Digital Social Hour - Walking Across the USA, Climbing Mt Everest & Near Death Experiences I Mike Posner DSH #420

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Mike Posner comes to the show to talk about his journey of walking across the United States, climbing Mt Everest & near death experiences APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/D2cLkWfJx46pDK1MA BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was getting ready to start my 17th and I just felt this pain shoot up my leg. I thought, you know, what the hell was that? As soon as I had that question, I heard the sound I didn't want to hear. Oh no. Shh. And I realized that poisonous rattlesnake had just bit me. Dang. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys. Very special episode today. Mike Posner's in the building. How's it going, my man?

It's going well. Dude, the moment you walked in, I felt episode today. Mike Posner's in the building. How's it going, my man? It's going well. Dude, the moment you walked in, I felt your energy. Thank you. Yeah, you're different, man. I appreciate that. I'm just your reflection. Man, your story is amazing. I mean, you walked across the country. Yes, 2019, I started on the East Coast and walked on foot to the West Coast of the US. Incredible. And it took you six

months right it took six months and three days that is insane i had to get on the other side one rattlesnake bite where'd you get bit and not which state i got bit um i was about two thirds of the way through the journey 1797 miles i had walked and you And just to give you an idea, I started with two feet in the Atlantic Ocean. So at this point, I had walked across New Jersey. I had walked across Pennsylvania. I had walked across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas. And I'm in the Colorado,

and I could just see the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. Beautiful. And that was really an exciting feeling to see those mountains and know that I had gotten that far on foot. And at that point in the journey, I was doing 24 miles a day, and it hurt bad. My feet were in bad shape. And worse than the physical pain was the mental suffering that went on top of that,

which was a lot of uncertainty. It wasn't clear to me whether the damage I was doing to my body or the pain I was feeling was going to be permanent or not. But I wasn't. I was past the point of, you know turning turning back or giving up and so i'd walk 16 miles that day and um just getting ready to start my 17th and just felt this pain shoot up my leg and i thought you know what what the hell was that as soon as i had that question i heard

the sound i didn't want to hear oh no and i realized that poisonous rattlesnake it just bit me dang how big was it it was actually a baby snake okay which is said to be more dangerous because i guess they like blow their entire load of venom as opposed to regulating them like more mature adults wow um but and i actually never saw the snake you know i just felt the snake i heard the snake and you know they're not kind of out for the count down for the you got knocked out i sat down and at first no i didn't get knocked out i just i've just felt this stinging in my ankle but to be honest with you the pain from the bite it wasn't worse than the pain i was already in not even close right so i was like you know i'm

kind of making jokes and whatever and um there were a few guys there with me, and I was just trying to keep it light. And they were starting to get a little nervous. And one of them, John, you know, looked at his phone. There's no service. So he, like, runs up the road to try to get a bar of service, calls 911, and comes back with the phone. It still has her on the line. And I asked dispatch, you know, what's going on?

She said, I sent an ambulance from the last town you were in and another ambulance from the town you're going to, and I sent a helicopter. And whatever gets there first, get in. And I said, am I going to die? And she said, I don't know sir whoa and after the venom started to make its way through my body well darkness started to cloud my awareness and i was kind of fading out i was fading out and i would kind of just like disappear and so after the initial uh kind of like joking around where i was just like it

doesn't hurt that bad like once the once the poison started to get into me it didn't really hurt it just i i would disappear and i'd wake up and i realized you know this this is not a beast thing wow this could be the last day of my life that's insane so what got there first the helicopter actually the um ambulance got there first you know mind you this is small town so these are like volunteers you know they're not even these are people who who work ems out of the goodness of their heart you know they have another job they got there first they took me to la junta hospital and um when i got there i i faded out again that's what it came to and they they gave me anti-venom and eventually they gave me all the all the anti-venom that they had

and then they airlifted me to a bigger hospital wow yeah that is crazy man it was cool being in the chopper you know you have such a positive outlook it was cool it was crazy they kept trying to drug me yeah and you didn't want that oh i had been walking across america and every place i went no matter if it was uh white people black people rural urban every single place i went the the locals of the town would tell me there's a horrible drug problem here as if it was like unique to their little town. And so I kept thinking about that and they just like, yeah, they kept offering me like narcotics.

I was like, yeah, this hurts for sure, but not that bad. Yeah. You know, they're like, are you sure?

I'm like, yeah, I'm sure. Wow. The fact that they're that accessible is pretty scary. Yeah. Like you could just say you're in pain and get them, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's definitely a problem. You also accessible is pretty scary. Yeah. Like you could just say you're in pain and get them, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a problem. You also climbed Everest, right? Yeah, man. So Everest, stuff happens like Everest is one of the gifts from the snake bite. So in hindsight, the snake venom was medicine. And you hear a lot about people taking plant medicine. Yeah, yeah.

Take the thing and a few hours later you get this lesson. Well, with the snake venom, it took a little bit longer for me. So I had to go to the hospital five days. I had to go home. I couldn't really walk. I had a walker and crutches and i'm not done you know i've walked two-thirds of my journey and the funny thing starts to happen is uh everyone takes care of me i'm just getting all this attention for being hurt and actually like uh the story of my snake bite got picked up by a lot of the mainstream

news yeah i remember seeing that and so i started to get more famous from being injured and subconsciously there was a part of me that didn't want to get better that that linked being hurt with getting love wow and so that part of me didn't want to get better and i'm sitting there and even though my leg is like now the size of an elephant trunk and all this stuff like the rest of my body is really enjoying it i'm in air conditioning now people are cooking for me all my heroes are dming me telling me to feel better soon, bro. And after about three weeks, this funny thing happened, Sean, I started to heal. And are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below. And here's the episode, guys. I had a decision to make. I'm either going to go back to my life before the walk, which was a life of luxury and Uber Eats and playing in the sandbox of West Hollywood, or I'm going to return to the snake riddled roads of Colorado 10,

the blistering foot pain and the sweltering heat. And I knew that I had the best reason to quit of all time. I almost died. I almost lost my leg. When I really thought about it, that reason was really just like an excuse in disguise and i knew most people would just think if i quit it was just like a cool story with now a bad ending but i wasn't doing it for most people i was doing it because i myself like the snake was was shedding a layer of skin wow and it wasn't all the way off yet and so i i took my back to the exact spot that

those fangs went in my leg and i took a step and i kept taking steps until i got to those rocky mountains and everybody told me you're gonna have to slow down there high elevation and i kept taking steps so i went up and over them jeez and at that point i got the the medicine from the snake venom which was i and all of us, I could do anything. I could be, do, or have anything. And that's when kind of pipe dreams and fantasies about Mount Everest started to transform from fantasies into a plan. Because I knew I had never climbed a mountain. I had never held an ice axe i never worn crampons

me trying to go from never doing any of the never doing any of those things and belonging on the tallest mountain in the world was gonna be a journey of nothing but pain suffering and literal blood sweat and tears was everest harder than the country one well at this point in the story like i don't even on everest i'm just thinking about oh god and i'm thinking like yeah it's gonna be hard but look at who look at my i do hard that's who i am now it's not who i was before that snake bite so going to your question, it actually was harder. And after I walked across those Rocky Mountains,

I walked across the rest of Colorado and the Navajo Nation and part of New Mexico and Arizona and part of Nevada and into California, people started texting me prematurely, congratulations. In my head, I'm like, for what? I'm done. There's a desert here. I'm in the middle of love. There's rattlesnakes here. There's another mountain range.

That's Mambo mentality right there. Yeah, I kept going. And I remember this moment where I was getting closer to L.A. And this car pulled to the side. These three young kids, they were on their way from Vegas back to LA. And they, they smelled like they were from LA. They got those cologne wafts out of the air and they had these flowy black,

they looked like they were from LA. Designer clothing. They looked like how I used to look. And, maybe this is like mean to say but I pitied them I pitied them because they're still playing in that sandbox and I walked across the rest of California, and I kept taking steps until the Hollywood sign's on my right, and the pavement turned into sand, and after six months, three days, 2,851 miles,

I dove in the ocean. That was one of the best days of my life. But I was so scared of going back. I had, you said mama mentality i call that for me i call it snake bite now that's the part of me that's the dog my mom's never met that part of me my friends they're like hopefully knowing me but it's there and i found it i was so scared of losing it because the the edifice of the walk across America every day, 4 a.m. You can't roll out of bed whenever you want because it's too hot.

4 a.m., you get up. Never push snooze. It's like you barely stand up, you're so sore. I'm going to do 24 anyways. Heat wave, I don't care. Floods, I don't care. I go. And so the edifice of that project the way it was set

up was every day i got to i got to hang out with snake bite once the journey was over i was terrified that basically i was becoming yeah and so that was part of why i wanted to do everest you know it's like there was, I sensed there was more inside me when I started the walk. You know, I started off like this nice Jewish boy who wrote songs in rooms with no windows in West Hollywood. Then I did this journey, and I'm like, whoa, there's not a little more in me.

There's a lot more. When I got in the ocean, ocean didn't feel like an ending it felt like a beginning you know beginnings hide themselves and ends and so the the fear of going back to old mike and the sense of being able to do anything combined with the Blake canvas that now seemed to be my life, all combined to me going to Nepal and trying to climb Mount Everest. Crazy journey, man. Yeah. You went from a world in the music industry where it's all about money, looks, appearance,

and you totally did a 360, right? Well, it just became really clear to me that I was attempting to find peace by making the external circumstances of my life just right. And so my life was becoming more and more luxurious. And I was like, maybe, and I didn't feel at peace. So I'm thinking to myself, like, maybe I need to achieve a little more, or maybe I just need to move from this house to that house. Or maybe I shouldn't be hanging out with that friend. Maybe I need to go to this part.

And I start to really obsess over the minor intricacies of the external realities of my life. And I just got to a point where like, this is not working. This is not working. I think I need to do the opposite. I think I need to make my life less luxurious because the more comfortable I get, the softer I get, the more dependent I am on things being just perfect. And if like, I don't get my drink at the right time

or whatever, then I'm like, I have a bad day? This is not, it didn't feel like I was a man. I felt like a little boy in a 31-year-old's body. Wow. And in a lot of lineages, there's some sort of rite of passage, a bar mitzvah, a communion, or a vision quest. You know, it's like, I need to give myself one of those. And so, you're right.

Everything that used to be bad became good. Everything that was good became bad. Like, I used to hate when it rained in la you know i was like man it's raining i'm kind of like no low low energy now and whatever now it's like i'll go out to train for the walk like i hope it rains today because the walk's gonna be harder the walk's gonna be harder than. The walk's going to be harder than this. It's going to get harder than this. Everything that I'm training for is harder than my training. So I hope my training is the same.

When I started getting ready for Everest, I remember when someone said, it's going to be 30 degrees out. I go, ****. By the time I was going to Everest, 30 degrees was a hot day. Wow. Absolutely a hot day. That meant I wasn't going to have to bring most of my gear.

That meant I didn't have to bring my outer layers. That meant I was probably going to be wearing tights with some short. It meant a lot of things, but one thing it didn't mean was it's cold cold was now like negative 20 damn that's a cold day you know cold zero and so i'll be out there and i'm like i hope it when i'm training i hope it's worse i hope it gets worse and everything that the more uncomfortable the better and, the more uncomfortable, the better. And the more discomfort, the more freedom I had, the less stipulations I needed, the less boxes had to be checked in order for me to feel peace.

Wow. Yeah. That's some David Goggin stuff right there, man. Well, Goggin is a big inspiration for me. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know, and I love him. I got the chance to chat with him briefly.

Nice. Between the walk and the mountain. And he is almost prophetic. I spoke to him and I just finished the walk. And he said, so what are you up to now i said i'm gonna do everest now i'm a year i'm like a year and a half away i'm just starting the journey yeah he said you know when you're there there might be some people that don't come back the weather's gonna be up everything's be up and you know mentally you have to decide to go anyways and that's exactly what happened damn that's exactly what happened you serious yeah i mean

it's exactly what happens every year there but this is exactly what happened holy crap so people didn't come back on your trip yeah man yeah you know scary um the death rate on everest is one percent you know so every hundred people one obviously doesn't come back and for me there was a guy uh there was a guy that i had been on another expedition with who was way way more competent than me it was his it was his 10th time going for the summit he had he had summited everest nine times wow over the 10th and he was a he was a guide yeah he had a client and um he came down they they chose a different weather window than than john my coach, and I. And so much of Everest is mental.

Because every day you're getting weather reports from a couple of different meteorologists, and you're making decisions. And the decisions need to be made dispassionately because they hold your life in the balance. And you're also, also unfortunately having to make decisions about group psychology for example there might be some weather that rolls in for two three weeks and no one's climbing and now there's a window of three days of good weather we'll look at that and go everyone is so anxious from sitting around two, three weeks.

They're all going to go on the first good day. So maybe we go on the second or the third good day. Because unfortunately, there's too many people there. Oh, it's packed? Yeah, it's too many people. Oh, I didn't know that. It's not packed, but there's too many people. Packed is relative.

So it's this giant mountain, but there's one route on it. So it's still like the people are covering up 0.01% of this mountain. But you can still get caught behind a slow walker. Exactly. Yeah, this guy who had a client, he made a different decision than us. They went up on an earlier window. We decided it would be a little more. We thought we could get better weather if we waited longer yeah they went up they both came down his client was fine they summited but he got snow blind and got frostbite on all 10 of

his fingers whoa i'm sitting there looking like dude this guy, this guy is way better than me. It was really scary. You must have wanted to turn back at that point. I mean, I hadn't even started. I was at base camp. Oh, wow. Yeah, I wanted to quit before I started. Dang.

And I was having serious doubts. And the interesting thing about Everest is we we talk about why why is really important in any anything in life right like because anything worth doing is going to have some moment in it where you don't feel like doing it right and all the juice all the all the gift is on the other side of that feeling yeah it's pushing through the not wanting to do it but what what helps you push through what gets you to the other side to that juice to that gift is having a strong why and for me these everest had a way of just like killing my why's like one of them was this was the least valid one i just i wanted to be cool one of you guys did everest

right that wasn't the main reason i was there but let's have integrity 20 10 20 that's in the pot mixed around right i already knew that why i was before i got there right so of course that one is dead my next why i was like i wanted to find out what was inside of me, explore my own potential. Now, this why is like awesome on the surface, but when I got really close to death and I'm seeing dead bodies and we had a scare with avalanche at Camp 2, I'm like, man, exploring your potential is something all of us should do, but it's a really stupid thing to die for.

It's a really selfish thing to die for, and there's other ways to explore your potential other than absolutely risking my life. And so the only thing I really had left was my integrity. Because at this point, this might sound crazy, but I said I was going to do it. And for me, having that internal integrity of knowing when I say something, when I say I'm going to do something, it gets done. Like my words have that much power in them.

Maintaining that, it still was valid. Everything else told me this is a horrible idea. This is scary. I might lose my feet. I might lose my toes. I might lose my life. Everything was pulling me down like gravity. Even the whys that gave me juice to get there, like exploring my potential, were now becoming weights pulling me down. This commitment to integrity was the only thing that kept me going up. Wow.

Yeah, man, it was a wild journey. Crazy journey. But on June 1st at 4.35 a.m., you know, I got to be on the summit. Amazing. With John and Dawah Dorje and Dawah Cheering, our team. And, yeah, it's one of the best moments of my life yeah you probably can't even describe it in words must have been it's like the closest i'll ever get to be in combat because it's just so real and the bodies and

the element of coming back to the real world and no one understanding except for the guys you were with and the brotherhood that exists from that fact alone. You survived an avalanche with those guys. That's something you can't ever. That was a crazy, Camp 2 was a a crazy one that's my least favorite so the avalanche thing um this is what happened we're at camp two and camp two is is my least favorite place on earth how come because there's one third of the oxygen that we're

breathing in the air right now yeah if you take the oxygen we're breathing right now there's only one third the air we're breathing right now excuse me there's only one third the amount of oxygen in the air there got it so you're just falling apart. I'm in incredible shape at this point in my journey. I had to be to get there. When I walked 10 steps from my tent to go take a piss somewhere, I'm breathing like this. I'm not exaggerating when i lay down and go to sleep the respiratory respiratory rate naturally slows when we go to sleep all for all of us when i would close my eyes go to sleep there my body would think it

was suffocating so i'd sleep for about 10 seconds and then my body would go i don't know if oxygen so i didn't sleep we got to camp two and we knew there was a storm coming in but we wanted to be there because there's a weather window after that storm so on really big mountains you know when it snows a lot you don't go climb really steep stuff right because that's when things slide that's when avalanches happen so we were just staying put in camp two which we thought was relatively safe and uh i'm laying next to Dr. John, my coach, and he's sleeping somehow. He's an OG. He's done it before.

He's done it several times before in other serious mountains. So he's asleep, and I can't sleep for the reason I just described. And the sound of Avalanche, the rum rumble is a sound i had become accustomed to even from base camp you'd hear multiple times per day wow these big rumbles it was a scary sound but you would hear the sound and you would look and you would see it was some giant thing very far away the scale of these mountains is just unfathomable it's unfathomable right and so over time over the weeks i was there i learned that the the sound didn't mean anything you know it just meant avalanche was happening

somewhere far away so i heard heard this night at Camp 2. I'm laying with John, and I hear the sound. Big, bassy, rumbly sound. I wish I could do it better. If I had a deeper voice, I could give it to you. And I don't think anything of it because I've heard the sound so many times. It's like when you live in a city, you hear the alarm. It doesn't bother you.

Come from the country, you move to the city, the alarm scares the shit out of you. Right. So it's like when you live in a city you hear the alarm yeah it doesn't bother yeah come from the country you move the city the alarm scares out of you right so it's like that i'd become a city boy in this context so i don't think anything of it i hear the rumble and then all of a sudden hell just breaks loose and our tent starts to shake uncontrollably our tent rips open snow starts to blast me in the face starts to fill up my sleeping bag and i start to scream oh i scream john john john avalanche i mean this is by now i've been training a year and a half. I've climbed 72 mountains. Like I know a little enough about avalanches to know that being in one at camp two on Mount Everest means that I'm dead.

Whoa. Like there's not going to be any sort of meaningful search and rescue. Like even if i survive it how the am i gonna get back to where i am on the route how like i'm dead i'm not thinking i might be dead i'm thinking i'm dead damn like this is this is it this is the end of my life And it wasn't a feeling of peace or serenity. It was a feeling of terror. Wow. John wakes up, comes screaming his name.

He puts his hand on my arm. Out of a dead sleep, looks at me and says, mind you, while all hell is breaking loose, puts his hand on my arm, looks at me and says, mind you, while all hell is breaking loose, puts his hand on my arm, looks at me and says, it's going to be all right. Almost like magic. The snow stops blasting me in the face. The winds stop.

Everything goes back to normal. And what actually happened was the avalanche stopped just before hitting our camp. Wow. But it displaced so much air that what we were feeling was the air blast, which is also incredibly dangerous and can kill you. Because it could just blow you off the mountain. Correct.

But it didn't, so we were lucky. We were lucky. And I think about that moment because so often in life, we feel purposeless. We're not sure what the next step is. We ask these really big questions of ourselves that maybe aren't fair, like what am I on earth to do?

You're not God. You don't know that yet. And sometimes, I think, purpose is just to be that person that puts your metaphorical hand on someone's arm and says, it's going to be okay. Because people are in avalanches all around us all day. Whoa, that's deep.

And you see them, and I see them. They're in psychological avalanches. They're in psychological avalanches. They're in emotional avalanches. They're in physical avalanches. And I think about the gift that John gave me in that moment, and it was so inherent to his being. You didn't have to think about it. He woke up out of a dead sleep and said that.

And that's a gift we can all give each other you know as we go through life yeah it's gonna be okay man so you've had multiple near-death experiences those are two two yeah that's my two two uh close calls you're still at it man now you're planning another 3 000 mile walk right i mean it's it's a dream unannounced dream but yeah i got we could talk no secrets like i've been sort of fantasizing maybe about doing the the pct okay this summer so we'll see i'm not i haven't committed to that you know yet but i'm researching it yeah yeah got my eyes on it that's cool man got my eyes on it dude your story is crazy when it goes to training for these how many months just goes into that part of it so the walk is kind of interesting you know i probably trained three four months and the the training is kind of silly in hindsight i'm

like just walking around right walking around la you know and at a certain point um the training just naturally morphed into the walk itself like i was walking around la and i walk eight miles and then my first day to walk i think i walked eight miles or ten miles and then i slowly ramped up and by the end last week i was doing 30 miles a day so the train like the kind of trained on it in some ways everest was a year and a half full-time um living in the mountains moving to a place where i was at high altitude 24 7 and just turning my life over to this project. Still writing music, but it was, everything was secondary to getting ready to, not just climb Everest, but to belong on Everest.

I didn't want, I wasn't interested in just going there. When you go to Everest, there's a lot of people that don't belong there. I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in belonging there and going on the journey to, like, crush myself into becoming a mountaineer. And so that took 18 months full time. And in those 18 months, I climbed 71 mountains with John.

And Everest was the 72nd. Wow. That's incredible, man. Speaking of journeys, I want to talk about your journey in the music industry. Let's do it. You've had some very high highs, some low lows. Yeah. Where are you at right now after seeing what you've gone through the past 10 years you've

been in the industry? Well, I've sort of like recognized that you're right. You know, the entertainment industry has highs and lows. I'll call that the roller coaster. I even mentioned that in my song. I Took a Pill and a Visa. You don't never want to step off that roller coaster and be all alone. I used to think that the car on that roller coaster was me. This is just my career.

Wherever my career is, at the time, that's the car on the roller coaster. I'm not on the roller coaster i'm not on the roller coaster anymore you know i'm a spiritual being like everyone listening to this and you we're all spiritual beings we're we're children of the the most high the source of life and so my my love for myself my love for my family my love for my family, my love for life is not dependent on where that roller coaster car is on the ride. It's just a ride I get to be on, you know, or a part of me gets to be on. And that's all.

So right now, man, I'm more inspired than ever. Like you said, I had good energy when I came in. Thank you. I feel i have a lot of energy and i have more energy to make more things so um i'm creating i'm writing um in different medium mediums i just dropped my album with black bear mansions too nice on halloween and and i got a new album coming out soon that's like on the on the one yard line tweaking the last song yeah yeah super inspired and the the beautiful thing is like you go out and you you grow and and you know quincy

jones says the deeper the human you are the deeper the music you make and that's true you know so when i go on these journeys and i grow and life is a journey in and of itself you know sometimes you don't have to go on a walk across america life will just give you something really hard you know yeah like you know life is relentless in that matter and and perfect and perfect also give you the exact thing you need to grow in the way you need to. Yeah. And it's just been such a gift to be able to go grow as a human and then bring back what I learned and share it.

So that's part of what I get to do here today with you. So I thank you for that. Because when you just have these experiences and you keep them to yourself, they're kind of masturbatory. And when you have the opportunity to share what you learned, they can become beautiful, in my opinion. i was thinking the same word in my head thank you so i thank you for the opportunity to do that here today but i also get to do that in my music absolutely i'm blessed i get to do that in different mediums so it's so cool you know this

album now i couldn't have written it yeah five years ago it wouldn't have come out of my soul there's no way that's cool to see you coming from that place because I think a lot of artists come from the place of trying to keep producing hit records, and it's not genuine. They're just kind of following what worked in the past. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I don't call those people artists. They become, and look, I'm guilty of it at times, but there's a tendency to become basically a brand ambassador for yourself this worked you said it this worked

so I'm going to do more of that I'm making a product and my clientele has an expectation of the product I'm going to make so I'm going to make something within the bounds of those expectations and essentially you essentially a brand ambassador for this company that maybe you co-founded right and the the name of the company is your name so it's a little confusing um and

there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing inherently evil or wrong with that not one thing but it's not being an artist you know being an artist is a spiritual calling it's a mystical thing if you hear inspiration and ideas from a place you don't know what it is i call that god other people call it different things maybe they just call it inspiration or their higher self. But you're literally translating thoughts, ideas, melodies that are coming to you. You're not making them come to you. They're coming to you, and then you're translating them

into music that other people can hear. Wow. And your whole job is to listen to that inspiration and listen to nothing else. That is part of the job, is to block all the other stuff out. And the other stuff comes in the form of managers, but it also comes in the form of your own thoughts. And that's the most insidious

form of that of that distraction yeah it's your own thoughts going gosh that other thing worked in the same way injured mike with the snake bite linked being hurt with getting love, you link success with this one piece of material you made. And you link love with the success. But really, it's not love. It's just attention. There's a difference. Definitely. There's love and attention.

And so it's your job to undo these sort of mental entanglements. It's your job to keep that channel to wherever the ideas are coming from clear. And it's your job to listen to what that's telling you to do no matter what it's telling you to do. And that's a scary job. It is. You know, you have to be willing to risk your fiefdom, your empire. The fiefdom is like a small version of the empire it's like a little your little like piece of thing that you've built because you were successful yeah and it's

like no i'm gonna put all that on the line because because this crazy voice or this crazy piece of inspiration told me to that no one else gets yeah so it takes courage it does i feel like there's so many distractions as an artist too and i feel like there's so many distractions as an artist too and i feel like that's why very few of them have prolonged careers you rarely see guys make it more than 10 years in the music industry yeah yeah i can only think of like 5-10 people sure it's pretty insane yeah so how did you sort of make all those decisions to cut certain aspects of your life out? Dude, not without fear. I'm not special.

When I decided to do the walk, my father had just died. Let me be more accurate. My father had died two years ago. Avicii had just died. Mac Miller had just died. Mac Miller had just died. And I had a friend that was looking like he was about to die from his drug use. And I'm like, dude, I gotta do something different.

You know, I'm gonna die one day too. Hopefully not anytime soon. But I am gonna die. And I can either live the life that i'm quote-unquote supposed to live which is make an album going to her make album going to her pump like wring myself out like a like a washcloth for these record labels and managers and agents to get as much money out of me as possible while i like well i just end up up like a, yeah, like a dried up sponge, you know, with no life inside me.

And literally, you know, it's like a funny metaphor, but like literally that just happened to my friend. Like these guys were dead. They were dead. And they weren't coming back. and I was scared but I felt like I'm gonna die one day before that day comes I want to actually live mmm I want to actually live and not live the life someone else's life, the life that people are telling me I'm, quote, supposed to live,

that my soul knows there's more. I want to live my dream life. I want to live the life that if I heard someone else did this, I would think they're the most bad person ever because I should feel that way about myself. And I said this before, I got so sick and tired of being inspired. I got so sick of listening to podcasts like this or watching documentaries or reading books about people doing things that inspired me.

I was sick of being inspired. I wanted to become inspiring. To who? To me. To to me not to anyone else there's people still now that think walking across america is so stupid like why did you do that climbing everest is dumb like it risked your life i get it but to me i've lived a life that I'm proud of. I live a life like I sometimes reflect on it in the morning. I go, wow, wow, wow. And that's how I should feel about myself. That's how we should all feel about ourselves. So it's not, there's nothing special about these things.

They were just special to me. But all of us have a walk. All of us have a list of things we want to do when we're done doing what we think we have to do. The have to do list is usually **** and it's usually just your fear in disguise. You're scared to actually step in and see how great we know we really are. It's terrifying.

Yeah. And exhilarating. And beautiful. Absolutely. Mike, I'm so inspired, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Bro, thank you for having me. Absolutely.

Anything you want to promote or close off with? No. I don't want to promote anything. I just want to say to anyone out there listening, in the thick of it, anyone listening, going through hell right now, Winston Churchill said, if you're going through hell, keep going. And I love that quote and pain is a gift. It can be used as a gift.

Oftentimes, we don't need to go to another country or walk across a continent or take a crazy drug. We can just look at our life where it hurts. That's where we're supposed to grow. So if your life hurts right now, consider the fact that you're being called to be one. You're growing. And I wish you well on that journey.

God bless you. Love that, man. Thanks so much for coming on, Mike. Great episode. Thanks for watching, guys. As always, see you tomorrow. Peace.