The Rich Roll Podcast - Jeff Castelaz: Music As a Weapon, Solace In Cycling, Building a Life of Service & Why It’s All About The Neighborhood

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Jeff Castelaz is a big deal in the music biz. A self-made guy who scraped his way from nothing to launch and manage major musical acts, found and run a successful indie label and even serve up president duties at a major record label. All of these things are very impressive and interesting. None of these things are what draw me to Jeff. Jeff is on the show because of his compelling, at times heart-wrenching but incredibly human life story. From his abusive childhood to his struggles with alcohol to the devastating loss of his six-year-old son Pablo to cancer, Jeff is a survivor. A guy who refused to let unbearable pain destroy him, instead leveraging it to access a deeper personal truth, inner strength and sense of purpose. Finding life-saving comfort and solace in both music and cycling as far back as he can remember, Jeff successfully channelled his incredible passion for both into creating a life and legacy of meaning in selfless service to others as an entrepreneur, husband, father and philanthropist. In his most recent post as president of Elektra Records, a division of Warner Music Group, Jeff worked alongside the likes of Ed Sheeran, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kitten, bringing in acts like Fitz and the Tantrums, Saint Motel, The Moth & The Flame and Kaleo. Prior to his post at Elektra, Jeff served as CEO of Dangerbird Records, which he co-founded in 2003. There, he played a key role in the careers of Silversun Pickups, Fitz and The Tantrums and Liam Gallagher's post-Oasis effort, Beady Eye. In 2009 Jeff & his wife Joanne Thraikill tragically lost their son Pablo to cancer just six days after his sixth birthday. From the moment of Pablo's 2008 diagnosis with bilateral Wilms Tumor, a rare form of childhood cancer, Jeff took to the blogosphere to keep friends and family apprised of developments. Sharing his incomprehensible pain with a bold and raw vulnerability, PABLOG! went viral, resulting in a massive and unexpected outpouring of love and support for Pablo and the Castelaz / Thraikill family. Support Jeff and Joanne ultimately channelled into what would become the Pablove Foundation– a pediatric cancer charity which has raised $10 million to date in support of innovative pediatric cancer research and programs for kids and families living with childhood cancer. Each year since its inception, Pablove hosts a charity ride called Pablove Across America. Today — Monday October 5, 2015 — marks the start of Pablove’s seventh annual week-long cycling event in which 40 cyclists will ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco to raise funds and awareness for childhood cancer. To find out more, get involved and donate, click here. This is a conversation about music and life. Rage, pain, disease, addiction, loss and grief. It's about breaking old cycles. Learning how to heal. Growing up, self-care and sobriety. It's about hope, family, redemption and service. It's about salvation. And it's about the beauty, comfort and agony that comes with loving wide and loving deep. Jeff is an incredibly charismatic guy with a infectious energy and a spirit the size of Montana. I'm proud to call him friend. And I'm proud to share this conversation with you today. May it move you as deeply as it moved me. Peace + Plants, Rich

And I just wrote and wrote and wrote and my imagination lit up and opened up and it was like meditation for me. And we know now like cycling is literally a meditative act. They've done research on this. It does the same thing for the neural pathways that actual meditation, sitting on your ass and breathing deeply does for you. And it gave me a way to get around. It gave me something to be passionate about other than music and writing. That's Jeff Casteles,

and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What do you know? What's going on? What is the news? What's up? The Rich Roll Podcast. paradigm breaking culture change. And the goal is simple, to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves to embrace our inner truth and express that more deeply. So thank you so much for tuning into the show for subscribing on iTunes for checking out my weekly newsletter for giving us a review on iTunes, and always making sure to use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. The banner ad's right there on the podcast page. You can't miss it. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It's just a really straightforward, simple, great free way to support the mission. And it really does help us out a lot. So thank you so

much to everybody who has made a practice of that. Got my buddy Jeff Castellos on the show today. He's a great guy, super interesting guy, and I'm really excited about this one. I think you guys are in for a treat. Jeff is a high-level music industry executive. He is an avid cyclist. He is a philanthropist. He's just an amazing guy with a really compelling and at times heart-wrenching life story and service mission. And I'm going to tell you all about him in more detail in a minute. But first... All right, so Jeff Casteliz, you guys are in for a treat. I'm telling you, there's so much good stuff here. Jeff has lived a life, man.

What can I say? The highest of highs, the lowest of lows. In many ways, Jeff is a survivor. He's really gone through it and come out the other side, not just intact, but with a sense of purpose and service that kind of guides his trajectory. And when we first sat down to record this podcast, it was a few weeks ago. At the time, Jeff was serving as president of Elektra Records. It's a pretty big job, right?

Like sitting kind of high atop the music business hierarchy. And much of our conversation is kind of about what it's like to run a major record label. And it's really funny because just a couple of days ago, he texted me and he said, you might want to think about reframing how you're going to introduce me

in this podcast. And I had a little link there. It was a link to an article on Billboard magazine that was all about how Jeff was stepping down as president of Elektra, effective September 30th. So by the time you hear this, he will no longer be president of

Elektra Records, which is kind of hilarious. But nonetheless, I think it's still interesting to hear about that experience and what that's all about. While at Elektra, he brought in amazing acts and talent, people in bands like Fitz and the Tantrums, St. Elektra, he brought in amazing acts and talent, people in bands like Fitz and the Tantrums, St. Motel, The Moth and the Flame, Anderson East, and Kaleo. He worked with incredible acts like Ed Sheeran and Kitten while there.

And before Elektra, Jeff was CEO of Dangerbird Records, which is a record label and management entity and licensing entity that he co-founded in 2003. And while he was there, he played a key role in the careers of acts like Silver Sun Pickups, again, fits in the tantrums, BDI, all kinds of amazing musical acts. And now in the wake of putting Elektra behind him, he's going back to his roots, back to cast management, which is the management entity that he co-founded in 1992. And it's going to be exciting

to see what he does in this capacity. But Jeff is not on the podcast because he's a big music industry mucky-muck. That's a very interesting story, but there is so much more to him uh jeff's life story and how he not only emerged and survived out of his incredibly challenged upbringing in milwaukee uh to become so successful in this in this business well that would be enough of a compelling story but there's much more to it. In 2009, just six days

after his sixth birthday, Jeff and his wife, Joanne, lost their son, Pablo, to cancer, which, of course, nobody would wish such a fate on anybody, on any parent. And at the time, Jeff shared what I can only imagine was the most incomprehensible and profound degree of pain. He shared it openly on a blog, which is how I first found out about him, because I found myself reading this blog and just riveted by this story as it unfolded about what he was going through, what his family was going through, what Pablo was going through. as it unfolded, about what he was going through, what his family was going through, what Pablo was going through. And in the wake of Pablo's passing, Joanne and Jeff decided to channel their grief into service and formed this foundation called Poblove, which is a pediatric cancer charity, which funds innovative pediatric cancer research and programs for kids and families who are living with childhood cancer. And to date, it's been incredibly successful. It's raised nearly $10 million.

And an avid cyclist, you know, Jeff is a guy who sought refuge and answers on the bike, much like I have done. Every year, the Pavlov Foundation hosts a big charity ride called Poblove Across America. And this week, beginning on October 5th, in fact, marks the start of Poblove's seventh annual week-long cycling event. It's an event where 40 cyclists this year are going to ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco to raise funds and awareness for childhood cancer, which is really cool. And we talk a lot about that. Jeff's a really amazing guy. He's incredibly charismatic. You can really feel his love of people, of life, and of music. His love for his son is just undeniable. And the story of Pablo, I think, is going to leave you with a sense of gratitude. And my hope is that you will have a more profound appreciation for the now.

This is a long conversation, but it's well worth the investment in time. It's a conversation that explores music, of course, Jeff's love for music, what he learned as an entrepreneur in this creative industry, his love of cycling. It's a conversation about childhood pain and overcoming that. It's about addiction and recovery. It's about healing past wounds. It's about parenting and family and the incomprehensible pain of losing a child and figuring out how to reassemble life in the wake of such an incomprehensible tragedy. And it's about finding meaning and solace and purpose in giving back. So without further ado, enjoy my talk with Jeff Kastelitz.

Thanks for taking the time, man. Thanks for having me. I've wanted to do your podcast since you started it. Oh, I'm glad we're here, man. It was a long time coming. It's one of those things where it's like, we actually haven't spent that much time in person, but I feel like I know you pretty well.

Yeah. Probably better than I, you know, I think I know you better than i actually do but uh you know i feel i feel like there's um lots of different things that we can find points of commonality on to talk about so anyway i want to get into like kind of your growing up story and all of that but why don't we just like set the set the stage by you know explaining a little bit about like who you are and what you do now like what's entailed in being president of Elektra Records and what a day in the life of Jeff looks like.

Well, the bottom line is that I really stumbled into the music business when I was somewhere between 18 and 19 years old. And I really sort of just created my own path without even knowing what the hell I was somewhere between 18 and 19 years old. And I really sort of just created my own path without even knowing what the hell I was doing. So I really just, I loved music, and music was my savior. It was my best friend. You know, my records, or my stepbrother's records, or somebody's record that I borrowed,

they became my best friends growing up in a household that um that just that wasn't a whole lot of fun and wasn't frankly wasn't a safe place and so i got really into the songs i got really into what was going on in the songs even before i even really knew that i was doing that i was doing that if you know what i mean i would feel the different parts of the songs um and really try and understand like why did the keyboard player play that part and the whole reason that i do what i do is because i have this unquenchable thirst of this passion for finding music that makes me feel something with a capital F, whether it's commercially appealing

and all that is sort of like that's the second or third step after that. If I find something that moves me and makes me feel something, then I'm in the right place. And that hasn't changed from the time I was a kid, just buying records or just listening to songs on the radio. I was lucky enough to have some real angels in my life. You know, people tap me on the shows and say, Hey, do you want to work with our band? Like out of nowhere. And then that led to the next step and the next step and the next step. And so, yes, now I have this lofty job title. And prior to being the president of Elektra, I co-founded Dangerbird Records, which was at the time the epitome of this dude that grew up in a basement in Milwaukee, like reading

the liner notes of Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Oz and Black Sabbath Paranoid and Foreigner Ford, you know, trying to understand who are all these people in the credits. And it sounds novel and it's probably a cliche that's been told in 50 bad movies by now but it's true to my life and so i'm still that kid so a day in my life at the office is basically finding artists that make me feel something and then figuring out a way to get them into as many people's ears and way more importantly into as many people's hearts as possible so a successful band for me is one that um that really makes people feel something x percent of those bands are going to be bands that sell that's just a fact right i mean it's like fishing or playing odds silverstone pickups

who come from the neighborhood where we're sitting right now um were one of those bands and they had these amazing songs and they still do have amazing songs and um unorthodox songs you know they're they're a bit long they're they don't follow the traditional pop song structure but they prove the point i'm making which is that they made people feel something to such a degree that you go to their concerts and people are crying you know they're basically going like man you you're like saying shit that i you're basically describing my life and you don't even know me when you talk about the music making you feel something i mean can, is that something that you feel like you can quantify or articulate? Or is it just an instinctual gut thing where you just know it when you hear it?

All of the above. And obviously the purest form of what I'm saying is completely subjective. You know, you and I can both put a song on right now in the headphones that we're wearing. You might be like, yeah, whatever, dude. And I might be like, you know, freaking out. So a song that actually isn't a song that I grew up with. It's a song that I've fallen in love with way more recently. Um, is this song by, by the artist Chris Bell, who was in big star. And it's a song that he wrote and recorded after the band broke up. And it's called I Am the Cosmos. And it's just such an amazing song. It's bittersweet,

which is like my wheelhouse. It's like this major, minor thing. So it's driving, which is sort of like a positive thing. It's an aggressive thing's very it's very somber and very sad like elliot smith like many of the beatles songs and so it's both you know up and down at the same time and um it's like the high that people try to go for all the time now right right cocaine and pills right right whatever at the same time at the same time right i'm going up and i'm going down uh-oh what's that feeling in my chest um so yeah i can quantify it it's just that you listen to um the songs that formed who i am are um the beatles um love me do which my brother scott used to play over and over and over because it would make me cry when I was like two years old.

It scared the shit out of me. That's so interesting. Because that harmonica riff in the beginning of the song, which is like the hook of the song, it just scared me because it's like that minor sort of wailing sound. It's a weird song because on a surface level, it comes off like a ditty. Correct. But there's a lot more going on with that song.

Oh, yeah. But that was the secret of the Beatles, right? George Martin, who produced the Beatles, was a comedy producer for BBC. I had heard that. Right? And so what do comedy directors or comedy producers need? They need to know timing. They need to know all of the various aspects of emotion, right?

Because they're trying to convey this shit at the time just through sound. There's no, you know, he wasn't working in the visual medium. He was working only in sound. It's about timing. It's about, you know, what sound is going to convey what emotion, humor, sadness, anger. And the Beatles were masters of that with him, and they only ever worked with him.

And that song to me gets it. And then my they only ever worked with him. And that song, to me, gets it. And then my mom would play Neil Diamond Forever in Blue Jeans, which is a similar driving yet very sad song. And I'll stop there. You listen to Silver Sun Pickup's Lazy Eye. What is it? It's like this driving major-minor song. You listen to Fitz and the Tantrum's Money Grabber. Exactly the same thing.

And many of the bands I've managed, I mean, Dropkick Murphys are probably not known for being a somber band. They're known for being an aggressive punk band who write these amazing anthemic songs. But there's always songs on all of their records that do capture the sadness and the moments in between. Right, but there's always songs on all of their records that do capture the sadness and, and the moments in between. Right. So there's this through line with all the apps

that you're working with where you can identify that. I mean, does that, I would imagine it kind of transports you back into that, you know, basement bedroom and, you know, the self to, you know, the pain body of, you know, what you had to kind of endure to survive with, you know, 10 kids around and divorced parents and your dad being a barkeep and all this kind of craziness that was happening around you. I've worked through, I don't think I'd ever say all, I don't think anybody could ever say all of that shit. I mean, how could you ever say that? But I've worked through a lot of it and I have a very, very good relationship with my past now. Like it's okay. You know, it's just stuff that happened.

And in many respects, I now have the perspective that growing up in an unsafe house, you know, abuse and neglect, you know, all that stuff. Seeing as how it's the hand I was dealt and there's nothing I can do to change it now. It actually was helpful because it made me who I am. Well, it definitely, I think it gave you, it instilled in you survivor instincts. Yeah. And this kind of streetwise, you know, scrappy, you know, energy that allowed you to become this, you know, young, energetic entrepreneur. Yeah. I grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, my dad's corner bar. entrepreneurial environment, my dad's corner bar. And he had to figure out a way to extract more than just 40 cents for a glass of beer from customers. He had to figure out a way to sell

them food and to get them to put money on the bar for football pools and baseball pools and all this BS and raffling things off. I mean, literally raffling things off. And there's a hustle to that. And it's a salesman that. Yeah, a salesman. He's a salesman. And he could talk to anybody about anything, regardless of whether they were Native American dudes, Puerto Rican or Mexican dudes, white dudes of all different varieties.

My dad could really talk to anybody. And I really picked that up from my dad. Yeah, I feel like you have that. My dad and I, I have to forgive my dad like every nine months because he forgets that I've already forgiven him. You know, I say the thing we are taught to do, like I forgive you for everything you did and didn't do, right? Because the part that you didn't do is like, dude, you were my parent and you kind of like left me with nothing. Like when I was like 10. You know what I mean?

Like you just weren't around. But it's cool because that's when I was listening to all those records. So if I had like a parent like saying, hey, come and do your homework at the kitchen table. I don't know what I'd be doing right now. I'd be an accountant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Wait, did I just diss accountants? I'd just be a different person.

Accountant is always the default career when you want to make that kind of a point. I feel like, tell me what you think of this. We're around the same age. I'm a couple years older than you. that time when you're you know 10 11 12 13 14 that i can remember very distinctly just you know laying on my bed holding an album you know reading the liner notes listening to it discovering new music that you had to like work for to discover and letting it kind of like play out in real time yeah you know and i feel like that is something that you know this new generation of young people they're just it's just not part of their experience right like i think that's a lost

thing i mean there's of course this kind of hipster recapturing of the vinyl movement and and kind of analog and all that and that's all very cool but i feel like that's that's still kind of like a marginal thing it's not like a mainstream you know what i mean like the average like teenage kid who's going through something who's trying to discover a musician that's going to speak to them and give them some level of comfort i don't know if it's the same thing anymore it's not and um you know we had we grew up in the heart of the one-to-many reality, right? We had Walter Cronkite, who told us the evening news. And we had, you know, if you say the name of REO Speedwagon or Grandmaster Flash or Michael Jackson,

tens of millions of people had that exact same experience all around the country and all around the world. Or foreign or Boston or the Steve Miller band. It doesn't matter, you know, whatever it is that spoke to you. Yeah. And everybody was having the same experience because information traveled slowly. Right. And when things broke, they broke wider and deeper, if you will. Right. And now it's like, dude, you had, you had like a SoundCloud moment and it was just that. And now it's over. And now you have to figure out what

is your next Vine video going to look like? Because people forgot about you a day and a half later. That's the reality of it. And, um, it's different. I don't, I don't think it's worse, but it's different. And, um, on the other flip side, look at a band like Van Halen. During their first go-around with David Lee Roth, one could add up the number of songs they ever released. It's probably like 56 songs ever. The Smiths were the same way. They released more songs, but there was a finite number of songs.

If you're an artist today, you can put up a song like that and the entire world has it. And it can just be a throwaway song that you just wrote and you think it's cool. Whereas back then you had to spend thousands of dollars recording. And we grew up in a way where our imaginations were captivated by tuning into a syndicated radio show. I used to tune into the radio show metal shop and I didn't really identify as a heavy metal fan, but I liked many of those bands that they would play on that show. And I would tune into it secretly because I wasn't allowed to like listen to music at that hour, like nine o'clock on a Sunday. And if they were interviewing like Ozzy or if they were interviewing, um,

you know, rat who's first out studio of my really liked a lot, um, had incredible guitar solos. It's ridiculous music, but I can't lie now and say that I wasn't into it. I was, um, I really liked the first two Motley crew records,

you know, too fast for love. And then whatever the first electro record was called, but you know, those were moments and you know, you for love and then whatever the first electro record was called but you know those were moments and you know you you uh you had to be you had to show up when that was on yeah or you were screwed or you were it was over forever and i can remember taping the radio yeah pause tapes yeah yeah man and you're i mean so it's interesting because you're i mean your career has like navigated this whole trajectory right like you in one era, and now we're in a very different era

in terms of how we enjoy, digest, distribute music. Yeah, and every day I think either we're all completely screwed in the record business, or we're all in the right place for being survivors and still being here. And all we have to do is now that streaming is like really taking root, all we have to do is keep doing what we're doing, which is signing artists, being honest with people about their art, being honest in our marketing and all that stuff. Breaking those artists as we can, and then wait for the water to come up around the bottom of the boat and start floating us again. I keep hoping that.

And then I go back to we're all out of our minds to be in the record business because so few people are going to make all the money and so many people are going to get listened to, but they're never going to sort of feel the financial import of that. I love music. And I, and for me, let me just say this, like music is a weapon to me. I don't listen to music because like, I want to like feel good and I'm going to clean the house now. I don't do that. Music is a weapon for me. And I want to feel myself bleeding. Or if I turn the tables

and put on the right song, I want to get back at somebody over there through this song. We've all just seen straight out of Compton, like, you know, hopefully I haven't seen it yet. I still have to see it. I mean,

it's like the moment. It's like the cultural touch point of the year, I think. And I think it's going to, and I, and I hope it's going to be a big, big film financially and awards wise and other, cause it's telling a true story that changed the world.

I mean, those dudes were a wellspring for so much story, that changed the world. I mean, those dudes were a wellspring for so much stuff, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was huge. And coinciding with the riots and all of that. I mean, it was a gigantic cultural moment. And like, watching that movie,

it's not my story. I grew up in a different sort of hell than those dudes did, but I grew up in a hell of my own. And those songs are bombastic and outright violent. But they're visceral. Visceral. That's right. And I love that. And so when I say music is a weapon, that's the kind of music I go for. And even though these bands or these groups are completely

different, Guns N' Roses and N.W.A. were happening at the same time, right? And if you go back and listen to not the singles on Appetite for Destruction, but the other songs like Night Train and some of the other deeper tracks, there's a punk rock style, very L.A. punk rock style anger to those songs. They were way more devoid of melody.

They were way edgier songs than the singles that we all know and love. And those are the songs I go for, and I, for better or for worse, I could probably be a lot more successful if I got involved in music that was more pop-oriented and that that was less serious. Yeah, but that was never going to happen. I mean, let's take it back to you in junior high and finding this music as really a way to give you a vocabulary for what I would imagine was a tremendous amount of anger and confusing emotions about where you were.

Yeah. I mean, the doors, um, I had a great influence of my friend, Alan Hopakoski, who lived down the street from us, who was six years older than me. And he really taught me a lot about music. I mean, he taught me about, you always need the guy, the guys that are a couple years older to tell you what's going on. I learned how to work on cars with these dudes. They were all into American Motors cars. And up until very recently, I had a 1970 AMX. Absolutely fucking loved that car. And I learned how to work on cars with these guys.

I mean, I was like 10, 11, 12 years old. 13, 14 years old. I took my first drink with them, which is a whole other story. We're going to tell that story. Yeah. But I learned about the doors, and I learned about Cream, and I learned about John Mayall, and I learned about John Lee Hooker and Lead Belly. Basically, you did the diagram. What were the doors into? Okay, let's go back. What was Led Zeppelin into? Okay, let's go back. Let's read all the books about Jimi Hendrix

so we can find them. Who blew your mind, though? Who were your guys? Well, The Doors were absolutely my guys. I mean, I read the book, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which their manager, Danny Sugarman, wrote. And he's now deceased. And it was just an incredible book, not only about The Doors, but about L.A.,

and also about the record business at that time. And then we read Hammer of the Gods, the book about Led Zeppelin. I was always into reading about the music, too. I wanted to learn everything I could. But The Doors, I mean, Jim Morrison was the complete package for me. He was literate. He was deep i learned about i would go in anything he ever talked about the greek drama shit the poets this and that arthur rimbaugh i would go and read

it all yeah and that and that was really my gateway to my older brother scott who really was my real real mentor in art and photography and clothing, how I dress, the fact that I even cared about how I dress, and music. And he said to me one day, he goes, like, stop listening to that shit. It's terrible. I was probably listening to Van Halen. He was like, that shit sucks. Listen to this.

And he gave me a mixtape, a pause tape, which had Tones on Tail and joy division and bow house love and rockets the smiths yeah red laurie yellow laurie i mean you want to you know get an annotated you know reading list listen to the smiths and and jim morrison's poets and but jim morrison set me up for that right reading about the door set me up for, oh, there's something more behind these people. They're about something and they have an experience. And Jim Morrison was like, you know, because I never really got the impression that Led Zeppelin really dealt with too much strife as a band, right? Jim Morrison, because of the language and all the shit he did with the audience to get them to go mental and then the things he did in Miami with his

genitals and all that. He got in trouble. He really wanted to break through the fourth wall. He was taking risks. Yeah. And he got arrested for it. That and that, whatever pain I thought he was going through and how he was misunderstood and then eventually killed himself or whatever we're led to believe. In my own way, I connected my own pain and confusion about my own life and the feeling that I don't fit anywhere. I'm not wanted anywhere. I don't really have a home. I live in somebody else's house. And at any given moment, like I'm out of here. Right. Whether it's by my own choice or by hers. Hers meaning my stepmother.

But it ain't my house. My family name is not on the title of the house. And, you know, sometimes I would come home with my brother Dean, who's 18 months younger than me. And all of our possessions would be thrown at the end of the driveway in black trash bags and the locks would be changed that happened a number of times that was when you were you started off living you were living with your dad initially after the divorce right and you spent a lot of time in the bar helping him run the bar in the morning and after school yeah but then at some point you move in with your your mom right and you had a stepdad that wasn't

too keen on you guys? Or what was going on? So the deal is that we did live with our father. It was the whole trip of like me and my brothers loved, like we liked our dad because he was fun and he took us places and we got to eat like brat burgers at the bar and play like, you know, video games or whatever, right? Disneyland dad, 101.

He beat my mom up in court, as dudes could do back then, to get full custody of us. And we were like rah-rah about that. I was four years old. I didn't know. My mom was full of anguish, and she was sad. Like, little kids don't want to be around sadness. It's hard for them.

It's utterly confusing. You know, my mom was bearing all of the shit from their divorce and all the things that it was made up of. You know, my dad was beating her. He was cheating on her. I mean, just the whole bit. It's like everything you see in any movie. And so many of us grew up this way or with parts of what I just said. And we

have to be honest about it because it ain't our story. It's their story. We just, we were born into it. You're just a passenger. Yeah. And seeing the cops, hearing the cops at three and a half, four years old, tell my mom as she's bleeding on the sidewalk, as she says, can't you just go and talk to them? And then literally saying, man, it's against the law. We're not allowed to do that. Do you have a brother that can go and talk to him? Or can your dad go and talk to him? You know, my dad was just a drunk. He was just a big fucking baby

and a drunk. Bottom line. You know what I mean? And like his parents never told him no or something. He and I talked a lot about it. He doesn't remember a lot of it. And I go like, dude, like you're like 74 years old now. He's 75 now. And, um, sober now? No, I mean, he doesn't drink that way anymore. He doesn't really drink anymore, but no, he's not sober. You know, that's a whole other thing. But I'll go like, dad, like, it's all good. Like, I love you. You did what you did. I, again,

it's like your shit. It ain't mine. I stopped owning it. I learned how to stop owning it. And I give it back to you now. I give it back to mom. It's all good. But literally the cops saying that, right? And then you start listening to the doors and you start learning about the police and people feeling rejection and dejection. And where do I fit in?

And something about the doors just really did it for me. The whole thing, frankly, looking back on it, I love the music, but the music became like the least part of it for me. It was his politics and just the fact that he had this force of will to say like, no, I can do this. I can say this on stage. How dare you stop me from saying this? It's only words, words right and we take it for granted now because we can say anything i can swear on this podcast and you don't have to censor it and um jim morrison died at 27 years old and it would take many many many years for that reality to change, right? Yeah. So you're kind of absorbing all of this, you know, emotional intensity through this music that you're listening to. I mean, at what point do you start

to think, like, I want to translate this into, you know, something that I'm doing with my life? I was always involved in things in school. And when I went to high school, I went to the technical high school in Milwaukee. It was called Boys Tech. My brother went there, Scott, and he studied electrical engineering. You studied that in high school? Uh-huh, yeah. And then I followed suit and I left that.

You had to take a shop, as they called it. And I followed suit and I left that. You had to take a shop, as they call it. You could take automotive, aeronautics, architecture, chemistry, electrical engineering, whatever. And you had to dedicate three hours of your day, three class hours of your day to that pursuit. And then you also had to take all of your other classes that every other high school kid was taking in the city. And I left that shop, electrical engineering, because I didn't like it. And the minute we got to, like, hardcore calculus,

I just blew out the back of the pack. I was like, I was cool with the slide rule and all that shit. I got it, and it was great. And, you know, learning the color code of the resistors and all that shit, I'm getting here yeah i don't even know it doesn't even matter it trust me enough people will write you about that dude i fucking remember that but um but i just it wasn't my thing but so what i did is i got a waiver and i got out of shop but i didn't get kicked out of the school and so when i got out of my electrical engineering specialty, I had more time and I ran for student body president.

And I became the first ever kid. This is answering your question, by the way. It'll land on a music point. I became the first ever kid in the 100-year history of the school to become the student body president as a junior. I had always been a senior, right? And I ran. And I ran for real.

I did it Donald Trump style. My hair was flapping in the wind. I was saying crazy shit. I didn't have a Twitter account, though, yet. I hadn't been imagined yet in 87, 88. And I won. in 87, 88, and I won. And then one of the duties from doing that gig as the student body president was you were in charge

of putting on the prom. Oh, wow. Choosing the musical song and finding the venue and hiring the DJ. So this is the first concert. Yeah, exactly. Right, right. And I'm telling you, and that Milwaukee Magazine article

that you read, I think there was a photo of me with the total like side part hair, like the John Hughes era hairdo. But that was like, you know, like that was promoting a concert. Yeah, that was right. So did a light bulb go off? Yes. Like, oh, I like this was fun. Like, I get this well you know what's interesting about that is that is that uh you know on the one hand you're kind of this you know emotionally isolated you know feeling alienated and different from the other kids but you clearly had some kind of

overpowering you know uh personality gregariousness that, that could like overcome that, right. To like compensate for that or, you know what I mean? Like charisma over, over, you know, whatever, um, you know, weird, you know, weird kind of conflicting emotional stuff that you were dealing with. Look, you and I, um, you and I spend a lot of time with people who are on the other side of whatever happened in their lives, whatever their big moment was in their lives. And without making a choice, I guess I had to make a choice. I'm either going to basically kill myself because of the wackiness in my family home and the lack of learning anything about life,

and I'm just going to take drugs and jump off a building. We all knew people. maybe they were close friends maybe some dude you heard about how many times you heard about oh yeah so-and-so went to college and he fucking ran out a window in his dorm he's dead he was on lsd yeah more people than i right i mean that's such it's a common story then every time you hear it you think think, oh, that's a unique internet. Well, it's not really that unique. And I never identified with the stoners. Remember when people were called stoners? The dudes who wore green army jackets? I never really identified with them. The Metallica thing and the Megadeth thing. Even though I love that music now, I never identified with those dudes because I wanted to be like the guy

who was listening to the Smiths and this literate music and reading Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I wanted to be- And you're in this technical high school. Yeah, and I wanted to break through, man. I wanted to,

I was the kid down at the Central Library looking through the microfiche from the late 1800s and finding the interview with Oscar Wilde in the Milwaukee Sentinel and then printing it out for like, you know, cost like $3 or something and then taking it and hanging it on the wall in my dorm room in college. Like how,

like how many chicks were going to come over and think that was cool. Right. But I wanted to break through by, I, I, again, I wasn't thinking it at the time, but I guess I wanted to break through by being smart and by again, like, um, being well prepared and being like, um, together, like that was how I wanted to break through. I didn't want to be like these dumb asses that I saw on the South side of Milwaukee who basically, um, like, look, I'll say this because I grew up in this place.

It's very easy for people to see me now and go, oh, well, you're this guy and look at that and look at that. How dare you say something about blue-collar America? I mean, dude, I grew up in a place where people lived in homes that must have been 800 square feet, post-war homes, the era where everybody got a house with a front lawn and a back lawn and a garage.

And I delivered newspapers to dudes who worked in factories. That was our entire neighborhood. And it was firemen, cops, and factory workers. In Milwaukee, unlike LA, you have to live in the city if you work for the city. It's a pretty good law as far as I can tell. And I just like I didn't want to operate a punch press. And everybody I knew, everybody I went to grade school with, their parents worked in factories or were blue-collar people. And I never – I take nothing away from it. It's important, amazing shit.

And when I was younger, I did blue-collar work, but I just never saw that as my life. I didn't want to be taking dirt from under my fingernails, and I didn't want to lose a hand or a finger in a punch press. I just didn't want to do that. So you produced this prom concert, and the spark is lit, and you're like, are you thinking, like, I could get into this? Like, how can I continue to do this? I got high on the, okay, there's a calendar that has a date on it,

and it's X number of months away, and there's the yellow pages, and I can look up DJ. And I can, you know, start imagining places where we can hold the prom and go and look at them and figure out the rental. And some people see a shitty dirt lot in a sort of bad neighborhood and they run. I see a shitty dirt lot in a sort of bad neighborhood and I go, awesome, let's buy it and let's figure out what to do with it. And the neighborhood will come up around it and we'll be part of that. We'll be part of the movement there. That's a lot of vision and hustle for a 16, 17-year-old kid.

I got it from my dad. I just got it from my dad. And my dad and I talk about this, so he'll listen to this, and he'll probably be heartbroken by some of the things I've said to you, but he's heard them all before on a public level. But also, I have to give my dad a lot of credit because my dad could go okay jeffrey we're gonna clean out the back room of the bar um and we're gonna tear that wall out and we're gonna put in like six dart boards over there and i'm gonna start a dart an english darts league you know and like we would do all that work is always working an angle always working

an angle and i guess i got you know what i got i guess i got the always working an angle and so when it came up in my life naturally right um i could never say i planned any of that stuff but when it came up naturally my body you know like my heart and my body like knew, okay, this is home. Like we're supposed to be doing this shit, you know? And I had supportive adults. I mean, I had a couple of teachers in school who were awesome, awesome people. So you weren't looked at as like a troublemaker for, for like inciting teenage riots. Like they were like, yeah, go for it.

This is cool. Sometimes I was, I mean, I would get in. I mean, I would get in fights, man. And they would pull me down to the principal's office and they'd go like, dude, you're the student body president. You can't punch people in the face. Right? I mean, it was like crazy. But when I was in grade school, I was lucky enough to be a guest on Nikki Sixx's radio show. Oh, wow.

As part of our promotion for Pablo of Across America a number of years ago. And I told them the story about how I was wearing a Motley Crue jersey, not a T-shirt, but a jersey, in like fourth, fifth, sixth grade. I can't remember when. And I went to a Catholic grade school, St. Adelbert. And there were rules, man. You remember the Parents Music Resource Center and all that whole thing about Satan and the Catholic church and the conservative politicians got together and tried to control culture. It didn't work out well for them at all, as far as I can tell. No, no, it didn't. But what, you show up in a Motley

Kruger's? Yeah, and they pulled me down and they suspended me. The principal beat me up because I wouldn't take the shirt off. And my dad came down to the school and raised hell with them. Well, this is just your big FU. This is like an outlet for that anger. Yeah. Right? And so some of us in L.A., New York, London, wherever, the creative centers,

so many of us come from that place of like— Yeah you hear that it's a refrain you know that story in many different ways with many different people I know I keep going off topic but yes I got the bug of putting you know having an empty sheet of paper with a simple goal of like let's put on event x and then figuring out how to get it all going on and then promoting it. And I had the bug for promoting things. Back then it was putting up flyers around the school. Then when I got hired by this band, Wild Kingdom, who were a band that asked me to manage them when I was like 19 years old, my first management client. Then at that point in time, it was about putting up posters all over milwaukee with a

staple gun and a tape gun because you had to know where you could use a staple gun you can't use a staple gun on a metal pole as far as i can tell so you always had to have like two holsters you had the tape gun in one hand metal yeah and then you had the staple gun for everything else telephone poles well let's camp it there for a second, because there's kind of a cool story with Wild Kingdom, which ended up becoming Citizen King, right? Like this kind of amazing serendipity that occurred that kind of put you in contact with the main guy from that band, right? Yep, that's right. Dave Cooley, who was the keyboard player in Wild Kingdom, literally met me at Atomic Records, this classic indie record store.

And I was there for the record signing of a band called Lush. And it was the day that their album Spooky came out in America. I just interviewed them on the radio, on my radio show. And funny enough, the woman from the record company who worked at the distribution branch in Chicago made a deal with me. She

said, you can interview the band on your show, but you have to drive them to Atomic Records immediately when you get off the air because we're doing this record release signing event. And so you can take two of them and I'll have the other two, but you got to get them right there because this whole thing is scheduled and the tour is launching in milwaukee but you're probably thinking cool i'd be happy to drive them dude are you kidding me it was amazing and so um i met dave cooley at the record store and he literally came up to me and our a mutual friend introduced us and said hey jeff this is my friend Dave. His name was Dave Schneider at the time. And Dave's the keyboard player in Wild Kingdom, and I went white in the face

because I had done nothing but diss them in my newspaper where I was the music editor. And I thought, this guy's going to beat my ass. And he goes, hey, nice to meet you. We had made small talk, and it became clear that he didn't want to beat me up. And he said, hey. Had he read it, though? Oh, yeah. He said yeah he said he goes you know you've said some interesting things

about us in the press but you know he goes to be honest with you i think you've been very fair to us because you're right you know i basically said they haven't written a new song in a year and a half and they're they're sort of they're they're they're conceited a bit threadbare and you know and he goes hey would you like to go next door to subway and have lunch and i thought now he's really going to punch me. And then he basically asked me if I'd be interested in managing the band. And at the time I'd been thinking about being a manager because I thought from reading all these books, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and what have you, and then starting to be part of the concert committee at Marquette University across town where I went to school, I started to think to myself, managers, managers are the people that, like, make shit happen.

And the managers who you call if you have a problem with the record company, like, they won't send you enough posters or whatever to promote your concert. And so... The puppet master. Yeah, that's right. And also the person who takes responsibility. Also the person who is the... And you're never bigger than the artist's voice, right? But you are sometimes the chief storyteller, the chief narrator of the artist's story because the artists are the characters in the story, right?

Yeah, that's interesting. It has to be the right dynamic, right? But the manager can often be that neutral voice, voiceover narrator type situation like you have in a movie where you don't even know who the person is, right? You don't recognize their voice. You get to dictate how people perceive and understand. Yeah. And sometimes you're saying things from a different perspective than the artist and they love that

because they don't want to say certain things about themselves, but you can. Right, right, right. It's important shit. Right. But you didn't have that kind of clarity at that moment. Sure I did. You did? Sort of.

I mean, were you playing music at this time, too? Yeah, I was, yeah. You were. But were you clear, like, I need to be behind the music? Yeah. Because you knew that. Yeah, I knew that it wasn't. I mean, all that salesmanship and all the hustle was better served in the business context.

Yeah, the idea that musicians could have a hustle was not anything that I knew about yet. Now there's so many people can do that, particularly in hip hop. There's a whole aspect of hip hop where you're going to get your hot single, you're going to get your next couple hot singles, and you're going to build your empire. And you're going to be going to meetings. Well, as business people, as musicians, you know, have to be more and more entrepreneurial with their careers. I think it's more important than it used to be. Yeah. Especially with like, you know, white college rock, you know, you were dealing with disaffected people who, you know, drank too much beer and wrote songs about how fucked up they were. And, you know, from their parents and society. Right. I mean, that's the dinosaur junior. Jay Maskis has never written a song about like building a brand. Right.

I don't see like a lot of entrepreneurial hustle. Yeah. right i don't see like a lot of entrepreneurial hustle yeah guys just artists but but but the thing is is that when i um was on the concert committee at marquette we hired we we bought a pearl jam date for 2500 during the first album 10 and we kept calling the like the phone number at epic records that was in the rider for the tour department. And back in the day, you know, just for the younger people in the audience, there was no such thing as email. There was no cell phones. It was like you called people on the phone. I don't even think we had fax machines.

And no one ever got back to us and no one ever sent us posters and photos and all the things you needed to promote a concert. Had 10 blown up yet? It was like starting to brew up. photos and all the things you need to promote a concert and they had blown up yet or it was no it was it was it was like starting to brew up but even like the the album rock station in milwaukee there was no alternative station there yet they they wouldn't even allow us to do to book an interview with ed vetter for their sunday night specialty show they just said no they said no we don't play that band we're not interested interested. That's amazing. Pretty fucking funny, right? Yeah, that's crazy.

And then basically Epic Records never got back to us. And this is a band that I knew because being a journalist, I interviewed them before the album even came out when they were on the Chili Peppers tour with the Pumpkins. And they got on that tour. Literally no one had ever heard of them. They had just like two weeks earlier changed their name from Mookie

Blaylock to Pearl Jam right and so I had this real pride about getting this band and me and all my friends it was like we love this record and by the way if you're listening to this and you're gonna make fun of me for liking Pearl Jam F you. There's nothing wrong with that I was all about Pearl Jam. Right, but so many people love to hate them. And so what ended up happening is I got a wild hair, and I called information in Seattle, Washington. And from reading the liner notes of the album 10, I knew that this guy Kelly Curtis managed Pearl Jam. And must have said, Manager Kelly Curtis for Curtis Management or whatever the hell it was called.

I called information, dude, and I said, yes, I'd like the number for Curtis Management. And they said, is this Curtis Management on Denny Way? And I said, yes, it is. Because the address must have been in there back in the day when you would write letters to your favorite band or whatever. And I called the office and I said, hi, my name is Jeff Caslas and I'm from Marquette University in Milwaukee.

And listen, I just got to tell you, we keep calling the phone number at Epic Records and no one's calling us back. We need posters. We need CDs. We need glossies. We need to go and get press on this show. And we care. We love this band. And we want to do a good job for you.

And they were like, no problem. And they FedExed us a box of everything. T-shirts, everything. It was awesome. And so that's where I got the idea. Months later, when Dave Cooley asked me to manage his band, I thought, like, bingo. Like, that's what a manager does.

They just go, fuck the label. I'm going to do it myself. So I'm being honest. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I mean, it's another big kind of, like, light bulb moment. Like, where you're just, I mean, you're getting juice just talking about it. So clearly, like, you're like. Yeah.

Yeah, I am. That, like, you know, you found your thing, man. Like this was going to be your thing. Yeah, it was going to be my thing. And it's like, you had this idea of what a manager would be, but it's not like you, you know, had any experience managing any bands. I mean, was there like trepidation? Like, hey, will you manage my, were you like, yeah, definitely?

Or were you like, I don't, I don't know. Like, do I know how to do that? Like, what, what does that involve? It would be interesting to talk to the guys in the band and ask them like, you know, 25 years ago, what did I say to you in the first meeting? Because then he invited me to the rehearsal studio and there were seven guys in the band. And I would never forget I was wearing this lands and turtleneck which was skin tight I mean I'm probably weighed 150 pounds 140 pounds at the time and I rode my bike everywhere so I was super I was a cyclist and I rode my bike everywhere because I didn't own a car and I was wearing this green and

blue striped turtleneck and they must have thought I was a total idiot and I don't even know what I said to them but they hired me on the spot. And so by the way, manager back then meant I was the booking agent. I was the accountant. I was the guy that went to Kinko's. I was the guy that designed the flyers, hung them, was the road manager, was the roadie, booked the hotels. Actually, we didn't book hotels. We would drive until no one could drive anymore. And we'd pull over at the next hotel and we'd all go in one room so i did all that and i would get trepidation about like if i couldn't find gigs you know because you'd be calling like bar managers and going yo uh yeah wild kingdom rock island illinois the rock island brewing company which is still there ribco and um yeah we got this band the guy breathes fire at the beginning of the

show. We draw 900 people in Chicago and 1,200 people in Milwaukee. It's going to be amazing. And the guy would go, send me your tape. And then you'd call him for the next three months and he'd hire you for 400 bucks. And that would be, could you imagine taking like nine guys for 400 bucks? Granted, it was 25 years ago. Yeah, but still, like you're splitting it up. Dude. You're getting like 20 bucks each. 20 bucks.

Literally. OK's Chorale in Madison. You know, these places, some of them are no longer there. But you believed in these guys. Oh, my God. Dude. So let's talk about like what was going on in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee music scene at the time. Talk about what was going on in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee music scene at the time.

Well, you had the Violin Femmes who were from Milwaukee who, as far as we were concerned, were like, oh my God. The first two Violin Femmes records, in particular the first one, one of the best rock and roll records ever made. Ever, ever, ever to this day. Were they around? Not really. Brian Ritchieie the bass player was gordon had moved to new york the singer years before and and victor the drummer was around so the answer is like yes but really gordon was the guy you wanted to hang out with and he because he was the lyricist and he was the singer and he lived in new york but they created this tone

they created a tone and then like we knew people who knew them. The guy who owned the PA that we rented for our concerts at Marquette was their sound engineer. And he was in a band called the Oil Tasters, who had this seminal, basically underground single called, That's When the Brick Goes Through the Window. the window just the title alone is blowing your mind right now isn't it so amazing i mean right that's when the brick goes through the window and that's milwaukee for you right there milwaukee's a lot like boston people um people get fucking angry dude they're like trapped in this blue collar town and they're pissed off if they figure out a way to express their anger, they're doing it. And so we had the Bodines who were blowing up in that time. Underrated band. And we had Die Kreuzen,

who for us were a band that we knew. They were dudes we would see them around when they weren't on tour. We knew that they toured with Sonic Youth. We knew that they toured with Voivod. We that they um toured all over the world they went to europe you know and um and we knew that they were an important band and um they were an incredibly important band in the history of alternative rock and they get almost no credit for it for for one butch vick produced all of their albums and that's one of the ways that kurt cobain fell in love with butch's work and and thought of him when he was

thinking about producers for the album that would become never mind yeah i mean explain to people who butch vigg is and kind of his imprint on the music business so people that don't know butch vigg um is is now for many many years a dear dear friend of mine and was actually sitting in the chair that you're sitting on just last Saturday here in our backyard. And he's from a very, very small town in Wisconsin, like a farm town in what I would call romantically was a one horse town and still is. was a one-horse town and it still is um and and he um was in bands and and basically started recording because he couldn't get into the recording studio in the town next door and so he said screw it i'm gonna figure out how to do it on my own moved to madison wisconsin which is a big university town you know was in a couple of bands um fire town and spooner both of whom were on atlantic records both of whom were sort of heartland rock bands like the Bodines.

Spooner had a moment. Yeah, they had a moment, but neither one of them made it with a capital M. And he became a producer. He was producing the whole while. And he and Steve Marker, who was in those bands, started a recording studio called Smart Studios. Low budge. We'll record whoever has 400 bucks in a 12 pack kind of,

kind of situation. And they started getting really good at it and, um, started getting more and more gigs and Butch became like a real leader in the situation and started producing records for touch and go records in Chicago, twin tone records in Minneapolis, which is where the replacements came from, Sub Pop Records in Seattle,

and things like that. And then started producing Smashing Pumpkins out of Chicago when the producer of R.E.M. turned down Nirvana to produce the album that would become Nevermind. Yeah, because Kurt was obsessed with R.E.M. turned down Nirvana to produce the album that would become Nevermind. Yeah, because Kurt was obsessed with R.E.M., which people don't remember. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Interesting.

And so Butch became the next guy on the list. Right. And they did the demos for Nevermind at Smart Studios in Madison, but they recorded that album at Sound City Studios here in Van Nuys. And then Butch, after the Pumpkins blew up and Nirvana blew up and he produced a bunch of other things, he and two of the other guys from his old bands, Duke Erickson and Steve Marker, started doing alternative rock music like this

cool guitar driven tape loops drum beats kind of shit and they were then looking for a singer and they auditioned a couple people one of whom was this uh scottish woman named shirley manson and they they named their band garbage and so he's both a producer and a, you know, they started a band that sold 16, 17 million records in their career. And they kicked a big hole in the world. And, and so we were all, we were aware of all those people, but we both thought we could make it out of Milwaukee. And we also thought like, fuck, this is really hard.

This is never going to work for us you know and we just kept on i mean dude i had no money i i literally i don't know how i paid for anything so was there was there a tipping point with where wild kingdom i mean was it when it becomes citizen can't i mean what happens there where i mean because they're they're they're getting traction right like in the local area in the local region there's's like quite a bit of interest in them, but where does it tip over into them actually becoming a viable national act? So wild kingdom were really big in the upper Midwest, Madison, green Bay, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Chicago. And then it goes off a cliff. We never got into Michigan where

kids, weird thing about the time, right? That's right. That wouldn't be the case now. You're either everywhere or you're nowhere. Yeah, there was definitely regional music. And it was probably the end of that, of the era of regional music in some ways. Basically, they knew that they were going to break up when I started managing them and that the guys in the band were going to form a new band and look for a new lead singer.

And it was an agreed upon thing among all of them. It wasn't like they were firing the lead singer. He was a couple years older and he had different ideas than them and they wanted to sort of write better songs and write different songs. And so the core of the band, driven by Dave Cooley as an incredible writer and musician, they started another group called Citizen King. Citizen King was named after Huey P. Long, the great governor of Louisiana, which was my first foray into knowing anything about New Orleans or Louisiana.

Little did I know that it would foreshadow meeting my amazing wife who grew up in, you know, the center of New Orleans. And they had a plan to write songs and they wanted to be influenced by Lee Dorsey and Alan Toussaint and The Meters, all these great New Orleans artists and writers. And they wanted to cross that with hip hop. They wanted to have 808s and 909s, which are the kick drum sounds that you hear in hip-hop. And they wanted

to have, they wanted to sort of treat their own playing as samples, so they could play all the jazz and blues stuff that people were sampling back then. It was a phenomenal idea. Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, no one else was doing anything like that. Not in the Midwest, and we didn't even know what people were doing here in LA, but people were doing forms

of that here. And later on, when the band signed to Warner Brothers, people like Beck and other people thought that they were ripping him off. And it was just like, dude, you know, these guys have had a DJ in their band since 1986, dropping in like art ensemble of Chicago saxophone solos into a live band while they're playing on a stage that's bouncing up and down. Like, sorry, bro. Like you didn't invent the idea, you know? But in the end, they wrote a song called Better Days that became a big hit. We licensed it to films, to television shows, to commercials, everything, all of the above. But this had a big radio hit. The sad thing is that the record didn't sell. The band broke up. And that gave way to me going, oh, shit, I've just moved to L.A. from Milwaukee to break it in the management business.

These guys are my main client. What am I going to do now? And then I started hustling and picked up a couple more clients, picked up a couple of record producers, and that, you know, sort of... Cobbled it together. Cobbled it together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got into survival mode.

So with Citizen King, though, that's what originally got you to cross paths with Bush Vig, right? Because didn't they record in his studio in Madison? Yeah, that's exactly right. And we, there's two studios at Smart Studios. There's one upstairs and one downstairs. And a bunch of times when Citizen King was recording, their garbage happened to be off tour during the first album cycle.

And they'd be like recording movie songs or they'd be maybe recording new songs for their second album. And I became really close with Shirley because like, you know, she'd be sitting in the lounge watching television or talking on the phone or writing or reading and the dudes would be in there like playing you know like like overdubbing a guitar riff for like eight hours or something and she wouldn't want to be in the control room with them and i got to know her and she was very always very sweet to me and very supportive and very cool little did I know at the time I mean dude she was on MTV

they're on the radio every two minutes um later on in that album cycle somewhere along the line they were on the cover of Rolling Stone or she was anyway and she treated me like I was like you know her long lost friend and little did I know I didn her long-lost friend. And little did I know, I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the whole story of how they found her, someone saw her on 120 Minutes on MTV with her old band, and so she was sort of like the new kid on the block with them. They had all known each other for years, these dudes in this band.

They're all older than her. They're like dudes from Wisconsin. And she's like... She's Irish, right? No, she's Scottish. Scottish, uh-huh. You should edit that out. I know. She'll get really mad at you.

But, you know, she was like, here she is sitting in Madison, Wisconsin. You know what I mean? Like a college town, like with a capital C. Right. Like, you know, beer bongs, the whole bit, right?

Beer funnels. She has the bright red hair and the whole thing going on the accent you know she's fierce like walking down the street in madison oh hilarious as fuck like you know yeah boys that's right there and so you know we were sort of like um cut from the same cloth you know i felt like a fish out of water as a human being. And she was like getting to know this whole world of Wisconsin and these dudes that she was in a band with. And, you know, over the years, she's told Joanne and I all kinds of amazing stories. Like, you know, when she first got into Garbage, she'd never written a song. garbage she'd never written a song the band she had been in back in scotland um you know she'd always worked with with another dude who was like the songwriter guy and she was the singer

so again i had no idea that she was going through all of this and she was feeling vulnerable and she was like sitting in the lounge um like waiting for something right like waiting for her next shot what am i doing in wisconsin i don't want to put words in her mouth but yeah like right i mean just you know and he and i thought she's a rock star like and she's talking to me this is amazing and it buoyed me along you know and um so a couple times i would go up to madison from milwaukee it's like an hour away and i would go there for the weekend and i would we would just drink like we'd go out like i we'd go out to a couple different small bars and like drink when she was done in the studio and that was like

a big moment for me and uh in madison you can drink man yeah and uh so you know in milwaukee um i love milwaukee and i'm glad I grew up there, but like, you know, Milwaukee is one of those cities that you want to get out of. If you've got like the drive and the sort of craziness that I have of being an entrepreneur and having your hustle on, like you want to get out of there and you want to get to one of the two big playing fields in New York or LA.A. You got to do it. Yeah. How come you didn't move to New York?

I was never interested in New York ever. And also Citizen King, like we got all this interest and we signed with Warner Brothers, which is based here in L.A. And so I developed a lot of people from that label. I developed a lot of friends with the people from that label, excuse me, and they all lived here. And so I moved in with my friend Rachel Froegel, who, if you could see through that tree right there, she had a house and she had a spare bedroom. And my buddy Scott Booker, who to this day manages the Flaming Lips, he said to me, dude, you need to find someone who works at the label who has a spare bedroom and you need to rent it.

So when you go to L.A. You just always have a place. You always have a place. So you must have been out here all the time. I was. And then Rachel, who was the assistant to the A&R guy for the band, she eventually said to me,

you have to move to LA. Nothing's going to happen in Milwaukee. And I eventually moved out here and that's when the band broke up. Right, so it's that weird thing where here you are to chase the dream and then the dream seems to you know

get pulled out from underneath your feet right as you arrive yeah it was weird and I love all those guys and we're all still good friends we aren't close friends it's hard to be close friends

you know we have a shared trauma and sometimes people who have a shared trauma you know they want to see each other once a year sometimes they become inseparable you know we have a shared trauma and sometimes people who have a shared trauma you know they want to see each other once a year sometimes they become inseparable you see it with veterans sometimes being in a band man i don't know how any band stays together you know i think that the equation of getting people to get along and go through that process and then navigate you know the business and the creativity

through the ups and downs and the success. You know, when you see a band that's been together for a long time, I think it's amazing. Yeah. Bands are not democracies. They're just not. People can pretend that they are, but they're not. And, um, when you see a band that has been able to make it work for a long period of time, what are the common things that you can identify that help them stay together? Well, Pearl Jam would be a good one to talk about

because they've lasted a long time. Certainly, you can imagine that there was probably an explosion in the band, and there was probably people going to their corners, learning more about life, coming back together, sitting down, figuring out how are we going to operate. I'm not speaking from fact. I'm just imagining.

Because someone's the leader, someone's the main writer, and somebody else comes in. Very similar story to Garbage. Ed came in, and he was the odd man out. He wasn't from Seattle. He wasn't in 10 bands with all these guys. He didn't go to all the same schools they did. He didn't have all the same friends. And he's a great writer. But the first album musically was entirely written when he came into the picture. We all know that. It's a great story. And so you can imagine just on the creative wavelength, he had to figure out how in the hell am I going to fit into this thing

I'm the guy on the cover of Time Magazine I'm the guy screaming you know and I got to figure out how to get my groove on here and people have to stop pretending that things are democracies sort of on an operational level someone has to be the leader and

also I firmly believe everybody in a band has their place someone's really into artwork someone's really into like the the production design the logistics of touring someone's into the finance and legal bs and you know it's almost never the same person who's into all those things yeah yeah it's interesting i mean you think like you look at you too and you know correct me I'm wrong, but my understanding is that they basically split the money evenly amongst themselves. Is that correct? That's my understanding. And by the way, splitting the money evenly is a different thing from what I'm talking about. It's almost like accepting like, you know what, Rich does that. That's like his end of it. Like it's all good. good we used to fight about it but once we realized like you know rich is just into that so let him let him do it and have that fiefdom that like little

domain yeah but then on the other hand you have bon jovi where basically it's john bonjo like the the other guys rich symbol they're they work for him they're contracted players that's right that's right and i know lasted's lasted for an incredibly long time and i know richie very well and he'll say to you like i'm okay i'm okay with that danger yeah yeah i i was uh one of his managers and we put him out and he'll just say like i'm totally cool with that like john loves running the company he loves owning the company it's all good but but but he will also tell you it wasn't always all good. Yeah. And I think bands are like families. Bands are like starting a business or making a movie, right?

Sometimes there's an explosion at 2 in the morning on a movie set. Somebody motherfucked somebody else. Something flies. That movie crew doesn't have to stay together for 10 years. Fair enough. They come together for 45 days or whatever it is, and then they're done. Right. They may never work again

together yeah people have to figure out how to have lives in bands people have to figure out how to go and do their own thing david lee roth and his amazing memoir crazy from the heat talks about like as soon as we would get off tour i'd be like down in Belize or I'd be climbing a mountain somewhere or I'd be going to Africa and those dudes would just stay home and drink. I mean, some of the shit he says in his book, one could probably get sued for. I don't know how that worked out with them,

but whether it's accurate or not, it's immaterial. You just get the idea that it's like, I always encourage people in bands, like you gotta, and by encouraging them, I'm reminding myself of the same thing. Like, dude, you have to have a life outside of this. It's so easy to have it encompass everything because everybody loves music. So you have a very public job and everybody's always going to ask you about it.

And so you can kind of never get away from it. So you have to really get away from it. You have to practice going somewhere where no one knows who you are. It's an important thing. You have to recreate and regenerate your, yourself, two separate words, right? Yourself. I think that's true of any creative pursuit. Like you can't, you know, in order, in order to have something to express, you have to live your life. Yeah. In order to keep it, you've got to give it away. In order to keep it, sometimes you have to smash it on the ground in a sort of a healthy way and know that it's all going to be okay and it'll all come back together. Right?

Part of doing that is having a little bit of faith that it's not yours in the first place. Whatever talent you have, right? Like it came from somewhere. And hard work is cool and practice is cool. But like, you know, I'm just a believer that like, you know, we're born with certain things that are sort of innate inbuilt things. And if we've got it, if we have a certain talent, some people have a great talent for saying three sentences and changing people's energy, Like, wow, dude, you said that and you just totally got me. And you've totally changed how I feel about myself.

Thank you for that. We know people like that, right? Some of those people become songwriters and they write lyrics that just can snap people out of their shitty day because they just wrote a song about a shitty day. And it magnetizes other people's shitty days and then they can go on with their lives right i don't whatever you know the world is a vampire you know that's a great line how many times have you thought that it's so awesome it's such a great line All right, well, speaking of shitty days and taking a leap of faith, so you arrive in L.A. and the bottom falls out.

Is this where the partying starts to notch up a little bit? When does the dark side start coming out a little bit? The dark side, funny enough, I'm a weird guy in that respect. I moved to L.A. and drank less. What happened for me was that in Milwaukee, it was just completely not so. And on the road, you know, like with bands and stuff. You know, I was the guy that I would have, like, I would add shit to the rider of my bands. Your own personal stuff.

Right? I would just add it to, like, their rider. So I'd have like the, at the time I was on your rider at the time, I thought like Merlot was like, really like, that's like, no one's going to fuck with me on Merlot.

Like that's, that's high end shit. If you even know what Merlot is. Cause an alcoholic wouldn't be drinking Merlot. They just want a fifth of Jack. Right. Right. You're like hiding your,

you're hiding your alcoholism behind the highbrow taste. Yeah, exactly. And I would put a couple bottles of Merlot on the rider, and then when the band would go on stage, I'd crack one of those bastards open, and I wouldn't even use a glass. I'd just sit there and drink it. And then I'd take the empty bottle to the opening band's dressing room

and pop it in there so nobody would notice that I drank it. And because no one in the band had put it on the rider, they didn't give a shit. They didn't clock it that it was gone and um how long did that last though before they knew what was going on i think that we are all doing it and we um they never really said anything to me about that um they talked to me about my anger because you know the drinking like would just ignite the anger shit that you referred to earlier all that you know agita from my upbringing and the sort of lack of nurturing and the lack of just someone you know i mean like dude i probably hadn't i probably't, I never even really talked about this, but I probably was never touched by either one of my parents.

I don't really remember being touched by either one of my parents. That's an important thing. When Pablo was alive, I would hug him 10 times a day. I would put him on my shoulders. I would hug him. I would pick him up and put him in the car, you know, in the age of car seats. But, you know, I was angry. And I wasn't angry like walking down the street angry.

I was angry if something set me off. Yeah. I mean, were you attached to that anger, though? I mean, did you equate that with being part of your success equation? Like, I need that anger. That anger is fueling me and that's what's propelling me forward. Yeah, I was wrong about that.

But yes, I thought that I needed the burn, which the anger is part of the burn. I thought I needed the, I haven't eaten in eight hours. I'm getting dizzy. I thought I needed, and by the way, that all worked into my cycling as well because I would always want to go further. I'd always want to go faster back in the days of no helmet and wearing a Walkman. And yeah, I felt like because I grew up with pain, physical and emotional and

psychic, I developed a resistance to pain, which is why I can go and ride my bike, you know, 206 miles from Seattle to Portland on that STP ride up there and get on a plane and fly home. And I can do it in 10 hours because at some point the pain just does not register to me. Um, as we get older, that changes, doesn't it? But yeah yeah i thought i needed it i thought i needed and there's a lot of great lyrics about that you know billy corgan wrote the great line you know i'm in love with my sadness you know yeah it's that attachment to that emotional pain that that creates this you know mystique that that or illusion that that is where that is the birth of the creative impulse right it's just like eddie it's just like eddie van halen saying like when he got sober or illusion that that is where that is the birth of the creative impulse.

Right. It's just like Eddie, it's just like Eddie Van Halen saying like when he got sober that one time, way back when he, he said like, you know, I never, I've never played my guitar sober.

I've never gone on stage in Van Halen sober. Yeah. And you hear it. I mean, you hear it in this town, particularly all the time with people that are newly sober, creative people who are just absolutely terrified. And they think that their creative, you know, outlet, their creative career is going to be over that they've been sort of cut off at the heels. And what you see with people that get sober and really, you know, take recovery seriously is they blossom into this font of creativity that, you know,

completely blows the lid off anything they were doing previous. But there's that, that arc, that like learning curve of acclimating to that. And sometimes that takes a long time. Yeah, I agree. And when I went to my first meeting at age 28, I was scared. I mean, I don't know anybody who wasn't scared going into their first meeting unless they were just pissed off to be there. How did it all, you know, what was the moment? Like, how did it all break down? Two guys who were extremely important people in my business life, which back then was my life. There was no differentiation between my life and my business life.

It was just all one thing. Well, you're just a single guy here hot rodding around LA, right? Making deals and partying. Yeah. Yeah, I was. Yeah. And in Milwaukee, you know, when Citizen King got signed, I was, I could have, I had a choice to either rent an apartment or to have an office with my buddy, Fred Gillick, who's

one of my best friends on earth to this day. Fred was a graphic designer, still is. And we rented an office space and Fred, um, lived at home with his parents still. And I figured out that I could get this old desk from like, you know, the antique shop that had a wood front on it. And I put a futon mattress underneath the desk and I slept there at night because you know, now it's cool to work from home cause it's like modern and you have, you have wifi and all this shit back then.

It was like you people would be like, you work from home. I mean, how old were you at the time? 28 or something? Well, I got sober when I was 28 to the era that I'm talking about. I was like 24,

23, 24 and so forth. When citizen King got signed, I was 25. And so Jeffrey Weiss, who was the. When Citizen King got signed, I was 25. And so Jeffrey Weiss, who was the A&R executive at Warner, who signed them, he would tell people at Warner Brothers, like when we'd come in to tour the label offices in New York and LA, he'd say, this is Jeff.

He's the manager. And you're like, you know, he's so passionate about the band. He like lives in his office. And they'd laugh and he'd go, no, I i'm not kidding he lives under his desk i've seen it trying to hide it you were like yeah no it was like it was just my reality dude and so where'd you go to like shower and the ymca across the street at 411 west wisconsin avenue so we figured fred and i um figured out and fred eventually moved into that building too um we were squatting basically you weren't allowed to do that you know and we figured out that it was like you know 45 a month to belong

to the y and so we'd go and shower there in the mornings and even after citizen king got signed and we i got my big commission check and all that stuff i bought a car but i didn't get an apartment for like a while and so so I moved here eventually, and two guys who were very important mentors to me, Kenny McPherson, who was the head of A&R at Warner Chapel Music Publishing, and Greg Souders, who was the A&R guy who signed Citizen King to Warner Chapel. They both signed to them. Greg was like the A&R executive.

Kenny was the head of the department. Kenny's a Scottish guy. Greg is a dude who grew up here in Atwater Village and was in a band back in the day. They sat me down one day and they said, listen, we just heard this voicemail message that you left for Robert, who manages Smash Mouth,

who at the time were one of their significant acts. I mean, that band had monster hits. And basically, he played us your voicemail message over the phone, and you sounded like you were out of your fucking mind. What's wrong with you? And I was humiliated, and I was like, you know, because when you— Did you remember, or were you in a plot? Oh, yeah, no, I remembered, and I felt justified, of course, in what I said to him.

I mean, was it angry, or was it just hammered? It was angry. It was just being so off kilter and such a child. I never learned how to grow up. I never learned anything, you know? So I figured that if I can fight, fight, fight and scrap it out for my band, I got all of my esteem from how much I was working for my band. Well, it's a great mask, too.

It's a hugely great mask. It's a great mask for whatever fear or insecurity is really going on. My whole personality was built around, did we sell more tickets in Chicago this time? Or did we sell more tickets in Milwaukee? And the guys would be happy because they made more money. And there's a part of me that still, like, I still love those metrics. But I've had to learn like, yeah, but dude, you also have to have other things going on in your life. And by the way,

your wife doesn't work for you and your kids don't work for you. And you have to just slow down with this BS because you're home now, you know? And I, it's a daily thing for me, dude, to this day. But these guys sat me down and I just done'd just done an intervention with Bob Timmons, the great drug and alcohol counselor, a great sober dude. He's an amazing guy. He helps a lot of musicians. Yeah. And we'd just done a thing with one of my clients and those guys said, look, we love

you. We totally get it. We've both been the guy on that voicemail. you. We totally get it. We've both been the guy on that voicemail, but we, we see you as such a great young dude. And we think you could really have a great career in the business. You're, you've got all the like aspects of it, but you need to sort this thing out with your drinking and your anger. We've seen you so drunk and the anger always comes and you're fighting with bouncers and you're fighting with this and that. And, uh, you know, and one of them just said in this meeting, they just said like, look, we love you, but like, we need you to sort your shit out.

Or we're not gonna like, we're not going to refer clients to you anymore. We're not going to do it. And maybe you should go and see Bob Timmons cause you know him. And I went to see Bob in his office on main street and he's passed away, um, eight or nine years ago now. And he, I thought I was going to tell him all this shit that he never heard before right and he just sat there and laughed terminally unique yeah he exactly that's that's exactly it and i and he just sat there and chuckled and i was at first i was like what the fuck are you laughing at dude like i just told you some heavy shit i got mad and he was like no i'm laughing because like you know i went to prison for like holding up like

convenience stores with a double barrel shotgun and i'm laughing because I went to prison for holding up convenience stores with a double-barrel shotgun. And I'm laughing because you were telling me about how fucked up your childhood was. And I get it. I hear it. But my mom tried to kill me with a butcher knife. You know? And I moved. Everybody's sobriety story is like milk toast by comparison.

Yeah. And so then I learned this whole thing like quickly that he was laughing at me because he understood and he was laughing because he had sort of worked through his own story and he could sort of like he didn't have to be it he just knew that his story was like there and that there was a differentiation between like i am my story like, I am like my breath or I am like my being, I am like how I show up in the world today, but I'm not the shit that like they did to me before I was an adult. I, I, he was an amazing man. And he, were you able to get that from him in that meeting? All of that? No, I got

some of it. Cause he told me about his mom and going to jail himself and all that. And he taught me very quickly that like, we've all got our story. Here's mine. And he did that old trick where he, he goes, Oh, like, Oh, okay. So like, got it. You've done this. You've done that. Um, okay. Got it. Let me tell you my story. And so So he let me, and he did it without shame, right? That's one of the things we get to do. He was disconnected from shame and any gooeyness around it. He was just like, yeah, here's my story, dude. I went to prison, and then I basically started helping other people,

and it changed my life. And so he showed me, what became very clear to me then is that it was possible for me because I never went to jail. I got arrested a couple of times. I never went to jail. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, like pretty high bottom, pretty high bottom. And, um, yeah, I was not the guy wrapping a car on a telephone pole only because I never hit the ice patch. I mean, I was doing, I was driving beyond drunk. I talked a cop out of arresting me once who had his gun drawn on me. I don't know how I did it. He, he was like William H. Macy in Fargo, in Milwaukee. Oh, in Milwaukee. I was going to say that would never happen in LA.

Never, dude. That would never, ever happen in LA. Um, so I, I went to my first meeting and I loved it. There's all these people from all different walks of life. This dude over here is a cab driver. This dude over here looks like some sort of a surfer. This dude's wearing like a suit. And now that I've been sober almost 15 years, I understand. This guy is a cab driver. This guy is a surfer.

And this guy is like an investment banker in Century City. And they all come together. and this guy is like an investment banker in Century City, and they all come together. And when they walk through that door, the anonymous part is, it doesn't matter who you are on the other side of the door jam. In here, you're just a drunk trying to live another day.

It doesn't matter how much money you do or don't have. Yeah, it's about recognizing the similarities in the story and uh leaving the differences behind and collectively uh you know and openly communicating so that we can all get better it's cool i got a call today from a friend very unexpected, saying, hey, I don't want to drink anymore. And I know very few people who are sober, whether they work a program or not, you know, just people who just have given it all up. And would you mind talking to me about it? And I explained to this person, not only would I be delighted to talk to you about it and, and, and I'm honored that you would even think of me, but it's, it,

in fact, it's important to my day and my life and my recovery to actually give it away. As we say in the room, the most important. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And I explained to this person, like, it's not like what you do with this information is immaterial to me. Like I wish you the best. It's your journey. I can only sort of tell you the basics of it all, answer questions you might have. And then I'm meeting with the person tomorrow. I want to give them a meeting schedule. And, um, that was it. Yeah. Well, that's what it's about, man. You know, it's, it's like you said it earlier, you

know, you gotta, you gotta give it away to keep it away to keep it. And the beautiful thing about that practice of, you know, being in service of that way is in a weird kind of like selfish way, that's what helps. That's keeping you sober. That's keeping me sober. And so you get it together and you start to build this, you know, stable of management clients. And you start to build this stable of management clients. And then at some point, you make this decision to create Dangerbird, like this independent label that's really multifaceted, right? Like it's a label. It's also a management company.

It's licensing. And then it becomes like a kind of architectural, you know, becomes part of Silver silver lake like the murals on the building and all of that it really becomes like part of the fiber of the community um the intention was labels suck labels have become labels started as these like little tiny shops sun records chess records right rough trade records sub pop records they were tiny little started as these little tiny shops. Sun Records, Chess Records, right? Rough Trade Records, Sub Pop Records. They were tiny little things. And then they got bought up. They merged with other labels, sometimes for survival,

sometimes for economic gain, sometimes for both. And suddenly we were looking at thinking only big is good. We had Slash Records on Beverly Boulevard. You know, right here in LA, that was a seminal label. I mean, you have Faith No More, Los Lobos, The Violent Femmes, The Bodines, Soul Coughing. I mean, it all came from this tiny little joint. And so I thought like this label has to reflect LA. I wasn't thinking solely Silver Lake,

but I guess at the time, you know, when you thought music, alternative music, you really were thinking Echo Park and Silver Lake. But I really wanted Danger Bird to reflect LA and to be a voice of LA. It was really about like, yeah, again, I said earlier to me, you know, my favorite songs are weapons. Well, Danger Bird for me was a weapon. It was sort of like, fuck you to the business. Like, you know, you guys have wasted so many people's time,

people I've managed, people who I'm friends with, people I don't even know. Like, sure, it's great you broke the Spice Girls and you broke Lenny Kravitz and all this, but think about all the great artists that you just tanked. And it wasn't because their music wasn't good. It was because you just didn't get around to it because someone couldn't tell the truth to the band. Right, and at the same time, through your experience

of managing all these other acts and and having that frustration with with the labels you were forced to do it yourself right and then realizing that you could do that and then saying well you know let's just do this ourselves yeah and i had a great partner i met a fellow named peterbeck, whose artist name, he was an artist. His artist name was Peter Walker, is Peter Walker. And he and I started out as manager and client, and we had no intention of starting a label. He was looking for a record deal for a fantastic record he made, wrote, recorded, mastered. Artwork was done, everything everything but i couldn't get a

label to sign it because they were like well what would we do with a finished record now that's all anybody wants but this was uh 2002 2003 and so as part of that process and me being honest with him over dinner i said dude i'm sorry but of my favorite people who really love this kind of music, they don't get it. They don't get what they do with the finished record that's produced by Joe Ciccarelli, that has Jay from Wilco playing guitar, Joey Warnker from Beck and R.E.M. playing drums, and Justin Meldel Johnson from Beck's band playing bass. They don't understand it. And either he joked or I joked you know if he was sitting here he'd tell you like we should just start our own label maybe i said it because yeah because he

because he said like well what would that look like i must have said it because he responded and he was you know from a family that um his father had been a business, had been a leader in an entire field of business, cable television, where, you know, they'd done very, very well, like beyond someone's dad was a dentist or whatever and they could afford to do a recording session. And, you know, I think looking back on it, Peter was looking for,

to invest in something that he really believed in that mirrored his own purpose in life. So start a record label. I'm an artist. Let's start a label. You're a manager. You're a pretty cool dude. I mean, at the time, we knew each other only so well. And we sat down and wrote a mission statement.

And my brother Scott helped us with the business plan and we went and got a distribution deal and we did it and Scott died two weeks before our first release came out from cancer and he was 39 years old and he, so here I was the guy who taught me everything who also taught me how to be like an advocate

with a baseball bat in this crazy family situation. When he left that crazy house where we lived with 10 kids in a three bedroom ranch house, um, he said, you know, you have to fight, you have to protect yourself and Dean now here, he, um, was dead. And this label that I've started with my client and my friend who had also become really good friends with scott his records coming out two weeks later and that roller coaster of danger where it started there and i was immensely sad i was immensely morose and just, I was grieving my brother at a point in time when I had to get up and be like PT Barnum. Little did I know that that would be a foreshadow for what was to come in our, in my life and in our lives. Right. So, so, I mean, ultimately you succeed in this PT Barnum

act because you build Dangerbird into this, you know, incredibly successful entity. And it would appear that, you know, everything, the stars are aligning, you know, the tragedy of your brother's death aside, you get married and you have a son. You have Pablo. Pablo comes into the world and here's your opportunity to be the dad that you never had. That's exactly. And to be a husband and to be a stepdad. You know what I'm saying? How old was Grady when you met Joanne?

Seven. And I knew him because I lived six houses down the block from where we're sitting. And so Joanne bought this house in 96. It's all about the neighborhood. It's crazy, right? It's all about the neighborhood, just like it was back... I should have moved to Silver Lake when I came to LA. Yeah, just like it was in Milwaukee.

It's all about the neighborhood. And I knew Grady because I would see him playing soccer in the street with his nanny. And I would walk from my house, which was six houses west, and then to go to the reservoir right here, you'd have to walk by this house. And I knew this, I didn't know his name, I just knew this little kid. And then I met Joanne on a,

I was making a music video with my management client, Scapegoat Wax, who had this great song called Isle 10. They were signed to the Beastie Boys label, Grand Royal. We were making a video. It was also in the neighborhood, well, Atwater, right? Correct, yeah. Yeah, down the street.

And John Silva, who is the longtime manager of the Beastie Boys, was running the label with Mike Diamond. And we were looking at video treatments and video director reels, and John said, just hire Evan Bernard. He's amazing, and he's family. Because he had been part of the Beasties circle of friends that had done videos with them. Joanne was Evan's executive producer.

He was signed to her production company. And I met her at her office, and we became friends, and then... Were you like, oh, wait, we're neighbors? Did you put that together together or you didn't know initially we figured this out immediately because she dissed me um she dissed me for coming to the casting of the hot girl in the video and she was like yeah it's nice to meet you you have to leave now you're not sitting in this session and i said no you don't understand i just made a

video two weeks ago with a hot girl and it was we got to the set and the woman that they cast was wrong for the band's image and so my friend john silva who manages the beastie boys who's my mentor said to me dude you need to go to the fucking casting so we don't have that problem in our video and um she was like yeah right she didn't buy it no she didn't buy it at all and um she goes like you know and it was all it was very funny people were laughing evan is the funniest guy ever joanne's funny you know meanwhile there's a line of 200 actor chicks with holding headshots in line and um she goes like you know why don't you get in your fancy car and drive back to the west side and i'm sure you can find a date there

and i was like well that'd be great but i don't live on the west side here i am newly sober and she's dissing me and i don't know what to make of it and i explained her that i live in silver lake and i said but i probably should go to the west side because there's no hot chicks in silver lake and she goes what do you mean i live in silver lake and then it's like you could imagine the the edit you would do in the movie version of this you know it's like you could do it in three cuts she goes like like really where do you live i said i live above the reservoir well what street do you live on i live on reeds oh my god so right do I. What address? This address here, that address there, six houses apart.

Wow. And I said, oh. And she describes it. I said, oh, yeah, the white picket fence. You have the little boy who plays soccer in the street with his nanny, right? And she's like, how do you know? So crazy. We became friends.

She was setting me up on blind dates with her other friends. I helped her buy her first DVD player when she only had a VCR. I became the man friend. I was newly sober, so I was following the general rule in the program of don't get into or out of any new business or romantic relationships for the first year. My sponsor at the time really liked that idea. And so, um, while I went on coffee dates with her blind date friends, I never, I knew it was never going to go any further. Um, I was in fact just trying to actually practice socializing with people of the opposite sex. I'm heterosexual. So I was, um, practicing going out for coffee dates during the day for a cup of coffee with a woman and not having it be. Without an agenda.

Yeah, right. Without having like the semi-sonic closing time scenario happening, which is probably how I socialized a lot for all of those years, right? Right, right, right. And learning how to walk through the discomfort and the vulnerability of actually socializing with someone during the day and having to talk. Yeah, how does that work? Right, all that shit. And so my sponsor actually liked that part where he was like, you're not dating anyone.

You're going to go on a coffee date. It sounds a little bit like an end run around the rule. Yeah, whatever, dude. It worked for me. Hey, take it up with him. I'll give you his number. And then I asked Joanne on a date, like, you know, basically two weeks. Maybe I asked her on the date right before my one-year birthday,

but the date was going to happen after my birthday, so there's another end run. You're a lawyer, dude. Why are you complaining to me? Listen, I did the same thing. I met my wife, you know, right at the tail end of the one-year mark. So I'm right with you. Yeah. I did the

same thing so i um we went on our first date on valentine's day which is so corny but it was the day that worked out and we went on our first date and it was we had fun and like we've never stopped dating ever since like it's been amazing how many years now so it's 15 years yeah and i will say like i'm um an impossible jerk i am like you know a child like i'm like all the things you could ever throw into a bucket that are just like you know petulant i'm an idiot like i'm just all of those things on a bad day. Definitely a lot better with my anger and my temper and all that shit.

But your show to me is about not just being plant-based, which I'm not. I want to be. It's about to me, it's about people talking about life and what works and what doesn't and what have I been through and how have I pivoted? How have I shifted? What walls do I

still come up against? So that's why I want to tell the truth about that. Like all that, I'm all those things in that bucket, but, but by, but by, you know, meeting this amazing person on my path, um, where some of my shortcomings actually, you know, can get exacerbated or magnified, but also many of them I've been able to walk over the cold, so to speak, and really diminish them with like, you know, one of the things we get in our significant relationships is to practice. Well, when you have a solid partner, it's almost like a foil.

Yeah. Because your character defects are going to come out, right? They're going to manifest. And that's an opportunity to look at it, figure out what's going on, and try to identify how you can overcome it or do better next time, right? Like when you're single and you're just flying around town sober or otherwise,

like you don't have to necessarily look in the mirror until like a big problem arises. That's right. When you get into a real intimate relationship with someone, then yeah, man, all that stuff comes up. So of course, right? And we've been through it and we work on it and it's like you know i don't know i mean i'm 43 years old and joanne's 50 years old and we so we have a a lot of friends sort of like spanning in and out of this whole age range and you know like people

you can either choose to work on it in your business, your significant business relationships, your significant romantic relationships or not. You know, you can even work on it with your kids when they get to the right age because shit comes up. And it's hard and it's challenging and it's sometimes it feels completely nuts, but, um, it's really rewarding. And, you know, I, I will say like,

you know, getting, going to my first meeting, staying sober, working a program, working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous has really taught me how to be an adult. The simple things that no one ever talks about, like, you know, I was like the secretary of a beach meeting on the beach in Santa Monica.

I learned more about managing rock and roll bands and being, you know, later in what would later become be, you know, being a business executive and employing people and having to deal with all the things that go with that by, by being the secretary of a meeting on the beach in Santa Monica. And you know why. Yeah, yeah. Because every Tom, Dick, and Harry from Germany and Finland and, you know, Cleveland walks up to you when you're sitting in a circle on the beach and they come up and go,

Oh, what are you guys doing here? Can I sit down? And somebody has to explain, like explain like hey this is like a private thing and have a nice day and you you know you really can't say hey f you get the hell out of here doesn't look so good and um you really learned a lot about you're sort of the sergeant at arms and the and the secretary the person who's kind of like keeping the meeting going and um but that's like a sort of a, just a generic example, but I just learned how to just show up no matter what. But I also think that,

you know, what you and Joanne have had to endure, you know, with Pablo, I mean, that kind of scenario, I would say, you know, eight or nine out of 10 marriages would disintegrate around something like that. So, you know, let's, let's talk about that a little bit. So I guess the thing we haven't talked about yet, and depending on how you edit this, you might put this first is, um, so Joanne and I met, I became a stepdad. I'm, I want to say this right because this thing is going to go out publicly. I believe I'm the first boyfriend that Grady, Joanne's son had ever met. And I think that she'd had,

he'd met another one of her boyfriends, but didn't know it was her boyfriend. Like he was too young to understand all of that. So there's some technicality there. I was the first boyfriend that he ever met. And we would go and do, you know, family things. We'd go to the movies. We'd take Grady to, you know, Little League or whatever. And Grady's dad, Jimmy, is an amazing guy. We've been friends for years. And he's Grady's dad. Like he's Grady's dad with a capital D and I'm like the stepdad.

And I've always tried to be like, always tried to be like cool with all that and like find my place because I don't want to fuck with anybody's game in that respect. And became a stepdad. Joanne got pregnant. And I was mortified. I was 30 years old when she was pregnant.

Pablo was born when I was 31. And it was Joanne's, Joanne was really into having another baby. You know, we told Grady together, we did all the stuff that you do, you know, and we went to the classes, we read to the baby, we played at music and then the baby was born. His name was Pablo. And he was born on a Saturday at Cedars-Sinai here in L.A. And as you said earlier, he was my chance to be a dad to somebody in a way that nobody was ever a dad to me. And I love my dad and all that shit. I want to reiterate that. But my dad just wasn't there for me.

And he can't change that. It's just too bad. He was there for Jim Beam Beam and he was there for Ron the Roofer and City Rick and Rick the Mouth and, you know, you know, the guy down the block that we delivered beer to every Thursday. He was there for all of them, but he wasn't there for me. And that's just the way it goes. And I wanted to change that in my life. I wanted to break the cycle, as we say in psychobabble land, but I wanted to break the cycle, as we say in psychobabble land. But I wanted to break the cycle. It's a great way of saying break the cycle.

And I wanted to be a husband and I wanted to be home for dinner. And I didn't want to be like my dad, who was always on the other end of a phone bullshitting and lying and saying he was going to be, we'll leave after this cigarette or we'll leave after this beer. Right. And we had an amazing family life and um we lost my brother when Pablo was about two years old as I recall and then we thought cancer will never strike our family again Joanne literally said you're pre-disaster we're pre-disaster that We're pre-disaster. That'll never strike our family ever again. And it didn't.

And then one day I rode my bike for 80 miles up in the mountains here above Pasadena. It was my birthday, May 17, 2008. And Joanne was with Grady making a music video for his eighth grade graduation project. And I was here with Pablo. We were getting, we were taking a bath before we were going to our, um, my birthday dinner at Malo, this Mexican restaurant here in Silver Lake, where we were meeting like 40 of our friends and we, and they were going to meet us there, right? our friends and we can, they were going to meet us there, right? Joanne and Grady. And I noticed a lump in Pablo's abdomen called Joanne. We go to see his doctor, Dr. Fleiss, who's now deceased. He meets me at the office. It's like six o'clock on a Saturday night. And he goes, yeah, something

ain't right here. I see all these veins going there. He has no imaging or anything in his office. He's like an old school guy. And he goes, I'll tell you what, I'm going to call you into Children's Hospital Los Angeles, you know, which is, you know, two blocks from his office and four blocks from the restaurant. He goes, go, go to your dinner. It's going to take them hours. So go to your dinner. And then after a couple hours, just go there. And probably by that time, they'll be ready for you. Joanne ends up taking him there before the party's over and somewhere in the middle of the night after they do some imaging on pablo they come in and they tell us he has cancer and uh i literally the first fucking thing i thought was

but joanne said that's never going to hit us ever again. Like I literally, I thought that it's, it's, it sounds like adolescent to say that, but it's what I thought, you know? And the first thing I felt was for Joanne. I don't know why. I'm usually way more self-centered than that. But the first thing I felt in my body was for Joanne because she carried Pablo in her belly. And I just thought, this isn't right. Did you have a sense of how dire it was at the time? I mean, because cancer can mean a lot of things.

It's unclear. Is it treatable? Is it not treatable? What's the prognosis? We had no sense of it at the time. We were both, I mean, dude, it was like you got into that, an elevator, and it just started dropping at 50 miles an hour, and it didn't stop. That's what it felt like.

He's asleep on the gurney in the ER. It's not even a room. It's like this, the old children's hospital. You've got those little sheets that hang in between some other families right there, and you're having this moment. This kid's got a broken arm. Your kid's got cancer. We didn't know.

I mean, the next few days were a blur, and we got educated, and we got information, and we at first learned that Wilm's tumor was 95% curable, but then they had to go in and open him up. And then they had to test the tissue of the tumors. And there's five different stages of Wilm's tumor. It's the only cancer that has a fifth stage. And the first four are 95% curable. The fifth stage is 0% curable.

And that's exactly what Pavel had. Oh, wow. So did you know that early on? Yeah, we learned it within a couple of few days. Yeah, they did the surgery right away. And then they did the testing on the tissue of the tumor, and then they knew right away. Right. the testing on the tissue of the tumor, and then they knew right away.

Right. And with that, I mean, what is the treatment protocol when they say, we don't have a solution for this? The treatment protocol is the same as it would be if your child had one of the others. In other words, it's in the same bucket. They're all different variations on a theme. But it was 11 days of radiation and 13 months of chemo. And we never stopped hoping. We never stopped. You can go back and read my blog. We never stopped hoping. We never, to the point of like delusion, you know, we never stopped thinking our boy is going to go back to school. Like he's going to get through this. He's going to go back to school. We never stopped thinking that. In fact, we moved, he never

started kindergarten, but we moved him from the Waldorf, Pasadena Waldorf school where Grady went and we enrolled him at the Oaks in Hollywood. Like we literally changed schools for, and when I meet back up with Pablo, I hope we laugh about that. Like, you know, we just, things changed in his life and in our lives during the point in, during the period where he was in treatment. And we were just like, you know, for whatever reason, Joanne would have a different version of the story like anybody's significant other would. But just remember that we changed schools and he never started never started anywhere he was enrolled in two different schools and never started and um how long into it uh were you before you started publicly writing about it on the blog oh immediately i called our friend rishikesh here way and so i must have called or texted him and said can you start a blog and i knew that communication was important from when my brother Scott was in treatment back in 2002 and 2003.

And it was such a pain in the ass to call people and to have people calling you or to email people. Or have some email chain. Yeah, but that's what you had to do. That's where technology was. Blogs may have existed back then, but no one knew it. I learned how to text in 2002 because my brother had cancer and we were in the hospital and the doctors texted. So, but the blog quickly becomes something other than just keeping people up to speed on what's going on. I mean, it becomes this incredibly, you know, vulnerable, emotional kind of, I mean,

I sort of think of it in the, in the way that you found solace in the music as a kid you know this this way of like you know connecting with something emotionally like the blog kind of served a similar purpose for you in helping you kind of navigate your own emotions through this form of sharing yes and i have mixed feelings about it today. And I think that I've mixed perspective about it. And one of the many reasons I love Joanne is because she... She, you know, like I'm still like a hurt kid now. I want people to like me. You know what I'm saying? And while Joanne certainly wants people to like her, I mean, who doesn't?

She can say shit to people that is true to her in a way that's appropriate. But that might not be what somebody wants to hear. If you know what I'm saying. I do do my wife is like that as well yeah and i share the the people-pleasing trait so i know what that's like but how does that i mean how what does that have to do with the blogging because Joanne, in the end, although she loved and loves many aspects of the blog, many, many, many parts of why it was good and helpful and all that, I think some of it she felt like she didn't want people fucking knowing everything that was going on with us to that degree.

And I think she felt like I was spending too much time on it and that it was just a bit of a fucking annoyance to her and that's not fair because that seems shallow I think she felt like okay I get it right you're telling people what's going on

with Pablo so that they don't have to call us and email us and drive us mental. And it worked. But it's also like, sometimes I don't want to tell everybody everything. And I don't recall ever writing anything medically, like a threshold medical piece of news without checking with her.

I don't recall that at all. But I think, you know, look, to be honest, Rich, there were parts of the blog looking back on it that were more about me than him, aspects of it. And I was, if I think back to what I was thinking, it's that I was trying to present, I'm a father and a husband and a human going through this thing. So some of it was about me, like my riding and how am I coping? And we're learning from the doctors, like you have to have something else, mom and dad, you have to have an outlet. You do yoga. Okay, great. Mom's going to go and do yoga. Dad's

going to stay home with the kids. Okay. Then when mom comes home, you've got to go out and ride your bike. Trust us. Or other parents would tell us that. Right. And so, um, that's why I would, that would be my motivation for writing about my riding. Explain how cycling kind of, you know, soothed the pain or was an outlet for you? Like how, you know, how do you articulate the importance of being on your bike? I've always ridden a bike literally since my grandfather, my mom's dad taught me how to ride a bike when I was five. I've always ridden a bike. Bikes in history and bikes in modern times are transportation largely right if we consider the wide expanse of the globe bikes are the transportation of poor people who have no other options in many cases bike a bike is the thing you put under your ass to go and find your dreams think about you know world bicycle relief people in africa right right and so forth and so on it's

a big deal people back in the 1800s they were doing this sort of stuff i always rode a bike at first it was a dirt bike and then my cousin chris foley when he went when he left milwaukee to go to medical school and philly he gave me this trek bike with clip pedals and deodora shoes like super fine leather shoes that I would wear without socks. And I assumed that you just jammed your foot inside the clip and the thing locked underneath your, um, the ball of your foot and you cranked it down. That's how you did it. So I went from dirt bike to a road bike and growing up in Wisconsin, when you said I got a road bike, you meant a track. Cause that's all anybody had. so i got into like riding and that's when i got into like going like well shit i can go if i keep

riding up layton avenue and keep going and going and going and going eventually i get to the country and if i get to the country that's pretty awesome because there's nothing around except these two lane roads and i can just go and go and go and go. And Oh shit, the sun is going down. I need to turn around. There were no computers back then. There was, you didn't know shit. You didn't know how far you were going. I didn't know anybody with a car to go and like drive it and tell me how far. And I didn't know any other cyclists. I rode by myself. There was this one guy that I would run into. I don't remember his name. His name was Scott or steve and he um i remember he had a disc wheel on the back and i thought that was so cool just while he was out riding oh yeah dude it was so it was so ridiculous hey if you're not a cyclist

and you like to make fun of cyclists you're right we are all d-bags at some level because of the gear and the geekiness but we're also pretty cool so So give us a break. And this guy had a disc brake and a disc wheel. And I would ride with him sometimes and I would go like, okay, well, I'd just run into him and I'd ride with him and I'd go, where are you going? And he'd go, I'm going for another two hours. People did it by time back then. And then I'd say, can I ride with you tomorrow? And he'd say, yeah, meet me right here at 8 a.m. And that was it. There was no phone calls. There was no checking your texts like we do now all the time.

Dude, I'm running late. There was none of that shit. And I just rode and rode and rode, and my imagination lit up and opened up, and it was like meditation for me. And we know now like cycling is literally a meditative act. They've done research on this. It does the same thing for the neural pathways that actual meditation, sitting on your ass and breathing deeply does for you. And it gave me a way to get around. It gave me, um, something to be passionate about other than music and writing.

I was already writing at that time. And when I was a college DJ, to go back to that, I would ride from my mom's house where I was living on the very edge of Milwaukee into downtown with records in a backpack. At like 10 at night so I could get there in time to do my show. And so I rode and rode and rode everywhere. Then when I started making money, I bought a car. I got fat. I drank a lot more. I ate a lot more. I got fatter. The fatter I got, the less I wanted to ride. The less I rode, the fatter I got. And then I moved to LA where there is a robust cycling culture, but I didn't know anything about it. And I assume that no one rode here. I mean, back in 2000, 2001, you didn't see that many cyclists around LA. So I got fat.

And then around 2005, my doctor said to me, when I did my physical, he said, you know, you're fat. And I was like, oh, come on, man. That hurts my feelings. And he goes, I don't care if it hurts your feelings. I'm looking at your numbers and they're worse than they were last year. I guarantee you they're going to be worse next year if you don't deal. And I said, well, what can I do? And he said, it's very simple. Eat less and work out. He goes, like, you're a young guy.

Like, why are you so fat? Why do you weigh so much? Literally, this guy, Dr. Josh Trabulous. If you want someone to give you motivation, that's him. It's the straight talk, Dr. Josh Trabulous. If you want someone to give you motivation, that's him. It's the straight talk, Dr. Josh. And I said, do you know a nutritionist? I need to learn how to eat. Because among the many things I never learned how to do growing up was how to eat.

And he goes, yeah, I have this great person, Carrie Wyatt. I went to her. Joanne was amazing. Joanne wasn't working at the time she was raising our kids and running our household which is a lot of work and she got the cookbook

from Carrie, the cooking instructions and she followed it methodically and I lost 50 pounds I started riding I didn't realize you got that heavy I was 224 pounds when Dr. Traveller said, like, you're fat. And he, like, squeezed my gut. What an asshole, right?

I'm actually going for a physical Monday. And I'm going to tell him that I called him an asshole on your podcast. Like, you got to be, what are you now, like 175? 175 to 180. And so I got the same bug that you got that your book is, you know, hubbed on, um, much, you know, much, uh, younger sober dude than I was back then rather than I am now, but like learning to ask for help, learning to ask for instruction where I don't know that was like a big thing, you know? And so I went and met Carrie Wyatt and I would go there every week to get weighted and get my body fat measured. And she

would like tweak my diet and she'd tweak my food plan and joanne would keep cooking for me and i'd keep um riding and the weight just started coming off and then and then so when um i kept that passion going i hired a coach for cycling so i could learn how to do it right i didn't want to mess up my legs or whatever then i got into like the cycling scene here at Ronvelo Pasadena. Great riders learned, learned how to ride in a group, learned the real tenets of cycling with a capital C and learn the culture, got really into the gear, which Joanne was never happy about because it's expensive. There's no end to that. And, um, but really met so many great friends, had so many great adventures. Went to, rode from London to Paris for a charity ride over there called, it was for the big issue, which is like the homeless newspaper in London.

We rode there for the finish of the Tour de France. Did, you know, went and did a cycling camp up in Solvang here in California with Chris Carmichael. Met new friends through cycling, reconnected with old friends who were also into cycling. You get what I'm saying,. Carmichael Camp, yeah. Met new friends through cycling, reconnected with old friends who were also into cycling. You get what I'm saying, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Joanne loved it because I'd lost all this weight and it was like really inspiring.

And Pablo loved it. I think, I mean, he wasn't really old enough to really tell me subjectively. He liked what I liked. He liked what Joanne liked. He certainly liked what Grady liked. But he loved, I would have this bike thing that connected to my seat post, and we'd ride around, and he would love it.

And I was teaching him how to ride on training wheels. So cycling was this thing in our family. It was just like a nice thing. Then Pablo gets diagnosed with cancer, and the bomb goes off, and cycling takes on this new significance with me because it's the thing I can do. I can bring my bike to children's hospital, which is on sunset and Hollywood and Silver Lake. And I, if I'm overnight with Pablo, I can bring my bike, bring my cycling kit. And when Joanne comes in the hot, in the morning, we would trade shifts, you know, she'd sleep at home

or I'd sleep at home and then we'd shift. So I would go, okay, you're coming at seven and we have a meeting at 10 with the doctors. The minute you get here, I'm out the door and I'm going to go and pound Griffith Park as hard as I can and do all the climbs and do intervals and just get my anger out. Yeah. What I was going to say, I mean, I'm, I'm sitting here thinking like, you know, all right, you know, you're hit with this bomb and, you know, the emotions have to be going insane. But you can't drink. The anger is no longer acceptable. You know, that's sort of all the like sort of normal avenues that you might pursue to like express this like emotional, you know, sense of unease that you have.

But there's the bike. Yeah. And the bike can like fill that, you know, fill that void. It did. And, um, and the writing filled that void. The writing was a great release for me and gave me, um, I've always felt that I had a contribution to give in my life that was beyond profit, that was beyond making money for myself or others. And the writing really connected that in me. Because it was about expression. At the end of the day, my blog was about expressing my experience, for better or for worse,

which then allows other people to feel their feelings and my feelings as I've expressed them. And there's a knock-on effect to that, which is why it's what I get from music. To go back to the earlier topics when we were talking about what music means to me. I got to do my version of what my favorite songs do for me. I got to say what was true to me. And it turns out that it resonated with other people in their lives. I mean, dude, I'd have people... We'd have people emailing and saying like,

look, I don't know anybody who's ever had a life-threatening disease. Cancer's never touched my life. But what you said in that blog post last Thursday inspired me to like go and talk to my boss about a challenge we've been having together. Or you inspired me to quit my job and start a business that I am passionate about, you know? So it wasn't necessarily sure there's people that were gluing up to it because they were going through cancer without a doubt. But as I recall,

the way I was writing was just opening some people up all over the world. So that was pretty interesting to me. And I felt like, because look, anybody who does the business side of entertainment, if you have any inkling of being some sort of an artist yourself or a creator of anything, you definitely confront yourself with that all the time right because you go man what i'm like a suit yeah but i but i can write too yeah what's that it's a shadow artist thing yes right yeah and i try to keep the two things separate believe me because nobody wants

their label president like you know getting too crazy but i but but i really do put it all i put it all out there with my heart to write songs now? I do want to write songs. I do. But the blog then... But it did. It connected. I mean, it really connected with a lot of people. And I remember kind of reading.

I was reading the blog and reading all the kind of... You were getting a lot of press. There was a lot of attention on what was going on. And unfortunately, it didn't have a happy ending. No, it didn't. But there is a silver lining in that that which is the birth of the foundation Pablo um I want to just say this yet again because your show is about expression of one's truth and how one connects with the current of life to say something extremely new agey. But,

um, I always want to say like, I am one parent of a child. I'm not both parents of a child. And Joanne has a different perspective and she would say all of this in her own way. And I, I always want to say that.

Um, so Pablo was here for six years and six days. I'm not God. I'm not Jesus. I'm not Santa Claus. I'm not anyone's idea. I don't know anything. But what comforts me is this cliche that I learned when my brother died and I heard it a million times when Pablo died. And it sounds pretty good to me, which is that he was here for the amount of time he was here and, um, his legacy lives on and there's a power in that. And, you know, people will say like, oh, well he was here for just the amount of time he had to be here to make his mark on the world.

And like, I get that. Like I, I get, like, I'm saying it like in a smart ass way, but I, there's now more dogs in the world. And like, I get that. Like I get, like, I'm saying it like in a smart ass way, but I, there's now more dogs in the background. But, but like, I understand that people are just being nice when they say that. And it's like, what, no one knows what to say to someone whose child has died. But Pablo made a deep, deep impression on people. He, this does not take away from Grady. Grady, Grady has, makes a deep impression on people all the time. take away from Grady. Grady makes a deep impression on people all the time. He's an amazing dude. You just met him upstairs.

He's an amazing dude. He's not a grown man. He's going on 22 years old. Pablo never learned how to read. He was on the very cusp of that. He didn't learn math. He could barely write his name at the

age he was but um he made a deep impression on people he was and i'm not just saying this he was a he was this bombastic charismatic amazing dude and he could talk to anybody which i always thought and by the way joanne can talk to anybody as well. So she learned that from her parents. I learned it from mine. And we're an interesting couple. I just exploded in here. Well, when I'm around Joanne, I just take the back seat because she's such a great conversationalist. And we'll leave a party and she'll go like, you didn't talk at all.

And I'm like, yeah, because I let you do all the talking. So what ended up happening with the blog is, and what ended up happening in our lives is we decided to start a foundation so that we could raise, everybody wanted to give money. That's what happens when someone's sick or in an accident. And there was no such thing as GoFundMe. None of that stuff existed back then. And so I had read Lance's books and I was inspired by his advocacy. And I do not care to get into the politics of Lance Armstrong. He's a friend of mine. He's been an incredibly good friend of mine, a good riding buddy.

I don't really give a shit what he did in his cycling career. And I've told him that. I don't care. Okay. So I read his books and they were inspiring to me and what he actually did inspired me he started a foundation that's raised nearly a billion dollars and has given dignity to a disease that was second only to well i'm not going to finish that sentence because i don't want to seem rude. Cancer, when you and I were growing up and until 10 or 15 years ago, was like viewed

as a death sentence. It was like a dark cloud over somebody. We don't talk about them anymore. In many cultures, you literally didn't talk about that person anymore. And I think the most enduring thing that Livestrong has ever done and that Lance ever did was to try and just smash that shit wide open and say forget that people who have cancer are people and they should actually be held

in a unique place and we should help them and support them and love them and talk about them and talk to them and showcase them if you will because, and these are my words statistically X percent of all of us are going to have to deal with this

directly or indirectly in our lifetime. So why are we acting like pretend about it? Right, what is it, 28 million people? Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So we thought, well, we don't want to give the money to any old foundation. We have heard all different things

about foundations over the years. Where does the money really go old foundation. We have heard all different things about foundations over the years. Where does the money really go? Are you paying for salaries and office and all that? Let's start our own thing. So at first we just started a PayPal thing for people to give money to who wanted to give money. We said, when Pablo goes back to school, we're going to give money to, we're going to give the money to some organization that we fall in love with during his treatment and we'll be good. We then realized we need to come up with a name for it. Joanne comes up with the name Poblove because, you know, she was smart.

She added a V and E to the boy's name and there it was. We already had Poblog. Poblog, yeah, that's right. She probably named that too. She's good like that. And so we then incorporated and got the designation from the government and the way we went and we people just donated money we had we just thought we were going to give away the money when he started kindergarten and then pablo passed away and then i decided to ride my

bike from florida to la as a fundraiser and also to sort of find my way as a human being i didn't know who the fuck i was i didn't want to know who i was i didn't i just i'm not going to try and describe the grief that i feel that we feel i'm not gonna i'm just i don't care to even talk about it just i'm just i'm over it i don't want to talk about it anymore but it it was immense and deep. And on any given day, I could just walk out the door and never come back. And I'm not crazy and it's not morbid. And it's not like, you know, Michael Douglas in that movie falling down. It's just, just, it just is. And so that's, so I guess I will say a little bit about it. That's what I'll say. Anybody who's lost a child, whether they're, whether they die when they were a child or whether they were an adult when they died, right.

Um, knows that feeling. I just, I know it. I know it. I've never met a parent who's lost a child who doesn't understand, like I could just get up and walk out the door and never come back and just keep walking. I don't need my possessions. I don't need my shit. I don't need my phone. I don't need my status. I don't need my bank cards. I don't care. And on any given day, Joanne and I make a decision to get out of bed. I will say that about grief and the ongoing, I will say that about grief and the ongoing, never-ending process of mourning the loss of your child. I will say that. It's got to be an incredibly lonely feeling, though, too, right?

And I feel like, you know, the blog, your expression, the foundation has really provided community for these other parents who I would imagine, you know, would otherwise experience this in isolation because of the very words you said, like, no one knows what to say. No one knows how to act. We say what we think, you know, we should say, but we know it's not right. The whole thing is awkward and weird. Meanwhile, the parents are suffering, you know, terribly and alone. and alone yeah you some of the things i learned when my son died that i would like to share with people because people again no one talks about this shit one of the things you lose when you when your child dies um is your your sense of your identity and um you lose a part of your purpose. You know, we have another child.

But you lose a part of your purpose. I mean, once you have a kid, part of your entire purpose in life. Why you work so hard, where you work, that you work, you know, whatever. How you schedule your life. It's because you have a purpose and a responsibility around that. And as we said earlier, there's this responsibility and this purpose was significant to me specifically because of the fact that my parents left me behind. And, um, that that's hard, dude, that that's really hard. And being a stepdad to, to Grady, um, fulfilled part of that's hard, dude. That's really hard. And being a stepdad to Grady fulfilled part of that for me, but not all of it.

Because, again, Grady has a father, and I would never try and take his place. Yeah, on some level, it's unfinished business. Correct. You couldn't course correct. You couldn't change that pattern. Yeah. And so the things that linger linger there's a lot of things that linger man you're seeing pablo's friends grow up seeing them develop personality seeing

them walk you know i saw one of his friends with a holding a book a thick book and i i was that was really hard you know like like a book that the kid was reading, like a thick ass, like novel. That was hard. Cause one of the things I love doing with Pablo was, was reading with him at night in his bed, like under the covers. And I love reading and I love, I just wanted Pablo to be a reader. Like I pray that he'd be a reader and all signs pointed in that direction joanne's a reader too but for me again that thing of like my brain the way i grew up and you know being told i was a piece of shit by my stepmother and i was useless and i was a fucking idiot and my mom was an idiot and you know literally i'm not these are not

euphemisms this is actually what what I was told by her. The more books I could read by Anne Rand and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Wilde, you know what I'm saying? The more records I could devour. Those were like weapons in my arsenal to fucking climb out of that joint. And so I wanted my son to like have that same arsenal, even though he didn't need it for the same reason. But, um, we started this foundation and it blossomed into this thing. I wrote across the country, um, which is another

thing that's, that was insane. And, and I didn't even, I wasn't even clear at the time how hard it was for Joanne, how part of her felt like it was total bullshit and totally about me. And she told me, and there were things about it she didn't like. There were things about it she loved. And I was a child. I was, we were both hurt. My ears weren't working so well at the time. You know what I'm saying? Figuratively.

Yeah. And well, I mean, you, you, you know, grief takes many forms, obviously, as trite as that is, and you suffer together as a couple, but, but a lot of that suffering has to be alone. Yeah. Right. Cause you suffer in different ways. Yeah. So the foundation starts, um starts as a PayPal account.

People donate money. I go and ride across the country, visit children with cancer wherever I possibly can. I ride with my friend Rick Babington, who was my cycling coach for years, still a dear friend. And I mean, dude, we did 100 miles a day for 30 days. You know what that's like. You know what more than that's like. 100 miles a day for 30 days. You know what that's like. You know what more than that's like. 100 miles a day for 30 days. We raised a lot of money.

We got back. And Joanne looked at me and she said, we need to do something with this money. Like, we have to be responsible. Like, people have donated a lot of money. Our friends, their friends, people we'll never meet. And we have to really do what we said we were going to do probably at a level that we never even intended. And, you know, she had owned a production company for years. She was an executive producer that, you know, for people who aren't in

the business, if you like own a production company in the music, video, commercial film world, you're called an executive producer and so i said well you need to executive produce this shit because when i got back from my ride in november of 2013 my my goal my stated purpose was i'm going to go back to danger bird and we're going to get this i'm going to go back to work right you know my my whole crew was sitting there running the label and we needed to go and sign more artists make more more records, you know, make that money. And I couldn't like run a foundation. And so she did it and she has turned the Pablo foundation into a well-oiled machine.

It's a business, you know, it's a not for profit business, but it's a business. Yeah, of course. I mean, you guys have raised what, like $2 million? We've raised just Pavlov Across America in and of itself as an event has raised $2.2 million to date. And my goal this year is to raise $500,000.

So to really just break it through the stratosphere. As we sit here right now, we're at like 177. We have 40 riders riding, which is our biggest ride group ever. And we're going from LA to San Fran, which is

insane because you're going into the wind, but we're doing it. Yeah, coming up October 15th. And the foundation has raised over $9 million in aggregate since it started. So it's a proper thing. So just the annual rides have gotten a 2.2 or whatever. That's correct.

Beyond that, there's all this additional fundraising. I didn't realize that. Yeah, we have all different fundraising products, if you will, or mechanisms. So we have, first of all, we have different fundraising drives where people donate money, year-end drives and corporate matching drives. And we have a bunch of different events every year. Pavlov across America so far has been our single biggest driver. We have a bunch of people who've donated substantial amounts of money to the foundation.

I love to point out that we have dollar donors on up to the biggest check we've ever gotten was $500,000. So going from a dollar to a couple of Publis friends doing a bake sale on Larchmont Boulevard to here's $500,000. And how do you make decisions about where you place that money? Okay, so we have a three-pronged mission because we're parents who started a pediatric cancer organization. We were never going to have a one-pronged mission. That just didn't really reflect who we were as parents. Your kids in cancer treatment, you don't want just one thing. You want many things. Principally, you want your kid to survive.

To survive means treatment's got to get better and the long-term side effects got to be minimized. Just because you survive doesn't mean your life's pretty. You might have one leg is shorter than the other. Your spine may have been retarded because of the radiation. You might develop any number of other diseases. You may die early. All this shit happens.

So you want your kid to survive. So okay, great, so we're going to fund research, and we're going to take a venture capital approach to research. We found out very early on that pediatric cancer research is severely underfunded because there's not a huge commercial base for it. So the big drug companies and all these people that you think are looking out for everybody aren't because they're driven by profit, and there's not a lot of profit for it. So the big drug companies and all these people that you think are looking out for everybody aren't because they're driven by profit and there's not a lot of profit for kids. Why is that? I wouldn't have known that.

Because the number of kids that get diagnosed with cancer every year is extremely small in terms of the head count compared to adult cancers. They can't justify the R&D. They can't sink all the money into developing the drugs. Yeah, which is bullshit. Because when you save a child's life, you're saving 60, 70, 80 person years. And if somebody comes through cancer, unless they're like one or two years old when it happens, right? If they're sort of, you know, in a place in their life where they know what's going on, that person is probably going to over-index as a human being,

right? There's going to be something about their drive, their personality, their creativity that just goes way beyond what their peers do, right? Because of what they've been, they become a survivor. Right. That extra appreciation. Right. Yeah. For, Hey, Hey man, I'm alive. And it doesn't mean everybody, but it means many. And so the, the, the, the fact is that the drugs that our children are given with the exception of a couple are drugs that were designed for testing on adults. And we always talk about testing. Don't forget testing has two halves. One is how is it affecting your body right now

and what's the long-term knock-on effect, right? And so they're all tested on adults, they're made for adults, and they're down-dosed for the child's smaller body mass, which is why when you have a child and you're going for chemo, the first place you go when you go to the oncology clinic is triage.

They have to take your weight, right? They have to check your body mass. And then they do all the mathematics and then they deliver the chemo to you in the very right portion. And that's shocking to me. You're like napalming your kid's body with something that was never meant for a kid's body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just by reducing the amount doesn't mean

that that's the appropriate protocol. No way. It's totally cute when your child puts on your jeans and you take the funny photo or they put on your shoes and walk around. That's fine. But I don't know that we want to be giving them the exact same. Um, Hey, if that was the case, why don't we just let kids drink whiskey when they're like four years old? Like what's, what's the big deal? Shit ain't right. Their bodies aren't. Think about that rich. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, we know what I hadn't thought. I hadn't thought about that before. Like I would not have,

I would not have thought of that. So three prong mission research, we've given away a $11 million dollars in research free we do 50 000 grants we do um four to eight of those every year we have a scientific advisory committee that sends out requests for proposal rfps uh researchers send in their papers These eight people who are on our board are some of the top pediatric cancer researchers and oncologists. So they're both on the patient side and the lab side, all of whom are from name brand universities or hospitals all around the world. And they grade these proposals using a numeric rating system that the National Institute of Health here in America has designed. So it's a blind taste test, if you will, right? There's nothing emotional about it.

Shit is graded on numbers. They then collate the numbers and they recommend the top rated things to the board of directors. And Dr. Leo Mascarenas, who was Pablo's doctor at CHLA, leads that group and he's on the board. He's on our board of directors and he comes in and he walks us through everything in layman's terms. And we vote in X number of grants every year. We don't always agree with him. And sometimes we vote in things that he doesn't, that aren't his top choices, but that look interesting to us. So there's a subjective thing left for us even in the end,

but we've gotten their, um, their information. And so it's not like it's a bunch of lay people that we've assembled on the board who are just going, yeah, that looks good. I want to be clear with people about that. It's not like our buddy whose nephew's in med school at Duke or whatever. It's nothing like that. And the other thing as cancer parents and specifically parents of Pablo, he loved taking photos. I think a lot of kids like taking photos. And so we started a photography program because one of the things is that there's not enough for kids to do in hospitals. And there's certainly not enough arts education in hospitals.

Keep in mind, kids who have cancer probably can't go to school most of the time. So their relationship with education and the structure of that, of homework being tested, being kind of put on the rails, it goes out and that's messed up. Kids need that. Kids thrive on that. And so our Podlove Shutterbugs program actually puts a camera in the hands of kids with cancer, one-on-one instruction with a professional photographer. And they have homework. It's an eight-week course and they have homework and they have to do their homework. There's no testing, but they have to do their homework. And their homework is still life, diptychs, triptychs, perspectives, shadows, things like that. I love that, though, because I think that it gives them a way to tell their story

from their perspective. Dude, exactly. The power of narrative, which is exactly what you've taught us with your book. The power of narrative. And at a point in their lives where adults are talking about them and talking at them and poking them and prying them, cancer is not allowed in this program. The instructors, the volunteers, us as foundation members, we are not allowed to talk about cancer in and around those classrooms and the graduation and the gallery show.

And the kids love it. And we give them little cameras like that Canon that you have on the ground. In fact, it's probably like the same model that they use and they get to keep the camera and they get a printer and they learn how to do all this stuff. I mean, the electronics of it all these days is a whole other aspect of it.

And dude, the dignity they get, you know, it's beautiful. Giving a child the opportunity to express themselves is phenomenal. It is such a phenomenal thing to witness and to be a small part of. And keep in mind that many of the kids that we deal with are from very low socioeconomic strata. And so for them, like that camera might be the highest tech thing in their household. And here they are. They're like a star in their neighborhood or in their apartment building or their area

because they're part of this program. It's just awesome. It's cool. Also, a sense of normalcy, right? Yes, that's right. Like, we're not going to talk about cancer. It's just about this. Yeah, and the teacher goes to wherever the kid is.

So if the kid's in hospital that week, the teacher goes, if the kids back at home, they go there. It's really cool. And then we do a, we do a grab, a formal graduation.

They get diplomas. They take pictures with us and all that. And the instructors gallery show for, we do a big gallery show. Um, you know, we, we just started working with the Getty center here in LA and we did,

um, our, we did a bunch of our classes there. We did our graduation there. And so the kids are literally doing their classes and graduation at one of the best art museums in the entire world. And how cool is that? And we started in L.A. and New York. And now we're in 13 cities across the country.

Pretty phenomenal with that and and so really you know the the um the third prong of our mission is is to simply to bring joy to children and families who are going through pediatric cancer so however you want to call that you know and to you know my job as the chairman of the board and the co-founder is just to i'll keep giving this thing a voice to the best of my ability. And we get back to what's it like to be on the business side and to have achieved what I've achieved. First of all, I've only ever achieved what I've achieved with the help of a hell of a lot of other people.

The artists, my colleagues, my co- coworkers, my employees, whatever you want to call them. And I've gotten, you know, I'm lucky because I have friends like you who have a big mind share, you know, and because of what I do for a living, I have access to a lot of gatekeepers in the media and I'm able to be a voice for this foundation. And I take that responsibility very seriously. So the Pablo Foundation is something that allows Joanne and I a way to put our loss and our grief into a very, very productive legacy. Our intention, our design with this foundation is for it to go on far longer than we are running it and far longer than we are alive.

It's not like a small thing to us. We want this thing to be here forever. We have the financial plan to do that. Like any nonprofit, we have to keep getting more money in every year, but we are building the structure of this foundation to be a legacy organization. Well, it's a beautiful thing, man.

And it's an amazing way to honor Pablo's life and to carry the message of so many other people that are suffering out there, man. So thanks for sharing that with me. Thank you. It's good talking to you, man. Likewise. I appreciate it. I appreciate it too. Um, before we wrap it up, maybe, uh, I thought it could be, you know, kind of a good way to wrap to close it down is if you could share maybe just one or two things that, that might be helpful or informative to perhaps a parent who's listening out there who might be enduring or going through something similar to what you experienced? I remember is finding one or two people in,

on your team or, or around your team at your hospital to that you can trust. I've gotten many, many calls over the years. Somebody gave somebody my number and their child was just diagnosed. What can you, what can you say to me? And so I know other people are doing this thing of like, what can you say to me?

And so I know other people are doing this thing of like, how do I find a mentor? How do I find someone who's been through this? I need help, but I also need the truth. I'm very careful when people say that. Everybody always says that, and I'm very careful what I say to people, right?, there are things I'll never tell anybody and Joanne will never tell anybody. It's just, it's just, you don't, you just don't do that shit. So,

but, but asking people who know is helpful because the last thing you want to do is go to Google. You do not want to go to Google when your child has a life threatening disease. I'm sorry. You don't want to do that because there's all kinds of misinformation or things that are kind of right and kind of not right. It's goofy. And everybody does it, but all the doctors tell you not to do it. And the other thing that I said earlier is you have to make sure that you take care of yourself, nutrition, working out, blowing off that steam. And if you have other children, obviously making sure that they have nurturing. It's really hard. And we didn't do it right.

Well, I'll speak for myself. I don't know that you can do it right. I know that I wasn't the best during that period of time, but it's important. I mean, who would be? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But, yeah, that's, you can't take care of somebody else if you're not taking care of yourself first. Well, that's the idea. It's like the airplane thing where you gotta put your mask on first. It feels selfish, but it's not. It's just not.

And it's like, I think it's a big thing, like, in our society where everybody, you know, America, everybody thinks like, you know, being, while everybody's acting selfish, they all think, oh, if I take care of myself before I take care of you, I'm being selfish. But they're too busy being selfish to figure out that there's other ways to look at it. And hardly anybody ever tries on that other, you know, that other suit, so to speak. But you got it. Martyrdom, you know, that can be, so to speak. But you got to- Martyrdom, that's its own form of selfish egotism.

Yeah, fair enough. But I just think get good resources, get a good circle around, and just remember you don't have to answer the phone all the time. You just don't. Everybody's going to wish you well everybody's going to be awesome people were so amazing to us and continue to be so amazing to us but the fact is you can't interact with everybody it's impossible and it drains you and you need that energy for when your kid you know needs it right like the healthy boundary

yeah it's hard uh it all comes back to all this weird shit. But look, man, I find you really inspiring and I follow you on Instagram and I follow you on Twitter and I've read your books. You just gave me the cookbook and I'm going to, Joanne and I are going to cook some things. No pressure, man. I love, like I would love to do plant-based. I just, I find it to be that I'm totally ignorant to this and I'm just making this up. I think it's gotta be a hell of a lot of work. It's not, it's not just check out, check out the cookbook, man. It's a lot easier than you think. It's pretty simple stuff, but we can talk about that more. I have like coconut oil up there. You guys got to come out to the

house for dinner too and let Julie cook for you guys. I'm there. All right. I'm already there. I'm already there. And it, cool. I'm already there. And it's ridiculous that we haven't been out on a bike yet, so we've got to make that change. Oh, yeah. I saw you on the Nazca ride when I had pneumonia. That's right. We did see you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But we need to ride together. I know. Let's do that. Let's do that. All right, cool, man. So if you're digging on Jeff, you want to learn more about Poblove, the Poblove mission, consider donating. Go to poblove.org if you want to learn more about Poblove, the Poblove mission, consider donating. Go to Poblove.org if you want to follow Jeff.

He's PobloveJeff on Twitter and Instagram. And the big ride's coming up October 15th, yeah? October 5 through 11. October 5 through 11, yeah. I want to do it next year. Yeah, you should. You should. I will.

I'm committing now. I'll go. If you do Pavlov across America next year, I will be plant-based for a certain period of time at least, if not forever. How good would that be? That's a throwdown. Seriously, I'll do it. All right. Where's the ride going to be next year? I have no idea. All right.

Well. You can help me customize the route. All right. Sounds good, man. All right. Thanks, man. All right. Peace. Plants. can help me customize the route all right sounds good man all right thanks man all right peace that was amazing uh thank you jeff i love you buddy that was incredible i appreciate your honesty and your openness and your vulnerability with me it was just amazing. If this touched you guys in any way, I encourage you to please visit

pablove.org, consider a donation, and other ways to get involved to support the ride and the kids. Don't forget to visit the episode page at richroll.com for show notes to take your learning experience beyond the earbuds. And if you live in the LA area or your travels take you through this part of the world, please be sure to check out a few of the businesses that I'm partnered with. Joy Cafe, J-O-I Cafe. It's our organic plant-based and gluten-free eatery in West Lake Village. You'll often see me eating there. I was eating there today at lunchtime. It was amazing, actually. I just finished a ride. I went in there to get my lunch. And there was a whole family sitting in there, Australian family. And they were en route, I believe they're en route to returning to Australia.

I don't know where they were flying from. And they specifically created their itinerary that would give them a long enough layover in Los Angeles at LAX to allow them to rent a car and drive all the way out to Joy Cafe for lunch. I'm telling you, Joy Cafe is not close to LAX. It's a bit of a drive. Incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was so touched that they would do that. And I'm so glad that I was there to kind of greet them and meet them. So thank you for doing that. I'm also partnered with the Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery also in Westlake Village. You can find out more about these businesses at joycafe.com, joicafe.com, and karmabaker.com. It feels really good to serve the global community with this podcast and the books that we write, etc.

But it also feels really good to serve the local community with food that is consistent with my values. So check those out if you're around. I'd love to meet you and see you there. For all your plant power needs, go to richroll.com. Got all kinds of cool stuff there. We got nutrition products. We have 100% organic cotton garments.

We got plant power tech teas, sticker packs, whatever. All kinds of cool stuff to take your health and your life to the next level at richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. I got online courses at mindbodygreen.com. Two of those there, The Art of Living with Purpose and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Information is available at mindbodygreen.com. Two of those there, The Art of Living with Purpose and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Information is available at mindbodygreen.com. Click on Video Courses. That's it.

Thanks for supporting the show, you guys. Thank you for telling a friend. Thanks for sharing on social media. I appreciate you guys more than you can possibly imagine. I really hope you enjoyed Jeff today, and I'm going to see you guys in a couple days. So make it great. And we'll talk soon. I promise.

Peace. Plants.