Macklemore: How You Can Overcome Your Darkest Days & Hardest Battles!

Maybe this world's not for me 'cause I don't know what I'm doing here anymore. I feel nothing and I think that that's the hardest part. I haven't really spoke about this. It's, um... Yeah, I- I'll just say it. I mean- Macklemore! The man behind our favorite hits. Music superstar. Grammy Award winner. We're just getting started. You have no idea.

Where does the desire to be on stage come from?

Michael Jackson. I wanted to make music, art with melody. It was where I felt an escape from my head. 14-year-old taking 12 shots of vodka, you know, on a school night by myself, running from the police and doing drugs that never stopped.

I've read, um, your wife had taken a pregnancy test.

Yeah. We were in our home and I'm there, I'm high. Her period was late, went and got her the pregnancy test and I'm just, like, praying, "Let this be a negative pregnancy test. I'm not ready to give up the drugs." And then I heard the tears. And I remember walking outside and I just started bawling 'cause I couldn't feel any sort of happiness, and I knew what that meant.

If you were to go back and be able to have a conversation now with young Ben at 14 years old, before that first drink, what would you say?

That's a great question. It's gonna cause way more pain than good, but at the same time...

Would you like to go for dinner with me and my guests here on The Diary of a CEO? We are holding dinner parties all around the world over the coming months, and our subscribers on this YouTube channel are invited. We're inviting 20 subscribers to every dinner. So if you'd like to come for dinner with me and my guests here on The Diary of a CEO, I have a favor to ask you. All you've got to do is hit the subscribe button and I hope to see you at dinner somewhere around the world very soon. Ben, when I, when I think about people's lives, I... And I think from doing this podcast, this has become more sort of clear to me. I see their lives as like a series of dots-

Mm-hmm.

... you know, like, or a series of dominoes that fall to lead them to where they are today. And if you go back to the very start of that, that series of dots to understand the most influential moments or things that, um, inspired you to become the person you are today, in every sense of the word, what are those first dots, those first experiences that I need to know in order to understand you?

My first dots. My first dots, I think, would be listening to the radio outside, summertime, nextdoor neighbor's yard, and being introduced to music and loving music, falling in love that summer. I believe I was six years old, and, you know, I had an older neighbor who was maybe four or five years older than me and he had a bunch of, um... You know, my best friend was next door. He was five years older than us. It was like a collection of, of kids in the neighborhood, and I remember that summer being this magical introduction to art, to music, to listening to the radio, and falling in love with, with melody, with sound. That was my first, that was my first dot. And then my next dot shortly after that was falling in love with hip-hop music at the age of seven. And those were the first two dots that really set me on a path, a trajectory, and this desire to be on a stage.