119. Howard Bloom — Einstein, Michael Jackson, and Me: A Search for the Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll

<p>Howard Bloom — called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known” by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull — is a science nerd who knew nothing about popular music. But he founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and helped build or sustain the careers of our biggest rock-and-roll legends, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Queen, Kiss, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, Chaka Khan, and one hundred more. What was he after? He was on a hunt for the gods inside of you and me. <em><a href= "https://www.amazon.com/dp/1493051679/?tag=skepticcom20-20">Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me</a></em> is Bloom’s story — the strange tale of a scientific expedition into the dark underbelly of science and fame where new myths and movements are made. Shermer and Bloom also discuss:</p> <ul> <li>What and where is God?</li> <li>the search for God inside us all</li> <li>how an atheist can search for the soul</li> <li>conducting science in everyday life</li> <li>music as an evolutionary adaptation or cheese cake spandrel</li> <li>What makes some musicians successful and others not (hint: it’s more than 10,000 hours of practice)</li> <li>what it was like woking with Prince, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, and others</li> <li>Do female rock stars have as much sex with strange men as male rock stars have sex with strange women?</li> <li>why Michael Jackson was a transcendent talent, the Mozart of our time.</li> </ul> <p>Based in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Howard Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud” by Britain’s Channel 4 TV, and “the next Stephen Hawking” by <em>Gear</em> magazine. One of Bloom’s seven books, <em>Global Brain</em>, was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM,