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The Current Transcript for January 7, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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[Spanish speech]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That little snippet of chatter in Spanish is part of 100,000 secretly recorded conversations of El Chapo, Joaquin Guzman, the man U.S. justice officials allege is the highest ranking drug lord they've ever brought to trial and what a trial this is. Under high security in a federal court in Brooklyn, top insiders are spilling the secrets of Mexico's notorious Sinaloa cartel. And they include the son of El Chapo's business partner, the heir to the cartel, whose testimony is not only a betrayal of family, it's offering uncomfortable details of the links between the drug lords and government institutions. We'll talk to the people watching this and connecting the dots in just a moment. And then we'll turn our eyes to the skies with Britain's Astronomer royal Martin Rees.

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VOICE: These people on Mars will pioneer a post-human future and that future may lead to descendants of us and our species, going beyond our solar system.

AMT: Martin Rees is thinking ahead billions of years into the future, where he surmises humans may have to merge with robots to survive. Here is thoughts on the future prospects for humanity in half an hour. And if that's a little too overwhelming, well you can dream, right?

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VOICE: We're all dreaming, every time you have a REM cycle, every 90 minutes, you are having some dream activity, even if you're someone who doesn't remember your dream.

AMT: There is a lot going on in your head when you hit the pillow every night. Alice Robb says your dreams can help you process information, work through anxiety and confront your fears. Hear her in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Trial of El Chapo won't resolve the corruption that empowered him, says journalist

Guests: Alan Feuer, Anabel Hernandez

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VOICE 1: This is a man who the Mexican government had said would never break out of prison again, but he did and this time from the most successful prison in all of Mexico.

VOICE 2: And El Chapo found a way to burrow out right under the noses of Mexican authorities and get to this freedom tunnel.

VOICE 3: A dramatic capture. The world's most wanted, most dangerous drug lord. Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Back in Mexican custody tonight. Mexico's president announcing mission accomplished after a nearly six month manhunt for the Sinaloa cartel chief.

VOICE 4: Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman appearing in US Federal Court for the first time, facing a 17 count indictment including drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. He pleaded not guilty.

AMT: And so the ballad of El Chapo continues. The suspected drug lord, the alleged head of the notorious Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel, is far from home this week. After a decades long game of cat and mouse with the law, Joaquin Guzman is in a Brooklyn courtroom. His already epic trial resumed late last week with some stunning testimony from a man who has grown up with the Sinaloa cartel. It remains to be seen what convicting the kingpin, El Chapo, would really mean when it comes to stopping the flow of drugs, but we begin our conversation with someone who has been in that courtroom every day covering the trial. Alan Feuer is a crime and criminal justice reporter with The New York Times. He's in Brooklyn. Hi.

ALAN FEUER: Hello. How are you today?

AMT: Well I'm really curious to know what you know and there's so much I want to ask you, but remind us first the scope of what Joaquin Guzman is accused of.

AF: He is accused of essentially a massive drug conspiracy in which he has been charged with smuggling over the course of nearly two decades over 200 tonnes of cocaine, heroin and marijuana from Mexico across the United States border in an ever shifting fleet of planes, trains, fishing boats, submarines, tractor trailer trucks, virtually every conceivable means that you can think of. And attached to that drug conspiracy are some pretty gruesome murders.

AMT: It's a lot of stuff. Now Alan, the man who is supposed to be back testifying for the prosecution today, had some shocking things to say last week. He's nicknamed El Vicentillo. He's also known as The Prince. Who is he?

AF: He is the son of El Chapo's partner-in-crime, a man named, Ismael "Mayo" Zambada. And Vincente Zambada, the son, was potentially the heir apparent to the Sinaloa drug cartel. He grew up at his father's side, attending meetings, not only with Chapo and Mayo's trafficking partners and underlings, but also, by his own account, going with his father to meet with corrupt Mexican politicians and police officials. And he was sort of something like the prince in waiting. He was being groomed from a very early age to take control when the older generation ultimately stepped down. But in some really wild testimony last week, Vicente told the jury that at the age of 32, he had grown weary of the drug trafficking life and wanted to as he put it, retire. So he called an extraordinary meeting with his father and El Chapo, he said, and he asked their permission to step down. And the only thing more extraordinary than the man who was being groomed to run the cartel, wanting to get out of it, was that El Chapo apparently offered to help the young man get out, by of all things, reaching out to his own contacts in the DEA to see if they would sit down with him some day. Now we don't know because Vincent never said, if Chapo ever actually made good on that promise, but we do know because the American authorities have admitted as much, that within two years of floating this idea of getting out of the cartel, Vicente did indeed meet with two agents of the DEA at a clandestine meeting in Mexico. And that meeting set in motion a series of events that led to his arrest, his extradition to Chicago and ultimately to a cooperation agreement with the United States government that has brought him here to Brooklyn, testifying against not only El Chapo, but his father in absentia and in a larger sense the cartel that was his birthright

AMT: What has Vicente told the court so far about how the cartel operates?

AF: Virtually everything. So there's essentially three main things that the cartel does, right? It receives drugs from suppliers, mainly in Colombia and so they move the drugs from Colombia into Mexico. They then moves the drugs from Mexico into the United States and then everybody forgets they have to move the money back from the United States, where the drugs are largely sold, to Mexico and then again back some of it to the Colombian suppliers, paying off the investment. So Vicente took the jury through virtually every aspect of the cartel's operations, explaining how the smuggling routes worked, explaining how the cash was moved back and forth. He explained the history of the cartel's various and extremely bloody wars. He laid out personal grievances and petty gossip that went between the various members of the cartels and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Chapo and his operation. He knew personally Chapo. He obviously knew his father. He knew Chapo's cousins, his brothers, his sons. It was sort of a flood of information came out of this guy that essentially he's been waiting almost a decade to come to the court and do this.

AMT: He also said his dad had a bribery budget of a million dollars a month.

AF: A month. It was astonishing.

AMT: So who was getting that money?

AF: Well a lot of people. Vicente said that, for example, the director of the state judicial police in Sinaloa state, where the Sinaloa Cartel is based, was on the cartel's payroll. His father had a high level contact who was the chief of the Mexican equivalent of the Secret Service. Essentially the agency that guards the Mexican president, the chief of that protective detail, when Vicente Fox was president, was on the cartel's payroll. A high ranking general, who was a top official within the Mexican Defense Department, was on the cartel's payroll. And on and on it went. Some of these people were on $50,000 a month salaries.

AMT: This seems like a huge betrayal. What kind of security does this guy have?

AF: Well you know we don't know the details of it of course, but we do know that he is in custody, under federal protection, in jail. So yes is it a betrayal? It's absolutely a betrayal. Although the fascinating thing is that as I mentioned from the start, both his father and El Chapo, at least by Vicente's account, gave him permission to leave the cartel and Chapo seems to have tried to facilitate that leaving by helping Vicente get in touch with the DEA. So it's a kind of remarkable Shakespearian story of betrayal, but at the same time there was a sense that the older generation, Chapo and his partner, Mayo, Vicente's father, weren't able to save themselves and thought perhaps that they might save the younger generation.

AMT: Incredible. What's really at stake with this trial, Alan?

AF: And that's a great question. So it depends on who you ask. If you ask the federal government, they're really just trying to convict El Chapo and they see El Chapo as one of the most powerful drug lords on the planet. Fair enough. You know there is a larger issue in that this is really the first time that a major cartel figure like Chapo Guzman has been on trial publicly. Other cartel leaders have been arrested, extradited, but many of them have pleaded guilty prior to trial, so we haven't had a kind of cathartic explanation and unfolding of all the evidence that the American government has collected on these groups over the years. So in some sense, this is a public airing of all things known about El Chapo and the Sinaloa drug cartel, with a major caveat that we're not getting everything. We're getting you know what the government would like us to hear and the evidence tailored directly towards the aim of convicting Chapo Guzman. Much of this case has been litigated in secret and there has been a raft of sealed filings, redacted filings. So it's very clear that a lot is going on beneath the surface that is not in the public view. And so it's sort of you know there's this tension that exists between the government laying its cards on the table for the first time, but also keeping several cards you know in the vest pocket.

AMT: It's fascinating. Alan, thank you for this. I'll let you go, I know you want to get to court.

AF: I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

AMT: Alan Feuer is the crime and criminal justice reporter for The New York Times. He's covering the trial of El Chapo in Brooklyn, New York. Now as El Chapo faces justice in Brooklyn, the world's attention is focused on the violence and corruption his cartel fostered. My next guest has been responsible for exposing many of El Chapo's alleged crimes and the connections between the Sinaloa cartel and powerful interests in government and business. Anabel Hernandez has braved threats and attempts on her life to tell the story of the cartels in Mexico. We have reached her today in Italy. Hello.

ANABEL HERNANDEZ: Hello Anna Maria. Good morning.

AMT: What do you think of the testimony coming from Vincente Zambada right now?

AH: Well can I mention is that I have been investigating the Sinaloa cartel by the last 13 years. So I know very well the story of El Vicentillo and I know very well how he's saying all this information, why he's giving all this information in trial. Vicentillo is a key part of the Sinaloa cartel because as you already mentioned, he grow up there, inside the cartel. His father, El Mayo Zambada, the partner of El Chapo Guzman, was the other head of the cartel. So when Vicente, the enemies of the cartel tried to kill Vicente El Vicentillo, when he was very young, when he was just 15-years-old. So since that moment he start to be beside his father all the time and this is the way how he learned everything about the business. I had contact with the Vicentillo lawyer in 2011 when the trial in Chicago start or should start. And he gave me all these information about this supposedly arrangement between the DEA and El Vicentillo and on other members of the Sinaloa cartel. I was the first journalist that revealed these supposedly agreements with the DEA. So after Vicentillo tried to push to forced the DEA to recognize these supposedly agreement, the DEA, the attorney general office and El Vicentillo came on an agreement. And in this agreement he accept to start to give all this information, not just in these trial. I have to say that thanks to El Vicentillo, the DEA, the US government have been able to arrest to many members of the Sinaloa cartel, since 2012, 2013, 2014. I can tell you for example because I know very well this story, that thanks El Vicentillo, El Chino Antrax, one of the key members of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in Amsterdam because you know in 2013, because El Vicentillo was able to give all the key information to the US government to be able to arrest him.

AMT: Okay so Anabel, let me ask you then, with all of us coming out, does this mean, will this affect the flow of drugs?

AH: No. The point is this. I mean the trial of El Chapo Guzman is very symbolic. It's important in this sense of just this huge criminal that has been responsible of many deaths in Mexico, finally is in trial, in a real trial. But the problem is that these will not resolve all the corruption, all the laundering money that exists in Mexico and then help to the Sinaloa cartel and also to other cartels to exist. So it's good that El Chapo is on trial, but the bad news is that all the corrupted people that helping to became what he is, is free. It's not in jail. It's not arrested. It's still in the power in Mexico.

AMT: Well and we heard that his testimony included saying that his father had a budget to bribe people of one million dollars a month. How high up does the Sinaloa cartel's influence go in Mexico from the work you've done?

AH: Well can I tell you is that and it's also confirmed by other testimonies witnessed in this trial is that former presidents, I mean we are talking about that at least the four last former presidents in Mexico have been receiving money from the cartels and specifically from the Sinaloa cartels. We are talking about the Secretary of States, like the former secretary of public safety, former secretaries of defense have been receiving money, hundreds of dollars, millions of dollars from these cartels and that's why the cartel became so powerful, of course. If you're able to buy the government, of course you will be the principal cartel in Mexico. That's what happened. Unfortunately because the impunity that exists in my country, now El Chapo is not under trial in Mexico, he's on trial in New York and all these corrupted people that help him is still be free and impunished in Mexico.

AMT: Okay and I should just say that these are allegations. Obviously no one has been charged and we cannot independently prove this in this conversation today. But tell me, how badly has the Sinaloa cartel and corruption hurt Mexican society?

AH: I will give you just an example. El Vicentillo just said last Thursday or Friday that the federal police, I mean the main police that exists in Mexico work for them and as killers. I mean these federal police start to prosecute the enemies of El Chapo and kill them or arrest them, instead to protect the society. Now you can see how bad it is. If the federal police is like a guerilla and works for a, like a paramilitary group and works for the cartel, instead to work and protect the society. Now you can see why one quarter of millions of people have been murdered in Mexico in the last 12 years. How 36,000 people have been disappeared in Mexico because these wars between the cartels. Because the government, the federal police, the military, the navy, that should work and protect the society, many times, many occasions, like we can see and hear very clear now in this trial in New York, works for the cartels. So this is the reason why the security, the justice in Mexico doesn't exist. It's not just my point of view. If you check, if you review all the numbers, all the statistics from the Mexican government, you will see that what I am saying is like this.

AMT: Yeah and of course among the many dead because of all of this violence are the journalists doing what you do, trying to cover it. I'm just wondering how you go about the work you do under threat?

AH: Well this is a very difficult and emotional thing I have to say, question because me and many other journalists in Mexico have been under threat by the last years because we are trying to rebel, try to under cover, to put light in all these corrupted connections between the cartels and the different levels of the government. So as you know, Mexico is the most dangerous places in America to be a journalist. Almost it's the second most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, more than Libya or Syria. And this is because we are trying to do a job, trying to help the Mexican society to understand what is happening. Because if the journalists keep silent from this corruption, the Mexican society will never have the chance to change, so yes me and others risk our lives, but I think it's worth it.

AMT: Anabel, I want to thank you for all the work you do. Thank you so much for talking with me today and thank you for your work.

AH: Thank you. Thanks to you.

AMT: That's Anabel Hernandez. She's a Mexican investigative journalist. Her books include Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. Her other book is A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing 43 Students. She's been on this story for a long time. We reached her in Italy today. Stay with us, the news is next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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'No planet B': Sending humans to Mars isn't the answer to Earth's problems, says U.K. astronomer royal

Guests: Martin Rees

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, do you remember what you dreamed last night? Science writer Alice Robb thinks we should all be paying more attention to our dreams, even if the jury is still out on just why we dream in the first place. She will join me in half an hour, but first dreaming of how our species will live a billion years into the future.

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VOICE: We want to make sure that there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back. I think that's why it's important to get a self-sustaining base. Ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive. It's more likely to surive than a Moonbase. But I think a Moonbase and a Marsbase that could help regenerate life back here on Earth would be really important to get that done before a possible World War 3.

AMT: So put that on your to do list, humanity, a base on Mars sometime before World War 3. That's suggestion came from entrepreneur Elon Musk. You just heard him there. He is not the only big picture thinker nudging us to get going on a plan B for our species, before it is too late. Physicist Stephen Hawking caused a stir the year before he died, when he said we need to colonize another planet or face extinction. Britain's current astronomer royal, Martin Rees has been thinking a lot about the civilization ending calamities that could befall us from climate change to nuclear annihilation or even an asteroid impact. But he remains optimistic that with the help of technology, we will have a long future as humans. Martin Rees has a new book, it's called On the Future: Prospects for Humanity. And he joins us from Cambridge, England. Hello.

MARTIN REES: Hi. Very good to be on the show.

AMT: Nice to have you with us. Why do you argue that such esteemed thinkers as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are wrong in thinking we need to move human civilization to space to save ourselves?

MR: They're only half wrong. I mean I agree with that in the long run, there will be a small community living on Mars and I think they will be important for the future of intelligence. But what I don't agree with is something, which I think both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking believe which was there'd be mass emigration. I think we have to accept that there's no planet B, which can ever be made as comfortable as the Earth. We've got to accept that dealing with climate change though hard, is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars and it's a dangerous delusion I think to believe that there can be mass emigration, a million people or so going to Mars. But on the other hand, I do think we should cheer on the bold adventurers who will, perhaps on Space X rockets, go to Mars in the next few decades. And Elon Musk himself famously said that he hoped to die on Mars, but not on impact. And I think he's 47-years-old now and that's not a crazy aspiration for him and so I hope he succeeds. So I don't believe in mass emigration, certainly not during this century, but to make the Earth habitable not just now, but for future centuries, that's the top priority. But I do think that having a few people on Mars will be important because they will be away from all the regulators who might inhibit the use of genetic modification or cyborg technology and also they're in an environment to which they've adapted. So I think the first settlers on Mars will be sort of crazy adventurers, taking high risks, but they will use all those techniques to adapt themselves to an environment very different from Earth and they will become a very different species within a few centuries. Even though we stayed the same because we're quite well adapted to living on the Tarth. But the people on Mars, will be a quite distinct species within a few centuries. And of course what may then happen, intelligence won't be the wet hardware we have in our brains, but it'll be something electronic. And of course once that happens then they won't need an atmosphere. They may prefer zero gravity, so they will go off from Mars and go into space and if they're nearly immortal, an interstellar voyage is no deterrent to them. So I think in the long term future, I'm entirely with Elon Musk that those people on Mars will pioneer a post-human future and that future may lead to descendants of us and our species going beyond our solar system.

AMT: So talk to me a little bit more of the role of human space travel and how you see it.

MR: Right, well in the near term of course, we are fascinated by space travel and it's nearly 50 years since Neil Armstrong's one small step on the moon, which was a real high point of manned space flight. And I'm old enough to remember that, but to young people today, it's ancient history. You know they know the Egyptians built pyramids, they know the Americans sent people to the moon, but they both seem rather strange national goals and of course what's changed between then and now is that robots have gotten much better and the practical need for sending people into space is far less than it ever was. And although some nations may still want to send people into space as an assertion of superpower then the robots can do all the jobs of exploration and building something on the moon better than humans can. And that's why, if I was an American, I wouldn't support NASA's manned space program at all. It's very expensive and expensive because NASA using taxpayers money and sending up civilians, has to be highly risk averse. The shuttle was launched 135 times, it failed twice. Each of those failures was a big national trauma in America and caused delay and extra cost trying to make it still safer. So my take is that we can cut the cost of manned space flights, if it's done in a more risky way, taking up into space only the kind of people like test pilots and adventurers, prepared to accept those risks. So I think Space X or Blue Origin, those are the companies run by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they could launch people into space and perhaps even to Mars, much more cheaply than NASA and they'd be launching people prepared to take risks of not coming back.

AMT: When you call your book on the future, you mean it. You look as far as billions of years into the future. Do you think humanity will still be around?

MR: No certainly not because we know that Darwinian selection takes about a million years for a new species to develop. The outcome of nearly four billion years of Darwinian evolution from the first protozoa. So even there was Darwinian selection, then humans would not be around in millions of years time, but of course what's going to happen is that future evolution won't be Darwinian selection, it'll be what I call secular intelligent design. It'll be designing new species, maybe organic, maybe electronic and this will happen much faster. So that's why I think within a few hundred years, there'll be post human species, perhaps on Mars, rather than here, who are very different from us. So I think intelligence will survive, whether it's dominated by organic brains like ours or by electronic brains. We don't know, but it would be different from humans. But of course you're right in saying that we can't predict very far ahead because the sun is less than halfway through its life. It's got six billion more years to go before it flares up and engulfs the inner planets and the universe itself is expanding and may go on forever.

AMT: Do you think that we in our form today, would recognize those post humans if we were to be able to exist in the future and see them?

MR: Well that's a very interesting question I think we would recognize that these were intelligent beings of some kind, but it's whether we'd have any sort of emotional resonance with them. And I think we wouldn't because we can read the literature written by Greeks and Romans two or two and a half thousand years ago and we can sort of resonate with the emotions of those writers and artists because human nature hasn't really changed since our ancestors roamed the African savannah 50,000 years ago. But on the other hand, if we have genetic and Cyborg modification, then it may well be that whatever intelligence is around a few centuries from now, will have no emotional resonance with us. They may have a sort of algorithmic understanding of how we behaved, but they won't understand our emotions and our nature in the way that we understand the emotions of ancient Greeks. So that will be a real game changer.

AMT: And you can correct me here if I'm completely off base, but if we think about string theory, we think about that kind of adaptation going on in the future, then maybe if we on our planet are visited by alien beings that they're really maybe just from the future.

MR: Well of course there's a separate question whether we are alone in the universe or whether there's other intelligences. I think the answer is we don't know, but one of the most exciting challenges for the next few decades is in my view to understand the origin of life on Earth. We should then fully understand to understand whether that is a rare fluke or whether it would have happened in other environments like here on Earth. We've also learnt in the last decade that there are about a billion planets, rather like the Earth, orbiting other stars in our galaxy. So there are lots and lots of places where life could have evolved, if it's not a very rare fluke and course it's a fascinating question to know what variety of life exists among the stars.

AMT: You make the point that intelligence will survive. Is it likely that in the future AI will be smarter than humans?

MR: I think in many ways it will be smarter. Of course it is already smarter. I mean it can learn to play chess as well as the world champion within just a few hours because of the speed with which it operates, compared to the way our brains operate. So in special purpose tasks AI is already ahead. I think the more open question is well two questions, one is to what extent we want AI to make decisions for us. Are we happy if a decision on whether we need an operation, whether we let out of prison etc. should be made by a machine, which can't explain its reasoning to us, even if we know the machine is on the whole reliable, we'd rather reluctant to entrust our fate to it. So that's one thing, but the other question is to what extent these machines will ever be humanlike in the sense of interacting with their environment, being self aware unconscious and appreciating the wonders of nature as we do. If they do develop all those qualities then they will be superior to us in all respects, but it could be that although they are superhuman in many respects, they will never actually interact with the real world in the way that we do with our senses and that we couldn't realistically imagine our brains being downloaded into something electronic without it completely destroying the essence of our personality. We just don't know. So some people think that the AI will in fact be super human in its not only its capacity to do things, but its comprehension as well. Others think it'll be able to do things, but won't understand what it's doing and just be a zombie. And that's a very important question, which I think affects the way we react to this potential future. If these entities, which are post humans, are superior to us in all respects, deeper introspection and all that, then we should welcome their take over. On the other hand, if they really are zombies, then we should perhaps be sad if there's going to be no entities who are able to appreciate the wonder and beauty of nature as we can and to speculate as we can, but that's a long term question. In the short run, the issues of AI are the extent to which we allow it to run our lives. Clearly it can do things like running electricity grid and traffic flows very well, but it can't do too much and it can't interact with the real world. But the key question is to what extent do we have to worry more in the future about artificial intelligence than about real stupidity.

AMT: Some people already have images in their heads of robot overlords.

MR: That's right. Yes.

AMT: Do you not worry about that?

MR: Well it's a worry, but I think we don't know whether that's ever going to happen.

AMT: Okay so we don't worry about it yet.

MR: I worry more about real stupidity for the next few decades.

AMT: Well I want to talk to you about that as well. Let's come back to the present. First of all, what will it take to make sure we humans survive long enough to see some of what you're talking about come through? Where do you see the greatest scientific and technological threats facing us right now?

MR: Well of course technology is advancing very fast and this is on the whole very good news because if you look at our lives today, they couldn't exist were it not for the science and technology of the last century. And a seven and a half billion people in the world couldn't be fed at all without modern developments of biology etc. So we need technology and we need it to develop more, if you want to provide a better life for a growing population in the future. So I think there's no doubt about that, but the worry is that these new technologies are very powerful and their upside is great, but so are the risks they present. And of course we are already seeing this in the case of cyber, computers and computer networks are hugely beneficial to society. On the other hand, we know that they enable an individual or small group to cause widespread disruption, knocking out electricity grid in the few cities or something like that. And so we know that we are vulnerable because even a few people can cause massive disruption by cyber methods and the same will be true soon of bio. Because if they can engineer a virus, which is more dangerous than a natural virus, they can perhaps produce pandemics. That can be done just by a few people. So we do have to worry about the fact that these new technologies empower small groups of technically savvy people to cause massive disruption by error or by design. And I'd like to say the global village will have its village idiots, but they will have a global range and we have to worry about how we can regulate the misuse of these technologies. And that's going to be hard. It's going to be hard because whereas to make a nuclear bomb requires big conspicuous facilities, to make a cyber attack or to make new virus, requires the kind of equipment which is available in lots of university and industrial labs. I worry that whatever regulations we try to impose, they can't be enforced worldwide anymore than the drug laws can or the tax laws can. So I worry that whatever can be done, will be done somewhere by someone, whatever the regulations say and that makes me concerned about whether we'll have a really bumpy ride through the century because of the disruption and all the measures that have to be taken to enhance security and reduce privacy or liberty.

AMT: We have seen cases where scientists go against ethical norms held by most others in their field. The creation of gene edited human embryos, the so-called designer babies just recently. What should be done if somebody breaks the rules?

MR: Well I think they can be ostracized by the community and may be punished. But I think we can exert social pressure and we can have a legal regulations, but my point is that when it's so hard to track down an individual or small group anywhere in the world and such a small group can have global consequences, it's a new situation which we've never had in the past. We've had people who can cause disruption, terrorists etc. but we have not had the situation, we're going to have it soon, when those individuals can cause some disruption that cascades globally and this is a new kind of instability in society.

AMT: Who should be making the decisions on how we keep science and technology in check or at least with oversight?

MR: Scientists themselves of course need to warn politicians and the public of any downside of their researches and also they have a duty in my view to try and foster all the beneficial applications of anything they discover. But scientists themselves shouldn't decide how their work is used. Their expert on the science, but any decision on energy, health or the environment is something which involves economics, politics and ethics. And scientists aren't experts on that. So what we really need is a scientist should be responsible in what they do and they should engage with the public and the public should have enough feel for science that they can participate in a debate, a democratic debate, on how science should be used. How it should be used for human benefits and what sort of genetics should be allowed and what shouldn't. This should be something where everyone participates and that means they all have to have some feel for science and for numbers and only then can the debate rise above tabloid slogans and that's very important.

AMT: How do scientists like you make sure that we in the general public are literate enough about technology to know what real risks future developments pose and what is a false or an exaggerated threat?

MR: Well I mean I think it's the responsibility of scientists to do what they can to talk to journalists and politicians and indeed to engage with the wider public in explaining their science. I'm an astronomer and I certainly would enjoy my work less if I couldn't talk to a few fellow specialists. I enjoy explaining the wonders of the universe to a wider public and it's gratifying that the public is in many cases interested in these things and interested in many ideas that are irrelevant to practical life. I mean for instance kids that are keen on dinosaurs than on anything that's more relevant. They're fascinating and so we want to stimulate young people and old people and regard science as part of our culture and indeed as the one truly global culture because science brings the world together. All nations and all face because protons and proteins are the same everywhere and we can straddle all boundaries. And of course we need to straddle those boundaries to deal with some of the problems like climate change. So we need the public to be aware of science and of course to have some education, but I'm not one of these people who moans about the public being ignorant of science. The public is sadly rather ill informed about many things and although it's sad if the public doesn't know the difference between a proton and a protein, it's equally sad if they don't know the history of their country or can't find South Korea or Iran on a map and of course many people cannot do those things either. So I think we all accept that we need to have a level of common public understanding and education if we are to have an informed democracy.

AMT: What do you think will tip the balance in the near future about whether new technologies take us toward a brighter future or a bleak one?

MR: Well it's very hard to predict. I mean obviously we fervently hope that the benign future will happen and we can't control these downsides. All I'm saying is I think it's good to have a new challenge to governance to ensure that we can avoid these downsides. Let's hope we can. Education is one way and of course the other way is to minimise the of people who want to be anti-social in these drastic ways and minimise the consequences of disaffection by segments of the public. And in my book, I make a particular emphasis on Africa because in Africa the situation is rather bleak for many of the population, they're at the poverty line or below it and the prospects of them developing are not altogether bright because they can't leapfrog like the East Asian Tigers did by undercutting manufacturing costs in the West because robots do that now. And so they're going to be left behind perhaps and of course the one thing they do have in Africa is mobile phones. So they know what they're missing. And so I think that if we don't help Africa to develop then this is a recipe for mega versions of the boat peoples immigration that we're seeing in the Mediterranean already. And I think in general, society is getting more fragile because of expectations being high. Let's think of pandemics. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed half the population of towns in Europe. The rest just went on fatalistically. If we had a pandemic now, even a natural one, not necessarily an engineered one, then I think once the number of cases reached 1 percent of population, there'd be social breakdown. That's because it would overwhelm the capacity of hospitals and people to clamor for treatment, which they know they weren't getting. And also if the electricity grid went down for a few days, that would be catastrophic in any big city. So I think our society is of course helped and sustained by these technologies, but if things go wrong, then the consequences are far worse than they were for anything in the Middle Ages.

AMT: And you again make the point that we have to confront that here on Earth in our relatively close future, rather than think we can escape the universe.

MR: Absolutely, we got to focus on making the world sustainable and avoiding all the downsides of technology, which is too much CO2 emission and too much climate change, too much extinctions caused by change in land use, all these things. We've got to ensure that we leave the world for the next generation, which is as good as the one we inherited.

AMT: Martin Rees if you were to live a thousand years and that's another controversial area of science right there, what change would you be most excited to see by the end of that time?

MR: Well of course being a scientist, I'd like to know answers to many of the puzzles which engage me and my colleagues now and I think we will have hugely more knowledge because if I compare what we knew 50 years ago when I was starting as a student with today, we've made huge advances in what we understand and I expect that to continue. But I think we will have to be helped by some kind of AI because I think there's an intrinsic limit to what human brains can assimilate and just as a monkey can't understand quantum mechanics, there may be some crucial aspects of physical reality, which our brains just can't cope with. And so we may find that it's frustrating because we won't be able to understand things, although we can perhaps use machines to help us to do calculations, but that's not the same as having an actual real insight and comprehension. So I do worry that even if the science is advancing then it may be something that we can't really fully comprehend.

AMT: Lots to think about as we move into a new year. Martin Rees, a delight to talk to you. Thank you.

MR: Well thank you very much for having me on the show.

AMT: Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal. He's the author of the new book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity. He joined us from Cambridge, England. And just to pick up on a point that he was musing about, whether there's a limit to how much humans can know or understand, I spoke with Martin Rees about exactly that idea a year ago in a philosophical debate with David Deutsch, the father of quantum computing. If you want to listen to that, there's a link to that segment on our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And while you're there, click the contact link. Let us know what you're thinking as you listen to what he has to say and how he's thinking. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or find us on Facebook. Now stay with us, coming up in our next half hour, we're chasing the dream. Science writer, Alice Robb, joins me for a journey into the latest thinking on our own dreams. Why we deam at all. We're going to talk about lucid dreaming. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Science writer says our dreams are more important than we may think

Guests: Alice Robb

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Song: "Yesterday" by the Beatles]

AMT: The classic Beatles song "Yesterday" has been called the greatest song of the 20th century and Paul McCartney says the inspiration for writing that came to him in a dream. He is not the only artist who's been inspired by nighttime reveries. The British author Graeme Green kept dream diaries from the age of 16. He agreed to have them published after his death, when he said he would no longer be embarrassed by them. The painter Salvador Dali was famous for harnessing his dreams and using the images he saw in them for his surrealist paintings. That explains a lot. He engaged in what is now known as lucid dreaming, having a conscious awareness that you're dreaming and even being able to control what happens in that dream. It is a chance encounter with that phenomenon that got my next guest hooked on dreams. Alice Robb is a science writer whose new book argues that we should all be paying more attention to what happens when we're asleep because dreams can help us process new information. It can help us work through our anxieties and even confront our worst fears. Her book is called, Why We Dream. And Alice Robb joins me from New York City, in our New York studio. Hi.

ALICE ROBB: Hi. Thanks for having me.

AMT: How did you first encounter the idea of lucid dreams?

AR: So it was sort of a random coincidence. I was in college and I was doing an archaeological dig, which was a requirement for my major and I was in this pretty remote village in Peru, where we didn't have internet access and I read all the novels that I brought and a friend of mine had brought this book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and without much else to do, I started reading it and I just became really hooked on this idea that there's something called lucid dreaming, which are these dreams where you become aware within the dream that you're in a dream and sometimes you can even control the plot of the dream. And what I learned is that some people just do this naturally, especially children and for most people, including me, you can learn to induce lucid dreams by doing certain exercises and meditations during the day.

AMT: So just so I understand, what is the difference between a lucid dream and a regular dream?

AR: So in a regular dream, you're not aware that you're in a dream, which is why dreams are so affecting and often terrifying. If you're being chased by a monster in a dream, you think it's really happening, whereas in a lucid dream, it's this sort of special state of consciousness, where you are both asleep and aware that you're asleep, but you can learn to stay in that state and prolong it and you know try different tricks, decide if you want to fly, decide you want to banish the monster. There are all sorts of things you can do with it.

AMT: And so you had this experience and that led you to want to find more about dreams.

AR: Yeah. So when I found this book, my friends and I started doing some of the exercises that Stephen LeBerge recommended. So the main one was first we started talking about our dreams throughout the day. In the morning we would talk about what dreams we could remember from the night before. So we started improving our dream recall by talking about our dreams and then doing throughout the day, what LeBerge calls reality test. So that's where you ask yourself if you're awake or asleep and you try to do something physical to really test whether you're awake. So you might like plug your nostrils and if you find that you can breathe through your plugged nostrils then you know that you're asleep and you do this like ten times a day and you ask yourself the same question in a dream and hopefully you answer yourself that you're asleep and then you have a dream.

AMT: So I want to talk about that more as we go on, but let's talk more about dreams and how we see them too. How would you compare our present attitudes about dreams and dreaming with how they've been seen throughout history?

AR: So this is another thing that I found really surprising when I started thinking more about dreams is that I think most of us in the West, certainly I grew up with the idea that dreams are not something we should really think about that much or talk about that much. They're just these silly little stories and who knows where they came from and you know just get on with your day. And then I started reading more about dreams, I learned that in the past and in different cultures, people have cared very deeply about dreams. Dream diaries are some of our oldest pieces of literature. I mean there are dream prophecies in the Bible and there are cultures where people would traditionally wake up in the middle of the night and talk about their dreams and it's really only more recently that we've sort of cast them off.

AMT: When we think about the meaning of dreams, a lot of us might think about Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. What kind of impact did he have on our understanding of dreams?

AR: It's hard to talk about dreams now without talking about Freud. He had such a huge impact on the field. And on the one hand he gave dreams this sort of academic legitimacy in the early 20th century by really putting them at the forefront of the new field of psycho analysis. In the interpretation of dreams, he argued that dreams are the key to understanding ourselves, to unpacking our neurosis. But on the other hand, he had a lot of ideas that really haven't been borne out. One of his most famous and enduring ideas is that dreams are all about sex. There isn't a lot of evidence for that. Sex actually seems to be relatively rare in most people's dreams. And then his other main idea was that dreams usually represent wish fulfillment, whether conscious or unconscious.

AMT: But it's interesting because the sexual side of the dream is the thing that's persisted.

AR: Exactly and I think that's actually, that idea has really contributed to the embarrassment that a lot of people still feel about talking about their dreams.

AMT: So when did mainstream science start paying attention to dreams?

AR: I think much more recently. I think we've all really absorbed the message that sleep is very important for our bodies, for our mental health, for learning, but even sleep research itself only really got off the ground in the mid-20th century. Rapid eye movement sleep was only discovered in the 1950s and before then you know scientists thought that when we fall asleep, we're just kind of shutting down. Not until the 1990s did scientists figure out that dreams could be studied in a lab.

AMT: So tell me more and what scientists have discovered about why we dream and what kind of function these dreams serve in our cognitive lives.

AR: There's a whole lot going on in our brains, while we're dreaming and there are a lot of ideas about why they're important. One, which comes to us from evolutionary psychology, is that we're dreams, that dreams fulfilling this important psychological function of helping us to practice for events that we'll find stressful during the day. So one of the things that scientists noticed when they started looking at dreams more systematically, was that dreams are overwhelmingly negative experiences. The most common feelings in dreams are things like anxiety and guilt and fear and the most common scenarios are you know things like being chased. And so evolutionary psychologists wondered why would we be having these unpleasant experiences and one answer is that we're working through our anxieties in this low stakes or no stakes environment of being asleep and then when we wake up they seem less scary.

AMT: Well it's interesting because you looked at a study of dreams with people who had been in prison, who have been held in concentration camps during the Holocaust. What did they find about the dreams of Holocaust survivors?

AR: They found that actually a lot of people who were imprisoned in concentration camps found that while they were in the camps, they had very pleasant dreams of eating really nice meals or being reunited with their family members and those dreams helped them keep going by reminding them of life and the pleasures of real life. And dreams play a big role in helping us recover from the trauma. Similarly to how you practice for upcoming events and dreams that you're nervous about, you can work through your past traumas.

AMT: And with these Holocaust survivors, they weren't playing the trauma at all during sleep until they were actually physically removed from that place.

AR: Right, as if they were their brains were just helping them survive psychologically and postponing that work of processing what they had been through, until they were in a situation where they would be capable of dealing with it.

AMT: Now we heard in our introduction about some creative types inspired by dreams. What does the science say about the type of people who are most likely to dream and the ones who are most likely to have nightmares?

AR: We're all dreaming every night. Every time you have a REM cycle, which is about every 90 minutes, you are having some dream activity and if you were in a sleep lab and woken up at just the right moment, you would probably be able to report your dream, even if you are someone who doesn't dream or doesn't remember your dreams. People who tend to remember their dreams more, the most important thing is wanting to remember your dreams. They're very susceptible, it's just that intention. So people who value their dreams and to talk about them and think about them, especially for people who keep a dream journal are most likely to remember their dreams, but there are other things too. People who wake up more frequently in the night have more opportunities to remember their dreams. Usually if you're just conking out at midnight and waking up at 7, you're going to remember probably at most, the dream that you just woke up from. Children tend to have a higher dream recall. There's some evidence that there are personality traits associated with higher dream recall like openness to new experience and tolerance of ambiguity, but I'd say the main thing is wanting to remember your dreams.

AMT: I want to play you a clip from the radio show, This American Life, from an episode called the Seven Things You Know You're Not Supposed to Talk About. Host Sarah Koenig and her mother have put dreams on that list of things you're not supposed to talk about. Here they are reacting to a group of people who get together regularly to share their dreams.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I'm in a projection room. There is a complete mess.

VOICE 2: The carpet and the sticks of butter and the bird and the my cat Charlotte.

VOICE 3: And he stands up with the chest pains and then he collapses on the ground.

VOICE 4: The way I'm playing you this tape now of these dreams and these fragments, that is because that's how I was hearing them at the time. I could not, for the life of me, focus on what people were saying. And I want to be clear, it had nothing to do with those people who are really nice, smart people, right. It's just that this is what happens to me when anyone tells me their dreams and you were bored too. I know the signs.

VOICE 5: Well of course.

AMT: Of course she was bored about dreams. Why do you think a lot of people don't want to hear about or talk about dreams, especially other peoples?

AR: I've thought a lot about this and I asked a couple of literary theorists if there are any there's, if there's any real reason why we think of dreams as boring or you know is it just this stereotype that we have because we've devalued dreams as a culture. And some of the ideas they gave me are it can be hard to follow dreams, they don't have the typical logic that we expect of a narrative and our stakes as a listener are not that high. I mean we know that it didn't really happen and we know that the story ends with the dreamer safe in bed. But I think that it has more to do with the fact that we don't really think dreams are important. I mean if we were treating them as the key to understanding ourselves then I think we would be more willing to listen to other people's dreams. And I've been working on this book for a few years and so many people have told me their dreams during that period. You know whenever I meet someone at a party they often really want to talk about their dreams and those conversations are often very interesting and revealing and lead to much deeper conversations than you'd typically have with someone you've just met.

AMT: So you don't flee the room, you keep listening. [Laughter] So Alice Robb, you actually went to a conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, where not everybody likes to admit they are. What was it like?

AR: One of my favorite things about working on this project was that it brings together so many researchers and people from different fields. And because dreams are a relatively small fields of study in the sciences, they have this history of collaborating with people across all different disciplines, from literature and psychology, you know history, as well as the herder sciences. And also of collaborating with you know people who are more interested in whether dreams have psychic powers or you know whether dreams can predict the future. So there's this annual conference that's held. The year I attended it with at an abbey in the Netherlands and every morning I attended a dream group, which was a, it would be a group session where one person would share a dream and then a whole group of strangers, led by a psychologist would analyze it together. And I mean it was like my favorite part of the day. So I would challenge to go to one of those and be bored.

AMT: So tell me about some of the people you met at this conference?

AR: I met a lot of people who were just there because they really care about dreams. I met someone who was building a device in his basement that he hoped would induce lucid dreams if you used it.

AMT: What was it?

AR: I think it was supposed to be like a mask that you wore and it would flash lights in your eyes, which would signal you to enter the lucid dream, if you remembered. Which is actually something a lot of people have tried. I don't think there have been great results, but the idea has been around for a while. I met someone who said that he had made all of his decisions in life, based on his dreams and he said that was going great for him.

AMT: There were other people weren't there, who didn't really want anybody to know they were there.

AR: Yeah there were, I met a few people you know who said that like a psychologist who said he doesn't tell his colleagues that he comes to this conference. Other people who would pretend that they were going to a science conference, which gave it this feel as if we at this like secret convention where we could reveal our weird interesting dreams.

AMT: So that goes back to the shame and the fringe element that it was once seen as and the fact that it was seen as sex talk with Freud, as opposed to something far deeper and more indicative of. Do you think that that's some kind of a holdover?

AR: Yeah definitely. And also in the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of, the work on dreams was coming from like parapsychology labs. There was a lab in Brooklyn where the psychologist or parapsychologists tried to prove that people could communicate with each other in their dreams. In the 60s in England and Wales, a psychologist set up what he called premonitions bureaus, where he tried to collect people's dreams and use them to, he hoped that this would predict natural disasters, so that the government could prepare for them, based on the warnings in people's dreams. So a lot of kind of fringy stuff, like that was going on and kind of reinforcing this link between dreams and the supernatural and you know not really helping people who had a more scientific interest in dreams.

AMT: I want to get back to lucid dreaming because you also went to a retreat run by a pioneer in the field of lucid dreaming. What was that like?

AR: The retreat was run by Stephen LeBerge who is the person who got me interested in lucid dreaming in the first place. And he's a really fascinating figure. He did this work in the 1980s, when he was just a graduate student at Stanford. So he was a very skilled lucid dreamer and he devised these experiments to prove that lucid dreaming was a real phenomenon because there's a lot of skepticism. So even though people had philosophers and mystics had written about lucid dreaming for thousands of years, most scientists believed that they were really just waking up or maybe they were making it up. And Stephen LeBerge devised these experiments where he would go to sleep in with you know monitors proving that he was asleep and research assistants watching him and go into a lucid dream and so when you're in REM sleep, your muscles are paralyzed, except for your eyeballs. And he figured out that he could actually move his eyeballs. He could control the movements of his eyeballs, while he was in a lucid dream and he did it. So he, with people watching and sure that he was asleep, he went into a lucid dream and moved his eyeballs. And he repeated this, he taught other lucid dreamers to do it and this sort of opened the door to the study of lucid dreams.

AMT: Why would we want to have lucid dreams, as opposed to regular dreams?

AR: I mean on the one hand there are certain clinical applications. There have been studies of people using lucid dreams as practice sessions. I mean there's one study where people by some sports scientists who had volunteers try to toss a coin into a cup six feet away and then some of them taking a nap and have a lucid dream and dream about the task and they had more improvement when they woke up than people who didn't do that. And you know there are athletes who talk about using lucid dreams to practice for their events and then there are some applications for mental health and anxiety, that if you can summon up your demons in a lucid dream and confront them, that can have a real powerful impact on your waking life and relationships.

AMT: I think I had my own lucid dream experience and I'll run it by you and you can tell me what you think. So I used to always have a pursuit dream, where somebody was chasing me and they would chase me and chase me and I would finally get to a place where I could close the door and be they would be on the other side of the door and I would close the door and the door would never meet the door jam. There would always be a space and the hand would reach in in that space and I'd wake up with a start. And I learned about lucid dreaming and I thought about it. I don't think I thought about it consciously, but I thought oh wouldn't that be cool if you could like lucid dream, what would that do? And then one day I had a dream where I was being pursued, the same thing, being pursued and it was going on for a long time and I said in the dream, this is a dream. This is stupid. I am closing the door on you and I've never had that dream again. I don't have pursuit dreams anymore.

AR: Yeah that's amazing. I've heard a number of stories like that, that lucid dreaming is one of the most effective ways to deal with recurrent nightmares.

AMT: So I cured myself? I guess. So in researching all of this and writing this, what have you learned about how we could really leverage our dreams to get more use out of them?

AR: I mean the main thing is that it just takes so little effort to start remembering way more of your dreams. I always tell people just write them down in the morning or you know if you don't want to, speak them into your phone. There are some great dream journal apps. And most people are just so surprised to realize that they can remember their dreams and they are dreaming and even if you know you're not going to put them to some use, you know it's not that you want to figure out your issues or whatever. It's just interesting to know what you're doing for a couple of hours every night for your entire life.

AMT: How has your own life changed since you started paying attention to all of this?

AR: I, because I spend a lot of time thinking about dreams, I feel like they are pretty integrated with my life. And one thing I really love is just sort of becoming that person who gets to hear other people's dreams. I feel almost like I'm a therapist or something sometimes, but it feels like a very sort of privileged role to be in. And as I mentioned, I have a group of friends who've been, we've had our own dream group, where we meet every month and talk about our dreams. And that's been really fun and I think we'll keep doing that for a long time. But yeah just coming to appreciate that this is part of what it is to be human.

AMT: And when you do, when you talk to other people in your dream group, do you get a better understanding of who people are because you do get a glimpse into their inner lives?

AR: Yeah it's such a different way to get to know people. I mean I've made such close friends through that group and just had real conversations about our anxieties and our past that you don't really get into you typically.

AMT: Okay well thank you for your insights into all of this.

AR: Thanks so much.

AMT: That's Alice Robb, science writer and author of Why We Dream. She joined us from New York City. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Q's screen panel reconvenes to dissect last night's Golden Globes. Remember you can take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. Now we started our look at dreams with the Beatles song that was inspired by a dream. So we'll end today with another song from the Fab Four. This one goes out to anyone who has been inspired to crawl back into bed for a few extra dreams. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "I'm Only Sleeping" by the Beatles]

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Jan. 7, 2019 episode transcript

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