In 1988, Joe Bloom was a rock and roll rock star in the music industry. But then he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease that kept him in bed for 15 years. And when he finally got back on his feet, he had no idea what to do with himself. So he decided to do something about it. And that something turned out to be one of the most important things he ever did: he went on to write a book about it, and become a best-selling author. And then, just like that, he was gone. He was gone forever. And now, he s back. In this episode, Joe talks about what happened to him, and what it was like to be diagnosed with M.E.C.S. (MEicalgasmic Encephalitis Syndromes, also known as Chronic Ecological Distress Syndrome, or MEidiaclisis) and how it affected him for years. Plus, he tells the story of how he managed to get back on the bandstand after 15 years of being bedbound for most of that time, and how he came back to life. This episode originally aired on the radio show Mythology. It's available on most major podcast directories, including the New York Times, CBS Radio, NPR, and NPR. and NPR affiliate KWVS. Subscribe to Mythology today! and leave us a review of the episode on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast, Mythology! if you like it! Thank you for listening and subscribe! and share it with a friend! It helps us spread the word to the rest of the universe. XOXO, the universe is bigger than you can count! Love Ghost of God? by clicking on it? and we'll be listening to it on your friends, too! And we'll send you more like it on Anchor, and other places you can help spread it around the universe more widely than you know it's cool, too, and it'll help us spread it everywhere else, more like that's cool than you're listening, more of it, more places like that you can do it, better than you'll be cool than that, and more of that, more stuff like that? -- Thank you, thank you, thanks, bye bye, bye, good vibes, good night. bye.
00:00:36.000Yeah, so you were just saying right before we did the podcast, you were in bed for 15 years.
00:00:41.000Yeah, 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.
00:00:52.000It's called, these days, this month, it's called MECFS. 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.
00:01:05.000So I was too weak to talk for five years.
00:01:17.000And I was too weak to have another person in the room with me for five years.
00:01:21.000You couldn't have a person in the room.
00:01:23.000My stress levels were off the charts, and the slightest thing would – just the crack – my wife tried to keep me company.
00:01:31.000So we have this big king-size bed, and she would lay in bed reading – And the sound of the page turning went through me like a cannonball.
00:02:17.000I 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.
00:02:28.000You 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.
00:02:39.000And 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.
00:02:51.000And since I only had a tiny amount of energy, if I lay there, horizontal, in the bed, We're good to go.
00:03:18.000And this was a box that allowed me to control both computers from one monitor and one keyboard.
00:03:23.000So 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.
00:03:32.000And I rebuilt the personality online because I couldn't get any further than to the bathroom and back.
00:03:50.000I got into science at the age of 10. I got into theoretical physics and microbiology.
00:03:54.000I built my first Boolean algebra machine when I was 12. I co-designed a computer that won science fair awards when I was 12. I was taken to see the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo.
00:04:08.000And disappeared into his office for an hour.
00:04:10.000My mother wondered what in the world had happened to me because it was supposed to be a five-minute courtesy call.
00:04:14.000We were discussing Big Bang versus steady-state theory of the universe for an hour.
00:04:20.000And 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-Toroidal model, that predicted 38 years in advance dark energy.
00:04:34.000And then I ended up in the rock and roll business.
00:06:03.000I 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,
00:06:18.000who wrote The Rolling Stones' first hit, he and his brother.
00:06:22.000And they have this big aircraft hangar sized farm building.
00:06:38.000And 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.
00:06:50.000I had no idea that blacks ever got involved in coal mines, much less that that's how gospel culture began.
00:06:57.000And I... They drove me five hours back to the airport again.
00:07:01.000I sat there on the plane with my little TRS-100, the very first laptop computer, this little gizmo that ran off of AA batteries.
00:07:10.000And then I forgot my laptop on the plane.
00:07:26.000Walk a minimum of two and a half miles and do your work.
00:07:31.000So I worked and powered my way through it by Tuesday.
00:07:36.000I 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.
00:07:49.000I don't know how I even got up the stairs, and it was all downhill basically from there.
00:08:52.000And 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.
00:09:01.000And I, as I say, had to reinvent myself with what little I had.
00:09:06.000The books were still of value, my science was still of value, and I had to create a new me online.
00:09:15.000Now, when you say create a new you online, and you say create a new personality, what exactly do you mean by that?
00:09:21.000What was wrong with your old personality?
00:09:23.000The old personality couldn't walk anymore, couldn't talk anymore.
00:09:50.000First, I... God, I can't even remember what came first, but at some point...
00:09:56.000Because I was fact-checking my first book, but had to do this all laying there in bed.
00:10:02.000I got hold of Napoleon Chagnon, who is the anthropologist who chronicled the fierce people, the Yanomama, in South America.
00:10:11.000People who are really, I mean, the more people you kill, the more wives you get.
00:10:15.000It's as simple as that in Yanomama culture.
00:10:19.000And I wanted him to read my book, my first book, The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.
00:10:26.000And he said, look, people are out to destroy my career right now.
00:10:29.000I 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.
00:10:38.000Well, he introduced me to a social group in which I could interact as long as I could continue to type.
00:10:57.000But 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.
00:11:06.000And Einstein said, to be a genius, it's not enough to come up with a theory only seven men in the world can understand.
00:11:13.000To 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.
00:11:22.000So Albert Einstein, my hero, said, schmuck, listen up.
00:11:25.000You want to be an original scientific thinker?
00:11:28.000You have to be the best writer you can possibly be.
00:11:31.000So I've been working on my writing since I was 16 years old.
00:11:36.000It took me four years to get around to doing it after Einstein gave me the orders.
00:11:40.000And when I was put on the Human Behavior and Evolutionary Society group, Well, I can write my fucking ass off.
00:11:49.000So people were impressed, and they gathered around me, fortunately.
00:11:56.000Now, 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!
00:12:09.000And 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.
00:12:19.000And I didn't always have the strength to even lift my hands and do that.
00:12:28.000Doctors don't know a damn thing about this.
00:12:31.000Eventually, my first wife, who I lost because of this, 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.
00:12:48.000And the most useful thing that he did was hand me a piece of paper with an email address on it.
00:12:53.000And he said, this is another one of my patients.
00:13:11.000When 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.
00:13:20.000Well, 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.
00:13:28.000And I ended up with, 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 B12,
00:13:48.000Oxytocin, the stuff that creates trust in neuroeconomics experiments.
00:13:53.000Oxytocin, 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.
00:14:09.000And it makes you trust everybody in the room and everybody who walks into the room.
00:14:57.000But 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.
00:15:18.000So, in all probability, the reason I can do between 400 and 700 push-ups 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.
00:15:32.000I've never heard of anybody taking that as a supplement.
00:15:36.000There was a doctor named something like Seastrunk in Texas who was using it on CFS patients, and my friend, the Texas patient of my doctor, found Seastrunk and got his protocol out of him, in other words, exactly what he'd used to treat The problem.
00:15:51.000And we gave it to my doctor and he sat on it for six months until he could regurgitate it as his own bright idea.
00:16:22.000I mean, this was my first traveling since I'd gotten out of bed, and it was taking a huge chance, because there was a huge chance of throwing me back into bed again.
00:16:29.000And I flew all the way to Germany and was doing just fine.
00:16:33.000I was exhilarated that I was doing so well.
00:16:35.000And then halfway between Germany and Moscow, the CFS symptoms began to come back.
00:16:41.000And then I reviewed what I was doing, and I realized I'd missed all my afternoon pills.
00:16:48.000And as soon as I was able, well, we had to find a bed in the infirmary, which is scary, and the Moscow airport, because there are people walking around with machine guns and military uniforms, and they want to take my passport away in order to allow me to lay on a bed in the infirmary,
00:17:05.000and so I could be disappeared at any second.
00:17:09.000But 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.
00:17:37.000I 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?
00:17:48.000Well, guess what one of the primary things you do to stop stomach aches?
00:17:52.000Amitriptyline, the very thing I had gone off of.
00:18:53.000And so these are the hours my body demanded.
00:18:57.000And I had been working often until 8 o'clock in the morning from roughly 11 o'clock at night or something like that, and losing track of time, and it was very disorienting.
00:19:07.000And once I started this two periods of sleep a day, my day stabilized.
00:19:39.000For some reason, it's as positive as an elixir.
00:19:45.000And 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.
00:19:52.000I've written four books this way so far in cafes.
00:21:09.000So here I am, the guy who worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, and all of those people.
00:21:14.000And I'm co-designing a multi-planetary mission at Caltech right now.
00:21:18.000I'm out here in California to do a bookstore reading, my first one on the West Coast for How I Accidentally Started in the 60s, my current book.
00:21:26.000But 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've got some important things to do there.
00:21:36.000And then they let me sit on the board meetings.
00:21:39.000I used to be on both the board and the Board of Governors.
00:21:42.000And there are some important things I need to help this group accomplish.
00:21:46.000And 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.
00:21:55.000And to get up and do an interview with a British filmmaker who's making a film about Prince.
00:22:04.000In the meantime, there's a film being made about my life called Surf the Catastrophe.
00:22:08.000It'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.
00:22:23.000A couple of Sundays ago, my director got his third Grammy, or Emmy, and one of my cameramen got his second Grammy.
00:22:56.000I refuse to go into one specialization and see the walls close in on me and get buried there.
00:23:01.000And 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.
00:23:23.000Well, 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,
00:24:03.000Well, 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.
00:24:17.000How 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.
00:24:36.000They were crowded in on either side of you, supporting you.
00:24:40.000And people had a sense of being lifted out of themselves and having a transcendent experience and becoming part of three things.
00:25:42.000We're all built with certain supernormal responses inside of us.
00:25:48.000Certain gushes of emotion you can hit if you hit just the right stimulus.
00:25:53.000And 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,
00:26:09.000and who could bring that audience to that ecstatic level.
00:26:15.000Does it disturb you to study someone as fucked up as Hitler, though, and look for the genius in his approach, especially as a Jew?
00:26:48.000Is this what was fascinating to you about rock in the first place that led you to become a publicist?
00:26:53.000Right, 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.
00:27:01.000Now, how much was I going to learn about mass ecstasies, the forces of history?
00:27:07.000It'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.
00:27:18.000And 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.
00:27:50.000I mean, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock says, Schmuck, listen up, the way that Einstein, except he doesn't, I mean, he's an anti-Semite, so he's not going to say Schmuck.
00:28:00.000If 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...
00:28:17.000You 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.
00:28:24.000You don't have the life energy to do that anymore.
00:28:28.000And your whole life will have been a failure.
00:28:32.000So if you have something heroic to do, start it now.
00:28:37.000So I was in a poetry class, because poetry had had a huge influence on my life.
00:28:42.000And one day the poetry teacher, the poet in residence at NYU said, Bloom, when everybody leaves the classroom, close the door.
00:28:55.000And 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.
00:29:56.000I 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.
00:30:19.000The 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.
00:30:24.000The truth at any price, including the price of your life.
00:30:27.000Yeah, 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 had met in jihad.
00:30:36.000So when people realized I was writing this, they said, you can't write that.
00:30:43.000The first rule of science is the truth at any price, including the price of your life.
00:30:47.000And if you tell me I can't write it because it's gonna get me killed, I know that it's doubly important for me to write this because nobody else is gonna have the guts to.
00:31:00.000You 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.
00:31:19.000You seem to be looking at this as almost like a form of not necessarily uncharted energy, but undocumented.
00:31:30.000Almost 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.
00:31:44.000No, 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.
00:31:54.000I'm looking at this in terms of a very, very, very big picture.
00:31:57.000And 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.
00:32:09.000Yeah, 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.
00:32:17.000When you say you worry about being, I mean, after all you've accomplished, how could you be typed?
00:33:07.000And my parents were going to send me off to a small private school, but they made me promise to work in school.
00:33:13.000I'd never worked in school before, and I forget where I was going with this story.
00:33:18.000But there is one experience I had in this little high school that's really relevant, and that is...
00:33:24.000Okay, by the time I'm 16 years old, I've been after the ecstatic experience for four years in scientific terms.
00:33:30.000When 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.
00:33:40.000And finding books in Buffalo isn't that easy.
00:33:44.000And then I'm 16 and I've been elected the head of the program committee in my school.
00:33:49.000The program committee, this every day starts for the entire student body with a 45-minute Morning session.
00:33:56.000And I emcee those sessions, and I program two of them.
00:34:01.000So the juniors come to me, and they say, we're having a dance, could you please advertise our dance for us?
00:34:08.000And they don't understand the irony of what they've just asked.
00:34:12.000If there's a dance anywhere in Buffalo, New York, people want me to park my feet elsewhere, preferably in Cleveland or Houston, Texas.
00:34:20.000And so this is a really weird request.
00:34:22.000So I put a piece of music on the turntable behind the stage, and I get up on the stage, and I'm incompetent.
00:34:53.000And then it feels as if their energy coalesces like a big amoeba and reaches out a pseudopod, and the pseudopod...
00:35:01.000Sends 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.
00:37:38.000And so I'm hanging on to these sturdily American craftsman-built doors of the Fraser blue car my dad drives, and my parents are at my ankles, shredding my socks, trying to pull me up toward the synagogue, and I have a sudden realization.
00:37:57.000Galileo 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.
00:38:12.000He takes this tube and he turns it in a totally unexpected direction up.
00:38:18.000And another guy, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who uses these same high-tech devices lenses because he's a draper.
00:38:52.000Right now, in this scene, they're in my parents, and they are tugging with astonishing force at my parents and my socks.
00:39:00.000And if the gods are in my parents, then the gods are in me, too.
00:39:04.000So my task in life is going to be to take that lens that Galileo turned up and that van Loonhoek turned down and turn it within to find the gods inside of us.
00:39:16.000Meaning finding those ecstatic experiences.
00:39:19.000And that dance experience was the most primal of these ecstatic, you could call them spiritual experiences, but for me it's secular.
00:39:36.000But that was the closest I was going to get to what Hitler had summoned forth.
00:39:44.000Those 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 many different religious leaders.
00:39:59.000There's something about what they're doing that is almost contagious.
00:40:03.000You see the energy that they're putting out.
00:40:09.000It's a bizarre thing that human beings have.
00:40:14.000Compulsion to pay attention to people that have achieved this extreme level of performance.
00:40:20.000Well, because they seem locked into a truth.
00:40:23.000That truth speaks itself through every muscle of their body.
00:40:26.000If you're that confident to be like the preacher on stage shouting out to the heavens, and if you're that confident to have that much energy and conviction, there must be some truth to what you're saying.
00:40:36.000And 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.
00:40:45.000It's not you, but of course it is you.
00:40:47.000So 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.
00:40:58.000If 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.
00:41:13.000But if you're going to work with me, you have to understand that music is not an exchange of pieces of plastic.
00:41:23.000It's not about markets and branding and all of that stuff.
00:41:27.000Music is about an exchange of human soul.
00:41:31.000When 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.
00:41:40.000And at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, very often there's a lyric there.
00:41:43.000My job is to find the self inside you who wrote that lyric and introduce it to the self that says, hello, how are you?
00:41:50.000Fine, thank you very much, and all the ritualistic aspects of life.
00:41:54.000When you go on stage, you have the kind of experience that I had.
00:42:02.000You are danced around as if you were a marionette.
00:42:04.000You feel 17,000 souls coursing through you to something higher, being transmogrified and channeling back to those people in a continuous loop.
00:42:14.000My 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?
00:42:21.000So if you're willing to give me six weeks to study you and then come out to your environment and see you in your environment for anywhere from one to three days, my job is secular shamanism.
00:42:33.000Find that fucking soul that dances you.
00:42:35.000So you would go and hang out with them?
00:43:02.000And 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.
00:43:57.000So they rebelled, and the word went out in the press that John Coorer was a prick, that he was just an obnoxious, horrible human being, and that his music was crap.
00:44:08.000And 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.
00:44:22.000And My impression was that Ken wrote his review of John's album without ever opening the shrink wrap.
00:45:36.000And he explained how if you take a cane and you put it out, the sheep walk in single file.
00:45:41.000You can get 2,000 sheep all walking in single file.
00:45:44.000And 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.
00:46:02.000Well, that's how I perceived the rock crit elite.
00:46:50.000We don't know we're on a certain level because we figure this is the range of humanity.
00:46:55.000If 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.
00:47:04.000Sorry, in Michael Jackson's case, he did not fit on this normal plane at all.
00:47:10.000He was on a plane somewhere where you've never seen a human being before.
00:47:13.000So, the first time I met him, We were at his brother Marlin's Pool house.
00:47:23.000It'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.
00:47:31.000And there's a billiard table in the middle of the room and there are arcade games, which at that point in particular, 1983, were unattainable.
00:47:42.000No human could afford arcade games unless you were Steve Wynn and you were actually equipping an arcade.
00:47:49.000So we're in this room, and Michael and I are standing next to each other.
00:47:54.000So his left elbow is at my right elbow.
00:48:09.000We'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.
00:48:15.000Hand-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.
00:48:53.000Michael is seeing the infinite in things that even the artist didn't see it, with such infinity as Michael is seeing it.
00:49:01.000And by the time he gets to the full page, He's having a full-scale aesthetic orgasm.
00:49:08.000I have never seen anything like this in my life.
00:49:11.000And 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.
00:49:21.000Michael 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.
00:49:31.000And I will never see another human like that again in my lifetime.
00:52:15.000So 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?
00:52:25.000Well, 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.
00:52:35.000I mean, you know, this is why I curse Jeff Bezos.
00:52:37.000I 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.
00:52:46.000Yeah, but you hire good people who do know those things.
00:54:13.000I think he's done 11 reuses so far, something like that.
00:54:16.000But 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.
00:55:13.000The two rockets landing simultaneously.
00:55:16.000So 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 produce jobs programs, not to get us to space.
00:56:33.000We need that money to actually design...
00:56:36.000Habitats on the moon, design mining equipment to mine the ice on the moon and turn it into rocket fuel and breathable oxygen and drinkable water.
00:56:46.000And there are tons of things we need, but NASA's not producing them because it's trying to compete with Elon and Jeff.
00:57:02.000And then I bought you a Boeing 737, and 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,
00:57:17.000and plowed it into the Atlantic Ocean and discarded it.
00:57:20.000Now, but I'm doing this all without charging you anything, you realize.
00:57:25.000So, 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.
00:57:40.000This is the way we do space at NASA right now.
00:57:43.000So how much would it cost you per ticket for you and a friend to go from LA to New York and back again?
00:58:01.000So that's what NASA is doing with this space launch system, and it's gobbling up so much money, there's no funding left for the stuff we really need to do.
00:58:09.000Do you think it would be better if they just privatized the entire venture?
00:58:12.000It 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,
00:58:30.000which 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.
00:59:07.000They simply want to maintain the jobs in their districts.
00:59:10.000Plus, if they feed the SMIC, the Space Military Industrial Complex, the Space Military Industrial Complex will kick back contributions to their campaign funds.
00:59:59.000Buzz and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, that's a long time ago.
01:00:04.000That's two generations, two and a half generations ago.
01:00:08.000And kids in America have lost that dream of creating a paradise above the sky.
01:00:14.000Because 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.
01:00:22.000But 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.
01:00:33.000But is the issue the actual engineers and the scientists themselves?
01:00:49.000But is that really a conversation that's taken place?
01:00:52.000Yes, 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.
01:01:11.000They control the budget, and one of the tricks that the SMIC, the Space Military Industrial Complex, has known for a long time, Is you try to parcel our jobs to as many states as possible.
01:01:22.000So 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.
01:01:38.000That 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.
01:01:56.000Because they're counting on your campaign contributions.
01:01:58.000Where are you going to get the money to give them campaign contributions from that billion to three billion dollar nipple per year that NASA has been forced to extend to you or that the Air Force has been forced to extend to you?
01:02:41.000On Friday, or no, Sunday, at the National Space Society's annual event, I'm talking about China's new Silk Road versus America's highway in the sky.
01:02:51.000The new Silk Road, the Chinese government's going to put in a trillion dollars.
01:02:54.000It's a total of a $20 trillion project.
01:02:57.000It pulls together something like 66 countries and 3.3 billion people.
01:03:01.000And I co-founded and chaired something called the Asian Space Technology Summit in Kuala Lumpur last May, just about exactly a year ago.
01:03:11.000And it was obvious, being in Malaysia, that China has bought Malaysia's heart.
01:03:19.000That Americans don't count for much anymore because the Chinese are already spending money.
01:04:15.000A platinum highway in the sky means a space economy.
01:04:18.000One meteor called something like AMON-335 has more resources than the gross domestic product of England, France, Italy, and South Korea combined.
01:04:44.000Somehow another extract resources and then bring them back to Earth?
01:04:46.000But if NASA seriously wants us to develop that space economy, they have to do their part.
01:04:52.000Elon and Jeff are bringing the rockets to the table right now, reusable rockets.
01:04:59.000Like 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.
01:05:19.000But where's the mining equipment going to come from?
01:05:22.000That's something NASA needs to be working on, plus the mining equipment for the moon.
01:05:27.000To turn the moon basically into a fuel station for rockets.
01:05:30.000Have you time to think about this while also thinking about all the other things you think about?
01:05:32.000Because I do my best thinking when I'm thinking about 15 things at once.
01:05:36.000And 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.
01:05:42.000I 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.
01:05:53.000No, 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.
01:06:10.000One of the laws is the theory of entropy is so fucking wrong that it just defies it.
01:06:16.000Okay, entropy means that everything is falling apart constantly.
01:06:19.000And that in order to make something positive happen, you have to shed more negative energy, not really negative energy, more dispersed waste energy.
01:06:27.000And in fact, the universe doesn't work like that.
01:06:30.000The universe, in the very beginning, it formed quarks from nothing but motion.
01:07:09.000380,000 years later, they begin to sweep themselves together in these massive social agglomerations that look like big potatoes.
01:07:16.000And those are the beginnings of galaxies before they form their spiral arms and stuff like that.
01:07:22.000And then within the The spiral arms of these galaxies, gravity balls, are competing with each other to see who's the biggest gravity ball and the biggest wins, and what does he do to the losers?
01:07:34.000He 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.
01:07:44.000Eventually, what happens is you get so much gravity and so much matter in this gravity ball that the gravity ball explodes.
01:08:02.000How 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?
01:08:11.000What is the official definition of entropy?
01:08:13.000How is it defined by Webster's Dictionary?
01:09:05.000It 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 and inversely with the temperature of the system broadly,
01:09:32.000the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system.
01:09:37.000The degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system.
01:09:41.000Obviously, that's a very lucid explanation, and you could recite it to a five-year-old and he'd understand exactly what you were saying, or to your grandmother.
01:10:25.000So, 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.
01:13:42.000No, this is the God problem, how he got all his cosmos creates.
01:13:45.000And 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.
01:13:56.000But it was actually written during those five years when I couldn't talk.
01:14:01.000The first draft was written during those five years.
01:14:03.000So there I was laying in bed not able to talk, and I know from all of my research that when you are a human who feels of no value to your fellow human beings, you begin to die.
01:14:52.000So 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.
01:15:04.000So 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.
01:15:38.000And I snail-mailed my friend Eric Gardner, because Eric Gardner had started out in the music business as a roadie for the Jefferson Airplane.
01:15:47.000And I wrote Eric and said, Eric, I've just written this book.
01:15:51.000Could you get it to the Jefferson Airplane?
01:15:53.000Because if I could get them to say something positive about it, that validated it, because they were a key act in the 1960s.
01:16:00.000And Eric said, no, no, no, I have somebody better.
01:16:06.000So I sent him the manuscript, and he got the manuscript to this other client of his.
01:16:09.000And 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,
01:16:31.000But 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.
01:16:44.000This book reached him six months before he would die of prostate cancer.
01:16:48.000And 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.
01:16:56.000Because you were trying to do that to yourself.
01:16:58.000Since 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.
01:17:11.000And 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.
01:17:25.000So 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.
01:17:34.000And 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.
01:17:43.000But someday it just may save somebody who's in a position equivalent to yours.
01:17:59.000It was a four-day conference in a pension just outside Moscow, 50 miles outside of Moscow.
01:18:05.000It was a worker's paradise built in the 1960s.
01:18:11.000And all the people there, all the physicists, were going around drawing the same diagram on napkins to explain what they were talking about.
01:18:17.000And it's a diagram of how Schrodinger's equation manifests itself in one single isolated electron.
01:18:24.000There's no such thing as an isolated electron in this universe.
01:18:28.000There's no such thing as an isolated quanta of light, an isolated photon of light.
01:18:36.000There's no such thing as an isolated anything.
01:18:38.000I mean, when you look up at the night sky, what do you see?
01:18:42.000Some of those stars are 13 billion light years away.
01:18:48.000It's taken 13 billion years for that light to get to us.
01:18:51.000But we can still see those lights with a telescope.
01:18:55.000If there is light flooding the entire universe from those stars, 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?
01:19:13.000So why is this misconception prevalent?
01:19:15.000It because the equation fits certain very artificial experiments that were set up in the lab.
01:19:23.000And 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.
01:19:33.000And the explanation, for some reason...
01:19:37.000A lot of people in this universe think we're on our own.
01:19:48.000They'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.
01:19:55.000So I was basically lecturing these guys about a social cosmos.
01:19:59.000In which conversation, information exchange is constantly taking place, all over the place.
01:20:05.000And the fact that Trobinger's equation assumes an isolated entity, and there are no isolated entities in this universe.
01:20:13.000And when I was finished, I expected them to throw me out of their conference.
01:20:19.000And instead, they sat there as if this had been my bar mitzvah, and I'd just done a haftorah, or whatever it's called that you do at a bar mitzvah, and they were my uncles.
01:20:28.000They were all sitting back, their faces were beaming, they were smiling.
01:20:32.000You know that radiance, that redness that infects a face that's excited about something?
01:20:37.000It was astonishing, and I couldn't understand why.
01:20:41.000And then three years later, I have a collaborator in theoretical physics, Pavel Karakin, of the Keldish Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
01:20:49.000And Pavel emailed me and said, Dr. Uzhikov, 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.
01:20:59.000You have to download it from Arxiv.org, which is the leading site for preprints in advanced mathematics and advanced theoretical physics in the world.
01:21:07.000And so I downloaded it, put it on my Kindle, and listened to the first half while I was taking my afternoon walk.
01:21:13.000These long walks through the park can be very helpful.
01:21:16.000And 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. Užakov, and I said, Dr. Užakov, I don't know if you remember me.
01:21:26.000I'm that crazy American who spoke at your conference, but I've just read the first half of your book, and it's phenomenal.
01:21:31.000He used every concept that I had given in my presentation.
01:21:36.000And I got one of those almost instant emails back, an email that comes within two or three hours, and Ushkov said, remember you?
01:21:45.000Didn't you read the first half of my book?
01:21:48.000And 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.
01:22:02.000Quantum physics doesn't make sense to me.
01:22:11.000I'll go over it and over it again and get little chunks of it, and I would understand, like, sections of sentences, and then I'd have to try to put them together with the other sections.
01:22:22.000But 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, said that basically a particle exists in many states simultaneously, and it's not until it's measured that it collapses into one state.
01:22:39.000That's one of the basic principles of quantum physics.
01:22:44.000Every 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.
01:22:56.000Nothing is isolated in this particular cosmos.
01:22:59.000I watched a video where you were talking about that there is essentially a universal brain.
01:23:05.000Well, 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.
01:23:54.000Remember, Einstein gave me my marching orders.
01:23:56.000You 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.
01:24:04.000And I want to make good radio for your audience.
01:24:07.000What 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?
01:24:19.000I 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?
01:24:39.000I'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.
01:24:48.000Well, my obligation is to do both simultaneously.
01:25:18.000He rented a second-floor apartment, and he was trying to isolate himself the way that those particles are isolated with the Schrodinger's equation, the particles that were being drawn on napkins in Moscow, so that he could strip everything away and find out what was the most basic...
01:25:36.000The most basic axiom, the most basic thing we take for granted in life.
01:25:41.000And he came up with, I think, therefore I am.
01:25:46.000While he was trying to think this out, he was needing a rubbery gum eraser with which he erased his ink.
01:25:54.000He 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.
01:26:05.000He 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.
01:28:15.000And the fungus has a very peculiar lifestyle, and I'm very curious to find out how it got this lifestyle.
01:28:21.000But it lives half of its life in an ant colony, and half of its life in a sheep.
01:28:26.000So when it comes out of the phase that it goes through in the ant colony and is ready to go into the sheep, it takes over the brain of an ant.
01:28:36.000And it gets that ant to climb to the top of a stalk of grass.
01:28:48.000You'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?
01:29:00.000That it can actually be that precise in how it takes over the controls of that mind?
01:29:05.000Is this related to one of those, the fungus that gets inside those ants and...
01:29:08.000The 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.
01:29:16.000Oh, I'm not aware of that one, but it sounds...
01:29:34.000And 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.
01:29:42.000I mean, built into them, inside of them.
01:29:44.000And they have these carrying hairs on their thighs, and they carry pollen in those.
01:29:50.000And when they arrive at the unloading bay, there is an unloading bay in the hive.
01:29:55.000And 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.
01:30:05.000They stick their tongues down your throat to check out what's in your public stomach.
01:30:09.000They go wild with excitement when they discover it's filled with nectar.
01:30:12.000They check out your thighs, the carrying hairs on your thighs.
01:30:16.000They go wild when they see that you're carrying pollen.
01:30:19.000They feel you all over with their antennae.
01:30:21.000They are intensely excited when they are unloading you.
01:31:03.000I mean, if you were their mother, what would you say?
01:31:06.000You're wasting your fucking life, for God's sakes.
01:31:08.000Okay, 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.
01:31:21.000And when you arrive at the unloading dock of the hive, the unloading bees stick their tongue into your public stomach, empty, sorry.
01:31:32.000They turn their backs on you so savagely that you feel as if you've been cut dead.
01:31:37.000And it finally, I mean, you can't believe that the old factory's 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.
01:31:52.000And Thomas Seeley, the guy who's done most of the research on this, calls you an unemployed bee.
01:31:59.000And you are as depressed as if you were unemployed.
01:32:20.000They 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.
01:33:03.000You fly out to the flower patch that she has recommended and you check it out for yourself.
01:33:07.000And if you get excited about it, you come back and you start dancing.
01:33:12.000And ultimately the bee who gets the greatest number of backup dancers wins.
01:33:17.000And 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.
01:33:25.000Now that's a collective mind operating on the basis of 20,000 independent bees.
01:33:30.000And the living world Operates in pretty much the same way.
01:33:37.000Bacteria are using you to get them chocolate eclairs.
01:33:40.000You are using them to digest chocolate eclairs.
01:33:44.000They are teasing our scientists into wild activity by threatening to develop illnesses that can bypass all of our antibiotics.
01:33:52.000Which, by the way, are chemical weapons that microorganisms, colonies of microorganisms use to kill entire competing colonies.
01:34:49.000When people tell you we are the only creatures that make war, they're lying.
01:34:52.000So is this why also, 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.
01:35:12.000I mean, I'm not aware of that, but it sounds logical given what we're learning about the biome, it's called.
01:35:18.000Yeah, 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.
01:35:30.000But those eventually go away, especially when you supplement with a lot of probiotics and then you go to a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.
01:35:38.000You start to crave those kind of foods, and the cravings for sugar and bread go away.
01:36:32.000Because you can get them in one-pound bags, so it's precisely pre-measured for you, and they freeze them when they're fresh.
01:36:40.000And you can throw them along with a slab of chopped chicken, a frozen slab, into a microwavable container and microwave them for 15 minutes.
01:36:52.000I mean, throw a lot of spices in so that you change the flavor, but day after day.
01:37:01.000That'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.
01:38:02.000So these huge honking amounts of butter, and then I take these giant slabs of peanut butter.
01:38:08.000And I pile them up, leaving a little hole in the center.
01:38:12.000And in the hole in the center, I put grape jam and strawberry jam.
01:38:16.000And 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.
01:38:33.000And I'm indulging myself with this other half of the bagel.
01:38:38.000How bad do you feel after you digest that?
01:39:13.000Well, also, if you carb 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.
01:39:19.000And that turns out to be the case anyway.
01:39:21.000So I sleep immediately after my breakfast, and then I sleep immediately after my dinner.
01:39:25.000And that's the way the day is arranged.
01:39:26.000It's arranged to maximize the useful, high-energy, high-focus time.
01:39:32.000Now, did they ever try to put you on any kind of amphetamines or anything?
01:40:30.000I do believe you, but I'm just saying, seeing you in this state, you're smiling, and obviously what you said about enjoying conversations is so apparent.
01:40:40.000You really enjoy getting these ideas across.
01:41:27.000There's a global brain taking place right there.
01:41:29.000And 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.
01:41:38.000Now, 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...
01:41:55.000Of 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.
01:42:09.000He's discovered that there are animalcules, little animals, totally independent, flailing around in the sperm.
01:42:17.000And he writes a lengthy letter about this to the Royal Society.
01:42:20.000Now, what has he just done, Joe, to the Royal Society?
01:42:28.000I mean, it took me about 40 years of thinking about it, maybe 50, to work it out.
01:42:33.000And then I suddenly realized, this guy is, why does masturbation keep showing up in my life when, look, the Boy Scouts threw me out when I was 11 years old for incompetence at Morse Code.
01:42:41.000And if they hadn't thrown me out for incompetence at that, they could have thrown me out for incompetence at not time.
01:42:46.000Now, admittedly, I've never heard of another human being ever being thrown out of the Boy Scouts, but still.
01:43:20.000So, at any rate, then, 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?
01:44:01.000I felt the beatniks were the first people who would ever accept me in my life.
01:44:06.000You were reliving the time you were carried away by the children.
01:44:10.000Yeah, well, 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.
01:44:29.000And I walked into the store and it was empty.
01:45:14.000So 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...
01:45:24.000You were barefoot with a sleeping bag?
01:45:26.000Yes, I had been barefoot for six months, and your feet get so thick that you can walk over gravel, glass.
01:46:11.000And I said, yeah, I'm looking for the beatniks.
01:46:15.000And 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?
01:46:30.000Well, that was just a little too vague a destination for me.
01:46:58.000It was two years before the electric Kool-Aid acid test.
01:47:02.000If you just hung around a little bit, you would have been there perfect.
01:47:06.000Well, I prefer starting my own groups, actually.
01:47:09.000And this group gathered around me and around one of my traveling companions.
01:47:14.000And we eventually ended up in a big, pink, condemned house.
01:47:18.000This is all in how I accidentally started in the 60s.
01:47:20.000In a big, pink, condemned house in Berkeley, three blocks away from the Berkeley campus.
01:47:25.000And we didn't care if it was going to fall down at any minute.
01:47:28.000And we wore no clothes, zero clothing during the day.
01:47:33.000And my, I guess, co-leader was a guy named Dick Hoff, who had the body of an Adonis.
01:47:38.000When we walked down the street together, women could not take their eyes off of him.
01:47:43.000But they sliced through me as if I weren't there, as if I were invisible.
01:47:47.000And every woman wanted to sleep with him.
01:47:50.000And 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.
01:48:02.000And remember, Michael Jackson is still the most remarkable person I've ever met, but Dick Hoff was pretty remarkable.
01:48:08.000And so Dick set the tone, being naked, and Dick would go into the bathroom to do the things you do in the bathroom, but leave the door open and continue his conversation with you while he was in there going.
01:48:20.000So that was the norm for us, and I was the spiritual leader of the group.
01:48:31.000What's it like to be a spiritual leader at 19?
01:48:34.000It feels very good when people believe in the things that you say.
01:48:37.000It feels very good when you're hitchhiking and somebody takes you to MacArthur Park in L.A., 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,
01:48:53.000walks up to you and says, you look like the idiot in the Dostoevsky novel.
01:48:57.000So he doesn't mean that as, you look like an idiot.
01:49:48.000That'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...
01:50:05.000All those things can go crashing and disappear.
01:50:08.000That's why I don't understand the need to do it in front of all these people.
01:50:12.000Because I need the energy of other people.
01:50:14.000Well, there are a lot of people that live in New York City.
01:50:56.000So, at any rate, I discovered that in New York there are so many people...
01:51:01.000That you can pick people one by one and put them together into your own clique.
01:51:05.000And 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.
01:51:17.000I'm around giant groups 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.
01:51:30.000Then the podcast reaching all these people I need alone time like I have the opposite Requirement amazing.
01:51:38.000I need that if I don't get like my writing I have to write alone I write when everyone's asleep right house.
01:51:44.000I wait till everyone goes to bed and then I do my writing and I've learned I guess it's a discipline.
01:54:41.000So he would call at 4 in the afternoon, and he'd say, okay, I want you to look at this website.
01:54:47.000So I'd go look at the website and call me when you look at it.
01:54:49.000So I'd call him again, and he'd say, okay, now look at this website.
01:54:53.000Now, gradually, I got the idea that he was trying to tell me that there were extra galactic civilizations, and that they were coming to Earth and signaling us through crop circles and a whole bunch of other things.
01:55:11.000Even if you totally disagreed with everything he was thinking, he lit that fire.
01:55:16.000I used to drive home from the comedy store at night.
01:55:18.000That was 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.
01:55:35.000A lot of intellectuals do that as their secret sin.
01:55:41.000And 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.
01:56:04.000Well, 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.
01:57:15.000Buzz 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 the candidates are talking about.
01:57:25.000We've got two years in which to do it.
01:57:27.000And I said, okay, I'll form a group to do that.
01:58:02.000This wantant disregard for reality, this absolute desire to prove something, instead of looking at the objective facts, proving that aliens are real, proving that we've been contacted, proving that these eyewitness testimonies are legitimate.
01:58:18.000Let me try to get across a weird idea, okay?
01:58:22.000Once 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.
01:58:34.000And Nico Tinbergen would go off to the coastal cliffs.
01:58:40.000And 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.
01:58:50.000And 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.
01:58:58.000So when the seabird came back from her fishing, and waddled herself into place, moving her hind back and forth to get in place to...
01:59:13.000And when the egg was knocked out of the nest, the bird would reach her beak out, pass the egg, and then pull her beak back in toward her chest to pull the egg toward the nest.
01:59:24.000And she'd do it over and over again until she got the egg in the nest.
01:59:28.000And Nico Tinbergen had this weird idea, I wish I knew where it came from, that this is a reflex.
01:59:33.000You know, like when your doctor takes a hammer and hammers your knee and you're...
01:59:38.000Your leg shoots out and you had nothing to do with it.
01:59:41.000He figured this is the same kind of a reflex.
01:59:44.000And he figured that if you have a reflex, you need a trigger for the reflex, like that patellar hammer that hammered your knee.
01:59:52.000So 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.
02:00:02.000And 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.
02:00:11.000And 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.
02:00:20.000Now, if you're the bird, that real egg has your genetic legacy.
02:00:32.000And 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.
02:00:43.000And they continued to do research with this kind of thing, and they discovered that they could trick some songbirds.
02:01:13.000Well, 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.
02:01:27.000All that is related to some supernormal stimuli.
02:01:34.000So Hitler was basically saying the world is about to end and the kingdom of God is coming.
02:01:40.000Except 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.
02:01:55.000But 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.
02:02:03.000And how did you describe the stimulation?
02:02:07.000So the supernormal stimulus of this artificial egg is like supernormal stimulus of this extreme behavior at the podium that attract people in.
02:02:19.000And basically, Hitler was talking about the equivalent of extraterrestrials.
02:02:25.000He was talking about this magic quality of the Germans.
02:02:28.000He 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.
02:02:44.000In this case, it's the Volkgeist, the spirit of a people.
02:02:49.000And the flying saucer people are after an end of the world in which the world will be remade.
02:02:56.000And 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.
02:03:06.000And he preached that the world, as we know, was about to end, and we were about to enter a new kind of paradise.
02:03:12.000And because he was Jewish, he figured it's going to happen at Passover.
02:03:17.000Because 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.
02:03:26.000So 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.
02:03:40.000His prediction of a kingdom of God arriving at that particular Passover ceremony turned out to be utterly wrong.
02:03:46.000And in fact, the Romans seized him and nailed him to a cross.
02:03:53.000It was the opposite of everything he'd predicted.
02:03:56.000But the religion he'd 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.
02:04:08.000But what Paul put together around Jesus was a supernormal stimulus.
02:04:14.000And it evoked a supernormal response, a supernormal reflex.
02:04:19.000And 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.
02:04:48.000And 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.
02:05:04.000And when you're doing art, when you're doing commentary, when you're doing comedy, you are hitting The buttons.
02:05:54.000So this is almost twice the length of a normal book.
02:05:57.000And I was able to do it because I had told all the stories in the book.
02:06:01.000And I had felt out how the audiences responded to the stories, and I knew the words to use, and they were a well-worn path in my brain.
02:06:09.000So I simply put down on paper an oral vocabulary, but it's the audience who shapes You, by giving you feedback.
02:06:21.000And eventually you perfect something so it's like Nico Tinberg and Super Egg.
02:06:25.000I 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,
02:06:40.000to evoke the sense that there is a paradise beyond the world that we know.
02:06:46.000Don'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 Even though you know it's fake,
02:07:15.000it still hits whatever that genetic button is inside of your head.
02:07:20.000And the alien theme, the idea behind it, the archetype, is kind of like Space Daddy.
02:07:26.000It's like, you know, I know we're stupid, but just like this guy who's screaming on the pulpit has all the answers.
02:07:33.000Like, thank God someone has all the answers.
02:07:35.000Well, Space Daddy is for the atheists.
02:07:48.000And when you, as I said, when you fashion a joke, you're fashioning it to be a supernormal stimulus.
02:07:53.000But Space Daddy might be real somewhere, because we're dealing with extraordinary numbers.
02:07:59.000Okay, 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.
02:08:07.000So I'm a skeptic about life being anywhere.
02:08:38.000The fact 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.
02:08:50.000Fast forward a couple of million years.
02:08:54.000Galaxies all are pretty much the same.
02:08:57.000And all of them spring into existence pretty much at the same time, at least the first generation of galaxies.
02:09:06.000Stars ignite within those galaxies, all following pretty much the same principles.
02:09:16.000That's planets, that's moons, all kinds of things.
02:09:19.000So there is this tendency for the universe to do the same damn thing at pretty much the same damn time, pretty much same damn everywhere in this cosmos.
02:09:28.000And 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.
02:09:42.000But those are very simple little molecules, even though we call them biomolecules.
02:10:14.000So 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 single molecule that's your genome.
02:10:32.000And we haven't learned very much at all about how you go from the simple molecules to that incredibly complex molecules.
02:10:40.000The origin of life is still one of the big puzzles.
02:10:42.000But again, because there's supersynchrony and supersimultaneity all over the cosmos, pretty much the same thing happens at pretty much the same time.
02:10:50.000The odds are that there are millions of other planets that have life.
02:11:24.000And finally, I got to their album covers.
02:11:26.000And when I got together with the leader of the band, Maurice White, for lunch, because I hadn't yet learned to set up my boundaries and tell people, I'll only work with you if I can see you in your own environment for between one and three days.
02:11:44.000I 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.
02:12:09.000So 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.
02:12:23.000And he's trying to put together an organization to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
02:12:30.000So, if I introduce the two of you, would you be willing to do a benefit concert for him?
02:12:34.000Because right now, he's struggling to get money together.
02:12:57.000As soon as Carl got wind of where Maurice was coming from, pseudoscience, the conversation was over, because Carl was already gambling too much on ideas that could get him totally laughed out of science.
02:13:11.000So, it was unfortunate, but that was the early 1980s.
02:13:17.000Probably about, actually, probably about 1980. Didn't he want to just sit down with Maurice and sort of explain what we know so far?
02:14:43.000He was at God knows what event, and 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.
02:14:55.000And 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.
02:15:05.000So it's, you know, little pieces of grit that we pick up and carry in our shoes and walk with.
02:15:23.000And 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.
02:15:34.000And he was in the middle of a whole bunch of people who wanted to take selfies.
02:16:04.000So 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.
02:16:21.000And 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.
02:16:30.000That'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.
02:16:39.000And Earth, Wind& Fire had that with music.
02:17:51.000It is a bloody miracle that a Joe Rogan emerges from 86 billion neurons working together.
02:17:57.000But you're more than 86 billion neurons working together.
02:18:01.000You're 86 billion neurons working with 7 billion fellow human beings and the whole bacterial world.
02:18:06.000And the plant world and the animal world.
02:18:09.000And it's all contributing to who you are, minute by minute by minute.
02:18:13.000So 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.
02:18:25.000But it's such an attractive subject that you have these shows like Ancient Aliens.
02:18:55.000And I'm trying to tell people I have a book called The Genius of the Beast, a radical revision of capitalism.
02:19:00.000And it says that there's an underpinning imperative in capitalism that nobody gets, although capitalists have to obey it in order to make money.
02:19:09.000And it's, save thy neighbor, be messianic.
02:19:12.000Save a hundred neighbors, you get a hundred dollars.
02:19:14.000Save a million neighbors, you get a million dollars.
02:19:18.000And the book talks about material miracles.
02:19:24.000When 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 cash box, then a record company will sign her, and the record company will make her career.
02:19:39.000And I had to say, Kenny, listen to me.
02:19:42.000Once you get a record company, your troubles begin.
02:19:45.000The record company will throw every conceivable obstacle and some inconceivable obstacles in your path.
02:19:50.000And you have to have a Panzertank Brigade strategy.
02:19:53.000And 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 we'll have a star in two years.
02:21:56.000I 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.
02:22:07.000I had a conversation recently in the podcast with someone, and we were talking about...
02:23:15.000The archetype, I'm saying, 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.
02:24:39.000So 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.
02:24:48.000And so did Jesus' religion disappear because it made a prediction and the prediction didn't come true?
02:24:58.000So apparently the religion is somehow a supernormal stimulus, even though its predictions don't come true.
02:25:04.000There's something in us that needs a higher something.
02:25:09.000Well, isn't the prediction of religion just wait around because it's going to come true?
02:25:13.000Well, 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.
02:25:39.000Well, 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.
02:25:52.000And they took these billboards out, and then they came and went, and in many years...
02:25:56.000And then they said, oh, we've made some calculations, and we've made some mistakes, and there's some errors, but it's still common.
02:26:03.000Well, it happened in 1840. William Miller made a prediction.
02:26:06.000Everybody sold their goods, and we're waiting for the rapture, and it didn't happen.
02:26:11.000So 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.
02:26:42.000And Michael Jackson and his mother were Jehovah's Witnesses, which I believe is one of the William Miller-based religions.
02:26:51.000So, 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, it'll last.
02:27:08.000And we humans think that we're all about rational prediction and control.
02:27:29.000There is a vast universe out there and there are so many possibilities and it's so overwhelming that this framework of religion or occult 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.
02:27:54.000Well, that's a good hypothesis that it brings things down to a scale we can comprehend.
02:27:58.000I think of it as almost like a bridge to evolution.
02:28:02.000Like 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?
02:28:15.000Well, let's give them a point so they can make it to the next juncture.
02:28:51.000But, 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, because the cosmos has never done it before,
02:29:17.000Our entire civilization is like one searcher bee in a possible cosmic intelligence, assuming that there are other living things, conscious things, intelligent things, elsewhere.
02:29:27.000And eventually, we will patch all these pieces together.
02:29:30.000But right now, we're patching together the pieces from trillions?
02:29:36.000I mean, if there's just a trillion cells in you...
02:29:40.000Then 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.
02:29:56.000Imagine 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 them those damn chocolate eclairs.
02:30:09.000The material world would not be the same.
02:30:13.000You have given bacteria new powers, and they have given you powers you wouldn't have without them.
02:30:20.000Possibly powers that allowed you to evolve in the first place.
02:30:23.000Well, they think it changes your personality now.
02:31:09.000How the hell Does a bacteria learn or a bacterial colony?
02:31:14.000Because they think in groups of seven trillion.
02:31:18.000How do they think out how to drive the rat as if it were a robot?
02:31:24.000And as if it were a tank, and they were at the controls.
02:31:27.000How did they manage to evolve a lifestyle in which they spent part of their life in one creature and another part of their life in another creature?
02:31:35.000How did they know the anatomy and the brains of those creatures so incredibly well?
02:31:43.000We haven't even considered the question.
02:31:45.000Well, it's a fascinating concept because the cat, the bacterial, the colony, has to actually get into the cat's gut to reproduce.
02:31:55.000It can't reproduce outside of the cat's gut, which is just insane.
02:31:59.000And 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.
02:32:11.000And as he's talking about it, you're just trying to imagine how long this took.
02:32:16.000Well, Sapolsky's one of the MacArthur Genius Award winners who said that The God Problem was a great book.
02:32:23.000The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates.
02:32:26.000So, 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.
02:32:34.000And then solved the mystery and then turned the result into a tool.
02:32:40.000That is a hard thing for people to acknowledge or even consider that we might be the only ones that have gotten to this point.
02:32:47.000And 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.
02:33:21.000He's talking about, I think it's Dakota.
02:33:23.000And there's some river that goes through Dakota.
02:33:26.000And on one side of the river, the culture is one way.
02:33:29.000On the other side of the river, the culture is another way.
02:33:31.000Even with all of our modern communications technologies, there are still differences.
02:33:36.000And the universe, at least the universe in the case of life, and we only know of life on one planet, It's constantly stretching out fingers into unused territories.
02:33:53.000It'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...
02:34:07.000For example, we humans right now, we're under the influence of another end-of-the-world religion, looking toward a different kind of paradise.
02:35:16.000Then 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.
02:35:44.000What we need to be after is climate state.
02:35:46.000If we really want the climate to be the way it was in 1650, before the Industrial Revolution, that's a human choice.
02:35:53.000That'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.
02:36:02.000My question for you, though, is why is it such a sacred subject?
02:36:06.000What you've just said, even just questioning it for a moment and saying that environmentalism is a type of religion— Climate denialist.
02:36:15.000And then people would love to break it down in a very simple one-sentence statement and call you, you know, Howard Bloom is a climate denialist.
02:37:16.000So if you're having a good meat meal with a bunch of people, this is a chemical in your gut that says, these are good people, stick with them.
02:38:01.000And 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.
02:38:11.000So we were born in this peculiar way, that is, naked.
02:38:15.000And 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.
02:38:32.000The 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.
02:38:47.000She says what made us human was cooking, just what you said.
02:38:51.000Because when you cook, you liberate a whole mess of calories and nutritive sources that are not available to a gorilla that's eating leaves.
02:39:53.000The reason we need to save their environment is because they're so dumb as a group.
02:39:57.000Because 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.
02:40:06.000Whereas baboons who have smaller individual brains have greater collective smarts.
02:40:12.000Do you see now baboons have domesticated dogs?
02:41:05.000But 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.
02:41:29.000Okay, 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 once they develop certain genetic tricks,
02:41:45.000they pass the tricks around in little tiny envelopes for all practical purposes.
02:41:51.000So they're constantly sharing new bacterial tricks.
02:41:54.000So we are told by the environmentalists, the New End Times movement, that we have used up all the resources on this planet.
02:42:05.000We have vastly overburdened this planet.
02:42:11.000But bacteria are 12 miles beneath our feet right now, and they are turning raw rock, granite, into bio stuff.
02:42:21.000Now, 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?
02:42:31.000Who 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.
02:43:35.000Because 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 or snowball or twice in its history.
02:43:51.000The 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.
02:44:03.000It is circling the core of the galaxy approximately every 235 million years.
02:44:09.000And 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.
02:44:19.000It gathers something like a hundred trillion tons of cosmic dust per year and At certain points, it goes through clouds of cosmic fluff that triple the amount of that dust that we gather,
02:44:36.000which changes the climate considerably.
02:44:40.000And we go through a Milankovitch cycle.
02:44:42.000It changes the climate every 22,000, 40,000, and 110,000 years.
02:45:18.000The norm is rapid climate change much more rapidly than we've seen, and ice ages, and they alter.
02:45:26.000So we better damn well learn these things.
02:45:28.000Now, 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,
02:45:46.000and she said, well, if you guys are going to build these giant solar harvesting farms, these five mile by five mile arrays of photovoltaic panels, when you see a hurricane heading for Jamaica, send down a laser beam.
02:46:02.000It 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.
02:46:15.000Well, that's the beginning of harnessing these things, harnessing disasters as energy opportunities.
02:46:27.000If 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?
02:46:51.000That's one of the most devastating catastrophes we can imagine, an explosion.
02:46:55.000What 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?
02:47:07.000Well, 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.
02:47:18.000And that the Christians who still believe in the coming of the kingdom of God.
02:47:41.000My friend Eshelbin 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,
02:47:59.000And 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.
02:48:10.000It was something a little harsher than that, meaning you have sinned.
02:48:16.000And I watched this movement develop from the beginning, and it developed by using conformity enforcers.
02:48:23.000Well, that Al Gore movie tipped it over the top.
02:48:49.000Because 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.
02:49:15.000He had a frown on his face that was unbelievable.
02:49:19.000He walked out with that same serious frown, uncompromising, without saying goodbye, without saying thank you, without any of the normal social graces.
02:49:29.000And he didn't have a name for what he was doing.
02:49:32.000Conservation was the name of what he was doing back then.
02:49:35.000And it was Earth Day that put another word on the map, environmentalism.
02:49:39.000And 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.
02:49:52.000When 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.
02:50:01.000And environmentalism was built to get into the brains of young people and never leave.
02:50:07.000And eventually environmentalism developed its own end-of-the-earth scenario.
02:50:13.000It 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.
02:50:33.000And 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.
02:51:28.000And 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.
02:52:30.000But 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.
02:52:44.000You can't do that with sulfur droplets in the atmosphere.
02:52:48.000It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life.
02:52:50.000But that's the first solution, technological solution, to come out of all of the climate people's mouths.
02:52:57.000But we need to do what they're talking about.