Aubrey Balkind

As the founder of Ojai’s Sane Living Center, Aubrey Balkind envisions a future, where humans live in harmony with both nature and artificial intelligence. I spoke with him about growing up in Apartheid South Africa and leading one of the 20th century’s most visionary strategic design agencies in New York City.

OUTSIDE the Sane Living Center in Ojai stands an imposing stainless steel sculpture entitled EVO3. Created in collaboration with artist Ray Cirino, it features more than 100 laser-cut images of drops of water, people and abstract tech shapes, with the words BIO (NATURE), EGO (SAPIENS) and ALGO (A.I.) written beneath. It’s a breathtaking welcome to the recently refurbished building, which also houses the Hip Vgn restaurant, in which Sane Living is an investor. Co-founded and run by Aubrey Balkind and his partner Carol Cilliers Blaschke, Sane Living is dedicated to promoting the health of both “people and planet.” By providing guidance on how to make simple yet powerful lifestyle changes to prevent chronic illness and disease, it is focused on “illuminating life's inherent self-healing, regenerative nature.” In short, Sane Living wants to empower people to allow their bodies to heal themselves.

OVERCOMING CHILDHOOD ILLNESS

This ethos of self-healing has been a fundamental part of Aubrey’s life from an early age. Born in South Africa in 1944, he became severely ill as a young boy when he contracted typhoid fever aged four. Hospitalized and kept home from school for four years, his body was so weakened by the disease that it simply “couldn’t function.” It was a life or death situation but thanks to his African nanny nursing him back to life the young boy recovered. “I was so weak that my nanny had to spoon-feed me and I grew up on this strange diet of African and Jewish food,” Aubrey recalls in an unmistakable South African accent. “I never got any of the things other children would eat – no sugar or sweets of any kind – and gradually I started to feel how the food I was eating was helping my body to heal itself.” Slowly he started walking again, returned to school aged eight and finally began to play tennis. And as his physical strength increased so did his intellect. “I went from failing and having to repeat a year to top of my class and I could really see how my body and mind were connected. It was quite incredible.”

Aubrey is a quiet, unassuming man with grave intensity. Speaking with him inside a meeting room of the Sane Living Center, our conversation bounces around in no conceivable order from childhood to the present, from his past work to his vision for the future, from himself to other South Africans like entrepreneur Elon Musk, comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah and billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. At times I struggle to connect the dots as he strikes me as an absent-minded professor lost in a nonlinear universe of his own thoughts. But then he delivers answers with such poignancy and profound wisdom that I am simply left in awe.

*The EVO3 sculpture outside of The Sane Living Center. Photo by Square Productions*

NEW HORIZONS

Aubrey says one of the most defining moments of his life was in 1963, when he went on his first overseas trip to Europe to stay with his uncle and cousin in Paris. Visiting art galleries and museums, enjoying decadent dinners, meeting world-renowned ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev and watching The Beatles live in concert, made the experience "otherworldly" for him. “I had been so isolated in South Africa and seeing all this stuff, learning about food, art, theatre and music, it really opened my eyes,” he enthuses. After Paris, Aubrey’s cousin invited him to spend a week with him and his South African stepfather Sydney Brenner in England. Brenner, who in 2002 won the Nobel Prize for Physiology & Medicine, at the time headed up the molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge University, where a decade prior, Watson and Crick had made the historic discovery of the double helix, the twisted-ladder structure of DNA. “My time with Sydney Brenner was spectacular. He had a serious sense of humor and really planted the seeds for my emerging understanding of the world and the power that humans, nature and DNA could play in the universe,” Aubrey recalls.

After returning to South Africa, Aubrey emigrated to the US in the late 1960s inspired by civil rights advocate Robert F. Kennedy, who in 1966 visited the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where Aubrey had studied economics. Kennedy’s speech on equality and racial justice at a time when South Africa was mired in apartheid deeply moved Aubrey, who began socializing more with African people, much to the dismay of the ruling National Party. "We were being followed," Aubrey recalls gravely, adding he "could see where things were headed." Two years later, in 1968, Aubrey came to New York City and enrolled in an MBA at Columbia University. He arrived in early June, two months after the killing of Dr Martin Luther King and just days after Kennedy’s assassination. "Coming to the US from South Africa was shocking in many ways," he says.

LEADING FRANKFURT BALKIND

However, Aubrey never considered a return to South Africa and instead immersed himself in New York City. Together with designer Philip Gips he founded creative agency Gips + Balkind in 1972, with the idea of him running the business and Gips teaching him design. During its first decade in business, the agency created campaigns for some of the most defining movies of the era, including Rosemary’s Baby, Alien, All That Jazz and Kramer vs. Kramer. Gips + Balkind later became Frankfurt Balkind after famous Madison Avenue ad man Stephen Frankfurt joined the company and grew into one of the most visionary and renowned advertising agencies in the US, expanding from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a list of clients that comprised a who’s who of the technology, finance and entertainment industries – from Adobe to Sony, Goldman Sachs and Chase Bank to CNN, ESPN, MTV and Comcast. Forward-thinking and fiercely focused on technology, Aubrey was one of the first members of TED in the mid-1980s, while his pioneering agency worked with its clients on a strategic C-level, catapulting them into the digital age. Frankfurt Balkind’s work was seminal: from timeless movie posters to launch campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands and institutions, they did it all. Today their work, including the groundbreaking 1989 annual report for Time Warner, is featured in the collections of museums including the New York MoMA, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

“If we want to survive as a species, we have to change.”

— Aubrey Balkind

Aubrey sold Frankfurt Balkind to global agency Interpublic in 2003, spinning off its Los Angeles division and rebranding it Bemis Balkind, after creative partner Peter Bemis. That agency created award-winning campaigns for films including Forrest Gump, Titanic, Slumdog Millionaire, A Beautiful Mind and Shrek among countless others. In 2014 Bemis Balkind was sold to InSync and Aubrey turned his attention to health by founding Sane Living. “I sold the firms because I believe work similar to what Frankfurt Balkind did to leverage the digital era is now needed to help create saneness in people’s health lifestyles,” he explains.

*The Sane Living Farm, located in a canyon just west of Ojai.*

COMING TO OJAI

Aubrey and his partner Carol left Los Angeles to move to Ojai in 2014. “It really reminded us of South Africa,” Carol explains. The couple acquired 20 acres of land now known as the Sane Living Farm, an avocado and citrus permaculture orchard situated to the west of the town on the edge of the Los Padres National Forest. Designed for retreats, the property is an extension of the Sane Living Center, with walking trails and beautiful mountain views. Aubrey and Carol live just a few miles up the road in the Matilija Canyon community in a home complete with a sulfur hot spring. The Sane Living Center meanwhile is housed in a recently rebuilt former mortuary on Matilija Street in the very heart of Ojai. A high technology space, the beautifully remodelled auditorium is an ideal venue for events of any kind, which of course thanks to Covid-19 have been out of the question. Aubrey admits he’s having “a hard time with the virus” but as we start to see a light at the end of the tunnel and a return to normalcy seems within reach, Sane Living will once again open its doors and help people to make changes to a live saner, healthier life through community events, lectures, video screenings and more.

“To get there and change our lifestyle, we need to focus on four main things,” Aubrey explains. “How we eat, move our body, detox and de-stress.” He adds that this is achieved by following a diet of natural foods, an exercise routine of movement involving balance, breathwork and dance, a detox regime of fasting and grazing, and the elimination of stress through socializing, meditation and connection to nature. All this together presents a powerful path to assisting the body to heal itself and to prevent chronic disease without the need for medication.

*The Sane Living Center Auditorium, where events and talks focus on sane living.*

A SANER FUTURE

But Aubrey’s vision for a future of self-healing goes far beyond these four areas of life. He sees existential threats to humanity that reach further than the dangers of addiction and poor lifestyle choices. From agro-chemicals eroding nature’s topsoil to fossil fuels impacting our oceans and climate change, to technology and artificial intelligence poisoning our minds, Aubrey’s theories are complex, involving ideas of Bio (nature), Ego (humans) and Algo (artificial intelligence). "It's really about the three eras of evolution and the idea of time," he explains. "With AI things are moving so much faster now than they ever have in our planet’s history and we need to address the existential threats we're facing. Things are getting worse but if we learn to change our lifestyle we will not only survive but probably prosper.”

His vision is one of balance between the three eras and for humanity to unite globally to move forward in a sane direction. As I leave Aubrey and the Sane Living Center I once more take in the EVO3 sculpture, now illuminated and projecting a stunning dance of shadows against the building’s exterior. I notice it is shaped like a question mark. Is it asking me where humanity is headed? In what direction do I want to take my own life? “If we want to survive as a species, we have to change,” Aubrey insists. And the magnitude of our conversation hits me like a tonne of bricks.

CAROL CILLIERS BLASCHKE

Aubrey founded the Sane Living Center together with his partner Carol Cilliers Blaschke, an accomplished healer and teacher with more than 30 years’ experience in clairvoyance and astrology as well as yoga, rebirthing breath-work and rejuvenating foods. A fireball of energy, Carol is the yin to Aubrey’s yang and beautifully balances his quiet intensity with her bubbly, outgoing nature. A fellow African soul, who grew up in Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Carol and Aubrey met in Los Angeles a decade ago and combined their unique skills to launch the Sane Living Center and Farm and help to guide people to living a healthier, fuller life. Carol’s story is one of courage, curiosity and coincidence that finally led her life path to Ojai.

Article Published June 2021