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

I was getting ready to start my 17th and

just felt this pain shoot up my leg.

I thought, you know, what the hell was that?

And 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 had just bit me.

Damn.

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And here's the episode.

All right, guys.

Very special episode today.

Mike Bosner's in the building.

How's it going, my man?

I'm well.

Dude, the moment you walked in, I felt your energy.

Thank you.

Yeah, you are, 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 U.S.

Incredible.

And it took you six months, right?

It took six months and three days.

That is insane.

And I had to get on the other side of one rattlesnake bite.

Where did you get bit and at which state?

I got bit,

I was about two-thirds of the way through the journey, 1,797 miles I had walked.

And, you know, 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'd walked across Pennsylvania, I'd 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 is really it, 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,

you know, 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 I'd walk 16 miles that day and um

i was 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

and as soon as i had that question i heard the sound i didn't want to hear oh no

and i realized a poisonous rattlesnake had just bit me.

Dang, how big was it?

It was actually a baby snake,

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.

But and I actually never saw the snake.

You know, I just felt the snake.

I heard the snake and you know, then I kind of out for the count, down for the count.

You got knocked out?

I sat down and at first, no, I didn't get knocked out.

I 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're they were they were starting to get a little nervous and

um one of them John you know, looked at his phone, there's no service.

So he's like runs up the road to try to get a bar of service, calls nine-one one 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 him.

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 just kind of fading out.

I was fading out.

And I would kind of just like disappear.

And so after the initial

kind of like joking around where I was, it's just like, it doesn't hurt that bad.

Like once the poison started to get get into me it didn't really hurt it just i i i would disappear and i would 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 towns 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

uh They got there first.

They took me to La Junta Hospital.

And

when I got there,

I faded out again.

That's what I came to, and

they gave me anti-venin.

And eventually they gave me all the anti-venom that they had.

And then they airlifted me to a bigger hospital in Puebla.

Wow.

Yeah.

That is crazy, man.

It was cool being in the chopper.

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.

I had been walking across America and every place I went, no matter if it was

white people, black people, rural, urban, every single place I went,

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.

Yeah.

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 definitely a problem.

You also climbed Everest, right?

Yeah, man.

So Everest,

this 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,

you know, take the thing, and a few hours later, get this lesson.

Well, but the snake venom took a little bit longer for me.

Okay, so I had to go to the hospital five days.

I had to go home.

And

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:

everyone takes care of me.

I'm just getting all this attention for being hurt.

And actually, like

the story of my snake bite got picked up by a lot of the mainstream news students.

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 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

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Now I had a decision to make.

I'm either going to...

Go back to my life before the walk, which was a life of like luxury and Uber Eats and playing in the sandbox of West Hollywood.

Yeah.

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.

You know, I almost died.

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 shedding a layer of skin.

Wow.

And it wasn't all the way off yet.

And so 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 going to have to slow down there at high elevation.

And I kept taking steps till I went up and over them.

Jeez.

And at that point,

I got the medicine from the snake venom, which was

I

and all of us,

I could do anything.

You know, 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 had never worn cramp-ons.

Me trying to go from

never doing any of those things and belonging on the tallest mountain in the world was going to 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 it.

Oh, got it.

And I'm thinking, like,

yeah, it's going to be hard, but look at who, look at my, I do hard shit.

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 some part of Nevada and into California.

People started texting me prematurely, congratulations.

In my head, I'm like, for what?

Done.

A desert here I'm in the middle of.

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 LA

and this car pulled to the side.

These three young kids, they were on their way from Vegas back to LA,

and they

smelled like they were from LA.

They got like those cologne wafts out of the air, and they had these flowy black.

They looked like they were from Lotton

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 were still playing in that sandbox.

And I walked across the rest of California and I kept taking steps until the Hollywood signs on my right and

the pavement turned into sand and after six months, three days, 2,851 miles, I dove in the

ocean.

And that was 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 that snake bite now.

That's the part of me that's a dog.

My mom's never met that part of me.

My friends, they're like, hopefully no one meets, but it's there.

And I found it.

I was so scared of losing it because 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.

5 a.m.

Stand up.

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.

Like, I go.

And so the edifice of that project, the way it was set up, was every day

I got to hang out with Snakebite.

Once the journey was over, I was terrified that basically I was becoming

And so that was part of why I wanted to do Everest.

You know, it's like there was

a sense 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, it didn't feel like an ending.

It felt like a beginning.

Beginnings hide themselves and ends.

And so

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 the 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 like I shouldn't be hanging out with that friend hanging out this maybe I need to go to this part and I start to like 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.

Like this is not, 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

you know, in a lot of lineages,

there's some sort of rite of passage, a bar mitzvah, communion, or a vision quest.

you know it's like

I need 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 it's 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 today because the walk's going to be harder.

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 worst.

And the same, when I started getting ready for Everest,

I remember when

if someone said, it's going to be 30 degrees out, I go, f.

By the time I was going to Everest, 30 degrees was a hot 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.

Like, 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 is zero.

And so.

I'd 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 was the more uncomfortable the better

and 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 and

um

I love him.

I got the chance to chat with him briefly

between the walk and the mountain.

And he is almost prophetic.

I spoke to him in a,

I just finished the walk.

And

he said, so what are you up to now?

I said, I'm going to 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 fed up, everything's gonna be fed up,

and you know, mentally you're gonna have to decide to go anyways.

And that's exactly what happened.

Damn, it's exactly what happened.

You serious?

Yeah.

I mean, it's exactly what happens every year there, but it's 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 out every hundred people, one, obviously it doesn't come back.

And for me, there was a guy

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 tenth time going for the summit.

He had he had summited Everest nine times.

Wow.

He was going for the tenth.

And he was a c he was a guide.

Yeah.

He had a client.

And um

he came down.

They chose a different weather window than John, my coach, and I.

And so much of Everest is mental.

Because every day you're getting weather reports from a couple 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 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.

Right.

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.

Yeah.

Packed is relative.

So, like, it's just giant mountain, but there's one route on it.

So it's still, like, the people are covering up 0.001% of this mountain.

But you can get caught behind a slow walker.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

And,

yeah, this guy who had a client, he went up on a, 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 snowblind and got frostbite on all ten of his fingers.

Whoa,

I'm sitting there looking like, dude, this guy is

this guy is way better than me.

Yeah,

he was really scary.

That must have been, 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 talk about why.

Why is really important in 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 gift is on the other side of that feeling.

Yeah.

It's pushing through the not wanting to do it.

But 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,

Everest had a way of just like killing my whys.

Like one of them was

this was the least valid one.

I wanted to be cool.

I wanted to be a guy that did Everest, right?

That wasn't the main reason I was there, but let's have integrity

10, 20%.

That's in the pot mixed around, right?

I already knew that why was before I got there, right?

So,

of course, that one is dead.

My next why 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, camp two,

I'm like, man, that 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.

Right.

Maintaining that,

it still was valid.

Everything else told me this is like a horrible idea.

This is scary.

I might lose my feet.

Might lose my toes.

I might lose my life.

Everything

was pulling me down like gravity.

Even the wise 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.

And

man, it was a fing wild journey.

Crazy journey.

But on

June 1st at 4.35 a.m., you know, I got to be on the summit

with uh John and and Dawa Dorje and Dawa Cheering, our team.

And um

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 being 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.

The bond, yeah.

Fact alone.

You survived an avalanche with those guys.

That's that's something you can't ever.

It was that was a crazy thing.

Camp 2 was 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 okay

because there's one third of the oxygen that we're breathing in the air right now yeah 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.

Like,

I'm in incredible shape at this point, you know, 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 rate naturally slows when we go to sleep

for all of us.

When I would close my eyes and 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,

not enough 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 was 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

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 I'm laying next to Dr.

John, my coach.

And

he's sleeping somehow.

You know, well, he's he's an OGs.

He's done it before.

He's done it several times before and you know, other

serious mountains.

And so he's asleep.

And I can't sleep like for the reason I just described.

And the sound of avalanche, the rumble, is a sound I had become accustomed to.

Even from base camp,

you'd hear multiple times per day.

Wow.

These big rumbles.

And it was a scary sound.

But you would hear the sound and you would look and you would would see it was some giant thing very far away.

The scale of these mountains is just unfathomable.

It's unfathomable.

And so over time, over the weeks I was there, I learned

that the sound didn't mean anything.

You know, it just meant an avalanche was happening somewhere far away.

So I heard this this night at camp two, I'm laying with John, and I hear the sound.

Big, bassy, rumbly sound.

I wish I could do it better if I was

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.

Yeah, come from the country, you move in the city,

the alarm scares out of you.

Right.

So it's like that.

I had 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.

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 2 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 f am I going to get back to where I am on the route?

Like,

I'm dead.

I'm not thinking I might be dead.

I'm thinking I'm dead.

Yeah.

Like,

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,

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?

And maybe like, you know, you're not God.

You don't know that yet.

And sometimes

I think, you know, our 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.

You know, they're in psychological avalanches.

They're in emotional avalanches.

They're in physical avalanches.

And,

you know,

I think about the gift that John gave me in that moment, and it was so

inherent to his being.

He 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.

This can be okay.

Man, so you've had multiple near-death experiences.

Those are the two to my two

close calls.

You're still at it, man.

Now you're planning another 3,000-mile walk, right?

It's a dream.

Unannounced dream.

But yeah, we could talk.

No secrets.

I've been sort of fantasizing maybe about doing the PCT

this summer.

So we'll see.

I haven't committed to that

yet, but I'm researching it.

Yeah.

Got Got my eyes on it.

That's cool, man.

Got my eyes on it.

Dude, your story is crazy.

When it goes to the training for these, how many months just goes into that part of it?

So the walk is kind of interesting.

You know, I probably train three, four months.

And the training is kind of silly in hindsight.

I'm like just walking around.

Walking around LA, you know?

And at a certain point,

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 of the walk, I think I walked eight miles or ten miles.

And then I slowly ramped up.

And by the end of last week, I was doing 30 miles a day.

So the train, like the train, I kind of trained on it in some ways.

Everest was a year and a half full-time.

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.

Wow.

I wasn't interested in just going to Everest.

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

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.

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 pilot visa.

You don't ever 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 anymore.

You know, I'm a spiritual being.

Like everyone listening to this and you, we're all spiritual beings.

We're children of the most high, the source of life.

And so my

love for myself, 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 uh my album of black bear mansions 2 nice on halloween and and i got a new album coming out soon that's like on the on the one yard line of tweaking the last song so yeah super inspired and the the most the beautiful thing is like

you go out and you grow.

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,

like, you know, life is relentless in that matter.

And

perfect, perfect also.

It gives 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

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 hate 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, yeah, you're a brand ambassador for this company that maybe you co-founded.

Right.

And the name of the company is your name.

So it's a little confusing.

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.

It's 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 also comes in the form of your own thoughts.

And that's the most insidious form

of

that distraction.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Fiefdom is like a small version of an empire.

It's like a little, your little, your little like piece of thing that you've built because you were successful.

Yeah.

And it's like, no, I'm going to put all that on the line 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 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 five, ten 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.

Avici

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 got to do something different.

You know, I'm going to die one day too.

Hopefully not anytime soon.

But I am going to die.

And I can either live the life that I'm quote unquote supposed to live, which is make an album, go on tour, make an album, go on tour,

like wring myself out like a like a washcloth

for these record labels and the managers and agents to get as much money out of me as possible while I like, while I just end up 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.

Yeah.

They were dead.

And they weren't coming back.

And

I was scared, but I felt like I'm going to die

one day.

Before that day comes, I want to actually

live.

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.

Like, I want to live my

dream life.

Like, I want to live the life like that if I heard someone else did this, I would think they're the most bad person ever.

Yeah.

Because I should feel that way about myself.

And I say 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 me.

Not to anyone else.

There's people still now that think walking across America is so stupid.

Like, why did you do that?

Kami Evers 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.

We'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 to walk across a continent or

take a crazy drug.

Like, 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 you're being called people.

You're growing.

And I wish you well on your 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.