Insight From the Roadies & Rebels Podcast Appearance

Extracted Stories highlight the moments from this appearance that carry structural meaning inside the Dias OS. These stories are not anecdotes; they are pattern signals that reveal how pressure, trust, coordination, and reputation operate in real environments. Each story captures a principle that will repeat across industries, domains, and eras, forming the narrative building blocks for future remixing.

Mike describes himself as “an accidental tourist” in the pro audio world. He was a skinny, nerdy Jewish kid in Las Vegas who loved music, wanted sex/drugs/rock and roll, and played bad drums badly. His actual path in was through construction and landscaping for his dad. An intellectual property attorney offered to “fund” him, which Mike assumed meant backing a plant or arboretum idea. Instead, the lawyer told him that idea was terrible and introduced him to Mindy and Jerry Harvey, who were just starting Ultimate Ears. Mike’s first job in the industry was co-writing the Ultimate Ears business plan and ghost-writing Jerry’s Live Sound International articles. Those articles doubled as his crash course in in-ear monitors, frequency response, and monitor world, and quietly set him up as Jerry’s invisible left hand.

Mike reframes Jerry Harvey’s role not as “the inventor of in-ears” but as the person who commercialized and normalized them under real pressure. When Jerry was hired to mix in-ears for Van Halen, there were already two competing in-ear systems on the market. Jerry showed up with those two sets, and Alex Van Halen hated both. After the second attempt, Alex told him bluntly that if he wanted to keep his job, he’d better fix it. Jerry’s move was not to intellectualize—it was to go back to the shop and build his own set of ears tuned to the real needs he was hearing on stage. Mike stresses that Jerry never set out to start a company; he “just wanted a tool that worked” and had first tried to get existing manufacturers to make the changes he needed. Their refusal accidentally created the conditions for Ultimate Ears and the modern IEM market, and Mike’s entire career—and much of the documentary he’s making—sits downstream of that inflection point.

Greg and Mike use their own relationship to illustrate how placement actually functions in the field. Greg remembers being fascinated by in-ear monitors and naively offering to “open doors” for Ultimate Ears at trade shows, not understanding that everyone UE talked to was already an artist. Over time, he and Mike became genuine collaborators, doing freelance work together and trading calls when a placement question came up. Mike points out that Greg is one of the only people, besides his wife, who will tell him flat-out when an idea is horrible—and that this bluntness is why he trusts Greg’s yes so much. If Greg says a placement is right, it bypasses all filters. Greg, in turn, relies on Mike to go to bat for artists who have had a bad experience and need to be taken care of. The subtext is clear: placements that work are built on long-term candor, reciprocity, and shared standards, not hype.

In the back half of the conversation, Mike pivots to his work with the Roadie Clinic and why he considers it some of the most important work in the industry. He explains that touring pros are gone nine to eleven months of the year, often without stable health insurance or support systems, while their partners are left balancing home life alone. Paul and Courtney Klimson created the Roadie Clinic in Niles, Michigan to support both sides of that equation—touring professionals and their families at home—by providing access to mental health resources, medical care, crisis response, and, just as importantly, a listening ear. Mike highlights Courtney’s care package program: she self-finances bags filled with useful items like laundry bags, socks, and thoughtful treats, then hand-delivers or ships them to tours and to the spouses left at home. That simple act of love opens doors for conversations about support, builds trust with entire crews, and, in Mike’s eyes, creates the single best opportunity manufacturers have ever had to align their brands with real care instead of shallow sponsorship. He frames it as a compounding flywheel where doing the right thing for crews also becomes the smartest possible placement strategy.

The episode includes several side stories that reinforce the core themes. Greg tells the infamous “Nickelback episode,” where a conman posing as drummer Daniel Adair tricked a manufacturer into sending a box of mics to Florida. Greg only unraveled the scam because he had real relationships with FOH engineer Joe Keiser and the Nickelback camp, who eventually called to say “you better sit down—that is not Daniel Adair.” Mike calls it the kind of story that has more long-term traction than a routine success placement, because it exposes how fragile credibility is when you don’t verify through trusted production people. They also discuss a “dumb ask” from one of Mike’s former bosses, who wanted the singer of Spoon to stop mid-show, hold up a pair of branded headphones, and throw them into the crowd as a promotional stunt. Mike refused, explaining that even if he could technically ask, the request would nuke his career and violate the social contract with fans. He draws a hard line between impossible asks (good ideas but wrong conditions) and dumb asks (ideas that are fundamentally out of character and destructive). The conversation closes with Greg coining “reputation on investment” as a truer definition of ROI in this world, and Mike agreeing that in a trust economy, sometimes the real win is the quiet knowledge that crews know you are safe to work with.