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 9: Howard Bloom mentioned this article on makingbetterpod.com.