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On The Open Mind, Alexander Heffner interviews Moby, discussing his environmental activism and views on societal change. Moby questions the effectiveness of past global unity campaigns like "We Are the World," suggesting they highlight media's influence more than genuine collective action. He connects our emotional responses to media with a potential disconnect from direct experience, likening it to reacting to things that aren't there. Moby emphasizes the subjective nature of reality, highlighting the power of individual perception and the importance of self-awareness in addressing global issues like climate change. He criticizes humanity's continued reliance on unsustainable practices, comparing our behavior to that of cavemen, and advocates for simple yet inconvenient changes, such as eliminating animal agriculture to drastically reduce environmental damage. While acknowledging the complexity of issues like GMOs and vaccines, Moby stresses the need to move beyond simplistic black-and-white thinking and urges individual responsibility in creating a more sustainable future. He aims to be a "prophet of the glaringly obvious," highlighting readily available solutions that require only collective will to implement. The conversation touches upon the influence of corporate and political interests in hindering environmental progress, and Moby’s desire to encourage self-awareness as a path towards positive change.

Title: "(1) The Open Mind: We’re All Made of Stars - Moby - YouTube"
Video Transcript: "I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. Multi-million album-selling artist Moby, yes that renegade genre-defining musician joins us today. While occupying disparate musical terrain like our past musical guests Aloe Blacc and Macy Gray, Moby has a distinctive style attitude punch beneath his acoustic electronica blend of numbingly mind-altering music. As we immerse ourselves into the orbit of his political consciousness, particularly in terms of our environmental stewardship and challenges, I thought we might share some of Moby's recent tweets on the subject. Watching one million gallons of water going in the drains after a water main break, in response to Jon Oliver at Last Week Tonight's segment on the tobacco industry, he asks, "How is this still a thing?" And on the question of evolution or climate change, he wonders, "How can we take Republicans seriously? It's mind-boggling." He goes on to quote from presumably two of his favorite historical figures from the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. "Until we stop harming all other beings, we're still savages." That was our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And then about a hundred years later, "The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man," and that was Charles Darwin. Moby also said it's sad when people see music as a product or a means to an end, and I found that compelling, because he says music is perfect in and of itself, beautiful in and of itself. Now I ask certainly for the individual but what about for society, for someone who concerns himself so much with society. Moby, if it's still capable of change, I wonder where is this generation's "We Are the World" moment? MOBY: The big question, um, and I think I can't answer it without also looking at the effectiveness of the original "We Are the World." I don't really know what "We Are the World" accomplished, I'm sure it accomplished some things, but it seemed more just like this odd excuse for a bunch of public figures to get together in a room and I don't know. Almost like spit in the ocean of unconquerable terrible circumstance... HEFFNER: Whether it was in response to Haiti or in response to the tsunami in Southeast Asia, these moments of a unifying global consciousness, they really seem fleeting. MOBY: Hm, not to sort of take the, I don't know, almost like Marshall McLuhan meta view of it, but it seems like it says more about media and semiotic theory than about the events themselves. What I mean by that is and, and I don't want to be glib or dismissive of the way that people respond to media, but I had this experience in 2004 when John Kerry was losing to George Bush in the presidential election and I and all my friends had worked very hard on the Kerry campaign and I was there with people from the DMC and from MoveOn and we were all gathered around a big-screen TV watching the election results come in and slowly realizing that we had lost the election and people started crying and people started getting so emotional, and I was upset but then I had this sort of quasi-epiphany and I realized ultimately right now we're responding to pixels turning on and off and sound coming out of a small speaker, like and I had this thought which was, and I know this might sound a little odd, I was like one of the ways that we define mental illness is people who respond to things that are not there, you know, so when you see someone walking down the street screaming at the air, you're like oh they're crazy 'cause there's nothing in the air that they're actually screaming at. They're imagining things. And I think that again, from an almost like evolutionary semiotic perspective, the way that we respond to media is that, like we sit in front of a screen, like now, and you have a profound emotional reaction to pixels which I think future generations will look back at that and say like why wasn't your sense of self, your worldview informed by direct experience as opposed to vicariously experiencing something through a screen, nothing in the air that they're actually screaming at. They're imagining things. And I think that again, from an almost like evolutionary semiotic perspective, the way that we respond to media is that, like we sit in front of a screen, like now, and you have a profound emotional reaction to pixels which HEFFNER: Hm. It's skewed, it's warped, it's accelerating technology that we're inundated in. Um, for someone who achieves a level of, as I said in the intro, um, almost hallucinogenic, um, um, migration to another planet at least when I listen to your music, uh, a planet that I want to be on, MOBY: Mm hm. But uh, I mean essentially, and I'm sort of stating the obvious, the way in which we respond to everything is subjective, you know? Nothing in our experience actually exists outside of our perception of it, our cognition, so really the only thing there is... is cognition. You know, the world as it actually might be ontologically bears no relation to the way in which we perceive it. And I think that's probably why I've dedicated myself to being a musician, because of my own subjective response to other people's music, but also the sort of ineffability of music, that it technically -- it has no form or structure, it's just, it's basically just wind hitting our ear drums. of extinction by a million... HEFFNER: But what do you mean by not enjoying it? MOBY: And no one's happy. HEFFNER: Oh, uh huh. MOBY: You know, like, like you could almost say like oh if we were burning all these fossil fuels and creating all this waste and if everybody on the planet was joyful, you could say well, eh, you know, at least people are happy. with just a little bit of collective will, you know? Climate change could functionally end tomorrow, you know, there are so many choices that we think are intractable and they just aren't, but we don't have political leadership or corporate leadership or even in the public sphere people who are actually willing to sort of make the effort to sort of make these changes that would, I don't know, make life more sustainable on this planet. third album he was trying to achieve social justice but ultimately, uh, philanthropy was his uh, cause where he saw resolving the problem of food deserts. Uh, what, what are you really trying to tackle? MOBY: My, I guess broad, vaguely esoteric goal is to help people become more self-aware. And I know that sounds like sort of Southern California new age mumbo-jumbo, but, the problems that we face as a species are all problems that result from a lack of self-awareness. And stop making, like we're still making caveman decisions, you know, we're still responding to the world as if it's this huge threat and we need to like, kill the other, eat as much fatty food as possible, and decimate our environment to be safe. But to state the obvious, the world has changed a lot in the last few hundred thousand years. And the hope with someone who's sick is that they're able to quit and sort of undo the damage as opposed to be killed by the illness, and I sort of feel like we collectively are at that place, like we've created an illness here on this planet and I hope I don't sound like a hippy, it just seems kind of obvious that we have, that like, the planet is very, very sick. The hope... Um, and that, that's honestly my biggest hope. HEFFNER: But that, that takes, that takes, that's your hope, that takes environmental, um, external factors, MOBY: Yeah. HEFFNER: That uh, may or may not present themselves in a, in a radically fast-paced way. MOBY: I think it's largely up to the individual and it, but for some reason it made me think of, and I'm not a doctor, but it made me think of friends of mine who work in emergency rooms. and eating junk food, is that working? You know, is smoking cigarettes and getting in your SUV to drive to Starbucks to not talk to the people next to you in line, like is that working? You know, like is going to the office 90 hours a week to make tons of money and then have a heart attack, like, is that working? And the simple question is no it isn't, so then that's the first step is like, identifying what's not working and then looking around and saying well, are there any people on this planet either now, or in the past who have sort he was miserable and it didn't work, and then he went out and "renunciated" if that's a word, um, got rid of everything and that didn't work, and then he found this middle way which did seem to work, a way of like empirically supported pra- practical, impracticable sustainable life, and I see it, I feel like it's up to each individual to do that and not constantly get so distracted by all the stimuli and all the noise and all the choices that aren't benefiting us as individuals or benefiting us collectively. and that they didn't spend time, they didn't spend ten hours a day online. Uh, so it's looking at these examples and saying how, how can we sort of implement change, either on a local level, on a state level, on a nation-state level 'cause the thing with change, and again I feel like I'm completely stating the obvious, we either choose to change or change is forced upon us. HEFFNER: Huh. And are we ever really aspiring to be ethical citizens if we're only responding to the chaos, mayhem, um, horror that uh, results if we don't listen to your admonition here? MOBY: Mm hm. HEFFNER: I wonder how vegans look at meat-eaters, I'm not a particularly passionate meat-eater, but I am curious generally on your disposition towards, towards meat eaters. It's my place to talk about things that are important to me, but not in a way that criticizes other people or judges them, and um, sorry I got distracted, there was a dog behind the camera. [LAUGHS] But um, it's, it's not my place to judge, it's my place to perhaps draw attention to the ways in which we're living that don't collectively, and now the dog is bouncing up and down. diabetes, cancer, diverticulitis, all these problems that stem from a poor diet. HEFFNER: What I find interesting, Moby, is, there's a whole current and there has been developing over many years of, of a cancer-fighting regime... MOBY: Mm hm. HEFFNER: Um, and in turn, we've made steady strides on certain fronts but in general, our approach has not been that environmental factors are prevalent in contributing to how we die. MOBY: You know, 'cause a lot of our national food policy was written by the Beef and Dairy Council, you know, which not surprisingly, beef and dairy figured pretty prominently in the food pyramid. But it would just make sense if we could all step back and simply look in a clear-eyed objective way at the way in which food, food production, and food consumption is destroying us. Um, I've tried to lobby our governor, who I have a lot of respect for, about water use. Um, to put it in perspective, it takes 10,000 gallons of water to make one pound of beef. It takes a hundred gallons of water to make one pound of beans. It begs the question, in a state that has exceptional drought, why are we funneling water literally and figuratively to livestock, to cows, to chickens, to pigs, to sheep. didn't mention it and he was so honest, he looked me in the eye and he said that's because it's too inconvenient of a truth for most people. HEFFNER: Hm. MOBY: And I keep coming up against that as like environmentalists, progressive people who care about the earth still want to hold onto these old actions that are destroying the earth. there are relatively easy solutions but they're inconvenient, you know, if, and I'm not gonna sound, I don't want to sound like a crazy vegan animal rights activist but if tomorrow we all collectively on this planet stopped using animals for food, deforestation in the rainforest would end. Climate change would be reduced by 25 to 30 percent. So in one fell swoop, we could fix all these problems but the collective response is, well people like hamburgers. HEFFNER: Or that you're painting the picture of a utopia that might never be accomplished? MOBY: It's just, it's just so frustrating because utopia is an inch away from us, like it's within our grasp, we don't even have to make a huge effort, like it's utopia is there and it's easily attainable, it's just no one seems to be, we don't seem to be collectively willing to MOBY: It's a lot easier to prevent a problem than fix a huge problem once it happens. HEFFNER: Where do you want your mark to be? MOBY: Um, uh, it's, well I kind of maybe on my tombstone, when and if I die, um, maybe if it just says here lies Moby, he was the prophet of the blaringly, or the glaringly obvious, HEFFNER: [LAUGHS] MOBY: You know, I mean I don't think that my perspective is terribly insightful or even terribly well-informed, it's just obvious. like the example I always use is like we have this amazing supercomputer in our heads. You know, our brain is so complicated and can process so much information and do so much stuff, it still thinks that a stick is a snake, you know, so we kind of need to be patient with ourselves, to just make every effort to just stop being so stupid. Like GMOs is similar, like I can't say I'm 100 percent pro-GMO or one hundred percent anti-GMO 'cause I think it's complicated. The same thing with vaccines, it's hard to make this sweeping generalization that vaccines are all good or vaccines are all bad. I'm sure there are lots of instances where vaccines clearly, empirically have proven to be great. It doesn't have to be this black and white monolithic thinking. So that's my thought on vaccines, it's like what it says about us as a species is we're really uncomfortable with complexity. HEFFNER: Moby, thank you today for joining us on The Open Mind and thinking about from a musician and activist, a thoughtful leader's, uh, arts leader's perspective, how we, how we shape uh, our environmental future. org/openmind to view this program online or to access over 1,500 other Open Mind int"
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