Julian Dorey Podcast - #45 - Ashtin Larold: Making Music; Facing Anxiety & Depression; Racism & Police Debate

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Ashtin Larold is a singer, rapper, songwriter, and recording artist. He initially rose to prominence in September 2015–after his YouTube video, "White Kid Kills it in High School Rap Battle," went viral. Today, his original music has millions of streams across Apple & Spotify.   - Ashtin's Music - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5IEv10kDPVFB23d7kXUZbn   Apple: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ashtin-larold/1128030427  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 4:31 - How Julian found Ashtin’s music back in 2019; Ashtin’s music influences; “Gatekeepers” in rap; The Jordan - LeBron comparison example & the problem with comparisons 23:09 - Music is an art while sports is a “score”; Criticism vs. conviction; The wild backstory of Ashtin’s Famous Freestyle Rap Battle (“White Kid Kills It In Freestyle Rap Battle”) that put him on the map. 34:48 - Ashtin’s transition to melodic music; T-Pain & Autotune; “Finding your sound”; How Ashtin is influenced by whatever he’s listening to heavily at a given time 43:00 - How Ashtin’s dealt with panic attacks, anxiety, and depression; Ashtin’s struggles with contemplating suicide; Ashtin’s early days of experimenting with different drugs 58:13 - Ashtin tells the story of when both of his lungs collapsed and he refused anesthesia during surgery 1:05:05 - Dealing with suicidal thoughts; Mental pain can be worse than physical pain; Ashtin talks about facing his lowest moments and how he got through them 1:17:39 - How Ashtin has handled the Covid 19 Pandemic; Revisiting TRENDIFIER #38 - Grant Wiley; The importance of self care maintenance and showing your emotions 1:30:30 - Ashtin talks about his Mom & his Friend Group; What Ashtin’s other aspirations before music were; “If you’re not living an interesting life, you can’t make interesting art” 1:44:06 - The problem with the “starving artists” myth; Artists & depression / suicide / sadness patterns; Ashtin’s wish to “spend time being happy”; getting rid of negative influences in life 2:01:18 - Why this podcast is a true conversation; The critical importance of an artist’s personality and likability; 2nd Amendment and gun discussion; Debating society's attitudes toward Covid; “The Answer to many hard issues often lies in the middle.” 2:14:26 - Why Ashtin does not like the police system; Not knowing what it’s like to be a black person or a police officer; Ashtin tells a funny fake-burglary story from his teenage years that led to a run in with cops 2:28:54 - Why Ashtin believes the police force has rampant racism; The problem with police unions; “Vocal Minorities”; The issue with “Blue Lives Matter” 2:47:10 - The problem with the US Justice System; “The 13th” Documentary (Netflix); Malcolm Gladwell’s bail experiment from his book, “Talking To Strangers”; “We ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

because it's fucking wild bro because a lot of my anxiety is rooted in fear of losing control fear of dying fear of you know i'm dying young or dying in a way that i don't want to or blah blah blah and it's you know it's it's weird that there's a dichotomy there that you have this juxtaposition of like well how how come someone whose anxiety is all based and rooted in them not wanting to die, how are they so anxious that they're about to end their life? You know what I mean? It doesn't even fucking make sense. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by the one, the only, Mr. Ashton

Larreld. If you have not heard Ashton's music, it has been streamed millions of times and it is terrific. I won't get into the full story of why this was a big circle of life moment for me, having him come in here to the studio. I had never met him before, but long story short, I had heard every record he had ever made a couple years ago and because it got passed along to me and it was terrific and so when i got the call from my friend austin beers asking if i would want to talk to this great artist ashton larold out of south jersey i was like yes i would i would very much like to talk to ashton so he came in here and he's a pro. So he did not disappoint.

But one thing I would say about this guy is that he puts all his cards on the table, man. No one can ever say that he doesn't say exactly where he stands or where he's been. And it came across because for probably two hours we talked all about what we started with his musical influences and his come up because chances are, I won't get into it right now, but you probably saw him as a kid in a YouTube that went very, very viral. I'll just leave it at that. And so we went through that and his career and how he approaches his music. And then he really opened up on his mental health battles. And I mean, he said it himself himself i'm an open book and he absolutely is it was it was pretty amazing and you can really see where he gets his perspective in in life and

in his work so to have that happen in this studio was an awesome thing and for him to set the example for other people to be comfortable to open up about that kind of stuff amazing we also had a long maybe like an hour conversation on the state of the police force and racism which i mentioned last week my last two guests kind of opposite political ends so i had someone from the right wing in in gavin last week who was terrific and now this week i i have ashton who himself comes from the liberal wing, also terrific. But these are hard conversations, and we got into it. Like I said, the guy puts the cards on the table, and he put his cards on the table there. So I'm going to have to go listen to this whole thing a few times. This is now like four podcasts in a row I'm saying that.

But look, I guess that means great things are happening in here. So if you haven't checked out Ashton's music, go stream it. It's phenomenal. There's something in there for everyone. There were a few moments today where I kind of had some goosebumps hearing him talk about it. And I'm looking forward to having this guy in here again. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment on the video if you would, please. To all of the people who have left a five-star review with a comment on Apple Podcasts, thank

you. They do keep rolling in. They are all phenomenal, and they're a huge help because new listeners who are coming to the page and deciding, i going to give this a shot listen for a couple minutes just to see if it's good they read that stuff and if they get some good comments there with some detail it goes a long way so to everyone who's done that thank you if you could take a minute to do it if you haven't already i would really really appreciate that said you know what it is i'm julian dory and this is everyone understands this but few seem to do. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. Ashton Laro. Thanks for coming, dude.

Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this one. Yeah. This is kind of crazy because I was talking with you about it before, but just for people to get some context out there I had gotten connected to your music back in the end of 2019

my cousin hit me up and said this guy Ashton Larrell that I went to high school with, hear me out he's really fucking good and I'm kind of a music snob so I'm like, alright, let's'm like, all right, let's see. I've never heard of him.

I'm like, let's see. And then she played me the song Broken. And I was like, oh. Oh, no, this guy's good good. This guy's good good. Thank you. Dude, how did you get into music? When did it happen?

I've been into music, honestly, my whole life. I probably started the second I found out I could download a program called like Audacity for free and run to Target and get a fucking $14 little plastic USB mic and be like you know start recording shit and just be like just to see the

even though not to talk shit on Audacity I think everyone downloaded it at one point but like you know i'm here for it even if you know how basic it looks like just seeing the the tracker go across the screen see the waveform of the vocals and stuff i was like yo this is lit um and then i i dude i used to just get i started drinking real young, and I would just hang out with my friends. And the people that, like, sort of got me into drinking and, you know, all that shit, they also got me into freestyle rap. And I had never done it before. Like, I listened to rap music, but I had never really tried like freestyling and just me at the time like anything anytime i

got like a positive like a big positive response for some shit like seeing these older kids who we were hanging out with be like damn he's kind of good at freestyling and i was like okay like these older kids who are already like allowing me to drink with them or whatever i already feel like they're fucking cooler than me so then when they start like treating me like i'm their age treating me like their peer and being like yo you can rap like you should try writing shit started writing shit um how old were you when this was going on 13 14 damn yeah um and you know i was probably 14 maybe 15 when i started recording like again blue snowball plugged into my friend's laptop audacity downloading you know ripped mp3 beats off youtube with the beat tag still in it just doing remixes and stuff like excuse me um yeah and then slowly over time just getting better honestly like i the whole

the whole fucking game is just keep doing it like so many people go into it with i think the what's cool is that i got into it just because I thought it was cool to do. And then afterwards, when shit started popping off later on in high school, I was like, oh, I can make money off this. I can make this into my life. I think now people go into it going, I want to make money off this. I want to make this into my life. And that's the goal initially. So they get discouraged when they don't see money the first year or the second year or the third year.

And they're like, fuck, it's not going to work, whatever. And then they give up. And it's like, dog, I've literally been doing this for, I guess, technically over 10 years now. And only, I would say, this year, 2020, is the year that I started to feel like i really had developed my sound like before that ever i was getting closer and closer and closer and you could see the progression but this year the stuff that i'm holding on to right now um that's the stuff that i feel like and that's you know people people hit that that benchmark at different times and after a different amount of time and practice and stuff for me it was about 10 years so well there's a lot to unpack there

with like your journey here so i want to come back into there and come back to some things but on your your sound because you mentioned you got into this with rap but you've developed into a very wide ranging artist since then like your, when I went through all your records a year and a half ago, there was a little bit of everything in there. I could not put you in a box at all, which I love. I love it when some guy can give me this 100-mile-an-hour just flow on one song, very hardcore,

and the next song just vulnerable, raw, open, and singing, and actually good singing. Thank you. So for you, where did it start to get to like, okay, I've been doing rap, and what did that look like? You said you were freestyling stuff and making some tracks, but when did it turn into actually making full-blown tracks? And we can talk about some of the freestyling stuff too, obviously.

And then when did it get to, hey, you know, I want to sing too. I want to create some sort of like alt vibe as well. So I always, I was always singing. I was in the Philadelphia Boys Choir when I was a kid. No shit. Yeah. So I was in choir and shit in school. I loved singing.

I grew up around music. My mom was always playing me music um and all different types of honestly like what'd you like dude like back then elton john queen green day meatloaf death leopard black sabbath you know that was the my mom had me listening to from the time i was two years old and i was living with her and my grandma so i didn't i didn't have the internet i didn't have mtv i didn't have cable so i didn't even get exposed to rap until i was probably like 10. wow yeah so i didn't and then it was like i didn't you know what mean? It's like finding out a new color exists. You know what I mean?

You're like, I know music. I know what music sounds like. And then one day they're like, no, you fucking don't. Here's this new one. And they're like, oh, shit, new music just dropped. New genre. It was really exciting for me. And I remember just I would go home, I would go on YahooMusic.com.

That's how fucking I'm showing my age here, bro. Go up to the computer room. Dude, I was on LimeWire. I feel you. I feel you. Bro, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the family desktop. Oh, yeah. Go upstairs, hop on fucking Yahoo Music, and I would just watch music videos.

And my mom would come in and yell at me if I was watching like Candy Shop or some shit you know what i mean it's a great video it's a great video yeah shout out 50 um fit dude 50 is that was that your first like real exposure to rap when he dropped i'm not even gonna lie i think i had like karaoke tapes with like fucking the sugar hill gang like a hip hip heavy like that that like i had a couple karaoke tips because again i love to sing so one of my one year for christmas i asked for a karaoke machine um i think my first introduction like modern rap was probably candy shop by 50 cent yeah yeah and then great song it's a amazing song bro i was shit. I was probably in like second or third grade. And I came home and I was listening to that.

And my mom was like, dog, what are you doing, bro? And I was like, she was like, do you know what this means? And I was like, I know it's not for me. You know what I mean? I knew I wasn't. I'm like putting together context clues. I'm like, I don't know if he really means a real lollipop. I don't know.

I think he might mean something else. And my mom was like, I don't want you listening to this. And I was like, I'm going to keep listening to this. That means you're going to listen to it more. Yeah. No, as soon as you make something of forbidden fruit. When I first started, like, really getting into rap, when I first started doing it myself, when I realized I don't need to go to a recording studio whatever uh the two big people i was listening to then were

mac miller and chris webby when i first started chris i haven't heard chris webby in a while wow shout out chris that's a name he's still doing good he he's dropped songs with some of my friends actually um and then mac miller obviously i have self-care tattooed on my knuckles. Yeah, RIP to Mac. But that was sort of when I was like, damn. Because, you know, I went to a fucking Catholic school. I was surrounded by suburban white people. My exposure to rap was largely what other suburban white kids were listening to.

So I had everything on the radio, you know what I mean? Lil Wayne, Drake, T-Pain, all that shit. And then I had this backpack rap, like Hopson and Kid Cudi and Wiz Khalifa and Chris Webby and Mac Miller. And I started to get into that. That's when I started freestyling and stuff, started recording shit. And then when I started to get real serious, I was into niche West Coast hip-hop, like indie, dumbfounded, wax, breezy lovejoy, EOM, Intuition.

And then my love for hip-hop just sort of went into phases, bro. I didn't start listening to older stuff until I was older. You know what I mean? I feel like I need to do due diligence and go back and actually listen to what what got us here you know what i mean because i was just listening to what was out now and like i also feel like there's an expectation though for newer rappers like you see people going like you know hot 97 or the breakfast club and and people are getting grilled like oh you know like name five eric b and rock him songs and it's like bro this kid is 17 dog like his old school rapper is wayne yeah you know

what i mean like that's dmx was old school as fuck for for these for these kids bro and i'm older than a lot of these yeah rest in peace man like i'm i'm older than a lot of these kids bro and i'm older than a lot of these yeah rest in peace man like i'm i'm older than a lot of these kids that are blowing up right now you know what i mean like what are you 25 26 25 yeah um it's crazy that like you know some of these kids and it's it's a very small handful but some of these kids hit the right fire at like 17 and it's a great point you make it you can't expect them yeah to know that and if they do cool but i don't think it should be like this gatekeeping thing like you can't do rap music if you can't name 10 tupac songs it's like yep you know what i mean do i have to know every like

i get it and you can still recognize that they were you know titans fucking pillars of the culture and led the way for what's here doesn't mean you have to necessarily rock with their music or it might not be what you listen to on a daily basis you could still appreciate it and respect it and be grateful that these people paved the way for the evolution that has led to where we're at right now but i just don't think i don't think it's that deep like you can still show respect to the fucking people that that got us here without being like i just dude it just bugs me i hate seeing that shit when people are getting grilled like man you're not a real rapper like you don't even name one krs1 song song. It's like, bro. You got me. This kid is 14. You know what I mean?

It's kind of like the get off my lawn generation in rap now because we take it for granted, but rap is now, and I mean this in a good way, it's long in the tooth. I mean, I guess Afrika Bambaataa did the first real stuff in the late 70s, but officially it starts getting off the ground mid-80s or so, and then NWA just hits the button and mid 80s or so and then nwa just hits the button and everything starts to go and then you get pock and biggie but you know we're in 2021 yeah there's it's to your point you you mentioned to some of these guys little

wayne's like the old school guy he is yeah fireman was bumping in 04 yep you know so some of these kids were born when they were five, when we were 13 or whatever. And it's just, I don't know, you can't hold everyone to that standard. And I think, too, is rap is this one genre, and for some reason, there's a lot of gatekeepers and tastemakers in the community who have a real problem with just admitting that there's gonna be subgenres of any genre you know what i mean you have classic rock rock as a thing encompasses so much fucking music so many types of music math rock is not going to be the same as like hair metal you know what i'm saying they're just different types of music they're still rock and they're still rooted in the same thing but it's so you know what i'm saying like no one is trying to compare black sabbath and like the the grateful dead you know what i mean

they're just way different exactly and you wouldn't do that they they were both good and but like i see all these comparisons like oh like almost like j cole is more valuable his art is more valuable than someone like uzi because of the the lyrical content and it's like that's one way of looking at it for sure. But does, you know what I mean? Like, how are we grading art? Because it's a sort of abstract thing. So while Cole might be saying there might be a lot more substance in his songs, but if Uzi's song makes you feel more, then that's where the value comes from. And it's like, why are we comparing these

two artists who make very different music for very different audiences why are like why are why are you even saying like cole was better you know and if they don't make the same type of music as far as i'm concerned i think because our society is obsessed with ranking our society our society is is never happy with just appreciating yeah we always have to say what's better than something else and get the conversations flowing to create tribes around things right you know one of the conversations i've had my entire life that i don't even have anymore because i just want to appreciate is you know being a guy who's born and raised on the east coast i'm in the minority with my love for tupac he's my favorite artist of all time i know every song he ever made that's awesome and like i love biggie yeah love

him he's incredible his flow was unbelievable yeah i'm always gonna give you the argument straight up that like that you know the guy put out 45 songs in his life tupac recorded 10 000 yeah you know tupac hit you want to talk about sub-genres of music, he hit every fucking sub-genre of it. Yeah. And so, I'll get into these arguments, and what it turns to is like a you versus them kind of thing. Like, oh, no, no, no. But, like, I must think Biggie sucks. Right.

Or, like, you must think Pac sucks. And, no, no. They're too varied. I do not go to listen to many Biggie songs when I go to listen to Tupac's. Right. They're different vibes. Exactly, bro. And they can coexist.

Yeah, man. You see it in basketball, too. And I think people should have taken more note from after Kobe died, where it's like, let's stop the fucking fighting and just appreciate it. Right? Like, you know, LeBron can be this controversial figure to some but he's done he's lived the american dream yeah he's a four-time champion yeah he's the greatest specimen athlete i've ever seen in my life like let's stop having the whole jordan lebron thing let's just like they can both be great you know what i'm saying there's nothing wrong with i i don't know bro and i think a lot

of that really is rooted in insecurity truthfully i think that there's a lot of people who... What do you mean by that? That's interesting. So I think... All right, so most of the people who get... This is what... Because I'm not a huge sports guy. And I always...

It's funny to me to watch people argue about sports because you have people who couldn't... You take the worst fucking player in the NBA right now, and you put him up against any of my friends who are arguing about the NBA, and, bro, he will dust you. He will fucking dust you. He'll make you look like a fucking baby, bro. You're going to look like a child, all right?

And you're sitting here, oh, he's trash. He's trash. Bro, if you can't do something, how are you going to call someone else trash? If you can't do something how are you gonna call someone else trash if you can't do what he's doing don't call him trash well he's not as good as so and so and neither the fuck are you you're not as good as him so shut the fuck up what are you talking about like i don't know because i think in music i get so many people who tell me bro trust me do this do that and i always ask what like what credentials do you have and i'm not i'm not trying to be condescending or pretentious but like you know i don't go to my auto mechanic and go like hey this is how you should actually this is how you should do that

because i'm not a fucking mechanic so it's like i'm not gonna tell someone else how to do some shit i don't know how to do it doesn't make sense to me but in in music and sports and and in like entertainment people seem to feel like they can go uh he should have he should have fucking done this play it's like he this is his life, bro. You know what I'm saying? You work at Arby's, dog. Like, stop commenting on that shit. Oh, dude, he shouldn't sing like that. He put too much auto-tune on it.

Do you own a microphone? You know what I mean? Like, have you ever plugged in a microphone? Do you know what a digital audio workstation is? Like, if I said doll to you right now, you don't know the i'm talking about so why are you commenting on dude and it's just i feel like to have that conversation it makes a person feel big you know what i mean oh they should have done it this way yeah they're doing you can't do why why would you tell like you know what i mean it's weird and it feels it comes across as a as a thing that is rooted in insecurity for me you're you're a true

artist if anyone listens to that answer and for for all the great reasons of it it signifies exactly how your brain wires so let's let's take this sports and the music example real quick before we go to it there is a big difference between sports and music yeah in sports there's a score and a and a final line right did you win did you lose did you score 30 points did you have two touchdowns or didn't you right music is a pure art i'm not saying what they don't what they do on the court or on the field doesn't have art forms to it it does but there's a result yeah music yeah you could say there's results with grammys and stuff but there's so much of it and it's related to everyone because i've never met someone who does not listen to any music right neither everyone does right so there are some

people who don't watch basketball there are some people who don't watch football yeah music it's it's as old as time universal yeah so to an extent when you're talking about like people critiquing the audience is the ultimate critique for sure because they're the buyer right but what you're getting to is when people start to tell you on on their own ideas which i think is what you're handing out with the insecurities point, which I agree with, where people are coming out and saying, no, no, this is how you should do it, because that's what I think, and therefore it has to be right. This is where there's a really fine line between courage of conviction and not taking criticism, right? So, just because someone has absolutely no credentials doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.

Yeah, for sure. But where are they coming from when they say it? Yeah. And it sounds to me, and this doesn't surprise me one bit, and frankly, I can relate with a podcast to some extent. It sounds to me like a lot of the people you're talking about are the ones who just suddenly have that Monday morning quarterback opinion. Right. And they're like, oh, yeah, I know exactly the difference between an auto-tune that goes X decibels versus one at the, you know what I mean? Like, it's bullshit when it does that. And I think the bigger,

dude, there's so many fucking things that have become pet peeves only after I've gained a certain amount of insight into the music industry or making music. That shit, I might have used to, like, I might have done that, you know what I'm saying? Like, back in the day, had I not known.

Can you pull that mic in just a little bit yeah yeah um beautiful so the big one is like when i first started making more melodic music and stuff where i started making songs that weren't just about like lyrical spiritual miracle individual venomous apprenticeship fuck all that shit, bro. When did that shift happen? When I realized I don't want to be a YouTuber when I'm 30 years old. Kind of. And I was like,

alright, because initially I got my start on YouTube and then it was almost like, I felt like I had to kind of be formulaic because I developed this audience accidentally via the rap battle. And it was very much like the youtube rap community can you can you tell people the context on that because i guarantee you many of you listening right now will know exactly what this video is because it it did blow the up and it's also i know that's not the vibe you're

going for at this point and it's it's older now I mean you were like little when you were like 15 or something when you did that but it's incredible thank you I mean it's it's like fucking incredible yeah so uh it's the it's the white kid kills it in high school rap battle me me with a little buzz cut and fucking gray button down uh rapping against the kid with a blurred out face so uh yes why was his face blurred out i never asked that uh well it didn't used to be um the original version the original version had his face uh and then we spoke about it he asked me to take it down i was like i thought we agreed to do this you knew it was going to be filmed you knew it was getting put up like wait you could go in after the fact on youtube no i took the original down and re-uploaded the second one

the original had two and a half million views and i was fucking sure that when i took that down and re-uploaded this new one with his face blurred out that it was going to do like a hundred thousand views and then do nothing it's at like 27 million yeah thank you look i i don't thank you to the kid that made me take that down bro because i don't know that i would want a homicide of myself online either that's fair well and dude i'm not like a dickhead about it yeah like i was like listen we got to come to some compromise because this is my career and i don't want it to interfere with your career let's let's do something like I took his name out of everything. There's no more introduction.

He doesn't get introduced anymore. I blurred his face out. It was nice of you to do that. I don't want to be a fucking asshole. I don't want to be the reason this kid can't get a job or some shit or he's getting clowned on or whatever. You know what's crazy about it though? I got to go back and watch again. I didn't watch it before you came in here.

I haven't watched that. I think i watched it after i talked with austin like a month ago when we got connected but if i remember correctly it's not even like he was horrible yeah you were just so good that it was just a i mean he read it off an ipad that's like the biggest thing that didn't help no and i think what a lot of people don't realize, to put it in context, what a lot of people don't realize about that battle is it looks very one-sided. It looks like I'm being an asshole. For a month prior, once we agreed to do this, for a whole month prior, all he did was talk shit. I'm going to fucking, you're going to want to throw hands. I'm going to come so personal.

I'm going to come so crazy. You're going to want to hit me. Are you sure you still want to do this? He had other people coming up to me going like, bro, he showed me his bars. They're fucking wild. A month before this shit is going on, right? I keep forgetting you read that because it's blurred. Yeah.

You got a lyric about that too. Yeah. You're like, you're reading your shit on an iPad. Bro, it's like, how do you talk shit for two months say i wrote the crazy because make no mistake at the time i was super into rap battle culture all that 99 of that shit is pre-written people you have two weeks to write the craziest bars it's sort of unspoken you memorize your fucking bars you don't come up and read it off a fucking ipad like the cannabis versus disaster battle like dog what are you doing and then like the day before he starts talking he's still talking shit but he's like nah

nah we're doing it in the school parking lot i'm like bro it's gonna get shut down instantly if we do it in the school parking lot they're gonna come outside and shut it down immediately we're doing it you know in the place we ended up doing it uh the parking lot like behind a shopping center it was like no one's gonna fucking show up blah blah blah so i'm like bet everyone shows up at my spot you know what i mean he's he's a no-show for the first 15 minutes he finally shows up and everyone is already against him now because he's been talking non-stop shit how did this start like he just said he wanted to rap battle you and then started talking shit nah if i'm being honest i wanted to rap battle my man chuck so dope shout out chuck

um and i was trying to like get him more i like tweeted because there weren't there weren't a lot of rappers at a fucking catholic high school so i tweeted like oh anyone want to rap battle me and i was kind of hoping that chuck would be like yeah let's do it um but this fucking kid answered and i knew who he was i didn't i wasn't like close to them or anything um but you know i was like all right bet like and it wasn't i wasn't intending for it to be this like animosity malicious sort of thing i was genuinely like i'm gonna do because i did another battle before that i've since taken off youtube but i'd done another rap battle before that and i won that one in a similar fashion um so there was a body bag at the end yeah um unzipped no okay yeah i zipped that boy up um um no that's my boy though shout out jeremy gonzalo i miss you bro um

but uh yeah so he he just started being all cocky and just being a dickhead bro and i was like all right well i literally know i'm going to body you even if he didn't bring his ipad i would have bodied him it would have been better for him because at least then he could have said like all right i'm doing this you know stand up and and you know do it with your chest bro he's oh dude i wrote all these bars and then he gets and he goes oh i just wrote all this last period i'm like the fuck you talk some somewhere a lie oh you already lost like you lost right there and then he starts reading it and it's just people are like what the fuck is this cornball ass kid doing and it's like bro like i don't know what you expected people were not gonna look upon that

amicably and at the same time like if you're gonna talk shit because i really wasn't talking crazy until he started going, taking it there. And then I was like, all right, well, I'm not just going to sit here and, like, let you talk work. Like, I'm literally, I'm going to body bag you. And now probably 100 million people have seen me body bag that kid. So it's like, yeah, fucking stupid games, stupid fucking prizes. Like, I don't know what you want. Like, so then he called me a few years after the fact, after it blew up.

He was like, you know, blah, blah, blah, I'm getting clowned. And I was like, all right. You know what I mean? Like, what do you want to do about that? I'm not taking the video down. He was like, I'm going to get a lawyer. Then I was like, get a fucking lawyer, bro. I have a lawyer.

You agreed to be on camera. We did it in a public place. You agreed to do it. It was some shit that you wanted to do. I have text messages from you asking agreed to be on camera. We did it in a public place. You agreed to do it. It was some shit that you wanted to do. I have text messages from you asking me to put it up. So you consented to having that up there. You want to withdraw that now. That's fine.

But like, we're going to come to a different agreement. So I was like, listen, I'll I'll blur your face out. I'll remove your name. You will not be tagged. You won't be, you know know linked to or anything like that the people who were at the school know the people who know you know the people know me know and that's it i won't say his name i'm not going to air him out i hope that he's doing well i don't have any ill wishes to him we were kids when that should happen yeah it's years ago years ago

but what's the real crazy part is he throws his whole fit take it down take it down take it down then he finds out how much money i made from the video so a couple years later he calls me up and he's like yo bro like let's get a round two and i'm like dog a year ago you were bitching at me to take this shit down first of all like a A year ago, you said lawyer. Right. Now you want the smoke again. And why? Because he's like, oh, well, it's not fair that I didn't get da-da-da. And I'm like, I don't know what. Sorry, bro.

It's on my fucking channel. And it was my idea. And I arranged for all that shit to happen. You're pissed off. I understand you're pissed off. I'd be pissed off too, but stupid games. So he was like, yeah, let's do a round two. I was like, you want to do a round two?

We're getting paperwork. There's not going to be a, yo, we're taking it. And I'm running out of space, and we're selling tickets. And I'm like, I'm going to make this the worst decision you've ever made in your life. Because I was pissed, bro. I was like, how the fuck are you going to make me take this shit down and risk it? Obviously, it ended up being a good thing. It was a blessing in disguise.

But at the time, I was like, bro, you just threw a fit about it. Now you want to do it again? Like, if that's the case, we could do it. And then, obviously, it didn't happen. He wasn't about that line. It didn't happen. So you had this moment where this just kind of crystallized with something that you had been doing for a long time,

like for fun, freestyling. And so then you start making some music. But where we got into that rabbit hole with that was when it started to transition to a little bit of the melodic sound and moving to like some new genres and and and going after like some different ends of your creativity so i don't know what year that was but when did that actually start to happen honestly not until i had the talent to do it because i always wanted to do it um i just wasn't there as a songwriter yet I wasn't good at writing melodies I was great at cover songs I could cover a lot of the songs I like to

do but to write an original melody I just didn't have I wasn't there yet artistically when you say melody by the way I just wanna make sure I understand you're not talking about the lyrics at all you're talking about like how the flow of the actual under part of the song is no I mean like you know so if I hear an instrumental and in the old days when I was making like Jersey Devil and stuff a lot of my choruses were just like either repeated phrases or something but not said melodically not sung you know what I mean it was hard for me to write lyrics that had a melody to them got it um i just wasn't there yet so i would write i'm the jersey devil i'm the jersey devil

these other motherfuckers just ain't on my level and it was like okay it's a chanty chorus it works as a hook whatever when i finally was when everything finally started to click and i got better at being a musician and i was able to write my own melodies and stuff i immediately started trying to do that i immediately and i i had a lot of other influences um you know what i mean like juice world trippy red peep when when melodic rap started to be a thing it was like god damn i thought i thought that was genius because um it is and i mean it i mean like modern melodic rap because obviously autotune um you know goes back to the early offs you know what i'm saying like i think t-pain is one of the most fucking influential artists everything has autotune now back then he was one of the few people who were doing that shit. And he also had a lot of courage with that, too.

Because, look, he made a couple. I can't remember if I'm in Love With A Stripper was the first one. But he made a couple bangers. And he became like this before meme culture. Like the meme. Like, oh, yeah, T-Pain making an auto-tune. But he continued to do it. And then made a bunch of bangers.

And then people started going, oh. And now find me a melodic rapper that isn't using auto tune 100 man he set he set that fucking stage and that is all all him um but yeah once i realized that i was like and again man i gotta give props to those people that paved the way for me because I probably wouldn't have had the courage to do something like I'm going to try and make an emo rap song or quote unquote emo rap or like an you know a rock rap or alternative rap or whatever um and then I heard it and I was like yo I really fuck with this this is like very lined up with me because I used to listen to a lot of like metal and punk and blah blah blah um so it was

like combining two forms of music that i really identified with in a way that i felt was like cool um and obviously dude when i first started doing it you could hear the influences like heavily you know what i mean um there's like when i listen to your music if i listen to like some of the melodic stuff especially yeah there there's 10 to 15 people that pop in my head it's not like you know you and i were talking i don't know if we said this on the podcast or not but some people said for some of your songs like some post malone vibes definitely but there's a lot like you mentioned juice world just now yeah 100 feel that and you start going through and you're like oh yeah there's a little bit of this a little bit of that

like there there's a lot of there's a lot of layers to it and what's cool about it is you kind of create your own sound from that because people can't put they can't put their finger on oh he's this guy or like he's that you know what i mean like everyone always tries to put you in a box my goal is to get to a point where now when a new person comes out and goes you you know, I'm going to, I released this song or whatever. Now they go, that sounds like an Ashton Larratt song. You know what I mean? That's the next level? Where I now have my own sound that's so distinct

that you could see maybe where the roots of it lie, but then you could see the influences, but it's very much my sound. And that's constantly a work in progress because my sound is always fucking changing. know as i listen to new shit and i'm i'm as a musician i'm super super super like influenced by whatever i'm listening to at the time if i'm listening to a lot of punk rock i'm gonna make some more punky sounding shit if i'm listening to a lot of Trap, I'm going to make a Lemonade or a Pop Out. If I'm listening to some screaming type rap, you know, XXX or, you know, Zilkami, I'm going to be making that type of shit just because I find that I'm only listening to those

songs because I'm in that headspace to begin with. You know what I mean? If I'm listening to some fucking angry ass shit, I'm probably in an angry point. You know what I mean? I'm pissed off. And so I'm listening to all this shit that's like refuel you know what i mean i'm pissed off and so i'm listening to all this shit that's like refueling this fucking fire i'm pissed off i'm listening to shit that's pissed off and it's probably not good emotionally but it's like then i want to go to the studio and make some fucking angry shit or if i'm does that get you out of a sync that like because i know sometimes you got to be in there like okay this is kind of my goal this is the sound I want to go for right now but then I mean if people can't hear how many influences you have at this point then they're not listening to this podcast I mean I

love this because you are really all over the place with things you've listened to and I'm sure there's other stuff too but you know you you get into that moment where you're like all right I'm listening to a lot of Def Leppard right now that's the kind of shit i want to get but yeah oh we were working on songs that were going for more of a let me use a stupid one like luther vandross vibe you know what i mean like you can yeah i'm out yeah okay uh i'm i and i don't i don't bought a lot of songs i'm not i have friends that make fucking 100 songs a week that's just not me um my my the artistic part of my brain doesn't work like that i and it's not like one of these things like i have to be inspired and it's like okay yeah but if i just made like four turn up songs i'm i'm turned the fuck out bro i'm all

tired you know what i'm saying i don't want to do that shit anymore i can't crank out 15 songs that sound exactly the fucking same about the exact same shit before i start feeling like i'm copying my damn self bro like i i don't like being repetitive which has hurt me in the past and like while you while you say like i think there's some fans of music in general who really appreciate um an artist who is versatile but i feel like one of the mistakes i made so far in my career was not really setting a distinct sound that's for me and then branching out i i came with you know i do like the five fingers of death part two right after i dropped some angry shit. And then I drop some melodic shit, emo shit. So people get on my page. I dropped a fucking trap shanty.

I dropped a shanty song with a trap beat behind it. So they go to my page and they hear, oh, you that kid from TikTok. Yeah, and I bet your bitch watch. Then they hear, I set sail for a great white whale. And then they hear, I ain't fucking slept in 11 days. Pour another bottle in the lemonade then they hear i don't need to say my and it's like bro who the fuck is this kid who is he as an artist um and that just comes from me having like artistic adhd because it's like i love music

bro it's so fun and i fucking hate i dude in all aspects of my life, when I start getting in a rut, I work in extremes. You know what I mean? When I get really tired of having this long-ass fucking hair that's getting in my face and getting in my mouth at night, I'm going to shave my head bald. You know what I mean? If I'm, I work in extremes. If I'm, I can't do. Are you bipolar? Do you have some of that,'m, I can't do. Are you bipolar? Do you have some of that too?

I don't think so. Cause I, dude, I've seen like a million therapists. Shout out, shout out my therapist, bro. I don't want to drop the name on here,

but I got you. Um, how long have you been doing that? I first, I first started seeing a therapist when I was like 14. So 14, 15 around there. Um, and it's been on and off since

you know i'm at a point now where i have i have a very good understanding of my own mental health um i'm very comfortable with once i realized that anxiety and depression for me at least and in the way that it works for me because i think it's different for everybody um once i because a lot i got really bad panic attacks i have horrible fucking anxiety and once i realized like okay because i would get caught up i'm having a panic attack i fucking hate this i want it to end i want it to stop and call my mom and call my girlfriend fucking i don't know why i'm panicking right now i don't i fucking hate feeling like this blah blah blah and what would happen when you get

that i mean the normal shit bro i get fucking it depends you know sometimes it's like i got white death like i smoke too much weed or some shit i just go pale and i can't you know i'll get really quiet i stop talking um i try and distract myself um and i dude you could read it on my fucking face when i'm anxious like i'm i'm i'm an open book like that i'm bad at disguising my feelings um but once i realized like because shit was getting dark for a minute you know what i mean like i you know i've i've dealt with some some serious shit mental health wise and once i realized like okay well as far as the anxiety attack because depression depression's a different bitch but when i'm having a panic attack i'm not gonna die you know what i mean what because now i can i can identify okay you're

not having a heart attack you know this is a panic attack and yeah it's uncomfortable and you want it to end but the more that you sit here and just dwell on it the more that you you zone in you get tunnel vision on that anxiety attack and you keep feeding it you know You know what I mean? You're stuck in a thought loop. I want it to end. I want it to end. I want it to end. What exactly do you want to end? Well, I don't like how my chest is tight, or I feel hot, or I feel nauseous, blah, blah, blah.

And now you're just thinking about it overnight, so you're making it worse. As soon as I just went, okay, listen, you're having an anxiety attack. You're not going to die. It's not going to kill you. Your thoughts are only as much as you're having an anxiety attack. You're not going to die. It's not going to kill you. Your thoughts are only as much as you're willing to give them. So if you just recognize, yes, this is uncomfortable. Yes, it's unpleasant. But just let it go.

Just wash it. Let it wash over you, bro. It's like if you've ever been like surfing or some shit and just got railed by a big wave and you're just under there getting spun around. It fucking sucks and it's scary and it's uncomfortable. But you can't really fight it. You're flering around just chill and flow back up you know what i mean and that's how i kind of deal with my anxiety these days it's like take a deep breath step outside for a second grab a beer do whatever but just chill just let it be accept the fact that i'm anxious about something and then sort of look in and be like all right why did i have this anxiety attack in the first place? What about this situation triggered this?

What about my environment or my situation right now made me so anxious that my body kicked in like a fight or flight response? And I think a lot of that, cause I've been medicated and unmedicated. I, I fucking preach that in a lot of cases um dealing with the root of the issue is more beneficial long term because a lot of a lot of these psychiatrists get these kids 14 15 years old who have serious fucking issues because serious ass shit happened to them yeah and they need to address that shit and really like fully address what has happened to them why they feel this way but instead a lot of these fucking psychiatrists go all right well here's

some lexapro and you know you're putting a band-aid on a bullet wound bro and as soon as you take that shit off you're bleeding again you know what i mean as soon as you know it might deal with the symptoms of it but then you now you need that now you need that to function because without it you can't and you know the side effects and stuff for me i was just like yo fuck this shit it's not worth it so i did a lot of work towards just really dealing with the roots of my anxiety and really addressing what makes me feel some types of ways. I'm not one of these pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work, work, work, it's all on you.

If you can't do this shit, you're a pussy. None of that shit. That's not what I'm saying. But I think that there's a lot of benefits to be had from really introspectively analyzing, like, okay, why is this so hard for me to do or what about this situation is freaking me the fuck out and how can i address that how can i change the way that i feel how can i change the way that i respond or do i just need to avoid this type of situation because that's an okay thing too bro like i'm i'm not good with drugs i'm not good like you know certain drugs really freak me the fuck out so i just don't do those drugs you know they also have massive long-term implications yeah i mean we don't

need to sit here and be like a fucking commercial and be like if you take this drug you may die tomorrow like we don't need to do that but you know what i mean i mean it it chemically changes you it they're drugs they're drugs and yeah what i think we do sometimes is like we start to rail on everything and it becomes this it's like society zero to a hundred right yeah there's a reason they were created yeah there are certain people that like something's going on and like it's actually there yeah what ends up happening when you incentivize like oh by the way you know doctor gives it out they get paid on it right you know suddenly it's like you i love that line you put a band-aid on a bullet wound yeah throw a couple pills at it right and so for you it's it's really impressive to to hear you go through that because it seems like a you're a veteran of being

open about your feelings with somebody which you know let's just be honest with with guys we're not good at that inherently you know no but you've been doing this since you were a kid i'm an open book bro if i have if i feel some type of way i think and i this is put this shit on the record as a man if you feel some type of way say that shit with your fucking chest if you feel scared if you're dealing with some shit say it like a fucking man and stop hiding it and pushing like taking it out on your family your friends whatever if i'm sad or I'm scared or I'm whatever, I'm a fucking person, bro. And you can look at it any type of way you want. Anything that I feel, I'm going to say, bro. Because I just, like, I'm, especially with mental health and shit, I don't think any guys should have to be fucking embarrassed about that shit.

You know what I mean? We've all been through some shit that we didn't want to go through. Whether it's losing a loved one or medical issues or dot, dot, dot, dot. It doesn't fucking matter. We've all been through some shit and different people

have different thresholds. Different people have different, you know, responses to different things. I'm, I am an open fucking book, bro. Like, I'm, I've dealt with a lot of shit.

I've been on suicide watch. I have been suicidal multiple times. What gets you there? It was a, dude, it was a whole, whole fucking litany of just bad decisions and then unfortunate circumstances that just happened to me um but honestly like it i don't particularly think it matters because at the end of the day i wouldn't be here like i didn't have the strength to do this shit alone my family my friends when i was like yo i can't even like i was showering with the fucking door open and shit because my family was like we're not fucking playing around you're saying you're you're feeling this way then i'm sorry like you know what i mean we're not having you locking the

fucking door and offing yourself in there so and my friends were on top of me my parents were on top of me and i you know i i was okay with therapy i sought the fucking i sought help was what were you thinking some of those things when you were like 13 14 because you said you started therapy back then uh yeah so my what initially i never had anxiety my whole life really like i you know i got nervous about shit just like anyone does but i didn't have like an anxiety disorder and so um i had a bad trip with dxm cough syrup like robo tripping um and you mentioned too like you got into drinking and stuff yeah i got yeah young was this just because like look and and i think we said this in some other context earlier yeah when

you're told you can't do something you want to do it right like you for me i was just like once i found drinking and smoking weed and like i it was like I got to meet new versions of myself. It was like, oh, this is kind of cool. I'm different a little bit when I'm drunk. And I'm different when I'm high than I am when I'm drunk and when I'm sober. What made you want to do that at like that age though? You know, like 13, I'll be honest. So like 13.

Yeah. I think my balls would drop. Yeah. I'd have to go back and check for right yeah like maybe hold out like a fucking thing and see if they went down far enough but like i wasn't thinking about like yo let's let's get some doers out you know what i mean no for me it was just like i don't know i it part of it was definitely the allure of doing some shit that was like for older kids but i didn't do it and i could say this honestly like i wasn't one of those kids that was

like drinking to be so that other people would know that i was drinking and like be cool or whatever like i genuinely like drinking i still to this day i party a lot i don't do that because it's cool i just like being drunk i like getting up it's just a thing that i've always enjoyed and i think when you're that, sometimes you don't make the best decisions, obviously. So I was getting drug tested for weed. My mom caught me smoking weed, blah, blah, blah. I was constantly getting grounded and fucking whatever. So my mom was drug testing me.

Then I found K3, K2, that type of shit. I was like, that does not show up on a pot test so your boys started doing a bunch of that then that got made illegal and i dude i had some weird ass experiences with that where i would just lose consciousness or like jesus yeah i was bro i was like a fucking idiot bro like it's kind of like a funnel you get started and then you know everyone says like gateway drugs and stuff i'm not saying that i'm saying like you're just trying to experiment around you're like coming of age a little bit and then yeah oh let's try this yeah no and it was very

much like you know i would i would look up and make sure that like all right like how much is safe to do blah blah blah um and then i just you, they made K3 illegal. My friend was like, yo, we've had some fun times just drinking Robitussin. So I went online, you know, for those of you, actually, I'm not going to give drug advice. Um, yeah, the fucking, I was getting ready to like come in and be like, we do not condone that on the show. Yeah. Um, but anyway, I had to make sure there's certain safety issues with Robitussin. You have to make sure that certain ingredients aren't in it because you have to make sure that only certain active ingredients are in there because otherwise, you know, you can have kidney failure, liver failure, whatever.

So I like did. I did as much. Can you buy that over the counter? Fuck yeah. Yeah, I was going to say. And I was a kid like the first we had to go around to a couple of differentacies before they were like, they were like, hey, how sick are you? What the fuck do you need four bottles of cough syrup for? And I was like.

Bro, I'm sick as fuck. It's a science project, bro. Like, I don't know. Just give it to me. It's legal. You can't not sell it to me. But they could. So we eventually got some.

I drank, you know, whatever. And my friend's sister had a panic attack ironically and came and picked him up because she like wanted someone to be with her or whatever and he was supposed to trip with me and i'd never tripped before so now i'm alone it starts kicking in and it feels really good at first you know it's like a really good weed high or whatever and then shit starts getting a little bit sketchy and it it just got sketchier, sketchier, sketchier. And I ended up telling my mom. I was like, yo, like, I fucked up. I did this, da, da, da.

Here's what I did. I showed her the bottle. And honestly, bro, I don't remember a whole lot after that. I remember I tripped for hours and hours and hours. And then the next day, I still felt off. I just felt weird. I was convinced that I did like brain damage with the drug or some shit and they were just like no like you just have anxiety and i was like

nah dude like this is different my vision's fucking funky like um it just everything feels it feels like i'm on drugs it feels like i'm like having like white death from smoking too much weed that's like how i would really describe like intense periods of anxiety. I was like, nah, I fucked my brain up. So I was getting CAT scans, MRIs. Like, yo, I'm telling you I fucked my brain up. They're like, dog, you just have anxiety. And I'm like, anxiety doesn't, you know.

I always thought like anxiety was just like, you just worry a lot. You know what I mean? But there's so many physical manifestations that I could really have. And the same thing goes for depression. But so, you know, whatever. i started seeing a therapist you know and i'm and you were cool with it or i was was seeing a therapist i was cool with um i didn't really want to do the antidepressants any anxiety jokes but i did them for a little bit i hated them i eventually weaned myself off them i didn't even tell nobody i would just put the bag i would take the pill because my mom would count how many pills

were left in the bottle to make sure i was taking them um and i would just take them put them under my tongue and then fucking spit them out somewhere else and i just stopped taking them on myself and then i told my mom i was like listen i weaned myself off those shits like i'm not going back on them i don't like the way they make me feel um we're gonna do this with just therapy and we're gonna figure out why i feel this way and that's how i'm gonna do it um wow that's a really and and again i don't want to like i don't want to box some people in or use that and make them sound like they're weak or whatever there are people who need that but that's a that is an incredibly especially given like a lack of good decisions when you're 12 and 13 14

whatever that's an incredibly mature thing to do at that age oh well a lot of it like a lot of it just came from i didn't like i knew i didn't like the drugs so i was like well we're gonna try some other shit because i don't like the drugs if that doesn't work you know and we have to whatever but i want to give this the fucking college try so i'm i start getting better and better and better now when everyone else started getting into drinking i had already gone through my drinking phase stopped and i'm like the sober guy now so my friends are smoking i'm not smoking my friends are drinking i'm not drinking prom weekend i was sober and shit you know what i'm saying when you're 16 17 i'm getting older

i'm going through i was sober for all of high school just about i mean freshman year i wasn't freshman year i was still smoking and drinking sophomore year the day before sophomore year of high school was when i did the cough syrup um and then from sophomore year to i guess like the summer of my freshman year of college i was sober um because i was just anything anything because i was so in my head about it like when i the first time i tried smoking weed and shit because i would try shit here and there and it would give me like flashbacks to the trip i would have like vivid visceral flashbacks and i was like it's just not worth it bro you know what i mean like i want to have a good time i'd love to drink but i i know that every time i do that shit it's a coin flip as to whether or not i'm gonna have this flashback and i just don't feel like that so i was getting

to a better place by the end of high school and my lung collapsed spontaneously how'd that happen well i don't think smoking since you were like 11 or 12 uh cigarettes you know what i mean like i i just quit smoking last march and congratulations thank you the doctor the other day was like wait so you smoked for like over 10 years and i was like yeah she was like you're 25 i was like listen i know like you're not fucking you know i i get it i do you know what That is one thing that even to this day, when people say they did it, I'm always shocked because they'll often say they did it at like 11 or 12. And I'm like, what the fuck?

Like, what? How? Dude, I would sit outside mini-marts and gas stations with like $20 bill and I'd just ask older kids to go in and buy me cigarettes. Like, I'm just fishing for that shit. But, so my one lung collapses and I'm freaking the i'm just fishing for that shit but so my my one lung collapses and i'm freaking the fuck what's that feel like fucked like it does not feel good man it felt like someone it felt like mike tyson was standing over me kicking me in the chest

with stiletto heels on like the whole time because i woke up with it i woke up and i was like damn i slept wrong or something and i can't remember which lung one i think this one was first i don't fucking remember oh they both went yeah that's that's where i'm going with this but so the first one goes i'm like damn i i don't know and it's like it's really like a just a tight fucking harsh pain radiating from here all the way to my back. So I go to the school nurse. She's like, you probably slept wrong. Here's a heating pad and a fucking Gatorade.

You know what I mean? Like, go back to class in a little bit. So I'm sitting there. Shout out to the school nurse. Yeah. Fuck. My aunt's a school nurse, though. She's a great one.

I'm sorry. She wouldn't do that. I'm sure she wouldn't do that. No, no. She's great. school nurse though she's a great one sorry she wouldn't do that i'm sure she wouldn't do that no but uh so i finally i'm like nah some some shit is wrong bro like so we go to south jersey radiology they're like yeah your lung popped whatever we're gonna go take you to the hospital we'll fucking blow it back up you'll be out of there tomorrow morning bet all right let's get this shit over with so i go in there now in mind, I still have horrible drug anxiety.

Hospitals are full of drugs, and the doctor's giving them to you. You don't really have a choice. So that was super traumatic for me, and I ended up getting two surgical procedures without anesthesia because I was more scared of how the drugs would fuck with my head than I was of, like, yeah, it's going to suck. You know what I mean? It's going to hurt a lot, but when the shit is done it's gonna stop hurting you had a lung procedure

without anesthesia too you would think my dumb ass would have learned after the first time i learned after the second time bro because that shit fucking sucked and i was yeah yeah yeah i bet it did so you know the first the first time should happen, I'm in the hospital for 11 days. Daily x-rays, daily chest tubes. I'm plugged into fucking, you know, I got an epidural in my spine. Holy shit. I got artery lines, IVs, all types of shit. Dude, I'm like fucking, like plugged into the matrix, bro.

And so I finally get out out and it fucked me up man i'm but it didn't set me back to like square one like i was still okay eight months go by my dumb ass kind of quit smoking but then like you know four or five months and i'm like well they said that there's less than a one percent chance of the other one going and at that point statistics still meant shit to me. Dude, when you're, what are you, 16, 17, something like that? 17, yeah. Yeah, it's like, you remember the things we thought at 17?

Like, oh, that's how that works. Like, oh, this will do that. They were like, less than 1%. I was like, that's such a small percent, bro. I like those odds. Give me the cigarettes. You know what I'm saying? So then I'm literally eating an apple in my kitchen one day,

and the other one just goes, and I knew it the second it happened i was like there's no fucking way bro like you gotta be fucking kidding me um so i tell my mom i brought even put a shirt on i i stepped into some fucking shoes i found on the ground i got in the car i was like yo call dan over have him watch you know my little siblings um we got to go to the hospital this shit happened again so i walk in the hospital looking like fucking crazy no shirt shoes hanging off and i'm walking in there my lung collapsed i know you just listen to me my lung is popped and they're like you know what i mean so they put me in a room and i end up in the same hospital same hospital room on the same floor with all the same doctors, nurses.

So it was like reliving a trauma almost exactly. So I do, I'm diagnosed with PTSD, which sounds crazy to some people, but when you have a traumatic experience and then less than a year later, it was literally like reliving a nightmare because it was so fucking horrible and I'm putting on all these. Bro, the second time, I got up one day and i was like i'm leaving they're like huh and i was like yeah i'm just gonna leave uh started getting ready to rip shit out of me and before i could even do that they tranquilized me i woke up bro they tranquilized you yeah they they were not

fucking right wait how does that work they just is it like a dart no they put some shit in my iv bag they just squirted some shit in there um and i woke up later like i could think clearly but i couldn't talk it was freaky and there was a clown in my room bro i swear i swear on my family that this is a real story i'm like coming to but it's like a drug haze anyone who's ever been like really bent out really knows like you know sometimes you wake up the next day And you're like how much of yesterday was real and how much was the drugs and you're coming out of like pain drugs, too And and like yeah, that's it's loopy. I'm on morphine and fucking every other bullshit so I'm coming like Xanax everything and I Come to and there's a fucking man in a shitty clown costume, bro.

He had like Skechers on with like shower loofah balls taped to him instead of like the clown shoes. Oh, so he was like a Joaquin Phoenix like clown. Yeah, it was like Patch Adams like shitty stepbrother or something. And he comes in, he's trying to make me laugh and stuff. I'm tripping my ass off and I'm like, I can't speak i can't i'm just moaning like i'm trying to sound like yo get him the fuck out of here bro i don't fuck with you like i appreciate fuck off stephen king get out of my room i i wake up like i go back to sleep and i wake up and i'm finally like coming to i'm like feeling more sober i'm like mom that like those

drugs are fucking crazy i was hallucinating like i saw a clown and shit and she was like no that was real he was in here and i was like huh he was like yeah he's a volunteer he likes to come to the pediatric intensive care unit and just like try and cheer the kids up and i was like i guess that's i guess that's better than me hallucinating a whole ass clown, but I was like, bad fucking timing, bro. And so I got out of the hospital the second time, and I was just so fucked up. Deep personalization, derealization. I had a couple psychotic episodes where it's like,

I am no longer really sure what's reality and what is delusion or whatever, so I'm fucked and then uh i just have good friends and good family they held me the fuck down and i was like you know what you know there were times where i really didn't want to be here but i i didn't want to hurt the people that i loved so i stuck it out for them but they're you know i wrote the note you know what i'm saying i wrote the note i left it under my door and i was ready to fucking i told my best friend i was like yo was this after all that or yeah yeah so i was like you know what i'm ready to you know sign off i think and they were like bro please don't you know blah blah

blah and i was just like bro see my mom cry like that and i was just like hell like all right this sucks and it's is it was the worst hell i wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy just because mental pain can be so much worse than physical pain honestly like it manifests physical pain too it does but like you can't turn off the mental pain sometimes you know what i mean like and a lot of people you know a lot of people know what the fuck i'm talking about um that's why i elected to get those two surgeries because i was like well if i'm on these drugs it might really fuck my head up and i would rather be in physical pain for an hour two hours whatever then you know

have this shit fuck me up for a week two weeks a month three months whatever um so yeah that's how i that's how i went about that um you know i saw you told you told your friend about it yeah yeah i was did people stop like is that how it stopped like people stopped you or not physically last minute i was kind of like not sure really how I wanted to do it. And I was like, you know, my mom had taken on, you know, I used to collect knives. My mom fucking took all those shits. I was like, God damn, like, you know, what am I going to? I just didn't want to be there.

I didn't want to die, but I didn't want to be alive. You know what i mean it's not that i wanted to die because i was still scared to die but i just anything would be better than feeling the way i felt you know what i mean there was at that point that's really how i felt i was like dude anything would be better than living like being a prisoner in my own thoughts being a prisoner in my own head not being able to and now i'm so fucking familiar with my anxiety my post-traumatic stress with my depression where it's like i know you fuckers now all right like and y'all are still in the car but i'm driving you know what i mean like i like how you say things thank you yeah thanks that's a good visual to put on it like i i don't know what you mean though on that first thing you said so i think

that i think this is important because you know i like on this podcast when shit i am not expecting kind of happens because we talk it out right like this is not like hey ashen we're we're gonna go through 10 questions right now so you see the bullet points like this is just like you know we're shooting the shit and where it goes it goes i don't even know where we started this so we'll maybe loop back maybe we won't but i've been very interested in some of the people i've had in here taking me inside of mental thoughts across the spectrum that they've had that i'm like oh wow you know i have all my own fucking issues trust me but like i'm like man that's interesting i never knew that or like i didn't know what that was so when you say like i want to i didn't want to die but i didn't want to be alive anymore yeah

i'm almost confused by that and it's not the first time I've heard that, but I've never asked about that. So, you know, it's like, it's, it's like knowing that you have two options and you don't really like either of them. You know what I mean? Almost like some kind of election or something.

No, I'm just kidding. Um, um, I will retweet that one, my um no so it's like when i'm comparing the election to like suicidal ideation yeah that's fucking awesome kids don't do drugs um that was all i'm gonna use that that's great thank you that's great um i had ashton larrell in here he said trump and biden were suicidal death

like so i'm sitting there and i was just like i every day is miserable from the moment i can't sleep at night but sleep is the only time where i'm my head isn't tormenting me and it's just it's it's hard to even put into words. So you were able to sleep, though? I mean, it would usually end up being because sleep deprivation, too, is not a good thing to throw on top of mental health issues. But my shit would keep me up for two days. And then my mental shit would keep getting worse and worse and worse because I wasn't fucking sleeping. And then I'd crash. I'd wake up at 6 p.m. on a fucking fucking Wednesday and be like where the fuck am I you know whatever um and it was just it was dude all of that that time period is very hazy to me but the the overwhelming

why drugs freak me out is like once you once you're on the ride once you strap into king deca and the fucking thing takes off you get off when it's done if you're halfway up and you go fuck fuck i hate this i fucking hate this that sucks pal you're on this fucking ride you know what i'm saying like you're on okay yeah you get off when it's when it's time, when they fucking get you off. And with drugs and anxiety and shit, it's kind of similar. Once you're in it, as much as you fucking hate it, as much as you want it to be over, you got to ride it out. You know what I'm saying? Like, if I do Molly, I'm on Molly for eight hours at least. You know what I'm saying?

There is no halfway through I'm having a bad time. I'm off molly. Nope. That's not how drugs work. And I think the combination of, you know, psychotic depression, which is, oh, fucking, thank God. That was a very short period of my life where I was actually, like, delusional and shit. But you have that mixed with anxiety mixed with like severe anxiety and severe depression and it literally feels like

you're on drugs it feels like you're going fucking crazy you're not sure like what thoughts to listen to blah blah blah i felt like i was going fucking crazy and that thought was so scary to me that i was so focused in like i feel like i'm going fucking insane and you know I read these forums online it never ends it keeps going it's like my mom would always be like you know the only people who are going and writing on these fucking forums are people who like aren't getting better like people who got better aren't coming on the forums and saying I feel fine now so I was like but at the time I couldn't I couldn't think rationally I wasn't in my right mind to be making any type of decisions or anything like that so when i say like i didn't want to be alive

that's why i didn't want to be alive every day was fucking hell but i didn't want to die because i knew like i knew that was it i'm not a religious person so for me you pull that trigger it's game the fuck over for me there is no no, and, you know, the saying that suicide is a permanent, you know, answer to a temporary problem, uh, kind of rings true, but it was like, I didn't, I did, I wanted to see if the ride would get better, as much as I fucking hated it, I was just like, dude, I'm like, and part of it was like i was i was scared to kill myself but i didn't want i didn't want to be alive and i didn't want to die but it was like it was like the scales were constantly going back and forth like oh fuck like

which which which way am i gonna go um you sat down you wrote the note yeah like you were you were close yeah oh yeah for sure a couple of times a couple of times but you know with the the support the help of my family the fucking wonderful therapist i have you've been with someone for a very long time i take it yeah she's been my therapist since i was like 17 or so that's awesome um and i think that's that's to me that's the most important thing is finding i went through 13 or 14 therapists before i finally found one that was like this is the person that's gonna help me i think that's really important a lot man yeah i've heard i've heard someone that works with you but i've heard also that like people and not to like on a profession we

don't want to do that but people go through a lot of shitty therapists who again we kind of talk about the one thing earlier like they throw a pill at the problem or something yeah you know and it's like it's almost like all right we got an hour yeah so you got to find the person who's like you got to find the person that's a person you're going to find a human being that you're that you connect with because at the end of the day bro therapy is just guided venting a lot of the time you know what i mean they're giving you suggestions and stuff but it just feels good to be heard and and for someone the biggest thing for me was like i feel like i'm going crazy and she was like you're not you're not going crazy you feel this way crazy people first of all aren't scared of going crazy because crazy people don't

fucking know that they're crazy when she said she said that and i was like damn and then i was like well because i was having really severe depersonalization and derealization like sort of to a delusional point where i was like convinced i wasn't real i was convinced everything wasn't real or this was all a bad dream or whatever she was like that's a coping mechanism but let's just say it is a dream it's always been a dream it's never been like that's a coping mechanism but let's just say it is a dream it's always been a dream it's never been real it's always been fake and you're not real and you know whatever because i would always be like oh well you know if none of this is real and you're telling me it's real it's just because the illusion wants to keep me locked in here you know what i mean like i would find an answer for fucking everything um but then i just started thinking like it's not a bad illusion i got a great family i have great friends

like i wasn't scared of it being a simulation i was scared of the feeling that i was going crazy and scared of the idea that that's a crazy fucking thought to have you're putting that on your head yeah because and then it's like a snowball yeah just kind of you're thinking the crazy shit again you're going crazy this means you i was getting checked out for schizophrenia and shit um which i don't have by the way um but yeah and i just ended up sort of realizing like you know sometimes when shit is not going your way you just gotta let it not go your way you know what i mean because you could fight you could fight an acid trip all you want you could be the strongest fucking most jack fucking guy in the game you could be a strong mentally mother you could be a mentally strong motherfucker too

you could try and fight off a bad acid trip. Or you could try and take the fucking restraints off you on Kingda Ka. Fight it all the fuck you want, bro. Those things are staying on. You know what I'm saying? If you're midway through an anxiety attack and it's a bad one, guess what? You might have to ride it out. And it might fucking suck. But it's not going to kill you.

And once you accept that shit and just go, all right, I'm going to feel uncomfortable for an hour or so. Really uncomfortable. And I'm going to really want it to stop. But it's not going to stop until I calm down. And the first step to calming down is going, you're not going to die. It's uncomfortable, blah, blah, blah. Just let it be uncomfortable. Life wasn't always supposed to be comfortable.

And I think that, you know, I don't know. I'm sort of babbling but like it's no no this is really good it's uh that's just my take on mental health that's how it's it's helped it's what helped me um you know i've seen other people deal with it differently i know people who swear by medication and listen bro at the end of the day if you're happy if you're good if you're content and you're living your life in a good way that's not hurting other people fuck my opinion fuck like you know what i'm saying yeah fuck it do it do what works for you that's what worked for me that's my two cents on it but uh you know mental health varies because

every person is different so i'm just getting reminded, listening to some of this, to a conversation I had recently in here. I had my buddy Grant Wiley in here probably about two months ago. He's one of my favorite people ever. Just a beautiful guy. Total, you want to talk about open book? You and him would go all day. He really, like no secrets, just of yeah calls it like it is but

he was he was one of the best college football linebackers ever played at west virginia back said you're not a big sports guy but he was back early 2000s like 2000 to 2003 so 1999 michael vick wins big east rookie of the year okay 2000 grant wiley wins East Rookie of the Year. Okay. 2000, Grant Wiley wins Big East Rookie of the Year. All right. That puts it in perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good.

You know Michael Vick. I know that one. So he really surprised me with how much he went into some of his thoughts in college when he was having this great career. Yeah. You know, you watch this guy on ESPN, it's like, oh, he has everything, right? Right. And then just like everyone, behind the scenes, there's shit.

Mm-hmm. Right? scenes there's right and there's things you deal with and so i don't need to get into the full context of the whole thing that happened with him but there were a bunch of things and then one thing that really kind of put it over the top and he talked about that suicidal thought moment or whatever because you know it's not to be macabre if that's the word or morbid or whatever yeah you know but it's not to be macabre, if that's the word, or morbid or whatever. Yeah. You know, but it's something I'm always so curious about because I think, I've seen so many great people who have committed suicide. Yeah.

And it's like, it's not because they're bad people or what, at all. Yeah. It's just like, sometimes people are so busy taking care of everyone else that they they don't they don't take care of themselves and and they can't they can't get over that hump and and when you're alone in a room by yourself with your thoughts I think all of us can understand that's a dangerous thing but I think what's worse is when you're in a room full of people and you're still along with your thoughts that's that was the worst for me is one way can you actually explain that real fast yeah I mean when you're

your mental state is so bad that you're in a room full of people and you're trying to you can't even focus on a conversation you can't be in the moment you're not living in the moment you're in your head and you feel fucking you don't even want to be there you'd rather be alone

because it's easier to be to just fucking deal with this shit alone and not have to try and pretend that you're okay and not have to try and put on appearances or you know let other people think you're okay or you don't want to fucking ruin the mood of the party or whatever but like i also think that like you were like you were saying um you know you know a lot of a lot of artists seems like a lot of artists kill themselves. And I think... We were saying that off camera earlier.

Yeah. And, like, for me, as an artist, I have to spend a lot of time with myself. I'm super in tune with myself. I'm very familiar with myself in a way that i don't i don't know if other people are i've never been in another person's head or another person's body so i don't know but i'm very introspective and when other you know um i i feel like part of me as an artist is i feel things in a very saturated way. I have a fucking temper.

I get pissed off easy, and then I calm down quick. I feel I can go from absolutely elated, having a fucking amazing night, to crying, sobbing about some shit that happened fucking eight months ago, two years ago, six years ago. Because it just feels like it's still happening. I feel very intensely. So you're saying that it doesn't matter whether it's just you alone in the room or if you're around a lot of people, it can just kind of happen at the snap of a finger. That's real mental illness, bro. for sure like and that's it's less likely and now i'm a lot better and my friend like i said bro my friends know me if i'm having a panic attack i'll straight up tell my friends yo having a panic attack i gotta go

you know what i mean once i get it out once i know i don't have to pretend that i'm okay right now yeah i can just go into a different room and fucking veg out and just let it pass. But I'm not alone in that room anymore because now I know that these people know me. Because I didn't hide it. Because I told them up front. I opened up. I was like, this is who I am. This is what I'm dealing with.

And they chose to stick by me. So why the fuck would I hide it now? You know what I mean? They know my shit. fuck would i hide it now you know what i mean they already know they know what i what you know my shit they know who i am they know what i deal with they're still my friends so i don't i don't have to be afraid to to open up to them and go yeah man like i don't know what it is i don't know why i'm freaking out right now but i'm tweaking or you know yeah dude i don't know i was i was having a good time and now all't know why i'm freaking out right now but i'm fucking tweaking or you know yeah dude i don't know i was i was having a good time and now all of a sudden i'm just i don't know i'm

real i'm upset i'm sad i'm annoyed i'm pissed i'm in a bad mood i understand i understand what you mean now yeah by the way with that room like you have a lot of people in the room and you it doesn't matter like you can just kind of shift and be like all right i'm all alone yeah i i didn't get that at first and now i want to tie that to it because I think the context is when you start feeling alone around people. Yeah. Then you actually get to the room alone. Yeah. And that's where it can happen.

Yeah. You know, that's where people do it. It's not like a lot. I mean, there are some cases where people do this. It's not like a lot of people walk into the middle of, like, their friend's house and go, hey, bye, everyone, you know, and shoot themselves. They do it alone somewhere right so you know like with with grant that the one example i was given he talked about with his one precipitous event like he'd sit alone in the room mind you this is a middle linebacker in 2000 before they really cared about concussions he's just running like a human battering ram every play into big people right exactly right so like all these all this and you're mad all the time

right like his head cleared up so much after he played football yeah because it's like oh wow i'm not doing this every day right you know so he's got he's got this time alone at night and he talked about you know they he lived with a bunch of his teammates and they had a weapon for protection and he would play with it yeah and i asked them i was like you know did did you think you were going to use it and he was adam and he said no so you know on the one hand like he wasn't there yeah but he was and i was like well why not and he goes because it was almost like you're in this place where you feel alone in that room big time and it just reminds me a lot of what you said now that i have context with it of like not wanting to live but not wanting to die yeah very very similar because he's like you're alone but you don't want to do

it yeah you just have to accept that like you have the ability to yeah which is a really fucking crazy thing that you fuck with your head i've, that's fucking crazy because I always used to say when I was suicidal, I wish it wasn't an option. I always used to say that. Like, bro, because it's fucking wild, bro, because a lot of my anxiety is rooted in fear of losing control, fear of dying, fear of, you i'm dying young or dying in a way that i don't want to or blah blah blah um and it's it's you know it's it's weird that there's a dichotomy there that you have this juxtaposition of like well how how come someone whose anxiety is all based and rooted in you know them not wanting to die how how are they so anxious that they're about to end their life you know what i mean it doesn't it doesn't even make sense you know um

but you know it was what it was and i think i'm grateful for that cough serve experience i'm grateful for my lungs collapsing i'm grateful for being suicidal i'm grateful for dealing with depression i think that my therapist said something interesting to me when covet all started because i hadn't seen her in a while when covet started bro you know before we knew anything about this it was this big scary monster you know what i mean before we knew anything about it we're just seeing fucking footage of mass graves and all types of crazy shit that's a wild time man well i'm thinking fuck it's a respiratory disease if i get it i'm gonna be hospitalized and my my security net my safety net my fucking support system is other people and i can't be around them right now and if i do have to go to the hospital for covid

i'm not going to be able to talk to my mom or hold her hand or do whatever. I'm going to be fucking in there by myself with my thoughts. And to me, that was like, fuck. So I'm calling my therapist and we're doing remote sessions or whatever. But she was like, you know, you're handling it better than a lot of that was because this was a lot of people's first real bout with some severe anxiety or some severe depression or really having to be alone with yourself. You know what I mean? When you're, you know, I'm used to it. So for me, it was like, okay, yeah, it was really bad in the beginning.

I was really fucking anxious. I was about to go back on medicine. I was thinking about going inpatient, whatever. And then a couple weeks went by. I figured out. I got in my fucking groove. I was like, all right, this is what I'm going to do. Did you have anyone around?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you had some people. You weren't like on an island. No, but I was with my family. And, you know, they're my fucking support system too. So I was worried, you know, when they were still going to work and stuff. I was like, God forbid.

You know what I mean? Because I know people who've lost loved ones from this. And, yeah, so I just think having this, you know what I mean? Like I just had to go to the hospital a few weeks ago for some medical shit. I was terrified before I went. And then I got there. I was fucking terrified. And it was miserable.

I hated it. I was anxious the whole fucking time. And I got home and I went, damn, you did that shit. Four years ago, that shit would have fucked you up for a whole month. And the next, I was, as soon as I got out, I was back to me. You know what I'm saying? Four years ago, that would have fucked me up for a month. You know what i'm saying four years ago that would have fucked me up for a month you know what i mean just being in that situation would have left a lot of residue mentally yeah now it

doesn't you know what i mean i went to the doctor the other day bro i haven't seen a primary care doctor since probably like 2014 how's that possible you don't know impossible bro i was i'm telling you you have to do a physical at some point for something i guess you're an artist yeah work for yourself yeah i wasn't i wasn't doing shit so um i was uh yeah so that was a big thing for me too because you know another thing i'm scared of is like a chronic illness that's gonna put me back in the hospital where i gotta stay overnight and get all the tubes and everything like is that your battlefield that that's where that's where the bad shit that and drugs it's like so but i did it and i come home and i'm like damn all right you know what that i'm it's like you know what i mean like when

you set a new pr or something at the gym you you're like, couldn't do that a while ago. Now it's not as hard. It's still work, but it's not as hard. And now the old shit doesn't feel like nothing. So that's kind of where I'm at with mental health. It's like the more shit that tries you, that you get through, you know, the old cliche, like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Yes, but also like self-care is constant maintenance it's not wait till you're in a crisis and then deal with it don't wait till the car

breaks down get the fucking oil change regularly you know what i mean take care of the thing and it's a lot less likely to break down and if you wait and wait and wait and wait go to the mechanic you ain't been in the mechanic in four years you haven't changed your oil in 20,000 miles you're gonna go into that mechanic and they're gonna say you got some real shit to deal with right now as opposed to staying on top of things and making checking in with yourself and it's so stupid bro that people like genderize that and politicize that oh that's just for liberals that's just for women bro shut the fuck up that shit is for women, bro. Shut the fuck up. That shit is for people, dog. You want to be a grown ass man who can't process his own emotions or, you know, he's lashing out at his family or his loved ones because he's repressing all this shit because he doesn't want to cry, bro. Yo, have you seen Coco?

Like, dead ass, bro. If you didn't cry at Coco, go to jail. Honestly, bro, you don't belong in society like there's just some shit where it's like dog yeah it's sad guy yo like dog i i don't know bro i'm i'm just my mom is one of the most important figures in my life and i clearly yeah that's that's coming across yeah we haven't really talked about that but i'm hearing it yeah like that's a con she's i mean she's your mom but she's everything you're talking about like she was there for you know like all the bad shit i know everyone says they have the best mom in the world because everyone feels that way

but like mine mine really is you know what i mean my mom puts up with me yeah i i'm i'm running for your money right i i don't know every gray hair on my mom's head is my fucking fault you know what i'm saying shout out my mom i'm sorry my fucking fault. You know what I'm saying? Shout out my mom. I'm sorry. I'll start paying for hair dye. I promise you. No, but I think having a lot of strong female influences in my life really early on where

because my parents are divorced and before my mom got with my stepdad, I was just sort of floating around, aunts, uncles, grandmas, whatever, because my mom was working my stepdad i was just sort of floating around aunts uncles grandmas whatever because my mom was working so some days i'd be with someone some days i'd be with someone else um and i didn't have this like gender and i you know not even to get political but the whole like gender role parents thing where it's like there's the mom that lets you cry and your dad says fucking stiffen up your upper you know what i mean be a man and m&m drop there i see that yeah yeah so i was like i didn't i didn't really have that in some some formative parts and my stepdad's not really like he was never the person i went to so it was always my mom sort of guiding me through tough shit and i'm not even gonna cap

bro like i cry i cry about shit and i'm like i'll catch myself like damn bro i'm watching anime right now like why the fuck why am i yo why is this getting me bro you know what i mean like if some sad shit happens i'm honestly i think i think i cry easier at like tv shows and movies than i do about real life shit but like i still bro some shit happens and it's like it's overwhelming i just i'm not even playing bro i cry and that's like people look at that as a sign of weakness but i think it's i don't know it just seems weird to me like why is that feminine or gay or whatever it's like bro it i think the manliest shit you could do is is cry in a room full of men as a man every one of those guys is either being like that's brave or he's judging you and for you to have the balls to just be like this is how i feel

or or not even you know we don't even have to take it to like cry but just admit you feel some something that's taboo or express emotions that you know what i mean and i think that's another thing like my friend group is so just open and accepting have you had a lot of similar like the same kind of friend group for a long time like a lot of long-term friends or is it most of my friends i would say about half of my friends i've been friends with for about 15 years that's awesome and the other half i've probably been friends with for like eight nine years so uh that's not normal and that's a very i know no but i mean that in a good way yeah that's like i'm very lucky to have a crew like that bro that's awesome they're my family like they're not my friends bro like and they know exactly who they

are man um and it's it's amazing because i i really do feel like i i'm not big on religion or spirituality i'm not super spiritual i don't i'm not i i'm back and forth with destiny and fate and all that shit um but it just feels weird sometimes when i think about how everything in my life has lined up to this point where it's like all right if i hadn't gotten bullied out of public school and gone to catholic school oh that's how that happened yeah so i went to i went to catholic school in about fifth grade so i was getting bullied for i went to winslow what'd you get bullied for just being weird i was just weird you know what i mean were you small like i mean i was skinny i wasn't like small small but it wasn't even like i was just weird bro you know what i mean i for a while you're an artist yeah yeah yeah yeah that ass they'd be like yo why are you drawing anime

and shit i'd be like now anime is cool bro so you know what i'm saying like fuck you yeah dead ass fuck you um but no so i went to catholic school and that was weird too because i wasn't raised You know what I'm saying? Fuck you. Yeah, dead ass. Fuck you. But no, so I went to Catholic school. And that was weird, too, because I wasn't raised religious. So I didn't really know what the fuck was going on. And high key, being into religion at that stage in Catholic school was kind of in. This God shit's lit. Yo, that's your next song.

This God shit's lit. Yeah, i'm driving a christian album bro um hey you easy did it you can do it but like bro believe in you one of my best friends now uh we met he we fucking hated because i was a pussy bro like i was i was weird i was just i was a weird kid bro and i was soft and i you and I, you know, and his name's Dan. I'm hanging out with him tomorrow. Shout out, Dan. Everyone, most of my, like, hardcore fans know Dan Comer. Shout out, Dan Comer. He was, we fucking did not get along at first, and it would, like, come to physical fighting,

and he said that he was like, bro, you were such a pussy, but he's told me one time that the first time he respected me, I walked down my friend's fucking basement. And this bitch throws a fucking sneaker at my head and just split my lip open. I'm pissed off. So I start trying to fight him. And he's just beating the shit out of me. You know, it's like kid fighting. Like our fists weighed six ounces.

You know what I mean? So we're just punching each other and wrestling or whatever he was like bro you just kept you were crying but you kept getting back up and kept trying to fight me while i was continuing to just physically dominate you and i was like hey thanks man you know what i mean because now now it's like bro that's that's my guy bro he's seeing me at my most vulnerable i've seen him people respect people respect people who who keep coming yeah you know and it sounds like a stupid thing because it's a it's a kid fight right like we all laugh on those we all had them right you're like holy shit wow didn't know what i was red in the face crying but you're

going yeah and and it's it's you know we're all animals at the end of the day and there's this thing that happens where there's that respect like oh wow yeah you know like my buddy mike spear me when we would black out in college or come very close you know we get after it a little bit mike spears is six i mean he's been on here but he was bigger back then he was his six three division one football alignment yeah who do you think was winning that one not me right you know but it's almost like he's like wow this dumb ass is crazy enough to like actually like stand up with some of this shit okay all right no i'll fuck with him yeah that's that's something bro there's there's definitely something there um yeah i don't know i'm i'm like bro like i've

i've been friends with these people for what feels like my whole life you know what i mean i was friends with them at 10 years old, and now I'm going to be a groomsman at one of their weddings. You know what I'm saying? That's the coolest shit. It's fucking crazy, bro. That's the coolest shit. It's fucking wild.

Because I probably have like 8 to 10 people from grade school that I'm still really, really, really fucking close with. And then probably another 8 to 10 people from high school that I'm still really, really, really fucking close with. And then probably another eight to 10 people from high school that I'm still really, really, really fucking close with. And these people are not under any sort of illusions about who I am. You know what I mean? I'm the dumb ass fucking who's still pursuing, you know what I mean? Like I was willing to go, fuck it. I'm going to, you know, I always got good grades. I was in AP classes, honors classes, and everything like that. My whole family always was like, Ivy League for you. I was like, I want to do it.

Really? Yeah. No, I wanted to be a marine biologist. I'm super into, like, I have like a whole streaming service. God damn, you're an artist, man. You have no idea. You have no idea. That's exactly what I would expect.

If you were going to, like, I wouldn't expect, like, yeah, gonna go fuck i was gonna get a pen wouldn't expect that but then like oh what do you want to do yeah marine biology is lit that is exactly like with the dolphins and shit that's exactly what i expected i wanted to do some shit like that um and like i said i was in honors ap pretty much my whole life like high school and all that i was in advanced classes and stuff and I was young gifted and talented all that bullshit and I was very much I was good at school but I never and there's honestly there's no fucking way to say this without sounding like a pretentious dickhead but like I was pretty smart just naturally I didn't know I didn't have to apply myself at school and because of that it comes across in your writing yeah well but what's crazy is like because of that because school came

easy to me i never did my homework i was likable people liked me so i would just be like yo let me can i just get your homework um i was a good test taker so i didn't really have to study with so my time management and organizational skills don't fucking exist. I'm literally a grown-ass child, bro. I'm a grown-ass child. I go, like, quarantine has been helpful for me because I used to do some shit. Like, I'd have a studio session or a video shoot or a photo shoot. And my friend would be like, yo, we just went to the thrift store and we got an electric wheelchair. Or like, yo, we just hit this fireworks store

we're gonna blow up this we're gonna blow up this TV we're gonna try and blow the whole thing up with fireworks I'd call my engineer and I'd be like my tire's flat or like some shit you know what I mean and I'd be like

we reschedule you don't understand a song is gonna come out of this yeah no and it's like bro because i don't have a real job with real expectations or obligations it's like art is whenever art is whenever the fuck i'm feeling artsy uh and a lot of the times i feel like getting drunk and doing dumb ass bullshit how how often do you like do you because you're not and frankly a lot of most artists are like this like you're not like organized in that way as you're describing but there's still a process like okay i need to go to the studio i need to get x done by x date like there's still some of that i don't even have that you don't do that at all no so what's what is

your process like are you like all right i'm feeling it let's hit the studio all week this week because like this is the week yeah yeah that's it's very bro like i said man like i'm so i work in extremes when i'm when i'm going it's i'm on and i'm just there and it works and when i'm not yo uh what are you doing today i bet you wanna you wanna grab drinks that's it yo what are you doing today uh none uh you want to grab drinks. That's it. Yo, what are you doing today? Uh, none.

Uh, you want to grab an Airbnb? Let's go skiing or something. Like, you know what I mean? Just like, I think a lot of artists, because we live in this era where you got to feed this algorithm, this fucking endlessly ravenous,

voracious fucking algorithm that just feeds and feeds and feeds. And you've got to feed it, feed it, feed it. If you want to remain relevant, fuck that that shit stop getting caught up in that don't get caught up in the you have to release we listen if you want to you're gonna grow faster for sure but do not feel like you have to feed this fucking algorithm because it's you're never gonna feed it it's always hungry and i see so many people cranking shit out and being like damn i wish i had more time to work

on it motherfucker you do you made that deadline you're your boss move it fucker like i don't go hang out bro what are you writing about if all you do is grind grind grind grind grind no one can relate to a like 99 of fucking civilians don't want to hear man i spend all my time grinding and fucking writing and rapping like bro cool that might be cool for a song or two you know express that but if you're not living an interesting life you can't make interesting art if you're not doing cool different shit if you're a bland ass fucking uncooked mozzarella stick of a person like you can't write anything interesting you gotta do weird shit like fuck it you want to make good art be a weird person like you gotta just not live a normal life you have to do different shit

in my opinion, at least. I don't know. Like, if you spend all your time grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding, this, that, and the third, congratulations, bro. You got a nine to five. Like, that's the whole reason I didn't want to get in. Like, fuck all that shit. I dropped the fuck out of college. And I was like, I'm doing this.

I'm getting tattoos that are job killers. So I don't even, don't give me a safety net because my lazy ass will be like, well, I mean, if this doesn't work out, no, fuck that. It has to work out. Yeah, it will work out because like, it just, it's gonna. Because I fucking, this is what I've been doing for my whole life. And I've seen the growth and I've seen all of like this one in a million mentality where it's only one in a million people make it well then how come all of my friends that i started doing this shit with all of my peers that i was doing this with for five years how come they're

all making a living off of it now i thought it was one in a million it's not one you know i mean ridiculous if you have the talent and the personality and the drive so so three so 330 people in this whole country are making good music right now exactly that no that's just not you know what i'm saying the dumbest thing i've ever heard in my life like we we talked about earlier everyone listens to music you listen to it all the time a lot of people do like bending genres now and everything and we see it and stuff but bro and you don't even have to be like a lot of people have this sort of black and white um image when it comes to music you're either a struggling starving artist or you're or you're drake it's like oh there's a big middle ground i know so many people

who you probably wouldn't know who i'm i'm either friends with or like, I would consider them semi-famous. You know what I mean? Because I know them. They have a massive fucking audience, but they're not a household name. And they're making more than most nine to fives pay. You know what I'm saying? And I got no college debt.

I got, you know what I mean? I own all my own shit.'m my own boss i do whatever the fuck i want and you're and we talked about this earlier when you first got here but like you're you're here for for people that are listening and not watching right now i'm holding my hand up like at my eye level right there are a lot of artists who may have talent or whatever and they're kind of here they're down at the table right you because everyone just like you did you have to start off yeah you have to start and then you know the top is post like the guys who have all the

attention you're not there yeah but you know you you got seven figure streams here like you you have a you have a known name all it takes is like that what like all it takes is for fucking spotify to start paying me because i got seven figure streams but i'm not making seven figures so fair fair yeah and because look it takes money to make money it does takes money and put behind money to make money absolutely you know i know you know the music industry well some of the things i've learned over the last few years getting involved with some of those people holy shit yeah like if people and no disrespect whatsoever to taylor swift saying this because obviously like she's an incredible artist so no disrespect but if people knew the fucking money that went behind her every time every song but every album yeah i know that number yeah oh baby like you can't the the regular person the person who's

even like got a lot of attention like you to say nothing of the people who are like trying to make it right like it's tough competing with that so you number one i would say it's impossible it's pretty impossible yeah but number one you got to be great and number two you got to have that moment so you got to create a lot of moments here and there and here and there and here and there to get to that moment but i i don't before we get to that i don't want to get off one point that i think is important to kind of close this whole part of the conversation we just had together because to me that was i really appreciated that that was so important to go through all that because it takes people up here with you and and how you approach this thing right like we haven't even talked about

your lyrics i know you're right it's incredible thank you and and now i understand it too you know like i i thought about some of the lyrics in broken i mean aptly named song yeah and and i understand now yeah you know so looking at it though you mentioned earlier and i think we had talked about it before the podcast but you know a lot of artists are sad people a lot of artists have tragedy and stuff and sometimes you can risk this being overstated but i can't tell you how much i agree with that and i've talked about that a lot and i it's not just music it's it's a lot of different things and i think a lot of art forms painting like you know what i'm saying poetry look through history yeah vincent van gogh was miserable you know michelangelo sat on

his on his neck craning for like i don't know six fucking years painting the 16 the sistine chapel yeah you know if you i don't know if you've ever been there but that shit's insane i can't imagine that shit on drugs but sober it was insane you know so like you know it's lit when when you do that but you know like so many of these guys and and and and women over time it's i said something like this earlier but they're so it's almost like they're so busy trying to put a smile on other people's faces that they forget to put one on their own yeah and you know you even look at a guy like robin williams robin williams who's one of the greatest actors you'll ever see. One of the naturally funniest people you will ever encounter who battled this in his head. And he never told anyone because that's not what he felt like he was put here to do.

He felt like, I'm here to make people laugh. And then it's so sad that after they're gone or after something happens, you're like i wish right you know the people around them and it's a shame to live with that but i think about that a lot because i i had mentioned at the beginning going through your records heavily like a year and a half ago and sydney showed him to me and so i remember listening like i'm a writer that's that's that's what i do by trade before i do this but you know i remember listening, like, I'm a writer. That's what I do by trade before I do this shit. But, you know, I remember listening to the lyrics over and over again. And I listened to your shit and nothing else for about two weeks. I listened to you in the gym, which was interesting.

Damn. Yeah. Like, I'm weird with music in the gym. So, like, I wouldn't even expect, like, all these different vibes to, like, yeah, I'll just bump Ashton, but I did. And I would listen to the writing and everything, and I kind of, I like being a detective and deducing where people are coming from. Yeah. But I put together this picture of this kid who clearly, like, had a, and you say, you rap about that in your songs, like, I'm just a kid, a blank, but that visual but clearly had like some kind of great foundation and now i get the blanks filled in with that today

talking about like your mom and your grandma and stuff for sure but somewhere along the way you know whether it was other people could have been some of the bullying stuff or whatever or certain things that just happen in life like you get all these thoughts in your head and you get these demons and stuff and maybe what i probably would have been wrong about is like the talking about it part Which you're so open and comfortable with and clearly have been for a long time. I didn't get that right I wouldn't have thought that I would have thought this guy's a little more closed off But I saw it in the art and the writing and then even the fucking sound of the song like you yeah you take that opening those opening three bars from broken and you put that shit even the fucking sound of the song like you yeah you take that opening

those opening three bars from broken and you put that shit in your fucking head and then you fucking come on and the voice is exactly what you expect it's gonna be and then you put those lyrics with it i'm gonna butcher a couple of them so i won't say them right now but you can go through them and you're like yo this kid in some ways is like pointing out his own reality crying for help on some things and also like like putting his soul into a song in a way that other people even if they have a different experience in life yeah can sit there and be like yo what he's saying that yeah fuck with that heavy and i think that's. I'm way better at making sad and angry music than I am at any other type. That's one thing you'll find is there's not a whole lot of happy songs in my discography.

I think Grew Up's kind of happy. I like Grew Up, yeah. Grew Up's kind of happy. That's a good song. That's probably one of my favorite songs I've ever written. Even Grew Up, it was a bittersweet thing. Missing all faces because they don't come around. The Lost Boys ain't the same age somehow. We grew up, it was like a bittersweet thing. Missing all faces because they don't come around. The lost boys ain't the same

age somehow. We grew up. That's like, for me, damn. You know what I mean? Looking back and being like, bro, it feels like fucking yesterday. I was like, mom, can I get off the bus at Dan's house instead of my house? We're going to go ride bikes and eat Slim Jims.

You know what I mean? And that transferring into experimenting with drugs and alcohol at a young age and just feeling like, bro, I really feel like I did a lot more in my life than a lot of people. I feel like I've lived a lot more because, and bro, that could sound pretentious or condescending. No, I agree with you 100%. I feel like I lived a lot of life, and I'm proud of that. I'm grateful for that.

And my goal with all this music shit, man, is for me, like I said, I'm dog shit with time management and all that. The pandemic has only highlighted this, but what's always been really important to me is time. That's like my love language, you know what I mean? Quality time. I like spending time with the always been really important to me is time that's like my love language you know what i mean quality time i like spending time with the people that are important to me um so when i'm when i'm in a vacuum i can't see all my friends i can't see the people i care about i realized like fuck bro so the whole reason that i want to get money that i want to be paid to a point where i don't have to worry about a surprise fucking expense or some shit.

For me, financial freedom is when money isn't a stressor in your life. Because money's been a stressor in my life for a long time. And once that goes away, I'm now my own boss and I'm making enough money that I don't have to worry. It's not a thing that I, it doesn't add to the list. Excuse me. I've been doing it all day over here. I'm just better at getting it away from the mic than doing this for a living. Dude, I was like, fucking, I just, the whole reason I want to do this is that, so, one, I would like to be able to put my friends on as well.

I don't want my mom to have to work until she's really fucking old. I want to pay her back for everything that she's given me. I want to pay my friends back for everything they've given me. And I really want to be able to just spend time being happy. Because for me, like I said, bro, I'm not spiritual. I'm not religious. so i don't really you know i guess depending on the day depending on my mood i'm either atheist or agnostic just really depends but um because i feel like this is a finite amount of time that we have

i don't and the older i get the more my fucking tolerance for bullshit, fucking bullshit ass people. If you're a fucking miserable person, if my interactions with you make me feel negative consistently, get the fuck out of my life, bro. I don't, and I don't, there's no love lost. I don't wish you harm. I don't wish you death or I still want you to succeed, but we, we're not meshing like that. You know what I'm saying? We can't, I don't want you in my life. And you might, you know what I mean? That might upset you or offend you. I'm sorry, but I have a finite amount of time on this fucking earth and I want

to spend the least amount of that time upset, annoyed, frustrated, pissed off, scared, whatever. If you bring that shit into my life, I don't fucking want you in my life i want to spend time with the good ass people that i've been with for years and years and years that still to this day when i'm with them i get that sort of childish carefree fun safety like just a those are my people bro that's my family you can let loose yeah and just bro i'm just me you know what i mean i'm not ashton larry i'm j. You know what I mean? I'm not Ashton Larratt. I'm Jeremy. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And I didn't ask you that at the beginning. But when you're around your friends, they call you Jeremy? Yeah. Not even. Not even. Bro, I think about that sometimes, how few people actually call me straight up Jeremy. It's usually Yerp or Germ or Big Yerm or Big Yerm yerm big yerm big germ yerm yerm what like so few fucking people call me call me jeremy um it's like what was the first one germ yeah germ i like that yeah yo germ i think i'm gonna call you germ and i like that that bro hell yeah welcome

welcome to the club because it's almost like you know and i i don't know how different artists deal with this because i'd like i've never had a stage name or whatever but you know you think about post malone does does he want to be called post i mean that is his last name technically right so it's like not too far off but they won't just be called austin like you hear him talking interviews when he says something funny for effect in third person he says like austin austin yeah you kind of like i wonder how people deal with that sometimes because people know you as ashton so it's like for that that is what you want them to do in a way but it's still like yeah they don't know you you know what i mean for me personally it's like i feel not offended because like i'm

i'm not easily offended um but like if if i don't know you bro and you hit me up on some hey jeremy did you google that you know what i mean why do you why do you even know that bro like that's it's not that out there you feel me like yeah did you like and it's weird because it feels like you're you have a some sort of like i don't know like a plan like you're gonna get close to me by calling like i'm gonna be like oh wow you did your research shawnee like i'm gonna you did the you did the how to win friends and influence yeah yeah it's like bro i'm not if you don't know me like that just fucking call me ashley because that's that's who you know you don't know jeremy you know what i'm saying um and it used to be that ashley was literally just the name the whole reason i even asked and larry is yeah how'd that happen on a

dare we mean on a dare do you uh you familiar with a dare? Are you familiar with Dave Chappelle and the Chappelle Show? Yeah. You know Ashy Larry? Oh, my God. Yeah. That's where you got the name. Yo, me and my friend were high as fucking giraffe pussy. How old were you?

Probably like 15. So you went- My rap name before that was, I think it was Skin and Bones, bro. I was real skinny. Yo, I was the white preacher, so I preacher so i got your beat all right yeah there you go yeah yeah i was so we're we're high as fucking hell bro and we were watching i don't even know if we were watching that shit but my boy chris used to call my one friend ashy larry because he would smoke and every time he smoked a dutch bro it was like his lips got ashy and i was like dog like what are you like what is that bro like is your cock like i've never seen cotton mouth

manifest on the lips like that bro you need cocoa butter fucking toothpaste or some shit like and he would call him ashy larry we were high as fuck one time and i don't know why but we were like yo like what if what if ashy larry was like british nobility we were like his name would be ashton larold and ashton larold yeah and it was very much like oh shit that's really and the idea of like the character ashy larry as a british nobleman or some shit was so funny and my friend was like yo i dare you to change your name on soundcloud or that shit that's brilliant yeah and so that's how it happened and that's i'm gonna call you austin lateral yeah bro that was we were like that would be so fucking funny but um and you're the opposite it makes it better you're like the opposite i mean

in a good way yeah no i'm definitely in no way zero pretentiousness about that bullshit just like all right let's live no i'm a trash man bro throw me in the trash when i die that ass oh my god wow so frank reynolds is my spirit animal wait who's frank reynolds always sunny they need to be oh yeah yeah bro i'm such a fucking frank reynolds and that that show always sunny and trailer park boys okay and then oh what's the other one the office i love you those that's the white that's one of the whitest traits about me is like i with mayonnaise a lot i really do i'm not just saying that i really do like mayonnaise man i haven't had mayonnaise in like a decade i love taking me back right now i love mayonnaise and i love the office and those are probably my two most caucasian traits or like i'm really about both of those

things well i feel like it is like kind of a law like if you're caucasian you're supposed to like the office i will say that one yeah but the office people killed over that oh yeah dude like it's it's like a cult yes it's when the when the when the race police came around, they knocked on my door. They were like, how did you feel about when Andy took over? And I was like, I didn't like that. And they were like, all right, that's fine. And then they went next door, and they asked my neighbors. And I heard him say, he was like, oh, you know, I never really watched The Office. And then I heard a gunshot.

And, yeah, I mean, they came back over. They were like, yeah, it wasn't related. You know, we just check in and make sure all the white people in the neighborhood like The Office. Oh, my God. You bastard. Good one. But that show, Trailer Park Boys and Always Sunny, my boys always had on in the background. Yeah.

So I have never sat down and followed the plot. Yeah. I have sat down and laughed my ass off at individual episodes, blissfully ignorant as to what the fuck is going on. Yeah. I've probably seen half of each of those shows. Right. Couldn't tell you anything that happened. That's so fair.

I just know like, yo, that shit was hilarious. That was me with Blue Mountain State. My friends used to have that fucking show on. And it was like I would catch episodes, I would catch a gag, and I would fucking shit myself. But then they'd be like, yo, do you like that like that show and I'm like I've never really watched it I've just caught you know individual things but yeah man what were we talking about before

Frank Reynolds came up I actually don't remember threw you a curveball there and now I see the curveball came back it was a boomerang I threw a fucking curveball at myself dude we went through we've gone through a lot of things like just like i like this format with the podcast when i'm bringing interesting people and i have i tell everyone this and i'm dead ass i had to have a guest that was bad everyone's been just

for different reasons it's like whoa you know you get up out of here and it's like amazing but we cyclone so many things around what you do like with your story too yeah that it's like i'm almost confused into my head like what we even got to and we're drinking a little bit too that's always good i feel like that's the natural like anytime i see a fucking podcast where it's like clinical i'm like this is not how conversations happen this isn't natural like bro anytime i'm at a bar talking to some fucking person i just met and i'm like this person's interesting yeah we start talking about like oh you like uh oh you like whiskey sours i like whiskey and then by the end of it we're like bro i was at that same fucking horse race that was fucking great you know what i mean like and's like, how the fuck did we get here?

But it's just like, that's just the nature of conversation, which truthfully, to be honest, this is a thing that I feel like a lot of people might not agree with. But I think as artists, part of, there's a lot of talented musicians that are just abrasive people. They're not like, they're not people people you know what i mean i feel like most of the people that i know who are successful or like in any in any form of art or entertainment they have the talent that's undeniable but i i would argue that

sometimes the personality is more it is more influential than the... Because there's artists that I don't really rock with all their music, but I fuck with them. They got the thing. You know what I mean? It's like, I like this dude. I wouldn't have found him without his music, and some of his music's really fire,

but the thing that really draws me to this dude is his personality. And I feel like when you have all that stuff it's a that's a winning combination man and i i really like i don't even think that's just honestly now that i think about i don't even think that's just with music bro because oh it's with every personality will carry you places that a degree couldn't that you know what i'm saying prior experience if you make a good impression on someone someone likes you you already you know what i mean you don't have to do a lot of other shit being being likable is such a fucking powerful thing because then people will see like if you have value to add people will be looking for it yeah you don't have to you don't

have to do a lot of work people will be like oh okay he can do that too right all right that's my guy you know what i mean dude just being being like like bro it sounds like so like ah bro like but like if you're just like a chill dude your life's gonna be easier you know what i mean everything i argumentative ass people i can't fucking there there are so many people that I've known in my life who are so talented, whatever it is. It could even be business. Yeah. And they just get in their own way. Dude. Because they're not.

Oh, my God, bro. They're not. You're preaching to the fucking choir right now. It's not. I have so many people in mind. I'm not going to air anybody out, but you know who the fuck you are. It's just like they forget that everything no matter what it is whether it's music yeah business sports whatever everything comes back

to people like you were just saying you gotta be able to sit down and like understand another person's perspective you don't gotta agree on everything or you know be some some guy who's just completely trying to be over agreeable or something like that you don't have to be that but you have to like be able to to hold your own and also let someone else hold their own in front of you yeah and there are so many people who are just so in their world and guess what sometimes for artists for like musicians this can actually work out that's one place where there can be an exception with that but kanye that's actually a great example because he really is in his own world but like some people can do

that with that but in most things in life because most of us aren't going to be you know six-time grammy yeah most of us aren't gonna be we're not gonna be that we're gonna do whatever job this is or be good at this thing or whatever and like you have to be able to pull it back and be good with people too because your talent will never get known that way. Even Kobe, who was always this mamba on an island, there was an extent to which even when he was calling all his teammates Charmin Soft, he fucked with them. Shit, legend, legend.

Fuck with them in the locker room. There was an understanding there and and you and unfortunately we had to hear about a lot of that in his death but you heard that because people were like hey i know how it looks sometimes but like yo he just wanted to win and we got that and that's that's the same thing bro you could tell when people um really have like a i'm sorry bro i'm still so fucking addicted to nicotine you put these pouches in i have like multiple canisters with me on i was what you know what this whole time i was wondering if that was strictly a fashion statement no i carry shit in it the fanny pack but like because i got skinny jeans on are you packing right now

is there 45 in there no no yo it's cool if there is like this is this is second amendment household i appreciate it dude i can't you can't fucking carry in jersey yeah which is you know and listen i'd be ratting you on the podcast right now so i i uh because i think i'm i'm i'm pretty liberal if i'm being honest i'm a very liberal person i was raised around guns um i'm very comfortable with guns and i don't dude i feel like for this specific issue bro and i mean i it has caused me to like look back at other issues and go all right we'll try and try and apply the same thing sure um but like you know i know you say well you know more people having guns means less gun violence.

That sounds crazy. I don't fucking blame you for it. And I don't blame anyone for having their opinion on gun violence because I think in this country, God damn it, bro, I'm about to look like Cletus. I'm not even going to ask who that is. Like, there's a lot of people in this country especially lately who

if the problem doesn't affect them or hasn't impacted them personally they will deny that the problem exists or really downplay how big of a problem it is because I know for damn sure if my little sister got shot up at high school,

I would... That would be with me forever. You know what I mean? I had a friend. His father passed away from COVID. I can't imagine how frustrated he gets seeing this shit on Facebook going, nah, it's just the flu.

Most people... Because his dad was in good health. He had no pre-existing conditions. And that shit came out of fucking nowhere. And you know what I mean? It might not be super likely, but it fucking happens. And when you downplay, that's where this anger comes from. That's why this division is so angry recently.

It's because when you have people downplaying what other people are going through, and it's not some bullshit. It's not like, oh, some people are getting yelled at in the classroom. Motherfuckers are dying. Motherfuckers are dying from gun violence, from police violence, from this COVID shit. And then you have people going, it's not that big of a problem. You know what I'm saying? To you. But that, bro, it's like selfishness

and being really self-centered, that shit bothers me. Especially when it runs into real life. You could be about yourself. You could be about your money, whatever, blah, blah, blah. If your selfishness negatively starts affecting your neighbor, you know what I mean? I don't want to wear a mask. I'm going to put my neighbor who does, he wants to wear a mask.

I'm going to put him in danger because I don't feel like it's a big deal. Instead of just going, bro, like, put the fucking tiny half-ounce piece of fabric on your fucking face for 10 minutes while you talk to him. Because, you know, it matters to him. If, you know, Doug, I could fucking, I could go. No, this is good. I like this conversation because we have this a lot on this podcast i i've always i always like cards on the table like where i'm at and i have been on both ends of the spectrum in my life i was left in college i was right right after college i was

a nobody guy in 2020 and i'm kind of i always have to say and maybe this undercuts me before i give opinions but i am very very cynical politically okay i i don't blame i don't blame you i tend to think they all suck and i have a lot of evidence on why they all suck and maybe there are some on each party who are actually good and i ignore them right i'll admit maybe that's the case fine but to me you know second amendment's one thing because i never felt like that strongly about it and then covet happened and now it's like kind of a non-issue because people are like oh shit like for whatever reason everyone from across the political spectrum was suddenly like maybe i need a gun you know because like

shit's hitting the fan well they were like yeah shit was about to be mad max right you don't want to be you know don't bring a knife to a gunfight exactly exactly so like that's one thing yeah but on on other things i fuck with what you're saying so heavy because there's a lack of common sense and empathy like a combination of the two yeah and so you know i and i've been strong about some of this i i think the covid restrictions and i was living up in north jersey when this hit yeah that's where i lived and it was bad like it was very very very bad and the guy at my old job that sat five feet to the left of me was in a coma for 55 days he lived on a respirator in a coma insane right so like and i had a lot of other friends who had it bad including one guy who i would say if this man has had a carb in 30 years i'd be stunned like yeah like

the best in shape person you've ever seen who's banged up from it so like i know like it is the farthest thing from a hoax imaginable and the data supports that by the way right i also know it's not killing 20 of the population right i also know that masks do help but the idea that like you know covid does wait at the please be seated sign in restaurants i don't know if you know that no i'm you know i'm and i've been saying this shit from the beginning i'm with this with anything like i said if you feel some type of way say with your chest and do it with do it with fucking gusto you know what i'm saying do that shit with gusto bro if you're gonna shut shit down what is this what is this middling shit i can't

fucking stand that shit i fucking hate people who can't pick a side and i fucking and when politicians do that it bothers the fuck out of me so i understand you know commit to something yeah you want to if if you feel like this is a threat to your state to your people that you're supposed to protect and you want to shut shit down, say that shit with your chest. Don't be afraid that it's going to cause division between, you know, whoever. Say that shit with your chest. Yeah, there's a lot of denial. There's a lot of, like, dancing around.

Like, bro, the curfews? Yeah, the curfews are the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The virus starts at, you know, what does it start at 10 p.m.? Get the fuck out of here've ever seen the virus starts at you know what does it start at 10 p.m get the fuck out of here here's the thing most things in life and i truly i will stamp my reputation as i say it all the time and some people from both sides yell at me fucking i don't care like maybe they'll figure it out because i think there are a lot more people in the middle than we give credit for it i agree they don't want to say anything right right? Most things in life, the answer is in the middle. Yeah.

You know? Like, you see people got pissed when they saw the Black Lives Matter protests and everything, and they ended up getting out of control. First of all, a lot of that was, like, a few bad actors coming in and fucking burning cities and shit. Right. Right? So it's not... There were a lot of people there. Like, I had a lot of friends there.

They weren't fucking burning shit. No. They weren't doing it. You know what? All the people I know were completely peaceful. Completely peaceful. So what do we do, though, though in the media we just show all the burning and then we show on the other side we show the capital riot well what about the other fucking 77 million people who weren't there you know what i mean so i get pissed at that hypocrisy but i feel like on on that issue we started with you can admit like it shouldn't be like yo that doesn't

exist i don't empathize with your position there is no such thing as police violence there's no such thing as like data that shows that they're killing more black people than white people which the data does show per capita it's like a three to one ratio right because i think 11 or 12 percent of society is black 66 is white so white. So when you average out those. And the incarceration is all fucked. Yeah, incarceration, that's an entirely different conversation. And it's really fucked. That's really fucked up and impassionate.

For me, I'm not going to sit here and, like I said, bro, if I said some shit once and I still feel that way, I'm going to say it with my chest. Do it. I fucking hate cops. I hate cops. And that's, I don't. Now, hold on on let me push back on that real fast go ahead do you think that there is a little bit of a generalization for two things number one the fact that probably like growing up like in high school and whatever and and in some ways and i mean this is a compliment in some ways like you're a big kid like you're just kind of you're kind of you're kind of living your life like the way it was so there's a little bit of that rebel

and let's be honest we all ran from cops in a fucking field 100 when we were 15 60 like i still do that shit a lot of close calls right yeah so like there's some negativity there 100 right like we didn't enjoy cops when they walked into the high school party. And we're like, I'm going to write all you kids up. Like, fuck you, right? Yeah. And then the other thing is we do get the continued, what's the word? The continued volume of when cops go bad. Like there was a video the other day. I forget the guy's name, but this was a lieutenant in the army.

I don't know if you saw this. Oh, dude. Yeah, i saw that bro oh my god first of all first of all this is where i have a problem with the blue wall of silence yeah if you are that happened in december bro i know that happened in december i know it's on camera i know if you are it only was a problem once the video went viral bro if you are a cop and you are not and you are in that unit unit and you are not denouncing that motherfucker for what he did, you have some complicity in that. Well, and that's why I have a problem with the bad apples argument.

It's just a few bad apples. Because, you know, apples can't tell on the other bad apples. You know what I'm saying? They're not sentient things. They're fucking fruits on a tree. Okay, yeah. If I'm a cop, right, and I'm not making generalizations, but we all knew some kids in high school were like, he's probably going to be a cop. And they did.

I'm going to get arrested on the way home dude they're gonna be like yo hey what's up a cab what's up bro what's up dude i have friends who have you know become cops and it's i for me that like you said the blue wall of silence that shit and like you know in response to instead of responding to these events with compassion they respond with resistance and doubling down you know what i mean instead of going like you know what we don't think you're making this problem up we don't think you're blowing this out of proportion this is a group of fucking people that has every fucking right to be upset that this shit keeps fucking happening yeah and it only the conviction rate is like one percent for cops

that end up doing this shit it's it's very small and i'm not gonna sit here and pretend like i know what it's like to be a cop because i don't i'm also not gonna pretend like i know what it's like to be black because i don't and i never will and see you just said those two things though that's so important yeah because you don't. Yeah. Because you don't know each of those. I don't know each of those, right? And so I think one of the points I want to drive at here, because, and I also, like, when we're having these conversations, it's so important to have it. It's so important to say how you feel, too.

And so I appreciate you coming out and saying, like, yo, that's my attitude. Like, fuck cops, right? So let's put it out in the open yeah i think a lot of it is and you don't have to agree with me at all i think a lot of it is there's that parade and what's it called the pareto principle like the 80 20 rule okay so that 20 that's bad yeah maybe two percent of them are bad yeah but the other 18 percent are the people who have the opportunity to say something and don't. Yeah. And so what happens?

We define, I love, I've never heard that before, by the way, that the other apples can't talk about the bad apples. Yeah, they're not going to tell on the bad apples. That's fucking brilliant. Yeah. I'm going to use that. I will trademark you on that. Thank you.

And that's what I mean. Like, you have all these artistic ways with words. Thank you. It's a beautiful thing. I'm going to go through and listen to all of them again after this. But, like, that is so true. Yeah. And then what ends up happening is you, and it's not just you.

A lot of people are like, fuck all of them. Right? But I'll bet you that a lot of guys, and you've probably had some bad experiences with this, too, no doubt. But, like, you've played a lot of live shows and shit in front of hundreds of people. Yeah. doubt but like you've played a lot of live shows and shit in front of hundreds of people yeah and i'll bet you there were there were a couple good cops there who are like controlling you know the kid tripping balls on molly and trying to get up on the stage with you a little bit honestly no really honestly no no yeah i mean first of all most of my shows are not in front of hundreds of people most of them are still pretty small um numbers online usually don't translate super well

in the real life um but that's neither here nor there in my experience with the cops i've been arrested um do you care if i ask for what uh it was it was initially armed burglary but obviously i didn't get you know i wasn't burgling all right so there was no burgling taking place. Those fucking cops did some good cop bad shit. Like, fuck all that. I understand why they thought what they thought, but I'm standing there with a weapon.

I got guns drawn on me and whatever. I think about that sometimes and I go, if I were black, would I be here right now? If I was black in the woods with a four-foot crowbar and a mask on and a bunch of cops pull up and i turn around real quick and they see me with a weapon do they go oh we thought it was a rifle do they go oh we weren't sure he was armed he didn't know he looked like he was gonna run at us i don't know i don't know because those cops were not i'm gonna be honest bro those cops were

not good cops they were dickheads the whole way they were calling us all types of slurs and shit all different types of gay this that and the third the one cop was so proud to tell me i just got back off suspension i broke my fucking hand on some guy's face and he's like proud to tell me that i'm like dog first of all I'm 18 right now, I'm handcuffed and leg shackled to a steel bench welded to the floor, you could beat the fuck out of me right now, 100%, you could beat the fuck out of me when I wasn't doing that, I'm, at the time, I was like a buck 50 soaking wet with fucking bricks in my pocket, like, and the whole time, bro, when I'm sitting there, leg shackled and handcuffed on the ground, he's got his boot on the back of my neck, he had his gun drawn on me for way whole time, bro, when I'm sitting there, leg shackled and handcuffed on the ground. He's got his boot on the back of my neck.

He had his gun drawn on me for way too long. Like, he said drop that crowbar. That crowbar hit the ground quicker than gravity took place. You know what I'm saying? Like, and I'm not even one of those because I don't think. What were you doing with the crowbar? We were going to break into a house. It was an abandoned house.

All right. We get there. We're walking around back. Bro, this fucking house looks like something out of a batman comic there's ivy growing up the sides of the wall where is this what town i don't want to say um fair um you can tell me off cam yeah and we were we were telling each other scary stories one night or whatever we suck each other out my boyfriend was like yo there's a crazy ass abandoned house sketchy as shit let's fucking go in there there's like marionettes old marionettes hanging in the windows and shit, bro.

Like, it looks like. I'm out already. I'm out. But, so, you know, we go there to do that that day. We go around back, and we notice, like, there's these trash cans. Were you just looking for, like, adventure or, like, just. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we weren't. I mean, dude, there's nothing worth. There's nothing in there. There's nothing to rob. Yeah. We were looking to, like, scare the fuck out of ourselves, basically. Like, it's some fun kid shit to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We weren't. Dude, there's nothing. There's nothing in there. There's nothing to rob. Yeah. We were looking to like scare the fuck out of ourselves, basically. Like it's some fun kid shit to do. Yeah.

And we get there and there's like the trash cans are full out back. So we're like, bro, if there's a motherfucker staying here, he is unhinged. Because this house looks like it is inhabitable. Like you can't live here and be a normal ass person. Let's not break the fuck in there. Because that is gonna kill the fuck out of us i don't want to take a chance there's some squatter in there whatever i used to you know we used to break into abandoned houses hang out drink do whatever there were times where i found out after the fact that there was one time in particular where i found out that a squatter had been in there the whole time.

And that was the creepiest shit to know after the fact. No. Okay. Had to know. Had to ask that first. By the way, for people listening, I just passed a little note to Ash. Yeah. To Jerem over here to make sure.

So we had broken into this house a few times. We found out from the cops a couple weeks later that there had been a dude in there that time when we were in there exploring the house. He was in there the whole fucking time. Both times we went in there. Chilling. Yeah. Didn't make himself known, was hiding from us and shit. And we were like, yo, that is fucking sketchy.

So I was like, all right, you know what? The trash cans are full. Something's going on here. I don't know if the bank owns it. I don't know if it's getting demoed or some shit. But let's not go in here. I shit you not again. I swear this know if the bank owns it. I don't know if it's getting demoed or some shit, but let's not go in here. I shit you not again. I swear this is true.

I swear on my family. See these chicken hens, right, in the backyard. Five or six of them. They're walking down this path. I'm like, I mean, we're here. You want to go follow the fucking chickens? All right, bet. So we walk back a little bit.

They disappear, but now we're on this trail and we find this fucking like an old dilapidated greenhouse right and outside of it are boxes stacks and stacks like probably like 20 boxes of cans of dull pineapple slices that were like kind of new so we're like bro what the fuck is going like are people trying to make moonshine back here or some shit i don't want to i'm like i'm not just took me back to like sixth grade man yeah i'm not trying So we're like, bro, what the fuck is going on? Are people trying to make moonshine back here or some shit? I don't want to. I'm like, I'm not trying to. That just took me back to like sixth grade, man. Yeah, I'm not trying to get run up on, though.

So I'm like, let's keep it the fuck moving. We see a hunting stand, and then we find this fucking old ass well. Finally, we come to this thing we're looking at. We can't figure out the fucking. It looks like a power plant or some shit. We're like standing there looking at it. And I had heard sirens earlier, but I was like, ah, it's probably not for us you know what i mean like why are they gonna put sirens on on the way to a crime scene let everyone know they're coming that doesn't make sense i

thought someone got pulled over or something because we were close enough to a main road um and we're standing there trying to figure out what the fuck we're looking at and uh next thing you know cops are all over the place. They pull up like kind of lightheartedly like, hey, boys, you know the way to get out of here? And we're like, fuck. Like, just say we're getting arrested, bro. Like, don't come up here and giving me hope that you guys are going to be cool. You got a crowbar in your back pocket. No, it's a four-foot crowbar.

It's in my hands. Oh, noted. It's a big fucking crowbar. Yeah. And so the cop says that to you with a crowbar in your hand well i was facing the other way i turned around immediately draws his gun dropped the crowbar i bet i dropped that they coughed me whatever they're searching on my pockets and so my dumb ass bought the crowbar earlier that day i kept the receipt in my pocket which

that's conspiracy on top of because then it was like oh you didn't just grab this like you plan to come here you plan to do this the receipts in your pocket dumb ass i also unbeknownst my friends didn't even know i had this on my pocket oh no brought a rubber mask oh now my friends weren't at the time they weren't really doing like that you know what i mean they they weren't hanging out in abandoned houses i was planning to sneak away from them and this is a dumb ass idea too because my one friend had a flare gun and in my mind i'm like i'm gonna jump i'm gonna hide in this house they're gonna go where the fuck did he go and then i'm gonna run i'm gonna run out with a clown mask i'm gonna scare the shit out of oh my god right but it doesn't look great when it doesn't even sound believable now that i'm saying it but like so i'm standing out

here they find a rubber mask in my pocket i come to find out that the place we're standing in front of is a cell tower that gets broken into kind of frequently for copper wiring so that's in the scrapyards or whatever so i'm standing out there with burglary tools flashlights and masks my boy's got a fucking flare gun and his his dumb ass was like i don't know why we have it like it was like in case like there was a squad or something they were like oh no that's always a weapon we were like but so we uh i'm laughing but like do you know how many people this this is like a little bit out there but how many of us sitting here right now who might be like the most upstanding individuals whatever i don't know who's

listening who did really fucking stupid shit like this when we were 17 or 18 i'm like i'm getting the shiver up my spine on a couple stories this is this is a little bit next level with the crowbar and flare gun but i'm just picturing the cop and the fact that they thought you were serious. I mean, which I guess in some ways I understand, but I'm like, come on. What's crazy, too, is that any time there's a fucking, I'm dealing with cops. If I'm with a group of people, they zoom in on me. You must be the ringleader. And, like, bro, at that time, I really wasn't.

It was, like, my friend's idea, and I was just, like, I was just the bull with the crowbar. But. Well, the crowbar didn't help. It didn't help. But they were, like, all right, like, if you could, you know, if you could try and. The rubber mask, too. That fucked me up. That definitely didn't help.

They were, like, they said that, they're, like, all right, if you can convince me that you're not here to break into this place right now, we'll let you go. And I was, like, all right. I'm literally, at this point, admitting to conspiracy to commit a different crime oh wait so you hadn't gotten in yet no bro we didn't we weren't gonna break into the power plant we were literally looking at it trying to figure out what the fuck it was and then we were gonna walk back the other way because we were like so wait a second how can they even arrest you because technically it's not like you had like blow in your pocket or something. No.

You know. I had condoms. They made sure to joke about that. Oh, you guys going to butt fuck each other when you got in there? And we're like, dog. It was just, I mean, at the end of the day, bro, I got off. Yeah, because there's nothing committed. I don't know, you know, four white kids from private school.

In court, it looks a lot different. You know, we all got button downs and whatever. Our parents showed up. What if you don't, what if you don't got parents to show up for? What if you can't afford a lawyer? What if you- Oh, it's so true. So true. So these things all go down.

And I've had, you know, I have black friends who have told me straight up, like, bro, like, I, you know, I've had experiences with the cops where it's just like, it's just straight up unfair. It is profiling. And it's like, I know that shit happens. And for me, a lot of, and it's just, I know this is anecdotal, but like. No, thank you for admitting that. But it doesn't mean it's not. It doesn't mean it's not a part of the rule. Yeah.

But like the people that I know too, who are going to become cops, a lot of them are racist. And that's not... Let me ask you this real fast. Yeah. When you say racist, because I think it's an important word that we have made into a not even worth a nickel. Because we label everything racist right away. No, these are real racists. Okay. not even worth a nickel because we label everything racist right away no these are real racists okay these are these are people who you know believe that black people are inherently

more violent that are inherently more um you know inclined for criminal behavior or whatever yep and and i to just to be clear on my end too because it is my shot i want people to know yeah i would put that under the definition like if i were labeling someone a racist straight up that's the shit that it's like if they inherently think that and it's not just some built-in back prejudice that they need to fucking fix it's not like oh they said you know they said the n-word on xbox live in 2007 they're racist that's not what I'm talking about. These are people who have bad opinions and ideas about black people. Okay, continue. That's good.

You know, knowing so many kids going to private school, I know a lot of kids who come from white, wealthy, conservative backgrounds, and I see a lot of that. I see a lot of racism. I see, I've overheard and seen parents comfortably talking to me, saying racist, that shit in the car because they just assumed that I was on that same level with them and I'm 14, 15 they're saying the n-word

hard r in the car I'm scared bro you know what I mean this is a grown ass man it's my friend's dad what am I going to say don't fucking say that it's so uncomfortable I don't care who the fuck you are if if you're listening to this, everyone can admit. They don't have to say who, but they've been in a room or in a situation where someone says that for, it's never for the right reason. It's always for the wrong reason.

But like, it's, I'm a strong believer, don't be afraid of words, right? Yeah. It's different when there's a history behind something. Yeah. And there's like a feeling you get like, woo! Yeah, there's a history behind something yeah and there's like a feeling you get like whoa like like there's a visceral response yeah and we're white yeah you're like oh we don't even have that attachment to the word in the same way that we still feel something exactly and that's just that's good that says that speaks volumes for the response that it probably evokes in a lot of

people who were tied to this whose grandparents were called this and kicked out of schools and you know like people it's crazy that wasn't that long ago either it's not and that's the thing like when i was being taught about the civil rights movement and stuff it's very much taught like it's a thing that happened and we resolved it and we fixed racism when you're learning about that shit in school it's almost like they did it martin luther king did it he fixed it and it's it's really that's not the case you know what i mean we think of we think of racism as this past tense thing you know as in on in the societal level and in my experience it's just not and for me i i do say that we need to reform not just the police but the whole justice

system because while the laws might not be written in a way that's racist if they're carried out the laws only function as well as they're practiced as well as they're enforced and if the people who are enforcing the laws are enforcing them unfairly or in a biased manner then it doesn't matter that the law isn't racist cops are the the arm of the law you know what i mean they're the muscle that's that's how the law happens and then don't even get me started with courts and that's a whole other fucking thing but we do need reform because it has become this thing now where instead of cops in a broad sense i'm not saying every cop but in a broad sense police organizations in in response to all of this

shit yeah they've banded together they've gotten closer the blue bro that fucking blue life matter flag i can't i can't stand it bro if i'm being honest let me ask you this real fast yeah because i agree with it like i think the police union thing that does not sit well with me yeah and there's a lot of you and like inherently when you just look at it broadly like i'm a union guy like because i don't want to see the idea of a union is the little man shouldn't get fucked i agree agree with that yeah what happens is a lot of corruption happens in these things now take it to the next level and have it be a government the police already are protected you know what i mean like but that's the point they they're the government yeah right so that always

sits wrong with me like imagine there's there's not a senator's union you know what i mean there's not i don't i don't think so but like there isn't but you know there's like a you know behind the scenes exactly exactly like that's a whole separate conversation. But not to get into that, like on the cop side, that never sits right with me. The one place – and this is where I get in trouble because I just empathize with – like I look at the sides and I'm like, I empathize with that. I empathize with that. Yeah. One place where I'll say I empathize with that, not to sit here and say like you should fucking fly a blue lives matter flag because I I think that that makes the problem worse yeah personally but like

when you get attacked and you're all labeled like that and it's just an inherent reaction when you see something exactly it's like that it's that animal thing so I get that I get it I get why it happens but I think like I said for, growing as a person, I think that personal growth is just something that most people should strive towards. Yep. On an emotional level, too, because I think physical growth is important, but you want to be a good person. Yep.

For me, if someone's really coming at me and saying, like, if I'm having multiple people, let's just say come to me, friends, family, people I don't know, if i'm if i'm having multiple people let's just say come to me friends family people i don't know if if i'm hearing the same thing over and over again come up to me saying like damn bro you're really fucking you're really argumentative or you're really you're really aggressive at some point i would go all right well why are all these people i don't know saying this you know it was one thing with my friends but there there's some stock there at a certain point you have to go okay well can i just keep going no no no it's you it's you it's you it's not me it's not me at a certain point listen bro like people don't take off work and put themselves in a situation

where they're gonna get tear gassed and hit with a rubber bullet they don't do off work and put themselves in a situation where they're gonna get tear gassed and hit with a rubber bullet they don't do that lightly and they don't do that for no reason and think think about by the way think about when like the heavy shit recently happened yeah happened in the midst of a pandemic yeah where people they lost their jobs they're locked inside they're away from people yeah they can get mad like you see a video of derrick chauvin sitting on george floyd for whatever it was nine minutes and fucking 40 seconds fuck that guy exactly you see that if you don't get i don't know anyone in in my life who wasn't mad like down the street in franklinville when when there was the i i knew people that were

at this protest there was a peaceful protest knew people that were at this protest. There was a peaceful protest. All they did was march. All they did was march with signs. On the side of the road, these people with big, fat, fucking Blue Lives Matter flag, a Trump flag, a Confederate flag. First of all, we're in the North, motherfucker. Yeah, I will never understand the Confederate flag.

I'm not sorry about that. It's just like, it blows my mind. And they're sitting there, knowingly, alongside the route that they know this protest is supposed to take place. And they're sitting there by all those flags reenacting George Floyd's death. They had one white guy going, oh, I can still breathe. It's not that bad. He's fucking, you know, this. That was in Franklinville. Bro, there's some real shit going on in here.

And that's the problem because the i can't say the word i want to say right now because we're not allowed to say anymore but you know what i'm looking for those types of individuals yeah start they get all the attention too yeah and that's what we do and we do it with both extremes too so like when we talk about the protests what do we give attention to we give it attention to the people who burn buildings right who by the way half the time are just fucking anarchists who aren't even there for the protest those white bulls coming through and doing that shit to to give oh dude they were also they they were like all white like oh oh yeah so but you know you you look at that and it's like fuck like it I just wish, and this isn't realistic.

Yeah. I wish that we didn't give attention to the polarized worst of the worst. The vocal minority. I think there's a difference in the vocal minorities. And I think I saw this a lot when we're talking about certain groups of people. Wait, what do you mean vocal minorities? I want you to define that real quick. So when I, like, all right, so you have, and I want to separate this from the term minority, meaning like, you know, people of color, people.

Right, right, right. But you have a group on one side who, you know, has become the face of conservatives or the face of so-and-so supporters or whatever. And then you have the face of the left. And, you know, obviously, I know that not every, you know, Republican or is is racist or whatever um and i know that you know most most of my friends are very liberal none of the people i know are like bro i'm in a video with a hundred plus million views and i'm using the the f slur you know what i mean i you know what i forgot to ask you about that earlier. Yeah. Because I do find this interesting in that we mentioned that video was from so long ago. Yeah. The world changes.

You adjust with it. Yeah. Right? So, like, I never say that word. You never say that word. Right. But the internet doesn't forget on things, right? I think what we do is we post-judge history sometimes because people are lying if they don't think that that

was thrown around all the time it was but for a long time you know but so was the n-word you know what I mean um at the point that I was at my life was I sheltered yes was I uh extraordinarily privileged without even but it's not even a question. I didn't know the history behind that word. To me, because it was thrown around so much, and that's on me, bro. That's on me. I didn't even think about it because I didn't have to because it didn't refer to me. You know what I mean?

When it referred to me, it was like, oh, you're being stupid or whatever. Yeah. But I'm not gay um that word was never used at me with malice and i i was ignorant to the history behind it now i know uh if the internet decides to cancel me someday and that's a whole other issue is like there's a big fucking difference between canceling someone and holding someone accountable for some shit that they said you hear that oh kevin hart got canceled he had a bad day on twitter he didn't get canceled he's making a fucking million dollars tomorrow what the fuck are you talking about he got canceled he had a bad day on the internet because someone said what's up with this and maybe it was 10 years

ago and maybe all he needed to say was yeah that's on me i fucked up that was stupid that doesn't represent me as a person and i'm really sorry for those that i hurt with that and you know what i've i i've sorry i hope that you can see you know i've done better and and i've learned and i've grown from that and and i won't ever fucking do it again you won't catch me doing that again because that's not me anymore and it wasn't even me then that's a that's a very shitty representation of me, but that's a whole other thing. Oh, is that like a year ago or something? What, when Kevin got...

Yeah, yeah. I couldn't even tell you, bro. I'll put the link in the show notes so people have it, but yeah, I remember that. But like, so most of my liberal friends, I have friends that are gay, I have friends that are trans or whatever, they know who I am. They're not trying to ruin my life about some shit. They have friends that are trans or whatever. They know who I am.

They're not trying to ruin my life about some shit. They're not trying to get me whatever, banned off Twitter or nothing like that. Because most people are reasonable on both sides. And you can tell when there's intent to hurt and that kind of stuff. And listen, if the internet decides to hold me accountable, then you know what I mean? Like I wrote an article about it and I forget the newspaper, but I wrote an article about, you know, why I regret using that and whatever. But that's not the point right now. I don't want to get off topic.

When I say like vocal minorities and there's a difference in them, you have a vocal minority who's speaking out on the oppression of other people, speaking out for people who aren't being listened to, because you have someone like Cap where he kneels and they say, fuck you, you're being unpatriotic, protest differently. Colin Kaepernick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have him peacefully protesting. He's not saying anything.

He's not hurting anyone. He's not burning anything or touching anyone or being violent in the slightest it's a peaceful protest during a sports game and they say get sports out of politics or get get politics out of sports rather i'm sorry shut up and dribble yeah and it's like is it all right well if you want politics out of sports what's the answer you you want politics you don't agree with that of sports um and that's cool but say that you know what i mean don't don't come with this half half energy like you're trying to disguise what you really mean i don't like that half speak double speak bullshit um and then you have another vocal minority that's pushing back against that yeah um that's saying you know and those are different things to me if you have

you know it's almost like if a kid was bullying me for years and years and years and i and i finally snapped and i was like yo fucking stop stop bullying me you're you're a bully and his response was don't fucking call me a bully. I'm not a bully. I hate that word bully. Those are different things. The outrage is, might be equal, but the outrage is coming from different places. And we can't pretend that all outrage is created equal because it's not. What do you mean by that? I never heard that. All outrage isn't created equal.

You could be outraged because you don't feel like black people are protesting in the right way. You could be a white person and be outraged that they're doing this and that and the third. Or you could be a black person who's outraged that black people are being killed by police at a much higher rate or being incarcerated at a much higher rate. That outrage is sparked from generational trauma and systemic racism that should not exist right now. There's no excuse for it to exist in the justice system. There just isn't a justifiable reason for racism. Do you think anyone reasonable would disagree with that, though? That's the thing. See, I probably, you asked me that four years ago i might have said no

i i i i've known over the past four years i've seen people that i believe to be reasonable people that i believe to be smart start to fall in line with some things that i really don't think that reasonable people should feel or think and and that's been hard for me to because you know I have a background with these people I have a friendship with these people and it goes well what what kinds of things specific like all right you know what I'm saying like they'll they'll get mad at Colin Kaepernick for kneeling and then they'll get mad when a protest happens, peaceful or otherwise. They get mad that the anger is that black people are upset. At the end of the day, they're pissed off that these people are pissed off. And that bothers me because if the police were targeting people that look like me

at an unfair rate if i was getting pulled over and he couldn't really give me another reason besides like yeah you look suspicious you know i'd be pissed the fuck off and i would start to notice that and then when you have now we live in the age of social media where everything is recorded and i mean you said it earlier like that case where they pulled over the the army bowler i'm gonna put that in the show notes too yeah if you haven't seen that it's just it's it's it's it's maddening but the fact that that happened last december yeah and it only went viral and there was only consequences once it went viral means that the consequence is largely

performative the consequence is not because the bad thing happened it's because people know that the bad thing happened it's the consequence is performative you're sorry because you got caught yeah and you're not even sorry because a lot of those people respond by going you know what i mean when they flew that blue lives matter flag out of that police station everyone knew what they what they were doing when they did that they like you know what i'm saying if you're gonna do some that's wrong and then when you're called on it and you see the outrage and the the sorrow and the grief and the frustration in the face of these people who just want change yeah and you respond to that by basically going you blue lives matter i will say this till i die bro there's no Unless we're talking Smurfs Or the motherfuckers from Avatar

I've never met a blue person in my fucking life There's that one dude on Oprah He's the only blue life I've ever fucking seen No cop I've ever met Has blue skin So blue lives don't fucking exist You choose to put on that fucking uniform My friends do not choose to put on their skin

when they're born they didn't get to say because guess what with the way that the world is if people did have a choice everyone would be white because we do have a privilege we do have if people got to choose it's like when you're creating a character in skyrim and you notice that well this person's immune to this this, this, and this. Why would I want to, you know what I'm saying? But people don't choose. And there's unarguable inequity and inequality. And it's plaguing

the justice system. And it's plaguing these streets. And it's just, it's literally... The justice system is the biggest problem. Because it's... Dude, did you system is the biggest problem and but because it's it's dude like did you watch the 13th no oh it's a great document it's on netflix okay it's about the 13th amendment and it shows how the 13th amendment repealed slavery right and it shows how the justice system kind of replaced slavery in a way right well he privatized prisons exactly and it

built into that even before that before it was that organized it turned into this whole like slave catcher mentality like okay well we can't enslave him now let's find other ways to do it and the thing is like you watch that documentary it's it's made by someone who's very left like ava duvernay yeah it doesn't mean it's wrong yeah if you like go fact check everything she says in there well facts aren't political you can't make exactly you go you go quote unquote fact check what what what she's getting across in there number one it checks out yeah number two i got a lot of respect for the fact that nuke ingrich yeah agreed to be in the documentary okay now newt gingrich

is a right winger to this day right who was the speaker of the house in 1994 when they passed the crime bill yeah right now it was passed by bill clinton right he brought to the table he's got to own that yeah but like there was bipartisan support for that and newt gingrich signed off on that and so i respected two things about it. First, I respected Newt basically coming on there to be like, yeah, I got that one wrong. I appreciate that. A lot of politicians don't do that. And number two, I respected the fact that he looked at this and said, I know Ava DuVernay, who is my political opposite, is making this documentary, but clearly she's on to something here.

So I don't give a fuck if she would never vote for me or I would never agree with her. That's on to something here so i i don't give a fuck if like she would never vote for me or i would never agree with her that's not the point here the point is we have some type of system that's been set up the wrong way and we have to own that and figure out how to fix it so what i would say to that is when you have someone like nuke ingrich who is well known and well wellrespected conservative figure. Firebrand. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He can say in that documentary, in that space,

yeah, I believe that this was wrong, blah, blah, blah. That's cool, and that's respectable. Rally your friends and go, okay, listen. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because you are, at the end of the day, man, I don't see a reason for this outside of taught hatred, taught bigotry, and its roots are so far into our society. You know, I mean, you look at the prohibition of cannabis rooted in racism. A lot of drugs, the prohibition is crack and cocaine or you know

you think of cocaine as this wolf of wall street rich white guy wall street drug a fine and they're off but crack all you had is water and baking soda yeah it's functionally basically the same drug it's a free base form of the same drug those those are the two stereotypes though yeah what i'm saying right there yeah like you're describing the actual drug i'm describing how it goes down you look in the justice system how many people are in jail for like crack and that's for 20 years and without even getting conspirators conspiratorial that's that's that's rooted in racism as well. It is. When I say, fuck cops and fuck all cops and all cops are bastards and shit, first of all, all cops are bastards, that's a misunderstood slogan.

It didn't originate in the U.S., and it's older than a year. The police system is bastardized. The police as an organization have been bastardized. They do not. And I think most people, if you just ask, like, all right, well, with the exception of maybe an incredible crisis, how often do the presence of cops make you feel safe? And how often do the presence of cops make you feel threatened? Because for me, even if I'm, bro, I'll be driving, doing nothing be driving doing nothing not texting i'm paying attention the road a cop pulls behind me i'm fucking 10 and 2 all of a sudden going like oh shit i hope he doesn't notice that i'm driving

and that's a comedian's bit i don't know who i stole that from but like and i'm white and i might have tattoos and i might you know have fucking silver teeth or whatever but i'm white you know what i mean i can't i can't escape that bro i'm white i have a certain privilege with the police i have a certain privilege with the justice system i have experience yeah that let me i've been caught with drugs i've been caught with weapons i've been bro i've been caught with shell casings and shit in my car pills in a bottle with with my name not on it i've been caught with drugs. I've been caught with weapons. Bro, I've been caught with shell casings and shit in my car. Pills in a bottle with my name not on it. I've been caught with switchblades that are illegal in New Jersey.

I've been caught. I go, yo, do you know so-and-so? Yeah. Let me go. Like. Do you think that that could happen? Let me paint a hypothetical for you just fairly. Could happen with a black person yeah it could yeah i don't think it's very likely lighter percentage much lighter yeah because i and i think i would agree i think the numbers support it could

happen you get you get a cop that's very much not like that and he's having a good day and you say oh you know you know so and so he might go all right you know but i think the evidence supports that that's not very likely and i think that more more times than not black people are are viewed by certain groups of people as more prone to violence more prone to having drugs or guns or whatever and that's just not fair it's just not and there there's a built-in prejudice too and it's not and this is where you move down a step from straight racism um have you ever read like any malcolm gladwell stuff he wrote talking to strangers the tipping put great author phenomenal but i think it was in talking to strangers we've we've talked about this on the podcast on one episode before and i forgot to check but he talks about a study that was done

i think in new york city of judges yeah with incoming cases so someone just got arrested and they have their first hearing where they determine bail and whatever. Right. And most of these judges are white. Yeah. But the study conducted has something to do with AI. I don't remember the context. I don't want to go all the way deep into it. But the study basically conducted how likely were they to make a worse bail or a harder-off bail for a minority, so a black or Latino person. Versus a white person. exactly, versus a white person. And there was a clear difference. And it wasn't like atrocious, but there was a clear divide, right?

Like you could see it, and I forget, I think he put the numbers in there, so we'll check that, but it was clear. And the point he was making when he went through the whole study was that a lot of these judges aren't necessarily racist i'm sure you probably have a couple in the bunch that are like it's just law of averages you're gonna have it okay but they have this built-in thing where they're used to this environment where oh the cops brought in we're in new york city biggest city in the world right cops brought in a black person the last six cases we saw we assume they did x okay well this person probably did too so there's this guilt by association that you built in and so instead of and think about how crazy this is that like a person on a bench in a robe on a tuesday after

fucking lunch break is deciding something like this but in their head they go from 100 grand to 150 grand well and so on something you said like that's you said that's a step down from racism. I would say that that's when you were now adding 50 grand to a bail based on someone's skin color. I would say that you might not go out of your way to assault a black person. You might not go out of your way to associate with white supremacists or whatever. But if you're actively participating in that and you can't look inwardly and because i think i don't i don't like the word prejudice i think that a lot of times people use it to downplay racism um it's it's prejudice to me is

diet racist you know what i'm saying like if you might not be outwardly attacking black people. You might not be calling them slurs. You might not be, you know, outwardly super supportive. But if you're, you know, like you said earlier, and I agree with this in a lot of cases, I do believe that most things happen in the middle. I do believe that most of life exists in a gray area. But I'm firm on a couple things where you're, there's not always a gray area. You know what I mean? No, you're absolutely right about that. And for me, race, you know, like, rights, human rights.

I don't, there's not a lot of wiggle room for me for my opinions there's not a whole lot of wiggle room do you think any differently of someone who isn't white or don't you do you think differently of someone who's outwardly and obviously gay or don't you are you already making assumptions before you know their name before you've met them before you've had a conversation with them to me that isn't like oh well once my dad got to know him and he knew he was a good person well why the fuck did he think he was going to be a bad person i think that so and i and i don't want to defend that because i understand what you're saying yeah i think one thing i would say where it's like a another level to it is people will not consciously do some things which doesn't make it right but they

won't consciously do some stuff and i'll give you a more i don't know if the word's innocuous but a lesser example let's say you and i yeah walk into a courtroom yeah now chances are we're going to be in a button down so our arms are covered right yeah but let's say we both do and now i cut off my hair i had hair down here the other week so we were even right i got the scruff right here but let's say i shaved it off right and for whatever reason we had our sleeves rolled up yeah you're getting a higher bail than me yeah it's gonna happen yeah and i don't think the judge who's probably heard 30 cases this day some of them might be bad right but let's just say this isn't a bad one i think the judge in their head has some built-in things about you know from fucking 1980 where it's like criminal looks

like exactly you talked about earlier like i got you said something like i got tattoos on my arm so i fucked over my future job in interviews. I actually think that today that... That's going away. Yeah, exactly. It is going away. But my point is, there's still some things that some people don't inherit. They don't say, yo, that guy has tattoos, fuck him.

But in their head, they're like, oh. And I agree with that. I do. I agree that people... Because, bro, I'm not perfect. I do some shit subconsciously. Bro, even in my relationship with my significant other, I realized... She pointed out some shit I didn't realize i was doing before i knew i was

doing it i could say that if you don't know if you're not consciously aware that you might be doing something that's harmful or or hurting somebody that's one thing it's not an excuse but once once that thing has been pointed out blatantly and you go, this is exactly what we're talking about. We're not talking hypotheticals. We're talking this, this type of shit with cops and black people. This is what we're talking about. There is no more, oh, we didn't know it was a thing. There is racism rampant in the justice system we have now pointed it out if

you're not going to get rid of it you are now saying you're okay with it yeah if you're in a position where you can get rid of this bullshit ass fucking toxic, hateful, despicable behavior. And you don't after it has been pointed out to you. You are complicit. As far as I'm concerned, you're just as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger. Because if you're not going to hold that person to the same standard that you would hold a civilian, if you're going to protect them because of the blue wall of silence or because of this fraternal brotherhood bullshit, fuck all that. You are now the reason that a criminal, a murderer, a racist is not facing the consequences that he should. And you could take that on a broader scale.

Do you appreciate it? I'll ask this. Like, I don't know if you saw this one, but it was pretty viral. So you might have seen this but one of my favorite things with the protests last summer was there was a sheriff out in it was in the midwest he was in michigan i think who went on video with a ton of people who were gathered to protest and said we're gonna march with you because we're mad too because what we saw on that video talking about scumbag chauvin and george floyd like that does not represent who we are you're mad you have a right to be mad we hear

you not only that we want to stand up with you too and they went and marched with all the people too and i saw that i did not see enough of that in my opinion yeah from enough police forces around the country not to say that all of them are on video but it's like i agree with you in the sense that there should be more instead of just complete defensiveness which to some extent i understand when you're all being called pigs in a blanket and that's that would suck right and you're like well i'm not fucking that i get it right equal but opposite reaction but to some extent you do have to be like okay maybe the loudest people who are doing this for the wrong reasons fuck them we don't need to listen to that but the people who are gathered

here like march or something like hey we should take a part in that or hey we should say like yo we hear you well i think okay that's that's that's step 0.5 for me that step zero is to go we're going to publicly acknowledge this that's step 0 0.5. You have to make the change. To be performative, to go, we're going to march. I saw that in Philly. And I saw this. I'm not even going to say. I don't want to implicate myself in anything.

But I saw on Twitter. And I did my due diligence after seeing that. Because I don't take things at face value. But there were these cops that basically did that. We're're gonna march with you blah blah blah and then a week or two later those same cop one of the same cops was you know shooting less than lethal rounds and and and tear gas and stuff into a protest that was peaceful that they then escalated that and then they i mean they had these people in between a wall on the interstate and the fucking road and they had them all corralled there they were they weren't they yeah the cops were not being attacked

um you could say these people dispersed do it we have a right to to gather and protest you do it's it's constitutionally protected if they're not doing some shit that's wrong you can't go well we think it might get violent we got to shut it down we got to use uh you know we we got to get we got to be violent first so that we we eliminate the possibility of them getting but that's the stupid shit because it is going to get violent when when you start shooting at people who aren't doing anything wrong they are going to fucking snap back because they're there to protest that exact type of behavior so of course they're going to start throwing bricks and fucking soup cans and shit like and i saw time and time and time again these people you know and i've experienced excessive use of force and blah blah

blah listen man which by the... I don't expect perfection. Yo, I'm going to cut you off for one second. I think it's very important to say the context you've given in this with your own experiences with it is very important. I don't mean to say like, hey, look, you got to do some criminal shit.

So you know, but like you shared that today. You're going into detail about it today. And it gives... Look, unfortunately, unfortunately, I don't know what the word is. It gives it more credence that today you're going into detail about it today and it gives look unfortunate unfortunately unfortunately i don't know what the word is it gives it more credence because it's not like you're just sitting behind a keyboard and like saying yo the patriarchy man like you have experience and you understand where the worst experience is too in yourself people people can identify with me and my experience starts to feel like maybe an experience they had or whatever and

then then they like I said earlier, people care about shit when it affects them or their loved ones. If you live in fucking East Bumblefuck nowhere in the middle of the country, you've never, you know, you don't interact with a lot of black people. You're not friends with a lot of black people.

The cops around you aren't black. You might live in a small town where you know the cops, whatever. So you're taking personally these oh well i know him he's not a pig he you know how well do you know him you know what i'm saying do you there there's just so many aspects of this like it's so frustrating for me to see bro because i'm i'm tired of it and i get i get fucking mad bro it makes me mad it ruins my fucking day when I see this shit now because I'm so fucking tired and I can't even imagine how tired someone that isn't white is who they're wondering you know a black mother is wondering well my kid

isn't out here doing dirt or nothing like that. But if he meets the wrong cop on the wrong day, is my kid going to be next? The next accident, the next, oh, I thought it was my taser, the next, I thought he had a gun, the next blah, blah, blah. There are certain jobs where accidents can't happen. You're familiar with firearms. You're not going to confuse a taser and a gun. A loaded Glock 17. That was the dumbest one I've ever heard. You you're not going to confuse a taser and a gun a loaded glock 17. that was the dumbest one ever you're just not going to confuse those two things

it's a nerf gun versus a loaded glock you can't and and if if you don't know the difference and if you can't tell you should be a cop no you can't be a cop nope it that like it's it's that type of where yeah there's that one and the other one we talked about. Yeah. You see those two this week. It is, I don't care if you're like sitting in your house. But like you said, those two this week. That's what I'm saying.

It's impossible not to get pissed off by that. Yeah. And especially when it's on video too, like the one was. It's like, what are we doing? Imagine the shit over the years that we didn't get dealt with before the, you know, the widespread use of body cams. And even in places where they're still not used the way they should be or used to their fullest extent or they're turned off. Listen, bro. I am who I am.

I say fuck cops with my whole ass fucking chest and i mean every cop unfortunately i'm not saying that because every single that's that's a ridiculous statement for me to to say fuck every cop it's not because i think that every single cop in america is a racist piece of shit but these are not small problems these are people's's kids. These are people's brothers. These are people's lives. And even if you want to go and say, well, he had a warrant for armed robbery. Cool.

Let the justice system, let a fucking judge decide what he, because last time I checked, the death penalty was not the consequence for that crime. Also, you are not the judge. You're not in charge of sentencing. You're not the judge you're not in charge of sentencing jury and execution exactly you're a fucking cop they have no obligation to protect us or serve us they don't that's not their job that has been gone over in court before

i don't feel like when i'm when i'm around a cop i feel like he's waiting for me to do some shit i don't feel like he's looking out for me you know what i'm saying do you think some people could feel like there are some looking out for them and and and by the way from your experience i also don't blame you because you literally had one where they were looking well it's and it's not even that experience because in that situation do i get why they felt the way they felt fuck yeah i get it it looked bad it looked bad it looked like i was there to do some shit yeah you had a two by four yeah like but once it but i've also that's far from like i said that's far from the only bad copics that's the only time i've been arrested there have been other cases where i had more shit that i could have done real time real time i had shit that i couldn't excuse

i couldn't get out of it and he just let me go now do you think that those guys will let you go two questions all right no no dude i don't shy on this podcast we talk about this shit i love that and i love that and i've talked about it with white people i've talked about with black people i don't shy away from shit i love that if i'm wrong i'm wrong tell me i'm wrong number one do you think that in those situations, it was more likely that if you were black, they wouldn't have let you go? And number two, do you feel like those cops might have actually been pretty good cops and pretty good people who saw the bigger picture

and saw that maybe, you know what, you weren't a horrible person? Yes and yes. Okay. I do think that if I were black, it would be a different situation. I agree with that, by the way. Yeah. I got shell casings. Statistically. Yeah. shell casings from multiple calibers of weapons in my trunk i got knives weapons drugs

the law says i'm supposed to go to jail for that yeah i and listen bro i can put, I can put on my white voice and I can say, listen, your honor, I'm really sorry. It was a mistake. I didn't mean to do that. And, you know, it was the wrong place. It was the wrong time. I'm not stupid, bro. When the time comes, I know how to talk to cops. I don't talk to a cop like this.

You know what I'm saying? This is my conversational voice. I'm not... You know how to be like, yes, sir. Yeah, because I know I'm not going to sit here and try and get myself in more trouble than I'm trying to get in. But that's kind of fucked.

That's kind of fucked that I can do that and I can go, oh, I'm sorry, sir. What? Oh, my license yeah no my bad um uh what are you what are you pulling me over for oh i'm sorry i didn't even know i was speeding like when i do that and i played the fucking innocent little private school oh yeah do you know so and so the fact that that works says something yeah um the fact that that works says something. Yeah. The fact that a certain manner of speech or a certain type of clothes or a certain aesthetic. I don't even think the clothes matters anymore. We saw that.

Like the way, yeah. Well, that's the whole thing. Respect the troops. Respect the troops. Respect the troops. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck all that.

That goes out the window when it suits you. And I don't like that. I like, like I said said my energy is the same across the board if i say some shit i'm gonna say some shit i'm gonna keep it consistent consistency is another big issue i have with the other side of of things um i see and i'm not trying to i don't like painting with a broad brush because i don't believe that that's the right thing to do. I can't condemn that when I see it in racism and then do that myself. However, when I see people going like, yeah, COVID ain't real, it's fucked up.

You know, this shit is oppression. I can't go to sports clips and get my goddamn number two Caesar cut. I can't do it without wearing a goddamn mask you know first the first thing it's gonna be is a fucking mask and then i'll tell you what next year they're gonna have you wearing a fucking uh uh a hijab bro that's that's what that's what they're doing get that shit the fuck out of my face dog bro you gotta act too you really gotta get into that bro like you said we said, we said this earlier, facts aren't political. Facts are not political.

And I love turning that on these motherfuckers like Ben Shapiro, who, by the way, I wanna... Ben, let's meet up, bro. I wanna give you a wedgie. You're a dork. Well, listen, Ashton, Ashton, Ashton. Okay, you're not looking at the facts here. This is what they want. This is what they want.

The facts state that, according to police, 97% of police are good. My doctor wife. You're not looking at the facts here. This is what they want. This is what they want. The facts state that according to police, 97% of police are good. My doctor wife... So you're saying 3% are bad. My doctor wife said that her pussy has never gotten wet. The wet ass pee. The pee word. I'm going to get your wet ass pee on my wet ass pee.

Dog. He does kill me. He does kill me. He's a dork, bro. He's a dork. He's a fucking dork. He's a dork. I agree.

It's... That got me off. That got me off got me off topic bro no but i'm talking about like it's okay so a lot of the facts don't care about your feelings that's like a that's like a a hot phrase that a lot of these these like you know the steven crowders and the ben shapiros they they love to throw that out okay facts don't care about your feelings both ways what are the facts and you know i hate i hate doing this shit because there there's always a reason they always come up with a reason and it's weird bro you could tell when someone is like just be just wants to antagonize a situation. Dude, I hate people that monetize this shit. You can sit there with Ben and get... He'll use 18-syllable words to try and make you look dumb,

but there's a lot of rappers out here using big words and saying absolutely nothing. You know what I mean? And that same sort of shit applies i think they but by the way i think many of them i won't speak for all the rappers but like many of them including ben come by and honestly yeah you you know those people who are just kind of like their iq is so high that they don't realize they're not speaking your language well i don't even i'll defend him on that he definitely he'll say some shit that you can tell seems so obvious to him and you look at and you're like what the fuck did you just say well you know i just i i think a lot of this stuff comes down to empty rhetoric and i think

here's my thing is like yo if in 2016 you voted for trump because you felt he was the better of two options having not known what a trump presidency looked like that's that's okay that's okay you did that or whatever you know and i'm not talking about the people that voted for him because they were like well white is right that not those people i'm not talking about those people i'm talking about the people that were just like well given uh the choice between hillary rodham clinton and donald, you know, I personally just feel like he's the lesser of two evils. Because truthfully, that's what I did with Biden. And guess what? It's fuck Biden too.

Biden has done nothing to show me that he meant any of the shit he said. But that's the thing. Dude, he's asleep. Of course. Alright. Like, I almost won't... I feel bad for him.

Here's my thing. He doesn't know where he is. I voted for Joe Biden. Yeah. Because of that, it's my responsibility to hold him accountable. And I'm not going to sit out here and defend his every move and go and try and justify shit that I shouldn't be trying to justify. But I saw that a lot with uh the other guy um and i saw people that i know who i believe are rational logical fucking very smart people starting to defend things that it's like dog you're you're

dying on a hill that's not like worth dying on and you can't even justify it's okay to go you know what i thought something and then i was proven otherwise yeah it yo if you're wrong and you learn better is your responsibility to like do better is your responsibility to go yeah you know i i thought this and i was i was wrong and that's that's okay i think some of those people get so dug in because they get pissed off because they feel like it doesn't work both ways yeah and that's that's a real disease in the system and everyone's at fault for that all of us are fault including by the way and this needs to be said while i empathize with a lot of the people who sit like where i sit just pissed off at everything yeah one thing i can say about myself at this point is i roll the mics and the cams and we talk about it and we start those conversations.

I may empathize with people who stay quiet on it. Yeah. But if you want to see, if you don't like these two options. Yeah. And you don't like how polarized they are and you don't like how we live in 2021 and convince ourselves that on 10 million issues you need to be one side or the other. Yeah. Then talk about it. Yeah.

Because the longer you stay silent silent guess who gets more attention the people who are going to be the loudest on every not just one or two one or two is fine on every single issue that is here or here left or right and it's like you're not going to change shit if you're staying quiet so like and and that's why i get those reactions to those crowders of the world and the fucking pod save americas of the world because they're just continuing to drive that wedge and it so like and and that's why i get those reactions to those crowders of the world and the fucking pod save americas of the world because they're just continuing to drive that wedge and it's like and that's why i'll push back on you with with some of the cop stuff and whatever and that's and i respect by the way i think everything you've said today because i've and sometimes i i made you and a lot of other times you did it voluntarily you backed up with your own experience and facts and also like your own empathy yeah and like not to totally shift off a serious topic here but i want to talk

about this before we get out of here and by the way i want you in here again okay cool with that like this is i love this conversation and there's a lot of again this is why i love doing this because i had no idea it was going to go here today but it did but like i was starting this with and and i never like when when you're going off on stuff i'm gonna let you go like that for sure i appreciate that thank you i'll babble that's no that that's what i do with people like i i let the guests decide where this is going and i just ride the wave but i started somewhere in this with like the empathy for people which has come across in multiple ways whether it be political, personal experience,

or in your music and your own story as well, with your family even and your mom. And we talked somewhere in here a while ago about some of your battles with your head and how that then comes out in the art. And I read lines, or hear, not read lines, I hear lines like, tell me if I died today, would you care if I was dead? Right?

And I may have butchered a couple. No, you're pretty much spot on for that. I'm playing this song in my head right now, but I'm fucking talking to you too. So I can't, I'm hearing myself. So I don't know. But, you know, that was in the song Broken. And there's other lines like that and whatever. And then I see this same guy, you know that i don't know if i said this

earlier because you were talking about it i should have said this but like the song grew up is like a paradox to me because you're talking about growing up but you're talking about being the same kid yeah and everything and it's such a beautiful thing and i see like that that like happy-go-luckiness and then i see that that that other thing in a song like Broken, aptly named, where it's like, I hear you talk about all these other people. And I hear you talk about all these friends you've had for either eight years or 15 years, which it sounds like it's like 10 people or something. That's amazing, right? So all these people care about you clearly, and you really fucking care about them. And yet you still put something like that

in the song which means you feel a certain type of way right and maybe it's like there's so i was talking to who were you talking to my audience not so much my friends because a lot of the times i'm addressing people or i'm addressing an issue and with that specific line it was like how many times do we have to go through the situation where a motherfucker dies that like okay you know he had a fan base but he wasn't big and then after he dies his shit blows the fuck up oh yeah man or you know like give people their fucking flowers while they're here bro if you fuck with someone again say with your fucking chest bro like don't be scared to fuck with someone because the guy next to you doesn't. You know what I'm saying? Especially with art and shit.

I see that all the time when I started doing shows. If a couple key players in the audience start dancing and turning up, all the other followers start doing that shit too. If those people don't start doing that, the other people are scared to be the one that starts it. You know what I'm saying? So as a performer, you learn how to manipulate those people. You can smell a leader in a group. You know what i'm saying so i as a performer you learn how to manipulate those people you get you can smell a leader in a group you know what i'm saying you could tell

you learn how to sort of get those people going and they get the rest of the crowd going um so so is there and i want to make sure i understand this too is there like a little bit of if you're addressing the audience more than anything are you addressing some people saying like hey i know you really fuck with what i have to say yeah and you really fuck with the vibe i put out there because the music's got to sound good it's not just what you write right but like there's not enough of like hey i'm stamping my approval behind this because i feel this and i'm willing to tell other people about that yeah i mean that's a part of it it's almost like you know i don't know man it's just there's there's

so many things with art and it's like half the time bro like i mean like you said i think that's a really good summary of who i am as a person is this really goofy dumbass motherfucker that does dumbass bullshit and couldn't give a fuck about responsibility or obligation or time management. And then there's another side of me that's very passionate about what I feel is important to me. And for those things, I'll die on my feet. But 99% of the time, i'm i'm just fucking chilling you know but it's it's hard for me to even sort of deal with the dissonance between the i don't give a fuck me i'm just trying to have fun and then me where i i see a video of of some some you know injustice

or whatever happening on twitter and i'm pissed off for a day and i'm texting my girlfriend like i don't know where to put this i don't know what to do with this i'm an angry person i'm like you know what i'm saying it's it's weird that i'm so do you i want to ask you this though yeah do you think someone that has to do with because you talked about this earlier like how people put their insecurities out there i do it all the time too right like we what's the common thing we i hope you don't mind me cutting you off i just want to i want to go with this like we reflect our own problems on other people sometimes yeah and so like you've been through the fucking ringer with yourself no one else right like i'm talking about your personal shit.

Right. And you think that sometimes, because I feel like you're very, I know you're very, very hard on yourself and harder on yourself than you should be, especially with what you create. And do you think some of that then manifests on your reaction to things that then piss you off? Because it's like, yo, I would be this hard on myself about this, so I'm going to be this hard on other people about this shit too i don't i think i'm pretty easy on myself to be honest i don't hold myself to a schedule i don't like if i like some shit i'm gonna put it out i'm it's not gonna be trash because right not to sound like a pretentious asshole but i'm good at music it's right some people are good at football i'm fucking not i'm good at music it's what i'm good at like people are good at shit and i don't think. I'm good at music. It's what I'm good at. People are good at shit, and I don't think that that's a...

Music is something. It's a talent of mine that I recognized I had. I nurtured that talent, and now it's a thing that I'm good at. And I know that, and I'm confident in that. I don't think day-to-day I'm really hard on myself. I don't put a lot of effort into being the person I am. I just am myself if i find that i need to be straining it like if i'm straining to write a song i just i trash it i'm not i'm not gonna

sit there and fucking try and write if it's not coming out it's not coming out yeah um with my With my life, like I said, man, my goal is to be a free man. A free man where I have my own time, I'm my own boss, I'm my own money, and I am nobody else's man. I'm my man. That's a good goal. I look at that as me being like, what is more childish than having no fucking rules? What is more childish than being an adult and being able to do whatever the fuck you want? I want to buy a big boy toy. I'm going to get a fucking Ferrari and drive it fast. I'm going to drive it to a track. I'm going to drive that fucker fast. Cause that's why, that's why it's a Ferrari. Um, you know what I mean?

I want to do a big boy adventure. I want to go to a different country. I want to go on a cruise. I want to fucking have a timeshare or a fucking vacation house in the mountains because i love the fucking mountains like you love the mountains love the fucking mountains bro you're from south jersey you love the mountains love the mountain i love that love the mountain that's so is it was that like a was that like a getaway dream when you were a kid? Just like, damn, I don't even know. I didn't even know I loved the mountains until I got into college. My friend took me to his house in the Poconos. His grandparents had a house in the Poconos. A lot of my 15-year friends had gone away to college.

And I was starting a new budding friendship with a lot of these guys at the time. And my friend started taking me to this place in pogonos and it was like it clicked immediately when i got up there because i'm a suburban dude but when i got up i like the green and i'm i love the outdoors i love camping i love all that types of um and just being in nature i like being around running water i like like being around mountains and shit like that. So for me, that place, I felt a lot of artistic inspiration. The whole Keep Dreaming Kid EP, very based on that. August 12th refers to every year the Perseid meteor shower that we would go up to the Poconos and watch.

I think, by the way, side note, I think that was some of your best work. Thank you, bro. Fucking damn. I think so, too. Thank you. I appreciate that was some of your best work. Thank you, bro. Fucking damn. I think so, too. Thank you. I appreciate that. That EP is... And I know it's got thousands and tens of thousands of streams, but that EP is incredibly underrated.

I couldn't agree more. I'm not just saying this because you're in my studio. Thank you. I told people at the front of this, I listen to every fucking record you made in 2019, and I'm a music snob. I'm more likely to say something sucks when it's not known right yeah or when it's known frankly it's really fucking good thank you like it is it is it is just if you are a human being and you feel things in your own experience and you listen to your music i i think we talked about this off camera when you first got here everyone

has a great bullshit meter about things. And it's a mean way of putting it, as I said. But think about the dumbest individual you know. I guarantee you they have a very good bullshit meter. You can smell it. And there's no... With your music, even when you're maybe insecure about something and it comes across in a song, and I'm forgetting an example,

but I know I have one in my head somewhere. I'm just a little fucked up at this point something and it comes across in a song and i'm forgetting an example but i know i have one in my head somewhere i'm just like a little up at this point but like it comes across and it's honest and so like i know like oh damn that's how he was feeling in in that song right there and you do not see that consistently from enough artists including by the way some people on a one name names who put out great work that i listen to that's awesome because they're very talented and it could be the next level if they just went there and you go there thank you and you have the talent so i appreciate that um yeah i mean like that's that's my goal bro is is just i want to be a kid forever and that's that's all it all it comes down to i had a crazy fun childhood because school came easy so so I wasn't really doing schoolwork.

And, you know, a lot of my best friends were in the same boat where we weren't doing our homework. We weren't studying. We were just hanging out. Yeah. And we had so much fucking fun, and we didn't give a fuck about anything, and we just did what the fuck we wanted. And when you're a kid, you can get away with shit because there's no consequences. They go, ah, he's a fucking kid, whatever. Now, obviously, I'm not talking about going out and hurting people or anything like that but

responsibilities largely financial responsibilities i feel like are responsible for the death of childhood and most people yes they they end up doing a job they don't like to pay for things that they need to have. Necessity comes before desire. And I think that that's my biggest fear is because I'm not spiritual, because I have one life, like I said, I want to be happy as much as I can. And I don't want to have to compromise, I don't like having to go, well, I'll still be happy on the weekends, or I'll find happiness in this thing that I hate doing, or I'll make it work, because I've seen so many adults just kind of be like, damn, like, you know, I hated that job, I did it for years, because, you know, I needed to put food on the table, or roof, or man, it paid so good, I hated that job. I did it for years because, you know, I needed to put food on the table or a roof over my head.

I paid so good, I just hated going to work every day. Fuck that shit. I would rather be kind of broke and living bummy, but happy, than doing some shit I hate to have a bigger house. It's like, bro, what is comfort? For me, comfort is being free, being as free as I can.

My rules, my way, mine way mine my money my music i don't bro i'm broke just to keep it a buck i'm fucking broke i i spent a lot of money when i was like 19 18 19 when i first started getting a lot of youtube money that i would not spend now i could have invested it and i'd be not broke right now but i didn't um spotify pays like bullshit obviously i haven't been doing shows this past year um i'm not like broke broke you know what i mean i have a little bit of money but i'm not financially independent right now yeah you know what i mean i'm not gonna say i'm not buying a house i'm not buying a car yeah as far as not like i get nervous if i have less than 5k in my bank account. You know what I mean?

I'm always on the verge of that. You know what I mean? And that might be more beneficial. And I'm grateful that I have that money and it comes from my music. But I'm not making a crazy amount of money or nothing. That's the goal is to become financially stable. I don't need a million dollars a year. I don't need $150,000 a year. I need enough to have a car that works reliably, have a house that is comfortable, to be able to cover a surprise medical expense.

And my car breaks down, some bullshit where i know i'm not gonna need to figure it out it's already figured out you know what i mean and my my only goal in life is to do that by doing what i love to do and that's it that's that's it and i you know i'm you and i talked on the phone before you ever did this yeah and like talked about some of the shit you got going on and i don't want to go into any of that or divulge any of that. And you're in a really good spot. You work with a great company, AMG, which we didn't even get to talk about today. I would love to talk to you about that because you've been with those guys forever. And you and I had talked about how, dude, when you're in, when you're an athlete, when you're a musician

or something like that, finding people to handle your business who are not scumbags is a very hard thing to do yep and you find you found people for fucking years ago yeah who who you've been with and and have a close relationship with and like it's such a team yeah and so on a future podcast i want to do that justice and give and give that give that some light because that's that's i like when we find the positive and things where there's a lot of negative yeah so there's there's and what's your guy's name by the way brady brady yeah shout out brady shout out amg i like i like what brady's building there yeah so i definitely definitely want to do that but i the reason i was bringing that up is because i appreciate the fact that you still have that perspective knowing what you got

going on and knowing what the next steps here are and knowing that like you're already there yeah you have millions of streams like it's there and now the next level is starting to happen and so you have the perspective of tasting what a lot of fame and a lot of money is going to allow you to do and yet while you're so close to it and you work for so many years to get there you also had the perspective of like hey man there's a word for me that's like enough yeah and like it wouldn't take a hell of a lot for me to get there and i have the perspective on not losing who i am or or very importantly the people who are around me who

have been there every step of the way 100 and my number one thing in my life that i'll die with and and that i i really appreciate from you talking about your friends about because i feel the same way is like my people around me are loyal as fuck yep they're great people they're from all different backgrounds and all different beliefs and like i fuck with all of them because they've been the same person the whole way and when you can say that about people like my one friend nico who's been my best friend since we were three years old yeah he's been the same guy since we were three years that's good people it's exactly yeah and so when it's look maybe this is judging a book by its cover a little bit but i in a positive way judge people when they can tell me that about their circle yeah you know it says something about you it does yeah it and immediately you're higher in my book than maybe even should be but it's like i'll drink

to that dude it's i'll drink to that all day but listen man this was fucking awesome i i believe in like some universal shit and whatever and it's just funny that we had this whole crazy last 13 months with the world shutting down and everything yeah Yeah. And like three, four months before that, I get past all your music and I fucked with it so heavy. And fucked with your, I'm not even going to lie, like ahead of your music itself, the production, I fuck with the writing so fucking heavy. Thank you, man. And then, you know, someone, dude, I forgot about it. Yeah. Like I listened to you for two straight weeks, three months and a long hair that started to come in went by.

Coronavirus hits. I go into my world like my whole life has fallen apart and trying to figure out what to do. Yeah. Never thought about you again. Yeah. I'm sorry. Didn't. No, it's cool.

Like, you're in my Apple library. Yeah. Didn't click your music not once during the pandemic. Yeah. And then Austin Beer, shout out Austin, hits me up goes yo yo julian would you want to talk to this kid ashton larry he's really good i'm like dude i like dropped my coffee i was like yes i want to talk to and what's weird is like i know austin but so i got hit up by austin's friend mike so shout out mike burns as well um mike hits me up he's like yo uh you remember austin right i'm like yeah yeah yeah

he's like yo he has he has this guy so it was like a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy he's like a friend of a friend yeah and he was like you want to be on this podcast and i was like yeah fucking give me the details i was at my girlfriend's house and um yeah man i don't know like the whole six degrees of separation thing the small world bro my cousins went to fucking school with you yeah it's it's wild bro south yo some shit i'm not gonna elaborate on this but some shit is happening in south jersey right now yeah and you're now in the thunderdome not here i'm saying like just in general yeah like there's a lot of people i'm around who are doing way crazier shit than i am and like now you're in that circle

because they do listen to this and like i one really cool thing i've done with this is like i'll show you afterwards you go through the numbers of episodes there are people who didn't know each other who now talk to each other every day and work that's awesome it's a beautiful i love that i love that connections and community bro yeah so some of my guys i want to hook you up with after this but listen i'd love that we'd be talking all night let's get some take out all right i haven't eaten this whole time and then let's say i want to spread it out a little bit but somewhere down the line like maybe four or six months down the line i want to have you in again let's do it all right cool do it cool ashton larold germ thank you yeah

love it brother thank you for sharing your thoughts today i got a beautiful mind thank you got great music everyone where can they find your music besides Spotify? Fucking anywhere. Anywhere. Anywhere. Google me. And it's Ashton Laroche. Ashton Laroche. Ashton Laroche. I can't even fucking say it. Everybody else, give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.