Was I prepared for the entertainment industry? No! I was called the "sickly scientist" when I was a little kid. I was shunned by every human being around me. I was busy working with a professional microscope when I was in the 7th grade. I was the pale kid who isolated himself in his room with 50 animals. Lab rats that kept multiplying, Guinea pigs that kept multiplying, guppies, lizards that I raised from eggs. I lived in this little environment, as sealed off as if it were a sealed off capsule traveling through outer space on itss way to another galaxy.

RM: When I look at your present surroundings, with all these computer screens, TVs and phone lines around you . . .

HB: They're my windows on the world . . .

RM: Your illness put you back in that capsule hasn't it?

HB: Which has given me a totally different perspective. It's outsiders that, as Thomas Kuhn will tell you in his theory of scientific revolutions, it's outsiders who perceive the big picture in a way that no one else could see it. Like Erwin Schrodinger in his book, What is Life? He was a physicist and he came up with this seminal book that started all the modern biology we know, right down to genetics. Hid did it about 40 years ago or so. He was a total outsider. Outsiders can see what insiders cannot see. Being an outsider is an incredibly lonely proposition--I tried to kill myself 2 weeks ago--that's how lonely it gets, but it is an incredibly fruitful proposition, because of what you can see.

RM: That reminds me of something you'd said last week about the Jewish tradition of prophets who stand at the gates in rags, utterly socially unacceptable, like Isaiah shouting at the gates of the city, this outsider who can shake the walls and the people inside because he is armed with truth, with the "truth." Why is the Jewish rebel philosopher such an important intellectual archetype?

HB: Well, it's the same thing. We're always outsiders. We are always outsiders no matter how assimilated we are.

RM: But why does the tribe still cohere? Why is it even still identifiable?

HB: Because we know damn well that whether we identify ourselves as Jews or not, whether you're an atheist like I am, even people like me who are thoroughly assimilated and . . . hey Western culture is my culture, we are still outsiders. If a Hitler comes along--and a Hitler comes around every few hundred years for us--he doesn't give a damn if we identify ourselves as Jews or not. There have been versions of the ovens when the Babylonians threw us out of Jerusalem, when the Assyrians threw us out of Jerusalem, when the Persians under Haman wanted to hang 70,000 of us, there are Hamans right now all over the Islamic world, a world of a billion people, who are busy reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's one of the most popular books they sell there. They have books in Iran with titles like "Would You Rather Have Bedbugs or Jews?" and "Get Rid of the Jews."

RM: Let me ask you this, using your theories about "super organisms" as the filter, why is anti-Semitism seemingly a ubiquitous component of the Arab superorganism? Is it in the Arab DNA?

HB: It isn't the DNA, okay? And it's an Islamic thing, not an Arab thing. I wrote about this in The Global Brain. It says basically that those groups which are the most similar to each other are the ones that fight the most. Why? Because this is what creates the kind of differentiation that drives evolution. Jews and Arabs are brothers.

Here's an example, when I was in Hanover, Germany, I was there for meetings, it's a wonderful place, very democratic, a great place to walk around. Lovely. But after 2 days I realized, "Hey, there's nobody here with dark, curly hair. I'm the only one with dark, curly hair in this whole city. What's going on here?" and then I realized they killed off all the people with dark curly hair! I'm the only one!

And then I got on a plane and my flight had a layover in Frankfurt, and there I suddenly saw this mob of people with dark curly hair. Now after you've been isolated from people who look like you for several days, this is an experience that is utterly unreal. And who are these people? They are Jordanian guest workers, these are the people who want to exterminate me. These are my brethren. These are the people who carry my genes! These are my brothers and the greatest battles of all are between brothers.

Why? Because that is how the separations are formed which create new groups and generate new ideas that are thrown into the vast melting pot of ideas from which draws its new creations. Islam, according to Paul Johnson, the historian, is a Jewish heresy and so is Christianity. Who hates Jews more than Christians and Islamics? It's because we are brothers!

RM: So Cain and Abel is true?

HB: Yes. Metaphorically Cain and Abel is absolutely true. Cain had one way of life--hunting. Abel had another way of life--agriculture. The agriculturist killed off his brother and attempted to obliterate one alternative from the group mind--the hunter-gather way of life.

The weird thing is that in Japan, which has never had any Jews, anti-Semitic books sell in the millions. In the millions.

RM: It's true. I have a lot of Japanese friends, very close friends, and every once in a while, one of the most far out and forward thinking members of this, you know, elite, elite Japanese in-crowd, will say something to me that I find so gauche and unthinkable and then it forces me to recalibrate and then I realize "Oh, this is the way it is there." The thing that clued me in was how casually it was dropped into the conversation.

HB: Well, you know Japanese racism is just astonishing . . .

RM: Especially against Koreans.