Making Better Episode 9: Howard Bloom

Howard Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV , “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine, and “The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium” by Buckminster Fuller’s archivist. Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (“mesmerizing”—The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (“reassuring and sobering”—The New Yorker), The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism (“Impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable.” James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic), and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates (“Bloom’s argument will rock your world.” Barbara Ehrenreich). Click here to read his full biography, find Howard on Wikipedia, read Howard’s writings on Medium, follow Howard on Twitter and finally watch Howard on YouTube.

As always, there is a transcript available for this episode. Click here to read Episode 9 in its entirety.

Episode 9: Howard Bloom Transcript

Making Better transcript: Howard Bloom

“…and those changes, those uplifts and upgrades, those messianic moves, those are the real responsibility of capitalism.”
—Howard Bloom

(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
(music)


Chris: What do Prince, mining asteroids, starting the hippie movement, and being on Coast to Coast 300 times have in common?

Francis: Could it be Howard Bloom?

Chris: He’s our guest on this episode—he talked to us about his history as a rock’n’roll PR guy—

Francis: And that includes some time with Prince, which is a really interesting story.

Chris: We also discussed how Howard helped start the hippie movement—

Francis: All that and some background in science, in politics, in…you never know what Howard Bloom’s going to discuss next.

Chris: So without further ado, here’s our interview with Howard Bloom!


Chris: Howard Bloom, welcome to Making Better!

Howard: Thanks, it’s nice to be here.

Francis: Yes, thank you very much for joining us, we really appreciate it.

Chris: You’ve a long history doing public relations for rock and roll bands—can you tell us a little about that?

Howard: Ok, well you have to know, my background is not in popular culture, it’s not in popular music; my background is—at the age of ten I got involved with theoretical physics and microbiology, and at the age of 13 I realized that what really interested me was ecstatic experiences, the stuff that William James called “the varieties of the religious experience.” And when I got out of college phi beta kappa/magna cum laude, I had four fellowships in what is today called cognitive neuroscience, and I realized that if I accepted any of those fellowships—actually I accepted the one from Columbia—it would be Auschwitz for the mind, I would never get anywhere near the ecstatic mass human emotion tidal waves that I was looking for, the tidal waves that make the forces of history. So I took an opportunity, and I went into something I knew absolutely nothing about—popular culture—absolutely nothing about it. And a few years later founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACDC, [?], KISS, Queen, Run-DMC, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, ZZ-Top, GrandMaster Flash and the Furious Five, and a bunch of others. And my role, since I came into this from science and not from being a vinyl junkie, my role was, if you approached me, my role was to know your career, to have already analyzed its strengths and its weaknesses, and to see how we could make you—if you deserved it—how we could make you a permanent icon in the landscape, how we could make you a permanent presence in the lives of kids. So that’s what I did in the rock and roll business—I helped generate icons, I helped subcultures find their voice, I helped the country music—of all things, ’cause I didn’t like that kind of music—find its voice, but yeah, there was a group of people that were prisoners of the Bible Belt, and they felt they had a right to be on a global stage; well, I helped them find that voice on a global stage. I did the same with glam rock and with heavy metal, with punk music, with disco, and with…Texas culture and a bunch of others. So, the job wasn’t what you would think in terms of PR. Danny Goldberg, who was a terrific publicist and then became the head of Atlantic records and head of Polygram records, says that I wasn’t in this for the spoiled egos of rock stars, I was in it as an applied science—well yeah, but applied science with a heart, with a gut, with a soul. I mean, if you walked through my office and you were interested in working with me, I sat you down and told you something very basic: if you expect me to create an artificial mask for you, an image, and claim that it will make you a star, I’ll send you to my best competitor, I’ll get you a meeting in the next two hours. You can walk over from my office to his. If you’re going to work with me, you have to understand that music is a soul exchange, that it’s an exchange between something deep in you that takes you over and dances you on a stage, that takes you over when you try to write a lyric and are sure you can’t and two hours later there’s a lyric on the blank screen in front of you. Those are the gods inside of you, and my task is to find those gods, put you in touch with them, so you know what it is that is a force bigger than you are, that makes your music for you.

Francis: Can you give any examples of how that happened with some of your clients?

Howard: Yeah. Once upon a time, I used to read all three trade magazines, all three of the insider magazines on what was going on in the music industry every Monday morning when they came in, and I noticed something very odd; there was an artist I never heard of who was moving way up on the R&B charts, which white people didn’t pay any attention to in those days. Not only was he moving up on the R&B charts, his record went platinum, and I’d never heard of him—and I was a student who studied every comma and period in the music industry. Then I got a call asking if I wanted to work with this unknown person out of Minneapolis, who claimed to be 19 years old at the time, and it was the artist that I’d been watching move up the charts. And so I said immediately yes, he was obviously some kind of a strange phenomena. And his name was Prince. So I laid out my conditions, I will only work with you if I can sit down with you in your own environment, for anywhere from one to three days with no handlers around—no managers, no assistants, no wives, nothing—just me and you, and if I could go on a hunt for the soul inside of you, or the soul that dances you, the soul that makes your music. And the manager said yes. Then I got a very strange phone call from Warner Brothers Records—Prince was on Warner Brothers—and in those days, there was a big barrier at record companies between the black people and the white people, within the company. If you were a black act, you automatically got thrown over to the black staff, and the black staff and the white staff didn’t really talk. Warner’s was a little bit different, because whereas most of the black staff on the other side of the color barrier within record companies were relatively unsophisticated people, the folks at Warner Brothers, even in the black department, were Harvard-level people—extremely articulate, extremely intelligent. So I got a phone call from one of the extremely articulate, extremely intelligent black publicists at Warners saying, you put your foot in it, you’ll have a real hard time with this one. Prince won’t do interviews, we set him up for two interviews and he was quiet in one of the interviews and didn’t say anything, and in the other interview tried to strangle the interviewer. Now if this had come from a standard black staff, maybe…god knows how that idea would have arisen—but I would have taken it seriously in one way, but I had it taken a whole different way coming from this super-intelligent Warner’s publicist. Nonetheless they met my demands, and so they flew me, Bob Cavallo (Prince’s manager), flew me to Buffalo New York—which ironically is my home town, not Prince’s home town—where he was rehearsing for his “Dirty Minds” tour at the Shea Theater. And when his rehearsals were over around one o’clock in the morning, we locked ourselves in a back room in the dressing rooms, and we sat there talking until roughly 7-9 am in the morning. It was the Warner Brothers person was dead wrong that Prince wouldn’t talk to me. What were we looking for? We were looking for Prince’s imprinting points; there are certain points in your life where your brain is open to a certain kind of phenomena, and when it finds that phenomena it latches onto it and it makes that phenomena, whatever it’s hooked onto, whatever it’s imprinted on, a part of your brain’s shape, your brain’s morphology for the rest of your life. I call those things passion points, imprinting points. So among other things, I asked Prince a very simple question—when was the first time you remember being interested in music? And Prince talked about when he was five years old—which was often a key imprinting point, almost always a key imprinting point—and Prince’s mom had taken him to a theater in Minneapolis to see his father rehearse. And they come into the empty auditorium, and there his father was on center stage; and behind his father, said Prince, were five of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen in his life, and that was it. Some of the imprinting characteristics for most rock and rollers are that joining point, where sex and massive attention meet. With many of the artists I work with, their imprinting points came in watching Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, or watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. A point where the screaming girls, the mass attention, the sexual attention, they all come together in a common point. So, this was my main story in understanding Prince—there were lots of others, but this was a key story. So now I was in a position, when I finished my hours and hours of interviews, I went back home—I didn’t yet have computers—I had to cut and paste literally with scotch tape and scissors, and I cut apart the interview and I arranged it in chronological order so it told the tale of Prince’s most important imprinting points, and I sent it back to Prince, and I said, “this is your story. And whenever you do an interview, I want you to tell this story, no matter what the interviewer asks, tell this story, because the interviewer is a megaphone, the interviewer is a microphone through whom you speak to your audience. And your audience has to know what’s at the heart and core of you.” And I gave him a bunch of other training in how to do interviews, and then within the next two years, he did roughly 150 interviews altogether, the person I was told could not possibly do an interview, and who had tried to strangle an interviewer—we never had a problem, never. Now look, Prince—it took me a long time to realize this—Prince was only about five foot, two inches tall, he was tiny. And so I would imagine that when Prince was growing up, he’d taken a lot of shit, that he’d been beaten up a lot, and so he was very timid around men. He wasn’t timid around girls, especially attractive women. I insisted on going out to Minneapolis once a year, after looking at the lyrics to his upcoming album, and debriefing him, because every year your imprinting points change a little, you continue to grow and your imprinting points grow with you. And the third year when I went out to Minneapolis to interview Prince, he had me in the auditorium watching him as he was rehearsing, and then refused to see me. The fear had taken over. Nonetheless, one of the tricks to what I was doing is that, Hermann Hesse says that you have 10,000 personalities hidden in a dark closet of the mind, and the only one of those 10,000 personalities you know is the one that fought to the surface and became you. But those other personalities are inside of you, so one of the tools that I use, which is strange coming out of science, was tuned empathy. It was finding that hidden self in that dark closet of the mind that corresponded to Prince, and then resonating to Prince’s frequency. So Prince’s manager was able to call and say, look, you know, I’m not supposed to have lyrics to Prince’s album, and you’re not supposed to know about the lyrics for Prince’s album. But if the lyrics to Prince’s album mysteriously show up at your desk at 10:30 tomorrow morning, can you tell me what Prince is thinking? And the answer was always yes. All I had to do was see the lyrics, and I knew where Prince’s head was at, I knew where his heart was at, I knew where his soul was at, for years, without ever once again being able to sit down and have a multi-hour conversation with Prince. So that’s just one example of finding the soul inside of you and helping reveal it to your audience. So you think science would be the basis of what I did, and science was in fact the basis of a lot of what I did, but you know science isn’t science unless it uses empathy as well. Science isn’t science unless—or has a good sense of a lot of the stuff it doesn’t know. When it comes to the realm of the human soul, which is what I was after in the music industry, science doesn’t have a clue. So you have to be able to open your eyes. And the first two rules of sciences that I learned at the age of 10, the two rules that converted me to being, to science as my religion, are 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. When I was twelve and thirteen years old, I discovered that the most interesting stuff right under your nose isn’t under your nose, it’s behind your nose, it’s what I call “the gods inside.”

Francis: As a scientist myself, I kind of view it as science is what we’ve been able to demonstrate in a reproducible way, and there are phenomena that we can see are pretty reproducible but we don’t have any instruments to measure them.

Howard: Right. We have no numerical system for grabbing ahold of them, and in science very often when we don’t have a system involving equations and numbers, we feel helpless. In fact, usually we deny that the phenomena exists altogether until we find a way of dealing with them with formulae and math.

Francis: Yeah, I think as I’ve grown as a scientist I’ve just become more and more humble in terms of being aware of how much there is to know, how much phenomena is out there that is not subject to our senses and to our tools. But you could see their effects.

Howard: Absolutely. Hitler’s not a replicable phenomena, although his speeches tended to have pretty much the same impact when they were made, and yet should science understand a Hitler or how he came to be, so that we can stop new Hitlers from arising? Absolutely. Should we understand what he was able to do successfully in stirring the souls of his audience? You bet! Should we be able to use that for good? You bet! Should we deny that it exists? No way! Science is the aspiration to omniscience, it’s the aspiration to know and understand everything, and our science is still, very, very, very, very primitive. It thinks it understands the world, the cosmos, but it understands such a tiny fraction of the cosmos, that it’s ridiculous, and there is something called observational science. You go out into the field and you become a participant-observer. You become a part of the process that you’re observing—Margaret Mead used to do that in anthropology, and in fact that all the great anthropologists have done that, and it’s where the phrase “participant-observer science” comes from. Well, I was doing participant-observer science in the music industry, and the tales of all of these adventures are in a book. It’s called Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, and that book will be available in April of 2020. And the other books tend to focus on science, because the situation is that I left the music industry in 1988, I felt I had learned everything that I was going to learn from it, and I got sick. So I was sick in bed for 15 years and started to write my books. This sounds hideous to say it, but the fact is I had become a legend in the music industry and the BillBoard Guide to Music Publicity, a publicity textbook, for example, had 20 pages just of an interview with me, about what I called perceptual engineering. I was credited with having re-invented publicity in the music industry. So because of that, I needed to re-establish my scientific credentials, because the rock and roll publicity overshadowed my scientific credentials.

Chris: Did you choose to walk away from the music industry, or was it your illness?

Howard: I started doing the research for what would be my first book in 1981, I started organizing the material in 1984, and I started writing it in 1987, I think. And then I wanted to move away from the music industry and just do my books full time. There’s no way you can get away with that when you’ve got a wife and you’re at a legendary level. And I got sick, and the sickness was horrible, it was monstrous, I was too weak for five years to have another person in the room with me and too weak to utter syllable, too weak to say a thing. So it was hideous, but monstrosities produce advantages sometimes, and it allowed me to do my work on my books full time, and I needed to do my books on science because, as I said, I needed to re-establish those credentials. And when I was 12 years old I had built my first [?] algebra machine, I had co-designed a computer that had won science fair awards, I had been schlepped off to a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at my hometown university, the University of Buffalo. I imagine that he was granting five minutes as a courtesy to my mom, and instead we spent an hour discussing the hottest topic of science at the moment, the interpretation of the Doppler shift and Big Bang vs. Steady State theory of the universe. At the age of 16, I had worked at the world’s largest cancer research facility, the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute, and I had spent that summer at Roswell developing a theory of the beginning, middle and end of the universe that predicted something that wouldn’t be discovered for another 38 years—dark energy. And if you go online and look up “Howard Bloom Big Bang”—or big bagel—you’ll see the theory in a five and a half minute, very simple animation, and it explains what dark energy is, which is a mystery to science. The actual existence of dark energy wouldn’t be discovered until 1998, I was coming up with this theory in 1959. So even though I had this scientific background, nobody knew it. So my first books were all science, The Lucifer Principle of Scientific Expedition to the Forces of History, which a lot of people call their bible and reads like it was written tomorrow. The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, the office of the Secretary of Defense had a forum based on that book and brought in people from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM and MIT; The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, which the sheik who runs Dubai named a racehorse after, which his former minister of development who runs a 33 billion dollar sovereign real estate operation and he’s co-founder of the Arabian business and economic forum, and he went in front of the Arabian Business and Economic Forum and said there’s a book I particularly resonate to, it contains the future of Dubai, and proceeded to read passages from The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism. The 11th President of India called the book a visionary creation, and he and I worked together for four years on harvesting solar energy in space and transmitting it to earth. The next book was The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, and that’s very relevant to what you’re doing in science, because Barbara Erenreich read that book, and she wrote an introduction for the paperback version. And in her introduction, she says that for 250 years we’ve been doing reductionist science; it’s only gotten us so far. To understand how a hummingbird flies, via reductionist method, you have to kill a hummingbird—well, there goes everything that makes the hummingbird fly. In this book, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, is the first step in the next 250 years of science. The other books are How I Accidentally Started the 60s, which I wrote while I was sick in bed. Certain forms of human yanked me out of my misery, and they were P.G. Wodehouse and Dave Barry, and I wrote this book, it’s the story of my adventures accidentally helping start the hippie movement, and I wrote it to be as hilarious as I could possibly make it. And then a manuscript got to Timothy Leary and Timothy Leary came back with a quote that was just astonishing: he said it was a monumental masterpiece of American literature, and filled with [wow woo aha] experiences and nonstop scientific comedy routines and waves of hilarity, and wow-woo-aha and he compared it to James Joyce. What I didn’t realize is, as I was writing this book from my bed in an attempt to create the kind of transcendent humor that had lifted me out of my circumstances, and Timothy Leary was dying prostate cancer and needed exactly the same thing, and apparently he found it in that book.

Chris: Can speak more to how you accidentally invented the 60s?

Howard: It was an acdent. I was a total outcast in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. The other kids, to the extent that they acknowledged me at all, called me the sickly scientist, and I read Time magazine from cover to cover every week. And every week Time magazine covered the latest escapades of the beatniks. I thought, well, there may be no social group that want to have anything to do with me in Buffalo, New York, but if I could ever get anywhere near the beatniks, they would accept me. So I thought the beatniks would accept me, and so I tried to drop out of high school, I tried to get a motorcycle and drive to California, not realizing not only did I not have the money for a motorcycle, I did not have a driver’s license and knew nothing about how to drive one. But nonetheless, my parents managed to enlist my teachers, and they persuaded me not to drop out of high school, so when I went off to Reed College, which was called the Harvard of the West and had the highest median SATs of any school in the country at the time, higher than Harvard, higher than Cal Tech, higher than Yale; a few weeks before the end of my freshman year, I dropped out to seek Zen Buddhist Satori and to find the beatniks. And I trekked all the way down from Portland, Oregon to North Beach, which was where the Beatniks were supposed to be headquartered. And I went to the City Lights bookstore, which was owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was the king of Beat poets, and the store was empty! I walked in, there was a guy behind the counter, he was reading a book, he didn’t lift his eyes when I walked in; I asked him where the beatniks were, he didn’t even answer. I walked out on the street looking terribly confused, and somebody stopped and said, “you look disturbed about something, can I help you?” The kindness of strangers is really remarkable under some circumstances, and I said, “yes, I’m looking for the Beatniks.” He rolled his eyes up into his head, and scratched his forehead, and then he finally said, “well, have you tried Colorado?”—and that was a little bit vague as a destination for me. So what ended up happening is that people followed me and my two companions, and the group grew larger and larger, we ended up living naked all day long in a big condemned house in Berkeley, California, and people were dropping out of their jobs and dropping out of their schools to come out and follow us. So while looking for the Beatniks I accidentally became one of the catalysts—I’m sure there were thousands of us—for a movement that as yet had no name. And I left the country for a year after these adventures, and when I came back Time-Life publications, the same people who had told me about the Beatniks, had found a name for our movement, they called it the hippie movement. So that’s how I accidentally started the 60s. And I’ve got another book, it’s The Mohammed Code, and it’s about the rise of Islam and within a hundred years of Mohammed’s death, the empire of Islam conquered a territory 11 times the size of the conquest of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman empire, and seven times the size of United States. Nothing like it has ever happened in the history of the world, it is the biggest imperialist and colonialist movement this world has ever seen, and the most successful. And since understanding the forces of history is what I’m all about, using science, that book is essential reading. So that’s it, that’s my seven books, and now Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll in April.

Chris: What can you tell us about the new book without spoiling it for us when it comes out?

Howard: Well, Michael Jackson’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life, so far utterly beyond the norm that it’s hard to describe it, except that I tell the stories and the stories get that across in this book, and I also pursue the mystery of who killed Michael Jackson. But the stories you must read, because you know there are certain people who expand the boundaries of human possibility: like for example, in 1954, no one had ever broken the 4-minute mile, and a guy in England got together with somebody who had a very analytic mind, and they took pictures, they took film of his running, Roger Bannister, and they analyzed every movement of his knees, every movement of his ankles, so that he could be trained to maximize his energy when he was running. And the 4-minute mile, which experts had considered a biological impossibility, he broke it. Now once Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, if you look at Wikipedia and look up the 4-minute mile, it will explain that every decent, [boldly] competitive runner now automatically breaks the 4-minute mile. So there are certain people who expand the bounds of human possibility, and Michael was one of those people. And he did it—remember the first two rules of science? 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? Well, rule 1, the truth at any price including the price of your life, it’s courage. And rule 2, look at things that are under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there, is awe, wonder, curiosity. Michael had a quality of awe, wonder, and curiosity I had never expected to see, I had never imagined. He was purely committed to his kids, to his audience, absolutely, totally dedicated to them, and he would have laid his life on the line for his audience. But you have to read the stories, because until you read the stories, you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. I’m hoping this book will correct the record on Michael, and it’s the stories of my involvement with all these other artists: with Bob Marley, there’s a lengthy chapter on Bob Marley, with Bette Midler, with Billy Joel, with Paul Simon, etc. It’s my adventures, literally looking for soul.

Chris: And how does Einstein fit in there?

Howard: Einstein was a major role model for me when I was a kid, and…OK, so I’m in eighth grade and I’m 12 years old and…I didn’t register at the time, it took me decades to register this, but no one ever made eye contact with me in school. So one day, it came as a total surprise when one of the girls in class moved her eyes in my direction and fixated on me, and said “I told my mother you understand the theory of relativity.” Well, in reality I didn’t understand the theory of relativity, and it was a big deal in those days, it was said that only seven people in the world understood it, but I wasn’t going to contest that to her, because it’s the only thing I had to stand on, being the sickly scientist. As soon as school got out, I got on my bicycle and I rode the two miles to my local library—the librarians knew me better than my mother, literally—and I said “give me everything you’ve got on the theory of relativity” and they went in the back and did some shuffling around, and they found two books and they shoved them across the desk to me. One was a great big fat book, and one was a little tiny skinny book. So I started with the great big fat book, because I had learned at that point that if you don’t think you understand something, if you push yourself all the way through to the bitter end, by the time you finish you’ve understood something. And then eight o’clock at night rolled around, and I was only 50 pages into this book, which was all equations and very little English, and I don’t understand equations, I never have. And I realize that my mom’s going to put me to sleep at 10 o’clock and I’ve got two hours left to understand the theory of relativity. So I turned to the little skinny book, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but every once in a while it feels as if an author has reached out through the page, grabbed you by the lapel, put his nose up to yours and said, “schmuck, listen, I’ve got a message for you.” Well, that’s [Patton?] with the introduction to Einstein’s book. Einstein seemed to drag me nose to nose with him, and say these words: to be a genius, it is not enough to come up with a theory that only seven men in the world can understand. To be a genius you have to be able to come up with that theory and then explain it so simply, so clearly, that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it. So Albert Einstein, through the pages of a book, had told me, “schmuck, listen up! You want to be an original scientific thinker? You have to be a writer, and not just any writer—you have to be a delicious writer, a clear writer.” So that became part of my marching orders, as a part of my science, to become a writer. And becoming a writer was what accidentally got me into popular culture, and ultimately into the music industry. So Einstein was responsible, of all things, for my ending up working with Michael Jackson and Prince. There is this movie that’s come out recently, about Michael Jackson, it made it onto HBO, it was a hit at the Sundance festival, and it accuses Michael of all the hideous sexual deeds with children that ultimately destroyed Michael’s life and destroyed his career. And when that movie came out, what was noticeable was, there was an avalanche, a tidal wave, of reaction against it. And there were people going online, going on Youtube, and giving detailed analyses demonstrating, with timelines, with precise timelines, why the claims being made about Michael couldn’t be true. The avalanche was an avalanche of Michael lovers around the world who refused to give up on Michael Jackson, and this is 10 years after Michael Jackson died. So the remarkable thing is that Michael’s hits record, in the public mind, not just here in Amsterdam and Moscow, all over the world, that no other artist in my lifetime has ever hit—I mean, beyond even Elvis. And people know there is something worth loving there, they don’t know what. And this book attempts to answer the question of what, what was it that the fans of Michael Jackson know at an intuitive level, that the critics of Michael Jackson do not know.

Francis: There’s a phenomenon that I’ve always been interested in, which is how popular music participated in the evolution of human consciousness, and one of the things that was really clear in the 70s is, American at that time seems very free in terms of the process by which grassroots music would be discovered and then curated and offered to the public, by either AM or FM radio, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in some of the communist countries, it was all controlled by the government—it was laughable, actually, in comparison to the richness and, I guess, just the immediacy of the music that the West had. Are we sort of creating, through the corporatization and monopolization of the media, something that kind of mirrors what happened in Russia and how causing things to stall maybe in terms of how fast this country could be evolving, is the fact that the cutting edge of the art isn’t really being offered to the masses, the people who are capable of appreciating it but aren’t going to go out and find it on their own.

Howard: Well, I think the opposite is happening. Look what I just alluded to, Pandora. Pandora and Spotify have changed everything, so has Youtube. People are able to find a far vaster array of music than they’ve ever been able to find in their lives. Musical artists are able to find an audience more easily than has ever been possible in the past. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s, when I got into the music industry, there was a rough equivalent of the Stalinist bureaucracy at the top, the gatekeepers, the folks in the record industry. You had to get the attention of A&R guys, those were talent scouts, and manage to get a record company contract, and record company contracts were almost impossible to get—maybe one out of a million musical acts actually got a music industry contract—so without going through the gatekeepers, you couldn’t reach the public. Today, you can go out and start touring on your own, if you can afford it, ‘cause it’s very expensive, and you can start connecting with your audience. You’ve got people like Amanda Palmer, who raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter—that wasn’t possible back in the 70s and 80s. And with Pandora, you have personal control over what you get to listen to, you give thumbs up and thumbs down to things, and you can add any artist who’s on Pandora that you want to the station that you’re listening to. That wasn’t at all possible in the 1970s and 1980s; you had top 40 radio and you had something I helped establish, and the whole story of how that was done—or at least I was there for its birth—you had progressive radio, where the DJs were allowed to play anything they wanted.

Chris: I think we used to call that AOR…

Howard: Yeah, Album Oriented Radio, you’re right. My role was accidental—I mean, most of my life has been accidental—in order to get into popular culture, I started a commercial art studio with a bunch of starving artists. One day, I walked our portfolio of artwork into ABC, and ABC had owned seven FM stations, and this new concept of progressive radio had just been invented. ABC was going to do something incredibly risky—it was going to take these seven stations, stop doing the top 40 which everybody else was doing, a limit of 40 songs that got airplay—and was going to go with the progressive format. It hired me and my art studio to do all the graphics for this huge change, and we did a spectacular job. I had a 19-year old artist named Bradley Johannsen who was a visionary—every time he sat down and did a picture, it was an entire world you had never seen or imagined before in your life. So he did seven of these imaginary worlds for ABC, and it helped put them on the map, and ABC asked me to found an advertising agency in order to handle all their ads, and I didn’t want to learn time-buying, which sounded incredibly boring to me, so I didn’t do it—but that gives you a measure of how trusted we were at ABC Records. So I was there for the inception of Album Oriented Radio, I wasn’t a move and a shaker, I was a participant. Remember, I didn’t know anything about popular music—my Rachmaninoff/Beethoven/Bartok and Stravinsky were the people I had been listening to since I was ten years old, and the head of promotions for ABC started educating me about popular music. And then one day she said, look, we’re having a concert in Studio B, why don’t I give you two tickets. OK, so I took the two tickets and I took my lead artist and took him with me, and we went to Studio B. There was this piano player on stage, and my artist, Peter Bramley, started getting up out of his seat and whooping and hollering and he embarrassed the shit out of me, I thought this was terrible behavior, why can’t he just sit still? And then the concert was over, and it took me years to process this. What I failed to realize is, one of the reasons that that artist on stage, that piano player, was able to give such an incredible performance, was because Peter Bramley was feeding him energy, and you need energy from an audience if you’re a performer on stage. It’s what lifts you out of yourself, it’s what does give you an ecstatic experience. It does allow the gods inside of you to dance you around like marionette. The artist onstage was named Elton John, and the album came out as Elton’s first live album, and you can still hear Peter Bramley to this day whooping and hollering, and helping make that concert what it was. So I learned about popular music from my experience, my involvement with ABC, and my involvement in helping them establish Album Oriented Rock, or Album Radio.

Chris: I used to just absolutely love the DJ Vinnie Scelsa in New York, I don’t know if that name rings a bell..

Howard: Oh yeah, absolutely. Plus there was the day I was [up] at ABC, their DJ and the new format, one of their DJs was named Dave Herman, and there was a stack of records almost up to his shoulder, at least up to his nipple in front of him, and he was leaning on it with his elbow, and we were talking, and then one of the album covers caught his eye. And he looked down, he lifted the album cover in his hands, and he said “this looks interesting, I think I’ll play it when I get on the air.” The album that he’d picked up was called “Jesus Christ Superstar,” it was the most unlikely record you’ve ever heard of, it was a rock opera, which was a dream at the time. It was the story of Jesus Christ told from the point of view of Judas Iscariot—I mean, how the hell would that ever be commercial, right? And it was the first airplay, in Herman’s play was the first airplay that Jesus Christ Superstar got. And of course since then Andrew Lloyd Webber, the writer of Jesus Christ Superstar, has become a multi-billionaire and has been recognized by the Queen. So it was almost, my experience was almost Forrest Gump-ian experience. Sometimes I made things happen, and it wouldn’t have happened without me, and sometimes I was there, along for the ride, and can tell you what it was like—and it was fascinating.

Francis: One of the things we like to discuss on this program are concepts for the future and how we can evolve beyond where we currently are right now in terms of technology, in terms of how the world is structured, in every regard. I was wondering what your thoughts are about what direction the world is going in, and what kind of vision we can aspire to.

Howard. Well, four billion years ago there was this hideous planet, absolutely monstrous; poison pill in stone. And it was the mother of all climate change catastrophes, its temperature went up and down 88 degrees every three hours, for three hours you were on the surface of this killer of a planet, you were exposed to something poisonous called radiation and for three hours you were exposed to something equally poisonous called [darkness?]. Plus it had a tilt to its rotation, and the result was that as it rotated around the sun, it produced four major climate changes a year—summer, fall, winter and spring. And life had the audacity to get started on this planet, and over the course of the next four billion years, despite catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe, the greened and gardened the place. Despite a hundred and forty-two mass extinctions, life continued to hold on and expand. If life has greened and gardened one poison pill of stone, how many poison pills of stone are there above our heads, just waiting to be greened and gardened? They’re all over the place. We’re discovering there are billions and billions of planets up there. Look, life is imperialistic and life is colonialistic. It likes taking over territory, kidnapping and seducing and recruiting dead atoms and bringing them into this enterprise of life, into this grand initiative of life. There are creatures that are better than us at research and development, they’re called bacteria. We race with them and we narrowly manage to stay neck and neck with them, but there’s only one species on this planet that can take green and garden stuff, that can take ecosystems out of the gravity well and to other poison pills of stone—and it’s us, humans. It’s our obligation to open the rest of the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond that, a multitude of galaxies, to life, to green and garden the whole thing. So I’ve got this document called Garden the Solar System, Green the Galaxy, and you can find it on HowardBloom.net, on my website, again that’s HowardBloom.net. I was at Maxwell Air Force Base in May, and with a team of people I put together a two billion dollar moon program, and right now we are promoting that two billion dollar moon program because they current President, much as I loathe and despise him, and the current Vice-President, much as I loathe and despise him too, want to get us to the moon by 2024. And if that’s the motivation that gets us greening and gardening all of those gravity balls up above our heads, fine. And we’ve got a way that we can do it, so we are promoting this two billion dollar moon plan, and the two billion dollar moon plan and my partner in this is a three-star general, and the plan is very simple: give a billion dollars to the first company that can land a nice, big roomy human habitat on the moon, and give another billion dollars to the company that can set it up and run it. That’s it, that gets us on the moon to stay, and it gets around a whole bunch of obstacles that the space military industrial complex is trying to throw in our path and keep us from getting to the surface of the moon. One of my friends, a chief research scientist at NASA, visited his old friends at NASA, the powers that be at NASA, about eight months ago, and he came back with a very simple report: that the people at the top in NASA had told him, “if you think we’re going let you step on the surface of the moon, you’ve got another thing coming.” In other words, NASA was sabotaging our ability to take [ego?]systems to space. And this program gets around any form of NASA sabotage whatsoever. So, the future is above our heads, the future is in taking life to places it has never been before and allowing it to adapt and kidnap, seduce and recruit a biotic atoms, dead molecules and atoms, and bring them into the grand enterprise of life.

Chris: I heard you on Joe Rogan’s podcast talking about this space-military-industrial complex. Now, I was born in 1960 so I was not aware when President Eisenhower gave the nation the warning about the military-industrial complex, but I’ve certainly grown to see its evils. Would you like to speak to that?

Howard: Well, yeah. The space military-industrial complex saddles us with impossible programs, and they kill us! It is not here to provide American security, it’s here to undo American security. I mean, just like Donald Trump to undo American security, too, but it’s a different process. So back in…10 years ago, Boeing was doing research on gas stations in space, fuel propellent depots in space. What’s the advantage of a gas station in space? Well, you could take an existing rocket from ten years ago, you could fly it to orbit, you could refuel it in orbit, and it could go to the moon, it could go to Mars, it could go to Jupiter, it could go to the moons of Jupiter, it could go to the rings of Saturn, it could go anyplace in the solar system with a simple refueling, and no new rocket had to be developed to accomplish this. So we could have been up and running if Boeing had continued the development of these propellent depots, these gas stations in space. We could have been up and running with human programs to the rest of the planets a long time ago. But Boeing managed to land a contract for something that would produce far more immediate lucre, far more immediate profit. It was called the Space Launch System—it was a mega-rocket, it was a franken-rocket cobbled together by Richard Shelby, the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee in order to keep jobs in his district, and cobbled together from old technologies. So Boeing killed—not only killed its work on gas stations in space, it forbade the use of the word “depot” anywhere in Boeing or the other company that it controlled, United Launch Alliance. Meanwhile, Richard Shelby got that same gag order placed on NASA itself. So for ten years there’s been this focus on a space launch system, the mega-rocket, the franken-rocket, and it has meant two billion dollars a year to Boeing. The franken-rocket was supposed to fly, space launch system, was supposed to fly in 2015. I don’t know if you noticed it, but 2015 is in the rear view mirror, that was four years ago, is the franken-rocket/space launch system anywhere near being ready for flight? Not at all! It may never fly. And if it ever flies, it will cost between one and two billion dollars per flight. Now for that, you could buy 22 launches of Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy. In other words, you could buy 11 launches to the moon, and 11 launches to Mars from Elon Musk, and you could buy it today, because the Falcon Heavy rocket is already flying, it’s already done three flights—unlike the space launch system, which may never fly. And for the sake of all of this, we stopped the space shuttle and America has not had access to space in American vehicles since 2011. We’re supposed to be the space leader, we hitch our rides to the International Space Station on Russian rockets. This is a hideous, monstrous embarrassment. Plus, the space military-industrial complex has come up with this plan to never get us to the moon—it’s called the Gateway, the Lunar Gateway, and it’s a tiny little space station that’s supposed to orbit the moon, but never get us to the lunar surface! And Lockheed Martin is trying to put all of our attention, all of our money into this, and it is succeeding, so far. So the business of the space-military-industrial complex over the course of the last nine years, has been to keep us out of space, not to get us into space. Why? In order to make a quick and easy profit. A friend of mine from Boeing points out that the space-military-industrial-complex makes its profits off of what are called change orders—every time that Congress changes its mind about what the characteristics of a rocket should be, or every time NASA changes its mind.

Chris: My background is engineering, and I’ve done a lot of contracting, and I know exactly how the engineering change order, ECO as we call it, can bloat a project and absolutely destroy the deadlines.

Howard: Right. So the more bloat, the better, because the more money that means on the bottom line of companies like Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin. So, the goal is to get beyond this, and the two billion dollar moon program just doesn’t say a word about them, doesn’t threaten their program, takes whispers of money—a billion dollars for two years running, is a whisper of money in NASA terms—and simply gets us to the moon, period, to stay, with a nice big roomy human habitation. And Bob Bigelow, the reasoning behind this program is that Elon Musk has already got the Falcon Heavy, and he’s about to have the Starship to get us to the moon and back. Jeff Bezos has already announced his moon program, with his Blue Moon lunar lander. And Bob Bigelow, who was behind the Quality Hotel chain, or something of the sort, he’s a hotel entrepreneur, and he bought inflatable habitat technology from NASA over 15 years ago, roughly 20 years ago, and he’s had a plan for a lunar colony, and he’s been building it—for ten years. For ten years, we’ve had a lunar colony that could be finished in a year or two, with a little bit of extra funding. And here we are talking about this useless little lunar orbiter, just to make money for Lockheed-Martin? Are you kidding me? Americans’ leadership in space is going to determine which set of values rules the world for the next 40 years. The Chinese want it to be them, and they have a detailed program for how they are going to colonize the moon, colonize Mars, colonize the solar system and then colonize the universe. And it is so important to the Chinese that Xi Jinping has had this all locked into the Chinese constitution, what he called the Chinese Space Dream. So we have our own companies knifing us in the back, and if China wins in this space war, it’s the Chinese set of values that is going to dominate the world for the rest of this century. It’s the Chinese totalitarianism, it’s the Chinese intrusion into your personal life, it’s the Chinese system of using face recognition in order to give you toilet paper. You’re in a bathroom in China, a public bathroom, and if the facial recognition system says you have not been a good citizen, that you haven’t toed the party line with enough fidelity, it won’t give you toilet paper! That’s a major motivational interference in personal life.

Chris: We’ve recently had the journalist James O’Malley on the podcast—we haven’t published that episode yet—and he’s been following the Chinese social credit system very closely, and he took a trip to China and was just…you know, if you have good social credit you could ride the fast train, if you don’t you have to ride the slow train, it’s really like a dystopian science fiction story…

Howard: Yeah. It’s Pavlovian, it’s Skinnerian, it’s, you know, you give the pigeon a piece of corn when it moves in the direction you want it to move in, and you successfully shape its behaviors. That’s what the Chinese are doing, giving out little rewards if you turn in the direction the party wants, and depriving you of rewards or giving you negative reinforcements when you turn out of the direction that the party wants. So if that’s the way we want the world to be run, no freedom of speech, no tolerance, no pluralism—you know, we have a million Uighurs who are in re-education camps in China right now. If that’s the way we want the world to be run, then let them win the space race, and they will make sure that’s the way the world is run. If you want tolerance, pluralism, freedom of speech, and democracy, the things that we value in the United States, we gotta win this space race, it’s as simple as that. Plus, the space race is going to do, for the future of humanity, what opening up the New World did for the Europeans—it tripled the gross domestic product in 100 years, of all of Europe, and space is going to triple the gross domestic product of all of humanity. It’s going to provide what are called, in my book, the Genius of the Beast, material miracles and secular salvation like you wouldn’t believe. Who should be delivering that to the world? Well, I’m an American chauvinist, I want America to be the country that delivers this to the world. In the music industry, which I departed from in 1988, I want to see soul come back. I want to see an emphasis on the fact that music is a soul exchange, that it’s not about downloads, it’s not about pieces of plastic, it’s not about the transfer of money, it is about fucking goddamn human soul. I would love to see that return—whether it ever will or not, I don’t know, because I was the only one preaching it when I was there, and I’m not there anymore. Every once in a while, I try to inspire somebody new in the music industry to follow this particular line, but it’s not that easy. So the future is space, and the future is soul.

Chris: You say that you want to return “soul” to capitalism—can you explain to our listeners what that means?

Howard: Yeah. There’s a hidden mandate in capitalism that most capitalists fail to see, but they follow it whether they see it or not, and it’s “be messianic.” It’s “save, lift and upgrade your neighbor.” Upgrade one neighbor you get a dollar, save, lift and upgrade a hundred neighbors you get a hundred dollars, save, lift and upgrade a hundred million neighbors and you get a hundred million dollars. It’s as simple as that. When Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, he upgraded human possibilities in ways we have never imagined before. Look, when I was co-designing a computer, when I was twelve years old, computers were the size of a brownstone in Brooklyn, like the one I’m sitting in right now. To have a computer in your pocket is astonishing! To be able to communicate with friends in Beijing or Hong Kong or Hungary while you’re walking down the street with tiny little headphones, ear buds in your ears, that astonishing! So what Steve Jobs developed was a material miracle, it was a source of secular salvation. And we’ve been churning out these material miracles since approximately 1790, when the steam engine was perfected. We once upon a time…what’s the name of the guy who wrote Robin Hood and…Sir Walter Scott. So Sir Walter Scott was alive as the new steam engines were coming online, and Sir Walter Scott said, “Those who tell you that a steam engine will ever power a mode of transportation are lying to you, it will never happen!” And you know, Sir Walter Scott was a reasonably intelligent and well-informed guy. Well, then, steam engines were put on ships, and all of a sudden instead of taking months to get across the Atlantic, and being totally reliant on winds, you could directly go across the Atlantic in a week or so. We’ve been introducing these new material miracles every ten to fifteen years now, for over 200 years. And what’s the job of you and me, what’s your job as an engineer? What’s my job as an imagineer, as a visionary? It is to make sure that those material miracles come at an even greater pace in the future, that we utterly change the nature of what it is to be human. Look, when their parents put an iPad in the hands of their 16-month-old child, and that 16-month old lays in his cradle and starts exploring the digital landscape that’s implicit in the iPad, and comes to know that digital landscape better than his parents ever will, and comes to be more proficient in the use of this thing…the use of an iPad, than anyone could have possibly have imagined, and that child ends up at the age of 5 going to first grade with the equivalent of bachelor’s degree in submarines or dinosaurs or whatever the subject of his or her personal obsession is, you’ve changed the nature of what it means to be a human being. And those changes, uplifts and upgrades, those messianic moves, those are the real responsibility of capitalism.

Francis: Yeah, I was just wondering where you go from there.

Howard: Well, where you go from there? The law of unintended consequences. Every time you invent something, if it really takes hold, it produces results of kinds you never could have imagined before. And according that first habitation, that nice, big roomy comfortable human habitation of Bob Bigelow, inflatable habitat on the moon, where that’s going to lead—well, it’s going to take an industry. When Sputnik went up, who could have ever imagined a communications satellite? Dish TV? Direct TV? Being able to take the Olympics from one side of the globe to the other instantaneously? Not having to make a videotape and then rush the videotape by courier to New York so it could be seen in North America. Who could have imagined the telecom business? Nobody! Nobody did. And yet today, the satellite industry alone is worth a third of a trillion dollars a year, and once we get to other poison pills of stone and start greening and gardening them, we’re going to triple the gross human product, eventually. First we’ll raise that to three trillion dollars, from a third of a trillion dollars, and then it will utterly change the nature of what it means to be human. And it’s the unintended consequences that are going to be the real stunners. When Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, he never imagined putting an iPad in the hands of a baby, and how it would change that baby’s life. Look, you know, we’re born with twice as many brain cells as we use, and then half of our brain cells are pared away, they go through apoptosis, pre-programmed cell death. So the ones that stay alive, the brain cells that stay alive and the assemblies of brain cells that stay alive are the ones that are called upon for action and use. When you put an ipad in a baby’s hands, you re-sculpt its brain, because there are whole ensembles of neurons that would have died out in a previous generation and are now kept vigorously alive. You have just changed the nature of what it means to have a human brain, with a simple piece—well, not so simple piece—of technology. So we do not know what the impacts are going to be, of gardening the solar system and greening the galaxy. We don’t have a clue. All we can say is, material miracles come tumbling out of the least expected places, and this is certainly an opportunity for material miracles we have never imagined in our lives.

Chris: We’ve had a couple of Scientific Skeptics on this show, and you’re on Coast to Coast, the radio program with the UFOs and the weird conspiracy theories and all of that, and I’m certain you’re probably going to be the only guest we ever had who’s been on Coast to Coast—so what do you actually believe of what they—George Noory and his guests talk about?

Howard: Nothing. I don’t believe that there are aliens up there, but the fact is that this universe has a tendency to super-simultaneity and super-synchrony. I did a paper about this for Physica Plus a long time ago. That means that all of the quarks at the very beginning of the universe came into existence at precisely the same time, in only 16 different forms with gazillions of identical copies of each. Then, all about three hundred thousand to three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang, the first atoms came together, and they were precisely the same and they all came together about the same time. Then, gravity took over, you had the era of the great gravity competitions, the great gravity crusades, and that resulted in the assembly of black holes, galaxies, and stars. Black holes, galaxies of stars are all pretty much the same, and pretty much arrived, sort of, at the same time. So if the universe is in the habit of giving birth to new forms, entirely new forms like galaxies and stars and planets, and putting them together in pretty much the same form at pretty much the same time, then it stands to reason that mega-molecules have assembled life all over the place at pretty much the same time, give or take a million years or two. But we have absolutely zero evidence for the existence of alien life, of life outside of this one single planet, and we’ve been looking diligently for it since I put Earth, Wind and Fire together with Carl Sagan to see if Earth, Wind and Fire could do a benefit concert for the SETI project, and that would have been about 1981. That’s forty years ago, almost, and we haven’t found a thing. So the odds seem to be, from a scientific point of view, that there is no alien life, that we’re it when it comes to life. So I don’t believe in any of the conspiracy stuff…I mean, they have me as their token Democrat, as their token liberal, and as their token real-science person. And I appreciate the fact that they want me—I mean, 300 appearances is terrific, it gives me new challenges, new things to explore and research every single week. So I’m very grateful to them, but I don’t agree with any of the ideas that they tend to fixate on.

Chris: I enjoy listening to Coast to Coast—sometimes I have weird sleeping problems, and I’ll find myself awake when it’s on, and even though I disagree with everything, I enjoy the humanity of the callers, I think there’s something in the people who call in to that show that I just find compelling.

Howard: And you’re one of a whole mess of people, all over the country, who are secret listeners to the show, who will not confess it during daytime hours, but who are, for one reason or another, awake at one in the morning, Eastern Time, when the show starts, and are insomniacs and enjoy listening to the show. So when they had me do a one-hour debate with one of their Republicans, on Republicanism versus Democratism, they took a poll, and he got 80% of the votes and I got 20% of the votes. But that 20% is so grateful for hearing sane stuff that it makes it worthwhile. And George is very good to me—George Noory, the host—is very good to me.

Chris: What makes the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?

Howard: So the Republicans operate on fear of people smaller than they are, people weaker than they are. They get their hierarchical kicks, they feel high on the social totem pole…stepping on, stomping on, the people beneath them—immigrants, in this case. Democrats tend to want an open world. Democrats try to, tend to want a global world. The amygdala, which is where political activities are centered for conservatives, is a fear center; the insula is an identity center, it’s more concerned with flashing symbols to those in your group that you’re one of them. And there’s a huge amount of conformity within the liberal left, among us Democrats, but we’re operating from different parts of the brain, and we’re operating with different assumptions about what the world is really all about, and Donald Trump is betraying America and he’s the traitor—I mean, to use words, I don’t like to use these words in political discourse, but they’re words that are used every single day by the Tea Party and the conservatives. They use the word “traitor” and they use the word “turncoat.” Well, Donald Trump is the only traitor and turncoat I have seen in the White House in my entire lifetime.

Chris: I think this has been a very good interview, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. Howard, what would you like to plug or promote, what would you like our listeners to look at?

Howard: Well, just look up Howard Bloom on Amazon, and buy any book that you choose, and then let me know what you think of it. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, coming in April.

Chris: Maybe you can come back on the show then, and…

Howard: Well, that would be terrific. I will look forward to the next time.

—END

Making Better Episode 8: Hayley Stevens, Parranormal Researcher

Hayley Stephens is a paranormal researcher and she lives in what she refers to as “Weird Wiltshire” in the United Kingdom. she is studying towards a BSc (Hons) Psychology. she works full time and in between working and studying, she researches paranormal claims and phenomena. Hayley hosts The Spooktator podcast and is also active on Twitter. Click here to read Hayley’s full biography and feel free to browse her website, which she updates frequently. As with all Making Better episodes, this one is fully transcribed. Click here to read a full transcript of Episode 8.

Making Better Episode 7: Penny Arcade

Since first climbing out of her bedroom window at age 14 to join the fabulously disenfranchised world of queers, junkies, whores, stars, deviants and geniuses she has become one of the most influential performers in the world. By fearlessly displaying her singular brand of feminist sexuality and personal conflict she has garnered countless fans worldwide with an emotionally and intellectually charged performance style. Internationally revered as writer, director and actress, she has influenced generations of artists around the world.

(Click here to read a rather lengthy biography of Penny Arcade). Click here to follow Penny Arcade on Twitter in English, and click here to read a complete transcript of Making Better Episode 7: Penny Arcade.

Episode 7: Penny Arcade Transcript

Penny Arcade Making Better Transcript

(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, this is episode seven of Making Better, and we’re featuring Penny Arcade.

Francis: Yeah, Penny is someone that I’ve loved listening to for many years. I think the first time I ever heard her was at Saint Mark’s Church on New Year’s eve, which is when—used to be like so many of greatest Beat artists and other poets would be there reading for the New year, and you’d kinda get the sense of where the world was at by listening to them all, and Penny really stood out. I remember at the time thinking, who is this person? And I’ve followed her through the years, and her performances and I find her take on the world extremely well-thought-out and visionary, and I think people will really enjoy her.

Chris: I agree. I think this is one of my favorite episodes so far, and it’s not often you get to talk to a real 60s radical anymore.

Francis: Not only that, but someone who was the type of a radical where they didn’t have to sort of apologize a lot for the naivete of their youth. A lot of what Penny has believed, she’s believed most of her life and I guess history’s borne it out.

Chris: So without further ado, let’s get on to our interview.


Chris: Penny Arcade, welcome to Making Better!

Penny: Oh, OK, hi! (laughs)

Francis: Hey Penny,

Penny: Hi, Francis

Francis: …I’m so exciting to spend some time talking with you now, and I think it would be great for our listeners if we could just start a little biographically…and maybe you could talk about where you came from, and …

Penny: OK. I’m first-generation American, I’m the first person in my family born in America. My mother’s family, who I was mostly raised with, are from Baslikata*, which is the Appalachia of Italy, it’s one of the very, very poorest parts of Italy and it’s a place where the people were fundamentally sharecroppers. So I come from people who were slaves not in the 17th century, but in the 20th century. The vast tracts of land were owned by the nobility, a nobility that did not live anywhere near where these lands were. So I have always been anarchic. As Judith Molina once said to me, “Penny, you’re an optimist, because you’re an anarchist, and all anarchists are optimists.” So yeah, do I think that the world could be a better place? Yes. Do I think that that’s gonna happen? No. Why? Because of human nature, and we’re living for the past, seriously, 30 years with the commodification of rebellion. So all these people who have 27,000 tattoos, they all have the same tattoo as everybody else, ‘cause they all want to be different like everybody else. They were gathering down at Occupy, and eating french fries from McDonalds. There’s a real schism in the intellectual life of Americans. Americans are not political people; they have a culture of being political, which mostly at this point buys down to buying Che Guevera t-shirts for their four-year-old children. This thing that everybody’s waiting for to happen, that’s really really bad, that everybody’s afraid is gonna happen—it’s already happened. OK? It’s already happened. So, for me, I don’t believe you can change the world, but I do believe you can change the world around yourself. I came up through the 60s, I was involved with Yippie!, which was the Youth International Party with Abby Hoffman. I was involved with Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers with Ben Morea, that did preach armed revolution, and at that point, in 1968, 1969, there was a radical left in this country. There hasn’t been a “Left” in this country, honestly, since when? Since the 60s. There’s no Left in this country. People have a lot of fantasies about their political involvement, but they don’t want to take a really hard look at what the real situation is, and the real situation is, take it to the streets. Listen, the last big demostration we had in New York, which was the one where the infantilized women with their little pussy ears—there were three cops at that demonstration. That’s how worried they were. Three cops at the whole demonstration!

Chris: In the old days, there’d be three cops just watching me.

Penny: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, I think people are walking around, everywhere I go I hear people talking “oh, they’re talking truth to power, I was just talking truth to power this afternoon.” These people are seriously narcissistic fools. I mean, you don’t talk truth to power and win.

Chris: Nobody wants to go to jail.

Penny: Wells they definitely don’t want to go to jail, they also don’t want to be hit in the head. And the police do hit you in the head, you know.

Chris: I’ve personally been arrested 24 times in civil disobedience actions, so, I know the routine.

Penny: But we’re living in a period where there is such a fanciful idea that people have, that they’re being pro-active, meanwhile, how many states are already ratifying anti-abortion? And then everything’s fragmented, so culturally, what you might call the Left, is completely…

Chris: …people like Bernie Sanders, and AOC…

Penny: No, but what I’m even talking, I’m talking more about whether it is minorities, women, or what are now called “queers,” it’s all been micro-sliced. There is no coalition. And you cannot achieve anything without coalition. So, you have the Black Lives Matter people, which I try to connect them with class issues—they could care less about class issues. You know, everybody’s got their own thing, like all the gay people who are so ill-informed that they don’t realize that if we lose Roe v. Wade, we lose LGBT rights, because the ACLU wrote the gay liberation, I don’t know what you’d call it…contract, let’s call it, on the back of Roe vs. Wade, as unnatural acts. So that they used the unnatural so-called act of a women getting rid of a fetus from her own body, and they had it cover the unnatural so-called unnatural acts of same-sex sexuality. But people are oblivious to these things, and so people are only interested in their own little plot, happily digging away in their own little plot, whereas the right wing forms coalition with anyone. As long as you hate the rights of other people, you’re welcome to coalesce and be part of the coalition with the right. I mean, but you know this is not just happening in America, it’s happening world-wide, and we have been warned about this, not just since George Orwell, but all the way back to the beginning of the century with Brave New World. And people have not listened, because people don’t listen until it happens to them. I tried to do housing activism in this neighborhood of the Lower East Side in the mid-90s, and there were like twenty-seven million 20-year olds with multiple piercings and tons of tattoos lined up in the cafes of Avenue A…you couldn’t get them to one demonstration. But the second that they’re about to be evicted out of their building, suddenly they become interested in housing rights. And all of these things are the same, it’s the same thing with feminism. You know, the MeToo movement supposedly created this burst of flower of feminism, but feminism does not mean that you care what happens to you and your eight friends, it means that you care about what happens to all women. And the failure of feminism has always been the way women betray women, and women continually betray women.

Chris: The feminist movement started that way, with Sojourner being kicked out and Helen Keller being kicked out, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton being kicked out, all for raising issues of race or..

Penny: Right. …and class. Race and class.

Chris: Helen Keller was social justice.

Penny: Right. I don’t really know where it’s gonna go, because everything’s so fragmented now, it’s not like you’re gonna get any kind of real group of people…I mean, everybody wants Trump impeached, I’m like, Trump is not the problem! Pence is the problem—Trump has no values. Pence has tons of values and they’re all evil. We’re living in a world of disinformation, we’re living in a world of fragmentation, the promise of the internet failed…

Chris: I don’t think we can entirely conclude that. I think it is failing right now, but we don’t know where it will be in five years…

Penny: OK, but what I’m talking about is, the idea was that people would be connected. And the result is, that you used to be able to get more information from just walking down Avenue A, about what was happening in this neighborhood, than you can get now, with all of the social media that we have. Because of the algorithms and because of human nature. People want pleasure, people do not want to do anything that is uncomfortable. And when I talk about the failure of the internet, baby, fifteen years ago, if I was researching something, and with my clever mind where I could come up with multiple, multiple multiplying, over and over and over, every single one of them a closed door that you come to that’s another www-dot-zi-doc-dot something, that leads nowhere. There is a real failure to the internet, because the internet is not free. The internet is owned, and it is manipulated, and I’m not a programmer and I’m not a tech person. But I know, I’m a user, and I can tell when it’s impossible to get anywhere with the internet compared to what was going on before. And about five years ago, I was at the McDowell, doing a McDowell residency, and there was a wonderful young woman whose name I’ve forgotten now, who is a worldwide web activist, and she presented a program to, I don’t know, 40-50 artists who were gathered at McDowell, talking about what was really going on with the internet. Those people could care less—and these were supposed to be, you know, really investigative, artistic minds, right? And at the end, very very very, the talk was over and I just raised my hand and I said, “excuse me, how many people in the world are doing what you do?” She said, “oh, being activists for freeing the world wide web?” I said, yeah. She goes “oh, there’s probably about a hundred and fifty of us.”

Chris: We had Richard Stallman on the podcast as a guest, and he’s the leader of that movement.

Penny: Ok, so the point that I’m making is, the next thing that she said, “do you want to know how many people are employed by the forces of evil?” she said, “try five hundred thousand.” So the balance is really off. So before you can do anything about anything, you’ve got to face the true, real facts. You know, which means not just as a group, but individually. How far am I willing to go? What would I do? How much do I care? And I care about the working poor. I care about immigrants without papers. I don’t give a fuck about middle class people. As when the Matthew Sheppard demonstration happened—I can’t remember what year that was—and lots and lots of nice, well-meaning gays and lesbians went to the march and had their candlelit march, and then they were all completely freaked out when police on horseback started stampeding into them! You know? They were like “we don’t want a police state”—guess what? It is a police state! I’m not Miss Optimism here, but I am all for facing reality, and for what can we do, and I’m not sure about what we can do.

Francis: Could we talk about your life as an artist a little, too, because there would be a lot of people who aren’t…

Penny: Yeah, who aren’t familiar with my work. Like, everybody.

Chris: You’ve gotten to work with two of my heroes–

Penny: Yeah? Who are they?

Chris: Andy Warhol and Quentin Crisp.

Penny: Oh. OK, that’s interesting. Very, very diverse people.

Chris: But they were both profoundly interesting to me, so…

Penny: Yeah, well…everyone has their taste, don’t they? Right. Andy was a very interesting person, not that anybody could really experience really how interesting he was, because he was very introverted and alienated, I guess is what you’d say. He was a strange man in many ways. And Quentin Crisp was also a very odd person. I was very close to Quentin Crisp and I knew him very, very, very well, and he had an extraordinary intellect that, because of his—well, really, his belligerence—I mean, he really couldn’t hide what he was. For people listening who don’t know who Quentin Crisp was, he was an effeminate, gay Englishman who, at the end of his life, achieved a great deal of fame, one could say, because a film in the UK in 1975 brought the question of homosexuality into public discourse for the first time. It was called “The Naked Civil Servant,” and it was played on PBS, so it was not only in the UK and Europe but also in America. And Quentin became quite famous in his early seventies, and he was a brilliant, brilliant man. He was an aphorist, which means a person who comes up with one-liners, and an organic intellectual. He was quite, he had quite an extraordinary brain. But he was also very limited, because most of his life he was delegated to a very, very narrow social milieu. Because he was so effeminate, and because he could not hide what he was—as he said, “every closet door I knocked on, they said ‘not in here.’”

So, at any rate, my work, I started doing theatre…actually the first theatrical thing I ever did was, I somehow in 1967, when I was seventeen and first came to New York, I ended up with the Hog Farm. And the Hog Farm was a very famous commune in the 60s that roamed around America in busses, and they’re the people who fed everybody and did all the triage at Woodstock, so they’re famous for that. And I somehow knocked into these people as a homeless street kid might, in 1967, and they had a gig at the Electric Circus, which was a big performance place that catered mainly to Long Island teenagers and kids from the boroughs. And they were hired to be, like, professional hippies at this event, and I found myself unwittingly standing next to Wavy Gravy, also known as Hugh Romney, who in the 50s had been a pretty successful stand-up comedian, and then with Ken Kesey and these other west coast psychedelic people, he became Wavy Gravy and started the Hog Farm. And unbeknownst to me, I was standing next to him, and I guess he got this idea that he should put somebody up in the air over the crowd of kids who were dancing--Sly and the Family Stone were playing on stage—and he said, “we’re going to pick you up and we’re going to sail you over the heads of the people,” and I was like, “OK.” And I guess he chose me because I was small, and I went sailing over the heads of the people, and I think I’ve always had good instincts, I understand systems, so I tried to be very entertaining as I was sailing through the air, you know, not just be a lump of coal. And I ended up on the stage with Sly Stone and started dancing, and looked over at Sly Stone who was like, giving me super-dirty looks, like GET OFF THE STAGE, and I probably did the first stage dive in rock and roll history! I dived into the audience, and they sailed me back over the heads of all the people ’til I got to the very end and was dropped off. So that was my very first performance, and then not long after that, I was introduced to the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, which was the original glitter-glam rock’n’roll political theatre of the 60s that influenced everything from Hair to Rocky Horror to David Bowie. And the New York Punk scene—which I hate that term, “punk” because punk means somebody who challenges you to a fight and doesn’t show up—so I just was never “punk,” I’ve always been an outsider. Or in the 60s, when we didn’t want to be hippies, we said we were “freaks.” So there were freaks and hippies. So John (Vaccaro) who started the Playhouse of the Ridiculous really tuned in to the darkness that was in America that “Hippy is dead”—that was 1968, and they had a big funeral for the Hippy is dead in California, and also in the East Village, that was the fall of 67—either the fall of 67 or the fall of 68—was when Groovy and Linda were murdered in the East Village and then everything turned very dark. But Vaccaro was already—he was older, he was probably close to 40 in the late 60s—their manifesto is, “our situation is beyond the absurd, it is absolutely ridiculous.” So they were looking at the world as a place that had gone beyond the absurdity of Ionesco and the other people who were looking at modern life as a real degradation of the human spirit. And his theater was extremely political, he was the first person who had a rock’n’roll band onstage, and a lot of the people who came out of the Playhouse created what was called the first Punk scene, which was people like Ruby Lynn Rainer* and the Rednecks and Wayne County, who became Jane County, and he influenced the Dolls, the New York Dolls were influenced by Vaccaro…the Stilettos, which started with Elva Gentilly* and Debby Harry and then morphed into Blondie. So that’s kind of the milieu I come out of as a teenager. So if the theater that I was involved with in the 60s was about tearing down the fourth wall—between the public and the people on stage—then I grew up to tear down the other three walls. So I have made my own work since 1985, I started making my own work when I was 34, after performing for 16 years in other people’s work. And my work is political humanism, investigating the human condition, what it means to be human in 2019. My relationship is with the public, as opposed to with critics or with arts administrators, and it’s quite a miracle that I’m able to do my work all over the world, given that i make a lot people nervous. Not the audience so much, but certainly the gatekeepers, which is why most of your audience has never heard of me. Let’s put it this way: I’m not on Fresh Air, you know what I mean? 

Francis: So would you consider yourself a performance artist, a poet, a…

Penny: Well, I am first and foremost a poet. And for people listening, there’s many ways of being a poet. So I didn’t write poetry for a very long time, because I was very insecure. I still have a great deal of lack of self-confidence and lack of security emotionally. I know it doesn’t sound, I don’t sound like an insecure person, but you can be a really smart insecure person. So I believe what I perceive. I’ve spent years honing my mind, through reading and argument, and listening to people who are smarter than me, and being around people who kicked my ass and didn’t let me have soft ideas. I live every day as a poet and always have since I was a child, meaning I go where the day takes me, and my investigation is into my place in the world, my place in this life. And originally I fell into being an experimental theater actress, that’s what I did with the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, that’s what I did with Andy Warhol. Andy asked me to become a Warhol “superstar” in 1969 and I was in his film, “Women in Revolt.” I found the Warhol scene really boring…

Francis: Why?

Penny: Why? Because it was boring! It was boring, it was like a lot of..you know…people act like the Warhol scene was like some kind of a French Foreign Legion that you joined—I mean, there was all kinds of people there, and it was mainly about how they looked. You know? And a lot of really crazy people who wanted a lot of attention for absolutely no reason. So Andy wasn’t discerning, he was neither discerning nor loyal. You know, people would come and be around and he’d have them be around, and it could be anybody. I always say that about the Underground, people always say, “oh, I wish I could be part of the Underground, I’m just not cool enough”—but the Underground’s not about being cool. It’s about being willing. People who were interested in those particular kinds of activities that were going on gravitated to a scene like the Warhol scene, and people tried to, you know, be part of it. I did not try to be part of it. Andy chose me from the Playhouse of the Ridiculous because he wanted people who were performers but who weren’t crazy. So that’s a real problem, not being crazy, if you’re an artist, because a lot of people are really crazy, and I’m not. I’m a very, very grounded person. I don’t think being an artist is special, OK? A lot of people want to be artists because they think it’s special. They think it’s going to set them apart from people, but I just don’t see it that way. And just like I don’t see being gay as being special.

Francis: I personally feel like the vocabulary of politics right now—it makes it impossible to have a really meaningful conversation and figure out what to do. Because in my mind, left-right politics, all that, especially when you get people who go to college and they want to be a lefty and they read all this old 19th Century stuff, and everything—but I feel like we’ve kind of come to this point now where there’s power that is held by very few people, you know the resources and the potential to affect that power, the potential to use technology and resources for the betterment of most people instead of very few, we never get that conversation going because we’re using all this old terminology, and it’s not…

Penny: i agree with you. I agree with you. Because most of it’s really poseur, you know? It’s not really people who really want to do anything. I mean, people call me an activist all the time, it’s written about me—I have never called myself an activist. An activist is what your community calls you, and they call you that usually after decades of selfless, anonymous service. And people just go around calling themselves activists, you know, it’s like you’re not an activist. An activist is somebody like Carmen Febone* who for like 60 years fed the poor on the Lower East Side and nobody knows her name. That’s an activist, you know? But this is the thing, it’s the gentrification of ideas. [tweeting in background] That is my bird clock, by the way. So a different bird will sing from time to time. [tweeting] That clock belonged to John Vaccaro, who passed away about, I don’t know, about six, seven years ago, and I inherited that clock, which means I have to think about Vaccaro every time it chirps. Someone was asking they were calling me an activist in an interview yesterday, and I said I’m not an activist. I think if I was a real activist, when I was in Zanzibar two years ago and I realized that they needed schools for the children there, and they needed fresh water in the villages, I would have stayed there and I would have made that mission my mission, because it was right in front of me. I’m not an activist, but I am a helper in my community. People know that when they have a problem, they can come to me and I don’t extend my help only to people I like. So in that sense, I am active.

Francis: [Do you agree] we’ve been revolving around the concept of inclusion, and how every everything is…I like how you used that term “micro-split..”

Penny: micro-splicing…

Francis: micro-splicing and, it’s so true that there’s all these little causes and they’re not connected…

Penny: There’s no coalition. The 60s worked because there was coalition. Now, you think that the powers that be don’t realize that coalition is dangerous, and so why not have all these little micro-spliced groups? And then what do you do with the college students? Because throughout history, it’s been the young who have led change in the world, because young people are always idealistic. And now all those kids, all those young people—if they’re at all interested in anything, which a lot of them are not, a lot of them are just operating in some kind of Kardashian reality—but the rest of them are all split up into little different groups. They’re either into Black Lives Matter, or they’re into the MeToo movement or they’re into trans rights or they’re into gender-fluid-queer-something. No…people do not come together to fight the common enemy.

Francis: Which is…?

Penny: Well, I would say it was that democracy was an experiment that failed. It never happened. We had more or less democracy at different points in this country’s history, but we never had a full functioning democracy. And I think that what really happened that people don’t look at is, the only trickle-down that ever happened was the trickle-down corruption at the highest levels of government and commerce, that happened with Halliburton and with Enron and all of these terrible scandals that we had in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, where honor, justice, honesty, all of these values no longer have any meaning in our culture. What has a meaning in our culture is, getting over. Did you get over? You got over? We respect you. Did you get the money? We respect you. We’re speaking right now from the Lower East Side, the East Village Lower East Side of New York, which, you know, in the 60s up to about 1983, there was a really big difference between uptown and downtown. People who lived downtown were usually aligned with left politics, they were anti-war, they were anti-rampant capitalism, they were for clean water, clean food, free sex and…meaning the freedom to choose…and it was a very big difference to uptown. And then around 1985, this started to change, and all of a sudden the values of downtown changed. So you would have a performer like Taylor Meade, who was also a Warhol superstar, but Taylor Meade came to New York in the 40s, he was a poet, he was aligned with the Beats and he was a very, very, very funny comedic actor. Well, he used to perform with Bill Cosby and all those famous comedians in the 50s, and when Bill Cosby would see Taylor Meade, who didn’t have a pot to piss in, Bill Cosby would sit down and have a talk and a drink with Taylor, and nobody thought, “oh, there’s Bill Cosby, he’s a multi-millionaire. There’s Taylor Meade, he’s poor.” Nobody would think that way, because the values didn’t include that. Nobody cared—so you’re a millionaire, so what? You had to have more going on than celebrity or money. That was an actual intrinsic value in the downtown art scene. That’s gone now. They’ll do a flip for Taylor Swift or for any other, you know, psuedo-celebrity—and I say “psuedo-celebrity” because to be a celebrity is different than being famous. To be a celebrity is to be celebrated for being able to do something. Taylor Swift is not rock star—Prince was a rock star, Taylor Swift is an insect. But the world has changed, and people don’t want to face it. So as you’re saying, Francis, that we’re using outmoded language, political language, the truth is that just everyday contemporary language is completely in a crisis where you can’t say anything, only certain people can use certain words…

Chris: And we need to remember fifty different pronouns…

Penny: Right. Exactly. And this is all—it’s just fascinating to me, because people think there’s some freedom in this. And the reality is that in the 80s, there was this huge politically-correct movement, which was the same thing. You couldn’t say “queer,” you couldn’t say “dyke,” you couldn’t say all these words or all these words you couldn’t say. And that was coming from the right wing. And now it’s coming from the supposedly the left. But I’m always, like freaking out when people talk about the Left, because what Left? You know, there is no Left. There’s nothing radical going on in America. Really, Trump got into office because of the abdication of the centrist middle class from the working class. The working class in this country is flipping out. Of course they’re going to go fascist. That’s what they do. Nobody cares about the fact that you cannot put food on the table for a family of four without both parents working two jobs. I grew up, my father was put in a mental hospital from a beating he received at Ellis Island when I was three, and I was raised by my mother and grandparents. And my grandparents were very elderly, and my grandfather worked til he was 78 years old, as a ditch digger for the city of New Britain, Connecticut, and my mother was a sweatshop seamstress. When I met Robin Morgan in 1967 at the Yippie hotline—Robin Morgan, for those of you who may not know, is a famous feminist, she was one of the original high-profile feminists in the 60s—and she invited me, Abby Hoffman gave her the other side of the storefront, and she started WITCH, which I do not remember what it stood for, but Women-ITCH, whatever it is, google it. They did the big demonstration against the Miss America pageant in 19…I guess it must have been 1968. I went to one of these meetings, she invited me to one of these meetings she was having, and I looked around the room and all of the women who were there—there were about eight women—most of them I knew as being the girlfriends of leftist political guys, including Robin Morgan. And Robin Morgan was telling me, “women don’t want to be housewives.” And I was looking at her, and I’m like, “my mother sews 70 hours a week in a sweatshop, she’d love to be a housewife.” I would have loved to have my mother at home. Are you kidding me? My mother would come home, and we couldn’t talk because she was exhausted from sewing in the sweatshop. So, you know, this privilege that accompanied a lot of these people’s ideas, you know I’ve always preferred the underclass. At least you can be direct with them, and you can be forthright and honest. I think the biggest problem that we’re facing right now is that it’s impossible to communicate with anyone. No one is allowed to stumble through ideas. In contemporary neuro-science, we know that you learn to form ideas by talking. You know, it used to be thought that first you were thinking, and then you spoke. But actually now it’s understood that you speak, and through speaking, you form ideas. And that’s the important reason for having a vocabulary, because the larger your vocabulary, the more expansive your thoughts can be. But right now we’re living in a time that is getting just narrower and narrower and narrower as far as expressing ideas.

Francis: Did you read Victorian literature? They were so elegant. Their vocabularies were immense compared to ours.

Penny: I know.

Francis: And, you know like…

Penny: I mean that was part of being seen as an intelligent person, was having a vocabulary. You know, I do my bit, I go to universities, and I talk to the kids. A lot of times they’re angry with me, and I say, “yeah, you’re angry with me,” I said, “but in 30 years I’ll be dead but you won’t have any water to drink.” You know, there are dark periods in history.

Francis: This is a dark period.

Penny: Yeah. And they usually last, like, 30 years.

Francis: It’s been at least 30…

Penny: Yeah…(laughter)

Francis: I remember I saw you at Saint Mark’s Church one New Year’s Eve, and you did this bit about the Age of Aquarius…

Penny: Oh yeah.

Francis: And how, everyone thought it was in the 60s but it turns out that it’s not for another 30 years or something…

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: ..or maybe it’s coming?

Penny: Well, I mean, the thing is that…look at what we’re living with. Monsanto. In what Kardashian world would anybody ever have thought, with the history of famine on this planet, that making seeds that only last one cycle is a good idea? Who thought of that?

Francis: Why is that even legal?

Penny: But it’s insane! It’s completely insane. When I was in Tanzania, last year, I met three biochemists, and they were telling me that in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, all GMO things are illegal. Because they’ve already lived with famine. They’re not falling for that. But look at what’s happened in America, the greatest of America once was that we could feed all the people who lived here, and that there was free education for everyone. And we are losing both. It’s staggering. I mean, in my lifetime—I’m gonna be 69 years old in another month and a half—and I never would have believed. This is something even with the paranoia the 60s, we could have never come up with this scenario.

Francis: No.

Chris: We were so paranoid as hardcore punk radicals, we were constantly…you know, we’d be hanging out at Frank’s house trying to figure out who among us was the CIA plant and everything like that…

Francis: Oh, there was definitely a couple.

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: They were the ones that interrupt constantly, and you know, like derail you, make sure you can’t accomplish anything…

Chris: I don’t think we were important enough for the government to worry about.

Penny: But the thing is that you still wouldn’t have been able to come up with the scenario that we’re currently living in. The thing that’s interesting is, I was in Australia during the presidential primaries, before the primaries. And one of the Australian political papers asked me to write a personal view of American politics. And I knew that Trump was gonna win. And nobody…everybody wanted to…”how did you know Trump was gonna…”

Francis: Yeah, how did you know?

Penny: It was..you know, it was as clear as the burning cross on your lawn! It was what America wanted, it was the unspoken America, that that’s who they were aiming at. The America that thinks Trump is a successful businessman. I mean there’s something wrong with this world—they can publish, and promote, and say, that every single business of Trump’s has gone under, and you’ll still get a whole bunch of people going “he doesn’t to be in bed with the government, cuz he’s rich.” Americans are super-stupid.

Francis: Do you know what’s coming after him? Some Democrat or…gets in office and realizes that he totally gutted us financially. And then they’ll say, well, we have to responsible, we’re going to have to do some austerity again.

Penny: Right. Well the austerity should come from the government itself. Stop paying all of these retirement benefits of hundreds of thousands of dollars for all these people who’ve been Senators and been in the government. The whole thing makes no sense, none of it makes sense, and it’s not…it’s not something that can be fixed. So if it’s not something that can be fixed, the way I see it is, like, reminds me of how I felt on September 11th. On September 11th, when the plane went through the second tower and I was watching it from the roof here, and I knew that the plane was gonna go through the second towe—which all the people on all the roofs around me somehow didn’t know. And I kept screaming, it’s gonna go into the tower, and people were looking at me like I was crazy. I thought, OK, now we’re gonna get New York back again, ‘cause nobody’s gonna want to be here. And instead what happened? It became the go-to place. So what will happen is, there will be a series of cataclysmic natural events, that we already know, that our government is not prepared for any emergency. We saw it with Katrina, we know nobody’s minding the store. During Katrina we watched it on television for days. Like, OK, you can bomb the shit out of Yemen but you can’t drop bottles of water and food into that…

Chris: The Superdome.

Penny: That’s right. There’s something really wrong. I mean we already know that Americans can’t work. Americans have lost the capacity to work, right? They took all the jobs, and then…so we have several generations of people who have never had to really be able to do something. I mean, we are dependent on Mexicans and on people coming from Eastern Europe and places where people can still ..make things. I mean, I brought a pair of shoes—there’s a shoemaker on Second Avenue, and I had this pair of shoes that I bought in Scotland, and they had—they were real witch’s shoes, and the toe turned up. And I used to tell everybody they were flat when I bought them and then I put ‘em on and the toes turned up—and I had had them in San Francisco, in a theater that was very damp. And the platform, which was made out of foam, disintegrated. I went everywhere with these shoes, I tried so many different places; I brought them to England, I brought them to L.A., I brought them everywhere looking for someone to fix them. And I was up in Woodstock and this woman said to me, “by the way, if you ever need a shoemaker, there’s this great shoemaker in the East Village on Second Avenue and Third Street.” I thought that was the oddest thing that someone would say to me, so I went there with the shoes. I put them on the counter and I said, “Can you fix these?” And he looked at ‘em, he said “100 dollars.” I said “done. When will they be ready?” He said “in one week.” The next day I get a phone call, “they’re ready.” And I go and pick them up at another shoe store, on First Avenue, and the guy brings me the shoes and they look brand new. I said “oh my god, you fixed the platform!” Remember, this is like an Arabic shoe with the toe goes skyward, right, it’s like round and up. And I said, “oh you fixed the platform,” and he said “what?” I said “you fixed the platform.” And he goes to the back and he comes back with the old platform. He had built a new platform. I looked at him and I said, :Are you from Uzbekistan?” And he said, “Why do you know that?” Because only somebody from Uzbekistan would still know how to make a shoe. Not just repair a shoe, but he made the shoe. I mean it was so outrageous, but this is what we find, that we’re losing really basic skills. I mean, New York City—you know, this is not a great place to get stuck if something really bad happens. Where’s the food? You know, we already know, like the flooding that’s in this neighborhood. They’re selling multi-million dollar apartments in Miami Beach, yet everyone knows that within 15-20 years, Miami Beach is not gonna exist anymore.

Chris: I’m currently sitting in St Petersburg, Florida and my house is at 35 feet, so I’m rooting for climate change so I can sell it as oceanfront property…

Penny: Well, there you go. But you see what I’m saying—we’re not facing, our leaders are not facing, the reality. I’ve said for a long time that what we need is a million-child march, because it’s the children who are going to inherit all of this.

Francis: Well, there’s that Swedish woman…

Penny: Yeah, the girl. Yeah, she’s fantastic.

Francis: Yeah, she’s…ok, she might be one little glimmer of hope, optimism, that generation…

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: ‘Cause eventually the kids are gonna be like the 60s again, where they’re gonna say, you know, if you’re an adult, we’re not interested in what you have to say, you’re…

Penny: Well not only that, it’s just the betrayal is tremendous.

Francis: Yeah.

Penny: The betrayal is enormous, because this is what bothers me—what is wrong with these oligarchs who are not even interested in the welfare of their own spawn? Right? They’re going to suck all the value out of the planet…

Francis: They have compounds that they’re gonna, you know, run to when the shit hits the fan…

Penny: Oh yeah, in Uruguay and stuff. Yeah. But it’s funny, because like I don’t know what they think. I mean, it’s like just the concept of a gated community—who wants to live in a gated community? So let’s get back to, now, what can be done. So I really am in the business of Being and Becoming, that’s what I’m trying to always evolve, and I’m a big promoter of authenticity and individuality for people. And that’s one of the ways that we can help ourselves…

Chris: One of the recurring themes on the podcast, from a lot of our guests, has been making small changes and, you know, if you get millions of people to make small changes suddenly it’s a big change.

Penny: That’s true. People stop using straws and plastic wrapping and…I’m here with an iced coffee in a plastic container, and I realize, oh, I should…I bought my stainless steel straw, you know, and I should take my stainless steel canister to get my iced coffee. I agree, small changes. But when it comes to what’s going on in the government and the failure…see, one of the things I’m most angry about is, I’m angry with the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Congress, because they are not protecting us from what’s going on in the White House. How dare…how dare the White House sell off our natural resources, our state parks, our highways…and these things aren’t even publicly known. You just get dribs and drabs of that information. We have Democracy Now! is one of the few news sources where you find out what’s actually going on…it’s a very sophisticated government. Corruption and evildoing are not new inventions. These were understood all the way back to the seventeenth century. So there are safeguards within our government to protect us from people taking advantage…and yet Trump has been able to have his own offspring as—what are they called?

Chris: Senior advisors…

Penny: Advisors! They’re doing all kinds of business, on the back of Americans—it’s like nobody’s minding the store. We’ve all been in that position, we’ve all been in a position where, all of sudden something goes wrong and there’s a free for all. And we’re like…well….we shouldn’t really be doing this but…I’m taking this. I’ve been there, I think most people have. And that’s what’s going on in the government.

Francis: So a question that comes to me a lot lately is, what can people who find reverence and beauty in nature, what can we do to…how do we interact with people who don’t have that? I just see it as something that potentially…

Penny: I mean, that’s…this is like the million dollar question, because if people have no respect…I mean…there’s Chris Tanner’s mother. Chris Tanner is a painter in the East Village, and his mom lives in North central California, and she has been an ecology person as a Congresswoman, etc. for 60 years. And she is seeing right now all of the things that she helped put in place be overturned. If it’s happening in California, where people care a little bit, like nobody cares here. I don’t know, I don’t know what the answer is. But I think that the card that holds the change is going to be an ecological disaster card. Something’s gonna come from the outside that’s gonna lay something down. And I don’t know what that is, but…that’s my sense. It’s…there’s not going to be a change because of the good wishes and well meaning of people. It’s gonna be in response to a crisis.

Chris: We’re bumping up against our time limit, so…

Penny: Yeeeah! We did good.

Chris: I’ll just ask you the same question we ask every guest: Is there anything you’d like to promote or pimp or tell people about that they should go see?

Penny: Well, everyone can go to my website, which is PennyArcade.tv—you can write to me, anyone can write to me who would like to write to me, at mspennyarcade@gmail.com. Invite me to your town—I like doing my work in different cities and meeting different people, and you’re all welcome any time to write to me with any of your problems, I can solve all your problems…my problems I’m not so good with, but other people’s problems are a piece of cake. Stay in touch!

Chris: Well, thank you so much.

Penny: Thank you.

Francis: Thank you.

—END

Making Better episode 6: Jim Fruchterman #a11y

Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur, a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and a Distinguished Alumnus of Caltech. Jim believes that technology has the power to improve—even transform—the lives of people around the world. As Founder and CEO of Benetech, he focused on bringing Silicon Valley’s technology innovations to all of humanity, not just the richest five percent. He is a former rocket engineer who also founded two successful for-profit technology companies. Under Jim’s leadership, Benetech created and scaled multiple software for social good enterprises spanning education, human rights, and environmental conservation. Jim has recently founded a new nonprofit, Tech Matters, to provide strategic technology services that maximize impact, not profit. Jim is active on Twitter as @JimFruchterman

As with all of our episodes, this one also is accompanied by a transcript so that everyone can enjoy it. Click here to read a transcript of Episode 6.

Episode 6: Jim Fruchterman

Making Better—Jim Fruchterman

(Music) Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, we’re up to episode 6 of Making Better!

Francis: Yes, and this is a really great episode.

Chris: This episode is Jim Fruchterman. He’s McArthur Genius Fellow, he’s one of the people who invented modern machine recognition based optical character recognition (OCR), he’s a social entrepreneur and a leader in the social entrepreneurship field, and while I respect an awful lot of people in the world, Jim is one of the very few whom I truly admire. This episode has a few audio glitches in it, we use a program called Zoom to record, and we had a few internet hiccups, but we hope you enjoy the episode.

Francis: (hiccups) That was a hiccup.


Chris: Jim Fruchterman, welcome to Making Better!

Jim: Thanks a lot Chris, glad to be here.

Chris: So you have a long and varied career doing all kinds of things, but always with a social conscience aspect to it. So if you could just give us a bit about your background, that’d be a great way to get started.

Jim: Well sure. Well, basically I’m a nerd. You know, I started doing computer programming in the early 70s, I went to Cal Tech, which is kind of nerd mecca, and so I was always interested in technology and science and figuring things out—and it was never quite clear what that career was going to be, but I thought I’d either be an astronaut or a professor. So that was kind of the track that I was on in college and when I started grad school. The connection I had to solving social problems was in college, I was in a class, a modern optics class, and we were learning how to make optical pattern recognition things. And because it was the 70s, and pretty much all the jobs were in the military-industrial complex, our professor was using the example of how you could essentially get a smart missile with a camera in its nose, and have a computer that had a representation of the target—could be a tank, or a bridge—and the idea is that you’d fire your missile, it would look around in the world until it spotted its target, lock on, zoom in and blow it up. So I had to do a project for this class, and I was going back after the lecture going, ‘I wonder if there’s a more socially beneficial application of this.” And then I got my one good idea in college, which was, hey, maybe you could make a reading machine for the blind. Maybe instead of recognizing tanks, you could recognize letters and words and speak them aloud. So, the next day I went back to my professor with a lot of enthusiasm, and he explained that someone actually had used this kind of technology to do pattern recognition on words; matter of fact it was I think the National Security Agency was using it to sort through Soviet faxes that they had intercepted. And they were having too many faxes, so if they could spot the word, like “nuclear weapon” in Russian, they would actually route that to a human..a human analyst to actually review. And I said, oh, great, so it’s already been built—how much does it cost? He said, uh, I think it’s millions of dollars per installation…which took a little of the air out of my, you know, reading machine for the blind tires. But it lay the groundwork for some of the future things that happened. So after finishing my masters at CalTech, I went to Stanford to start a PhD, and—Stanford is in the middle of Silicon Valley, and this was a pretty exciting time in Silicon Valley’s history, and so I and a couple of other engineering grad students started an entrepreneurship talk series in our dorm. And our first speaker had started a PC company named for our dorm, and the second speaker was the president of a private rocket company. And, I’d always wanted to be an astronaut, I’d even gotten an interview with, with the people at NASA in Texas, and so I said, ah great! So I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, joined the rocket project as their chief electrical engineer, built all their electronic systems, and the rocket actually blew up on the launch pad. So that was a bit of a disappointment…and I went back to Silicon Valley with my boss from the rocket project, and we tried to start our own rocket company, we tried to raise $200 million. No one gave us $200 million, and then my boss—now partner—said, hey, I know this guy who’s a chip designer at HP and he wants to start a company to design a custom chip that will something really cool. And I said, what’s he got in mind? He said, I don’t know, let’s go have dinner with him. So we went and had dinner with this guy, and he described how he wanted to make a chip that could take in light and recognize letters and words. ..Wow..that’s like my good idea from college, you could help blind people read with that. And so that became the start of a company that was originally called Palantir and then changed its name to Calera, and made essentially the first omni-font character recognition technology that worked without being trained. And as we started the company, we became more aware that Ray Kurtzweil had invented a OCR system and a reading machine before we had, and we, you know, raised a bunch of money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists to compete with their character recognition product. Long story short, it was one of the early machine learning companies in Silicon Valley, our particular breakthrough was, we took millions of examples of characters and trained an algorithm in how to recognize those characters, and it worked really well. Company built up, sold a lot of products to insurance and law firms and the government and, you know, those were sort of our main commercial markets, but the dream of making a reading machine for the blind was still there, and I still didn’t know any blind people, but I just imagined they could use this. And so we built a secret prototype, based on our commercial character recognition product, that was connected over a serial cable to a PC that had a first-generation *tracks voice synthesizer in it. And we demonstrated this to our board of directors, and it worked, it scanned the page and it read it aloud, and my board was, you know, excited, the product demo, you know, there’s a new potential product, and they said, Jim, you’re the VP of marketing, how big is the market for reading machines for the blind? And I said, well, we think Kurtzweil is selling about a million dollars a year, now that they’ve been acquired by Xerox….a relatively awkward pause occurred in the board meeting, and they said, well, but we’ve invested $25 million in this company, what’s the connection between a million dollar market and that? And I said, oh, it would be great PR, the employees are really excited bout it, our customers will be proud of us…and they’re like, no, you know, you’re only $15 million and year and you’re supposed to be $30 million a year in revenue by now. You’re missing plan, you’re not making money, we’re not going to allow you to distract the company to launch a new product to help blind people, because it doesn’t make enough money. And they were, you know, right from a business standpoint, wrong from a social and moral standpoint—so that’s kind of what caused to…to launch out of, sort of, the traditional Silicon Valley tech world and into the assistive technology and nonprofit world.

Chris: And that’s when you founded Arkenstone.

Jim: That’s right. So, so I went to, after the board vetoed it, I went to…the board vetoed the project because they didn’t want to distract the company. [*] said well, you could start your own nonprofit. And I said, what do you mean, nonprofit? He said, well, you don’t think there’s any money in this…I said, no…he said, I can give you pro bono help to start a charity, and you’d be essentially a tech nonprofit. I kind of giggled, ‘cause, as you know, I said well gee, I you know, i’ve been associated with an accidentally non-profit tech company, you know…gee, maybe if you’re a non-profit tech company you’re like…successful by definition if you lose money! (laughs) And so, that was the start of Arkenstone, and the idea was, because the market was so small, if we could make a break-even, you know, half a million, million dollar a year venture, it would be a big success. And Arkenstone became the only high-tech company I’ve ever been associated with that actually beat its plan. I think within three years we were $5 million a year, and making reading machines for the blind as an enterprise, and breaking even—and that’s how Arkenstone actually went into the reading machine for the blind business and my old company was perfectly happy for me to do it, just as long as I did it outside of the company as a customer. They gave me a really big discount, they gave me extended credit, but—as long as I wasn’t distracting the team from making money, they didn’t have an objection for me doing it. And basically, I got a pretty sweet deal in exchange for a noncompete and no-hire agreement from my old company.

Chris: And that would go on to become what’s now Benetech, a nonprofit with a much broader set of goals and agenda. Why don’t you tell us about Benetech…

Jim: So Arkenstone got started in 1989, got to $5 million a year, and as time went on, you know, we would keep cutting prices, more people would be able to afford the product, our revenue stayed about the same. We were always break-even. We created a new product, we created a talking GPS for the blind called Strider, but it didn’t make enough money and we were short of money, and Mike May, who was then our VP of Sales, was kind of our core user of that product, he ended up spinning out of Benetech and starting Sendero Group to make talking GPS. But I was basically struggling with the fact that running a break-even social venture meant that I had no extra money, and the fact that we kind of had to shut down Strider or spin it off was basically an indicator that break-even was great as far as it went. So after about ten years, I got…I was kind of getting bored, I had all these ideas for other things that we could do to help blind people, to do stuff [for human rights], then the guy who started what became Freedom Scientific, Dick Chandler, came over and said, hey, I want to buy Arkenstone from you. And well, it doesn’t belong to me, it’s a charity, go away! So, he came back a couple of months later and he said, Jim, why don’t you tell me what your aspirations are? Hmm. This turns out to be a negotiating ploy, but as a nerd I didn’t really recognize it as such, and I said, well, I have all these dreams of doing, you know, other things for blind people, I want to do human rights,..and he said, tell you what, I’ll give you $5 million to your nonprofit, buy the assets of Arkenstone and merge it into Henter-Joyce with its JAWS product and Blaize Engineering with their Braille and Speak product, and you know, we’ll create this new company, and you can stay in the nonprofit with your engineering team, rent the engineering team back to us for a year, and then go off and start new projects. So that’s…but they also bought the Arkenstone name, so we had to change the name of the nonprofit from Arkenstone to Benetech. And we did our year of work on the next version of all the products that we had sold to Freedom Scientific, and then we had the ability to go off and look at a whole bunch of new projects. And so what we did is, we had about $5 million from Freedom Scientific, which could not go into my pocket—that’s illegal, it’s a charity—we raised another between $4 and $5 million from big silicon valley donors, especially Skoll and Omidyar are the two key people behind the creation of eBay. We had $9 million, we looked a hundred ideas, we invested in 20 ideas, and four of them became nonprofit social enterprise products that went on to change their field. So the one that is really well known in the blindless field is Bookshare, but we also started a first big data group human rights movement, we started the first software for capturing human rights data so that the information wouldn’t be lost, we created an environmental project management package, and plus there are a lot of other projects that we tried that didn’t take off, which is pretty much the Silicon Valley way, it’s just that in every case we’re not looking to make money—‘cause we’re nonprofit—it’s how can we help the most people while breaking even. And that formula turns out to, not only, you know, worked after we sold to Freedom Scientific, but it’s continued to work to this day, and we’ll always have lots of cool tech for good projects in our hopper, and are busy trying to figure out how to, which ones will take off, and then scale them up and make an impact.

Chris: And your business plan for Benetech received the Charles Schwab recognition as the best business plan for a nonprofit that year…

Jim: We got a lot of recognition. It was Klaus Schwab, who was the founder of the World Economic Forum, the Davos people, who gave us the Social Entrepreneur award and our Bookshare business plan won, I think, runner-up in the Yale business plan competition, which was the first social [*] business plan competition…and then we won the Skoll award. Even though we were pretty early on, once we made that transition to Benetech, we started to get a lot of attention, because the social entrepreneurship field—this idea of using innovation and entrepreneurship to help solve social problems—really started taking off in the early 2000s. Because we’d been doing it for a dozen years, we were seen as one of the founders of that movement.

Francis: Why is it that you won these awards, what specifically did you do best?

Jim: I think the unusual thing about us was, we bucked the Silicon Valley greed-profit-seeking motivation, that often leads Silicon Valley to do some kind of nasty things. We said, look, no, we’re setting up to be in the public good. So I think the reason that people got excited and recognized us was the idea of an exciting, Silicon Valley startup company that had chosen to be a charity, to be a nonprofit, and to focus on doing social good, kind of flew in the face of how people regarded Silicon Valley, which was make money at all costs, and kill yourself along the way. I think that was one reason, I think the other reason was that the things we we were doing were really understandable. Many tech companies have great products that the average human being cannot understand why this middleware company exists. We were helping blind people read, you know, we were the Napster of books, when it came to Bookshare. We were helping document human rights and helping convict genocidal generals of genocide. I mean, this I think captured more people’s imagination that technology could be used deliberately for good rather than occasionally evil by accident, which is certainly the story of big parts of the tech industry today.

Chris: I like the phrase, the “G-mafia,” it stands for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Amazon as the evils of, ah…artificial intelligence these days.

Jim: Basically, we were using what was considered at the time “artificial intelligence” to actually help blind people read. And AI has that potential to do good, it’s just right now I think we’re at a point where a lot of people are applying machine learning/AI in very sloppy ways…and hurting a lot of people, because they’re just ignoring many of the things we know about things like statistics. Anyway, we can come back to that, but I’m spending a lot more time kind of helping, not only the disability community, but other minority communities understand some of the threat that AI, badly applied, actually poses to their interests.

Francis: One of the things that I found really troubling during, like, the 80s and 90s even, was the religion of the free market, where like the free market could solve every problem. One of the things that I’ve seen, especially in research, is that when there isn’t a lot of money to be gained, it’s hard to get funding and it’s hard to get things up and running a lot of the time. Say, for example, with rare diseases, that kind of thing, you know we have this situation now where nonprofits kind of pick up the slack, but it seems to me that there’s like an inefficiency to it all because, for example, my girlfriend has a nonprofit, and she spends half her time or more raising funds. Is this model, in your view, working? Is there…other ways to approach it on a larger scale? Is government maybe supposed to play more of a role?

Jim: Well, the short answer is yes. People often try to say, Jim, why aren’t you a for-profit? Can you be making a lot more money as a for-profit? And the answer is…yeah, but we want to work on social problems. And many social problems are directly connected to a market failure. The reason that Arkenstone, you know, the original name of Benetech, got started was because our investors said, “no, that doesn’t make enough money, don’t do it.” And so, now, the free market religion usually goes the extra step of saying, if it doesn’t make a lot of money, it’s a bad idea. And that’s the idea that I reject and a lot of other people reject, which is, wait a minute, if you think that, then you’re going to consign 95% [men who need] to never getting the benefits of most of this cool technology we’ve created. And the great thing about technology is, the marginal cost of a new piece of software, a new chunk of content, is next to nothing. So as long as you can see your way clear to actually working on this thing that’s not an exciting market, you can do an amazing amount of good for almost no money. Bookshare is an example of, we promise any student in the US that needs a book, we’d already have it, we’ll go get it and add it to our library. And now the library has 700,000 books and about 700,000 users—that runs for $10 million a year. On less than another $10 million a year, we can solve the problem for the whole darn planet, which by the way is a fraction of what the planet spends on library services for people with disabilities. Its leverage is terrific. The other part of your question, which is about what model is there? So, there’s basically two models; one model is, you encourage the creation of nonprofit social enterprises, like Arkenstone or Benetech, and now there are several hundred of them. So, we were alone back in those days, and the other people who were starting similar things at the same time, we didn’t know about each other, I didn’t know that this thing existed for the first ten years. And so now we know that we’re a field, the people who create the technology—the companies, the academics, the authors, the publishers, whatever it might be—they’re often quite generous with access to their intellectual property to help more of humanity. So we’re actually able to get our hands on this stuff. So I think that that is a good model. The nonprofit sector is never going to be as scalable, as efficient, as something that actually makes money. So if you can do social good and make money, I encourage people to do that. But I think your last point is, what about regulation—I think it is possible to take some of the worst things about industry and change some of those things by legislation. And the one that a lot of people with disabilities are familiar with, it’s actually against the law to discriminate against people with disabilities. Now, we all know that doesn’t stop it from happening, but on the average, it makes it harder, and as people lose more and more lawsuits, they do more and more to avoid getting, you know, caught in a lawsuit, we actually move the ball forward. So I think that both of those models are important, and I think that it’s clear that we have a need for more nonprofit social enterprises, and we also have a need for more government regulation to remedy some of the excesses of the market, some of the negative social consequences that come from—you know, whether it’s over pollution and climate change, or it’s discrimination through AI—these are all things that need some attention, in my opinion.

Chris: Can you speak more to some of the human rights and the non-disability related things that you work on at Benetech?

Jim: Oh sure. I think the great thing about the sort of transition at Benetech was, it gave us some money to respond to some of these needs. And so the story of Benetech has been, starting from base in technology serving people with disabilities (which by the way is still more than 2/3rds of what Benetech does), but we’ve been able to do quite a number of projects for other parts, other social issues. So one of the big questions we had is, how can we help prevent atrocities in the developing world, on human rights violations? And you know, we thought about it a lot and the best thing we could come up with was, what if you could capture and not lose the testimony of, you know, people who survived human rights abuses, that witnessed them, and so t hat started a very long sequence of work at Benetech—it’s been going on now for over 15 years—of supporting the human rights movement. Because frankly, if you think about the human rights movement, the only thing it has is information. I mean, activists and information are their only assets. And so, we found out that the majority of these stories, these truths, were getting lost—groups were going out of business, they were getting…their offices were burned, their computers were stolen—so the idea is, hey, let’s capture those stories, let’s back them up into the cloud, so that they’re not lost, and then if we get a big pile of data, then we essentially had a big data group that would actually analyze these patterns and so testify in genocide trials, identify patterns of basically who did what to whom, and be part of the support for the outnumbered human rights activists. And so we got involved in a lot of the large-scale human rights violations, you know, civil wars and conflicts, we helped really understand what the numbers are and political science, that was kind of unusual to actually be asserting things based on data rather than opinion. And we had lots and lots of data in a lot of these civil wars and conflicts, from many , many different groups. And so we were able to do this, we moved into the LGBT community in Africa, after they were under a lot of threat of capital punishment for being gay, and certain African countries was being floated as a law, helped groups write the first police violence against gay people and their country kind of reports, and leading to change, and often we’re helping the UN, so…so for example right now, our biggest project in this area is that there’s between five and ten million videos that possibly include information about atrocities in the Syrian civil war, and we’re writing machine learning AI algorithms to help basically go from $5 or $10 million videos that you might want to look at, which no person can actually do, down to maybe the 500 or 1,000 videos that might be relevant to preparing a case against people who launch chemical munitions. We’re not a human rights group, we’re the nerds and the scientists who help make the human rights movement more powerful. That’s one example, another example is the environmental field came to us, about a dozen years ago, and said to us the state of the art for project management in the environmental field at the time was an excel spreadsheet, and that—you know, it’s another case of the market failure that we talked about, is construction had fifty different project management packages, depending on what you were constructing. But people who were running, you know, wetlands restorations, or campaigns against environmentally bad practices, were stuck with an Excel spreadsheet. And a general tool like Microsoft project was way too complex for your average biologist or activist, so we wrote something called [morati]. We jokingly called it TurboTax for the environmental activist professional—the idea is that it would ask you a set of questions, kind of a “wizard,” and come with an explanation of how a dollar in, like more salmon or cleaner air or whatever it might be—and so that project has gone on to be, you know, the leading project management package in the environmental movement. The list kind of goes on, I mean, we’re doing a ton of stuff in assistive technology, we started the Diagram Center, which is all about how to make STEM and STEAM; and the whole idea of Diagram was, why doesn’t everyone in the field get together, build shared technology and shared standards as a common effort, given that we all care about making science and technology, engineering and math, and arts content more accessible. And so that’s a great example, and then of course some, the one that I think is very exciting is the woman who took over as CEO of Benetech from me in…late last year, Betsy Bowman, who’s been at Benetech for 10 years, she helped get the “Born Accessible” campaign launched, and the goal of “Born Accessible” is to eventually put Bookshare out of business. The idea is that if we can convince the publishers to create their mainstream e-books completely accessibly, then blind and other people with disabilities related to print can just get the standard e-book and it should work great. And that’s increasingly the case, and we’re hoping to do that for more and more complicated works so that, eventually, the need for something like Bookshare will peak and people will start relying on mainstream e-books to be able to read what they need to read.

Chris: And what do you see for the future, what ideas are out there that you haven’t started on that you would really be enthusiastic about doing next?

Jim: So I’m actually having a blast with actually not being the CEO of Benetech, and the great thing is, I think Benetech is going to continue to expand and have ever-greater impact under the new leadership, and frankly it was probably, after about 30 years, probably time for someone to take over Benetech. And the roadmap that Benetech has is pretty clear—you know, we worked closely with the World Blind Union, and other blindness organizations, especially the NFB here in the United States, to get the Marakesh treaty passed globally, to get the US to ratify it, Europe has ratified it…I think the goal is, is that even as we work on the Born Accessible movement here in the US, to reduce the need for Bookshare, I think that there are millions of people around the world for whom access to books is, you know, ten or twenty years behind where we are in the US. And so I think the Marakesh treaty is going to let us, over time, become the national library, be where Bookshare was 15 years ago in the US. I think right now Bookshare is the national library, free national library in easily a dozen countries already. So I think that roadmap is kind of set, obviously Benetech is going to go off and do more and more stuff in human rights. Benetech’s also started doing stuff in health and human services, they have a project called Servicenet to make information about health and human services a lot more available to people who need them, because that field is stuck kind of in the “yellow pages” era of information management. So Benetech is off and running those things. I’ve launched a new social enterprise called Tech Matters, as of January. It’s actually physically sponsored by Benetech, so we still have a connection, but the difference is that if I don’t raise money for Tech Matters, then I don’t get paid, so Benetech’s not on the hook for paying my salary. And now I’m working on a whole fresh set of social problems that Benetech hasn’t had the bandwidth to work on. So I”m working with the global movement of child helplines, so these are the people who, you know, in many countries take the phone call from a kid in crisis or someone who sees a kid being abused, and helping them update their technology platform to do a better job of helping potentially a hundred million kids around the world in the next few years. I’m working on fighting slavery in the supply chain, basically unethical labor practices, I have a next-generation environmental project that’s going to help essentially regions figure out what to do about climate change and the environment and matching conservation up with livelihoods and agriculture and all that sort of stuff. So the common thread to everything I get to do today is, someone has a social problem that they want to solve, they’ve got a group of nonprofits or government agencies, or for-profits, that want to work together on solving that, and I get to be their nerd. I get to help imagine what technology products or standards or glue might help unlock the potential of these people to help solve this big social problem. And that’s, frankly, it’s a blast. I’m, you know, fresh challenges, lots of people who are very dedicated to the community that they serve, and I get to make their tools or help see that they have the best possible tools for the job.

Francis: I think what you’re doing speaks to an enormous need in society today, where there are all these technological solutions, and maybe potential for creativity with what we have, and it’s not really being discussed even as a choice for society. I think that the role that you’re playing is one that we need on such a larger scale.

Jim: I’m glad to say that I’m part of the growing movement, because a lot of people see the same problem that you see with technology. And I see it most obvious in the universities, both among faculty and students. I think that computer science faculty—to pick a group—are very concerned about what they’ve helped create, which are basically, in many cases, technology companies that are, if not immoral, are certainly amoral, and often are kind of clueless about the negative social impacts that they have. Quite a number of universities have started programs that go by a bunch of different labels; one label is “public interest technology,” the idea that people might want to work on essentially using technology to help solve social problems and serving in the public interest rather than in the private interest. There’s people who work on “computer science plus” problems; so, how could computer science help ag, how could computer science help human rights, how can computer science help education. So there is a movement here, and I know that, for example Stanford just announced a major university wide program to try and engage their faculty, who are pretty high-powered, and their students, into actually working on social problems rather than on just relentlessly spinning off, you know, the next Silicon Valley unicorn company. So, I like the think this is going, and of course there is a, you know, very exciting stuff going on in the—especially in the last administration—that has continued, under the Trump administration, which is, you know reforming how the federal government uses technology to better serve people. Government agencies realize that they’ve done a really bad job of serving society, I think the Healthcare.gov fiasco of a few years ago was kind of, you know, one of the low points and I know that a lot of people are trying to make sure that technology actually works better for, let’s say, veterans or people who are on Social Security, and hopefully we will see more progress in those areas, which touch an awful lot of Americans.

Francis: Well if you want to talk about waste, what are we going to do about this defense budget, and the amount of resources…I mean, all that power that could be used for good. I know this is sort of one of those out of left field questions, but you can’t, you know, get away with saying, hey, I’m not a rocket scientist because actually at one point you were.

Jim: (chuckles) Obviously I got started by hearing about a military application of technology and thinking about a social application of that same technology. And the good news is, you know, Silicon Valley got its start almost exclusively in defense industry applications, and the story of Silicon Valley over the nearly 40 years that I’ve been here, has been a steady move away from being focused as much on military applications of technology to applications that help society, and we see this in the giant protests at companies like Google about their technology being used, say, to target people for assassination with drones. There’s an awful lot of people in the tech field who did not go into the tech field to build technology that did that sort of thing, and talent ultimately is one of the biggest factors in what goes on in tech companies. And so many tech companies are going to have to pay attention to how their technology is being used, and I think that we’re going through a period right now, you know, we’re highlighting not only how technology is being applied to military things, but also how the technology is being applied to, whether it’s enabled bullying, or thrown elections, or whatever it might be, I think people are beginning to grapple with some of these social impacts that got ignored during the go-go phase of the last, especially 20 years of the growth of the internet.

Francis: I love the idea of being a nerd. I mean, I consider that like a pretty high compliment in my world…you know, you think that maybe this country would want to try a nerd for President, I think what we have now is like as opposite a nerd as you could possibly be.

Chris: I think Michael Dukakis was that candidate, and we…he didn’t do very well.

Jim: Yeah, I know, my sister was saying “will you please run for president” and I’m like—naah.

Chris: C’mon Jim, everyone else is…why not?

Jim: I think that one of the biggest concerns expressed by nerds, especially nerd philosophers and nerd thinkers, is that the technology that we’ve created has undercut, kind of, respect for technology, for science, for fact. And they lay that at the door of essentially what are our social media, sort of world has created is that, by the way that a Facebook or YouTube makes money is for people to stay on their site longer, and they’ve learned that the way to get people to stay on their site longer is to feed t hem more and more outrageous things to cause them to get angry, or get sad, or—to basically appeal to their lowest emotions. The problem with things that are false is that they are more engaging. Essentially, Silicon Valley has created this giant engine to sort of stupidify the average person who uses their products, because it’s in their economic interest for you to get more and more false information because it’s more engaging. ‘Cause, you know, whether it’s clickbait or a false claim, those things get a lot more attention—i.e., more people spending more time on the site—than things that happen to be true. I think there are people who are very, very worried about this, and this might, you know, come back to some of this regulation that so many people in Silicon Valley object to regulation, but they’re like systematically destroying respect for science, respect for truth, respect for institutions…by creating a tool that relentlessly destroys those things in their economic interest.

Chris: There was a study published recently, I think it was out of a university in the UK, that showed that if you start YouTube with a brand-new account, completely fresh, you know, Google doesn’t know anything about you so it doesn’t know what to recommend, and you do your first search on the US House of Representatives, and then just watch each video that it recommends to follow next, and within eight to ten videos you’re going to be on something promoting the flat earth theory.

Jim: Yeah. Or Alex Jones and Infowars, or something else like that—yes. I was actually reading a book, actually entitled “Zucked” which is by an early advisor to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who actually says it’s like three or four things, but, we tend to end up there because the algorithms encourage it. And AI, really good at doing whatever task you set it to, and if the task is “have people spend more time on the website and click more and look at more ads,” that’s why you end up with stuff that’s false. But I’m on the techno-optimist side. I think that most tech people want to be creating things of value, and do not want to be associated with things that are evil by accident, or now, one might argue after it’s been pointed out enough, evil on purpose—and so I think that my goal is to keep putting the idea that it is possible to make a living doing technology for social good. It may not be the best path to becoming a billionaire, it’s a pretty bad path if becoming a billionaire is your objective. You know, there’s an awful lot of people who want to live a life that they can actually be proud of and work on things that they’re actually proud of, and as demonstration of that there’s a lot of great teachers and a lot of great people in many professions that help people in spite of the fact that they don’t make as much money. I want to get more of the tech field to channel itself into this, how can we do good on purpose? How can actually set out to maximize human utility—making people’s lives better? Because I think that is ultimately what drew a lot of us to being nerds.

Francis: We had a guest, Richard Stallman, on recently, who had this really great idea I thought, which is to have a progressive tax on corporations based on their size. Basically what that would do was, it would make it so, you know, at a certain point it just doesn’t make sense to get any bigger, and you know the idea that that would ultimately create a more diverse and robust economy.

Jim: And of course Richard, you know, founded the free software movement, which really influenced these more community values—and we are giant fans of free software, we’re also giant fans of open source software, which I know Richard’s not crazy about. But I’m not as much of an economist, I’m how we actually choose to solve this problem. I do believe that whether it’s income inequality or abuses of tech platforms, that we’re going to see more regulatory activity, we’re going to see more changes in tax, but ultimately it depends on the electorate deciding that they want those changes. And it’ll be interesting to see if we can get that consensus, because clearly we haven’t necessarily been moving in that direction lately.

Chris: As we just discussed, AI’s driving people to increasingly faulty and useless information, people are more and more likely to be misinformed.

Jim: Yeah, and sometimes it’s much more subtle than that. I did a major study last year for a major disability donor, and they asked me to look at what technology might help if the goal was to greatly increase the number of people with disabilities who had employment. Many of us on this call know about assistive technology and other ways that you could make people in employment more effective and more likely to be able to get a job or keep a job, because they have tools at hand to do it. The thing that blew my mind—and maybe it shouldn’t have—was essentially technologies taking over the recruiting and the hiring process in almost all large corporations and many small and medium corporations. And Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, has been applied to every single step in that process, and in many cases, the way machine learning has been applied is egregiously discriminatory against people with disabilities. Which, one would think, is against the law in this country, but that doesn’t stop people from buying this technology or applying it, because the people who sell the technology say, “our machine learning, it doesn’t see gender, it doesn’t see race, it doesn’t see disability” and yet the way they’ve implemented these things can’t help but discriminate. And I think that we’ve, you know, we’re part again of a movement of calling out these technologies and saying “how is it possible that that technology doesn’t illegally discriminate against people”…and I expect, actually, that we’re going to have to have disability rights attorneys suing companies over buying machine learning tools that discriminate against people with disabilities, and eventually people will have to actually correct this. But some of these companies are going to become, you know, very rich before anyone actually calls them to account for the fact that they built something that extensively discriminates against people with disabilities.

Chris: About a year ago, I wrote a blog article called “Can an AI be Racist?” and I based it entirely on what Apple suggests in my Favorites playlist every Tuesday, that comes out, if you use Apple Music…and every week they recommend 25 songs that you’d like to listen to, you know, from your own library and put it together as a Favorites mix. And literally for weeks and weeks on end, the top dozen were all white artists, and the bottom thirteen were all black artists. And Jimi Hendricks was always the borderline. So for some reason, Apple Music prioritizes white artists over black artists, and my record collection’s probably 75% minority.

Jim: Yeah, it’s really fascinating how that works out, isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah, but it surprised me after a few weeks in a row, when I started following it.

Jim: This is an issue that’s getting a lot of attention, and people are ..one of the things that people are trying to do, one of them is make the people who work on machine learning a much more diverse crowd, so that the kind of oversight that might lead to the kind of outcome you describe is less likely to happen if you have a more diverse group of people working on it, going “gee, this result seems very odd.” But in many cases we don’t have people who work on these tools that see these obvious problems. And of course, I think gender discrimination problem is the one that’s the most obvious, and people have the most awareness that it’s a problem. There’s a famous story about Amazon killing an automated resume screening tool because they could not keep it from discriminating against women. And if it’s that hard to stop something from discriminating against women, imagine how hard it is to stop it from discriminating against minorities or people with disabilities.

Francis: I think that’s really a fascinating line of thought, because it circles back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier, where in, you know, like a capitalist free market system, you know there’s going to be like certain things that just don’t get attention that really need attention. I wonder if there’s some kind of connection there.

Jim: The example that I use in this report is a company called Hire Vue (and they spell it, you know, like hiring people and View like v-u-e I think). What they do is create a screening tool, that they show you a video and you record yourself answering that video, and then a machine learning algorithm analyzes your facial movements and your voice tone and your word choice, and decides whether you are the one in five people who do this who get an interview with a human being. So they screen out 80% of all people. And I think we can all imagine many, many different kinds of disabilities that might get in the way of using this, from accessibility problems with the app as itself, actually pointing the camera at the right spot…and then the question is, well, how many people with disabilities were in the training set that they used to create this “scientifically validated” thing? And I’m guessing not a lot of blind people were in their training set. So, you know, it’s both the algorithm, what they’re collecting, has tremendous discriminatory capabilities. What if someone can’t speak, what if someone has a stroke and half their face doesn’t move, what if they’re from a culture that discourages obvious show of emotion…I mean, all these things that are discriminatory and then you have the training set, and how it was trained, and I’m guessing that it did not reflect a diverse population that included lots of minorities and people with disabilities. And yet, this tool is going, it’s out there and being used all over the place, and one of my favorite geeks, the guy who actually was like the head of our human rights program for almost ten years, he said “something that you all should watch out for is, when the customer for a machine learning tool and the people who build the machine learning tool…if neither of them suffer any consequences when the machine learning tool gets something wrong, you’ve got a case of moral hazard.” And this is classic example of, the company is saving money, that bought the tool, the company that sold the tool is making money, and the fact that they might egregiously discriminate against people with disabilities…who’s suffering? People with disabilities, not people who are in the middle of this transaction. This is the core of the problem that we’re having, essentially with the new generation of technology, is that the people who are engaging in the financial transactions are actually not the people who suffer the consequences of the decision, right? The users of Facebook, people posting on Facebook, they’re being commoditized and product-ized to get a free tool, but, you know, it’s Facebook and their advertisers that are making all the money. This problem just keeps resurfacing, that we’ve now moved to a market where the traditional “I am the seller, and I’m getting for you, and your the purchaser, and we’re the only dynamic”…Silicon Valley has, in many cases has moved to this dynamic where the person who actually uses the product is the product, and I think we’ve all heard that kind of claim, but it shows up in this sort of thing where the people who suffer the consequences of it going wrong aren’t actually making the decisions about how to build the product or actually how to pay for it.

Chris: And how do you see a path to disrupting that?

Jim: I mean, we’ve talked about the two paths that are there, which is, you know, starting nonprofit social enterprises that actually focus on doing good with the technology, and regulation to curb the most excessive abuses by the for-profit world. I’m not naive, it’s…it’s not going to be possible for nonprofit social enterprise to displace Facebook. I don’t take that as a very serious option. But I find that many of the technologies, or the things that we’ve come to understand from these technologies and these successful companies can be applied to deliberately doing social good. Obviously doing pattern recognition to help blind people read books was the one that started my career. You know, right now we’re trying to figure out how could you use machine learning to better prosecute war criminals, in the Syrian context. The project we’re working on around, sort of, large scale environmental stuff, how could we be using machine learning to better model erosion and water retention in regions that are going through land degradation and desertification. The same tools can be applied to these things, and I think that a lot of this is intent. We need to get more people intent on doing social good with technology, to create value that is not purely privatized, that actually keeps in mind the impact this has on society, and then we need regulation that actually makes it difficult for people to go out and just ruthlessly exploit people, which they actually have a great habit of doing.

Francis: Another things that I think is a big flaw in our society today, in regards to its relationship to new technology, is basically how the workday has gotten more and more intense when the actual amount of labor it takes to sustain a quality of life for the world has gone down. I was wondering if you could speak to that at all?

Jim: There are people that are working on this, and different groups have tackled different parts of it. So, there’s a guy who came out of the tech industry who started a movement called “Time well spent.” And the idea is that these tech tools have stolen a lot of our attention, and that has caused our human relationships to actually suffer, because these things are designed to be addictive, more addictive and overcoming many of our self-governing mechanisms, you know, why we should spend more time with our family, for example. And so they’ve influenced new features on the latest generation of iPhones and Android phones, actually spend more time with tools that help you keep from looking at email up until when you go to bed, creating more awareness of, gee I spent 40 hours last week playing this online game, maybe that’s actually not what I want to do. We also have some things going on in terms of social norming and regulation, and the Europeans are further along on this, whether it’s with much stricter privacy requirements and antitrust requirements, and actually fining companies like Google billions of dollars for violating those things. There’s also, I know there are European companies that turn off email in the evenings so that their employees can’t work on company email after a certain point, after six o’clock at night, or before eight o’clock in the morning, whatever it might be. One of my favorite books on this subject is from Tim O’Reilly, the guy who coined the term “opensource” and has been a big leader in the tech field for a long time, he wrong a book called WTF, which when he gave a talk on it in the Obama White House got sanitized to “What the Future.”

Chris: That’s funny, ‘cause President Obama was on Marc Maron’s podcast called WTF, and he expands it to be the largest philosophical question of our time, “What the Fuck?”

Jim: Yeah, exactly. Well anyway, it’s good to know that President Obama’s up for this in multiple dimensions, but Tim’s book—I mean, there’s a lot of exciting stuff there about where he sees the future going. But one of his biggest points is, we get to choose—you know, people often in the tech industry present this as an inevitable form of, you know, it must be this way. Data wants this. Business just works this way. And that’s not actually true. As a society, we can choose to prioritize privacy more, or prohibit some of the most abuses of our data, or whatever it might be. And so I think the question is putting, sort of, society back in charge of making some of these choices, either by informally what they choose to do and not do, but also what their legislators do in terms of regulating industry.

Chris: Changing gears then, what is it about technology you are most optimistic about, looking to long term future? Like, you know, where do you see us in 20, 30, 40, 50 years if your optimistic vision of technology happens?

Jim: I think that there’s some things that technology can do for us that will make lives better. So let’s say that we have some agreement on what a better life is. Or whether that’s just more autonomy to make choices about their life. So we could imagine technology helping solve the climate change issue, or taking some of the extreme impacts of climate change off. We can imagine technology and access to information being such that education becomes more effective, that the rights of women and minorities and people with disabilities have a greater level of respect. Obviously there’s tremendous stuff going on in the medical area. So if our goal is to reduce human suffering, to improve the quality of life for people, to give people more autonomy and more choices in how their lives unfold, that communities can make choices about how they want development or industrialization or conservation to be pursued in their communities—I see every single social issue that we face, there’s a lot of people working on that issue that want to make a dent in it, and I see technology as an indispensable tool in helping realize those visions of a better, more just, healthier, greener planet, whatever it might be. And so, you know, that’s what makes my job really so much fun. It’s if someone sits down with me and says here’s a social problem, and here’s the better world that we can imagine, it’s not hard for me to come up with five exciting technology ideas that might help contribute to that, a couple of which are bad ideas, a couple of which are probably great ideas—I don’t know which are which right now, but it’s not hard to figure that out, and that’s what I get to spend my time on, and I know that there’s an awful lot of people coming out of the tech industry who would like to be doing that kind of work, and I want to that just more normal, more sustainable, more of a career choice that more people with tech skills can actually pursue.

Francis: How would you recommend to someone who is hearing this that wants to change careers now? What would be the first steps for someone like that?

Jim: You know, you’re most powerful when you bring skills to bear, and so if you are mid-career, and there’s a lot of things that people have learned in their career that might apply to doing social good, right? I mean, I think my background as a tech entrepreneur and a machine learning guy actually turned out to be pretty darned handy to a lot of things that I ended up doing, leading Benetech, and now Tech Matters. And so if you are early in your career, I mean I often advising people, saying, what are you really good at? Get better at it, get some experience…some people come out of school and go into the nonprofit sector. And I think that that is increasingly a career option, but I’m also aware that the way our economic system works, often people come out of school with so much debt they have to go, and go to a job that makes more money. But I think that, I see people coming to the kind of work that Benetech does, whether it’s fresh out of school, early career, mid-career, late career, final sort of phase in your career—people at every step along that way are actually saying, I want to move from money to meaning, is sort of one of my catchphrases. And I think that there are…if you have a skill that’s actually applicable to these kind of social good applications. And so there are, there’s a lot of meat out there. It just doesn’t happen to pay, you know, $500,000 a year.

Chris: But you can make a reasonable salary in the non-profit sector. Because of some research I’ve done recently, I know the salaries of an awful lot of people working in the non-profit sector in the blindness space, and they’re making a living wage.

Jim: Yeah. And yes, I mean, the CEO’s generally not making, you know, billions or hundreds of millions or tens of millions, or generally not millions, but we can get people who are working for big tech companies to come join us. They often take a significant pay cut, but you know we can still pay more than $100,000 a year to a software developer with a lot of experience, even if they can make more than $200,000 or $300,000 at some of these tech companies. I mean the average salary at Facebook is like $250,000 a year.

Chris: But that doesn’t include contractors, and they have a ton of contractors there.

Jim: No, they do have a pretty deft way of pushing those people off payroll. But you come fresh out of school from an elite school, and you get paid an awful lot money to go to these companies. But again, if you’re not about profit-maximization but working on something that you really care about, yes, you can make a decent living and…we have lots of people who work for Benetech who work around the country and take advantage of the flexibility of working from home. Many of our employees with disabilities are actually working from home rather than living in a very high-cost area like Silicon Valley that doesn’t have great transit. They can take a different place and do a great job, because frankly, given the kind of technology we have today, your online presence doesn’t look much different whether you’re in Chicago or New York or down the hall here in Palo Alto.

Francis: One of the things that I try to do in this show is create almost like a brainstorming kind of moment, at times where you’re maybe even like theorizing about how the future could be and how…either what technology you would predict, or importantly, what technology that isn’t being used right now that if implemented, could make huge changes for the better.

Jim: I tend to be more practical…even…

Chris: This gives you the chance to step into speculative fiction.

Jim: (laugh) Alright, this is my Atwood moment.

Francis: This is the show where, that we’re up for that.

Jim: The thing that really excites me about technology and the directions that we’re going with sensors, with better medical technology, with better data collection technology, with better machine learning technology, is that the idea that we would be able to understand social problems at a far more detailed level, is very exciting and a bit terrifying, right? So the challenge to us going ahead is, how could we use knowing everything we possibly might want to know about a social challenge, and then using the technology to do social good while still respecting the privacy and human rights of the people who involved. And so, I think that that is the essence of what I want to see going forward. I just love sitting down and saying, imagine we know everything, now what will we do? Because the way that we’re going, that’s actually a realistic assumption for tackling some of these problems, thanks to the incredible sensing infrastructure, data infrastructure, that we already have, that could be applied not so much to making money, but instead making life better on the planet.

Chris: Is there anything you’d like to promote or plug, whether it’s something you’re working on or something that other people are working on?

Jim: I think the thing that I want to “plug” is that people should get more involved in using technology explicitly to do social good. I think that it’s something that’s in many people’s hearts, and they feel like it’s like almost they don’t have permission to do that…I want to give people permission to go out and find a way to make a living while doing really great things through technology.

Chris: Excellent. And with that, thank you so much for coming on Making Better, Jim.

Jim: I’m glad to be part of it. Thanks.

—END

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Making Better Episode 5: M. E. Thomas

Episode 5: M.E Thomas Transcript

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Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Francis: Hey Chris.

Chris: Hey, Francis.

Francis: So today I’m very excited, we have author M.E. Thomas, who wrote Confessions of a Sociopath, A Life Hiding in Plain Sight. When you hear the term “sociopath,” what comes to mind?

Chris: I would think it’s somebody who’s either a criminal, highly manipulative, or…generally evil. But that was before we had our conversation with M.E., and a lot changed in my mind in that hour.

Francis: So with that in mind, why don’t we just jump straight into the interview today.


Francis: Hello! I’m really delighted to have M.E. on today. So welcome to the show…

M.E. Thank you.

Francis: Just to start, for people aren’t…haven’t read your book, or…would you like to introduce yourself, your background?

M.E. Yeah, sure. So I, I guess starting at the very beginning, I’m a westerner, grew up in California. I’m Mormon, the church actually is trying to get us to say the full name of the church, so I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I was born into it, raised into it. I have pioneer ancestors. I’m a musician, I majored in music and then I went to law school, and I happen to be a diagnosed sociopath, or anti-social personality disorder.

Francis: I guess what I’d want to start with is just maybe your thoughts about neuro-diversity…and just like the spectrum, even among sociopathy and how it’s generalized.

M.E. OK. It’s an interesting question for me, because I didn’t even realize that I was different, or how I was different, until kind of a later age. So I’ll just quickly walk you through that. Like, when I was a child I always thought that I was different but I mostly thought that maybe I was just smart. I am pretty smart, like in the way that I perform well on standardized tests, or whatever. There were just kind of things, you know, that other children didn’t see that I saw, and vice versa, honestly. I just had different blind spots than other people. So I mostly just grew up with a different perspective. It wasn’t until I was in law school, and I was sharing an office space with this other law student—we were both law students doing a clerkship at the time—and we were really bored, because they honestly only had like five to ten hours of work for us to do a week, but we had still be there. And during that time, we just talked about everything. She was really interesting, you know, she had a degree in theology, she was gay, though…and had grown up kind of during this era in which it wasn’t OK to be gay, so a little bit older. And after, you know, weeks of talking about basically everything, she said you might want to consider the possibility that you’re a sociopath. So I looked it up and I thought, wow, this really fits.

But I didn’t think of it as a disability at the time, I didn’t really think much of it at the time, which is probably kind of typical sociopathic reaction, to not really care about personal details in my life. And it wasn’t until maybe, it was about five years later that I was having some difficulties in my life. I had work problems, getting fired or kind of let go from a job, or relationship problems, long term friendship problems, romantic relationship problems…and all these things falling apart at the same time. And I started to notice a pattern, I started to notice, hey, this is not the first time this had happened. And in fact it happens about every three years. So to that extent I started thinking maybe there’s something to this sociopathy thing, maybe I should look into it, and maybe this is..this is somehow contributing to the fact that I, every three years, kind of have this cyclical self-destructive way of living. And I thought, too, you know, I’m getting older. When I was younger it was fine to self-destruct like that, because it’s more expected, people…other people were doing it, you know, it’s fine to total your car, you know, everybody does it kind of once in their teenage years. But you can’t kind of keep doing that as you become an adult. It was starting to become apparent to me, you know, it was starting to have more lasting consequences for me. And so I looked into it, I started a blog, which was sort of a journal I guess of researching different aspects about sociopathy. And the other reason I started the blog was I thought, you know, the stuff that I read, kind of online at the time—this was like 2008—so this is…there isn’t a lot written online, but the stuff that you did read was pretty negative, almost uniformly negative. And it said it wasn’t treatable, and it said, you know, there’s nothing that we can do for these people, and they’re just, you know, essentially a plague on society. And the best that society can hope for is being able to identify sociopaths and essentially set them up on an island together, you know, to live out their lives. Or people talk about, you know, just round ‘em up and kill ‘em, that sort of stuff. And I thought, that’s not been my experience. You know, I found out a lot of the research on sociopathy has been done on male prisoners. I don’t think, to this day, there’s research been done that either looks directly at the female population, or includes a significant female population. 

So then, you know there’s just, like, a lot that we don’t know about sociopathy. I think there’s a lot that we don’t know about disabilities in general, and the role that they kind of play in society, and the different things that people can do with a brain that’s wired differently. And I think it’s kind of…myopic to think, you know, there’s an optimal human. It’s like, what is optimal today is not necessarily going to be optimal tomorrow, etc. In fact I worked for a nonprofit, sometimes, do some work for them, legal work, and they quote this, I forget what the exact statistic…something like 60% of jobs that kids today will be doing when they’re adults don’t even exist yet. So they’re kind of suggesting, you know, like, we can’t just train people, we can’t take ‘em at eight years old and say, ok, this is the job that you’re going to be when you’re an adult, and we’re going to give you the education and training necessary to, you know, optimize that particular performance of that job, because we don’t know that that exists. So I think that sort of suggests that there’s a little bit of hubris in thinking that there’s going to be an optimal human, and thinking that the circumstances that we currently live in are going to be the circumstances of tomorrow, essentially. So I guess I think, in terms of neuro-diversity, you’re basically hedging your bets as a society. I think there’s the moral, kind of, reason for why we are interested in neuro-diversity, which is that all human life has value, you know. If you think that, then naturally you’re going to be on the side of neuro-diversity, but I think there’s also a good strategic way of thinking about neuro-diversity, which is that there’s sometimes situations in which you want  a certain type of personality or a skillset or experience; the more diverse it is, the greater chance society has of surviving. Just a quick funny kind of example: so one of my friends recently had a birthday party for stepchildren. And she does not get along with the ex-wife, right? And the ex-wife was going to be coming to her house, and the ex-wife before has come to her house and given her the silent treatment, and like treated her like trash. So she’s like, you know “I really want you to come, M.E., to this birthday party”…essentially—maybe you guys can kind of guess—to talk to the ex-wife, to put her down in subtle ways, you know, to basically check any attempts that she had about, you know, these little micro-agressions, and to, like, you know, instill my own—her own sense of fear about, you know, messing with this situation. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to come…

Chris: I’ve been invited to parties just to be the asshole..

M.E. Right. But being an asshole sometimes is terrible, you know, in social situations, and sometimes it’s really, really useful. I think most people can kind of understand, you know, you’re in a terrible work situation, or you’re, you know, you’re in a terrible like public situation, like one time—same friend—we were dining, we were eating Thai food, really one of these kind of hole-in-the-wall places with eight tables. We happened to be seated right next to these other two women. And then halfway through their meal, they turned over and said to my friend—and I think they had, like they had every moral justification in the world to say this, but they said—“you know what? you have a really annoying voice, and your voice has been annoying me this entire time that you’ve been talking during dinner. You have ruined this meal for me.” And …

Francis: Oh my god.

M.E. I know! (laughing) I went off on those people! I’m just, you know, not afraid of confrontation, you know, I just—I don’t even think I was rude. I didn’t yell, I didn’t get emotional, I just, you know, cut them to the quick,” that’s unacceptable, please leave now. Now they’re faced with this situation where they thought—who knows what they thought when they said that? They thought she was going to stop talking, maybe, or apologize, or whatever it is. But it’s just, you know, sometimes it is, like you say, it pays to be an asshole, or it pays to have an asshole around, I guess.

Francis: As long as you’re not a dick.

M.E. Right. (laugh)

Francis: The dick thing I don’t know if scientists have come up with whether it’s a nature vs. nurture thing, but in the absence of having a moral …a morality that’s universal and religiously based, I think a lot of people have whittled it down now to just, “don’t be a dick,” is sort of like enough for society to function with.

Chris: “Wheaton’s Law” comes up so often….

M.E. What is Wheaton’s Law?

Chris: Don’t Be A Dick.

M.E. Oh, ok.

Chris: It’s Will Wheaton, the actor from Star Trek. He did a presentation at a conference a number of years ago, just called “Don’t Be A Dick.”

M.E. (laughs) What is his definition of being a dick? I’m curious, because in this idea of, like, making things better, that you are all, are interested in, I often wonder, you know, what is the acceptable kind of neutral behavior, you know? And like you say, in the absence of having like a religious morality or, you know, in this world in which we’re trying to kind of look for that neutral morality, well what does it mean to be a dick? Like what are the things we can say, you know, never do this behavior, this behavior is not acceptable. Since we’re saying that so much behavior is acceptable in certain circumstances.

Chris: One of the things we in the humanist community are constantly wrestling with is how to prove to people that we can be “good without God” and how we actually do have an ethical framework and things like that. So when we’re encountering somebody with what we would believe to be irrational beliefs—you know, somebody who believes in a flat earth or somebody who denies climate change, or—you’re not going to convince people to become critical thinkers by being a dick. You know, don’t go up to them and say, “you’re stupid.” Maybe try to engage in a conversation with them about why they believe in what they believe, and maybe try to point out the logical fallacies and hope that they come around to our side.

M.E. Right. Yeah, I can see a, one thing that I have been thinking about recently, you know, and has like kind of a religious kind of coloring to it, the belief, it definitely comes from a religious perspective, but I think it’s interesting when you think about, like, the idea of how can we have a happier society, like a sort of utopia type society? Religiously, that’s what we think of heaven. Right? Heaven, and the Mormons are interesting, they have like a very practical idea, I think, about heaven. They’re almost kind of like science fiction-y the way they view heaven. They think of heaven as being just like a place where people are much more advanced, right? You’re much more advanced to the point where you’re, you’re essentially like, god-like. Right? And how do you have a society in which people have such great powers? You know, they’re very kind of god-like, but you don’t end up with wars and destruction. You know, you don’t end up with them getting so advanced, so powerful, that one person can sort of like set off a chain reaction and destroy everything. And in Mormonism, the concept is, you cannot interfere with other people’s agency. That is the one sort of “don’t be dick” rule, is that no matter what you do you have to allow the other person freedom. Right? You can’t impede on their own autonomy, I guess. So whatever you do, it can’t affect their own ability to do whatever it is t hat they want, or to be essentially unmolested. You know, like you have to make sure that all your actions and choices don’t affect others, or if they do affect others, that there’s some sort of consent. That you’re not infringing on somebody’s agency that way, which I think is a really interesting concept, and it’s a concept that I feel like has been…popular before, maybe, you know, there have been some movements in which it’s been popular, like, just “Don’t Tread on Me.” Right? Or even the Tea Party movement, which I think first started off with being, you know, like live and let live, and then kind of twisted to different things.

Chris: I hear similar ethical frameworks described, certainly by Unitarians, where belief in a god is optional but an ethical lifestyle is the most important thing. And I hear it at humanist events, really often, is, you know, in our “good without god” is, you know, here’s an ethical framework. It reminds me a lot of how you described your relationship with Mormonism in the book, in that it provides, you know, a set of guidelines for living and also gives you the rational reasons behind them.

M.E. Right. Exactly. It’s interesting that you say these things about ethics, but what…what are the rational reasons? You know, like, there are different…I guess if you are a, you know, sort of utilitarianism, right? Then there’s going to be a different kind of outcome that you’re looking for. Right? And that’s where the ethics come in, is that we’re looking for the outcome that allows for, you know, the best ultimate utility, right? And I guess Mormonism, the interesting kind of twist they have on it is this, this real focus on agency and autonomy. “Cause in Mormonism they have a belief, actually, that there was a war in heaven, and it’s interesting kind of thinking about where we are socially. You know, World War I, I think a lot of people don’t really understand what were the causes of that war. It seemed like people were just eager to go to war, right? World War II, there’s a greater kind of understanding of what the causes were, because they related to the aftereffects of World War I, which were so terrible. And now we have nuclear bombs, and I think the concern is—and I was just watching a Rick and Morty episode (laugh) where they reference this—you know, you’re going to get so advanced that you’re basically going to be able to bomb yourself out of existence. Right? The concern is that, you know, we have gotten so advanced that we have the real capacity to harm ourselves irreparably, as a society. That’s kind of the concern, and I guess the ethics, especially if you are going to talk about a utopia that would be so advanced, that would be a major concern. How can we avoid having these sorts of wars, or major conflict happen. And I think the simple Mormon answer, but it kind of makes sense to me logically, too, is that you just, you can’t interfere with other people’s agency. Like if somebody wants to—and this is the thing that I think is so hard for people to kind of get behind, today–is to allow somebody to be a racist. You know, this idea, and I talk about it actually in my classes that I teach, paralegal classes, is it OK to punch a Nazi? I would have thought the answer, from anybody who had, like, any sense of ethics, would be “no.” It’s never OK, like the ends don’t justify the means, right? Even if they’re a Nazi, you still, you still can’t punch them. Right? We have a legal system, right, where we hold people accountable in various ways, but you’re not a vigilante, you know. We don’t believe in vigilanteism, that’s why we have the legal system that we do, and all of its checks and balances, right? And the police system that we do, and all these things are intended to get to this point where we’re not just punching the wrong people, I guess, or you know, like people aren’t taking it upon themselves to inflict violence on others. But even rather well-meaning people, I hear them say, “yeah, it’s OK to punch a Nazi,” that’s an OK thing. And part of it I think comes from this idea that, you know, if you don’t fight bad things, you know, and fight them just as dirty, you know, as they’re trying to fight against you, then there’s going to be something that…bad happening. But I think a lot of it comes from just this feeling that you don’t like Nazis. You know, you don’t like Nazis, you don’t approve of the way that they are, you don’t agree with their beliefs, and you have a hard time existing in a world with Nazis. It makes you angry, you know, makes these people angry to live in a world with Nazis, and it offends them personally, too. I’ve heard people, and you know, there’s kind of a funny joke people say, you know, on Twitter, I guess a little bit of a meme, where they’ll say, you know I’m personally offended. Somebody says, you know, I eat my McDonald’s french fries this way, with the ketchup, and you know that’s disgusting, and they’re “oh, I’m personally offended.” You know? They’re…and it’s a joke, right? It’s meant to be a joke, but it’s also kind of true-ish, that people are getting personally offended, they feel personally attacked when they’re kind of called out about certain things. Or when there’s other people existing in the world that have nothing to do with them, you know, they’re just speaking, for instance, at a, the university that this person might be attending. They express feelings of, like, personal hurt, you know, or that they would be traumatized to have that person speak at the university. There’s something of like a personal trauma that they’re experiencing. That sort of thing, I think, wow. That would be a real impediment to allowing people to have the free agency, because if somebody wants to believe, you know, somebody wants to be a Nazi, why is that like a personally offensive thing to you? You may find it offensive, or you may find it logically, you know, like Nazism doesn’t make sense, logically. Or here are the other reasons why I find it distasteful or evil or wrong, that’s fine. You can have an opinion, but why does it offend you that somebody else’s opinion is different, I think is a really interesting question, and I think something that, you know, a sociopath would never experience. You know, so this seems really weird to me, to see it in so many people, it’s almost like this weird malady, like some sort of sickness like plague that’s spreading throughout, psychologically, throughout the community, especially I think in millenials, but not exclusively. You know, there are plenty of old, especially the stereotype old white people, who have similar thoughts. You know, they can’t stand the thought that there’s this gay couple next door that are raising their child with neutral gender pronouns, and have not told the child whether the child is a boy or a girl. There are plenty of people being offended by that, or the anti-vaccine people…you know, people get, want to kind of get angry about these things, and I guess I just don’t understand it. If somebody wants to do something, and it’s not infringing your agency, then why? And they’ll go through a lot of kind of mental leaps to get to the point where they’re saying, no, these people are affecting me. Because, you know, one Nazi’s gonna turn to ten, is gonna turn to 100 and eventually I’m going to end up in a totalitarian society of Nazism, and that will affect me. But I just don’t see it, and I especially don’t see how urgent it is from the one Nazi to you need to punch them. You kind of, what you were saying about “good without god” and these ethical lifestyles, and like this idea of trying to convince people to “don’t be a dick,” you know, with their irrational beliefs, you’re not going to convince people by punching them. It’s like an absolutely ineffective tool that they’re choosing to use, too. You know what, I think it kind of is, and it stems from like my own experience with sociopathy. I essentially think most personality disorders, from what I’ve learned, from what I’ve known, from what I’ve experienced and the people that I’ve met, I think most personality disorders involve an issue with the sense of self, with the sense of identity. Right? I think that’s why they’re called personality disorders, right? Like a narcissist has a false sense of self, there are other ways that people kind of distort their view of self in other personality disorders. For a sociopath, there’s just a very weak sense of self, there’s like, almost, like, you’re not an actual person, you’re just like, like a hologram or like a cypher. You know, an illusion—or you’re like, water or something. You take the shape of whatever vessel that you happen to be in.

Francis: People identify with their programming a lot of the time. Like, they’re born into a culture, they’re born into a sexuality or, you know, like they’re male, they’re female, they’re from this class; there are all these things that are sort of accidental, almost. They were just born into it, and then they identify with that. But how much of that is real in terms of what their potential to be anything is, you know what I mean? And what if, in that regard, sociopathy is more of an awareness that these are things that are almost like accidents that were put upon the human consciousness of this child, and then they identified themselves with it. Whereas, if you don’t grasp on to all that is like, this is me, then you have to figure it out for yourself.

M.E. Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. I wouldn’t say that that’s all that sociopathy is, but i think because they have such a weak sense of self, and there are other problems that are created by the weak sense of self. But I think one of the advantages is that they don’t feel like ego-hurts, for instance. You know, sometimes on the internet I guess we call it butt-hurt; you know, somebody gets so incensed because, you know, they feel like their ego, somebody has been challenging, kind of, their sense of identity, their sense of self. And that’s, is what sets them off so badly. I think we see it in politics a lot, when people have, you know, outrageous reactions, or people have these sort of temper tantrums. This idea that somebody has offended you—for whatever reason, like you said—because, you know, let’s say they’re American, and they identify so strongly with being an American, that whenever anybody says something slightly, what they consider to be unpatriotic, then they kind of flip out, you know, and they’re personally offended by it, because, you know, they’re an American. I think it is true, like a lot of these things are kind of…accidents, and I think the sociopath acknowledges it. I’ve never identified, for instance, strongly actually with my religion, even though I am interested in the religious beliefs, I’m interested in the theology, and the different kind of playing out those ideas—I never think of myself as being like, super-Mormon. I guess. Right? Like if somebody insulted Mormons or were like, “oh yeah, Mormons, polygamy, multiple wives, whatever,” I’d be like, “yeah, maybe this is true” right? (laugh) I wouldn’t take it personally. I have never identified for instance with my gender, either, and I think it’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t either consider myself bisexual, because it’s not like I think of other people as having these very strict kind of gender roles, either. I don’t think of myself as being “I’m a libertarian” politically, but I don’t think of myself as being libertarian, in fact I used to never vote at all. I used to kind of just be like, these are things that are happening, and there’s not that much I can do, and kind of, who cares? You know, like I never had like these strong kind of beliefs or sense of identity. And these strong beliefs and sense of identity, I think, do harm people in particular ways. There’s kind of a concept…Paul Graham, if you google this you can read his article, it’s a really short article, and he says keep your identity small. And he’s just kind of suggesting there are certain things that you strongly identify with, for instance you love the Steelers, or something, you’re such a huge Steelers fan, if somebody says something bad about the Steelers, it can really incense you. Right, it’s going to trigger you emotionally, you’re going to have a particular kind of emotional, irrational reactions to somebody suggesting, you know, that the Steelers aren’t as good as you think they are, for whatever reason. And we see it in Europe all the time, with the football hooliganism, these soccer teams that hate each other so much that they’re like getting in fights in which people end up dying. And it seems so kind of absurd, but it’s like, if that’s what you identify so strongly with, then it’s not so different than, for instance, nationalism that we see today, where people are willing to kind of like shut off their empathy to, like, huge swaths of people just because they’re not part of their identity, and they want to maintain the identity they do have, which is a certain view of what it means to be Norwegian, or a certain view of what it means to be an American. And they kind of want to freeze in time this 2010 or 2019, whatever their view is, like, this is the perfect way to be Norwegian, we want to go back to the 1940s in terms of what it means to be Norwegian. They identify with these things so strongly that they’re willing to do similar sort of thing where the ends justify the means. They’re willing to infringe on somebody’s agency, they’re willing to punch somebody, they’re willing to, uh, hurt somebody in a way that I find to be…I don’t identify with it at all. Like, I don’t understand what’s going on there psychologically. I think there’s definitely something going on, but I think it’s an interesting concept sociopaths don’t have, other people do have.

Francis: One of the key things we’ve been talking about is, what are the things that are blocking our progress toward a more utopian society, and this idea that people can’t coexist or that people should persuade each other to be more like them, are not really true, and huge impediments…so, I’ve been liking the metaphor of the mosaic, and you know, like, when you talk about neuro-diversity, what’s great about that is you, you’re saying like on a biological level we’re even different. But that’s fine, and people will have strengths in ways that you might not, because they are different. And this idea that we’re all the same, or that we’re all capable of fitting into this monoculture and being happy, is absurd. And once you move past that, and say OK, the reality is we are different from each other and that’s cool…you know, like it kind of opens it up to not be intimidated and appalled by differences in the way that those people that used to pick on us and beat us, you know, want to beat us up, Where they saw us as a challenge to their own identity, as opposed to saying, wow, you know, that guy is onto something really creative, and you know, I would never in a million years feel comfortable walking down the street dressed like that but I’m really happy there’s someone who does, something like that, you know? But for some reason, it was seen instead as a challenge, and that’s I think one of the important things that we have to get rid of. And you know, this idea that we can’t accept certain types of people is problematic. You know, there wil be people who may be, initally at least in a more utopian direction, identify themselves as like, you know, Aryan-ness or whatever. But I think ultimately, once you take away the dangerousness or the anti-social-ness of it, a lot of them might lose interest in being Nazis. Or maybe they won’t, who cares, you know? If somebody wants to go live with their own race, I don’t think anybody has a right to say you can’t do that. And one of the failings of the left, I think, is that they are so black and white about things that when it comes to people having freedom of choice, it just even can’t happen, because there’s all these rules of what’s right and wrong in a politically correct context.

M.E. Yeah, I agree. this is kind of an interesting story, right. So when the book comes out, I quickly get outed as a sociopath by some of my law students. And it gets on this legal gossip blog, and I start getting phone calls, I start getting emails from people who are finding this out. And some of them are really positive and nice, you know, and I still think these people are great people and I really respect them.

Chris: I think anyone who spends the time to actually read your book is going to have a much more positive view of you as a sociopath than somebody who didn’t. I think the book really answers a whole lot of questions, just the average man on the street wouldn’t think, had he not read the book.

M.E. Yeah.I hoped that that was true, and I think it is true for a large proportion of people, but I think there’s still more than I thought, there was still a proportion of people who, for whatever reason—and you know, confirmation bias we know, if you have a previous belief it’s really hard to let go of that belief. Certain types of people are more open than others, certain types of people hold more rigidly to their previously conceived beliefs than others, for various reasons or in various contexts. And so there was kind of a negative reaction. But I had kind of hedged my bets a little bit with this, you know I was a law professor, wanted to stay a law professor. Was hoping I would stay a law professor—the end of the story is, no, I did not stay a law professor, right. So that kind of, uh, clues you in to how people ultimately reacted. But one of the schools I taught at was in San Francisco, I was there as a visiting professor, and I intentionally chose to visit there, because I thought, well in hedging my bets, you know if I have connections with more law schools where they know me personally, there’s a greater chance for instance that this school would end up hiring me even after the book was done, And I thought, San Francisco, liberal San Francisco, right? They’ll for sure be able to look at this and think, hey, you know this person is a…you know, neuro-diversity, we’re pro-diversity and we’re pro- people being able to be the people that they were born as, right? You know, we’re willing to support that, I thought that was maybe going to happen. But they had the worst reaction of everybody…they banned me from the campus, they not only banned me from the campus, they banned me from being a thousand yards from the campus. It was like the entire downtown San Francisco area they allegedly banned me from and said that they would call the police if I, you know, crossed that boundary. Of course that’s not legal. There’s nothing legal or right or rational about it. If you read the email they sent me, it was just such an irrational kind of knee-jerk reaction, which was just kind of like, sociopath=bad for whatever reason.I’m not sure what their sort of reason is, but there was something triggering about the very fact that I was, like, a sociopath that they just found so unpalatable, not just unpalatable, but dangerous, you know, unpredictable, who knows what it was. They went to the extent of violating so many of my civil rights, or at least purporting to violate my civil rights, for just having a published this particular book. It’s a really interesting reaction, and it’s one, I don’t think it’s indicative of all kind of reactions, or like a liberal progressive thing. When I think about—and it is true, you know, politics, like both parties seem very black-and-white thinking, in kind of unpredictable ways for me, I guess that’s why I’m a libertarian is, because I don’t understand how you can have a certain stance on the death penalty and abortion, for instance. (laughs) Which both parties have, which seem to contradict each other, a little bit, right? So these sorts of reactions, you know, the reaction that these people had, like why is it so threatening to them that I’m a sociopath? I don’t have a criminal record, I have no history, past history of violence, and to have that sort of reaction where you’re just like, you know, I can’t even stand to be around you. I said, OK, I’ll just come pick up my things or something. They said no, we will mail you your things. It was that bad. And I was like, OK, well I still need to like grade my finals, and they’re like, you’re gonna need to do that, you know, a thousand yards away from campus, you know, never come back sort of thing. And I….I even said, you know, I feel like you’re having an overreaction, they were like, no, we have thought about this a lot, you know, we’ve considered it. So it’s an interesting thing, in this world in which we allow for neuro-diversity, would that be something that is acceptable to do? They have a fear, and that’s what I kind of understood. You know, they have a—I don’t think I’ll say, legitimate, they had a legitimate fear in the sense that it was an authentic fear. They were feeling fear. They had like an actual sense of fear, but it was an unjustified sense of fear, right? Same with these people with the identity. They have a hurt, you know, they feel personally offended, but is it like a feeling of personal offense that we can kind of get behind and say, OK, you know, we’re going to allow you to feel personally offended and act however you want. Hit a Nazi. It’s fine to have the feeling, I guess, but then the action cannot be to infringe on people’s identity…er, I’m sorry, sense of agency. Even if it is, you know, you have that fear, you have that hurt, you have these various feelings.

Chris: So I was just sort of wondering how you felt neuro-diversity might fit in with diversity in general, because people with disabilities are the only minority who intersects with every other minority, and is also oppressed by every other minority.

M.E. Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, it’s interesting, I didn’t even think about it, but it’s like, even within neuro-diversity, people who say that they’re pro-neuro-diversity, they don’t like sociopaths. You know, it’s fine if you’re austistic—you know, in fact I have a Downs Syndrome uncle, I write a little bit about him in the book, he has violent tendencies that were so severe that he could no longer stay with my aunt, who was his caretaker. He had to go to an institution basically. And do I think that people with Deans Syndrome are all violent? No. But do I think that violence manifests itself in a way that’s kind of different to him, you know, with Downs Syndrome? Yeah, because we can’t call the cops, we can’t throw him in prison, we don’t have, kind of, these avenues that we have with people who, who don’t kind of have disabilities. I just think it’s a really interesting way to treat people. Like there are true differences in the way that we treat people—I think it’s great that we’re not throwing him in prison, but I think it’s also weird that we throw people in prison who are sociopaths, then, right? Because they also have unique kind of issues; they don’t respond well to punishment, just like my Downs Syndrome uncle. I think it’s so great that people have become so, kind of open minded about children with autism now, right? I think it’s great for the children, I think it’s great because it was like, kind of a kicking a wall, you know, to try to force these kids to behave like normal kids, and for what reason? You know, who is it benefitting? To try to get them to kind of conform to these, like, ideas of what a good kid should be in a educational setting, 32.5 kids per class or whatever, and they’re all sitting there with their workbooks. You know it’s such, so weird how we’ve gotten rigid about these ideas, but it…yeah, I find it…hmm…a little appalling that the same people who promote neuro-diversity in one area, and seem to be so, kind of, accepting and willing to accept, are the same people who are banning me from campus, a thousand yards from being on campus. It’s such an overreaction to me.

Francis: That kind of awareness issue, don’t you think?

M.E. If I thought—and this is kind of a little bit of jaded—part of my legal research was actually in information sharing, and misinformation, right? And what we can do about, kind of, free speech issues, you know, like what does the law have to do with free speech and do we really think that there’s a marketplace, a functioning marketplace of ideas, such that good ideas survive and bad ideas eventually kind of die out. And I think, you know, in the past five to seven, ten years, we’ve seen a lot of social behavior that suggests that our previous conceptions that people are really looking for truth and for facts—they’re not completely false, you know, like I think people still prefer the truth generally speaking, but there are situations in which they don’t. So it’s a misinformation thing, but I think there’s something else underlying their…reluctance to give the same kind of neuro-diversity privileges to other people. I’m really interested, I don’t have like an answer on it, but I think it is an issue when I was so interested in this concept of trying to make a better society and kind of, what would it look like? Of a utopian society and, uh, kind of the science behind it. Are there impediments to that—scientific, psychological, resource, economics, to having this kind of utopian society, and I immediately started thinking of these, because it’s been something that I have grown up all my life seeing, kind of the back side, the hypocrisy, of empathy. You know, the hypocrisy of compassion, right? The hypocrisy of these, you know, like these good feelings, kind of tribalism, you know, the negatives. Even before other people saw it, I saw it. Mob mentality has been, like, my constant fear, you know the idea that—and we know that it happens, you know, it happens to normal people, where they all just happen to gang up.

Francis: Well, I consider myself highly empathetic, and I would consider mob mentality one particular expression of empathy. I don’t think you’d have mob otherwise.

M.E. Yeah. (laugh) I agree, but I want to hear your ideas on it. Like go ahead and explain it.

Francis: Well, the thing is, empathy connects people. It makes you feel their feelings, but empathy is also sort of like an on-off switch. And if you can identify an idea of different people as “other,” then you can feel empathy towards your tribe and then no empathy at all, if anything like the opposite, towards them. You know, which is why in every war, they try to like de-humanize them, make the enemy seem like they’re really different on some fundamental level. And, you know, what they’ll do is they’ll whip up the empathy like they did in the lead up to the Iraq wars, where, you know just saturated you with the 9-11 stuff and the personal stories of how these horrible terrorists who like, they hate freedom, they want to do this, they attacked our homeland—and it’s like an empathetic response towards the people that were suffering on such a intense degree, that raises that mob mentality, where they “yeah, let’s kill ‘em!” You know? But I think if you didn’t have empathy at all, that wouldn’t be possible, because you’d be like, rational, and you’d be like, um…you know, you’re not subject to that same level of mob and tribalness.

M.E. Yeah. You know, I’ll take it one step further, I think it’s like not just empathy maybe, although I think it has a role, and say it’s also this, this kind of sense of identity. Because you think, would a mercenary fight as well as somebody who’s a true believer? You know, we see true believers doing outrageous things, you know, horrible things, 9-11, for instance. Right? Because they identify so strongly, they think this is like the absolute truth, and I’m going to impose this truth on everybody. You know, the infidels, the non-believers, they have to hear this message and the best way to reach them, I guess, is to kill them—that’s kind of the attitude. We used to think of that attitude as being associated mostly with extremists and terrorists, but now we’re like out there punching Nazis, right? I think Antifa is one of the most terroristic organizations that we have operating in the United States. But I don’t think it’s condemned often enough, to like go out there are commit violence against people who have opposing viewpoints to yours?

Chris: I don’t think Antifa has enough power or actual organizational capabilities to be a real threat.

M.E. I hope that’s true. (laugh)

Chris: I think they’re a bunch of kids who show up looking for a fight, and…we had that back in the 60s with the counter-revolutionaries showing up to start violence and…you know, I think they’re just troublemakers.

M.E. Hmm. I hope.

Francis: As Joe Strummer once said, they’re kind of Stalinist, maybe.

M.E. Stalinists in what way?

Francis: In the sense that, like, they, they act like they’re for the people and for like these higher values, but they’ll like squash you if you think differently.

M.E. Right, exactly. You know, I have a little brother who is solidly hipster Millennial, and I kind of use him as, you know, keep my fingers on the pulse (laugh) of that type of generational, like…he’s socialist, you know, he loves Bernie Sanders, the…kind of, this type of thinking, right? Which I don’t think is necessarily bad, it’s just like there’s a particular type of group of people that I think are associated with those kind of beliefs. And I think they’re sympathetic to Antifa, I think these younger people are kind of like…you know, I keep repeating it, but it’s like the “ends justify the means,” this concept of, we’re in this fight, good and evil, and we are on the side of good, and the people who disagree with us are necessarily evil.

Chris: I don’t trust Bernie Sanders, ‘cause he reminds me too much of myself. He’s an old man with messy hair who talks about things he can’t deliver.

M.E. Um-hm. (laughs)

Francis: I think the, the reason why people do find some sort of inspiration in Antifa is that, you know, there’s been this like, mechanism that’s been going on for a long time where the right wing are like street fighters, like they just want to win, they don’t give a fuck how they’ll go about it, if they win, they win. The left is like, you know we have to be democratic, reach across the aisle, and provide like persuasive arguments and data, and all this stuff, and when it gets down to the fight, they get their asses kicked, because, I mean, they’re bound in a way that people who are like street fighters are not bound. It seems like there are people who are willing to have the strength of their convictions enough to really fight for them. I’m not saying that that’s a good thing necessarily in this situation, but I also think there is a frustration amongst people on the left that, they’re just getting steamrolled.

M.E. Yeah. I see that, I see kind of why they feel that way, you know I don’t think it’s completely irrational, but I, I guess I disagree with that kind of attitude that they’re gettting steamrolled. They kind of, and this is..it’s, again, I think it’s this idea of identity and maybe identity politics, now that we’re talking about politics, is that any kind of—if you have such a strong belief that, you know, the people that oppose you, you know, it’s almost like a zero-sum game. You know, any gains that the right makes, you know, makes the left feel like they’re getting steamrolled, and I’m thinking, you know, not really. You know, what happened to, like, compromises and concessions, like most people would think of that as being pretty weak now. And they’re so sick of the compromises and concessions, that they think that they’re constantly getting ripped off. Whereas the left, they’ve had control of the Supreme Court basically since the Warren Court, right? Roe v. Wade and they’ve maintained that for decades and decades, right? Now they’re upset at the thought of that ending. They don’t kind of see that they’ve had their way, essentially, for the past, what is it, like four or five decades, starting with Brown vs. Board of Education. I think, controversially, and you can, controversially I say, but you can find Ginsberg also saying similar sorts of things about some of these cases, these big cases that even, you know, people who haven’t gone to law school know about. Some of the ways that the Supreme Court kind of justified—they’re not good methods. They broke particular judicial norms, you know, which is something we keep hearing about, you know, we’re breaking these norms, and it’s again kind of like the ends justify the means, right? Like we’ll be a little bit underhanded about the way that we go about kind of getting this result, because we’re so in…we’re so interested in the result. And I don’t think that that can happen ever. My kind of—and this is kind of a Stoic philosophy, too—is that it always has to be process-oriented, it can’t be result-oriented. Because if it’s result-oriented, then it really does turn into this kind of like zero-sum game. You can’t reach across the aisle if you want something and they want something else, you know, it always has to be a compromise. There can’t ever be, like, well let’s think about ways that we can like engage in this process and get someplace that, you know, neither one of us can even see right now. But it’s gonna be ultimately a better place than the current vision that we both have. Does that kind of make sense?

Francis: Yeah. And you know it’s a little bit dualistic to, to me in my mind, like we’re…we’re trying to come up with the uptopia where everybody gets to decide who they are, everybody respects everybody’s personal decision on who they are, and we have a society that it gives them the resources to actualize that life in a really exciting, fulfilling way. Or, you have this idea that, you know, it’s my way or your way, and it can’t be both ways. And actually, in reality, it can be both ways a lot of the time. And that’s why our system is failing I think.

M.E. Yeah. This idea of, just, coexisting seems to be kind of getting pushed out the window, there’s—I don’t know why, is it social media? We’re like, we can’t stand, you know, the cousin on Facebook or whatever who has different political beliefs than us, or something, and so people are just getting so incensed about it. They’re getting outraged, you know, we’re being steamrolled, where all it is is just (laugh) it’s just kind of like the natural shifts of power. I guess I just don’t see where anybody’s getting steamrolled, but both parties think that they are, because in the zero sum game, any time that the left wins, the right loses. Any time the right wins, the left loses. That’s kind of the attitude that people have. There’s no longer this idea of, like, hey we have a Constitutional Republic democracy, and this is the process, and if you didn’t like the result this time, then we have particular institutions that have been around for centuries, you know, that you can use and work within those institutions to enact the change. Now people are talking about, uou know, again, my little brother, who I think is a good indicator, kind of barometer of the way people are thinking, has just like, he thinks that the government is essentially useless Constitution garbage, you know, because it doesn’t lead to the result he wants. And that’s kind of, the mentality you have seen increase everywhere, where people are thinking constantly about the ends, they’re no longer thinking about means that we have been talking about. You know, how can you live a meaningful life, how can you live a life of fulfillment and purpose, and not have it being impeded by others. You know, like not have other people be offended by the fact that…

Francis: ..Or anyone’s business…

M.E. Yeah. It’s not anyone’s business. But people have made it their business, it’s gotten so popular, I think, in the past decade, to make everybody’s business your business. And I just don’t understand why.

Chris: Well, and we also live in a world where privacy no longer exists, I mean, you tried to publish a book anonymously, and how quickly were you discovered?

M.E. 24 hours (laugh), 48 hours…yeah. Definitely that same week.

Francis: Maybe what the college was angry about was that you didn’t abide by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.

M.E. Mmm. Do you think there is, like, still “don’t ask, don’t tell” for that sort of stuff?

Francis: Well, there’s so little awareness about it, first of all. I don’t think the true nature of the heterogeneity of human minds, of psychology, has been brought to the attention of people in general. When you’re talking about people maybe that don’t have a lot of empathy, and you know there’s always a whole spectrum to everything. My yoga teacher recently, and if you’re listening, my apologies if I’m bringing you up without asking, but, she was talking about how she works with people who are dying. She helps them with the death process, she calls it a “death dula.” And I said to her, you know, “how are you on the empathy scale? Do you have a lot of empathy, or not too much?” And she said, “ah, I don’t really have much empathy.” I said, “I guess you’re probably libertarian, right?” And she said “yup.” (laugh) But here is a woman who does, like she’s such a, like, angel, kind of, you know? Like she’s doing this job that I could not do, because I have so much empathy, I would make these people feel horrible about the fact they’re dying. She can be emotionally detached and actually do the job properly, you know. You’re like a trailblazer that you even wrote this book and got people thinking about this stuff and opened the conversation, but you just opened it as far as I can see. And it definitely, in my mind, impacts a lot on the idea of neuro-diversity and that sort of stuff, but I also feel like it’s also really, it’s beginning. You know, it’s like a nascent kind direction that we’re going in, a movement where we’re going to find that different people have different aspects of personality that we have pathologicized. You know, we take like extreme examples of it sometimes, and turn it into a disorder. But you know, it’s a spectrum. You know, like I think people don’t understand, you know like you have all these primary colors that we’re figuring out now psychologically, but you know like people don’t, I don’t think, really understand what all that means, and what’s there. And honestly, even people like me who’ve been studying this stuff and trying to like really wrap my brain around and figure out how to use this to make society better, I feel like it’s still very new, to me, the cutting edge of human consciousness in some ways.

M.E. I hope. You know, I hope that this is, this is happening. I think people are becoming more aware. I think that, again, kind of—this has been the theme of at least my comments—the impediment I can kind of see to people being more open about the possibility that other people are living equally valid lives, even though they’re making very different choices, is this concept of identity. Can you believe, for instance, can I believe that my religion has truth to it without necessarily thinking that other people’s beliefs are wrong? Can I think that one way is a good way without thinking that other peoples’ ways are bad? I think there’s kind of like a, just like a…a broadening of your perspective that needs to happen a little bit more before we’ll get to that place where society is really capable of having that degree of acceptance for neuro-diversity. It reminds me, I follow on Instagram, I think it’s called “medicalpedia” and it has a…I don’t know why I follow it, it has like all these gruesome, you know, photos. Somebody, you know, got their foot cut off in a motorcycle accident, right? And it will show–I think it’s for medical students, but it’s really interesting, I think to learn so much about the human body and the way that it’s connected by seeing it in these kind of distressed ways. And I recently saw a picture of, there was a homeless man who got brought into the hospital, and he was complaining of having a lack of sensation in his feet, and he’s also diabetic, right? And they’re taking off this sock, and underneath the sock—yeah, you can look this up—are hundreds of maggots, and I was like “what!” Like as they’re peeling away this sock, there’s just these maggots, like falling off the sock, I mean literally, like his foot is covered with maggots. And you start seeing the maggots start coming out from under the skin, you know, and you’re like, how can somebody let it get this far? I’m sorry I’m not able to attribute the source on this one, I recently read this article, this comment about this guy talking about homeless people, and his comment was basically that if you don’t understand other people’s choices, right, if somebody’s choice seems so kind of stupid and wrong to you, then you really don’t understand the full background of their situation, their environment, why they’re making that particular choice. Like if we could get to the place where, instead of just decrying everybody’s choices as being wrong, where we would try to understand why is it that you’re making this choice? You know, why did you let it get this far? What are the kind of influences that lead you to believe this politically, you know, why is it that you have this particular emotional reaction to things? If we really tried to kind of understand why, then I think we would, we’d be able to understand better how everybody has good in their choices, you know, everybody is kind of doing the best that they can, and that there really is an ethical, kind of ultimate good in allowing people to have the autonomy to live their own lives, make their choices, that there’s value in that and we don’t have to have everybody look and act and be the same.

Chris: I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t really like labels like “left” or “right” or Democrat-Republican, blue-red, or whatever; because I think it creates a false dichotomy, and I think people have embraced that false dichotomy. I mean, I think we probably, as Americans, you know, Trump supporters and Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters, probably agree on 90% of stuff, if you asked them as individuals. And yet we join these teams, or become members of these tribes, and all of a sudden, as you were referring to earlier, it becomes a black and white, win or lose, situation.

M.E. Heh. Yeah, and it is kind of weird. Let’s say I like the Steelers so much, let’s say I like a particular member on the Steelers. In two years he’s going to be playing for, like, the Chargers or something. You know, it’s so weird that we’re kind of this way, we’re so rigid, in thinking that this moment in time is going to stay this way. You know, the Republican party is always going to be like this, the Democrat party is always going to be like this. Whenever there’s a new movement, right, we’re like, whoaoh! You know, this is shaking things up so much, and how are we going to kind of like live—I think it really just illustrates the falseness of the labeling. Right? That there isn’t so much a dichotomy as we thought before, even if there are things that are dichotomous, we’re not necessarily perceiving them correctly, they’re going to shift, possibly, and having more of this openness to the way that we understand labels. I went to Cambodia—when did I go? like 2010 or something—and at the time I had travelled kind a lot of places, but still, out of all the places I’ve travelled, it seems like the people were…and you know, I understand, I was only there for a few days, it’s hard to get an impression, but my impression of them was that they were very happy.. They were very happy, very kind of, um…content. And it was also one of the poorest places I have ever been. You know, so poor that I realized by the second day, when I saw like a little piece of plastic wrapper out in kind of these rice patty villages, I was so surprised to see it, and I was like, why am I so surprised to see this candy wrapper? And it’s because I hadn’t seen any plastic waste or any waste at all in the past, you know, 24 hours, right? So super, super poor, even compared to other SouthEast Asian countries. I kind of wondered why they’re so poor, and I thought maybe it has to do with, you know, Pol Pot and the killing fields and they had that civil war for so long that they were just sick of the violence, they had, you know, a similar sort of situation, one people trying to impose on the other types, and the types are fighting and they both think that they’re justified, and they’re willing to, you know, use violence to impose their beliefs and their worldview on other people, that can’t stand the fact that there are other people different from them. You know, very similar kind of story that seems to be behind so much conflict in the world. But after decades of this, and I think 20% of the Cambodian population was killed? And still now it has one of the highest amputee rates, right? Because they land-mined the entire country, basically. In fact, like you can still…I forget what the rates are, it’s like a thousand people a year die from land mines, and then many more end up maimed or otherwise hurt. There are like, you know, certain places are just unoccupied because of land mines, there’s like 10,000 landmines or unexploded ordnances. But they’re just sick of it, right? And so maybe that will happen to us, too. Maybe we’ll be like, you know, shaming each other, playing the zero-sum political game, until like we get to the point where we realize from personal experience, you know, decades later, that it was a terrible way to govern a country, it was a terrible way to relate to our fellow humans, and that there was just such waste. You know, human, human waste or otherwise, that we’ll just learn. You know, we’ll learn even though we have the capacity to do this particular thing, we’re not going to do. Similar thing with World War I, World War II.

Francis: That’s such a great thought. Before we end, I would like you, if you can, to maybe talk a little bit about what you’re working on now. You’re researching a book, right?

M.E. So I, I’ve started writing a second book, probably in the last year or so. The reason why I started thinking about it is, you know, I’ve learned a lot since the last book was published, I guess 2013, so almost six years ago, in May. Since then, I’ve gone to a therapist, I’ve learned some other things, and so I kind of thought, you know, I have…I have some more things to share. And so I wanted to share it with people, and there was this…young man, he’s in his mid-20s in Australia, and he wanted to join the Australian version of like, essentially the Seals, their Navy special forces. But he wasn’t allowed into the military, because during his college era, somehow he had gotten the diagnosis. He was seeing a therapist. The therapist never told him what the diagnosis was, but it was in his medical records, and so when went to go to apply to join the Navy, they saw that and said, you know, you’re not getting in. And he was like, “M.E., now what? Now that I have this diagnosis, I just found about it last month, and it’s ruined my dreams of what I wanted to do as a career”…You know, he was like a semi-professional swimmer, so it was definitely what he wanted to do. And I thought, this is the perfect question that I feel like I can kind of help answer. And I think I had a little bit of hubris, too, when I started, I’ll go down and meet him, and I’ll try to meet some other, kind of, sociopathic minded people, and try to kind of start sharing my ideas about things. And I..I still do think I have like, some insight that does help them, and I do try to help them. I’ve been, now, I don’t know, like ten different countries or something, I’ve been traveling the world this past year, meeting these people and other people who aren’t necessarily sociopathic minded but are interested, or have similar experiences, you know, are interested in neuro-diversity, or have friends, relatives, who are sociopathic minded. And I’ve since learned a lot, and I guess I’ve learned even more than, you know, thinking I have the right answers. And I guess talking to you today, this may explain a little bit of the background of why I think it’s so important to hold your beliefs lightly, gently, and keep and open mind, is that everybody has such different experiences. You know, the British sociopaths are different than the French ones, are different than the Russian ones, are different than the Australian ones…and it’s not even just their nationality, obviously, that’s different. It’s just everybody is so different, and things manifest themselves in such different ways for different people, and the answer that’s right for me is not necessarily going to be the answer, or the solution, for somebody else. So I guess even within the sociopathic community, I’ve learned to understand and respect that a little bit better, and understand that everybody essentially has to just make their own way, and that there are certain things that are more true than others, or will tend to be true is more situations than others, but I think when you take anything to an extreme, you’re gonna end up in a bad place. That’s true of virtues, they can become vices, and I think that’s even true of “truth,” that you can distort truth by taking it to an extreme. So, I guess I just think more in terms of everybody is different, there’s such a huge diversity of people, even amongst the sociopathic community, things that work for us, things that seem right for us, maybe aren’t going to be necessarily so for other people, and to just kind of be OK with that.

Chris: And with that said, what makes you optimistic about the future? I mean, I don’t think you’d be out there writing books and doing the activism you are if you’re optimistic at least at some level.

M.E. Mmh. That’s so true. It is so true, I really am optimistic about the future. I think one thing that makes me optimistic is that I, myself, have changed, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever been really kind of rigid about beliefs, even though I write the book, you know, the first book is just kind of a snapshot of what life was like, and a lot of it was, by the time I even was writing it, it wasn’t stuff that I was necessarily, you know, still engaging it. I guess (laughs) some of the more childish things, you know, or some of the more immature things, by the time I wrote it, they were mostly in my past. And things have changed similarly, like with therapy, other things that I’ve been doing, you know, relationships that I’ve had with other people—I just see things as being, like, this journey of change. I have seen change in my own life, I’ve gotten to happier places in my own life, and so I…just, I guess I believe in the power of change? Self-willed change, and I think I believe in the, I guess, the divinity of the human condition. You know, I believe in the, the potential that humans have to do really great, good things, and to have very deep, meaningful, lives, live lives of meaning, and to understand that they have quite a bit of power. Everybody has power. Sociopaths are more aware and thinking about power every day, but everybody has power to understand, you have the power to do of great good, and great evil. Which is why, you know, even if you’re just kind of shooting off a tweet, or shooting off a Facebook post, to kind of be more considerate and aware of the sorts of effects that that may have on people, to be more considerate and aware of the way your actions affect others, and this kind of getting to this concept of treating everybody as being equally, I guess, sacred. You know, and not interfering with their own ability to change and to…make their choices freely and uninhibited by…your own issues and hangups and your own feelings about what they’re getting up to.

Chris: Well, thank you, M.E. Thomas, for joining us on Making Better.

M.E. Thanks so much, Chris.

Francis: Yeah, Thank you very much.

M.E. Thank you, Francis.

—end

Making Better Episode 4: Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman leads the Free Software Movement, which shows how the usual non-free software subjects users to the unjust power of its developers, plus their spying and manipulation, and campaigns to replace it with free (freedom-respecting) software.
Born in 1953, Stallman graduated Harvard in 1974 in physics. He worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab from 1971 to 1984, developing system software including the first extensible text editor Emacs (1976), plus the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also nown as truth maintenance (1975).
In 1983 Stallman launched the Free Software Movement by announcing the project to develop the GNU operating system, planned to consist entirely of free software. Stallman began working on GNU on January 5, 1984, resigning from MIT employment in order to do so. In October 1985 he established the Free Software Foundation, of which he is president as a full-time volunteer.
Stallman invented the concept of copyleft, “Change it and redistribute it but don’t strip off this freedom,” and wrote (with lawyers) the GNU General Public License, which implements copyleft. This inspired Creative Commons.
Stallman personally developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system: the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various others.
The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also contains the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, is used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers. Alas, people often call the system “Linux”, giving the GNU Project none of the credit.
Their versions of GNU/Linux often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important, and even include nonfree software in those systems.
Nowadays, Stallman focuses on political advocacy for free software and its ethical ideas. He spends most of the year travelling to speak on topics such as “Free Software And Your Freedom” and “Copyright vs Community in the Age of the Computer Networks”. Another topic is “A Free Digital Society”, which treats several different threats to the freedom of computer users today.
In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through inviting the public to contribute articles. This idea helped inspire Wikipedia.
Stallman is officially a Visiting Scientist at MIT.
Free Software, Free Society is Stallman’s book of essays. His semiautobiography, Free as in Freedom, provides further biographical information.
He has received the following awards:
• 1986: Honorary life time membership in the Chalmers Computer Society
• 1990: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
• 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award “For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros).”
• 1996: Doctorate honoris causa from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology
• 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award
• 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
• 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being
• 2001: Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Glasgow
• 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership
• 2003: Doctorate honoris causa from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
• 2003: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú
• 2004: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina
• 2004: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Tecnológica del Perú
• 2005: Fondazione Pistoletto prize
• 2007: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in Peru
• 2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre
• 2007: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote, in Peru
• 2007: Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Pavia
• 2008: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru
• 2009: Doctor of Science honoris causa from Lakehead University in Canada
• 2011: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Argentina
• 2012: Honorary professorship from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru
• 2012: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru
• 2012: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrión, in Peru
• 2013: Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame
• 2014: Doctorate honoris causa from Concordia University in Canada
• 2015: Doctorate honoris causa from Universidad las Américas in Peru.
• 2016: The Association for Computing Machinery’s Software and Systems Award for development of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Click here to read a full biography of Richard Stallman. Click here to read a full transcript of this episode.