Kitchen Confidential with Moby

What made you tackle something so different from your former New York teashop TeaNY?
I haven’t been involved in TeaNY in about 10 years, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is struggle and a degree of failure are often times the best predictors for success. TeaNY didn’t fail at all, but it really struggled for a while, and from that, I learned what not to do. If I do something that succeeds, I usually learn nothing from it. If I do something that fails, it can be really instructive. When something fails, you step back, take stock of what went wrong, and hopefully, when you do a similar thing again, you figure out how to avoid the pitfalls and mistakes. It’s about learning from failure.

How do you lead a sustainable lifestyle?
Just being alive, we’re bound to mess things up a little bit. It’s hard to be a human and not cause some damage at some point. I see sustainability as being a really healthy, guiding principal. It’s not necessarily an orthodoxy, it’s more something to aspire towards, and to that end, I feel a little uncomfortable in my role as vegan evangelist because I don’t want to seem strident, but veganism is way more sustainable because you’re using fewer resources. I live and work in the same place, so I don’t really commute. I have an electric car. I’m a vegan. I don’t really ever use my air conditioning or my heat. When I bought [my] house it was all grass, so I tore up the grass and put down mulch, put down drip irrigation under the mulch and put in drop-tolerant plants. I’m not patting myself on the back for it; I’m just saying our actions have to reflect the environment [in] which we live.

You lived in the Wolf’s Lair compound for a few years. What made you decide to move?
When I moved here, I bought this crazy castle in Beachwood Canyon and I renovated it and I loved it, but pretty quickly realized it was way too much for one person; it was like 10 or 11 bedrooms. At one point, I had a lot of people staying over and I realized I didn’t like having 10 houseguests. So I sold it to a friend of mine and moved here [to Los Feliz], and pretty much this was all I was looking for. I wanted to be on the Eastside, I wanted to be able to walk out my door and get to Griffith Park easily, and I wanted a sunny, happy house.

Are you in this current space for a while? Why or why not?
If I left, it would be to move to someplace that had even more nature, like Idlewild or Humboldt County. I love Los Angeles. For all its shortcomings, the fact that it is an urban environment with nature that’s warm in the winter, cool in the summer and that it’s filled with oddball artists, musicians and writers is wonderful. I would maintain that everything bad about L.A. is all just a double-edged sword. The traffic is horrible and disgusting, but it means that we have the most vibrant public radio in America.

What other business ventures are you involved in?
My life is fairly simple; I don’t need anything more. There’s nothing material in the world that I long for. Financially and entrepreneurially, I’m pretty happy keeping things the way they are. I have a lot of spiritual, philanthropic and artistic interests, but the only way I could justify being more entrepreneurial is to try and support some of the philanthropy I’m interested in. I grew up poor, white trash in Connecticut surrounded by wealthy people, and then in New York surrounded by wealthy people. A lot of people base their lives on just acquiring more wealth for the sake of wealth, or more things for the sake of things, but it never seems to make them very happy. Rather than be frustrated by what I don’t have, I think it’s a lot more interesting to focus on the things that I do have. I do fun things every now and then, like investing in other people’s restaurants or in real estate; I have friends that are real estate developers in New York, and if they’re doing interesting projects, I’m happy to loan them some money. My criteria for entrepreneurialism: the project has to seem interesting; it can’t just be about a bottom line. I’m not going to invest in an oil pipeline or a blood diamond mine just because it might be lucrative. If you can put money into the world in a way that supports beneficial things, great.