Transcript of my conversation with Jaya Battacharyya & Howard Bloom 4/22/2023

(0:02 - 0:09)

Hello, Mark. Hello, Howard. So wonderful to have you both in this show and a huge welcome.

(0:11 - 3:45)

Wonderful to see you too. And Mark is one of my favorite discussants, so we're up with momentum already. Well, we are looking to hear a few very interesting facts and a few very scientific philosophies in this interview.

So I'll start with it without any delay. Howard, my first question to you is you have worked with some of the most iconic figures, but I'll start by asking you, how was it like to work with Michael Jackson? How was he as a person, as a professional and any particular memories that you have of him, which was unforgettable? Well, working with Michael was a transcendent experience. It was beyond anything I ever anticipated experiencing with another human being in my life.

You know that my background is actually science. And I got into theoretical physics and microbiology at the age of 10 and came up with the theory of the beginning, middle and end of the universe that predicted dark energy 38 years in advance when I was 16. So the first thing that grabbed me, one day a book appeared in my lap and said the first two laws of science are these, and this is what really became my religion.

Law number one, the truth at any price, including the price of your life, and it told the story of Galileo and it told it all wrong as if he were willing to sacrifice his entire life for his truth. It didn't turn out to be correct, but that was the law of courage and I needed to hear it that way. Second, look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before and then proceed from there.

And it gave the example of Anton van Leeuwenhoek. When I was with Michael Jackson at his brother Merlin's pool house, a little tiny one room house with one room on the first floor and one room on the second floor, standing at a billiard table with Michael at my right shoulder, his elbow at my right elbow, his knee at my right knee. And the brothers were crowding around us so they pressed the two of us together.

And an art director from CBS pushed a portfolio, one of the best artists in the world, across the table. And Michael began to open it to see the first picture. And he got one square inch into the picture and he went, oh, and his knees began to buckle.

And he got another square inch or two into the picture. And he went, oh, and his knees buckled even more. I could feel his body language was being transmitted directly to my body.

What was the pictures about? These were pictures for, these were five candidates for the artists who would do their upcoming, the Jackson's upcoming album cover. And the artist we were looking at was Paul Whelan, an artist from Connecticut who was a fantasy artist beyond belief. He's just astonished.

But the most important thing is that as Michael continued to open the page, his O's got louder and his knees buckled even further. And then I. Sorry, was it the artwork that he was seeing at that time? He was looking at a picture by Paul Whelan, a fantasy. So it sounds, it was an album cover.

So they, they're competing. No, it wasn't an album cover. It was an illustration for Paul Whelan's portfolio.

(3:45 - 4:03)

Portfolio is a great, big, usually vinyl thing. And it's to sell himself, right? It's part of his artwork, his collections. Yeah.

So he shows his best pictures, except in this case, it was hand tool leather. And the others were hand tool cherry wood. These were legendary artists.

(4:03 - 4:26)

And, but by the time Michael got to see the full picture, I had just felt in my body, Michael going through an aesthetic orgasm. It was unlike anything I had ever imagined that a person could experience before in my life. And look back to the first two rules of science.

(4:26 - 4:38)

Rule number two, look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before. Rule one is the law of courage. Rule two is the law of awe, wonder, and surprise.

(4:38 - 5:26)

And I had just seen awe, wonder, and surprise come to life in a form I had never anticipated. Yes, I carry the poem by William Blake about seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower and infinity and whatever it is, and eternity in an hour. That goes with me, though I can't remember the words precisely, wherever I go.

It's an aspiration. All of a sudden this aspiration was there in the flesh, a real human being incarnating that aspiration, being that aspiration right next to my elbow, right next to my shoulder, right next to my knee. It was an astonishing experience.

(5:27 - 10:50)

I would like to ask you, in terms of seeing him as a professional, did you feel at any time that he's an inborn superstar? I mean, there is something different in him than others in his professional approach that makes him stand out. Absolutely. He was not like any other artist I've ever met.

And remember, I've met some of the greatest artists of our time. I've met Prince and Bob Marley and Bette Midler and AC DC, Oris Smith, Kiss Queen, Run DMC, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, people like that. And yet, all of them were normal humans.

Normal humans with abnormal talents and amount of persistence. But Michael was not on the same plane that they were. He was on a plane above everyone.

In fact, he was on a plane above anything I've ever expected to see in my life. The one person who would have understood that plane and how rarefied it is, how difficult it is to describe it in normal human terms was Dr. A.P.J. Kalam, the 11th President of India, who felt that he was, hoped that he was a visionary, and he was, and who thought I was a visionary. And I hope he was right.

But despite our being alone in a room together with the sky surrounding us and the windows on all sides, and his specifically putting me through a visionary test, making me read a preface that he'd just written to a book to see if I would light up and be staggered by it, the way that he had lit up and been staggered by reading my book, The Genius of the Beast. Despite all that, Michael was on a plane even Dr. Kalam could not have reached. And Dr. Kalam, believe me, was very, very special and very, very beyond the norm.

But no, Michael, I tell the story in the book of the fact that in 1954, the sports psychologists or physiologists of the time said that no human would ever be able to beat the four minute mile. No human would ever be able to run a mile in less than four minutes. And then two med students in Britain got together and analyzed every move that one of them made when he ran until finally he was able to do what the physiologists had said was impossible.

He beat the four minute mile. From that point on, every major internationally competitive runner has done the impossible. They have all beaten the four minute mile.

Because that one person, Roger Bannister, showed them it could be done. Michael Jackson was to the realm of the human spirit. But Roger Bannister was to the four minute mile.

Michael Jackson experienced a degree of courage, awe, wonder, and surprise, the first two rules of science, that is beyond my ability to transmit to you with mere words. If I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in gods and angels and demons. But if there were, indeed, if I ever met an angel in my life, it was Michael Jackson, because he's so much further along the path to that human emotion that we call the divine, that I have ever imagined experiencing.

I mean, I think you are the first person perhaps in the world who compared Michael Jackson with Dr. Abdul Kalam, the president of India, who was a nuclear physicist and completely two different people. But it's such an interesting thing for everybody to hear and such an interesting comparison. And I will come to APJ Abdul Kalam later.

Mark will ask the question, but I want to ask you, could you give an example of any incident with Michael Jackson where you've seen him professionally, maybe practicing, maybe thinking about the audience, which made you think that, oh, this is something way apart. It was Michael behind the scenes that grabbed me. It was who Michael really was, not how his performance was.

Look, I worked with some of the greatest performers of the last 50 years. John Mellencamp, one of the lesser known people that I worked with, is an astonishing performer. So was Prince, just an astonishing performer.

And these are people who, in a sense, when they were on stage, they were ripped by something far bigger than they were. They had the equivalent of out-of-body experiences. I know when this first happened to me, I had an out-of-body experience when I was performing in front of an audience that really congealed, that really came to the surface for me.

And so these were as close to God as you can get. They were being danced by forces larger than themselves that danced them like puppets. And they just had to stand aside and watch as their strings were pulled like marionettes.

(10:50 - 11:37)

And what was dancing them? I call it the gods inside of us. And you'll see an explanation of that in my book, Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me, A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll. So all of those were ecstatic, divine, astonishing performers who just broke the normal mold of reality when they were on stage.

Michael was one of them. He was one of them. But when it came to the person behind the stage, the person who came to the fore, when the lights were down and the crowd was gone, Michael was miles above everyone else that I ever worked with, including Prince.

(11:37 - 15:23)

You mean as a human being or as a constant thinker? As a human being, because he had that quality of awe and wonder in him everywhere. And he had that deep commitment to his audience. Look, Jaya, one day I got a call in my office in New York City saying, you've got to be out here by 11 o'clock tonight.

Michael is canceling his tour. You're the only one he will listen to. And so I flew out to L.A. It was four o'clock in the afternoon.

There was time to do it. I was at a giant studio lot by 11 o'clock that night. I went into one of these huge studio buildings and the Jacksons were rehearsing on 150-foot long stage, which was twice the length of any stage I had ever seen before in my life.

And I've worked with some of the biggest artists that have been, Queen in South America, for example. And then we went to a little trailer that is set up as a dressing room. They're common in the film industry, especially these big vans that have been laid out as dressing rooms.

And the brothers took up a row of plastic benches on one side of the trailer. Michael sat at the very head next to the driver's seat, which was clearly the dominant position, the throne. And I sat at Michael's immediate left-hand side again.

And Michael explained to me why he was canceling this tour. He was canceling it because his brother Jackie, he said, was the best dancer he'd ever seen in his life and was the greatest choreographer he'd ever seen in his life. Now think about that, for a second.

Michael Jackson was probably the greatest student of dance of the 20th century. And he knew everybody, all the dancers moves from Fred Astaire to James Brown. And so when he said his brother was the best dancer he'd ever seen, that was not a casual statement.

And he said his brother Jackie had a bone chip in his knee, which I knew because I had flown out to California and organized the press conference of the doctors who were operating on that bone chip. And his brother Jackie was supposed to be healed and wasn't. And he did not dare take his show on the road.

He made it clear that the year before that, he had hired the best in every field that he could to be part of putting this tour together. And he wanted to be a total surprise to his audience because he wanted to evoke that quality of awe and astonishment that a picture on a billiard table had evoked in him. He wanted to evoke that in his audience.

So he made all of them sign non-disclosure agreements. And if he couldn't give his audience absolutely the best, he would not be giving them that transcendent experience that he aimed for. And when he was describing this, I had a vision.

And it felt to me, it looked to me like his chest had opened up, his ribcage has swung open like golden gates. And I could see 10,000 kids inside his chest, his kids. And that was an indication of all things, of the first law of science at work, the truth in any price, including the price of your life.

(15:23 - 15:48)

It was Michael's degree of narrow, deep commitment to his audience. Now in that particular, that was like a clash between Moses and Muhammad. Because going back to the visionary experience, sometimes when you see clearly into the future, something grabs you and speaks itself through you.

(15:49 - 17:34)

It's not you, the normal you, that's trotting out an argument. And Michael spoke with that passion of the gods. And I did too.

So it was like Moses up against Muhammad. It was amazing. And ultimately, Michael saw the logic of what I was trying to explain to him.

More importantly, he felt the logic of what I was trying to explain to him. And he didn't postpone the tour. But it's his bone deep commitments.

It's his ability to experience awe, wonder and surprise in every cell of his body. And then to be committed to that experience. What did I tell him? Basically, look, the press has taken advantage of your non-disclosure agreements by claiming that nobody we know, these are the highest level press people, nobody we know has been hired to do your sound system.

So your sound system is going to electrify the performers on stage. Nobody we know has been hired to do your staging. So the stage is going to collapse.

No one we know has been hired to do your lighting system. So six story high lighting presses are going to collapse on the audience. And no one we know has been hired to do security.

So gangs are going to be running up and down the aisles with knives and guns in their hands. And your children will not be safe. And the result will be that no one will dare take their children to a Jackson's Victory Tour concert.

No one will dare. That was it. He believed it.

(17:34 - 18:27)

Um, what I said, you mean? Yes. Well, it's true. Yes, it was really what was happening.

The press had been battering this tour for a year. And the only reason they and I didn't know that it was because of the NDDA agreements. I was going on television shows and doing interviews with the press.

And I had the facts in front of me. And I, I was countering this negative wave of press that everything was going to fall apart, that this, this was a totally amateur experience, that the Jacksons were only doing this tour to milk the last out of Michael before he went on without them, which wasn't so far as I could tell true at all, that that was not in their nature. They would never have done such a thing.

(18:28 - 20:53)

Reluctant because one of his brothers was not into it. So definitely he wanted to be together with them. He not only did he want to be together with them, he wanted to be together with them in order to deliver awe, wonder and surprise to his audience.

He didn't feel he could do it as effectively without them. And it's a difficult thing to achieve the different, the other difference. So Michael is up there as one of the finest performers I've ever seen along with and not ahead of, along with John Mellencamp and Prince and Billy Idol and John Jett.

All of them are ecstatic performers. All of them are manifestations of the gods inside of them when they go on stage. There isn't, but there is another little detail that made Michael very different from the rest.

There were elements of improvisation in Prince's shows, John Mellencamp's in the shows of all the others. They did not know exactly what they were going to do and exactly when. They just had a certain repertoire of moves and those moves came out of them when it felt appropriate.

Michael was very different. Michael had worked out every dance step and then and every one of them again to awe, wonder and surprise and give a feeling of validation and empowerment to his audience because that's what his performances were really all about. And then he had put all of the best moves that he had been able to put together together into one long piece of choreography.

And then Michael did exactly the same show with exactly the same movements every single night and with total mastery. I would equate it to like a Cirque du Soleil show where it's predetermined every single step and every movement was. Except remember, I tried to explain to potential clients that if you want to come to me, you have to understand something.

I'm not going to fashion an artificial mask, an image that will make you a sir. I'm going to find the deepest soul in you, the gods inside of you, because music is not an exchange of cornflakes or pieces of plastic. Music is an exchange of human soul.

(20:54 - 22:10)

Now, every single one of the artists I've just mentioned went on stage and the ultimate experience in the exchange of human soul took place, including Michael, including Michael. But his performance in doing the same thing every night was so extraordinarily spontaneous in its feel, in its look, that even John Pirellis at the New York Times, who is a very severe critic of musicians, especially popular musicians. The New York Times' whole role is to find artists who aren't popular and promote them and to tear down artists who are popular.

So you would think he would tear apart Michael Jackson. No, he said something very strange. He said that every single move and note is exactly as good as it is in his videos and on his albums.

Do you know how difficult that is to achieve in a live performance? It's not just difficult, it's impossible. And Michael achieved it every single night in between. It was about 75 concerts that we did all together.

(22:10 - 25:27)

Now, Michael didn't see it that way. Michael would come off stage and he would say, you know, that third step that I took in Bad, it just was off. And he'd give a little list of his complaints about himself.

Well, guess what? Not a single soul in the audience was the least bit aware of any of those little smudges or quirks because he was so damned good. So again, the real surprise is who he really was as a person. And let me just give you a clarification about what it means to be a person.

I said, when you go on stage and you feel the faces of the audience melting and you feel their eyes widening and you feel them come together as one giant gelatinous blob of soul, like a big amoeba, and you feel that amoeba reach a pseudopod, reach a tunnel out to you and send its entire energy, whether it's 700 people or 70,000 people, and that energy goes through you as if you were an empty pipe. And it reaches the peak up here of your head somewhere and is utterly transmogrified and flows back down to them. And for 65 minutes to 70 minutes, you have a continuous feedback loop of your soul and theirs.

It is not you who is performing. It is you who are being performed. And when artists get off the stage, as soon as they go behind the shadow of the curtain and they can't see the audience anymore, and the audience can't see them, they go through an astonishing deflation.

As Peter Townsend was trying to get Eric Clapton off of heroin, George Harrison had tried it before him and had failed. And the song about Montelli, Moore, all running off, all the names of all of the chocolate creams in a mixed chocolate box, that song came from George Harrison's failed attempt to get Peter Townsend, the founder of The Who, off of heroin, and to get Eric Clapton off of heroin. So finally, Peter Townsend went to Eric Clapton and said, look, I understand why you do heroin.

For 65 minutes, you've had the souls of 70,000 people flowing through you, and you've had the Godhead flowing back. And then when you go behind the shadow of the curtain, all of a sudden, you're empty. Where there were 70,000 souls, there are now nothing.

And it hurts. And you do the heroin in order to fill that empty pipe, to not feel that pain. Well, John Mellencamp would come off the stage, and he would look like a scarecrow.

He would look like a robot. Where his eye sockets were, all you could see were shadows, no eyes, just darkness. And we would walk him as if he were, again, a golem, a big animated creature of plague, to the dressing room, and then to a little room that has set aside specifically for this, for John, or a little room that could be locked.

(25:28 - 26:19)

Then his and his wife would go in with him, or one night, I went in with him, and we would sit there for an hour, waiting for John Mellencamp's real personality to return. The personality with whom he said, with which he said, hi, hello, how are you? Fine, thank you very much. And how are you? The ritual everyday self.

Well, like those, so there were two selves, at least two selves, in a person like John Mellencamp. The gods that took him over, that came from within him, when he was in front of his audience, and then the self of everyday life. Michael was not exactly like that.

The Michael of everyday life was never a Michael of everyday life. He had been a professional since he was nine years old. Some say since he was six years old.

(26:20 - 28:24)

He had never had a crack at a childhood. He had been, he had been meeting kings and queens. When he was nine and ten years old.

So the real Michael Jackson, unlike the real John Mellencamp, which had to get along with other kids in high school, the real Michael Jackson had grown in a kind of a milieu that normal people do not grow up in. So even Michael's normal everyday self was not normal. It was normal to the extent that when I did my homework on him, I read over a thousand articles.

It was a stack this big of clippings. And every one of those articles said the same thing. Michael Jackson is a bubble baby.

He's afraid of other human beings. If you reach out a hand to touch him, he will cringe back in involuntary fear. So when I was waiting at Marlon Jackson's pool house, standing at the pool table with his brothers, and I knew that Michael was due to come any minute.

I had been, look, I grew up among guinea pigs and lab rats. Other people didn't want to have anything to do with me. Not even my parents wanted to have anything to do with me.

So I didn't know anything about normal human rituals. And when I was 19, somebody was kind enough to teach me that when there's somebody entering the room that other people want you to walk up, you put your hand out, you say, hi, I'm Howard. And the other person puts his hand out and says, hi, I'm and fill in the blank and you're up and running.

So for the first time in my life, when I heard the screen door of Marlon's pool house opening, I walked up to the screen door. I put out my hand and I said, hi, I'm Howard. And Michael reached a hand back and he shook my hand and he said, hi, I'm Michael.

He was normal. Of course he was different. We're all different.

(28:25 - 35:12)

The three of us are each different from the other. Very different. But the fact is that Michael was a normal human being, but was never a normal human being because he lived on the boundaries of the ethereal.

He lived on the boundaries of the ecstatic every single day of his life, at least until I knew him when he was 25 years old. Then a bizarre, a bunch of horrible things happened to him. And Michael Jackson spent 25 years on this planet becoming Michael Jackson and 25 years dangling on the cross.

So because of sexual allegations, which I believe were trumped up, and I can explain to you why I think they happened. I'm happy to talk about it. I actually, and if I, if I may, I also, just to be clear about that, I actually watched a show that indicted Michael Jackson in a very neverland.

Yup. The Neverland one. And then I had reached out and contacted someone who actually, I had a three hour conversation with Taj Jackson, who's Michael Jackson.

Yes, I know. And that's how you and I connected Howard. And through that conversation and through another documentary the square one documentary with Danny Wu, it compelled me to completely change the perception of what Michael Jackson was given to us was fed to us as a public.

And it's actually giant, something you and I have looked at is the media's manipulation of things. And then I had journalists on who could tell you they were at a show where Michael Jackson was and the newspaper articles lambasted him. And it was completely opposite of the actual thing that was going on in the show.

It's very interesting. Let me give you a little bit of background that the other journalists probably didn't give you. When we did our initial press conferences about the upcoming Jackson tour, we had 3,500 press people, 3,500 in New York city and 3,500 people in LA journalists.

That's unheard of. You are doing very, very well if you call a press conference and 35 people come. So there was a press contingent of about 250 people who went to every single date.

And this was easy because these were football stadiums that the Jacksons were playing and they have a press box that's elevated way up above the field and it has glass windows and it's all set up for phone calls. It's all set up to set up your laptop computer. And we did have a tiny number of laptop computers in those days.

I was carrying one of them, a RadioShack, the TRS-100. And one night the person covering the concerts for the Boston Globe, which is Boston's leading newspaper, told me a story. He said one day, no, it was the Boston Herald American, which was the second biggest paper.

It was always selling 20,000 to 25,000 copies less than the Boston Globe. And this person from the Boston Herald American said, one day our publisher walked into the newsroom, which is something that never happens. The publisher's on a much higher level up above that's decorated with original Picassos and things like that.

He came down to our newsroom and he took a look around the room and he pointed at me and said, you, I want you to write a Michael Jackson story for the cover. And everybody in the newsroom erupted. And they all told the publisher the same thing.

We do not put celebrities on our cover. We are a serious news publication. That's what a tabloid supermarket magazine does.

And he said, you're writing a cover on Michael Jackson tomorrow, period, and walked out. So this person wrote a cover story on Michael Jackson. They put a brand on the cover.

And that day, instead of falling 20 to 25,000 newspapers behind the Boston Globe, they were 25,000 to 30,000 newspapers ahead of the Boston Globe. In other words, putting Michael Jackson on the cover sold newspapers. So the next day, the publisher walked down to the newsroom again and pointed at the rock and roll journalist and said, you, from now on, I'm giving you your own private office.

I'm giving you your own secretary. I want a Michael Jackson story a day. And the Boston Globe, knowing that this had just happened at the Boston Herald American, the publisher picked on one of its rock writers and gave him the same treatment in exchange for a Michael Jackson story a day.

Then these newspapers learned something about the impact of Michael Jackson on circulation. Yes, if you had a Michael Jackson story that you could promote on the cover somehow, you sold more newspapers. But if you had a negative Michael Jackson story and if it bleeds, it leads Michael Jackson story on the cover.

You sold even more newspapers. So the job of these people who were assigned to nothing but Michael Jackson became to find anything negative you could about Michael Jackson. And if I may full circle on that, Howard, it's funny that this even comes up today because Rupert Murdoch, the alleged person with the Fox allegations of the Trump election denying, was the person who owned the newspapers in London who daily bashed Michael Jackson, knowing that that would give subscription increases and people more people would read it and more people would sell that newspaper.

Rupert Murdoch allegedly has now done that both in TV media with the Trump election and Dominion and the other election machines and did it with Michael Jackson on on slamming him and making up stories every day. Negatively, there is something that happened even earlier than that. I mean, this is a good observation, but at the very when the tour was just being put together and the Jacksons were looking for the right promoter to do a tour of this magnitude and they were basically they were running through promoters as if they were casting a film.

(35:14 - 36:29)

And one day, Michael Goldberg, who was the West Coast investigative reporter for Rolling Stone, was given what was supposed to be an internal document, a contract that the Jacksons had proposed to one of the possible promoters. And the story that Michael Goldberg was given was that, see this contract, it's clearly predatory. Tickets up till now have been $12.

The Jacksons are going to charge something like $30. There's a reason. And again, the story was that they were given that Michael Goldberg was given was that Michael is or that the Jacksons are out to make it rich quick on the basis of their brother's fame before they fall out of the limelight entirely.

And then the same person, in my humble opinion, because I had one of my jobs when I took on the job, I went to the Jacksons room at the Helmsley Palace, their suite to tell them no. I had been telling them no for four months. I said, if you've got a talking dog and it mentions Michael Jackson, and it can mention it on the phone, it'll get a cover on any newspaper or magazine that it wants.

(36:29 - 36:56)

So you don't need me. I don't do that. And finally, they said the Jacksons are coming to town on Saturday.

Can you meet with them? And there's an old expression that somehow I had learned that if you're going to say no to a person, you must say no to their face. So I went to see the Jacksons. And the minute the door, this gilt and white door, opened to their suite on the second top floor of the Helmsley Palace, I had to change my mind.

(36:56 - 42:01)

And it's because I saw four of the most decent people I'd ever seen in my life, all lined up against the wall in chairs. And I could feel that there was some kind of deep trouble in the room. And these profoundly decent people were being whipsawed, tortured somehow.

So I took the job immediately. If you need me to save you, yes, I'm there for you. So my job became to try to figure out what was screwing things up.

Something had totally screwed up the press on this tour already, three months before they called me onto the scene. And whoever it was, was incredibly good at staying invisible. Well, I think I know who it was.

I think that was the person who leaked the first contract with the first wrong story, absolutely false story, to Michael Goldberg at Rolling Stone. And because Rolling Stone is a press leader, all the other press people all over the world copied that story. They all tried to pretend that they were actually coming up with journalism, but no, they were copying that story.

And then Michael represented, long after that tour was over, Michael represented the highest in power and money you could get in the music industry. He was almost as big as the Beatles and Elvis Presley combined. So people who gravitated to power and money wanted a cut of Michael Jackson.

And there's one power player in particular who wanted a cut. And to explain the negative stories, the sexual stories, one day Billy Joel was on his motorcycle driving out in the countryside in Long Island. And a car, he went through a green light, which is what you're supposed to do, just drive through the green light.

But a motorist coming in from the other direction or coming from Kenny Corner from at a right angle to him, went through her red light and tried to make a left hand turn. Billy did not have enough stopping room. He put on his brakes and his car or his motorcycle hit the car and he flipped over the car and landed somewhere on the other side.

The 27 year old woman who was driving the car got out in a panic. She was sure she had killed him. And in fact, he had to be medevaced to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.

And he almost lost the use of his right hand, which would have been disastrous because he's a piano man for a reason. That's where he's happiest is on stage performing. But apparently this woman went to her attorney and the attorney said, look, you don't understand what you've stumbled into.

He's a superstar. You tell anybody who asked, he hit you. And he did, didn't he? And you throw a lawsuit against him.

And he will settle out of court to keep this out of the headlines. And Billy did. He settled for $250,000, which was a lot of money back then.

Someone, well, Michael loved kids because he'd never had a childhood. He was suffering childhood deprivation. And his bedroom wasn't like your bedroom or mine.

Our bedrooms are private places. His was a public place. For example, he and another client of mine, Lionel Richie, wrote the lyrics for We Are the World in his bedroom.

And so he'd have kids for sleepovers because it was something he'd never been able to experience when he was a kid. And if you've ever had one and you probably had, you remember how that they were so exciting that you were still up babbling at the time when the sun came up. Let's not go into that because there is so much of information.

It's so warped. So it's great, hugely interesting to know about the thing media has done to so many superstars. And that itself is a very eye-opening thing that you have revealed here.

I would go on to ask Howard one more thing that much has been written about you on how you have catapulted the careers of a few people. And actually, Billy Joel's own biography writes that about how every musician needed you to get their image authenticated by the masses. And as well as it has been written a lot about how you catapulted Prince's career with your suggestions on how he should appeal to a certain kind of masses.

And you have famously talked about how you have used applied science and math in understanding mass psychology. Could you tell me a few examples or maybe one example, one good example of where you have advised one of them, you have identified a superstar, advised them something and that has actually changed their career. That has brought a huge success.

(42:01 - 44:57)

Well, John Mallencamp was the press hated him. The press hated him so much they felt they knew about his personality and it was nasty. And they would review his albums literally without opening the shrink wrap on his albums, without listening to the albums.

And I told his day-to-day manager that, I mean, his day-to-day manager came to me and said, John wants you to work with him. And I said, I will only work with John on the following terms, that he allows me to study him for six weeks, everything he's ever written, everything that's ever been written about him, then come out to wherever he lives in his environment and spend a day with no managers, no handlers, no wives, no intercessors of any kind. And the story that I found was absolutely remarkable, was the very epitome of authenticity.

And so I taught John how to deal with the press, you know, be a decent human being is what I was teaching him. He hadn't been a decent human being to the press up until then, because they had been hurting him over and over and over again. I introduced him to a few members of the press and I started to tell John's story to every major press person I could sit down with for lunch, because it took three hours to tell the whole story.

And when I was finished, it took me three years, but when I was finished, John had a climactic concert at Rockefeller Center at Radio City Music Hall. And when the concert was over, all the press people I'd taken to lunch came up to me and grabbed my biceps and put their face very close to mine and said, you were right, you were right, you were right. And from that moment on, it was just a cover story after cover story for John Mellencamp.

But I did it by taking the aspects. You shared amazing, amazing. How did you know? I mean, we have we are running out of time, but I would have liked to know.

You said you are a very reserved person as a child. How did you know all these tricks? It's it actually baffles me that way. But maybe we'll keep that question for some other time.

We need to ask you a few other interesting things. Mark will talk about Dr. Abdul. Yes, I'm happy.

Happy to. Yes, Dr. Yes. So he's a nuclear physicist.

Your book, your book, Genius of the Beast. Right. It was lauded by him.

And your picture was put in his memorial. Can you share the story of how you're in Delhi and I'm on the wall? Can you share the picture of how you got on the wall? Well, Dr. Kalam, I've been involved with harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it to Earth since the 1990s. It is the answer to net zero.

(44:57 - 47:51)

It can absolutely replace all the use of fossil fuels for energy production and transportation, period, and bring us to net zero. Well, I heard that this person I'd never heard of before, Dr. Kalam, a former president of India, given a lecture in Boston about space solar power. That's what I thought I heard anyway.

And a friend of mine, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was going to spend a year and a kind of exchange program with the Indian Air Force. And when he was there, he said, you know, I think I could get you to Dr. Kalam. Here's this person that you have to meet.

So I wrote to the person he told me I had to meet and and and I sent I had just published The Genius of the Beast. So I sent a copy to Dr. Kalam as a courtesy. I knew that he get a stack of email three feet high every day and he'd never see it.

But I just needed to make sure he knew that he had gotten the courtesy of receiving a copy. Now, one of the things that I've been schooled in and dealing with a former head of state is you never contact him directly. You always work through intermediaries.

And one night I was sitting at the tea lounge, the club, the cafe where I used to write my books, and I got this email and it was from Dr. Kalam. And he said, I sat down at four o'clock to read your your book. It's ten o'clock at night.

I couldn't put it down. It is a visionary creation. And then he went on to repeat the phrase visionary creation in about 15 different ways for the rest of a long paragraph.

And so that began my friendship with Dr. Kalam. So then I put Dr. Kalam on the phone with another friend of mine, Buzz Aldrin, to have a space solar power initiative based out of the National Space Society. And then Buzz wanted to go to India with President Obama.

And he was told that if he ever said anything about space, solar power, or anyone ever knew that he was interested in space, solar power, he'd be out on his tail. There is no way he would make it into the White House, much less on the trip to India. So he called and said, are you saying that this was before Obama became president? No, this is when Obama was in the White House.

Okay, so what he means, he couldn't adopt that policy because that policy would have been political death in America. Right, exactly. Because big oil would have basically had a singular... It's so big now in America.

And everybody in NSS is talking about it. It really baffles me that this was which year? This was probably about 2014 or something like that, 2013. And that would have been second term.

(47:51 - 48:32)

Possibly a little bit earlier, 2010. It may have been before his second term, which would have been 12, right? So it would have made more sense that it would have been before his second term because of the political suicide. Yeah, it may have been in his first year.

But one way or the other, Buzz called and said, I have to pull out of the Kalam initiative. And that was it. So Kalam and I did our best to push space solar power.

And Buzz was a senator at the time, correct, Howard? No, no, no, no. Buzz was... Was out of it at that point. Yeah, he was... Okay, he was already out.

He had become the apostle of space to the world. He's had some interesting conversations over the years, too. You've seen some weird interviews.

(48:32 - 48:57)

Oh, yeah. We've had some amazing conversations over the years. So at any rate, that's how I met Dr. Kalam.

And then Dr. Kalam came to address the National Space Society in San Diego. And I was there. It was an annual meeting of the National Space Society.

But my intercessor with Dr. Kalam is a very strange man. I love him dearly. I will love him for the rest of both our lives.

(48:57 - 52:08)

But some days he can tell you you are the savior of the world and the greatest person ever to walk the planet. And then some days he can slash you like a Siamese cat with sharp claws. He can just tear you to shreds.

And I was tired of periodically being torn to shreds. So I thought Dr. Kalam would not want to see me. And then, and there was this long line of people waiting to go through security and get into the elevator and go up for their little 15 minute meetings with Dr. Kalam.

I was not among them. And then the head of the National Space Society came to me and said, Howard, Dr. Kalam wants to see you. Okay, I'd been summoned.

So I got into line. I went through security. I got up to Dr. Kalam's suite.

There were some very important people talking with Dr. Kalam. I didn't want to interrupt because I don't think I'm a person of very much importance. And all of a sudden Dr. Kalam's eyes caught mine.

And it was as if we had known each other since we were five years old and he'd never seen me before. I have no idea of how he recognized me. And he stepped out of his little group of very important people and came over to me and broke diplomatic protocol immediately.

He gave me a huge hug and he dismissed the important people from the room. And eventually he explained to me that I was a visionary. That's hard to accept about yourself, even though I know now what he meant.

And he wanted me to read something he had just written as the introduction to a book. And we stood next to each other with our faces this far apart, about two feet apart. And he watched my eyes as I was reading this page.

And he was obviously waiting to see if that audience reaction that I told you about with a rock star was going to happen. If my eyes widened, my pupils dilated, my face lit up, all those things happened. All those things happened.

He was waiting to see if I recognized the visionary in him and could see that in this room surrounded by the sunshine of windows on three sides, that we too were among a very unique, blessed group, the visionaries. So that was my doctor. And when he, after he died, and I wanted to know why my picture was on the wall of the Kalam Center, the head of the Kalam Center said, don't you know Dr. Kalam loved you? Well, that's a very strange statement coming from a head of state.

But I appreciate it because he's like the most revered president of India. Everybody in India is, they feel proud that he became our president. So he is hugely acclaimed by all of, I mean, across party lines, everybody in India considers him one of the biggest nation makers of India.

(52:08 - 52:30)

An ISRO has declared that it's going to give SpaceX a run for its money in terms of offering inexpensive lift to space. And the ISRO was a product of Dr. Kalam and his major area of expertise, which was rocket science. Amazing.

(52:31 - 53:27)

But he taught me, Jaya, he taught me what a visionary is. He taught me, or at least he ratified it. And yes, a visionary means that you can spot a person who's a star because something in your gut goes off.

You can spot it with Chakra Khan. You can spot it with Joan Jett. You can spot it with Billy Idol.

And you can spot it with Elon Musk. Because in 2005, that thing in my gut that goes off when there is a superstar or a person of mythic stature shows up. Elon Musk had not even put a firecracker in a tin can yet and launched it.

He had launched nothing. NASA was laughing at him, saying he would never get anywhere. And he and I had three phone calls.

(53:27 - 55:11)

Why? I couldn't explain to him why I was insisting on these calls. It was because that alarm in my gut that goes off when I meet a superstar or hear a superstar had just gone off. In John Mellencamp's case, I was driving a rental car on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and a song came on the radio.

And the song, I don't know what the accurate word is. The song discombobulated me. The song made it impossible for me to drive.

I had to find a parking spot as soon as possible and pull into it because I couldn't drive anymore. That's how powerfully the song gripped me. It was Hurt So Good by John Mellencamp.

And this is months. Hurt So Good. Okay, Hurt So Good.

I have to listen to it. It's one of his top hits, Jaya, just so you know. It's called Hurt So Good.

I think I might have heard this song and I can't recall it, but I think I've heard the title. Well, so Dr. Kalam was giving me a term to use to encompass the vision that I had when I was with Michael Jackson of his ribs opening up like golden gates, the certain knowledge I had about Chakra Khan, about John Mellencamp, again about Joan Jett. He was wrapping them all up.

And with Elon Musk, he was wrapping them all up in one term, visionary. Are you still in touch with Elon Musk and the ideas that he puts in right now with SpaceX and his idea about going to Mars? Are you collaborating with him? We're not in touch anymore. However, I wrote a piece for Scientific American on establishing a permanent infrastructure, a permanent transportation infrastructure in space.

(55:12 - 56:11)

And Jeff Bezos retweeted it, sent the whole thing to his four million people. And Elon Musk gave an interview to Business Insider about it that occupied a full page. So that's the closest I've come to Elon Musk in the last few years.

Well, I have to come to the last question because we are short of time. See, you had a very life changing thing in 1989 with the bedriddenness. We'll talk about it in another one in another episode, perhaps.

But you were out of business, out of this life for 15 years. But you came back in 2003. And then you started something called the Space Development Steering Committee with a coalition with the with the leaders of NSF and Mars Society and Space Frontier Society.

(56:12 - 56:26)

And you've been collaborating with Buzz Aldrin and all the... Buzz was the one who got me to start it. But while I was sick in bed, I was too weak to speak for five years. I was too weak to have another person in the room with me for five years.

(56:26 - 56:44)

And I wrote three books and I founded two international scientific groups. Oh, but tell me something with this action. You also have a vision of a unified world and you also have a vision of changing, bringing things together to make a change.

(56:44 - 59:06)

Where do you want to see this world go with your ideas, with your actions, where your actions are intended to go to? If it was an ideal world, how do you envision it? Where do you want to see the world? What is your dream of seeing the world in future? Well, my ideas are, first of all, they're all summed up in a project I've been working on since I was 12 years old. And it's called the Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe, including sex, violence and the human soul. And when I finish the book, my eighth book, which I'm working on now, that'll be my ninth book.

I want people to be able to see the unity in the sciences. I want them to be able to see the big picture. Ultimately, I want them to be able to use the perceptual lenses that I try to provide to change their lives.

And it has been working. Give an example, please. Give an example of how you are advising them to change their lives.

Well, all I know is that I started when people sent me positive information, positive, saying positive things about me, I keep it all in a file and I keep it in a file. So when I wake up on a day when I'm depressed and feel like I'm of no value to anybody in the world, I can look at this file and it'll reassure me. Well, that file, which started out as a couple of pages, is about 350 to 400 pages long now.

And the most important statement is one that comes over and over again. I read one of your books when I was 16 years old and it changed my life. It gave me a meaning for life.

That is the highest goal, Jaya. That's just the highest goal. To influence somebody's life changing journey in this life.

That is surely. Could you tell me what are you dreaming about in terms of space space tech with this initiative that you have taken? Well, we all of us are the Starship is going to change the relationship between ecosystems, life and the universe, literally. And it will carry immense cargoes.

It's built for 100 passengers or 110 tons of cargo, in some cases, 150 tons of cargo. It's far beyond anything. I mean, NASA has its space launch system.

(59:07 - 1:00:00)

This is so far beyond the space launch system, which will carry three crew people at a time, three that it's ridiculous. Plus, for the cost of one space launch system launch, you could launch 2000 starships and carry 200000 people to space. There's a government lucky bucket.

Yeah, we are now we are now focused on what do you do with the Starship once you have it as an instrument? Ultimately, the goal is to have colonies floating in space that are more comfortable than the place where you live right now. Colonies with parks and forests and wild animals and lakes and nice big houses. That's that to me is really the ultimate goal and at least beginning the terraforming of Mars, turning Mars green instead of red.

(1:00:02 - 1:00:11)

What a wonderful. It's all summed up. It's all summed up in a visual manifesto called Garden, the solar system, green, the galaxy, which you can find on Howard Bloom dot net.

(1:00:12 - 1:01:21)

OK, I'll surely look it up. Mark, you have any last questions for Howard? No, I I think this is a very pleasant conversation. We covered a lot of different different aspects.

How about yourself, Jaya? I have really had, as I expected, a very enlightening conversation with you, which opened my eyes to a lot of things. And as I was expecting a scientific philosophy to just enter into me through and that's what it did. So thank you both so much for joining.

And thanks both of you for this lovely conversation. Howard, always a pleasure to hear you read your books, to read every little anecdotes that you put in your thoughts. They are so unique.

And maybe one day I'll talk to you about how they are aligned to a lot of other philosophies that you may not have heard of and you may not have read. But that would be wonderful. Actually thinking in the same lines.

And that's what taught me a lot about you. So thanks very much for joining. I hope to have another conversation with you.

Thanks. And both of you have a great day. Thank you, Howard.

Thank you very much, Jaya. Take care, everybody. Have a good night, Mark.

Good night. Take care. Take care.

Bye. Bye.