Your life is already a three act story.
You have the rise to meteoric fame.
Mike Posner. Mike Posner.
Breakthrough Audience of the Year award.
Then you have the crash.
My career had plummeted.
I had a hit and my career plummeted.
And then you have the rebirth.
One of Spotify's top 10 most streamed songs of all time.
Mike Posner is enjoying sweet success.
At the time it was scary.
The fame, the adoration, the money.
Really the fame. The money, all other stuff was nice, it was the fame.
So what I'm supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
But I already know that story.
So I said, what am I actually curious about?
And it's why you would climb Everest, why you would walk across America.
What's the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
I've never been asked that before.
Okay, let me try to tell the truth.
I want to ask you about some things back when we were at Duke.
So people who are listening who don't know this, me and Mike actually were at Duke at the same time, same year, freshman class.
I remember hearing stories that there's a white boy rapper in the dorm next door.
And we were like, who is he trying to make it?
Whatever. Didn't really think too much of it.
And then I suddenly started to see a couple of interesting things.
The first interesting thing I saw was that at some point I opened up my laptop and I went to iTunes.
And I saw you at the top of iTunes.
But it wasn't the top of iTunes.
It was the top of iTunes U.
And iTunes U was like this little part of iTunes that was like four lectures.
In Silicon Valley, we call this a growth hack.
Sometimes you got to be clever and you got to turn your disadvantage to an advantage.
Can you teach me about this?
Because I've always known half the story.
I didn't know the full story.
Yeah, absolutely. So I was a giant hip -hop fan.
So I started rapping when I was eight.
Got to Duke, you know, 12 years later.
And I started to sing.
And, but really, I was singing almost from a hip -hop perspective.
I use these complex rhyme schemes, polysyllabic rhyme schemes.
Even in my first hit song, Cooler Than Me, it's got a complex rhyme scheme.
So you got designer shades just to hide your face.
So it's not just the last syllable of the rhyme, that rhymes shades and face, but also designer rhymes with hydrant.
This is a rapper thing, right?
And so I was combining hip -hop with melody in a way that I thought was dope.
I thought it was cool.
And I didn't hurt anyone.
Do it before, really.
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Back to this episode.
And so I started to share my music and I was getting a little bit of traction on these hip -hop blogs, which were important in hip -hop at the time.
Blogs like 2DOPE Boys, NaWrite, even Kanye's blog, which is a really big deal at the time.
And this is an era of piracy.
So everyone, you probably remember when we were at Duke, we did not pay for music.
So you'd go on - LimeWire.
LimeWire, Bitt, Bitt, Torrance, that whole thing.
And so I knew no one was going to pay for my music because we weren't paying for Kanye's music.
We weren't paying for Jay -Z.
The artists we love the most, we were stealing their music.
So no one's going to pay for my music because no one knows who I am.
So I understood that.
And I understood it was important.
I was on these hip -hop blogs, but then I was going to have a shy kid and I was really into my music.
So I'd always stay in and then my friends would come back.
They'd stumble into my room drunk, interrupt my song and push them out and this whole thing.
And one day I go to this kid's room down the hall named Xander.
He was a really cool kid, you know?
Seemed to have a more robust social life than I did.
It was only cool Xander's.
I never met an uncle Xander.
Yeah, exactly. So he said to me, hey, Posner, at the party last night, they played your song and all the sorority girls knew the words.
I said, what, really?
That's my job. I've been making music 12 years now.
That's never happened.
He goes, yeah, and dude, they played it twice.
They played it twice in a row and everyone's saying the words.
So then I said, wow, okay.
The next day my mom calls and she says in passing, by the way, I really like that song you made cooler than me.
I don't know how she heard it.
Her friend sent her.
It was my MySpace at the time.
So I said, okay, that's kind of peculiar.
It's on the hip hop blogs.
The sorority girls like it and my mom likes it.
The next day, my friend Big Sean calls, who I came up with in Detroit and he had gotten a record deal with Kanye.
He's a rapper from Detroit and a dear friend of mine.
He said, I love cooler than me.
He goes, I think that could be a hit song.
I said, hold on. If Sean, mom and the sorority girls all like the same song, something's going on here that never happened before because I've been making music 12 years and nobody seemed to particularly give a besides me, including my mom, right?
Always supportive and loving.
Pay for music less supportive, but never told me she liked one of my songs.
I'm 20 years old. So I realized the way these hip hop blogs work was you'd go on the site.
There'd be a blog entry with your song.
And then you had to do some kind of a right clicking and there was always these weird links that would throw you off into some sketchy websites and you had to click the right thing and then save file ads.
And that's how you download the song, but it was really convoluted and hidden behind advertisements.
And I just realized that these sorority girls were never going to do that.
They were never going to, they're never going to go to these hip hop blogs.
And if, you know, snowball chance and hell, they would, they wouldn't ever be able to download the song.
So I realized iTunes was just starting to come out and it was this safe place you could get music.
And so I knew I needed to get my music there, but then I had this other rub that I alluded to earlier, which is no one's going to pay for it.
So I need it to be free like it is on the blogs, but I need to be on iTunes.
And then I saw iTunes U.
So iTunes U was this section of iTunes that was set up for professors to post their lectures.
And if you weren't there, you went to a different school, you could listen to this professor's lecture and it was purely educational and the cost was free for everything on iTunes U.
There was no charge.
It was an educational arm of iTunes.
So I said, I got to get my music there.
Now this is where Life Capital L comes in.
I'm from Southfield, Michigan.
It's a suburb of Detroit.
I was born in Detroit.
I moved to Southfield when I was two years old.
I grew up there. Lived there until I'm 18.
I go to Duke University.
I do some searching and I find out who's in charge of iTunes U for Duke.
So if you're a Duke professor and you want to post your lecture, how do you get up there?
I find out it's a man named Todd Stabley.
I cold email. Remember you could type in any name and the director could get the email.
So I get Todd's email.
I cold email him and we do a phone call.
He gives me his number and his number is the same area code as mine.
Hey man, 248 area code.
Yeah, he goes, I'm from Southfield, Michigan.
Where are you from?
I said, come on. Now let's get the goosebumps still to this day.
I said, look, this is what I'm trying to do.
I'm a student artist and I want to share my album.
And I want to put on iTunes U.
He goes, oh yeah, man, from Southfield.
You're a student, we could put on iTunes U.
No problem. Life set that up for me, man.
So I got my music onto iTunes and you just search on iTunes like any other thing.
But when my album came up, the price was free.
Any other music out costed $1, whatever it was.
Mine was free. And so then I got busy on Facebook.
I created a Facebook event and there was a link to that album.
And I activated all my communities.
So I was from Michigan and a lot of my friends went to different colleges across the country, including Michigan, Michigan State.
Gosh, friends at Northwestern, friends at Marquette, wherever they went.
And then my friend, I was in fraternity and we had pledges.
So these older guys would do mean things, these pledges, make them do 1 ,000 pushups, whatever.
I said, look, you guys are gonna do something for me.
Paul has the pushups.
You're gonna send the invitation to this Facebook event to everyone in your Facebook network, every single person.
And there's a way I had a protocol, five steps and you could send it out.
And all of you are gonna change your profile picture to my album cover.
And all my friends, they all changed their profile picture to my album cover.
And my friends did the same thing.
My fraternity brothers, they all did the same thing.
So all their friends that were at different schools, they sent it out.
And then here's that.
The last thing is the music was good.
So if the music wasn't good, none of this shit matters.
But, and my music wasn't always good.
Like I said, I'm 20, I started I was eight.
So 12 years, making songs, a lot of songs to get to that one song where my mom likes it, right?
And Shawn likes it.
So this iTunes U thing, yeah, it was a thing that was pivotal for me, pivotal.
And so from there, pretty much every college in the US was listening to Mike Posner that year.
And it started off small, it'd be 50 people, and I'd get a show at Dayton, Ohio.
I'd go to Dayton, Ohio, I'd be booked to play at some bar.
You know, at colleges, there's always a hustler guy that throws the parties and, you know.
So those guys would book me.
They'd say Posner, come play Friday night at - And are you even getting paid to do these at the time?
Or - At the start, 500 bucks.
So I'd go, my boy Pat Cline became my manager later.
He booked me at Dayton, Ohio.
I go there and there's 25 to 50 people.
I do my set and they know every word to my song.
A month later, he booked me to come back and it'd be 300 people there, every word to my song.
And so it just started to expand like that.
And yeah, the iTunes U was a really great hack.
I've never heard that story.
That's amazing story.
So, because what you did then, you kind of stacked these, right?
So you did that. Then you started doing the shows, which normally, correct if I'm wrong, normally you kind of, you did it backwards, right?
So like it seems like normally you'd have a label, they would get you set up with the tours.
You were kind of underground.
So you, if I remember correctly, because you already had tours and fans, then when record labels were interested, you're like, yo, I'm de -risked.
Like I'm more de -risked than the average artist because look at this.
Like I've already, I'm already playing shows with real fans all around the country.
And I remember being at Duke and we would hear like, dude, this dude flies out every weekend.
It just does a show at a different college and flies back and like takes his test.
That's what you were doing.
We were doing two or three, man.
I got crazy. Yeah, I would do two or three.
And that senior year I had set up, so I had all my classes Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
I'd leave Thursday night, rip Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night.
I get three checks, come back, have a bunch of cash, go to the bank, put in the bank, come back in my house, this dirty, filthy house, like go to class again.
It was insane. Doing homework on the planes, it was insane.
Insane. It seems like one of the unique things about you is like you may not be the best rapper or the best singer or the best kind of beats producer guy, but because you're good enough to be dangerous on all three, you were able to be like a one -man machine that was able to get a bunch of practice
reps in and keep trial and error where you weren't dependent on somebody else's time or somebody else's interests or tastes or whatever.
Is that fair? No, I don't think so.
How would you say it?
I would say, yeah, I'm probably, yeah, I'm definitely not the best singer, I can't dance or anything or do any cool runs, but I'm a damn good writer.
That's like your A -plus skill.
And people connect to me, I think, because of the writing.
You know, yeah, I can't.
If I did American Idol, I'd lose.
You know, I can sing, but not.
Well, one of the things that inspired me when I was doing the research was that at some point in the middle of your career, so not like before he made it, but like actually after you had the initial burst of success, it seemed like I read something that you went back and almost like took music lessons
and singing lessons and enrolled into college.
And you said something like, I'm in this class and I'm not the best singer in the class.
I'm supposed to be this guy who's the star, right?
They all want to be artists.
I actually even have the credentials, but I thought that was a kind of an amazing, humbling move to just, of course, why wouldn't I dedicate myself to the craft?
Can you talk a little about that?
There was something in that that resonated with me because I think that's unusual.
Yeah, well, there's two things in that.
One, I think it speaks to the point I just made where there are these people.
At that time in my career, I was in a cold spot.
So I said, hey, let me use this time to get better at my skills.
And if I'm being honest, yeah, I don't know how to play.
I had a hit song, but I know how to play guitar.
I didn't know how to really sing.
I was a rapper who had started singing.
I didn't know how to play piano.
So why don't I learn some of those things?
And I remember I was at a campfire kind of situation and that guy, Cy, was there.
You remember him? Open gongos there.
And Tori Kelly was there.
And they were passing the guitar around the fire.
And Tori Kelly sang this song.
It was so beautiful.
And then I had just written a song that day.
I wanted to sing it.
And I said, could you play the guitar these chorus of thing?
And she's trying to do it for me because I couldn't play the guitar.
And I really wanted to sing my song, but I couldn't do it.
And it didn't really work.
And I remember leaving.
I thought, that's stupid that I can't do that.
That's never going to happen again.
I'm going to learn to play the guitar.
And you'd be able to sing the song at a campfire.
So that's one part of it.
It's this lesson to go, hey, being an artist, it's similar to being a human.
It's about growing.
It's about being a better artist than you were a year ago.
And you can always, your relationship to the music deepens or any art form deepens your whole life.
Art is not like the NBA.
It's not like you peek at 30 and you can't jump as high anymore.
No, this is a lifelong thing.
You can always get deeper.
So that's part A. But then part B was, yeah, I realized kind of to the point right before this point was I'm in a singing class.
I took Berkeley School of Music online.
It's these great singers in there.
And yeah, I was like in the bottom quartile of that class, but I was a successful recording artist.
And those people all wanted my job.
And I realized I had something that most people don't, which is my writing, but I have a way of connecting.
The music I make, whether it doesn't matter, music is not about hitting the high, like life.
It's not about hitting the perfect node in the run.
It's about, does this part of my humanity speak to that part of your humanity?
I'm raising my hand.
I'm taking my clothes off out here and it's vulnerable and going, this is what it's like for me to be a human.
Anyone else? And if I do a good job, someone else hears it.
And I'm so glad you said it because that's how I've been feeling for years.
And I didn't know how to articulate it.
And now I don't feel as alone.
That's what an artist does.
And so I realized in that singing class, I already know how to do that.
I can add colors and refinements and make things more sophisticated by adding to my skills.
But at the end of the day, even if you got no skills and you can do that, you're a great artist.
You're a great artist.
Well, I love your music videos for this reason.
Now that you say it, when I think about, when I became a super fan of yours - Like you, sorry, by the way.
That's why you're a great artist.
We talk about the beginning.
You always say, I'm a lowercase artist.
No, you're making the thing and it obviously connects with other people.
You're obviously following your own curiosity and going, hey, I'm making the thing that's a million podcasts in the freaking world, dude, right?
But you're doing something in a way that connects with other humans.
And you're not doing it because you're doing it by trying to connect with yourself and connect your own creativity and curiosity to the art you're making or the pieces that you're making, wherever you call them.
And so, yeah. And by the way, I used to approach it very differently.
I used to approach it very analytically, logically, Duke kid, right?
Like, there's a certain set of skills that gets you into Duke and those skills were, I was trying to sort of map the market out and the opportunity.
Where's the white space?
And my coach, my trainer, I've mentioned before, he's like, the white space is you, bro.
He's like, the product is you pushed out.
That's it. Take yourself, turn yourself inside out.
Whoever resonates with what you are, that's your target customer.
You don't need a market study, right?
Who are my customers?
The people that love what I do.
And he just flipped it on its head.
And I was like, dude, you're speaking a different language to me.
Different. I've never seen this in a book.
But I started to put some faith in that.
And that's when I did the podcast.
I was like, what's the podcast supposed to be?
It started off as only interviews.
And then we would just get on the podcast sometimes, just shoot the shit about, dude, did you see this app that did this?
It was just me pushed out.
That's what I'm actually interested in.
So I just started talking about it.
And then all of a sudden, it was getting a different result because there was only one of those because it's the only one of me, right?
So that was a big lesson to learn.
This sounds kind of obvious and almost like a fortune cookie, but...
But it takes courage.
You got to go do it.
It takes courage. And you have to stumble upon it.
You had to do the other things.
So yeah, it has to be stumbled upon.
I had this line on my song that said, I'm in the yoga class headband now.
People say I'm off brand.
How? I am the brand.
Therefore, anything I do is on brand now.
I'm on brand now. I look at my heroes and that's what I am now.
People got attached to a version of me because it hurts when they see a person who's free.
And I'm so grateful for all these lessons.
Twice as much money.
Half the possessions.
No drugs, now the vision's clear.
All my gold jewelry just disappeared.
That's the universe telling me to start switching gears.
The deeper the human, the deeper the songs.
I saw all of this three years ago.
It's almost like it was me reading my poem.
I like that. How'd you get on the radio?
Because that's a black box.
How'd you even figure out how to get on radio?
Oh, the thing I was going to say to you before was, the music industry has completely moved that way.
So these days of a record label, hey kid, you got talent.
We're going to develop you for six years.
That doesn't happen.
And now it's even more so.
You only get a record deal if you already have an audience.
So that no longer is the responsibility of the label.
That's not the responsibility of the artist.
And there's so much data now.
So labels can be really prudent.
I'm going, hey, that, that, or that, or that, right?
Okay, you asked about getting on the radio.
So I graduate and I sign a record deal and I'm making this new album.
I'm starting to work with bigger producers.
I'm working with Benny Blanco and making these songs and thinking, when I do my first real album, not an iTunes U album, it's going to be big.
And I'm starting to make all this new music.
And the original cooler than me used to have this line in it.
It used to, at the end of the verse would say, you're so vain.
You probably think that the song is about you.
Don't you? If I could write you a song to make you...
I don't know if you remember that.
I remember that, yeah.
Yeah. Is that still the song?
That's the one I remember.
It's not. Most people don't know it that way because we went to then go clear it because that's a Carly Simon song.
You're so vain. So this was this two lines in the verse.
We go to go clear it.
We say, hey, I use this part of your song and my song.
Want to give you credit for it.
Can we work out a deal?
Her representatives say, no problem.
We'll just take 80%.
Or maybe a 70 % or something like.
Dude, it's like, it's two lines of the verse.
So I had to change that.
First thing I had to go say, behind Jamaica.
Nobody knows who you really are.
Who do you think you are?
So we had changed that out.
And then I'm thinking that I'm going to make this new hit song.
Benny Blanco is a brand big thing because I have a record deal now.
And when I play the new version of Cooler than Me without the Carly Simon, my record label thinks they say, it's not as good.
It's not as good anymore.
So I think we should use one of the new songs to be your first real single.
Cooler than Me has now been out for two years to us college kids.
I'm in New York city.
I'm about to go to some meeting or studio or something.
Hang out with a friend and my manager says, we got to do a meeting with this radio promoter.
His name's E &C. We need to do a meeting with this guy.
His job is he gets songs on the radio.
Usually the label's supposed to do that, but we need to pay him to do it ourselves.
I said, I don't want to go to that meeting.
I want to go to the studio.
I'm an artist. You go to the meeting.
He goes, this is more important.
I go, no, it's not.
He says, yes, it is.
I said, why? Well, Cooler than Me is your first single.
The label doesn't know it, but I know it.
This is my manager, Daniel Weisman.
I said, Cooler than Me is old.
It's two years old.
It's been out two years and everybody has already heard it.
On the sidewalk in New York City looks me in the eye, he goes, nobody has heard it.
I'll go to the meeting.
We go to the meeting.
We hire E &C. I think we paid him, what was it?
Five grand, 10 grand.
And he's going to get the song on a few radio stations.
No guarantee how much they're going to play it because I can get on a few stations.
So he gets on a few stations.
And this thing starts catching on.
People are calling in the station.
We like this song. Before Shazam released, but they have some way they test it.
The tests are going crazy.
And these few stations, Patty Moreno and Sacramento and Shorty, they start playing the song 50 times a week.
That's a lot. And then DJ Reflex in LA, Power 106.
He plays the song. It does well here.
Starts catching on here.
Now the label calls and they go, we told you, cooler than me is your first single, dude.
What a great idea. And that's what labels are great at.
And that's what great at starting fires.
But if you can start a fire, they got a hell of a lot of gasoline.
So then they go into hyper mode, do their thing, start getting on all the other stations.
And that was how I got on the radio.
And at that time, the radio drove.
Yeah. But you win Spotify and get on the radio or you win YouTube and you get on the radio.
Then it was the opposite.
Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out.
It is called the Next Wave.
It's hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands as part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, which of course is your audio destination for business professionals like you.
You can catch the Next Wave with Matt Wolf.
And he's talking about where the puck is going with AI creators, AI technology and how you can apply it to your growing business.
So check it out. Listen to the Next Wave wherever you get your podcast.
I told you I get more out of the research for these than I do the interview sometimes.
And at first I got discouraged by that because I was like, oh man, it's kind of anti -climatic.
All the fun was in the foreplay.
Not the real thing.
We're going to change that.
We're going to change that.
But then I got excited.
I was like, oh wait, that means when I'm doing the research, look for look for the gold because there's usually like one thing that I'm like, wow, that alone made this worth it.
This whole trip worth it.
And so for me, that was this one, which was about I guess making art or making songs.
Do you try to make a hit?
Do you try to think about what the audience wants?
And the quote was, I just do what's cool to me and sometimes the whole world agrees.
I like that. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Like where that mindset comes from?
That's a good question because I could talk about that mindset really easily.
But you asked me something different, which is where it is.
Where does that come from?
Where does that come from?
I've never been asked that before.
So we're off to a good start.
That's an answer I give other people.
When artists are struggling, I tell them, your job is to make the thing that you think is beautiful.
Period. That's it. Don't do it.
I think it's beautiful for you or your manager or your fans.
That's it. So that's an answer I give to others.
Now you're asking me a question about my answer.
The roots. So okay, let me try to tell the truth or find what's true for me.
In part, it comes from messing it up.
Undoubtedly, I experienced a lot of success in my early twenties.
And I got addicted to it.
The fame, the adoration, the money, really the fame.
The money, it was the fame.
One of those that had a higher high than the rest.
Frickin' fame, dude.
Oh, and so I can remember trying to replicate the success I had for my first hit song, which is a song cooler than me.
If I could write you a song to make you fall in love.
That song. And I just wanted that feeling.
I wanted to be that guy that everyone was looking at.
And so I can remember going in the studio and going, all right, I'm trying to make a...
Make a hit. Make a hit.
Make something everyone else likes.
And whenever I tried to create from that vantage point, the only thing I succeeded in making was something I hated.
And sometimes I think, wow, even if I don't like it, maybe everyone else will.
It kind of checks all the boxes.
It's the right BPM.
It's got a catchy melody and a cool lyric.
It doesn't really meet my standards from my aesthetics, what I think is beautiful.
But who cares what I think?
This is about me being famous.
And of course, if you don't like it, nobody...
You went from a guaranteed audience of one to zero to start this.
And I think life or God, I believe in God.
Sometimes I just call it life.
So I'll use those interchangeably in this interview.
Life with a capital L.
I thank God that it never gave me success with one of those because it wanted me to learn that very lesson that I could teach to others.
But gosh, could you imagine if one of those things I didn't really like got really popular?
That would have been even worse.
You'd have been trapped on that path.
I'd still be doing interviews about that song now, still be singing that song at my shows now.
The original plan for this episode was, your life is already a three -act story.
So from a podcaster point of view, oh, this is easy.
You have the come up.
You have the rise to meteoric fame, everything that everybody wants.
You're a pop star. You're on stage.
Shirt's off. Everybody's crazy about you.
You're the man. Then you have the crash.
And then you have the rebirth, right?
So your story is already like that.
And so what I'm supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
But then I have to do what's honest for me too, which is, I already know that story and I like that story.
I don't really want to talk.
I'll ask you some questions about it, but I kind of already know that.
So it wouldn't be honest for me to ask that because I wouldn't be curious.
I already know it. Great, man.
So I said, what am I actually curious about?
And I was like, I wanted to know that like, hey, you said something that resonated with me, which is my job is not to make a hit.
It's to make something that's cool to me.
And sometimes the world agrees.
So that was the first place I want to start.
The second one is, I'm not a musician, but I'd like to, I'm maybe like a lowercase A artist.
I write, I have a podcast.
I do things like that.
You're an artist, capital capital.
Thank you. Something exists now out of that used to just be an idea in your head.
You're an artist. You heard it here first, Mike.
Those are things I'm an artist.
There we go. Absolutely.
The thing that's been helpful for me when I write is exactly that.
So if somebody asks me, how do you write something great?
How do you write something that goes viral?
And the best thing I ever read was sit down and write one true sentence, one true sentence.
And that just became like a calling card for me.
It was like, oh, I know where to start now.
Let me sit down and try to write one on a sentence.
And that's surprisingly hard because the honest sentence is usually something vulnerable.
And if I look at your hit songs, so if you look at, you know, I took a pill in Ibiza, the one true sentence right at the beginning is, you know, I took a pill in Ibiza to, you know, show Avicii I was cool.
Or in your new song, it's something like, There's a part of me underneath the part that I let people see that part is the good part.
I love that. Underneath the part that I let other people see, that is the good part.
And I was like, man, he's really good at the one true sentence.
Is that is that a technique you use at all?
Like honesty to write the song or to bake the core of the song?
Yeah, you know, there's all adage and studios gets thrown around.
And more so in Nashville and LA, or they say, don't try to write a good song, write a true song, and then it'll be good automatically.
My music. Listen, when I was 13, I was a, I was a rapper.
I started rapping. I was eight, but I was around 13.
I started to consider creating a stage name.
And I'd go six months.
I remember I had this rapper name is Acrimony.
And then I had this other name for six months later.
I threw it out and I go, my name further here on out is MCMP.
Right? The world will know MCMP.
Yeah. I was about 13 and a half.
Yeah. Like AIM screen, name status.
Yeah, exactly. And it goes, and I had this thought to myself that said, my music isn't an act.
The stuff I write even then was just what was happening in my life.
It was real to me. So my I shouldn't have a stage name.
I should have my name.
And I said, I'm going to go by Mike Posner.
That's my name. And that's who I am.
And who I am in life is who I am in my music.
This came back one other time.
I was almost 20 years later.
It was right when I wrote I took a pill in Ibiza because my career had plummeted.
I had a hit and my career plummeted.
And I was known, as you know, for doing kind of frat songs and party songs.
I had just, you know, upbeat dance success song cooler than me.
And then I wrote I took a pill in Ibiza.
And it's a sad singer songwriter song on the guitar.
Most people don't know.
Yeah, the original is and I thought, dude, like whatever is left of my career will be destroyed by and what is funny now.
But at the time it was it was horror.
It was scary. It will be destroyed by me making such a drastic change in my music.
Like no, none of my fans that liked what I did before will like this.
It's so different. And I started contemplating again.
And maybe I should change my name for this project.
And I remember thinking, oh, maybe I'll change my name to the truth.
It was like, no, the truth is your name is Mike Posner.
And so I quickly got my head out of my ass on that one again and went, hey, you know, like this is my story.
And the three X story you talk about, you know, I've owned it for better, for worse, or tried to.
Yeah. Do you look for that moment where you're like, I'm almost so scared to put this out.
I got to change my name.
It's so this goes to a certain place where it's not safe.
Have you now learned to look at that signal and be like, maybe there's something here if I'm feeling that?
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, a huge, huge barometer of something I should be writing is that oh, I really don't want to write this.
This moment was so painful.
Like, I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to think about it.
So yeah, it's not the only, you know, it's not to say the converse is not true, which is the only thing that should be written is something that causes you great pain.
That's not true. But often that is that is an entry point that that is worth examining.
Right. Absolutely. We had Tim Ferris on the podcast and I asked him a question.
I said, Tim, my, my, my, my one honest question.
I was like, I'm supposed to ask you about for our work week, but I read it already.
I said, the thing I really want to know is how do you decide what's next?
Because I knew he was kind of thinking about what's next.
And I know that whenever Tim Ferris is trying to do something, he's methodical.
He doesn't just, he doesn't just do it.
He's got like a way he's going to do it.
That's right. And I was like, I kind of just.
Hop to the next thing.
Like, how do you do figure out the next thing?
And he goes, well, I create a menu of options.
And he's like, he's like, and on that menu, I make sure I have, I leave room for the weirdest option.
I go the weirdest option.
Why are you going to do it?
He's like, I'm not necessarily going to do it.
He goes, but because I treat like the weirdest idea of what I could do next.
This is not what I normally do.
This is not what I'm known for.
So if you're still around, you must have, I actually need to overweight you as a, as an option for me.
For you, when you try to figure out what's next, like, uh, whether it's the next song or the next project, like writing a book, how do you decide where to apply your talents?
Well, it's hard now is what choosing what not to do.
That's the hardest part is killing things.
And on paper, I may be doing too many things right now.
I'm writing my book intensively every day.
A lot of time alone, my computer, I'm putting an album out.
We're expanding our business in a lot of different ways.
So on paper, if I was making the menu, I go cross tool them out.
But your question was, how do you decide?
The same internal compass that I use in the, in the micro, when I'm creating, I'm writing a sentence in my book and I go, that word is not quite right.
No, not that. And then boom, that one, it's an internal knowing it's a feeling.
So that that's it. Mark Twain said the difference between the almost right word and the right word is there is between lightning bug and the lightning bolt, right?
And is that the truth?
Yeah. Has it happened in your songs?
Is there a song today that we all know that almost was.
It took a pill in Sacramento.
Didn't have the same ring to it.
Just kept trying to make it work.
It doesn't hit no. No, but just on the song, same way, a lot of times in the production.
Gosh, that's not the right snare drum sample.
We'll work for an hour, go through every the office sounds and that's the one you just know.
There's a quote that Rick Rubin has that I love, which he says, the best way to serve your audience is to ignore them.
Meaning to not try to reverse engineer what they might want or what they might like, what they might just make what you want or what you like.
That is the best way to serve them.
When you hear something, you're like, Oh, that's probably the truth.
I think I just heard the truth.
Okay. Now the rest of my life is coming to grips with that truth.
I don't need to search for the answer.
I got the answer. It's just a question of how long I'm going to deny myself.
How many roundabout ways I'm going to avoid facing the answer.
Now I know the answer.
Has that been easy for you?
Kind of back to that first question about like making what you want.
If music is pretty easy now and honestly, taking care of my finances has been a big part of that.
What do you mean by that?
I'm financially secure.
I don't need to make another dollar from my music again.
So logically, I was able to just talk to at some point in the past, talk to that part of that voice in my head and go, Hey, dude, like, you never need to make a song that you don't want to make ever again.
You never need to be in the studio with a person you're not a fan of ever again.
Ever. And that made me a much better artist.
And I live in Silicon Valley.
There's people with more money than, than God out there and they don't feel like they have enough.
I know a lot of people who have enough, who have made the last dollar they will ever spend many times over, but they still do things to chase more.
And they don't like to say they're doing it, but if you watch people's actions, people's actions will sort of speak where they're devoting their talents to.
What's the, uh, what was useful to you to coming at coming to peace with, you know, having enough, was it as simple as I wrote down how much I needed and how much I had and I, the logic part of my brain solved that, or was it a different part of you that, that got peace with, with the money side of,
of your life? Both two folds.
So I had, you know, the analysis where they do a Monte Carlo or whatever.
It's like, you spend this much or this many more years, you'd be okay.
So that was like a money manager did that for you or.
Yes, I was part of it, right?
Just knowing, Hey, I'm okay.
You got to shift at some point, right?
Because when you're coming up, you say yes to everything, you know, opportunities going to work.
And then when you get successful, you have too many opportunities.
You got to learn to say no, there's, there's paradigm shifts along the journey.
And so that, that was one of them.
That's the logical part.
And then the, the illogical part or the spiritual part, is realizing what true wealth or abundance or success is.
To me, it's my definition, true success or wealth is health.
It's the ability to have joy in a present moment.
That's, if you can do that, you're a wealthy person.
And if you're grateful, if you're grateful, what you have, you're wealthy.
There's a perception in the business world, which is that the chip on, on your shoulder serves you.
I know investors that will invest specifically in people they know are kind of like sort of damaged, semi -screwed up, but they know that that gives them this sort of psychopathic, you know, drive.
And when somebody's really happy, I know people who don't want to invest in somebody who's super at peace because the returns might not be there.
I don't know if I believe that.
Do you think that the best art comes from, you know, people who are in a happy place or the people who have that pain?
Do you think that the best success comes from the people who are, have that big chip on their shoulder or, or not?
What's your take on that?
I can't answer in terms of where to invest your money.
I don't really know that much about that stuff, but what I can speak to is architecting a more beautiful life.
I don't have a perfect life, but it's a hell of a lot more perfect than it was five years ago.
Right. So what I can say is I don't want a life that is hyper successful in the vertical of work and finance and a desert wasteland in the areas of passionate intimacy, faith, spiritual growth, friendships, fun, physical health, giving back.
All right. So I believe the way I look at my life and I do measure this.
Is work and mission is but one vertical.
And the thing I screwed up in my twenties is I thought if I crushed it so hard in this vertical, meaning I got all the fame on money that I thought the points would carry over.
I thought, yeah, I can not show up, you know, to Thanksgiving and not return my mother's phone call because she knows I'm busy.
I'm pop star Mike Posner.
I can, I can not, you know, see my friends or ghost them for months on end.
They understand I'm pop star Mike Posner, Grammy nominated Mike Posner, international superstar.
I can never like go on dates and just have one night stands after my shows for years on end and never develop emotional intimacy or the capacity to communicate on an intimate level or vulnerable level with a, another human being, because I'm international superstar, Grammy nominated Mike Posner.
I can never give back with my time or not so much with my money either because I'm international.
And what you get is just a life that isn't that good.
Winning the game of life has played on all these different verticals and some of them require different skillsets that you won't find in the work vertical.
It's not going to help you be a good husband.
It's going to help you be a good father.
I have a mission, right?
So it's not saying abandon this for the other.
It's how do you do it all in balance?
How do you have everything?
That's what I'm interested in.
That's what I'm building in my life.
I'm doing the best job of it I've ever done.
Am I perfect? No, but boy, am I prodding myself.
All right, a quick break.
I know that if you're listening to my first million, that means you love numbers.
Well, I've got a new podcast called Moneywise and the premise is simple.
We talked to high net worth people.
So people who have somewhere between 50 to 500 million dollars and we start with simple premise, which is tell me exactly how much money you have, how much money you make every month, what your portfolio looks like, how much money you spend every month, and every other bit of information that involves
your net worth and your spending.
And the reason we do this is because I want to demystify money.
So we just had this woman named Ann who has a 94 million dollar portfolio after selling her business and she spends $360 ,000 a month.
And she talks about where the money is and what she spends it on.
And why she spends that much and if it makes her happy or not.
And then we dive deep on different topics like children, buying versus renting, giving money away.
We basically are having a conversation that I see a lot of rich people having behind closed doors, we do it publicly.
So check it out. It's called Moneywise.
And you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
There's a great clip on YouTube of Jim Carrey when he gets some award and he goes up on stage and he gave almost the same speech you gave.
He's like, this is my second Emmy.
I used to be... Oh, yeah, the Golden Globes.
A Golden Globe. He's like, one time Golden Globe.
I was probably subtly plagiarizing that in my rant.
It was great. I was one time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey.
And tonight, I'm tear -tied.
And he's like, and when I go to bed at night, I will dream about being three times.
He has a great quote, which is, I wish the whole world could be rich and famous so they would know that that's not the answer.
You got to taste that.
And you found out yourself.
That's not the answer for you and doesn't seem like it's the answer for most.
I have this goofy analogy that I want to ask you about.
Do you ever watch the show Survivor?
When I was a kid, I watched it.
I guess I'm one of the doofuses that is still watching it in season 47.
What's going on with you, man?
We all have a thing.
Some people got weird things.
This is mine. I want to go on Survivor someday.
That's part of my angle here.
But there's this thing that they do on Survivor, which is, I think, a good analogy for life.
So in Survivor, the best thing every player wants is the immunity idol.
It's this one thing that if you had it, you're safe.
You can finally relax.
You've got the one thing that everybody wants.
And that's been the case for many years.
Recently, they made a twist.
They call it the beware idol, which is basically you pick it up and it says beware.
This comes with some disadvantages.
And the player has opportunity.
They can just put it down.
They don't have to take any of the disadvantages.
So far, 100 % of players, not a single player, has ever put it down, even though it says on the label, beware, this thing has disadvantages that come with it that will hurt you in this game.
And every player can't resist.
They take it. And I was thinking about, I was watching Survivor.
I was prepping for this podcast and I was like, I think fame is the beware advantage of life.
It's the thing that we all think we want the money, the fame, the love of others.
And it's it could say it on the label.
Beware people who become pop stars when they're young, those aren't the happiest people, but we would all take it over again, right?
And so there's something to that.
And I actually was curious, like, for you, if you could go back, if there wasn't the next Mike Pozer, he's he's 21 years old, you get 15 minutes in a room with him just like this and you could tell him anything.
I'm curious. What would you tell him?
And do you think he would listen?
Yeah. My smiles don't result from good things.
They result in good things.
You have sovereignty over your own emotions and the way you respond to and interpret every event of your life and life.
And Naval Ravikant says, life is a one player game.
And you need to exercise and practice that sovereignty.
You need to develop rituals that give you the best chance of of enjoying your life to the fullest and and being the joy in life, not waiting for something good to happen so you can feel happy.
Being happy. So something good will happen.
Not waiting for someone to do something nice for you so you can feel good.
Doing something nice for someone else to make them feel good.
And then you feel good, you know, by default.
So I didn't have a handle on any of that stuff when I was 21.
I saw a great example of that from you, which was I think you either you missed a flight or you were delayed on a flight or something like that.
And I love this example because so relatable, everybody's been in this moment where it's travel, stressful, and then travel often feels out of your control, whether it's a flight delay or you miss your connection or whatever it is.
And there's the common cliche reaction to that.
And we actually all kind of have that reaction, but it's not always the response.
Can you tell that story?
Because I think that example is stood out to me.
Not everybody's going to relate to being a pop star or making great music, but this was something everybody can relate to.
So I'd love if you could share this one.
I've been told in recording studio so many times, the lyric that I'm trying to write isn't relatable.
Hey Mike, you can't put that in a song because no one will relate to it.
Yeah, nobody else took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii, they were cool.
That was just me. But everybody's done something that wasn't true to themselves to try to gain the attention of someone else.
And so while the lyric on the surface is unrelatable, the emotion underneath the lyric is universal.
And the same thing with all these stories, my life is my life.
I'm the only guy I know that got nominated for the Grammy, walked across the continent and climbed Everest.
And I did that by design, right?
Because I wanted to have a life that was cool to me and unique to me.
And yeah, and part of it was ego that like, hey, I want to be unique.
But also I wanted my life to be inspiring to me.
But every element, every one of the stories we share today, whether it's a story from you or a story from me or survivor or what have you, has human emotions underneath that are universal.
So the story you're talking about is, yeah, I did a post.
I never talked about this.
This is a podcast world premiere.
I had this, this horrible travel day, man.
The day before wasn't good and I didn't sleep and woke up early and we had to drive three hours to the airport or Colorado.
And it was an accident, I 70.
And we just got in this traffic jam and we're in the car.
Seven hours, missed the flight.
And it was just, I was feeling sorry for myself.
And it was just, stuff was bothering me in other parts of my life.
It was a bad day, man.
I didn't feel good physically, emotionally, everything was off.
And I remembered that I was on a Zoom call at Tony Robbins conference about time and scheduling efficiency.
And in one of the breakout sessions, one of the other participants said, when you're having a bad day, ask yourself, what could I do to make this a great day?
And it just, it flashed back in my head while I was in that car.
I said, well, this is, okay, this is a bad day check.
We got the first part.
All right. I said, what can I do to make this a great day?
And I said, okay, if I could use the fact that I'm having a bad day to do some nice for others, that would be a really cool thing.
That would make me proud of myself.
And so I called my assistant.
I said, yeah, this is all messed up.
You know, I'm supposed to, and I was missing family time.
I get only so many days of my family every year, my mom, my sister, and I was missing one of them.
I'm just bummed out.
I go, look. So we get to spend the night in Denver tonight.
Can you find me a place where I can just go volunteer?
Not with money, actually show up, go serve.
And Stacy, she's amazing.
She found me... I forgot the name of the establishment, but it was set up for people that were getting off of drugs, and they could live there.
And they could have a roof over their head, and some meals while they find a job, and they get some training.
And I just show up to serve food.
And when I showed up there, I was still tired.
I physically had a headache, still all the same things.
But I was just proud.
I said, hey, I used my suffering, my having a bad day as an excuse not to go to bed, not to complain, not to take it out on somebody else.
But I used that as an excuse to do something good for someone else.
So I did alchemy today.
I turned my suffering into service.
I turned my suffering into connection.
And that pride I felt in myself, because I would usually not do that.
I would usually have a pity party in the hotel and look at my phone.
It just gave me all this pride.
And I say this when I speak a lot, it's true happiness comes from growth.
True happiness comes from growth.
It doesn't come from getting everyone to like you.
It doesn't come from getting the most followers.
It doesn't come from a million dollars.
It doesn't come from things going the right way for you, the right way for you.
It comes from playing a part in the evolution of your own soul.
So it's saying, hey, I usually do things this way, or if I did something this way.
And that day I can truly say was one of the best days of my year.
Without a doubt. I went to bed proud.
And by the way, so much energy.
Yeah. There's certain things that take energy that seem like they take energy, but actually give.
It's like going to the gym.
Anybody's tired. You don't really want to go to the gym, but you go to the gym, suddenly you have energy.
It's like, wait, how'd that math work?
It was supposed to take energy to go work out.
But I have more than I had when I started.
It doesn't make any sense, but it does it to anybody's ever done.
It makes perfect sense.
It makes sense because if I would have stayed in the hotel room, played on my phone, I would have got more and more tired because I was engaging in an activity that I knew I don't care about.
But when I engage in an activity that I know is going to do something to make my soul grow, there's unlimited energy.
So sometimes doing more is easier than doing less.
Sometimes a hard goal is easier than an easy goal.
Right. My trainer, he told me this story once, but I loved it.
Very similar to your story just now.
He came to our workout in the morning and he's beaming and he's always a happy guy, but I could tell a little extra pep in the step.
What's up, man? Hey, man.
What's going on, dude?
I thought I was looking like more fit or something.
I didn't know what the reason was.
I was hoping. Secretly open it was me.
But then he was like, he goes, well, for the last nine months, I've been driving around with an expired license.
And he's like, I didn't want to go to the DMV.
So I avoided that pain.
But then every time I drove, I was paranoid all the time that I was going to get pulled over.
And then if I got pulled over, it was going to become this mess.
And so he's like, there's always a little anxiety that was eating at me.
He's like, so today I woke up.
I just decided I'm doing it differently.
So his thing is always just do it differently.
So do it differently than you used to do it in the past.
That simple thing. So instead of trying to do things perfectly, just do it differently.
And you do that often enough, you end up getting pretty damn close to perfect.
And so he goes, I did it differently.
What'd you do differently?
And so he's like, all right, where's the local DMV?
He Googles it, and you know, Google, it shows you the star ratings.
And like, imagine a DMV's star ratings, right?
Like, there's no DMV on Earth with a five star review, right?
That experience was stellar.
Yeah, exactly. It's like a one and a half star experience.
He's like, oh man, he's like, the reason I haven't been going, I've been dreading the DMV.
And I love this because like, everybody dreads a DMV.
So I love this. He looks at that one and a half star and he goes, okay, but I'm a sovereign being.
I don't have to have a one and a half star experience.
That's the average experience.
I'm gonna have a five star experience.
How do you have a five star experience?
It's not by going in there and them giving you five stars, just by you walking in a five star customer.
So he gets in his car.
He drives to the DMV.
No appointment, walks in proud, happy, excited, opens the door for some lady.
You know, it helps this.
It helps these people.
Hey, why don't you guys go ahead of me instead of everybody in the DMV rushing into the line?
You guys go ahead. Yeah, have fun.
And then he's the lady he was joking around with while he was walking from the parking lot.
And turns out she works at the DMV.
She sees him on the inside.
She's like, what are you here for anyways?
He's like, I've been driving out this expired license.
I've been so stressed out about it.
But I said, today's the day.
She goes, you're right.
Today is the day. Come over here.
Cuts the whole line, gives him the thing.
He doesn't have to take the test, gives him the license.
He walks out of there like, you know, under 30 minutes with a five star DMV experience.
And so he took that and he was like, yo, I just like this is like watching somebody part the seas.
It's like, you have seen an act, if you didn't believe in manifestation before, if you didn't believe that you control your experience before, like, well, look what I just did with the DMV.
I love that story. So I always held that one as like, yeah, you get to choose.
You get to choose your experience.
And like, I also like that message of like, don't expect the world to be giving you this five star hospitality.
Five star, like you'll be a five star customer and watch how the universe sort of responds to you.
I love that. So I thought you would like that.
Yeah, thanks for the story, dude.
I want to remember that one.
That's good. I want to ask you about some things you mentioned, Benny Blanco.
I got to ask you because I'm really fascinated by these people who are the influencers of the influencers.
They're the people who unlock creatives in some way or they just have this like really high hit rate.
What's going on? What are they doing differently?
And we don't know the answer.
He was telling me, he's like, oh, I read some shit.
He tries to create a safe space.
He kicks people out of the room.
He lights candles. I was like, okay, I gotta ask Mike about this.
What's Benny Blanco's superpower?
What does he do well that has enabled him to work with guys like you and get kind of great results?
From my perspective, it's what you did, but it's the intangibles.
It's not the type of candle.
He really has a gift for making artists who are a fickle bunch, right?
Can easily get scared.
We're kind of like exotic birds, you know?
Get scared or like, you know, we're sensitive in a good way.
We pick up on things that other people don't.
And then we can write about and help other people to see that.
You know, we see divine in the mundanity.
But as a result, you know, we can feel someone's energy.
A lot of artists could go, yo, if that dude is weird, like, it's hard for us to write a song if there's a weird dude in the room or, you know?
So he's a master at, yeah, creating the physical space.
But him, he knows how to get the best out of the best people in the world.
You have people like that in your life.
I'm sure. Whether it's family or friends, that, gosh, you just feel comfortable around him.
So he has a gift for that.
And he also has great taste.
And his superpower, one of his superpowers is that.
And he's always really fun to be around, you know?
And like, I'm really driven, type A.
When I first worked at Benny, he was the first person I did a real studio session with, where I was in an actual recording studio.
You know, I'd written songs with Big Sean in my basement, but I'd never gone to a studio.
And I was always like, man, we got to work hard.
And at that time, we're paying by the hour for the studio.
We got to make the song.
Let's go. And he was the first guy, I was like, dude, it doesn't matter if we make a song today.
I was just B. And the song will come out.
And if it doesn't, it'll come next time.
So he taught me how to collaborate.
He taught me a lot about, and hopefully, I do that for other artists now, too, you know, other people when I collaborate.
But yeah, he has a gift for that.
I'm obsessed with these videos that are like, you know, some guys love The Roman Empire, whatever.
Mine is like watching the making of these songs, because there's so many of these on YouTube.
You've got a bunch of them on YouTube.
It's like, you know, this grainy footage.
And you hear you can hear them play the lick for the first time.
And they're like, Oh, yeah, I like that.
It's like, that's the song.
And you almost want to reach the screen, but like, that's it.
That's the song that we're all gonna love.
You just don't realize you just did it.
There's one of Benny and Ed Sheeran, I think at a tour bus where he's like, writing Love Yourself or something like that.
And they're just messing around.
It was the same sort of vibe where he's like sitting there across the leg of Barefoot.
He's like, it didn't seem like there's a lot of stress around like, what is the answer?
It was more just like, that'd be fun.
I like that. You know, and he was just playful with it, which allowed them to play and be like, you should go and fuck yours.
Although yeah, that's great.
That's a great line.
And it's like, wasn't the appropriate line, but it was the like fun line.
And because it got there, the song got there.
I'm pretty fascinated by those.
One of the things that I heard that Ed Sheeran said, I thought it was pretty interesting.
Yeah. There's some documentary about him on Apple TV plus, but he goes, it's almost like a superstition.
He said, I believe that rooms have songs, rooms and instruments have songs because to write his album, he wouldn't just like go to a studio.
He would rent a farmhouse or something like cool, inspiring space.
And he would build a mobile studio there, which was 85 % as good as the like, the best studio, but the house would get like double the inspiration for him or the comfort for him in the band.
I thought that was very interesting, the trade -off between, you know, efficiency or, you know, picture perfect audio versus creative inspiration.
Do you, how, what do you do with your environment to like get the most creative version of you?
Very similar, you know, so first of all, I love to work in immersion like that.
I have a studio in here and, you know, I mostly record myself.
When I'm home. So my whole career, same as when I was in the dorm room, the mic's a little better now, but I have a laptop, nice mic plugged in a nice pre and I hit record on the laptop.
I sing until I mess up.
I hit stop. I engineer the thing myself.
That way I can record whenever I want.
I don't need another person.
I have to wait for someone else to come over, but I love to work in immersion, similar to what you just described with Ed, which is that's when the most stuff happens.
Hey, we're going to take a bunch of talented people.
We're going to go to a nice place that's divorced from our normal duties, and we're just going to live and breathe this art for a week or two weeks.
Then we're going to basically work till we die.
And then we take a couple of weeks off and we come back and do it again.
I like to work like that.
Is that where some of your songs have come out of, like a setup like that?
Yeah, my songs come from all over, so that's my personal favorite way to do it.
But it's not about what I like.
The songs coming through.
So I've written songs on airplanes, I've written songs here, I've written songs in the morning, I've written songs at night, written songs starting with piano licks, written songs starting with lyrics, written songs starting with melody, so pretty much every different way.
Hey, by the way, we having fun?
I'm having fun. Where are we measuring up to your research, dude?
It's higher because...
That's what I tried to do.
You gave me that iTunes U.
I'm better in real life.
That iTunes U story was amazing.
Everybody's got their favorite dish.
That's my favorite dish.
It's a combination of the serendipity of things working out for somebody 10 years in the making.
Like, I love that. Everybody who's trying to do shit, you want to hear stories that, yeah, after 10 years, then it starts to work out.
This is something we all need to hear those stories.
But then also, you did engineer it in a way too.
Like, you weren't a passive observer to some lucky circumstance.
You took steps to like, hmm, observation.
Let me double down on that.
And you did things that there's no textbook to say, make your pledges, change their profile pictures and invite people.
But it makes sense at the same time.
So I love that story.
Thank you. I want to ask you about the walk or Everest or the silent meditations.
But I book at them all under one philosophy, which is, do hard things.
Is that the right description of your philosophy?
Why you would climb Everest?
Why you would walk across America?
What's the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
They were large examples of the airport day going wrong, going to volunteer saying, my life is maybe too easy right now.
And that's why it doesn't feel right.
So I'm going to make a harder goal.
I'm going to make my life harder, but then paradoxically, my life feels easier when I'm doing the harder thing.
So they've hit on a lot of things that we touched on today.
And I think that's true probably of walking across the U .S., climbing Everest and doing some longer meditation retreats.
Can you take me back to one of them where you were?
Life is easy, but doesn't feel quite right.
I don't have the same level of joy I should be having on paper.
And then the decision, what the voice said that made you go do one of those.
Can you walk me through that?
Yeah. With the walk across America, I was at a friend's jewelry shop and someone across the room said, my friend just walked across America and I was like a tractor beam.
I went, I said, what'd you just say?
He said, my friend walked.
I go, you can do that?
I guess you did it.
No one else cared about it.
Like, what's up with you man?
And I said out loud in that jewelry shop, I'm going to do that one day.
I actually don't think I said, I said, I want to do that one day.
And the sentence lingered in the jewelry shop like a fart no one wanted to claim.
And everyone just sort of went back to whatever they were talking about before I said it.
Fast forward four years later, four or five years later, my father dies from brain cancer.
And I think about six months after that, my assistant at the time, Nick, comes to pick me up, take me to a studio session that day.
And he said, Hey man, Avicii's dead.
Avicii is a friend of mine that I worked with in the music studio.
I worked with him a few weeks before.
He said, Avicii is dead.
I go, don't fuck with me, man.
He said, I'm not fucking with you, Avicii's dead.
I say, I can't believe this.
And I get in his car, he drives in the studio and I keep saying, I can't believe this.
And while I'm saying, I can't believe this out loud, there's one thought going through my head that I can't make stop.
It's I have to walk across America.
I have to walk across America.
I have to walk across America.
I have to walk across America.
And it was this proximity of death that's saying, Hey dude, you see that man that gave you your life, the one that you look just like.
He's dead. That's what's going to happen to you.
You see that other man who does the same job as you.
You guys do the same.
You do concerts. You're in the studio with him last week.
He's dead. That's what's going to happen.
You maybe not in the same way, but this is a return trip.
Another couple of weeks pass.
I'm in this shitty little guest house.
I'm renting in West Hollywood bouncing around studio is trying to make my next hit.
And my friend Willie calls me and he goes, Hey Mike, I got bad news.
My best friends that we grew up with his name is Ronnie.
He goes, Ronnie's dead.
Shit. And I just realized, dude, I'm going to die.
Before I die. I want to live the life that I actually wanted to live and I wasn't doing it.
I was living the life that I thought my manager thought I should live.
Truly. I was living the life that I, I was 30 years old, living the life that 20 year old me had set up and it was, it was pain.
I walked across America cause I was in pain and I, I wanted to figure out a different way.
When you were doing it, did you like a lot of times the reason I do something isn't the thing I get out in a great way.
I go in for one reason and I come out with it's like going to Chuck E.
Cheese to play the games.
You get all these prizes at the end that you didn't even realize that's, that's how the tickets work.
What were the prizes you got at the end of that?
I found a part of myself that was, that was so much stronger than I ever knew was even there.
Not only found a part of myself, unleashed a part of myself that I previously didn't know was there.
Dude, I got bit by a poisonous rattlesnake.
I spent three nights in the ICU.
I got air lifted. I got told by dispatch, I might not live.
I got told by doctors.
It might take me eight months to heal.
I got told by other doctors, I might lose my foot.
And I did a crazy thing, dude.
I went back. I kept going.
Everyone expected me to quit because probably cause the old me was such a bitch.
I was like, my whole life was about me and everything, me being comfortable.
And so, like I'm going to do the opposite.
I'm going to be a five star Walker.
Right. I'm going to do it different.
I'm going to do it different.
I'm not going to use, I'm not going to use this injury as an excuse to do less.
I'm going to use that as an excuse to do more.
And yeah, I get to do podcasts and talk about it.
And this thing is on my Wikipedia page and the check, the real trophies that you ask is I became someone new.
And that part of me is, it is so different, having an inkling, you're strong versus knowing you're strong because you, because you were strong.
And I was strong in a way I hadn't been before.
That's amazing. I think that the there's this concept of Misogi.
Have you heard of this?
We've talked about in the pod before this guy, Jesse Itzler came on.
I love Jesse Itzler.
He's a good friend, man.
Yes. So Jesse, anything for Jesse Itzler.
I liked that. For real.
He's one of my, I don't ever use the word like mentors or heroes or anything, but I call him blueprints.
I look for people who live interesting lives that I'm like, Oh, that could be, I like the way that house is laid out.
Maybe I could steal some of that blueprint.
He's that for me too.
And by the way, friend spend time with him off the record.
He's that guy. Yeah.
That's actually something I always wonder.
Because on the podcast, you'll see people's, you know, hopefully that guy 24.
I've been with him.
I watch him with his kids.
He's that guy. So he's got, he has this idea of Kevin's rule and he's got the Misogi, which is like, Misogi is like the one, one grand challenge a year, one ambitious, hard thing you're going to do, whether it's super physical or it might be some other thing.
Like I have mine, which is can I go 24 hours straight without a complaint in my head?
That's my, that's my Misogi.
It's harder for me than an Iron Man or anything like that.
That's dope, dude. I want to try that too.
That's a super power.
Not in your mouth, in your head, dude.
Yeah. That's - Anybody could not say it, but I'm saying it to myself.
It's the conversation I'm having in my head is the big one all day.
So good, man. And so I'm really working on that.
And it's so funny. You see it.
You're like, and actually you're a Tony Robbins guy.
I'm a Tony Robbins guy too.
He said a phrase, which made me realize how important this was.
He says he goes on some trip and he meets some guy in India or whatever.
And the guy goes, asked him something about suffering.
And he's like, yeah, I'm Tony Robbins.
Like, I don't know if you know this, but suffering isn't what usually people describe me as, like, you know, driving a powerful, a successful, all these things.
He's over. He's like, didn't say that to him, but that was an internal feeling was like, what do you mean suffering?
And he's like, well, I just saw you kind of yelling at your guy over there.
He's like, well, no, he wasn't doing his job.
And so I had to, you know, immediately, you know, demand the performance.
And the guy brought to his awareness, like, man, there are so many of these little moments every day where you're losing your state, this beautiful state that you're in, and then it goes away.
And he said it like he said, how cheap is your happiness?
Like how little does it, how much, how little of inconvenience does it take?
If I spill this water on this desk right now, do you lose that beautiful state or you stay in it?
Because if you lose it, then that was cheap, man.
That was so easy to knock you out of that.
And I heard that and that was like, oh, that's a, it's a thing I want.
And I, when I look at your story about like the things you wanted in your twenties, the success, the fame, the money, the love of everybody, like those are the things all of us want, want, at least in our twenties, is often their whole lives.
And a big part of life seems to be just figuring out what are you supposed to actually want?
You know, I wanted this, I achieved this.
Oh shit. Worst case scenario, I realized I didn't even want the right thing in the first place.
I played a game that was rigged for me to lose.
So, you know, some of your story reminds me of that philosophy that has served me well.
It's so well said. And I believe the person that Tony was talking to was Krishnaji.
Yeah. And, and so Krishnaji and his wife, Prettnaji, are these amazing teams.
And they teach that there's only two kinds of states, beautiful states and suffering states.
And there's all different types of suffering states and types of beautiful states, joy, laughter, calm, serenity, or pain, depression, self -pity, you name it, right?
But there's really only two states.
And so I think what all of us really want is to have more beautiful states, less suffering states.
And so we're talking about tools to get there.
What do you want? That's what you want.
I think. Right. The problem is we convince ourselves that we want the middleman.
We think the promotion gives us the beautiful state.
Well, yeah. Achievement gives us the beautiful state.
Anything you want, you want because you think it's going to give you a better state.
And maybe it will momentarily, but the trick of the game is, hey, you don't have to wait for the thing.
Feel it now. Feel it right now.
And if you can win that game, you've won life.
Right. And so nobody's perfect.
I don't know anybody.
You know a lot of these guys too.
We just met, so now you know.
Right. Like you, we get to spend time with a lot of these teachers and gurus.
So I haven't met one yet that's 100 % in a beautiful state.
But we can work more towards there.
And we need external goals.
So that's a lot of my message.
Hey, set a goal that actually inspires you.
That's Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning.
You need something in the future looking forward to.
It's important. At the same time, you need to be winning this internal game of, hey, that's my goal.
But how do I want to feel as I'm going after it?
That's a different kind of goal that interweaves with your external goal.
And most people forget to set that one.
And they lose. They lose life.
They might win on the vertical axis.
They might win on the horizontal axis, but they lose in the depth, the vertical axis.
So that's it, man. Thank you for bringing that story up.
Great reminder. And that's it.
That's all we're trying to do, man.
And so any of these like tips or tools or stories, it's all to win that game.
Right. Well, listen, man, I appreciate you inviting me out to your house and appreciate you doing this.
Thank you, bro. It has been great.
Peace. I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like days on the road.
Let's travel. Never looking back.
