The Joe Rogan Experience - #1119 - Howard Bloom

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

Howard Bloom is an author and he was also a publicist in the 1970s and 1980s for singers and bands such as Prince, Billy Joel, and Styx. His latest book "How I Accidentally Started The Sixties" is available now on Amazon -- https://www.amazon.com/How-I-Accidentally-Started-Sixties/dp/1945572914/ref=la_B001KIRZ9U_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526939581&sr=1-6

try to keep this about a fist away from your face okay the best length how's this a little closer if you can yeah good we're live oh we that was quick oh you're a wizard over there mr bloom yes joe thanks for doing this man i appreciate it well we were in a film together so we've been like right next to each other on celluloid. What film were we in? That was the Culture High, 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 was. 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 again. What did you have? It's called, these days, this month, it's called ME-CFS. Up until now, it 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 for 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. You couldn't have a person in the room. My stress levels were off the charts and the slightest thing would just the 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. have a sense of humanity and you don't know it. And something like this that wipes out your entire future, every dream you ever had for yourself, robs you of your sense of humanity. And you don't know there is a sense of humanity 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 two computers and a Chinese box. Don't let anybody tell you the 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.

me to control both computers from one monitor and one keyboard. So we had 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 the 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 going to write my first book, and I was going to – I'm a nerd from science. I got into science at the age of 10. I got into theoretical physics and microbiology.

I built my first Boolean algebra machine when I was 12. I co-designed a computer that won science fair awards when I was 12. on science fair awards. When I was 12, I was taken to see the head of the graduate physics department at the University 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 came up with the theory of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe, the Big Bagel Theory, or the Bloom-Troydell model, that predicted 38 years in advanced dark energy. And then I ended up in the rock and roll business with this background.

So when I imagined I was going to write my first book, I was going to leave the rock and roll business behind because my field expedition in rock and roll, I'd learned, I thought, as much as I was ever going to learn from it. And I'd worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACDC, Aerosmith, Kiss, Queen, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, people like that. What caused this disease? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody has a clue. No idea of what the – so in the different names, chronic fatigue syndrome, ME, is that what you said? ME is myalgic encephalomyelitis.

It's a more dignified name. Can they understand it to the point where they could test for it? Do they give you a blood test or they just – No, they can't test for it. They don't know what causes it. There is no... I've written... Look, a friend approached 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 this pamphlet. It explains how I got out of it,

but what worked for me is not necessarily going to work for you or anybody else. Was it a gradual slipping away of your energy, or was it a quick drop off? Not that gradual. 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's Sam Cooke's daughter and her husband, Cecil Womack, who wrote 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 in past 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 of 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 they drove me 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 AA batteries. And then I forgot my laptop on the plane. I don't do things like that. Something was a little off. The next day,

I thought I had a cold. My technique for handling a cold, work your fucking ass off. Walk a minimum of two and a half miles and do your work. So I worked and powered my way through it. By Tuesday, I was so weak that my staff had to 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. I don't know how I even got up the stairs. And it was all downhill basically from there. For 15 years. 15 freaking years.

That's unbelievable. Right. But I still 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 they'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 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 just gave it to them.

Yeah. And the next day I got a call from a 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 of value. My science was still of 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 exactly do you mean by that? What was wrong with your old personality?

The old personality couldn't walk anymore, couldn't talk anymore. That was your body. That was my body, but you have 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? Well, I got online. 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 Chagnon, who is the anthropologist who chronicled the fierce people, the Yanomamo in South America, people who are really, I mean, the more people you kill, the more wives you get. It's as simple as that in 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 and 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 email. So just a group of people that you could interact with, with email. 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 author is writing this directly into your face.

And Einstein said to be a genius, it's not enough to come up with a theory only seven men in the world can understand. To be a genius, you 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. It took me four years to get around to doing it after Einstein gave me the orders. And when I was put on the Human Behavior and Evolutionary Society group, well, I can write my fucking 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 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 had 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? Were doctors giving you? Doctors don't know a damn thing about this.

Eventually, my first wife, who I lost because of this, I lost a 34-year marriage because of the illness. She persuaded a CFS doctor, 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. We're looking for treatments that might possibly save us from our illness. So when I tell people the stuff I take and they say, okay, who can I get this from? And I send them to my doctor, my old CFS doctor.

He says, oh, I don't give those treatments. 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 me to try them and i ended up with a every morning i give myself a shot with three different things in it a half a cc of magnesium one cc of oxytocin and about two cc's of cyanocobalamin which is liquid vitamin b12 so. So B12, magnesium, and oxytocin. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Oxytocin, the stuff that creates trust in neuroeconomics experiments. Oxytocin, 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 is this little experiment called parabiosis. Take an old rat. His brain is aging. His heart is 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 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, it's really crazy. But when they tried to figure out what is reversing the aging in 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 pushups in a 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. I've never heard of anybody taking that as a supplement. Well, it showed up.

There was a doctor named something like C. Strunk in Texas who was using it on CFS patients. And my friend, the Texas patient of my doctor, found C-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 regurgitate it as his own bright idea, and then he prescribed it for me, and it's done wonders. Wow. That and a bunch of other stuff have done absolute wonders.

What are the other things that have 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 was my first traveling since I'd gotten out of bed. And 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 doing and I realized I'd missed all my

afternoon pills. And as soon as I was able, well, we had to find a bed in the infirmary, which is scary at 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 gabapentin and within 15 minutes the symptoms were gone. Wow so did you have you ever tried to isolate individual ones to remove some of them from the protocol to see if those are the ones? I once removed one, amitriptyline. It's an antidepressant. That's what it 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 stomach aches, and they went on for months and months and months, until I finally got fed up and started researching on Google. What do you do about stomach aches? Well, guess what one of the primary things you do to stop stomach aches is? 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 four o'clock in the morning until eight 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 my assistant. I give her her marching orders for the day, I go back to sleep at 11, and I sleep until 3. 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, two four hour chunks, because that is better for you. My body was refusing to do the eight hour thing. So one of the first symptoms of CFS is insomnia. Okay, now Joe, if your body is refusing to sleep for eight hours straight, listen to your body. Give it what the hell it wants. And so these are the hours my body demanded. And I had been working often until eight 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 do 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, a novelist, and all kinds of people who just sit there and slave away all day. But I'm listening to Pandora. That gives

me a sense of life. For some reason, 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? Robbers. Yeah, right. That's what you'd think. But I have the time of my life looking up at the stars out in the middle of the meadow and being where I'm not supposed to be.

Are you 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 overstepped the boundaries. I've been out there after one o'clock and they do close the place at one and throw us all out. But no, in New York lore, unless you're walking a really big dog, you do not go out into parks at night. But 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. 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 am, the guy who

worked with Michael Jackson, Prince Bob Marley, and all of those people. And I'm co-designing a multi-planetary mission at Caltech right now. I'm out here in California to do a bookstore reading, my first one on the West Coast for How I Accidentally 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 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 about Prince. In the 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 a year of 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. the cameraman who's been with us through this whole thing. A couple of Sundays ago, my director got his third Grammy or Emmy, and 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 it. Yeah, I was going to 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 fabulous. This is part of what gives you juice. Yeah, because for whatever reason, if I refuse to go into any niche, I refuse to go into one specialization and see the walls close in on me and get buried there. of me and get buried there. 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 a 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 pixels in a big picture. So I do all the sciences. What is that term? Autodidactic?

Yes, autodidact. Autodidact, right. Well, I read two books a day from the time I was 10. And by the time I got to college, remember, I'm there 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. That's pretty weird. Which is really weird. That's pretty weird. So by the time I got to college and 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 end 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 panorama, 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 at 10 o'clock at night. And people on the Unterverlinden, 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. Ein Volk, one tribe. Ein Reich, one state. Ein Führer, one leader. But it gave them, we all 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 in Hitler's case that this was an accident? No, I think Hitler designed this. Yes, he did design it. He absolutely designed it. So 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 all this? Yeah, how did he know all this? The way any artist knows how to achieve things that he may never have seen achieved before in his life. It's intuition. We're all built with certain supernormal 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 his art director. So Albert Speer would art direct these massive events like 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, and who could bring that audience to that ecstatic level. Does it disturb you to study someone as fucked up as Hitler, though, and look for the genius in his approach, especially as a Jew? Yeah, you bet your ass, of course. 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 in it. And 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 that led you to become

a publicist? Right. Because remember, if I'd gone to grad school, I would have been giving paper and pencil tests to 22 college students in exchange for one psychology credit. Now, how much was I going to learn about mass ecstasies, the forces of history in that college class? Nothing. It's fascinating, though, that you had this foresight, because for many people, the idea of going to grad school and becoming a professor, like 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 can welded over you. It's a big mistake. And I started a commercial art studio with a bunch of artists that I had worked with.

One day I was in class. 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 F.J. Alford Prufrock says, Schmuck, listen up, the way that I stand. Except he doesn't. I mean, he's an anti-Semite, so he's not going to say Schmuck. T.S. Eliot. But he said, listen up. If you don't start doing the heroic stuff that you feel will define you and bring young women crawling to your ankles and kissing your knees, 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 at NYU said, Bloom, when everybody leaves the classroom, close the door. I need to 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 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 had already been repossessed. He and his wife and child were sitting on a bare rug 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 allow you 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 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 where I was 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 nose as if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there. The truth at any price, even if that price is... Including the price of your life. Yeah, so when people tell me, for example, about my book, The Muhammad Code, how a desert prophet brought you ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, or how Muhammad invented jihad. So when people realized I was writing this, they said, you can't write that. You'll get killed.

Who the fuck cares? The first rule of science is the truth at any price, including the price of your life. And if you tell me I can't write it because it's going to get me killed, I know that it's doubly important for me to write this because nobody else is going to have the guts to. So 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 ecstatic state that you're studying when it comes to Hitler or rock music. You seem to be looking at this as almost like a form of not necessarily uncharted energy, but undocumented. Almost as if it's like there's fuel out there that you're tapping into and utilizing 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. aware of, but I don't think they're thinking about it the same way that you are.

No, 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. And I get disturbed when it looks like I'm going to get typed, like I've spent so much time on space in the last few years that I'm afraid people are going to 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 you worry about being, I mean, after all you've accomplished, how could you be typed? Oh, it's real easy. But by who? By fools? Partly by myself, but also by others. Interesting. By yourself. Yeah. You're worried about yourself.

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 it but i share a similar desire to be fascinated by many different things at the same time and you've 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 in school i read two books a day that's it so i read a book under the desk teacher who cared about the teacher um And my parents were going to send me off to a small

private school, but they made me promise to work in school. I'd never worked in school before, and I forget where I was going with this story. But there is one experience I had in this little high school that's really relevant. And that is, okay, by the time I'm 16 years old, I'm going to have to do the ecstatic experience for four years in scientific terms. When I'm 14 and hear 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. And finding books in Buffalo isn't that easy. And then I'm 16, and I've been elected the head of the program committee in my school. The program committee, 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, 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 in 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 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. It didn't work. 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 coalesces 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 an out-of-body experience. I'm convinced that I'm on the ceiling watching all of this happen, that I'm not 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 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. Not for football stars, not for anything. That's a scene in a movie.

Well, I mean, it might be. What is that for me? Well, I've been after well i've been after the ecstatic experience by then at that that carves the forces of history for 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 attacked into a part of me that's in there i mean when my parents tried to drag me off look i i, we're going back in time. Let's go back to when I was about to be 13 years old, okay?

And I realized sometime when I was 12 1⁄2 years old that I was an atheist. I didn't believe in God. 12 1⁄2? Yeah. Why 12 1⁄2? I have no idea. You're a true believer.

Six months in, you're like, fuck this. It took me two and a half years of reading two books a day. You're a true believer. Six months in, you're like, fuck this. It took me two and a half years of reading two books a day. But 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 mitzvah. And plus, it was the only party I was ever going to be invited to, my own bar mitzvah party, right? Who could—

Right. You've got to keep it together. Yeah. So it wasn't until after the bar mitzvah was over and all of the thank you notes had been written until I was able to admit that I'm an atheist. So that means that 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, the 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. At 12 and a half? Yeah.

Well, by now it's 13. Okay. And so I'm hanging on to these sturdily American craftsmen-built doors of the Fraser blue car my dad drives, and my parents are at my ankles trying, shredding 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 tube, and pointing the tube, which was designed to be used for horizontal viewing, so you could see an army coming over the horizon

towards 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 von Leeuwenhoek, who uses the same high-tech device as lenses, because he's a draper. He sells fabric. So he uses his magnifying 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 socks. And 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 Loonhok 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, it's secular.

Sorry, spirituality. I got sex on the brain. But that was the closest I was going to get to what Hitler had summoned forth. 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 is almost contagious. Like you see whatever they're – the energy that they're putting out, it's so compelling. It's a bizarre thing that human beings have, 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. You read it in there. That if you're that confident to be like the preacher on stage shouting out to the heavens, that 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 are 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 going to come to me when I was in the rock and roll business and you wanted to be my client, 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 at 2 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 4 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 it 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 are danced around as if you were a marionette, you feel 17,000 souls coursing through you to something higher, being transmogrified and channeling 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, how are you? Fine, thank you very much.

So if you're willing, 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 fucking soul. So you would go 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 home in Seymour, Indiana. We finished at four o'clock in the afternoon. John looked the way that he only looked when he came off stage. 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 the press who hated John Mellencamp around.

Why did they hate him? They hated him because he had signed with Tony DeVries, who was managing David Bowie, and Tony DeVries thought that his magic came from changing people's names. David Bowie had been 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 each 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 Coor 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. 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 listened to it, you would be expelled. People would shun you at the next launch. They wouldn't want you there. Or the next dinner. So you shouldn't even listen to it because it's that bad. Exactly. You just, you had to the group think had been established.

Yeah, and peer pressure is tremendous within the rock crit or was tremendous within the rock crit establishment. Among the rock critics. They had 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 in approximately 1832,

commentator, Thomas Carlyle in England in approximately 1832, wrote about the pop culture critics of his day. In his day, pop culture was novels and plays. 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 2,000 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 withdrew the cane, every one of the other 4,999 sheep would jump at precisely this 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 Prince, like John. Michael Jackson was not an ecstatic on stage. 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. 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 remarkable, they don't believe me. He was, you know, you and I and Jamie are on a certain level.

And we don't know we're on a certain level because we figure 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 going to encounter is another person pretty much like us. these days, what we're going to 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 Marlon's 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 bill your table in the middle of the room and there are kade games which at that point in particular nineteen eighty three uh... were unattainable no human could afford arcade games, um, unless you were Steve Wynn and you were actually equipping an arcade. Um, so we're in the middle, we're in this room and Michael and I are standing next to each other. So his elbow is at his left elbow is at 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 this 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 started in pop culture in the art business. And these were my legendary

competitors. And Michael opens the first page of the first portfolio, and he gets a square inch into it, a postage stamp size piece into it. And he goes, oh, and his knees begin to buckle. And he gets another two square inches into it, just lifts the page a little bit further. Oh, he lifts it even further. Oh, Michael is seeing the infinite in 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 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 the people he called his kids, And his commitment to his audience, to the people he called his kids. Oh, God. I forgot to turn this off. We can't take the call. So let's find. Of course, you're an Android guy, too. Yes. Oh, God.

How do we? I know. Want my help? We pulled down from here. I'm an incompetent with this stuff. How could you be? For people who don't see you right now, 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, but then underneath them you have other headphones. I have a total of three pair of headphones on me. Three? Because they wear out so quickly. And then I need to replace them. What are you doing with them?

Chewing them? Well, no, I'm petting dogs, and that yanks them around. The best quality sound that I've been able to get is in $8 headphones. What? That doesn't make any sense. It's extraordinary sound. It's just that the wiring goes. Wait a minute.

Why is it the best quality sound on those cheap-ass headphones? It has the best quality bass that I've ever gotten. I have these Shures. Yeah. You know, the ones that are like straight wires with clear covers. I actually get very annoyed when Apple got rid of the microphone jack, the headphone jack on their phones. Well, I would be annoyed, too. Yeah, because of that.

Yeah. It was 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. What does that mean? 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 wacky. Which phone are you using?

The Samsung Note 8. Oh, okay. Well, you know, some people think that Samsung's got a little bit of bloatware in their software. Since you're an Android guy, have you ever considered using like a Google Pixel 2? Well, I like a big screen. Pixel 2 XL. So six inch screens. Well, that would be very neat. 6.2 would be terrific.

It also, when you squeeze the sides, the Google Assistant pops up. Yeah. Yeah, you squeeze the sides and you can start asking questions. Neat. Well, I need to find one that's also got the headphone jack on the top. They don't have a headphone jack. Google got rid of the headphone jack. Oh, my God.

I know. That's what I'm saying. Because if you use Bluetooth, if it's tuned to your cell phone, you can't tune it to your Kindle. And you can't tune it to your laptop. And 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 it, it picks up back where you were listening?

can listen to it, and then as you're reading it, it picks up back where you were listening? Well, it does. It's supposed to do that, but sometimes it really wimps out and takes me 30 pages away from where I was reading, and it becomes hard to find where I was reading. Oh, that's annoying. I mean, you know, this is why I curse Jeff Bezos. I hope he 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 those things. But isn't he supposed to be cheap? Like, in terms of, like, how he pays workers at the Amazon factories? I would 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. Yes, he has a rocket company. Does he think he's Elon Musk? Yeah.

Look at you over there, Jeff. He thinks that SpaceX and Elon Musk are the hare, and he's the tortoise. So he has launched a rocket, the same rocket, eight times now, and landed it again. Really? Yes. The same rocket? The same rocket. So he's demonstrated multiple reuse.

The problem is that his rocket can only get to the fringes of space. It can't really get into orbital space. There he is right here. Jamie just pulled it up. We can look at it right there. Yes, that's it. Wow. Is that real? Is that real, Jamie? That's totally real. Why does it look fake?

Because you haven't seen it before. I don't know. Doesn't it look like CGI to you? I sound like Eddie Bravo. So it could be, but he's actually launched this thing eight times. What's with the golf ball inside of there? I have no clue. It's probably demonstrating that it's weightless. We live in an extraordinary time of super geniuses doing incredible shit.

And this is how it lands? It lands the same way? That's exactly it. You got it. That's incredible. And Elon says, you know, that Elon's been landing his rockets, and he's been reusing them. I think he's done 11 reuses so far or something like that.

But Elon is saying that he's going to get so precise in his landings that the rockets will land precisely on the brackets from which they took off. Wow. Yeah. That was on the same pad. I mean, that was a fairly small pad that the Bezos rocket. So Bezos is a very well-controlled rocket. Elon's, you saw after the Falcon Heavy launch,

the pictures of the two boosters landing simultaneously within 100 yards of each other. I didn't see that. I didn't watch it. Oh, you have to bring that up sometime because it's an astonishing sight. I like how Bezos is the Amazon Prime videos they're putting out. They're putting out some really great shows. They're putting out a lot of stand-up comedy now as well. Right. Which they're trying to somewhat compete with Netflix.

And if you have a – there it is right there. Wow. It just landed. Well, that's it. That's the money shot. Yeah. Wow, that's incredible. The two rockets landing simultaneously. That's unbelievable.

Yeah, so the goal here is, up until now, NASA, which has been dumbed down so much it's ridiculous by Congress and the Senate, because Congress and the Senate insist on designing their own rockets in order to bruise jobs programs, not to get us to space. 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 that you put out. It's worse than that. There's a little thing called the Alabama Mafia. It's a bunch of senators in Congress from Texas and Colorado and 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 $30 billion to design it. And it's a throwaway rocket. So it's going to cost $1 to $2 billion for each flight. You think this is intentional? It's intentionally, yes. It's intentionally stupid. You think so? 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. That's a long time. When we do get access to manned space, it's going to come from Elon Musk. It's not going to come from any of the major space companies. And $3 billion 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, to 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 going to do this for free. I'm not going to charge you a penny. All you have to pay are the expenses.

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 plane out into the Atlantic, over the Atlantic, and plowed it into the Atlantic Ocean and discarded it. 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 $325,000, and fly you back, and then I'll fly the 737 out over the 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 L.A. to New York and back again? Approximately $325,000 per ticket. How often would you fly from L.A. to New York?

Not very often, if ever. So that's what NASA is doing with the 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 entire venture? It would be better if they offered what are called 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 the companies, but it's Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined and allow them all to bid on this because Elon is going to bring it in for a tenth the cost. Elon has developed the Falcon Heavy for approximately $2 billion. He's developed all of his rockets for

approximately $2 billion for all of them. It's costing NASA $30 billion to develop a turkey. Now, how do they keep doing that in the face of these guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? How do they keep doing that in the face of these guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? Congressmen and senators don't care. They simply want to maintain the jobs in their districts. Plus, if they feed the SMIC, 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 Vaders of space, the Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grumman's and the big aerospace, traditional aerospace contractors. So Congress in a certain number, it's a cabal of senators

and congressmen who are screwing us up because a country that dreams big gets big. A country that looks up goes up. A country that looks down goes down. We've become accustomed to looking down because we don't have that glorious option. The moon is way behind us. Buzz 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 in America have lost that dream of creating a paradise above the sky because NASA's abandoned them. And NASA's 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 $3 billion a year would mean that you could develop an entire Elon Musk space program and launch roughly 20 rockets. But is the issue the actual engineers and the scientists themselves?

I mean, they must... No, it's politicians. Right. But the politicians, are they able to dictate what the actual scientists and engineers create? Yep. And say, hey, you must create something that is disposable? Yes. But is that really a conversation that's taking place?

Yes, because these guys have said, okay, we want to use space shuttle, leftover space shuttle technology, and they've mapped out the specifications of the rocket that they want. These guys are doing. 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 SMIC, the Space Military Industrial Complex, is known for a long time is you try to parcel our jobs to as many states as possible. jobs to as many states as possible. So major programs like 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 campaign contributions from that billion to $3 billion nipple per year that NASA has been forced to extend to 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 one-tenth the price and deliver them for one-tenth the price.

Imagine where we would be. I mean mean you're 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 uh 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 come on man on friday or no sund, at the National Space Society's annual 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 a trillion dollars. It's a total of a $20 trillion project.

It pulls together something like 66 countries and 3.3 billion people. 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 going to be the Chinese century, unless we counter with an equally big vision. And the big visions are not coming from Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., 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. called something like AMON-335, has more resources than the gross domestic product of England, France, Italy, and South Korea combined. In one meteor. In one meteor. Oh, and I forgot to throw in India. India's in that list, too.

Combined. So is the idea to mine this meteor, to land on it? Yes, exactly. Somehow or another extract resources and bring them back to Earth? But if NASA seriously wants us to develop that space economy, they have to do their part. Elon and Jeff are bringing the 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 in 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 $220 on a really good day. That's what's happening with space. But where's the mining equipment going to come from? That's something NASA needs to be working on. Plus the mining equipment for the moon from? That's something NASA needs to be working on, plus the mining equipment for the moon, to turn the moon basically into a fuel station for rockets. How do you have time to think about this while also thinking about all the other things you think about? Because I do my best thinking when I'm thinking about 15 things at once. And that's why the music is there,

because my mind is empty if I don't have, because that's another thread going on at the same time. I want to bring you back to something you said earlier that you sort of glossed over, but you were talking about quantum physicists getting everything wrong. So I 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 A does not equal a that's aristotle's primary law of identity no it's not always true um one of the laws is the theory of entropy is so fucking wrong explain entropy to people that might not know entering 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 work like that. The universe, in the very beginning, it formed quarks from nothing but motion. Quarks from motion? Are you kidding me? Yeah.

The first things from movement? Are you joshing? No. And then the quarks had to get together in groups of three, because this is a profoundly social universe, so 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 do all these particles do?

280,000 years later, they begin to sweep 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. form their spiral arms and stuff like that. And then within the spiral arms of these galaxies, gravity balls are competing with each other to see who's the biggest gravity ball and the biggest wins, and what does he do to the losers? He swallows them and gets even bigger, which makes it possible for that gravity ball 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 they're planets and moons. How the hell do you go even this short distance into the life of a galaxy 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 weasel definition. Weasel? Yeah. In other words, it's deliberately obscure. Ah, because it's such a weird subject? Yeah. That's funny. But every priesthood has a shibboleth. A shibboleth is a magic word. If you can't pronounce it, you're dead.

Ah. And so every tribe wants you to believe in something that's impossible. Remember the Red Queen or the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland said, sometimes I dream up six impossible things before breakfast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have to pass the test by showing that you believe in something that's obviously fatuously wrong. 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 in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder that is a property of the system's state and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in 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 it is. 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, or to your grandmother.

No, it is a little weaselly. It is a little weaselly, right. 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 current science. Why does that assumption exist, do you believe? 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 19th century what computers are to the 22nd century, or whatever we're living in now. The 21st century, sorry. 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 an 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 produce exhaust. 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 in that story of the universe? I was telling you the degradation 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 in its early days. It has pressure waves. That means that these elementary particles are squooching together and forming a wave.

Is that a technical term? Yes. And then they're squooching apart, and they're forming a trough. And then they're squooching 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 entropic? Is that disorder constantly increasing? No, it's the very opposite. What the universe does, it takes every form of waste and turns it into an opportunity. I mean, we call this place Earth. What are we naming it for? The excreta of worms, the shit 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. And we call it dirt when it's in the earth. So we are taking this entropic stuff, the shit that came out of worms, and we're farming in it and

plants are growing in it trees are growing in it flowers are growing in it is that entropy is that a continual slide 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 Well, 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. I think three MacArthur Genius Award winners, all said, this is a great book. And one compared it to 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 the God Problem, how he got all this cosmos creates. And let's not forget, for the sake of the audience, we're actually here to promote how I accidentally started the 60s, which is my newest book. Fifth book? It's my sixth book.

But it was actually written during those five years when I couldn't talk. Wow. 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, Wow. 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 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 A number one attraction cue? It's humor. So there I was reading Dave Barry and reading P.G. 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. And when I got back, the Loose Empire, the Time Life Empire, had given it a name.

They called it the Hippie Movement. Wow. And I tried to write it as absolutely in 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 Gardner, because Eric Gardner had started out in the music business as a roadie for the Jefferson Airplane. And I wrote Eric and said, Eric, I've just written this book. Could you get it to the Jefferson Airplane? Because if I could get them to say something positive about it,

that validated it, because they were a key act in the 1960s. And Eric said, no, 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 wow, woo and aha experiences and nonstop waves of scientific comedy routines and nonstop waves of hilarity. And compared it to James Joyce and said, wow, woo, aha, 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 Timothy 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 chapters 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 Wodehouse and Dave Barry had done for me. And I was stunned when I found that out. Absolutely stunned.

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 circumstances as a gift to your fellow humans. And, yes, you will doubt that it will ever be of value to any human on the planet because that's how us humans feel about most of our 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 physicists got wrong? Well, all of them for four, there was a four day conference in a pension just outside Moscow, 50 miles outside of Moscow. It was a worker's

paradise built in the 1960s. And all the people there, all the physicists were going around drawing the same diagram on napkins to explain what they were talking about. And it's a diagram of how Schrodinger's equation manifests itself in one single isolated electron. Well, guess what, 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 an isolated quanta of light, an 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. 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 misconception prevalent? Because the equation fits certain very artificial experiments that were set up in the lab.

experiments that were set up in the lab, and once an experiment is done and accepted, then everybody who doesn't get the same results thinks he's doing it wrong and does it over and over again until he gets the same results. And the explanation, for some reason, a lot of people in this universe 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. I mean, 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 of 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, which conversation, information exchange is constantly taking place all over the place. And the fact that Schrodinger's 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 conference. And instead, they sat there as if this had been my bar mitzvah, and I'd just done a haftor, or whatever it's called that you do at a 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 face that's 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 Karakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And Pavel emailed me and said, Dr. Uzhigov, 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

Arxiv.org, which is the leading site for preprints in 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 walks 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. Uzhikov, and I said, Dr. Uzhikov, 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 e-mails back,

an e-mail that comes within two or three hours, and Uzhikov said, Remember you? Didn't you read the first half of my book? And we are credited in there, my partner, Pavel and I. So to at least a bunch of quantum physicists from 11 time zones gathering in Moscow, what I was saying made sense. Well, quantum physics doesn't make sense to me. I've tried. I've tried really hard. It makes about the same sense as that definition you were just reading of entropy.

Exactly. I'll go over it and over it again and get little chunks of it, and I would understand sections of sentences, 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 it was Niels Bohr 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 state. 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. I watched a video where you were talking about that there is essentially a universal brain. Well, yes, because you and I, right now, we're going to be talking to possibly out of your 500, where it's more like 1 million total viewers and listeners. It's probably more than that. I think it's probably closer to three. Yeah, so we're going to be talking to, let's say, 100,000 of them or 200,000 of them.

And they're processing what we are saying. Right now there are bacteria in your gut and mine who live in enormous colonies, an enormous bacterial 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 are you just relaying the information? Like, are you cognizant? Yeah, both.

Both. Because I want, remember, Einstein gave me my marching orders. You have to take complex ideas and simplify them so much that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of 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 actually consciously thinking of all of these different minds, taking into account all these different mind-blowing things that you're saying, and then applying them out in the world? I think so.

Yeah. I mean, you know, if you hear it coming out of my mouth, that's what's churning around in my brain. I'm just, you're such a bright guy. I'm just trying to understand if you're in the moment, or if you're in the moment as well as being consciously aware of the spread of information well my obligation is to do both simultaneously yeah yeah that's my obligation that's what i assumed yeah so at any rate so the the entropic theory doesn't make any sense the i mean look there i wasn't a bed right right so you would think i'm totally isolated i'm not you're not 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 um 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 schroding 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 this 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 invented 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 fucking the cleaning lady whom he made pregnant so how isolated really was he the universal mind theory this or this concept, I shouldn't say theory, the way you're describing it is very interesting. That there is no individual thought. That essentially...

Oh, there's lots of individual thought. But it's all connected to all the other people that are around you and all the people that you've interacted with and all the places you've been and the things you've seen and all the people that are constantly thinking simultaneously around you that you're aware of and the people that you're trying to influence because you're trying to influence people all day long right 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 right then you really have to work hard to influence them. But 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 the things that you use to survive. They're also making chemicals that influence your mind and your moods. They're vitamin K. They are making an awful lot of the things that you use to survive. They're also making 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 store so that you will feed them the stuff that they love the most? Or is 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'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 in an ant colony and half of its life in 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 of that mind. Is this related 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 it will infect the colony? Oh, I'm not aware of that one, but it sounds...

To cordyceps? Yeah, but it sounds similar. But the real deal is, okay, life on this earth functions the way that a beehive functions. And how does a beehive function? 95% of the bees are 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.

a public stomach in which they can carry this stuff, I mean, built into them, inside of them. And they have these carrying hairs on their thighs, and they carry pollen in those. And when they arrive at the unloading bay, there is an unloading bay 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. They 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. Wow. 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. They're anywhere 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 whims. Following their whims. I mean, if you were their mother, what would you say?

You're wasting your fucking life, for God's sakes. Okay, eventually you, the conformist bee, start coming back without pollen in your caring hairs and without nectar in your public stomach 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 bees stick their tongue into your public stomach.

Empty, sorry. They see your caring hairs. Empty. They turn their backs on you so savagely that you feel as if you've been cut dead. And it 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 Seeley, 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 down 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 do 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 bees simply following their instincts, five have come back having found new flower patches, and they are dancing, and the dancing excites you, and they're dancing in competition with each other. Some will dance 27 seconds. Some will dance 27 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 what the tailwinds 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 backup dancers wins and you all go out all you conformist bees who are 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 the living world operates in pretty much the same way. Bacteria are using you to get them chocolate eclairs. You are using them to digest chocolate eclairs. They are teasing our scientists into wild activity by threatening to develop illnesses that can bypass all of our antibiotics, which, by the way, are chemical weapons that microorganisms, colonies of microorganisms use to kill entire competing colonies. We stole them from microorganisms. We didn't invent them. Antibiotics. competing colonies. We stole them from microorganisms. We didn't invent them.

Antibiotics. So the scientists are very aware of the fact 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, moxicillin, stuff like that. These are bacteria-created poisons.

Bacteria make war with each other. When people tell you we are the only creatures that make war, they're lying. So is this why also when, especially if you're experimenting with your diet, people 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, and it makes it very difficult to get off that kind of a diet. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I'm not aware of that, but it sounds logical, given what we're learning about the biome, it's called.

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, you 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 developed it myself. You developed it yourself?

Well, again, I developed it myself. It took 30 years. And it's a diet that maximizes my energy and my ability to concentrate. What's a typical meal? There are only two meals. Breakfast is a can of tuna fish, an 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 in the morning? Yeah. Remember, I'm on this odd 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 vegetables? 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 dinner. 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 I allow 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 half. I mean, 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. You're not allowed to eat butter? No.

Why is that? Well, we're told that butter is bad for us, and dairy turned out to be a problem for me. And I had to work away around my food allergies, and this is the diet that did it. Do you have an allergy to dairy? I apparently did. I'm not sure I still do. So these huge, honking amounts of butter, and then I take these giant slabs of peanut butter, and I pile them up, 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'm 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 puts you to sleep. Why should you have to slog through the gray goo of your after-meal experience with your friends? I mean, if I'm with a friend, I want to be at my maximum. I want to enjoy. How do I enjoy myself? With my mouth open and my tongue going. Right.

So 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 going to want to crash in 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 the day 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 amphetamines or anything?

experience you know i helped start the 60s so um i helped start the drug culture and that meant i did amphetamine twice it was brand new back then in whatever ever form it was popular pro vigil 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 works 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 joe 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 amazing. Right.

So I'm giving three speeches this week at the. 15 in, 15 out. Yeah. Right? Yep. Wow. So. You have so much energy.

It's hard to imagine you being bedridden. I mean, it really is. You're. I couldn't form a single syllable i mean i believe you yeah i do believe you but i'm just saying seeing you in this state you're smiling you're and obviously what you said about enjoying conversations is so apparent you really enjoy getting these ideas across 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 is in some way contributing to our knowledge base. In 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 ape it in our own minds so we could anticipate its movements. So we anticipated the movements of lions. We anticipated the movements of e deer. We had to be able to ape it in our own minds 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 bison and the other creatures we were hunting, even the woolly mammals, could not have lived without those bacteria in their guts.

Now, we didn't discover those bacteria until Anton von Leeuwenhoek 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 roughly 1850. But nonetheless, he is taking his observations of fresh human sperm through his newly invented microscope, and he's sending the observations. He's discovered that there are animalcules, little animals, totally independent, flailing around in the sperm. And he writes a lengthy letter about this to the Royal Society.

Now, what has he just done, Joe, to the Royal Society? He's confessed to masturbation. Oh, my goodness. Where done, Joe, to the Royal Society? He's confessed to masturbation. Oh, my goodness. Where do you think he got the 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? 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 that, they could have thrown me out for incompetence at that time. Now, admittedly, I've never

heard of another human being ever being thrown out of the Boy Scouts, but still. You got thrown out of the Boy Scouts? That's right. For incompetence at Morse Code? Incompetence at Morse Code, right. Being incompetent at Morse Code? Yes. That seems so simple. To me, it wasn't simple. So, at any rate, rate i mean i was too busy with theoretical physics and

cosmology saying you're just uninterested yeah it wasn't that you were incompetent you really never bothered to learn it was too i had other better things to do they had already figured out something better than morse code yeah long before that 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 back to freshman year at the age of 21. Why'd you drop out? Well, I wanted to find the beatniks. I wanted to find Zen Buddhist Satori, 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 carried away by the children in your school. So I dropped out of school and went seeking Satori and the Beatniks and hitchhiked from Seattle down to the City Lights Bookshop, which was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookshop. And 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 jufro of a kind. People had been wearing their haircuts and military haircuts, crew cuts. 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 some of the members of the experience, look at you there. There's a photo of you.

Yes. What is that photo from? That's probably 1965 or 1966. That is a great picture. And the guy who, so how could you ignore if that walked into your bookstore and you've 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 a sleeping bag?

Yes, I had been barefoot for six months. And your feet get so thick that you can walk over gravel, glass. Why were you barefoot for six months? It felt like the right thing to do under the circumstances. Did you give that up? Well, no, eventually I gave it up. Do you have any calluses left? No, none.

It's done. No, I can't walk over gravel anymore. Don't you long for those days where you can do that again? Not a bit. No, I like current shoes. I love current shoes. So at any rate, but would you ignore what you just saw? I wouldn't.

That person with hair coming out of his head like electrocuted worms. Well, if you had that smile on your face like that, 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 bookstore looking crushed. Right. And somebody walking down the sidewalk said, 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 me colorado yeah with the beatniks in colorado i have no idea he thought they might be yeah so i ended up hitchhiking up and down the west coast with several friends. You just gave up? You gave up on the beatniks? I gave up on the beatniks because I wasn't a specific address and I didn't want to leave 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. So you just hung 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 I accidentally started in the 60s. In a big pink condemned house in Berkeley, three blocks away from the Berkeley campus. And we didn't care if it was going to 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 we walked down the street together, women could not take their eyes off of him. But they sliced through me as if I

weren't there, as if I were invisible. And every woman 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 having a psychic pain of any kind. It was uncanny. It was unreal. And remember, Michael Jackson is still the most remarkable person I've ever met but tick off 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 continues conversation with you while he was in there going so that was the norm for us. And I was the spiritual leader of the group. And how old were you at the time?

I was 19 or 18 years old. What's it 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 soapboxes and orating their heads off about Marxism or the coming of Jesus or whatever. And somebody in the crowd, while you're just watching what's going on, walks up to you and says, you look like the idiot in the Dostoevsky novel. So he doesn't mean that as you look like an idiot. He's talking about something unusual.

an idiot. He's talking about something unusual. And I start explaining to him what I'm doing. And before long, all of the crowds around all the guys on soapboxes with all of 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 100,000 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's what I'm here for. But I'm here to write the books too. Now writing the books is a lonely proposition. Writing is very lonely. You have to isolate yourself. That's why I'm here for. But I'm here to write the books, too. Now, writing the books is a lonely proposition. Writing is very lonely.

You have to isolate yourself. That's why I do it at a coffee shop where out of the corner of my eye I can see humans around me and where I can spend four hours 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, all those things can go crashing and disappear. That's why I don't understand the need to do it in front of all these people. Because I need the energy of other people. Well, 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 of all the people that live there.

And I can't, I mean, I've tried Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Pedro. New York City does it for you. Oh, yes, in ways I never imagined. Really? I never thought. How long did it take before you realized 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 cliques.

Cliques don't want me. And I'm not comfortable. I'll take you in my clique. Well, I'm generally not fit into cliques. Cliques don't want me. And I'm not comfortable. I'll take you in my clique. Well, I'm generally not wanted in cliques. Oh, you'd be wanted in, I don't really have one, but if I did, you'd be wanted in it. So that's very sweet. I guess I have a loosely formed one.

Yes, that's very nice. But so 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. 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, you're still accepted. I'm around giant groups of people so often because of the UFC doing commentary and these huge arenas filled with people. And then doing stand-up in front of thousands of people so often because of the UFC, doing commentary in these huge arenas filled with people, and then doing stand-up in front of thousands of people, and then the podcast,

reaching all these people. I need alone time. I have the opposite requirement. Amazing. I need that. If I don't get my writing, I have to write alone. I write when everyone's asleep in the house. I wait until everyone goes to bed, and then I do my writing, I have to write alone. I write when everyone's asleep in the house. I wait until everyone goes to bed, and then I do my writing.

And I've learned, I guess it's a discipline, how to be alone in the midst of a lot of people. Right. But you need the energy. I need the energy, yes. So what I want you to describe to me is like what is the energy of these people around you? Like what is happening? First, you have to understand something. 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 underdive, nosedive. 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've 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 my audience. But you don't you when you do get interrupted, I should say it does fuck you up. Yes. So I simply writing. I just say writing. You don't like it. Yes, so I simply, writing. You just say writing? Yeah.

Oh, wow. But I do it without ever lifting my eyes from the page. I've learned to discipline my eyes. You just go writing, writing. Something like that. People are like, fuck you, man. I just wanted a cigarette. Yeah, but they know me. Oh, they know you.

I'm sort of the mayor of the chocolateria, the cafe where I work. Don't give the name out, man. Well, I'm respected there. Well, there's a lot of weirdos out there that find that spot. Well, that could be. And go riding, huh? Yeah.

Don't give out the address. But 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, Art Bell's show. Yeah, it's the highest rated overnight talk radio show in North America. Is George Norrie still the host of it? Yeah, and it's 545 radio stations. And they'll one night, 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 in Israel.

And you just jump on and talk about everything. I like to get five hours, six hours notice because I like to put in three hours of research. 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. 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 because they can ask me questions about anything. Did you do it during the Art Bell days as well? Yes, but Art would have me on for four to five hours. And that was a hoot. That was really a hoot. I did his show once. It was a highlight of my life. Well, Art was one of the most energetic talk show hosts you've ever seen in your life.

I'm a huge fan of that guy. So he would call at four in the afternoon and he'd say um okay i want you to look at this website so i'd go look at the website and call me when you look at it so 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 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 lit it even if you totally disagreed with everything he was thinking yeah he lit that fire i used to drive home from the comedy store at night 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 i believe it was a san diego station and you could usually get it better late at night right so it'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 heartbell right and a lot of people in the kingdom of nine a lot of people did that a lot of a lot of intellectuals do that as their secret sin um and because they're awake 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 history.

I do global geopolitics. I do geoeconomics. I do psychology. I do murders. I do bacteria. I do stars. Do you do your own show? Well, 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 have 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 a podcast. I do a YouTube thing. Oh, okay.

Why don't you put it out as a podcast as well? You can 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, I used to do T.J. Kincaid's show with him, The Amazing Atheist. He's been on a couple times. Well, he's fabulous. And six foot eight or something like that. He's a good dude. I like that, he's fabulous. Yeah. And 6'8", or something like that. He's a good dude. I like that guy. I like him, too. And so he had me on for two years running, and then said, you've got to start your own. So I started my own, and he, of course, at this point has 950,000 subscribers or something like that. I have 13,400 subscribers.

Well, we'll try to pump you up. That would be neat. That would be terrific. I mean, you really should do your own thing. It's not difficult to do. Right. And once it gets set up, it's fairly easy. You just need a recorder. Well, we'd have to set me up. Meantime, I—

We can set you up. But look at me. Buzz Aldrin said 12 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 that 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. You could do this. Let me ask you this because you're this big coast-to-coast art belt fan. Right.

How much of that UFO stuff do you pay attention to? None. None. Yeah, me too. Zero. When people contact me on LinkedIn and their major credential is they do a UFO magazine or something like that, I don't add them. 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 that proving that aliens are real proving that we've been contacted proving that these eyewitness testimonies are legitimate

let me try to get across a weird idea okay okay um once upon a time in the 1940s, there were two guys, Conrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen, who got a Nobel Prize for inventing a field called ethology, which is a certain kind of observation of animal behavior. And Nico Tinbergen would go off to the coastal cliffs around northern Europe, and he would observe these seabirds. And the seabirds would go out, I don't know how many miles, 10, 30, 40 miles out to the ocean to feed and bring back food for the young. And then 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 in 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 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 Nico 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 your leg shoots out and you had nothing to do with it. He figured this is the same kind of a reflex, and he figured that if you have a reflex, you need a trigger for the reflex, 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 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 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 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 they 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, underlying 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 controlled 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. And how did you describe the stimulation? Super? Supernormal stimulus. So supernormal stimulus of this artificial egg is like supernormal stimulus of this extreme

behavior at the podium that attract people in. Right. And basically, Hitler was saying, 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 Wagner 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, in this case it's the Volkgeist, the spirit of a people. And the Flying Saucer people are after an end of the world 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, as we know, 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 at Passover, because at Passover you put out a cup for Elijah, and Elijah's there to precede the Savior, the guy who will save the Jewish people. So he went up to the 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. And 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 put together, 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 supernormal stimulus, and it evoked a supernormal

response, a supernormal reflex. And the flying saucer ideas that, you know, here we are on Earth, but there's this race that's above us that can save us. That's pushing at the same buttons. Hitler was pushing at the same buttons. The world, as we know, is about to end, and there's a new paradise, and the 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 in quest of the ecstatic of God, the gods inside of us, at the age of 13, I was looking for those supernormal responses in us, and for the

supernormal stimuli that evoked 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 I accidentally started the 60s. 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 178,000 word book and a normal book is 90,000 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 you it's the audience who shapes you by giving you feedback and eventually you perfect something so it's like Nico Tinberg and Super Egg. I mean, Nico Tinberg was eventually able to make eggs, super eggs, that had day glow 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 you 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. She has large breasts. Right.

Even though you know it's fake, it still hits whatever that genetic button is inside of your head. Yep. And the alien theme, the idea behind it, the archetype, is kind of like Space Daddy. It's like, you know, I know we're stupid, but just like this guy who's screaming on the pulpit has all the answers. Like, thank God someone has all the answers. Well, Space Daddy is for the atheists. Space Daddy is for the people, you know what, I've listened to all these people down here. I think they're full of shit, but Space Daddy is going to help 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 supernormal stimulus. But Space Daddy might be real somewhere, because we're dealing with extraordinary numbers. Okay, as a science person, 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 supersimultaneity, supersynchrony. And when the universe starts as a rapidly expanding sheet of nothing but space and time, it's space, time, and speed. That's all it is. And when it precipitates in quarks, which is unlikely. How can space, time, and speed become particles, quarks? Right.

The fact is that there are only something like 16 different forms of those quarks. is that there are only something like 16 different forms of those quarks, and there are a gazillion 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 galaxies,

all following pretty much the same principles. They're all just big gravity balls. Gravity's 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 damn thing at pretty much the same damn time, pretty much same damn 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 biomolecules. It simply means they've got carbon. Life depends on molecules. In the case of your genome, if we took just one cell, you wouldn't miss it.

You have 100 trillion others. So we took just one cell from your body, and we took out the genome. Well, it's actually the genome. So we took out the genome, the, the, the, well, it's 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 mollusk single molecule that's your genome uh... 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 over 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, 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. It was Earth, Wind, and Fire. And so I read all their lyrics.

I read everything about them. I studied them like a Talmudic scholar. I always did. And finally, I got to their album covers. And when I got together with, um, the leader of the band, Maurice White for lunch, um, cause 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 Maurice and said,

Maurice, if I've got you right, you believe that approximately 11,000 years ago, people from another civilization someplace else in our galaxy or beyond our galaxy came to this earth and brought us all of our technologies and left the messages of their technologies in the pyramids. Have I got that right? And Maurice smiled, and he said, yes.

So 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 Maurice said yes. So we tracked down Carl Sagan's summer cottage telephone number.

we tracked down Carl Sagan's summer cottage telephone number and I put together a conference call between Maurice white and, um, Oh God, what's his name again? Billions and billions and billions of planets. Carl Sagan. Yeah. And, um, as soon as Carl got wind of where Maurice was coming from pseudoscience conversation was over because Carl was already gambling too much on ideas that could get him totally laughed out of science. So it was unfortunate, but that was the early 1980s, probably about 1980.

Didn't he want to just sit down with Maurice and sort of explain what we know so far? No. What was Maurice's stuff based on? Was it Zacharias' stuff? You know, it's all kinds of, it's everywhere. Right. You can find it all over the place.

Did he have like a source? Not that I asked him. No, I was too busy trying to put this thing together. And it was unfortunate. Yes, it would have been neat if the two of them had been able to sit down and talk. And it was unfortunate. Yes, it would have been neat if the two of them had been able to sit down and talk. But Carl, as I said, you know, when he had, because his first wife, Lynn Margulis, the National Academy of Science Award winner, and I became friends,

and she was kind enough to almost mentor me. And Dorian 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 um just by having the television show the people in quote legitimate science were saying carl's not a legitimate scientist because there's a television show that's right because he's getting more attention than i am now they would never admit that that's really what was in their hearts. I've heard that from people about Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I've heard the exact same thing. 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 God 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 on everything. And I'm older than he is. So it's, you know, 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 astonishing 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 12 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 people who wanted to take selfies. They 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 me the little lecture, but all these people were waiting for him.

But he is amazing. So we talk about that incandescent power when you go transcendent on stage and you become an empty pipe through which something speaks through you, even though they're 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 of 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. And 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 ago.

Yeah, right. That wasn't their specialty. That's why you and I specialize in the things we do in order to add to the collective mind that enriches the people around us and us, too. 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.

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 supernormal stimulus. 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 intelligence. But we don't realize that it's we who are the neurons. And in the same way that 100 billion, or it's 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 a Joe Rogan emerges from 86 billion neurons working together.

But you're more than 86 billion neurons working together. You're 86 billion neurons working with 7 billion fellow human beings and the whole bacterial world 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 cells

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 to this. But 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 channel. Well, because... It is a history channel, right? Because what 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 ache. We ache 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 that nobody gets, although capitalists have to obey it in order to make money. And it's save thy neighbor, be messianic. Save a hundred neighbors, you get a hundred dollars. Save a million neighbors, you get a million dollars. And the book talks about material miracles and about secular salvation. about material miracles and about secular salvation. When Joan Jett's manager came to my office and said,

look, I've got this artist, she's been turned down by 23 record companies, could you just as a favor get me one line in Cashbox, then a record company will sign her, 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 your troubles end. 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 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 years. What? She's been turned down by 23 record companies. 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 single 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 I've ever said it. The lead singer I was talking about with this band called Rufus is named, now see if you remember her name, because this is a long time ago, Chaka Khan. Sure. So did the prediction come true? It did, but are we off track here? We're off track. What does this have to do with ancient aliens?

What does this have to do with this desire that people have to know that we got our wisdom from the stars? Well, it's not directly about that, but it's occasionally you tap into something bigger than yourself. And occasionally I had visions. And occasionally those visions came true. And so there's something super, not super natural, but certainly super normal about being able to have two visions, only two. One with Chaka Khan, one with Joan Jowell. There are ways in which we form a larger collective intelligence and we can sometimes tap into it. form a larger collective intelligence and we can sometimes 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 in the context of people having this desire to believe that we've been visited by extraterrestrials that we've been shaped and molded and helped. I mean, I had a conversation recently in the podcast with someone, and we were talking about genetic interference. Was it Theo we were talking about? People being a product of genetic engineering. Right.

Alien DNA being introduced into primate hominid dna right and the where's the missing link and i kind of tried to crudely explain with my limited knowledge that that's not really the case right we know how humans evolved from ancient hominids right but well we there are a lot of mysteries there are but there's australia pithicus but imagine okay here's the deal imagining that there is a higher intelligence, literally higher. Humans have a thing about heights. Sure. And we're not alone.

Crayfish have a thing about heights. Lobsters have a thing about heights. Lizards have a thing about heights. Puppy dogs have a thing about heights. So in that, we're not alone. And looking for a higher power in the sense of up there somewhere. Smarter than us, more evolved, us in the future. I mean, that architect, I've always said, seemsarter than us, more evolved, us in the future.

I mean, that architect, I've always said, seems like what we're going to look like to the architect. 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 big 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.

Right. The cause of many worries and woes and wars and strife. And that we'll eliminate those. And that will exist almost entirely in our minds. And that this is what we're looking at when we see the gray alien. So race seems to be a problem with people who like to pick sides and decide which one's better or worse. And so there will be no more race.

Everyone will be one homogenized, homologized, what's that word? Homogenized. What's the other one? Homologous? Yeah. What is that word? Homologized? Yeah. Homologization? What is that word? Homologized? Yeah.

Homologization? What is that word I'm looking for? Whatever. A collection of all the races brought to one form. Right. And everybody will share this form so there'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 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 going to happen at any minute. So first it was going to happen any day now, then any week now, then any month now, then any year now, then any decade or century now, millennium now.

And so did Jesus' religion disappear because it made a prediction and the 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 going to 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 come through the following century. We read the scrolls incorrectly.

Yeah, but it has the power to hang in there for 2,000 years. That's astonishing when its basic prediction is utterly false. There's always, every decade or so, there's some group that decides they know when the next... William Miller in the 1800s. Well, there's a recent one just a few years ago. There was billboards all across the country by some group that had decided it was going to take place on a certain date right and they were like are you ready and you know there's the rapture's coming right took these billboards out and then it came and went

and in many years you know and then they said oh we made some calculations right and we made some mistakes and there's some errors but well it's still common. Well, it happened in 1840. William Miller made a prediction. Everybody sold their goods and were waiting for the rapture, and it didn't happen. So William Miller said, I must have gotten my calculations wrong, went back to the calculating board, and came back with a new calculation that was a year later and amazing. Remember those? Do you remember those judgment days? I never saw them.

May 21, 2011. He is coming again. Whoops! But the point is that William Miller's religion, even after it got it wrong twice, is still around. It's the Adventist religion, and it's in two different sects, and there are at least 22 million of them planted around the planet. planted around the planet and michael jackson and his mother were jehovah's witnesses um which i believe is one of the william miller based religions so if if you fashion the religion right as a supernormal stimulus like those eggs with polka dots and day glow that still were able to outfox the real eggs or out stimulate the mother yes um it'll last and we humans think that we're all about rational prediction and control no we're not but in the face in the the understanding that in the greater view of the universe what we understand about the universe we are so

minuscule right the more we pay attention to it, the more it's just sort of embedded into our consciousness that there is a vast universe out there. And there are so many possibilities and it's so overwhelming that this framework of religion or a cult or whatever you want to call it becomes sort of like a scaffolding in which you can sort of operate inside of this impossibly large thing that we exist in and yet still have meaning. Well, that's a good hypothesis, that it brings things down to a scale we can comprehend. a bridge to evolution. Yeah. Like of 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, 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, so we should be forced to finish the other half. That's the version I like because it puts the onus on us. And, God, I wish I had my computer, my laptop here,

because I'd read you an epigram that I wrote that's my favorite. But basically, for all we know, well, it's in the laptop. In 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 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 bees. Our entire civilization

is like one searcher bee and a possible cosmic intelligence assuming that there are other living things, 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 trillions, I mean if there are just a 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 right 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. Right. The gut biome actually affects the way you think about the world that you live in. So there's somehow or another shaping you. You know about this illness that you get from cats. Now, when it takes over a cat. Toxoplasmosis. Yeah, actually, when it takes over a rat, rats are normally repelled by the smell of cat urine.

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 rat 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 do they think out how to drive the

rat as if it were a robot? And as if it were a tank, and 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 one 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 um we have no idea. We haven't even considered the question. Well, it's a fascinating concept because the cat, the bacterial, the colony has to actually get into the cat's gut to reproduce. It can't reproduce outside of the cat's gut, which is just insane. 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 Sapolsky on the podcast. Oh, Sapolsky's terrific. Broke it all down for us. And as he's talking about it, you're just trying to imagine how long this took. Well, Sapolsky's one of the MacArthur Genius Award winners who said that The God Problem was a great book. The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates. So yeah, we have 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 solved 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 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 in why wouldn't it be here well uh in um james fallow's new book he's talking about i think it's dak, and there's some river that 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, it's 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 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. Now, this is a little silly. We humans may be contributing to climate change, 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 a scientific Jesus. You cannot question the ancient scrolls. And it's an end times belief system. 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 Gaia, the universe will go back to being a stable, a climatically stable Garden of Eden. Well, I got news for you. 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 degrees 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 all way in the past. And what people are concerned with is what our role and what impact human races have. It doesn't matter.

concern with what our role and what impact human races 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 technologies my question for you though is what why is it such a sacred subject? What you've just said, even just question it for a moment and saying that environmentalism is a type of religion, climate denialist, boom. You could be labeled with that,

and then people would love to break it down in a very simple one-sentence statement and call you Howard Bloom as a climate denialist, climate change denialist, that son of a bitch. And the next thing you know, people will repeat that. It doesn't have to have any basis in fact. And nobody will want to sign you anymore for a book contract or anything. Right. Any complexity or context in what you're trying to say.

They don't want 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 carbon stabilization technology, then so be it. But we have to develop others because this globe goes through ice ages

and global warmings. So you think the answer is in technology? Yes. That's what the answer's always been for humans. I mean, why were we born? Look, we have this chemical in our gut called a cystic enon, and it only goes off when we eat meat. So we're built to eat meat. And it's a bonding hormone like 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 guts that says these are good people. Stick with them. Don't tell the vegans this. Yeah. Well, so why, if we were born to eat meat, 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 figured out a way to make clothes. We figured out a way to use skins. We figured out a way to isolate ourselves from the environment in terms of housing and control of fire. You got it. And that means that we were born naked. We were naked apes for a reason, because we are homo toolicus, 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 to 3.4 million years ago, long before we became modern humans. So we were born in this peculiar way that is naked and without claws and without ripping fangs. After we developed the tools it took, like fire and cooking, which you just cited, to allow us to have artificial claws, artificial ripping fangs, to cook our meals. The big conclusion of a book that I've just read on what makes us different from a neuroscientist, she's the neuroscientist who corrected the standard figure for the number of neurons in the brain from 100 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 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 Franklin 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 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 extraordinarily 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 one environment, that's the 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.

Yeah, they domesticated house dogs. Yeah. And figured out a way to keep the dogs near them so they could be alerted to when some Intruders are in that's amazing Crazy yeah, kidnap these dogs and hold them hostage and feed them right and the dogs just kind of learn to hang around them 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 tamed us. Yeah. Look how well we treat them.

Here it is right here. See, they hold on to these dogs. The dogs try to get away. Oh, is that a puppy in its shoulder? It's a puppy on the ground. Oh, I see. And they eventually stay with them in these camps, but they hold them hostage.

Look. Amazing. He's dragging this dog around. He's not killing it, not eating it. Right. But they have somehow or another figured out that. He's dragging this dog around. He's not killing it, not eating it. Right. 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. Amazing. It's crazy.

Absolutely amazing. Really crazy stuff. But remember, we were just looking at baboons. Yes. And baboons have a brain smaller than the brain of a chimpanzee. Have 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 that bacteria work in a group of 7 trillion and have a collective intelligence within that group. And they have a collective multi-colony intelligence because they, once they develop certain genetic tracks they pass the tricks around and little tiny envelopes for practical purposes uh... so they're constantly sharing

new bacterial tricks so we are told by the environmentalists the new end times movement uh... that we have used up all the resources on this planet. We have vastly overburdened this planet. We are eking it out of existence.

But bacteria are 12 miles beneath our feet right now, and they are turning raw rock, granite, into biostuff. Now, if the task of life is to kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible into 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 get it. Our bacteria nature, you bet your ass.

So what is nature telling us through these bacteria? You have 100 trillion more ounces, yes, 100 trillion more ounces or 100 million more ounces of dead stuff for every living ounce 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 if 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 bitch. Mother Nature throws every conceivable obstacle on her 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 that's been iceball Earth, snowball Earth twice in 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. than the mission of Frodo the Hobbit. It is circling the core of the galaxy approximately every 235 million years. And 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 100 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 biogenic 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 in which 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 woman 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 out a laser beam, lays the outer edges 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 opportunities. 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 and 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, in the piston 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, I don't want to say scientific dogma, but dogma in terms of the way you're allowed to talk about climate change. Well, there are certain aspects of science that are religion because we science people are built with the same supernormal 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 what you said so far is outside. Yeah, a little bit. Absolute heresy. Like people would get angry at you.

Well, one person did. It was an astronomer who had gone 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 Eshel Ben 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, oh, Lee will talk to you. He's a very open guy. And when I got hold of Lee, I forget his last name, but you would recognize it.

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 you wrote in the Wall Street Journal about climate was unfortunate. It was something a little harsher than that, meaning you have sinned. 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 things helped. An unfortunate truth that just people, they realized they had, I mean, if you want a virtue signal, you got to get 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. So that's what started it off, you think? Yes. Yes. Because in the 1950s, when I was the head of the program committee at my high school, I 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 six foot two. And in those days, that was really, really tall. And he was the 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,promising 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 age. 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 was a butterfly specialist, said that by 1980, which remember, 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 1980, 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 growth. 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 remember all the hundreds of millions of people dying in India and China and the

United States? Remember how your parents had to stand on each other's shoulders in order to find room to live? Joe Tainter No, I don't recall that. Peter Robinson You don't? What's wrong with you? I don't understand. Joe Tainter Well, much like the apocalyptic cults, they

moved the goalposts yeah exactly and so now it's climate change and originally it was global warming and then they smartened 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 need 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 uh 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 on a big 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 would be so stupid. It's ridiculous. It's not a reversible move. But if you have a laser 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 time and the third time until you perfect it. You can't do that with sulfur docks, droplets in the atmosphere. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. But that's the first solution, technological solution,

to come out of all of the climate people's mouths. But we need to do what they're talking about. We just have to take ownership of it. Howard Bloom, we've got to wrap this up. This was a very, very enjoyable conversation. I really appreciate it. I'm having a take ownership of it. Howard Bloom, we've got to wrap this up. This was a very, very enjoyable conversation, man. I really appreciate it. I'm 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. How often are you in L.A.? Very seldom. Very seldom. Because I'm on my own dime here. Well, I would be happy to fly you out if you're willing to come. Well, I would love to come. Let's make it periodic.

Do I look like I would ever say no to a conversation with you? Let's do it again. Thank you, sir. We shall. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Howard Bloom, ladies and gentlemen. How much?

What time is it? Thank you.