Less Really Is More

Less Really Is More

John Robbins wants you to cut back on more than just ice cream.

Yes, my friends, due to the current recession, penny-pinching is back in and, conversely, ostentatious displays of extravagant wealth are out. But if this post–Miller High Life transition is proving tough, John Robbins, author of The New Good Life—Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less (Random House, 2010), could be a source of inspiration. Robbins walked away from the Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune his dad co-created and put himself through Cal before moving to an island off the coast of British Columbia. There he and his young wife lived happily on a mere $500 a year. Back in California in the ’80s, he began work on his first book, the seminal Diet for a New America. Now, The New Good Life zeros in on how to cut down on what you spend on transportation, housing, and food—and be happier in the end. Recently, I rang Robbins at his solar-powered digs in Soquel, Calif. to see if I could tap into his frugally happy mojo.

Paul Kilduff: I was just thinking, maybe “The Biggest Loser” reality show could be re-made into a new game show where instead of the biggest loser losing weight, the biggest loser would be someone who doesn’t have much of anything monetarily.

John Robbins: And is happy.

PK: You could be the host of that show.

JR: I’d love it. I know people who have really high qualities of life. Their relationships with their families are conscious and beautiful. I’m not saying without stress. There aren’t any relationships, close relationships, without stress. But they use the stress to grow, so the communication is always getting stronger, and their understanding of themselves and each other is deepening and they live with a connection to themselves. They have self-respect. In their presence, other people flower. They don’t have very much money but they have enough. If your basic needs aren’t satisfied, if you don’t have enough financial security that you have your basic human needs met, then honestly, money is happiness. You need money to get that. A certain basic amount is required. Beyond that though, we’ve bought into this more-is-better metaphysics and it’s crazy.

PK: Everyone knows you walked away from the Baskin-Robbins fortune and you could have run that company. When I was in high school, I worked at Baskin-Robbins. I’m sure people tell you this all the time.

JR: Well, so did I.

PK: It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.

JR: I did, too.

PK: I had a lot of free ice cream.

JR: Not as much as me.

PK: Do you have any fondness for the company or what it means to people?

JR: Oh, a lot. I mean, I grew up with it. I loved my father. He and I had a very conflicted relationship over the years but in the last couple of years of his life, it was the closest ever. I don’t eat ice cream anymore but don’t feel sorry for me. I ate enough in my childhood for 20 lifetimes. All our clocks in the house were the old clocks; they weren’t digital. Instead of saying one, two, three, four, five to 12, each number said 31. An ice cream cone isn’t going to kill anybody but the more you eat, the more likely you are to have heart disease and become obese and have diabetes. If I were to be selling that product, I would want people to eat more. That’s what business is about and I didn’t want to be involved in selling a product that was undermining people’s health.

PK: I was happy to hear that you and your father did come to some sort of reconciliation at the end.

JR: Very much so. He had a lot of respect in the end for what I had done with my life.

PK: Did he ever adopt any of your philosophies at all?

JR: Yeah, he did actually, to a degree. His own health crisis was the trigger. He developed very high blood pressure and very serious diabetes and heart problems. Really, the inevitable and predictable consequences of the way you live. His cardiologist said to him—this is in the very late ’80s or early ’90s—“Mr. Robbins, you’re a very sick man. All we can do now is try to juggle your medications and try to make your few remaining years a little more comfortable unless you’re willing to make really major lifestyle changes.” And my father said, “Well, what would that be?” And he says, “Well, I think to start with, you should read this book,” and he handed him a copy of my first book, Diet for a New America.

PK: Oh, my God.

JR: And this is the highest priced cardiologist. It’s a man who has treated two presidents when they had heart problems. And to my father, this is the high priest of Western medicine speaking. And he is saying, “You should read the book written by your maverick son.” It was an extraordinary moment, my dad told me about it. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall and seen the look on his face.

PK: [What about] your unfortunate involvement with Bernie Madoff, investing with him—I’m assuming that’s what you did?

JR: I didn’t invest with him. I invested with a friend who was an attorney and wealthy donor to EarthSave and some of the other nonprofits I was involved with. My grandsons were born with a lot of special needs, it’s almost certainly a lifetime situation and there’s a lot of cost attendant to raising special needs kids. My friend said, “You know, I can help. I have this investment that the returns are steady and reliable and very, very secure.” He said that they were assessed as T-bills and he said some other things about it that turned out not to be at all true. He wasn’t lying to me. He didn’t know. But he bundled our money with his and some other nonprofits and took it. And three steps down the line, it was with Madoff. I had never heard of Bernard Madoff.

PK: So you weren’t consciously going out there and seeking him out.

JR: Oh no! I didn’t know who he was. It’s amazing the difference between what I thought was the case and the truth, but then Madoff was a fraud. He was criminal. He deliberately and systematically deceived an enormous number of people, many of whom are very sophisticated financiers investing billions of dollars. I’m a little guy. I’m not a financier, but I did trust a friend who trusted a friend who put the money with Madoff, and I got wiped out.

PK: Have you found it in your heart anywhere to forgive Bernie Madoff at all?

JR: No, I’m not interested in that. Remember, I never met him. I never knew who he was. I understand now that he was the perpetrator of all this. I’m not sure who really he worked for, even. I don’t think we know the whole story at all. The amount of money involved in this fraud is just too big, $65 billion? That’s not lifestyle money. He lived it up in a grotesque way but nobody can spend anything like that kind of money on a lifestyle. That’s the kind of money that funds wars, that overthrows governments. There’s a lot of questions about where that money . . . actually, where is it?

PK: Now, if you could come back as an extinct species, what would that be?

JR: Oh my.

PK: You haven’t thought about that one yet?

JR: No, no. That’s a question that has not been asked. I would love it if extinct species could come back. The fact is, they can’t.

PK: Right, they can’t.

JR: And I think that I don’t even want to joke about it because the extinction of species is, to me, one of the most criminal and immoral obscene acts of our culture. We, as a people, are driving a level of extinction of species that is unprecedented in the history of the Earth. It’s a wave of extinction that is sweeping the planet. The best estimates are by the end of this century, two-thirds of the species on Earth could be gone. This is so disgusting and appalling to me. I know you were joking but if we look at life as a mirror telling us some things, reading signs about ourselves, then when are we going to wake up?

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For more Kilduff, go to thekilduff-file.blogspot.com.


JOHN ROBBINS VITAL STATS

Age: 62

Birthplace: Glendale, Calif.

Astrological sign: Scorpio

First “real” job: 
Commodities floor options trading clerk.

Planet you’d emigrate to?: 
I think I have emigrated to planet Earth.

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