“The idea that we’re running out of resources is foolish, all we’re running out of is imagination.”
Comcastrodors, omnologist Howard Bloom has come on the show to put soul into the machine. He is here to remind you that you MUST change the world. You need a yearly soul check, and Howard would like to remind you that it is everyone’s OBLIGATION to make history, to cheat death at every possible turn.
In this episode, Howard talks to our host Maximüs Groves about getting the Pope on the phone to solve our energy crisis, about the importance of the development of space based solar power, planetary missions, space manufacturing, and the repurposing of carbon dioxide. From accidentally starting the Sixties to living in a state of constant climate change and even contemplating the emerging compassion of Western culture, there is a universe of big ideas we are responsible for bringing to bear – and no stone is left unturned.
Also, get ready for the best wingman story you’ve ever heard.
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How do you do today. Well it’s been Max It’s a very typical day I’m trying to put the pope together with the eleventh President of India the pope on Thursday came out with an and cyclical saying we should save the earth by turning to renewable resources and getting rid of fossil fuels. So we just happen to have the ultimate replacement for fossil fuels. It involves harvesting solar energy in space and sending it back down to earth transmitting it with the same kind of waves that your cell phone uses. So it’s harmless waves that could over the long term eliminate all fossil fuels for ever. And it’s an infinite energy resource and the pope is extremely concerned about reaching the the poor of the earth. And whereas Rhineland lines are running lines to these people copper copper wires could cost trillions of dollars with space spatial or power. You just transmit it to the place where you want to send it to transmit it. So this is a normal damage job right in front president but that’s not but that’s not the only thing you know when I turned away from getting the pub together with the eleventh President of India. I’ve already gotten Buzz Aldrin together with the eleven President of India. Then I picked up the thread of conversation Cal Tech. I was flown out to Cal Tech twice to co-design a multi planetary mission the world’s first parallel process planetary mission. And today I had a meeting on the phone when I was walking through the park with John Hoeven who’s I believe it NASA Ames and who’s a specialist in building units to take carbon dioxide and turn it into methane and then take the methane and turn it into plastics or turn it into fuel. OK so the atmosphere of Mars is carbon dioxide gas which other planet has an awful lot of carbon dioxide it wants to get rid of. Which one was it. It’s Earth. Oh yes yes. That’s trying to judge trying to avoid and global warming. That one Yeah well I’m kind of telling on the rising sea level to bring one amazing beach front property here in Atlanta. That’s going to be addressed and to to see the tree part of being on the beach that it’s going to be nice and then lastly the elimination of New Orleans Saints will be wonderful to show them a cultural loss to lose the city and what not but that sports franchise will be done for life. God Well obviously we’re working on some solutions that will dodge that problem. Max I know you know we are told that the body of science is all unified in this business of climate change news for you this is the planet of climate change is the planet of climate disaster. It’s that way long before humans ever evolved and it smacks us up one side of the head with ice ages and up the other side of the head with global warming’s and there were two hundred thousand year period while we were still evolving. This is really instinct as you’re actually making both arguments of the same time that we need to make carbon dioxide regulations but also need to be perceptive that the world is always changing. Exactly so when I was in Japan last year talking about it was a conference on harvesting solar power in space and sending it back down to earth and we have people from the European Space Agency and people from Jax which is a pants equivalent of NASA and I suddenly realized that what we need to go after is not the idea that by taking the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will turn nature into what she always was a warm and pleasant bosom a petting zoo want to garden that nature has never been that she has never been that wouldn’t be able to point to for like throwing nature inflicts posing it’s wonderful brutality right. So so the C O two well if we get. At the C O two perhaps we will take a small step toward a karmic carbon or toward a climate stabilization technology but we’ve got knowledge that if we want to have an atmosphere if we want to have a climate that resembles a climate of six hundred fifty one hundred years before the industrial revolution that’s a human choice. And that’s an anthropogenic attempt to manipulate the climate and climate stabilization is violently unnatural. Nature hates an equilibrium. Absolutely hates an equilibrium. So what we’re going for is anthropogenic climate change or anthropogenic climate stabilization which means that we have to have the technologies not just to get rid of carbon dioxide and start and stop greenhouse effect we also have to develop the technology to stop the next Ice Age because it was just a new study that came out in the last two weeks that showed that we are way over due for an ice age. Normally periods the kind of climate that we’re experiencing last about ten thousand years are as of the last twelve thousand years. We are over due for a big freeze I feel like there was a Futurama joke and their global warming happened is like yeah but the ice age even the town of God Well that’s that’s pretty much accurate because the climate goes up and down we wouldn’t be who we are today if it weren’t for the fact that a bunch of us chose to move out of Africa and take on an impossible challenge. The ice age and we actually learn to live long before we are modern modern humans long before we were homo sapiens. We learn to live in what are called her glacial areas which means on the very outskirts of glaciers. Well for animals that evolved in the pleasant tropical climate of Africa that was a big stretch and how do we do it. We developed a climate stabilization technologies. Now they were small scale. What are they saying like hunting for the first one. We just got it. We just now. At the complete planetary scale of that exact thing. Yeah we need to go from a tent made of mammoth tusks and mammoth ribs with mammoth hides around it to the whole damned atmosphere. You must love capitalism because like that is the principle of scale. Absolutely. Well I love certain aspects of capitalism I wrote a book called The genius of the beast a radical revision of capitalism but its original title captured its spirit much more accurately it was originally called Reinventing capitalism putting soul in the machine. And as long as you can keep capitalists honest and as long as you can keep them competing with each other capitalism can be one of those fruitful things on the face of the earth in fact. Well I wrote that book because people used to I was stuck in that when I wrote that book I was stuck in that for fifteen years and all kinds of amazing intellectuals come traipsing through my bedroom and almost all of them would say the same thing as soon as they entered the bedroom door Western civilization is dying and it deserves to die it’s the worst civilisation in the history of mankind it’s the most violent civilization in the history of mankind. And I disagreed with that so I spent God knows how many years roughly six years to come up with the following. Every every If it a logical system that has called on our idealism has promised one thing it would lift the poor and the oppressed only one system has ever done it. The western system whatever the hell that system is and the western system is done the following if you’ve been born in one nine hundred fifty your life expectancy would’ve been thirty eight point five years if you’d been born in Western society in the year two thousand it would have been seventy eight point five years that is more than a doubling of the human lifespan. If you had been the poorest paid worker in London in two thousand you would have earned what an entire tenement full of the poorest paid workers in London earned in eight hundred fifty seven times what those poor restock workers back in one nine hundred fifty were earning. If you’d been born in well today. Our odds of dying a death. Hands of another human being are one tenth what they were in sixteen fifty In other words the piece has gone up by a factor of ten years and all this is like a defense of Western civilization. But this does is this also an argument that you know perhaps while we’re oversensitive to the poor and protection locally that we should be conscious of it being better or try to step away from that and policy that we absolutely look at our great grandparents could deliver us an extra forty years of life then certainly we deserve an extra eighty years of life to our great great grandkids if the if the poorest paid workers earn seven times what he or she was earning one hundred fifty years ago we need to make that fourteen times for a great great grandparent this is so entertaining because it is just like earlier it’s like listen you don’t understand how good the poor got it and we got to make it ten times better for him. No Yes we got to make that if you make things ten times better for the poor they won’t be poor any more they could all be middle class so we do have to pay attention to Caddy’s idea of the one percent everybody’s idea of the one percent I mean there’s a radical redistribution of wealth going on in society and that will eventually shoot the poor and shoot the rich in the foot too. Because where do they get their money ultimately from a lot of us normally ogles spending our money on things that we think will improve the quality of our lives. If you take away the money that allows us to do that to make those consumer choices you’re ultimately going to yank the money supply from the rich. But who wants to do that in order to yank the money supply from the rich. We have to make all of us all of us poor. No The secret is to get a more equitable distribution of the wealth yes to reward people who take big chances. Look at E.M.I. Musk Yeah. Everything he’s done has been a huge huge gamble I mean once upon a time he was not a billionaire. Once upon a time he was a kid just getting out of college. I’m self a question. Payments bank. Well they could but here’s what he did he asked with self what three things are going to do the most to change the very nature of humanity in my lifetime. And he answered that with the internet alternative energy and space. So first he got into item number one the Internet and helped perfect Pay Pal. That’s where he earned his eight hundred million to a billion dollars for and then he went directly directly died of number three space. And his challenge was huge he knew nothing about engineer rocket engineering nothing at all. And but he’s a very determined and stubborn person and the result is America right now is in a space gap. We haven’t been able to get American civilians in the space or Americans of any kind in the space an American vehicle since the shuttle was retired in two thousand and eleven. We’ve been paying seventy five million dollars to take out a total of four billion dollars to the Russians to get our people into space. That’s our gross embarrassment and the only person who shows signs of getting us out of that position in the next year and a half is Elan Musk with capital. Yeah so he deserves to make a lot of money exchange in that in the first billion dollars was the hardest one. That’s what they say I don’t think you and I are ever going to experience that problem. Well the difficulty of it will seem very. But there is more you know if you took an average bunch of kids today and you gave them a Stanford Benet I.Q. test from one thousand nine hundred they would register as marginal geniuses they would register register with I.Q.’s of one hundred thirty five because the average I.Q. is going up thirty five points so again if our great grand parents could deliver that to us we are great grandkids another eighty points on their I.Q. and the list goes on I mean even the heights were four inches taller than we were a little over a hundred years ago. That’s a that but that’s a register of how much we’re better fed better clothed and better house even and now look here everybody. Shoot me for saying this but when you are walking past a poor person sleeping on the sidewalk tears your tears my heart out. When I see that as well. The point is that these guys are wearing fancy highly engineered running shoes they are wearing scintillate and covering themselves with insulate clothing. There they are in a terrible state there’s no way they should be in that state although in many cases they’re in the state because there are literally insane. And they they don’t go into a shelter of any kind. But at least the stuff they’ve got. Here’s an example of stuff they got an eight hundred fifty. There was a real technophile guy who just loved technology. He loved it so much to the side to do build a building unlike any building that had ever been seen on the face of the planet before it was all laugh and steel and he managed to convince countries like Russia and Paraguay and China to send their latest technologies to this building so he could see all the hot new stuff. His name was Prince Albert. His wife was Queen Victoria. They the building he built was a Crystal Palace and he got all these things together all these technologies and eight hundred fifty one for the greatest physician. But he came down at the age of forty two with a stomach ailment. Nobody no one knew what was in that would you know is what it is today. If he had been a homeless person sleeping on a street in the year two thousand and fifteen he would have been sent to an emergency room and the emergency room would have given him antibiotics and he would have lived to the age of seventy or eighty. But no that wasn’t available at no matter what the cost of an eighteen and the eight hundred fifty S. when Prince Albert came down what a stomach problem and he died at the age of forty two. So it isn’t just a matter of more money and more spending we have access to goods that give us powers so far beyond those of the people of eight hundred fifty it’s ridiculous on the western system whatever the heck the western system is has given it and the book The genius of the beast tries to show you what Western religion issues. It seems as though the cultural ideology of sympathy and perhaps self loathing for access rights may be the same as implanting the policies that enable or at least require emergency rooms to turn away. Nobody right within to put these things in place at the same time is a God there. Thank God that policy is there because you know I’m a stone cold atheist but if there’s no God in this universe it’s our job to do her work and and saving the poor and you know I’ve been I was stuck in a hospital overnight and a couple of years ago and I was in the emergency room overnight and there were these raving lunatics three people who managed to do something to themselves that allowed them to get into the emergency room. How do we know for one thing they raved all night they kept the rest of them from getting any rest and some of us were very seriously ill and could not afford to raving all night long. But also the nurses said oh yeah he’s here every two weeks. So there are poor people who are taking advantage of this kind of system but thank God we’ve got it. Thank God we have to take care even of the poor and if we were able to lift them while Step one with a lot of these people is how to get them sane and unfortunately our technologies for sanity are not very good. They’re not much better than they were two thousand years ago. You know that’s an interesting example because I remember at least of a public who looks at celebrity and just sees what looks like almost similar kind of raving and as I was researching your background to me was Tommy you were like the forefront of like the entire Rockstar sort of mythology of like the sixty’s but what you have to realize is if you were if you were a musician and you walked into my office and you were interested in working with me I would give you a speech and the speech went something like this what if you expect me to create an artificial mask an image that I could claim was going to make you a star. I’m going to get you a point. Then immediately with my best competitor I don’t do that you have to recognize that music is not about selling downloads it’s not about selling pieces of plastic. It’s about fucking goddamned human soul and I want to say that on the radio. At any rate but really it’s about human soul when you say you know as much as you can with a damn human soul. So at any rate I explain to you that if you sat down at two o’clock in the afternoon to write a lyric which you are forced to do if you want to be a rock star you are absolutely certain there’s no way in hell you can write a lyric and you don’t have any clue as to how you’ve ever written a lyric in the past. And on a good day all of a sudden my four o’clock in the afternoon there’s a lyric in front of you in fact sometimes lyric is so perfect that it feels to you as if it wrote itself that you didn’t write it. Well my job is to find that deep soul inside of you that wrote that letter. When you go on stage and a really good night you see the pupils of the audience dilating you see their faces melting you see them becoming like one big energy source and that big energy source reaches to you goes through you as if you were a pipe goes to something higher in yourself that you don’t even understand gets utterly transmogrified and comes flooding out through you back to that audience in a kind of reverberate irrate loop. My job is to find the soul inside of you the gods inside of you how can’t you like the marionette that is absolutely amazing. You are the atheist. Absolutely committed to bringing the soul out of the rest of humanity. You’re right you’re right that’s a very accurate assessment. So this is what I taught my my rock stars and I taught them that every year you’re going to go through changes in science are called developmental changes you won’t be the same person you were the year before and if you let me come out and find who that soul is inside of you this year and put you in touch with that you will be able to still speak to your audience when you’re in your fifty’s in your sixty’s. Unfortunately I didn’t stay in the business long enough to do that long term process. Did with John Mellencamp for a while. Prince sort of shied away. He’s really afraid of men I know that sounds crazy but he’s of only five foot two or something like that. So he was probably beaten up a lot when he was a kid or something like that. But I really did not get to put into practice what I really wanted to do which is doing a soul track every single year. Right on until you’re in your seventy’s so that your audience can still find a sense of identity a sense of commonality a sense of the exposure. That’s a really important point because I just got it was remember his name. Are you familiar with the heavy metal producer who is notorious for bringing out every personal anxieties fear and pain point possible in his middle fingers. Wow. No but it sounds very interesting. He is a complete sadist putting down I believe recording with corn several other artists and put them to the furthest women of their own psychological agony to capture into a microphone. Well there is no I would say it was a dark side like evil version of what you’re trying to describe for yourself right because you want ultimately the things that are the most of beauty and the things that dance in the sunshine on the top of mountains to come out of your clients as well as the dark side I mean remember Purple Rain. I’ve been working with Prince since one nine hundred eighty one by the time that film came out and that film was a total manifestation of his agonies and it was of not just a very successful. It grabbed me so powerfully emotionally that it was insane. And the story goes on that movie I got to get these calls from Bob follows a bloody genius. And who is was Prince’s manager. Then he went on to head Disney and they produced nine films Bob has done astonishing things but Bob would call and he’d say You know I have Prince’s lyrics you’re not supposed to know that. So show them to anybody. But if they show up in your office tomorrow at ten thirty in the morning can you tell me what Prince thinks so and yes the answer was always yes because one of the secrets to what I did was I released. Did you intently I spent at least a day alone with you with no minders no anybody to find that soul inside of you and I have found it by using the impact that parts of me. Herman has said there are ten thousand personalities in a closet of the mind all hidden away. The novelist takes out those personalities and lets them play and I took one of those personalities for each of my clients. The one that fit him so I was tuned sickly to my clients from that point on that’s why I could answer a question like What is Prince thinking. But most important I got a phone call I guess it was one hundred eighty three or one nine hundred eighty four from Bob and he said you know we’ve been working on the show might spend two weeks out on the set of the film and we said we’ve been working on this film in the editing room we’ve done everything we possibly can do it it’s just not working it’s just not coming together as a film. We’re showing it to Warner Smar Oh and I need you there. So I flew out to California and Wednesday whatever it was early in the morning the next day and decided to watch the film on a flight which I never do but I wanted to have a standard of comparison and the film that I saw on the flight was absolutely if I had Frank you glance at the president Paramount Pictures had yanked me into the film industry back in one nine hundred seventy three and I knew exactly how I would present this film in a marketing mout to Paramount Pictures. If it were my film because that Richard Dreyfus and Susan Sarandon and it was the story of a single mother trying to raise her kid and then falling in love with a guy who pays some rent because she’s at the age of ten it he’s running one of the rooms. Well at that point single motherhood white single motherhood was a brand new phenomena and no one was speaking for those single mothers yet no one was giving the sense of being a movement of having a group identity of not being alone. This film or was should have been perfect and when I watched it I realized it wasn’t working. It just wasn’t working. Despite the perfection of the marketing memos that I could write and how did I know it wasn’t working. Because when you see a film. If it’s really successful. You don’t want anybody to see you when it’s over because there are tears in the corners of your eyes you’re all choked up you really can’t talk. It’s the lump in the throat and the tear in the corner of the eye factor and this film didn’t have it. Well I went over to the studio where Purple Rain was screening for Warner Brothers and it was a giant Screening Room one hundred thirty five seats which is rare. Usually it’s a screening room with twenty seats. And Bob wanted me to sit next to him. Bulk of our Prince’s manager No I couldn’t do that because I didn’t want anybody to see me. I wanted to know if a lump in the throat and tear in the corner of the eye factor was at work and if anybody was around inhibiting me if I knew people were watching me. That wouldn’t happen so I went way in the back of the screening room and I watched it all by myself and wow I mean it hit at a god level and it did that here in the corner of the eye thing and it did the throat. I’m a shoe now unable to talk thing it was one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen in my life. Wired As I think about that actually because that just isn’t a personal protection thing is it just the level of vulnerability or add or is that protecting your own power in a very powerful players. Well you have to work with what you’ve got and what you’ve got is your humanity and and if you were in a power setting if you were in a setting where you have to demonstrate authority and demonstrate mastery then you can’t let those those little flaws in your nature come to the surface. You don’t want people to see you when you’re crying you don’t want people to see you when you can’t talk when you just can’t talk because you’re too choked up that’s not your best moment. So what you do is if you are still registering being in a power setting you know allow yourself to have those feelings it’s automatic. It’s not something you choose it’s just automatic. So you have to know yourself well enough to know how to play yourself you’re like an instrument. But if you’re going to this is unless that your vulnerability was to product to connect to the rest of the public then right. Oh yes. Absolutely absolutely. So we went into the conference room and it was all over next door and there was a perhaps there was a full time film P.R. firm brought in on the case because Bob didn’t know about my background in film at all and besides I was known as leading music publicist and in the record industry not as a film publicist. So we went to the side room into the conference room and the first people and they were going around the table trying to get opinions of the film because everybody had just seen it for the first time except Bob and they started with the film publicists and the film publicists and ice and said This is a dead movie. Nothing’s going to happen it’s going to be impossible to work this film. They didn’t say it in exactly those words they tried to be diplomatic but that was the point. And then and then they got to me and I stood up and I said what this film is history. This film is as much history as the Beatles deciding to write their own songs in an environment where everybody had sung songs from Tin Pan Alley which produced a revolution that they were expressing their own feelings when they went on stage. It totally changed the nature of the music industry. That’s what this film is going to do for a film and then I gave them a little history of the film industry in the one nine hundred thirty S. where for example the Wizard of Oz was made secretly slosh budget and really didn’t do anything in its first roughly three years and then became the Wizard of Oz despite studio resistance and I said you cannot kill this film if you kill this film you will be making a historical error you will be you will be desecrated in the human soul and heart and it worked. You were like at the tipping point of like these urgent changes and sort of a public consciousness you know and that that characterizes what I’m doing with the team at Cal Tech which I was about to mention to you I mean we’re designing these things called interplanetary smart tiles and we want to put a cluster. Put sixteen hundred of them up with one dragon capsule and we want to put sixteen hundred first in low earth orbit to show what they can do and they harvest sunlight they harvest radio waves and turn them into electricity and they harvest thermal energy. So there are triple killer comes to harvesting energy plus they have a brain and when you get sixteen hundred of them their brains relate to each other and swarm intelligence. So we want to put six hundred up there to supply power to Cube Sats. A lot of college kids are designing Cube Sats these days and send them up and commercial ventures. There’s a company that is has put together an extra that will extrude this high premium fiber optic cable. Very very expensive fiber optic cable and if they do it in space where it’s weightless they’ll get perfect fiber optic cable when they do want to earth. They get imperfections and there are a bunch of companies like that designing safe made in space is already got a three D. printer on the International Space Station. So we’ll supply power but it’s a demonstration. Then we do sixteen hundred of these things on the moon in order to provide the energy to take a lunar ice and turn it into rocket fuel hydrogen oxygen and like with water. Then we put we want to put sixteen hundred of them on Mars and we really designed these for Mars again to provide a computing platform or cloud computing for all practical purposes swarm intelligence with learning algorithms to store up energy and to use that energy to again take the water from three feet below the Martian surface and turn it into rocket fuel and breathable oxygen and drink water so that twenty years from now when the first humans get there they’ve got all the supplies and when it comes to hydrogen oxygen and drinkable water and breathable air that they that they need and they brought in people from the energy from the Energy Department the State Department DARPA I.B.M. and MIT and the MIT or the I.B.M. guy. They brought in is amazing because he works with a computer called Deep Blue jeans that has instead of one processor everything is lined up to go through that one processor. It had one hundred fifty six thousand seven hundred twenty processors or something like that just right out of the Linux kernel to be able to support that that was a joke like Linux always Azzam whatever they updated it someone’s like oh yeah I made it so we can have a million processes at once out it just makes us want to spy problems like no why would I. Well yes that’s the goal I mean because your brain is a ten billion or one hundred billion unit multi parallel processor each one of your neurons is capable of functioning on its own but it’s built to function in a team and all these neurons are functioning simultaneously and in concert. In fact what the what DARPA’s the is the one the DARPA program manager was there who is financing the Dharma more hendra out at I.B.M. sell the dental labs in California to simulate the brain first. They simulated the brain of a rat. Then they simulated the brain of a cat and now they are working their way up to a human brain because they feel that if they can create enough parallelism anough similarity to the brain they’ll get an emergent property consciousness. Well also there’s a question for you because I don’t I listen to your stuff and everything has been a motivation for the development of human race based upon basically killing sucking and eating as like the primary like thing that like progress is all cultures for it. So our digital entity that we’re creating from this perspective is it’s going to be what energy or is it to be able to have that kind of drive. Well I mean when it comes to energy that’s where the letter to the Pope that I work that I just sent out comes in because harvesting solar energy in space and getting it down to earth provides an infinite energy resource and you don’t need energy wars anymore. You can actually hear prayer so if you actually try that yet so I’ll have to check. Except the turn this is going to sound really crazy acts. So strap yourself in. I really don’t know that they are. Yeah I had sounded sane but I I do my laptop ing In other words my work at a place called the cocoa bar these days here in Park Slope Brooklyn and the cocoa bar was taken over by new owners roughly two or three months ago. The new owner is Italian. It turns out that the new owner has made headlines all over Italy many many many times and has won many many awards because she used to own a discotheque and nightclub restaurant kind of thing and was very successful and the mob started sending people into her dance floor and starting fights and making things impossible for her. And basically the mob What are the cut of the action. So she went to the home to the little town where the mafia comes from and she got the women together and she said You have got to stop your men from doing this violent behavior and it was a brilliant approach and think of the balls it takes to do that when your life is under threat. So she formed an organization basically of wives of mafia members to stand up against what their husbands were doing and she won all kinds of awards and then she became a thorn in the side of the mob. So they beat her up they knocked out all over teeth they broke her arm. Among other things and she left Italy because it was a safer that’s why she’s in the States. But but she did spend time with the pope because the pope gave her an award. So I went to and I didn’t know that I didn’t know she’d spent time with the pope which she told told me this whole amazing story yesterday for the first time. So here I am trying to find a way to get to the pope in addition to just sending a letter and hear him or coffee shop every day working. Yeah well so I went to her and I said Rosie do you have any way to get to the pope. I know this sounds insane but remember once upon a time. A Buzz Aldrin the second man on the moon. Together with the eleventh President Dr A.P.J. called Skype on my laptop to work on promoting the idea of space solar power and I did it in order to get to the president. Now that sounds really unlikely and felt like a fantasy but I get it. And one day I was in China and discovered that the president was about to go to Florida and was about to give a speech on his space policy. Well if we could reach him any time before he gave that speech we could influence if we reach him after he gave that speech it will be too late because the speech will be so or the policy would be set in stone. So I sent an e-mail to buzz saying buzz we have seven hours to get to the president and two hours later I got an e-mail I’m in Chengdu China. For God’s sakes I got an e-mail back saying Howard I am on earth Force One. So these things I’m trying to put together sound absurd ridiculous and nonsensical. But but they can be done. They can be done. I guess the strength of your network read them apparently because Rosie just you should have seen her light up. Yes we’re talking going around then practically I mean what she also said is you need to get headlines in the Italian papers. Let me introduce you to feel my friends in the Italian press who’ve been doing headline stories on me. That’s terrific. That’s fantastic that’s exactly what we need and yes she’s the owner of this they have the most amazing pastries ever seen. And admittedly I was in Vienna two weeks ago and my friends kept saying it’s the pastries and it’s the pastries about Vienna I never saw a single pastry and not one I didn’t see a single bakery in Vienna on a similar connection the only way we’re having this phone call is because yeah D.-MI was leaving a trip after having seen you and me and my college classmate and subsuming next to her on the plane. Oh my gosh. And amazing. And hands of just been like. Introduce himself very politely as he does because he’s kind of a brat is the tameness guy ever right when it comes to normality to me what’s right and teams thinking Who the fuck is this boring guy. And now they’re married. Amazing guy. And now the groomsmen on Brad’s side at the wedding. And since then we’ve just been how we put a show together and here we are. Well that’s that’s amazing that’s very well that’s how it happens. Yeah the six degrees of separation to me sounds a little flick and I don’t trust. Well that’s everyone in the world so that you can take it like as far as you want to go for that one great big ones you can find smaller ones probably. Meantime I thought you know what I was in Vienna. I was speaking at first I went to Toronto and I spoke three times at the National Space Society’s annual meeting and I was I’m on the board and the Board of Governors. And it’s great fun to do board meetings because you sit there and people are droning on and on if you catch the drift of what they’re saying. You can see some implication of what a bunch of them are saying that they don’t see and if you wait and wait and wait and then open your mouth and give them that implicit something they welcome it and it influences their action for the next year. So board meetings can be enormous fun but then I went to the to give two speeches to the International Society for Information Studies in Vienna. They were doing a summit and I met some people who put me into all the foundations of information science group. And yesterday the leader of the group sent out this note saying you must realize that in this group you must write in scholarly language well OK if I’m ever forced to write in scholar language I quit and I won’t quit. I’ll continue writing it right. So so I so I was prepared to be thrown out of this group. That’s what I was prepared for about four hours ago when I went over to the Cocoa bar and I got in when I open my laptop. It’s in the mail from the leader of the group saying why don’t we move all of our discussions into the foundation for Information Sciences Group. So I had to write him a note and I haven’t seen his answer yet saying Pedro. Remember I don’t write that way. I don’t write in a scholarly language I think it’s in fact a crime to write in scholarly language or Wilde said something to the effect of until you’ve written what you have to say they’re all English you don’t really know whether you have anything to say thank you and if you can’t write. Yeah I mean Stein said to be a genius it’s not enough to come up with a theory only seven men in the world can understand. You have to be able to come up with a genius with an idea that only seven men in the world can understand then you have to be able to explain it so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it. And Einstein through a book told me that at the age of twelve absolutely gave me gave it to me as a life command so I sent those quotes Oscar Wilde and Einstein to Pablo the leader of the group by the way his name as you won’t believe this Pablo marihuana M A R I J U A N. Does that suggest anything strange to you at any rate I think like a man supports individual freedom and liberty. That’s right. So and you know I’m in a movie that supports this I mean I got up I’m in six upcoming movies one of them’s out and it’s called what is it called again the culture high and it’s a movie about the damage of the drug war has done to American society and when they called me they said We’re doing a movie about marijuana we want you in it and then I said I haven’t used marijuana since one nine hundred seventy two and I never liked it. I never ever liked it and I said that doesn’t matter doesn’t matter. We’re going to show up your house in two weeks be ready for us. So I’m in that movie and you know I went to see the opening hour one of the first weeks performances of it and I went with a filmmaker has been documenting my life for the last year and a half or so. He’s taking two hours of. Two hundred hours of footage on me. So we watch the show it’ll be a good conversation. Well so Richard Branson is in it and Seth Rogen is in it. And Lester Grinspoon from Harvard is in it and my heart is breaking because it looks to me like I didn’t really make it into the movie I mostly made it on the cutting room floor. And then when the lights go on this filmmaker is leaning back and he says you realize how many time you times you’re in this movie don’t you. And I said no because I think I didn’t end up in the movie at all. He said that one hundred times. So when Newsweek came out with a review two weeks later there were only two people from the movie quoted in they were not Richard Branson and Seth Rogen they were Lester Grinspoon who got one quote and me and they gave two quotes and they use one of my quotes as the kicker the emotional tag at the end of the piece the grand finale of the piece so I asked a soul out of marijuana. Right. So who knows. It’s a very crazy world is crazy. But you’re you’re right we’re always on the tipping point of things and if we network sufficiently and we should that’s good for us. I mean humans can’t exist without ties to other human beings. So if we were sufficiently then we will be there at the tipping points especially if we believe very deeply in the obligation of each one of us to make history when as it only humans are humans like us who’ve ever made history that is a very interesting just like fried right there is like as a belief point. It’s everyone’s obligation to make history. One day I was being flown down to Washington by the Air Force to talk about harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it down to earth and then you know how do you know how you’re when you’re in the waiting room at an airport you will automatically you just can’t help us this is a basic human instinct. You automatically scan the room for the prettiest one and then you hope that you get seated next year. And Max it never happens. And having me while I was happy was nice Well it and it happened to me on this one. So I’m sitting on this. Yeah right exactly. Mary so. So I’m sitting next to this interactive and trying to the British Germans chatter up and all of a sudden they hear the stentorian voice behind me. Howard is that you. And it turns out to be Buzz Aldrin. So you know you’re trying to hit the plane and some way that’s not such a guy in the movies going all Buddy it’s good to see you. Yes I’m fraid that’s what happened that’s not what story I have ever saw. Well so when we finally deplaned I stood at the door of the plane waiting for buzz and we took that you know how long that walk is no matter what airport you’re in from your off ramp to the luggage terminal I mean it seems to take forever if you can find it at all. So we took that long long walk together and I started lecturing buzz on the subject of how it’s the obligation of us humans with dandruff and that some make strange noises in the bathroom and we think nobody else makes to make talking history. If you on that point which OK but talking I mean letters Alexander the Great was one of those people Julius Caesar was one of those people Napoleon was one of those people. And look at Winston Churchill who saved Western civilization. He had a depression so bad that he called it his black dog. He couldn’t sleep normal hours. He did weird things like he’d have dinner parties every night because he was living in a mansion out in the countryside that it belonged to his family for hundreds of years and and then when they finish Cheri at the end of the meal he go into a side room where he had an entire staff a night staff working because that’s what he do is writing from one o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the morning. But most important was his depression I mean Little around him podgy and he was an alcoholic for God’s sakes. And he was he was addicted to cigarettes. And yet. This guy saved Western civilization. So all those can do it for all those reasons like do you think in today’s climate to someone like Churchill could ascend into a position of that kind of power. Yes OK Yes I think the world is right. You put it that you put it very well when you said that somehow I always seem to be right in the middle of some tipping point. Well it’s only the tipping point if you can see it and there are some of us who well and I’m sure all of us can do this. When you step into a situation where a bunch of people are converging problem sometimes you are the only one who can see the problem. And sometimes you are the only one who can see the solution. And without you the whole thing doesn’t move forward but with you it does. So you can be the catalyst and that’s what I mean look at my life I have no right to be doing any of these things. I mean aside from the fact that I got into science at the age of ten into microbiology in theoretical physics and I when I was twelve I was carrying around engineering pamphlets on the various speeds of rockets and how they could someday possibly a certain speed get something into space that would permanently orbit the earth at that point it was one nine hundred when I was ten years old with one hundred fifty three and at that point nothing had ever no human thing and ever orbited this planet. But so I was carrying around these engineering manuals Not that I understand engineering I do not but and how likely is it that a person with that background is going to end up in the music business founding the biggest P.R. firm in the music industry. How likely is it that that person is going to be credited with founding of attire magazines are the Heavy Metal magazine then then how likely is it that he’s going to put the eleventh President of India and Buzz Aldrin together and get an e-mail saying Howard I’m an airforce one. None of this stuff is likely but how as a human being it’s your job to do the most so likely if you see something process like it requires not following somebody else’s plan but I was just going for your heart or whatever you see. It’s like what if you put your finger on it you go with your passions you go with your curiosities in two thousand and one. I vented a new term called them knowledge and then I wrote a manifesto for it and it’s for kids who are in their software year of college and they’re interested in art history neurobiology and cinema and everybody including their parents was saying smock make up your mind until you make up your mind about one of these things you’re a nobody you know it’s that period in life where you go through the Who am I question. Yeah. Eat your heart out and some people commit suicide over. Well I’m Knology says hey tell people your own knowledge as to why because I’m Knology is the right to follow every single one of those curiosities for the rest of your life. Follow them as long as you are passionate about them. If you lose your passion shelve them for a little while and if new curiosities come up add them to your bouquet add them to your tool kit and when you’re forty years old and all of your friends are having a midlife crisis and they are all wondering why the hell they aren’t planet earth and they’re buying little red sports cars and picking up ones in order to somehow validate themselves you will just be coming back from the wilderness with your first messages the first messages that come from your multiple curiosities and they will be unlike the messages of anybody else on the face of planet Earth and you will know why you are here and you will be just at the beginning of the most exciting forty years of your life. So you write my pain point all right because like sophomore year of college was probably most needed to hear that precise message. Well the SO I. Couple of kids I’m finding kids I don’t have time to promote this but I’m finding kids who need it and I’m telling them about sending them the manifesto and hopefully it will help them out of this jam. And now there’s another word for something like this it’s conciliate comes from E.O. Wilson. But there’s a very deliberate difference between knowledge and consoling and consoling it’s implies laying down and taking it. Getting up and Knology is the aspiration to all nations. If there is no job God It is our job to do the work. That means omniscience and omnipotence. There are not things that you and I will never achieve in our lifetime but if we don’t go for them with all our heart all of our strength all of our might we’re not going to advance the cause of either humans nature or most basically the cosmos says we do things the cosmos is never seen before. When we invented the smartphone that was something that nature and this cosmos had never ever experienced before. So we are the great changers. We are the great bringers of the next steps of the cosmic evolution. You’ve been very profound values for what the for not believe in God can very profound values for what God should be or represents or to force and it should have on the rest of us. Absolutely I mean I’ve got this. Let me see if I can find it in the laptop I’ve got this same look like yours of Campbell honestly like this whole mythology is wildly important it doesn’t matter which one is true or not or something. Well follow your joys follow your bliss. That’s Joseph Campbell Listen to this. Since there is no God It is our job to do the work. God is not a being. She is an aspiration a gift a vision a goal to seek. Ours is the responsibility of making a cool universe turn just of turning pains to understand things 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. But to realize 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. So that’s it that’s I wrote that and that’s sort of my creed of the thousand purse. Why would you have to sign. How they resolved into that storm well and also I don’t maybe this is just my approach but you have to find the most extreme experiences you can you have to get to know people of all kinds from all different corners of life you have to come to understand them with those hidden personalities because coming to understand them brings out the hidden personalities in you and the more of those you can tap when you’re making decisions about things the greater your food lack of a better word your wisdom will be and believe me other people need your wisdom. They really do. So what else should we cover here. I mean we’ve done everything from the pope to and space. We haven’t done anything beneath the ground it’s I can tell you one interesting thing about stuff and if the ground we’re being taught that we are burning up the resources of this planet and that is a violent why life in general when it when it got started it was imperialistic It was ambitious and it was colonialist they’re going to send out shoots to as many untouched places as it could and its job was to kidnap seduce or recruit as many dead atoms as it could possibly get it’s not hands on but it’s chemical bonds on and bring them into this grand enterprise of life and it was up against a deadline. There’d been one hundred forty two mass extinctions on this planet because this is the planet of climate change and climate catastrophe always has been. So the draw the job of life was to stretch into as many unexpected nooks and crannies as you possibly could to turn as many poisons as you could into new for new sources of food before the next mass extinction comes and if you fly from New York to L.A. for example a look at look beneath you once you get past Pennsylvania everything is brown there is very little life and you realize how thin that tiny little crust of life is on planet earth and when you look at it carefully for every ounce of bio stuff living stuff there are one hundred twenty million ounces of dead stuff just. Waiting to be brought into the bio process into this grand enterprise of life so the idea that we’re running out of resources is foolish. All running out of his imagination. Once upon a time in the fifteen hundred sixteen hundreds the English were terrified they were having what they call the timber crisis they were afraid because they turned so much former Forest in the farmland that they were going to have enough timber to keep their houses to make stealing or to make iron and glass and most especially to make warships and that timber graces that fear of tem regresses lasted for roughly one hundred fifty years that England ever run out of temper and all among other things they invented steel ships. That’s the big way around it. England thought it was going to run out of timber for fuel. What did they discover. Well they threw a bunch of people out of their society for not going along with the Episcopal Church they were called non-conformists and they wouldn’t let the non-conformists into their schools so the non-conformist had a set of schools of their own and they taught their kids modern science instead of teaching the old quadrivium and Trivium Latin and Greek and stuff like that and their kids discovered this toxic waste in the wilds of England it was this black stuff that seemed to be good for just about nothing. And they discovered that you could burn it and they built canals which had not been built in England before eventually they built railroads and they hold the stuff in the big cities like London so it could be used for fuel it was called coal the way around it timber crisis was to get beyond timber and find some out something else that could be used as a resource often something that was either dead an indifferent or often something that’s a poison was a rock was an answer no extract. Yeah exactly I mean it was eight hundred forty eight hundred forty eight and and a new form of lamp had been invented about forty years earlier that gave a brilliant pure white light. It was phenomenal. The problem. Was it was came from the fat of whales and it was whale oil and it cost the equivalent of two hundred dollars a gallon. So only the super rich could afford it. So people in three different locations Canada Poland and I forget the third. We’re working on taking out another toxic gook that had only been used for medicine up until then and turning it into a substitute for whale oil and the toxic glow was what we call petroleum and the stuff that they that they invented was kerosene and kerosene was able to give a quality of life equal to that of the whale oil for roughly a dollar sixty a gallon. Well what John David Rockefeller did he do two things. If you bought in the early days because there was a guy who’d come up from the god knows where to Pennsylvania and realized or at least he thought that if he drilled a standard water well in territory that was using this black gook he might hit a motherload of the Black Rock and that was bust began oil drilling and the oil drillers all refine their own oil and if they sold you a five gallon jug of their oil it came with a lamp because they were trying to hook you on using this new form of lay up of there was a great difficulty when you ran out of the jug of kerosene. You went down to the market and you bought another jug of kerosene every jug of kerosene was distilled differently. I was refined differently and that meant that when you had your lamp all set for the first five gallons you used and you put in the new kerosene often the lamp blew up in your face the number of burning cases that you see in the records. What is this. Oh my God this is my new phone and says it’s listening to everything that we’re saying give me a break. We’ve got perpetual surveillance. Yeah. So at any rate. So. So there were all of the. People who are being blown up by their lamps and this is a small problem. So Rockefeller set out to do something he called standardizing the oil so that every five gallon jug of oil you’ve got no matter where you go out in the world would fit the lamp that you had adjusted for your very first five gallons of oil and you wouldn’t have lamps exploding on you. That’s where standard oil came from. And the other thing that Rockefeller did you know he was being persecuted for his secret deals with the railroads. Well he made secret deals with railroads in order to get costs down and that allowed him to drive the cost of kerosene down from two dollars a gallon to six cents a gallon. Think what that did for the quality of human life. It meant that in one thousand nine hundred only the super rich could afford to stay up all night drinking dancing and playing cards. And the poor were left in the shadows. They had to go to bed when the sun set. This gave an extra five hours of life to the average human being including the poor. An extra five hours of life. That’s like an extra six years. It’s like a life. Yeah it’s so you know the guy. Well that’s hard to come down on him for doing mean in the ass these things because in the end is mean and nasty things benefited huge huge numbers of people in your mind. Would you be would you say that it’s our job less to focus on the problems that are happening now and more on the potential of what we can make out of it. Well I think you put your finger on the two ends of the spectrum and I think we have to focus on the problems of now fifty percent and we have to focus fifty percent on the possibilities of what can be. Because generally it’s the possibilities of what can be that solve the problems we’re having now. The way antibiotics solve the problem of of the kind of illness that knocked off the poor prince Prince Albert when he was a mere forty two years old it was moving into the future with. All new possibilities possibilities that had no one had even had a clue to that. That would have saved the life of Prince Albert if he could he have been alive one hundred fifty years later. So constantly moving to the future constantly follow your curiosities because it’s a future that’s going to redeem the past and the present. So violence is a very big topic particularly religiously motivated or sexually motivated right perhaps most recently in Charleston South Carolina and ongoing in Middle Eastern conflict areas. I guess to find this is a question how do we combat media that’s let’s say designed to destroy We have affectively fought it to the point where there’s ten times as much peace in the world as there was and sixteen fifty and because we are so we’re so down on ourselves we’re so accustomed to criticizing ourselves we’re so accustomed to saying that we are the worst people in the history of mankind. There was a radical change that took place in one in the seventeen hundreds of eighteen hundred and intil Seventeen hundred people have gotten their jollies by tying a chicken to a post and a live chicken and then little boys would pelt it with stones and they would love every minute of its agony and they would pelt it to death. They would do similar things with cats. It was appalling what these kids and dogs for sport and torture was considered a great public spectacle if there was going to be a torturer hanging. Everybody took a picnic basket and went and around seven hundred that changed and people started caring for their pets and seeing their personalities and their pets and becoming concerned about cruelty toward animals and toward other human beings. We still don’t know what the roots were of this humanitarian revolution but whatever it is we have to take it further. So in the case of Islam that means today a friend of mine who is I am. My biggest fan splits his time between Pakistan and Dubai. He is the trainer to the stars of the Pakistani national cricket team which is our equivalent to the N.F.L.. No not at all because he’s very he’s he’s got a lot of courage Plus there’s a sheik who made Dubai what it is today. He is the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and he doubles as the sheikh who runs Dubai. And he’s named are a source after one of my books. So I seem to be popular in Dubai at least at the highest levels. So at any rate my friend is very disturbed about what’s happening in Pakistan because there are extremist murders there are usually hottest murders going mult mass murders going on virtually every day. And he said look I think your way of thinking has to be taught to the people of Pakistan so since we can’t bring you there let me put you on a conference call with three of the most important people in Pakistan so you put me on the phone with a guy who runs four billion owns a four billion dollar business a guy who only owns seven hundred fifty million dollar business with officers from seventeen countries and the head of the former head of the Pakistani Software Association who was its head as a Pakistani software industry doubled in size and. Hussein the friend who ran the Pakistani software industry reads my Facebook page and when I talk about Islamic extremism and when I talk about the roots of Islamic extremism in the Qur’an and in the the holy books of Islam because I know those books very well. He disagrees with me and I love it when he disagrees with me I love it that he pays attention to my page. It’s true cultivating people like this who are tolerant pluralist and modernists that we will eventually get somewhere with Islamic Jihad. We have to do everything in our power to have to give these people. A strength to prevail over their worst elements. And it’s very hard because if you know the how these in the Qur’an you know that ISIS is following the Hadid in the Qur’an word for word that they are following the example of Mohammed’s life word for word. Step by step that Mohammad was he never called himself the prophet of peace. He called himself a proper war. And some of bin Laden used to call him the prophet of conquest. And in fact he was he commanded sixty five military campaigns. He personally led twenty seven of them. He was very big on beheadings very big outings he seemed to enjoy it so he was and the universal Suna foundation in Pakistan claims very proudly that that Mohammad during his ten years of military activity conquered one hundred thirteen square miles of territory a day a day and within a hundred years of Muhammad’s death Islam had taken a territory. Eleven times the size of the kind of quests of Alexander the Great five times the size of the Roman Empire and seven times the size of the United States the biggest empire literally in the history of the world. And so there is justification in the life of Mohammad for everything that ISIS is doing and they cite those justifications in their publication to beak their glossy magazine. But it’s done the less it is the people like Hussein who disagrees with this entire interpretation of Islam and who runs by I think you will provide a perfect example of the same thing. The easiest way to criticize atheism is just pure humanism but you are wildly concerned of the state of the human soul. Right. And the state of humanity in general and this day and the future evolution of human history I want to see it continue to evolve which means I want to look our job is to conceive the absolutely impossible to bring it into the realm. Of the conceivable then to bring it from the conceivable into the real where it becomes at first a novelty then to make it a commodity so that we all can take it for granted and use it as a stair step to see the next level of the impossible. So our job so that value. Do you see that opportunity in the house. It depends. Again people like Hussein believe that Islam is a religion of peace and they will cite verses from the Qur’an and they will cite verses from the just as the guys in ISIS will do to support that. Well it’s our job to support them to the best of our ability. So I wrote a note saying today you disagree with something that I said and it always carries my heart a little bit when he disagrees with something that I say. But I wrote him a note to tell him I’m extremely grateful that he continues to follow my Facebook page after knowing