In this episode, I sit down with a good friend of mine to talk about the history of the cannabis industry. We talk about how it all began, the early days of legalization, and the current state of the industry in California. We also talk about what it's like to grow and sell cannabis in California, and how it compares to other states in terms of production and distribution. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some insight into the industry and what it takes to be a successful grower and distributor. I know that it's not always easy growing and selling cannabis, but there are a lot of people out there who are willing to do it and do it well. I hope that you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, and Cheers. -Jon Sorrentino and Mike Holmes Thank you Jon and Mike for coming on the pod. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share, and tell a Friend about what you think of the podcast! We'll be looking out for you in the next episode! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's up? 4:30 - What are you looking forward to next? 5:20 - What do you like about this episode? 6:15 - How do you think about it? 7:40 - How does it feel? 8:00 9:30 11:40 12: What's your favorite part? 15:15 16: How do I think it's going to be the best part of the show? 17: What are my favorite part of this episode so far? 18:20 19:10 21:30 Is it a little bit more? 22:30 What would you like to see you're going to make it better? 27:30 Do you have a question? 26:30 Can you give me a tip? 29:00 Is it better than that one? 32:00 More? 35: What s your favorite piece of advice? 33:00 Can I have a guest? 36:00 What's a good day? 37:00 Do you agree or not? 39:00 Are you a friend of a friend? 40:00 Would you agree?
00:00:51.000So, you know, we'd get into some of the activism aspect of it as well, and that's when we heard names like Jack Herrera, who pretty much opened our eyes to everything.
00:01:00.000And then, you know, I think we became real advocates.
00:01:04.000You know, at first, you know, we thought we were, you know, sort of...
00:02:32.000The thing I heard maybe like five years ago, before it was legal in Denver, or a bit longer than that, before we got legalization here, that companies like Philip Morris and companies like that were already buying land and already trademarking names for some of the cannabis that we know today so that when they come into the game,
00:03:00.000They have ownership on some of the names and some of the brands and trademarks and stuff like that.
00:03:07.000And obviously the acreage to grow vast sums of cannabis.
00:03:15.000Who knows how true that is, but I don't doubt some of that.
00:04:33.000Fortunately, here in California, you know, they've allowed people to have distribution licenses so that there's not one distribution center because that would be a monopoly for sure.
00:04:44.000And that's what they wanted to, supposedly, you know, the lobbyists that put 64 together were trying to stop it from being a monopoly and corporations coming in and taking over and stuff like that, you know.
00:04:57.000So interesting because pot is such a non-corporate drug, you know, it's such a non-corporate thing.
00:05:03.000That these corporations were trying to get a grip on weed.
00:06:41.000The taxes are so high right now for the consumer and for the cultivator and for the retail shop that you got to survive this wash right now that's happening in order to still be, you know, doing business when the corporate structure comes in.
00:06:56.000Because please believe they're going to lobby so that those taxes come down because the margins are not right, you know, as 40%.
00:08:02.000How funny was it that he got in trouble for that?
00:08:05.000You know, what I find it funny is how, you know, they put these stereotypes on stoners for so long, like we're lazy, unproductive, and all that stuff.
00:08:15.000This guy's one of the most decorated Olympians in the history.
00:10:13.000February 2009, he was only 23, apologized for an incident where he was caught on camera at a party smoking a bomb that was allegedly marijuana.
00:10:24.000You know, he shouldn't have apologized for that.
00:10:27.000He shouldn't have had to have apologized for that.
00:10:29.000The thing is, they have those guys bent over a box because they're all just trying to get that sponsorship money.
00:11:50.000Yeah, we were trying to be different, not sound like a typical West Coast group, because a lot of West Coast groups at that point, what the labels were looking for were NWA types and things like that, like either...
00:12:06.000You know, gangster, West Coast gangster rap.
00:12:09.000They were looking for that or either the Kid Frost Chicano type.
00:12:32.000And so people, you know, they were like, where the fuck are these guys from?
00:12:36.000And people thought we were from Cypress Hill, New York, because there's a Cypress Hill down there.
00:12:40.000And, you know, people just didn't really know at first, because we were one of the first groups that didn't put our images on any of our first, you know, any of our singles or our art covers.
00:12:51.000We never did, like, the shots, like...
00:12:53.000You know, that we're existing at that time where it's a clean shot of the group or the artist or whatever.
00:12:59.000We were always on some, you know, because we were metalheads too, you know, before the hip hop, we liked the obscure metal album.
00:13:06.000So we didn't, we were like, we're not going to put ourselves on the covers.
00:13:09.000We're just going to do these crazy obscure covers and make people, you know, try to guess who we are, be mysterious.
00:14:03.000You have to be consistent in hip-hop, you know, in music in general.
00:14:07.000Especially, like, if there's a time where radio stops playing your music or, you know, as MTV stopped playing music videos and they went for more...
00:15:37.000And one of my partners who I grew up with, who was one of my partners in our Dr. Green Thumb brand and whatever, his father was a, you know, sensei and his sensei and became my sensei.
00:16:21.000And his father, you know, he was, you know, born in Japan, raised out there, and he, you know, their shit is kind of different.
00:16:29.000They go to martial arts universities, and they get degrees in different martial arts.
00:16:36.000So they can go and take, like, okay, Hapkido and Jiu-Jitsu and Shotokan and all this, and, you know, get their...
00:16:45.000Their degrees, you know, they work their way up in the belt system and all that stuff, but they become teachers through that university, I guess.
00:16:54.000And, yeah, his father was one of the guys in one of the federations that he's one of the three or four senseis that have to come in and give you the black belt when you actually get it.
00:17:15.000So you could imagine when Lyoto Machida came on the scene, you know, we were like, yeah, someone representing the style that, you know, we were training under.
00:17:23.000Yeah, a lot of people got excited when he came about.
00:17:25.000He was really the first guy to legitimize karate in the modern era of mixed martial arts.
00:17:30.000He showed, like, if you could do all those other things, if you could stuff takedowns and you knew submissions and all those things on top of that.
00:18:37.000Yeah, and then when you learn, if you really actually want to fight, you want to learn Muay Thai and all those other things, you have way quicker legs.
00:19:41.000I gotta tell you, if there's any physical activity that is addicting, it is paintball, because it's chess with guns.
00:19:48.000Because it's so fast and so close, and you gotta think of a strategy, you know?
00:19:52.000It's not all shooting straightway, it's all shooting angles and getting your guys to positions to get those guys out to keep moving up, to get their flag, wipe them out, and bring the flag back.
00:20:03.000Now, are there restrictions on power, like the power of the guns?
00:21:27.000And they shoot a whole bunch of paint so that the other guys that are the front and mid guys can get into these different positions to shoot the other guys out.
00:21:36.000So the guys in the back, we're shooting the most paint.
00:21:38.000So you have to use that fanning style.
00:22:12.000Yeah, that's what they would replicate, like a football, soccer field, and you put all these obstacles up, these blow-up obstacles, and they're all just positions to try to take to get a better angle on the other side.
00:22:58.000You know, the thing about paintball, right, is that let's just say there's six tiers, right?
00:23:04.000There's the pros, there's the semi-pros, there's the amateurs, there's the novice, there's the rookie, and each tier had at least 200 teams competing in this.
00:26:34.000You know, I wasn't running too fast then, but you know, they always hit me, man.
00:26:39.000I'll always get hit on my DM on IG or Twitter like, hey man, when you come back to the paintball field, I'm like, when I get time, which is probably never, but It seems like a big-time suck.
00:27:44.000A lot of people have asked me and invited me because they know I'm a UFC fan, I'm a mixed martial arts fan, I'm a boxing fan, all that shit.
00:27:53.000You know, a couple of my cousins are...
00:27:55.000Well, one of them was a champion professional boxer, which was Michael Carbajal.
00:28:20.000So, yeah, I've been invited to, you know, come fuck with some jujitsu, and I think I, you know, I think I will, because, I mean, you gotta know it.
00:28:31.000I think, you know, it's something that would benefit anyone to know that.
00:34:12.000You want to know what I think is before the internet and all these different platforms where you can get information, our government and other governments could debunk any information on UFOs, anything,
00:34:27.000because there wasn't the wide communication that exists now, right?
00:34:32.000So I think now they put in people who are saying this crazy, wild, way-out shit so that people that are really trying to expose truth on certain things, they get looked at as whack jobs like the rest of those that are trying to say,
00:34:49.000oh, well, Flat Earth, or we're on a disc, or we're in a globe, or blah, blah, blah.
00:35:07.000I mean, that was one of the things they enacted with the Homeland Security, that they can record every American's call.
00:35:14.000And, you know, whatever conversation mentioned certain keywords, as we were saying earlier, they would, you know, they would get shuffled off to a certain department.
00:35:24.000And those guys were red flagged and looked at.
00:35:32.000I've been traveling, what, 20 some odd years at this point where when I was coming back into the United States, for a long time I would not get randomly checked or anything like that.
00:36:52.000That's like giant pillows filled with weed.
00:36:55.000So, you know, right then and there I knew, you know, from that reaction that he had that anybody with any sort of, that's involved in entertainment, music, athlete, you know, whatever, actor, actress, they're watching all of our shit.
00:37:13.000Well, especially someone like you who's been at the forefront of pushing cannabis legalization and always talked about it openly, flagrantly, even when it was a Schedule I substance.
00:37:52.000Because I lost track of him for a minute, you know, and when I went back to get a renewal some years back and he's like, Lewis, you've been with me a long time.
00:38:04.000I mean, what it looks like is that you're patient number four.
00:39:05.000I didn't smoke cigarettes, so I was like, I don't smoke cigarettes.
00:39:09.000Did you ever get your lungs checked out from all those years of weed smoking?
00:39:12.000Yeah, I mean, you know, I get physicals and stuff like that, and, you know, occasionally I'll have my lungs checked, and they tell me they're great.
00:39:44.000And so, you know, you might look at someone's lungs who smokes cigarettes and you might see something there and like, hey, you need to, you know, slow the fuck down over here.
00:39:54.000And every time that I've had my lungs checked or whatever, whether I've gotten sick or whatever, they're always telling me lungs are in good shape.
00:40:04.000And it's a funny thing because I think in 1987, I was 17 and I was gangbanging.
00:40:15.000I got shot, and I got hit by a.22, and as hollow points do, it broke into three pieces, the hollow point, and one of them punctured my lung on my left side.
00:40:32.000And, you know, they were telling me, well, you know, do you smoke?
00:40:37.000No, I don't really smoke because I didn't smoke cigarettes.
00:40:40.000I smoked weed, but I wasn't going to divulge that at the time.
00:40:44.000I was 17 and, you know, and they said, well, you know, well, that's good because you'll never smoke again.
00:40:51.000They punctured your lung and blah, blah, blah.
00:41:40.000I was very lucky because it punctured my lung and then two of the pieces, one was by the heart and one was by my spine.
00:41:47.000But I was at Martin Luther King Hospital in Linwood and we call that place Killer King because you go in there for something small and end up dying or come out gimped out or something.
00:41:59.000So, you know, I wasn't going to allow them to try and get to those bullets or those fragments.
00:42:20.000And, you know, it's the first line you're trying to, they're telling you every day for five minutes, ten minutes to blow that, you know, not all in one shot, but like to keep practicing getting the ball up there.
00:42:33.000And that will help inflate the lung and get it back.
00:42:36.000So I had to do that for probably like three weeks.
00:42:40.000And, you know, the puncture wound, it healed itself, pretty much.
00:42:46.000And the pieces are still in your lung?
00:44:27.000Try to ride the line, be professional and be in the music, but they're still kind of in this world over here, and when one bleeds into the other, it fucks everything up.
00:45:15.000The way you carry yourself, the way you communicate with someone and know whether they're disrespecting you or not, and how you deal with that disrespect, which is a whole different world in the gangbang shit, but it's a different kind of education.
00:46:58.000Like, so if my father was a gangster in this gang and he still lives in this neighborhood, pressure's on for me eventually to take up where father left off.
00:47:23.000And that's the thing, because if you don't feel like you belong in your school or you don't belong in your family, that shit can totally take hold, and you end up there.
00:47:36.000Fortunately, I had good friends that weren't gangbangers.
00:47:40.000They had talent for music, which was Muggs and Sen's brother, Mello.
00:47:46.000I did music as a hobby before I got into gangs and they got me back into the music because they recognized something in me and said, hey, we want you to come back.
00:48:38.000There was a guy that we used to listen to coming up.
00:48:42.000His name was Ram LZ. He was on this record called Wild Style and he was in the movie.
00:48:47.000He was this rapper who was very obscure, But he was an artist too, you know, like a graffiti artist, but then also an artist, you know, but he was also a rapper.
00:48:58.000And what he would do is he'd rap in a regular style, like his talking voice.
00:49:03.000This is the brother they call the Ram Bell.
00:50:08.000Because, you know, I had a tendency as rappers, you know, that don't know because there's no school for this unless you have somebody who's done it and they teach you, okay, this is what the get down is.
00:50:22.000For the first few years, man, I was trying to do the voice and I'd end up getting overhyped because the crowd is hype and I'd start yelling the verses instead of rapping them on the record.
00:50:33.000I'd throw my voice out, my voice would get scratchy, I'd be sounding like Busta Rhymes and shit, you know what I mean?
00:50:39.000And it took me five years to actually harness how to actually do the shows with this voice.
00:50:46.000And I had to go to this opera singer coach.
00:50:56.000But her shit was like to teach you the operatic way of singing, which is from the diaphragm.
00:51:02.000Tighten the stomach, take little breaths, but those little breaths make your lungs expand a lot, and it's less projection from your throat and more from the bottom.
00:51:13.000And she taught me that technique, and I never went hoarse again after that.
00:51:19.000People often compliment me on sounding so close to how the records are.
00:51:25.000There's once in a while where I might get excited and start saying it louder than it might be, but I'm always sort of right there.
00:51:32.000And I gotta give all props to her, because if she hadn't showed me that technique, I'd probably still...
00:52:27.000It allows your lungs to expand while you're breathing from your diaphragm.
00:52:34.000So that's what she taught a lot of singers.
00:52:37.000And another method is to cheat the word.
00:52:41.000Like, pronounce it, you know, like you're kind of like, it's like what these mumble rappers do when they pronounce the word and they kind of mumble it and they sort of cheat it.
00:52:50.000You know what the word is, but they didn't pronounce it all the way.
00:53:35.000Um, one of my friends had heard of her, you know, because I mean, in the industry, you know, become friends with other, you know, your peers and stuff like that.
00:53:47.000And, you know, I knew a couple singers and they were, you know, noting my problem is just, you know, screaming my verses and coming back with the And
00:54:23.000She taught me the certain words that you can cheat for certain breath control purposes because the way you pronounce certain things sort of add to that and just the tightening of the diaphragm.
00:54:39.000If I hadn't learned that, it would have took me a lot longer to do the shows the way that I can do them now.
00:54:48.000From the first song on, my voice gets in.
00:54:52.000The first few bars, it warms up right then and there.
00:54:56.000It's not really like singing where I gotta sustain notes and stuff like that, so I don't have to do those same kind of warm-ups.
00:55:02.000If I was gonna sing some shit, yes, I would definitely have to get the pitch right and the throat warmed up to do those different melodies or whatever the hell, but...
00:55:26.000Yeah, back in the day, man, someone had to be the guy endorsing you, you know, like saying to, you know, these guys over here, hey, man, listen to this artist right here.
00:55:41.000And then you would have to do a couple showcases and stuff like that and, you know, win some people over.
00:55:47.000I mean, we definitely did our share of showcases in the beginning, but we were getting passed on left and right.
00:55:53.000Because people thought, what are they talking about with this cannabis shit?
00:56:00.000And we didn't sound like a West Coast group, you know, because we were trying to sell our shit to West Coast labels here, and they did not get us.
00:56:08.000It wasn't until, you know, Muggs had, you know, he'd previously been in a group called 73, and he had worked with these guys called the Rhyme Syndicate, which was Ice-T's guys.
00:56:20.000So he kind of, you know, he was the guy that people knew.
00:56:23.000And then Send Dog's brother, Mellow Man Ace, eventually would get in the door.
00:56:29.000And so, people started hearing about us through, you know, through more Mugs than Mellow.
00:56:35.000Mellow didn't really do shit for us, you know, all truth told.
00:56:39.000But Mugs, you know, they kept hearing about a group that he was forming outside of 783, which came to be Cypress Hill.
00:56:48.000And so, you know, the guys that worked on him...
00:56:51.000Worked with him on the 783 records, which is Joe Niccolo of Rough House Records.
00:56:57.000You know, he wanted to sign whatever Muggs was doing.
00:57:01.000And, you know, he eventually ended up signing us.
00:57:04.000And they had a distribution deal with Sony Music.
00:57:08.000So, you know, we put out our records to Rough House Columbia or Rough House Sony, something like that.
00:57:14.000And that's how we got put on, you know.
00:57:17.000Again, it had to be word of mouth because if nobody heard of you, you had to have some really fucking dope music for them to even consider you.
00:57:27.000If you didn't have someone backing you, it was tough.
00:57:31.000You had to have someone come speak on your behalf and say, hey, these guys are the new shit.
00:57:57.000And those were the guys that took our snippet tape and they were showing our snippet tape to other rappers like, hey guys, look at these new fucking guys because...
00:58:06.000You know, Busta Rhyme told me this story.
00:58:09.000Yo, son, I heard your shit from EPMD way back in the day.
00:58:13.000They was playing for Public Enemy and I just happened to be in the room.
00:58:19.000And Ice Cube, when we met him for the first time, and we had our ups and downs with him, but he's one of my homies.
00:58:28.000He told me, yeah, man, the first time I heard of y'all was through EPMD. We was on tour, was doing the show, and they came in with y'all taping.
00:59:08.000I mean, he's a producer, so he's always making music, but as a rapper, they don't put out as much stuff as they used to, but yeah, they're still active.
01:03:35.000They made us push, you know in groups like that made us better So when we heard this guy fucking doing or this band doing the cover and then they asked us to come play this song Which which would be their last night as rage against the machine for a long time.
01:03:50.000This was like their last show right here Wow, we got to do that with them That must have been amazing and I was wearing a dad hat before dad hats were cool I will not wear one right now.
01:05:46.000But I got to tell you, since joining Prophets of Rage and us, you know, when we tour Europe and stuff like that, and we do a combination of, you know, Rage Against the Machine songs, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill, along with our own material, the mosh pits are fucking crazy,
01:06:03.000But, you know, there was one thing that I saw that was not brutal, but it was cool as fuck.
01:06:09.000And it was in, I believe it was Sweden or Switzerland, but out of like the 60,000, 70,000 people that were out there, there was like maybe 5,000 concentrated people who sat down on their ass, right?
01:06:51.000It was a move that the crowd was doing.
01:06:53.000So there's 5,000 people out of the 30,000 that are sitting in, you know, like next to each other, lines, rows, you know, just fucking of people rowing on beat, dog.
01:10:23.000You know, I wasn't like doing like the, I don't know if there's like categories of poetry, but you know, it was just stuff that would happen from day to day, you know.
01:10:48.000Just, again, everyday stuff, or I'd randomly pick something to write about.
01:10:53.000So if it was about the cannabis industry, I'd write something about that.
01:10:57.000If it was about the music industry, I'd write something about that.
01:11:02.000Every now and then, back in the early 2000s, there was a magazine called Industry Insider Magazine, and occasionally I would write articles for that.
01:11:13.000I wasn't really that great because, you know, I was so spotty in school that, you know, it needed work.
01:11:22.000But they left it raw, the way that I would put it out there.
01:11:25.000And people got my point, and that was cool, but...
01:11:29.000I looked at it in the way that the music that I've done in a lot of the songs serve as a certain form of journalism for me.
01:11:39.000Bringing up certain issues that people don't necessarily hear, like Throw Your Set in the Air is a song on Tebble's Boom, and it's a song about how you would get inducted into a gang, how you get put into a gang, how you fall into it.
01:11:56.000And some people might think, you know, by hearing it that it was glorifying it and praising it, but it wasn't.
01:12:05.000So you know the signs to look for if your kids are, you know, fucking around with the wrong people, you know, and that's...
01:12:13.000I took it like, okay, maybe I'm not a journalist like I intended to be, but this is my way of it.
01:12:20.000I can enlighten people with certain things.
01:12:24.000Like anything, somebody's going to read something or hear something and maybe misinterpret what you say, but it's all about who's listening and who's reading and who's watching and stuff like that and their interpretation of it.
01:12:38.000Some don't, and that's just the nature of it, but most people get it, and I've come across people that have come to me and come and said, hey man, your song's on Temple of Boom, man.
01:12:51.000They helped to get me through these times, or these songs raised me.
01:13:44.000And sometimes in being that voice, you know, you get objects put in front of you and certain opportunities don't, you know, get put on your table.
01:14:05.000He is very insightful in the shit that he says, and he is very unafraid to state it and state his opinions.
01:14:14.000For you to get people coming up to you, when they first started coming up to you, telling you that your music got them through things, that it means so much to them, when that first started happening, that must have been surreal.
01:15:39.000It was a crazy thing because it's not something that I had ever envisioned happening.
01:15:44.000I didn't think that the music would blow up like that.
01:15:48.000We were doing it to obviously try and make a name for ourselves and make music that people like, but fuck, we didn't see that coming at all.
01:16:03.000Like when Kill A Man started going, it was like surreal because, you know, we didn't think that song would take just because of the chorus itself.
01:16:13.000You know, fuck what the song is about.
01:16:16.000We knew that the chorus was what they were going to hear more than anything.
01:16:20.000And so, you know, we thought, nah, we're going to have a good Underground album.
01:16:26.000We didn't think they were going to put Kill A Man in the Juice movie, and that would blow that song up even more so than it was getting.
01:16:34.000Because we had released Funky Phil ones first, and it was a double A-side single, Funky Phil and Kill A Man on the other A-side.
01:16:41.000Which means, at that time, the DJs had the option of which song they wanted to go, whereas most of the time, you had an A-side, B-side, and the A-side is most definitely the one that the record company wants you to push.
01:16:55.000We gave it a double A-side because we thought maybe the DJs would like Kill A Man More.
01:17:01.000They went with Funky Phil and the record company because they figured it would be easier to market, right?
01:17:07.000And then the DJs started flipping the record.
01:18:44.000And, you know, fuck, we definitely didn't think that was going to happen.
01:18:49.000I mean, you know, it was all a surprise.
01:18:50.000And It went from one minute you could go to a mall and be, you know, unassuming and nobody even knows who the fuck you are and, you know, you're getting about your day to now you go to the mall and the whole fucking mall is swarming on you like fucking you're like...
01:19:07.000You know, Paul McCartney or something.
01:27:30.000Yeah, I mean, that place was, you know, a small place, too.
01:27:34.000But, I mean, it goes to show you, man, like, if you got it, you can do it.
01:27:40.000Yeah, it's probably better sometimes because it's unique.
01:27:42.000Yeah, because people will remember, you know, the other way, yeah, you know, it probably would have been a great show and people would be talking about it, but they'll remember the fact that you got over that adversity.
01:28:12.000That had been one of the most important things that I learned in watching others do shows and stuff like that and what I would do when I got up there.
01:29:17.000Some people own the space, like LeBron and Kobe and Kevin Garnett, who came straight from high school, and they own the space the minute they got...
01:29:37.000Some of them, you know, again, they come in and they already got it.
01:29:43.000You know, like LeBron, he was, you know, playing a grown man's game right when he got into the league, thrown into the fire, but he was ready for that.
01:29:52.000He got better and learned the role and learned who he was as he's gone, but he was one of those rare people that can just jump into it.
01:31:38.000Knowing the songs, making sure that I know them through the nervousness, you know, and so for us, we did a lot of rehearsals in the early days just so that those first shows that we did, that we were locked in and we made an impression.
01:31:53.000And, you know, when we did that and we saw the results of how people were reacting to our show, it gave me more confidence.
01:32:02.000So, you know, I'd rehearse the songs in my head, you know, when I wasn't around the other guys.
01:32:08.000I'd be kicking the songs or be on a treadmill working out, saying the songs, you know, getting them in my head and just gave me the confidence that I know this fucking shit.
01:32:19.000I go up there, I'll rock this fucking thing.
01:32:21.000I'm not going to forget it because that's always the problem for me.
01:32:25.000It was never getting in front of people.
01:33:15.000The same thing when you're rocking stages, you know?
01:33:18.000A lot of us sometimes forget to go and put the time in and rehearse.
01:33:23.000And you could see that when there's a sloppy show or someone's out of breath or they're not saying the whole line or they said the line wrong or they're changing up fragments of the song to make it easier for their performance and it doesn't necessarily fit.
01:33:37.000That's when you know somebody ain't putting in the work.
01:33:41.000But for us, that was a part of the draw for Cypress.
01:33:46.000That's how we won a lot of people over, was the energy of our live show.
01:33:51.000But it took that, the rehearsals, man.
01:33:53.000And I would tell any artist coming up right now, man, before you start doing your shows, because you may get a hit that fast these days.
01:34:03.000And you may be called to go do that show.
01:34:05.000Now, if you don't do that show right and you suck, as good as that song is, you're never going to sell tickets when they fucking say, hey, so-and-so's performing at this place.
01:35:14.000I mean, that's what they tell you pretty much in any meditation to focus on the breathing and all these things are going to come through your head.
01:35:20.000But if you keep on focusing on that, you know, everything sort of goes away and you're reset.
01:35:28.000So, you know, I'll do that when I feel maybe some sort of anxiety before going on.
01:35:34.000If I don't feel that, I don't necessarily do the meditation.
01:35:37.000We'll just do the prayer and that sort of sets it all in.
01:35:43.000Some shows, man, I'll have to go in a room and just sit there and do the breathing.
01:37:09.000I almost lost my shit right here because, you know, seeing 300 and some odd thousand people jumping around to your shit, you know, it could give you some equilibrium problems.
01:38:27.000Well, that's a funny thing, man, when you watch those dudes that are trying to escape from the cops on the ground, and then you watch the cops in the helicopter, the spotlight just stays in the car the entire time.
01:38:42.000What do you do when you have to take a shit?
01:38:45.000Like how long does it take to get from the front row to the back if you have to take a shit?
01:38:48.000I'll tell you, we walked around in that shit right there and it was super muddy and crazy and people were like butt naked with mud smeared all over their fucking bodies and it was like people went primal.
01:39:43.000It was the type where if you walked through it with your shoes and your shoes weren't tight or you weren't wearing boots, it was sucking the shoe right off of your foot.
01:39:53.000Hell, in that show, I jumped into the crowd because normally I would jump into the crowd and just be floating, stage dive style, but I would still be doing the song.
01:43:14.000I'll tell you this though, they were cold-blooded, the organizers, because...
01:43:19.000These guys had some fucking moxie, I'll tell you that.
01:43:27.000Hey listen, you know, after every band was done with their set, they expected you to leave right away because the next wave of bands was coming and they were getting your spot.
01:43:37.000If you had a dressing room, once your set was done, you were expected to get the fuck out.
01:43:45.000Yeah, it was best if you did, because if you didn't take the ride when you were supposed to, you were getting stuck there.
01:43:52.000They couldn't guarantee that they could give you the ride back to your shit after that, because they had all the other bands to think of, and they might not have room for you when they take the other bands.
01:45:51.000Yeah, I mean, listen, we know that that's not our show.
01:45:56.000They're not all there for us, you know, because it's a mixed bag, right?
01:45:59.000A bunch of different artists, and you're winning over people, if anything.
01:46:04.000You're there playing for your base of people that might have come to see you We're good to go.
01:46:24.000It was like a big notch under the belt and a boost for our confidence knowing that we can get in front of anybody, play with anyone, and get that reaction.
01:46:35.000I mean, because after that, we were getting booked on metal-driven festivals and stuff where we're the only hip-hop on it, but it's all straight-up metal.
01:49:28.000Because sometimes, you know, when your adrenaline is kicking, you're not really thinking, you know, what's in my pocket and shit like that.
01:49:34.000But yeah, you know, throughout, I had chicks trying to grab my shit, for sure.
01:51:23.000And some are still lagging a little bit behind, but I gotta tell you, man, this last trip I just had to Vancouver.
01:51:29.000I was just there for 420. And they had some shit that California boys would be like, yo, this is fire right here.
01:51:42.000They had animal cookies that were really good.
01:51:45.000Wedding cake, which is a strain that's popular here in Cali via the Jungle Boys and Burner and stuff like that when they were working together on exotics.
01:51:58.000And they also had this joint called Black Diamond and Tri-Octane.
01:52:03.000And all of them, man, I gotta say all of them burned sweet.
01:52:27.000It's just that Some of the nutrients, if you're using salts as your nutrients, you know, which most people are these days, your ash comes out white.
01:52:36.000If you're using nutrients that are already pre-made, like an advanced nutrients and the others, sometimes, you know, you might have a little bit of black ash because some of the components into those nutrients.
01:52:50.000It just looks prettier when it's white.
01:52:52.000But anyway, these guys, their shit, all white ash.
01:52:56.000The taste was fucking beautiful and the high was definitely there and I gotta say the guys in Vancouver man, they've stepped it up Well, they've been running weed through Vancouver for a long time.
01:53:51.000Where it wasn't legal, but they didn't ever arrest anybody for it.
01:53:55.000But there was a lot of gangsters, a lot of hell's angels were involved.
01:53:58.000A lot of dudes were selling weed, and they had...
01:54:05.000Yeah, you know, it's still sort of, I mean, you know, listen, the black market's always going to be anywhere, especially right now that the taxes are so high to buy cannabis and to grow it and all that stuff.
01:54:19.000Everything that involves it, it's pretty expensive right now.
01:54:39.000But, you know, it's always going to exist.
01:54:41.000And, you know, we sort of went through the same thing when 215 came about here in California, where it was, you know, cops didn't know what the fuck to do when they caught you with it.
01:54:55.000Because they knew as well as we were, this shit is eventually going to be legal.
01:54:59.000They don't want to be wasting their time in putting people in jail for cannabis because there's other people that need to be in jail for real, for real crimes.
01:55:10.000But yeah, I think what's happening in Vancouver now is that Now that it's legal, yeah, people are still making money and they're still on top of the game, but it's harder to make the money right now.
01:55:25.000Well, maybe not for Canada because it's federally legal, but you still got to jump through a number of hoops in terms of regulation and fines and fees and shit like that to operate there.
01:55:39.000You know, and they're a little bit different than ours.
01:55:42.000Obviously, we're not, ours isn't like federal yet.
01:55:46.000But I mean, you know, from what they were saying is that like, you know, in a few years, all these companies will be making a whole lot of money right now.
01:55:55.000They're making money, but it's basically about survival, getting past a certain level.
01:56:25.000Yeah, you can use credit cards, but realistically, if you're making money from cannabis in terms of if you're a cultivator or whatever, if you're a business entity in the cannabis world, they won't take your money if they know it's coming from the cannabis culture,
01:56:45.000But, you know, in the last two months, Forbes just put out a story about that the federal government is going to start allowing banks to allow banking in the cannabis sector.
01:57:08.000Yeah, and that just came out yesterday.
01:57:11.000You know, the Forbes story came out like maybe last week or something, but this is, you know, one of the residuals of it is that, you know, in places like California that we had problems with banking, Yeah.
01:57:40.000And, you know, obviously that ain't safe because you've got pirates out there still to this day trying to figure out, okay, where do they keep their money?
01:57:49.000Well, when I was in Colorado, when it first became legal, and they were having a real hard time, they couldn't use credit cards, it was all cash, and they just had spec ops guys everywhere.
01:57:58.000Bulletproof vests, just covered with guns, just ready to rock at any moment's notice, and they were worried that they were going to get, you know, someone was going to try to take over the store and take all the money.
01:58:10.000Yeah, I mean, there's still issues that they got to worry about moving into the future in terms of transportation, right?
01:58:17.000Because throughout the history of doing any sort of business in terms of products going from one side of the nation to the other, trucks get hijacked a lot for electronics, for any sort of goods.
01:58:32.000So, you know, when you're transporting cannabis from state to state, they're going to have to have that, you know, figured out, too, because there's, you know, people that are going to be trying to jack those trucks and hitting that into the black market.
01:59:24.000If I remember the story, they got the guys, and the guys basically explained how it worked, that they get dropped off, and they leave them with seeds and this and that, and then new guys come in every couple weeks or a couple months, and they live there.
01:59:39.000They just watch the weed until it grows to the point where they can cultivate it.
01:59:42.000And then they move on after it's done.
02:00:09.000I believe natives own that ranch, right?
02:00:14.000Yeah, you can find, to this day, these stones where they ground up acorns, where they have a little pivot, like a hole, where they ground it up.
02:00:55.000And I'll tell you, man, you know, as quiet as they've been in this cannabis culture, you know, you would think that that'd be one place that's like celebrated and whatnot.
02:01:06.000But, I mean, they still are coming up with, you know, incredible flavors down there, you know, in terms of, you know, breeding certain strains and creating new strains.
02:02:44.000I mean, I don't want to get too hippy, too hippy-dippy, but I would think that something that lives in nature with all those other trees and shits, communicating with those trees.
02:03:19.000Probably fertilizing some of that shit out there.
02:03:21.000For the longest time, we used to have to get, you know, I'm one of the owners of Onnit, and when we made hemp protein, we used to have to buy our shit from Canada.
02:05:59.000How weird is it to smoke weed with Mike Tyson?
02:06:01.000I've smoked with him before, and I've smoked with him on a couple separate occasions aside from there, but one of the places that I smoked with him was at that fucking Leota Machida Rashad Evans fight.
02:06:13.000When we all left, you know, after the fight, we were sort of getting to our cars, and he ran into me and my partner Kenji, and we were smoking a fat one right there.
02:07:58.000He said some of it was fentanyl, some Percocet, some...
02:08:02.000Fentanyl wasn't even around back then.
02:08:04.000Well, a form of it, you know, like whatever...
02:08:06.000Yeah, it was an opiate that was whatever, the fentanyl of that time, whatever.
02:08:10.000I can't remember what he called it, but there was two or three prescription drugs that they would give him, and he said he wouldn't feel nothing.
02:08:17.000He felt good, like there's no pain, no nothing.
02:08:21.000But the focus that he had was not there, right?
02:08:27.000He said that he smoked weed in one fight.
02:08:30.000Like, he smoked weed before one particular fight, and he used the whizinator to get through the urine test.
02:08:46.000And he said he'd never had so much focus...
02:08:49.000In a fight that it made him realize he should have been smoking weed through every goddamn fight because he focused on everything he was supposed to.
02:10:08.000No one can manage that from the time when he's 20. To, you know, by the time he retired, I mean, it was probably just a whirlwind of chaos.
02:10:17.000And it's crazy, because he realizes that, like, looking back at it, and he says that he doesn't train anymore because it awakens a beast in him.
02:10:31.000Yeah, because I was watching, you know, your interview with him, and one of our guys that was in the backseat asked him, hey, do you ever train?
02:10:39.000Do you ever, you know, he's like, Nah, I don't do that no more.
02:10:42.000Yeah, he goes, every now and then, I get on the treadmill, and I do some running on the treadmill, but that's it.
02:10:46.000I would imagine that if he got back in training, he'd get in shape real quick.
02:11:57.000I told Mike that he didn't realize, this is the last thing because I know we both got to go, but I said, do you know that...
02:12:04.000All the dudes you fought to get to that title, including the dudes that you took titles from, they all stopped fighting after you beat them.
02:12:14.000None of them wanted to come back and get nothing.
02:12:17.000They wanted no part of that heavyweight title after that.
02:13:00.000Yeah, and I told him, the other thing I told him real quick, too, was, you know, like, that explanation that he had on his documentary where he, as he's coming to the ring, he knew he had to fight one.
02:13:15.000And I told him, you know, I was at that Bruce Seldon fight, and I saw exactly what you explained in Bruce Seldon, because Bruce Seldon was knocking fools out left and right.
02:13:28.000He was like a really good heavyweight.
02:13:30.000The minute he got in there with Mike, he fanboyed out, tasted that glove...
02:16:43.000Well, you know, the people that he had around him.
02:16:46.000I mean, you know, Dodd King around him.
02:16:48.000He took all his people that he trusted away from him, put different trainers in his corner, different people that were influencing him, and it just took him backwards, man.
02:17:00.000And all the people that actually helped got him there.
02:17:13.000And to me, I think Don King being Don King, he stood a chance to make more money with someone taking out the fight, you know, 11 to 12 rounds as opposed to one.
02:17:26.000Well, he just, he gave Mike the worst deals ever, too.