Our guest today is author Mishka Shubalay. After receiving an MFA from Columbia University, Mishka promptly quit writing to play music. He lived out of a Toyota minivan for a year, touring nonstop, and has shared the stage with artists like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Decemberists.
His Kindle Singles for Amazon have all been bestsellers. He writes true stories about drink, drugs, disasters, desire, deception and their aftermath. The Long Run is Mishka’s mini-memoir and details his transformation from alcoholic drug abuser to sober ultrarunner. His latest Kindle single is called Of Mice and Me and details him finding an orphaned baby mouse and the life lessons it brought to him.
Also at the end of the interview we have a pre-release of a song from Mishka’s forthcoming record.
In This Interview Mishka and I Discuss...
The One You Feed parable.
Watching the wolves battle since he was a kid.
Nihilism and self defeating behaviors.
How he celebrated his 5 years of sobriety.
The ebb and flow of life.
Remembering and forgetting our life lessons.
How running is his meditation and prayer
Doing the hard thing and embracing the challenges remind him that he wants to be alive.
How its harder to train for six weeks than to run 10 miles at once.
That smaller changes can be more difficult to maintain.
Changing the default posture of our mind.
How his mantra went from Fuck It to Try Every Day.
Success being built on a series of failures.
Learning to recover from our mistakes
Extending the benefit of doubt to ourselves.
The negative voice of the bad wolf.
How we won't recover from addiction unless it is the most important thing in the world.
His fear of AA.
How there are no magic bullets.
His public promise to attend an AA meeting.
How it's worth trying anything once, expect maybe crystal meth.
Our communal desire for having a lot of pain over a long period of time versus a brief intense pain.
How following our dreams is not always the right approach.
Playing music for the love of it.
How the only thing that makes us happy is happiness.
How getting everything we want doesn't always make us happy.
Posting a picture of the The Strokes guitar player's ass all across Manhattan.
Mishka Shubaly Links
Mishka Shubaly Homepage
Misha Shubaly Amazon Author page
Mishka Shubaly on Twitter
Of Mice and Me
The Long Run
Beat The Devil
Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:
Kino MacGregor
Strand of Oaks
Mike Scott of the Waterboys
Todd Henry- author of Die Empty
Randy Scott Hyde
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Available Results
Generated results are saved to your library for reuse and search.
Choose Template
Pick the result you want. You can review provider and model before generating.
A concise first-pass summary for understanding the episode quickly.
A comprehensive, source-grounded extraction of the reusable knowledge in an episode.
Technologies, AI models, technical methods, capabilities, limitations, and adoption implications.
Repeatable methods, frameworks, mental models, processes, and systems.
A dedicated analysis of warnings, limitations, trade-offs, weak evidence, and uncertainty.
A dedicated inventory of concrete resources named in the episode.
A concise first-pass summary for understanding the episode quickly.
A detailed readable summary organized by chapter or topic.
A navigable map of subjects, topic flow, and suggested chapters.
A comprehensive, source-grounded extraction of the reusable knowledge in an episode.
Reusable atomic knowledge units extracted from the episode.
A comprehensive extraction focused on health practices, protocols, claims, and safety caveats.
A comprehensive extraction focused on opportunities, strategy, markets, and company building.
Explicit actions, next steps, habits, recommendations, and things to avoid.
A dedicated inventory of concrete resources named in the episode.
A dedicated analysis of warnings, limitations, trade-offs, weak evidence, and uncertainty.
A concise first-pass summary for understanding the episode quickly.
A detailed readable summary organized by chapter or topic.
A navigable map of subjects, topic flow, and suggested chapters.
A comprehensive, source-grounded extraction of the reusable knowledge in an episode.
Reusable atomic knowledge units extracted from the episode.
A comprehensive extraction focused on health practices, protocols, claims, and safety caveats.
A comprehensive extraction focused on opportunities, strategy, markets, and company building.
Scientific findings, mechanisms, studies, hypotheses, and the limits of the evidence discussed.
Technologies, AI models, technical methods, capabilities, limitations, and adoption implications.
Investment theses, assets, catalysts, valuation reasoning, time horizons, and risks.
Chronologies, actors, causes, consequences, turning points, and competing historical interpretations.
Policies, proposals, stakeholders, arguments, implementation constraints, and predicted effects.
Career paths, skills, hiring signals, workplace decisions, transitions, and limitations of the advice.
Behavioral mechanisms, biases, motivation, habits, emotions, interventions, and evidence limitations.
Economic mechanisms, incentives, indicators, market structure, forecasts, and uncertainty.
Leadership principles, team systems, organizational design, culture, feedback, and failure modes.
Audience, positioning, messaging, acquisition, retention, experiments, metrics, and failed approaches.
Teaching methods, learning strategies, practice, feedback, assessment, and effectiveness evidence.
Theses, premises, arguments, objections, values, thought experiments, and unresolved questions.
Communication patterns, conflict, boundaries, expectations, repair methods, and contextual limitations.
Books, papers, authors, courses, and other learning resources mentioned in the episode.
Repeatable methods, frameworks, mental models, processes, and systems.
Explicit actions, next steps, habits, recommendations, and things to avoid.
Memorable statements and important claims with attribution and source context.
A dedicated inventory of concrete resources named in the episode.
A dedicated analysis of warnings, limitations, trade-offs, weak evidence, and uncertainty.