Transcript of my conversation with Howard Bloom 4/9/2022

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Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Knocked Conscious. Today is Thursday, April 14th, 2022, and I want to share a conversation I had with a gentleman named Howard Bloom. He's an overall genius, a world-famous publicist, scientist, philosopher, you name it.

He's a jack of everything. He knows it all. I had a great hour and a half long conversation with him over Zoom this past weekend, and I wanted to share that with everybody.

I do have another scheduled conversation with him because the conversation was cut short. I left all of it in the podcast because it's really cute, because Howard just cracks me up. So here's the conversation.

I hope you enjoy. And there we go. Yes, reporting in progress.

Eureka, sir. How are you? Okay, so there I am at the age of 12, and Martin Gardner, an amazing mathematician, had a regular column in the Scientific American called Mathematical Games, and I interpreted one of his columns as calling for a computer that would play a certain game. So I sat down with a friend of mine who was three years older than I was, and we got together over and over again, and I mapped out what this computer would be.

Then he built it, and he won the science fair award. So I've never built a computer with my soldering gun. In fact, in those days, that would have been, I was 12, so it was 1955.

The store that had electronic components in the city of Buffalo, New York, my hometown, had no computer components because computers in those days were the size of buildings. I remember the punch cards and everything. Yes, exactly.

So nonetheless, he built the computer and he won the science fair awards. Then many years later, after dropping out of college and accidentally helped start the hippie movement and hitchhiking and riding the rails and having all kinds of adventures, including with murderers, I went back to school at NYU, and I took a computer programming course because I loved computers, or at least the idea of computers, and I got an A plus in this course. Whoever heard of A pluses? They don't bother with pluses normally.

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They just give you an A, and I got A pluses on every single program that I wrote. But when the grad students translated my programs into punch cards and fed them into the computer, not a single one of my A plus programs ever made it through the computer. It always had a run error or some kind of skip or freeze, right? In those days, the computers put out a thousand sheets of paper, all, you know, accordion folded together.

Absolutely. Yeah. The dot matrix type or with the sides, right? We're fed through the wheels.

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Right. And the computer was designed to spot simple common errors in something called diagnostics. They all appeared on the front page in something called diagnostics.

My errors never appeared on the diagnostic page, which meant that the poor grad students had to go through a thousand pages of what was called machine language. Yes. The raw language that the computer spoke to itself.

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Right. And humans couldn't cotton on to, to find the error. And always somewhere around page 97, there was a spot where there was a division by zero.

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Which you cannot define by zero. Yes. Right.

Which totally flummoxes a poor computer. Absolutely. So, so the, you were saying before we got on in the midst of, I mean, we got on by clawing our way through all kinds of technical problems.

Absolutely. And you were saying that the way you think is not the way computers think. Not, not at all.

So if I, if I may, may I introduce you just very briefly, Howard? We'll certainly go forward from there because I, I'm not going to lie. I am gushing right now. I am just bringing year to year.

I, I could speak with you, like I said, myriad of topics or mere, I'm sorry, myriad topics. It's crazy. So welcome Howard Bloom.

The most recent book is Einstein, Michael Jackson, and me a search for soul in the power pits of rock and roll. Is that correct, Howard? That's absolutely correct. And if I move my chair, you should actually be able to see the cover of the book.

I think we do have that back there. So I am recording it. So we will see that.

So thank you. And that was, that was published in 2020, correct? Oh my God. I lose track of these things.

I think it was somewhere around 2020. Yes. But to your point about this is I listened to your book for first of all, how this, how this came to be was just kismet for me.

So I'm, I'm absolutely blessed that I'm even having a conversation because so many things are going through my mind. I can't, it's very hard to explain, but basically it just opens up every channel. That's always bouncing around in my brain, you know, that's amazing.

So I listened to your book, I listened to the book and then I watched your, and then I happened to type you up to look at any other interviews you had. Right. And you were on Joe Rogan.

And then I melted. So then I listened, I listened to that podcast. And it's funny because every question that Joe had came up, I'm not Joe Rogan by any stretch of any, any imagination, but I have the curiosity and I, right.

You know, you always talk about your attitudes, your first two rules of science. I adopt Aristotle's point of it. It's the mark of an educated man to entertain an idea without adopting it.

Right. And I think that's a very interesting statement. I love that one.

We get lost in that, right? How would we lose the nuance of conversation? Right. And that's where we're at in this crazy, crazy world. So someone in the Michael Jackson community reached out to me and gave me your email address, right? And it's one of those ones.

It's like a dial up one from back in the day. And I also have one that's old, but I reached out and two minutes later I get a response and thank you so much for being so gracious with your time. Well, you're welcome.

So we've been having a wonderful time wading through technicalities this afternoon. And it's funny, you spoke about having a conversation, how direct people are and at work. It's like when I walk into my job, it's like a switch flips and I am just all business.

Right. My home life and my work life are 180 degree opposites almost in a way. Well, here I am sitting at home and my life, I realized back around 1980 that my life was my work.

And so we took the living room of this place and we converted it into an office. And then Stereo Review came out and wrote an article about the office because it was on the technological cutting edge. And I don't know what made it technological cutting edge because it was before even DVD recorders had come out.

That might be because no one else had done it. That's what it is. Right.

I mean, you lay in your bed for on your back typing your books, correct? Well, I used to. I mean, I was stuck in bed for 15 years. And I share that right off the bat.

Let's let's talk about it. I mean, or do you have a direction you like to go? Well, you know, if we start at the beginning, we'll tell a coherent story. I love it.

So and the beginning is there was I don't know what happened in the first 10 years of my life. Well, I do know what happened. My father was drafted.

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My so he went off to San Francisco. My mother had to take care of the family store. And so I wasn't a baby.

In other words, I had no parents. The they hired my mother hired a cleaning woman. Now, look, if you if you're an intelligent person and she was and you have a baby, then presumably you will hire a babysitter, for God's sakes.

And in the title is the clear implication that she's there to take care of the baby. But if you hire a cleaning woman, she's there to take care of the vacuum cleaner. And the apartment was the size of a couple of postage stamps.

So the and she takes care of the postage stamp sized rug. So that's what happened. The babysitters would put me in a little windowless quarter from the that led from the living room to the bedrooms in the back.

And it had a hardwood floor. She never bothered to turn on the light. And she put up a baby barrier.

You know, one of those folding things. And that's how I spent the first three years of my life basically, oh, my God, was locked away. The social conditioning is just out the window.

No social conditioning whatsoever, not even parents. So and this is true. It was the result was truly painful.

Because for 50 years, I had clinical depression, which means that I was in emotional agony every second of every day for 50 friggin years. But the advantage of being a perpetual outsider, who's never acclimated to human groups, I'm always an outsider to human groups, the advantages are enormous. That's funny about this, because you would have been in my group, we had a group of the misfits, you know, or whatever, you know, that group of people that I it's, I've always been fascinated by different.

I don't have to agree with you to believe I don't believe in what you believe in to believe in you. Right? I just found people to be so fascinating. So the different people I would gravitate towards my group of people were all over the spectrum.

Right? I think you would have felt right at home in my click, right? You're you mentioned click, right? Well, yes, I but I never somewhere along the line, I discovered that I could assemble my own groups. And if I assembled a group, then I was clearly its leader. And that's the only position where I've ever felt comfortable.

I mean, it's reminiscent of when I got into something, well, look, I wasn't into popular culture as a kid, because popular culture was the culture of the people who beat me up and humiliated me and chased me around the block. Right? You went opposite of that. I mean, are you just kind of look the other way, right? Well, I, I listened to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Bartok and Stravinsky.

And then when I my parents sent me off to summer camp, one of their many hopeless attempts to make me human, to make me a kid. I refused to go along with the process. And there was a kid from New York at the summer camp, and New Yorkers who like people from another planet.

And he told me about this form of music that represented human freedom, and human freedom sounded wonderful to me. So I got into jazz, I didn't like it as much as I like Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Bartok and Stravinsky. But that I was into it, I bought tons of jazz records.

And, and I didn't register a like for anything in the world of popular music until I was hitchhiking and riding the rails up and down the West Coast. And one day I was picked up by a convertible, a Chevy convertible. And on their radio, the car radio, we were driving down the Pacific Coast Highway.

So we had the Pacific Ocean on our right, it was a magnificent view. And on came Neil Sadaka's Breaking Up is Hard to Do. And I liked that song.

Despite my- I love Neil Sadaka. Yeah, well, despite my resistance to popular culture. One of my early memories, I'm, I'm a little younger.

I'm 47. But right. I'm 30 years younger.

I'm 31 years younger. Yeah, but I'm an old soul, Howard. I mean, so many things I want to talk about.

But that I remember this 33 album that had a bunch of different songs on it. And I'm from Philadelphia. So the Temptations had just my imagination.

And it was Archie Bell and the Drells Tighten Up. It was my favorite song. It was this song that just made you just get up and dance.

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And Daryl Hall and John Oates were Philadelphia. Very much. I did 74s when I was born.

So that was definitely my real house. So they were totally imprinted on the Temptations. 100%.

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They wanted to be the Temptations more than anything else in life. If the Temptations were playing Philadelphia, they used to show up at the backstage entrance, just hoping to get a second or 10 seconds with any member of the Temptations they possibly could. So that led to me.

I mean, we're skipping over lots of stuff. I work A to Z to K to F to G, whichever direction we go. Well, so having discovered this, I mean, that's my job was to discover the souls of my clients when I finally got into popular culture and founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry.

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Soul was what it was all about. And since the soul of Hall and Oates, my clients, was just laser focused on the Temptations, I sat down with their manager, Tommy Mottola, who in those days was a famous powerhouse, and said, Tommy, look, the Apollo Theater is reopening for the second time. I handled the press on the first opening of the Apollo.

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Daryl and John are totally obsessed with the Temptations. If you get Daryl and John, or if you get the Temptations to say yes to performing with Daryl and John, I will get the Apollo Theater to say yes to giving us one of their opening slots. Because an opening slot of the Apollo validates Daryl and John in what they've been into all their lives.

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Absolutely. The Apollo is the standard for a segment of music that you are in or you're not in. I mean, you're part of it or you're not part of it.

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You're accepted or rejected. I've seen the boo-birds and I've seen the cheers at the Apollo. It's amazing.

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Amazing. So the Apollo was in the hands of a guy named Percy Sutton, who had been the borough president of Manhattan, and who had been high in the Dinkins-Mayoral administration, and who owns six of the biggest, most trend-setting R&B stations in the country. He was famous for not taking phone calls from white people.

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But I had been introduced to him through Bob Marley, and I was sure I could get him on the phone. And so... That's a good name drop, isn't it? I mean, the Bob Marley. Right.

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And that's a whole story in itself. Absolutely. So at any rate, Tommy went and got The Temptations.

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I called Percy and Percy said, well, my opening night is already taken, but how about doing the second night? Well, that was sufficiently historic, though nowhere near reopening the Apollo Theater with this show. That's sad. That would have been something else.

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But this was sufficiently historic that it made the point. And then I said to Tommy, there are these new things, and they're selling like crazy, and they're music video DVDs, 90-minute DVDs of an entire concert. So try to get a deal to put out a DVD version of this.

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And Tommy went out and he got that deal, and it sold like crazy when it came out. But how I got from being an outcast in a narrow, windowless corridor with my hands on a cold, hardwood floor, because I was crawling in those days, to rock and roll, that's a long story. So I do jump around because I follow the topic.

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You mentioned emotional depression for 50 years, but you're 78, correct? Can you tell me about that journey? Well, it's monstrous. It's really, truly monstrous to be in pain like that all of the time. And I guess we're skipping over a lot of stuff here, but I'm 14 years old.

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I've been reading two books a day since I was 10 years old. I've read one book under the desk and another book when I get home. Teachers do not like me because I never pay any attention to a word they say.

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I'm too busy reading. And by the way, I think that Daryl Hall used to do the same sort of thing. But at any rate, it's time for the transition from grammar school to high school.

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So I show up at the new high school I'm supposed to be going to, and the place is like a prison for me. It's huge. It's semi-Gothic.

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It has these high windows, like church windows. They sit me, seat me next to a Black kid, five inches taller than I am, who I adore. It turns out, to me, he feels just like a wonderful person.

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But I am truly oppressed by the atmosphere in this place. And then my parents reveal something to me. Now, I have to go back a step.

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My parents had, at some point, looked for private schools for me. And they'd sent me to an interview with interviews with the headmasters of the two major private schools in Buffalo, New York. And in one, I just didn't fit.

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Everybody wore suits and ties. I hate suits and ties. And in the other one, for God knows what reason, I said to the headmaster, look, I will only come to your school on the following conditions.

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First of all, you have to teach me Russian, because Russia is going to be a major country in the future. Remember, I'm 12 years old. It's 1955.

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It's two years before Sputnik goes up. That is unbelievable. But wait, I give him another condition.

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And I say, look, you traditionally teach science by teaching biology first, chemistry second, and physics third. I want you to reverse the order of your science courses. So you teach me physics, which means the Big Bang.

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Now, at that point, Big Bang theory was very controversial. And the guy who was in charge basically of steady state theory, its opponent, knew he would drive it out of theoretical physics within two years and no one would ever hear of it again. But I was totally convinced on Big Bang theory.

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So I said, first, you teach me about the Big Bang and the origin of elementary particles. That's physics. Then you teach me chemistry, because that's what elementary particles and atoms do when they get together, when they socialize.

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Then you teach my biology, because that's what molecules do when they socialize. And then you teach me anthropologies. You can teach me about the origin of human societies.

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And you talk about cultures and things like that. Yeah. And then you teach me history.

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That makes absolute sense, because you're going from small to large. You're going from the quark through to the large. And you're doing something miraculous that happens when you put things in chronological order.

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It's called a story. You're building, yeah, a foundation. Yeah, you tell a story.

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I'm 12 years old and I'm dictating this to him. So my parents, so back to the question of depression. So my parents, after my first week and a half at this monstrous school, it feels like a penitentiary to me, come to me and they say, look, we got you into the school with the headmaster that you gave a hard time to.

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If we will send you to this private school, which has 60 acres of land, it's green, it's gorgeous, but only on one condition. You have to promise to work. OK, so I've just promised to discard my two books a day and to work on homework.

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And I discover something that my work is the one thing that diminishes the pain of depression. It doesn't take it down to zero. It takes it down by maybe 25%.

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Is it a distraction thing or just an alternate focus, kind of like biting on a bit when you're getting surgery? Well, here's a little bit of theory. We have an internal self and external self. The internal self is guided by the parasympathetic nervous system, which handles things, automatic functions like heart beating and breathing.

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And and the internal self is there so we can check ourselves over so we can see if we have any serious problems that we need to take care of. However, the internal self is depressive. And then there's the exterior self.

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And the exterior self comes alive basically when we're interfacing with other people or when we're interfacing with some sort of a problem like your engine won't work. How do you fix it? And the exterior self is the opposite of depressive. It is moves in the direction of elation, if you want to call it that.

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And you can see the interior self at work in the morning when you wake up. Because when you wake up in the morning, whether you recognize it or not, your your mind goes through a quick body check. Like your computer checking out your car systems.

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And it looks for aches and pains and all kinds of stuff. But if you start talking to somebody else, that melts away and you go into your exterior self. Well, I never got much of an opportunity to engage the exterior self.

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When I was a kid, because I had no social contacts. And so I was dominated by the depressive interior self, the parasympathetic nervous system, that the exterior self is handled by what's called the sympathetic nervous system, which is there for engaging with the outside world. And if I engaged in work, it could take an hour.

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But within the first 15 minutes to an hour, I'd be soaring. I'd be flying. I'd be free of that interior self.

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Now, in the days of chronic emotional pain, the emotional pain never stopped, but it diminished. And so I became a workaholic. So my life has been my work ever since.

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And of course, you could say that I was already a workaholic at the age of 10 when I discovered books, because who else but a workaholic can read two books a day? Right, absolutely. So you're just wired like a person. I mean, how many percentage of people, less than 5%, maybe 1% or 2% wired in that level? I have no idea.

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All I know is that I became intellectually voracious. I encountered the first two rules of science that you alluded to earlier in the conversation. I was sitting there in my family's living room one day, this big, dark living room.

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And I knew the location of every single book in the house, because they'd all been the same ever since we'd moved into this house. And all of a sudden, a book appeared that had no place on our shelves. And it's on my lap, and I open it up.

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And it says, 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 that galvanized me. I don't know what you would call it.

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I imprinted on it. That became my religion. Truth.

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It's something about truth. Right. And I learned very early in this two-book-a-day reading habit of science books and science fiction books that science is about the aspiration to omniscience.

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It's about the desire to know and be able to explain everything. Right. And to know that you do not know is the true knowledge, right? Right.

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So I became omnivorously curious. Curious about everything. And I started looking for things right under my nose that everybody takes for granted and doesn't even see are there.

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Yeah. And the thing that I discovered right under my nose over the course of the two years of my basic education, the two years when I was reading two books a day from the age of 10 to the age of 12, what I discovered was under my nose is that when I went to my synagogue, which I hated to do, I absolutely loathed doing. Yeah.

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It was set up like a Lutheran church. It had these hardwood pews. I'm Lutheran.

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I know. I know what Lutheran is. So those pews lined you up and imprisoned you.

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Yeah. Because imagine the only space left in the pew is the middle seat. How do you get there? Everybody sitting there has to move their knees somehow, which is impossible, so that you can get through.

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So once you're through, once you found your seat, you're stuck. Then you have to go to the bathroom. Yeah, you are locked in.

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And you do whatever the minister or the rabbi tells you to do. If he tells you to stand, you stand. If he tells you to sit, you sit.

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If he tells you to sing, you sing. But there's something profoundly missing. I don't know why I realized this, but I realized this by the time I was 12, that there was something profoundly missing in this version of religion.

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Oh, for sure. And I think it's that humans took it to their advantage or changed it to their... Well, it's that there's no transcendent experience there. There's no ecstatic experience there.

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And it did become a business and a position of power. I mean, there are a lot of things that corrupt, right? And we see those things happen. Right.

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But the most important thing, I mean, okay, so eventually... If I may, may I give you a little background story? Yes, go ahead. My mother worked for a Jewish caterer in Philadelphia, Martha Ward Catering. Right.

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She became Wendy Ward Catering. We were one of the top ones. We run the Trump's Princess, for example.

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We've done, I think, the drummer Bon Jovi's wedding on the beach. We've done all these different... We've done the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 96 or 2000. I forget which year it was.

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I think it was 2000. And all these other things. I just grew up with a very rich Jewish community, yet we were German.

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Right. We had a community that was just unmasked. We were the same people.

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And then we look back to the years my grandfather fought in World War II on the German side. Amazing. And they escaped East Germany and came here with my mom and my aunt and my grandmother.

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And the stories that... The bless that I have, the luck that I am to be here, you know? Right. To see the multicultural type things and that. But I love the Jewish community synagogues.

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They are rich with this beautiful culture. But I can imagine the structure being suffocating. Well, I thought it was profoundly repressive.

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Okay. Was there ever a rabbi that did inspire? Oh, no. Not at all.

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When I was in confirmation class after my bar mitzvah, they threw me out. The rabbi threw me out. Because I was raising atheist arguments and I was monopolizing class time.

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And he couldn't teach anybody. They don't like those. Yeah, while I was in the room.

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So, no. There were no rabbis who ever inspired me. It's a crazy story.

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I mean, my mother at one point, she did a couple of good things. My mother couldn't handle intimacy, at least not with me. And it might have been that I couldn't handle intimacy.

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I mean, when your parents abandon you, when you're a baby, you develop defense mechanisms. So, you've got a fortress around your emotion. Jordan Peterson talks a lot about if you're not socially adjusted by four.

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And if the first three years of your life were not even, you know, there was no tactile response, there was nothing, that can easily imprint in a very negative. I mean, in your case, it certainly drove you in a very good positive direction. But it could easily turn the other way.

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I mean, it could easily, but my mother could do things at a distance from me. And she saw what was happening with me somehow when I was 12. And she arranged for me to have a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo.

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Now, I, because of those two rules of science, I became immersed in microbiology and theoretical physics at the age of 10. Right. And I was reading my head off on these topics.

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And my mother, seeing what was happening with me, took me to a used medical equipment store that sold medical equipment to the medical students at the University of Buffalo. And she bought me a professional 1935 Zeiss microscope. She let me pick it out.

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Carl Zeiss lens microscope from 1935. Oh my gosh. Yeah, right.

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I can imagine the precision and the handcraft, just the craftsmanship of it. And working, it was difficult as hell. But I mastered that.

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And I started looking at pond water, just like Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, had. And it was Anton van Leeuwenhoek's life that was used as the example of looking at things right under your nose, as if you've never seen them before, and then proceed from there. And then she arranged for a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo.

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Now, thinking back on it, the only thing I can imagine is that she managed to use her academic connections to get a courtesy visit. So I would imagine that this guy was planning to spend five minutes with me to appease my mother. But we went into his office.

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He closed the door. We didn't come out for an hour. My mother must have read every single magazine he had in his waiting room.

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And why? Because it was 1955. It was the year that the guy who was the major champion of steady state physics, steady state cosmology of the universe, it was the year he absolutely knew that he was about to destroy Big Bang Theory, which he had named facetiously. He came up with the term.

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That's correct. It was it was a spoof in a way. What is Big Bang Theory or something? He said it the way under his breath, I think, if I remember correctly.

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And so we sat there discussing Big Bang versus steady state theory of the universe and the interpretation of the Doppler shift, which was the hottest topic in science at the time. And if we may, the Doppler shift had to do with the red and blue shift. Is that correct? Yes, exactly.

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So exactly. It had to do with the interpretation of whether things were moving away from us or whether stars and other galaxies were moving away from us or moving toward us. Correct.

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And the Doppler shift indicated that they were moving away from us. That's right. And I believe it was red.

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Correct. Was it moving away from us? So if most people who probably are familiar with the Doppler effect, you hear a train going by, you know, it's very similar sound. In this case, it's light waves.

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But it would be a wave of some sort. I'm right. I apologize for I probably just mansplained that to somebody.

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But I just want to, you know, I never know who's listening. So just in case. But thank you.

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Please continue. So basically, the Doppler shift, we were finding that the further away it was, the faster actually was expanding. Correct.

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Right. Who was it that wasn't it Hubble that showed through the lens right through the telescope? Right. It was Hubble who came up with the expanding universe.

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And actually, I had I had Jeff Hester on who was actually the person who was one of the chief engineers for the Hubble. Right. He was there when the first picture was taken.

(34:59 - 35:04)

He was at the computer when the first Hubble picture. Oh, fantastic. He's an amazing gentleman as well.

(35:04 - 35:18)

You two would probably be peas in a pod. Right. Well, so so we came out of his office and he put his hand on my shoulder and he's standing behind me and he put and he said to my mom, you don't have to save for grad school for him.

(35:18 - 35:46)

He'll get graduate fellowships in theoretical physics at any school he wants. So can I ask you this about your family? Was it your family specifically, your mother specifically, or is it do you think it's a little bit cultural that your mother saw that talent in you and wanted to encourage it versus extinguish it? It's very cultural. Remember, Jewish women either want to marry doctors or they want their sons to become doctors.

(35:47 - 35:52)

Right. In other words, they want their kids to become credentialed. And they don't care.

(35:52 - 35:58)

Not in any it doesn't matter how correct is that right. They just want to be the best at what they do. Right.

(35:58 - 36:03)

And they and they want to have the status. There's a certain status that comes with being credentialed. Yeah.

(36:05 - 36:20)

And my mother's mother in Riga, Latvia, thought she was engaged to this guy who was on his way to becoming a doctor. And and he broke her heart. He left her and married somebody else.

(36:20 - 36:39)

And she instead married a tailor from a town on the outskirts of Riga called Golding. And and she bitterly resented the fact that he was not a doctor. And she destroyed him for the rest of their lives together.

(36:40 - 36:44)

And this is very Jewish. She couldn't stand the fact that he wasn't credentialed. Right.

(36:45 - 37:02)

And my mom had exactly the same syndrome. And my dad, she got him a liquor license because she was the personal assistant to the head of the New York State Liquor Authority. And he started a little tiny store.

(37:02 - 37:11)

And that's where she went when my dad was shipped off to California for the war. She went to take care of that liquor store. That's why I had no mom.

(37:12 - 37:35)

And she gave her husband, my father, the same sort of viciously hard time that her mother had given her father. And but my dad and I didn't quite realize that this until recently. My dad, I knew, built the biggest liquor store in western New York state.

(37:36 - 37:53)

What I didn't realize is what an important institution he built for the city of Buffalo and its surrounding towns. Today, what he built has become the Costco of liquor in western New York state. It's unlike anything they have any place else that I've ever been.

(37:53 - 38:04)

Interesting. So I come from a state in Pennsylvania that has a we're actually the largest single purchaser of liquor in the country because it's amazing. It's a blue state because Pennsylvania has state stores they don't have.

(38:04 - 38:16)

They don't have liquor stores like you would have in New York, right? So we have a totally different or they did have a totally different process. They started moving wine and beer into supermarkets. But tell us tell me about your your dad's store.

(38:17 - 38:27)

Basically, I mean, I didn't know that much about it. When I had to work there during one summer vacation, it nearly drove me insane with boredom. I mean, it was boredom to the point where it actually hurt.

(38:28 - 38:41)

It physically hurt. The boredom was so bad. I when my father had a bright idea, which was taking, he felt that there were certain substances in wine that improved human health.

(38:42 - 38:54)

And so he wanted to put out a line of vitamins that contained this miracle ingredient. Today, it's called resveratrol. Yeah, the antioxidant type pieces, right, that we got about this in red wine.

(38:55 - 38:59)

Okay, right. But in those days, this was breakthrough stuff. Oh, that is absolutely.

(38:59 - 39:15)

I'm just I'm astonished that your father had somehow made that correlation. Well, and so he went to my uncle, who was a doctor, and the two of them put together a company to sell this stuff. And I sat down, I was 15 years old.

(39:15 - 39:32)

It was the first thing my father had done that caught my imagination. And I wrote I created an advertising campaign that very explained in very simple terms what this stuff did. So I couldn't relate to most of what my dad was doing.

(39:33 - 39:36)

I mean, I hate alcohol. I loathe it. I despise it.

(39:37 - 39:52)

It is one of those lethal poisons on the face of the earth, literally, in terms of the number of deaths it causes. And but I could engage with this new thing he was doing. And then my dad came up with an idea.

(39:53 - 40:09)

He decided to introduce Buffalo, New York to something it didn't drink at the time called wine. And he would take my mom on Chateau trips around Europe. He literally brought the wine culture into Buffalo.

(40:09 - 40:39)

Yes. And he had me and I at that point had taught myself calligraphy. And he had me research all the wines that he was bringing in, digest the research down to 120 words and then calligraph the 120 words on a little stand up card so that he could lay the wines out on tables with little stand up cards that I wrote plugging the wines.

(40:39 - 41:00)

Now, I hated wine. But you said you gave this amazing quote from Aristotle at the beginning of our conversation in which Aristotle basically said until you can put yourself in the minds of just about everybody on this planet, you're not cutting it. You're not living up to your human potential.

(41:00 - 41:09)

Yeah. Even the minds that you disagree with. So I could get into these descriptions of the wines, even though I hated the wines.

(41:09 - 41:30)

Right. Today, there's this horrible, monstrous, appalling war going on in the Ukraine. And it turns out that you can't understand what's going on in Vladimir Putin's mind unless you understand the way of thinking created by a guy named Alexander Dugin.

(41:31 - 41:38)

I have a partner in Moscow. He's my partner in theoretical physics. His name is Pavel Korokhin.

(41:38 - 41:52)

He's at the Keldershen Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And to me, he's the only brother I've got on Earth. And 10 years ago, he said, you've got to look into this thing called Eurasianism.

(41:52 - 42:19)

So I started looking into this thing called Eurasianism. And it turns out that in the Eurasianist view of the world, which Alexander Dugin is the thought leader for, and he's the thought maker for. Would we call Eurasia China, Russia, and India? Or what do we call it in Eurasia? Basically, it's China, it's Russia, it's Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

(42:19 - 42:25)

OK. The entire Europe and Asia together, not the Eurasia transition between the two spots. Yes, the whole damn thing.

(42:26 - 42:43)

I understand. Alexander Dugin's philosophy, there's no such thing as the Darwinian timeline that you and I look at for the universe. In the beginning of this world, the first people that God created were the Russian people.

(42:43 - 43:02)

And he deliberately created them at the very hinge point between Europe and Asia. Why? Because God created the Russian people to rule the Earth. And the first step of ruling the Earth is ruling the entire Eurasian continent.

(43:02 - 43:19)

Now, Xi Jinping, I wonder what goes on in Xi Jinping's mind in relation to this philosophy, because it really means that once Russia has taken all of Europe, Russia wants to take China too. But China will be ahead of them and have 3x the people. They're not concerned.

(43:20 - 43:55)

They'll have the technology and they'll have roughly 10 times the number of people. But that would be the long 50-year goal of the dynasty, correct, of the CCP? Right. And in the current view, I mean, current as of this month, in the current Eurasianist view, the Ukrainians, first of all, Dugin says, you cannot talk seriously about Eurasian politics unless you solve the Ukraine problem.

(43:55 - 44:02)

Does this sound a little bit like the Jewish problem? It is. It does sound exactly like that. Yeah, it's Hitler's Jewish problem all over again.

(44:03 - 44:12)

Why? Because the Ukrainian people, first of all, don't exist. The Ukraine is little Russia and new Russia. It's all Russia.

(44:14 - 44:28)

And its people are Nazis. Now, what does that mean? I mean, I've had a very hard time getting a definition of what a Nazi is in Vladimir Putin's viewpoint. It's Western oriented.

(44:29 - 44:40)

It's democratically oriented. It's anti-Putin. If you are any of those three things, anti-Putin, pro-Western, pro-democratic, you're a Nazi.

(44:41 - 44:55)

Now, the majority of Ukrainians... So basically, he's redefined the term, and we're assuming he's not redefining the term. That's right. We're already confused at the first opening of the conversation.

(44:55 - 45:07)

Yes, because what... We're not even talking about the same things. Right. So the exercise we're doing right now, when it comes to Vladimir Putin's mind... Where's corporate media in all this? Forget them for the moment.

(45:07 - 45:25)

Let's finish the argument here. The argument is that the Ukrainian people, who, of course, don't exist, have demonstrated that the majority of them are Nazis by voting in a Nazi government. Well, what's a Nazi government? It's a pro-Western, pro-democratic government.

(45:25 - 45:55)

And because the majority of Ukrainians are Nazis, pro-Western, pro-democratic, they are too imbued with this Nazism to ever be reeducated. So the Russian people must exterminate the majority of the Ukrainian population. It is so old Germanic in thinking, because it reminds me of Jordan Peterson.

(45:56 - 46:05)

Jordan Peterson spoke of the German thing. How could you get to that point where you're the person unloading the people on the train cars at Auschwitz, right? Right. And it's disgust.

(46:05 - 46:17)

If you have enough disgust for someone, you want to exterminate disgust. You can dislike someone and disagree, but if you disgust it, you need to stomp it out. And well, that's a good point.

(46:17 - 46:28)

So right now, when we see when we see a suburb of Kiev, in which there are bodies, people who've been shot. And the train station. Lining the street.

(46:29 - 46:32)

Yeah, the recent train station. Or yes, this morning's train station. Yeah.

(46:33 - 46:51)

Well, that's exterminating people who are endangering everything that is positive and good in life. Yeah. Because everything positive and good in life comes from the Orthodox Church, comes from it comes from the institutions of Russianism, of being profoundly Russian.

(46:51 - 47:05)

And there's another few things that you need to know. But this is all in the spirit of Aristotle, saying you have to be able to put yourself in the mind of a person you disagree with profoundly. Howard, I'm going to process this as is.

(47:05 - 47:19)

I am all about the conversation because not enough thought is out there. So I would love for any kind of thing to spark anyone's mind to think differently or just to think. So please share.

(47:19 - 47:30)

Well, the point here is that there is a there is a noxious viewpoint. It doesn't mean we should exterminate the Russian people. The Russian people are profoundly good.

(47:30 - 47:34)

And they're suffering. They've suffered for 100 plus years. 50.

(47:34 - 47:44)

How many millions dead? Because of these oppressive philosophies. Remember, before the Marxists came along, they had the czars. Yes.

(47:45 - 47:51)

Yeah. So they have lived in a state that we would call oppression. Oppression, for sure.

(47:52 - 47:57)

Yeah. For 500 years, at least. But there are a couple of other things to know.

(47:57 - 48:09)

First of all, the Ukraine, Kiev. Kiev was the origin point of Russian of Russianism. Yes.

(48:09 - 48:12)

Yes. It's the homeland of Russianism. Yeah.

(48:12 - 48:41)

The Vikings came down the river, discovered the river system, the interior river system of Europe at the hinge point between Europe and Asia. And they discovered that there were all of these beautiful people, beautiful when they're young, at least, who they could take as slaves. And they could continue down the river system all the way to Constantinople, Byzantium, which was where the Russian Empire or where the Roman Empire was ruled for 1,200 years.

(48:41 - 48:53)

The Eastern Empire, right? Well, but they didn't think of it as the Eastern Empire. I'm just trying to be clear. Rome was running the Western half.

(48:54 - 49:03)

Okay, so let's go back to Constantine. So Constantine is in the middle of a battle. Constantine is not yet emperor of Rome.

(49:03 - 49:15)

And maybe he is, I'm not sure, but it's 322 AD. And Constantine has a vision of a cross in the sun. And he converts to Christianity, this outcast religion.

(49:16 - 49:31)

And over the course of the next 15 years, he converts the entire Roman Empire to Christianity. And the original heart of the Roman Empire is Rome. And the original heart of Christianity is Rome.

(49:31 - 49:45)

But Constantine has another bright idea. He decides to move Rome 1,200 miles to the east. And he picks a city called Byzantium.

(49:46 - 49:55)

And that's the new Rome. So that becomes Constantinople. Yeah, and that becomes the center of the Roman Empire, period.

(49:55 - 50:04)

And it also becomes the one place on earth to which God talks. God has spoken through Rome. Now God speaks through the second Rome, Byzantium.

(50:05 - 50:25)

And then in 1453, Byzantium falls to the Muslims. And the Russians believe that Moscow is the third Rome. So now Russia is the only place on earth that talks directly to God.

(50:27 - 50:49)

So that idea of being the third Rome with the destiny of saving all of mankind, the way that they're currently saving the citizens of Bupa by shooting a whole mess of them in the head, that becomes the manifest destiny of Russia. Interesting, third Rome, third Reich. I mean, it's very, I mean, it's just why I never thought of that.

(50:49 - 51:02)

Oddly parallel in so many different ways. Well, there's a weird thing about projection. You take your own worst qualities, and you cannot confess to yourself that they are your qualities.

(51:02 - 51:24)

So how do you handle the fact that they're alive in your mind and emotions almost constantly? You project them onto others. So often an accusation is a confession in disguise. So the man, the closest thing to an Adolf Hitler of the 21st century is named Vladimir Putin.

(51:25 - 51:43)

And he is accusing others of being Nazis and saying they need to be exterminated because they are Nazis. But who's the real Nazi? It's Vladimir Putin. Another person who uses this projection all over the place is Donald Trump.

(51:44 - 51:53)

And almost everything he accuses others of, he's guilty of. He accused Ted Cruz of being lying Ted. Well, he lies.

(51:54 - 52:06)

Donald Trump lies roughly 30 times a day. He accuses Hillary Clinton of being criminal Hillary. Well, this is a guy who skirted the laws.

(52:06 - 52:28)

Right now, we're talking about shutting off all of the conduits of Russian money in the United States, the money of the oligarchs. Well, if you're truly going to do that, you have to shut down the central core from which the Russian oligarchs work in the United States. That'd be real estate, I would assume, correct? Yes, it's Trump real estate.

(52:28 - 52:42)

Most specifically, it's Trump Tower. Because Trump Tower has been the capital of the Russian mafia in the United States. For I'm not quite sure how many decades at this point.

(52:42 - 52:54)

But one of Donald Trump's sons told us point blank, we make most of our money from the Russians. At the same time that his dad was saying, I have nothing to do with Russia. The point being that.

(52:54 - 53:00)

Was that probably because he's not the he's not the sharpest of the two. I don't remember. Donald to be the sharpest.

(53:00 - 53:38)

But the point is, OK, first of all, Sun Tzu, the Chinese master of tactics, the most respected strategist in the history of strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu that says that to defeat an enemy, you have to be able to walk in his shoes. In other words, to be able to defeat an enemy, you have to be able to find the empathic part of yourself that corresponds to the enemy so that you can breathe the way he breathes, so that you can eat the way he eats. So you can see the world through the lens through which he sees it.

(53:38 - 53:47)

So you can anticipate his next moves. So so that's oh, sorry. That's the exercise we're going through right now with Vladimir Putin.

(53:47 - 54:21)

Well, in that vein, in Putin's shoes, how did he not put himself in the shoes of the Ukrainians to fight for their sovereignty? Did he misstep here or did he really not? Does he not care? I mean, does he just throw bodies at it? Ukrainian sovereignty, first of all, he is he sees himself as being in the tradition of the great czars. He sees himself as being of the tradition of Ivan the Terrible. And did war crimes in any way disturb him? No, he got a name as great for being the terrible.

(54:22 - 54:43)

Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. And it's said that he is reading these days mostly about Catherine the Great. All of these czars expanded the Russian empire, and they expanded it by being perfectly willing to dispose of hundreds of thousands of humans at a time.

(54:44 - 54:52)

Right. Perfectly willing. In fact, that's what made Russia unique when, for example, it was invaded by Napoleon.

(54:52 - 54:56)

Right. And Germany. And when it was invaded by Germany.

(54:56 - 55:06)

Exactly. So Russia was always willing to have more corpses than anybody else could possibly and possibly accept. And there's a pride in that they wear that.

(55:06 - 55:17)

They wear almost like a badge of honor, like a badge of trauma. Like it's like the perfect the ultimate victim. Yep.

And again, million people in World War Two. You only lost 10 million. Yes, exactly.

(55:17 - 55:35)

That's exactly. So did he did he misstep in his abilities or did he just not care? I mean, is it ultimately just taking it at all costs? He doesn't care. He's already demonstrated his way of taking territory in Chechnya.

(55:35 - 55:39)

Yeah. And he leveled a city. And in Syria.

(55:40 - 55:45)

In Syria. Where he has leveled cities. And so his philosophy is level the fuck the city.

(55:45 - 55:54)

Doesn't matter how many people you lose. It doesn't matter how many people accuse you of war crimes. You have persistence that others don't because you are Russian.

(55:56 - 56:04)

And you have the persistence and the willingness to take more losses than anybody else could tolerate. Wow. And that's how you win.

(56:05 - 56:13)

And you level entire cities if they get in your way. And since the Ukraine doesn't exist. It's a false construction.

(56:13 - 56:19)

These cities have no right to exist. There's no way out. Yeah, there's no there's no there's no exit.

(56:20 - 56:25)

Right. You just have to. I mean, once you start this bat, you have to win.

(56:27 - 56:33)

So he has you. So he has just hypothetically. Obviously, it doesn't appear this way, but he takes Ukraine.

(56:33 - 56:42)

All he takes it right. Is there a net? Is there a net? Is Asian? Is Europe next? Is that what you're saying? Oh, yeah. Just like Hitler wanted all of all of Europe as well.

(56:42 - 57:07)

In approximately November, Vladimir Putin started all of this by saying, I'm going to announce my red lines. In other words, if you cross me on these things, you will have war. And he mapped out retaking basically all of the Eastern European lands that the Soviet Union had held.

(57:07 - 57:26)

He wanted no NATO troops in those territories, no NATO anything. And those territories, it would all be the Russian sphere of influence, which means Russia would control them the way it used to control them in the days of the USSR. What he was mapping out was approximately 40 percent of Europe that he wanted, period.

(57:26 - 57:34)

And he was giving an ultimatum. You give me these lands or you will have trouble. And the trouble started in the Ukraine.

(57:34 - 57:51)

Why? Because Eurasian politics, remember, Eurasian politics, meaning the politics that goes all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Right. That politics that spans 8400 miles from east to west.

(57:51 - 57:54)

That would be the largest landmass, I would assume. Correct. Yeah.

(57:54 - 58:03)

It is three times the size or the width of the United States. OK, just and even North America is probably. Yeah.

(58:03 - 58:26)

And something you have to remember, here's Vladimir Putin basically repeating the German argument of labusraum, having an up, we need more room to live in, is what Hitler was saying, basically repeating this, ignoring the fact that Russia is the biggest nation geographically on planet Earth. Right. Currently, yes.

(58:26 - 58:35)

Yes. That it crosses 11 time zones. That's almost a half the planet in way.

(58:35 - 58:47)

Yeah, 12 is 12 would be half. So yeah. And why does it need more territory? The argument for the last 500 years has been we are vulnerable on our borders, so we need to take more territory to protect ourselves.

(58:47 - 58:55)

Of course, what does that do? Gives you new borders where you're vulnerable. So you just have to take keep taking territory. Right.

(58:55 - 59:05)

So there's no borders left. Yeah, exactly. So and I really am interested in knowing what Xi Jinping thinks about all of this.

(59:05 - 59:21)

I mean, I thought you were he. You just said it. You would regard as Russia as much too small to ever achieve its ends with China as ever being able to conquer China, because you have five to 10 men for every one man that the Russians have.

(59:22 - 59:35)

And the technology, it's already so far ahead in both alternative energies, in homing technology, in the hypersonic era. All of it is so advanced. Right.

(59:35 - 59:41)

Exactly. And in fact, China at this point is way ahead of us. And so is Russia.

(59:42 - 59:44)

Right. Right. When hypersonic for sure.

(59:44 - 59:53)

And now we've launched that hypersonic initiative or whatever. Right. Well, we've had a long time, but we need how many nuclear weapons really? We're not even talking a small tactical.

(59:54 - 59:59)

How many of the big ones do we need? One for the globe to be pretty in trouble. I mean, maybe two. Right.

(59:59 - 1:00:22)

Well, but there's something else you have to know about this Ukrainian war. Back in 2000, from 1998 to 2000, Vladimir Putin was watching carefully our war in the Balkans. And he watched as we immobilized entire cities by taking out their energy supply.

(1:00:22 - 1:00:36)

And we made the Slavs in that territory of the Balkans absolutely helpless. We just paralyzed them. And he tried to think of a way in which he could make sure that never would happen to Russia.

(1:00:36 - 1:00:55)

So he supervised a total rewrite of Russian military doctrine. And in that new rewrite, which is finished in 2000, there were tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield nuclear weapons. And they were called de-escalation.

(1:00:55 - 1:01:12)

If you use them, it was called de-escalation. Why? Well, aside from the fact that George Orwell was right, and that some dictators can tell you day is night and night is day, and eventually you'll believe them. Aside from that, it meant because the enemy might be winning.

(1:01:13 - 1:01:21)

And if you used a tactical nuclear weapon, the enemy would withdraw in fear. Because you don't fear using a nuclear weapon. They do.

(1:01:22 - 1:01:35)

That's to your advantage. And even in the written doctrine that they talked about, any threat to Putin's regime is a threat against the existent, was an existential threat, correct? Yes, against Russia. Right.

(1:01:35 - 1:01:48)

So right there alone, just his removal or even trying to try him for any war crime after this could result in some very dangerous play. We'll have to see. I think this man should die immediately.

(1:01:48 - 1:01:52)

Right. Because every minute he lives, people are dying. I can't disagree.

(1:01:52 - 1:01:58)

I can't disagree with that. And nobody else. I don't think anybody else in Russia is guilty of anything.

(1:02:00 - 1:02:11)

Because they've been directed from the top and they've had no choice. I saw that young woman holding that sign in that news, behind the news anchor. What absolute bravery.

(1:02:11 - 1:02:16)

Balls. Absolute. You want to talk about your truth till death.

(1:02:16 - 1:02:19)

There's your truth right there. Right. And she knew what she was risking.

(1:02:19 - 1:02:30)

She knew it. She knew it. At any rate, we do have a case in point of where we have to be able to walk in the shoes of Vladimir Putin in order to anticipate his next moves.

(1:02:30 - 1:02:37)

And it means that we, look, I'm a Democrat. I'm a liberal. I support Joe Biden in most things.

(1:02:38 - 1:02:52)

But I think if you see a mass murder and you don't move to stop it, you are an accomplice to it. And that makes Joe Biden an accomplice to these mass murders. Why? Because Zelensky said, look, I will fight your war for you.

(1:02:54 - 1:03:03)

Vladimir Putin has announced he wants 40 percent of Europe. I will stop him here in Ukraine with my people. You will not have to sacrifice a single American.

(1:03:03 - 1:03:17)

Just give me fighter planes. Give me a thousand rockets a day, 500 anti-tank rockets and 500 anti-aircraft rockets. And give me fighter jets.

(1:03:17 - 1:03:29)

So we can control the sky so they cannot continue to raise our cities to the ground. That was a reasonable request. We should have done it a month ago.

(1:03:29 - 1:03:46)

And every day when people die, as they did at the train station this morning, Joe Biden is an accomplice in that death. And because Joe Biden is our president, we are accomplices in those deaths. He has to stop pissing around.

(1:03:46 - 1:03:57)

This is not a time for a coward in the White House. So no matter how much that cowardice is disguised as good sense. Right.

(1:03:59 - 1:04:06)

You and I will align in many ways and probably disagree on something. So I'm totally good with that because that's what this is about. Right.

(1:04:06 - 1:04:29)

So let me ask you, from your perspective as a very large proponent of Joe Biden, do you think that Putin chose the timing from other actions that Biden has made showing weakness, for example, like Afghanistan? I'm not trying to make this all that. Afghanistan helped, but it was two presidents who brought this about. It was Donald Trump who became Putin's puppy.

(1:04:31 - 1:04:37)

Donald Trump is a bully. But among bullies. Crimea was given under, was taken under Obama.

(1:04:37 - 1:04:43)

Yes. And that was a huge mistake, too. Yeah, I remember that one very clearly.

(1:04:43 - 1:04:52)

But so it's three presidents in a row. So as long as Trump was in power, Putin controlled the United States. Yeah.

(1:04:52 - 1:05:04)

And the thing is, because Donald Trump would do anything that Putin wanted him to do. Again, it's back to the bullies. There's a hierarchy even among bullies.

(1:05:04 - 1:05:09)

Right. Because they slap each other on the back, right? Because piranhas don't eat each other. Right.

(1:05:09 - 1:05:25)

Sharks don't eat each other. They eat the prey. And from roughly, well, 1978 was the first time that Russia gave Donald Trump and his model Serbian wife or whatever she was.

(1:05:25 - 1:05:38)

She was some sort of slob. He gave them a free, all expense paid trip to Moscow. And apparently Donald Trump has slavishly adhered.

(1:05:38 - 1:05:48)

I mean, look at the wives he's chosen. One American and two Slavic women. He has a serious infatuation with the Slavic empire.

(1:05:49 - 1:06:15)

And when Vladimir Putin came into power, he wanted, Donald Trump wanted more than anything else in the world to meet Vladimir Putin. And he put his Miss Universe pageant or whatever it was in Moscow, I believe in 2013, and said, maybe Putin will become my best friend. And it didn't happen.

(1:06:16 - 1:06:39)

So for years and years and years, he was begging for just the tiniest bit of attention from the bully among all bullies, the king of the bullies, Vladimir Putin. And because he sees himself as subservient in the pecking order of bullies to Vladimir Putin, he's willing to crawl at Vladimir Putin's feet. And we saw that in Helsinki.

(1:06:39 - 1:06:46)

We saw his body language. He was crawling and kissing this man's knees. Yeah, yeah.

(1:06:47 - 1:06:56)

So what did Yeltsin see in Putin? I mean, that's a good point. Putin is a little guy. This is, you know, little guys sometimes make a big difference.

(1:06:56 - 1:07:04)

Sneaking. Well, he did not think that Putin would threaten him in any way. I mean, he was taking Yeltsin.

(1:07:04 - 1:07:08)

I admired I admired Yeltsin. I admired Gorbachev. I was I that was my youth.

(1:07:08 - 1:07:14)

I remember. Right. You know, and I hated Yeltsin because he I mean, I hated Yeltsin because he drank.

(1:07:14 - 1:07:24)

Yeah, I have East German family. So I was very, very close to all of them. Like I said, my mom and my grandfather, grandmother and aunt escaped from East Germany in 1953 before the wall went up.

(1:07:24 - 1:07:37)

I mean, the stories that I did a podcast on, it's on my website. But regardless, it's just amazing. These stories of of strife and and just overcoming and just the humanity of it.

(1:07:37 - 1:07:46)

It's right. But how did Yeltsin got duped or just did not find him a threat is really. Yeltsin probably did not find him a threat.

(1:07:46 - 1:07:55)

He was handed him the keys. Right. I mean, yes, because he I'm sure he trusted that he could remain dominant over Vladimir Putin forever.

(1:07:56 - 1:08:10)

And it didn't work out that way. I mean, to him, Vladimir Putin looked like a blank slate. I mean, he had this Mickey Mouse little position in East Germany on the furthest boundaries of the KGB.

(1:08:11 - 1:08:17)

He never had amounted to very much. He had a mediocre career. He was a little guy.

(1:08:17 - 1:08:25)

How could this guy ever threaten him? Yeah. It's hard to see people's potential sometimes. I mean, or their mind inside.

(1:08:25 - 1:08:32)

Right. Their desires. You never know what what makes that person tick until you probably do one of your interviews.

(1:08:32 - 1:08:40)

Right. And Freud put it very well because he went through this with Jung. He picked Jung to be his successor.

(1:08:41 - 1:08:58)

Freud did because Freud felt, first of all, that the influence of his theories was limited because he was Jewish. So he needed to reach a non-Jewish audience. And Jung was the perfect blonde, blue eyed, non-Jew, Aryan.

(1:09:00 - 1:09:09)

And at first, for the first 10 years or something like that, Jung was subservient. And Jung was the vessel of Freud's ideas. But then he rebelled.

(1:09:10 - 1:09:11)

Then he came into his own. Yeah. Yeah.

(1:09:11 - 1:09:30)

And he and as Freud put it in one of his books, the gods always eat their fathers. And so Jung pitted himself against Freud, basically, and created an alternative philosophy. Well, that's what you see happening with Yeltsin and Putin.

(1:09:32 - 1:09:36)

Huh. I mean, it's an excellent viewpoint on it. I had not thought of it like that.

(1:09:37 - 1:09:52)

I thought that he had handed him the keys and then Yeltsin literally just rode off into the sunset. I didn't think he cared at that point. Well, what turns out to be the case, to my astonishment, is that the role model is there's something I call the grandfather effect.

(1:09:52 - 1:10:08)

You reject what your parents have given you, but you find what your grandparents have to be exotic and appealing. And that would be the motherland of the Soviet Union. No, the grandfather in this case is Stalin.

(1:10:09 - 1:10:24)

OK. So Vladimir Putin is going back to the pureness of the Stalinist model, the purity of the Stalinist model. And guess who else is going back to the purity of the Stalinist model? Xi Jinping.

(1:10:24 - 1:10:36)

Yeah. The atrocities going on in China, the Uyghur situation, the Yemen situation. I mean, we sit here and we're talking Ukraine, and there's just things.

(1:10:37 - 1:10:55)

I mean, are we? Well, look, there's something. I go on radio on 545 radio stations every Wednesday night doing a news commentary. And for years, I've been trying to explain to my audience that there is this thing called the axis of evil.

(1:10:55 - 1:11:17)

And the axis of evil is a sort of hidden military alliance, hidden in clear sight. And it's Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba. And they function together as an alliance.

(1:11:18 - 1:11:43)

And every time we try to fool ourselves into thinking that China is not part of this alliance, we're fooling ourselves. The Iran nuclear thing is also a head scratch. We're sitting here wanting to allow Russia to buy back the extra enriched uranium from the plants that they build and that they negotiated in a separate room from the United States.

(1:11:43 - 1:11:50)

Right. Help me understand just the logic of that. I understand wanting to do things well, but that does not seem very thought out.

(1:11:51 - 1:11:56)

No, I think it's horrible. The whole thing is monstrance. It's a giant charade.

(1:11:56 - 1:12:38)

Will Israel block this? Because of the IRGC piece? Well, that's it. The question is, is Israel going to have to go to war with Iran in order to stop this? Or is Israel going to have to tolerate it when on their missiles, the Iranians put slogans saying this is to annihilate Israel? Right, right. And why do we ally ourselves with people who want to annihilate Jews just the way that their grandparents' ally, Adolf Hitler, wanted to annihilate Jews? The Arab countries allied with Adolf Hitler for a simple reason.

(1:12:39 - 1:12:49)

They agreed on a fundamental premise. The Jewish people must be exterminated. And we are coddling these mass murderers.

(1:12:50 - 1:13:02)

Why? This is insane. Plus, we made a mistake. One of the things that Donald Trump did right was what he called the Abraham Accords.

(1:13:02 - 1:13:19)

Yes, yeah. With Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar. And this was positive because these countries were giving up on the idea of exterminating the Jews and instead allying themselves with the Jews.

(1:13:19 - 1:13:45)

And why were they doing that? Because Iran wants to wipe them out. Because part of the basic founding philosophy of Iran is the idea that the revolution in Iran is just the first of many revolutions. And the next people on the shopping list, the next people to be toppled were, first of all, Iraq, which now Iran, for all practical purposes, owns, thanks to us.

(1:13:47 - 1:14:08)

And it wants to topple the regimes in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and in Egypt. So they all have revolutions basically conceived and controlled by Iran. Would that be combining old Persia again then? When you really think about that in a weird way.

(1:14:08 - 1:14:20)

Because what they're doing is something relatively new. They're operating through proxy armies. And so they have between five and 10 proxy armies at work.

(1:14:20 - 1:14:32)

Hamas is a proxy army. If you go back to the Hezbollah founding document, it's all about Ayatollah Khomeini and his philosophy. My mother's hairdresser was Lebanese.

(1:14:33 - 1:14:44)

And we used to go over there when she got her hair done when I was a child. Right. And he had a radio put up in Lebanon, Beirut, when the shootings were out in the 80s.

(1:14:44 - 1:14:49)

And all you heard was gunfire. And then the radio was actually shot. And you heard it literally go out.

(1:14:50 - 1:14:52)

Amazing. Amazing. It's just this was a Tuesday.

(1:14:53 - 1:15:00)

You know what I mean? And we're sitting here. I'm sitting here in this beautiful, comfortable, air-conditioned house in Arizona. Right.

(1:15:00 - 1:15:12)

And I sit here and I hear about that. And I'm overwhelmed with how I can help, what I can do. Well, Hezbollah is taking over Lebanon.

(1:15:13 - 1:15:26)

And so far, Iran's proxy armies have taken Iraq. They are taking Lebanon a little bit every day. They're at work in Afghanistan.

(1:15:28 - 1:15:48)

One of their proxy armies is the Houthis in Yemen. This Yemen war is a proxy war between the Shiite powers, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, et cetera, versus Iran. And the biggest thing going on in the Middle East is the war right now between the Shiite powers and the Sunni powers.

(1:15:48 - 1:16:05)

The Sunni powers are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the rest of them. And the Shiite power is Iran and all of its little proxy armies that allow it to give the impression that these are just local groups. No, the Houthis are not local groups.

(1:16:06 - 1:16:18)

They carry banners. They're mercenaries, basically, or they're part of, right? They call for the extermination of the United States, the extermination of Israel and the extermination of Jews. Those banners that you see all the time.

(1:16:19 - 1:16:41)

You just don't know what they're saying because it's in the Arabic alphabet. And the slogans were put together in Iran. So we are encouraging through the JPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, we are encouraging Iran and we are offering to give them lots and lots of extra money with which to fund their proxy armies.

(1:16:41 - 1:16:50)

And the right understands that. The right, with whom I disagree about everything, understands that. The left does not.

(1:16:50 - 1:17:09)

And Donald Trump allied us with the Sunni powers. And it was the wisest thing he could have done. Because when Joe Biden broke that alliance, he was breaking, he was offending the guy who runs Saudi Arabia.

(1:17:09 - 1:17:13)

Right. That's correct. Which is why we're paying X amount for fuel.

(1:17:13 - 1:17:17)

They don't even take his phone call, for God's sake. That's right. Exactly.

(1:17:17 - 1:17:33)

I mean, there's so many directions we could go with this. There's one specific thing you talk about, and it's the last three presidents we mentioned. Last three presidents have launched missiles into Syria, if I recall correctly.

(1:17:33 - 1:17:39)

Right. I'm a constitutionalist. Above all, I feel like the Congress still should evoke those rights.

(1:17:39 - 1:17:54)

They should be the ones who declare that. The difficulty is that a guy I have worked with, and still in a loose alliance do work with, named Newt Gingrich, broke the American political system back in the 1990s. I know Newt well.

(1:17:54 - 1:18:08)

And Congress can't do anything. So let's do that. How did he break that? And in what way? I was sick in bed at that point, and I had to be kept away from stress.

(1:18:08 - 1:18:18)

So I didn't get to follow the news back in those days. But he put together his contract with America. Yes.

(1:18:18 - 1:18:27)

And he mobilized his troops to destroy anything Democratic. I'm talking about Democratic in the sense of the Democratic Party. Yeah.

(1:18:27 - 1:18:41)

To destroy anything that had to do with the Democratic Party. See, that's so wrong, because there's such value to both. The job of the Democratic Progressive Party is to move things forward, and the job of the conservative Republican Party is to keep you from moving forward.

(1:18:42 - 1:18:50)

And that constant pressure against the progress allows us to move forward in a steady, enough way. It's called a dynamic balance. Yes.

(1:18:50 - 1:19:12)

At the heart of blueism, I have this grand unified theory of everything in the universe, including sex, violence, and the human soul. And at the heart of it is- You're going to make me broke, by the way, because I have to buy all your audiobooks now. Well, so basically, it says in blueism, opposites are joined at the hip.

(1:19:14 - 1:19:41)

There was a guy who used to run ads in comic books when I was a kid, in which a skinny little 99 pound weakling is always beaten by a great big athletic guy who gets the girls. And what Charles Atlas was selling was a technique of doing exercise by, you know what you do when you try to show how big your bicep is? You curl up your hand into a ball. You put your elbow at right angles.

(1:19:41 - 1:19:56)

Yeah, there's a black and white pictures in the back of magazines, right? Where Tony Atlas would be like, build muscle weight like me. What he was preaching was isometrics. In other words, do what you do when you try to show your bicep to all your muscles.

(1:19:58 - 1:20:15)

Balance the extenders or lock the extenders in curious battle against the extensors or the whatever they are. Resistance training, right? Basically, in its own way. And government works through a balance of opposites of that kind, a dynamic balance.

(1:20:16 - 1:20:44)

And one side gets the edge over the other side, and that determines how the whole thing moves. But because Newt Gingrich turned the Congress into a battleground, a perpetual battleground, where it wasn't two sides contending against each other in debate and then coming to a conclusion. It was one side trying to exterminate the power of the other side utterly and not caring about conclusions.

(1:20:44 - 1:20:55)

Why? Because when a person from the government knocks on your door and says, I am here to help. That's the beginning of your troubles, said Ronald Reagan. In other words, government is bad.

(1:20:55 - 1:21:10)

So why not make, why not totally paralyze Congress and the Senate? Why not? Government is bad. Who can make the argument that a good idea is political? A good idea is just a good idea. Right.

(1:21:11 - 1:21:19)

And that's true. So with the Abraham Accords, it's a good idea. The death of one person, Khashoggi.

(1:21:19 - 1:21:33)

Well, the ass-kissing of Putin is a bad idea. He happened to work for the Washington Post, but he was a genocidal person too, because he believed in the extermination of the Jews. So fuck his ass.

(1:21:35 - 1:21:41)

Not that I don't care. I live for free speech. It's one of the most important values I have.

(1:21:41 - 1:21:56)

So I'm psychic and I just was going to say free speech. I was going to ask you about Twitter because of, I mean, regardless of how Donald Trump is or proceed or whatever, I believe the Ayatollah has an account open. Right.

(1:21:56 - 1:22:01)

Still that speaks to the death of Zion openly. Right. That is an open account.

(1:22:02 - 1:22:22)

Well, the problem was- What's the logic there? There's a simple practical problem that doesn't fit with my theories at all. Because I have a project, there's a thing called the Howard Bloom Institute, which is an up and running- On howardbloom.net speaks about it? No, this is howardbloom, all one word, dot institute. Okay.

(1:22:22 - 1:22:38)

Let me see if I've got that up here. Okay. And one of our projects is why save Western civilization? And one of the primary values, the primary values of Western civilization are democracy, freedom of speech, pluralism, and tolerance.

(1:22:39 - 1:22:57)

So how do I justify removing Donald Trump from Twitter? Because Donald Trump was using Twitter as a weapon against America. Yes, he incited violence, doxxed people. Obviously, we have those limits, right? There are those certain guidelines that we just cannot cross.

(1:22:57 - 1:23:08)

Well, one of the things- If those are crossed, I definitely am against, that cannot be. Remember, he's a little mini Vladimir Putin. Yeah, he's a little bully for sure.

(1:23:08 - 1:23:40)

What Vladimir Putin is demonstrating right now is that if you wipe out all contending opinions, and you repeat a falsehood, day after day after day, that falsehood becomes people's reality. So people, you've seen people in the Ukraine who are complaining because they have parents in Russia, and they can't talk to their parents anymore. Because when they tell them, look, 50 people died this morning at a train station because of a Russian attack, their parents say, that's not a Russian attack.

(1:23:41 - 1:24:02)

How dare you say that? Ukrainians attacking Ukrainians in order to make Russia look bad. Right, or it's the Nazis inside Ukraine doing it, right? Right, so they can't talk to their parents anymore, because they live in such different realities. And yet, the similarities in the culture are so intertwined.

(1:24:02 - 1:24:21)

I mean, what's the percentage of Ukrainians that speak Russian? Donald Trump was trying to impose that kind of alternative reality on the United States. He said, every piece of true news is fake news. And only news that comes from me, which I make up, and has nothing to do with reality, is real.

(1:24:22 - 1:24:33)

What's funny to me is, like, both things can be true. Like, there is fake news, and he speaks fake news. Well, back in the 1970s, I was on a crusade against the people in the media.

(1:24:33 - 1:24:58)

Why? Because journalism was important to me, very important, not just as a reader, but as a person who was beginning to write journalistically. And I felt that the same two rules that applied in science were basically the first two rules of journalism. The truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things from under your nose as if you've never seen them before, and then proceed from there.

(1:24:58 - 1:25:22)

And I saw instances where the press was lying to me. For example, there was this thing called the Howard Hughes was building, called the Glomar Explorer. And there were these glowing stories about how it was going to dredge minerals and metals from the sea bottom, and turn them into the new resource base for the globe's industries.

(1:25:23 - 1:25:35)

Well, it turned out that wasn't what the Glomar Explorer was at all. This was a cover story. And that basically the CIA in those days had called in the heads of what you just called the corporate press a few minutes ago.

(1:25:35 - 1:25:46)

And said, look, we need your cooperation with this. And what they were apparently trying to do was dredge up the wreck of a submarine. I don't remember whether it was a Russian submarine or an American submarine.

(1:25:47 - 1:26:00)

I think I remember that because one got lost or got misplaced in the head. Yeah, and they wanted to stay, wanted to piece together its secrets. So we're spending this vast amount of money with Howard Hughes, who had a traditional relationship with the CIA and the military.

(1:26:01 - 1:26:09)

Yeah, I would later, I would later trip across. The military. What's that? Howard Hughes had a lot of military aircraft.

(1:26:09 - 1:26:15)

Well, he was in the aircraft industry. Right, right, right. So, yes, the military had a lot to do with that.

(1:26:15 - 1:26:27)

Especially the birth of aviation. Geez. Apparently, when this is all very complicated and has to do with the speculation about conspiracies and the JFK assassination.

(1:26:28 - 1:26:41)

But I go down every rabbit hole, Howard. So please. Well, in 1959, Fidel Castro managed to pull off a revolution in Cuba and drive out the dictator Batista.

(1:26:42 - 1:26:56)

Now, Havana was a gambling town. My father used to talk about it with fascination. And the mafia was using it to launder its money.

(1:26:57 - 1:27:22)

And the CIA, seeing that the mafia was using it to launder money, used Havana to launder money, too. So when Havana was shut down as a casino town, a gambling town by Fidel Castro, the CIA had no place to launder its money. And they went to Howard Hughes and they said, look, there's this little place in the desert.

(1:27:23 - 1:27:39)

Can you help us develop it as the new Havana? And Howard Hughes helped them develop a city called Las Vegas. So was Havana thought of as a name? Because that would have been pretty cool. No, I don't think it was.

(1:27:40 - 1:27:44)

And I don't mean and you've read how I accidentally know you've read. I did not. I've read.

(1:27:44 - 1:27:52)

I read Einstein, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson. You saw how I accidentally tripped across the traces of Howard Hughes. Yes.

(1:27:52 - 1:27:57)

In my various adventures in the music industry. Absolutely. Yeah.

(1:27:57 - 1:28:20)

So at any rate, I was furious in the 1970s for this and a series of other stories in which the press wasn't telling the truth. And then I ran into an instance of it. My I went to NYU and I found a woman who was willing to sleep with me, which was another astonishment.

(1:28:21 - 1:28:30)

And so I moved in with her. And then at one point she came to me and she said, look, we have to get married. I'm embarrassed all the time because we live in a building with Catholic Puerto Ricans.

(1:28:31 - 1:28:45)

And they look down on me because you and I aren't married and you're sleeping here. And so if you don't marry me by May 11th, you're out, gone, period. So I went and found myself another apartment in the neighborhood.

(1:28:45 - 1:29:06)

And when I was shopping for other apartments, one of the buildings I looked at was really fairly astonishing. The Lower East Side at that point, which is where we were, her apartment was on 7th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C, was the most dangerous neighborhood, the deepest slum in New York City. And there were people on her block who were being shot every week.

(1:29:07 - 1:29:21)

There was a drug dealer on her first floor who had a door that looked like it was the door to a fortress. And nonetheless, somebody plowed straight through that door one day and stole all of the goods and money inside. It was a dangerous place to live.

(1:29:21 - 1:29:42)

And one of the buildings I visited because I was looking for an apartment was astonishing. Every apartment had been remodeled. Now, why you remodel apartments in a neighborhood where the rents are $40 a month is I don't understand how the landlord could afford to do this.

(1:29:42 - 1:30:12)

But the super who was part of this renovation process was extremely proud of the renovation. But he said, there's one family living in this building, we can't get rid of them, and their place is a fire hazard. Instead of getting their electricity from Con Edison, they wired the line up to the meter and are bringing in electricity with naked copper wires that could go off at any time.

(1:30:13 - 1:30:22)

The place, there are seven people living there. And the place is just littered with newspapers and all kinds of flammable things. And there's nothing we can do about it.

(1:30:22 - 1:30:42)

Well, a few days later, there was a story in the Village Voice. And it was about this appalling slumlord and how because of the slum conditions he maintained, there had been a fire in one of his apartments and a baby had been killed. When I looked at the address, it was the address of the building I had been to.

(1:30:43 - 1:30:57)

What they were saying about the landlord was a lie. It had nothing to do with reality. It was simply a projection of their knee jerk, who knows, Marxist or something point of view, some anti-capitalist point of view.

(1:30:58 - 1:31:09)

So I was furious because I depend on journalists for my news. And I want the truth. And I believe their obligation is to the truth.

(1:31:09 - 1:31:28)

So I went on a crusade against fake news. But fake news, these mistaken stories were one one hundredth of the news that was coming out. The fake news on Fox News is 99% of the material.

(1:31:28 - 1:31:40)

Maybe, OK, 90% of the material that's coming out. It truly is a fake news channel. And compared to that fake news, what I was complaining about is nothing.

(1:31:41 - 1:31:45)

Yes, it has to be rectified. No question about that. Everything should be accurate.

(1:31:46 - 1:32:00)

I quintuple check my facts for my books. Yeah. So so on that fact of journalism and truth, may I share the Michael Jackson, one of my Michael Jackson conversations? Oh, yes, absolutely.

(1:32:00 - 1:32:09)

So I spoke with a gentleman named Charles Thompson. Yeah. Who is in he was part of the the documentary that Danny Wu did.

(1:32:10 - 1:32:18)

Gosh, darn it. Which one is the square one square one documentary? I'm not familiar with the documentaries. That's the one he did.

(1:32:18 - 1:32:23)

Taj Jackson was big on that. Oh, my God, he's working on his own film. And he's working on his own.

(1:32:23 - 1:32:30)

He's doing a series as well. So he's working on a few things. So I spoke I was I had the luxury of speaking with Taj.

(1:32:30 - 1:32:35)

And then I spoke with Danny, who is the director. And then I spoke with Charles, who is a journalist who is also in it. Right.

(1:32:35 - 1:32:50)

He spoke of a story where he went to a concert or some benefit or some award program in Britain because he's a journalist. And something about I believe was a son at the time. Is that what's his name? Murdoch? Rupert Murdoch.

(1:32:50 - 1:32:56)

Right. Lachlan Murdoch. Yeah, get get anything against Michael Jackson at all costs.

(1:32:56 - 1:33:02)

If it's bad, it's better. If you can't find something, make it up. So he goes to this concert thing or this award ceremony.

(1:33:02 - 1:33:07)

Michael Jackson goes up. Place is going bananas. So I ask him to sing at the end of the night.

(1:33:08 - 1:33:12)

He can't hear they're handing him a microphone. It's just crazy. It's a bedlam.

(1:33:12 - 1:33:23)

He is walking off the stage, but not not in a huff, just confused or whatever. Right guy comes back in the next morning. And as he's walking towards the break room, everybody's apologizing.

(1:33:23 - 1:33:24)

Sorry, man. Sorry. Sorry.

(1:33:24 - 1:33:33)

And he's like, what are you guys talking about? He had no idea. He goes and he sees all the different newspapers laying out on the table. And here was at the top, Michael Jackson boot off stage.

(1:33:34 - 1:33:54)

And OK, let me tell you, let me tell you a story that will help explain this. Yeah, absolutely. So I end up as the top music publicist in the business and with the biggest PR firm, music PR firm in the business, which is a whole other story about how I got from Rachmaninoff to Michael Jackson.

(1:33:54 - 1:34:03)

And I end up working with the Jacksons. And we're out on the road. There are 120 journalists traveling with us.

(1:34:04 - 1:34:22)

We're doing stadiums and stadiums have press boxes that'll easily fit 150 journalists. And every night I do a press conference after the show. So because I've been wandering around during the show, taking notes on everything that's going on so I can tell all the backstage things to the press.

(1:34:22 - 1:34:37)

And one of the press people traveling with us tells me a story. And he says he works for the Boston Herald-American. In Boston in those days, there were two major newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald-American.

(1:34:38 - 1:34:52)

The Boston Globe outsold the Boston Herald-American by 10,000 copies every single day. The Boston Herald-American had nine Pulitzers. The Boston Globe had 39 Pulitzers.

(1:34:54 - 1:35:19)

And one day, the publisher of the Boston Herald-American, the second newspaper in Boston, walked into the press room where all the journalists are busy typing away. And he pointed at the guy who did the rock coverage and said, you, I want a cover story on Michael Jackson. And the room went bananas.

(1:35:20 - 1:35:27)

They said, look, we are not a shopping market tabloid. We don't do celebrity journalism. That's not news.

(1:35:27 - 1:35:39)

He listened to all of these complaints. And the publisher said, I'm sorry, tomorrow we're doing a cover on Michael Jackson and walked out. So the next day, the Boston Herald-American had a cover story on Michael Jackson.

(1:35:39 - 1:35:55)

Now remember, they undersold the Boston Globe by 10,000 copies every single day. The day they had Michael Jackson on the cover, they outsold the Boston Globe by 10,000 copies. Their circulation went up by 20,000.

(1:35:55 - 1:35:57)

20,000. It's a 20,000 delta right there. Right.

(1:35:58 - 1:36:15)

The next day, the publisher walked into the newsroom again, pointed at the guy who did the rock journalism and said, you, I'm giving you your own private office. I'm giving you a personal secretary. From now on, I want a Michael Jackson story every day.

(1:36:15 - 1:36:39)

And the publisher at the Boston Globe, seeing that he'd been outsold by 10,000 copies, walked into his newsroom and looked at his music journalist and said, you, I'm giving you your own private office with your own private secretary. I want a Michael Jackson story every day. Now, which do you think sold more, positive stories on Michael Jackson or negative stories? And I'll give you a hint.

(1:36:39 - 1:36:45)

If it bleeds, it leads. It's always the negative. Yeah, right.

(1:36:46 - 1:37:09)

So negative Michael Jackson stories meant huge amounts of money to publishers. But that's why artists are so special, right? Because making what they make out of a crowd, how they mold a crowd is a positive in every way. Well, unless you use it for diabolical reasons like Hitler.

(1:37:10 - 1:37:24)

Right. But it's basically a positive, right? In the general sense that we're all together in some way. Remember that experience? Remember that experience that I was seeking because the synagogue didn't have it of transcendence of the ecstatic? That happens at a concert.

(1:37:24 - 1:37:28)

We used to call it getting off. Yeah. The crowd would get off.

(1:37:28 - 1:37:46)

What did that mean? It went into an ecstatic and a transcendent state. And so did the artist on stage. And that speaks to the special, though, because, right, how hard is it to create good? It's so easy to create negative, right? The creating of the positive is such a challenge.

(1:37:46 - 1:37:52)

The energy. And it's not just a challenge. I'm going to use a very strange word.

(1:37:53 - 1:37:58)

You're chosen. Yeah. You can't achieve that through will.

(1:37:58 - 1:38:01)

Yeah. That is something. I mean, will is profoundly important.

(1:38:01 - 1:38:06)

Well, like your work ethic. Your work ethic is not it. I would not think it's a choice.

(1:38:06 - 1:38:09)

I think you're driven. You're wired that way. You're wired to work.

(1:38:10 - 1:38:28)

Right. And some people are chosen so that if they work hard enough at their craft, they reach a point where in front of an audience, they can have a transcendent experience because the audience is having a transcendent experience. It's it's a crowd phenomenon.

(1:38:29 - 1:38:36)

Somebody is. Oh, that's my girlfriend trying to remind me that we have a date. Go ahead.

(1:38:36 - 1:38:40)

Mute me. Mute me for a second. Well, no, no, no, no.

(1:38:40 - 1:38:47)

I well, I'll tell her. Let me go over to Facebook. So she wants.

(1:38:47 - 1:38:51)

Oh, what an amazing picture she sent. All right. OK, let me just tell her.

(1:38:51 - 1:39:03)

Absolutely. I carry I know we I know we have a date, but I'm on an interview right now. OK, so I'll be there on time.

(1:39:05 - 1:39:09)

OK, and I love your picture with the fan. OK, I love you, too. Bye.

(1:39:11 - 1:39:17)

OK, so shall I let you go or. Well, that's the only thing I do in life aside from. Oh, my God.

(1:39:18 - 1:39:20)

I'm late for the date. Oh, my gosh. You're late.

(1:39:20 - 1:39:25)

I'm I'm eight minutes late. I don't wonder she's calling me. Well, all right.

(1:39:25 - 1:39:29)

I better get off. We shall talk another time. Howard, thank you so much.

(1:39:29 - 1:39:32)

I hope we get to talk again soon. Me, too. Thanks.

(1:39:32 - 1:39:34)

Thanks, Mark. Have a great night. Bye.

(1:39:34 - 1:39:41)

Take care. Once again, that was Howard Bloom. You can find him just doing any kind of search for Howard Bloom.

(1:39:41 - 1:39:54)

He's a world famous, famous publicist, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, you name it. Like I said, thank you again for listening to not conscious. And I hope you guys have a great time.

(1:39:54 - 1:40:05)

Like I said, I have another episode scheduled with him or another conversation scheduled with him in a few weeks. As soon as I get that put together, cobbled together, I will post it. And I'll let you all know.

(1:40:06 - 1:40:07)

Thanks again, everybody. Take care.