Art Bell welcomes futurist Ray Kurzweil, inventor of OCR and speech recognition, whose 2002 induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and $500K Lemelson Prize underscore his visionary work. Kurzweil dismisses nature’s "flawless" design, citing worms with lifespans extended fivefold via gene manipulation and mice cured of aging-related diseases through biotech—three "bridges" (nutrition, drug design, nanotech) outlined in Fantastic Voyage promise radical life extension by 2029. He predicts AI will merge with human cognition, not replace it, while critics like Bill Joy’s warnings fade against tech’s exponential progress. Kurzweil insists virtual reality and medical nanobots will enhance—not replace—humanity, debunking fears of addiction or symptom-only fixes as outdated. The conversation hints at humanity’s potential to transcend biological limits, framing evolution as a continuum of self-improvement. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's very prolific time zones, every single one of them covered like a blanket by this program, Coast Coast Dam.
I'm Mark Bell.
My honor and pleasure to escort you through what's going to be a damn good weekend.
It really is.
This being the weekend version of the program, let me see, what have we got?
Tonight we have Dr. Ray Kurzweil, and he's going to talk about all kinds of really cool things.
Artificial intelligence, which I find totally fascinating, because, of course, I just saw iRobot.
God, that was a good movie.
Do you see iRobot?
So we'll have many questions for the good doctor.
And then tomorrow night, a real treat, somebody I've been waiting to interview for a very long time.
Michael Droznan, author of The Bible Code, is going to be here.
And oh, I've been waiting for this.
And then he'll also talk about his newsbook, Examining the Life of Howard Hughes.
And that's the second, that's another thing that I've been dying to talk about.
Howard Hughes, as you know, was my neighbor here over the hill in Las Vegas.
In fact, there are so many stories about Howard.
Did you know the television station in Las Vegas allegedly was bought, built by Howard Hughes so that he could enjoy the movies that he liked late at night?
That's a fact.
And so that's why a lot of nights that channel would play his favorite, that's all they'd be doing, is playing his favorite movies.
Now, Las Vegas, of course, is a teeming city of a couple of million people nearly.
But then Howard Hughes.
Well, anyway, I've wanted to talk about Howard Hughes for a long time, so I'm certainly looking forward to that.
Now, before we begin with the depressing news of the world, not all of it, by the way, I might add, depressing?
This time for a change?
I would like to direct your attention to an angel.
That would be my wife, Ramona.
Now, you know, we've been married so long now, and she came in the other day with a photograph that I had never seen of when she was 18 years old.
And it just blew my mind.
I said, hon, you really look angelic in this.
I think.
Totally angelic.
And so I scanned the photograph.
It's an old photograph, and it's up on my webcam right now.
I thought I'd put that one up for tonight of a photograph I didn't see, I didn't see until just recently.
Anyway, you ought to take a look at that.
That's my dear, beautiful wife at age 18.
And by the way, her mom is here visiting now.
I'll let her say hi tomorrow night.
All right, let us now.
Anyway, that's on the website.
You go to coasttocoastam.com and scroll up to the top and you'll see Arts webcam there.
Just click on that and Ramona's little angelic face at 18 will pop up.
All right, here we go.
The World News.
Grainer gets 10 years in Iraq prison abuse trial.
Army Specialist Charles Grainer Jr., who grinned in photographs of Iraqi prisoners being sexually humiliated, told jurors, I didn't enjoy what I did there, but he was grinning, was sentenced Saturday to 10 years behind bars in the first court-martial stemming from the prison scandal.
Grainer, labeled the leader of a band of rogue guards at the Baghdad prison in late 2003, could have received up to 15 years.
15 years.
Now, here's a good story.
You don't frequently see those in the world news, but by God, Titan.
You all know about it by now.
I'm sure you heard the program last night.
They went over it, I'm sure, in great detail.
Pictures snapped by the Titan probe and a low whooshing sound picked up by an onboard microphone drew gasps and applause from scientists Saturday as the mission to Saturn's moon continued its breathtaking revelations from more than 900 million miles across our solar system.
This really is something.
Data beamed back from Titan, one of Saturn's moons, sketched a picture of a pale orange landscape with a spongy surface topped by a thin crust.
Now, it sure, well, it sure did look like, well, I don't know, rivers, ravines.
It sure did look like something been running up there, huh?
Almost a shoreline, if you could use your imagination.
And by the way, so they had a microphone inside the spacecraft as this baby came down on Titan.
And I've got the audio.
I want you to hear the audio.
This is the same exact thing that you would be hearing if you had been in that spacecraft descending toward a Titan.
Actually, in the last moments, descending toward Titan.
was a microphone and this is the actual sound You hear the level changes.
In other less uplifting news, rescue workers spent all day Saturday digging through a massive snowpile, but they found no traces of five people feared dead in a 300-yard-wide, 500-yard-long avalanche that cascaded down a Utah mountainslide days earlier.
Exactly how many skiers might have been buried in the Friday afternoon snowslide remains unclear at this hour.
Ayed Alawi was handpicked by Washington as prime minister, but to stay in office, he must get majority support in the parliament that will be elected in just two weeks now, and that's not going to be easy.
Alawi is running on a ticket that's likely to be trumped by a rival one, supported by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.
And that ticket has its own candidate for the coveted prime minister spot, a French educated finance minister whose party has managed the rather difficult task of staying on good terms with both Iran and its nemesis, the United States.
They have walked a fine line.
It'll be interesting to see if they can pull off the elections.
You know, historically, occupations don't work.
They just don't work over the long term.
And I said it last week, and I'm going to say it again this week, though I know that it should not be uttered.
These words ought not be uttered.
The parallels between the situation in Iraq and Vietnam are inescapable.
They really are inescapable.
And I'll just leave it at that.
Seepage through a dam that had stopped Saturday, but most residents of Corona remained out of their homes in a voluntary precautionary evacuation, although a mandatory evacuation was canceled.
People were being urged to stay away from their homes and a mobile home park until Monday afternoon while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released millions of gallons of water to relieve pressure on the 64-year-old Prado Dam.
Now, that's, of course, as a result of all the incredible deluge we've had here in the West.
I mean, it was looking to be NOAA time.
The water was getting deep around town here in Perrompt, Nevada.
And baby, it just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.
In fact, I don't think I believe it, but you never know.
It says, what's happening at Antarctica?
Now, again, rumor.
According to inside Aussie News reports, the U.S. has decided to evacuate its base at McMurdo in the Antarctic and has requested the Russians to also send its icebreaker to assist evacuation.
They have a special icebreaker, the Russians.
Now, I don't think that's true, but here's what's not rumor.
In an event so large that the best seat in the house is going to be from space, a massive iceberg is, in fact, on a collision course with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.
NASA scientists have witnessed the 100-mile-long B-15A iceberg move steadily toward the ice tongue.
Now, the ice tongue is kind of sticking out from Antarctica.
And though the iceberg's pace has slowed in recent days, and NASA scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15th, it is, they say, a clash of the Titans, a radical, an uncommon event.
And if the two giant slabs of ice collide, we could see one of the best demolition derbies on the planet.
Even just a tap from the giant can be very powerful.
It will certainly be a blow far larger than anything else the ice tongue has ever experienced.
Now, when the iceberg and the ice tongue collide, the impact will likely dent their bumpers, that's in quotes.
The edges could crumple, and the ice and ice could pile and or drift into the Ross Sea.
But if B-15A icebergs should pick up enough speed before the two collide, the results could be even more spectacular.
In fact, the entire ice tongue could break off, making the rumor at the top of the page seem, at least, if not probable, somewhat more likely.
New studies, this very interesting story, new studies of the giant earthquake that produced devastating tsunamis in the Indian Ocean show that its shock waves ricocheted around the globe for hours and lifted the Earth's surface nearly an inch halfway around the world.
Did you hear that?
I mean, think about that.
The whole thing ricocheted around the globe for 12, for hours and hours and hours and actually lifted the inch, the whole surface of the Earth an inch on our side of the world.
Rick Aster, a geologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, compiled seismograms To measure the shock waves at increasing distances from the quake's epicenter.
The waves were about 1,000 times the size of those that seismologists customarily measure, big mamas.
In other words, the quake, of course, occurred on December 26 off the coast of northern Sumatra.
And the shock waves radiated out through the Earth's rocky interior.
How fast do you think they go?
Through the Earth.
They travel faster than waves do in air or water.
The waves were eventually picked up by seismometers, which measure vibrations in the ground.
Aster used data collected by a global network of seismometers to run the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, or IRIS, a consortium based in Washington that's financed mainly by the National Science Foundation.
IRIS has about 150 member institutions at universities in the U.S. and abroad.
The closest readings came from the Cocos Island, an Australian territory south of Sumatra, and from Sri Lanka, of course, and the farthest from the equator.
The seismic data shows the waves traveling around the Earth for six hours.
Astor said that even in Ecuador, the shock wave displaced the Earth's surface more than two centimeters, or even measured, as we know it, about an inch.
But the movement was slow to be perceptible to humans.
The jolt was much sharper in Sri Lanka and shook the ground over a range of nearly four inches.
Can you imagine that, though, on the other side of the globe?
The Earth bulged out an inch when that happened.
I don't know about you.
I didn't feel a thing.
And then, of course, there is this, which definitely has captured my attention and many others.
There are a lot of people worried about this.
The name or headline for this story is, Earth Ready to Strike Back at Cosmos.
NASA is set to launch a mission Wednesday in which it plans to blow a rose bowl-sized crater into an oncoming comet and unlock its secrets.
Now, they made their window, their one, they had a one-second window, a one-second window in which to launch this rocket, and they did it.
Anyway, a rose bowl-sized crater in a comet comes 65 million years too late to give the dinos payback for the asteroid that may have wiped out much for Earth.
But the mocking term captures the spirit of the mission set to launch, Wednesday it has, of course, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Instead of gently approaching alien worlds with retro rockets or parachutes, which is the normal NASA modus operandi, NASA this time has adopted the attitude of a 12-year-old with a new slingshot.
For millennia, comets and asteroids have been hitting the Earth.
Donald Yeomans, a comet historian and member of the Deep Impact Science team, said, this is our chance to hit back.
Or as one JPL official put it, quote, we're going to put a hurt on this thing.
You don't expect your stuff like this from NASA, do you?
Despite the locker room bravado, researchers insist there is serious science behind, by the way, it costs us $328 million to do this.
What we're going to do is have this spacecraft make a six-month journey into the neighborhood of Mars orbit, and there it will meet a comet known as Tempel 1.
When will it meet?
Well, right on the 4th of July.
The craft will then fire a probe at the comet.
The resulting collision, it is hoped, will expose secrets of the solar system that have been hidden away for 4.5 billion years.
They are going to hit this baby going 23,000 miles plus per hour, and it's going to be, matter of fact, it's going to be such a big explosion that there's some chance that all of you out there watching in the sky, looking, I guess, toward Mars on that 4th of July, you may see it.
Now, you know, scientists think that comets are made up mainly of ice, right?
But they're not absolutely positive.
Who really knows what they're made up of?
Are they iron, steel, solid ice, loosely packed snow?
Who knows?
And so there are people out there who have called me and have talked to me in recent days, and I certainly don't think that this will occur, but you hit something this hard.
And, you know, we saw so many movies, right?
Like Deep Impact and everything.
Remember Deep Impact where something was coming at Earth and we had to stop it?
Or we all went the way of the dinosaurs?
Well, I must admit that a number of people in the last few days have called me sort of panicky, saying, what the hell are we doing?
You know, we're liable to hit this thing and break it up.
And something then could head toward Earth, something we couldn't stop.
Now, I don't think that's very likely.
And I think that's a very outside scenario, but people seem worried about it.
They don't like what we're doing.
Hitting this thing so hard.
Kaboom!
And I guess it's good science.
It'll be an explosion equal to 4.4 tons of TNT.
Oh, that's not too bad, you know.
The probe, of course, is going to be annihilated.
They suggest it will create a 14-story deep crater.
And we're just going to blow the hell out of this thing.
Now, it's pretty big.
they're actually saying here the fireworks should provoke plenty of who's in arms on earth except of the scientists course are going to be uh...
They really don't know what's going to happen.
And I'm sure that the science is solid, and whatever they think will happen will happen, and they'll get little pieces that they can analyze or whatever.
But there might be a little reason for concern, a little reason for worry.
I don't know.
So I sort of told everybody who's been calling me, you know, I wouldn't get too exorcised about it.
It'll probably be all right.
But it is quite an endeavor.
Boy, I'll tell you, science just does leap out there, doesn't it?
And sometimes some of the things, I mean, look at the propagation, for example.
I've complained so much about this on 75 meters in the handbag.
For the last two or three months, I'm telling you, something unnatural is going on.
Yes, I know.
By the way, we just had a giant X-class of sunflare hours, just a few hours before I have come on the air here tonight.
And people will say it's that.
But, you know, it's not.
These conditions, these propagation conditions we've been having are certainly unaccounted for.
There is nothing that's happening on the sun, save for at this very moment, that would cause that sort of thing.
And it's been going on for months.
Something is wrong with the ionosphere.
Something is profoundly wrong with the ionosphere.
Ham radio operators are beginning all to say it.
You know, things like, well, I've been a ham operator for 50 years, and I've never seen anything like this.
I don't have quite 50 years under my belt yet, but I've never seen anything else like this.
And you've got to wonder if it might be hard.
unidentified
I don't know.
Abumba, can you hear my heartbeat in this heart?
Do you know that the heart of this voice lies at the feet?
You're used to know, you let your mind out so I can't go, don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'll tell you what's wrong before I get out of the cross, don't bring me down.
You're always talking about your crazy nights.
I love you, baby, just be clear and right.
Don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'll tell you what's wrong before I get out of the cross, don't bring me down.
Don't bring me down.
You're looking good just like you're stinking grass.
One of the days he's gonna break his legs, don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I'll tell you what's wrong.
All I did was don't bring me down.
talk with Art Bell, call the Wild Guard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell.
don't you think it unlikely that the pieces would crash to earth and burn homes and stuff well work we're making assumptions that it's just a ball of rock and frozen ice Yeah, and I mean, this has a tail to it.
unidentified
And if Professor McCanney says it's an electrical nature to our solar system.
nothing ever goes wrong that we do right you know i guess we have to stub our toes over and over again to we finally you know we know you wake up learn a lesson I worry a lot about what science does.
I really do.
And we all should.
Sometimes, God, they just do stuff and see what'll happen.
Push the button, Fred, okay.
Yeah.
And, well, you know, I'd like to say good luck with your prediction, but on behalf of everybody on earth, I really can't.
unidentified
Well, I'm with you, too, but I'll probably be talking to you again if something does happen.
Doug in Pensacola, Florida, fast blast me, which, by the way, you can do by going to the website and sending me a message.
He says, Ayard, how about going over the ionospheric changes that the hams have experienced?
Thanks, Doug.
Okay, sure.
Briefly.
Here it is, folks.
On a frequency of 3.
Let's say 3.9 megahertz, all right?
That's a frequency in which hams talk.
Now, for all the years that I've been a ham operator, which is since 1958, one could reliably depend on being able to talk to people that were 20 or 30 or 400 miles away.
Reliably on 3.9.
Well, say 3.84 megahertz in that portion of the band.
You could always, always, always depend for all these years on being able to talk to people, you know, a few hundred miles away.
It's called NVIS, near vertical incidence.
Anyway, during the last two or perhaps three months, that's gone, baby.
Within an hour of sunset, that's gone.
That which had been true for so many years is no longer true.
Almost inevitably, within one hour of sunset, there is no NDIS.
There's something wrong with the damned ionosphere, I'm telling you.
And now more and more hams, I'm hearing them all over the bands, beginning to say, yeah, they're finally noticing it.
It takes a while.
And I'm hearing, what the hell's going on with 75 meters?
How can this be?
And there is one possible answer, and I can't deny its possibility.
And that's HAARP.
One of the first stated goals of the HARP project in Alaska is to affect communications by bombarding the ionosphere with just perhaps even a billion watts, one billion watts of power.
And they're doing that now.
They may not quite be up to a billion watts, but they're pretty much of the way there, if not all the way there.
And so something's going on with the ionosphere.
What do you blame it on?
Not a lot has changed otherwise.
So one possibility has got to be HARP.
And we're keeping a very eagle eye on the HARP project right now.
In fact, I'm well aware that I'm quite well equipped to take recording equipment, because I have a very great deal of it, I can assure you, into places where I might get EVPs.
But I'm going to be absolutely honest with you, sir.
If I got an EVP, a real one, it would scare the hell out of me.
I'm serious.
And I guess, I think it's the same reason that I don't do remote viewing.
I interview remote viewers, but I don't do remote viewing because, you know, I don't want to know.
In life, I don't want to know what's coming next.
So even with that chance to learn, there's something inside of me that doesn't want to know.
I mean, if you could right now go through a little course and go mentally into your head and come up with the year you're going to die and how you're going to die, do you want to know?
That's like the idea of the guy who goes to a fast food place and gets their leave-ins and puts it in his car and motors down the street smelling like french fry, right?
unidentified
That's right, but it seems like a good idea.
Maybe you could get him on the air and find out about this.
Listen, you could consider an awful lot of things as possible and responsible for what's going on.
All I'm telling the audience and you is this has never happened for this kind of protracted period of time in all the years and sunspot cycles that I've been through.
It's never happened, sir.
So, you know, we're always talking about different levels, like the ozone layer, right?
Well, the ionosphere is another very important level, and I'm here to tell you something's up.
Sir, if you look at the statistics gathered by pollsters who are commissioned to do this kind of thing, the percentage of people in America who believe they have seen a UFO, the percentage of people in America who believe they have been abducted or have come into contact with alien beings is astounding.
I was wondering tonight you mentioned the guest that you're going to have on, and I was wondering if, I mean, tomorrow night is the guy with the Bible code?
The only hitch in this is that when they do core samples, sir, you know, those nasty things that go back, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of years, they find evidence of the climate shift that did that.
That's very worrisome.
You know, I mean, imagining The avalanche is fine, and it could be an answer, certainly.
But those core samples, they're really worrisome.
I mean, they indicate that we've had rapid climate change before, and so we'll probably have it again.
unidentified
Well, you've interviewed Robert Felix with his book about not by fire but by ice.
In fact, just here in our little town, we had a flash flood alert the other day, not because of rain that was falling immediately upon the ground here, but rather from rain suddenly melting in the mountains and then just washing down into the valley.
It was quite an incredible thing.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, this is Karina.
I wanted to give my opinion on one of the shows that you had on.
Anybody calling the show must immediately turn their radio off or it will be confusing beyond the ability for you to continue.
Okay.
All right, Karina.
unidentified
Hi, Mr. Bell.
I'm so excited that I got through to you.
I've been listening to you for about a year now, and one of the shows that you talked about a while ago was about how you think the world is going to end.
And I really believe that aliens is going to come back.
I've been looking at things that's been going on, the tsunami, the different tragedies, all the movies that I've been watching, Impact, Deep Impact, Armageddon.
And I really feel like that's how this world is going to end.
You said the beings that made us, they're going to come back and they're going to be able to get them.
They're going to look down at what we have done.
And they're going to be, well, let's keep it for the family, extremely disappointed.
unidentified
Well, I think they're angry with how us, us beings is running the world, you know, like how Bush, I'm, I'm, Like, it's like things that's going on, how they're destroying the earth.
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist.
He has successfully founded and then developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investments, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence.
Now, Ray was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
He received the $500,000 Lemelson MIT Prize, my gosh, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Clinton, among scores of other national and international awards.
Kriswell is a widely sought speaker, has given keynote presentations at many leading venues.
His presentations to diverse audiences combine wit and keen insight into contemporary issues of technology.
Its impact on society.
His lectures often include appearances by Ramona.
Ramona Yet, his virtual female alter ego.
And of course, the name of my wife.
And other engaging demonstrations of cutting-edge technologies that Kriswell and his teams have developed.
It was an interesting movie, but it suffered from the same thing that a lot of futurist movies do, which is it took one change, in this case human-level cyborgs, and put it on today's world as if nothing else is going to change.
I mean, the reality is that there's going to be lots of changes.
Now, the only reason I say that is because, again, returning to robots, Ray, when I was a child, I'm 59 years old now, the promise was, oh boy, we'd have the kind of robots we saw in iRobot that would do all the nasty chores for us and all the rest of it.
That was a promise, almost an absolute promise from science.
I mean, there are a lot of bad predictions about the future, and you can find embarrassing predictions that go back many decades and even centuries.
But it's important to have a sound methodology for anticipating the technological trends.
I mean, in your book, The Quickening, which came out in 1997, you talked about how technology was accelerating and the impact of technology, such as economic change, was also accelerating.
What I've done is actually create mathematical models of that acceleration.
And this really stemmed from my interest in being an inventor.
I realized that my inventions had to make sense when I finished the project.
And so noted most inventions fail, actually, because the timing is wrong.
So I became an ardent student of technology trends and have developed mathematical models of how technology evolves.
And this has actually taken on a life of its own.
I have a group of 10 people now that gathers data about technology in many different areas.
And I developed mathematical models.
I've been actually doing this for 25 years.
A book I wrote in the 1980s had hundreds of predictions about the 1990s and the early 2000 years, which I've tracked very accurately.
Right, but it's based, because it's based on a sound methodology.
I mean, some things are actually hard to predict.
If you ask me, will Google stock be higher or lower in three years from now?
That's very hard to predict.
But if you ask me, how much will it cost to sequence a base pair of DNA, or what will the spatial resolution of brain scanning be in 2010, those things turn out to be very predictable.
Well, I have a whole theory about that called the law of accelerating returns, which technology evolves in an exponential fashion because we're always using the latest generation of tools to create the next.
And for that reason, the power of the tools and the effect that technology has on the world accelerates and its impact grows exponentially.
And you can take, for example, the price performance of computing and put it on a logarithmic graph, and it forms a very smooth progression for the last hundred years.
The same thing is true of telecommunications.
In our book, Fantastic Voyage, we talk about this whole biotechnology revolution.
We're now understanding our biology in terms of information, And that is growing exponentially.
The amount of genetic data that we're sequencing is actually doubling every year.
The cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA comes down by half every year.
So, two-thirds through the genome project, we had actually only collected 2% of the genome, and the skeptics are saying, well, there's no way you're going to finish the project on time.
Well, I don't want to die, and I don't think I will get to the point where I want to die.
But I would say that if everything stayed the same, and if our experiences stayed the same, and we're not able to expand our minds and our experiences, all of us, including myself, would ultimately get sort of profoundly bored.
I mean, in addition to radical life extension, technologies such as nanorobots in the brain, which will interact intimately with our biological neurons, will enable us to greatly expand our experiences and our mental functions.
We'll be able to have full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system.
These are some of the things we talk about in the third bridge of our book.
Because this first bridge of staying healthy and doing things today with nutrition and supplements and exercise to slow down the aging process will keep even baby boomers like you and I and Dr. Grossman not only alive but in good shape until the full blossoming of this biotechnology revolution.
That will give us more time to the third bridge, which is the nanotechnology revolution where we can really go beyond the limitations of biology.
You know, many people look backwards and you'll hear very statistics.
If you stop smoking, you'll add a few years to your life.
If you exercise, you'll add some time.
That's looking backwards.
It's very important to look forward because of the exponential nature of these technologies, in a fairly short amount of time, we're going to have dramatically more powerful tools to enhance our health.
We are unraveling the 10 or 12 different causes of aging.
Well, in this book, Fantastic Voyage, Dr. Grushman and I describe a practical program.
Nutrition, and I can describe some of the details of that.
Aggressive supplementation.
Finding out what your specific issues are.
So we give you the guidance to really develop a customized program.
I mean, find out what your issues are.
Is your homocysteine high?
If it is, then take folic acid and B vitamins and TMG and some other things and get it into a healthy range.
Is your cholesterol high?
Just in the papers last week, there was a lot of discussion of C-reactive protein, that that's as important a risk factor as cholesterol because it's a measure of inflammation, and we're learning that inflammation underlies many of these very important disease processes like heart disease and diabetes.
Well, we do recommend things like EPA DHA, omega-3 fats, which are anti-inflammatory, or curcamin, which is anti-inflammatory.
And these don't have the downsides of these drugs.
I mean, I would draw a distinction between old drugs, which were discovered, and new drugs, which are being designed.
Drug development used to be called drug discovery.
And it literally was a matter of finding some Substance that seemed to have some positive effect.
They would find something that lowered blood pressure.
And we didn't really understand how it works.
It seemed to work, but it would have a lot of side effects.
It's kind of similar to when primitive man or woman, you know, thousands of years ago would find a tool, like, okay, here's a stone, this would make a good hammer.
And we couldn't really shape tools to do a job.
Now we're actually learning the precise biochemical steps underlying these disease processes.
And we would describe in the book, you know, each key step, this seven or eight different key steps in the progression of atherosclerosis, which causes heart disease, and new drug development, we're actually able to create very precise chemical weapons that will go and interfere with a very specific step and stop these disease processes without side effects or much fewer side effects.
So these old drugs like Biox, they do have certain benefits.
They're anti-inflammatory, but they have side effects because they were not designed to do a very specific job in a precise way.
I mean, it's good to slow down these inflammatory processes because inflammation, overactivation of the immune system, underlies, fundamentally, atherosclerosis.
Each step in the progression towards a heart attack is fueled by this inflammation process.
This particular class of drugs, though, have side effects, which in many cases may do more harm than good.
There are new drugs being developed that will much more precisely undercut these processes without the side effects.
And that's our second bridge that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage.
It is really being able to understand the information processes underlying biology and developing key tools that can then change those processes.
For example, we have tools now that can actually change the expression of your genes.
Something called RNA interference, which we talk about in the book, can actually turn a gene off.
We send in these little RNA fragments that latch onto the messenger RNA from a gene, which destroys it and actually prevents a gene from being expressed.
One gene, these genes are actually little software programs, and one of them called the fat insulin receptor gene says hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.
And these genes evolved tens of thousands of years ago.
Right.
So what would happen if you turned that particular gene off?
Well, there was tried at the Johnson Diabetes Center on rats.
They turned off the fat insulin receptor gene in the fat cells.
And these mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim.
They didn't get diabetes.
They didn't get heart disease.
They actually lived 20% longer.
They got the health benefits of caloric restriction, which is something we know extends life and provides good health, while doing the opposite of caloric restriction.
So that'd be a pretty cool drug if people could eat as much as they want and remain slim and actually get the health benefits of being slim.
So there are many genes that play a role in disease.
There are genes that play a role in aging.
And we have a tool now, actually just emerged in the last couple of years, RNA interference, which allows us to turn genes off.
Gene therapy, which allows us to actually insert new genes, is also making progress or exciting new ways of being able to place genes at the right place on a chromosome, which has been one of the problems with gene therapy.
We also have the means of inhibiting enzymes.
I mean, for example, one drug, which we talk about in Fantastic Voyage, called torsitroby, which is actually now in phase three trials, it turns off a very specific enzyme that destroys the good HDL, the good cholesterol called HDL in the blood.
By simply inhibiting that enzyme, people's HDL levels, the good cholesterol, soars, and that has a beneficial effect on slowing down or stopping atherosclerosis, which is the cause of heart attacks.
So, I mean, without hanging our hats on any one specific drug, because we need to let these trials continue, there are hundreds of these developments in process because we now have the tools to turn off an enzyme or add an enzyme, turn off a gene.
I wonder, we've got to take a break here with the bottom of the air.
I wonder if there is, though, the possibility in the near future of that magic bullet, that one moment when a genetic scientist actually manages to turn off the aging process.
Literally, just turn off the aging process, and that's it, and you don't get any older.
Think how that could change the world.
And that could happen in your lifetime.
unidentified
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Got to pay your dues if you want to see It's all coming to you now You know it don't come easy You
know it don't come easy You know it don't come easy Got to pay your dues if you want to see the blues And you know it don't come easy You don't have to shout or leave The vows you can even play them easy Forget about the past And all
your sorrow If the future won't pass It will soon be your tomorrow To talk with Art Bell from the wildcard line in area code 7757271295.
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And as the song says, your tomorrows get here very quickly, so it's something to consider.
How about you?
want to live forever?
All right, Ray, I understand that your book reasonably illustrates to a person how to get to the point where something, some big breakthrough may occur, how to live long enough to get to that point.
I mean, I think it's going to come in a couple of decades.
And that's why it's very important, particularly people our age in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, to really be aggressive in taking care of our health so that we'll be in good shape when these things happen.
We'll have other developments that will enable us to provide for a larger population.
Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, these developments will provide for very substantial economic growth.
Right, could it get to the point where somebody who just barely makes it, let's say, and they're 90 years old and along comes the magic bullet, would they then probably be frozen at 90 or would regression be possible?
Well, you know, I'm very opposed to the prohibitions and restrictions.
I think stem cell research is very important.
Ultimately, the holy grail of sort of cell therapies is something called transdifferentiation.
Rather than taking stem cells, which has somebody else's DNA, you know, what would really be beneficial is to take my own skin cells and turn them into other types of cells, smart cells, pancreatic allot cells that have my DNA, and in the process actually pick ones that don't have any DNA errors,
so they'll be DNA corrected, extend what are called the telomeres, which are indications of how old those cells are, and create basically youthful, regenerated, DNA-corrected cells with my own DNA.
Now, that's actually been done in a petri dish.
Scientists just in the past couple years have actually taken human skin cells and turned them into immune system cells and nerve system cells.
Because, you know, what is the difference between different types of cells?
They all have the same DNA.
Different genes are expressed, and we're actually learning how to control that gene expression process.
So these are some of the technologies that are in development now that we're learning to master in this second bridge of biotechnology, which is in the early stages.
But it's going to progress a lot more quickly than people realize.
As we talked about earlier, the power of these technologies is doubling every year.
Moore's law is really just one example of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which is that all information technologies grow exponentially, basically doubling their power every year.
And Moore's Law, with regard to computers, means the shrinking of transistors on an integrated circuit.
That will hit a wall, but then we'll go to another paradigm, which is three-dimensional molecular computing, which will continue that progression.
And Moore's Law was not the first, but actually the fifth paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing.
But we also see it in any other area, not just computing.
You're probably familiar with Bill Joy's arguments about the downsides of some of these technologies, but he actually got those ideas from my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Well, I mean, take this whole biotechnology revolution.
We've talked about some of the great benefits of understanding the disease and aging processes, overcoming heart disease and cancer, and extending aging.
The downside is it also provides a set of tools that a bioterrorist could use to create a new virus that spread easily, was deadly and stealthy.
knowledge to do that the tools to do that are actually more widespread than the tool to create an attack you know that a bomb i don't even have a little bit there is a way of It could target that way too, couldn't it?
Well, first of all, in my view, these kinds of prohibitions end up being like stones in a stream.
The flow of progress just goes around them.
Stem cell research itself has continued, despite it's not actually a ban on stem cells, it's a ban on Government funding.
It's continued in this country and certainly overseas.
And then embryonic stem cell research is not the only type of cell therapy.
And cell therapies itself is only one type of biotechnology.
I mean, in our book, Fantastic Voyage, we talk about a dozen different very exciting ideas about biotechnology.
Stem cells is one part of one of those ideas, and that's continuing.
So it's not, I mean, I think I'm certainly opposed to the prohibitions and the restrictions, and I think it's important research, and we're learning about gene expression through stem cell research.
And I think you will see some changes.
In fact, there's some very creative ideas now that actually create stem cells without the involvement of embryos, which will get around the ethical issues.
I think you will see this type of research continue.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't trust the Chinese, Ray, but with some of the cautions that you just talked about and the Chinese working like crazy on this, the average person would say to themselves, maybe the Chinese aren't our best friends at some point.
A key issue is the one I got back to, I referred to before, that we're actually pretty close to developing drugs that could combat viruses in general and broad-spectrum antiviral medications.
We need to really accelerate that work.
I testified before Congress recently suggesting that we spend tens of billions of dollars to finish that job quickly so that we have those tools before we need them.
Nobody was interested, but that doesn't seem to be the political motivation to do it.
I mean, we want to have those solutions in hand before some bioterrorist challenges us.
I mean, most people died of infectious disease and accidents.
Now people are mostly surviving those, for the most part.
So now we're confronting degenerative diseases, things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke.
And these are things that you don't catch just walking down the street one day.
They're actually, even in somebody 20 or 30, these processes have started and they're picking up speed.
And what we talk about in Fantastic Voyage is to really see where are you in the progression of these processes.
How advanced is your atherosclerosis?
Do you have early precursors of cancer?
Do you have early insulin resistance that could lead to diabetes?
And we provide information on tests that you can easily do by yourself or with your physician to really find out where you are so that you can do something about it before you take that last step off the cliff.
I mean, 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
I did the conventional treatment, made things worse.
I came up with a program that overcame my diabetes.
About five years ago, I met Dr. Grossman and actually went through a very extensive, he has a two-day executive evaluation at his Frontier Medical Clinic, Frontier Medical Institute in Denver, and really was able to refine that program.
And then working together with him, you know, we've refined our ideas and put it in this book, Fantastic Voyage.
So, I mean, I would recommend people, you know, follow our program.
We provide a very easy-to-understand program to find out your own issues and develop a personalized program.
If somebody wants a really intensive understanding of their own health and how to optimize it, I would suggest they do what I did and actually go out to Frontier Medical, which is fmiclinic.com, and have this two-day executive evaluation and get a personalized program that you can then follow at home.
Well, right now we're in the era of what I call narrow AI.
We have hundreds of systems that are as good as people for narrow tasks, like detecting credit card fraud or diagnosing an electrocardiogram or blood cell images or flying an airplane, landing an airplane, making financial investment decisions.
I mean, I could list a hundred things which people used to do and which computers now routinely do actually at better equal or better performance to humans.
My date for when computers will have the full range of human intelligence in which you could interview like you're interviewing me and really be convinced that you're dealing with a human-like intelligence, which is the Turing test, that's 2029.
By that time we'll have computers that equal or exceed the basic computational capacity of the human brain.
We will have completed the reverse engineering of the brain.
It's one thing we'll have nanobots, nanorobots that can go inside the capillaries of the brain and scan the brain from inside.
We'll actually understand the principles of operation of how the brain works.
We'll be able to apply that to these very powerful computers.
That there could be something that I could be interviewing just the way I'm interviewing you right now, getting the kinds of responses or even better than you're giving me right now from a machine.
and i i wouldn't know the difference the voice would be right i mean that that is like the classical test for how to determine human level intelligence and machine that that's what alan tern came up with in nineteen 2029.
2029.
All right, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour.
By 2029, I wonder if I'll make it to my first machine interview.
That'd be so cool, wouldn't it?
And now, when he doesn't have a name, but he'll be fascinating for the next three hours.
I give you R32.
I don't know.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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Happy and I'm smiling.
Walking miles to drink your water.
You know I'd love to love you.
And above.
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To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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Well, you know, actually, what's really going to happen is we're going to merge with our machines.
I mean, in Fantastic Voyage, we talk about the third bridge, which is nanotechnology, and the killer app is nanobots or nano-robots.
We'll be able to send millions of them into the capillaries of your brain.
They'll keep you healthy from inside your body by killing pathogens and so forth, but they'll also communicate with your biological neurons and actually extend our intelligence.
So that even biological humans like you and I will be enhancing our technology through this very intimate integration with our technology.
It's the nature of non-biological intelligence that it basically doubles in power every year, whereas our biological intelligence is fixed.
So ultimately, when we get to the 2030s, it's going to be the non-biological portion of our intelligence That predominates.
But it's also important to understand that the nature of machine is going to be different.
Right now, when you say machine, you think of something that's much less sophisticated, less complicated, less subtle, less supple than, say, a human being.
The nature of a machine is going to change.
Machines will actually be as subtle and as intelligent and as complex and deep and funny as human beings.
Let's say we achieve that, and I understand the implications of what you're saying.
Go back to iRobot and look at the premise presented.
You know, the three laws of robotics.
By the way, do you think those three laws are reasonable?
Is it reasonable that if you had something of that intelligence, that much intelligence, that you would lay down those three laws as the basic premise operating system?
Well, we actually have practical applications of that.
I mean, there's an FDA-approved implant that we talked about in Fantastic Voyage, and this exists today, that replaces the neurons that are destroyed by Parkinson's disease.
And the latest version of this neural implant actually allows you to upgrade the software for your neural implant from outside the patient.
And the biological neurons near this computer that are placed in people's brains receive signals from the computer and are just as they used to get signals from the biological neurons that used to be there before they were destroyed by Parkinson's.
Now, the threshold today is that we're overcoming certain diseases, but ultimately we'll actually go beyond our biological capabilities through this sort of intimate merger with our technology.
saying it will be human, it will be part of We actually, we talk about this in Fantastic Voyage, how our technology actually is a continuation of the evolutionary process that led to the technology creating species in the first place.
to come into being i you know i I don't know how I feel about what you're describing as a possible future where man will take as an evolutionary step a sort of a mating with machines, and it will seem natural.
But I can tell you right now, Ray, for example, you're being heard throughout the entire nation, but just fine, right on through the Bible Belt, Ray.
And there's a whole bunch of people there that would have a lot to say about some of the things you've talked about.
For example, chips, implanted chips, that sort of thing.
They have incredible.
I can tell you right now, you give out your email address if you have the honies to do that, and you'll get some email, and you'll see what I mean.
I've dialogued with people from many different kinds of backgrounds, and there actually is not religious opposition or opposition from conservative religious folks, for example, to this FDA implant for people with Parkinson's disease.
Human beings are not just fruit hanging from the tree vine to fall on the ground.
I mean, we are the species that seeks to solve problems, that seeks to go beyond our limitations.
We didn't stay in the ground.
We didn't stay in the planet.
We have not stayed with the limitations of biology.
We've been pushing human life expectancy.
And that's really why we sort of express in Fantastic Voyage this urgency to use today's knowledge to stay in good shape, because you don't want to be the last person on the line to the theater to not get in to the theater of health, which biotechnology and nanotechnology are going to bring to us.
So you think the opposition to this whole idea, and I'm talking about life extension, the possibility of living forever, toying with genetics, I mean, there are a bunch of people out there, Ray, that think that it's all unnatural and wrong.
It's important to understand that if I describe the world in 2020 or 2030, it's not as if we're going to wake up one day and take this huge leap to that world.
We're going to get there day to time.
And there are new developments, and they may seem controversial at first.
I mean, consider new reproductive technologies like test tube babies.
That was very controversial for six months.
But then people got used to it, and now it's just part of the landscape.
My view is that the FDA really slows down these innovations.
And what we're not giving enough weight is what is the cost of delaying life-saving treatments.
If you have a drug that could really reduce heart attacks and the FDA, because it's getting all this pressure to be careful, delays it an extra year, two years, three years, how many people are going to die as a result of that?
But that seems to get no political pressure because people have been dying from these diseases for a long time, and nobody blames the FDA for dying from a disease, whereas a few people die of a drug that's approved, and then there's congressional hearings and all kinds of political fallout.
So they're in tremendous pressure not to approve things.
And if they don't approve something, nobody gives them a hard time for failing to approve something.
God forbid they approve something, and then some people die.
A few people die in gene therapy trials and their congressional hearings, and all the research was stopped for six months.
I mean, how many, you could make a strong case that hundreds of thousands of people ultimately will die as a result of that delay, but you can't name them because it's a very diffuse phenomenon.
So in my view, we need to balance the cost of delay.
And nothing is risk-free.
And God knows these diseases like heart disease and cancer, which we're gaining the tools to make progress against, are not free of risk.
I mean, millions of people die each year across the world from these diseases.
If all limitations were removed on stem cell research of all the different lines, including the ones that are now forbidden, and all other, if the just virtually wasn't there and people could turn out things and just put them directly into human consumption, would that speed all this up tremendously?
If you heard, and you followed all of this, obviously, you've been through the regimen and so forth.
If you heard, Ray, that the Chinese had developed something incredible.
I'll just use the Chinese as an example.
It could be the French or anybody else.
Not the French.
And they had a radical life extension.
Would you be so motivated as to and get so excited as to go to China and get this treatment if it was available and to hell with the FDA and whatever all else?
I mean, general, these technologies and companies, whether they're Chinese, French, or American companies, are worldwide companies and serve the worldwide market.
And certainly China, their whole business model is to export their technologies and capabilities around the world.
So generally, you don't have to go to another country unless something is banned here.
What I'm saying is if there was some magic bullet that the FDA hadn't proved, therefore it wasn't available in America and you could travel to get it, you seem to be pursuing very hard life extension.
I would assume you would get on a plane if you had to and go.
I mean, in the hypothetical situation that I had some fatal disease and the only treatment was available somewhere else, if I was actually convinced that that was a good thing, well, sure, I would consider that.
But I think the really important thing, and what we talk about in a Fantastic Voyage, is to avoid getting into those quandaries.
These things, heart disease, cancer, they don't strike you out of the blue.
And you can actually find out where you are.
We talk about how you can test yourself to see where you are in the progression of these diseases and stop those processes before they get to a critical point.
Because the medical profession, the trillion dollars we spent or more on medical care is really after clinical expression of these diseases.
I mean, that's what the medical profession is trained to do.
And very often that's too late.
That's like waiting until you fall off the cliff.
It's a lot easier to deal with these things early on before they've really manifested themselves in disease.
You know me, I'm kind of geeky, so I don't think it's a, I don't know, evil thing or a wicked thing at all.
Even turning man, ultimately, into a man machine might be okay.
But I know a lot of people out there think it's wicked indeed.
They see these chips and they attach numbers to them, like three sixes.
A lot of people like that.
Wonder if that might be you.
we're going to open the lines for ray krizwaile in a moment Well, when you talk about artificial intelligence, again, because I just saw it and because I was so impressed by the, I don't know, the incredible animations in iRobot.
Nevertheless, there I am with iRobot again as we talk about this.
And, of course, ultimately, and this is a good question for Ray, ultimately, the robots decided that all the three laws, considered the three laws of robotics, it would be the perfect circle of protection for human beings.
The robots decided, within the context of those laws, that human beings were doing things that were basically so harmful and so detrimental to continued human existence that for our own benefit and our own,
well, safety, that everything would have to change, that the way we do biz here on Earth, you know, the polluting, the wars that we have, all those things that might put a big old dent in life extension, no matter what you do, that these things were so dangerous that they would have to take over and make it right.
Ray, why is there reason to believe that wouldn't happen?
But, Ray, if we can create machines, you said, as intelligent as people by 2029, then one would imagine by 2059 we'll be well into the area of much more intelligent than people.
We should really come up with a new word because these are not any kind of machine that we've ever met.
But that's really the key message.
We talk about that to some extent in Fantastic Voyage in the third bridge.
I mean, that's what we're really trying to get to, to this era of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, where we'll have these very powerful technologies.
I mean, enabling us to radically extend our longevity is just one implication.
We're also going to greatly be able to expand our experiences, for example, through full immersion virtual reality and also expand our intelligence.
Well, again, Ray, how would we protect against a greater intelligence than ourselves deciding that we're indulging self-destructive behavior and then changing that?
Our species seeks to improve ourselves, improve our world.
I mean, the idea that natural is good.
I mean, the tsunami was natural.
You know, we try to improve human existence and human experience and avoid some of the harshness of nature.
I mean, nature was very harsh.
People lived in caves thousands of years ago.
Even 200 years ago, life was extremely hard.
I mean, read Dickens, what life was like a few hundred years ago.
For 99% of the human population, it was extremely harsh.
So we've liberated ourselves to some extent from that harshness.
We've extended human longevity from 37 to now almost 80 in 200 years.
And I think we're going to see human longevity take a huge, very rapid rise As we master the processes underlying biology, and we're developing the tools to actually change those processes to overcome disease and the processes underlying aging.
Now, what I'm getting at here is, you know, as time goes on, technology exponentiates.
That seems to be, you know, that's a given.
Now, in the movie 2001, where they've sped up in the craft and they're going light speed, and the guy winds up in the room with his grandfather, or that grandfatherly being of himself, himself, and that child offspring.
The three of them were in that room together, as if time had sped up, like everything I understand in the cosmos is circular.
And how you're relating all of that to all of this.
And as time speeds up like that, it's 4.30 in the morning here, and I was on my way to bed.
You're giving different examples of exponentials, and exponential growth is seductive.
It seems like things are moving very slowly, and then suddenly they explode.
And you alluded to the fact that technology does that, and you said that was obvious.
I agree with you, but not everybody understands that.
I mean, one of the main themes that we articulate in this book that Dr. Grossman and I wrote, Fantastic Voyage, is that these technologies grow exponentially.
And a lot of even sophisticated scientists, even Nobel Prize winners, don't get that.
I've had arguments about, because they feel they've solved 1% of a problem over the last year, and it'll take 100 years to solve the problem.
Our understanding of biology is growing exponentially.
We're doubling our knowledge of biology, doubling the amount of genetic data we're sequencing, doubling our knowledge of the brain every year.
So, you know, 10 years from now, we'll be a very different world.
We'll have very powerful tools because of this exponential growth.
And that really should provide the motivation to stay healthy today so that we're in good shape when we have those more powerful technologies.
Well, you know, people look back idyllically at the wonderful natural life we had 200 years ago, unencumbered by technology.
But if you do any reading about what life was really like 200 years ago, you realize that, you know, a single misfortune could put a family into desperation.
There were no social safety nets.
Misfortune was all around you because a simple infection would be a disaster since we had no antibiotics.
I agree with you, but there are still people who say this is not natural.
Frankly, let's just cut right to it, that you live your natural life, Ray, and then you die, and then you progress, you go to heaven, your soul moves out of its physical body, and something very natural occurs.
But I mean, there are people who say that, nevertheless, these diseases and the suffering is part of life that they accept or even look forward to, end stage as much as middle stage and beginning stage.
I mean, do you think that if there really was an alternative, those views would change very quickly and those people that believe that, and there are a lot of them, Ray, would just suddenly say, oh, I don't believe that stuff anymore.
Well, you know, I mean, how many people really are willing to relinquish all of, you know, medical science and technology altogether?
I mean, in general, if somebody has a disease, most people, whether they're of faith or not, will seek the most sophisticated treatment that they have access to to alleviate suffering.
And I think there's a general consensus in the idea of progress, of overcoming what afflicts us.
Yeah, Ray, I have a question regarding the stem cell issue.
Are you familiar with whether or not they're working on being able to, for instance, create joints, human joints, either using a template and using stem cells that direction and directly injecting stem cells to improve joints?
I have severe degenerative joints, and I sure would like to be able to stick around, but sticking around is kind of a painful option at this point.
And I was kind of hoping that there's an option out there using the stem cell research to replace cartilage and stuff like that.
Well, I mean, there is experimentation with using stem cells to regrow all kinds of tissues, even nervous system tissue.
And there are successful experiments in animals.
I think we're quite a ways from practical therapies in human beings.
I think we're going to circumvent the whole embryonic issue.
There's some very interesting proposals for being able to actually create stem cells without embryos, or at least without destroying embryos.
The most interesting thing is actually be able to harness your own cells, either use adult stem cells in your own body that have your DNA, or even turn your skin cells into other types of cells, like cartilage or whatever cells you need.
Right, and we've actually done some preliminary experiments, we, I mean the medical scientific community, in a Petri dish of taking skin cells and turning them into several other types of cells by controlling the gene expression.
So these are the kinds of things that will come to pass, I believe, in the next 10 to 15 years.
And some of the early fruits of this are actually already in the testing pipeline.
We're learning the means of actually directly controlling the information processes, blocking a key enzyme or blocking a gene.
And we talk about probably 50 different projects like that in Fantastic Voyage.
Well, I think there's no question that human technology has trumped evolution.
I mean, we are making, we are already making dramatic changes in the nature of human life.
And biological evolution works on such a slow scale that we will be vastly changing the nature of human life long before the extremely slow pace of biological evolution could possibly affect human beings.
The cutting edge of the evolutionary process is not biological evolution now, it's technological evolution.
Well, when we fully reverse engineer biology, which I believe we will do over the next couple of decades, we will have the means of modifying biology and changing it any way we want.
I mean, adding another appendage is probably not something that we'd want to do, but what we will want to do is overcome disease, take the 10 or 12 processes underlying aging and stop them and reverse them, enhance our mental functioning, our emotional capabilities.
This is what's coming, and that's why in Fantastic Voyage, we spent two-thirds of the book on how to take care of yourself now.
I mean, right now, we do all our thinking on intra-neuronal connections that process at electrochemical speeds, chemical switching speeds of a few hundred feet per second.
It's a million times slower than electronic speeds.
And that was all wrapped up in the genetic world, I believe.
unidentified
Don't know where I've been so blue Don't know what's come over you You found someone new And don't make my breath blue I'll be fine when you go home I'll just laugh
all night long Say it is untrue And don't make my breath blue Somewhere in the woods we fell from
this guy's dog And realized that eternal day this is where this guy's from here It's 2am It's 2am It's 2am Fear is gone It's 2am It's 2am It's not so warm And don't make my breath It's time to take a chance
Yeah, there's no one loose Signs in my head Grab my blue signs All circuits are dead When I need cold My whole life spins into a prison And my circuits are the twilight zone The hitches in my house Tears are getting cold I'll be fine when you're the one who's in the sky
And I'm gonna go through the middle of all And I'm gonna step into the twilight zone And I'm gonna go through the twilight zone To talk with Art Bell.
Fall the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Maybe the big robotic revolution isn't going to happen.
Not exactly the way we thought it might in science fiction.
Maybe, as Ray Kurzweil is suggesting, I believe, we are simply going to take a natural evolutionary leap with machines.
We're going to join together with machines, and they will be as human, I guess, as we are, in a way.
I mean, they will be part of us, so they will be the evolved human being, and that all of this will be a natural, if not inevitable, process ahead of us.
I can assure you though, not everybody agrees with that concept.
First, it starts with our book, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which isn't very expensive and really provides a comprehensive guide.
Nutrition, I mean, the mainstay of the nutritional program is vegetables and a small amount of fruit and so on, and that's not very expensive.
Have a meeting, you know, walk there rather than take a taxi that'll actually save you money.
We do have a website, Fantastic-Voyage.net, that actually has a whole summary of the recommendations on there.
And then we have a site, rayandterry.com, where we actually provide basic supplements, which actually costs well under $1,000 a year for the whole supplement program.
Now, that's for a basic program.
One of the key messages in the book that we describe in detail is to find out what your issues are to develop a personalized program.
So, for example, you have, let's say, a high C-reactive protein that was in the news last week, you'd want to get that down and take more omega-3 fats, and we have a supplement for that.
And by that, I mean I've had doctors on the show who are saying that injections of hormone growth and things at that level also now are part, legitimate part of this, and they get a little pricey.
They not only lower cholesterol, but they actually appear to lower inflammation, which is also an independent cause Of both heart disease and other diseases.
But if you take statin drugs, it's important to supplement with coenzyme Q10 because statin drugs deplete the body of coenzyme Q10.
And that's something we talk about in Fantastic Voyage that it's generally not well known.
And a lot of doctors don't tell their patients to do that.
And it's a very, and a lot of the side effects that you get from statin drugs are because of this depletion, and it's easily rectified by supplementing with coenzyme Q10.
Yeah, I mean, the Protestant ethic supports the idea of work, creative work, bettering the world.
The Puritans and the Shakers were actually very inventive people and created inventions that better society.
I think a lot of the thinking that emerges from religious thought is supportive of the idea of progress and bettering the world that we live in, not just being subject to bettering by nature without seeking to improve or overcome human suffering.
Well, you know, our technology and our reach as humans through our technology is expanding exponentially.
It may seem from today's perspective, or what will be feasible many decades from now, may seem from today's perspective to be infinite, but actually, you know, when we get there, it won't be infinite.
Our conception of God, at least, God is described as being infinite in knowledge and creativity and intelligence.
So I would say that evolution, particularly technological evolution today, moves in what you could call a spiritual direction because it moves towards greater intelligence and greater creativity, greater beauty.
And you're a positive guy, Ray, but there's a race on.
On the one side, there's the Ray Kurzweils and Dr. Grossmans who are trying to do good things, prolong life, and make the world a better place for all of us.
And on the other side, this is the race part, we have people who wish us dead.
They don't want to make deals with us, Ray.
They've given up on that part.
They just want to blow us up or extinguish us or whatever.
The world is a really dangerous place, Ray.
So there's a race on, and I suppose you're optimistic about who's going to win it.
However, I think you'd agree that the benefit outweighs the danger.
Very few people, if any, are saying let's do away with the Internet because of destruction.
We do have a technological immune system that has emerged that, while it doesn't save us from all of the destruction of sulfur viruses, does protect us from a lot of it.
And I think we'll see the same thing in these other technologies.
We need to accelerate the development of, for example, broad antiviral technologies so that we can protect ourselves from a malevolent use of this technology.
Well, it's a good argument for continuing stem cell research, because these technologies will enable us to protect ourselves, and it is a race.
You know, it is feasible to create a bioengineered virus, and I don't think we'll see that very soon, but ultimately, we probably will encounter that, and we'd better have the defenses ready for when that happens.
See, Ray, the kind of world that you say we're on the edge of is the kind of world that Dr. Michu Kaku describes as a stage one, for example.
We're zero, type zero now, and we'd be type one.
We'd make that leap.
Recently, he's up the odds, and he's a little more optimistic, but for years he told me the chance of our getting, you know, he looks at all the stars and all the planets that we can see, and those we can't even see, and imagines one of the reasons we might not have had contact yet from anywhere else is because a lot of civilizations have come to the point where we are now, or near that point, and instead of making the leap to type one, the optimistic scenario, the more likely scenario is that they kill themselves.
I think it's possible that a civilization might destroy itself when it gets to a particularly powerful stage, but it's hard to know the assumption underlying the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that there must be, since there are trillions of planets out there, there must be millions of civilizations.
But that aside for a moment, you referred to the fact that I've written a book or two or four, actually.
One of them I'm very concerned about, Ray, and that is if you look at the environmental state of the world, I'm actually far more concerned about that than an irrational act of destruction, but you can't rule that out.
I'm concerned about, I don't know, the melting of the North Pole and the changes that are going on right now on our globe.
All of that is sort of industrial error, pollution.
This third stage that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage, nanotechnology, will actually enable us to reverse a lot of that.
For example, we'll be able to create solar panels that can actually create all of the energy we need.
If we converted 0.07% of the sunlight that falls in the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs.
We can't do that today because solar panels are heavy, expensive, and inefficient.
Nanotechnology will enable us to create very inexpensive, very efficient solar panels where we will store the energy in nano-engineered fuel cells and actually meet our energy needs in a renewable way without pollution.
There are ways that we can use nanotechnology to reverse the pollution that industrialization has created.
And there's many different types, and it's a long discussion, but there are types that are 100 times greater than the oil we've been using, but they're more expensive to get at, like shale oil and so on.
So energy from fossil fuels will get more expensive gradually, possibly over the next decade or so.
But that's actually going to create more pressure to accelerate these new technologies that are renewable.
I mean, we may have some short-term economic pressures because I really see the golden era of nanotechnology-based energy, also nanotechnology in the body that we talk about in Fantastic Voyage, nanotechnology for manufacturing is probably the 2020s.
So we do have to use some other technologies like fossil fuels in the meantime.
There are some new technologies there as well that will enable us to access some of these more plentiful technologies.
For example, coal can be converted into energy without pollution, and they're sending demonstration plants to do exactly that.
We need to invest more in these new technologies, which I think will have very substantial payoff.
I mean, the Chinese now and the rest of the world rightfully want the kind of comforts and technological level that we have here in the U.S. And they're quickly moving in that direction.
The problem is, of course, that with that, they're running into all of the things that we have, like emissions from vehicles and all the rest of it.
So it is indeed a race.
And it's going to be interesting to see how that race turns out.
Anyway, hold tight, Ray.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Ray Chris Weil is my guess.
And we're talking about where technology is taking us.
And it's really an interesting place, according to Ray, depending on how you feel about it.
It's not a world where robots run everything and do everything for us, like many of us imagined.
Not that world.
But a world instead where the machines and mankind, in a very natural kind of way, merge.
And that is our evolution.
Evolution is in our hands.
Think about that.
We will be our own gods.
unidentified
I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
Oh, love, and I've been waiting for this.
And how she gave me love
Some bell in the morning when I was drinking.
I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it end
A velvet mornin'when I'm strayed Flowers growin'on a hill Drivin'flies and daffodils Learn from us very much
Look at us, but do not touch Phaedra is my name To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
I'm not sure what an optimal design would be, but probably not one that includes heart attacks, cancer, and all the other things that kill us and or make us sick.
You would say, I suppose, that nature's design is not optimal if it includes all of those things.
Ray, do you agree with that, that it's not optimal, that nature is not dying?
I mean, nature is remarkable, but it's not optimal.
I mean, this is an issue that actually Dr. Grossman and I discuss at great length in our book, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever.
One of the key issues is that when our genes evolved tens of thousands of years ago, a lot of things were different.
It was not in the interest of the species for you and I to live much past child-rearing age because we didn't really contribute anything and we just used up the precious resources.
It was in the interest of the species for our bodies to hold on to every calorie.
We talked about this before.
We'd like to actually change that for a minute.
We've now identified that it's one gene, the fat insulin receptor gene, that controls that.
If we could block that in the fat cells, we could eat as much as we want and remain slim.
And that's been demonstrated in mice.
We talk about that experiment in Fantastic Ways.
There's a lot of things we'd like to change in our genes, and we're actually getting the tools now to change our genes.
So that the biotechnology revolution, which is in its early stages already, will reach its full fruition 10 or 15 years from now.
We'll have the means of actually changing these ancient genetic programs to be optimal so that we don't have heart attacks, we don't have cancer, diabetes.
There's actually a lot more we can do already right now with today's knowledge.
This is what we call Bridge One in Fantastic Voyage, is to really dramatically slow down these disease and aging processes.
Very few people really need to get a heart attack.
We can avoid the vast majority of these degenerative diseases through nutrition, through a sensible supplement program, exercise, and so on.
And we describe that in a lot of detail in the book.
Well, you know, the argument for cryogenics is it's a good insurance policy and that the alternative would be to have no hope if you die.
You know, I find it hard enough to advance my interests when I'm alive and kicking, and I find it fairly daunting to consider advancing my interests if I'm frozen somewhere.
So I think that's a personal decision.
I wouldn't try to influence people's decisions.
Really, what Dr. Grossman and I advocate is that you do everything possible to achieve radical life extension, not by being frozen, but by being healthy today, so that we can be healthy 10, 15 years from now when you have these very powerful news.
Well, I mean, AI had some positive elements of it.
The problem I had with the movie, and I have this with most features movies, is it took one change, in that case, human-level cyborgs, and put it on today's world as if nothing else is going to change.
There was no virtual reality.
The cars were the same.
There was no merging of human and machine.
Humans are just like they were today.
There's no advances in...
I mean, our third bridge in Fantastic Voyage is this nanotechnology AI revolution.
And we're going to be able to, for example, have full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system.
So you want to go in virtual reality, the nanobots, shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that you would be receiving in the virtual environment.
Then it feels just like you're in that environment.
You can choose from thousands of different environments to be with.
You can be in, you can go there with other people.
I mean, you and I right now are in auditory virtual reality, but we'll be able to add all of the other senses and have experiences with people in these virtual environments.
So that's one way in which we will expand our experiences.
Yes, but doesn't that lead away from the physical?
And like in the song in the year 2525, eventually we're just vegetative intellectual entities that are now part of machines and we're operating fabulously, but not in any way physically, particularly.
We've evolved into a complete mental being with our machines.
We'll also be physical, and we'll be enhancing ourselves physically as well.
In fact, all three bridges that we talk about in Fantasy Voyage enhance ourselves physically.
We can certainly do that with our health immediately with Bridge 1.
And then with biotechnology, we can perfect our biology and keep our physical bodies going so they don't catastrophically collapse from heart attacks and cancer and so on.
And then with nanotechnology, we can actually extend ourselves physically and make ourselves stronger, more capable, more resilient.
I just want to start off saying that I love the show.
Don't get to listen as much as I like to.
But the only problem I could see with all of this nanotechnology such would be that once individual control of our lives is given up to pretty much the Internet, what degree of free will do we have anymore?
In fact, I wrote in the 1980s that the decentralized communication that was coming would probably destroy the Soviet Union.
And we did see that.
We saw a great move towards democracy through the 1990s.
And even at other levels, I mean, for example, we talked about in Fantastic Voyage how patients go into their doctor's office armed with knowledge from the Internet.
They're not just dependent on their doctors for all wisdom and knowledge.
If somebody has a chronic disease, they join discussion groups of people around the world and really learn a great deal about that.
So the Internet is very democratizing.
It's liberating.
It can really enhance our freedom and our individual power.
And because it's decentralized, I actually see it as something that supports individual initiative.
Okay, International Line, you're on the air with Ray Kriswell.
Hello.
Oh, whoops, I didn't push a button.
International Line, sorry, you're on the air now.
Hello there, International Line.
Speak.
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Okay.
unidentified
I recently read an article about how AIDS, there could be a cure for AIDS on the horizon within the next couple of years.
And my grandfather wrote a story a couple years back, a novel, about how AIDS, there was a group within the Catholic Church that were conspiring to eliminate AIDS researching doctors to hold back the vaccine because it was God's way of eliminating the gays.
What types of groups do you think are there like this out there?
I mean, we have a long history of medical progress, and we've extended our lives tremendously, and we've overcome many diseases.
And the second bridge that we talk about in Fantastic Boys is really understanding very precisely each step in diseases like AIDS or heart disease and so on, and being able to attack them with very precise smart weapons that are not indiscriminate.
I mean, these old drugs that we're finding now that have these problems were not designed that way.
They're really very blunt instruments that may have some benefit, but as we're finding out, have many side effects.
These new drugs, done through rational drug design, where we can attack one precise enzyme or one antigen on the surface of a cancer cell and so on, are much more precise.
And while it doesn't mean that every one of these will work, these are very powerful tools that will enable us to make very substantial progress.
I mean, there are Muddite and reactionary fundamentalist reactions to progress in general.
I mean, we can see that in the world today.
The biggest danger is fundamentalism in general trying to oppose progress and use technology against us using sort of asymmetric warfare.
And I think the way to combat that, aside from fostering our democratic values in general, is to really hasten the development of the defensive technologies.
Right now, that would mean trying to develop antiviral technologies, medications that can combat viral diseases, because that's the biggest danger over the next decade.
My question for the caller is that I understand where you're going with all of this, you know, these technologies to help us, but it seems like that all of these technologies are really just kind of treating the symptoms and not the cause.
So my question is to you is, you know, with us constantly giving our power away to technology, don't you think we need to kind of go back to looking at why these things are happening, these illnesses in our life, that they're asking us to look deeper in our lives and what kind of problems we're having in our own lives?
Well, actually, if you read our book, Fantastic Voyage, you'll find we actually describe fundamentally how these diseases come about.
And we even talk about things like balance in life and stress management.
And we talk about nutrition and exercise and so on.
And really trying to address the fundamental causes of heart disease and cancer and so on, which are actually nutritional diseases and are caused by decades of the wrong diet.
So we do talk about that.
And as we actually understand and increasingly reverse engineer the processes underlying these diseases, as well as aging, ultimately we'll have from biotechnology much more powerful tools to actually stop and reverse these diseases and conditions and aging.
We talk about healthy carbs like vegetables, legumes, beans, lentils, and avoiding sugars and simple starches.
We talk about healthy fats like fish, olive oil, nuts, omega-3 fats, and avoiding unhealthy fats like trans fatty acids, excessive saturated fat.
So it's really a balanced program.
I mean, I love to eat, and I eat a lot, and I still remain slim because I eat the right foods, and I eat a very diverse diet.
And we really provide principles here.
We don't say, okay, this is what you're going to have for breakfast on Wednesday, because people have different tastes, different cuisines, and food, it does play a very important part in our lives and our ceremonies and our satisfaction every day.
So we provide a set of guidelines and really understanding of the role that nutrition plays in health.