James Gilliland claims extraterrestrial "Palladians"—genetically refined, telepathic beings linked to Native American traditions—have colonized Earth for millennia, warning humanity about environmental collapse and pole shifts tied to 2012 through direct encounters, including recent abductions near his Washington ranch. Meanwhile, Bart Kosko reveals noise’s paradoxical role: while sonar (e.g., Project Talisman Sabre) and industrial decibels harm marine life, controlled noise enhances neural networks, yet quantum computing risks breaking encryption, exposing brain data if consciousness were digitized. His skepticism of the Global Consciousness Experiment contrasts with Gilliland’s interdimensional claims, underscoring how noise—from cosmic radiation to hospital decibels—shapes both science and consciousness, blurring boundaries between technology, law, and the unseen. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be in whatever time zone you reside in, all of them being covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM, the largest program of its sort in the world.
Quite a claim, and totally true.
I'm Art Bell, second half of the weekend, escorting you through my honor and privilege, as always.
Now, coming up immediately is James Gilliland.
Now, I've got a couple of things to say about James before I read the ever-present bio.
Say what you will about James Gilliland, and people say much.
He's got a ranch.
I guess it's been a couple of years now.
I don't know how long I've been interviewing James, but I can tell you this.
I have received no less than 100 emails from people who have physically gone to the Gilliland ranch.
And they've all seen, they've all seen these UFOs that visit this area for I don't know what reason, but it's real.
No less, I'm telling you, take my word for it, no less than 100 emails from people who have gone to the ranch and then written to me in exquisite detail about what they've seen, blown their minds.
So it's real.
All right, so here we go.
James Gilliland is an internationally known speaker, minister, visionary, author of two books, Reunion with Source and Becoming God's 2.
He is the director of the Self-Mastery Earth Institute, NISETI.
Enlightened contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
After a near-death experience, James returned with what he refers to as an interdimensional mind, the ability to move beyond the body and the personality into other planes and dimensions throughout the multiverse.
This includes the ability to experience different timelines and future probabilities.
He is dedicated to the awakening and the healing of humanity and the Earth, as well as researching and ushering in new healing and earth-friendly energy technologies.
So let me stress again, no less than 100, I mean it, 100 emails from people who have just had their socks blown off by going to the ranch and witnessing for themselves.
And you can't undo that one.
They have seen.
We'll be right back.
Coming at the top of the next hour, Bart Costco, but for this hour, we've got James Gillow.
And James, no question about it.
I've had, as I said, at least 100 emails from people who have been witnesses to what happens up on your ranch.
Oh, we're located in Trout Lake, Washington, right at the base of Mount Adams, just about a little over an hour from Portland and probably about 30 minutes from Hood River, Oregon.
Well, there's a real long history of UFO activity that goes back to the Native American traditions and legends, and they had a lot of contact in the past.
And they had actually some beings they had contact with were doing all kinds of healings and things of that nature.
And actually living with some of the different nations here, the Yakima Nation and others all know about it.
What kind of, other than your MDE, other than your MDE, what contacts, and I know they're in your skies damn near every night, but other than that, what close contact have you had, James?
And because they say the first contacts are female, because when you meet a being that's very powerful like that, that has a lot of energy and you see a male, a lot of times people run for their gun or they run for something else.
They would be almost like what you would call a supermodel, that you would see.
They're very genetically refined.
The energy exchange that happens when you greet them, you fall in love with them almost instantly because they're just very beautiful beings and very beautiful.
Talked quite a bit about the condition of the consciousness here on Earth and the condition of the environment and how we need to raise our consciousness and clean up our act down here and some big changes that are in the wind.
And they're warning us that we need to completely change the way we treat each other and the way we treat nature and start living in harmony with each other and the planet.
Very beautiful messages, very spiritual messages.
Almost, they could be mistaken for an angelic message if you didn't know the difference.
They're concerned about the way we treat each other and our consciousness.
All of that makes sense, and all of that is fairly clear to, let me say, a lot of us without having to get the message from them.
Here's a question for you, James.
If we don't clean up the environment, if we don't change the way we treat each other, our warrior ways and all the rest of it, in what way would that affect them?
In other words, I guess I'm asking, why do they care?
Well, basically, they are very, very advanced, very spiritually and technologically evolved, and they have evolved to the level of where they're in pure service mode, and they serve creation wherever it is.
And we're a part of creation that is in dire straits right now, and everything is connected.
They know that.
There's a unifying force or field in which everything is connected.
So they know there's no separation and omnipresence.
There's no divisions.
There's no, you know, quantum physics is teaching us this as well.
And they just know that this is a part of creation that needs some major help right now to get through these times.
We're only taking little baby steps in quantum physics right now.
But yes, we're beginning.
Now, I'm not sure that our technology is going to move fast enough because I can clearly see how quickly the environment is deteriorating and human behavior hasn't changed much at all.
So if it's a race right now, we're losing.
That doesn't mean to say that I've lost all hope because I haven't.
But I am concerned that right now we appear to be losing the race.
If, all right, here we go.
If they have all of this technology, they're so advanced, they can see we're wallowing in difficulties and trouble, why in God's name, not to belittle you in any way, James, but why not the White House lawn?
Yeah, but no matter how you view the current administration and politicians, James, if they actually landed on the White House lawn or anywhere else of substance, I have faith that our president and our leaders would take a moment out and notice, don't you think?
You know, they don't want to deal with any kind of aggressiveness whatsoever.
That's not their way.
And they are working very hardly, very hard, I should say, working on the grid and the consciousness of the planet and assisting us through inspiration and other ways.
And they're doing the best they can, but they're kind of bound by universal law and free will.
In the beginning, they tried to work with governments, and now they're moving back to the common people because that just didn't go well.
And they found most of the people that sought out positions of power usually were lacking in the consciousness and the integrity that it takes to maintain the contact.
And they weren't exactly what they wanted to work with, and they couldn't really work with them.
They don't have all the rigid rules and regulations that we do.
They're very free.
They have the whole universe as their playground.
They have the unlimited technologies, the fuelless energies.
They can not just fly 7,000 miles an hour in this atmosphere, but they can jump dimensions.
And you think about the, I don't know how many billions of stars we have, something like 200 billion, I think it's more than that now, in our own Milky Way galaxy alone.
And there's 500 billion galaxies out there.
And then you add all the dimensions, at least 11 that we know about, the life out there is just beyond imagination.
And when you have that as your backyard and your playground, they're pretty unlimited.
If they really have, if they can transcend, oh, if they can do 7,000 miles an hour in our atmosphere or better, they can transcend dimensions, that sort of thing, that means they have a power source that if we were to be able to get our hands on it, and I know that I sound like somebody who Is investigating what just landed on the White House lawn.
But if we could get our hands on a power source, then a lot of the troubles that they're concerned about would evaporate because we would stop using fossil fuels at a rate that's polluting the planet.
And so even if they won't deal with the president or somebody on down the line, if they were to give you some of that technology and you passed it on, well, the whole process could begin.
Yeah, unfortunately, I know quite a few people that are dead right now that did have that technology.
One recent one, I think his name was Stanley Meyer, who actually split water on demand on a car.
And he had a big meeting with the military boys, and the next day he's found dead.
And that's just a small blip as far as the energy.
Just splitting water is one thing, but when you get into fueless energy and things that produce tremendous amounts of power, people that have that kind of technology, I know some of them, they've had their labs burned down, their families threatened.
I mean, I've been in that predicament myself, and the guys that I was working with, they just backed off.
They took it apart and said, forget it.
I'm waiting.
I'm waiting for something to happen, some kind of a change to happen, for the people to rise up and make this available.
And it's that space between what physics, the way physics talk about, the way things are created on the universe, we have the Big Bang and everything expands outward like a big balloon.
But it's really incorrect because you have to have contraction.
You know, you have to have two sides of the equation and they've eliminated the generactive side that contracts and it hits the zero point and then you have the big bang and it expands outward.
And they're tapping that source of creation, you might say, that's unlimited energy.
It's the same amount of energy that set this whole universe into motion.
We have a lot of footage of them here appearing, and a jet will vector in on them and come zinging right in on them, and all of a sudden they just disappear, and the jet goes by and they reappear and fly up its tailpipe.
We have a lot of witnesses.
I mean, we've got over 4,000 witnesses right now and Air Force Base commanders.
One of the guys that we interviewed, not the last show but the one before, actually had three PhDs, and he was with Skunk Works with a major...
A lot of times lately, you know, getting ready for this conference we're having up, I've been working 24-7, and I come in just dirt all over me, beaten, and I go out for maybe a half an hour or so and then collapse.
But I'm out there almost every night when we have clear skies, and I usually have a camera on me.
And just two nights ago, we had the Pacific UFO group here.
They're a whole bunch of young guys that have the gear you wouldn't imagine.
I mean, they have night vision, spotting scopes, binoculars with night vision.
They had 30 mile lasers.
They had all these incredible things.
And we had a massive ship come over, and we were hitting it with the laser and watching it through the night.
All of these people and many more have gone up there and, without a doubt, have sworn on a stack of Bibles about what they've seen.
Pictures?
Well, if it's at night and it's a light, that's what you get.
I'm Art Bell.
62 years ago.
Exactly.
62 years ago.
Before Roswell.
I was born on June 17th, 1945.
And if you check your calendars, you'll find that was a Sunday as is today in this time zone.
So yes, it is my birthday today.
Once again, Sunday, June 17th.
And so I'm 62 years old today.
If you want to check the website, coast2coastam.com, upper left-hand corner where it says Arts Webcam, you will see a picture of me and my little darling, our little darling, Asia.
That was taken, oh, I don't know, just hours ago, actually.
Erin took the photograph.
That's why she's not in it.
We'll try and get one with all three of us in it.
It's a Father's Day photograph.
There you have it.
62 years ago, I began to begin.
I don't know.
Anyway, James Gilliland is my guest, and say what you may, and a lot of people say a lot of things like, oh, baloney and all the rest of it.
It's not baloney.
Hundreds of people have now gone to his ranch.
They have had these sightings.
They are real.
I can't tell you what they are.
James claims he can, and we're in the middle of doing that.
These are creatures.
Some of them indistinguishable from supermodels, which makes contact sound like an enjoyable experience.
So indistinguishable from human beings.
Very beautiful ones at that.
James will be right back.
James, do these visitors believe in a God as such?
Well, the gods of our Bible, there is more than one God of the Bible, and a lot of people have a hard time understanding that.
And I've written about that in the books because people are polarized between this wrathful God image and this all-loving, all-forgiving God.
And when you read the Bible, you have two choices.
One, either God is totally schizophrenic and needs some counseling, or there are actually two separate occurrences that happen there.
And that is really what happened.
There was a lot of experiences with some very advanced beings that came here and passed themselves off as gods.
But the real truth of the matter is we have to go beyond that and ask ourselves who created them because they had bodies and they had names and images.
And there's something far beyond that that even created them.
For exactly the reason that you mentioned all these religions here on earth, no matter where you go, no matter to the deepest, darkest jungle, something is worshipped.
You know, so worship is, what's the right word?
Universal.
It's universal, and I'm no different.
So I believe there is a creator, James, and apparently they do too.
And that's kind of, I guess, what I wanted to know.
They're watching our environment deteriorate.
They're watching our continued, more than not, misbehavior.
At any point, is it your impression they will intervene if things continue to go downhill to the point where we're all threatened or our existence is threatened?
At any point, would they intervene or would they watch it all collapse upon us?
I think I sent you an article about Chernobyl, where one of the ships flew over Chernobyl and beamed a ray down right on the reactor that was melting down, and all the Geiger counters and everything went way down after that happened.
So that's one experience.
They've been doing mitigating a lot of the pollution here.
They're assisting us in certain ways, but the more they work and try to assist us, we actually put ten times more out.
I didn't have time to go into it tonight, but I've got an article here on Chernobyl.
And incredibly, not only are trees and plants returning, but animals and wildlife is, in fact, abundant because they've chosen, of course, not to build for the most part in that area.
There are a few really hardcore cases that remain around Chernobyl, but for the most part, it's gone back to the wild.
And I really mean the area around Chernobyl has gone back to the wild with trees, plants, and animals.
I've had three face-to-face encounters, and some of the people that have come to the ranch, you know, that come for the conferences, they actually, it's almost like a Woodstock, you might say.
Most of the people camp just so they can stay up all night.
Right.
You know, we had everything from spontaneous healings that were very well documented that happened to people seeing beings appear to them, a lot of things happening in the dream state, a lot of healing, a lot of information, you know, transferred.
So it's not just myself this is happening with, it's happening with a lot of people globally right now.
And this is just a hot spot where the veils are very thin and people can have those experiences.
And, you know, we're going to do it again this July 6th through 8th.
We're having another big Science, Spirit, and World Transformation Conference.
And so people can come out and have their own transformation process.
I'm still getting reports from people that were here and saw, I mean, one guy saw a huge triangle ship come over and he was beaming it with that 30-mile laser and it actually slowed down and stopped.
And some of the people freaked out when they got really scared when it stopped and then it just took off again and moved on.
So they sense the energy of the group and they see where you're at in consciousness and if you're ready.
But if there's fear, they just, you know, they'll stop and scan you and go, no, they're not ready yet, and they just move on.
Well, you know, Mexico is having just phenomenal footage.
I've seen hundreds, if not thousands, of ships, video footage of ships in the sky, and it's just amazing.
And low-flying metallic ships flying over cities and, you know, houses.
You know, it's got telephone poles in them in the footage and everything.
So you have really good reference points.
And Lima, Peru is now becoming an incredible hotspot.
It's always had UFO activity, but there seems to be huge flotillas coming into Lima, Peru right now.
So a lot of these, you might call them power spots.
This place where we live is a power spot as well.
They're kind of like vortexes of energy, and you'll see them around the pyramids and around, you know, even Iraq and Iran are seeing ships in the sky, and they're not knowing what to do about them because, you know, they're scrambling.
We've been back engineering UFOs for quite some time, and I know some of the people involved in that.
And we definitely do have some models, but I've actually had some of those people here, and they've seen the ships here, and they said, those aren't ours.
We don't know who those are because these are massive, and they do things that our ships can't do.
And, you know, these guys know what they're looking at.
And as you mentioned, in Mexico, for example, it's now become so common that a lot of the Mexican people just sort of almost take it for granted and don't even report these things anymore.
So I'm trying to figure out how they're going to initiate change from the bottom up.
If you understand the vibrational continuum, it goes from a physical reality to energy to light and then into consciousness.
And they're working down through that vibrational continuum to create change.
And everything begins in consciousness.
And quantum physics is teaching us this theory now.
And it's actually fast becoming a fact with a lot of Bruce Lipton's work out there and What the Belief and these other movies, they're actually realizing that consciousness is the creator for our tomorrow.
So they are working a lot with inspiration through higher consciousness and energy, and they're changing the collective consciousness grid on the planet.
And they're making changes on that level.
And it's very hard now to hold on to those energies of tyranny and againstness and separation and the ignorance of the past, you know, and the people that arrogantly believe they're beyond karma.
And, you know, those mindsets have a frequency or a vibration to them.
And they're just getting hammered with these new frequencies coming in right now.
And that's the way they work in their process of the awakening, healing of humanity.
If you can raise your frequency and put the intent out there and send out that love and joy and bliss, the mind in which you seek is the mind in which you're going to connect.
They can put out the intent and it'll come as close as they're ready for it.
And if they get into fear, it'll usually back off and move away.
But if they focus on just that love and joy and bliss and they have pure heart and open mind, you know, pure intent, they're going to have an experience.
They're looking for people like that to assist them in this awakening and healing process.
Yeah, these roofers were up on the roof, and the inspector was up there with them, and they all got abducted.
And it was pretty amazing.
And their story was that they came back, and when they started talking about 2012, they all started crying.
And it was very upsetting for them because they said that they met a beautiful woman, and she showed them the future, and also gave them a warning, said, you've got to change your ways.
And when you bring up 2012, they start getting tear-eyed.
I've been doing my darndest to get a hold of them, but I've been receiving the same information, but I've been trying to get it validated from a second source.
Considering what's coming, you know, we've got an incredible increase, you know, with storms and tornadoes and hurricanes, that's all going to be on the increase.
Earthquakes, volcanoes.
You know, we've got a slight pole shift we're going to be experiencing.
There's a lot of things that are coming up.
And the ships that these beings have, some of them are miles and miles wide, and they can alter continents and things like that.
So if we get our act together as a species down here and start asking for help and clean up our consciousness, you know, the help is there to turn these things around.
Yeah, it's kind of like you were talking about it's a grassroot thing.
If you talk to most of the common people, they basically want to live in harmony with each other and they don't really want to destroy the environment.
And, you know, they have the right consciousness.
And as you move up the line and you get up into the leadership level, that's where the real change has to happen because they're leading us down the downward spiral.
That's where it's least likely going to change, is at the higher levels.
When you obtain some manner of comfort, industrialization, and wealth, you want to maintain it.
And you can't blame those who want it.
When you look at India and you look at China, you look at the industrialization that's going on right now and the use of fossil fuels, you can't really raise hell about it.
And we probably will see this happen in other countries due to the resistance in this country.
But you'll probably see these water technologies and these fuelless energy technologies, all of these things are probably going to come out through other countries, which is very sad.
And it's going to leave America in the dust.
And it's mainly, again, due to our leadership.
I've only seen two.
I don't watch TV and I'm not really into that.
I get on the internet once in a while.
And I'm not a political person, but probably I think Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are about the only ones I've seen with the courage and the integrity to say it like it is.
Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California.
He holds degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics, and electrical engineering, and now law.
Dr. Costco recently became a licensed California attorney after passing the bar exam on the first shot.
Hardly anybody ever does that, and working for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.
He is an elected governor of the International Neural Network Society, has chaired several international conferences on neural and fuzzy systems conferences, sits on the electoral board of several scientific and mathematical journals, has published well over 100 scientific papers, and has published several popular essays and venues from Scientific American to the New York Times, and in fact, is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times.
Now, he has written a book, just written a book, about noise.
Actually, it's called Noise.
And, of course, heaven in a chip.
You recall that.
But noise is a very, very, very interesting topic.
And in a moment, we'll make some of it.
Bart Costco, welcome back to Coast to Coast A.M. Hi, Art.
It's looking at one of those garbage bin technologies that scientists and engineers have, I think, treated the wrong way often in the past because there's been a long-standing war on noise.
And the other reason I just, in the course of researching fuzzy systems and especially neural networks, how brains work, how neurons work, a lot of us kept finding in the early to mid-80s that a little bit of noise helped the system.
That was really an intriguing process.
And meanwhile, while teaching at USC and places like that, I and others did the usual routine of how do we fight noise, how do we filter it, cancel it, which is an important thing to do.
But there was a sense that we hadn't done enough of it.
Another way to think about it is that so much of our mathematical view of the world is linear.
And to compensate for the fact that we've got a nonlinear world, we add a noise term.
And that really means the real structure of the world is in that noise term, at least in the way we model it.
And so over the years, it took increasing work until I finally was able to make a contribution and contrary to expectation, find that in some important cases, noise really helped, all the way down to the nanotechnology level.
And what I was about to say is I go into a restaurant, for example, and it is, I mean, it is so annoying.
Noise starts, and you can have a large group of people, and it's relatively quiet, or like a group of, I don't know, mindless sheep, it starts getting louder and louder and louder and louder.
And the louder it gets, the louder it gets, because nobody can hear the person across from them, across the table from them.
And so they start talking louder, and pretty soon it's unbearable.
It's like the cocktail party effect, and several people are talking and trying to pick out the voice in the background.
The restaurant effect, just as you described it, is such that if you and I are talking, as we now are, we have an average signal-to-noise ratio between us.
And as the ambient background noise increases, we have to speak louder to maintain that same ratio.
But as we do that, we contribute to this collective failure of raising the overall noise level for everybody else, who then they have to respond by raising their signal level, Which is noise to us.
And before you know it, for a fixed audience, it can only get louder.
It gets louder and louder until people are almost shouting.
In some cases, if you go into a modern bar where the music, the background ambient music is so loud, they really are shouting.
But it doesn't go in the other direction really until people start to leave.
Last time I was at a place that had a band, a friend of mine came, this is 15, 20 years ago, wanted to go to Sunset Boulevard, wanted to go to the Whiskey Ago-Go where the doors started out.
And we went there like one or two in the morning, and everybody's wearing black leather jackets.
And the music was so loud.
I think terrible, too, but just this heavy metal music.
And I remember one woman in a black leather jacket was holding her little baby in the midst of that.
I was just thinking about all that shockwave energy going into that young brain.
One wave, the peak, comes in at the trough of the other.
If you do a lot of that, though, there's still a background hum.
So in an airplane, it's very effective because you get a good sense of the changes in the engine noise.
In a helicopter, it's tougher.
I had a student did a project on that recently, and there's so many different kinds of rotor noise and other noise.
In the helicopter, it's more difficult.
Had other students go to the Harbor Freeway, which is right next to USC, stand over it on a bridge and take measurements during rush hour.
And the bulk of the noise you can cancel.
It'll have this humming sound, but when there is an impulse of noise, a car honking or something else making a lot of noise, an engine backfiring, that you can't cancel and it'll come through.
It really comes down to signal plus noise minus noise.
And if your estimate of that noise is good enough, you know, it literally kills it off the subtraction mathematically.
But the trouble is it won't be good enough for a quick impulse, like all of a sudden someone, which could happen around Los Angeles, a gunfire, shooting a gun.
You won't be able to do that.
Now, if you had an overall pattern of gunfire, you could probably develop some smart techniques.
You get that from the headphones, you get it from aging at a certain amount.
But the latest studies, I cite a JAMA study, the Journal of American Medical Association from almost 10 years ago found that 15% of teenagers then, it's got to be higher now, have hearing loss comparable to old folks.
It really started about 80 years ago with zoning statutes and, of all things, piggeries.
As urban centers started colliding with farms and the like, the smell of pigs, the sound of pigs, there's a lot of case law about that.
And over time, I think the economists' argument, one, saying, look, it's just too difficult to litigate each case of a noise violation Of a private nuisance, right up to today when someone's playing a boombox or speaking loudly into a cell phone, it's a lot easier to have an overall rule, whether it's put out by the government or your employer or simply recommended by a friend.
That has been codified.
There are federal rules, there's OSHA rules for heavy industry type things and a variety of other things.
But increasingly in cities, you have most cities have noise ordinances and technically decibel level measurements that you're not supposed to go beyond, but they're not heavily enforced.
You know, I think we might in places like libraries.
And they certainly are banned on the airplane once you take off, but for kind of a questionable reason of whether that cell phone could interfere with electronics.
But I understand they don't want to take any chances with that.
And beyond that, it's just hard to believe that that could happen.
For example, California is about to implement a law that Governor Schwarzenegger signed that said you can still speak on a cell phone, a car, but you have to have both hands on the wheel.
And some cities have, in places, have experimented with banning cell phones, but I don't think those politicians stay in office very long.
Cell phone technology, in my estimation, while on the one hand has progressed, it has regressed.
In other words, we've gone from the relatively good analog connections we had, fairly good analog connections, that could have been better, to really lousy, narrow, digital, I don't even, I barely recognize the voice on the other end kind of connections.
And I'm waiting for the first company to come along and actually increase bandwidth on cell phones and provide a really good, old-fashioned, honest-to-God connection.
You know, Arn, I think that will happen someday, but right now there's so much competition for carriers that it's gone just, as you know, the other direction.
A lot of the kids we teach at USC in our graduate program in signal processing go out and get jobs.
They're the ones who drop your calls.
They're the ones, if you're in LA, who go around with antenna devices measuring the current signal strengths, and they make decisions directly or algorithmically whether to add more bits, more juice to your channel or to cut you off.
It is tightly constrained.
Those companies, I think, have fairly thin profit margins, but over time it should improve.
But you're aptly right.
The quality isn't real great.
I think, on the other hand, Art, other than folks like you have more experience in audio, I don't think there's a lot of consumer complaints about it.
Doing a, you know, so many people have cell phones now, Bart, that I would say 70 or 80% of the calls we get on a talk show like this when we go to open lines are from cell phones.
You know, I'm hesitant, both as a scientist and lawyer, to answer that definitively.
It's the sort of thing I don't think anyone can answer definitively.
There's always a risk of it.
And it takes us to that concept of negative evidence.
You would have to have a lot of evidence accumulate before you could say, no, there is no such chance.
It's very difficult to prove a negative, especially in something like that.
And given the sophistication of the devices, how you could burn out or confuse or potentially jam things, and on top of that, I guess now the added risk that a clever programmer might be able to figure out a way to do something quasi-terroristy to jam systems, I don't think anyone can come out and say there's no such risk.
There's a similar problem with what do you tell people, is it safe to hold a cell phone to your ear that close to your brain for a long period of time?
But what the findings are, looking at the meta-studies, that is studies that look at all the other studies, that it tends to go both ways, and everyone's waiting for more data to come in, with the exception, usually a recommendation in case of children, because they have thinner skulls and because their brains are developing, It probably makes sense to hedge your bets and give them a headset, tuned down, and not have them spend a lot of time blasting radio frequency energy into their brains.
Are the cell phone manufacturers, I don't know why I'm asking a lawyer this, are the cell phone manufacturers doing honest-to-God studies about the possible danger to people's brains by holding the cell phone close?
They really have done studies, Art, and as have a lot of other people in industry and the government.
This is a worldwide phenomenon.
I think Europe has probably done more, but there was an article not too long ago on IEEE Spectrum looking at the overall data, and it's that finding that so far we really can't say there's no immediate cause for alarm, but it's that difficulty of trying to prove a negative.
And if you see, you know, any experience with legal products liability, the potential downside is enormous.
Listen, if 20 years from now they find that, oh, there's been all kinds of damage, early Alzheimer's, all kinds of problems popping up, you guys who are lawyers, you're going to have a field day.
Although Bart is qualified to talk about all kinds of other things like, oh, for example, heaven in a chip.
But we're going to cover noise, various kinds of noise.
And in fact, coming up, how you can noise-proof your home.
And if there's one place that you want noise-proof and you want quiet solitude, it would be your home.
We'll talk about it in a moment.
Bart Costco is my guest, and we're talking about noise.
It's actually a much more interesting topic than you might imagine.
Noise is quite a study, and I wonder how it's affected your life.
In a moment, we'll talk about how you can have a much less noisy home.
We'll be right back.
Interesting.
I've got a couple of messages here.
A couple.
I've got hundreds.
Somebody says they don't understand the topic of noise.
Let's see.
Well, I'm not going to even give the name here.
And Kent Washington says, happy birthday, Eric.
Costco's a genius, but I don't understand the noise discussion.
Isn't sound noise, what you make of it?
I love all sorts of music and sounds, but others that would think is pure noise, I'd rather hear him talk about heaven on a chip.
We'll do a little bit of that.
Noise, folks, is an extremely important part of your environment for the good or the bad of it.
And for those who are understanding what we're talking about, how does one go about Minimizing the noise in your home, your castle, the one place you want it to be quiet.
White noise is, it doesn't technically exist, though we act like it does in science.
White noise is noise where each hiss and pop in the noise, if you were to slow it down and play it, is completely independent of the one before it.
Just as if somebody were flipping a coin and whether it comes up heads or tails is independent of the previous flip.
But in fact, there's a little bit of correlation, and nothing's perfect.
And if there's a little bit of correlation between each hiss and pop, then we usually call that pink noise.
But if you were to put on sci-fi glasses and look at the spectrum of white noise, it'd be flat across a constant energy level across all the frequencies.
Pink noise would gently roll off.
Your ear actually hears it as white noise.
And more correlated noise, which has created all kinds of real thermal processes around you and in you.
That we call brown noise.
And even more correlated noise is often called black noise.
So there's a whole spectrum of colors in the analogy with visible light.
A lot of electronic devices produce a kind of pink noise, crackle noise, popcorn noise.
In the book, I talk about 40 different kinds at one section.
But most attempts to add noise to a system that we use use just what you did, something electronic or otherwise to generate that, to approximate that.
It's used in a variety of ways to boost the energy of the signal, to hide things in the background, to mask it.
And in some cases, even, as I discussed in the book, to use it as a way to code.
I mean, that's, in effect, what's going on with all those cell phones.
All those signals are crossing in the air, and it's as if there's background noise.
One analogy I heard once, I think, does this very effectively.
If you're using what's called CDMA in your phone, code division, multiple access, it's as if you're in a room and several people are talking, and each of the two people talking are speaking in a different foreign language.
So you can understand each other, but all the other talking sounds like soft background noise.
Now, that's as opposed to putting each person in a separate room, which would be frequency division multiplexing, the older way.
Or to say two people speak at a time, you go, then you go, then you go.
That would be time division multiplexing, another older way.
So it is a way of using, letting all this crosstalk interference create a kind of faint background noise.
You know, my law degree is something I use largely for scholarly purposes.
For example, in working with a law school to set up a course on statistics and other types of uncertainty, I want to help bridge scientists on the one hand and lawyers and judges on the other.
Scientists need to learn a lot more about the law, especially intellectual property.
And my experience is that lawyers and judges need a great deal more about law.
And so it's more along those lines, an occasional incidental practice.
And I did work, as you said at the outset, for the district attorney.
In fact, what I recommend to people do, and I'm not trying to plug for legal services, but if you don't have an attorney, and I don't think most people do, you can go to your yellow pages or other device and tear out the page.
I can't advise you to photocopy it.
Tear out the page, assuming you own the book, of a good criminal defense lawyer, for example, and fold that up and put it in your wallet.
But Art, if somebody with a badge says you have the right to remain silent, do listen to them.
My experience at the DA's office, and I witnessed a lot of prosecutions and I read hundreds of files and others, is that usually the defendant hangs his or herself, usually himself, in that process of interrogation.
Quite often, look, the fact is, unlike TV, criminals often are not the sharpest tools in the shed.
And they're often drunk, and it isn't clear why they're doing these things.
They're drunk or drugged up in the heat of passion.
They say all kinds of incriminating things.
I remember one case involving some local gangsters.
There was a fight in the parking lot, and the girl bit the fellow on the arm, and he was so mad about that that he just kind of fessed up to everything.
It was a big drug deal going on.
And he thought that the DA would prosecute the girl for the bite.
Well, they never did.
The prosecutor has full discretion, but his admissions at that time sent him to prison.
I've always wondered why it is legal in the process of an interrogation after the subject has been mirandized and so forth for the police to lie to the person being interrogated.
I mean, you know, saying things like, well, your buddy Johnny in the other interrogation room just gave you up, so you might as well go ahead and tell us the story.
You know, if you use the verb lie, I think the legal system would say that's not permissible.
But the fact is, most police departments in major cities are, the policemen are trained on how to conduct interrogations.
They really push it to the limit on rules like Miranda and related decisions.
I don't know if they lie, but they, you know, there's a, put it this way, the Miranda rights are not nearly as powerful as you think you are.
And by the way, most studies show, almost all studies show, the defendants will simply waive them.
Outside of TV, you don't see them carrying a lot of weight.
But the key thing behind Miranda and that kind of 1950s stuff it came out of where the police would give the third degree is that there'd be no coercion.
And so once you've been notified that you have a right to the attorney, we're fully Mirandized and you proceed with the interrogation, the nature of the questioning can be quite broad.
In other words, for example, once you request an attorney, at that point, they are, if television is correct, which it frequently is not, they have to stop and get you an attorney, don't they?
And television is largely accurate here, that this is the one case, unlike the right to silence, where the police have the right to come back and reinitiate the interrogation.
If you unequivocally, I stress that adverb there, unequivocally say, I want my attorney or I want a attorney, then all questioning must cease.
To go beyond that would be unconstitutional.
But you have to make that crystal clear.
It wouldn't be like, hey, wouldn't it be neat if I had an attorney?
That won't do.
You have to state it quite clearly.
Whether they have to go get the attorney for you is different, but it does start a process and any further questioning is for Boden.
Certainly not advising people how to evade the law.
I hope the cops win the majority of cases here.
But I do think it's a case that even an innocent person or bystander or someone, could snap a trap on themselves or at least create a lot of hassles in life they don't need.
The first order, it's a very complex legal proceeding that started there.
And even if you are a lawyer, you still need another lawyer who's objective and can help you with the process.
You know, we're drifting sideways here, but that's all right.
Last week, there was a lead story on the Associated Press News about the death penalty.
And I've always been a very, very, very staunch advocate of the death penalty.
But, you know, these exoneration groups have begun to sort of rock my conviction, sorry for that term, that word, about the death penalty because too many people on death row lately have been released because of new evidence, specifically DNA evidence.
And these are people who are going to get the needle or worse and get put to death, and suddenly they didn't do it.
Whatever your position is on the death penalty, it is unique.
The punishment in that case, it's irreversible, really unlike anything else.
The frequency of the false positives, you know, that's up to debate, but it is fairly high.
One problem, Art, is I don't think there's enough, in the nature of government proceedings, enough yet computerization and checks of the DNA involved.
This can take a long time.
I was involved in one case at the DA's office where all of a sudden a felon was brought in out of, I think, Chino prison because many years earlier he had left his DNA at a rape and beating site.
And it had taken that long.
And the investigating officer had the foresight simply to cut out a chunk of the carpet that contained his substances.
And it took a long time for that to work its way to the criminal justice system until they got it, did the positive ID.
But given that, and we are talking about the government here, it's not the most efficient of enterprises, I think it should give everyone cause for pause.
I work with USC where I chair the Intellectual Property Committee.
That's really my emphasis is IP, patents, which I hope we can talk about tonight.
There's big changes in patent law that are taking place this year.
But patents and copyrights and trademark and trade secret and all the stuff that really underlies modern society and technology.
And a little more of the theory of evidence, which is getting what you were just talking about.
What counts as evidence one way or the other?
When in particular can you use statistics?
You know, I teach statistics.
I just finished a class in it.
And there was a famous Supreme Court case that came down 5-4, and it had to do whether the defendant could prove discrimination.
He was black in Georgia and killed a white policeman.
And the statistics showed that it was overwhelmingly likely if you were black and killed a white that you would get the death penalty versus the other way around.
And it came down 5-4.
That remains the most famous statistical study in the law to date.
Ah, I see they've got me back in the U.S. That was a quick flight.
Hi, everybody.
Indeed, from the high desert, I am Art Bell.
Dr. Bart Costco is my guest.
Degrees on degrees.
He's now an attorney as well.
And I do want to ask about patent law because it seems to me that in this technological world we live in, and it certainly is increasingly so, a lot of that which is sent to the patent office, and I don't want to badrap the patent office at all, but it's so complicated and so technological that I wonder, frankly, how they make judgments about what's a good and a bad invention these days.
We'll ask in a moment.
Caulking in the rubber under the fixtures.
I'm really going to do that.
A couple of interesting fast blasts here, opposite kind of.
One from New York City, Oana, says, the main reason I'm considering moving out of Manhattan is the noise.
The level of sound even makes sleeping difficult.
My poor dog is a wreck because of the daily walks he does.
They're filled with honks, booms, and bams making the general hum an unending assault.
And then from Oregon, cam operator there says, why can I only work if there's noise in the room?
I need the T V or talk radio or something to function at my best.
And in particular, if it's light background noise, I find if it's music without words in it, like orchestral music for me, that works just fine.
If there's words in it, I find it distracting.
I've told a story before how when I sat for the bar on the two days where everyone's typing madly, the typing creates a wonderful background approximation of white noise, keeps the brain energized.
On the day of all multiple choice, it's dead quiet.
You can hear every noise and every pin drop, literally.
And it's very different.
You get kind of tired, too.
So a little bit of noise energizes too much is too much.
I also like to comment on the dog in New York.
We know that noise does affect the environment and affects animals, but we haven't thought enough, I think, about how it affects sea creatures.
I touched on this in the book, but I have done a lot more research on it since.
And it's pertinent because in two days, we're about to we, the United States, with the United States Navy, with the Australian Navy, about to embark on something called Project Talisman Sabre, a vast military experiment off the coast of Australia in the Barrier Reef Park.
There'll be 30 vessels there, and they'll be using their very controversial medium frequency sonar and lower frequency sonar.
Now in the past, and I talked about this in the book, and you can go online and look at the photos, when the Navies used their low frequency sonar in various places like the Bahamas and famously in the Canary Islands, about four hours later on the beach are a bunch of dead beaked whales bleeding from their ears.
And when you do autopsies on them, you find bubbles in their brain and things that look like they suffered from the bins.
Beaked whales are the deepest going mammals.
They can be down for an hour.
They can go a mile deep.
And so far as we know, most of them just die and sink.
But if you go online, it's really startling to look at this.
So there have been many injunctions.
I just got back from Hawaii.
There were a lot of lawsuits filed a couple weeks ago trying to get the Navy to go easy on the sonar experiments around Hawaii since so many beach whales and related creatures are there.
But I didn't realize how not just noisy New York City is and the land, but how noisy the oceans are.
The measurements off the coast of California show that the average noise is about 10 times greater than it was, say, 40 years ago and only getting louder.
And it's doing that because of three things.
First are the Navy type experiments.
Those are big impulses.
Second and really dangerous are the air guns used to look for oil.
And the most common are about a million boats at any time on the sea just pinging the bottom with sonar.
And you've got to think of what that does.
Remember, in water, sound travels much more efficiently than in air.
If you've ever been underwater and you try to locate a sound, you really can't do it because it's about five times faster.
The way you locate sound right now in air is the sound hits one ear a little faster than the other.
Underwater, as far as your brain is concerned, it's sitting at the same time.
You know, fish and sea creatures can't see but a few meters in the water, but they can hear up to kilometers, many kilometers, many, many, many miles.
Some cases apparently hundreds of miles.
So evolution has adapted sea creatures very differently than us.
And when you start fiddling with their sonar structure, their brain structure, and bombarding them with the kind of pressure waves, I mean, the waves that come from an air gun looking for oil, they're on the order of 200 to 230 decibels.
That's like being at the base of the space shuttle when it takes off.
It's just incomprehensible.
It's trillions of times louder than the noise in your room.
And I wonder how these days, and whether the patent office is able to keep up with the kind of technological patents they're receiving or requests for patents they're receiving, whether they have the brain power and staff to make these kinds of judgments.
I mean, after all, Albert Einstein was a patent examiner, but the staff, I think, is the issue.
The money is the issue.
They get over 300,000 filings a year.
As you said, these are real complicated.
They come in the absolute cutting edge, and kind of beyond the cutting edge, of biotech.
As of the last 10 or so years, you can now get patents on software, strange new business methods.
The latest thing, for example, if you're a lawyer and you get the American Bar Association's journal, the big story, one of the big stories in there is the fact that part of your legal practice can be patented now.
And so how can that be?
You can do it in terms of how you fund, somebody got a patent on how you fund a certain type of tax shelter involving trusts.
It's for rich people.
And if you funded that tax shelter with certain types of stock options, well, you have to pretty much get a license.
And there's something like 50 or so pending patents have actually been issued on that, and 100 or so, nearly 100 pending.
To deal with all that, the backlog is huge.
It has only increased.
There was an effort to speed up patents that might be involved in the war on terrorism, but that doesn't very far.
It's understaffed.
It's underpaid.
It is a government bureaucracy.
I mean, they mean well.
I feel like they have a lot of talented people.
And when the patents come in, they do assign it to different groups.
And none of it goes to the biotech group or goes to the medical group or the chemistry group.
If you file, say, I don't know, a fairly complicated biomedical patent of some sort these days, what are you looking at in terms of cost, time before you finally get it or don't?
And so the trouble is the backlog has gotten worse.
There are some patents that will take up to seven or eight years to issue.
So you would think it would be from date of issue.
It used to be 17 years from the date the patent issued.
That's no longer true.
So it's 20 years, and it just depends.
If it's a biotech patent, it's likely if it's something that really has economic merit to be heavily contested.
And it can take quite a while.
And then the law has changed radically just in the last two months about what happens after it's issued.
But it's a crapshoot.
It's very expensive.
A tremendous amount of high-tech innovation, the cash, the R ⁇ D money art is spent on patent infringement and getting cross-licenses, in general, on IP litigation.
And it's not frivolous litigation.
This is complex stuff.
I'll give you an example.
One of the most famous cases in patent law recently had to do with the question, who interprets the claims of a patent?
Usually about 20 claims.
It's based on the old prospecting model of claims to land.
And it had always been a case that a jury interpreted because it's a matter of fact.
But the Supreme Court looked at that, Justice Souter writing from Majority in 1996 in the so-called Markman case and said, and they said 9 to 0, no, this really should be for the judge because claims are like statutes.
So suddenly the law changed.
But the neat thing about the case to me was, it was a fuzzy theorist.
The whole dispute centered on one word, the word inventory.
And it had to do with automated dry cleaning.
And the parties both had legitimate interpretations of that word.
Words are vague.
Words are fuzzy.
And so you're going to, you know, and they litigated that all the way to the Supreme Court.
And by the way, now, when you bring a patent action, the first thing you have to do is have what's called a Markman hearing, which is where the judge, either early on in the process or right up before trial, makes a decision about what the claims mean.
That's a huge battle.
Something I think like 40% of the outcomes are repealed.
And oddly enough, if it goes to a jury, the jury is not allowed to interpret the patent.
Yet, if there's an infringing patent, they have to compare the two patents and make a decision.
That what they're doing is they're simply going ahead and manufacturing a product X with this new invention in it.
And they're saying, look, instead of getting involved in patent law and lawsuits that are going to come out of it and all the rest of it, we might as well put this product on the market, make as much money as we can, as fast as we can, because we know somebody's going to steal it and not get involved in the big litigation that's sure to happen and even trying to file a patent.
Just go ahead and market the damn thing, make the money, and be done with it.
And I understand the motivation and the frustration of the inventor in that case because the average patent litigation case, I think it's $2 million now, but that's got to be on the downside.
The cases I've been involved with in different ways over the years, I've seen them up to $10, $15, $20 million in terms of litigation fees and really warranted fees.
The problem is you go ahead and do that, Art, then you may be looking down the wrong side of the gun barrel because someone else has got a patent or is getting a patent.
And you may have to defend anyway against that.
You might have been much better off having gone in and gotten the patent yourself.
Legally means that you can, if you like, you can try to reverse engineer a trade secret, and that's okay.
But what you can do is use unauthorized means.
You can't go in and steal it, for example.
And I have a book a few feet from me that purports to have an approximation of the formula, but I would hate to see someone who tried to make a company based on that.
There'd be a lot of litigation.
Trade secrets have the advantage if they have economic value and you easily maintain the secrecy through a badging system and a variety of other ways.
My principal income is through books and university, but I really think if you're getting involved in inventions and you want to make money on it, there's so much.
The hardest document in all of law to draft is not a contract.
That's hard.
It's a patent claim.
It has to appropriately capture the invention and as wide as you can throw the net and anticipate objections from opponents and from the Patent and Trademark Office.
And it has to prepare for a potential massive legal proceeding in civil court, some of the most complex law there is.
It's very difficult to balance the science on the one hand and the law on the other.
You need an expert to do that.
And also, if someone sends you a letter, which happens all the time to companies saying, hey, we think you're infringing our patent, sign this licensing agreement or else, you need to see an attorney.
You know, at the same year, that famous year, he put forth the first real mathematical description of what we now call Brownian motion or the heat diffusion equation.
The modern science of noise begins with it.
If Eisenhower had done nothing else, if he just published a noise paper and died, he would be one of the great names in physics because of that.
And right up, it's also tied into the very, it's the bridge from classical physics through quantum mechanics to where we are now.
But gets a little credit for it.
But in the book, I, in the back, try to lay out some of the very detailed end notes, but not in the text itself, to give you some sense of his accomplishment and an incredible year of 1905 when he published that and many other things.
Browning motions, when Robert Brown in the early 19th century looked at pollen grains under a microscope, he saw they were bouncing around randomly.
And we have since called that random motion Brownian motion.
And the more we've zoomed down at things, the more they bounce.
Well, it appears that the ultimate structure of matter, the universe, is random.
And quantum mechanics has only confirmed that.
And in particular, it bounces around in a pattern tied to that white noise, in fact, that you mentioned and demonstrated earlier.
So physical matter, molecules are not in atoms.
They're not like you learned in grade school where they were like marbles together.
They're always bouncing around, colliding.
They don't look like marbles at all.
They're actually clouds.
It's a random froth.
And the deeper you go into the universe, all the way down to Planck level, 10 to the minus 43 level, a real tiny area, it's random froth atop the froth.
And Einstein really opened that door with his 1905 paper.
So perhaps you can give us some idea after the break, which is coming up here shortly, of what we can expect.
I know you keep an eye on patent filings, which means that you should have some idea of some of the real practical things that are about to happen in the nano world, right?
I think it changes how we manipulate the basic elements of electrons and photons, so-called fermions and bosons.
We've done a lot of stuff with light.
We're doing more things now with electricity, not at this macroscopic level, but at the nanoscopic level and lower.
And what I said before, the break art, I think, is, and what we referred to Einstein is really the heart of it, the difficulty of it.
Everything is random down there.
Everything looks like noise, appears to be noise.
And how do you work with that?
How do you compute with that is the issue.
And to make the point a little more vividly, a student once asked me, well, what's the secret to the universe?
And my answer was, It's written in stone on a grave in Austria, in Vienna, Austria.
And it's on a grave of the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
And it says, S equals K log W. It's the definition for entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that things get more disordered.
And it was that S equals K log W, the fact that there's a logarithm of something random, the W is like a probability, that led Max Planck to modern quantum mechanics.
That was the insight of going over and viewing things now fundamentally from a random or noise-like perspective.
Einstein came back to that and extended Brownian motion.
But it starts there.
Well, that's great.
We can explain things.
And it means today we usually work with averages.
What we want to do, Art, is get down there in the small and work with individual photons and electrons as best we can.
And in particular, to create gates, on-off switches, ones or zeros, at least on average, for quantum computing, for example, or in nano computing, ands and ors and nots and ifs and those kinds of things.
And those are coming.
Some of those, there have been filings of patents, and we had, I think, a really big breakthrough last month in the journal Science from some French researchers.
They demonstrated the first electron gun, where you can shoot a single electron, just like a gun, like a single photon.
And that hadn't been done before.
And you can approach quantum computing in a much more powerful way in theory because electrons are what are called fermions and they're different than photons.
Photons or bosons, they can pass through one another without interference.
Electrons can't.
And so they're entangled in very different ways.
But we've never before been able to quantize a voltage like we can do now and control it.
We have with this the emission and absorption out of what's called a quantum dot of an individual electron, a kind of quantized alternating current.
It means that you can implement or test at least the elements of a lot of quantum computers.
Remember, computers still are a bunch of ones and zeros.
And the neat thing about quantum computers is they work in parallel.
And instead of one or two registers computing yes or no answers, you have a whole bunch of them and they can suddenly crack problems that you just couldn't do combinatorially otherwise.
The trouble is making those things.
It's going to take a long time to have viable quantum computers.
We have little experiments going on.
Some of my colleagues have done that, but we need to be able to test that and to have in-effect switches, on-off switches.
So the electron gun is a big step in that direction.
Okay, well, let's look ahead and say it'd be crazy not to.
On the other hand, if you and I are having a quantum communication, if we're talking a quantum channel, because of the nature of entanglement, we'll be able to detect, in many cases, whether anybody eavesdrops on us through very strange disembodied.
And so computationally, if there are mathematical type algorithms that we just don't have fast enough computers to solve, quantum computing has the promise to solve those.
But it's been real tough delivering on that.
On the other hand, there's comparatively simple nanotechnology, which with the help of the carbon nanotube is making great strides.
There are many patents on using carbon nanotubes as different types of transistors.
A lot of companies working on that.
We're all waiting to see.
We hear a lot of promises.
They've been used in different devices.
But a nanotube looks like rolled up chicken wire with, at the intersections of chicken wire, carbon atoms there.
In the case of nanotech, I think ultimately we have devices that would enable you to build things, or at least to compute things, but to build things out of matter.
I mean, the classic sci-fi example is you take a bunch of dirt, throw it into the nanomachine, heat it up with some energy, give it instructions, and like Aristotle, who said you can combine a blueprint with cement and get a building, out pops a hamburger.
I mean, that kind of thing.
I mean, that's a bit off, and there's all kinds of problems overcome in the atoms.
But the first order, we can strengthen materials so that you don't have to worry about a side impact collision in the car, for example.
The classic Eric Rexford model for 20 years now has been that you would take a pile of matter, say it's housed in an orange, which is just a bunch of molecules, disassemble them, and reassemble those molecules into an apple.
The trouble is getting your hands, because the so-called sticky fingers on a lot of those molecules and energy required to break the bonds and make the bonds.
That's always been the fantasy.
So it is like the teleportation scheme where you dissolve it and become reconstructed on the other side.
Very difficult to do the assembler or disassembler, and long before that, hard air, simply enhancing materials and improving communications.
For example, I'm happy to say the lead article in the November-December Journal of the Transactions on Nanotechnology was by me and my colleagues at USC, and Lee, and others, refining an earlier result we had on using individual carbon nanotubes as very tiny antennas, and in particular, adding noise to them to boost their ability to detect faint signals.
So, if you have severe hearing loss, what's going on in many cases is that your inner ear has lost a lot of the little hairs that detect signals.
If you get an accident, they bend and break, and that can lead to tinnitus, for example, which a lot of people have.
But wouldn't it be neat if we could, with a little bit of invasive surgery, go in there and replace that inner ear with something at least as good as you started with, maybe much better, with lots of little, instead of hair, little carbon nanotubes that can detect those frequencies and maybe do lots of things?
You know, we at USC have at least put that on a drawing board.
I know other groups have done that.
That kind of thing, I think, is feasible.
I call that nano-signal processing.
That's very different than trying to assemble things.
We're still just routing information.
And I think at some point, a real nano shirt where the materials are stitched together in a way that adapt and chemically change, you know, convert your smells or whatever they happen to be into whatever you want them to be, into cologne-like smells, and change color to reflect the environment like an octopus would.
A lot of people are looking at that because that's signal processing.
We have the algorithms all worked out in theory of how to convert inputs into outputs.
And trying to get little devices to approximate them is the issue.
And the thing about nanotubes, you can make a lot of them.
As I mentioned before, they tend to get stuck together.
And when you put them in a razor, it's very hard to unstick them.
But that's a technology problem, and we'll overcome it.
What happened to your past life of 30 minutes ago?
Where did it go?
We really don't know.
I mean, we know it's sitting there in the space-time continuum, but can we access that?
And maybe if we could, it would give some insight into what appears to be action at a distance because of the time thing.
But we tend to associate, you know, whatever now is with like the current playing of a movie and ignore that what you are is the entire film in the camera.
No, there's been, I think it was the Danube River, where some European scientists were able to send, teleport, as I recall, a qubit, a quantum bit from one side of the river to the other.
These are kind of toy experiments.
But there's been some simple demonstrations of that.
Not the kind of thing that we're all thinking of, simultaneous occurrence or conversations at a distance.
But that potentially could come.
Again, the trouble here is the noise, the random nature of quantum mechanics.
Most of these properties we talk about are only averages.
Once you go to Boltzmann's grave, once you get the world of entropy that Planck found, if he didn't introduce this, what happened was, he had what was called the ultraviolet catastrophe, which said as you increase the frequency of light, its intensity went up.
And if that were true, when you look at a fireplace, your eyeballs should burn out.
Your eyeballs don't burn out.
If you light a match, you should go blind.
And instead, it kind of goes up and then it falls off.
And to make that work, the quantum hypothesis came in with Boltzmann.
And that only says on average, but all kind of strange things can happen.
So you're in a room now, and there are air molecules, but it's totally permissible.
In fact, it has to occur mathematically, that there's a configuration of those molecules where they all go to one side of the room, and anybody in the room would suffocate.
It's just that that's so infinitesimally small in probability, that so-called fluctuation.
And we're now getting a sense in the noise research of how to manipulate those fluctuations, in the case of what are called Brownian motors and other structures, to do work or do forms of energy, transportation.
Do you think that eventually we're going to be able to download the contents of a human mind into perhaps a quantum computer, or perhaps even a computer that will come before a quantum computer?
I think you would have an approximation of going to heaven or hell, depending on the case.
But you would have your stream of bits, your being, your pattern would exist in that form of the bits, so you'd have a soul, but it wouldn't have the problems of where the soul goes.
Your consciousness wouldn't be limited by how fast or slow electrical pulses flow through neural wires.
It would occur millions, billions, maybe trillions of times faster.
Access subject only to the speed of light of all knowledge bases and databases.
The ability to create worlds just by thinking them.
I think the consciousness is like where we are in the movie right now.
We're playing the movie.
It's got a lot of energy and heat and light behind it.
But there's the whole strip which is the brain.
And if we can go in and really approximate what's going on in your brain, not just its architecture, but its current functioning.
So, well, these neurons are on, and these are filing.
We have a pulse train over here and not a pulse train here, then in theory, we should be able to take a snapshot of your brain just like we could take a snapshot now of your computer when you back it up.
And that snapshot when unfolded, as it unfolds in real time, would be what we had heretofore called consciousness.
In other words, it would be just a snapshot, or could you take all that a person is, transfer it to a computer, would you then have two separately unfolding consciousness tracks?
Well, you might, and that's a real problem here, that you could get the existence of the new thing, but you wouldn't have the uniqueness, because you can make 100 copies, a million copies.
It could run in parallel.
But I do want to make a little point of distinction.
I don't think it's going from you to a computer.
I think it's going from computer to computer.
On this model, you and I and the rest of us, you know, just computers.
The mead computers, the three pounds of neural tissue, it is a computing device at this level.
Very sophisticated, sloppy thing, needs sleep, lots of sugar, things like that.
But it is a computing device.
It is playing a kind of music that we call consciousness and mind, and we can play it on other instruments.
Bart, do you have any idea, because I certainly don't, in some of the government labs, and forget the government, perhaps even private labs that aren't discussing what they're doing, but they're out way beyond what we know of as a cutting edge right now, they've got to be out there.
And I wonder if they're beginning to toy with these kinds of things.
I think they speculate, or I think with the electron gun, that shows you how it tends to proceed at a piecemeal level.
And I don't think the researchers typically work on that, can see the forest or the trees.
No fault of their own.
It's just very difficult to see that.
But the research is so hyper-fine and it's precision.
It has to be, something like that.
And then you can create things, and I think someone else comes along, what are called second movers, and they put together the pieces.
I don't see a lot of that other than in science fiction and futurists like myself and others talking about that.
You just don't know in advance how a new device or gadget will really be applied.
One thing I like to think about is some of the most famous scientific papers published.
If you go back and actually read them, what they're famous for, like what they got the Nobel Prize for, maybe a paper in economics or physics, it often wasn't even the main subject of the paper.
It was some secondary thing buried in there.
Very hard to foresee that.
But I do think it will leave its footprints in the patent office.
I think this began in 1945 when Glenn Seaborg was able to patent an atom.
And he patented a mericium.
And it's one of my favorite patents because the first claim just says element 95.
And it withstood scrutiny.
He also patented curium.
And now there's an effort to patent artificial atoms and structures like that and things built upon them.
The good thing about those, remember, though, they run out after 20 years.
You can freely use and manipulate.
You might ask how that was doable.
The law is you can patent anything under the sun that's created by man.
And americium is not a naturally occurring element.
It's three elements above uranium.
And through neutron bombardment that man brought about, you could have that artificial atom.
Well, now we're going much beyond that in the various filings for quantum gates and quantum devices and nanodevices.
Since you're involved in science and the law, and we're coming up to a break here, but I'm very curious how you feel about whether there's enough oversight and legal restraints in place for some of the incredible science that we're right on the edge of.
In other words, scientists tend to invent, the light bulb goes off, and then they can throw the switch and do the experiment or not.
And really, who's there to say not?
This might be dangerous for all of society.
We'll be right back.
That's right.
We are opening the lines for Bart Costco.
Now, whether you want to talk about heaven in a chip, you want to talk about noise, you want to talk about.
Well, any of the things that he's such an expert at, nanotechnology, for example, pick up a phone, pick one of those numbers, and join us.
He'll be right back.
All right.
If I was listening properly, and I think I was, and it's possible to take, as you mentioned, a snapshot, or maybe possible eventually, to take a snapshot of somebody's brain, then this is about a perfect question, I think, for a lawyer.
Mark in Mexico, All the way down to Mexico says, yeah, noisy here, too.
However, I want to comment that imagine the legal implications.
If we could download or upload, if you will, memories and then use them in legal proceedings.
For example, if you punch someone, that's a battery.
But you have to show that that harmful or offensive touching was intentional, that you either desired that outcome or knew to what the law calls a substantial certainty that it will occur.
Now, let's suppose you do the same fist, you hit the person, cause the same damage, break the same nose, but you didn't intend to.
You were just being careless.
Well, then we either have regular negligence or we have a slightly higher level of gross negligence, maybe recklessness.
And it's important because if it's regular negligence, you have to show damages where you ever get those.
If it's gross negligence, you can get punitive damages.
And it may be even beyond that.
It may have been an involuntary, you may have had epilepsy.
So there'd be no criminal culpability, though there may still be some civil culpability.
So if you could get insight into that, what someone really thought, man, it would just be great for contract law.
It would also help a lot, I think, on issues of criminal law.
And it's not hard to envision a society where we trust the government with the inevitable implants or backups that we have, or maybe not in this society, but in others.
And when there's an accident, when there's a dispute, let's go to the video, so to speak.
Another example, it would add all too much force to the notion of a hate crime.
If we were able to take a snapshot of a brain and we were able to make the determination that somebody had thought about what they were going to do before they pulled the trigger, how many second-degree murder indictments do you think would be converted to first-degree by percentage?
As a fuzzy theorist, I get to use fuzzy terms like more than, or some would, or maybe quite a few.
But those things, as they say in the law, are fact-by-fact, fact-by-factual questions, case-by-case basis are.
It would increase it if you could really get insight into the brain state.
And we know, the fact is it's there, isn't it?
It's there.
It's an electrochemical state.
We just don't record it, but at some point we might, at least if you have that computer backup or some kind of computer implant chip, which might even have secondary effects, echo type effects.
And it could very well weigh in on the decision, which would still probably be a jury decision of the level of intent.
I don't know, but as they say in the law, it could be a factor.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is an awful lot of cases become second degree instead of first degree because it's very difficult to prove.
You know, you can talk about time elements.
Oh, he had time to go and get his gun or something like that.
But if they could really look at the brain, and maybe they wouldn't need an implant, Bart, it may be that that information remains stored in the brain.
Jim, in Northern Ohio, you're on with Bart Costco.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, hi, Art and Bart.
Sounds like a Las Vegas Magic Show.
But anyway, what I wanted to ask you was, I'm a healthcare professional, a physician assistant.
I once worked with an audiologist years ago, and we were investigating the harmful effects of live rock music that were playing at clubs and bars.
And we typically found that we had to go 40 feet into the parking lot behind closed doors before the decibel level did not cause permanent hearing damage.
Now, I myself am still find loud music nearly nauseating, but when I would ask people coming out of the bar, you know, and I showed them our findings, they did not seem to be phased by it.
So what I want to ask you, are some people addicted to like loud noise, loud music, loud noise?
And before I let you go to tinnitus, which you probably know is ringing in the ears.
And I once worked with an ear, nose, and throat doctor that theorized that if you had the ringing in the ears, you could actually find a level on the FM dial of your radio in between stations that you could mask the ringing in the ears by turning the radio up to a level of getting to the level of the tinnitus, the ringing in the ears, not on a radio station, in between radio stations.
And what I want to ask you on that second question, do you think ringing in the ears, tinnitus, is a result of noise pollution?
A lot of things can cause it because what happens is you're taking one of those many thousand little hairs inside, like the teeth on a comb, and bending it or breaking it, and thereby opening a lot of ionic channels, usually involving potassium.
And as a consequence, you're starting to send false electrical signals to the brain, and this is fake sound.
So there may be some cases where you could bring in another frequency.
But because so many people have already subjected themselves to hearing loss, doesn't that mean that a new rock band, sensitive as they might be to the idea that they're causing hearing damage, has to make it loud or they're going to flop?
Yeah, they do seem to be playing to an expectation there.
And a lot of hard of hearing people, I know a lot of people here in L.A. in the music business, and they're all hard of hearing.
A friend of mine produces obscure bands, and I always have to make sure I'm speaking to the correct ear, the left or the right one, because he's almost totally deaf in the other one.
Not so much law, but let's say in families you had maybe cheated, maybe you were planning writing someone out of a will.
And let's say a whole family was uploaded onto a computer, a nano computer, and you didn't want these things to be found out, but because they can be scanned, they can be found.
How would you keep family members from finding these things out from whatever techs or IT people or whoever would be running these computers?
Simply, how do you protect your private information?
Privacy, it looks like we'll be lost in large part in that world.
It'd be very difficult.
If you try to use some kind of encryption scheme, by the time you could upload a brain, you almost certainly would have quantum computers that could break that encryption.
Maybe there's some counter, counter scheme that could save that, but that would be tough.
I'll say one thing as a cryonosis art related to this, we talk about in the distant prospect, as improbable though it may now be, maybe different in the future, of actually coming back from cryonics is the massive loss of privacy.
I mean, the people bringing you back would be able to see every dirty little thing you ever did at the 53rd day of your life or the millionth day of your second of your life or whatever it happened to be.
So anybody could scan all that with your most intimate thoughts that you yourself have almost surely forgotten would be there on display and perhaps put up on the equivalent of the web.
It sure suggests it'll be tough to keep things secure, at least if you're representing things in a binary medium and trying to protect them with encryption, because one of the great promises, if not the central promise of Quantum mechanics is the ability to break into those.
Like, I trust human innovation, and I assume there'll be a thriving industry on the other side of that equation.
In other words, believe it or not, Bart, our governments function on secrecy.
Now, I know there's terrorists out there, and we worry about them and all the rest of that, but really, our own governments are the ones who keep secrets.
Now, they would have to be much more concerned with a world where there's no secrecy than the terrorists.
Just one question, but you were talking about the music and the volume levels.
First on that, it's not just hearing it, it's feeling the music, and I think some people like that effect.
What I called in about was you were talking about nano computers, and I was just wondering how this would apply to virtual technology or virtual reality.
The other thing is in the same realm you were talking about bringing this into the courts, your memories, how would somebody actually distinguish between an actual event and a dream?
The authentication of evidence is always a tough question, whether it's today with, you know, is that white powder really what the police found in the backseat of your car or what would be in the future, that so-called chain of custody.
Those are hard problems of evidence.
We'll always wrestle with them.
So I don't think that'll go away.
Again, in each case, there is such a high demand, though, for privacy, even though the technology undermines it, that I think we can count on, in some unforeseen way, novel solutions, likely patented or copyrighted, to help alleviate that to some extent.
But it's definitely going to be a scarce good.
That's not a bad thing in a sense, though, because the more scarce privacy becomes, the more it tends to spur innovation to protect it.
Well, maybe, but as you point out, with a quantum computer, there would be no code that you could possibly construct that couldn't be deconstructed quite quickly.
No code I think we could set up now, but Artsy, it might cut the other way, that when you have the technology to break It, you've also got a comparable technology to put something further out.
And it may just be an ongoing computer race of speeds.
In other words, you may have privacy on a 30-day basis or something as whatever the window would be.
But I don't think it'd be, I think it has to be, again, the other side, the mitigation here of the demand to protect that.
I've helped many people through the years in the manufacturing of their products.
And what I wanted to ask you, gentlemen, if you would comment on, that there was a time with protectionism back in the 1930s, which worsened the global depression in the 30s.
And what led to the belief that helping local communities, city and states and so forth, we gave up the thought of value for protectionism.
And because of this, I'm just wondering how people feel today.
Isn't it better for us to think of value instead of protectionism?
Everybody, any questions for Bart Tusco in any of these areas?
We've started talking about noise.
We're talking about all kinds of science, really, and he's well qualified to speak in any of these areas.
So any questions?
Here we are.
From coast to coast.
It's coast to coast AM.
I'm Mark Bell.
Certainly, I am a creature of the night.
Bart Tusco is my guest this night.
A very, very bright guy indeed.
And in a moment, we'll ask him if he believes, this comes from Terry and Bakersfield, that there's a universal energy that radiates a sound out of all things in the universe, like rocks, trees, plants, planets, and human beings.
That in a moment.
All right, circling back for a second to the subject of noise, Bart, he wants to know if virtually everything emanates a noise at some very tiny level.
And more deeply, the universe itself is permeated with noise leftover from the Big Bang.
The microwave radiation, it's about 159 gigahertz.
It's out there fluctuating.
It's passing through your body right now.
Literally the echoes from the creation barely 14 billion years ago.
We've sent a lot of probes up.
We're sending up more as we look deeper into that structure.
We're learning a lot more about the nature of the universe and where it's headed.
But if I come back to this, that tombstone in Austria, Ludwig Boltzmann, again, S equals K log W, inscribed on there.
And incidentally, there's a typo on that.
Here's the secret to the universe, and it's got a typo.
Instead of writing L N for log, it's written L O G, and that's a technical point for the audience.
But it does say that we began the Big Bang.
It does say that the structure is quantum-like, and it also tells us that it's going to end in noise.
That the phase we're going through now of star formation will pass.
There will be an expansion.
There's not enough matter, apparently, in the universe, according to these most recent measurements, for the universe to fall back on itself, and it will end in a very faint white noise, very cold, right above absolute zero.
There will be nothing there to say in those noise particles that Art Bell was here.
Shaheen in California, you're on with Bart Costco.
Hi.
unidentified
Hey, guys.
I just wanted to say that I don't have any marijuana in my room.
All right.
Well, y'all, I was thinking about this today, about how to create a machine that could visualize dreams.
And I just can't believe that y'all are talking about this tonight.
I was thinking about Bluetooth technology and how I can send a photo or a video from my phone to my computer and it's not attached to it.
And I was just thinking if maybe, you know, if they do something like this, could they tap into the social consciousness and connect people and send voice thoughts or something into the social consciousness?
And I was thinking, should scientists even invent something like this if they're not going to have control over who uses this technology?
And I discussed this, not in the book Noise, but in the book Heaven and a Chip.
Once you do upload, as I think inevitably at some point mankind will, into a chip, you can then combine, just as you suggest, combine your mind with others if you choose into a true kind of global collective consciousness, very much like the Internet, but a kind of mind net.
And who knows what kind of collective thoughts you could have there?
Russ in Toronto, Canada, you're on with Dr. Costco.
Hi.
Hi.
unidentified
Good morning, gentlemen.
Well, to digress for a moment based on the last caller's comments, check out CompuWest, September 1982, and Harold Weinberg, W-E-I-N-D-E-R-G, of Simon Fraser's Neurobiomagnetism Lab, who developed the first ever contract for a psychoactivated interface,
and that based on some work that I sent them at the turn of the 80s from Dr. Donald York at the University of Missouri Medical Center, who was at that time and in my communications with him, developing a technology to actually depict dream states.
But I won't get into that at this particular point.
I wanted to ask your guest art, what kind of patent are we talking about if we're developing, let's say, a new health occupations nomenclature that would revamp medicine and wanting to place new names for whatever reason someone would want to do that and however it might be challenged and why do it?
But let's say we're going to do that.
What kind of patent are we talking about in connection with that kind of development?
The concern is what kind of patent classification would exist for a patent that would develop a new health occupations classification for, let's say, the whole of medicine?
So retooling all the current existing terminology for the occupations.
You know, I think they would call that vague and indefinite in the patent office.
But if you did have a new health system, you could get what's called a method patent, which is the same legal reasoning that led to software patents.
That is, you're telling the world how to achieve something through taking a sequence of steps, in the case of software, by telling the computer to take a sequence of steps.
And there are many method patents.
You could patent your own way of doing CPR, for example.
I'm a little nervous here, but my question for Dr. Costco is, if someone was manipulated in some kind of time travel experiment and they realize that, can they alter that destiny of that manipulation, basically, if they're aware of it and can they change it to their benefit?
That's pretty good evidence, and no one has done it in the future.
Not conclusive evidence, but it's evidence.
The second problem is, to the extent that we see how you would do that through wormholes or other techniques, as I understand it, you've got to, in effect, bend two parts of the universe just like you take two parts of a piece of paper and make them touch.
That takes such tremendous amounts of energy.
Just to do it would be hard.
But to go back and then undo it would take even more energy, I think.
They've got a computer or had a computer at Princeton.
I think they still have it.
And then they have a lot of eggs.
Now, these are computers scattered around the world geographically, spitting out random numbers.
And when the computers suddenly become non-random, that's reported back to the computer of Princeton, all these little eggs.
And they've noticed that for years now, during large events like 9-11, for example, there was a big, giant spike about 30 minutes prior to the event itself.
Now, I guess they're pretty far along in proving that this really is so for large events.
And they can't figure out why these spikes are coming outside.
In other words, you would imagine, for example, with 9-11, once it happened, you'd get a giant spike.
In particular, the brain interface, the chip-neuron interface.
A lot of work on it, especially in the hiposamples.
unidentified
Do you foresee any hope for a person like me who is in dire need of difficult open heart surgery yet I'm not able to have it because of other complications?
It would be too much of a strain on other parts of my body, which the heart has depleted their ability to function correctly with my liver.
So I'm faced with this dilemma, and I'm looking for any, I'm casting about for some kind of hope somewhere if I can hang on for another five or ten years and not die in between.
And I think that, and I'm not a physician, I can't get medical advice.
I don't know all the facts here, et cetera.
But I do think the one thing we know in general is that the longer you can hold on, the more technology available to help you.
And so if you can extend it, going from one to five years is great.
Going from five to ten, I think you get an exponential increase in the availability, just given the rapidity with which we're developing products and services.
David in Knoxville, Tennessee, on with Dr. Costco.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, how are you doing, Art?
Happy birthday to you.
It's a pleasure to talk with Professor Costco.
My question has to do with general mathematics.
And it comes from a friend of mine who has a PhD in mathematics here in Knoxville.
And I was looking at some of his equations, you know, his papers one day.
And, you know, it's just all symbols.
And, you know, it looks like Greek, right?
You know, it's just all symbols.
And so I said, well, what are these symbols?
And he said, they're all theories.
And I've always followed mathematics as a layman.
I don't have the IQ to understand it.
But I got the feeling over the years that, you know, all this math that we understand is it all just theory upon theory upon theory?
Do we really know what we know?
Or is it just, you know, a house of cards?
Is that why we don't get anywhere?
Or, I mean, I know you've got the basic applications of electronics, but as far as general math goes, I'd like you to comment on that, and I'll listen off the air.
Let's go to a source of white noise, Niagara Falls, New York.
John, you're on with Dr. Costco.
unidentified
Hi, it's an absolute thrill to be on with you guys.
An amazing show, that's for sure.
I was going to talk, ask Bart, about I'm studying right now some neuroscience stuff, looking to do a mind-to-machine connection sort of end game.
And I was wondering what, for two things about that subject, in connecting minds to computers and reading what's in your mind, as you said, the nanotubes could be a way to do that.
Could you also use magnetism as in pinpoint, like a laser-like sort of field of many, many pinpoint magnetism, like where it shoots something to sense what the electrons are doing?
Firstly, and secondly, as far as canceling out waves, as you were talking with noise and noise canceling, could you also do that if the something in your mind as far as like I'm not sure how much your thoughts would act like a wave, but could you, in effect, cancel out someone's thoughts by shooting some kind of a sound wave or something like that?
The first question goes to, I think, NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance.
You know, we do have very faint magnetic traces in the brain, and you can manipulate those and measure those.
It's an ongoing thing.
The thing to remember about neurons, you've got about 100 billion of them, roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and they take spike trains coming in, like one-zero trains pouring in from about 10,000 different neurons at any given time.
And they emit their own spike trains.
So it spikes to spikes.
And we just can't figure out what that is.
And if not, the greatest question of neuroscience is how to decode the language of spikes.
And if you could do that, then maybe you could, at the wave level, as they very well have wave structure, maybe you could affect that, enhance that, cancel that.
Observations on noise, and I don't know why this is, but when you're watching television, you're watching a show and you have your volume at one level.
It seems a lot of times when a commercial comes on, it's two to three times louder.
Actually, the noise doesn't reach a higher measured decibel level.
What it reaches is the same decibel level, but it's so compressed that it's up at that decibel level the whole time.
So it sounds louder.
unidentified
Very annoying.
And then the other thing with noise is you go to the hospital to get well, and it's one of the noisiest places and so hard to even get a good night's sleep.
I have played in bands and DJed for about 20 years.
And I kind of have a theory, you know, you're playing a cocktail set, playing a quiet bossa nova, and people are just sitting and drinking and talking.
And as soon as you start playing a Rolling Stone song and crank it up, they're out on the dance floor and just interacting and being moved by the loudness of the music.
Do you think it emotionally triggers endorphins to cause this scenario?