The Sevan Podcast - #545 - DJ EFN

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Music producer and co-host of the hit podcast "Drink Champs".Welcome to this episode of the Sevan Podcast!Sign up for our email: https://thesevanpodcast.com/-------------------------Partners:https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATIONhttps://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK!Master of Coaching  - COACHING PUBLICATIONhttps://www.hybridathletics.com/produ... - THE BARBELL BRUSH Support the showPartners:https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATIONhttps://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK!https://asrx.com/collections/the-real... - OUR TSHIRTS... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. What's up, brother? Bam, we're live. Ah, thank you. Are you on the DJ EFN?

Are you on the East Coast? Yep, Miami. Okay, so you're 10 a.m. for you. 10 a.m. Where are you at? West Coast? Yeah, I'm in Santa Cruz, California. Super early for you.

South about 70 miles south of San Francisco. Nice, nice. Cheers. I appreciate you doing this. Cheers, man. Get some water here. What do you go by? Do you go by E or DJ E or DJ EFM?

My friends call me e usually all right yeah is that uh is that appropriate for me absolutely all right cool we're off to a fucking great start i want to show some people something real quick before we get started uh i i entered the podcast game about a year ago and i when i think of the people that i i would like to uh interact with first of all i don't give a shit about ratings it's funny i got a note from buzzsprout the people who uh you know host my podcast and they send little uh emails out telling you how to make your podcast better and like it's it's all just sellout shit.

I just cannot fucking believe it. It's just not who I am. The pieces of advice they give an example would be like, if you do a video on how to grill a steak and it doesn't do well, maybe you should do one on how to bake a steak. I'm like, fuck you. If grilling is my thing, I'm grilling. Right. I don't care if you like it or not. like it or not uh but uh this library of people that you um have uh interacted with is and we're the same i think you're 48 and i'm 50 47 i just turned 47 in may 47 uh here you are

with uh i can't even believe it too short i was born in oak in Oakland, California. Oh, Too Short's big for you. Yeah. I mean, he's big for all of us, but I mean, especially in that area. When I grew up listening to Too Short, he was still selling, you know, I think I had one of the original tapes out of the trunk of his car. Here You Are with 50 Cent, one of the newer guys. LL Cool J. I mean, I didn't even know.

When I heard him him I was like wow they rap in New York Lil Wayne Floyd Mayweather nuts and those of you who are looking through these slides

you're going to see a gentleman in the in the all of these photos also and this is I'm really curious about that relationship it's a rapper named Noriega but But now he goes by Nor, right?

Right. Right. OK. And they have a show called Drink Champs, which is from what I could tell, is part of a larger consortium called Revolt, which is owned by P. Diddy. Is that correct? Rev is the the tv network that distributes our television show and then our youtube uh video okay they're just partners with they license the content from us okay uh dj khaled uh hey is does he have something sprayed on his head there is that his real hair what's going on with the homie's hair i think he he probably dyed it i think i think he he says it in that episode oh he does okay yeah uh rick ross um i had the uh pleasure what a trippy cat i had the pleasure to go hang out with him at his house for a few hours one day he was doing some crossfit ross fit when he was calling. Yeah, yeah. That was awesome. Really, what are your first, before I keep showing off this crazy, what are your impressions of Rick Ross?

Oh, I've known him for years before he blew up to everybody else. I came up in Miami doing mixtapes. I was a mixtape DJ. That's the lane that I created for myself and my brand through my company crazy hood productions and crazy what crazy hood productions and the main thing for for us our mission when we started in in 93 coming out of high school is to like just really help put miami's hip-hop scene on the map and through my mixtapes i had all the guys that were bubbling in miami the first thing they did was usually get on a mixtape you

know on my mixtape um and specifically to ross and pitbull and all these guys they all came through my studios they all did drops they all did freestyles exclusive stuff for the for the mixtapes and i knew all these guys like i knew pitbull when he was you know super young and another cuban right pitbull's cuban uh um crazy social consciousness i don't mean in this sorry if this bothers you i don't mean in this fucked up woke bullshit social consciousness i mean like real social conscious no he's he's a he's a good dude he's a smart dude yeah um and you know he believes what he believes in like to me it's like if you wholeheartedly believe in whatever you believe in yeah then power to you you know cool all right sorry sorry uh so so the mixtape thing you were

a curator of rappers yeah i mean a mixtape dj is basically every mixtape was like putting together a compilation album that's the way i looked at it. And that's the way I approached it. Like I was the A&R for an album. And I put them out probably every few months I was putting out these mixtapes. And this is before in a time frame in the early 90s, mid 90s in Miami where commercial radio didn't have, we didn't have mixed shows out here that played hip hop on commercial radio. So the labels and the artists needed to get their music

out and they got it through mixtape DJs like myself, underground radio DJs, which I did that as well, pirate radio and college radio. And those are the outlets that they used in those times. So we were pretty important because they didn't have the commercial radio to do that for them. And you said you were A&R, what's that? A&R is basically at the label the that curates it helps artists you know pick beats get their features they're the ones that put together projects and so i i was like my own anr i was like the artist that was compiling these compilations which are mixtapes what's it stand for artists and repertoire if i'm not wrong okay uh and when you would mix these tapes would there

be gaps in between the artists like you would you would you would curate them and be like okay this tape is gonna be curtis blow and kumo d and you or you would actually mix them together so it's one long 54 minute yeah yeah it was a it was when i started it was on cassette tapes and it was turntables with mostly with vinyl i tapes and it was turntables with mostly with vinyl i mean i have my turntables right in front of me right now i'm in my office and um and i used to get a i eventually got a four track and i started with a with a cassette four track like a real old school four track and then you know that way i could get creative and putting you know overdubbing sounds and doing different things to make the tape.

It wasn't about just putting songs together on a list. It was making the tape have my personality on it. And so and then I would have my crew. We had rappers in the crew. We would intro. We would do these elaborate intros with skits. And we had skits in between different songs, all kinds of things. Yeah, i remember when

that wow i forgot that albums used to have like skits before the song sometimes right right and imagine it on mixtapes we would go crazy because you know we would have all these songs from your favorite artists but then we would put our own stuff in there it was it was cool so so when you would when you would do this you were basically just a one-man team what about what about legal issues did you have a lawyer did you did you have like paperwork were you guys officially like hey sign here i'm about to put you on a mix no no not when we started and i wasn't a one-man team i was it was my crew out of high school that we all banded together to make this company and and this brand called crazy hood and it was like at the time when we started it was like 10 to 15 of us and and no and i remember I had a lawyer at one point, you know, a few years after I started.

And when I told him that I was doing the mixtapes, he like, he lost his shit. He was like, oh man, you know, this is copyright infringement, all this stuff. But mixtapes is a part of hip hop culture. So it just, it just flew under the radar and for the most part the labels they sanctioned it but once your mixtapes got to a certain level or the artists that they were pushing already didn't need the mixtape then you would get these cease and desist letters from the labels it was a it's a big it was a sham on their part like they totally betrayed us so it was a game we'll use you until we're bigger than you and then we're done with you. Right. And so you'll hear about mixtape DJs like DJ Drama or or there was a big distributor in Miami getting raided by the feds. Like if they were Al Qaeda, you know, and freezing their assets and all this crazy stuff that was going on.

Luckily, I was getting these letters and, you know, sometimes I would just I wouldn't I would wait to put out a mixtape when I would get one of those letters. And then and then I'd be like, all right, fuck it. I'm just going to do another one. And when I hung out with Rick Ross, I was surprised by his personality. I didn't know what to expect, but he really seemed like an artist to me. Like he could have been any artist. Like if someone had been like, hey, that dude's the greatest painter, that dude's the greatest poet, or that dude's the greatest violinist,

I would have been like, yeah. There the greatest painter that dude's the greatest poet or that dude's the greatest violinist i would have been like yeah there was something like uh uh soft about him even though from room to room he carried the gun everywhere when we went in he had a gun with the fucking extended clip in it even when he was working out he kept it you know within 10 feet of him but there was even when i shook his hands they felt like supple and the way his fingers moved and the way he moved, he was, uh, he's intentional as an artist. He's very intentional. Um, he's, he's, he's a great lyricist, which, which is one of the things that I always wanted from the artists in Miami. Cause you know, we're in the South and, and, and we were known for Miami base, like two life crew and all them, which to me at that time, they were equal to like the Run DMC, just with different subject matter, you know? But as the South started growing, we started departing from lyrics and the certain sound. And to me, Ross, you know, he was a lyrical artist.

Pit had his own style of being lyrical. And I liked that about Ross. And he was always very intentional. He knew what he was doing. And he comes from a rough place like the gun thing he's from carroll city carroll city is a rough spot and and so but he he's dope man he's really dope i i forgot about uh miami bass like i can see the album now and they had the bass test right in the beginning we're going to run a bass test yeah some and then yeah yeah that that was an actual group, right? There was an actual album called Miami Bass. It wasn't just a- I wouldn't doubt it.

I don't know if there was a group called Miami Bass. That was more the style. There might have been. I don't doubt that there could have been. But 2 Life Crew, Uncle Al, Poison Clan. We had this whole genre. It became a parallel genre to hip-hop at the time because in Miami

they looked at hip-hop as this New York phenomenon kind of invading. It kind of had these parallel universes. Miami music, which was more of a dance. You danced to Miami bass when you danced with the girls. Here, if you went to a party in the

early 90s, mid-90s, the hip-hop was you just stood there and kind of bobbed your head or you had break dancers maybe come out and you watch them and then when reggae and bass came on that's when you danced with the ladies yeah when when when i was a kid i went to a school uh maybe i don't know 3 000 kids in my high school and there was uh i graduated 1990 from high school and from i don't know probably my sophomore junior senior year i kept a cassette player in my locker it was one of those ones that um came with the tr80 the radio shack computer right remember instead of cds putting into a computer you put the cassette tape and you push it and it loads the i don't know how the fuck that worked through sounds it loaded the shit up on radio shack all the cool gadgets right i remember just going to radio shack just

looking around they were kind of the ghetto gadgets though too right right well i mean for us we didn't know i mean that's right we could afford and couldn't even afford right um so but i but i took that cassette player that was supposed to be for the computer and i kept it in my locker and i would just like i would just bring all my friends over to my locker and i would always have like just the gnarliest rap just like you know all the nwa two life crew all that stuff uh utfo i guess they weren't that hardcore um gucci crew gucci crew yeah sally that that girl yeah that was a huge song out here um UTF-O. I guess they weren't that hardcore. Gucci Crew. Gucci Crew, yeah. Sally, that girl.

Yeah, that was a huge song out here. I had a little bit of Curtis Blow. I think he was in the eighth grade. I went to New York and I got a cassette tape of him. I don't even think you could find him on the West Coast that early. Anyway, my point being is it was all white kids. Right. It was all white kids. And when I hear about hip hop culture, it's always these black dudes talking about hip hop culture. Right.

And I'm like thinking to myself, the biggest part of hip hop culture probably is the part that no one ever talks about. The multicultural side of it. Or the fucking hundred million white kids that grew up in their fucking – in their high schools that never – that's the only fucking black culture they were exposed to or the most predominant piece of black culture they were exposed to. They didn't know that there's not a single black person in their neighborhood. But they embodied it. They lived by it. you know girls who are getting straight a's fucking new i bet you more white girls getting straight a's know the lyrics to fucking the two life crew album than any other fucking if you want to categorize it demographic you know what i mean and it's kind of um

it's fascinating to me like especially as i went through all of you you know as i went through your your um instagram and i started looking at all the drink drink champ stuff and it's just this to me like especially as i went through all of you you know as i went through your your uh um instagram and i started looking at all the drink drink champ stuff and it's just this massive uh portfolio of the artist but i i it's just fascinating to me that it's never talked about about who embodied that culture and what the effect of it had on them and when someone like kendrick lamar brought that girl up on stage and had her sing the fucking song and it had the word nigga in it and then she said it out loud and then he fucking called her out on it that's what i hear i didn't ever see the the video i'm fucking blown away you in what way are you blown away i'm blown away that there's a uh that it's so divisive still

that that that that that and maybe we still have time there's an artist called um i had him on here do you remember his name caleb the rapper on he has a song called let the white kids say nigga have you heard that song? You're talking to me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry No, no, no, I haven't heard that song But what I will say to that is this So I grew up in Miami

And we were saying the N-word I've seen white guys on your show say it I watched your piece Where you guys went to Cuba, crazy I don't know if he's a white guy, but he's not a black guy Oh, he's Latino, yeah, but he's not a black guy. Oh, he's Latino. Yeah, yeah. He's Latino.

So that's what I'm trying to say. We grew up saying that. It was in our vernacular was what we said. But I will tell you that. I'll tell you something that changed me. Why I think that even though it's hard for even us to get it out of our vocabulary because we grew up with it. It made me feel like we have to try to get it out of our vocabulary. I went to Atlanta. It was like, I don't know, maybe mid-90s, mid to late 90s.

My crew is mixed. We're Black and Latino. But we're in the elevator and it's mostly a bunch of Latino kids, a Brazilian, a Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian. And this elderly black woman walks into the elevator and we're from Miami. We're just talking the way we talk and we're throwing around and we're like normal. We're not obviously the way we're looking at it. We're not saying racially as something negative. We're saying it is just it's just the way we talk to each other, like saying bro or dude. Or like or like sometimes how I use fuck fuck it's just it just goes in every right but but when i looked at the elderly black woman and and cut how we were talking around her and figured did some quick math and said this she grew up in uh the civil rights movement most

likely it i'm gonna be honest with you it it bothered me yeah for her and i felt like you know what she doesn't you know first of all i've come to understand in different places different regions everybody's different so you you might be comfortable someone might be comfortable with you talking a certain way in one region you go to another region and they're not comfortable and and they're not wrong for that so i've i've actively you know said you know i'm not going to say it like that i'm not going to say that word you know if i have any you know if i can help it and and i don't say i don't say that word either but i do say in context i don't say n word i say the word when i say it but but i don't say the word i think it's

a bad word right right but like a naughty word i understand the the confusion because of the music like we went i do this film series where we travel to peru i mean the different countries but amazing series amazing god and um my my my one of my friends is with us he's jamaican he's black um and we're all together and this peruvian graffiti artist who's really cool he's the one taking us around really entrenched in the hip hop scene in Peru. He's saying the N-word left and right and throughout the trip. And so finally, my boy turns to me, my boy Drain, he's like, look, man, you know, it's bad enough I got to be in Miami in the States and hear a bunch of, they call us Chico's in Miami, a bunch of Chico's saying the N-word, that that i gotta come now to another country and hear them saying the n-word you know and he he's like i can't take it anymore and and you know i had to respect that and i and i pulled the kid to the side

and i said look do me a favor man you need to stop saying that it's it's bothering my friend uh do me the favor and he just looked at me, confused the kid. And he said, but you guys taught us this. Yeah, that's the irony, right? So I understand the confusion, but I think that we just, you know, if we know better, like how I felt when I was in that elevator and I knew better, I knew the context of history. I knew where it might bother somebody. Like, why do I just because I want to say this word just because I'm going to bother this person, I'm going to upset this person. I'd rather just try not to say it. It's not that important. You know, I agree wholeheartedly.

And it's just like if I have a if I have a 17 year old on the show, let's say I'm interviewing a 17 year old. I think I empathize with the fact that they have parents who are probably watching the show and that I need to be very, very conscious that they have parents watching the show and treat them like how I would want someone to treat my kid. Don't lure them down any fucked up questioning. Try not to swear in front of them. You know what I mean? Be,

uh, have some situational awareness. That being said, I got three Jew boys, right? I got three little boys jewish boys i never want i the fact that they're born onto planet earth where there's a word waiting for them that they're supposed to be offended by their whole life fuck you my kids aren't playing that game right like fuck that you can't words don't are never gonna have if i have anything to do

with it they're never gonna have that control over my voice. I think that word's not still not just a valuable word. If you know, like if they hear someone throwing the kike word around, they should be careful. Like, hey, don't turn your back to that cat. Right. Right. But on the other hand, I don't want I want my boys to be so whole. You don't want to be so powerful. Yeah, because it's what a and I and I this. And Jewish kids are raised a lot like black kids. Their parents whispered them to them, the world's out to get you. Right.

That it's going to be really hard. You've got to work twice as hard as everyone else. I don't even want to tell my kids that. Right. You know, it's – I'm going way off here. But I was so proud of Kanye, the route he took. So he kind of gets that he's, he wants to go super high, high, right? The 500,000 foot view of, of how words work and how love works.

And how did that affect the, uh, do you know what I'm saying about he, he's more red pill where a lot of, uh, the world isn't, isn't,'s more red pill where a lot of uh the world isn't isn't isn't red pill how did that affect the hip-hop world did that drop a bomb on it as he started yeah i mean so we're even off of the conventional wisdom it went all over the place you know for the most part the hip-hop community turned their backs on him when when he you know when he decided to go to the white house and he wore the maga hat and all that stuff for the most part i can't say everybody because that's right you wouldn't know that um and they thought you know i think he said something about slavery being a choice something crazy like that but what you know what i've learned with kaya because then we had him on the

show and i feel like we helped we helped give him a platform where he was he was open to speak for as long as he wanted to which some people criticize us to allow people but whatever i don't care about that part and he was able to get through his ideas and thoughts a lot more clearly to the audience and people understood him and my thing is whether you agree with him or not at least try to understand his position and you know and his perspective instead of just off you know really quick just negating it and i think it changed um i think we had a part a small part at least in helping kind of change you know the the outlook on on kanye the narrative that was being put out there for him. But I definitely think he, again, like how you said about Rick Ross being an artist,

Kanye is truly trying to be the freest artist possible. And that is refreshing. And to me, that's what I believe in art in general, not just hip-hop, in all art. It should be free to do and explore anything without criticism. But we're humans and we suck. So everything we do is going to be criticized. But if you're a true artist, you have to expect that. You have to be ready for that.

You know, don't get into art because you think you're going to please everybody and make a dollar. Because that's probably the last thing that will happen. Pleasing people and making a dollar if you're going into art. You know, the percentage of people that make it. But, yeah, he's freeing himself i'm not saying i don't know that he's truly freed himself you know the way he wants to but he that's his goal and he's he's practicing that he's actively practicing that yeah what what that's the theme of this show getting free right That's the theme of this show, getting free. Right.

Do you remember being a kid and an artist? And those, I'm projecting onto you, but up until your 20s, maybe your mid-20s or something, you build a cage for yourself. Right. An identity. I'm this person. I like this kind of music. I like these kind of music. I like these kinds of girls. And then at some point you're trapped and you don't even realize you built a cage for yourself and you break out of it. Did you ever have one of those moments as an artist?

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. You know, when I was, when I was maybe preteen and a teen, I was into, into, into punk rock, into thrash, into metal. I was a skater, a wannabe surfer. I was into this. And my mom, she's kind of into the arts. And so she kind of instilled this whole freedom of art type of vibe. And then I discovered NWA and Public Enemy and 2 Live Crew and Run DMC. And that changed my whole world perspective because I felt like that was the music of my generation. But I didn't want to neglect.

My whole thing is everything that you've experienced, everything that you were into should be a part of who you are. And just because you get into one genre of music or one thing, you shouldn't, like, that's it, negate or shed that other part of you. Because, like, for me, you you know i was a skater i wasn't the best skater but i was into i was a i was a skater nonetheless like i lived that life i feel like i'm always going to be a skater in my heart you know that that that uh that attitude you know i loved punk rock i loved thrash i loved all that stuff because i i needed that that energy and i found founded an NWA in Public Enemy and I related more to it.

But I feel like it's all punk because if you hear a lot of the early stories of hip hop, they were kind of like side by side with the punk scene. They were both counterculture musics. And so it made sense to me when I found that out later. one i found that out later so yeah but but to what you said you know when you get into your 20s and early 30s and you're kind of like now as an adult trying to to fit in and and make a living and all this stuff you do box yourself in and then when you get kind of i feel like for men it takes us a lot longer to really truly mature and kind of find ourselves then i could you could shed all that and be like no this is who i am i'm all of these things i'm all these things that maybe you don't accept or not cool with did something happen did you have a did you have a rock bottom did you did you do ayahuasca you did no i didn't have i want man i wanted to do ayahuasca

when i went to peru but i i wanted to do i wanted to do peyote from watching the movie young guns oh my goodness my favorite movie of all time that and top gun were on repeat in my house as a kid i wanted to be in the spirit world as they were oh my goodness but i wanted to do like the doors movie too with val kilmer i watched it i don't i can't i can't remember but i know i watched it i'm pretty sure i liked it but i i left you know i, I was a kid when Young Guns came out. But later on, I said, if I'm going to do something like that, I want to do it in that environment, like the desert. I want a Native American, you know, chief or somebody, you know, somebody to guide me through that stuff. And then later on, when I learned about ayahuasca and I had friends that went to the Amazon and did it with a shaman in an Indian village in the Amazon.

I was like, I want to do it that way. But when I went to Peru to film the movie, I was almost down to do it. But then I was like, this is not the right environment. Like, you know, what we're doing here, I don't think that this is the time to do it. But I did want to do it. But I never did it. And I would like to do it still. I want to do it um but i never did it and i would like to do it still i'm afraid of it i'm afraid of what it's gonna reveal to me to be honest with you but the rock bottom i had besides

anything like that was the the 2008 crash the recession which threw me all the way to the ground financially um and i was being told you know by everybody that loved me like all right this this pursuit of anything within the music realm it's over for you it's time to come to grips with it it's time to you know grow up you know your parents want you to be yeah yeah you know your parents always are like come on you're gonna and you know and the thing is is that when i started this journey with my with my boys you know we're from this area in miami called kendall and in miami in general wasn't a big place in hip-hop and so people were like this is a ridiculous dream of yours like you know you don't have any connections to the scene to the industry at large you know what are

you guys doing and so i mean i we we made it through i had i opened up a hip-hop clothing store with it with a partner is nor from you is nor from kendall no no no he's from queens he's from left frat queens okay okay we'll get to him sorry okay yeah so uh you know i started a marketing company i was managing i was i started doing as much as i could and and building these different branches in this tree to try to like to fund the dream to keep it moving and keep it going and um and then the and then you know i had an office after we closed down our store because we were getting raided by the cops because they thought we were drug dealers which is another story but um were you were you no we weren't One thing I was trying to do is create a safe haven for parents to bring their kids to really be able to just have hip hop culture, you know, have access to it. Because at the time, the stores that were available were all head shops, you know, where you find bong, weed.

Yes. Well, I mean, for me, it was like, you know, I just felt like that wasn't fair for the hip hop kid who just wanted hip hop. Right. So anyways, we got raided. The cops. And you didn't smoke weed. You didn't smoke weed. I mean, I tried it in my early 20s. I sold it a little, you know, and it just didn't work for me. It wasn't something like I have nothing against it. All my friends are weed heads, but it's just not for me. Yeah, not for me either. But anyways, the recession is kind of what reset everything for me, and I had a make it or break it moment, and I had to decide, like, am I just going to give it all up? Am I going to – is this all a fake dream?

Like, is this just not real? I just had to really account for everything I had done, and my whole thing was I invested my time, my life into this. And I'm not, I don't care who's telling me what, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna batten down the hatches. And that's when I came up with the idea

to do the film in Cuba, the first film. And that's when we started dealing with the podcast stuff too. Do you hear that people? While he's knocked down, instead of licking his wounds, he dreams bigger. Okay, fuck. My shit's unraveling. I'm going to start making a movie.

Yeah. Fucking crazy. I never made a movie. We were amateur filmmakers, for sure. Did you know this young lady at the time? At that specific time, no, but shortly after that. Karina Rain. Karina who connected us.

And at this point in 2008, do you have kids? No, no, no, no, no kids. I was holding out, man, because I knew that this lifestyle I was living was not to be a parent. And I really I wanted to like I wanted kids. I just knew it wasn't the right time for it, i know now it's never the right time right uh so 2008 what happened when i think of people who got um jammed up by 2008 is this what happened you have a mortgage for a house and you're paying uh 1300 a month and then mortgage the interest rates change and all of a sudden you have to pay 5400 a month and you can't and so you lose your house and everything starts unraveling is that

how it goes or not even i'm paying rent in an apartment i'm paying a lease i'm paying a rent at an office a studio uh and then also the way that i operated my business oh i wasn't paying taxes so i got hit by the rs at the same time you know i came with that old young punk mentality like fuck the man i'm not like what and i'm in my head i'm like what do they care about my measly taxes that's not gonna help anything but they cared and uh and i had paid later on but uh you know i had to pay the overhead and then what i was doing also is i just dumped most of the money i made into all these different things that we didn't know if they were going to make money, whether it was album projects with my crew, whether it was the mixtapes, whether it was

a clothing line that we had developed. And you just didn't know what was going to make money. Some things made money, some things didn't. And so when the crash happened, and mind you, I knew that there was a crash, but I didn't think it was the crash happened and mind you i didn't really i knew that there was a crash but i didn't think it was the crash that brought me down i thought it was my negligence i thought i fucked up i thought like miss like just mismanaged spread yourself too thin yeah which i was i was i was learning everything on the job like i didn't have any like real mentors i didn't i didn't know about managing finances and running businesses. I was just doing it. Right. And, um, so I really blamed myself. I was like, I'm a failure. I suck. But it wasn't until later on when I finally was kind of getting

out of it and doing, and then drink champ started to take off, you know, years later and doing interviews because of that, that other people were saying, man, I was going through it at that time. People that I respected in the industry, man, that was a tough time for me. And I'm like, holy shit, it wasn't just me. You know, so sometimes, you know, in those moments, you think it's all just you. It's all, you're the only one going through it. But what I didn't do at that time, and I preached, which obviously these people didn't do either, is I didn't show it. I didn't go out there and, you know, wasn't bummed about life. I wasn't, you know, blaming things or people. I was just, I just, I just, you know, consolidated as much as I could got back to just ramen noodles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know,

I had some great friends that would be like yo man you got to get out the house we got you on a couple beers or a couple drinks at the club at the bar you need to get out you know because i'm like i can't spend no more do you remember those friends still they're still they're still my friends they're my friends from high school that are part of my crew that that when we all realize we're not going to become these uh millionaires and sell platinum records a lot of my friends were like well i'm gonna go back to school or what i'm gonna go do this or i'm gonna do that but they're all stayed in the supportive role of of the company and the crew and what i do i did i did some stuff as a young man early 20s and it and it caused the house to

be raided and when the house got raided a handful of friends i was close with got busted for cocaine and it was no fault of their own it was just me being a fucking idiot it's a great story i have to tell it some other time but three three of the cats wanted to fucking dime me out even though like it would have done they wouldn't have benefited from it right and one of the dudes was like hey man that like we dime him out and not like our shit doesn't get better right right right and uh this this person went to war for me and and and i ended up staying friends with him flash forward to like maybe 15 years ago ah yeah about 15 years ago. And through just staying close with this person, I was able to get them a job where they made a million and a half dollars.

Oh, wow. And I was just, and I never thought about that until about a couple of months ago. I was like, holy shit. But like, I owe that person something my whole life in my head. That's exactly what I mean. It's like, like i owe that like not not like it's not doesn't weigh on me but like i i want part of my life is to pay that person back if i can that's how i feel when people say you know do you feel like you've made it or you've reached success and i'm like in my mind true success is when i can give all those guys that are a part of my organization a part of my crew that were supportive, at least give them access to jobs if they wanted them and give them access to things that they would like

to experience. And that's what I do as much as possible. You know, if I'm going out of town to a big concert, a festival, and I can, you know, get these guys on the trip, boom, they're going, you know, everything paid for, you know, or if if i could get them if one of them wants to do one of my friends wants to do photography for for what we do boom he's got the photography gig that's that's that to me is the ultimate goal that everybody at least has the opportunity to to to be involved if they want to and that to me is success your mom Your mom and dad are both Cuban? Yeah And who instilled in you This This work ethic This

I don't know what you call it but you have it I don't know man I mean You're an entrepreneur through and through So I was raised mainly by my mother My dad is a Vietnam veteran marine And he came back with all that stuff the ptsd the alcoholism all that stuff and and it that's my mom and my grandfather that's

cool that's cool um and i never i never got a chance to meet my grandfather he passed right before the year before i was born but anyways uh i was raised mainly by by my by my mother because it didn't work out for them. And I was born in L.A. We got to Miami because my dad came over here to Miami in the heydays of the 80s, the cocaine cowboys. I always say that there must have been good jobs for veterans, war veterans, Marines, Cubans in Miami at that time frame. And he went to school, too. He got an accounting degree.

So he had all the right job skills for that time frame in Miami at that time frame. And he went to school too. He got an accounting degree. So he had all the right job skills for that time frame in Miami. How old were you when you came to Miami? We moved back and forth a couple of times. I would say I stayed roughly around 10 years old. Okay, so you remember LA a little bit. Absolutely. And I would go back every year. I still have family out there.

Are your mom and dad first generation? Is your mom born in Cuba and your dad first generation is your mom born in cuba and you're both born in cuba i'm first generation here of course you are and i'm only child so you know just my so the work ethic part my mom just seeing her work i was a latchkey kid seeing her work you know uh english is her second language she didn't didn't speak it well, but she worked and she put food on the table as best as she could. On the flip though, although my dad, there's some horror stories with him growing up and him coming in and out of my life, from a distance though, and whenever he would come around, he was a businessman. around he was a businessman he he he had he had become uh there was a security company called burns security at the time they're like uh rivalry uh brinks or something like that uh yeah and so

he he rose from the miami offices to be the the vice president of the company and he was in time square had his office and remember seeing that and i I'm like, wow, this is, this is cool. And then he left that. And then he started opening up GNCs when they first started, like, and, you know, he was like a serial entrepreneur and he would like fail and he would go dirt broke. And then I would see him somehow manipulate the credit system and come back up and, and open up other businesses. So from a distance, I saw that and he's my dad. So that inspired me. Then I saw my mom working her ass off to make sure that we could live in our one bedroom apartment with some food. And so I think those two things inspired me. Now, had I wished my dad would have

been more hands on and teach me about business, teach me certain things that would have helped me tremendously. And but we've never had a good relationship like that. But he tried in his own ways when he opened some of his businesses. He was he he was like, you're welcome to come in and be a part of them and work with them. But it just never worked out. But I think those two things kind of like are the foundation. What jobs did you see your mom have? She worked. I don't remember in L.A. she worked for like an oil company a gas company in la but here in in miami she worked for miami-dade community college and she started in the

registration office and she ended up working her way into the arts department which she loved and through her i was able to go to school for free which i didn't finish community college i didn't finish it because i was just too busy trying to do this music stuff i didn't finish community college i didn't finish it because i was just too busy trying to do this music stuff i didn't have i just was never a book guy like that was never my thing i felt so terrible because she was so disheartened by me she's like it was free yeah you could have you know just done it it's free yeah that once she went to la to visit family for one summer i found out what credits I needed and I took the credits. I got my diploma. She came back, took her dinner. I'm like here. And she thought she thought I made like a fake.

She's like, ah, it's not real. No, no, no. I went to school and I did it because of you. Wow. You know, I felt terrible that I didn't go. And yes. So so I was able to graduate, got my uh AA at Miami Miami Day where she worked at I was an undergrad at uh for like 10 years I never graduated I'm not joking I went to City College and I went to UC Santa Barbara for probably another seven years seven years yeah my parents dumped so much money my mom not my parents my mom dumped so much money. My mom, not my parents. My mom dumped so much money. That's crazy. Yeah.

Holy shit. I'm glad I didn't end up fucking. But seven years, that's a lifetime. A lot of girlfriends. A lot of parties, I guess. That's a lot of girlfriends. When you watch your mom do this, what do you think it does to us boys to be raised by our moms and see how hard our moms work?

And I bring that up. It's kind of a loaded question, but I always hear there's this movement that women are strong and women are strong. There's this women strong movement, and I'm almost offended by it because it's like, fuck you. I know women are strong. Right. Like I saw what my mom did, like almost like you're belittling. I don't know. I think there's pros and cons of being raised by just your mother. Of course.

Yeah, of course. And I think the biggest problem in this country is not having dads. Don't get me wrong. For sure. It's the leading correlate from everything from cancer to going to jail. I we all need dads and the government should get the fuck out and let dads raise their kids. Both active parents are crucial in kids life. Whether the parents are together or not.

You need those two. My dad was there. I was lucky. My dad was there. I was lucky. And I don't want to throw my dad completely on the bus. He came in and out. And I just think he had a limited capacity because of everything he had been through he also came from cuba he was smuggled out in a

program called peter pan at 13 years old from cuba not wanting to leave his family they just felt like he had to go because they thought he was going to be killed by the communists and then he was in an orphanage in washington state from the caribbean a 13 year old kid in washington state you know in an orphanage. And then from there, without his parents being in the States, he volunteered for Vietnam. And in the Marines, he got shit because they were trying to make sure he wasn't a spy, a communist spy. Operation Peter Pan was a clandestine mass exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors aged 6 to 18. Whose fucking idea was that it was and he and

he held it against his parents for a while um because imagine him he had his whole world torn apart because they thought that he was on a black list that the communists were going to kill him or or whatever whatever their reasons were right right and so when my grandparents came to the states he was in vietnam so they didn't know if they were gonna see him alive but uh i don't know that story's crazy that story's fucking nuts yeah man so how did your mom get here she came on another program it was kind of like a lottery system her and my aunt they came before their parents as well but they came on they came on a regular flight they came to miami and then what we're doing in florida south florida at the time

which people don't realize you know south florida wasn't this big cuban community as it is today prior to um in mariel which is when castro released you know opened up the island released the prisons and and the asums, they would tell when people would get here from Cuba, they would actually give them free tickets, bus tickets to anywhere in the States. Like if you've got family, go, because they were trying to like, you know, like just not have so many people just here, like release the pressure. And so my mom ended up in California. My dad ended up in California also because he was based in San Diego. Oh, through the military. Right, right.

Through the Marines. Yeah. he was based in San Diego. Oh, through the military. Right. Through the Marines. And what the Cuban community was doing at the time is they created these networks and these social clubs. And we were part of one in Los Angeles. And they allowed Cubans to meet each other. And that's how they met.

And got married and had you. Did they get married? They got married. They were married a couple years before I was born. And they get married? They got married. They were married a couple years before I was born. And they lived in Anaheim, Anaheim Hills. And then I was born and then shit started going south. And me and my mom ended up moving to Southgate, where my family lived at the time in California.

And then my dad moved to Miami. And so they tried to work it out a couple times. That's why it's like a little blurry for me because we would move in here. And then my dad would have like these crazy PTSD episodes, guns drawn, screaming Vietnamese, speaking Vietnamese, like wild shit. And then me on would like leave in the middle of the night and jump on a plane and go back to California. Oh, shit. It was like a movie. It was. Yeah, it was yeah it was it was pretty wild but but like i what i was trying to say with all this is i kind of don't want to throw my elbows because when i realized everything this guy had gone through yeah like like you know like yeah i'm

you know i'm i'm disappointed in in our relationship but i understand it right right it's weird how that happens when you become an adult, right? There's things. I can think of so many things that I thought that my parents did was dumb when I was a kid. Now I'm like, who the fuck am I to judge that? Right. Like, I can't imagine going through half the shit he went through. And that was all.

How about his parents having to give him away? Oh, man. And my grandparents were amazing. They lived in Inglewood. They were there during the riots i was talking to him on the phone during the la riots but um going back to the films that's the that was the whole premise of me going to vietnam because my dad and me being apart what i i guess what i filled that void with was i was into all these war movies all these vietnam war

movies in my mind i i was in v Vietnam in a past life as a kid. And so, you know, G.I. Joe and the A-Team, but then it was like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon and Deer Hunter and those movies. Like I obsessed over these movies. And my dad would give me he gave me all his stuff from the military. He's like he didn't want any of it. So I would look at the bottom of the boots and if there was was dirt, I was like, ooh, this dirt was in Vietnam. So I say that. I went to Vietnam.

I was like, I never in a million years thought I would be in Vietnam. But then I traveled to Khe Sanh, where he was based and where he fought these crazy battles that the Marines fought at Khe Sanh, high in the mountains, deep in the jungle. And I got to go there to the base and be there. And it was surreal. When did you do that? Vietnam. I think I went in 2015 or 16. Who'd you go with?

The same crew. We filmed our movie there. And again, and going back to hip hop, like all this stuff is happening because of hip hop. Cause this journey is also because these are hip hop films that I'm making. And so we connected with the hip hop scene out there, which is amazing.

But that was a goal. Like this is this is my coming home as well. Cuba, we call it coming home because we're like following kind of like a family kind of route. But also we say wherever we find hip hop, we find home. And so Cuba, you know, is following my roots. And then Vietnam was a part of my roots as well, because I feel that vietnam had a big impact that war on on my family dynamic those are some hardcore movies you just mentioned i mean obviously full metal jack and platoon are hardcore but the fact that you mentioned deer hunter yeah man i haven't i mean i was a little kid when that came out oh i know you right now that's nothing in a movie i bet probably not but i mean it was pretty intense in that movie

crazy how did you get to see that that was an r-rated movie did you sneak that like on vhs or how did you see that was the crazy shit about my mom like she was like that's her freedom of art she she felt like you know she had her her her ways of you know trying to like shelter me but she really believed in me just seeing whatever and watching whatever. She's the one that bought me the NWA tape because I couldn't get it because of the parental advisory. She bought me 2 Live Crew. Now, when she heard it, she's like,

what the fuck did I buy you? She really was this free, artsy person that, for the most part, was like she felt like if she loved me and she instilled the right things in me, there's nothing exterior that should influence me and i feel i actually believe that uh for those you don't deer hunter that's interesting caleb that you brought that up 1978 i had a i had uncles my dad had four brothers and they would they let me you know what i mean that's how i smoked my

first cigarette that's how i saw the first time i saw like boobs on a screen i think they took me to saturday night fever with john travolta do you remember that movie absolutely but see i'm born in 75 so obviously i saw this movie way later but to me it was a brand new movie when i saw because that was that era too you know yeah i i don't know how it is anymore but like it real. Like kids didn't see R-rated movies when we were kids. Like that was naughty shit. My mom took me to see Eddie Murphy, Delirious and Raw. She went with me, which was awkward at the time. Do you know KFRC 610 AM in the Bay Area from back in the 70s and 80s?

No. They had Dr. Don Rose. He was the DJ. But anyway, he gave away free tickets and i was i was a little kid and i won tickets to rodney dangerfield at shoreline amphitheater and my mom took me definitely remember rodney dangerfield for sure oh my goodness i was just blown away i thought he was a god um i want to keep sorry 49 minutes into the show i supposed to get through the pictures in the first three minutes we're He was a god. I want to keep – sorry.

49 minutes into the show, I was supposed to get through the pictures in the first three minutes. Caleb, I'm going to pull these up just so I can control them. And then you're doing an amazing job. But if I do this, let's see if I do this. Where were we? DJ Khaled. Okay, Rick Ross. Busta Rhymes. uh to where were we to uh dj cal uh okay rick ross uh buster rhymes that's as cool as hell man very supportive of my films early on he actually warned me and said uh you're not going to be able to keep doing these films the way you're doing them

oh and why was that he felt that the popularity of drink champs was going to put me in danger And why was that? He felt that the popularity of drink champs was going to put me in danger. Oh. Because we were going to some dicey places in the film, in the films. And he just was like, you know, you got to be careful. He warned me like a couple of years back already. So but he he he he really, really supported it and showed a lot of love to the films i was in uh new york as a kid

and this was like like fuck man just like when the internet maybe maybe i wasn't a kid maybe i was in my early 20s but the internet was just like becoming something and uh i was uh downtown new york and a car pulled up and it was like a it was some sort of Mercedes. And on the hood, there was this, you know, the satellite dishes that are on the top of RVs on the roof of the car was one of those. And then out came out Busta Rhymes. And I looked at the license plate and it was his car. Yeah, Busta's. It was probably for like one of those giant car phones. He's a legend, man. He truly commands the room when he walks in.

Kanye. Dope. Yeah, Kanye was great. That episode was really a pleasure to do. Was that familial with him? Like when he leaves there, do you feel connected? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, Nori has a different, like Nori and I have different connections to a lot of the guests.

Nori, you know, was in for most of the guests, a lot of them, he was an active artist at the time that they were. So they were peers in that sense. I was an active DJ behind the scenes and more locally in Miami. But I was doing, I was working a lot of the records cause I had a marketing company as well that worked for a lot of these labels. So I worked with Kanye. He wouldn't remember that. I reminded him of that,

but he wouldn't remember that because he did it in every city, but I, I had a different connection, but yeah, after we do an episode like that where someone releases so much of their energy and, you know, and does so much,

we're, we're definitely connected uh the show for those guys who missed the beginning it's called it's called drink champs you can find it anywhere just google it and it pops up it's an audio podcast we're on youtube and we're on television if you have revolt tv on your cable and it's just these two guys right well i mean it's not just these two guys but these are the two front men uh dj uh efn who we have on the show here and uh nor nor he was a legend as well nori uh more kanye this is nuts i was a crazy digital underground fan yeah man rest in peace shock g crazy i got an opportunity to speak to shock g before he passed at a convention years ago so what was was tupac is is that where i first heard tupac was tupac part of digital

underground he was okay i thought so he was uh he was like a roadie um at the at first he was a young kid rolling with them and and it was, yeah, they gave him his beginnings. They kind of helped start his career. Or at least gave him opportunities. And he quickly exploded. He got shot out of there like a cannon, right? He did a, I think I always fuck up the name of the song, but it was a song for a movie soundtrack with, I think, Dan Aykroyd,

if I'm not wrong. And they did a song and Pac rhymed on that song. And his verse was phenomenal. It was a digital underground song. And I think from that, you know, it helped him get his deal, his solo deal. And then we started to see the beginnings of Tupac, the artist. beginnings of tupac the artist am i um there are these there are these groups these rap groups that are just so unique they kind of at least in my opinion they transcend the genre what happened and and digital underground was one of them like i don't know what was that rap i don't know what

that was that they were doing yeah no they were they were definitely hip-hop they just they were creative they were shock g was was a musical genius he could play all kinds of instruments and and he and he always wanted to explore different sounds and be very creative what happened to them they just kind of they they had a couple albums and then they just kind of disappeared right yeah i mean he talks about it a lot in the episode but shock i think kind of he was he was like the talks about it a lot in the episode but shock i think kind of he was he was like the one of those artists that wanted to be free yeah um and he just you know i think he i don't know if he got bored with it or he wanted to do different things

he just didn't want to be tied down to one thing and so i think that's that's part of what happened and he kind of gave his blessing for uh this other artist a younger artist to actually go help them the guys go on tour and play him play humpty so they call him young hump but he gave the blessing oh so that's wow so that's not him well no now if you see it like in the past few years back then yes that was him was him. But young hump is not, is not him. No, no. Young hump is out now. Like they'll tour now with young hump.

Oh shit. That's so crazy. I thought that was, I thought that was Humpty hump. No, no, no. That,

that was shock G playing that. And then sometimes he would have his brother just to really confuse people. But that was him. Is that what Eminem got all the um uh um alter alter egos i mean has that been in the rap game forever yeah yeah that's been a thing in hip hop i think it's definitely definitely shock g was one of the first to really really commit to it i mean on our hall he came out and i think had his brother as Shaq G next to him or something. Yeah.

What the fuck? I don't think I even knew any of that until you just said it. Yeah. I mean, of course, I know Marshall Mathers, Eminem. I know all that, but wow. Okay. Shit. Lessons.

School's in session. Let's keep going here twister twist is ill wow yeah he's amazing yeah he really is amazing right yeah i mean the speed at which he spits with with clarity yeah that's the most important part with the clarity yep how does how do you how does someone become a rapper to do all rappers start as closet rappers does everyone rap in hiding when they start i'm sure everybody has their own journey i'm sure there's people that are rapping as a joke right and they're taking serious some people yeah closet rappers and you know i think anybody that's a fan of the music thinks of themselves as someone that could rap like i was rapping on my mixtapes right you know but then i kind of was like ah you know i'm

not really a rapper but i i was like i could i could write some stuff but um you know i think it depends on the generation too we live in in different times where people uh you know, I think it depends on the generation, too. We live in different times where people, you know, reach certain levels in different ways. You know, I feel like the era that we're talking about here, you know, it's accessibility to studios, to producers. It was that was kind of like the the gatekeeping in the beginning to making it as an artist, because it was so difficult and so expensive to record yourself so you could be the the wackest rapper in the world but if you got into a studio and you had you got a producer to work with you you're already ahead of anybody that's even you know could be way better than you people already start acknowledging you as an artist because you got to that part um it was like that in uh in movie editing too so until apple put out the software final cut pro you needed millions of dollars right to have an editing suite then all

of a sudden overnight you needed 10 000 bucks or less that's right and i just and and i just uh i made all my first movies what living in a car plugging the computer into a cigarette lighter yeah same thing with filming the cameras and even the phone yeah change the game yeah the phone the phone you can make a whole movie now on the iphone it's it's crazy so and and that's um the uh in your movie oh in one of your movies the one from 2012 you go to cuba and you run in you in the ghetto you find a guy who's got a studio set up in a fucking closet with pro tools yeah in the mountains yep yeah a legit studio yeah as legit as they could make it they hand me your parts and film you know in the corner of his room i remember there was a in the film there's crabs i don't know what the fuck the crabs are doing on the mountain, but there's these crabs invading his home and stuff.

Yeah, that was dope. We had a really sentimental moment because we walked around that neighborhood. We were starving, and one thing that's hard to find out there is food in Cuba. We bought some just dry, uncooked pasta, and there was this girl that was we were like, how do we even make this? And the girl was like, oh, I could cook it for you. So we go, you know, into her home, which is like a shantytown area. And her mom had one eye missing. And her and her friend, they made they cooked the food for us.

And they were just so happy to like feed us. It was just like happy to feed us. It was just a super emotional moment. One thing that wasn't in the film that happened is they've served us the food with their best silverware, which was, by our standards, some crappy stuff.

They're there watching us all happy to see that they're feeding us. I go to take a fork full of food and there's a maggot oh yeah and i had to think really quickly because they're watching us they're all happy like this could completely ruin this moment for everybody yeah yeah and um i just thought of that dude andrew zimmer i think or zimmerman or whatever that guy's name that that goes to places and eats bugs oh right right i was already a fan of anthony bourdain

and that's kind of like an inspiration in the films as well but this andrew dude he goes and eats all these crazy bugs and he obviously is alive so i was like well you know what's one little maggot so i just took it down real quick oh you're a boss at that same moment this local guy that's been following us around the whole trip, we call him, we nicknamed him the zombie. He's a wild dude. He just, he found us. He wasn't even with us. He just found us in this maze of this shanty area that we were in, shantytown area. And he just comes in, barging in.

And he was always hungry and always thirsty, always wanting beers and always wanting to eat with us. Yeah. And he barged in. I go, hey, man, you hungry, bro? Sit down down and then he sat down and he started just grubbing but yeah i remember that guy in the film i i used to hang out with a lot of homeless dudes in college i ran basically a homeless shelter in my backyard i'd like and i kept a list of all in in one year i had 200 different people sleep in my backyard and i was concerned i was thinking did that guy ruin the movie at all like he was he was too much no we grew i mean for you we grew attached to him he became okay a character for the

film i think and and he showed parts stuff that we wanted like he was a super avid hip-hop head okay he started spitting lyrics like his the only english he knew was from lyrics and just the thing is is that he he was he had mental issues for sure yeah yeah um but he was harmless in that sense the only thing is we would wake up and he would like break into the place we were staying which we were staying at we rented from a family in a home and they were on the second floor we're on the first floor he would break in and be jacking our beers and and if we had food he would sit down and eat but i mean at the same time they have no like they don't they don't have food over there like they're literally they the families were willing to kill the one chicken they had for like two years to feed us because they wanted to take care of us people are living day to day day to day they're like really day to day it it was it

was heart-wrenching to see it but to see the flip of it is there was a certain kind of happiness that we'll never have here yeah because they kind of like just came to grips with their situation they live day by day but they find happiness and and very you know and and the small things in life that actually matter when when you get to that there's a saying people who don't talk to strangers don't talk to angels i could see that and uh there is a synchronicity that happens when life gets so hard that starts to become apparent and it's often around food right but you know when i first uh my first day becoming homeless in my life the first day i was ever homeless i was just sitting

out in the middle of this park and i'm like oh fuck i'm homeless and i'm like what am i gonna do and it's just you just and my dog okay just me and my dog out in the middle of this field and uh this dude come i was in my 20s and this comes walking up, and he's got a black garbage bag, and it's this black dude with dreads. And I had kicked this dude out of my house probably five times in the last two years, just some homeless dude. And I'd be like – he'd be in my yard or something, or he would just walk in my front door. I was in college. I'd be like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? And I would just be an asshole to him, right?

Because that was what you're supposed to do if some strange dude walks in your house. This fucking dude walks up to me. I'm tripping on what you're supposed to do if some strange dude walks in your house this fucking dude walks up to me i'm tripping on how i'm gonna what i'm gonna do like what am i doing homeless and he opens this garbage bag and he goes hey dude you want a chicken and it's a bag full of plastic rotisserie chickens all fucking perfect in plastic containers and i looked up to the heavens i was like yeah and that dude ended up being like one of my homies for the next three years he taught me the ropes yeah man crazy right around food like you did like you were by the way if you have you can go on youtube and you can watch this movie and it's a real hardcore scene they're basically out in the middle of nowhere nowhere ghetto land and if you live in the united states

it's hard to imagine these kinds of places um but uh and there's no one has any food and some stranger an angel feeds them yeah they have plenty of alcohol though yeah that's how i feel like that's how they keep the cuban people docile um i i have i think that uh what we talked about earlier is that the two biggest issues going on on the planet right now the two biggest correlates of problems are nothing what people think but i think the wise people like me, sorry to stroke myself, um, know that it's, it's diet and, um, and, and parents. I think that that, that is like, that's it. Everything else, I think is the great Thomas Sowell, uh, the economist out of the Hoover Institute says, like how you need, everyone needs both parents at home. Right. You have like, you have the greatest chance and people like me and you did fine without having both parents at home right you have like you have the greatest

chance and people like me and you did fine without having both parents at home i'm not saying it's like but 85 of the dudes in jail it's not because they're black or white or cuban or it's because they didn't have fucking both parents at home that's the correlate and what's weird is you can look at that for cancer obesity all those all those things, the strongest correlate. It's not food drought. It's not how rich or poor you are. It's fucking having both parents at home. And when I see your show and I see just the mass of the culture, and I don't mean to ambush you even though I am. Do you ever get concerned that the name of the show is Drink Champs and that you're kind of – that it's not a healthy lifestyle?

Kind of like I'm so bummed at The Rock and LeBron, LeBron pushing Sprite or The Rock pushing – during this pandemic, he launches an ice cream, a fucking hard alcohol, and a fucking energy drink. And it's like, dude, black people and Samoans, that's the last thing they fucking need, ice cream, alcohol. Do you ever think about that? All of us. Yeah. No. All of us. Yeah, no, that's a huge concern of mine that I would hate for the lasting legacy of drink champs is to perpetuate alcoholism or drinking lifestyle. And I don't see that on the show. I watched a shitload of them and I don't see it, but it is the name of the show and there are alcohol bottles everywhere. But I don't see motherfuckers being like, you got to drink. If you watch this show, you got to be fucking drunk or go buy the shrub. I don't see that in your show.

Right. And we try to preach balance as well. But the thing is, obviously, unless you watch enough of us, you might not catch that message. But both Nori and I, like his wife, opened up a juice bar. And so we both believe in juicing. I believe in fasting. We both believe in fasting. and so we we both believe in juicing i believe in fasting we both believe in fasting we both believe like i'm uh you know not to say that this is any better but for whatever reason i became a

pescatarian and not to say that like i said it's not to say it's any better but it works for me yeah and it was one thing that i do you know i truly believe that you don't look like you drink by the way what do you mean like you like you're you're a bright-eyed you have beautiful complexion and you're bright-eyed yeah i don't i mean i definitely well we're drinking i mean maybe the balance thing i don't know and you know i do crossfit i don't consider myself a crossfitter because i don't have the the fitness level of a true crossfitter but i've been doing it for years and it's done wonders for me and and i'm like like, I need to go to the box and to the gym. So that helps me. And Nori works out. And like I said, we do advocate for balance to be something that's very important.

But I know that that message could be lost to the audience. And the one thing that I'm always worried about and that I'm really worried about is the legacy of the show being something else. And so, yeah, to your point, I am concerned about that. And another thing, just really quick, like for our audio podcast, I've done a PSA, especially for people who might find themselves having addiction problems or anything like that, that i made sure that we put in there and you know little things like that that we'll try to do um at 50 i never thought anyone would want to ever see me work out and about a couple months ago an aspiring filmmaker came over to my house and he's like hey i want to film you work out and i was like oh fuck no one wants to see this fucking old dude work out but i

did but he did and he filmed it and he came over every week for like five weeks and filmed it and he put out these little videos and i cannot fucking believe how much they fucking inspired people they do it's crazy you know how many videos i watched prior to to committing to finally doing cross i hadn't done anything on on a fitness level since high school. You know, I played a little football in high school and I played, you know, street basketball and street football. Since then, it was, you know, late night studio sessions, eating at Denny's, you know, in Taco Bell. Like I was terrible health. And one of my friends, one of my boys that I've mentioned, I mentioned his name is Charlie. And one of my friends, one of my boys that I've mentioned, I mentioned his name is Charlie. He's like and he was always been into like working out and fitness. But his uncle had a huge transformation through CrossFit. And it was a fair it was eight years ago, actually. And he's like, yo, it was a box that opened up called CrossFit Brink. And he told me about it. But I was like, man, I can't imagine myself doing something like that. Like, that's like going in mind, zero to a hundred. Like, let me, let me start jogging or something.

And I watched videos. Those videos were so helpful to prepare me mentally to doing it. I was watching people in my age group, watching people who were new at it and their journey that they, that they documented. And then I did it and I almost died. You know, those first two months I couldn't move, but I just kept going. I almost died. Those first two months, I couldn't move, but I just kept going. I kept going. It's kind of like I tell people that what keeps me committed

is never wanting to feel sore like that ever again in life. That's why I keep going back, because if you take off a week or two and you go back, and after that first or second while, you can't move again. But yeah, man it was those videos were helpful so so kudos for making those is that did you meet uh karina there no actually when i told her that i was doing crossfit and about crossfit she was not a believer she but then she got into it because of me and she's whoo she's way more into it than i am She's she and she's really good at it, actually. Yeah, she got pretty hardcore. She's super hardcore. I mean, if I the thing is, I started doing CrossFit before Drink Champs.

Drink Champs kind of changed and before kids. Both of those things changed things for me. I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to like if I have to if I'm going to adhere to a diet, I need to like nothing could be in the home. You know, I adhere to it and that's it. And so now with kids and my girl lives with me and we have different, you know, styles of eating and the food that's introduced. And then, you know, now I do drink champs and the drinking and all that, whatever, whatever the excuses are that, you know, it's changed, you know, kind of like how my fitness level. But but there's still so many benefits that i get out of doing crossfit for sure uh the show and its influence is beyond just the name of it of course of course i just uh i and and to the back to drink champ yeah first of all we didn't know that it was gonna take off so number one we didn't we were doing a show on series xm before on xm before the merger that's

how far back and then series xm nori and I were doing it out of my studio here in Kendall. It was called Militainment Crazy Raw Radio, which Nori named the show. And it was a show we did weekly for like three years. It didn't take off. Nobody, I don't think nobody cared. And a couple of years later, I, you know, I introduced the idea of doing a podcast to Nori. The name was something because we were always drinking in the studio you're always drinking backstage and you're always

having these crazy conversations around liquor with your friends and that was the premise like let's bring those conversations that we have naturally backstage or in the studio uh in a podcast form and that's where it came from to To the front. How did you meet Nori? So Nori was, when I had my hip hop clothing store with my partner, Eddie Giggs, we had a store called Crazy Goods. Everything revolves around crazy, crazy hood,

which goes back to mental state, to be honest with you. But Crazy Goods was a hip hop store in that era. This is 97. We opened. Miami? Yeah, Miami in Kendall area.

You know, when an artist came into town, a hip hop artist, remember I told you that commercial radio really wasn't doing a lot for hip hop at the time. You know, the artists pre-internet promotion would go to do in stores. They would go to a record store or they'd go to, if there was hip hop stores, they'd go to a hip hop store. So my boy, uh, Phil,

he was the promoter that was taking around Nori, who was on his first promo run for Capone and Noriega, the group that he was a part of the first album they released called the war report. And what year was this? I would say this is late 97, maybe early 98. Wow. And he came to my store and we just, I had my, at that time I had a digital four track and I would get freestyles from anybody I would come across.

And he was buzzing. He was a huge buzz. You know, also as Latinos, we would also identify who are the Latinos in the community and, you know, really be hyped about them. And he was throwing little Spanish words. He's half Puerto Rican in his in his in his lyrics. So we were super, you know, geeked to meet him. And he came through with his crew and his crew and my crew. They hit it off. Him and I hit it off. He did a bunch of for me, which was huge at the time. He did a bunch of freestyles for me, which was huge at the time. And we stayed connected.

And I ended up doing, then he put out his first solo album. And I promoted, I booked him for his first solo show in Miami. This is pre-2000? Yeah, this is 98 for sure. This is crazy. And again, we stayed connected. And I think he was smart also because I think he made these really solid connections with DJs and street team people around the country, which was smart of him to have that network of people. And he was almost on every mixtape of mine. And then Capone got out of prison, his partner.

And they hired me to do the Capone Home concert here in Miami. I did that for them in, I think, 2000. I believe it was around then. And like I said, we were just advocating for each other. I would hear that he would talk about me in Hot 97 in New York. He's all over the mixtapes here. At that time, having a co-sign of an artist of that caliber for a local DJ like me did a lot for me. so I was always like man I want to I want to be able to give something back to this dude for for you know doing so much for me because he didn't have to do any of that stuff he wasn't charging me to do anything right so you know long story short if because it's a long story he ends up moving to Miami at a point he did like a reggaeton album he

felt like the industry the the english hip-hop industry kind of turned their backs on him because he was like really new with that that sound and he ended up coming moving to miami he ended up moving to kendall you know working out of my studio and that's where he i had him just i was like look you can do whatever you want in my studio i introduced him to my producers engineers we did the radio show um how do you know it's real there's so many people there's so many people that are just I don't know just jive turkeys just fucking how do you know the connection's real with him for me and again it goes back to like a balance of of what you you, how you're helping each other.

You know, artists very easily will will take advantage of fans and people who look up to them. And it'd be one way. But I always wanted to make sure that people respected myself, my crew, my company and what we brought to the table. So, you know, I would just be like, if he asked me for a favor, do something cool. I need you to do this for me. But he would do it. You know, you know, he would sometimes hit me up. Yo, I got this for you. And then I would in kind return the favor, you know. Yeah, that's I used to drive Turkey. Someone who's unreliable makes exaggerations or empty promises. Yeah, they're like there's like a when I grew up, the years I spent in Berkeley and Oakland, there's just a ton of fucking hustlers on the street. Yeah.

And it's about, my main thing is consistency with people. Like be consistent. And if people lack consistency with you and how they act and treat you, then you know that that's bullshit. That's a bullshit friendship. And ever accused of being naive or too nice to people or too nice to people. Well, in the earlier years, I was way more aggressive in my approach to everything i did okay i had a crew of dudes with

me 10 15 of us um and we you know some people might not respect us whether it was a part of town you're from whether it was that we were mostly latino there was different reasons why we would have to like you know be a little bit more aggressive and assertive. But I felt like there was a point where I kind of got humbled or I felt that aggression was just, it was just, it wasn't, it wasn't needed. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't needed. And so I kind of toned that down and, and, and it's like I said, I don't think I'm too nice. I think I,

I expect it to be equal. The exchange between people, you know, if I don't have a problem doing more. But if I see this completely lopsided in one way, then I'll disengage. This sort of this posturing that maybe you used to do to get respect as opposed to just like you speak for yourself. Did you consciously tone it down or just you got older and it toned down no consciously you did consciously i decided what do i want to do i want to get into beefs i want to get into shootouts i want to go to jail what what what is the fuck do i really want out of all this you know say i would get mad because i felt like i would mentor younger people and they would they would come up and kind of blow up a little bit beyond me and then like completely act like I didn't help them.

And I would get like I was just it would just get me really angry and pissed. And and there was things were happening where like younger crews were coming up locally and they were they were attacking us because that was the way you got on in hip hop. And so we would have like these rumbles and fights and guns would be around. And I just like, OK, where is this going it's going nowhere good yeah i have a respect already we already made a name for ourselves locally where you know what am i here for i'm not here for any of my friends to go to prison um which unfortunately one or two did and and i'm not here for anybody to get you know hurt so let's let's let's tone this the fuck down. Let's keep it business.

Let's do business. That's the drug dealing culture too, right? Like you're just slinging some weed to smoke your own. Then you start dealing like eights and ounces. And then next thing you know, you're like, fuck it. I'll drive to Mexico to get a pound. And then someone's like, hey, bring some coke over the border for me. And next thing you know, there's dudes with guns.

And you're like, what the fuck? I'm just trying to like what the fuck happened and you're like i i tap i'm out you know what i'm getting it's kind of funny how there's it's like that in the hip in the music world a little bit too how hard do you want to be it's the pursuit but it's the pursuit of money right i ultimately identify what the problem was like we're like i would divert from what i was into i I was into hip hop culture. I was into creating art. But then I would divert from that to make money because money was more important. And that's kind of where I came up with this idea.

We're like, fuck this, because you'll you'll burn people for money. You'll lie to people for money. You'll do whatever the fuck you need to do for money. And that's what I identified as. That's that's a problem. problem that is a problem and i don't want those kind of people around me so if i'm if i don't want those kind of people around me i can't be i can't like exemplify that i can't be that so i decided that it's money's not going to be my driver you know obviously we all need money and you need to make smart business moves, but I'm not going to be this greedy motherfucker trying to jerk people or or outshine people or push people to the side and fuck people over just to make make ends meet. So now that's what helped me. Did you read a book that got you into that kind of opened your eyes to that or?

I read several. That's another thing my mom was always doing to me. She was always pushing these self-help books down my throat, these audio books, whether it be Tony Robbins when I was young or all kinds of shit. She was always throwing my way. I would listen a little bit and get little pieces, but until I picked out one that I wanted to read myself or check out, I really like Napoleon Hill. I think it's called Think and Grow Rich. He did a whole series, which is actually way more amazing. The book is condensed. Do you know anything about him? Just a little bit. I know that book, Think and Grow Rich. What it was is he was tasked to study successful people in all different types of careers and sports and kind of identify the common denominators in their personality characteristics and the way they approach things. And he made up and then he made a book and a series about it. And that that book really was was very helpful. When you read it, did you see shit changing just all around you right away? Yeah, I did. I did. And, and, and, you know, when the recession shit was going on, the, the shit that was popular at the time was the secret. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I watched it and I, and I fucked with it. I was like, man, this is dope. But then I had

friends that watched it too. And, and, and what happened was there was two types of people that got something out of that. The people that said, said I'm just gonna sit at home and dream about my life being great and then look around and be like where's the check where's where's everything or the people that are gonna understand that yeah you know thoughts become things but you have to you have to be proactive you can't sit your ass you can't be lazy about it like you have to go out there and do them but with intention and that's what i got out of the secret as well i thought it was dope you know i took bits and pieces i'm not i'm not really into like like i don't like organized religion i don't like to be like in like a cult

mind state like i take what works for me from everything this might work for me this might work for me try to make it my own and move forward but there is something do you think that there's something going on here that's um not being talked about internally that can kind of only be pointed out just like um i don't want to use the word magic or miracle or mystical because it makes it too far away but just in terms of uh finding food in cuba finding the napoleon hill book having it change your mindset the the the powers of manifestation the powers of how thought gets you on the right path that there are some components and elements here that are um intangible but real as fuck but real as fuck kind of guiding like you got to get on this this that you got to get on your path that I can't even talk to or point at.

But it's, but it's real. You know what I mean? I wholeheartedly believe that to be true. I've had things happen in my life that are kind of unexplainable. Yeah. You know, go along those lines of kind of manifestation and intention and all that stuff. you know go along those lines of kind of manifestation and intention and all that stuff but i don't like you know what i've noticed is that when you talk to people about it if they're not if they're not in that mind state it just i don't say it's a it's a buzzkill they're

like uh you know i don't know it sounds like you sound like you're into some mystical shit right and that's not what it is you know it's it's just it really is man it's just just working doing what you do and just having clear ideas and intentions. And the thing is, it wasn't new to me because I did that out of high school when everybody said, you're fucking crazy. You have no connections in in hip hop or the music industry or anything. You're nuts. But what I did is I was reading all these articles from Master P to to Luke to to Eazy-E kind of like trying to build understanding of the industry. And then I kind of saw this lane, this road that I can kind of navigate and say, OK, I see a path. Yeah, I see a path. It's not going to be easy. That's the thing. It's not going to be easy.

The people that subscribe to The Secret is that they look at a bicycle in the window and the bicycle should appear at their house the next day. It's not going to be easy, but you will get there if you're consistent and persistent about it did you ever meet easy man i wish man he's definitely one of one of my idols for sure like nwa was just crucial for me nwa and public enemy those two specific groups i was thinking today when you came on there's so the crossfit community is kind of like it's a cult it's a family like it's a pretty hardcore cult and there's all these big names in it right not not big like in the world like we're fucking a tiny little fish we're a giant fish in the world's smallest pond right and we all think that the world knows about us and shit but

it's not at all but anyway so uh i think about how heartbroken i was like when uh easy and dre broke ways oh yeah like that shit just and i'm just this kid you know in california and like like i'm even even in high school i'm like i wonder if i could drive my car down there and get them together so they could talk i mean you know what i mean just dumb thinking dumb shit and and i think about that in my community too, in CrossFit, I was like, fuck, I wonder, cause there's people I beef with in my community. And I'm just like, fuck, maybe, maybe that's not good for the big, bigger. I was thinking about that, that just,

just morning about having you on all the beefs that you've witnessed and how it kind of hurts the fans. Like it hurts their hearts. Yeah, man. It just, that's when i feel like humans we just we have we're not evolving man like we just i always say like humans suck we just we go down to our primal and we just do things that we know is not beneficial to people and we we beef over dumb shit like to see like there's, like in hip hop right now, there is a problem. People are dying.

People are getting killed. These young kids are rhyming about things that they do and actively going out and doing them. And then also there's the whole thing of pill popping and all this stuff is popular. It's easy to be an old man and be like oh i come from the generation where you know we were we talked hardcore shit but we're trying to like tell you not to go down that path we we we didn't you know we didn't talk about we

talked about being a drug dealer but that you shouldn't do it and and we didn't do drugs ourselves because you know the dealer doesn't do the drugs but unfortunately man it's just i don't know man you get me down that road i start to get a little depressed about the world at large and now that i have kids it just makes me way more sensitive to a lot of topics and issues it's – yeah. Yeah, it's a trip. You know, when I lived in Berkeley, Oakland was on one side of us, and Richmond was on the other side, and they were like two of the murder capitals in the United States. And I lived in Berkeley, and it felt like just one giant city.

But because I didn't hang with any of those dudes, it was – it who you hang out with the shit the trouble you're gonna get in you could be fucking one city over you could be one block over you could be in the fucking hood but if you don't hang with those cats you're probably not gonna get shot right i mean the only difference nowadays is that social media has kind of leveled a little bit of that playing field yeah where there's a cross-contamination oh explain that to me what do you mean or you know maybe you have some kid in in a suburb start talking shit in the comments on some dude that's not from the suburbs and yeah and then they might see each other at a club and it boils over like that's the type of stuff that's happening where before you could be in these isolated areas and never see each other right i'm trying to think i besides the kid who brought a gun to school in the second grade

and then it was like nothing he just took his dad's gun and passed it around i never saw a gun in school none of the kids did you see guns in high school yeah i mean in junior high we had like i witnessed my first drive-by at my junior high oh i was i was uh i had to i don't know if i should be saying all i mean i've said it before but i had the anarchist cookbook yeah yeah i had that i was making bombs and and selling them to people and damnraping banana peels. Yeah, the banana, the pine needles, and orange peels. That's part of it. You can make all these crazy booby traps. And so, you know, I did see a lot.

And then in high school, there was gangs. You know, there was definitely gangs out here. And I saw a lot of shit. A lot of people get shot or stabbed. Not a lot. I mean, I say a lot. But I saw it enough. shit. A lot of people get shot or stabbed. Not a lot. I'm not going to say a lot, but I saw it enough. But it happened.

Right. I want to go back to this. Speaking of wild people, you had the game on the show. Yep. Why did he come on with that? Why did he come on with that? Why did he come on wearing this? I think it's just kind of like the COVID wear at the time. Oh, it was?

I mean, that's just, I'm not saying that because of COVID he wore that, but he was probably wearing that a lot as a mask during COVID and just wore it, you know, just for the look. Okay. And then eventually he took it off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like Pharrell had was wearing, I mean, this was, we were did his fresh out of quarantine and Pharrell was wearing a mask for most of the episode and then he kind of like brought it down. Did you have any COVID fear?

Um, not really. I caught it early on um i felt no i really didn't wasn't as me personally i wasn't as scared of covid i felt you know i was more worried about the effects on society of how the way we reacted as a country as a government me too i saw it early on like bubbling what was going on in china and i had a trip uh someone was flying me out to i think new orleans and this is it wasn't even hitting here yet and i told them you know like i told you with having my kids i'm a little bit more sensitive to things and so i told the guy i was like yo i can't do this trip man because there's some shit going on it's a covid 19 pandemic thing that i think is going to start coming over this way and it's

going to disrupt travel and and stuff like that so I don't want to be stuck out there and sure enough like the next week um I probably wouldn't have got stuck but it was close enough but uh that's all I was worried about I was more worried about how we were going to react as as a society to it how many kids do you have two I didn't see them on your instagram i don't like posting them on social media no and why is that i just i don't know i don't i'm kind of like that that old school mentality of you know you don't you don't really talk a lot about personal stuff you don't put you know like my kids to me are innocent they don't need to be posted on social media. Me personally, this is how I feel. Yeah. Yeah. If someone, I don't know, I always think about the worst things that could happen,

but I hope for the best, but maybe someone doesn't like me and maybe they, you know, they identify my kids and maybe they want to hurt me that way. Or I don't know. I just don't know. I just don't feel comfortable posting my kids. And I mean, I'm not going to say I never have, posting my kids and i mean i'm not gonna say i never have but i i really try to not do a lot of that oh i had a dear friend on who you may have heard of uh dave castro he used to run the cross of games and he told me that he said he doesn't put his kids on and i said why and he said because i wouldn't i don't want my kids ever to be somewhere this kind of fucking rocked my world when he said this because i post pictures of my kids said, I don't want my kids ever to be somewhere and someone approach them, even if they're good people. Be like, oh, you're Dave's kids.

Absolutely. And I was like, fuck, I don't want anyone ever approaching my kids either. Like stay the fuck away from my kids. Don't even look at my kids. I post pictures of them and them doing crazy shit all the time. I tell my girl all the time, I'd rather be over exaggerated in my protection of my kids than than sorry that something happened right so i'd rather someone say oh you're a little paranoid well fuck it when it comes to my kids i will be over paranoid about things yeah not to say that i'm sheltering them and not letting them do things

i'm just saying when it comes to like exposing them in certain ways you have a podcast that's a parenting podcast also the fatherhood's podcast yep when did you start that uh i think when as soon as my girl got pregnant with our first um so about four years ago and then shout out to my boy manny digital and and kgb over there uh you know i just me i was already talking to my friends who were fathers about what I should expect, just consulting with them. KGB doesn't

like to be seen. He's old school. He doesn't even have an Instagram or anything. Is that the real buff dude I see in a lot of your pictures? No, that's Charlie, the one that I keep saying Charlie. He's got big old titties. He's the one that took me to CrossFit. Now he doesn't do CrossFit anymore.

He's just at the gym pumping iron. But yeah, so we said, look, we're having these conversations. We think the community, it would be helpful in the community. You know, we're all like hip hop dads, basically. And we think that we feel that hip hop fathers have gotten a bad rap over the years yeah um so like let's let's have these conversations and and hopefully you know we can help some people while we're helping ourselves we're having real conversations that we were having on the phone without recording it in the fatherhood podcast and then we have guests like we'll have like bumby

talking about kind of being a grandfather we'll talk about angie martinez talking about being a mother to boys in the me too movement you know having different perspectives and different people on parenting and but more in line with with fatherhood um do you do you can how do people who are part of the hip-hop community identify themselves so like if you go to a crossfit gym people would call you themselves? So like if you go to a CrossFit gym, people would call you a CrossFitter. If you go to a Christian church, you know, people call you Christian. Does the hip hop community have a like do they are they called hip hoppers? Are they?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's changed over the years because hip hop has become this global. Genre of music that's like I wouldn't consider every fan a hip-hop head um but the thing is where i can only identify from where i came from and so the the way i came into to first of all when we were young we were living hip-hop culture besides listening to the music we were all break dancing we all were rocking around with boom boxes i was doing graffiti so we were already living the culture and that's those are the elements of the culture part of it you know and so once i learned that this thing's called hip-hop the rap music is the music of the culture and

it's that and the other then now i'm like okay i'm in hip-hop culture i'm into this and so in miami locally there was literally a few thousand hip-hop heads it was it was it was like i always tell people it was almost like identifying the goth kids in school yeah that's the those are the goth kids those are the those are the the you know the jocks and then these are the hip-hop kids yeah yeah yeah so that's back then it was a lot easier to say because we would all go to the same clubs there was only very few clubs you know or parties um and we would all see each other same clubs. There was only very few clubs or parties. And we would all see each other and kind of know each other by face.

Didn't matter what part of the city you were from. We'd all culminate for this love of this thing. It's changed over the years because it's become so huge. So I don't know that I can't speak for a 19-year-old kid who listens to rap and considers, you know, if they consider themselves a hip-hop hit or what they consider to be a hip-hop hit but this is how i consider it you know i feel like if you're into the culture you understand the culture you know kind of the history of the culture uh more or less the elements of it and what it what it means as a bigger thing just in the music itself than just rap music then i feel that you're a hip-hop hit are there any songs that you think that have just fucked our culture like um like just set us down the wrong path like nwa's fuck the police i mean i'm sure that it's

it there's a good argument to be made that like gangster rap has fucked up a lot of shit but then again i could say that argument for metallica i could say that argument for you know suicidal tendencies i could say that for butthole surfers i could say for you know a rain you know like whatever you know like when i used to when people used to criticize hip-hop i used to say to my i used to think about like the rap pack and frank sinatra how they were down with the mafia right like yeah they didn't talk about their music but they they were they were like the mafia's arm of music you know like they were what made them look cool and stuff so i think we have bigger problems than than blaming it on just hip-hop you know like it's not hip-hop's fault because again i subscribe to the idea that art should be free and open to

interpretation i think people should just be better you kind of said this already be better parents to your to your kids so that when they listen to fuck the police they don't go outside and say to a cop fuck you because nwa told me yeah i never did that but i always get the impression that people did do that i never listened to i didn't hear fuck the police and think anything less of police to me it's just a song but i'm sure there were people there were i'm guessing that there were crowds that that that invigorated i i tried what i tried to do is understand why they were saying that at a point and this is where public enemy helped me a lot and and putting myself in different people's perspectives and then looking at history because

that's another thing i feel like people don't have they don't have context because they don't know history people refuse to to learn about things so then they take it for what it is right now and if you do that then you're missing a big part of the problem right and so i would look at okay why are they saying that and then and then as i grew up and i started to have my own interactions with the police then i started to realize yeah i'm not not happy about these people either you know the policing could be better and if i went to school and i had a uh criminal justice class and and and i had a teacher mr brett amazing he was he was a police officer before he became a teacher and he was great man he was amazing and he

he taught us a lot about you know the pressure and the fears that cops have and why you should treat them a certain way when you interact with them and i adhered to all of that yeah and usually it was went well usually most cops were great but it was just those couple of bad apples that could really fuck it you know fuck everything up and make you fear all of them right you have to stay for all of them so you know it just depends man you ever spend any time in jail you get arrested arrested? Yeah, yeah. I got my jail. I have, I guess, two jails. But I got arrested. Do you know the, remember Ilion, the Ilion thing that happened in Miami with the kid?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a ridiculous story with that. And part of my problem with police. I knew it. All Cubans know each other. I knew it. They were all there. No.

So that was a big national news story obviously and it was huge the family where they had the kid remember when they raided the the house yeah for people who don't remember will you give us just a brief story that there was a kid who needed to be deported or something right and they came with his mom yeah he came on a raft the mom died in the ocean uh-huh the family here you know she risked her life to get her to get her kid here then the family here took him in but then i i believe castro was still alive yeah castro and the regime used that as a political you know anthem for themselves like they just amplified like this is a problem they wanted to use that on the on the

world stage and they were and then the father in cuba which i actually understand the father's like okay the mom died i need my son back yep yep yep yep yep you gotta look again perspective take the policy for a second perspective i feel them i feel them give me my fucking kid back or i'm burning the whole world down father was like you know mate of course he was used as a political pawn as well, just like the family here was used as a political pawn. Yeah. And then the father fought, and then finally, you know, the government, the U.S. government decided that, yeah, they had to give the kid

back. The family here, diehard Cubans, they were like, nope. And the local Cuban community were protesting it and, like, kind of surrounding the house, and then the feds went in and by force had to take the kid out. don't think they hurt anybody but you know they forced for entry so when that happened um protests sprung up all over the city cubans were protesting all over i had my store that i mentioned crazy goods on a street where down the street they were doing

a protest and this is before i go to cuba my friend who went to cuba with me garcia who was also one of the filmmakers with me and he was a rapper in my crew he's cuban as well so we both looked at each other this is history right now unfolding before us yeah let's go and look at least go look at the protest go check it out we're cuban let's just go and see what's going on yeah yeah so we walk over to the to the where i mean we drive over park, we walk over to where they're doing it. And they were just stopping traffic. It was like hitting pots and pans, dancing, singing. They were just being annoying to the traffic.

They were stopping traffic. The riot police get there. We didn't even go into the actual protest that was walking in the streets. There was a cop that stopped us and said, you guys stay here in the corner the the riot police are going to clear those people out when they come back you guys can leave because we wanted to leave actually we're like i told when i saw the riot police i told my boys like it's time to go yep yep um the right police clear out they come back mind you it's a corner with it's me my boy a little kid a little cuban kid yelling obscenities obscenities about he's like janet reno's a bitch and and cleanse it sounded even more funny um

and then there was a an older couple and then another couple younger couple where the where the woman was pregnant that was the group that was there on that corner when the right police are coming back they're tapping their their batons against their shields and that's dictating their pace that they're watching so as i see them getting closer to their point of where they started which is the intersection when we're on one corner i noticed that the pace was getting faster there's nobody now on the street we We're the only people there. And the one cop that stopped us from moving. And I'm like, where are they going with this? Where are they taking this? Like, what are they going to do? There's nobody else. It gets faster. It gets

faster. It gets faster. And then it gets to the point where it's like, and they just start, it's like 50 cops because it's a big, big street. They start running to us. And there's not even a dozen of you no a little kid talking crazy shit and me and my boy we were probably the the most you know that that they would be worried about we look at the cop the one that started yo and he just turns around and walks away oh shit and it maybe you know i'm saying 50 because that's what it felt like maybe right right right right many dudes with shields yeah and they're running and they're shedding they're they're running at us and they start throwing shit to make themselves lighter so they could run at first up for one thing i'm like

yo what is going on i told my boy boy, run. So I start dipping. I'm running. I'm running. I don't know what happened. The little kid, he zoomed right past me. He was a little skinny little kid. He runs right past me. And one dude just gets a beeline on me.

And he's like, he's on me. He's shedding his helmet. He throws his helmet at me. Hits me in the back. He throws his shield. He's like just throwing everything off so he could run faster. I turn the corner thinking, well, maybe he just wants me off this main street. So I turned the corner.

And when I turned the corner, I slipped on a piece of dirt that was there. And he just got on top of me. He started just beating me. I always tell people, I felt like this guy was beating me like if I raped his mother. Crazy. That's how angry this guy was. And he was just beating me me he was choking me i had a chain a gold chain he was like yanking me and like twisting it and i mean luckily he he

didn't beat me too too bad he picks me up and then he like zip ties my hands and then he tries i don't know you know that sometimes they use this tactic where they they bend your thumb yeah this swells up and then they have the twist ties really hard he did that to me threw me in the back of a paddy wagon i was by myself now my hands are killing me they're swollen i'm you know i'm a little beat up then the paddy wagon starts doing donuts and i'm flying around the pad oh shit oh shit that's like how they killed that one kid right i don't know man but this is all happening and and the cop was Latino, too. Like he was a Latino cop. So it's not a racial thing. It's just, again, I don't know what the fuck was going on.

And and then my then they stop and they had like this. They created like a mobile headquarters in a shopping plaza. And I see everybody had got caught except the kid. And then they got the pregnant woman. They put her on the other side. The paddy wagon was divided into two parts. They put her opposite of her, of her husband and he was crying.

She's pregnant. And they were stuffing the paddy wagon. And then they took us to, to the County jail and the County jail, you know, people weren't happy with the Cubans protesting. And a lot of, you would have thought that Haitians and Cubans were kind of rivals to it at this time because of the political issues that they were dealing with and they threw me and my friend into a haitian cell where there was a lot of haitians and but but

everything was cool like the haitian dudes were cool they were like it was cool yeah yeah it was cool it was cool cool enough it's cool like one dude like you know we had to immediately the house man's like y'all got to take a shower part i was like oh fuck man i don't take off my clothes and take a shower when they jack my shit and but while i'm taking a shower dude was like yo you dj oh shit whatever i mean that was the experience you know my girlfriend at the time she bailed us she bailed me out and uh and and we got bailed out and and then yeah so that's that's what we did did charges get dropped for that so a bunch of uh cuban lawyers were were doing pro bono work for all the cubans that were getting

caught up in that and yeah we got we got them to to drop the charges oh shit that's cool yeah so yeah and then i had another incident where I got, I think I had an overnight locker, but yeah, that was the most memorable one. Is, is, does he go by Noriega at all anymore? Yeah, yeah. You could call him Nori,

Noriega. He's cool with both. Okay. Does Noriega live close to you? His house? He used to. Now he lives in more like North Miami. Okay, but still the same city. Mm-hmm. And your Drinks Champ studio is in Miami.

We don't have a set studio, which we should, but we kind of are mobile. We've been doing it out of a bar. We have friends that own some bars. Oh, okay. Yeah. During quarantine, he wasn't using the bar so he was like just use my bar and we've been there ever since okay that's cool so that is and that's what i meant so that is your studio the bar is your studio yeah yeah yeah yep and um but you also will travel to people yeah we will do we've done stuff in la a bunch of stuff in la new york new orleans we went to the

recently the essence fest and how often are you doing shoot uh shows every week practically you do one a week i would love for us to do just one week we i i say we're like firefighters like because a lot of people come a lot of artists come to miami so basically we'll get the call and sometimes we just activate so like the other two weeks ago i think we did like three or four in one week we did two back to back in the same day so it will literally be like uh hey um j-lo's in miami and my friend knows her and she said that she'd come on your show and she but but she has to do it like in three hours. You'd be like, all right, cool. We'll see you down at the bar.

If it's J-Lo, that's going to happen. It just depends on the, on who it is. Right. We know it was going to be, you know, how hard it is, how difficult it is to book that person. How about the Island boys? Would you, would you, would you fucking get your shit together for three hours for them? I mean, I don't think so. They can come to my office and do our other show, Beer Fest Fridays.

What's up with those kids? What's going on? What are what are we seeing? What's their hit? Do you know anything about them? I mean, I think I just know what everybody else I just last night, though, I came across their interview with Steve-O. Steve-O did an interview for his's podcast i don't know man i just think they're two two kids you know how you say are people closet rappers or whatever i just think they stumbled onto this and it's you know nowadays the the what you know it's it's not just chasing a career and and kind of like xyz how you make money it's like going viral is a form of making money because once you go viral you can monetize that and and so they they figured out a way they went viral and they're taking advantage

of it i'm not mad at how they're taking advantage of it but i don't really know much of their story uh when i found out they were cuban i was like oh damn but oh they are cuban yeah they're too cuban yeah they're they're you know they're probably first or second generation okay i had no idea. Okay. Yeah, they're Cuban, and they seem like good kids, actually, from the interviews I've seen. They don't seem like bad kids. I just, you know. They don't seem like bad kids at all.

They don't seem like bad kids at all. But let me ask some more pointed questions. How cognizant are they? They're tattooing their face, dude. Yeah. They're tattooing their face. How cognizant are they're tattooing their face dude yeah they're tattooing their face how cognizant god i'm an old fucking man how cognizant of them is there a plan like let me go way far out there was there someone who came up to them and like some fucking jewish guy with a fucking suitcase who's four foot eleven is like listen boys this is what we're gonna do here's a plan over three years we're gonna do this we're gonna approach this social media strategy you guys are gonna get some tattoos on your faces you're gonna sing

these songs we're gonna do this kind of like how you might imagine like millie vanillie did i don't know if millie vanillie really did do that but um do you think that there's some sort of master plan with those guys or those kids are just like fuck it let's just they're every day they're shooting from the hip yeah look i don't know but i don't think so you think they're shooting from the hip i think so i mean i'm sure that they have a couple people around them especially now that they've you know they've become this like thing um and they're doing very like strategic interviews with i've seen them doing certain interviews with people but i don't i don't

think so i don't think that they started as like this whole campaign strategy that someone concocted for them i think there were kids that were doing it and and then something hit they even like an interview last night that i was watching with steve-o they said they said that they they didn't even like the thing that went viral that one of the brothers didn't like it, and the other one was like, no, that's cool. And they thought this other song that they did on TikTok was going to go viral, and then that ended up going viral. I mean, they do some weird shit that makes me think they're making fun of themselves, like when they show themselves fighting. Like, are they making fun of themselves? No, they are.

Again, I don't know for a fact, but i think that them or now the people they have i think now they have people around them that are identifying the algorithm or whatever you want to call it what works and what doesn't work and they're like do more of this wow and you know i think that that is is probably what's happening now incredible it's a trip to watch uh the the only advice i have for them is they gotta stop smoking weed no nicotine whatever whatever is in those vape pens whatever's in those vape pens they gotta stop they're going to you're gonna you're gonna be bummed and anyone who's addicted to nicotine you're you're gonna wish you weren't you're gonna you do not fuck with nicotine nicotine is terrible it is a and the vape pen is um just as bad

it's it's a thousand times worse man it's fucking heroin i see those years nori he he was a chain smoker and he was able to quit yeah good on him hey how do you do it did he lock himself in a room or something? I don't remember how he did it, but I know it was a part of it was with dieting and fasting and doing stuff like that, that kind of got him on that road. You guys have been friends for so long,

20 over, over 20 years. Yeah, man. Is it, um, do you guys talk besides, um, going to the show or do you guys try just to keep the whole relationship at the show level you know will you call him after this and

be like hey dude let's go to the beach or hey dude you want to get our kids together do you do that no because he lives he doesn't live close to me and and you know and i live where i live and we just we're at, and this goes to all my friends. I'm in a different place than all my friends in the sense that most of my friends have older kids that are either adults or approaching adulthood. And I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. Yeah. That's where I'm at too. What, you know, what people seem to have forgotten when their kids were that young, or they were so young that they didn't care as much or they just had a different type of lifestyle but i feel like hey man i'm lucky enough that i do the things that i do and and you know i have i

have a living that allows me to be in my children's life as much as possible and i understand that these my kids aren't going to be this young for long and so i want to be there as much as i humanly can around them more kids are you gonna have more kids i don't know i would have been fine with just one but myself and my girl were both only children and we know what that felt like so we brought my son into the world so they can have each other yeah Yeah, that's really cool. My wife and I used a shitload, which made a girlfriend at the time. We always used protection. And then once we, she wanted to have a kid when she was 39 and I was 43.

We thought we would never get married and never have kids. But then all of a sudden she wanted one. And then that's how we ended up with more because all of a sudden you know after 15 years of using condoms and then not it just became like four years of just just just fuck greatest four years of my life man god i love pregnant women just the whole the whole when they turn into mamas it's so great i don't know how dudes leave them when their mom is like, that's the time you want to be with them. For sure. You guys did a three hour interview with P Diddy,

but only showed 45 minutes of it. No, no. Our television version is 45 minutes. Cause it's an, it fills an hour block with commercials, but our YouTube versions are the full thing. Full thing. Because I thought i heard yesterday nori say that he asked p diddy how many times he's eaten j-lo's ass yeah and that and that

that didn't make the cut did that make the cut man that was a while ago does nori when nori says that do you do you want to run out of the room or do you get excited or are you just like no i'm just i'm i'm the thing is i'm i'm used to it you're chill okay i'm used to it so it's not neither either or you know um the only one that makes me cringe when he says how many abortions have you paid for like that's that's a wild oh he goes hard he goes hard he stopped saying that but um you know nor he's just you know he he's smart nor he's a smart guy he knows how to play the media role and yeah what you know what things people are going to be like shocked by and and you know and in the beginning i think that that's what helped us is that people a lot of these artists weren't weren't doing these kind of long form uh sit down interviews I don't even like

calling them interviews because I don't feel like we're journalists doing Q&A's we're just having these conversations but nonetheless they weren't doing them a lot and I think that what the fans and the audience really loved is to see them sit there for that long loosen up a little bit and then how they react to some of these weird questions or some of the weird banter because we have no problem in mid-conversation talking to our friend on the side hey pass me that or hey stop doing that or hey and so that's what i think people came to love about drinks like how is this guest gonna react to this environment and and so that's what it is.

Guest, it's kind of weird, right? Like, I don't know if it's like this for you, but I like all the guests pretty much equally. Like, I love just getting some dude who has 50 followers who lost 200 pounds and fucking just going deep with them. Yeah. Like, who made fun of you what happened how did you get you know what i mean just dig into their past next thing you know we're crying together just fucking dig but there's also a component it's like oh yeah look at me i'm a fucking big

game hunter i got dj efn coming on today i fucking you know put that fuck put his head on the wall you know what i mean in the podcast game like like it's i got a trophy right is in in your since you work with revolt do you guys get to enjoy um lesser guests or is it always rhino hunting is it like after kanye you're pissed that you got fucking the island boys you're like fuck we're really you know what i mean we're slipping i i think you could have you'll have different answers from myself and nori on our perspective of this but our show was founded on the idea of giving a platform for artists that came up in our era of the 90s and and then and then also prior to them any of the pioneers and and the people that inspired those peers of ours and ourselves, like the Karis ones and the Rakims and even going back, Grandmaster Kaz, the people who kind of

built the whole culture up. And so when we started six years ago, there was no platform for them to go to because commercial radio and anybody doing anything that was popular was only catering to the new artist. So it's easy. You could argue that people were saying that, oh, this is not going to get traction. That's why I think we were, we caught lightning in a bottle. I don't even think our distributor at the time, which was CBS radio, I don't think they were prepared. And in fact, I know they weren't prepared. They didn't think it was going to blow up because we didn't make a penny until six months down the road because their advertising and sales team didn't know how to sell us. And so now if you ask Nori, Nori's very competitive. He's very, very competitive. So now there's a lot more big podcasts in our space and everybody's trying to get these big names and big artists. But for me personally,

the best ones are the ones where we bring in these guys you haven't heard of for, you know, haven't heard their name in a while, find out they're still working, they're still dope, find out their story, and maybe help reinvigorate their career if we can have any hand in that. And I also think that when we have a big artist, it only benefits when we bring in that other artist the next, you know, the next episode. If We bring in a new audience and then that audience learns about this person

afterwards. Like we just had Patti LaBelle. Never in a million years would I have thought, never not even starting this podcast, not even when we had Kanye, that I ever think I would sit across the table from Patti LaBelle. Such an icon in music. Yeah, that is crazy. That was crazy. I saw that the most recent i'm

trying to see if i have the photo somewhere yeah is is um are you guys texting people like i'm like i like i d i used to i just got kicked off of instagram but i uh well kind of i don't know i can still kind of see my account but i had this account with a blue check mark and so that's what i would do i would just like dm someone like you and you'd see the blue check mark and you'd be like yo what's up and i'd be like hey can you come on who does that do you and nori like just you guys are just going into your contacts and just hustling all the guests all of us you know nori definitely has a large rolodex of people that he's been cool with because of his long career um and so that that helped jump start

our stuff you know i have people that i've worked with over the years artists that we wanted to have on that i've tapped into and then now we're we've gone into the weird realm of where we're a part of people's rollouts you know they're oh they're pressed from which i don't like that i don't like being a part of i want people to come to our show because they know what it. They're into it and they want to sit down and have that conversation with us. But when you're part of a press run, sometimes it's the publicity team, the managers, the label telling them to do the show. And it's not as, you know, it's just not as organic. It's not as authentic as I would like it to be. But I sit down with an open mind just to have great conversations with these people, have fun.

I think that's another thing. We're just trying to have fun and celebrate the careers of these people and the culture at whole and that we're all a part of it and kind of say we're all lucky to be here to make money off of this. Who's this? Okay, that was the game uh snoop dog yeah he's a reoccurring he was a second time he was on the show do you have any who's your who's which guest has been on the most uh fat joe has been on a lot jada kiss has been on a lot irv gadi this is his third time being on the show. Ja Rule. DMX was on twice. We had him. He was our first, not the first episode, but the first episode that really kind

of took us over the top. He was like our third or fourth episode. And it was a really like, you could call it maybe a dark episode. And then the last one we did with him, which was maybe a month or two before his passing, here in Miami, he was just in such good spirits and good health, it seemed. And he was really a pleasure to me. Like, now he knew what it was when he did the podcast the first time. He didn't understand what a podcast. He didn't understand what the fuck we were doing. We set up a shoot in a hotel lobby. And so this time around, he knew.

He had seen the viral clips from that one over the years. He knew what it was, and he was just in a good place, man. It was really dope. In the beginning, I've only been doing it a year. Well, that's not true. I've only been doing this podcast for a year. And now I'm 500 shows in. And when I first started,

like I would get like a UFC fighter on and I'd be all excited. This fucking guy would do it from his fucking car while he was so fucking stuck with driving while he's so fucking stoned. He can't answer a fucking question. And that's what I kind of, I guess what, what I was picturing the first time DMX is on, like they,

like they don't even know what they're getting into. No. Yeah. It's like, Hey dude, there's going to be be 30 000 people who see this and you're sitting in your car stoned like what the fuck he definitely he did it as a favor more to nori uh-huh they were label mates and he's like whatever bro you do you do what do you do a podcast what he didn't know like nori didn't know when i first was approaching about doing the podcast it was a fairly new thing specifically to hip-hop even and uh you could tell like he sat there dmx doesn't like interviews to start with he's not into interviews yeah um and he just he talked and he you know he drank a little and he got into prayer mode and you know people were thinking that maybe he was using again at the time i didn't

see him use anything all he did was drink and um it just he was just in a dark place you could tell though either coming out of it or going into it and after that you know that that that episode went super viral it took us over the top in terms of the numbers and we think of like oh he was on a quarantine episode via zoom and then he came to the show in person again in miami in recent times and and it was amazing like now he knew what's what's prayer mode he's big on like he's he's really religious and he he's he's he's known for going into like these sermons and prayers like he'll pray you know to for everybody just all of a sudden the minute of the interview yeah yeah like that that prayer went great you know it went viral for everybody like whether you're religious and you love it for that or

or just because how intense it was yeah fucking love it uh asap rocky how old is he? He's young. I don't know. I think he's like, what, 28 maybe? Yeah, man. He looks like he's 15. Yeah, he's with Rihanna. Mike Tyson is amazing. Wait, Asap Rocky is dating Rihanna?

Yeah. They got a baby that's coming. Wow. Is she like 10 years older than him? I have no idea. I'd be talking out of my ass Mike Tyson So what that's ASAP He's 33 Okay

And Rihanna's 34 So they're right there Chris Brown We went to his house in LA What did you think about that song he did with Lil Dicky The Freaky Friday? I thought it was cool. It wasn't something I was really into, but I thought it was cool.

And the video? I don't even remember seeing the video. Man, I watched it like, I swear to God, a thousand times with my kids. Oh, really? Oh, man, it's so good. Lil Dicky. Yeah. Did you ever see that freestyle he did on The Breakfast Club? Oh, man, it's so good. Little Dicky. Yeah.

Did you ever see that freestyle he did on The Breakfast Club? Years ago, right? Little Dicky, yeah, and he said the thing about bending over Michelle Obama. Oh, no, I don't remember that. Oh, fuck, it was crazy. It was crazy. And that animation video he did with snoop dogg yeah i remember that and doesn't he have a show yeah i yeah he does have a show i can't i i watched one or two episodes i really like him he's talented but it's so self-deprecating that it's over the top you know

what i mean i mean he really beats himself up like i i like a i like a little self-deprecating but it's tough and i guess with the name like little dicky it's like that's that's his shtick oh there she is yeah you guys you showed this oh we did show this okay caleb you're a good dude caleb's in the back here shut up running the show uh ll cool j run dmc two life crew too short utfo ghetto boys out of houston ghetto boys we've had scarface on uh i hosted a ghetto boys show here in miami that was dope before uh before homies passing uh salt and peppa um lil kim have you had lil kim on is she in jail no no she's out The four homies passing. Salt-N-Pepa. Lil' Kim. Have you had Lil' Kim on?

Is she in jail? No, no, she's out. We really want her as a guest. She's someone we've been trying to get on the show for a while. Yeah, she's remarkable. Those were all the people I was thinking to myself. I was like, oh, shit, I need to write down. I need to think of all the rappers that really, in the beginning, I was just, like, had my hair blown.

I mean, UB Illin by Run DMC, holy shit. Yeah, that was a classic. It's a classic. I mean, that was the anthem. Everyone was singing that. Run DMC, Beastie Boys at the time, too. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on.

What a great education for me. It is a group. The rapper that I had on, his name was Lika Veli, by the way. Okay. And I think I had a couple other rappers on. It's a fabulous genre. My last question for you is this. Would you guys ever think about, you floyd on are you are and you had tyson on any plans to um continue down that path you know

have israel adesanya on have like you know explore more fighters that you know you know who that is the one the um maybe have some politicians on have a have larry elder on you know um and any any thoughts of going down that yeah i mean well we have a branch of the show called drink champ sports that we're we haven't really you know explored completely but shout out to my boy paul uh that does that dream champ sports and yeah i mean i'm down to have me personally again speaking for myself i think anyone and everyone is welcome to do the show as long as we feel that we're going to have a good conversation and that somewhere in that conversation it's related to hip-hop it can't go far away from you know because that's what we do but i'm down for i mean actors comedians politicians anybody anybody napoleon hill i mean he's dead but we could have a seance for him um but yeah i'd be down and then

like i said we have sports we have smoke champs which is another branch of that we put out and we you know we're trying to build out this network and have other podcasters but but yeah i'm open to to having just great conversations with people awesome hey dude thank you man i got oh before we get out i do have to shout out imt the box i go to because i know a lot of the guys are watching and they and beer fest friday which is a a beer and crossfit podcast i produced with some homies i was a bad influence on them and i started having them drink a lot of beer and eat some pizza every friday after a while and it turns a podcast do you do some podcast every day i'm involved in

something podcasting pretty much damn near every day yeah you're a good dude i'm not producing it or i'm i'm doing an interview on one i'm involved in something every day i'm so thank you so much for coming on i know when you have your own podcast the last thing you fucking want to do is go on other people's podcast so i really appreciate it i love it because i love you never know where these conversations are going to go and it's refreshing yeah cool thank you for having me man i appreciate you and shout out to my girl for setting it up and my boy jay havana who helped quarterback it as well yeah awesome and i will be watching and uh and and staying in touch with you appreciate you sounds good man take it easy brother be safe yep everyone can you be on no no oh my god beer fest fridays elise car redow uh karina thank you for hooking me up uh probably

what what what a fucking remarkable fast two hours that blew by two hours and 11 minutes i was supposed to be at my kids skateboarding camp 41 minutes ago i just couldn't let um uh him go there i didn't even get to my notes it's like but but but man we sure did explore a lot so many interesting people with such crazy crazy history on this planet um tomorrow i do not have a show scheduled i don't think i think that uh for all of the athletes who have been reaching out to me uh i'm just a little bit overwhelmed please keep reaching out to me i thought i wasn't going to do any crossfit podcasts for a while but there's so many people who uh are open to doing shows together um and follow up after the games that maybe tomorrow i'll schedule two or three and we can just catch up with people.

But I don't think Caleb, do we have anything scheduled tomorrow? I don't see anything. No, we don't. Okay. All right, guys.

I will see you soon. Maybe tonight, even I know Jr. And Taylor and self and Brian Friend are crazy stimulated. And as we get further and further away from the games, they've been processing a lot. And there's some stuff that they want to share with you guys that's pretty remarkable. So maybe one of them will come on in the next, I don't know, 48 hours and we'll get to work. All right, guys, I will talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.