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"The Ocho- Why I started a podcast!" SPECIAL SOLO EPISODE · Caught on the Mike...

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Warning due to some language and subject matter, listener discretion is advised.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's episode number eight of the podcast, aka the Ocho.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And on today's special episode, we're gonna turn the tables, and I am going to tell the story about the how and the why I became a podcaster.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just you and me in a microphone for 25 minutes.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Caught on the Mic.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Much like the idea of doing the podcast itself, I had to ruminate on the idea of doing this actual episode.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I figured maybe one of the best things I could do would answer a big question, and that is why.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why did I start a podcast?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there's several different iterations of answers to that question, but I'll start with the most basic one.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: It started with a New Year's resolution.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now I don't believe in New Year's resolutions as a whole.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think they are huge setups for failure.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of 2019, I found myself a little bit lost in this self-discovery season that I've been in for a few years.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You could say it was kind of borderline depressive.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I have been living in Lincoln for five years now.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: My kids live in Omaha, and even though it's only 45 minutes away, sometimes that can be a little bit hard.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Most of my social anchors have been placed in Omaha, and I have been very transfixed on my career since I've been living in Lincoln.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've been out of the music business for about nine years now.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't played in a band since 2011, and short of doing some solo acoustic shows from 2012 to 2014, I've pretty much disconnected myself from music completely.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I was knee deep in a lot of self-help books.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have been for years.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the best Christmas gift I got was in 2018.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: I got an Audible account gifted to me by my wife, and I've been listening to two to three books a month every two months since that point in time.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had been listening to a book by Aubrey Marcus, and he is the co-founder and CEO of On It, and it's a lot about kind of finding your way in life and healthier living.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Socially, I felt really disconnected.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So for the first time in years, I made a resolution.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: At the start of 2020, I decided that I was going to be a bit more intentional with reconnecting with old friends.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Reach out a little bit more, do a little bit more of my part to follow through and get together with some old friends that maybe I neglected.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's very easy for me to reach out and say, hey, come over, come over, come over and invite friends to come to me.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I am horrible about meeting my friends where they're at.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I vowed to myself that 2020 was going to be the year that I was going to do that.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I also started a private Facebook group that included a lot of these friends, and it stays private.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It will stay private, but those friends know who they are.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a good way for a bunch of our friends to kind of reconnect with each other again while they're kind of going through the same age issues that I am dealing with.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then COVID-19 hit and things changed a little bit.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: These connections that I found so valuable kind of took on a different meaning.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The private Facebook group that we started kind of became a semi-support group to where a bunch of dudes that were navigating being parents, navigating their careers, navigating their fitness goals, navigating their entry into their late 20s, mid-30s, early 40s, early 50s, could kind of come invent and share and get a little bit of guidance, uh, get a little bit of an attaboy because society wasn't giving it to them.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a double-sided train of thought where you look at a guy, and if he's struggling, specifically with his mental health, you want to look at him and tell him to pull up his bootstraps and man up.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another side where empathy kind of goes out the window, and it is a very callous and cold thing to look at a dude that might be struggling a little bit and say the same exact thing.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's perfectly human to reach out to your brother or reach out to your sister.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not limited to dudes or any specific gender, and just offer a helping hand.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of what we did.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been great because it's re-established this social circle that's been missing for me in my life for quite a long period of time.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's reconnected some of our other friends, but I digress.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is about how I came to start a podcast.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So 2020 was a good year to do that.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever we're weighting the waters of a pandemic, creating a form of entertainment that has meaning is perfect.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we couldn't have been more primed for that.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea really didn't start this year.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to trace this back even further.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll start out by saying that there will probably be varying degrees of which some of you might know me.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your introduction to who Michael Clark is might have been through this podcast.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we've socialized in some season or past season of my life.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you know me from playing in bands, maybe we've worked together at one time or another, maybe we went to school together, or maybe you're just now getting to know me by listening to this very episode.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to trace this back to high school a little bit.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I never thought I was going to play in rock bands in high school.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, I always thought I was going to be an actor.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I had every intention of graduating high school, going to college, and taking acting classes and being a theater major.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I was one of those kids.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, hopefully one day land on the set of Saturday Night Live and be working for Lauren Michaels.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: True story.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Superintendent of my high school came to my graduation party.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: He handed me a card and it said, today LHS, tomorrow SNL.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it was one of the greatest things I have ever been given in my life.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was one of the greatest compliments I had ever been given.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: I had a very, very, very rough childhood.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, to this day, I still don't really have an active relationship with either one of my parents.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that is an entire different episode altogether.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a very limited relationship with anybody from my extended family, but again, that's an entirely different episode altogether.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of the acceptance that I got in life came from outside sources.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of praise that I was looking for in life came from outside sources.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very logical from a psychological standpoint as to why my endeavors and my creative endeavors have been rooted in performance nature.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you do it well enough, people will give you recognition.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what I was looking for.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's what I was missing in life.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was missing a certain level of recognition, and this is something that has encompassed a large part of my life, um, whether it be through acting in plays or doing solo acting in high school, playing in rock bands post-high school, and even to this day doing this podcast.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Words of affirmation, that's my love language, it's really important to me.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's largely because it's something I didn't get from a home life or a quality home life.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I get past high school and I decide that I'm going to college for theater and drama and to become an actor, and I was even awarded a few scholarships, including one very notable scholarship, uh, to do so.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't take it because the entirety of my senior year I lived on my own and I had to support myself.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I did this while living in rural Iowa.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Small town.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: I got into a little bit of trouble with the law, my senior year.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: There was a uh there was a party at my house and it got busted, and I got thrown under the bus on it, and it was a big debacle.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty nightmarish, if you want to know the truth, especially if you live in a small town and you're not originally from the small town.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: But my second love was playing music and playing in rock bands, and I tried to put together rock bands all through high school, it just didn't happen.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was limited resources where I was living.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my skill set was pretty limited, but getting into rock bands kind of set up the 15 to 20 years that would follow afterwards.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I lived in rural Iowa, uh small town, I would say about 2,000 people, moved to another small town in Iowa where the college was at, um, put together a few bands there, had a great time.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one of the coolest things I got to do when I was in that second rural Iowa town was play one of Slipknot's last local shows before they went and recorded their first major label debut.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: That was pretty cool.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was a debacle.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: That again, it's another podcast in and of itself, but it kind of set my pathway towards moving to Omaha, Nebraska, where I ended up settling down for about 15 years.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that wasn't without its pitfalls, too.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was in some very bad bands, I was in some very good versions of bad bands and very bad versions of good bands.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the pitfalls that I had playing in bands was taking projects from the basement to the stage, maybe a little bit too soon.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my first established band in Omaha, I would definitely say that was the case because it took about two to three years for us to find our footing and to be something I was proud of.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said in an earlier podcast, sometimes you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're playing in front of people in mass, uh sometimes uh once you make that first impression, that's how everybody knows you from that point forward.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to reinvent yourself.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I got really good at that.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I got really good at reinventing the sounds of the bands, how I would market the bands, and I fell in love with the business.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But there are aspects from a social standpoint that made me fall out of love with the business and fall out of love with the art of making music as a whole.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's kind of what brought me to the inevitable end in 2011.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we've already covered that in the very first episode of this podcast.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2012, I went through a divorce.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I had been married for five years.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had a five-year-old and a three-year-old at the time, and it led towards this slow sludging movement of self-actualization and a self-improvement phase of my life.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was single for the first time in a long time from 2012 to 2014.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time, I would say I was more of a glass half-empty kind of guy than a glass half full kind of guy.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had to reevaluate what my priorities were in life, and it kind of led to some bad decision making, some good decision making.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Regardless, I started to bear down and focus on being a parent first, um, being good at my career, second, and worry about taking care of myself third.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I channeled all of my power into um being motivated to go to the gym, trying to get my friends to be motivated to go to the gym.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: I started playing a little bit of acoustic guitar and doing my own songwriting thing again, but I just it never found its bearings like it did in some of the bands that I had been in the past.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the the big difference was is I had to hold myself accountable, you know.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: With playing in a band, I know a lot of my friends are never quite satisfied or 100% satisfied with the art they create.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And for myself, it was always about having the right recipe, but never having the right ingredients to execute that recipe.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, sometimes I was the bad ingredient.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're in a self-discovery phase, you learn to be self-critical without, if you're doing it healthy in a healthy way, you learn to be self-critical without completely tearing yourself down and destroying your psyche in the process.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of where I was at in that life around that time from 2012 to 2014.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: 2014, I met my now wife.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she was my girlfriend at the time.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I got a big promotion in my career, and everything just kind of took off.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2015, that's what landed me in Lincoln, Nebraska.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was a big move, and I needed to weigh everything from every angle possible.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to look at what was best for my kids, what was best for my career, and what was best for me.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the relationship was definitely really good for me and really good for my kids.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I had found the right person that I could work harmonious with and a way to where my kids and her kids, my now stepkids, could see how healthy relationships work.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: My career, I knew that the only way to move up would be to move forward.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that meant moving laterally and seeking out opportunities that other people might not want to take.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, in the grand scheme of things, it was leveling up in a way that could have been a head scratcher, but it did have its costs.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not living in the same city as my kids is definitely something that has weighed on me and still weighs on me to this day, but it was the best thing for them and for me to establish the best family structure that I could provide for them in this household.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was also a big change to not be in my comfort zones, not be in the activities that I was acclimated to doing, not having instantaneous access to my social circles or my friends, you know, the bars, the venues, the restaurants, the households that we used to meet up in.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it has become the best case scenario for my life overall.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully my wife, my kids, and my stepkids as well.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: That said, 2015, I moved to Lincoln.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: 2016, I had put on some weight.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um backing up to the band days, I had developed a very severe umbilical hernia around 2008 that I just let go for eight years.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when I went to the doctor about it initially, he said, Hey, you lose 20 pounds, you won't even notice that it's there.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it used to cause me a great deal of pain when I would sing, and it would affect my pitch, it would affect how I approached my vocals.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was tough.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the guys in my bands all knew it, but you wouldn't know it if you saw me on stage that this was happening.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So doctor challenged me.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you lose 20 pounds, you won't even notice it's there.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: I lost 40 pounds in 2010.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: But in that time in between, I had been yo-yo dieting, you know, gain 20 pounds, lose 30 pounds, gain 40 pounds, lose 20 pounds.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: It had been ongoing from 2010 to 2015.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, by the time I moved to Lincoln, I had let that hernia go for so long, it looked like the size of a golf ball protruding from atop my belly button.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was disgusting.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was a sight to see, but it was causing me a great deal of pain, and I couldn't really work out the way that I was working out before.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I put on about 40 pounds within a six-month period of time.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was horrible.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the start of 2016 happens.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: I finally get this hernia fixed, and I start this gym journey.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's going to the gym five days a week, um, eating right, you know, trying to control the tangibles, control the things that I can control and make it a lifestyle change as opposed to this crash diet thing that I had been doing before.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, how this ties into the story is I wasn't socializing as much.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um, I would socialize and hang out with my brother and sister-in-law when they would come to town.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Occasionally I would socialize with my wife's friends.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'd get together with my group of friends like once or twice a year.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that's something that just kind of comes with age, but I found myself feeling lonely more times than not.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, not lonely in the relationship sense, but lonely in the I'm kind of the only dude doing the only dude thing he can do at this point in his life.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was tough.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you fast forward to about 2017-2018, where I started this episode at, and that's where I decided that this is kind of my mission.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is my new mission statement is to reconnect with people and creating a vessel to reconnect with people.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: In December of 2018, I finished the book Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: You guys have heard me talk about it ad nauseum.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've mentioned it on three episodes of my seven-episode run of the podcast thus far.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I've also finished books by Michael Strahan, uh, Charlemagne the God, which that's a great one.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Shook Ones.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about dealing with social anxiety, uh, which is something I later discovered down the line that I have suffered from my entire life.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um I Living with a Seal by Jesse Eitzer, fantastic book.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: But through all these books and consuming all of this media and I and taking in all these podcasts, I realized that my new mission in life is to create something or create content of high quality that engages people.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And much like David Goggins' book is a book about David Goggins that's really about you, that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what my podcast is.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I want to have people on the podcast to tell their stories, tell about their extraordinary situations, and they don't even have to be extremely extraordinary because I believe that everybody's story is just as valuable as a Michael Jordan or a Michael Jackson or a Michael Clark.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: But through the vessel of their story, I hope that my listeners can find out a little bit about themselves in the process.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've been wanting to start a podcast since the day I stopped playing in bands.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: I just didn't realize what it was until probably about 2017 and 2018 when I started getting into podcasts and I started listening to books on a more regular basis.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Also over sharing on social media, if you will.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that's kind of what takes me to this moment that we're at right now.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: At the start of this, I told you that I started a group on Facebook of a bunch of my friends, a bunch of dudes.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I posed it one day.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: I said, hey guys, I'm thinking about starting a podcast.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this was after this very long run of us sharing how we're navigating this year that has been 2020, how we have been navigating this COVID-19 situation and dealing with every societal pitfall that's been thrown at us.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: And all of these dudes said, Hell yeah, man, hell yeah, start this podcast.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that day I ordered my first load of equipment, and here we are right now.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been fantastic and it's been fulfilling so far, and I couldn't be happier with how it's been turning out.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: But this performance mindset has been going on my whole life.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I started telling you the story about me being an actor in high school.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I could take it even further back to when I was three and four and reenacting scenes from Star Wars uh with my brothers or with my parents or with my cousins and doing little plays when I was in uh fourth and fifth grade with the neighbor kids across the street.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've always had a desire for performance.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've always had a desire to interact with people, and I am very blessed that you have been tuning in and listening to what this big dumb ape named Michael Clark has to say.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a nutshell and in a mouthful of words in about 25 minutes worth of time, that's why I started a podcast.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is my pay it forward moment.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope you keep listening, I hope you keep sharing, because every episode is very intentional.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's about bringing out the best in my guests, bringing out the best in me, and most importantly, bringing out the best in you.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Caught on the Mic with Michael Clark.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, thank you.