So I'm here tonight talking to Howard bloom
Who's a fascinating person and an 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 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 gonna talk about his newest book which is called how I accidentally started the 60s and then well
We're gonna see where it goes from there, so Howard. Thanks for
Showing up here and let's 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 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 at 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 masked 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 one of the 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 porting soul the machine and that
Book the man who runs Dubai the Sheikh who runs Dubai
named a racehorse after one of that after that book the
His former minister of development who's on Dubai's ruling council and runs a thirty
Three billion dollar sovereign real estate company to 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. APJ Kalam the eleventh 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
Column are all Muslims
And I'm a Zionist atheist Jew 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
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 found it. I knew nothing about popular culture
I founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry
I used my scientific tools since it's my background of science my life is science my bones and my flesh our science and
It became the most successful PR on that firm in the record industry
So I worked with Michael Jackson Prince Bob Marley about Midler ac/dc
Aerosmith kiss Queen Run DMC Billy Joel Paul Simon Peter Gabriel David Byrne Run DMC Grandmaster 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 thought 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 foreword by or was it wasn't a foreword
I don't think it was caught it 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 most successful PR firm the music industry
Yes, we were still on the ascent
Yes were establishing
Taking unknowns like prints and establishing them as major stars or joan jett who've 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 bloom 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
Well for two things happen first. I really needed to get out of publicity in the music industry
I had satisfied all of my intellectual questions because there were SATA questions. I was answer answering
What are the mass exhilarations the mass ecstasy's 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
Gotten 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 so
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 well these were 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 were 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 so that's it's a hell of a stretch
I mean yeah, but singular story, so okay, 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 of a cell or Kane that had no relationship to reality you could take the search for
Correlations into the real world I listen to music as 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 in Jordan in those days 12-inch speakers nobody to receive 12in speakers
but it had one, and we've 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 Barto Beethoven Stravinsky
Mozart stuff like that so I can't really say that I was properly prepared
Because I was hated by the other peak it's my age in Buffalo nior and my parents didn't have any time for me
So I was an outcast and the crowd of people that shut me out
Listen to popular music, so popular music. What started is 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 and but in the
1970 will late 1960s and early 1970s
I
Knew I had fellowships at for 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 mine
Why because I was fascinated by these ecstatic mass
fashions 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 fashions
I was not going to get to make contact with mass fashions if I went on to an 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 0 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 bloom when everybody rose out of the room
Close the door
I thought 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 and you're about to be bawled out chair and
the poet in residence
Said to me look last year I asked you to be on the staff of 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 had ever seen you could have a group of
Vikings each of whom had drunk a quart of ale
Bunk parking up against the wall on bonking each other
And if you put a literary magazine in the room that pale blue cover and the mists chosen type would
Make you I'd to 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 grown up with lab rats and and hamsters
not with human beings
but but I followed him obediently down the stairs and
When we sat down at the we 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
That that'd be Jordan. I learned that question that question is a very valuable tool
So I turned it into experimental a 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 I think you covered that in in how I started accidentally started the 60s right I think yeah there
Yeah, you know 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 assuming she was tired of having student husbands
She made it clear in a kind of sotto voce 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 we formed an art studio and
the first year we are in $75 a piece which is
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 Earth 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 ditched which disc jockey said 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 YC, I see so yeah, you're responsible that was I got to thank you for that because I
Listen to album-oriented FM stations a lot when I was a kid and so and a lot
I mean lots of people did but I didn't know you were you had a hand in that so that was very good thing
Well, I thank you for the thanks. I had a hand in that and
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 a 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 that it was ABC
PG o Ruth got his start there. Yes exactly and I acted in a Michael. O'Donoghue script that we did for the Evergreen revue
Which was leading a bohemian publication of the time it's art director was all those people who had called me
After he saw the Washington Square review the student literary the graphics magazine that that I've been putting together
But the 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 stew we're gonna 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 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 through the stage my artists 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 the pianist on stage was Elton John 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 trapped trying to track down
using things like William James the varieties of religious experience and
taking advantage of my my
Special vantage point so why do you think you know? You're you there's car
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 booked as she 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 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 suddenly an emerge probably between the age of 10 and 12
It probably came from the fact that I was suffering serious social deprivation
I really I had one friend at a time and that's about as much as I had and I was I was an indispensable
Figure when it came time to beat somebody up because I was the target
Okay, so 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 hardly to do with music which makes a perfect perfect sense to me because
Music is almost
Uh, what would you say it's an unerring gateway into that ecstatic experience right and for for very complex reasons?
I'd like to talk to you about that a little bit, but
it
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 you're surprising involvement with literary magazine your transformation of that into what was essentially in 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 right what what?
Deikun is there anything you can put your finger on you you associated there 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?
1960's and 1970's one sleep deprivation was a new discovery and then back in the 1990s and early
2000s Jaak 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 yeah, and didn't give them access to each other as peers
until they'd they'd 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 glad remove 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
Herrmann has said that there is 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
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
I was lucky thin with a huge nose
I can identify and ever wore suits though
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 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?
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 Fournier at the time
Pointing to Vince you are my modern reincarnation and my name is Alice Cooper
Now when when Vince Fournier won on stage and a dress 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 ferny a 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 him a surfer on the back of those mask passions those masts
Exhilarations that make the forces of history well Alice of the two
They're both real people and they're both inside events Fournier
But the one that's in there that has the greatest passionate intensity is the Alice Cooper not the Vince Fournier
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 and when he when he was super famous some of those guys were still
Mainstays of his bin we carry many selves well 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 I'm gonna fashion an artificial mask an image and
Through that make you a star, I'm gonna get you an appointment with my best competitor immediately you'll be with them in hours
If you're gonna 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
Yourself leaves you and you are danced like a puppet. They're like a puppet on a spring like a marionette
onstage 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 audio is a soul exchange if you're willing to put up with the fact that music is not about marketing music
It's 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 all it not matter that you know I
Listen tell us 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?
I mean record companies did that a fair bit on on?
Concept albums you know they throw a pop hit on there, but right 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 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 shocked bands like that were
the children of
Ministers the children of deeply religious people from another religious, right
Because he's bringing out the other side of things he like exactly the kind of things right well
He's there obviously the precursor of people like Marilyn Manson yes exactly
Marilyn Manson was a sort of cheap even though Marilyn Manson signed enough to be good to me Marilyn Manson was a kind of cheap
Take off 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 gonna be my client as what you just don't you don't just owe your
Audience your songs you owe your audience your life now Jordan typically 20 years to articulate what I meant by that
And it's simply that if you deserve
super sir
then you doesn't you will become an iconic figure and
Twelve-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 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 4 o'clock in the afternoon on a really really rare
Good day that lyric is so perfect in itself, but it feels like it wrote itself through you
When you go onstage if you see the dot 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
Pseudo pod 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 and 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 and tend 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
except socially acceptable words for their feelings and who feel crazy
Isolated and alone and you by revealing. What's deep inside of who 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 as the
necessary
counter position to isolation and abandonment loneliness and all of those things
Which which I think is a very?
very reasonable way of thinking about it's like meaning as the antidote to isolation and why and trap 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 very very good insight. I you get applause for that. Thank you
Thank you
and 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 a retina and then the images is
reconstructed say in our visual cortex, and then we
Then we we could become conscious of that image and plan our actions and 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 a body meant 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 is 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 since beyond
What our senses revealed to us moment to moment and so it puts people?
Then when you're moving to the music and we're all moving to the music or when you're dancing
Let's say with someone else and you're and you're as pairs, and you're all dancing together
It's that 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 it's also a symbolic representation of a
Harmonious and ideal Society and there it is something that's beyond us
and so it's it's interest so I get it so so partly what you're saying if I understand you is that for you the the
ecstatic collective experience that was associated with music for example in 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 it's like music was so such a powerful cultural force in the 60s and the 70s and the
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 layer a movement
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
I worked with a company called dot records
I was hired by Gulf and Western to found a public on artist 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
In country and western music now when I was a child when I was about three and a half years old
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
But I got were farm reports and Country and Western music this was in nineteen
nineteen forty six or something like that or nineteen forty seven and
I immediately knew that that music was alien to me
And I knew that it was the music of another subculture 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's sort of music really does seem to have that binding capacity you know and I think there's also something
Neurological about that because I think you 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
Fourteen fifteen to twenty you know there's a there's a there's a real intense
Period of neural pruning that occurs at the end of adolescence so you get then this amount of neural pruning after
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 self, right
You're you're born with twice as many neurons as you will actually need right right exactly and so
You're you're a massive possibility, and then you die into your actualities and then that happens again
It laid out lessons right which is also in 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 alright well
So I 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 me in your late teens your prefrontal cortex gets wired up now. What's the prefrontal cortex?
It's probably we 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 too 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 drafted you into your subculture music and so what Freud would call the super-ego
Is formed to a certain extent based on your sub cultural connections that you've developed as a team and again
Music helps identify that sub culture of which you feel apart all 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
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 absolute yeah, yeah
You can see that expressed in the lyrics right right and where which layout a system of values in some sense, right?
Something like hip hop for example well roughly 95 percent 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 were 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 ten 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 immerse Minh tin 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
Awesome 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 while 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 Frasor by now
Forgotten car and and they were shredding my socks. They were very regularly 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 and 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 right
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 were doing PR and all like I
Don't know what the hell. You'd call it. I call it secular shamanism. There was a name
I was never comfortable with because it's so unscientific but
That was the closest I can come to it
It's like dowsing for the human soul what I would have been a good name for a PR company a second
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 popular kid in my school
They voted me for two years in a row the chairman of the programming committee
Which means Iran student assemblies five days a week, and I program two a week?
So I was the MC for these things and one day the Tony do you manage that and simultaneously be unpopular?
That's a good question. I think my school had verily very classless school was founded by an acolyte 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 two 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
Laguna 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 Jewish treasurer. That's just the way it goes
So I was never in line 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 and
so 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 arbitrary 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 great well, so so yes
So competence can can can can step in where where popularity cannot go yes
That's a very well point phrase 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 a 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, yeah, and yet they want me to advertise this dance, so Jordan. I can't dance. I am 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 soot a pod 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 I
apparently 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 exciting 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 stats crazy story right and this is the 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 Rock 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 have 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 seventy 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 my everything you know about quantum physics does 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
the a lot of quantum physics is based on the idea that when you
When you treat a photon a single photon in a certain way when you split it in two
Here's how it's gonna 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 gonna throw me out of the conference because these are all people committed deeply
It's a 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 Culver Institute of Blog mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in
Moscow sent an email
And he said doctor
You jerk off 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 our sub org
I listened to at 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 oh
So Jordan I've had the privilege of proceeding through life with this enormous advantage
Social deprivation so then I'm still gonna chase you back to that story about the both the PR company
But I have another question for you
So you know you 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 mean 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 can't I found a to 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 what happened to you what 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 have been working on my book
for
Long enough to have fifth the first 15 chapters my cut 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 bail board died to music publicity had
20 pages of nothing, but me
So you know your wife is not gonna let you out of
a successful career and
If she doesn't want to lose the money. She doesn't want to lose the status
And all of a sudden want 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 I was losing strength I was losing the strength to pick up coat
um 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 myself
I don't know. What's happening. I could be dying, but I'm gonna be out of here in two weeks, and I'm giving you the business
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 a rent. Are you ready for this?
I because I couldn't afford this I had a rental 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 that's not the world's most glamorous limousine story no
It's not if 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 ten steps away, no my body wouldn't
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 at the st.
Vincent Millay and her poem renascence 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 tears that it seems like from another planet, so this was a what what Edna st.
Vincent Millay was telling me was fifteen years of
Absolute and unbelievable punishment is an advantage, and it will serve you well for the rest of your life
You got a story to tell you then this is something. I learned from Carl Jung so in the
in the Chartres Cathedral in in 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 it mazes 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 the each quadrant so you have to
Circumambulate the world you have to go north west to 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 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
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 sabachthani my lord my lord
Why hast 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 it 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 two?
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
Materialized 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 D
It 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 more ethereal God in the sky
These have to be our aspirations indeed
It one of my books the genius of the Beast or radical revision of capitalism talks about material miracles the very
Laptops with which we are having this conversation the very zoom with software that we are using these are fucking
material miracles
And and we are here to save each other when when Joan Jets manager came to me and said
Joan has been turned down by 20 through record companies
And if you get her just one line and one of the trade
Magazines a record company will snap her up and make her a star and I can go back
He's 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 reckon come no record company's gonna sign you on the basis one sentence
the day a record company signs you is the day your troubles beginning and
And you have to fashion a Panzer tape 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 that?
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 twenty two 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 salon
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
Well is it isn't there always angels playing music in heaven isn't that tight 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 yeah, 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 Daedelus
Has flowing in it
Daedelus makes a pair of wax wings for his son 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 twenty eight hundred years. How many generations did it take to make that real?
I can't even do the arithmetic
But it took until a hundred years ago
Until a hundred and ten 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 gonna go back now. I'm gonna go back. I agree with you. I mean I also think that
That and what do I mean by that well?
Well I think part of it is this that I don't 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 two people about a lot in the last year, and it seems to be resonating particularly with young men is that?
Because and then this is baby partly it 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
That one thing that comes out in your book cuz 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 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 at 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 in the Holocaust
No, me too
And but that's strange because you're about 10 years younger than I am maybe even more younger than I am and old are you?
Well, I'm 74 okay. I'm 55 so okay, so there's a big difference so but I did
350 push-ups this morning, and I was very disappointed because last week I did 600 so
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 there. We have nothing better to do
That's a phrase that indicates an open-ended infinity and open-ended 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
Actually if you go to my website Julia 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 five 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 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 roots of millions B. 3 where did all this behavior come from we'll remember our
Day for mothers 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 I'm back to your real 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 gonna
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 the bacteria if they have enough food will make their own community
You know I had I had a similar intuition about
codfish right you know you know all the codfish have disappeared off the northeastern kurai 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 hit hit
America I
Kept it secret, but you know the the schools were
Dozens or even hundreds of miles long and many many how thick and the average fish was like three to five feet
Across and right is 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 that's right
tributed knowledge and cards the cod
organized their their mating behavior as a consequence of the existence of the schools and
They also organized 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 right the thing about the cod is that when you get rid of the school's you get rid of the cod?
You can't reintroduce them because the cod aren't they're like ants they're not their communal right and so once you
Demolish this old structure that has this you know embodied memory. Let's say, that's who knows how many ten millions of years old
there's no coming back from that right well back to the bacteria for a second because it's good observation and I saw a murmuration 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 mm-hmm, 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 in just more than all the humans who have ever lived now there are bacteria like a rügen OSA
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 when they get up to a sufficient number
Lamo, 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 ours is
That does that explain why people can Harbor?
Like can't continue 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
Core a 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
Éclairs, 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 be it may also not be you that's craving the damn Eclair
But the background and the fact is that that bacteria were just at the beginning of this research?
But bacteria have an ability to influence your behavior right exactly exactly not and far more than we think right exactly so
And to engineer in a fine point fashion your behavior should they so choose the basic idea is 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
to constantly find new housing and
If we think these things are strange to us because in the 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 percent of our genes
And it is very likely that
Encoded in those genes is a whole
rulebook 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?
Mm-hmm part of our genetic potential that's there not as consequence of human evolution, but is 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 would we'd left your your biographical story at the point where you had finished
The art magazine and being successful at that and then we're introduced into the FM stations and so right
beginning of the PR firm so right
Just to mention it again. We're actually here talking about how accidently stirred in the 60s
And we've skipped over the whole story of how I accidentally started the 60s well
What a chance to talk we'll get a chance to talk again
I think because obviously there's things we could talk about for a very long period of time oh good so basically there I was
Helping get progressive radio off the ground and
also when I was 12
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 that had never happened to me before either and
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. I had annealed copper
I had made coils. I had made coal cream from an industrial formula
I had built my Rho design my first computer and several 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 meetings 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 Gamow of 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 my hand 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 read school for him
He will get graduate fellowships at any University, and he wants in theoretical physics
So 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 of 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 at 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 at all and you shove yourself all the way to the bitter dishes
End by the end you come out understanding something it's 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 collisions and mathematical equations are Greek to me. I've never understood
so
At 8 o'clock at night. I suddenly realize
I'm only 50 pages into this book and my mom's gonna put me asleep at 10 o'clock tonight
And if I don't go to school understanding the theory of relativity tomorrow
I'm gonna be humiliated, so I turn to 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 in your face and
That's how it felt Einstein grabbed me by the lapels and said schmuck listen up. Do 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 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 is 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 by art studio and
wearing an outfit that I bought from a designer that I was collaborating with on designing stuff and
They had 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 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 a fine Stein'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 a 6:00 in the morning going without a stitch of clothes on to an old Remington
1940s non electric typewriter pounding away at writing until 8:00 or 9:00
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, zoo
and I was taking notes frantically because I have no memory if I don't know that it's gonna disappear and
Somebody walked up to me and said do you want to edit a magazine?
Well in my abotu my freshman in my sophomore year of college
I had gotten a job writing for the Boy Scouts of America and had written there the chapter
I've rewritten their chapter on masturbation for the Boy Scout Handbook, and I've written the chapters get lined in your CV
yeah, yeah, but somehow they keep showing up and and
Because cause remember when I when I first got onto 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 of any price of including the price of your life and it
Told the story of Galileo, and it told it all wrong it sold it as if he had been
Giordano Bruno and been willing to go to the stake. No that's not true
I
Ban 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 van Lewin
Hope who invented the microscope and looked at pond water and discovered these tiny little things called animal culés
Microscopic beings 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 if yeah it took 30 years
Before I realized where he probably gotten the nice room, 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 their handbook on camouflage and their handbook there on
stalking and tracking and I had been thrown out of Boy Scouts at the age of eleven for incompetence of Morse code the
Only child I have ever heard of who has been thrown out of the Boy Scouts
so
And none so I have 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 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 of 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 was a rock and roll magazine and
He asked 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 magazines of 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 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 you which is only cover a band
That's of interest 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 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 track that presidential track, and I discovered that my that
I had one artist that was twice as popular
With my audience as his nearest runner-up right that was it 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 ten on the album charts the week
We came out we sold magazines, which means it was a four monthly time. I had to learn to predict
What was going to be in the top ten on the album charts for 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 of 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 percent 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
Sanger sized apartment overlooking the East River and
And Chet flipo one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone to valide himself?
He didn't feel like what 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 of a magazine
And he said single-handedly inventing a new magazine genre the heavy metal magazine
so that's how and and I became a scholar of rock and roll I mean I
Buy did you develop an affinity for the music yes, I fucking love it
I had and 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 whip lashing
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 uh
One day I was driving a rented car on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and a song came out in the radio
That made me do something
I had 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 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
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 them 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 Billie 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 Billie had informed me the first time
I met him at his home
out on hoister Bay
That I mean he had a piano room and it had a big grand piano, and he explained that that
Writing song this was like pulling teeth
That sometimes it took him three months to write a song that he would pace back and forth in their piano room and he would
Call his piano the beast with a da teeth
It was the Beast he was fighting to get songs out
Well Billy explained that after coming home at 2:00 in the morning for meeting this astonishing woman
he had sat down with this little notebook, and he had written an entire album full of
songs Wow he met his muse did he yes, and it was Christie Brinkley and
Yes, and but 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
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 Saturn. I out live I
was in the elevator and I bumped into Paul who was my client I did Simon and Garfunkel's reunion to her in the park a
reunion in the park, and then I did Simon and Garfunkel's reunion tour and
And Paul had a piece of paper in his hands, and I said what's that and he said selearis?
Rinna Selvam now remember I was so heavily in the 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 stirrer 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 hmm
Which almost helped 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 cheapened to me that I literally was losing control
my body 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 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 sheet 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 letters
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
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 in 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
Jonny Lang and Beth Hart who I think is the best vocalist I've ever heard of my life
they are yeah Beth Hart is just amazing she takes everything that a tagine did and
everything that Janis Joplin built on the on the base of what energy James had done and
Takes it five levels beyond what you ever thought any vocalist could ever know that's major praise because if Santa James was quite the creature
She really was she was an original so
That's but but we skipped the story of how accidentally started the sixteen. Oh well look let's do that like a week
That's a good place to stop. I think you know okay, because we got into well we completed this story
We completed that story. 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
But you've gone out and explored apart 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
Hope I hope that well I'd especially because you've read the second book. There's 12 rules for life
That should open up maps of meaning if which is a much more
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 meaning, so let's talk again. Well you're gonna
Talk to me. I think in January that was the plan right?
Yes, we were going to talk in January or February wouldn't make it out. Yes. I will set another talk
somewhere
And 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 not
Yes, yes, yes, let me know as foreign advance as possible because my gala walks 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 play
It was really a lot of fun, and 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 hard to invent you so I shall see you sometime
Two months good. Okay. Thanks, Jordan. Have a great night. Yeah. Okay. See ya bye, but