, you know, the characters like Rudy Bosch, Richard, Susan, uh, boy, some of those amazingly strong characters in that first Survivor just really, I thought, made that show.
So, what's happened since?
In the latest Survivor, It doesn't seem like the characters come across quite 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, 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 Sonny and Cher in 1973.
Enormous, 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 Marquesas, were number one and two, beating Friends and ER 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, you know, You Can 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, Eco Challenge is far more dangerous.
Far more than Survivor.
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 there are psychological dangers.
Psychologically, but we do great testing pre-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.
You know, 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, also they say, you know, like a racehorse will go 100% and run, run, run till it dies.
Human beings will give up after 5% of their effort has 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.
Oh?
Very, very reliable testing.
It takes seven hours.
And what does it test?
It tests personality and truthfulness, sticking to it, Logic and integrity and from following that then when 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 check.
But Mark in some cases for example don't you want Well, I don't know, insincere people, even liars, manipulators, people to really light sparks.
No, because everybody, you know, will do that stuff under the right pressure.
If you cast someone who is that 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, put stress and a million dollars at stake.
All 16 of them will melt down at one point and make great TV.
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.
It's called Lord of the Flies.
You guys joke about it a lot behind the scenes, I suppose?
Yeah, kind of.
We're all students of human psychology and social psychology.
Really, Survivor is almost social Darwinism.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
It certainly is.
Um, I, I was watching Nico Drowned 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, like, I mean, they were just goozy, oozing sores, and, 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 alive out there by thinking of ways to get you, Mark.
That was very funny.
I remember that clearly.
And it's almost like they tried to turn... And the humor did get them through.
They turned it into one of the Truman Shows.
You know, 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'd change the elevation of the mountain just to make it work better.
And they actually were calling me Christoph, which was the name of the character in the Truman Shows 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 a 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.
I, you know, 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 Eco Challenge and the people who, you know, they leave like saying never again, but everybody, the Survivor people, 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 Eco Challenge, there's at least I'd say 30% of teams are repeat teams every year.
Remember, EcoChallenge is far more of a true event than it is a TV show.
The EcoChallenge race would occur with or without TV.
We happened to make a TV show about certain people's experience in the EcoChallenge race.
It's like the Iditarod, for example.
That's a genuine race.
Yes, I've covered that.
And so, you know, most people would do that with or without TV cameras.
It's like climbing Everest.
The Eco Challenge is clearly one of the toughest competitions in the world.
It's on the par of climbing Everest.
And it's worse in some ways, because it's 12 days straight.
Teams of four.
Reliant 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 the Eco Challenge, right?
Yeah, I mean, between a team of four, the Williams team split $50,000 in four of them.
It probably cost them that to get there.
Yeah, absolutely.
They're paying me $15,000 per team for the privilege of racing.
That's what they have to pay?
Yeah, just the race.
Then, what's the rainbow at the end of the pot 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 Eco Challenge so pure, is it really is an inner quest.
People are doing it because they want to do it.
But the great thing is, 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.
Are Americans too soft?
I mean, the whole world.
I'll make it easier for you.
I'll make it easier.
Australians, too.
Too soft?
No, Europeans.
Yes.
All of us in the industrialized world are.
Yeah, I rather think that's...
Mostly true.
So, um, 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?
Well, 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 10am, we have a thousand teams trying to pay us.
Oh my gosh.
A thousand?
In 20 minutes.
If we let the registration open for a week or a month, oh my god, I don't know how many people would try to race.
Well then how do you possibly pick from among such a gigantic group?
Well, some of them I'll 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?
It does.
Even coming in the top five pretty much qualifies to invite you back.
Has there ever been a close incident to somebody either, you know, getting mortally wounded in some way?
How close has it come?
Very close.
In Borneo, the one you mentioned, somebody fell off the bridge, you know, paid attention to our instructions, and instead of walking their mountain bike down a jungle track, tried to ride it, thinking they knew better, went over the hammer bars, into a tree, and was pierced in the lung with a branch.
And the lung collapsed, and I landed my helicopter, and 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 can't wait to race again.
It's a strange life.
You know, every year people do get sick.
We just finished in Fiji, And the Fiji race was on television on the USA Network in April.
I've heard it's on the way, yes.
And during that, a number of people have been in hospital with various tropical diseases following that race.
I mean, after the Borneo race, I think we had 300 people hospitalized with a form of leptospirosis, 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.
We're at the top of the hour.
From t-shirts, to Survivor, to Eco Challenge.
My guest is Mark Burnett.
I'm Art Bell.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up the
the the the the
And a kid who's washing cars Take a giant step and reach right up and start.
In America, you dream like this comes true.
A guy like me starts with nothing And...
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene
She gets the landing screen Dig in to Dandy's feet.
Shiny night and the lights are low.
Looking out for a place to go.
Where the red light music is playing in the spring.
You've come to look for a dream.
Anybody could be that guy.
Not as young and musically high.
With a big bop music, everything's fine.
Go in the room for a dance.
And when he gets a chance You are the dancing queen
Young and sweet, only 17 You are listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from November 20th, 2002.
Off of the evening or morning, everybody, Mark Burnett, Ego 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.
You are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast to coast a m from november twentieth two thousand
two once again here's mark burnett and here's a question as a
viewer that i've always wanted to ask uh...
mark and that is uh... for a brief have a long survivor uh...
I'm wondering if your television show, as Survivor progresses, formulates challenges that are strategic for the game.
Now, what do 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 we get out on a grit before we ever start the game.
Really?
What we have learned is that you won't see many challenges these days which are All one thing or all of another.
Right.
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.
That's right.
All the challenges involve a fair, 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 Eco Challenge, 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 Eco Challenge, 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, the social dynamics is so great, they're far more worried with the other 15 people thinking about them than some, you know, plastic and metal camera happens to be there.
It's a minor annoyance, but 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 neat?
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 of other people to some of your stupid comments and the way you behave, you'd be far less likely to keep making those comments.
I've had a lot of that.
I mean, if you listen to audiotapes of the shows you do, you're going, oh, God, what's that mean?
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, you know, mainly on location, but are, of course, fed normally, you know, 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 three or four hundred person crew.
Only with good food.
Yeah, that's the only difference is the 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 port-a-potties, showers manufactured, you know, shower boats which are manufactured from just water that heats up in solar, 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.
So 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 that's being assaulted 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.
I don't wish I could, because what makes Survivor great are the number of viewers.
I mean, think about that.
We, even last year, both of our series, B, E, R, C, S, I, are friends.
I must be nervous.
Amazing.
Why?
Well, because we have a very wide, even if our ratings are not as high, our viewership numbers are greater.
We tend to have children, parents, and grandparents communally around the same television.
It's a communal Appointment television experience.
Right, right.
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 realize 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 there's a sea urchin, we don't show the vagina or the penis.
You get the point.
Some squats, you cut to someone's reaction.
People think that, oh my god, if I show the gross 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 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?
Um, 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.
Absolutely, I agree.
Uh, there was going to be, there was rumor of in several newspaper articles about possibility of a survivor.
Mir.
Back when the Mir, the space station, was still up.
We heard that you were in negotiations, or negotiating with the Russians, about perhaps getting somebody up on Mir, the winner of a Survivor Mir.
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, on the first time 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 contracts for no longer exists
it deals with it breaks up in the atmosphere and falls into the ocean
but i i've not pursuing it and i'm still
in negotiation now for right
uh... use for his rocket to go to the international space station from the
water really
uh... so in other words you'd pay by just the twenty million dollar fear
whatever it is and go through the russians and get somebody up there the
winner of so that could still be in the works crazy exhaust it will be will be survived
Survivor belongs in an organic survival situation.
There'll be a whole other television show, probably called Destination Space, which is about a bunch of Americans going through cosmonaut training with a view to going to space.
I may not even pull it off.
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 people, 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 Eco Challenge, or whether it would even be Survivor?
Just come, you know, 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, and a stressful situation, right back, boom, into the middle of all the cars, and concrete, and airplanes, and everything.
What's that like?
It's a totally difficult experience, in both cases, and in fact, in Eco Challenge, Even those working on the project go through what they call EWS, Eco Withdrawal Syndrome, 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 world.
In either one of the two programs, Mark, have you developed any really favorite contestants or favorite teams that 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.
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 Um, historical core value to that place.
What about, um, 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 gotta X that out almost, don't you?
Yeah, unfortunately, I was prepared.
Um, 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.
Really?
In a place called Wadi Rum on the Saudi border.
Wow.
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 of the Middle East.
And I had to cancel that project and went out and I 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 all that sort of stuff.
Somalia, Arabia would have been in a landlocked area.
The Australian outback wasn't an island.
So I found a bit of beach, but I do enjoy Ireland, 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 I'll 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 figure 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 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, they know they're just smart.
They get new 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?
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 warned six ways from Sunday with a million lawyers and 50,000 documents and all the rest of it.
We've heard stories about that.
And a big financial penalty.
They can't say worry, right?
But what about family and friends?
They must get hounded.
They also signed the contract, so 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-experienced 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... It works.
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...
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 looks like a movie in 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 it all very close 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, really recovering them.
I'm interested in that.
I'm also working on a 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 was shot entirely on location in Europe.
Much like Chevy Chase 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...
I'll say is 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, Well, what about the pushing of the envelope part of it though?
whether scriptural but it can't weather interesting
and was compelling and that's what matters so
unscripted fair if you'd like is about executing and making it really really good
well what about the pushing of the envelope part of it though uh...
i mean we've got uh... you know the shows like fear factor now and uh... it
every it gets wilder and wilder and wilder and that's gonna be on some minds out there
I suppose, in a way, that's going to happen with even the shows that you do.
You know, the challenges get a little harder every year.
Well, not really.
If you look at, like, 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.
City 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.
Basically directing it.
Well, okay then, the biggest question of all, is it fun?
I'm having a great time.
I mean, it's a chalice great place.
You get paid really well, and I'm in the creative arts business just like you are.
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 a lot of money at the same time.
Mark Burnett, thank you.
Thank you.
It was such a pleasure.
Thank you.
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.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast to coast a m from november twentieth two thousand
two and
and me de volumbe ando.
With the magic in his eyes, checkin' every girl and guy, cruisin' like he does the mambo.
And he's in a henna yellow disco, playin' sexy, gettin' hotter, he's a king, bangin' the dream on ra-ga-dan-ga.
And the DJ that he knows will always follow, with the rum-pum-pum, with the mix-a-may-bum, with the cola salsa.
I'm gonna dance, I'm gonna dance, I'm gonna sing, I'm gonna sing.
Ah, there are the sisters.
the somewhere in time with our bill continues courtesy of
premier network the girls
today they'll get any blood on the other
I'm going to get a new haircut.
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 program on SciFi 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, you know, the results are going to be on this Friday night on the Sci-Fi Channel.
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 a 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 a 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 have a lot to give you, we don't share.
Harold 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 there?
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 uh... one of strategy post business
magazine's books of the year took him around the world
but he makes his home in mill valley california which is where we're going to
be going in a moment they go to go to a m with you anywhere on your mobile phone
Coast-to-CoastAM.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.
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 20th, 2002.
So, uh, here's Harold Rheingold.
Uh, somebody in my office said Techno Weenie, Howard.
Techno, certainly.
I hope not too much of the weenie.
Well, no, I listen.
I don't shy away from that.
In a way, we are techno weenies.
I mean, you know, we're not... I just talked to Mark Burnett before you came on, and 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 the most, it's probably the single Well, if you think about it, it was not too many years ago.
Let's say ten years ago, this was really just a few enthusiasts.
A few meaning maybe a hundred thousand.
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 ten years ago, this was really just a few enthusiasts.
A few meaning maybe a hundred thousand.
Now we've got, what, about ten percent 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.
Yes.
It's really not one or the other, it's both and.
Yes.
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.
Yes.
We are seeing the telephone, the mobile telephone, the personal computer, and the internet merging.
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 get 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 a 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 a thousand 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.
You can, 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 you know, there are some people 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, that 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 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?
I think I can give you some examples.
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.
Oh, 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.
I have these devices in their hands that do a lot more than the telephones that we're used to.
Do they?
Absolutely.
I wouldn't have guessed Brazil.
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 Australian 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.
A real mess up there.
Well, the demonstrators managed to organize themselves using portable phones.
That's right.
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.
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?
Oh yeah, every day.
Every day.
Me too, and I just answered one.
We'll be right back.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up I'm running out of time, I'm running out of love to say
I'm running out of time, beautiful secret state to find I've walked it in slow motion and I do turn around to say
Stay my best love away I'm running out of time, I'm running out of love to say
I'm running out of time, I'm running out of love to say I'm running out of time, I'm running out of love to say
I'm running out of time, I'm running out of love to say I'm telling you it's gonna be the end, don't bring me down
No, no, no, no, no I'll tell you once more before I get out the door.
Get off the floor, don't bring me down Don't bring me down
Don't bring me down Don't bring me down
Don't bring me down What happened to the girl I used to know?
You let your mind go like that Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from November 20th, 2002.
Good morning, are you a techno-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 e-mails every single day.
And these are really classy e-mails.
These e-mails are always, like, from some government official in Nigeria, who just happens to have about 60 million or 30 million dollars that he doesn't know what to do with, and he sends it to 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.
he cut the whole knowing that you're a with thirty million dollars in his was widow and you know
she was all without money and i have a hard time you get that money out
country real fast and was going to give me a good part of it but just let it
come to my bank account so i answered the letter and in a moment i'll have about and
their response now we take you back to the past on art bell somewhere in
time Alright, 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, further 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 Siji Kato Ono.
As regard the update of trust, we'll be backdated to suit the claim as if sworn by the late engineer Siji 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 dollars and of course they're not.
Somebody here writes, Rick 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 have.
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.
But 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.
File sharing, right?
Well, what's interesting about it, 70 million people.
Not just Napster, but you know, 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 70 million people put their computers together through the internet and made this 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 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 Britney.
They've got four or five megastars that they put all their money into.
Less than 1% of the professional musicians in the US make more than $600 in royalties per year.
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 than ever before.
But is it the end of the record industry as we know it?
As we know it?
I think so.
Oh my God.
I think so.
But you know... 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 Napster, 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... You think they'll do it even though they can get it for free?
Oh yeah, I think there's 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, a hundred 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.
Absolutely.
And before the Internet, you could go to Hong Kong or Singapore or any number of places and buy movies before they hit the movie houses.
I know, but America's number one export, at least right up there near the top, would be movies.
Oh, you know what?
The movie industry tried to shut the VCR down.
Jack Valente, the chief lobbyist, said to Congress, and I quote, 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 videocassettes now.
He was wrong in a way.
In a way?
And you know what?
The motion picture The television did not shut down motion pictures.
You know, Hollywood boycotted the television.
They did not want to have motion pictures on television 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.
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 of 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.
There will always be a place for that.
You know, radio didn't go away when television came along.
It found a different niche.
There is also SEVY at home.
Certainly your listeners must be aware of SEVY at home.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
They certainly are.
Big telescopes that send signals from outer space.
Of course, American taxpayers are not paying for the immense computing power to look through those signals.
Right.
So, SETI 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 screen saver.
And this screen saver, 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 Mapster put 70 million hard drives together, this put the computing power together, these 2 million computers.
Twenty teraflops of computing power.
Well, that's a very admirable side of the Internet.
There's no question about that in the 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, and now that we have digital everything, there's no more, at least with VCRs.
You know, one person would copy, and you get a lousy copy, and then somebody else would copy, and you 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 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, obviously.
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.
They shut down all peer-to-peer communication in order to save the recording industry and Hollywood's revenues.
Yes.
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 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 Howard, 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.
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 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 Uh, 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 passed... Information Awareness Office now.
Information Awareness Office.
And Admiral Poindexter, um... Yeah, of all people, I mean, why did they pick Admiral Poindexter?
I mean, uh, you know, several felony counts with a round contract.
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.
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, they're 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 and we'd like to have them caught.
Yes, oh yes.
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 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 the word mob that's a little edgy because not every group of people who coordinate collective action have 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, you know, when the telephone came along, people did the equivalent of the Nigerian scam.
People were so unused to the technology that People could call him at home and talk about the money.
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.
Ultimately, it's up to people to figure out what's best for them.
I think that's a matter of literacy.
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 a secret right 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.
You're hooked up, aren't you?
One way or the other.
Radio, television, internet, text messages, telephones, color with internet and everything.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast to coast am from november twentieth two thousand two
hundred the
the the
you Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her ways?
Tell me what you say.
Don't you love her badly?
Wanna be her daddy?
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 ways?
Now tell me 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 worth a single lonely soul.
All your love, all your love, all your love, all your love is gone
The single lonely song of a deep blue dream Seven horses seem to be on the mark
The single lonely song of a deep blue dream The single lonely song of a deep blue dream
Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
You are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from November 20th, 2002.
Howard Rundle, Britain's smart mob.
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, we'll ask him about it.
I'm Art Bell, this is Coast to Coast AM.
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.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Noory and special guests.
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
Well all right, um once again, let's 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 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 their social benefits, but 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 non-violent 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 refutation 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, the 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.
There are thousands of professional eBayers.
They stay home, they buy and they sell on eBay, and frankly, Howard, I I'm amazed, Howard, 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.
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.
It works only because of that.
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 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.
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 is far-fetched, eBay is far-fetched.
Maybe you're wondering about the Saturday night date that you just talked about, so you just dial up www.venerealdiseasedirectory.com I hope there's no such thing.
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.
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 the navel tempted to to to deal with each other market
spring into being the fact that you can go into a store and give someone a
piece of paper and for the billion three chickens and they will give you a can
of soup that means that we're using this
symbolic communication system that we trust in some way
take your own website for example uh... i've got uh... charles in hawaii who the all the way
over there all over the water wise looking at your website right you're welcome
Your web community, I guess you'd 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 Redmond, Washington, comes up with some new scheme, they can broadcast it and the whole technology upgrades itself.
Perhaps.
You know, with regard to terrorism and our privacy and all the rest of it, nobody can 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 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 are 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.
Wow.
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, alright, Let me just sign off my Fourth Amendment rights here, give me my cell phone, give me my PDA, give me my two-gig 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 don't have any money?
Well, you know, actually, the real terrorists, they use encryption.
They're not going to be so easy 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 Rundle, used 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 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 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, 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.
Exactly.
What kind of world are we going to be living in then?
If I use encryption, that makes me a target.
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.
Not the kind of encryption that you can detect, but codes that they have agreed upon.
So, you know, 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 have 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.
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.
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.
That's going to make 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, reputation 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 these uh you know you see barcodes on everything already yes they are being replaced in fact the Gillette manufacturing company announced today that they were 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're implanting people now!
With discounts to the first 50,000 people who get implants.
Yes, that's right.
The generic name for this kind of environment is pervasive computing.
The objects around us, the places we go, are going to have information embedded in them 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 5th 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 5th and Main?
What kind of businesses do they have at 5th 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 Zagats?
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 Unveil 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.
for about a hundred and fifty dollars.
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.
It 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.
Hold the prune story, Howard.
We'll be right back.
It's the bottom of the hour.
I'm Art Bell.
Maybe that's what's coming next, you know?
Computer wars.
I have to Maybe that's what's coming next you know computer wars will
substitute human flesh and blood We'll have our wars with computers instead
We'd be good at that.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
on this somewhere in time.
I'm going to be a good boy.
I'm working on it.
I'm wearing a long coat so I hope those guys don't realize that he's trying to say that he's turning back on me.
It's too late now.
It's too late now.
You can hear it now.
You can hear it now.
The gun's still warm.
Yeah, there's a storm on the loose, a stormy ream in my head.
Wrapped up in silence, I'll forget this day.
When I get cold, my whole life spins into a prayer bed And my best friend is my life's song
Play it in your head, I'll sing it if I get gone I'll keep on dancing through the noon and dark
Where will you go now that I've gone too far?
You've gone too far Like a bullet in the bone
You've gone too far Premier Network presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002.
Where are you gonna go when you've gone too far?
Maybe we've already gone too far with what we're doing.
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, uh... I'll take it.
Give me that latest PDA.
I'm going to get you.
Listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM.
From November 20th, 2002.
Tomorrow night, Gordon Michael Scallion, 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 SciFi 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 poons.
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, 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.
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 CorpWatch.
I won't forget the headline, it was so surprising, it said, 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 metal 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 prunes.
Good Lord.
Well, you know, I mean, the day is coming.
Maybe it's here now.
You were mentioning earlier Reputations, you know, 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, Arvell, and I guarantee you every little tiny aspect of your life since this stuff has been recorded, it's all in there.
You can get, you go to Google, and in 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.
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.
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, 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 and 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.
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.
Uh, one of the things that looms directly in front of us right now is war.
Yep, right in front of us.
And we had another war with Iraq, of course, Desert Storm.
During Desert Storm, we really did an interesting thing with computers.
As I understand it, we introduced a 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 klezworm.
Oh, viruses.
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 ten emails I download, I get at least one Quez 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 gifs, 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.
Yes.
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 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.
Yeah.
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 network.
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 the 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.
Alright, 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.
What if we get artificial livers or kidneys?
People will accept these things.
I think that we are increasingly vulnerable.
Our energy systems, our medical systems, moving 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's 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 are 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, a 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're probably a pretty optimistic guy.
I've been watching you, listening to you very carefully during this interview, trying to leap every opportunity of 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, 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 has been for thousands of years, We got science.
Science is a collective enterprise.
It 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.
How 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 I'm... That's how far into it I am.
That's why I began this whole thing with the sort of saying, hey, don't shy away from techno-weenie so much.
That's me.
I am that.
May as well you, but it's me, for sure.
And so I'm dependent on that.
If it were to suddenly go away... Yeah, we're helpless.
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're 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 as long as the machines go away.
That's right.
But I don't think 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.
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 getting in a 747.
It's just a matter of interest, Howard, if they know that.
Right?
Yeah.
Then they know, like, when my TV is going to fail.
They know when my toaster is going to fail.
Oh, yeah.
They even know when my car is going to fail, right?
And they also know how long they have to make that warranty.
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 a medium of television.
And that television medium gave them a shared sense, a shared zeitgeist.
that gave them a connection with each other for the television medium is really a broadcast medium in
which the viewer doesn't really have any control over it
or what is broadcast to them. Alright speaking of control, I gotta
take a break here Howard, alright?
Alright. Alright, stand by.
Get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the park, the mean time.
We have that control here.
We have specific times.
We have to deal with them.
It's called radio.
And, uh, Howard Rheingold will be right back.
We're gonna go to the phone, so if you have questions about this world we live in, technologically speaking, here we are.
You are listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from November 20th, 2002.
But you don't need too many babies Coming in out of the rain and hear the jazz go down
Talk to the vision Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
You don't have to go Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
You don't have to go Oh, oh, oh, oh
You don't have to go I, I, I, I, I, I
All of these I cry I, I, I, I, I, I
All of these I cry Oh, I, I, I, I, I
Baby, please don't go When I read the letter you wrote me
It made me mad, mad, mad But when I read the words that you told me
It made me sad, sad, sad I'm Alfredo and I love you.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I've got a lot of friends who said when computers came out in their early era, 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.
I've got a lot of friends who said when computers came out in their early era, they'd never
ever have one of those damn things in their house.
Not a chance.
Not a million years.
Not in their lifetime.
You know what?
They've all got them now.
Every single last one of them.
Computer guru.
at least computer users and about half of them computer gurus.
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.
Listen on your way to work and again on the way home.
Or listen to one of over a thousand archived shows from the past three years.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Noory and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit coasttocoastam.com to sign up today.
You'll sleep like a baby knowing you'll never miss your favorite guests and topics ever again.
Remember, a one-year subscription comes out to only 15 cents a day.
Sign up today at coasttocoastam.com.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast-to-coast a m from november twentieth two thousand two
once again uh... here comes hard-line gold and uh... this hour we're going to
open up the phones with uh... strangle We've covered
We have covered all kinds of areas of technology.
Somebody just, Rick, just fast blasted me.
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 have 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 in 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 If you make a social query, your device will talk to their
device.
You pass by somebody in the hallway, your device will look to their device and 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, you know, I wouldn't have one of those damn things.
Boy, I'll die if I have one of those.
They've 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?
Well, you know, some people are opting out.
They don't carry the mobile phone.
They don't have a PC.
To have their garbage taken away, to have to turn their tap on and have water come in, to flush their toilet, and have their waste taken away.
Anyway, right?
They're dependent on a technological infrastructure that ties all of these services together.
Uh-huh.
All right, let's go to the phones.
This should be interesting.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Howard Rheingold.
Hello?
Hello there.
Art?
Oh, you're on a cell phone, aren't you?
Yes, I sure am.
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?
I'm in Illinois right now, just about 120 miles out of Chicago.
Yes, sir.
I'm a truck driver.
You guys were talking earlier about Big Brother, more or less, keeping an eye on everybody, and I was 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?
Yes, sir.
Thanks to Qualcomm.
Qualcomm, huh?
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.
That's not true anymore, exactly, is it?
No, it's not.
And it didn't really bother me until I found out just How closely they monitor 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.
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 were You're a hundred miles away, an hour later.
How the hell do you do that?
You're traveling a little bit too fast.
We're automatically going to fine you and deduct the money from your account.
You call her, do you think they know how fast you're going?
They absolutely do.
They're doing it now.
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 on the database, and sends you a ticket.
And you know, they're doing that with faces now, of course.
The average American, when they want to... Oh, I know.
I went to the Super Bowl last year.
We'll talk about that in a 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.
Don't have a clue.
They don't have a clue.
But is it bothering you?
It does, now that I know how closely I'm being monitored.
I appreciate the call.
Thank you.
See, 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.
Not only security, but convenience.
How many people... How about a paycheck?
I mean... 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?
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, 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.
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 government, 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 is going to have an
affair you know at five thirty with his secretary in the back office
well you know it's a maybe they can do it in the back of us but they better not
go out to a motel because the location of where their devices are
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 uh... where the person is you'll know where they put
their device but but but
but but but but um... wildcard line you're on the air with howard reingold
alone i'd part of the glory of porter del yes larry
i find that the collection of plan that the government has a so that that i
don't think that any individual american uh... initially is uh... in the privacy you know that 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 voicecraft 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 of 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.
Would you believe that I actually have a little button here, and should I push it right now?
No.
You probably wouldn't believe this, but if I were to push that, I could cause your heart to skip a beat.
What is it?
Like an alert?
I can't talk anymore about it, but I mean... Like Conrad?
No, of course not.
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 shift to a subversive website?
What if some spammer sends you some child pornography that you didn't ask for?
You erase it from your hard disk, but the record that it was there remains.
And identity theft is a major... I think that is where the control...
I think that is where the controls have to come in and 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.
Now, 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.
You know, 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, and 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 so 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.
That's something, I suppose.
Pervasive computing.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with Harold Rheingold.
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Hello.
Where are you?
This is Bob from Kansas City.
Yes, Bob.
I've got to ask, this is an excellent program.
I've got to ask Howard this question.
Howard, that truck driver, that cop, 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?
I mean, this guy has a good point.
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 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.
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?
Where are all these people going to go?
You know, throughout history, we used to have people digging ditches that are now dug by machines.
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, are 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?
A recent strike of the Longshoremen on the West Coast, 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 have 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 lawn sherman 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, and do you think that the government should be a big part of this re-education process?
It's inevitable.
I mean, otherwise... I think private enterprise has a huge stake in educating The workforce.
Because, you know, if people don't have jobs, they don't buy things.
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 a big problem.
It's a really big problem.
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.
Alright, hold on Howard, we're at the bottom of the hour.
There'll be a little computer there.
Because the night has millions of eyes.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
If you are through to me.
Oh, remember when you tell those little white lies at the night.
At the thousand nights.
You say that you're at home when you phone me.
And how much you really care.
So you keep telling me that you're lonely.
I'll know if someone is there.
All our plans have gone We're fucked now, they're gone You just don't feel the reaper No due to wind, the sun, or
the rain Come on baby, don't feel the reaper Baby, take my hand, don't
feel the reaper We'll be able to fly, don't feel the reaper Baby, I'm your
man La la la la la la La la la la la la la
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from November 20th, 2002.
Boy, are we ever racing across the river of technology tonight.
Howard Rheingold 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 Mobs, and all of it, of course, at artbell.com.
If you go to artbell.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 tonight's guest material and just look down there and there it will be.
Now we take you back to the past on Artbell Somewhere in Time.
Oh 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, you know, 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'd 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 make 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, and I wonder who that was calling me on the cell phone.
And then when they finally do get through, Howard, you gotta 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 the 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 the people, sound like crap.
Howard, they sound awful.
And to me, in some ways, a 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 entirely, in which the devices will simply route messages from one to another without going to some kind of central switch.
This of course I'm sure it does.
I do, Howard.
operators tremendously. 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,
you'll see that there's a 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.
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 SEC 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, the third generation networks.
These are the big telephone operators building these infrastructures to bring us The wideband internet.
Wideband wireless internet is what we're talking about here, folks.
That's 3G, as well as telecom.
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, 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 springing up, sort of the way the Internet did, that's challenging these spectrum options.
The FCC, they're faced with these companies that have invested billions of dollars, and the government is taking in this money, versus new technologies that are thousands or maybe even millions of times more efficient.
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.
You know, I haven't heard about that one yet, but it makes sense to me.
indian reservations on those indian reservations of hard to get
telephone lines is not cost-effective for the phone companies from there
some of these folks who are challenging these regulations are setting up
new radio technologies on the indian reservations so we'll get the complex
emerged on the new i've heard about that one yet but it makes sense to me
uh... that'll be uh... another good reason for the indian reservations
uh... to get in trouble with the federal government and other governments right
But the federal government, I mean, they're going to come after the Indians for their spectrum.
That's just the way they can get to the land.
Back to the phones.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Howard Rheingold.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me now?
Yes, I can hear you, sir.
Okay.
I wanted to ask you a guess.
Can you pull up all websites on the 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 and these new networks.
Howard, you travel a lot, don't you?
A fair amount, yeah.
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.
You didn't 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.
It's incredible.
What's going on?
Anything else, Caller?
Yes sir.
I try to pull up some website for my cell phone.
I have the internet on my cell phone and sometimes it says to use a different URL.
And then other times when I do get to a website and I try to sign on or maybe buy something, I can't do it.
That is because you need to have a cell phone that supports the particular kind of software protocols that enables you to send secure information.
So when you try to buy something, using a somewhat different signal
than when you are simply surfing through a website.
It's the secure communication protocol that enables you to buy things
and be reasonably sure that somebody's not picking that signal out of the ether
and getting 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 an 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 don't 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 my best.
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 He has 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.
Insurance companies, they know exactly how much fraud is going on out there and how much they need to charge for premium to cover that.
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 ten minutes?
I know that.
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?
Yes, it is.
And 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.
Wild Card Line, you're on there with Howard Rheingold.
Hello.
Good evening, or I should say good morning, gentlemen.
Right, good morning.
This is Kat from near San Francisco.
Yes, sir.
The statement was made that anybody who is not into the computer scene is essentially dead meat.
Yeah, I may have said that in one way or the other.
Right.
Okay.
I've got a scenario that's kind of unique.
Okay.
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, Art.
C, I've got tendonitis from shoulders to fingertips and both arms that make using a keyboard impossible.
Tell her my alternatives.
Oh, there are plenty.
You can get voice operated stuff.
You can, uh, 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, I know.
They're worried about the cell phone.
Here comes a cell phone with text.
Yes.
Well, you know, 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 are reading the newspaper like I see some people doing in
traffic but that you are distracted if you are using a cell phone or you are talking
to it even if it is a hands off phone.
So that is 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 uh... 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 air with Howard Rheingold.
Hello.
Hello.
Go ahead, sir.
Hi, my name is John, and I'm in Lakewood, Colorado.
Right.
Hi, Art and Howard.
Very interesting show.
Yes.
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.
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, Well, you know, an awful lot of religious people in the world believe in scripture, in 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 yet, Howard.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Rheingold.
Hello.
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... No, no, no.
Don't tell me why you didn't call.
Tell me why you did call.
Okay.
All of your information is kept in your registry, in your computer, and I have two concerns.
One is data mining.
To be narrow-casted 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?
Profiled.
Yeah.
I got you all right.
Howard, how about... He's right, I'm sure.
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.
Data mining are habits so that advertisers 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.
Yep.
Oh, Howard, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program tonight.
That is your latest book, right?
Smart Mobs.
Smart Mobs.
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.
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 Art Bell.
Good night.
I've been drifting on a sea of heartbreak, trying to get myself ashore for so long.
Export Selection