Moby: See myself in the pouring home.

Moby: See the light Come over. No,

Moby: I see myself in the pouring rain.

Moby: I watch Hope. Come over me.

Moby: Hi, I'm Moby and welcome to the inaugural first episode of Moby Pod. Of course, the name is a pun ish. Is that a pun? Lindsay Moby Pod or Cuz if people don't know, sorry, I, I'm talking over you and you haven't even said anything .

Lindsay: Moby Pod a double.

Moby: A double on to it is perhaps more of a double Anton than a pun, cuz if you don't know a pod, a group of whales is a pod and I'm named after a whale.

Moby: So we thought Moby, or rather, okay, I'm not even gonna throw you under the bus, Lindsay, I thought Moby Pod would be a good name. So if it's a terrible name, you are not responsible. Here's

Lindsay: what I like to think of is, A pod of ocean mammals with your head just jumping around, eating seaweed.

Moby: I don't know if whales eat seaweed, but do they now

Lindsay: I'm You're Moby Moby Mammal.

Lindsay: Moby Ocean Mammal mammals would, but I

Moby: just had this vision of like, when you say a pod of whales, with my head on the whales, I just think of these like anxious, awkward, middle-aged whales. Kind of like not even jumping around, just sort of like swimming and being uncomfortable.

Lindsay: Yeah, same. Sounds nice.

Lindsay: sounds really fun.

Moby: So yeah. So this is our, the first episode.

Lindsay: Yeah. Do you wanna, do you wanna like introduce yourself and tell people who don't know? I mean, everyone who's listening to this probably knows who you are, but do you wanna say why you're making a podcast? Partially?

Moby: Well, hi, my name's Mobi and I am making a podcast because I love the idea.

Moby: of hanging out and talking to you. Mm-hmm. , hanging out and talking to Bagel, who's currently napping next to you on the couch. She's loving this and having the ability to talk about anything, which might be self-evident, but it's just, I love the idea of like, our pod, the, the podcast Moby Pod. It's potentially about everything.

Moby: It's about animals, it's about politics, it's about music, it's about health. It's about ridiculous nonsense because I'm a ridiculous human being. Um, just

Lindsay: ridiculousness,

Moby: direct to consumer. There's a lot of ridiculousness, but there's a lot of earnestness. Earnestness, is that a word? Probably d Earnest . So this is my overly long-winded intro to Moby Pod and my, my co-host Lindsay.

Moby: And because I a loud mouth, I feel bad cuz I'm talking too much. So Lindsay, why don't you tell us, including me, because I don't know at this point what we're gonna talk about today. Like what, what, what themes and subjects we might be looking at. Great.

Lindsay: Well first of all, hi, I'm Lindsay. Hi Lindsay. A lot of you that know who Mobi is probably don't know who I am.

Lindsay: Um, I'm the mother of a tiny dog named Bagel, but also Mobi and I are collaborators on some stuff, sometimes not in the music world, but in the Macon weird things world. Um, like we have a short film doing the festival circuit right now called Why I'm a Vegan, that I think is cute as heck, um, and other things of that nature.

Lindsay: Um, and we thought a podcast would be a really fun thing to do together. And so today

Moby: what are we gonna talk about today? We're

Lindsay: gonna talk about, um, Some music stuff. I have some questions about some of this music you speak of. Okay. Um, we're gonna talk about a little bit of politics, a little bit of things I think are funny that I think it'll be funny to hear you talk about them.

Lindsay: And we're gonna talk about David Bowie. I really wanna know some stuff about David Bowie and I know you know a lot and your relationship with him was really cool and

Moby: we're gonna hear more about that. Okay. And then hopeful. As soon as we're done recording this podcast, we'll make another one. And at some point, um, even though we are both loudmouthed, although I, I I might be more of a loud mouse, uh, I'm not sure it's not a competition.

Moby: Um, loquacious feels correct. I spend a lot of time alone and so on the rare occasion when I'm actually with human beings, I got a lot to say. Yeah. . So, yeah. So for future podcasts, we'll probably even have guests on. Um, but I'm a little wary of having guests on because I'm afraid that if we have guests, I'm just gonna talk over them.

Moby: And I don't wanna be the host who like invite someone on the podcast and then just rambles on while they. Try to talk. I don't think

Lindsay: you give yourself enough credit because I've seen you in conversation with people and you're very good at asking questions and listening and synthesizing and, you know, following up in a, in a thoughtful

Moby: way.

Moby: Well, thanks. That's kind of you to say. So, and I think it could go really well. Great. So without any further ado, um, let's start the inaugural episode of Moby Pod Podcast. Commences.

Lindsay: Hey, mobi.

Moby: He .

Lindsay: Do you know that song that's like. It's like, here now go into salsa.

Moby: Sure. Okay. I mean, the song that we played at the beginning of the podcast

Lindsay: Yeah. With the music video where Gwen Stefani licked your head. Yeah. And you had a, you had a kind of, um, like funny glasses on. Mm-hmm. like

Moby: sunglasses.

Moby: Yeah. I'm, I'm, for so many reasons, I'm familiar with the song , at the risk of really sounding like a self-involved dick. One of the main reasons I'm familiar with it is that I wrote it and recorded it. Wow. And released it under my name. Humble Brag. . Yeah. .

Lindsay: Um, why did you write that?

Moby: Boy? Oh boy. We, again, this is one of the dangers of.

Moby: Old is, I feel like I could self volve vividly talk about the story of this particular song for a year. Cause there's so much weirdness to it. Okay. Um, so the song itself, I remember so clearly when I wrote it, it would've been the summer of 1998, A beautiful summer, and I was making music for what I thought was going to be my last album play.

Moby: Mm-hmm. . And I remember sitting upstairs at my little loft and I thought like my career was done. You know, this was a dark time in my little life. Like I was battling panic attacks. Uh, I was actually part of a panic attack study at Columbia University. Whoa. And my mom had died. I was kind of on the verge of being broke, although, how old were you at this time?

Moby: 32. So quite young. And I was sitting upstairs, my loft and I was playing. Okay. Musically, the idea was to juxtapose a sort of slightly menacing verse with an incredibly happy chorus. So the verse is just B to D flat, minor, because the verse is like,

Lindsay: I'm a mad person in a bad place, verse .

Moby: And then as I was playing that on acoustic guitar, I then thought, oh, what if I play the happiest chord progression?

Moby: Ever, which was e majored to a flat minor. To a major. Yeah. Like very happy. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. So I recorded it. That's really fun. And I mixed it at unique studios and just the

Lindsay: music. You didn't have the words yet? No. You didn't have words, you just recorded

Moby: the music. If I recorded the music and then I wrote the words.

Moby: and then I finished it by mixing it. I mean this is again, I could like every weird little last aspect of it to me is interesting. Like it was one of the last times I was ever at a studio in Times Square. Cause Times Square used to be where all the studios were pre gentrification and

now

Lindsay: it's just 70

Moby: Sephoras.

Moby: Yeah. And these studios, not to dismiss your seventies Sephoras, cuz you're absolutely right. It's just, that's all it is now. Yeah. So Unique studios where this was mixed. One of the things that made Times Square Studios so fascinating in the eighties and the nineties was the, first of all, they were filthy.

Moby: They were all like just old black leather couches. They were dirty. And like sometimes you'd go to these studios and run DMC would be there sometimes. Aerosmith and or the Rolling Stones would be there. Sometimes Limp Bizkit would be there. Like you just, you never knew who was gonna be at these studios.

Moby: And it was such an interesting thing leaving these studios in Times Square, cuz you'd leave at one in the morning in Times Square when Times Square was really scummy and it was just this quintessential New York moment. Mm-hmm. , like you'd mix a song and you'd leave at one in the morning seeing like Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones, like smoking cigarettes in the lobby and you'd walk out in Times Square and it'd be cold and it just felt so wonderfully New York.

Moby: Yeah. So not make the long story too much longer. The song is also a little bit of. First of all, it's the only top 40 song I've ever had in the United States. I think it got to number three in the charts here. What year was that? 2000. So that's the only thing I have in common with Jimmy Hendrix is he and I have both, we are both only ever had one song in the top 40.

Moby: Um,

Lindsay: crazy. Um, yeah, that's wild to

Moby: think about. And then lyrically, the song is supposed to be about, sort of similar to your favorite video, uh, video game Stray . Um, it's about a post-apocalyptic future where life has kind of lost a lot of meaning. And why did

Lindsay: you wanna write a song about that? Because

Moby: I thought it was interesting, especially to make like a super happy chorus with the understanding that's what the song's about.

Moby: And then time passed, the album came out and it became very weirdly successful considering it was supposed to be my last

Lindsay: well, but you had Gwen Stefani on the truck,

Moby: which was like not on the album version. She. , her version came later. Oh,

Lindsay: so you put this song out with just you on play? Yeah. And then later, well, how did the, okay.

Lindsay: Wait. I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm gonna ask that question later, or I'll let you tell.

Moby: Okay. So she recorded, she actually recorded vocals for the song South Side earlier, like, you know, at the beginning. Mm-hmm. . But then I ended up not using her version on the album cause the, the mix that I had without her, I thought sounded better for the album.

Moby: Then the people at the record label heard the version with her and they loved it, and they're like, wow, this needs to be a single. And so then we remastered the album with her vocals. To be clear, her vocals are great. I just thought that the original had a little more of like a lo-fi grungy quality to it.

Moby: Wow. That is a

Lindsay: sick burn to

Moby: Stefani. No, I mean, no, her, her contribution was great. No, she's, she sounds

Lindsay: so good. And y'all, the music video is so good.

Moby: Okay. So. Moving forward. So keeping in mind, this was supposed to be my last album. It was supposed to fail, and then all of a sudden it became really successful.

Moby: Mm-hmm. , like at one point play was selling I think 150,000 copies a week. Crazy. Which, that, that doesn't even happen anymore. Even like, I don't even think Taylor Swift and Adele, that happens with them, but like back then people bought CDs. Yeah. So it came time to make the video, and this is the embarrassing part, , the budget for the video was I think around $750,000.

Moby: Whoa. It was ridiculous. To make the video shoot. They flew me in via helicopter. Like I Where did you shoot it? Because I was on tour. Oh. And so basically I would like fly into Los Angeles on a helicopter, do the video shoot all day, and then get back on the helicopter and fly to whatever show I was doing.

Moby: Clearly not the most climate friendly way of making a video. Mm-hmm. . Cause

Lindsay: that was in the nineties when we just like put gasoline in the pool. Cause we were like,

Moby: yum. Pollution, like climate change was just like this weird idea that like, we were like, oh, Al Gore apparently wrote a book about it, but no one really knew anything more than that.

Moby: Yeah. . So, but just the excess. And then the video came out and became this huge MTV hit and radio hit. But the other minor interesting thing, it was only a hit in the United States. Hmm. So when I play. In concerts outside the United States, that's when people would go to get a snack. They're like, play porcelain, dumbass

Moby: Yeah. Like, like Southside here. The biggest song I've ever had outside the United States. No one knows it. Crazy. And then coming full circle next year, I'm actually putting out this album called Resound. It's a follow up to the album Reprise, which is like doing sort of orchestral versions of some of my songs.

Moby: Mm-hmm. . So the version of South Side I did with, uh, Ricky Wilson from the Kaiser Chiefs. Wow. Kaiser Chiefs. Yeah, because I love the Kaiser Chiefs and I love his voice. So yeah. So there's this very, like, it's tons of horns. Like it's, I can't play it cuz it's a, hasn't come out yet, but it's, um, it's a really, I think it's a really sort of like interesting, very aggressive version of Southside.

Moby: So there's probably a million more things I could say about the song, but I've already rambled on Hawaii too much.

Lindsay: Wait, but I still have some questions. Oh. Oh, okay. , which is like, I understand that like the apocalypse is really interesting to you, but like when you were writing it, did you have like scenes in your head of some like world that doesn't exist?

Lindsay: Like how do you come, how does that happen? Like what is the visualization? What does that path.

Moby: Oftentimes when you, when people think of an apocalypse similar to your, the video game stray that you like, it's like everything's gone wrong. Yeah. And I was like, what about the, the middle ground, like an apocalypse that kind of looks like one of those cities like Port Mosby and Papua New Guinea where it's just stuff doesn't work.

Moby: Mm-hmm. , you know, like you can't really drink the water. The air is kind of foul. And the mo, every time you leave your house, it's unsafe. And so that's kind of like the idea that there's this interim apocalypse that will probably get to at some point where even the United States is like, I mean the United States, we've always had urban areas that have been like that.

Moby: Mm-hmm. , but it seems like it's sort of potentially heading more in that direction. So it's kind of about like an apocalypse that would be normal to the kids who lived in it. Cool. Like if you're born in that, it just is what you know, so it's writing a song from that perspective. That's amazing. You know?

Moby: Cause I'd still like go out and do kid things, but it would be during what we would consider an apocalypse. Kind of like, I remember reading or hearing testimonials from like people who lived in Sarajevo during the war and like it was war people were dying left and right, but they still did. They still went to parties.

Moby: You know, they still did normal things in the middle of all this apocalyptic chaos. .

Lindsay: It makes me think of, you know, the song Ring around the rosy pocket full of

Moby: Posey? Oh, it was about plague victims. Yes.

Lindsay: Mm-hmm. . Yeah, like ring around the rosy is like the, the red rings you would get around like the sores and pocket.

Lindsay: You carried Posey in your pockets because you smelled of rotting human, which you were.

Moby: Yep. And then Ashes. Ashes was actually apparently supposed to be at Chu at Chu because before you died you sneezed. You had an uncontrollable sneezing fit. We all fall down. Yep. And then you're dead. So it's kind of like that, like Yeah, like in the middle of the plague, people still wrote children's songs.

Moby: Yeah. So that's, that's what was going through my head when I was writing the lyrics. . Oh, one last interesting thing is in 2002 I did this festival tour with David Bowie. Um, it was David Bowie, Buster Rhymes and myself, the year and the Blue Man Group. And the year before I'd done it with Outcast and the Roots.

Moby: Mm-hmm. , so David Bowie and Buster Rhymes and Blue Man Group and I, we played at Jones Beach. Mm-hmm. , this big venue in Long Island. Mm-hmm. . And there was a huge thunderstorm. and one of the opening lines of south side is, here we are in the pouring rain and I pulled, okay, this is gonna sound again, self-aggrandizing, but it was actually a really special moment cuz normally when it rains either the show gets canceled or the performer hides under a safe place.

Moby: But I pulled, I was like, if there, if the audience is gonna be in the rain. , I'm going to be in the rain. So I pulled my microphone out to the front of the audience. So I was getting drenched just the way they were. And when I sang, here we are in the pouring rain, 25,000 people screamed at the top of their lungs.

Moby: It was a very special concert moment. Wow.

Lindsay: Weren't you afraid you would get electrocuted?

Moby: It was wireless mics. So like when you have a wireless guitar or wireless mic, it's like, yeah, like sure stuff could go wrong, but it's not the old days when things when you're like connected via a cable to the power grid.

Moby: Okay, good. It probably wasn't smart. I was really worried about you. Yeah, . But no, I didn't get electrocuted. Everything worked fine and I just got drenched.

Lindsay: That sounds really, I wish there was video of that. If it happened now, you know, it'd be all over TikTok .

Moby: So that's the profoundly long-winded, that could be even more long-winded story of.

Moby: That song, south Side .

Lindsay: That's, yeah, that It's a real catchy tune You made .

Moby: Thanks.

Lindsay: The first thing I have is a little segment I like to call Mobi. Why are you like this? Mm-hmm. , where I ask why you're like this in regard to little things that you do.

Moby: I'm not a, yeah, I'm not a normal person, so

Lindsay: something that I've noticed about you that. I wouldn't say I have any sort of feeling about it other than like some amusement, but occasionally concern does creep in.

Lindsay: And that is, you are, you are an avid tea

Moby: drinker. Oh, I, by the way, I was just thinking to myself, I was like, wow, I think you just could, uh, I think you almost just described every single facet of my life. , like concern. Yeah, . Okay. So yeah, I'm an avid, like amusement with some

Lindsay: concern mixed in there.

Moby: Yeah. So I'm an a.

Moby: I am. I am. Yeah. I used to own a little tea company. I am an avid tea drinker.

Lindsay: Like how many cups of tea would you say you drink in a day?

Moby: I try to restrict myself, I'd say like four or five

Lindsay: of like

Moby: caffeinated teas. Yeah. Like black tea, white tea, green tea. Oo.

Lindsay: and do you drink non-caffeinated tea, like end of

Moby: day?

Moby: Uh, yes. I enjoy a pleasant herbal infusion. Okay. . I'm an old person. We like gentle things that are not

Lindsay: challenging. Um, , I also enjoy an herbal infused tea, but something that you do that I don't think I've seen before mm-hmm. Is that you, your tea cups are white on the outside. They're white cups and so dirty on the inside that they are a deep kind of yellow brown, like, okay.

Lindsay: Hold on just

Moby: a second. A smoker. Long hold on. , because I would just like to say earlier today I gave you a teacup with water in it. I would like you to look at this teacup and tell me if it's far away. Did you put it far away for the tell me? Does it support. The premise of your question, , is that a dirty teacup?

Moby: Okay. Or is that a, is that one of the cleanest teacups you've ever seen? I

Lindsay: wouldn't go that far, honestly. Really? But it is cleaner than the teacups of, of yester

Moby: your, so here's, here's my, here's the story. Recovering all the important stuff here. It's like artificial scents, weather,

Lindsay: teacups, teacups, . We should just, this almost like knitting time with Moby.

Moby: This is gonna be a big podcast in retirement communities. Um, Moby in his soft jammies. So, okay, so the year is 1987. And I had a French girlfriend and at the time I was living in this abandoned factory in the crack neighborhood and I was broke, but I saved enough money to go with her to Paris cuz we had a place to free, free place to stay.

Moby: A friend of hers had this empty apartment in Paris. So I first time leaving the United States went to Paris and I was so nervous and so excited, like I couldn't believe I was in Paris, France, . And I tried dressing like a Parisian, like I even had a striped sweater that I bought in a secondhand store. Did you have a little beret or something?

Moby: I did not have a beret, um, but I had hair at the time. And one of our favorite things to do was to go to this little tea place called Labe. I think that's how I pronounce it. Labe. And we would sit there and drink tea and play cards. And it was opposite some park somewhere in Paris. And um, They would play Eric Sati.

Moby: I mean, it was like so perfect and Parisian and idyllic. Um, it actually is what led me to open a tea shop years and years later. Cause I just, this was my favorite thing about going to Paris was going to this little tea shop. But one of the things that impressed me so much was the guy who ran the tea shop was this old French intellectual who didn't really talk, but he like, of course, smoked cigarettes.

Moby: Um, which I thought was so cool. Even though I didn't smoke, it was so cool and French, like he'd, so he'd bring you your tea and it was like, but all the teac cups and all the bowls, everything was completely mismatched. Like it was the most, the tables, the chairs, everything was mismatched. Like the, the, the, the boards and the floor were mismatched.

Moby: Like it was just such a ramshackle place. And I loved that. And the teac cups were chipped and the teacups were stained brown because tea has tannins, which stain things, brown teeth cups. And so I thought, wow, this is so cool that this guy doesn't like, he's so bohemian, he doesn't care about his teacups.

Moby: And so I, when I started drinking a lot of tea, I was like, wow, I'm inspired by this old French intellectual bohemian, and I'm not, I'm gonna wash my tea cups, but I'm not gonna try and clean the tannins out of them. And then our friend Lindsay Lewis was over at my house and I served her something in a cup and I realized like, oh, for most people, a cup that is stained deep, deep brown looks.

Moby: Filthy. Like it looked like she was horrified, like almost like, how dare you give me a liquid in this filthy brown? And I was immediately like defensive, like, no, but it's clean. Like I washed them. I just don't scrape the brown tannin stuff out. Um, and I almost started telling her this story about how I was inspired by going to this tea salon in Paris, France.

Moby: And I realized then, but not now, foolishly, that it sounds so pretentious and ridiculous. . Um, Our other friend. This is, I'm taking a tedious story and making it longer and more boring. Our friend Julie Mintz told me about these things called magic sponges. Mm-hmm. and I went out and bought magic sponges, and I realized one thing that magic sponges are really good at is cleaning that brown tanny stuff off of teac cups.

Moby: And so now my teacups are borderline pristine and we

Lindsay: checked and there's no, there's no, because I always, I don't know, think of these magic sponges as like, they have to be, do like it's devil magic

Moby: sponges. It might be devil magic, but I think it's just the material that they're made out of. Like we, you and I joined a writer's class.

Moby: And it mainly involved listening and I'm not so good at that. So what I would do on these Zoom calls is turn off my camera, put it on mute, and spend two hours going around my house cleaning everything with a magic sponge. Cause I was, I was just introduced to this more wonderful world of ma and I'm not sponsored by magic sponges.

Moby: Just to be clear, I don't know if they're toxic or not, but boy are they good for cleaning up teacups so you don't have to be embarrassed of your teacups when your friends come over like, now .

Lindsay: I mean, this looks pretty good. Yeah. I gotta say, if I didn't know your secret, you'd think that might be, I wouldn't

Moby: even think twice about it.

Moby: That that was not a 25 year old teacup you would think, huh? What a reasonably new teacup he has. I would. Okay.

Lindsay: Um, okay. Thank you for that. My pleasure. That was really an uh, uh, global, international answer. Yep. You're like, how to, A

Moby: very simple cup question, which might be. an interesting segment. We can do like picks the most banal, ridiculous thing you can think of and create a long story around it.

Lindsay: Um, yeah, I think we just did it and there's plenty more where that came from.

Moby: I'm person boy, I have give me. Anything. Give me a like, show me a light bulb, a teacup, a weird little duck sculpture. And I guarantee you, I can tell you a long stupid story.

Lindsay: Arti tiny baby easel.

Moby: Yeah. That for

Lindsay: bagel, that's one.

Lindsay: That's a short story.

Lindsay: Something I wanted to challenge us with, because I think you're a surprisingly good storyteller. Mm-hmm. , is to just improvise an adventure movie plot because I feel like your best ideas tend to just come right fresh off the noodle. And so I thought that we could maybe come up with something really compelling.

Lindsay: Right now

Moby: we're gonna noodle some ideas for adventure movies. Go.

Lindsay: So there's a woman who just realized that she can't dance and she thought her whole life, she was a great dancer and she meets a guy who loves to dance and she can't. And then he breaks up with her and then she gets drunk and falls in a trash can.

Moby: And this is an adventure movie?

Lindsay: Yeah. That's the part before the adventure. Okay. That's an inciting incident. Okay.

Moby: Cuz it does seem a little bit more like a Sandra Bullock romcom setup.

Lindsay: Yeah. But the breakup is gonna lead her to, maybe she's gonna go to Spain and learn how to salsa with a man named Darn Bernardo.

Lindsay: Okay. .

Moby: Okay. So. For the purpose of this narrative, we encounter the heroin and she's drunk in a garbage can.

Lindsay: Yeah, yeah. That's what happens to her. And then she's like, I gotta get outta here.

Moby: She's, maybe this is too obvious in trite, but, so she's in the dumpster and like the guy comes over and some of the people from the bar come over and they're, first, they're laughing, but then they look in and they're like, are you okay?

Moby: And she's like, just leave me alone. And she stays in the dumpster too long. Like she's actually like, and maybe there's some sort of internal monologue, maybe there's some voiceover. She's talking to herself, she's like, you know, I could get out of the dumpster. But, but why? Like, could, could she

Lindsay: be like, a little bit like disgusting Cinderella inside of there where like maybe some animated or like animatronic rats come up and she like can talk to them about what's going on for her.

Moby: And she's like, yeah, I got, I got no reason to leave. So she stays in the dumpster and eventually she falls asleep in the dumpster. Cuz she's very

Lindsay: drunk. She was too embarrassed to come outta the dumpster. Yeah. She was trying to wait for everyone to go away. Yeah. I'm just,

Moby: she's like, I'm just waiting. I I need a blank slate.

Moby: I need to leave. So while she's lying there, a crime happens nearby. Mm-hmm. . And someone runs by the dumpster and throws a briefcase or a bag into the dumpster and the bag contains something.

Lindsay: Money and classified government documents from

Moby: Mar-a-Lago. Or let's say the bag contains, let's say, oh, the bag is empty, but it's a really nice bag.

Lindsay: No, it has to have something in, it may be

Moby: vials of, hold on poison. We're gonna, we're gonna, so the bag is empty, but it's a really nice like Chanel coach type bag. And so she's like, that's weird. But like we see the backstory of. . Some guy is like clutching this bag. He's being chased by serious bad guys. He throws the bag in the dumpster.

Moby: He keeps running, he keeps running, he gets hit by a bus or gets shot or some, somehow he dies and she just thinks like, huh, maybe my night's not so bad. I've just found this great bag. Yeah. And so she gets out, stumbles home with her new bag, goes, goes to bed, wakes up is smells like dumpster, is like, she's like reliving the night.

Moby: And then, but when she relives the light in the night, she's like, oh, well it wasn't all bad cause I got this cool bag. Turns out the bag. is the secret meaning like the material it's made out of or something? It could either be sewn into the lining of the bag or it could just be the material of the bag could be imprinted with something.

Lindsay: Okay. I like it. Like codes to a detonator or something like that. Yeah.

Moby: Okay. So the big, the big question is what does the bag contain or what is, what is, what is the bag? And I would love it personally if it's something that we didn't expect. Okay. Because it could, it could

Lindsay: Dinosaur dna?

Moby: Yes. Like or Yeah, like some sort of like the encoding of some unknown type of D n a or if I was to like raise the stakes, it would be something that ends an industry on earth.

Moby: Like, like a recipe, like maybe it's some sort of code for building cold fusion. Because if there was, if there was actual cold fusion energy mm-hmm. , the world's economy, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, Brazil, all these countries that rely on selling oil and petroleum products, they're outta business. So like if you come up with a recipe for actual cold fusion, you will get assassinated within like a second because the most powerful people on the planet will cease to have money in the, if there was viable cold fusion.

Moby: Okay, let's go with cold fusion purse, or, okay. Let's say this is some sort of, it's an energy secret and it's hidden like the purse is somehow, it's, it's, it's encoded within this purse. Um, okay. So then she goes out into the world. She's using her purse, using her purse, like, like she has no idea what it is.

Moby: The, then the question is, how do we reveal what it is?

Lindsay: Well, I think that maybe they, she, she gets spotted with the purse. They start chasing her. They get her, they attack her. But then our, then like other secret people come along and they're like, we'll rescue you, but you have to play by our rules. You're going undercover now.

Lindsay: And then it all comes together in the final thing where the guys that are helping her and the guys that are looking for her are all at a suaree in Aha. Where they've, where they've escaped to and she has to act like she's the character. But the character that they created, that she's embodying is an incredible dancer.

Moby: Okay. I'm okay if we, in the interest of brevity, just sort of leave it at that for now, and like let some, maybe in future episodes we revisit that.

Lindsay: Yeah, this can just be the movie we're otherwise constantly

Moby: creating, honestly. I mean, I, I like that idea. The sort of every episode we step back into the movie.

Moby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, step back into the magical story

Lindsay: and the story can just be called a dancer's bag. . ,

Moby: yeah. How can, how can anyone resist that

Moby: if I have a question? What's that? Okay. The question is, what odd piece of information or knowledge do you have that most people might not know? Not not about you. Not about me, not about anything. Just like, just generally speaking, what do you like a piece of information, you know, trivia, science, pop culture, anything.

Moby: What do you know that other people might not know? Well, it's very,

Lindsay: it's very broad. It's hard to

Moby: narrow. It's super broad, but like, Something people might even be surprised by. Like for example, the one I'm gonna go with, and I'm sure that someone smart out there or someone with the Google can challenge this, but my understanding is that naked mo rats are essentially immune to cancer and almost every disease that affects other animals, why they're trying to figure that out.

Moby: Can we have that? They're trying to figure that out. I just read, I read an article a while, a while ago, and this is my what? My takeaway was that naked mo rats are these super species who somehow don't get cancer. Wow. Again, I should have prepared more seeing as I'm the one bringing up this question and not just said something off the cuff from a scientific American article I probably read 10 years ago.

Moby: But then again, if someone can prove me wrong, by all means prove me wrong. Cuz by proving me wrong, they'll feel pretty good. But I, my understanding is that naked mul rats, who are also one of the most interesting looking creatures I learned, first learned about them in the movie, uh, Errol Morris, is fast, cheap, and outta control.

Moby: Um, they are these weird, fascinating, they're naked mole rats. They live underground, they're naked, and they're kind of like mole rats. Uh, but I, as far as I know, they don't get cancer. , do you think it's

Lindsay: because they're exposed to No, they're not exposed to like sunlight and things in the air. I have no idea.

Lindsay: And they only eat like

Moby: dirt creatures. If I remember, I thought, oh, they only, they only eat dirt creatures like worms.

Lindsay: Um, and like, you know, mushrooms

Moby: and stuff. So my limited recollection, I thought that one theory was that because they are naked, they have no fur or anything, that they're constantly, their, their bodies are constantly being like cut and chal.

Moby: Like they're all these base, like things that our bodies protect us from, or things that, like animals with shells or feathers or fur are protected from. Mm-hmm. . But they're not. And I think that as a result, they might have this hypercharged immune. That's, again, everything I said could be completely wrong, but I thought that was really interesting that there is this one mammal that does not get cancer.

Moby: Um,

Lindsay: that's fascinating. And I want some of that mole rat sauce. You know what I'm saying? Yep. Maybe that's what's in the movie bag is the secret of the mole rat. Oh.

Moby: Like they've taken, like they've reverse engineered rat stem cells. Yeah. So that humans could have them and it would Oh, that's a good one.

Moby: Yeah. And it would basically mean moving forward. Humans would not die of cancer. Human like, like humans would become almost immortal. Yeah.

Lindsay: But they could never see the light of day again.

Moby: But then the idea is like, there would be like, it challenges an industry. So that would challenge all healthcare. Yeah.

Moby: Healthcare would bait healthcare. Like unless it's broken bones or getting shot or getting hit by a bus, like healthcare, like hospitals, pharmacies, pharmaceuticals, everything kind of ends.

Lindsay: The title is now the Dancer and the mo rat bag. Yeah. . . Okay. Um, do you wanna know my fun fact? Yes, please. That I learned from the internet, which is apparently in the ocean.

Lindsay: There is. Um, okay, so first of all, the ocean, there's like 80% of the ocean that no one has ever seen, explored,

Moby: whatever. Perhaps even more, who knows? Like there's

Lindsay: a mass amount of ocean that is unknown. Mm-hmm. meaning maybe there's a megalodon. That's not my fact though, because that's, I don't know if there's a megalodon.

Lindsay: Apparently there is a wall of fish that is so huge that it warps sonar on like the floor of one part of the ocean. It is so much an unimaginable amount of fish that just stay clumped together in this like large thing. It's this big mystery is this fish wall and nobody knows why they go there or how do they know it's fish because they looked harder.

Moby: I don't know. So they've seen it? No, they,

Lindsay: I don't know if they've seen it properly, but they soared enough that they deciphered through the warping that

Moby: it was fish. Okay. So I guess cuz it's moving like I guess are, cause it's moving. Yeah. Like the, if it's a rock, it would behave a lot differently than a whole bunch of fish.

Moby: Yeah, that's,

Lindsay: it's like, but it's this kind of, but also, here's something, there is something called a meso pelagic zone. of the ocean that's referred to like the twilight zone of the ocean. Mm-hmm. where like weird things happen to light and it can't, like, it's impossible.

Moby: I think that's my limited understanding of that, and maybe we're talking about two different things, is there are these heat vents that are so far down that like no life could exist except around these heat vents and it's sort of almost there.

Moby: One theory is that this is what life was like on earth at the beginning of the planet. Like before oxygen existed, before photosynthesis existed, life existed around these heat vents. Whoa. Um, because I think the, the, the creatures who live around, they don't breathe oxygen. They're, they're like a different type of creature.

Moby: But again, maybe we're talking about two. I I also, I could just be making stuff up. I don't know. I just, again, vaguely remember reading in Scientific American a long time ago about these heat fence. So the meso pelagic

Lindsay: zone, it's the twilight zone of the ocean. or so they say, but you know, that's all I know is that there's a giant mystery wall of fish in the ocean.

Lindsay: Does it have a name? I don't know. Um, I, I've probably a mystery fish wall.

Moby: Um, okay. So that's my one thing. I just, I, I love, like a couple years ago on my birthday in lieu of presence, all I asked people was to tell me something I didn't know. And clearly there's a ton, meaning I, there's a lot of stuff I don't know, but I love facts that I've, things that I've never heard before.

Moby: Good to know. Like, isn't it interesting knowing that as far as we know, naked mall rats don't get cancer?

Lindsay: Yeah. It's incredible. Yep. I love to know that. So, okay, now I want one,

Lindsay: I have a lyric. Of a very famous song currently, and I know that you don't always listen to pop music, do

Moby: you? I don't really know anything about

Lindsay: pop music. Right, okay. But you are on TikTok and so maybe you'll have heard this song before on TikTok, because all pop songs go right to TikTok now. Oh, is

Moby: it about the Korney?

Moby: No, it's not. It's not the Korney song. It's not the Korney song. Okay. That I, I know the Korney. I don't, I mean, yeah, I'm familiar with the Korney song. That's the extent of my knowledge of pop

Lindsay: music. Okay. Here you have to finish the lyric. Sure. It's

Moby: not the Korney song. It's not the Korney song. Really like the Korney song.

Moby: I know you do. Not so much. I mean, like as a vegan, I take a little issue with the butter aspect of it, but there is vegan Butter. Butter.

Lindsay: Yeah. Okay. Miko is an incredible, I like it better than

Moby: butter. Butter, yeah. I stand corrected. I now have unconditional love for the the Korney song. I

Lindsay: mean, can you imagine a more beautiful thing is what this kid says about Korney

Lindsay: It's the most precious thing I've ever heard in my life. Yeah. Okay, here's Lyric. I'm gonna stay the first part and then you finish. Okay, great. The sentence

Moby: okay. Here is, okay, call this segment. Old white guy finishes new pop song. Yeah,

Lindsay: I like that. Okay, here's the first part. In a minute, I'm Anita.

Moby: Increased amount of transparency from the International Monetary Fund. . Is that it? We're supposed to rhyme.

Lindsay: Well, you don't know what it's supposed to rhyme. Well, um, I like it. I

Moby: like what you said in a minute. I'm a need a antibiotic shot after spending too much time on the ply at Burning Man with Tech Bros.

Moby: No, try.

Lindsay: You get, you can have some more tries

Moby: in a minute. I'm gonna, I'm gonna need a private suite at Davos because they keep putting me in the same. Room as Robert Reich and he snores when he sleeps . I know.

Lindsay: I don't know what any of those things you just said are okay. Okay. Try one more and then I'll

Moby: tell you in a minute.

Moby: A way to mine cryptocurrency that is not so environmentally destructive. .

Lindsay: Um, no. None of those are right. Do you wanna know what it is? Sure. Please. In a minute. I'm Anita sentimental, man or woman to pump me

Moby: up. Okay. I don't understand it. Know I'm an a sentimental man or woman to pump me up.

Lindsay: Yeah. It's like, make you pump me up.

Lindsay: Make me feel better.

Moby: Okay. Because things are going poorly for this person. Like they not necessarily, you know, sometimes by self-doubt

Lindsay: perhaps, but a little shot of confidence from someone sentimental about you is never a bad thing. That's true.

Moby: Yeah, it is. I mean, we sometimes forget that, like, just like a little word of encouragement could be the difference between someone having a great day or not a great day.

Lindsay: Yeah. A great day or a fine day. It could be the difference between surviving and

Moby: thriving. Yeah. Like if someone had just been a little nicer to Hitler when he was a painter, maybe he would not have gone on to become a genocidal dictator. Maybe if someone had just been like, if, if Donald Trump's dad had been a little nicer to Donald Trump growing up, maybe Donald Trump wouldn't be this insane psychopath.

Moby: et cetera. So yeah, so, so be nice. Say life, especially, say nice things to the people who might go on to become insane genocidal dictators. . I've known a few. Yeah. You've dated a few. Am I right? Huh? Am

Lindsay: I right? ? Uh, I like that one. That was really fun.

Moby: Okay,

Lindsay: so what are we doing? We're making up a song. Oh, okay. Probably about the Naked Mole rat. Yeah. I feel like people don't wax poetic about the naked mo rat quite enough. Maybe a good lyric is Can't get sick.

Moby: how about we start, we we can move on to Can't get sick as a good start to the

Lindsay: chorus? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, um, could it be like a story song like, um, like, like Jack Lived in a Hole and Yeah. I couldn't really see

Moby: So, so Jack is a Naked Mora Jack is the Naked Mora. Oh. As opposed to like, someone meets a naked.

Lindsay: Oh yeah, no. Jack's a naked mo rat and he can't get sick and he's immortal and he will never die. But it's sad because all of his human friends die.

Moby: Okay, well, Jack lived in a hole. The other naked mole rats

Lindsay: so far were really good.

Moby: Then one day Jack left his hole and went to Baltimore where he met human people, doing human people things, and he became friends with all the human people and he even started wearing a flannel shirt, which he didn't need cause he was a naked mole rat.

Moby: But then Jack realized cuz he's a naked mole rat, that he'll never get sick. That you're lying , which is great, but all. So made him sad. Why did it make him sad? Because he realized that the humans and everything else in the world, except for maybe lobsters can get sick. Lobsters also might be immortal.

Lindsay: Lobsters can't die,

Moby: I don't think lobsters die. Well, lobsters are basically imm. As well. Like they can die. Mo rats can die too. They, they don't, yeah.

Lindsay: So if a lobster and a mo rat fell in love, they could be in love

Moby: forever. And then Jack realized maybe it made sense to just spend time with other immortal beings like lobsters and other naked mo rats.

Moby: And he tried to make friends with tar degrade. Cause tar degrades are functionally immortal as well, but the tar degrades are very small and they only speak space alien languages.

Lindsay: Okay. That was really good. I love that song.

Lindsay: Okay, will you do me one huge favor though, because I love Sure. This cuz you have a lot of like, Little short stories of crazy time in New York. And will you just tell one story?

Moby: Okay. So towards the end of my drinking, I started doing a lot. I, I had always enjoyed drugs, but I was mainly just a straight up alcoholic, you know.

Moby: And towards the end of my drinking, I was having around, I guess like 15 to 20 drinks a night, sometimes more, and doing a lot of cocaine, a lot of Xanax, a lot of Vicodin, like whatever I could get my hands on. And one night my friend Cynthia and I were in this bar that's no longer there called Max Fish, and it was this, Bar on the Lower East side that something was always happening there.

Moby: Like you could go there on a Sunday at three o'clock in the morning and it would be crowded with interesting people. And so I used to go there all the time. So it was a Sunday around three o'clock in the morning, it was pouring rain outside and I went to the bathroom and the bathrooms were disgusting.

Moby: Like when you think of a disgusting dive bar bathroom, it's the max fish bathroom. Like so horrifying, especially imagine three o'clock on a Sunday morning, like no one's cleaned this in a few days. Like it's, you know, and it, so it's disgusting. And as I was peeing, I looked down and in the corner of the bathroom floor there was a bag of drugs.

Moby: and I picked it up and I brought it back to Cynthia and I was like, I just found this in the bathroom. And she was like, what is it? And I was like, I have no idea. And so we invented this game called Drug Roulette and we'd said, we're gonna do this entire bag of drugs, but we don't know what it is.

Lindsay: The entire ba Yeah.

Lindsay: Was it like a

Moby: powder or pills? Yeah, it was like white. . Um, and so we basically did, I don't know how, what, 12 lines? 12 like big thick lines or whatever. It turns out it was like some sort of speed . Um, but I just thought like in hindsight, like what sort of out of control bottoming out addict thinks it's a good idea to do a bag of drugs you find in the corner of the bathroom of a dive bar at three o'clock on a Sunday morning with the better than likely chance.

Moby: Like what if it had been fentanyl, we would've both just. Dropped dead. What if it had

Lindsay: been angel dust and you would've eaten

Moby: Cynthia? Oh, well, I did have a few angel dust experiences. Angel dust was a very complicated drug. I don't reco. I really think best, best to stay away from the old. I had some very unpleasant, real hallucinate hallucinations on angel dust.

Moby: Did you eat anyone? Did not eat anyone. I did not feel compelled to eat anyone. I didn't feel compelled to throw myself off the roof of a building. But angel dust, I, I was very happy to never do it again after doing it a few times. That makes

Lindsay: sense. It's never

Moby: appealed to me. No, it's, it was, I, I didn't the first time, I did not do it intentionally, but that's a story for another time.

Moby: Okay. . Um, but yeah, so that the drug roulette of doing drugs that we found in the corner of a bathroom of a dive bar, three o'clock and the rainy Sunday morning, that was in and of itself, maybe not that dramatic, but just the idea that we were both kind of like, yeah. Worst case scenario, we die big. Who cares?

Lindsay: It could be a fun movie called Speed four Dive Bar, bathroom , where you do speed and then, um, race each other down

Moby: the, to the Narcan down the street. Yeah.

Lindsay: So Mobi. Yes. . Um, something really cool that I would love to hear you talk more about, and in light of it being 20 years later, your relationship with David Bowie and your like close friendship with

Moby: him. Yeah. I realized, so like when you were asking earlier, like about news stuff, it made me realize it was 20 years ago.

Moby: This summer that I went on tour with David Bowie, and there's the weirdest. We went on, we did this tour together called Area Two. There had been Area One, which was this super remarkable lineup. It was me and The Roots and outcast and New Order, and the Band Incubus, and a whole bunch of DJs like Tito, Carl Cox, uh, et cetera.

Moby: So it was this amazing tour. And then the second year was me and David Bowie and Buster Rhymes and the Blue Man Group. And again, a bunch of other DJs. The Blue Man group. Yeah. Cool. So it was really like a bunch of space aliens going on tour, but to. In a little bit of historical perspective, David Bowie was my favorite musician of all time growing up.

Moby: Growing up in the year, what would've been 1970 something, the first job I ever had, I was 13 years old working illegally as a caddy at a golf course. Mm-hmm. . And I was, I'm small now. I was very small then. And caddies are not supposed to be small, like you're carrying golf clubs and I still don't know anything about golf.

Moby: And I worked as a caddy carrying old people's golf bags cause I was too little to carry normal golf bags. and I worked this job just long enough until I made enough money to buy two David Bowie records. Oh. And one of them was heroes. And I remember so clearly like coming home with I, I bought larger and Heroes and I got home and I larger, I liked, but Heroes was like transcendent as far as I was concerned.

Moby: And David Bowie. , from my perspective, was like the greatest singer, the greatest lyricist, the most inventive, rockstar musician of all time. You know, he helped invent new wave. He helped invent glam rock, like he helped invent so much stuff. He invented ambient music with Brian Eno, and I just revered him as did everyone and loved him.

Moby: And then in 1995, I met David Bowie. He was on tour with Nine Inch Nails, and they had a party after their show at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. And someone at the party said, would you like to meet David Bowie? And I was like, how is that even within the realm of possibility, Like, I'm a nobody and you're asking me if I want to meet a demigod.

Moby: And I met David Bowie. And what do you think first meeting of David Bowie? What did we talk about? What was it? Guess just guess. Like of all the things like two musicians, two people interested in art and culture, um, two potential space aliens, what are they gonna talk about when they first meet? Um,

Lindsay: probably like,

Moby: um, if your answer is real estate, you are correct.

Moby: we talked. About real estate. And I just was like, I was like, I'm talking to David Bowie, I'll talk about anything. And for some reason he was really interested in real estate and so we talked about real estate.

Lindsay: Where was he like

Moby: looking to buy or something? No, just generally He was like, he was like, oh, and I, I think I might have even blurted out, like I had this tiny little cabin in upstate New York and I was like, oh, I was just at my cabin in upstate New York.

Moby: It was like this place had no heat, barely had running water. And so that led us to talk about real estate. And then here's where it gets interesting. Five years later I get an email out of the blue from David Bowie and I was like, I can't, what is the, and I, I checked my manager, I was like, is this real?

Moby: Is this really David Bowie? And David wrote to me and said, Hey mobi, not sure if you remember meeting me five years ago. I was like, oh yeah, I've got it tattooed on my face, . and he said, I moved in across the street from you. Now that we're neighbors, do you wanna go get a cup of coffee? And I was like, again, in what universe is this?

Moby: Even within the realm of possibility, one that David Bowie knows who I am. Two, that David Bowie lives across the street from me. And three he wants to meet up and get coffee. And from that we became friends and neighbors. And so for the next like two years we worked on music together, we had dinners together, we got lots of coffee together, we went on strolls together.

Moby: And then in the summer of 2002, and at this point David Bowie had retired from. For health reasons. But in the summer of 2002, I said, oh, well I'm going on tour with, uh, blue Man Group and Buster Rhymes. And David said, oh, that sounds like fun. Can I come stop? And I was like, okay. So once again, sorry to repeat myself, but there is no universe in which David Bowie and I meet.

Moby: There is no universe in which David Bowie and I become friends. There is no universe in which as friends, we go on tour together, . But I've left out the single weirdest detail. What? Well, first of all, I mean like all this, I still can't believe that this happened. My favorite musician of all time, we became friends, neighbors went on tour together.

Moby: He went on. He only had one condition for us going on tour. What that I be the headliner. So David Bowie the greatest most successful musician of all time, insisted that I go on last and he go on before me. Why? For the funniest reason. Because he wanted to leave after his show and not sit in traffic . Oh

Lindsay: my God.

Lindsay: He like you

Moby: now . And so he was like, if he was like if I, he's like, he basically said, he said if I'm, he got paid more, he was definitely the real headliner. But he said if he said if I go on last him, then he would be sitting in traffic. Cause we were playing like 20, 30,000 people a night and it's like 20 or 30,000 cars leaving the venue.

Moby: And he was like, he just wanted to play his show and go back to the hotel and go to. And so that was it. I just thought that, so not only did I go on tour with David Bowie, but technically I was the

Lindsay: headliner. Wow. Just because he's such a pragmatic Because

Moby: he was like Houston, God bless. I completely understand.

Moby: Like sitting in traffic Yeah. With 30,000 cars is not fun if you just played a show. So like Yeah. So my there fast forward me, okay. Actually rewind. It's the late seventies. I have my first job carrying old people's golf clubs just until I can make $10 so I can buy two David Bowie records. Fast forward, we're on tour together, hanging out backstage, like normal neighborhood friends.

Lindsay: It's like this crazy dream come true.

Moby: It's also possible it didn't happen , like it's possible that none of this has happened. That like my, I do have this. Lightly held theory that I've taken a lot of masculine and I'm in the desert and all of this is a hallucination and I'm still living in an abandoned factory in a crack neighborhood.

Moby: It's possible. That's my 20 years later going on tour. David Bowie reminiscence.

Lindsay: Did you, when you were touring with him, did you ever, were you ever like hit with like, oh my God, I can't believe, like, what is that? How do you process that when that thing is

Moby: happening? I mean, that only happened every single time he walked on stage.

Moby: Yeah. And at the beginning of every song he played. Yeah. We also. And it's immortalized in the movie Moby Doc. Um, we played a cover of a pixie song together on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Mm-hmm. . And that was pretty intense. Like we're doing, we did a duet together. So there I'm singing with David Bowie on stage in front of millions of people on the Tonight Show.

Moby: Again, this should never have happened because like in my world, like I'm living in an abandoned factory with no running water, not playing music with David Boon. That's my show. Did you, were you nervous?

Lindsay: Mm. I mean, do you get nervous when you were about to perform? I mean, in

Moby: general, weirdly, no. I get nervous about everything else , but like standing on stage in front of, like, one time our friend Julie, uh, was in, in Europe and I was playing a show in Paris and it was, uh, I forget what it's called, but it's a big festival and there's about 150,000 people in the audience.

Moby: Mm-hmm. . And she and I were talking backstage and I looked and someone said like, oh, time to go on stage. and like, she was like, you're going on now. I was like, yeah. She's like, aren't you nervous? And I was like, no, it's 150,000 people. Why would I be nervous? So that doesn't make me nervous. Going to a party where I have to talk to people.

Moby: that makes me uncomfortable.

Lindsay: That's why. Because, because you trust yourself to like, like my, my thing would always be if I was going to do that would be, oh my God, what if I forget man who cares A cord? Or forget a word or forget. You

Moby: know what I mean? Then, then you forget it and you make a joke about it.

Moby: Has that happened to you on stage? Oh sure. All sorts of things have happened for future podcasts. We can talk about like the time that I got attacked by a guy and 10 foot tall tree costume and I had to wrestle him to the ground cause he wouldn't stop attacking me. And on stage. Yeah, in, in the middle of a show, a guy like second come guy on drugs wearing a giant tree costume.

Moby: Was he on stil? I don't even know, but he was like, it was, it was a, it was a 10 foot tall tree costume and he ran on stage and he tackled me and the promoters and everybody thought this was part of the act, so no one stopped him. And so it was a good three or four minutes of me wrestling a guy in a 10 foot tall tree costume.

Moby: And he wouldn't stop fighting me. Like he was like really fighting me.

Lindsay: Wait, I love this. Maybe the next time you play live, if it ever happens, I can be the tree and we can have like a space. I

Moby: don't, no, but this was a re please fight back. But this was a real, like, he, he was not kidding around. Like he wasn't like, huh.

Moby: Lighthearted to tackle like, he was fighting me. Were you scared? Yeah, I was actually like,

Lindsay: because he was like trying to hurt me, pulling punches. Like, not pulling, but like,

Moby: wrestling, wrestling, holding out. Like, you know, like it wasn't, it wasn't lighthearted and fun. And

Lindsay: did, were there people on stage with you that could see that there was a real, uh,

Moby: skirmish effort?

Moby: This was back in the rave days and I was touring by myself, so it's just me on stage. It was like a drum machine in the keyboard and everybody was on drugs, so like no one knew what was going on, but the promoter thought that this was, Part of my show that the tree guy ran on stage. And how long do, how did it end?

Moby: Three or four minutes. Eventually, like I yelled at the promoter, like, please help. And that's when he realized that the tree guy was not supposed to be on stage.

Lindsay: Oh my. So, God, that sounds really, really scary. For a lot of reasons.

Moby: I got, I'm old guy. I got a lot of stories.

Lindsay: Tree guy. I mean, as, as a bit it would've been

Moby: good.

Moby: Oh yeah. I mean, if it was planned, if it was planned or if it was involved. A tree guy not trying to attack me. Like if it was just a tree guy who wanted to wrestle a little bit, that's fine. Or smooch. This was actual like scary tree guy, .

Lindsay: Um, I'm so sorry you were attacked by that tree

Moby: man. Better. A mildly unpleasant event That makes a good story than like a good event with no.

Moby: Maybe not a good event, but like I'd rather have like a little bit bad that creates a good story than a tiny bit banal that creates no story. Okay,

Lindsay: good. I'll keep that in mind for the future.

Moby: Okay. Why did I say that? ? I take, I think, yeah.

Lindsay: I'm just gonna like stand in your backyard and a tree costume and jump on you when you least expect it triggering.

Lindsay: Okay. I have a fan mail here. Okay. Jackson from Texas says, loved hearing. When it's cold, I'd like to die on Stranger Things. How did you come up with that song?

Moby: Okay. Well, hi, Jackson from Texas. So when it's cold, I'd like to Die. Was written in 1994, almost 30. Years ago, a good year, and I was making my first ever album.

Moby: Like I never thought I would've a record deal. I never thought, I certainly never thought I'd be able to make an entire album, and I wanted the album to sort of be. Almost a kitchen sink approach to making an album. Like my managers wanted me to just make a dance album. They were like, people think you're a dance artist.

Moby: Make a dance record. And I was like, yeah, but I want there to be punk rock songs on there. I want there to be classical pieces on there. I want ballads. And one of my favorite bands of the eighties was this obscure, experimental indie band called Hugo Largo. and the singer from Hugo Largo. It's a woman named Mimi ga.

Moby: And so I was like talking to my managers and I was like, do you think Mimi Gazi would be interested in collaborating? Like she's just got this amazing voice. And so she sang two of the songs on the, my first album called Everything Was Wrong and one of them was, when it's Cold, I'd Like to Die. And the version that was in Stranger Things, the version that's on the album is this very minimal, you know, just strings and, and female voice.

Moby: Mm-hmm. . . And I remember playing it to my managers and they were like at first really confused by it. Cause they're like, there are no drums. And I was like, yeah, I know. And they're like, but there's no drums. Like this isn't a dance track. This isn't even really an electronic track. Like what are people gonna think?

Moby: And I was like, I, it's a beautiful song. Like I don't really care what people think. And what was so interesting is a lot of people gravitated towards that. And then the very last song, God Moving Over the Face of the Waters, became a lot of people's favorite songs on the record. Mm-hmm . So when it's cold, I'd like to die.

Moby: We could never really play it live cuz it's so minimal, so austere. But then it was used in The Sopranos as well. I don't, I don't have a spoiler alert, but there's a, there's a very emotional scene in the show, the Sopranos, when, when it's cold, I'd like to die features. Mm. And I didn't know it was going to be used in Stranger Things.

Moby: So I was watching that last episode or the last season, and all of a sudden started playing. And I was like, what is this? And when you license a song to a TV show or a movie, you never know how they're going to use it. Right? Like, I license a song to the Val Kilmer movie, the Saint, and the song. Plays in a cafe while a car is driving by for approximately two seconds.

Moby: Like you don't even know it. It happened like that. And that's a lot of times when you license music, that's what happens. Mm-hmm. , like it's barely in there. But then every now and then there's something like, like Stranger Things where like they basically played the entire song mm-hmm. during one of the most emotional moments of the entire series.

Moby: And I felt like I was getting choked up. Other people were texting me saying they were crying while they were watching it. Um, so to Jackson's question, how it came about was, the song itself is actually really simple. It's only four chords. Can you do it? I can. I have a guitar. Okay. So it's really at its most simple is just the opening chord, C chord

Moby: to G Major. Mm-hmm. F Major.

Lindsay: Do we get

Moby: words? We could have words, but that would involve me singing it. And you don't like to sing that song, going to do that because the original Mimi's version is so beautiful. It's

Lindsay: so good. It's so haunting and

Moby: beautiful. Um, and when we first went on tour, we tried playing it live. So the year was 1995 and Mimi and I were on tour.

Moby: But a lot of, um, a lot of our shows were raves. You know, like we opened up for the prodigy. Whoa. And we're playing raves. Or if I was playing my own show, it was people showing up because up until this point, they knew me as an electronic musician. So like right, people showing up, wearing rave clothes, taking ecstasy, waving glow sticks around expecting nonstop techno barrage.

Moby: And there's me and Mimi on stage playing when it's cold, I'd like to die. And so, like, the recorded version became very beloved for a lot of people. But trust me, live, it was a disaster. Like imagine, well still you're playing a rave in a field in Germany, you go on at two o'clock in the morning in between two hardcore techno DJs and you try to play when it's cold, I'd like to die.

Lindsay: People are out there like, no, I wanna, I wanna wave my light. Stick around. No.

Moby: Yeah. Yeah. So, . It's a beautiful song that was a complete disaster. Played live and I'm sorry I can't sing it, but trust me, you don't want to hear me No one. I mean, if you do want you, you might want to hear me sing that song for the only reason being that it'll make you feel better about anything you might ever do.

Moby: Cuz nothing you do will ever be as bad as me trying to sing that song. That's not very nice to me. Or you? To you. No, really my version of it. Like, it would, it would be sad. Like, like the most embarrassing karaoke moment anyone's ever had to be me trying to sing when it's Cold Dead like . Okay, okay. Okay. So that's how it came about.

Moby: And I remember Mimi G coming over to my studio and in my mind she was like such a huge rock star cuz she had made an album, you know? And in her mind she was an experimental artist from the Lower East Side. And that's how it came about.

Lindsay: That's really cool.

Moby: I like that story. Thanks. I wish I could sing it, but trust me.

Moby: I mean,

Lindsay: you gave you a kazoo, you could kazoo it.

Moby: Mm. Maybe that might even be worse than .

Lindsay: Um, that was really pretty though. I love how you're like, it's just this cord and then it's like strummed in a fancy way. My brain doesn't really understand . Like if I did it, it would be like, um, okay, great.

Moby: Well that has been the first inaugural episode of Moby Pod, and all I can say is thank you, Lindsay, for hanging out and talking about so much random stuff with me and getting me to invent a song.

Moby: I mean, there's certain things that I just, I'm sure that if I'm not embarrassed of them right now, I will be really soon. But I also think. You take the stuff you're embarrassed of, and for the most part, put it out into the world and don't worry about it too much.

Lindsay: Everything I do and say embarrasses me.

Lindsay: So I feel like it's just adding to the pile of embarrassing things I've done in my life.

Moby: Well, I don't, okay,

Lindsay: but that's a, that's a me problem. My therapist and I are working on it. Um, thank you everyone so much for listening to this episode of Moby Pod. We're very, very happy that it's inside of your ears and brain, and

Moby: it'll be a second one coming up real soon.

Moby: So

Lindsay: soon. Just a quick little thank you to the people at Little Walnut Productions, Mike Romanski and Jonathan Ne Vapa that help make all the things happen, bts that means behind the scenes in industry speak, and also thanks to the lovely folks over at Human

Moby: Content, and we'll talk to you guys again in about a week.

Moby: Is that correct? Probably. Okay. So should we play Southside again to go out. Yeah, give him the tunes, drop the beats, something new and modern. And he's only 24 years old. . Yeah. Okay. Thanks again. See myself in the pouring home.

Moby: See the light come.

Moby: I see myself in the pouring rain.

Moby: I watch hope. Come over me.