Paul Katz of Entertain Impact: “Why You Need To Move and Groove”

By Yitzi Weiner, Founder & Editor of Authority Magazine, CEO of Thought Leader Incubator

As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Katz.

Paul Katz is a social entrepreneur, music veteran, multiple Grammy nominee, and UK attorney who has worked with major artists and overseen music for Oscar winning films. For nearly two decades, through his company Entertain Impact, Paul has utilized pop culture and engaged influencers in marketing and advocacy campaigns for causes.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up in a loving home in suburban London, where I spent most of my school days playing soccer and listening to music. I started my own DJ business at 13 years old, and continued spinning through my undergraduate, postgrad, and law school days. By the time I left high school, I had applied to work at EMI Records, the Beatles label, six times, and eventually worked at EMI when I first qualified as a UK attorney. My mantra has always been follow your passion, not the money, and music was my first love. That’s what took me to the US nearly four decades ago.

When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?

I was not particularly philanthropic-focused as a kid but was an avid reader. The book that opened up my worldview as a 15-year-old was the novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s, the story follows Ivan Denisovich Shukhov an ordinary prisoner, wrongly imprisoned during Stalin’s reign of terror for one day. Noble Prize winner in Literature Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag as a dissident, so the book is largely based on his own experience and is more potent. The book made me uncomfortable and appreciative of my situation. I even went to the kitchen and, for my breakfast, slowly ate a small piece of bread dipped in water, which was the prisoner’s ration on a good day. The book was the catalyst for me to join Amnesty International, especially their letter-writing campaign to free political prisoners and to become involved in the field of Human Rights.