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Howard Bloom ran the most successful rock 'n' roll and pop PR firm in the 1970s and 80s. His client list was hundreds of names long and included the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, AC/DC, KISS, Queen, Aerosmith, Joan Jett, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, and hundreds more.
I was introduce to Howard by my friend John Giuffre who asked if I'd be interested in interviewing him after listening to the first episode of this show with Mike Hill. Normally, when someone tells me that they know someone I should interview, my guard goes up instantly. I've always been selective with the interviews I do, even more so now. The goal with The Jacob Kelly Interview Series is to be incredibly proud and excited of each and every interview I do. There will be no interviews done on this show just for the sake of it.
So when John said he had someone I should interview my brain instantly started running through my stock answers to get out of this situation. But after John told me who Howard was and why I specifically would be a good person to interview him, I was in. John only recommended Howard after getting to know me, what I'm interested in, the goals of this show, and listening to some of my other interviews. I wanted to publicly give John my thanks for being one of the view people to be this considerate when recommending a guest.
Once I booked my interview with Howard I spent two weeks reading his book: Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, taking copious amounts of notes in preparation for the interview.
There's a couple of things that I did differently with this interview that started in the prep process. For the first time ever, I removed large chunks of my notes. I had tons of different topics and tangents to ask Howard about but I'm working on making my interviews more focused, to give them a consistent arc and not just a bunch of random questions. In doing so, I set the A-story, and B-story for this interview in advance and removed every other piece of notes that didn't fit, no matter how good they were (I had a whole section on subcultures I hope to ask Howard about in a future interview one day). The focus for this interview that I had written down was "How to Build Stars in the 1980s and How to Build Stars Today". We didn't get through nearly as much as I wanted to do but I have lots of info ready for another interview.
The second thing I did was to take notes throughout the interview. We recorded this interview using Riverside (also my first time using Riverside - shout out to my friend Danny Desatnik for letting me use his) and I recently got a Remarkable II tablet and thought I'd try taking notes of interesting things Howard said throughout the interview. I find it easier to keep follow up questions top of mind while also actively listening to the guest during in-person interviews as opposed to remote ones. Taking notes during this interview allows me to quickly jot down interesting follow up questions and then turn my attention back to the guest. Overall, this helped me ask more relevant follow up questions throughout this interview and is something I plan to continue for future remote interviews.
The last new thing I did has nothing to do with the interview itself but with how I presented the interview on YouTube. For the last couple of interviews I've cut them down to 6-20 minutes long, and reordering questions to create a more satisfying narrative. This resulted in one of my interviews becoming the second most viewed interview I've ever released. With this interview, instead of just cutting down the length, I removed my questions and instead layered in talking head videos of me providing additional context. The end product is a cross between an interview and a video essay. If you'd like to watch that, it's available here.
Howard is an interesting guy with long, tangential answers, sometimes I wasn’t entirely sure where his answers were going but he always found a way to bring them back to my original question. This made it tough for me as an interviewer because you’re supposed to cut your guests off (in a polite way) when it feels like they’re losing the thread. But with Howard eventually bringing it back to the original question I didn’t want to cut him off because that would leave open loops. So for the first question of this interview I let him speak for 20 minutes without interruption.
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Howard, the first question I have for you today is, I was wondering if you could explain “The Gods Within”, because I feel like that will be an under-arching theme throughout our entire conversation.
Well, you know, the human brain is very strange, and we're born with twice as many brain cells as we need. The first job, once you emerge from the womb, is paring away the neurons that you won't need and focusing on the neurons that seem to help you in your current environment. One of the strange aspects of this is that we go through imprinting periods. Our brain looks for a certain kind of object. It fixates on that object once it finds it, and then it builds around the memory of that object for the rest of your life. And Konrad Lorenz, who is one of the founders of [ethology] and won a Nobel Prize for his work. Konrad Lorenz first saw this when he was six years old, and it was near his parents’ summer home on the margins of the Danube with a six year old girl. They saw ducklings and they saw these newly hatched ducklings sort of looking around confused because they had just come out of the egg looking for something, not knowing quite what. Then they saw their mother and they fixated on their mother and then of course, their brain is built around their memories with their mother. But Konrad Lorenz saw more of this when he became an animal researcher for the Max Planck Institute and got the Max Planck Institute to buy his parents summer home as a research station. He loved birds so he had ducks and geese and all kinds of birds with their nests in the backyard. One day he was passing a nest with goslings who had just hatched and they looked around not knowing what they were looking for, but looking for something with a certain characteristic. They decided that the thing with that characteristic was not their mother, it was Konrad Lorenz. You know how geese line up in single file? They followed him into the kitchen and they stuck with him. They stuck with him for the rest of their lives. And years later, when they went into their adolescence, their sexual phase, guess what they wanted as a mate? Somebody who looked just like Konrad Lorenz, just like dear old mom. So we humans also have these sensitive moments, these imprinting moments when our brain opens up to things with certain characteristics. Oh, by the way, just to take this a little step further. Konrad Lorenz later discovered that if he rolled a soccer soccer ball past the nest at precisely the time when the little babies have just come out of the shell and are looking around for something they know, when they spot that moving soccer ball they'll follow that around for the rest of their lives. So they're not terribly discriminating.
We humans have these moments, too. So this was the most useful question I used to ask my clients (Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, people like that) was, “what was your first memory of music?” And usually we would find something at about the age of five, and it usually had two characteristics:
It implied intense attention, the attention of really focused emotional crowds. Crowds of girls, actually, preferably crowds of screaming girls.
But in Prince's case, it wasn't quite the crowds of screaming girls. His dad was a jazz musician. His mom, when he was five took him to see one of his dad's rehearsals. So they walk into this empty auditorium with probably seats for about 500 people. And the seats are all facing the stage, that's implied attention. There is a spotlight in the center of the stage on this guy behind the piano. And here is what really impressed Prince. Remember, he's five years old, and remember something else, Sigmund Freud says that five is one of the most sexual ages children go through. So what really impressed him was five beautiful girls, the most beautiful girls he'd ever seen in his life behind his dad. And that was it. That was Prince's imprinting moment. For Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon ot was seeing Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. On The Ed Sullivan Show the audience was just packed with girls and from the minute Elvis stepped out to the stage, the girls were screaming, and that was it. And then another imprinting moment came when Kevin was 15, and The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and the same thing happened. You couldn't hear the music because of the girls screaming. So that kind of thing lasts. That becomes what I call a passion point, because it propels your most profound desires for the rest of your life. And now those passion points are what give rise to “The Gods Within”.
To give you an idea of my first experience of “The Gods Within”, I had been hunting down “The Gods Within” since I was 12 years old. God knows why, because I came from the world of science and my two initial fields were microbiology and theoretical physics but this seemed to me to be something utterly and completely worth pursuing. Four years after I started my hunt for “The Gods Within”, when I was 12, I had an imprinting moment, apparently, or 11. When I was ten, I started reading science fiction and I started reading two books a day and I started reading real legitimate science. One of the first books that I read was Isaac Asimov's Foundation, the first book in what was then the Foundation trilogy (now it's seven books) and Isaac Asimov talked about something called mass psychology and group behavior. I apparently imprinted on that. I didn't know where I got that until I decided to reread the first three of [the Foundation books] to my girlfriend and wham! There it was, mass behavior. So I was on the track of mass behavior.
And look, I was not a popular kid in Buffalo, New York. No other kids wanted to have anything to do with me, and my parents weren't the least bit interested. One day when I was ten, this book appeared on my lap and it said, the first two rules of science are these:
1. The truth at any price, including the price of your life.
And it gave the example of Galileo, and it told the story wrong. But I needed the heroic version, not the real version. In reality, Galileo hadn't been willing to go to the stake to defend his truth. He'd made a deal with the pope to stay alive. But that's not what I needed to hear. At the age of ten, I needed genuine courage and rule number two:
2. Look at things out under those as if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there.
Look for the things that you and everybody around you take for granted and thus are invisible to you. Bring them into the realm of visibility, your hidden assumptions and then proceed from there. So at any rate, this was my life: science. And when I was 16, when I was in my sophomore year of high school, there were these popularity positions. If you were the most popular kid in class, you got voted the class president up. If you were the second most popular kid you got voted vice president. If you were the most popular girl, you got voted the class secretary. And if you were the most popular Jew, you got elected class treasurer. And I wasn't popular and never had been. So there was no chance for me in any of those positions. But the school had this weird parallel system of committees that actually had to get things done. And when it comes to getting things done, popular kids are generally absolutely clueless. So when it comes to those positions, they'd rather shove it over onto the shoulders of somebody who is unpopular as long as that person will take care of it and get it away from them. So I was voted the head of the program committee. Now every day started out in the auditorium with an assembly. It started out with 45 minutes and I got to program two of those assemblies a week and I got to emcee five of them. And then the second year, my senior year, they also voted me the head of the program committee. So they liked what it did to keep me out of their hair. One day the juniors came to me and they said, “We're having a dance and could you advertise it for us?” Remember, I'm the emcee five days a week, and they didn't see the irony of the situation. If there was a dance anywhere in Buffalo, New York, I was cordially invited to stay as far away as possible, preferably Cleveland or Albuquerque. I can't dance. Every two years my parents would try to turn me into a normal kid, and every two years it would fail. And one year their effort had involved sending me to dance classes for the whole school year. I didn't learn a thing. I mean, no girl would dance with me. When the instructors danced with me, they learned to regret it because I broke so many of their toes. So there I am [on stage] with a piece of music playing on the turntable. Allegedly, I'm going to dance in order to advertise this dance. And I started moving in a way probably no human had ever seen before. It was like Chuck Jones, the guy who drew the Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and all that stuff. It was like a cartoon drawn by Chuck Jones on a night when he had dropped LSD. It was weird. As I was dancing, I noticed something strange. The pupils of these 350 people who all hated me were growing wider, their eyes were growing wider, their faces were melting, they were losing their individual identity, their jaws were hanging. They were coming together in one giant collective blob of energy or soul or something like that. Then like an amoeba reaching out, a pseudopod it seemed to reach a tunnel out to me, and I had an out-of-body experience. I was on the ceiling watching this happen and I saw their energy go up through the empty tube of me to somewhere around my head become utterly transmogrified and flow back down to the audience in a continuous reverberatory loop, a feedback loop. And it was fucking amazing. I was on the ceiling watching this. Something was dancing me, and when it was over, the audience did something it had never done in my time in that high school before and would never do again in my time there and it did this as if it had practiced it all their lives. It moved in a mass down to the foot of the stage, picked me up off the proscenium, put me on their shoulders, and they carried me out of the auditorium and on up the hill to the building where we had our classes and only then did they let me go. That was my first real experience of “The Gods Within”.
Now, what the hell was dancing me? I do not know. I'll give you guesses, but I really do not know. Something that was much bigger than myself was pulling my strings as if I were a marionette. Well, here is what I think it was. I think it was those passion points come to life. I think it was them in the same way a charcoal briquette, if you doused it with lighter fluid and throw on a match, bursts into flames. I think it had been laying there dormant all that time and was suddenly bursting out in a kind of flame that only happens when you have the oxygen of mass, fascinated, glued, attention. So those are “The Gods Within”. Let's imagine you’re the lead singer of Aerosmith and you have an album and it's due and you sit down at 2:00 in the afternoon and yes, you know that you've written lyrics in the past, but you have no idea of how you’ve ever done it. And, you know, staring at a blank laptop screen or a blank page of paper that you may have been able to do it before, but you sure as hell cannot do it today. And then by 4:00 in the afternoon, on a good day, there's a lyric in front of you. And once or twice in your life, that lyric is so good that you know that you didn't write it, that it wrote itself through you. Those experiences of being taken over for 2 hours by something that writes lyrics just using you and the thing that happens in a performance experience on a good night when the audience pours all that it is through you for 60 minutes or 70 minutes, those are “The Gods Within”. And yes, I can call them passion points and I can call them imprinting moments all I want but the fact is that God knows what they are. They're “The Gods Within”. Divinity is not a god. Divinity is not something up in the sky with a bathrobe shuffling around on the clouds, using them as a living room. Divinity is an experience that lives potentially inside of you and “The Gods Within” come to life through the emotion of divinity or the ecstatic experience or the transcendent experience of the kind that I've just described. Every one of my artists look, they were almost all superstars, and in many cases, I took them from zero and helped make them superstars. Prince was utterly unknown when I started with him, Joan Jett had been forgotten and turned down by 23 record companies. Billy Idol was about to become a two hit wonder and be utterly forgotten. My job was to find the gods inside of them and introduce them to those gods inside so they would never lose touch with them. Now, in reality, that was unnecessary with Joan Jett. She was the gods inside of her, her normal self scarcely existed. It's her performance self that's her real self, when she is taken over by that massive bonfire inside of herself that comes from her imprinting points. Billy Idol was the same. He is his most him when he's on stage and absolutely going crazy in front of an audience. John Mellencamp is one of the best performers I've ever seen in my life. He's on a par with Prince, except he's alive, which of course, gives him a certain advantage.
Let's just take a segue, Peter Townsend once described this experience. He and George Harrison were trying to get Eric Clapton off of drugs. And George tried and he failed and he wrote a song about it, which is the song that has a whole bunch of other chocolate, a little chocolate bonbon flavors [Savoy Truffle] . But Peter Townsend did not give up and Peter said to Eric Clapton, I understand why you were doing heroin and drinking. You go in front of an audience of 7000 to 70,000 people and for the 60 Minutes the souls of those 70,000 people flow through you as if you were an empty pipe they go up to the “God Head”, Because at that moment, Peter Townsend believed in Meher Baba. So they go up to the Baba and within you they are utterly transmogrified and they flow back down to the empty pipe of you. So for 60 or 70 minutes, you are filled with the souls of 70,000 people. The minute you go behind the curtain and the audience can't see you anymore, and you can't see them, it all falls away. And instead of a pipe for 70,000 souls, you are an empty pipe and it hurts. That experience for John Mellencamp was so extreme that when he got off the stage, he was in a daze. His eyes no longer looked like eyes. They looked like sunken pits of blackness. We had to guide him to his dressing room and then to a smaller room within the dressing room where we could lock him up so nobody could come in and he would be with his wife, Vicki, in those days or with me. And it would take him an hour for his normal self to return to the empty pipe he had become. And every time when the process was over, he said, I’m never touring again in my life because the whole process for him was too painful. For me, it's never been painful. It's been sheer exhilaration because I've had it happen a tiny number of times since then. Whatever it is that takes you over, that bonfire that comes above the charcoal briquette of your passion points or your imprinting points is fucking phenomenal. It is absolutely amazing and it is almost impossible to describe in the English language.
There's a lot to unpack there. I'm going to do my best to kind of summarize everything quickly before I ask my next question. So imprinting points and passion points are essentially the building blocks of the soul, of your individual soul. “The Gods Within” are an unknown quantity that can take that soul and control it in ways you aren't aware of – whether it be in flow or a concert. And then ecstatic experiences or mass ecstatic experiences is when your soul is being controlled by something you're unaware of but is so strong that it's able to control the souls of everyone around you as well.
Well, it's not a matter of control, but it is. I mean, yes, control is an aspect of it. First of all, you don't control this stuff. It controls you, it dances you. Second, the attention from the audience, which provides your energy, your oxygen that's not under the control of anybody in the audience at all. Is it under your control? No. It's under the control of whatever the hell it is that's dancing you, which means “The Gods Within” you.
But there is a phenomenon you have to recognize. It's called emergent properties in science. I'm writing about it in my book. I've written about it in my book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates. Aristotle, once upon a time, about 2300 years ago, said that you need to break things down to what he called their elements and in other words, to the smallest pieces you can break them down to. We call those smallest pieces today particles, for little parts. Then you need to understand the laws of those elements from which we get the phrase elementary laws and once you understand the laws of those elements, you understand everything. Well, let's take the first atoms that formed in this universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang – there were these tiny little things, relatively speaking, the size of my fist and these great big things, relatively speaking, the size of the Empire State Building. And they had been smashing and banging and ricocheting off each other like bump ‘em cars for 380,000 years. It looked like that's all they would ever do. But they began to slow down in an expanding universe. High speed is heat, low speed is cool. They were cooling and as they slowed down something that I would never have predicted in my wildest dreams but you might have imagined because you're good at imagineering things happened and I would have denied that it could ever happen just simply based on Aristotelian logic. The things the size of Empire State Buildings, we’ll put this in anthropomorphic terms, discovered they had an inanimate need, an inanimate longing. The things, relatively speaking, the size of your fist, discovered they had an inanimate need [as well]. And the [needs] of the thing the size of the Empire State Buildings perfectly fit the needs of these little tiny flickers the size of your fist. And so they came together and joined and they joined in something we call an atom, in something we call hydrogen. Now, here is the trick. According to Aristotle, if you understand the rules of the elements, that is a proton and an electron, the little things and the big things, you understand everything you need to know. But that's not true. Knowing those laws of protons, of electrons, all you know, it was the laws of protons, electrons. But there is this entirely new reality that comes into existence from the pairing of the two that's larger than either of them. And those are the properties we call atoms, and those are the properties we call hydrogen.
Well, take this charcoal briquette at the bottom of the soul. Your imprinting points and the lighter fluid that comes from the attention of an audience or from sitting down to write a lyric. Light a match, touch it to that [charcoal briquette and] the flame that comes out of that is nowhere near explained by knowing properties of charcoal briquette, lighter fluid and a match. It's something of its own, a whole new, what we call in science an emergent property. But it is as real as real can be, because our entire concept of matter comes from atoms. So even though it's spiritual, it's this thing that doesn't exist because there's only a proton and electron after all, those are what exist. It's a relationship between the two that somehow hovers like a ghost over the two of them. And that ghost is as real, at least as real as the proton and electron itself. So this property that hovers like a ghost, that is packed into the charcoal briquette, the imprinting point, most of our lives and then comes to life with a whole new kind of self of its own – that's the gods inside. And the gods inside is not adequately explained by knowing that there's a charcoal briquette.
And then if you can't explain “The Gods Within” how did you find the imprinting moments for your clients to be able to tap into “The Gods Within”?
I did something very simple, and that's a very good idea for a journalist, whether the journalist is hunting down soul as I was or just trying to write a good story. And that is, I started at the beginning – that's where I started with the question of,“What's your first memory of music?” And then if you were my client, I took you through the history of your life one moment after the next, and I took you all the way to where we are today. From the beginning. And what I found were those imprinting points. Then on the plane, on the way back to New York City, I took my yellow pad [and] I took your story and I put it in chronological order in a way that emphasized the passion points and I sent it back to you because it was a transcript of what you had said to me, just ordered in chronological order. Because, you know, sometimes you reach the age of 13 and you suddenly remember, “but there's this thing that happened to me at the age of eight”. So I got those all in order.
So they told the story you had told me or had been trying to tell me. And I said, “This is your script. From now on, I'm going to bring you out to New York. I'm going to set up eight interviews a day for you three days in a row. Then I'm going to send you out to L.A. and I'm going to set up another 24 interviews, eight interviews a day. And no matter what the interviewer asks you, I want you to answer with this story. Now, look, you'll be hesitant to do that because none of us like to repeat ourselves and you'll be tempted to say, ‘As I told the previous guy.’ No. Pretend this is a rock concert. In a rock concert, you don't say, as I said to my previous audience, or this is the song I just sung to my audience in Cleveland. You want to give that audience a sense that they're the only ones you've ever made music to, that this is the first time you've made this music. You want to give that feeling to that interviewer. And I guarantee you they'll come into the room and ask you a profoundly stupid question, like, ‘How do you categorize your music?’ And there's no good answer to that and it doesn't lead anywhere. It's a dumb question. So if you answer with this story, they are going to go home that night and say to their wives, (because in those days they were all men). They're going to say, ‘Honey, I am a brilliant, brilliant interviewer. I asked this kid named Prince today this question, How do you categorize your music? And here's what he told me’.” And you have to regard the journalist – I know this sounds terribly crass, but you have to regard the journalist as a megaphone because the people you're really speaking to are the audience that that journalist allows you to reach. I was not knowing it at the time, not being able to figure it out for another 20 years [but]I was building you into an icon for the reasons you deserved to be an icon for all the things you had to overcome and all the things that you had achieved and those things that were the core of your passions that you kept alive. For example, in Prince's case, turning down a bunch of record deals because they didn't give him creative control and holding out until he was 19 for a record deal with Warners that gave him total creative control; creative control over the music on the album, the album cover, every publicity photo, the whole thing. That was staying true to the gods inside of him.
So at any rate, that's how I went about the process. And while I was turning you went to an icon because this story of how you would manage to achieve what you would achieve while expressing the gods inside of you and staying authentic to that was something that a kid who hung your poster [on their wall], you know, we start getting sexual the age of 12 and was going through one of the most profound life changes humans ever go through and was looking for people whose posters to hang on his bedroom wall – that if he [or she] hung your poster on his [or her] bedroom wall, you would be worthy of being his [or her] role model for the next 40 years of his [or her] life.
I want to dig into this a little bit more. So you were saying how you would do research on your clients as much as you possibly could. I know with the Jacksons you compiled a dossier [compiled of] thousands of articles. When you now have this dossier, you've gone through these thousands of articles and you sit down to interview someone – and we're not talking a two hour interview, we're talking one, two or three days [for] 8 hours straight. What kind of questions are you asking? Are you just looking to fill in the gaps in your dossier? What are the types of questions you're asking when you sit down with someone for three days in a row?
It's not a matter of what types of questions I'm asking. I'm following a narrative thread in you, my client. So I ask that first question and then the question is always, “What happened next?” Because I'm digging in you. I'm not trying to structure you except within the framework of a timeline. But, you know, we live in timelines, time as the structure of our lives.
You ask the first question and then, “What happened next? What happened next? What happened next?” What happens when you hit a dead end, or they're not exactly sure what comes next in the chronology, or they take a big jump?
They take a big jump, fine. So then we end up going back to what we were missing. So how did that happen to you? What was the color of the wall of the room? Where was the building you were in? Who were you with? Your goal is to be a camera in the room on behalf of the audience, the people you're working for, and I mean the people who are the ultimate audience of the star, even though they've never met this star yet. You want to give the fullest picture possible and when it comes to certain critical things like how they went from being a normal kid who dreams of being a star but doesn't have a shot to climbing the step by step staircase that led them to actually being able to access stardom – that's a vital story for a 13 year old, 14 year old or 15 year old to read. It means that he or she, no matter how ordinary, with persistence could also reach that extraordinary level of stardom. Assuming that he or she has the talent, and talent was something I [always] left out of the equation. Because that's up to you to fill in. The one thing I can preach to you is perseverance.
How do you figure out what the passion points are, those imprinting moments? When you're sitting down with someone, you have this dossier of their entire life, ow are you able to pick out the correct imprinting moments? How do you know?
Because they jostle something inside of you. They produce feelings inside of you too. There are powerful experiences. Again, like Kevin Cronin seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show changed his whole life, gave him. I mean, one of the things that's primary to us is our aspirations, our sense of what we want to achieve in the future, which we often don't know. They’re as buried as that briquette. What we can do, what opportunities we actually see ahead of us, although too much of the time, we don't see any opportunities ahead of us. But all of that is crucial and a role model helps you see a potential path.
Are you able to identify your own passion points or do you need someone else? How do you [personally] know when the moment will be emotionally resonant enough to stir something within someone else?
All of my artists needed me. In other words, they needed an outsider to see this picture. They needed an outsider to say, “It's important that you tell this story”. We all have our stories within us and they all become very ordinary and we're all sure they're so ordinary that nobody would want to hear them. It takes an outsider to say, “No, this is a chilling moment in your life when you were five and your mom took you to see her dad performing. This is a chilling moment in your life, when at the age of 15 you saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show”. Now, after doing this with many, many artists, when I went back to my science, it was my job to figure out how to explain in the terms of the science we have today, and possibly the science we won't have today, but I'm trying to put on the map what these moments were all about. But the first thing is something inside of you says this is important because two things:
One thing you share in common with your artist is you're both human. One thing I have in common with you, we’re human. We were both born of a mother. We were both babies, we were both toddlers, we were both children, and we both hit adolescence – all of that we have in common.
The other thing is that Hermann Hesse the novelist said all of us have hidden in a dark corner of the soul, a little closet that has 10,000 personalities that could have been us. But somehow the “us” that we regard as us was chosen, managed to dominate over all the other potential personalities. Well, that closet of the 10,000 hidden selves becomes very useful to you when your job is as a “secular shaman”, to find the passion points, “The Gods Within”. That's your key. Somewhere in that closet is Prince. Somewhere in that closet is Michael Jackson. Somewhere in that closet is John Mellencamp. And you find the self resonance in your empathic core that resonates to the frequency of Michael Jackson or Prince or John Mellencamp. And then you are hit with a gift or a problem, depending on how you want to look at it. You are stuck with the soul of that person inside of you for the rest of your life. That's one reason it's so difficult to lose these people. We've lost Prince. We've lost Michael Jackson. We've lost Freddie Mercury – Queen was another client of mine. These losses hurt. They are like amputations.
I have a quote of yours, speaking of these 10,000 versions of yourself inside of you. You said it was your job to find the people who deserve to be iconic, the part of you that deserves to be iconic. What makes someone deserving of being iconic?
Now, that's a tricky one, because one of the things I've been figuring out in the God knows how many years it's been, almost 50 since I left the music industry. Apparently I have some sort of alarm in the gut that tells me when somebody’s a superstar. So when I went out to pick up the manager of a band that had a number three record out at ABC Records, just after I had been put in charge of running an east coast public and artist relations department for ABC. I went out with a purpose, I captured him in a limousine. I picked him up in a limo, and I knew it was rush hour. So we were going to be baked in traffic, getting him back to Manhattan by limo. I had him as a prisoner and I said, “Look, I know your band prides itself on its democracy, that every group member is equal to every other group member. But if you let me break those rules and put all the attention on the lead singer and cover my ass with the band, I guarantee you I will give you a star”. Now, the lead singer was named Chaka Khan, and I have only said something like, “I guarantee you I will…” about four times in my life and every time it produced a star.
Now, in 2005, a bunch of people in the space community dragged me, struggling and kicking out to a space event in L.A. The National Space Society's ISDC, International Space Development Conference, and I saw a person speak there who said, “When I got out of college, I asked myself what three things would make the greatest difference to humanity, would change humanity the most in my lifetime? My answers were the Internet, alternative energy, and space”. So he went into the Internet business and he helped build a company and when the company was sold, he got close to $1 billion. And then he skipped over number two, “alternative energy” and went directly to space. He was being laughed at at that point because he had never even launched a tin can with a firecracker inside of it. And the people at NASA and the people at Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman were laughing. They were saying, “He will never get anybody safely to space, we're the only people who can do that. We have decades of experience in doing exactly that. We have huge teams. What does he have? Bupkis”. But the alarm in my gut said this is a figure of mythic proportions and kids will be following his example 110 years from now. Why the figure 110? Don't ask me. These things speak of their own volition. That was Elon Musk. So he and I had three or four phone calls in which I couldn't explain to him why I was calling, because it took me another 15 years or so to figure out the alarm that had gone off to Chaka Khan, and gone off to Joan Jett, and gone off to Billy Idol, and gone off to Prince was going off again, but this time in a slightly different manner, because it's this is not just an iconic person. This is a person who will be historically important.
So how do you explain that alarm in the gut?
I have no explanation. The closest I can come is this and it's not an explanation, but it gives me a little of something. Once upon a time in the 2010s, I was told to get in touch with an intermediary of a guy named Dr. A.P.J Kalam, who was the 11th president of India, the most trusted politician in all of South Asia, a superstar in South Asia. I was told he might be interested in space solar power so I contacted him and in fact, he was very excited about space solar power. In a later book they would credit me with having convinced him about space solar power [but] I thought he was already convinced. At any rate, he and I became a working team for four years. I introduced him to Buzz Aldrin on Skype and a bunch of other things and one day I sent him a copy of my book, The Genius of the Beast. Now, I did this knowing that he would never get a chance to read it, that he gets a slush pile of snail mail three feet high every single day and that this would be lost in the stockpile but I did it as a courtesy so he would know I had done it. Well, a few days later, I got an email. First of all, he's a former head of state and there are certain protocols for a former head of state and they are not allowed to communicate directly with people. They have to go through their intermediaries and I am not allowed to go directly to him. I have to go through intermediaries. Thems is the rules. So I got an email directly from Dr. Kalam and he said, “I got your book at 3:00 this afternoon. I sat down to read it. It's 10:00 tonight. I couldn't put it down. Your book is a visionary creation”. Now, that's a summation of the letter, because the email was long and it used the word visionary over and over and over again.
A few years later, there was one of these international space development conferences, this time in San Diego, and Dr. Kalam was coming. But my intermediary with Dr. Kalam could praise you to the sky and say you were the savior of the earth, and then after three weeks of that, he would tear you to pieces. I did not feel I deserved the pain and I didn't want to endure it any longer. So I had cut off relations with him (he now remains one of my good friends). At any rate, I didn't think Dr. Kalam was going to want to see me in San Diego, and I didn't bother to sign up for the list of people who were going to be shoved like Pez candies in a Pez dispenser through security and on up the elevator for their allotted 15 minutes with Dr. Kalam. And then this man who towered over me came up to me. He was the head of the National Space Society, and he said, Dr. Kalam wants to see you. So I put myself in the line with the other Pez candies and waited for my journey to go through security and be sent upstairs. I got up there and Dr. Kalam was talking to some very important people and I'm not a very important person, so I didn't want to interrupt. I looked for an inconspicuous place against the wall where it wouldn't bother them. And then Dr. Kalam’s face lifted and his eyes saw my face and he lit up. Not just his face… all of him lit up as if we had known each other since first grade and he'd just seen me for the first time in decades. He abandoned the important people he was talking to – he came over to me and he gave me a huge hug. That is totally against protocol. I guess he's supposed to give the hug to an intermediary who is supposed to pass the hug on. Dr. Kalam dismissed the important people and he was all excited. He wanted to show me something. He had just written the introduction to a book, and he wanted me to read the introduction to the book. It was short, so the two of us stood there. I read the introduction to the book [with] Dr. Kalam, only a foot and a half away, looking into my face, especially looking into my eyes. As I started to read, I had a sudden realization, Dr. Kalam had said my book was visionary and that I was a visionary, right? Dr. Kalam is very well known as a visionary. [He] had been for decades, and he wanted to see if, as I read this book, would light up the way he had lit up to my work. He wanted to see if there was a recognition that he was a visionary and if we were on a common plane. Sounds very elitist, right? It's not. It's something you have within you and if you tried to help it, that would be wrong.
You know, I've always been aware that I come from a long line of prophets, I'm Jewish. And the prophets, Isaiah, who was primarily complaining about real estate taxes, which I didn't understand back then, or real estate loans, but these visionaries who convened with the deity and then come back and speak their truths, no matter how unpopular that makes them. So I identified with these great visionaries of history. But it's only in the last ten years that I've been able to finally articulate at least this experience to figure out why I was talking to Elon Musk. To figure out why I said that I will give you a star to Chaka Khan's manager. Joan Jett in her interview for this documentary on me, The Grand Unified Theory of Howard Bloom says you would watch and Howard would find one person after another and then a year later, that person would be a star. No, it's not because of me. Although nobody else was doing what I was doing. Nobody else was trying to give you somebody whose soul was of such platinum value that it would be worth betting your life on that person by making that person your role model, by bringing that person into the total value system or the total closet down deep in your mind where your values are kept. I know that it's there. I can cite some of the times when it's going off, but I cannot tell you what it is except for the one experience with Michael Jackson, where I got a call at 4:00 in the afternoon.
Look, I knew who Michael Jackson was the minute I met him. I did not know him through that three inch thick stack of newspaper clippings. Those were totally misleading. But within the first half hour of my knowing him, I knew his soul. Weird statement right? But it's true. I can't explain it. So I got a call at 4:00 in the afternoon at my office on 55th Street near Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. I always kept a little red nylon knapsack behind me because I would get these calls. I was the Red Adair, the guy who used to put out oil fires. I was the Red Adair of the music industry. The guy you called in an emergency. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “You've got to be out here ( meaning L.A.) at 11:00 tonight. Michael is canceling his tour. You're the only one he will listen to”, meaning Michael Jackson. So I told my receptionist to get me the soonest flight she could, and get me a car service. I went out to the airport and went out to L.A. I went to this huge facility, a studio lot filled with aircraft hangar sized buildings that were dark and and forbiddingly empty because of the time of night. You felt the chill, the emptiness of those buildings. I went into one of the buildings that seemed to be only lit a tiny bit and there were Jacksons rehearsing on the biggest stage I'd ever seen in my life, a hundred and ten foot stage. To give you an idea of what a 110 foot stage is, when ZZ Top took Texas culture to the world, One of my tours in 1976 or 1977, they had what they considered to be the biggest stage ever in the world. It was [75 feet wide and] shaped in the state of Texas and was tilted at an angle so you could see its shape anywhere in the audience. Lord knows how they learned to do their moves on that tilted stage. The Jacksons’ was 110 feet. I mean, that's 40% bigger. So at any rate, I watched them finish their rehearsal and then we all threaded out. The Jacksons would always put me with Michael and they would flank the two of us. We walked out to a dressing trailer – I don't know if you've ever seen a dressing trailer, but a dressing trailer is a great big van, a huge van that's been turned into a dressing room on wheels. In this dressing trailer there was a banquette of seats directly across from the entrance, these red vinyl seats and a banquette of seats on the opposite side to your left as you came up the stairs. Then there was a tiny little banquette, big enough for possibly 1 to 3 people behind the windshield. That seat behind the windshield was the throne. Michael took the throne. I sat at his immediate left hand and the brothers sat on the opposite banquette and Michael explained to me why he was canceling his tour. He said, “Look, my brother Jackie is the best dancer that I have ever seen in my life and the best choreographer. Jackie has a bone splint in his knee. The surgery that was done was supposed to be healed by now. It's not healed and I signed everybody working on this tour to a nondisclosure agreement so that I could make every detail of this tour an utter and complete surprise to my kids”. I knew what he was talking about, because the first time we met, Michael had stood next to me, my right elbow against his left elbow. He had opened an art portfolio from an artist who was one of the artists being submitted [for] the cover of the next album. I had seen as he peeled back the page and only saw an inch, his left knee up against my right knee, began to buckle and he said, “Oooh”, and then he opened it another two inches “oooh, oooh, oooh” and my knees had a buckle too. I suddenly felt what he was feeling. He was a feeling, an aesthetic orgasm. He was seeing the infinite in the tiniest of things. What, Michael was showing me sitting on that banquette in this dressing trailer, that's what he owed to his kids. It was a quality of awe, wonder and surprise beyond anything I had ever imagined seeing much less feeling by direct body contact in my life. Despite the second law of science, “look at things under your nose as if you have never seen them before”, which is the law of awe, wonder and surprise, here was awe, wonder and surprise incarnate orgasming right next to me, an aesthetic orgasm. So that's what Michael was trying to explain to me. He owed to his kids.
I had the only visual vision of my life [that night]. I saw Michael's ribs as golden gates and I saw them swing open and I saw 10,000 kids in his chest. His kids, the kids he would protect at any cost, including the cost of his life. Where these visions come from, Lord alone knows. There's no laboratory scientist who's ever going to be capable of measuring them or seeing [them] with an electroencephalogram [or] with an MRI because you can't predict when it's going to happen. It may only happen to you five or six times in your life, but it's real, it's as real as the flame above that charcoal briquette. And like the property of hydrogen and atom that come to life because a proton and an electron have mated. It comes from something. All I am is a 149 pound piece of meat. It comes from somewhere in this meat. This is my business explaining these things. This is my science, explaining these things. And I can't explain beyond the raw elements like the imprinting moments.
And so how were you able to save the tour then?
I explained to Michael [...] theI press is like a herd of sheep. There was an experiment done in 1839 by a writer in Germany. If you've ever tried walking in the countryside with a girlfriend, you're aware there are poplar trees and between them is a little tiny, one foot wide, blackened, rutted path. You have no idea what it is until you see 2000 sheep come along and walk in single file down that little rut. They're the ones who made that rut and blackened it. So this writer in Germany in the days when writers were naturally stars and scientists and scientists were writers saw a herd of sheep coming down one of these ruts, and he stepped over to the side of the field and when the first sheep was about to come, he stuck out his walking stick and the first sheep, the alpha sheep, jumped over his walking stick. Then he withdrew his walking stick and watched as 1999 other sheep all jumped at exactly that point, even though there was nothing to jump over anymore. The press are like sheep, and if you can get the lead sheep to jump, you get all the rest of them. And somebody was trying to destroy this tour and had been leaking negative publicity among other people to a guy named Dave Marsh. Dave Marsh was one of the lead sheep and Dave Marsh had been writing, “we know everybody in the business (meaning what was called the Rock Crit elite in those days, him and his group of friends) and nobody we know has been hired to do the lighting system. So the lighting system four storeys high is going to collapse on the heads of kids and kill them. Nobody we know has been hired to build the stage, so the stage is going to collapse during the show. Nobody we know has been hired to do the sound system, so the performers, if they touch the microphones, are going to be electrocuted. And nobody we know has been hired to do security. So there are going to be gangs running up and down the aisles with 12 inch long knives and eviscerating your kids”. And this was taken very seriously, it was showing up in publications all over the country, in CBS Morning News where they had me come out immediately after he came out with his accusations. What I didn't understand was the reason he could do this until Michael and I were sitting there catty corner to each other on those banquettes. I didn't understand why there was no information on who was doing anything. It was because Michael had signed them to an NDA agreement so that he could utterly take by surprise, just awe his kids. I explained to Michael what had been happening in the press, that there had been negative press since the tour was first announced and Don King who was in charge had bollocksed up an initial press conference – ever since then the long knives have been out for this tour, and if Michael postponed this tour to wait until his brother Jackie was able to dance, he would lose what little credibility this tour still had. And the kids that he'd done all this for would never get to see his shows. It would validate everything that people like Dave Marsh were trying to say. This is another aspect of being a visionary, when you know something to your core, you have a certain authority in the way you say whatever it is, that is almost unbelievable. So it was like Moses, one prophet going up against Mohammed, another prophet. We were a brotherhood of prophets at that moment, Michael and I. He understood what I was saying, not just at the verbal level, not just at the rational level, at the deepest emotional level. He knew I was saying the truth. There was a reason people in later decades pointed out to me that there was a reason that they called me at 4:00 in the afternoon. There was a reason they said, you are the only one he will listen to because we're both truth seekers and we loved each other on that basis. I don't know whether he loved me… but I do. I absolutely do.
Is that how you were able to understand his soul within 30 minutes, the first time you met him?
Yes. Because the first time I met him, I had read all this stuff about him. I had spent a lot of time with the brothers because they were the ones who hired me. We were at Marlon's pool house in Encino, California. The pool house is a little building by the pool that has one big room on the first floor and one big room on the second floor. In the big room on the first floor, there's a billiard table in the middle. The walls are lined with arcade video games, which is impossible. No normal human could own arcade video games [back then]. The brothers and I were gathered. They were having a meeting about merchandising. There were all these T-shirts and jackets on the pool table, and the Jacksons put me in the middle and they flanked me on either side because they listened to me, Jacob, which was very strange. I was trying to explain to them that you're trying to put out the most amazing tour anybody's ever seen. Your T-shirts have to be the most amazing t-shirts anyone's ever seen. Your jackets have to be the most amazing tour jackets anybody’s ever seen. As I was making my little speech, but it was an important one, the screen door started to open.
Now, I didn't grow up among other kids, they would have nothing to do with me. And my parents, as I said, didn't want to have anything to do with me either. So I grew up with lab rats and guinea pigs in my bedroom and guppies and they don't have the rituals of politeness that we humans have. But somebody, when I was 19 years old, tried to teach me one of those rituals. It was that if you were at a party and somebody that other people want you to meet comes in, you walk over to that person, you stick out your hand, you say, Hi, my name is fill in the name of your hand and the other person will stick out his or her hand and say, Hi, my name is. So I had never done that in my life, even though I'd been taught it and every article in this huge pile of stories had said Michael Jackson is a bubble baby. He fears other human beings. If you put your hand out to touch him, he will shrink away in fear. So I put my hand out to the person coming through the screen door and I said, Hi, my name is Howard [for the] first time in my life. And he stuck out his hand and shook mine and he said, Hi, my name is Michael. He was a normal human being. I mean, it was not a Donald Trump handshake. He was not trying to break every bone in my body. It was a lighter handshake than normal, but it was a human handshake, for God's sakes. I said, Michael, I have a press release, I need your approval. He said, “okay, let's go up the stairs”. So we went up to the second floor. The second floor was crammed to the ceiling with amplifiers and keyboards. Michael found a spot on one amplifier. I found a spot on a facing amplifier. I started to read him this press release. Now there's something you have to know about my writing.
When I was 12 years old, in eighth grade, a girl in my eighth grade class had turned her face in my direction, which had never happened to me before. And then she made eye contact with me, which also had never happened to me before. She had said, “I told my mother you understand the theory of relativity”. While there were a lot of things in science I did understand at that point – I was able to have an intelligent conversation for an hour with the head of the graduate physics department of the University of Buffalo about big bang versus steady state theory of the universe – sI was a pretty advanced level, but I didn't understand the theory of relativity, and I didn't dare confess that to her because I didn't want to humiliate myself. The only thing I had going for me was the kids had a name for me, it was “The Sickly Scientist”. It was the only form of attention I got. So I jumped on my bicycle as soon as school let out, I peddled over to the little white library building near my home under the giant elm trees and ran in. The librarians literally knew me better than my mother did, so I said, “Give me everything you've got on relativity”. They rummaged around on the shelves and they came up with two books, a great big fat book that was all equations with maybe seven words of English on each page and a little skinny book by Einstein himself. Now I had learned at that point at the age of twelve, never start with the easy stuff, always start with the hard stuff. You may think you're not understanding a word but by the time you get to the end of it you will have understood something. So I started with a hard book, and then at 8:00 that night I realized my mom’s going to put me to bed in 2 hours and I don't understand the theory of relativity yet, and I'm only up to page 50 of this book. So I would switch the little skinny book by Einstein, all by himself. And in the first two pages, it felt like he had reached out through the book, put his nose to mine, grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Schmuck, listen up. To be a genius it's not enough to be able to come up with a theory that only three 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 clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand”. In other words, Einstein had said to be a scientific thinker, an original scientific thinker, which is the only role human society has ever given me or allowed me. You have to be a writer and not just a good writer, a great writer, a yummy writer. So those are my marching orders. And I started to take my writing very seriously.
I started writing poetry, and I became the editor of the literary magazine at NYU. The poet in residence thought I would be the next great poet to come out of NYU because I took my writing seriously. At a certain point I had realized that running the Howard Bloom Organization that it wasn't good enough to hire a writer to do my writing because my job was to go out and capture the soul of my artist and my writer was not going to be able to get that soul across and it was the most essential ammunition that my account executives would have, so I'd better damn well write all that material myself. So, the press release I was reading to Michael was something I had written myself with all of this intense writing background behind me. Michael heard the first two sentences and he slumped on his amplifier. Then I read him the next few sentences and he slumped a little further. By the time I got to the end, he was slumped over all the way and he said, “Man, that's beautiful. Did you write that?” And of course I had. Michael Jackson was the only person in my time in the music industry who had ever seen the craft or the art or whatever you want to call it in my writing. Later, The Washington Post talking about my second book, would say his writing is beautiful but Michael saw that even in a press release. Then we went downstairs and that's when we had a meeting with the art director from CBS, and she brought over five artist portfolios and that's when the brothers flanked us, and that's when Michael and I were jammed up against each other. And that's when Michael opened the first inch of Michael Whelan’s portfolio. Michael Whelan is amazing, an amazing artist, and Michael [Jackson] saw more in that first inch than Michael Whalen had ever seen in the entire picture. That's when his knees buckled. That's when he began making orgasmic noises and conveying all of that directly [through] body language to me and that's when I knew Michael Jackson's soul, unequivocally. And it was the second law of science come to life in a way I had never imagined in my life.
And so was it because he was a physical embodiment of the second law of science that allowed you to understand who he was right away? Or would you say you knew him? What did you know?
It was that empathic thing and that empathic thing is very hard to articulate, but it articulates itself and it will articulate itself even if it doesn't tell you it's there. It will start influencing your actions, even if you don't know it's there. One of the great unknowns is not just out there in space or down at the bottom of the sea, it’s inside of us. So my job is, as we are having this conversation, to see what's going on inside of me and what's going on inside of you to the very best of my ability, because it's going into those unknown spaces for which we have no words and articulating them for the first time. That's our job as culture makers. That's our job, whether we're poets or painters or scientists.
Culture maker being the poets, painters and scientists?
Yes, and Michael Jackson and Prince. I needed to leave the music industry, I got all of my questions answered. And to work with Mick Jagger, which I was asked to do, would surely be a repetition of what I'd already done and plus it would be to be treated as a lackey. To work with U2, whose music I really didn't like would have been a repetition of what I'd already done.
I had started writing my first book, and I knew that in my forties I would start writing my books. Look, when I was a kid, I was raised by books the way Mogley was raised by wolves. As I said, I read two books a day, one under the desk at school, one when I got home. So my world and my obligations are to books. When I was ten, look at what picked me up and gave me a purpose in life, those first two rules of science, in other words, two guys Galileo and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope. He had reached out across a distance of 350 years and lifted me out of chaos and so what's my job in life books. What is my job in life? To reach out over the next 350 years and reach the next confused kid who needs a latch point and imprinting moment for his or her life. That's been my obligation ever since I was ten years old. That's a culture making job.
But I got sick in 1988, which allowed me to leave the music industry. My wife would never have allowed it because it would have meant not earning money anymore. But I had known that because I was working under intense stress seven days a week for eight years straight without vacations, that at some point my body would break down in some way. My wife and I had invested in real estate because I needed something that would be able to give me the money I needed to survive when I was too sick to do anything. I knew that was going to happen and it happened in 1988, not in a way I'd ever foreseen at all, but with what didn't have a name in those days but it's now called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It was serious for five years. I was too weak to talk and too weak to have another person in the room with me. During that period of time the internet saved me. I wrote three books, and I founded two international scientific groups and ran them from my bed without being able to talk thanks to the internet. It looked like I would never get out, [I thought] this was how I was going to spend the rest of my life.
But when I finally got out 15 years later, I hadn't seen the world for 15 years. I thought Michael Jackson first had been just wickedly attacked with sexual allegations and everything he was had been blackened and I was sure that he had been forgotten by then. And I was sure that Prince had been forgotten by then. So I went to a local cafe I'd been hearing about for years, but had never been able to go to because I couldn't get out of my house and I mentioned Prince and Michael Jackson because I wanted to see the reaction, I wanted to see whether anybody responded. It was 15 years later and everybody said as if it were something that they have very seldom felt free to admit, “Yes, Michael Jackson and Prince have shaped my life”. Now, some people were more shaped by Prince than by Michael Jackson, and some people were more shaped by Michael Jackson than by Prince but obviously, these two guys had been an imprinting point for all of these people. And those imprints were staying alive, they're alive today. It's almost 20 years after I got out of bed. It'll be 20 years in a couple of months and those guys are still alive in the culture. They are culture makers. I am not as famous, nor will I ever be as famous as they are but I am attempting to be a culture maker by reaching out to that kid 350 years from now and you are working to be a culture maker as well. One of the goals of culture makers is to reach into the wilderness, into the blackness, the dark cave of the inner articulable, the things for which we have little speech and to find ways of wording them, of putting them to words, and then of understanding the best tools that we have in our era and with any tools we can invent to go beyond our era. That's the job of us culture makers.
What makes someone like a Michael Jackson, like a Prince still relevant 15-20 years later?
I cannot tell you. I do not know. I mean, to my mind, Michael was the epitome of the first two laws of science. The truth at any price, including the price of your life. He made it clear that his commitment was above all other things, including the price of his life to those 10,000 kids in his chest, when I saw them between those golden gates that swung open for me. He was the living embodiment of the second law of science, the law of awe, wonder, and surprise. I strongly suspect that those two things which have never been articulated by the press came across anyway. That's why I wrote in [my book] Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me, “if you love Michael Jackson, you know him better than any of the biographers or critics whoever have written about him because you know something about him profound that is not in the realm of words”.
As for Prince I really do not know. He was a workaholic like me. Those of us who love what we do are workaholics because we love doing it among other things. He was utterly dedicated to his music. And I can get electrified when I hear somebody covering When Doves Cry or any of his other songs. “I know I'm never going to find one like me” or something like that. Bonnie Raitt covered it and [Prince] introduced me to Bonnie Raitt, he said, “You better call this guy that I work with”. I don't know in Prince, because I was riveted by his onstage performance. I believed in him from the very beginning with all my heart and but I cannot tell you what it is about him that still appeals to people to this day.
I do know one thing, back in 2003, when I first got out of bed and was asking people about Michael Jackson and Prince, one kid, a teenager said to me, Purple Rain’s the ultimate makeout movie. Now, that's a much more important statement than it looks on the surface, because making the transition from childhood to adolescence, becoming sexualized is one of the biggest transitions that we have. And despite bar mitzvahs and confirmations, we do not really have a way of validating the experience you're about to go through. You have to take it on pretty much on your own and that first time when you take a girl to a movie and you agonize for 15 minutes about whether you dare touch her arm and take her hand, and then you agonize for another 20 minutes about whether you dare put your hand on her shoulder and then another 20 minutes whether you dare put your hand across to her other shoulder. That's an experience that nobody guides you through. So to say that there is now a ritual for that inarticulable experience and it's Purple Rain that is making a very powerful statement, at least to me.
I don't know if you can intentionally do this, but it’s finding ways to put yourself and your art in those rituals that become imprinting moments.
You can't choose those. You just have to work from the heart. You just have to work from the deepest bowels of yourself and soul and emotional self. You just have to let yourself be taken over by the gods inside. And because those gods are authentic, they will resonate with other people.
And to your point, it's not necessarily a clear resonance. Sometimes it's a subconscious resonance where we can't explain it.
Yes, the self below the floorboards of the self I call them.
Is it the same thing to resonate with someone and connect with someone 350 years later, like your mission is to reach through the pages in centuries from now to connect with kids then?
Absolutely, I’m playing to an audience just like Michael was thinking about how he could best surprise and or his audience. So when I write books, I agonize, I write them in colloquial English, which means, you know, conversational English, as if you and I were talking. I do that because Einstein told me that to be an original thinker, it's not enough to come up with things that nobody can understand. You have to be able to put them so clearly that anybody can understand them [and I do that] by knowingly agonizing when I use a current colloquialism, a current catch phrase. We often have to do that to make our work sing and I'm writing science ideas, but if my work doesn't sing I'm in serious trouble. But I know that 300 years from now, 350 years from now, a lot of those colloquialisms will have disappeared from the language and kids will be stuck. I mean, fortunately, their artificial intelligence equivalents will be far better than ours and be able to explain these things to them easily… I’ve never thought about that before. I write the books that will sing the most from my heart to yours, knowing that there may be a translation problem to the kid I'm ultimately singing to 350 years from now.
But at the end of the day, you were impacted by something from 350 years in the past so it's more than possible they’ll still be able to understand it 350 years in the future.
I certainly hope so. People come to me, and this has been happening for God knows how long now, people send me emails and say, I picked up your book when I was 16 years old. Nothing made sense to me up until then. Your book made sense of the world. It gave me a purpose in life. Now I'm 30 and I'm still functioning with the tools that you gave me in that book. But I used to get letters from kids who were 16 years old saying life didn't make any sense to me until I picked up your book and now it makes sense. So I'm reaching those kids now, despite the fact that I'm on the very furthest fringes of fame, I'm almost unknown. Yet some people are being reached. So the people who were reached this way constantly point out to me that you're reaching us. So that's a good sign that you'll be able to reach that kid 350 years from now.
And what's the impact you want to have on that kid 350 years in the future? What's the big mission?
The big mission is to make that kid feel not alone, to feel validated and to set that kid out on the ultimate quest, which is the quest to understand everything, the quest for the omniscience, the quest to use every faculty that you got, every science that you've ever been given, and every colloquial tool that you've ever been given and and everything that's in you that hasn't been given to you understand the biggest challenges that come to your mind because you will see the biggest challenges ahead us differently than I or anybody else would. And hopefully you will come back with different answers than anybody else would. I want you to feel like you [can pursue] omnology, the aspiration to omniscience. The field for the promiscuously curious. It's there so that when you're in your sophomore year of college and your dad sits your dad and he says, “Jacob, look, you're interested in art history, you're interested in neuroscience, you're interested in film, you got to make up your mind. Are you going to be an art historian? Are you going to be a neuroscientist or are you going to be a filmmaker? Until you make up your mind, you're nothing”. Omnology is there, so you can say, “Screw you, Dad. I have these free curiosities and I’m going to follow them for as long as they continue to passionate me, to make me passionate. And if new curiosities come along, I will follow them too and when I'm 40 and all of my friends are having midlife crises and the men are buying little red sports cars and picking up blondes and cheating on their wives, and the women are planning elaborate divorces to find out who they are, all because they have no idea of why they're on this planet, I will just be coming back from the wilderness of my multiple curiosities with my first answers. And while my friends feel they're at the end of their lives, I will know that I'm at the beginning of mine.”
Is that the key to finding your passion is just following your curiosities and seeing where they lead?
Your curiosities are a great help. *chuckles*
Howard Bloom, this has been an absolute pleasure.
Well, it's been a pleasure for me too. So send me off to work out my book and wish me luck.
I wish you all the best. I know most writers enjoy the experience of having written more than the experience of writing itself.
I love the experience of writing itself.
I’m happy to hear that. What is this next book? When can we expect it? Is there anything else you want to tell the people about? I want to give you the floor, plug anything and everything you got.
I've written seven books and I think they're all important. Each one in a different area. They're all tiles in a larger mosaic. The book I'm working on now is “The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong”. Like many of my books, it's a book of heresies. The next book will be “The Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe, Including Sex, Violence, and the Human Soul, which is a little something I've been working on since I was about 12 years old. But it’s been growing and growing. And then my girlfriend wants me to write a book on omnology because we put together a course for Kepler Space University, which you can sign up for in Florida. You can get it online and we take you through the greatest omnologists of all time to show you aspects of yourself and things that you can achieve that you really want to achieve but haven’t dared to try to want to achieve before. I’m about the 80 Jacobs so there's no way in hell where I can take this five years to do a book that I'm going to be able to do all these books.
And Calling the Grand Unified Theory a little project is an understatement. What is there, 8000 chapters in the book?
Oh, my God, it's over 10,000 by now.
That I think, is a topic for another day. We have been here for almost an hour and a half, Howard. I'm going to let you go work on that book. I appreciate you for the time. I'll make sure everything's linked in the show notes down below so people can find it. They can read all your books, learn more about you. I'll talk to you soon.
Alright, thanks, Jacob. Have a wonderful weekend.
You too, Howard.