Transcript of my conversation with Howard Bloom 4/23/2021

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Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Knocked Conscious. Today is kind of a part two, but not really part two. It's just a second conversation that I had with a gentleman named Howard Bloom.

I had this conversation with him on Saturday, April 23rd, 2022. It was another enjoyable conversation with him. It wasn't as long as the last one, but it had a lot of cool, neat things that I don't think get discussed too often.

So I think it's a little different than some of the other conversations that we have. So here's Howard in all his glory. Enjoy.

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There, we have each other. There, perfect. Excellent.

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Okay, get the angle right. And who, is that Bob Marley above me? It is. And off to my right here is Billy Joel down there.

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Amazing. Two of my clients, and who's the third? Yeah, that's John Travolta. That's John Travolta.

Amazing. So those two paintings are Stephen Holland. He's a famous sports artist.

He paints a lot of sports artists. I have a Muhammad Ali of his. And I had an interview with him.

I love that conversation. He's a great, great guy. And then the one behind me is the Fishwick, Stephen Fishwick, who did the Bob Marley.

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Right. Well, the Bob Marley is just a terrific piece of work. It's beautiful.

It's a little harder to see it, but I'll take pictures. I'll send them to you so you can take a look at them. But I wanted to share those with you because we didn't have video last time.

I know you had them as clients. So I had a list of things from the last conversation. So thank you again for joining me.

I am so grateful because everything you talk about makes me ask about 42 other things. So that's a horrible branch of curiosity that I have. Right.

We call that in my territory of the woods, Omnology, a discipline for the omnivorously curious. Beautiful. The promiscuously curious.

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I'll take anything with an omni in front of it. So if we were talking about just, I guess, we were kind of talking about the stories that were made up just in general, right, about artists and whatnot, just to sell papers. Obviously, we're talking in the vein of Michael Jackson, because that seemed to be the biggest one.

Do you mind expounding a little bit about that experience? Well, when I first came to New York City in 1964, I had been reading as my gospel publication, The Village Voice, because the village is where the beatniks were, and the beatniks were a that I could relate to when I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York. I couldn't relate to anybody in my own hometown. And during my first year in New York City, I met a woman who was willing to sleep with me, which doesn't happen that often in your life.

And at least not if you're me. I resemble that remark, sir. Be careful.

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Right. And I started living in her apartment with her, and it was an apartment on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side was the most dangerous slum in New York City.

Somebody on her block was shot every single week. So I moved in with her, and after about five or six months, she started pressuring me to marry her, because she said that the building was filled with, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, was filled with Catholics, and they looked down on her. She felt every time she walked out of the door for living with a man in sin.

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Right. And she gave me a date. If I hadn't married her by such and such a date, I was going to have to move out.

So I was not interested in getting married. I never wanted to get married in my life. And so I started apartment hunting.

And one of the buildings I visited, which had vacant apartments, was just a block away on 8th Street, and it was the most unusual building. The rent that my girlfriend was paying was $23 a month. So when we split it between the two of us, it was $11.50 a month, if you can imagine that.

I absolutely cannot imagine that, even the least bit. Well, so this other building had rents of $40 a month, which was more in line with the tradition at that point for that neighborhood. I would think at the time, yeah, for sure.

But the remarkable thing was that every single apartment in the building, with the exception of one, had been renovated and renovated beautifully. How the landlord got the money to renovate with rents of $40 a month is utterly beyond me. But the super, who was very proud of the renovation, taking me around, was upset about the one apartment they hadn't been able to renovate.

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And it had Puerto Rican tenants, and it had seven people living in an apartment that he felt was appropriate for four people. And it had newspapers and flammable stuff all over the place. And because the people in there did not want to pay an electric bill, they had jury-rigged wiring before it reached the meter to steal their electricity from Con Ed.

And the super said, this is a fire trap. But there was no way he or the landlord could do anything about it and bring it up to the standards of the rest of the building. Because there was a, I would assume there'd be some kind of tenants' rights at that point? Yeah, there were lots of tenants' rights.

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For sure. And there were Trotskyite rights. Which are vital.

I don't want to criticize tenants' rights. No, they are vital. I just want to speak to that might have been the cause, right? Right.

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Obviously, to look at this. At any rate, a few days later, I picked up my usual copy of the Village Voice and read that there was this terrible slumlord. And because of the slumlord's depravities, there had been a fire.

And in the fire, a baby had died. And when I got to the address, it was the building I had just visited a couple of days earlier. And the entire headline was false.

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Right. The entire story was false. The only true thing was that there had been a fire and that a baby had died, which is horrible.

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Which is awful. Absolutely. But you're compounding this by vilifying this person who, you know, obviously had no responsibility.

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No culpability. Yeah, culpability in that way. And so this was very upsetting.

Because when I was 10 years old, a book opened up on me a lap and told me that the first two rules of science are these, the truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, and then proceed from there. And though those were the first two rules of science, I assumed that they applied to journalism as well. And what I was seeing was the opposite.

It was the journalist bringing a preconceived idea and not seeing the facts and not looking at the things right under his nose and not doing any research, not going out and interviewing anybody at all, but simply regurgitating a preconceived point of view, which in the case of this particular story, I knew to be utterly false. Right. And that was my introduction to what you could call fake news.

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Yeah. And then I became obsessed with it, because I took journalism as seriously as I took my science. And you know that I would eventually become a journalist.

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Absolutely. So I started collecting false stories in the press. Of course, in those days, it was all what we call now mainstream media.

And the mainstream media, my media was corrupted in certain instances. And that was tremendously upsetting. Yeah.

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Then in 19 or in 2016, something very strange happened to the fabric of truth. A man came along who told an average of 12 lies a day, and who used this term, fake media, fake press to impugn the mainstream media. Well, I knew that approximately half of a percentage of stories in the mainstream media were false.

That's what I had learned in my crusade for truth in journalism. But I also knew that 99.5% of what this man said was utterly, completely false. And he was trying to, first of all, the term fake news had been picked up from the Nazis.

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It turned out that this guy, who is famous for not reading, he can't even read the daily intelligence reports on the security status of the United States. It turned out that there are two books that he reads. A friend of mine is close to his first wife.

And his first wife says that he keeps two books by his bedside table. And those two books are Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and a compilation of Adolf Hitler's speeches called something like How I Will Conquer the World. And every night before he goes to sleep, this man who was now in the White House of the United States reads excerpts from these two books.

And one thing that Hitler and his team invented was the concept of the Luden press, the lying press. In other words, yeah, I speak German, actually. So I know, I know a little Yiddish.

I know a lot of Germans. So the lying. Yes, right.

Exactly. So this was a concept that Hitler used to discredit the mainstream media of Germany. The what's the difference between the mainstream media and what Hitler put out? Or what? Well, state media propagandized and whatnot, right.

Or what Putin puts out, right. But I will say recently, I don't even call it mainstream anymore. I call it corporate media, because I believe that they're beholden now to corporations and the sponsors.

So now I'm finding things are great more from an outside perspective like that from men from the state. Well, that could be but I haven't had a chance to research it. And until I have a chance to research it, I won't believe it's true.

I would love I would love to do that. Because I mean, we see stories that were suppressed as well. And I am a center right person.

I'm a moderate conservative more because of my background. Right? I'm conservative fiscally. But I am all about doing being you I want everyone to be free and in love with each other.

I do not who loves whom. I don't care. You want to be called something? Sure.

I don't care. It does not. It's all what you want to do.

That's great. Right? I love that. I love the personal freedom of it.

That said, I'm not that guy's backer. I'm not a Trump. Right? I'm not a backer of this gentleman.

However, I do see that both sides are very, very skewed by their the feeders of their of their pockets, right? Right. Well, one of the things I invented something when I was in the music industry that I call perceptual engineering. One principle of that was that good information drives out bad.

It was a variation on Gresham's law and economics. And I had gotten Gresham's law wrong. Gresham's law is actually bad money drives out good.

But in my experience, if you dug deep enough, and if you found the truth, and if you told that truth over and over and over again, people don't register that they've seen something until they've seen it for the 15th time. So you have to repeat it over and over and over again. And I recognized at the time that the principles of perceptual engineering could be used for good or for evil, just like a hammer can be used to build a house or a hammer can be used to kill.

I would say that those would be talking points. If we're going to go in a political way, right, you just say that same three, three word phrase over and over again, prudent pipe price hike, or right by inflation, right? Like, right, both sides, right. So you just keep saying that and saying and that's how it gets ingrained.

15 times, boom, boom, boom, right? A lot. Exactly. You can program very easily, very what we're seeing right now.

We're seeing what Donald Trump tried to achieve, which is putting us in perceptual blindfolds in which we would only see his lies. As truth, we can see how that works out in a country called Russia. Because Vladimir Putin has destroyed all of the independent press.

When he put out a law saying that for saying anything disrespectful to the army, which means anything disrespectful to Putin's point of view, you can be jailed for 15 years. When he did that, the few remaining independent press outlets shut down. Yeah.

And the result is the only thing that the Russian people sees is the news as filtered through Putin's imagination. Yeah, I saw something I listened, something that had they were putting on a radio station that was some other radio station, but it was only broadcasting the state news. Right.

So they've got control of the airwaves base information that's not like a VPN, right? Some people do have a little bit of limited access outside, but for the most part, it's pretty controlled. Yes. So the people of Russia, because this has been repeated 15 times, believe that Ukraine doesn't really exist, that it's really little Russia or new Russia, that it's a part of Russia or old Russia, actually origins.

Right. And they believe that the Russian that the Ukrainian people want to be liberated, liberated from who? Well, they believe that the state, the Ukrainian state is run by Nazis. And if you read very carefully through the Russian literature to find out what the definition of a Nazi is, it's real simple.

A Nazi is anybody who disagrees with Vladimir Putin. It is anybody who is attracted to the West. That's it.

And an essay came out a few weeks ago in RIA Novosti, which is a Russian wire service that said, in essence, the Ukraine has demonstrated that it is majority Nazi. How has it demonstrated that by voting a Nazi regime, Vladimir Zelensky, who happens to be Jewish, so can't possibly be a Nazi, in into power? And these people, these pro-Westerners, cannot be re-educated. They cannot be redeemed.

They must be destroyed. So this article says the majority of the Ukrainian people must be killed. And the few remaining have been so radically misshapen mentally by the Nazi regime that it will take a full generation of re-education to bring them back to the truth.

And what is the truth? Anything Vladimir Putin wants you to believe is the truth. So according to the Putin people, NATO put together America is Russia's greatest enemy. And America runs NATO.

And NATO had set up the Ukraine as a launch platform to launch a full-scale attack against Mother Russia. People believe this. Well, when you're not told anything else, you're told whatever you're fed.

Right. So this is perceptual engineering used for evil, not for good. And what Putin has set his people up to believe is that the extermination of the Ukrainian people is a moral and ethical necessity.

So this is what it means to take control of the media, using the stick of the concept of Luton press, the lying press, the fake media, the fake news. So this is one of my problems with with me as a whole, because I'm a doc. I love documentaries.

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Right. But my favorite documentaries are pretty drab. They just state what's going on.

And I end up coming to a conclusion on my own. It doesn't paint it with a, you know, is this the end kind of thing where let's use Inconvenient Truth, because I know you spoke with Joe Rogan in 2018 about climate. Right.

And Inconvenient Truth, just like another side, like I guess Dinesh Souza's like 2016. It asked the question, like, is this whatever? But it knows the answer. I mean, it already has the answer before it even starts asking the question.

Right. That's not what a documentary is. You know, that's a that's an op ed, in my opinion, you know.

Right. So spinning off of that 2018, it's 2022 climate. What what are you seeing about climate? Have you had any different ideas since that? Well, yeah, I've got a very different idea.

And I'm finishing. I finished the first manuscript of my book. It's called The Case of the Sexual Cosmos.

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Everything you know about nature is wrong. OK. And it says.

This planet is the mother of all climate catastrophes. For one thing, the we're in a solar system that every two hundred and thirty five million years does a complete turn around the center of the galaxy. And that voyage, that two hundred and thirty five million year voyage has terrors that would freeze the blood of Proto the Hobbit.

Oh, yeah. We we go through the spiral arms of galaxies. We go through massive floods of cosmic rays.

We go through massive floods of cosmic dust. And every single one of those things alters the climate dramatically. Meantime, we have something called the Milankovitch cycle, which is a result of our tilt in going around the sun.

Yeah, it's the the the the precession of the earth because it's on it. Right. On an axis.

Right. So every fourteen thousand, every twenty two thousand. That's what it is.

Forty two thousand and one hundred thousand. And then there's another odd number in there. Two hundred thirty nine thousand or so.

And there's no change. I mean, it's what we see in the sky changes by the procession as well. But most important, the climate change is correct.

Correct. Plus, plus the sun does not give out an even amount of energy. No, the sun.

It's not an oven set at 450. You know, no, the sun has I forget whether it's increased or decreased. I think it's increased.

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It's increased slightly. Yeah. Thirty three percent.

Yeah. So that's a part of the 11 year. Also with the corona mass ejection as well as the other pieces.

We live in a pretty violent. I mean, that right here is pretty shocking. And one other thing, when life took root on this planet for three hours every day, that is for a full day, life was exposed to this absolutely destructive stuff called radiation.

Yeah. Like the ozone was able to till three. No, no.

That's what I'm saying. It took a while to build that. Yeah.

Correct. Right. And then for another three hours, life went through something equally toxic darkness.

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The length of a full day was six hours in those days. So and the climate went up and down approximately eighty eight degrees every three hours, up eighty eight degrees, then down eighty eight degrees. Meanwhile, because the planet was tilted on its axis, it went through four violent climate changes every year.

We today we call those summer, winter, fall and spring. And those are gigantic climate changes. They were shifts back then.

They would have been much more extreme, for sure. Right. And we've gone through in the 200000 years since we became homo sapiens.

We've gone through 60 ice ages. And global warmings and five almost end of life events. Well, no, but there there were back five hundred thousand years, five hundred million years ago.

There were two incidents of what's called snowballers in which the ice on the face of the earth was so thick, even at the equator, that it was over a half a mile thick. Wow. And life survived this.

So life has adapted, but but the difficulty is, yes, it may be true and it probably is that we've added. I mean, we're certain that we've added to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Well, you're a physicist, right? Let's be honest.

Methane, CO2. They are greenhouse greenhouse gas. They are greenhouse gases for a reason.

They trap energy. I mean, that's what they do. And greenhouse gases, once upon a time, saved life.

Yeah. What got us out of those snowball or absolutely were greenhouse gases. So those are essential.

Yeah. Those are liquid water. Yes.

But here's the big deal. We are busy aching and groaning about a mass extinction that we will create through our contribution of greenhouse gases. Well, wake up, guys.

There's something even bigger. Yes. Let's get rid of those greenhouse gases emitted by man.

But let's be aware of the fact that the next great ice age and the next great global warming, the next great global warming and ice age that doesn't come from tailpipes and smokestacks that has nothing to do with human beings is right around the corner. Right. It's lurking in the shadows.

And we need to protect both against manmade greenhouse gases that we have to recognize that greenhouse gases are essential to the preservation of life. We have to be preparing for the next giant ice age, the next giant climate change that has nothing to do with us. Right.

And so in the book, I am advocating climate stabilization technologies. So what are climate stabilization technologies? We've been dealing with climate stabilization technologies since approximately three million years ago, when we invented the stone hammer and killed the first animals and took their coats off and put them on ourselves. That's a climate stabilization technology.

Look, every other animal we know is built for something called thermal regulation. Right. We're built for adaptation.

Yeah, we're built for technological adaptation. For certain. For certain.

Right. So we are born naked and without thermoregulatory equipment of the kind, you know, you can take your dog out in 100 degree temperature and I don't care how much the owner says my dog is having a hard time. Dogs generally do not have a hard time in 100 degree temperature.

When they meet each other, they still wag their tails and want to play. Right. And you can take your dog out when it's minus 100 degrees.

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Right. And it doesn't bother your dog. But we don't have the thermoregulatory equipment to handle that.

We are built to make our own climate regulation technologies, climate stabilization technologies. 17,000 years ago, we took mammoth ribs and mammoth tusks, and we put them together in a giant framework and covered them with mammoth hides and built tents big enough for seven families. That's a climate stabilization technology.

Absolutely. When we invented the brick 10,000 years ago and built an entire garden complex of three room apartments using that brick, that was a climate stabilization technology. Now it's time to go big time.

I and a lot of my colleagues in the space community, you know, I run four different space groups. We are advocating harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it to Earth to solve our energy needs. What's that Tesla style? Almost right.

Yes. Almost Tesla style beaming. And we're advocating it because the resources of space, the energy space, the wasted sunlight out there.

Yeah. What do you think about by the time it gets through the atmosphere? It is completely dissipated. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. It's almost like a nutritionless vegetable.

Right. Right. So oiled.

So we have access to for all practical purposes, infinite energy up there. And we can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, eliminate most of the emission, the manmade emission of greenhouse gases. We can reach net zero using space solar power, solar power harvested in space and transmitted to Earth.

Are you familiar with Michael Schellenberger by any chance? Yes. Running for governor? No, no, I wasn't aware of that. Oh, he's actually running for.

Yes. And he's the author, right? Yes. He's the author of that book, the climate change book.

Right. Exactly. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

It just popped into my head to ask you about that. Right. So so the trick is that we can use space solar power to reach net zero.

And we can do it using Elon Musk's starships, which are capable of carrying between 100 and 150 tons of stuff. They're pretty impressive vehicles, aren't they? Right. Exactly.

Impressive. Yes. So I'm rooting for them with all my heart and soul.

I am. And I had four conversations with the Elon 17 years ago when NASA said that he was a fruitcake and was never going to launch anything. And in fact, Elon had not even put a firecracker in a tin can yet.

He hadn't. That's a story. How about the first time I saw this? Yeah, I saw him speaking.

And he said, when I got out of college, I asked myself, what are the three things that are going to make the biggest difference to humanity in my lifetime? The three things that are going to change humanity the most? And the answers he came up with were cyberspace, the Internet, alternative energy and space. So he went into cyberspace, into the Internet. Starlink built PayPal.

Yeah. And Starlink as well. Right now.

Well, no, no, Starlink is much newer. Right. But I'm saying it's his idea.

But I'm saying that's a result of his ultimate vision. Right. But at that point, he went into PayPal.

And when he sold his part of the company, he got approximately a billion dollars. Now, PayPal is Peter Deal. Is that correct? Peter Teal? It was Peter Teal and Eric Weinstein.

Yes. Yeah. And then Eric Weinstein is now with Teal.

I didn't know that place. Yeah, I didn't know that. Well, he's at the at the Peter Teal place, the new Peter.

Right. Right. So yeah, those are the guys.

And then he skipped over number two, or at least this is what he says. He skipped over alternative energy and went directly to space. And since then, SpaceX, his company has become the most reliable rocket company on the face of the earth.

It's launched a new rocket every day. I mean, every week for the past ever since the turn of the year. Ever since the beginning of 2022.

It's had over 100 successful launches with no flaws, no problems whatsoever. More important, it's had roughly 90 landings. So the boosters are amazing, right? And we have one rocket that's gone to space and come back 12 times.

That's beautiful. So what Elon is trying to do is establish a space transport company with regularly scheduled trips so you can book your passage on these things. And right now, the Falcon nine, the Falcon nine is the rocket on planet Earth right now.

Yeah, that's the heaviest record. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and the Falcon nine has it's about to take its fourth batch of humans into space. They take four at a time, or was it? Yeah, they take four at a time. That's what I thought was built for seven is if Okay, I think Yeah, I've seen it with four on board.

Right. And that's what they've been doing. So at any rate, right now, these Falcon nine launches cost about $50 million a piece, which is a huge price break over the $4 billion that the so called space launch system that the government is voicing.

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Oh, that's called a leaky bucket. Howard. Yes, very leaky, leaky bucket.

That's hardly a bucket leaks. Yeah. Yeah.

Remember, it hasn't launched yet. It was supposed to launch in 2015. I think they were cupping it in their hands.

Howard. Yes. So and the Starship will carry 100 passengers and 100 to 150 tons of cargo to orbit for $2 million.

$2 million 125th the price. Yeah, that's 4%. Oh my gosh, that's 96% reduction in cost.

Right. And that's unbelievable. And NASA's rocket, the space launch system will according to the government accounting office cost $4 billion for a launch.

That is enough money for hundreds of Starship launches. That is enough money for a separate space program to go to each planet in the solar system. An entire space program.

We're not talking about one rocket. We're talking about a dozen rockets to each of these places. Right, exactly.

So it's amazing. Yeah. So Elon is changing the nature of the relationship between life and the cosmos single handedly.

Now, the reason I had four conversations with Elon is the minute I saw him give that speech about the three things that would change humanity the most. I apparently have an alarm that goes off in my gut when I meet a superstar. Oh, Howard, you shouldn't have.

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Yeah.

I mean, that's what happened. That's what happened when I sold shocker. Yeah.

So that's it. Tell me what happened. What was it? Well, I didn't know what it was.

All I knew was I had talked to this guy and I knew something else. I knew that kids would be modeling their life on his 110 years from that, which is approximately 100 years from now, which is about correct. Yeah.

And why the figure of 110? Don't ask me. These things come to you. You don't conceive them.

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So you look at him. Does he have an aura? Does he have a ding, a glimmer? No, no aura. No, nothing.

In fact, it took me 15 years to figure out why I was bothering him on the phone and I couldn't explain it to him because I didn't realize yet that I've spent most of my life working with potential and actual superstars. I've spent most of my life taking people who deserve to be superstars and giving them the iconic status that both they and their audiences deserve. Because when you validate an artist, when you make a new icon, you just validated a hundred million or more people.

Right. It's their influence. Yeah.

Resonate to that artist's frequency. Right. Well, I didn't.

It took me 15 years to figure out the reason I was bothering Elon with these phone calls in which I had absolutely nothing to say. Mark was because I do apparently have this ringer in my gut that goes off when it senses a mythic figure. So tell me, tell me the conversations.

Tell me about the conversation. They were nothing. I was wasting the man's fucking time because I, my articulate self has yet no idea of why I was calling him.

As I said, it took 15 years of processing. And have you reached out since with a quick email? I sent one email and I said, look, I've had a lifetime of helping potentially mythic figures become mythic figures. And I apparently have this alarm in my gut that goes off when I see a person who has that potential.

And that alarm went off when I saw you. And so you are now becoming an iconic and a mythic figure. I sent that email about three or four years ago, just before Elon started hitting the headlines on a regular basis when he was still a niche market commodity.

So, and I never got an answer back to that because Elon at this point is overwhelmed. How can he possibly see his emails? I'd hate to see the read slash unread portion of his emails. I just can't even imagine.

It must be huge. So what are we on this planet for? Well, apparently I'm on this planet partially to help spot mythic figures. And when I have the capacity to help them become what they deserve to be, so their audience too, can become what it deserves to be.

Are you psychic? Do you know, is it a psychic thing? What is it? What is the ding? I don't know. All I can tell you is it feels like it's in my gut, but who knows where the hell it is. Right.

So I'd love to ask you about that because I'm a quantum guy. I'm a quantum mechanics guy and I've had personal psychic experiences where I've had actual visions now. Right.

Well, I do too. And I wonder where they come from. Unless I've actually experienced them, I wouldn't think they were real.

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Right. In my case, they only occur to me very, very rarely. But when they occur, they're real as hell.

And where they come from, I just imagine it's all the knowledge you've gained on the verbal level, all the knowledge you've gained on the visceral level, all the knowledge you've gained on the muscular level that suddenly comes together in a vision of what's about to be. One of my most vivid visions, in fact, the only one that's visual because my visions don't usually have visual components, was with Michael Jackson. And I got a call at four o'clock in the afternoon saying, you've got to be out here, meaning L.A. By 11 o'clock tonight, Michael is canceling his tour.

You're the only one he will listen to. That's quite a statement. You're the only one Michael Jackson will listen to.

This was 83 or 84, you said? This would have been 83. So this is going on. I mean, we're talking thriller.

We're talking. Yeah, this is it. This is right.

And the victory tour was what the Jacksons were putting together. Right. So I kept a little red nylon knapsack, a $19.99 knapsack behind my desk, and it had in it a spare, the first laptop computer, the RadioShack TRS-100 and a spare shirt and a spare razor blade because I used to get these calls on a fairly regular basis.

I can imagine the clientele calling in a heightened state. Let's put it that way. Emergency.

Yes. So I flew out to L.A. and I picked up my rental car and I drove to the address I was given and it turned out to be in the middle of a giant studio lot. And the giant studio lot at 11 o'clock tonight is a very spooky place because there are these buildings that look like aircraft hangars and they are totally empty and everything.

Yeah, spooky. Everything is dark. Yeah.

And there was one lit aircraft hangar and I went into it and the Jacksons were rehearsing on one hundred and ten foot stage. And my task was to sit there through the rest of the rehearsal and meet with them after the rehearsal was over. Well, just to give you an idea of the size of one hundred and ten foot stage.

When ZZ Top took Texas culture to the road, it built a giant stage in the shape of the state of Texas tilted at an angle so you could see that shape no matter where you were in the audience. Oh, very cool. And that stage was seventy five feet wide.

Huge. Right. The Jackson stage at one hundred and fifteen foot wide was 40 percent bigger.

Right. I mean, it's over it's a third of a football field, a quarter of a foot or almost half a football field. Right.

So they finished rehearsal and we all we we all headed out to a dressing trailer. I don't know whether you've ever seen a dressing trailer, but it's this big trailer. It's this big sort of truck or van, a mega van.

Sure. That is set up as a dressing room. Yeah, absolutely.

So it had a banquette of red plastic seats opposite the entrance and another one to the left of the entrance and another tiny little banquette of seats just big enough for two or three people at the very end. So Michael took the throne, the seat at the very end, and I took the seat immediately to his left. Who said to his right? No, I was to his left.

Yeah. Who do you remember? Oh, the brothers. His brother.

That would make sense. Brothers were also on the other seat. Well, always the king's hand to the right, isn't it? So you made you pick the right the correct seat in respect and courtesy and.

Right. And because you don't want to come across as trying to be domineering. Correct.

(39:03 - 39:35)

Especially if you're about to be domineering. You want to control from behind. Yes.

Yes, exactly. I'm very aware. So at any rate, Michael explained to me, first of all, the press had been getting a ton of negative publicity.

The press operates like a group of sheep. And there was an experiment or actually was an author in Germany in 1830 who was standing in the middle of a field and saw a bunch of sheep coming down a sheep lane. A sheep lane is this very narrow lane that's just big enough for sheep to go in single file.

(39:36 - 41:22)

And he tried an experiment. He took his cane and he put it out in front of the lead sheep, the first sheep out of 2000 sheep. And so that sheep jumped over the cane.

Then he withdrew his cane and every single one of the sheep after that, all 1999 other sheep jumped at that spot, even though there was nothing to jump over. Yeah, they simply imitated the monkey. Yeah, the alpha sheep.

Well, Dave Marsh was an alpha journalist. Anything he said, everybody else imitated. And he said, we meaning what called itself in those days, the rock crit elite, the tiny handful of rock journalists who made up the mind of the entire press for around the United States and Europe.

He said, the Jacksons are doing this giant tour. They haven't hired anybody we know to do the staging. They haven't hired anybody we know to do the sound.

They haven't hired anybody we know to do the lighting. They haven't hired anybody we know to do the security. The result is going to be that the artists are going to be electrocuted on stage by their own microphones.

Their stage is going to collapse. These four story high lighting towers are going to collapse on the head of the audience and kill innocent kids. And without proper security, there are going to be gangs running up and down the aisles with giant knives, eviscerating people.

So you dare not take your kids to this concert. Right. So basically, the cons each concert was outsourced individually within the city that it was held.

No, no, no, not at all. Okay. So let's let's hear Michael.

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So please, Michael, finally, explain to me why the press was open, or why the tour was open to such negative press.

(41:22 - 42:43)

Okay, so that was the allegation is what you're saying. Right. Okay.

I just want to be clear. And and he said, basically, I had seen his quality of awe, wonder and surprise, which was beyond astonishing. It was mentioned that with the art book with the Yeah, I'm an atheist, but this was as if it were the clouds had parted and God's own sunshine had flown through Michael.

And so Michael explained that he wants to give that quality of awe, wonder and surprise to his kids. And when he was explaining this, I had a vision. And it's the only visual vision that I can remember having in my life.

I saw his ribs as golden gates. I saw those gates swing open. I saw 10,000 kids in his chest, his kids.

So where these visions come from, I mean, I had a vision without any visual elements. When I told Chaka Khan's manager, that if he let me pull her out of the group and put all the attention on her, despite the fact that the group prided itself on its democracy, all the members were equals. If he covered my ass, I told him, I will give you a star.

Now where that came from, God alone knows, Mark. And then you told her something good. Yes, right.

(42:44 - 42:57)

Yeah, it's, it's unbelievable. And my, my, my interaction more realistic, but they're, they're so tell me about one of your visions. Well, the first one I ever had was a week before the shooting in South Carolina.

(42:58 - 46:54)

Right. And it was the first I was actually I was working with a psychiatrist who's like an NLP. Right.

Neurolinguistic programmer. Right. He was, he was, we were doing a meditation and he was doing like a guided meditation.

He was putting me through like a vision. Right. And in this vision, I saw these shades, sheets of glass in the sky turn.

Right. And I'm like, remember watching, looking through a store window during Christmas, like looking at all the TVs. Oh, yes.

You know, it's kind of looked like that, you know, and right on the screen was a black man behind a podium in a suit. Right. And he reaches out to his right to shake someone's hand.

Right. He reaches to his left to shake someone's hand. And then I see a gunshot go off.

Wow. And I looked up film footage of the pastor. It was Clement to pink me.

Right. And what's interesting is I didn't think anything of the, I had, I was distraught when I came out of the vision. Right.

And my, the guy told me goes that either happened in a dimension or it will happen here. And I'm, and once again, I'm open, but it's hard for me to, if I haven't experienced it, I'm pretty open minded, but it's hard for me to really step into that world. And then a week later, he goes, I don't know if you know what happened.

I'm like, yeah. And then he just explained everything. And there's a picture of him at the state legislature making a speech where he has this mannerism of shaking it.

He reaches his hand out to his left and his right, but it's like a way of speaking. Right. I had never seen it before.

And I saw him in the suit behind the podium and it hairs, it just, it shook me. And I've had multiple of those types. Amazing.

Not good. I mean, it's pretty scary to me. So.

And I'm lucky I, I have, look, I go on the radio every Wednesday night at 1 0 6 a.m. Eastern time on 545 radio. Well, coast to coast. Obviously.

Right. So I know you're open to this and I'm, I'm open to, but I, but I'm not trying to get at what you think I am, because what I try to do, they give me three and a half minutes. And in three and a half minutes, I have to give you one hours worth of material.

And my goal is to give you stuff. You simply will not read or be exposed to any place else. And what usually happens is I go on and I talk about something that I say is happening or is about to happen.

And two days later, press headlines all over the world come out with this thing that I've just said two or three days later. It's fairly astonishing. So obviously some of us are tuned to these potential futures.

Yeah, it is interesting. And I think it is, it could be a quanta thing, or it could just be to your point. We we're blessed or burdened with that ability to process information to a level that is the butterfly effect where you just is so out there that we don't even know.

Well, there's something even more all life forms are tuned to working out the implications of the past in order to foresee the future. A bacteria has to wander looking for what we call a chemo, a chemo variant or well, okay, it you're looking for the smell of food, right? And you keep moving. Because there's an assumption within your very structure that says if you keep moving, you will run across one of these chemotactic variables, which is necessary for its continuation and growth and right.

And but you live in a colony of 7 trillion. So a 7 trillion are out there, assuming that there's going to be an ex chemotactic variable, because that's always what's happened in the past. And then assuming that they have to go up the gradient toward where it's the strongest.

(46:55 - 49:18)

Um, so they have to keep track of what they've just sensed, in order to extrapolate what they are about to sense, right? Um, that's a basic of life. And if you have 7 trillion of them, they're exploring the landscape very thoroughly through this process. But the very existence of the colony as what you might call a perceptual web is based on the assumption that there will be a future, it will have characteristics of the past, if you can correctly derive the characteristics of that past, you can foresee the future.

Now, it's vague, and it's approximate, but no, you survive for 4 billion years, right, on the basis of this basic assumption that you can somehow take the past and use it to predict the future. Well, I appreciate you. So thank you for, you know, humoring me during that.

Well, so you and I are foreseeing the future possibilities, implicit in what we know of the past, and we're doing the same thing that that bacterium is doing. Right. So I used to call it when I started writing about notes about this future projection, and all life forms are built as future projectors.

So where the visions come from that are so absolutely distinct in you and me, and that actually go on the record in my case, with these radio appearances, so that I can't, you know, make up what I said, the way that what's his name McCarthy is making up what he's saying right now. You mean any human, any politician with their mouth moving right now? That's right. And this all takes us back to the roots of perception, and the fact that if you exterminate all forms of media that are based on fact checking, and you turn all of the media to reiterate your fantasy, to repeat it over and over again, your fantasy becomes the reality for the entire Russian people in the case of Vladimir Putin, or the entire American people, in the case of a guy who tried to pull off a Putin, and so far has not succeeded, but has come very close Donald Trump.

(49:18 - 52:48)

And this makes you very frightened about the fragility of truth. Yeah, I'm finding it. I've, I'm more concerned about the fragility of truth, just because I've seen it exposed to an extent and the depth.

So the trust is, has been more lost, even if, even if the facts are more correct than they've ever been. The trust has been absolutely dissipated. And I think I saw something, what were the United States of the free media in the, in the world.

We're like the 26th or 28th country that believe we're like 20% trusting in the media, 28% or something. It's right. It's all time low.

And, and, and, and we're up against a major dilemma right now. It's my opinion. It's my opinion.

And once again, this doesn't, this isn't fact by any means, but I feel like I see the us always governing through the middle. So it goes extreme to extreme. So Watergate happened and Woodward and Bernstein, you know, all that, that made being a journalist like chic and gave journalists all the power because they exposed the lies of the state or the writing of the state.

And then with that power, then the corruption came within that system as it grew in power. And now it's getting to the point where it's making up these stories just to keep the power or to, you know, and now it needs to be checked, you know, in some way, but not checked because I'm a free speech person. It can't be checked in that way.

It needs to just be countered by good speech or proper speech or, or factual, you know? Well, and unfortunately we're in a situation where we have to make up our own minds and, and I love that because you and I have great minds, right? So we hope we do our best. So, so the point is that the moral compass is being lost because we are going from the assumption that when a politician opens his mouth and we discovered that what he says is false, he's shamed. That's the case six years ago.

That's not the case today. There's a different measuring rod for what's moral. And today, when a politician opens his mouth, he has to say the thing that's going to be most expedient, that's going to get him, allow him to progress in power the most.

And there is no commitment to truth. And there is no shaming anyone because Donald Trump has taken lies as a daily fact of life to be its new moral compass, its new moral framework. Of course, everybody assumes you're lying now.

And everybody somehow assumes that if you're lying on the side that you particularly like, those lies are truths, right? And the concept of fact checking, checking against the closest we can come to empirical reality has gone out the window, despite all the PolitiFact and other fact checkers, Snopes. Well, fact checking is actually, it's kind of a publicist thing that you should know a little bit about that, wouldn't you think? It feels like a fact checker is a propagandist in a way that has a certain agenda. I've seen it from both sides, not taking a side.

I have an issue with all of it. I'm trying to find underneath. I want us to get back to kind of a, you know, actually wanting to make change that help people, you know, be a beautiful thing.

(52:48 - 55:47)

It would be a beautiful thing. But Donald Trump basically tells you that if you are a slavish worshiper of this new God, Donald Trump, that everything will improve for you. No, no, no.

I'm going on the record as refusing to do that because I may run for Congress. Well, that would be interesting. I may do it.

I'm very much considering it, but I have an uphill battle in my district. That would be terrific. So at any rate, so we are, it sounds, and since we are, I have dealt with entertainment.

My life has been in science. Science is all about truth. Truth is a very hard thing to pin down.

Even what a truth is, is a hard thing to pin down. Presumably the more fact checking you do, and that's what laboratory experiments are about, is fact checking in an extreme degree. The more fact checking you do, the closer to the truth you're likely to be.

But we are all biased. We, as Albert Einstein said, we all come into any situation with a theory and we see everything through the eyes of that theory. So if we're Republicans, we see things one way.

If we're Democrats, we see things another way. If we are, if we are legacy Republicans, we see things in a very different way from the way the Trump Republicans see things, because that is a cult of personality, just like Kim Jong-un's family has had a three-generation cult of personality. Right.

Well, as well as the classic Democrats and progressives are very different, opposite ends of the spectrum. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I'm a, I'm a center Democrat.

You're a center Republican. Exactly. So I disagree with a lot of stuff the progressives put out.

And I actually put out a, a YouTube video about four years ago saying fuck Ocasio-Cortez, because I think she's monstrous. I think, I think the extreme is dangerous, but, but I do not want to suppress it. I need it there because I need to know who has that opinion so we can counter it.

Yes, exactly. Not to push it on, not to push it down, but to, to give, to show an opposite or a counter to it. And I run one group that's called the $2 Billion Moon Prize Group.

And I want to talk to you about that, sir. Okay. Well, that includes the former governor of New York state, David Patterson, who is a Democrat.

Me, who is a Democrat. And my favorite. A three-star, a three-star general who, because he's been in the military, is accustomed to hiding whatever proclivities he has politically, but I suspect leans Republican.

I would think military that with that order there, it's definitely a more conservative minded person. Right. And this is from, you know, I've been working with him for five years.

So he would have been an 80s, 90s general. Yeah. And a guy named Newt Gingrich.

(55:47 - 57:17)

Right. That's my favorite. I could not see you and Newt Gingrich in a room together talking at least politics.

I certainly couldn't see it, but I could see you talking. It was very strange I had to do that. I mean, I got an email one day from a colleague in the space community saying, we're meeting with Newt Gingrich on Friday.

Would you like to come? Well, look, Mark, like you, I am trying to change the world. I'm trying to change the universe. I'm trying to change the situation of humanity for the better.

And I know that I have about the same power over that as an ant has in a colony of 20 million ants. Right. I just want to nudge it, you know, let me just nudge it in the right direction, you know.

So any contact I can have with levers of power can be useful in making this a better world. One hundred percent. Yeah.

So I said, yes, even though I'm on a very strict sleep schedule because I was in bed for 15 years with very serious illness. And and this was going to take place at a time of day when I absolutely must be asleep. Didn't matter.

And I said to the person inviting me, can I bring my friend three star general Steve Quast? And he said, yes. So Steve Quast flew in from Montgomery, Alabama. I took the train down from New York City and I showed up at nine o'clock in the morning and we were ushered into a big conference room with a big conference table big enough for about 15 to 20 people.

(57:19 - 57:42)

And as we're all scrumming through the door, you know, like rugby players, I'm trying to manipulate Steve Quast, the general, so that he will sit directly next to Newt Gingrich, who will sit at the head of the table. And Steve Quast, who's bigger than I am, almost anybody on planet Earth is bigger than I am out hustles. He outmaneuvers me.

(57:42 - 58:53)

He gets me into that chair where I am sitting with my left knee up against Newt Gingrich's right knee as he sits at the head of the table, sitting to his right. Yeah, I'm sitting to his right. It's not because I in this case, I did not get to choose my position.

Right. And because, you know, I would have positioned myself in the in the chair that gives you the greatest leverage, the alpha, the submissive alpha role. Yeah.

Gives you leverage from beneath. Yes. Right.

We love the puppet masters. Right. Right.

So I'm maneuvered into this strange position and they go around the table, starting with the person to Newt's immediate left. And everybody gives a little presentation. And when they come to me, I give a little presentation of the project we've just cooked up when I went to Montgomery, Alabama, to whatever the Air Force base is down there and met with a group of space people and sat there listening to them for an hour and then finally said, I think what you guys are trying to get at is this and outlined the two billion dollar moon price, getting to the moon, using off the shelf technology.

(58:53 - 1:00:05)

For example, right now you can buy a Falcon Heavy off the shelf. You can buy a capsule, the Dragon capsule off the shelf. Oh, really? Yes.

You can buy rockets that land on Earth. So presumably could be modified to land on the moon. For sure.

Falcon nine or the Falcon Heavy off the shelf. So there you have all the basic elements for what the whatever his name is, Trump administration wanted to achieve, landing the first woman on the moon. You could have started that four years ago.

And you'd have achieved it by today as long as you didn't hand it over to NASA to administrate or any of the space military industrial complex companies, which would bog you down for generations. So how do we do it? How do we do it from sixty two to sixty nine or sixty three to sixty nine? Was it just a single line of focus? Is that just what it was? Yes. We put in a massive measurable two to five percent of our total budget.

(1:00:06 - 1:00:12)

GDP, right? Yeah. Whatever it was. Today, we're spending a tenth of a percentage of our budget.

(1:00:13 - 1:00:22)

And there's more red tape than ever, right? But we don't need to do things that way. The example is the space launch system versus the Starship. Oh, absolutely.

(1:00:22 - 1:00:33)

The space launch system. It's it's seven years after the time when it was supposed to be ready. It's probably ten times the cost of what it was originally supposed to be.

(1:00:33 - 1:01:16)

And it still hasn't even had a wet dress rehearsal yet, much less a flight. Elon Starship prototypes have flown several times already. With great success.

I've seen how amazing they are. They're just right. And they're only waiting for FAA approval to do their first orbital launch of the Starship.

Presumably, they could do that within a month of right now, possibly two months of right now. So they're delivering for a tiny fraction of the NASA cost. So what we are basically what we were advocating in that meeting was doing an end round around what is called cost plus contracts.

(1:01:17 - 1:01:31)

How does he sleep? How does that how does he sleep at night? Does he sleep two hours? What's he get? I don't know. A power nap? So back to the story of Newt. So I'm sitting there to his immediate right, and I'm the last one to give a presentation.

(1:01:31 - 1:01:43)

And Newt Gingrich is not like any other in the same way. Michael Jackson was not like any other human I've ever met on the planet. He was he was a step into divinity beyond anything we've seen in evolution.

(1:01:44 - 1:02:20)

And is it cerebral? No, it's Newt is also one of these people who's beyond human. That's what he put in a different way or in a similar way, a very different way, a radically different way, the opposite way. First of all, first of all, he is three times as wide as he was back in the 90s when you saw him on television.

He is the size of Gabba the Hutt. Secondly, yes. Secondly, he has you know, you are able to read the facial gestures and the body gestures of everybody you've ever met.

(1:02:20 - 1:02:38)

Everybody. No, there are none. I've never seen him.

It is astonishing. I've never seen that with another human being. He looks blank and cold.

He looks absolutely cold. You can't even read dilations in his pupils. And he looks as if he were carved on Mount Rushmore.

(1:02:39 - 1:03:38)

Nothing moves. So instead of being completely moved, which he was never moved. Yes, it's a very, very, very good opposition.

I never thought of that. And so I gave my presentation and there was nothing, absolutely nothing. And I walked out of the meeting.

Mark, I do not like to lose. If you put me in a game, I like to win. And I'm accustomed to winning, even though it's very hard.

It's very hard. It's never easy. But this time I felt I had failed.

And I was humiliated. I humiliate very easily. And three weeks later, I got a phone call saying, Newt is adopting your program.

And within three weeks of that time, we were in Time, Newsweek, Fox News, MSNBC, just about everything that you can imagine. Right. With our $3 billion moon prize.

(1:03:39 - 1:03:46)

He does show up on Fox everyone every now and again. Right. He has good press contacts and we had given him a good hook, basically.

(1:03:46 - 1:03:51)

That's amazing that you were able to and you got no read leaving that meeting. No. Wow.

(1:03:52 - 1:05:01)

And Robert Walker, who is the former head of the House Science Committee, has become somebody I deeply love. He's part of the $2 billion moon prize team. And he is Newt Gingrich's right hand man.

When Newt was sitting at the head of the table, Robert Walker was sitting at the tail of the table. And he is a Republican and I am a Democrat. And I like to use this as an example of bipartisanship, because what we do is very simple.

We focus on what we have in common and we forget about the stuff we disagree about totally and just focus on achieving the goals of the thing we have in common. And there are certain needs we all have in common. Right.

And they're clear. They're clear because we find ourselves nodding when we hear it. Right.

So if I can do this and I'm a historical flea, there are other people in a much better position than I am who could be doing this too. This kind of bipartisanship in which you try to achieve real goals. Yeah.

(1:05:02 - 1:05:38)

So that's it. I think I should go to do my work. Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for your time again. I'm so grateful for that time and good fortune and good luck with everything in your new book. Do you want to share? May you run for Congress? I may.

I may actually do it. I'm not certain, but it's U.S. Arizona District 7, if it would. Amazing.

Well, I was just in Phoenix. How close was... We are. I'm in Phoenix.

I live in Phoenix. Amazing. I went down to Phoenix on very short notice to have Passover with my family because it's been COVID and it's been three years since we've been able to have a family event.

(1:05:38 - 1:05:55)

And I'm 78. And, you know, any meeting could be my last, even though I intend to be around for another 20 years. When you're in Phoenix again, please feel free to text me.

You have my number. I will absolutely open my house or we'll meet for dinner or something. That would be very neat.

(1:05:55 - 1:06:00)

Thank you again. Howard, tell us about all your stuff. Share all your information so everyone can get a hold of you.

(1:06:00 - 1:06:15)

To find out about me, you go to howardbloom.net or just go to Google and put in Howard Bloom. It's B-L-O-O-M, like the flowers that bloom in the spring. The book that will get you started on my way of thought, because there is a whole philosophy here.

(1:06:15 - 1:06:31)

It's called The Brainian Fight Theory of Everything in the Universe, Including Sex, Violence, and the Human Soul. And it's taken very seriously by people in the scientific community. And I make it, I try to make it as readable as a restaurant gourmet dessert tray.

(1:06:31 - 1:06:48)

So that once you start eating these bonbons, you can't stop, even though each one contains new knowledge, new insights, new ways to see the world, hopefully. So just go to Amazon, look up Howard Bloom, and it'll give you the Lucifer principle. And that's a good place to start.

(1:06:49 - 1:07:12)

My first book, because it reads as if it were written tomorrow. Talks about things like Iran's nuclear capacities. Great.

And Wednesdays, you're on Coast to Coast? Wednesdays, 106. Look up Coast to Coast AM stations, and it'll give you the station near you. And I'm on for a three and a half minute news commentary every Wednesday night.

(1:07:12 - 1:07:21)

And it's where you will find out what you will read in the headlines 48 hours later. I'm looking forward to check that out. I have seen the small clips before, but I'm very, I'll dig a little deeper.

(1:07:22 - 1:07:33)

Terrific. Okay, well, have a wonderful afternoon. You as well.

I'm blessed to have come across your just being able to have a conversation. I'm so grateful. So thank you.

(1:07:33 - 1:07:44)

I am too, Mark. Okay, have a good afternoon. Take care.

Bye. Once again, that was Howard Bloom. Conversation recorded on April 23rd, 2022.

(1:07:45 - 1:08:05)

If you like the podcast, if you like the conversation, please feel free to subscribe and like www.knockedconscious.com, K-N-O-C-K-E-D-C-O-N-S-C-I-O-U-S.com That's knockedconscious.com. Thank you again and have a great day. Take care, everybody.