Where do I begin with the man who only needs one name?

Moby has been a prominent figure in the music scene for decades – a punk rocker-turned-electronica artist who has sold over 20 million records worldwide, Moby’s genre-defying soundscapes have captivated audiences around the globe, earning him Grammy nominations, a devoted fanbase, and countless other accolades. Beyond his musical success, Moby is also an activist, a filmmaker, and an author – as you’ll hear about in this conversation, his journey has been one of profound introspection, self-discovery, and relentless pursuit of personal growth.

Lindsay Hicks brings her own unique brilliance to the table – she is a passionate environmentalist and sustainability expert, recognized for her collaboration with Moby to amplify the message of climate change activism. Together, Moby and Lindsay have formed an extraordinary partnership, blending their passions for music, activism, and thought-provoking conversations into the recently launched Moby Pod. 

In this conversation, we delve deep into how to navigate pivotal moments and deep challenges – neither of their journeys have been without public scrutiny and personal hardship. Moby and Lindsay are beacons for the commitment to self-discovery, doing the work, and the  resilience to keep going. We’re all creating something in life, and it was a breath of fresh air to experience the authenticity Moby and Lindsay brought to this conversation and to what they are creating.

“I don’t pay attention to how anyone might want to label me… I cannot stay sane and calm if I’m constantly being torn apart by the opinions of people I’ve never actually met.”

In This Episode:

Moby’s attraction to punk rock

Because I grew up very poor in a very affluent society, I grew up with a lot of fear and a lot of caution both at home, at school, wherever I was. And when I found punk rock, it threw caution to the wind. And it also had an authenticity. And who knows, other music might have as well, but other music felt so … And I still love a lot of different types of music, but punk rock, there was a genuineness to it. People weren’t hiding. They were wearing their shame like a badge of honor. They were wearing their disenfranchisement like a badge of honor. And they were yelling about it. And it stood in such stark contrast to my upbringing of being ashamed, of being afraid. And then all of a sudden, there was this gigantic liberation that came in the form of people screaming about the things that I didn’t know you were allowed to express.

Lindsay’s compassionate roots

I moved around a lot, and so I was always exposed to different people and different places, and I realized that the same groups existed everywhere. Everywhere was a little bit a version of the exact same thing. So I already had an outsider’s perspective, which gave me a lot of compassion for everyone. It made me see all the ways that everyone was the same and the ways that everyone, even if they were different, it wasn’t that much different. It was them exploring a part of themselves that we all probably have a little bit. And so I think because of that, I developed a deeper sense of not only compassion, and so I was curious about other things, and I think that’s how I found PETA.

Moby’s first experience with therapy

I was in a relationship and it was as dysfunctional as a relationship can be, just awful in every way that a relationship can be awful. And we were like, “Okay, it’s a last ditch effort. Let’s go to couples therapy.” And so we went to this wonderful therapist on the Upper West Side of New York, and I remember the first time we went in, I thought the therapist was going to look at me and congratulate me on being this enlightened, rational, long-suffering boyfriend who knew himself so incredibly well. And that’s not what he said. What he said at the end of the session was like, “Well, Moby, for what it’s worth, I think you might want to consider coming to therapy at least two or three times a week on your own.” I was like, “You mean I don’t get a gold star for being able to reference different schools of thought and different types of therapy?” And I was basically just a traumatized, broken person who had never really looked at the trauma. I’d inhabited the trauma, I’d written songs about the trauma, but I’d never actually explored it.

Getting sober (Moby)

I was doing all these types of therapy, sometimes going two or three times a week, and I was still anxious, I was still depressed. And I went to a psychiatrist and he’s like, “Well, you are also spending $1,000 a week on cocaine and you’re having 20 drinks a night. It’s possible these things are informing your sense of self and your emotional state.” And I was like, “Oh, you mean drinking 20 or 30 drinks a night and doing tons of cocaine and going to sleep with Xanax and Vicodin, and being disappointed every time I woke up that I hadn’t died in my sleep, this wasn’t normal?” So that led me to get sober, and I did the 12 steps, and I found the 12 steps to be also a really phenomenal way to better understand myself, better understand the world in which I lived. And if someone wants to ignore the 12 steps, by all means please do so, but for me, they were really helpful and basically concretized or solidified everything else I’d sort of been doing in therapy.

Traumatic experiences (Moby)

The trauma, well, part of it was hereditary. I remember when I was around eight years old, my father … Okay, to put it in hereditary context, my father killed himself drunk when I was two, and I was sporadically sexually abused when I was growing up. But those things in and of themselves, my limited understanding is that unique experiences of trauma are not enough to rewire … Okay, oftentimes unique experiences of trauma might not rewire someone. Some trauma obviously could, but it’s the day-to-day experience. And my day-to-day experience was one of, as I said, fear and shame and uncertainty. And I was raised by drug addicts and alcoholics, and there was no predictability and no real stability.

Hitting rock bottom (Moby)

It was October 8th, 2008, and I had played a fundraiser for a politician upstate New York, and I of course had my 25 drinks afterwards and found someone to sell me terrible rotgut cocaine. And I was taking the train back into the city, and I couldn’t think, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t look out the windows. I was so hung over and sick. And I realized I’d felt that way every single day for the last eight years. And all of a sudden I was like, “Oh, it’s not getting better. I’ve tried to strategize my way around this, but it’s just simply not getting better.” And that was my bottom. And again, there was no car crash, there was no waking up next to a dead person, there was no waking up covered in blood. It was just simply, as Steven Tyler from Aerosmith said, I just unrelentingly sick and tired of being unrelentingly sick and tired.

Lindsay’s turning point

Moby asked me a question, “And how has your relationship with your mother affected you?” And I was like, “I don’t think it has.” And it hit me. I was like, “No, I don’t think it has,” and then I was like, “Has it? I don’t know,” and then I didn’t think about it again. And then maybe it was a few weeks or a few months later you were like, “That was a moment I realized you had a lot of work to do, and you do have a lot of work to do.” And I was like, “Wait, what?” And I was immediately defensive. And then I thought about it and I started going to therapy, and I realized that every toxic behavior, every coping mechanism that wasn’t working for me, all kind of stemmed from those early moments, those early relationships, her early relationships and things I saw her doing, it all kind of stemmed from that. And how I relate to Moby’s story is that I think it’s very easy to not understand how much pain you’re in, to push forward every single day and not comprehend that what you’re doing isn’t working for you. And to think, “I’m waking up every morning, I’m getting my stuff done, I’m paying my bills usually. I have friends, I must be fine.” And eventually things start to catch up with you and you realize, “Wait, not only is this not working for me, this is actually maybe killing me a little bit.”

The intricacies of self discovery (Lindsay)

I’m still 100% deep in it. I’m not here touting any sort of accomplishment, but I am saying I have worked with many therapists. Mostly I feel like I’m still in a stage, and hopefully I’ll be out of it soon and into the next, but of still gathering understanding, gathering information, putting together with a professional, putting together the pieces of breaking down what my responses are to certain situations and where they came from, and figuring out all the parts of me that are trying to work together to do the right thing in my brain that isn’t actually the right thing. And to sort out where it came from, why I do it, what the habits are, and deconstruct it all. And what I’m hoping to do now that I have gained immense knowledge and understanding is to get to more of a proactive place of building the new habits.

Wisdom from AA (Moby)

One of my friends from the program said something that I loved, and it’s so simple. Well, two things I heard in meetings. One is, “We’re either moving towards a drink or away from a drink,” and you can replace drink with anything. Like we’re either moving towards anxiety or away from anxiety, I’m moving toward bad habits or away from bad habits, I’m moving towards anger or away from anger. And the other thing I heard that’s so simple but so hard to put into practice, another old-timey alcoholic at the end of one of his shares just said, “Do more of what works, do less of what doesn’t.” And the simplicity of that, I was like, “Oh, yeah, it kind of does come down to that.”

Other people’s opinions (Moby)

I don’t pay attention to how anyone might want to label me. I stopped reading social media comments. I stopped reading reviews. I stopped watching interviews of myself a long time ago because the simple illogic of it finally struck me. And I hope that maybe this is helpful to anyone who’s listening where think of how strange it is that we hand our sense of self, that we hand our emotional state, over to strangers, over to people we’ve never met, and people who might just be bots in Macedonian cube farms. I’ve had friends of mine have Twitter arguments with people they later found out were bots. And I realized that a while ago, that I cannot stay sane and calm if I’m constantly being torn apart by the opinions of people I’ve never actually met.

Abstinence from social media comments (Moby)

I spent the next, I don’t know, 15 years obsessing over what people said about me because for a minute it was really good. I mean it sounds like I’m also describing alcohol and drugs, like in the beginning, “How great. This is the answer to all my problems.” And then slowly over time you realize it’s destroying you. And towards the end, especially when social media was sort of invented, I would read comments where people wanted to stab me, they wanted to destroy me, they wanted to watch me die, they hated me. And I was like, “What good can come from knowing this? What possible benefit am I getting? I’m just being constantly destroyed by people I’ve never met.” And so I had to learn, I had to say like, “Okay, similar to alcohol and drugs, I can’t practice moderation.” With alcohol and drugs, I have to have an abstinence model. And with the opinions of strangers, I have to practice abstinence because the other alternatives are to find every person who hates me and kill them. And in addition to being unethical, it’s also kind of illegal and probably not practical because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people.

The futile fight against nature (Moby)

I could say that on one hand, self-involvedly, I’m incredibly thrilled to be named after the vast, chaotic, unknowable forces of the universe. But also the allegory for our current culture is the more we fight against nature, the more we’re just going to destroy ourselves. We’re currently, culturally and as a species, we’re all becoming Ahab, whether it’s climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, water use, desertification, etc. We’re waging a war on nature. And it’s sort of going to Las Vegas, like the house always wins. Nature is going to win. It might be time for our species, I say presumptuously but also empirically, to stop fighting an unbeatable foe.

From selfish to service (Moby)

When I started getting sober, and hopefully this is a lesson that applies to people even who aren’t considering sobriety, but just in general, is I had been so selfish. I was selfish in my friendships. I was selfish in my family relationships. I was selfish in my romantic relationships. I was selfish with the people I worked with. And it was all based on fear and control. I thought the more I can control my environment, the more I can get exactly what I want from the world, the happier I will be. And I don’t want to anthropomorphize the universe too much, but I feel like the universe was sort of saying to me, “Selfishness and clueless materialism, that’s not the way to have a good life. That’s not an enlightened, healthy way to live,” as much as I wanted to live that way. And when I got sober, I started reading different literature and there was this idea of service. And I hated reading about being of service. I hated reading about selflessness because I wanted to be selfish. But over time, I found that trying to control the world, trying to be an abject materialist, and I’m not criticizing materialism per se, but I’m criticizing the idea that materialism could replace or supplant call it like health and spirituality. And so I found myself focusing more on nature, on spirituality, on service, and on creativity as its own end.

Being of service (Lindsay)

When I can go out of my way and be of service, even the thought of going to work at the food bank in a few weeks, knowing that that is something I’m going to do, fills me with so much joy. Working with my boyfriend’s daughter on an audition, and just giving her that time and feeling like I’m actually able to help her. To have people on our podcast whose ideology I believe with and know that I get to be a part of putting that out into the universe. It’s all an act of service. So when I’m in a state of service is when I thrive and when I feel the best. And so as my life moves forward, I want to incorporate every single form of being of service that I possibly can. And I mean part of that is also finding better ways to fill my own cup, finding better ways to be full and to show up fully for this kind of hopefully a life of service that I can create for myself.