Mike Posner On Making Art, Embracing Growth & Walking Across America

An accomplished singer, songwriter, poet & producer, Mike Posner knows what it's like to be rich and famous. He also knows what it's like to be forgotten. To grieve. To grow. To embrace that which is most important. And ultimately express his truth through art. This is the story of a remarkable talent's attempt to live an artist's life — the struggles faced and lessons learned along his most mercurial path. In 2010, while still an undergraduate at Duke, the Detroit native's career exploded with the release of his debut song Cooler Than Me. The irresistible pop song topped charts worldwide, selling more than two million copies and launching him into the stratosphere almost overnight. But fame is fleeting. Unable to immediately top his debut, Mike's solo career soon faltered. Turning to writing, Mike spent the next several years behind the curtain churning out hit songs for everyone from Justin Bieber (‘Boyfriend') and Maroon 5 (‘Sugar') to Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Nick Jonas and Avicii. Then, in 2016, his career as a solo artist once again blossomed. A remix of his song ‘I Took A Pill In Ibiza' unexpectedly surfaced as an international smash on the electronic dance scene, landing him a Grammy nomination for Best Song that year. Not long after, Mike was hit with a trifecta of heartache. He weathered a break up with his girlfriend. His father passed after a bout with brain cancer. And his friend and frequent collaborator Avicii took his own life. It was a dark time for the young musician. But the life of an artist is one of persistence. No matter what, Mike continued to show up for music. The result, and his best work to date, is the recently released album, A Real Good Kid — a mature, vulnerable and infectious pop meditation on grief, celebrity, ego, loss, art and personal growth. Without a doubt, Mike is an incredibly talented musician. But what inspired this conversation has little to do with music and everything to do with character. What draws me to this human is his spirit. An old soul with an expansive perspective on art, life and meaning that belies his age, Mike overflows with emotional wisdom forged from experience. And his unbridled, authentic enthusiasm for life and personal expression is as infectious as it is instructive. This is the story of unpredictable highs. Low lows. Love and loss. What it means to move on. And finding solace while stuck in the middle. I first saw Mike perform before an IN-Q spoken word event several years ago and ever since have appreciated him from afar. But I fell in love with him during our conversation. I'm fairly certain you will too. For those visually inclined, you can watch our conversation on YouTube at: bit.ly/mikeposner431 or listen in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  So I'm playing concerts much more often for many more people. I'm making more money. I'm sort of parading around the world, taking my shirt off at shows. And it's such a gift to sort of fall into this kind of, quote, "success" at the age I was at, which was like 23. What I realized, the ways it didn't change my life was, it didn't make me any happier. It didn't make me any more comfortable in my own skin. And it didn't clear up any of the insecurities I had with myself. And what was especially disillusioning about that was, I thought it would.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  That's Mike Posner, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:04Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, people? How you guys doing? Welcome to the podcast. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host, and today I have musician Mike Posner on the show, vocalist, songwriter, incredibly prolific producer. And I gotta say upfront, this guy is just such a gift. Not only is he an amazing talent, he's just a real sweetheart. And I can almost guarantee that you are familiar with his music, perhaps his song Cooler Than Me, which came out in 2010, or his more recent, mostly acoustic song, I Took A Pill In Ibiza, or Ibiza, depending

• 2:44Rich Roll?

  upon how you pronounce it, from his 2016 sophomore LP. And that song was a massive hit. It was nominated for Grammy Song of the Year. And along the way, Mike has written all manner of chart busting songs for seemingly everyone. You know that Justin Bieber song, Boyfriend? Well, that was Mike. He wrote Sugar for Maroon 5, as well as songs for everybody from Pharrell to Talib Kweli, 2 Chainz, Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, Nick Jonas, Avicii, who we talk a lot about today, and so many others. So this is essentially going to be a conversation not only about Mike's story, but also about creativity and self-expression

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  with an incredibly prolific artist. Like I said, Mike is a beautiful soul. His energy is just infectious. And yet, at the same time, he's amazingly grounded, centered, calm, all traits that he directly credits, as you will soon hear, to a consistent meditation practice, something he is incredibly dedicated to.

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  Okay, so Mike Posner, yes, he's an incredible musician, but that's not really what motivated me to talk to him. It was more his spirit, his perspective, that really drew me in. He is a magnetic, beautiful, large personality. He's overflowing with positivity. He's got this unbridled, honest enthusiasm for life, which I really respect and admire, but it comes not without challenges that he's faced and obstacles that he's had to confront and overcome. In fact, his journey has really been quite the roller coaster. So this is a story that begins with a precocious kid in Detroit, a kid with big dreams,

• 4:38Rich Roll?

  who launched his storied musical career while still a student at Duke, Duke University. It's a story of unpredictable highs and many low lows, with a lot of reflection and grieving and growth, both emotional and spiritual, along the way. I'm not going to spoil any more of it, other than to say, I have appreciated Mike from afar for quite a long time before this conversation, but I just fell in love with him during this exchange, and I think you guys are going to as well. So, let's kick it off. We're going to start with a beautiful acoustic version of Mike's aptly titled song, "In the Middle."

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Perfume on my shirt

• 5:26Speaker 02

  puts me in the past.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Too tough to be without her,

• 5:35Speaker 02

  but too afraid to ask. Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Too young to settle down

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Too old to be in bars

• 6:08Speaker 02

  It's hard to take it easy It's easy to be hard Yeah

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the mid

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Forgive me, I am building my ship as it sells How do I become who I wanna be while still remaining myself?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  People love the old me I don't know where he's gone

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Too tired to be famous Too vain to be unknown Yeah

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Here I am again, stuck in the middle

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Here I am again stuck in the middle.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Here I am again stuck in the middle.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Rich Roll?

  That is insane, man.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 8:05Rich Roll?

  So beautiful. Thank you for that. I love it.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening.

• 8:11Rich Roll?

  Um, it's so poignantly honest and vulnerable and, and, and raw. And I think that's really a touchdown of, of your work. You know, my favorite line is too tired to be famous. Too vain to be unknown, you know?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  It's like the courage to, you know, admit that.

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  It, it almost takes, um.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  It's easier to just admit it.

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  You know, it'd be a lot of, and it takes a lot of energy to sort of decide, okay, I'm going to share these things with people. And this list of things about myself, I'm, I'm not. And that, that takes a lot of energy to sort of constantly be navigating. And a lot of bandwidth. I found it's just a little, little simpler to just be honest and truthful.

• 9:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting in the context of, you know, the evolution of your career as somebody kind of started out in the rap world doing rap battles, you know, back in high school where it's all about fronting and ego. To, you know, this arc to come to this place of, of just raw emotional vulnerability. You know, to come to the, I, I mean, I think of you. It's interesting looking back at the origins of, of how you began with, you know, influences, you know, coming directly from traditional rap into this guy who, who, you know, kind of, to me feels a lot more like Cat Stevens, you know, meets in queue.

• 9:50Rich Roll?

  With this poetry and this kind of folk sensibility wrapped up in, in pop with its roots in hip hop and rap.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  It's the genre thing is a trip for me because, um. I love a lot of different music. Uh, it's today is January, what, ninth?

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Ninth.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And the last week or so, I have made like four hip hop songs in a row. Just straight rap songs, you know? And so it's like, yeah, I mean, I get in the cabs.

• 10:21Rich Roll?

  People are confused.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get in a cab in a different city, you know, hey, how's it going? What do you do? I'm a recording artist. What kind of music do you make?

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  How do you answer that?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  I don't never know what to say. I say I jump around to every album. And um, man, I think I'm really good at a bunch of different things.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  You're very good at it.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's, it's tough. It's, I don't, I don't feel like I fit in one of those boxes. I feel like I fit in all of them.

• 10:49Rich Roll?

  So how do you follow that muse? I'm sure there's pressure, you know, on you. Oh, you need to be in this lane. You know, this is what works. This is what people want. I mean, I know when you played um, the Lions game on Thanksgiving Day, like people hadn't seen you with the beard. You know, and they were freaking out because they're used to seeing you in a certain light.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  That was so uh, tough at the time, but so

• 11:16Speaker 01

  helpful of, you know, with a few months of hindsight. So, you know, first of all, um, to answer your original question is you really try not to pay attention as much as you can to the um, reaction to the art. You know, for me, the reward is in the making of the thing in the first place. And if something becomes really popular, which has happened a few times in my career. You know, I made thousands of songs, but I've had like five that have kind of like absurdly popular. I don't know why or how, but it happens every once in a while. But I try just to kind of ignore that. Um, it's almost part of my job to ignore that.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  And um, because the tendency, if you pay too much attention is to replicate. Or emulate something you already did that was quote unquote successful. So you should sort of leave that behind and then listen to whatever. You know, yeah, that for me, I have to have some sort of practice to be quiet. Meditation really helps. And listen to what comes up in me and then just follow that. The things just pop in my head and my job is to get them recorded and produced the way they sound in my head. And that's it.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Do you feel like your, your, your job is really to open that channel? That it's less about you, that it's, that it's coming from some other place?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, look, we all have a ton of thoughts that come in our head each day. And do you really get credit for the thoughts that pop in your head? I don't know.

• 12:47Rich Roll?

  I like to take credit sometimes.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we all do. I do too, you know, it's like, but the, the honest answer is like, this song just popped in my head and I wrote it down. Do I get credit for that? I mean, I guess in our society, the way it's set up, yeah, I do. I get paid for it and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, I think it's, yeah, it's more about listening. You know, listening to, I'm always scared. I'm like superstitious. I'll be laying in bed at night. And, uh, you know, a melody pops in my head or something like that. And, uh, I'm like, man, I'm tired. I want to get up and put this down. But I'm, I'm always worried that, and maybe it sounds silly, but I'm worried. I will forget, but I'm worried that if I don't put it down, whatever is sending them to me will stop.

• 13:34Rich Roll?

  Right. Cause you're not honoring it.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give them to someone else.

• 13:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, you're not going to pay attention? I'm going to send this idea to somebody else.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:41Rich Roll?

  That's a, that's very similar to, um, do you know Elizabeth Gilbert?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I know of her. I just was recommended.

• 13:50Rich Roll?

  She wrote this book called Big Magic.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:52Rich Roll?

  And one of the ideas, it's a great book, but one of the ideas in that book is that the ideas, all of these ideas are kind of floating around in the clouds.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 14:02Rich Roll?

  And, you know, as an artist, your job is to finally attune that, that radar, that antenna, so that you can pull it down and nurture that idea. But if you don't, somebody else is going to grab it.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:16Rich Roll?

  Or maybe, and it's timing. A lot of it is timing, right?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Rich Roll?

  So I like that idea. Like, oh, if I don't, if I don't write this down and get it down right now, like that muse is going to travel elsewhere.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if it's true, but it might be.

• 14:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you have like a formal writing process? Like, what does that look like?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I do not. You know, so I'm thirty years old. I'll be thirty-one February twelfth. And I started writing my first raps when I was eight. So I'm like twenty-two years into this thing, and I have written songs every which way. From, I've written them at night, written them in the morning. I've written them to beats that are already done. I've written them on the guitar. Started with melody, started every, every way.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  So there isn't one thing like, oh, I get the, I get the hook or the lyric?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  No, I tried, I tried to figure this out. I'll tell you what I did a few years ago. I, I made a spreadsheet with what I thought were, were my best songs. It was like ten songs on there. My best songs to me, not the biggest ones. And so, and then I tried to, I made another, all these columns where I wrote down every, everything I could remember, the season, the time of day I wrote it, the mood I was in, what I ate that day, how much I slept, everything I could remember, to see if there was some sort of pattern. Because if, if, you know, if, if all ten of them came at seven PM,

• 15:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I was gonna stop writing, trying to write at ten AM, you know, so. I found no pattern, other than, I think more than half of them were, were second attempts at an idea or used an idea that had some, some failed idea was being reworked in a lot of these things. That was the only pattern I found. But as far as like, yeah, specific process or time of day, there was, there was no pattern.

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  Like, like having an idea, but not executing on it right, right away and letting it marinate?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Even trying to execute, execute on it and, and failing. You know, or sometimes you write a song that's a bad song, but has one great line in it. So then later, you might be writing a great song, and you steal that line from that bad song, you just throw that bad song away.

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  On that idea of, of trying to find quietude, you know, tuning out all the signals that are coming at us. It's getting harder and harder to do that with our phones and with the internet. It's so easy to distract ourselves with these addictive devices. That I would imagine as an artist, you have to be very disciplined about making sure that you carve out that special time to create outside of that kind of influence that's always, you know, kind of bearing down upon us.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Correct. You know, for me, I have a meditation practice, which is I meditate a minimum of 20 minutes twice per day. So that really helps.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  Like Vipassana or what is the?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I usually am doing TM.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  TM.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  I've done a Vipassana retreat. That was no joke, man. Have you done one of those?

• 17:27Rich Roll?

  No, but it's on my to do list for this year.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  That was no joke. Man.

• 17:32Rich Roll?

  10 days?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  10 days.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  Which center did you go to?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I went to one in Texas, just because that's the way the dates worked out. And I was coming off 12 days at a monastery where I was in solitude.

• 17:45Rich Roll?

  For how long?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I was there 12 days and that one, I was completely alone. And so there was no program or whatever. And so my confidence was pretty high.

• 17:55Rich Roll?

  I got this.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I had a good, yeah, I was like, I got this. I got there. That thing was no joke, man. It's the sheer physicality of it because you're on a mat, on the floor, sitting cross legged for 10 hours a day, for 10 days. I'd say my back was lit up, man. It was no joke. And you know, waking up at 4:00 AM and you're basically just meditating until 10:00 PM or something like that.

• 18:24Rich Roll?

  I've heard from, I've talked to a lot of people that have done those retreats. And my sense is that you get to your breaking point at like, I don't know, day seven or something like that. That's when a lot of people bolt, but you gotta just stay.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, that was cool. Cause at the Vipassana ones, you don't, there's no talking. And beyond that, there's no like, there's not supposed to be any communication. It's not supposed to be like gesturing or even eye contact. But and there's assigned mats, if you will. So there's like,

• 19:00Speaker 01

  The people next to you are the same every sit. And you sort of make things up about your brain at least starts to make things up. Like, you know, I would, I'd come in and like, I felt like they were my battalion, you know? I'm like, alright, let's do this guy. And then like the dude next to me, he like, the third day, he didn't come back. I'm like, man, he's gone. I was like, and the guy next to me, I just really liked, there's something about him. I liked him. I was like, man, in my head, I was going, please do not quit, man. I need you, man. I need you, man. And everyone sort of, on the last day, they like let you start talking to like, you know, sort of have a transition period back to getting in the real world.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And everyone is kind of doing that to each other, like, man, you helped me so much. And the guy's like, really?

• 19:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that connection, that intimacy that, that can be created without any language or real interaction. I'm sure you felt like you really knew those people at the end of that period.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. And then sometimes I would talk to him on the last day. And sometimes they were exactly who I thought they were. And sometimes they were like the opposite. Yeah.

• 20:11Rich Roll?

  It's fascinating.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I'll tell you a story from my third day there. There was a guy sitting in front of me and he was overweight.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  He didn't look very healthy.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  He looked like a sort of like a worn man. And I, uh, I'm not proud to say, I felt sort of like repulsed by this guy. And every time we'd sit, and it's dead quiet in there. And you're supposed to not really move, you know? And this guy would be fidgeting, you know? Couldn't get, change his leg, whatever. And I was getting so annoyed.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  We get to the third day and I'm having a real tough time.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  It hurts, man, your back, you know? And I'm thinking, why, why did I pick to do this? This is ridiculous, man.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  And all the sort of background negativity that's running it, you kind of got to deal with.

• 21:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  When you're, when you're there. I, so in this particular sit, day three, I'm fidgeting a lot. And we're forty-five, fifty minutes into this hour-long sit and I, I'm just out of it. I open my eyes, which I'm not supposed to do, and there's this guy. And he's sitting like the gosh darn Buddha, like.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Showing you what's what.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  I start crying.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Because I thought, you're such a, you're such an asshole. I mean, here's this man who, he's showing up to this thing, man. It's gotta be harder for him than you to sit like this, and he's showing up. And you're over here judging him about how he looks, or he fidgeting. What, he's such an asshole, man. And, and the thing that, that made me cry, that I felt so ashamed was because I know it's not the, I'm, I know I'm doing that all the time, you know, judging people.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  And judging myself. And that was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I wish I could say I don't do it at all anymore, but it's, it takes time to sort of unlearn to.

• 22:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just put it right up in your grill.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  But meanwhile, you're not really supposed to be thinking about anything.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  You're supposed to be focusing on that breath. Equanimity.

• 22:55Rich Roll?

  Well, what got you?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Equanimity.

• 22:57Rich Roll?

  Equanimity, man. That's the goal. What got you into meditation?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I grew up.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  An atheist. I grew up, it's sort of what's, real is real. And was sort of a like, Midwestern Jewish pessimism about the world. And.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  When I was 24,

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I saw a friend of mine who, a lot of your listeners will probably know, watchers, maybe, viewers. His name, his name is Big Sean. And Sean and I had known each other since we were 18. You know, he used to come to my house and make music. He called my mom mom, this kind of thing. And so, when I'm 24, both of our careers have sort of started. And his career is like exploding at the time, for the first time. He's having his first sort of wave. And we're both in L.A. He says, "Come to the studio."

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So I go to the studio, meet up with him. And I'm sure you and everyone hearing this has had a moment where someone just lights you up. They're, for whatever reason, being around them makes you feel good. You might even be around them and they leave and you still feel good. And

• 24:32Speaker 01

  that's what happened that day. He was just like, he was just in a good, in a good place. And it was reverberating out to not just meet everyone around him. So I went home and the next day I came back to the studio. I go, "What's, what's up with you, man? What's going on here?" Because he's doing, I mean, his career, he was like shelved for six years. I mean, he's signed to Kanye for years and years and years and years. And nothing happened. And then all of a sudden, bang! It was just all happening and, and he was in such a good spot with it. So I'm like, "What's, what's going on?" He goes, "You gotta read these two books. Two books. One was The Alchemist,

• 25:15Speaker 01

  and the other was a book called Asking It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks."

• 25:23Speaker 01

  And

• 25:23Rich Roll?

  The channel.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I go, she seems to be working for him, man. So I get the books, man, you know, and that sort of opened my whole world.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  Ignited your whole spiritual path.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And that was the beginning and the, the foreword to asking is given was written by a guy named Wayne Dyer, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who's from Detroit.

• 25:48Rich Roll?

  I didn't know he was from Detroit.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  He actually was my mom's, uh, like counselor, high school counselor.

• 25:54Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:55Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:57Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  And, um,

• 26:01Speaker 01

  so his, his foreword really resonated with me. And I remember one of the quotes says, said, um, I don't think he made it up, but it said, um, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And that, that, that was just so foreign to me.

• 26:19Rich Roll?

  Blew your mind.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Blew my mind.

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And so I started YouTube with him and he had some guided meditations. So that's, those were the first meditations I ever did. And then I, I went into TM and then

• 26:31Rich Roll?

  Ever since, man. That's interesting. I, I, I would have suspected that

• 26:37Rich Roll?

  the path that you're on was born more out of some of the, you know, painful moments in your life, but it really sounds like it came from a pure aspiration to just, you know, inhabit, you know, a different level of consciousness because you saw your friend who was doing well.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Rich Roll?

  Happier.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And I think there was some like, there's probably some jealousy mixed in too. Like, man, he's, he's winning too.

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I want to do that as.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  So I'm not proud of that, but that I'm sure that was mixed in there as well.

• 27:12Rich Roll?

  Well, let's track it back to, to, uh, to Detroit, man, to the beginning.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:18Rich Roll?

  So you started, you started writing raps when you were eight.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Rich Roll?

  In Detroit.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:23Rich Roll?

  So is this like Eight Mile Detroit?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm from, uh, I was born in Detroit proper and I grew up in a place called Southfield.

• 27:30Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Southfield borders Detroit. So everyone knows the movie Eight Mile.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Um, south of Eight Mile is Detroit and the other side, south of Detroit is Eight Mile. On the other side is Southfield, which is kind of confusing, kind of a mouthful. But I live in Southfield, um, which is where I lived at least, um,

• 27:53Speaker 01

  was a, was a middle, sort of middle class, um, dem- demographically, ethnically is very similar Detroit.

• 28:02Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So it's not like Bloomfield Hills?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  It's not Bloomfield Hills.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  I'm from Gross Point.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, is that right?

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  I was born there. I mean, we moved, we moved when I was young, when I was like seven. So I can't really say I grew up there, but my parents are from Detroit.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  That's great. You know where they went to high school?

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  Uh, Gross Point.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  Is it east?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 28:20Rich Roll?

  Gross Point, yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is Gross Point North too.

• 28:22Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Yeah, I think it, I think it was east or south, one of those. I think east.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So Southfield is like, um, it's not the hood at all, at least in my part of it. Um, ethnically, it's about, I think 75% African American.

• 28:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Um, the young, the old, the younger people, like the kids tend to be even more African American and the sort of the older population is more white. Um, but we had like, I had a bunch of boys on my street. We sort of played basketball every day. We rode bikes all around.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  Had your crew.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  It was a magical place to grow up, man. My mom still lives there and I go back all the time. I love it there. I love Southfield. I love Detroit.

• 29:12Rich Roll?

  So that's where it all begins. So where does the music pop in?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  I first started playing drums. I was like in fifth grade and, uh, I have a few older cousins that rapped. I thought they're cool, man. And, um, and a lot of my buddies, they listened to hip hop. So first hip hop I heard was like, was on TV. It was like DMX and Mr. Core.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  And I thought.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And then I later sort of got into more like underground, I call it underground now, like Talib Kweli and Outcasts and Most Def and these kind of things. And I remember

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  The heady ones.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of my buddies were having

• 29:53Rich Roll?

  Intellectuals.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were having a sleepover. Aaron Webster and Ronnie Posey, still my buddies. And for whatever reason, we decided we're gonna freestyle tonight at this sleepover at Ronnie's house. And so we all sort of found CDs that had music without words on it. I remember I brought a Moby CD because there was a track on the end of the CD that didn't have any top line. And so I put this on, we all tried freestyling. And I remember they, they sort of felt like, oh, that was fun. And I remember thinking, I'm never gonna stop that. I'm never, I'm gonna get really

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  That's like a moment.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get really good at that.

• 30:37Rich Roll?

  Did you have like a conscious awareness that that was a kind of a flick the switch?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  It wasn't even a decision. I just knew I'm gonna get good at that. And I did. So now I would practice freestyling. And at first, my mom had a computer with like a terrible microphone on the top. And I figured like on some of the old Windows, there was like a voice recorder. So if I played, you know, music through the computer speakers and rapped at the same time, I could sort of make a recording. And there's like, one of my buddies had these like terrible things where my voice hasn't dropped yet. And I'm like, you know, so I started doing that. And my mom bought me a keyboard from Best Buy eventually, that she let me hook up to her computer. I started figuring out how to make beats. And I was

• 31:25Speaker 01

  stealing a lot of software off the internet. And, yeah, man, I just, I just kept going. And like you mentioned earlier, in high school, I used to battle, you know, and which for me, I was, I was small in high school. So I, basketball was everything, man. Basketball was everything. Like, the thing I wanted more than anything was to be good at basketball.

• 31:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I was tiny. And I tried real hard, played good defense, but like

• 31:52Rich Roll?

  It's not gonna happen.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  It wasn't gonna happen, you know. And so here in this, this

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Rap battle area, my weakness actually sort of became my strength because I was so unassuming. I was so small, I was so white, that when I would say a line that like, I'd get a bigger reaction.

• 32:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Because it was

• 32:15Rich Roll?

  They're not expecting it to come from you.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, surprising, surprising, so.

• 32:18Rich Roll?

  So that make you like, were you a popular kid in high school then? For being able to do that?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say I was popular, but I was friends with everyone.

• 32:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  It's sort of like my relationship with genres now was the same way I was with cliques at school. I'm cool with everyone. Do I really belong to any of them? Not really. I'm a floater kinda.

• 32:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the guy who can throw down like you is gonna be able to ingratiate himself with the athletes and with the stoners and with, you know, pretty much every, every crew, right?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, that was really when music did begin to,

• 32:54Speaker 01

  to deepen me as a human too.

• 32:56Rich Roll?

  What do you mean by that?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  I was doing beats and I was selling beats to rappers in addition to recording my own stuff. And the rappers all lived in the hood. So I would end up in these neighborhoods that I wouldn't have otherwise been in. And I just learned a lot. I had more of an awareness

• 33:21Speaker 01

  for the, the privilege that I, that I have and that I grew up with. And when I finished high school, I, I was a good student and I went to Duke University after. And I met a lot of kids who, who didn't have that awareness and I actually felt really bad for them.

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  That's definitely a big cultural change.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, these sort of like trust fund babies and you know, a lot of people might, might actually feel jealous of them. I never felt jealous of them. I felt, I felt sort of sad for them because they had only lived in this one little bubble of, of life. And you know, since music has taken me, or taken me here today, it's, it's been a magical way to navigate the world. It's taken me all over the world.

• 34:13Rich Roll?

  Well, you seem like you're like a good kid, right? I mean, your mom, I mean, education must have been important for you to get into Duke and, you know, be a kid who's like doing the rap thing, but also getting good grades at the same time.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:27Rich Roll?

  Like, those two things don't usually coexist?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  No, I mean, usually just artists in general hate school. And I actually didn't like school, um, but I loved getting As. I don't know what it was, because there was no sort of like, there was no reward in my house. And some of my friends, they get an A and their mom would give them like money or something like that. Or, and there was no punishment either if I got a bad grade.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I just, I don't know. I always was like, if I was in a class, I just expected to ace everything. And I have to study, you know? I worked hard at it.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  So you're at Duke, uh, and you were in like a frat, right?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  So you did like the full Duke thing, but you're like making beats in your dorm room at the same time?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:16Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm trying to just visualize.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I met, um, I, the summer before Duke, I interned at the radio station in Detroit.

• 35:24Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So you, yeah, you were collaborating with Big Sean in high school, right? He was your-

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Right that summer, right before, we meet. And I gave him a couple of beats and this kind of thing. And then I leave to go to Duke. Sean, mind you, had a scholarship to Michigan State, but Kanye signed him. He said, "Don't go to Michigan State." "Why?" "Because you're gonna be a rapper, dude, you don't go to college."

• 35:52Speaker 01

  So I go to Duke, Sean stays in Detroit, and I got my little setup in my dorm room. I'm making beats and I'm sending them. I'm sending every beat I make back to Sean. He's the only guy I know, you know, that's like, got a record deal.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  Right, but he's working with Kanye, I mean, that's your in.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  He's working with Kanye, exactly. And he is working with, um, some of our other buddies from Detroit. And I remember, I was at Duke and-

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I have math test. And I was used to being like, one of the smartest kids. At Duke, I was like, the dumbest kid. I remember studying for this math test really hard, and I got it back, and I failed it. It wasn't like I had slacked off, and like, I had worked on it and studied, and I failed it.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And a day later, I got this news from Sean that the producers, our other buddies in Detroit, Kanye was gonna sign them too. And I go, man, man, did I mess up. That should have been me. I should have stayed in Detroit. I'm over here filming math tests. And these guys getting signed by Kanye.

• 37:04Rich Roll?

  Right, with a bunch of frat boys.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  So, anyway, like, a year passes, and I just keep making beats, keep sending them to Sean. And I make like a hundred beats in a year, send them all to him. He might use like, two of them.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And then I had this sort of weird idea to start, start singing my raps.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  Where did that come from? Because prior to that, you weren't singing at all.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  Which is crazy, because you have this elegiac voice, that, you know, I can't, I can't imagine a time in which you weren't singing.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Thank you. Uh, I'll practice later, but, um...

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I, Jack Johnson was, was blown up at the time. I sort of had this like, harebrained scheme to make like, a hip hop Jack Johnson band.

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  Right. Where I would have like- I imagine Jack Johnson was huge at Duke.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, he's huge everywhere at the time. At least, yeah. And so it seemed. And, uh, so I had this idea of like, having acoustic guitars, J Dilla drums, I would rap. And, um, and rap and like, sort of sing. And there was another guy at our school, Eric Holges. He would sing. He was like, a real singer, and, um...

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And then, so I started this band, Mike Posner and the Brain Trust. And um, started putting stuff out and really what happened was the two guys in the band quit. Eric was the real singer. And I love Eric to this day. He has a, another band called Delta Ray that he started after and they're very wildly successful now. And Jeff O, he can bring his guitar back. And so, I was like, man, I gotta start singing this stuff. And what was interesting to me was as, I was such a big hip hop fan. And I had never heard a rapper, I'd never heard a singer sing the way I really wanted to hear a singer sing as a hip hop fan.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  So an example is like um, my first popular song is this song Cooler Than Me.

• 39:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  And it has the complex rhymes in it, multi-syllabic rhymes, which I never heard singers use. So I'll show you what I mean. I, I said, "You got designer shades just to hide your face." So not only do shades and face rhyme, but designer and hide your rhyme also. And that to me was just friggin' cool. Like, I never heard a singer do that.

• 39:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, when you sing it, you don't immediately think hip hop, but when you deconstruct it, you can see it.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like a, a hip hop fan would hear that.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  You know?

• 39:45Rich Roll?

  So you're like, you're, you're bending the genre. I mean, it's really bending, bending the genre from the beginning is what cracks it open for you.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It was a weird sort of like, it took 12 years. So at this point, I'm 20. I made music all this, all this time. It wasn't till I was 20 that I stumbled on this thing that was influenced by others, but was unmistakably mine. And I knew right away. Everyone's reaction was different. People were singing this song all over Duke campus and-

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  Right, so you make these demos, right? And they're getting played at the parties around-

• 40:21Speaker 01

  They're played at the parties, people and, and I didn't go to the parties because- I was recording in my dorm and the only time, it's loud in dorms. The only time you could really record is when everyone else goes out. 11pm to 2:15am. So that's

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  Your vocals went down?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  That's when my vocals went down. Then my buddies would come back and they'd be like, "Man, they played "Cooler Than Me" at the party and everyone knew it." Which, that never happened to me. Then my mom calls me, she goes, "I like this song 'Cooler Than Me.'" "Really?" I love my mom to death. She's an honest woman. She never told me she liked any of my stuff before. Always supported me, bought me instruments, paid for lessons. She never said, "I like this personally." She said she liked "Cooler Than Me." Then Big Sean called me. He goes, "Cooler Than Me" is like a hit song, man.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I go, "What are you talking about, man?" I'm just

• 41:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if both your mom and Big Sean like it, like the crossover potential.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, man. That's what I was thinking and so then it just sort of started from there, man.

• 41:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and what's, what's unique and cool and kind of of the moment of that time is the fact that you end up releasing this song on iTunes U.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  Right? Because that was, there was no Spotify. You couldn't, as a consumer, just upload your music onto the internet to distribute it, right? But you kind of found this loophole.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Correct. And, and this was at a time when music was being pirated at a very high rate.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And the music industry was really in trouble. And I knew better than anyone, I had the Duke internet, we were stealing everything, you know? And so

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Was this like full Napster era or a little bit after?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  It was a few years after, losing BitTorrent, the kind of thing. And

• 42:13Rich Roll?

  LimeWire?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:15Rich Roll?

  All that kind of stuff.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And so typically, if you made what they call mixtapes, which was like a free album. A lot of times rappers, before they make their album, they make a mixtape, okay? Which would include some original stuff and would also include them rapping over other people's beats. Now

• 42:39Speaker 01

  I made a mixtape and my mixtape was hosted by Don Cannon, who did all the biggest mixtapes. So I had this very legitimate cosign from Don Cannon. And typically, you'd put this thing out on a website called datpiff.com. And there was like a Z share link. You'd click the Z share.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  I'm already lost.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it was this really confusing thing. There were ads all over it, trying to trick you to click other. And then like, you had to navigate your way to a place where you'd actually right click and hit like, save target ads and it would download. And I knew I could get my stuff in those places on that website and stuff. But I also remember my friends telling me, these, these white girls at Duke know the words to this song. So I'm thinking, I gotta, I gotta get in a place where they, they can get it too. Cause I know they're not on Z share, they're not on datpiff. So I have on Z share, I have on datpiff. But in addition, I found this loophole with iTunes U,

• 43:45Speaker 01

  which was set up for professors to post their lectures. You know, if you're a professor at Duke, you can do a lecture on a topic and anyone from all over the country can get it. And the, the cool thing about iTunes U at that time was it was free.

• 44:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you could download lectures from all of these colleges.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 44:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, does it still exist?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I think so, it was sort of transformed in some ways. And so the loophole was, I found the guy who ran iTunes U for Duke. And I called him up and we still text every once in a while. And I find out, he's from, he's from Southfield, Michigan.

• 44:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, man, it's like divinely inspired.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  He goes, I'll put your album on there. He goes, I've done that before. And it's true, I wasn't the first guy to do it. So he put my album on there and now my stuff is on iTunes, but it's free. Now, that's important because.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  We weren't buying Kanye's albums. We weren't buying Lupe's albums. We weren't buying Jay-Z. We were stealing all of them.

• 44:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  So I knew no one's gonna pay for my album because they don't know who the heck I am. So it's important it's free, but it's also in a safe spot.

• 44:55Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  iTunes. And so, um, I started a Facebook group. I got all my buddies to invite all their friends, all my high school friends at different colleges. And before I knew it, I was, I was being asked to come to every, every college, man. Come play, come play this fraternity, this thing. And I'd get there and everyone knew my stuff.

• 45:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So it's this interesting, uh, combination of artistry and entrepreneurship. Like, you know, learning how to like market your own, your own deal, you know? Like DIY.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's cool. So, so is that how it got? Like, how did it get to? Because the next phase is super interesting. Like, how did it get to, you know, all these record labels and Jay-Z?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. There, there's people at record labels that are looking for this sort of thing.

• 45:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  They're looking for artists that, while they're doing a show and everyone knows the words to their stuff and they're not signed, right? So, um, a few, you know, some people spotted me, some A and Rs and, um, some managers reaching out. And it's a small industry. So if sort of one label is talking about something and two labels, then you can kind of go to a third one and be like, hey, they're gonna offer me a deal. Do you want to have a meeting? Type of thing. Um, so, yeah, my stuff started to, to catch on. And I was taking these meetings. I'm in my junior year at Duke. I'm flying to New York. I'm meeting with Craig and Julie at Atlantic.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  You know, I'm meeting with Barry Weiss at RCA. Um, and I'm, I'm going back to Duke and I'm in finals week, you know? And, uh, I'm writing this paper and my manager calls me and he says, you gotta go back to New York. I go, I can't go back to New York. What I need to do is finish this paper, man, because.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm behind the eight ball a little bit here, man. And he goes, you gotta go back to New York. Jay-Z wants to meet you. I go, Jay-Z didn't wanna meet me, man. Don't mess with me. He goes, Jay-Z wants to meet you. I go, okay. Book the flight. And I didn't believe, I didn't believe. I thought I was gonna go and they would say, hey, we're sorry. He's busy today. You're gonna meet with someone. So that's what I actually thought.

• 47:21Rich Roll?

  Cause that happens all the time. Like if you've been around entertainment, that's, it goes that way more often than not.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And I, yeah, that's what I expected, man. So I didn't tell any friends, you know? And I get on the plane. I go to, to New York.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  Do you think, sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that impetus, like I have to go, even though I have a final, was in part informed by this sense that you had made this mistake in going to Duke while Big Sean and those other guys were getting signed? Like you didn't wanna miss another opportunity?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a deal with myself in those years, which was if there's any scent on the trail, you gotta go. So there were times where, you know, like the first time I was supposed to meet with Cannon, who did my mixtape, I drove to Atlanta and something got messed up, like the guy connecting us and he was busy. And I went there for no reason. But I had a deal with myself. There was scent on the trail. You gotta go.

• 48:29Rich Roll?

  And what's the ambition level look like at this point?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Then or now?

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  Then.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Hi, well, I'll tell you what changed it for me was, was knowing Sean. You know, cause I met Sean and then Sean really got his deal done with Kanye. And he was going in the studio with Pharrell. He's going in the studio with The Dream. He was meeting Madonna.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  And. This was a guy that I used to freestyle with. You know, we'd go back and forth and it's hip hop. I always thought I was better than him. You're right. Not just him, I thought was better than everyone. And so this thing that seemed so far fetched before was just, I knew it was gonna happen now. I go, Sean did it, I'm next, it's happening, you know? It's, I just knew. Yeah. And, um, but I tell him all the time, man. It, he, he really changed my life twice. Once by just living his life in that way, showing me what was really possible. And then again, when he told me, read those books. Books, right.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, by living it. Yeah. In the studio that day and. So Jay, so you're on, you go to New York to see Jay-Z? And Sean, he opened up so many, a year before the Jay-Z meeting, we're in Detroit and Kanye's playing Gold in the Dark Tour, okay? And Sean gets like guest listed 20 tickets. So it's like all of our buddies are there, man. Sean brings all of us backstage.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And we meet Kanye and then like three months later, Sean calls me up and he goes, Kanye's playing MSG tonight. You wanna come? Um, Jay-Z's supposed to be there. I say, I do, but I'm in Michigan. Right. Phone is silent. MSG, Madison Square Garden. Yeah, phone is silent for like 10 seconds. I go, I should probably book a, book a flight. He goes, he goes, yeah, you should. So we go there.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  I go to pick up the tickets at will call. I'm gonna get back to the next meme, Jay-Z. I go to MSG. I go to will call, say, hey, I'm Mike Posner, our ticket's supposed to be here. And they go, we have no tickets for you.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Dang, are you sure? Michael, maybe Michael? No tickets for you. I call Sean, I go, man, there's no tickets here for me. He goes, okay, um, just meet me at the studio then. I'm at the studio with Kanye. I go, upgrade. Thank God there were no tickets. So we go to the studio, gives me the address. He meets us downstairs and always in these nicer studios, there's a lounge, which is like room for the managers to wait while artists meet. So he goes, just wait in the lounge. So he goes in the studio and you can hear the music they're playing. And I hear one of the songs I did with Sean playing.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And I know Kanye West is listening to this track, Who Knows?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  That I produced, I sang the chorus on and Sean rapped on. And I, I'm freaking out because I know if he likes this thing, this could change my life, like for real, for real, like.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  So the song ends, I see a bunch of people walk by the lounge towards the elevator. I go, I guess we're leaving now. So I walk, I follow them out and Sean's there, Kanye's there. Sean goes, Kanye, this is Mike Posner. He made the song that I just played you. Kanye goes, oh, cool. Gives me a fist bump. And then there's another silence, five seconds, 10 seconds. And very courageously, I ask, did you like it? And Kanye goes, no.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  He goes, he goes, maybe, maybe it's, could be for Lupe. It's not right for Sean.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And then he said, one of the coolest analogies ever, he goes, I'm sorry, Sean bumped it, you said it, I had to spike it. Meaning like, he played it, you asked me, I had to tell you the truth. I'm like, and then I'm thinking like, how did he think of that that quickly?

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  You appreciate the honesty, like on one level.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  It didn't feel, I want to be very clear. It did not feel rude at all.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Because you meet too many people and they go, oh, man, that's so great.

• 53:27Rich Roll?

  Smoke up, yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just honest.

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  Have you, have you, have you.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  And it helped me. It helped me. Um, because

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I knew in my heart I had better stuff in me.

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  And so we got in this elevator and all I wanted to do was make music. I didn't want to quit. I wanted to make more. And

• 53:50Speaker 01

  that six months passed, I keep doing my thing. I keep plugging the, the stuff starts to catch on. Now I'm back and now I'm in the office with Jay-Z.

• 53:58Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. Well, before you get into that, two things.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:00Rich Roll?

  First, have you run into Kanye since?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  To talk about this?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  You have?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I'll get to that. I'll get to that.

• 54:08Rich Roll?

  So we'll, we'll, we'll hit that later. Secondly, um,

• 54:13Rich Roll?

  I think it goes to that thing you were talking about, about showing up. Like it could have, what if he had liked it? That could have changed your life. And the fact that he didn't, and he told you still held tremendous value in pushing you to do and be better.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure.

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  But that wouldn't have happened had you not bought a ticket and gotten on the plane, thinking you're going to a concert, but being led into, you know, this other situation that you could have never predicted.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Sent on the trail.

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And, um, so I, so now, now I'm in finals week.

• 54:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Six months later, eight, I don't remember, eight months later, and I'm in Jay-Z's office. I got my laptop. I'm fumbling with the aux cable. I get that thing in there. I'm nervous. I play it cooler than me. And Jay-Z goes like this.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  He just like.

• 55:06Rich Roll?

  Squint his face and shaking his head.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  He just.

• 55:09Rich Roll?

  Like in a way that you're not sure if he likes it or you know, you know, he's into it.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I knew he loved it.

• 55:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  I knew he loved it. And we had this incredible meeting. He, I felt like he really understood me. I was there like two hours, which in hindsight, I'm like, that was ridiculous. And I'm about to leave and I just had this inkling. I go, can I play you one more song? He says, yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  So I plugged my laptop back in, I play him, Who Knows, same song. And he, he went nuts. He goes, he goes, "I can't believe you almost left without playing this for me." He go, you know, "Don't ever forget to play that song."

• 56:00Speaker 01

  So I go back, this is the same one, Kanye, and like, same song. I go back to Duke. I'm back in the library, trying to finish this paper. In a moment of procrastination, I open up my email. There is

• 56:17Speaker 01

  an offer for a record deal from Roc Nation.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Now, I end up signing with a different label, but

• 56:24Rich Roll?

  Why?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Uh,

• 56:28Speaker 01

  two reasons. Um, one, the, the actual deal was, was better.

• 56:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Significantly.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And secondly, Sean hadn't blown up yet.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  So I look at my buddy who was signed to an artist as opposed to being signed to a major record label. And I thought, man, I don't know, is, do the artists, do they do anything, or do they only care about themselves? So I was sort of hesitant. Now, what I learned was, later,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  if you're signed to an artist and you sort of get, it's like this with any label, you get the ball rolling yourself. They can add a lot of kerosene to the fire. You know, if you're signed to Jay-Z and you, and you start blowing up, he might do a feature on your second single. You know, and then, bang, kabang.

• 57:17Rich Roll?

  But it's a little bit of wait and see.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I hadn't, it's like that with any label, but I just hadn't seen it yet. All I knew was my buddy had been signed two, three years and nothing had really happened yet. So I signed with a different label. And

• 57:34Speaker 01

  we re-release Cooler Than Me, a remix of Cooler Than Me. Big Sean was on the original Cooler Than Me. And this song sort of explodes. And I go to the European Music Awards in Madrid, Spain. And I see Don C, who was like Kanye's right-hand man. And he's the man. And I go, Don, what up? And he goes, have you seen Kanye? I go, no. I go, he probably doesn't remember me. And he goes, oh, no, let me introduce you. So I go to Kanye. He introduced me. And he didn't remember me. I got to just kind of tell him the story I just told you. And one of the things he said, even before I said the story, was, oh, Mike Posner.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  He goes, I really like your music. And I knew I had done my job. After I got out of that elevator, I went and I worked. And I continued to get better. And it felt really good.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool. Full circle moment.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sometimes the, the, the failure in the moment is not really a failure. It's, it's a, a step on the path to success, right?

• 58:48Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, you got to be able to hear that kind of constructive criticism without taking it personally or letting it deflate you.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're somebody who, I get the sense, fully owned the fact that this was going to be your path, had a deep, profound knowing that somehow it was going to work out for you. So when you're that rooted and committed, I don't know if you were obsessed, but you were definitely, you know, full bore, 100% headed in that direction.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Rich Roll?

  When you're in that place, you're in a better situation to hear that kind of feedback without, without it getting you derailed.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Correct. Correct.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  So this song blows up. And does that change your life?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  In some ways, yes, and others, no. And I'll tell you what I mean by that.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  It changed the things I was doing. So I'm playing concerts much more often for many more people. I'm making more money. I'm sort of parading around the world, taking my shirt off at shows. And unfortunately, what I realized, and it's such a gift, to sort of fall into this kind of, quote, success at the age I was at, which was like 23.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  The ways it didn't change my life was, it didn't make me any happier.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  It didn't make me any more comfortable in my own skin. Um, and it didn't

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  clear up any of the insecurities I had with myself. And what was especially disillusioning about that was, I thought it would. I thought when I get these, accomplish these things, I'll feel content in myself to a point where I'll actually be nicer to other people, but I just wasn't.

• 1:01:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a shared delusion that's an epidemic in our culture, right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Rich Roll?

  If I just get this, if I can get this status, or this thing, or this job, or this relationship, or this bank account, then that's going to solve my problems and I can, and I can relax and

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:01:19Rich Roll?

  I'm okay with myself.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  And I don't know that, um, you can just hear two guys talking about that and believe them, because I didn't. You know, I had to learn that myself. And that's why I say it was a blessing, a gift. You know, I feel that my audience has gifted me the opportunity to explore what life's about when you stop chasing shiny things.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, the interesting thing is you had the awareness, the conscious awareness, um, to understand that the chasing was not going to resolve the dilemma. Because I think most people who find themselves in this situation, which is a quality problem to have.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:07Rich Roll?

  Uh, let's be clear.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Rich Roll?

  Then perpetuate the delusion by saying, all right, well, I just need one more hit.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  One more, I need, well, I got this nice house, but if I just get the bigger house, like they'll chase that to the grave.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:02:21Rich Roll?

  So to get off the train is something that eludes most people and is difficult to do. So why do you think you were able to do that?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I think I'm doing it still, to be clear, you know, there's a, there's definitely some part of me, percentage that still does that, still wants everyone to like me and is upset when they don't and wants the album of the year.

• 1:02:54Rich Roll?

  So you're not enlightened, you're not an enlightened being. I mean, look, you're, we're humans, of course.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think the person, I know for sure.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  But the honesty of that is refreshing.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  The percentage of that is lower each year, I think, you know, it used to be a hundred percent, you know, I, I didn't have any awareness of it, it just, it was me, you know, there was no part of me that was looking at this, looking at this, you know, objectively. Now I'd say, I'd hope it's like under 50% of like, why do what I do?

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  Well, you have this huge hit and it puts you on the map, but then you have kind of a fall out period where you're trying to make, you know, more hits, thinking it's going to be easy because your first one was huge. So you've had the ups and the downs, you know what it's like to, to be in both of those places and it reminds me of that thing that Jim Carrey has said, which is something along the lines of like, I wish everyone could be famous so they could realize like, it's not the solution to what ails us or what we're truly looking for.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  That's a great line. Yeah, that's a great line. He's right.

• 1:03:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  He's right.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  Plus the irony, the added irony of, of the song that makes you famous, cooler than me, is this about you not being cool?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:04:06Rich Roll?

  But then it makes you cool.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  It happened again, yeah, and it happened again, you know, so on my second big hit that I sing was, was about the fall from fame, which I thought was, was pretty interesting, you know?

• 1:04:23Rich Roll?

  I took a pill on Ibiza.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I took a pill on Ibiza is about what happens, like you're a one hit wonder. Then what happens with that, that story is not so well documented. This is a line in there, it says, um,

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just a singer who already blew a shot. I get along with old timers because my name's a reminder of a pop song people forgot. And the song I'm talking about is cooler than me. But then, there's something about this song that ironically gives me another shot.

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  Well, setting aside, you know, the melody and the lyricism and the kind of, you know, beautiful, technical aspects of what makes that a great song, great pop song. It's the honesty and the vulnerability that I think allows people to connect with your humanity.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:05:18Rich Roll?

  You know, and again, and that's what we were talking about at the outset. I mean, that's a, that's a theme that runs through your best work.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and to me, that's not a departure from hip hop.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Authenticity in hip hop matters a lot, you know, when, when you listen, if you think about your favorite rappers, they tend to be people that you believe what they say. Like, they're not making up a story, you know, whether it be Jay-Z. Jay-Z says he never lies in songs, and that's probably true. And it's cool because you, you, there's authenticity to it. It, it, their stories don't resemble my story.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  But I've always tried to maintain that, that feeling that what I'm saying is, is true. You know, not as some pieces where they're like completely fiction and I think it's pretty obvious when it is, but that matters.

• 1:06:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, how do you square, I mean, there's a lot of fronting in hip hop too, right? There's a lot of chest pounding and...

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  There is, but if you think about your favorite guys, you know, I shouldn't say, but I think about my favorite guys.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  Which are who?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  I mean, Jay-Z, Kanye West.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Now we're gonna top five this, man.

• 1:06:42Rich Roll?

  Kendrick.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Dangerous, Andre 3000, you know, J. Cole, you know, Kendrick. These are guys that are, they're authentic, you know, isn't it? And if they're saying, if they're saying they drive a certain car, they probably actually have that car, you know, those guys, you know what I mean?

• 1:07:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Which isn't always the case, you know?

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  Right, and, and, and this song, how many years in between the two hits?

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  2010 and like fi- five or six.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  Five years, right?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  So you get the, the, uh, the first hit, you make it big, suddenly you're touring, you're traveling, people know your name, all that stuff. You get the dope house and the dope car. Was there a little bit of like, now I am gonna be cool? Like, I'm gonna play this out? Like, let's see what this experience is like?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I was sort of doing what I thought I was supposed to do, which, which is sort of, I'm sort of ashamed about now. A lot of like, um,

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  womanizing, um, this is like wasting money on like clothes and shoes and stuff. Like, I had shoes I didn't even knew, I didn't even remember I had.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  And at a certain point, I just couldn't justify it anymore. You know, just like, how do I have all this stuff? And like, how do I have 200 pairs of shoes or something ridiculous? And there's someone within a mile from you that has none, you know? So I just, I don't know, I, I, I, I knew that making more...

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  More attention from the opposite sex, more fame. I knew that wasn't gonna change my experience of life.

• 1:08:39Rich Roll?

  Did you have like a bottoming out moment with that? Or was it just sort of a slowly arising awareness that this wasn't gonna work?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Slowly arising, slowly arising. And I remember I bought a van on, I think we found on Craigslist. And it had like sort of a bench sheets in the back that fold out to a bed and a little closet in it. I just put the stuff in that could fit in there. We donated the rest and I just drove away.

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  From all your shit?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I drove away from my house and so, yeah, like I just left. And I went to the, I went to Utah and I always wanted to see if I could be happy without all my shit.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  And I found, yeah, I can.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  So I should probably stop orienting myself, orienting my life with, with money, fame, notoriety, attention from the opposite sex as my north star.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. At the same time, you were, you were still writing songs, but they just weren't connecting in the same way.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never stopped writing songs. You know, there's sort of a gap in my career from 2010, my first album, to my second album, 2016. But I made two albums in that time. It was just that because my career had slowed up so much,

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  that my career was really considered over by, by record, by just sort of everyone in the industry.

• 1:10:18Rich Roll?

  Like music industry.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was considered a one hit wonder. A good songwriter, hire him to come in if, if you, if you want to hit single or something like that. But him singing is, that's sort of done. And so my, I was making these albums, but they weren't being released. And I hope to one day sort of figure out the legalities and, and get those out there.

• 1:10:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it, it, it feels like, it seems as if.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  In that period after that hit, when you're trying to replicate that, or just in this presumption that you're going to be able to create more and more hits, you're fighting this growing sense that you are a one-hit wonder. And it's only when you make total peace with that and then do it in a public way, that everything then shifts again.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. It's like you can't have what's next until you're okay with what's here now.

• 1:11:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And during that period of time, is this when the kind of spiritual growth is starting to take root? Like, what are you doing?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Correct. So I started meditating. In this book, Asking It Is Given, it changed my life. It's about sort of a wacky thing that people have a lot of opinions about, but I believe in the law of attraction, which is you sort of get what you think about. So if I'm thinking about, you know, my success is coming, then my success is coming. If I'm thinking about, it's not here yet, I'm going to get more of, it's not here yet. So there's a subtle shift in the thinking.

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  Acceptance and freeing yourself from expectations.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just sort of like re-brainwashing myself. It really was like a brainwashing where I had to train my mind to think of my career and myself differently than everyone else did. Because everyone else thought my thing was done. And each day I would journal, I would sometimes write the same sentence over and over and over again. And I just got myself to, I'd take walks where I'm repeating the same thing, almost like a mantra in my head, like, I will accomplish this. And eventually, I started to really believe that.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe it's happenstance. I don't know. I can't say for sure. I don't have a double-blind study, but I know that um, I got my own internal dialogue to a point where just like the first time where I knew that was gonna happen, cuz Sean did it, I knew I was coming back.

• 1:13:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  I knew my, everything was gonna work out.

• 1:13:06Rich Roll?

  Did you know Ibiza was gonna be the one?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  No, because I thought it wouldn't be the one because it has a drug reference in the title in the first line. So I'm thinking, they're probably gonna play that on the radio.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  The radio's gonna play this.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but um, I didn't know. I, I, I knew it was a good song when I wrote it.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  I liked it right away.

• 1:13:27Rich Roll?

  So this song, it gets, it gets remixed, right? And that was the one that goes bananas?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  And this song has been played like a billion, I mean, that's not an exaggeration, like a billion times on Spotify, right? It's like, something like, that one of the top couple, most streamed songs in the, in the history of the platform?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, at some point it was, like, six months ago it was number 10 all time.

• 1:13:51Rich Roll?

  All time.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  It's probably been passed by.

• 1:13:53Rich Roll?

  That is insane.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that is insane. It's insane to me, too. It's crazy.

• 1:13:59Rich Roll?

  Like, how do you even process that?

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I guess I don't really. Like, we started out at the beginning, try not to, really.

• 1:14:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  You know, cuz my job isn't to make another Ibiza, it's just to make whatever pops up next.

• 1:14:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I feel like there's this interesting, um, I don't know if it's a trend, but this wave of artists, musical artists, who are kind of redefining what it means to be prolific. And for lack of a better word, like, cool, like, the old trope of rock and roll star, parties, you know, ends up in the grave too soon, you know, the Janis Joplin kind of scenario is outdated. And now, what's really interesting are people that are

• 1:14:56Rich Roll?

  Not only producing amazing art, but doing it from a place of elevated consciousness. Like, I see you as somebody, you're like a spiritual warrior. You're on this spiritual journey. And the more you kind of raise your conscious awareness, the better your work is. And there's an infectious kind of spirit that emanates out from you, perhaps in the same way that you felt from Big Sean.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  When you make that. And I see this, you know, with people like yourself, but you know, like in Q is somebody who's very much like that. And I know he's your boy. But there's a lot of people now. And, and I think the public is embracing that and saying, this is, this is cool. Like, look at these guys. Like, they've gone through hard things. And they're not just checking out with drugs and alcohol and, you know, how many chicks they can sleep with or whatever. Like, they're coming from it from, from, you know, this higher plane.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  I, that's, it's so nice of you to say that. Thank you. Because that's my aim, you know?

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  If I could, if I could be that for other people, if I give that gift that Sean gave to me that day, that's like my highest.

• 1:16:08Rich Roll?

  Is that the mission? I know on your website, you have like, you can click on the mission tab and it's like one sentence.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's to enjoy my life and help others enjoy theirs. And in the meantime, be as kind to other people as possible.

• 1:16:22Rich Roll?

  That's a pretty solid mission.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  It's my mission.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  You know? And I had this crazy moment with Ram Dass. Do you know Ram Dass?

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  So a buddy of mine, his mother was dying and she had a relationship with Ram Dass. They were friends, they used to Skype. And they had a trip planned. She died. And my buddy says, I still want to go. Will you go with me?

• 1:16:46Rich Roll?

  To Hawaii?

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  To Hawaii. We go, go to Maui. And...

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  We roll up on his house and it is like, it's just, you know, beautiful. And they let us in, they said, sit in the living room. And he comes in on his electric chair, and he's had a stroke.

• 1:17:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  And he looked at us with these big old eyes that just said, "I love you."

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  We could have been serial killers. He lis- and he said a bunch of words I'd heard him say before. But some of- you, you, you felt it.

• 1:17:28Rich Roll?

  Just the energy.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  You felt it. I, I don't know how to explain it, other than it was a palpable, physical feeling. And I left, I walked out of his house. He, he talked to us for like forty-five minutes and he goes, "Okay, time for you to go."

• 1:17:43Rich Roll?

  You've got a healthy boundary.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  And I just want to stress, it wasn't anything he said. It was all stuff I'd heard him say before. It was almost like recycled speeches. It was him. And we walked out the door, closed the door, and I like, I keeled over.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  I, he told us, "You're walking around all day and you're choosing

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  and categorizing what to love and what not to love. You know, I like this, I don't like this. All day you're doing that." He goes, "It's too much work. Just love everything."

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  He goes, "See, the, see, my friend told me, we need to love everything." And he, he sent me a dirty carpet. I framed it. There it is. I love that carpet. And he has a puja table, right? And it's like, he's got like Gandhi and Maharaji and, uh, you know, all these saints, right? Um, and then he kee- keeps a, then it was a picture of like, uh, of, of George Bush. Now he keeps Donald Trump, because he doesn't like George Bush and Donald Trump, but he loves him.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  And I just walk out the house like, this is a whole different way to be in the world.

• 1:18:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that is, that's, that's heavy. The oneness, like the just unconditional love for all and the interconnectedness of everything.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Correct. And-

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  I thought, I didn't feel like I met some guy, some like deity. I felt like I met a guy who did the work. This dude has been meditating, you know, he's done the work for the last however many years, forty, fifty. And I, I just made a deal with myself, like that's, that's what I want to be to other people. What else do I have to do? You know?

• 1:19:34Rich Roll?

  So what do you?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  If I could light someone up like that, like that's, that's what I want to do.

• 1:19:38Rich Roll?

  How do you practice that? How do you combat your own internal, you know, presets to override, you know, whatever judgments you have in order to kind of occupy that space?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Well, we keep going back to meditation, that helps. You know, yoga helps, exercise helps, because they sort of like clear things out, right? You know, it's like, you know, you finish some hard workouts, like that's sort of like a reset, right? So you're back to zero. And then you could create your own story. So for me, that, that involves like a lot of studying, you know, whether it's, you know, listen to a lot of these guys' lectures, like Ram Dass, or Alan Watts, or Abraham Hicks, and Eckhart Tolle. I just try to like brainwash myself with that stuff. Um, and I'm always, I'm always trying to listen to, to that stuff. Recently, I've been, um, I just started this thing, because I realized I'm always listening

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  to like someone, someone's lecture, or like someone's like affirmations, like when I'm going to bed on like a, on a clip, or, and I thought I should make one for myself. And so I just recorded some for myself that are like tailor-made for me, like, and I know the, I know the things I need to work on, like, you know, that I still care too much about what other people think about me, and, um, you know, and I know I can get petulant and frustrated and, and sort of petty at times. So I, I, I started, sort of made my own recordings, and I'm, I'm excited about sort of brainwashing myself with those.

• 1:21:16Rich Roll?

  I like that.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  That's cool. What do they say? Can you tell me, or are they just for you?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Um, I think I'll probably release them at some point, you know? Um.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just sort of like work myself up into a frenzy. And I'm saying in first person, it's like I am, you know, I'm right where I'm supposed to be. You know, I had to live my whole life to get right here. The, the past is, is not a real thing that exists only in my head. And it, and it really has no bearing on me right now. What's moving my life forward is my mood and my vibration in this moment. And that's it. And I'm here and I'm supposed to be here and I'm a good person and I'm happy and I'm loving. You know, these sort of things and it go and, and sometimes I'm like yelling, I'm so excited. You know, it's, it's cool.

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:22:14Rich Roll?

  When I think of you and I kind of look at how you live your life and what you do.

• 1:22:20Rich Roll?

  You're an artist who, who, whose work extends beyond just music. Like, I feel like your canvas or your template is your life and the way that you share it. Like, there's the songs and there's the concerts and the performances. But the open way in which you share your life experience is like a larger, you know, it's like expanding the aperture on, on what your artistic expression is with this canvas of your life and how you're, and how you're living it.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  I just want to say thank you because these, these are things that matter to me. And I look at that the same way. Like my, I do feel like it's not just my music, it's my life. Like Gandhi said, you know, a story, a guy went up to him on a train once and he goes, can I have a quote, he was a writer, can I have a quote from my newspaper? Do you have a message? And he wrote down, my life is my message. It's like. All my, all my decisions and this creation, my whole life, that is my big piece of art, like, and I'm adding a stroke or taking a stroke away every day.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  So I just want to thank you. It's, it's cool for me to be seen the way I see myself. So I, I, I just want to thank you for that.

• 1:23:45Rich Roll?

  You're welcome. I mean, you, you have such a charming, beautiful, like childlike nature to yourself. You know what I mean? It's very, it's like easy to be with you.

• 1:23:56Rich Roll?

  And, and I can't help but compare that to

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  the life of your friend Avicii. I watched his documentary the other day and was very moved by, by it. And, and there's plenty of, have you seen it? Have you watched the movie?

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:13Rich Roll?

  I heard you didn't want to watch it.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  I don't know if I can.

• 1:24:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But I think what, what I took away from it is somebody who was extremely gifted. And also, you know, like just kind of an introverted, beautiful, giving dude, you know, who just had this facility for music that was unbelievable. And what happened is, yeah, and, and I'm not like steeped in DJ culture. Like, I don't know that much about it, but.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  You can't, I don't think you really can know how good he was unless you worked with him like I did. Because the tendency, and I'm sure some of these guys do, they go up there and they hit play and whatever. But he was, it, his genius was in the studio. He's writing these songs, you know, and he's making all the music on his computer.

• 1:25:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  And his sense of melody, I mean, the Swedes are known for their melody. Most of my friend made fun of me because I did a 23 and Me and I have like 0.1% Scandinavian.

• 1:25:18Rich Roll?

  That's what it is.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  They go, there's where your hits are from, you know? But, uh, his melodies were just ridiculous. The melodies of his drops. And then he would write the melodies of the songs too. And he was annoying in the studio because he would. Every little note had to be exactly right and he's always changing it.

• 1:25:36Rich Roll?

  Complete perfectionist.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  And they have all these people like Wyclef Jean and Chris Martin and all these people are like, oh, my God, you have no idea how talented this guy is. He's just like so supremely talented. It's all in his head. He's got it perfect in his mind. And the process is just bringing that to life and trying to get other people to understand what he's trying to express. But in that journey, you know, his, his like, his arc to superstardom was so rapid. And he was suddenly surrounded by this infrastructure of people that there was this whole machine behind what he does. And he was powerless to get it to stop. And throughout the movie, he's like, I have so much anxiety. I gotta stop. We gotta can't like,

• 1:26:21Rich Roll?

  warning sign, warning sign, warning sign, warning sign. And still, it was so difficult for him to extricate himself from that. And I think most people would think of that scenario and say, well, he should have just had better people around him, or why couldn't he just say no and take a break? And the truth is, it's more complicated than that. It's, these weren't bad people that were surrounding him and nobody-

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  They're doing their job.

• 1:26:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're doing their job and they're not telling him, look, you can't cancel. They're just saying, well, if you do, this is gonna happen. It was a very realistic portrait of what it must be like to be caught, caught in the middle, you know, in that situation. And he did take breaks and the movie kind of concludes with him on this island and you think it's gonna be all good, because he is, he finally finished all his shows. I'm not gonna tour anymore. And you think he's gonna find the peace that he's looking for. And yet, the depression or whatever, you know, kind of mental disposition that he was harboring, he still couldn't overcome. And I think it's informative for anybody, but especially someone like yourself, who's

• 1:27:29Rich Roll?

  been in that situation, been out of it, is back in it. You know, what do you take away, as somebody who was his friend and who collaborated with him and knew him quite well, like, what do you take away from how he lived his life? And how does that inform how you make decisions?

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  The first thing I take away is actually not from his life, it's from his death.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  And I don't think it's particular to his death.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  But anytime

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  someone close to us goes,

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  the first thing it does is reminds us we're next. We're gonna go too. And people don't like to think about that. It's one of the reasons it's painful.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  And so

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  this, his death reframed my life. In that

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  I know the time is now. You know, we all got a list of things that we wanna do when we're done doing what we have to do.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  You can't wait. You know, it's like

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  my dad is dead now. He can't do anymore. Tim is dead now. Now Mac is dead now too. And I know one day I will be dead as well. Before that day, I need to live my life. I can't wait till tomorrow or next week. This is it. And I have one of those infrastructures as well. You know, around me and it's set up to maximize profits. So it's like you have a song, okay, you need to tour as much as you can. Sell as many songs as we can. And there's no one on the team.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  There's no like palliative member of the team going

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  let's do X amount of less shows to make sure Mike is good and that's my job. So

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  I think one of the reasons Jeff connected us was, you know

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Tim's passing is, is one of the big reasons I'm walking across America this coming year is, you know, this was something I wanted to do, I'll do it one day. I got it. It's the first thing I thought, man, I gotta do that fucking walk. I could do that walk before it's too late. What are you waiting for this year of life? So now I gotta have some hard conversations. I had to meet with my band, say, hey, guys, we ain't touring this year.

• 1:30:30Rich Roll?

  So you had a whole tour, because you have an album coming out in like a week, right?

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm coming a week. I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to do the tour. I'm supposed to do all the late night TVs, all this stuff. They're not booked already, but that's, that's protocol.

• 1:30:41Rich Roll?

  That's the way it goes, yeah.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I have a hard talk with my manager, hey, man, I'm actually gonna make zero dollars next year, which means you're gonna make zero dollars.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  How'd that go?

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  It's a tough conversation for him, you know, at first. Now, I call him a day later, I go, where are we at with this, man? Because are you upset with me? He goes, look, man, I know you're making a life decision, not a career decision, and I support you. So he got my back, you know, at the end of the day, but it's hard. It's hard, because all these people are reminding you exactly like you said, but, but you could miss this opportunity. What if, what if, what if Coachella wants to book you? What, you know, I don't know. I gotta do, I gotta do this, man. This is it. I just wrote the other day, it's

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  a lot to unpack, you know, it's a lot to unpack. I can't put my life on one track. You know, people say I'm giving up a year of my life to do the walk. I say I'm taking one back. That's how I feel, man. It's, it's, it's my life. It's my life. I can't, I can't, I can't do what everyone else thinks I'm supposed to do, whatever. That's, that's your life.

• 1:31:57Rich Roll?

  If you're not gonna take control of your life worth what, where you're at right now, then somebody else will. And you, like you said, you've got an infrastructure that would be more than happy to take, take the reins on that.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:32:07Rich Roll?

  You know, and it's, it's, so it's gotta be even harder for you to put the brakes on and say, no, I'm gonna do this other thing. So we should just say, for people that are listening or watching, March 1st, you're gonna walk across America.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  It's gonna take you like, the better part of a year to do it.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Maybe a year, who knows?

• 1:32:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  Where does this, like, why this? Like, what is this about?

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Man, we all have that list. The same way a song pops in my head, I know I gotta write it. And this pop in my head, I know I gotta do it.

• 1:32:42Rich Roll?

  You gotta do it. Just, it's instinctual.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  I know I, I know I wanna do it. I know, you know, I don't know why I want to.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  I'm not making that call. I'm not, I'm not deciding what's calling to me. I'm just, I'm just listening.

• 1:32:57Rich Roll?

  And is the idea to kind of create a community experience out of doing this, like sharing it?

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Rich Roll?

  Having people join you? Playing music along the way?

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, I, you know,

• 1:33:10Rich Roll?

  Spontaneously.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  I know what's gonna happen if I, you know, sit in the studio, make an album and tour. I don't know what's gonna happen in walking across Arizona in 100-degree weather.

• 1:33:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're gonna have so many people coming out to walk with you.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't wait. It's gonna be cool. I can't wait, you know, and I just got to a place where, like I said, Tim passed, and I was just sort of tired of listening to all these great podcasts that you and others do, and reading these books about all these great individuals and not doing those things myself. I wanna like, it's all like a marketing to myself. Like, I wanna be the person that I think is awesome. Like,

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  if I was not me and I heard my music, I would think it's awesome. Obviously, I'm biased. But if I, if I was, if I was not me and I was looking at Mike Posner and he was doing his career, and then he said, "You know what? I'll walk across America." Like, me personally, I would think that guy is fricking amazing. I'm trying to make myself someone that I'll be proud of, you know? And then that target moves because I've become that person. You know, next year, I'll be that guy that I'm like dreaming of. So it's, it's really cool. I have another line that goes, I said, um, I don't know what I'll do when it's done. Hopefully, I touch a life. Maybe you could be one. I'm not walking to find, I'm not walking to show people who I am.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  I'm walking to find out who I'll become.

• 1:34:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and as somebody whose, whose life is your art, you have to live that life in order to have something to say and to express.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  It's like, there's no way I'm gonna do this thing and not learn.

• 1:34:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Not learn a crazy amount.

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

  The best part is the, the unknown, like the absolute question mark of like, what's gonna happen? Because stuff will happen and it's gonna be this crazy adventure.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've just had some like emails with people who have done this and they go, they'll say things like, "Nothing will be the same after this." Or they'll say things like, "Like, at some point on this journey, you will come face to face with the deepest depths of your soul."

• 1:35:20Rich Roll?

  I don't know if it'd be that dramatic, but...

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  They go, "But don't worry about that yet." You know, so it's like, whether it's that or even 1% of that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn more. I'll have more on my palate than I do now, a year from now.

• 1:35:35Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm, I'm not retiring, you know, from music at all. It's like, I'm even more committed to going out there, diving back into life and bringing that back to my music. I feel the deeper the human, the deeper the songs. And on, on the surface, this may look like, uh, me like attempting to drop out or escape from the world. It's actually the opposite. I feel like when I'm sitting like, in a nice house and I get on the tour bus and everyone on the tour bus works for me, I feel like that's a departure from reality. That's not real life. I wanna dive, like, I wanna walk through all the smallest towns in Indiana

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  and listen to people and listen, in the meantime, while I'm walking to all the greatest albums ever made that I haven't gotten to yet and come back and, and put all that into my music.

• 1:36:29Rich Roll?

  Well, I know it's right because you just literally came alive talking about this.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  I'm excited.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  You know, I think it's, this is a good thing. And the irony is that, is that this is probably gonna be the best marketing tool for the album.

• 1:36:45Rich Roll?

  By like, like you said, like you know, like, hey, you do Fallon, you do this, you go on this late night show, you then you do, this is the tour that you do, you're doing something completely different, but I think that's interesting. And I think people are going to be interested in following that journey. And I think it's just going to create a groundswell of, of awareness around what you do.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  It could, it could not.

• 1:37:06Rich Roll?

  And maybe not, who cares? But the point is like, doesn't matter.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I, you know, I want to be honest too. There is some part of me that has thought about that and hopes that happens. Like, like, this will be my biggest tour of all time. And screw you, label. Look, I did it my way. And now I'm a big star.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  What is the label telling you?

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Actually, I haven't got.

• 1:37:30Rich Roll?

  I've had a harder conversation than your manager.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he had to tell them. So I haven't gotten any calls.

• 1:37:36Rich Roll?

  Oh, man.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't gotten any calls.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  So March 1, but you're starting, you're starting on the East Coast, right? Do you have the route mapped out?

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  I will, I will in the next few days.

• 1:37:47Rich Roll?

  All right. So because this won't go up for a little bit, but you'll be.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  So right now I'm looking probably in New Jersey. I've been looking at, it's not decided. So if anyone wants to join or follow along, they can follow me on social, on Instagram. That's really where I am. I don't, you really do Twitter. But I'm looking at Asbury Park. I'm a Springsteen fan. So I think it'd be cool to go there.

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  Well, you got to start with your feet in the ocean.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Well.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be freaking cold.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  I plan on putting my whole body in. I love that cold water, man. You do cold water?

• 1:38:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I love cold water.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  I get in there. I was, I have a house in Northern Michigan. It was up there.

• 1:38:29Rich Roll?

  Where in, where in Northern Michigan?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Well, I won't give you too many details. Kind of like a little secret. It's in like a tiny, tiny, don't want it to like blow up.

• 1:38:35Rich Roll?

  You have people knocking on your door.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  But it's an hour away from Traverse City. And yeah, I was just up there in December and I got in the water. It was real cold, but I love it. It's like, it's like 20 coffees to me. Yeah. And so that'll, that'll be cool. And.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  My, my, anyone is sort of invited to join, you know, with some caveats, you know, I'm gonna be walking like 20 miles a day as I ramp up into this.

• 1:39:07Rich Roll?

  Are you gonna do it with a backpack?

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  Or like, how are you gonna handle the logistics?

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  I'm actually doing this probably in the most pretentious way. In that I'll have an RV that goes ahead of me each day and one person with me. That allows me to do a couple of things. One, allows me to go faster, right? Cause I'm not carrying as much stuff. Two, I can bring more stuff like a guitar and a keyboard. Whereas if I'm like pushing a cart, most people don't do a backpack. Some people start with the back because it's very romantic. But most people end up pushing a cart because it's more practical. So yeah, I'd just be able to take more stuff and play music and have like my mom can come out for a day type of, type of thing.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  I do plan on doing like at least two weeks of this thing with the cart, like a long one up there. So we'll see.

• 1:40:00Rich Roll?

  So impromptu concerts along the way.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, oh yeah, tons. I need to ask your advice too about like foot care and blister prevention.

• 1:40:10Rich Roll?

  That's big, man.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Rich Roll?

  Cause with things like this, it's the tiny things. It's the details that can derail you. If you have the wrong pair of socks or.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:19Rich Roll?

  You know, your shoes get wet and then you get a big blister and then you can't walk. We can talk more about that.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:40:25Rich Roll?

  But yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  I need all of that.

• 1:40:27Rich Roll?

  You wanna make sure you're taking care of that. But you know, if you have an RV full of stuff, you're gonna be all right. You know, I think the thing is you're gonna be excited in the beginning and you're gonna wanna like walk a little bit further than you probably should each day. And so to err on the side of less is more until you acclimate and get used to it.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great advice.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then you'll kind of, you'll build into it over time. But I'm excited for you, man.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be cool. I can just see you like, you're coming up on some little town and there's like a little theater that no one ever uses. And you're like, hey man, could we use that tonight? You know, and just shout out on Instagram and some people show up or whatever and you play and get to know some people.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  We call those ninja shows. And that was invented by a woman named Amanda Palmer. Do you know Amanda Palmer? Unbelievable human and thinker.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Artists and excuse me. And she made up this concept of ninja show, which is when her shows would sell out, another good problem to have, she would feel bad for people that couldn't get tickets. So before her show, she would tweet, hey, I'm gonna be at this corner with my ukulele at seven o'clock, come and I'm gonna play. Uh huh. And she'd just go show up and play. And I heard, I read her book, man, I was like, I gotta do that. That's cool. This is so cool. So I've done probably forty of those since then. I've played at like the Grand Canyon where like five people have shown up. And I've played at the school, like University of Dayton, where I tweeted, hey, I'm gonna

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  be here in like an hour and like two thousand people show up. So ridic, so cool. And it, it's really fun because most shows are set up to keep you as separate from the audience as possible. You think about the, the stage itself puts you higher. There's usually a barricade with security in between the stage and the barricade. And even the word fan, short for fanatic, sort of like. Stay away from those people. Yeah, sort of, um, yeah, it, it, um, categorizes them as dangerous. Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  And that's how I thought about my audience until I did, started doing ninja shows. Because I was, I play my guitar and then I meet them after. And it's just people like you and me, like, we both have artists that we love and we listen to and like, for whatever reason, I'm, I'm that artist for them, which is so cool. And I know what that's like, cuz I have artists like that, you know? One of them's Kanye West. And music is about connection. Correct. And yeah, I just stopped thinking about these, you know that saying, like, I'd never wanna be in a club that I was allowed into? It's sort of like that, where there was earlier in my life, more of a.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Underlying sense of unworthiness, like, there must be something wrong with you if you like me this much. But, no, there's nothing wrong with me or them, you know, it's just they connect my music. And so that was, it was really cool doing those shows and I'm excited about doing tons more of them.

• 1:43:51Rich Roll?

  Are you gonna do, you should document, you're gonna have like a documentary career with you? Because this idea of going across America and connecting with this country, I think could be a powerful narrative.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  I honestly have enough on my plate right now, logistically figuring out how me and one person with me are gonna do this thing.

• 1:44:13Rich Roll?

  So only one other person?

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  It will be with me and it'll cycle, it won't be the same person the whole way.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  But my plan is sort of announce this thing and if anyone wants to shoot me, they're welcome to, but I don't really wanna be like executive producing that. I'm on the way, man. You know, I don't wanna have a lot, I don't have a big crew.

• 1:44:37Rich Roll?

  It would take you out of being present for the experience, which is the whole point of it.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  And I don't wanna be managing a lot of people.

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  I just wanna walk.

• 1:44:44Rich Roll?

  Have you, you're friends with Jed Jenkins probably, aren't you?

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  No, but I wanna be.

• 1:44:49Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Rich Roll?

  I can't believe you don't know him. I would've thought you guys were tight.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Rich Roll?

  But his experience from that bike ride, you should, you should definitely connect with him.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  I haven't read his book either, I heard it's incredible.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  I heard his writing is...

• 1:45:04Rich Roll?

  He's a beautiful writer.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a great writer.

• 1:45:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you should definitely read that book. I'm amazed that you guys aren't connected, I'm happy to connect you.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Please do, man. Yeah, I'm sure he'll help me a lot.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  Cool, so let's wrap this up.

• 1:45:21Rich Roll?

  If we could close it down with a few words of wisdom for...

• 1:45:27Rich Roll?

  Somebody who's out there, who aspires to give voice to their creative muse, perhaps somebody who's a little frustrated or stymied, doesn't know how to take that first step.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Rich Roll?

  You know, what is, what is some inspiration or some tools that you've used that have been helpful in bringing, bringing truth to your expression?

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Being an artist is a really simple job. And this goes for any medium, writer, painter, musician.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  Your job is to create the art that you want to be in the world. The art that you want to exist.

• 1:46:12Rich Roll?

  And how do you define art and artist?

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Anyone doing something creative, you know? I think, I don't know. But yeah, you're asking about someone who's looking for their muse. And what gets in the way of the muse is when we start worrying about what other people will think. Even one extra person is too many. If I think about, will Rich, will he like this song? It will mess my process up. All I can do is create the stuff that I want to be created. The stuff I want to exist. It's a beautiful job. You get to tailor make things for you. Beautiful things that are, that are made to your exact preferences. And no one else can do it, except you.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  And so it's just, it's just very simple.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  That, coming back to that has helped me every album, you know?

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  And I think I heard it, I don't, I didn't make that up. I heard it from Maria Popova, from Brain Pickings.

• 1:47:20Rich Roll?

  Right, Brain Pickings, yeah.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Just, just make what you want to be made. That's it. You know, so we could, we could zoom out. Just do what you want to be done in your life. That's it. It's your life, it's your creation. Go get it. No one else can do it for you. If you don't do that thing, it just won't happen. You know, if you don't write that song, that song won't get written. No one else could do it for you.

• 1:47:47Rich Roll?

  It sounds so simple.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  It is simple. It is simple. It's easy to lose track of that, but I think it is pretty simple to come back to that. You know? I've told big, I've told big name artists that. They're in the throes of an album and they're confused. They have too many songs.

• 1:48:08Rich Roll?

  It's like, what do you like? What are you trying to say?

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  I just tell them that and they go, it's like they took a, took a dip in the cold lake, man. Like, wow. And it's for myself, too.

• 1:48:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Being honest with yourself about who you are, what it is that you want to say. I think it requires a level of like self-integration, self-understanding that comes with the meditation and all these other practices that you've been doing.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  They don't hurt, for sure.

• 1:48:38Rich Roll?

  Cool. Well, you're a beautiful man, Mike Posner. Thank you.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. You are too, man. And I didn't even get to ask you any questions.

• 1:48:46Rich Roll?

  No, it's not about me, man. It's about you today. I love everything that you are and do. And I wish you only the best, most incredible experience on this walk.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. I'll see you at the end.

• 1:49:03Rich Roll?

  With all the, I don't know, man. I think I might come, I might have to come and join you first.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  You are super invited.

• 1:49:08Rich Roll?

  It's, uh, it sounds amazing.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  You are super invited.

• 1:49:11Rich Roll?

  And you're a beautiful soul and I appreciate your art and your artistry and the spirit with which you share your, your gift. You know, because you are a gifted man.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:49:22Rich Roll?

  And the way in which you're so, you're so free with this gift, with humanity, I think is, is something really special. So, thanks for coming and sharing with me today.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. What, what else we have to do?

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  I don't know. That's it, man. Life is short, brother. Cool. So, if people want to connect with you, just, you're easy to find on the internet.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all Mike Posner. P O S N like Nancy E R.

• 1:49:49Rich Roll?

  Spotify, Instagram, your website.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  MikePosner.com?

• 1:49:54Rich Roll?

  You're gonna have the map there, right?

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  I'll have the map and I would say like if people really want to join up, probably the best place is Instagram. I think I'll be most sort of active and perhaps it will pull, my website will probably pull from there.

• 1:50:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  And also, yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  Be ready if you really want to walk too. You know, like if you can't walk a mile, like, don't come try to walk with me, you know?

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  This is for real.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  This is for real. This is for real. And there's some other things I, I have on my site, you know, I said, I'm not, uh, this isn't like a catered event either, you know? It's like, if you want to come for more than a day, you gotta figure that out on your own.

• 1:50:43Rich Roll?

  Right. You can't, you can't take that burden on of other people.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  No, your food or whatever. And I also say, if you want to walk with me, um, no drugs or alcohol. You know, we're rolling into, as guests into tiny towns and I got no interest in sort of babysitting drunk people or high people.

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  Clean living.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Clean living. Let's do this, Rich Roll.

• 1:51:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, reimagining the rock star life. There you go, bro. Um, well, you're gonna have to come back, uh, when the walk is done and tell me about it.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  That would be so cool, man.

• 1:51:14Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Maybe like the next day.

• 1:51:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, straight here, dude. The Today Show is calling. Forget it.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  What if I get here like on the way?

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  For sure, man. Pass right, pass right by here.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  I think I'll be crying.

• 1:51:28Rich Roll?

  That's good, man. People have cried on this show.

• 1:51:33Rich Roll?

  All right, dude. Much love.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:51:39Rich Roll?

  I love that guy. I told you, right? I told you you would fall in love with him. Unbelievable. What a beautiful, fantastic, uh, soul overflowing with love and positivity. Uh, do me a favor, hit Mike up on Instagram or Twitter at Mike Posner. Let him know what you thought of today's conversation. Keep an eye out for his impending upcoming walk across America. Mike has had to postpone the start date of this walk a couple of times due to, uh, an injury in his foot. I emailed him the other day to see if there was an update on the specific date that he was going to launch this thing. He basically said he's day to day awaiting the final approval of his physical therapist and his orthopedist.

• 1:52:21Rich Roll?

  So, uh, I think it's gonna start soon because he's itching to make it happen. But, uh, he has not officially announced the date, so just check in with him on Instagram. I think it's probably the best way to stay on top of that, uh, and to get updates if you want to join him along the way. If you are struggling with your diet, if you are truly desiring of finally in 2019, mastering your plate, but you feel like, "I don't really have that much skill in the kitchen. I don't have a lot of time." I can't stress enough how much I know for a fact, our Plant Power Meal Planner can help you. It truly is an extraordinary product. We work very hard to create, and it solves a very basic problem: making nutritious eating

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  convenient, delicious, and affordable. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you'll get access to thousands of delicious and easy to prepare, plant-based recipes. Everything's totally customized, based on your personal preferences, with unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and a team of expert nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week to answer all of your questions. It's all available for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year, which is literally the price of a cup of coffee. And right now, we have a special offer, a deal, $20 off when you sign up for a year when you use the code POWER20 at checkout. So basically,

• 1:53:47Rich Roll?

  you're going to get this entire thing for 80 bucks for a year of unlimited access. Again, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode. Take a screen grab on your phone and share it on your favorite social media platform. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, wherever you enjoy this content. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you can support the show as well on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering production. Show notes, interstitial music. This week, of course, the music was done by Mike, Mike Posner in

• 1:54:32Rich Roll?

  the middle, live from the studio, which is awesome. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin, who video and edit the video for the podcast and create all those social media short clips. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music by Analemma. Thank you for the love, for your attention.

• 1:54:52Rich Roll?

  For giving me a listen and my guests a listen. I really do appreciate it. I couldn't do what I do here without you guys. And it's so heartwarming to know that the content that I work hard to put out every week, and my team works hard to put out every week, is affecting and impacting so many people. I read all your messages and I greatly appreciate it. I will see you back here next week with another amazing episode with the CEO, the Cosmic Engagement Officer of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. You know Dr. Bronner's, right? They make that amazing natural soap. His name is David Bronner. He is extraordinary. He is one fascinating dude. You're not going to want to miss it. So until then, be well, do well. Peace, plants. Namaste.