How Mike Posner built a music empire from his dorm room

0:00:02 Your life is already a three-act story.
0:00:04 You have the rise to meteoric fame.
0:00:05 -Mike Posner. -Mike Posner.
0:00:06 Great through Otters of the Year award.
0:00:08 Then you have the crash.
0:00:09 My career had plummeted.
0:00:11 I had a hit, and my career plummeted.
0:00:12 And then you have the rebirth.
0:00:16 One of Spotify’s top 10 most streamed songs of all time.
0:00:19 Mike Posner is enjoying sweet success.
0:00:21 At the time, it was scary.
0:00:23 The fame, the adoration, the money.
0:00:24 Really the fame.
0:00:25 Really the fame.
0:00:28 The money and all that stuff was nice, but it was the fame, man.
0:00:31 So what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
0:00:32 But I already know that story.
0:00:34 So I said, “What am I actually curious about?”
0:00:36 And it’s why you would climb Everest,
0:00:38 why you would walk across America.
0:00:41 What’s the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
0:00:42 I’ve never been asked that before.
0:00:44 Okay, let me try to tell the truth.
0:00:57 I want to ask you about some things back when we were at Duke.
0:00:58 So people who were listening who don’t know this,
0:01:01 me and Mike actually were at Duke at the same time.
0:01:03 Same year, freshman class.
0:01:06 I remember hearing stories that there’s a white boy rapper
0:01:08 in the dorm next door, and we were like,
0:01:09 “Who is he trying to make?”
0:01:09 And whatever.
0:01:11 Didn’t really think too much of it.
0:01:14 And then I suddenly started to see a couple of interesting things.
0:01:18 The first interesting thing I saw was that at some point,
0:01:21 I opened up my laptop and I went to iTunes.
0:01:24 And I saw you at the top of iTunes.
0:01:25 But it wasn’t the top of iTunes.
0:01:27 It was the top of iTunes U.
0:01:28 [Laughs]
0:01:31 And iTunes U was like this little part of iTunes
0:01:32 that was like for lectures.
0:01:34 In Silicon Valley, we call this a growth hack.
0:01:37 Sometimes you got to be clever and you got to use your,
0:01:39 turn your disadvantage to an advantage.
0:01:40 Can you teach me about this?
0:01:41 Because I’ve always known half the story.
0:01:43 I didn’t know the full story.
0:01:44 Yeah, absolutely.
0:01:47 So I was a giant hip-hop fan.
0:01:48 So I started rapping when I was eight.
0:01:51 Got to Duke, you know, 12 years later.
0:01:53 And I started to sing.
0:01:58 But really, I was singing almost from a hip-hop perspective.
0:02:03 I used these complex rhyme schemes, polysyllabic rhyme schemes.
0:02:05 Even in my first hit song, “Cooler Than Me,”
0:02:07 it’s got a complex rhyme scheme.
0:02:11 So you got designer shades just to hide your face.
0:02:15 So it’s not just the last syllable that rhymes shades in face,
0:02:18 but also designer rhymes with hydra.
0:02:19 This is a rapper thing, right?
0:02:23 And so I was combining hip-hop with melody
0:02:25 in a way that I thought was dope.
0:02:26 I thought was cool.
0:02:28 And I hadn’t heard anyone do it before, really.
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0:03:09 And so I started to share my music,
0:03:12 and I was getting a little bit of traction
0:03:14 on these hip-hop blogs,
0:03:17 which were important in hip-hop at the time.
0:03:20 Blogs like “Too Dope Boys,” “Nah Right,”
0:03:23 even Kanye’s blog, which is a really big deal at the time.
0:03:27 And this is the era of piracy.
0:03:29 So everyone, you probably remember when we were at Duke,
0:03:31 we did not pay for music, you know?
0:03:33 So you’d go on–
0:03:33 Lime wire–
0:03:36 Lime wire, BitTorrents, that whole thing.
0:03:39 And so I knew Nolan was gonna pay for my music
0:03:41 because we weren’t paying for Kanye’s music.
0:03:43 We weren’t paying for Jay-Z.
0:03:45 The artists we love the most, we were stealing their music.
0:03:48 So no one’s gonna pay for my music
0:03:49 because no one knows who I am.
0:03:51 So I understood that.
0:03:52 And I understood it was important.
0:03:54 I was on these hip-hop blogs,
0:03:57 but then I was gonna have a shy kid
0:04:00 and I was really into my music.
0:04:03 So I’d always stay in and then my friends would come back.
0:04:05 They’d stumble into my room drunk,
0:04:06 interrupt my song and push them out.
0:04:07 And this whole thing–
0:04:12 And one day I go to this kid’s room down the hall
0:04:14 named Xander, he was a really cool kid, you know?
0:04:19 And seemed to have a more robust social life than I did.
0:04:21 There’s only cool Xanders.
0:04:22 I’ve never met a not cool Xander.
0:04:24 Yeah, exactly, dude.
0:04:31 And so he said to me, “Hey, Posner,
0:04:34 at the party last night, they played your song
0:04:37 and all the sorority girls knew the words.”
0:04:40 I said, “What, really?”
0:04:44 Mind you, I’ve been making music 12 years now.
0:04:45 That’s never happened.
0:04:47 He goes, “Yeah.”
0:04:50 And dude, they played it twice.
0:04:52 They played it twice in a row
0:04:53 and everyone’s saying the words.
0:04:57 So then I said, “Wow, okay.”
0:05:02 The next day my mom calls and she says in passing,
0:05:04 “By the way, I really like that song you make cooler than me.
0:05:06 I don’t know how she heard it.”
0:05:08 And her, you know, friends sent her–
0:05:10 I was in my MySpace at the time.
0:05:13 So I said, “Okay, that’s kind of peculiar.
0:05:15 It’s on the hip hop blogs.
0:05:18 The sorority girls like it and my mom likes it.”
0:05:22 The next day, my friend, Big Sean calls
0:05:24 who I came up with in Detroit
0:05:26 and he had gotten a record deal with Kanye.
0:05:29 He’s a rapper from Detroit and a dear friend of mine.
0:05:31 And he said, “I love cool to me.”
0:05:32 He goes, “I think that could be a hit song.”
0:05:35 I said, “Hold on.
0:05:41 If Sean, mom and the sorority girls all like the same song,
0:05:44 something’s going on here that never happened before.”
0:05:46 Because I’ve been making music for 12 years
0:05:49 and nobody seemed to particularly give a fuck besides me,
0:05:52 including my mom, right?
0:05:53 Always supportive and loving.
0:05:58 She, you know, paid for music less supportive
0:06:00 but never told me she liked one of my songs.
0:06:02 I’m 20 years old.
0:06:09 So I realized the way these hip hop blogs work was
0:06:13 you’d go on the site, there’d be a blog entry with your song
0:06:19 and then you had to do some kind of right clicking
0:06:20 and there was always these weird links
0:06:23 that would throw you off into some sketchy websites
0:06:25 and you had to click the right thing
0:06:29 and then save file ads and that’s how you download the song.
0:06:34 But it was really convoluted and hidden behind advertisements.
0:06:38 And I just realized that these sorority girls
0:06:39 were never going to do that.
0:06:41 They were never going to,
0:06:44 hey, they’re never going to go to these hip hop blogs
0:06:47 and if, you know, snowball chance in hell they would,
0:06:48 they wouldn’t ever be able to download the song.
0:06:52 So I realized iTunes was just starting to come out
0:06:54 and it was this safe place you could get music.
0:06:57 And so I knew I needed to get my music there
0:07:00 but then I had this other rub that I alluded to earlier
0:07:03 which is no one’s going to pay for it.
0:07:06 So I needed it to be free like it is on the blogs
0:07:11 but I need to be on iTunes and then I saw iTunes U.
0:07:15 So iTunes U was this section of iTunes
0:07:19 that was set up for professors to post their lectures.
0:07:22 And if you weren’t there, you went to a different school,
0:07:25 you could, you could listen to this professor’s lecture
0:07:29 and this was purely educational and the cost was free
0:07:30 for everything on iTunes U.
0:07:31 There was no charge.
0:07:34 It was an educational arm of iTunes.
0:07:37 So I said, I got to get my music there.
0:07:41 Now this is where life capital L comes in.
0:07:42 I’m from Southfield, Michigan.
0:07:44 It’s a suburb of Detroit.
0:07:45 I was born in Detroit.
0:07:47 I moved to Southfield when I was two years old.
0:07:48 I grew up there.
0:07:49 I lived there until I’m 18.
0:07:50 I go to Duke University.
0:07:54 I do some searching and I find out
0:07:57 who’s in charge of iTunes U for Duke.
0:07:58 So if you’re a Duke professor
0:08:00 and you want to post your lecture,
0:08:00 how do you get up there?
0:08:04 I find out it’s a man named Todd Stabley.
0:08:06 I called email type.
0:08:08 Remember you could type in any name
0:08:09 and the director could get the email.
0:08:10 So I get Todd’s email.
0:08:14 I called email him and we do a phone call.
0:08:17 He gives me his number and his number
0:08:19 is the same area code as mine.
0:08:22 Hey, man, you got two, four, eight areas.
0:08:23 He goes, yeah.
0:08:24 He goes, I’m from Southfield, Michigan.
0:08:25 Where are you from?
0:08:27 I said, come on.
0:08:30 No, so I get the goosebumps still to this day.
0:08:32 I said, look, this is what I’m trying to do.
0:08:38 I’m a student artist and I want to share my album, you know,
0:08:40 and I want to put on iTunes U.
0:08:41 He goes, oh yeah, man.
0:08:44 From Southfield, you’re a student.
0:08:46 We could put on iTunes U. No problem.
0:08:48 Life set that up for me, man.
0:08:53 So I got my music on to iTunes
0:08:55 and you just search on iTunes like any other thing.
0:08:58 But when you went, my album came up, the price was free.
0:09:06 Any other music out cost a $1, yeah, $99, whatever it was.
0:09:06 Mine was free.
0:09:10 And so then I got busy on Facebook.
0:09:14 I created a Facebook event and there was a link to that album.
0:09:19 And I activated all my communities.
0:09:22 So I was from Michigan and a lot of my friends
0:09:24 went to different colleges across the country,
0:09:30 including Michigan, Michigan State, gosh, friends in Northwestern,
0:09:35 friends at Marquette, just wherever they went.
0:09:41 And then my friend, I was in Fraternity and there were these,
0:09:42 we had pledges.
0:09:44 So these older guys do mean things.
0:09:46 These pledges make them like do, you know,
0:09:48 thousand push-ups or whatever.
0:09:50 I said, look, you guys are going to do something for me.
0:09:51 You’re going to send–
0:09:52 Pause the push-ups.
0:09:56 You’re going to send the invitation to this Facebook event,
0:10:01 to everyone in your Facebook network, every single person.
0:10:04 And there’s a way I had a protocol, five steps,
0:10:05 and you could send it out.
0:10:08 And all of you are going to change your profile picture
0:10:09 to my album cover.
0:10:12 And all my friends, they all changed their profile picture
0:10:13 to my album cover.
0:10:15 And my friends did the same thing.
0:10:18 My fraternity brothers, they all did the same thing.
0:10:20 So all their friends that were at different schools,
0:10:20 they sent it out.
0:10:23 And then here’s that.
0:10:25 The last thing is the music was good, right?
0:10:28 So if the music wasn’t good, none of this shit matters.
0:10:31 But and my music wasn’t always good.
0:10:32 Like I said, I’m 20.
0:10:33 I started when I was eight.
0:10:37 So it’s 12 years making songs, a lot of songs,
0:10:41 to get to that one song where my mom likes it, right?
0:10:42 And Sean likes it.
0:10:47 So this iTunes U thing, yeah, was a thing that was pivotal for me.
0:10:48 Pivotal.
0:10:54 And so from there, pretty much every college in the U.S.
0:10:55 was listening to Mike Posner that year.
0:10:59 And it started off smaller, 50 people.
0:11:02 And I’d get a show at Dayton, Ohio.
0:11:05 When I’d go to Dayton, Ohio, I’d be booked to play at some bar.
0:11:08 You know, at colleges, there’s always a hustler guy
0:11:10 that throws the parties.
0:11:12 And so those guys would book me.
0:11:14 They’d say, “Posner, come play Friday night.”
0:11:17 And are you even getting paid to do this at the time?
0:11:19 Or at the start, 500 bucks.
0:11:22 So I’d go, my boy, Pat Klein, became my manager later.
0:11:25 He booked me at Dayton, Ohio.
0:11:27 I go there and there’s 25 to 50 people.
0:11:30 I do my set and they know every word to my song.
0:11:33 A month later, he’d book me to come back
0:11:36 and there’d be 300 people there, every word to my song.
0:11:40 And so I just started to expand like that.
0:11:46 And yeah, the iTunes U was a really great hack.
0:11:49 I’ve never heard that story, that’s amazing story.
0:11:52 So because what you did then, you kind of stacked these, right?
0:11:55 So you did that, then you started doing the shows,
0:11:58 which normally, correct me if I’m wrong,
0:12:00 normally you kind of, you did it backwards, right?
0:12:02 So like, it seems like normally you’d have a label,
0:12:04 they would get you set up with tours.
0:12:05 You were kind of underground.
0:12:06 So you, if I remember correctly,
0:12:09 because you already had tours and fans,
0:12:12 then when record labels were interested, you’re like,
0:12:13 “Yo, I’m de-risked.
0:12:16 Like I’m more de-risk than the average artist
0:12:16 because look at this.
0:12:18 Like I’ve already, I’m already playing shows
0:12:21 with real fans all around the country.
0:12:23 And I remember being at Duke and we would hear
0:12:25 like dude flies out every weekend.
0:12:27 It just does a show at a different college
0:12:28 and flies back and like takes his time.
0:12:30 That’s what you were doing.
0:12:31 – We’re doing two or three, man.
0:12:32 I got crazy.
0:12:34 Yeah, I would do two or three.
0:12:36 And that senior year I had set up.
0:12:40 So all my classes, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
0:12:43 I’d leave Thursday night, rip Thursday night,
0:12:44 Friday night, Saturday night.
0:12:47 I get three checks, come back, have a bunch of cash,
0:12:51 go to the bank, put in the bank, come back in my house,
0:12:55 this dirty, filthy house, you know, like go to class again.
0:12:58 It was just insane doing homework on the planes.
0:13:00 Like it was insane, insane.
0:13:03 – It seems like one of the unique things about you is like,
0:13:05 you may not be the best rapper or the best singer
0:13:08 or the best kind of beats producer guy,
0:13:11 but because you’re good enough to be dangerous on all three,
0:13:14 you were able to be like a one man machine
0:13:18 that was able to get a bunch of practice reps in
0:13:20 and get, you know, keep trial and error
0:13:23 where you weren’t dependent on somebody else’s time
0:13:25 or somebody else’s interests or tastes or whatever.
0:13:26 Is that fair?
0:13:28 – No, I don’t think so.
0:13:29 – How would you say it?
0:13:30 – I would say, yeah, I’m probably,
0:13:32 yeah, I’m definitely not the best singer.
0:13:34 Definitely not, you know, I can’t dance or anything
0:13:37 or do any cool runs, but I’m a damn good writer.
0:13:41 – Writer, that’s like your A plus skill.
0:13:46 You know, people connect to me, I think, because of the writing.
0:13:48 You know, yeah, I can’t.
0:13:51 If I did American Idol, I’d lose, you know, right?
0:13:53 You know, I can sing, but not-
0:13:55 – One of the things that inspired me
0:13:57 when I was doing the research was that
0:13:59 at some point in the middle of your career,
0:14:01 so not like before he made it,
0:14:04 but like actually after you had the initial burst of success,
0:14:06 it seemed like I read something that you went back
0:14:09 and almost like took music lessons and singing lessons
0:14:10 and enrolled in a college
0:14:12 and you said something like, you know, I’m in this class
0:14:14 and I’m not the best singer in the class.
0:14:16 I’m supposed to be this, you know,
0:14:17 I’m supposed to be this guy who’s the star, right?
0:14:19 They all want to be artists.
0:14:21 I actually even have the credentials,
0:14:22 but I thought that was kind of an amazing,
0:14:26 humbling move to just, of course,
0:14:28 why wouldn’t I dedicate myself to the craft?
0:14:29 Can you talk a little about that?
0:14:31 There was something in that that resonated with me
0:14:33 because I think that’s unusual.
0:14:34 – Yeah, well, there’s two things in that.
0:14:37 One, I think it speaks to the point I just made
0:14:38 where there are these people,
0:14:42 at that time in my career, I was in a cold spot.
0:14:46 So I said, hey, let me use this time to get better at my skills.
0:14:48 And if I’m being honest, yeah, I don’t know how to play,
0:14:50 like I had a hit song, but I didn’t know how to play guitar.
0:14:51 I didn’t know how to really sing.
0:14:53 I was a rapper who had started singing.
0:14:55 I didn’t know how to play piano.
0:14:59 So why don’t I learn some of those things?
0:15:00 And I remember I was at a,
0:15:06 at a, it was kind of like a campfire kind of situation.
0:15:09 And that guy, Si was there, do you remember him?
0:15:10 – Yeah. – Obengongo’s there.
0:15:12 And Tori Kelly was there.
0:15:15 And they were passing the guitar around the fire.
0:15:17 And Tori Kelly sang this song.
0:15:18 It was so beautiful.
0:15:20 And then I had just written a song that day.
0:15:22 I wanted to sing it.
0:15:24 And I was at, I said, could you play the guitar?
0:15:25 These chorus of things.
0:15:29 She’s trying to do it for me because I couldn’t play the guitar.
0:15:31 And I really wanted to sing my song, but I couldn’t do it.
0:15:33 And it didn’t really work.
0:15:36 And I remember leaving, I go, that’s stupid that I can’t do that.
0:15:38 That’s never going to happen again.
0:15:39 I’m going to learn to play the guitar.
0:15:42 And you’ll be able to sing my song at a campfire.
0:15:42 You know?
0:15:45 So that’s one part of it.
0:15:47 You know, it’s this lesson and go, hey, you know,
0:15:54 being an artist is about, it’s similar to being a human.
0:15:55 It’s about growing.
0:15:58 It’s about being a better artist than you were a year ago.
0:16:02 And you can always, your relationship to the music deepens.
0:16:06 Or the art, any art form deepens your whole life.
0:16:09 Art is not like the NBA, you know?
0:16:13 It’s not like you peak at 30 and, you know, you can’t jump as high anymore.
0:16:15 So you, no, this is a lifelong thing.
0:16:19 You can always get deeper.
0:16:26 So that’s part A. But then part B was, yeah, I realized kind of to the point
0:16:29 right before this point was I’m in a singing class.
0:16:31 I took Berkeley School of Music online.
0:16:32 There’s these great singers in there.
0:16:38 And yeah, I was almost like, you know, in the bottom quartile of that class.
0:16:41 But I was a successful recording artist.
0:16:44 And those people all wanted my job.
0:16:51 And I realized I had something that most people don’t, which is my writing.
0:16:57 But I have a way of connecting the music I make, whether it doesn’t matter.
0:16:59 Music is not about hitting the high, it’s like life.
0:17:02 It’s not about hitting the perfect note in the run.
0:17:09 It’s about does it, does this part of my humanity speak to that part of your humanity?
0:17:10 I’m raising my hand.
0:17:11 And I’m taking my clothes off out here.
0:17:12 And it’s vulnerable.
0:17:15 I’m going, this is what it’s like for me to be a human.
0:17:16 Anyone else?
0:17:21 And if I do a good job, someone else hears it.
0:17:28 And I’m so glad you said it because that’s how I’ve been feeling for years.
0:17:30 And I didn’t know how to articulate.
0:17:33 And now I don’t feel as alone.
0:17:35 That’s what an artist does.
0:17:40 And so I realized in that singing class, I already know how to do that.
0:17:48 I can add colors and refinements and make things more sophisticated by, you know,
0:17:49 adding to my skills.
0:17:54 But at the end of the day, even if you got no skills and you can do that,
0:17:55 you’re a great artist.
0:17:57 You’re a great artist.
0:17:59 Well, I love your music videos for this reason.
0:18:04 Like now that you say it, when I think about when I became a super fan of yours.
0:18:07 Like you, sorry, by the way, that’s why you’re a great artist.
0:18:08 We talked about the beginning.
0:18:10 You always say, I’m a little lowercase arts.
0:18:13 No, you’re making the thing and it obviously connects with other people.
0:18:18 You’re obviously following your own curiosity and going, hey, I’m making the thing that,
0:18:21 it’s a million podcasts in the frickin’ world, dude, right?
0:18:26 But you’re doing something in a way that connects with other humans.
0:18:28 And you’re not doing it because you’re trying to,
0:18:31 you’re doing it by trying to connect with yourself and connect your own creativity
0:18:37 and curiosity to the art you’re making or the, you know, the pieces that you’re making,
0:18:38 whatever you call them.
0:18:39 And so, yeah.
0:18:42 And by the way, I used to approach it very differently.
0:18:45 I used to approach it very analytically, logically.
0:18:46 Duke kid, right?
0:18:49 Like, you know, there’s a certain set of skills that gets you into Duke.
0:18:55 And those skills were, I was trying to sort of map the market out and the opportunity.
0:18:56 Where’s the white space?
0:18:58 And my coach, my trainer, I’ve mentioned before.
0:19:01 He’s like, the white space is you, bro.
0:19:04 He’s like, the product is you pushed out.
0:19:05 That’s it.
0:19:09 Take yourself, turn yourself inside out.
0:19:13 Whoever resonates with what you are, that’s your target customer.
0:19:15 You don’t need a market study, right?
0:19:17 That, who are the people, who are my customers?
0:19:18 The people that love what I do.
0:19:20 And he just flipped it on its head and I was like, dude,
0:19:22 you’re speaking a different language to me, different.
0:19:26 I’ve never seen this in a book, but I started to put some faith in that.
0:19:27 And that’s when I did the podcast.
0:19:28 I was like, what’s the podcast?
0:19:29 It started off as only interviews.
0:19:33 And then we would just get on the podcast sometimes, just shoot the shit about,
0:19:35 dude, did you see this app that did this?
0:19:36 It was just me pushed out.
0:19:37 Because that’s what I’m actually interested in.
0:19:39 So I just started talking about it.
0:19:42 And then all of a sudden it was getting a different result
0:19:45 because there was only one of those, because there’s only one of me, right?
0:19:47 So that was a big lesson to learn.
0:19:50 That sounds kind of obvious and almost like a fortune cookie,
0:19:51 but you’ve got to go do it.
0:19:53 It’s just courage.
0:19:54 And you have to stumble upon it.
0:19:58 You have to do the other thing.
0:20:00 So yeah, it has to be stumbled upon.
0:20:06 I had this line on my song that said, I’m in the yoga class headband now.
0:20:08 People say I’m off brand.
0:20:10 How I am the brand.
0:20:13 Therefore, anything I do is on brand now.
0:20:14 I’m on brand now.
0:20:21 It’s like, I look at my heroes and that’s what I am now.
0:20:26 People got attached to a version of me because it hurts when they see a person who’s free.
0:20:28 And I’m so grateful for all of these lessons.
0:20:33 Twice as much money, half the possessions, no drugs, now the vision’s clear.
0:20:36 All my gold jewelry just disappeared.
0:20:39 That’s the universe telling me to start switching gears.
0:20:42 The deeper the human, the deeper the songs.
0:20:45 I saw all of this three years ago.
0:20:47 It’s almost like it was me reading my poem.
0:20:51 Yeah, where it’s trying to be.
0:20:52 I like that.
0:20:55 How’d you get on the radio?
0:20:56 Because that’s a black box.
0:20:58 Like, how’d you even figure out how to get on radio?
0:20:58 Yeah.
0:21:05 Oh, the thing I was going to say to you before was the music industry has completely moved that way.
0:21:07 So these days of a record label.
0:21:09 Hey kid, you got talent.
0:21:11 We’re going to develop you for six years.
0:21:12 That doesn’t happen.
0:21:14 And now it’s even more so.
0:21:16 You only get a record deal if you already
0:21:18 have an audience.
0:21:22 So that no longer is the responsibility of the label.
0:21:24 That’s not the responsibility of the artist.
0:21:28 And there’s so much data now, right?
0:21:30 So labels can be really prudent.
0:21:32 I’m going, hey, that or that or that, right?
0:21:36 Okay, you asked if I’d get on the radio.
0:21:40 So I graduate and I sign a record deal.
0:21:42 And I’m making this new album.
0:21:44 I’m starting to work with bigger producers.
0:21:48 I’m working with Benny Blanco and making these songs and thinking, you know,
0:21:53 when I do my first real album, not an iTunes U album, it’s going to be big.
0:21:55 And I’m starting to make all this new music.
0:22:02 And the original cooler than me used to have this line in it.
0:22:06 You go, at the end of the verse would say, you’re so vain.
0:22:10 You probably think that the song is about you.
0:22:13 Don’t you, if I could write you a song to make you.
0:22:14 Right?
0:22:14 I don’t know if you remember that.
0:22:15 I remember that, yeah.
0:22:16 Yeah.
0:22:17 Is that not still the song?
0:22:18 That’s the one I remember.
0:22:18 It’s not.
0:22:22 And most people don’t know it that way because we went to then go clear it.
0:22:24 Because that’s a Carly Simon song.
0:22:24 You’re so vain.
0:22:27 So this was this two lines in the verse.
0:22:28 We go to go clear it.
0:22:32 We say, hey, you know, I use this part of your song and my song.
0:22:34 You want to give you credit for it?
0:22:34 Can we work out a deal?
0:22:36 She, yeah, she represents it.
0:22:38 No problem.
0:22:39 We’ll just take 80 percent.
0:22:42 The review is seven years.
0:22:44 So I’m like, dude, that’s like, it’s two lines of the verse.
0:22:47 So I had to change that, right?
0:22:48 First thing I was going to say.
0:22:53 Behind Jamaica, nobody knows who you really are.
0:22:54 Who do you think you are?
0:22:56 You know, so we had to change that out.
0:23:03 And then I’m thinking that I’m going to make this new hit song with Benny Blanco.
0:23:06 It’s a brand big thing because I have a record deal now.
0:23:13 And when I play the new version of Cooler Than Me without the Carly Simon,
0:23:17 my record label thinks they say it’s not as good.
0:23:19 It’s not as good anymore.
0:23:23 So I think we should use one of the new songs to be your first real single.
0:23:28 Cooler Than Me has now been out for two years to us college kids.
0:23:30 I’m in New York City.
0:23:32 I’m about to go to some meeting or studio or something.
0:23:35 Hang out with a friend and my manager says,
0:23:38 we got to do a meeting with this radio promoter.
0:23:40 His name is Ian C.
0:23:42 We need to do a meeting with this guy.
0:23:44 His job is he gets songs on the radio without you.
0:23:47 And usually the label is supposed to do that,
0:23:50 but we need to pay him to do it ourselves.
0:23:51 I said, I don’t want to go to that meeting.
0:23:52 I want to go to the studio.
0:23:53 I’m an artist.
0:23:54 You go to the meeting.
0:23:55 He goes, this is more important.
0:23:58 I go, no, it’s not.
0:23:59 He says, yes, it is.
0:24:00 I said, why?
0:24:04 Well, Cooler Than Me is your first single.
0:24:07 The label doesn’t know it, but I know it.
0:24:09 This is my manager, Daniel Weissman.
0:24:13 I said, Cooler Than Me is old.
0:24:15 It’s two years old.
0:24:19 It’s been out two years and everybody has already heard it.
0:24:23 When the sidewalk in New York City looks me in the eye,
0:24:26 he goes, nobody has heard it.
0:24:32 I’ll go to the meeting.
0:24:34 We go to the meeting.
0:24:35 We hire ENC.
0:24:36 I think we paid him.
0:24:38 What was it, five grand, 10 grand?
0:24:41 And he’s going to get the song on a few radio stations.
0:24:43 No guarantee how much they’re going to play it,
0:24:45 but I can get it on a few stations.
0:24:51 So he gets on a few stations and this thing starts catching on.
0:24:53 People are calling into the station.
0:24:54 We like this song.
0:24:59 Before Shazam really, but they have some way they test it.
0:25:00 The tests are going crazy.
0:25:05 And these few stations, Patty Moreno in Sacramento and Shorty,
0:25:09 they start playing the song 50 times a week.
0:25:10 That’s a lot.
0:25:13 And then DJ Reflex in LA, Power 106,
0:25:15 he plays a song that does well here.
0:25:16 It starts catching on here.
0:25:18 Now the label calls.
0:25:22 They go, we told you, Cooler Than Me is your first single, dude.
0:25:26 What a great idea.
0:25:29 And that’s what labels are great at.
0:25:31 It’s not so great at starting fires,
0:25:34 but if you could start a fire, they got a hell of a lot of gasoline.
0:25:37 So then they go in hyper mode, do their things,
0:25:39 start getting it on all the other stations.
0:25:41 And that was how I got on the radio.
0:25:43 And at that time, the radio drove.
0:25:44 Mattered, yeah.
0:25:49 It still matters, but you win Spotify and get on the radio,
0:25:51 or you win YouTube and you get on the radio.
0:25:53 Then it was the opposite.
0:26:00 Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast
0:26:01 that you should check out.
0:26:02 It is called the Next Wave.
0:26:04 It’s hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz
0:26:06 as part of the HubSpot Podcast Network,
0:26:08 which of course is your audio destination
0:26:09 for business professionals like you.
0:26:11 You can catch the next wave with Matt Wolf,
0:26:13 and he’s talking about where the puck is going
0:26:15 with AI creators, AI technology,
0:26:17 and how you can apply it to your growing business.
0:26:18 So check it out.
0:26:21 Listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast.
0:26:27 I told you, I get more out of the research for these
0:26:29 than I do the interview sometimes.
0:26:31 And at first I got discouraged by that
0:26:33 because I was like, oh man, it’s kind of anti-climatic.
0:26:35 All the fun was in the foreplay, not the real thing.
0:26:36 We’re going to change that.
0:26:38 We’re going to change that, but then I got excited.
0:26:40 I was like, oh wait, that means when I’m doing the research,
0:26:41 look for the gold.
0:26:43 Because there’s usually like one thing that I’m like, wow,
0:26:46 that alone made this whole trip worth it.
0:26:47 And so for me, that was this one,
0:26:51 which was about, I guess, making art or making songs.
0:26:53 Do you try to make a hit?
0:26:56 Do you try to think about what the audience wants?
0:26:58 And the quote was, I just do what’s cool to me
0:27:00 and sometimes the whole world agrees.
0:27:02 I like that.
0:27:03 Can you talk about that a little bit?
0:27:05 Like where that mindset comes from?
0:27:08 That’s a good question because I could talk about that mindset
0:27:11 really easily, but you asked me something different,
0:27:12 which is where does that come from?
0:27:13 Where does that come from?
0:27:16 And I’ve never been asked that before,
0:27:17 so we’re off to a good start.
0:27:21 That’s an answer I give other people.
0:27:23 When artists are struggling, I tell them,
0:27:28 you know, your job is to make the thing that you think is beautiful.
0:27:28 Period, that’s it.
0:27:30 Don’t do what I think is beautiful are you
0:27:31 or your manager or your fans.
0:27:32 That’s it.
0:27:34 So that’s an answer I give to others.
0:27:36 Now you’re asking me a question about my answer.
0:27:37 The root.
0:27:39 So, okay, let me try to tell the truth.
0:27:41 Or find what’s true for me.
0:27:44 In part, it comes from messing it up.
0:27:51 Undoubtedly, I experienced a lot of success in my early 20s.
0:27:56 And I got addicted to it.
0:27:58 The fame, the adoration, the money.
0:28:01 Really the fame, really the fame.
0:28:04 The money, all the stuff was nice, it was the fame.
0:28:05 One of those had a higher high than the rest.
0:28:07 One of the freaking fame dudes.
0:28:14 And so I can remember trying to replicate the success I had
0:28:17 from my first hit song, which is a song cooler than me.
0:28:20 If I could write you a song to make you fall in love.
0:28:22 That’s all in it.
0:28:24 I just wanted that feeling.
0:28:27 I wanted to be that guy that everyone was looking at.
0:28:31 And so I can remember going in the studio and going,
0:28:32 I’m gonna try to make a.
0:28:33 Make a hit.
0:28:34 Make a hit.
0:28:36 Make someone everyone else likes.
0:28:42 And whenever I tried to create from that vantage point,
0:28:45 the only thing I succeeded in making was something I hated.
0:28:51 And sometimes I think, wow, even if I don’t like it,
0:28:52 maybe everyone else will.
0:28:53 It kind of checks all the boxes.
0:28:54 It’s the right BPM.
0:28:57 It’s got a catchy melody and a cool lyric.
0:29:01 It doesn’t really meet my standards for my aesthetics,
0:29:03 what I think is beautiful.
0:29:05 But who cares what I think?
0:29:08 This is about me being famous.
0:29:08 Right.
0:29:12 And of course, if you don’t like it, nobody.
0:29:17 You went from a guaranteed audience of one to zero to start this.
0:29:21 And I think life or God, I believe in God.
0:29:23 Sometimes I just call it life.
0:29:25 So I’ll use those interchangeably in this interview,
0:29:27 life with a capital L.
0:29:30 I thank God that it never gave me success with one of those
0:29:34 because it wanted me to learn that very lesson
0:29:35 that I could teach to others.
0:29:38 But gosh, could you imagine if one of those things
0:29:39 I didn’t really like got really popular?
0:29:42 Whew, that would have been even worse.
0:29:43 Right.
0:29:44 You would have been trapped on that path.
0:29:47 Yeah, I’d still be doing interviews about that song now,
0:29:50 still be singing that song at my shows now.
0:29:50 Right.
0:29:52 The original plan for this episode was
0:29:54 your life is already a three act story.
0:29:58 So from a podcast or point of view, oh, this is easy.
0:30:02 You have the come up, you have the rise to meteoric fame,
0:30:05 everything that everybody wants, your pop star, your onstage,
0:30:09 shirts off, everybody’s crazy about you, you’re the man.
0:30:13 Then you have the crash and then you have the rebirth.
0:30:15 So your story’s already like that.
0:30:17 And so what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
0:30:20 But then I have to do what’s honest for me too,
0:30:22 which is I already know that story and I like that story.
0:30:23 I don’t really want to talk.
0:30:25 I’ll ask you some questions about it,
0:30:27 but I kind of already know that.
0:30:28 So it wouldn’t be honest for me to ask that
0:30:29 because I wouldn’t be curious.
0:30:30 Cool.
0:30:31 I’ve already know it.
0:30:31 Great, man.
0:30:33 So I said, what am I actually curious about?
0:30:36 And I was like, I wanted to know that.
0:30:38 Like, hey, you said something that resonated with me,
0:30:41 which is my job is not to make a hit.
0:30:43 It’s to make something that’s cool to me
0:30:44 and sometimes the world agrees.
0:30:46 So that was the first place I want to start.
0:30:48 The second one is, you know, I’m not a musician,
0:30:52 but I’d like to, I’m maybe like a lowercase A artist.
0:30:53 I write, I have a podcast.
0:30:54 I do things like that.
0:30:57 No, you’re an artist, capital A.
0:31:00 Some exist now out of that used to just be an idea in your head.
0:31:03 You’re an artist.
0:31:04 You heard it here first.
0:31:05 Mike, those are things I’m an artist.
0:31:05 Here we go.
0:31:06 Absolutely.
0:31:09 The thing that’s been most helpful for me when I write
0:31:10 is exactly that.
0:31:12 So if somebody asked me, how do you write something great?
0:31:13 How do you write something that goes viral?
0:31:15 And the best thing I ever read was sit down
0:31:18 and write one true sentence, one true sentence.
0:31:20 And that just became like a calling card for me.
0:31:22 It was like, oh, I know where to start now.
0:31:25 Let me sit down and try to write one honest sentence.
0:31:29 And that’s surprisingly hard because the honest sentence
0:31:30 is usually something vulnerable.
0:31:33 And if I look at your hit songs, so if you look at,
0:31:34 you know, I took a pill in Ibiza,
0:31:37 the one true sentence right at the beginning is,
0:31:39 you know, I took a pill in Ibiza to, you know,
0:31:41 show of Ichi, I was cool.
0:31:43 Or in your new song, it’s something like,
0:31:49 There’s a part of me underneath the part that I let people see.
0:31:51 That part is the good part.
0:31:56 And I love that underneath the part that I let other people see.
0:31:58 That is the good part.
0:32:01 And I was like, man, he’s really good at the one true sentence.
0:32:03 Is that, is that a technique you use at all?
0:32:08 Like honesty to write the song or to bake the core of the song?
0:32:12 Yeah, you know, there’s all adage and studios gets thrown around.
0:32:15 And more so in Nashville and LA where they say,
0:32:17 don’t try to write a good song, write a true song,
0:32:19 and then it’ll be good automatically.
0:32:24 My music, listen, I was 13, I was a rapper.
0:32:25 All right, I started rapping when I was eight,
0:32:26 but I was around 13.
0:32:30 I started to consider creating a stage name.
0:32:32 And I’d go six months.
0:32:34 I remember I had this rapper name is acrimony.
0:32:37 And then I had this other name six months later,
0:32:40 I threw it out and I go, my name further.
0:32:44 Here on out is MCMP, right?
0:32:46 The world will know MCMP.
0:32:48 It has about 13 and a half.
0:32:50 Yeah, like aim, screen, name, status.
0:32:51 Yeah, exactly.
0:32:52 Exactly.
0:32:54 And it goes, and I had this thoughts for myself.
0:32:57 I said, my music isn’t an act.
0:33:03 This stuff I write even then was just what was happening
0:33:04 in my life.
0:33:05 It was real to me.
0:33:07 So my, I shouldn’t have a stage name.
0:33:07 I should have my name.
0:33:13 And I said, I’m going to go by Mike Posner.
0:33:15 That’s my name.
0:33:17 And that’s who I am.
0:33:20 And who I am in life is who I am in my music.
0:33:23 This came back one other time.
0:33:26 It was almost 20 years later.
0:33:29 It was right when I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”
0:33:32 because my career had plummeted.
0:33:34 I had a hit and my career plummeted.
0:33:37 And I was known as you know for doing kind of
0:33:39 frat songs and party songs.
0:33:44 I had this, you know, upbeat dance success song cooler than me.
0:33:46 And then I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”
0:33:50 and it’s this sad singer songwriter song on the guitar.
0:33:51 Which most people don’t know.
0:33:52 Yeah, the original was this.
0:33:56 And I thought, dude, like whatever is left of my career
0:34:00 will be destroyed by, and it’s funny now,
0:34:03 but at the time it was horror, it was scary.
0:34:10 It will be destroyed by me making such a drastic change in my music.
0:34:14 No, none of my fans that liked what I did before will like this.
0:34:16 It’s so different.
0:34:17 And I started contemplating it again.
0:34:21 Maybe I should change my name for this project.
0:34:25 And I remember thinking, oh, maybe I’ll change my name to the truth.
0:34:29 And I was like, no, the truth is, your name is Mike Posner.
0:34:35 And so I quickly got my head out of my ass on that one again and went,
0:34:37 hey, you know, like, this is my story.
0:34:45 And the 3X story you talk about, you know, I’ve owned it for better, for worse, or tried to.
0:34:50 Do you look for that moment where you’re like, I’m almost so scared to put this out?
0:34:52 I got to change my act name.
0:34:57 It’s so, this goes to a certain place where it’s not safe.
0:34:59 Have you now learned to look at that signal and be like,
0:35:02 maybe there’s something here if I’m feeling that?
0:35:03 Yeah, absolutely.
0:35:09 And yeah, a huge, huge barometer of something I should be writing is that,
0:35:12 I really don’t want to write this.
0:35:16 This moment was so painful, like, I don’t want to talk about it.
0:35:18 I don’t want to think about it.
0:35:24 So yeah, it’s not the only, you know, it’s not to say the converse is not true,
0:35:28 which is the only thing that should be written is something that causes you great pain.
0:35:29 That’s not true.
0:35:34 But often that is an entry point that is worth examining, absolutely.
0:35:37 We had Tim Ferriss on the podcast and I asked him a question.
0:35:40 I said, Tim, my one honest question.
0:35:43 I was like, I’m supposed to ask you about four hour work week, but I read it already.
0:35:46 I said, the thing I really want to know is how do you decide what’s next?
0:35:48 Because I knew he was kind of thinking about what’s next.
0:35:52 And I know that whenever Tim Ferriss is trying to do something, he’s methodical.
0:35:54 He doesn’t just, he doesn’t just do it.
0:35:57 He’s got like a way he’s going to do it.
0:35:58 That’s right.
0:36:00 And I was like, I kind of just hop to the next thing.
0:36:02 Like, how do you do figure out the next thing?
0:36:04 And he goes, well, I create a menu of options.
0:36:07 And he’s like, and on that menu, I make sure I have,
0:36:10 I leave room for the weirdest option.
0:36:11 I go, the weirdest option.
0:36:12 Why are you going to do it?
0:36:13 He’s like, I’m not necessarily going to do it.
0:36:18 He goes, but he goes, I treat like the weirdest idea of what I could do next.
0:36:20 This is not what I normally do.
0:36:21 This is not what I’m known for.
0:36:24 So if you’re still around, you must have, I actually need to
0:36:28 overweight you as a, as an option for me for you.
0:36:33 When you try to figure out what’s next, like, whether it’s the next song
0:36:38 or the next project, like writing a book, how do you decide where to apply your talents?
0:36:42 Well, it’s hard now is what choosing what not to do.
0:36:47 That’s the hardest part is, you know, killing things.
0:36:51 And on paper, I may be doing too many things right now.
0:36:56 I’m writing my book intensively every day.
0:37:02 A lot of time alone, my computer, I’m putting an album out.
0:37:04 We’re expanding our business in a lot of different ways.
0:37:09 So on paper, if I was making the menu, I go, cross two of them out.
0:37:10 Right, right.
0:37:12 But your question was, how do you decide?
0:37:21 And the same internal compass that I use in the, in the micro when I’m creating,
0:37:27 I’m writing a sentence in my book and I go, that word is not quite right.
0:37:29 No, not that one.
0:37:30 Boom, that one.
0:37:34 It’s an internal knowing.
0:37:34 It’s a feeling.
0:37:36 So that, that’s it.
0:37:40 Mark Twain said, the difference between the almost right word and the right word is
0:37:43 there is between lightning bug and a lightning bolt.
0:37:43 Right.
0:37:46 And it’s not the truth, right?
0:37:46 Yeah.
0:37:48 Has it happened in your songs?
0:37:48 Oh yeah.
0:37:51 Like, is there a song today that we all know that almost was?
0:37:53 Took a pill in Sacramento.
0:37:55 Didn’t have the same ring to it.
0:37:56 Just kept trying to make it work.
0:37:58 It doesn’t hit.
0:37:58 No.
0:38:03 No, but just on the song, same way.
0:38:06 A lot of times in the production, gosh, that’s not the right snare
0:38:07 drum sample.
0:38:10 We’ll work for an hour, go through every,
0:38:16 the all the sounds and that’s the one you just know.
0:38:19 There’s a quote that Rick Rubin has that I love, which he says,
0:38:22 the best way to serve your audience is to ignore them.
0:38:28 Meaning to, to not try to reverse engineer what they might want or what they might like
0:38:31 or what they might just make what you want, what you like.
0:38:33 That is the best way to serve them.
0:38:35 You know, when you hear something, you’re like, oh, that’s probably the truth.
0:38:36 I think I just heard the truth.
0:38:39 Okay, now the rest of my life is coming to grips with that truth.
0:38:41 I don’t need to search for the answer.
0:38:42 I got the answer.
0:38:45 It’s just a question of how long I’m going to deny myself, you know,
0:38:48 how many roundabout ways I’m going to avoid facing the answer.
0:38:49 Now I know the answer.
0:38:54 Has that been, it’s been easy for you kind of back to that first question about like
0:38:55 making what you want.
0:38:58 If music is pretty easy now, and honestly,
0:39:03 taking care of my finances has been a big part of that.
0:39:04 What do you mean by that?
0:39:06 I’m financially secure.
0:39:09 I don’t need to make another dollar from my music again.
0:39:14 So logically, I was able to just talk to at some point in the past,
0:39:17 talk to that part of that voice in my head and go, hey, dude, like,
0:39:25 you never need to make a song that you don’t want to make ever again.
0:39:30 You never need to be in the studio with a person you’re not a fan of ever again, ever.
0:39:33 And that made me a much better artist.
0:39:36 And I live in Silicon Valley.
0:39:40 There’s people with more money than God out there.
0:39:43 And they don’t feel like they have enough.
0:39:45 I know a lot of people who have enough,
0:39:48 who have made the last dollar they will ever spend many times over,
0:39:52 but they still do things to chase more.
0:39:54 And they don’t like to say they’re doing it,
0:39:56 but if you watch People’s Actions, People’s Actions will sort of speak
0:39:59 where they’re devoting their talents to.
0:40:06 What was useful to you to coming to peace with having enough?
0:40:09 Was it as simple as I wrote down how much I needed and how much I had?
0:40:12 And the logic part of my brain solved that?
0:40:16 Or was it a different part of you that got peace with the money side of your life?
0:40:17 Both, two-fold.
0:40:22 So I had the analysis to where they do a Monte Carlo or whatever.
0:40:25 So you spend this much or this many more years to be okay.
0:40:28 Like a money manager did that for you?
0:40:30 Yes, I was part of it, right?
0:40:31 Just knowing, hey, I’m okay.
0:40:35 You got to shift at some point, right?
0:40:37 Because when you’re coming up, you say yes to everything.
0:40:39 You know what opportunity is going to work.
0:40:42 And then when you get successful, you have too many opportunities.
0:40:43 You got to learn to say no.
0:40:49 There’s paradigm shifts along the journey.
0:40:51 And so that was one of them.
0:40:52 That’s the logical part.
0:40:57 And then the illogical part or the spiritual part
0:41:03 is realizing what true wealth or abundance or success is.
0:41:06 To me, it’s my definition.
0:41:09 True success or wealth is health.
0:41:15 It’s the ability to have joy in a present moment.
0:41:19 That’s, if you can do that, you’re a wealthy person.
0:41:22 And if you’re grateful, if you’re grateful what you have, you’re wealthy.
0:41:25 There’s a perception in the business world,
0:41:28 which is that the chip on your shoulder serves you.
0:41:31 I know investors that will invest specifically in people they know
0:41:35 are kind of like sort of damaged, semi-screwed up.
0:41:38 But they know that that gives them this sort of psychopathic drive.
0:41:40 And when somebody’s really happy,
0:41:44 I know people who don’t want to invest in somebody who’s super at peace
0:41:46 because the returns might not be there.
0:41:48 I don’t know if I believe that.
0:41:51 Do you think that the best art comes from people who are in a happy place
0:41:53 or the people who have that pain?
0:41:55 Do you think that the best success comes from the people
0:41:58 who have that big chip on their shoulder or not?
0:41:59 What’s your take on that?
0:42:04 I can’t answer in terms of where to invest your money.
0:42:06 I don’t really know that much about that stuff.
0:42:12 But what I can speak to is architecting a more beautiful life.
0:42:14 I don’t have a perfect life,
0:42:17 but it’s a hell of a lot more perfect than it was five years ago.
0:42:27 So what I can say is I don’t want a life that is hyper successful
0:42:30 in the vertical of work and finance
0:42:36 and a desert wasteland in the areas of passion and intimacy,
0:42:43 faith, spiritual growth, friendships, fun, physical health, giving back.
0:42:44 All right.
0:42:46 So I believe the way I look at my life,
0:42:51 and I do measure this, is work and mission is but one vertical.
0:42:58 And the thing I screwed up in my 20s is I thought if I crushed it so hard
0:43:01 in this vertical, meaning I got all the fame, all the money,
0:43:03 that I thought the points would carry over.
0:43:09 I thought, yeah, I can not show up to Thanksgiving
0:43:13 and not return my mother’s phone call because she knows I’m busy.
0:43:14 I’m a pop star, Mike Posner.
0:43:21 I can not see my friends or ghost them for months on end.
0:43:23 They understand I’m pop star Mike Posner,
0:43:28 Grammy nominated Mike Posner, international superstar.
0:43:33 I can never go on dates and just have one night stands after my shows
0:43:36 for years on end and never develop emotional intimacy
0:43:39 or the capacity to communicate on an intimate level
0:43:42 or vulnerable level with another human being
0:43:45 because I’m international superstar, Grammy nominated Mike Posner.
0:43:49 I can never give back with my time or not so much with my money either
0:43:50 because I’m international.
0:43:54 And what you get is just a life that isn’t that good.
0:43:57 Winning the game of life is played on all these different verticals.
0:44:00 And some of them require different skill sets
0:44:03 that you won’t find in the work vertical.
0:44:05 It’s not going to help you be a good husband.
0:44:07 It’s not going to help you be a good father.
0:44:08 I have a mission, right?
0:44:10 So it’s not saying abandon this for the other.
0:44:13 It’s how do you do it all in balance?
0:44:14 How do you have everything?
0:44:16 That’s what I’m interested in.
0:44:17 That’s what I’m building in my life.
0:44:19 I’m doing the best job I’ve ever done.
0:44:20 Am I perfect? No.
0:44:24 But boy am I proud of myself.
0:44:30 All right. If you’re listening to this pod,
0:44:31 I already know something about you.
0:44:34 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:44:36 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things
0:44:37 that we’re talking about.
0:44:38 How much money people make.
0:44:40 How much money people spend.
0:44:41 How much money businesses make.
0:44:42 You want to know all of this.
0:44:43 People’s net worth.
0:44:44 All of it.
0:44:46 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:44:47 So my company, Hampton,
0:44:49 we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:44:51 We do this thing where we survey our members
0:44:53 and we ask them all types of information,
0:44:55 like how much money they’re paying themselves,
0:44:57 how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:44:59 what their team-wide bonuses are,
0:45:00 what their net worth is,
0:45:01 what their portfolio looks like.
0:45:02 We ask all these questions,
0:45:04 but we do it anonymously.
0:45:05 And so people are willing to reveal
0:45:07 all types of amazing information.
0:45:08 So if you really cannot Google,
0:45:09 you can’t find anywhere else.
0:45:11 And you can check it out at joinhampton.com.
0:45:14 Click the reports section on the menu.
0:45:16 Click the salary and compensation report.
0:45:17 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:45:18 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:45:19 Check it out.
0:45:20 Now, back to the pod.
0:45:27 There’s a great clip on YouTube of Jim Carrey
0:45:28 when he gets some award.
0:45:30 And he goes up on stage
0:45:31 and he gave almost the same speech he gave.
0:45:33 He’s like, you know, I’m…
0:45:36 And he’s like, this is my second Emmy.
0:45:38 You know, I used to be…
0:45:39 Oh yeah, the Golden Globes.
0:45:40 A Golden Globes.
0:45:43 Yeah, I was probably suddenly plagiarizing that in my rant.
0:45:44 It reminded me of it.
0:45:45 It was great.
0:45:47 I was one-time Golden Globe winner, Jim Carrey.
0:45:50 And tonight, I’m terrified.
0:45:52 And he’s like, and when I go to bed at night,
0:45:54 I will dream about being three-time.
0:45:56 And he has the great quote,
0:45:59 which is, I wish the whole world could be rich and famous
0:46:01 so they would know that that’s not the answer, right?
0:46:03 You know, you got to taste that.
0:46:05 And if you found out yourself,
0:46:07 that’s not the answer for you.
0:46:08 And it doesn’t seem like it’s the answer for most.
0:46:13 I have this goofy analogy that I want to ask you about.
0:46:14 So do you ever watch the show “Survivor”?
0:46:17 When I was a kid, I watched it.
0:46:18 I guess I’m one of the doofuses.
0:46:19 They’re still watching it in season 47.
0:46:21 What’s going on with you, man?
0:46:23 Okay, so we all have a thing.
0:46:23 I got my thing.
0:46:24 Some people got weird things.
0:46:25 This is mine.
0:46:27 I want to go on “Survivor” someday.
0:46:29 That’s part of my angle here.
0:46:32 But there’s this thing that they do on “Survivor,”
0:46:33 which is, I think, a good analogy for life.
0:46:35 So in life, in “Survivor,”
0:46:37 the best thing every player wants is the immunity idol.
0:46:40 It’s this one thing that if you had it, you’re safe.
0:46:41 You can finally relax.
0:46:44 You’ve got the one thing that everybody wants.
0:46:46 And that’s been the case for many years.
0:46:48 Recently, they made a twist.
0:46:49 They call it the beware idol,
0:46:51 which is basically, you pick it up and it says,
0:46:54 “Beware, this comes with some disadvantages.”
0:46:56 And the player has the opportunity.
0:46:57 They can just put it down.
0:46:59 They don’t have to take any of the disadvantages.
0:47:02 So far, 100% of players, not a single player,
0:47:03 has ever put it down.
0:47:05 Even though it says on the label,
0:47:09 “Beware, this thing has disadvantages that come with it
0:47:11 that will hurt you in this game.”
0:47:13 And every player can’t resist, they take it.
0:47:15 And I was thinking about, I was watching “Survivor.”
0:47:17 I was prepping for this podcast and I was like,
0:47:19 “I think fame is the beware advantage of life.”
0:47:22 It’s the thing that we all think we want the money,
0:47:25 the fame, the love of others.
0:47:28 And it could say it on the label, “Beware.”
0:47:31 People who become pop stars when they’re young,
0:47:33 those aren’t the happiest people.
0:47:35 But we would all take it over again, right?
0:47:37 And so there’s something to that.
0:47:41 And I actually was curious, for you, if you could go back,
0:47:44 if there was the next mic poser, he’s 21 years old,
0:47:46 and you get 15 minutes in a room with him just like this,
0:47:49 and you could tell him anything.
0:47:50 I’m curious, what would you tell him?
0:47:52 And do you think he would listen?
0:47:57 Yeah, my smiles don’t result from good things,
0:47:58 they result in good things.
0:48:01 You have sovereignty over your own emotions
0:48:06 and the way you respond to and interpret every event of your life and life.
0:48:09 Like Naval Ramakas says, “Life is a one-player game.”
0:48:13 And you need to exercise and practice that sovereignty.
0:48:17 You need to develop rituals that give you the best chance
0:48:22 of enjoying your life to the fullest and being the joy in life.
0:48:25 Not waiting for something good to happen so you can feel happy.
0:48:28 Being happy so something good will happen.
0:48:31 Not waiting for someone to do something nice for you
0:48:32 so you can feel good.
0:48:35 Doing something nice for someone else to make them feel good.
0:48:37 And then you feel good by default.
0:48:44 So I didn’t have to handle any of that stuff when I was 21.
0:48:45 I saw a great example of that from you,
0:48:47 which was I think either you missed a flight
0:48:49 or you were delayed on a flight or something like that.
0:48:53 And I love this example because it’s so relatable.
0:48:57 Everybody’s been in this moment where it’s travel stressful
0:49:00 and then travel often feels out of your control,
0:49:02 whether it’s a flight delay or you miss your connection
0:49:03 or whatever it is.
0:49:07 And there’s the common cliche reaction to that.
0:49:09 And we actually all kind of have that reaction,
0:49:11 but it’s not always the response.
0:49:12 Can you tell that story?
0:49:14 Because I think that example is stood out to me.
0:49:18 Not everybody’s going to relate to being a pop star
0:49:19 or making great music,
0:49:21 but this was something everybody can relate to.
0:49:22 So I’d love if you could share this one.
0:49:25 I’ve been told in recording studios so many times
0:49:28 the lyric that I’m trying to write isn’t relatable.
0:49:31 Hey, Mike, you can’t put that in the song
0:49:33 because no one will relate to it.
0:49:37 Yeah, nobody else took a pill in the bees at a show of Ichi.
0:49:38 They were cool.
0:49:40 That was just me.
0:49:45 But everybody’s done something that wasn’t true to themselves
0:49:47 to try to gain the attention of someone else.
0:49:53 And so while the lyric on the surface is unrelatable,
0:49:57 the emotion underneath the lyric is universal.
0:49:59 And the same thing with all these stories.
0:50:01 My life is my life.
0:50:04 I’m the only guy I know that got nominated for the Grammy,
0:50:07 walked across a continent and climbed Everest.
0:50:09 And I did that by design, right?
0:50:11 Because I wanted to be the only guy to do that.
0:50:15 I wanted to have a life that was cool to me and unique to me.
0:50:19 Yeah, and part of it was ego that like,
0:50:20 “Hey, I want to be unique.”
0:50:24 But also I wanted my life to be inspiring to me.
0:50:29 But every element, every one of the stories we share today,
0:50:31 whether it’s a story from you or a story from me,
0:50:33 or survivor or what have you,
0:50:37 has human emotions underneath that are universal.
0:50:42 So the story you’re talking about is…
0:50:43 Yeah, I did a post.
0:50:45 I never talked about this.
0:50:47 This is a podcast world premiere.
0:50:55 I had this horrible travel day, man.
0:50:59 The day before wasn’t good and I didn’t sleep.
0:51:02 And I woke up early and we had to drive three hours to the airport
0:51:04 in Colorado.
0:51:06 And it was an accident at I-70.
0:51:11 And we just got in this traffic jam and we’re in the car seven hours.
0:51:12 Missed the flight.
0:51:15 And it was just, you know, I was feeling sorry for myself.
0:51:19 It was just stuff was bothering me in other parts of my life.
0:51:22 And it was a bad day, man.
0:51:25 I didn’t feel good physically, emotionally.
0:51:28 Everything was off.
0:51:33 And I remembered that I was on a Zoom call
0:51:42 at Tony Robbins conference about time and scheduling efficiency.
0:51:44 And in one of the breakout sessions,
0:51:46 one of the other participants said,
0:51:47 “When you’re having a bad day,
0:51:55 ask yourself, what could I do to make this a great day?”
0:51:59 And it just, it flashed back in my head while I was in that car.
0:52:01 I said, “Well, this is, okay, this is a bad day.
0:52:03 Check, here we go, we’re on the first part.”
0:52:07 I said, “What can I do to make this a great day?”
0:52:15 And I said, “Okay, if I could use the fact that I’m having a bad day
0:52:19 to do something nice for others, that would be a really cool thing.”
0:52:21 That would make me proud of myself.
0:52:24 And so I called my assistant.
0:52:25 I said, “Yeah, this is all messed up.
0:52:28 And I was missing family time.
0:52:33 I get only so many days of my family every year.
0:52:35 My mom, my sister, and I was missing one of them.
0:52:36 I was just bummed out.
0:52:39 I go, “Look, so we’re going to spend the night in Denver tonight.
0:52:43 Can you find me a place where I can just go volunteer?”
0:52:45 And I was money, actually show up, go serve.
0:52:48 And Stacey, she’s amazing.
0:52:49 She found me.
0:52:54 I forgot the name of the establishment,
0:52:59 but it was set up for people that were getting off of drugs.
0:53:01 And they could live there.
0:53:06 And they could have a house roof over their head and some meals
0:53:08 while they find a job and they get some training.
0:53:13 And I just show up to serve food.
0:53:19 And when I showed up there, I was still tired.
0:53:22 I physically had a headache, still all the same things.
0:53:23 But I was just proud.
0:53:30 I said, “Hey, I used my suffering, my having a bad day as an excuse,
0:53:32 not to go to bed, not to complain,
0:53:35 not to take it out on somebody else.
0:53:38 But I used that as an excuse to do something good for someone else.
0:53:39 So I did alchemy today.
0:53:42 I turned my suffering into a service.
0:53:44 I turned my suffering into a connection.
0:53:48 And that pride I felt in myself,
0:53:50 because I would usually not do that.
0:53:54 I would usually have a pity party in the hotel and look at my phone.
0:53:58 It just gave me all this pride.
0:54:02 And I say this, you know, when I speak a lot,
0:54:04 it’s true happiness comes from growth.
0:54:06 True happiness comes from growth.
0:54:10 It doesn’t come from getting everyone to like you.
0:54:11 It doesn’t come from getting the most followers.
0:54:13 It doesn’t come from a million dollars.
0:54:16 It doesn’t come from things going the right way for you,
0:54:18 the right way for you.
0:54:21 It comes from playing a part in the evolution of your own soul.
0:54:24 So it’s saying, “Hey, I usually do things this way.
0:54:26 What if I did something this way?”
0:54:35 And that day, I can truly say was one of the best days of my year without a doubt.
0:54:38 I went to bed proud.
0:54:41 And by the way, so much energy.
0:54:44 Yeah, there’s certain things that take energy,
0:54:46 that seem like they take energy, but actually give.
0:54:47 It’s like going to the gym.
0:54:49 Anybody who’s ever, you’re tired.
0:54:50 You don’t really want to go to the gym,
0:54:52 but you go to the gym, suddenly you have energy.
0:54:54 It’s like, wait, how’d that math work?
0:54:56 It was supposed to take energy to go work out,
0:54:58 but I have more than I had when I started.
0:54:59 It doesn’t make any sense, but it does.
0:55:01 It, to anybody who’s ever done it makes perfect sense.
0:55:05 It makes sense because if I would have stayed in the hotel room,
0:55:08 played on my phone, I would have got more and more tired.
0:55:13 Because I was engaging in an activity that I knew I don’t care about.
0:55:21 But when I engage in an activity that I know is going to do something to
0:55:26 make my soul grow, there’s unlimited energy.
0:55:29 So sometimes doing more is easier than doing less.
0:55:33 Sometimes a hard goal is easier than an easy goal.
0:55:36 Right. My trainer, he told me this story once,
0:55:38 but I love this. Very similar to your story just now.
0:55:42 He came to our workout in the morning and he’s beaming.
0:55:46 And he’s always a happy guy, but I could tell a little extra pep in the step.
0:55:49 What’s up, man? Hey, man, what’s going on, dude?
0:55:51 I thought I was looking like more fit or something.
0:55:52 I didn’t know what the reason was.
0:55:54 I was hoping secretly open, it was me.
0:55:57 But then he was like, he goes, well, for the last nine months,
0:56:00 I’ve been driving around with like an expired license.
0:56:04 And he’s like, I didn’t want to go to the DMV, so I avoided that pain.
0:56:07 But then every time I drove, I was paranoid all the time
0:56:08 that I was going to get pulled over.
0:56:10 And then if I got pulled over, it was going to become this mess.
0:56:12 And so he’s like, that was a little anxiety I was eating at me.
0:56:15 So today I woke up, I just decided I’m doing it differently.
0:56:18 So his thing is always just do it differently.
0:56:20 So do it differently than you used to do it in the past.
0:56:22 That simple thing.
0:56:24 So instead of trying to do things perfectly, just do it differently.
0:56:28 And you do that often enough, you end up getting pretty damn close to perfect.
0:56:29 And so he goes, I did it differently.
0:56:30 Oh, what’d you do differently?
0:56:34 And so he’s like, all right, where’s the local DMV?
0:56:37 He Googles it, and you know, Google, it shows you the star ratings.
0:56:40 And imagine a DMV’s star ratings, right?
0:56:43 Like there’s no DMV on earth with a five-star review, right?
0:56:45 So it’s like one and a half.
0:56:47 That experience was stellar.
0:56:47 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:50 So it’s like a one and a half star experience.
0:56:54 He’s like, oh man, the reason I haven’t been going, I’ve been dreading the DMV.
0:56:57 And I love this because it’s like everybody dreads a DMV.
0:56:59 So I love this.
0:57:01 He looks at that one and a half star and he goes,
0:57:05 okay, but I’m a sovereign being.
0:57:08 I don’t have to have a one and a half star experience.
0:57:09 That’s the average experience.
0:57:10 I’m gonna have a five-star experience.
0:57:12 How do you have a five-star experience?
0:57:13 It’s not by going in there and them giving you five-star.
0:57:16 It’s just by you walking in a five-star customer.
0:57:23 So he gets in his car, he drives to the DMV, no appointment, walks in, proud, happy, excited,
0:57:25 opens the door for some lady.
0:57:27 You know, it helps these people.
0:57:29 Hey, why don’t you guys go ahead of me?
0:57:31 Instead of everybody in the DMV rushing into line, you guys go ahead.
0:57:32 Yeah, have fun.
0:57:37 And then the lady he was joking around with while he was walking from the parking lot
0:57:40 in turns out she works at the DMV.
0:57:41 She sees him on the inside.
0:57:43 She’s like, what are we here for anyways?
0:57:45 He’s like, I’ve been driving on this expired license.
0:57:46 I’ve been so stressed out about it.
0:57:48 But I said, today is the day.
0:57:48 She goes, you’re right.
0:57:49 Today is the day.
0:57:50 Come over here.
0:57:51 Cuts the whole line, gives him the thing.
0:57:53 He doesn’t have to take the test, gives him the license.
0:57:58 He walks out of there like under 30 minutes with a five-star DMV experience.
0:57:58 Five stars.
0:57:59 And so he took that.
0:58:04 And he was like, yo, I just, like, this is like watching somebody part the seas.
0:58:07 It’s like, you have seen an act.
0:58:11 If you didn’t believe in manifestation before, if you didn’t believe that you control
0:58:13 your experience before, like, well, look what I just did with the DMV.
0:58:14 I love that story.
0:58:18 So I always held that one as like, yeah, you get to choose.
0:58:19 You get to choose your experience.
0:58:22 And like, I also like that message of like, don’t expect the world to be giving you this
0:58:23 five-star hospitality.
0:58:28 Five-star, like you be a five-star customer and watch how the universe sort of responds to you.
0:58:29 I love that.
0:58:31 So I thought you would like that one.
0:58:33 Yeah, thanks for that story, dude.
0:58:34 I want to remember that one.
0:58:36 That’s good.
0:58:38 I want to ask you about some things.
0:58:40 You mentioned Benny Blanco.
0:58:45 I got to ask you because I’m really fascinated by these people who are the influencers of
0:58:45 the influencers.
0:58:48 They’re the people who unlock creatives in some way or they’re,
0:58:50 they just have this like really high hit rate.
0:58:50 What’s going on?
0:58:52 What are they doing differently?
0:58:53 And we don’t know the answer.
0:58:55 He was telling me, he’s like, oh, I read some shitty, like, you know,
0:58:56 tries to create a safe space.
0:58:57 He kicks people out of the room.
0:58:58 He lights candles.
0:59:01 I was like, okay, I got to ask Mike about this.
0:59:03 What’s Benny Blanco’s superpower?
0:59:08 What does he do well that has enabled him to work with guys like you and get kind of great results?
0:59:12 From my perspective, it’s what you did, but it’s the intangibles.
0:59:14 It’s not the type of candle.
0:59:22 It’s he really has a gift for making artists who are a fickle bunch, right?
0:59:23 Can easily get scared.
0:59:27 Kind of like exotic birds, you know, get scared or like, you know, or sensitive.
0:59:31 In a good way, we pick up on things that other people don’t.
0:59:34 And then we can write about and help other people to see that.
0:59:36 You know, we see divine in the mundanity.
0:59:40 But as a result, you know, we can, we can feel someone’s energy.
0:59:42 A lot of artists go, yo, if that dude is weird, like,
0:59:47 it’s hard for us to write a song if there’s a weird dude in the room or, you know,
0:59:52 so he’s a master at, yeah, creating the physical space.
0:59:58 But him, he knows how to get the best out of the best people in the world.
1:00:00 You have people like that in your life, I’m sure.
1:00:04 Whether it’s family or friends that, gosh, you just feel comfortable around them.
1:00:06 So he has a gift for that.
1:00:13 And he also has great taste and his superpower, one of his superpowers is that.
1:00:19 And he’s also really fun to be around, you know, and like, I’m really driven type A.
1:00:23 When I first worked at Benny, he was the first person I did a real studio session with,
1:00:25 where it was in an actual recording studio.
1:00:31 You know, I’d written songs that Big Sean in my basement, but I’d never gone to a studio.
1:00:35 And I was always, man, we got to work hard.
1:00:37 And at that time, I’m paying by the hour for studio.
1:00:39 We got to make the song, let’s go.
1:00:43 And he was the first guy goes, dude, it doesn’t matter if we make a song today.
1:00:47 Let’s just be, and the song will come out.
1:00:50 And if it doesn’t, it’ll come next time, you know.
1:00:53 So he taught me how to collaborate.
1:00:58 He taught me a lot about, and hopefully I do that for other artists now too.
1:01:00 You know, other people when I collaborate.
1:01:01 But yeah, he has a gift for that.
1:01:06 I’m obsessed with these videos that are like, you know, some guys love the Roman Empire,
1:01:09 whatever, mine is like watching the making of these songs.
1:01:10 There’s so many of these on YouTube.
1:01:11 You’ve got a bunch of them on YouTube.
1:01:14 It’s like, you know, this grainy footage.
1:01:17 And you can hear them play the lick for the first time.
1:01:19 And they’re like, oh, yeah, I like that.
1:01:20 It’s like, that’s the song.
1:01:21 And you almost want to reach the stream like, that’s it.
1:01:24 That’s the song that we’re all going to love.
1:01:25 You just don’t realize you just did it.
1:01:30 There’s one of Benny and Ed Sheeran, I think at a tour bus where he’s like writing,
1:01:31 love yourself or something like that.
1:01:32 And they’re just messing around.
1:01:34 It was the same sort of vibe where he’s like sitting there across the leg of barefoot.
1:01:40 He’s like, it didn’t seem like there’s a lot of stress around like, what is the answer?
1:01:43 It was more just like, that’d be fun.
1:01:43 I like that.
1:01:47 You know, and he was just playful with it, which allowed them to play and be like,
1:01:48 you should go and fuck yours.
1:01:49 And they’re like, yeah, that’s great.
1:01:50 That’s a great line.
1:01:54 And it’s like, wasn’t the appropriate line, but it was the like fun line.
1:01:56 And because it got there, the song got there.
1:01:58 I’m pretty fascinated by those.
1:02:02 One of the things that I heard that Ed Sheeran said, I thought it was pretty interesting.
1:02:06 Yeah, there’s some documentary about him on Apple TV plus.
1:02:08 But he goes, it’s almost like a superstition.
1:02:13 He said, I believe that rooms have songs, rooms and instruments have songs.
1:02:17 Because to write his album, he wouldn’t just like go to a studio.
1:02:20 He would rent a farmhouse or some like cool inspiring space.
1:02:26 And he would build a mobile studio there, which was 85% as good as the like the best studio.
1:02:31 But the house would get like double the inspiration for him or the comfort for him in the band.
1:02:34 I thought that was very interesting.
1:02:39 The trade off between, you know, efficiency or, you know, picture perfect audio versus
1:02:41 creative inspiration.
1:02:45 Do you, how, what do you do with your environment to like get the most creative version of you?
1:02:46 Very similar.
1:02:49 You know, so first off, I love to work in immersions like that.
1:02:57 I have a studio in here and, you know, I mostly record myself when I’m home.
1:03:03 So my whole career, same as when I was in the dorm room, the mic’s a little better now.
1:03:08 But I have a laptop, nice mic, plugging a nice pre.
1:03:11 And I hit record on the laptop.
1:03:13 I sing until I mess up.
1:03:13 I hit stop.
1:03:15 I engineer the thing myself.
1:03:18 That way I can record whenever I want.
1:03:19 I don’t need another person.
1:03:21 I have to wait for someone else to come over.
1:03:25 But I love to work in immersion similar to what you just described with Ed,
1:03:28 which is that’s when the most stuff happens.
1:03:30 Hey, we’re going to take a bunch of talented people.
1:03:37 We’re going to go to a nice place that’s divorced from our normal duties.
1:03:40 And we’re just going to live and breathe this art for a week or two weeks.
1:03:43 Then we’re going to basically work till we die.
1:03:47 And then we take a couple of weeks off and we come back and do it again.
1:03:49 I like to work like that.
1:03:51 Is that where some of your songs have come out of?
1:03:52 Like a set up like that?
1:03:56 My songs have come from all over, you know?
1:03:59 So that’s my personal favorite way to do it.
1:04:02 But it’s not about what I like.
1:04:04 It’s, you know, the songs coming through.
1:04:05 So I get together.
1:04:06 So I’ve written songs on airplanes.
1:04:07 I’ve written songs here.
1:04:08 I’ve written songs in the morning.
1:04:09 I’ve written songs at night.
1:04:12 Written songs starting with piano licks.
1:04:14 Written songs starting with lyrics.
1:04:16 Written songs starting with melodies.
1:04:18 So pretty much every different way.
1:04:20 Hey, by the way, we having fun?
1:04:21 I’m having fun.
1:04:23 Where are we measuring up to your research, dude?
1:04:28 It’s higher because you gave me that iTunes U.
1:04:29 I’m better in real life.
1:04:32 That iTunes U story was amazing.
1:04:35 That’s like, you know, everybody’s got their favorite dish.
1:04:36 That’s my favorite dish.
1:04:40 It’s a combination of like the serendipity of things working out
1:04:42 for somebody 10 years in the making.
1:04:43 Like, I love that.
1:04:46 Everybody who’s trying to do shit, you want to hear stories
1:04:48 that, yeah, after 10 years, then it starts to work out.
1:04:50 There’s something we all need to hear those stories.
1:04:53 But then also you did engineer it in a way too.
1:04:56 Like you weren’t a passive observer to some lucky circumstance.
1:05:00 Like you took this, you took steps to like, hmm, observation.
1:05:01 Let me double down on that.
1:05:05 And you did things that there’s no textbook to say, make your pledges,
1:05:07 change their profile pictures and invite people.
1:05:08 But it makes sense at the same time.
1:05:09 So I love that story.
1:05:10 Thank you.
1:05:12 I want to ask you about the walk.
1:05:16 But also the walk or Everest or the silent meditations.
1:05:20 But I book at them all under one philosophy, which is do hard things.
1:05:24 Is that the right description of your philosophy?
1:05:25 Why you would climb Everest?
1:05:26 Why you would walk across America?
1:05:30 What’s the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
1:05:30 Yeah.
1:05:36 They were larger examples of the airport day gone wrong, going to volunteer.
1:05:42 My life is maybe too easy right now.
1:05:44 And that’s why it doesn’t feel right.
1:05:48 So I’m going to make a harder goal.
1:05:50 I’m going to make my life harder.
1:05:54 But then paradoxically, my life feels easier when I’m doing the harder thing.
1:05:58 So they’ve hit on a lot of things that we touched on today.
1:06:04 And I think that’s true probably of walking across the US, climbing Everest,
1:06:08 and doing some longer meditation retreats.
1:06:11 Can you take me back to one of them where you were?
1:06:15 Life is easy, but doesn’t feel quite right.
1:06:18 I don’t have the same level of joy I should be having on paper.
1:06:22 And then the decision, what the voice said that made you go do one of those.
1:06:23 Can you walk me through that?
1:06:27 Yeah, with the walk across America.
1:06:34 I was at a friend’s jewelry shop and someone across the room said,
1:06:37 my friend just walked across America.
1:06:39 And it was like a tractor beam.
1:06:41 I went, I said, what did you just say?
1:06:44 He said, my friend walked.
1:06:45 I go, you can do that.
1:06:46 I guess he did it.
1:06:48 No one else cared about it.
1:06:50 I’m like, what’s up with you, man?
1:06:57 And I said out loud in that jewelry shop.
1:06:58 I’m going to do that one day.
1:07:01 I actually don’t think I said, I said, I want to do that one day.
1:07:07 And the sentence lingered in the jewelry shop like a fart no one wanted to claim.
1:07:14 And everyone just sort of went back to whatever they were talking about before I said it.
1:07:20 Fast forward four years later, four or five years later, my father dies from brain cancer.
1:07:25 And think about six months after that.
1:07:33 My assistant at the time, Nick comes to pick me up, take me to the studio session that day.
1:07:37 And he said, hey, man, Avicii’s dead.
1:07:41 Avicii is a friend of mine that I worked with in the music studio.
1:07:43 I worked with him a few weeks before.
1:07:45 He said, Avicii’s dead.
1:07:47 I go, don’t fuck with me, man.
1:07:48 He said, I’m not fucking with you.
1:07:49 Avicii’s dead.
1:07:53 I said, I can’t, I couldn’t believe this.
1:07:58 And I get in his car, he drives in the studio and I keep saying, I can’t believe this.
1:08:01 And while I’m saying I can’t believe this out loud,
1:08:05 there’s one thought going through my head that I can’t make stop.
1:08:08 It’s, I have to walk across America.
1:08:10 I have to walk across America.
1:08:11 I have to walk across America.
1:08:12 I have to walk across America.
1:08:15 And it was this proximity of death.
1:08:22 I was saying, hey, dude, you see that man that gave you your life?
1:08:24 The one that you look just like?
1:08:26 He’s dead.
1:08:29 That’s what’s going to happen to you.
1:08:32 You see that other man who does the same job as you?
1:08:34 You guys do the same.
1:08:37 You do concerts, you’re in the studio with him last week.
1:08:37 He’s dead.
1:08:40 That’s what’s going to happen to you.
1:08:43 Maybe not in the same way, but this is a return trip.
1:08:45 Another couple of weeks pass.
1:08:50 I’m in this shitty little guest house that I’m renting in West Hollywood.
1:08:54 Bouncing around studios, trying to make my next hit.
1:09:00 And my friend Willie calls me and he goes, hey, Mike, I got bad news.
1:09:04 We’re our best friends that we grew up with.
1:09:05 His name is Ronnie.
1:09:06 He goes, Ronnie’s dead.
1:09:08 Oh, shit.
1:09:12 And I just realized, dude, I’m going to die.
1:09:18 Before I die, I want to live the life that I actually wanted to live.
1:09:19 And I wasn’t doing it.
1:09:23 I was living the life that I thought my manager thought I should live.
1:09:26 Truly.
1:09:29 I was living the life that I, I was 30 years old,
1:09:32 living the life that 20 year old me had set up.
1:09:36 And it was, it was pain.
1:09:39 I walked across America because I was in pain.
1:09:43 And I wanted to figure out a different way.
1:09:51 When you were doing it, did you, like a lot of times the reason I do something
1:09:53 isn’t the thing I get out in a great way.
1:09:56 I go in for one reason and I come out with,
1:09:58 it’s like going to Chuck E. Cheese to play the games.
1:10:00 You get all these prizes at the end.
1:10:02 You didn’t even realize that’s, that’s how the tickets work.
1:10:05 What were the prizes you got at the end of that?
1:10:14 Found a part of myself that was, that was so much stronger than I ever knew was even there.
1:10:18 Not only found a part of myself,
1:10:26 unleashed a part of myself that I previously didn’t know was there.
1:10:30 Dude, I got bit by a poisonous rattlesnake.
1:10:32 I spent three nights in the ICU.
1:10:33 I got airlifted.
1:10:35 I got told by dispatch.
1:10:36 I might not live.
1:10:37 I got told by doctors.
1:10:39 It might take me eight months to heal.
1:10:42 I got, you know, told by other doctors.
1:10:43 I might lose my foot.
1:10:48 This is like, and I did a crazy thing, dude.
1:10:49 I went back.
1:10:50 I kept going.
1:10:55 Everyone expected me to quit because probably because the old me was such a bitch.
1:11:01 You know, I was like, my whole life was about me and everything.
1:11:02 Me being comfortable.
1:11:05 And so like, I’m going to do the opposite.
1:11:07 I’m going to be a five-star Walker.
1:11:08 Right.
1:11:09 But do it different.
1:11:10 I’m going to do it different.
1:11:14 I’m not going to use this injury as an excuse to do less.
1:11:16 I’m going to use it as an excuse to do more.
1:11:22 And yeah, I get to do podcasts and talk about it.
1:11:24 And this thing is on my Wikipedia page.
1:11:30 And the real trophies that you asked is, I became someone new.
1:11:39 And that part of me is, it is so different having an inkling.
1:11:40 You’re strong.
1:11:45 You’re strong versus knowing you’re strong because you were strong.
1:11:48 And I was strong in a way I hadn’t been before.
1:11:49 That’s amazing.
1:11:53 I think that the, there’s this concept of misogy.
1:11:54 Have you heard of this?
1:11:56 We’ve talked about it on the pod before.
1:11:59 It’s got Jesse Itzler came on.
1:12:00 Oh, I love Jesse Itzler.
1:12:02 He’s a good friend, man.
1:12:03 Yes, so Jesse came on.
1:12:04 Anything for Jesse Itzler.
1:12:06 I like that.
1:12:07 For real.
1:12:12 He’s one of my like, I don’t ever use the word like mentors or heroes or anything,
1:12:14 but like I call him blue print, blueprints.
1:12:18 So I look for people who live interesting lives that I’m like, oh, that could be.
1:12:20 I like the way that house is laid out.
1:12:21 Maybe I could steal some of that blueprint.
1:12:22 Same.
1:12:23 He’s that for me too.
1:12:27 And by the way, a friend spent time with him off the, off the record.
1:12:27 Yeah.
1:12:28 He’s that guy.
1:12:29 Yeah.
1:12:31 That’s actually something I always wonder because on the podcast,
1:12:32 you always see people’s, you know, hopefully best.
1:12:34 He’s that guy, dude, 24.
1:12:36 I’ve been with him or watching with his kids.
1:12:37 He’s that guy.
1:12:42 So he’s got, he has this idea of Kevin’s rule and he’s got the Missogi,
1:12:45 which is like, Missogi is like the one, one grand challenge a year.
1:12:48 One ambitious, hard thing you’re going to do,
1:12:50 whether it’s super physical or it might be some other thing.
1:12:51 Like I have mine, which is,
1:12:54 can I go 24 hours straight without a complaint in my head?
1:12:56 That’s my, that’s my Missogi.
1:12:58 It’s harder for me than a, you know, an Iron Man or anything like that.
1:13:00 That’s dope, dude.
1:13:01 I want to try that too.
1:13:02 That’s a superpower.
1:13:04 Not in your mouth, in your head, dude.
1:13:05 Yeah, yeah.
1:13:06 Anybody could not say it.
1:13:07 But I’m saying it to myself.
1:13:09 It’s the conversation I’m having in my head is the big one all day.
1:13:10 So good, man.
1:13:12 And so I’m really working on that.
1:13:13 And it’s so funny.
1:13:16 You, you see it, you’re like, and actually you’re a Tony Robbins guy.
1:13:17 I’m a Tony Robbins guy too.
1:13:20 He said a phrase, which made me realize how important this was.
1:13:24 He says he goes on some trip and he meets some guy in India or whatever.
1:13:28 And the guy goes, asked him something about suffering.
1:13:31 And he’s like, yeah, I’m Tony Robbins.
1:13:34 Like, I don’t know if you know this, but suffering.
1:13:36 Is it what usually people describe me as like, you know,
1:13:39 I’m driving a powerful, successful, all these things.
1:13:43 He’s over, he’s, I didn’t say that to him, but that was an internal feeling was like,
1:13:44 what do you mean suffering?
1:13:48 And he’s like, well, I just saw you kind of yelling at your guy over there.
1:13:50 He said, well, no, he wasn’t doing his job.
1:13:53 And so I had to, you know, immediately, you know, demand the performance.
1:13:57 And the guy brought to his awareness like, man,
1:14:00 there are so many of these little moments every day where you’re losing your state,
1:14:02 this beautiful state that you’re in.
1:14:03 And then it goes away.
1:14:06 And he said it like, he said, how cheap is your happiness?
1:14:10 Like, how little does it, how much, how little of inconvenience does it take?
1:14:12 If I spill this water on this desk right now,
1:14:15 do you lose that beautiful state or you stay in it?
1:14:16 Because if you lose it, then that was cheap, man.
1:14:18 That was so easy to knock you out of that.
1:14:19 And I heard that.
1:14:23 And that was like, ooh, that’s a, it’s a thing I want.
1:14:27 And when I look at your story about like the things you wanted in your 20s,
1:14:31 the success, the fame, the money, the love of everybody.
1:14:35 Like those are the things all of us want, at least in our 20s is often our whole lives.
1:14:41 And a big part of life seems to be just figuring out what are you supposed to actually want?
1:14:44 You know, I wanted this, I achieved this.
1:14:46 Oh shit, worst case scenario.
1:14:49 I’ve realized I didn’t even want the right thing in the first place.
1:14:51 I played a game that was rigged for me to lose.
1:14:56 So, you know, some of your story reminds me of that philosophy that has served me well.
1:15:02 It’s so well said and, and I believe the person that Tony was talking to was Christian G.
1:15:02 Yeah.
1:15:06 And, and so Christian G and his wife, Pretenant G, are these amazing,
1:15:09 and they teach that there’s only two kinds of states,
1:15:13 beautiful states and suffering states.
1:15:17 And there’s all different types of suffering states and types of beautiful states.
1:15:22 Joy, laughter, you know, calm, serenity or pain, depression, you know,
1:15:23 self-pity, you name it, right?
1:15:25 But there’s really only two states.
1:15:33 And so I think what all of us really want is to have more beautiful states, less suffering states.
1:15:35 And so we’re talking about tools to get there.
1:15:36 What do you want?
1:15:38 That’s what you want, I think.
1:15:42 Right, the problem is we convince ourselves that we want the middleman,
1:15:45 we think the middleman, the promotion gives us the beautiful state.
1:15:45 Well, yeah.
1:15:47 The achievement gives us the beautiful state.
1:15:51 Anything you want, you want because you think it’s going to give you a better state.
1:15:55 And maybe it will momentarily, but the trick of the game is,
1:15:56 hey, you don’t have to wait for the thing.
1:15:57 Right.
1:15:57 Feel it now.
1:15:59 Feel it right now.
1:16:02 And if you can, if you can win that game, you’ve won life.
1:16:03 Right.
1:16:03 Right.
1:16:06 And so nobody’s perfect.
1:16:08 I don’t know anybody.
1:16:09 You, you know a lot of these guys too.
1:16:11 We just met, so now you know.
1:16:11 Right, right.
1:16:19 But like you, we get to spend time with a lot of these teachers and gurus.
1:16:27 So I haven’t met one yet that’s 100% in a beautiful state, but we can work more towards
1:16:31 there and we need external goals.
1:16:32 So that’s a lot of my message.
1:16:35 Hey, you set a, you set a goal that actually inspires you.
1:16:37 That’s Victor Frankel, man search for meaning.
1:16:39 You need something in the future looking forward to.
1:16:40 It’s important.
1:16:47 At the same time, you need to be winning this internal game of, hey, that’s my goal.
1:16:49 But how do I want to feel as I’m going after it?
1:16:55 That’s a different kind of goal that, that interweaves with your external goal.
1:17:01 And most people forget to set that one and they lose, they lose life.
1:17:06 They might win on the vertical axis or they might win on the horizontal axis,
1:17:08 but they lose in the depth, the vertical axis.
1:17:10 So that’s it, man.
1:17:13 It’s such a, thank you for bringing that story as a great reminder.
1:17:14 And that’s it.
1:17:16 That’s all we’re trying to do, man.
1:17:24 And so any of these like tips or tools or stories or, you know, it’s all to, to win that game.
1:17:24 Right.
1:17:24 Yeah.
1:17:28 Well, listen man, I appreciate you inviting me out to your house and appreciate you doing this.
1:17:28 Thank you, bro.
1:17:29 That’s been great.
1:17:29 Great fun.
1:17:30 It has been great.
1:17:31 Peace.
1:17:33 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:17:39 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like my days off on the road.
1:17:39 Let’s travel.
1:17:40 Never looking back.
1:17:42 Bye.
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