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Nov. 25, 2006 - Art Bell

02:38:51

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Joel Garreau - Radical Evolution

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	From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, that'd be 7,107 islands in totality.
	Actually, you know, I don't know how many of those are occupied.
	I bid you good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
	Each and every one covered like a blanket by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell, here to escort you, my honor and pleasure to be escorting you, through the weekend days in the U.S.
	It's great to be here.
	Last night, we went to a Bee Gees concert, which was kind of neat.
	The Bee Gees were here in Manila, and it was the first time I had seen the Bee Gees.
	And while, of course, they're not all together anymore, who is, it was still the Bee Gees, and it was fun.
	Tonight's webcam is a picture we took a couple of days ago.
	Aaron spent endless hours decorating our Christmas tree.
	Christmas, of course.
	Thanksgiving came and went unnoticed, of course, here in the Philippines.
	It is not a holiday celebrated in the Philippines.
	Though I must say, the American Embassy closed up for it.
	But otherwise, it came and went unnoticed.
	Christmas, however, Is a monstrous holiday here in the Philippines.
	Absolutely monstrous.
	And if you think the U.S.
	is the only one that immediately after Thanksgiving begins Christmas preparations, boy are you wrong.
	They do it here like crazy.
	Now, there's one other item to share with you.
	News of the Philippine Islands.
	On the southern island of Mindanao, which is where the majority of the difficulty is with terrorism and that sort of thing, one of Abu Sayyaf's Main Lieutenants was nabbed by the Philippine Army yesterday, which, or today, I'm not sure which, which was a big strike on the War on Terror here in the Philippines.
	At any rate, the webcam is of our Christmas tree, the one she spent so many hours on, myself, Erin, and our two kitties.
	That constitutes the family, other than the one in the burner.
	Now, my antenna is an interesting story.
	I think I told you I snuck up on the roof, what now, a couple of weeks ago, and put up an antenna, which I then modified about six different times, requiring me to go up and climb up on the sort of the concrete area, I guess you'd call it, which is above the building, which is at the 200-foot level.
	So here I am.
	Up there constructing this monster of an antenna.
	It did turn out to be a monster.
	40 meter dipole, actually more like a 75 meter dipole.
	The hams out there will know how big that is.
	Pretty big.
	Pretty good size.
	About 60 feet on each side.
	And I firmly attached it sort of to the various aircraft warning lights that are up there.
	And I waited.
	You know, I thought, this is not going to stand.
	In other words, they're going to find it.
	A couple of weeks went by and they didn't find it, and finally my conscience got to me.
	So I went down there to the manager of the building and I said, can you come see me for a moment?
	And she came along with the engineer.
	And I took them up to the roof.
	And I said, that's my little bar, it's just a little wire, it won't hurt a thing.
	And they went, oh my god, did you put that up yourself?
	I said, well, yeah.
	And so, I don't know, they're probably going to make me take it down.
	They called requesting details, like, what time did you do that?
	Can you tell us what day and exactly what time you did that?
	Like, how did you get away with that?
	Or something, I don't know.
	I'm sure I will get some sort of letter from them soon.
	They said, well, you don't have to take it down right away.
	We'll check with the corporation and see if you can keep it up.
	So we'll see, but I have a feeling there's a letter on its way to me saying you must take that monstrosity down.
	Looking at the world news, never a fully pleasurable thing to do.
	Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a ceasefire Saturday.
	It's actually a positive story, sort of, as long as any ceasefires ever remain in place in that part of the world.
	To end a five-month Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants into the Jewish state, a step toward Possibly reviving long-stalled peace talks, the Israeli military said early Sunday that all of its troops had been withdrawn from the Gaza in the hours before 6 a.m., before the 6 a.m.
	ceasefire took effect.
	Police fired 50, get this, 50 rounds Saturday at a car of unarmed men leaving a bachelor party at a strip club, killing the groom on his wedding day in a shooting that drew a furious outcry from family members and community leaders alike.
	The stray bullets hit the car 21 times.
	That's a spray of bullets.
	21 times, after the vehicle, get this, rammed into an undercover officer, and then an unmarked NYPD minivan, twice, not once, but twice, according to police, the police commissioner would not say if the collisions were what prompted the police to open fire.
	Certainly, that would not, it seems like it wouldn't have justified that kind of response.
	But there may be more to it than we know.
	Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister is struggling to prevent sectarian violence from sending Iraq into a full-fledged civil war, and it sure seemed like one.
	He's facing strong criticism from top Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders alike as he prepares for a summit with President Bush next week.
	It sure is looking like a civil war, isn't it?
	Well, I'm sure you've all seen the story, the dying spy is said to accuse a Russian agent of his death.
	As he lay dying, an ex-Soviet spy poisoned in London named an alleged Russian agent that he feared had been targeting him and who he had previously told police was harassing him.
	A British newspaper said in a report published Sunday that Alexander Levenko, a former KGB agent and fierce critic of Russian President Putin, died Thursday night of heart failure after suddenly falling gravely ill from what doctors said was poisoning by a radioactive substance.
	Now, what is this with poisonings in Russia?
	Seems to be the way to do it.
	The problem with poison is that it takes so long that if you know who did you in, you've got time to tell.
	So it doesn't seem like a very effective method of assassination, certainly brutal, and certainly difficult for the poisonee, but leaving that person alive long enough to possibly tell who did it.
	Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans packed a major highway Saturday in a rally for opposition presidential candidate Manuel Rosales.
	One of the largest demonstrations against Chavez in years.
	Shouts of dare to change rose up from the dense crowd filling the highway for several miles and then spilling into nearby overpasses and streets in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
	The rally came eight days before the country's presidential elections.
	Now I was in Caracas, Venezuela.
	And that is one of the countries where I felt not at all comfortable.
	There's kind of a disquieting atmosphere in Caracas and I recall having a camera with me and of course like every tourist snapping at everything that came within my vision that looked interesting.
	And I recall snapping a picture of something or another in Caracas, and a guy on the street drew his fingers across his throat at me, like, take one more picture of that and you're dead meat.
	And so that sort of was my impression of Caracas.
	Michael Richards will appear on the Reverend Jesse Jackson's nationally syndicated radio program, now that ought to be something, to discuss his racist rant at a Los Angeles comedy club.
	The Associated Press has done an analysis and wonders if firms are crimping oil supplies.
	in the Keep Hope Alive program is now a chance to reach out and apologize to
	black community.
	Seth Jackson. The Associated Press has done an analysis and wonders if firms
	are crimping oil supplies. Well you'd think it was Texas they say. Dusty roads
	course the scrubland toward oil tanks and warehouses. Beefy men talk oil over
	burritos at lunch. Like grazing herds oil wells dip non-stop amid the tumbleweed
	or even into the asphalt of a parking lot.
	That's why the rumor sounded so wrong here in California's lower San Joaquin Valley, where petroleum has gushed up more riches than the whole gold brush combined.
	So why would Shell Oil Company simply close its Bakersfield refinery?
	Why scrap A profit maker.
	That is a very good question.
	Unless you expect the price of oil, perhaps you're upset at the fact that the price of oil has dropped in recent days, and you're simply going to shut down until the price of oil climbs to where you feel it's profitable to once again pump.
	In a moment we'll look at a bit of the other news.
	I found the following article incredibly interesting.
	Let's see how you do with it.
	Anybody familiar with the subject is well aware that UFO abduction reports almost always include accounts of physical examinations, right?
	Performed inside the craft, correct?
	The abductee usually lies naked and immobile on a flat table while one or more of a variety of physical operations are carried out.
	There is, however, one Virtually universal detail in these procedures that has never, to my knowledge, or the knowledge of the person who wrote this, been commented upon in any of the literature.
	The abductee never seems to feel any degree of shame or embarrassment about his or her nudity.
	One woman told that during an abduction in her very early adolescence, usually a time of great shyness and confusion about one's body, right?
	That she felt no more concern about her nakedness in the occupant's presence than she would have felt in the presence of her cat or tropical fish.
	This fact is even more surprising when one considers the many accounts in which several humans, sometimes strangers to one another, are naked together in the same craft.
	The woman is an example, one example, one who had been abducted along with an older brother and a younger sister.
	All three were nude, yet none seemed to feel anything at all about their shared and vulnerable condition.
	Fear of the UFO occupants alone does not explain any of this at all.
	There are a number of photos of Nazi concentration camp victims who, after being taken from their inhuman cattle car transport, were ordered to strip.
	Photographs reveal that even under these circumstances, these sad, weak, doomed men and women and children still instinctively attempted to cover their nudity with their hands and arms.
	With UFO abductees, something else, some kind of tranquilizing factor, appears to be at work.
	One can speculate that the abductee's calmness about their nakedness results from a combination of quasi-hypnotic trance states endemic to the abduction process and simply conditioning.
	If one has been abducted regularly since early childhood and has each time been undressed throughout the experience, one might come to expect it as a norm.
	A male abductee once put it to me this way, it's just the way it is.
	You never have your clothes on.
	You don't even think about it.
	Well, what insights can we derive from the abductee's oddly neutral reaction to their state of nakedness?
	A state apparently devoid of any sexual overtones or any embarrassment.
	First of all, the consistent appearance of this unexpected detail virtually destroys the basic argument invented by UFO debunkers.
	Many psychological theorists, both professional and amateur, have attempted to explain away all UFO abduction reports as fantasies of one kind or another.
	Correct?
	The most popular current version of this theory is that People invent these accounts to mask such disturbing events as childhood sexual abuse, incest, molestation at the hands of doctors, nurses, or babysitters, or rape experiences.
	Other people theorize a questionable borderline abductee type which they call, grandiosely, the fantasy-prone personality.
	While still others simply insist that these accounts are nothing more than disturbing dreams.
	If any of these theoretical explanations were true for even half of the UFO accounts that have been carefully investigated thus far, one would expect to find strong erotic overtones or outright shame, possibly embarrassment, described by literally hundreds of abductees as they recall their naked condition.
	If an abductee account is nothing more than a fantasy masking a rape or childhood seduction or molestation, the circumstances of undressing or being forcibly undressed should provide key traumatic moments in these narratives, but they don't.
	And I thought that was an extremely, extremely interesting article, and it certainly is true in all the years, in all the years, that I've been taking myself accounts of abductees And listening to them from the most famous, you know, abductee researchers in the world, this has never come up.
	Never!
	They're naked!
	And normally, under any circumstance, nakedness would certainly be a big cause of embarrassment.
	We'd attempt to hide, you know, put our hands over our privates, right?
	Men and women alike.
	But never, ever in abduction accounts is it even mentioned.
	So I thought whoever wrote this was right on the money.
	Dead right on the money.
	Why is it, what is it about abduction that absolutely strips, sorry for the metaphor, Takes that embarrassment and disintegrates it completely, so that it's not even part of the story, other than to say they're naked.
	They never said they were embarrassed, or, my God, my clothes are gone, I feel so vulnerable.
	None of that!
	Ever!
	So that's something to keep in mind next time you hear about a UFO abduction.
	And then this article also, I thought, fascinating.
	Many times we look towards science in search of answers to other people's claims.
	But what about our own experiences?
	The probability of humans having experienced a supernatural experience, get this, is 8 out of 10 according to an experiment with students of parapsychological interest at the University of Harvard in the year 1999.
	But what exactly is a supernatural experience?
	Well, I've got a list here of some, and I think you will probably add to these.
	But, for example, 1.
	One twin feels excruciating pain in the head, only to find out later his other twin died at that precise hour in a car accident where his head was battered.
	2.
	A mother feels that her little boy is in terrible need of her.
	Only to receive a call from school because her son broke a leg.
	A tourist visiting Rome for the first time feels the need to walk down a street, simply knows that if he makes a right turn, he'll find a very old church where he used to go every Sunday.
	When he takes that turn, there it is, he begins crying with a flood of emotions.
	Or a person is talking with someone else, only to realize he's had that same conversation with that very person long before that day.
	Or two friends are talking at the same time.
	They keep silent to let the other talk first, only to start talking together again and saying the same phrase as the other.
	In other words, as I was saying.
	Ordinary people that experience a special occurrence, but then remember having dreamed about it, say, a month ago.
	And this one almost happens to everyone.
	One person meets another for the first time, but somehow feels that they are connected.
	But they don't know why, or when.
	Oh, and don't forget the emotions that accompany the meeting.
	In this case, one of them usually says something like, haven't we met before?
	A person is on the verge of losing a loved one who happens to be very far away, all of a sudden they simply know that he or she is dead.
	A person is walking down a street full of people, but somehow feels that there's someone watching them, and the hairs on their arms raise straight up.
	Two people meet for the very first time.
	One of them somehow feels the other is terribly evil, although that person may seem really nice.
	We're going on a trip by air, but something makes us feel uncomfortable about it.
	Only to shrug it off as nonsense, and when we take the trip, we have to land somewhere else because the airplane had, quote, problems.
	It could happen with cars, ship trips, job promotions, a new job, a skiing trip.
	It just makes us feel uneasy and usually something does happen, not all the time of course.
	A person says goodbye to a soldier going to war and when he turns to leave the person sees a dark shadow hovering over that soldier a few times, a few, short time later rather, the soldier is killed in battle.
	Animals, especially... I really love this one.
	Animals, especially cats, dogs, birds, or monkeys, getting agitated and staring at a blank space while they pull slowly back.
	Boy, have I ever seen that one.
	The important question through all this is, why do we shrug these things off and then just continue our lives as if nothing strange had happened?
	Are we afraid of the unknown?
	Why do we usually say things like, well, it's only my imagination?
	Can you think of anything else to add to the list?
	I bet you can.
	Or are you one of those rare people who never ever notices anything like these things?
	I think that was from ZetaTalk.
	That, too, is a very good article, and I have, of course, had many such feelings, especially, I must say, with aircraft.
	And thankfully, well, a few times, something has happened.
	In other words, we've had a very rough landing, or we have landed somewhere else.
	But most times, it just simply turns out not to be true.
	Otherwise, I think that people would be putting off flights and cancelling trips at the last moment and doing that sort of thing.
	Maybe we should all be paying more attention to these feelings because there is something to all of this.
	And of course when we have ghost stories, we get a million stories like this.
	You know the, I felt a sharp pain.
	I've got a twin or I've got a brother and at that exact moment I later found out that my twin or my brother or my sister died.
	These are inherent.
	These things are deep within humanity.
	So deep that many of us have forgotten them.
	From Manila in the Philippines.
	Open lines coming up.
	I'm Art Bell.
	And indeed, from Manila, here I am.
	Finally, the thunderstorms and the typhoons, at least for the time being, have stopped roaring over our heads, so that's certainly welcome news.
	Let's go to the phones.
	We promised open lines, open lines.
	It shall be anything you want to talk about.
	Wes, to the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello?
	Hello there.
	Jerry, I think, in Portland?
	Right.
	I want to talk to you about that freeway.
	I'm glad you got a tropical island back.
	I want to talk to you about the freeway that Mexico is pushing into Canada.
	Ah, yes.
	The free trade freeway.
	Yeah, there's nobody talking about it.
	It's not on the news.
	The government ain't doing anything about it or anything.
	They've already bought one highway through one of our states.
	I mean, bought and paid for it.
	And I heard that on Paul Harvey.
	And he said, who on earth is buying is Mexico getting their money.
	And right away I thought of China.
	Well, I don't know about China, but I think what we're trying to do here is get free trade
	going between our hemisphere.
	And I do understand that.
	I do understand why we ultimately have got to get our hemisphere together to trade with
	our other hemispheres.
	It's inevitable.
	And I've told this story a million times, don't really want to tell it again, but from
	– but I guess I will in a way.
	We began as sort of loosely connected communities that traded with each other, right?
	Then we began trading with different cities.
	Then we began trading with states.
	Then we began trading between countries.
	There's a lot of that going on now, right?
	Then we began to form blocks.
	For example, the European Union, the Asian block that is now getting together and is going to be monstrously strong.
	And we really need a similar block in the Americas.
	So that's going to occur.
	Now, who's buying our highways?
	I don't know.
	I'm going to have to find out more about that story.
	But whoever they are, I hope they keep them in good condition.
	Small joke.
	Wild Card Line, Jeff in Missouri, you're on the air.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	Sure.
	And happy belated Thanksgiving.
	Thank you.
	And Merry Christmas.
	Well, thank you.
	I assume you've heard about the Globalist and their agenda and all that stuff by now?
	I think I've heard of it, yes.
	First, what's your take on it?
	Before my main question.
	Well, that kind of winds into what I was just talking about.
	I suppose a global economy and ultimately a global government are probably inevitable.
	Well, I've been contacted by a group that claims to be a resistance to that organization, New World Order type.
	New World Order rebels?
	Yeah.
	Are you going to join?
	I don't know.
	I'm trying to figure it out.
	I don't know if they're legit or not.
	What would your job be in this organization?
	Typical, I guess, grunt.
	So a grunt, huh?
	Well, typical.
	You'd want towed a rifle?
	Covert actions.
	Covert actions.
	You remember that explosion on the North Korean-Chinese border a few years back?
	I do.
	They claim they did that, right?
	They prevented something, that's all I can say.
	Well, look, every time there's a conference about global trade, it is attended by many demonstrators and there's always trouble, so as we move toward a global economy and a global government, there's going to be a lot of trouble, there's no question about it.
	Well, they appear to be that.
	It just appears the new world is to be evil, the beast type, beyond all that stuff.
	People always imagine that, but what if it worked out differently?
	What if some great global government came to be...
	Yeah, see that's why I'm...
	Now, bear with me for a second.
	That was based on the freedoms and the rights that we now enjoy.
	Yeah, that's why I'm debating it.
	On one hand it could be good, but then on the other hand, politics could get involved and could end up like the UN.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So that's why I'm questioning it.
	Well, I think the UN does not work because it is a consortium of all the different nation states that have different interests.
	The idea of a global government is a single interest.
	Yeah.
	The question is whether that interest would be benign or possibly like a cancer.
	That's what I wanted to ask you about and get your take on it.
	I don't have the wisdom, sir, to give you the answer on that.
	I only have the wisdom to know that we are headed in that direction now.
	Whether it would be an evil entity or whether it would be modeled after the... After all, democracy seems to be infecting the entire world.
	Democracy, on a positive note, is taking over the world.
	How many communist states are left?
	Not many.
	China, North Korea, Cuba.
	Cuba's on the cusp of change.
	China's sort of moving toward a bit of change.
	Not North Korea.
	But I mean, communism, more or less, is a dead duck.
	I don't know.
	I pondered this for a long time.
	I think that a global economy is probably inevitable, and where you have a global economy, you inevitably will have some sort of global rule.
	And again, the reason the UN does not work is because it's made up of all these different nations, and all of them have different interests, and so it's paralyzed.
	Nothing ever gets done.
	Right?
	It's not too hard to see that.
	First time caller line, Cedar Park, Texas.
	Scott, you're on the air.
	I have to say it's an honor and a privilege to speak to you.
	And with you.
	I appreciate that.
	I have a story about the day my brother passed away.
	I went to start my car in the morning and it wouldn't start and so I thought the battery was dead and I called my mother who called in to work late and came over to my apartment and helped jumpstart my car and we drove it up to the local Walmart and got the battery replaced and we're walking around Walmart waiting for the battery to be finished and I had a pager at the time and about 10 years ago and I looked down at my pager it was 1013 and I looked at my mom and I said yeah the car should be finished by now and they called my name and the car was done and the batteries replaced and I drove it home and
	We both had to go to work, and we're both late, and I looked at my mom and I said, you know, would you like a cup of tea?
	She's Scottish.
	She passed about four months ago.
	God bless her.
	And she said, yeah, you know, let's have a cup of tea.
	So we had a cup of tea, and the phone rang, and it was one of my brother's childhood friends who was at college with him.
	And he told me that my brother had passed away.
	When we went down to College Station to identify the body and take care of all the funeral arrangements and all that stuff, I got the police report and the medical report and the time of death was 10-13.
	So, but the only coincidence out of all this was you happened to look down at your pager at 10-13.
	Well, I mean he has made his presence known in other ways.
	He actually directed his high school girlfriend, who dying at 25 is basically the love of his life, out of nowhere to contact me when I hadn't spoken to her in years, and we had no idea where each other was.
	A voice told her to look me up in the corporate directory that I was there, and she looked me up and found my name and contacted me, and she has a myriad of stories of my brother.
	Trying to get messages to me and my mother before her passing.
	It's just so... Well, that is remarkable.
	And I've often wondered if I would try to get a message back to any or all of you in some way after I pass.
	It's inevitable.
	We're all headed in that direction.
	And it would be an interesting experiment, wouldn't it, to try and get a message back These things do happen.
	Coincidence?
	Maybe.
	There are many other examples, and I read many of them a little earlier, of things that are even far more striking.
	You know, things that you just suddenly know that somebody has passed away.
	I recall a similar incident when my dad passed.
	Wildcard Line, John in New York.
	You're on the air, hi.
	Hi, how are you?
	I just have two questions for you.
	I'd like to know if your wife got the sonogram to find out if she's going to have a boy or a girl.
	Uh, she has had, um, but it's too early to identify boy or girl.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And my second question is, uh, what's your plan of attack?
	Because I'm 37, I've been smoking for 20 years, which besides Nicorette gum, What's your true plan of attack?
	A quitting secret?
	Alright, here you go.
	I've noticed something interesting lately.
	Now, as you know, I'm in the process of quitting smoking.
	And I've actually, for the first time in my adult life, I've begun to notice that there are many times when I start
	to light up a cigarette and I just go, eh, I don't want this. And I put it back in the pack. Now,
	that just has never happened to me before.
	I got myself down to about four cigarettes a day. Now, my radio days, as I think I've mentioned to
	you previously, are a bit of a different story. I'm, you know, radio and smoking are connected
	in ways that I cannot even begin to describe.
	When I'm on the radio, it's like I have to have a cigarette.
	Now, I've calmed down my after-meals cigarettes a little bit.
	I've escaped that one to some degree.
	Another one that I notice is telephone.
	Of course, I've spent a great deal of my life because I'm on the radio and I have guests and I have to line them up and talk to people.
	It's just the way it is.
	I'm on the phone a lot.
	It's almost an automatic reflex.
	The phone rings, you grab a cigarette.
	So, I'm working on these keys, these automatic keys.
	After meals...
	After lovemaking, after whatever it is, you know, there's sort of automatic keys for a cigarette.
	Those of you who smoke know exactly what I'm talking about.
	So, lately, the progress to report is that several times lately, when I've sort of, in one of those automatic moments, grabbed a cigarette, instead, I put it back.
	That's pretty good.
	For me, in fact, that's really good.
	So it's a sign that I'm making progress, I think.
	Matt, in St.
	Petersburg, Florida, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Art, it is an honor to talk to you once again.
	Good to have you.
	Yes, and congratulations on the miniature human that's about to come into the world and on the smoking progress.
	I know you're proud of both of them.
	Thank you.
	I got a psychic cat story for you.
	You're going to love this.
	All right.
	Okay, several years ago I was involved in a job where I had to travel out of town frequently.
	And I was staying with my mom and dad in the house I grew up in, and this cat would never go into my room for some weird reason.
	But whenever I had a road trip coming up, he'd go in there and he'd stay on my bed until I got back.
	Like two or three days before, before even I knew I was going out of town, the cat would come in and get up on my bed.
	After about three or four times, I was kind of like, okay, well, I wonder where I'm going this week.
	And then I'd go to work and two or three days later, okay, here I go, I'm off again.
	That is strange.
	You know, I read the one, did you hear the one I read about cats that will suddenly look at a blank space in front of them and then just sort of slowly back away from it, like something is there that we can't see.
	So they either imagine something or they're seeing something in a spectrum we cannot see.
	They're recognizing it's there and then backing away from it.
	Well, I tell you what, when your baby gets here and starts about six or eight months old and they start becoming aware of things, watch him or her real close because eventually they'll find one spot in the room and they'll just keep staring at it.
	That's how my daughter started out.
	And she just sees all kinds of stuff now.
	I believe it, sir.
	I think that little children are just like cats in that regard, and I think that it's very likely they see things we don't.
	And then civilization trains them away from believing they can see these things, and then sure enough, they don't.
	That's right.
	Well, we're deprogrammed.
	We've never told either one of our kids, it's just your imagination, you're seeing things.
	They say, well, we saw this and that.
	Oh, what did it look like?
	And you get the strangest darn stories, don't you?
	Oh, we hear some good ones.
	And it's to the point now that we call our house The Portal and somewhere it'll happen.
	I'll say, well, we've had another coast-to-coast moment.
	That's good, thank you.
	A coast-to-coast moment.
	These are actually, that puts a little bit too much credit into coast-to-coast.
	These are just human moments.
	These are things that all of humanity has at their disposal.
	And we've just lost it, that's all.
	We've lost the ability to listen to ourselves.
	And I think if we did listen to ourselves, there would be far fewer accidents.
	There would be far fewer problems in life if we just listened carefully to what our own brain is telling us.
	But we sort of cast all that aside because, well, we just don't believe these things anymore.
	The Filipino people, God bless their souls, believe an awful lot of myths that we don't believe.
	I've caught myself now, a few times, just, you know, my wife will tell me something about something she believes, and instead of scoffing at it, I've stopped scoffing.
	I did that in the beginning.
	I scoffed at a few things.
	Monsters and such that they believe in, and customs that they believe in, because there's probably something to them.
	Now that doesn't mean that every one of them is true, and I don't for one second believe that they are all true.
	For example, the Aswang story.
	There may be something to the Aswang, I don't know.
	The Aswang is a creature here in the Philippines that is believed to come after young children still in the womb, or even just young children.
	You know, it may be something just to scare young Philippine children, but I think there is more to it.
	And there are so many other myths here in the Philippines, and I've just sort of stopped pooh-pawing them because, well, because who knows?
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Oh, good evening, Art.
	Good evening.
	This is Larry from St.
	Louis.
	All right, Larry, I'm going to hold you on the line for just one moment because I see that once again I've become so involved in what I'm doing that I've forgotten to do a break.
	So you hold it right there.
	We'll take a break and be right back.
	It just happens to me every single time.
	I get on a roll here, and I completely forget about our commercial breaks.
	All right, Larry, you're back on the air again.
	Oh, good afternoon, Art.
	Hi.
	Before I get to my real question, I've always wanted to ask you this.
	I keep forgetting to ask, have you been abducted?
	No.
	Oh, okay.
	I was watching America's Most Wanted tonight, and there's a, do you enjoy playing polo?
	I have never played polo in my life.
	Well you're lucky then because according to John Walsh there's a man from the Philippines that has been enticing rich American polo players to come over to the Philippines and play polo with them and then they disappear and they finally did find One of the American men's bodies, so... Where was he buried?
	In a polo field, probably, right?
	No, it was a small village.
	The Manila police... Incidentally, they had it written on the back of their uniforms, I guess, in Tagalog.
	It didn't say police.
	But it was far from Manila, and they believed that He was shot somewhere, the American, and then his body was
	dumped there, but there's three accounted for right now.
	Well, there's absolutely no possibility of my being enticed away into a polo game of death.
	I've never had any interest in polo.
	I guess, thank goodness, huh?
	On the international line, Paul in Winnipeg, you're on the air.
	Hey Eric, how are you doing?
	I'm all right, sir.
	I guess you get asked that a little too much.
	You know, I'm really glad you're quitting smoking.
	That's something that I'm trying to deal with too, and I totally relate to the radio experience.
	When I did radio, I was like totally, probably a pack a night.
	Anyway... I was more like a... Listen, I was a pack of show, buddy.
	I'm serious.
	Pack of show.
	That's rough.
	That's rough.
	I don't know how you keep... Anyway, listen, we're here at the top of the hour, so real quick.
	Well, I just keep seeing 11-11 and I don't know why that is.
	I've checked it out on the internet.
	Apparently there's something about it there, but for a lot of people you were talking about global government.
	I think what people need to do is watch what's happening in the Middle East, especially with Israel.
	And one of the major signs is rising... Listen, I've got to call a halt to it there.
	I'm sorry, we're simply out of time.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	You are indeed, and here comes a guest.
	Joel Carroll, I hope that's right, is a reporter and editor at the Washington Post.
	He's a member of Global Business Network and a principal of the Carroll Group, a network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are.
	How we got this way, and where we're headed.
	He's also served as a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and George Mason University.
	Joel's latest book, Radical Evolution, the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies, and what it means to be human, takes an unprecedented, sometimes alarming, always spellbinding look At the hinge in history at which we have arrived.
	I've never heard it put quite that way, a hinge in history.
	For hundreds of millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward at altering our environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture, or even space travel.
	Now, for the first time, we're increasingly aiming inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny, and Possibly our immortal souls.
	Radical evolution is about altering human nature, not in some distant tomorrow, but in the next 10 or 20 years.
	Now, I want to read you a short article that I think bears on some of what our guest, or the kind of thing our guest is going to talk about tonight.
	Listen carefully to this.
	Chop off a salamander's leg, and a brand new one will sprout up in no time at all.
	But most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs.
	Now, a research team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has been able to regenerate a wing in a chick embryo.
	That's a new wing, folks!
	A species not known to be able to regrow limbs, suggesting that the potential for such regeneration exists innately in all vertebrates, including humans.
	Their study, published in the Advanced Online Edition of Genes in Development on November 17, demonstrates that vertebrate regeneration is under the control of the powerful WNT signaling system.
	Activating it appears to overcome the mysterious barrier to regeneration in animals like chicks that can't normally replace missing limbs.
	And while inactivating it, an animal known to be able to regenerate their limbs, frogs, zebrafish, salamanders, shuts down their ability to replace missing legs and tails.
	Quote, in this simple experiment, we removed part of the chick embryo's wing, activated the WNT signaling, and got the whole limb back.
	A beautiful and perfect wing.
	According to the lead author, by changing the expression of a few genes, just a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscle and skin, everything that is needed.
	Now, although they cannot obviously do it yet for humans, that may be on the horizon.
	In other words, as we unwind the human genome, and then we begin to tinker with the human genome, for good or bad, a lot of people think it's bad.
	The ability, for example, to regrow a lost arm, a leg, a finger, a toe, or literally any part of your entire body, something that would not be immediately fatal to you, Maybe possible.
	To regrow limbs.
	Can you just sit on that and think about it for a little while?
	To regrow limbs.
	Possibly to regrow spinal columns.
	That sort of thing.
	That may be in our rather immediate 10 to 20 type year future.
	We'll talk to Joel about all this and more in a moment.
	Ladies and gentlemen, Joel Caron.
	Joel, are you there?
	I am.
	Good.
	Am I slaughtering your last name?
	It's pretty close.
	Close.
	Let me hear your version.
	How about Joel Garreau?
	Joel Garreau.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, that was pretty close.
	All right.
	Now, you work for the Washington Post, huh?
	I do.
	You do.
	And what made you decide to write this book?
	Radical Evolution is about how we're at a turning point in history.
	This is one of the biggest changes in tens of thousands of years of what it means to be human, and how it's happening right now.
	We're the first species, really, to take control of our own evolution, as amazing as that sounds.
	And Radical Evolution is the roadmap to this turning point for the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years.
	This is not some distant science fiction future.
	This is a world that's opening up in front of us right now.
	You talked at the beginning of the show about how we have programs going that will allow us to regenerate limbs.
	That's a program that was started at DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
	This is the research and development arm of the Pentagon.
	It's unlikely that they're going to allow us to regrow spinal columns anytime soon.
	But what they did notice was that even in children who accidentally lose a finger, they will regrow that finger if it's not sutured up right up until the time that they're, say, 8 or 12.
	And they thought that, well, wait a minute, something got switched off here that prevented us from regrowing our limbs How do we switch it back on?
	That's just part of the world that's opening up now, in which we're beginning to start creating artificial organs, like livers and kidneys.
	This is part of a broad sweep of technologies, all of which are aimed inward, at modifying our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, and our kids.
	And if you can do all that, then you're talking about really changing what it means to be human.
	And I identify three scenarios about what that means to society.
	Because even as amazing as all of these technologies are, the real thing that I'm interested in is where do we go from here?
	Where is this going to take us as a society?
	Well, that in itself is a very interesting question.
	I mean, you're talking about, I presume, the next 10 or 20 years.
	If you project from there and add another, say, 50 or 100 years to it, it's almost beyond even the ability of a good science fiction writer to get it right.
	Right.
	Well, I try very hard to keep this in the here and now, and I don't make any predictions in radical evolution.
	I talk about what's actually in the Hopper right now, what's in the labs, the, I mean, what's going to be happening in the very near future is that your kid is going to be coming home from school again in tears because he just can't compete with other kids who are more athletic, more smart, better behaved, more beautiful, better, more capable, and able to get into the best colleges, and your kid can't.
	And the difference is that These other kids, their parents have invested in all of these enhancement technologies that are coming online and you haven't.
	And when that day comes, you're going to have to decide what you want to do.
	You've basically got three choices.
	You can either say to the kid, listen, wipe your nose.
	I don't care how other parents treat their kids and how they deal with their, their minds and bodies.
	We love you just the way you are.
	Or you can go out and remortgage the house again.
	In order to engage in this arms race in which people are increasingly seeing, embodying the old army slogan, be all you can be.
	Or you can try to get these kids thrown out of your school, the enhanced kids.
	But the trouble with that is it just widens the gap between people who are the same kind of version 1.0 human as the one that we've been used to all of these years.
	And the ones that are increasingly embracing these technologies.
	I mean, as you say, with that Regenesis program, this is something that you can see in the headlines right now.
	This is not science fiction.
	Oh no, listen, this is a story that I ran across earlier this morning.
	Of course, I perused what you were going to be talking about a little bit, but I ran smack into this story about regrowing limbs, and I went, oh my God, they're actually talking about regrowing arms and legs and not Well, just in the next three years, for example, there are four U.S.
	and it hit me right between the eyes. Now, there are apparently other enhancements that,
	you know, are on the rather immediate horizon. What might they be? What might little Johnny
	have in another 10 or 15 or 20 years that my child, if I don't allow it, might not?
	Well, just in the next three years, for example, there are four U.S. companies that are racing
	to bring online memory pills as prescription drugs. These are drugs that would dramatically
	enhance your capabilities to remember. Like most of these enhancements, they're originally
	aimed at people who are really sick. In the case of memory pills, they'd obviously be
	aimed at Alzheimer's victims.
	Okay, I've heard of the example. I've heard of, I think it's Ginkgo biloba, something
	like that.
	No, no, no.
	This is not any of that.
	A whole new class of drug.
	This is real, no kidding, pharmaceuticals.
	This stuff works.
	This makes a big difference.
	This is not some vitamins or something that you get at your health food store.
	This is stuff that dramatically works and it's FDA approved and it's a prescription drug.
	And the reason they think this is going to be such a big deal commercially is because they think that, as with all of these enhancements, the second group that wants it is the needy well.
	And in this case, it'll be the aging baby boomers who can't remember where they put their car.
	And then the third group that any of these enhancements is aimed at is the merely ambitious.
	And in this case, it'll probably be our kids.
	I mean, you think of what parents do now to get their kids into their best schools.
	Well, think of how memory plays a role in so much education, whether it's language or the law.
	Well, suppose that in three years you could basically buy your kids an extra couple of hundred points on their SAT scores with these memory pills.
	Already, the Educational Testing Service that runs the college boards are already very fidgety about this.
	Joe, are they actually talking about an increase in IQ or just a measurable increase in what you can remember?
	These are simply memory pills.
	But farther down the line are cognition enhancers, which are meant to actually improve your ability to process information.
	And this is in the near term.
	Pharmaceuticals are in the first wave of these enhancements that you're going to see actually coming on the market.
	In fact, you know, we're having this debate on our sports pages right now with Barry Bonds, you know, the baseball slugger.
	The question on the sports pages is, Should Barry Bonds go around with an asterisk on his forehead for the rest of his life because he's a fundamentally different kind of human than the people whose records that he broke?
	Well, that's very, very primitive pharmaceuticals.
	I mean, that's just steroids and stuff like that.
	But incrementally, one prescription at a time, we're looking at a variety of drugs that are going to be dramatically increasing our abilities physically, mentally, Socially, in a host of other ways, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
	The four technologies that are really driving this are what I call the GRIN technologies, which stands for Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology.
	And all four of these are interweaving, and what they all add up to is an ability to dramatically change who we are and how we function.
	I can go through the four of these and how they're changing us, if you'd like.
	I would like, yes.
	Okay.
	Genetics, of course, you know, what's really driving all four of these technologies is something called Moore's Law.
	There's a guy named Gordon Moore, who back in 1965, six years after the first computer chip, he noticed that the number of transistors That you could get on a piece of silicon for a dollar was regularly doubling.
	And he boldly proclaimed that this doubling was going to continue for the next 10 years.
	Well, little did he know.
	I mean, Gordon Moore at the time was just a lowly electrical engineer.
	But he ended up becoming one of the three founders of Intel.
	You know, Intel inside, the computer guys.
	Of course.
	Just a little asterisk here.
	Did you know that Gordon Moore recently said that he believes his own law is going to hit a brick wall?
	There's a lot of debate about this.
	There's no question that two-dimensional silicon is going to be hitting its limits.
	Somewhere in the vicinity of 2015 or so, because the sheer size of the, you know, you're going to be getting down to the molecular size.
	Now, people have been predicting the end of, you know, computer growth for centuries now.
	I mean, we went from mechanical computational devices to tubes, and just when tubes were beginning to hit their limit, suddenly we went over into silicon, And now Silicon is hitting its limits.
	And the question is, is that the end of the road for Intel?
	Do you think they're just going to quit?
	Well, there are quite a few different ways of doing this kind of computing that are in the offing.
	One of them is to start stacking it three-dimensionally rather than just flat.
	And that would mimic the way the brain works.
	Another way of doing it is to use quantum computing.
	Which use the spooky realm of quantum mechanics to start producing machines that can work it millions of times faster than the ones we have now.
	And there are even what they call meat machines, which is basically DNA.
	And DNA, after all, is just a means that the body uses to do computation.
	So there's a host of different kinds of computers that are in the offing.
	The question is, Will they become mature in time for the end of two-dimensional silicon?
	And in some ways, I hope that Moore's Law does stop sometime soon, because these technologies that are coming online are changing who we are so fast that I really think we could use a breather here.
	But I'm not necessarily optimistic that this thing is going to slow down any time soon.
	Nor am I. It may indeed hit the wall, but I bet just as it gets to the wall, we will discover something in the quantum world.
	It's interesting, Einstein, referring to entanglement, or the whole quantum world, described the whole thing as some sort of spooky action at a distance that he simply couldn't explain, and that's where he stopped.
	I mean, there's an awful lot of this technology that is, in fact, pretty pause-giving.
	And, I mean, one of them is when you talk about the genetic technologies, for example, what that essentially is about is not just the genome.
	It means controlling cells at the very most basic level, turning them on and off.
	One of the things that DARPA is working on, for example, is an ability to create people who can In effect, have a metabolism like Lance Armstrong at will.
	The idea is to send soldiers into battle at peak performance and have dominance at the metabolic level over their competitors.
	That's a really amazing change that you're talking about there.
	The very idea that you could even think of this.
	One of the things that They're looking at, for example, they noticed that you really don't want to have soldiers run out of energy on the battlefield.
	I mean, the physical energy inside your body.
	And the way that you're creating that now, of course, is by eating calories.
	But the problem is that a special forces trooper can easily go through 20,000 calories a day.
	You know, that's just an amazing number of calories.
	That works out to three meals ready to eat and 48 power bars.
	Well, you can't even carry that much food, much less eat it comfortably.
	So the question they're asking is, suppose you didn't have to do that.
	Suppose you didn't have to eat for as long as a week.
	Suppose instead that what you could do is tap at will the energy that's stored in your fat.
	Well, they're working on that right now.
	And when they first started talking to me about this, you know, I'm writing it all down, and suddenly it dawns on me that they're talking about being able to burn your fat at will.
	And I kind of raised my hand and said, me, me, give some to me.
	I mean, how long have I been working out to no effect?
	You know, and all of a sudden they're talking about burning fat at will.
	And they kind of smile this little smile and say, the civilian implications of this technology have not eluded us.
	Dieting is a 40 billion dollar a year industry.
	Oh, absolutely.
	This could end it.
	Um, this could all end a lot of things and begin a lot of other things.
	Alright, Joel, hold tight right there.
	I wonder if any of the rest of you have noticed what I've noticed in the last half hour.
	Joel Garrow has a voice that is so very much like Whitley Strieber's voice that if I didn't know better, I'd say it was Whitley.
	But it is not.
	He's a very interesting guy, obviously.
	He works for the Washington Post, and he's written a book called Radical Evolution, The Promise and the Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What it Means to be Human.
	And I wonder if what it means to be human ultimately is going to mean that we turn into something that from, well, at least a conventional perspective, is not human at all.
	How enhanced do you want to be?
	That's a pretty interesting question.
	Would you like to be able to grow a new arm if you lost one?
	Well, yeah, sure.
	Would you like to be able to remember things with more ease?
	Well, yes, probably.
	Would you like your IQ boosted another 100 points?
	Hmm, well, maybe.
	Would you like eyesight that's, well, I don't know, 10-10 instead of 20-20?
	If that represents an enhancement, I think it probably does.
	And or on down the line, how enhanced do you want to be?
	How much money do you have?
	Joel Garreau is my guest.
	Joel is talking about that.
	He's written a book about it, Radical Evolution, the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies, and what it means to be human, and if, at the end of all this, we even are human.
	That's perhaps a question that we'll pose coming next.
	The genetic revolution seems well underway.
	The promise of nanotechnology is a little foggier, to me anyway, Joel.
	And as we look at all this, if you go back, I don't know how old you are, Joel, but if I go back to when I was a child, we were all watching movies.
	And news, for that matter, that told us by the time we were, oh, in our 50s or 60s, robots would be doing it all for us.
	We'd have our arms slackly at our sides, and robots would be running everything.
	And we'd be lucky if they didn't run away with the whole world on us.
	Now, that never really happened.
	And I wonder if what we're talking about here is an exception to that rule.
	Well, yeah.
	Remember the paperless office?
	Oh, sure.
	There's another great prediction.
	And weren't we supposed to be having hotels in orbit by now?
	Yes, sir.
	Yeah, well, I mean, this is why I don't make any predictions in radical evolution.
	I'm just talking about, you know, what exists in the pipeline right now and what's in labs.
	And I'm looking at the curve of exponential change that's behind this.
	I mean, are you old enough to remember when computer screens only came in black and white?
	I am, yes.
	Do you remember rotary dial phones?
	I of course do, yes.
	I'm 61, Joel.
	I remember all of that.
	Do you remember what mimeographed machine fluids smell like?
	I do.
	How about polio?
	You know, Joel, that I was one of the first test subjects that received one of those little sugar cubes that either had a polio vaccine in it, which I later found out it really did, or was nothing but sugar.
	Well, see, the thing that's interesting is that, you know, this recitation sounds funny.
	You know, because it sounds so incredibly antique.
	And yet, this is stuff that existed in the lifetime of an awful lot of people on the show.
	And the question is, well, what happened?
	Well, what happened was that we started entering a curve of rapid technological change.
	And by a curve, I mean, that's the important part, is that At the beginning of the show, we started talking about how computers were doubling in power every 18 months.
	A doubling is an amazing thing.
	It means that each step is as tall as all of the previous steps put together.
	And we've never seen a curve like this before in human history.
	There have been 30 doublings since the first computer chip was built in 1959.
	And that means an increase of over 500 million times You know, just since 1959, we've never seen anything like this before.
	The closest that you can come in the past was that you had 14 doublings of railroad miles in the 1800s in the United States.
	Yes.
	And that changed everything.
	New York went from being a collection of villages to a world capital.
	Chicago went from being a frontier boomtown to a brawny goliath.
	San Francisco went from being Four months from the East Coast to six days.
	It changed families.
	It changed business.
	It turned the United States into a world power.
	And yet, that was only 14 doublings.
	Now, with the computer devices that we're looking at, there are now refrigerator magnets with more firepower than was obtained by the entire North American Air Defense Command in 1965.
	And nobody really cares, of course, how fast a computer goes.
	The important thing is that this repeated doubling of computer power opens up windows on entirely different worlds that we never imagined possible before.
	Genetics is a really good example of that.
	When people first talked about sequencing the human genome back in 1985, there was an awful lot of people who, first of all, didn't think it was possible, and second of all, they thought, well, if it was possible, that might happen by 2015, At a cost of zillions.
	And, of course, it happened much faster than that.
	It happened in the year 2000, and at a fraction of the original estimated price.
	And that's because the people who were doing the projections weren't taking into account this constant doubling and redoubling of firepower that allows us to now open up a world in which, you know, anybody will be able to get their genome sequenced for $1,000 and then for $100.
	Because the underlying gear will become increasingly powerful.
	Of course, the next step in that category, Joel, is going to be not just the sequencing, but the manipulation.
	Now, we're beginning the manipulation phase of it.
	Once you learn what the sequence is, then you can begin to change little things here and there.
	And that's when you begin to get new arms and legs and organs and all kinds of amazing God-like things happen.
	Yeah, well what happens is that the actual changing designer babies and all that stuff, that's somewhere down the road.
	That probably won't be commercially common for another 10 years or so.
	But as you say, before that, we start using the knowledge that we've gained to create new pharmaceuticals on demand and to start actually controlling the body's function at the cellular level.
	And that's just one step.
	I mean, the other thing that's going on is robotics, which is, you know, using machines that are implanted in our bodies to create powers that seem to be only, you know, part of comic book superheroes back in the 1930s and 40s.
	You want to hear about the telekinetic monkey that exists down at Duke?
	I do!
	There's a monkey down at Duke University in North Carolina who can Move objects long distance with her thoughts.
	I'm not making this up.
	Well, tell me why you believe it to be really true.
	Well, because it was written up in Nature Magazine and was also funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
	You want to know how you make a monkey telekinetic?
	I do!
	What happened was, her name is Belle, and she's a cute little owl monkey.
	She's about eight pounds and very smart.
	And in order to, what they were trying to do was to create a link between computers and your mind directly.
	And Belle was the experimental monkey.
	The first thing they did was they got her hooked on computer games.
	She had a joystick, and if she could, with the joystick, if she could make the cursor hit a flashing light, she got a drop of juice.
	But within a few days, it became clear that she almost cared about the juice.
	She was hooked on the computer game.
	And when that happened, then what they did is they drilled a hole in her head, and they took a tiny device about the size of a baby aspirin that had hundreds of super-fine wires coming out of it, and they implanted it in her motor cortex, which is the part of the brain that controls motion, like using your arm.
	And these wires, the reason they were so tiny, so thin, was what they did is they lined up the wires with individual neurons in her brain, so that when the neurons fired, the wires could sense this and relay the signal directly to a computer.
	And after they finished with this implant, they sealed her up, and they fired up the computer game again.
	And she started playing the game, and as she did it, using her arm, they watched the signals in her brain You know, through this device on the computer, and they began to figure out what neuron firings meant what.
	You with me so far on this?
	I absolutely am, yes.
	Okay.
	Then, you know, when they finally figured out what the brain was doing and how it, you know, was associated with her arm motion, then they disconnected her joystick.
	So there was nothing that this joystick was doing.
	And they fired up the computer game again, and sure enough, Using just her thoughts, just her neurons firing, she could control that cursor and hit the flashing light.
	Okay, so what they were doing was back-engineering the effect they were observing from the neurons that were firing.
	Right.
	And then, just to be cool about it, they put the signal on the internet and piped it up 600 miles north to MIT, and there was a robotic arm And, you know, they piped the signal into the robotic arm, and the robotic arm began to dance in exactly the same fashion as her arm would have been moving had she been using her arm to play her computer game.
	And so I would submit that if you've got a monkey that can control a robotic arm 600 miles away with her thoughts, that you've got a telekinetic monkey.
	And in 2004, we had the first human who was wired this way.
	His name is Matthew Nagel, and Matthew's not the world's sweetest guy.
	He got involved in a knife fight, and he ended up getting his spinal cord severed, so he's locked up from the neck down.
	So he volunteered for a similar procedure, and they put one of these implants in his brain, and he became the first human to send an email with his thoughts in 2004.
	And he, too, can control a robotic arm.
	Now, you may wonder, you know, why would you want to do this to a monkey or to a human?
	Well, because you could wire up a pilot who could then control his plane with thought instead of having to move an arm, for example, and the seconds or microseconds involved in the difference could be the difference between getting shot down and shooting the other guy down.
	Bingo!
	That's the official reason.
	The F-22 jet fighter is a very difficult aircraft to control with a joystick, but the notion that DARPA has is, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could blur the distinction between the made and the born, between humans and machines, and that not only could you control the machine directly with your thought, but it would be a two-way street, such that whatever the machine senses, whether it be radar or Or long-distance sensing, or heat, or stress, or whatever.
	Suppose that were piped directly into your brain, bypassing keyboards and screens.
	They think that would be just a wonderful melding of mind and machine.
	That's the official reason.
	But the real reason is that at the time that this was being put forward at DARPA, the guy who ran the Defense Sciences Office, which ran that show, His name is Michael Goldblatt, and he has a daughter named Gina Marie.
	And Gina Marie is a very talented young lady.
	She just graduated from the University of Arizona, bilingual, very talented, and she's got cerebral palsy.
	So she is supposed to be spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
	Well, her father, Michael, is way up front about the fact that he has spent untold millions of your taxpayers' dollars on this mind-machine interface Because if you can control a machine with your thoughts, there's no reason, theoretically, that those machines couldn't be in Gina Marie's legs.
	And the day that that happens is the day that Gina Marie will be able to get out of that wheelchair and walk.
	So Michael Goldblatt has been spending an awful lot of this My Machine Interface money to save his daughter.
	And that's just one of the, you know, many incremental, small step-by-step advances that starts really challenging You know, what it is that you view as the normal capabilities of human beings.
	You're a very optimistic, obviously, a very optimistic guy.
	I'm not as optimistic.
	I see the same changes that you see, but I worry that eventually we blur the distinction of our own humanity.
	I mean, when, as we become part human, part machine, are we not so sure what we are anymore, for one?
	Sure, that's a really good point.
	Well, you know, as I say, I don't make any predictions in radical evolution.
	What I do is I make, I do scenarios.
	And scenarios are convincing stories about how the future could work, given, you know, the facts that we have on the ground right now, the kind of technologies that I'm talking about that exist in the labs.
	And, you know, one of the scenarios is, there's three scenarios, heaven, hell, and prevail.
	And the Heaven Scenario is the optimistic one that you talk about.
	And this is the one in which, in the very near future, we start to conquer pain, suffering, ignorance, stupidity, and even death.
	And as you know, there's a famous inventor and entrepreneur named Ray Kurzweil, and he's sort of the poster child for the Heaven Scenario.
	Ray thinks that he's immortal.
	He really does.
	He thinks that if you can live in a healthy fashion for the next 20 years, that you could live for a very, very long time, like thousands of years.
	And he reasons that all that has to happen is for the technologies to advance faster than you're aging.
	And if you've got a good enough health plan, you know, you could live for a long time.
	And this scenario, the Heaven scenario, is not totally nuts.
	At the National Institute on Aging, at the National Institutes of Health, There's a bet going on right now among these very sober, serious scientists that the first person to live in a robust fashion to the age of 150 is already alive today.
	So the heaven scenario is credible, but it's only one scenario.
	Then there's the hell scenario, which is the one you talk about.
	And this is the one in which, okay, you've got this curve of change, but instead of it going straight up, In a fashion that leads to a world that's essentially indistinguishable from the Christian version of Heaven, suppose it goes straight down.
	The poster child for this is the inappropriately named Bill Joy, who's the former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems.
	And he noticed that an awful lot of these technologies are becoming dirt cheap.
	I mean, genetics, for example, is well within the range No sir.
	of any reasonably bright grad student in a well-equipped lab.
	And he says, you know, this is not like nuclear power that takes a country, or the capabilities
	at least of North Korea, to create.
	Any idiot can do some of these technologies.
	And the question is, suppose it gets into the hands of madmen or fools.
	One of the examples of this is the Australian mousepox incident.
	Did you hear about this?
	No, sir.
	This is the one in which Australia is an isolated ecosystem.
	And so from time to time, it has introduced species that just run amok because they have
	no natural enemies.
	And one of these apparently is mice.
	From time to time they're just up to their butts in mice.
	And so geneticists there were working on a mouse contraceptive, and instead they created a monster.
	They took the mouse pox virus, which is a disease that affects mice, and they made one genetic tweak And they created a virus that was 100% fatal.
	Every single mouse died.
	And then they took what they learned, and they put it on the internet, where everybody could see it.
	Well, this just drives the people who worry about the health scenario nuts, because mouse pox doesn't hurt humans, but it's a very close relative of smallpox, which obviously does.
	And they say, my God, you know, if you give the kind of power to create this kind of evil to anybody with access to the Internet, you know, isn't it just a matter of time before somebody, you know, uses this in a fashion that could be truly horrible?
	And in fact, the people who think about the hell scenario, their projection is that they can see us wiping out the human race in the next 25 years.
	Oh yes, Joel, just let me stop you.
	They really did that?
	They created this and they actually killed all the mice in Australia?
	Yeah, 100% of the lab mice died.
	Of the lab mice?
	Yeah, they did not get out into the wild.
	Why not?
	Well, the point of this is that they're saying that knowledge of this kind of capability is essentially the same thing as The physical object.
	I mean, if you had an Ebola virus, for example, you know, that usually, when researchers work on that, they are in stage four quarantine, which is an extremely elaborate way of making sure that this doesn't get out into the wild.
	And, you know, and people who are advocates of the health scenarios say that if you have an object that's that dangerous, you should treat the knowledge of that object With the same kind of quarantine, because the knowledge of it and the physical thing is increasingly getting interchangeable.
	And this is a huge argument, because right now, science is entirely based on the notion that you share your insights, you share your wisdom, because nobody is as smart as all of us.
	All right, Joel, hold it right there.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	Joel Garroa is my guest.
	I just wonder, I'm curious, why, if they had this perfect thing to kill all the mice in Australia, and it worked in a lab, they didn't release it in the wild.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	Here I am, Joel Garreau is my guest, and Joel is a fascinating guy.
	He's obviously done his homework.
	Many times when you interview a reporter, and he's not just a reporter, he's a reporter and editor both at the Washington Post.
	And much more.
	You don't really get into the meat of the subject, because, well, reporters are reporters, and when you ask them about details of what it is they're actually talking about when they come to do a radio show, they don't know the details.
	Well, Joel not only knows them, but has thought very, very hard about it, obviously, and is doing a very credible job of talking to us about what we might be.
	Radical Evolution, his book, the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies, And what it means to be human.
	What it means to be human.
	I'll get that right.
	In a moment, we'll get back to Joel and this mouse pox thing.
	Stay right where you are.
	Joel, you're an obvious exception.
	I almost gave up having journalists on the program, because a lot of times they would write about fascinating things, but then when you interviewed them, and you got into depth with them, and would ask them a question, they couldn't answer it.
	They'd say, well, I just, you know, I talk to the people and report on it, but I can't explain that to you.
	And that would be sort of the dead end of most of the subjects we pursued.
	That's not the case with you.
	Mousepox.
	I don't quite get this one.
	They killed all the mice in the experiment in the lab, then didn't turn it loose in the wild to kill all the mice in Australia, but instead put it on the internet.
	So that's confusing.
	Well, this is, you know, at the heart of the hell scenario, which is that, you know, when you're talking about technologies that can create more of themselves, Like a virus can.
	You have to know where the off switch is.
	Because if you don't, very bad things can happen.
	The least mature of the four technologies that I'm looking at, genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology, is nanotechnology.
	And that probably won't be mature for another ten years or so, but the implications of it are profound.
	Nanotechnology is the ability to create anything you want.
	One molecule at a time, or one atom at a time.
	Anything you want.
	I mean, a molecularly accurate stake, if you want to, or diamonds.
	Well, one of the early applications of this that people are hoping for is something called nanobots.
	These are incredibly small robots, smaller than a human red blood cell.
	And what they hope, the reason they think this is a big deal Is that they can imagine injecting thousands of these into your bloodstream, and first they will be used as disease detectors, sniffing out cancer cells, for example.
	And then they hope that they'll be able to create attack bots, which will go out and, you know, eat the cells that you don't want, like the cancer cells, like a Pac-Man game.
	Well, you know, this has tremendous upside implications.
	That's the heaven scenario.
	But the concern is that in order to create enough of these robots to do you any good, the first nanobot that you build is going to have to build a second nanobot.
	And then those two are going to have to build another two, so you get four, and then eight, and then sixteen.
	Well, you can see how this curve goes up, and you can imagine zillions of nanobots then proceeding to self-replicate.
	Whenever you're talking about a self-replicating anything, whether it's a computer virus or a nanobot, you better know where the off switch is.
	Because if you don't, you know, there's a scenario that is called the Grey Goo Scenario.
	Yes, I'm very familiar with it.
	This is the one in which, you know, hypothetically, if, you know, if you don't know where the off switch is on these tiny robots, then they can keep on going until there is no energy left on the entire planet.
	And the whole planet is reduced to grey goo.
	Now, there's a lot of reason to think that that probably is not technologically possible, because there are all sorts of barriers to this in terms of physics.
	But the concern is that you don't just let this stuff into the wild.
	If you don't know where the off switch is, And everything that it's capable of.
	But the thing is that, you know, those are only two scenarios in the Heaven and Hell scenario.
	But they're both credible.
	They could happen.
	You know, they are realistic.
	But there's a third scenario, which is the one that I'm pulling for.
	And that's Prevail.
	And the Prevail scenario is not some middle ground between Heaven and Hell.
	It's way off in its own special territory.
	Because in the Prevail scenario, people say, hey, wait a minute, you know, all of this curve of Exponential change and all of this technology going at incredible speeds.
	The question is, what is this going to do to humans?
	Well, the assumption in both the heaven and the hell scenario is that our futures are techno-determinist.
	And what that means is that, this is a view of history that suggests that technology runs us, rather than the other way around.
	And in the prevailed scenario, they're saying, well, wait a minute, suppose our future is not techno-determinist.
	Suppose that the important thing is not how many transistors that you can get to talk to each other.
	Suppose it's how many ornery, unpredictable, imaginative humans that you can get to talk to each other.
	The reason that I'm guardedly optimistic about this prevail scenario, rather than heaven or hell, is that we have some examples in history of how humans have already prevailed.
	For example, You know, you look back at the world, you look at Europe in the year 1200 or thereabouts, and you can be, rationally, be pretty pessimistic about the future of the human race.
	You see plagues, you see marauding hordes, you think, you know, we're cooked.
	But then in 1450, all of a sudden we invent the printing press, and everything changes.
	Then, all of a sudden, we've got a way of storing and sharing and distributing our ideas In a way that had never been possible before.
	And look what happens.
	First you get the Renaissance, and then you get the Enlightenment, and that leads to science itself, and to the rise of democracy, and you end up with the foundations of our world today.
	And, you know, all of the changes that came about as a result of the printing press were beyond the imagination of any one human being, or even any one country.
	What this was all about was a whole bunch of individuals acting in their own best interest, in a bottom-up way, not in a top-down way, inventing things that turned out to be global trade, for example, or the entire scientific enterprise, or democracy.
	So the heart of the prevailed scenario is, If you can demonstrate that the number of challenges that we're facing is going straight up on an exponential curve, well, if our responses socially are flat, you know, if our institutions don't respond quickly, well, then you can pretty easily see how we're going to very quickly be toast.
	Because if the challenges are going up and our responses are flat, the distance gets taller and taller.
	But the heart of the prevailed scenario is Suppose there are two curves.
	Suppose that the changes are going up on an exponential rate, but suppose our responses are, too, also going up exponentially.
	You know, you can see that, for example, even in 9-11.
	The fourth airplane, Flight 93, never makes it to its target.
	Why?
	Because the Air Force is so quick on the trigger?
	Well, that's controversial, isn't it?
	Well, I don't think that that was the case.
	I hope that what happened is that the passengers took it down, and I personally believe that is what occurred.
	However, I wouldn't be shocked, nor would I be surprised, if it had been shot down.
	Do you think that it happened because the White House was so smart?
	No, look, I'm with you here and I hope that the social changes are progressing as quickly or keeping pace with the technology, but I'm a pessimist and I don't think that's happening.
	Now, let me give you my side of the hell scenario.
	And that is that, yes, the world has changed.
	But today, with science the way it is, I see mankind ending either as a result of a scientific accident, or just as likely, somebody who wants us dead.
	And the people who committed 9-11 are people who are basically saying, either convert or die.
	And eventually, they're going to get hold of their version of mousepox, or whatever in the world it is, it's equivalent.
	And do you for one second, Joel, think they will hesitate to essentially push the button?
	Well, this is why the health scenario is a totally credible scenario.
	I mean, the thing about thinking in terms of scenarios is that all three of these scenarios are plausible and logical and they're all very different.
	And people keep on asking me, well, you know, which one is it?
	And I say, no, no, no, you don't understand.
	I don't have a crystal ball.
	I don't know what the future holds.
	I don't know anybody who does.
	But what I do see is that you can think systematically and rigorously and rationally about the future, and hopefully you can help make some choices.
	The thing about the health scenario that's interesting is that people, you know, as soon as you say something like, you know, there's a technological possibility that we could wipe out mankind tomorrow, Everybody kind of nods their head and says, yeah, yeah, that's right.
	I mean, the health scenario is the easiest sell in the universe.
	And I wonder about why that is, because I guess we had a really rough 20th century.
	The thing is that, you know, when you look objectively at, you know, where we are today, you know, most of the, almost all of the cataclysm projections have turned out to be wrong.
	You know, back in the 1970s, we were talking about the possibility That there were going to be food riots because there was going to be starvation in the streets.
	And instead, what turned out to happen is that the big problem is obesity.
	We're living in one of the least likely scenarios the world can imagine, which is that we haven't fired a nuclear weapon in anger for 60 years.
	Back in the 50s, people wouldn't have given you a plugged nickel for that scenario.
	They would have thought that that was just incredible.
	And yet, it's the world in which we live.
	Now, don't get me wrong, this could all change in the next three minutes, but nonetheless, we have managed to prevail.
	We have managed to create things like game theory that got us through the Cold War.
	And, you know, you can ascribe that to luck, and maybe that's true, but on the other hand, what I'm interested in is, well, what's the future of human nature?
	And this gets to the question of What do you mean, human nature?
	What does it mean to be human?
	And it could be that what it means to be human is that we're the kind of species that creates our own luck.
	Just barely fast enough, but so far we've managed to prevail, and the hope is that we will continue to do so.
	And again, I don't want to sound like a cockeyed optimist about this.
	The hell scenario is real.
	It could happen.
	You start looking around and you're seeing brand new ways of people coming together that are really pretty amazing when you think about it.
	I mean, look at eBay.
	That's not just a flea market.
	That's hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are coming together without any top-down hierarchy, without anybody telling them what to do, to create a global exchange mechanism that's beyond the control of Any president or any Congress.
	You're seeing the same thing with YouTube and with MySpace.
	I mean, on the one hand, these are just toys and they're trivial, but on the other hand, they are a means of humans coming together to, you know, create new realities in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago.
	I mean, ten years ago, the phrase .com was brand new.
	You know, think of how fast that we've changed already.
	And that is at the heart of the prevail scenario, is can we continue to create new ways of coming up with solutions that were unimaginable 10 years or 20 years ago?
	You know, the same way that we've created a world now that would be hard to have believed if you were around in the year 1200.
	Let me ask you this.
	Do you think the Prevail scenario envisions a future where the world is still divided into nation-states?
	That's a credible scenario.
	That's possible.
	But one of the downside risks of this is that we end up with much more fundamental divisions than we have now.
	That's right.
	You know, right now, you look at the divisions that are created in the world over race, for that matter, or religion.
	Well, potentially, this radical evolution could create different kinds of humans.
	I can easily imagine that you'd end up with three kinds of humans.
	The enhanced, the natural, and the rest.
	The enhanced would be those people who embrace these technologies for themselves and their children, and grab at every chance they get.
	The naturals would be people who do have access to these technologies, but choose not to indulge, like today's vegetarians, for ethical reasons or emotional reasons or whatever.
	And then the third group would be the rest, and these are people who, either for reasons of geography or money, do not have access to these enhancements, and they envy and despise those who do.
	Well, that could put those kind of divisions Could put race and religion in the shade as a divider.
	That's a very, very bad scenario.
	Right, but doesn't all of human history teach us that that is the most likely scenario of all?
	If these changes that you describe, and I'm with you, I believe they are going to manifest, do arrive, then isn't that the most likely scenario that those who have will be hated and envied and all the rest of it by those who have not for whatever reason, economic or otherwise?
	It's a credible scenario, but I don't make predictions, and I can think of a lot of reasons why that might not happen.
	For one thing, the whole idea of haves and have-nots is an industrial age way of thinking.
	It's based on the idea of shortages, and that the rich get and the poor don't get.
	Well, look at where these technologies are in fact going right now.
	Take a look at cell phones.
	That's moving out to... Those are the real personal computers of our age.
	That's our connection to the Internet.
	And right now there are 30 African nations with more cell phones than they have landlines.
	It's been six years since the people of the Philippines overthrew one of their tyrants using the text messaging function on their cell phone to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the street in demonstrations That got rid of one of their tyrants.
	You simply, if you were here, have you ever been to the Philippines, Joel?
	No, I have not.
	They're ahead of us in the cell phone category.
	They've got G3 deployed across the entire nation.
	You can go to one of the most remote areas on Mininal, for example, and have G3 and have a picture phone and see the person that you're talking to.
	They're years ahead of us and you're absolutely right.
	It's beyond all belief what's happened here.
	And it has lots of practical consequences.
	I mean, you have ordinary fishermen whose lives are becoming, you know, incredibly better because they don't just have to come back to their home port to sell their fish and take whatever price that they're offered by the broker there.
	If they get a catch, they can start making cell phone calls while they're still out to sea and find out where the best price is.
	That may not sound like much, but that really changes lives.
	And these technologies are getting out to the masses much faster than television, or radio, or refrigeration, or the automobile.
	So there's reasons for guarded optimism that we're not looking at the have, have not situation.
	These technologies are not controlled by the United States, or by the West for that matter.
	An awful lot of these are burgeoning in places like India, China, Korea, Japan, Europe.
	This is a global project that we humans are on, and it's unlikely to be stopped.
	The question is whether we will have the wisdom to come up with ways of dealing with this that are as amazing as the technologies that are advancing so rapidly.
	All right, Joel, hold it right there.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	There's something I want you to consider during the break, and that is the hell scenario by scientific error.
	I could describe many, many moments in human history Where we've stumbled into or created a new technology, whether it would be element 92 and the early nuclear testing that went on.
	Of course, they didn't know what was going to happen, but they plowed ahead anyway.
	Or an incident in San Francisco where they took away somebody's immune system to try out a new drug for the AIDS virus that had the potential to race around all of humanity and kill us.
	In other words, the big oops factor will be right back.
	Joel Garreau is my guest.
	He's a fascinating man, no question about that.
	He's written a book that I suggest you pick up.
	If it's anything like, well, the interview has been, you're definitely going to want to read it.
	Radical Evolution is the name of it.
	The promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies, and what it means to be human.
	He's a reporter, both reporter and editor, at the Washington Post.
	I'm R. Bell.
	In a moment we'll talk about the oops factor.
	The big difference between the technology that was and getting up toward the top of
	the curve and where we are right now, Joel, is that in the past a mistake meant a local
	problem or at worst a regional problem.
	But with where technology is going, particularly the technologies that you've been talking about, our very Core, our genetics, or whether you're talking about little tiny machines that can race around our body and fix heart trouble and cancer and all the rest of it.
	Somewhere along the line here, there's going to be an oops factor.
	And I recall in San Francisco, they killed a guy's complete immune system trying out a new drug on him.
	And they admitted that there was the possibility of trouble for the entire human race if it went wrong.
	But it didn't stop them.
	They went ahead anyway.
	Then we go back to the invention of the bomb, and they thought, well, the whole, it was credible thought that the whole atmosphere might ignite, but they went ahead and pushed the button anyway, and I could go on giving you examples, but as we get into this newer technology that you've been discussing tonight, there is the possibility of hell by mistake.
	Isn't there?
	Because since when do they not push the button?
	Oh yeah.
	I mean, this is why the hell scenario is credible.
	It absolutely could go that way.
	But what I find fascinating is, why do we... I wonder if there's something about humans that we're so obsessed with the hell scenario.
	I mean, if you have three scenarios that are equally rational, why is... I mean, this happens to me all the time, is people always want to focus on the hell scenario.
	Sure.
	And I think... and I've given this some thought.
	You know, we have been projecting these health scenarios for a long time.
	In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and it was a huge hit.
	She was just a teenager, and she had this amazing creative vision.
	And I'm wondering whether what's going on is that it's much easier for us to imagine disaster than it is to imagine solutions.
	You know, that's one of the reasons that I started pushing towards trying to imagine, well, what would a transcendent human look like?
	You know, if these technologies are, in fact, pushing forward, you know, the trouble with the people who are advocating the health scenario, I mean, I have a great deal of respect for them.
	They're asking very important questions.
	They're asking questions like, you know, should we eliminate pain and suffering?
	You know, is that maybe we shouldn't?
	Maybe, you know, suffering and dying is a critical part of what it means to be human?
	I think that's a fascinating question.
	And I'm glad we're asking these questions.
	I wish that we had been asking questions this smart back when we were originally sold nuclear power, for example.
	However, you know, when you start asking people who advocate, who talk about the health scenario, they say, well, what would you then do about it?
	And they, you know, and that's where they kind of draw a blank.
	They kind of say, well, we should maybe stop it all.
	Well, it's unlikely.
	I mean, whatever problem we've got, the bigger the problem, the more likely we are to reach for a brand new technological fix.
	For example, the energy crisis.
	One of the reasons why we might survive that and move on to a world beyond oil is that it's getting more and cheaper To produce alternatives to oil, like ethanol from cellulose, from wood.
	Right.
	The big deal about that is that, you know, a few years ago, the enzyme that was required to create that ethanol cost the equivalent of $5 a gallon.
	Now it costs $0.15 a gallon, and the reason is genetic technology.
	We've created brand new bugs that are able to, you know, digest this wood and in effect turn it into gasoline.
	Right now, there's a company in Silicon Valley called NanoSolar, which has broken ground for its factory.
	I mean, it's got $100 million in venture capital funding, and what they're planning on doing is creating flexible sheets of plastic that, in effect, generate electricity.
	Again, that's nanotechnology at work.
	So the question is, you know, I think that the real stretch of imagination is not to, you know, think about how this could all You know, go to hell tomorrow, because it quite clearly could.
	But the question is, well, suppose... The thing is, pessimism doesn't take a lot of imagination.
	You know, anybody can think about how this could all go to heck in a handbasket tomorrow.
	The real challenges over the last 20 or 30 years have been ones to try to imagine the upside.
	I mean, think about IBM back in 1980.
	They then projected that the entire world market for PCs for the next 10 years was going to be 254,000 copies.
	Notice the precision.
	Not 250, 254.
	And so everybody nodded their head, and they proceeded to act on this projection.
	And, of course, they were off by almost exactly a factor of 100.
	If they had just had the wit to try to think about the upside, They never would have given, you know, Bill Gates the job of creating the operating system.
	And similarly, AT&T back at that time, you know, decided there was no future in mobile phones.
	And look at where AT&T is today.
	So I've been trying to think about, I mean, I've expended some of my energy trying to imagine, well, okay, you know, suppose this technology does in fact continue to increase, you know, and suppose our You know, social responses to it, managed to struggle along in our imperfect way at the same pace.
	You know, well, what would a transcendent human be like?
	And this goes back to my thing about, you know, well, what do you mean human?
	What do you mean human nature?
	And I think what we are, basically, is that we're storytelling, pattern-seeking animals.
	I think that's what humans are.
	We can't tolerate an absence of meaning.
	I mean, we will look up into the night sky and see stars, And we'll come up with the most elaborate stories as to why the stars were arranged the way they are.
	And we'll see dragons up there, and bears, and dippers, and kings, and queens, because we just can't imagine that this is random.
	Well, I think that one of our challenges right now, the reason that the health scenarios are so credible to us, is that we've got a problem with our narrative about how the world works.
	I mean, I don't think this is a technological problem.
	I think that this is a spiritual problem in a lot of ways, or a social problem.
	We just don't have, we no longer have an agreement on how the world works.
	And I was thinking about the last time we had a change in history as dramatic as the one that Radical Evolution talks about.
	You know, and it was the one about a thousand years B.C.
	where we were increasingly becoming conscious You know, we not just had brains that functioned, you know, allowing us to count, but we started to become self-aware.
	And what happened back then was that all over the world, among societies that were not in contact with each other, you know, we saw the rise of all the world's great religions.
	We saw the rise of the Judeo Old Testament that led to Christianity.
	We saw the rise of Buddhism and Confucianism, we saw the rise of the great philosophers of Greece.
	And I'm wondering, and they talk about this as the Axial Age.
	You know, it's the age in which all of these new understanding systems come up.
	And I've begun to wonder, I wonder if we're ripe for a new Axial Age.
	I wonder if we're ripe for a new way of starting to think about what this all adds up to.
	I'm not particularly religious myself, but it occurred to me to think, you know, well, maybe I should be talking to some of the people who were devout, because they've been thinking about this for several thousand years, maybe they have something to say.
	And I ended up talking to Karen Armstrong, who wrote this terrific book called A History of God, and she's the one who turned me on to this axial age where you saw Confucian, Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and the Greeks, I think what we were doing back then, we were filling up the emptiness in our emerging consciousness with the highest aspirations for human nature we could possibly imagine.
	I think that that's what those religions are about.
	And I'm wondering whether it's time, whether we're now heading into a situation in which we are going to be coming up with our own new narrative about what it means to be human, and what is going to be evolving Is a new narrative about who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed, and what makes us tick.
	Now, you know, call me a cockeyed optimist, but, you know, maybe it'll work this time.
	You are kind of an optimist, but that's fine.
	What kind of social structure, Joel, do you imagine that would support this prevail scenario?
	Well, the core of it would have to be, you know, the whole idea of the transcend idea.
	Would be an elaboration of the prevail scenario.
	And again, the reason I'm interested in what the optimistic version might be is that the pessimistic version doesn't get you much of anywhere.
	You just say, okay, the world's going to come to an end tomorrow.
	It doesn't make much of a movie.
	There's not much plot to it.
	It's the end of the world is at hand.
	There's nothing you can do about it.
	Hold on tight.
	The end.
	With fabulous special effects.
	But otherwise, it's not much of a movie.
	Neither is the Heaven Scenario for the same reason.
	Whereas, you know, the idea of trying to forge our own transcendence, trying to imagine, you know, what this world could be like and how we could come together.
	Well, what that would involve is, you know, is in fact, you know, what we're seeing is this dramatic change in human connectedness that we're seeing all over the world.
	That is enabled by our technologies, not caused by it.
	I mean, just look at this conversation that we're having, you know?
	You're in the Philippines, I'm in Virginia, your producer is god only knows where.
	You know, and we think nothing of this.
	And yet, this is becoming more and more common.
	And it's this connection with more people who are not saints, you know, who are struggling, who are coming up with good enough solutions But the deal is that now if you find a good enough solution, you can find it worldwide, and you can implement it in a big hurry.
	And that's the fundamental change that was simply not possible, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.
	Okay, but Joel, even with this connectedness that we have, and it is amazing and it's wonderful, but until we stop killing each other and everybody, you know, holding up their version of God's book in front of them as they do so, Until we stop that, and the divisions over religion, and until we move past the individual nation-state.
	I mean, many presidents have uttered the New World Order, or One World Government, or however you want to look at it.
	These words have come from their mouths, usually followed by much criticism.
	Until we get to that point, how do we even imagine the prevail scenario?
	Well, you're absolutely right.
	Once again, it could be that we're going to toast ourselves in the next five minutes.
	I don't mean to say that I don't view that as a credible scenario.
	However, what you can see, historically, is that an awful lot of our problems don't ever get solved.
	They just sound more and more antique.
	For example, I have two daughters who are teenagers.
	And, you know, on television they watch documentaries about the Civil Rights era, and it's like it was a million years ago.
	They just don't get it.
	They look at the people being hit with the fire hoses and they say, what was that about?
	I mean, the significance of this is that problems I don't think ever get solved.
	They just end up sounding more and more antique.
	You know, the issue of the Cold War and communism.
	For my kids, that's ancient history.
	They don't, they barely know who Ronald Reagan is.
	There are, you know, and that would be the, that there might be a parallel evolution in history in which, you know, the idea of, you know, the nation state and one world government and all of the stuff that we talk about today just ends up sounding, you know, just sounding more and more antique because it's transcended by the new stuff that we create, that we go along, that we're just beginning to imagine as we go on today.
	I mean, it's tough.
	If you focus only on the past, of course you're going to be a pessimist, because the solutions for our new problems don't exist back there.
	The issue is, can we start inventing things on the fly and sharing them ever faster?
	You know, and if that's, you know, Panglossian, if that's too optimistic, then we are in fact doomed.
	But in fact, we see some history that suggests that that's possible.
	I'm trying to get in a place where I can agree with that, but I'm not sure I can.
	I am a pessimist.
	It just seems to me that we've got to find a way around this religious divisiveness and these separate governments.
	I just can't even imagine.
	I can certainly imagine all of the technological changes that you're talking about.
	I can imagine very privileged, changed human beings in the U.S.
	and perhaps in Europe and even some parts of Asia.
	And then I see this world of haves and have-nots and I just can't imagine the kind of social evolution that it's going to take for us to prevail.
	Well, in which case, we're toast.
	But the other thing, too, is that, you know, I don't think that, you know, when you look historically at solving an awful lot of these problems, you know, you can't count on people to change.
	You can, however, count on them to die, or at least so far.
	That's true.
	And when they do, they're replaced by new people, younger people, who are not necessarily better or worse than the ones who preceded them, but they've had an
	entirely different life experience, and they've come up with an entirely different view of the
	future.
	So, you know, I think that it's... I mean, I've seen it happen, you know, in my lifetime,
	in which problems that seemed utterly intractable and utterly insoluble end up sort of fading away
	as younger people just can't quite remember why, you know, in the United States, why,
	you know race was such a big deal or you know in canada it was language
	I'm not suggesting that I think that humans are not going to be figuring out brand new ways of dividing themselves up.
	I mean, we're ornery, cussed, unpredictable critters, we humans.
	And I don't think that's going to change.
	You know, what I do think is that we've also got an ability to steal fire from the gods every chance we get.
	I mean, I think that's at the core of human nature, too.
	You know, existential threats, threats to, you know, to our existence, has a wonderful way of focusing us, you know, on the problems at hand.
	For example, you know, one of the reasons to be guardedly optimistic about the prevail scenario is suppose these technologies, you know, one of the reasons, you know, the things that I've been doing about this is I've been typing as fast as I can.
	I mean, I don't have much hope in That these solutions are going to be handed down to us by some president or by some Congress or by some, you know, collection of wise men.
	If we solve these problems, I have a hunch that we're going to be doing it in a bottom-up way, not top-down, where millions of individuals produce, you know, small solutions that are good enough, like eBay, like YouTube, like MySpace, and which originally started as toys, but which end up becoming something much larger than that, you know,
	almost while we're not looking.
	And if we can't do it in a bottom-up way, if we can't do it, you know, millions of individuals solving their own
	individual problems locally and producing good enough solutions locally, then I think we're
	toast.
	The pessimist in me says, gee, a lot of these big things are developed by who?
	DARPA.
	DARPA goes out and looks for these new ideas, new inventions, new technologies.
	And what do they have in mind for them?
	Sure.
	Not necessarily emptying the cancer wards across the world, but a better way to have war.
	All of these technologies emerge first wherever there is the most competition.
	And that's why you see it first in the military and especially in sports.
	I'm going to be real surprised if we don't have enhanced leagues sometime soon.
	All right, hold it right there, and we'll be right back.
	We're going to take a break here at the top of the hour, and then we're going to open the phones.
	Joel Gouraud is my guest, and what a guest he is.
	We're talking about the future, the rather immediate future of the human race.
	Do you want to be part of it?
	Will you take that pill, or will you say, no, not me?
	I'm Art Bell.
	Heaven, hell, or prevail?
	Which of those scenarios do you think is more likely, given the technological progress we're making right now, which is arguably very, very fast?
	Moore's Law may be coming to a conclusion, but that's not the end of the rapid change.
	In fact, it may be actually the beginning of an even faster change in technology.
	And as we move toward, well, I don't know, I guess becoming half-human, half-machines as we move toward the enhanced human capabilities that Joel's been talking about tonight, we're going to have to have a parallel change in our social ability to deal with these changes, or it's going to be hell for sure, in my opinion.
	Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe as people who feel this way die out, we'll all find out that we are changing fast enough to keep pace with it.
	I hope so.
	Anyway, we'll be right back.
	your chance to ask Joel a question is coming right up.
	I get questions from listeners, Joel, as we go along with the program.
	Eddie in New York City says, would you really want to make your children Human 2.0?
	Wouldn't you rather they, say, are Human 3.1?
	Remember that Microsoft didn't get to a good version of Windows for the PC until 3.1.
	That's arguable.
	Could we witness something analogous to this, but with humans?
	Hello, Joel.
	Hello.
	Could we, in fact, become Different kinds of humans?
	Certainly.
	But the question is, you know, what do you mean by human?
	I mean, if you're talking about, are we going to be the same kind of people that came across the Bering Straits 15,000 years ago or whenever, well, already we're not.
	You know, we routinely live to be 70, 80, 90.
	They would view that as a miracle.
	We've already used our technologies to conquer disease and so forth.
	What's new is that we have these powers that were unimaginable before to start accelerating this process.
	And we also have the ability to start doing things that, right now, all of the powers of the comic book superheroes already exist.
	There are exoskeletons, for example, at the University of California at Berkeley.
	Think of it as a wearable robot suit.
	You put it, I mean, I've jitterbugged in this machine, and what it basically allows you to do is lift 180 pounds as if it was 4.
	And that's super strength.
	At the University of Pennsylvania, they have devices called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machines that show what your brain does when you lie.
	And I've stuck my head in this magnetic resonance machine to see if it would work.
	And, you know, it's still in beta.
	It doesn't work really tremendously well.
	But the very fact that you can see what the brain does when you lie and you can identify it is a remarkable change.
	That's like, you know, the shadow knowing what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
	And the list goes on and on.
	Well, how about you, Joel?
	I mean, you've described for us a lot of these changes that are going to be possible in the next 10 or 20 years.
	Would you, if you thought they were safe, avail these for your children?
	Would you avail yourself of these for your children?
	Well, you know, I mean, we're already seeing things like, you know, the NBC Nightly News is sponsored by Viagra.
	You know, think ten years ago, if somebody had told you that the evening news was going to be sponsored by a product that does what Viagra does, you know, you would have thought that was nuts.
	You know, one of the reasons, if I'm making any sense to you at all right now, it's because there's a drug called Provigil, which is a prescription drug readily available.
	You can get it from your doctor.
	And what it does is it shuts off the human trigger to sleep.
	And thank God for it.
	It's great stuff, you know?
	Maybe there should be a sponsor on this show.
	Yeah, there you go.
	All right, let's dip into the public here.
	East of the Rockies, Bruce in Pennsylvania.
	You're on the air with Joel Gouraud.
	Hi.
	Yes, sir.
	I was just wondering, have you seen the movie Awakenings?
	I have not.
	Well, what would happen if These smart pills, for example, the ones that increase intelligence, were given to someone over a period of time and then they chose to stop taking them.
	Did that person's IQ go down?
	I'm not really sure.
	Joel, what do you know about these enhancement drugs, intelligence or memory?
	You know, that's kind of a hypothetical.
	That gets into the realm of science fiction.
	And so the short answer is, beat the heck out of me.
	But it is a concern.
	This is one of the reasons that we test these things and pray that they don't have side effects.
	Will they have side effects?
	I'm sure they will.
	Will we be able to correct them?
	That's the interesting question.
	Well, you do expect, though, in the next 10 to 20 years, there'll be a pill that we can take, or there already is, that will enhance our ability to remember.
	I mean, is that real?
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	That's real as heck.
	That's not science fiction.
	That's already in the works in four U.S.
	pharmaceutical companies, and they expect to have a commercial product within three years.
	The news is that we have a new understanding of how the brain works that is enabled by our technologies that is allowing us to do remarkable things.
	Will there be unintended consequences?
	Oh, I'm sure there are.
	That's part of the human discovery process.
	The question is not whether we're going to make mistakes.
	That's for sure.
	The question is whether we're going to learn from our mistakes.
	That's at the heart of the prevail scenario.
	Joel, I wonder how they differentiate between the ability to remember and basic intellect.
	Aren't they sort of mixed up together in a way?
	Sure.
	This is why it's raising profound questions.
	This is why this is not just something to just do the oh wow.
	I don't really care about the technology all that much.
	I'm not that much of a gear freak.
	I don't care about the toys.
	What I'm interested in, you know, is where this takes us as a species, and where this takes us as humans, you know, whether we're going to end up not being just smarter, but whether we're going to be wiser.
	I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that we're figuring out ways of tweaking the brain that will allow us to conquer diseases that right now seem insoluble, like Alzheimer's.
	The question is, where does this take us?
	And, you know, and the people who are, you know, who are worried about the health scenario, this is why they're very valuable, because they're asking so many important questions.
	I think part of what this is, is that, you know, we tell ourselves horror stories in some ways to inoculate ourselves.
	You think back to the 50s, and there were all of these, you know, nuclear, wintered, you know, horror story movies.
	On the beach, for example, where the last humans, you know, are sitting.
	I love them, Joel.
	I absolutely love that genre.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, in some ways, I think that helped inoculate us.
	I mean, you look at 1984, that book, you know, I mean, that portrayed a world in which computers, you know, at the behest of a horrible dictator, enslaved the world.
	Well, you know, in some ways, That was kind of an inoculant.
	I mean, to this day, when we see something bad going, we say 1984, or we say Brave New World, you know, and we shudder.
	And, you know, it's a shorthand way of us humans saying, that's a road that we don't want to take.
	And I think that's the real value of these horror stories, is that it's a way of, you know, for us processing change.
	As fast as we can.
	I think we're storytelling animals.
	Or the Foreman Project.
	I don't know if you ever saw that one.
	I think it was the Foreman Project.
	Essentially, that machines are given control over most of what we have, including our nuclear weapons, that sort of thing.
	And the machines, being perhaps wiser, is the right word, than we are, decide that we're on the path to self-destruction, and machines essentially do something that we might not think of as being in our own best interest.
	Sure, I mean, that's one of the horror stories that we love to tell ourselves, is suppose our creations decide that we're the problem, not the solution.
	The infestation, as it were.
	Yeah.
	Okay, let's go to Fresno, California.
	Robin, you're on with Joel Leroux.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	In order for us to prevail, we must reinvent ourselves.
	And I wanted to get Joel to comment on what role our education system can play with this and how we teach our children and what we are teaching our children in the public school system.
	If we don't re-evaluate this, And teach children in the second grade to type rather than writing cursive.
	We need to reevaluate our education system because we're never going to thrive.
	We can survive, but we need to thrive.
	And I think that since we're animals of habit, changing patterns of thinking is not going to be an easy feat because there's more people Who are less likely to step out of a comfort zone.
	You know, they'll stick with the true, tried, tested, and if it works, don't fix it kind of mentality.
	How do you feel about the education system that our children are going to every day and how we can change patterns of thinking for parents to say, for instance, my daughter, before she went to college, I said, before you go into that field, you must live a day in the life she wants to be in culinary.
	She has to work in a restaurant.
	She must have a feel for what it's like.
	And then once you're there, to understand that, yes, you can do it by the book,
	and you can learn by the book, and yes, you must have that background,
	but always enhance what you're learning to add your own element to it,
	to bring to the next degree for your generation above and beyond what has been a true tried and tested. And
	I think unless we think in those mentalities on a day-to-day life, we're not
	going to get to the point of many more Bill Gates or Einstein's or the
	people that truly make a difference. And I think with the white noise that these
	kids are dealing with with the iPods and so forth, are they ever going to be able
	to really think in In fact, some of the people who have responded most vigorously to radical evolution have been people in the education industry.
	It is.
	All right, Robin, hold it right there.
	That's a lot to tackle.
	The educational system, Joe.
	Well, that's a great point.
	I mean, in fact, some of the people who have responded most vigorously to radical evolution
	have been people in the education industry.
	One of the things that I'm a little depressed by when I work with these people is that they're
	much more concerned with saving their own jobs and their own way of doing things.
	They're much more interested in saving the public education system, for example, than they are actually creating learning.
	The public education system was a product of the industrial age.
	What it did was produce an awful lot of workers with certain minimum skills, And they mass-produce these literate people off the assembly line of education.
	And don't get me wrong, it did the world a lot of good.
	I'm not knocking it.
	But then I look at my daughter today, who's 16, and when she comes home from high school, the first thing she does is she turns on all her machines.
	She turns on her IM and her email and her cell phones, and she and her pals end up starting to work on their homework collectively, over the wire, as a team.
	And then, they go back to school in the morning, and the first thing the teachers make them do is turn off all their machines.
	And, if they attempt to try to solve problems collectively, like they did the night before, they'd be thrown out of school, and they'd say that was cheating.
	Well, you know, what I'm saying is that I see plenty of learning going on, but that's not the same thing as the schools.
	Maybe you could comment on this, Joel.
	There are people who believe that, for example, the Internet, instead of stifling ideas, I'm sorry, instead of promoting ideas, is sort of making the top ten ideas available for everybody in the world, so that instead of having somebody on an island or a nation In some far-flung place who didn't know he can do something, he reads on the internet that it is this way and everybody believes the same thing.
	So while the internet is certainly a blessing in many ways, it may also sort of connect people in a way that doesn't promote the next evolution, the next idea.
	Oh sure.
	I mean there's no technology that's ever been created as far as I know That doesn't have downside potential.
	I mean, Al-Qaeda is using the Internet in a very effective fashion.
	There's nothing magic about these technologies.
	I don't see any technology that's going to save us some magic bullet.
	It's the question of how we use it.
	In the case of our new technologies like the Internet, it's really different from television and radio.
	Radio produced the top 40 list.
	And those are the only songs that, you know, that you heard again and again and again and again.
	Now, however, you know, what you're seeing with these new technologies is what is called the long tail, which is, you know, sure, you have best sellers, but you also have thousands of songs, thousands of books that maybe only sell one or two a week that are also available to you instantly.
	So, I mean, there's two sides to this.
	One is that, yes, you can share Britney Spears faster than ever, and your pornography faster than ever, but on the other hand, you can also trade other kinds of ideas that right now, perhaps, only have a small number of people listening to it, but it's the ability to take those small number of ideas and get them out to people in a way that was never possible before.
	That's a reason for guarded optimism.
	Well, being an American, I was a little shocked the other day when somebody told me the American educational system is no longer at the top of the list, and I believe that is true.
	We are no longer at the top of the list at all, and that was shocking and sort of depressing to me.
	Do you confirm that, and if so, what kind of changes do we need, going back to that lady's question, in our educational system to Well, those numbers are slippery.
	If you look at 16-year-olds in math, then it's true that the Americans routinely end up far down the list.
	However, if you start looking at 25-year-olds, that's the reason for guarded optimism, because our 25-year-olds are the equal of anyone.
	And there are some reasons for that.
	One is, it sounds so simple, but we have the community college system in the United States, which is one of the great inventions of the second half of the 20th century.
	Every time people have a life change in the United States, the first thing they do is they go back to school.
	They get divorced, they lose their job, the first thing they do is they enroll in the community college.
	That's a system that doesn't exist in other parts of the world.
	It allows us to change as our circumstances change, and it keeps on going forever.
	When I teach, I frequently have people in their 60s who are enrolled in graduate school.
	That's a remarkable thing.
	The other thing you're seeing is the rise of what's called serious games.
	We're seeing all of these Of course, all of the ink goes to the shoot-em-ups and all that stuff, but increasingly people are using that kind of technology to teach people how to do surgery, to teach people how to deal with poverty.
	There are all of these changes that are coming online that we don't really know what the outcome is going to be.
	But, you know, if you're going to be, you know, have some reason for hope about the future, you don't look at what's dying, you look at what's being born.
	All right.
	We're down toward the bottom of the hour, Joel, so hold tight.
	We're talking about all kinds of changes in the human race, perhaps changes that will eventually sort of render us non-human or only partly human.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed, here I am.
	Joel Gouraud is a reporter, editor as well at the Washington Post.
	He's written a book, a fascinating book if it's anything like the interview, called Radical Evolution.
	Certainly we're having a radical evolution, aren't we?
	The promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies, and what it means to be human.
	And in a moment, we'll find out if the book is generally available and where.
	Joel, your book, I take it, is generally available on Amazon.com, all the usual places, bookstores
	as well.
	And how long has it been out?
	If Doubleday hasn't let me down, it certainly is, yeah.
	How long has it been out now?
	The paperback just came out in the spring.
	Alright, and the hardback, how long ago?
	A year ago.
	A year ago.
	What kind of reviews have you received, and I'm sure that other people in the publishing business have taken a look-see at it.
	Yeah, sure.
	Well, let's see.
	You're giving me the chance to do the plug here.
	The New York Times called it captivating, brilliant, enthralling, dazzling.
	Wow.
	Not bad.
	Uh, went for it.
	Says, uh, deserves serious attention for its potential to turn the world upside down and inside out in the relatively near future.
	Great news, it's extremely readable.
	I've gotten some nice reviews, I'm very fortunate.
	Yeah, I can imagine.
	I can imagine, so I'd like to read it myself.
	There are a lot of New Age type people out there, Joel, who think that there's going to be this radical, almost instant evolution in human social consciousness, that there's going to be this magical point Where something giant happens and there's great change in the way humans think about everything.
	I tend to think that it's going to be more this gradual change and it is kind of a race isn't it?
	To see if we can keep pace with the technological change and I don't know that we're doing that yet but I guess if I was as much of an optimist as you are I might believe so.
	Well I'm an optimist because pessimism is boring I guess.
	As I say, I'm not saying that we can't screw this up.
	I don't make any predictions.
	I'm just saying that if we do have some hope for where we're headed next, here's what it looks like.
	The problem I have with an awful lot of the New Age nostrums is that it might work, but it's untestable and it's unprovable.
	You know, after you say, well, you know, the world is going to change dramatically, uh, you know, then you say, okay, fine, great.
	And, uh, and if it doesn't, then what?
	Um, I mean, it's a, it's a triumph of hope.
	Um, but with, but with no agenda, I mean, you know, so what do you do with this is what I keep on asking people.
	And, um, and that's where I, you know, find an awful lot of the new age stuff to be lacking.
	Pessimism is not boring, Joel.
	I mean, it generated things like On the Beach and other wonderful movies that just scared the hell out of us.
	First time caller line, you're on the air, John, with Joel.
	How are you doing?
	Okay.
	What do you feel about, do you mind talking a little bit about Jesus Christ and the Holy Grail and things like that?
	No, I don't think we mind talking about that.
	That's religion.
	And, Joel, in this kind of brave new world that you talk about, there are going to have to be changes, I think, in religion.
	And if there are not, well, it's the reason we're divided as we are now.
	You want to venture into that territory at all?
	Sure.
	One of the things that I've done is, you know, I've got It's a book that has evolution in its title, radical evolution.
	And as you know, the whole teaching of evolution has become tremendously controversial.
	So, I've gone out of my way to try to reach out to evangelical Christians.
	I've been appearing on their radio shows with a certain amount of regularity, and it turns out that I offer them an out that they find attractive.
	It turns out there are an awful lot of smart evangelical Christians who are not particularly interested in fighting the Darwin Wars over again, but they just don't want to appear to be disloyal to people who are fellow believers.
	So when I get on their shows, I say, hey, tell you what, how about we just set aside for the time being You know, what happened 100,000 or a million years ago?
	Let's talk about what's going to happen to our kids in the next 5, 10, 20 years, and it dramatically changes the conversation in a way that causes them to constantly invite me back.
	Yeah, that's a very good approach.
	I hadn't considered that one.
	Instead of arguing it all, just sort of look ahead instead of looking back.
	That's a good one.
	Wildcard Line, Diane in Glendale, Arizona.
	You're on with Joel.
	And Joel, and I'd like to just say quickly hi to my brother Bill in Yuma.
	I'm sure he knows who I am.
	You know what?
	I disagree wholeheartedly with everything your guest has said.
	Really?
	Joel, do you believe there's a creator or not?
	We all climbed out of primordial muck.
	Is that it?
	And we've Well, here's where we get to try it.
	Now, why even bother arguing all of that?
	As Joel says, why not look ahead?
	Let's look ahead at what he said regarding the smart pill to de-trigger a human's need for sleep.
	I believe we have that already in crystal meth, and look at the results of that.
	I don't think crystal meth is exactly what he was talking about.
	What would be the results?
	People kill for days and days and then they kill their children.
	I can address that.
	Okay, go right ahead.
	I mean, there are lots of ways to stay up.
	I mean, that's not the big deal.
	I mean, caffeine is as old as tea in China and coffee in Arabia and chocolate in the New World.
	That's not the big deal of staying awake.
	The big deal is doing it without ruining your cognition, ruining your way of thinking.
	I mean, the downsides of speed are legendary.
	What's remarkable about the new brain drugs is their ability to target specific areas of the brain.
	I mean, it's the broad-spectrum approach that creates side effects.
	The ability to deal with the brain in very highly specific ways that offer possibilities that you know ultimately
	will have drugs of one in which you know there are drugs that are tailor-made
	you know for art. It'll be art 12379 and it'll be aimed specifically at his genome.
	Now you have to decide whether that's a heaven or a hell outcome
	but it's in the works. Sure. Well you know she came at you
	again with the same argument that you said you dismissed by saying let
	us just look at the future but that perhaps dismisses it too
	easily because The belief system and the strength of that belief system of people like that young lady and the others that you encounter on the programs you talk about is so strong that even though you're able to divert the conversation temporarily and get a good show out of it, Joel, that still
	That belief system lurks as a giant cog in the wheel, or I guess I ought to say, the possible wheel of prevailing.
	Well, you're absolutely right.
	One of the things that I find interesting is the rise of fundamentalism worldwide.
	Not just Christian fundamentalism, but Muslim fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, and there's even Buddhist fundamentalism, my God!
	Yes.
	And if it's going in the direction that you suggested, John, I'm sorry, if it's going in the direction you suggest it needs to be going in, shouldn't that not be the case?
	Well, that's what I thought.
	I've been scratching my head about that, and I thought, well, didn't people predict that with the rise of science that rationalism would prevail?
	I think what's going on is that as we see change going faster and faster, it's difficult for people to handle this.
	And as a result, anybody who says that they have got a solution, and that they have got a truth, well that's going to be incredibly attractive.
	When the ground is moving beneath your feet, you look for something to hang on to, and I think that's what What fundamental beliefs do is they offer you some bedrock, and I totally understand the attractiveness of it.
	On the other hand, the question is, can you proceed to imagine new ways of dealing with these problems that we're facing in the real world?
	I mean, I think that it's all well and good to consider the hereafter, and I'm in favor of that.
	But I'm right now focusing on what we're going to do to deal with our societies and our hopes and our dreams in the here and now.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies in Illinois, John, you're on with Joel.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, Joel.
	This is from Springfield, Illinois.
	Hopefully, Art, you had a happy Thanksgiving.
	If I don't talk to you, Merry Christmas to both of you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Joel, instead of taking pharmaceuticals to enhance memory, Cole, what do you think about the future holds for implants directly attached to nerve endings?
	For example, there's someone in the East Coast that's disabled, that he runs his whole house just by thinking, and military pilots directly linked to weapon systems and flight systems.
	And I'll listen off the air.
	Okay, well I guess you didn't catch the beginning of the show because that was covered, but you may want to go ahead with that, Joel.
	Yeah, well, I'm not aware that Those technologies are actually out of the lab yet.
	I mean, I don't know that there's anybody actually flying a plane with their thoughts.
	But in fact, you do have humans who are running their house, for that matter.
	But we did have the first human being in 2004 to send an email with his thoughts, a person who was Matthew Nagel, who was a quadriplegic.
	So, I mean, these technologies that blur the distinction between the made and the born uh... you know between up in our machines
	you are definitely happening right now there are thirty thousand people in the
	united states running around with what's called cochlear implants
	these are not hearing aids the little computers
	are attached directly into the nerve endings that go to the brain
	and uh... they allow the profoundly deaf to hear yes rush limbaugh is one of them
	yet another one is uh... is popular implants which similarly
	go directly into the optic nerve and basically a little computer camera
	that pipe directly into the brain and a lot of the profile they profoundly blind
	I mean, one of the problems that I have talking about this is convincing people of what exists, much less what's in the pipeline.
	I mean, that's one of the difficulties that we're dealing with, with the pace of change.
	Is that the incredible is happening every day?
	And you've also got to wonder a little bit, Joel, these are things that we know about.
	I wonder how much DARPA is working on and other similar agencies that they have decided not to make us aware of yet.
	Yeah, I asked that question.
	I spent the better part of a year there.
	there. You can go on the website to www.darpa.mil and just start going through the list of what
	they're working on.
	And what they're working on in the clear is the part that's pretty jaw-dropping.
	And there is no doubt some classified work.
	But you don't have to worry about that.
	Just take a look at what actually exists and what's in the labs and what they're being very upfront about.
	That website goes on forever.
	Yes, it does.
	On the international line, Rob in Ontario, Canada.
	You're on the air.
	Hi.
	This is absolutely fantastic.
	You know what?
	You guys are covering all aspects, and I thank you for that.
	Thank you.
	You bet.
	Okay, as far as you talk about heaven and hell, okay, in the last caller she was a little bit stuck, I believe, as far as what you said about the fundamentalism.
	Fundamentalism.
	Oh my God, I'm stuck.
	Okay, my question is, if God is omnipotent, why would He create a hell where somebody would be destined to go there knowing that, then why create that person in the first place?
	Well, that one may be a little bit out of any of our leagues.
	I'm a reporter, not a theologian.
	Okay.
	Wish we could answer that one for you, but yes, we can't.
	West of the Rockies, Jim, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art and Joel.
	Fascinating show.
	Thank you.
	Don't you think it would take some sort of catastrophic event in order to bring the human race together and in order for them to be able to shed these culture and Religious differences in order for them to accept, you know, this radical technology.
	That actually is a very good question.
	I remember that President Reagan, among others, made several comments that, perhaps it was wishful thinking, that what if the Earth were invaded by some extraterrestrials?
	Then we would all have to come together to fight a common foe.
	Joel, this one also is probably out of your ballpark, but do you think some giant event of that magnitude would bring us all together?
	Well, that would be the easy way.
	I mean, the reason that people have hopes like that is because it takes us out of the hard slogging of having to invent the future ourselves.
	Right.
	You know, if suddenly the Martians arrive, well, you know, all bets are off.
	My proposition is, suppose that they don't.
	You know, suppose it's up to us.
	This is a rather remarkable situation that we're in here, where, you know, we humans are increasingly taking control of matter and energy and life itself.
	Well, you know, you're basically assuming the powers that seem godlike.
	Well, it may be, Joel, that for evolution to continue, perhaps we've been brought this far, and then it's been put in our hands, and our own evolution is in fact in our hands.
	once said, we are as gods, we might as well get good at it.
	I think that's what this is about.
	Well, it may be, Joel, that for evolution to continue, perhaps we've been brought this
	far and then it's been put in our hands and our own evolution is in fact in our hands.
	You apparently believe that.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, that's where the evidence seems to take me.
	I mean, one of the things that has occurred to me is that we don't seem to be able to find any other intelligent life form in the universe.
	Perhaps this is the wrong show to say that on.
	Maybe you have different information than I do.
	No.
	But the thing that occurs to me is, you know, maybe this is the final exam.
	Maybe the reason that we're not finding other intelligent species is that maybe all intelligent species get to the point Where they take control of their own evolution, their own engineered evolution, their own radical evolution.
	Maybe this is the final exam.
	Maybe everybody else flunked.
	That's yet another reason for us to, you know, we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
	Yeah, that's not at all hopeful.
	If the reason we've not yet heard from any other intelligent race is that there is this final exam point, and just about everybody flunks, Then I think it was Michio Kaku, a very well respected theoretical physicist, who said that when you get down, really get right down to it, Joel, the possibility of us moving from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization, and I won't go through trying to describe that for you, but basically handling the discovery of Element 92 and living through it, the chances of our getting through that are very slim in his estimation.
	Sure.
	And yet, we've done it for the last 60 years.
	Again, I don't mean to come across as a Pollyanna.
	I don't mean to suggest that I think that the optimistic version of this is in any way inevitable.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I totally see how we can screw this up.
	The hell scenario is very, very real and very possible.
	The one thing that I wonder is whether the other species who may have hit this point All right.
	Joel, that's it.
	We're way out of time.
	Buddy, thank you for being on the program.
	It's been absolutely brilliant.
	You have a good night.
	Thank you, Art.
	that if we prevail it's going to be not because we're so special but because we're so ornery.
	Alright, Joel, that's it. We're way out of time. Buddy, thank you for being on the program.
	It's been absolutely brilliant. You have a good night.
	Thank you, Art.
	Take care, Joel. Alright, everybody, that's it from Manila in the Philippines for this
	And what can I say?

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