Scott Bloom is a comedian, keynote speaker, and host of the podcast No More Bad Events. A lifelong student of personal growth and comedy, he has spent his career making people laugh while accidentally discovering profound truths. His first book, You CAN Judge a Book by Its Cover, is a collection of faux book covers that left readers wondering if he was putting them on or if he genuinely believes his own ridiculous theories. Scott lives in Los Angeles with his two kids who remain unconvinced that turning quantum physics puns into actual success constitutes a real job (even their dog, Victory, has questions).
This is his second book, though in some timeline, it's his first. Time will tell.
Q: What motivated you to write this book, and why now?
A: I wasn’t planning on writing a book. Years ago, I started making faux book covers as a running joke, parodies of self-help and business books, each one with a funny fictional synopsis. That joke eventually became my first book, You CAN Judge a Book by Its Cover, a real book made entirely of faux book covers.
During the pandemic, I came back to making them as a way to brand my humor on social media. People were in on the joke, commenting as if the books were real, asking where they could buy them, playing along.
Then one day, I created a cover called The Atomic Morning Miracle, a satirical mashup of Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I looked at it and thought, This could actually be a funny book.
But as I started writing it, something happened. Real ideas kept showing up. Especially around quantum thinking, the idea that we exist inside a field of multiple timelines and multiple possibilities. I realized some of this could actually help people. So I built exercises around it. What started as a parody became a real self-help book that just happens to make you laugh while it changes you.
Q: What was the most challenging part of writing your book?
A: The biggest challenge wasn’t actually the writing. It was getting this manuscript into Scott Bakula’s hands. I had written a fictionalized version of him into the book as the Quantum Tour Guide, a character helping the reader navigate between the parody chapters and the practical exercises. The writing flowed, but the whole project hinged on whether the real Scott Bakula would agree to be part of it. If he said no, this book wouldn’t exist. Luckily, he said yes.
The writing itself came naturally once I got going. What I really loved was the rewriting. Comedy lives in the rewrite. You start with a funny idea and keep working it until every word counts. That’s where the joy is.
The hardest writing was the vulnerable stuff. Comedy is my comfort zone. It’s who I am. But this book asked me to open up in places I usually don’t. I share some of the mental health challenges I went through during the pandemic. I write about losing my father and the fact that he never got to see the finished book come to life. Sitting in those moments without reaching for a joke was a different kind of work, and it made for probably the most important writing in the book.
Q: How does your personal or professional background influence your writing?
A: I was a funny kid. I loved making my family and friends laugh. I still remember a friend in second grade telling me he thought I was funny, and how good that felt. In college, I started an improv group called the Court Gestures. We performed on Friday afternoons on the lawn outside the library, and I MC’d cabaret nights on campus. That led to stand-up, corporate MC work, and comedic keynotes.
Alongside that, I’ve been on a long spiritual and personal growth journey. I’m fascinated by why we’re here and what we’re here to do. I think it’s to grow, to fully embody our true selves while having this human experience. Those two tracks finally collided in this book.
The first exercise in the book is to create a To Be List instead of a To Do List. On it are qualities you want to live from, ones closer to our true nature, like love, joy, gratitude, and peace. The core idea is that we already have everything we think we need to get. The book is trying to shatter the illusion that if you just achieve a certain goal or reach an idealized image of yourself, you’ll finally be happy. Joy is uncaused. Happiness needs a reason. You can feel joy in any moment because it’s been yours all along.
That’s the through line of everything I do. Comedy lowers people’s defenses, and once the defenses are down, the real stuff can land.
Q: Who do you hope this book will resonate with the most?
A: There are really two groups, and the book is built for both.
The first group is people who love comedy. They might never pick up a self-help book on their own. I’m hoping they come for the laughs and leave with something they didn’t expect—a new way of seeing themselves and what they already have. Anxiety is a huge issue for so many people right now. I believe everything in the universe is happening for you, not to you. When you can accept what shows up because you trust it’s helping you get where you need to be next, the anxiety starts to loosen. That’s the real shift. And comedy is what gets you there. It lowers tension. It breaks down defenses. My hope is that someone reads the funny parts, gets disarmed, and decides to try the exercises, even ironically at first. Then they notice they feel better. Calmer. Less driven to constantly chase something to feel okay.
The second group is the personal growth readers. They’ll dive straight into the exercises and get a lot out of them right away. For them, the comedy is a relief, a reminder not to take the work so seriously.
The Atomic Morning Miracle isn’t your conventional self-help book, and it isn’t your typical humor book. It threads the needle between the two. The comedy becomes a Trojan horse so the transformation can sneak up on you. And the fictional Scott Bakula is the bridge between them. He’s the Quantum Tour Guide, the reassuring coach who shows up to say, “Yes, this is bizarre, and yes, this is ridiculous, but stay with it. There’s a reason. Trust me.” He even points out when they’re starting to shift, when they’re seeing life a little differently. And by the end, the reader does.
Q: What advice would you give to someone thinking about writing a book?
A: You have to be inspired. You need an idea or a vision you genuinely want to share with the world. It has to be something you can’t not write. Because writing a book is a long process. This one took me about a year, and ironically, I thought I was almost done in the first few months. I kept rewriting. Kept discovering. Kept refining. But it never felt like work because it was my passion. I always looked forward to discovering what was going to happen next. I loved it!
You can’t casually write a book. It has to be in you and needs to come out. You feel driven to create it. You don’t have a choice.
The other thing is, you have to trust the process. You won’t know in certain moments where it’s all going. A big example for me was Scott Bakula. I wrote the entire book with the fictional Scott Bakula as the Quantum Tour Guide, fully committed, without knowing if the real Scott Bakula would ever read the manuscript or agree to be part of it. If he had passed on the project, the book as it exists now wouldn’t have happened. I trusted that something would unfold. And it did.
The best part of writing is the feedback loop. You put an idea on the page, and seeing it there sparks the next idea, which sparks the one after that. You’ll surprise yourself. You’ll never fully know what the final book will be until you’re in it. Mine started as a comedy and became a self-help book. I would never have discovered that if I hadn’t started.
So start. That’s the advice. Start writing, and you’ll get to experience the joy of creating.
Q: What’s one thing readers might be surprised to learn about your journey, whether in life or in writing?
A: A lot of people who realize they can make people laugh when they’re young use comedy as a defense. It keeps people at a distance. It masks vulnerability. I remember my father asking me, “Can you be serious for a moment? Does everything have to be a joke?”
When you’re a funny kid, every laugh feeds your ego. It lights you up. And then you want more. It’s like a drug. You’re not aware of it, but you’re constantly chasing that high. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I needed the attention. The affirmation. The praise. My parents divorced young, and both of them were a little more focused on themselves than on me. Comedy gave me friends, community, a way to feel seen.
But here’s what surprised me about my own journey: You really start to grow as a comedian when you don’t need the laughter anymore. You’re not looking for approval or validation anymore. You’re freely sharing your art and letting the audience decide what to do with it. The work gets braver. You take more chances. You open up to things you wouldn’t have touched before.
That’s been my whole arc. Through comedy and through my own personal growth work, I’ve gotten more open, more vulnerable, more willing to be honest about who I actually am. There are things in this book I would never have shared even ten years ago. I would have been too worried about how I came across. Too protective of my image. I’d try to control what people thought of me.
Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” That line has stayed with me. The cracks are your flaws, your insecurities, your vulnerability. When you stop hiding them, something gets in. Call it Source, call it grace, call it whatever you want. It meets your truth there, in the broken place, and what comes back out is your light. That’s how you connect with people in a deeper way.
I didn’t just want people to laugh with this book. I wanted them to feel something underneath the laughter. To see themselves a little differently. To realize they don’t have to keep chasing something to be okay. They already are.
Q: Do you have a writing routine or ritual that helps keep you focused?
A: Full disclosure: I’m not one of those people who wakes up at 5 a.m. and writes for four hours. That’s the kind of optimization and productivity cult my book is actually making fun of. Good for the people who do it. That’s not me.
My ritual is simpler. I get an idea, I get inspired, and I can’t wait to sit down and start typing. That’s it. Inspiration is the ritual.
What I do have is a rewriting process. When I’m writing comedy, I read it back, and if I hit a spot where something feels a little off, even if I can’t say exactly why, I keep rewriting—sometimes the same passage, over and over, for days, even weeks, until I can read it from top to bottom without anything catching my ear. It’s not about being a perfectionist. After doing this long enough, you develop an ear. You can feel when a word is wrong or a rhythm is off, and you keep refining until it lands.
The trap is reading something and going, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” Good enough is the enemy. I’m looking for great. Some people in my life would call me a little obsessive about it, which makes me sound like a perfectionist. I don’t need it perfect. I just need it to sound right. So I may not wake up at 5 a.m. to write, but I might end up writing till 5 a.m. (Ironically, I rewrote those last few sentences a bunch of times. I think I finally got it right.)
Q: Is there a particular quote, motto, or piece of wisdom that guided you through the writing process?
A: A line from A Course in Miracles has guided me for a long time. I call it W7 because there are seven words in this meditation that start with W. “Where would You have me go? What would You have me do? What would You have me say, and to whom?”
That’s the practice underneath everything I do. It’s me opening up to something greater than my own limited mind. I don’t always have the answers. None of us do. But when I get quiet and let something greater guide me, the answers tend to show up. It’s quieting your mind so you can tap into your intuition, Source, the universe, a Higher Power, Taylor Swift—whatever you want to call it. We all have access when we stop trying to figure things out. It just shows up. For me, it happens sometimes on long walks with my dog. Sometimes in the shower. Almost never when I’m trying to force it.
Writing this book asked me to trust that over and over. I didn’t have all the answers when I started. I trusted that what I needed would be revealed. And it was, again and again. The Scott Bakula piece. The exercises. The whole architecture of the book. None of it was planned at the start. It was uncovered.
When you open up to something more expansive than your finite mind, your life goes in directions you couldn’t have planned or imagined. That’s been my experience, and it’s a big part of what this book is really about underneath the jokes.
Q: Are you working on another book or project you’d like to share?
A: Yes. I think I’ve accidentally created a new genre: comedic personal growth books, each one guided by a celebrity playing a fictional version of themselves. I’d like to build that out into a series. You probably think I’m kidding, but I’m not.
In fact, speaking of ideas coming to you, this one showed up in the shower. The title and the concept arrived at the same time. The book is called Beyond the Dome. The dome is a hip-hop reference to your head, specifically related to freestyle rap. As in the phrase “off the dome,” which means speaking or creating spontaneously, without overthinking. The book is about going past even that. The best ideas don’t come from you. They come through you. Forcing them doesn’t work. Letting go is how you make room. That’s what the book is about.
And of course, it needs a celebrity to play a fictional version of themselves. Since this book has Scott Bakula attached to it, and he, among many other things, played Captain Jonathan Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise, I thought it would be funny to get really specific with the genre. Not just a celebrity, but a celebrity who formerly played a captain on a Star Trek series.
I won’t say who I have in mind. But I’ll give you a hint. He’s bald, and he always made it so.
Knowing me, I’ll probably write the whole book first and then reach out to his team. That worked once. I’m on a roll. Why not press my luck?
Q: What are five books that have had a lasting impact on you?
A:
These books shaped me in two directions. The first four cracked open how I think about consciousness, presence, and what we’re actually here to do. The fifth is Steve Martin’s memoir, which taught me what it really takes to develop a comedic voice over a lifetime. Comedy and consciousness have always been the two tracks of my life, and these books are the foundation underneath both.
Scott Bloom's new book, The Atomic Morning Miracle, is coming soon August 4, 2026!