Billy Corgan reveals his chaotic wrestling past—owning the NWA since 1948, briefly leading TNA before a "Game of Thrones"-style power struggle, and settling a lawsuit due to an illegal contract—while defending his split from music fans over the association. He traces wrestling’s mob ties and Chicago’s gun violence surge (3,700 shootings in 2021) to arrested dealers creating vacuums, and contrasts his turbulent childhood with his son’s early years. Corgan critiques the music industry’s exploitative contracts, Napster’s missed opportunities, and how fame traps artists in nostalgia, arguing brands like GNR thrive by evolving beyond hit songs. His skepticism about industry adaptation clashes with Rogan’s optimism for artists like Chance or McGregor, before Corgan hints at shapeshifting encounters in his upcoming book—Solo Acoustic and OG Lala mark his latest creative defiance of mainstream constraints. [Automatically generated summary]
I lost one of the motions, which led to then me negotiating, and we settled out of court.
But the judge, the contract that they signed that would have allowed me to take over the company under the motion that I had filed, the judge basically dismissed my motion because...
The contract they had signed with me was illegal under Tennessee law even though a Tennessee lawyer had negotiated on the company's behalf and signed it.
Yeah, so it'd be like if you did a contract with me, and then I sued you, and then the judge says, well, even though Joe had a California lawyer signed, it's illegal under California law, so therefore the contract's meaningless.
And I think that's part of what we're trying to do.
That's the cool thing about the NWO is we actually possess that history.
And so our job is to sort of update it, you know, to bring that tough guy thing back into the modern world in a way that sort of doesn't insult the audience's intelligence.
And the cool thing about the NWA's history was you had all these rival promoters, including the McMahons in the Northeast, that eventually sort of formed a kind of ad hoc association.
to create a better business in essence get everybody on the same page and what they would do is they named one champ and the champ would rotate through the different territories come in and take on the whoever was the local guy they build up the local guy and then a guy like Ric Flair would come in and beat the local guy and it would always be like a bit of a scrum and then he'd come back for a second there would be a cage match and then Ric Flair would move on to the next territory and that's how those guys rotate around then everybody made more money Wow And then the government got involved at different points because there was collusion.
It used to be, because I felt like, I don't know, as the keeper of my image or something, I felt this responsibility to sort of manage it, and at some point I just let it go.
My favorite story, one of my favorite stories of my father was he was doing a drug deal and, or he was buying drugs, and so he stops somewhere and the guy got in the car.
And then the guy pulled out a gun and stuck it in his ribs, you know, and did, like, give me all your money.
And my dad looked at him and said, kill me.
Basically, because he was unhappy, so he figured, no, fuck it.
It wasn't until my second album in the band blew up that he started to kind of change his tune.
Then he became more supportive.
Then he got really weirdly jealous.
And then he started doing weird things.
Like he'd call me and be like, if you need me to write you any songs.
Like I'm like number one.
And he's like, he's asking me to write songs.
It was so weird.
But then he was also on a lot of drugs.
And so there was that, you know, there's that interweave of like...
And weird stuff, like, you know, one day he calls me and he's like, my dad always played this cool 1964 Purple Flying V that was like his guitar, you know, and my dad to me was like a star and he still is in my mind.
So he told me one day, you know, when I die, you know, I'm going to give you my guitar.
And then fast forward four years later, he calls me up.
He's like, yeah, I'm going to put this guitar on eBay.
I mean, I know it probably sucked growing up like that, but damn, to be able to tell everybody your dad was this guitar-playing, gun-toting, drug-dealing psycho.
It's shocking to me as somebody who was born in Chicago, I still live in Chicago, that it's just like we've normalized this insane violence in this community.
I heard the other day, I could be wrong and I'm sure he can find, but I think somebody said the other day, there's been 3,700 shootings in Chicago already this year.
And I think we're already over 600 gun fatalities.
Well, here's the thing, and this is the classic tale.
Now, it was reported the other day that the carjackings in Chicago have gone up like 200%, and now those carjackings are filtering into the nice neighborhoods.
So now you're gonna start seeing some action because now it's now it's blowing up past the sort of You know, I mean look at that the shot clock a person is shot every two minutes and 20 seconds a Person is murdered every 12 hours.
Yeah, for years, I got a little inside information.
For years, what I'd heard is that they had this sort of like, as long as you stay on this side of the street, we'll look the other way for this, but you've got to keep your people in line over here.
And I know enough people in the PD that that was sort of the general understanding.
I remember one time, because I knew somebody who worked in the gang task force, I was like, how come there's always whores on the bridge on Friday night?
Don't you guys see the 50 whores on the bridge?
And they said, no, that's where we tell all the whores to go, so we can protect them.
We'd rather have them there so we can keep an eye on them, and we know it's going to happen anyway, so better we control it.
So that was the way Chicago sort of operated, was like...
We'll tolerate crime up to this level and twice a year we'll run everybody in just to kind of make it look good in the paper.
And then apparently whatever they did that created this power vacuum.
Well this guy was a former cop and the way he was describing it was pretty absolute.
He's like they made a mistake.
This solution that you were saying of like kind of like saying hey keep it over here or keep it under wraps and we'll arrest a certain amount of people.
It sounds like maybe that's the only way to manage it.
Well, the one thing I have heard from people that are in those communities is that literally the, and this maybe supports what you're saying, is that the power divisions are like block to block.
So it's almost like an insurgency where it's like two blocks.
versus two blocks versus one block versus three blocks so literally if you're walking on the wrong side of the street it's not even like neighborhood the neighborhood it's like block the block yeah which is crazy and just growing up in that neighborhood having that be your normal as a child and then you know growing into adulthood around that and having just used to people getting shot used to shooting people you I mean, if there's that many people getting shot and that many gunshots going off, everybody must be common.
There's something about Chicago that seems to me to have the momentum of the old days still deeply entrenched in it, whereas that doesn't seem the case in LA and a lot of other big cities.
But it's like, South Park did that episode where it's like, it's all like once the Whole Foods moves in, like everyone's supposed to live a certain way.
You know, it's this idea of sort of like you can drop this homogenous idea of what modern culture is like in any place and it will just sort of riff out.
You know, I think, but again, saying your environment that you grew up in, this chaos, and then coming from Chicago and coming from, you know, the stories you're telling about your dad, that had to contribute to like the deepness and intensity of your music, right?
Well, the great thing is then I traded one imprisonment, Suburbia, for rock and roll aesthetics and who gets to say who's integral and who's cool and not cool.
It's like, I've had weird experiences with people, not with Nirvana people, but people who are in the Nirvana world.
There's still this weird, like, because I'm from Pumpkin World.
Sometimes I'll have weird stuff happen and I'll dig down and find out it was somebody who used to work in Nirvana world trying to cut my ankles 27 years later.
Yeah, well, Rick's a friend, so for me, it was like, I was sort of at a low point, and he kind of picked me up when I was down, so it was like, I didn't mind sort of trusting him with, like, the head part of it all.
Kind of like, you deal with that part, and I'm just going to sort of be the performer and the weird guy in the corner.
I felt like it allowed me to focus on the music and the performance and sort of just freed me to just, you know, let whatever, because sometimes you can psych yourself out.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
Like, you can have a really good song, you know it's a good song, and then you start second-guessing yourself, and then you start thinking, well, maybe this song's not good enough, and then that'll infiltrate into your performance, as opposed to being free, like, hey, I've just got a good song, and if that one doesn't work, I've got another good song.
So letting Rick kind of do the picking and choosing, and that's a good take, and that's a good song, it was just like, okay, I'm just going to kind of just go down this road.
It took me back to sort of a more innocent way of approaching the work, and I'm very grateful to him for that.
Yeah, it's got to be quite a mindfuck to create something and then practice it and rehearse it over and over again and tweak it and mess with it and not know, really, almost not be able to be objective anymore.
But when you're flying a thousand miles an hour and you're selling gazillions of records and making all this money and you're surrounded by a bunch of sycophants, they're not going to tell you, hey, man, you need the doctor to come in and kind of sort your head out.
If you get on a winning streak, and you're creating things in a bubble, and then they work, Well, then you want to take all the credit for it.
You forget all the thousand hours in the bedroom that you listen to Jimi Hendrix or, you know, Bauhaus or Merciful Fate or whatever, you know, like, that gave you all these ideas.
You know, you don't want to give them credit.
You want to be the author of your own success.
And everyone starts patting you on the back and...
Yeah, I'm weird in that I've always been willing to talk about the process, which, again, is anti-gimmick, but also...
I've always approached it more like a performance artist in that I'm after the bigger message of how work intersects with fame, intersects with personal feeling, intersects with personality and how people perceive things.
I like all that weird Andy Kaufman uncomfortability.
That's part of my attraction.
So I've been willing to use myself as the battering ram, which is how I end up becoming a meme Right because people people latch on to these personalities I've created which of course are ancillary to my real personality Right, but they don't they don't necessarily want to give me credit that I'm a sort of controller of the forces at play So if I say something dumb people assume that I'm dumb It's hard for them to assume that I'm saying something dumb on purpose because I want a reaction, right?
Yeah When you become a hugely successful musician and your life becomes touring, big arenas, doing radio shows, getting on the bus, getting on the plane, all this stuff, does it make it difficult to have the time or the actual experiences to continue to create?
Well, I always said that about, like, I mean, there's a lot of bands, but some of the great Allman Brothers or Leonard Skinner, like, they had a bunch of songs about leaving.
And so I try to use that as fuel to sort of pivot where I wanted to go musically, but I wrote this very introspective, dark record, which a lot of people really like now, but at the time it was like so antithetical to this big rock machine.
Yeah, I was like castigated for being an idiot, and I went from golden child to idiot, you know, in one fell swoop.
I have a much greater appreciation for the zeitgeist effect of the public.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
It's like...
How many Zeitgeist did Elvis have?
Three.
U2's had two or three.
Frank Sinatra had two or three or four.
I mean, there's something about when it all seems to make sense, like the public's fascination, the artist's place in time, the work that's being created.
There's a sense of like familiarity, but also something is happening and everybody wants to take part in it.
And so I have a much greater appreciation for that moment.
The ego of the artist wants to convince yourself that you're always in that moment.
I would argue if you are, there's something wrong.
You haven't matured into a deeper relationship.
So in the same thing, an artist needs to mature into a deeper relationship with their work, or their relationship with the public, or their relationship with themselves.
And if you can do that, and you look at great examples, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Tom Petty, when they get there, Everybody comes back, Bob Dylan, because they think, okay, now you're giving me some new information.
This isn't just a riff on the thing that you gave me before.
And I think the public has shown over time the willingness and the ability to follow artists if they're able to go to that place where they mine out something new that actually is like a cultural contribution and not just sort of more of what they already know.
I think that's so important for you to talk about.
I'm so glad you do.
Because for upcoming artists and in all sorts of genres, just people who are involved in creating, to hear someone as successful as yourself talk about the various struggles of the mind and of momentum and the different stages and various points of your career.
If you get success and you have leverage, they'll get out of your way because you're making them a lot of money.
But the minute you're not making them as much money, then they step in and they start playing these Jedi mind tricks on you.
We know what to do.
You know, the public's going to forget about you.
I mean, I've heard all these things like, you know, this kind of weird, like, yeah, you're in the room, but, you know, we're the arbiter of whether you can stay in the room.
Well, they've moved to a different set of circumstances, and I'm not as conversant as I once was, but one thing they do with certain younger artists, but I think particularly more in the pop realm, is they do these 360 deals, where it's like, if you get a perfume deal, you own a piece of your whole world.
And fame is such a great quotient in American life now that you can see where kids would trade, Fame and be willing to give away the profit part.
So if you actually survive the cut, let's call it phase one, you're successful, you're a name, and now you're in a place to either renegotiate or your deal is up or whatever.
I once had a conversation with a very powerful music executive, and I was friends with the guy, so I was like, give me the insider psychology here.
Now that I know the game that you run, what do you tell people like me when they get here?
And he says, oh, it's just there's always a price.
So they know that even if you get through the matrix of the whole thing and get out the other side, that there's just a dollar amount that will buy you back in.
And in fact, if you look at a lot of the machinations of the music business over the last 20 years, especially with the rise of the internet, it's to keep people in the system.
They don't want true independence.
Look no further than the deals that the record labels cut with the streaming services.
They got into ownership equity deals with the streaming services in an arrangement for them to have an equity position.
They agreed to very low rates for the artist's music.
So when you listen to Bob Dylan's song on Spotify, Bob Dylan's not getting a lot of money for that.
But as Spotify and the other streaming services raise up in their equity position, the labels benefit.
So the labels pimped out their own artists to take a greater equity position in a rising business.
That's the word they would use to market him, like he's an independent artist, but he's got a machine behind him, so I don't know if he's independent, you know.
Yeah, I'm good friends with Sturgill Simpson, and Sturgill's tried to educate me as to how the record business keeps people in the fold with owning your merchandise and your likeness forever and all these different things.
That makes me uncomfortable hearing how they weaseled that.
How they negotiated cheap prices for the performers, then they got an equity position in the company, so as the company grows, because they don't have to pay much and they get all this music, they get money from that.
The reason I supported it in the beginning was I thought that the free association with music would create a more holistic, fans finding what they want, and that we would do well in that ecosystem.
That turned out not to be the case.
And I think now that it is sort of set up in the streaming service world, now that's starting to be the case because people are finding us because it's sort of organized and there's sort of institutional culture.
But when it was free-wielding, I don't think we played the game well enough to take advantage of it.
Yeah, there was a lot of argument that people would find new music because of that in a way that they would have never found if the record companies and the radio stations had a lockdown on what got distributed.
Somebody did a study, it's my one piece of empirical evidence, like the British Association of Something, when it first became a real issue, did a study about people's fidelity to artists Whether they got something for free or they paid for it.
And they found the loyalty was literally nil if they got it for free.
That the actual act of purchasing something created a relationship that then created a sort of a desire to want to prove that the relationship was profitable.
In essence, I buy your comedy concert.
I didn't get it for free.
It makes me actually assess whether or not my thing was a good investment.
And if you prove to me it is, I become more loyal to you because now we're in a relationship.
So that's part of my argument now with music is the brand, and I'll use my brand, Smashing Pumpkins, or the NWA, is far more valuable than my sort of profit loss on paper.
The G&R brand or the Harley-Davidson brand or the Joe Rogan brand, those are durable brands that are worth far more than you could sort of prove on paper.
The G&R one's a fascinating one to me because Axel just went off the rails and into the woods for so long— Shooting his face up with a bunch of shit and looks like he was just gone looks like we lost him I mean to me as a kid Guns N' Roses like I mean they were like welcome to the jungles like one of my all-time favorite songs when I was like 18 or whatever old I was when it came out I mean it was amazing and then to see them just have this incredible success and then Axl goes crazy But
I would argue and I don't mean this in a disparaging way I would argue that that The freedom in Axel and the path that they took is added to the brand.
It's the sum total of what that person represents that I think is the durability.
As fans, we get into like, well, I don't like the new song.
I think that misses the mark.
There's only one Guns N' Roses in the whole world.
And I have fought mightily internally to protect what the Smashing Pumpkins means.
I know it's not for everybody, but there's only one Smashing Pumpkins.
I know that.
I knew that as a kid, and then I got a little lost in it, and I've come out the other side, and I realize that protecting what that brand is worth is so much more valuable than whether somebody liked one song or one album or something I said in 1992. It's so inconsequential.
And there were some performances of Axel's when they were attempting to come back, or maybe he was touring on his own, I forget which one it was, where he was like off.
He wasn't quite there yet.
And now you see him now, live, and he's fucking killing it.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying is, you could sit there and talk about what somebody did in some year past, but if they put it back together, they put it back together not because they're trying to satisfy something, they're putting it together because the forces within them are not easily controlled.
It's like a good fighter, right?
When they put it all together.
I've heard you talk on commentary.
It's like a good fighter manages their adrenaline, manages their focus.
You know what I mean?
You can't go completely hog wild and you can't be too conservative.
You're right on that line.
And that's what performance really is like.
It's like a lot of people outside the bubble have a hard time understanding this.
Every night I step on stage, I want to do a good show.
Sometimes it's just not there to be had.
It could be the moon or it could be what I ate for breakfast.
A successful performer like yourself and you see one hit wonders.
One hit wonders have always freaked me the fuck out.
And I don't know why, because I'm not even a musician, but just the horror of being successful and hitting and then it all going away and then you're fucked.
Opportunities or moments in in pop culture is when that kind of stuff happens Because with one song, you know, She's My Cherry Pie, you can just shoot to the top of the charts.
Like, you know, I've been playing these acoustic shows and, you know, at some point people start shouting out songs and I just say to the audience, look, the great thing about turning 50 is I don't give a fuck what you want.
I was going to do what I want to do.
And at the end of the day, right, that sells better to most of the audience.
Because most of the audience, I would argue, appreciates me being independent, even if they don't always get what they want, than being a shill.
It's like a weird thing like, yeah, we can't soundcheck until 530 because there's somebody in the anteroom making burial arrangements for their family.
I used to really find that I could play a different show, small versus big, and I found over the last 10 years, I blame the internet, that almost every audience is now the same.
That the expectations of the audience from 250 to 5,000 or up is almost identical.
That may also have something to do with just having a long career and then people kind of say, I want to see these songs or something.
But I don't find as much willingness to take the journey as it used to be.
Because we, you know, in the 90s, we would do shows in a club and we would play no hits and just play weird b-sides and people loved it because it was like, I'm seeing the band I wouldn't get to see at the Enormaldome.
I found that even, because originally I was going to stand, and this I know seems kind of minor detail, but I decided to sit.
And I actually found by sitting and being very still and just performing and doing my best job of performing the songs, the audience enjoyed the show better.
Like, I took out all the showbiz.
You know, when you're standing, you're doing the, you know, whatever.
Your moves.
I think...
Creating a level of intimacy and drawing the audience forward is probably the only sort of difference maker that I've found because there's literally no showbiz.
I used to view performing as an art project thing, which is I want to sort of create a provocative situation and then I want to ride the wave of the provocative situation.
And of course I grew up in a generational thing that the audience was sort of interested in that.
Sort of the explosive nature of the mosh pit and you know this kind of weird sublimated violence that would kind of come out during the shows and we were part of the engine that would sort of bring out this emotional quality and then at some point you know Things change.
Again, I don't know if it's a generational thing, but I found that the only way I could play older music with a good heart and an open mind was to get into the others appreciating it.
Because if you ask me, it's not for me anymore.
Because in essence, as an artist...
And I'm not trying to jump in your head, but as an artist, I want to be able to say, how do I feel tonight?
And tonight I want to—I've written like 400 songs, so to me I would like to say, okay, of these 400 songs, I just feel like playing these 15 songs tonight.
But I can't do that, because I do have to go out and do the Hickory Dickory Dock poem.
It's sort of expected, and if I don't, I'm going to get lit up.
Because I came from such complete anarchy that to sort of put myself in the straight jacket of being a...
You know, growing up in the era I grew up in, it felt like putting on the gold lame jacket and going to Vegas.
That's what it felt like to me.
You know, it felt like I was really...
You know, I'd become, you know...
guys yeah yeah you know doing the musty old routine it was like this is so antithetical to why I even became an artist but at some point again I had to appreciate that and I talked about it once with Pete Townsend in private it's like the idea that you know what is your responsibility to a generational memory like Pete was talking to me once about how people were getting mad at him for using and I saw him quoted publicly so I don't feel like I can't be giving anything away
People were getting mad at him for using, like, won't get fooled again in a car commercial.
And Pete's quote was something along the lines of, like, I don't care if you lost your virginity to Mary Lou in the backseat to my song.
It's my song.
I can do with it what I want.
So it takes time to sort of appreciate that at some point if you've been lucky enough, and I am lucky enough to have created a few kind of cultural milestones for a generation or multiple generations, that they feel very possessive of those things.
And so if you're not willing to possess them with them, it almost feels like to them you're rejecting their idea.
And when you're surrounded by a bunch of sycophantic artists who are literally tripping all over themselves to give the audience what they want, to create this kind of idealized, isn't this amazing feeling?
And we've all been to those shows.
It's the greatest concert ever.
And then you go to the next show and it's the exact same lines in between the songs.
It's Vegas, right?
I'm incapable of that.
So my way of feeling it was...
But my appreciation of that was to try to get inside the head of why the audience needed that from me.
Because it felt burdensome.
Like, why me?
Like, get it from the guy over there.
Like...
There's plenty of people you can get this vibe from.
Yeah, see, to me, I don't think there's anything, and I'm not trying to, I don't know enough about their world, but I don't think there's anything wrong if that's who you want to be.
Yeah, he did a television show, like a regular sitcom, and he cried on some TV show, like Arsenio Hall or something like that, about people angry at him for being controversial.
I mean, the amount of times I've been in a parking garage or a grocery store or whatever, and somebody who's very nice, very respectful will walk up to me, and that's what they know.
And if you can be humble about it, I think, it's pretty amazing that literally I can get off any exit in America, and pretty much anywhere I go, somebody has some reference to what I've done.
That's pretty...
Pretty remarkable.
So if you can get behind that, you can think, oh, that's pretty cool.
I'm cool with that.
It's not this oppositional thing, like, you should have paid more attention in 94. Right.
And it's also part and parcel to when you take a fringe movement, which, you know, alternative music, grunge, whatever it was, and it's thrown in the mainstream, those social codes and mores don't translate very well to mainstream code.
My step-grandfather, who was a World War II vet, very closed down, classic Eisenhower Republican type of guy, smart, you know what I mean, had literally zero interest in me as a kid.
I mean, negative zero interest.
And one day I'm sitting there at Christmas and now Grandpa wants to talk to me about the economics of my success.
My manager, who was, you know, we were with the Metallica guys at the time, he called me on like a Wednesday or something, and he said, I can't say for sure, but more than likely, based on the calls we're getting, you're going to be number one this week, meaning melancholy.
Like, when you reach a certain level, and you're selling out these giant arenas, and you're one of the biggest bands literally ever, you're, like, one of the top 100 biggest bands of all time.
And the great shame of my band was musically we were super tight and we never disagreed on music.
It was like this weird phenomenon where musically we were like totally in sync.
We could produce and write music very very quickly and it was always the other stuff around us.
So that sort of ate at the core and then when we lost our personal relationship that's what diminished the musical relationship.
But you don't know it at the time.
Because you're sort of, I don't want to say arrogance is not the right word, but it's like you have a sort of a, you know, you got a little bit of a thing in your walk and you think, you know, you got the world by the you know what and all good.
You think you can power your way through anything because you have.
Because the songwriters get, if you, quick lesson, the songwriter gets paid separate statutorily by the government than the actual copyright of the recording.
So if I'm on Joe Rogan's label, you pay the band for the recording, which of course in that case would be split four ways, but you owe me a statutory rate as a songwriter for the sale, which I think these days is about 10 cents.
So every record we sold where I was the sole songwriter, I was getting 10 cents that they weren't getting, or 8 cents or whatever it was at the time.
So you can imagine over a gazillion records sold, it added up.
So I start pulling away financially, But when you're a kid and you're 23 and somebody's having this conversation with you and you literally don't even have an apartment and somebody's trying to tell you how you're going to make a lot more money, it's like, what does that mean?
Fast forward four years later and it's like, I'm making a lot more money.
So that sort of sows, it organically sows discontent.
You know, it's a, whether you call it jealousy or not.
And then as I emerged as sort of the auteur and the big mouth in the band and maybe the person who was most willing to be controversial or whatever, we'd get in a room with journalists and they would just talk to me.
And then we'd get out of the interviews and the band members would yell at me for them not being asked questions.
So it's like this weird thing like it was my responsibility to push them more as stars or...
I'm not preaching for sympathy, and I can't speak for the modern music business, but the business we were in in the 90s, we were surrounded by people who were giving us wrong information.
Now, were they giving us wrong information on purpose or because they weren't bright enough?
I don't know, but we weren't getting the right information.
Very few people actually try to sit us down and say, look, this is going to be a problem.
Trust me.
You know, it's like you're in there with the hounds and there's just...
My understanding is they, and again, going back to the conversation I had with the executive, they just basically look and they say, you've got four years if you're lucky.
And sorry to interrupt again, but the other weird thing is, again, the system I was in was even if you were successful, it was set up to make you feel like you weren't successful.
I once said to somebody who is a very famous name in the business, it's like you guys find a needle in the haystack and then you spend the next 20 years telling them they're not a needle in the haystack.
Right.
What I'm trying to say, and I'm not saying it well, is you would think you would be surrounded by people who are telling you, you're talented, you're special, we want to help you because the more you succeed, we'll succeed and we'll all succeed together.
It was the exact opposite.
It was like, no, you're dumb.
You're wrong.
No, you're crazy.
Don't do that.
You're going to ruin it.
And then, and even if you'd say, I want to wear this hat, okay?
I'm gonna wear this hat.
And when it wouldn't work, they'd say, see, you should listen to us.
I think it was actually probably before digital got really huge.
A lot of people thought she had a ghostwriter, but it was really...
Eye-opening to a lot of people that didn't know anything about the music business, like where the money actually goes and how much money has to be spent and how little you actually make, even though if you sell a shit ton of records.
But like a great Greek mythology type myth thing, the music business has made two critical mistakes over the last 30 or so years that led to its current sort of reduced status.
one was they let mtv run amok on free content and when they tried to rain mtv and mtv basically told them to take a hike and the music business back down so when mtv stopped playing music content there was nothing the music business could do because they'd given away all their leverage to the to mtv and then the second was when napster showed up and they acted like napster was a virus that they just needed to stamp out not really realizing
that napster was just the beginning of a whole wave of new technologies and new sort of social interactions or something those two critical errors led to the music business reduced position and it's Music has been around forever, but the music business has been around, what, 100 or so years?
Yeah, I think we're into 120 plus years of recordings.
When I first came to LA in, whatever, 90, and had the meetings, and you'd be in that office and the people with the beards and everything, and they'd be like, so when we put the product out, and every time they would say product, I would sort of wince.
Product!
How can you call my art product?
You know what I mean?
And that's, to them, it's just, it's cookies and toilet paper.
It's just, it's whatever.
And, um, and it's not to say they're not fans and they don't appreciate, you know, or they don't care, but at the end of the day, it's just some sort of weird business, you know, and like all institutional cultures that are sort of kind of corrupt at their core, it just sort of runs on its own inertia.
When you see someone like Chance the Rapper break out of that system, do you think that that's a model that can be followed, or is he just like an outlier?
and people respect the fact that he took a chance and fought Mayweather can I ask you a fanboy UFC question so tell me if you're talking about like Cormier lost to Jon Jones right yes okay and he lost Jones was on whatever, right?
I don't know if you know the most recent speculation that I talked about the other day, but the most recent speculation is that John might have snorted cocaine that was cut with creatine that was contaminated with steroids.
Because if you look at the timeline, I know, if you look at the timeline, and John loves some cocaine, but if you look at the timeline of when John tested negative and when John tested positive, it is preposterous to think that he thought that he could take it and not pass.
Right.
The fight coincides with 10 days out from his birthday party, where he apparently got blitzkrieged.
So it is entirely possible that, and this is just massive speculation, but we have done some research online and found that there have been cases of creatine that was contaminated by cheap creatine from China, contaminated with steroids.
Specifically the type of steroid that he tested positive for.
And creatine is often used to cut cocaine, apparently.
So it is entirely possible that he did blow, and that blow had steroids in it through the contaminated creatine.
The question is, did he lose because John Jones is a cheater?
Or did he lose because Jon Jones is an amazing fighter?
So the second one would be harder to deal with.
Because if he lost because Jon Jones is an amazing fighter who did coke 10 days out before their title fight and kicked his ass, and now they give Daniel the title back...
We value honesty so much, and there's very little other than some rudimentary observations they can make with FMRI, functional magnetic imaging, resonance imaging.
I jump at the opportunity to expose things that I think are fucked up about me.
But that one...
I mean, when it comes to, like, cheating in combat sports, it has such an intense significance to it that it's not an option or it's not a factor in other sports.
It's that you can cause damage to your opponent, like physical damage that could affect them for the rest of their life.
Like, that was the case with Vitor Belfort when he fought Michael Bisping.
He head-kicked Bisping and knocked him out, and Bisping suffered a really badly detached retina in his eye and went on to have...
I think several surgeries and now has oil in his eye.
If you look at his eye, there's permanent oil to protect his retina that he has to leave in there until he decides to quit fighting and then he'll have another surgery on it.
And the question is, did Vitor land that because he's highly skilled or did he land it because he's highly skilled and taking testosterone?
You increase your ability to cause damage and that changes the game.
It's not like hitting a baseball.
If a guy's on steroids and he hits a baseball and his team won and your team lost, I get how the team would be upset that he's a cheater.
There's speed, there's the amount of energy that you have, and then there's psychological factors like confidence.
There's no metric to figure out what...
What kind of an effect being a juiced-up psychopath has?
Like if you're someone who like Vitor Belfort who's already highly skilled and then you pump him full of steroids and he comes out there like motherfucker like he just like feels like he can't lose and then he has so much confidence and then all this skill on top of that I hate to pick on him, but he's my favorite example because the difference between him on testosterone and him off testosterone is so radical.
There's been these photos side to side of the two of them together and you're just like, wow.
One of them's a destroyer, the other one is a dad.
He's a dad bod.
It's weird.
So if that's the case with Jon Jones, what do you want to pull it up?
So to answer your question, Daniel Cormier is an awesome guy.
I mean, it really breaks my heart when I see people get upset and boo him, people that don't like him.
I just don't think they know him.
And for whatever reason, he is...
I mean, to just be completely honest, he's always going to be in the shadow of the greatest light heavyweight champion of all time, and that's John.
John's the greatest.
I mean, he's so uniquely talented and special, and just there's something about him all across the board, and part of his partying and all that shit is kind of connected to that, because he's fucking wild.
It's one of the reasons why.
When he fought Shogun for the title, he was 23 years old.
He opens the fight with a flying knee.
Who fights a legend like Mauricio Shogun Hua, who was one of the greatest ever in Pride, former light heavyweight champion at the time?
Jon Jones fights him.
He's 23 years old, and his opening move is a flying knee that lands.
I mean, he's just uniquely improvisational, creative, wild, talented, physically incredibly dominant, very strong.
Got a crazy body for the game, like really long limbs.
It's a strange comparison to make, but back in the day, I used to hang out a lot with Dennis Rodman when he was playing for the Bulls, and he had freakish strength, kind of similar body, like very long, like you wouldn't look at him and think muscles, and Rodman could pick a 250-pound man up with one hand and lift him over a rope.
Something is about long limbs and leverage and it's like they have this if they have as long as they have a certain amount of muscle with that long those long limbs and long leverage.
It's a series the Bulls probably should have lost.
But they didn't.
It's the famous series where Michael had the flu and scored 36 points.
I don't know if you know that game.
It's like one of the most famous games.
Michael legit had crazy flu and scored 36 and they won the game.
And they won the series.
So in between one of those games...
Dennis knows some billionaire.
There's a day off.
We get on the billionaire's plane and we fly to Vegas.
We stay out all night gambling.
And this is Dennis like...
You know, rubbing dice on people's bodies and throwing the dice so drunk they're bouncing out of the craps pit.
I mean, just total mess.
And you're thinking, how is this going to help us win a championship?
Very much a fan mentality.
I'm thinking, you know, naively, I'm going to kind of rein them in.
So we stay out all night.
We never go to bed.
We fly on the private plane back to make the morning press shoot-around back in Utah.
So we've only been in Vegas for like eight hours.
So 9 a.m.
I'm sitting in the stands.
I haven't slept at all.
They do the whatever, the shoot-around.
And Dennis walks up and says, let's go back.
Go back where?
The hotel?
No.
Let's go back to Vegas.
So after the morning shoot-around, drove to the airport to fly commercial, because now the billionaire's not flying him back again, and gets on a plane commercial and is giving me shit because I don't want to go back to Vegas with him.
No, Dennis is sort of, he kind of trotted out into the ether, and I, you know, it's hard to follow.
Under my thing, it falls under what I call the celeb friendship.
I've, at various times, had to have, I've tried to have friendships, legitimate friendships with very famous people, and the way they run their worlds is, I'm sure you've encountered, it's like, you've got to go through this guy to talk to this guy, and then the message doesn't get through, and I think, oh, fuck all that, I'm not doing that.
Yeah, it gets into the weird thing of, like, you tell Larry the guy, and then Larry never tells the guy, and then the guy's upset at Larry, but Larry's looking at you like, we had to go do this thing, and I just...
Yeah, there's a few guys that are like that, right?
There's a few...
It's weird.
I feel like...
When someone reaches a certain level of success, especially fame, they get people to sort of handle certain menial tasks and then that person sort of becomes their babysitter.
But it's great that you're willing to be this guy and be yourself openly because one of the things about music in particular, but I guess a lot of other areas of show business too, is that people really protect that image.
They protect that brand.
They protect that thing that they're projecting to their fans.
They have this idea of what their fans want, and they hold that really sacred.
But I think pulling the curtain back the way you do, I think it's very brave, but it's also very important.
So as an artist who's been in the public sphere almost 30 years and I've seen people manipulate my image and turn me into a meme and all this stuff, I'm very sensitive to if somebody wants to deny me the right to either reply or get my message out.
I agree as well, and I think it's very important that if people do say those things that you don't approve of or like, that other people express why they don't approve of those things or like them.
And the only way that happens is if you hear the initial thought.
You have to hear the one thing that you don't like in order for someone to say something that resonates.
You go, yes, that's why we disagree with that initial thought.
If we generally agree that an idea is so abhorrent or so racist or so bigoted, then what are we afraid of because...
The argument should be that the collective agrees that that is an inappropriate thing to do and express, and then socially we can sort of correct course, and it gives the other person on the other side the opportunity to course correct, too.
Yes.
In essence, if you're so sure of an idea being true, what are you afraid of?
Yeah, it's one of the more uncomfortable things about people on the left today is this newly embraced idea that you should be able to suppress ideas you don't agree with.