There's no one that you wouldn't love if you knew their story. And when you share your story with somebody, it starts to become real. When you hear you echo yourself back to yourself of what your experience has been and your life has been, it becomes real to you. It also becomes real to them. And the greatest gift that 2 people can share is to share
each other's story. And so if the greatest gift is that we share our stories, if I don't share mine, I'm actually depriving you of the greatest gift. Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. I am Drew Horning, host of this short but special series with guests who are not graduates of the Hoffman Process, but whose life's work is harmonious with the work and ethos of the process.
As you settle in to explore this new terrain, just please keep in mind that the views and ideas expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of the Hoffman Institute. However, we think you will find these conversations very interesting, very thought provoking, and we're really glad you're here and hope you enjoy this conversation.
The Hoffman Institute and Modern Elder Academy have had an ongoing series of collaboration and conversation where we bring people in and interview them together. A few months ago, I had the chance to meet up with Michael Franti, the musician, the activist, the human being. And so we offer you this conversation recorded live and face to face in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Michael, Hoffman is so experiential. It's so much learning happens through the intellect. Mhmm. But it's when you get the body
engaged Mhmm. That the real learning happens. And I haven't been to a lot of concerts, but I've been to, like, 5 for the uninitiated. What happens at your concerts? What what is the experience about? What do people get when they go to a Michael Franti experience? Well, I believe that music is the sound of feelings. So because all of us have different feelings, it's different for everybody, of course. But my goal as an artist or one of them is to create an opportunity for people to have
ease of heart. And what that means to me is that whatever's inside of you can pass with ease. And, I just played a few days ago at, the Memorial for Reverend Cecil Williams in San Francisco. He was this incredible icon feeding 10,000 homeless people every day, like just for, you know, 50 years and an incredibly inspiring leader. One time when I was at church there, he said, Joy is the intersection between the human and the divine. And that's why sometimes
when you feel joy, you laugh. Sometimes you feel joy, you cry. But it's those moments when you feel that ease of heart, like whatever is inside of me is just passing with ease. And 2 years ago, my biological father died of COVID. It was during the midst of the pandemic. And we had a Zoom funeral, a Zoom Memorial like this. And my wife happened to be away and I was alone with my 5 year old. And we had these memorials.
And at the end of it, I just really wanted to hug everyone on the other side of the Zoom and just feel that human presence. And because I did it, I went away from it with so much, like, grief bottled up inside me. So a few months pass, and there I get to go see my first live concert in 2 years. There's this great band called The Munchies, and they're the only Indonesian band. I live in Bali. It's the only Indonesian band that has a fiddle player and a
banjo player. The Munchies. The Munchies. And they may have the only banjo in Indonesia. I don't know. But they're up there jamming and singing. They get drummer with a huge Afo and he's sweating and playing. And at a certain point, I just like threw my hands up to the sky and I closed my eyes and I started to just feel tears, just like
streaming, like a waterfall down my cheeks. I started like singing at the top of my lungs and dancing and sweating and crying and having great memories of my dad and having painful memories of my dad and just like letting it all go. And after an hour of that, I just felt better. You know, I just felt like, man, I need, like, there was nothing else that could help me just wash it through like
that. So, like, at my shows, that's, you know, that's what I hope people feel even, like, a little bit at some point, but they feel that sense, like whatever's inside of me, this is a safe place and a fun place to let go. And we have, a retreat place in Bali called Soshai in Bali. And it's equally based around music and play as it is around going deep on your yoga mat or processing or journaling or having conversations because we believe that that's the other side
of it. Like, that's the, you know, when you're talking about the body, it's like you can go and sit and have this really powerful, deep conversation. And sometimes the best way to integrate it is to just go listen to a DJ and just fucking dance, you know? And, and so our place is equally committed to both that sense of inner soul and then that, like, outward expression. And because in part, counteracting the overthinking of it. Right? If we just think our way, then somehow
but it it doesn't work. It's a it's a endless loop. Isn't it? Yeah. In fact, we have a t shirt at our hotel. It says underthink it. Underthink it. Yes. Which to me means just, like, just do it. Like, just if you feel it, you do it. We we spend so much of our life oystering ourselves. You know? Like, last night, I got lost here. I was walking from this building to the other where I was trying to get through, which is And there's a lot of land. Yeah. It's like about 3 miles
of desert. And and I thought, oh, I just go to here, and they take a left and right and left and right and left, and I'll be in a but I got way lost. And so, like, in my head, as I'm walking through the desert is, like, this every story that I've ever told myself about shame, about you shouldn't have gone out there in the dark without a light. You you shouldn't have you know, your phone's on 2%. Like, why did you go out there without a GPS? You know? Like and I'm like All that
came Yeah. Yeah. Roaring. Rolling back. And I'm like, I should be calling somebody, but then if I call them, I'm embarrassed. I got lost. And then I decide, like, I'm gonna skip the roads because I look on the GPS, and it's like this to get to here. And so I go, oh, if I just cut across the desert. So I'm like, I get back to where I'm supposed to be and I'm like covered in cactus and like, but I bring this up just to say that you get in your head so much and so much of
our life is spent that way. Just thinking about what other people are thinking about me. And then you realize that they weren't thinking about me at all. You know? And why did I waste this Ever sleep. This time? Yeah. You're sleeping. Yeah. Oh, it turns out when you go fuck everyone else, everyone all everyone's, It was 2 hours of you wandering the desert.
So, Lynn Twist, who we first co interviewed together, talks about Hoffman being the the place to go to heal the past and MEA Modern Elder Academy as a perfect segue to the present and the future. How do your past and the work you do, the life you live, how are those connected, your past and your present? Well, I'm 58 now. And when I was born, my biological mom is Irish, Belgian, and German, and my biological father is African American and not away Indian from the mountains of Virginia.
And when I was born, I was held by my mom for an hour and then given up for adoption. And I was adopted into the Franti family who are 2nd generation immigrants from Finland. They had 3 kids of their own, and they adopted myself and another African American son. And just around things that I have, one sister who's a lesbian and one brother who's a police officer. I grew up in this mixed melting pot of a family, all different sizes and shapes and colors. And my parents were alcoholics.
And there was cynicism and sarcasm on one side of the emotional spectrum and rage on the other side. And there was very, very little in between that was expressed. And my whole life, I always felt like 2 things. 1, like I was an outsider in every situation as in whether it was my own family or school or anywhere. And the other was I grew up feeling abandoned. And so throughout my life, everything that I've always felt has been put up against this frame of feeling left out and abandoned.
And so as an adult today, I've been, you know, unraveling that. How does that affect my relationships? How does it affect my wanting to be desired and what I'm desired for? I see other people in the world being different. And so, you know, getting back to, you know, Hoffman and going into, I've never been to the Hoffman experience, but going into the modern elder academy, I have a friend who was here yesterday named Robert Maribel. And he's from the red Willow tribe here in Taos Pueblo.
And his people have been living in the same dwellings there for 1200 years, the same exact buildings. And he said, he came here and spoke. And he said, every 10 years they have a new initiation. And it's like they go on this walk for 48 hours. They go 63 miles in 48 hours. Some of their initiations are just 48 hours. Some of them take a year and a half where they're underground for that, like, like they're literally in a cave, like under, and they're learning all these history. They're they're
discovering about themselves. They're looking at who they are and how they are in the world, but it happens every 10 years. And in between, they have to do preparations for that. We don't have that in our culture, in our society. So we get to this place where we're 58 years old, and, you know, I'm literally unraveling my birth. What modern elder is to me is the place where you have an opportunity to look at yourself and hold this lens up to yourself and say, you know, I've lived this life. I've
done these things. Maybe I've raised these kids or had this job or started this career, or I didn't do that career, or I didn't raise those kids, or I didn't do
the things that I wanted to do. And now I've got this opportunity in my life to mark this moment as a time of initiation or as a time as what Chip calls Chip Conley, the founder here, one of the founders here, as a time of chrysalis of, like, not midlife crisis, but this chrysalis that you're in that now this butterfly can finally blossom. So getting back to where I was growing up, and as as I mentioned, my father who raised me, my adopted father was an alcoholic.
At 60, 6, he had a stroke. And I'm thinking, like, I'm not that far from that age. Who knows what's gonna happen to me? But 60 6, he had a stroke. And and when he came back, he lost all his function. He was paralyzed for I was in a coma for 20 days. He came back, couldn't speak, couldn't write, couldn't stand, couldn't tie issues. He had to relearn and do everything. When he came back, he blossomed into the most beautiful person, Drew. He would be kind to strangers.
He made amends to me and everyone in his life he'd ever heard. After his stroke. After his stroke. And it was like the stone had been removed from his heart. I went and had lunch with him. It was the only time that we ever had lunch together because with 5 kids, you just don't get to have lunch alone with dad, you know? So we did. And I said, dad, it's amazing how much you've changed. And he looked at me and he said, I haven't changed at all. And I was like,
my guy. Like, why what's going on here? Like and he said, what I mean by that is I've always been this way. It's just that I had this stone in front of my heart that prevented me from showing it. And part of that was alcoholism. Part of that was the way that he had grown up. But for whatever reason, he just could not express his love or his passion. And he said, I'm so glad you chose to do music. Because he didn't want me to do that. And he was really mad at me for even doing it.
He said, I'm so glad you chose to follow your heart and do what you wanted to do. Because he said, I always wanted to be an architect, but I thought who would build my buildings? Like, why would anybody wanna choose my building? And so he said, I'll be a math teacher because there'll always be someone who needs math, but he hated it. He hated teaching. Like after the 1st 5 years, he was sick of it and he did it for 40 years or whatever. But he, what he
did love was carving. And so he would, he found that thing in his life that he did all his life. And then in his midlife, he just, it became explosive. He carved 100 and 100 of birds and he loved carving waterfowl. And we have 100 of his carvings, but he found this other thing in his life that lit him on fire. Another thing that he did is he decided he was gonna read a 100 pages of a book every day. And I was like, I don't get that.
Like, why would you like you got, you know, how many years left in your life? Why are you gonna spend your time just with a book? But for him, it was like this thing that fed him. And now that I'm at my age, I'm like, there's nothing that I love more than learning from other people. And there's and when I can learn from people who are in the other side of the world through reading or through listening to an audiobook, it just opens me up so much. So
I like, I get that now. And now I'm able to see like the pearls of wisdom that my dad had for me and all of us now have at this age have this wisdom. And our legacy isn't going to be a statue in the town square. You know? And even those people who have that statue in the town square, they thought that was gonna be the coolest thing, and they put money for it. When I dive, all the statue would be you know? And now nobody cares. You walk by the birch shit on it,
nobody fucking gives it to you. Yeah. You know? But the things that you can pass on are helping somebody else through those tenure transitions, through those cycles in their life, through that pain in their life, through that reassurance, you have that, hey, I'm here. And I felt that too. And here's something I learned that can maybe make it a little bit easier for you. I wanna ask about that journey through understanding your birth. Mhmm. And you sing so much about love and the the power of
it and the expression of it. Earlier, there was also anger Yeah. In your music. And so how do you see the the juxtaposition and the relationship between these seemingly 2 very diverse emotions. Yeah. How do you hold them? You know, when I first started making music, Drew, I was like, I was just trying to write what I felt. And coming out of the household I did, the environment I came
out of, I was pissed off. And I thought, like, if I could make noise about what was happening in the world and some political thing or some social crisis, that it would bring awareness to it and it would help solve it. And after a decade of doing that, I realized like, I'm not, you know, like I remember going to, when the first Gulf War happened and we went and had this big march,
they're marching in the street with signs. And, and I was waiting the next morning for George Bush, the first one to call me and go, by golly, Michael, I saw your sign and you're right. I'm gonna stop the fucking war. You know? And it just didn't happen. It didn't move in the speed that I wanted to. Then something really remarkable changed me. I fell
in love. And before I had sex with this woman who would become my wife at that time, I wanted to make sure that I didn't have HIV because I had had so much unprotected sex in the eighties. And as I was waiting for the results of the test to come back, and back then it took 2 weeks to get the results and you got a letter in the mail. I went from writing this angry song about, you know, F the government because they're not responding to this crisis. And I was like, that's not
really what this is about. This is about relationships and human relationships or your relationship with yourself that's causing you to do intravenous drugs, which is now putting you at risk? Or why are you having unprotected sex? Or why are you having sex with someone you don't know or care about? Like, what are these things that are all in that? And so that all became the song that instead of being this song of rage, there's a song of, like, vulnerability. I believe that vulnerability is
more powerful than rage. And sometimes when you're vulnerable, you're angry. That's okay. But a lot of other times you're uncertain, You're scared. You're in fear. You're joyful. You're happy. You're, you know, there's there's something that's happening and you're not that all the time. So to be able to have the ability to express the full rainbow of human emotion in my songs became important because I'd go out to a festival and I'd be like,
yeah, fuck. There's just so many and and then there's like a bunch of hippies naked dancing and throwing ice at each other. You know, I'm like, I'm like, this isn't landing here, you know, so but I learned just in the moment enjoying it. Just in the moment and enjoying it. But if you talk about feelings and if you talk about what's happening in your heart, and then it lands in a
different way. And I don't believe I've ever been able to change the world overnight, but I know that I've been able to help people make it through a difficult night. And that comes from, like, your values. Values are actually what inform everything that we see in the world. All the problems that we see in the world can be solved through people expressing their value and appreciation for nature, their value and appreciation for difference, their value and appreciation for other.
And what that comes from is soul and, and like your soul is all of that wisdom and that knowing, and things that you feel. And it comes from somewhere in universe or God or spirit or your DNA or from your ancestors or the collective of your experience, the collective of everyone's experience, whatever it is that leads it. Each person is different. I have this ongoing conversation with a friend of mine. He's this really brilliant artist who believes in multiverses.
You know, like that if there's trillions and trillions and trillions of planets, like there's gonna be one planet where it's like here, except I'm Drew and you're Michael. You know, like there's gonna be this like one little thing, you know, like the Mandela effect. And like yesterday I was out in the desert, I'm walking to the desert. I'm looking at this juniper tree and there's no two leaves on that juniper tree that are the same. There's no 2 little purple berries that are same.
The formation of rocks around me in the ground could not possibly be the same. And I just moved it, and now it's different. And the likelihood that there is another universe where all those things were exactly the same, except one little leaf was different, To me, seems less imaginative to think about or more boring to think about than the fact that everything is different. Every single thing in the universe is chaotically and impossible to duplicate.
That excites me more to think about because then it makes me think like your soul couldn't possibly be what my soul is. Yeah. Your soul is completely different. And if that's the case, every soul that exists in the universe or ever have existed in the universe is a different collection of knowing and understanding about life and about what's right for you or for them. And just like my dad had to remove that stone or whatever it was in his life that removed that stone
for him. And he was able to show up like that. That's what I feel like MEA is about. Just being able to go, what do I really feel? What am I really excited about? What really hurts me? And why does that all hurt me today after so many decades? And now what is the creative aspect of how am I gonna show up in the world now to do the things that I'm passionate about and to find that, or that is gonna take me there and be able to listen to that thing. And like Rick Rick Rubin talks about
it a lot. The difference between like art and craft, which is that art is you go on a creative exploration without any destination in mind. And craft is when you say, oh, I wanna build a pan that is nonstick and that can work on electric surfaces as well as gas services. And so we're gonna craft this thing with this destination in mind. And and then you can take both. You could take your art and you can craft it into something someone
else can understand. And now it's a song or now it's a book or now it's something, whatever. And wouldn't it be great if arts and crafts were the number one thing taught in schools? You know? Like, that would be cool. Yeah. There's something about not just reflecting for the sake of reflecting. At some point, we've gotta get out of ourselves. Yeah. How do you talk about that? Mhmm. Because there so many people do such introspective work, and it's so normalized. Yeah. But it can't be
the end game. Yeah. You know, I believe, first of all, that there's no one that you wouldn't love if you knew their story. And when you share your story with somebody, it starts to become real. When you hear you echo yourself back to yourself of what your experience has been and your life has been, it becomes real to you. It also becomes real to them. And the greatest gift that 2 people can share is to share each other's story.
And so if the greatest gift is that we share our stories, if I don't share mine, I'm actually depriving you of the greatest gift. Sharing our story helps us to put it out into the world. But then as elders, you know, something I love that Chip talks about and it told me is, that used to go to the old gray haired man when and say, hey, when do I put my corn in this year? And he'd say, well, we had a late frost and a lot of rain this year, so we're
gonna put it in June. But if we had a early frost, you would've put it in in May. And now you just go to Google and go, put it in a gin. So what we have as elders though, now in this wealth of infinite knowledge is discernment. To be able to tell somebody or share with somebody, this is what I learned from my experience and what I've observed and been told and taught by other people's experiences of here's a way to navigate through your life. You take it, and you
make it yours now. You know, it's just like The Beatles trying to copy Chuck Berry, but they're The Beatles. So it ends up as much as they wanted to be Chuck Berry, they couldn't be. It just sounded like them. That's how the world is. It's like you take all these experiences and information and life, and then you get to interpret it back to the world. And then that becomes part of the experience of the world.
And when you don't do that, when we stop ourselves for whatever reason of sharing that, and of living that, and of trying new things and exploring new things, then we're not adding to it. You know? And I and I I think that's, you know, getting back to what you first asked, that's that would be my answers. That's great. I know we're running low on time, but I have a great question about the 2 of you. So how does Chip Conley and Monterey how do they get together? How did you
guys have been friends for 20 years? Yeah. Oh, and more. 35. Yeah. 35 years. Yeah. So how did that happen? I imagine you know a lot of people, but how did this friendship occur? Well, Michael is, what, 4 4, 5 years younger than me, and he was a student at University of San Francisco, basketball player there. He he was getting his band together. His band was in Philly, or some of his band members were in Philly. He'd fly them out, and they'd stay in
my first hotel. My first hotel Oh. Is a place in the Tenderloin in San Francisco called the Phoenix, and it was a rock and roll hotel. And so that's we started to get to know each other there, but it sort of built over time. You know? He was involved in Michael was involved in Glide Memorial Church. Cecil Williams, you mentioned earlier Who just passed. Yeah. Just passed. He just actually, Michael just sang at his memorial,
4 days ago. And I was on the board there, and I started getting really involved there. And so there was that. And then one thing built on the other, and then we just became closer and closer as Michael decided that he was gonna create Soulshine, which everybody has to go to in Bali, his his retreat center because I had a hospitality background. This is before I was creating my retreat center, MEA, but I was on the board of the Esalen Institute. I went over to Bali and sort of
I don't know. Mentored him a Yeah. A lot. And and saw his his his wife, and and they had their wedding in at the Phoenix at my first hotel. And, you know, just I don't know. I've you talk. That that was a lot. That's kinda like what happened. But the through line for for me is that I've always known Chip as somebody who cared about people.
When I first started sharing about, like, maybe opening this retreat center, you know, Chip told me how he had started joie de vivre based on Maslov's key of needs and to create this place where people are safe, warm, beautiful, you know, conditions with everything they could possibly need so that they could think about higher things. And they can find joy, and they could find intellect, and they can explore and find creativity. And I thought that's an amazing
thing to build, you know, our tolerance. And and our our hood places, you know, from that about inspiring change. And that's that's our mantra at Soulshine is to inspire change in people so they may inspire change in others. And for everybody, it's something different. Some person's like, I just wanna lose £4. You know? And the other person's like, I really wanna connect with my 15 year old. Another person's like, I I really wanna do that, start that business that I always dreamed of doing.
And that's the thing that I feel, Chip, you know, is like apart from any like agenda or political thing in the world, like, Chip just cares about people being becoming happy and finding who they are. And And we're mirrors for each other. Yeah. And maybe all 3 of us in a sense that what brings us joy is the ripple of impact, the ROI of just, like, helping feel good about the fact you brought a smile to someone's face. There's a collective effervescence we talk about in
NDA. And I think that's true at a in a Hoffman workshop where there's a sense that you get to know each other so well, you have a sense of communal joy. And this is also what happens at a concert with Michael and in a workshop with Michael. So Yeah. We should put in our show notes or something about the research around collective effervescence Oh, yeah. Because it's real. Emil Durkheim. Experience Neil Durkheim. French sociologist. That's the guy.
So what's next for you? What's what does the picture start a tour, tomorrow night. I'll be on the road for four and a half months. Our tour is called the Togetherness Tours. It's myself and Steven Marley and Trevor Hall, Trombone Shorty's on a few shows and this great new bank called Bombargo from Canada. And the reason I called it that is it pains me to see the division that I see taking place in the world and especially in our country today. I believe that 95% of
who we all are is really similar. You know, people want need, you know, a roof. They need a job. They need food. They need, you know, clothing. They need opportunities, access to education, health care. The songs that we sing, the dance, the way that we pray, the way we embrace the great mystery. You know? And that's Our our political Yeah. Our political So 95% is everything that is similar. Yeah. And 5% is the difference. And the difference is actually
where the most beautiful stuff is. That's where the beauty is. So, like, when I'm thinking or I was thinking about togetherness, like, I was thinking, do we try to relate to each other on all the things that are the same? And it's, it's actually looking at the difference and seeing the beauty and the difference is how I, it's how I believe that we get to togetherness. Because the one thing that we all have in common is
that each of us is completely unique. That is why I make music is is to make people have a feeling that it's okay to be their unique individual self and to connect with others with them being that part of the fruit salad. Togetherness and celebrating the beauty and the difference. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. So grateful. Thanks, Jim. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Razzi Grassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other, and in the world. To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.