Mike Posner — the musician behind “Cooler Than Me” and “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” — joins Shaan (his Duke classmate) for a wide-ranging conversation about how he engineered his early career from a dorm room using iTunes U, what he learned when fame arrived and disappointed him, and the philosophy that led him to walk across America and climb Everest. The episode is as much about the inner game of being an artist as it is about the outer mechanics of building a music career.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Mike Posner (guest, musician/artist)
Introduction: A Three-Act Story [00:00:00]
Shaan: Your life is already a three-act story. You have the rise to meteoric fame — Mike Posner, Mike Posner, breakthrough Artist of the Year award. Then you have the crash — “my career had plummeted, I had a hit and my career plummeted.” And then you have the rebirth — one of Spotify’s top ten most streamed songs of all time. Mike Posner is enjoying sweet success.
Mike: At the time it was scary. The fame, the adoration, the money — really the fame. The money and all that other stuff was nice, but the fame, man. The fame.
Shaan: So what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that. But I already know that story. So I said, what am I actually curious about? And it’s why you would climb Everest, why you would walk across America — what’s the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
Mike: I’ve never been asked that before. Okay, let me try to tell the truth.
Duke Classmates: The iTunes U Hack [00:01:30]
Shaan: I want to ask you about some things from back when we were at Duke. For people who don’t know this — me and Mike were at Duke at the same time, same year, freshman class. I remember hearing stories that there’s a white boy rapper in the dorm next door and we were like, who is he, trying to make it, whatever, didn’t really think too much of it. And then I suddenly started to see a couple of interesting things. The first interesting thing I saw was that at some point I opened up my laptop, went to iTunes, and I saw you at the top of iTunes — but it wasn’t the top of iTunes, it was the top of iTunes U. And iTunes U was like this little part of iTunes for lectures. In Silicon Valley we sometimes call this a growth hack. Sometimes you got to be clever and turn your disadvantage into an advantage. Can you teach me about this? I’ve always known half the story, not the full story.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a giant hip-hop fan. Started rapping when I was eight, got to Duke twelve years later, and I started to sing — but really I was singing almost from a hip-hop perspective. I’d use these complex rhyme schemes, polysyllabic rhyme schemes, even in my first hit song, “Cooler Than Me.” It’s got a complex rhyme scheme. So you got designer shades just to hide your face — it’s not just the last syllable that rhymes, “shades” and “face,” but also “designer” rhymes with “hydra.” That’s a rapper thing. I was combining hip-hop with melody in a way I thought was dope, that I hadn’t heard anyone do before.
So I started to share my music and I was getting a little bit of traction on these hip-hop blogs that were important at the time — blogs like Two Dope Boys, Nah Right, even Kanye’s blog, which was a really big deal back then. This was an era of piracy. You probably remember at Duke we did not pay for music. You’d go on LimeWire, BitTorrent, the whole thing. And I knew no one was going to pay for my music because we weren’t even paying for Kanye’s music, weren’t paying for Jay-Z. So I understood that. I understood it was important to be on those hip-hop blogs, but I was kind of a shy kid, really into my music, always staying in, and my friends would come back drunk, stumble into my room, interrupt my song, and I’d push them out — this whole thing.
One day I go to this kid’s room down the hall named Xander. Really cool kid, seemed to have a more robust social life than I did.
Shaan: There are only cool Xanders. I’ve never met a not-cool Xander.
Mike: Exactly, dude. So he said to me, “Hey Posner, at the party last night they played your song and all the sorority girls knew the words.” I said, “What? Really?” Mind you, I’ve been making music twelve years at this point. That’s never happened. He goes, “Yeah, and dude, they played it twice in a row and everyone was saying the words.”
Then the next day my mom calls and she says in passing, “By the way, I really like that song you make — ‘Cooler Than Me.’” I don’t know how she heard it, but it was on my MySpace at the time. So I said, okay, that’s kind of peculiar. It’s on the hip-hop blogs, the sorority girls like it, and my mom likes it.
The next day my friend Big Sean calls — he’d gotten a record deal with Kanye, he’s a rapper from Detroit, a dear friend of mine — and he said, “I love ‘Cooler Than Me.’ I think that could be a hit song.” I said, hold on. If Shaan, my mom, and the sorority girls all like the same song, something’s going on here. That had never happened before. I’d been making music twelve years and nobody seemed to particularly care except me, including my mom. She’d always been supportive and loving, but she’d never told me she liked one of my songs. I’m twenty years old, I’m like, wow.
So I realized the way these hip-hop blogs worked was you’d go on the site, there’d be a blog entry with your song, and then you’d have to do some weird right-clicking, navigate through sketchy websites, click the right link, save-as — it was really convoluted and hidden behind advertisements. And I realized those sorority girls were never going to do that. Snowball’s chance in hell they’d even find the hip-hop blogs, and if they did they’d never be able to download the song.
So I realized iTunes was just starting to come out, and it was this safe place you could get music. I knew I needed to get my music there. But then I had this other problem — nobody’s going to pay for it. So I needed it to be free, like on the blogs, but also on iTunes.
Then I saw iTunes U.
iTunes U was this section of iTunes set up for professors to post lectures. If you were at one school you could listen to a professor from another school. It was purely educational and everything was free. So I said, I’ve got to get my music there.
Now, this is where Life — capital L — comes in. I’m from Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. I go to Duke University. I do some searching and find out who’s in charge of iTunes U for Duke. I find out it’s a man named Todd. I call him. His area code is the same as mine. He goes, “248?” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “I’m from Southfield, Michigan. Where are you from?” I said, “Come on.” I still get goosebumps. He goes, “Oh yeah, man, you’re a student from Southfield — we can put you on iTunes U, no problem.”
Life set that up for me. So I got my music on iTunes, and when you searched it, my album came up — but the price was free. Everything else cost 99 cents. Mine was free.
Then I got busy on Facebook. I created a Facebook event with a link to the album and activated all my communities. I was from Michigan — a lot of my friends had gone to different colleges across the country, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Marquette, wherever. And then I was in a fraternity. So I told our pledges — normally they’d be doing a thousand push-ups or whatever — I said, “You guys are going to pause the push-ups. You’re going to send the invitation to this Facebook event to everyone in your Facebook network. Every single person.” I had a protocol, five steps. And all of you are going to change your profile picture to my album cover. All my friends did it. My fraternity brothers did it. All their friends at different schools sent it out.
And the last thing — the music was good. If the music wasn’t good, none of this matters. My music wasn’t always good. I started at eight, I’m now twenty, that’s twelve years making songs — a lot of songs — to get to that one song where my mom likes it and Sean likes it.
So the iTunes U thing was pivotal. From there, pretty much every college in the US was listening to Mike Posner that year. It started off small — fifty people. I’d get a show in Dayton, Ohio, booked by one of those hustler guys that throws the parties at colleges. I’d go, there’d be twenty-five to fifty people, do my set, they knew every word. A month later, he’d book me to come back and there’d be three hundred people, every word. It just kept expanding.
Shaan: I’ve never heard that full story. That’s amazing. Because what you did is you kind of stacked these things, right? You did that, then you started doing the shows — and normally, correct me if I’m wrong, you’d have a label, they’d get you set up with the tours. But you kind of did it backwards. So when record labels got interested, you were like, “Yo, I’m already more de-risked than your typical artist. Look — I’m already playing shows with real fans all around the country.” I remember being at Duke and we would hear, “Dude, this guy flies out every weekend, does a show at a different college, flies back, and takes his tests.” That’s what you were doing.
Mike: Two or three shows a weekend. It got crazy. Senior year I had set up all my classes Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I’d leave Thursday night, play Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, get three checks, come back with a bunch of cash, go to the bank, come back to my house — just dirty, filthy house, you know — go to class again. Doing homework on the planes. It was insane.
The One-Man Machine: Writing as the Core Skill [00:14:00]
Shaan: It seems like one of the unique things about you is that you may not be the best rapper or the best singer or the best beat producer, but because you’re good enough to be dangerous on all three, you were able to be this one-man machine — lots of practice reps, trial and error, not dependent on somebody else’s time or taste. Is that fair?
Mike: No, I don’t think so. How would I say it? I would say — yeah, I’m definitely not the best singer. I can’t dance, can’t do any cool runs. But I’m a damn good writer. That’s my A+ skill. People connect to me because of the writing.
Shaan: Yeah, if you did American Idol you’d lose, but —
Mike: I can sing, but it’s not one of my things. One of the things that inspired me in the research was that at some point in the middle of your career — not before you made it, but after the initial burst of success — you went back and took music lessons, singing lessons, enrolled in a college course. And you said something like, “I’m in this class and I’m not the best singer in the class.” You’re supposed to be the star. I thought that was an amazing, humbling move — why wouldn’t you dedicate yourself to the craft? Can you talk about that?
Mike: There are two things in that. One — I was in a cold spot in my career at that time, and I said, let me use this time to get better at my skills. I had a hit song but I didn’t know how to play guitar, didn’t really know how to sing properly — I was a rapper who’d started singing. Didn’t know how to play piano. So why not learn those things?
I remember being at a campfire situation, and Ty$ was there, and Tori Kelly was there, and they were passing the guitar. Tori Kelly sang this song, it was so beautiful. And then I had just written a song that day and I wanted to sing it, but I couldn’t play guitar and it just didn’t work. I left thinking, that’s stupid that I can’t do that. That’s never going to happen again. I’m going to learn to play guitar. I need to be able to sing a song at a campfire.
That’s part A. Part B — yeah, I was in this singing class, Berkeley online, great singers in there. I was in the bottom quartile of that class. I was a successful recording artist and those people all wanted my job. And I realized I had something most people don’t — my writing.
But also I realized, music is not about hitting the perfect note or doing the run. It’s about: does this part of my humanity speak to that part of your humanity? I’m raising my hand and taking my clothes off here — it’s vulnerable — and going, “This is what it’s like for me to be a human. Anyone else?” And if I do a good job, someone else hears it and thinks, I’m so glad you said it because that’s how I’ve been feeling for years and I didn’t know how to articulate it. And now I don’t feel as alone. That’s what an artist does.
And so I realized in that singing class — I already know how to do that. I can add colors and refinements by adding to my skills, but at the end of the day, even if you’ve got no technical skills and you can do that, you’re a great artist.
Shaan: Well, I love your music videos for this reason. I became a super fan — sorry, by the way, that’s why you’re a great artist. We talked about the beginning, you said “I’m a lowercase artist.” No — you’re making the thing and it obviously connects with other people. You’re following your own curiosity. There’s a million podcasts in the world, right? But you’re doing something that connects with other humans, and you’re not doing it because you’re trying to connect with others — you’re doing it by trying to connect with yourself.
Mike: And by the way, I used to approach it very differently. I used to approach it very analytically — Duke kid, right? I was trying to map the market, find the white space, find the opportunity. And my coach, my trainer, he was like, “The white space is you, bro. The product is you pushed out. That’s it. Take yourself, turn yourself inside out. Whoever resonates with what you are — that’s your target customer. You don’t need a market study.”
And he just flipped it on its head. I was like, dude, you’re speaking a different language. I’ve never seen this in a book. But I started to put some faith in that. That’s when I did the podcast. It started off as only interviews, and then we would just get on and shoot the shit — did you see this app that did this? It was just me pushed out, what I was actually interested in. And then all of a sudden it was getting a different result, because there was only one of those. There’s only one of me.
Mike: I had this line in one of my songs: “I got the yoga class headband now, people say I’m off-brand. How I am the brand, therefore anything I do is on brand. Now I’m on brand now.” It’s like — I look at my heroes and that’s what they are. When people attach to a version of you, it hurts when they see a person who’s free.
Making It to Radio: The Cooler Than Me Story [00:23:30]
Shaan: How did you get on the radio? Because that’s a black box. How did you figure out how to get on radio?
Mike: So I graduate, I sign a record deal, I’m making this new album. I’m starting to work with bigger producers — working with Benny Blanco, making these songs, thinking when I do my first real album it’s going to be big.
Now, the original “Cooler Than Me” had this line at the end of the verse: “You’re so vain, you probably think that the song is about you, don’t you.” We had to go clear that — that’s a Carly Simon song. So we said, hey, I use two lines of your song in mine, want to give you credit, can we work out a deal? She said yes. Her representatives said, no problem — we’ll just take 80 or 70 percent. Dude, it’s two lines of the verse. So I had to change it. I went with “Behind Jamaica, nobody knows who you really are, who do you think you are.”
And then I’m thinking I’m going to make this new hit song with Benny Blanco. But my record label says the new version of “Cooler Than Me” without the Carly Simon part isn’t as good. So they say we should use one of the new songs as my first single.
I’m in New York, about to go to a studio session, and my manager says we have to do a meeting with a radio promoter, Ian C. His job is getting songs on the radio. I said, I don’t want to go to that meeting, I want to go to the studio. He says, this is more important. I go, no it’s not. He says, “Cooler Than Me” is your first single. The label doesn’t know it, but I know it. I said, “Cooler Than Me” is old — it’s been out two years, everybody’s heard it.
He looks me in the eye on the sidewalk in New York City and goes, “Nobody has heard it.”
So we go to the meeting. We hire Ian C — I think we paid him five or ten grand to get the song on a few radio stations, no guarantee on how much they’d play it. He gets on a few stations. It starts catching on. People are calling in — “I like this song.” Before Shazam really existed, the tests are going crazy. A few stations — Patty Moreno in Sacramento, Shorty — start playing the song fifty times a week. That’s a lot. Then DJ Reflex at Power 106 in LA plays it, does well. Now the label calls: “We told you ‘Cooler Than Me’ is your first single! Great idea!” What a great idea, right?
That’s what labels are great at — they’re not great at starting fires, but if you can start a fire, they’ve got a hell of a lot of gasoline. They went into hyper mode, started getting it on all the other stations. And that was how I got on the radio. At that time, radio drove everything. It still matters, but now you win Spotify and get on the radio, or win YouTube and get on the radio. Then it was the opposite.
Just Do What’s Cool to You [00:31:00]
Shaan: I told you I get more out of the research for these than I sometimes do the interview. At first I got discouraged by that, like, oh man, it’s kind of anti-climactic. But then I got excited — I was like, oh wait, when I’m doing the research, look for the gold, because there’s usually one thing where I’m like, wow, that alone made this whole trip worth it. And for me that was this one: “I just do what’s cool to me and sometimes the whole world agrees.” Can you talk about where that mindset comes from?
Mike: That’s a good question, because I could talk about that mindset really easily, but you asked me something different — where does it come from? I’ve never been asked that before.
In part, it comes from messing it up. I experienced a lot of success in my early twenties and I got addicted to it. The fame, the adoration, the money — really the fame. The money and all that stuff was nice, but the fame had a higher high than the rest. And I can remember trying to replicate the success I had from my first hit song. I wanted that feeling again. I wanted to be that guy that everyone was looking at.
So I went into the studio going, I’m going to try to make a hit. Make something that everyone else likes. Whenever I tried to create from that vantage point, the only thing I succeeded in making was something I hated. And sometimes I’d think, even if I don’t like it, maybe everyone else will — it checks all the boxes, right BPM, catchy melody, cool lyric — it doesn’t really meet my aesthetic standards, but who cares what I think? This is about me being famous.
Of course, you went from a guaranteed audience of one to zero to start.
Shaan: Yeah, man.
Mike: And I thank God, or Life — I believe in God, sometimes I just call it Life, I’ll use those interchangeably — I thank God it never gave me success with one of those, because it wanted me to learn that lesson I could then teach to others. Could you imagine if one of those things I didn’t really like got really popular? That would have been even worse.
Shaan: You would have been trapped on that path.
Mike: I’d still be doing interviews about that song. Still be singing it at my shows.
The Three-Act Story: What Shaan Was Actually Curious About [00:35:00]
Shaan: The original plan for this episode was your life is already a three-act story. From a podcaster’s point of view: oh, this is easy. You have the rise to meteoric fame, everything that everybody wants — you’re a pop star, on stage, shirts off, everybody’s crazy about you, you’re the man. Then you have the crash. Then you have the rebirth. So what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that. But then I have to do what’s honest for me, which is I already know that story and I kind of already know it. I’d ask you some questions about it, but I wouldn’t be genuinely curious.
So I said, what am I actually curious about? And it was that line: my job is not to make a hit, it’s to make something that’s cool to me, and sometimes the world agrees. That was the first place I wanted to start.
The second one — I’m not a musician, but I’d like to think I’m maybe a lowercase-a artist. I write, I have a podcast, do things like that.
Mike: You’re an artist. Capital A.
Shaan: Capital A — you heard it here first. My cousin thinks I’m an artist, here we go.
The thing that’s been most helpful for me when I write is exactly that. If somebody asks me, how do you write something great, how do you write something that goes viral — the best thing I ever read was: sit down and write one true sentence. One true sentence. And that became like a calling card for me. I know where to start: try to write one honest sentence. And that’s surprisingly hard, because the honest sentence is usually something vulnerable.
If I look at your hit songs — “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” the one true sentence right at the beginning: “I took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii I was cool.” In your new song, there’s something like, “There’s a part of me underneath the part that I let people see, and that part is the good part.” And I love that — underneath the part that I let other people see, that’s the good part. Is honesty a technique you use to write?
Mike: There’s an adage in studios that gets thrown around, more so in Nashville and LA: don’t try to write a good song, write a true song — and then it’ll be good automatically.
When I was thirteen I was already a rapper. I started rapping when I was eight, but around thirteen I was considering creating a stage name. I had one for six months — Acrimony, I think — and then I threw it out and thought, from here on out my name is Mike Posner. That’s who I am, and who I am in life is who I am in my music.
This came back almost twenty years later, right when I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.” My career had plummeted. I’d had a hit and then my career plummeted. I was known for kind of frat songs and party songs — upbeat, dance, success songs like “Cooler Than Me.” And then I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” which is a stark singer-songwriter song on guitar. Most people don’t know the original version.
I thought: whatever’s left of my career will be destroyed by me making such a drastic change. None of my fans that liked what I did before would like this. And I started contemplating, maybe I should change my name for this project. Maybe I’ll do it as “The Truth” or something. And then I thought — no. The truth is your name is Mike Posner. So I got my head out of my ass on that one again.
Shaan: Do you look for that moment where you’re almost so scared to put something out that you want to change your act name — where it’s not safe? Have you learned to look at that signal and think, maybe there’s something here?
Mike: Absolutely. A huge barometer of something I should be writing is that I really don’t want to write this. This moment was so painful. I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to think about it. So yeah, that’s an entry point worth examining. Though the converse isn’t necessarily true — not everything worth writing has to cause you great pain. But often that is an entry point.
How Do You Decide What’s Next? [00:43:00]
Shaan: We had Tim Ferriss on the podcast and I asked him, the thing I really want to know is how do you decide what’s next? Because I knew he was thinking about what was next. And I know whenever Tim Ferriss is trying to do something, he’s methodical, he’s got a way he’s going to do it. I said, I kind of just hop to the next thing — how do you figure it out? And he said, “I create a menu of options. And on that menu, I make sure I leave room for the weirdest option.” I said, the weirdest option — why? He goes, “I’m not necessarily going to do it, but I treat the weirdest idea of what I could do next as something I need to overweight as an option.” So for you, when you’re trying to figure out what’s next — the next song, the next project — how do you decide?
Mike: What’s hardest now is choosing what not to do. Killing things. On paper I may be doing too many things right now — I’m writing my book intensively every day, putting an album out, expanding the business in a lot of different ways. On paper I’d cross two of those out.
But your question was how do you decide. And the same internal compass I use in the micro — when I’m writing a sentence in my book and I go, that word isn’t quite right, no not that, and then boom, that one — it’s an internal knowing, a feeling. Mark Twain said the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning bolt.
Shaan: Has that happened in your songs? Is there a song we all know today that almost was something else?
Mike: “Took a Pill in Sacramento” — didn’t have the same ring to it. We just kept trying to make it work. Doesn’t hit. Same thing in the production. “That’s not the right snare drum sample” — you’ll work for an hour, go through the whole sound library, and then, that’s the one. You just know.
There’s a quote Rick Rubin has that I love: “The best way to serve your audience is to ignore them” — meaning don’t try to reverse engineer what they might want or like, just make what you want, make what you like, and that is the best way to serve them.
Shaan: When you hear something and you’re like, oh, that’s probably the truth — I just heard the truth — okay, now the rest of my life is coming to grips with that truth. I don’t need to search for the answer. I got the answer. It’s just a question of how long I’m going to deny myself.
Has making what you want been easy for you?
Mike: Music is pretty easy now. And honestly, taking care of my finances has been a big part of that.
Shaan: What do you mean?
Mike: I’m financially secure. I don’t need to make another dollar from my music. So logically I was able to talk to that voice in my head and go, hey — you never need to make a song you don’t want to make, ever again. You never need to be in the studio with a person you’re not a fan of, ever again. And that made me a much better artist.
I live in Silicon Valley. There are people with more money than God out there and they don’t feel like they have enough. I know a lot of people who have enough, who have made the last dollar they will ever spend many times over, and they still do things to chase more.
Shaan: What was useful to you in coming to peace with having enough?
Mike: Twofold. I had the analysis — the Monte Carlo simulation, that kind of thing. A money manager helped me see, hey, if you spend at this rate for this many more years, you’re okay. So that was like the logical part — knowing I’m okay.
And then the illogical part, or the spiritual part, is realizing what true wealth or abundance or success actually is to me. My definition: true success is health. It’s the ability to have joy in the present moment. If you can do that, you’re a wealthy person. If you’re grateful for what you have, you’re wealthy.
The Beware Idol: Fame as a Double-Edged Gift [00:50:00]
Shaan: There’s a perception in the business world that the chip on your shoulder serves you. I know investors who will specifically invest in people they know are kind of screwed up but have this psychopathic drive. When somebody’s really happy, some people don’t want to invest because the returns might not be there. Do you think the best art comes from people in a happy place or people who have pain? Do you think the best success comes from people with the big chip?
Mike: I can’t answer in terms of where to invest your money — I don’t really know that much about that stuff. But what I can speak to is architecting a more beautiful life. I don’t have a perfect life, but it’s a hell of a lot more perfect than it was five years ago.
What I can say is I don’t want a life that’s hyper successful in the vertical of work and finance and a desert wasteland in the areas of passionate intimacy, faith, spiritual growth, friendships, fun, physical health, giving back. Work and mission is but one vertical. The thing I screwed up in my twenties is I thought if I crushed it so hard in this one vertical — got all the fame, all the money — that the points would carry over.
I thought, yeah, I can not show up to Thanksgiving and not return my mother’s phone calls — she knows I’m busy, I’m pop star Mike Posner. I cannot see my friends or ghost them for months on end — they understand, I’m pop star Mike Posner, Grammy nominated, International Superstar. I can never go on dates, just have one night stands after shows for years on end, and never develop emotional intimacy or the capacity to communicate vulnerably with another human being — because I’m International Superstar Grammy nominated Mike Posner. I can never really give back — I’m International Superstar and so on.
And what you get is just a life that isn’t that good. Winning the game of life is played on all these different verticals, and some of them require different skill sets that you won’t find in the work vertical. It’s not going to help you be a good husband, help you be a good father. So it’s not saying abandon this for the other — it’s how do you do it all in balance? How do you have everything? That’s what I’m interested in, that’s what I’m building. Am I perfect? No. But boy am I proud of myself.
Shaan: There’s a great clip on YouTube of Jim Carrey when he gets some award. He goes up on stage and he gave almost the same speech. He said something like, “I wish the whole world could be rich and famous so they would know that that’s not the answer.” You got to taste that and you found out yourself.
I have this goofy analogy. Do you ever watch Survivor?
Mike: When I was a kid I watched it.
Shaan: I’m one of the doofuses still watching it in season 47.
Mike: We all have our thing.
Shaan: So in Survivor, the best thing every player wants is the immunity idol. If you have it, you’re safe. Recently they made a twist they call the Beware Idol. Basically you pick it up and it says, “Beware — this comes with disadvantages.” The player can put it down. So far, 100% of players — not a single one — has ever put it down. Even though it says on the label: this thing has disadvantages that will hurt you.
I was watching Survivor prepping for this podcast and I thought, I think fame is the Beware Advantage of life. The thing that yeah, we all think we want — the money, the fame, the love of others — and it could say on the label, “Beware: people who become pop stars when they’re young, those aren’t the happiest people.” But we’d all take it anyway, right?
So I was curious — if you could go back, if there was a next Mike Posner, twenty-one years old, and you get fifteen minutes in a room with him, what would you tell him? And do you think you would listen?
Mike: The thing you opened the interview with — my smiles don’t result from good things, they result in good things. You have sovereignty over your own emotions and the way you respond to and interpret every event in your life. Life is a one-player game, and you need to exercise and practice that sovereignty. You need to develop rituals that give you the best chance of enjoying your life to the fullest. Being the joy in life, not waiting for something good to happen so you can feel happy — being happy so something good will happen. Not waiting for someone to do something nice for you so you can feel good — doing something nice for someone else to make them feel good, and then feeling good by default.
I didn’t have a handle on any of that stuff when I was twenty-one.
The Bad Travel Day: Turning Suffering Into Service [00:59:00]
Shaan: I saw a great example of that from you — I think you missed a flight, or were delayed on a flight. I love this example because it’s so relatable. Everybody’s been in that moment. Travel stressful, out of your control — flight delay, missed connection. There’s the common cliché reaction, and we all kind of have that reaction, but it’s not always the right response. Can you tell that story?
Mike: I’ve been told in recording studios so many times that the lyric I’m trying to write isn’t relatable. “Mike, don’t put that in a song, no one will relate to it.” Yeah, nobody else took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii they were cool. That was just me. But everybody’s done something that wasn’t true to themselves to try to gain the attention of someone else. So yeah, the lyric on the surface is unrelatable, the emotion underneath is universal.
Same thing with all these stories. My life is my life. I’m probably the only guy I know who got bitten by a rattlesnake, walked across a continent, climbed Everest — and I did that by design because I wanted to be the only guy. I wanted to have a life that was cool and unique to me. But every element of every story we share today has human emotions underneath that are universal.
So the story you’re talking about — yeah, I did a post. I’ve never talked about this in a podcast. I had this horrible travel day. The day before wasn’t good, I didn’t sleep, woke up early, we had to drive three hours to the airport, and there was an accident on I-70 in Colorado, traffic jam, seven hours in the car, missed the flight. And I was just feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t just the travel — stuff was bothering me in other parts of my life. It was a bad day. I didn’t feel good physically or emotionally.
And I remembered I was on a Zoom call in a Tony Robbins conference about time and scheduling efficiency, and in one of the breakout sessions one of the participants said, “When you’re having a bad day, ask yourself: what could I do to make this a great day?” It flashed back in my head while I was in that car. I said, well, this is a bad day — check. What can I do to make this a great day? I said, okay, if I could use the fact that I’m having a bad day to do something nice for others — that would be a cool thing. That would make me proud of myself.
So I called my assistant. I said, we’re stuck, this is all messed up, I’m going to be missing family time. I said, look, we’re going to spend the night in Denver tonight. Can you find me a place where I can just go volunteer? Not with money — actually show up and serve.
Stacy — she’s amazing — she found me a place for people getting off drugs who could live there and get meals while they find a job and some training. I just showed up to serve food.
When I got there, I was still tired. Still had a headache. All the same things. But I was just proud. I said, hey — I used my suffering, my having a bad day, not as an excuse to go to bed, not as an excuse to complain or take it out on somebody else, but as an excuse to do something good for someone else.
I did alchemy that day. I turned my suffering into service. I turned my suffering into connection.
And that pride I felt in myself — because I would usually not do that, I would usually have a pity party in the hotel and look at my phone — it gave me all this energy. I say this when I speak a lot: true happiness comes from growth. It doesn’t come from getting everyone to like you, getting the most followers, a million dollars, things going the right way for you. It comes from playing a part in the evolution of your own soul. Saying, “I usually do things this way — what if I did it this way?” And that day I can truly say was one of the best days of my year. Without a doubt. And I went to bed with so much energy.
Shaan: There are certain things that seem like they take energy but actually give it. Like going to the gym — you’re tired, don’t really want to go, but you go and suddenly you have energy. That doesn’t make sense. But it does to anybody who’s ever done it. Because if you stayed in the hotel room and played on your phone you’d get more and more tired, engaging in something you know you don’t care about. But when you engage in something that’s going to make your soul grow, there’s this unlimited energy.
Sometimes doing more is easier than doing less. Sometimes a hard goal is easier than an easy goal.
Mike: My trainer told me a similar story. He came to our morning workout beaming. I was hoping secretly that it was about me getting more fit, but it wasn’t. He said, “For the last nine months I’ve been driving around with an expired license. Didn’t want to go to the DMV. But every time I drove I was paranoid I’d get pulled over. Little anxiety eating at me constantly. So today I woke up and I decided: I’m doing it differently.”
His thing is always just do it differently. Not trying to do things perfectly, just differently. You do that often enough, you end up getting pretty close to perfect.
So he Googles the local DMV. Looks at the star ratings. A DMV, right — one and a half stars. He goes, okay, but I’m a sovereign being. I don’t have to have a one and a half star experience. That’s the average experience. I’m going to have a five-star experience. And it’s not by going in there and them giving you five stars — it’s by walking in as a five-star customer.
He gets in the car, drives to the DMV, no appointment, walks in proud and happy. Opens the door for some lady. Helps people — “Hey, why don’t you guys go ahead of me.” And then the lady he was joking with in the parking lot turns out she works at the DMV. She sees him on the inside. “What are you here for?” He’s like, “I’ve been driving around with this expired license, been so stressed out, but today’s the day.” She goes, “You’re right, today’s the day. Come over here.” Cuts the whole line, gives him everything, he doesn’t even have to take the test. Walks out in under thirty minutes with a five-star DMV experience.
Shaan: That’s like watching somebody part the seas. If you didn’t believe in manifestation before — look what just happened with the DMV. I always hold onto that: you get to choose your experience. And I like the message — don’t expect the world to give you five-star hospitality. You be a five-star customer and watch how the universe responds.
Benny Blanco’s Superpower [01:10:00]
Shaan: I want to ask you about Benny Blanco. I’m really fascinated by these people who are the influencers of the influencers — the people who unlock creatives. I heard he reads some stuff, tries to create a safe space, kicks people out of the room, lights candles. I got to ask Mike about this. What’s Benny Blanco’s superpower? What does he do that’s enabled him to work with guys like you and get great results?
Mike: From my perspective, it’s the intangibles. It’s not the type of candle. He has a real gift for making artists feel comfortable. Artists are a fickle bunch — we can easily get scared. Like exotic birds, you know? We’re sensitive in a good way. We pick up on things other people don’t, and then we write about it and help others see it. We see the divine in the mundane. But as a result, we can also feel when someone’s energy is off. A lot of artists, if there’s a weird dude in the room, it’s hard to write a song.
So he’s a master at creating the physical space, but really — he’s just one of those people you feel comfortable around. He also has great taste. And he’s really fun. And honestly, I’m driven, type A. When I first worked with Benny, he was the first person I did a real studio session with in an actual recording studio. I’d written songs with Big Sean in my basement but never in a real studio. I was always like, we got to work hard. At that time I was paying by the hour. Let’s go, let’s make the song.
And he was the first guy to go, “Dude, it doesn’t matter if we make a song today. Let’s just be, and the song will come. And if it doesn’t, it’ll come next time.” He taught me how to collaborate. And hopefully I do that for other artists now too.
Shaan: I’m obsessed with these videos of the making of songs. Some guys are obsessed with the Roman Empire or whatever — mine is watching the making of these songs. There’s so many of them on YouTube, grainy footage, you can hear them play the lick for the first time, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I like that” — and that’s the song. And you almost want to reach through the screen like, that’s it! That’s the song! You didn’t even realize you just did it.
There’s one of Benny and Ed Sheeran on a tour bus, writing “Love Yourself” or something, and they’re just messing around. Ed is sitting there cross-legged, barefoot, very playful, like “yeah, and it’s not—” you know. Not a lot of stress around finding the answer. And because of the play they got to “you should go and love yourself” — which wasn’t the polished line, but it was the fun line. And because it got there, the song got there.
One of the things Ed said I thought was interesting — he believes that rooms have songs. Rooms and instruments have songs. To write his album he would rent a farmhouse or some cool inspiring space and build a mobile studio there. The house got double the inspiration even if it was 85% as good as the best studio. The trade-off between perfect audio and creative inspiration — what do you do with your environment to get the most creative version of you?
Mike: Very similar. I love to work in immersions like that. I have a studio here, and I mostly record myself when I’m home. Same as when I was in the dorm room — the mic’s a little better now, but it’s a laptop, a nice mic plugged in, I hit record, I sing until I mess up, stop, engineer it myself. That way I can record whenever I want, I don’t need another person, don’t have to wait for someone to come over.
But I love working in immersion similar to what you described with Ed. Take a bunch of talented people, go to a nice place divorced from our normal duties, just live and breathe this art for a week or two weeks. Work until we basically die, take a couple weeks off, come back and do it again. I like to work like that.
Shaan: Is that where some of your songs have come out of?
Mike: My songs come from all over. That’s my personal favorite way to do it, but it’s not about what I like — the song is coming through. I’ve written songs on airplanes, here, in the morning, at night. Starting with piano licks, starting with lyrics, starting with melody. Pretty much every different way.
Shaan: Hey, by the way — I’m having fun. Where are we measuring up to your research?
Mike: Dude, it’s higher. You gave me the iTunes U story — that was amazing. That’s like everybody’s got their favorite dish, and that’s my favorite dish. It’s the serendipity of things working out after ten years in the making. Everybody who’s trying to do stuff — you want to hear those stories, after ten years then it starts to work out. We all need to hear those. But also you engineered it. You weren’t a passive observer to some lucky circumstance — you took steps, made observations, doubled down. You did things there’s no textbook for, like making your pledges change their profile pictures. But it makes sense. I love that story.
The Philosophy Behind Everest and the Walk [01:22:00]
Shaan: I want to ask about the walk across America, and Everest, and the silent meditations. I’ll bucket them all under one philosophy: do hard things. Is that the right description of what drives somebody to do those things?
Mike: They were large examples of what we talked about with the airport day — going to volunteer, saying my life is maybe too easy right now and that’s why it doesn’t feel right. So I’m going to make a harder goal. Paradoxically, my life feels easier when I’m doing the harder thing.
Shaan: Can you take me back to one of them — where life is easy but doesn’t feel quite right, you don’t have the level of joy you should have on paper, and then the decision? What was the voice that made you go do one of those?
Mike: With the walk across America — I was at a friend’s jewelry shop. Someone across the room said, “My friend just walked across America.” It was like a tractor beam. I said, “What’d you just say?” And they were like, “Yeah, I guess you can do that.” Nobody else cared about it. I said out loud, “I’m going to do that one day.” The sentence lingered in the jewelry shop like a fart nobody wanted to claim. Everyone went back to what they were talking about.
Fast forward four or five years. My father dies from brain cancer. About six months after that, my assistant at the time, Nick, comes to pick me up to take me to a studio session. He said, “Hey man, Avicii is dead.” I said, “Don’t mess with me, man.” He said, “I’m not messing with you. Avicii is dead.” I said, “I can’t believe this.”
He drives to the studio, and I keep saying “I can’t believe this” out loud. But the one thought going through my head that I cannot stop is: I have to walk across America. I have to walk across America. I have to walk across America. It was this proximity of death saying, hey dude — you see that man who gave you your life, the one you look just like? He’s dead. That’s what’s going to happen to you. You see that other man who does the same job as you, who you were in the studio with last week? He’s dead. That’s what’s going to happen to you.
A couple weeks later I’m in this little guest house I’m renting in West Hollywood, bouncing around studios trying to make my next hit. My friend Willie calls. “Hey Mike, I got bad news. Ronnie’s dead.” Our best friend from childhood.
And I just realized: I’m going to die. Before I die, I want to live the life I actually wanted to live. And I wasn’t doing it. I was living the life I thought my manager thought I should live. Truly — I was thirty years old, living the life that twenty-year-old me had set up. It was pain.
I walked across America because I was in pain and I wanted to figure out a different way.
Shaan: When you were doing it, a lot of times the reason I do something isn’t the thing I get out of it. I go in for one reason and come out with something else — like going to Chuck-E-Cheese to play the games, but you get all these prizes at the end you didn’t even realize were coming. What were the prizes you got at the end?
Mike: Found a part of myself that was so much stronger than I ever knew was there. Not only found that part — unleashed it.
I got bitten by a poisonous rattlesnake. Spent three nights in the ICU. Got airlifted. Got told by dispatch I might not live. Got told by doctors it might take eight months to heal, that I might lose my foot. And I did a crazy thing: I went back. I kept going.
Everyone expected me to quit, probably because the old me was such a wimp. My whole life was about me being comfortable. So I decided to do the opposite — I’m going to be a five-star walker. Do it differently. I’m not going to use this injury as an excuse to do less. I’m going to use it as an excuse to do more.
And yeah, I get to do podcasts and talk about it, and it’s on my Wikipedia page. But the real trophies — I became someone new. Having an inkling you’re strong versus knowing you’re strong because you were strong — I was strong in a way I hadn’t been before.
The Misogi and Jesse Itzler [01:32:00]
Shaan: There’s this concept called misogi. Have you heard of it?
Mike: Uh huh.
Shaan: We’ve talked about it on the pod before. Jesse Itzler came on.
Mike: I love Jesse Itzler. He’s a good friend, man. He’s one of my — I don’t like to use the word “mentor” or “hero” or anything — but I look for people who live interesting lives, who I’m like, oh, I could steal some of that blueprint. He’s that for me.
Shaan: By the way, I’ve been with him off the record — he’s that guy. I always wonder because on a podcast you see hopefully someone’s best self. But he’s that guy. 24-7. I’ve watched him with his kids. He’s that guy.
Mike: So he has this idea of Kevin’s Rule, and the misogi — one grand challenge a year. One ambitious hard thing you’re going to do, whether super physical or some other kind of thing. My misogi, which is harder for me than an Ironman or anything like that, is: can I go twenty-four hours straight without a complaint in my head?
Shaan: That’s dope. I want to try that.
Mike: Not out of your mouth — in your head. The conversation you’re having in your head is the big one all day.
Shaan: So good.
Mike: And actually, you’re a Tony Robbins guy — I’m a Tony Robbins guy too. He said a phrase that made me realize how important this was. He’s on some trip and meets some guy in India. The guy asks him about suffering. Tony’s like — I’m Tony Robbins, I don’t know if you know this, but suffering isn’t what people usually describe me as, I’m thriving, powerful, all these things. And the guy goes, “Well, I just saw you yelling at your assistant over there.” And Tony’s like, “Well, he wasn’t doing his job, so I had to immediately demand the performance.” And the guy brought to his awareness: there are so many of these little moments every day where you’re losing your state.
And he said it like this: “How cheap is your happiness? How little does it take? If I spill this water on this desk right now — do you lose that beautiful state? Because if you do, that was cheap. That was so easy to knock you out.”
And I heard that and I was like — that’s a thing I want.
Beautiful States vs. Suffering States [01:37:00]
Shaan: When I look at your story — the things you wanted in your twenties, the success, the fame, the money, the love of everybody — those are the things all of us want, at least in our twenties, often for their whole lives. A big part of life seems to be just figuring out what you’re supposed to actually want. I wanted this, I achieved it, and then worst case scenario: I realized I didn’t even want the right thing. I played a game that was rigged for me to lose. Some of your story reminds me of that.
Mike: So well said. And I believe the person Tony was talking to was Krishna Das. And so Krishna Das and his wife Prem — they’re these amazing teachers, and they teach that there are only two kinds of states: beautiful states and suffering states. All different types of each — joy, laughter, calm serenity, or pain, depression, self-pity. But really only two states.
What all of us really want is to have more beautiful states and fewer suffering states. We’re talking about tools to get there. What do you want? That’s what you want. The problem is we convince ourselves that we want the middleman. We think the promotion gives us the beautiful state. Achievement gives us the beautiful state. Anything you want, you want because you think it’s going to give you a better state. And maybe it will, momentarily. But the trick of the game is: you don’t have to wait for the thing. Feel it now. And if you can win that game, you’ve won life.
Nobody’s perfect. I haven’t met one person — and you and I get to spend time with a lot of these teachers and gurus — not one who’s 100% in a beautiful state. But we can work more towards there.
And we need external goals. Victor Frankl — man’s search for meaning. Need something in the future to look forward to. That’s important. At the same time, you need to be winning this internal game: that’s my goal, but how do I want to feel as I’m going after it? That’s a different kind of goal that interweaves with your external goal. Most people forget to set that one. And they lose. They might win on the vertical axis, might win on the horizontal axis, but they lose on the depth.
That’s it. That’s all we’re trying to do. Any of these tips or tools or stories — it’s all to win that game.
Shaan: Well, listen, man. I appreciate you inviting me out to your house and doing this.
Mike: Thank you. It’s been great.
Shaan: It has been great. Peace.