Passion Points and the Art of Creation

Howard Bloom has been called the next lineage of seminal thinkers and includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller.

He’s been called the next Stephen Hawking. He is the author of seven, maybe eight books, including the Lucifer principle, the scientific expedition of history, and then recently published Einstein, Michael Jackson, and me, search for soul in the power picks of rock and roll.

Anyone walking around some late afternoon prospect Park in Brooklyn, might  see  Howard walking vigorously, stopping only to gaze at the beauty of the dogs, beautiful puppy as he calls him, circling in the square

You might not know the name Howard Bloom, and you might, but you will certainly recognize the names.

Howard was a key part of the teams that he helped bring from obscurity into international fame. These artists include Joan Jett and the Blackhearts,  Prince, John Mellencamp, Chaka Khan, Luther Vandross, and more than a hundred others. He’s worn many hats, a scientist, the publicist, catalyst of movements, and author of some of the most important books of the last hundred years.

Where does art and music come from?

First of all, art, Ezra Pound, the poet, said that the artist is the antenna of society.

Art is the future, trying to piece itself together through us.

It starts for all of the artists that I’ve worked with, and as you said, I’ve worked with over a hundred, including people like Michael Jackson, who was an entire experience worthy of a show on his own right, because he set a new standard for AWE, WONDER AND SURPRISE.  Now awe wonder and surprise are the basic rules of science. And where does all wonder and surprise come from? It starts in your childhood. It starts with certain imprinting moments.

You know, imprinting ducklings when the mother walks by her ducklings who have just come out of the egg, and she does it at a certain time. The ducklings start to follow her. They do what’s called imprinting on her, and they will follow her for the rest of their lives. I mean, until they become adults.

That’s imprinting. I called it passion points.

It’s something that sticks with you through the rest of your life. For example, Prince, you know that when I started with him, nobody’d ever heard his name.

And I went out to Buffalo to do a nine hour interview with him

And he told me the story of a passion point, an imprinting moment. His dad was a jazz musician.

His mom had taken him to the theater where his dad was rehearsing. He had seen 500 seats, all pointing toward a center point on the stage.

Everything pointing toward a center point on the stage. His dad was in that center of attention on the stage. And behind his dad were five of what he described as the most beautiful women he had ever seen. And that was it. That was his imprinting moment. From that moment on, he wanted to be a musician. Why? To get beautiful girls, which is another part of why artists create.

Creation is like the equivalent of the peacock sale, the creation of art. It’s our way of developing something so flamboyant, so familiar, but more masterful than what other people are doing. And yet with an element of novelty. Why? Because we can get girls if we’re men.

In women’s case, it’s harder for me to say I have never been a woman.

But we artists flash our creativity like the peacock’s tail. In the end, it’s all about getting girls as strange and reductionistic as that sounds. And it brings us to glories. It brings us to incandests. It brings us to catch fire in front of our audiences, picking up the spirit, the soul that they are channeling to us, taking it, turning, letting it go through us as if we were an empty pipe, letting it go somewhere vaguely around our head, become utterly transmogrified. And then that energy that we get from the audience flows back down through us again as if we were an empty pipe and to the audience and ignites them even further. And that process of mutual ignition, that exchange of human soul is what even the art of Van Gogh who painted in isolation is really about.

Human soul being shared through one’s skin, senses….

I asked the actor Harry Hamlin who was named the sexiest man alive in the 1980s by People Magazine. He used to be in LA law those days. He’s had quite a few parts since then. He acted in a Broadway production of Equus. And I wanted to know with all of those lights at the foot of the stage, preventing you from seeing your audience, how do you get that energy that comes from the audience? And Harry said something that should have been obvious. You hear it in their breathing. And if you’ve ever had phone sex, you hear the other person’s response in his or her breathing. One way or the other, you get that stimulus from the audience if that audience is enraptured by you.

So let’s talk about you mentioned something about Van Gogh working in isolation.  I understand many artists and creators like to isolate themselves during the process of creation. Somehow along the way they want nothing to get in the way of whatever it is that they’re thinking about.  I understand that Einstein used to just spent a good part of his day thinking.  Just really, really deep thinking. And if he could not find the answer to a problem or the solution, he would pick up his violin and somehow he would find it in music.

Well, how do we describe to the lay person, the person who isn’t creating music or art or poetry or writing a screenplay, what this process is like?

All of a sudden everything is coming out all at once. Everything they thought about for the last week or month or days or hours is coming out like a baby coming out of the womb. Well, I’ve just come out of 10 years of relative isolation writing my new book, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos. Everything you know about nature is wrong. And writing is a very isolating process. You have to shove aside every potential distraction so that you can spend four hours a day or five hours a day just researching and writing and utterly completely concentrating. And it looks like one of the most isolated processes in the world and certainly doesn’t fit that model that I just brought up of your audience of 700, 7,000, 17,000 people whose breath you can hear and whose attention comes through you as if it were a tidal wave of electricity.

So that obviously doesn’t happen when you’re isolated and alone or when nobody knows who you are. Remember Van Gogh, even though his brother was one of the top art dealers in Europe, he was only able to sell two of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings in Van Gogh’s entire lifetime. Most of the time when Vincent van Gogh was painting, he was painting in the most painful isolation, you can imagine. But your audience is always there in your head with you. Your audience is always looking over your shoulder. You are always doing something to have an impact, whatever you choose that impact to be on your audience. I choose that impact to be enlightenment. One, Alan Johnson from UCLA called Wow and Aha Experiences. That’s what I want you to have. And that, it’s very hard to carry your audience in your head, but it goes with you wherever you go. And you have to write to it. And how do you develop an audience? You brought up Einstein. Well Einstein had his passion points, his imprinting moments. His father was, and his father and his uncle had a startup in this brand new technology called electricity, in the electrical gadgets business.

And his uncle gave him a compass when he was five years old. And he found the mystery of how the compass needle, no matter where you walked or what direction you were walking, always turned in the same direction as if a ghost were guiding it. That became one of the great mysteries of his life. And then his family used to have an impoverished medical student from Poland over for lunch on Thursdays. His name was Max Talmud. And Max saw this child, Einstein, seven, eight, eventually 10 years old. And he gave this child a copy of Euclid’s Elements, the fundamental book on geometry.

And Einstein, astonishingly, the book is set up with a series of propositions, and you have to prove the propositions. Einstein worked out the proofs for every proposition in the book while he was still a child. So what did Einstein want to know about more than anything else? The geometry of the universe that would explain why that compass needle keeps pointing in its own strange direction.

So who was in Einstein’s head? His uncle, his father, Max Talmud.

And those were the major people. And they were his audience for the rest of his life trying to solve a mystery.

So Einstein working in uncharted waters with his theory.

Well, it wasn’t that he was working in uncharted waters.

There had been a major experiment when he was still very young. And everybody assumed that light waves, like waves in the ocean, waves in the ocean travel on water. So waves of light that come from distant stars had a travel on something. And that something was the ether. So if you pointed an object, if you drove an object through the ether going straight head up against it, it would push you back.

And if you drove in the direction that the ether was going, that the waves were going, they would push you forward. And you should see that in the fact that the waves would look as if they were closer together coming at you and further apart going behind you. So two guys, Michelson and Morley, one of them from Cleveland, Ohio, had put together a set of instrumentation to see if in fact we’re plowing into the ether and it’s dragging on us. And when we go with the direction of the ether, we get an extra boost. Nothing of that sort happened.

Light acted the same way when it was traveling, supposedly against the ether as when it was traveling with the ether. And that was a big puzzle. And Einstein grew up reading the works of, I believe something else Max Talmud gave him, the works of a science popularizer called Bernstein. And Bernstein poured forth in highly readable language all the science up to Einstein’s time. So Einstein was not going to get stuck in one scientific category. He was accustomed from Bernstein to seeing all the sciences all at once. And he was schooled in scientific mysteries of science. And then it appears that he immersed himself in the journal of the German Society of Physics, which was edited at that point by a guy named Max Planck. And so between all of these things Einstein was reading, he was very aware of all of the currents of science of his time and very aware of the mysteries that couldn’t be solved. So it’s not that he was using new facts or even new questions.

It’s that he saw the answers from totally, totally unexpected, unanticipated points of view, points of view, which if Einstein hadn’t existed, it may be would never have been discovered to this very day.

Okay. Speaking of discoveries, we have Einstein many years before the several centuries before that, Copernicus, Galileo, they went against, they had theories and discoveries and discoveries that were pronounced valid, true. Right. They went up against the biggest power in the world at that time. The church. The Roman Catholic church. Right.

The biggest power in the Western world.

Okay. Thank you for correcting me there.  What must they have, what must Copernicus and Galileo have been going to reveal that the Catholic church was wrong in its belief that everything revolved around the earth?

The reality was the earth revolved and the other planets revolved around the sun. Right. Well, it happened by accident, Steve.

Copernicus was given a homework assignment by the Pope.

The calendar, holidays on the calendar like Easter, which is definitely a spring holiday, tended over the course of hundreds of years to wander on the calendar. So a spring holiday ended up in winter or ended up in summer. And the Pope was concerned about this because ever since the Gregorian calendar, 2000 years ago, the church had had to maintain a calendar of holidays and make sure they fell in the right places. But the math of the calendar wasn’t working correctly.  The mathematics.. With which the calendar was on.

Ever since the Babylonians 5000 years ago, humans had been trying to figure out the patterns, the cycles of the moon and of the sun. And by the Roman era, 2000 years ago, they felt they had it knocked. They understood the sun and the planets. They understood that the sun and the planets were on crystalline spheres and those crystalline spheres circle the earth.

They had it all figured out. It was very complex, but they had it. They thought they had it all figured out, but they didn’t have it sufficiently well figured out to keep Easter in the spring.

So the Pope turned to Copernicus and said, “Can you work out the mathematics, rework the mathematics, improve the mathematics for us so that we can predict Easter or we can declare Easter in the spring. So it always comes in the spring automatically in our calendar.”

So Copernicus Copernicus went to work on that job and he couldn’t do it within what was called the Ptolemaic system. He couldn’t do it within the system of crystalline spheres revolving around the earth. He had to make a totally unexpected assumption. He had to assume strictly for mathematical purposes that the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the earth, that the earth did not revolve around or the sun did not revolve around the earth, that the earth revolved around the sun. And once he added that strange assumption to his mathematics, his mathematics worked.

But Copernicus was terrified that if anyone found out that he had created this math based on the idea that the earth might revolve around the sun, he would be burned alive at the stake.

And so he wrote a book about it, but he wouldn’t show his book to anybody except for his apprentice. And it wasn’t until he died that his apprentice made that book public. And that book in turn influenced Galileo.

Now God knows what Galileo’s imprinting points were, but Galileo’s father was one of the greatest musical theorists of his time. And you know how musical theory had begun with Pythagoras 2,400 years ago, who had figured out that there was a relationship between the length of a chord of string that you made music with and the chord that it produced.

And a mathematical relationship that produced harmonies. So all of this was part of what Galileo grew up on. And when Galileo did his experiments running steel balls down a plank to see how rapidly they accelerated on their way down, no one has asked the question of how did he keep time to time these balls as they were accelerating.

He didn’t have clocks.

So it turns out that Galileo, the son of a musician, sung songs to time the ball, rolling down what we now call an inclined plane. So you have, it’s as if you gather a bouquet of striking emotional experiences when you’re five years old. And then you gather some more when you’re 10 years old.

It’s like Kevin Cronin, the songwriter and singer for “R.E.O. Speedwagon.” When he was five, Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and you couldn’t hear his music because the girls were throwing themselves at the stage and screaming so loud. That was one passion point, one imprinting point for Kevin Cronin.

10 years later, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and girls screamed so loud that you couldn’t hear the Beatles’ music. That was a second imprinting point. One came when Kevin was five, one came when Kevin was 15.

And imprinting points like that showed up in Galileo’s life and showed up in Albert Einstein’s life and are showing up right now while we’re having this conversation in you and me.

So now you understand that ball going down the incline plane.

Let’s talk about where the world is now. No, no. Let me rephrase that question.   Where do you believe it’s at by what we’re being told? Let’s say war, war, battles. People don’t know what to trust. With all this wisdom, what would you tell an entrepreneur who wants to do the right thing for society to do to tap into the wisdom of the last part of this conversation?

Well, we believe that we are living on the cusp of catastrophe in a moment whose decisions could lead to the end of humanity and the end of life as we know it. And that’s happening both in the realm of war, where the war between Iran and Hamas was started on October 7th. I mean, the war between Iran and Israel was started on October 7th when an Iranian proxy, Hamas, attacked Israel in vicious and monstrous ways. And that war has been building since October 7th. And there’s a possibility it could become a nuclear war in World War III.

The other risk is climate change. Well, the new book, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, says that  disaster is opportunity in disguise, that nature is using you and me to feel out for future impossibilities and turn them into reality, that every irritation you’ve got, every little gripe that you complain about is really an item on a checklist that you would like to see resolved. If you can resolve one of those issues that makes you mutter and curse in your daily experience, then you have a commercial opportunity.

Your task in life is to find things in your own soul that sing and vibrate to the currents of the moment, to the opportunities of the moment, and use them to solve  to solve your problems so you can solve other people’s problems, to give you new glories and new delights so you can give other people new glories and new delights.

If you save, uplift, empower, and upgrade one neighbor, you get a dollar. If you save, uplift, empower, and upgrade 10 neighbors, you get $10. If you save, uplift, empower, and upgrade 10 million neighbors, you get $10 million. That’s how Jeff Bezos has made all of his money, by changing the very nature of our life with Amazon and making things so convenient that 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, we could not have imagined it. That’s how the guys at Microsoft have made their billions.

By giving billions of us new tools that utterly change our relationship to knowledge, we can get knowledge together in a half an hour that used to take us three months.

So, save, uplift, empower, and upgrade your neighbor. How do you find the things that will save, upgrade, and empower your neighbor?

Look at your own irritations. Look at your own desires. The things that you desire and the things that irritate you are the things that are likely to be irritating hundreds of millions of others at the very same time.

Howard, you’ve talked in the past about human soul. You’ve talked about self-reliance. You’ve talked about Gods within.

Right.

You are an atheist.

Absolutely. In almost every single one of my books has a title with a religious element in it. From the “Lucifer Principle” to the “God problem.”

How does an atheist discover, enable other people who might not be thinking the same way to discover the Gods within?

That’s a good question and that’s my job.

I try to do it through my books and I try to do it through my interviews. But the fact is that I realized when I was 12 years old that I was an atheist.

What was the moment? What happened?

Well, I don’t know what happened. From the age of 10, I’d been reading two books a day. I read one book under the desk at school. I read another book when I got home. Some of these books were science. I strongly suspect that I read Bertrand Russell’s small book on Christianity in which he expressed his atheism. I strongly suspect it percolated in me and then something very strange was coming up. I was the least popular child in all of Buffalo, New York. If there were a party of any kind in Buffalo, I was cordially invited to say as far away as possible, preferably Cleveland or Tucson.

But an event was coming up in which I not only was going to be invited to a party, I was going to be the central figure at a party. It was my bar mitzvah. So I realized that I was an atheist.

But if I confess that to myself, I wouldn’t be able to go through with my bar mitzvah. I’d miss the only party in my life that I’d ever been invited to.

And I’d miss the presence.

Bar Mitzvah is a windfall of gifts and checks. So I kept the awareness that I was an atheist out of the main arena of my consciousness until the bar mitzvah was over. Then I was able to confess that I was an atheist. Well, when you confess that you’re an atheist and you look at the world around you and look to see what are the most intense of human experiences, the most intense of human experiences are religious experiences.

They’re sexual experiences and they are religious experiences. And I wanted to understand those passions. I did not know yet know the phrase participant observer science, which is used in anthropology. It’s one like Margaret Mead.

You throw yourself into a tribe and imbibe its ways in every cell of your body so thoroughly that the tribes people who never elect a female’s chiefs and never elect foreigners chiefs make you a chief.

And so I became fascinated with what William James called the varieties of the religious experience. And I wanted to understand them from a participant observer point of view. I wanted to experience those experiences with all my heart and soul.

And then I wanted to be able to put them in the framework of my science and explain where they belonged in the world. And that’s been one of my great missions since I was 12 years old.

Was that understanding of human soul, the artists that you worked with and the art studios that you led, campaigns that you ran? Was that one of the biggest driving forces in your life?

Absolutely.

Because what I picked up on from science and from one other source, when I was five, I went down to the local, I went with the other kids who usually shun me, but they let me in on this. They were going down to the corner store and they were going to buy baseball cards.

Well, I didn’t have the slightest interest in baseball, but there was another set of trading cards there from a guy named Frank Buck. And Frank Buck used to mount safaris into Africa. And instead of bringing back dead animals and stuffing them, he brought back live animals and gave them to zoos and circuses. And he had a slogan, bring them back alive. And that combined with what I learned from all the scientists I was reading gave me the impression that one major job of science is to mount scientific expeditions like Frank Buck’s safaris into Africa,

Scientific expeditions into the wilderness of the human soul, into the wilderness of the human experience,

into the very wilderness that produces the religious experience and to come back like Frank Buck, bringing the experience back alive, having lived it, having felt it in your bones and muscles, and then coming back to understand it in scientific terms. And that’s what I’ve been doing most of my life, thank goodness, because very few people get this opportunity. I’ve been going on one adventure after another, each one as a scientific expedition into the forces of the human soul.

And then I discovered in researching the current book, I discovered somebody I had never heard of before, Wilhelm von Humboldt. And it turns out that around 1800 Wilhelm von Humboldt went out on a sailing ship on a scientific expedition.

And he helped popularize scientific expeditions. It was William Humboldt’s five-year expedition to South America where he walked 6,000 miles on foot where he tried to climb what people thought at that time was the highest mountain in the world and where he made a side trip to North America and met with Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson, because von Humboldt was such an electrifying figure. Thomas Jefferson gathered the leading intellects and artists of this new American Republic to meet with William von, I called him Helmholtz a second ago, William von Humboldt, a whole different person.

But so I suddenly discovered that what I was doing, scientific expeditions of the forces of the human soul and into the forces of history were not unique to me. William von Humboldt wrote up his expeditions in seven volumes. When Charles, he later influenced a guy named Charles Darwin who tried to imitate William von Humboldt by getting on a sailing ship that was off on a scientific expedition. And he spent five years on that ship. It was called the Beagle, making his voyage of the Beagle. Well that’s what I did being first co-founding an art studio that became one of the leading avant-garde commercial art studios on the East Coast, then creating a public relations firm in a field I knew I had known nothing about until then, rock and roll, and helping build careers like helping sustain careers or build careers like Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s. And then went back to my science. It’s been one expedition. Oh, and I forgot dropping out of college and accidentally helping found the hippie movement. So what I’ve been studying is social groups and their ecstasies by experiencing them, by helping generate them, by becoming a master at generating attention storms.

These storms of the collective spirit, these hurricanes of the collective spirit.

Howard, let’s talk about the Howard Bloom Institute and Osmology.  What is that and why is it important?

Howard Bloom Institute is important because it is promoting a new field. It’s an omnology.

And omnology is a discipline for the promiscuously curious. It’s a discipline for kids like Albert Einstein, who was reading Bernstein’s books that gave him a broad overview of all of the sciences.

It’s for people who, it’s there so that when you’re in your sophomore year of college, and you’re taking neuroscience, you’re taking art history, and you’re taking film, and your dad sits you down and says, “Look, Steve, you have to make up your mind. Are you going to be a filmmaker, a neuroscientist, or an art historian? Until you make up your mind, you’re nobody.” And our omnology is there so you can give your dad the middle finger and say, “Dad, I have three areas of curiosity. Those are the source of my passions. I am going to follow those three curiosities simultaneously, and if they become old and boring, I will set them aside, and if new curiosities come up, I will go after them.” And when my friends at the age of 40 are all having midlife crises, and the men are buying little red sports cars and picking up blondes because they have no idea of why they’re here on planet Earth, the women are planning elaborate divorces so they can finally find themselves.

They will be feeling they are at the end of their lives. I will be coming back from the wilderness of my multiple curiosities with my first big picture answers. While my friends feel they are at the end of their lives, I will know I am the very beginning of mine. And that’s what omnology is about. Basically, the Howard Bloom Institute is there. I have a very peculiar way of thought, Steve. You, we’ve known each other for over 20 years. You probably know that better than I do even.

But I am about to be 81 years old, and I will eventually die. And how do we perpetuate this peculiar way of thought so others feel they have permission to think outside the box in their own strange ways? To pursue things like collective soul as a legitimate scientific enterprise and as a legitimate thing to try to experience for all it’s worth. Going to Taylor Swift concerts or whatever it takes.

Leaving that template of that way of thinking and that way of being and that way of pursuing your life is the job of the Howard Bloom Institute.

The Howard Bloom Institute

Howardbloom.institute