Howard Bloom, a polymath with MECFS since 1988, credits oxytocin and magnesium for his 74-year-old ability to do 400–700 push-ups—up from just 92 at 19—while dismissing NASA’s SLS as "intentionally stupid" due to its $325K-per-flight waste. He co-founded the Asian Space Technology Summit, championed China’s $20T Silk Road, and proposed asteroid mining to fuel a "platinum highway in the sky." Bloom’s The God Problem debunks entropy, arguing order emerges from chaos, like galaxies forming from quarks or bacteria shaping human moods. His work spans rock publicity—where he uncovered Prince’s and Michael Jackson’s authenticity—global extremism (The Muhammad Code), and a Caltech-led multi-planetary mission, all while rejecting scientific dogma as "sheep-like conformity." Ultimately, he frames humanity as adaptable tool-users (homo tulicus) who must actively manage nature’s instability through bold technology. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, 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.
It'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.
Yeah, I thought, first of all, something you don't know.
You have a sense of humanity and you don't know it.
And something like this that wipes out your entire future, every dream you ever had for yourself.
Robs you of your sense of humanity.
And you don't know there is a sense of humanity until it disappears.
So it took me three years.
I had to rebuild a personality from just about scratch because the one area I could handle, at least most of the time, was the Internet.
You know, the internet hit the music industry in 1983, and I had been lusting after it for years because only academics had access to this real high-tech thing.
And I had, it took me three years to realize that every day I was trying to go up to my front room office and work, and that sitting was draining me of my energy.
And since I only had a tiny amount of energy, if I lay there, horizontal, in the bed, my voice would eventually come back.
So I had an assistant take two computers, because in those days, two computers was about half the size.
The processing power was half the size of your cell phone.
And I had him hook up two computers and a Chinese box.
Don't let anybody tell you the Chinese don't invent things.
They do.
And this was a box that allowed me to control both computers from one monitor and one keyboard.
So we had the keyboard up on foam bolsters so that I could see it when I was laying perfectly horizontal in bed so I could still see the keys.
And I rebuilt the personality online because I couldn't get any further than to the bathroom and back.
I mean, I was going to write my first book, and I was going to...
I'm a nerd from science.
I got into science at the age of 10. I got into theoretical physics and microbiology.
I built my first Boolean algebra machine when I was 12. I co-designed a computer that won science fair awards when I was 12. I was taken to see the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo.
And disappeared into his office for an hour.
My mother wondered what in the world had happened to me because it was supposed to be a five-minute courtesy call.
We were discussing Big Bang versus steady-state theory of the universe for an hour.
And when I was 16, I worked at the world's largest cancer research lab, and I came up with the theory of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe, the Big Bagel theory, or the Bloom-Toroidal model, that predicted 38 years in advance dark energy.
And then I ended up in the rock and roll business with this background.
So when I imagined I was going to write my first book...
I was going to leave the rock and roll business behind because my field expedition and rock and roll, I'd learned, I thought as much as I was ever going to learn from it.
And I'd worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACDC, Aerosmith, Kiss, Queen, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, people like that.
I fly down to, I think it was Richmond or something like that, to go out five, to be taken by Jeep five hours into the countryside to meet with Linda Womack, that's Sam Cooke's daughter, and her husband, Cecil Womack, who wrote The Rolling Stones' first hit, he and his brother.
And they have this big aircraft hangar sized farm building.
It's going to be their home.
But right now they've just had it built.
It's empty.
It doesn't have heating yet.
And it's March 10th.
It's still the end of winter.
And so we go in past the sheep and into this building and there's no furniture in there and I sit there and interview them for five hours and find out that there's something called a black coal mining culture and that gospel came out of those black coal mines.
I had no idea that blacks ever got involved in coal mines, much less that that's how gospel culture began.
And I... They drove me five hours back to the airport again.
I sat there on the plane with my little TRS-100, the very first laptop computer, this little gizmo that ran off of AA batteries.
And then I forgot my laptop on the plane.
I don't do things like that.
Some of it was a little off.
The next day I thought I had a cold.
My technique for handling a cold?
Work your fucking ass off.
Walk a minimum of two and a half miles and do your work.
So I worked and powered my way through it by Tuesday.
I was so weak that my staff had to pick me up under the armpits and drag me off to the elevator and throw me in the back of a car service car and ship me out to Park Slope to my Brownstone in Brooklyn.
I don't know how I even got up the stairs, and it was all downhill basically from there.
And the next day I got a call from a West Coast competitor offering me a lot of money, and I had to say, no, I'm sorry, I gave it to my staff yesterday.
And I, as I say, had to reinvent myself with what little I had.
The books were still of value, my science was still of value, and I had to create a new me online.
And I've been working on my writing since I was 16 years old.
Science is my base.
But the book I got at the age of 12 by Albert Einstein, you know, sometimes a book grabs you by the lapels and it feels like the author is writing this directly into your face.
And Einstein said, to be a genius, it's not enough to come up with a theory only seven men in the world can understand.
To be a genius, you have to be able to come up with that theory and then express it so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it.
So Albert Einstein, my hero, said, schmuck, listen up.
You want to be an original scientific thinker?
You have to be the best writer you can possibly be.
So I've been working on my writing since I was 16 years old.
I was late.
It took me four years to get around to doing it after Einstein gave me the orders.
And when I was put on the Human Behavior and Evolutionary Society group, Well, I can write my fucking ass off.
So people were impressed, and they gathered around me, fortunately.
Now, admittedly, it's all on a computer screen, and it's all via keyboard, and there are no living humans in the room anyplace, but it saved my life!
To be able to do that.
And then I founded two international scientific groups of my own, and I wrote three books, because those were things I could do with that keyboard, as long as I had the strength to do the keyboarding.
And I didn't always have the strength to even lift my hands and do that.
Eventually, 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.
And the most useful thing that he did was hand me a piece of paper with an email address on it.
And he said, this is another one of my patients.
She's in Texas.
I want you to get in touch with her.
And the two of us went out like Hansel and Gretel holding hands going into the forest looking for treatment modalities.
We're looking for treatments that might possibly save us from our illness.
So...
When I tell people the stuff I take, and they say, okay, who can I get this from, and I send them to my doctor, my old CFS doctor, he says, oh, I don't give those treatments.
Well, he gave them to me, but he gave them to me because those were the things that felt like they might work, and he allowed me to try them.
And I ended up with, 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, magnesium, and oxytocin.
Oxytocin, the bonding hormone.
Oxytocin, the stuff that creates trust in neuroeconomics experiments.
Oxytocin, if you're a mother and you've just given birth to a baby, when you put that baby to your left nipple for the very first time, you feel in some cases like you've just taken LSD. Because this chemical goes coursing through your body and it's a trip.
And it makes you trust everybody in the room and everybody who walks into the room.
It's oxytocin.
And oxytocin, I've been on oxytocin now for 20 years.
And oxytocin, it turns out, also does something else.
There's this little experiment called parabiosis.
Take an old rat.
His brain is aging.
His heart is aging.
His kidneys are aging.
You hook up the circulatory system to the circulatory system of a young rat.
And guess what starts happening to the old rat?
His brain starts reversing, getting younger.
His heart starts getting younger.
His kidneys start to get younger.
So I'm about to be 75 years old in a month.
And I do between 400 and 700 push-ups in the morning first thing.
But when they tried to figure out what is reversing the aging in the muscles of the rat, the heart of the rat, the brain of the rat, the one ingredient they were able to isolate and then use on other rats to get them to get younger instead of older was oxytocin.
So, in all probability, the reason I can do between 400 and 700 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.
There 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.
And we gave it to my doctor and he sat on it for six months until he could regurgitate it as his own bright idea.
And then he prescribed it for me.
And it's done wonders.
That and a bunch of other stuff have done absolute wonders.
Without that, I mean, I was on my way to Moscow once I finally got out of bed.
I was going to address an international conference of quantum physicists about why everything they know about quantum physics is wrong.
I was fine.
I mean, this was my first traveling since I'd gotten out of bed, and it was taking a huge chance, because there was a huge chance of throwing me back into bed again.
And I flew all the way to Germany and was doing just fine.
I was exhilarated that I was doing so well.
And then halfway between Germany and Moscow, the CFS symptoms began to come back.
And that was scary.
And then I reviewed what I was doing, and I realized I'd missed all my afternoon pills.
And 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, and so I could be disappeared at any second.
But when we finally got to our hotel and opened up my drug roll, I took the gabapentin, and within 15 minutes, the symptoms were gone.
I started having these blinding stomach aches, and they went on for months and months and months, until I finally got fed up and started researching on Google, what do you do about stomach aches?
Well, guess what one of the primary things you do to stop stomach aches?
Amitriptyline, the very thing I had gone off of.
So I had to go back on it.
So it's a whole network, a mesh, of supplements, drugs, and lifestyle.
I don't sleep the way normal people sleep.
I sleep from 4 o'clock in the morning until 8 o'clock in the morning.
I get up.
I listen to magazines on the Kindle while I'm taking my bath and shaving and all that stuff.
I meet with my assistant.
I give her her marching orders for the day.
I go back to sleep at 11, and I sleep until 3. And then I get up for my second workday.
And that's when I do all my writing and all that kind of stuff.
Okay, now, Joe, if your body is refusing to sleep for eight hours straight, listen to your body.
Give it what the hell it wants.
And so these are the hours my body demanded.
And I had been working often until 8 o'clock in the morning from roughly 11 o'clock at night or something like that, and losing track of time, and it was very disorienting.
And once I started this two periods of sleep a day, my day stabilized.
And there's other stuff.
I mean, listening to Pandora, you would think, what does that have to do with your illness?
Well, I work at a cafe.
That's a vital part of things, because I'm surrounded by people.
And I've slowly built community in this cafe.
Other workaholic writers like me, a neuroscientist, a novelist, and all kinds of people who just sit there and slave away all day.
But I'm listening to Pandora.
That gives me a sense of life.
For some reason, it's as positive as an elixir.
And it gives me a sense of control over my environment, and I don't hear the conversations going on around me, so I can really focus on my work.
I've written four books this way so far in cafes.
All of this stuff.
Walking five miles a day in two bursts.
I mean, there I am going through a meadow in the middle of a park at night.
How many New Yorkers do you know who go out and walk through a park?
In the middle of the night.
Robbers.
Yeah, right.
That's what you'd think.
But I have the time of my life looking up at the stars out in the middle of the meadow and being where I'm not supposed to be.
So here I am, the guy who worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, and all of those people.
And I'm co-designing a multi-planetary mission at Caltech right now.
I'm out here in California to do a bookstore reading, my first one on the West Coast for How I Accidentally Started in the 60s, my current book.
But then I have three presentations at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, and I'm on the Board of Governors of the National Space Society, and I've got some important things to do there.
And then they let me sit on the board meetings.
I used to be on both the board and the Board of Governors.
And there are some important things I need to help this group accomplish.
And then I go back to New York and get, hopefully, if I'm lucky, and my planes are on time, I get to New York in time to get some sleep.
And to get up and do an interview with a British filmmaker who's making a film about Prince.
In the meantime, there's a film being made about my life called Surf the Catastrophe.
It's a 60- to 90-minute film, and they're finally getting, after a year of shooting, they're getting down to the editing, and it's a three-time Grammy winner who is my director and one of the cameramen who's been with us through this whole thing.
A couple of Sundays ago, my director got his third Grammy, or Emmy, and one of my cameramen got his second Emmy.
Yeah, because for whatever reason, I refuse to go into any niche.
I refuse to go into one specialization and see the walls close in on me and get buried there.
And my goal since I was 16 years old and working at the world's largest cancer research facility has been not to be a mole digging a hole so deep you can't see anything, but to be the eagle flying over the landscape and taking each of those mole holes as pixels.
Well, I read two books a day from the time I was 10, and by the time I got to college, remember, I'm there at the age of 12 with the head of the graduate physics department, not just the physics department, the graduate physics department, and we're talking as equals, which is really weird.
Well, because since I was 12 or 13 years old, I wanted to take all the panorama, the full palette of the sciences, and I wanted to use them, among other things, to understand ecstatic experiences.
I wanted to understand...
How Hitler put together this performance, torchlight parades where 15 guys are walking down the streets abreast of each other carrying torches at 10 o'clock at night, and people on the Unterverlinden, the big boulevard, are packed so tight that if you pulled up your feet, you wouldn't topple over because the crowd would hold you up.
They were crowded in on either side of you, supporting you.
And people had a sense of being lifted out of themselves and having a transcendent experience and becoming part of three things.
Ein Volk, one tribe.
ein reich one state ein führer one leader but it gave them we all need a sense of being a part of something bigger than ourselves i wanted to know how that sense of ecstatic dissolution into something bigger than yourself happens do you think that in hitler's case that this was An accident?
Knows how to achieve things that he may never have seen achieved before in his life.
It's intuition.
We're all built with certain supernormal responses inside of us.
Certain gushes of emotion you can hit if you hit just the right stimulus.
And he hired Albert Speer to be his art director, so Albert Speer would art direct these massive events like this, but it was Hitler who would go into a state of ecstatic preaching, as if preaching in tongues, but preaching in one tongue, German, and who could bring that audience to that ecstatic level.
Right, because remember, if I'd gone to grad school, I would have been giving paper and pencil tests to 22 college students in exchange for one psychology credit.
Now, how much was I going to learn about mass ecstasies, the forces of history?
It's fascinating, though, that you had this foresight, because for many people, the idea of going to grad school and becoming a professor, like, that was the golden pot at the end of the rainbow.
And everybody knew I was going to be a college professor from the time I was 10 years old, but the closer I got to it, the more I realized that this is like being put in a sardine can and having the can welded over you.
It's a big mistake.
And I started a commercial art studio with a bunch of artists that I had worked with.
One day, I was in class.
I was very serious about poetry.
Poetry set a lot of the tones.
It taught me how to lead a life.
I mean, the love song 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.
T.S. Eliot.
But he said, listen up.
If you don't start doing the heroic stuff that you feel will define you and bring young women crawling to your ankles and kissing your knees, if you have that in you, that vision of what you want to be, and you don't start it now, today, this hour...
You will put it off and put it off and put it off, and when you hit the age of 50, you'll suddenly realize you don't have the life force.
You don't have the life energy to do that anymore.
And your whole life will have been a failure.
So if you have something heroic to do, start it now.
So I was in a poetry class, because poetry had had a huge influence on my life.
And one day the poetry teacher, the poet in residence at NYU said, Bloom, when everybody leaves the classroom, close the door.
I need to talk to you.
Well, that doesn't sound good.
And he said, okay, he sat me in the balling out chair, and he said, look you, last year I asked you to be on the staff of the literary magazine.
You never even showed up.
This year I'm telling you, you are the literary magazine.
So, I turned it into an experimental graphics and literary magazine.
So I knew a bunch of artists, and one of them was being thrown out of his apartment, and it was the beginning of the summer.
His electricity was about to be cut off, his phone was about to be cut off, and his furniture had already been repossessed.
He and his wife and child were sitting on a bare rug floor, crying.
When I walked in and I said, look, you're a bloody genius.
Give me your portfolio.
I'll take it out for two weeks.
I'll get you work.
That'll allow you to pay your rent.
And then I can move on and get a proper summer job.
Well, it didn't turn out to be that easy.
By the end of the summer...
I hadn't gotten a single job.
I got New York Magazine interested in doing a feature on my art studio, but I hadn't gotten the artist and the other artists in the studio a single job.
And I'm an obsessive-compulsive.
So I called Columbia, where I was supposed to go to grad school, and said, you know, I have a back problem.
I won't be showing up this year.
Joe, the truth at any price, including the price of your life, is one of my religious principles.
It's the first rule of science.
The second rule of science is look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, and then proceed from there.
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The truth at any price, including the price of your life.
Yeah, so when people tell me, for example, about my book, The Muhammad Code, how a desert prophet brought you ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, or how Muhammad had met in jihad.
So when people realized I was writing this, they said, you can't write that.
You'll get killed.
Who the fuck cares?
The first rule of science is the truth at any price, including the price of your life.
And if you tell me I can't write it because it's 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.
You seem to be approaching all these different things, whether it is sitting in the cafe, listening to music, being surrounded by people, poetry, the ecstatic state that you're studying when it comes to Hitler or rock music.
You seem to be looking at this as almost like a form of not necessarily uncharted energy, but undocumented.
Almost as if it's like there's fuel out there that you're tapping into and utilizing that you know that everybody's kind of aware of, but I don't think they're thinking about it the same way that you are.
No, and I'm looking at this in the context of everything from the Big Bang to what's going on in our brains while we're having this conversation in the future you and I are fashioning through our actions at this point.
I'm looking at this in terms of a very, very, very big picture.
And I get disturbed when it looks like I'm going to get typed, like I've spent so much time on space in the last few years that I'm afraid people are going to type me, and I refuse to be typed.
And you've got to see where they all fit together.
That's the real trick.
And the tool for this, for me...
When I was 12 years old, my parents...
I'd never paid attention in school.
I read two books a day.
That's it.
So I read a book under the desk.
Teacher?
Who cared about the teacher?
And my parents were going to send me off to a small private school, but they made me promise to work in school.
I'd never worked in school before, and I forget where I was going with this story.
But there is one experience I had in this little high school that's really relevant, and that is...
Okay, by the time I'm 16 years old, I've been after the ecstatic experience for four years in scientific terms.
When I'm 14 and hear about a book called The Varieties of the Religious Experience by William James, I spend four months looking for a copy of the book because there is no Amazon yet.
And finding books in Buffalo isn't that easy.
And then I'm 16 and I've been elected the head of the program committee in my school.
The program committee, this every day starts for the entire student body with a 45-minute Morning session.
And I emcee those sessions, and I program two of them.
So the juniors come to me, and they say, we're having a dance, could you please advertise our dance for us?
And they don't understand the irony of what they've just asked.
If there's a dance anywhere in Buffalo, New York, people want me to park my feet elsewhere, preferably in Cleveland or Houston, Texas.
And so this is a really weird request.
So I put a piece of music on the turntable behind the stage, and I get up on the stage, and I'm incompetent.
I can't dance.
I mean, I spent a year in dance class.
My parents were trying to make me normal.
It didn't work.
But I dance.
And it's not like any dance you've ever seen before in your life.
And I see the girl who hates me most.
I see her pupils start to dilate.
And then I see all of the pupils, 350 sets of pupils, 700 eyeballs, dilating.
And then I see their faces melting.
And then it feels as if their energy coalesces like a big amoeba and reaches out a pseudopod, and the pseudopod...
Sends itself through me and the energy goes up through me as if I were an empty pipe, reaches something just above my head and is transmogrified, utterly transformed and goes back down to the audience again in a continuous feedback loop.
And I have an out-of-body experience.
I'm convinced that I'm on the ceiling watching all of this happen.
That I'm not under any control from me.
I'm in control of this energy.
And finally, when it's all over, remember, these kids do not like me.
In this school.
Not at all.
And they do something as if they have practiced it all their lives.
And I know for a fact they have never done it before.
They surge down to the foot of the stage.
They pick me up on their shoulders.
They carry me out of the auditorium.
They carry me up the walkway to the building above where we have our classes and then they put me down.
And 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.
Galileo had his insights by taking these new fangled devices called lenses, putting them in a tube, and pointing the tube, which was designed to be used for horizontal viewing, so you could see an army coming over the horizon towards you long before they could see you.
He takes this tube and he turns it in a totally unexpected direction up.
And another guy, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who uses these same high-tech devices lenses because he's a draper.
He sells fabric.
So he uses his magnifying glass to see how tight the weave is in his fabric.
And his great innovation is to take these lenses and turn them down and look at pond water and look at his own sperm.
And I suddenly have this realization while my parents are shredding my socks and trying to drag me up to the synagogue.
There are no gods in the heavens.
There are no gods beneath the earth.
So where are the gods?
Right now, in this scene, they're in my parents, and they are tugging with astonishing force at my parents and my socks.
And if the gods are in my parents, then the gods are in me, too.
So my task in life is going to be to take that lens that Galileo turned up and that van Loonhoek turned down and turn it within to find the gods inside of us.
Meaning finding those ecstatic experiences.
And that dance experience was the most primal of these ecstatic, you could call them spiritual experiences, but for me it's secular.
Sorry.
Spirituality.
I got sex on the brain.
But that was the closest I was going to get to what Hitler had summoned forth.
Those speeches that Hitler gave, I don't understand German, but the intensity that he was giving these speeches out, and I've seen this before with radical Islam speakers or with many different religious leaders.
There's something about what they're doing that is almost contagious.
You see the energy that they're putting out.
It's so compelling.
It's a bizarre thing that human beings have.
Compulsion to pay attention to people that have achieved this extreme level of performance.
If 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.
And there is a good chance that you are having a kind of out-of-body experience of one kind or another because something deeper inside of you takes you over and performs through you.
It's not you, but of course it is you.
So if you were going to come to me when I was in the rock and roll business and you wanted to be my client, I would give you a lecture.
I would say...
You have to understand something.
If you are coming to me to fashion an image, to brand you, and to make you a superstar, I'll get you an appointment immediately, within the hour, with my best competitor.
But if you're going to work with me, you have to understand that music is not an exchange of pieces of plastic.
It is not an exchange of downloads.
It is not an exchange of money.
It's not about markets and branding and all of that stuff.
Music is about an exchange of human soul.
When you sit in front of a blank piece of paper at 2 o'clock in the afternoon to write a lyric, you know you can never write a lyric again because you have no idea of how you've ever written lyrics in the past.
And at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, very often there's a lyric there.
My job is to find the self inside you who wrote that lyric and introduce it to the self that says, hello, how are you?
Fine, thank you very much, and all the ritualistic aspects of life.
When you go on stage, you have the kind of experience that I had.
You are out of your own body.
You are danced around as if you were a marionette.
You feel 17,000 souls coursing through you to something higher, being transmogrified and channeling back to those people in a continuous loop.
My job is to find that soul inside of you that dances you on stage and introduce it to the self of, hello, how are you?
Fine, thank you very much.
So if you're willing 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.
They hated him because he had signed with Tony DeFries, who was managing David Bowie.
And Tony DeFries thought that his magic came from changing people's names.
David Bowie had been named David Jones, and he had changed it to Bowie.
And so he called John Johnny Cougar.
And then he did something that sounds devilishly clever, but was the opposite of clever.
He had a book made with one page on each of all of the dominant critics of the day.
One page, a picture, a little write-up on each of them.
And the press perceived this as trying to buy them.
And they don't like being bought.
So they rebelled, and the word went out in the press that John Coorer was a prick, that he was just an obnoxious, horrible human being, and that his music was crap.
And so even my friend Ken Emerson, my impression from Ken, Ken was at that point the Record Reviews editor for Rolling Stone, and eventually he'd be an editor at the New York Times Sunday Magazine, a very influential magazine nationwide.
And My impression was that Ken wrote his review of John's album without ever opening the shrink wrap.
Without ever listening to it.
Because everybody was assumed in that community that you knew what John's music was.
Crap.
And you knew what his personality was.
Crap.
And if you open the album and listen to it, you would be expelled.
Yeah, and peer pressure is tremendous within the rock crit, or was tremendous within the rock crit establishment.
critics and it goes it's so much power back then it's so crazy but they were so rigidly conformity enforced now this wasn't unique to the 1970s and 1980s because carlisle the social commentator thomas carlisle in england in approximately 1832 wrote about the pop culture critics of his day in In his day, pop culture was novels and plays.
And he compared them to sheep.
And he explained how if you take a cane and you put it out, the sheep walk in single file.
You can get 2,000 sheep all walking in single file.
And if you put your cane out in front of the lead sheep, and the lead sheep jumped over your cane, and then you withdrew the cane, Every one of the other 4,999 sheep would jump at precisely this same spot, even though there was nothing to jump over anymore.
Well, that's how I perceived the rock crit elite.
And my job was to turn them around.
But my job was also to see true ecstatics, like Prince.
Like John, Michael Jackson was not an ecstatic on stage.
Michael Jackson was an incredible, astonishing performer who had studied his craft from the age of nine.
And so he worked out every single move in advance.
John, you never knew from one night to the next what Prince or John Mellencamp were going to do in performance.
And he was the most remarkable person I've ever met in my life.
And when I tell people how remarkable, they don't believe me.
He was, you know, you and I and Jamie are on a certain level.
And...
We don't know we're on a certain level because we figure this is the range of humanity.
If we go out and meet anybody on the street or even anybody famous, I work with Buzz Aldrin these days, what we're going to encounter is another person pretty much like us.
Sorry, in Michael Jackson's case, he did not fit on this normal plane at all.
He was on a plane somewhere where you've never seen a human being before.
So, the first time I met him, We were at his brother Marlin's Pool house.
It's a little house with just enough room for one big room on the first floor and another big room on the second floor with a little tiny staircase between them.
And there's a billiard table in the middle of the room and there are arcade games, which at that point in particular, 1983, were unattainable.
No human could afford arcade games unless you were Steve Wynn and you were actually equipping an arcade.
So we're in this room, and Michael and I are standing next to each other.
So his left elbow is at my right elbow.
His left knee is at my right knee.
And we have a meeting with the art director from CBS. I'm condensing this story.
There's lots more.
But...
We're having a meeting with the art director, and she walks in with five of the most gorgeous portfolios you've ever seen in your life.
Hand-carved cherry wood, hand-carved leather, and these are from guys I know because I started in pop culture in the art business, and these were my legendary competitors.
And Michael opens...
The first page of the first portfolio, and he gets a square inch into it, a postage stamp size piece into it.
And he goes, oh, and his knees begin to buckle.
And he gets another two square inches into it, just lifts the page a little bit further.
Oh!
He lifts it even further.
Oh!
Michael is seeing the infinite in things that even the artist didn't see it, with such infinity as Michael is seeing it.
And by the time he gets to the full page, He's having a full-scale aesthetic orgasm.
I have never seen anything like this in my life.
And remember, the first two rules of science are the truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there.
Michael is seeing the infinite in the tiniest of things, and you've never seen a human with this degree of awe, wonder, and surprise anywhere in your life.
And I will never see another human like that again in my lifetime.
Michael was beyond belief.
Utterly beyond belief.
And his commitment to his audience, to the people he called his kids...
Well, 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.
I hope he knows what he's doing in space better than he knows what he's doing with the Kindle HDX. Well, I just don't think he could possibly know all the things he's doing.
Yeah, but you hire good people who do know those things.
So the goal here is, up until now, NASA, which has been dumbed down so much it's ridiculous by Congress and the Senate, because Congress and the Senate insist on designing their own rockets in order to produce jobs programs, not to get us to space.
And the result is we Americans haven't had access to space on American-made vehicles since 2011. That's a long time now.
That's a long time.
When we do get access to manned space, it's going to come from Elon Musk.
It's not going to come from any of the major space companies.
And $3 billion a year is sunk into this space launch system, this Turkey, and another Turkey called the Orion.
And that's money that needs...
We need that money to actually design...
Habitats on the moon, design mining equipment to mine the ice on the moon and turn it into rocket fuel and breathable oxygen and drinkable water.
And there are tons of things we need, but NASA's not producing them because it's trying to compete with Elon and Jeff.
Elon and Jeff know a secret.
If I volunteered to fly you to New York City, and I told you, I'm going to do this for free.
I'm not going to charge you a penny.
All you have to pay are the expenses.
And 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, and plowed it into the Atlantic Ocean and discarded it.
Now, but I'm doing this all without charging you anything, you realize.
So, when you want to fly back from New York to California, I'll buy you another 737, another $325,000, and fly you back, and then I'll fly the 737 out over the Pacific, and I will ditch it.
This is the way we do space at NASA right now.
So how much would it cost you per ticket for you and a friend to go from LA to New York and back again?
Approximately $325,000 per ticket.
How often would you fly from LA to New York?
Not very often, if ever.
So that's what NASA is doing with this space launch system, and it's gobbling up so much money, there's no funding left for the stuff we really need to do.
It would be better if they offered what are called COTS programs, where you ask companies to bid on getting a rocket wherever you want it to go, and doing with that rocket whatever you want it to do, and then let Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and United Launch Alliance, which is a big company underwritten by the government that is, I can never remember the names of the companies, but it's Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined.
And allow them all to bid on this.
Because Elon is going to bring it in for a tenth the cost.
Elon has developed the Falcon Heavy for approximately two billion dollars.
He's developed all of his rockets for approximately $2 billion for all of them.
It's costing NASA $30 billion to develop a turkey.
They simply want to maintain the jobs in their districts.
Plus, if they feed the SMIC, the Space Military Industrial Complex, the Space Military Industrial Complex will kick back contributions to their campaign funds.
Buzz Aldrin calls these the Darth Vaders of space.
The Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummans and the big aerospace, traditional aerospace contractors.
So Congress and a certain number, it's a cabal of senators and congressmen who are screwing us up because a country...
A country that dreams big gets big.
A country that looks up goes up.
A country that looks down goes down.
We've become accustomed to looking down because we don't have that glorious option.
The moon is way behind us.
Buzz and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, that's a long time ago.
That's two generations, two and a half generations ago.
And kids in America have lost that dream of creating a paradise above the sky.
Because NASA's abandoned them, and NASA's been forced to abandon them by these congressmen and senators who steal this money from the NASA budget.
But if that money were used, look, that $3 billion a year would mean that you could develop an entire Elon Musk space program and launch Roughly 20 rockets.
Yes, because these guys have said, okay, we want to use space shuttle, leftover space shuttle technology, and they've mapped out the specifications of the rocket that they want.
They 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.
So major programs like the latest fighter that the Air Force, the Navy are being told to use, those represent jobs in roughly 45 states each.
That means that if you're Lockheed Martin and you want to keep your contract for a plane that people are claiming can lose to a 1951-era MiG, all you have to do is hit the congressmen and senators from those 47 states.
And they'll all back you.
Why?
Because they're counting on your campaign contributions.
Where are you going to get the money to give them campaign contributions from that billion to 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?
But if NASA seriously wants us to develop that space economy, they have to do their part.
Elon and Jeff are bringing the rockets to the table right now, reusable rockets.
Like the 737s that we have now that we turn around in LA and send back to New York and then turn around in New York and send back to LA for 35 to 40 years each.
They amortize their costs.
They allow you to get a round-trip ticket for as low as $220 on a really good day.
That's what's happening with space.
But where's the mining equipment going to come from?
That's something NASA needs to be working on, plus the mining equipment for the moon.
To turn the moon basically into a fuel station for rockets.
I want to bring you back to something you said earlier that you sort of glossed over, but you were talking about quantum physicists getting everything wrong.
No, and I've debunked that in a book called The God Problem, how a godless cosmos creates that has five heresies, and heresy number one is that A does not equal A. That's Aristotle's primary law of identity.
No, it's not always true.
One of the laws is the theory of entropy is so fucking wrong that it just defies it.
Okay, entropy means that everything is falling apart constantly.
And that in order to make something positive happen, you have to shed more negative energy, not really negative energy, more dispersed waste energy.
And in fact, the universe doesn't work like that.
The universe, in the very beginning, it formed quarks from nothing but motion.
Quarks from motion?
Are you kidding me?
Yeah.
The first things from movement?
Are you joshing?
No.
And then the quarks had to get together in groups of three, because this is a profoundly social universe, so they couldn't survive.
And one form of quark like this, with one up and two down or something like that, is a neutron.
And the other direction, three quarks, is a proton.
And all of this is anti-entropic.
And then what do all of these billiard balls do?
What do all these particles do?
380,000 years later, they begin to sweep themselves together in these massive social agglomerations that look like big potatoes.
And those are the beginnings of galaxies before they form their spiral arms and stuff like that.
And then within the The spiral arms of these galaxies, gravity balls, are competing with each other to see who's the biggest gravity ball and the biggest wins, and what does he do to the losers?
He swallows them and gets even bigger, which makes it possible for that gravity ball to confront another bunch of gravity balls and beat them out for size and swallow them.
Eventually, what happens is you get so much gravity and so much matter in this gravity ball that the gravity ball explodes.
That's called a sun, a star.
And around it are smaller gravity balls that manage to hold their own in competitions.
And they're planets and moons.
How the hell do you go even this short distance into the life of a galaxy that's been around for 13.7 billion years with precisely the opposite of entropy happening?
be how's it defined by Webster's dictionary do you know it's usually a weasel definition weasel yeah in other words it's deliberately obscure because it's such a weird subject yeah that's funny but every priesthood has a shibboleth a shibboleth is a magic word if you can't pronounce it you're dead and so every tribe Do you know?
Wants you to believe in something that's impossible.
Remember the Red Queen or the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland said, sometimes I dream up six impossible things before breakfast.
It says, a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder that is a property of the system's state And that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system broadly, the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system.
So that's what they're saying it is.
The degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system.
Obviously, 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.
Because in the 19th century, when this was formulated, the metaphor of the day was the steam engine.
It was the hot new technology.
It was to the 19th century what computers are to the 22nd century, or whatever we're living in now.
The 21st century, sorry.
And...
So, what they realized was, you take this steam, and you push it into a piston, and it throws that piston up into the air, and then the piston comes back down again.
But then, there's waste.
The steam then has lost its energy, and it comes out of an exhaust valve, and you put in more hot steam, right?
But it was actually written during those five years when I couldn't talk.
The first draft was written during those five years.
So there I was laying in bed not able to talk, and I know from all of my research that when you are a human who feels of no value to your fellow human beings, you begin to die.
Your immune system goes into under...
stops protecting you from diseases.
So I needed to somehow maintain a social set of connections, despite the fact that I couldn't talk and my own wife couldn't walk into the room and read a newspaper with me.
So what did I do?
I figured, okay, most sick people churn out what are called repulsion cues.
Cues that drive other people away.
They don't want to be near you when you're sick and suffering.
They really don't.
Kind as they may be.
So you have to put out attraction cues, the opposite of repulsion cues.
And what's an A number one attraction cue?
It's humor.
So there I was reading Dave Barry and reading P.G. Wodehouse, and these guys were lifting me for an hour or two above my misery, giving me this transcendent humor that just took me out of my state at that point.
So I tried to write transcendent humor, and I wrote this story of how I accidentally helped form a movement on the West Coast that had no name, and then I left the country, and when I got back, the Loose Empire, the Time Life Empire, had given it a name.
They called it the Hippie Movement.
And I tried to write it in as funny a manner as possible.
And then when I was finished writing it, I wrote, because I couldn't talk, I wrote a letter.
In those days, they had to be snail-mailed, because most people didn't have email back then.
I did, but most people didn't.
And I snail-mailed my friend Eric Gardner, because Eric Gardner had started out in the music business as a roadie for the Jefferson Airplane.
And I wrote Eric and said, Eric, I've just written this book.
Could you get it to the Jefferson Airplane?
Because if I could get them to say something positive about it, that validated it, because they were a key act in the 1960s.
And Eric said, no, no, no, I have somebody better.
Send me the manuscript.
So I sent him the manuscript, and he got the manuscript to this other client of his.
And the other client came back with a quote that said, it's a monumental masterpiece of American literature and filled with wow, woo, and aha experiences and nonstop waves of scientific comedy routines and nonstop waves of hilarity and compared it to James Joyce and said, wow, woo, aha, and signed it, Timothy Leary.
And I thought, this can't be for real.
This just can't be for real.
But it was 1995. And what I didn't know, it took me 15 years to find out, is that Timothy Leary got this book when he was sick in bed like I was.
He was dying of prostate cancer.
This book reached him six months before he would die of prostate cancer.
And I had written the book to be on a plane of humor that would yank you out of your body and yank you up to an ethereal plane of humor.
Since these two guys had done it for me, I needed to do my best to do it for others, and to attract people to stick with me, because I sent these things out as letters, the chapters out as letters, to friends, hoping a few friends would still stick with me.
And when Leary read it, apparently it did for him what Wodehouse and Dave Barry had done for me, and I was stunned when I found that out.
Absolutely stunned.
So yes, Virginia, you can be in the worst of all possible circumstances, and you can pull together something from those circumstances as a gift to your fellow humans.
And yes, you will doubt that it will ever be of value to any human on the planet, because that's how us humans feel about most of our endeavors.
But someday it just may save somebody who's in a position equivalent to yours.
It was a four-day conference in a pension just outside Moscow, 50 miles outside of Moscow.
It was a worker's paradise built in the 1960s.
And all the people there, all the physicists, were going around drawing the same diagram on napkins to explain what they were talking about.
And it's a diagram of how Schrodinger's equation manifests itself in one single isolated electron.
Well, guess what, Joe?
There's no such thing as an isolated electron in this universe.
There's no such thing as an isolated quanta of light, an isolated photon of light.
There's no such thing as an isolated anything.
I mean, when you look up at the night sky, what do you see?
Some of those stars are 13 billion light years away.
It's taken 13 billion years for that light to get to us.
But we can still see those lights with a telescope.
If there is light flooding the entire universe from those stars, how could 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?
It because the equation fits certain very artificial experiments that were set up in the lab.
And once an experiment is done and accepted, then everybody who doesn't get the same results thinks he's doing it wrong and does it over and over again until he gets the same results.
And the explanation, for some reason...
A lot of people in this universe think we're on our own.
No, we're never on our own.
We're always under the influence of other human beings, and look at the stars.
Only the light is reaching us.
They're not determining whether your girlfriend's going to argue with you tomorrow like your horoscope says, but there's that influence of merely being able to see them.
So I was basically lecturing these guys about a social cosmos.
In which conversation, information exchange is constantly taking place, all over the place.
And the fact that Trobinger's equation assumes an isolated entity, and there are no isolated entities in this universe.
And when I was finished, I expected them to throw me out of their conference.
And instead, they sat there as if this had been my bar mitzvah, and I'd just done a haftorah, or whatever it's called that you do at a bar mitzvah, and they were my uncles.
They were all sitting back, their faces were beaming, they were smiling.
You know that radiance, that redness that infects a face that's excited about something?
It was astonishing, and I couldn't understand why.
And then three years later, I have a collaborator in theoretical physics, Pavel Karakin, of the Keldish Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And 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.
You have to download it from Arxiv.org, which is the leading site for preprints in advanced mathematics and advanced theoretical physics in the world.
And so I downloaded it, put it on my Kindle, and listened to the first half while I was taking my afternoon walk.
These long walks through the park can be very helpful.
And when I got to the cafe where I was working in those days and got my laptop in front of me, I wrote to Dr. Užakov, and I said, Dr. Užakov, I don't know if you remember me.
I'm that crazy American who spoke at your conference, but I've just read the first half of your book, and it's phenomenal.
He used every concept that I had given in my presentation.
Every concept.
And I got one of those almost instant emails back, an email that comes within two or three hours, and Ushkov said, remember you?
Didn't you read the first half of my book?
And we are credited in there, my partner Pavel and I. So, to at least a bunch of quantum physicists from 11 time zones gathering in Moscow, what I was saying made sense.
I'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.
But one of the most important things, I think it was Niels Bohr who said this, I'm not quite sure, but one of the members of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics said, said that basically a particle exists in many states simultaneously, and it's not until it's measured that it collapses into one state.
That's one of the basic principles of quantum physics.
Well, guess what, Niels?
Every particle is being measured in some way all the time, all of its life, by other particles that are basically taking its measure and then responding.
Well, yes, because you and I, right now, we're going to be talking to possibly out of your 500, where it's more like 1 million total viewers and listeners.
You have to take complex ideas and simplify them so much that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand them.
What I'm trying to get at is once you have got it established in your head that nothing is isolated, that everything is connected, when you speak, are you aware when you're speaking that everything is connected?
I mean, are you actually consciously thinking of all of these different minds, taking into account all these different mind-blowing things that you're saying, and then applying them out in the world?
I mean, once upon a time I wrote an essay about Descartes.
Well, Descartes came up with the idea of, I think, therefore I am.
He took a retreat in Amsterdam.
He rented a second-floor apartment, and he was trying to isolate himself the way that those particles are isolated with the Schrodinger's equation, the particles that were being drawn on napkins in Moscow, so that he could strip everything away and find out what was the most basic...
The most basic axiom, the most basic thing we take for granted in life.
And he came up with, I think, therefore I am.
Now, think about this for a minute.
While he was trying to think this out, he was needing a rubbery gum eraser with which he erased his ink.
He was sitting on the second floor, which means somebody had invented the architecture that he was sitting in and the concept of the floor and the concept of beams that go across from one wall to the other that were holding him up.
He was looking out the window and he was looking at the hats that the Amsterdam men and women were wearing as they walked by, and he was fucking the cleaning lady whom he made pregnant.
to all the other people that are around you and all the people that you've interacted with and all the places you've been and the things you've seen and all the people that are constantly thinking simultaneously around you that you're aware of.
And the people that you're trying to influence because you're trying to influence people all day long.
If you want somebody to bring you a sandwich, you have to get across that you want that sandwich.
And especially if you want somebody like a wife or an assistant to bring you a sandwich, then that's not normally what they do.
Then you really have to work hard and influence them.
But the...
The universe, at least the living part of the universe, and so far we only know of life on this planet, it's all interconnected.
Those bacteria I was talking about, they're in your gut.
They are making your vitamin B. They are making your vitamin K. They are making an awful lot of the things that you use to survive.
They're also making chemicals that influence your mind and your moods.
They're manipulating you.
So when you go down to the corner store, To buy some chocolate eclairs, and you go home and you eat them.
In fact, you can only digest a small portion of the chocolate eclair.
Those bacterial colonies living in your gut, they do the rest of the digesting for you.
So, who's really going to the corner store?
Who's really the boss?
Who's really driving you, the vehicle of transportation?
Are these bacteria driving you down to the corner store so that you will feed them the stuff that they love the most?
Or is your will driving you to the coroner's store?
Well, the answer is a little of both.
A little of both.
Not as much of both.
I mean, there's this example of...
There's this fungus.
And the fungus has a very peculiar lifestyle, and I'm very curious to find out how it got this lifestyle.
But it lives half of its life in an ant colony, and half of its life in a sheep.
So 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.
And it gets that ant to climb to the top of a stalk of grass.
Why?
Because when the sheep come along to graze, they will inhale the ant.
What?
You're telling me that a fungus can control the mind of an ant in ways that we're just beginning to explore now, this year, and maybe last year a tiny little bit?
That it can actually be that precise in how it takes over the controls of that mind?
But the real deal is, okay, life on this earth functions the way that a beehive functions.
And how does a beehive function?
95% of the bees...
Are conformist bees.
And they go out to the hot flower patch of the day, and they mine the nectar, and they have a public stomach in which they can carry this stuff.
I mean, built into them, inside of them.
And they have these carrying hairs on their thighs, and they carry pollen in those.
And when they arrive at the unloading bay, there is an unloading bay in the hive.
And when they arrive at the unloading bay, if the unloaders know that the interior really needs pollen and nectar, And they see you carrying that pollen and nectar.
They stick their tongues down your throat to check out what's in your public stomach.
They go wild with excitement when they discover it's filled with nectar.
They check out your thighs, the carrying hairs on your thighs.
They go wild when they see that you're carrying pollen.
They feel you all over with their antennae.
They are intensely excited when they are unloading you.
And that gets you excited.
You feel like a rock star.
Because this is the same kind of attention a rock star gets.
So you go back out to the flower patch of the day and mine some more.
Meanwhile, there are these lazy, good-for-nothing bohemian bees.
They're anywhere from 5% to 20% of the colony.
And they don't do a single useful thing at all.
And so far as you can see, they don't do anything to earn their keep in the colony.
Why?
Because they're out doing loop after loop after loop and lazy eights after lazy eights after lazy eights.
They'll fly eight miles just following their whims.
Following their whims.
I mean, if you were their mother, what would you say?
You're wasting your fucking life, for God's sakes.
Okay, eventually you, the conformist bee, start coming back without pollen in your caring hairs, and without nectar in your public stomach, because the flower patch, the hot flower patch of the day, has been thoroughly plundered.
And when you arrive at the unloading dock of the hive, the unloading bees stick their tongue into your public stomach, empty, sorry.
They see your caring hairs, empty.
They turn their backs on you so savagely that you feel as if you've been cut dead.
And it finally, I mean, you can't believe that the old factory'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.
And Thomas Seeley, the guy who's done most of the research on this, calls you an unemployed bee.
And you are as depressed as if you were unemployed.
How do we know that?
Because your body temperature is down and you're crawling instead of walking.
And you're begging for food from other bees.
Well, you look for something to perk you up.
Now, what do humans use?
A football game.
A movie.
Bees use pretty much the same thing.
What does that mean?
They go to the unloading dock, Out of the 200 lazy, good-for-nothing bohemian bees simply following their instincts, five have come back having found new flower patches.
And they are dancing.
And the dancing excites you.
And they're dancing in competition with each other.
Some will dance 27 seconds.
Some will dance 27 minutes.
And if you find the dance of one of those dancers sufficiently persuasive, it lifts you out of your lethargy.
Gets you excited and you fly out.
She's giving a little in a little figure eight dance.
She is giving precise instructions on how to get to the flower patch and what the headwinds are and what the tailwinds are.
And you pick up her message.
You fly out to the flower patch that she has recommended and you check it out for yourself.
And if you get excited about it, you come back and you start dancing.
And ultimately the bee who gets the greatest number of backup dancers wins.
And you all go out, all you conformist bees who are now unemployed, go out to the new hot flower patch of the day and the same pattern repeats itself.
Now that's a collective mind operating on the basis of 20,000 independent bees.
And the living world Operates in pretty much the same way.
Bacteria are using you to get them chocolate eclairs.
You are using them to digest chocolate eclairs.
They are teasing our scientists into wild activity by threatening to develop illnesses that can bypass all of our antibiotics.
Which, by the way, are chemical weapons that microorganisms, colonies of microorganisms use to kill entire competing colonies.
We stole them from microorganisms.
We didn't invent them.
Antibiotics.
So, the scientists are very aware of the fact that the bacteria are getting ahead of us in research and development.
And are beginning to develop techniques to get around all of our drugs.
So they are researching their ass off.
So is there any common brain that links the bacteria to the scientific community?
You bet.
They're competing with each other.
And in the process of competing with each other, what are they doing?
They are both creating new options for all of life.
So 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.
Yeah, when you find out one of the things, if you're trying to alter your diet, if you're in a very high refined carbohydrate diet and you try to get off of that, you have intense cravings.
But those eventually go away, especially when you supplement with a lot of probiotics and then you go to a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.
You start to crave those kind of foods, and the cravings for sugar and bread go away.
That's all I ever eat except on Friday I allow myself to eat sauces and cheese, sauces out of a jar, because I don't eat things that have artificial ingredients or additives of any kind normally.
And so I have this wonking huge meal.
And then on Saturday I allow myself to splurge on absolutely anything I want to eat.
So these huge honking amounts of butter, and then I take these giant slabs of peanut butter.
And I pile them up, leaving a little hole in the center.
And in the hole in the center, I put grape jam and strawberry jam.
And then I take out the marshmallow fluff, and I put out almost an entire jar of marshmallow fluff on top of this one half a bagel, because I really want to taste the bagel naked with just butter on it, because I haven't had bread all week, and it can taste really good.
And I'm indulging myself with this other half of the bagel.
I 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.
I mean, I'm still dealing with how to get across the idea of a global brain, but it's basically every creature on the face of the earth is in some way contributing to our knowledge base.
In our hunter-gatherer days, if we were going to bring down a deer and eat it for dinner, we had to get to know the mentality of that deer.
We had to be able to ape it in our own minds so we could anticipate its movements.
So we anticipated the movements of lions.
We anticipated the movements of eagles.
We turned lions and eagles and bears into totems and named ourselves after them because we were trying to learn from their very spirit.
We were trying to learn muscularly and emotionally how to be them so that we could defeat them when the time came.
There's a connection there.
There's a global brain taking place right there.
And the deer and the bison and the other creatures we were hunting, even the woolly mammals, could not have lived without those bacteria in their guts.
Now, we didn't discover those bacteria until Anton von Leeuwenhoek dared to take his lens and, instead of having it horizontal to measure fabrics or look at fabrics, started looking down at his own sperm, which was a very...
I mean, look at what this guy did.
He's a tradesman.
He's not a trained scientist.
Of course the word scientist didn't exist until roughly 1850. But Nonetheless, he is taking his observations of fresh human sperm through his newly invented microscope, and he's sending the observations.
He's discovered that there are animalcules, little animals, totally independent, flailing around in the sperm.
And he writes a lengthy letter about this to the Royal Society.
Now, what has he just done, Joe, to the Royal Society?
I mean, it took me about 40 years of thinking about it, maybe 50, to work it out.
And then I suddenly realized, this guy is, why does masturbation keep showing up in my life when, look, the Boy Scouts threw me out when I was 11 years old for incompetence at Morse Code.
And if they hadn't thrown me out for incompetence at that, they could have thrown me out for incompetence at not time.
Now, admittedly, I've never heard of another human being ever being thrown out of the Boy Scouts, but still.
So, 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?
Well, I wanted to find the Beatniks.
I wanted to find Zen Buddhist Satori, the Zen Buddhist State of Enlightenment.
I was dead serious about those things.
I was in the top 10% of a class that had higher median SATs than the classes at Harvard, MIT, and Caltech that year.
It was at Reed College, the school that Steve Jobs would eventually drop out of.
A very tough school.
And I didn't realize I was in the top 10%, but nonetheless, I had these things I wanted to do.
I was inspired by on the road.
I felt the beatniks were the first people who would ever accept me in my life.
Yeah, 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.
That's probably 1965 or 1966. That is a great picture.
And the guy who...
So how could you ignore if that walked into your bookstore and you've never seen a haircut like that before and the person was barefoot in addition to that and carrying a sleeping bag...
And somebody walking down the sidewalk said, you look troubled.
Can I help you with something?
And I said, yeah, I'm looking for the beatniks.
And he said, well, and he rolled his pupils up into his forehead and he scratched his head and he thought and he thought and he thought and then he came out of it and he said, well, have you tried Colorado?
Well, that was just a little too vague a destination for me.
And this group gathered around me and around one of my traveling companions.
And we eventually ended up in a big, pink, condemned house.
This is all in how I accidentally started in the 60s.
In a big, pink, condemned house in Berkeley, three blocks away from the Berkeley campus.
And we didn't care if it was going to fall down at any minute.
And we wore no clothes, zero clothing during the day.
And my, I guess, co-leader was a guy named Dick Hoff, who had the body of an Adonis.
When we walked down the street together, women could not take their eyes off of him.
But they sliced through me as if I weren't there, as if I were invisible.
And every woman wanted to sleep with him.
And he had this sense of somehow he had lived a life up to that point with never having a depression, never having a doubt, never having a psychic pain of any kind.
It was uncanny.
It was unreal.
And remember, Michael Jackson is still the most remarkable person I've ever met, but Dick Hoff was pretty remarkable.
And so Dick set the tone, being naked, and Dick would go into the bathroom to do the things you do in the bathroom, but leave the door open and continue his conversation with you while he was in there going.
So that was the norm for us, and I was the spiritual leader of the group.
It feels very good when people believe in the things that you say.
It feels very good when you're hitchhiking and somebody takes you to MacArthur Park in 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, walks up to you and says, you look like the idiot in the Dostoevsky novel.
So he doesn't mean that as, you look like an idiot.
He's talking about something unusual.
And I start explaining to him what I'm doing, and before long, all of the crowds around all the guys on soapboxes with all of the Marxist and Jesus lectures have abandoned their speakers, and they're all listening to me.
Well, you can tell I really get off on talking to an audience of anywhere from one person to 100,000 people.
That's why I do it at a coffee shop, where out of the corner of my eye I can see humans around me, and where I can spend four hours and be profoundly rude, because when you're in the middle of balancing seven ideas and you're fashioning a sentence, if somebody interrupts you for half a second...
So, at any rate, I discovered that in New York there are so many people...
That you can pick people one by one and put them together into your own clique.
And if you put them together in your own clique, you always maintain a certain central role, even if you admire the people that are in the clique and you really want to advance them, you're still accepted.
I'm around giant groups of people so often because of the UFC, doing commentary in these huge arenas filled with people, and then doing stand-up in front of thousands of people.
Then the podcast reaching all these people I need alone time like I have the opposite Requirement amazing.
I need that if I don't get like my writing I have to write alone I write when everyone's asleep right house.
So he would call at 4 in the afternoon, and he'd say, okay, I want you to look at this website.
So I'd go look at the website and call me when you look at it.
So I'd call him again, and he'd say, okay, now look at this website.
Now, gradually, I got the idea that he was trying to tell me that there were extra galactic civilizations, and that they were coming to Earth and signaling us through crop circles and a whole bunch of other things.
But it was the way he did it.
He did it with such energy, he lit a fire in you.
Absolutely lit it.
Even if you totally disagreed with everything he was thinking, he lit that fire.
I used to drive home from the comedy store at night.
That 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.
Well, I was asked, the guy who created the show with Art Bell, who created Coast to Coast with Art Bell, He wanted to do a radio show where I could have as many nights of the week as I wanted, and the guy who wrote Conversations with God would have the other nights.
Buzz Aldrin said 12 years ago, we've got a presidential election coming up, and we've got to try to get space on the agenda of the things the candidates are talking about.
When I started interviewing some of the people that are involved in the movement, you find the same thing over and over again.
This just...
This 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.
Once upon a time in the 1940s, there were two guys, Conrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen, who got a Nobel Prize for inventing a field called ethology, which is a certain kind of observation of animal behavior.
And Nico Tinbergen would go off to the coastal cliffs.
Around Northern Europe.
And he would observe these seabirds, and the seabirds would go out, I don't know how many miles, 10, 30, 40 miles out to the ocean, to feed and bring back food for the young.
And then they would come back at the end of the day, and their nests, they'd have 200 nests next to each other, but the nests had very low walls.
So when the seabird came back from her fishing, and waddled herself into place, moving her hind back and forth to get in place to...
Incubate her chicks to warm the eggs.
She'd often knock an egg out.
And when the egg was knocked out of the nest, the bird would reach her beak out, pass the egg, and then pull her beak back in toward her chest to pull the egg toward the nest.
And she'd do it over and over again until she got the egg in the nest.
And Nico Tinbergen had this weird idea, I wish I knew where it came from, that this is a reflex.
You know, like when your doctor takes a hammer and hammers your knee and you're...
Your leg shoots out and you had nothing to do with it.
He figured this is the same kind of a reflex.
And he figured that if you have a reflex, you need a trigger for the reflex, like that patellar hammer that hammered your knee.
So he looked to see if there was a trigger that triggered this yanking your beak back in order to scoop the egg back into the nest.
And he tried building artificial eggs to see if he could find out what the cues were in the egg that were causing this reaction in the bird.
And finally, he got a super egg, which means it was bigger than the normal egg, it was browner than the normal egg, and he put the real egg.
Now, if you're the bird, that real egg has your genetic legacy.
It's your genetic future.
A lot is riding on that egg.
A lot of you.
And the phony egg.
And the phony egg would attract the bird so strongly that she would ignore her own egg and yank, yank, yank with her beak until she pulled the phony egg into the nest.
And they continued to do research with this kind of thing, and they discovered that they could trick some songbirds into taking a basketball into their nest.
And then when the poor little birds tried to get on top of the basketball to incubate it, they would slide off, and they'd be very frustrated, and they would climb back on again and slide off again.
Well, underlying what Adolf Hitler was doing, underlying what I was doing, dancing on that stage, underlying what you do in front of an audience when you get incandescent and lose yourself and something else talks through you.
So Hitler was basically saying the world is about to end and the kingdom of God is coming.
Except the kingdom of God, in his case, was the world will be controlled by the master race, the blonde and blue-eyed Aryans, and all other people will be slave people.
Or we'll be exterminated.
But it was this golden paradise that he was inviting the Germans to, in which they ruled the world because they were born to rule the world.
And basically, Hitler was talking about the equivalent of extraterrestrials.
He was talking about this magic quality of the Germans.
He was talking about the shared soul of the Germans and how the people in Wagner operas and the gods of the old Germans had been in the souls of these people, and he was evoking the group soul, the zeitgeist.
In this case, it's the Volkgeist, the spirit of a people.
And the flying saucer people are after an end of the world in which the world will be remade.
And a guy named, well, there was a Jewish kid from a backward town, a really backward town, who only had been trained in manual skills.
And he started preaching.
And he preached that the world, as we know, was about to end, and we were about to enter a new kind of paradise.
And because he was Jewish, he figured it's going to happen at Passover.
Because at Passover, you put out a cup for Elijah, and Elijah's there to precede the Savior, the guy who will save the Jewish people.
So he went up to the holiest city in Judaism, to Jerusalem, and he had a dinner, this Passover dinner, and they put out the cup, and that's when the kingdom of God was supposed to arrive.
His prediction of a kingdom of God arriving at that particular Passover ceremony turned out to be utterly wrong.
And in fact, the Romans seized him and nailed him to a cross.
And he died.
It was the opposite of everything he'd predicted.
But 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.
But what Paul put together around Jesus was a supernormal stimulus.
And it evoked a supernormal response, a supernormal reflex.
And the flying saucer ideas that, you know, here we are on Earth, but there's this race that's above us that can save us.
That's pushing at the same buttons.
Hitler was pushing at the same buttons.
The world, as we know, is about to end, and there's a new paradise, and the Germans will rule everything.
So we are built to receive certain kind of stimuli.
God knows how we got built that way.
And when I went out in quest of the ecstatic of God, the gods inside of us, at the age of 13, I was looking for those supernormal responses in us, and for the supernormal stimuli that evoked them.
And when you're doing art, when you're doing commentary, when you're doing comedy, you are hitting The buttons.
You are creating supernormal stimuli.
You are testing out jokes until they reach just the right shape.
And you know what you can feel in the audience, what that shape is.
And then you repeat that shape, knowing what its impact is going to be on the audience.
I wrote a new book.
It took me a long time to write all of my previous books, including how I accidentally started in the 60s.
And by the way, it isn't the same 1995 manuscript.
I had 20 years of additional processing and was able to put a lot more meaning into the book.
And hopefully it's still really funny.
But I was able to write a book in six weeks.
The first draft of 178,000 word book.
And a normal book is 90,000 words.
So this is almost twice the length of a normal book.
And I was able to do it because I had told all the stories in the book.
And I had felt out how the audiences responded to the stories, and I knew the words to use, and they were a well-worn path in my brain.
So I simply put down on paper an oral vocabulary, but it's the audience who shapes You, by giving you feedback.
And eventually you perfect something so it's like Nico Tinberg and Super Egg.
I mean, Nico Tinberg was eventually able to make eggs, super eggs, that had day glow on them, had polka dots on them, that were absurd, but they still had the ability, the way that flying saucer myths have the ability, to evoke the sense that there is a paradise beyond the world that we know.
Don't you think when you think of supernormal stimulus that when you see you know like a preacher on the pulpit that's screaming with confidence when you see Any of these things like even when it comes to fake breasts like you're seeing something like you know what you want you want a woman to be Good at bearing children right to have the right hip to waist ratio That she's designed to breastfeed she has large breasts Even though you know it's fake,
it still hits whatever that genetic button is inside of your head.
And the alien theme, the idea behind it, the archetype, is kind of like Space Daddy.
It's like, you know, I know we're stupid, but just like this guy who's screaming on the pulpit has all the answers.
Okay, as a science person, I have to tell you that there's only one place in which we've ever discovered any evidence of life, and it's down here on Earth.
So I'm a skeptic about life being anywhere.
Now, changing...
To a different scientific perspective, there's this thing that I call supersimultaneity, supersynchrony.
And when the universe starts as a rapidly expanding sheet of nothing but space and time, it's space, time, and speed.
That's all it is.
And when it precipitates in quarks, which is unlikely.
How can space, time, and speed become particles, quarks?
The 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.
Fast forward a couple of million years.
Galaxies all are pretty much the same.
And all of them spring into existence pretty much at the same time, at least the first generation of galaxies.
Stars ignite within those galaxies, all following pretty much the same principles.
They're all just big gravity balls.
Gravity is gravity balls all the way.
That's planets, that's moons, all kinds of things.
So there is this tendency for the universe to do the same damn thing at pretty much the same damn time, pretty much same damn everywhere in this cosmos.
And we do know that there are biomolecules, carbon-based molecules, Being formed in interstellar cold gas clouds, interstellar hot gas clouds, all kinds of unlikely places in the cosmos.
But those are very simple little molecules, even though we call them biomolecules.
This simply means they've got carbon.
Life depends on molecules.
In the case of your genome, if we yank just...
If we took just one cell, you wouldn't miss it.
You have a hundred trillion others.
So we took just one cell from your body and we took out the genome.
Well, it's actually the genome.
So we took out the genome and we stretched it out because it's all tangled up in the cell.
It would be three feet long.
So there's a big distance between a tiny little molecule of ammonia in an interstellar cloud and that huge Very complex, highly ordered, three-foot-long single molecule that's your genome.
And we haven't learned very much at all about how you go from the simple molecules to that incredibly complex molecules.
The origin of life is still one of the big puzzles.
But again, because there's supersynchrony and supersimultaneity all over the cosmos, pretty much the same thing happens at pretty much the same time.
The odds are that there are millions of other planets that have life.
Those are the odds.
But I set all that aside because we don't have evidence of any life.
And we've been looking since...
Okay, I'll tell you a story.
It seems to have nothing to do with anything.
But...
Once upon a time, a manager gave me an act to work with.
It was Earth, Wind& Fire.
And so I read all their lyrics.
I read everything about them.
I studied them like a Talmudic scholar.
I always did.
And finally, I got to their album covers.
And when I got together with the leader of the band, Maurice White, for lunch, because I hadn't yet learned to set up my boundaries and tell people, I'll only work with you if I can see you in your own environment for between one and three days.
That wasn't quite at that point yet.
I sat with Maurice and said, Maurice, if I've got you right, you believe that approximately 11,000 years ago, people from another civilization, someplace else, in our galaxy or beyond our galaxy, came to this Earth and brought us all of our technologies and left the messages of their technologies in the pyramids.
Have I got that right?
And Maurice smiled, and he said, yes.
So I said, okay, there's this scientist from Cornell University, and he has just had a tremendous success with a science series on PBS. It's the most watched series PBS has ever had.
And he's trying to put together an organization to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
So, if I introduce the two of you, would you be willing to do a benefit concert for him?
Because right now, he's struggling to get money together.
And Maurice said yes.
So, we tracked down Carl Sagan's Summer Cottage telephone number.
And I put together a conference call between Maurice White and...
As 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.
So, it was unfortunate, but that was the early 1980s.
Probably about, actually, probably about 1980. Didn't he want to just sit down with Maurice and sort of explain what we know so far?
And the question is whether Neil deGrasse Tyson was ever a scientist, because he's primarily been a showman most of his life.
And you should see him.
Joe, I... When did I see him?
He was at God knows what event, and I was probably there because a friend was giving a sold-out lecture at the American Museum of Natural History, and I didn't realize that Neil deGrasse Tyson was going to show up.
And when he showed up on stage, because I consider myself competing with him, because I've always wanted my own television series, and Neil has been ahead of me on everything, and I'm older than he is.
So it's, you know, little pieces of grit that we pick up and carry in our shoes and walk with.
So at any rate, I saw him on stage.
I couldn't believe it.
That man is astonishing on stage.
He's beyond your imaginings on stage.
So I went up when it was over.
And it was Buzz Aldrin who had originally introduced us via email and said, I'm the guy that Buzz Aldrin introduced you to 12 years ago, who's been emailing you every once in a while, ever since.
And he was in the middle of a whole bunch of people who wanted to take selfies.
They don't get autographs anymore.
They take selfies.
And they were lined up.
To get selfies with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson turns back on all of them.
This is not right.
This is not proper.
This is not polite.
In order to give me a lecture about how hard it had been to make himself into a showman.
And it looks easy, but it takes decades of work.
Well, I appreciated him giving me the little lecture, but all these people were waiting for him.
But he is amazing.
So we talk about that incandescent power when you go transcendent on stage, and you become an empty pipe through which something speaks through you, even though they're words that you've thought out for years, but all of a sudden they're speaking themselves through you.
And how it's the essence of the forces of history, that ability to give people the sense that they've been yanked out of themselves and are a part of something bigger than themselves.
That's the super normal reflex that is the most profound, and it's the one that grabs history by the balls and changes its direction.
But then it takes off the way that gazillions of particles of identical kinds show up all across the face of the cosmos.
Right.
It hits the zeitgeist with just the right supernormal stimulus.
And all of a sudden it takes off.
And we're all aware of the fact that we didn't do this.
And we're all aware of the fact that there is some supernormal intelligence.
But we don't realize that it's we who are the neurons.
And in the same way that a hundred billion It's now 86 billion is the figure.
So you've got 86 billion neurons in your brain.
Well, I got news for you, Joe.
The folks in science are saying that 86 billion neurons is you, which is a bloody miracle.
And they're right.
It is a bloody miracle that a Joe Rogan emerges from 86 billion neurons working together.
But you're more than 86 billion neurons working together.
You're 86 billion neurons working with 7 billion fellow human beings and the whole bacterial world.
And the plant world and the animal world.
And it's all contributing to who you are, minute by minute by minute.
So we are individual cells in this collective brain the way that individual neurons, who are individually quite stupid, are part of the collective brain that is a Joe Rogan or a Howard Bloom or anybody listening.
Because what we become is something larger than ourselves.
It's much larger than ourselves.
And so there is something that's super normal.
And we can think of it as something supernatural.
But we ache.
We ache for salvation.
And I'm trying to tell people I have a book called The Genius of the Beast, a radical revision of capitalism.
And it says that there's an underpinning imperative in capitalism that nobody gets, although capitalists have to obey it in order to make money.
And it's, save thy neighbor, be messianic.
Save a hundred neighbors, you get a hundred dollars.
Save a million neighbors, you get a million dollars.
And the book talks about material miracles.
And about secular salvation.
When Joan Jett's manager came to my office and said, look, I've got this artist, she's been turned down by 23 record companies, could you just as a favor get me one line in cash box, then a record company will sign her, and the record company will make her career.
And I had to say, Kenny, listen to me.
Once you get a record company, your troubles begin.
That's not when your troubles end.
The record company will throw every conceivable obstacle and some inconceivable obstacles in your path.
And you have to have a Panzertank Brigade strategy.
And if you let me do the strategy, if you work as hard as I do 17-hour days, seven days a week, if you do everything I tell you to, I guarantee you we'll have a star in two years.
What?
She's been turned down by 23 record companies.
Where is there left to go?
Doesn't that mean she should stop?
No.
I only said this to two people in my lifetime that I will give you a star.
The first one was to the manager of a band called Rufus.
Which had a number three single on the charts at that time called Tell Me Something Good.
I trapped him in a limousine.
I picked him up at the airport and knew we were going to be trapped in rush hour traffic.
And said, look, I know your band has prides itself on its democracy.
But if you let me put all the attention on your lead singer and you cover my ass with the band, I guarantee you I will give you a star.
Those are the only two times I've ever said it.
rufus his name now see if you remember her name because this is a long time ago shaka khan sure so did the prediction come true it did but are we off track here we're off track what does this have to do with ancient aliens like what does this have to do with this desire that people have to to know that we got our wisdom from the stars well it's not directly about that but it's occasionally you tap into something bigger than yourself And occasionally I had visions.
And occasionally those visions came true.
And so there's something super, not super natural, but certainly super normal about being able to have two visions, only two.
One with Chaka Khan, one with Joe and Jack.
There are ways in which we form a larger collective intelligence, and we can sometimes tap into it.
But if we can't, then we better believe in something higher than ourselves, or we have a hard time making it on the face of the earth.
I don't know if it necessarily makes sense in the context of people having this desire to believe that we've been visited by extraterrestrials, that we've been shaped and molded and helped.
I had a conversation recently in the podcast with someone, and we were talking about...
Was it Theo we're talking about?
People being a product of genetic engineering.
Alien DNA being introduced into primate hominid DNA. Where's the missing link?
And I tried to crudely explain with my limited knowledge that that's not really the case.
The 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.
Our minds will get larger, our sex organs will be thought of as being problematic.
the cause of many worries and woes and wars and strife, and that we'll eliminate those, and that we'll exist almost entirely in our minds, and that this is what we're looking at when we see the gray alien.
So race seems to be a problem with people.
They like to pick sides and decide which one's better or worse, and so there will be no more race.
Everyone will be one homogenized, homologized, What's that word?
Well, it's been very hard to justify that after it didn't come true tomorrow and it didn't come through next year and it didn't come through the following century.
Well, there's a recent one, just a few years ago, there was billboards all across the country by some group that had decided it was going to take place on a certain date.
Well, it happened in 1840. William Miller made a prediction.
Everybody sold their goods, and we're waiting for the rapture, and it didn't happen.
So William 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.
But the point is that William Miller's religion, even after it got it wrong twice, is still around.
It's the Adventist religion, and that's in two different sects, and there are at least 22 million of them.
Planted around the planet.
And Michael Jackson and his mother were Jehovah's Witnesses, which I believe is one of the William Miller-based religions.
So, 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.
And we humans think that we're all about rational prediction and control.
But in the face, in the understanding that in the...
Greater view of the universe, what we understand about the universe.
We are so minuscule.
The more we pay attention to it, the more it's just sort of...
Embedded into our consciousness.
There 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.
Like of us being wild ape creatures to us having language and comprehension and this concept of our position in the universe being so small and then what is the point of all this?
Well, let's give them a point so they can make it to the next juncture.
But, one way or the other, the fact is, every time we do something new, like inventing the smartphone, which Steve Jobs did, We add to the repertoire of the cosmos, because the cosmos has never done it before, so far as we know.
And even if there were civilizations on other planets, they'd be taking a path different than ours.
So we are like the searcher bees.
Our entire civilization is like one searcher bee in a possible cosmic intelligence, assuming that there are other living things, conscious things, intelligent things, elsewhere.
And eventually, we will patch all these pieces together.
But right now, we're patching together the pieces from trillions?
I mean, if there's just a trillion cells in you...
Alone.
Then think of all the cells we're patching together when we bring together all the creatures of the sea, all of the creatures of the land, all of the microbial creatures, all of the visible creatures, and somehow allowing them to influence our collective brain as we influence them.
Imagine what life would be like for bacteria if they couldn't have you as a vehicle, and they couldn't force you to get into your car and go down to Ralph's and buy them those damn chocolate eclairs.
The material world would not be the same.
You have given bacteria new powers, and they have given you powers you wouldn't have without them.
Possibly powers that allowed you to evolve in the first place.
Well, it's a fascinating concept because the cat, the bacterial, the colony, has to actually get into the cat's gut to reproduce.
It can't reproduce outside of the cat's gut, which is just insane.
And so it has to figure out a way to get into the cat's gut, and the best way to do that is to get into a rat and rewire the rat's sexual reward system.
Well, Sapolsky's one of the MacArthur Genius Award winners who said that The God Problem was a great book.
The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates.
So, yeah, we have all these mysteries ahead of us, but every mystery we solve, for all we know, it's the very first time that the cosmos has ever pondered that mystery.
And then solved the mystery and then turned the result into a tool.
That is a hard thing for people to acknowledge or even consider that we might be the only ones that have gotten to this point.
And that some, if human intelligence exists, and we know it does, that it is, as far as we know on this planet, the peak of intelligence, at least in terms of its ability to affect and change its environment.
And on one side of the river, the culture is one way.
On the other side of the river, the culture is another way.
Even with all of our modern communications technologies, there are still differences.
And the universe, at least the universe in the case of life, and we only know of life on one planet, It's constantly stretching out fingers into unused territories.
It's constantly taking...
it's doing the opposite of entropy.
It's constantly taking chaff and garbage and stuff that seems like it would have nothing to do with life and turning it into pistons and pillars and...
Fuel for life.
For example, we humans right now, we're under the influence of another end-of-the-world religion, looking toward a different kind of paradise.
It's called environmentalism.
And it says that we humans are causing climate change.
Now, this is a little silly.
We humans may be contributing to climate change, but climate change has been the norm on this planet for 4.5 billion years.
Because it says the world is about to end because of things we've done, because we've sinned.
And if we simply sacrifice to the goddess of nature, To Gaia.
The universe will go back to being a stable, a climatically stable Garden of Eden.
Well, I got news for you.
This planet has never been climatically stable.
In the very beginning, it wheeled around its axis once every six hours.
That means if you pick any point on the surface, it was in this poisonous stuff called radiation.
For three hours.
Then it was yanked into darkness, which is equally destructive, and the temperature would go up a minimum of 86 degrees every, whoops, up and down 86 degrees every three hours.
That's climate change.
Plus, it was on a tilt, and it was rotating around the sun.
And as it rotated, the climate went through hideous changes.
If we really want the climate to be the way it was in 1650, before the Industrial Revolution, that's a human choice.
That's biogenic in origin, and we need to acknowledge that that's what we have decided, and now we're going to develop climate stabilization technologies.
And we developed the first stone tool, to the best of our knowledge, approximately 3.1 to 3.4 million years ago, long before we became modern humans.
So we were born in this peculiar way, that is, naked.
And without claws and without ripping fangs, after we developed the tools it took, like fire and cooking, which you just cited, to allow us to have artificial claws, artificial ripping fangs, to cook our meals.
The big conclusion of a book that I've just read on what makes us different from a neuroscientist, she's the neuroscientist who corrected the standard figure for the number of neurons in the brain from 100 billion to 86 billion by actually counting them.
She says what made us human was cooking, just what you said.
Because when you cook, you liberate a whole mess of calories and nutritive sources that are not available to a gorilla that's eating leaves.
And how do we know that?
Because the gorilla is born with a pot belly the size of a Franklin stove.
Because it needs this huge digestive apparatus in order to handle those leaves, to break them down into food.
Right.
Well, when you cook, you don't need that huge gut.
Now, the bacteria, or the ape, is not able to go very far, the gorilla.
He certainly can't migrate once.
You know, you see Jane Goodall, and she is pleading for us to save the habitat of the chimpanzees.
Have you ever seen Jane Goodall pleading for us to save the habitat of baboons?
Never.
The baboons are the rats of Africa.
Baboons are extraordinarily adaptive.
They're extraordinarily curious.
They're always finding new environments and figuring out ways to turn them into food.
Chimpanzees don't have that quality.
The reason we need to save their environment is because they're so dumb as a group.
Because the collective intelligence of a group of chimpanzees is so low that now that they're adapted to one environment, that's the only environment they can adapt to.
Whereas baboons who have smaller individual brains have greater collective smarts.
But they have somehow or another figured out that if they keep these dogs around long enough, the dogs will bark when intruders and predators are near.
Okay, so let's see how we measure the intelligence of bacteria, knowing that bacteria work in a group of 7 trillion and have a collective intelligence within that group, and they have a collective multi- Colony intelligence because once they develop certain genetic tricks, they pass the tricks around in little tiny envelopes for all practical purposes.
So they're constantly sharing new bacterial tricks.
So we are told by the environmentalists, the New End Times movement, that we have used up all the resources on this planet.
We have vastly overburdened this planet.
We are eking it out of existence.
But bacteria are 12 miles beneath our feet right now, and they are turning raw rock, granite, into bio stuff.
Now, if the task of life is to kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible into the grand project of life, who's doing the best job right now?
Who recognizes that for every ounce of living stuff on the planet, there are a hundred million ounces of dead stuff waiting to be kidnapped and seduced and recruited into the grand project of life.
Bacteria get it.
Our bacteria nature, you bet your ass.
So what is nature telling us through these bacteria?
You have a hundred trillion more ounces of Yes.
100 trillion more ounces or 100 million more ounces of dead stuff for every living ounce you've got.
And your obligation on behalf of life is to do what the bacteria are doing.
Kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible and bring them into the project of life.
Mother Nature throws every conceivable obstacle on her path, and she can't help it.
Why?
Because our planet, in addition to the fact that we are on a tilted axis, so we go through a climate change called summer, fall, winter, and spring every single year, and it's a pretty violent climate change, and we have a planet that's been iceball or snowball or twice in its history.
The fact is, the planet is on a trajectory, on a path, on a voyage, on a mission that is scarier than the mission of Frodo the Hobbit.
It is circling the core of the galaxy approximately every 235 million years.
And as it goes through that long voyage around the center of the galaxy, it goes through spiral arms of galaxies that change our climate dramatically.
It gathers something like a hundred trillion tons of cosmic dust per year and At certain points, it goes through clouds of cosmic fluff that triple the amount of that dust that we gather, which changes the climate considerably.
And we go through a Milankovitch cycle.
It changes the climate every 22,000, 40,000, and 110,000 years.
Not precisely, but in that range.
So, yes, if we want to stabilize the climate, take responsibility for your decision already.
Admit that this is a biogenic decision.
And then go after climate stabilization technologies.
Yes, try removing carbon from the atmosphere.
See if it works.
But, in the long haul, we are on a 12,000 year passage in which climate has been relatively stable.
That's not normal.
The norm is rapid climate change much more rapidly than we've seen, and ice ages, and they alter.
So we better damn well learn these things.
Now, when I was in Japan a few years ago in a conference about harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it down to Earth, which is carbon neutral and a source of such tremendous amounts of power that it defies description— There was a woman from the European Space Agency,
and she said, well, if you guys are going to build these giant solar harvesting farms, these five mile by five mile arrays of photovoltaic panels, when you see a hurricane heading for Jamaica, send down a laser beam.
It lays the outer edges of the hurricane so that you change the heat at a certain point on that hurricane and redirect it so it doesn't hit Jamaica, so it goes harmlessly out to sea.
Well, that's the beginning of harnessing these things, harnessing disasters as energy opportunities.
Now, have we ever done that?
Well, what about fire?
If you'd been the first one to start playing with fire, your mama would have told you, look, you see all those dead animals in there that have been roasted and barbecued by this forest fire?
You want to become one of them?
Put that back where it belongs.
And fire saved us.
At the heart of a jet, at the heart of a piston, and the piston of a car, what do we have?
Explosions.
Explosions?
That's one of the most devastating catastrophes we can imagine, an explosion.
Well, there are certain aspects of science that are religion because we science people are built with the same supernormal responses in us that the flying saucer people have in them.
And that the Christians who still believe in the coming of the kingdom of God.
There was an astronomer who had gone up to Canada for God knows what reason.
He wrote a book on the evolution of the cosmos.
I thought it was brilliant.
My friend 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, Lee will talk to you.
He's a very open guy.
And when I got hold of Lee, I forget his last name, but you would recognize it, Lee sent me a note saying, well, it's a pleasure to meet you, but that article that you wrote in the Wall Street Journal about climate was unfortunate.
It was something a little harsher than that, meaning you have sinned.
And I watched this movement develop from the beginning, and it developed by using conformity enforcers.
Because in the 1950s, When I was the head of the program committee at my high school, I programmed in a guy who talked to us about what was being done to whales.
And the pictures were horrifying.
This guy was a giant.
He was about six foot two.
And in those days, that was really, really tall.
And he was the most severe person I'd ever met.
He walked in without acknowledging me.
I had booked him at all.
He had a frown on his face that was unbelievable.
He walked out with that same serious frown, uncompromising, without saying goodbye, without saying thank you, without any of the normal social graces.
And he didn't have a name for what he was doing.
Conservation was the name of what he was doing back then.
And it was Earth Day that put another word on the map, environmentalism.
And that got environmentalism into first grades and second grades and fourth grades when kids are at an imprinting age, when their brains are literally being fashioned around some of the key things.
That they absorb at that age.
When we talk about impressionable, we're talking about a certain element of the morphology of the brain that wraps itself around certain things and then never lets them go.
And environmentalism was built to get into the brains of young people and never leave.
And eventually environmentalism developed its own end-of-the-earth scenario.
It tried to develop one in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich, who was a butterfly specialist, said that by 1980, which remember 1968 was 12 years away, so that's like my talking about something that will happen in 2030. It seemed a long ways away.
And he said, by 1980, we would get to the point where there are so many people on the planet that we'd have to stand on each other's shoulders.
There would be no room for us.
We would vastly outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment, meaning the food supply.
Would run out.
It would not be able to keep up with our population growth.
And as a consequence, in the early 1980s, people would die by the hundreds of millions in India and China and even the United States.
Now, remember back to those days, Joe.
I don't know if you know the history of it.
You were probably born after it.
But remember all the hundreds of millions of people dying in India and China and the United States?
Remember how your parents had to stand on each other's shoulders in order to find room to live?
We need to do these climate stabilization technologies.
We must.
I mean, we've been doing them.
You said it best.
We've been doing them ever since we invented the fur coat.
Which allowed us to get out of Africa and go to the forest ends of Asia when we were still far from being humans, modern humans.
That the technology of the cave and beyond that the technology of the hut.
All these are climate stabilization technologies on a small scale.
Now we need to do climate stabilization technology on a big soul.
No, that does not mean that we have to put sulfur droplets into the atmosphere to keep the sun from warming the surface of the Earth.
That would be so stupid.
It's ridiculous.
It's not a reversible move.
But if you have a laser harnessing space solar power and you use it to redirect hurricanes, you can see what worked the first time and try something different the second time and the third time until you perfect it.
You can't do that with sulfur droplets in the atmosphere.
It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life.
But that's the first solution, technological solution, to come out of all of the climate people's mouths.