Drinking from the Firehose with Howard Bloom

So I'm here tonight talking to Howard Bloom, who's a fascinating person and an author of many books, and a polymath of sorts. We've known each other by electronic communication for quite a long time—it's something exceeding a decade—but we've never met either in person or electronically by video until now. 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.

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. Then we're going to talk about his newest book, which is called "How I Accidentally Started the 60s," and then, well, we're going to see where it goes from there. So, Howard, thanks for showing up here and let's see where we can go. Why don't you tell everybody about yourself?

Howard: Well, it's a pleasure to see you in person because I think it's been about 14 years, maybe 15 years that we've known each other. I put together a Science of the Soul initiative a long time ago, and you were one of those kind enough to sign on. But I am the author of six books. The first book is called "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History," and even though it's about 25 years old, people are buying it because it feels like it was written yesterday for tomorrow, and people call it their Bible.

The second book is "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century," and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the United States reformed based on that book and brought in people from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. The third book is called "The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism." I preferred its original title, which was "Reinventing Capitalism: Parting Soul from 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.

His former minister of development, who's on Dubai's ruling council and runs a thirty-three billion dollar sovereign real estate company that built the tallest building in the world, went in front of the Arabian Business and Economic Forum and told them there is a book that I particularly resonate with; it's "The Genius of the Beast," and it contains the future of Dubai. 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. Kalam 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 chaired the Asian Space Technology Summit with large groups of representatives from China, the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, and from the 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 my background is in science, my life is science, my bones and my flesh are science—and it became the most successful PR firm in the record industry.

So I worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, 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 would 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.

Jordan: Yes, and I was just reading that book about a week ago.

Howard: And thought, what did you think of it?

Jordan: Oh? I thought it was very funny. It was—it was—I also thought it was remarkable that you managed to have a foreword by—or was it? It wasn't a foreword, I don't think it was—by Timothy Leary.

Howard: Yes! Well, let me tell you how that came about. There I was—well, it was about 1981, and I started to go back to my science. Yes, I was running the most successful PR firm in the music industry. Yes, we were still on the ascent. Yes, we were establishing taking unknowns like Prince and establishing them as major stars, or Joan Jett, who had been turned down by twenty-three 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, you need to write a book.” 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; by 1988 I had gotten up and running and written the first chapters on a vacation, and then I came down—well, two things happened. First, I really needed to get out of publicity in the music industry. I had satisfied all of my intellectual questions because there were SATA questions I was answering. What are the mass exhilarations, the mass ecstasies, the mass emotions that are the forces of history that power historical change? That's what I was after, and you see that in miniature with the Beatles, or with Michael Jackson, or with Prince.

So I had 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 to talk about representing him; I wasn't interested. I'd been through all of this.

So 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 did you manage it? So I guess that's two questions. But also, what did you learn from all of that?

Howard: Well, these are very good questions to prepare me for this! Martin Gardner, from the time I was ten, 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. 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!

Jordan: So okay, so elaborate on that.

Howard: 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 listened to music obsessively from the time I was about ten years old. My uncle and I used to stand next to a huge old burl wood radio that was as tall as I was at the time, and it had a giant speaker in it. In those days, twelve-inch speakers—nobody received twelve-inch speakers—but it had one. And we'd listen to the classical music station in Canada because we were in Buffalo on the border, and we would compete to see who could 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, Bartok, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Mozart—stuff like that. So I can't really say that I was properly prepared because I was hated by the other kids my age in Buffalo. 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 listened to popular music. So popular music, what started as with Elvis Presley—what was around before Elvis Presley? And then moved on— that was alien music to me, and I wasn't the least bit interested in it. But in the 1970s and late 1960s and early 1970s, I knew I had fellowships at four grad schools in what is now called neuroscience. At that point, it was a do-it-yourself proposition. I was going to have to take courses in the med school at Columbia and put them together with courses in psychology at Columbia and make my own neuroscience because there were no neuroscience courses.

But I had four fellowships to do this, and I realized that grad school would be Auschwitz for the mind. Why? Because I was fascinated by these ecstatic mass fashions that give people a boost, that lift people out of themselves—that 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 into an academic career. I'd be spending the rest of my life giving paper and pencil tests to twenty-two 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? Zero!

The entire phenomena I wanted to understand would not be there anywhere in my life. So I took advantage of the fact that I had basically been kidnapped in my junior year by the poet-in-residence at NYU who had said, he 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. The chair of the poet-in-residence said to me, "Look, last year I asked you to be on the staff of the literary magazine; you didn't even show up. This year, you are the literary magazine. You don't even have a faculty advisor. The minute you walk out that door, you're it."

Now walk out that door. And I walked out the door looking totally baffled because I hated literary magazines—they were the most boring things you had ever seen! You could have a group of Vikings, each of whom had drunk a quart of ale, bonking each other and if you put a literary magazine in the room that pale blue cover and the mist 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 grew up with lab rats and hamsters—not with human beings! But I followed him obediently down the stairs, and when we sat down at the coffee shop, and I ordered water and he ordered coffee, he said, "If you could do anything you want with this magazine, what would it be?"

And I said, "A picture book!" So that, that'd be Jordan.

I learned that question—that question is a very valuable tool. So I turned it into an experimental graphics magazine, and it was a wild hit! And it was a wild hit not just on campus where they doubled our budget for the second issue; it was a wild hit in the art directorial community.

I think you covered that in "How I Accidentally Started the 60s," right?

Jordan: I think, yeah, there.

Howard: 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 assumed 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 formed an art studio, and the first year we were in $75 apiece, 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 importantly, 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 New York City.

Jordan: So yeah, you're responsible! That was—I got to thank you for that because I listened to album-oriented FM stations a lot when I was a kid!

So, and a lot—I mean, lots of people did. But I didn't know you had a hand in that, so that was a very good thing.

Howard: 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—

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.

Jordan: That it was ABC PG or Ruth got his start there.

Howard: 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. Its art director was all those people who had called me after he saw the Washington Square review, the student literary—the graphics magazine that I had been putting together. But the promotion person at ABC was extremely kind to me.

And every time I walked in, I’d hear Carole King or James Taylor, who were the biggest people in rock music at the time, on the speakers on the floor. And she would do things like—I mean, she was just clueing 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 going to have a live performance in Studio B by a pianist! Why don't I give you two tickets?"

So I took her two tickets. I went down to my art studio on 4th Street and 2nd Avenue in the East Village. And my leading artist was just a brilliant, brilliant cartoonist, and I invited him to come to this event with me.

We went to the event, the pianist took through the stage, my artist sat next to me, and from the minute the pianist played his first chord, my artist was on his feet going, "Wow! Yippee! Yahoo!"—and totally embarrassing me! I mean, I wanted to crawl under the seat and become absolutely invisible. The pianist on stage was Elton John!

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 special vantage point.

So why do you think—You know, there's a kind of contradictory narrative that runs through that story, which is that, you know, when you were a kid, you were sort of isolated; you were bookish; you were more scientifically oriented. But at the same time, you obviously had a—what would you call it? A feel for ecstatic experience. Was that a consequence of your participation in the counterculture in the 60s, or was that something that had emerged even before that?

Howard: It was something that emerged probably between the age of 10 and 12. It probably came from the fact that I was suffering serious social deprivation. I really—I had one friend at a time, and that's about as much as I had. And I was an indispensable figure when it came time to beat somebody up because I was the target!

Jordan: 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 isolated childhood experiences, do you think?

I mean, you said it had something to do with music, which makes perfect sense to me, because music is almost, what would you say? It's an unerring gateway into that ecstatic experience.

Howard: Right, and for very complex reasons! I'd like to talk to you about that a little bit, but it isn't obvious why someone who was more scientifically oriented, say, would also make that leap over to the more mystical end of things. And then, of course, pursue it through pop culture!

So you laid out, you know, your surprising involvement with the literary magazine, your transformation of that into what was essentially a visual art publication, your entry into the world of radio, and then into rock. I don't want to lose that thread because that also leads to your PR firm, and I presume we're getting to that.

But right, what do you think is—can there anything you can put your finger on? You associated there also with being physically bullied and being a social outcast. But why did that give you the hunger for that experience, for that ecstatic experience?

Howard: Well remember back to the days of the 1960s and 1970s? 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, and didn't give them access to each other as peers until 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.

Jordan: 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 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? Sometimes I wonder if part of that isn't a consequence of play deprivation in childhood.

Howard: Well, 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 ten thousand 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 a lucky thin with a huge nose—I can identify! And he always wore suits though, and he was always a teacher's pet, and the result was the other kids hated him. He was kicked around and beaten and excluded the way that I'd been kicked around and beaten and excluded.

Then one day a neighbor was in his kitchen who was into a Ouija board and making contact with spirits through the Ouija board. 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 or 17th century." And you’re pointing to Alice—I'm pointing to his name, who was Vincent Fournier at the time.

Pointing to Vince, "You are my modern reincarnation, and my name is Alice Cooper!" Now when Vince Fournier went on stage and dressed 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 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 mass exhilarations that make the forces of history.

Well, Alice of the two, they're both real people, and they're both inside Vincent 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 part of his band!

And when he was super famous, some of those guys were still mainstays of his band! We carry many selves well inside of us, and my job in PR was to find people who deserved 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 going to fashion an artificial mask—an image—and through that make you a star, I'm going to get you an appointment with my best competitor immediately! You'll be with them in hours.

If you're going to work with me, you have to understand something: the music you make is about human soul that comes from the very soul of you! And what happens to you when you go out on stage and feel as if yourself leaves you, and you are danced like a puppet? They're like a puppet on a spring, like a marionette on stage—the force that moves you—that is 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 is not about product, music is not about downloads—music is about the exchange of human soul—then I will work with you. Quite the statement for a Zionist atheist Jew!

Jordan: Yes, it really is all. It not matter that, you know, I listen to Alice Cooper a lot when I was a kid and still now, especially that record, "Welcome to My Nightmare," which I think is an absolute classic.

You know, there' a couple of pop songs on it, 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 the best way.

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?

Howard: Oh, no, no! His father was in the aerospace industry in Arizona. Oh, big aerospace territory!

Jordan: 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 religions, right? Because he's bringing out the other side of things!

Howard: Exactly, the kind of things.

Jordan: Right, well, he's, there, obviously, the precursor of people like Marilyn Manson!

Howard: Yes, exactly! Marilyn Manson was a sort of cheap—even though Marilyn Manson signed on 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—one of the things that I told you, if you were going to be my client, is: what you just don't—you don't just owe your audience your songs; you owe your audience your life!

Now, Jordan, it typically took twenty years to articulate what I meant by that. And it's simply that if you deserve to super serve, you will become an iconic figure, and twelve-year-old kids will paste posters of you up on their bedroom walls.

You will be—you know the concept of the trellis? You grow a tomato plant on a trellis—well, you will be the trellis on which people grow. You will be the role model! So your life is one of the most important things that you have to offer.

But I wasn't just after their superficial life; I was after—I was after this. When you sit down of an afternoon, let's say two o'clock in the afternoon, with a blank computer screen or a blank piece of paper, and you need to write a lyric, you feel as if you could—you don't know how you've ever written a lyric in your life!

You certainly know you can't write another one again! And by four o'clock in the afternoon—on a good day—there's a lyric in front of you. By four o'clock in the afternoon, on a really, really rare good day, that lyric is so perfect in itself but 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 in a reverberatory circuit, and you have an out-of-body experience—you watch yourself from the ceiling—the force that dances you on stage—that is your fucking goddamn soul!

And that's my intent—to find! And that's what I intend to introduce you to! Why? Because you are about to become an icon, and if you become an icon, you have to be a force that takes hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of kids who feel lost in the world, who don't dare express their feelings because there are no acceptable socially words for their feelings, and who feel crazy, isolated, and alone!

And you, by revealing what's deep inside of you, will validate what's deep inside of them!

So I think you had the other made the other shoe drop for me then because, you know, you're talking about—that at least in part, you're talking about that ecstatic experience as the necessary counter-position to isolation and abandonment, loneliness, all of those things, which I think is a very reasonable way of thinking about it.

It's like meaning as the antidote to isolation and tragedy and malevolence for that matter. And I think music is—you know, I've thought deeply about music. I've tried to figure out why it has what it represents and why it has the effects that it has.

And I think—and this is a neuroscientific view of it, to some degree. And you know, it seems to me that it's better to think about the world as something that consists of patterns rather than as something that consists of objects.

So an object would actually be a pattern that sustains itself across time.

Howard: That's not all that very, very good insight! You get applause for that!

Jordan: 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 image is reconstructed, say, in our visual cortex, and then we could become conscious of that image and plan our actions in consequence of that.

But that isn't how it works! The way it works is that there are patterns in the world, and then the patterns are shifted into patterns of light 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 as the least representative art form. I don't think that's right at all! I think it represents the reality that exists in a profound sense beyond what our senses reveal to us moment to moment!

And so it puts people—then when you're moving to the music and 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 interesting!

So I get it—so partly what you're saying, if I understand you, is that for you, the ecstatic collective experience that was associated with music—for example, 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 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 toss it aside!

And it's like music was such a powerful cultural force in the 60s and the 70s and the overwhelmingly powerful force!

So 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 artist relations department for their fourteen record companies. And one of those companies was Dot Records, and Dot Records was number three on the country charts.

It was with the 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 farm reports and country and western music. This was in 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. I 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!

Howard: 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 real intense period of neural pruning that occurs at the end of adolescence!

So you get then this amount of neural pruning after you're born in the early stages of infancy because you have a lot of neural connections, and then a lot of them you kind of die into your childhood self, right? You're born with twice as many neurons as you will actually need, right? Exactly!

And so you're a massive possibility, and then you die into your actualities. And then that happens again, 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!

Howard: Alright, well—I don't know what you think about the second element of that, because it's a brilliant observation! And the second element of that is that in your late teens your prefrontal cortex gets wired up! Now, what’s the prefrontal cortex? It’s probably—we talk about it as the center of administration in the brain, executive functions—its primary job is making you human! What does that mean?

You would think that means encouraging certain things like creativity and thought. No! The job of the prefrontal cortex and making you human is to repress things! It's to damp things down! It's to inhibit things!

And you are learning which things to inhibit after you become utterly grafted into your subculture. And what is one of the elements that has drafted you into your subculture? Music!

Jordan: And so what Freud would call the super-ego is formed to a certain extent based on your subcultural connections that you've developed as a team! And again, music helps identify that subculture of which you feel a part!

Howard: Alright, well, okay, 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, you can see that expressed in the lyrics, right?

Jordan: Right! And where— which lay out a system of values in some sense, right? Something like hip hop for example—well, roughly ninety-five 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 eleven 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 betrayal and all of that kind of stuff makes absolute sense!

Howard: 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 even discussing your shared immerse min tin whatever that subculture happens to be!

Jordan: Right! And my guess is that at some point music provokes oxytocin because oxytocin is the ultimate bonding hormone, and music is a bath in the sense of human belonging in the field!

But even if you're alone and you're listening to Pandora or Spotify all by yourself, it feeds you social bread and meat! And in the 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—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 twelve 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 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 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 twelve to thirteen, became use your scientific tools to find the gods inside of us!

Jordan: Okay, okay! Well, you also again 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 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 would have been a good name for a PR company—a second?

Howard: 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 a continuation of the same tradition, right?

And one thing—there was one very important thing that had happened to me when I was sixteen years old: Even though I was almost a popular kid in my school, they voted me for two years in a row the chairman of the programming committee, which means I ran student assemblies five days a week, and I programmed two a week!

So I was the MC for these things, and one day, Tony, do you manage that and simultaneously be unpopular? That's a good question! I think my school was a very very classless school!

It was founded by an acolyte of John Dewey, and he was behind the scenes actually setting the school up, and 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 have kids vote for president and vice president, you're going to vote for the most popular kid in the school as the president! The second most popular kid is vice president, the most popular girl is 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 twenty feet away a soccer ball directly into my face! And believe me, it has a lot of force and so—twenty feet!

Howard: But when it comes to functional positions like how do we run these school assemblies, the popular kids don't have a clue! So if you bring them into a room, if they're arbitrarily 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 fifteen 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 twenty-minute mark all of a sudden has an idea, they will glom around you even if they don't like you!

Great, well, so competence can step in where popularity cannot go! Yes, that's a very well-phrased phrase!

So there I was, the head of this programming committee. One of the kids, 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!

Jordan: Yeah, yeah!

Howard: And yet they want me to advertise this dance! So Jordan, I can't dance! 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—three hundred fifty 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 su-ta-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 as I danced! That self inside of me that dances you on stage—that is your fucking goddamn soul!

And that was my ecstatic experience!

When it was all over, the audience did something it had never done in my days at that school, and would never do again so long as I was there! It surged to the foot of the stage, and as if it had practiced this act all its life—it picked me up off the stage! It put me on its shoulders and 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 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 fourteen—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 had been laying out a series of examples of the ecstatic experience with all of its delusions and hallucinations and all the rest on a laboratory bench!

And then saying to me, "Look, you're coming along 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, but 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!

A lot of quantum physics is based on the idea that when you treat a photon, a single photon, in a certain way, when you split it in two, here’s how it’s going to behave. But if it’s being measured, that’s not going to happen!

Well, guess what! We're constantly taking each other's measure! Photons are constantly taking each other's measure because they move in groups, crowds, and herds. That’s why a beam of sunshine comes through your window! Not a photon of sunshine!

And when I finished the speech, I was sure they were going to throw me out of the conference because these are all people committed deeply to quantum physics. Instead, they sat there, beaming like proud uncles!

I could not figure out why! 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 suborg, I listened to it that afternoon on my hour-and-a-half walk through the park on my way to the cafe where I do all my work, and I got all excited!

Every social concept—that means every concept that I had given in this talk was in this book!

So, Jordan, I’ve had the privilege of proceeding through life with this enormous advantage—social deprivation! So then I'm still going to chase you back to that story about the both the PR company, but I have another question for you.

So you know, you are detailing out the kind of childhood that in principle could have left you bitter and resentful! So why didn't it? Like, why didn't that happen to you?

Howard: 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 fifteen 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 founded 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!

Jordan: What happened to you? What were you suffering from?

Howard: Well, we figured it out! I mean, I figured it out on my own and then taught my doctor about it! It's called chronic fatigue syndrome! It's better sometimes known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, and nobody knows what causes it!

But in 1988, I really had been working on my book for long enough to have the first 15 chapters of my 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 Billboard 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, I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was ninety degrees out, and I’d be freezing and shivering!

I was losing strength; I was losing the strength to pick up a coat. 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? 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 the world's most glamorous limousine story!

Jordan: No, it isn't! It’s not at all the world's most glamorous limousine story!

Howard: 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 let me do it!

And one of the lessons I learned in my childhood again when I was sixteen years old—poetry was extremely important to me. And I learned a lesson from two poets! One was Edna St. Vincent Millay and her poem “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 what Edna St. Vincent Millay was telling me: 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 Chartres Cathedral in France, there's a maze and that you walk, and 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 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 of consciousness, you might say! The center point of the world, but also the place where you voluntarily accept your suffering!

Which is what Christ did! I mean, if I'm not a Christian, but if you believe in the religion that St. Paul created based on Jesus, then God had to become human in order to experience human suffering! And when Christ was on the cross, writhing in agony, he 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!

One way or the other, religion talks to us really about what we need to do! There's this—I’ve got this saying in here, let me see if I can find it—it’s not in front of me at the moment, but give me a second, as it's very important!

It's an epigram that I wrote a few years ago, and it says, "Since there is no God, it is our job to do his work. God is not a being; he is an aspiration—a gift—a vision—a goal to see. Ours is the responsibility of making a cruel universe turn just—of turning pains to understandings and new insights into joy—of creating ways to soar the skies for generations yet to come—of fashioning wings with which our children's children shall overcome! Of making worlds of fantasy 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 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 a more ethereal God in the sky, these have to be our aspirations! Indeed, in one of my books, “The Genius of the Beast”, "A Radical Revision of Capitalism," I talk about material miracles—the very laptops with which we are having this conversation! The very Zoom software that we are using—these are fucking material miracles!

And we are here to save each other! When Joan Jett's manager came to me and said, "Joan has been turned down by twenty record companies! And if you get her just one line in one of the trade magazines, a record company will snap her up and make her a star, and I can go back—," he said to being a songwriter and a producer!

And I sat him down on the couch and said, "Kenny, that's not the way things happen! The day a record company signs you on, the day a record company signs you is the day your troubles begin!"

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—seventeen 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 was 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 song "I Love Rock and Roll" appears on the radio, and you love that song for three and a half minutes, that song is going to yank you out of the misery of a personal hell!

That is secular salvation! If on the other hand, I'm working with a filmmaker, and I've worked with a bunch of films who can yank you out of yourself for an hour and ten minutes or an hour and fifty minutes, that's over an hour of secular salvation!

Well, isn’t there always angels playing music in heaven? Isn't that a tie-in?

Howard: Yes! Unfortunately, it gets very boring up there because all they do is sing the praises of God!

Jordan: Well, maybe that's what Joan Jett was doing too!

Howard: You know, yes exactly—making hits for heaven!

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 a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred lifetimes, three hundred generations! But flying—we can see the myth of Daedalus flowing in it!

Daedalus 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!

Jordan: Okay, so I'm going to go back now. I'm going to go back. I agree with you. I mean, I also think that—and what do I mean by that? Well, I think part of it is this—that I can't see that we have anything better to do!

Howard: No! In fact, that's a very good phrase! This is something I've been talking to people about a lot in the last year, and it seems to be resonating particularly with young men 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!

Howard: That's a very interesting point, Jordan! That one thing that comes out in your book, because I read it a month or two ago—I know it's not coming out until something like February—is there's a definite Christian perspective, and it is a stern and austere perspective in the book!

And what you just expressed comes from a deep Christian perspective: we're going to lose it all, so we might as well risk it all! And I would agree with that even though I come from a very different kind of perspective!

How did you arrive at that?

Jordan: Although we're saving that for a later podcast when I will interview you about your book!

Howard: Well, for me, it was a matter of trying to understand! I would say mostly trying to understand what happened in the Holocaust!

Jordan: No, me too!

Howard: And, but that’s strange because you’re about ten years younger than I am? Maybe even more younger than I am!

Jordan: How old are you?

Howard: Well, I’m seventy-four!

Jordan: Okay. I’m fifty-five!

Howard: Okay, so there's a big difference! But I did three hundred fifty push-ups this morning, and I was very disappointed because last week I did six hundred!

Jordan: Well, so you've got me on the push-up front, I must say!

Howard: Yeah, so, but— But 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! An open-ended and as yet unstructured infinity!

Now it's not completely unstructured! Remember, 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!

Jordan: I can send it to you!

Howard: That would be wonderful! Actually, if you go to my website, JuliaPeterson.com, you can download the PDF!

Jordan: Okay, great!

Howard: Because I've been hungry to read this for a long time!

Jordan: 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, ten million, twenty million!

Because there are many cities in China with a population of twenty million! There’s Mexico City as well! And we fall into it naturally! We naturally build the infrastructures that we need!

We naturally develop the infrastructure of habit that we need to get along with each other at that very compressed level!

And you would think, well, but how did that come to be from an evolutionary point of view? After all, humans have never had the privilege of living roots of millions! Where did all this behavior come from?

Howard: Well, remember our Day for Mothers, the ones who are at the very, very base of our family tree from whom we derive approximately forty percent 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 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!

Jordan: You know, I had a similar intuition about codfish, right? You know? You know all the codfish have disappeared off the northeastern coast, right? And like, I've read stories because I did a lot of work on oceanic—the whole oceanic destruction about four years ago for a UN committee!

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 hit America!

They kept it secret! But you know, 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, right?

It’s 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?

Howard: That’s true!

Jordan: 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!

There’s distributed knowledge, and cods organize 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 schools, 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 million years old—there's no coming back from that, right?

Well, back to the bacteria for a second because it's a good observation! And I saw 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 two hundred starlings!

But those groups can become a million! And they all know what to do! They know how to wheel around in a much broader pattern!

But it all goes back to the bacteria because bacteria live in groups! A colony the size of your palm is seven trillion! It's 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, they lay very low! But they’re constantly monitoring to see how many of them there are!

And when they get up to a sufficient number, 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 ours is—that does that explain why people can harbor like continuous levels of toxic bacteria in their bodies without ever falling prey to disease? Is it a matter of the fact that they don’t hit that core number, and that they're monitoring that constantly?

Howard: 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 éclairs, and it's not you who's digesting the chocolate éclair!

You have just acted as a transportation mechanism to feed a bunch of bacteria in your gut, who will digest that chocolate éclair! And what they shit out is glucose, right?

Jordan: Well, it may be—it may also not be you that's craving the damn éclair, but the bacteria! 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?

Howard: Right! Exactly! Not and far more than we think, right? Exactly!

Jordan: So, and to engineer it 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 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 became Homo sapiens, we’ve never had such a thing, until the last century, we're crazy!

Because our ancestors left us forty 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 twenty million who are in Mexico City!

Part of our genetic potential that's there not as consequence of human evolution, but is something that preceded that!

Jordan: Right, exactly! But it's a guess!

This is something I want to go back to! How did we end up in this scenario? I have a few more questions now!

Howard: Well, back to the PR element, it’s really fascinating to share the journey with you! Would you mind if we take one more segment to wrap this discussion up with how I accidentally started the 60s?

Jordan: That sounds great!

Howard: Okay! The subcultral connections from the 60s and the role of rock music have played a pivotal role in constructing the identity and experiences of those generations!

It's a fascinating time of rebirth for so many! And our adventure continues as we unpack it!

Jordan: Definitely! And there's so much more to explore as we leap forward into your experiences!

Let’s plan to meet again for that deeper dive!

Howard: Perfect! I look forward to it!

Jordan: Wonderful! Take care, Howard, and thank you again for this engaging discussion!

Howard: Thank you, Jordan! Have a great night!

Jordan: Yeah, okay! See ya! Bye!