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June 30, 2020 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von

01:53:01

E284 Diplo

Theo sits down with Diplo to talk about Tekashi, cultural appropriation, and battling ego. Check out Theo’s other show King and the Sting https://bit.ly/KATS75_Slices ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Merch https://theovonstore.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This episode is brought to you by… Bridge Credit Solutions https://bridgecreditsolutions.com/theo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music “Shine” - Bishop Gunn http://bit.ly/Shine_BishopGunn ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hit the Hotline 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://bit.ly/TPW_VideoHotline ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Find Theo Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEKV_MOhwZ7OEcgFyLKilw ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Producer Nick https://instagram.com/realnickdavis See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Today's episode is brought to you by Gray Block Pizza.
	For all of your pizza needs, if you need it, they got it.
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	1811 Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles on the way to the beach.
	Gray Block, get that hitter, baby.
	Today's guest is one of the most successful and one of the most musically maybe provocative or I don't know, unique men that there is in the music market.
	He has a new album out, which is kind of a country, well, I don't know what to classify.
	We'll get into it a little bit, but it is Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley Chapter 1, Snake Oil.
	It's the new album.
	I suggest you check it out.
	It's got some real bangers on it.
	Today's guest is none other than Diplo.
	I mean, you did it, we did it.
	You did more riffraff here, right?
	Was it Europe?
	Okay, so that was like he helped kind of.
	Yeah, I mean, I remember he was living in Baltimore, and I just was watching his videos, and I had a, I had a label.
	I saw the label called Mad Deason, and I was just like, man, this guy, there's something special about him.
	And I linked him and had him come up to LA, and we worked a little bit.
	And we made his, I signed him to his first album on my label, which for me, in retrospect, I think it was one of the most groundbreaking hip-hop albums of this new generation.
	And people won't believe me, but every time I work with a young rapper, they always brought him up.
	Like, because they're like 14, 15, they watch him on YouTube and he's like doing lines of Coke or like acting crazy or just being unabashedly himself, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's what he is.
	They had this free, they see that and they see like this idea of like the freedom that he did because he was like anti, he was like the people on World Star would comment, just he would blow up on Wolfstar to people just like, fuck this.
	Like, you know, they were like, what the fuck is this bullshit?
	But it's like drove the videos up to where people were like so confused.
	And if you're like an older person, you're like, I don't get that hip-hop.
	But if you're like 14, 15, like, oh, I love this aspect of this.
	So like.
	That's a good word.
	He's like punk hip-hop.
	Yeah, he was punk and he was just, everything was freestyle too.
	I mean, he was, that's what I was saying with him.
	I bet the podcast is just so good because the guy is so fast.
	Like he just things he freaking comes up with, pulls out of space is just like, what the fuck, bro?
	He's that tangerine Lamborghini, dude.
	He has a, what was the album called?
	I want to give him, I know he has a new album out right now called Vanilla Gorilla, yeah.
	Vanilla Gorilla.
	So everybody go and get that and support Riffraff, man.
	Yeah, I love him.
	Dude, when I, so I went to his place in Florida.
	Deerfield.
	And where he lives?
	Yep, in Deerfield.
	So we get there, we go to the front door, right?
	And I'm kind of nervous because it's almost like meeting like an endangered species.
	If you don't know him for the first time, he must be a pretty daunting creature.
	Remember in Jurassic Park when they kind of are milling around and they know the dinosaur is out there?
	And they just see the big old bronzaurus.
	It's kind of like that.
	Yeah, he is like that.
	When you're riding along, you don't know where the animal is going to come from.
	And then we get to his front door and it has been welded shut.
	There is no way.
	There's an actual door?
	Yes.
	It's just a huge piece of metal that is welded.
	Why do you get in?
	Bro, that's fun.
	So I started just saying things that I'd seen on Harry Potter, you know, like still a good thing.
	Trying to open the door.
	And then he takes us.
	Then he comes out.
	His assistant comes out through the garage and he met us in there.
	His assistant?
	He had no, this guy, Maserati Mike.
	Oh, you're right.
	Everyone Matt.
	Yeah, he always has people around that are just like crazy people are his assistants, but I don't know.
	Crazy, but also slash barber.
	And Maserati Mike gave me some stripes in my head, too, that were really, really dope.
	And I felt like when he did that, that I was.
	Did he have the mullet when you interviewed him?
	Yeah, he did.
	He just got in it.
	He has a good mullet.
	Yeah.
	Oh, he's got beautiful hair.
	I cut his brother's hair, Victor.
	Is that who you did on Instagram?
	Instagram and he has good There you go, right there.
	Yeah, he has a good, yeah, yeah.
	That's a young mullet.
	Now your mullet's a little fuller.
	You shaved the insides a little bit more?
	Yeah.
	It's getting a little more.
	I have the straightest hair that like my mullet.
	I'm going to get a mullet soon.
	It's my last thing before I just shave the head off.
	Oh, you're going all the way back to that.
	Bro, I'm 41. I mean, like, this is my last chance for growing my hair long.
	I don't think this is like, it was like an accident.
	I started doing it.
	I'm just like, I can't turn back now.
	It's like a one-way street.
	And I'm so scared because when I do it, I just give up on the dream of having long hair.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So I'm going to go to mullet.
	But I have straight ass hair.
	It's going to look like a Joe Dirt.
	But I don't even have the hair that sticks up, though.
	Like how those guys, like the 80s guys had the fucking things that pop up.
	It's not going to look like that.
	It's going to look like...
	I mean, can you pull up any...
	Pretty.
	Yeah, let's go straight.
	Joe exotic, but I think his hair was, he bleached it so much, it got like fluffy, but it's kind of hard to do the straight hair mullet, man.
	Or almost stringy.
	I didn't want to say it.
	You said it, Nick.
	Thank you.
	Stringy hair.
	I have thin hair.
	I'll be honest, man.
	I'm on my last leg over here I mean these are like That one, go to the second one.
	That's what it's going to look like.
	A prison light.
	It's like, that's what I'm going to look like, bro.
	And I think it's blonde, so you're going to think I'm bald, really.
	It's going to be pretty.
	Dude, if you go full with the front really, really low cut, that's going to be a brave move.
	But you're going to feel like a stallion.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you know, it's a good mullet is Diane Word had a good, he had a good mullet.
	The guy from Ninja, Diantward.
	He has a good mullet.
	Oh, who's always...
	And his girlfriend.
	He was always talking about him.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, wow.
	He does.
	And his girl has a really good mullet, too.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'd watch their heads fuck.
	You never seen them?
	Uh-uh.
	They're a rapper from South Africa that, like, he's an old school hip-hop rapper, like from that era from South Africa, but he, like, thinks Afrikaans, like, the whackest culture in the world.
	So he kind of, like, made a fake version of Afrikaans rapper as kind of a joke, but it was amazing.
	Like, this culture of like these kind of like Cape Town, like, Yeah, they made fun of the whole culture of like being like white South African Afrikaans rapping, and they just made it actually cool.
	He made these amazing videos, like super cutting.
	I just produced some of the music for them, and they made a movie about robots in South Africa.
	They actually did amazing things, like fool artist.
	I love the guy, and that's his, that's hit the girl in the band, sick rapper too.
	And they both were like, they had a child together, and they're just like an awesome power couple, and they're doing like cool things for in South Africa.
	For the community there, yeah, I think so.
	I think they, they represent like Cape Town, like kind of like this kind of hybrid of like, I mean, South Africa may be one of the most amazing places, like culturally.
	It's my favorite country, man.
	Yeah, I love it.
	I mean, like, I go there.
	I work a lot in Africa with like my other project major laser.
	And, like, I do shows like Nigeria.
	We go to Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa is just like a bubble.
	Like, it doesn't really, it exists on its own because it's so diverse with like people and music.
	And even the scene there, there's like techno music there, like African techno, African houses, like African hip-hop.
	You know, they speak Nkosa.
	They speak like four different languages.
	They have whole different music scenes and they have Afrikaans.
	They have like, you know, rock and roll.
	It's just the craziest, most vibrant place.
	It's just like chaos there.
	And I love that place so much.
	And then if you see Cape Town, they have like these amazing communities there where they're like doing like drifting and like they're doing like these crazy.
	It's just, it's just such a bizarre place.
	I wonder why.
	Well, I guess because, I mean, obviously they have so much African culture there.
	Like anytime I've been there, we even went up into like into the country, like away from some of the coastal areas and went to like some black colleges, like the first black college ever and like some places.
	So I could see how they just have their influences or just all over the place because it's also a real kind of avant-garde.
	I think there's like this, it was always the richest African country.
	It's terrible because like, you know, it was, it was colonized and I think it was, you know, it's this hybrid of European, like four different tribes that are really big in South Africa.
	Then you have like Indian culture and then like a lot of immigrants.
	And then the like, you know, like the last 20 years, I mean, apartheid only ended like the 90s, which is crazy.
	And then it kind of dissolved into like, there's like chaos in the political universe there.
	But in general, it's very, it's a first world country.
	It's like the infrastructure was built during apartheid and there was always like, they had like a space program.
	You know that?
	They had like a 80s, they had like a space program.
	I would love to see that.
	I mean, there's like this kind of like sense of like, I mean, when you watch Diane Word in their movies and some of that stuff, there's like sense of like aliens in South Africa, you know, like this kind of, oh, the movie, he did the movie where the guys are like District 9. Like they're that great.
	They're part of that community that do that kind of stuff.
	That's like a full South African film.
	And it kind of feels like, you know, I saw that movie.
	That was amazing with those big aliens kind of like it was like a jungle.
	Like a realistic version of like how aliens, it's a movie about refugee culture.
	What it would be.
	Because the aliens are like refugees and they're put into like this, they're put into the ghettos.
	And it's like if you take the idea of race and humans out of it, you think about it from a different perspective, that's the movie.
	It's like kind of like you think about it in a different way.
	Like how, you know, we're actually one species, humans.
	Right.
	And how can you like discern like the idea of race and speech?
	It's just like kind of a really strong conversation because South Africa has such a violent history.
	And, you know, it's kind of cool now because I think the younger generation of kids I see when I go and play there, they're like finally post-apartheid, like the way they think about people.
	But if you've meet people that are over 30, they still have this sense of inbred racism in their minds that they have to get rid of.
	Yeah, racism is kind of fascinating, man, because some of it is, I think it's, some of it, sadly, I think just takes time to go.
	Yeah.
	Because some of it isn't even some people's fault.
	It is the parent.
	It's the grand.
	It's just something that's like, it's almost like that Reaganomics.
	It's hard, man.
	It's hard to change your parents' minds.
	It's weird.
	And South Africa.
	Yeah, South Africa, like really when apartheid broke, I think it was like a strong, like the whole culture changed, rules changed, laws changed, and it broke really.
	America's had this like sliding dealing with racism that's never really gone anywhere.
	We never really, I mean, we had like a civil rights movement, which was, you know, people always go back to that.
	Like that was a big movement, but really nothing when you think about what's happening now, like nothing really has changed since then for black Americans to where it's still like ingrained like racism in our, in our, in our society.
	And you think about places, which is amazing we had a civil rights movement because you think about places like Brazil even like they don't they never had that they never had places like where they had a movement right for like black Brazilians and Brazilians of color like change the government the way the country is but America had it but we just still have no we're dealing with racism so slowly right I mean the fact that we're still like Mississippi and I was born in Mississippi is now have the conversation to change the Confederate flag off their flag is like that was the Confederate flag was put on Mississippi's flag during like the 1890s
	as like to because of that was a racy time yeah it was definitely done as like a moment like a really racist movement and it's like there's no reason to there's no pride or heritage in that flag like for me right i'm born in mississippi and i you know i'm proud of it i'm proud that i was born there but i mean there's no reason for that symbol to mean anything to anybody it's literally like the symbol of losers and it offends people so i don't understand what the what the argument is well i think and i and i can even not i can't justify the argument but i know that i think there's some people who just
	grew up with it not being like maybe their grandparents it was a racist thing for you know but i think there's like younger people who are just like oh that means that i'm southern or that means that i'm they they it there's a lot of disinformation of like what it does mean like and people when people experience like what black lives matter means or defund the police it's like a shocking idea right in the beginning but if you just read into it a little bit and kind of understand the concepts you can kind of be logical about the way you think about it if you think about the reason of that image it's kind of easy to understand why it's uninclusive
	but if you're born there and you just grew up there you want to hold on to that because that's you like i understand a little bit of your tradition yeah but you don't know you don't like think about oh wait that actually is something that was extremely racist yeah it was put into the flag whatever so then you can feel oh yeah that's why that's why it bothers people and then you got to realize like is it that important to you right as it is to them because it's actually offensive to them for you it just means like something that you don't really understand that it means but right for you it's maybe something that you put up on your wall but i think um you know because i agree with you wholeheartedly you know i
	know exactly what you're saying the tough part is getting people to see that other perspective really getting them to see it, you know, and also, yeah, I think for a lot of people, and that would be my only argument against not against it, but for understanding, like having empathy for why some people think, oh, you're taking away a piece of my tradition.
	You know, it's just the tradition to them, not as much the history.
	Yeah, everybody in America is like, feel like they're fighting to hold, like there's fighting for like hold on to something, like, but it's like, you got to understand what is it, what's it really mean?
	If you kind of want to define it to yourself.
	And if you dig that deep, you'll be like, oh, actually, you know what?
	It's kind of bullshit, but it might take you a while to scratch the surface.
	Right.
	That's the thing.
	And that's the thing.
	And that's what I think, you know, it's like having empathy for people as they figure out what's that process.
	And that's sometimes, I think, what's hard to do between different sides.
	It's like, you know, it's, you know, I've been lucky enough and, you know, to come from a place and to kind of get to another place where you can kind of get a different view of things.
	Even just going to South Africa, bro, I remember the first time I went to South Africa.
	It was the first country I ever went to outside of America.
	Why'd you go there for the first time?
	I was working on a reality show and they took us there.
	As a trip.
	Yeah, as a trip.
	And I remember getting there and I remember there were so many, we were in like these Soweto villages and stuff and there's so many black people.
	Just so many, and I grew up in Louisiana and it was really 50-50 in our area, but I remember thinking, holy smokes, all these people, and there was a lot of Christians too there.
	And I remember, you know, I believe in going to heaven and stuff.
	And so I remember thinking, holy smokes, there's going to be a lot of black people in heaven.
	I'd never, that's kind of weird to conceptualize it that way.
	It is, but I'd never thought about it.
	You know, I guess I'd only gone to mostly white churches.
	And, you know, not that I thought heaven was only for white people, but when I saw, it was just, I mean, some of the Soweto villages were tens of thousands of people out in these like lean towns.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Shanty towns.
	Yeah.
	And I was like, holy smokes, like all these people are going to be in heaven too.
	And I've never put that other countries also go to heaven.
	I think I just never, I thought heaven was just for Americans.
	It's crazy thing about America.
	That's the most segregated place in America is churches.
	Like literally, you never see like white and black people go to church together.
	It's always like a defined chicken brings in everything.
	Yeah, church's chicken is the only place where it's like everybody's there having a good time.
	But I just thought about that.
	It's not like a bad thing.
	Religions, you know, it's organized in a certain way, but you never, I went to church all the time as a young person.
	It was just like our neighborhood down in Florida where Miss City was like a white church.
	Yeah.
	And the black church was on another side of the street or whatever.
	And there never was like.
	The black church was fucking high.
	It was way, way more.
	Way more volume.
	Can we go to the black church every once in a while?
	Dude, I remember going to a black funeral and being like, damn, I want to be black, man.
	Because with this.
	Well, Louisiana, you have like the most amazing funeral culture.
	It's like crazy with the second line and like jazz funerals and like, wow, it's like just the culture.
	You're definitely going to heaven.
	Are you going to 100%?
	You're going somewhere way better than we are.
	I don't want to go there and just like a guy like going, oh, dude, dude.
	I want to go there where it's like, fucking hell.
	I want the top of the casket to be wet.
	That's how it is sometimes, man.
	We had a question that came in for you actually right here.
	There's questions?
	Oh, shit.
	I'm not sure if our audio is up or not.
	It looks like my nephew.
	It might be, man.
	What a video.
	What a video.
	Hey, I'm going to be a little bit more.
	Man, I just want to know, man.
	What made you want to draw the country out?
	Oh, shit.
	Yeah.
	Other than that, man, keep doing what you're doing.
	Gang, gang.
	Let's get it.
	There you go.
	Let me see.
	I was just talking to Ernest who worked with Morgan Wallen in the car on the way here.
	And we were talking about growing up, I lived in Nashville for a couple of years at Hendersonville.
	And I didn't consider myself part of country or not.
	I was in the hip-hop scene there doing stuff.
	But when you grew up there, the channels are like 31 is CMT, and then 33 is BET.
	And I remember when I got out of school, I would watch the CMT Country Countdown, and I would watch Rap City afterwards.
	And I was always like the fusion of that between commercial breaks.
	I would switch channels.
	I'll watch like, you know, I'd see like Alan Jackson videos and then I'd watch like KRS1 or like Wu-Tang.
	And I just was like, grew up with that music everywhere.
	And, you know, kids in their trucks riding around doing the same thing, listening to country nip hop.
	And my album isn't really a fusion of that, but I like the last couple of years, I've been like getting more and more into country because the artists are so awesome and like so much good stuff coming out of Nashville and songwriters, you know, from Morgan and like Chris Tapleton to my guy Sturtle Simpson.
	Oh, yeah.
	And there's just, I was like, damn, this stuff's like awesome.
	Like Marin Morris, you know, Casey Musgraves.
	And I was like getting into the vibe a little bit.
	And I was just thinking like, what, this shouldn't be a taboo thing to do is like work on country.
	And when we made the first song, Morgan, it was like very controversial for Nashville, even for him, like because it was a trap record, kind of.
	I don't even think about that.
	I just put the drums that fit on the record.
	Right.
	But it was like never got played on country radio.
	We had to get it on.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	It got a highway on the, and still not played on country radio because they don't, they think it's too.
	You guys're remade.
	You mean the one that's on your new album?
	Yeah.
	It's called Heartless and Morgan Wallen.
	And it's like kind of like got 808s and stuff in it.
	Yeah.
	So good.
	So it's just, but it's streamed like crazy.
	So like all these kids are listening to it and people are doing on TikTok.
	And I'm like, this, you kind of don't need the Nashville scene to do the country music.
	Like you have to, it's like an order to get in there, I felt like.
	And I just felt like me and Morgan, we did this record and he believed in me.
	I'm so glad he gave me this record.
	And we did it separately.
	We streamed the record and kids liked it.
	And I think like kids that are that guy's age, like high school kids and older kids are just this music, this fusion of kind of like club and hip-hop and country, which isn't forced, just we worked hard on making it make sense.
	It really is a time for that right now where people can, like I said, no country radio is playing it.
	We're almost having like half a billion streams in the album already.
	But it's also interesting too, because I think that younger generations, you see them, they want it to be, they want to find it in an alternative way.
	And it's where we get stuck in ways that we kind of grew up with.
	Like you want to get it on this.
	Like I said, like we're just talking about the churches, I mean, when you go to high school, you're like, you get in with the art kids.
	You get in with like the jocks.
	You get in with like the goth kids.
	I mean, if you're a black kid, you're going to do a certain thing.
	Like you're going to live with your experiences in that neighborhood.
	Like you might get into hip-hop.
	It's going to be hard for you to get into goth music or metal music, but some kids do It nowadays, kids don't have only the information in their neighborhoods, they have YouTube, they have TikTok, and they're getting exposed to everything.
	And they make this choices about what they want to be or what they want to do really, really early.
	Like it used to be kind of like, you know, you have these genres, and you kind of, as people, you get put into them too because of the amount of information you get.
	And I think the last couple years, it's just there's no genres.
	We're like, we broke that down.
	I think that's why it's a time where record like this can exist, you know, and like people aren't, you know, or, you know, rapper, like, I think Outcast is a good example.
	When they came out, they just broke down all barriers and they made quality music.
	They made funk, they made rock, they made hip-hop, they made like, you know, trap music, and they just like crush it internationally.
	And I think that was like a good example of what you could do.
	You could mix everything up together.
	And I think that from then on, they opened the door for a lot of music to just be like genreless.
	And I've always been a sponsor of that, you know?
	Yeah, you seem really kind of genre-less, especially I feel like as you get more into like kind of learning about, you know, what you've done and where you've gone through and like even just the locations that you've done a lot of your shows, like you'll do some, I mean, even just saying that you've done shows in Nigeria, it's in Tunisia.
	I don't know if you said Tunisia or not, but.
	We played like Uganda Independence Day.
	Wow.
	Because the project I do, another project called Major Laser is just, it doesn't really, it's not like a big project in America.
	We had a huge record called Lean On that was here a couple years ago and like light it up.
	It never really like the brand never worked.
	It's like group of guys like me, my friend is Jamaican, my friend Mexican Ape Drums and Wall Street Fire.
	And we're just like this diverse group.
	We have dancers and we do a show, but it didn't really fit into the trend in America where we like were able to tour it or whatever.
	But in Africa, it just took off.
	Like that project, because I think Africa is just also a place where you see the fusion.
	Like you think South Africa is like that diverse place and like Uganda, Kenya, especially.
	We had these big shows.
	There were more people coming to our shows in Kenya than I could get in like New York.
	We have like 15,000 kids in Nairobi at our shows.
	And we actually got, we got paid really well.
	And then Africa is difficult too, Randy, because you have a couple markets where you can make, but Nigeria had always go there and play for free.
	Like the first couple of times I went there because they don't give a fuck.
	The Nigerian music scene is so enormous and it's so big.
	And right now it's so influential that we had to like actually chip our way into that.
	And then finally had some fans come and then we had a couple records that were that did well there.
	And for a couple of years, I just concentrated on like Africa and like, you know, Europe for touring for that project because it was, that's where my money was.
	And then, you know, being here in quarantine and working on the country album is the first time where I've had like a record connect in America, actually.
	So I've been just pushing that out, making videos and marketing.
	Those songs slap, man.
	I mean, it's really good.
	We have a guy who works on a different podcast called King of the Sting, and he is the only black Henry Rollins fan that we have.
	But it's interesting to see like that a younger generation, things aren't as linear.
	You know, like we talk a lot about beige power here, that one that like we're all hurtling towards this beige skin tone eventually.
	Where it's like, yeah, we're going to be one person because of globalization.
	It's like just, you know, it might be slower than you think, but it might be faster.
	And I think we're all going to work towards, you know, one culture.
	I mean, people, we have only one YouTube, right?
	At the end of the day, so you have records that can go anywhere.
	They can get big in Africa.
	They can get big in China, Japan.
	And you have like, it also equalizes anybody can just upload a song to SoundCloud or YouTube and it can go, you don't need a label.
	You don't need an infrared.
	Because that changes the, there's not as much of that, the glass ceiling, the doorkeeper.
	You don't need to break through all these doors to get to where you are.
	Like if you're in a band back in the 60s, first you have to save up money to get a guitar or whatever, learn it.
	Find people who like guitar too, become a band, spend your energy learning songs, like divorce your wife, whatever.
	Go to Sun Studio.
	Find some money to go to a studio, record a demo.
	This is already three years into your project.
	Then maybe find someone to send your demo to, and then maybe suck someone's dick at a label to get in the door or whatever.
	And then that's like three.
	You need a woman in the band.
	You have to have a bad one.
	Or you need an eager man.
	Yeah, you just gotta, it was so rough.
	And the process took so fucking long.
	And then maybe they'll give you a deal, which is going to suck, obviously.
	Yeah.
	Then you got to force them to market your music and maybe make a video or go on tour.
	We're talking a five-year process to get your one fucking song out, right?
	Now kids are like 17, suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, have a fucking crazy ass haircut in a face tat, bang, drop a record.
	And they're fucking little peeps.
	It's got to be a fucking, but it's got to be a movement.
	Like for me, Peep was like amazing.
	You know, it took me a while to like get into this music.
	I became a huge fan.
	And like XX Extentation, another guy would just like, I was like, these guys are like doing it from the heart, really.
	Like even with Riffraff in the beginning, you just feel like it's really raw and real.
	Because they didn't have any, it's almost like folk music.
	They had no background to do it.
	They just dropped what they felt like they could do.
	And it was like people and kids connected with it.
	Like, wow.
	Yeah, they would even be like really fucked up making the music sometimes.
	I mean, Riffraff, I couldn't fucking make a song with him without a bag of cocaine.
	Like it was a fucking, we had a studio and there was a painting.
	I got like a gold record on the wall.
	And he, he fucking dug a hole behind the painting and hid cocaine there.
	So I was like, where's the coke come from?
	Like, you always had a bag of cocaine hidden in a wall socket somewhere.
	And I was like, and without the cocaine, he would just be like, trying to write lyrics.
	Like, what the fuck?
	And then with a Coke, go in the booth, 16 fucking verses, just dropping them like left and right.
	So not to say you should do cocaine, but for some people, it just helped a little bit.
	Look, it's Florida.
	Look, that's considered a hobby in Florida, I think.
	And it's a little wet.
	That's the thing about that Florida cocaine, man.
	So it got a little damp on the top.
	It's crazy the different places where drugs are so accessible.
	Like Florida, yeah.
	Coke was like people in high school were just doing it.
	I mean, I don't even know what kids are doing nowadays.
	That's crazy.
	I don't know either.
	But I don't know if kids are doing as much.
	I want to tell a refresh story too because it is so much fun.
	There's something about him.
	It's like seeing the only, it's like somebody knows where there's like a freaking like hippopotamus and they're not telling anybody else or something, you know?
	He's like, he's just like, and if you get, he's had a career, a long career now, man.
	He's been like doing this for like 10 years.
	And if you go on that YouTube tunnel, you can go there for like a week.
	It's just crazy.
	It just deep.
	He cut up a mango for me, man.
	He said he was changing his diet, mangoes only.
	He told me.
	I've seen him go for a lot of different diets, man.
	He was on a drug-bending WWF diet once.
	Oh, yeah.
	I think he's vegan, though.
	He's the last couple of years.
	I mean, he's in sober.
	So I think he's doing.
	Good for him.
	Yeah.
	Last time I saw him, he was getting more.
	That was more the vibe he was going for.
	I took him to the premiere of that movie, Game Changers, which is a movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger produced it in James Cameron.
	It's a movie about like how you don't know this, but the best athletes in the world are vegan, and they have been for a while.
	The guy who's like the strong man of the world, like the biggest weightlifter, this guy, Armenian guy, he's vegan.
	The best female bike riders, vegan.
	The best track runners are vegan.
	And I don't suggest everybody be vegan because I think it's just, you know, you got to be.
	I know that's interesting, though.
	That's interesting throughout.
	But when you're doing, when you're doing, yeah, that guy is vegan.
	Look at that guy.
	That bone.
	So you can actually get big.
	Or is it Iranian or something?
	But he looks awesome.
	Got the sickest.
	I mean, if you get the mullet and those sideburns, that guy's the Icelandic guy.
	That guy's a beast.
	He's like seven foot tall, the other guy.
	But that guy, he's currently the biggest weightlifter and he's vegan.
	Yeah, the Chris Paul was, they're talking about a new diet that Chris Paul was doing.
	I think it was vegan and how Chris and Chris was at the basketball player.
	He was the premiere, and so was DeAndre Jordan, who also was bigger.
	He's hilarious.
	He's big.
	Yeah.
	Texas.
	He actually went to high school with the Riffraff.
	Did he really?
	I took him to Vegas once.
	They recognized each other.
	No.
	I was like, what?
	Riffraff has the best way.
	So I'll get there.
	So I'll go into the garage.
	He shows me all the clothes that I owned from 1991, right?
	His clothes are yours.
	They're his.
	Actually, they could have been my childhood clothes.
	He just happened to have them in a box at his house, right?
	He probably could still wear them and make sense of it.
	Bro, he had all just every, anything that was.
	Hypercolor, anything, anything with the Air Jordan, like four colors and like, yeah.
	Totally.
	All of that in a box.
	Then he's like, let's go for a ride.
	So he gave me this pretty cool bicep.
	Was it a bicycle?
	Yes, like a motorized bike.
	And he got on a four-wheeler.
	And we literally went through his neighborhood.
	I was going to say, he gave me a bison and I rode it around the beach.
	And I was like, whoa, this would be just some Coke.
	Frashing to a brick wall.
	Well, the bison went and bought a couple grams while I was on it.
	I was like, what a fucking, that's a big bison.
	You need to scroll.
	Fucking bankroll that bison, dude.
	Yeah.
	I'm like, I don't know if Joe Rogan would kiss me, bro.
	He might have fucking take his own life.
	You ever heard the story about the cooked up bear?
	There's a bunch of Coke.
	Maybe you look up the Coked Up Bear.
	This is another good story.
	A guy was like drug dealing and like a pane crashed and he was like drug trafficking in Kentucky and a bear found all this Coke and ate all of it and he was like he ate like a pound of cocaine and was like and then they found this bear and they found he was like just raging in coke in the forest and he died within like 20 minutes yeah but they've taxidermy and he's like in a state hall or something he's like the the craziest coke bear there he is Pablo Eskimo legendary cocaine bear of Kentucky but he died he did the most coke of any animal of all time uh
	does Nick Cage now own this bear I feel like he would buy the Oregon bear out of the museum you probably probably take snort some of the bear's hair probably and get it dude what about Sway Lee I saw you had him on album I know he's from Tupelo as well yeah yeah Swayle actually my only show I ever did in Mississippi was in Tupelo they used to do this they used to do that Christmas at the casino or no no it was in it it was in a um it was in a like there must be a basketball arena for there's a university around there or something it was like 10,000
	capacity maybe northwestern Louisiana or something it was no it was it was in Tupelo it was like there was like a little tiny arena there where they must have country shows and things like that but we did a show there and honestly bro that show gave me a lot of faith in Mississippi because I mean I'm from Mississippi they're both from Tupelo the brothers and then you know Elvis was born in Tupelo we went to his childhood home on our last tour we stopped over there the home he was born in that's in Memphis I think they they uh they the the guys who sold him his first guitar came to my show they have like another museum there and
	they he used to buy hardware stores just used to sell musicians instruments back in the the 50s I guess that's where you would buy even have music shops you had to go to a hardware store and they had a guitar up there and they had a his hardware store came and gave me like a bunch of memorabilia and stuff but that crowd was like I mean it was weird it was segregated like there was groups of kids from different high schools but it was like the first time I think Mississippi ever had a show that was like equally white and black and like kids are just knew every lyric to every song and you know I'm glad they let me open because the kids didn't know who the fuck I was I was like up there DJing with
	them but it was the mayor came out and gave me the key to the city that's awesome and um Grace Remer's amazing I mean those kids are amazing they are like the outcast to me like they're they're also like a like I said kids that don't they don't have rules like they grew up like probably listening to everything and Sway's voice is amazing we did a bunch of record we did a record with Ellie Goulding called Close to Me that went went last year I heard that man yeah there we were right there yeah that was in Tupelo actually so that was the home that yeah that Elvis was born in we just stopped there on the last tour man yeah I'm a big Elvis fan yeah man it's
	interesting but then they also say that and we brought the guy up last time some of his tour some of his songs were bought off of a black back then I think a lot of times they were he was definitely ripped everything off of the black rockabilly uh you know like early rock artists not even sure what the genre was back then but I mean he was he had like 5,000
	songs like some crazy number in the beginning I'm sure he had black songwriters he wrote some stuff at Sun Studios with like you know Johnny Cash even and what's the other guy who used to write Elvis' records another another East Tennessee guy Wayland East Tennessee guy but I mean he was I mean everybody knows the Elvis story I mean he was definitely uh no it was it was in Sun Studios there's a picture of Johnny Cash Elvis and Carl Perkins and there's like the four of these guys it was like an amazing vibe in that studio but um you can say what you
	want I mean Johnny I mean Elvis has a oh he still look very uh people loved yeah this picture's sick look at this guy million dollar quartet it's uh Carl Perkins Shiny Cash Elvis writing and Elvis got them baby cheeks almost like he has butt skin on his face he had a beautiful face he had a nice this early looks like he had Botox back in Mississippi style Jerry Lewis Lewis Jerry Lewis yeah that guy was a freaking bro he's from Vidalia Louisiana he wouldn't that guy wouldn't have made it these days marrying a 13 year old sister actually in Hollywood
	he still might have made it no he actually it ruined his career he actually he went to Europe and it just became like a it was like an early like tabloid thing and he couldn't really get past it wow um I saw him he he was then he him and uh him and Richard Richard Lil Richard had this crazy fucking beef where they were like they were like they were like they were like always like asking who can headline the shows and I remember like it was always like they would play shows together and was like who's gonna who's the headliner and at one point either he or Richard just set the whole piano on fire and
	like walked off stage because they opened for one of them and then I think they became friends in the end like in the 80s they did a song together but there was like a beef that's gangster bro yeah because they were both like these piano rocking southern dudes and then oh yeah man oh he's from faradi louisiana actually i think i saw him about five years ago actually at his daughter sang a couple of the songs but he would come out for like every other one they would kind of wheel him out you know piano on fire and played it show story jerry lewis set piano on fire.
	Yeah, that's like the good old days, man.
	When you do a show and you're so mad, probably fucking drunk as fuck, and you're cutting, you're like, I don't know what kind of drugs you're doing, but then quay ludes or something, you know.
	You've seen Walkhard, that movie with John C. Reilly?
	Yeah.
	Uh-uh.
	Oh, my, you gotta watch it.
	It's one of the fucking best music documentaries of all.
	It's fake, but basically, John C. Reilly does everything, like invents country, invents like punk, invents like, he just, he's Brian Wilson in a lot of time.
	Yeah, Forrest Gump, and he's like, they kind of do the Johnny Cash song, the Johnny Cash movie.
	Walk hard.
	Or Walk Tall?
	Walk Tall.
	And they call it, make fun of that, but John C. Reilly does every genre and is this crazy country guy and has like 100 kids by the end of the movie.
	Does every drug by the end of the movie?
	Dude, those days, you were pulling up in town and somebody, they literally, somebody would say, hey, these are drugs.
	And it would just be like almost.
	The movie's so funny because everybody's like, he walks into the back room and his, what's the black comedian, the SNL guy with the music?
	Tim Meadows.
	Tim Meadows, every time he walks in the backstage, Tim Meadows like smoking weed.
	He's like, what are you doing?
	Tim Meadows is like, it's marijuana, man.
	You don't want to do this.
	He's like, what does it do?
	It makes you feel happy and it mellows you out and you feel great.
	You don't want to do this.
	He's like, I think I want this marijuana.
	And he does that.
	And then the next like 10 years later, he's like, what are you doing?
	And he's like, it's called cocaine.
	Like, what does it do?
	He's like, I don't know, man.
	You don't want this.
	It makes you feel great and excited.
	I'll try the cocaine.
	It's like heroin.
	And like three years later, it's just like, I mean, and it's not addictive at all.
	And he looks like Jim Morrison in the picture.
	Look at that photo.
	Oh, bro.
	You got to watch this movie.
	It's my favorite movies of all time.
	Wow, dude.
	No, I got to watch it.
	I just watched Uncut Gems last night.
	That's dark.
	Bro, it was good, though.
	I wanted the guy to die so bad, man, because he just wanted the pain.
	Yeah, he was an addict.
	There's no way this is going to end well.
	You just know, like, you want him to get back with his wife, but the side girl was hot.
	And then you want him to win, but you know, you're never going to win.
	And then you want to win.
	And then you're like, oh, fuck, this came together.
	And then he dies.
	Spoiler alert.
	Yeah.
	The last gym gets cut.
	But what's awesome about that movie, bro, is the fucking soundtrack is phenomenal.
	It wasn't, it was sound that I felt like, this is my perception.
	It was sound that made me feel.
	Uncomfortable.
	Yes.
	And it made me, it was like sound that tried to get me just through small sounds and repetitive beats to get me feel a certain way.
	One of my favorite musicians of all time is Hans Zimmer.
	And I love Blade Runner.
	And the new Blade Runner I loved even more.
	And the soundtrack was so fucking amazing.
	I love ambient music.
	I love that kind of like futuristic music.
	And the guy who did the soundtrack, I think his name is 10 Point Tricks.
	This is an ambient guy.
	And he just, the fact that the director went with that guy to make a movie and he just, it's so, it felt so wrong when it's in the movie, the weird like sense, but then he just, it really puts you on edge on the, on the right level for you to be uncomfortable watching that movie.
	Yeah, I never felt like that.
	I never felt like, what's, I'm watching the movie, I'm enjoying it, but also something else is happening to me.
	And what is it, what is causing that?
	And yeah, it was just, it was the.
	Because soundtracks are really difficult to do and like to make, because you have to watch the film and like put it in, you know, you got to kind of get closure with the whole film coming together with the sound.
	And that guy, he crushed it.
	I love that.
	I love that.
	I love the soundtrack more than the film, actually.
	When I listen back to it.
	Have you been pushed to do soundtrack?
	Have you done it before?
	No, but that movie made me want to do it.
	Because during quarantine, I haven't really worked on a lot of new music.
	I've been putting out some of the country stuff and working on some house music, but I just don't...
	First, you don't want to do sessions because this isn't really...
	You don't want to get sick.
	But then I don't feel like you can't really sit down during this weird time.
	It feels a little more like less heavy than it did in March and April now, even though it's technically worse, I guess, with our other cases.
	Yeah, the vibe is a little different now.
	It's not as it doesn't feel as anxiety attack feeling, you know, like you don't feel like you feel like there's some end.
	There's going to be ending psyches.
	Some people are getting out of it.
	Like New York City, for instance, beat this thing, you know, so we can do it.
	But in the beginning, I was like, I had like a lot of anxiety attacks.
	I just felt like weird.
	You don't want to write a song about a love song.
	You don't want to feel, you can't write a pop song during all that vibes.
	The energy is not right.
	So I was writing a lot of ambient music.
	I was just like doing stuff with scents and making these records that are just like spacey and like no drums.
	And I did a whole EP that I'm going to drop at some point that I just made.
	That's the only thing I've done during quarantine is like that kind of music.
	Just sounds.
	Yeah.
	Sounds like kind of, but you got to, it's like kind of classical music, but with synthes.
	Like, I mean, that's kind of what neoclassical music and ambient music is.
	It's like you put chords together and you kind of build things up with like arpeggiators and then you like, you know, Brian Eno at all?
	You heard him?
	He produced U2's Joshua Tree and he's like an ambient artist, but he kind of combined these new ideas of sound with pop records back in the 80s and just amazing.
	I can consider him a composer.
	But it's like, yeah, it's like being a composer, I guess, doing this kind of music.
	I've just been that.
	Do you get a little bit jealous whenever you see somebody do something like a loophole or something or kind of like start to see the new thing?
	You're like, oh.
	Yeah, I mean, that's how you work on music.
	I've just been, I'm a producer more than an artist.
	You know, I think with the Country Album, it's the first time I've done a full artist record on a major label.
	But before that, I've always just been like, Beyonce want a record, Usher wants a record, you know, a rock band wants a record.
	Or I work in the studio with different writers and propose ideas.
	And I come up with concepts.
	That's what a producer does.
	You kind of like, you work with an artist and you think, like, even with Riffraff, you're like, how can I make what I like about this guy?
	How can I make the best version of him?
	That's what you do with anybody.
	Maybe it's Madonna.
	Maybe it's Adele, whatever it is.
	You know, you aim for the biggest records, the big artists.
	Then you work with someone like Riffraff because you're just like, this is fucking awesome.
	Like, this is something really cool.
	And I love what he does.
	Or Sway Lee.
	And you can find new artists too.
	But as a producer, your job is to create concepts.
	And, you know, maybe not even writing the piano.
	You can be like Rick Rubin and just sit back and just fine-tune that idea with the chili peppers.
	But is it hard to figure out, though?
	Like, sometimes I find even from myself from doing comedy and doing just different types of things within the world.
	Is it hard to figure out what some of your real strong suits were and then to focus on those, even if those went against like, sometimes somebody, you know, going to be the star sometimes, but then you're like, oh man, but I'm so good at this.
	But this weird idea of a star always.
	I've never been really good at anything, even playing music.
	I mean, I've always been like, like I said, I would come up with like weird, I find the loopholes where no one was doing stuff.
	Like Major Laser started because no one was making this like reggae and dance hall music, you know, and I'd done stuff with this girl in MIA who was like my girlfriend at the time and made amazing records.
	Oh, damn, dude.
	And then I went to MIA.
	This is just because it's full circle, really quick.
	I saw John C. Reilly at an MIA concert in New Orleans.
	No, this was in like a warehouse or something.
	It was like 4 a.m.
	It started, but anyway, I wonder if I was there because I DJ'd her a lot of her shows back in those days.
	But we did this fusion.
	She was an artist that really put me onto like how far you can go with just ideas.
	And she had these ideas and she fucking crushed it.
	And I learned a lot from her.
	And I think we started like this major laser thing because I was like, no one's doing this.
	We could do it in a different way, like dance hall records and reggae because no one's doing it.
	And it took a while.
	We made some big records and then it grew, but it was something no one was doing.
	And then back then, no one was even streaming music.
	We worked really hard in the streaming services because a lot of the majors were not really pushing streaming.
	They were still fighting to sell physical copies.
	And I did it all independently.
	We did it on our own.
	And I learned a lot from there.
	But I think you find little projects that people don't do.
	And sometimes you take risks and they don't work.
	My first album I produced was a band called Rolo Tomasi.
	And it was a fully metal math rock band.
	I didn't know what I was doing, but I just did it because I got it.
	That was my first job.
	And then the next day I was working with Bruno Mars.
	He was a songwriter back then.
	When I first moved to LA, I just did whatever jobs I had.
	You just make your way up to where you could hopefully place a big record with somebody.
	And you just learn a lot.
	Like, I learned everything from coming to LA and leaving behind the idea of being an artist and being like a producer in the game here.
	And then, and then as I got better at that, I kind of got sick of that.
	Like, I don't want to write records of other people.
	Right.
	And I started doing my own little projects.
	And then.
	And just being creative.
	Yeah, because you know, doing a project, writing the music is, for me, I think it's like 20% of the project.
	The other 80% is coming up with the concept and the marketing and like what it is, video things.
	Like you think about the name of the style, the way you're going to dress this project.
	You kind of come up with these, you create the artists.
	And that's 80% of what artists are nowadays.
	In my opinion, you have to come up with it with like a real brand, you know?
	And that's what people get first.
	The music comes secondly.
	Like if you see someone like this fascinating, you're like, oh, what is this?
	And you dig into it.
	You're like, oh, the music.
	Rick Rat is a great example.
	Yeah, he's all brand.
	I mean, he was just like, his music's great too, but it was all brand.
	But another, like, Marshmallow, another guy, you know, like he's a DJ.
	And I think, you know, he might be like 90% brand because he's just like, the concept is so strong what he does.
	It's so easy to identify with.
	And then he puts out quality music as well.
	Like he's pop artists, but I mean, he, no other DJ could do that because they're just another guy.
	He's a marshmallow.
	So it's like kids can gravitate to that really easy.
	And I think what he did is a great marketing campaign from the jump.
	His manager and him really crushed that.
	Yeah, him and Kane Brown have that great country record.
	That great song.
	I had that record originally that he sent it to me.
	I actually was like texting Kane.
	I was like, man, it was like me and Marshmellow fighting for that record, actually, in the beginning, because it was going to be something for my project.
	And then I lost the battle.
	Oh.
	It's whatever.
	Cain Brown, you still owe me a record, bro.
	Where are you?
	There you go.
	There you go.
	Cane Brown, man.
	I love Kane Brown.
	You know, New Orleans, when I was growing up, a lot of the artists that were there were like the big timers and, you know, Lil Wayne.
	Did you watch that hip-hop evolution, the New Orleans episode?
	Uh-uh.
	Fuck.
	I need to put it.
	I'm going to re-watch this whole episode and write down all the things I've done.
	The one in New Orleans starts with like Master P. And I mean, New Orleans, for me, bro, it's the, first of all, I think Memphis has the longest cultural significance in hip-hop.
	Right.
	People can argue me, but like when you think about what music sounds like now hip-hop, it all comes back to this Memphis sound, like this aggressive, this dark, and the trap beats.
	And like, it's just lasted forever.
	And it was a small flash in the pan when 3.6 and like 8 ball and MJG were doing it.
	And then New Orleans was like the same kind of sound.
	They had this electronic drum sound.
	They loved electro.
	They loved like Mandy Fresh was making, you know, like these kind of like 808 sounds and they mixed it with the second line jazz and then big timers.
	And then Master P came up with the idea of independent label and he fucking crushed it.
	And then it's Cash Money came out and then and they had this amazing bounce music, which I love so much.
	Well that's what I was going to get to is the bounce scene because yeah, like Big Frida, like some of the art of music is the most popular, but the bounce scene there has been probably the biggest thing that's come out of New Orleans.
	He never left.
	And it's the same.
	You know, Frida, I worked with a couple bounce artists.
	There's Flyboy Kino, there's Sissy Nobi, and it's very gay.
	It's crazy.
	People don't realize how gay the hip-hop scene in New Orleans is.
	A lot of the rappers and labels, you know, you talk to like Mystical or like Car Wash once.
	I was in Mystical in the studio.
	No.
	And after he got out of jail, and I had just done this record called Express Yourself with Nikki DeBee, who was another gay bounce artist from New Orleans.
	And it's like my fusion of like dance music in New Orleans bounce back then.
	And I remember playing it for Mystical in the studio.
	And I was like, man, could you jump on this record?
	It was super gay.
	And the video was gay too.
	And I was like, can you jump on this record?
	And, you know, Mystical said to me, he's like, bro, that's hard.
	And that's actually New Orleans music.
	And he knew that's like, that's actually the scene.
	He wasn't like homophobic or anything, but he's like, man, I just can't come out of jail and do this record right now.
	I can't really do a verse on a gay bounce record.
	He'll be like, I'll be right back in jail.
	He's like, whole group of news.
	But at the same time, he had respect and knew that that's like real New Orleans music.
	Because you don't realize even the, you know, Big Freedom that record with Drake that came out last year.
	I don't even know that.
	Because Drake's last album had a lot of bounce influences, a lot of New Orleans records on it.
	But there's not, there hasn't been a, there hasn't been a strong, hip-hop's been the only, or bounce has been the only real music to come out of that area, kind of.
	I feel like hip-hop band in the 90s.
	Oh, you mean Three Doors Down?
	Something like that.
	I removed their studio when I worked on music with them.
	Oh, I knew you were talking about.
	They're nice guys, too.
	That's the only other thing I know from New Orleans, really.
	I remember running through the wagon last falling a step behind.
	And there's another, there's a jam band from New Orleans, too, but I forget.
	Best.
	Fucking.
	Also, the meters, bro.
	You know them?
	Oh, dude.
	One of them owns a freaking restaurant where I take my stepdad all the time.
	I mean, if you want to learn, for me, meters is funk and country.
	Completely matched.
	You might just think they're funk, but they're like country, bro.
	And they're instrumental.
	Like, meters are like one of one of my biggest influences of all time.
	Like, they're so dope.
	Like, New Orleans funk is just like, if you want to learn about music, New Orleans is the birth of all American music, in my opinion.
	Wow.
	Like, everything comes from New Orleans.
	You know, from the history of like, it's the perfect combination of African music and European music.
	Go back.
	No, that's not them.
	Three-door.
	It's not three-door.
	It's someone.
	It's Bird Eye Blind, Dog, something.
	It's like a one-word name.
	Look at Indie Band New Orleans, maybe.
	Indie Band.
	Indie Rock, New Orleans.
	I mean, you'd think there would be so.
	Well, there's like, well, there's, is it NBA Youngboy from Baton Rouge?
	What the f ⁇ is that his name?
	I'm not sure.
	He might be the biggest.
	Oh, there's also Kevin Gates.
	Yeah.
	NBA Youngboy's from Is he from Baton Rouge?
	I mean, he's like one of the biggest, like low-key.
	Yeah.
	Like, low-key, he's one of the biggest figures in hip-hop.
	And I don't even know one NBA Young Boy song, but like, he just, every girl knows him and knows his music.
	He just is always.
	I love him.
	And Boosie, but he lives in Atlanta now.
	Boosie is...
	Like, he was like, he missed all technology and then just came.
	Wasn't it so great?
	And he denied it.
	I asked him because he came in.
	I asked him, I said, do you think that because you were in jail, you missed kind of like the evolution of technology?
	So you came into Instagram and we're just way too real.
	He was so real.
	It didn't register for him.
	But I thought that's exactly what I was saying.
	Because I heard a story that he got out and his like friends gave him an iPhone.
	He's like, what is this?
	Like, he was like, it was like literally came out of jail and like, went from, it was, he missed the clutch parts of technology and hip-hop and just came back like insane.
	Like, he's a legend, though.
	Anybody, you come back to him.
	A lot of people, like, if you do like that dirty hip-hop, he's the guy.
	And that's, I don't know much about Baton Rouge.
	I know, I only went there once to, um, I actually went to Lil Boosie.
	I did a, uh, I was in Baton Rouge for like my birthday.
	I had nothing going on.
	I was in New Orleans for my birthday when I turned like 24. I just went by myself to like read and just, I love Louisiana, just like go to bars and stuff.
	And I had a friend there, and we went to see, Boosie did a concert at a mall in Baton Rouge.
	And I went and saw him just before he went to jail.
	And that's the only time I've ever been in Batrouge was to go see Boosie at a mall.
	Man, we had so much.
	I fucking love him.
	Dude, when he left, it was one of the first times I ever felt like, man, I wish he was still here.
	I'd be scared as fuck the hell out of him.
	Well, he was like, I would not even like.
	I should have told you before he came in, bro.
	I'd be so scared.
	Glenn Davis was on.
	He's a basketball player, Big Baby.
	He played for the Celtics, and he came on.
	He's like, nah, Boost is the real gangster, man.
	He said he's one of the last.
	Big Baby played.
	He played for the Clippers for a while.
	Yeah.
	And he played for Florida University of Florida?
	Oh, he played at LSU.
	LSU.
	Yeah.
	There was another guy, Demetrius.
	Demetrius was another big giant center, like fat basketball player.
	It was called Demet Hook.
	Oh, yeah.
	I forget his name.
	Who was that guy?
	Because Big Baby was not...
	We loved him.
	When he scored points, the crowd went crazy for him.
	People love him.
	Well, he's extremely lovable.
	He has such a good.
	He does not look like a basketball player, honestly.
	He's 75% heart, you know.
	Demetri Hill is big.
	Dimitri Hill.
	He was big, too.
	I remember watching him play.
	But he loves being.
	He lives in Las Vegas now.
	He loves being.
	Actually, he just hit me up after Dustin Poirier won that fight, and they ended up connecting, man.
	Oh, there you go.
	Is that Demetrius?
	He played for Gators.
	I remember that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's him.
	He was a big boy.
	Dang, it's always fun when you see them big boys do it, huh?
	It's always fun, man.
	Shaq was big, too, but he ended up, he wasn't really that muscle.
	But he's built like a big, giant human being.
	A lot of the centers are not like that.
	Yeah, they really don't have that center position anymore.
	Shaq in college, you throw up a picture of Shaq at LSU.
	He was lean at LSU, man.
	He was long.
	I mean, who's that Lakers player?
	It's just like cut.
	I don't think players are Lakers anymore.
	Maybe Rockets.
	Dwight Howard.
	He's just like the first buff basketball player.
	He's a model.
	I feel like I always felt like he's more of a model.
	Yeah, look at the baby Shaq.
	I mean, you look at young Shaq.
	Man, I DJ with Shaq sometimes.
	Yeah, I played his podcast this week and he did like a stream, and he just, this guy is fucking dedicated to DJing, bro.
	And he fucking loves it.
	He's a dubstep DJ, and he's most aggressive DJ I've ever seen in my life.
	He just goes dances.
	And before quarantine, every show he did, he would go out in the audience and hang out with everybody in the audience.
	And you just could see him.
	He's like towers of everybody, but he's just like.
	What is it you think that he, that he, that he just, he really loves doing it?
	Or he loves the vibe.
	Have you ever hanged out with him?
	Have you talked to him?
	Because he's just happiness, bro.
	He just loves.
	He just found a lot of like contentment and like happiness after the game.
	I think he became, you know, he's a sports commentator.
	He's just smart and awesome.
	Look at this guy.
	Bro, the crowd.
	He's just.
	I love it.
	That's so crazy.
	Outside lands, like he is one of the most aggressive DJs ever.
	Look at him.
	He can't even fit in the booth.
	Dude, so that's what it looks like when you're in there, huh?
	Yeah, it doesn't look like that, but it looks...
	Does it almost feel like sometimes like, like, I notice on stage, if I'm doing stand-up, I can feel a crowd.
	I can feel what's going on.
	It's almost like at some points, it took a long time, but I feel like it's like I'm like I'm an orchestra.
	And when you're good, too, at that point, you can just, like you said, like then you just flow, right?
	It makes it feel right that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I can, there's a con, but there's an energy connection.
	There's a, in the beginning, it's this nervous other energy where it's like, I'm trying to make sure I'm doing my job.
	Yeah.
	And then later it becomes this energy where it's like, oh, I'm orchestrating the feeling of this environment.
	Yeah.
	Does it, what is it, what is that feeling like when you guys are doing your job?
	I think when you DJ, it's always, it's even more than the stand-up.
	You have to really feel the rhythm of the crowd.
	I've even picked the records you're playing.
	I mean, I'm more of an open format DJ, so I kind of do whatever.
	I kind of improvise.
	A lot of people just go to their concerts Set list.
	I do that when I'm headlining somewhere because I have to program my lights.
	But mostly in Vegas, I'm like doing three hours.
	I'm just looking at the crowd and playing records I want to play and then going where I try to go there.
	Like, you know, with the jokes, maybe you go, maybe it's not funny, but you want to push something or even with controversy, which is probably hard, really hard for comedians.
	I mean, you must walk the line now, but you want to go as controversial, then you pull back, whatever.
	So I think with me as a DJ, you still, you want to like sneak things in and like that problem.
	That's what DJs, that's what we've always been.
	We've always been the people to push the boundaries.
	We're the purest form of the distribution chain.
	Like music happens and we're the ones that give to people in the nightclub or somewhere where they can feel the music for real.
	Because you can't really feel it in your car on the radio.
	You might get pop records, but we make dance music and hip-hop to where we are, our job is to push it as far as we can to be the best DJs.
	Well, it's interesting.
	It makes me think almost like if I'm in a supermarket, you got the area where everything's like in the boxes, and it's all boxed and packaged perfectly for you.
	Then you got that produce area and shit's a little bit more.
	Wow, less.
	You might find an orange in the fucking cucumber area.
	That's the real food, yeah.
	But you know what?
	I grew up, my sister, I remember going to eat at her house when I was back in town, and she only eats canned vegetables because we grew up like that.
	And she has, it's, and I don't, it's always like the Publix cans or like fucking, what's the other shitty ass, Albertsons or Piggly Wiggly?
	And she just has never been to the produce section.
	Wow.
	She didn't know what it is.
	She didn't know what a green bean looks like unless it's wet in a fucking can.
	Unless it looks like it's been through.
	It looks like it's been a Guantanamo.
	In a real one, she's like, what is that thing?
	And I was like, she's like, green beans look like this.
	And I'm like, okay.
	My family, we just only ate cat of cans.
	I don't know what.
	And my mom.
	Well, I think it was just that time period, too.
	And I think produce isn't it?
	Yeah, you know what?
	Produce section didn't really exist in like the 80s.
	You might get some bag of apples or whatever, bag of apples.
	You weren't going to select your own apples.
	That's no.
	The government's going to select those apples for you.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, man.
	Those apples, dude.
	Yeah, those apples knew each other before they got here, you know?
	I'll be damned if you're going to feel that.
	You're not going to sleep.
	No, no, back the fuck away from those apples.
	Here's your bag, motherfucker.
	Damn, dude, that's so good.
	As an adult growing cropping, I'm like, I always go to produce and buy and shit.
	But when I was younger, you never...
	That's for the liberals, sir.
	The Democrats go shopping for the produce thing.
	What's that man over there feeling on that camera?
	Why doesn't he have a wife?
	Nobody needs to pick their own pineapple.
	The government does that for you.
	Let's get a question right here.
	All right, what's this guy talking about?
	Wow, he's driving.
	I got something going on in the background.
	Is he singing the demo?
	Good boy.
	We all sign that.
	That would have been a great idea.
	Look, Shaman Dez.
	Let's go.
	Now you're remixing podcasts.
	What up, Diplo?
	Hope you guys are doing great.
	Hey, real quick, Theo, I'm supporting my Wildcat hit.
	Bear down, baby.
	Bear down?
	Dippo, I just had a question for you.
	Would you ever consider doing a fresh banger with our boy Takashi6ix9ine now that he's out of jail and all?
	I know Theo would love that.
	I'm a huge 6ix9ine fan, honestly.
	His music, bro, he puts the music out and I wait for it.
	I even show up at the time he tells me to be in the middle of it.
	He's having an Instagram live, I got to stop the car and watch it.
	I mean, honestly, he's the first.
	Just the fact that he broke down.
	I mean, I just love him just for being just the fucking biggest punk ass there is.
	Oh, he's like, I love all that.
	And I love that hip-hop had this like, kind of, it's kind of boring now.
	Like, it's kind of like, there's the older guys, they don't go away, and they kind of like talk about the same shit.
	And they're beef and bullshit.
	Yeah, and they're all bullshit beef.
	And he's actually just, fuck you.
	Fuck you.
	Here's your, here's, there's a picture of you being a bitch.
	And like, he's not scared of anybody.
	And I just love that he just kind of deconstructed hip-hop in a way.
	And people are like, no one can kill him.
	It's like impossible.
	I don't know.
	He came and bothered the guy.
	And I just.
	And how can you not kill him?
	He's wearing the brightest fucking shit in the whole world.
	And he just has all these like, yeah, he always talks about, I'm rainbow-haired guy.
	And you, what the fuck?
	Why are you mad at me?
	Like, I mean, I just love that he, and he, and he, and he didn't hit the number one with that, with this, with that first thing he'll out of jail.
	And then he learned how to do it.
	And he did the, you know, tie it in with the sales of the clothes and the physical.
	And just, it's all big fucking hack at this point.
	And he just hacked it.
	And he like, he learned from it and got the number one.
	And everybody, fuck everybody.
	I love the actual fuck you, the everybody that he did.
	And he came and did it.
	Yeah.
	So I love him.
	And I would, I'd love to work with him.
	I know his, I know him, his, his, uh, his label head really well.
	We worked on ideas back before he went to jail and haven't connected with him since then.
	But I'm also not really doing hip-hop right now, but I would do something with him just because I love him as an artist.
	Yeah.
	And it's controversial.
	People probably like, tell me that that sucks, but I just, I fucking fuck with him hard.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, I feel you, man.
	I do too, dude.
	I'm like, and I love how there's all these haters that he's against.
	It's almost like this invisible world, you know, that he's created.
	It's real renegade, though.
	I think it is.
	It is.
	So even when you said deconstructed, I'd always heard people say, "I'm gonna deconstruct something," but I never kind of knew what they were talking about.
	But just now when you said that, it's They're scared of him now.
	What the fuck y'all doing, man?
	I'm on house arrest.
	You can't win because he'll just do whatever.
	You can't.
	There's no rules for him, you know?
	And then he gets Nikki Minaja, which is crazy because they're always fighting over who's Nikki Minaj's boyfriend.
	Yeah.
	But she was with him on the record, Fifi, back in the day.
	I think she just also loves his...
	She'll say whatever the fuck she wants.
	And I got a record coming out with her in Major Laser this month.
	And I love her.
	And I honestly, I worked with her a couple times.
	And she is a fucking hard worker, bro.
	Is she really?
	Yeah.
	I've never really been a fan.
	As a rapper, lyrically, I mean, she's like, no one can touch her, I feel like.
	And then at the same time, we did the song together and she went back and forth.
	Like, I'm just like, small song, you know, maybe it'll be big.
	She liked the record and she did it for me and she likes me, I think.
	But she just went back in the studio like four times.
	I didn't even ask her to.
	She's like, I want to change this part.
	I want to change this part.
	And she went like a bunch of times, asked me my advice on it.
	A real pro.
	She's a real collaborator and she does it.
	Like her and Madonna are the two women that were just like, they work harder than me.
	And that's hard.
	I feel like I work pretty hard.
	So they both like.
	It sounds like you do, man.
	I wish that they could take your brain whenever you pass and just splice it into like literally hallways of a library where people could walk through and see what you do.
	Might be some stuff in there, man.
	I don't know if you want to open that up, man.
	We'll have a special area.
	Yeah, you might need to define where you can.
	Remember back in the day, they used to have a video store and they would have the double doors where the parking lot.
	Oh, the porch doors.
	I would sneak in there all the time.
	Growing up in Florida, I would go to my grandma's house.
	My parents would just drop me out.
	They're Like, fuck, they couldn't afford a summer camp or nothing.
	I had nothing to do.
	They would just drive me four hours to New Smart's little small town, drop me grandma's, and I could only walk in my little sand.
	We don't have dirt roads in Florida, we had sand roads.
	Wow.
	And I would walk a fucking mile to the video store.
	My grandma would give me like $5.
	I would just rent every WWF video.
	I watched every wrestling because I never paid for the pay-per-views.
	I watched like the last five years.
	I watched like, one summer I watched like 500 wrestling contests and then every kung fu movie there was.
	I just, then I found the porn area.
	Oh, yeah.
	Couldn't rent those, but I would go.
	I'd go back.
	I'd go see those boxes.
	Dude, I'd read the boxes with my dick out.
	I mean, just the awkwardness and then renting them and then stand in front of somebody and have like a stack of like these dirty pornos.
	But dude, there's almost more of a respect there.
	There's a line in the sand where you're like, okay, am I doing this or not?
	Do I mean this or not?
	Now it's too easy access.
	Oh, yeah.
	You can be, it's too much privacy.
	Back in the day, you're a fucking pervert.
	We're going to see.
	Yeah.
	Who's a pervert?
	Or you can stand outside.
	There's always a sex shop too that has like the pornos.
	And like in Philly, there's like this one little area.
	They probably cleaned it up since I was living there, but there was like one little area where they had like the shops where you would just go and you could just jerk off and like watch a girl behind a glass and they would do things.
	Damn.
	There's like this like shops and then you go and there's video stores.
	Me and New York had that shit too.
	I don't see it.
	The idea is that sex shops doesn't even like anymore.
	Not full-on hookers.
	I'm talking about like there's this area in Philly where just like you see a real woman through glass.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I did that in once in Amsterdam.
	I've never seen that anywhere else though.
	And she would just do the thing.
	It's kind of like what a, I guess what a chat, what's it called now?
	The cam girl would do.
	Yeah.
	But the next ones over there in Philly were probably pretty.
	Dude, I remember this.
	Now you make me think of it.
	This one time I was in Amsterdam.
	And so they had a thing.
	You go in this little cage kind of and everybody's glass opens up.
	And there's a wheel.
	There's like a lazy Susan in there and it has people and there's like a man and a woman having sex and everybody's, then you can see everybody's face.
	Oh, you can see everybody else?
	I thought it wouldn't be a mirror to see.
	That's awkward.
	The mirror goes up and everybody's got already like jerking and you're like, all right.
	So you realize you got to look right at the couple.
	You can't be straying visually.
	And then the crazy part was everybody else's slides went down after they were done, after 15 minutes or whatever.
	Mine didn't go down or something.
	So I don't know, bro.
	Another crazy part was watching the couple who are now dizzy from the thing spinning help each other off the thing.
	It's like when your kid on the little fairs with the park and you'd let your kid walk away and he'd stumble and he's kind of drunk.
	It's always a fun.
	One of his ears is 40 pounds.
	You know, you've done so much with music over the years and especially so much, I think, with diverse.
	Let's get a question right here.
	This guy actually looks diverse.
	Let's get him in here.
	All right, what up?
	Kev here from Toronto.
	Diplo, where would you rather party?
	Trinidad or Jamaica?
	Soca or Danza.
	That's a tough one.
	What's it going to be?
	I'm going to say Trinidad.
	He's probably Trini.
	Looks like he's from Toronto.
	He has a big like Trini diaspora.
	But I just had a baby in Trinidad with my ex-girlfriend.
	And well, she's like my, you know, she's an awesome girl.
	And I haven't seen the baby because I was going to go there in March for a show and stay there for a month.
	And then I've been, we try to travel ban.
	I have to quarantine in Trinidad.
	Wow.
	And so I would go to Trinidad.
	I need to go there as soon as possible.
	But the city itself, Port of Spain, Trinidad is like, people don't know this, but it's kind of like this kind of probably one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries.
	It has good surf.
	Has this amazing music culture, but it has this crazy mashup of like, you know, European, African, and Indian, just kind of all like living there and working in this crazy music scene.
	Of course, Soca, they have reggae dance hall.
	We used to do parties there.
	Major Lazer had a show there every December.
	And it was at this water park.
	And it was like the craziest show we'd have.
	Like people on shoulders, like water flowing everywhere, like crowd doing all the different dances together.
	And I mean, Trinidad was just legendary.
	And I miss going there to do shows.
	But if you get a chance, check out Trinidad, man.
	For Carnival?
	I think it's like in the end of February.
	Same time, right, right before Mardi Gras.
	So you can actually, I did a tour last year.
	I did two years ago, I did Carnival in Brazil.
	I had a show in, I went to Trinidad to see the Carnival.
	I didn't do a show there.
	And then we went straight to Mardi Gras and did all of the circuit basically because it's all around the same holiday.
	So what was that vibe like?
	Was there like, obviously they must have differed from each other?
	Oh, 100%.
	The carnival in Brazil is just like the Super Bowl.
	I mean, there's like a Samba drum.
	They have their own stadium just for the carnival floats.
	And the music is insane.
	It's like the whole country parties at once.
	It's just so sexualized and beautiful at the same time.
	Everybody's so fucking happy.
	And then Mardi Gras in New Orleans is just like, just fucking trash.
	Like in the next level.
	But we had this really awesome.
	It was a little drop-off from one of the I love it so much because I love, I actually went to see some of the floats at Mardi Gras for the time.
	So I've been there for parties and I was like, damn, these floats are awesome.
	Like all the different, yeah, they're really cool.
	It was such a lower level, but I'm like, you see like the black community floats and like the second line.
	You say the white people doing like the things and you just, it's, it's like the one thing where everybody's kind of is together on the side of the roads and seeing everything.
	And I played a party with a good friends of mine, band called Arcade Fire.
	You know those guys?
	I've heard.
	And Wynn Butler is the lead band guy.
	And he's also a basketball player.
	And he has a party there called Carnival Crew.
	And it was amazing.
	It was like drag queens.
	And like we had Choppa played with me.
	And it was like, he DJ'd and it's like a Haitian band playing Haitian music.
	And it was like just like this really like multi-cultural.
	It was like amazing party.
	And just like the most inclusive party you could have in New Orleans.
	There's a lot of that there.
	That's that place is kind of anything.
	That's why I'm saying like the bouncing is gay.
	The city itself is so DIY.
	Like kids go there, like punk kids.
	There's a lot of punk bands in New Orleans.
	And like punk kids, they go there and they get a warehouse space and they have a little commune and they build, they make their own little restaurants or whatever.
	And it's like, you don't have, this might sound fucked up.
	I think Katrina might have done the most work to preserve the culture of New Orleans because right before Katrina happened, it really felt like New Orleans was destined to be this big destination.
	And like people were buying property and hotels were coming in there, restaurants.
	And then Katrina just wiped out all the investment.
	Like in a way, People left.
	There was like 400,000 people before Katrina, and only like 200,000 left.
	And the city had to start over again.
	But what didn't stop was that all that cultural movement didn't really end and it just got bigger and more.
	It's isolated, you know?
	And you need the isolation kind of to build sometimes.
	And I think, I just think New Orleans for me is like my favorite place in the world to go all over the world because it's spontaneous and crazy and you don't know what's going to happen.
	And I love that.
	I love that.
	Well, you know, it's so interesting.
	You talk about the investment side of it.
	It's funny, like, you know, something really unique and special can start somewhere, be it a festival, be it like a vibe, anything.
	But then eventually money comes in because they want to own stuff in the area.
	They want to make it bigger.
	And then it kind of like it weakens stuff over time.
	100%.
	But it's so funny because if you didn't have money in the area, but then it's funny because it's like we want money in areas to help to help.
	But then it's from no money that usually really beautiful things can come from.
	Our art comes from like, you know, desperation a lot of times.
	So it's so funny to just have that dichotomy.
	It's like you need, like when I was young, man, I'd have given anything to be able to, for us to have some money for my mother not to work for, you know, to just have a little bit of time where we could have, I don't know, just felt like not ashamed of who I was or something.
	You know, just, I don't know.
	You know, I wish we'd have had some money, a little more comfort.
	Yeah.
	But then it's like.
	But you had to work harder to do what you do.
	I think for me, like I moved to Philly to go to university and I had like nothing that.
	You go to Temple where you go?
	I go to Temple, yeah.
	Dude, Temple's fucking wild.
	If you get up there on, is that Front Street?
	What is that?
	My parents went to visit me.
	My parents went to visit me.
	It's on Cecil Burma.
	It's a fucking bird.
	Market in Cecil B. Morris.
	Somebody trained a crow to drop off fucking cocaine for him up there one time.
	Yeah, they run drugs on birds up there.
	People would park in the middle of the fucking street and go do what they needed.
	But if you just go, if you just go, Temple is like a little bubble of like, you know, a university, but any outside of that area, North Philadelphia, just looks like apocalypse now.
	Like it's burned out buildings and like it's just, it's fucking street by street, just crazy ghetto from like from 60 more all the way to like 40 blocks up.
	Kind of endless.
	Like, and it's, it's, I worked up there.
	When I went to Temple, I ended up graduating.
	I didn't even graduate.
	I got out my fourth year.
	I left because I was just like, fuck this, fuck school.
	And I got a job as a social worker.
	And I worked up in these high schools up there.
	Wow.
	You're pretty gangster, huh?
	It was fucked up, man.
	I mean, like, back to the drugs.
	We were talking about, we weren't talking about drugs, but I was talking about it.
	I'm always talking about it in the back of my head.
	But the kids I was working with were just so geeked up on Riddling.
	Like, they weren't even, they didn't even, one of the kids couldn't even read.
	And they didn't care.
	It wasn't like, let's teach a kid to read.
	He's like getting Riddling so he doesn't bother any other kids in school.
	It was like fucked up.
	And these kids were just like building these, the government was actually building these drug addictions for these kids from like 10 years old already.
	And that's how you put, that's how you, it's just, there was no, there was no, there was no idea to fix this fucking place they lived at and like help with their parents who were, you know, dealing crack on the side.
	There was never like, how do we fix this situation the kid lives in?
	It's like, just give him some drugs so we can move on.
	Yeah.
	That was like the way that the government in the city dealt with it.
	And I did that for a little while and I just fucking quit.
	And honestly, I learned a lot from, that was my hardest job I ever had was doing that, doing that.
	It was called TSS.
	It was like therapeutic staff support.
	I went to schools with the kids and like helped, like wrote notes about the kids and helped them with whatever he needed and stuff like that, like one-on-one with a kid for a few weeks.
	And it was rough to see like that.
	I was like literally shadowing this kid every day, helping him and doing reports on what he was doing.
	You know, it's funny.
	I remember growing up, like one of the hardest things was like just the amount of poverty that there really is in a lot of the black community.
	And in the white community, too, it's just a little bit different, I feel like.
	I mean, there's so much poverty in America still.
	And it's going to get worse and worse for what we have right now.
	I mean, just living in LA, you see the homeless situation, how insane that is.
	And to see, when you move here for the first time, I actually used to take people to skid roads to be like, who are from Europe?
	I'm like, have you ever seen something like this?
	Because it's like block by block.
	And it's like a little community there.
	And, you know, a lot of people that are homeless in California are like have mental health problems where they actually can't exist in a normal way.
	And they have, that's like the last resort for them to survive is let's be homeless.
	But I've noticed during this pandemic, there's a, there's a little, I live in Hollywood, but there's like one overpass and it just keeps growing.
	Small little community there.
	And the people are younger and younger.
	Wow.
	And they're not even like, maybe they have mental health problems, but their kids are like, they're well put together.
	They have like some of this girl who's like a punk rock girl who's like every day she's up at like seven putting her mohawk in, but she just lives in this tent because she, you know, when it was a stay-at-home water, she had nowhere to go.
	She probably lived with her parents or whatever and like how to leave.
	So I think a lot of kids, we're seeing a lot more of this poverty situation happening with young people that never happened before.
	And I think that's not being addressed.
	And LA is just, it's a fucking lot of homeless going on here.
	And I think it's a lot of homeless.
	There's a lot of money here too, which is shocking.
	You know, it's really interesting.
	I mean, even hearing you say about when you were doing the TSS stuff and that water bottle might be uneven on the bottom of it, I saw.
	It fall.
	Yeah.
	You took the labels off.
	I don't know why we did actually.
	We got a Poland Spring sponsorship.
	I think because it was, I think because we were giving out poor waters.
	We're going to do Dasani for now.
	Dasani sucks.
	Core water is expensive.
	I invested in Core Water.
	Did you really?
	Yeah, in the beginning.
	I made a lot of money out of Core Water.
	I love Core Water.
	It sold to Dr. Pepper, and I got Dr. Pepper stock at the end.
	I was like, what?
	I had to wait a year to sell it.
	I finally did.
	I was like, all right, no.
	Dude, Dr. Pepper was one of the only beverages when I was growing up.
	There was like five beverages, and one of them was Dr. Pepper.
	So, like, it's interesting because throughout time, it's like, yeah, they try to put different things into communities.
	It's like, like you were saying, they try to, you know, they'll try to diversify communities.
	Like, oh, let's boss in kids from different places.
	Let's try and flood it with drugs.
	Let's use, oh, drugs will be the solution, you know.
	I think we're starting to realize over time that, or money, let's just try and pump money.
	And I think money definitely helps.
	A lot of people talk about white privilege, and I think a lot about green privilege.
	I think there is some white privilege.
	But I know that money, like you go to, you look at a place like Atlanta.
	I was talking with Boosie about it.
	And just when you see that wealth, when you go to Atlanta and you see for the first time, I remember the first time I went there, it seemed like just like the place where the Braves play.
	And then over time, it's become, you see wealthy black people and you see, oh, this is what happens when a community of people has money.
	they live more, I don't want to say comfortably like in their assets, but comfortably inside of themselves as a human, you know.
	Like, you don't see the kids that I grew up around where it was like, you know, kids that just were just, you know, some of them didn't have parents, kids like 15, 20 years old couldn't even read, you know.
	Even the music scene, I think, coming from Atlanta recently, a lot of these kids, you know, when you grew up, hip-hop, you know, rappers came from like the lowest parts of a city or it was like they had to call their way out to make music.
	And I think the last 10 years, you have kids from the suburbs that actually are like changing the game.
	Like Lil Nasak's good example, he's like, I think, I'm not going to speak on his family.
	I think he might be a middle-class kid, but he's like, he had the opportunity to put his energy in something that maybe he wasn't going to be a rapper.
	Right, right.
	But if he wasn't middle class, would he have been able to have that ability?
	And then he changed the game.
	Like the biggest record of all time, actually.
	And I think that's something that happened because of, you know, putting people in a position where they can have a little more opportunities.
	Because at some point, I'm a firm believer that anybody in America can honestly make their way up to where they can.
	I know that I'm going to have a lot more opportunities being a white guy.
	My parents put me in a place that made it help there.
	My father, you know, he was dirt poor.
	He had no opportunities.
	He had to go to the Vietnam War just to get it.
	He was like, not even have a job just to get a GI bill to go to college.
	And he goes to college.
	He was like late 20s.
	And he's the only person to go to college out of like a whole generation of his family for like 100 years.
	And he made it and like went to college, graduated when he was 30 or something and got a job at a hospital, worked his way up to have a great job at a hospital and put me to college, like gave me the funds to go to University of Central Florida.
	So he didn't spend that much money, but I would have never done it.
	I can get a student loan now, which I suggest never doing to anybody because I think it's the biggest sham there is.
	But my dad was able to do that.
	And I think he also, maybe being white, you know, down south also probably helps him secure a job in different places like Mississippi or Alabama.
	But at the same time, I think it's possible for anybody, but it's different.
	Like the road is going to be a lot flatter for me to climb than it's going to be for a young black guy who has to go up high.
	But if you're in the middle class, that's, you know, I think the economy doesn't really see race.
	It's like an algorithm.
	It sees zeros and numbers.
	It sees numbers, right?
	You know, like I think tech funds, all these things like that doesn't, like, they're not inherently racist.
	Our political, social, economic system in America is inherently racist.
	Not it's probably by default because it's just been built that way and you can't, you know, you can't deconstruct it that easily.
	Right.
	It takes time.
	It does take time.
	But I think, yeah, you said like money is going to give people more experiences that they can take.
	I mean, having disposable income is you're going to spend money on music.
	You're going to go to concerts.
	And when the economy is good, actually the music scene grows a lot more.
	And I mean, right now, you're not going to have a lot of new music in 2020 because no one's touring.
	People are scared to put out the records.
	No one's writing.
	No one's spending money at shows.
	People are surviving.
	I mean, even as you said, you know, it's like not a time.
	It's, you know, when people are, it hadn't really been the time really to make maybe new music.
	You know, it's funny.
	Yeah, I think, you know, piggybacking on what you're saying, it's like, yeah, when you're surviving, when you have to expend energy surviving, you don't, it's hard to fantasize or imagine or to dream or to, you know, you can't, it's really hard to do both.
	Like me, I never had an opportunity.
	I didn't start making music until I was like 20, like really putting my energy into it.
	So I was like 19, 20. Most kids, like, they started in like Billie Eilis, like at 11, 12, you know, like I was, even as a DJ, I didn't put my first record out till I was like 26. And that's like, I'm a grandpa, you know, a rapper.
	If you're not coming out at 16 years old now, you're like, you're grandma.
	You're old as fuck.
	Who's his dad?
	But I think now kids have that opportunity.
	Like they have a little, like I said, like Sound Club.
	They don't need that fucking ceiling.
	They can break through.
	If you have a good idea, good concepts.
	But right now, there's not a lot of we're in like a TikTok generation.
	Like music's kind of, we're only digesting 15 seconds of songs right now.
	Yeah.
	It's almost like you have to have that hook.
	Yeah.
	Which is not good for the rest of the movie.
	I don't think a lot of TikTok records don't make artists though.
	So I hope it's a phase.
	I'm not mad at TikTok and I've had I've used my TikTok to my advantage sometimes, but I think a lot of the songs that come out, you get this guy has a song on TikTok that's like, shoot, I'm not going to give you examples, like maybe have like, become a number one record and still has like, you know, 30,000 followers on Instagram because no one's actually checking for the artist.
	They're just looping this moment.
	It's about the influencer that's doing it.
	Yeah, I think TikTok is just like, it's this weird.
	Yeah, I don't know if those people become real artists off of there.
	Yeah, they don't.
	I think it's a trend thing, but I think hopefully there might be someone that comes out of it that you're like, oh, you know, SoundCloud rap came out.
	I thought it was all kind of garbage.
	And then XXX Temptation came out.
	I was like, this guy, a real artist came out of it.
	Yeah.
	And like had like, like kind of put the whole thing on his shoulder.
	Even at 6ix9ine, I think he came out of it.
	I was like, he survived it and lasted.
	But all those other rappers that had songs out, they're gone, you know?
	It's like they had like one month people played the records and it was hype and then they're out.
	Do you feel like, because you, you know, you do, I mean, you know, you really love to experience different cultures, it seems like.
	And, and, I mean, you talk about it, it's at the forefront of your communication, you know, like, do you feel, you know, a lot of people get accused of cultural appropriation and stuff these days, which, you know, it's a huge discussion topic, really.
	But I feel, do you, but sometimes it's, you're more of a liaison for cultures, I feel.
	100% I'm a cultural appropriator.
	I think you feel that.
	I mean, do you really feel that way?
	I just don't think there's anything wrong with it.
	Like, even, even if, even just me doing country music, I'm starting doing country music at 25. I was like, I wasn't even a fucking rodeo.
	Yeah, like, I wasn't born.
	Like, I don't belong.
	Yeah, you weren't in Dallas Meyers Club or something.
	So it's not like, it's not with Dallas that would be pretty epic, but like, I think anything you do culturally, like, I don't think, what am I supposed to do?
	Like, what defines exist?
	I grew up in Mississippi.
	I mean, I florida, am I supposed to like ride an alligator or, you know, just like work at Walgreens?
	I don't know.
	There's not any, I don't think anybody should be defined.
	And if you, if you put rules on culture and music, you're setting yourself up for like constricting anything, any ideas.
	I mean, like, someone should have said a little about my sex.
	You're not, you're not allowed to do this.
	You're not allowed to make country music.
	I'm actually, I started doing like more random music earlier in my career to where if I started doing like major laser now, I would probably would never have flown, you know, like, or if I did like, I look back at like my video, my bounce video for Express Yourself, this New Orleans, I can never make a video like that now.
	Like, girls twerking, I'm like the only white guy in the video, and like I'm DJing, I'm like in downtown New Orleans.
	I mean, like, I look back and like, that was a moment that couldn't happen now because there's like rules and regulation to that.
	Um, is there, uh, I think, yeah, I'm a liaison as a producer, I'm just, that's always been my job.
	I've been fascinated by music.
	Right.
	The people that inspired me, someone like David Bowie.
	You know, he did funk.
	He did, you know, he did glam.
	He did like folk music.
	His biggest hit was like, let's dance with Niles Rogers.
	I mean, it was like full-on, like, the guy who did chic.
	I mean, he just, and no one ever said, like, he's, you know, culturally appropriating something.
	He just was an artist.
	I mean, art is art.
	Yeah.
	And you have to be influenced.
	Like, you have to be influenced by things.
	I mean, my favorite, Richard Pryor is my favorite comedian.
	Chris Rock's my second favorite comedian.
	And my others, this guy named Jerry Clower, actually, who's out of Yazoo City, Mississippi.
	I'll have to send you some of his stuff, man.
	You've literally, since you've sat here, has made me wonder if I can listen to so much more music.
	I mean, I think with music, also, I owe a lot.
	A band like The Clash is might be like my biggest influence because they started with punk.
	They did reggae.
	They did hip-hop.
	And they had a record.
	My favorite record of all time might be Rock the Kazba, which is like political.
	It's a dance record.
	It's beautifully done.
	It's produced really well.
	And if they came out today, people have been like, what are you doing that?
	You know, like, what are you doing?
	But I think that argument, I've been hearing that argument about culturally appropriating music for like 20 years.
	And I just don't go away.
	People listen to my music.
	If they like it, they like it.
	I hope that my music affects you to where you want to listen to it.
	And you're like, oh, I love this.
	I love this country.
	Even with the country stuff, I mean, Nashville is not fucking with my country music sometimes.
	I think you listen to it.
	They're like, uh, but if a kid, like, I'm making it for that 14-year-old kid driving around, like, I don't, he doesn't, he doesn't think about like the rules when he listens to my music.
	I'm like, this isn't supposed to listen to that, you know?
	And in fact, he probably doesn't want to listen to the music.
	I think you should parents listen.
	I think he shouldn't, but I think he should have a lot of education on music because I am, as a DJ, I've been in, I know so much about music.
	I think that's my only, that's the only thing I've done.
	So I know where I came from.
	I know that I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for black music, even like black and gay music when it comes to house records.
	I know where the roots come from, and I know to show support and love when I can to those people, because that's actually my, that's what I can do for those people who are in the scene.
	Like if it's like a young black DJ, I'm going to fucking book him over with another young white DJ just because, or if it's a young woman, because that's something I can do.
	And that's actually important.
	If I can make music and get to a position where I can help other people make more music, well, it seems like you try to do that.
	I mean, it seems like you try to do that with your label.
	Yeah, 100%.
	But it does get hard to juggle, though, doing your own and then also being a producer.
	Does it hard to get juggle?
	Not really.
	I think that I used to just always, like, give the example like Beyonce.
	I always work a record for Beyoncé or Rihanna.
	And if they wouldn't take it, I'd make it my record.
	You know, I worked to make it for them because those are two artists I was like, I was constantly, you know, the manager's like, can we hear some ideas?
	And I would focus on that.
	And then I would never get the record done for them.
	But I would just, I'd be like, okay, I made this great record that they didn't take.
	Like good stories like Lean On, my biggest probably record I ever made with Major Laser was written for Rihanna originally.
	And the story is I played in the studio and she just was like, not fucking with it.
	Wow.
	And a blessing because I own the master of that record, you know, and like I made like a shitload of money and the record reached a lot of people and I was proud of it.
	And we made a video in India actually with like no money, like $75,000.
	And then if I made that video today, people would have fucking, it would have been canceled, you know, because like, I love India.
	We're just like, we're just chilling in India.
	I had a show there.
	I played with all these kids.
	Like, let me just spend the money I made at the show on the video.
	And, you know, here, and we had a girl came out and the video.
	It's actually nice and awesome.
	You know, it's a vibe.
	People are going to criticize it.
	I mean, you're going to get criticism all the time.
	You're going to get haters.
	It's had it for so long.
	It's hard, man.
	It's hard not to.
	And especially these days, I even worry more about comedy.
	It's like, how can I talk about stuff?
	How can I try and share my truth or share what my story is or even what my thoughts are?
	Yeah.
	Without being sarcasm is lost.
	That sucks for comedy because sarcasm is a fucking art form, right?
	I think, and people don't fucking get, they don't even take a time to realize it.
	And then you get stuck on the quotable or whatever.
	And then you get fucked on something that you don't, you're not listening to the context of my joke or whatever.
	And I think that's, comedy should be indifferent to that, but it's never.
	I don't know how it gets back to that.
	Because yeah, it's like my first Netflix special is a lot of it is real tongue-in-cheek.
	It's almost like a character, you know, in a weird way.
	And yeah, some people take it verbatim and it's like, oh, but you don't see what I'm doing.
	You don't see what's going on here.
	But yeah, sarcasm is really.
	It's hard.
	If you're going to go see a comedian, you have to give him artistic license.
	I think as a fan, you should.
	And if something happens and you and the person in the is taken out of context, dig into it.
	And that person can defend themselves too.
	I think it's fair enough.
	But you should be careful because if nothing else, I think cancel culture is pretty fucking whack.
	But if nothing else, it does help to take away some of the things that shouldn't be done.
	But I think we're going to survive this and people are going to like what they like.
	If something's funny and they know it's, you know, at the end of the day, be a good person, be kind, know, be informed about things.
	I think, you know, when it comes to defund the police or Black Lives Matter, things like that, I'm going to talk about politics in the show, but I think if you get into it and you kind of just read a little bit, you can understand a little bit more about what this idea is, what the concept is.
	The words themselves are really scary.
	Well, yeah, it makes me think.
	I mean, yeah, if you stay on Twitter, you're just going to get in fights.
	But I think if you, you know, it made me think, you know, and I see you as a big proponent of it and, you know, being out and involved.
	I saw you out and involved in the protests and stuff on your Instagram.
	And it makes, it's made me think as a person and then also as a white person, what do I have differences when I look at a black person?
	Do I have, you know, do I have different behavior?
	You know, it just, it started to, it's definitely made me think that.
	And that's the best thing of it.
	Yeah.
	It's to make me think, what, you know, like, am I driving past impoverished neighborhoods, whether they're black or white or any color, it makes me think like, and thinking, oh man, those people don't have anything.
	Right.
	But then thinking, well, am I doing anything in my life to help be a part of, you know, the solution?
	Like, and even as you said, like, you were working as the TSS and, you know, and then they tried drugs to help with the kids.
	And then they tried like, well, let's bust kids from different areas.
	That'll change it.
	I think in the end, it's human connection, really.
	100%.
	Kids get together.
	I think you see South Africa.
	I was bringing that back up again.
	These young people, like, like, these kids are like, like a young black guy I was talking to, he's like, his girlfriend was white.
	And he never thought it was weird.
	But of course, his parents and her parents probably were like scared.
	I think for them, and those are kids are going to change the world.
	Like, those kids that have this new definition of what it means to be a white person.
	A young person.
	You bring a black kid over and they're like, pass the bread, and then like, dad will be like, you want me to bounce past it?
	Like, he tries to make a funny joke.
	And you're like, oh, my God.
	I mean, my dad and parents, like, they're still.
	But they're trying to get somebody.
	I root for them.
	But yeah, like, honestly, what's happened, all this attention on information has turned a lot of like my nephews and stuff who were like, actually, probably borderline racist about two years ago, are a lot smarter.
	And they live in a diverse neighborhood.
	Like their high school is probably half, like, half white, but they had to, like, it's like jail.
	You had to like kind of like go, you have to like fucking find your click and live with it.
	Like, you're not, yeah.
	If you're a white person to go to jail, you have to join, you have to join a white supremacy thing immediately.
	It's the only way to survive.
	I mean, it's like kind of sucks, but it's like, that's the fucking definition we have.
	And like in high school, same thing.
	Gay or German, bro.
	If you get in jail.
	So I think like we have, that's going to be hard to get past that, you know?
	But I think at the same time, I think my, my nephew's like, I talked to him a little bit.
	I'm like, why do you write something like that on Twitter?
	Because I was like, I was kind of concerned about him.
	And then like, I kind of explained to him, like, not in a attack him way, but I'm like, you know, kind of think about things.
	And, you know, I think it helps.
	It's just like conversation.
	Like, literally, it's hard because there's so much misinformation, like, honestly, because we just, it's not really in our face when we see the problems that we just kind of cover them up.
	So it's up to everybody.
	You just got to learn.
	I mean, if you go to school, you got to learn.
	And it's, but yeah, and I think sometimes I even feel like attacked as a white person.
	It's like, well, is it, you know, some people don't want to talk about, you know, equality or talk about, some people also are, they just want to be controlling.
	And they, you know, so you have to, it's hard to like kind of, you know, it's just, it's tough.
	It's a tough balance because it's.
	A lot of people are just, it's tribal, you know, people feel like, this is my tribe.
	I'm white and I have to, I have to fight for this or whatever.
	They don't realize like that's.
	And black too.
	Yeah.
	Same thing.
	People think, and I think that's what, you know, we're in this position, you know, and when Trump, his whole campaign is like based on division.
	He doesn't have a campaign stance.
	You know, I'm not going to endorse anybody, but I think that it's so easy for him to do that because that disinformation, that tribalism is what creates any energy for him because he has no energy otherwise.
	Because he has no stance in anything.
	He has no purpose as a president.
	He has a business.
	I've always seen him as a shady businessman, kind of, which in some aspects of, you know, it's what a lot of America has become.
	So I'm not shocked that he's the emotionally, he doesn't have, he doesn't appear to have that ability to connect on an emotional level or to under emotionally understood.
	I love when someone asks him like his favorite Bible chapter.
	He's like, I'm not going to answer that.
	I love the whole book.
	Old Testament, New Testament.
	He's like, I love them equally.
	He has no idea about it.
	He doesn't even read.
	He never read the Bible his whole life.
	Black Testament or White Testament.
	He's like, I love them both.
	Yeah, he doesn't have any opinion.
	Dude, it's almost, you know, it's so funny.
	You talked about wrestling earlier.
	Everything is turned really into the WWE.
	It's all about 15-second bits.
	It's all about.
	Fucking WWE, though.
	God damn, the racial stereotypes and how crazy it was, but it defined me as a kid.
	I learned about everything.
	I loved them.
	There was like the fucking shh.
	There was like Sergeant Slaughter.
	There was the Junkyard Dog.
	There was the fucking Australian dudes.
	There was a fucking Chinese guy.
	There was a Iranian terrorist.
	But even Sergeant Slaughter wasn't a good guy.
	He was a bad guy.
	It was like, there were no rules.
	it was like Hulk Hogan became a bad guy for a while Everything was like the most, they just built the stereotypes so crazy.
	And as a kid, you like learned about everything.
	We learned about it.
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	That's one of your favorite wrestlers.
	And yeah, but that's how a lot of us learned about, dude, the only age.
	He was probably a hero at Tatanka, right?
	You probably love it.
	You're like, fuck it.
	He was my guy.
	I had a hatchet that he would come out with a hatchet.
	There was no definition.
	There was no good or bad.
	Like after a while, everybody was bad or they're good.
	He'd probably turn into a heel.
	If he was there long enough, you become the heel, right?
	You become the guy that's like the evil guy.
	Totally.
	They got to spin it around.
	I got one last question I want to ask you, and I'm just trying to remember what it is in my head real quick.
	Tatanka.
	And I could talk to you forever, but I just, you know.
	Ricky the Dragon Steamboat 2. Oh, dude.
	That was the only Asian person that I knew enough was.
	Then Yokozuno came in at the end.
	He was the sumo guy.
	Iron Sheik.
	Iron Sheik.
	You may remember, aren't you?
	He got big on Twitter because he...
	He had this amazing Iron Sheik and Hacksaw Jim Duggan story where they were on a Coke bender together and they got arrested in Alabama or something.
	And they were supposed to be arch rivals.
	Like Hacksaw Jim Duggan, like the pro-American arrival.
	And then Iron Sheik was like the Iranian terrorist.
	And they partied together.
	And they animated the story once.
	They got caught by the police and they had to go to jail together.
	And they got caught like, oh, they're friends.
	And it kind of ruined their whole fucking storyline.
	Did you see the documentary?
	Did you see the Jake the Snake documentary?
	No, I got to watch that.
	Man, it's so good.
	Has he become governor?
	No, that's Jesse Ventura.
	Jesse Ventura, yeah.
	Jake the Snake, his best thing was, though, sometimes he had to check the snake and they would put it down below in the plane and the cold air would kill the snake.
	So he would literally.
	He had to get a new snake all the time.
	Or sometimes he'd bring out his bag with a dead snake in it and it just never killed him.
	Damn, he could have been an emotional support snake nowadays.
	I bet they have those.
	They have those?
	There's a woman that had a kangaroo on a plane.
	They had a horse like recently.
	They took the horses out, though.
	That was too crazy.
	I love these guys.
	And also, you can be a fucking wrestler and be like 45 and just still be like a sex symbol.
	I need those.
	I'm 41, so I need to figure out what my next move is, man.
	And wear those tights, man.
	Do you have a, you know, I look at John Mayer sometimes.
	He's not fit either.
	And no.
	You just had to be a fucking man, dude.
	They're not.
	I'm not waiting for some real gay wrestlers to come out.
	Oh, there was Goldust.
	Oh, I didn't even know that.
	Goldust was the gay.
	He was like borderline gay.
	You don't know, but you didn't even, it wasn't even like a controversial thing.
	Racism, I mean, it was like, it was no rules, man.
	Well, don't you find how interesting it is?
	Gold dust wrestler, I think.
	I think it was Dusty Rose's son.
	Don't you find it interesting how online people are one way and in real life they're a different, they're different?
	Yeah, I mean, also being online is anonymous.
	You don't have to be anything.
	You just be fake.
	People are inherently racist because they want to do that.
	I mean, that's what the kind of the online world kind of sucks, yeah, because you don't really get a real person out there anymore, you know?
	Yeah, and it's funny because you would argue with someone online, but if you met with them and just and had the same conversation, you would not, it probably wouldn't be an argument.
	Also, people like, you know, they want to, they want to stroke controversy, and they like just, they'll do any different retweets and just to get a little hype on things.
	Like, some guys, some other DJs, right, like called me out during this whole process moment, and I'm like, I know the people, and I'm like, bro, you're going to get a couple retweets for this.
	And I'm TM, like, you know, are you going to, like, this worth like not having a friendship with me anymore for this?
	And some of them are just like, you know, how to cut people off sometimes.
	Like, just like, yeah.
	Just to get a little hype, get a little retweet is like, talk to me if you have a problem, you know?
	Like, let's do something.
	Let's hash it out.
	Yeah.
	Let's discuss it.
	And here's the here's Post Malone's son.
	Gang, gang.
	What's up, Steve?
	What's up, Tisblill?
	I got a question from Tisbale.
	I can hear it.
	Making electronic music.
	What do you think you'd be doing?
	Like, if that just wasn't an option, what do you think you'd be doing right now?
	What's funny?
	Because that's what I'm going to ask.
	You know, John Mayer, I've seen him do comedy before.
	Yeah.
	And I thought he was extremely funny for a guy who doesn't get to get reps like everyone else because, and the reason he says he doesn't is because I can't get up there at a blank slate anymore.
	It's just they won't, it's not how it's going to interact with society, you know.
	People get to get up and practice with a blank slate.
	And I think he would have been a great comedian.
	Is there something else you like?
	But he just didn't have enough time.
	It's funny with life.
	You only get really so much time.
	I mean, I saw him once do at the Peppermint Lounge with Dave Chappelle.
	And it was one of those ones where you lock your phone up.
	And I think it was a lot of the stuff that was on Dave's, like, was he on Netflix special or something like two years ago?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So he did a lot of that material, and it was pretty controversial.
	And I think he kept some of it out.
	I can't even repeat some of it, but he had like Eddie Murphy in the front.
	It was like all, it was like a, and it was awesome because it was like, that was like a no fucking holes bar, like do whatever he wanted without the phones because you can't really, yeah.
	Word of mouth, he did something controversial.
	No one cares.
	Right.
	A video of it, yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it's evidence or whatever, right?
	Yeah, and clubs have started doing that lock on your phone.
	Which is kind of, which is, I guess it's kind of the only way to keep, keep people like, that's, it's, your experience is here.
	You're not going to take this and go get a gotcha moment on a comedian or something.
	Yeah.
	But he did it with John Mayer.
	It was awesome.
	They did like the music.
	It was very improvised.
	I think the whole thing was improvised.
	And that's scary to me, but they have reports like a podcast, I guess, right?
	You just kind of, I mean, we wouldn't be very good on a college stage, but maybe we have to put some practice a little bit.
	But they had it.
	They had the chemistry and it just works.
	But I just thought, I feel like John is just a genius and almost he could have gotten into a couple different things, you know, but he got into music.
	And so that's where his creativity lies.
	His current mood is awesome, though.
	His little TV show he does on Instagram Live.
	And he was the first guy to do before all these, before there was like pornos on Instagram Live, which took over, he was like, had the first popping Instagram Live and it was really funny and very clever and he's fucking smart guy.
	He's a really smart guy.
	Do you, but do you see, but is there something else that you feel like, man, if I'd have had more, like, do you think you could have been, you know, you're a great producer.
	Do you think, you know, an entertainer musician could have been something else?
	I'm always, I'm like a cultural agitator.
	You might say like, you know, appropriate, whatever it is.
	I think that you can go and read a lot about what cultural appropriation means.
	But I was always felt like a cultural agitator to where I like, I went to school.
	The reason I went to temples is because I went to school for anthropology because I was obsessed with culture.
	Like literally, I was obsessed with like what it means to be a human being, like what, what it is to be creative.
	And what defines you from who you are to create what you are?
	And I was obsessed with like the history of people and like different places.
	Like why do Japanese people dress like this?
	And why do they make music like this?
	And what's Hindu religion about?
	And what does it mean to be like, you know, maybe what's it like to be living in Texas and like work at a cement factory?
	Like what is this?
	Like this is what I was always obsessed with.
	And I went to school for anthropology and documentary filmmaking.
	And I was like, I really wanted to bring people in culture to life in a clever way, in a new way.
	And I worked on some documentaries.
	I even made one a couple of years ago before I started making music about Brazil because I was like obsessed with like the music there and the culture and the weirdness of it.
	It's just fucking weird.
	Yeah, Salvador once and it was wild.
	No, because that place is just defined by it's a fucking mess.
	It's European, it's Portuguese, it's African, it's Indian, it's Japanese, it's like all those things create something.
	And that's what, that's why I've kind of like always shy away from like discussing like what it means to create culture because culture is mutations.
	And for it to move and for things to be created, you have to put two things together that shouldn't belong or that are random.
	Like, you know, a Japanese, like, if you go to, in Sao Paulo, there's a neighborhood called Liberdadge, and it's one million Japanese Brazilians live in this neighborhood.
	And you walk around and see like Japanese guy's name like, you know, Miguel Carvalho Kawasaki, and he's got like long hair and he's fucking walking around like a fucking G. And you're like, that's not the son, I bet.
	Yeah, but that's like, that's a real fucking, right?
	That's a thing.
	And that's like, I'm like, I love that that exists.
	And like, what, what's like, what comes from that?
	And why is there samba music or bossa nova and it comes from these things that just explosions, right?
	And that's what culture is to me.
	And I always want to be part of that.
	I love that culture.
	You love culture, man.
	So even if it's not just the music, music just seems to be the easiest way for people to digest culture is like music.
	Because that's like going to be your introduction to country music, your introduction to like African music.
	The music is it.
	You don't have to read about the history of Africa to like understand a Nigerian record.
	It just affects you.
	So that's why I love music and the idea of culture.
	But I would love to work back in film and documentary.
	That would be cool if I get older because I mean, you know, my days are numbered as a DJ.
	I hope that I want to be like a 55-year-old DJ.
	If I can make it that long, I'll do it if it pays the bills.
	But I mean, at the end of the day, I want to age gracefully and do more things.
	I think music was one thing I do.
	Maybe it's film and TV next.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	Maybe I own a pizza shop or something.
	Yeah.
	Maybe a woodworker.
	I can see that, dude.
	Would you...
	I have to pee too.
	If you want to watch this movie, it's an hour and 25 minutes, but it's not that well done.
	But I funded the whole movie by myself.
	Like, I would get shows.
	I would go back to Brazil.
	Tavela on Blast?
	Yeah, I would get money from shows and go back to Brazil and bring a camera and like shoot shit.
	I shot it with you.
	It's a guy in Brazil that I knew named Leandro.
	He's a filmmaker that I met.
	I worked at this magazine called Colors As a young person, I got a job there and I met a bunch of filmmakers and stuff, and I just kept in touch with them before internet, you know, and this is like 2007 or something, no, 2000 or 2004.
	And I just met some creative people, and I met this guy, we made a movie together.
	And I would never ever suggest doing something like this on your own.
	Like, I just like the biggest waste of money I made, like, and having the pressure of creating it and like having be stingy on the budget, like everything I made money-wise, I put my money for that couple years.
	And yeah, you go halfway down the road, you got to get all the way there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I got to pee so bad.
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah, me too.
	Should we go pee together?
	Yeah, maybe should go pee together.
	Is there different styles?
	How's it going?
	Oh, this one I want to ask you about.
	So ego.
	So like, you know, in the last couple years, I've had a bigger career, right?
	And so, you know, there are moments where my ego starts to get big, you know, and I, and I never, I always knew I had maybe some ego.
	We all have it.
	Yeah.
	But I never really thought like, oh, well, what is, you know, like, and then there's moments where it started to feel really, you know, not out of control, but it grows without my consciousness of it growing.
	Do you ever have any issues like with that?
	Or just, were you ever able to see that in your own life?
	I think, I think, I think that's, people probably see it more than I do, you know, when it comes to ego, because I'm just like, I'm a kind of an independent person and maybe it affects other people's lives, like build up my friends or my family.
	And sometimes they put me in check, but for the most part, I mean, being humble is where I think I got where I'm at.
	Like, you always got to pay dues and just feel, feel good.
	But if you really want to ego check, just go on Twitter every once in a while and just see what people are talking shit about.
	That'll fucking break you down pretty quick.
	I also think I started about four years ago, I did ayahuasca for the first time.
	And that's a fucking ego deflator, like hardcore.
	You do that, and it's like a drug that kind of puts you, like you might even poop your pants.
	It just kind of breaks down that whatever you feel, you become like more of an of a, it naturalizes you in a way.
	I can't explain it.
	Yeah, it kind of gives you the shame.
	Yeah, like, and you're puking and you're thinking of things and you don't, you just, it's, it's, you're in a dark, it's dark and then it's bright and it just, you, you go through a lot of things.
	The best way to explain it, how it helps you is that you have a messy closet, right?
	When you do ayahuasca, it kind of helps put everything in the drawers so you can like understand things a little better because that's what your brain probably is.
	It's like a messy closet sometimes.
	But I've done that.
	The two times I did it, it really helped ground me to where I had another outlook a little bit.
	And I try to use that message now when I, you know, because it is important to not have an ego.
	But at the same time, ego's back to 6ix9ine.
	I got him where he's at.
	Even if it's all big play, he knows he's using it for his advantage.
	Sometimes it could work.
	It could backfire pretty easily if you don't have it planned out.
	If you're not playing chess with it, if you're playing like checkers with it, it could backfire on you.
	Yeah.
	We had, you know, one of my favorite comedians is a guy Chris Dalia, and he would always reference you on his Instagram called.
	Did you ever interact with him about that?
	Did you think that it was funny?
	Yeah, well, he was friends with Dylan Francis early on.
	And I think I met him through that.
	And I never met him, actually, but we just, I didn't understand enough if he was making fun of me or not at the beginning, but I was retweeting it and I thought it was pretty funny.
	Yeah, it was so funny.
	But I was like, I'm not even that special, but I guess I'm like a B-level celebrity that he picked up because I thought you could have picked somebody better or whatever, but it was kind of cool.
	I got a lot of people always tagged me when he did that.
	Yeah, I thought it, because then I got to be, I got to go to, once I started getting like nice green room and stuff, I'm like, what am I, Chris to Leah?
	It made it so it was fun for me because then I got to do it to just make fun, like make, bring him into it, you know, be part of his thing from it.
	But yeah, I was just wondering how that landed on you.
	I never really, we, he always commented on my Instagram and he was like, dude, fucking, he's bizarre.
	Like, you know, that's just really cool about him.
	It was like, real creative.
	You scratch your head when you see some of the stuff he does.
	And I think Dylan Francis, another DJ, was like kind of like borderline comedy in a DJ, which is kind of a cool space because no one really does that.
	But Dylan was really, he would act and does in TV shows and stuff like that.
	Yeah, he's too creative, man.
	He's like Riff Ref.
	Sometimes you watch some of those videos, you're like, what the fuck are you thinking?
	I don't think he's trying to not even land him to be funny.
	It's just almost like, it's just something, which is great.
	A real creator can kind of not really aim for like a success, but just like a shock value thing.
	Another guy who I love who's kind of like half comedian, half dancer is this guy named...
	I always forget his name.
	He's a dancing guy.
	It's going to take a second.
	We need to edit this out.
	Whereas there's this guy, CholoFit Creeper that I like who's Latino.
	Oh, is that dogface guy too?
	He's like a crip, kind of like dances.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I sent his thing to Frankie Kinonis.
	Which I think is the best last name.
	If I could have any last name, it would be King Yonis.
	Kinonis is a good one.
	Yeah.
	It's this guy, Casey Frey.
	Oh, yeah, Casey Frey is.
	Bro, I mean, first of all, he's one of the sickest dancers ever.
	And he doesn't really dance that often.
	But some of his comedy is just like, so, what the fuck?
	And then the way he integrates like dance and comedy, like, I don't even think he does, he does it on purpose.
	He just is like, it's a special.
	This is who he is.
	Yeah.
	I play basketball a couple times.
	We know each other just from, he's a friend of a lot of the DJs.
	And love that guy.
	He's like, so, he inspires me a lot.
	He seems really cool.
	People always say you got to talk to Casey Frey or you got to connect with him.
	Maybe that's a good vibe that I need to.
	I think that's everything that I have, man.
	I mean, I could keep talking about stuff, but, you know, I just want to, yeah, thank you for your time.
	Yeah, man.
	And it's interesting.
	Yeah, man, I do think it's interesting how, like, even just from talking to you, it makes me want to know a little bit more about, you know, makes me want to know more about music, but it makes me want to also have a little bit more respect for the history of music.
	Because, yeah, people don't realize that even just like humans, like music comes from parents.
	Yeah.
	You know, like music, like each sound has like a couple of parents to it, you know, and grandparents.
	And then.
	I think you do the same thing that I do with comedy.
	Like, you know the history.
	Like you said, some of your favorite comedians.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	I do know a good bit about it.
	I think I think, like, you know, you're going to be, you know, you're the comedy of right now.
	So you have to take all the things that happened before you, understand that, twist it up, and then know how far you can push things.
	And I heard Kevin Hart say it once.
	He's like, he has a black comedian.
	He always like, he's going to push it further than he, and then there's going to be someone in five years going to push it further than him.
	It's like their job.
	His idea is just to blaze the trail.
	And I think you, it's going to be the same thing.
	Like, you know, the history and you're going to push it as the character that you are and the person you are.
	And I think it's a little bit difficult now because you have to walk a tighter line with comments.
	I almost like the challenge part of me sometimes.
	Last week, I was like, you know, two weeks ago, I was scared.
	Yeah.
	And then last week, I was like, you know what?
	This is what it is, you know?
	And I think that I can do it.
	It's going to make people be a little bit tighter about what they do almost.
	When you have a set of rules, this sounds fucked up because we were just talking about how there should be no rules or anything, but it also can create something special.
	I'm going to give you a really boring metaphor.
	You're probably going to edit this out, but I went to film school and I went to a class called Iranian Cinema.
	Damn, bro, that's crazy.
	Because I live in Westwood, bro.
	Okay, this might be some people.
	But Iran has this amazing film industry in the 90s.
	And there's a director called Abbos Kiristami, and he made a record movie called Waterford, or something about chocolate.
	Waterford Chocolate?
	Something like something for chocolate.
	Maybe look up the film because I don't want to fucking butcher this.
	Water for chocolate.
	Water for chocolate.
	But he is a famous director because in Iran, it's such a Muslim country and the rules to make a film.
	Like you can't show any women without the hair mask.
	You have to talk about God in certain ways.
	There's like all these fucking rules.
	But these guys made these films where it's like such a narrow line they could walk and they always win like awards worldwide for these films they make.
	This guy especially, because it's just like, he made a lot of films, but I think he, having those rules and having to have to work inside that became something really, you have to push even harder to get that creative juice in people to know what you're talking about and make a message happen.
	Dude, that's so interesting to hear you say that.
	Yeah, because the rules, it was almost like when the teacher or if the government, whatever it is, it tells you, okay, these are the rules, there's something then inside of you that's like, okay, okay, I see your rules.
	I'm going to play by the rules, but watch what I'm going to do.
	Find a loophole or something.
	Yeah, man, that's pretty fascinating.
	Thomas Wesley, thank you so much for being here.
	Do you like Diplo or do you like Thomas?
	My real name is actually Thomas Wesley Pence, but just like I put Thomas Wesley my first to middle name because a lot of country guys have two first names kind of divide.
	But yeah, Wesley's my real name.
	People always call me Wesley.
	Do you feel like you're still Diplo?
	Do you feel like it's been like a like you're a snake or something ever that shed its skin?
	Do you feel like it's just something that I mean people when they when fans see me now they go Thomas because they just read my Wikipedia page or whatever they don't want they don't want to say Diplo.
	It's also not a very cool name, but it's like you know, it's it's more of tribe.
	It almost seems tribal look itself in a weird way.
	I kind of, it doesn't, it never had really a defined reason to be called that, but I, you know, whatever.
	It worked for me, and I did a lot of different music, but at this point I have so many different little bags.
	Like I did like Thomas Wesley, I did like the major laser, did this thing called Silk City with Mark Ronson, did the thing called LSD with Sia and Labyrinth, and it was like a psychedelic project.
	So I'm just like fascinated with like, you can do things.
	You can do different things.
	You can be different people.
	And that's kind of like, it throws you into a tussle if you kind of want to bring out the cultural whatever.
	I do whatever.
	So you can't really, no group can be mad at me for too long.
	So I'm going to be moving on to the next thing by the time they figure out what they're mad about.
	It's interesting, the cultures that are kind of within us, even within our series, within our types of thought, you know?
	Like sometimes we might not even recognize that repeated thoughts that we have inside of us even take on a culture of our own.
	And if we're afraid to act on those, are we like kind of putting a dam on like some ability of our own creativity and stuff?
	Art is like, man, that's the one thing, man.
	Putting art in a box is like, you're keeping yourself from so many experiences that could happen, you know?
	Yeah.
	It's always about being like, open yourself up a little bit.
	And, you know, it's all about just being a nice, good person, being kind, having empathy, and create, but create, you know, do things responsibly.
	It's not that hard.
	You can fuck up.
	Also, you can fuck up and fucking fix it.
	And say a fuck.
	Yeah.
	You can say you can fuck up.
	I mean, look at people always talk about XX Extentation.
	I brought him up a lot in this conversation.
	I don't know if you know his music that well, but he had a terrible, he was a rapper that.
	Yeah, I know just of his death and he had a terrible history with women and violence in women.
	And a lot of people, you know, wrote him off for that.
	And I feel him.
	If they want to, they can.
	and they have the right to do that, but he affects a lot of people's lives where they just...
	People like have records that had this Kurt Cobain feeling, which is really raw.
	And people affected that way.
	Little Peep did the same thing.
	And I think it's okay for him to work at himself and be better.
	And I think the music, like I said, music's about a feeling.
	Music is something that doesn't have to have history sometimes.
	Right.
	A lot of people, I mean, you can also define like Michael Jackson, take him off the radio.
	Some people say like that.
	I mean, do what you want.
	I'm not going to take Michael Jackson off my iTunes.
	I'm not going to stop playing his records.
	If you don't give people the ability to like recognize or learn or evolve or anything, it's definitely such a case.
	Not everybody should be defined by their history.
	A good example is like Malcolm X, you know.
	If you had wrote him off, like, you know, beating women and going to prison and doing things and went to prison, changed his life and became a great leader and an amazing, you know, philosopher in a way.
	So people have a lot to offer.
	I think you need to define what is it that's not right and let them know that and like let them change.
	And hopefully that makes it better for other people.
	Yeah.
	Because cancel culture, it's easy to take down celebrities, but you're not taking down the guy next to you at a bus or whatever that's actually doing damage or like verbally abusing or a woman that's, you know?
	Right.
	That's what we have to, we have to find the ways to change those things, like where it's where it's normalized for people in everyday culture, like in a frat or whatever it is.
	That's going to be the ones to change the world.
	Not just like a gotcha moment on a Twitter or something.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I agree, man.
	It's definitely disheartening to see some of that culture, you know.
	But yeah, but to take it into our regular lives, you know, and to recognize, okay, well, first of all, what are my own behaviors that I could be, you know, like even going back to the Black Lives Matter movement and just seeing a lot of that go on, you know, like it just made me think like, okay, well, let me really ask myself, you know, if I'm talking to a black person, do I have different things in the back of my head while I'm talking with them, you know?
	Or if I'm with one of my black friends, am I behaving, You know, like just little things, which some of it's okay, some of it's just nature, and it's going to be, but just make sure just to check myself to see what's going on, you know.
	And we have to, we have to allow spaces where people can do that.
	Uh, I mean, it's about learning people, yeah.
	Life's about learning and changing.
	I mean, if we if we want to say so no one can change, fuck, we're not, we're fucked, we're fucked because that's we got to change.
	Everybody's got to change, and and that's, it's, it's okay, yeah, it's okay to do better.
	Yeah, um, yeah, it's okay to do better.
	That's a good, that's a good statement.
	Uh, Thomas Wesley, uh, thanks so much for being here, man.
	Thank you for having me.
	Appreciate it, yeah, but next country album.
	Gang, gig.
	Now, I'm just falling on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
	I must be cornerstone.
	Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of my life out.
	I can feel it in my bones.
	But it's gonna take a little time for me to set that parking break and let myself all mine shine that light on me.
	I'll sit and tell you my story and I'll be in the forefront.
	Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jonathan Kite and welcome to Kite Club, a podcast where I'll be sharing thoughts on things like current events, stand-up stories, and seven ways to pleasure your partner.
	The answer may shock you.
	Sometimes I'll interview my friends.
	Sometimes I won't.
	And as always, I'll be joined by the voices in my head.
	You have three new voice messages.
	A lot of people are talking about Kite Club.
	I've been talking about Kite Club for so long, longer than anybody else.
	So great.
	Hi, Sweetheart.
	Please do.
	Anyone who doesn't listen to Kite Club is a dodgy bloody wanker.
	John Maine.
	I'll take a quarter bottle of cheese out of the quarter.
	I think Tom Hanks just buttiled me.
	Anyway, first rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
	Second rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
	Third rule, like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or watch us on YouTube, yeah?

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