Anji and Ryan were recently interviewed by Ryan Tratner for his podcast, The Vegan Optimist.
“The Vegan Optimist is a podcast spreading positivity and optimism about the future of veganism. It is a place of learning focused on positive developments in all things vegan!”
It’s a pretty fun half hour conversation that goes into how we met, how/why we became vegan, and what lead to the creation of our YouTube channel, as well as our thoughts on veganism and vegan activism, how to go vegan, the lie of “humane” meat, plus a lightning round of couple questions. What stupid thing did we recently get into a fight over? Find out!
Check out the podcast at:
Partial Transcript of Interview:
Vegan Optimist: Ryan and Anji, how about we start off with you telling the listeners a little bit about yourselves, how you two met, your journey to veganism, and how your YouTube channel started.
Anji: Wow, that’s a lot.
Ryan: Do we have an hour to answer that one question? I’ll let Anji give it a shot. I answer this one so often. I’ll see what you say.
Anji: Well, first of all, thanks for having us. This is fun. I haven’t done a podcast in a minute. Let’s see. So Ryan and I met in the mid-90s through music. We both had bands. His band was a lot more well-known than mine on a label called Project Records, and I was doing college radio at the time. And so I interviewed him a few times for my show. I guess, actually the first time I met him was at a show, not his show, but I was seeing another band and someone was like, “Hey, do you want to meet Ryan from Love Spirals Downwards? He’s here right now.”
Ryan: Oh, God.
Anji: It literally was like that. So that was the first time I met him. And then we were at a couple of parties that were thrown by his record label and hung out. And we’re both eating Trader Joe’s snacks together and stuff.
Ryan: Probably plant-based snacks.
Anji: I know! So we just started hanging out because of music. And then from music, we started doing music together. You may know that all the music that’s in the Happy Healthy Vegan show is made by the two of us. Well, sometimes just Ryan, I suppose, instrumentals.
Ryan: Love Spirals is our band. Sometimes sprinkled with, at least in the earlier days, some songs from the Anji Bee solo album. We’ve made five albums now. Is that right?
Anji: I think so. Yeah. Five full-length albums and like a bunch of remix EPs and singles and compilation tracks. So yeah, we’ve got a lot of music online. So then from there, I started getting into podcasting in 2005. We started, I started a podcast, the Chillin with Lovespirals podcast.
Ryan: Our band.
Anji: Yeah. And then I started a music show called The Chillcast. And then The Chillcast ended up having a video component for awhile. I was signed with a podcasting company, blah blah blah. Eventually my podcasting company got bought out by someone else.
Ryan: It was destroyed and went away.
Anji: Yeah. It was destroyed by another company. So then we reinvented ourselves as YouTubers, I guess. And Ryan really started that.
From The Vegan Optimist: The Vegan Optimist – Episode #7 with Special Guests: Ryan Lum & Anji Bee (Happy Healthy Vegan), Jul 11, 2021