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The Inevitability of a Strange World (2025 Wrap Up & Reflection of 5 Years) · Caught on the Mike...

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good whatever time it is that you are listening to this right now.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is usually the real estate where the listener discretion is advised, comment rests, and I'll say it.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Listener discretion is advised.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I say a couple of bad words throughout this.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is a solo episode.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: It falls and is dropping on my birthday, December 22nd, 2025.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: A reflection back at the year 2025 and a little bit of optimism for 2026.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I hope all of you have a fantastic rest of the holiday season and rest of the year and enjoy the episode.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: The inevitability of a strange world.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: The inevitability of a strange world.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of my most favorite album titles of all time.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the early 2000s, there was a band called Halifax.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: You might remember them from, I think it was the 2003 or 2004 season of The Real World Austin, where the entire um cast got to be interns for Drive-Thru Records.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Halifax was featured.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Later, I would learn more about Halifax through their song Sydney and through a very unique rendition of Paula Abdul's Straight Up that they recorded for the Punk Goes Pop series that was popular around that time.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The inevitability of a strange world was the album title that dropped in 2006, and I loved that album.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Later on, 2007, 2008, when I was singing in the band AraSing, we used to cover a song off that album called Our Revolution, which is a very throwbacky song.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like Motley Cruz Kickstart My Heart.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've used that album title to um set up blogs, set up podcasts, Facebook posts.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I have used that term, the inevitability of a strange world, over and over and over again.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought it would be really clever to use it to set up this podcast episode, the very last episode of 2025, a year that was busy beyond comprehension and belief.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because this really became a strange world this year, particularly for me.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I try and kind of keep on the sidelines when it comes to that socially divisive stuff.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get right into it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: 2025 marked the five-year anniversary of Caught on the Mike, an astounding accomplishment in the podcast space.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in September, I commemorated that five-year anniversary on the date by releasing episode 200.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could say that it wasn't by design, but I worked double time to make that happen.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, yesterday I was counting every single episode that I released in 2025, and I released 59 episodes in total.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I am a huge believer in the idea of quality over quantity, but quantity was plentiful in 2025, and it's crazy because I started the year a little bit more conservatively than I may have liked.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of moments where I had to give pause and think about what is the next step?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Who is the next person I'm going to have on?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I try and do things by design.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: But by May, through a very few amazing strokes of luck, the show essentially started booking itself.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And something I am eternally grateful for, especially whenever I'm just trying to keep the engine going.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone that's ever had a creative endeavor has come into a position like that at some point in their journey.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Mine just happened to come about this year, five years into doing a show.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lesson to be learned there.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: If I may be so vulnerable for a minute and honest, I will say it is really hard in sharing that lesson without sounding like a sociopath or an absolute narcissist.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But here we are.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think persistence pays off.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I will tell you in 2025, that's really when I felt like the show actually started and started to find its voice.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Five years in.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was just looking up a statistic.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Podfading, or when podcasts stop producing new episodes, is extremely common with sources suggesting that 90% of podcasts don't make it past three episodes, and those that do, ninety percent quit before episode 20, leaving very few active shows.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, in 2025 I got to episode 215.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Something that if you would have told me when I started this endeavor, would have been yeah, it'd be awesome if I could do that.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I really didn't think it'd be realistic.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Namely, having the opportunity to talk to some of my personal heroes, whether it be in the music space, the athletic space, the business space, actors, actresses, you name it, um, I feel very lucky and very fortunate to have had the experience that I've had and the level of consistency that I've had.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: So going forward and leaning into my earlier commentary about narcissism and not looking like a sociopath, I wanted to assure all of you that this final little episode of 2025 is absolutely not intended as a humble brag session as much as it is a recap, an opportunity for participatory management, an opportunity to bring you back into the fold.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you've walked away from caught on the mic at one point or another, or if you're just now discovering caught on the mic, it would be huge in 2026 if you join this movement in any way, shape, or form that you can.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have given myself a hard deadline.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have given myself the deadline of December 22nd, 2027.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that's two years from the day this episode drops to make a decision on whether or not I want to keep moving forward with the podcast.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I'm committing it to video, I'm committing it to audio that I've given myself a hard deadline to make a decision about the show.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the third quarter of 2025 got extremely busy for me to the point where the last quarter of 2025, I had to pull the reins back a little bit.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't been as active in releasing episodes the past few weeks, and that has also been by design.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: There were many occasions this last year where I was releasing multiple episodes a week when I set off to do this thing in 2020.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of committed myself to, yeah, maybe I'll release one every 10 days, 10 to 14 days, one every two weeks, 26 episodes a year, let alone get myself to a point where I drop 59 episodes in one year without a single solo episode.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's 59 plus guests throughout the course of a year.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty huge for a guy doing it in his basement.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: A guy that's not even famous by any of his own accord.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And like any sane person, I've had to learn some lessons along the way.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the hard way.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: One of the biggest ones is the 80-20 rule that 80% listening, 20% speaking, which can be extremely hard to do when the show is 99% done remotely.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's a blessing and a burden in and of itself.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a blessing because it gives me the opportunity to talk to anybody in the world where they're at, when it is convenient for them, opening up these huge opportunities to talk with some of my biggest heroes.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a burden because it is so hard to not talk over the top of each other when you're recording remotely.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it requires some strategic editing.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a lot of friends ask me, they're like, hey, have you ever considered doing the show more in person?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, I have.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's a silly question.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to do more episodes in person, but that requires a whole other level of production.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it would be a better quality show if I had.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's something I'm looking towards in 2026.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I do more in-person interviews again.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I might need to check, change up my camera structure, my recording interfaces, and everything along those lines to make those moments possible.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: But like I said, there's the other side of it.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like I got to talk with Sam Nelson Harris of X Ambassadors this last year.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got to talk with Nick Hexham of 311 this last year, Travy McCoy of Gym Class Heroes this last year, Ryan Cabrera, Eric Bass of Shinedown this last year.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Huge opportunities.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Angelo Moore of Fishbone, like a lot of people that I have listened to on a pretty regular basis.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't take that for granted and I can't, you know, forego one format for the sake of another and cost myself more opportunities along those lines, you know, because I am so, so, so grateful for those moments.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I have found myself, whether it be in bands or this podcast or other creative endeavors I've done with my life, is this all or nothing mentality.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I do it one way, I have to go all in on this one way, versus taking more of a hybrid approach.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I let all that word vomit out about recording remotely versus in person to say that I'm hoping 2026 I can kind of take a more hybrid approach to doing the show.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've never shied away from the idea of letting you in on how the sausage is made, short of sharing how I book guests, which I will never do.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: But um I do that for the sake of inclusivity.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I created the show in 2020, I wanted to create a culture and a community around something during a time when we all kind of felt disconnected.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I've always overshared to almost an annoying extent where I am at with my creative process in an effort to get you creatively involved yourself.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope more collaborations are also on the table in 2026.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if you kind of have something creatively to offer the show, let me know.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we can work together.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: But as I bring this kind of celebratory moment to a close and move towards the what happened versus where we're going portion of this shorter episode, I just want to say that I hope to continue to keep you a part of the process.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: The first 10 minutes of this recording, I talk to you about the process.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I want to keep you in the loop.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to be a part of it.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Caught on the mic, it's not just me, it's all of you as well.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into the specifics where we started 2025 and where we're ending 2025.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have to take one more step back to the past and talk about show format.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: The show has always been diverse.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have been told many, many, many times that if I didn't niche down my show, my show would fail.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Five years in, I don't think my show has failed, but I've had everybody from every walk of life on the show paranormal experts, uh, MMA fighters, authors, actors, musicians, because I believe my niche was always in the strength of a person's story, not what it was that they did.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I leaned into that more at the beginning of the year.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: The reason it came across that the show was a little bit more niche towards the music side of things was just because of the opportunities that were provided to me.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Truth be told, once June hit, the show was essentially booking itself.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was at a point by say July or August where I was turning down more opportunities than I was taking because I was being very oddly specific about sequential order, how I wanted certain guests to appear on the show.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that worked out with timelines, and sometimes it didn't.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I did make my MMA focus a little bit more centered around specific events.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: You may or may not know, I work a lot in the MMA space with a regional promotion called Dynasty Combat Sports.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I do the pay-per-view commentary with my good friend and fellow podcast host, Caleb Betzold, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I focused more of my MMA stuff around their specific events.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in May, I did a week of Dynasty Combat Sports athletes and personalities, and then I did that again in November.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that really benefited the show because it is such a niche sport that it didn't disrupt some of my other um interest sets that I put a lot of attention onto.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is part of my format going forward.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I always want to have fighters on the show, but I would prefer it be around big fights, big events.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: I still want to have UFC guys, I still want to work with all of my friends out in Colorado and elsewhere, but I want to do so in a way that's more strategically beneficial to them and beneficial to the show at large.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: This past month, I took a lot of conference calls about how I'm going to book Caught on the Mike in 2026.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And assuming all of those things come to fruition, I could see 2026 being a much bigger year than 2025.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, at some point, I might even throw up on the screen if you're watching this on the YouTube version, all of the people that appeared on the show in 2025.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I highly encourage you to go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, wherever you are watching or listening to this from, and just look at everything, starting with the episode with Wayne Sullivan, my friend in the MMA space, and ending with my friend Bill Des, professionally known as Two Feet, and just see the depth that we went to in 2025.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hoping that I can maintain the same depth in 2026.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: In 2025, I also got a little bit more guarded about Michael Clark, the host of Caught on the Mic and the personal side of what I shared on the podcast and podcast-related content.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: But we did have some major milestones.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: I am a divorced and remarried man.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am the parentslash stepparent to four kids.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: I prefer just say I'm the parent of four kids.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have twin stepdaughters, a daughter, and a son.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all three girls graduated high school in May and started college in August.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a huge change, and that influenced a lot of what was going on and how busy I was this last year.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: My son became more active in his athletics, like with football, and he started working jobs.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's a junior in high school, and I'm just really lucky to be the parent that I needed when I was younger.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think about inflection points that influence who I became.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't make a huge secret of the fact that I have been mostly estranged from my parents my entire life.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've been living on my own since I was 16 years old.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my mother left my younger brothers and I when I was 12.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I got kicked out of the house when I was 16.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, had very strained relationships with my parents.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I always kind of used that as my North Star to determine what type of parent I was going to be in, what type of influence I would not only be in my kids' lives, but the lives of the people that surround me.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um being a parent has always been the number one thing I've wanted out of life.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: In the summer of 2023, July 1st, 2023, my dad passed away.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: I would be lying if I didn't state how strongly of an impact that had on me, even if I don't talk about it.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it changed how I consume things and the type of information that I want to share and how I spin things, what my spin narrative is, if you will.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: I really made a conscientious effort to try and keep my output more positive.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to control what my input was going to be as well.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they say garbage in, garbage out.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's very true.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So reflecting upon my dad's life, my relationship with my dad, my relationship with my kids, it did impact the type of material I was creating for Caught on the Mike and the type of conversations I wanted to have for the show.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's odd to make that correlation.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I think about some of the pop culture I decided to start consuming around that time, and there's a big greater sense of purity that seemed to re-emerge in my life.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've always been a nostalgic person, but my nostalgia kind of slipped more towards fonder times, like a lot of the pop culture of the 90s.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, bands that I had written off and um fell in love with all over again.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, just last night I watched the uh new Counting Crows documentary, and to be quite honest, like the later half of the 90s, I was one of those people that kind of guiltfully turned on them and started rolling my eyes at them.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I loved them when they came out, and I've got other great examples of that, you know.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, having a conversation with Nick Hexham from 311, 311's always been one of my most favorite bands.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was a top five get for me.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, somebody I wanted to have on the show from the moment that I started this show.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But having him on the show and diving as headfirst as I did back into 311's music in 2025 had a dramatic impact on me.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that it all kind of correlates back to that mindset shift that happened during the summer of 2023.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: I tie all of these sentiments into how I socially interact with people now as well.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, December of 2019, before the pandemic started, I shut all of my social media down for two weeks.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when I logged back on the day after New Year's, I unfollowed so many people and so much shit.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Anything that kind of fed a negative mindset.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: I unfollowed, I deleted, I unfriended.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a lot of messages from people that I used to be social media friends with is wait, why are we not friends anymore?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I just I don't answer it because I it was like this repetitious pattern of garbage in, garbage out, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know that person that every single post that they put up is some inflammatory political post and you're consuming it over and over and over and over again, and then it becomes the dominant thing that you're thinking about, or that friend that is just saying nasty shit about other people all the time.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't cut that person off, you find yourself saying nasty shit about other people all the time.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that in 2019 only to undo it in the heat of pandemic, whenever social media really doubled down on everything.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's something that I had to get more deliberate about throughout 2024, and really a foundational thing that I stood my ground on in 2025 was detaching myself from you know the negative echo chamber.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things about having a creative endeavor like a podcast.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Podcast and something that I've seen online a lot is your greatest fan is a person you have never met before, and your biggest hater is likely someone you call a friend.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something I've had to make peace with a lot.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I've got a lot of friends that listen and watch my show, but really I've made more friends as a result of creating this show, and that's something I can't take for granted, and something I hope to accomplish more of in 2026.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: I really care about culture and building a cultural foundation behind a more positive movement, which is the core values of what I do.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not perfect about executing it.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: My wife will point out every time all these great things that I talk about on the show and how sometimes I kind of contradict myself with the way that I live and the way I internalize things in the world detached from the show.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean I'm insincere or disingenuous or I really don't care about certain things, but if I'm going to preach about a certain value set, I need to also live that exact value set.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the type of people that I want to surround myself with, and that's the type of people that I want as part of the caught on the mic culture.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that makes sense.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I say all of this, I share all of this, all the past 20 minutes that you listen to come down to these few simple things.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Caught on the mic is always going to aim to get better, to be better, to one up itself, um, whether it be the aesthetics of the background, the production quality, the type of guests that I have on the show, but it is all going to be reflective of some strong core values and ways that we can make the narrative online spaces and personal spaces, real world spaces a much better place.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is my number one question that I ask at the end of every episode.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: I ask every single guest, no matter who they are, what walk of life they come from, what's their advice for making the world a better place?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is my contribution to it because it's something that I truly and genuinely believe in.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: So for 2026, I hope to have another watershed year, and I hope to meet more of you.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you have abandoned the show in the past, I hope you take this opportunity to rediscover it.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you are new here, thank you so much for discovering me, and let's continue to push this movement forward.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: I promise it is my goal to do nothing more than to get better, have better interviews, better content, more positive forward thinking moments for all of you to enjoy and to be a part of.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: I had intended on releasing an episode like this right around the five-year anniversary 200 episode mark.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to do a solo episode.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I just got so so busy with other guests that I wasn't given that opportunity.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm dropping this episode today, December 22nd, 2025, on my birthday, to uh express some gratitude for all of you and uh say I'm excited for what's to come, and I hope you are too, and I hope you are all part of it.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you have a fantastic rest of the holiday season in 2025, and I look forward to seeing you all more frequently in 2026.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: The world is a much better place with you in it.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here.