Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 17, 2007 - Art Bell

02:37:07

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Noise, Law, and Technology - Bart Kosko - James Gilliland - UFO Update

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	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, oh, a hundred 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 a hundred 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 Gods II.
	He is the director of the Self-Mastery Earth Institute, ESETI.
	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 a hundred, I mean it, a hundred 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 Kosko.
	But for this hour, we've got James Gilliland.
	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, and I... First of all, James, where are you located?
	Oh, we're located in Trout Lake, Washington, right at the base of Mount Adams, just about About a little over an hour from Portland and probably about 30 minutes from Hood River, Oregon.
	Okay.
	Why your ranch?
	I mean, it's a... Why your ranch?
	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 where Doing all kinds of healings and things of that nature, and actually living with some of the different nations here, the Yakama Nation and others all know about it.
	Well, did anybody anywhere along the line, including yourself, ask why that area?
	Yeah, I know why this area.
	Basically, there's a lot of massive bases around on the planet.
	Shasta, the Himalayas, a lot of these mountains have bases, you might say, some inner earth beings that are connected with the star nations as well.
	Okay, so you think they're inner-earth dwellers, I guess is the right word.
	I don't know.
	It's a combination.
	A lot of them are ancient ancestors, and some of them went inward during the cataclysms and continued with their technologies, and there's some that left and escaped the cataclysms and went on.
	You know, the Earth has been colonized for thousands of years, and that's the history we don't hear about.
	A lot of people are digging up the relics right now and starting to put the pieces together.
	All right.
	What kind of, other than your NDE, other than your NDE, 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?
	Well, I've had about three different experiences.
	One was a face-to-face with a group called the Palladians.
	And they're exquisitely beautiful beings.
	They're very genetically refined and very advanced.
	Describe physically what these beings look like.
	The only ones I've seen are female.
	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 You know, people run for their gun, or they run for something else.
	Sure.
	Sure, a female would be far less threatening to an earthling.
	Exactly, and so the first contacts are usually female, and especially for men.
	For women it might be male, I don't know.
	Well, alright, describe them.
	They're very beautiful.
	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.
	Okay, in a human sense, James, in other words, you said supermodel.
	Do you mean all the way human or are there, if there are distinctions between a beautiful human supermodel and what you saw, what are those distinctions?
	Hardly anything.
	I mean, they could be walking among us and you wouldn't even know.
	A lot of them.
	Some of them, their ears are just a little bit different than ours.
	But you wouldn't really notice.
	And some of their eyes are just a little bit bigger.
	But otherwise, you wouldn't notice a thing.
	And their language?
	They don't speak.
	They have the ability, the ones that are working with the planet right now, have the ability to speak most languages.
	But it's usually telepathic.
	It's thought to thought.
	And what thoughts did you exchange with them, if any?
	We 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, very beautiful messages.
	Very spiritual messages.
	Almost, they could be mistaken for an angelic message if you didn't know the difference.
	Well, maybe if you were a person of faith, you would take them as angels.
	I think a lot of people do.
	Even Billy Graham called them God's other angels.
	So they're concerned about the environment.
	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 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 can, they just know that this is a part of creation that needs some major help right now to get through these times.
	Quantum physics is beginning!
	To teach us that.
	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, alright, here we go.
	If they have all of this technology, that is 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?
	I think we covered that last time.
	They're looking for intelligent life, you know, men with integrity.
	And there's really no reason for landing there.
	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?
	Oh yeah, they'd take a moment out and notice.
	They'd call in the military and they'd try to capture their vehicle and back-engineer it for the war industry and incarcerate them.
	Yeah, they probably would.
	Yeah, they probably would.
	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.
	There's so much they can do.
	So they're avoiding governments?
	They are now.
	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 we're 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.
	Do you have any idea what their social structure is, what their religious beliefs are, if any, any of that?
	Yes, they have families just like we do.
	They're very They don't have all the rigid rules and regulations that we do.
	They're very free.
	They, you know, they have the whole universe as their playground.
	They have the unlimited technologies, the fuel-less energies.
	They can, you know, not just fly 7,000 miles an hour in this atmosphere, but they can jump dimensions and, you know, 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.
	Their lives are very unlimited.
	They've transcended disease, they've transcended, you know, material need, all of that.
	If they really have, if they can transcend Well, 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, 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 was found dead.
	And that's just a small blip as far as the energy.
	Splitting water is one thing, but when you get into fuel-less 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.
	Hey, how much, if anything, do you actually know about the technology?
	Well, I don't know... I have an understanding of how it works.
	It taps into zero point.
	And it's that space in 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 generative side.
	So, do they frequently go back home?
	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
	So do they frequently go back home?
	In other words, do they traverse the space between here and the Pleiadian system back and forth?
	Yes.
	Yes?
	Yes.
	They can do it in a moment.
	They can jump.
	They don't really fly necessarily.
	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 Can't really mention the name of it.
	I don't want to get these guys in trouble.
	Listen, I'm not a doubter anymore.
	I mean, I've had more than enough emails from people who have gone to your place and they just rave about what they've seen.
	It can't be from Earth.
	It's extraterrestrial.
	No question about it.
	I was a doubter when I came up here.
	I mean, I could go on and on and on.
	Emails all over the place.
	How do you work that, by the way?
	How do you accept or reject visitors to your ranch?
	You know, we don't.
	Almost the energy here rejects them.
	You know, if they come up here with a bad attitude, it gets amplified, because this is a vortex.
	It's a very high-energy place.
	So if somebody comes up here with a bad attitude or ill intent, it just amplifies and intensifies, and they don't last very long here.
	But most of the people that come here just have an open mind, a loving heart, and just want to know the truth.
	And that's why I created this place, because I found out there's no way you're going to really get this out, even through the UFO community.
	There's a lot of... Have you had a lot of people with what you called evil intent?
	We've had some.
	You know, we've had the usual, you know, black helicopters, psychotronics, and I've had lug nuts taken off my car and brake lines.
	One time I was out filming and a bullet went whizzing by my head.
	Really?
	Really?
	Yeah.
	So there's something watching out after me.
	I've always You know, I just accept that it comes with the work, and it's tapered off now, so we really don't have these problems anymore.
	I think it's gone so public with shows like this, going out to, what, 15 or 20 million listeners?
	I don't know what you have now.
	Right, a lot of listeners.
	Yeah, and when you go that public, all of a sudden it backs off.
	You know, the best way to do it is to hide out in public, you know, not to shrink in fear.
	Yeah, hide in plain sight, right?
	Exactly.
	Are you out most nights, or how do you work it now?
	Pretty much.
	If we've got clear skies, I'm usually out.
	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 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 is just incredible.
	I wish I had that kind of gear here.
	By the way, and that's something I want to ask about, we live in an age now of high-definition, low-light cameras.
	Just amazing cameras.
	I've got a high-def Sony camera and it's awesome.
	Now if you could combine that, how many daytime sightings do you get, James?
	You know, unfortunately we don't get that many daytime sightings and a lot of the photographs we get The people never see the ships.
	They just appear on their film.
	So they stay pretty much cloaked.
	Every once in a while, I mean, I've seen some massive cigar-shaped ships.
	I've seen ones that look like pyramids.
	And at the last conference, we had a huge triangular ship come in and two huge green, like, mother ships came in, one from the south and north.
	And we had, like, 400 people here, plus The speaker, I think we had 12 speakers, and most of them have been on your show.
	You've interviewed a lot of these speakers that have been on.
	Wendell Stephens was here, Nick Bajic, Brooks Agnew, both.
	Dr. Sala and Dr. Wobre, you know, with the exo-politics movement, all of them were here, and they got to see the ships.
	You know, next time you have them on the show, ask them about their experience.
	Oh, believe me, I will, and I don't doubt you for one second.
	Hold on, James.
	James Gilliland is my guest, and he's right.
	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, um, 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, but it's a Father's Day photograph.
	There you have it.
	Sixty-two 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?
	They do believe in a God, but it's not an entity like the little old man with the beard that a lot of people push, or the wrathful God.
	There's over 11,000 religions on the planet right now, and they have over 11,000 You know, experiences and images and doctrines.
	It's amazing.
	But they go far beyond that.
	And they consider it more of a divine intelligence.
	It's a creative intelligence.
	It's the one consciousness that encompasses all consciousness on all planes and all dimensions throughout the universe.
	It's that cosmic glue that holds everything together.
	And they just have a whole different image of it.
	It's a much more expanded image.
	All right.
	But not the God of our Bible.
	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, you know, there are actually two separate occurrences that happen there.
	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?
	Well, there's a limit to allowing.
	They let things go so far, and they know that we gain wisdom through experience, and sometimes we have to walk through our creations before we gain the wisdom from it.
	And they also know that we're eternal souls, but they really feel a planet and a civilization is a terrible thing to waste, and so they're doing all they can right now to help us and assist us.
	More ways unseen, but... Alright, do you know any of those ways?
	Do you know anything they're doing?
	Oh, they're doing many things.
	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 Uh, really hardcore cases that remain around Chernobyl, but for the most part, it's going back to the wild.
	And I really mean the area around Chernobyl has gone back to the wild with trees, plants, and animals.
	It's amazing.
	Uh-huh.
	Yeah, they've done a lot.
	It's amazing what they've been doing.
	You know, before, there's a couple things I wanted to cover before I go any further.
	First one, I want to congratulate you and say happy birthday, you know?
	Thank you.
	For making it this far, anyway.
	Yeah, hey.
	Considering all the amazing work you've been doing.
	And also, too, congratulations on Asia Bell, your daughter.
	I've kind of sensed her energy, and she's got some sweet, powerful energy.
	She's going to go places.
	She's something else.
	Believe me, she's something else.
	You know, I don't want to sound like a proud, beaming daddy, but I am, and she is the most aware.
	She actually stayed awake almost eight hours today, and that's ridiculous.
	I mean, she was born May 30th, and if ever, I'll tell you James, if ever there was an old soul, she's it.
	And anyway, back to these encounters, how many actual face-to-face kind of encounters have you had?
	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 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.
	We're going to do it again this July 6th through 8th.
	We're having another big Science Spirit and World Transformation Conference, so people can come out and have their own transformation process.
	Is there any way that you can be fairly sure that during one of these events, something interesting will happen?
	Or could it all fall flat and a couple days go by and nothing at all happens?
	You know, they've never let us down.
	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, nah, they're not ready yet, and they just move on.
	All right, well obviously you are in a hotspot.
	Are there any other hotspots equivalent to where you are that you're aware of around the world right now?
	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 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.
	Well, I'm a little suspicious of anything over Iraq and Iran.
	If we've got anything new and whiz-banging, I'm sure we're using it there.
	Oh yeah, I'm sure we are.
	And there's other things watching that as well.
	I mean, after all, James, even you would have to admit that a lot of what we call UFOs probably are test aircraft of our own.
	I mean, that's just a fact of life.
	Oh, there definitely are some.
	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.
	I'm interested in the manner of contact.
	Okay, they're not going to governments.
	They're not going to our leaders.
	They're making contact with people like you, 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.
	Well, it's mainly done through consciousness.
	We've got A lot of information about that.
	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.
	A lot of Bruce Lipton's work out there, and, you know, What the Belief, and these other movies, they're actually realizing that consciousness is, you know, the creator of 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 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, you know, they work in their process of, you know, the awakening and healing of humanity.
	Okay, is it your opinion that they react to directed intent, you know, directed consciousness?
	Oh, 100%.
	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.
	So if somebody's out there right now and they want contact, you're suggesting they can get it?
	They can.
	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 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.
	Anything about abductions?
	Now, abductions for the most part, James, are considered kind of negative.
	I mean, it's kind of like kidnapping, right?
	So, have they ever related anything to you about the taking of cows, the taking of people against their will, that sort of thing?
	Do you know anything about that?
	Yes, I do.
	That's not really my focus.
	There's a lot of other people.
	You know, they just had a kind of an abduction that happened.
	I was in Yelm working on a movie.
	There's a world premiere movie that's going to be screened at the conference.
	And this contact has begun with me, James Gilliam, and it's called His Story.
	And people can see the trailer on the website, but I was there going to Yelm to do this trailer, and they actually abducted these people right off the rooftop at Walmart.
	They're building a Walmart there, and Linda Moulton Howe actually did a story on that on Coast to Coast.
	I can't remember if she was with you or... No, not me.
	It was probably with George, I think it was.
	But it's amazing.
	Taken from the roof of Walmart?
	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 and said, you've got to change your ways.
	And when you bring up 2012, they start getting teary-eyed.
	Alright, did they go beyond tears and explain what we can expect without any change between now and 2012?
	Well, you know what?
	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.
	Well, just give me what you've got from a single source.
	Yeah, they don't want to talk about it right now.
	They're leery of losing their jobs and things like that, so they want to keep quiet about it.
	Well, without naming names, can you tell me what they told you?
	Well, basically, I didn't talk to him.
	I got the information from her report, Linda Moulton Howe's report.
	Oh, okay.
	And it was very clear on there, and then I called the inspector's office, and I called around, and I just got kind of a second-hand story about this, and so I haven't been able to interview any of the guys.
	If any of those guys are there, they can contact me through the eSETI website, or even contact you and fill you in on the rest of the story.
	But it's the same thing I've been seeing.
	It's the same thing you've written your book about.
	It's global warming and the Earth changes.
	We are in dire straits right now, and we're going to need all the help we can get to get through these times.
	That's exactly why I'm working with these beings, because I really believe they're our best shot right now.
	Well, I hope they step forward and help us in some big ways, because we really, really need it, James.
	We definitely do.
	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 I don't know.
	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.
	Boy, I don't know.
	I would like to say that human behavior is on the mend and that some new consciousness
	is descending on the human psyche, but I don't know, James.
	I don't know that I've seen it yet.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, it's kind of like you were talking about.
	It's a grassroots 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 You know, into the leadership level, that's where the real change has to happen because, you know, 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.
	They only want what we have, James.
	And why shouldn't they?
	You know, they could have more than we have.
	And we probably will see this happen in other countries due to the resistance in this country, You'll probably see these water technologies and these fuel-less 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, you know, our leadership.
	I've only seen two.
	I don't watch TV, and I'm not, you know, really into that.
	I get on the Internet once in a while, and I mean, I'm not a political person, but probably I think Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are about to Only ones I've seen with the courage and the integrity to say it like it is.
	Okay, listen, we're out of time.
	We'll do a whole show in the near future.
	You've got something you want to plug?
	Do it quick.
	Well, I want people to check out www.eceti.org.
	Check out the Science, Spirit, and Mind Conference.
	The World Transformation Conference is on July 6th through 8th.
	And also, too, to check out the trailer of the new movie, Contact Has Begun, with James Gillan, his story.
	And it's a wonderful new film that's going to be hitting theaters soon, and it's going to be out in DVD.
	OK, buddy.
	A couple other movies coming out, too, we'll talk about later.
	All right, done deal.
	We'll do a whole show soon, James Gillan.
	Thank you very, very much.
	Have a good night.
	You, too.
	Thanks again, Art.
	From the high desert, we'll be right back.
	Well, yes it is.
	Hi, everybody.
	Coming up in a moment, Bart Kosko.
	What an incredible guy.
	Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California.
	He holds degrees in Philosophy, Economics, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering, and now Law.
	Dr. Kosko 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 in 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.
	Heaven in a Chip, if you recall that.
	But noise is a very, very, very interesting topic.
	And, in a moment, we'll make some of it.
	Bart Kosko, welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
	Hi Art, happy birthday.
	Oh, thank you.
	Thank you, indeed.
	And Father's Day.
	And Father's Day, yes, yes.
	Every few years, Father's Day rolls around on June 17th, Sunday, as the day I was born, and this is one of those.
	Anyway, it's great to have you back, and a very interesting topic.
	Noise.
	I lived, as you know, for eight months in the Philippines.
	And in the Philippines, Bart, noise is part of the culture.
	And I mean very seriously so.
	Every little store has speakers out blasting at ear-splitting levels.
	I mean, it's just part of the culture.
	And when I brought Erin to America, the first thing that hit her as the noise hit me when I got there was the amazing, by contrast, silence.
	It was bothersome, actually.
	Well, enjoy it while it lasts, Art, because I think you've got a taste of things to come.
	Those stereo systems are becoming more frequent, more powerful, and it's not going to go in the other direction.
	What made you even decide to look into the subject of noise?
	That's a good question.
	It's a natural follow-on to fuzz.
	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, there's been a long-standing war on noise.
	And the other reason, Art, is 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, you know, 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, 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.
	But the other reason, Art, is I hate noise.
	I do, too.
	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, uh, you can have a large group of people, and it's relatively quiet, or, like a group of, uh, 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, uh, them, across the table from them, and so they start talking louder, and pretty soon, it's unbearable.
	In fact, I call that the restaurant effect.
	It's like the cocktail party effect when 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.
	I hate that.
	And of course, I don't go to bars.
	I don't drink.
	I'm not a drinker, so I have an aversion to bars in general, and particularly where they have either a jukebox going full blast or a band going full blast, and you can't have an enjoyable, quiet dinner conversation.
	You can't do it.
	I agree fully.
	Last time I was at a place that had a band, Art, A friend of mine came, this was 15-20 years ago, wanted to go to Sunset Boulevard, wanted to go to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, where the doors started out.
	And we went there at like 1 or 2 in the morning, and everybody was 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.
	There are some technologies that allow you to put on some headphones.
	You know, they're advertised widely on TV.
	Yes, they are.
	That cancel noise, whether it's aircraft noise or, I don't know, a lot of background talking and yelling in bands or whatever.
	How well do they work?
	They work well if the background noise doesn't change too fast.
	I have a class where we teach this.
	It's called Adaptive Signal Processing, and I discuss this in Chapter 5 of the book.
	It's based on something called LMS, or the Least Mean Square Algorithm.
	And as long as you can take a measurement and get a reference measurement of what the noise is, then you can build a model to add in the negative.
	In other words, cancel it.
	Which cancels, exactly.
	So you can have waves, 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 on 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 do 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's 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.
	You can't cancel it because the processor can't get a hold of it quick enough to cancel it.
	To kill it off.
	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 in 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, but the... God, I don't know.
	I hope we don't have to get to that.
	I hope so as well.
	But for the kinds of sounds you would hear while driving to cancel the hum in your car, or a variety of other things, I think it's worth getting.
	And contrary-wise, I would recommend against a headset used to amplify sound.
	The evidence just continues to mount that that's very dangerous, it produces hearing loss, and you don't realize that until it's too late.
	Yeah, I'm sure I've got some hearing loss.
	I've been wearing headphones, Bart, all my adult life, and radio of course.
	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.
	Really?
	Yeah, just blasting so much energy directly into the ear canal.
	That was long before the iPod.
	Well, let me ask this.
	Is American society getting louder?
	Yes, in almost every measure.
	There are some cases where it's not.
	For example, airplanes are quieter than they used to be.
	There's a lot of litigation about that.
	Half as noisy as they were, say, in the 1960s and 70s.
	On the other hand, there's more of them.
	So that's a trade-off.
	There's been cases like that where there's been real efforts to improve soundproofing or the sound, industrial sounds.
	But what is louder and harder to measure, Art, is what you talked about.
	Just everybody in their daily lives using more cell phones, more gadgets.
	There's, you know, millions of car alarms.
	There's millions of leaf blowers.
	And things like that, which are only increasing in frequency, and again, in power.
	So it is noisier on that.
	All right.
	Interestingly, right now, you and I have, and I don't know that the average person can hear it, but there's a little bit of hum on the line.
	Can you hear that?
	I do, yes.
	Okay.
	I think that's probably on your phone, Bart.
	And it's probably from a power source.
	From some sort of power source, yes.
	By the way, a classic thing to noise cancel.
	It would be.
	Yes, it would be.
	Unfortunately, in the radio business, you know, we've got a lot of devices that take background noise and amplify it.
	Right.
	And so it's probably, in some cases, getting amplified and quite loud.
	Other stations have a lot of dynamic range and they might just hear it at a very low level.
	But it's there.
	And so it's noise.
	You say noise.
	Noise has become a legal nuisance.
	In other words, we're beginning to get legislation about noise?
	Yeah, lots of legislation about noise.
	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.
	Now you still see a lot of cars I was in Las Vegas the other day for a doctor's appointment and why is it that people feel it's so cool to remove a muffler It's a small thing, but it's not so small.
	I mean, a car without a muffler is very, very noisy.
	Yes, it is.
	And this is the problem.
	The economic structure of noise is a market failure.
	Somebody's getting a benefit.
	The person who removed that muffler is getting whatever benefit they get from that.
	But they're imposing all these costs on third parties and not having to pay for it.
	And that's not economically efficient.
	And that argues whether we like it or not, but we don't.
	It really does argue for some kind of coercion, some kind of government action.
	And that's the basis of noise ordinances, whether they're muffler rules or something comparable.
	Do you actually think that we might ban cell phones in public places?
	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, whether that cell phone could interfere with electronics.
	I've always had high doubts about that.
	Yeah, I do too.
	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 and places have experimented with banning cell phones, but I don't think those politicians stay in office very long.
	Well, I have other complaints.
	You're a bright guy, Bart.
	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... Correct.
	...to fairly good analog connections.
	They 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, Arne, 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 call.
	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.
	You know, those companies, I think, have fairly thin profit margins.
	But over time, it should improve.
	But you're absolutely 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.
	Well, there ought to be.
	There may be.
	Doing a, you know, so many people have cell phones now, Bart, that I would say Seventy or eighty percent of the calls we get on a talk show like this, when we go to open lines, are from cell phones.
	That's right.
	You think about that, all the different services available, and how those manufacturers and providers have to cut those fees down to the bone.
	Many of them go under, and I think that's why you're not seeing the bandwidth you'd like to see.
	I suppose, but you know, I for one, Would be willing to pay extra for a good connection, and I really think, Bart, that a lot of people would.
	Yeah, I think we'll get back to that premium service at some point, but I don't see it right now.
	Everything's headed towards a disposable, more inexpensive, have more cell phones, again, cheaper.
	Well, it's true.
	It's true.
	Have you done any study at all, we touched on it a moment ago, all of the aircraft people tell you, as soon as we start to take off, all the cell phones have got to be turned off.
	Now, they claim that there's danger to the navigation equipment of the aircraft.
	Is that a bunch of baloney?
	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 you could, a clever programmer might be able to figure out a way to do something quasi-terrorist style to jam systems.
	You know, I don't think anyone could come out and say there's no such risk.
	There's a similar problem with what do you tell people if it's safe to hold a cell phone to your ear that close to your brain for a long period of time.
	Is it?
	Well, again, both as a scientist and a lawyer, I have to dither here.
	The evidence, there's been a lot of studies, they're largely inconclusive.
	Now that you're a lawyer, you're going to be harder to talk to.
	Yeah, a little harder to talk to, 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.
	Everyone's waiting for more data to come in.
	With the exception, usually a recommendation in the 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 Had them spend a lot of time blasting radio frequency energy into their brains.
	It must be a lot safer to get a Bluetooth device, put that on your ear, and put cell phone on your hip, right?
	I think that would be.
	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 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 that difficulty of trying to prove a negative.
	And if you see, you know, any experience with the Legal products liability, the potential downside is enormous.
	Listen, if 20 years from now they find that... Yeah, 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.
	That's all too true.
	All right.
	Hold it right there, Bart.
	Tonight's subject Is noise.
	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.
	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 Cosco 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 would think it's 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?
	Well, one thing, Art, is to replace tile floors with carpets.
	That may be the biggest thing you can do.
	Corporations and other places, a lot of folks like tiles because it's easy to clean, but it just bounces the sound waves off and they ricochet around.
	You want something that absorbs the vibrations of sound.
	That's right.
	And again, noise is, in this case, unwanted sound, unwanted energy.
	You can also put up drapes.
	It goes a long way, but the carpets are a big deal here.
	And the old shag carpets of the 70s are probably the best way to go.
	They're harder to clean.
	They may be gaudy to look at, but they absorb sound much better.
	Likewise, appliances should be put on rubber mats or comparable structures to dissipate sound.
	That's a good point.
	That does help to do that.
	There's another thing.
	If you take your windows, there's two ways to go.
	One is simply to caulk them.
	Caulking makes a big difference.
	It helps seal the sound waves coming in and helps damp down those vibrations because those windows are almost perfect vibrators.
	Boy, is that a good idea!
	Now, if you've got the money for it, you can come up with more elaborate windows that have a thermos-like structure.
	There's two windows, and there's some trapping the sound in between.
	That's expensive, and it requires a lot of remodeling, but the simplest thing to do is go to your hardware store and buy some caulking compound.
	Oh, that's such a good idea!
	I'm going to do that.
	You can try it.
	Just see what happens.
	In fact, you can go to a local electronics store and get a noise meter and just measure it, for example, and you can see.
	By the way, it's a good thing to take with you.
	I have, in general.
	Those are simple things you can do.
	Well, I live here in the desert, Bart, where heat is a big problem.
	Noise is not so much of a problem.
	It's very quiet here, but heat is.
	And I've got these special screens that kill a lot of the heat, but the caulking idea is not just only good for noise, it's also good for heat.
	Absolutely.
	It's insulation.
	Very good.
	And then the idea of putting something rubber under the appliances is superb.
	I bet that really cuts it down.
	It cuts it down, and I think it helps clean things, ultimately, and move things.
	Yeah, washers, dryers, refrigerators, that sort of thing?
	Yes.
	I want to do that.
	Thank you very much.
	What a wonderful idea.
	You're welcome.
	Okay, have you done that in your own home?
	I've done some of that, and always doing more of it.
	But I put up a lot of layers on the windows to block out sound and light.
	I think you also sleep better that way.
	And I go further.
	I like to sleep with a fan.
	I like to approximate that white noise sound of a stream or fountain.
	And when it goes off, you're much more likely to hear the other sounds, but it tends to mask out.
	One of the big health problems with noise is lack of sleep or lower quality sleep, another symptom of modern society.
	What is white noise, Bart?
	White noise 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.
	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 its 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.
	Even more correlated noise is often called black noise.
	So there's a whole spectrum of colors in the analogy with visible light.
	Okay, here's an example of what I think white noise is.
	That sound like white noise?
	That's a pretty good approximation.
	Yeah.
	The spectrum would be approximately flat.
	Yeah, that's just taking a VHF radio with no signal, removing the squelch, and that's basically, that's almost white noise.
	That's right.
	A lot of electronic devices produce a kind of pink noise, crackle noise, popcorn noise, it's all kind of, in the book I talk about 40 different kinds in 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 To boost the energy of the signal, to hide things in the background, to mask it, and in some cases even, as I discuss in the book, to use it as a way to code.
	And that's, in effect, what's going on with a lot of 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, 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.
	Because you can understand each other, but all the other talking sounds like soft background noise.
	Now that's, as opposed to putting each people, each person in a separate room, which would be the 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.
	Okay.
	And you say that some white noise, kind of like, for example, a soft fan above you at night, actually helps?
	It certainly helps threshold-like systems.
	Thresholds like neurons that are on-off switches.
	And your brain consists of a few hundred billion of those, and also throughout your body.
	That's a mathematical fact, something we call the Forbidden Interval Theorem.
	You can prove that it will occur.
	A lot of simulations have shown it.
	A variety of scientists have demonstrated it with different kinds of life forms.
	There's never been a demonstration of an internal noise source in a creature affecting other parts of the body and improving it.
	But we have been able to take, we being my colleagues, noise and add it to a system and improve the overall performance of the system.
	That's called SR or Stochastic Resonance.
	You broke up there.
	I'm sorry.
	It's called Stochastic Resonance or SR.
	Okay.
	Alright.
	You're now a lawyer.
	Are you going to use your law degree in this area anywhere?
	My law degree is something I use largely for scholarly purposes.
	For example, I'm 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.
	In my experience, 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.
	Yes, it says you worked recently as a Bar Certified Law Clerk for the L.A.
	District Attorney's Office.
	What do you do?
	Well, I prosecuted felony preliminary hearings, and it was, for an academe like me, about as close as I'll ever get to combat, I think.
	I wanted something with action, with the help of some judges and others.
	I got the position, I had to be trained, and initially I participated in various prosecutions.
	But then, with a supervisor, I was able to go solo.
	And so this is the screening device, the little mini-trial that we have in California for a felony, not a misdemeanor.
	Grand Theft Auto, for example, certain kinds of drug possession or selling, a lot of violent things.
	And quite often the defendant is held to answer, and the case proceeds.
	And if there's not a strong enough case, then it's kicked out at that level.
	But a great majority of the cases, felonies, are dealt with at the level of what's called the prelim, the preliminary hearing.
	Very few actually go all the way to trial.
	I don't know, maybe 3% or something.
	Well, since you're now a lawyer and you work in a prosecutor's office, do you have any advice for people who get in trouble with the law?
	Two things.
	Number one, I would keep my mouth shut.
	And number two, I would call an attorney.
	In fact, what I recommend that 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.
	Just tear out the page 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.
	Well, I watch Law & Order.
	It's one of my favorite shows.
	And the moment the attorney walks in the room, in the middle of some sort of interrogation, first thing they say is, uh, interview's over, shut up.
	That's right.
	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.
	The fact is, on Mike 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.
	There 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.
	Fascinating.
	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.
	The fact is, most police departments in major cities, 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 Miranda rights are not nearly as powerful as you think they are.
	By the way, most studies show, almost all studies show, that defendants can 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 that 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, you're fully Mirandized, and you proceed with the interrogation, the nature of the questioning can be quite broad.
	Now, before that, it's very different.
	Well, people are very easily intimidated.
	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?
	Well, almost.
	Almost?
	That's the Edwards rule, 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 foreboding.
	Well, on the other hand, if you're... So you're saying that you should do that, keep your mouth shut, get an attorney, even if you're innocent as new driven snow, You can still get yourself in trouble, or if you're really innocent, is it okay to say, look, no, I'll talk to you.
	What do you want to know?
	I didn't do a thing, so let's talk.
	My main advice on anything where your life or liberty or property could be at risk is to get an attorney immediately on anything, specifically on criminal law matters.
	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 the case that even an innocent person, Or bystanders, 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.
	Bart, let me ask you about this.
	You know, we're drifting sideways here, but that's alright.
	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 a 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.
	That's right.
	Whatever your position is on the death penalty, it is unique.
	The punishment in that case is 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 of 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's 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 through the criminal justice system until they got it to 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 applause.
	It's beginning to affect me.
	I'm not so sure anymore that Such a final punishment is appropriate when we're finding so many innocent people.
	On the other hand, if you have a case where the guilt is indisputable, the classic extreme philosophy class example is what do you do with Hitler?
	If you really are opposed to the death penalty, would you just give him life?
	That's an extreme case, but there are many cases, dictators and recently Saddam Hussein, where there was no doubt that these were mass murders.
	And that's a different matter, but for the rank-and-file person sitting on death row, there is a real issue there of the criminal evidence.
	Here's another question, maybe you can comment.
	In some instances, now Texas carries out death penalties pretty quickly compared to other states, and there have been a few instances where DNA exonerated the person on death row, but even in the face of that, The legal system proceeded with the execution based on the fact that, look, we don't care about the new evidence.
	This person was judged guilty by, you know, jury of their peers, and this execution is going to go forth.
	You know, sometimes you'll see decisions in the Supreme Court and elsewhere where there seems to be an undue adherence to meeting a filing deadline.
	I think that's what happened in the case you're referring to.
	It's been a while since I looked at it.
	One of the hard lines in the law is the filing of an appeal, and that's not a fuzzy line at all.
	It's an absolute black-white line.
	If you miss that at any step in the proceedings, they can have draconian consequences.
	Wow.
	On the other hand, judges are supposed to resort to what's called equity and to deal with hardships like that, and that's where the debate lies now.
	Now that you're an attorney, Is there any itch in you to practice criminal law, either side?
	You've done a little on one side, what about the other?
	Not in a general way, Art.
	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 been big changes in patent law that are taking place.
	Really?
	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 five to four, 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.
	All right, Bart.
	Hold it right there.
	Bart Kosko is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	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 Kosko 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 bad rap 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.
	Interesting fast blast 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 TV or talk radio or something to function at my best.
	Thanks.
	Sheree.
	So, there are two opposites, Bart.
	One who can't stand the noise and the other who can't work and function without it.
	I think both points are accurate.
	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 told the story before, Hal, 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.
	It's too much.
	I'd 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, Art, 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 talk about this in the book, and you can go online and look at the photos, when the Navy's 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 bends.
	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.
	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 beaked 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 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 of sonar.
	Right.
	You've got to think of what that does.
	Remember, in water, sound travels much more efficiently than in air.
	Right.
	If you ever go 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 the air, the sound hits one ear a little faster than the other.
	Underwater, as far as your brain is concerned, it's hitting 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.
	In some cases, apparently hundreds of miles.
	So, evolution has adapted sea creatures very differently than us.
	When you start fiddling with their sonar structure, their brain structure, and bombarding them with the kind of pressure waves.
	The waves that come from an air gun looking for oil, they're on the order of 200 to 230 decibels.
	It's almost 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.
	Well, the oceans are in enough trouble right now as it is, and sea life is certainly in enough trouble.
	And I was aware of the lawsuits in Hawaii.
	Right.
	Is anybody raising any legal noise about what's going to occur near Australia, near the Great Reef?
	You know, I don't know if there has been specific action.
	That's tough to do because of jurisdictional issues.
	Usually go to federal court and ask for an injunction.
	There's been a lot of those, and maybe it's agreed quite reasonably, I think, to study it more closely.
	At the same time, you know, they do have to test their submarines.
	The International Whaling Commission, backed by 200 top whale experts and scientists from around the world, have come down opposed to it.
	You know, Europe has, the European Union, it hasn't banned the use of that kind of sonar, but it has recommended that it be avoided.
	I don't know if this particular action, but everyone's watching it.
	It's a very big deal in the noise world, because it's just about to happen.
	It starts Tuesday, and it goes on for about two weeks.
	There'll be up to, I think, 17,000 or so troops from the U.S.
	over there in the exercise, including nuclear U.S.
	submarines.
	I must admit, I haven't thought a lot about the noise, except from the stories emanating from Hawaii because of the lawsuits.
	But yes, I guess undersea noise, and particularly as you point out, the air guns they use to look for oil, that's a lot of noise.
	And you know, the ecological situation in the world right now is pretty delicate.
	It's very delicate.
	It's like the case of the boom box.
	Somebody gets a benefit or the muffler missing that you talked about, and the costs are imposed on third parties.
	Now, you know, we have unintentionally polluted the oceans.
	I mean, I wasn't meant to do that, but it's a third-party market failure kind of thing.
	And we're doing it now in this noise way.
	And I really wasn't aware of that until I researched this and didn't realize how it harms, for example, squid seem to be very sensitive to noise.
	And once you have a look at the crust Alright, let's switch to, for a moment, patents.
	on big schools of squid often just float up dead.
	We just don't know how much damage it's causing and the stress effects, although a lot of people
	are starting to look at it.
	All right, let's switch to, for a moment, patents.
	I'm very interested in that, 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 brainpower and staff to make these kinds of judgments.
	I don't want to question their brainpower.
	I mean, after all, Albert Einstein was a patent.
	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 at the absolute cutting edge, kind of beyond the cutting edge of biotech.
	After 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, one of the big stories in there is the fact that part of your legal practice can be patented now.
	How can that be?
	Well, you can do it in terms of how you fund somebody to get a patent on how you fund a certain type of tax shelter involving trust.
	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.
	I've actually been issued on that, and 100 or so, nearly 100 pending.
	To deal with all that, the backlog is huge.
	There was an effort to speed up patents that might be involved in the war on terrorism, but I don't think it's gone very far.
	It's understaffed.
	It's underpaid.
	It is a government bureaucracy.
	I mean, they mean well.
	I do think they have a lot of talented people.
	And when the patents come in, they do assign it to different groups.
	In other words, it goes to the biotech group, or it goes to the medical group, or the chemistry group.
	A lot of that overlaps.
	And it's just real hard stuff.
	Yeah, it's got to be hard.
	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?
	What?
	First, there's several hundred dollars just naked filing fee.
	That's if you kind of commit legal suicide and do it yourself.
	You have to take it to a patent attorney.
	And that's going to be probably a few thousand dollars, maybe several if it's real complicated.
	And this, by the way, is kind of getting at the heart of where the debate is in Congress now about how to deal with the patent situation.
	You want to favor the bigger company or the smaller inventor?
	There's lots of arguments either way.
	The system now that we adopted is 20 years from date of filing.
	Oh, my God.
	And so the trouble is the backlog has gotten worse.
	There are some patents that 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, is spent on On patent infringement and getting cross licenses.
	Yes.
	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?
	There's about 20 claims.
	It's based on the old prospecting model of claims to land.
	And it had always been the case that a jury interpreted it, because it's a matter of fact.
	But the Supreme Court looked at that Justice Souter writing for the majority in 1996 in the so-called Markman case and said, and they said nine to zero, 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, as 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, 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.
	It's something I think like 40% of the outcomes are appealed.
	And, and oddly enough, if it goes to a jury, The jury's not allowed to interpret the patent, yet if there's an infringing patent, they have to compare the two patents and make a decision.
	So the patent law is really complex and in flux.
	And I want to say another thing, very few judges have any technical training.
	Well, let me tell you something, Bart.
	I have friends who do invent electronic things.
	New electronic things.
	And they are so fed up with the whole patent system that what they're doing is they're simply Going ahead and manufacturing 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.
	Here's the trouble, and I understand the motivation and the frustration of the inventor in that case, because the average patent litigation case can run, I think it's two million now, but that's got to be on the down side.
	The cases I've been involved with, In different ways over the years.
	I've seen them up to 10, 15, 20 million dollars in terms of litigation fees, and really warranted fees.
	The problem is, if 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.
	I don't think there's any easy way out of this.
	Apparently not.
	And I'll bring that up, but that's finally the decision they came to.
	All right, so... One of the things, one decision you make as an inventor is, do I want to go with a patent, which in the best case is 20 years, or trade secret?
	I mean, Coca-Cola has done real well with its formula locked in a vault in Atlanta for over 100 years.
	That would have run out on the patent.
	They had a patent, what's called a design patent, on the shape of that bottle.
	They also have a trademark on it that's still good.
	That design patent ran out, but they had made the decision to just patent that technology.
	Well, it'd be a very different soft drink world.
	So, what they have is a trade secret.
	In other words, they've got the secret in a vault.
	Right.
	Somewhere.
	And that legally means what?
	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 reasonably maintain the secrecy through a badging system and a variety of other ways.
	It can last forever.
	And so a lot of inventors simply go that route.
	Okay, well that's a good tip I guess.
	So your advice to, and we have many inventors in this audience.
	My advice is the same as before.
	Get a lawyer and get a good one.
	And pay for it up front and do it right.
	Well, I guess that's good advice.
	I guess.
	Sounds like good advice for somebody in your business.
	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, 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 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.
	Okay.
	It sure makes business a complicated affair, doesn't it?
	Albert Einstein published his first paper on the special theory of relativity in 1905.
	What did he contribute to the history of noise?
	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... If Einstein had done nothing else, if he'd just published a newspaper and died, he'd be one of the great names in physics because of that.
	Can you reduce that to English for me?
	into the very, it's the bridge from classical physics through quantum mechanics to where we are now.
	But gets little credit for it, but in the book, I in the back try to lay out some very detailed end notes,
	but not in the text itself, to give you some sense of his accomplishment and that incredible year of 1905
	when he published that and many other things.
	Can you reduce that to English for me?
	You know, the first part.
	The Brownian motion part.
	Brownian motion, 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 zoom down at things, the more they bounce.
	So 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, and atoms, they're not like you learned in grade school where they were like marbles together.
	They're always bouncing around, colliding, and 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.
	Okay.
	Bart, if you could, we live in an amazing age, you know, with nanotechnology and all the bio stuff that's going on.
	If you could be in any field right now, or let me restructure that, what do you think is the fastest, most productive, moving field of technology right now?
	I think nanotech.
	I think it would combine chemistry with computer science, something like that.
	I was about to ask, do you see that in patent filing?
	Absolutely.
	It's the real assault on matter underway right now.
	It's a golden age.
	It's a gold rush.
	A gold rush.
	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?
	Some idea.
	All right.
	Patents are promises.
	Products actually deliver.
	Yes.
	All right.
	Bart Kosko.
	Hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Here I am.
	Bart Kosko is my guest, and we're talking ostensibly about noise, but all kinds of things, actually.
	He's a brilliant man with knowledge in many, many areas.
	Want to find out what's going on with nanotechnology?
	Stay tuned.
	We'll be right back.
	All right, Bart, what do you see coming?
	I know nanotechnology has the potential to truly change the world we're living in.
	How much so?
	I think quite radically.
	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 refer 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 Wien, Austria.
	It's on the grave of the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
	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 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 nanocomputing, 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 of 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.
	Okay, I was going over a lot of heads out there.
	What is this going to mean?
	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. 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 the big step in
	that direction. Okay, well let's look ahead and say we actually create a working
	Quantum Computer.
	Yes.
	What will that potentially give us that we don't have now?
	Among many other things, it could crack your security for wireless codes.
	Mostly encryption techniques we use are based on taking big prime numbers and multiplying them.
	Right.
	And then to try to figure out whether what you've got is, figure out what the product of primes is very difficult.
	You really can't do it today.
	But if you had a lot of quantum computers working in parallel, you could arguably break things.
	So it could potentially undermine security in a very deep way.
	Great!
	Well, it cuts that way.
	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... The thing about the quantum effects is this action at a distance that seems impossible when things are entangled.
	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.
	So it's like diamond.
	It's a big molecule.
	All of this so far sounds great for the military.
	I mean, they'll crack codes, and maybe it's great for the terrorists.
	I don't know.
	But what about... Turn it around.
	We cannot crack terrorist codes now if they use publicly available encryption, in many cases.
	You could run all those underground computers at Fort Meade, at the National Security Agency, and if I understand it, they still won't crack a lot of them.
	Right, I guess that's great for the military, but I mean for the people listening right now, what kind of products can they expect that will change their lives?
	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.
	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, it's a bit off, and there's all kinds of problems to overcome in the atoms, but they're first order.
	We can strengthen materials so that you don't have to worry about a side impact collision in a car, for example.
	Wait, come back to the hamburger.
	Yep.
	I like burgers.
	How would that work?
	I mean, remember Star Trek with the A replicator?
	Yes.
	Is that what you're talking about?
	How would you create the hammer gun?
	The classic Eric Drexler 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 of the so-called sticky fingers, a lot of those molecules and energy required to break the bonds and make the bonds That's always been a fantasy.
	So it is like the teleportation scheme where you dissolve and become reconstructed on the other side.
	Very difficult to do the assembler-disassembler.
	And long before that, 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, Inlee 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.
	That's right.
	It's like a comb losing teeth.
	As you get older, they fall apart.
	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.
	Oh, that would be incredible.
	How far are we from that?
	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, the algorithm is 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 race, it's very hard to unstick them.
	But that's a technology problem.
	We'll overcome it.
	Okay.
	Let's talk a little bit about this spooky action at a distance.
	These two particles that have, I guess, have to have some original association with each other.
	But then I think you can take one of them to the other side of the world and it will flip and flop in exact concert with the other one.
	At least in some kind of statistically correlated way.
	That's right.
	That's the hardest thing to grasp about quantum computing.
	And it looks like magic.
	It looks like action at a distance.
	What is magic?
	Because there has got to be, and I bet eventually there will be discovered, some kind of communication between the two.
	Now, we may not understand on what frequency or in what way, but there's got to be something.
	And people say, no, no, no, there isn't.
	And Einstein shared your intuition.
	I think I understand that.
	I don't think I have a good sense of it.
	What happened to your past life of 30 minutes ago?
	Where did it go?
	You know, 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.
	Do you have any sense of how these two particles act in concert without communication that we're able to detect?
	I can give you the mathematical answer over the phone, but I understand mathematically.
	Intuitively, I really don't.
	You learn the properties of entanglement, what to expect, how to manipulate the equations.
	And you know that to the extent these things have been tested or approximately tested, it's come up so far so good.
	But I don't think anyone has that, what we'd all like to see, that next layer down, the so-called hidden variables explanation of it.
	There's got to be something somewhere.
	There just has to be.
	Well, hopefully we'll encounter aliens or someone or find something else written on a gravestone somewhere that tells us.
	But I think we're going to have a tough time at this point figuring that out.
	It does seem to be beyond the scope of the models we have.
	And so far, any attempt at communication using this entanglement has failed, yes?
	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, a simultaneous occurrence of 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's 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.
	Dry balls don't burn out.
	Right.
	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 kinds 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's so-called fluctuation.
	And we're now getting a sense in the noise research of how to manipulate those fluctuations.
	In the case 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?
	Yes, I do.
	I think we talk about the other direction, the upload, but if we can sample, if you could put a big nano comb through your brain, remember there's no bones in the brain, and think of those nanotubes or quantum wires are equivalent There would be trillions of these things going through and detecting the local structure of the neural communications.
	We should be able to approximate it, not get it exactly, but a pretty good engineering approximation of your neural circuitry, and replicate that, and in effect run that like a simulation, but run it at much faster speeds.
	In fact, that is one way of getting into a chip, and they haven't liked things into a chip.
	And if you were able to do that, what would you have?
	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.
	And that, I think, is heaven on a chip.
	How do you know, though, that you would transfer the consciousness?
	That part you can't know.
	And you surely can't know.
	You'd transfer the soul.
	I think the consciousness is like where we are in the movie right now.
	We're playing the movie.
	It's got all the 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 following it.
	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.
	Right.
	And that snapshot when it unfolded, as it unfolds in real time, would be what we had heard before called consciousness.
	I'm trying to assimilate that.
	In other words, but it would be just a snapshot or could you 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 could make a hundred copies, a million copies, it could run in parallel.
	Yes.
	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 are just computers.
	The meat computers, the three pounds of neural tissue.
	It is a computing device at this level.
	A 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.
	But it's a perishable device.
	Highly perishable in nature's great curse that there's no backup.
	But there might be.
	There might be through engineering means of backing up.
	To take recordings from your corpus callosum, for example, probably with some kind of neural comb.
	There's a proposal that's been out for that.
	But just to see it like your circuit diagrams and see the flow of the circuits, we'd like to have a better sense of that.
	We don't have anywhere near the computing power now to do that, but that's a computational problem we can solve.
	Bart, do you have any idea, because I certainly don't, in some of the 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, I wonder if they're beginning to toy with these kinds of things.
	I think they speculate, but 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.
	You can see the forest for the trees, no fault of their own.
	It's just very difficult to see that.
	But the research is so hyper-fine in its precision, as 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 patents office.
	I think this began in 1945, when Glenn Seaborg was able to patent an atom.
	And he patented Americium.
	It's one of my favorite patents.
	The first claim just says Element 95.
	And it withstood scrutiny.
	It 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 that 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.
	It started with him.
	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 Kosko.
	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 in 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.
	Bart?
	That's a great point.
	It goes to the question of intent.
	So much of the law turns on your brain state.
	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.
	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 when you go to get those.
	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.
	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, 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.
	Bart, what is it?
	I'll give you another example.
	It would add all too much force to the notion of a hate crime.
	Oh, okay.
	That's a good one.
	Or how about this?
	What's the difference between second-degree murder and first-degree murder?
	Exactly.
	That's exactly right.
	Because first-degree murder has got to be willful and deliberate.
	It's got to be intentional and premeditated.
	Premeditated.
	Premeditated means some kind of time element.
	And it could be, as they say, a wink of an eye.
	And to be deliberate means you weighed the pros and cons.
	So we could, you know, play the tape and see, you know, before you squeeze the trigger, did you really believe it was such and such?
	Or did you weigh the cons and do some complex calculation?
	You know, it would be, I think, put it this way, it would be what we call discoverable.
	It may not be always admissible in court.
	But the birth of discovery is really huge in our legal system, and it may be something we want to quote-unquote discover on, and then based on that do something beyond it.
	But it does open a Pandora's box, a mental element.
	Well, here, this asks you just for an opinion, but here it goes.
	As long as it's not on a specific case, because I can't give it to you.
	No, it's not.
	Of course not.
	I know.
	You're so hard to talk to now.
	All right, this is just an opinion, general question.
	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 Somewhat, 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.
	It would increase it if you could really get insight into the brain state.
	And 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.
	Well, if they get access to it... That could be hard, but I think that's a little tougher sell.
	Uh, that you get out of the memory trace.
	I want to also point out though, many cases you, what's called mitigate down.
	Uh, here's an example where you, uh, fully intend to, to kill someone and, and do so.
	Is it murder?
	Well, what if it's the old case of a fine and catching your wife with another man?
	Uh, there you've got just an aggravating circumstance, but adequate provocation.
	So you're going to have a kind of voluntary manslaughter.
	You know, there's a lot of factors like that.
	You would still have the intent, but that wouldn't be the key issue.
	It would be how upset you were.
	Did you have an adequate time to cool off?
	Maybe you could get evidence on that, too.
	And other objective factors outside of your brain.
	And then, of course, there's the question of, even if the technical aspect becomes possible, doesn't that walk right into the Fourth Amendment?
	I mean, how can there be any more Intrusive, and even the Fifth Amendment, that is to say, implicating yourself.
	You know, I think, again, for criminal matters, you're going to have that implication.
	But remember that about the Constitution, with one exception, it does not apply to the people of the United States.
	It applies to the government.
	And that sole exception is the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition on slavery in the private sector.
	That doesn't apply, by the way, in the public sector, and hence we have military drafts and juries.
	But the Constitution does not apply to non-state actors.
	So in civil litigations, the Fourth Amendment is irrelevant.
	I can go to your room and find your marijuana and give it to the police and they can use that.
	I have no warrant.
	But they can't go to your room and use that unless they have an adequate warrant.
	Because there's state action in one case and not in the other.
	So for the civil proceedings, it would be very different.
	Okay, all right, well listen, we should go to the lines.
	A lot of people want to talk to you.
	Jim in Northern Ohio, you're on with Bart Kosko.
	Hi.
	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 we're 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, and 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.
	Tinnitus, yeah.
	Right.
	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?
	I call it tinnitus.
	The answer is it often is.
	It can also be a bump on a head.
	An antibiotic like streptomycin can cause it.
	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 fake sound.
	So there may be some cases where you could bring in another frequency.
	That again would be a case-by-case basis.
	But come back to your first point.
	I think you're right on.
	The addiction type response is because as you start to knock out those hairs, those teeth on the comb, you listen to loud music.
	And rock music, if you're very close to the live concert, the usual number is about 130 dB.
	That's extremely loud.
	It's comparable to race car noise.
	And you don't need a long exposure to lose your hearing.
	I cite in the book, Noise Discussion, some rockers who were on a campaign to get people to tune it down.
	And when you start to lose the hearing, you tend to need to play the music ever louder to get back to your earlier hearing levels.
	And this is why you tend to know somebody that is hard of hearing, they're simply playing the TV too loud or something else too loud.
	That does seem to happen.
	I think rock music played, and by the way it's true for classical music too, if you get right next to the orchestra, it's simply too loud to be safe for more than, I don't know, what is 60 seconds or something.
	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.
	He's almost totally deaf in the other one.
	And that's all too symptomatic, Art.
	Yeah, but as I'm saying, doesn't a new group have to make it loud?
	They have to play to the addiction.
	I think that's right.
	I think that's, again, also part of the culture.
	They've got typically three chords played over and over in a variety of ways.
	And, you know, the music is not Sophisticated.
	I think I can say this, I began as a composer.
	One thing I do when I listen to music like this, I count the number of chords.
	There aren't many chords per minute.
	The melodic lines don't tend to be very elaborate, for example.
	So you ask them, how do they get the stimulation?
	The answer is usually rhythm.
	A full orchestra, over a hundred instruments, will be balanced by one percussionist, in most cases.
	One kettledrum, or the like.
	A rock group puts the drums right up front.
	And it seems to go for volume, to get that energetic response in real simple 4-4 time rhythms, rather than other complexities.
	So yeah, they play into the heart of hearing.
	Okay.
	To Ray in Cleveland, Ohio.
	You're on with Bart Kosko.
	Hi.
	Hello, Art.
	I love your show.
	Thank you.
	I believe I've been listening since the 90s.
	Yes, sir.
	I have a question about privacy.
	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 nanocomputer, 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 like family members from finding these things out from whatever text or IT people or whoever would be running these computers.
	That's a good question.
	In general, simply how do you protect your private information?
	Privacy, it looks like, will 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 cryonicist, Art, related to this, we talked about in the distant prospect, as improbable though it may now be, may be different in the future, of actually coming back from cryonics, is the massive loss of privacy.
	I mean, people bringing you back will be able to see every dirty little thing you ever did, at the 53rd day of your life, or the millionth day or 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.
	Could be there on display and perhaps put up on the equivalent of the web.
	Well, then doesn't the emergence of quantum computing mean the end of all secrets?
	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 things.
	I trust human innovation and I assume there'll be a thriving industry on the other side of that equation.
	On its face, it's a little threatening.
	And I wonder, to whom?
	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.
	I think that's an issue.
	I mean, for example, what goes on in the White House.
	Each president has vigorously defended the right, at least since Nixon, to keep matters private.
	Recently, Dick Cheney and others were involved in litigation on this.
	And I think they have a legitimate argument.
	We do want our leaders to be able to discuss things without key secrets and military plans being released.
	On the other hand, we want transparency.
	It's a tough balance, but technology tends to undermine privacy.
	That, unfortunately, is the corollary.
	Mm-hmm.
	Wow.
	John in Wyoming, you're on the air with Bart Kosko.
	Hi.
	Hello, gentlemen.
	Art, Bart, fascinating subjects tonight.
	Yes.
	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 nanocomputers.
	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, did you, 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, and we'll always, we'll always wrestle with them.
	So I don't think that'll go away.
	Again, in each case, there's such a high demand, though, for privacy, even though the technology undermines it, that I think we can count on 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 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
	And it may just be an ongoing computer race of speed.
	In other words, you may have privacy on a, you know, on a 30-day basis or something as whatever the window would be.
	But I don't think it'd be, I think it'd have to be, again, the other side, the mitigation here of the demand to protect that.
	It'd be all kind of other schemes.
	Okay, Bob in Fresno, California, your turn with Bart Kosko.
	Mr. Bell.
	Yes, sir.
	It's been a few years since I've talked to you, sir.
	I've listened to you from the beginning.
	I don't believe there's enough awards or accolades for a man such as yourself, who is king of all of them.
	Thank you.
	And my two quick questions.
	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?
	All right.
	Bart, any comments?
	Very quickly, I think Ricardo was right that protectionism is wrong because open competition is more efficient.
	Local industries will lose, but overall, globally, the whole economy wins.
	Okay.
	I suppose that's true, but at the cost to the individual, right?
	Well, certainly individual manufacturers.
	You wouldn't be the last person making the horse and buggy when the cars came out.
	I guess that's true.
	All right, everybody, any questions for Bart Kosko in any of these areas?
	We started talking about noise.
	He's 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 Art Bell.
	Certainly, I am a creature of the night.
	Bart Kosko 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 in 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.
	The answer is yes.
	You admit noise.
	We all admit thermal noise.
	And more deeply, the universe itself is permeated with noise, the 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 setting 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.
	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 begin 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 And 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.
	I've got to give that some thought.
	Shaheen in California, you're on with Bart Kosko.
	Hi.
	Hey guys, I just wanted to say that I don't have any marijuana in my room.
	Well, I was thinking about this today, about how to create a machine that could visualize dreams, and I just can't believe 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 Like, people 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?
	Two questions.
	The good is answered by can.
	If they can, they will.
	That's just how the world will be.
	And I discuss this, not in the book Noise, but in the book Heaven in 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.
	There's nothing to stop it, though, technically.
	Yeah, that's pretty close to a lot of science fiction, isn't it?
	Well, I don't know.
	To me, the hard part is getting what's going on in your brain now through the porting technology.
	Everyone's working on it.
	A lot of universities are working on it.
	They're trying to get the chatter of your neurons captured or written onto a chip.
	But once we've done that, then getting the chips to talk to one another, well, that's old news.
	Russ in Toronto, Canada.
	You're on with Dr. Kosko.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Well, to digress for a moment based on the last caller's comments, Check out to CompuWest September 1982 and Harold Weinberg, W-E-I-N-B-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 him 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 occupation 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?
	You know, I have to answer that.
	I didn't hear all the call.
	I think it was a fade-out on that.
	Alrighty.
	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 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 by 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.
	It may well be such a pattern, I don't know.
	It probably is.
	Marie in New Mexico, you're on with Dr. Cosco.
	Hi.
	Hi, how are you this evening?
	Just fine.
	Good.
	I'm a little nervous here, but my question for Dr. Cosco is, if someone was manipulated in some kind of time travel experiment and they realized that, can they alter that destiny of That manipulation, basically, if they're aware of it, and can they change it to their benefit?
	The trouble with time travel is twofold.
	First, we don't see time travelers around us.
	That's pretty good evidence that no one has done in the future.
	Not conclusive evidence, but it's evident.
	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.
	Highly unlikely.
	There is some indication, Doctor, that consciousness, as being measured by experiments that were going on at Princeton, may eclipse time, in a way.
	I don't know if you've followed any of that or not, but it's very interesting.
	I'm not sure I follow.
	Eclipse time?
	Yeah, Eclipse Time.
	In other words, the Global Consciousness Experiment was looking at various events, big events for the world, like 9-11.
	And they were noticing that... Are you at all familiar with that experiment?
	I have heard about this on paranormal type experiments.
	Well, I guess.
	Um, 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, when the computers suddenly become non-random, that's reported back to the computer at 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, 9-11, once it happened, you'd get a giant spike.
	But the spike came before it.
	And many other events.
	When you have doubt in the law, a standard response is to say, show me the case law.
	Here, to a statistician, you say, show me the Chi-square test.
	There are ways for testing for randomness.
	I literally teach those.
	I just taught them this past spring.
	And if that, what you said, is the case, it shouldn't be that hard to show that it differs from Uniform probability or pure randomness.
	I have not seen that, but I would like to.
	Look into it.
	It's fascinating.
	Bart in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
	You're on the air with Bart Kosko.
	Hi.
	My extreme pleasure to speak to both of you gentlemen.
	Thank you.
	Dr. Kosko, a lot of your concepts are over my head, and this is a college graduate, which I thought I had a good grasp of.
	Of new concepts, but you have had several references to interfacing with the human body.
	Do I understand that correctly, like with the brain?
	In particular, the brain interface, the chip neuron interface.
	A lot of work on that, especially in the hippocampus.
	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 that would be too much of a strain on other parts of my body which the heart has depleted their ability to function correctly like 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.
	Do you see any possibility of that?
	That's a very good question.
	A lot of people of course in a very similar position.
	Medically and with nanotechnology and any other developments that are going on, how much hope for people who can hang for another five years or so?
	That's such a hard question for lawyers.
	Of course, I want everyone to have hope and I think that, and I'm not a physician, I can't get medical advice, I don't know all the facts here, etc.
	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 1 to 5 years is great.
	Going from 5 to 10, I think you get an exponential increase in availability, just given the rapidity with which we're developing products and services.
	So hang in there.
	Okay.
	David in Knoxville, Tennessee, on with Dr. Kosko.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	How are you doing, Art?
	Happy birthday to you, and it's a pleasure to talk with Professor Kosko.
	My question has to do with general mathematics, and it comes from a friend of mine who has a Ph.D.
	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, um, I mean, I know you've got the basic applications of, like, electronics, but as far as general math goes, I'd like you to comment on that, and I'll listen off the air.
	Thanks.
	David, first off, let me say, I have a lot of colleagues in Tennessee and Knoxville, including my first PhD student, Song Gong Kong.
	You know, he has a very deep question there, the kind of thing you discussed in a course in the philosophy of mathematics.
	Is mathematics real?
	You know, if I hold two marbles in my hand, am I holding the number two in my hand?
	And where does math exist?
	You could take all the matter out of the universe and math would still seem to be there.
	What math is, I think, is structure.
	It shows the pure relationships.
	It doesn't matter which two marbles I hold or any two things.
	It's just the two-ness.
	And that's literally how we define math.
	And by the way, it's an interesting exercise, Art, to see the definition of the number one.
	It takes a full page, single space of Symbolic Logically to do that correctly.
	Why math matches fact?
	So well, is one of the great mysteries.
	Is it something we're creating?
	Or, as I suspect, as a kind of Platonist or Pythagorean, that this is like the voice of God.
	The world of mathematics consists of infinitely many truths, and we've just touched a little bit on them.
	The number of possible truths for a physical universe with a finite amount of energy has to be finite.
	And it's just hard to reconcile the infinity of knowledge and truth with mathematics with the finiteness of the universe.
	I'd like to meet an alien and ask him or her if that.
	Let's go to a source of white noise, Niagara Falls, New York.
	John, you're on with Dr. Kosko.
	Hi, it's an absolute thrill to be on with you guys.
	An amazing show, that's for sure.
	I was going to talk to Esquibart about, I'm studying right now some neuroscience stuff, looking to do a mind and machine connection sort of endgame.
	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 like pinpoint, like a laser-like field of many, many pinpoint, where it shoots something to sense what the electrons are doing, firstly?
	And secondly, as far as cancelling out waves, as you were talking with noise and noise cancelling, Could you also do that to 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?
	That would be great if we could.
	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 1-0 trains pouring in, from about 10,000 different neurons at any given time.
	And they emit their own spike trains, so it's spikes to spikes.
	And we just can't figure out what that is.
	If it's not the greatest question of neuroscience, it's how to decode the language of spikes.
	And if you could do that, then maybe you could at the wave level, because they very well have wave structure.
	Maybe you could affect that, enhance that, cancel that.
	We just don't know.
	Okay.
	Dan in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
	You're on with Dr. Kosko.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Good morning.
	Three quick points.
	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.
	They just use it up.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I think another paradox is... You should change your channel, and if enough people do that, we'll stop doing that.
	You know what?
	Let me interject here.
	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.
	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.
	Oh, is that true?
	But my question on noise, I'm a DJ and a drummer.
	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 Stones 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?
	I think it does, but I don't know the evidence for that.
	But let me come back to your point about hospital sounds.
	There was a study, and I cited the book Noise, coming out of Johns Hopkins, and they looked at average noise levels in hospital waiting rooms, and they found in 1965 it was about 57 decibels, which is pretty loud.
	Let me tell you one, Bart.
	levels and as of 2005 it risen from 57 to 72 decibels on average. So hospitals
	are getting noisier and that's just general noise and not just that annoying
	loudspeaker going on all the time. Let me tell you one Bart, I just was in a
	hospital because my wife had a c-section. Now, unbelievable.
	The noise was just simply unbelievable.
	For example, right over the patient's head, and this is a private room, high-class hospital, I won't name it.
	But, you know, nurse so-and-so, report to so-and-so.
	All this is going on right above your head as you're trying to sleep.
	I just couldn't believe it.
	And you hit the main point.
	Noise induces stress.
	And stress causes everything, in part, from heart attacks to strokes to just a lack of sleep and lack of sense of well-being.
	Exactly!
	How can they not have studies on this and be, you know, working on reducing the stress for people in hospitals of all places?
	The World Health Organization recommends an average noise level of something like 35 decibels.
	And again, in this country, John Hopkins said it's roughly twice that, of 72 decibels.
	Amazing.
	Listen, your book, we're about done with the show.
	Actually, we are done.
	Your latest book is Noise.
	How long has that been out?
	It came out in August.
	Not quite a year.
	In August.
	So, go get it, folks.
	Amazon.com.
	Read all about it.
	Bart, as always, it's been such a pleasure.
	You are so good in so many areas that we'll talk to you again soon.
	Thanks, Art.
	It's been fun.
	Okay, my friend.
	Good night.
	There you have it.
	That's Bart Kosko.
	He really is.
	No matter what the scientific subject, he's the guy.
	It's been a great weekend and I will take the week off.
	Hand off to George.
	See you next weekend.

▲