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Howard Bloom \\u2014 called \\u201cthe greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known\\u201d by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull \\u2014 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. Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me is Bloom\\u2019s story \\u2014 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:

• What and where is God?
• the search for God inside us all
• how an atheist can search for the soul
• conducting science in everyday life
• music as an evolutionary adaptation or cheese cake spandrel
• What makes some musicians successful and others not (hint: it\\u2019s more than 10,000 hours of practice)
• what it was like woking with Prince, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, and others
• Do female rock stars have as much sex with strange men as male rock stars have sex with strange women?
• why Michael Jackson was a transcendent talent, the Mozart of our time.

Based in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Howard Bloom has been called \\u201cnext in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud\\u201d by Britain\\u2019s Channel 4 TV, and \\u201cthe next Stephen Hawking\\u201d by Gear magazine. One of Bloom\\u2019s seven books, Global Brain, was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.

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