Howard Bloom

00:02try to keep this about a fist away from your face okay the best thing how's this a little closer if you can't yeah good we're live Oh we that was quick oh you're a wizard over there mr. bloom yes Joey appreciate well we were in a film together so we've been like right next to each other on celluloid what film are we in that was the culture hi Brett Harvey and it's you me Richard Branson and Snoop Dogg Oh good company yes right yeah so you were just saying right before we did the podcast you were in bed for 15 years yeah I wasn't I got sick in 1988 I wasn't able to make it out of that bed until 2003 but Joe I was absolutely certain I would never make it out of that bed well yeah what did you have it's called these days this month it's called Emmy CFS up until now was just known as chronic fatigue syndrome CFS but it's real serious if you get a bad case of it so I was too weak to talk

01:06for five years too weak to talk you didn't talk at all not a bit I didn't have the strength to puff out even a syllable and I was too weak to have another person in the room with me for five years he doesn't have a person in the room my stress levels were off the charts and the slightest thing would just to crack my wife tried to keep me company so we have this big king-size bed and she would lay in bed reading a newspaper and the sound of the page turning went through me like a cannonball and she just tore me to pieces and she had to build a separate room in the front of the house and live there because I couldn't tolerate anything did you think it was over yeah I thought first of all something you don't know you have a sense of humanity and you don't know it and something like this that wipes out your entire future every during the overhead for yourself

02:08Rob's you of your sense of humanity and you don't know there is a sense if you until it disappears so it took me three years I had to rebuild a personality from just about scratch because the one area I could handle at least most of the time was the Internet you know the internet hit the music industry in 1983 and I had been lusting after it for years because only academics had access to this real high-tech thing and I had it took me three years to realize that every day I was trying to go up to my front room office and work and that sitting was draining me of my energy and since I only had a tiny amount of energy if I lay there horizontal in the bed my voice would eventually come back so I had an assistant take two computers because in those days two computers was about half the size the processing power was half the size of your cell phone and I had him hook up to computers and a

03:12Chinese box don't let anybody tell you the Chinese and Chinese don't invent things they do and this was a box that allowed me to control both computers from one monitor and one keyboard so we have the keyboard up on foam bolsters so that I could see it when I was laying perfectly horizontal in bed so I could still see the keys and I rebuilt a personality online because I couldn't get any further than to the bathroom and back that was it what do you mean by you rebuilt a personality well everything I hadn't expected I mean I was gonna write my first book and I was gonna I'm a nerd from science I got into science at the age of 10 I got into theoretical physics of microbiology I felt built my first boolean algebra machine when I was 12 I co designed a computer the one science fair Awards when I was 12 I was taken to see the head of the Graduate physics department at the

04:06University of Buffalo and disappeared into his office for an hour my mother wondered what in the world had happened to me because it was supposed to be a five-minute courtesy call we were discussing Big Bang versus steady state theory of the universe for an hour and when I was 16 I worked at the world's largest Cancer Research Lab and I up with the theory of the beginning middle and end of the universe the big bagel theory or the Blum toroidal model that predicted 38 years in advance dark energy and then I ended up in the rock-and-roll business with this background so when I imagined I was gonna write my first book I was gonna leave the rock and roll business behind cuz my field expedition and rock and roll I'd learned I thought as much as I was ever going to learn from it and I'd work with Michael Jackson Prince Bob Marley Bette Midler ac/dc Aerosmith Kiss Kiss

04:58Queen Billy Joel Billy Idol Paul Simon Peter Gabriel David Byrne people like that what what caused this disease it's like nobody knows nobody knows nobody has no idea of what the so in the different names chronic fatigue syndrome Emmys I would just have me as myalgic encephalomyelitis and his more dignified name dude can they understand it in to the point where they could test for it do they give you a blood test or they just can't test for it they don't know what causes it there is no I've writ like a friend approach me at one point and said the Duchess of Kent has what you have can you write her a letter about how to manage it so instead of a letter I wrote 14 or 16 pages or something like that so when people have this I send them in this pamphlet it explains how I got out of it but won't work for me is not necessarily going to work for you or anybody else

05:50was it a gradual slipping away of your energy or was it a natural it happened on March 10th of 1988 so March 9th you're fine March 10th March 9th I'm fine March 10th I'm fine I fly down to I think it was Richmond or something like that to go out five to be taken by Jeep five hours into the countryside to meet with Linda Womack that Sam Cooke's daughter and her husband Cecil Womack who has broke the Rolling Stones first hit he and his brother and they have this big aircraft hangar sized farm building it's going to be their home but right now they've just had it built it's empty it doesn't have heating yet and it's March 10th it's still the end of winter and so we go and pass the Sheep and into this building and there's no furniture in there and I sit there and interview them for five hours and find out that there's something called a black coal mining culture and that gospel came out

06:49of those black coal mines I had no idea that blacks ever got involved in coal mines much less that that's how gospel culture began and I they drove need five hours back to the airport again i sat there on the plane with my little TRS 100 the very first laptop computer this little gizmo that ran off of double-a batteries and and then I forgot my my laptop on the plane I don't do things like that someone that was a little off the next day I thought I had a cold my technique for handling a cold worth your ass off walk a minimum of two and a half miles and do your work so I worked power to my way through it by Tuesday I was so weak that my staff had a pick me up under the armpits and drag me off to the elevator and throw me in the back of a car service car and ship me out to Park Slope to my brownstone in Brooklyn a guy don't know how I even got up the stairs and it was all downhill

07:52basically from there 15 years 15 friggin years leave right but so but I still had I had gotten halfway through writing my first book my plan was okay I'll do what I've done with all my rock and roll bands when my book is ready to come out I'll go do every morning television show every radio show every newspaper in the country I'll stay at high houses where the sheets are sunny and yellow and where they make the bed for you you don't have to make it yourself and I'll feed you food and stuff like that and I'll promote my book that was my vision of my next step in life my future well if you can't leave your bedroom that's all gone that's all gone and you have to and I had to walk into my office one day and say I have no idea of what's happening to me I could be dying I have to be out of here in two weeks and I gave the whole thing to my staff the biggest PR firm in the music industry he

08:50just gave it to them yeah and the next day I got a call from West Coast competitor offering me a lot of money and I had to say no I'm sorry I gave it to my staff yesterday so and and and I as I say had to reinvent myself with what little I had the books were still a value my science was still a value and I had to create a new me online now when you say create a new you online and you say create a new personality what do you what exactly do you mean by that well I thought your old personality old personality couldn't walk anymore it couldn't talk anymore that was your body that was my body but you have a no idea of just how much of your personality is your body and your vocal cords and stuff like that that you take for granted or instruments of some internal you I had to invent an existence let's put it that way online and how did you do that like we say well

09:47I got on I got on line first I god I can't even remember what came first but at some point because I was fact-checking my first book but had to do this all laying there in bed I got hold of Napoleon Chanyeol who is the the anthropologist who chronicled the fierce people the Yanomami in South America people who are really I mean you the more people you kill the more wives you get it's as simple as that and Yanomamo culture and I wanted him to read my book my first book the Lucifer principle a scientific expedition into the forces of history and he said look people are out to destroy my career right now I can't get involved with anything controversial but I'm a key member of the human behavior in evolution Society and you should be a member well he introduced me to a social group in which I could interact as long as I could continue to type so this is a message board or it was all done via

10:47email so just a group of people that you could interact with with you yeah and I've been working on my writing since I was 16 years old science is my base but the book I got at the age of 12 by Albert Einstein you know sometimes a book grabs you by the lapels and it feels like the authors writing this directly into your face and Einstein said to be a genius it's not enough to come over come up with the theory only seven men in the world can understand to be a genius who have to be able to come up with that theory and then express it so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it so Albert Einstein my hero said schmuck listen up you want to be an original scientific thinker you have to be the best writer you can possibly be so I've been working on my writing since I was 16 years old I was late

11:35Bob took me four years to get around to doing it after Einstein gave me the orders and one when I was put on the human behavior and evolutionary society group well I can write my ass off so people were impressed and they gathered around me fortunately now admittedly it's all on a computer screen and it's all via keyboard and there are no living humans in the room anyplace but it saved my life hmm to be able to do that and then I founded two international scientific groups of my own and I wrote three books because those were things I could do with that keyboard as long as I have the strength to do the keyboarding and I didn't always have the strength to even lift my hands and do that but I did most of the time now during this time were you getting treated with doctors giving you doctors don't know a damn thing about this eventually my first wife who I lost

12:33because of this after I lost a 34 year marriage because of the illness she persuaded CFS doctor or a doctor who specializes in chronic fatigue syndrome to come out to my house when he was going to a party in Brooklyn and see me and the most useful thing that he did was hand me a piece of paper with an email address on it and he said this is another one of my patients she's in Texas I want you to get in touch with her and the two of us went out like Hansel and Gretel holding hands going into the forest looking for treatment modalities weren't looking for treatments that might possibly save us from her illness so when I tell people the stuff I take and they say okay who can I get this room and I send them to my doctor my old CFS doctor he says oh I don't give those well he gave them to me but he gave them to me because those were the things that felt like they might work and he allowed

13:27me to try them and I ended up with a every morning I give myself a shot with three different things in it half a CC of magnesium one CC of oxytocin and about two cc's of Sannikov Altman which is liquid vitamin b12 so b12 magnesium and oxytocin AXA Tosun the bonding hormone oxytocin the stuff that creates trust in neuro economics experiments oxytocin which if you're a mother and you've just given birth to a baby when you put that baby to your left nipple for the very first time you feel in some cases like you've just taken LSD because this chemical goes coursing through your body and it's a trip and it makes you trust everybody in the room and everybody who walks into the room it's oxytocin and oxytocin I've been on oxytocin now for 20 years and oxytocin it turns out also does something else there's this little experiment called parabiosis take an old rat his brain is

14:29aging as hard as aging his kidneys are aging you hook up the circulatory system to the circulatory system of a young rat and guess what starts happening to the old rat his brain starts reversing getting getting younger his heart starts getting younger his kidneys start to get younger so I'm about to be 75 years old in a month and I do between 400 and 700 push ups in the morning first thing that's crazy yeah that's really crazy but when they tried to figure out what is reversing the aging and the muscles of the rat the heart of the rat the brain of the rat the one ingredient they were able to isolate and then use on other rats to get them to get younger instead of older was oxytocin so in all probability the reason I can do between 400 and 700 push-ups in the morning at the age of 74 and when I was 19 the most I could do was 92 and I was working really hard at it is the oxytocin

15:31it's never heard of anybody taking that as a supplement well it showed up there was a doctor named something like see Strunk in Texas who was using it on CFS patients and my friend the Texas patient of my doctor found see Strunk and got his protocol out of him in other words exactly what he'd used to treat the problem and we gave it to my doctor and he sat on it for six months until he could reverse it eight at his own bright idea and then and then he prescribed it for me and it's done wonders that and a bunch of other stuff have done absolute wonders was the other things that it worked I think gabapentin without that I mean I was on my way to Moscow once I finally got out of bed I was going to address an international conference of quantum physicists about why everything they know about quantum physics is wrong and I was fine I mean this is my first traveling since I'd gotten out of bed

16:25and it was taking a huge chance because it was a huge chance of throwing me back into bed again and I flew all the way to Germany and was doing just fine I was exhilarated that I was doing so well and then halfway between Germany and Moscow the CFS symptoms began to come back and that was scary and then I reviewed what I was doing and I realized I'd missed all my afternoon pills and I and and as soon as I was able well my we had to find a bed in the infirmary which is scary and the Moscow Airport because there are people walking around with machine guns and military uniforms and they want to take my passport away in order to allow me to lay on a bed in the infirmary and so I could be disappeared at any second but when we finally got to our hotel and opened up my drug roll I took the the gabapentin and within 15 minutes the symptoms were gone Wow so did you have you ever tried to

17:21isolate individual ones remove some of them from the protocols see if I've once removed one amitriptyline it's an antidepressant that sort of was originally designed for and I figured I don't need this anymore I'm perfectly healthy it was a big mistake I started having these blinding stomachaches when they went out for a little I mean for months and months and months until I finally got fed up and researching on Google what do you do about summer cakes well guess what one of the primary things you do to stop stomach cases amitriptyline the very thing I had gone off of so I had to go back on it so it's a whole network a mesh of supplements drugs and lifestyle I don't sleep the way normal people sleep I sleep from 4 o'clock in the morning until 8 o'clock in the morning I get up I listen to magazines on the kindle while I'm taking my bath and shaving and all that stuff I meet with

18:19my assistant I give her her marching orders for the day I go back to sleep at 11:00 and I sleep until 3:00 and then I get up for my second workday and that's when I do all my writing and all that kind of stuff so you do you sleep in four-hour chunks whoo 4-hour chunks because like that is better for you my body was refusing to do the 8-hour thing so one of the first symptoms of of CFS is insomnia ok now Joe if your body is refusing to sleep for 8 hours straight listen to your body give it what the hell it wants and so these are the hours my body demanded and they I had been working often until 8 o'clock in the morning from roughly 11 o'clock at night or something like that and losing track of time and it was very disorienting and once I started this two periods of sleep a day my day stabilized and there's other stuff I mean listening to Pandora you would think what does that have to

19:17do with your illness well I work at a cafe that's a vital part of things because I'm surrounded by people and I've slowly built community in this cafe other workaholic writers like me a neuroscientist novel novelist and all kinds of people who just sit there in slave away all day and but I'm listening to Pandora that gives me a sense of life for some reason it says it's as positive as an elixir would be and it gives me a sense of control over my environment and I don't hear the conversations going on around me so I can really focus on my work I've written four books this way so far in cafes all of this stuff walking five miles a day in two bursts I mean there I am going through a meadow in the middle of a park at night how many New Yorkers do you know who go out and walk through a park in the middle of the night Robb's yeah right that's what you'd think but I have the

20:12time of my life looking up at the stars out in the middle of the meadow and being where I'm not supposed to be you're not supposed to go through the park at night well they let you I have been thrown out six times by the police because I've over I've overstepped the boundaries I've been out there after one o'clock and they do close the place at 1:00 and throw us all out but no when in New York lor unless you're walking a really big dog you do not go out into parks at night and but do you put this whole lifestyle together and it's not just any individual ingredient that's making me better I'm happier than I was when I was 19 I'm stronger then I walk a lot more slowly than when I was 19 but in terms of push-ups and other exercises I'm stronger than I was when I was 19 years old that is a crazy journey Howard that's crazy and it's only a part I mean right now I'm Co designing so here I

21:10hurry I'm the guy who worked with Michael Jackson Prince Bob Marley and all of those people and I'm Co designing a multiplanetary mission at Cal Tech right now I'm out here in California to do a book store reading my first one on the west coast for how I suddenly started the 60s my current book but then I have three presentations at the annual meeting of the National Space Society and I'm on the board of governors of the National Space Society and I got some important things to do there and then they let me sit on the board meetings I'm used to be on both the board and the Board of Governors and there are some important things I need to help this group accomplish and then I go back to New York and get hopefully if I'm lucky and my planes are on time I get to New York in time to get some sleep and to get up and do an interview with a British filmmaker who's making a film

22:03about prince and meantime there's a film being made about my life called surf the catastrophe it's a 60 to 90 minute film and they're finally getting after shooting they're getting down to the editing and it's a three-time Grammy winner who is my director and one of the cameramen who's been with us through this whole thing a couple of Sundays ago my director got his first or his third Grammy our Emmy and my one of my cameramen got his second Emmy so there's all kinds of wild stuff I have 15 projects going on at once and I love that yeah I was gonna say that it seems like you get very energized when you're talking about the amount of different things you're doing all at once yeah it's a sad word what gives you juice yeah because for whatever reason if I refused to go into any niche I refused to go into one specialization and see the balls closed and I mean get buried

23:00there and my goal since I was 16 years old and working at the world's largest cancer research facility has been not to be a mole digging the hole so deep you can't see anything but to be the eagle flying over the landscape and taking each of those mole holes as pic pixels in a big picture so I do all the science what is that term auto doctor yes autodidact all right well I read two books a day from the time I was ten and by the time I got to college remember I'm there with the at the age of 12 with the head of the Graduate physics department not just the physics department the Graduate physics department and we're talking as equals which is really weird so weird so by the time I got to college I ended up with four fellowships in neuroscience I realized that for me graduate school would be the auschwitz of the mind I felt I was in a boxcar on my way to the

23:59end of everything I wanted to understand in life why is that well because since I was 12 or 13 years old I wanted to take all the panoramas the full palette of the sciences and I wanted to use them among other things to understand ecstatic experiences I wanted to understand how Hitler put together this performance torchlight parades where 15 guys are walking down the streets abreast of each other carrying torches to ten o'clock at and people on the gunther virulent van Lyndon the big Boulevard are packed so tight that if you pulled up your feet you wouldn't topple over because the crowd would hold you up they were crowded in on either side of you supporting you and people had a sense of being lifted out of themselves and having a transcendent experience and becoming part of three things I invoke one tribe I know right one state ein Fuhrer one leader but it gave them we

24:58all need a sense of being a part of something bigger than ourselves I wanted to know how that sense of ecstatic dissolution into something bigger than yourself happens do you think that we're in Hitler's case that this was an accident no I think designed this was yes he did design it he absolutely decided he knew that he could create this sort of ecstatic state in these people you bet he was an ecstatic and he was preaching to people to bring them to a state of ecstasy how did he know all this how did he know I was he know all this the way any artist knows how to achieve things that he may never have seen achieve before in his life it's intuition we're all built with certain super normal responses inside of us certain gushes of emotion you can hit if you hit just the right stimulus and he hired Albert Speer to be as art director so Albert Speer would art direct these massive events

26:00like this but it was Hitler who would go into a state of ecstatic preaching as if preaching in tongues but preaching in one tongue German hmm and who could bring that audience to that ecstatic level he was disturb you to study someone as up as Hitler though and look for the genius in his approach especially as a Jew yeah you bet your ass of course but I figure if Hitler could use this for evil the big trick is to understand it and use it for good and in fact it turns out that a rock concert has these ecstatic elements sure in it you know you hear about audiences getting off that's what the people on stage are constantly trying to achieve that's an ecstatic state is this what was fascinating to you about rock in the first place yes led you to become a publicist right because remember if I go into grad school I would have been giving paper and pencil tests to 22

26:58college students in exchange for one psychology credit now how much was I gonna learn about mass ecstasy's the forces of history right in that College cross nothing no that you you had this foresight because for many people the idea of going to grad school and becoming a professor like that was the that was the golden pot at the end of the rainbow and everybody knew I was going to be a college professor from the time I was 10 years old but the closer I got to it the more I realized that this is like being put in a sardine can and having the cam welded over you it's it's a big mistake Wow and I I started a commercial art studio with a bunch of artists that I had worked with one day I was in class I was I was very serious about poetry poetry set a lot of the tones it taught me how to lead a life I mean the love song ivy alfred Prufrock says schmuck listen up

27:54the way that einstein except he doesn't I mean he's an anti-semite so he's not gonna say schmuck TS Eliot but he said listen up if you don't start doing this the heroic stuff that you feel will divine will define you and bring young women crawling to your ankles and kissing your knees if you don't if you have that in you that vision of what you want to be and you don't start it now today this hour you will put it off and put it off and put it off and when you hit the age of 50 you'll suddenly realize you don't have the life force you don't have the life energy to do that anymore and your whole life will have been a failure so if you have something heroic to do start it now so I was in a poetry class because poetry had had a huge influence on my life and one day the poetry teacher the poet in residence and why you said bloom when everybody leaves the classroom closed the door I

28:51to talk to you well that doesn't sound good and he said okay he sat me in the balling out chair and he said look you last year I asked you to be on the staff of the literary magazine you never even showed up this year I'm telling you you are the literary magazine the minute you walk out that door you're it you don't even have a faculty advisor now get out that door so I turned it into an experimental graphics and a literary magazine so I knew a bunch of artists and one of them was being thrown out of his apartment and it was the beginning of the summer his electricity was about to be cut off his phone was about to be cut off and his furniture already been repossessed he and his wife and child were sitting on a beer raagh floor crying when I walked in and I said look you're a bloody genius give me your portfolio I'll take it out for two weeks I'll get you work that'll get to allow

29:45you to pay your rent and then I can move on and get a proper summer job well it didn't turn out to be that easy by the end of the summer I hadn't gotten a single job I got in New York Magazine interested in doing a feature on my art studio but I hadn't gotten the artist and the other artists in the studio a single job and I'm an obsessive-compulsive so I called Columbia we're supposed to go to grad school and said you know I have a back problem I won't be showing up this year Joe the truth at any price including the price of your life is one of my religious principles it's the first rule of science the second rule of science is look at things right under your noses if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there the truth at any price including that price of your life yeah so when people tell me for example about my book the Mohammed Code how a desert prophet brought you

30:32Isis al-qaeda and Boko Haram or how Mohammed met in Jihad so when people realized I was writing this they said you can't write that you'll get killed who the cares the first rule of science is the truth and any price including the present of your life and if you tell me I can't write it because it's gonna get me killed I know that it's doubly important for me to write this because nobody else is gonna have the guts to so that it falls on me so screw that you seem to be approaching all these different things whether it is sitting in the cafe listening to music being surrounded by people poetry the goal of the ecstatic state that you're studying when it comes to Hitler or rocks rock music you seem to be looking at this as almost like a form of not necessarily uncharted energy but uh undocumented as almost as if it's like there's a there's fuel out there that you are you're tapping into and

31:37utilizing that you know that everybody's kind of aware of but I don't think they're thinking about it the same way that you are know and I'm looking at this in the context of everything from the Big Bang to what's going on in our brains while we're having this conversation in the future you and I are fashioning through our actions at this point I'm looking at this in terms of a very very very big picture yeah and I get disturbed when it looks like I'm gonna get typed like I've spent so much time on on space in the last few years that I'm afraid people are gonna type me and I refuse to be typed as the space guy yeah because I need to have access to every field that I can possibly understand because I'm in the process of putting together a big picture when you say worried about being I mean after all you've accomplished how could you be typed oh it's real easy but by who but

32:24models well partly by myself but but also by others interesting by yourself yeah you're worried about yourself I yes I absolutely in order to be happy I need to be in a dozen fields simultaneously that's fascinating I am much less intense about it but I share a similar desire to be fascinated by many different things at the same time and you got to see where they all fit together that's the real trick and and the real and the tool for this for me when I was 12 years old my parents I'd never paid attention at school I read two books a day that's it so I read a book on under the desk teacher who cared about the teacher and my parents were gonna send me off to a small private school but they made me promise to to work in school I'd never worked in school before and I forget where I was going with this story but but there is one experience I had in this little high school that's really

33:22relevant and that is okay by the time I'm 16 years old I'm after the ecstatic experience for four years in scientific terms when I'm 14 and here are about a book called the varieties of the religious experience by William James I spend four months looking for a copy of the book because there is no Amazon yet at finding books in Buffalo isn't that easy and then I'm sixteen and I've been elected the head of the program committee in my school the program committee this every day starts for the entire student body with a 45-minute morning session and I emcee those sessions and I program two of them so the juniors come to me and they say could we're having a dance could you please advertise our dance for us and they don't understand the irony of what they've just asked if there's a dance anywhere in Buffalo New York people want me to park my feet elsewhere preferably

34:16in Cleveland or Houston Texas and so this is a really weird request so I put a piece of music on the turntable behind the stage and I get up on the stage and I'm incompetent I can't dance I mean I spent a year in dance class my parents were trying to make me normal didn't work and but I dance and it's not like any dance you've ever seen before in your life and I see the girl who hates me most I see her pupils start to dilate and then I see all of the pupils 350 sets of pupils 700 eyeballs dilating and then I see their faces melting and then it feels as if their energy coalesce is like a big amoeba and reaches out a pseudopod and the pseudopod sends itself through me and the energy goes up through me as if I were an empty pipe reaches something just above my head and is transmogrified utterly transformed and goes back down to the audience again in a continuous feedback loop and I have

35:17an out-of-body experience I'm convinced that I'm on the ceiling watching all of this happen that I'm not under under any control from me I'm in control of this energy and finally when it's all over remember these kids do not like me in this school not at all and and they do something as if they have practiced it all their lives and I know for a fact they have never done it before they surge down to the foot of the stage they pick me up on their shoulders they carry me out of the auditorium they carry me up the walkway to the building above where we have our classes and then they put me down they never did it before they never did it afterward enough for football stars not for anything that's the scene in a movie well I mean it might be what is that for me I've been after well I've been Lee after the ecstatic experience by then at that the carves the forces of history

36:09for four years of my bloody life what did you think you tapped into did you did you think you had somehow another manifested this no I I knew I act into a part of me that's in there I mean well my parents tried to drag me off look I have I have we're going back in time let's go back to when I was about to be 13 years old okay and and I realized sometime when I was 12 and a half years old that I was an atheist I didn't believe in God 12 and a half yeah why why 12 and a half at 12 yo idea I have six months in me two and a half years of reading two books a day so and but I you know you can sometimes Park something just out of consciousness in a closet of your mind and keep it there so I kept it there because I didn't want to miss out on the presence from my bar mitzva and plus it was the only party I was ever going to be invited to my own Bar Mitzvah party right who could write yeah

37:04yeah so it wasn't until after the bar mats who was over in all of the thank-you notes had been written until I was able to to admit that I'm an atheist so that means that I my Bar Mitzvah is in June by the time I'm finished with all the thank-you notes it's August well what's just around the corner September and in the Jewish calendar that High Holidays so my parents try to drag me off to High Holidays and they get me as far as the street that the synagogue is on and then I refuse to go any further and as yeah at well not by now it's 13 okay and so I'm hanging on to these sturdily American craftsmen built doors of the freezer blue car my dad drives and my parents are at my ankles trying threading my socks trying to pull me up toward the synagogue and I have a sudden realization Galileo had his insights by taking these new fangled devices called lenses putting them in a

38:03tube and pointing the tube which was designed to be used for horizontal viewing so you could see an army coming over the horizon toward you long before they could see you he takes this tube and he turns it in a totally unexpected direction up and another guy Anton van Lewin Hoch who uses the same high-tech devices lenses because he's a a Draper he sells fabric so he uses his bang divine glass to see how tight the weave is in his fabric and his great innovation is to take these lenses and turn them down and look at pond water and look at his own sperm and I suddenly have this realization while my parents are shredding my socks and trying to drag me up to the synagogue there are no gods in the heavens there are no gods beneath the earth so where are the gods right now in this scene they're in my parents and they are tugging with astonishing force at my parents and my

38:59socks and if they're if the gods are in my parents then the gods are in me too so my task in life is going to be to take that lens that Galileo turned up and that Van Loon Hawk turned down and turn it within to find the gods inside of us meaning finding those ecstatic experiences and that dance experience was the most primal of these ecstatic you could call them spiritual experiences but for me its sexual sexual secular sorry spirituality I've got sex on the brain but that was the that was the closest I was going to get to what Hitler had summoned forth those speeches that Hitler gave I don't understand German but the intensity that he was giving these speeches out and I've seen this before with radical Islam speakers or with you know many different religious leaders there's something about what they're doing that is it's almost contagious like you you

40:04you see whatever they're that the energy that they're putting out it's so compelling it's this it's a bizarre thing that human beings have this this compulsion to pay attention to people that have achieved this extreme level of performance well because they seem locked into a truth that truth speaks itself through every muscle of their body they leave it and they're confident right like the preacher on stage shouting out to the heavens and if you're that confident to have that much energy and conviction there must be some truth to what you're saying and there is a good chance that you were having a kind of out-of-body experience of one kind or another because something deeper inside of you takes you over and performs through you it's not you but of course it is you so if you were gonna come to me when I was in the rock and roll business and you wanted to be my

40:52client I would give you a lecture I would say you have to understand something if you are coming to me to fashion an image to brand you and to make you a superstar I'll get you an appointment immediately within the hour with my best competitor but if you're going to work with me you have to understand that music is not an exchange of pieces of plastic it is not an exchange of downloads it is not an exchange of money it's not about markets and branding and all of that stuff music is about an exchange of human soul when you sit in front of a blank piece of paper two o'clock in the afternoon to write a lyric you know you can never write a lyric again because you have no idea of how you've ever written lyrics in the past and at four o'clock in the afternoon very often there's a lyric there my job is to find the self inside you who wrote that lyric and introduce

41:47it to the self that says hello how are you fine thank you very much and all the ritualistic aspects of life when you go on stage you have the kind of experience that I had you are out of your own body you're danced around as if you were a marionette you feel 17,000 Souls coursing through you to something higher being transmogrified channelling back to those people in a continuous loop my job is to find that soul inside of you that dances you on stage and introduce it to the self of hello you find thank you very much so if you're willing to give me six weeks to study you and then come out to your environment and see you in your environment for anywhere from one to three days my job is secular shamanism find that soul dances oh and hang out with them I'm not really hang out it would be a very intense interview with John Mellencamp we started at nine o'clock in the morning at his homeland

42:44sing or Indiana we finished at four o'clock in the afternoon John looked the way that he only looked when he came offstage he looked hollowed out he looked like a scarecrow he had empty caverns where his eyes should have been he was wiped he was totally wiped and that interview allowed me to find the authentic John Mellencamp and preach it to the press and turn to press who hated John Mellencamp around why they hate him they hated him because he had signed with Tony DeFries who was managing David Bowie and Tony DeFries thought that his magic came from changing people's names David had Dave Joey but named David Jones and he had changed it to Bowie and so he called John Johnny Cougar and then he did something that sounds devilishly clever but was the opposite of clever he had a book made with one page on each of all of the dominant critics of the day one page a picture a little write-up on

43:49each of them and the press perceived this as trying to buy them and they don't like being bought so they rebelled and the word went out in the press that John Cooper was a prick that he was just an obnoxious horrible human being and that his music was crap and so even my friend Ken Emerson my impression from Ken Ken was at that point the record reviews editor for Rolling Stone and eventually he'd be an editor at the New York Times Sunday magazine a very influential magazine nationwide and my impression was that Ken wrote his review of John's album without ever opening the shrink-wrap without ever listening to it because everybody was assumed in that community that you knew what John's music was crap and you know what his personality was crap and if you open the album and listen to it you would be expelled people would shun you at the next launch they wouldn't want

44:50you there well then I shouldn't even listen to it yeah exactly he just you had the group think had been established yeah and peer pressure is tremendous within the rock crittur was tremendous within the rock kritis tabla shman The Rock The Rock critics and it goes that's so much power back then it's so crazy but they were so rigidly conformity enforced now this wasn't unique to the 1970s and 1980s because Carlisle the social commentator Thomas Carlisle in England and approximately 1832 wrote about the pop culture critics of his day and his day pop culture was novels and plays and how and he compared them to sheep and he explained how if you take a cane and you put it out the sheep walk in single file you can get two thousand sheep all walking in single file and if you put your cane out in front of the lead sheep and the lead sheep jumped over your cane and then you

45:49with drew the cane every one of the other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine sheep would jump at precisely the same spot even though there was nothing to jump over anymore well that's how I perceived the rock crit elite and my job was to turn them around but my job was also to see true ecstatics like prints like John Michael Jackson was not an ecstatic onstage Michael Jackson was an incredible astonishing performer who had studied his craft from the age of nine and so he worked out every single move in advance John you never knew from one night to the next what prince or John Mellencamp were going to do in performance they didn't know how well did you know Michael Jackson I thought very very well and he was the most remarkable person I've ever met in my life and when I tell people how were merkel they don't believe me he was you know you and I and Jamie are

46:47on a certain level and we don't know we're on a certain level because we figured these are the range this is the range of humanity if we go out and meet anybody on the street or even anybody famous I work with Buzz Aldrin these days what we're gonna encounter is another person pretty much like us sorry in Michael Jackson's case he did not fit on this normal plane at all he was on a plane somewhere where you've never seen a human being before so the first time I met him we were at his brother Marlins have pool house it's a little house with just enough room for one big room on the first floor and another big room on the second floor with a little tiny staircase between them and there's a billiard table in the middle of the room and there are arcade games which at that point in particular 1983 were unattainable no human could afford arcade games unless you were Steve Wynn

47:46and you were actually equipping in arcade so we're in the middle that we're in this room and Michael and I are standing next to each other so his elbow is that his left elbow is it my right elbow his left knee is at my right knee and we have a meeting with the art director from CBS I'm condensing the story there's lots more but we're having a meeting with the art director and she walks in with five of the most gorgeous portfolios you've ever seen in your life hand-carved cherry wood hand-carved leather and these are from guys I know because I was I started in pop culture in the art business and these were my legendary competitors and and Michael opens the first page of the first portfolio and he gets a square inch into it a postage stamp-sized piece into it and he goes oh and his knees begin to buckle and he gets another two square into it just lifts the page a little bit further

48:49oh he lifts it an even further oh Michael is seeing the infinite in the things that even the artist didn't see it with such infinity as Michael is seeing it and by the time he gets to the full page he's having a full-scale aesthetic orgasm I have never seen anything like this in my life and remember the first two rules of science are the truth at any price including the price of your life and look at things run under right under your nose as if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there Michael is seeing the infinite in the tiniest of things and you've never seen a human with this degree of awe Wonder and surprise anywhere in your life and I will never see another human like that again in my lifetime Michael was beyond belief utterly beyond belief and his commitment to his audience to his the people he called his kids Oh God I forgot to turn this off so

49:51let's of course you're an Android guy too yes Oh God how do we I know well we pulled down from here I'm an incompetent with this stuff how could you be a couple for people who don't see you yeah because a lot of people are listening he has literally a Batman utility belt with two Kindles you have two Kindles strapped to you at all times right you have the headphones for the podcast I have a total of three pair of headphones on me because they were out so quickly and they don't need to replace them yeah well no I'm petting dogs and that Yanks them around that the the best quality sound that I've been able to get is in $8 headphones what it doesn't make any sense it's extraordinary sound it's just that the wiring goes why why is it the best quality sound those cheap-ass headphones it has the best quality bass that I've ever got yours yeah no one's there like straight wires with clear

50:52covers I mean I actually get very annoyed when Apple got rid of the microphone jack headphone jack on their phone well I would be annoyed - yeah because of that yes such a high quality sound right so I'm surrounded with electronica but when it comes to my phone my phone and I do not agree on what a command is so whenever well when I try to pick up the phone and answer it it hangs up when I'm not trying to do anything on the phone it interprets that as a hand gesture of some sort and does something which one are you using the Samsung Note 8 okay well you know some people think that Samsung's got a little bit of bloatware and there's some yeah since you're an Android guy have you ever considered using like a Google pixel to like well I like a visual Android I like a big screen pixel to excel screen well that would be very that would be very neat six-point-two would be terrific it also

51:45when you squeeze the sides yeah Google assistant pops up yeah yeah you squeeze the sides and you just start asking a question Nate well I need to find one that's also got the headphone jack on the top they don't have a headphone jack that's what I'm saying because if you use if you use Bluetooth right if it's tuned to your felt a cell phone you can't tune it to your Kindle and you can't tune it to your laptop that I need to be able to switch between those three devices simultaneously right so do you have that Kindle Fire HD application where you can listen to it and then as you're reading in it picks up back where you were listening well it does it's supposed to do that but sometimes it really blimps out and takes me 30 pages of where far away from where I was reading and becomes hard to find where I was reading that's out I mean you know this is why I cursed Jeff Bezos I hope

52:37he knows what he's doing in space better than he knows what he's doing with the Kindle HDX well I just don't think he could possibly know all the things he's doing yeah but you hire good people who do know this why isn't he supposed to be cheap like in terms of like how he pays workers at the Amazon fact I was imagine that when it comes to Blue Origin his rocket company that he is not cheap oh I didn't even know he had a rocket company s he has a rocket company he's Elon Musk yeah he thinks that he thinks that that SpaceX an Elon Musk are the hair and he's the tortoise so he has launched a rocket the same rocket eight times now and landed it again really yeah same rock the same rocket so he's demonstrated multiple reuse the problem is that his rocket can't can only get to the fringes of space it can't really get into orbital space is right here Jamie

53:31just pulled it up you could look at it right there ha ha yes that's it Wow is that real that's a real Jamie that's totally why does it look fake you haven't seen it before I don't know doesn't that look like CG are you I'm like 80 Bravo so it could be but he's actually launched this thing a time what's with the golf ball inside there I have no clue it's probably demonstrating that it that it's weightless we really strong our time of super geniuses dude incredible and this is how it lands it was the same way that's exactly it that's incredible and Elon says you know that Elon has been landing his rockets and he wants to read and he's been reusing him I think he's done 11 were uses so far or something like that but Elon is saying that he's gonna get so precise in his landings that the Rockets will land precisely on the brackets from which they took off Wow

54:26yeah so it was on the same pad I mean yeah I was a fairly small pad that the Bezos rock so basis is a very well controlled rocket eelain's you saw after the Falcon Heavy launch the pictures of the two boosters landing simultaneously within a hundred yards of you have to bring that up sometime because it's an astonishing I'll exercise dose is the Amazon Prime videos they're putting out they're putting out some really great shows yeah they're putting out a lot of stand-up comedy now's well right which they're trying to somewhat compete with Netflix and if you have a there it is right there heavy well though that's that's it yeah that's the money shot yeah Wow landing simultaneous unbelievable yeah so the goal here is up until now NASA which has been dumbed down so much it's ridiculous by Congress in the Senate yeah Congress in the Senate or insist on designing their own rockets and ordered

55:27Roose jobs programs not to get us to space right is that what the problem is it's a funding issue too right it's like you have to have immediate results for the amount of money it's worse than that the there's a little thing called the Alabama mafia it's a bunch of senators and congressmen from Texas and Colorado and ms mississippi and all the states that have rocket jobs and they have designed a rocket called the Space Launch System and it's going to cost thirty billion dollars to design it and it's a throwaway rocket so it's going to cost one to two billion dollars for each flight you think this is intentional it's intentionally yes it's intentionally stupid you think said yeah because it's designed for jobs and the result is we Americans haven't had access to space on american-made vehicles since 2011 that's a long time now when we do get access to manned

56:20space it's going to come from Elon Musk it's not going to come from any of the major space companies and three billion dollars a year is sunk into this Space Launch System this turkey and another turkey called the Orion and that's money that needs we need that money to actually design habitats on the moon design mining equipment to mine the ice on the moon and turn it into rocket fuel and breathable oxygen and drinkable water and there are tons of things we need but NASA's not producing them because it's trying to compete with Elon and Jeff Elon and Jeff know a secret if I volunteered to fly you to New York City and I told you I'm gonna do this for free I'm not gonna charge you a penny all you have to pay are the expenses and then I bought you a Boeing 737 for $325,000 and allowed you and one friend to get into this thing and then I flew you to New York and then I flew the

57:14plane out into the Atlantic over the Atlantic and plowed it into the Atlantic Ocean and discarded it now when but I'm doing this all without charging you anything you realize so when you want to fly back from New York to California I'll buy you another 737 another 325 thousand dollars and fly you back and then I'll fly the 737 out over Pacific and I will ditch it this is the way we do space at NASA right now so how much would it cost you per ticket for you and a friend to go from LA to New York and back again approximately three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per ticket how often would you fly from New York from LA to New York not very often if ever so that's what NASA is doing with this space launch system and it's gobbling up so much money there's no funding left for the stuff we really need to do do you think it would be better if they just privatized the

58:11entire venture it would be better if they offered were to call cots programs where you ask companies to bid on getting a rocket wherever you want it to go and doing with that rocket whatever you want it to do and then let Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and United Launch Alliance which is a big company underwritten by the government that is I can never remember the names of with the companies but it's Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined and allow them all to bid on this because Elon is gonna bring it in for a tenth the cost Elon has developed the Falcon Heavy for approximately two billion dollars he's developed all of his rockets for approximately two billion dollars for all of them it's costing NASA 30 billion dollars to develop a turkey now how do they how do they keep doing that in the face of these guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos congressmen and Senators

59:06don't care they simply want to maintain the jobs in their districts plus if they feed the smick the space military-industrial complex the space military-industrial complex will kick back contributions to their campaign funds as a result so this is an evil spiral Buzz Aldrin calls these the darth vader's of space for Lockheed Martin's and Northrop Grumman the big aerospace with traditional aerospace contractors so Congress incent a certain number it's a cabal of senators and congressmen who are screwing us up because a country a country that dreams big gets big a country that looks up goes up a country that looks down goes down we've covered become accustomed to looking down because we don't have that a glorious option the moon is way behind us buzz and and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon that's a long time ago that's two generations two and a half generations ago and kids

60:09in America have lost that dream of creating a paradise above the sky because NASA's abandoned them and it's mass has been forced to abandon them by these congressmen and senators who steal this money from the NASA budget but if that money were used look that three billion dollars a year would mean that you could develop an entire Elon Musk space program and launch roughly 20 rockets that is the issue the the actual engineers and the scientists themselves I mean they must know it's these politicians right but the politicians are they belong distant engineers create y'all say hey you must create something that is disposable yes today is that really a conversation that's taking place yes because these guys have said okay we want to use space shuttle left over space shuttle technology and we and they've they've mapped out the specifications of the rocket that they

61:04want these guys are doing some yes that's right how's that possible oh it's easy that seems disgusting they control the budget and one of the tricks that this smick the space military industrial complex is known for a long time is you try to parcel our jobs to as many states as possible so major programs like the the latest fighter that the Air Force the Navy are being told to use those represent jobs in roughly 45 States each that means that if you're Lockheed Martin and you want to keep your contract for a plane that people are claiming can lose to a 1951 era MIG all you have to do is hit the congressmen and Senators from those 47 states and they'll all back you why because they're counting on your campaign contributions where are you going to get the money to give them a campaign contributions from that billion to three billion dollar nipple per year that NASA has been forced to

62:08extend you or that the Air Force has been forced to extend to you it's a very corrupt system that's a dirty system and it means that the Russians and the Chinese can develop equivalent aircraft for example for 1/10 the price and deliver them for 1/10 the person would be mean you're totally talking about two super geniuses Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk imagine where it would be if they didn't exist and exactly the odds are very high that they wouldn't exist the odds are very high that somebody could do away with them it would be fairly easy hey don't even put that out there yeah well the front man on Friday or no Sunday at the National Space Society Xan Ewell event I'm talking about China's new Silk Road versus America's Highway in the sky the New Silk Road the Chinese government's going to put in two trillion dollars its total of a 20 trillion dollar project it pulls

62:58together something like 66 countries and 3.3 billion people and I co-founded and chaired something called the Asian space technology summit in Kuala Lumpur last May just about exactly a year ago and it was obvious being in Malaysia that China has bought Malaysia's heart that Americans don't count for much anymore because the Chinese are already spending money they already own 15 to 20 ports they own 15 to 20 ports Piraeus which is the port of Athens the city that was the cradle of Western civilization guess who owns it the Chinese and they're upgrading these ports to do things that no port we've ever seen before has been able to do so because they have a big vision a really big vision they're going to dominate the 21st century the 20th was the American Century this is gonna be the Chinese century unless we counter with an equally big vision and the big

63:55visions are not coming from Donald Trump in Washington DC or from senators and congressmen they are coming from precisely the people you fingered they're coming from Washington they're coming from California they're coming from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos the two guys who can save us by opening a platinum Highway in the sky what does that mean a platinum highway in the sky means a space economy one meteor called something like aimin 335 has more resources than the gross domestic product of England France Italy and South Korea combined in one meteor it was meteor I want I forgot to throw in India India's in that list too combined so is the idea to mine this mean your yes on it and yes exact someone another extract resources yes bring them back to her but if NASA seriously wants us to develop that space economy they have to do their part they have to deal on and Jeff are bringing

64:55the Rockets to the table right now reusable rockets like the 737s that we have now that we turn around in LA and send back to New York and then turn around and New York and send back to LA for 35 to 40 years each they amortize their costs they allow you to get a round-trip ticket for as low as two hundred and twenty dollars on a really good day that's what's happening with space but where's the mining equipment going to come from that something NASA needs to be working on plus the mining equipment for the moon to turn the moon basically into a fuel station just think about this while also thinking about all the other things you think because I do my best thinking what I'm thinking about 15 things at once and that's why the music is there cuz my mind is empty if I don't have because that's another threat going on at the same time I want to bring you back to

65:44something you said earlier that you've sort of glossed over but you were talking about quantum physicists right getting everything wrong so we flew to Moscow no and I've debunked that in a book called the God problem how a godless cosmos creates that has five heresies and heresy number one is that one is that a does not equal a that's Aristotle's primary law of identity no it's not always true one of the laws is the theory of entropy is so wrong censoring means that all everything is falling apart constantly and that in order to make something positive happen you have to shed more negative energy not really negative energy more dispersed waste energy and in fact the universe doesn't look worked like that the universe in the very beginning it formed quarks from from nothing but motion quarks for motion are you kidding me yeah the first things from movement are you joshing no

66:44and then the quarks had to get together in groups of three because this is a profoundly social Universal they couldn't survive and one form of quark like this with one up and two down or something like that is a neutron and the other direction three quarks is a proton and all of this is anti-entropic and then what do all of these billiard balls do what all these particles do 280,000 years later they begin sweet themselves together in these massive social agglomerations that look like big potatoes and those are the beginnings of galaxies before they form their spiral arms and stuff like that and then within the the spiral arms of these galaxies gravity balls are competing with each other to see who's the biggest gravity ball and the biggest winds and what does he do to the loser's he swallows them and gets even bigger which makes it possible for that gravity

67:38ball to confront another bunch of gravity balls and beat them out for size and swallow them eventually what happens is you get so much gravity and so much matter in this gravity ball that the gravity ball explodes that's called a Sun a star and around it are smaller gravity balls that manage to hold their own in competitions and their planets and moons how the hell do you go even this short distance into the life of galaxies that's been around for 13.7 billion years with precisely the opposite of entropy happening what is the official definition of entropy how is it defined by Webster's dictionary do you know it's usually a Wiesel definition Wiesel yeah in other words it's deliberately obscure because it's a weird subject yeah funny but every priesthood has a Shibboleth a Shibboleth is a magic word if you can't pronounce it you're dead and so every tribe wants

68:37you to believe in something that's impossible remember the Red Queen or the White Queen and Alice in Wonderland said sometimes I dream up six impossible things or breakfast yeah yeah and you have to pass the test by showing that you believe in something that's obviously fatuously wrong and that's the end and the Shibboleth for being considered a legitimate scientist is preaching allegiance to pledging allegiance to entropy pull it up let me see what it says here okay it says a measure of the unavailable energy and a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the systems disorder that is a property of the system state and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system broadly the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system so that's what they're saying

69:36this the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system now obviously that's a very lucid explanation and you could recite it to a five-year-old that need to understand exactly what you were saying it's very weaselly it has lots of outs so my book the god problem how a godless cosmos creates debunks that along with a bunch of other assumptions in currency how does that assumption exist he blew because in the 19th century when this was formulated the metaphor of the day was the steam engine it was the hot new technology it was to the the 19th century what computers are to the 22nd century or whatever we're living in now the 21st century sorry and so what they realized was you take this steam and you push it into a piston and it throws that piston up into the air and then the piston comes back down again but then there's waste the steam then has lost its energy and it comes out of

70:44an exhaust valve and you put in more hot steam right so this was a theory about the waste that comes out of the steam engine but now that we don't have I mean cars yes they producing now would you say that solar power and solar power does not produce exhaust so where's the entropy right but where's the entropy that story of the universe I was telling you a gradation of the batteries because I mean they are all yes that could be but it's a it's a squidge compared to the construction of a Sun right it's a squidge compared to the construction of a galaxy and all that random stuff in the universe all those random particles first of all they're not random they all participate in something the universe rings like a Gong and it's early days it has pressure waves that means that these elementary particles are scooching together and forming a wave it's a technical term yes and and then there

71:46scooching apart and they're forming a trough and then they're screwing together again and that wave ripples across the cosmos the way that you see waves rippling across the Pacific when you're flying to Hawaii is that an tropic is that disorder constantly increasing no it's the very opposite what the universities it takes every form of waste and turns it into an opportunity it I mean what we call this place Earth what are we naming it for the excreta of worms the of worms because they produced what we call soil well think of the meaning of that word soil when something is soiled what is it like it's not covered with earthy loam it's dirty so and we call it dirt when it's in the earth so we are taking this entropic stuff the that came out of worms and we're firming in it and plants are growing and it trees are growing in it flowers are growing in it is that entropy is that a continual

72:52slide toward disorder it's the very opposite it's a continual slide toward order and higher degrees of form how is this theory been received well or your interpretation if that's a good question because I really have no answer the people who I sent the book to in the early days all of them except well including a Nobel Prize winner and I think three MacArthur Genius award winners all said this is a great book and one compared it to of Charles Lyell's history of the earth which gave Darwin a lot of ideas and to Darwin's origin of the species and asked is this really a great book like those two books and the answer has been yes and this is the Lucifer principle no this is an odd problem how a godless cosmos creates and and let's not forget for the sake of the audience we're actually here to promote how accidently stirred in the 60s the news is my newest book fifth right it's

73:54my sixth book six but it was actually written during those five years when I couldn't talk the first draft was written during those five years so there I was laying in bed not able to talk and I know from all of my research that when you are a human who feels of no value to your fellow human beings you begin to die your immune system goes into under under performance and stops protecting you from diseases so I needed to somehow maintain a social set of connections despite the fact that I couldn't talk and my own wife couldn't walk into the room and read a newspaper with me so what did I do I figured okay most sick people to churn out what are called repulsion cues cues that drive other people away they don't want to be near you when you're sick and suffering they really don't kind as they may be so you have to put out attraction cues the opposite of repulsion cues and what's an

74:48a-number-one Attraction cue it's humor so there I was reading Dave berry and reading PG Wodehouse and these guys were lifting me for an hour or two above my misery giving me this transcendent humor that just took me out of my state at that point so I tried to write transcendent humor and I wrote this story of how I accidentally helped form a movement on the west coast that had no name and then I left the country when I got back the loose Empire the time-life Empire had given it a name they called it the hippie movement and I tried to write it as absolutely and as funny a manner as possible and then when I was finished writing it I wrote because I couldn't talk I wrote a letter in those days they had to be snail mailed because most people didn't have email back then I did but most people didn't and I snail mailed my friend Eric gardener because Eric Gardner had started out in the music

75:43business as a roadie for the Jefferson Airplane and I wrote Eric and said Eric I just written this book could you get it to the Jefferson Airplane because if I could get them to say something positive about that about it that validated it because they were a key act in the 1960s and Eric said no no I have somebody better send me the manuscript so I sent him the manuscript and he got the manuscript to this other client of his and the other client came back with a quote that said it's a monumental masterpiece of American literature and filled with wild woman experiences and non-stop waves of scientific comedy routines and non-stop waves of hilarity and compared it to James Joyce and said Wow whoo ha ha and it and signed it Timothy Leary and I thought this can't be for real this just can't be for real but it was 1995 and what I didn't know it took me 15 years to find out is that

76:37Timothy Leary got this book when he was sick in bed like I was he was dying of prostate cancer this book reached him six months before he would die of prostate cancer and I had written the book to be on a plane of humor that would yank you out of your body and yank you up to an ethereal plane of humor because you were trying to do that to yourself I needed to since these two guys had done it for me I needed to do my best to do it for others and to attract people to stick with me because I sent these things out as letters the chapter is out as letters to friends hoping a few friends would still stick with me and when Leary read it apparently it did for him what Woodhouse and Dave berry had done for me and I was stunned when I found that out absolutely stunned so yes Virginia you can be in the worst of all possible circumstances and you can pull together something from those

77:31circumstances as a gift to your fellow humans and yes you will doubt that it will ever be a value to any human on the planet because that's what that's how us humans feel about muster or endeavors but someday it just may save somebody who's in a position equivalent to yours that's amazing that is amazing what are the other things that the quantum physicist got wrong well all of them for for that was a four-day conference in a Pensione just outside Moscow 50 miles outside of Moscow it was a worker's paradise built in the 1960s and and all the people there all the physicists were going around drawing the same diagram on napkins to explain what they were talking about in its diagram of how shortened Jers equation manifested itself in one single isolated electron well guess what Joe there's no such thing as an isolated electron in this universe there's no such thing as

78:29an isolated quanta of light and it's isolated photon of light there's no such thing as an isolated anything I mean when you look up at the night sky what do you see stars some of those stars are 13 billion light-years away it's taken 13 billion years for that light to get to us but we can still see those lights with a telescope is if there is light flooding the entire universe from those stars how could this be how could there ever be a particle living on its own not awash in light gravitational effects electromagnetic effects from all the other things in the universe or at least a good many of them so why is this why is this misconception prevalent it because the the equation fits certain very artificial experiments that were set up in the lab and once an experiment is done and accepted than everybody who doesn't get the same results thinks he's doing it wrong and

79:30does it over and over again till he gets the same results and the explanation for some reason a lot of people in stores think we're on our own no we're never on our own we're always under the influence of other human beings and look at the Stars yeah only the light is reaching us they're not determining whether your girlfriend's going to argue with you tomorrow like your horoscope says but there's that influence merely being able to see them so I was basically lecturing these guys about a social cosmos in which conversation information exchange is constantly taking place all over the place and the and the fact that trope ensures equation assumes an isolated entity and there are no isolated entities in this universe and when I was finished I expected them to throw me out of their comforts and instead they sat there is if this had been my bar mitzvah and I just done a

80:24haftorah or whatever it's called that you do go to Bar Mitzvah and they were my uncles they were all sitting back their faces were beaming they were smiling you know that radiance that redness that infects a faceless excited about something it was astonishing and I couldn't understand why and then three years later I have a collaborator in theoretical physics Pavel kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of live mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Pavel emailed me and said dr. ushakov the man who ran that conference the man who gave you such a hard time about your credit card he's just written a book you have to download it from arc cyborg which is the leading site for preprints and advanced mathematics and advanced theoretical physics in the world and so I downloaded it put it on my Kindle and listened to the first half while I was taking my afternoon walk these long

81:14walks through the park can be very helpful and when I got to the cafe where I was working in those days and got my laptop in front of me I wrote to dr. Usha Clough then I said dr. Usha klav I don't know if you remember me I'm that crazy American who spoke at your conference but I've just read the first half of your book and it's phenomenal he used every concept that I had given in my presentation every concept and I got one of those almost instant emails back an email that comes within two or three hours and who said remember you know didn't you read the first half of my book and we are credited in there my partner Pavel and I so two at least a bunch of quantum physicists from 11 time zones gathering in Moscow what I was saying made sense quantum physics doesn't make sense to me well I've tried yeah I'd really it makes about the same sense as that definition you were just reading of

82:10entropy exactly I'll go over it and over it again and get little chunks of it right and I would understand like sections of sentences right and then I'd have to try to put them together with the other sections it's hard it's tough stuff but one of the most important things I think was in the old war who said this I'm not quite sure but one of the members of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics said that basically a particle exists in many states simultaneously and it's not until it's measured that it collapses into one stage that's one of the basic principles of quantum physics well guess what Niels every particle is being measured in some way all the time all of its life by other particles that are basically taking its measure and then responding essentially nothing is isolated nothing is isolated in this particular cosmos you were talking I watched a

83:00video where you were talking about that there is essentially a universal brain well yes because you and I right now we're gonna be talking to possibly out of your 500 words it's more like 1 million total viewers and listeners more than that so it's probably closer to 3 yeah so we're gonna be talking to let's say a hundred thousand of them or two hundred thousand of them and they're processing what we are saying right now there are bacteria and your god and mine who live in enormous colonies and enormous bacteria colony if you had it on the palm of your hand it would be the size of your hand but you couldn't see it are you thinking of this while you're saying it are you thinking of the vast numbers of people that are listening and watching or you just relaying the information like are you are you cognizant yep both both because I want remember Einstein gave me my marching

83:55orders you have to take complex ideas and simplify them so much that I mean with a high school education and a reasonable degree of on intelligence can understand them and I want to make good radio for your audience but once you what I'm trying to get at is once you have got it established in your head that nothing is isolated that everything is connected when you speak are you aware when you're speaking that everything is connected I mean are you are you actually consciously thinking of all of these different Minds taking into account all these different mind-blowing things you're saying and then applying them out in the world I think so yeah I mean you know if you hear coming out of my mouth that's what's churning around in my brain I'm just you're you're such a bright guy I'm just trying to understand if you are in the moment or if you're in the moment as well as being consciously

84:45aware of the spread of information my obligation is to do both simultaneously yeah yeah that's my obligation is what I assumed yeah so at any rate so that the entropic Theory doesn't make any sense the I mean look there I wasn't Abed right right so you would think I'm totally isolated I'm not you know I'm not I mean once upon a time I wrote an essay about Descartes well Descartes came up with the idea of I think therefore I am he took a retreat in Amsterdam he rented a second-floor apartment and he was trying to isolate himself the way that those particles are isolated with the Schrodinger's equation the particles that were being drawn on napkins in Moscow and so that he could strip everything away and find out what was the most basic thing the most basic axiom the most basic thing we take for granted in life and he came up with I think therefore I am now think about

85:44this for a minute while he was trying to think this out he was needing a rubbery gum eraser with which he erased his ink he was sitting on the second floor which means somebody had event of the architecture that he was sitting in and the concept of the floor and the concept of beams that go across from one wall to the other that were holding him up he was looking out the window and he was looking at the hats that the amsterdam men and women were wearing as they walked by and he was the cleaning lady whom he made pregnant so how isolated really was he the universal mind theory this that or this concept I shouldn't say theory it the way you were describing it is very interesting that there is no individual thought that essentially there's lots of individual thought it's all connected right to all the other people that are around you and all the people

86:39that you've interacted with and all the places you've been the things you've seen and all the people that are constantly thinking simultaneously around you that you're wearing and the people that you're trying to influence because I'm trying to influence people all day long if you want somebody to bring you a sandwich you have to get across that you want that sandwich yeah and especially if you want somebody like a wife or an assistant to bring you a sandwich and that's not normally what they do then you really have to work hard in influence come but but the the universe at least the living part of the universe and so far we only know of life on this planet it's all interconnected those bacteria I was talking about they're in your gut they are making your vitamin B they are making your vitamin K they are making an awful lot of things that you use to survive they're also

87:24making chemicals that influence your mind and your moods they're manipulating you so when you go now to the corner store to buy some chocolate eclairs and you go home and you eat them in fact you can only digest a small portion of the chocolate eclair those bacterial colonies living in your gut they do the rest of the digesting for you so who's really going to the corner store who's really the boss who's really driving you the vehicle of transportation are these bacteria driving you down to the corner sir so that you will feed them the stuff that they love the most or are as your will driving you to the corner store well the answer is a little of both a little of both not as much of both I mean there there's this example of there's this fungus and the fungus has a very peculiar lifestyle and I'm very curious to find out how it got this lifestyle but it lives half of its life

88:22in an ant colony and half of its life in a sheep so when it comes out of the phase of that it goes through in the ant colony and is ready to go into the sheep it takes over the brain of an ant and it gets that ant to climb to the top of a stalk of grass why because when the sheep come along to graze they will inhale the ant what you're telling me that a fungus can control the mind of an ant in ways that we're just beginning to explore now this year and maybe last year a tiny little bit that it can actually be that precise in how it takes over the controls lesson I needed to one of those the fungus that gets inside those ants and the ants are aware of it so they take the ant away because the ant will explode and spray spores into the air and affect the in fact although I'm not aware of that one but it sounds cordyceps yeah it's yeah but it but it sounds similar yeah but

89:22but as a real deal is okay life on this earth functions the way that a beehive functions and how does a beehive function ninety-five percent of the bees are our conformist bees and they go out to the hot flower patch of the day and they mine the nectar and they have a public stomach in which they can carry this stuff I mean built into them inside of them and they have these caring hairs on their thighs and they carry pollen in those and when they arrive at the unloading bay there is an unloading day in the hive and when they arrive at the unloading bay if the unloaders know that the interior really needs pollen and nectar and they see you carrying that pollen and nectar they stick their tongues down your throat to check out what's in your public stomach they go wild with excitement when they discover it's filled with nectar they check out your thighs the carrying hairs on your thighs

90:15they go wild when they see that you're carrying pollen they feel you all over with their antennae they are intensely excited when they are unloading you and that gets you excited you feel like a rock star because this is the same kind of attention a rock star gets so you go back out to the flower patch of the day and mine some more meanwhile there are these lazy good-for-nothing bohemian bees there anyway from 5% to 20% of the colony and they don't do a single useful thing at all and so far as you can see they don't do anything to earn their keep in the colony why because they're out doing loop after loop after loop and lazy eights after lazy eights after lazy eights they'll fly eight miles just following their whim following their whims I mean if you were their mother what would you say you're wasting your life for god sakes okay eventually you the conformist be start

91:12coming back without pollen and you're carrying hairs and without nectar and your public something because the flower patch the hot flower patch of the day has been thoroughly plundered and when you arrive at the unloading dock of the hive the unloading bee stick their tongue into your public stomach empty sorry they see your caring hair is empty they turn their backs on you so savagely that you feel as if you've been cut dead and if finally I mean you can't believe that the old factory is not delivering anymore and it's not giving you a paycheck so you keep going back to the same patch over and over again more slowly each time until finally you give up and you literally crawl into the hive and Thomas Sealy the guy who's done most of the research on this calls you an unemployed bee and you are as depressed as if you were unemployed how do we know that because your body temperature is

92:03down and you're crawling instead of walking and you're begging for food from other bees well you look for something to perk you up now what humans use a football game a movie bees use pretty much the same thing what does that mean they go to the unloading dock out of the 200 lazy good-for-nothing bohemian B is simply following their instincts five have come back having found new flour patches and they are dancing and the dancing excites you and they're dancing in competition with each other some will dance twenty seven seconds some will dance twenty seven minutes and if you find the dance of one of those dancers sufficiently persuasive it lifts you out of your lethargy gets you excited and you fly out she's giving a little in a little figure eight dance she is giving precise instructions on how to get to the flower patch and what the headwinds are and

92:59what the tail winds are and you pick up her message you fly out to the flower patch that she has recommended and you check it out for yourself and if you get excited about it you come back and you start dancing and ultimately the bee who gets the greatest number of back dancers wins and you all go out all you can form us bees were now unemployed go out to the new hot flower patch of the day and the same pattern repeats itself now that's a collective mind operating on the basis of 20,000 independent bees and that the living world operates in pretty much the same way bacteria are using you to get them chocolate éclairs you are using them to digest chocolate éclairs they are teasing our scientists into wild activity by threatening to develop illnesses that can bypass all of our antibiotics which by the way our chemical weapons that microorganisms colonies and microorganisms used to kill

93:59entire competing colonies we stole them from microorganisms we didn't invent them antibiotics so the scientists are very aware of the fact that the bees are that the bacteria are getting ahead of us in research and development and are beginning to develop techniques to get around all of our drugs so they are researching their ass off so is there any common brain that links the bacteria to the scientific community you bet they're competing with each other and in the process of competing with each other what are they doing they are both creating new options for all of life Wow so when we're talking about antibiotics penicillin amoxicillin stuff like that these are bacteria created create boys bacteria make war with each other when people tell you we are the only creatures that make war there alone so is this why also when especially if you're experimenting with your diet

94:57people that have a very sugar based diet they have a high number of certain kind of bacteria in their stomach that craves that kind of sugar that makes it very difficult to get off that that kind of a diet well that's interesting I mean I'm not aware of that but it sounds it sounds logical they've got really about yeah the biome it's gone yeah yeah when you find out one of the things if you're trying to alter your diet if you're in a very high refined carbohydrate diet and you try to get off of that the have intense cravings but those eventually go away especially when you supplement with a lot of probiotics and then you go to a high-fat low-carbohydrate diet you start to crave those kind of foods and the cravings for sugar and bread go away it's very strange well that's interesting because I am on a very restricted diet I have it is development myself you know yes I developed it myself

95:51it's take it took 30 years and it's a diet that maximizes my energy and my ability to concentrate what's a tandem you know there are only two meals breakfast is a can of tuna fish and avocado and a mango that's at 10:30 in the morning dinner which is at 3 o'clock or 2:30 in the morning 2:30 the morning yeah remember I'm on side schedule and I'm primarily nocturnal because of my illness right so dinner is a half a pound of ground chicken a pound of frozen vegetables an apple an orange and a banana why frozen vegetable because you can get them in one-pound bags so it's precisely pre-measured for you and they freeze them when they're fresh and you can throw them along with a slab of chopped chicken a frozen slab into a microwavable container and microwave them for 15 minutes I mean throw a lot of spices in so that you change the flavor but day after day and you've got

96:59dinner and that's all you ever eat that's all I ever eat except on Friday I allow myself to eat sauces and cheese sauces out of a jar because I don't eat things that have artificial ingredients or additives of any kind normally and so I have this wonking huge meal and then on Saturday allowing myself to splurge on absolutely anything I want to eat so that's your cheat day yeah what do you find yourself going to on a cheat day well these days I've sort of settled into a pattern I take one frozen bagel a big one out of the refrigerator I slice it in half I put huge amounts of peanut butter on one Haley first I use a quarter of a pound of butter and i slather on the two halves of the bagel because I'm not allowed to eat any of these things bread not allowed to eat butter no I well we're told the butter is bad for us and it and dairy turned out to be a problem for me and I had to

97:53work out I had to work away around my food allergies and this is the dawn of an analogy to dairy I apparently did I'm not sure I still do but so these huge honking amounts of butter and then I take these giant slabs of peanut butter and I Powell them up with a leaving a little hole in the center and in the hole in the center I put grape jam and strawberry jam and then I take out the marshmallow fluff and I put out almost an entire jar of marshmallow fluff on top of this one half a bagel because I really want to taste the bagel naked with just butter on it because I haven't had bread all week and it can taste really good and I indulging myself with this other half of the bagel how bad do you feel after you digest that I don't feel bad I eat before I go to sleep and well eating put you to sleep why should you have to slog through the gray goo of your after meal experience with your

98:52friends I mean if I'm with a friend I want to be at my maximum I want to enjoy then how do I enjoy myself with my mouth open and my tongue going right so and even having food in your mouth is just preventing you from having a good conversation Wow that's a fascinating way to approach it so you just well also if you carve up like that you know with all that sugar and carbs you're gonna want to crash about 40 minutes after you're done and that turns out to be the case anyway so I sleep immediately after my breakfast and then I sleep immediately after my dinner and that's the way that it is arranged it's arranged to maximize the useful high energy high focus time now did they ever try to put you on any kind of a feta means or anything no not really and and my experience you know I helped start the 60s so I helped start the drug culture and that meant I did amphetamine

99:47twice it was brand new back then in whatever ever form it was popular provigil or new vigil I have a friend who has chronic fatigue and that's what they put him on well the stuff I'm on work so well I don't want to mess with it at this point I'm lucky to be out of that bed I thought I would i jo I thought I would never be out of that bedroom again in my life and you've been out of the bed for 15 years well since yeah that's 15 years that's a man right so I'm giving three speeches this week at the en 15 out yeah right yep so you have so much energy it's hard to imagine you being bedridden I mean it really is you're you're I couldn't form a single syllable I mean I believe you yeah I do believe you but I'm just saying it's seeing you in this state you're smiling you're and obviously what you said about enjoying conversation is so apparent you know I really enjoy getting these ideas

100:42across well this is tremendous I mean I I'm still dealing with how to get across the idea of a global brain but it's basically every creature on the face of the earth isn't some like contributing to our knowledge base and our hunter-gatherer days if we were going to bring down a deer and eat it for dinner we had to get to know the mentality of that deer we had to be able to a pit in our own mind so we could anticipate its movements so we anticipated the movements of lions we anticipated the movements of eagles we turned lions and eagles and bears into totems and named ourselves after them because we were trying to learn from their very spirit we were trying to learn muscularly and emotionally how to be them so that we could defeat them when the time came there's a connection there there's a global brain taking place right there and the deer and the blood on the bison

101:31and the other creatures we were hunting even the woolly mammoths could not have lived without those bacteria in their guts now we didn't discover those bacteria until Anton van Lewin Hoch dared to take his lens and instead of having it horizontal to measure fabrics or look at fabrics started looking down at his own sperm which was a very I mean look at what this guy did he's a tradesman he's not a trained scientist of course the word scientist didn't exist until at roughly 1850 but nonetheless he is taking his observations of fresh human sperm through his newly invented microscope and he the observations he's discovered that there are animal fuels little animals hmm totally independent flailing around in the sperm and he writes a lengthy letter about this to the Royal Society now what is he just John Joe to the Royal Society he's confessed to masturbation where do you think he got

102:28the sperm I mean it took me about 40 years of thinking about it maybe 50 to work it out and then I suddenly realized this guy is why does masturbation keep showing up in my life one look the Boy Scouts threw me out when I was 11 years old for incompetence at Morse code and if they hadn't thrown me out for incompetence of that they could have thrown me out for incompetence at not tying now admittedly I've never heard of another human being ever being thrown out of the Boy Scouts but still then in my thrown out of the voice that's right what happened at Morse code is it Morse code right being incompetent at Morse code yeah it seems so simple to me it wasn't simple so at any rate I mean I was too busy with theoretical physics and cosmology saying so you're just one interested yeah it wasn't that you were incompetent you really never bothered or it was too much I had other better

103:16things to do something better than Morse code Yeah right right so at any rate then in the in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college I mean I dropped out for three years so I was going to back to a freshman year at the age of 21 why did you drop out well I wanted to find the beatniks I wanted to finds an Buddhist Satori at the Zen Buddhist state of enlightenment I was dead serious about those things I was in the top 10% of a class that had higher median SATs than the classes at Harvard MIT and Caltech that year it was at Reed College the school that Steve Jobs would eventually drop out of a very tough school and I didn't realize I was in the top 10% but nonetheless I had these things I wanted to do I was inspired by on the road I felt the beatniks were the first people who would ever accept me in my life you were reliving the time you were

104:08carried away by the children yeah well so so I drop out of school and went seeking Satori and the beatniks and hitchhiked from Seattle down to the lights book shop which was Lawrence Ferlinghetti bookshop and that's where the pizzas yeah that's her that's where the beatniks are supposed to be hanging out and I walked into the store and it was empty and there was a guy behind the counter and I probably said something like where are the beatniks and he acted as if I wasn't even there now that was hard Joe because I had a jew-fro of a kind people have been wearing their short their hair their haircuts and military haircuts Crewcuts and I had this long curly hair and no one had ever seen anything like it before the closest to it was the wig that Harpo Marx used to wear wasn't that wasn't them some of the members of the experience get you there what is that

105:04photo from probably 1965 or 1966 and the guy so so how could you ignore if that walked into your bookstore and you never seen a haircut like that before and the person was barefoot in addition to that and carrying a sleeping bag you were barefoot with us yes I had been barefoot for six months and your feet get so thick that you go walk over gravel ass why are you barefoot for six months it felt like the right thing to do under the circumstances that up well I know eventually I gave it up do you have any calluses left no no no I can't walk over gravel any don't you like long for those days yeah no I like current shoes I love current shoes so at any rate but would you ignore what you just saw that person with hair how many of us had like electrocuted worms buff yeah that's what I'd be like this guy's got something to say what's up yeah the guy ignored me so I walked out of the

106:03bookstore looking crushed and somebody walking down the sidewalk said um you look troubled can I help you with something and I said yeah I'm looking for the beatniks and he said well and he rolled his pupils up into his forehead and he scratched his head and he thought and he thought and he thought and then he came out of it and he said well have you tried Colorado well that was just a little too vague a destination for Colorado yeah with a beatniks in Colorado I have no idea he thought they might yeah so I ended up hit checking up an eye on the west coast with several fortunes gave up he gave up on the beatnik the beatniks because I wasn't a specific address and I didn't want to leave what years the West Coast it was 1962 oh you were early it was two years before the 60s woke up and realized that it was a distinct decade it was two years before the electric kool-aid acid test and just

107:03hung around a little bit you would have been there perfect well I prefer starting my own groups actually and this group gathered around me and around one of my traveling companions and we eventually ended up in a big pink condemned house this is all in how accidentally served in the 60s in a babe king condemned house in Berkeley three blocks away from the Berkeley campus and we didn't care if it was gonna fall down at any minute and we wore no clothes zero clothing during the day and my I guess co-leader was a guy named dick Hoff who had the body of an Adonis when when we walked down the street together women could not take their eyes off of him and but they sliced through me as if I were weren't there as if I were invisible and everyone wanted to sleep with him and he had this sense of somehow he had lived a life up to that point with never having a depression never having a doubt never

107:57having a psychic pain of any kind it was uncanny was unreal and and remember Michael Jackson still the most remarkable person I have ever met but dick Hoff was pretty remarkable and so dick set the tone being naked and dick would go into the bathroom to do the things you do in the bathroom but leave the door open and continue his conversation with you while he was in there glowing so that was the norm for us and I was the spiritual leader of the group so are you at the time I was 19 or 18 years old I'd like to be a spiritual leader at 19 it feels very good when people believe in the things that you say it feels very good when you're hitchhiking and somebody takes you to MacArthur Park in LA and there are all these guys on boxes and orating their heads off about Marxism or the coming of Jesus or whatever and and somebody in the crowd while you're just watching what's going

108:53on walks up to you and says you look like the idiot and the duskie asking novel so he doesn't mean that as you look like an idiot he's talking about something unusual right and and I start explaining to him what I'm doing and before long all of the crowds around all the guys on soap boxes with all the Marxist and Jesus lectures have abandoned their speakers and they're all listening to me well you can tell I really get off on talking to an audience of anywhere from one person to a hundred thousand people whatever I don't care it lights me up and so did it feel good yes so you feel like that doing that is your calling yes yeah that that's what I'm here for but I'm here to write the books too no writing the books is a lonely proposition writing is very lonely if you isolate yourself that's why I do it at a coffee shop we're out of the corner of my eye can see humans around me and

109:54where I can spend four hours in and be profoundly rude because when you're in the middle of balancing seven ideas and you're fashioning a sentence if somebody interrupts you for half a second right all those things can go crashing and this is here why I don't understand the need to do it in front of all these people because I need the energy of other people's wealth a lot of people that live in New York City my friend Jeff said that he wouldn't live anywhere else he loves New York City because he gets energy out all the people that live there and I can't I mean I've tried Seattle Portland San Francisco San Pedro and the inner city does it for you oh yes in ways I never imagined I never thought how long did it take before you realize that that was the spot for you not that long because what I realized about seven months into it was I don't fit into clicks clicks don't want me and

110:44I'm not a human click well I I'm generally not wanted in cleats yes that's very nice but Oh at any rate I discovered that in New York there are so many people that you can pick people one by one and put them together into your own clique hmm and if you put them together in your own clique you always maintain a certain central role even if you admire the people that are in the clique and you really want to advance them and you're still accepted I am around giant groups of people yeah so often because of the UFC doing commentary and in these huge arenas Phil Wow and then doing stand-up in front of thousands of people and and then the podcast reaching all these people I need alone time like I have the opposite requirement amazing I need that if I don't get like my writing I have to write alone I write when everyone's asleep right house I wait till everyone

111:45goes to bed and then I do my writing and I've learned I guess it's a discipline you know how to be alone in the midst of a lot of people right now you need the energy I need the energy yes but I want you to describe to me it's like what is the energy of these people around you like what is happening first you have to understand so it's not a distraction no we are built to take in input from other human beings and to give output to other human beings right and when we feel unnecessary as I said our immune system goes into under dive mmm nose dive right and so we need to be around other people now if you're a writer and you write and I write as you said you need to isolate yourself so I figured out a way to be utterly isolated in the midst of a bunch of people I need the energy from those people because otherwise I do my best writing when I'm feeling the energy of

112:34my audience but you don't you you when you do get interrupted I should say it does you up yeah so I I simply write I say writing yeah but I do it without ever lifting my eyes from the page I've learned to discipline my writings writing something like that you managed wanted a cigarette yeah but they they know me oh no I'm sort of the mayor of the chocolate area the cafe where I work don't give the name out man well I'm respected there well and a lot of weirdos out there well in that spot that could be writing huh yeah so but don't get about the address but we need you know we need social input right we desperately need it so as you said you can only be alone after too much social input yes now I do a show called coast to coast it's a crazy weird Flying Saucer show yeah yeah it's the highest-rated overnight talk radio show and murthy Snorri still though yeah and

113:33it's 545 radio stations and they'll one night that I mean they'll call me on no notice and say we need you on tonight about the norovirus we need you on tonight about the killing in Texas the school shooting in Texas we need you on tonight about the Gaza riots and Israel and you just jump on and talk about it I like to get five hours six hours notice because I like to put in three hours of research hmm and but one night I was walking out in the middle of the meadow in the park looking at the stars and my phone began to ring now at 11:40 at night or 12:40 at night when you're communing with the Stars you don't really want to answer the phone right but I'm on call for coast to coast you're always on call yes I've done it 237 times that's crazy and they call me the human computer so cuz I can ask me questions about anything did you do it during the art bell days as well yes but

114:26art would have me on for four to five hours and that was a hoot that was really a hoot I did a show once it was a highlight of my life well art was a little the most energetic talk show host you've ever seen in your life and that guy so he would call at 4:00 in the afternoon and he'd say okay I want you to look at this website so I go look at the website and call me when you look at it sorry I'd call him again and he said okay now look at this website now gradually I got the idea that he was trying to tell me that there were extra Galactic Civilizations and that they were coming to Earth and signaling us through crop circles and a whole bunch of other things but it was the way he did it he did it with such energy he lit a fire in you absolutely even if you totally disagreed with everything he was thinking he lit that fire I used to drive home from the comedy store at

115:18night that was the only one of the only things that I would listen to because it was AM radio and I would get it from believe it was a San Diego station and you could usually get it better late at night right so I'd be like one o'clock in the morning I was driving into the valley and I'd be listening to the coast to coast with heart bail right a lot of people Kingdom of nine a lot of people did that a lot of a lot of intellectuals do that as their secret sin and because their wake late at night and there's nothing else really on the radio and this at least teases a little bit of your brain so I do global I do global history I do global geopolitics I do geo-economics I do psychology I do murders I do bacteria I do stars your own show while I was asked the guy who created the show with art Bell who created coast-to-coast with art Bell he wanted to do a radio show where I could

116:13have as many nights of the week as I wanted and the guy who wrote conversations with God would have the other nights why don't you just do a podcast I do not not a podcast I do a YouTube okay thing why don't you put it out as a podcast as well you could just take the audio from it well I have very little time in which to do this so I know how to put it up on YouTube it doesn't get that many hits I mean well I used to do TJ Kincaid's show with him the amazing atheist he's well he's fabulous yeah and six foot eight or something like that good dude I like him too and so he had me on for two years running and then said you got to start your own so I start on my own and he of course at this point has 950 thousand subscribers or something like that I have thirteen thousand four hundred subscribers will try to pump you up that would be neat that would be terrific you

117:03really should do your own thing it's not difficult to do right and once it gets set up it's fairly easy well I'll eat a recorder we'd have to set me up meantime I it's a yeah but look at me I'm Buzz Aldrin said twelve years ago we've got a presidential election coming up and we've got to try to get space on the agenda of the things the candidates are talking about we've got two years in which to do it and I said okay I'll form a group to do that so I'm going to do this let me ask you this because you're this big coast-to-coast art belphin right how much of that UFO stuff do you pay attention to none none yes zero when when people contact me on LinkedIn and their major credential as they do a UFO magazine or something like that I don't add them I used to love that stuff I just think it was so interesting and intriguing yeah it started actually paying attention to it yeah and I

117:56started interviewing some of the people that are involved in the movement you find the same thing over and over again this just wanton disregard for reality right this absolute desire to prove something instead of looking at the objective facts the proving that aliens are real proving that we've been contacted provided these eyewitness testimonies are legitimate let me try to get across a weird idea okay okay once upon a time in the 1940s there were two guys Connor and Laurence and Niko Tinbergen who got a Nobel Prize for inventing a field called mythology which is a certain kind of observation of animal behavior and Niko Tinbergen will go off to the coastal cliffs around northern Europe and he would observe these sea birds and the sea birds will go out I don't know how many miles 10 30 40 miles and outs of the ocean to feed and bring back food for the young and

118:50then they would come back at the end of the day and their nests they'd have 200 nests next to each other but the nests had very low walls so when the seabird came back from her fishing and waddled herself into place moving her hind back and forth to get him place to incubate her chicks to warm the eggs she'd often knock an egg out and when the egg was knocked out of the nest the bird would reach her beak out past the egg and then pull her beak back in toward her chest to pull the egg toward the nest and she'd do it over and over again until she got the egg in the nest and Niko Tinbergen had this weird idea I wish I knew where it came from that this is a reflex you know like when your doctor takes a hammer and hammers your knee and you're your blank shoots out and you had nothing to do with it he figured this is the same kind of her reflex and he figured that

119:45if you ever reflux you need a trigger for the reflux like that patellar hammer that hammered your knee so he looked to see if there was a trigger that triggered this yanking your beak back in in order to scoop the egg back into the nest and he tried building artificial eggs to see if he could find out what the cues were in the egg that were causing this reaction in the bird and finally he got a super egg which means I'm it was bigger than the normal egg it was browner than the normal egg and he put the real egg now if you're the bird that real egg has your genetic legacy it's your genetic future a lot is riding on that egg a lot of you and the phony egg and the phony egg would attract the bird so strongly that she would ignore her own egg and yank yank yank with her beak until she pulled the phony egg into the nest and they continued to do research with this kind of thing and

120:46they discovered that they could trick some songbirds into taking a basketball into their nest and then when the poor little birds tried to get on top of the basketball to incubate it they would slide off and they'd be very frustrated and they would climb back on again and slide off again it was cruel so the phony eggs like fake tits those are things called supernormal stimuli and the idea is that they bring these reflexive reactions yes well underlying what Adolf Hitler was doing underlying what I was doing dancing on that stage underline what you do in front of an audience when you get incandescent and lose yourself and something else talks through you all that is related to some super normal pattern in us yes so Hitler was basically saying the world is about to end and the kingdom of God is coming except the kingdom of God in his case was the world will be

121:45controlled by the master race the blonde and blue-eyed Aryans and all other people will be slave people or will be exterminated but it was this golden paradise that he was inviting the Germans to in which they ruled the world because they were born to rule the world so how did you describe the stimulation super super normal stimulus so silver super enormous till stimulus of this artificial egg is like super normal stimulus of this extreme behavior right at the podium right attract people in right hmm and basically Hitler was saying I was talking about the equivalent of extraterrestrials he was talking about this magic quality of the Germans he was talking about the shared soul of the Germans and how the people in vogue nur operas and the gods of the old Germans had been in the souls of these people and he was evoking the group soul the zeitgeist the in this case is the Volk

122:46Geist the spirit of a people and the Flying Saucer people are after an end of the world that in which the world will be remade and a guy named well there was a Jewish kid from a backward town a really backward town who only had been trained in manual skills and he started preaching and he preached that the world was as we know it was about to end and we were about to enter a new kind of paradise and because he was Jewish he figured it's got to happen to Passover because it Passover you put out a cup for Elijah and Elijah is there to precede the Savior the guy who will save the Jewish people so he went up to the so holiest city in Judaism to Jerusalem and he had a dinner this Passover dinner and they put out the cup and that's when the kingdom of God was supposed to arrive his prediction of a kingdom of God arriving at that particular Passover ceremony turned out to be utterly wrong

123:46and in fact the Romans seized him and nailed him to a cross and he died it was the opposite of everything he predicted but the religion he'd put together was son and the religion really that Paul put together because Paul was an international figure you know he was comfortable in the global world of the Roman Empire but what Paul put together around Jesus was a super normal stimulus and it evoked a super normal response a super normal reflex and the Flying Saucer ideas that you know here we are on earth but there's this brace that's above us that can save us that's pushing it the same buttons Hitler was pushing it the same buttons the world as we know is about to end and there's a new paradise and those Germans will rule everything so we are built to receive certain kind of stimuli god knows how we got built that way and when I went out and quest of The Ecstatic of God the gods inside

124:53of us at the age of 13 I was looking for that super normal with those super normal responses in us and for the supernormal stimuli that evoke them and when you're doing art when you're doing commentary when you're doing comedy you are hitting the buttons you are creating supernormal stimuli you are testing out jokes until they reach just the right shape and you know what you can feel in the audience what that shape is and then you repeat that shape knowing what its impact is going to be on the audience I wrote a new book it took me a long time to write all of my previous books including how accidentally started the sixties and by the way it isn't the same 1995 manuscript I had 20 years of additional processing and was able to put a lot more meaning into the book and hopefully it's still really funny but I was able to write a book in six weeks the first draft of one hundred and

125:49seventy eight thousand word book and a normal book is 90 thousand words so this is almost twice the length of a normal book and I was able to do it because I had told all the stories in the book and I had felt out how the audience was responded to the stories and I knew the words to use and they were a well-worn path in my brain so I simply put down on paper an oral vocabulary but used its the audience who shapes you by giving you feedback and eventually you perfect something so it's like Niko Tinbergen super egg I mean new Niko Tinbergen was a eventually able to make eggs super eggs that had dayglo on them had polka dots on them that were absurd but they still had the ability the way that Flying Saucer myths have the ability to evoke the sense that there is a paradise beyond the world that we know don't you think when you think of supernormal stimulus that when

126:49you see you know like a preacher on the pulpit that's screaming with confidence when you see any of these things like even when it comes to fake breasts like you're seeing something like you know what you want you want a woman to be good at bearing children right to have the right hip to waist ratio that she's designed to breastfeed each as large breasts right even though you know it's fake it still hits whatever that genetic button is inside of your head yeah and the alien theme the idea behind it the archetype is kind of like space daddy right it's like you know I know we're stupid but just like this guy who's screaming on the Pope it has all the answers like thank God someone has all the answers well space daddy is for the atheists right space daddies for the people you know what I've listened all these people down here I think they're full of but space daddy's gonna

127:44help us out yeah well that's the general idea is that what it is yes and when you as I said when you fashion a joke you're fashioning it to be a super normal stimulus but space daddy might be real somewhere because we're doing numbers okay as a science person okay I have to tell you that there's only one place in which we've ever discovered any evidence of life and it's down here on earth so I'm a skeptic about life being anywhere now changing to a different scientific perspective there's this thing that I call super simultaneity super synchrony and when the universe starts as a rapidly expanding sheet of nothing but space and time its space time and speed that's all it is and when it precipitates in quarks which is unlikely a house how can space time and speed become particles works right the fact is that there are only something like 16 different forms of those quarks and there are a

128:44gazillion of identical copies of each quark everywhere and they all sprang into existence at the same time fast forward a couple of million years galaxies all are pretty much the same and all of them spring into existence pretty much at the same time at least the first generation of galaxies stars ignite within those gralik seas all following pretty much the same principles they're all just big gravity balls gravity gravity balls all the way that's planets that's moons all kinds of things so there is this tendency for the universe to do the same damn thing at pretty much the same damn time pretty much same damned everywhere in this cosmos and we do know that there are biomolecules carbon-based molecules being formed in interstellar cold gas clouds interstellar hot gas clouds all kinds of unlikely places in the cosmos but those are very simple little molecules even though we call them

129:46biomolecules assembly means I've got carbon life depends on molecules in the case of your genome if we yanked just we took just one cell you wouldn't miss it you have a hundred trillion others so we took just one cell from your body and we took out the genome look the the problem what well is actually the genome so we took out the genome and we stretched it out because it's all tangled up in the cell it would be three feet long so there's a big distance between a tiny little molecule of ammonia in an interstellar cloud and that huge very complex highly ordered three foot long molecule or molix of a single molecule that's your genome and we haven't learned very much at all about how you go from the simple molecules to that incredibly complex molecules the origin of life is still one of the big puzzles but again because they're super synchrony and super simultaneity all

130:46over the cosmos pretty much the same thing happens at pretty much the same time the odds are that there are millions of other planets that have life those are the odds but I set all that aside because we don't have evidence of any life and we've been looking since they're okay I'll tell you a story it seems to have nothing to do with anything but once upon a time a manager gave me an act to work with was Earth Wind and Fire and so I read all their lyrics I read everything about them I studied them like a Solomonic scholar I always did and finally I got to their album covers and when I got together with the leader of the band Maurice White for lunch because I hadn't yet learned to set up my boundaries and tell people I'll only work with you if I can see you in your own environment for between one and three days that wasn't quite at that point yet I sat with my

131:44with with Maurice and said Maurice if I've got you right you believe that approximately 11,000 years ago people from another civilization someplace else and now our galaxies are beyond our galaxy came to this earth and brought us all of our technologies and left the messages of their technologies and the pyramids if I got that right and Maurice smiled and he said yes I saw I said okay there's this scientist from Cornell University and he has just had a tremendous success with a science series on PBS it's the most watched series PBS has ever had and he's trying to put together an organization to find extraterrestrial intelligence so if I introduce the two of you would you be willing to do a benefit concert for him because right now he's struggling to get money together and where he said yes so we tracked down Carl Sagan's summer cottage telephone number and I put

132:45together a conference call between Maurice white and God what's his name again billions and billions and billions of planets Carl Sagan yeah and as soon as Carl got wind where Maurice was coming from pseudoscience conversation was over because karl was already gambling too much had ideas that could get him totally left out of science so it was unfortunate but ever that was the early 1980s probably about my actual probably about 1980 didn't you want to just sit down with Maurice and sort of explain what we know so far no stuff based on was it you know it's all kinds of it's everywhere right now you can find it all over the place is it make did he have like a source not that I asked him no I was too busy trying to put this yeah this thing together and it was unfortunate yes it wouldn't need if the two of them had been able to sit down and talk but Karl as I said you

133:45know when he had because his first wife Lynn Margulis in the National Academy of Science Award winner and I became friends and she was kind enough to almost mentor me and Dorion Sagan Carl Sagan's oldest son has been a friend he's an absolutely brilliant science writer you read his essays they change your perception of the world period and just by having the television show the people in quote legitimate science were saying Carl's not a legitimate scientist this is a television show that's right but he's getting more attention than I am now they would never admit that that's really what was in their hearts from people about Neil deGrasse Tyson I've heard the exact same that could be and the question is whether neil degrasse tyson was ever a scientist because he's primarily been a showman most of his life and you should see him Joe I when did I see him he was at

134:44god-knows-what event and why I was probably there because a friend was giving a sold-out lecture at the American Museum of Natural History and I didn't realize that Neil deGrasse Tyson was going to show up and when he showed up on stage because I consider myself competing with him because I've always wanted my own television series and Neil has been ahead of me and everything and I'm older than he is so it's you know the little pieces of grit that we pick up and carry in our shoes and walk with so at any rate I saw him on stage I couldn't believe it that man is Astana on stage he's beyond your imaginings on stage so I went up when it was over and it was Buzz Aldrin who had originally introduced us via email and said I'm the guy that Buzz Aldrin introduced you to twelve years ago who's been emailing you every once in a while ever since and he was in the middle of a whole bunch of

135:36people who wanted to take selfies I don't get autographs anymore they take selfies and they were lined up to get selfies with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Neil deGrasse Tyson turned his back on all of them this is not right this is not proper this is not polite in order to give me a lecture about how hard it had been to make himself into a showman and it looks easy but it takes decades of work well I appreciated him giving it a little lecture but all these people were waiting for him but he is amazing so we talked about that incandescent power when you go transcendent on stage and you become an empty pipe through which something speaks through you even though their words that you've thought out for years but all of a sudden they're speaking themselves through you and how it's the essence of the forces of history that ability to give people the sense that they've been yanked out

136:27of themselves and are a part of something bigger than themselves that's the super normal reflex that is the most profound and it's the one that grabs history by the balls and changes its direction an Earth Wind and Fire had that with music they certainly did they just didn't have it when it came to the understanding of civilizations from 11,000 years right that was their specialty that's why you and I specialized in the things we do in order to add to the collective mind that enriches the people around us and us too that's that is so attractive to people to think that we got it from somewhere else why do you think that is partly because no individual creates the stone tool I mean there may be an individual who did it first right but then it takes off the way that gazillions of particles of identical kinds show up all across the face of the cosmos it hits the zeitgeist with just the right

137:21supernormal stimulus yeah and all of a sudden it takes off and we're all aware of the fact that we didn't do this and we're all aware of the fact that there is some supernormal in elegance but we don't realize that it's we who are the neurons and in the same way that a hundred billion arts now 86 billion is the figure so you've got 86 billion neurons in your brain well I Got News for you Joe the folks in science are saying that 86 billion neurons is you which is a bloody miracle and they're right it is a bloody miracle that our Joe Rogan emerges from 86 billion neurons working together bod you're more than 86 billion neurons working together you're 86 billion neurons working with seven billion fellow human beings and the whole bacterial world yeah and the plant world and the animal world and it's all contributing to who you are minute by minute by minute so we are individual

138:14cells in this collective brain the way that individual neurons who are individually quite stupid are part of the collective brain that is a Joe Rogan or a Howard bloom or anybody listening but it's it's such an attractive subject that you have these shows like ancient aliens right I mean that's like one of the longest-running shows in the history check well because because the what we we become is something larger than ourselves it's much larger than ourselves and so there is something that's super normal and we can think of it as something supernatural but we ate we ate for salvation and I'm trying to tell people I have a book called the genius of the Beast a radical revision of capitalism and it says that there's an underpinning imperative in capitalism nobody gets although capitalists have to obey it in order to make money and it saved thy neighbor being messianic save

139:12a hundred neighbors you get a hundred dollars save a million neighbors you get a million dollars and and the book talks about material miracles and about secular salvation when I when Joan Jets manager came to my office and said look I've got the service she's been turned down by 23 record companies could you just as a favor get me one line in cashbox than a record company Mull signer and the record company will make her career and I had to say Kenny listen to me once you get a record company your troubles begin that's not when troubles in the record company will throw every conceivable obstacle and some inconceivable obstacles in your path and you have to have a Panzer tank brigade strategy and if you if you let me do the strategy if you work as hard as I do 17 hour days seven days a week if you do everything I tell you to I guarantee you will have a star in two

140:05years what she's been turned down by 23 record companies where where is there left to go doesn't that mean she should stop no I only said this to two people in my lifetime that I will give you a star the first one was to the manager of a band called Rufus which had a number three signal on the charts at that time called tell me something good I trapped him in a limousine I picked him up at the airport and knew we were going to be trapped in rush-hour traffic and said look I know your band has prides itself on its democracy but if you let me put all the attention on your lead singer and you cover my ass with the band I guarantee you I will give you a star those are the only two times over resetting the lead singer I was talking about with this band called Rufus his name now see if you'll remember her name because this is a long time ago Chaka Khan sure so did the prediction come true it

141:03did but are we off track here we are off track what does this have to do with ancient aliens what does this have to do with this desire these will have to to know that we got our wisdom from the stars well it's not directly about that but it's occasionally you've happened to something bigger than yourself and occasionally I had visions and occasionally those visions came true and so there's something super not supernatural but certainly super normal about being able to have two visions only two one with Chaka Khan one with Joan Jett there are ways in which we form a larger collective intelligence and we can some times tap into it but if we can't then we better believe in something higher than ourselves or we have a hard time making it on the face of the earth a very does this make sense it does I don't know if it necessarily makes sense and the context of people having this desire to

142:02believe that we've been visited by extraterrestrials that we've been shaped and molded and helped and that I mean I had a conversation recently in the podcast with someone and we were talking about genetic in if it was it Theo we're talking about people being a product of genetic engineering by alien DNA being introduced into primate hominid DNA right and where's the missing link and I could I tried to crudely explain with my limited knowledge is that that's not really the case right we know how humans evolved from ancient hominids right well we there are a lot of mysteries there are but there's not okay here's the deal imagining that there is a higher intelligence literally higher we humans have a thing about huh sure and we're not alone crayfish have a thing about Heights lobsters have a thing about Heights lizards have a thing about i'ts mommy dogs have a thing about

142:55i'ts so in that we're not alone and looking for a higher power in the sense of up there yes some were smarter than us yeah us in the future it makes an architect I've always said seems like what we're going to look like well if that architect has artificially shaped our DNA then who shaped the DNA of the architect right the archetype I'm saying yeah you know the large head the right eyes the tiny body is that we are slowly but surely becoming less muscular more reliant on our minds right our minds will get larger our sex organs will be thought of as being problematic and the cause of many worries rainbows and Wars and strife and that will eliminate those and that will exist almost entirely in our minds and that this is what we're looking at we see the grey alien so race seems to be a problem with people right to pick sides and decide which one's better or worse and so there will be no

143:51more race everyone will be one homogenized homologa what's that word homogenized was the other one hammam homologous with it yeah what is that word Amala guys yeah homologous ation what is that word I'm looking for whatever a collection right all the races brought to one form right and everybody will share this form so they'll be no pros or cons nothing better and everything will exist in the mind so it's another version of the kingdom of God yes and and the strange thing is space Daddy yeah so the strange thing is that Jesus made these predictions that the kingdom of God was going to arrive at any minute right and the first Christians waited around it was gonna happen at any minute so first it was gonna happen in any eighth day now than any week now than any month now then in a year now than any decade or century now millennium now and so did Jesus religion disappear because it made a

144:53prediction a prediction didn't come true no not really so apparently the religion is somehow a supernormal stimulus even though its predictions don't come true there's something in us that needs a higher something well isn't the prediction of religion just wait around because it's gonna come true well it's been very hard to justify that after it didn't come true tomorrow and it didn't come through next year and it didn't complete sense you read the scrolls and correctly yeah that's just has the power to hang in there for twenty two thousand years that's astonishing this is when its basic prediction is utterly false there's always every you know decade or so there's some group that decides they know when the next William Miller in the 1800s it was a recent one was just a few years ago there was billboards all across the country by some group that had decided it was going to take place

145:46on a certain day right and they were like are you ready and you know there's the raptures coming right hook these billboards out and then came and went and in many years you know and then they said well we made some calculation right and we made some mistakes and there's some errors but well it happened it happened in 1840 William Miller made a prediction everybody sold their goods and we're waiting for the rapture and it didn't happen so William Oh said I must have gotten my predict by my calculations wrong went back to the calculating board and came back with a new calculation calculation that was a year later and amazing remember those do you remember those ja the May 21st 2011 he is coming again whoops so but the point is that William Miller religion even after it got it wrong twice is still around it's the Adventist religion and that's two different sects in there at least 22

146:39million of them planted around the planet and Michael Jackson and his mother were Chavez witnesses which I believe is one of the William Miller based religions so if if you fashioned the religion right as a supernormal stimulus like those eggs with polka dots and a glow that still were able to outfox the real eggs or out stimulate the mother yes it'll last and we humans think that we're all about rational prediction and control no we're not but in the face and the the understanding that in the greater view of the universe what we understand about the universe we are so minuscule right more we pay attention to it the more we it's just sort of embedded into our consciousness that there is there is a vast universe out there and there are so many possibilities and it's so overwhelming that this this framework of religion or a cult or and whatever you want to call

147:41it become sort of like a scaffolding in which you can sort of operate inside of this impossibly large thing right we exist in and yet still have no that's a good hypothesis that it brings things down to a scale we can comprehend I think of it as almost like a a bridge to evolution yeah like us being wild ape creatures to us having language and comprehension and this concept of our position in the universe being so small and then what is the point of all this well we'll it let's give them a point so they can make it to the next juncture well there's a rabbinic idea and this is from 1500 or something like that probably in Poland and the rabbi said God left creation half-finished we should be forced to finish the other half that's the version I like I like because it puts it puts the onus on us yes and there I god I wish I had my computer my laptop here

148:40because I'd read you an epigram that I wrote that's my favorite but basically follow it up for all we know well it sits in the laptop and your laptop over there yeah but one way or the other the fact is every time we do something new like inventing the smartphone which Steve Jobs did we add to some real chore but we add to the repertoire of the cosmos right because the cosmos has never done it before so far as we know and even if there were civilizations on other planets they'd be taking a path different than ours so we are like the searcher peas our entire civilization is like one searcher bee and a possible cosmic intelligence assuming that there are other living things kind of conscious things intelligent things elsewhere and eventually we will patch all these pieces together but right now we're patching together the pieces from trillions more than I mean if they're

149:36just the trillion cells in you alone then think of all the cells we're patching together when we bring together all the creatures of the sea all of the creatures of the land all of the microbial creatures all of the visible creatures and somehow allowing them to influence our collective brain as we influence them imagine what life would be like for bacteria if they couldn't have you as a vehicle and they couldn't force you to get into your car and go down to Ralph's and buy those them those damn chocolate eclairs the material world would not be the same you have given bacteria new powers and they have given you powers you wouldn't have without them possibly powers that allowed you to evolve in the first place well they think it changes your personality now I think that the gut biome actually affects the way you think about the world that you live in so you

150:30know about some hard another shaping you you know about this illness that you get from cats now when it takes over a cat yeah when it's actually what it takes over a rat rats are normally repelled by the smell of cat urine and when toxoplasmosis takes over in a rat's brain all of a sudden the rat is attracted by the smell of Brett urine why because the toxoplasmosis spends its life part of it in the mouse or rat and part of it in the cat so at a certain point it has to drive you over to where the cat is likely to find you in order to get itself into the cat now think about this how the hell does a bacteria learn or a bacterial colony because they think in groups of seven trillion how did they think out how to drive the rat as if it were a robot and as if it were a tank and they were at the controls how did they manage to evolve a lifestyle in which they spent part of their life in

151:32one creature and another part of their life and another creature how do they know the anatomy and the brains of those creatures so incredibly well we have no idea we haven't even considered the question well it's a fascinating concept because the the cat the bacterial the colony has to actually get into the cat's gut reproduce or I can't reproduce outside of the cat's gut right which is just insane right and so it has to figure out a way to get into the cat's gut and the best way to do that is to get into a rat and rewire the rat's sexual reward system we had a Sapolsky on the podcast apolskis terrific broke it all down for us and as he's talking about he just trying to imagine how long this took well Sapolsky is one of the MacArthur Genius award winners who said that the god problem was a great book the gospel how a godless cosmos creates so yeah we

152:27have all these mysteries ahead of us but every mystery we solve for all we know it's the very first time that the cosmos has ever pondered that mystery and then solve the mystery and then turned the result into a tool that is a hard thing for people to acknowledge or even consider that we might be the only ones that have gotten to this point and that some if human intelligence exists and we know it does that it is as far as we know on this planet the peak of intelligence at least in terms of its ability to affect and change its environment right and we assume that if something can reach this point here that it's reached that point somewhere else but not necessarily well it would be different but somewhere it had to have been the first place yeah why wouldn't it be here well in James Fallows new book he's talking about I think it's Dakota and there's some river

153:24that goes through Dakota and on one side of the river the culture is one way on the other side of the river the culture is another way even with all of our modern communications technologies there are still differences and the universe at least the universe in the case of life and we only know of life on one planet is constantly stretching out fingers into unused territories it's constantly taking its doing the opposite of entropy it's constantly taking chaff and garbage and stuff that seems like it would have nothing to do with life and turning it into Pistons and in pillars and fuel for life for example we humans right now we're under the influence of another end of the world religion looking toward a different kind of paradise it's called environmentalism and it says that we humans are causing climate change but that's this is a little silly we humans may be contributing to climate

154:25change but climate change has been the norm on this planet for 4.5 billion years this is one of those sacred science subjects that's almost like you're not allowed to talk scientific Jesus you cannot question the the ancient scrolls and it's an end times right belief system yes because it says the world is about to end because of things we've done because we've sinned right and if we simply sacrifice to the goddess of nature to gaya' the universe we'll go back to being a stable a climatically stable Garden of Eden well I got news for you this this planet has never been climatically stable in the very beginning it wheeled around its axis once every six hours that means if you pick any point on the surface it was in this poisonous stuff called radiation for three hours then it was yanked into darkness which is equally destructive and the temperature would go up a minimum of 86

155:23degrees every whoops up and down 86 degrees every three hours that's climate change plus it was on a tilt and it was rotating around the Sun and as it rotated the climate went through hideous changes but this is our way in the past and what people are concerned with what our role and what impact human race is doesn't matter what we need to be after is climate State if we really want the climate to be the way it was in 1650 before the Industrial Revolution that's a human choice that's biogenic in origin and we need to acknowledge that that's what we have decided and now we're going to develop climate stabilization technology and see those what why is it such a sacred subject if you what you've just said even just question it for a moment and saying that environmentalism as a type of religion climate denialist yum you could be labeled with that that's right

156:15and people would love to break it down in a very simple one-sentence statement and call you there's a climate denialist right climate change denier list that's son of a and the next thing you know what people will repeat that it doesn't have to have any and nobody want to sign you anymore for a book or anything right any complexity or context in in what you're trying to say they don't want the the subtle nuance of what you're trying to express well there's a blunt nuance we have to develop climate stabilization technologies if taking carbon out of the atmosphere is a carpet stabilization technology then so be it but we have to develop others because this this globe goes through ice ages and global warming's is when the answer is in technology yes that's what the answer has always been for humans I mean why were we born look we have this chemical in our gut cholecystokinin and

157:08it only goes off when we eat meat so we're built to eat meat and it's a bonding hormone oxytocin it brings people together so if you're having a good meat meal with a bunch of people this is a chemical in your Utz that says these are good people stick with them don't tell the vegan says yeah well so how why if we were born to me don't we have claws why don't we have ripping fangs why don't we have fur because we figured out a way to cook it because we've got way to make clothes right you've got pins we figured out a way to figure out a way to isolate ourselves from the environment in terms of housing and you got a roll of fire you got it and that means that we were born naked we were naked apes for a reason because we are homo to Lukas whatever that word would be we are the people of tools and we developed the first stone tool to the best of our knowledge approximately 3.1

158:05to 3.4 million years ago long before we became modern humans so we were born in this peculiar way at that is naked and without claws and without ripping things after we developed the tools it took like fire and cooking which you just cited to allow us to have artificial claws artificial ripping things to cook our meals the big conclusion of a book that I've just read on what makes us different from neural scientists she's the neuroscientist who corrected the standard figure for the number of neurons in the brain from a hundred billion to 86 billion by actually counting them she says what made us human was cooking just what you said because when you cook you have you liberate a whole mess of calories and nutritive sources that are not available to a gorilla that's eating leaves and how do we know that because the gorilla is born with a potbelly the size of a

159:08Franklin stove because it needs this huge digestive apparatus in order to handle those leaves to break them down into food right well when you cook you don't need that huge gut now the bacteria or the the ape is not able to go very far the gorilla he certainly can't migrate once you know you see Jane Goodall and she is pleading for us to save the habitat of the chimpanzees have you ever seen Jane Goodall pleading for us to save the habitat of baboons never the baboons are the rats of Africa baboons are extraordinary early adaptive they're extraordinarily curious they're always finding new environments and figuring out ways to turn them into food chimpanzees don't have that quality the reason we need to save their environment is because they're so dumb as a group because the collective intelligence of a group of chimpanzees is so low that now that they're adapted to an environment that's

160:04the only environment they can adapt to whereas baboons who have smaller individual brains have greater collective smarts do you see now baboons have domesticated dogs no yeah you know they divest domesticated house dogs yeah I figured out a way to keep the dogs near them so they could be alerted to when some bad shooters are in fact amazing reason yeah kidnap these dogs and hold them hostage and feed them right and the dogs just kind of learned to hang around well they're ideal hunting companions it's very bizarre yeah it's what we did once upon a time and and you could say very easily it wasn't us who tamed dogs it was dogs who chained us yeah look how well we treat them here it is right here see that they hold on to these dogs the dogs try to get away oh is that a puppy and its shoulder it's a puppy on the ground oh I see and they they eventually stay with

160:58them in these camps but they hold them hostage look amazed dragging this dog rights not killing it not eating it no but they have somehow or another figured out that if they keep these dogs around long enough the dogs will bark when intruders and predators are near oh ma this is crazy absolutely amazing really crazy stuff but remember that was we were just looking at baboons and baboons have a brain smaller than the brain of a chimpanzee if you ever seen a chimpanzee do that no no chimpanzees are not highly adaptive what's the measure of intelligence ability to adapt yeah okay so let's see how we measure the intelligence of bacteria knowing the bacteria work in a group of seven trillion and have a collective intelligence within that group and they have a collective multi colony intelligence because they once they develop certain genetic tricks they pass the tricks around in little tiny

161:48envelopes for all practical purposes so they're constantly sharing new bacterial tricks so we are told by the environment the new end-times movement that we have used up all the resources on this planet we have vastly overburdened this planet we are eating it out of existence but bacteria are 12 miles beneath our feet right now and they are turning raw rock granite into bio stuff now if the task of life is to kidnap seduce and recruit as many dead atoms as possible into the grand project of life who's doing the best job right now who recognizes that for every ounce of living stuff on the planet there are a hundred million ounces of dead stuff waiting to be kidnapped and seduced and recruited into the grand project of life bacteria yet it our bacterial nature you bet your ass so what is nature telling us through these bacteria you'll have a hundred trillion more ounce of the hunt power

162:56yes hundred trillion more ounces or 100 million more ounces of dead stuff for every living else you've got and your obligation on behalf of life is to do what the bacteria are doing kidnap seduce and recruit as many dead atoms as possible and bring them into the project of life use technology to stabilize the environment that's what we choose yes and that is what we've chosen and but people are not regarding it as a choice they're regarding it as something imposed on them by a higher force right no I'm sorry Gaia Mother Nature is not a higher force mother nature is a mother nature throws every conceivable obstacle or path and she can't help it why because our planet in addition to the fact that we are on a tilted axis so we go through a climate change called summer fall winter and spring every single year and it's a pretty violent climate change and we have a planet

163:48that's been ice ball earth snowball earth twice its history the fact is the planet is on a trajectory on a path on a voyage on a mission that is scarier than the mission of Frodo the hobbit it is circling the core of the galaxy approximately every 235 million years and is it as it goes through that long voyage around the center of the galaxy it goes through spiral arms of galaxies that change our climate dramatically it gathers something like a hundred trillion tons of cosmic dust per year and at certain points it goes through clouds of cosmic fluff that triple the amount of that dust that we gather which changes the climate considerably and we go through a Milankovitch cycle it changes the climate every 22,000 40,000 110,000 years not precisely but in that range so yes if we want to stabilize the climate take responsibility for your decision already admit that this is a

164:59biogenic decision and then go after climate stabilization technologies yes try removing carbon from the atmosphere see if it works but in the long haul we are on a 12,000 year passage once climate has been relatively stable that's not normal the norm is rapid climate change much more rapidly than we've seen and ice ages and they alter so we better damn well learn these things now when I was in Japan a few years ago in a conference about harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it down to earth which is carbon neutral and a source of such tremendous amounts of power that it defies description there was a loan from the European Space Agency and she said well if you guys are going to build these giant solar harvesting farms these five-mile by five mile arrays of photovoltaic panels when you see a hurricane heading for Jamaica send down a laser beam lays the outer

166:04edges of the hurricane so that you change the heat at a certain point on that hurricane and redirect it so it doesn't hit Jamaica so it goes harmlessly out to sea well that's the beginning of harnessing these things harnessing disasters as energy opportunity now have we ever done that well what about fire if you'd been the first one to start playing with fire your mama would have told you look you see all those dead animals in there that have been roasted or barbecued by this forest fire you want to become one of them put that back where it belongs and fire saved us at the heart of a jet at the heart of a piston and president of a car what do we have explosions explosions that's one of the most devastating catastrophes we can imagine an explosion what causes this very rigid it's not I don't want to say scientific dogma but dogma in terms of the way you're allowed to talk about

167:05climate change well there are certain aspects of science that our religion because we science people are built with the same super normal responses in us that the Flying Saucer people have in them and that the Christians who still believe in the coming of the kingdom of God you can't debate this this is not something like even though I said so far is yeah lute Harris like people would get angry yeah well one person did there was an astronomer who would going up to Canada for god knows what reason he wrote a book on the evolution of the cosmos I thought it was brilliant my friend Sheldon Jacob my colleague who was the head of the physics department at the University of Tel Aviv and the head of the physical Association you know the association of all physicists in Israel where they have some pretty good physicists said Olli will talk to you and he's very open guy

167:58and when I got hold of Lee I forget his last name but you would recognize it Lee sent me a note saying well it's a pleasure to meet you but that article that York in the Wall Street Journal about climate was unfortunate it was something a little harsher than that meaning you have sinned and and I watched this movement develop from the beginning and it developed by using conformity enforcers well that Al Gore movie tipped it over the top it helped a lot of unfortunate truth that just people had they realized they had I mean if you want a virtue signal you gotta be on board well what really put the environmental movement on the map was Earth Day and the guy who pulled that off really pulled off an amazing PR stunt that was just an astonishing PR stunt and if that's what started it off yes yes because in the 1950s when I was the head of the program Kemeny of my high school

168:54I programmed in a guy who talked to us about what was being done to whales and the pictures were horrifying this guy was a giant he was about 6 foot 2 and and in those days that was really really tall and he was most severe person I'd ever met he walked in without acknowledging me I had booked him at all he had a frown on his face that was unbelievable he walked out with that same serious frown uncompromising without saying goodbye without saying thank you without any of the normal social graces and he didn't have a name for what he was doing conservation was the name of what he was doing back then and it was Earth Day that put another word on the map environmentalism and that got environmentalism into first grades and second grades and fourth grades when kids are at an imprinting age when their brains are literally being fashioned around some of the key things that they absorb at that

169:52age when we talk about impressionable we're talking about a certain element of the morphology of the brain that wraps itself around certain things and then never lets them go and environmentalism was built to get into the brains of young people and never leave and eventually environmentalism developed its own end of the earth scenario it tried to develop one in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich who is a butterfly specialist said that by 1980 which rumor in 1968 was 12 years away so that's like my talking about something that will happen in 2030 it seemed a long ways away and he said by 2019 80 we would get to the point where there are so many people on the planet that we'd have to stand on each other's shoulders there would be no room for us we would vastly outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment meaning the food supply would run out it would not be able to keep up with our population

170:52growth and as a consequence in the early 1980s people would die by the hundreds of millions in India and China and even the United States now remember back to those days Joe I don't know if you know the history of it you were probably born after it but did remember all the hundreds of millions of people dying in India and China and the United States remember how your parents had a stand on each other's shoulders in order to find room to live no I don't recall that you don't I do I don't understand well much like the apocalyptic cults they move the goalposts yeah exactly and so now it's climate change and originally it was global warming and then they smarten up to the fact that they better cover their ass just in case we had an ice age instead of warming and glass what is the planet of global warming and climate change this one yeah big time so they are right and they are wrong right we

171:48need to do these climate stabilization technologies we must I mean we've been doing them you said it best we've been doing ever since we invented the fur coat which allowed us to get out of Africa and go to the forest ends of Asia when we were still far from being humans modern humans that the technology of the cave and beyond that the technology of the hut all these are climate stabilization technologies on a small scale now we need to do climate stabilization technology and a big soul scale no that does not mean that we have to put sulfur droplets into the atmosphere to keep the Sun from warming the surface of the earth that we so stupid it's ridiculous it's not a reversible move but if you have a laser from harnessing space solar power and you use it to redirect hurricanes you can see what worked the first time and try something different the second

172:41time in the third time until you perfect it you can't do that with sulfur ducks the droplets and the atmosphere it's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of my life but that's the first solution technological solution come out of all of the climate people's smells but we need to do what they're talking about we just have to take ownership of it however bloom we got to wrap this up this is a very very enjoyable conversation well I'm having really appreciate it I having a great deal of fun so if you need me in the future you can get me on the phone which is how I do coast-to-coast let's do it yeah often a UNL a very seldom very self as I'm on my own dime here and I well I would be happy to fly you out you're going to come well I would love to come let's do I look like I would ever say no to a conversation with you let's do it again all right we shall really appreciate it

173:32okay Howard bloom ladies and gentlemen how much what time is it