#2163 - Freeway Rick Ross

I was like, you know, I dialed your number and it wasn't working no more. I was like, OK.

I didn't know.

So I was technically homeless, I was staying in a vacant apartment, me and my old lady and my two kids. And when I told you that I was doing bad, you was like, Man, you need a t-shirt? And, you know, when I left the show, I was a little hot. I was like, Damn, that motherfucker told me I needed a t-shirt.

I'm fucked up, but he know I handle money, he know I'm a thinker. Why he didn't help me? And so I'm walking down the street downtown. And this kid come up to me. And he was like, Hey Rick, I heard you on Joe Rogan the other day and I was like, Yeah.

He was like, Yeah, and I got a t-shirt idea for you. I said, Oh shit, another one of those motherfuckers.

And I said, What's your idea? And he said, The real Rick Ross is not a rapper. And I said, Corny is a motherfucker. But I kept an open mind and I said, OK, let's do it, the kid did it.

I go to him a couple weeks later and he give me 100 t-shirts, I sell a whole hundred the same day.

My PayPal? Because, you know, I ain't saw you since then, so I never got to tell you. Thanks for telling me to do a t-shirt, even though I was mad at you.

That's what I was looking for. When I got out of prison. I was like, somebody's going to come and say, man, I know you can handle money, let's do something. So I was looking for that, I was not looking for a t-shirt.

But, you know, in one of my favorite books, it might come through the back door. Don't look at the front door, look at the back door. So I did that, and when you put that t-shirt on, man, my PayPal went like this here.

And I was like my old lady, she was like, man, that PayPal is going crazy. I was like, that motherfucker broke.

I said, go check the bank account, and she went and checked the bank account and it's like, $18,000, $20,000 in there. And I was like, Oh my goodness, we finna get an apartment.

Wow, so my whole life changed from there. From there, I took that money and I did this. You wrote a book, I wrote a book.

I had already wrote the book, oh, I wrote the book in prison, oh, when I had a life sentence.

You know, I wrote this book. This was kind of like my message to the world about what it takes to become a drug dealer, how you become a drug dealer. I wrote it for kids, so they would know if they started to be a drug dealer, what they was going to run into.

And they make their own decision. OK, you sell drugs, yeah, you might get a big house, you might get the cars. But at the end of that rainbow is some cuff links and a prison sentence.

So I felt that.

The United States Government, or some people inside the United States Government, were selling crack in the hood and probably other places too. And they were using that to fund this war, they're using the money to fund this war. And you were the one who was moving the drugs.

Learn how to become a lawyer in jail. Figure out that the way they did you with three strikes was bullshit. Because it's supposed to be three different instances of you being arrested. They used the three instances of whatever they tried to pin on you, correct?

From one case, and so you got out of jail.

You know, it's funny because I said my judge and my lawyer and the prosecutor couldn't read.

I mean, because it was really plain and simple in the law, the way they explained it.

The most important thing was an intervening arrest, not that you get convicted three times, but it was an intervening arrest. Because they're saying that if you get a kid and he does three different things and you whoop him one time, that's for all three.

Now if he does something and you whoop him one time and that whooping is over and he goes and does it again and you whoop him for the same thing again, now you whooped him twice.

But they were all the same time. You whooped me one time.

So I get two more whoopings before, you know before, it's a three strike.

That fucking t-shirt paid our rent, man. Wow, I mean, you know, and my fucking kids now are playing tennis, my daughter is so fucking good at tennis.

I'm talking about like, really good, they saying, she's like, Serena good, really, yeah.

Wow, and I try not to like, you know, because it's my daughter, so I got to like, keep myself honest, you know what I'm saying. But I'm seeing her do things that I was doing at 16 and 17, and she's just turned 12, and she's doing those things right now.

I just want to see them to grow up, to be 20, 30 years old. And I've had a great life, man, I met some great people and, you know, I had some. I had some things happen to me, too. It ain't all been rosy.

You know, my documentary, I think, was we working on a documentary when I did you the last time?

No accountant. So they sold the documentary to Al Jazeera, rented it to Al Jazeera, rented it to Netflix, and I got zero dollars out of it.

I made the front page of Netflix for like, a year.

The day of the premiere, I got my first books from that book there, and I had my demo books. He bought one for $100, which I thought was like, Yeah, I'm going to do good with this book, $100 for one book.

So he took that book and he did snowfall.

And he didn't count me as an advisor, he didn't count me in at all, nothing.

I got you, let me get out of here.

It'll haunt you, it'll haunt you forever.

And I think that's ridiculous, and I think you.

And there's a lot of good people out there that just get fucked.

I wanted to be a drug dealer, you know, because all the pictures I saw of drug dealing was, you know, look, who I was doing drugs in the 80s. Everybody, all the entertainers, you know, so I wanted to be in entertainment.

Everybody.

Now, I used to be a drug dealer.

Like, you're absolved of all your crimes and all your sins, and you're welcome in society because you're very popular.

I really do. You want some coffee, some water? Water's right here.

A drug dealer who owed him money, someone who stole money from him, pistol whipped. This dude wound up going to jail for 50 years, gets out. They reduced his sentence to 25 years.

You know, Josh brought him in to show someone who can be rehabilitated. A month later, he gets out, cuts some dude's head off and gets caught.

And then also, you know the system itself, once you're inside, once you're a part of the system. Man, that can fuck you up. You do 25, I mean, how many years did you do in there?

I was mad when I first went to jail.

But then, you know, I started analyzing my life, and, you know, I wanted to know how I got there. You know, what are you doing here? You know, this wasn't part of the plan, right, right?

And I just figured I made some bad terms, you know, I listened to some people that, for the most part, loved me to death, you know, would have died with me. And they gave me what they had to give me, you know, and what they had to give me was the drug game.

Because I remember I was young at the time, I remember watching it all play out on TV and seeing how this insane story was playing out. That they were selling drugs, what the government was involved in the drug game so that they could fund it.

Who was pretty good at tennis, but he couldn't make it in tennis. You know what I'm saying now, you're telling me that? He was working with the White House, with Oliver North and George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

What all these people, I know, it's just like. For me, it was unbelievable, but even when I first went to jail before, all of this stuff hit the fan. One of the guys that went to elementary school with me, he came up and he said, Man, I heard the stories, but I couldn't believe it was you.

You was the poorest kid in the school. You and your brothers used to change pants. And you had holes in your tennis shoes and you used to put tennis balls on your shoes so your feet wouldn't be on the ground. And that was really you, and I was like, Yeah, he was like, man, you used to make millions of dollars.

So it was one of those stories that, you know, you really had to see it to believe it.

I mean, it's like, worse than ever, like some of these places that we go in, and I would be afraid to go there without a gun. And it's like a third world country, it's like a jungle. They got cardboard boxes and crates and tents and makeshift Shantytown plastic.

Yeah, and it's like, miles of these places, and Oakland is Oakland's crazy, Oakland is terrible.

And this isn't America. And this is why we have $175 billion to send overseas to help them, help people in Ukraine, help people in Israel. We don't have anything to clean this problem up, this massive problem. And all those people, all those people out there are wasted potential, all of them, all of them, who knows how many of those people? If they had a little bit of help, if they got the right counseling, they got the right, this, the right, that they started to get a path towards a good life, they could turn it around.

So what I wanted to do? I never had a job, you know, I never had a job right now today, I've never had. I mean, you know, I get paid for doing speaking engagements and stuff, but I'm saying, I've never had a job. Where I punch a clock. Or I had to fill out an application, none of that stuff, because I couldn't fill out an application before I went to prison.

And now, you know, I'm not going to fill out an application. But I had all this potential, but I had nobody to give me a boost, you know, to say.

And that's one of the things that I was saying about Lulu House that they're doing is they got housing for you. When people get out of jail, they go stay there for a while, they give them clothes.

They feed them. But sometimes you need those type of things to, you know, my break was you putting on that damn t-shirt?

Had I not got that break, I don't know where I would be at right now. And you know, I wasn't going to sit around and let my kids be hungry. You know, I had two new babies, you know, I had two new babies when we did that show.

Like, three years old, two years old, so they was really new. So me getting that money coming in was like, heaven sent, you know. Like, Yes, you know, I got a way to get me some traction now, but without that kind of traction, you know. And most of those people, they're not going to have the opportunity to do a t-shirt for themselves.

So, you know, we need to set up programs where these people can get a fresh start.

We had an episode here where we were talking to Chat GPT. Have you done any of that you messed around with Chat, GPT or AI, or anything like that?

How would you solve the homelessness and all the situations? And it basically laid out this plan, and one of the things would be re-energizing communities and helping taking places like these shanty towns in Oakland. Set up community centers, police presence, do something to stop the crime, do something to try to educate people, do something, community centers to give people a trade, a craft, something where they can move forward. There's, you know, there's a place out here, loaves and fishes, right? is that what it's called?

We actually went to the house yesterday. There's a community that they have here, I think it's called community first. Hold on a second, I'm going to find out real quick.

Yeah, we went there yesterday, I took my family there yesterday. And Community First Village is this thing that my friend Alan Graham has put together and he's got right.

Now there's, I think he's at like a thousand acres. And they build homes for these people, they have all these programs for these people, they have gardens, these people are making art and selling it.

This one woman made a chess set, she sold it for $10,000. These people are incredible artists. There's a lot of creative, interesting people that just don't know what to do or where to turn. And they've been doing drugs their whole life.

They're all fucked up and they're homeless, and they've got records and they don't know what to do.

And one of the things that drives me crazy is the pull yourself up by your bootstrap shit, you know, like, shut the fuck up, people don't even have boots like, what are you talking about?

That's so crazy, like you're supposed to do it yourself. People can't read, they don't know where to go, they don't have no positive influences.

And we don't spend any money on that. I've always said, if you want to make America great again, you really want to make America great. Have less losers. How do you have less losers? Give more people a chance.

You're never going to have equal outcomes because some people work harder, some people are smarter, some people are luckier. There's a lot of factors, but what you can have is change the amount of opportunity that people have, because some people have zero opportunity, they have nothing. And if you give more people opportunity and more people help, you'll have more winners.

You'll have more people successfully living in society, contributing, and everything gets better.

They can duplicate a win. Because, I mean, you know, I keep going back to me, you know? Having the opportunity to do this t-shirt. I had no clue to do a t-shirt. I wasn't thinking about doing no t-shirt. That was not in my plan to do no t-shirt, you know?

So sometimes they just need that little boost, yeah, the little vision, you know, from somebody else that's actually out here. Because, you know, when I came home, I had no idea what the world was, everybody had cell phones, you know?

Right, right, I mean, they're on computers and I'm like, I'm like a fish out of water. I don't understand this.

You know, I don't, I don't even know my way around South Central for a while. It took me a while, just, to, you know, to get back on the streets and the avenues. Because so much stuff changed in 20 years. So we give people all this time in prison and, like you say, someone was on drugs or whatever.

And we got to set up a system where they can readjust. You know, most people go back to prison within the first three or four months.

Jesus. The second, I might do two and a half million, the third, I might do a million and a half. And then after that, it'd be a million dollars every day, and then the 15th, it would spike back up, maybe three million, maybe two and a half million.

And then it would start decreasing again.

Why not open up your own business? So drugs? I couldn't go to the bank and borrow money. You know, South Central was redlined at that time, you know they wasn't loaning money on houses or nothing in South Central at that time.

We was totally redlined, not like it is right now, you know? South Central is one of the hottest properties in the country, where if you got a house there, you can borrow money on it. They buying them, but at that time it was redlined.

So I didn't have any way to get money, and drugs looked like a viable source of raising money.

So it was totally baffling to me to find out. Well, I never thought it out. I didn't know what a million dollars was when I first started, you know? Like when I started selling drugs, probably the most money I'd ever saw was probably like 200 bucks, 300 bucks at one time.

I'm going to hit 300, 400 backhands over and over and over and over again. I'm not going to stop until I do my number. And I took that same mentality into the drug business. You know, I'm not going to stop selling my drugs and take my girlfriend to the movies. You know, I'm not going to the club.

I'm not drinking, I'm not smoking, you know, I'm going to stay up under this tree and wait till the money comes.

You know, my mom and my dad broke up when I was four months old, so I didn't really know my dad met him a few times. So the male figures that I saw was these street guys, you know, crips, you know bloods.

And when I stopped playing tennis, I was 18 years old. And I was old enough to know. Like, Oh, I ain't shooting nobody because he wear red, I ain't shooting nobody because he wear no blue. You know, I ain't with that. I'm not sticking a gun in nobody's face to rob them, you know, I'm not doing it.

So I had to find what I felt was a valuable way of making a living. And when I saw cocaine shoot, they come over and they dancing. We going to the club? I need a 50..

Me and my girl, we turning up tonight, so I was like, Damn, they're going to give you $50 and you make them feel like that. I want a part of that, I want to be with that, I want to be the one to make them happy like that there.

And I'm going to get paid to make them feel like that. There I'm all in, and I dove in, you know, and I was in love, you know, I was in love with the business.

All the trophies was good and, you know, the pats on the back. But, you know, now I'm putting money in my pocket. You know, I can go by my mom house and say, Hey, go pay your light bill. Yeah, you know, put gas in your car.

You know, my little brothers and sisters didn't have to go to school with hoes in their tennis shoes no more.

40 years later, and nothing's changed in terms of drug dealing, nothing's changed in terms of drugs being legalized. They're still giving money to criminals, and particularly criminals in Mexico. I mean, that's literally what funds the cartels. And the fact that there's a demand in America and the supply is all brought over. Or, for the most part, a lot of it is brought over by the Mexican cartels. We're just empowering them.

We're just giving them money.

And because in order to get rid of drugs, the way they're trying to do it, they would have to get rid of all three elements. Right? You know, you'd have to get rid of the manufacturers, yeah, you'd have to get rid of the distributors, and you'd have to get rid of the users.

Yeah, because if you get rid of one, the other two are going to create that one again.

When I was in high school, my friend's cousin got hooked on Coke and I watched his life fall apart. I was like, Oh, I don't want nothing to do with that. I was always terrified that I was going to do something that was going to turn me into a loser. So, you know, I grew up poor and we moved around a lot and I always felt out of place. I never felt like I had anything going on in my life until I started doing martial arts when I was a kid, when I was like 15..

That's when I really got into it and then from then on I said, This is the key to life. The key to life is discipline and focus. And I don't want nothing that's going to take away my focus, nothing's going to take away my drive.

And I saw my friend's cousin, I was like, God damn, he was a good dude. And now he's like a vampire. And now he's like hiding in his attic apartment. And they're all just like doing coke all the time and selling coke. It was horrible, yeah.

So I never fucked with Coke, but I know a lot of successful people that every now and then they do a little coke, you know? And I think it's like everything else, I think it's, I mean, there's a lot of things. Alcohol is addictive.

I like a little alcohol every now and then. I don't think it's that bad, I don't think weed's bad, I don't think any of these things are bad. I think what's bad is bad behavior and bad thinking and not understanding the consequences of what you're doing.

And the consequences of what we're doing by making drugs illegal is so crazy. Because all we're doing, we're not reducing the demand, we're not reducing the supply. We're just empowering criminal elements in another country that now are immensely powerful.

That's who you want to be, and we're empowering that, we're empowering all that in this country by our stupid fucking laws.

You know, if it had no value, I mean, if it was worth what it's really worth? It's a plant, so it grows well, so it doesn't take anybody to grow it. So you're talking about it might be worth pennies, but it's the value that we create that attracts people to Coke.

And the way I see it that if it loses its value. Most people that I saw get started with Coke, start off selling and they get curious, Well, what does it do for you? And they try it and they don't or not capable of not doing it anymore.

I did it for about two weeks, you know, when I got up to, like, an ounce. My cousins talked me in. Hey, go ahead and try it, go ahead and try it, because I never tried it before.

I never smoked marijuana or nothing at that time and they talked me into trying it. And when I looked up, I had like $300, I had about $9,000 worth of coke, and when we finished, I had $300..

So what I realized is that they had tricked me into getting started so that they could get high.

So about that day, when I finally cleared my head up, I said, You know what, I'm never doing it again and I never done Coke again.

A lot of it is exaggerated. And, you know, he talks openly about responsible drug use. I mean, this guy's a professor, legitimate academic, an intellectual, and he talks openly about his own personal drug use.

And we have to get people that are more sensible. You know, when I got home and found out that marijuana was illegal, you know, it was like, Wow, finally, we're waking up, you know?

So you can just get that. It's very the whole thing's very strange. It's like there's worse things in this world than marijuana. Absolutely, oh my God.

Marijuana makes people calmer, makes people funnier.

High time event the day I get off parole. So my boy from Cincinnati, he's flying out to L.A, so he flies out to L..A, he comes by the house.

He's like, Man, you're off parole, let's go celebrate. And I was like, Cool, where we going? He's like, Man, they're having a high time event coming.

I was like, Oh, no, I don't want to get with that drug stuff, man.

Because, you know, I'm still, even though I've been through all I've been through, I'm still under this impression that they have been instilling in us. Oh well, marijuana is a gateway drug, right, you know? So I'm still tripping off of that. So I was like, Oh man, I don't want to go out there, you know, I started selling marijuana.

Get involved with the marijuana. Next thing, you know, I'll be back doing coke because I understood that I'm an addict. I was an addict to selling cocaine. I mean, I love.

If I had a problem, my old lady start arguing, I just go sell some coke.

So now I forgot about him being sick. So Coke had become like a crutch to me where anything that went wrong for me, Coke made it better. I mean, you know, like the commercials.

You know, everything goes better with Coke.

I bet you did, man. I found myself out there, man. Those people treated me so good, I was like, what the fuck I want to be in this community?

And after that day, you know, I've been chasing the marijuana business.

In 2016,.

When the federal, when they changed the law, I went there and they, you know, first, they didn't want convicted felons to work in the industry, right? I was like, what the fuck, how you guys going to say that? And we the ones made it where the industry is legal now.

Had the people not go to jail for selling marijuana, you never would have thought about legalizing it, right? And they had me to argue to City Council, Wow, that issue.

Cocaine might be actually it's medically. Do you know that Coca-cola is one of the largest importers of coca leaves? That coca leaves still flavor Coca-cola?

If you're a Coke fan, it's like the flavor that Coke has is flavored partially, at least by cocaine. Coke is schedule 2 interesting. Schedule 3 would be like ketamine, testosterone, anabolic steroids, codeine. Oh, mild shit.

Some sort of, yeah, well, codeine ain't that mild, that's interesting, tie them all with codeine, probably to the less than 90 milligrams.

Okay, so then that's where marijuana's going to be, which is still ridiculous. What schedule's Ambien? That shit's fucking scary. What schedule's Adderall?

What's Adderall? Just hit it right there, Jim. Yeah, if you click on What schedule's Adderall? right above.

What schedule drug is? Adderall Yeah, schedule 2. That stuff is fucking crazy. I know a lot of people hooked on that.

Schedule 4.

Less that's funny Xanax Xanax is 4..

I know a lot of people have been fucked up by xanax, valium. I know a lot of people that have been fucked up by valium, fucked up by valium, yeah.

And then that stuff is less illegal than marijuana. It's crazy, we're so silly. I mean, it's the little baby steps towards legalization, you know, that's.

One thing that California has above Texas, for sure, is the legalization of marijuana. It should be legal in federal law.

And they're defunding what they should do. If you want to tax it, you're making plenty of money. I'm sure a lot of people want to buy weed, take that money and fix the fucking problems, use that money.

Use that money to fix the problems. Stop with all the bureaucracy, stop with all these fucking useless people that are getting paid for these homeless programs in Los Angeles. It's just a scam. It's just a bunch of people making money, some of them upwards of $250,000 a year, to fix the homeless problem.

And they're not doing Jack shit.

I mean, the problem can be solved. It's got to be somebody who says, you know what? We're going to throw a few, maybe $50 million, $100 million, into building some low-income houses. We're also going to have some treatments, where people get treated, where they get job training. It's just so many things. I mean, I don't know.

Even when I look at some of our supposed to be millionaires, billionaires the way they, I don't know. I would look at this problem and I would solve it totally different.

Because even though I like making money, I'm not like typical people. They get the money and they want to harness it and they just want it for themselves so that they can look down on everybody else. I don't think money is supposed to be used like that. I think money is supposed to be put back into the community, where the community can rejuvenate and the money circulates into the community.

Yeah, I mean, that's how you get your kicks, you know, I would get my kick by seeing somebody do good, like, look at that motherfucker, he doing good.

That's a good kick, that's my motherfucker boy, yeah, you know.

They get a kick off of being the most powerful person. Yeah, you know, and that's an evil inclination that is built into humanity. For some reason, there's always been that impulse for some people to do that.

It's very unfortunate.

That's when you're really powerful, when you don't have to use it, you're like, See, I'm so powerful, don't nobody even make me use it?

I don't think that helps anybody. I think there's a real possibility that we come out of this better. It's just we have to think right and act right.

And now we're fucked, and now we have to turn this shit around.

One of them was 21. These are the people that started the Declaration of Independence, they signed it. These are the people that were the founding fathers of this experiment and self-government that you and I both live in.

They were young as fuck, man. Yeah, now you look at the people that are in Congress, now you look at people like, you know, like the president.

He can't even form a sentence, he doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. When he's talking to foreign leaders, he's out of it.

And that's with a lot of them, and they get there through years and years and years of being deeply embedded into the system. And they know how to work it. And next thing, you know, they're the top dogs.

Right, and then you really become an American.

I think if you're not experiencing real life, then you don't know what real life is right. You know, if you don't see it, you don't touch it. You know, some of these people never, never go out to the communities.

You know, different roll the dice, different circumstances, different life.

They genuinely want to believe they're special, which I think is a trap.

If you go out and you do something special, you know, then maybe you're special, you know? But if you're not doing anything that anybody else can't do, then you're no better than nobody else.

And those people also, what they do is they elevate everyone around them because they make you realize, like, Wow, my watermark was here, now it's here.

Yes, then you're special, yeah.

And it could be a great thing, or it could be what happened to you. It's like the wrong inspiration.

But, you know, that could be in your case, it turned out to not be good, but in other people's cases, in different things, with different examples of people that are succeeding. Like, you could have done what you did in the drug game if you had better opportunities in fucking anything. I agree, and it's genuinely it's the discipline of an athlete, which is an extraordinary discipline, the discipline to force yourself to do things you don't want to do.

You develop that ability and the ability to, like, really, hone in and focus, and have drive and a work ethic. That translates to everything, everything. You just got to find a different thing to do.

I'm going to get beat down again, right? You know, I don't have the support, you know? I don't have the crutch to hold me in position until I can build my strength up to be on my own. And I think that we as a society have to give this to our children, because if we don't, our children are going to be in trouble.

Thank you, and I'll be like, Thank you, I should be thanking you because you just made my day, you know, I got off by doing that.

And I'm from the streets, you know, I'm from where people kill you for colors. You know? Some of my first heroes was Tookie Williams. You know, I used to look up to Tookie Williams. I want to be like, Tookie, I want to be a crip, you know?

So to now see the world to where I should be trying to save lives, you know, is a total different mentality than when I was 12 years old. 11 years old, you know? And yeah, and I'm saying, guys fight over color and stuff.

That was because I was ignorant, I didn't know any better, right, you know? But once I was educated to the facts that, hey, we supposed to be helping save lives, not destroying a life.

How how exciting book reading was. And and you know, the books I started to read was about making money. I got. I got to tell you that there was about either making money or how the mind works. You know how to how to think, you know how to think successfully, how to have faith in yourself, how to believe in you, you know, because when when you don't believe in yourself.

It's hard to believe in anything, right? You know? If you believe you're a loser, then you think everybody else is losers as well, right? So having these experiences in these books, you know, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, like, just blew my mind.

You know, like, fuck, people actually think like this here, you know? Like? You can think and grow rich, you can use your mind to create, and you only really need one idea that could could make you a fortune. You know, you shouldn't be allowing other people to.

Feature mine their ideas, you know what they think you should be, you know?

Because when I was coming up, other people affected the way. I thought, you know, like, man, you play tennis, that's a girl sport, you know?

You write, you read in a book. why are you reading a book? You need a gun, you know? So these things start to shape your mind. And you know when I find out from James Allen that I am the gardener of my mind, and.

I have to keep my mind weed free, you know, I have to pluck the weeds out as soon as a negative thought pop in. Because, you know, even since I've been home, you know, they offer me coke. I had a few guys come, Oh, I was just playing, you know, nudging on the shoulder.

I was just playing to see see where you was at with it.

So as soon as those things happen, you got to get rid of them, you know? Because when Blandon approached me about selling drugs again, I wasn't planning on selling drugs no more, but when he kept offering it. And when I listen to the tape in court, man, you know, I'm in court.

We're going to trial and they play the tapes of our recorded phone calls. And he says, Rick, I got 700 kilos. First thing popped out of my mind, my mouth, and I don't even know I said this.

How much? First thing, I told myself, I have promised myself, Joe, I promised myself and my kids I'm never selling coke again. But when he asked me that question on that tape, which is probably what convicted me, wow.

I said, How much?

Wow, unconsciously, I think I think I had had fallen asleep behind the wheel, so you had already decided to get out. I was out. I hadn't sold drugs in five and a half, six years.

He was wearing a wire, he was recording the conversation.

How much, how much. I just kept hearing myself, how much, and I just put my head down because I knew that that was a crucial mistake.

Wow, even though I didn't, I didn't bite that time. I didn't bite, but you did say how much, I did say how much, that's all it took.

That's all it took. So that showed an interest. Oh God, as if I would have said, Oh, I don't fuck with drugs, no more.

But you know, I'm talking to my partner, I'm talking to the homie. We chopping it up, right? Oh, times.

Just good time, curiosity.

What kind of figures are we talking about here? Yeah, it's exciting, too, right? Yeah, that's also a part of the problem.

Your life is mundane. Selling drugs is exciting, I bet the girls.

Yeah, pay for nice hotels.

Nice this, nice clothes, so it's easy.

You know, not to be able to buy a girlfriend the shoes she wants. And you know, we have to come up with things. Because, you know, most of the manufacturing jobs overseas, right? You know, we don't make anything in America anymore. Very little.

Huh, just have people in other countries that are extremely poor work for almost nothing.

It's weird, man, we're we're goofy, goofy culture and we have so much information. It's not like the solution is impossible to solve.

You know, we got to, we got to put our hands down, our feet down and say, you know what, we're going to make a stance. And and you know, that's what I believe. You start with, what you got, where you at. You know, so many people want things to be perfect. No, it ain't going to be perfect.

You know, you might have to go through a little something, you might have to miss a couple meals, you know, but this is what it's going to take.

That's a very hard sell.

It is, it is, but we got to put people first, we got we got to learn, I mean, we got to stop being stupid.

Yeah, and I believe when, when, when we don't put people first, we're being stupid. Yes, because without people there's no drugs, right?

No business, there's no nothing.

Yeah.

The crazy thing is, is enough resources for everybody? there's enough for everybody? There really is. It's just our system, it's just.

It's just manipulated and all fucked up and poorly organized and badly planned.

How, so well some of it. I can't talk on air about it because it ain't proper, right?

But I would just tell you that, that that I'm being privileged to see this business destroy itself. I'm watching them just destroy their business. You know, no organization, no, no camaraderie, you know, I'm gonna beat this guy out, I'm gonna beat that guy out.

I'm gonna put him out of business and they really going to put themselves out of business at the same time. It's like, I saw a thing in national geographic when I was in jail. And it was alligator, and one of those big water moccasins was fighting, and the water moccasin wound up swallowing the alligator.

Really, yeah.

But in the process, he swallowed the alligator, so an alligator go inside, he's still alive, he takes his claws and go like this here, oh God.

Probably his last.