Killer Mike discusses his 100-pound weight-loss goal, gun ownership advocacy, and systemic critiques of prisons (e.g., $1/hour wages) and underfunded neighborhoods. He contrasts modern criminalization with his grandfather’s moral redemption and praises Tyson’s resilience while critiquing capitalism’s exploitation—like California’s weed taxes. Trigger Warning’s Netflix evolution into raw, accessible debate reflects his belief in free speech and community reinvestment over corporate dominance, leaving Rogan inspired by his blend of creativity, discipline, and unfiltered honesty. [Automatically generated summary]
Like when I have a salad, when my wife makes salad, she literally will make the salad.
She may add a little goat cheese or not.
She'll throw some chicken or some steak on there.
But if it's fruit in the salad, I don't need any salad dressing.
Just throw some strawberries or some apples or something.
Something to just give me that spry of juice and I'm good.
Now, if I could figure out doing that three to four times a day versus the one meal I'm with my wife and then eating like trash in the studio, I'll be great.
And my doctor literally told me Michael's sugar is poison.
I want you to work it out of your diet.
But these kids that are members of these little punk-ass street fraternities, essentially gangs, we criminalize and villainize a bunch of teenagers who simply don't have anything to do.
They don't have jobs.
They don't have skills.
They don't have organization.
They don't have police athletic league like they used to.
They don't have people engaging them in academics or sports where they used to.
So they just kind of, you know, mess off, fuck off.
Sometimes fuck up and violence happens, right?
If you could take those same kids with entrepreneurial spirit, that'll sell you water on the side of a highway.
You add it to something the public already wants anyway, cola.
You create something like Cripple Cola and B-pop.
And essentially what you're doing is creating the same sugary shit that we all go buy and drink and we shouldn't.
And now we're giving the structure of, say, a Hell's Angels to say, yeah, you can say we're a criminal organization, but we still can sell you a fucking T-shirt because we're now paying our taxes, we're now employing people, and we're now doing what we're supposed to do.
And that's what I wanted to give you.
The gift of my friends who are members of Street Fraternities.
And we actually pulled it off at the show.
These guys actually managed to bring something in microcosm to the market in Atlanta.
It did well enough for us to keep continuing doing it.
Yeah, but the thing is, like, you know what I found out with me with sugar?
It's either just do it or don't.
Like, for me, it's easier to do things that are actually a real just sugar, like a Mexican Coke, or just have, you know, some carbonated water with lemons in it.
Yeah, I mean, talking to Elon Musk on the show about that, when he was talking to me about the thoughts that are bouncing around inside of his head that he can't control.
And then it's always been his whole life, like, you wouldn't want to be me.
I was like, Jesus Christ, I'm just thinking about it.
I thought I did something cool smoking with Mar, and that was definitely cool, but you getting Elon Musk to fucking smoke is classic stoner history in the making right there.
I know I give my managers headaches three, four days a week.
God bless their souls.
You know what I mean?
I know I do.
I really...
Like, my friend today who's with me, he's a promoter.
Eric Milhouse.
When I met him, we were doing a show.
We were booked to do a show.
Me and another artist.
Well, the other artist's contract didn't say pay regardless.
Mine said pay regardless.
So after the show, I'm like, where's my fucking money?
And everyone's like, what are you talking about?
You don't get paid?
I'm like, no, it was my fucking money.
Or I think it may have been before, like I'm not going on.
And he ends up snatching me in another office like, look, I'm going to fucking pay you.
Don't tell the other fucking guy.
Oh, Jesus.
And that's how we became friends.
I took my money, acted like I didn't get paid, talked shit about him in front of the other guy, and then called him later like, man, I don't know what the fuck made you hold cold, but thank you, and we've been friends.
And so when he called me and said, you're going to Joe Rogan's experience, I'm like, you're coming with me.
I will advise anyone who likes street rap to get to the South and get to one of those small clubs where anybody's accepted and just go watch those kids as they grow up.
I will say, like in Atlanta, Meech and Key, who both manage their management for 21 Savage, they've been on the Atlanta scene for years cultivating young talent, whether it was Grip Plies, Rest in Peace.
Two-Nine, which was another group out of Atlanta.
And all these kids were dope.
You know, some worked out, some didn't.
Gripped out of cancer, unfortunately.
Two-Nine, the members went their separate ways, but still are making dope music.
But then they found a kid in 21 that they managed to help get to the next plateau.
And congrats to 21. They had a number one album a couple weeks.
But management usually comes from a group of people who care and just want to see someone they're a fan of be treated well in the industry.
So I really applaud music managers.
Because like you say, placing your own fate in your own hands is one thing.
Placing it in the fate of an emotional addict, which a lot of times the act can be, including myself, oh shit.
My publicist, God bless her soul, I thought I killed her a couple of times this year.
I have two publicists, a white woman in Catherine, who's done a lot of music publishing.
And then when I start talking about topics, I have a black woman in Jennifer Farmer, who's a great publicist, but she's also a publicist for former Senator of Ohio, Nina Turner, and mega church pastors.
So she's helping me keep my image clean, but she doesn't want me getting on television talking about doing cocaine.
And smoking joints.
And I don't do cocaine, but it's like, if I go to a club, yeah, I do coke.
And you could just see her face sink behind the screen.
Somebody has to be the kid that's willing to poke the hornet's nest just to see how many will fly out.
Two of my greatest heroes, when black people usually talk about heroes, we talk about Martin Malcolm, Elijah Muhammad, Marcus Garvey.
But two of my biggest heroes coming up were Luther Campbell and Larry Flint.
Because in my lifetime, I saw Luther Campbell and Larry Flint fight the government on behalf of the American people's right to say whatever they wanted to say.
So at the same time in my formative years, I was learning to love the Bill of Rights, the preamble in the United States Constitution.
I got a chance to see people fight for my right.
And I couldn't wait to be a rapper just so I could curse and buy my own titty books.
You know what I mean?
And those people have shaped my life in terms of love of freedom and liberties as much as a Thurgood Marshall, as much as a Barbara Jordan, as much as a Shirley Chisholm.
So for me, who I am is needed.
I remember one of my friends saying, Mike, I like the fact you talk on social issues, but why do you always feel necessary to talk about smoking weed in strip clubs?
I say because that's what I really do.
And I never want someone to be able from the other side to say, don't like this guy because he smokes marijuana and goes to strip clubs.
I want whoever they say that to to say, yeah, and he goes with his wife and they smoke together.
I don't want it to be some secret.
I want people to understand that when I want you to be free, I don't want you to be free to agree to see the world the way I do.
I want you to be free to live as you would like to live so long as it doesn't infringe on me and others.
Yeah, but they also make examples out of the popular.
I just found out what the monkey on the stick thing meant, what apparently monkeys are an idiot.
Wild out, so farmers will kill one monkey and put his head on the stick so other monkeys will know, hey, this is dangerous to do, right?
So essentially, famous people, me, you, Luther Campbell, Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Andrew Dice Clay, Richard Pryor, what you become is something to symbolize what will happen if you dare step out of line of social order.
So your head being on a stick is less about actually charging you for crimes and more about keeping the rest of the public in fear.
It's a lynching.
A lot of times we don't want to say that, but it really is.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, songs, vibrations, humming, you know, meditation, you hum, you know, that rhythm changes things, you know, and it opens your mind.
It clears you.
You know what I mean?
Had it not been for an artist like Lil' Kim, would you have feminism in the way you have now?
Would you have women gladly celebrating their sexuality and bodies if it wasn't for her?
Well, I think it was a little bit of that, but I think at one point in time, it was a little that a lot of rappers would look at guys like Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash and old school gangster country guys.
There's something about the Allman Brothers, Midnight Rider, and Whippin' Post that's radically different than you just singing about your Ford and rafting on Saturdays with your chick.
When they came at me about the NRA interview last year, every day I smoked a joint, woke up and laughed and listened to that record.
Like every single day.
I just wanted you guys to know it didn't bother me any.
My wife just told me to shut up talking to you all.
We went shooting a lot more and we played Almond Brothers Whipping Post every morning because I had to remind myself that this is normal.
That you're being done like this publicly because you're disagreeing with a system that people have agreed to that you don't agree to and it's okay not to agree.
So the Allman Brothers really got me through that segment and stopped me from punching a lot of bourgeoisie black people in the face.
And I'm a lover of the United States Constitution as a whole of all our rights and amendments.
But in particular, you know, the First and Second Amendment rights matter to me as an African American and as an American.
First and foremost, as an African-American, I've only been free 55 years.
My parents were born in apartheid.
And as an American, we are a country that broke off from what we felt like was the tyranny of a monarchy.
And we did that because farmers and guns dared to wage guerrilla warfare against, at that time, one of the largest armies and navies in the world.
So I honor that by continuing to be in the spirit of those farmers, you know, in the continuance of Christmas Attucks, the first person to die in the American Revolution, was a black man.
So for me, I would dishonor those patriots who started this country and Christmas Attucks, and I would dishonor the lineage as an African American who's only 55 years into freedom by giving government my gun back.
I mean, this is not saying we should stockpile guns and point them at the government, but if people have guns, it's way harder to just take over cities.
But I think what we need more of is people like you that are a reasonable, very educated in the matter, very articulate person who comes from a place where they don't expect that argument to come from.
You know, like you think about left-wing people or Democratic people, progressive people, you always think, you know, you think about Democratic people overwhelmingly being appreciated by the black community, and you always associate them with being anti-gun.
And the part of the country I'm from and what you do often.
Like, I'm from a part of the country.
I grew up fishing, hunting, growing food.
My sister grows food.
Don't get to hunt as regularly now.
Still fish occasionally.
Shots out to Greg Street, one of our biggest TJs down there.
He's a great fisherman, right?
But this is as normal in my part of the country as not having straws and being able to smoke in public in places like LA. It's just not that big of a deal.
You know, in my mind state, a household should have five guns, right?
You should have a revolver, you should have a semi-automatic for infuring your wife carrying out, you know, in public.
You should have a shotgun, just because it's a great all-around gun to have, whether it's burglars or vermin, you know, and you should have bolt-action rifles.
So, of course, in case you've got to kill your meat, you should have a semi-automatic rifle, you know, defend against here and there just to fuck off on Sundays and show your homeboys who's dick bigger.
But what you should not do is give up your right to all weapons.
What we can do, though, and I would say as an owner, you get lazy sometimes, you don't train enough.
We should train more.
And that doesn't mean, you know, go try to be the quickest draw and you practice it, you know?
But what you want to do is make sure you know what you're doing with your weapon, make sure you know how to clean your weapon, make sure you know how to store your weapon.
And I took my son and my nephew, and I'm shooting.
I'm about to start taking my 11-year-old girl, Michael, shooting, because I want them to know what they do if they see a gun.
So we've already went through, what do you do if you're somewhere and you see a gun?
How do you get out of that situation, get other kids out of that situation, and let an adult know?
All that comes with it.
And the strange thing to me is that my mother, when she was in high school, was actually taught how to shoot a rifle, right?
Because the NRA, which is now vilified and hated for reasons, some deservedly so, some not, They used to have big programs in public schools to make sure that children knew firearm safety.
So my mother's school and other schools benefited from that.
I don't care if it was just that sheet of paper that told you gun safety before you went in a range.
That was just a piece of propaganda they did that was better for the overall public.
So I tend to say, as Americans, we've gotten away from stuff like trades in school.
We've gotten away from different options besides funneling our kids into college debt.
And we've also gotten away from basic training, such as balancing a checkbook, Basic home economics, how do you make a lasagna at home by yourself?
And stuff like gun shooting and archery.
I think that if those things return to public school, you get a safer, more confident student body.
You get a reduction on things like bullying and bullshit.
You get an increase on self-propelled interest of children, and you start to meet, to grow scholars that excel.
I'm from the underground rap scene, and I like the East Coast rap, I like battle rap, that type of stuff coming up.
So I was more out of the open mic scene.
I got to hang around the older guys and the cool guys and the drug dealers because I could rap about street stuff, right?
Whereas when you take like a T.I., he was always interested, loved music and stuff.
But Tip was a trap rapper from the start.
He was entertaining for the streets, so he didn't need to go to fucking open mic.
He just needed to be opened up on a mic and then allowed the greater public to hear him.
I talk about him and Big Boy because they're two of my best friends, so I know I got poetic license to talk about those guys where I don't really tread lightly with other rappers.
You never know whose feelings get hurt.
So there was no need for him to do open mics as much as just find someone who believed in him, and that was KP, L.A. Reid, DJ Toomp.
And gave him platform to create the genre now known as trap music.
Me, I came up more out of the battle rap scene and out of the, you know, go show your wares.
Kind of like a comic.
You get up in front of everybody, do your shit, see what works, go home, readjust, come back next week.
My nickname was Skunk, or my family called me Michael.
My friends were the Unruly Scholars, and those guys were like just East Coast rap.
One was from Connecticut, one was from South Carolina, but his family's from New York.
They could rap their ass off.
They were like rocking me.
Big Daddy came in the same group.
They defeated a lot of guys, made better records.
And then one day, there was this thing called Green Lights where people would play their music and then they'd be battling each other.
My homies didn't come and man, you could just, everybody who you thought was the homies, homies was just shitting on them.
I'm like, what the fuck?
This is my homies.
And my man, Gerard, G.G. McGee, who I had just seen a couple weeks ago, he was the person that kind of pulled me out of knocking around in a trap trying to be a petty drug dealer into a studio.
And he was the first person to say, yo, this kid could really rap.
Like, you know, fuck that shit.
I know he steals cars.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And he's rising around doing hood rat shit with his ratchet friends, but he can really rap.
Let's get him in.
So he was the guy that started bringing me in.
So it offended me.
They were talking about my friend like that.
So I just start fucking off with their heads, battle rapping them.
And a man named Double D called me Killer that night.
Roast Battle is what they're doing with stand-up comics with the same principle.
Yeah.
They go, well, they prepare for it, like sometimes, like weeks out, and they tell them who they're going to be battling against, and they write a bunch of jokes about each other and just shit all over each other.
It is that, and it's a rare place, that one spot where they're doing it like that, that roast battle, is a rare place because it's like pure joke writing and fucking meanness.
Because you've got to keep it together while this person is just ruthlessly shitting on your appearance and your life and ex-relationships and divorces.
And Stylebender, as he's getting ready to go into the octagon, he was dancing.
He was dancing to the song, and then he got inside, he was dancing, having a good time, and then once the fight started, I don't know if you've ever seen him fight, he's in the Matrix.
That's the advantage of going from skinny to big, though, versus me, where there's tons of muscle under here, but got to lose a lot of chubby to see it, baby.
The good thing about it too is with a guy like you, if you continue and you continue to lose weight and get healthier, you're going to inspire other people to do the same thing.
People that are your fans that go, fuck man, now I want to get my shit together.
Well, they want to believe in enlightenment and in all the media portrayals of enlightenment and all of, you know, when people talk about mystical experiences they had in India.
It's always that part of the world that emphasizes spirituality and the idea that the Hindu religion is a more ancient, more complex spiritual religion.
Because I've always wondered, like, what the fuck is it up with white people and East Indian people?
Because Vikram, who directed Trigger Warning, also has a documentary where he creates a fake religion and convinces, you know, white middle class people to follow him.
Like, hey, man, I'm going to get me a shirt that says, white people won, stay woke.
And what I mean by that is, Western civilization, this is the latest phase.
Like, people have to understand, there have been We're good to go.
Between the West and what we call the Middle East now, what was once Western purge or Western Asia, this is thousands of years of war.
You know, you're hearing Islam versus Christianity, but it's really two ideologies that have been fighting for thousands of years over how the globe should be governed.
So with that shit, man, it's like...
There's no stopping this shit.
But white Jesus springs out of that and kind of goes everywhere and colonizes everything.
So, you know, the church pops up with candy for kids, Bibles for you.
And by the way, we're going to be gone a while, but we're going to leave this guy here on the wall so you know what the ideal, what God's son look like.
So if God's son looks like a doobie brother, then so does God.
Well, really, Jesus was probably a tan guy with dark hair and curly hair and brown eyes that was saying shit that the government and the church didn't like, so they knocked him the fuck off.
I think that once you understand that as human beings, we really only look different because of subtle differences and atmosphere and change and who you mix with when.
But I think that all those books that our moms paid Oprah to sell us of self-help and inward looking, Reverend Ike had told my grandmother's generation that in the 70s.
You know what I mean?
And I think that we're scared to turn off the lights and at some point see something divine within ourselves.
Because once you do that, that requires you act differently.
And I think that people need to be told what to do.
Not that they actually need it, but they want to be instructed.
You know, versus knowing or going on a gut feeling or experimenting and getting something wrong.
You know, my grandfather was one of the most kind, moral men I've ever met.
He was always gentle with children.
He only put a belt in my butt twice in my life.
And shit, I think he cried harder than I. Same man at 14 years old shot a man at church for kicking his bike down.
You know, he grew up in between 14 and 54 when I was born, and he had experiences that he had learned to regret, and he had dealt with that, and he had become something that by the time I was a child and he was raising me, my grandfather was divine in my eyes almost, you know what I mean?
He was perfect because he was genuinely good and moral.
But as a 14-year-old boy who had grown up fatherless, who dropped out of school in the third grade, and who understood that I must protect my mothers and sisters, he refused to be bullied by anyone, even an adult, to the point of putting a bullet in him.
You know what I mean?
So I think that a lot of times we're afraid to see that divinity in ourselves also because then you have to acknowledge the darkness and you have to deal with that.
And it's easier to get instructed by someone else and it's easier to see the evil is outside too.
It's easier to see that it's something that I can't control that just happens versus I'm complying and I'm complicit in it, you know?
It's also a consequence of, you know, one of the things that bothers me the most when people talk about people that commit crimes or think about people that commit crimes, so much of who a person is is a consequence of things that had nothing to do with them.
One of the weirder things about our culture is that we haven't put more of an emphasis in finding the spots that are the ghettos and the terrible neighborhoods in this country and figuring out a way to build them up.
Yet we do not put resources into building institutions that will create entrepreneurs or work on the soft skills so the kids can be working at and around production houses, studios.
We put that money into prisons.
And then we use prison labor to undercut things like call centers, things like that, that factories may need.
And we're doing a disservice by doing that.
And I always say we because we look to our quote-unquote leaders and blame them.
When so many times we allow it, you know, we allow this to happen by not paying attention and not voting.
We allow it to happen by not raising our voice, even though we know someone in prison and saying this is wrong.
You know, the last people, I don't believe, just for the record, I don't believe in the big three, the Abrahamic religions.
I'm not into them.
But the books I've read, and they're amazing graphic novels.
I kind of read them like a graphic novel of sorts, right?
And when you look at the people who Christ died with, right?
He was up there with thieves.
The last person he saved before he got out of here was a thief, was a confessed thief, was dying right next to him.
And he was like, you know, we're going to go on this together.
That's an amazing thing.
So as you're serving your Savior or your Messiah, you need to be thinking about who he spent his time with.
You know, he was with liars and thieves.
He was in the streets.
He was with people who alleged to be prostitutes.
And I think that if we start to turn our attention to those places and we put our intentions in good there, we do produce on the other side better.
But as long as we look at religion as something that makes us holy, makes us clean, washes us of our sins, and we become pious in that, I think religion will be something that's forever kind of harmful and help to create that.
And I think that that That believing that some people are good at evil doesn't allow us to say, well, what could we do to fix those ghettos, to fix those depressed areas?
Because for every ghetto where I'm from, for every ghetto that's in a city in the South, I can show you a mountainous region with a trailer park that's just as bad.
So you're flying a loser's flag, so it just never really bothered me.
But as I got older...
The drama that's been placed around it has been amazing because if I'm not going to change Robert E. Lee, the school's name, I'm not going to really be able to change the place.
It's going to be here.
You know, as a Southern, you just got to accept it's going to be there.
But Turbo Jesus is a kid.
I saw following.
So my natural assumption is...
You know, typical redneck kid, right?
Hella talent.
He can fix anything with a motor on it.
He makes these amazing katana-like swords out of wrenches, right?
He's just an amazing kid.
But I see him rallying against kids that uphold that flag and upholding, you know, anything that feels like racism or nationals.
And he's just one of the most morally good kids I've ever seen running around.
And he's an ally and he doesn't look like stereotypically anything you would expect.
But that's the great part of This, to me, the great part of all this country is, you know, as polar opposites as people try to make, say, you and I, here we are together as equals.
You know, here we are together engaging one another as equals and we don't look like one another.
We're not from the same places.
And I think there's just a whole bunch of opportunity in that.
You know, I think that there's money to be made.
In promoting that versus promoting division and fear.
So absolutely, there is money in helping children be better.
And if we're going to live in a capitalist system, be a compassionate capitalist and be the best you possibly can, because we need more of you.
I told Larry King earlier today that I'd rather stop arguing over the Second Amendment with people that I should be arguing for an amendment of the 13th Amendment with.
We should stop arguing over guns and we should start to say, why does our 13th Amendment have a loophole that allows for slavery?
They're saying this right here, more than 2,000 volunteer inmate firefighters, they volunteered, including 58 youth offenders are battling wildfire flames through California.
Inmate firefighters serve a vital role, clearing thick brush down to bare soil to stop the fire spread.
We look at it as though it's something that just is, like it has to be.
But it doesn't have to be like that.
Especially if we know history.
That's all I'm really trying to say.
There are other ways to try this.
And we could.
You can try to fix homelessness without criminalizing being homeless, right?
We know that most men that are homeless have some types of mental illness or schizophrenia.
So that means that we've broken down and we're not taking care of the mental ill in a way that we should be or could be.
So if you start to fix that, you start to fix that kind of homelessness.
We know that women and children, we know why they're on the street, and we know that if they're subsidized into these type of affordable housing apartments in the city, the kids have the opportunity to go to better schools, to become better parts of society in terms of having the networks and resources.
We know the mothers are closer to work, can be home, but we don't do that.
We build cities like right now.
Now we're developing Atlanta and we've been promised a certain amount of of workspace in the city for working class people, for poor people.
Some of the developers aren't doing what they say they do.
And because you do that, you start to increase the things that are blights on us.
You know, we just have to be really committed to it and do it.
That's it.
And once we do it, it's done.
You know, but if we if we keep acting like it's not happening and complaining about poverty and crime and war and not doing anything, it's just the cycle never stops.
And that's the the insanity I really don't understand.
She said, you know, she doesn't want to hear people keep complaining about gentrification.
When the kids that are leaving these neighborhoods, whether they sing, dance, rap or not, or just go get good jobs and go be decent human beings, you should be re-entering your neighborhoods.
You should be buying houses or pieces of land there.
One of the most impressive things, one of my favorite players was John Stockton.
And I don't know if it's true or not, but I read a story that he actually bought a house right on the street he grew up in.
So in the off season, he'd go back essentially home with his kids.
So they'd had some type of normalization to their life.
We should be doing that.
T.I. and I have bought properties together in the same neighborhoods we grew up in.
I like to see more athletes and rappers become the merchant and business class in that way.
And I like to see people who grew up in neighborhoods move back to those neighborhoods they grew up in, like the typical iconic American dream.
You can build another 8,000 square foot in the back of your A-frame house if you want to, but you shouldn't be going to...
50-60 minutes outside the city and then complaining about the blight of the city because you took yourself away.
Do you think that everyone should feel that way, though?
Do you feel like you have to be committed to the city that you grew up in, or couldn't you want to just get the fuck out of there and go somewhere different?
There's nothing wrong with getting the fuck out, but you just think you should go back and support it.
Yeah, it's like I tell kids in college when they say, Mike, what can we do?
Kids in college, when you go speak at college, they say, well, what can we do?
Kids want to affect the world.
Very easy.
Find a kid in high school, tutor that kid, make sure they replace you at this university or another.
That's it.
You're just replanting a seed.
If you grow food, you know, you don't grow the same land year after year after year.
You have to give that land a break, retill it, you know what I'm saying?
And it's kind of like the neighborhood.
So you don't have to stay in the same neighborhood your whole life.
You don't have to feel like I never went into anything or escaped anywhere.
But you do have to don't sell your mother's house, you know, right?
Rent it to your cousin.
Let your younger sister, but don't sell your mother.
That piece of land was worked for.
The blood, the toil, the soil, it means something, and it should.
And for working class people especially, it keeps your neighborhood and communities more like the ones that made you be a good human being.
So I think that there's something most people don't leave the town they grow up in.
They move to the other side or they move to the suburbs.
Most people marry somebody they knew.
You know what I'm saying?
My thing is make the best of it.
Don't let it keep becoming the worst.
A man named Mr. John, my wife and I own barbershops.
People don't know.
We own these things called the Shave, Wash and Groom Shops.
We have one at State Farm Arena where the Atlanta Hawks play.
We have our flagship store on Edgewood Avenue.
Edgewood Avenue and Auburn Avenue were once the centers of black Atlanta in terms of commerce and retail and money.
Atlanta Life Insurance Company was there.
You guys Google some of this stuff.
This is big-time shit.
This isn't the old narrative of, we've never had nothing, because that's not the truth.
Atlanta was a very rich city for African Americans.
Still is.
On this street, used to be owned by African Americans, the storefronts in there.
Their children, after these people died off, sold the buildings off and sold them for cheap.
And I know this because a man named Mr. John, who runs a grocery store there, stopped me one day.
He said, you know, Michael, after we're gone and this neighborhood's been gentrified and everything's different, they're going to come along and say that white people stole this from us.
And he said, that's not true.
He said the children of the people that were here left and they never came back because they didn't think what their parents built was good enough.
Oh man, it killed me.
Because that's not just black people, that's Americans, period.
We have gotten to a point where we are unappreciative.
We are entitled and we don't think what happened before us was good enough.
So we don't treasure it, we don't honor it, we don't reinvest in it.
That could be a farm in Milledgeville, that could be a house in Adamsville.
But we have to do a better job of appreciating ourselves, appreciating our community, and then appreciating our greater community.
And you have to re-enter.
You have to re-entrify that.
You have to be a part of whatever gentrification happens to make sure that your stake is still there and that what you care about from a morals and civil perspective is represented there.
My uncle John Blackman, who was a huge influence on me, died and had a five-car garage where he did transmissions and stuff, and I begged my aunt to sell it.
Please, I know they're going to come, the Beltline's coming, but please sell it to me.
I didn't want my uncle's building to go to strangers and become an apartment complex or something.
And I walked in your building, and I seen your building, and I said, wow, I know what I'm going to do with it now.
I've had it for like three years now.
I just had it.
But I never knew what I wanted to do.
But you were like, yo, you need somewhere to go every day.
Your building is impressive.
I'm like, yo, I'm just going to just make...
My uncle's building my offices, right?
And I'll figure out a way to make a lot of money off of it.
I mean, I've already made a lot of money, which is enabling me to buy it.
But it's important to me that as this neighborhood turns into hipster land, because it's definitely going to be...
It's just going to be black hipster.
It's going to be like chocolate hipster land.
I just wanted to make sure that there's still some chocolate working class in there.
And sometimes they're going to go buy coffee and there's going to be a loud-ass muscle car and lots of marijuana smoke blowing out of it so they'll know that my uncle's nephew's still in town.
I was a good rapper, but Outkast of Criminal Records, my first record that went gold at a time where every other record was going $10 million.
It didn't work, right?
It didn't work for me.
So I had to go to Texas and people like Chameleon Aaron Paul Wall...
Bun B, Zero, Slim Thug, Trader Truth, right?
People like Flip and Hump.
These people taught me how to press up my own CDs, put them in the marketplace, sell them at profit, reinvest and sell.
They taught me that and selling drugs, you know, and they taught me the rudimentary fundamentals of business.
And when I met my wife, I can remember dating two, three, four, five little hot chicks and her just mentally being, you know, my wife called her like right freshman year of college, but just mentally she was Thank you.
Light years ahead of everyone because her grandmother had raised her in that way.
Grandmother had a shot house, you know, like a chitlin circuit.
You go get a shot for $2 on Sundays because the South is, you know, a weird place.
We didn't use to sell alcohol on Sunday.
So my wife, I recognize, had a sharper mind than me for business.
What I had was good ideas for what would sell or what would be well in the marketplace.
You know, one barber comes in one day like, I want to wear a glitter cape today.
And the next barber's coming in like, yeah, I want to cut hair into nude.
I want to use your shop to do it.
And you're like, bro, it doesn't work like that.
But I had to learn.
For us, the booth rent model, like you paying booth rent and us not making any more profit, that doesn't it.
So we had to kind of say, well, what does Supercuts do?
What does Great Clips do?
Oh, you want it by commission and then you split.
That means they have to be there.
And that's how we kind of learned business.
When we got an offer from the Hawks to put our place in the space of the arena and we want to be in more arenas, we started to understand, okay, this is how you do business business.
This is not just how you make $2,000 to $4,000 extra a month and that's just some good income for your wife to be able to enjoy.
But this is how you start to say, more than a barbershop, this is a lifestyle and retail brand.
We happen to barber.
But if you're a guy, I don't like going to the beauty shops or beauty stores to buy my brushes or buy my combs or, you know, if you want to get a little gray out of your beard.
You know, you don't want to be in the RX section of your local Walmart or your, like, hey, where do I get the gray for my beard because I want to go get hot young chicks, you know.
You want to go and shop.
And so we develop products.
We have cool stuff.
You can just buy it right there.
And we're learning to be business people.
And hopefully, I would like to become the Chick-fil-A of barbershops.
I'd like for people to want to have us in their town and pay us a lot of money to come.
DJ Vlad has taught me a lot about stocks, so much to the point that I bought my wife thousands of dollars in stocks for Christmas.
She cried.
She cried when I showed her the wedding band that I bought because I never really got a wedding band.
I really want to show you I'm dedicating myself to you and this is never coming off.
So at the beginning of Christmas she cried when she saw my wedding band and at the end she cried when I said I never want you to be fully dependent upon me or feel that way so here's a lot of stock and she cried like a baby.
I called Vlad like that shit works bro.
So I'm learning about, and I just put lots of money into the S&P 500s, but I don't know a lot about cryptocurrency and stuff.
I'm fascinated by the idea of a decentralized economy.
The whole thing has always been about the amount of money that banks control.
If you just stop and think about what goes on with The Federal Reserve and what goes on with all the money and how much a dollar is worth overseas, the balance of it all.
If there was something that we could all rely on that wasn't controlled by any gigantic group of people that have a vested interest in profiting off of this pile of money, if it was some sort of a Bitcoin-like thing.
I've gotten myself to the place where I know exactly what I have to pay attention to and what I don't, and what I don't have to pay attention to is just gone.
And, you know, shit ain't been too good if you ain't got money.
If you poor and black, if you poor, America's fucked up.
If you poor and black, America's fucked up with a dildo in your ass.
So, you know, my whole shit is let me take care of my money because my grandpa, you know, my grandmother, her family owned land.
They started as sharecroppers, but because they own land, she could she could become educated because they could sell the stuff they grew to stores and produce markets and stuff.
So she they were methodist.
So she got to go to school.
My grandfather's mother owned no land.
So my grandfather had to work in a bread factory and cotton mills and shit.
So I knew the difference between ownership and, you know, the advantages of having something in it.
So it's something I kind of obsess on because I don't want my children to endure poverty.
And I grew up working class.
You know, my wife, she jokes, but she says it a lot.
You know, she's from housing projects in Savannah and her grandmother and her mother worked.
They were out of there.
But, you know, she says to me all the time, you were spoiled.
You know, you're a little rich kid.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
She's like, you had a fucking RV. I'm like, I lived in an A-frame house.
She's like, I don't care.
Your grandparents can afford an RV. You guys went on vacation.
You were spoiled.
You know what I mean?
So, I understand money means a lot.
And it doesn't mean everything to me, but it helps to afford me to be able to take care of her and my children.
A lot of people talk a lot of shit about billionaires they like and they want to be.
And there are tons of billionaires from the nerdy sexy of Bill Gates to the wild, dope, eccentric sexy of Elon Musk to the OGs of Warren Buffett and shit.
They were bred for purposes of fighting and purposes of bringing down bulldogs.
You know, they run alongside the bull, grab the nose ring, drop their weight, flip, essentially flip a bull.
So I'm just thinking to myself, as we like the aesthetics of what they look like, like, what are we really doing to these little guys where they're fucking, they're buff to shit, but they're short as shit.
It's hard to get up a pair of steps for them, you know?
You should have one pit that's dedicated to you and the family, or you should have two pits that are part of the family and they understand who's the dominant and who's the alpha and who's the beta.
So if they get lonely, and they get lonely without you, like they miss you, they'll do shit like just tear up the fucking sofa or the house or do the laundry.
And then you'll get there, you'll call them, you're looking for them, and they're like, oh shit, I fucked up.
And they're hiding in the room and shit.
They're brilliant little fuckers.
My man CeeLo had a bunch of great pits back in the days.
My oldest daughter has a tiny little dog and it's one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen because it's part Chihuahua and part Australian Shepherd dog, I think.
But it's the only dog I've ever had where its paw got caught on the leash and it lifted its leg up And put it behind the leash.
I've never seen a dog do that.
Dogs get that one arm in front of the leash, and then they're fucked.
We're the most advanced of the primates, but we exhibit characteristics that we can see in the lower primates, and if you pay attention to all the top scientists who have been studying human evolution, they're all pretty much in agreement that there was something that we were all similar to, and they all branched off in a bunch of different ways.
It's amazing they keep finding new forms of people, too.
Yeah, I saw one.
Desinovian or something like that, that's what it's called?
I think if a pit stop happened, and what was the movie that was really crappy, not as good as it should have been, that was the Aliens, like, precursor or something, it showed essentially where they came.
Aliens were chick hanging out at the moon, say, yo, look at the blue plants, let's fucking go see what it is, and say, yo, wow, that monkey looks great.
Fuck the shit out of it, got out of there, and the next thing you know, you have war and pestilence and violence and poverty and MMA. And joints.
I don't know what the ocean was like a couple hundred thousand years ago, before people really became what we are, tool-using, you know, people that figured out how to get out into the ocean and capture fish.
Imagine if you could see it.
Imagine if you could see an image of how many fucking fish were out there 200,000 years ago versus how many are now.
It's like they live next to a vampire that just keeps sucking the life out of it.
I was happy that it was cotton because seeing as how they're the biggest investor in Africa and China was growing cotton, that didn't go well for black people 500 years ago.
So I was just like, please don't let cotton grow on the moon.
I don't think anybody has a quarrel with anybody over there.
The hustle is that the real interaction is between a very small amount of people that involves all these other people that are with them for some strange reason.
I have different people that are pockets of my life that love you, so as I'm shouting people out, I appreciate you letting me do it, but I know they'll appreciate it.
Listening to him describe his childhood and how Customato had hypnotized him, that was amazing, because I'd never heard him talk about that before, and that's what people need to understand, like who he was.
People want to say, oh, he was hyper-aggressive, and he did terrible things, and he was violent.
When you look at hip-hop and where it was and where Mike was at the time, it was a perfect synergy for him to become a hero.
Mike Tyson, Mike Jordan, these people became icons at a time where the United States, like in the 80s, after getting opaque, kicking ass in the 80s, That crisis fucking up the 70s, Iran, shit at the end of the 70s, early 80s.
Steel, I remember my grandfather worked at Hall Steel.
I remember Steel, my other grandfather, Steel leaving America.
I remember it just kind of being...
It wasn't as proud.
And he was one of those things that made you feel badass.
And the times feel dangerous.
And he wore black in those little boxers.
He didn't wear the boots.
He wasn't flashy.
He was a perfect villain at a time where villainy, N.W.A., you know what I'm saying?
It was celebrated.
Danger.
I think he was perfect for the time.
And I think he's perfect for now.
Like what Mike is, when I hear him interview and I really talk and people make fun of his lisp or whatever, and I think that gets in the way of you hearing the real wisdom he's saying a lot of times.
Like Mike has repeatedly talked about change and about growth and about how he doesn't see things the same.
And I think if we actually listen to that, it kind of challenges us to do the same shit that we really don't want to do.
He's like in a classic Kung Fu film, he's the reluctant teacher almost.
You do a movie, Mike is the guy who is a student go to beg to teach you to fight, and you want to know why he won't teach you, and it's because you find out later your teacher killed someone in the ring or some shit.
He is really that character.
He is a...
You could tell, even with the pigeons back in the days, that there's kindness and love in there somewhere.
And now he gets to express it to human beings.
You just see he's a happier person, you know what I mean?
But I can honestly tell you that I read an article in HuffPost or something years ago that talked about parents who smoked and stoners actually being more engaged with their children.
So that doesn't mean you get up and you get fried the first thing in the morning to take your kid to school.
But it does mean that Where drinkers or smokers would come home and almost avoid the child to smoke or drink or do something else or had other things going on, stoner would literally pop up, may take a hit or two of the joint, and the focus would be more on just being a child parent and kind of kicking it, cooling it.
So if you're just a little bit high and you're around kids, you would be thinking more the way they're thinking or trying to be a little calmer with them and a little bit more patient.
Yeah, I think it's very important for all of us to be honest about how we feel.
It doesn't make you weak.
It just makes you brave enough to be able to express honestly what everybody is probably feeling, but it's scared to bring up because they don't want to be thought of as weak.
They don't want to be a whiny bitch.
So they don't want to tell you what's going on that's wrong.
But especially something like anxiety.
The delicate balance of chemicals that exist in the human mind and how much it can be affected by stress and relationships and life in general and your diet and all these other factors.
Like, if they allowed it to be legal, then you would allow it to be regulated, which means you would allow it to be, like, you would know exactly how many milligrams of this is in this and how much you should take if you weigh 112 pounds versus you weigh 212 pounds.
All those things should be taken into consideration by scientists.
I think they're having a lot of studies, or a lot of success, rather, with veterans and treating veterans with MDMA and MAPS. You know MAPS, the psychedelic organization?
There's doing some study now at Harvard about it, about heat shock proteins and hot yoga and how much inflammation it reduces and how beneficial it is to you.
I forget what scientists were involved in it, but a bunch of people were talking about it the other day.
Well, if you have something that you shouldn't be eating, like you eat a hot dog with sauerkraut and a Coke, and then two hours later try to go to yoga class, you're a criminal.
I wonder what that is, because that's the same thing that everybody says.
I mean, regardless of your religious beliefs, just stop for a second and try to figure out why so many people see themselves from above their body, see themselves outside their body.
I mean, all people, and even science, kind of agree at this point that their body is just a vehicle of sorts, a machine of sorts, that whatever energy or soul or spirit, whatever people are trying to identify, it's within it.
But it does disconnect it, I would imagine.
I'm hoping that they figure out how to put my soul in a computer before I die.
No, I'm saying if you're 89 and you're about to get the fuck out of here and you got the opportunity to upload into 29 again for the next 29 years, like, yo, fuck that.
I might try that before I decide to click on out of there, you know?
I think they're going to be able to reverse aging, and I think they're going to be able to do that before they're going to figure out a way to get you into a machine.
The way Elon Musk looks at it is that he was trying to warn people, but they weren't listening, and that...
There's no telling how powerful they could get once they become sentient.
Once they start taking control of their own destiny and creating new robots and just deciding whether or not we live or die and how they're going to run things, they're essentially going to become a life form, an artificial life form that's way fucking smarter than us.
And he's saying, do you think it's smart to arm these things?
Do you think it's smart to make this?
He's looking at it in terms of, he's the tip of the spear, right?
When it comes to technology and implementation of it.
I mean, think about who this guy is, right?
If he's the one who's telling you, everybody's got to slow the fuck down.
You literally might be making a Terminator movie here.
You literally might be making a Terminator movie.
Yeah, we have to worry, because when you're saying that you think we evolved from monkeys, we evolved from some lower thing, well, the idea is that we've got to keep going.
Well, if we might hit a biological bottleneck, and that might be the whole convergence of humans and technology, that might be what it's all about.
Like, biologically, this system doesn't move fast enough.
But if we can transcend this and move into some sort of a digital life, that life, we can accelerate all of the innovation, all of the improvements in insane numbers, light years.
Travel through time.
Change the fucking nature of life itself.
That's going to probably be one of the stages of our future, whether it's 1,000 years from now or 100,000 years from now.
It seems to me like with this adoption of science into our daily lives in terms of the technologies that we're all addicted to, phones and tablets and all these different things.
Yeah, and he's also coming out with something called Neuralink.
I don't exactly know what it was.
He was very vague about it, but he was saying it was going to change the bandwidth, to change your ability to access information, and people were going to wear it.
You're going to wear this thing on your head.
It's going to literally charge up your fucking brain in some strange way.
We're, you know, 30 or 40 years away from being unrecognizable.
That's what I think.
I think we're 30 or 40 years away from being, living in, half the time living in a virtual world, half the time living in an augmented world.
I think people are going to exist in these weird worlds where it feels real and isn't.
I think they're gonna come out with programs that are fun at first, but then become life-consuming, where you put on these fucking goggles and this suit, and you go into this world, and you live with these people, and they interact, we touch each other, but no one's there physically, but you feel like you are, and it's magical.
Like, you're living in Avatar, you're on Pandorum, you're hanging out with the blue people, you're with the Na'vi.
That shit could happen.
You could literally get to a point where you believe you're there.
And I'm going to probably hit a joint a couple times, and we'll Uber down, and I'm going to walk through this museum.
Now, she usually doesn't like going with me because people kind of sometimes will recognize me, and it bothers her if she's really trying to hang out with Dad, you know what I mean?
But I'm going to get a chance to walk through that, whether it's just me or her, kick it solo dolo, and just experience that with her.
Just that you see the goggles and goggles and mirrors on mirrors.
And go to strip club a couple times a week instead of every day with Sleepy.
Shouts out to Sleepy.
I miss you, bro.
But they asked, man, Fahamu, Dr. Fahamu Pico, and I know I'm saying his last name wrong, is an artist who my wife owns his piece.
He did the rap music cover.
My wife has a piece on loan to the Carlos Museum at Emory University.
He's going to be a Basquiat-like artist in terms of How he's talked about and more.
He's an amazing human being and artist.
We're lucky enough to own some of his works.
He's on the board and he suggested that me and a guy named Kenyon who worked over at Interscope be brought to and they met us and they accepted us.
And I'm like...
You got to understand, I grew up about four or five miles from this place.
And for most kids, this place was an impossibility to go to because their imagination wouldn't let them do it, right?
So you're in these cities, a lot of times you have very poor or working class areas that are right next to things that are inspiring, but kids are not brave enough to break the filter and go because they're never encouraged to.
And the High Museum and things like that have always made it very accessible.
So when Ted Turner owned the Braves and the Hawks, if you got B's and A's, you got tickets to the game, right?
So you could see baseball.
Part of the reason baseball died in inner cities is because the stadiums moved out and you couldn't see it, right?
The High Museum and the Woodward Foundation, which is a Coke charity, gave me and two other kids a scholarship to go train on Saturdays to draw and paint, stuff like that.
So this museum has been in my life since I was a kid.
So being asked to get on the board...
It's just a huge honor, and especially having an 11-year-old now that probably is going to want to be an artist, man.
Yeah, when two people really enjoy each other's company and benefit from each other's presence and get inspired by each other, the two become bigger than just one plus one.
That's why, you know, I make sure when I'm introduced, you know, and other stuff, you know, Joe Rogan's people know a Michael Render, Killer Mike, but on a place I always say, you know, first and foremost, a Michael Render, because this is what my mom named me.
Killer Mike's a character that I enjoy playing, you know?
And I'm Shay's husband and I have to run the jewels.
These things are more than just who I am.
They make significant, you know, change in my life.
If I live up to the honor in those titles, then, you know, I'm a better person.
Since you're a fun guy and you're an inspirational guy in terms of your work ethic and all the things that you've achieved, when you say things like that and you talk about your word and you talk about who you are, that's very powerful to young people coming up.
Because they'll hear that.
They'll hear how smart you are and how well-read you are and how much you understand about the business and life in general.
And then they hear how your thought process works and it'll help them...
And this is more serious than we're showing up and we're angry.
This is confronting government.
And once government has shown you do something a few times, you have to practice guerrilla warfare or you're just doing what the British did that lost them America.
You're stepping up in a formation, shooting your shot, falling back, stepping up.
You're just playing a fucking game where they're dancing versus doing things that really disrupt the system and things that really progress the move.
And I was like, oh, shit.
Shit!
You know, this is radically, this guy is more than just a funny man.
He's really sacrificing and laying that shit down.
I definitely think there's something to that that it's there's very few people that are as free with what they're allowed to say Like stand-up comedians because we're saying this crazy shit under the guise of it being funny Yeah So you can get away with saying a lot of things that won't be criticized as long as people laugh at them And you have a good point if you're just making the points without the joke people wouldn't they would they don't want to hear it they get mad at you But something about delivering a point with a joke That's why trigger warning works.
Yeah, for sure.
It's one of the last ways you can deliver a message that maybe people don't agree with, but if you can make them laugh at some shit they don't even really agree with, and they're laughing hard, they'll see a little bit of your point.
When you set out to do trigger warning, what was the initial premise, and how much of it did it change once you got to production, once you started filming?
Originally, we shot it with FX, and we overdid it.
It looked really good, but it looked really TV. And it could have been dope, but it would have been a parody of a very real thing I was tempted to do.
And right now, I'm talking about Crippercola.
What it turned into at Netflix was a real...
In your face, simple and plainly shot documentation of the possibilities of barbershop arguments, right?
So in a barbershop argument, you get to say, you know, the only thing that separates Al Capone from Joe Kennedy is Al Capone got caught and eventually died in prison, and Joe Kennedy went on to produce presidents, but they both have been bootlegger.
You know, people say shit like this, barbershop talk, and then you have to go home and be asking yourself, like, well...
Well, damn, if Papa Joe was a bootlegger, like, technically it could have went fucked up for him and we never would have had an American dynasty versus Al catching siblings and shit and not going so well.
But him being the preeminent marketing campaign in face of any Capone-like thing you want to sell cigars to a restaurant, right?
So I got a chance to say, you know, shit, what if I could do this for my guys?
And again, giving it a shot and giving it a try.
I thought of that shit...
At 15 years old, I started trying to figure out how to do it 10 years ago.
Daniel and I got it done eight, nine years later.
And now you have this.
And I say that just to say that Brian Koppelman, the creator of Billions, is a brilliant writer to me.
And he's a friend also.
But Brian has been putting up lately these just encouraging things, telling writers to write, even if your stuff is getting bought, even if you don't think it's good, to write, to push yourself, to push the idea forward.
And I've been taking a lot of inspiration for that because Daniel Weinfeld and I, one of the co-writers and co-creators, Daniel and I have been talking and developing this over 10 years.
Now I know how to do it, how to go in a room, how to get it.
It won't take me 10 years for the next one, but it was worth the struggle.
It was worth doing that.
It was worth...
Tweaking my idea was worth critiquing my idea to be like the first time around like nah it's not it's not what it should be because I was nervous to shit the night before it came out about everything in it you know the the what scenes were shot how did it look the production value and now seeing people get it and unlike a lot of other artists not have to call yourself a genius let me tell people every artist thinks there's a genius Every comedian thinks they're fucking Richard Pryor.
In some part of your mind, you have to think you're great, or why do it?
You have to believe there's greatness in you, right?
But I never wanted to be the guy.
I'm a fucking genius, you know what I mean?
I just never wanted, but to see it, because I always thought the idea was genius.
Like, fuck that shit.
You remember real people that used to come on in the 70s, 80s?
I remember watching that show as a kid, looking at motherfuckers like, wow, these motherfuckers exist in these far-off places like Iowa and Kansas.
And I wanted to approach it.
I wanted to approach people in a very...
I'm here right in front of you kind of way, not above you, not celebrity, Michael Moore-ish, but people know I'm a rapper, and it gave me that opportunity.
And people can say it's genius, and I'm going to say I'm humbled and honored, but you're fucking right.
And it's genius because I'm engaging people at a regular human level, not at the level of celebrity or power that used to be engaged, but one that allows them to fully open up.
I haven't seen it on TV since some shit like Real People.
I haven't seen revolutionary TV like The Jeffersons or You know, all in the family are marred.
And I think that the world is getting scary and pussy, to be honest.
You know, not to disrespect pussies because pussies are tough.
But I think that something needs to be dangerous.
The best compliment I got on this press run has been like Ambrosia.
Ambrosia for Head said, how does it feel to have the most dangerous show on TV? And it's dangerous because it unites people.
It doesn't separate people.
It gives you alternative answers in the ones you thought you had, and it forces you to think.
It doesn't solve all the problems or wrap it up pretty at the end.
It gives you some options to do and some shit to think about.
I started, man, my man told my wife, you know, get Michael a leaf blower, and he'll just start going back outside.
So I started looking for leaf blowers.
And I started taking, instead of having my nephew do it, because I'm running around on tour and shit, just when I'm home, taking my own trash up and down it.
Spending some time fucking around in my yard, watching around and stuff.
I realized, being a rapper and living on a tour bus, how much I had stopped going outside.
Meanwhile, my cousins are fucking hogging in East Georgia.
And I'm just like, if it went down tomorrow, I'd be fucked.
I'm rusty as a nail in the rain right now.
So I definitely think there's something to be said for introducing your kids to maybe a little more of what it was like 20, 30 years or 30, 40 years ago.
I often pray that aliens go ahead and attack this motherfucker so white people and black people will cut the bullshit and finally have to unite like one great movie of Red October.
And one of the things that was really strange about it was that it shot off this gigantic wave of conspiracy theorists who were thinking that they're going to tell us something about alien contact.
Check this out.
Listen to this.
unidentified
Some outside universal threat.
I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
I'm willing, based on all the theology, I'm willing to accept it as a possibility.
Because I don't think that we're alone, right?
I just don't, there's nothing, even if there's some divine thing that woke up and decided to make us and we're special children and we're on earth in a blue planet, there had to have been some other things made or played with, right?
I don't think that, I think it's very arrogant as a human being.
To think that it's just us, right?
And I think that the possibility that something made it here and something happened exists.
Absolutely.
Because if we're experimenting on animals and things, my daughters are me.
Their temperament is me.
Their curiosity is me.
I'm looking at Michael, and I'm looking at Anaya, and I'm like, arguing with Anaya is like arguing with myself.
She doesn't know why she acts like that.
I don't know.
Now, if I can look at my pit bull and say...
Well, her mother acted like this, and this is why I know she's coded.
This is why I know her father.
Then I have to look at my daughter and say, on a genetic basis, 23 of my chromosomes, I know our temperament is like that.
I know why Michael is not going to argue.
She's a smart kid.
She's an art student.
But the minute you put her in danger, she's going to punch you.
You know what I mean?
That's what it's going to be.
And it's not going to be anything else because she is going to protect her.
So it's like I have to think that my curiosity, if nothing else, my drive to do this.
So if you take the primate side, you say, well, you know that I have to live amongst this.
I've got to survive.
There's wolves, there's lions, tigers, bears out here.
I have to go high.
I have to create shelter.
There's something else with a very small input could have dropped here, landed here.
And what's crazy, if you look into the Nation of Islam philosophy of sorts, they have a UFO-type philosophy.
Something here, and by their mind, a scientist created all of that, went a short way and kind of created the different races.
But something could have come here, and it gets here, and it says, boom.
If I do this and this and I create this and then we set upon evolution, we end up here.
Or that just could be, you know, me stoned having watched too many sci-fi movies.
But it's certainly possible that if we could go to another planet we knew had life, that it's possible if we found some lower primates that we would manipulate them.
It's very possible.
We had a full survey of another planet.
We got there and like, okay, here's the good news.
Good news is a lot of life.
Bad news is the most intelligent thing is basically a chimp.
But we got some ideas and what we're going to do is we're going to plant some seeds of our genetics in some of these chimps.
They're going to be smarter than the other chimps and then we're going to leave mushrooms everywhere.
The way I've been describing it is that I feel like we're some sort of electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon.
We don't even know what the fuck we're doing.
We're about to become a butterfly.
We're just making this cocoon.
And we're just completely engulfed in it.
We're not thinking about it, but everyone does it.
They all do it.
That's how I felt like.
When I see all this stuff getting better and better and more invasive in your life and the technology becoming more and more advanced and everybody obsessed with it, that's the thing I think.
This is eventually going to be everything.
It's going to be way better than this physical life.
They're going to offer you a life that exists just like The Matrix.
The Matrix sounded like such horseshit.
Fun, fun movie, great movie and shit, but like, that can never happen.
I think what they're saying is that as people become more educated and more affluent and more successful, as more urbanization takes place, people work more and have less children.
And when they have less children, the population actually slightly decreases.
I think the idea is that as urban – listen, this is not my theory for sure, but I've read it.
The idea is as the world becomes more urbanized and more educated and more wealthy, as cities spread out, what happens is less of those people have kids, and they have less kids.
But the overall humans, once people have serious careers, like the man and the woman have a serious career, both of them are really invested in their career, they generally tend to have less kids.
Is that these cities and these urban areas, that as the society sort of evens out globally, whether it takes a thousand years or a hundred years, as things start to even out, people will be more like Los Angeles and less like poor places like Calcutta.
But, like, Jacque Fresco in The Venus Project talked about moneyless societies, the radical change of what are political states and things of that nature.
Chomsky talks about...
You know, essentially all countries essentially now, no matter Western or Eastern, oligarchies and shit.
So, like, what's the radical departure from this then that saves it all?
I think people are more aware of the flaws of the system than they ever have been any generation previous.
I think when you look at kids from the 70s and the 80s, I don't think they were nearly as educated as to how truly fucked up this country is.
But also yet truly amazing in terms of like the history of the world.
But has plenty to improve on.
But probably will.
I think people are getting better at life.
They're getting better at all the things.
And government will come along with it.
I think we're going to get better at things.
We understand each other better.
We communicate better.
I'm optimistic.
And I think with all these incredibly intelligent people that are looking at the problems in the world in terms of carbon in the atmosphere or pollution in the ocean, people are already starting to work on solutions.
And when she taught about how even if your parents weren't naturalized, they weren't citizens, if you were just born on U.S. soil...
You got a shot.
You know, you were a citizen.
And I was just like, damn, that's amazing.
Because when you think about, at that time, we had learned about, I think, in history, the Irish and their plight to be here and things of that nature.
Just like, man, this country gives you a fucking shot.
And this is like when America was rattled.
This is in the middle of public enemy era and shit.
But there was something to be admired in that.
Like, James Baldwin had an adoration.
Poor America that many people didn't, even though he ended up dying as he's living in France.
I think the expectation, the dream that America sells you, man, this shit is amazing, or it can be.
And to know that that was the possibility then and now, my kids don't think like that.
My kids are dead in the middle of keeping people out.
That shit is fucking weird.
So in my lifetime, I'm scared that that's something I might see happen in this country.
That's how afraid I am right now.
With shit going fucked up.
That's what I mean when I say, when you say, well, we'll have a government or a world one day where people will be more affluent.
Well, in capitalism, even though I'm a capitalist, you know, I try to practice compassionate capitalism.
In capitalism, capitalism requires someone get snookered.
Well, if weed does become legal worldwide, I mean, countrywide, it's entirely possible that it's going to stimulate economies in a lot of very poor places.
Well, it also, it wouldn't make sense in any other relationship.
In any other relationship where all someone is saying is, if I let you sell something, you give me a certain percentage because you're basically saying that all of the frameworks of our government and the city's roads that you drive on, all that stuff takes money to maintain.
So we're just going to take a little piece.
No, they're taking 39%.
That's so much.
But if that 39% went all to public schools and paying teachers more money and paying cops and paying firemen and community centers...
Policemen should be from areas that they're policing or areas like those.
They should be offered no interest loans to live at and around those communities.
Teachers should be also, and the fire department, they should almost hold a special place because of the nobility of those jobs and how important they are.
We also should do stuff like tax freezes once you retire.
Whatever your taxes are, once you retire at 65 years old, we should knock maybe 10-20% off and that's what you pay until you die.
We should do everything we can to make the class of people you're saying about affluence possible and we're not doing it.
I guess that's the only button I'm pushing when I seem...
Because I'm a very optimistic person, but my pessimism comes more from...
The lack of what I've seen us be willing to do to make sure that one another treated fairly than I have seen for right.
And men are taught to face each other, to hate each other, and to hate on each other, and to look at each other with a famine mentality, or scarcity mentality.
That makes me feel better to these people like you out there.
It makes people feel better when they listen to your music and they enjoy it, that you're this guy behind it that's not taking any of this for granted and you're running with this shit.