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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:32Rich Roll?

  That's Jeff Castiles, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What do you know? What's going on? What is the news? What's up? I am Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the show. This is the podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers, across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. And the goal is simple. To help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves, to embrace

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  our inner truth and express that more deeply. So, thank you so much for tuning into the show, for subscribing on iTunes, for checking out my weekly newsletter, for giving us a review on iTunes, and always making sure to use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. The banner ad's right there on the podcast page, you can't miss it. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It's just a really straightforward, simple, great, free way to support the mission, and it really does help us out a lot. So, thank you so much to everybody who has made a practice of that. Got my buddy Jeff Castelaz on the show today. He's a great guy, super interesting guy, and I'm really excited about

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  this one. I think you guys are in for a treat. Jeff is a high-level music industry executive. He is an avid cyclist. He is a philanthropist. He's just an amazing guy with a really compelling and at times, heart-wrenching life story and service mission. And I'm going to tell you all about him in more detail in a minute, but first...

• 3:23Rich Roll?

  Alright, so Jeff Castelaz. You guys are in for a treat, I'm telling you. There's so much good stuff here. Jeff has lived the life, man. What can I say? The highest of highs, the lowest of lows. In many ways, Jeff is a survivor. He's really gone through it and come out the other side, not just intact, but with a sense of purpose and service that kind of guides his trajectory. And when we first sat down to record this podcast, it was a few weeks ago, at the time Jeff was serving as president of Elektra Records. It's a pretty big job, right? Like, sitting kind of high atop the music business hierarchy,

• 4:06Rich Roll?

  and much of our conversation is kind of about what it's like to run a major record label. And it's really funny, because just a couple days ago, he texted me and he said, "You might want to think about reframing how you're going to introduce me in this podcast." And I had a little link there. It was a link to an article in Billboard Magazine that was all about how Jeff was stepping down as president of Electra, effective...

• 4:32Rich Roll?

  September 30th, so by the time you hear this, he will no longer be president of Elektra Records, which is kind of hilarious. But nonetheless, I think it's still interesting to hear about that experience and what that's all about. While at Elektra, he brought in amazing acts and talent, people like, people in bands like Fitz and the Tantrums, St. Motel, The Moth and the Flame, Anderson East and Kaleo. He worked with incredible acts like Ed Sheeran and Kitten while there. And before Elektra, Jeff was CEO of Dangerbird Records, which is a record label and management entity and licensing entity that he co-founded in 2003. And while he was there, he played a key role in the careers of acts like Silver Sun Pickups,

• 5:17Rich Roll?

  again Fitz and the Tantrums, BDI, all kinds of amazing musical acts. And now, in the wake of putting Elektra behind him, he's going back to his roots. Back to Cast Management, which is the management entity that he co-founded in 1992. And it's going to be exciting to see what he does in this capacity. But Jeff is not on the podcast because he's a big music industry muckymuck. That's a very interesting story, but there is so much more to him. Jeff's life story and how he not only emerged and survived out of his incredibly challenged upbringing

• 5:58Rich Roll?

  in Milwaukee to become so successful in this, in this business, well, that would be enough of a compelling story, but there's much more to it. In 2009, just six days after his sixth birthday, Jeff and his wife Joanne lost their son Pablo to cancer, which of course, nobody would wish such a fate on, on anybody, on any parent. And at the time, Jeff shared what I can only imagine was the most incomprehensible and profound degree of pain. He shared it openly on a blog, which is how I first found out about him,

• 6:39Rich Roll?

  because I found myself reading this blog and just riveted by this story as it unfolded about what he was going through, what his family was going through, what Pablo was going through. And in the wake of Pablo's passing... Joanne and Jeff decided to channel their grief into service and formed this foundation called Pablove, which is a pediatric cancer charity which funds innovative pediatric cancer research and programs for kids and families who are living with childhood cancer. And to date, it's been incredibly successful. It's raised nearly $10 million. And an avid cyclist, you know, Jeff is a guy who sought refuge and answers on the bike,

• 7:23Rich Roll?

  much like I have done. Every year, the Pablove Foundation hosts a big charity ride called Pablove Across America. And this week, beginning on October 5th, in fact, marks the start of Pablove's 7th annual week-long cycling event. It's an event where 40 cyclists this year are going to ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco to raise funds and awareness for childhood cancer, which is really cool. And we talk a lot about that. Jeff's a really amazing guy, is incredibly charismatic. You can really feel his love of people, of life, and of music. His love for his son is just undeniable. And the story of Pablove, I think,

• 8:03Rich Roll?

  is going to leave you with a sense of gratitude. And my hope is that you will have a more profound appreciation for the now. This is a long conversation, but it's well worth the investment in time. It's a conversation that explores music, of course, Jeff's love for music, what he'd learned as an entrepreneur in this creative industry, his love of cycling. It's a conversation about childhood pain and overcoming that. It's about addiction and recovery. It's about healing past wounds. It's about parenting and family and the incomprehensible

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  pain of losing a child and figuring out how to reassemble life in the wake of such an incomprehensible tragedy. And it's about finding meaning and solace and purpose in giving back. So, without further ado, enjoy my talk with Jeff Castelaz.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  Thanks for taking the time, man.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. I've wanted to do your podcast since you started it.

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  I'm glad we're here, man. It was a long time coming. It's one of those things where it's like, we actually haven't spent that much time in person, but I feel like I know you pretty well.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

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

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the, the bottom line is, is that I really stumbled into the music business when I was somewhere between 18 and 19 years old. And I really sort of just created my own path without even knowing what the hell I was doing. So I really just, I, I loved music and music was my savior. It was my best friend, you know, my records or my stepbrother's records or somebody's record that I borrowed. They became my best friends growing up in a household that, that just, that wasn't a whole lot of fun and wasn't, frankly, wasn't a safe place. And so I got really into the songs. I got really into what was going on

• 10:41Speaker 01

  in the songs, even before I even really knew that I was doing that, I was doing that, if you know what I mean. I would feel the different parts of the songs and really try and understand like, why did the keyboard player play that part? And the whole reason that I do what I do is because I have this unquenchable thirst of this passion for finding music that makes me feel something.

• 11:08Speaker 01

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

• 11:49Speaker 01

  at the time, the epitome of this dude that grew up in a basement in Milwaukee, like, reading the liner notes of Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Oz, and Black Sabbath Paranoid, and Foreigner Four, you know, trying to understand who are all these people in the credits. And it sounds novel, and it's probably a cliche that's been told in 50 bad movies by now, but it's true to my life. And so, I'm still that kid. So, a day in my life at the office is basically finding artists that make me feel something and then figuring out a way to get them into as many people's ears, and way more importantly, into as many people's hearts as possible.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  So, a successful band for me is one that really makes people feel something. X percent of those bands are going to be bands that sell. That's just a fact, right? I mean, it's like fishing or playing odds. Silversun Pickups, who come from the neighborhood where we're sitting right now, were one of those bands. And they had these amazing songs, and they still do have amazing songs. And unorthodox songs, you know, they're a bit long, they don't follow the traditional pop song structure.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  But they proved the point I'm making, which is that they made people feel something to such a degree that you go to their concerts and people are crying. You know, they're basically going like, man, you, you're like saying shit that I, you're basically describing my life and you don't even know me.

• 13:24Rich Roll?

  When you talk about the music making you feel something, I mean, can you, is that something that you feel like you can quantify or articulate, or is it just an instinctual gut thing where you just, you just know it when you hear it?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  All, all of the above, and it's, and obviously the, the purest form of what I'm saying is completely subjective, you know? You and I can both put a song on right now in the headphones that we're wearing, and you might be like, yeah, whatever dude, and I might be like, you know, freaking out.

• 13:51Rich Roll?

  Transformed.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So, a song that actually isn't a song that I grew up with, it's a song that I've fallen in love with way more recently, um, is this song by, by the artist Chris Bell, who was in Big Star, and it's a song that he wrote and recorded, um, after the band broke up, um, and it's called "I Am The Cosmos", and it's just such an amazing song. It's bittersweet, which is like my wheelhouse, you know, it's like this major minor thing, so it's driving, which is sort of like a positive thing, it's an aggressive thing, and then, but it's very, it's very somber and very sad, like Elliott Smith, like many

• 14:31Speaker 01

  of the Beatles songs, and so it's both, you know, up and down at the same time. And, um, it's like the high that people try to go for all the time now.

• 14:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Right? Cocaine and pills.

• 14:44Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  At the same time.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  At the same time, right. "I'm going up and I'm going down. Uh-oh, what's that feeling in my chest?" Um, so yeah, I can quantify it, it's just that, you listen to, um, the, the songs that formed Who I Am. Are um, the Beatles um, Love Me Do, which my brother Scott used to play over and over and over because it would make me cry when I was like two years old. It scared the shit out of me.

• 15:11Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Because that harmonica riff in the beginning of the song, that which is like the hook of the song, it just scared me. Because it's like that minor sort of wailing sound. And then my mom-

• 15:22Rich Roll?

  It's a weird song because on a surface level, it it comes off like a ditty, but there's a lot more going on with that song.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, but that was the secret of the Beatles, right? George Martin, who produced the Beatles, was a comedy producer for BBC.

• 15:36Rich Roll?

  I had heard that.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Right, and so what do what do comedy directors or comedy producers need? They need to know timing. They need to know um, all of the various aspects of emotion, right? Because they're trying to convey this shit at the time, just through sound. There's no, you know, he wasn't working in the visual medium, he was working only in sound. It's about timing, it's about, you know, what sound is going to convey what emotion, humor, sadness, anger. And the Beatles were masters of that with him, and they only ever worked with him. And that song to me gets it, and then my mom would play Neil Diamond Forever in Blue Jeans, which is a similar, you know, driving yet very sad song.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  And I'll stop there, right? You listen to Silver Sun Pickup's Lazy Eye. What is it? It's like this driving major minor song. You listen to Fifth in the Tantrums Money Grabber, exactly the same thing. And and uh, many of the bands I've managed, I mean Dropkick Murphys are probably not known for being, you know, a somber band, they're known for being like an aggressive punk band, um, who who write these amazing anthemic songs, but there's always songs on all of their records that do capture the sadness and and the moments in between, you know?

• 16:51Rich Roll?

  Right, so there's this through line with all the acts that you're working with, where you can identify that. I mean, is that- I would imagine it kind of transports you back into that, you know, basement bedroom. And, you know, the self to, you know, the pain body of, you know, what you had to kind of endure to survive with, you know, 10 kids around and divorced parents and your dad being a barkeep and all this kind of craziness that was happening around you.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I've worked through, I don't think I'd ever say all, I don't think anybody could ever say all of that shit. I mean, how could you ever say that? But I've worked through a lot of it and I have a very, very good relationship with my past now. Like, it's okay, you know, it's just stuff that happened. And in many respects, I now have the perspective that growing up in an unsafe house, you know, abuse and neglect, you know, all that stuff. Seeing as how it's the hand I was dealt and there's nothing I can do to change it now, it actually was helpful because it made me who I am.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Well, it definitely, I think it gave you, it instilled in you survivor instincts. And this kind of streetwise, you know, scrappy, you know, energy that allowed you to become this, you know, young, energetic entrepreneur.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, my dad's corner bar. And he had to figure out a way to extract more than just 40 cents for a glass of beer from customers. He had to figure out a way to sell them food and to get them to put money on the bar for football pools and baseball pools and all this BS. And raffling things off, I mean, literally raffling things off. And there's a hustle to that.

• 18:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, salesman.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It's a salesman and he could talk to anybody about anything, regardless of whether they were Native American dudes,

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Puerto Rican or Mexican dudes, you know, white dudes of all different varieties. My dad was, uh, could really talk to anybody and I really picked that up from my dad.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I feel like you have that.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  My dad and I, I have to forgive my dad like every nine months because he forgets that I've already forgiven him. You know, I say the thing we are taught to do, like I forgive you for everything you did and didn't do, right? Because the part that you didn't do is like, dude, you were my parent and you kind of like left me with nothing. Like when I was like 10, you know what I mean? Like you, you just weren't around. But it's cool because that's when I was listening to all those records. So if I had like a parent like saying, hey, come and do your homework at the kitchen table.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  I don't know what I'd be doing right now. I'd be an accountant.

• 19:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Wait, did I just disaccountants? I'd just be a different person.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  Accountant is always the default, like, you know, career when you want to make that kind of a point.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  Um, I feel like, tell me what you think of this, like, you know, we're around the same age. I'm a couple of years older than you, but, you know, there was that, that time when you're, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, that I can remember very distinctly, just, you know, laying on my bed, holding an album, you know, reading the liner notes, listening to it, discovering new music that you had to like work for to discover, and letting it kind of like play out in real time.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Rich Roll?

  You know, and I feel like that is something that, you know, this new generation of young people, they're just, it's just not part of their experience, right? Like, I think that's a lost thing. I mean, there's, of course, this kind of hipster recapturing of the vinyl movement and, and kind of analog and all that, and that's all very cool. But I feel like that's, that's still kind of like a marginal thing. It's not like a mainstream, you know what I mean?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  The average, like, teenage kid who's going through something, who's trying to discover a musician that's going to speak to them and give them some level of comfort.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  I don't know if it's the same thing anymore.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  It's not, and, um, you know, we had, we grew up in the heart of the one-to-many reality, right? We had Walter Cronkite, who told us the evening news, and we had, um, you know, if you say the name of, you know, REO Speedwagon, or Grandmaster Flash, or Michael Jackson, tens of millions of people had that exact same experience all around the country and all around the world.

• 21:10Rich Roll?

  Or foreign, or, or Boston, or the Steve Miller Band. It doesn't matter, you know, whatever it is that spoke to you.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everybody was having the same experience because information traveled slowly.

• 21:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And when things broke, they broke.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Wider and deeper, if you will, right? And now it's like, dude, you had like a SoundCloud moment. And it was just that, and now it's over. And now you have to figure out, what is your next Vine video gonna look like? Because people forgot about you a day and a half later. That's the reality of it. And it's different. I don't think it's worse, but it's different. And on the other flip side, look at a band like Van Halen during their first go around with David Lee Roth. You know, one could add up the number of songs they ever released. It's probably like 56 songs ever. The Smiths were the same way. They released more songs, but there was a finite number of songs.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  If you're an artist today, you can put up a song like that and the entire world has it. And it can just be a throwaway song that you just wrote and you think is cool.

• 22:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Whereas back then, you had to spend thousands of dollars recording. We grew up in a way where our imaginations were captivated by tuning into a syndicated radio show. I used to tune into the radio show Metal Shop. And I didn't really identify as a heavy metal fan, but I liked many of those bands that they would play on that show. And I would tune into it secretly because I wasn't allowed to like listen to music at that hour, like nine o'clock on a Sunday. And if they were interviewing like Ozzy, or if they were interviewing, you know, Rat, whose first studio album I really liked a lot. Had incredible guitar solos. It's ridiculous music, but I can't lie now and say that I wasn't into it. I was.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  I really liked the first two Motley Crue records, you know, Too Fast for Love and then whatever the first electoral record was called. But, you know, those were moments and you, you.

• 23:11Rich Roll?

  You had to be, you had to show up when that was on.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you were screwed.

• 23:14Rich Roll?

  Or you were, it was over forever. And I can remember taping the radio.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, pause tapes.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 23:21Rich Roll?

  And you're, I mean, so it's interesting because you're, I mean, your career has like navigated this whole trajectory, right? Like you began in one era and now we're in a very different era in terms of how we, you know, how we, you know, enjoy, digest, distribute music.

• 23:39Speaker 01

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

• 24:23Speaker 01

  so few people are going to make all the money. Um, and so many people are going to get listened to, but they're never gonna sort of feel the financial import of that. I love music and I, and for me, um, let me just say this, like, music is a weapon to me. I don't listen to music because like, um, I wanna like feel good and I'm gonna clean the house now. Like it's not, I don't do that. Music is a weapon for me. And I want, I wanna feel myself bleeding. Or if I turn the tables and put on the right song, I wanna like, you

• 25:03Speaker 01

  know, I wanna get back at somebody over there through this song. You know, we've all just seen Straight Outta Compton, like, you know, hopefully.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  I haven't seen it yet. I still want to see it.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like the moment, it's like the cultural touch point of the year, I think. And I think it's gonna, and I, and I hope it's gonna be a big, big film financially and awards wise and other, because it's telling a true story that changed the world. I mean, those dudes were a wellspring for so much stuff, right?

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it was huge. And coinciding with the riots and all of that.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, it was a gigantic cultural moment.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And like, Watching that movie, it's not my story. I grew up in a different sort of hell than those dudes did, but I grew up in a hell of my own. And those songs are bombastic and outright violent.

• 25:51Rich Roll?

  But they're visceral.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Visceral, that's right. And I love that. And so when I say music is a weapon, that's the kind of music I go for. And even though these bands or these, the, the, the, these groups are completely different. You know, Guns N' Roses and N W A were happening at the same time, right? And if you go back and listen to not the singles on Appetite for Destruction, but the other songs like Night Train and some of the other deeper tracks, there's a, there's a punk rock style, very LA punk rock style anger to those songs. They were way more devoid of melody. They were way edgier songs than the singles that we all know and love. And, and those are the songs I go for and I, um,

• 26:37Speaker 01

  for better or for worse, I could probably be a lot more successful if I got involved in music that was more, um, pop oriented and that was more, um, less serious.

• 26:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but that's not, that was never gonna happen. I mean, let's take it back to, you know, you in junior high and, you know, finding this music as really, you know, a way to create, to give you a vocabulary for what I would imagine was a tremendous amount of anger and confusing emotions about, you know, where you were.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the Doors, um, I, I had a great influence of my friend Alan Hapakowski, who lived down the street from us, who was six years older than me. He really taught me a lot about music. I mean, he taught me about.

• 27:23Rich Roll?

  You always need the guy, the guys that are a couple of years older to tell you what's going on.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I learned how to work on cars with these dudes. They were all into, um, American motors cars. And up until very recently, I had a 1970 AMX. Absolutely fucking loved that car. And, um, I learned how to work on cars with these guys. I mean, I was like 10, 11, 12 years old, 13, 14 years old. I took my first drink with them, which is a whole other story.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  We're gonna tell that story.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, I learned about The Doors and I learned about Cream and I learned about John Mayall, you know, and I learned about John Lee Hooker and Lead Belly and all, you know, basically, you know, you did the diagram, but what were The Doors into? Okay, let's go back. What was Led Zeppelin into? Okay, let's go back. Let's read all the books about Jimi Hendrix we can find.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Who blew your mind, though? Like, who were your guys?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Well, The Doors were absolutely my guys. I mean, I read the book, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which their manager Danny Sugarman wrote. And he's now deceased and was just an incredible book about, not only about The Doors, but about LA and also about the record business at that time. And then we read Hammer of the Gods, the book about Led Zeppelin. I was always into reading about the music, too. I wanted to learn everything I could, but The Doors, I mean, Jim Morrison was the complete package for me. He was literate. He was, um, he was deep. I learned about, I would go in, anything he ever talked about, the Greek drama shit,

• 28:56Speaker 01

  the poets, this and that, Arthur Rimbaud, I would go and read it all.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And that was really my gateway to my older brother Scott, who really was my real, real mentor in art and photography and clothing, you know, how I dressed, the fact that I even cared about how I dressed, and music. And he said to me one day, he goes like, "Stop listening to that shit. It's terrible." I was probably listening to Van Halen. He was like, "That shit sucks. Listen to this." And he gave me a mixtape, a pause tape, which had Tones on Tail and Joy Division and Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, The Smiths.

• 29:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Red Lori, Yellow Lori.

• 29:34Rich Roll?

  I mean, you wanna, you know, get an annotated, you know, reading list, listen to The Smiths.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And Jim Morrison's.

• 29:40Rich Roll?

  Poets and the.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  But Jim Morrison set me up for that. Reading about The Doors set me up for, oh, there's something more behind these people. They're about something and they have an experience. And Jim Morrison was like, you know, 'cause like, I never really got the impression that Led Zeppelin really dealt with too much strife as a band, right? Jim Morrison, because of his, um... The language and, and, and all the shit he did with the audience to get them to go mental. And then, you know, the things he did in Miami with his genitals and all that, and he got in trouble. He really wanted to break through the fourth wall.

• 30:17Rich Roll?

  He was taking risks.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he got arrested for it.

• 30:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  That, and that, um, whatever pain I thought he was going through and how he was misunderstood, and then eventually killed himself, or whatever we're led to believe.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  In my own way, I connected my own pain and confusion about my own life and, and, and the feeling that I don't fit anywhere. I'm, I'm not wanted anywhere. I don't really have a home. I live in somebody else's house. And at any given moment, like, I'm out of here.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Whether it's by my own choice or by hers. Hers meaning my stepmother. Uh, but it ain't my house. My family name is not on the title of the house. And, um, you know, sometimes I would come home with my brother Dean, who's 18 months younger than me, and all of our possessions would be thrown at the end of the driveway in black trash bags. And the locks would be changed. That happened a number of times.

• 31:13Rich Roll?

  That was when you were, you started off living, you were living with your dad initially after the divorce, right?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:18Rich Roll?

  And you spent a lot of time in the bar, helping him run the bar in the morning and after school.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:23Rich Roll?

  But then at some point, you move in with your, your mom, right? And you had a stepdad that wasn't too keen on you guys, or what, what was going on?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  So, the, the deal is, is that we did live with our father. Um, it was the whole trip of like, me and my brothers loved, like, like, we liked our dad because he was fun and he took us places and we got to eat like brat burgers at the bar and play like, you know, uh, video games or whatever, right? Disneyland dad 101. He beat my mom up in court, as dudes could do back then, to get full custody of us. And we were like rah rah about that. I was four years old. I didn't know. My mom was full of anguish and, um, she was sad. Like, little kids don't want to be around sadness. It's hard for them. It's confu-, it's utterly confusing. Yeah,

• 32:11Speaker 01

  my mom was bearing all of the shit from their divorce and all the things that, that, that it was made up of. You know, my dad was beating her, he was cheating on her. I mean, just the whole bit. It's like everything you see in any movie. And so many of us grew up this way, or with parts of what I just said. And we have to be honest about it because it ain't our story, it's their story. We just, we were born into it.

• 32:35Rich Roll?

  You're just a passenger.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and seeing the cops, hearing the cops at three and a half, four years old, tell my mom as she's bleeding on the sidewalk, as she says, can't you just go and talk to them? And them literally saying, ma'am, it's against the law, we're not allowed to do that. Do you have a brother that can go and talk to him, or can your dad go and talk to him? You know, my dad was just a drunk. He was just a big fucking baby and a drunk, bottom line. You know what I mean? And like his parents never told him no or something. He and I have talked a lot about it, he doesn't remember a lot of it. And I go like, dude, like, you're like seventy-four years old now, seventy, he's seventy-five now. And, um.

• 33:11Rich Roll?

  Sober now?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  No, I mean, he doesn't drink that way anymore. He doesn't really drink anymore, but no, he's not sober. You know, that's a whole other thing. But I go like, dad, like, it's all good, like, I love you, you did what you did. Again, it's like, your shit, it ain't mine, you know? I, I, I, um, stopped owning it. I learned how to stop owning it, and I give it back to you now. I give it back to mom, it's all good. But literally the cops saying that, right? And then you start listening to The Doors and you start learning about, you know, the police and people feeling rejection and dejection, and where do I fit in? And something about The Doors just really did it for me, the whole thing. Frankly, looking back on it, I love the music, but the music became like the least part of it for me.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  It was his politics and just the fact that he had this force of will to say like, no, I can do this. I can say this on stage, how dare you stop me from saying this? It's only words, right? And we take it for granted now because we can say anything, I can swear on this podcast, and you don't have to censor it.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And, um, Jim Morrison died at twenty-seven years old, and it would take many, many, many years for that reality to change, right?

• 34:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Rich Roll?

  So you're kind of absorbing all of this, you know, emotional intensity through this music that you're listening to. I mean, at what point do you start to think, like, I wanna, I wanna translate this into, you know, something that I'm doing with my life?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I, um, I was always involved in things, um, in school. And when I went to high school, I went to the, the technical high school in Milwaukee. It was called Boys Tech. My brother went there, Scott, and he studied electrical engineering and then, um,

• 35:01Rich Roll?

  He just studied that in high school?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Uh huh, yeah. And then I followed suit and I left that. You had to, you had to take a shop, as they call it. You could take automotive, aeronautics, architecture, um, chemistry, electrical engineering, you know, whatever you're, and you had to dedicate three hours of your day, three class hours of your day to that pursuit.

• 35:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And then you also had to take off your other classes that every other high school kid was taking in, in, uh, in the city. And, um, I left that shop, electrical engineering, because I didn't like it. And I, and the minute we got to like hardcore calculus, I, I just blew out the back of the pack. I just, I was like, I was cool with the slide rule and all that shit. I was, I got it and it was great. And, you know, learning the color, um, the color, um, um, code of the resistors and all that shit. I'm getting deep here.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't even know.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Doesn't even matter. Trust me, enough people will write you about that. I go, dude, I fucking remember that. But, um, but I just, it wasn't my thing. But so what I did is I got a waiver and I got out of shop, but I didn't get kicked out of the school. And so when, when I got out of my electrical engineering, um, specialty, I had more time and I ran for like student council, student body president. And I became like the first ever, um, kid.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  This is answering your question, by the way. It'll land on a music point. I became the first ever kid in the 100 year history of the school to become the student body president as a junior. It had always been a senior, right? And I ran, and I like, I ran for real. Like, I did it like Donald Trump style. You know, my hair was flapping in the wind. I was saying crazy shit. I didn't have a Twitter account, though, yet. I hadn't been imagined yet in like, in 87, 88. And I won. And then, um, one of the duties from doing that gig as the student body president was you, you were like in charge of putting on the prom.

• 36:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Choosing the musical song and finding the venue and hiring the DJ.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  This is the first concert.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:03Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And it like, I'm telling you, and, and, and that Milwaukee Magazine article that you read, I think there was a photo of me with the

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I saw the picture.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Total like, side part hair, like the John Hughes era hairdo and, um, but that was like, you know, like, that was promoting a concert. Yeah, that was right. It was like,

• 37:22Rich Roll?

  So did a light bulb go off? Like, oh, I like, this was fun. Like, I, I get this. Well, you know, what's interesting about that is that, is that, uh, you know, on the one hand, you're kind of this, you know, emotionally isolated, you know, feeling alienated and different from the other kids, but you clearly had some kind of overpowering, you know, uh, personality gregariousness that, that could like, overcome that, right? To like, compensate for that, or, you know what I mean? Like charisma over, over, you know, whatever, um, you know, weird, you know, weird kind of conflicting emotional stuff that you were dealing with.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Look, you and I, um, you and I spend a lot of time with people who are on the other side of whatever happened in their lives. Whatever their big moment was in their lives. And I, I, without making a choice, I guess I had to make a choice. I'm either gonna be, I'm either gonna basically kill myself because of the wackiness in my family home and the lack of learning anything about life. And I'm just gonna take drugs and jump off a building, or, you know, we've all, we knew, we all knew people. Maybe they were close friends, or maybe it was some dude you heard about. How many times you heard about, oh yeah, so and so went to college and he fucking ran out a window in his dorm and he's dead? He was on LSD.

• 38:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, more people than I'd like.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, that's such a, it's a common story. Then every time you hear it, you think, oh, that's a unique internet. Well, it's not really that unique. And I, I always, um, I never identified with like the stoners. Remember when people were called stoners? The dudes who wore green army jackets? I never really identified with them. The Metallica thing and the Megadeth thing, even though I love that music now, I never identified with those dudes. Because I wanted to be like the guy who was listening to the Smiths. And, um, this literate music and reading Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I wanted to be-

• 39:15Rich Roll?

  And you're in this technical high school.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I wanted to break through, man. I wanted to, I was the kid down at the central library, looking through the microfiche from the late 1800s and finding the interview with Oscar Wilde in the Milwaukee Sentinel. And then printing it out for like, you know, it costs like $3 or something. And then taking it and hanging it on the wall in my dorm room in college. Like how, like how many chicks were gonna come over and think that was cool, right? But I wanted to break through by, I, I, again, I wasn't thinking it at the time, but I guess I wanted to break through by being smart. And by,

• 39:52Speaker 01

  again, like, um,

• 39:56Speaker 01

  being well-prepared. And being like, um, together. Like that was how I wanted to break through. I didn't want to be like these dumbasses that I saw on the south side of Milwaukee who basically, um, like I, look, I'll say this because I grew up in this place, you know? It's very easy for people to see me now and go, oh, well, you're this guy and look at that and look at that and how dare you say something about blue collar America. I mean, dude, I grew up in a place where people lived in homes that must have been 800 square feet, post-war homes, the, you know, the era where everybody got a house with the front lawn and a back lawn and a garage. And I delivered newspapers to dudes who worked in factories. That was our entire neighborhood.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And it was, it was firemen, cops and factory workers. In Milwaukee, unlike LA, you have to live in the city if you work for the city. It's a pretty good law as far as I can tell. And I just, like, I didn't want to operate a punch press. And everybody I knew, everybody I went to grade school with, their parents were worked in factories or were blue collar people and I never- I take nothing away from it. It's important, amazing shit. And when I was younger, I did blue collar work, but I never, I just never saw that as my life. I didn't want to be taking dirt from under my fingernails and I didn't want to lose a hand or a finger in a punch press. I just didn't want to do that.

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  So you produced this prom concert.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  And the spark is lit and you're like, are you thinking like, I could get into this? Like, how can I continue to do this?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I got, I got high on the, okay, there's a calendar that has a date on it and it's X number of months away and there's the yellow pages and I can look up DJ. And I can, you know, start imagining places where we can hold the prom and go and look at them and figure out the rental. And some people see a shitty dirt lot in a sort of bad neighborhood and they run. I see a shitty dirt lot in a sort of bad neighborhood and I go, awesome. Let's buy it and let's figure out what to do with it and the neighborhood will come up around it and we'll be part of that. We'll be part of the movement there.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  And that's a lot of, you know, vision and hustle for, you know, 16, 17 year old kid.

• 42:13Speaker 01

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

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  He's always working in angle.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Always working in angle. And I guess I got, you know what? I got, I guess I got the always working in angle. And so when it came up in my life naturally, right? I could never say I planned any of that stuff, but when it came up naturally. My body, you know, like my heart and my body like knew, okay, this is home. Like, we're supposed to be doing this shit, you know? And I had supportive adults, I mean, I had a couple of teachers in school who were awesome, awesome people.

• 43:18Rich Roll?

  So you weren't looked at as like a troublemaker for like inciting teenage riots? Like, they were like, yeah, go for it, this is cool.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Sometimes I was, I mean, I would get in, I would, ah, I would get in fights, man. And, um, and they would pull me down to the principal's office and they'd go like, dude, you're the student body president, you can't punch people in the face.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it was like crazy.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when I was in grade school, I, I was lucky enough to be a guest on Nikki Sixx's radio show.

• 43:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Uh, as part of our promotion for Pablo Across America. A number of years ago, and I told them the story about how I was wearing a Motley Crue jersey, not a t-shirt, but a jersey. In like, yeah, 4th, 5th, 6th grade, I can't remember when. And I went to a Catholic grade school, St. Adelbert.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  And there were rules, man, you remember, the Parents Music Resource Center and all that whole thing about Satan and the Catholic Church and the conservative politicians got together and tried to like control culture. It didn't work out well for them at all, as far as I can tell.

• 44:23Rich Roll?

  No, no, it didn't. But what, you show up in a Motley Crue jersey?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they pulled me down and they would, they suspended me and my, the principal beat me up because she would, I wouldn't take the shirt off. And my dad came down to the school and raised hell with them.

• 44:37Rich Roll?

  Well, this is just your big F you, you know, this is like an outlet for your, for that anger, you know?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And so with some of us in LA, New York, London, wherever, you know, the creative centers. So many of us come from that place of like-

• 44:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you hear that, it's a refrain, you know? I've heard that story in many different ways with many different people.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  I know I keep going off topic, but yes, I got the bug of putting, you know, having an empty sheet of paper with a simple goal of like, let's put on event X, and then figuring out how to get it all going on. And then promoting it, and I had the bug for promoting things. Back then, it was putting up flyers around the school. Then when I got hired by this band, Wild Kingdom, who were a band that asked me to manage them when I was like 19 years old, my first management client. Then at that point in time, it was about putting up posters all over Milwaukee with a staple gun and a tape gun because you had to know where you could use a staple gun. You can't use a staple gun on a metal pole as far as I can tell. So you always had to have like two holsters. You had the tape gun in one hand.

• 45:40Rich Roll?

  For the metal.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you had the staple gun for everything else.

• 45:42Rich Roll?

  Telephone poles. Well, let's camp it there for a second because there's kind of a cool story with Wild Kingdom, which ended up becoming Citizen King, right? Uh, like this kind of amazing serendipity that occurred that kind of, you know, put you in contact with the main guy from that band, right?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right. Dave Cooley, who was the keyboard player in Wild Kingdom, literally met me at Atomic Records, this, uh, you know, classic indie record store. Um, and I was there for, um, the record signing of a band called Lush, and it was the day that their album Spooky came out in America. I had just interviewed them on the radio, on my radio show. And funny enough, the woman from the record company who worked at the distribution branch in Chicago made a deal with me. She said, "You can interview the band on your show, but you have to drive them to Atomic Records immediately when you get off the air because we're doing this record release signing event."

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And so you can take two of them and I'll have the other two, but you gotta get them right there because this whole thing is scheduled and then the tour is launching in Milwaukee.

• 46:51Rich Roll?

  Right. But you're probably thinking, "Cool, I'd be happy to drive them."

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Dude, are you kidding me? It was amazing. And so, um, I met Dave Cooley at the record store and he literally came up to me and our, a mutual friend introduced us and said, "Hey, Jeff, this is my friend Dave." His name was Dave Schneider at the time. And, uh, she said, "Dave's the keyboard player in Wild Kingdom." And I went white in the face because I had did, I had done nothing but diss them in my newspaper where I was the music editor. And I thought, "This guy's gonna beat my ass." And he goes, hey, uh, nice to meet you. We had made small talk and it became clear that he didn't want to beat me up. And he said, hey.

• 47:28Rich Roll?

  Had he read it though?

• 47:29Speaker 01

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

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And the managers who you call if you have a problem with the record company, like they won't send you enough posters or whatever to promote your concert. And so.

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  The puppet master.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And, and also the person who takes responsibility, also the person who, who is the, um, and you're never bigger than the artist's voice, right? But, but you are sometimes the chief storyteller, the chief narrator of the artist's story because the artists are the characters in the story.

• 48:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  And the manager, and it has to be the right dynamic, right? But, but, um, the manager can often be that, that, that neutral voice, voiceover narrator type situation like you have in a movie where you don't even know who the person is. Right? You don't recognize their voice.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  You get to dictate, you know, how people perceive and understand.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And sometimes you're saying things from a different perspective than the artist and they love that because they don't want to say certain things about themselves, but you can.

• 49:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  It's important shit.

• 49:13Rich Roll?

  Right. But you didn't have that kind of clarity at that moment.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Sure I did.

• 49:16Rich Roll?

  You did?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Sort of.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  I mean, were you playing music at this time too?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, yeah.

• 49:20Rich Roll?

  You were.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  But I wasn't.

• 49:21Rich Roll?

  Were you clear like, oh, I need, I need to be behind the music?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:25Rich Roll?

  But you knew that.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew that it wasn't, I mean, I was a pretty good.

• 49:29Rich Roll?

  Hustle is better served.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:31Rich Roll?

  In the business context.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea that musicians could be like, could have a hustle was not. Anything that I knew about yet. Now it's, there's so many people can do that, right? Particularly in hip hop, right? It's like you're, there's a whole aspect of hip hop where you're like, you're gonna get your hot single, you're gonna get your next couple of hot singles and you're gonna build your empire. And you're gonna be going to meetings.

• 49:54Rich Roll?

  Well, as, as business people, as musicians, you know, have to be more and more entrepreneurial with their careers. I think it's more important than it used to be.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  But in 1991, especially with like, you know, white college rock, you know, you were dealing with disaffected people who, you know, drank too much beer and wrote songs about how fucked up they were. And, and you know, from their parents and society, right? I mean, that, that's, you know, Dinosaur Jr., Jay Mascis has never written a song about like building a brand.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Right?

• 50:25Rich Roll?

  I don't see like a lot of entrepreneurial hustle in that guy. He's just an artist.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  But, but, but the thing is, is that when I, um, was on the concert committee at Marquette, we hired, we, we, we bought a Pearl Jam date for $2,500 during the first album, 10. And we kept calling like the phone number at Epic Records that was in the rider for the tour department. And, and back in the day, you know, just for the younger people in the audience, there was no such thing as email. There was no cell phones. It was like, you called people on the phone. It was, I don't even think we had fax machines. And, um, no one ever got back to us and no one ever sent us posters and photos and all the things you needed to promote a concert.

• 51:06Rich Roll?

  Had 10 blown up yet or was it pre?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was, it was like starting to brew up. But even like the, the album rock station in Milwaukee, there was no alternative station there yet. They, they wouldn't even allow us to do, to book an interview with Ed Vedder for their Sunday night specialty show. They just said, no, they said, no, we don't play that band. We're not interested.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Pretty fucking funny, right?

• 51:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And then, um, basically Epic Records never got back to us. And this is a band that I knew, cause being a journalist, I interviewed them before the album even came out when they were on the Chili Peppers tour with the Pumpkins. And they got on that tour, literally no one had ever heard of them. They had just like two weeks earlier changed their name from Mookie Blaylock to Pearl Jam, right? And so I had this real pride about getting this band and me and all my friends, it was like, we love this record. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're gonna make fun of me for liking Pearl Jam, F you.

• 52:02Rich Roll?

  There's nothing wrong with that. I was all about Pearl Jam.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Right, but so many people love to hate them.

• 52:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Um, and so what ended up happening is I got a wild hair and I called information in Seattle, Washington. And from reading the liner notes of the album 10, I knew that this guy Kelly Curtis,

• 52:24Speaker 01

  managed Pearl Jam and, you know, must have said-

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  He's listed in the Yellow Pages?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Manager Kelly Curtis for Curtis Management or whatever the hell it was called. I called information dude and I said, yes, I'd like the number for Curtis Management. And they said, uh, would you, is this Curtis Management on Denny Way? And I said, yes, it is. Because his, the, the, the address must have been in there back in the day when you would write letters to your favorite band or whatever. And I called the office and I said, hi, my name is Jeff Castles and I'm from, you know, Marquette University in Milwaukee and listen, I just gotta tell you, like, we keep calling the phone number at Epic Records and no one's calling us back. Like, we need posters, we need, um, CDs, we need, um, glossies, we need to go and get press on this show.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And like, we care, we love this band. And, um, we wanna do a good job for you. And they were like, no problem. And they FedExed us a box of everything, T-shirts, everything. It was awesome. And so that's where I got the idea, months later, when Dave Cooley asked me to manage his band, I thought, like bingo. Like, that's what a manager does. They just go, fuck the label. I'm gonna do it myself. So I'm being honest with-

• 53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I mean, it's another big, kind of like, lightbulb moment. Like, where you're just, I mean, you're getting juice just talking about it, so clearly, like,

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I am.

• 53:47Rich Roll?

  That like, you know, you found your thing, man. Like, this was gonna be your thing.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was gonna be my thing.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  And it's like, you had this idea of, of what a manager would be, but it's not like you, you know, had any experience managing any bands. I mean, was there like trepidat- like, hey, will you manage my, were you like, yeah, definitely? Or were you like, oh, I don't, I don't know, like, do I know how to do that? Like, what, what does that involve?

• 54:09Speaker 01

  It would be interesting to talk to the guys in the band and ask them like, you know, 25 years ago, what did I say to you in the first meeting? Cause then he invited me to the rehearsal studio. Um, and there's, there were seven guys in the band and uh, I would never forget, I was wearing this Lands' End turtleneck, which was skin tight. I'm, I'm probably weighed 150 pounds, 140 pounds at the time and I rode my bike everywhere. So I was super, I was a cyclist and I rode my bike everywhere because I didn't own a car. And I was wearing this uh, green and, and blue striped turtleneck and they must've thought I was a total idiot. And I don't even know what I said to them, but they hired me on the spot.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  Wow, crazy.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  And so by the way, manager back then meant I was the booking agent. I was the accountant. I was the guy that went to Kinko's. I was the guy that designed the flyers, hung them, was the road manager, was the roadie, booked the hotels. Actually, we didn't book hotels. We would drive until no one could drive anymore and we'd pull over at the next hotel and we'd all go in one room. So I did all of that and I would get trepidation about like, if I couldn't find gigs, you know, if I, cause you'd be calling like bar managers and going, yo, uh, yeah, Wild Kingdom, Rock Island, Illinois, the Rock Island Brewing Company, which is still there, Ribco. And um, yeah, we got this band, the guy breathes fire at the beginning of the show. We draw, you know, 900 people in Chicago and 1,200 people in

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Milwaukee. It's going to be amazing, you know, and the guy would go, send me your tape. And then you'd call him for the next three months and he'd hire you for 400 bucks. And that would be, could you imagine taking like nine guys for 400 bucks? Granted, it was 25 years ago.

• 55:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but still like you're splitting it up.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 55:52Rich Roll?

  You're getting like 20 bucks each.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  20 bucks? Literally, you know, OK's Corral in Madison.

• 55:57Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  You know, these places, some of them are not, no longer there.

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  But you believed in these guys.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Oh my God, dude, dude.

• 56:03Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about like what was going on in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee music scene at the time.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Well, you had the Violent Femmes who were from Milwaukee, who as far as we were concerned were like, oh my God, like, you know, the first two Violent Femmes records, in particular, the first one. One of the best rock and roll records ever made, ever, ever, ever to this day.

• 56:24Rich Roll?

  Were they, were they like around?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Not really. Brian Ritchie, the bass player was. Gordon had moved to New York, the singer, years before. And, and Victor, the drummer, was around. So the answer is like, yes. But really Gordon was the guy you wanted to hang out with and he, because he was the lyricist and he was the singer. And he lived in New York.

• 56:42Rich Roll?

  But they created this tone.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  They created a tone. And then, like, we knew people who knew them. Like the guys who, the guy who owned the PA that we rented for our concerts at Marquette was their sound engineer. And he was in a band called The Oil Tasters, who had this seminal, basically underground single called, "That's When The Brick Goes Through The Window." Just the title alone is blowing your mind right now, isn't it? So amazing. I mean, right? "That's When The Brick Goes Through The Window" and "That's Milwaukee" for you right there. Milwaukee's a lot like Boston. People, um, people get fucking angry, dude. They're like trapped in this blue collar town and they're pissed off.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  If they figure out a way to express their anger, they're like, they're doing it. And so we had the Bodines who were blowing up in, in that time.

• 57:34Rich Roll?

  Underrated band.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And we had, um, Decroitzen, who were, for us, were a band that we knew. They were dudes, we would see them around when they went on tour. We knew that they toured with Sonic Youth. We knew that they toured with Voivod. We knew that they toured all over the world. They went to Europe, you know? And, um, and we knew that they were an important band. And, um, they were an incredibly important band in the history of alternative rock and they get almost no credit for it. For, for one, Butch Vig produced all of their albums and that's one of the ways that. Kurt Cobain fell in love with Butch's work and, and thought of him when he was thinking about producers for the album that would become Nevermind.

• 58:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, explain to people who Butch Vig is and kind of his imprint on the music business for people that don't know.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  So Butch Vig is, is now for many, many years, a dear, dear friend of mine and was actually sitting in the chair that you're sitting on just last Saturday, um, here in our backyard. And he's from, um, a very, very small town in Wisconsin, like a farm town. And what I would call romantically was a one-horse town, and it still is. Um, and, and he, um, was in bands and, and basically started recording because he couldn't get into the recording studio in the town next door. And so he said, screw it, I'm gonna figure out how to do it on my own. Moved to Madison, Wisconsin, which is a big university town. You know, was in a couple of bands, um, Firetown and Spooner, both of whom are on Atlantic Records, both of whom were sort of heartland rock bands like The Bodines.

• 59:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they had a moment.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Never made it. Yeah, they had a moment, but neither one of them made it with a capital M. And he became a producer. He was producing the whole while. And, um, he and Steve Marker, who was in, um, those bands, started a recording studio called Smart Studios, low-budge, will record whoever has 400 bucks and a 12-pack kind of, kind of situation. And they started getting really good at it and, um, started getting more and more gigs. And Butch became like a real leader in the situation and started producing records for Touch and Go Records in Chicago, Twin Tone Records in Minneapolis, um, which is where The Replacements

• 59:51Speaker 01

  came from, um, Sub Pop Records in Seattle, and things like that. And, um, and then, um, started producing Smashing Pumpkins out of Chicago. When, when, when the producer of R.E.M. turned down Nirvana to produce the album that would become Nevermind.

• 1:00:09Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause Kurt was obsessed with R.E.M., which people don't remember.

• 1:00:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know that either.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, um, Butch became, you know, the next guy on the list.

• 1:00:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  And, um,

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  They did the demos for Nevermind at Smart Studios in Madison, but they recorded that album at Sound City Studios here in Van Nuys. And then Butch, you know, after The Pumpkins blew up and Nirvana blew up and he produced a bunch of other things, he and the, and two of the other guys from his old bands, Duke Erickson and Steve Marker, started doing like alternative rock music, like this cool guitar-driven, tape loops, drum beats kind of shit. And they were then looking for a singer and they auditioned a couple of people, one of whom was this Scottish woman named Shirley Manson. And they, they named their band Garbage and so he's both a producer and a, you know,

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  they started a band that sold 16, 17 million records in their career and they kicked a big hole in the world. And, and so we were all, we were aware of all those people, but we both thought we could make it out of Milwaukee and we also thought like, fuck, this is really hard. This is never gonna work for us, you know? And we just kept on, I mean dude, I had no money. I, I literally, I don't know how I paid for anything.

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  So was there, was there a tipping point with, where Wild Kingdom, I mean, was it when it becomes Citizen, I mean, what happens there where, I mean, cause they're, they're, they're getting traction, right? Like in the local area.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  In the local region.

• 1:01:47Rich Roll?

  There's like, you know, quite a bit of interest in them, but where does it tip over into them actually becoming a viable national act?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  So Wild Kingdom were really big in the upper Midwest. Madison, Green Bay, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Chicago. And then it goes off a cliff. We never got into Michigan where Kid Rock-

• 1:02:08Rich Roll?

  There's another weird thing about the time, right?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:02:10Rich Roll?

  You know, that wouldn't be the case now. You're either everywhere or you're nowhere.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there was definitely regional music and it was probably the end of that, of the era of regional music in some ways. Basically, they knew that they were gonna break up when I started managing them and that the guys in the band were going to form a new band and look for a new lead singer. And it was an agreed upon thing among all of them. It wasn't like they were firing the lead singer. He was a couple of years older and he had different ideas than them and they wanted to sort of write better songs and write different songs. And so, the core of the band, driven by Dave Cooley as an incredible writer and musician, they started another group called Citizen King. Citizen King was named after Huey P. Long, the great

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  governor of Louisiana, which was my first foray into knowing anything about New Orleans or Louisiana. Little did I know that it would foreshadow meeting my amazing wife who grew up in, you know, the center of New Orleans. And they had a plan to write songs and they wanted to be influenced by Lee Dorsey and Alan Toussaint and the Meters, all these great New Orleans artists and writers. And they wanted to cross that with hip hop. They wanted to have 808s and 909s, which are the kick drum sounds that you hear in hip hop. And they wanted to have, they wanted to sort of treat their own playing as samples. They could play all the jazz and blues stuff that people were sampling back then. It was a phenomenal idea.

• 1:03:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, no one else was doing anything like that.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Not in the Midwest. And we didn't even know what people were doing here in LA, but people were doing forms of that here. And later on, when the band signed to Warner Brothers, people like Beck and other people thought that they were ripping him off. And it was just like, dude, you know, these guys have had a DJ in their band since 1986, dropping in like art ensemble of Chicago saxophone solos into a live band while they're playing on a stage that's bouncing up and down. Like, sorry, bro. Like, you didn't invent the idea, you know? But in the end, they wrote a song called Better Days that became a big hit. We licensed it to films, to television shows, to commercials, everything, all of the above.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  But this had a big radio hit. The sad thing is that the record didn't sell. The band broke up. And that gave way to me going, oh shit, I've just moved to LA from Milwaukee to break it in the management business. These guys are my main client. What am I gonna do now? And then I started hustling and picked up a couple more clients, picked up a couple of record producers and...

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  That, you know, sort of

• 1:04:51Rich Roll?

  Cobbled it together.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Cobbled it together. Got into survival mode.

• 1:04:54Rich Roll?

  So, so with Citizen King, though, that's what originally got you to cross paths with Bush Vig, right? Because didn't they record in his studio in Madison?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And we, um, there's two studios at Smart Studios. There's one upstairs and one downstairs. And a bunch of times when, when Citizen King was recording there, Garbage happened to be off tour, um, during the first album cycle. And they'd be like, recording movie, um, songs, or they'd be maybe recording new songs for their second album. And we'd be, and I became really close with Shirley because like, you know, she'd be sitting in the lounge, watching television, or talking on the phone, or writing, or reading. And the dudes would be in there like, playing, you know, like, like overdubbing a guitar riff for like, eight hours or something. And she wouldn't want to be in the control room with

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  them. And I got to know her. And she was very, always very sweet to me, and very supportive, and very cool. Little did I know at the time, I mean, dude, she was on MTV. She, they're on the radio every two minutes. Um, later on in that album cycle, somewhere along the line, they were on the cover of Rolling Stone, or she was, anyway. And she treated me like I was like, you know, her long lost friend. And little did I know, I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the, the whole story about how they found her, someone saw her on 120 Minutes on MTV with her old band. And so she was sort of like the new kid on the block with them. They'd all known each other for years, these dudes in this band. They were, they're all older than her. They're like dudes from Wisconsin. And she's like

• 1:06:28Rich Roll?

  She's Irish, right?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  No, she's Scottish.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  Scottish, uh huh.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  You should edit that out. She would get really mad at you. But, but, you know, she was like, you know, here she is sitting in Madison, Wisconsin. You know what I mean? Like a college town, like with a capital C, like, you know, beer bongs, the whole bit, right? Beer funnels.

• 1:06:46Rich Roll?

  She had the bright red hair and the whole thing going on.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  The accent.

• 1:06:51Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  You know, she just

• 1:06:53Rich Roll?

  She's fierce, like walking down Main Street in Madison.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Oh hilarious as fuck.

• 1:06:57Rich Roll?

  There's a bunch of like, you know, frat boys.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  That's right. And so, you know, we were sort of like, um, cut from the same cloth. You know, I felt like a fish out of water as a human being. And she was like, getting to know this whole world of Wisconsin and these dudes, um, that she was in a band with, and, you know.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Over the years, she's told Joanne and I all kinds of amazing stories. Like, you know, when she first got into Garbage, she'd never written a song. The band she had been in back in Scotland, you know, she'd always worked with with another dude who was like the songwriter guy and she was the singer. So, again, I had no idea that she was going through all of this and she was feeling vulnerable and she was like, sitting in the lounge, like waiting for something.

• 1:07:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Like, waiting for her next shot.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  What am I doing in Wisconsin?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  I don't want to put words in her mouth, but yeah, like, right? I mean, just, and I thought she's a rock star, like, and she's talking to me, this is amazing. And it buoyed me along, you know? And a couple of times I would go up to Madison from Milwaukee, it's like an hour away, and I would go there for the weekend and I would, we would just drink. Like, we'd go out, like, we'd go out to a couple of different small bars and like, drink when she was done in the studio. And that was like a big moment for me. And in Madison, you can drink, man.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  And, so, you know, in Milwaukee, I love Milwaukee and I'm glad I grew up there, but like, you know, Milwaukee is one of those cities that you want to get out of. If you've got like the drive and the sort of craziness that I have of being an entrepreneur and having your hustle on, like, you want to get out of there and you want to get to one of the two big playing fields, New York or LA.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you gotta do it.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  How come you didn't move to New York?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  You just always have a place.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  You always have a place.

• 1:09:29Rich Roll?

  And so you must have been out here all the time.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  I was. And then I eventually, and then Rachel, who was the assistant to the A and R guy for the band, she eventually said to me, like, you have to move to LA. Like, nothing's gonna happen in Milwaukee. And I eventually moved out here and that's when the band broke up and.

• 1:09:48Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's that weird thing where here you are to chase the dream and then the dream seems to, you know, get pulled out from underneath your feet right as you arrive.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was weird. And I love all those guys and we're all still good friends. We aren't close friends. It's hard to be close friends. You know, we have a shared trauma and sometimes people who have a shared trauma, you know, they want to see each other once a year. Sometimes they become inseparable. You see it with veterans. Sometimes.

• 1:10:15Rich Roll?

  Being in a band, man. I don't know how any band stays together. You know, I think that the equation of getting people to get along and go through that process and then navigate, you know, the business and the creativity through the ups and downs and the success. You know, when you see a band that's been together for a long time, I think it's amazing.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, bands are not democracies. They're just not. People can pretend that they are, but they're not. And.

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  What, when you see a band that has been able to make it work for a long period of time, like, what are the common things that you can identify that help them stay together?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Well, Pearl Jam would be a good one to talk about because they've lasted a long time. And certainly you can imagine that there were, there was probably an explosion in the band and there was probably a, you know, people going through their corners, learning more about life, sitting, coming back together, sitting down, figuring out how are we gonna operate. I'm not speaking from fact, I'm just imagining, you know, because, you know, someone's the leader, someone's the main writer, then somebody else comes in. Very similar story to Garbage. I mean, Ed came in and he was the odd man out. He wasn't from Seattle. He wasn't in 10 bands with all these guys. He didn't go to all the same schools they did. He didn't have all the same friends. And he's a great writer. But

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  the first album was, musically was entirely written when he came into the picture. We all know that. It's a great story. And so you can imagine, just on the creative wavelength, they, he had to figure out, how in the hell am I gonna fit into this thing? I'm the guy on the cover of Time Magazine, I'm the guy screaming, you know, and I gotta figure out how to get my groove on here. And people have to stop pretending that things are democracies, on an, sort of on an operational level. Someone has to be the leader. And, and also, I firmly believe everybody in a band has their place. Someone's really into artwork, someone's really into like, the production design and the logistics of touring. Someone's into the finance and legal BS, and you know?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  It's almost never the same person who's into all those things.

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you think like, you look at U2, and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that they basically split the money evenly amongst themselves. Is that correct?

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  That's my understanding. And by the way, splitting the money evenly is a different thing from what I'm talking about. It's almost like accepting, like, you know what? Rich does that, that's like his end of it, like, it's all good. We used to fight about it, but once we realized, like, you know, Rich is just into that.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  So let him do that.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Let him do it.

• 1:12:53Rich Roll?

  Have that fiefdom, that like, little domain.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  But then, on the other hand, you have Bon Jovi, where basically, it's John Bon Jovi, like, the other guys, Richie Simbora, they're-

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  They work for him.

• 1:13:03Rich Roll?

  They're contracted players.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:13:05Rich Roll?

  And that's lasted for an incredibly long time.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  And I know Richie very well, and he'll say to you, like, I'm okay, I'm okay with that.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  You have Mover at Dangerbird, right?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was one of his managers, and we put him out, and he'll just say, like, I'm totally cool with that. Like, John loves running the company, he loves owning the company, it's all good. But, but, but he will also tell you, it wasn't always all good.

• 1:13:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And I think bands are like families, bands are like, you know, starting a business or making a movie, right? Sometimes there's an explosion at 2:00 in the morning on a movie set, somebody motherfucks somebody else, something flies-

• 1:13:40Rich Roll?

  That movie crew doesn't have to stay together for 10 years.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 1:13:43Rich Roll?

  They come together for 45 days, or whatever it is, and they, then they're done.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  They may never work again together.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. People have to figure out how to have lives in bands. People have to figure out how to go and do their own thing. David Lee Roth, in his amazing memoir, Crazy from the Heat, talks about, like, as soon as we would get off tour, I'd be like, down in Belize, or I'd be climbing a mountain somewhere, or I'd be, you know, going to Africa, and those dudes would just stay home and drink. I mean, some of the shit he says in his book, one could probably get sued for it. I don't know how that worked out with them, but you know, whether it's accurate or not, it's immaterial. You just get the idea that it's like, you know, I always encourage people in bands, like you gotta, and by encouraging them, I'm reminding myself of the same thing, like dude, you have to have a life outside of this.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  It's so easy to have it encompass everything because everybody loves music. So you have a very public job and everybody's always going to ask you about it. And so you can kind of never get away from it. So you have to really get away from it. You have to practice going somewhere where no one knows who you are. It's an important thing. You have to recreate and regenerate yourself, two separate words, yourself.

• 1:14:58Rich Roll?

  I think that's true of any creative pursuit, like you can't, you know, in order, in order to have something to express, you have to live your life.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. In order to keep it, you've got to give it away. In order to keep it, sometimes you have to smash it on the ground in a sort of a healthy way and know that it's all going to be okay and it'll all come back together, right? Part of doing that is, is, is having a little bit of faith that it's not yours in the first place. Whatever talent you have, right? Like it came from somewhere. And hard work is cool and practice is cool, but like, you know,

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  I'm just a believer that like, you know, we're born with certain things that are sort of innate, inbuilt things. And if we've got it, if we have a certain talent, some people have a great talent for saying three sentences and changing people's energy, you know, like, wow, dude, like you said that and you just totally got me. And you've totally changed how I feel about myself. Thank you for that. Like we know people like that, right? Some of those people are song, become songwriters and they write lyrics that just can snap people out of their shitty day because they just wrote a song about a shitty day. And it magnetizes other people's shitty days and then they can go on with their lives, right?

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  I don't know, whatever, you know, the world is a vampire, you know, that's a great line. How many times have you thought that? It's so awesome.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  It's such a great line.

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  Alright, well, speaking of shitty days and taking a leap of faith, so you arrive in LA and the bottom falls out. Like, is this where the partying starts to notch up a little bit? When does the dark side start coming out a little bit?

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  The dark side, funny enough, I'm a weird guy in that respect. I moved to LA and drank less. What happened for me was that in Milwaukee, it was just completely not so. And on the road, you know, like with bands and stuff. You know, I was the guy that I would have, like, I would add shit to the rider of my bands.

• 1:17:04Rich Roll?

  Your own personal stash?

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Right, I would just add it to like their rider. So I'd have like the, at the time-

• 1:17:09Rich Roll?

  What was on your rider?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  At the time, I thought like Merlot was like really like, that's like, no one's gonna fuck with me on Merlot. Like, that's high-end shit. If you even know what Merlot is-

• 1:17:21Rich Roll?

  Because an alcoholic wouldn't be drinking Merlot, they just want a fifth of Jack.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Right, right, exactly.

• 1:17:26Rich Roll?

  So you're hiding your alcoholism behind the highbrow taste.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, exactly, right? And I would put a couple bottles of Merlot on the rider, and then when the band would go onstage, I'd crack one of those bastards open, and I wouldn't even use a glass, I'd just sit there and drink it. And then I'd take the empty bottle to the opening band's dressing room and pop it in there so nobody would notice that I drank it. And because no one in the band had put it on the rider, they didn't give a shit. They didn't clock it that it was gone. And, um-

• 1:17:53Rich Roll?

  How long did that last, though, before they knew what was going on?

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  I think that we are all doing it, and we, um... They never really said anything to me about that. Um, they talked to me about my anger. Because, you know, the drinking like would just ignite the anger shit that you referred to earlier. All that, you know, agita from my upbringing, and the sort of lack of nurturing, and the lack of just someone, you know-

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  I mean, like dude, I probably hadn't, I probably wasn't, I never even really talked about this, but I probably was never touched by either one of my parents. I don't really remember being touched by either one of my parents. You know, that's an important thing. I mean, when Pablo was alive, like I, I would hug him 10 times a day. I would put him on my shoulders, I would hug him, I would, um, you know, pick him up and put him in the car, you know, in the age of car seats. But, you know, I was angry and I wasn't angry like walking down the street angry. I was angry if something set me off.

• 1:19:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, were you attached to that anger though? I mean, did you equate that with being part of your success equation? Like I need that anger, that anger is fueling me and that's what's propelling me forward.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  I was wrong about that, but yes, I thought that I needed the burn, which the anger is part of the burn. I thought I needed the, um, I haven't eaten in eight hours. I'm getting dizzy. I thought I needed, and by the way, that all worked into my cycling as well because, you know, I would always want to go further. I'd always want to go faster back in the days of like no helmet and wearing a Walkman. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I felt like, you know, because I grew up with pain, physical and emotional and psychic, I developed a resistance to pain, which is why I can go and ride my bike, you know, 206 miles from Seattle to Portland

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  on that STP ride up there and get on a plane and fly home and I can do it in 10 hours. Because at some point the pain just does not register to me.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  As we get older, that changes, doesn't it? But yeah, I thought I needed it. I thought I needed it and there's a lot of great lyrics about that, you know? Billy Corgan wrote the great line, you know, "I'm in love with my sadness." You know?

• 1:20:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's that attachment to that emotional pain that, that creates this, you know, mystique that, that, or illusion that that is where, that is the birth of the creative impulse.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you hear it, I mean, you hear it in this town particularly all the time with people that are newly sober, creative people who are just absolutely terrified and they think that their creative, you know, outlet, their creative career is gonna be over, that they've been, you know, sort of cut off at the heels. And what you see with people that get sober and really, you know, take recovery seriously is they blossom into this font of creativity that, you know, completely blows the lid off anything they were doing previous. But there's that, that arc, that like learning curve of acclimating to that, and sometimes that takes a long time.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I agree, and, and when I went to my first meeting at age 28, I was scared. I mean, I don't know anybody who wasn't scared going into their first meeting unless they were just pissed off to be there.

• 1:21:31Rich Roll?

  How did it all, you know, what was the moment? Like, what, how did it all break down?

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Two guys who were extremely important people in my business life, which back then was my life. There was no differentiation between my life and my business life. It was just all one thing.

• 1:21:47Rich Roll?

  Well, you're just a single guy here, hot rodding around LA, right? Making deals and partying.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was, yeah. And in Milwaukee, you know, when Citizen King got signed, I was, I could have, I, I had a choice to either rent an apartment or to have an office with, with my buddy Fred Gillick, who's one of my best friends on earth to this day. Fred was a graphic designer, still is, and we rented an office space. And Fred, um, lived at home with his parents still. And I figured out that I could get this old desk from like, you know, the antique shop

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  that, that had a wood front on it, and I put a futon mattress underneath the desk, and I slept there at night. Because, you know, now it's cool to work from home because it's like modern and you have, you have wifi and all this shit. Back then, it was like, you'd be, people would be like, you work from home?

• 1:22:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, how old were you at the time? 28 or something?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Well, I, I got sober when I was 28. To the era that I'm talking about, I was like 24, 23, 24, and so forth. When Citizen King got signed, I was 25. And so Jeffrey Weiss, who was the A&R executive at Warner, who signed them, he would tell people, um...

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  At Warner Brothers, like when we'd come in to like tour the label offices in New York and LA, he'd say, "This is Jeff. He's the manager." And you're like, you know, "He's so passionate about the band. He like lives in his office." And they'd laugh and you'd go, "No, I'm not kidding. He lives under his desk. I've seen it."

• 1:23:11Rich Roll?

  You weren't trying to hide it. You were like, "Yeah."

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  No, it was like, "It was just my reality, dude." And so-

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  Where'd you go to like shower and stuff?

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  The YMCA across the street at 411 West Wisconsin Avenue. So we figured, Fred and I figured out, and Fred eventually moved into that building too. We were squatting basically. You weren't allowed to do that, you know? And we figured out that it was like, you know, $45 a month to belong to the Y. And so we'd go and shower there in the mornings. And even after Citizen King got signed and we, I got my big commission check and all that stuff, I bought a car, but I didn't get an apartment for like a while. And so I moved here eventually and, and two guys who were very important mentors to me, Kenny McPherson, who was the head of A&R, Warner Chapel Music Publishing,

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  and Greg Souders, who was the A&R guy who signed Citizen King to Warner Chapel. They both signed them. Greg was like the A&R executive. Kenny was the head of the department. Kenny's a Scottish guy. Greg is a dude who grew up here in Atwater Village and was in a band back in the day. They sat me down one day and they said, "Listen, we just heard this voicemail message that you left for Robert, who manages Smash Mouth, who at the time were one of their significant acts. I mean, that band had monster hits." And basically, he played us your voicemail message over the phone and you sounded like you were out of your fucking mind. What's wrong with you? And I was humiliated and I was like, you know, because when you-

• 1:24:41Rich Roll?

  Did you remember or were you in a-

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, no, I remembered and I, and I felt justified, of course, in what I said to him.

• 1:24:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, was it angry or was it just hammered?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  It was angry. It was just being so off kilter and such a- Child, I never learned how to grow up. I never learned anything, you know? So I figured that if I can fight, fight, fight and scrap it up for my band, I got all of my esteem from how much I was working for my band, right?

• 1:25:07Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a great, it's a great mask too.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  It's a hugely great mask.

• 1:25:11Rich Roll?

  For whatever fear or insecurity, you know, is really going on.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  My whole personality was built around, did we sell more tickets in Chicago this time? Or did we sell more tickets in Milwaukee and the guys would be happy because they made more money? And there's a part of me that's still, like, I still love those metrics, but I've had to learn like, yeah, but dude, you also have to have other things going on in your life. And by the way, your wife doesn't work for you and your kids don't work for you. And you have to just slow down with this BS because you're home now, you know? And I, it's a daily thing for me, dude, to this day. But these guys sat me down and I'd just done a, like an intervention with Bob Timmons.

• 1:25:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, not Bob.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  The great, um, drug and alcohol counselor, a great sober dude.

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  He's an amazing guy. He helps a lot of musicians.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he, and we'd just done a thing with one of my clients and those guys said like, look, we love you. We totally get it. We've both been the guy on that voicemail. But we, we see you as such a great young dude and we think you could really have a great career in the business. You're, you've got all the like aspects of it, but you need to sort this thing out with your drinking and your anger. We've seen you so drunk and the anger always comes and you're fighting with bouncers and you're fighting with this and that. And, uh, you know, and one of them just said in this meeting, they just said like, look, we love you, but like, we need you to sort your shit out or we're not gonna, like, we're not gonna refer clients to you anymore. We're not gonna do it. And maybe you should go and see Bob Timmons because you know him.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  And I went to see Bob in his office on Main Street. He's passed away, um, eight or nine years ago now and he. I thought I was gonna tell him all this shit that he'd never heard before.

• 1:26:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  And he just sat there and laughed.

• 1:26:52Rich Roll?

  Terminally unique.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, exactly. That's, that's exactly it. And I, and he just sat there and chuckled. And I was at first, I was like, what the fuck are you laughing at, dude? Like, I just told you some heavy shit. I got mad. And he was like, no, I'm laughing because like, you know, I went to prison for like, holding up like, convenience stores with a double barrel shotgun. And I'm laughing because like, you know, you were telling me about how like fucked up your childhood was. And I get it, like, I hear, but like, my mom tried to kill me with a butcher knife. You know? And, and I, and I moved.

• 1:27:20Rich Roll?

  Everybody's sobriety story is like milquetoast by comparison.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so then I learned this whole thing like quickly that he was laughing at me because he understood. And he was laughing because he had sort of worked through his own story. And he could sort of like, he didn't have to be it. He just knew that his story was like there. And that there was a differentiation between like, I am my story. Or like, I am like my breath, or I am like my being. I am like how I show up in the world today. But I'm not the shit that like they did to me. Before I was an adult. I, I, I, he was an amazing man and he-

• 1:28:04Rich Roll?

  Were you able to get that from him in that meeting? All of that?

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  No, I got some of it. Cause he told me about his mom and going to jail himself and all that. And he taught me very quickly that like, we've all got our story. Here's mine. And he did that old trick where he, he goes, oh, like, okay, so like, got it. You've done this, you've done that. Um, okay, got it. Let me tell you my story. And so like, he let me, and he did it without shame, right? That's one of the things we get to do. He was disconnected from shame and any gooeyness around it. He was just like, yeah, here's my story, dude. I went to prison and, um, then I basically started like helping other people and it changed my life. And so he showed me, what became very clear to me then is that it was possible for me, cause I never went to jail.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  I got arrested a couple of times. I never went to jail or prison.

• 1:28:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, in the grand scheme of things, like, pretty high bottom.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Pretty high bottom. And um, yeah, I was not the guy wrapping a car around a telephone pole only because I never hit the ice patch. I mean, I was doing, I was driving beyond drunk. I talked a cop out of arresting me once who had his gun drawn on me. I don't know how I did it. He, he was like William H Macy in Fargo, in Milwaukee.

• 1:29:16Rich Roll?

  In Milwaukee. I was gonna say, that would never happen in LA.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Never dude, that would never, ever happen in LA. Um, so I, I went to my first meeting and I loved it. There's all these people from all different walks of life. This dude over here is a cab driver. This dude over here looks like a, some sort of a surfer. This dude's wearing like a suit, you know, and you know, now that I've been sober almost 15 years, I understand. This guy is a cab driver. This guy is a surfer. Um, and this guy is like a, an investment banker in Century City. And they all come together. And when they go, when they walk through that door, the anonymous part is it doesn't matter who you are and you're the side of the door jam. In here, you're just a drunk. Trying to live another day.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter how much money you do or don't have.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's about recognizing the similarities in the story and leaving the differences behind and collectively, uh, you know, and openly communicating so that we can all get better. It's cool.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  I got a call today from a friend, very unexpected, saying, hey, um, I don't want to drink anymore. And I know very few people who are sober, whether they work a program or not, you know, just people who just have given it all up. And um, would you mind talking to me about it? And I explained to this person, not only would I be delighted to talk to you about it and, and I'm honored that you would even think of me, but it's, in fact, it's important to my day and my life and my recovery to actually give it away, as we say in the room.

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  The most important thing.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:21Rich Roll?

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

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  And then it becomes like a kind of architectural, you know, becomes part of Silver Lake, like the murals on the building and all of that. It really becomes like part of the fiber of the community.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  The intention was labels suck. Labels have become, labels started as these like little tiny shops. Sun Records, Chess Records, right?

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Rough Trade Records, Sub Pop Records. They were tiny little things. And then they got bought up. They merged with other labels, sometimes for survival, sometimes for economic gain, sometimes for both. And suddenly we were looking at like, thinking only big is good. You know, we had Slash Records on Beverly Boulevard. You know, right here in LA, that was a seminal label. I mean, Faith No More, Los Lobos, The Violent Femmes, The Bodines, Soul Coughing. I mean, all came from this tiny little joint. And so I thought like, this label has to reflect LA. I wasn't thinking solely Silverlake,

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  but I guess at the time, you know, when you thought music, alternative music, you really were thinking Echo Park and Silverlake. But I really wanted Dangerbird to reflect LA and to be a voice of LA. It was really about like, yeah, again, I said earlier, to me, you know, my favorite songs are weapons. Well, Dangerbird for me was a weapon. It was sort of like, fuck you to the business. Like, you know, you guys have wasted so many people's time, people I've managed, people who I'm friends with, people I don't even know. Like, sure, it's great you broke, you know, the Spice Girls and you broke Lenny Kravitz and all this, but like, think about all the great artists that you just tanked. And it wasn't

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  because their music wasn't good. It was because you just didn't get around to it because someone couldn't tell the truth to the band.

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  Right. And at the same time, I mean, through your experience of managing all these other acts and having that frustration with the labels, you were forced to do it yourself, right? And then realizing that you could do that and then saying, well, you know, let's just do this ourselves.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I had a great partner. I met a fellow named Peter Grossbeck, whose artist name, he was an artist. His artist name was Peter Walker, is Peter Walker. And he, he and I started out as manager and client and we had no intention of starting a label. He was looking for a record deal for a fantastic record he made. Wrote, recorded, mastered, artwork was done, everything. But I couldn't get a label to sign it because they were like, well, what would we do with a finished record? Now that's all anybody wants. But this was, uh, 2002, 2003. And so as part of that process of me being honest with him over dinner, I said, dude,

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, but all of my favorite people who really love this kind of music, they don't get it. They don't get what they do with a finished record that's produced by Joe Chicarelli, that has Jay from Wilco playing guitar, Joey Warner from Beck and R E M playing drums, and Justin Meldell Johnson from Beck's band playing bass. They don't understand it. And I, either he joked or I joked, you know, if he was sitting here, he'd tell you, we should just start our own label. Maybe I said it because, yeah, because he, because he said like, well, what would that look like? I must've said it because he responded. And he was, you know, from a family that, um, his father had been a business, had been

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  a, a, a, a leader in a, an entire field of business, cable television, where, you know, they'd done very, very well, like beyond someone's dad was a dentist or whatever, and they could afford to do a recording session. And, um, you know, I think, I think looking back on it, Peter was looking for, um, to invest in something that he really believed in, that, that mirrored his own purpose in life. So, you know, start a record label. I'm an artist, let's start a label. You're a manager. You're a pretty cool dude. I mean, at the time, we knew each other only so well. And we sat down and wrote an admission statement, and my brother Scott helped us with the business plan. And we went and got a distribution deal, and we did it.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  And, um, Scott died, um, two weeks before our first release came out, um, from cancer. And he was 39 years old and he, so here I was, the guy who taught me everything, who also taught me how to be like an advocate with a baseball bat in this crazy family situation, when he left that crazy house where we lived with 10 kids in a three-bedroom ranch house. He said, you know, you have to fight, you have to protect yourself and Dean now. Here he, um, was dead.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  And this label that I've started with my client and my friend, who had also become really good friends with Scott, his record's coming out two weeks later.

• 1:37:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  And that roller coaster of Danger Bird started there. And I was immensely sad. I was immensely morose. And just, I was grieving my brother at a point in time when I had to get up and be like P T Barnum. Little did I know that that would be a foreshadow for what was to come in my life and in our lives.

• 1:37:42Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so, I mean, ultimately, you succeed in this P T Barnum act because you build Danger Bird into this, you know, incredibly successful entity. And it would appear that, you know, everything, the stars are aligning, you know, the tragedy of your brother's death aside, you get married and you have a son, you have Pablo. Pablo comes into the world and, and here's your opportunity to be the dad that you never had.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  That's exactly, and to be a husband. And to be a stepdad.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:38:20Rich Roll?

  How old was Grady when you met Joanne?

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Seven. And I knew him because I lived six houses down the block from where we're sitting. And so Joanne bought this house in 96. It's crazy, right? It's all, it's all about the neighborhood, just like it was.

• 1:38:35Rich Roll?

  I should have moved to Silver Lake when I came to LA.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, just like it was in Milwaukee. It's all about the neighborhood. And I knew Grady from, because I would see him playing soccer in the street with his nanny. And I would walk from my house, which was six houses west, and now to go to the reservoir right here, you'd have to walk by this house. And I knew this, I didn't know his name. I just knew this little kid. And then I met Joanne on a, I was making a music video with my management client, Scapegoat Wax, who had this great song called Isle 10, which they were assigned to the Beastie Boys label, Grand Royal. We were making a video.

• 1:39:11Rich Roll?

  She was also in the, well, Atwater, right?

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah. And John Silva, who is the longtime manager of the Beastie Boys, was running the label with Mike Diamond.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  And we were looking at video treatments and video director reels and Johnson, just hire Evan Bernard. He's amazing and he's family. He's because he had been part of the Beastie's uh circle of friends that had done videos with them. Joanne was Evan's executive producer. He was signed to her production company. And I met her at her office and we became friends and then.

• 1:39:44Rich Roll?

  Were you like, oh, wait, we're neighbors? Did you put that together or you didn't know initially?

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  We figured this out immediately because she dissed me.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  She dissed me for coming to the casting of the hot girl in the video. And she was like, yeah, it's nice to meet you. You have to leave now. You're not sitting in this session. And I said, no, you don't understand. I just made a video two weeks ago with a hot girl and it was, we got to the set and the woman that they cast was wrong for the band's image. And so my friend, John Silva, who manages the Beastie Boys, who's my mentor, said to me, dude, you need to go to the fucking casting so we don't have that problem in our video. And um, she was like, yeah, right.

• 1:40:29Rich Roll?

  She didn't buy it.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  No, she didn't buy it at all. And um, she goes like, you know, and it was all, it was very funny. People were laughing. Evan is the funniest guy ever. Joanne's funny. You know, meanwhile, there's a line of 200 actor chicks with holding headshots in line and um, she goes like, you know, why don't you get in your fancy car and drive back to the west side and I'm sure you can find a date there. And I was like, ah, well, that'd be great, but I don't live on the west side. Here I am newly sober. And she's dissing me and I don't know what to make of it. And I explained to her that I live in Silver Lake. And I said, but I probably should go to the west side because there's no hot chicks in Silver Lake.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  And she goes, what do you mean? I live in Silver Lake. And then it's like, you could imagine the, the, the edit you would do in the movie version of this. You know, it's like you could do it in three cuts. She goes like, really? Where do you live? I said, I live above the reservoir. Well, what street do you live on? I live on Reed's. Oh my God. So do I. What address? This, this address here that I was there at six houses apart. And I said, oh, and she describes us as, oh yeah, the white picket fence. You have the little boy who plays soccer in the street with his like nanny, right? And she's like, how do you know? So crazy. We became friends. Um, she was setting me up on blind dates with her other friends. I helped her buy her first DVD player when she only had a VCR. Like I became like the man friend.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  I was newly sober, so I was like, you know, following the general sort of rule in the program of like, don't, don't get into or out of any new business or romantic relationships for the first year. And my sponsor at the time really liked that idea. And so, um, while I went on coffee dates with her blind date friends, I never, I knew it was never going to go any further.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  I was in fact, just trying to actually practice socializing with people of the opposite sex. I'm heterosexual, so I was, um, practicing going out for coffee dates during the day for a cup of coffee with a woman and not having it be-

• 1:42:33Rich Roll?

  Without an agenda.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Without having like the semi-sonic closing time scenario happening, which is probably how, how I socialized a lot for all of those years, right? Um, and learning how to walk through the, the, the discomfort and the vulnerability of, of actually socializing with someone during the day.

• 1:42:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  And having to talk.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How does that work?

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Right. All that shit. And so my sponsor actually liked that part, but he was like, you're not dating anyone. You're going to go on a coffee date.

• 1:42:58Rich Roll?

  It sounds a little bit like an end run around the rule.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever dude. It worked for me. Hey, hey, take it up with him. I'll give you his number. And then, um, and then I asked Joanne on a date. Like, you know, basically two weeks, uh, maybe I asked her on the date right before my one year birthday, but I, but the date was going to happen after my birthday. So there's another end run. Whatever. You're a lawyer dude. Why are you complaining to me?

• 1:43:22Rich Roll?

  I did the same thing. I met my wife, you know, right at the tail end of the one year mark. So I'm right with you.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Rich Roll?

  I did the same thing.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  So I, um, we went on our first date on Valentine's day, which is so corny, but it was the day that worked out and we went on our first date and it was, we had fun. And like, we've never stopped dating ever since. Like it's been amazing.

• 1:43:46Rich Roll?

  How many years now? So it's about 15 years?

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I will say like, I'm, um, an impossible jerk. I am like, you know, a child, like I'm like all the things you could ever throw into a bucket that are just like, you know, petulant, I'm an idiot. Like I'm, I'm just all of those things on a bad day.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Definitely a lot better with my anger and my temper and all that shit.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  But you know, your show to me is about not just being plant-based, which I'm not, you know? I wanna be, I wanna be, but it's about, um, it's about to me, it's about people talking about life and like, what works and what doesn't, and what have I been through, and how have I pivoted, how have I shifted? What walls do I still come up against? So that's why I wanna tell the truth about that, like all that. I'm all those things in that bucket, but, but by, but by, you know, meeting this amazing person on my path,

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  where some of my shortcomings actually, you know, can get exacerbated or magnified, but also many of them, I've been able to walk over the coals, so to speak, and, and really diminish them with, like, you know, one of the things we get in our significant relationships is to practice.

• 1:45:07Rich Roll?

  Well, when you have a solid partner, it's almost like a foil.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Rich Roll?

  Because your character defects are gonna come out, right? They're gonna manifest, and that's an opportunity to look at it, figure out what's going on, and try to, you know, identify how you can overcome it, or do better next time, right? Like, when you're, when you're single and you're just flying around town sober or otherwise, like, you don't have to necessarily look in the mirror until, like, a big problem arises.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:45:37Rich Roll?

  When you get into a real intimate relationship with someone, then, um, then, yeah, man, all that stuff comes up, so, of course, right?

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  And we've, we've, um, been through it, and we work on it, and it's like, you know, I don't know, I mean, I'm 43 years old, and Joanne's 50 years old, and we, so we have a lot of friends, sort of like spanning in and out of this whole age range. And, you know, like, people, you can either choose to work on it in your business, your significant business relationships, your significant romantic relationships, or not. You know, you can even work on it with your kids when they get to the right age, because shit comes up. And, um,

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  it's hard and it's challenging, and sometimes it feels completely nuts, but, um...

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  It's really rewarding and you know, I, I, I will say like, you know, getting, going to my first meeting, staying sober, working a program, working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous has really taught me how to be an adult. The simple things that no one ever talks about, like, you know, I was like the secretary of a beach meeting on the beach in Santa Monica. I learned more about managing rock and roll bands and being a, you know, later, and what would later become be, you know, being a business executive and, and employing people and having to deal with all of the things that go with that by, by being the secretary of a meeting on the beach in Santa Monica. And you know why?

• 1:47:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  Because every Tom, Dick and Harry from Germany and Finland and, you know, Cleveland walks up to you when you're sitting in a circle on the beach and they come up and go, oh, what are you guys doing here? Can I sit down? And somebody has to explain like, hey, this is like a private thing and have a nice day and you, you know, you really can't say, hey, F you, get the hell out of here. It doesn't look so good. And, um, you know, you really learned a lot about your sort of the sergeant at arms and the, and the secretary, the person who's kind of like keeping the meeting going. And, um, but that's like a sort of a, just a generic example, but I just learned how to just show up, no matter what.

• 1:47:54Rich Roll?

  But I also think that, you know, what you and Joanne have had to endure, you know, with Pablo, I mean, that kind of scenario, I would say, you know, eight or nine out of 10 marriages would disintegrate around something like that. So, you know, let's, let's talk about that a little bit.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  So I guess the thing we haven't talked about yet, and depending on how you edit this, you might put this first.

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Is, um, so Joanne and I met, I became a stepdad. I'm

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  I want to say this right because this thing is going to go out publicly. I believe I'm the first boyfriend that Grady, Joanne's son, had ever met. And I think that she'd had, he'd met another one of her boyfriends, but didn't know it was her boyfriend. Like, he was too young to understand all of that. So there's some technicality there. I was the first boyfriend that he ever met. And we would go and do, you know, family things. We'd go to the movies. We'd take Grady to, you know, Little League or whatever. And Grady's dad, Jimmy, is an amazing guy. We've been friends for years. And he's Grady's dad. Like, he's Grady's dad with a capital D. And I'm like the stepdad. And I've always tried to be like, always tried to be like, cool with all that

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  and like, find my place. Because I don't want to fuck with anybody's game in that respect. And became a stepdad. Joanne got pregnant. And I was mortified. I was 30 years old when she was pregnant. Pablo was born when I was 31. And it was Joanne's, Joanne was really into having another baby. You know, we told Grady together. We did all the stuff that you do, you know? And we went to the classes. We read to the baby. We played it music. And then the baby was born. His name was Pablo. And he was born on a Saturday at Cedar Sinai here in LA. And as you said earlier, he was

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  my chance to be a dad to somebody in a way that nobody was ever a dad to me. And I love my dad and all that shit. I want to reiterate that. But my dad just wasn't there for me. And that he can't change that. It's just too bad, you know? He was there for Jim Beam, and he was there for Ron the Ruffer, and City Rick, and Rick the Mouth, and, you know, you know, the guy down the block that we delivered beer to every Thursday. He was there for all them, but he wasn't there for me. And that's just the way it goes. And I wanted to change that in my life. I wanted to break the cycle, as we say in psychobabble land. But I wanted to break the cycle. It's a great way of saying, break the cycle. And I wanted to be a husband, and I wanted to be home for dinner. And I didn't want

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  to be like my dad, who was always on the other end of a phone, bullshitting and lying and saying he was going to be, we'll leave after this cigarette, or we'll leave after this beer, right? And we had an amazing family life. And

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  We lost my brother when Pablo was about two years old, as I recall. And then we thought cancer will never strike our family again. Joanne literally said,

• 1:51:05Rich Roll?

  You're pre-disaster.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  We're pre-disaster. That'll never strike our family ever again. And it didn't. And then one day I rode my bike for 80 miles up in the mountains here above Pasadena. It was my birthday, May 17, 2008. And Joanne was with Grady making a music video for his eighth grade graduation project. And I was here with Pablo. We were getting, we were taking a bath before we were going to our, my birthday dinner at Malo, this Mexican restaurant here in Silver Lake, where we were meeting like 40 of our friends. They were gonna meet us there, right? Joanne and Grady. And I noticed a lump in Pablo's abdomen.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Called Joanne. We go to see his doctor, Dr. Fleiss, who's now deceased. He meets me at the office. It's like 6 o'clock on a Saturday night. And he goes, yeah, something ain't right here. I see all these veins going there. He has no imaging or anything in his office. He's like an old school guy. And he goes, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna call you into Children's Hospital, Los Angeles, you know, which is, you know, two blocks from his office and four blocks from the restaurant. He goes, go, go to your dinner. It's gonna take them hours. So go to your dinner and then after a couple hours, just go there. Probably by that time, they'll be ready for you. Joanne ends up taking him there before the party's over. And somewhere in the middle of the night, after they do some imaging on Pablo, they come in and they tell us he has cancer.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  And I literally, the first fucking thing I thought was, but Joanne said that's never gonna hit us ever again. Like, I literally, I thought that. It's, it's, it sounds like adolescent to say that, but it's what I thought, you know? And the first thing I felt was for Joanne.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  I don't know why.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  I'm usually way more self-centered than that, but the first thing I felt in my body was for Joanne because she carried Pablo in her belly. You know? And I, and I just thought like, no, this is not, this isn't right. You know?

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  Did you have a sense of how dire it was at the time? I mean, cause that can mean, you know, cancer can mean a lot of things. It's unclear, you know, is it treatable? Is it not treatable? What's the prognosis?

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  We had no sense of it at the time. We were both, I mean, dude, it was like you got into that, an elevator and it just started dropping at 50 miles an hour and it didn't stop. And that, that's what it felt like. He's asleep on the gurney in the ER. It's not even, it's not even a room. It's like this, the old children's hospital, you know, you got like those little sheets that hang in between, you know, some, all their families right there and you're having this moment. This kid's got a broken arm. Your kid's got cancer. We didn't know. I mean, the next few days were a blur and we got educated and we got information and we at first learned that Willem's tumor was 95% curable, but then they had to go in and open him up and then they had to do, had to test the tissue of the tumors.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  And there's, there's five different stages of Willem's tumor. It's the only cancer that has a fifth stage. And the first four are 95% curable. The fifth stage is 0% curable and that's exactly what Pablo had.

• 1:54:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. So did you, did you know that early on?

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we learned it in, within a couple of few days. Yeah, they did the surgery right away. And then they, they, they did the, uh, the, the, the testing on the tissue of the tumor and then they knew right away.

• 1:54:47Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and with that, I mean, what is the treatment protocol when they say, we don't have a solution for this?

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  The treatment protocol is the same as it would be if your child had one of the others. In other words, it's in the same bucket. They're all different variations on a theme, but it was 11 days of radiation and 13 months of chemo.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  And we never stopped hoping.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  We never stopped, you can go back and read my blog, we never stopped hoping, we never, to the point of like delusion, you know, we, we never stopped thinking, our boy is gonna go back to school, he's gonna get through this, he's gonna go back to school. We never stopped thinking that. In fact, we moved, he never started kindergarten. But we moved him from the Waldorf, Pasadena Waldorf School where Grady went, and we enrolled him at the Oaks in Hollywood. Like, we literally changed schools for, and, and when I meet back up with Pablo, um, I hope we laugh about that, like, you know, we just, things changed in his life and in our lives during the point in, during the period where

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  he was in, in treatment, and we were just like, you know, for whatever reason, Joanne would have a different version of the story, like anybody's significant other would, but just remember that we changed schools, and he, um, he never started anywhere. He was enrolled in two different schools and never started, and, um...

• 1:56:14Rich Roll?

  How long into it, uh, were you before you started publicly writing about it on the blog?

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Oh, immediately. I called our friend Rishikesh Hirway, and so I must have called or texted him and said, "Can you start a blog?" And I knew that communication was important from when my brother Scott was in treatment, back in '02 and '03, and it was such a pain in the ass to call people, and to have people calling you, or to email people.

• 1:56:40Rich Roll?

  Or have some like email chain going around.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's what you had to do, that's where technology was. There may have, blogs may have existed back then, but no one knew it. I learned how to text in 2002, because my brother had cancer, and we were in the hospital, and the doctors texted, so...

• 1:56:55Rich Roll?

  But the, but the blog quickly becomes something other than just keeping people up to speed on what's going on. I mean, it becomes this incredibly, you know, vulnerable, emotional kind of, I mean, I sort of think of it in the, in the way that you found Solus in the music as a kid, you know, this, this way of like, you know, connecting with something emotionally, like the blog kind of served a similar purpose for you in helping you kind of navigate your own emotions, um, through this form of sharing.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  Yes, and I have mixed feelings about it today, and I think that I've, I've mixed perspective about it, and one of the many reasons I love Joanne...

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Is because she...

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  You know, like, I'm still like a hurt kid and I want people to like me. You know what I'm saying? And... While Joanne certainly wants people to like her, I mean, who doesn't? She can say shit to people that is true to her in a way that's appropriate,

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  but that might not be what somebody wants to hear. If you know what I'm saying.

• 1:58:10Rich Roll?

  I do. My wife is like that as well.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:13Rich Roll?

  And I share the people-pleasing trait, so I know what that's like. But how does that... I mean, what does that have to do with the blogging?

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Because Joanne,

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  in the end, although she loved and loves many aspects of the blog, many, many, many parts of why it was good and helpful and all that, I think some of it she felt like she didn't want people fucking knowing everything that was going on with us to that degree. And I think she felt like I was spending too much time on it. And...

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  That it was just a bit of a fucking annoyance to her. And that's not fair, because that seems shallow. I think she felt like,

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  "Okay, I get it, right? You're telling people what's going on with Pablo so that they don't have to call us and email us and drive us mental." And it worked. But it's also like, sometimes like I don't want to tell everybody everything. And I don't recall ever writing anything medically, like a threshold medical piece of news without checking with her. I don't recall that at all. But I think, you know, look, to be honest, Rich, there were parts of the blog, looking back on it, that were more about me than him. Aspects of it. And I was... If I think back to what I was thinking, it's that I was trying to present, "I'm a father and a husband."

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  And a human going through this thing. So some of it was about me, like my riding and how am I coping? And we're learning from the doctors, like you have to have something else. Mom and dad, you have to have an outlet. You do yoga? Okay, great. You know, mom's gonna go and do yoga, dad's gonna stay home with the, with the kids. Okay, then when mom comes home, you've gotta go out and ride your bike. Trust us. Or other parents would tell us that, right? And so, um, that's why I would, that would be my motivation for writing about my riding.

• 2:00:22Rich Roll?

  Explain how cycling kind of, you know, soothed the pain or was an outlet for you. Like how, you know, how do you articulate the importance of being on your bike?

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  I've always ridden a bike, literally since my grandfather, my mom's dad taught me how to ride a bike when I was five. I've always ridden a bike. Bikes in history and bikes in modern times are transportation, largely, right? If we consider the wide expanse of the globe, bikes are the transportation of poor people who have no other options in many cases. Bike, a bike is the thing you put under your ass to go and find your dreams. Think about, you know, World Bicycle Relief, people in Africa.

• 2:01:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  Right? And so forth and so on. It's a big deal. People back in the 1800s, they were doing this sort of stuff. I always rode a bike. At first it was a dirt bike and then my cousin, Chris Foley, when he went, when he left Milwaukee to go to medical school and feel like he gave me this Trek bike with clip pedals and Deodora shoes, like super fine leather shoes that I would wear without socks. And I assumed that you just jammed your foot inside the clip and the thing locked underneath your, the ball of your foot and you cranked it down. That's how you did it. So I went from dirt bike to a road bike. And growing up in Wisconsin, when you said I got a, a road bike, you meant a track, because that's all anybody had.

• 2:01:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's where they, that's where they make them.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

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

• 2:02:33Rich Roll?

  Just while he was out riding?

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, dude, it was so, it was so ridiculous. Hey, if you're not a cyclist and you like to make fun of cyclists, you're right. We are all D-bags at some level because of the gear and the geekiness, but we're also pretty cool. So give us a break. And this guy was, was, had a disc brake and a, a disc wheel. And he, um, I would ride with him sometimes and I would go like, okay, well, I'd just run into him. And I'd ride with him and I'd go, where are you going? And he'd go, I'm going for another two hours. People did it by time back then. And then I'd say, can I ride with you tomorrow? And he'd say, yeah, meet me right here at, you know, 8 a.m. And that was it. There was no phone calls. There's no checking your texts like we do now all the time.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm running late. There was none of that shit. And I just rode and rode and rode and my imagination lit up and opened up and it was like meditation for me. It's, and we know now like cycling is literally a meditative act. They've done research on this. It does the same thing for the neural pathways that actual meditation, sitting on your ass and breathing deeply, does for you. And it gave me a way to get around. It gave me, um, something to be passionate about other than music and writing. I was already writing at that time. And, um, when I was a college DJ, to go back to that, I would ride from my mom's house where I was living on the very edge of Milwaukee, into downtown with records in a backpack.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  At like 10 at night so I could get there in time to do my show. And so I rode and rode and rode everywhere. Then when I started making money, I bought a car. I got fat. I drank a lot more. I ate a lot more. I got fatter. The fatter I got, the less I wanted to ride. The less I rode, the fatter I got. And then I moved to LA. Where there is a robust cycling culture, but I didn't know anything about it and I assumed that no one rode here. I mean, back in 2000, 2001, you didn't see that many cyclists around LA. So, um, I got fat. And then around 2005, my doctor said to me, when I did my physical, he said, you know, you're, you're fat. And I was like, oh, come on, man. That hurts my feelings. And he goes, I don't care if it hurts your feelings. I'm looking at your

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  numbers and they're worse than they were last year. I guarantee you, they're gonna be worse next year if you don't deal. And I said, well, what can I do? And he said, uh, it's very simple. Eat less and work out. He goes, like, you're a young guy. Like, why are you so fat? Why do you weigh so much? Literally, the, this guy, Dr. Josh Trabulus, if you want someone to give you motivation, that's him. And I said,

• 2:05:10Rich Roll?

  It's the straight talk.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  And he goes, and I said, do you know a nutritionist? I need to learn how to eat. Cause among the many things I never learned how to do growing up was how to eat. And he goes, yeah, I have this great person, Carrie Wyatt. I went to her. I, Joanne, um, was amazing. Joanne, um, wasn't working at the time. She was, you know, raising our kids and, and running our household, which is, you know, a lot of work. And she, um, got the cookbook from Carrie, like the cooking instructions and she followed it methodically. And I lost 50 pounds. I started riding. I started riding.

• 2:05:46Rich Roll?

  I, I didn't realize you got that heavy.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  I was 224 pounds when Dr. Trabulus said, like, you're fat. And he like squeezed my gut. I'm an asshole, right? I'm actually going for a physical Monday. And I'm gonna tell him that I called him an asshole on your podcast.

• 2:06:00Rich Roll?

  Like, you gotta be, what are you now? Like 175?

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  175 to 180. And so I got the, the same bug that you got, that your book is, you know, hubbed on, which is like, I'm sort of, I'm sort of sick of feeling this way. I'm certainly sick of looking this way. And, um,

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  I just needed, I needed to ask for help. And so there was this theme in my life being a, you know, a sober dude, um, much, you know, much younger sober dude than I was back then, rather than I am now, but like learning to ask for help, learning to ask for instruction where I don't know. That was like a big thing, you know? And so I went and met Carrie Wyatt and I would go there every week to get weighed in and get my body fat measured. And she would like tweak my diet and she'd tweak my food plan. And Joanne would keep cooking for me and I'd keep, um, riding. And the weight just started coming off. And then, and then, so when, um, I kept that passion going, I hired a coach for cycling so I could learn how to do it right. I didn't want to mess up my legs or whatever.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Then I got into like the cycling scene here at Rovello Pasadena. Great riders, learned, learned how to ride in a group, learned the real tenets of cycling with a capital C. And learned the culture, got really into the gear, which Joanne was never happy about because it's expensive.

• 2:07:21Rich Roll?

  There's no end to that.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  And, um, but really met so many great friends, had so many great adventures, went to, rode from London to Paris for a charity ride over there called, it was for, for the big issue, which is like the homeless newspaper in London. We rode there for the finish of the Tour de France. Did, you know, went and did a cycling camp up in Solvang here in California with Chris Carmichael.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Met new friends through cycling, reconnected with old friends who were also in the cycling. You get what I'm saying, right? And, um, and Joanne loved it because I'd lost all this weight and it was like really inspiring. And Pablo loved it. I think, I mean, he wasn't really old enough to really tell me subjectively. He liked what I liked. He liked what Joanne liked. He certainly liked what Grady liked, but he loved, I would have this bike thing that connected to my seat post and we'd ride around and he would love it. And I was teaching him how to ride on training wheels and. So cycling was this thing in our family. It was like a nice thing. Then Pablo gets diagnosed with cancer and the bomb goes off and cycling takes on this new significance with me because it's the thing I can do.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  I can bring my bike to Children's Hospital, which is on Sunset and Hollywood and Silverlake. And if I'm overnight with Pablo, I can bring my bike, bring my cycling kit. And when Joanne comes in the morning, we would trade shifts, you know, she'd sleep at home or I'd sleep at home and then we'd shift. So I would go, okay, you're coming at seven and we have a meeting at 10 with the doctors. The minute you get here, I'm out the door and I'm gonna go and pound Griffith Park as hard as I can and do all the climbs and do intervals and just get my anger out.

• 2:09:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what I was gonna say, I mean, I'm sitting here thinking like, you know, all right, you know, you're hit with this bomb. And, you know, the emotions have to be going insane, but you can't drink. The anger's no longer acceptable, you know, that's sort of all the, all the like sort of normal avenues that you might pursue to like express this like emotional, you know, sense of unease that you have, but there's the bike.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:30Rich Roll?

  And the bike can like fill that, you know, fill that void.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  It did. And, um, and the writing filled that void. The writing was a great release for me and gave me, um,

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  I've always felt that I had a contribution to give, you know, in my life that was beyond like profit, that was beyond like making money for myself or others, you know, and the writing really connected that in me. Because it was about expression. At the end of the day, my blog was about expressing my experience for better or for worse, which then allows other people to feel their, those, their feelings and my feelings as I've expressed them.

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  And there's a knock on effect to that, which is why.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  It's what it's what I get from music to go back to the earlier topics when we were talking about what music means to me. I got to do my version. Of what my favorite songs do for me. I got to say. What was true to me. And it turns out that it resonated with other people in their lives. I mean, dude, I'd have people. We'd have people. Emailing and saying like, look, I've never, I don't know anybody who's ever had a life threatening disease. Cancer's never touched my life.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  But what you said in that blog post last Thursday. Inspired me to like, go and talk to my boss about a challenge we've been having together, or. You inspired me to quit my job and start a business. That I am passionate about, you know? So it wasn't necessarily, sure, there's people that were gluing up to it because they were going through cancer without a doubt. But. As I recall, the way I was writing.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Was just opening. Some people up all over the world. So that was pretty interesting to me. And I felt like, um, cause like, look, anybody who does the business side of. Of entertainment.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  You know. If you have any inkling of of being some sort of a. An artist yourself or a creator of anything. You definitely confront yourself with that all the time, right? Because you go, man, what? I'm like a suit.

• 2:11:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  But I, but I can write too.

• 2:11:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's that it's that shadow artist thing.

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:56Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I try to keep the two things separate, believe me, because nobody wants. Their label president like, you know, getting too crazy, but I, but I, but I really do put it all, I put it all out there with my artists.

• 2:12:06Rich Roll?

  He wants to write songs now?

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do want to write songs, I do. But, uh. The blog then.

• 2:12:13Rich Roll?

  But it did, it connected. I mean, it really connected with a lot of people and and I remember kind of, you know, reading, you know, I was reading the blog and reading all the kind of, you were getting a lot of press, there was a lot of attention on what was going on and unfortunately, you know. It didn't have a happy ending.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  No, it didn't.

• 2:12:28Rich Roll?

  You know, but there, there is a silver lining in that, which is the birth of the foundation.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  Pablo, um, I want to just say this yet again because your show is about the expression of one's truth and how one connects with the current of life, to say something extremely new agey. But, um, I always want to say like, I am one parent of a child. I'm not both parents of a child. And Joanne has a different perspective and she would say all of this in her own way. And I, I always want to say that. Um, so Pablo was here for six years and six days. I'm not God. I'm not Jesus. I'm not Santa Claus. I'm not anyone's idea

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  of, I don't know anything. But what comforts me is this, um, cliche that I learned when my brother died and I heard it a million times when Pablo died and it sounds pretty good to me, which is that, you know, he was here for the amount of time he was here. And, um, his legacy lives on. And there's a power in that. And, you know, people will say like, oh, well, he was here for just the amount of time he had to be here to make his mark on the world. And like, I get that. Like, I get like, I'm saying it like in a smart ass way, but I, there's now more dogs in the background. But, but like, I understand that people are just being nice when they say that. And it's like, what,

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  no one knows what to say to someone whose child has died. But Pablo made a deep, deep impression on people. He, this does not take away from Grady. Grady, Grady has, makes a deep impression on people all the time. He's an amazing dude. You just met him upstairs. He's an amazing dude. He's now a grown man. He's, you know, going on 22 years old. Pablo never learned how to read. He was on the very cusp of that. You know, he didn't learn math, like none of that. He could barely write his name at the age he was, but, um, he made a deep impression on people. He was, and I'm not just saying this, he was a, he was this bombastic.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  Charismatic, amazing dude, and he could talk to anybody, which I always thought, and by the way, Joanne can talk to anybody as well. So like, she learned that from her parents, I learned it from mine, and it's, we're an interesting couple.

• 2:14:52Rich Roll?

  Exploded in her.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  Well, when I, and when I'm around Joanne, I just take the backseat because she's such a great conversationalist and I, we'll leave a party and she'll go like, "You didn't talk at all." And I'm like, "Yeah, because I let you do all the talking." So what ended up happening with the blog is, and what ended up happening in our lives is we decided to start a foundation so that we could raise, everybody wanted to give money, that's what happens when someone's sick or in an accident. And there was no such thing as GoFundMe, none of that stuff existed back then.

• 2:15:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  And so, we, I had read Lance's books, and I was inspired by his advocacy, and I do not care to get into the politics of Lance Armstrong, he's a friend of mine, he's been an incredibly good friend of mine, a good riding buddy. I don't really give a shit what he did in his cycling career, and I've told him that. I don't care. Okay. So, I read his books, and they were inspiring to me, and what he actually did inspired me. He started a foundation that's raised nearly a billion dollars, and has given dignity to a disease that was second only to, well, I'm not going to finish that sentence because

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  I don't want to seem rude. Cancer, when you and I were growing up, and until 10 or 15 years ago, was like viewed as a death sentence. It was like a dark cloud over somebody. We don't talk about them anymore. In many cultures, you literally didn't talk about that person anymore. And I think the most enduring thing that Liv Strong has ever done, that Lance ever did, was to try and just smash that shit wide open and say, "Forget that. People who have cancer are people, and they should actually be held in a unique place, and we should help them, and support them, and love them, and talk about them, and talk to them, and showcase them, if you will."

• 2:16:45Speaker 01

  Because, and these are my words, statistically, X percent of all of us are gonna have to deal with this. Directly or indirectly in our lifetime. So why are we acting like pretend about it?

• 2:16:56Rich Roll?

  Right. What is it? Twenty-eight million people?

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So we, um, thought, well, we don't wanna give the money to any old foundation. We have heard all different things about foundations over the years. Where does the money really go?

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  Are you paying for salaries in office and all that? Let's start our own thing. So at first, we just started a PayPal thing for people to give money to who wanted to give money. We said, when Pablo goes back to school, we're gonna give money to, we're gonna give the money to some organization that we fall in love with during his treatment and we'll be good. We then realized we need to come up with a name for it. Joanne comes up with the name Poblav because, you know, she was smart. She added a V and an E to the boy's name and there it was.

• 2:17:38Rich Roll?

  We already had Poblav.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Poblav, yeah, that's right. She probably named that too. She's good like that. And so we, um, then we then incorporated and got the designation from the government and the way we went and we, people just donated money. We had, we just thought we were gonna give away the money when he started kindergarten. And then Pablo passed away and then I decided to ride my bike from Florida to LA.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  As a fundraiser and also to sort of find my way as a human being. I didn't know who the fuck I was. I didn't wanna know who I was. I didn't, I just, I'm not gonna try and describe the grief that I feel or that we feel. I'm not gonna, I'm just, I don't care to even talk about it.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  Just, I'm just, I'm over it. I don't wanna talk about it anymore. But it was immense and deep and, and any given day, I could just walk out the door and never come back. And I'm not crazy. And it's not morbid and it's not like, you know, Michael Douglas in that movie, falling down. It's just, just, it just is. And so that's, so I guess I will say a little bit about it. That's what I'll say.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Anybody who's lost a child, whether they're, whether they died when they were a child or whether they were an adult when they died, right? Um, knows that feeling. I just, I know it. I know it. I've never met a parent who's lost a child, who doesn't understand, like, I could just get up and walk out the door and never come back and just keep walking. I don't need my possessions. I don't need my shit. I don't need my phone. I don't need my status. I don't need my bank cards. I don't care. And, um, on any given day, Joanne and I make a decision to get out of bed. I will say that about grief and the ongoing, never-ending process of

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  mourning the loss of your child. I will say that.

• 2:19:36Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be an incredibly lonely feeling, though, too, right? And I feel like, you know, the blog, your expression, the foundation, has really provided community for these other parents who I would imagine, you know, would otherwise experience this in isolation because of the very words you said. Like, no one knows what to say. No one knows, you know, how to act. We say what we think, you know, we should say, but we know it's not right. The whole thing is awkward and weird. Meanwhile, the parents are suffering, you know, terribly and alone.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. You, some of the things I learned when my son died, that I would like to share with people because people, again, no one talks about this shit. One of the things you lose when you, when your child dies, is your, your sense of your identity. And, um, you lose a part of your purpose. You know, we have another child. But you lose a part of your purpose. I mean, part of the, once you have a kid, part of your entire purpose in life. Why you work so hard, where you work, that you work, you know, whatever. How you schedule your life. It's because you have a purpose and a responsibility around that.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  And as we said earlier, there's this responsibility and this purpose was significant to me.

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

  Specifically because of the fact that my parents left me behind. And that that's hard, dude. That's really hard. And being a stepdad to Grady fulfilled part of that for me, but not all of it. Because again, Grady has a father and I'm not, would never try and take his place.

• 2:21:18Rich Roll?

  You could, on some level, it's unfinished business.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:21:21Rich Roll?

  You couldn't, you couldn't course correct. You couldn't, you know.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:21:24Rich Roll?

  Change that pattern.

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the things that linger, there's a lot of things that linger, man. You're seeing Pablo's friends grow up, seeing them develop personalities, seeing them walk. You know, I saw one of his friends with a, holding a book, a thick book and I was.

• 2:21:41Speaker 01

  That was really hard.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  You know, like, like

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  a book that the kid was reading, like a thick ass like novel. That was hard. Cause one of the things I loved doing with Pablo was, was reading with him at night in his bed, like under the covers. And I love reading and I love, I just wanted Pablo to be a reader. Like I prayed that he'd be a reader and all signs pointed in that direction. Joanne's a reader too. But for me, again, that thing of like my brain, the way I grew up and, you know, being told I was a piece of shit by my stepmother and I was useless and I was a fucking idiot. And my mom was an idiot and you know, literally I'm not, these are not euphemisms. This is actually what I was said, told by her, like.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  The more books I could read by Anne Rann and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Wilde, you know what I'm saying? The more records I could devour. That, those were like weapons in my arsenal to fucking climb out of that joint. And so I wanted my son to like have that same arsenal, even though he didn't need it for the same reason. But um, we started this foundation and it blossomed into this thing. I rode across the country, um, which is another thing that's, that was insane. And, and I didn't even, I wasn't even clear at the time how hard it was for Joanne. How part of her felt like it was total bullshit and totally about me.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  And um, she told me and um, there were things about it she didn't like. There were things about it she loved. And I, I was a child. I was, I was a.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  We are both hurt. My ears weren't working so well at the time. You know what I'm saying? Figuratively.

• 2:23:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and well, I mean, you, you, you know, grief takes many forms, obviously, as trite as that is. And you suffer together as a couple, but, but a lot of that suffering has to be alone.

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Rich Roll?

  Right? Because you suffer in different ways.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the foundation starts as a PayPal account. People donate money. I go and ride across the country, visit children with cancer wherever I possibly can. I ride with my friend Rick Babington, who was my cycling coach for years, still a dear friend. And, um, I mean, dude, we did 100 miles a day for 30 days. You know what that's like? You, you know, more than that's like, um, 100, 100 miles a day for 30 days. We, we, uh, we raised a lot of money. We got back and Joanne looked at me and she said, we need to do something with this money. Like, we have to be responsible. Like, people have donated a lot of money. Our friends, their friends, people will never meet.

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  And we have to really do what we said we were going to do, probably at a level that we never even intended. And, you know, she had owned a production company for years. She was an executive producer that, you know, for people who aren't in the business, if you like, own a production company in the music, video, commercial, film world, you're called an executive producer. And so I said, well, you need to executive produce this shit. Because when I got back from my ride in November of 2013, my, my goal, my stated purpose was I'm going to go back to Dangerbird and we're going to get this. I'm going to go back to work.

• 2:25:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  You know, my, my whole crew was sitting there running the label and we needed to go and sign more artists, make more records, you know, make that money. And I couldn't like run a foundation. And so she did it and she has turned the Pablo Foundation into a well-oiled machine. It's a business, you know, it's a not-for-profit business, but it's a business.

• 2:25:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, you guys have raised, what, like 2 million bucks or 2 million dollars?

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  We've, we've raised just Pablo Across America in and of itself as an event has raised 2.2 million dollars to date. And my goal this year is to raise 500,000.

• 2:25:42Speaker 01

  So to really just break it through the stratosphere. Where as we sit here right now, we're at like 177. We have 40 riders riding.

• 2:25:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:25:51Speaker 01

  Which is, which is our biggest ride group ever. And we're going from LA to San Fran, which is insane because you're going into the wind, but we're doing it.

• 2:26:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, coming up October 15th.

• 2:26:02Speaker 01

  And the foundation has raised over $9 million in aggregate since it started.

• 2:26:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a proper thing.

• 2:26:09Rich Roll?

  So just the annual rides, I have gotten the 2.2 or whatever.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 2:26:13Rich Roll?

  Beyond that, there's all this additional fundraising. I didn't realize.

• 2:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. We have all different fundraising products, if you will, or mechanisms. So we have, um, you know, first of all, we have different fundraising drives where people donate money. Year end drives and corporate matching drives. And we have a bunch of different events every year. Pablo across America so far has been our, our single biggest driver. Um, we, we have a bunch of, um, people who've donated substantial amounts of money to the foundation. We, I love to point out that we have dollar donors on up to like the biggest check we've ever gotten was $500,000.

• 2:26:51Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  So going from a dollar, you know, to a couple of public friends doing a bake sale on Largemont Boulevard to here's $500,000.

• 2:27:00Rich Roll?

  And how do you make decisions about where you, where you place that money?

• 2:27:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so we have a three-pronged mission because we're parents. We started a pediatric cancer organization. We were never going to have a one-pronged mission that just didn't really reflect who we were as parents. Your kids in cancer treatment, you don't want just one thing. You want many things. Principally, you want your kid to survive. To survive means treatment's got to get better and the long-term side effects got to be minimized. Just because you survive doesn't mean your life's pretty. You might have one leg is shorter than the other. Your spine may have been retarded because of the radiation. You might.

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  Develop, you know, any number of other diseases you may die early. All this shit happens. So you want your kid to survive. So, okay, great. So we're going to fund research and we're going to take a venture capital approach to research. We found out very early on that pediatric cancer research is severely underfunded because it's, there's not a huge commercial base for it. So the big drug companies and all these people that you think are looking out for everybody aren't because they're driven by profit and there's not a lot of profit for kids.

• 2:28:13Rich Roll?

  Why is that? I wouldn't have known that.

• 2:28:15Speaker 01

  Because the number of kids that get diagnosed with cancer every year is extremely small in terms of the head count compared to adult cancers.

• 2:28:28Rich Roll?

  They can't justify the R and D. They can't sink all the money into developing the drugs.

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is bullshit because when you save a child's life, you're saving 60, 70, 80 person years. And if somebody comes through cancer, unless they're like one or two years old when it happens, right? If they're sort of, you know, in a place in their life where they know what's going on, that person is probably going to overindex as a human being, right? There's going to be something about their drive, their personality, their creativity that just goes way beyond what their peers do, right? Because of what they've been, they become a survivor.

• 2:29:07Rich Roll?

  Right. That extra appreciation.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Hey, man, I'm alive. And it doesn't mean everybody, but it means many. And so the fact is that the drugs that our children are given, with the exception of a couple, are drugs that were designed for testing on adults. And we always talk about testing. Don't forget testing has two halves. One is how is it affecting your body right now? And what's the long-term, you know, knock-on effect? Right? And so they're all tested on adults. They're made for adults and they're down-dosed for the child's smaller body mass, which is why when you have a child and you're going for chemo, the first place you go, when you go to the oncology clinic is triage. They have to take your weight.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  Right? They have to check your body mass. And then they, they do all the mathematics and then they deliver the chemo to you in the, in the very right, you know, portion. And that's shocking to me. You're like napalming your kid's body with something that was never meant for a kid's body.

• 2:30:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just by reducing the amount doesn't mean that that's the appropriate.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  No way.

• 2:30:16Rich Roll?

  Protocol.

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  It's totally cute when you're, when your child puts on your jeans and you take the funny photo or they put on your shoes and walk around, that's, that's, that's fine. But I don't know that we want to be giving them the exact same, um, hey, if that was the case, why don't we just let kids drink whiskey when they're like four years old? Like what's, what's the big deal? Shit ain't right. Their bodies aren't, think about that, Rich.

• 2:30:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  You know, we know.

• 2:30:42Rich Roll?

  And I hadn't thought, I hadn't thought about that before. Like I would not have, I would not have thought of that.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  So three-pronged mission, research.

• 2:30:48Rich Roll?

  You're funding the research.

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  We've given away, uh, 1.1 million dollars in research fee. We do $50,000 grants. We do, um, four to eight of those every year. We have a scientific advisory committee that sends out requests for proposal, RFPs. Uh, researchers send in their papers. These eight people who are on our board are the, are some of the top, um, pediatric cancer researchers and oncologists. So, so they're, they're both on the patient side and the lab side. From all of whom are from name brand universities or hospitals all around the world. And they grade these, these proposals using a numeric rating system that the National Institute of Health here in America has designed.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  So it's a, it's a blind taste test, if you will, right? There's nothing emotional about it. Shit is graded on numbers. They then collate the numbers and they recommend the top rated things to the board of directors. And Dr. Leo Mascheranos, who was Pablo's doctor at CHLA.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  Leads that group and he's on the board. He's on our board of directors and he comes in and he walks us through everything in layman's terms. And we vote in X number of grants every year. We don't always agree with him and sometimes we vote in things that he doesn't, that aren't his top choices, but that look interesting to us. So there's a subjective thing left for us even in the end. But we've gotten their, their information. And so it's not like it's a bunch of laypeople that we've assembled on the board who are just going, yeah, that looks good.

• 2:32:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  Want to be clear with people about that. It's not like our buddy who's nephews in med school at Duke or whatever. It's nothing like that. And the other thing, as cancer parents and specifically parents of Pablo, he loved taking photos. I think a lot of kids like taking photos. And so we started a photography program because one of the things is that there's not enough for kids to do in hospitals. And there's certainly not enough arts education in hospitals. Keep in mind, kids who have cancer probably can't go to school most of the time. So their, their, their relationship with education and the structure of that, of homework being tested, being kind of put on the rails, it goes out and that's messed up.

• 2:33:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  Kids need that. Kids thrive on that. And so our Pablo Shutterbugs program actually puts a camera in the hands of kids with cancer, one-on-one instruction with a professional photographer. And they have homework. It's an eight-week course and they have homework and they have to do their homework. There's no testing, but they have to do their homework. And their homework is still life, diptychs, triptychs, perspectives, shadows, you know, things like that.

• 2:33:30Rich Roll?

  I love that though, because I think that, that it's, it gives them a way to tell their story, just from their perspective.

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  Dude, exactly. The power of narrative, which is exactly what you've taught us with your book. The power of narrative. And they get to, and at a point in their lives where adults are talking about them and talking at them and poking them and prying them, cancer is not allowed in this program. The instructors, the volunteers, us as foundation members, we are not allowed to talk about cancer in and around those classrooms and the graduation and the gallery show. And the kids love it. And we give them little cameras like that Canon that you have on the ground. In fact, it's probably like the same model that they use and they get to keep the camera and they get a printer and they learn how to do all this stuff. I mean, the electronics of it all these days is a whole other aspect of it.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

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

• 2:34:58Rich Roll?

  It's cool. Also a sense of normalcy, right?

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:35:01Rich Roll?

  Like we're not going to talk about cancer, it's just about this.

• 2:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the teacher goes to wherever the kid is. So if the kid's in hospital that week, the teacher goes there. If the kid's back at home, they go there. It's really cool. And then we do, we do a formal graduation, they get diplomas, they take pictures with us and all that and the instructors.

• 2:35:19Rich Roll?

  A gallery show for everybody?

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  We do a big gallery show. Um, you know, we just started working with the Getty Center here in LA and we did, um, we did a bunch of our classes there and we did our graduation there. And so the kids are literally doing their classes and graduation at one of the best art museums in the entire world. And how cool is that? And we have now, we started in LA and New York and now we're in 13 cities across the country. Pretty phenomenal with that. And, and so really, you know, the, the, um,

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

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

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

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

• 2:37:13Speaker 01

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

• 2:37:35Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a beautiful thing, man, and it's a, it's a, an amazing way to honor Pablo's life and to carry the message to so many other people that are suffering out there, man. So thanks for sharing that with me.

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:37:48Rich Roll?

  It's good talking to you, man.

• 2:37:49Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 2:37:50Rich Roll?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  I appreciate it too.

• 2:37:53Rich Roll?

  Before we wrap it up, maybe I thought it could be, you know, kind of a good way to wrap, to close it down, is if you could share maybe just one or two things that, that might be helpful or informative to perhaps a parent who's listening out there who might be enduring or going through something similar to what you experienced.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  I think that.

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  One of the things that I remember is finding one or two people in on your team or around your team at your hospital to that you can trust. I've gotten many, many calls over the years. Somebody gave somebody my number and their child was just diagnosed. What can you, what can you say to me? And so I know other people are doing this thing of like, how do I find a mentor? How do I find someone who's been through this? I need help, but I also need the truth. I'm very careful when people say that. Everybody always says that and I'm very careful what I say to people.

• 2:39:04Speaker 01

  Right? Cause it's, there, there, there are things I'll never tell anybody. And Joanne will never tell anybody. It's just, it's just, you don't, you just don't do that shit. So, but, but asking people who know is helpful because the last thing you want to do is go to Google. You do not want to go to Google when your child has a life threatening disease. I'm sorry, you don't want to do that because there's all kinds of misinformation or things that are kind of right and kind of not right. It's goofy and everybody does it, but all the doctors tell you not to do it. And, and the other thing that I said earlier is you have to make sure that you take care of yourself. Nutrition, working out, blowing off that steam.

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  And, and if you have other children, obviously making sure that they have nurturing. It's really hard and we didn't do it right. Well, I'll speak for myself. I don't know that you can do it right. I know that I, I, I, I wasn't the best during that period of time, but it's important. I mean, who would be? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:11Rich Roll?

  But, uh, but yeah, that's, you can't take care of somebody else and you're not taking care of yourself first.

• 2:40:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's the idea. It's like the airplane thing where you gotta put your mask on first.

• 2:40:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  It feels selfish, but it's not. It's just not. And it's like, I think it's a big thing, like in our society where everybody, in America, everybody thinks like, you know, being, while everybody's acting selfish, they all think, oh, if I take care of myself before I take care of you, I'm being selfish. But they're too busy being selfish to figure out that there's other ways to look at it. And hardly anybody ever tries on that other, you know, that other suit, so to speak. But you gotta.

• 2:40:49Rich Roll?

  Martyrdom, you know, that can be, that's its own form of selfish egotism.

• 2:40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair enough. But I just think like, get, get good resources, um,

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  get a good circle around and you just remember you don't have to answer the phone all the time. You just don't. Everybody's gonna wish you well. Everybody's gonna be awesome. People were so amazing to us and continue to be so amazing to us. But the fact is you can't interact with everybody. It's impossible. And it drains you and you need that energy for when your kid, you know, needs it.

• 2:41:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Like the healthy boundary.

• 2:41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard. Uh, it's, it all comes back to all this weird shit. But, uh, but you, uh, look, man, I, I find you really inspiring and I follow you on Instagram and I follow you on Twitter. And I've read your books. You just gave me the cookbook and I'm gonna, Joanne and I are gonna, are gonna cook some things.

• 2:41:39Rich Roll?

  No pressure, man.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  I, I love, like, I would love to do plant-based. I just, I find it to be, um, that I'm totally ignorant to this and I'm just making this up. I think it's gotta be a hell of a lot of work.

• 2:41:54Rich Roll?

  It's not. It's not. Just check out, check out the cookbook, man. It's a lot easier than you think. It's pretty simple stuff. But we could talk about that more.

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  I have like coconut oil up there, dude.

• 2:42:03Rich Roll?

  You guys gotta come out to the house for dinner too and let Julie cook for you guys.

• 2:42:06Speaker 01

  I'm there.

• 2:42:06Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  I'm already there.

• 2:42:08Rich Roll?

  All right, cool.

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  I'm already there.

• 2:42:09Rich Roll?

  And, and it's ridiculous that we haven't been out on a bike yet. So we gotta make that change.

• 2:42:13Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I saw you on the Nasco ride when I had pneumonia.

• 2:42:16Rich Roll?

  That's right, we did, we did see you.

• 2:42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we need to ride together.

• 2:42:19Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 2:42:20Speaker 01

  Alright, let's do that.

• 2:42:21Rich Roll?

  Alright, cool man. So if you're digging on Jeff, you want to learn more about Pablove, the Pablove mission, consider donating. Go to Pablove.org if you want to follow Jeff. He's Pablove Jeff on Twitter and Instagram. And the big ride's coming up October 15th, yeah?

• 2:42:38Speaker 01

  October 5 through 11.

• 2:42:40Rich Roll?

  October 5 through 11, yeah. I want to do it next year.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should, you should.

• 2:42:44Rich Roll?

  I will. I'm committing now.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  I'll go, if you do Pablove across America next year, I will be plant-based for a certain period of time at least, if not forever. How good would that be?

• 2:42:56Rich Roll?

  That's a throwdown.

• 2:42:57Speaker 01

  I'll, seriously, I'll do it.

• 2:42:58Rich Roll?

  Alright. Where's the, where's the ride gonna be next year?

• 2:43:01Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 2:43:02Rich Roll?

  Alright, well.

• 2:43:03Speaker 01

  You can help me customize the route.

• 2:43:06Rich Roll?

  Alright, sounds good, man.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  Alright, thanks, man.

• 2:43:08Rich Roll?

  Alright, peace. Plants.

• 2:43:15Rich Roll?

  That was amazing. Thank you, Jeff. I love you, buddy. That was incredible. I appreciate your honesty and your openness and your vulnerability with me. It was just amazing. If this touched you guys in any way, I encourage you to please visit Pablove.org, consider a donation, and other ways to get involved to support the ride and the kids. Don't forget to visit the episode page at richroll.com for show notes to take your learning experience beyond the earbuds. And if you live in the LA area, or your travels take you through this part of the world, please be sure to check out a few of the businesses that I'm partnered with. Joy Cafe, J-O-I Cafe. It's our organic, plant-based, and gluten-free

• 2:44:00Rich Roll?

  eatery in Westlake Village. You'll often see me eating there. I was eating there today at lunchtime. It was amazing, actually. I just finished a ride. I went in there to get my lunch, and there was a whole family sitting in there, Australian family, and they were en route, I believe they're en route to returning to Australia. I can't, I don't know where they were flying from. And they specifically created their itinerary that would give them a long enough layover in Los Angeles at LAX. To allow them to rent a car and drive all the way out to Joy Cafe for lunch. I'm telling you, Joy Cafe is not closed to LAX. It's a bit of a drive. Incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was so touched that they would do that. And I'm so glad that I was there to kind of greet them and meet them. So, thank you for doing that.

• 2:44:45Rich Roll?

  I'm also partnered with The Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery, also in Westlake Village. You can find out more about these businesses at joycafe.com, J-O-Y-cafe.com, and karmabaker.com. It feels really good to serve the global community with this podcast and the books that we write, et cetera. But it also feels really good to serve the local community with food that is consistent with my values. So, check those out if you're around. I'd love to meet you and see you there. For all your plant-powered needs, go to richroll.com. Got all kinds of cool stuff there. We've got nutrition products. We have 100% organic cotton garments.

• 2:45:28Rich Roll?

  We've got plant-powered tech tees, sticker packs, whatever. All kinds of cool stuff to take your health and your life to the next level at richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. I've got online courses at mindbodygreen.com. Two of those there are The Art of Living with Purpose and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Information is available at mindbodygreen.com. Click on "Video Courses." That's it. Thanks for supporting the show, you guys. Thank you for telling a friend. Thanks for sharing on social media. I appreciate you guys more than you can possibly imagine. I really hope you enjoyed Jeff today. And I'm going to see you guys in a couple of days. So, make it great and we'll talk soon, I promise. Peace. Plants.