The Rich Roll Podcast - Reimagining Fashion As Environmentally & Ethically Sound

Episode Date: March 16, 2015

We talk quite often about food on this podcast — particularly the health, environmental and ethical implications our collective dietary choices and the global impact of the industrialized food industry on the same. But you might be less consciously aware of the massive extent to which the garment industry impacts a wide range of concerns from global climate change to animal welfare to ethics and beyond. Fashion is a world that desperately needs an environmentally consci tion. Joshua and his work is part of that solution — leveraging forward-thinking, modern textiles and progressive, business practices that embrace fashion and aesthetics to bring consumers beautiful, better and quite honestly, more ethically imagined and manufactured garments for us to enjoy. This is a really interesting talk about: * the complex intersection of ethics, aesthetics and fashion; * the social norms and parameters that define masculinity; * why fur is the furthest thing from cool; * what really goes into creating garments from wool; * the environmental impact of raising animals for clothing; * the advent of more sustainable and ethically manufactured materials for garments; and * the realities behind what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur in the garment industry. Highly intelligent, hyper-articulate and of course always bespoke, Joshua is an outstanding ambassador and aesthete of modern fashion modalities, not to mention badass at CrossFit to boot. It's my honor to share my friend Joshua's message and experience with you and my hope is that you will come away from this conversation more enlightened and educated when it comes to aligning your consumerism with your values. I did. Even if fashion is not your thing, trust me. This compelling exchange just might surprise you. I sincerely hope you enjoy the offering. Peace + Plants, Rich

The fashion industrial complex and the fashion media industrial complex are these huge global forces that affect millions of people, billions of animals, ecosystems everywhere. And the fashion industry has a very interesting dynamic of being able to be perceived as both innocent and fun, while at the same time being globally impactful. So it's dangerous. It's a dangerous combination, if not sinister. That's Joshua Katcher, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey guys, my name is Rich Roll. I am your host and I am on a mission. And that mission is simple, to help you guys live and be better.

So to serve this end, I do lots of stuff, all kinds of stuff. But one of those things is this podcast where each week I deliver to your doorstep through your earbuds, long form, in-depth conversations with some of the best and the brightest, the most forward thinking, paradigm busting minds across all categories of life, health and excellence to help you discover, uncover, unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self. I want to thank everybody for subscribing to the show. I know there's a lot of choices out there when it comes to your precious time and the content choices that you make. So it means a lot to me that you're tuning in right now. Thank you for spreading the word to your friends and to your colleagues and coworkers and for sharing this show on social media. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter and thank you for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. This means so much to us. So to all of you out there who have made a practice of doing this, we thank you sincerely. Okay.

As you know, I like to mix things up here. I like to bring on all kinds, who unveils a really interesting perspective on the garment industry, which is an industry or a subject matter that we've never really talked about on this podcast before. It's a peek behind the curtain at exactly how most clothes are manufactured, distributed, and marketed. And I have to say, it's really quite revealing and at times a little shocking with an amazing number of parallels to the food industry, which, as you know, is a sort of continuous topic of conversation on this podcast. It's really, really interesting. So even if fashion or clothes are not your thing, you have no interest in this whatsoever. Maybe you wear dad jeans. You don't care. Please have a little faith in how I curate this show and trust me because this is a really compelling conversation.

It's an important conversation, I think, and I think it's a topic that just might surprise you. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud

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When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, I got Joshua Katcher in the house. Who is Joshua? Well, Joshua is the founder and the creative director behind the sustainable, ethically conscious, high-end fashion line called Brave Gentleman. He is also the founder of The Discerning Brute, which is a men's lifestyle website focused on fashion, food, etiquette, and ethics. website focused on fashion, food, etiquette, and ethics. He's also a public lecturer and adjunct professor of fashion at Parsons The New School, where his research focuses on sustainability and ethics in fashion production. This is a really interesting talk. It's a talk about the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and fashion, the environmental impact of raising animals for

clothing, the advance of more sustainable or ethically manufactured materials for garments. And it's talk about the truth behind what it really takes to be a successful entrepreneur in the garment industry. Joshua is highly engaging. He's super intelligent and articulate. And it was really fascinating to gain a little bit of a better understanding on a world I previously knew very little about. It was really revealing. I think this is an important discourse and my hope is that you'll come away from this conversation a little more enlightened, a little more informed when it comes to aligning your consumerism with your values.

So let's walk a mile in Joshua's shoes. You live in Williamsburg, right? I do. I live in Brooklyn. I've been there for over 10 years. You've seen it transform. I have. Recently, yes. My family is from Brooklyn. Oh, wow. My dad grew up in Bensonhurst. My grandparents lived in Brooklyn all their lives. They moved upstate a little bit. But then I was raised up a little more in the country, Poughkeepsie. Most people don't think of Poughkeepsie as the country, but in comparison to...

If you grew up in the boroughs, yeah. I mean, it is an artery of new york city you can take the metro north train i used to as a teenager hop on the train and go down to saint mark's place and go to hardcore shows and punk rock shows and yeah look at all the freaks well how old um probably from the time i was about 15 yeah that. That's so young. Like I, like times have changed, right? Can you imagine just sending like your 15 year old into Manhattan to like cruise around? Yes. Yeah.

You say yes, but like the reality of that, I don't know. Well, you always tell your parents something very different than what you're actually doing. Right. I was sent out to the wilderness with no parental supervision. You were the youngest. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole different podcast story. We'll do that later.

I know. Alaska and the Lower East Side had a lot in common. They do. They actually do. A lot of freaks. Different way. Did the garment industry sort of run through your family? I mean, do you come from...

Are you Garmentos? Yeah. I mean, I didn't know it until recently, but it did. Yeah, the Schmata trade. It's my great-grandparents were glove makers in Gloversville, New York. Wow. That's great. And that's another, you know, it was the capital of glove making in North America.

And obviously that economy bottomed out and has gone overseas. I didn't know that there was a capital of glove making. I mean, that's why it's called Gloversville. It got named after the industry. And I guess naming of cities and towns back then, it was very literal. What should we call this town? That meeting, that town hall meeting. We make gloves.

So how about Glovers City? No. It's kind of like the kids choosing the name for the soccer team. Not that much thought goes into it. Or like how your seven-year-old daughter names the dog. That's right. How about Snowy Blizzard? Since we're in snowpocalypse right now, and you still made it out.

Glover the dog. Exactly. Yeah, it's snowing pretty intensely right now. It's the first big storm of the season. I know. It's kind of cool that we're here together. We're going to pull out the trundle bed for you because the subway

is going to be closed and you're going to be stuck here. I came expecting to be able to get put up in a hotel one night. Did you bring your pillow? Anyway, yes. You need to come with your pajamas. Right. Well, Cole, right before we started

recording, you were saying that uh you just wrote um a response to an op-ed piece and we were starting to get into it and i thought maybe we should record this conversation so what was that piece yeah there there is a piece written by an editor a new editor at stylecaster and stylecaster is a website that does a lot of fashion reporting. They're sort of along the lines of WWD, Women's Wear Daily, which is considered the foremost authority on fashion news. But Stylecaster is a little younger. It's web. It's totally web-oriented. And they do things to get attention, like most websites want to do. So this editor wrote an article called I wear real fur and I'm not ashamed. And you can just tell by the title that that was intended to get a lot of

traffic and get a lot of comments and get people's riled up. If you read it, the tone, the talking points, it came, it looks like it came right out of a fur industry marketing handbook. Right. So I just read it.

I read through it. And here's this influential young woman who's in a powerful position, and that's amazing. But she goes on to make some very false claims about the fur industry. And it's really, it hurts. It impacts lives when people make those claims. It makes people feel better. Oh, it's okay.

It's okay to buy fur now because, you know, this one editor went to a marketing website and read their talking points. What is it that's, what were these points that she was purporting that are false? That it might be, you know, that maybe you could disabuse, you know, people's ideas of how that how that business functions you know she she poses one of the classic uh concepts which is i i now eat meat so why should i care about fur like why is it okay to be contradictory and i think that that is a huge problem overall like

no none of us can be perfect none of us are pure and i don't think that that is a huge problem overall. None of us can be perfect. None of us are pure. And I don't think that that's what any social justice movement is about. It's not about being perfect and pure for yourself. It's about being effective and bringing about change. So I think that that's still... Just listen to your mom. Yeah. I mean, my mom pretty much had it down. Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because you're going to now choose to eat a steak doesn't mean it's also okay to confine an animal for its entire life in a tiny cage and then kill it in a horrible way just for something as frivolous as an accessory.

But there's this idea that if I'm not perfect already, why bother doing anything else? Why bother leaving your apartment? Yeah. You know? Yeah. Why not just, you know, commit all the horrible acts that I can because I'm doing one thing. Because you already did it. Yeah.

If I'm already going to hell, I may as well have fun. I think that's kind of the attitude. But there's something beneath that and i think that what she really is attracted to is the symbol of fur and first still symbolizes power and sex and luxury and class and all of these things that we really desire in this culture the history is pretty fascinating right it is like henry the eighth and yeah yeah i mean I think it went before that. Edward III, he made these sumptuary laws, which basically made fur a status symbol by law. So if you were, only if you were noble or, you know, a royal, could you wear most of the kinds of fur, especially something like ermine. When you see a picture of a king or queen from that, from the Middle Ages, and you see those white furs with the little tufts of black coming out of it, it's a trope that we see when we see royalty represented. That's ermine. It takes

hundreds of ermine. They're little creatures to make one garment. So furs like that only, you know, you could be arrested, you could be put to death if you were a commoner who wore fur. So these laws lasted for hundreds of years. And you have generation after generation of people believing that only the very most powerful people wear fur. And I think we still can see the ramifications of that today. It creates an entrenched system in which it's just understood that if you're wearing this garment, it's just understood that if you're wearing this garment, that what comes with that is a sense of status and luxury and all of these things that we associate as aspirational in our culture.

Absolutely. And it's such an interesting garment to try to analyze from a sociological standpoint, from a historical standpoint, and from a psychological standpoint. Because I think what happens is that fur, because we know now how it's made, most people know, instead of it turning us off to it, it becomes a transgressive, naughty indulgence. So, the fact that it's cruel almost makes it more desirable and that's some psychological acrobatics that is a little difficult to wrap your head around but when you look at our culture from

a from the standpoint of cuisine and the standpoint of a lot of other things we gravitate towards things that were the crueler the more gruesome the more enjoyable it more enjoyable it's believed to be. Like the baby veal. Yeah, foie gras or like an exotic indulgence. Yeah, it's this idea that because it was so terrible, it must really be amazing. The payoff has to be equally as heightened as the production was gruesome. And I think there's a practice in France

that's still done behind closed doors at certain restaurants, and people will hide their head under a veil when they're eating this because of the shame. But it's also a status symbol to be eating under the veil. And it's basically a bird that's soaked in some form of liquor, and then c blade is alive and then you eat it after it's burned to death and i don't remember the exact name what this is but i think that's sort of along the same lines when we talk about fur and we talk about right and we talk about there there's the monkey brain thing too right i don't know where exactly that is somewhere in asia where they yeah they crack the skull open while the monkey's alive alive. It's like in the middle of the table. Yeah. I remember watching, when I was in high school.

Faces of Death. Faces of Death. Yeah, they did. That was the documentary that actually started me thinking about animal sensuals. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah. And I was in an after-school club called Swift, Students with Ideas for Tomorrow.

That's awesome. Yes, let's get you ready for the World Fair with that. And look at how well it impacted you. I guess I was. It worked. I was there just because I had friends that were in it. I really didn't, I wasn't somebody who cared that much about world events or issues.

I didn't see myself as even a valid person to be addressing issues. I was just like, oh, I'm sort of just in the background. I'm going to just float through life, and I'm not a decision maker. And I think that that was a very formative year for me when I joined that club. And I saw that video, and I started, it was the first time in my life that I thought that the adults weren't right. I was like, just, it was the first time in my life that I thought that the adults weren't right. I was like, oh, maybe they're not doing things right.

Maybe, maybe they don't have all their shit together. That's a weird moment of loss of innocence, you know, as you grow up, because you just assume like your parents know everything and adults have everything figured out. And then you get older. The rude awakening. Yeah. Like even down to you know like i was looking on your website before the thing too and you're talking about

you're sort of doing a faq question and answer like don't i need meat to be healthy yeah you have your answer and it's like well ask you know my doctor told me i needed meat and you're saying well doctors only get like three or four hours of nutrition education throughout medical school that's like asking your dentist to fix your computer. You know, like the idea, like the idea that like, you know,

you, this, this is an adult actually who probably should know something about this. And then to find out, actually, they don't know that much. They were never really specifically trained in it. That is,

you know, an awakening moment. And to know that the world kind of functions that way is very disconcerting. We're trained from the time we're children to hand over authority to all of these figures who supposedly know what's going on. And we're told you're not, you know, you're not the person who should know about this or who can solve these problems. There are experts there for that. And if you want to become an expert, you have to do X, Y, Z and get all of these certifications and blah, blah, blah. And I think that that is really intimidating for young people. And a lot of them become apathetic because they say, why, how am I ever going to have influence?

I don't have the money to get a PhD. I don't, I'm not going to become a senator. You know, these are people who were born into it, essentially. This is a, this is almost a, an oligarchy in that sense. So you have this huge portion of citizens who just feel disempowered and they feel that their voice is not um valid for for making decisions like that and we turn to doctors and we turn to supposed experts and often they're just like you and me and they read books and they got a title and now they're telling you what to do. And you can read books and find things out for yourself. But I think that's changing.

You know, I think that the Internet has democratized that process a little bit. And I think the younger generation kind of implicitly understands that there is, that the possibility exists for them to have influence. I mean, you just see it on a base level, just with the rise of whatever the newest Instagram star is or whatever, that somebody could come with basically zero qualifications and have a huge impact on culture. I agree. I think that there is some democratization that's happened because of that. But I also think it gets reduced to the lowest common denominator

when it comes to people who end up having the largest following. Yeah, for sure. That's another topic. All right. So you're this, you know, enterprising young man in Swift and you watch Faces of Death. You see monkeys' brains being eaten. It was horrible. I'm getting a picture now of your younger formative years. Yeah. I mean, when I was 15, I was in high school in upstate New York. And I was into skateboarding and punk rock music and grunge and just living my life, playing guitar in my bedroom by myself and reading comic books. And then I had this experience. It shifted everything. And I remember people telling me that I had lost my sense of humor for a little while.

I was always very silly and very jokey. And my parents noticed and my friends and family noticed that after that experience, I just got very serious. I sort of internalized this idea that there are these huge problems, these huge environmental, ethical, social problems that are not being dealt with. And not only aren't they being dealt with, they're being worsened. And as I become an adult, what am I supposed to do about this? How can I affect the change and try to help? And everybody at every step of the way wants to stop you.

You can't do that. Why bother? You're never going to change anything. You're just one person. So does that energize you, or do you then go out and buy a trench coat and kind of hang your head low and brood? Well, I think the trench coat and brooding

can be an aesthetic argument that can help enhance your effectiveness. But yeah, I mean, that's a great segue into the power that fashion has. Exactly. I mean, it's, yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I mean, when you appear to be an enigma, when you appear to be mysterious, when you appear to command attention through your aesthetics, it really, in this culture today, heightens your influence.

And I think a lot of activists underestimate that. I think we like to throw out the laundry with the wash water when we look at fashion. We think fashion is something that's just frivolous. It's just about having fun and finding great deals and going shopping. Meanwhile, the fashion industrial complex and the fashion media industrial complex are these huge global forces that to be perceived as both innocent and fun, while at the same time being globally impactful. So it's dangerous. It's a dangerous combination, if not sinister. The general person doesn't really consider it or take it seriously and sort of perceives it as, well, you don't really look at it and consider the process of how that shirt you're wearing came to the store.

And in that respect, it bears a lot of similarities to big food companies and the industrial system that produces our food. But because we're putting it inside of our body as opposed to on top of our skin, we're more inclined to maybe consider that a little bit more intelligently or deeply. There's still, of course, close to zero transparency there. But when compared to fashion, it's even more so. And yeah yeah to understand that it is this massive business yeah and i would argue that that the shirt that you put on your back is of equal importance to the food that you're putting in your mouth and even if you're even if you're just concerned with health your skin is an organ and it absorbs it absorbs the things that you come in contact with and if you're wearing a conventional cotton shirt

that took several pounds of pesticides to make, some of that ends up in your skin. So whether or not you're ingesting it, there's no big difference. If you're sleeping on it at night, if you have your head resting on a pillow every night, all night, and that pillow is contaminated, which a lot are, then that is going to have a health impact on you. So, I think there's a prejudice against considering things that aren't entering our bodies.

And that needs to shift. Yeah, and I also think there's another really impactful component of it. And that is the demand of the population for garment companies to provide clothes at a certain price level. It's like a voracious, it's almost an entitlement. It is an entitlement. Like, I deserve this garment and I don't want to pay for it. I don't want to pay very much for it. And having been a garment designer and manufacturer, if anybody understood just how many subcontractors

touched that shirt that's sitting on the back of Rich's chair, they would not believe it. And this demand is causing negative consequences to our planet, to our children, to all kinds of people that are involved in these industries. And we don't even think a second thing about it. No one has a clue what happens. That's why I wanted to start teaching. I began teaching at Parsons last year, and I'm going into my second semester. I'm actually having a snow day tomorrow on my first day of class. Congratulations.

Thanks. That's so disappointing, though, because it's your first day, right? You're excited. First day of the semester. I can email the students and still give them homework. I'm sure they'll be thrilled about that. But I teach two classes. One is called Fashion and Culture, and one is called Fashion and the Narrative.

And in both of those classes, we deal a lot with what you are talking about, this idea that there is this, when we look at a product, a fashion object, usually we judge it based on whether it's attractive or not. And that is what's called aesthetic irrationality, where we say this is pretty, therefore it's good. Therefore, it's a good, not an evil. And I don't mean evil in a religious sense, I mean, in a societal sense of causing great harm or damage.

mean in a societal sense of causing great harm or damage and the process is rarely as beautiful as the finished product and i think that in order for a fashion object to be truly handsome or truly attractive and beautiful the production has to be equally attractive and that is not the case in 99 of the fashion industry right now. And there is this history behind every garment that if you trace it back step by step, whose hands touched it, who, where it came from,

where it was grown. Most people don't know that one of the top, um, causes of child slavery in the world are the cotton fields in Uzbekistan where children are basically trapped in perpetual debt. They have to get these bags to pick the cotton, and most of them can't afford the bags. They're taken out of school, or they go to school and their teachers bring them to the fields to work, which is a real travesty. which is a real travesty.

And they are given these bags that they have to repay, but they never make enough money to repay it after their expenses at the end of each day. So they're perpetually in debt. They're picking cotton. These are children. These are probably from six years old to teenagers. And that is where conventional cotton comes from. And Uzbekistan is the second leading producer in the world.

So that's just one example. I would have, you know, I didn't know that. I would have never known that. I mean, but I do know that, you know, there's a reason why t-shirts at Old Navy cost, you know, $3, whatever they cost. So, but there's this disconnect and there's this dissonance, right?

Like I intellectually understand like, well, the reason this stuff is so cheap is because probably, you know, but there's this disconnect and there's this dissonance, right? Like I intellectually understand like, wow, the reason this stuff is so cheap is because probably, you know, probably wasn't such a great setup to get this stuff here, but whatever is cheap, you know, I'm going to get it. I don't think about it. You know what I mean? In the same way that you can have that same relationship with the food that you're buying at the grocery store. So. And it's problematic because we live in a society where almost everything that we have a relationship with is like that.

We just put faith in the producers and the makers. And we say to ourselves, if it was really that bad, they wouldn't be doing it. And I think that we say that far too often to ourselves. And they say, well, if they didn't want it this way, they wouldn't buy it. Exactly. And it becomes this allowance. We allow each other to do it. I mean, I think it comes too to the whole, you know, our whole kind of addiction to excess.

You know, like we're going to go in and we're going to, we find a shirt, we're not going to buy one, let's buy 15, let's buy five in every color, you know. And if, you know, I remember when I was living in France and I traveled to Italy for the first time and it was this hilarious thing because it was, you know, in the 80s and, you know, there were some quite extraordinary Michael Jackson-esque kind of flange shoulder outfits that would show up in Rome. And, you know, really catch your eye and be like, whoa, look at that person's getup. And then literally the next day you'd see them in the exact same outfit. And the next day you'd see them in the exact same outfit. And suddenly I started to realize the European mentality is you don't buy 50 things. You buy one thing.

You might spend like $1,000 or $3, bucks, but you're going to plan, you're going to plan your thing, right? And you're going to invest in it and you're going to actually own that for a long, more of a long, long, just a more of a long view. It's a commitment.

It's a relationship. It's a relationship. And, and I think people are frightened of their identities now. And part of the problem of fast fashion, very much like fast food where you know you go to forever 21 and you spend three dollars on a shirt and then it falls apart the next week and you go buy another one this idea of constantly perpetually being able to change your identity and

how you're perceived i think is very sought after this fluid fluid identity and when you buy if you save up and invest in one piece that was made fairly or made sustainably um that's a that's a scary to some people because then they say oh this is how i'm going to be seen for quite a while right they're frightened of committing to their possession because everything is so well because you know and it's fueled by the fact that everything is so cheap right now so it's just disposable i mean when we were kids it was like you know once a year i'd go my mom would take me and we'd get the tough skins and that was it you know like yeah but now it's like oh whatever we'll just go get more like it's like going to the grocery because it's so cheap and everybody there's a desire especially in young people now to be able to

visually articulate all of these different personas that oh i'm today i'm going to be punk tomorrow i'm going to be goth the next day i'm going to be you know preppy and those identities back in you know earlier at least in the earlier 20th century, those were more stable. Yeah, once you picked one, you were in that lane for a while. You were punk, and you wore the same jacket that you had every day, and you would embellish it yourself. And if you, you know, if you were preppy, then that was it. But now it seems like all these looks are so available and so easily accessed, and that you don't really have to put any work into doing it. It's very confusing from an identity standpoint. And I think we all are going through

this identity crisis. But I think it also fuels the confusion. And I know that, you know, I've been hired myself to go into different clients' homes and actually clean their closet out. And they own so much stuff and they don't know who they are and they can't find themselves. And I'm like, get rid of all this stuff. Like, what are you doing? You know, get clear. So, I think that it feeds the problem. It makes them more confused. So, I don't see us really finding ourselves or finding an expression or an artistic expression that is in alignment with, you know, the true core of an individual. Right.

That's that often. And it is something that's very part of the human experience to be able to visually represent yourself, to be able to decorate your body, to be able to, I mean, you can look at minimally contacted peoples that are still living today that, you know, they do that. And I feel like as a species, we have had a connection to being able to somewhat adjust our aesthetic appearance for whether it was for ceremonial purposes or for personal, you know, personal identity to signify, you know, who you are and what you believe.

Um, and I just think that it's important to, to not write that off entirely. I think there's a lot of people who are, they believe they're anti-fashion. They believe that they are against this idea of, uh, of having an aesthetic representation of yourself that somehow aesthetics are subordinate to other forms of experience or not as pure that being concerned about aesthetics is somehow a base desire yeah that is you know kind of a lower interest and yes somebody who is a true intellectual wouldn't be bothered with something like that but it's it's it's it's wed into the fabric of our dna and who we are as human beings and i think to deny that is to deny an aspect of what it means to be human

and how you express yourself. Right. You know, what you put on is a choice. You know, whether you're declaring it to be anti-fashion, that in and of itself is a fashion choice. Exactly. I mean, even if you're a nudist, that's a choice to not wear clothing. Right. Yeah, exactly.

It's still a choice. And the fluidity of those those choices particularly with younger people i think goes hand in hand with the acceleration of technology and social media and all this you know all these things go together and when you were talking about kind of the deep psychological black hole of making that like naughty choice and kind of probing what that means i I mean, you can reflect that back on this fluidity and what does that say about these people who are having difficulty making that choice? Is it because they want to, I mean, look, you know, is it out of fear? They want to be loved. They want to be accepted in whatever group they are. And when everyone in these groups is always changing too,

and that creates confusion and, you know, this goes way beyond. And there's a lot of confusion around the idea of what sin is, and I think that when we look at our religious history, the idea of sin, all these transgressions, some of them were very pleasurable and some of them were not. Sins like sexuality or materialism or gluttony, these things can be enjoyable from a physical experience standpoint. And I think there's a lot of confusion around this idea of sin means that it's going to

be enjoyable. So, therefore, when you sin by buying a fur coat or you sin by purchasing, you know, the foie gras platter, even though you know that it's wrong, you almost celebrate that it's wrong because you know that the payoff is going to be so great, that this is a sin and therefore it's going to be pleasurable. And I think that that is where a lot of activists lose sight of how to address the problem where we, we believe that if we maintain the idea that this, that being good, being a do-gooder is going to convince people to make the right choice.

I think we're fooling ourselves because being a do-gooder is seen as boring. Right. You have to make a bad-ass pair of shoes, you know, and they have to look really fucking good. Exactly. You know, and then people will fall into line.

It comes down to design. You have to make superior design. And this is what's so exciting about what's happening, I think, in the vegan community right now. All of the most exciting innovations in cuisine and textiles and fashion are happening in the realms of organic plant-based high-tech synthetics. Even stuff, I just went to the Biofabricate Conference, which was held in New York City,

not too far from this hotel. And at the Biofabricate Conference, there are innovations happening that are blowing my mind. I mean, we're growing leather in the laboratory. We're able to grow. I think a scientist at Duke just two days ago announced that he was able to grow muscle that contracted in the laboratory. We are on the verge of being able to use synthetic biology to replace all animal products, but have identical animal products that aren't attached to living animals. So these industries know what's happening, the fur industry, the leather industry, the meat industry, and they don't know what to do. Either they're going to have to invest in these things themselves and shift over, or they're going to be steamrolled. Right. And the analogy in the food context is what's happening with beyond meat

and hampton creek and the unilever uh lawsuit you know which is basically the mayonnaise business panicking because hampton creek's creating a healthier cheaper alternative you know what i mean so in the synthetics uh context the same there's a parallel track happening right here and it's you know and the and and what what kind of um those guys say whether it's ethan brown or uh you know josh tetrick it's like the animal protein is an antiquated technology it's wasteful it is not sustainable it requires a ridiculous amount of resources and it just doesn't work anymore it's bad design it's equally applicable to the clothes just doesn't work anymore. It's bad design. It's equally applicable to the clothes that we're wearing. Yeah.

It's just bad design. People that still are, people that insist upon leather, wool and fur being the epitome of quality and fashion. It's just, it's wrong. It's bad design. It's inefficient. It's clunky. It requires, it's such a slow process to raise animals you know imagine here we have this a hair fiber that we use but it's attached to this being that needs to be born and raised

and grow up and it has space and feed and water and and it has a huge impact and i think wool is one of the most overlooked environmental problems when i look at my my contemporary sustainable designers and they all are crazy about wool because the hair itself yeah it's it's great it's biodegradable it not you know mother nature designed it wonderfully to uh to wick away moisture and do all these high performance things however it's to a, to a being that has a huge environmental impact and Australia and New Zealand, the world's leading producers of wool. Um, their number one cause of greenhouse gas emissions are sheep.

And right. The numbers I was looking on your website, you recounted some of these numbers. They're astonishing, right? It's like 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand is is caused by the wool industry yeah just the sheep farmer yeah and if it's not exactly 50 it is immensely significant um and the leather industry also it people don't realize we look at the final product and we judge that We don't look at the process and that's very problematic.

And what about the brutality in some of these sharing warehouses? It's horrible. Imagine that you were a person who had to shave a struggling, large, strong animal day in and day out all day long. These animals don't want to be pinned down. They're prey animals. They experience extreme fear in being turned over on their backs. And in shearing operations, they have to be sheared from many different directions and quickly.

And these are not calm animals that just sit down and get a haircut and it's a friendly thing and they walk away. They have to be tied down. And when they don't cooperate, they're beaten and they're hit and they're slammed against the floor and undercover investigations very recently have shown that in high volume wool production facilities and shearing operations animals are being their skin is being sheared off they're struggling they're being cut and when they're cut they if they aren't left to die they're stitched up with no anesthesia right there on the spot and and then at the end of this whole process of this whole you know wool uh wool production process when the sheep is considered

spent when they're not producing as much wool as they should they're packed onto these giant ships like cruise ships they're actually designed after slave ships. And they're sent to the Middle East on a sometimes many week long journey through the ocean with no veterinary care, no water, no food. And they arrived only to be slaughtered for halal meat if they survived the journey. reading some veterinary reports about what happened on some of those ships the animals at the very bottom layer all of the feces comes down into the bottom god and you have animals arriving up to their heads and shit and and you know and it's a corrosive substance they so this is this is such and this is all for a fiber that we can grow in the laboratory. Why on earth would we still be doing this to these living beings when we have so many

alternatives and the opportunity for innovation is just beyond. And I think that we are underestimating the potential in our design students. When we look at fashion schools and we keep telling the students, you know, if you design menswear, you must use cashmere, you must use wool, you must use leather. And we're not giving them the opportunities or the financial incentives to be able to find other things. And the fur industry is giving them financial incentives to use fur. Why aren't there people out there giving designers incentives to use sustainable materials? There's two people doing it. And it's not enough. Stella McCartney is one.

She has a scholarship. And John Bartlett, right? I don't know if John Bartlett does it, but he, he, he does amazing work. He's very active. But Bruno Peters is another designer, a very accomplished designer. And he has a fund for students that they can apply to where they would win 10 000 euros for agreeing to use ethical materials and exploring that world that's amazing and at parsons i'm very active in trying to get a partnership going with some of the

synthetic biology laboratories here in new york like GenLabs, to get students thinking about how to solve these problems. That's super interesting. A couple observations. I mean, first of all, like I'm the first to admit that, you know, my entry point into the vegan world, the plant-based world was definitely through the prism of health. Right. And, but, you know, as these things go, when you embark on this journey, the road gets narrower and the vision expands. You know, so there's this this, you know, thing that happens where you start to you take the blue pill in the matrix and you start to really take a look at how the world functions and how certain things operate. And it was inevitable before, you know, it came time to really consider my consumer choices beyond the plate. And that's been a more recent thing for me, in all honesty, you know, it came time to really consider my consumer choices beyond the plate. And that's been a more recent thing for me, in all honesty, you know, and, and, you know, I was definitely a

guy walking around thinking, well, what's the big deal with wool? Yeah, they're just giving these animals a haircut, you know, like they're living nice lives out and whatever. And I saw that video not that long ago, that was going around where it literally showed this, you know, these people just beating these animals up and shearing them really quickly. And they're bleeding everywhere and they're punching them in the head. And like I had no idea, you know, and it really made me think about what is actually going on. It's a painful realization and it's something that we avoid having to realize. It's something that we avoid having to realize. And it's understandable why these aren't the most popular ideas because they're painful and they require a shift.

Well, because if you really consider them, then you have to consider your own choices. And that requires behavior change. And people don't like that. They want to be told that what they're doing is just fine. And whatever bad habit they're, perpetuating that they should just continue to do so. And yeah, go home and watch dancing with the stars. There's a, there's a movie that I show in my class or an excerpt from a movie.

I don't know if you remember it. It was a horror film from the eighties that is a, is an underrated classic. It's called, um, uh, Oh, why can't I remember the name now?

It's on your curriculum. It's on, it's part of my curriculum and I don't remember the name now? It's on your curriculum? It's part of my curriculum and I don't remember the name. They Live. They Live. Do you remember this? I saw that, yeah. So They Live was, it was a film about this guy, John, and he's sort of a vagabond worker.

He just wanders around and finds random jobs. And he comes across these glasses, these sunglasses, stored away, hidden behind a wall in a church. And he puts them on. And when he puts them on, he sees through the ideology of the culture. He sees what things for how they really are. So, when he looks at an advertisement up on a billboard, instead of it, you know, being this sexy woman laying down on a beach with a bottle of vodka it says procreate and when he looks at another ad it just says obey and he looks at money and it says this is your god so when he's wearing these glasses the truth is

revealed about how things are and there's this alien element where you know all of these evil aliens have taken over control of the world. And when he's wearing the glasses, he can see who they are. And they're all people in powerful positions. So they're controlling the world through reptilian energies. Exactly. Yeah, that sounds prophetic. I'd like to know who the person is who thought of that because that's an advanced consciousness.

So you should check out that film. because that's an advanced consciousness. So you should check out that film. If you're a fan of horror and you're also a fan of smart films, I think it's very similar to The Matrix, where the sunglasses are that pill. And he has a fight with his best friend, where he battles him to try to get him to convince him to put on the glasses. And it's really hard for his friend to accept them.

And it's this really long, ridiculous fight accept them and they you know it's this really long ridiculous fight scene and he finally puts them on but i think that um it just shows how how how he resists seeing the truth that's interesting what else is on your uh curriculum like what do you what do you you know what are you professoring on to your students i just put together the class reader for uh the fashion and culture class, and we're touching on a bunch of different stuff. Some of the things I'm excited to share with the students are a chapter from Tansy Hoskins book called unstitched.

It's an anti-capitalist fashion handbook. That's the name of it. She really takes a hard look at the way the fashion system operates how it affects people how it affects the environment how it affects animals and and how it affects us as consumers and that word consumer being a consumer it's just so weird we're not considered citizens anymore we're considered consumers and i think i would much rather be you know a citizen investor who like puts his money into companies that he believes in than just somebody who passively consumes things. Right.

Your job is to consume. Yeah. That's it. Ingest. Yes. But you shall not have a say in what's happening. No. Your job is to just.

Well, it has the kind of the connotation that something's been programmed like that you're a robot you know right and so then you're being sort of manipulated yeah because you're the consumer all right so it also provides this illusion that everything is taken care of and you don't need to worry you just need to sit back and like let things come to you right and you know do what you do what you need to do to make the money so that you can go spend it exactly that is your job yeah and then when you spend, do what you need to do to make the money so that you can go spend it. Exactly. And that is your job. Yeah. And then when you spend this money and you accumulate these things and you still don't find happiness, what does that mean? I think that's part of...

Well, you need to go back to the mall. Get more. Because you didn't get the right thing. That's called affluenza, right? Yeah, right. No, but I mean, I just don't want to get totally off this topic before I discuss this with you. But I wanted to ask you because when I was, let's see, in 1996, which was a long time ago, I was using a lot of faux fur and faux leathers out of Germany.

And I would pay completely insane prices. It made no sense to my bottom line, but I was very inspired about them. And I wasn't a vegan at the time, and you don't know much about me, but I come from Alaska, so my dad was a hunter. So, I grew up in a very sort of extreme environment for a yogi, you know, sort of meditator type person. But I was using these beautiful, I loved, always loved going to the France fabric show. Yeah. And, I mean, the most beautiful, beautiful, you know, display of amazing fabrics. And they already back then had an extraordinary, you know, arsenal of amazing, just amazing furs. You couldn't tell the difference.

They were exquisite in every way. So tell me now what's going on in the market and what, who's producing these. And I don't believe that much of it is produced domestically, but has that changed? Is it being produced domestically? It would be wonderful if it was, cause I would save a lot of money in my designs. I'm buying, I'm buying materials from Europe and Europe is at the forefront of innovation when it comes to materials. I refer to them as future leather, future fur, future wool. I think that using terms like faux and fake are a little detrimental to how it's perceived. I think people who buy a luxury item, they want what's considered real. And I think that the problem, one of the problems we run into is that the fur industry and the leather industry get to say, we're authentic, we're real, everyone else is a faker.

And I think that that's problematic. So these materials are superior. They're superior to leather, they're superior to fur in many, many ways. And there's no reason we shouldn't refer to them in that way. They're superior to leather, they're superior to fur. we shouldn't refer to them in that way superior they're superior leather they're superior for um in the sense that they are for example they're more supple they wear better they like is that what you mean by superior or just in terms of the the sort of cost of production and the sustainability it's a little bit of everything and and part of that is the idea that it isn't

set in stone that there's there's always potential to progress. That's what's great about technology and synthetics is that we have come such a long way with what we're able to create. And now when you look at, for example, scientists in Norway who are developing textiles for the coldest climates on the face of the earth for explorers for um you know arctic oil rig workers for um for ice scientists they are not using fur they're not using wool they're using high tech high tech synthetics this is these are the what we can do now what we can program into textiles to be reactive, to have smart polymers that know what your body is doing and how to respond, to open up, to let out heat, to close up, to prevent heat from escaping. The technologies are incredible. So the idea that somehow the pelt of an animal, the chemically preserved pelt of an animal is going to be superior to our innovations is just marketing.

It's just fluff. But the types of faux fur that we're seeing today, the types of future fur we're seeing today, they're becoming more customizable. They can do things that, you know, you can't do domesticating animals. And with the future leather that I'm using from Italy, it, you know, the boots that I'm wearing, I wore here, you know, through the snow. I've worn them through almost three New York City winters. They break in, they breathe, they're durable, they shape to your foot. They do everything you would want leather to do, except they didn't have as huge of an impact as raising cattle did. So there's a lot of fear in these traditional industries, these animal-based industries, about what's going to happen to them. So it's in their interest to try to smear the faux products.

try to smear the faux products. So they refer to them as, oh, it's a petroleum-based product. It's terrible for the environment. It's this, it's that, it's toxic. But they forget to mention also how their industry uses incredible amounts of petroleum products and chemical processes. When you talk about an animal's skin,

this is something that nature designed to decompose. This is something that when the animal dies, nature designed it to biodegrade and go back into the soil. And when you preserve it, you need to use a toxic soup of chemicals to prevent it from doing what it was designed to do. And those chemicals appear... There was just a study done in italy on children's clothing you

know we're poisoning our children with this stuff on fur lined children's clothing that it contained uh carcinogenic chemicals like chrome and and heavy salts and um just really really disturbing stuff these are not natural products but the marketers want you to believe it's natural because the fur off of an animal's back is natural so they say oh this is a renewable resource it's natural it laughs you know they have this really interesting contradiction where they say it's biodegradable but it lasts far longer than everything else so it's you know it's gonna it's gonna last like wait it's gonna last you 30 years with this coat and it's also biodegradable it's

like wait you can't have both things like which which is it so you know when you have a fur coat it has to be refrigerated it has to in the hot weather so it doesn't rot off your back it has to be checked for infestations that you know this idea of the fur vaults at the big department stores where you bring your fur coat to be refrigerated in the summer. I mean, most people have air conditioning now, so they don't need that anymore. But fur coats and hot weather, not a good, you know, very smelly. Or in the rain, very smelly. You know, anybody who really understands the production process we're all compassionate by nature right it's just i think it's a matter of whether we're willing to kind of look at this and and evaluate it and you know the the decision not to look at it goes back to the unwillingness

to entertain the possibility of behavior change but is is it, you know, is it getting better? Like, how is it in the industry, you know, with what you're doing, how are you perceived? How are you, are you met with a lot of resistance or are you welcomed as this is, you know, this is where the business is heading? It's a little confusing, actually. You know, in the nineties, it was very popular to be anti-fur and that changed we're looking at an industry that's reporting higher fur sales than ever before at a higher price than i would not have thought that that's that's interesting it's very and it has a lot to do with the chinese market it has a lot to do with the um the the rise of the upper middle class in china and the desire

for luxury status symbols like handbags and like fur coats, um, on an international level. But even, even the United States reported higher fur sales than in a very, than a very long time. And it's because a mark, you know, it's effective marketing that the fur industry has a lot of money. It's one of the most marked up products on you know out there when you look at the cost of a luxury fur coat versus how much it costs to make it's marked up so so high so they end up with all this extra money to be able to market and what they do what the new york times exposed them as doing is going to fashion schools approaching young

designers offering incentives for them to use fur. It's like the pharmaceutical industry or the tobacco industry. Yeah, and they have lobbyists. They do everything that every other industry you would imagine does to get their product seen. They do that. And they have a big budget to do it. So they'll approach a young designer like Philip. Well, I shouldn't mention any names.

They'll approach young designers who are offered trips to Europe to go train in Copenhagen to be, you know, to learn the techniques and they're wined and dined and they're given free product to put in their senior shows and to fill the runway. And who's going to say no to that? If you're a young struggling designer and you have this opportunity to get ahead, of course, you're going to say yes to money, of course, you're going to say yes to free luxury materials. So again, what we come back to is this idea that we need, we need incentives for students to also use these superior materials that are ethical. And that doesn't exist yet, really, on a large scale. Yes. Interesting. To get back to the timeline, so how do you make this leap

from enterprising Syracuse student to getting interested in kind of pursuing this as a vocation? First with the blog and then later with the line. It was almost by accident. I went to school, I went to college in Syracuse and I studied video art. I have a BFA in video art. And I also on the same campus as SUNY ESF, which is Environmental Science and Forestry School. And I was allowed to take classes there. So I had an unofficial minor in environmental

studies. And I always wanted to combine the environmental with the video. And I said, oh, I'm going to become a documentary filmmaker. I'm going to make movies about these issues. And I'm going to change people's minds by watching my films. And I sort of lost hope in video, in film. And it wasn't... How did that happen? Did something specific happen that made you... It was a series of things. In film. And it wasn't, and this is no. How did that happen? I mean, did it was,

it was something specific happened that made you. It was a series of things. I, I said, I'm going to go work at MTV. You know, who has, who has influence on, on youth MTV at the time. So this was before YouTube. This was before imagine a world before YouTube. So MTV was still very popular among young people i i became a producer um at youtube uh i became a producer at um mtv and i uh i said okay i'm gonna

work my way up into a position where i can start pitching ideas about shows that I'd like to see air. And maybe instead of the show being about, you know, just a bunch of spoiled 16 year olds who are getting everything they want for their birthday, which was a show that I worked on, it could be a bunch of very exciting and attractive young people who by day are activists and by night are, you know, nightlife people who are partiers. So there's this balance there. They're doing amazing things to change the world by day, but they're also, you know, they're also indulgent. And I think that I thought that that would really work. And I figured out after years of trying that there was just no way anything like that could ever air. Yeah. It's like, no, no, Sweet 16.

Come on, stay focused. When people look at the television and they see the shows on air, there is a reason why those shows are there. And it's because the advertisers allowed them to be there. So, you know, in a sense, these advertisers are the fathers of all of these shows that they chose not to kill and um and that was a show that would never be aired so um you know maybe i could have gotten it on a small independent network or you know something like al gore's current tv they would play a few of my

videos but when it came to really reaching the masses, it would never, never happen. So I had to shift focus and say, okay, what is another medium that is incredibly influential, that forms identity, that forms people's ideas about the world and about who they are? And I found that the fashion industry was that, if not more influential than media. influential than than media what's interesting is that you had this almost like emboldened sense that you wanted to influence people like you felt like you had that in you you had that capacity you were looking for the right vehicle to do it but that shows like a very kind of on some level like a very determined person i have always been stubborn. My parents always said I should have been a lawyer because I will argue to the death if I think I'm right. But no, I'm insistent and I'm stubborn, and I'm not afraid to be that way, especially if what I believe has been well researched. But I'm also open to being wrong. And I think that that's important, too.

But I'm also open to being wrong. And I think that that's important, too. But with this, I just said, you know, there's no reason why I can't be the person who makes this happen. So I tried and I failed. And then I shifted focus to a different industry. And I knew nothing about fashion in 2008. If you had met me in 2007, you know, you'd be looking at a totally different individual. I knew nothing about fashion. I didn't care about fashion.

I just thought I wasn't even participating in it. Who cares? It wasn't that long ago. No. So within a matter of a few years, I ended up accomplishing the idea that I'm an expert in this field. And it came because I started writing about it and I started researching it. And I, you know, I started the blog, The Discerning Brood.

When did that start? In 2008. Yeah. And then, you know, I ended up teaching at Parsons, which is one of the top design schools in the world. Yeah, to go for like literally in six years to go from somebody who didn't care or know anything about fashion to being a professor. That's crazy. That's awesome. What I found was that fashion fascinated me in the same ways.

And it crossed over into a lot of areas that I was already interested in. That the only difference was the application. It still touched on all of these very interesting sociological and psychological and environmental and ethical issues. But instead of it being about things we're putting inside of us or, you know, actions that were happening out in the world, it was about the, you know, the production of clothing and the wearing of clothing. And it becomes, the human body is such an interesting site for studying how culture manifests. And I, if I didn't love it, i wouldn't have been able to do it i immediately just became enthralled with how complex uh the fashion discourse is but at the same time how it's looked at as this very silly thing by most people. But you, you know, what was the switch that got flicked that took you from somebody who is, you know, blogging about it,

covering it or discussing these issues into actually being an entrepreneur who's launching, you know, his own line and stepping into that aspect of, you know, production and manufacturing? Right. Well, I wouldn't have been able to do it without partners i i was writing about menswear writing about the things that i would like to see that didn't exist on the discerning brute i i have a you know i have a sense of the type of shoes i wanted to wear and the type of suits i would like to wear then like why isn't anybody making yeah i couldn't find i couldn't find anything you know at the time there was a few brands and they were okay um but then i approached novakas which is owned by the

the sisters that own mooshu's and so that's their in-house brand and i approached them and i said would you like to collaborate i would love to design shoes and we can utilize your production setup. And, you know, and they agreed. And we had many long meetings about the kind of shoes we wanted to make and how they would be higher end. And we would upgrade the materials and upgrade the design. And, um, and if it wasn't for them, I'd never would have gotten started making fashion. So that collaboration is still going on today. All of the shoes that I make, the shoes and boots that I make, are in collaboration with them. And it just, yeah, that support system was incredible.

And then... So it started with shoes. It started with shoes. It started with... So that was Brave Gentleman, that was going to be product number one. Right. And then, I mean, initially i wanted to see if i could make a vegan suit because there were no high-end vegan suits that were that's a weird

thing to say for somebody you know maybe who's listening who who's thinking well well how is it you know how is how is a suit not you know like what's made out of kale is there bacon in your suit like what do you mean a vegan suit well I mean vegan suit in the sense that the materials that are used to make the suit haven't been made with animal products. So even if you buy a cotton suit or a linen suit, chances are the interlinings, the materials you don't see, the material that sits between the lining and the outer shell fabric. Traditionally, in high-end menswear, it's horsehair. And horsehair, it's a horsehair canvas, and it provides a structured look to the suit, so it doesn't wrinkle, it doesn't sag.

You know, it sort of shapes to your body in the right way. I didn't know that. And there are replacements for it that are considered cheaper. There's synthetic, but usually it has wool in it. Um, things like collar backing, things like buttons made from horn. Uh,

I mean, the menswear world is nothing but animal products. So when I say a vegan suit, I mean a suit that is not using animal products, but also I consider, you know, cruelty free vegan to not also include harming people. So, not made in a sweatshop.

Yes, you can go to H&M and you can buy a $90 three-piece suit. But chances are it was made somewhere like Cambodia and the people making it did not get paid fairly. However, in order to accomplish this goal, I just had to put in a lot of time of researching textiles. And I finally found the right materials. And then I started working with a factory in Italy and a designer, this Italian designer, who helped me come up with the first suit. John Bartlett, actually. I remember walking into his store in the West Village and saying, I want to make a blazer and I don't know how. Can you explain to me how you would do it?

And the conversation I had with him, that was one of the first, you know, times I tried to wrap my head around how does fashion arrive in the stores? How is it coordinated? How do all these designers know how to use the same colors in the same season? And where, you know, where is this authority where's the divine mind yes divine fashion mind yes in paris uh the the the forecasters um so yeah i started trying to do that what did john say to you that's why i'm doing t-shirts now no he um he was very he was very respectful and he didn't laugh at me and he didn't ridicule

me and he said well you know i'm happy to help you and this is this is how i've done it and and i wouldn't have been able to do it if it wasn't for him isn't that amazing yeah and i think the amount of help that i got from people who believed in what i was doing or what i wanted to do was was immense and essential. And so then I started doing ready-to-wear. I've recently started doing more outerwear. It's expensive. Making ethical fashion is not cheap, and you don't make a lot of money back on it. And one of the biggest complaints I get from customers and from fans and readers is, why is your stuff so expensive?

And I say, I wish I could sell you a $50 pair of shoes. That would require cheap toxic materials, cheap labor. It would require all the things that I am against. And the whole reason I'm in the fashion world is to change those things, not to create cheap fashion. So it's... And ultimately over time, if you can build, you know, a significant customer base that's loyal and other designers start to do the same, then you'll be able to get economies of scale through volume. Yes. Right. But you're a pioneer, you know, you're out there trying to do this before those sort

of mass chains of production exist. Well, I think it comes from also re-education. It's like we have to start talking about these things and what are things that we can do as, you know, vegans or people that want, you know, to support the planet and want to not have a heavy footprint, you know, here in our lives, what can we do? And I think, you know, that was my experience. And when I entered the fashion business, I had so many people help me. And I think the reason so many people are so willing to help you is because this gig is one of the toughest gigs. It's one of the toughest

things you could ever do. So if they see somebody that has the fire that wants to do it, it's almost like an unspoken fraternity or something. I had so many people share with me, or I could have never done any of it. But I think that we have to start talking, broaden this discussion from the food that we put on our plate to really looking at the impact globally of all of our decisions. And so we need to start offering, you know, an alternative perspective. So maybe one perspective would be, you know,

start to shift your awareness and really invest in something like know that you're going to pay a little bit more for what you're providing, but know that it's okay and that we're going to start to have like more of a long run view instead of, you know, this immediate gratification. Well, your consumer choices are as much political choices as anything else. You're making a statement, you're voting, you're standing for something. And that has value. And it's about being conscious of your environment. And, and I think what you were alluding to, not alluding to, you were actually saying straight up, like fashion is how you present yourself to the world. If there's anything

that's going to, you know, kind of create a statement about who you are and what you mean and what's important to you, what you're wearing is a pretty strong, you know, indicator. It is. And again, it's totally undervalued. And I think that in the same way that the best argument for veganism is not a verbal argument, it's a plate of amazing vegan food. Or an impeccably tailored suit or a beautiful pair of shoes. Like that's how you're going to shift consumer choice. We live in a culture where aesthetics are, they reign supreme. And if what you're making happens to be ethical, but it's superior, it's designed in a superior way with superior materials, that in itself is an argument for what you believe in. And that's a more effective argument than, than trying to point out all the reasons why.

And that, I think that's a call to action for people to really take aesthetics seriously and to, and to really understand. I think it's the, the perceived correctness of beauty never overcomes the correctness of being, being right. And I think that,

um, if we can make beauty correct in both ways, then that is going to, you can't argue with that. Um, the, the scary thing about fashion is that the industry is accelerating that the season,

the way, the way that the industry operates on a seasonal basis, you know, we see change over. And there's this idea that with each new season, there's improvements, that we're working towards something, that there's some telos, some final purpose, some end vision in sight. The singularity.

Every time we have a new collection presented on the runway we're like one step closer to what but it's nothing it's nothing it's insane it's repetition and regurgitation manic it's well it's just it's fomenting demand out of nothing right i mean julie would tell these stories about how crazy her life was because you're constantly trying to feed this beast and you just like it oh it just completely consumes every minute of your waking day and ultimately you know it just it was i mean talk about sustainability it wasn't sustainable for her life to continue it um so how are you like managing all of that how are you managing all of that? How are you doing? It's hard. I resist the fashion calendar, which is really, really problematic. The fashion calendar demands that in January I do market.

In February I do fashion week. Then I immediately get on the next season and prepare for market and prepare for fashion week. It's a hamster wheel and you can't get off of it. And it gets faster and faster and more demanding as you go. And to fight the, to fight for slow fashion is very challenging. I look at my Instagram feed of, of the fashion, the fashion people that I follow who are at Paris fashion week right now, the men at men's week. the fashion people that i follow who are at paris fashion week right now the men at men's week and i i get this feeling of like oh i should be there why are like i need to be represented i need to be showing my stuff how come i'm not there and then i have to remind myself that that is not

the life i want to live i don't want to be running around the globe constantly ready for the you know the second you show something it's out of date and you have to move on to the next thing it's transient it's non-stop and that system is going to self-destruct it can't go on the way it's going much longer when you look at a store like gap or you know those the the seasons change maybe seven to eight times a year for them it isn't two seasons anymore for some of these big companies every weeks, they're changing out new styles. You cannot compete with that. You can't keep up with it. Right. And the most successful companies are the ones that have the designers or the owners that literally are recreating all the time. They never stop. So you show your collection, but then they go home and then the next day you're whipping out a new style, a new style.

Things just keep coming in the room. Like know it's it's constant constant and it drives people i mean people kill themselves there are designers who were driven to the point of suicide because of the industry and it is not it is not an easy it's it's a it's a cutthroat industry. It is not a nice industry. People are not nice. And it's all about who can make the coolest stuff in the moment that can follow up with even cooler stuff in the next moment and never take a break. And so what part does... Have you researched customization and the part that that plays in making the garment unique? and the part that that plays in making, making the garment unique. But like, let's say that you had like a base fabric or like, you know, a special, you know, a special future leather that's just constant. But then what about,

what about the possibility of people customizing that that would, that would make it different. And then you're not having to commit to the fabric because you're in trouble also even more because you're sourcing overseas. So you have to be six to eight months ahead in order to get it through customs and all that. I think that the aesthetic of brave gentleman is very classic menswear. It's stuff that doesn't really change with trends.

You can kind of step outside of that cycle, right? It's a great suit, you know? Yeah. They're going to be subtle differences, you know, that're slowly going to morph over the years but generally and that's what a tailor is for you get a great suit and you adjust it if your body adjusts and you have the lapels changed a little bit if you didn't like the style but you invest in a good suit and it should last you a decade um and with shoes and boots the same thing these are things that should last you a decade. And with shoes and boots, the same thing. These are things that should last. It should be investment pieces and they should defy trends. You should never buy something that's trendy.

And I think that that's part of the mentality. The problem is if you even look 100 years ago, people owned two or three outfits. And they would rotate them and that was it. And now people don't know what to do with the amount of stuff that they have. Right, right, right. And all these clothes are overflowing and it's just, it's nuts. So Brave Gentleman, we're really trying to provide classic styles. We re-release the same styles every season with maybe a different material or maybe we've upgraded and updated the way that

it's made and improved it. That's the goal for me is I would love to have one collect an annual collection, one collection a year. I would love for it to be able to, you know, accommodate both seasons and, and then just let it, let it sort of become divine. Right. And then people let it sort of become. Let it not be divine. Right. And then people, you know, the idea of customizing, I think, is up to the individual who buys it to style it. If you're making classics, it's about how you wear it. It's about who you are. And it's not about, you know, getting a shirt with a specific graphic on it or something. It's about having these very sort of standard things that fit well, that look good on you

and they what is the word I'm looking for? Accommodate your other choices. Yes, they accommodate you as an individual and make you look good. You want to wear the clothes, you don't want the clothes to wear you. They accent you. I want to talk about

masculinity. What's that? The discerning brute. No, you talked earlier about you sort of had this punk rock ethos as a kid and then we talked about kind of the transitory aspect of maybe today's youth with respect to how

clothes inform identity. It's just not punk rock anymore to wear a leather jacket. It's meaningless, right? Like a lot of these tropes, to use a word you used earlier, really don't carry the same kind of gravitas that they once did. And so, you know, in some respects,

maybe clothes have been, you know, sort of deprived of that power that they once had in certain eras, because there was less, there was more permanence in that identity that I think you adopted, right? And how does this kind of inform now where we're at, like, in terms of what it means to be an iconoclast, or what does it really mean to be punk rock? And I think that, you know, where you stand, and, stand, and disabuse me of this idea if I'm

stating it incorrectly, but what's more punk rock, what's more hardcore than taking a stance against a giant industry for a higher ethical perspective on things? I mean, that's a ballsy thing to do. It's a courageous thing to do. It's not a popular thing to do it's a courageous thing to do it's not a popular thing to do it requires a you know a backbone and a sense of self and everything that you know punk is about thank you you know it's true my inner 14 year old would be yeah i mean like whether you're john joseph you know ranting about gmos or you know know, whatever it is, like there's a, there's a very kind of like, you know, uh, intentional, um, and there's a, there's a very intentional conviction about a point of view that, that contravenes, you know, popular culture that I think is, you know, at times unpleasant for other people because it challenges them. And that's really what punk is about at its at its true core right it it's a it's an interesting ideology to uh to to resist to try

to bring about change to you know fight the system essentially and i think that those ideologies are very tied into hardcore and punk rock music. And the bands that I grew up listening to were empowering in that sense. I would listen to bands who would tell me that I can change the world. I can make these decisions. And not only can I do it, but it's cool and it's admirable to do those things. To be complacent, to be apathetic. These are not things to aspire to. But we have industry working very hard to get kids to believe that being apathetic is cool. Not giving a shit is the new, that's the new rebellious thing to do.

That to rebel against a perceived culture of do-gooders is the real rebel. To not care. And that's easy, you know. to rebel against a perceived culture of do-gooders is the real rebel to, to not, not, not care. And that's easy. You know, I think that, yeah,

it's lazy too. It's lazy and it's easy and it's the path of least resistance to power. When, when we, when I talk about, I do a presentation called fashion and animals and I talk about the aesthetic lure of, of fictitious evil and how villains have such a lure because in depictions of evil in Hollywood, you know, we have characters that are shadowy and sexy and dangerous.

And this is how evil is perceived by mainstream America, at least, that it's this very attractive thing. stream america at least that it's this very attractive thing you know when you look at vampires when you look at um most villains in film are there's something you know they're more desirable yeah dangerous and sexy they're sexualized yeah yeah and i think that the the lure of that of that fictitious evil is much more attractive to people than the lure of fictitious heroism that heroism is looked at as you know it's it's a lot of work to be a hero you have to have values and consistency and knowledge and these things are not something that you just come across to be to be a villain is easy you can be totally nuts you can be bonkers and still have power you don't have to justify anything you're

doing look at someone like Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians. She was, you know, out of her mind, but powerful. And now she's become this icon celebrated in the fashion world, that she's no longer a villain. She's this fabulous, eccentric, you know, fashionista. And so, you know, being a hero is hard. It's a lot of work. So, you know, being a hero is hard. It's a lot of work. So if I want to have power and I don't want to put in the work, then I'm going to be a villain. If I want to have power and I have the patience and the discipline to do work, then you can be a hero. And that's sort of the perception that it's boring to be a do-gooder, like we said before. But in reality, really bringing about change, really being somebody who is changing the world and challenging the status quo, it is visionary and intoxicating and beautiful. And I think that that is underappreciated by a lot of people who haven't had a glimpse of that. How does that inform your idea of masculinity? I mean, you know, both of your entities, you know, Discerning Brute and Brave Gentleman, like these conjure up, you know, and sort of make you ponder and consider

what your idea of what it is to, you know, to actually be a man. And what does that mean in modern society? Well, I acknowledge that we live in a male-dominated culture. We live in a patriarchy. We value patrilineage over matrilineage and all of our religious heritage and all of our cultural heritage. And we live in a culture where men still, you know, have power over everyone else, over children, over women,

over, you know, over people that are considered others over animals. So there's power in, in masculinity. And I think that a lot of men are afraid of showcasing compassion or showcasing empathy because it compromises their masculine identity. That we've been told that these behaviors, these characteristics of empathy are relegated to the realm of the feminine. Characteristics of empathy are relegated to the realm of the feminine and if you are an empathetic person if you are a compassionate person if you care if you care about people animals the planet you are compromising your masculinity you're compromising your ability to do what it is believed that men need to do and men need to be able to you know bring home the bacon without caring about how that's done.

And I think that when you look at something like the stock market, it's this manifestation of masculinity in this very mainstream way where there aren't indicators for well-being in the stock market. You can't measure that. So when something is not controllable, when something is not measurable, it can't bring about change and to be a hero that a lot of these qualities of have of needing strength and needing needing a backbone as you said and and having discipline and these can be these can be seen as very masculine qualities and that doesn't mean women can't also do it people who identify as women are certainly discerning brutes and brave gentlemen as well. But I also realized that I'm not attempting to be a perfect example of what, of what our culture should be. I'm manipulating a concept and playing around with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's powerful too, because of course the great irony is that, um, is too, because, of course, the great irony is that true masculinity demands a sense of respect and responsibility in the relegation of the power that comes with being a masculine force in our culture, right?

And so what does that mean? That means that, you know, somebody who is truly, truly, truly masculine understands that that benevolence is just as important as the exercise of that power, whether it's to oppress or to uplift. If you watch Gladiator, right? Like he's very benevolent in his sort of exercise of the limited power that he has throughout that movie. And he's a hero, right? He's taking the hard road. But the truly masculine person is the person that really kind of understands the complexity of that. Like a great leader, the great leaders throughout history that we look at were the ones that were the most compassionate. And I think that when you get down to those great leaders, it isn't even necessarily masculinity that they're embodying. It's humanity that they're embodying. This idea that the masculine and the feminine can come together and can coexist

in this idea of what it means to be a human being. We all have masculine characteristics. We all have feminine characteristics. But we live in this culture that likes to put everything into a little box and define it and say, this is who you are, and this is who you are. And that, I think, is very limiting. And it's so limiting for men. Men are so scared of being, I remember being a young boy and paying so careful attention to, okay, I can't cross my legs this way. I can't hold my body this way. I can't, you know, look at my nails this, this way. You know, there's all these little behaviors that we're trained to do to not be perceived as feminine. And, and I remember those fears of like, oh, I can't let, you know, I can't cross my legs

sitting like this. And there are, in the mainstream, the way that men are depicted, it's both insulting and limiting. So, when you look at a commercial, how are, you know, how are dads always depicted in commercials? Well, they're sort of, you know, very straight-laced and buffoons, you know. They're idiots. Yeah, they don't know how to cook, they're sort of, you know, very straight-laced and buffoons, you know. They're idiots. Yeah, they don't know how to cook. They don't know how to clean. Mom has to do everything.

But they, you know, they put on the tie and they go to work and they make money. And I think that that's, you know, so untrue in so many cases. I know so many wonderful fathers who know how to cook and clean and, you know, and the marriage or, you know, the relationship they have

is much more of a partnership and an equal partnership. And then you have this manifestation of masculinity in the mainstream where there are these four characteristics that define men. And I've said this before in a few other places, and excuse my french uh but they are uh ball which is sports bitches which is womanizing um beer which is drinking and beef which is meat eating so if you are not womanizing and playing sports and eating meat and drinking beer you are existing outside of the mainstream male identity within American culture, at least. And I think a lot of European culture as well. Although I think European men are allowed to be a little more feminine.

They're given... Oh, it's definitely different. Yeah. But in the sense of, you know, those four characteristics, I think those are sort of the underpinnings of masculine identity. And if you are somebody who doesn't like sports, or if you're somebody who isn't womanizing you know if you're if you're with the guys and you see like a hot lady walk by and you don't like cat call her then you're going to be questioned how come you don't think that woman's hot are you gay are you are you are you too feminine

and wait so balls bitches uh beef and what was the fourth one? Beer. Oh, beer. Right, right, right. Shit, I don't do any of that. I can't check one box. You do sports. Right, but not ball sports. Not really. Yeah, I do like very unmasculine sports.

But I think the type of sports you do would still impress the mainstream man. Yeah. All right, so maybe one out of three. Bench press. That's another b but uh yeah i think that that um right and if you're not doing if you're not doing even one like if you're doing three out of four that's still probably yeah you're okay well yeah but still like it's you know it's it could be tough it can be it depends on which one especially if you're lacking yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah i suppose but um but but right, like, yeah, if you're not, if you're not traveling in that direction, you know, kind of on that program, then you're left to field. And yeah, that's a problem. And I think there are a lot of men who, you know, don't identify with, you know, a couple of those, those bees, and they feel ostracized, or they feel like they

go and they kind of pretend to like it anyway, because they want to be, you know, part of that. And so there's a lot of suffering that comes with that. Oh, absolutely. A lot of quiet, silent suffering. A lot of young boys go through a phase of development where they have to quiet those feelings that they have about, you know, I remember hearing a story of a friend who was, he went hunting with his father for the first time and, you know, his father made him shoot the animal and when he cried, he told him, be a man. And I think that that really sort of summarizes it. It's like being a man means not crying means not empathizing and learn to shut that down learn to close down your emotional your emotional self learn to quiet those feelings

of guilt and those feelings of empathy because there are hindrance to to doing what needs to be done and i'm reading a book right now actually called Brutal. And it's really, really good. I haven't finished it yet. It's, I don't remember who it's, Brian Luke. Brian Luke. It's called Manhood. And the subtitle is Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals. in the idea of how controlling and dominating animals is essential to our understanding of what masculinity is.

And hunting is a central role in masculinity. The idea of the sacrifice, of sacrificing animals in order to showcase your abilities and your manhood. I feel like hunting exists on one level as sort of, you know, a last vestige of a rite of passage for young men in a culture in which we no longer really have those kinds of things to, you know, sort of bring a young man up into adulthood, you know? And I think if you look at most indigenous cultures or human cultures throughout history, they've been marked with, you know, very pronounced rites of passage for young people to sort of, you know, kind of symbolize their stepping into manhood. And we don't have that, you know.

And I think that that's problematic. You know, I think hunting represents an aspect of that for men. hunting represents an aspect of that for men. But I think the fact that we don't have some form of that, um, creates sort of, you know, I don't know if I, I don't know if it's fair to say gender confusion,

but, but at least like a, a lack of sort of appreciation or understanding or a simple guidebook or rule book for, you know, what is to be expected or, you know, what,

what, what qualifies as being, you know, what is to be expected or, you know, what qualifies as being, you know, a functional, responsible, masculine man in our culture. Yeah. And so we rely on advertising and, you know, it's like television commercials inform that. And is that even desirable? I mean, do we live in a post or are we moving towards a society that is beyond these very stringent gender identities this binary this male i mean i personally know many people who exist entirely outside of the gender binary

and there are it's definitely not well adjusted yeah like it's that's becoming definitely you know expanded yeah and i think that even though I think I identify as a masculine man, even though I also am a gay man. And I think that there are straight men who are more feminine than me. And I think that there are trans men who are more masculine than me. It's really interesting what has, what, what is happening with our ideas about gender in this culture and how tied they are to, when you look at, when you look at our religions and our history. And, um,

I mean, if you look at something like in the middle ages, the way that men dressed, so, you know, they were more decorated and more flamboyant than women. Um, and the,

the agenda, you know, there was, there's these fluctuations throughout history about how we embody the genders that we identify as. But right now, the one that we just talked about, I think is dominating this,

the embracing the idea of being a predator of being that, that is a, that is a masculine ideal. And really, I mean, spiritually and evolutionary, when we're coming into the embodiment of our true, you know, spiritual self, it's more of an androgynous expression because we both have male and female within us. And we both, whether you happen to be physically embodied as a male or a female,

still within that, when you become, you know, divinely balanced, you're expressing both feminine and masculine aspects really in an even way. So, it's, you know, different expressions are necessary or relevant at different times. It depends. So, you know, I agree with you. I think that as we continue to evolve, there's a lot more versions of the human being that is genderless. And it doesn't really have anything to do with sexual preference. It just has to do with how they were made and what is their expression as a human being. I agree. Yeah.

How can I be a better, brave, gentle man? Buy a pair of his shoes. Yeah. For sure. Definitely. Well, I'm like,

I'm already thinking like, where, where's the, where do I go and get fitted for this suit? You know, I gotta get, I gotta get one. I'm trying to do less custom made suits and more ready to wear suits because it's really,

it's really hard doing. Is it direct to consumer? I mean, you don't, are you, are you showing showing in retail spaces i would like to sell in retail spaces so i can't i can't really um this is one of the problems with fashion is that if you want to sell in stores your price point has to be higher because you need to make room for the retailer to make money too and if you undercut them i have a i have an online store and if i'm selling my shoes for half the price that the retailer would no one would carry it sure because because people would only you know they would feel i was undercutting them so there is something

called keystone markup which you know a lot of products go through and that is sometimes followed in fashion sometimes not i can't do it because if i were to do the standard markups i would have 500 shoes so i do sell my shoes cheaper than than they would be at a suggested retail price but i do want to sell to you know i would love to be carried at barney's i would love to be seen as a brand that is on par with those other brands and you know right now the only designer that's really at that level doing those things, well, two of them, mostly Stella McCartney and somewhat of Vivian Westwood, they are the only two designers I really know of who invest in sustainable materials that don't use fur, that have some sense of what's going on

with the livestock production connection to fashion. And they have gigantic budgets, and they're doing huge revenue and they're just in a position to be able to do that at scale. My parents were both public school teachers. Stella McCartney's father is a Beatle. So I had a little more challenge getting started. Not to say that she's not talented. I mean, she's amazing and she's an inspiration

and she's one of my personal heroes. And I love what she's done. But I'm just pointing out that a lot of people who make it in fashion are able to because they have the support system, of course. Yeah, and you really do need that. I mean, that definitely was my decision after slugging it out for six and a half years,

working 14-hour days. And then I just realized, you know, on my capital, personally funded, I could only exist at a certain level. Yeah. But, you know, I think, you know, it's so amazing to meet you and hear you speak. You're so articulate and you're so aligned with your purpose. Thank you. And I think, I mean, I would love to be in one of your classes. And I think you are, you know, you're a gift and you found your groove. And I know you're going to influence and inspire a lot of young minds. And I think it's just, we just need to start offering just

different perspectives and all of us need to just, you know, do it a different way. You know, just throw down and spend the extra money. You know, I've been looking at Stella McCartney shoes. I mean, how I usually am, I'm navigating it now because as I shop mostly in thrift stores and I try to use, you know, find, if I wear leather, it's something that's vintage or that's been worn before. If I wear leather, it's something that's vintage or that's been worn before. But I am an artist, and I do believe in the part of being human is expressing yourself through your clothes.

And I would never exist where I didn't care about fashion. It's not in my makeup. as I progress in going into approaching fashion in a ceremonial sort of approach and really think about, you know, customizing certain aspects of your wardrobe that are very, very specific to the individual. And I think that all of us can do that by kind of breaking out our inner artisan and, you know, collaborating with artists in the neighborhood or something, but definitely buying pieces from a designer like you who has taken all the time to resource and put so much care into this. And I already sent your link to my sons because I have my, our two sons who are 18 and 20 and then my nephew's 23. And they have been on the lookout for the last three months they've been researching consciously and ethically created clothes so they and they

haven't bought a thing yet you know they're they're actually have not been that uh involved in fashion they've been just sort of wearing what was ever in their closet or what they buy at the thrift store but they're musicians and they have an amazing band and they're going to be coming out with their first recording and so but their main thing is they're trying to research who's doing this in an ethical manner. And they're all vegan. And so it's really cool. So I sent them your link. And the music industry has been very supportive of Brave Gentleman, actually.

Oh, nice. I have Jared Leto was wearing my boots in a full-page spread in LA Confidential magazine. Is that what it's called? Yeah, LA Confidential. And there's Angelino. The big format page magazine. Yeah, I think it was LA Confidential. So he was in a full-page spread wearing my boots.

So cool. And Davey Havoc from AFI just got in touch. I just sent him a bunch of stuff to wear on, on an interview and I've gotten requests from Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Harrelson. And it's been nice to have that support from Hollywood because when, when someone in Hollywood is seen in your stuff, it sort of validates it in the mainstream. Um, but yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of, a lot of work that still needs to be done. I'd love to open a store in New York.

I'd love to have a flagship physical location for Brave Gentleman, but I can't do it alone. So if there's any angel investors listening. Any partners, step forward. What about even just doing a pop-up store? I've done pop-ups. Oh, you have? Yeah, I've done temporary pop-ups.

It would be nice to have sort of a home base, a destination to be able to do, you know, to have my inventory to do shipping from, to have a curated space that is getting foot traffic in places that are comparable. I would imagine it, you know, would have to be somewhere like Soho or the West Village or the East Village, somewhere where there's comparable menswear stores because I don't want it to be just for vegans. I want it to be people who just see a great shoe in the window and come in and they want it. And then the icing on the cake is that it's made ethically. And I really look forward to that day. I'm buying lottery tickets. That's awesome.

That's great. It'll happen. It's going to happen. We've only been doing this a couple of years. Look how far you've come. I know, but I'm like, you know, time's limited. We only have one life. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. We've only been doing this a couple of years. Look how far you've come. I know, but I'm like, you know, time's limited. It's all happening. I have a lot to do.

Yeah, and we got to get you to do some women stuff too. I get a lot. I'm planning on, I get a lot of requests from women and a lot of women do buy, who have bigger feet, do buy my smaller size shoes. But I want to release all of my designs in women's sizes because i think menswear for women is very very popular right now a lot of women love menswear and if it just was you know in their size yeah that it would be great um hey uh yeah that's cool all right well we gotta we gotta close it down in a minute but we didn't even talk about crossfit i know i was just gonna say that you read my mind because i was like before we close it down i gotta know how the crossfit's going because i know you

just you just pr'd your deadlift right well it wasn't no i pr'd the snatch oh the snap okay um and it's not what it sounds like a lot of people sort of giggle at that name don't giggle um the snatch is an olympic uh lifting technique where imagine that your your barbell with the weights are it's on the floor in front of your feet and um somehow through uh some magical actions it ends up over your head and you're in a squat and then you stand up um there there's a lot of technique in between the part where it's on the floor, the part where it's over your head. Um, and I, I PR which means I got a personal record of 135 pounds today for the snatch, which is, it's hard to do heavy snatches. So, um, yeah, my deadlift is closer

to in the, in the mid three hundreds approaching 400 range. Cool. And you've been doing CrossFit for a couple of years now. Yeah. I've been doing crossfit for a couple years now yeah i've been doing it for a couple years what inspired that honestly it was the fact that everybody there was paleo and it was it was like a bastion of paleo i was like i was like i could do that come on i i bet i could you know as a vegan go in there and like prove to all these paleo people that i can compete on you know on a similar level i'm not a pro i'm not going to the crossfit games but as a regular you know as a regular um person that goes to crossfit i i do i do try to be in the top five usually for performance for each each workout and i and i've

been mostly successful so i think i may have been in first place today. Let me check. Oh, wow. You can look on your phone. Does that create like a brain freeze for all the paleo people at your CrossFit gym? Or are they like... I wear some obnoxious vegan t-shirts. For some people, you know, it's an eye roll. For some people, they want to know like, how do you do this on, you know, eating nothing but lettuce? Well, that's your first problem. It would be hard if all you know eating nothing but lettuce well that's your first problem it probably

would be it would be hard if all you were doing i know i had actually a coach one of the coaches approached me and she's like i have this new student in one of my classes and she's super skinny and she's always complaining that she's sore and i just found out that she's vegan like i know you're vegan what are you doing to maintain your body weight? Like, how are you building strength? She didn't... Not just maintaining, you put on like 25 pounds of muscle. Yeah, I gained almost...

I'm approaching like 25, 30 pounds of muscle that I gained. And I've been vegan for 17 years. This is not, you know, muscle that I built while I was eating meat and then I suddenly became vegan. I'm a longtime vegan since right after. Since the movie. Yeah. Since that horrible movie that I saw.

Oh, so I was going to look at the PR board. Here we go. So I'm going to see. It's called Whiteboard. I'll see if somebody beat me. I'm sure somebody did. But if I'm in first place today, maybe the the blizzard kept a few oh there i am number one number one nice so wait this is like williamsburg crossfit like what's your what's the cross this

is crossfit virtuosity look at that like it's a special app for us this is called wadify uh-huh it's the app where you put in all of your scores and it keeps track so that is so it's not just about obsessing over what place you're in it's about it's about um tracking your progress knowing what what your one rep max is knowing what your five rep max is and but for me i mean it ended up it started out as this competitive thing where i was like i need to prove that a vegan can do this and it also ended up becoming a great community i am good friends with most of the people that i go to the gym with they're so friendly it's such a great group dynamic it's slightly competitive but mostly fun and i recommend it to anyone i think there's a lot

of stigma associated with it where it's being perceived as this sort of almost militarized form of exercise and it's hyper aggressive and but it's it's really fun and it's a it's the best workout i've ever had and in a short amount of time i can i can be in and out of the gym in one hour and have a good workout and for somebody that has a busy schedule i couldn't ask for when i used to go to the gym i'd be like i have to go to the gym and do the same thing and it'd be boring and i wouldn't see any progress in my body um but it's always with crossfit it's always different it's like almost every hour of the day i can go at 12 30 if i have a break i can go at 8 30 at night if that's the only free time i have and um i sound like i've been brainwashed i know i think you you have. It's also cool that you have the community, though.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. What they've done so marvelously is create real community around fitness. And regardless of your perspective or opinion on CrossFit and the particulars of the exercises, that's the game changer. You know what I mean? Yeah, you go to the gym, whatever. yeah that's the game changer you know what i mean to like it's different yeah you go to the gym whatever there's people there but they're not it's not a it's not exactly a you know mutually supportive community of people that like are cheering for you and all that kind of stuff i'm about i'm going to show you i put it on instagram because i like to you know provide people with

some motivation and inspiration about of the uh of the snatch you can see what it looks like maybe i described it incorrectly. But here. So the video is playing. There you go. Oh my goodness gracious. That looks really impressive. And then you get to like throw

the weight down. I'm done. You get the wristbands and the beard going on and the whole thing. It's fun. You look like a 1920's, right? That's very... It's fun. You look like a 1920s strongman, you know? That's what I was for Halloween. Oh, you were? I put on like a striped tank top and I got like a big curly mustache and I part my hair

in the middle. Did you see the video that Rich posted about the strongest man in the world? Oh, Patrick. Patrick Boubamian. Did you see the video? No, I didn't need to see the video. Rich was there yeah he was on stage when it happened i was on stage in toronto when he did that carry and i took a

little gopro video that is awesome thank you for doing that i'll show it to you afterwards i want to see it he's such a cool guy that was so inspiring i interviewed him a long time ago and he what struck me was how friendly super warm he was like such a such a nice guy well when you talk about like sort of inverting you know definitions of masculinity yeah like strongest guy in the i mean arguably one of the strongest people walking around the planet and also one of the most gentle kind friendly you know interesting people you're ever going to meet the gentle giant he Just a teddy bear. He is a brave, gentle man. He is.

Patrick, isn't he? And a discerning brute. He hopes so. He is, he is. I'm going to leave you with one final thought, which brings it back to your previous filmmaking aspirations. Yes. So has anybody made,

I mean, we're in this golden age of documentaries. Has anybody made a documentary that is kind of the forks over knives slash cowspiracy version of, you know, looking at the way the fashion industry works and the environmental implications and the ethical implications, you know, sort of. I mean, there's been films that have addressed specific issues like skin trade addressed, you know, fur, but nobody has made a film that really looks at the fashion industry under the umbrella of what it is and is addressing.

There's a blog called Not Vogue. And Not Vogue, you know, it's a great blog. It looks at fashion from its power structure, how criticizing the power power structure how it's this form of of identity control of social control essentially when you look at the people who are positions of power in the fashion industry the editors um the real decision makers the owners these major brands um there's a lot of social control that's being uh being you know set out onto the world um but there's all these elements and that's one of the problems why no one has done the documentary about it is because it's so complicated it's so

complex i'm currently working on a book called fashion and animals and it touches on a lot of these issues um i i believe that the fashion industry is needs to be approached from an intersectional standpoint. And for people who don't know what intersectional means, it was, um, it's a way of looking at things that has sort of a feminist, um, uh,

underpinning to it. Um, it's, it makes the argument that all oppressions are interconnected. So if there's a, when we look at the fashion industry, it's, it's ripe for in an inter

sectional analysis because it affects everyone and everything and you can't look at it without also bringing into impact like you know the socioeconomic conditions of wherever these workers live and you know their access to other things that they need in their life. Yeah, you can't address the issue with the sweatshop without also addressing the issue of the pollution, without also addressing the issue of the animal that was, you know, killed to be tanned, which caused the pollution, which is affecting the people who are in the tannery. You know, these oppressions are intrinsically connected and we have to approach it that way. We can't say let's address this one problem. Let's say you can't be reductionist. Yeah. So, um, that's cool.

So how far along are you in the book? I released a preview to the book, which was about 50 pages, uh, at an event at the Alexander Gray associates gallery in New York city. Um, back in September. Since then, I've had no free time. I'm working on it. I hope my book agent isn't listening to this. But I'm working on it, I promise. I'm trying to have it done.

Do you have a publisher already, or is that all lined up? I don't yet have a publisher, but I do have an agent who has very good relationships with publishers, and I just have to finish the damn book. All right. Well, I'm going to hold you publicly accountable to doing that. I need to make a promise so that I actually have to live up to it. Yeah, and I think where Rich is going is that we also want you to promise that you're going to make that documentary.

I would love to make the movie based on the book. Yes. I think I envision, I mean, as a filmmaker, as a person who works, you know, make that documentary i would love to make the movie based on the book yes i i think i i envision i mean as a filmmaker as a person who works you know i just last week i was editing commercials for in order to fund my fashion that's right um yeah i have a day job in order to in order to fund the fashion design so glamorous yeah so um we have a sustainability problem. People are like, do you sleep? I do a little bit. Um, but yeah, I can envision what the film would look like and how it would be. And, and, but the problem with film is that you got to get people to see it.

And we live in a world that's inundated with media. How do you get the right people and enough people to sit down and look at something, make a great film. something? Make a great film. Yeah, make a great film. I mean, look at the Cove. It won an Academy Award. And the dolphin slaughter is happening. And the sushi is still happening.

Yeah, as we speak, the animals are being slaughtered in Japan. And not to say it didn't bring about a huge awareness. I mean, it did. It brought about so much awareness. And there's so many more activists focused on it. But has it resolved the problem yet? No, and I think that that really sort of affected me very deeply to know that a film, an Academy Award-winning documentary, is not going to have immense and swift impact on stopping something

terrible yeah but then you also have other cases like you know the documentary was it black fish you know the that's true you know the orca whale that had a huge impact yeah and then you know and look at how forks over knives have changed the habits of millions of people very very true and very soon to change many people, Cowspiracy. Have you seen Cowspiracy? I did. Cowspiracy is fantastic. And did you see The Ghosts in Our Machine? No.

I haven't seen that. Beautiful film. You have to see that. It's probably, I loved the way the production value, I loved how it looked, how it was shot. And I also loved, it did a very interesting thing where it didn't make you, the viewer, accountable. It was about this documentary photographer who went and shot animals in these various situations. She went undercover on a fur farm and she went documenting animals, sorry, in all of these different scenarios.

And it became about her and her struggle and her story. So you could watch it without feeling like judged. You're being accused of something, right? And I think that that was a really brilliant technique. And it's a gorgeous, gorgeous film. Obviously, the subject and the filmmaker is a photographer, so I wouldn't expect anything less. Cool, man.

Well, thanks for talking to us. Sure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being with us in the blizzard. No, that was a pleasure and an honor. The sun has gone down. And you're inspiring, and you need to keep doing what you're doing, man.

I appreciate what you do. I have a huge amount of respect for the mission that you're on. And this podcast is about anything. It's about how do you better access and express that more authentic aspect of who you are. And I see somebody who is very true to that. And it was great to sit down with you, man. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Cool. So if you're digging on Joshua and you want to connect with him, go to bravegentleman.com and the discerningbr.com which is more the blog yeah uh and you're on all the social media yeah you can find me on instagram at at the discerning brute twitter is discerning brute and i'm on facebook as well so say hi there you go all

right cool man thanks peace plants namaste Thanks. Peace. Plants. Namaste. All right, we did it. Well, that should give you more than a few things to think about next time you go to the mall, right? I hope you enjoyed it. In fact, I'm going to see Joshua today. I'm going to check out his line, and I think I'm going to pick up a few of his items. Pretty excited about that. Send me your questions for future Q&A podcasts.

And to find all the information, education, products, tools, resources, and inspiration you need to take your health, wellness, fitness, and self-actualization to the next level, go to richroll.com. Peruse our nutrition products, our education products, and yes, our garments, all made with 100% organic cotton, I might add. If you like this podcast, please take a moment to give us a review on iTunes, and you can pick up the free app to listen to episodes older than the most recent 50 that you see on iTunes. Thanks for supporting the show. Keep telling your friends. Keep using the Amazon banner ad. Keep sharing it on social media. Keep Instagramming it.

I love that. Don't forget to tag me, at Rich Roll. Okay, you guys. See you next week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.