Jesse Israel

EVERYONE EATS        |        SEPT 24, 2020

Jesse Israel

FOUNDER OF THE BIG QUIET

Jesse is a social entrepreneur, meditation leader and former record label executive known for founding the mass meditation movement The Big Quiet. Jesse has signed multi-platinum bands like MGMT, but now leads some of the largest meditations in the world, teaches meditation to next-generation leaders, and speaks at Fortune 500s and colleges.

At the start of 2020, Jesse was invited to go on tour with Oprah Winfrey and WW to speak at and lead mass meditations at sold-out arenas throughout the US. Jesse’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Vice, Vogue, Fast Company, GQ and the Wall Street Journal.

INTERVIEW BY ROSIE ELLIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOLLY CRANNA

JESSE'S HOME IN VENICE, CALIFORNIA

Jesse let us into his beautiful, three-story Venice Beach home where he has been learning to cook alongside his roommate Matt.

BREAKFAST

I alternate between a couple different things. One of my favorites is a smoothie that I'll do with organic oat milk, frozen blueberries, banana, almond butter and the Vital Proteins collagen peptides powder. I'll blend that up in my Magic Bullet. The alternative is a gluten-free or paleo granola that’s mainly made of nuts and seeds. I try to find brands with low sugar … one day I'll make my own (laughs). With my breakfast, I take a supplement called Host Defense by My Community . It's a mushroom supplement that's f*cking awesome. I cannot recommend it enough.

I stopped drinking caffeine once I got pretty consistent with my meditation practice, which brings me a lot of energy. I no longer need it. If I have caffeine, it often makes me feel too jittery, too energized.

LUNCH

Lunch is typically something on the lighter side. I love to make a salad with very fresh produce. On a good week, I'll go to the Venice Farmers Market for fresh produce. Otherwise, I just get some organic veggies going from the fridge, maybe I'll chop up some turkey, make like a really simple dressing with olive oil or avocado oil and balsamic vinegar – and that's a great lunch. Once or twice a week, I go to the hot bar at Erewhon.

DINNER

Dinner really varies and is the meal that I'm most social with. I love to eat out for dinner, but I've been starting to cook more this year, particularly because of the pandemic. Lately I've been doing a lot of stir fries with a bunch of different veggies and organic chicken. And then I’ll make a sauce that my sister taught me. It's sesame oil, aminos, almond butter and rice vinegar. The almond butter gives it a really nice thick consistency, and I'll spill it over the stir fry. I’ve also recently learned a really simple lamb chop recipe. It's just just sumac, a little bit of salt, pepper, and olive oil. You sear it on a pan and then put it in the oven for a couple of minutes and it just comes out beautifully.

Eating out is challenging right now because of COVID, so I've been doing more outdoor dining or take-out. I really like the ramen at Mitsui (a Japanese market in Mar Vista). I've been taking that to-go and eating on my roof, or I'll get take out tacos and we'll eat them at the beach, or sometimes I'll eat in the Superba outdoor area.

DESSERT

I love Hu dark chocolate and Lily’s sugar-free dark chocolate. I usually don't have sugar after my meal; if I have too much sugar, it will mess with my sleep. So I'll have a little bite here and there, but definitely not every night.

SPEED ROUND

Biggest food pet-peeve?
When I get food delivery and there's just a sh*t ton of utensils and unnecessary packaging.

Dream dinner guest?
My dad’s dad – my grandpa Saul. I never got to meet him. He died when my dad was young.

 

Favorite restaurant?

Shake Shack. I always get two ShackBurgers, cheese fries and an Arnold Palmer.

 

Any vitamins or supplements?
It’s not really a supplement, but I do take a bath almost every day and use a lot of epsom salt. I find it to be really helpful with feeling rested and with body and muscle discomfort. I LOVE my epsom salt baths. My favorite bath salt is the Big Dipper Mineral Bath from Bathing Culture. It’s an awesome sustainable brand.

Best snack between meals?
There’s a nut butter man at the farmers market. He makes these protein balls filled with all these different nut butters. You just need one to take the edge off in between meals.

Best dish you make?
The dish that pleases me most is just a very simple brown rice pasta with sauce, some sausages and parmesan. The college special.

Favorite neighborhood restaurant?
I really love this place called Pecorino (in Brentwood, by my parents' place).

Cocktail of choice?
A fine mezcal with one or two ice cubes. I just got a bottle of Gem & Bolt.

Five items always in your kitchen:
Almond milk, almond butter, cashews (one of my favorite little nibbles), organic lettuce varieties, and recently, I've been keeping a lot of organic turkey around.

Cooking playlist?
Recently I've been cooking to a jazz musician named Matthew Halsall.

Any foods you avoid?
I try to go light on dairy, fried stuff and heavy, simple carbs. I feel like if I eat too much of those, I just don't like how I feel after the meal. But I do find that if I just eat it in moderation, especially if I eat that stuff and don't get full (like 80, 90% full) then I'm good afterwards.

Whose routine would you love to see on Everyone Eats?
Kendrick Lamar.

Last thing you ordered for delivery?
I picked up Gjusta. We had bagels, breakfast burritos, almond butter with honey and toast, yogurt parfait, orca salad, a turkey sandwich. It was a lot of stuff because I was visiting a friend and meeting his baby for the first time, so we were feasting.

 

Go-to market or grocery store?

The Venice Farmers Market on Fridays.

 

Go-to comfort food?
When my mom was pregnant with me she would get these intense cravings for hard tacos from Taco Bell. She would get them pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times. To this day, a hard taco is the most comforting food to me. I very rarely will go to Taco Bell, but every now and then, when I do, I get the hard tacos there and it brings me absolute joy.

Favorite celebrity chef?
He’s not a celebrity, but Matt, who's one of my best buds who I’m living with right now, is a great chef and has been teaching me all of his tricks and walking me through meals. I've been his sous chef for a lot of the pandemic.

Where do you most feel like The Regular?
I go to my parents' place for dinner every Sunday – that's where I feel most like The Regular.

THIRD SCOOP

What inspired you to start The Big Quiet five years ago and how did launching this company change you as an individual?

I ran a record label for about 10 years. Just a couple of years into my record label journey, I was getting pretty stressed out and experiencing debilitating anxiety and panic attacks and was having a tough time. I got into meditation in my early twenties and found that it was really helpful, but I really was only practicing by myself; I was yearning to have a space to practice with other people and other people that were like me. I would meditate at music festivals and with friends who were music managers or musicians. I started meditating with other people in the music industry when we were at parties and started to just really love the sense of community around getting quiet in the face of so much noise.

And I ended up leaving that company about six years ago to start to find ways to really give myself, to bringing people together to meditate, and to also have space to just talk about real sh*t, you know, be human with, be human with each other. So I started organizing group meditations just as an experiment. And in my free time, I started at my buddy's apartment with twenty people and it just grew. I didn't have a plan to actually start the Big Quiet, it just organically happened based off of a desire to feel connected with people in a new way, and seeing that people were really hungry for a space like that. And the Big Quiet was born out of those, those group meditations at my buddy's place. People were really hungry to learn tools, to help them move through the challenges in life, and were also really hungry to have a sense of belonging and community in a city like New York, which can oftentimes feel lonely. Those were the two things that really inspired me to start it.

How did launching this company change you as an individual?

Before I was doing this work, I felt like I needed my life to look a certain way. A lot of that was based off of the way that I was raised, you know, growing up in a very privileged part of Los Angeles, having lots of really successful friends and peers. I felt like my life was supposed to look like, you know, me raising a ton of money for a startup or being the CEO of a big company or working up the corporate ladder in Hollywood. But, when I decided to do something very different, which was to build the Big Quiet, and speak with big groups about this stuff, it was really challenging for me at first, because I was doing something that felt like it was very different than what a lot of my peers were doing and what I felt like I was supposed to be doing. I really had to unlearn that career path and the life path that I thought I was supposed to be on. It was really tough for the first few years to be doing something different, even though it felt so good and it felt so clearly aligned with a need that people have right now. So it really has pushed me into just owning that my path is different, my timeline is different, my skills are different and the way that I'm really giving myself to my work and my life, or just the way that I'm contributing to the world is unique to me. Being able to love that about myself and celebrate that and not compare myself to other people and to really find joy and my own unique way of showing up has been a real blessing and probably the most important thing that I've learned from building the Big Quiet.

Has meditation had any effect on the foods you consume or how you think about nutrition?

I mentioned earlier that I don't really have dietary restrictions, but I'm aware of how food makes me feel after I eat it. This is something that's really grown from practicing meditation and mindfulness. It's an awareness before I start eating of how something is going to make me feel while I eat it, but also how it's going to make me feel after I eat it. Taking the time to just pause before I eat and really stop for a second and say, do I feel like the pleasure that I'm gonna experience in this moment of eating it is going to be worth the way that my body feels afterwards? Or is there a way that I can enjoy this food so I can enjoy it in the moment and still be able to enjoy the moment afterwards? Just taking that pause before I eat is really helpful.

I'm also slowing down to eat, which is something that I don't do all the time, but when I'm able to eat slowly, really take my time with flavors and smells, it is a whole different eating experience. It's a real practice because I think we're designed to eat fast. I think it's just part of the hunter gatherer in all of us that wants to eat the food fast. I think we've all got that wired in us. When I can slow down and really just appreciate the taste in my mouth where the food came from, who prepared it, the different steps and processes that got the food to my plate and then into my mouth, it just tastes so much richer.

Also having a moment of gratitude before I eat is something that meditation and mindfulness has allowed me to do. I'll sit down and look at a beautiful meal with great friends or family around the table and just have a moment to pause. Oftentimes we'll share that moment together before we all eat, just to appreciate that we can sit and have this delicious food and have each other's company. Eating food and sharing meals with people is such a special way to celebrate life, to feel a sense of gratitude to connect, to commune. There's a lot of power in food in that way.

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