Drinking from the Firehose with Howard Bloom (vhlL7IjaZNI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vhlL7IjaZNI

So I’m here tonight talking to Howard Bloom who’s a fascinating person and an author of many books and a polymath of sorts and we’ve known each other by electronic communication for quite a long time. It’s something exceeding a decade, but we’ve never met either in person or electronically by video until now. And Howard is definitely, well he’s a singular sort of person and he has a very broad range of knowledge, as broad as anyone I’ve ever encountered I would say. And so what I’m going to do first is turn this over to him so that he can tell you a little bit about himself and about what he’s done. And then we’re going to talk about his newest book which is called How I Accidentally Started the 60s and then we’re going to see where it goes from there. So Howard, thanks for showing up here and let’s see where we can go. So why don’t you tell everybody about yourself? Well it’s a pleasure to see you in person because I think it’s about been about 14 years, maybe 15 years that we’ve known each other. I put together a Science of the Soul initiative a long time ago and you were one of those kind enough to sign on. But I am the author of six books. The first book is called The Lucifer Principle, a Scientific Expedition into the Force of History. And even though it’s about 25 years old, people are buying it because it feels like it was written yesterday for tomorrow and people call it their bible. The second book is Global Brain, the Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. And the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the United States, the reform based on that book. And brought in people from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM and MIT. The third book is called The Genius of the Beast, a Radical Revision of Capitalism. I preferred its original title which was Reinventing Capitalism Putting Soul in the Machine. And that book, the man who runs Dubai, the sheikh who runs Dubai, named a race source after that book. His former Minister of Development who’s on Dubai’s ruling council and runs a 33 billion dollar sovereign real estate company that built the tallest building in the world. Went in front of the Arabian Business and Economic Forum and told them there is a book that I particularly resonate with. It’s The Genius of the Beast and it contains the future of Dubai and he proceeded to read passages from that book. And Dr. A.P. J. Kalam, the 11th President of India, said that that book is a visionary creation. And this is despite the fact that the sheikh who runs Dubai, his former Minister of Development and Dr. Abdul J. Kalam are all Muslims and I’m a Zionist atheist shoe. So if there’s any sign of hope for peace in this world, that’s it. I’ve done lots and lots of other things just a few months ago. I co-founded and shared the Asian Space Technology Summit with a large groups of representatives from China, the Chinese Academy of Space Technology and from England Space Program. I’ve done the weirdest variety of things you’ve ever seen in your life. Oh, and I should not forget once upon a time I founded, I knew nothing about popular culture. I founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry. I used my scientific tools since my background is science, my life is science, my bones and my flesh are science. And it became the most successful PR firm in the record industry. So I worked with Michael Jackson, Prince Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACBC, Aerosmith, Kiss Queen, Run DMC, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Run DMC, Graham Esther, Flash and the Furious Five, little things like that. Yeah, well, it’s a crazy biography. You’d think you’d have to think that someone was making that up if you didn’t know it was true. And then you also accidentally started the 60s, apparently. Yes. And it was just reading that book about a week ago. And what did you think of it? Oh, I thought it was very funny. It was it was it was I also thought it was remarkable that you managed to have a forward by or wasn’t wasn’t a forward. I don’t think it was commentary by Timothy Leary. Yes. Well, let me tell you how that came about. There I was. Well, it was about 1981. And I started to go back to my science. Yes, I was running the most successful PR firm in the music industry. Yes, we were still on the ascent. Yes, we were establishing taking unknowns like Prince and establishing them as major stars or Joan Jett, who’d been turned down by 23 record companies. And we made her double platinum in a year and a half. But I finally got a little time for you to go back to my science. And then I was taking a bunch of journalists out to Long Island to see REO Speedwagon. And a bunch of them said, boom, all these ideas you keep talking about us, you need to write a book. And one of them took me under his wing and actually mentored me, Timothy White, who wrote for the Associated Press and Rolling Stone. So I started working on a book in 1984, about 1988. I had gotten up and running and written the first chapters on a vacation. And then I came down for two things happened. First, I really needed to get out of publicity in the music industry. I had satisfied all of my intellectual questions because there were a set of questions I was answering. What are the mass exhilarations, the mass ecstasies, the mass emotions that are the forces of history, that power historical change? That’s what I was after. And you see that in miniature with the Beatles or with Michael Jackson or with Prince. So I got in as far as I could. I mean, you two would approach me to represent them. I wasn’t interested. Mick Jagger had sent an emissary talk about representing him. I wasn’t interested. I’d been through all of this. Well, let me ask you, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So I mean, the first question would be, I think, how, what is it that you had done that had prepared you for that? And how and how did you manage it? So I guess that’s two questions. But also, what did you what did you learn from all of that? These are very good questions to prepare me for this. Martin Gardner, from the time I was 10, I was reading two books a day. My teachers hated me because I was reading a book under the desk at all times and never, ever paid attention to them. And many of these are science books. And I read the Scientific American from cover to cover. And Martin Gardner, who was a mathematician, had a column called Mathematical Games. And I learned what I know from Mathematical Games. It taught me certain techniques I was able to bring into the record industry. So that’s a that’s a hell of a stretch. I mean, yeah, but singular story. So OK, so elaborate on that. Well, what it taught is how to look for correlations and more than mathematical techniques for finding correlations. It gave you a gut feel of what a correlation looks like so that you didn’t have to go off to a world of mathematics. It was so arcane that it had no relationship to reality. You could take the search for correlations into the real world. I listened to music obsessively from the time I was about 10 years old. My uncle and I used to stand next to a huge old Burlwood radio that was as tall as I was at the time. And it had a giant speaker. And Jordan, in those days, 12 inch speakers, nobody had ever seen 12 inch speakers, but it had one. And we listened to the classical music station in Canada because we were in Buffalo on the border. And we would compete to see who can identify a piece of music by its first four notes. Well, often we could both identify the piece of music by its first note. However, it was all classical music. It was Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Mozart, stuff like that. So I can’t really say that I was properly prepared because I was hated by the other kids my age in Buffalo, New York, and my parents didn’t have any time for me. So I was an outcast. And the crowd of people that shut me out listened to popular music. So popular music, what started with Elvis Presley, what was around before Elvis Presley, and then moved on, that was alien music to me. And I wasn’t the least bit interested in it. But in the 1970s, the late 1960s and early 1970s, I knew I had fellowships at four grad schools in what is now called neuroscience. At that point, it was a do it yourself proposition. I was going to have to take courses in the med school at Columbia and put them together with courses in psychology at Columbia and make my own neuroscience because there were no neuroscience courses. But I had four fellowships to do this. And I realized that grad school would be Auschwitz for the mind. Why? Because I was fascinated by these ecstatic mass passions that give people, that boost people out of themselves, that lift them into something much bigger than themselves, a deep need that every human has to feel at some point a part of something much bigger than his or herself. And those are the mass passions that create historical change. They are the forces of history. And I was not going to get to study mass passions. I was not going to get to make contact with mass passions. If I went on to win academic career, I’d be spending the rest of my life giving paper and pencil tests to 22 college students in exchange for a psychology credit. Now, exactly how much ecstatic experience are you going to see in a classroom of that sort with paper and pencil tests? Zero. The entire phenomena I wanted to understand would not be there anywhere in my life. So I took advantage of the fact that I had basically been kidnapped in my junior year by the poet in residence at NYU who had said, he’d said, look, boom, when everybody appears out of the room, close the door. I don’t I need to talk to you. Well, Jordan, that means a bawling out, right? So I waited till everybody left. I shut the door. I sat down in the you’re about to be bald out chair. And the poet in residence said to me, look, last year, I asked you to be on the staff of the literary magazine. You didn’t even show up. This year, you are the literary magazine. You don’t even have a faculty advisor. The minute you walk out that door, you’re it. Now walk out that door. And I walked out the door looking totally baffled because I hated literary magazines. They were the most boring things you would ever seen. You could have a group of Vikings, each of whom had drunk a quart of ale, bonking up against the wall and bonking each other. And if you put a literary magazine in the room, that pale blue cover and the miss chosen type would either put everybody to sleep instantly or would drive them out of the room. So I looked very confused and a student walked up to me and said, you look troubled about something. Can I help you? Why don’t I take you down for a cup of coffee? I didn’t know what a cup of coffee was. I’d grown up with lab rats and hamsters, not with human beings. But I followed him obediently down the stairs. And when we sat down at the coffee shop and I ordered water and he ordered coffee, he said, if you could do anything you want with this magazine, what would it be? And I said, a picture book. So Jordan, I learned that question. That question is a very valuable tool. So I turned it into experimental and graphics magazine and it was a wild hit. And it was a wild hit, not just on campus where they doubled our budget for the second issue. It was a wild hit in the art directorial community. I think you covered that in how I accidentally started the 60s. Right. I think it’s in there. So what that allowed me to do is when I, and my wife was putting pressure on me, she had had a previous husband who was a student. She was tired of having student husbands. She made it clear in a kind of sort of a way that if I went off to grad school at Columbia, I could kiss her goodbye. Not a nice idea after three years of marriage. So with all these pressures on me, I threw my lot in with the artists that I’d assembled for this magazine. We formed an art studio and the first year we earned $75 a piece, which is just enough to get you food and possibly a little bit of shelter in New York City. But eventually I made another cover of art direction magazine. I invented a new animation technique for NBC TV. And most important, my studio did all of the graphics for ABC 7 FM stations at a time when there was a revolution taking place in radio. There was this brand new form of radio called rock radio or album radio or progressive radio. It was which discos would actually play what they wanted. And I was there because ABC 7 FM stations all converted to this new progressive format. And they used me and my art studio to get that across. To kids all over the world. Oh, I see. I see. So you respond. Well, that was I got to thank you for that because I listened to album oriented FM stations a lot when I was a kid. And so a lot, I mean, lots of people did, but I didn’t know you were you had a hand in that. So that was a very good thing. Well, I thank you for the thanks. I had a hand in that and they will ABC asked me to form an advertising agency to handle all of their advertising. And Jordan, I didn’t want to get involved in time buying. That was just too dry for me. But because I was walking into we did one other thing. There was a new magazine with a bunch of Harvard kids. It was a monthly version of the annual Harvard Lampoon. It was called the National Lampoon and my art studio art directed the first seven issues that it was ABC. P.G.O. Rourke got to start there. Yes, exactly. And I acted in a Michael O’Donoghue script that we did for the Evergreen Review, which was leading a Bohemian publication at the time. It’s our director was one of those people who had called me after he saw the Washington Square Review, the student literary and graphics magazine that I’d been putting together. But the promotion person at ABC was extremely kind to me. And every time I walked in, I’d hear Carole King or James Taylor, who were the biggest people in rock music at the time, on the speakers on the floor. And she would do things like. I mean, she was just clue me in. She was bringing me into the rock and roll world. One day, for example, she said, we’re going to have a live performance in Studio B by a pianist. And why don’t I give you two tickets? So I took her two tickets. I went down to my art studio on 4th Street and 2nd Avenue in the East Village. And my leading artist was just a brilliant, brilliant cartoonist. And I invited him to come to this event with me. We went to the event. The pianist took to the stage. My artist sat next to me. And from the minute the pianist played his first chord, my artist was on his feet going, wow, yippee, yahoo. And totally embarrassing me. I mean, I wanted to crawl under the seat and become absolutely invisible. The pianist on stage was Elton John. And what I failed to get was that my artist was giving Elton John the energy he needed to do the very kind of ecstatic performance that takes you out of yourself and makes you feel part of something bigger than yourself that I was trying to track down using things like William James, the varieties of the religious experience, and taking advantage of my special vantage point. So why do you think, you know, there’s a kind of a contradictory narrative that runs through that story, which is that, you know, when you were a kid, you were sort of isolated. You were bookish. You were more scientifically oriented. But at the same time, you obviously had a, what would you call it, a feel for ecstatic experience. And like, was that a consequence of your participation in the counterculture in the 60s, or was that something that had emerged even before that? It was something that emerged probably between the age of 10 and 12. It probably came from the fact that I was suffering serious social deprivation. I had one friend at a time, and that’s about as much as I had. And I was an indispensable figure when it came time to beat somebody up because I was the target. Okay, so that’s interesting too, because that also, I mean, it isn’t obvious how you get from that position to being interested in ecstatic experiences per se. So what’s the connection there with your rather, like, what would you call it, isolated childhood experiences, do you think? I mean, you said it had something partly to do with music, which makes a perfect sense to me because music is almost a, what would you say? It’s an unerring gateway into that ecstatic experience. Right. And for very complex reasons. I’d like to talk to you about that a little bit, but it isn’t obvious why someone who was more scientifically oriented, say, would also make that leap over to the more mystical end of things. And then of course, pursue it through pop culture. So you laid out, you know, your surprising involvement in the literary magazine, your transformation of that into what was essentially a visual art publication, your entry into the world of radio and then into rock. I don’t want to lose that thread because that also leads to your PR firm. And I presume we’re getting to that, but what, what do you, is there anything you can put your finger on? You, you associated it also with, with like being physically bullied and being a social outcast, but why did that give you the hunger for that experience for that ecstatic experience? Well, remember back to the days of the 1960s and 1970s when sleep deprivation was a new discovery. And then back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Jacques Panksepp took that a step further. And in his studies of rat behavior, he discovered that if he deprived a bunch of child rats, little rats, baby rats, if he deprived them of the ability to play and didn’t give them access to each other as peers until they, they become adults, they suffered play deprivation and they spent just as much time playing with each other as adults as they would have spent playing with each other. Had they been allowed to as children. Okay. So I want to make a quick lateral move there and we’ll get back to that. You know, I’ve been thinking about these, these strange modern manifestations of identity fantasy, or that’s what it looks to me like these people who are playing at, what do they call them? Other kids and playing with their identities in a really fantasy based way. And sometimes I wonder if part of that isn’t a consequence of play deprivation in childhood. Well, that sounds, that sounds like a distinct possibility, but remember Herman has said that there are somewhere deep, dark in the mind, there’s a closet with 10,000 hidden personalities. One of the things that I discovered, we’re going to get out of chronological order, but one of the things that I discovered when I first became full time involved with rock and roll was the story of Alice Cooper and the story of Alice Cooper reveals something about the question that you just raised. Okay. Okay. Um, Alice Cooper was a little bit like me when he was a kid, his mom used to dress him up in a suit every day and he was a gawky, thin with a huge nose. Um, I was gawky thin with a huge nose. I can identify and never wore suits. And he was always a teacher’s pet. And the result was the other kids hated him and he was kicked around and beaten and excluded the way that I’d been kicked around and beaten and excluded. Then one day, a neighbor was in his kitchen who was into a Ouija board and making contact with spirits through the Ouija board. Um, so a spirit allegedly contacted her and said, I am the ghost of a witch who was burned at the stake in the 16th century and, or 17th century. And you pointing to Alice, I’m pointing to his name was Rince Fernier at the time pointing to Vince, you are my modern reincarnation and my name is Alice Cooper. Now, when, when Vince Fernier won on stage and addressed with mascara at a high school talent night for the very first time playing his own music, chopping up baby dolls with an axe, which is the more real person Vince Fernier, the shy little kid dressed up in a suit who gave apples to his teacher or Alice Cooper, the person on stage who comes to life with an ecstatic identity that makes them a surfer on the back of those mass passions, those mass exhilarations that make the forces of history. Well, Alice of the two, they’re both real people and they’re both inside of Vince Fernier, but the one that’s in there that has the greatest passionate intensity is the Alice Cooper, not the Vince Fernier. And that’s why though he had been picked on and none of the kids in his school had liked him. The minute he finished his first performance, all the football guys who used to beat the crap out of him, surged down to the foot of the stage and volunteered to be parts of his band. When he was super famous, some of those guys were still mainstays of his band. We carry many selves around inside of us and my job in PR was to find people who deserve to be iconic and then to explain to them, first of all, I will not, if you think that I, as your publicist, am going to fashion an artificial mask and image and through that make you a star, I’m going to get you an appointment with my best competitor immediately. You’ll be with him in hours. If you’re going to work with me, you have to understand something. The music you make is about human soul. That comes from the very soul of you. And what happens to you when you go out on stage and feel as if your self leaves you and you are danced like a puppet, like a puppet on a string, like a marionette on stage, the force that moves you, that’s one of the gods inside of you. That is your soul. And what you’re experiencing with that audience is a soul exchange. If you’re willing to put up with the fact that music is not about marketing, music is not about product, music is not about downloads, music is about the exchange of human soul, then I will work with you. And quite the statement for a Zionist atheist Jew. Yes, it really is. I listened to Alice Cooper a lot when I was a kid and still now, especially that record, Welcome to My Nightmare, which I think is an absolute classic. You know, there’s a couple of pop songs on it, which, which I think it, I mean, record companies did that a fair bit on on on concept albums, you know, they throw a pop hit on there. But as a concept album, it’s brilliant. And it’s really well arranged. And it’s really like, not horrifying, exactly, because that’s not exactly right. But it’s unbelievably dramatic, I would say theatrical in the best way. And I really think it’s a work of genius that Welcome to My Nightmare. So and I had no idea that that was Alice Cooper’s background, although I did hear that he was the child of a minister. Is that also correct? Oh, no, no, no. His father was in the aerospace industry in Arizona. Oh, big aerospace territory. Right. But a lot of the kids who were turned on to Alice Cooper and were turned on by other shock bands like that, were the children of ministers, the children of deeply religious people, children of the religious right. Because he’s bringing out the other side of things. He was right. Exactly. Right. Right. Well, he’s obviously the precursor of people like Marilyn Manson. Yes, exactly. Marilyn Manson was a sort of cheap, even though Marilyn Manson was high enough to be good to me. Marilyn Manson was a kind of cheap takeoff on Alice Cooper didn’t have the staying power that Alice seems to have had. But the point is that I one of the things that I told you if you were going to be my client is you just don’t you don’t just owe your audience your songs, you owe your audience your life. Now, Jordan, it took me 20 years to articulate what I meant by that. And it’s simply that if you deserve to be a superstar, then you will become an iconic figure. And 12 year old kids will paste posters of you up on their bedroom walls. And you will be you know, the concept of the trellis, you grow a tomato plant on a trellis. Well, you will be the trellis on which people grow, you will be the role model. So your life is one of the most important things that you have to offer. But I wasn’t just after their superficial life. I was after I was after this. When you sit down of an afternoon, let’s say two o’clock in the afternoon with a blank computer screen or a blank piece of paper, and you need to write a lyric, you feel as if you could you don’t know how you’ve ever written a lyric in your life, you certainly know you can’t write another one again. And by four o’clock in the afternoon on a good day, there’s a lyric in front of you. By four o’clock in the afternoon on a really, really rare good day, that lyric is so perfect in itself that it feels like it wrote itself through you. When you go on stage, if you see the pupils of the audience dilating, if you see their faces melting, losing individual characteristics, if you see their energy fusing into a collective energy rather than just individual energies, and if that collective force reaches a pseudopod out to you and hooks into something inside of you that’s bigger than yourself, and again, you feel like an empty pipe and something inside you is transmogrifying all of this energy and flooding it back down to the audience in a reverberatory circuit, and you have an out-of-body experience. You watch yourself from the ceiling as you’re danced. That self inside of you that dances you on stage, that is your fucking goddamn soul. And that’s my intent to find, and that’s what I intend to introduce you to. Why? Because you are about to become an icon, and if you become an icon, you have to be a force that takes hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of kids who feel lost in the world, who don’t dare express their feelings because there are no socially acceptable words for their feelings, and who feel crazy, isolated, and alone. And you, by revealing what’s deep inside of you, will validate what’s deep inside of them. So I think you had the other, made the other shoe drop for me then, because you know, you’re talking about that, at least in part, you’re talking about that ecstatic experience as the necessary counter position to isolation and abandonment, loneliness, and all of those things, which I think is a very reasonable way of thinking about it. It’s like meaning as the antidote to isolation and tragedy and malevolence for that matter. And I think music is, you know, I’ve thought deeply about music. I’ve tried to figure out why it has, what it represents and why it has the effects that it has. And I think, and this is a neuroscientific view of it to some degree, and you know, it seems to me that it’s better to think about the world as something that consists of patterns rather than as something that consists of objects. So an object would actually be a pattern that sustains itself across time. It’s, that’s not all that’s not very, very good insight. I, you get applause for that. Thank you. Thank you. And so, so then you think, well, for you can even think about the way the visual system works this way. So, you know, we tend to think that there’s a world out there and then there’s an image of that world projected onto our retina. And then the image is, is reconstructed, say in our visual cortex. And then we, then we, we can become conscious of that image and plan our actions in consequence of that. But that isn’t how it works. The way it works is that there are patterns in the world, and then the patterns are shifted into patterns of light, of illumination, and then those are shifted into patterns of neural activity on the retina. And then those are shifted into patterns of neural conductance along the optical nerves, and then patterns in the visual cortex. And then those are expressed as patterns of movement. So it’s all the transformations of patterns. And the meaning of a visual perception is the pattern of action that it gives rise to, which is why you need embodiment to be able to perceive. And I think the reason that music speaks so deeply to us of fundamental meaning is because it’s actually the most representative art form, you know, because people think about it in some sense as the least representative art form. I don’t think that’s right at all. I think it represents the reality that exists in a profound sense beyond what our senses reveal to us moment to moment. And so it puts people, then when you’re moving to the music and you’re all moving to the music, or when you’re dancing, let’s say with someone else and you’re as pairs and you’re all dancing together, it’s the patterns of the cosmos, so to speak, manifesting themselves as the patterns of the music, manifesting themselves as the patterns of your body and in syncopation with everyone else. So it’s also a symbolic representation of a harmonious and ideal society. And it is something that’s beyond us. And so it’s interesting. So I get it. So partly what you’re saying, if I understand you, is that for you, the ecstatic collective experience that was associated with music, for example, and pop music, perhaps was, you could see it out very clearly as the antidote to painful isolation. And I mean, one of the things that struck me as struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society is that it really does fill the void that was left by the death of God. And it’s partly because you cannot rationally critique music. You know, it speaks to you, it speaks of meaning. And no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and lift it up and, and, and toss it aside. And so I also like music was so such a powerful cultural force in the 60s and the 70s and overwhelmingly powerful force. So the other, the other element is very important to this is music is the voice of a subculture. So when you tell a hundred million kids who felt utterly isolated and alone, that they, that their experiences had not been reflected in the experience of any other person on earth, that in fact, they are not alone, they are a movement. Um, you give a subculture a voice and you can see that with, well, when I finally got into working with music, one of the first things I did was work with country and Western music. Now, Jordan, uh, I worked with a company called dot records. I was hired by a Gulf of Western to found a public and artists relations department for their 14 record companies. And one of those companies was dot records and dot records was number three on the country charts. And that it was with third place company and it wanted to be number one, uh, in country and Western music. Now, when I was a child, when I was about three and a half years old, um, I woke up on a Sunday before anybody else in the house had woken up, went out to the front room where there was sunlight, which I didn’t get to see as often as I’d like and turned on the radio. And because it was six o’clock in the morning or something like that, what I got were farm reports and country and Western music. This was in 19, 1946 or something like that or 1947. And I immediately knew that that music was alien to me. And I knew that it was the music of another subculture. It would not necessarily be kind to the subculture from which I came. So I never liked country music, but in the 1970s, when I got this position with Gulf and Western, one of the things I crusaded for the hardest was country and Western music, because I felt that these people had a right to express their identity. I felt they had a right to get beyond the ghetto of the Bible belt, which is where they were kept and where they were suppressed. It was an era of subcultures finding themselves and expressing their right to exist. It started with music really does seem to have that binding capacity, you know, and I think there’s also something neurological about that because, and tell me what you think about this, if this is in accordance with your observations, but it seems to me that the music that people listen to as they’re catalyzing their adult identity, say between the ages of about 14, 15 to 20, you know, there’s a real intense period of neural pruning that occurs at the end of adolescence. So you get tremendous amount of neural neural pruning after you’re born in the early stages of infancy, because you have a lot of neural connections and then a lot of them, you kind of die into your childhood cell. Right. You’re you’re born with twice as many neurons as you will actually need. Right. Right. Exactly. And so you’re a massive possibility and then you die into your actuality. And then that happens again in late adolescence, right? Which is also when schizophrenia develops, because that process seems to go wrong for some people. But as you’re dying into that adult identity, one of the things that seems to catalyze that is the music of your culture at that time. And that also seems to unite you in some way underneath rational thought with the people of your generation, let’s say with the people you’d have to cooperate with and compete with. And so there’s something really deep about that too, that’s not well understood. And, and, and so, well, so I don’t know what you think about the second element of that, because it’s a brilliant observation. And the second element of that is that in your late teens, your prefrontal cortex gets wired up. Now, what’s the prefrontal cortex? It’s probably talk about it as the the center of administration in the brain executive functions. Its primary job is making you human. What does that mean? You would think that means encouraging certain things like creativity and thought. No, the job of the prefrontal cortex and making you human is to repress things. It’s to damp things down, it’s to inhibit things. And you are learning which things to inhibit after you become utterly grafted into your subculture. And what is one of the elements that has grafted you into your subculture? Music. And so what Freud would call the superego is formed to a certain extent based on your subculture or connections that you’ve developed as a teen. Right. Again, music helps identify that subculture of which you feel apart. Right. Well, okay. So, so partly what’s happening there is that because music is poetic, and also it’s poetic and emotional, let’s say it also constitutes the, the pre rational substrate from which the values of that subculture emerge. So it’s like the, it’s part of the mythological substructure of the values of that culture. And you can make that sense. Yeah. Yeah. You can see that expressed in the lyrics in particular, right. And where, which lay out a system of values in some sense, something like hip hop, for example. Well, roughly 95% of the lyrics in pop culture are about mating. They’re about mating rituals. They’re about courtship rituals. And you as a person who’s, wait, the meeting has been upgraded by the best and now includes, okay, God knows what it was trying to tell us. So at any rate, you have just emerged from childhood. Your hormones, your sexual hormones have begun to act. Girls as young as 11 can become pregnant already. And you are obsessed with finding your place in the world and finding a mate. And courtship rituals mean an awful lot to you. They’re about to what they’re there, what you are about to embark on for the next 10 years of your life, at least. And so this obsession with courtship rituals with mating and dating and breaking up and, and betrayal and all of that kind of stuff makes, makes absolute sense. Right. Exactly. Well, the thing is music frames that too, because it gives you something that’s in common with your potential mate. And it also gives you a set of rather, I wouldn’t say stereotyped activities, but at least predictable activities that are associated with courtship and mating. And so that would be going to concerts and going to movies, which are heavily musically influenced and dancing and, and even discussing your, your shared immersement in whatever that subculture happens to be. Right. And my guess is that at some point music provokes oxytocin because oxytocin is the ultimate bonding hormone and music is a bath in the sense of human belonging in the field. But even if you’re alone and you’re listening to Pandora or Spotify all by yourself, it feeds you social bread and meat. And in the, in the nervous system, the central nervous system, everything boils down to inhibition or excitation. There is a hormone of excitation and it’s glutamate. There is a hormone of inhibition and that’s GABA and oxytocin feeds down into the GABA system, the system that keeps you calm down. Basically it gives you a sense of peace. Now music itself, I mean, the first musical, first I have to give you an experience that I had that allowed me to see into all of this. I had already been fascinated by the gods inside of us. I concluded at the age of 12 that I was an atheist and if there were no gods in the heaven above us and no gods in the ground beneath us, where were the gods? Well, my parents were trying to drive, drag me an atheist off to high holiday services and they were so intent about it that I was literally holding onto the doorframe of their blue Fraser or by now forgotten car and, and they were shredding my socks. They were very quickly tearing my shoes off. They were doing everything they could to get me up to the temple. And so I realized in that moment, if the gods are not above, if the gods are not below, where are they? They’re inside my parents. If they’re inside my parents, they’re inside of me. They’re inside of all of us. So my task at basically the age of 12 to 13 became use your scientific tools to find the gods inside of us. Okay. Okay. Well, you also, again, you elaborated on that part of the story that also made you attune to those ecstatic experiences because the case that you’ve just laid out, or I suppose we laid out together to some degree is that perhaps it was that the fact that you were isolated as a kid made you even more sensitive to the collective belonging element of music because you were so starved for it. And so, and then the idea of the gods within that you just laid out seems to me to be very much akin to what you described as either your tactic or your philosophy with regards to PR for the rock personalities, because what you said you were doing was trying to make them reveal some of these archetypal figures within and that that would, and that you were actually trying to foster that, which meant in some sense, you weren’t doing PR at all. Like, I don’t know what the hell you’d call it. I called it secular shamanism. It was a name I was never comfortable with because it’s so unscientific, but that was the closest I could come to it. It’s like dousing for the human soul. Well, it would have been a good name for a PR company. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that’s a very, well, I think that’s a very useful way of thinking about it because obviously one of the holdovers from the shamanic traditions is obviously music. I mean, that’s just, that’s just a continuation of the same tradition. Right. And one thing, there was one very important thing that had happened to me when I was 16 years old, even though I was almost an unpopular kid in my school, they voted me for two years in a row, the chairman of the programming committee, which means I ran student assemblies five days a week and I programmed to a week. So I was the MC for these things. And one day that you managed that and simultaneously be unpopular. That’s a good question. I think my school had very, very, my school was school was founded by an accolade of John Dewey and he was behind the scenes actually setting the school up and it, you know, schools have their popularity positions, president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, all of that. But my school was clever enough to start putting functional committees together in your very first days at school, your very first days of your freshman year. Now, when you, when you have kids vote for president and vice president, they’re going to vote for the most popular kid in the school as the president, the second most popular kid is vice president, the most popular girl as secretary and the most popular Jew as treasurer. That’s just the way it goes. So I was never aligned for any of those positions. I had no popularity whatsoever. In fact, one of my classmates actually fired with remarkable accuracy from only 20 feet away, a soccer ball directly into my face. And believe me, it has a lot of force distance of 20 feet. So, but when it comes to functional positions, like how do we run these school assemblies, the popular kids don’t have a clue. So if you bring them into a room, if they’re arbitrarily, for example, assigned to a committee, they will all piss on their little piece of territory. They’ll all stake out a position of some kind, just to establish their status in the room. And after 15 minutes of this, when they’ve all said their piece, and it comes time to actually do something, they’re clueless, they’re silent, they don’t know what to do. And if there’s an unpopular geek like me, who at that 20 minute mark, all of a sudden has an idea, they will glom around you, even if they don’t like you. Right. So, so yeah, so competence can can can step in where where popularity cannot go. Yes, that’s a very well put phrase. So so there I was, the head of this programming committee, and one of the kid, one of the juniors came to me and said, we’re doing a dance. We’re, you know, we’re setting up a dance. And could you advertise it for us? And he didn’t realize just how absurd that statement was. If there’s a dance or party of any kind in Buffalo, New York, one of the first things you have to realize about it is I am not just disinvited. I am invited to stay as far away as humanly possible. Yeah. And yet they want me to advertise this dance. So Jordan, I can’t dance. I absolutely I can’t do a box step. I can’t do a foxtrot. I can’t do a waltz. I can’t do any of those things. But I went on stage and put some music on the turntable and danced. And I saw the pupils dilating of the audience 350 people who hated me and hated me for two and a half years at that point. Their pupils were dilating their faces were melting. I felt that pseudopod of energy coming to me and through me as if I were a pipe. I felt it going up to something inside of me more or less at head level that utterly transmogrified it. And I felt the energy being sent back through every move that I was making. And I had an out of body experience. I saw I thought I was on the ceiling. I watched all of this from the ceiling. And apparently it looked like a looney tune drawn on LSD. As if Chuck Jones had been doing Tom and Jerry after taking a very big hit of acid. It was one of the strangest weirdest things you’ve ever seen. And when it was all over. So that was my ecstatic experience when it was all over. The audience did something it had never done in my days at that school and would never do again so long as I was there. It surged to the foot of the stage and as if it had practiced this act all its life. It picked me up off the stage. It put me on its shoulders. It carried me out of the auditorium and it carried me up the pathway to the building above where we had our classes. So that was my introduction. Yeah. And but this is that’s crazy story. Right. And this is three years after I’d gone off after the ecstatic experience knowing that it was something vital. I mean I’d heard at the age of 14 two years earlier I’d heard that there was a book called the varieties of the religious experience. And in those days we had no Amazon. We had local bookstores and local bookstores in Buffalo. I mean give me a break. But I finally found a copy at the University of Buffalo bookstore and it felt as if William James had been laying out a series of examples of the ecstatic experience with all of its delusions and hallucinations and all the rest on a laboratory bench and then saying to me look you’re coming along 70 years later. You’re going to have scientific tools that I did not have. This is your job. And it was my job not just because William James was giving it to me because something deep inside of me was crying out to understand it. And it probably was that the privilege of social disconnection the privilege of social deprivation because that privilege made me sensitive and it’s always made me sensitive to group behavior. Right. So when I was in Moscow in 2005 lecturing a group of quantum physicists from all over the world why everything they know about quantum physics is wrong. It’s because there is no such thing as an isolated particle. Every particle is part of a herd a mob a group of some kind. A lot of quantum physicists is based on the idea that when you when you treat a photon a single photon in a certain way when you split it into here’s how it’s going to behave. But if it’s being measured that’s not going to happen. Well guess what we’re constantly taking each other’s measure photons are constantly taking each other’s measure because they move in groups crowds and herds. That’s why a beam of sunshine comes through your window not a photon of sunshine. And when I finished the speech I was sure they were going to throw me out of the conference because these are all people committed deeply to quantum physics. And instead they sat there beaming like proud uncles and I could not figure out why. And three years later my collaborator in quantum physics at the University at the College Institute of Live Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow sent an email and he said Dr. Yuzhikov who ran that conference and gave you such a hard time about your credit card has just published a book. It’s a new approach to quantum physics. It’s called constructive physics. You have to get it immediately. So I downloaded it from arcs of org. I listened to it that afternoon on my hour and a half walk through the park on my way to the cafe where I do all my work and I got all excited. Every social concept that means every concept that I had given in this talk was in this book. So Jordan I’ve had the privilege of proceeding through life with this enormous advantage social deprivation. So then I’m still going to chase you back to the story about the PR company but I have another question for you. So you know you are detailing out the kind of childhood that in principle could have left you bitter and resentful. So why didn’t it? Like why didn’t that happen to you? I think because of my father. My mother was a deep pessimist. My father was a profound optimist and I must have had my father’s genes predominating over. I got them both. Optimism and pessimism. But I’m grateful for everything that’s happened in my life. I’m for every deprivation. You know I was sick in bed for 15 years and even that turned out to be it was nightmarish. It was horrible. It inflicted pains for which there are no words in the English language because I was isolated for five years and could not talk. Literally could not muster the energy to move the larynx to give a single syllable of sound. And yet I it was nightmarish horrible and monstrous as it was. I found two international scientific groups at that time. I wrote three books and I learned what it’s like to be at that extreme of the human experience. Extreme isolation. Extreme pain. What happened to you? What were you suffering from? Well we figured it out. I mean I figured it out on my own and then taught my doctor about it. It’s called chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s better sometimes known as myalgic encephalomyelitis and nobody knows what causes it. But in 1988 I really had been working on my book for long enough to have the first 15 chapters of my first book. I really wanted to get out of publicity. There’s no way I could have because I was a legend. I mean the billboard guide to music publicity had 20 pages. Of nothing but me. So you know your wife is not going to let you out of a successful career. And she doesn’t want to lose the money. She doesn’t want to lose the status. And all of a sudden wonk. I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was 90 degrees out and I’d be freezing and shivering. It was 40 degrees out and I would be overheated. I was losing strength. I was losing the strength to pick up coat. And I had no idea of what was happening. And I went to doctors and the doctors had no idea of what was happening. And I walked into my office one day. It was the biggest PR firm in the music industry. And said to my staff I don’t know what’s happening. I could be dying but I’m going to be out of here in two weeks and I’m giving you the business. And the next day a competitor from the west coast called and offered me a huge amount of money for the business. And I said I cannot sell it to you. I just gave it to my staff yesterday because my word is my bond. And I kept trying to struggling to try to do normal things. Leon Uris when I finished my manuscript of the first book, The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, I got a copy to Leon Uris, the novelist. And Leon Uris read it and called on a Sunday night and raved about it for half an hour. So I tried to get into New York to see him but I had to rent, are you ready for this? Because I couldn’t afford this. I had to rent a limo so I could lay down in the back seat all the way into Manhattan to see Leon and then lay down in the back seat all the way home. That’s not the world’s most glamorous limousine story. No it’s not at all the world’s most glamorous limousine story. Eventually I learned I couldn’t even do that and eventually I became too weak to even try because I was just lucky to be able to get to my bathroom. But if I tried to get to my kitchen an extra 10 steps away, no, my body wouldn’t let me do it. And one of the lessons I learned in my childhood again when I was 16 years old, poetry was extremely important to me. And I learned a lesson from two poets. One was Edna St. Vincent Millay and her poem, Renaissance said to see the infinite in the tiniest of things, which was definitely a goal on my list. You have to be able to comprehend the suffering of every human on the face of this planet under every extreme circumstance. And I expanded that to mean you have to come to understand not just the suffering but the point of view of everyone who comes from a culture that’s so foreign to yours that it seems like it comes from another planet. So this was what Edna St. Vincent Millay was telling me was 15 years of absolute and unbelievable punishment is an advantage and it will serve you well for the rest of your life. I got a story to tell you then. This is something I learned from Carl Jung. So in the in the Sharpe Cathedral in France, there’s a maze and that you walk and it’s at the center point of the cathedral that’s a crucifix essentially. And so the maze is at the center of the X that marks the point of maximum suffering. Okay, right. Now, it’s a symbolic pilgrimage and what you do is you the maze is a circle and in the middle is a symbol that looks kind of like a rose. And in order to get to the middle, which is that central point, you have to enter the maze and then you have to walk through the each quadrant. So you have to circumambulate the world. You have to go northwest, east and south. You have to cover every bit of territory and then you get to the middle and the middle is marked by the X, which is the point of consciousness, you might say the center point of the world, but also the place where you voluntarily accept your suffering. And which is what Christ did. I mean, if I’m not a Christian, but if you believe in the religion that St. Paul created based on Jesus, then God had to become human in order to experience human suffering. And when Christ was on the cross writhing in agony and screamed Eli, Eli, my Lord, my Lord, why has thou forsaken me? It’s because God needed to experience the absolute extreme of human despair in order to carry out his task of saving mankind. And one way or the other, religion talks to us really about what we need to do. There’s this, I’ve got this saying in here. Let me see if I can find it. It’s not in front of me at the moment, but give me a second, as it’s very important. It’s an epigram that I wrote a few years ago. And it says, since there is no God, it is our job to do his work. God is not a being. He is an aspiration, a gift, a vision, a goal to see. Ours is the responsibility of making a cruel universe turn just, of turning pains to understandings and new insights into joy, of creating ways to soar the skies for generations yet to come, of fashioning wings with which our children’s children shall overcome, of making worlds of fantasy materialize as reality, of mining and transforming our greatest gifts, our passions, our imaginings, our pains, our insecurities, and our lusts. This is the work of deity, and deity is a power that resides in us. In other words, if these are things that we imagine that Jesus has done on our behalf and on behalf of a more ethereal God in the sky, these have to be our aspirations. Indeed, one of my books, The Genius of the Beast, a Radical Revision of Capitalism, talks about material miracles. The very laptops with which we are having this conversation, the very Zoom software that we are using, these are material miracles. And we are here to save each other. When Joan Jett’s manager came to me and said, Joan has been turned down by 23 record companies, and if you get her just one line in one of the trade magazines, a record company will snap her up and make her a star, and I can go back, he said, to being a songwriter and a producer. And I sat him down on the couch and said, Kenny, that’s not the way things happen. The day they record come, no record company is going to sign you on the basis of one sentence. The day a record company signs you is the day your trouble is beginning, and you have to fashion a Panzer tank strategy that can ride over every obstacle you can possibly imagine. So if you work the way I work 17 hours a day, seven days a week, if you do everything I tell you to, I guarantee you we will have a star in two years. One thing that I knew is that I love rock and roll was going to be a hit. Now, what does it have to do with secular salvation? Everything. Because according to work that was done with deeper studies in the 1980s and 1990s, we all cycle through about seven major mood swings a day. We adults, it’s more like 22 for kids, for adolescents, which means we go from heaven to hell and back again seven times a day. If I can succeed in making Joan Jett a star so that her song, I Love Rock and Roll, appears on the radio, and you love that song for three and a half minutes, that song is going to yank you out of the misery of a personal hell. That is secular salvation. If on the other hand, I’m working with a filmmaker and I’ve worked with a bunch of films who can yank you out of yourself for an hour and 10 minutes or an hour and 50 minutes. That’s an over an hour of secular salvation. Isn’t there always angels playing music in heaven? Isn’t that the thing? Yes, unfortunately, it gets very boring up there because all they do is sing the praises of God. Well, maybe that’s what Joan Jett was doing too, you know. Yes, exactly. Making hits for heaven. Yep. So at any rate, anything that a god can do, anything we imagine that a god can do, that’s our aspiration and that’s what we have to do our best to achieve. Now, we don’t achieve these things in a single lifetime. Sometimes we engage in multi-generational projects that last 100, 200, or 300 lifetimes, 300 generations. But flying, we can see the myth of Didylus has flying in it. Didylus makes a pair of wax wings for his son Icarus and Icarus indeed flies. He just flies a little too close to the sun and melts the wax and falls into the sea. So that dream has been around for at least 2800 years. How many generations did it take to make that real? I can’t even do the arithmetic, but it took until 100 years ago, until 110 years ago to make that dream come true. If we persist, and I don’t just mean individually, I mean collectively, if we persist generation after generation, the things we regard as godly, we can achieve. And we must. We must. Okay, so I’m going to go back now. I’m going to go back. I agree with you. I mean, I also think that, what do I mean by that? Well, I think part of it is that I can’t see that we have anything better to do. No, in fact, that’s a very good phrase. This is something I’ve been talking to people about a lot in the last year, and it seems to be resonating particularly with young men, that because, and then this is maybe partly also tied into your idea of the benefits of deprivation. It’s like, in some ways, each person is permanently lost because we’re fragile and finite and mortal and all of those things. And so the game is up pretty much from the beginning. But one of the things that’s so interesting about that is the fact that you’re going to lose everything also means that you could risk everything. That’s a very interesting point, Jordan. The one thing that comes out in your book, because I read it a month or two ago, I know it’s not coming out until something like February, is there’s a definite Christian perspective. And it is a stern and austere perspective in the book. And what you just expressed comes from a deep Christian perspective. We’re going to lose it all, so we might as well risk it all. And I would agree with that, even though I come from a very different kind of perspective. How did you arrive at that? Although we’re saving that for a later podcast when I will interview you about your book. Well, for me, it was a matter of trying to understand, I would say, mostly trying to understand what happened in the Holocaust. Well, me too. And but that’s strange because you’re about 10 years younger than I am, maybe even more younger than I am. How old are you? I’m 74. Okay, I’m 55. So okay, so there’s a big difference. But I did 350 push ups this morning. And I was very disappointed because last week I did 600. So wow. Well, so you’ve got me on the push up front, I must say. Yeah. So but but the you are absolutely right. And that phrase of yours, we have nothing better to do. That’s a phrase that indicates an open ended infinity and open and then and as yet unstructured infinity. Now it’s not completely unstructured. Remember you your first major work was on the underlying structures of religion. And I’m still fascinated to read it. I need to get it in Word or PDF format so I can listen to it on my Kindle. One of these days, I can send it to you. That would be wonderful. You can actually if you go to my website, Jordan Peterson calm, you can download the PDF. Okay, great. Okay, because I’ve been hungry to read this for a long time. So the future isn’t entirely unformed. For example, somehow I believe and now this is a hypothesis. This is really a hypothesis. We humans seem to know what to do when we come together in groups of a million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, because there are many cities in China with a population of 20 million, there’s Mexico City as well. And we fall into it naturally, we naturally build the infrastructures that we need, we naturally develop the infrastructure of habit that we need to get along with each other at that very compressed level. And you would think, well, but how did that come to be from an evolutionary point of view? After all, humans have never had the privilege of living in groups of millions before. Right. Where did all this behavior come from? Well, remember, our great foremothers, the ones who are at the very, very base of our family tree, from whom we derive approximately 40% of our genes are bacteria. And bacteria do not live a life alone. They cannot tolerate it. They live in groups. So James Shapiro is one of the great scholars on bacterial behavior. When I called him one day and said, James, if you drop a single bacterium into a Petri dish, is it going to die because of isolation? And he said, no, no way. It’s going to start dividing until it makes a community. It surrounds itself with a community. So the idea that you cannot have a bacteria without a community is quite true. It’s just a bacteria. If they have enough food, we’ll make their own community. You know, I had a similar intuition about codfish, right? You know, all the codfish have disappeared off the Northeastern coast. And like I’ve read stories, because I did a lot of work on oceanic, appalling oceanic destruction about four years ago for a UN committee. And anyway, so I was studying about the cod and they’ve all disappeared. The schools of those things that existed back when the Europeans first came over, the Portuguese probably knew about them before Christopher Columbus even hit the American shores, kept it secret. But you know, the schools were dozens or even hundreds of miles long and many, many, wow, thick. And the average fish was like three to five feet across and right just densely packed. But it turns out that like the idea that there’s a codfish is an illusion. In some sense, there are schools of codfish, right? The schools themselves know where to go for food and they know how to maneuver through the ocean because the schools are actually millions of years old and so they have distributed knowledge and the cod organize their mating behavior as a consequence of the existence of the schools. And they also organize themselves so the larger fish are protected in the schools by hordes of the younger fish and the older fish are the ones that are more fertile. The thing about the cod is that when you get rid of the schools, you get rid of the cod. You can’t reintroduce them because the cod aren’t, they’re like ants. They’re not, they’re communal. Right. And so once you demolish this old structure that has this embodied memory, let’s say that’s who knows how many tens of millions of years old, there’s no coming back from that. Right. Well, back to the bacteria for a second, because it’s a good observation. And I saw murmurations of starlings last week in Buffalo, New York when I was up there for Thanksgiving. In other words, groups of probably only about 200 starlings, but those groups can become a million and they all know what to do. They know how to wheel around in a much broader pattern, but it all goes back to the bacteria because bacteria live in groups, a group, a colony, the size of your palm is seven trillion, which is more than all the humans who have ever lived. Now there are bacteria like a ruganosa, which come into your body. And when there are small numbers of them lay very low, but they’re constantly monitoring to see how many of them there are. And when they get up to a sufficient number, whammo, they grow through a massive change. And basically it’s as if they’re saying, okay, now we’re big enough to take Jordan apart and they become infectious and they create disease, but they don’t do that until quorum sensing tells them that there are enough of them to do that. So, so our, does that, does that explain why people can harbor like continual levels of toxic bacteria in their bodies without ever falling prey to disease? Is it a matter of the fact that they, that they don’t hit that quorum number and that they’re monitoring that constantly? No, we have a lot of bacteria that have adapted to living synergistically with us and actually do our digesting. You go down to the market because you have a craving for chocolate eclairs and you come back home and you eat one of the chocolate eclairs and it’s not you who’s digesting the chocolate eclair. You have just acted as a transportation mechanism to feed a bunch of bacteria in your gut who will digest that chocolate eclair and what they shit out is glucose. Right. Well, it may, it may also not be you that’s craving the damn eclair, but the bacteria. And the fact is that the bacteria were just at the beginning of this research, but bacteria have an ability to influence your behavior. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Far more than we think. Right. Exactly. So, and to engineer in a fine point fashion, your behavior should they so choose the basic ideas that bacteria have been through this business of living in vast, vast multitudes before, and they have certain social evolved social behaviors that turn them into effective groups that allow them to constantly find new food, um, to constantly find new housing. And if we think these things are strange to us, because in the a hundred thousand years since we become homo sapiens, we’ve never had such a thing until the last century. We’re crazy because our ancestors left us 40% of our genes. And it is very likely that encoded in those genes is a whole rule book of how you behave when there are the kinds of vast masses of tens of millions that you were talking about in the cod behavior or the 20 million who are in Mexico city or in major cities in China. Part of our genetic potential that’s there, not as consequence of human evolution, but as something that preceded that. Right. Exactly. But it’s a guess. This is a hypothesis. Let’s go back. Let’s go back to you were you, you had, we’d left your, your biographical story at the point where you had finished, uh, the art magazine and being successful at that. And then we’re introduced into the FM stations. And so the beginning of the PR firm. So, so tell me what happens after that. Just to mention it again, we’re actually here talking about how I accidentally started the sixties and we’ve skipped over the whole story of how I accidentally started the sixties. Well, we’ll get a chance to talk. We’ll get a chance to talk again, I think, cause obviously there’s things we can talk about for a very long period of time. Oh, good. So basically there I was, um, helping, uh, get progressive radio off the ground. And, um, also when I was 12, um, a girl had turned her eyes to mine. It was eighth grade. She turned her eyes to mine and I was startled because no girl had ever done that before. And in fact, then she locked into eye contact and I was even more startled because I bet had never happened to me before either. And, um, and she said, I told my mother, you understand the theory of relativity. Now remember I had been in science for two years at this point, reading two books a day. Um, I had a kneeled copper, I had made coils, I had made cold cream from an industrial formula. Um, I had built my, or I helped to co-design my first computer and it won several, uh, science fair awards and I had built my first Boolean algebra machine. Oh, and my mom had schlepped me off to the university of Buffalo to sit down for a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at the university of Buffalo, which was probably a courtesy call that he was going to allow me five minutes for. And I was in there for an hour and we discussed the hottest topic of the time, which was the interpretation of the Doppler shift and big bang versus steady state theory of cosmology. That’s why he kept me in there because it was the very year when the chief champion of steady state theory, Fred Hoyle knew with absolute certainty, he was about to demolish George Gamov’s theory of the big bang and it would never be heard from again. So this was the hottest topic in science. And when we got out, the guy towered over my head and he put sand on my shoulder and he said to my mom, you don’t have to study for grad school or you don’t have to save up the red school for him. He will get graduate fellowships at any university and he wants in theoretical physics. So that’s a good day. That’s a good day. So I had a history in science already. And, and when this girl turned her eyes to mine, she said, I told my mother that you understand the theory of relativity and I couldn’t confess Jordan, even though truth that the truth at any price, including the price of your life is the first rule of science for me. I couldn’t confess that I didn’t know that because what did I have going for me? Yeah, I think God will forgive you for that. Well, so I jumped on my bicycle and I went down to the library and the librarians literally knew me better than my mother did. And I said, give me everything you’ve got on relativity. And they shoved two books across the desk, get me a great big fat book by Einstein and two collaborators and a little skinny book by Einstein all by himself. And I started with the big fat book because I’d learned at that point in life that if you go through something, you don’t understand it all. And you shove yourself all the way to the bitter vicious end. By the end, you come out understanding something, if only on a gut level. So I was doing that with the big book and the big book had about seven words of English on each page. And the rest was all mathematical equations and mathematical equations are Greek to me. I’ve never understood them. So at eight o’clock at night, I suddenly realized I’m only 50 pages into this book. And my mom’s going to put me asleep at 10 o’clock tonight. And if I don’t go to school understanding the theory of relativity tomorrow, I’m going to be humiliated. So I turned to the little skinny book. And it was written just by Einstein all on his own. And there was an introduction to the book. And sometimes it feels as if the author is stepping out through the pages grabbing you by the lapel putting his nose to yours and shouting a personal message in your face. And that’s how it felt. Einstein grabbed me by the lapels and said, schmuck, listen up. If you want 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 express it so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it. So Albert Einstein had told me to be a writer. And so I was operating a writing career while I was in undergraduate school. And then advancing it when I was when I started the art studio, the goal for me at that point was your next step to be the writer Albert Einstein told you to be is you have to write for magazines. And one day I’d walked into the office of a magazine carrying the portfolio of my art studio. And wearing an outfit that I bought from a designer that I was collaborating with on designing stuff. And they women at this magazine, it was an underground magazine called rags, an underground fashion magazine, it was bankrolled by one of the people who bankrolled Rolling Stone. And the women didn’t look at my portfolio, all they looked at was what I was wearing. And they said, Do you have more of those? And I said, Yes, I’ve got a whole closet full of them. And they said, Can you write an article about that? Well, I’ve been looking for my big break with magazine writing Einstein’s imperative was at my back. So I said, Of course I can. And I wrote an article and then I became a contributing editor and I wrote 175 pieces for them. And then one of the the other contributing editors started a new magazine called natural lifestyles. And it made me a contributing editor there too, which meant I was getting up at six in the morning going without a stitch of clothes on to an old Remington 1940s non electric typewriter pounding away at writing until eight or nine, going into the art studio, getting that up and running, and then coming back home and sitting there with a pot of coffee until 11 o’clock at night when I put myself to sleep. And I was getting tired of this Jordan, it had been going on for a year. So because of the national lampoon, because there was a great big steady check coming in every month, my artists voted me out of my studio, they didn’t want to pay me the percentage that they owed me. And for me, that was like getting sick. It was a fortunate thing. Because I’d been there for three years and I could have continued there forever running this art studio. And and but I was busy writing and one day I was covering of all things a parapsychology convention for natural lifestyles, the other magazine I was a contributing editor to and I was taking notes frantically because I have no memory if I don’t know that you’re going to disappear. And somebody walked up to me and said, Do you want to edit a magazine? Well, in my app, between my freshman and my sophomore year of college, I had gotten a job writing for the Boy Scouts of America and had written their chapter, I’ve rewritten their chapter on masturbation for the Boy Scout handbook. And I’ve written the chapters, I’ve got a line in your CV. Yeah, yeah. Somehow I keep showing up. And, and because because remember, when I first got on to science at the age of 10, it was because a book appeared in my lap. And it said the first two rules of science are these the truth at any price of including the price of your life. And it told the story of Galileo and it told it all wrong. It told it as if he had been Giordano Bruno and been willing to go to the stake. No, that’s not true. Then the second rule of science was look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there. And it gave the story of Anton von Lewinhoek who invented the microscope and looked at pond water and discovered these tiny little things called animal tools, microscopic beings. And he also looked at human sperm. And then he’d written a letter to the Royal Society describing what he had seen. Now think about that Jordan. Yeah, it took 30 years before I realized where he’d probably gotten the human sperm. And he’s confessing this to the Royal Society. Yeah, that’s quite the story. Right. So masturbation kept following me wherever I went. But I wrote the Boy Scout book on camouflage. That is their handbook on camouflage and their handbook. They’re on stalking and tracking. And I had been thrown out of the Boy Scouts at the age of 11 for incompetence of Morse code, the only child I have ever heard of who has been thrown out of the Boy Scouts. So I had learned a lesson. And the lesson was if I care enough about my audience, I want my audience to be able to drop down on all fours and get so close to a bunny rabbit using the techniques of stalking and tracking that I teach them that the rabbit doesn’t know they’re there until they’re rubbing noses with it. That I can write anything. So I didn’t ask what the magazine was about when this kid walked up to me and said, Do you want to edit a magazine? And we didn’t have Google in those days. So I had the name of the publisher that I was supposed to set up a meeting with. But I had no idea who he was. And there was no way to look him up. And I had no idea what his magazine was. I walked into his office, two editors were in the process of packing up their stuff and leaving on the opposite side of his office suite from his office. And I knew nothing about Rock and Roll. It turned out that the magazine was called Circus and it was a Rock and Roll magazine. And he asked only one question. Can you turn out a magazine in two weeks? Because he had two weeks before he had to deliver his magazine to the printer and his editors were leaving. And I said yes. And I turned out the magazine in two weeks. And that’s how I became the editor of a Rock magazine. And over the course of time applying Martin Gardner’s approach to things looking for underlying correlations, I invented all kinds of correlational studies that allowed me to get a handle on my audience. And I learned that my audience wasn’t interested in the traditional format of the Rock magazine that my publisher adhered to, which is only cover a band that’s of interest to your audience once a year. I discovered that like the audience for Time magazine, which my boss wanted me to imitate, and which I read from cover to cover when I was a child, Time magazine has an article of the president not once a year, every single week. It’s a running soap opera. And if they have a secondary character like Henry Kissinger, he’s in there at least every other week. And then there are tertiary characters who may show up once every four months. But you need that Star Trek, that A Trek, that presidential track. And I discovered that I had one artist that was twice as popular with my audience as his nearest runner up. And that was Alice Cooper. And the closest runner up was David Bowie. But David Bowie looked pathetic by comparison with Alice Cooper. So I went to my publisher, and I’d taken the sales figures and I’d worked out additional correlations, like the fact that if we had cover lines about people who were in the top 10 on the album charts, the week we came out, we sold magazines, which means that with a four-month time, I had learned to predict what was going to be in the top 10 on the album charts four months in advance. So I went to my publisher, I had a complete format for him. I said, I guarantee you, this is only one of three statements of this kind I’ve ever made in my life. I guarantee you that if you use this format, we will increase the sales of our magazine. And he was kind enough to let me get away with a total overhaul. And the result was we increased in the next 12 months by 211%. And my publisher went from a man of modest means with an apartment on Second Avenue overlooking traffic to a man of immodest means with a huge aircraft-sized, anger-sized apartment overlooking the East River. And Chet Flippo, one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone, to validate himself, he didn’t feel Rolling Stone validated sufficiently, did a history of rock and roll journalism for his master’s thesis at the University of Texas at Austin. And he sent me six pages by Messenger one day. And it was about this guy working in a little windowless closet with a manual Remington typewriter, single-handedly pounding out a magazine. And he said, single-handedly inventing a new magazine genre, the heavy metal magazine. And I became a scholar of rock and roll. I mean, I- Did you develop an affinity for the music? Yes, I fucking love it. Who’s your favorite? Well, my favorite before this had been Vivaldi’s Winter in the Four Seasons, because it’s angry and scowling and whiplashing. And now my favorites became, well, my favorite as a person was Michael Jackson, because I never met anybody like him in my life and never expected to meet anybody like him. And he embodied the first two rules of science in a way that none of the science people that I’ve known and loved have ever embodied it. And my favorites musically right now, I mean, they’ve changed over the years. One day I was driving a rented car on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and a song came on the radio that made me do something I’d never done since, had never done before, and I’ve never done since. I had to pull the car over to a side, the side of the road and stop and do nothing but listen to this song. And it was Hurt So Good by John Mellencamp. So Billy Joel, I loved him in his angry period, but I came to him after his angry period. And one day I wanted to get together with him socially, because I hadn’t seen him in a long time. And I don’t socialize very readily. I like to get together to work together, but not necessarily to schmooze together. But I did call him for socializing. So we met for breakfast at a restaurant at the outdoor cafe, part of a restaurant on the ground floor of the Essex House where he had an apartment. And he came down the elevator carrying this child’s notebook. You know how when you’re in first and second grade, your parents buy you a black covered, marbled with white notebook to write in? Well, he had one of those. And he put it in the middle of the table while we were talking. And he explained something. And he said, when I was growing up, and we were teenagers, and we would hang out on the corner just watching all the girls go by, girls to us were a separate species. They were like mules or donkeys or dogs or something like that. If we had anything to do with them, the simple goal was to score. We assumed that they didn’t have brains like ours. And I met a girl last night, Billy said, who utterly defied those rules of what girls are. She is articulate. She is intelligent. She is on top of things. She was a pleasure to talk to. Now, Billy had informed me the first time I met him at his home out on Oyster Bay that he had a piano room and it had a big grand piano. And he explained that writing songs was like pulling teeth. That sometimes it took him three months to write a song that he would pace back and forth in that piano room. And he would call his piano the beast with 88 teeth. It was the beast he was fighting to get songs out. Well, Billy explained that after coming home at two in the morning for meeting this astonishing woman, he had sat down with his little notebook and he had written an entire album full of songs. Wow. He met his muse, did he? Yes. And it was Chrissy Brinkley. And yes. And you could see how she might inspire a song or two. Yes, absolutely. But the point is that it was Billy’s most vapid album, at least to me, that I’d ever heard from him. And it’s an album that I really am not interested in listening to, but his angry period, when he was angry with his first wife, Elizabeth, um, Hey, those were really, really good songs. Paul Simon astonished me. One day I was in the elevator over at the Broadway, whatever it’s called building Broadway studios or something. I have the building he owns with Lauren Michaels of Saturday Night Live. I was in the elevator and I bumped into Paul, who was my client. I did Simon and Garfunkel’s reunion tour in the park or reunion in the park. And then I did Simon and Garfunkel’s reunion tour. And, um, and Paul had a piece of paper in his hands. And I said, what’s that? And he said, it’s the lyrics for my next album. Now, remember I was so heavily into poetry, the poetry changed the nature of my life when I was 14 to 16 years old. And that I was the editor of a literary magazine that won two national academy of poets prizes in addition to the Stuart caused in the art community. So I asked if I could see the lyrics. It’s hard to describe this, but when I read the lyrics, my knees almost buckled, which almost out of the floor bones and stones or something like that. I’m terrible with album names. It was some of the most astonishing poetry I’d ever, ever read in my life. And it reached so deep into me that I literally was losing control of my body. Um, so I asked him if he minded, if I showed these to the lyrics to one friend, just one friend at the New York times. And so he, we went into his office, we made a Xerox and I walked out with the Xerox of the lyrics. Now I had learned that the, that the media is like sheep and that if you can take one of the lead sheep and turn him in your direction, that you can change the perception of an artist within the critical community. And I had a friend who was an outsider and yet a lead sheep because he was at the New York times and he was an outsider because he was gay before you could admit that you were gay. So even I didn’t know that he was gay. I just, just knew he was a little bit strange and that I as a consequence felt protective of him. And I called him and said, I have just seen the most amazing lyrics I’ve ever seen in my life. But for all I know, it’s an illusion for all. I know I’ve somehow hyped myself into this. Um, if I send you the lyrics, can you tell me if I’m crazy? And two hours later, I sent it to him by messenger and two hours later, I got a phone call saying, you are not crazy. So Paul Simon has amazing, astonishing gifts. And beyond that, I mean, I love rock and roll and blues based service. So these days I’m listening to Joe Bonamassa and, uh, Johnny Lang and Beth Hart, who I think is the best vocalist I’ve ever heard in my life. Yeah. Yeah. Beth Hart is just amazing. She takes everything that, uh, at a James did and everything that Janice Joplin built on the, on the base of what James had done and takes it five levels beyond what you ever thought any vocalist could ever. Well, that’s major praise because it was, and James was quite the creature. She really was. She was an original. So that’s, but, but we skipped the story of how I accidentally started the sixties. Well, we’ll do, let’s do that. Like we, that’s a good place to stop, I think, you know, okay. Um, because we got into, well, we, we completed the story. We completed that story. Um, I would love to talk to you again. It was an absolutely great conversation. And well, for me, it’s a privilege because I love your thinking about music, about religion in terms of its underlying archetypes, because that’s a part of my life quest that you’ve gone out and explored a part that I would never have had the time to explore with a mind that’s yours. And so it’s going to be different than mine. So I will download the PDF. Um, I hope, I hope that, well, especially because you’ve read the second book, there’s 12 rules for life that should open up maps of meaning, which is a much more, um, I would say it’s a much denser book and it’s probably not as well written, although I think it’s, it’s, I’m not complaining about it. It, it accomplished the goal that I had set out to accomplish, which was, well, you’ll, you, you’ve experienced some of it with 12 rules for life. And I’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about maps of meaning so let’s talk again while you’re going to talk to me, I think in January, that was the plan, right? Um, yes, we were going to talk in January or February when the book is out. So we’ll set another talk somewhere. Um, are you in New York? I’m in New York. I’m sitting here in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Well, maybe if you wouldn’t mind the next time I come down to New York, we could, no, absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yes. Let me know as far in advance as possible. Cause my books up. Okay. And we’ll do it. Okay. Good. I’d love that. Okay. You’ve been a pleasure. Oh, it’s been really good talking to you. And it was, it was a, it was really a lot of fun and you’re, you’re, you’re an amazing font of stories and, and interesting tangents and, and crazy schemes and adventures. It’s really, like I said, if you didn’t exist, it would be hard to make it hard to invent you. So I shall see you sometime in the next two months. Good. All right. Thanks Jordan. Have a great night. Yep. Okay. See you. Bye. Bye.