Mike has quite a biography to share. Born on May 4, 1972, his biological mother was a heroin addict and gave Mike up for adoption to a Native American mother, And a Caucasian father. At 7 years old, his adoptive parents filed for divorce. Living with his mom on borderline poverty was extremely hard, she then remarried. "There were all sorts of things happening," says Mike. "When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mom stayed out all night, came home the next day with a guy, and he moved in. I'd never met the guy before, and all of a sudden he's my Step dad. We didn't get along for years."

"Later on, when I hit high school, my mom moved away from us, and me and my Step dad got real close. He instilled a lot in me. The one thing my family did give me is blue-collar morals. But then he died when I was 17." Mike had already moved out, leaving home when he was 15 to live out of his truck. He then rented a room in Billie's house, and later he lived in a punk squatter building. Billie and Mike began living for their weekends at Gilman Street. Mike still continued to go to school.and live on his own. He supported himself by working as a cook."I worked with food, I was a cook, it sucked. Kids do yourself a favor, stay out of the restaurant business, period. That's my advice, and if you go and get a job at a restaurant now, I hope later on you're thinking, when you're washing a dish one day and you just go 'Mike told me so, I hate him'"

He almost didn't graduate high school, because his mother refused to sign one of his mandatory-attendance forms. "I took my mom aside," Mike says. "I said, 'This is how it is. You have so much shit going on in your life, so if once every semester you ask me if I've done my homework and jump all over my case, that's not right. Have I failed yet? No. And I'm going to graduate if you stay off my back. The one time in your life you chose to have morals, and it's going to fuck me up. Don't play mom once a year. It doesn't fucking cut it.'" Mike did graduate after all, and he even took more than a year's worth of courses at a community college.

hen Billie and Mike moved into a squat in Oakland, California. And what inspired the song," Welcome to Paradise." In 1996 he married his long time girlfriend Anastasia. A year later, in April 1997 his daughter Estella-Desiree was born. His nickname for her is "Hero."He recently was remarried in 2004, however his wife, Sarah, left him because he spent too much time in the studio recording American Idiot.

He owns a café/restaurant named Rudy's Can't Fail Café, after a song by The Clash. The café is located in Emeryville, CA.