The Rich Roll Podcast - Moby on Transforming Electronic Music, Elevating Consciousness & Saving The Planet

Episode Date: May 9, 2016

Most know Moby as the eclectic and introspective DJ / musician behind Play — an album that sold over 12 million copies and elevated dance electronica from the clubs of lower Manhattan into a full-blown mainstream phenomenon. Far more interesting is the story of Moby himself. Reared in suburban poverty by a single mom, Moby was an awkward, alienated kid who turned early and often to music for comfort. Classical guitar and music theory morphed into high school punk efforts like the Vatican Commandoes and post college dropout stints DJ'ing at local Connecticut nightclubs. But traction eluded him. So in 1989, this poor, white, skinny, Christian, vegan teetotaler pilgrimaged south to lower Manhattan, thrusting his frail, wide-eyed self into the beautiful, hedonistic, harrowing life of art, music & impoverished squalor that defined the drug-fueled dance music scene of downtown New York City in the 1990's. Cribbing from the flap copy of Porcelain*, Moby's arresting, magnificent new memoir hitting bookstores next week, “[h]e would learn what it was to be spat on, to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City: the age of AIDS and crack but also of a defiantly festive cultural underworld. Not without drama, he found his way. But success was not uncomplicated; it led to wretched, if in hindsight sometimes hilarious, excess and proved all too fleeting. And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated an end in his career and elsewhere in his life, and put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would in fact be the beginning of an astonishing new phase: the multimillion-selling Play.” Not only was Play a multi-platinum smash success, it would soon become the soundtrack to our lives — a record that would shift culture and cement Moby as one of the most interesting and iconic musicians of our time. Wealth and fame arrived. Obsession followed. And Moby embraced it all. Mansions, lofts and country manors. Debauchery, blowouts and binges. Whatever, whenever. Anytime, all the time. It was always too much. It was never enough. And this is where things get really interesting. The story of Moby is one of fidelity to authenticity. It’s about a life defined by survival, perseverance and self-belief. It's about losing one’s self to surrender to the higher self within. It's about discovering what is most important in life. And the beautiful trudge towards clarity, purpose, satisfaction and service. Today we explore the remarkable life of a most extraordinary artist — a man as introspective as he is self-deprecating; and as serious as he is deadpan droll. I absolutely love this exchange. So press Play and enjoy. Peace + Plants, Rich

If animals weren't used for agriculture, famine would disappear. Rainforest deforestation decreases by 90%. Ocean acidification decreases by 25%. Water use decreases by 40%. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, all are reduced by at least 60%. Zoonotic disease disappears. That's Moby, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, planet Earth dwellers and podcast listeners. My name is Rich Roll.

I am your host. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast, the show where each week I sit down with paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of culture, art, health, wellness, nutrition, spirituality, meditation, fitness, athletic performance, entrepreneurship, creativity, you get the picture. I do it to help all of us unlock and unleash our best most authentic

selves so thank you so much for tuning in today for subscribing on itunes for leaving a review on itunes and of course big love to everybody who has made a habit of always using the amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your amazon purchases doesn't cost you a cent extra click the banner on any episode page at richroll.com. Takes you to Amazon. Buy what you're going to buy. It's all good. Amazon kicks off some loose commission change. And that is greatly appreciated. So thank you so much. All right. I got the one and only Moby on the podcast today. Very exciting stuff. You guys know Moby, right? I'm pretty sure most people know who this guy is. I mean,

he's one of the most iconic and interesting musicians of our time. But perhaps even more interesting than his music is his story, the story of Richard Melville Hall, which is this really kind of compelling path from suburban poverty and alienation to living this beautiful and at times harrowing life of art, music, and impoverished squalor in downtown New York City in the 1980s and the 1990s as a DJ and a musician. This sort of awkward, poor, skinny, teetotaling vegan white kid from Connecticut who gets thrust into the hedonistic, drug-fueled dance music club scene at a time when crack and AIDS dominated the streets of New York. And after 10 years of this, Moby contemplated hanging it all up. Just one more record, a swan song goodbye before calling it a

day. And that record was Play. It was a record that not only sold over 10 million copies, it's a record that seemingly found its way into countless commercials and major motion pictures. It really ushered in an entirely new form of electronic music that literally shifted our culture. And it made him rich. It made him famous. But it didn't necessarily make him happy. And that's where I think things get really interesting. I got a couple more things I want to say about Moby, but first... All right, back to Moby. So, I don't know, this is a really interesting exploration of an extraordinary life, an extraordinary artist, and in certain respects, a really unlikely success. The fact that Moby considered that it might be his last record, you know, on the precipice of

play coming out, is kind of a fascinating parable for commitment and perseverance and true, real fidelity to your voice. Anyway, this conversation is great. It's deep. It's funny. It's serious. It's about creativity. It's about artistry. It's about sobriety and advocacy. We talk about the music and art scene in 1980s New York, which is a favorite subject of mine. The evolution of how Moby became Moby. We talk about alcoholism and recovery, the current state of the music industry. And Moby's had a lot of high highs and low lows. And so what has he learned about what is truly important and meaningful in his life and in life in general? We talk about his veganism and his current advocacy. We talk about his new restaurant, We talk about his veganism and his current advocacy.

We talk about his new restaurant, Little Pine in Silver Lake, which is amazing. And he has also been quite vociferous about the California drought in his advocacy and calling out the governor. We talk about that a little bit. And also a little bit about his new book, which is called Porcelain. It's a memoir, which comes out very soon, May 17th. And it's funny because we scheduled this interview before I even knew he had a book coming out. I didn't even realize it until the day before the interview. I didn't get an advanced copy.

I still haven't read it because it hasn't come out yet, but it is getting some really incredible early reviews and press buzz. I've seen the word masterpiece getting thrown about here and there. And he has these incredible blurbs from people like Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers and Susan Orlean. And look, as a writer, that's about as good as it gets. So I would surmise that this is a pretty incredible book, which I can tell you I will definitely be reading the day it comes out.

All right, enough. Let's press play and talk to Moby. Thanks so much for doing this, man. My pleasure. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me into your beautiful home. And as I was driving over here trying to wrap my head around the many points of intersection, all the different kinds of things that we could talk about, I thought, you know what? I should call John Joseph and ask him. And John, always the lively one, had, he's like,

ask him about the punk days back there. Ask him about the Vatican Commandos. That's exactly what he said. Here, I can show you the text he sent me. What was it? Yeah, the Vatican Commandos, which was your punk band, right? Yeah, in high school. So, I was born in New York on 168th Street.

And then I moved to Connecticut and I went to high school there. And I had a high school punk rock band called the Vatican Commandos. And John Joseph might be one of the like 10 people on the planet who remembers seeing the Vatican Commandos. Yeah. And how long did that last? Let me think. We started our punk rock band in 1981. 1981.

And I left in 83. The rest of them kept doing it until, I don't know, 85, 86. And we actually just had a reunion show in New York. Oh, wow. What are the other guys doing now these days? So this is perfectly in keeping with the world of Connecticut punk rock. One of the guys, the bass player, started a successful media company. And the singer who, like the last time I saw him in high school, had a blue mohawk and

was doing acid, is now a brain surgeon. That's classic. He's a neuroscientist and a brain surgeon. So, this is what happens, like Connecticut punk rockers become doctors and start media companies. Right. Which is great. So, this was, was this after you were living in Darien and then moved to the city or before you moved to Darien? This was, yes, I lived in Darien, Connecticut for about, let me think, maybe 15 years.

Uh-huh. And I always have to qualify that because Darien, Connecticut is one of the wealthiest, preppiest towns on the planet. You know, like, it's where they essentially invented white people. Yeah. When I hear about it, I think about, about like robert chambers and the preppy murder and like dorians and the upper east side that's the gist of it yeah so i haven't heard someone mention dorians in a long time that's a pretty obscure reference um but so darien is the whitest wealthiest preppiest place on the planet what made it odd for me is that my mom and i were on food stamps and welfare and she was a pot

smoking hippie who dated artists so i grew up in this very wealthy environment and we would have to borrow money to buy food so it's given me like socioeconomic issues that i probably hold on to to this day yeah well i mean that's pretty intense and from what i gather you know there was a fair amount of chaos i mean your your father died when you were quite young, like drunk driving accident or something like that. And your mom, you know, was sort of a wild, free spirit, hippie person. She was an aspiring wild spirit, free hippie person. I mean, like, because she was, this was, you know, I was born in 1965 and my dad died in 67. So then my 23-year-old mom, who wanted to run off and be a hippie and move to Haight-Ashbury,

suddenly found herself a single parent having to raise a child. Right. And so she did her best, but it was the late 60s and the early 70s. She's like, fuck it, I'll just bring him with me. That did happen a couple times yeah so i mean i remember i did have those experiences of like being seven years old or six years old and waking up in a commune on a saturday morning and like walking around and like trying to wake up the naked hippies right to see if any of them could make me breakfast oh my god i mean everybody has a story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's interesting.

I mean, I think that that informs an underlying core theme of artistic sensibility and everything that you do. And I'm interested in where music started to come in and the kind of artistic spark that prompted you to move to New York City and begin this whole adventure. Well, I remember the first time I heard music. I was four years old, I think four, and I was in the car with my mom. We had this very old, rusty, falling apart Plymouth something or other. And Creedence Clearwater Revival, Proud Mary came on the radio, and I was transfixed, and I refused to get out of the car until the song had ended. Which both sort of presaged two things.

One, a lifetime spent obsessing over music. And two, just that capacity to obsess over anything. So I think at that point my mom could have looked at me and said, okay, at some point you'll be a musician and an alcoholic. Right. Because no four-year-old gets this kind of like focused, like obsessed OCD focus on something. Right, right, right. And so how did that begin to manifest? Did you start tinkering with instruments or did your mom say, well, I should probably,

you know, get him some lessons or? Both. So my mom played piano. She had a bunch of different boyfriends, all whom played different instruments uh-huh um my uncle played the recorder you know like the little wooden flute um another uncle who played guitar and so i grew up around all these instruments and basically growing up rather than play sports or hang out with girls i just played music like i borrowed my mom's record so i'd like stay home sick from school watch cartoons um play guitar and listen to my mom's records and are you one of those people that can just

pick up an instrument and just what's that word called called? Where you can, like an autodidact, where you can just learn it, you hear it, and you don't have to learn music per se, like how to read music, but you can just pick it up. I don't know if I'm, I mean, I'm an autodidact in the sense that I'm for the most part self-taught. Like I had a couple of years of music theory lessons and studying classical music when I was very young. lessons and studying classical music when I was very young. But yeah, I don't know if I have any special ability when it comes to picking up a new instrument, but I have no fear of picking up a new instrument. So like a lot of people, if you put them in front of a cello, they'll assume they're not allowed to touch it. And I am perfectly happy to pick it up and start playing around with it and see if I can get sound out of it, even if it sounds terrible. Right, right, right.

And so when was the first band? The first band, when I was 10 years old, 10 or 11 years old, I started a cover band with some friends. It was a bass player, me, and a drummer. And we had no singer, and we learned three songs. We learned Happy Birthday by the Beatles. We learned the bass line from Money by Pink Floyd. And I think Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin.

So our rehearsals. Marketable skills. Yeah. You go on the birthday party circuit with that. But the problem is we didn't have a singer and we were all too scared to try singing. So we would just get together and do like these three songs over and over and over again. But did you know even then, this is it for me? This is what it's going to be?

I guess, no. Not really. I mean, I knew that I wanted my entire life to be spent in the world of music, but I never thought of it as a job. Because everyone in my family, my mom, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, for the most part were artists who never had any commercial success. So, I just assumed that if I decided to be an artist or a musician, I would do it because I loved it and never have a career with that. So, I thought I would have to become a lawyer or, I mean, I was a philosophy major in school.

So, I assumed I would go to get my master's or my doctorate in philosophy, teach philosophy at some public college somewhere, you know, some state school. I imagined I would be in a loveless marriage, and I would live in like some cold New England town, and I would like, my wife would get fat, and I would get skinny, and I would start smoking just to sort of like die early and make music in my spare time. That's a very specific image. Kind of. You put a lot of thought into that. That's what I thought was gonna end up happening. and music was just going to be this thing that i did obsessively but on the side and never for a second thought that i would have any like professional life around music yeah but but

it seems like there's there's artistic impulses kind of oozing out i mean you have the photography thing too like that started pretty early too and didn't you study that formally yeah i uh well my uncle who had been a photographer for the new york times gave me my first camera when i was 10 so when i was 10 i got my first guitar and my first camera and i did both of them obsessively the thing is guitar and by the way i have to apologize there are going to be sounds in the background because we're sitting almost outside we're in the world. So if you hear a saw or a helicopter, you can blame Los Angeles. Right. But so playing guitar is a lot more egalitarian when you're growing up,

meaning to learn guitar, you just have to sit down and play guitar. To become a photographer, especially when I was 10 years old, meant having enough money to buy film to buy paper to buy to buy developing chemicals to have a dark room so it's like being a photographer was just too expensive for me to really focus on growing up so i did and i love doing it but i would shoot like a roll of film every six weeks and have to think super hard about every picture i took because each picture represented like a roll of film every six weeks and have to think super hard about every picture i took because each picture represented like a significant part of my net worth yeah yeah that's interesting impediments in between you and the output of the creative impulse which it's funny

now like because we're like the same age like even when i take pictures on a digital camera like i feel like i have to exert some kind of economy like oh don't take too many you know what i mean because you're programmed from oh you're wasting film yeah and now anything involving memory or ones and zeros it's all essentially free and limitless yeah it's just like i can't wrap my head around that yeah and you've you've uh you know rode that wave of transition in your own career from you know the height of it all the way to the other side. And I'm sure it informs, you know, your perspective on your musical career going forward, which is something I want to get into. Okay. Yeah. But let's go back

to, you know, kind of the early days of moving to New York City. I mean, if you were under the impression like, oh, this music thing is going to be something on the side i mean what was what was the plan when you show up on the lower east side the plan was hmm i didn't i didn't really have a plan that went beyond like 24 hours so in the late 80s i tried to get a record deal the thing is i didn't know how to get a record deal. The thing is, I didn't know how to get a record deal. I didn't even really know what a record deal was. So I made cassettes of some of my, I was trying to be like Morrissey. I was doing singer-songwriter-y type stuff

and doing electronic music and punk rock on the side. But I really wanted to have a record deal as like a Morrissey wannabe. And so I made these demo tapes and I sent them out to 20 different record labels, just like from addresses that had been written on the back of record sleeves. And I got one response, which was Disney Records sent me a form letter saying that they do not accept unsolicited material. And that was the one response I got from these 20 demo tapes.

And then as I got more involved in the DJ world, I started making demo tapes of my original electronic music. This is the late 80s, 88, 89. And I would go to New York, and I'd just wander around lower Manhattan, go to every record company and drop off tapes. And then the next week, I would do the exact same thing. And I would just keep kept doing it and kept doing it because I think it's funny. I get asked now that I'm old, I get asked often, like, what advice do I have for up and coming musicians or artists? And one, I think you have to love what you do. Two, you have to work exceptionally hard at whatever it is you love to do and three

it really helps if you don't know how to do anything else so i had no distractions when i was trying to get a record deal because i had no fallback career you know it wasn't like no plan b there was no plan b and i was living in an abandoned factory right keep the overhead low yeah i was paying fifty dollars a month to a security guard who turned the other way so i could go into this abandoned factory i was making four thousand dollars a year and i was pretty happy so i would you know fill my bag with cassettes and just walk around and drop them off hoping that maybe somewhere someone would listen and then then finally, in 1989, someone listened to one of the tapes, and I got my first record deal. And what made it kind of

remarkable is that the guy who signed me to his label at the time didn't have an office, didn't have employees, had never put out a record, and didn't have a name for the label. Perfect. But I signed a contract with him because he was the only person who'd ever actually taken the time to listen to what I was doing. And so that was the first record. That was the first label. And how did that one do?

Well, then I had my studio set up in his apartment, and I would answer faxes, and I would clean the apartment. You weren't just getting signed by the label. You were actually running the label. I was like an intern and an artist. So I would clean the kitchen, take stuff to UPS, go to the post office, send faxes, answer faxes, clean the apartment, and make records as well. But I was the only artist signed to the label. send faxes, answer faxes, clean the apartment, and make records as well. But I was the only artist signed to the label,

so I made records under five different names, so the label seemed like they had five different artists. In fact, the first compilation album they put out, it was a compilation album of five different artists, and it's all just me. That's pretty funny. So that puts you at least locally on the map, right? I mean, do you start booking gigs in the clubs and DJing around town? Yeah. I mean, I got very lucky. I started DJing at a club in New York called Mars, which was the biggest, coolest nightclub on the planet. It was like five or six levels.

nightclub on the planet it was like five or six levels and somehow the man who booked djs listened to one of my dj demo tapes and i got a job djing there and that was kind of what introduced me to the world of lower manhattan and nightclubs and music yeah and for somebody who's listening who's not familiar with that that very specific point in time in that geographical location, I mean, it was quite something. I was living there. I was in New York from 89 to 94, and it was crazy, you know. So, maybe paint the picture a little bit about what that nightlife scene was all about. Okay, well, nightclubs, I mean, this was the height of the AIDS epidemic and the height of the crack epidemic. So, and lower Manhattan, I mean, now it's so absurd, like $10,000 rents you a two-bedroom apartment.

Back then, landlords were burning down their buildings because it was cheaper to burn your building than to pay taxes on it. So, every night, there would be different tenements in the Lower East Side on fire. And rent was super, super cheap because it was super dangerous. Every day someone was getting stabbed or shot or infected with AIDS or something. So it was like living in a war zone.

And the nightclubs, one of the things I loved about them was that they were mainly Latino and African-American. So when I was DJing at these clubs, it was like 10% of the people going out were white and everybody else was black and Latino, which was odd. But as a white guy from Connecticut, it really made me feel at home and I still don't

know why like playing house music and hip-hop and reggae for African-American and Latino audiences somehow made me feel way more comfortable than like playing rock music for white people yeah I mean what were the I'm trying to remember what the other clubs were like like Danceteria like Danceteria was a few years before that. I think Danceteria closed in like 89. I loved Danceteria. That was a magical place. So the other clubs would have been...

Limelight. There's Nell's, Limelight. Yeah, Nell's. Even the Palladium, Red Zone, The World, Sound Factory. The Building was open for a little while. But also a lot of places were getting shut down because the drug dealers would show up with guns and just start shooting people. Right, right.

So every week I'd go to work and one of the doormen would say, oh, did you hear about Raphael? He got shot last night. You know, it's just like, or do you hear about Jorge? He has AIDS. Like every single week you just kept hearing about that. hey he has aids like every single week you just kept hearing about that so but you're making a name for yourself and you're kind of uh getting into your groove right i think there's this this idea that you burst on the scene with play but play was like your fifth album right yeah so i started making singles in 1990 uh and then the second single i released involved, I used some of the music from Twin Peaks, and it became a huge dance hit in the rest of the world. Not so much here, but in England it was a top ten record. I still remember seeing it in the singles charts in between Michael Jackson and Phil Collins. Right, that's true. And this was like my second single that I made on like the cheapest equipment in the living room of the record company where I worked.

Right, and how old were you at that time? I was 25. Right. So, 25 years younger than I am now. So, leading into play, did you feel like you had that kind of momentum like was there a sense that play could be this breakout success or was that just like a shocking surprise so throughout the 90s i made records and i toured uh 1995 i was headlining the second stage at lollapalooza so like the first five years of the 90s and it's funny I'm putting out a book in May that's about this these exact 10 years right I want to talk about that so so

so it's all very fresh in my mind right now but so 90 by 95 like the momentum you're talking about was there you know Spin named my album in 1995 their album of the year it's called Everything is Wrong and then the next record I made was a super dark punk rock record called animal rights yeah which stopped the momentum in its tracks like this weird left turn right and went back to punk yeah so not just but not just punk but like super visceral very dark punk not even like fun green day style punk this was more like i don't even know i was like speed metal punk that was like very feral what was the i mean why why did you make that decision um one it was what i'd grown up with two after eight years of sobriety in 1995 i started drinking again and I found myself going to these rock clubs in the

Lower East Side and wherever and hearing the Stooges and hearing Pantera and hearing Sepultura and hearing all the you know the Bad Brains and Minor Threat stuff I grew up with and just fell in love with guitar based music again and so I thought I thought, like when we were growing up, a lot of the artists that I loved experimented. You know, like Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music. John Lennon wrote Revolution No. 9.

The Clash made hip-hop records. Like I thought part of being a musician was to experiment and try out different genres and styles. So I made this album, Animal Rights. I just wanted to make a really noisy punk rock record. And I had hoped that the response among critics and whatever would have been, at the very least, some acknowledgement that I had done something different.

And instead, it was either met with the worst of all possible reviews or complete silence. So, I suddenly found myself, after five years of good momentum, I found myself playing shows to like 30 people a night. Wow. And drinking constantly, battling anxiety, dating strippers, just doing all. And then it got worse and worse. So, by the end of the 90s, I thought my career was done. Right. By 1998.

Let's make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. Let's just dig that hole. Like everything just kept getting worse. I was running out of money. My mom died. And so I thought I was going to make one last record, which ended up being the album Play. So that was supposed to be my last record

that was supposed to be a failure out of the gate, and it ended up selling close to 10 million records. Why was it supposed... It was supposed to be sort of business insiders were like, this is not going to succeed, or you didn't care? I cared, but I just... I mean, it was 1999.

It was the era of Limp Bizkit and the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. It was the era of people spending millions of dollars on videos and millions of dollars making records. So along comes me, like a bald has-been musician making a record in his bedroom involving vocals from records that were 50 years old. Sampling like old blues records. It was absolutely, you couldn't have had less of a recipe for success. And yet it struck this sort of zeitgeist chord.

Something, yeah. And it just, you tapped into something, you know, that was going on culturally because it crossed over in such a massive way. I mean, every song on that record became a hit. I mean, it was extraordinary. It just exploded. I mean, I almost see it as like the Bernie Sanders of records, meaning like completely unexpected and so much more successful than I certainly would have imagined.

Right. How compacted was that period of time? I mean, did it really, I mean, I know it kind of, didn't it come out originally in 99, it kind of eked out some sales and then it was re-released and that's when it exploded? Or how did it all kind of like work? So in 1999, it came out and it did 100 times better

than I or anyone around me thought it was going to do. But then in 2000, it ended up doing a million times better than we thought. Like all of a sudden, a year after it was released, it went to number one in England and Australia and Germany and France and Italy. And suddenly I had a top five single in the United States and it went to number one in Canada. Like it just kept, it didn't stop. Like it just kept going. And every week my managers and i kept thinking like okay it's got to be done now and then like a month later it had sold more and we i still don't know what happened right but it was nice i mean the downside well i guess the double-edged sword is the big success of that

record and then the next record 18 and then the record after that hotel which did really well outside the united states that level of success introduced me to a world that i hadn't really been a part of which was the red carpet dating movie stars world and i just drank constantly went out every night did any drug that was put in front of me and bottomed out pretty quickly and the nice thing is i've seen almost everything that the world has to offer and i've indulged in everything the world has to offer and it makes it a lot easier to not be tempted by it now. So now I hear about like people going out and taking tons of drugs and having sevensomes. I'm like, Oh, good for you. I just have no interest anymore. Yeah, I mean, it is you're kind of like, you know, the wizard who's, you know, come down from the

mountain or you can you can be the the Oracle in the cave because you've lived all these different lives. I mean, we can unpack the sobriety story. I mean, I feel like in kind of canvassing, you know, the history of your life, a lot of it boils down to you always being on some level, and please correct me if I'm way off base here, but, you know, kind of, you know, searching like on this spiritual quest. I mean, there's a reason why you were attracted to the punk rock straight edge movement there was a reason why you got interested in like hardcore christianity like these are you know i don't know whether they're followings or you know you know dogma aside like just a sense of belonging or at least a a sort of spiritual through line that you could connect with but it seems like it's this evolving search for that through success and ruin and sobriety and, you know,

drunken debauchery and big houses and downsizing and everything that you've experienced. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. But I think in a weird way, it involves a spirituality that we as humans don't talk about that often. Which to me, because oftentimes, especially in the world like Southern California, the world we live in, oftentimes, and I'm not going to malign anyone's spiritual practice, practice but people sort of assume that spirituality means cleanliness and calmness you know like so like a spiritual world would be like clean and calm and wearing white clothes

yeah and like and to me the spirituality that i have sort of come to is, I hope, a spirituality that's based on both my individual human experience, our collective human experience, and how messy those things are. You know, like I was talking to a friend of mine who's a Buddhist, and I think I annoyed her because I was asking her, I was was like why do you think the Buddha is always depicted smiling and she said oh because he's enlightened and I said I think it's because he knows he's still human except he's just fully he's fully experienced what it means to be human and he just lives with an like a gentle acceptance of that you know And that's part of how going out and experiencing things is I don't have the ability to judge anyone. So if someone does something stupid or thoughtless or violent or debauched, I can't judge them.

Because I've probably done the same thing or something similar. similar. And so, it's hopefully through experience and through self-examination, we come to a place where we are compassionate in our knowing of ourselves and equally compassionate in trying to understand other people. Yeah, that's interesting. As cliched as that might sound. Right. It is, but there's also a very interesting irony that's packed into that, which is that you and I are both members of organizations that are sort of known for being highly dogmatic and judgmental. Which is? Well, being in recovery or having certain opinions about 12-step, right? And an outsider's perspective on what that means. And also, you know, the vegan community.

Oh, yeah, that's true. And a certain reputation that comes along with that. Because I really, I don't think I'm a judgmental person. I work very hard to not be judgmental, to be in that place. And I believe that you are being completely honest and genuine and coming from that place too. And in the experience that I have in recovery and with a lot of the people that I know in the vegan movement, you know, are on that same level. And yet there's a sort of public perception issue with both of these organizations, I suppose.

Yeah. I mean. And that's rooted in reality. I mean, there's a reason for that. offer someone the ability to belong to an organization with like-minded people, it's part of human nature that certain people are going to dogmatically embrace that, even if what they're embracing is non-dogmatic. Like AA, for example, the core of AA, as written by Bill W. and whoever else, is completely non-dogmatic. There's not even anything proprietary there. Like, you don't even have to be sober to be a part of it.

Right, just a desire to stop drinking. But so many people embrace it dogmatically. And it's sort of, I think... Well, and also because there's this tradition of anonymity, which, you know, I suppose on some level could be argued we're transgressing right now. I never know where that line is. I don't worry about it too much. But I don't either.

That puts it in a position where it can't really defend itself against those kinds of claims. And for some reason that reminds me of 1988, I think it was 88 in New York. I remember sitting on the subway in 1988 and the headline on the New York Post said, New York City, murder capital, because New York had had the highest number of homicides in its history. And I looked around the subway and I looked at everybody on the subway and they

were all sitting quietly and peacefully going home to like watch TV and make dinner. And just the contrast between this headline, New York City murder capital, and everyone quietly sitting on the subway just made me realize to sort of state the obvious, like we like dramatic headlines. So the people who get sober through AA and are quiet and nice and humble,

like no one's going to write about that. But like the person who gets sober in AA and relapses and kills himself, or goes out and screams at people that they need to be dogmatic in their sobriety, that's what gets headlines. Or the vegan celebrity who's talking about how great it is to be vegan and then abandons it,

you know, two months later. And I think that we can have standards for ourselves, but there has to be that understanding of like, oh, we're human and here's what it means to be human. Like as humans, we're messy and flawed and we grab onto things because like deep down we know that being a few decades old in a 15 billion year old universe like we're all aware that like our lives are like fleeting and potentially insignificant so we latch on to things that might give us a sense of significance which tends to be rigidity and dogma and the idea that we're right and everyone else is wrong yeah there's an an innate drive for certainty to be a member of a team, even if that certainty is based in fear. Yeah.

You know, that's better than uncertainty because that's much more terrifying. It's, yeah, fear and tribalism. And it applies to politics, you know, like militant Republicans, militant Bernie Sanders supporters. It applies to sports teams, you know, like militant Manchester United fans,

militant Denver Broncos. It applies to music, militant jazz fans. Mac or Windows or teams, you know, like militant Manchester United fans, militant Denver Bronx. It applies to music, militant jazz fans. Mac or Windows or whatever, you know. And that's why I think that, I don't know, personally, like I have an inclination towards getting caught up in that. Because I certainly have, like in the punk rock world, the vegan world, the dance music world, the Christian world. Like I've been caught up in that orthodoxy and dogma, but it all speaks to my insecurity, you know, which is an insecurity that is both unique to me, but also shared with everyone. Like, you can't, if you're human and you're not a psychopath or a sociopath, you have

to have some insecurities and some fears, you know. It's just impossible to get through life and not be filled with doubt. a psychopath or a sociopath, you have to have some insecurities and some fears. It's just impossible to get through life and not be filled with doubt. Right. So let's take it back to kind of the sobriety story a little bit. I mean, you would have these periods of sobriety,

like sort of quote unquote sobriety. I mean, they weren't sort of 12 step sobriety, just saying, at a very young age, like you're drinking and getting crazy and then getting sober at like 13 or whatever it is and- Yeah, first time I got sober I was 13. Sober for a while and then deciding, ah, I can drink and doing that for a while and like this progressive kind of gestalt of using that takes you to, you know, a certain place where you finally have had enough. I mean, what was, I mean, was it a dramatic bottom or was it just, you know what, I'm done with this?

It was not a dramatic bottom, but it was, because basically I hit bottom in like, let's say 2005. And then I just stayed there for a long time. say 2005 and then i just stayed there for a long time so from 2005 until 2008 i just lived in a state of bottom you know was that when you were throwing those crazy parties upstate throwing crazy parties and like yeah and so it wasn't like like any one of those nights or mornings for most people would have been a bottom. I just became so accustomed to 36-hour long hangovers and constant panic attacks and self-loathing and contempt for the daytime. Like it just, this became my status quo. status quo so like i that's what i mean like i lived i lived in the like this sludgy bottom for such a long time that started to seem normal until it started to get even worse you know and

then what's that like to like be i mean you are you know this is a moment in time where you're super successful you got tons of cash you got like from the outside looking in it's like this guy's got it made he's a superstar i mean does that create like an extra sense of like shame like this i'm supposed to be happy but i'm not and like why can't i make sense of all of this i mean what is that like i mean it's like it's that old thing of like chasing the dragon you know like i had a couple of perfect nights and i spent the rest of my life trying to get back there you know like that like a perfect night like this one perfect night i remember i think it would have been 2001 and there was ecstasy and champagne and tons of

super exclusive private parties and like conversations with mick jagger and richard branson going home with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. Like, that was perfection. And then I spent every day after that trying to get back there, with sometimes succeeding more often than not. But, like, you know, the world has a way of intruding, you know. And then you find yourself, like, 4 o'clock in the morning, walking down Houston Street, blind drunk and lonely and crying. And you're yourself like four o'clock in the morning walking down Houston Street, blind, drunk and lonely and crying. And you're like, oh.

And if that only like if if the majority of my experiences after that perfect night had been quite good, I'd probably still be out there. But over time, empirically, the majority of the experiences were just grim you know and also the the inability and i'm i don't know if you've had this experience but like i tried to drink like a normal person of course i remember one night in particular i decided i was not going to be defeated by alcohol so i went out with the idea of having two drinks this was i was like left my apartment i was like i'm going to have two drinks and come home because that's what normal people do so at 10 p.m i sat down in a bar with some friends and i had two drinks the plan was to be home by midnight at eight o'clock in the morning i had had 15 drinks i was having sex with some israeli woman i just met there were

30 people in my apartment some of whom watching me have sex, there was drugs everywhere. So that was my best attempt at moderate drinking. Yeah. Well, who's interested in two drinks anyway? That's normal. Civilians. Yeah. I can't, I don't understand. I'd rather have none, you know, none or all. Well, that's, I remember after I got sober, I was talking, I was out to dinner with some friends of mine. And I said, one thing that kind of proved to me what an alcoholic I am. None of them were finishing their drinks, and I was offended by this. And I said to a friend of mine, I said,

you're not an alcoholic, why aren't you drinking more? Right. And I said, if I wasn't an alcoholic, I would be drunk every day of my life. Of course, exactly. And I stopped, I was like, oh, that's not the thing that... Normal people don't think that. I can remember watching a television show at age 19 or 20, some stupid whatever. It doesn't even matter what it was, The Love Boat, whatever it was.

And there's like a mini bar behind the characters when they're playing out whatever scene that they're playing out. And I just couldn't understand why they didn't just stop what they were doing and just start getting drunk in the middle of the scene. Sort of to that end, it's funny. The only fist fight I've ever been in was at a bar on the Lower East Side because a man wouldn't get out of my way because I wanted to order a drink. You just don't get in between you and the drink.

It was like a mama bear and her cub. And something feral snapped in me. Yeah. And I was like, I needed that drink and how dare he stand in the way. But you had to do your rounds before you were ready to actually kind of surrender to the 12 step ideology and philosophy, right?

Like you're trying to do it your way a million times. You have to be done that's the thing and like you can't really make the effort to do the work until you're done you know and you i'm sure we and anyone who's listening to this who's been through this process like when you're done you know you're done like it's just something happens you're done, you know you're done. Like it's just something happens and you're like, okay, I'm done. And like I have that experience. I go to meetings and people come in who've had bad experiences drinking or using, but they're not done. Like you can just tell that they're not quite done.

But that sense of being done has to be coupled with a willingness to do some work around it. Because you could say like, I know people that say they're done, but then they think that that just means that they're done and they don't have to do anything anymore and they're never gonna drink again. And that's just a ticking time bomb. There's a reason why only the first step mentions drinking, you know? And I would say, and I feel bad,

like we're talking so much about sobriety. It's okay, we're gonna get into the vegan thing in a minute. Okay, but. Usually I have to, like, it's just, I have a vegan person or I have a sobriety person. You know? You're the whole package, man. I'm the double winner. Yeah.

So, I remember early days of real sobriety for me. Some old timer on the Bowery told me that AA was not about sobriety. It was about spirituality. And I thought that was the single dumbest thing anyone, I was like, that's a cliche, that's nonsense. I was like, you're wrong. A few years later, I couldn't agree with him more. Like getting sober, eh, it's important,

but the spiritual side of it, that's the purpose. And it's supported by the literature, it's supported by everything in the big. And it's supported by the literature, it's supported by everything in the big book. It's about clearing the record so you can have a spiritual life. And that spiritual life of honesty, compassion, non-judgmental service. At least this is my perspective. And this is what sustains me. If I didn't have my weird cobbled together spiritual life, I don't know why I'd stay sober. I don't know why I would be doing the things I'm doing.

You know, like it's the opposite of nihilism, I think. Yeah, well, it gives you an anchor and a sense of purpose. I think, you know, people get freaked out by that initially when they come in, it takes, there's an acclimation period to that, I think. I certainly have. And the language is certainly, everything's God is certainly everything's god god god god god and so you assume it's so weird and colloquial and like outdated like the language of the book is bizarro it's adorable in a way like when you know like i especially like when they because it was written

in the 30s and they have lines like maybe someday humans will get to the moon yeah you know maybe some days scientists will understand how atoms work. I was like, I just want to do a read. I mean, it's an adorable artifact in those ways. Or when they use hipster lingo. Yeah. From 1938. Yeah, I know.

It's so hilarious when they do that. But it's still like that spiritual core of it, of non-proprietary, non-dogmatic, non-judgmental, compassionate spirituality. Which to me, that's the core of every 12-step program. And it should ideally be the core of our lives, regardless of whether someone's an addict or not. And it's been, you know, eight years, seven, eight years? Seven and a half years, yeah. And you're still plugged in and rocking it.

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, time passes and I go to, I love AA and I love the meetings, but it's the spirituality that sustains me. And so, I find that spirituality in many things that are not AA related. Right. Of course. Whether it's reading other books or praying or meditating or what have you.

Like certain things that... So AA is the cornerstone of my entire spiritual life. But going to meetings where people either complain about how much their rent is or that they just broke up with their girlfriend or that they wish they could go back out. Non-solution oriented. Yeah, I'm happy to show up for that. But that can't sustain me spiritually, at least not at this point. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. So let's get into the vegan thing.

Okay. So that starts early for you. 1987. Mm-hmm. So almost 30 years ago. And what happens? Like you just have sort of an inbred kind of genetic predisposition to not be into meat or be extra sensitive? It's pre-Morrissey, right?

I grew up loving my American diet. Like when I was 15 years old, I ridiculed the vegetarians at my high school. I loved McDonald's. I loved Burger King. I loved Steakums. I loved pepperoni pizza. Steakums, I haven't heard that in a long time.

Like I loved the American diet so much like and i thought everything about it was just perfect like chocolate ice cream like yellow american cheese yellow american cheese like i thought that fluff yeah fluff was the one fluff was the one thing that even like fluff and mayonnaise because they didn't seem like foodstuffs to me like i liked them but like they they were so far from food that i couldn't fully embrace them even when i loved twinkies and bacon okay you know like i remember eating sitting down with like a can of like duncan heinz frosting and eating the entire thing. Right. And wondering, why don't people do this every day? Because it's so great.

And so I wholesale fully embraced the American diet, 100%. And I didn't know why anyone wouldn't. And my mom, who was like an erstwhile hippie, would occasionally try to feed me brown rice or tofu. And I thought it was child abuse like i just couldn't understand why when there was a world of like meatloaf and pizza why she would try to feed me vegetables you know i have more vegetables you weren't a candidate like you weren't a candidate for this movement at all not in the slightest no i i remember we had one vegan

in my high school and she refused to play softball because the gloves were made out of leather. And I just thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. But I also loved animals. So I was a quintessential American in that way of like, I loved animals and I loved eating animals. And then when I was 19 years old, I was petting Tucker, a cat that I had rescued from the dump, who I loved. And I was petting Tucker. And all of a sudden, I saw that, like, Tucker had two eyes and a central nervous system and fur and a profound, rich, emotional life. You know, Tucker loved doing things.

Tucker loved people tucker loved being outside like tucker was a fully formed life form who just had his own rights and his own will and it suddenly dawned on me oh if i love tucker the cat and his two eyes and his central nervous system and his rich emotional life i was like that means all creatures with two eyes and a central nervous system have rich emotional lives, are deserving of having their own lives and are deserving of my love and care and protection. And so basically at that moment, that was my conversion. It was really like one moment

where the lights went on like that and that was it? It was like going to the chiropractor and getting adjusted. And like suddenly I felt aligned. like that and that was it it was like going to the chiropractor and getting adjusted and like suddenly i was i felt aligned meaning up until that point i had been okay loving animals and eating animals and at that moment i suddenly realized no imposing human will on an animal is wrong like it's just simply like as wrong as anything can be and of course it took me a couple years to figure out what to do with this new right is this like 1979 1980 or something like that or this was like 84 okay it's 1984 and then i had like a year of being vegetarian at first i had a year of giving up red meat and chicken and only eating fish.

And then I had a year of just being like a milk and eggs vegetarian. And then in Thanksgiving 1987, I finally became a vegan. And you were living in, well, you were in New York at that time. In Connecticut at that time. Oh, in Connecticut at that time. Yeah, I was still about a year away from moving to New York. Yeah, I was trying to think like what was going on in New York. Like, wasn't it Angelica open?

Angelica. Angelica was on St. Mark's Place. Right. And that was the first vegan restaurant I ever went to. Right, right, right. And that's how John, you know, John and the Bad Brains, I think like those guys worked in the kitchen or washing dishes or something like that back in the day. But that was like the one place, right? There was that.

There was Dojo. I mean, there are lots of vegetarian restaurants. Angelica's possibly was one of like five vegan restaurants on the entire planet. Certainly was the best and the gold standard. And of course, given the way New York is changing, I don't know if it's gonna be around much longer, which is a shame because it's still,

every time I'm in New York, I eat there as often as I can. Yeah, I do too. I do too. I always take the early flight from LA so I can get to New York in time for dinner and I'll check into my hotel and go straight to Angelica like every time.

Do you know they now take credit cards? I do know that, yes. This is a big deal because they have that ATM machine in the lobby. You always make sure you have cash. Yeah, I think they had a, there was some kind of dispute with the landlord, but I think they resolved some of it. I don't know.

I think it might be moving forward okay right now. I hope that, I mean, it's been around for 40 years. Right. I hope that it has another good 40 years left in it. Me too. So, when did you become this activist? When did you start getting vocal about these ideas? Well, there was a health food store near where I was living in Connecticut.

And I would go in there and ask them essentially how to be a vegan. This was 87, 88. And I would buy my organic carrots. I was also, as I said, making $4,000 a year. So I had to be a very frugal vegan. And so I would make brown rice and i started sprouting my own beans i started making my own bread because it was like i was living on ten dollars a week in terms of food which you can quite easily like carrots onions brown rice black

beans lentils real easy to be like a super broke vegan as I was. And one day I was in this health food store and a woman behind the counter told me about a diet for a new America by John Robbins. And so I bought it and I took it home and I pretty much read it in one sitting. And when I finished, I was like, that's it. I'm an activist, like i'm done this is my life you know it just clicked in like this was the this was the thing that you could connect with

that and then reading like pita magazines and every time you'd go to the health food store there'd be like a different flyer about something and so i basically got indoctrinated via John Robbins and a health food store. Interesting. And so even though you had these sort of periods of sobriety and then you'd go out or whatever, like you never wavered on the vegan thing. I had yogurt in 1992 once. That's my, from 87 until now.

Oh no, I accidentally, I went to a restaurant in Portland about eight years ago, and the chef was making me a vegan meal. And as I took a bite of sushi, he ran out across the, he said, no, that's not vegan. So I did have one bite of crab sushi, which to be fair, was not nearly as good as the vegan sushi. And I had a couple of bites of yogurt in 92. So as far as I know, that's my animal product intake in the last 28 years. A lot of people ask me, how do you make the switch? And how do you kind of weather the cravings and all of that kind of thing?

Because I made that switch later. But I find that the principles of recovery are highly applicable because it's sort of like it removes the decision fatigue in the sense that you're either drinking or you're not, right? You're either sober or you're not sober. There's no gray area there. So in a dietary sense to say you're either eating animal products or you're not, it's kind of pretty basic and simple. That's the one rule that you don't break. And also, I mean, I'm really going to sound like an old person now but like i want to say like

kids these days the you know like being a vegan in 1987 your options almost didn't exist right you know your options were carrots soy milk did exist tofu and tempeh existed but like nothing else there was no vegan ice cream there was there were no vegan donuts there's like kidding yeah the three vegan restaurants natural food market was like just a weird warehouse with some bins in it yeah you know that and it looked frightening and the people in there did not look healthy that was prana on first avenue I used to go to all the time. And I was like, are these people look unhealthy because they're eating this food? Or are they in here because they need this food to get healthy?

It was never clear. And now, I mean, the fact that you can go online and you have countless vegan resources. And there's so many great vegan organizations. And there's countless vegan restaurants. And the former president of the United States is primarily vegan. Some of the biggest pop stars on the planet are vegan. Back in 87, vegan was so obscure that no one knew how to pronounce it. Vegan.

Vegan. Vegan. Because it was like vegetable, vegetarian. I remember having a serious debate with a friend of mine in Angelica's about whether it was vegan or vegin and I thought it had to be vegin because there was vegetation, vegetable, vegetarian

like it should be vegin you were arguing for vegin but enough people corrected me and said no it's vegan so now transitioning to veganism there's nothing in the non-vegan world that doesn't exist in the vegan world at least as good as it does in the non-vegan you're like

like vegan cheese now it's great it's crazy yeah and i think it's a perfect time to segue into you know the new the new restaurant little pine and you and you've done an amazing job. It's a beautiful place, man. And I feel like it's the perfect intersection of, how do I say this? I don't know how to articulate it. Like it's not too casual, but it's not too fancy either. Like it's not overly precious in its food preparation,

but it's not like fast to go either. You know, it's surprising in the sense that, okay, you have an expectation, you go to a vegan restaurant, what are you going to get? And then you're kind of mixing it up with some pretty interesting things like the stuffed shells and things like that, that you don't typically see in a vegan restaurant. You know, they're not going to emphasize something that is kind of something that's going to require a ricotta flavor or a cheese flavor and my i surmise that this is because you you know filled the kitchen with like real chefs that know what they're doing that's a large part of it i mean part of it is the ethos of i don't at this point in my life i don't, at this point in my life, I don't have any entrepreneurial goals.

Like, I don't, you know, I live a relatively simple life. All I want to do is activism and music and healthy stuff. So the restaurant, you know, the profits that it does generate 100% goes to animal welfare. So that way I can never make a penny from it. And that means that my thinking around it is not, like when I'm wondering about the design or the menu or the whatever, I'm not thinking how it can increase my bottom line. I'm thinking about how can it in a sustainable way advance the cause

of veganism and my goal with the restaurant is i want it to remind people who might be non-vegan or whatever that veganism is very viable i want it to look like the sort like especially it's in silver lake so i sort of want it to look like the sort of like, especially it's in Silver Lake. So I sort of want it to look like something like look like the people's homes in Silver Lake. I want our art and the books we sell to be things that would be in people's homes. Because my hope is like we live in LA and there are so many progressive people here. There are people who drive Priuses and they voted for Obama. They have a Bernie Sanders sticker on the back of their car. They listen to NPR and they still go to In-N-Out Burger. It's like it's the one thing that's missing.

It's this really weird blind spot where that dissonance is allowed to live and thrive. Yeah. And so I'm hoping that maybe people have enough experiences. Like maybe they go to Little Pine. They go to Crossroads. They go somewhere else. They go to the farmer's market, they see cowspiracy, and they realize that to be a thoughtful progressive, your thoughtfulness and your progressive ethos has to apply to food and

animal welfare. Like, that's kind of my hope with it. Well, I think you're succeeding in that regard. And, you know, there is so much kind of, you know, cultural interest in this movement that makes it very exciting, you know, that didn't even exist a couple of years ago. And I think it's exacerbated by, you know, this increasingly intense conversation that we're having around global climate change. And I know that you've been pretty outspoken on these issues, specifically, you know, the water use issue, which, you know, in California is something that we all need to be really mindful of. So, break that down a little bit, because it was interesting. I was talking at Wanderlust. The other day I was giving a talk on meditation. Oh, that was the one.

I was just there like for a book signing like the night before, I think. And you were doing it with Charlie Knowles? I think so, yeah. And Light Watkins, was he there too? Charlie though. A bunch of other people. And so I talked about my approach to meditation. And someone asked me why I was an animal rights activist.

And I said, without thinking, I said, okay, because it's like, it's the magic bullet that fixes everything. You know, like if animals weren't used for agriculture, famine would disappear. Rainforest deforestation decreases by 90 ocean acidification decreases by 25 water use decreases by 40 cancer heart disease diabetes etc obesity all are reduced by at least 60 um zoonotic disease disappears etc etc etc. So specifically, it's the magic bullet that just fixes all of these issues. So whenever someone talks about rainforest deforestation, I'm like, well, that's animal agriculture. Someone talks about heart disease, I'm like, that's animal agriculture.

Someone talks about Ebola, that's animal agriculture. It's eating animals, using animals for food. The California, but the thing that drives me crazy, or climate change, 40% of climate change is directly attributable to animal agriculture so cop 21 in paris not mentioned once animal agriculture even the bbc mainstream bbc wrote an article saying why are they not mentioning animal agriculture because it's 40 of climate change but here in california um i believe and it's the the figures are a little iffy but like something like let's say 50 i think it's 75 of

california's water goes to agriculture 40 of that goes to animal agriculture or to the feed that goes to animals. The water, the 40% of water that's used for animal agriculture supports agriculture that contributes roughly 0.5% to California's GDP. So 40% of our water that's paid for by all of us contributes 0.5% of our GDP. Yeah, that's insane from like an economic point of view. It's completely insane. And I asked the governor and his representative, I don't want to name because I don't want to get people in trouble. I asked them about this and their response made me want to start hitting people. They said, oh, well, farmers have suffered enough.

And I was like, really? So you're lumping a huge cattle ranch with 10,000 heads of cattle in the same category as people who are growing organic broccoli? Yeah, it's a colossal, you know, non-answer answer followed by something. Didn't he say something like, well, we're all in this together? Yeah. Which is like, what does that mean? That means you're saying nothing. Yeah.

You know what? And it's so infuriating and i don't know like it's the thing with animal agriculture there's one simple solution that would fix everything which is ending subsidies to animal agriculture if if every government on the planet tomorrow ended all animal agriculture subsidies, we would simply, as a people, stop eating meat and dairy. Because... It'd be too expensive. So expensive.

I mean, a pound of beef without subsidies would be about $30. Maybe more. You know, a family of four going to McDonald's without subsidies, $75. It would just, it would set the balance where the balance is appropriate to set, which is that, you know, meat and dairy products are sort of things that are not meant to predominate your plate at every meal. They're meant to be sort of special or what have you. And if economics were allowed to do what they're supposed to do unchecked and unregulated that's how it would balance out and it's where unfortunately

the true hypocrisy of like republicans and the tea party comes to the fore i mean of course they're hypocritical and everything but especially regarding animal agriculture like the republicans and the tea party should be our allies on this because they want small government and an end to subsidies. If you mention this to them, they take it off the table. Right. They're like, they'll take this off the table and they take defense spending off the table. Simply because these are things that exist in their constituencies. Right.

It's a pick and choose when it comes to regulating in that regard. And that's the breadbasket of America. and they're not going to alienate that population but it's and i know that i'm stating the obvious but it's just it's it's so mind-boggling that like we are subsidizing animal agriculture and in the process destroying our climate destroying the rainforests and destroying us you know not to mention the fact that we're killing trillions of animals but we're killing us like it's like it's so like future generations are going to look back and just ask like what were you guys doing exactly the analogy i always use is if like an alien came to the planet and said take me to the person who can tell me how you make your food you know and

you showed them they would be like what is wrong with you and then next they would say take me to the person who can tell me how you make your food yeah and you showed them they would be like what is wrong with you and then next they would say take me to the person who makes your energy they're like well what we do is we go three miles below the surface of the ocean and we dig up this black toxic stuff and ship it all around the world and the alien would say but you do know every day in the form of sun and wind your planet generates and receives more energy than has ever been used by humans and it's free. No, we're going to keep digging three miles under the surface of the ocean because that just makes more sense to us. Or like the alien would

say, oh, all that grain you have, why not just feed that to people? Right. Come on, Moby. Because it's better for them. It's better for the environment. It's better for the animals. You come on, Moby. Because it's better for them. It's better for the environment. It's better for the animals. Like, you end famine, people live longer, people are healthier, people avoid disease. Like, it's so utterly mind-boggling.

Because, like, past generations, they didn't know better. You know? Like, in the 30s, people smoked and they drank and they drove without seatbelts because they didn't really know that much better. But now, we know everything and we still do the stupid things. So, what is the block? You know what I mean? Like, why can't we? I mean, we're having this conversation and this conversation is coming up. Like, I feel like this is a conversation that didn't even exist two or three years ago. And a lot of people are having this conversation. That's progress. That doesn't mean that it's translated into regulatory changes as of yet,

but I feel that it's inevitable at some point. Like, is it headed in the right direction? How can we be doing a better job? I think it's like sobriety or someone who quits smoking. You hope that they figure it out before they die. You know, you hope someone gets sober before drinking kills them. You hope the cigarette smoker quits smoking before they get emphysema and lung cancer. As a species, we hope that we figure it out and make these changes before the consequences destroy us. Unfortunately, at this point, I don't know. Like, we as a species are so naive and, like, kind of cluelessly hopeful,

we always assume things are going to work out. There's just a chance they're not. There's a chance that 50 years from now— We'll innovate our way out of it somehow. Yeah. But when we have these, you know, regulatory systems in place that are so difficult to, you know, upend, it makes it almost impossible i mean i think it has to take smart committed clever strategic leadership and i think we have to be that like literally like you me and anyone who's listening, you're like, because politicians, all they care about is keeping the lights on tomorrow.

You know, and the whole thing is short-term thinking. It's incredibly short-sighted. And when you, you know, you poll these people and, you know, 40% of them are climate change deniers, they're not really. You know, they're just, they're pandering to a constituency. I mean, I remember at one point, like, Sarah Palin was giving a speech. It's like, what, like, 60 years ago. And she was talking about her patriotic values. And I remember laughing.

She was saying, like, you know, like, a strong military and, you know, a strong energy sector. I was like, why wasn't this funny that your patriotic values dovetail perfectly with the people who are giving you money you know and like the sad thing is they the oil companies and the defense industry and big animal agriculture have turned their self-interested corporate strategy into patriotism for dumb people right which on some level is a stroke of genius oh it is brilliance i mean that whole idea it's not good but it's brilliant and and i almost can't like i can fault them for doing that but they're like big agriculture big energy defense companies like they're just being self-interested where why haven't the democrats stood up you know why, why hasn't Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders or anyone stood up and said, oh, how is sending American money to Venezuela or Saudi Arabia? Like, how is that patriotic?

How is funding agriculture that causes childhood obesity, causes heart disease, causes cancer, causes diabetes? Like, how is this patriotic? These things are not patriotic. And so, it's like the opposition has been asleep at the switch. And I feel like that's where we can't wait for the existing leaders to lead. No, it truly has to be a grassroots movement. It's not going to happen from the top down. It's going to happen from the top down. It's gonna happen from the bottom up.

And one of the things I say all the time is that we feel so disenfranchised, like our vote doesn't count and who cares about me and you're just the little idiot, who cares what you have to say. But the truth is what you put on your plate, what you choose to buy, what you choose to eat are incredibly political acts and they do have meaning and they have great significance. You know, every time that you swap the animal products off your plate, you know, save something like, you know, a thousand

square feet of rainforest and animals life, like a tremendous amount of water, a certain, you know, percentage of CO2 emissions. Like I don't, I can't recount the stats off the top of my head, but they're significant. And that's just one meal. This is something that you can do. And I think that if you really own that and you understand what's at stake here, and you can step out of your myopic worldview and see that there's a greater play going on right now, it's incumbent upon you to act on that and to use your voice. Well, one thing I really want to do, because I completely agree,

is figuring, I want to write, whether it's a website, whether it's a book, on effective animal activism. Because I think one problem that we have in our movement right now is we do a lot of wheel spinning. You know, like we spend money rescuing a few animals rather than working on the bigger problems. You know, we fight amongst ourselves. We criticize Beyonce because she's only a part-time vegan. Like, I think we need...

Yeah, we argue about like tiny, the minutiae. Yeah, which can be fun, but we have a serious task at hand, which is to change the world and change the way people eat. And we don't have many resources. We're not rich. There aren't that many of us, but we're right. And for us to be serious activists, we need to stop spending money that isn't accomplishing

anything accomplishing anything we need to stop wasting time that isn't accomplishing anything you know so i kind of want to just sort of like look at the things that we as a movement are doing and apply actual like rational effectiveness criteria to it so what would be an example of that um an example of that it's really hard because it's some stuff that people love cat rescues i love cats but spending a lot of money to save some cats who are then going to be fed food made from other dead animals, might not be the best use of our resources. You can still love cats, but saving billions of farm animals has to take priority over saving 10 cats.

Especially when those cats are going to go on to kill countless other animals and eat countless other animals. There just has to be empirically supported rational criteria applied to what we do. It takes all voices though. Oh yeah. You need the angry vegan

and you need the palatable vegan and all of those people have their role in their place in this grand play. I'm just thinking in terms of like charitable giving. Like I have friends who give like a couple of thousand dollars a year. And like, I personally think it should go towards the people who are involved

in media and legislation, you know? And like, it means that some of the people who are doing wonderful things probably shouldn't be as funded as they currently are. Yeah, it's interesting. Well, I can't let you go without talking a little bit about the new book, Porcelain, which I didn't even realize until the other day. It's coming out soon, right? In May? Yeah. I wish I could have gotten an advanced copy of it. I don't have a

copy of it. You haven't gotten galleys yet? No. I mean, I've gone through the galleys, but I gave them away. Oh, you did? Uh-huh. Well, this is exciting because there's a lot of, like, incredibly positive press about this. I just read a piece, I think it was in The Guardian, like, just lauding you with all kinds of crazy praise. And you have, like, these amazing blurbs from everybody from Salman Rushdie to Dave Eggers. I mean, that is, like, you know, the literary elite. That's pretty cool. Yeah. is like you know the literary elite that's pretty cool yeah i mean this might sound like sober spiritual aa southern california cliche i certainly am happy that thus far people have responded well

to it but i really enjoyed making it i really enjoyed talking about it. I hope that somehow I can be of service through it. Like, I don't need more attention. I've had enough attention in my life for like, I don't, I don't want, like, there's so much more that can be accomplished with creative stuff, you know, like, A, I should, you should love making it. And B, when it goes out into the world, how can it somehow be of service? How can it maybe help someone? And sometimes we don't know. You put out a record, it's like, I don't know how that's going to help someone, but maybe it does. So, if the book does well, I just hope that it can somehow be of service in accordance with divine principles.

Right. And is it like a sort of a sober addiction memoir? I mean, it's a very specific point in your life, right? Like, it ends before play comes out. Yeah. So, it's just that section of your experience. Basically, the first half of it, I'm sober and Christian and teaching Bible study and in the rave scene and and broke and super odd you know like playing at sex parties but teaching bible study during the day

um and then halfway through the book i start drinking again and i go to this other extreme of constant drunkenness uh dating tons of strippers, all that. And then the book ends, as I think I might've mentioned earlier, like when the book ends, my mom is dead. I've lost my record deal. I'm constantly hung over and drunk. I'm bottomed out in every way.

And I released the album play. And that's the end of the book. Right, when you think all is lost. All was completely lost, yeah. That's so crazy um but we'll see what happened like it was really fun to write and if it that so that old that question we always either ask or get asked it's like what is success and i think success is mmm it's complicated you know like in the ye olden days someone would make a book or a movie or a record and the success was only determined by like how much money

it brought in mm-hmm I think now success has to be determined like how much integrity did you have around making it how much did you enjoy it really fulfilled and making it did it come what was your intention and did you have around making it? How much did you enjoy making it? Were you creatively fulfilled in making it? What was your intention and did you stay true to that? Yeah. Is it honest? Is it going to reach people? Is it going to help someone who experiences it? Have you created a voice of honesty in a disingenuous world?

And then if some money gets generated, that's fine. if some money gets generated, that's fine. But like that should largely be sort of like a byproduct of all these other things that are done honestly with integrity. Or so I think. It has to be that way now anyway, though, because the economics don't, I mean, you know, the days of putting out a record and it sells 10 million copies is like winning the lottery.

Yeah, unless you're Adele, that doesn't happen. It's this weird time where you've removed all the gatekeepers, and now anybody can, not anybody, but most people can get access to at least some level of the equipment required to create music. There's no distribution barrier. You can upload it to SoundCloud, and you're in charge of cultivating your own audience.

The empowerment that comes along with that is extraordinary, but it also completely changes the economics of the entire thing. But I feel like, has that shifted your approach to making music? Because I feel like you came from a pretty pure place with play, and it's the same now. There's a difference in expectation, perhaps. It's funny. I came from a place of making music just for the love of making music.

It got corrupted for a while when I started selling a lot of records. And now I've, for many reasons, had to go back to a place of purity, largely because you can't be a 50-year-old musician making your 15th record in 2016 and expect anyone to buy it. Right. So, like, when I'm working on the music I'm working on now, like, I love doing it. I hope it goes out into the world and people like it. And if someone buys it, that's just, like, a super rare happy byproduct of the process.

But I don't expect it. byproduct of the process but i don't expect it but how do you feel when you when you're driving down la cienega and you see these crazy huge billboards for the las vegas casinos with the picture of the latest dj you know playing at this pool party or that i mean this ascension of edm and like this culture that has that has like blown up around it is fascinating i'm simply happy it's not me because i've Because I've done that. I've played Las Vegas. The eight hour pool party. I've done it and I don't enjoy it.

So like when I see the guys who are doing that, I'm like, you know what? More power to you. Like if, imagine you're like a 24 year old Swedish guy. You have a couple of hit EDM tracks. You find yourself in Las Vegas drinking and doing drugs and sleeping with random people and whatever like for them god bless I'm just glad it's not me right unless someone builds a time machine

and we can go back and be 24 years old and doing that yeah yeah so walk me through you know your perspective on you know reflecting back on this path of you know making a lot of money and being famous and you know living in fantastic houses and all you know making a lot of money and being famous and you know living in fantastic houses and all these sorts of things that you've experienced that everybody aspires to we walk around intellectually we know like money doesn't make you happy fame doesn't make you it's more headache than it's worth blah blah blah whatever but then we're addicted to tmz culture and we still believe that this is going to be the answer this is going to be the thing that is going to

make us happy. Even though there's no evidence for it. If wealth and fame made people happy, Donald Trump would be one of the happiest people on the planet. And there would be no divorce lawyers in Beverly Hills.

These hills around Los Angeles would be teeming with the happiest people on the planet. And then sometimes, there are a lot of people who love going hiking, who love hanging out with their dogs, and they're probably pretty happy. The one thing I have found, and it's true,

but it's also a good Southern California cliche, is no matter what you do or where you go, your brain goes with you. And the space that your brain sits in never changes. So if you're Puff Daddy in a 40,000 square foot house or some struggling 50-year-old screenwriter in North Hollywood in a studio apartment, their brain isn't exactly the same sized house.

And the brain is everything. And all it does is respond to information that's fed to it by our flesh bags. You know, everything is the brain. And every decision we make, we try to control the world thinking like that's where reality and truth are. Everything's the brain, you know, understand the brain, heal the brain you know understand the brain heal the brain look after the brain talk to the brain when it's wrong and that's where i think like think real change happens you know because like the brain is the most complicated sophisticated thing the universe has ever made but sometimes it still thinks a stick is a snake you know like it's it's yeah the reptilian instinct takes over like it can

do a billion things flawlessly at the same time and still want to punch some guy who takes your parking space at gelson's you know like it's just like that it's so dumb and so remarkably sophisticated but like it all like and everyone thinks that's what I was saying earlier, I'm so glad that I've gone through the socioeconomic fame ringer. Because I know, okay, I'll tell you, this is the best way to sum up our fame, wealth-obsessed world. I went to a birthday dinner in New York about six years ago for a real estate developer, one of Donald Trump's friends. And Michael Bloomberg was there. Trump was there. Steve Schwartzman was there.

All like the billionaire's elite were there. I got invited because my date brought me. My date was this attractive lady and she got invited and so she brought me. And the man whose birth date was, whose name I don't remember rented hammerstein ballroom and had earth wind and fire playing right and had like 500 of his closest friends there fully catered tons of entertainment everything you know like and at one point earth wind and fire were playing and i looked at donald trump and i looked at michael bloomberg and i looked at all the billionaires and they were dancing but with no they weren't smiling no one was laughing no one was happy i looked over at the kitchen staff and they were smiling and laughing and dancing and

having the best possible time and i was like that in a nutshell like if you can dance with your friends you're probably way happier than people who aren't dancing with their friends and like there's nothing wells can do good things it can make you comfortable it can enable you to be like to sleep in a clean quiet bedroom you can take your friends out to dinner you can occasionally like go to the movies and not worry about it but like beyond that you know and then it can help you like pay for health care and certain things but beyond that there's nothing magical about it in fact it's the exact opposite like it pretends to be magic when it isn't you know so people spend their whole lives pursuing the magic of wealth and fame and then when they get it they're miserable

so it's like way better just put your energy and elsewhere right like even more angry because then they feel like they've been cheated on this promise yeah either angry or feeling inadequate like a friend of mine coined the term affluenza you know like people heard that yeah they get they like get to a certain point they have a lot of money they have a lot of fame and they're miserable and so they either then most likely what they figure out is that they're doing it wrong so like if they have a four-bedroom apartment in new york they think if they have a six-bedroom apartment yeah well it goes back to just chasing the dragon yeah it's like there's always somebody above you and you know donald trump's pissed off

because there's somebody above him and you know that you just play that out to your deathbed and i sometimes think like how would like having 10 million, $1 million, or $100,000 make your experience in the shower better? How would it make eating a piece of toast with organic peanut butter and apple butter better? How is it going to make sitting in the sun reading your favorite book better? How is it going to make holding hands with someone you love better? These are things that, how does it make hiking better you know the the retort to that of course would be well that's easy for you to say because you you know because you have all these things but it's easy for me to say because i've experienced everything you know and like and when you

whenever you i'm sure you've maybe you've experienced this in people you've talked to or your own life but But like interview Keith Richards. I guarantee you ask him when he was happiest. He'll say when he was probably 19. Right. Before any success. You know. It's always that way.

Yeah. It's the, you know, the tech entrepreneur remembering back to when they were in the garage. And so it's just, I mean, the stuff that really delivers happiness is available to almost everybody. And most of it is not, it's either free or not very expensive. And it's the meaning that we bring to it. You know, like an organic orange eaten in Griffith Park is probably going to be better than an organic orange eaten poolside at P. Diddy's 40,000 square foot house. Depending upon who you are. Yeah.

I mean, some people won't believe this, but I'm just saying this. This is 100% my experience, and it breaks my heart to see so many people still very actively pursuing things that ultimately won't bring them happiness. And in the process, screwing up relationships, screwing up their health, et cetera. It's like, find the things that you love right now and focus on that.

And how do you translate that into your daily practice? Like, what is a day in the life? Oh, just being in love with as many things as I can see. Like, the way, one of the reasons I live where I live is because I like looking at trees right you're literally like there's trails right across the street from you you can go hiking right out your front door so if i look out my window and i see sunlight coming through green leaves that makes me happy being in a 10 000 square foot house wouldn't make that any better. In my life right now, for what it's worth,

the things that truly make me happy can't be improved on by status or wealth. And you're a guy who appreciates design. I think aesthetics are important to you, right? You've lived in some pretty cool homes and you have the eye that I can see just around in the room that we're in right now. Those things are not irrelevant, but there's ways of doing them and bringing them into your life that don't have to be over the top. And none of these, I don't have anything that's expensive. I don't, when you, the moment you have something expensive, you have to worry about it. But what was it like, like you moved into this giant castle in the Hollywood Hills, right? And you lived there for a while. Like, was there like five minutes of like, yeah, man, this is awesome?

Or did that like feeling fade? Or what was that like? Like, there was a lot of press written about that house and that purchase. It was okay. Yeah. It was a really. It was a baller house. It was a remarkable house.

But like, you know, 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I was sitting at my kitchen table on my laptop. And at that exact moment, everybody else was sitting at their kitchen table at their laptop. I was sitting at a kitchen table in a castle overlooking all of Los Angeles. It didn't really affect my experience of checking Facebook, you know. Then I made oatmeal. It certainly didn't change the way the oatmeal cooked or tasted or where I bought it. The day-to-day stuff, the quotidian minutia that fills our lives

is largely unaffected. Certainly, it's affected by extreme poverty. But for most people, it's just like they have the exact same stuff in their lives. In the olden days, this is also I think it's really odd, in the ye olden days, what wealth gave you access to was very different than poverty, meaning 500 years ago, wealth meant you didn't freeze to death. Wealth meant that you actually had food. Wealth meant that you had clothes.

Now, the paradox, the irony is the wealthier someone is, the more likely they are to be thin. The poorer someone is, the more likely they are to consume too many calories right you know the wealthier someone is the more likely they are to sweat and burn calories the poorer someone is the more likely i'm just saying this is all demographic the more likely they are to sit more these are this is weird consequences of wealth and poverty. So, yeah. A lot of that goes back to the subsidies that we talked about before, right? So, unfortunately, I have to get going.

Yeah, I know. We got to wrap this up here anyway. But when you, I guess you can say air, when you publish. Yeah, it's airing it, publishing it. Yeah. Posting it. When you satellite these.

Yeah. I'm assuming you edit them? Not usually. I'll just put it up. Unless, like if you were to say to me, you know what, I said something I wish I didn't say or I didn't say it correctly. If you could just edit out the parts where I'm talking. Yeah, I'll do that. No, that was great.

You've been very generous with your time and uh you are a true artist and you are an inspiration and i appreciate uh i appreciate you taking the time thanks very cool to uh get to know you a little bit and as we were saying earlier the leaders have to come from somewhere i hope it's the people who are listening yeah you know like it is like somewhere like gandhi at one point gandhi was like a really mediocre lawyer living in africa and he was on track to remain a mediocre lawyer living in africa but something compelled him to become gandhi martin luther king was just a regular old preacher you know like the leadership has to come from somewhere it has to be be us. We can't wait for some magical cornucopia to give birth to magic leaders. It's like, it has to be now. It has to be us. Yeah. There's no white horse riding in to save the day.

No. We are the white horse. Yeah. So, be your own white horse, right? Just don't do it. All right. Thanks, man. My pleasure. Thank you. Peace.

Lights. just don't do it all right thanks man my pleasure thank you peace all right that was a really cool experience i just love that he He's really funny. He's insightful. He's sensitive. He was present. And his story is not only touching, I just think it's really powerful. And I hope you guys enjoyed it and got as much out of that experience as I did. Again, make a point of checking out his new book, Porcelain. It comes out May 17th, but you can pre-order it now. Don't forget to check out the show notes at richroll.com. I got tons of links this week following up on everything that we talked about

to take your edification and your infotainment to the next level. If you haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, please make a point of doing that, youtube.com forward slash richroll. I've thrown up four vlogs already, which are these kind of fun, creative peaks behind the scenes at how I live my life on a daily basis with a little insight that I share with you guys. They've been really challenging but also creatively gratifying to put together. It takes a lot of my time, but I'm enjoying it. I'm trying to reach some level of consistency with the video output that I'm doing. And so I'd appreciate it if you check it out. Let me know what you think on YouTube.

What else can I tell you? Oh, let's thank the people that helped put this show together today, shall we? Jason Camiolo doing an amazing job with audio engineering and production. Thank you, Jason. Sean Patterson, who does all the graphics for the episode. Chris Swan for production assistance. He puts together and compiles, helps compile the show notes and theme music, of course, by Annalema. Thank you for all the support, you guys. I love you guys as the audience.

It means so much to me. And my final thought for today is if you are committed to a path, if you feel strongly about your creative instincts, your aesthetic, as it were, but it doesn't seem like you're getting any traction, I think Moby's story is a really powerful example of what can happen when you stay the course, when you continue to hone your craft and remain true to your voice. And like I said in my most recent YouTube video, my fourth vlog, 004, the writers that make it are the ones who don't give up. They're also the ones who don't get caught up in the results. They don't wait around to see if their script sells or their book gets, you know, whatever, how many copies are sold. They just start writing the next thing.

And I think that's true of whatever you're involved in, whatever your pursuit is, it doesn't have to be as writing. I think writing just, that's a good example, a powerful example. have to be as writing. I think writing just, that's a good example, a powerful example. So if this resonates with you, if you find yourself connecting with kind of where you are right now through this story, then stay the path. Double down on the quality and the output of your work, but stay out of the results. Keep moving forward. And most of all, cultivate that belief in yourself. See you guys next week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.