B-Real joins Joe Rogan to trace cannabis culture’s shift from underground advocacy—like Cypress Hill’s early ties to Jack Herrera—to corporate monopolies, with Philip Morris and Ohio’s restrictive licenses stifling small growers. They compare regional strains (California vs. Vancouver) and legal hurdles, like California’s banking struggles and cartel grow ops on Tejon Ranch or Humboldt. B-Real credits music and martial arts discipline—Shotokan karate, seven-day training—to escaping gang life, while Rogan highlights Tyson’s cannabis-fueled dominance and King’s exploitation. The episode underscores how legalization and legacy battles reshape industries, from weed to hip-hop, while resilience and adaptability remain key. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, we'd get into some of the activism aspect of it as well, and that's when we heard names like Jack Herrera, who pretty much opened our eyes to everything.
And then, you know, I think we became real advocates.
You know, at first, you know, we thought we were, you know, sort of...
We read the high times magazines that we were stoners.
So we thought we were advocates but like in reading what other freedom fighters were actually doing out there and protests and rallies and all that stuff.
You know, we we really weren't advocates like we thought we became that later for sure.
The thing I heard maybe like five years ago, before it was legal in Denver, or a bit longer than that, before we got legalization here, that companies like Philip Morris and companies like that were already buying land and already trademarking names for some of the cannabis that we know today so that when they come into the game,
They have ownership on some of the names and some of the brands and trademarks and stuff like that.
And obviously the acreage to grow vast sums of cannabis.
Who knows how true that is, but I don't doubt some of that.
Because, you know, you had like people that got those licenses or permits or whatever.
on the cannabis culture or business, how to cultivate and how to run retail stores or any of that.
They didn't have any of that knowledge.
And, you know, they'll usually give it to an insider because they know how much money they stand to make.
That's like if there was just one distribution center, right?
And everybody has to go through that distribution center.
How much money does that distribution center make?
Because you've got to pay for your shit to go there.
And then, you know, who knows if it...
Well, you know if it passes because you know as a cultivator what you did.
So you'll know it'll pass because it's clean.
But you've still got to pay that fee every time.
And it's got to go through them.
Fortunately, here in California, you know, they've allowed people to have distribution licenses so that there's not one distribution center because that would be a monopoly for sure.
And that's what they wanted to, supposedly, you know, the lobbyists that put 64 together were trying to stop it from being a monopoly and corporations coming in and taking over and stuff like that, you know.
They'll partner up with brands that exist and people that have knowledge.
The corporations that come in in the next five years, it's going to be interesting.
Because I do think...
That it's set up for them to come in.
The taxes are so high right now for the consumer and for the cultivator and for the retail shop that you got to survive this wash right now that's happening in order to still be, you know, doing business when the corporate structure comes in.
Because please believe they're going to lobby so that those taxes come down because the margins are not right, you know, as 40%.
Yeah, we were trying to be different, not sound like a typical West Coast group, because a lot of West Coast groups at that point, what the labels were looking for were NWA types and things like that, like either...
You know, gangster, West Coast gangster rap.
They were looking for that or either the Kid Frost Chicano type.
And we didn't want to do that.
We didn't want to foothold ourselves like that.
You know, Muggs being from New York, he wanted to sort of blend both worlds, right?
So, you know, we went with the East Coast type sound with L.A. type of slang mixed with East Coast slang.
And so people, you know, they were like, where the fuck are these guys from?
And people thought we were from Cypress Hill, New York, because there's a Cypress Hill down there.
And, you know, people just didn't really know at first, because we were one of the first groups that didn't put our images on any of our first, you know, any of our singles or our art covers.
We never did, like, the shots, like...
You know, that we're existing at that time where it's a clean shot of the group or the artist or whatever.
We were always on some, you know, because we were metalheads too, you know, before the hip hop, we liked the obscure metal album.
So we didn't, we were like, we're not going to put ourselves on the covers.
We're just going to do these crazy obscure covers and make people, you know, try to guess who we are, be mysterious.
And one of my partners who I grew up with, who was one of my partners in our Dr. Green Thumb brand and whatever, his father was a, you know, sensei and his sensei and became my sensei.
I went from Taekwondo to Shotokan.
And I started training with him.
I mean, he had been in the dojo since he was five years old, training with his father.
So, you know, I came into that.
It took a little bit of convincing for me to go from one thing to another, because it's such a different style.
But, you know, I adapted to it, and I liked it, and it was very different.
Less flash, but...
Very disciplined.
And his father, you know, he was, you know, born in Japan, raised out there, and he, you know, their shit is kind of different.
They go to martial arts universities, and they get degrees in different martial arts.
So they can go and take, like, okay, Hapkido and Jiu-Jitsu and Shotokan and all this, and, you know, get their...
Their degrees, you know, they work their way up in the belt system and all that stuff, but they become teachers through that university, I guess.
And, yeah, his father was one of the guys in one of the federations that he's one of the three or four senseis that have to come in and give you the black belt when you actually get it.
So you could imagine when Lyoto Machida came on the scene, you know, we were like, yeah, someone representing the style that, you know, we were training under.
Yeah, and then when you learn, if you really actually want to fight, you want to learn Muay Thai and all those other things, you have way quicker legs.
I gotta tell you, if there's any physical activity that is addicting, it is paintball, because it's chess with guns.
Because it's so fast and so close, and you gotta think of a strategy, you know?
It's not all shooting straightway, it's all shooting angles and getting your guys to positions to get those guys out to keep moving up, to get their flag, wipe them out, and bring the flag back.
It's hard, because we were using different guns at the time, because it's like each year a better gun comes out.
The technology gets better.
So, you know, we were using it first when we started these guns called Angels, and then we went over into these other guns.
Fuck, I can't remember the name of them.
They were light.
I mean, the best thing is to have a light gun with the trigger that you can fan, see?
Because that's the technique to get it to shoot like an Uzi, right?
You're not supposed to be able to pull the trigger and multiple balls come out with one pull.
It's supposed to be that the gun shoots as fast as your two fingers or three can toggle.
So if you get a rhythm, you could shoot that thing like a fucking Uzi.
And everybody has a different position.
Like mine, I was like one of the quarterbacks, which is the last three on the line.
See, it's like a football field, right?
You got the 50, and there's obstacles at the 50, and in between, and it's mirrored on the other side.
The quarterbacks play the back.
And they shoot a whole bunch of paint so that the other guys that are the front and mid guys can get into these different positions to shoot the other guys out.
So the guys in the back, we're shooting the most paint.
Yeah, that's what they would replicate, like a football, soccer field, and you put all these obstacles up, these blow-up obstacles, and they're all just positions to try to take to get a better angle on the other side.
On a competition team, you have 11 for the roster and 7 play at a time.
And you can switch guys out.
But now it's different.
Now they do like 5-man and 3-man teams.
I don't know anything about the new style.
But they constantly call me back.
Because I'm in better shape than I was when I played.
I was a little bit heavier then.
That's why I was at quarterback.
Yeah.
You know, I wasn't running too fast then, but you know, they always hit me, man.
I'll always get hit on my DM on IG or Twitter like, hey man, when you come back to the paintball field, I'm like, when I get time, which is probably never, but It seems like a big-time suck.
Loved it, man.
I loved playing the game.
It was so addicting.
It was hard to pull away from it.
I would even, at times, be coming home from a tour straight into a tournament.
Like, I'd get off the plane, I'd have somebody have my paintball shit ready, and boom, straight to the tournament.
And some people die of a heart attack there because, you know, it's too much for them to be on that little bridge that they have there that extends past the edge of a canyon.
They put in a little bridgeway so that you can go and look down.
You want to know what I think is before the internet and all these different platforms where you can get information, our government and other governments could debunk any information on UFOs, anything, because there wasn't the wide communication that exists now, right?
So I think now they put in people who are saying this crazy, wild, way-out shit so that people that are really trying to expose truth on certain things, they get looked at as whack jobs like the rest of those that are trying to say, oh, well, Flat Earth, or we're on a disc, or we're in a globe, or blah, blah, blah.
Since George Bush Jr. was president, they've been listening to our phone calls.
I mean, that's a fact.
I mean, that was one of the things they enacted with the Homeland Security, that they can record every American's call.
And, you know, whatever conversation mentioned certain keywords, as we were saying earlier, they would, you know, they would get shuffled off to a certain department.
I've been traveling, what, 20 some odd years at this point where when I was coming back into the United States, for a long time I would not get randomly checked or anything like that.
They just let us go by.
And I made a few posts somewhere, you know, with an abundant amount of cannabis, right?
And right after that post, each time I came back into the United States, they sent me into secondary for a search.
And I started asking, like, hey, I've been traveling for X amount of years now.
I've noticed that the last four times that I've come back from another country, you guys are randomly checking my bags now.
What's the deal?
Am I red flagged?
What's going on with my passport?
Well, I'm not really allowed to tell you this, but what kind of postings have you made on your social networks?
So, you know, right then and there I knew, you know, from that reaction that he had that anybody with any sort of, that's involved in entertainment, music, athlete, you know, whatever, actor, actress, they're watching all of our shit.
Well, especially someone like you who's been at the forefront of pushing cannabis legalization and always talked about it openly, flagrantly, even when it was a Schedule I substance.
Because I lost track of him for a minute, you know, and when I went back to get a renewal some years back and he's like, Lewis, you've been with me a long time.
I mean, what it looks like is that you're patient number four.
And so, you know, you might look at someone's lungs who smokes cigarettes and you might see something there and like, hey, you need to, you know, slow the fuck down over here.
And every time that I've had my lungs checked or whatever, whether I've gotten sick or whatever, they're always telling me lungs are in good shape.
And it's a funny thing because I think in 1987, I was 17 and I was gangbanging.
I got shot, and I got hit by a.22, and as hollow points do, it broke into three pieces, the hollow point, and one of them punctured my lung on my left side.
And, you know, they were telling me, well, you know, do you smoke?
No, I don't really smoke because I didn't smoke cigarettes.
I smoked weed, but I wasn't going to divulge that at the time.
I was 17 and, you know, and they said, well, you know, well, that's good because you'll never smoke again.
They punctured your lung and blah, blah, blah.
They thought I was going to have to work off one lung.
But in the three days, you know, they were able to get the blood out of the lung and I was able to get it back, you know, through the exercises they told me, you know, to get it back to its regular size.
That's like when I go do my physicals and they do the MRIs and the x-rays and all that.
The doctors, you know, sometimes they forget because they see so many patients.
Mr. Freeze, these appear to be bullet fragments.
What is that?
Well, you just said it, Doc.
They're bullet fragments.
You've seen them a dozen times.
Yeah, I was very lucky.
I was very lucky because it punctured my lung and then two of the pieces, one was by the heart and one was by my spine.
But I was at Martin Luther King Hospital in Linwood and we call that place Killer King because you go in there for something small and end up dying or come out gimped out or something.
So, you know, I wasn't going to allow them to try and get to those bullets or those fragments.
They give you this breathing apparatus that has like a ball in it, right?
And it has two lines.
And, you know, it's the first line you're trying to, they're telling you every day for five minutes, ten minutes to blow that, you know, not all in one shot, but like to keep practicing getting the ball up there.
And that will help inflate the lung and get it back.
So I had to do that for probably like three weeks.
And, you know, the puncture wound, it healed itself, pretty much.
Try to ride the line, be professional and be in the music, but they're still kind of in this world over here, and when one bleeds into the other, it fucks everything up.
So I chose.
I was going to do music and just talk about those life experiences and whatnot.
That was probably at 18 that I started taking on the music, and that's where it went, you know.
Well, you know, your street, you know, there's common sense and then there's common sense on the streets.
And then there's being aware and looking out and, you know, not being a doormat.
And just, it's a whole different type of schooling when you're gangbanging.
You know, it's...
The way you carry yourself, the way you communicate with someone and know whether they're disrespecting you or not, and how you deal with that disrespect, which is a whole different world in the gangbang shit, but it's a different kind of education.
I wouldn't take it back.
Some of the things I definitely regretted while I was doing it, for sure, but Yeah.
Yeah.
for these kids to be doing something, you know, because not everybody's good at sports, you know, but there has to be other opportunities other than that to get kids interested in doing something else.
Because falling into the gangs, it's easy.
If you don't have a good home life at home, the guys on the street are your second family and they eventually become your first family.
You know what I mean?
And if you don't have a father figure at home, one of the guys in the gang becomes your mentor.
He could become the guy you look up to as your father figure.
There's that.
And then...
There's not enough programs out there to keep people into doing something different than falling into that.
And then sometimes, you know, it just it's a matter of, you know, you growing up in this neighborhood.
If you have to walk down that street and they approach you and say, hey, you live in this hood, you got to be with us.
If you don't, we're going to make it hard for you.
So there's that peer pressure.
And then there's the legacy shit.
Like, so if my father was a gangster in this gang and he still lives in this neighborhood, pressure's on for me eventually to take up where father left off.
You know, and it's all those things.
And then some people just are thrill seekers and they choose it.
They have nothing, you know, in common with none of that.
And that's the thing, because if you don't feel like you belong in your school or you don't belong in your family, that shit can totally take hold, and you end up there.
Fortunately, I had good friends that weren't gangbangers.
They had talent for music, which was Muggs and Sen's brother, Mello.
They were...
I did music as a hobby before I got into gangs and they got me back into the music because they recognized something in me and said, hey, we want you to come back.
Once we started working on our Cypress Hill demos, Muggs came to me and said, Hey man, you gotta do something.
You gotta do something different.
Otherwise, you're gonna write for Sen.
Because Sen had a good voice.
His shit was locked in.
My voice, I was rapping in a voice similar to the one I'm talking.
And although the rhymes were good...
It didn't cut through on the style like on the beats.
It just sounded like some regular shit.
So I didn't want to be someone's writer.
I wanted to write for myself.
There was a guy that we used to listen to coming up.
His name was Ram LZ. He was on this record called Wild Style and he was in the movie.
He was this rapper who was very obscure, But he was an artist too, you know, like a graffiti artist, but then also an artist, you know, but he was also a rapper.
And what he would do is he'd rap in a regular style, like his talking voice.
This is the brother they call the Ram Bell.
He had a deep voice like that.
And then he would flip right in the middle.
unidentified
Take it up town to Cypress Hill with the shotgun, blah, blah, blah, like that.
And, you know, we were always freaking out on that he had two styles.
So I tried throwing my voice in that sort of similar style, and it ended up sticking.
I didn't really like...
I didn't think anybody was going to like it.
I thought they were going to be like, get the fuck out of here with that.
But they ended up liking it.
And I think the first song that came about in that style was the song Real Estate off our first album.
It's, you know, that was where I tried it the first time they liked it.
it so then kill a man came next and i tried that song in that style and hand on the pump and it just became a flow after that and i really did not feel it at first i was like fuck i can't believe they got me rapping in this voice right and it it took it took a minute to get used to that You know, like doing it live?
Because, you know, I had a tendency as rappers, you know, that don't know because there's no school for this unless you have somebody who's done it and they teach you, okay, this is what the get down is.
And we didn't have that really.
It was all hands-on learning.
For the first few years, man, I was trying to do the voice and I'd end up getting overhyped because the crowd is hype and I'd start yelling the verses instead of rapping them on the record.
I'd throw my voice out, my voice would get scratchy, I'd be sounding like Busta Rhymes and shit, you know what I mean?
And it took me five years to actually harness how to actually do the shows with this voice.
And I had to go to this opera singer coach.
Really?
Her name was something, Elizabeth Sabine or something like that.
She trained a lot of folks.
But her shit was like to teach you the operatic way of singing, which is from the diaphragm.
Tighten the stomach, take little breaths, but those little breaths make your lungs expand a lot, and it's less projection from your throat and more from the bottom.
And she taught me that technique, and I never went hoarse again after that.
People often compliment me on sounding so close to how the records are.
There's once in a while where I might get excited and start saying it louder than it might be, but I'm always sort of right there.
And I gotta give all props to her, because if she hadn't showed me that technique, I'd probably still...
It allows your lungs to expand while you're breathing from your diaphragm.
So that's what she taught a lot of singers.
And another method is to cheat the word.
Like, pronounce it, you know, like you're kind of like, it's like what these mumble rappers do when they pronounce the word and they kind of mumble it and they sort of cheat it.
You know what the word is, but they didn't pronounce it all the way.
Um, one of my friends had heard of her, you know, because I mean, in the industry, you know, become friends with other, you know, your peers and stuff like that.
And, you know, I knew a couple singers and they were, you know, noting my problem is just, you know, screaming my verses and coming back with the And
fuck, she taught me the warm-up.
She taught me the certain words that you can cheat for certain breath control purposes because the way you pronounce certain things sort of add to that and just the tightening of the diaphragm.
If I hadn't learned that, it would have took me a lot longer to do the shows the way that I can do them now.
The first few bars, it warms up right then and there.
It's not really like singing where I gotta sustain notes and stuff like that, so I don't have to do those same kind of warm-ups.
If I was gonna sing some shit, yes, I would definitely have to get the pitch right and the throat warmed up to do those different melodies or whatever the hell, but...
Yeah, back in the day, man, someone had to be the guy endorsing you, you know, like saying to, you know, these guys over here, hey, man, listen to this artist right here.
They're the new shit.
They're going to be the one.
And then you would have to do a couple showcases and stuff like that and, you know, win some people over.
I mean, we definitely did our share of showcases in the beginning, but we were getting passed on left and right.
Because people thought, what are they talking about with this cannabis shit?
And we didn't sound like a West Coast group, you know, because we were trying to sell our shit to West Coast labels here, and they did not get us.
It wasn't until, you know, Muggs had, you know, he'd previously been in a group called 73, and he had worked with these guys called the Rhyme Syndicate, which was Ice-T's guys.
So he kind of, you know, he was the guy that people knew.
And then Send Dog's brother, Mellow Man Ace, eventually would get in the door.
And so, people started hearing about us through, you know, through more Mugs than Mellow.
Mellow didn't really do shit for us, you know, all truth told.
But Mugs, you know, they kept hearing about a group that he was forming outside of 783, which came to be Cypress Hill.
And so, you know, the guys that worked on him...
Worked with him on the 783 records, which is Joe Niccolo of Rough House Records.
You know, he wanted to sign whatever Muggs was doing.
And, you know, he eventually ended up signing us.
And they had a distribution deal with Sony Music.
So, you know, we put out our records to Rough House Columbia or Rough House Sony, something like that.
And that's how we got put on, you know.
And...
Again, it had to be word of mouth because if nobody heard of you, you had to have some really fucking dope music for them to even consider you.
If you didn't have someone backing you, it was tough.
You had to have someone come speak on your behalf and say, hey, these guys are the new shit.
And...
Fortunately for us, once we put out our snippet tape, like when Sony put out our snippet tape, guys like EPMD, right?
And they were one of our favorite groups in the world, man.
They were the top five for Cyprus.
Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, EPMD. Love EPMD. Yeah, fuck.
They were the shit.
And those were the guys that took our snippet tape and they were showing our snippet tape to other rappers like, hey guys, look at these new fucking guys because...
You know, Busta Rhyme told me this story.
Yo, son, I heard your shit from EPMD way back in the day.
They was playing for Public Enemy and I just happened to be in the room.
And Ice Cube, when we met him for the first time, and we had our ups and downs with him, but he's one of my homies.
He told me, yeah, man, the first time I heard of y'all was through EPMD. We was on tour, was doing the show, and they came in with y'all taping.
That's how I heard of y'all.
They were like our first street team, man.
Fucking EPMD. One of our top three favorite groups was out there with our snippet tape telling people, hey, these guys are the new shit.
They do stuff occasionally, but I think they do more work individually now.
I know Eric Sermon is putting out a record right now.
He was just promoting it on some radio show.
And...
I mean, those guys still stay active.
I mean, he's a producer, so he's always making music, but as a rapper, they don't put out as much stuff as they used to, but yeah, they're still active.
And it was an honor to me because I was really good friends with them to begin with.
I saw them come out the gate before they exploded and became Rage Against the Machine.
And so for them to cover one of our songs, we were like, man...
Fuck yeah.
You know, because they helped us get better.
You know, there was a lot of groups that we looked to for influence, even if they were doing different style of music.
Like, Public Enemy was an influence to us.
Rage Against the Machine was an inspiration to us to, like, push the envelope a little bit more on what we were doing.
Not necessarily, like, how they were, because they had their own sound, just like we had our own sound.
So...
They made us push, you know in groups like that made us better So when we heard this guy fucking doing or this band doing the cover and then they asked us to come play this song Which which would be their last night as rage against the machine for a long time.
This was like their last show right here Wow, we got to do that with them That must have been amazing and I was wearing a dad hat before dad hats were cool I will not wear one right now.
But I got to tell you, since joining Prophets of Rage and us, you know, when we tour Europe and stuff like that, and we do a combination of, you know, Rage Against the Machine songs, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill, along with our own material, the mosh pits are fucking crazy, man.
But, you know, there was one thing that I saw that was not brutal, but it was cool as fuck.
And it was in, I believe it was Sweden or Switzerland, but out of like the 60,000, 70,000 people that were out there, there was like maybe 5,000 concentrated people who sat down on their ass, right?
And were like...
What the fuck are these people doing?
Are they protesting our set?
What the fuck is going on, right?
And what was crazy is, you know, you're not going to stop playing.
You just keep going.
So we start on, I believe the song was Gorilla Radio that we were playing at that point.
So there's 5,000 people out of the 30,000 that are sitting in, you know, like next to each other, lines, rows, you know, just fucking of people rowing on beat, dog.
It was almost like writing raps, but it's without saying it, right?
You read it and shit like that.
I would just write poetry about everyday shit.
You know what I mean?
Nothing...
You know, I wasn't like doing like the, I don't know if there's like categories of poetry, but you know, it was just stuff that would happen from day to day, you know.
And I had a knack for writing.
I realized that.
And I always wanted to be a journalist.
That's, you know, the thing that I thought I was going to be at school, right?
Just, again, everyday stuff, or I'd randomly pick something to write about.
So if it was about the cannabis industry, I'd write something about that.
If it was about the music industry, I'd write something about that.
Every now and then, back in the early 2000s, there was a magazine called Industry Insider Magazine, and occasionally I would write articles for that.
I wasn't really that great because, you know, I was so spotty in school that, you know, it needed work.
But they left it raw, the way that I would put it out there.
And people got my point, and that was cool, but...
I looked at it in the way that the music that I've done in a lot of the songs serve as a certain form of journalism for me.
Bringing up certain issues that people don't necessarily hear, like Throw Your Set in the Air is a song on Tebble's Boom, and it's a song about how you would get inducted into a gang, how you get put into a gang, how you fall into it.
And some people might think, you know, by hearing it that it was glorifying it and praising it, but it wasn't.
It was basically, this is how it is.
So you know the signs to look for if your kids are, you know, fucking around with the wrong people, you know, and that's...
I took it like, okay, maybe I'm not a journalist like I intended to be, but this is my way of it.
I can enlighten people with certain things.
Like anything, somebody's going to read something or hear something and maybe misinterpret what you say, but it's all about who's listening and who's reading and who's watching and stuff like that and their interpretation of it.
Some get it.
Some don't, and that's just the nature of it, but most people get it, and I've come across people that have come to me and come and said, hey man, your song's on Temple of Boom, man.
They helped to get me through these times, or these songs raised me.
For you to get people coming up to you, when they first started coming up to you, telling you that your music got them through things, that it means so much to them, when that first started happening, that must have been surreal.
It was a crazy thing because it's not something that I had ever envisioned happening.
I didn't think that the music would blow up like that.
We were doing it to obviously try and make a name for ourselves and make music that people like, but fuck, we didn't see that coming at all.
Especially with Insane in the Brain.
When they told me...
Like when Kill A Man started going, it was like surreal because, you know, we didn't think that song would take just because of the chorus itself.
You know, fuck what the song is about.
We knew that the chorus was what they were going to hear more than anything.
And so, you know, we thought, nah, we're going to have a good Underground album.
We didn't realize it would blow up.
We didn't think they were going to put Kill A Man in the Juice movie, and that would blow that song up even more so than it was getting.
Because we had released Funky Phil ones first, and it was a double A-side single, Funky Phil and Kill A Man on the other A-side.
Which means, at that time, the DJs had the option of which song they wanted to go, whereas most of the time, you had an A-side, B-side, and the A-side is most definitely the one that the record company wants you to push.
We gave it a double A-side because we thought maybe the DJs would like Kill A Man More.
They went with Funky Phil and the record company because they figured it would be easier to market, right?
Our record was out like six months, had dropped off the chart, and they flipped the record.
Our shit slowly starts to go back up the chart.
We got back on the chart and started climbing.
And we were getting a whole lot of mixed show play.
And then we started doing a lot of promotional shows, that being one of them.
And it started going.
And Kill A Man started getting us going.
And, I mean, we toured for...
Probably a year and a half, just a lot of promotional shows, not getting paid, just Sony having us out there promoting the record.
And by the time our record got back up into the middle of the charts, I mean, it was still rising, and they saw that.
They were like, we got to get them off the road in making a new record.
So that's when we got out there with Black Sunday.
And with Black Sunday and Insane coming out, again, that's not a song I thought would blow up when they chose that for the single.
I'm like, well, alright, there's better songs, but fuck it.
That's the one.
Okay.
So it comes out, boom, it explodes, and now we have...
Our Black Sunday charting at number one coming in.
And our first album had come all the way from the bottom to hit number five.
So we had two albums in the top ten of the 200 songs on the chart, which no one had ever done in hip-hop before.
We had one in five slot.
And, you know, fuck, we definitely didn't think that was going to happen.
I mean, you know, it was all a surprise.
And It went from one minute you could go to a mall and be, you know, unassuming and nobody even knows who the fuck you are and, you know, you're getting about your day to now you go to the mall and the whole fucking mall is swarming on you like fucking you're like...
You know, Paul McCartney or something.
It was the craziest shit.
They would ask us to leave the malls.
Really?
Yeah.
I used to go to this one called the Montebello.
It was in Montebello.
I can't remember what the name of the mall was, but it was in Montebello, the only one down there at the time.
And we knew everybody there as we're coming up because that's where we'd go shop.
So you make friends and people in the shop and stuff like that.
And when we come back off a tour this time and try to go to that mall...
You know, one of our friends fucked up and wore a Cypress Hill jacket.
Yeah, because people will remember, you know, the other way, yeah, you know, it probably would have been a great show and people would be talking about it, but they'll remember the fact that you got over that adversity.
It's like you liken it to college stars that are coming into the professional sports now, like basketball players, for instance.
You get this number one draft pick.
He comes to a team, and everybody has these high expectations.
No one knows that this kid...
Some people own the space, like LeBron and Kobe and Kevin Garnett, who came straight from high school, and they own the space the minute they got...
I mean, Kobe had to work.
He wasn't the greatest, you know, when he started, he had to work to get to where he was at.
And a lot of these guys do.
Some of them, you know, again, they come in and they already got it.
You know, like LeBron, he was, you know, playing a grown man's game right when he got into the league, thrown into the fire, but he was ready for that.
He got better and learned the role and learned who he was as he's gone, but he was one of those rare people that can just jump into it.
Some people have to get better at it.
It's the same thing with music.
You get thrown on that big stage for the first time.
If you're not prepped for it, you're going to definitely be nervous.
Now you could either embrace that and...
It'll be your first show and you can do a good one or you can do a horrible one, but either way you can learn from that.
And if you don't learn from it, then the run is short.
If you learn from it, you learn how to get better and sustain a longer career.
You know what we did that helped me was that we rehearsed a lot.
Because for me it was like more remembering the songs.
It wasn't like the nerve to go out in front of people.
Because we came from the breakdance in b-boy culture, the popping and stuff like that.
So much of that is going against someone, battling someone in front of a crowd.
And if you can be in front of a crowd doing that, because that's vulnerable.
I mean, you know, because in a battle, you could either win or you lose.
And if you lose, you know, obviously you can lose in an embarrassing way or you lose in a close battle.
But either way, people are sitting there watching you, judging you, either cheering you or booing you.
You know, any one of those.
So that helped me be able to get on stage and perform in front of people.
For me, it was more about knowing the songs, making sure that I know them through the nervousness.
You know, and so for us, we did a lot of rehearsals in the early days just so that those first shows that we did, that we were locked in and we made an impression.
And, you know, when we did that and we saw the results of how people were reacting to our show, it gave me more confidence.
So, you know, I'd rehearse the songs in my head, you know, when I wasn't around the other guys.
I'd be kicking the songs or be on a treadmill working out, saying the songs, you know, getting them in my head and just gave me the confidence that I know this fucking shit.
I go up there, I'll rock this fucking thing.
I'm not going to forget it because that's always the problem for me.
It was never getting in front of people.
It was, do I know my shit?
And now I know it in such a way that like, you know, it's second nature.
Do I still get those nervous butterflies?
Yeah, for sure.
Some shows, depending who's watching, who's on the side stage or how big the crowd is and whatnot.
Yeah, I still get some of that.
But, you know, I do a quick meditation before I go out there.
You know, just in my head, real quick.
And then our band prayer.
And then that's the switch right there.
And we go and we're ready.
But it took me a while to get to that, you know, because it takes work.
It's like anything.
If you're an athlete, if you're a boxer, you're only going to get better by boxing all the time.
Training all the time.
Not overtraining, but making sure that you're in there putting in the work.
And it's...
The same thing when you're rocking stages, you know?
A lot of us sometimes forget to go and put the time in and rehearse.
And you could see that when there's a sloppy show or someone's out of breath or they're not saying the whole line or they said the line wrong or they're changing up fragments of the song to make it easier for their performance and it doesn't necessarily fit.
That's when you know somebody ain't putting in the work.
But for us, that was a part of the draw for Cypress.
That's how we won a lot of people over, was the energy of our live show.
But it took that, the rehearsals, man.
And I would tell any artist coming up right now, man, before you start doing your shows, because you may get a hit that fast these days.
And you may be called to go do that show.
Now, if you don't do that show right and you suck, as good as that song is, you're never going to sell tickets when they fucking say, hey, so-and-so's performing at this place.
Ah, fuck that.
I'd rather just listen to the record.
He sucks live.
You know, so rehearse, man.
Rehearse.
And then after that, hey, take, you know, do what you will.
But those, they fucking help, man.
You know, for your confidence on performing the song.
I almost lost my shit right here because, you know, seeing 300 and some odd thousand people jumping around to your shit, you know, it could give you some equilibrium problems.
Well, that's a funny thing, man, when you watch those dudes that are trying to escape from the cops on the ground, and then you watch the cops in the helicopter, the spotlight just stays in the car the entire time.
I'll tell you, we walked around in that shit right there and it was super muddy and crazy and people were like butt naked with mud smeared all over their fucking bodies and it was like people went primal.
It was the type where if you walked through it with your shoes and your shoes weren't tight or you weren't wearing boots, it was sucking the shoe right off of your foot.
It happened to me a number of times.
Hell, in that show, I jumped into the crowd because normally I would jump into the crowd and just be floating, stage dive style, but I would still be doing the song.
Hey listen, you know, after every band was done with their set, they expected you to leave right away because the next wave of bands was coming and they were getting your spot.
If you had a dressing room, once your set was done, you were expected to get the fuck out.
Yeah, it was best if you did, because if you didn't take the ride when you were supposed to, you were getting stuck there.
They couldn't guarantee that they could give you the ride back to your shit after that, because they had all the other bands to think of, and they might not have room for you when they take the other bands.
Yeah, I mean, listen, we know that that's not our show.
They're not all there for us, you know, because it's a mixed bag, right?
A bunch of different artists, and you're winning over people, if anything.
You're there playing for your base of people that might have come to see you, but you're winning everybody else over if you're doing it right.
And for us, it was like a victory because we saw, you know, half a million people up there jumping up and down to all our shit.
And they knew the words and they were singing with us.
And, you know, it was like a big notch under the belt and a boost for our confidence, knowing that we can get in front of anybody, play with anyone and get that reaction.
I mean, because after that, we were getting booked on metal-driven festivals and stuff where we're the only hip-hop on it, but it's all straight-up metal.
I mean, we were playing shows co-headlining under Metallica, right?
Metallica, Cypress Hill, Biohazard, Deftones, Fear Factory, and all that stuff.
You know what I mean?
And we'd be in that mix playing those festivals with those guys and with hip hop music.
And, you know, the boost that it gave us in the confidence.
It was like, fuck that.
We can play with any of these motherfuckers.
It doesn't matter who it is.
And we went to those metal festivals with our hip-hop and got metal reaction.
Mosh pits, stage dives, everything.
And it felt good to be able to hang up there with Metallica.
I mean, yeah, what they do to a crowd is crazy.
But we realized that if we were playing on the same venue, going before them, in a festival form, we can fucking hang with anyone.
And that pretty much...
Put us over the top with doing festivals like, yeah, we're gonna fucking rule this shit.
People are gonna have to up their game when we're on that festival with them.
They're still behind California, you know, in terms of how much good weed there is here.
Like, I mean, there's so much, you know, from north to south and in central Cal.
There's so many different strains that are fucking good, right?
You go to other places and they have a few strains that are good, but that's because they're still, you know, they're still trying to catch up in terms of knowledge and cultivation and stuff like that.
And how to make the strains that they have, you know, maximize the flavor and the high and all that stuff.
Some have caught up.
And some are still lagging a little bit behind, but I gotta tell you, man, this last trip I just had to Vancouver.
I was just there for 420. And they had some shit that California boys would be like, yo, this is fire right here.
They had animal cookies that were really good.
Wedding cake, which is a strain that's popular here in Cali via the Jungle Boys and Burner and stuff like that when they were working together on exotics.
And they also had this joint called Black Diamond and Tri-Octane.
And all of them, man, I gotta say all of them burned sweet.
They tasted good.
That white ash that people are looking for now, you know, people think, you know, when they see white ash, it's the purest.
Newsflash.
Even if it has a little bit of black ash, it's still, you know, there's still, you know, people clean, flush their roots.
You know what I mean?
It's just that Some of the nutrients, if you're using salts as your nutrients, you know, which most people are these days, your ash comes out white.
If you're using nutrients that are already pre-made, like an advanced nutrients and the others, sometimes, you know, you might have a little bit of black ash because some of the components into those nutrients.
Doesn't mean it's not clean.
It just looks prettier when it's white.
But anyway, these guys, their shit, all white ash.
The taste was fucking beautiful and the high was definitely there and I gotta say the guys in Vancouver man, they've stepped it up Well, they've been running weed through Vancouver for a long time.
Yeah, you know, it's still sort of, I mean, you know, listen, the black market's always going to be anywhere, especially right now that the taxes are so high to buy cannabis and to grow it and all that stuff.
Everything that involves it, it's pretty expensive right now.
Which, my point was, you know, when the corporations come in, that shit comes down.
And then the black market has a bigger problem at that point.
Because then prices of cannabis will come down.
But, you know, it's always going to exist.
And, you know, we sort of went through the same thing when 215 came about here in California, where it was, you know, cops didn't know what the fuck to do when they caught you with it.
They didn't want to do anything.
Because they knew as well as we were, this shit is eventually going to be legal.
They don't want to be wasting their time in putting people in jail for cannabis because there's other people that need to be in jail for real, for real crimes.
But yeah, I think what's happening in Vancouver now is that Now that it's legal, yeah, people are still making money and they're still on top of the game, but it's harder to make the money right now.
Well, maybe not for Canada because it's federally legal, but you still got to jump through a number of hoops in terms of regulation and fines and fees and shit like that to operate there.
You know, and they're a little bit different than ours.
Obviously, we're not, ours isn't like federal yet.
But I mean, you know, from what they were saying is that like, you know, in a few years, all these companies will be making a whole lot of money right now.
They're making money, but it's basically about survival, getting past a certain time when all the legislation, all the rules and all the regulations are finally set in place and they're not going to change from year to year like they have been.
Yeah, you can use credit cards, but realistically, if you're making money from cannabis in terms of if you're a cultivator or whatever, if you're a business entity in the cannabis world, they won't take your money if they know it's coming from the cannabis culture, right?
Right.
But, you know, in the last two months, Forbes just put out a story about that the federal government is going to start allowing banks to allow banking in the cannabis sector.
You know, the Forbes story came out like maybe last week or something, but this is, you know, one of the residuals of it is that, you know, in places like California that we had problems with banking, that is no longer going to exist.
So now if you needed to expand your business or something, you can get a business loan now or you can actually put your money in the fucking bank, you know, whereas before you had to fucking buy some sort of vault or some shit and keep it there.
And, you know, obviously that ain't safe because you got pirates out there still to this day trying to figure out, okay, where do they keep their money?
Well, when I was in Colorado, when it first became legal, and they were having a real hard time, they couldn't use credit cards, it was all cash, and they just had spec ops guys everywhere.
Bulletproof vests, just covered with guns, just ready to rock at any moment's notice, and they were worried that they were going to get, you know, someone was going to try to take over the store and take all the money.
Yeah, I mean, there's still issues that they got to worry about moving into the future in terms of transportation, right?
Because throughout the history of doing any sort of business in terms of products going from one side of the nation to the other, trucks get hijacked a lot for electronics, for any sort of goods.
So, you know, when you're transporting cannabis from state to state, they're going to have to have that, you know, figured out, too, because there's, you know, people that are going to be trying to jack those trucks and hitting that into the black market.
If I remember the story, they got the guys, and the guys basically explained how it worked, that they get dropped off, and they leave them with seeds and this and that, and then new guys come in every couple weeks or a couple months, and they live there.
They just watch the weed until it grows to the point where they can cultivate it.
And I'll tell you, man, you know, as quiet as they've been in this cannabis culture, you know, you would think that that'd be one place that's like celebrated and whatnot.
But, I mean, they still are coming up with, you know, incredible flavors down there, you know, in terms of, you know, breeding certain strains and creating new strains.
Yeah.
And doing it outside, you know, like, as they call sun-grown or greenhouse, you know, which is not something we do here in the South.
I mean, I don't want to get too hippy, too hippy-dippy, but I would think that something that lives in nature with all those other trees and shits, communicating with those trees.
For the longest time, we used to have to get, you know, I'm one of the owners of Onnit, and when we made hemp protein, we used to have to buy our shit from Canada.
It was so stupid.
I was like, this is so ridiculous.
You have to buy hemp from another country to bring into this country.
I've smoked with him before, and I've smoked with him on a couple separate occasions aside from there, but one of the places that I smoked with him was at that fucking Leota Machida Rashad Evans fight.
When we all left, you know, after the fight, we were sort of getting to our cars, and he ran into me and my partner Kenji, and we were smoking a fat one right there.
Yeah, and I told him, the other thing I told him real quick, too, was, you know, like, that explanation that he had on his documentary where he, as he's coming to the ring, he knew he had to fight one.
And I told him, you know, I was at that Bruce Seldon fight, and I saw exactly what you explained in Bruce Seldon, because Bruce Seldon was knocking fools out left and right.
He was like a really good heavyweight.
The minute he got in there with Mike, he fanboyed out, tasted that glove...
You know, if you believe in conspiracy theories, right?
He didn't even hit him right there.
He just fell on purpose.
If you believe in conspiracy theories, you think about it like this.
Mike was knocking guys out in the first round and people were paying a whole lot of money for tickets and pay-per-view.
When you look at it, it looks like they were trying to slow his role and put in a guy like Evander Holyfield who was a brawler.
He could box, but he could brawl in and take the fight 11 rounds and, you know, make it a fucking great pay-per-view where Mike would totally ruin the pay-per-view and knock your ass out in a minute.
And when you look at it, the way boxing was for such a long time, I wouldn't put it past it that, you know, a lot of the shit that happened to him was manipulated so that it would slow his role.
Well, you know, the people that he had around him.
I mean, you know, Dodd King around him.
He took all his people that he trusted away from him, put different trainers in his corner, different people that were influencing him, and it just took him backwards, man.
And all the people that actually helped got him there.
We're fucking gone.
And those were the guys that was actually giving him guidance as to, you know, how to conduct yourself, be a man, and all that stuff.
And he got around the vultures, man.
And to me, I think Don King being Don King, he stood a chance to make more money with someone taking out the fight, you know, 11 to 12 rounds as opposed to one.