#1119 - Howard Bloom

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Try to keep this about a fist away from your face. That's the best length.

Howard Bloom (0:07)

How's this?

Joe Rogan (0:07)

A little closer, if you can.

Good? We're live? Oh, that was quick. Oh, you're a wizard over there. Mr. Bloom.

Howard Bloom (0:17)

Yes, Joe. It's great to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it.

Howard Bloom (0:19)

Well, we were in a film together, so we've been right next to each other on Celluloid.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

What film were we in?

Howard Bloom (0:25)

Well, that was The Culture High, Brett Harvey, and it's You, Me, Richard Branson, and Snoop Dogg.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

Oh, good company.

Howard Bloom (0:34)

Yes, right.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

Yeah, so you were just saying right before we did the podcast, you were in bed for 15 years.

Howard Bloom (0:42)

Yeah, I got sick in 1988 I wasn't able to make it out of that bed until 2003 But Joe, I was absolutely certain I would never make it out of that bed.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

What did you have?

Howard Bloom (0:52)

Yeah, it's called these days, this month, it's called ME-CFS.

Up until now, it was just known as chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS. But it's real serious if you get a bad case of it. So I was too weak to talk for five years, too weak to talk.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

You didn't talk at all.

Howard Bloom (1:11)

Not a bit. I didn't have the strength to puff out even a syllable.

And I was too weak to have another person in the room with me for five years.

Joe Rogan (1:21)

You couldn't have a person in the room.

Howard Bloom (1:23)

My stress levels were off the charts. And the slightest thing would just to crack. My wife tried to keep me company. So we have this big king size bed and she would lay in bed reading a newspaper. And the sound of the page turning went through me like a cannonball. And she just tore me to pieces.

And she had to build a separate room in the front of the house and live there because I couldn't tolerate anything.

Joe Rogan (1:53)

Did you think it was over?

Howard Bloom (1:55)

Yeah, I thought first of all, something you don't know. You have a sense of humanity and you don't know it. And something like this that wipes out your entire future, every dream you ever had for yourself robs you of your sense of humanity. And you don't know there is a sense of humanity until it disappears. So it took me three years. I had to rebuild a personality from just about scratch because the one area I could handle at least most of the time was the internet. The internet hit the music industry in 1983 and I had been lusting after it for years because only academics had access to this real high tech thing.

And it took me three years to realize that every day I was trying to go up to my front room office and work and that sitting was draining me of my energy. And since I only had a tiny amount of energy, if I lay there, horizontal, in the bed, my voice would eventually come back. So I had an assistant take two computers because in those days, two computers was about half the size of your cell phone and I had them hook up two computers and a Chinese box, don't let anybody tell you the Chinese don't invent things, they do.

And this was a box that allowed me to control both computers from one monitor and one keyboard. So we had the keyboard up on foam bolsters so that I could see it when I was laying perfectly horizontal in bed so I could still see the keys. And I rebuilt the personality online because I couldn't get any further than to the bathroom and back. That was it.

Joe Rogan (3:40)

What do you mean by you rebuilt a personality?

Howard Bloom (3:42)

Well everything I hadn't expected, I mean I was going to write my first book and I was going to, I'm a nerd from science. I got into science at the age of 10 I got into theoretical physics and microbiology. I built my first Boolean algebra machine when I was 12 I co-designed a computer that won science fair awards when I was 12 I was taken to see the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo and disappeared into his office for an hour. My mother wondered what in the world had happened to me because it was supposed to be a five-minute courtesy call. We were discussing Big Bang versus steady state theory of the universe for an hour.