The Pomp Podcast - 281: Ben Baller On Being An Innovator Of Culture

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Ben Baller is a musician, actor, and jeweler. He founded IF and Co, which creates extravagant diamond-encrusted jewelry. Baller has attracted many client celebrities, such as Kayne West, Drake, Nas, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Snoop Dogg, Black Eyed Peas, and Mariah Carey. He even created a diamond-encrusted belt buckle for Michael Jackson. In this conversation, we discuss the wild stories from Ben's days at Priority Records and Aftermath, how he became the number one jeweler in the world, why Ben is an entrepreneur and innovator, the story behind the $10 million ring he created for a Middle Eastern Prince, and why Ben was born to talk shit.  This episode is an unedited view into the life and mind of one of culture's most important people. Please be prepared for foul language and powerful ideas.  ===============================  TaxBit is a refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pomp.substack.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ben Baller did the chain! That's right. Ben Baller is a musician, actor, and jeweler. He founded If & Co., which creates extravagant, diamond-encrusted jewelry. Baller has attracted many client celebrities, such as Kanye West, Drake, Nas, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Snoop Dogg, Black Eyed Peas, and Mariah Carey. He even created a diamond-encrusted belt buckle for the late Michael Jackson. In this conversation, we discuss the wild stories from Ben's days at

Priority Records and Aftermath, how he became the number one jeweler in the world, why Ben is an entrepreneur and innovator, the story behind the $10 million ring he created for a Middle Eastern prince, and why Ben was born to talk shit. This episode is an unedited view into the life and mind of one of culture's most important people. Please be prepared for foul language and powerful ideas. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Taxbit. Taxbit automates your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. They easily connect your exchanges to securely sync your transactions and run them through Taxbit's tax engine. You can generate a completed

tax form with a single click. Founded by tax attorneys and CPAs, Taxbit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. You can get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to taxbit.com slash invite slash pump. The link's in the bio. Go click it. Taxbit.com slash invite slash pump. Also, this isn't just a podcast. Every day I wake my ass up and I write a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pomp.substack.com or go in the description and click the link pomp.substack.com. It's the email you never knew you needed. All right, let's get into

this episode with Ben. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Ben Baller here dude is ready to crush it uh thanks for doing this man I really appreciate it no man I appreciate it bro I'm I'm it's so funny I'm just thinking sorry man you got the

New York hat on I got an LA hat on so it's hilarious man I didn't plan that I wasn't gonna wear a hat but I forgot to shave my head today so I look kind of crazy with my Mr. Burns that's why I got a hat on because my hair's all crazy can't get to a barber yeah man um let's jump into your background i think a lot of people know you now as ben baller the jeweler uh obviously got the songs and everything kind of uh you know really riding the top of culture but uh you had a whole nother life before uh before the jewelry game maybe let's start just like where you grew up and kind of your life uh coming into high school and into college well you know what's really crazy is like i'll give you like a a forward before we even get

into that it's it's just you know being a big jeweler in the game and it and it's without an ego you know i'm you know people rank me the top three biggest jewelers in the world um i think i'm even even higher than that in a certain way but i mean i'm one jeweler of the year a few times you know where some of these people or 99 of the people on instagram never been nominated you know and there's millions of jewelers in the world and to be recognized for um not being orthodox you know i'm saying being totally unorthodox uh t-shirt not wearing a button down not wearing a suit you know uh tattoos whatever else and one of the reasons why i never tattooed my face or my neck or my hands was because i knew i was going to meet saudis

there's certain people to get in a room nowadays it's not necessarily accepted because i think if you walked into you know a meeting with some vcs in silicon valley and atherton you know what i mean your face is tired they'll be like you know about how much money you make it's kind of like all right dude like you know but going back and forth um it wasn't until about maybe two years ago even after i won jewel of the year that i didn't consider myself a jeweler and i've been doing this for 15 years it is my main profession it's my longest profession but i always consider myself a renaissance man because of all the the things i've done in my life so to go to the beginning, I've always had a love for hip hop culture. And, you know, I'm 47. So when

I grew up, it was sort of a taboo thing. It was exotic. It wasn't really out there like that. You know, I mean, obviously, rock and roll was everything. It was an alternative back then. It was mod, you know, modern music. We listened to the Smiths and the Cure and things like that. Then there was like metal and ACDC. Then you got the country and like hip-hop was so so foreign um i just adapted i mean i i didn't even i like i was born into it you know i jumped i didn't even dive deep in i was born in it trying to search for it you know and um you know now today it's the biggest uh format of music there is in the world pretty much right it's the most influential it's crazy so with that said you know i grew up with a

graffiti background great dancing um dj um and you know uh i was just in the streets i came from a father who was a part-time minister was a um he had uh well he was a professor at ucla for 30 years and my father is very big on academics very very severe super crazy traditional korean have to get fucking straight a's um i'm the youngest of three kids my oldest brother um to give you an idea my brother got a 1580 on his sat score and when he was 14 years old and my dad put him in the hospital because he missed the one question so you know with that said um my sister she did pretty well as well my brother went to a school called philips academy andover which is a very prestigious high school we didn't have any money going up he had a 90 scholarship

and um his boarding school obviously my sister went to Exeter and then um you know my parents got divorced and it was a wrap for me I was getting straight A's in school because I was getting my ass beat and uh it just wasn't for me so around sixth grade my parents got divorced and I just was like I became a latchkey kid the parents got divorced they separated um my mom could have won custody, but she's a workaholic. My mom's totally different. She was a dress contractor for most of her life. And my mom just always been a hard worker. She came from the era of when she could have taught a Harvard business class from just hard work ethic and how to execute it right. Well, now it's, you know, you've got to work smarter. You know, a lot of people can

work hard, right? You have to, you know, there's people who, there's Mexicans out here, Hispanics that are working insanely hard manual labor. I'm not speaking about that unless those people were able to turn it into a landscaping business or you know things like that my mom just knew how to do that she regrets putting the sewing machine in like people like forever 21 or like you know just people you know like like she my mom put the sewing machine in a lot of people's hands and they became very big in the garment industry and became some billion you know billion dollar companies so anyways um i grew up in that household and i was running the streets djing just wanted to fucking listen to music and whatever else and and um i wasn't a great student

i think i graduated high school with like a 2.75 gpa i did get like a 13 something on my sat after three times which is still pretty good and i think the basic stuff was like you know i think if i took it one more i would have got better but um i still couldn't get into any schools that i wanted to academically and my dad was uh you know was the head of fucking asian studies you know he's he's the head of asian studies at ucla and i couldn't even get to ucla and pay for it fucking scholarship. Right. So with that said, um, I, uh, I got more serious about sports and, uh, I love basketball, but I always felt like I was a year behind. And I don't know if this it's, it's something that I figured out in the last decade, which is crazy. Cause I've

been out of school for 30 years. Right. And like, um, I figured out that when i left varsity basketball i was like damn if i had one more year i'd have done better but you don't have that one year you know you got to move on but football i got it immediately even football i could have even did better and i kind of like slacked off but i got a scholarship playing football at division one school you know so i ended up getting to college good school um you uh you know you enter a different world you're the shit um all state all county all cif which is like one of the best you know it's the conference in the california um there's not as many schools uh there's not the programs that are now you look at high school programs in texas and their

football programs look nice in the nfl stadiums right and they're it's serious and um you know i get to college and there's 113 people at camp the next day immediately 20 people drop camp another thing is remember there's no cell phones there's there's pay phones the pay phone there's one and then there's another one really far away it's like a two mile walk just to get to the entrance of this naval academy in Vallejo California and people just don't want to do it and for some reason the bay doesn't really get hot like that but it was really hot that day and people were quitting everything else and um my first day at camp I just noticed I talked a lot of shit but I wasn't as good as these people I had guys and uh you know that were 300 pounds and

they're right behind me, chasing me. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, the level of athleticism is a whole different level. I'm like, man, I don't know if this is going to work. And I have the coaches telling me, hey, man, gang, you better step your shit up. You know, and I'm thinking like, fuck, man, you know, what am I going to do? You know, I mean, I wanted to not go to school, but I'm here now. So let me make the best of it. And it was just crazy. And then someone stole my cleats the first week of school. So they're talking shit to me and everything else. And it was a struggle I get to school I end up playing a little bit here and there but I realized because I wasn't a starter and I wasn't a star there was a lot of different like you know like things that

where they could pull your scholarship you know if you're not if you're not playing right here and there whatever but meanwhile the star players never saw them in class never saw these guys doing anything the homework's getting done for them they're at least getting a 2.7 3.0 average they're going to get all their shit taken care of they're the booster program there with the alumni you know I had a guy who was pushing the gym lights, like the lights and then the things to put the stands and the basketball courts away. I mean, it would maybe take 15 minutes to push all the lights in a gym and he was

getting, you know, $50 an hour back in like 91. And I'm like, Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, I'm like still trying to whatever. So I figured that, okay, what am I going to do here? This is an academic school. This ain't working out. So I ended up transferring over to a division two school across the bridge of San Francisco. On top of that, they had a film school there, which was uh nicholas cage's dad who's uh francis ford coppola's brother augusta coppola he's the head of the dean of uh cinematography there and so i said all right well look i can play basketball

and football here i can flourish kind of get this going and whatever even still i missed home but it was there that my love for the bay area became like very heavy and um you know uh even though i was born and raised in la um i have an apartment in san francisco a lot of my businesses in san francisco and i was there way before the the 2011 2012 uber and all the the app um smash and before even the the the dot com shit and everything right and um i've always had a fond feeling for san francisco so that was something in the back of my head whatever um finished college i uh start pa work which is slave work and then i realized that what the fuck does this have what is getting coffee building someone's house grabbing someone's

contact lenses what the fuck does have to do with the film industry this is the stupidest shit in the world like i don't get it and it's just la you know everyone's coming to la to be an assistant or be this this and this and after like four or five movies i was like man this shit ain't coming it so my sister got me a job as a promoter at the world's famous rocks brand nightclub you know night at the rocks brand right it was like funny so i started working there as a promoter and long story short i hated promoting but a lot of celebrities were there and whatever and i was going about the wrong way like like i would see like sylvester sloan hey man hey you should come out here boom and people like hey man don't talk are you fucking crazy you don't talk to celebrities

or whatever and i was like bitch i was born and raised in la i see these guys i was just i thought because i was part of the club i can kind of talk to these people bottom line is i kind of started still figuring my way out um but my passion was dj and music so uh one night the dj didn't show up to the roxbury he was smoking crack and i had an opportunity to dj so i lived five blocks away from the roxbury in the shitty ass apartment had roaches and all kind of stuff the day i moved into this apartment there was fucking epidemic needles epidemic needles um inside the the the the fucking cabinets i'm like holy shit it was a very heavy uh predominant like gay area and whatever that makes a difference we're just a fucked up place and i was like you know what dude it's cheap

i'm very close to good shit boom i go home grab my records come back i do a pretty decent job they give me the night there at a super fraction of the rate and i'm like fuck it i don't care that starts going good um a buddy of mine who was a very good friend of mine he uh his dad was investing in a new restaurant and um they had a restaurant that was successful it was only soul food like high-end five-star soul food restaurant that denzel washington or nixon deb yallon um this one black socialite guy uh brad johnson they owned it they're opening a new spot called creek alley and denzel was one of the main guys they're gonna make it like i don't know how old you are but back in the day moomba was like it was a restaurant but it had like music it had

ambience you know i was gonna do a thing so i was like hey man i'm ready to you know so i waited outside the fucking place while they're building this place and one day sure enough um there's this uh uh gift it was like a retail store called 40 acres of mules spike spike leaves merch stop and denzel washington's car was parked in front of there so i just waited until he came out like i literally waited it was hours i just shot the shit with people in the store blah blah so he gets there i get my fucking tape and i'm like hey man uh i know you're opening the restaurant man i want to give you my thing and he's like it's not a nightclub like why are you having this i was like well i know you like hip-hop and i want to provide the music and if you don't like this tape i'll

work for free for you know a year and i was working for so cheap anyway i was doing whatever i could to survive and um sure enough you know a week later assistant calls me he's like hey man you got a job here boom i go in there and it's like a full state-of-the-art dj system it's probably the nicest dj setup i've ever seen in the nightclub like the fuck and it's not a nightclub it was a bar jamaican restaurant from there i had um i met people prior like from dj met eze dr dre rather a lot of rappers that were working at this nightclub it was an all ages club um the founders of the club was my best friend nick adler whose father is lou adler uh rock and roll legend rocky gaur picture show cheech and chong um beyond like insane you know california dreaming

mamas the papas he produced that song like insane he's like my you know kind of like my illegitimate godfather he uh you know helped me tremendously with my career so his son was my best friend loved hip-hop him and david faustino who was bud bundy from married with children and another guy they started this club called ballistics and it became huge it was at the world famous risky whiskey a go-go which you know the doors every single rock band's performed there james brown and nick allard's dad owned the place so we're doing this thing there i was the dj i met um i'm trying to think of someone people would know but will i am who's the the lead rapper the head of a black eyed peas a lot of people also don't understand that will i will i am was

the founder of beats by dre he actually came with the concept and everything um and he was a battle rapper just on the stage broke no money nothing uh exhibit was a pretty famous rapper was up there there's some pretty big underground hip-hop people and it was it was a platform you know and uh so you know i get this job and um the first week i i dj there they do the black oscar party there and I'm like holy shit obviously Denzel you know like I meet everybody Quincy Jones blah blah whatever and then like right after that I'm doing the black Grammy party I'm like this is fucking insane so I meet Dre I meet Pac I do Jada Pinkett's birthday so all these people started to gravitate towards me because I was a good DJ and I was doing these things and one night

I'm DJing and a couple fights had broken out and people are like oh you know they're like hey listen we don't want this to be a stereotypical club where fucking fights break out and there's fucking they're like oh they're worried about drug dealers and all the racism against black people we gotta keep this shit classy yo man you can't play any music after like 80 like four so you want to play some fucking you know some some earth wind and fire and some some alan green she's like that cool you can't play with hip-hop and i was like fuck man one night the owners of the club they went to vegas to go see an oscar delahoya fight they're flying in a private jet so we're watching the fight at the bar the general manager's my boy he was 15 20 years older than me and i was like

okay this guy don't give a fuck he was messing with some chicks and uh i knew already he's about to go get his dicks up in the fucking office he didn't give a fuck what was going on so i wanted to make sure these guys were going to vegas to be at the fight and at the fastest they're going to hang out watch the fight maybe have a couple drinks and then fly back by a certain time back to la so i seen dr dre sitting down ready to watch the fight i said all right fuck this i'm playing all hip-hop i'm playing everything that i don't care if i get fired this is my shot so i gradually go from the 60s 70s 80s and then obviously now to the 90s current hip-hop i take the fights off i take all the sports off the tv screens and there's a big movie and i put all black exploitation films

The Mac, Superfly, all the shit And Dre's bugging Everyone's in this place, NBA players, Lakers and stuff And I have a guy who's my buddy I'm like, hey man, play for like 20 minutes I'm gonna go to the bar and get a drink So I go down, everyone can see me

I'm like elevated way up in the sky And I go down and I sit like 10 streets next to Dre And I know that Dre would, you know And sure enough, Dr. Dre's like, hey man Fuck you know about that music, bro Like, what are you, Chinese? what are you like you're playing all this like real funk like you're playing some real shit like what's up and I was like oh man my brother's your age you know and um um I knew a lot about Dre then

before the internet even existed and I was like you know I've just been a big fan of hip-hop and uh you know um this is what I'm doing and and uh you know I music's my life and so he's drinking a long ice tea I'll never forget this is crazy right this is 25 years ago and uh he buys me a drink and he goes yo man do me a favor man you got a number and i was like back then i had a pager i had no cell phone no nothing i had a house phone and i had a pager and the pager it's like boom so get the pager number and uh three days later like on monday he pages me to go to the studio and bring some records next thing i know i'm working with death row records i'm djing scratching doing stuff i'm seeing suge and i'm seeing all this crazy stuff i'm really starstruck at this point

and i've been very little i've been starstruck less than a handful of times in my life and then um he tells me he's like hey man um you know uh i'm in a situation here it's kind of getting tricky and this had been brewing up between his beef with sugar is going on and who's trying to leave after i try to leave death row and start his own company because there was a lot of things it was like if you watch the nwa story there was a lot of friction between obviously easy e and nwa they all broke up boom and then now is another situation so i don't know what's going on but he's like hey man i gotta do you need to talk to he's the guy that gave us our first deal boom next thing i know i meet this jewish dude named brian turner who owned priority

records and the craziest thing these chicks that i was hanging out with they were a lot older than me they were five or six years older than me you know when you're 21 and trying to figure things out 22 and the girl's 27 or 28 it's definitely you know it's it's a big especially back then now it's like but we're hanging out these chicks and all four of them were pretty hot one of them tells me she just started dating this guy and um I was like oh man you know like fuck that dude you know and I'm trying to like hook her up my boy somehow some way I connect her with the president of priority records who's enormous mobile they get together they get serious they get engaged they get married they've had kids and everything boom so I was like

part of that so this guy took me in um I wasn't in the mail room but I was I was an A&R manager So that's like the bottom of A&R, but you still got some clout, you know? And within two years, I became vice president of Priority Records. You know, we had Jay-Z sign Jay-Z's first album deal. We had Master P. We obviously had Ice Cube and a lot of things going on. Dre hits me and says, hey, man, I finally got my situation straight. What you want to do?

I just signed a two-year contract for $100,000 a year for the next year to be $125,000. I have an expense account I can go eat at fucking Spago's or Mr. Charles and charge for the company I can even buy like something nice everything my whole life's a write-off at this point everything's free um I have flights I have a cell phone I mean I just have everything I have great benefits I have a 401k and Dre said he had a pretty decent infrastructure but he didn't have this corporation with small companies like yo what do you want to do now this is the guy that gave Dre his start pretty much and i tell i tell my boss and i'm like hey man i got an offer you know i gotta be honest with you and he's like we've never had any kind of static he's like you you know what kind

of a punk kid you sound like right now like i like you're young as hell you have a lot of talent you know you're doing well we have big things he goes listen i promise man stay here don't leave but if you want to leave then go ahead i didn't respond back to what he said and he knew immediately so he's like yo dude just just get the fuck out of here and i felt bad but i was so i wanted to work with dre you know he's a legendary dude i go work with dre shit doesn't i'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs for three years because i think he was trying to figure out his life and everything else but he signed eminem eminem became huge um finally he drops his second album it took six seven years to drop an album back then it's ridiculous like now it's even ridiculous but back

then it was like unheard of to wait that long to drop a solo album he put out like other albums right but anyways that being said I got lost to the mix there was no one I could really work with we had 11 artists signed a label none of that shit really mattered because Dre was focused on Eminem his solo thing so I kind of signed a couple big producers there and whatever meanwhile throughout all this that's going on I became a pretty big nightclub DJ um when I say big I was like you know if you ever heard a guy named Mark Ronson he's a very big DJ he's a very big he's enormous now in the music business and even more than that me and Mark were probably very comparable to each other in careers and he was DJing all the hype nightclubs in New York I was DJing the best

clubs in LA once in a while he'd fly to LA and guest spot I would go to New York and guest spot as well it's one of those things I had a billboard in Vegas before any of these big EDC like all these nightclubs were having these big DJs come all over the world from Tiesto and Calvin Harris whatever so i had a flourishing dj career i had a lot of clout being head of anr aftermath but the music business just kept being too political like hey man um we gonna make this record uh big this year and i'm like what are you talking about like you're gonna spin this record here i'm like man fuck this chick like what are you talking about i'm about to play this but no and it got political even in the clubs where it was hard for me to say no to play a record for two minutes

You know And then I started to understand What Paolo was And things like that And bribes And I was like Yo man I've let myself get so infiltrated

And so My mind got so polluted And so corrupt With just So pretty much I wasn't playing What I wanted to play anymore And I wasn't even playing

For the people anymore I was like doing things And I just started to hate The music business DJing was like Alright the only last thing left I Leave Aftermath

I'm still DJing This is the part That gets tricky i started selling drugs and uh no cocaine i know it sounds weird right i just i wasn't dealing with the white because the sentences were different you know you get busted for weed you know like if you're selling a million pounds you might get 10 years right which is an insane amount of time but you know you sell you know a fucking ounce of coke man you're going to jail for 30 years you know so it's different so anyways going on i started selling weed and it was profitable it

was it was very well i was doing it very low key and i was doing a certain amount i was running damn near fucking you know crazy weed shit having vacuum sealers shipping packages had drivers going to interstate and everything else i was doing that while djing and with that it was affording me not to dj four or five nights a week i could dj one or twice only the biggest premier hot clubs were paris hilton supermodels would be up at fucking kobe you name it and i'd pull up to the nightclub in a porsche and the porsche is small it has you know a trunk in the front and i would bring like one and a half crates i had an assistant that came out and i just started getting crazy whatever but um throughout that time i never invested anything all my money was cash

so with that um besides buying like stupid shit like louis vuitton or gucci and things like that i was buying sneakers an enormous amount of sneakers um when i got to like 100 200 pairs i was like holy shit i don't have space for this so i moved to a three-bedroom apartment in the valley in san fernando valley in sherman oaks california and um you know people are like why you got a three-bedroom you know why don't you buy a house and it's not i couldn't because i wasn't you know well not gonna incriminate myself on here but you know basically um i uh just said hey man i'm gonna sell sneakers on the side right while i'm doing this this and this now meanwhile you know drug money's cool i wasn't like you know a cartel person so like i was making good money but

it wasn't ridiculous to the point where it was any retirement shit or anything and i knew that this was a very short-lived career until you get arrested or whatever so i was just buying sneakers and i was stocking up on anything rare and it was just something i had a hobby with spying in 2001 2002 in 2002 nike hit me up because uh i'd been on the the early very early sneaker message forums there was only two one of them was very big it was called nike talk and it was no affiliation to nike but it was just a nike fan site and this this thing produced a lot of enormous people kanye west was on there um just a lot of rappers a lot a lot of big streetwear people and uh we would do buying trades and sells and there was like it was like the first social media

like we would post what did you wear today oh what what shoes you wearing you know boom and sneaker values are going up and up and up and we started realizing this is like baseball cards but on a whole different level so around 2003 late 2003 i have about 1800 personal pairs of sneakers. 1,800. People who have 500 pairs today are considered like insane sneaker collectors, right? I remember at 500, my mom said, you know, when you had a couple, I was like, hey, you know, 100 pairs of shoes is a lot, you know, you know, maybe something's wrong with you. You know, maybe you should go see someone to see, you know, to, you know, consult. If maybe mentally you're okay, maybe something's wrong with your brain. Then it got to 500 and she's like, hey man, you know,

something maybe is really wrong with you and at a point she didn't understand it was a business and i didn't understand it was business i was bartering i was selling things but i was buying shit just to support my habit if i didn't like a pair of shoes i was buying three pairs and people couldn't get one i just had built these connections throughout tokyo um london new york philly um some parts of atlanta baltimore and i was doing all this shit and um you know working with nike doing marketing campaigns with them i have a fallout with nike the same way i do with the music business it became very political very um and i don't care listen at this point i'll speak freely i heard the gap is run or it was run very like not like scientology but it was really run

like very strict like a weird thing we don't do this this is i started noticing that like i was wearing a polo one day and i get an email like hey uh yeah we make polos at nike so you can't wear a polo into the store it's considered competition we do parties at this house it was an energy house and she's like yeah we saw that you put a flyer on nike talk you said parties we don't do parties at nike we do events and i was like all right here we go trying to influence the narrative and what i could say and how language is and i was like i saw people doing that and i was like you know man i'm too free man i'm like i can't do this shit so i'm excited i'm to release my first sneaker sneaker collaboration with nike in 04 started in 03 and again certain

things i can say the language and i was like you know man you know what man i just i was fed up at this point i stopped um um selling uh selling weed around 02 and i had saved up money here and there i was like you know man fuck this i also spent a lot of money on just stupid shit a lot of meals everything in 2004 I finally said you know what fuck Nike I went on my website which was a very big sneak website called benbaugh.com and I had no page you couldn't buy shoes you couldn't look at shoes it was just a one page front and said fuck Nike and aerial block letters very big and when I looked at the IP addresses because you could search you know who's with your page there are so many from Portland Oregon like Beaverton Oregon Portland Oregon I'm like oh

shit and then I get this message hey Ben we want to let you know that you know we're not we're going to cut relationships with you we don't want to talk to you but i was a bitch i'm gonna get fucked you but at that point she was even telling the owners of very big sneaker stores like that they were in business and hey if you let ben in your store and of course it's allegedly no bitch i know they're saying if you let ben in your store we're gonna have to pull your nike account so they're trying to blackball me from these stores i was like okay all right so i gather my sneaker collection i start selling off small parts here and there some of the bigger like more general issues that were like two three hundred bucks whatever i started moving them to yokohama

tokyo japan and um i decided to put an auction up and it had to be two different auctions the auctions hit hit every message form it hit message forms i weren't even like like sneaker related and the auction started growing on ebay like oh shit here we go like oh we knew and it was like i started and i truly did because it never happened before i started what is now called the reseller game get gordon gecko style both auctions end at just under 2.9 million dollars now i become a millionaire for the first time in my life by accident which i say it's not by accident but i mean i didn't intentionally do that but still at the end of the day you know from that point forward i knew everything i've been doing in life meant something and so

you know i went and bought a ferrari the immediate data check cleared you know i went to dad i went to fucking do a bunch of silly shit i'd go to restaurants to order six drinks i'd have an iced tea orange juice a sprite coke uh an alcoholic beverage and other shit whom i buy appetizers you know i'd finish what i can and i was never that guy um and then uh you know um my fiance at the time she was a supermodel and uh she was like she was the one who watched the breadwinner in our house and she was like hey man um i gotta be honest with you you know i don't know who the fuck you are one um you've turned into a total douchebag and uh this just isn't working out and i was like fuck man i was like i'll find another girl i ain't tripping you know blah blah whatever

she leaves um i fucked up by the way i got caught cheating on the girl she never caught me she knew though that was always going on women have a great intuition and uh i started my i just started seeing my life kind of spiral like down and i was like fuck man i got depressed i actually went to go see a therapist for the first time in my life um i was smoking way more weed than usual i was drinking i was even taking pills i was being just a little reckless and i said hey man you know what i need to fucking get some culture i need to get a passport and see the world and do something i've never did and i want to do boom so i travel i think i had about 20 countries in a six-month span and I'm trying to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do next. And I couldn't figure it

out for the life of me. I thought about opening up the business. I was going to open a barbershop that was like, you go there, buy some dope white teas. You can buy some other cool clothes, some trinkets, all the cool shit that hip hop people like. Boom, come out of town and there it is. And I was like, hell man, this ain't it. I know I hate it. I was not going to ever work in food because I worked at Burger King when I was in high school. I worked at Subway. I hate any kind of food business. It's just a nightmare. I wouldn't want to invest in a restaurant. I don't care how successful just that shit just brought back bad memories of being like a slave and bus boy and and drive through it i was just like no fuck this even on a nicer little restaurant so

i came back i uh i had a mentor at the time mr cartoon was world famous tattoo artist and he gave me a lot of good advice you know and um i hit up my cousin who had been doing jewelry for a long time his dad my uncle had been a jeweler they're in a pretty seedy part of south central la in the hood in the ghetto and uh i go sit down just drive and take a take a drive to his shop and it's like you know it's the hood i go there once a while to get white tees and socks and just sometimes i used to get sneakers down there and like you know um this is after the riots obviously way after this 2004 and i see my cousin has a corvette and um that was like a nice car he had a corvette um i have a ferrari but at the same time i also have a rules royce was weird

and I didn't want to go to Slauson to South Central in the Rolls Royce so you know I bought my friend's BMW I drive down there and I see my cousin's car and it knows his car and it had an iridescent paint job so it was like green pink it was a chameleon I was like dude

this is the biggest douche bag where I drive this car finally it's my cousin's car he tells me he's doing very lucrative business it's very good you know blah blah considerate and he had proposed this to me in 97 when I got in the music business to like bring Bone Thugs-N-Harmony bring you know uh dr dre anybody bring some celebrities here so we can get this business going

so we agree the korean way which is just a handshake and i said hey listen we gotta at least start an llc our parents have not spoke to each other because they fuck each other over in business and they didn't do things the right way let's at least have some paperwork you know handshake was one thing so you know we started llc i said hey there's some conditions let's start this business boom next thing you know i have an insane rolodex from the music business and being out in the nightclubs and you know whatever and uh you know i uh work with travis barker i work with um mariah carey i work with the clips uh pusha t and these guys legendary hip-hop group and um things start to take off my mentor and idol in the games a guy named jacob the jeweler

jacob and co and um jacob went to jail for money laundering and um when he went to jail no one wanted to talk to him so i had to get in with diddy and these other big celebrities and so now everyone this guy had killed us making millions upon millions they all start shifting slowly my way but it also opened for other new york dealers to flourish as well but that's where it started and then you know i just went in increments um oh nine the recession hit and i realized i was like wow. I've never seen nothing like it. My parents have never seen a recession like that in their lives. 09, it's getting really bad. And I said, all right, I need to figure something out because I'm about to quit jewelry. This is ridiculous. So I had someone with a name. People on MySpace

knew me. I was popular enough. And I started creating jewelry that wasn't $25,000, $50,000, $60,000. And I started making jewelry that was $1,000 to $2,000, $3,000 max. I started making these pieces and it was a little more it was kind of like the style to wear like little classy diamond chains just be you know keep it like major league baseball don't keep it you know hip-hop and um that did pretty well i met my wife in 09 and um you know we got together and she became like a good luck charm for me and things started turning around and even parts 2010 people were doing bad i started to do really well like in february and next thing you know i just take my marketing never had i've never had a real agent anything else you know i get a small reality show

later on fuse network they dumbed the shows down put them on google which is youtube and you know just each year i just took it to another level and then you know i can't tell you how many rappers have said my name in a song and then you know there's hit songs things like that and then i uh i incorporated my side brand ben baller did the chain and you know i just had i had money coming in from different directions from from streetwear jewelry from appearances and i finally like it took so long to like even though i was i'm represented by wme i had caa before that that's theatrical and they try to get into business they never understand the influencer uh marketing thing they're getting it now but one i hate that word influencer i fucking can't

stand that work because i have too much talent and there's too much that i do for me to be called that so i finally just recently got with a real big agency and they've taken it to a whole different level like partnerships with Snickers with Moet Hennessy um K-Swiss Puma Nike you know just a bunch of things I'm starting to get things and even though I'm not for everyone I'm very brash I have a very foul mouth I um you know I uh I'm very outspoken you know I'm not for every company you know but but we started to find the companies that could look past that and I've been okay I just obviously can't say fuck Trump and things like that like so freely I don't talk about religion and things like that but that's where we are today and you know in a gist yeah

for sure so let's go back to the aftermath days i think a lot of people just like that's a time of hip-hop where everyone was like man that was the golden era was when all that was going on what is like the number one memory you have of working there with dre and kind of all the work they were doing the number one memory was i had an ego out of control i've never changed i think my mom has said this last year she said you've never changed if anything you've polished some areas you know you always had confidence and um money never changed you it enhanced you know certain things about you but that period of your life you were definitely a piece of shit my mom saying this right she was very proud of me but at the same time like you know like this was

embarrassing because you know Koreans you know they want you to be a doctor lawyer blah blah I'm like look man that's like I said the worst job to be in now I mean not offense I mean my attorney and my and my doctor are great people but um ego out of control I'm making $150,000 a year and um the i'm starting to see checks like i wasn't getting this $5,500 a month paycheck that's you know after taxes and everything else blah blah whatever you know you get your paychecks and things i was getting bonuses and points and things like that you know and i remember dre wrote me a really big check i've never had a check like i've never had a six-figure check in my entire life and he pulls me to the side and he says hey man making a million dollars

is as easy keeping it is not and i was like what are you talking about man you know i'll make a million i thought a million even then i'm 24 i thought once you become a millionaire you stay a millionaire you know i didn't know you know you know why would i know so pulls me aside and um he bought everyone an expedition this was like the hottest this was the hottest suv out and there wasn't a ton of people but he bought like you know the eight guys uh expeditions and he bought like three or four girls explorers that worked in the company and i was like you know dope and everyone got their checks a lot of these guys make more money because they had points of their producers and their artists and stuff but you know it pulls me to the side he goes what

are you gonna do with the money and i'm like why are you asking me that's fucked up did you have did you ask them did you ask butter did you ask mel and you asked chris like you know why why why you fuck with me and because you're my asian man you know and i think you have more potential you know like what are you gonna do i'm like i don't know man you know i mean i never had money before you know what i'm gonna do you're like i want to get a versace shirt he goes okay get a get a versace shirt what are you gonna do and i was i don't know man why why you because man look at man don't be an n-word and i was like what and i was like man okay whatever you know i just was i really wasn't paying attention i was focused on going to the bmw dealership century west bmw it

was in the back of my mind i just had to go and he was like man listen man just be smart and i was okay fine i go straight to century west bmw i go buy an m3 left there i was there an hour and a half to a paper blood i left there i go to this place called jr's jewelers and sherman oaks and i buy a rolex with diamonds in it i come back to the studio because the studio our hours are different drill work till 3 4 in the morning 2 a.m you know so i go back to aftermath studios and i pull up in the car and everything else blah blah i don't say anything because i don't want dre to be mad right the dude who runs the studio is also dre's like right hand man he tells him what's going on amen this one here this this this and we have a ton of security because you can't

just go in there we had id cards and everything so it starts going around the studio amen ben baller yo man ben yang yo ben ben yang and ben baller man yo he bought this bmw dog shit got chrome wheels man just have a bus oh man this motherfucker man he went out there and did this and so from what i heard dre got up like literally out of his seat they said he got up it was like a beat is just being made like he's making a beat like he's like you know like halfway into making a song stops it walks out of studio b walks into the kitchen i'm making a roast beef sandwich with all this extra mail sender blah blah he goes oh you having a nice sandwich i'm like yeah i was like oh what's up trey i was like dr man what's up man and he goes so what's up man uh what'd you

do today and i was like oh man you know um i was like i never had a rolex before you know so like you know boom and he goes oh that's a nice watch man it's a nice watch man you didn't buy anything else and i was like well i mean yeah i bought a couple things like oh did you get a versace shirt I was like, nah, nah, I'll get one this week. He goes, nah, you don't need to get one this week. I was like, why? He goes, because that's your motherfucking black BMW out there on chrome wheels and everything else.

And I was like, man, I wanted a nice car. He goes, you have a nice car. You know, you got a Lexus and you have an Expedition. And most people at your age don't even have two cars, let alone you have a third car. I was like, well, no, I'm selling a Lexus. And he goes, and he didn't speak to me for almost a month. That was probably my most memorable moment. one of the most memorable moments and he was just disgusted with me now the funny thing was

all that money went so when i left aftermath i had no money i was broke i spent everything it's great it's crazy how uh he saw it coming right but uh but you gotta kind of learn the lessons for yourself um and then i'm gonna lesson by the way i think i needed that kick in the ass yeah well that's what happens right um and then on the nike talk forums you were wild man i had a lot of people telling me when i said i was gonna do this they're like yo you gotta talk to me about the nike talk forums he was going wild on there you know um there's moderators and admin on the on these i don't know how how i don't think any other message forum was this crazy even like i've been part of car message forums ferrari forums everything was ever and there's

people here and there and people have jokes and whatever this was like a real legitimate form back in the day and um i was like not the first because i didn't know you could get banned but i got banned like two or three times immediately and then i became one of the most banned people on that site then they ip banned me where i had to go change internet providers to go watch the site no one ever started creating name whatever it was crazy so um i started to play nice i started realizing because i would talk shit i would literally this is the thing i grew up in the streets where we talk shit to each other no one's gonna go call the police or call the me too movement or whatever blah blah are some of the words wrong yeah okay i get it bagging on somebody

look man the shaming thing is just so fucking ridiculous now someone's like oh man you're fat you're old you're washed up i'm going to come and retaliate back and kill you again you ain't gonna get a shot that's what we did we shot shit to each other all day long now it's like hey man did you really just fat shame that person man shut the fuck up bro listen i'm not with that pussy shit man everyone's so sensitive today and everything else but you know i mean it was just a different thing i would talk crazy and so um i helped a lot of people on that site though and uh one day i i went um this was during the time was like one of the most famous things was i found out that these nike skateboard shoes that called sb dunks were going to come out

and i found out early so i did a trip all the way from oregon down to san diego the entire west coast and i cleared out 40 of the sb stock i put all of them in storage and didn't even look i think i let like 40 pairs go for like a lot of good friends and sold at retail whatever i put them away and i forgot i forgot they even existed you have to understand i've never been a type person to save money i've never been a safe person whatever this was like i was like you know what he's gonna burst something i just i just had a hunch i didn't have like this ipo thing we'd like oh it's you know but i had a hunch in an ipo sense like this is gonna fucking blow up let me let and sure enough there wasn't enough supply to go around it wasn't a big release and it wasn't a

big release on purpose it was just i mean like they did that like oh it's limited edition they just it was a skateboard marketed shoe they didn't know if it was a do well or not and they hear me I, you know, again, Gordon Gekko mentality, I clear the shit out. So when I did that, I posted a big picture in my living room with all the shoes lined up. And I said, yo, you guys keep posting your collections, right? What about the stockroom pics, fam? I created a term called stockroom pics. It became a rule on Nike talk. One of the new rules because anyone posting stockroom pics will be banned from this site, blah, blah, because it didn't do anything, but it promoted back. You know what I mean? Now you're not collecting anymore. Now

you're reselling. Even though I was a collector, you're looked upon. Now I'm taking other people's who want to get shoes and I'm selling to them for four or five times the price. And it just fucks up the game. This is the early part. Now there's StockX, there's Coke, there's Stadium Goods, there's Flight Club, so many different websites you can buy shoes from. And there's so many reseller stores. So anyways, I found this out early. So the stock room picks pissed everybody off then for all the people that were banned like for real for real they couldn't get a new IP address they created hood talk which was the Nike talk hater page it was called hater talk at first but somehow some way we violated a bunch of rules so they they got the sites the website the forum

banned and then it became hood talk and it was basically there were forums in there general forum boom then name all the moderators and admins you think are haters and they would photoshop pictures of them post their addresses fuck these people whatever then they had shit where could obviously post porn and nike talk but like there was a porn section then there was joke section then there was this then there was a section where all you do is roast each other like oh man you love this shitty ass mustache yo pop you're still wearing the fucking wired air what's all the airpods you why you got that cheap ass hat that's a 47 that ain't even a real new era like it was just bag sessions going on and it was so much xenophobia racism every possible homophobic just

crazy people were just going loose on there and they're like yo man ben's really active on this thing and it was just i was like you guys are snitches and i just talked so much shit on there i don't think i ever even grew up i never even like matured i just acted like throughout the entire time and then a certain point i became really popular on the page and people were just like yo people call me out like oh man you ain't doing shit with your life blah blah whatever when i got my first place i bought i posted pictures of it posted pictures of my cars things like that and so i was like just flexing on there heavy and people hated it but some people were like hey man you know what he did it himself you know he made the money himself he didn't come

from a rich family every you know guys have these and even still this guy bought a bunch of shoes sold them and and you know he hustled some guys that are still doing this there's one guy who's sitting on shit you know five six million dollars in shoes and part of me is like yo bro like amazing you stuck it out but what a fucking nightmare dog sell your shit dude do something different with your life bro like what like that's all he has though you know like with me it was like nah bro something's better than this yeah i think part of it is uh when it comes to all the shit talk i grew up in a family with five boys so that's basically the way we communicated right you could never walk in the room and say hey man i like your clothes right he's got to be hey man

your shirt looks stupid right and that meant that you actually right yeah of course and kings are talking shit like you know yeah and and uh look i'm real close to all my brothers and still to this day right you answer the phone and it's like what's up loser right so so i hear i hear you on that um i think part of what's so uh compelling about your story though right is everyone tries to put labels on it oh he was a dj he did you know the shoes uh he's a jeweler all stuff but at the end of the day, like your entire story, every stop along the way is you're just an entrepreneur, right? It was just constantly pursuing, how do I do something that creates value and leads to revenue or income? Now you're good. And so maybe talk a little bit about just

like, at what point did you realize like, I'm actually conducting business here, right? I'm actually an entrepreneur. It's not just me with like a bunch of side hustles. Like there's a structure to this and i can do this in any industry right whether it's djing whether it's with shoes whether it's with jewelry like it's the same thing over and over again just in different industries and creating value so what happened was i never worked in anything i didn't actually have an interest in people have a hard time becoming successful in one career like you said right i had a successful i was successful in three careers okay and one of those careers being two side careers you know um this is how it goes i never had a wealth manager or a cpa to advise me

on how to incorporate myself and once i learned how to incorporate myself and do things like that i was like oh my god why the fuck didn't somebody tell me this you know a long time ago like i just fucked off you know like one it would save me enormous amount of money on taxes and whatever and things like that but um from music early on i saw where i missed opportunities to make money i could have sold mixtapes here boom what if i sold 5 000 mixtapes well it cost me nothing but my labor and some basic costs boom okay there's absolutely cost to buy cassettes and these are real mixtapes right now that's like some bullshit we're talking about real mixtapes that were like you know like they were blended through and there was this and that then people elevated it and then

all of a sudden they call it mixtape it's part of a record label it's like not a mixtape it's like songs there's no it was just different so anyways going on i realized the missed opportunities i had as a record executive when i became a solo dj i started to understand all right how important it is to market myself so if you remember that movie american pie is that what it's called i forgot what the dude's name was but he told that one chick natasha leone i think to tell everybody he had a really big penis or something right and it was like a boom and it was like a rumor went around and like in a way i was telling people oh you know man yeah you know i'm getting paid like five six hundred dollars a night 500 was definitely was mark ronson nobody was getting paid that much

in a nightclub back then in the 90s and like i was telling people yeah man you know it's crazy man i'm going to paris next week to go dj this this and this and i was making up these stories but i was doing it because i had no other way to promote myself and people were like yo what and it wasn't like it's instagram like oh where's the pictures at there's no fucking cameras back there like you they barely had the disposable cameras back then but no one had no one really cared you know you had like guys who had real professional photos but it was like no it wasn't that common to have to take pictures of your of your i mean sometimes yeah but me it just wasn't i know i'm asian people are like oh the cameras that was a big joke back in the 80s you know 90s

and 70s you know Japanese people always have cameras around whatever anyways I didn't have one so I started marketing and I developed this folklore of Ben Baller being bigger than he was it landed me a job in Vegas at the Hard Rock Hotel Casino I ended up getting a billboard there that started you know started doing and I started taking out ads in newspapers the LA Weekly and smaller ads like hey boom you know Ben Baller's doing this this week boom be at Dragonfly I'm be here and um i started to realize that was good then the sneaker thing was part of my dj because i was djing i was selling weed the weed money that was cash was going into sneakers the sneakers when they got sold or whatever they did i've washed the cash at that point they weren't checking

shit like that back in the day ebay wasn't even fucking charging you a fee paypal didn't charge nothing now paypal's making sure the taxes are done you know what i mean like they're hitting you they're recording everything it wasn't like that back then you know even on ebay ebay had a feature where you were able to look let's say for instance i'm like i want to see what pomp is buying today oh shit pomp bought some ky jelly he bought two pairs of nikes for specific things i could see everything you bought i could see the things you're even watching it was crazy it's super you know like invasive of your privacy but i was able to like you know just i understood like all right i got this little thing here okay let's make some t-shirts and i'm gonna say they're limited

edition i only made 100 nobody fucking knew i made 500 whatever it was and we did it and they sold out and so that was another hustle and then i created a crew um air max crew there's a sneaker called the air max but then there's the term mac which is sort of like a pimp m-i-c-k so i called ourselves the air max crew so we were like the nike pimp crew right it was me this guy named dj homicide who was very famous he was a group called sugar ray an enormous rock band pop band um and then dj am rest in peace who was my boy and uh we had an honorary member who no one even knows this his name is demaney he owned flight club he started flight club but this time it was called vintage kicks you know he sold his company for 60 million dollars it's a lot of money you know so

we had this crew i was doing appearances i was able to market myself without a manager i had email address that was my acting manager no one ever met this person he's like charlie from fucking charlie's angels right and um i was just able to to to you know keep elevating myself but as basketball happened i told you i wish i had another year which i had the year this where i'm at you know i wasn't a rapper or certain things were like you know after you turn 30 you're like washed up you don't want to hear your music anymore like oh yeah you're not talking about drugs and guns anymore and blah blah it's harder as you get older to be a rapper to stay credible, stay relevant. So, you know, I never looked at the entrepreneur side until I sold my

collection and I realized, holy shit, I could have did this a long time ago and not have to sell an entire bulk. I could have did this in a different way, but I understood at that point, anything I'm passionate about, I'm going to find a way to make money. So when I started the jewelry business, even that, I said, we got to create a separate name. We have Friendster and we have MySpace to promote it. And then we have the traditional stuff. We can put flyers out and do certain things and whatever. I can start marketing and putting on celebrities, of course, that's the best promotion, whatever. And I started realizing, okay, we're big. We got so big that IF&Co, my company, which stands for Internally Flawless and Company, Internally Flawless is technically

the best diamond you could possibly get in the world. Our company was really called IC Fresh code i-c-e-e and we were using the icy logo like it's icy i-c-e-e it's all melted with ice and everything and then we had fresh in a engraver's font which looks like the cash money font and having together and putting this out there i see the the slushy corporation sees that when you google i see we were coming up in the top five they want to own the top 20 on google so they send a cease and desist to us because they're saying that we're confusing people because we're talking about ice and stuff i'm like well ice is a fucking is a slang for for diamonds you know what i mean slang for jewelry and they're like okay we don't care that happens boom we have to

restructure and at that point i said all right man look you want to get big okay tiffany and coda to sell t-shirts they don't need to they have the turquoise box that's their marketing thing right what do we have all right we need to go out here and market this shit so we're making plastic pieces. I started making t-shirts. So that became, I was making enough side shit that wasn't jewelry. Well, technically the plastic things were t-shirts that was taking care of our entire payroll, that hustle. So everything else now is just cream on the top. You know what I'm saying? It's fucking icing, literally pun intended. Right. So I, um, I started to realize, hey man you know ifn co is dope but what about ben baller the brand so i just started to market

myself after 08 and you know it just every you know five years or so even less i elevate what i'm doing when i got into the cannabis space you know i'm like hey man let's see what happens boom you know out there whatever there's people who have a lot more followers than me five six million i don't know if they're fake or not their engagement isn't the same they don't have the same following when i did my television show these people did a professional they did professional analytics of what my my demographic was and they're like hey man look man for someone your age you know they're gonna have someone strong in their age group they might have a little bit of people above them a little bit of people small you have fucking 12 16 year olds you have 18 to 24

you have the 24 to 32 you have the 32 to 40 you even have the 60 year olds i had such a wide audience that i was like holy shit i was like this is a good thing so you know i didn't have to study my market anymore and uh i just put i said hey look at anyone 21 and over i got this new vape pen you know it was early on no one was doing the vape and i was like i just kind of thankful and i was i wanted to be high-end i didn't want to be some mediocre shit i was trying to be the Walmart of weed. I want it to be the apple. So I said, you know what? I did gold, platinum and rose gold. Those are the three colors they made available. I had 12 strains, put them out there. Next thing I know, I get an order for a hundred thousand pens and my partners

who were big in the cannabis space were like, holy shit, Ben. All right, man, this is exactly what we thought would happen. I didn't invest a single dollar in the company and I was able to get 40% of the company, but 30 and 30, but them together, they had a majority share, you know, my voice whatever bottom line is it became insanely lucrative the camera space became big and again i was like yo we got to do merch we got to do hats this this and this and i gave a ton away um and you know um i was very passionate about i started doing in-store appearances all throughout california and there'd be 300 to a thousand people lighting outside and every time i'm like bro if you told me even 10 years ago people would line up to meet me this is stupidest

thing. I can't, these people actually want to meet me. It's silly. And I, you know, I'm meeting these people and, um, you know, it's just, it's just been really, really good. It didn't get bad until the pandemic happened. One, the technology of pens that I use for our cannabis business is built and based in China. It's called CISO technology, of course. So that shit got stopped. And obviously there was people who were complaining about vaping debts. Now, look, I've never said COVID was a, was a, was a hoax. I've been a big advocate on spreading the awareness for a long time. The vape thing, definitely a hoax. Yes, people are getting sick. Guess what? They were smoking things with pesticides. They forget to say that. They're just thinking all

pens are very poor job on the media's part because there are people out there that are doing a good job and putting out good product that's pesticide free and listening to the BCC, which is like the IRS FDA of cannabis. And you know, we're following the rules and it just sucked. It killed our business a little bit, but I was able to work around that. And I always am. One door closes And I could be in an all cement room, okay I'm going to fucking laser saw a door And open that bitch, you know I'm going to figure out a way to do something always

But, you know I've always figured out a way to come up Now in the pandemic We're in a very special space I could have made A lot of money Selling masks and doing certain things I felt morally

Ethically, it was wrong For me to benefit off this Even if I donated a shit of money, I just felt that's just that ain't it that's not it man i've seen people make a ton of money selling things like that and i said look man there's got to be another way you people don't realize look i didn't talk about that until like you know a month ago but right now we're at what 26 million people have no jobs or 30 i don't know the exact number but what i'm getting at is i truly feel like okay fine open the economy back up not new york but open it back up i did a poll the other

the day. 89% of people said, we ain't going to no fucking store to sit. I mean, some restaurant to sit down and eat. We're not going to a fucking movie theater. I'm not going to get it. They're scared to whatever. And they have every reason to be, especially people like me and myself, you know, I'm a smoker. I fucking, I'm 25 pounds overweight. You know, my son has a very, very high chance of dying from it. So with that said, this shit's going to be bad and the economy will get worse and worse. And I feel terrible if I accepted money from someone buying certain things. So it's like certain things where i feel like they bring value you know or whatever it may be i have a collaboration with tops baseball cards i had a big you know i was a big baseball card collector

when i was a kid and uh there was a really really big episode of gary v that he did about baseball cards i've never followed gary v heard his name a bunch of times we have mutual friends i always felt like okay what's up with this dude whatever i don't know listen to the episode he talked about baseball cards and when you're talking about investments under 2000 it was like the most that was the best you know option i didn't know so these baseball cards are selling really well my podcast by keeping it real informing people now that obviously people realize later holy shit ben was right and we all thought he was a fucking idiot this fucking guy gave us right information like you know like we should probably you know like give dude his flowers and with that

said traffic went up with that obviously sponsorship money came up and i started generating real money you know more than six figures now where we're where holy shit never in a million years my income from jewelry has stopped my custom jewelry is there and it's this but i don't consider that like i don't look at it like oh well i got money here that's not how it goes i need to have a positive on every aspect of every business my cannabis has gone down because we're not essential because it's a vape now if it was my flower company which we haven't launched yet that was being launched in march so it's fucked up i have three enormous collaborations with takashi Murakami probably one of the greatest biggest living contemporary artists on the earth and like

we made a lot of money then I had you know potentially 1.7 million dollars to make with him that got canceled for the rest of the year because one of them was in Hong Kong one is in New York another one's in Japan and these these uh collaborations aren't just gonna happen they can't or they have to be I don't know how they're gonna but it can't happen now um I had a big show I was doing so a lot of my money had stopped so even though podcast is doing well and everything else i'm not considering yeah you should be blessed we should be lucky you know what i read i don't read very much but phil jackson had said in his book if you have no expectations you'll never be disappointed fuck that bro i demand more out of life you know i'm saying

koreans and italians have a lot of passion you know we talk a lot angry have have you know have angry issues or aggressive people and because my retail dream business sucks the custom one's going all right that might offset each other but the cannabis sucks whatever so it's like i don't look at it like it is a blessing but at the same time like all right how do i do this and figure this out because it's going to get worse and worse how many people are going to go want to buy a twenty five thousand dollar bracelet in three or four months you know like even the one percent or the point zero zero one percent they're not spending like that you know i see the car exotic hardness he's taking and things like that so i'm just in a very unique space right now where

last year late last year i thought that we're gonna have a recession so i've been saving for that and i've been worried about that so i scaled back on a lot i haven't scaled back on my cell phones we have six cell phone accounts because every one of my kids has a cell phone why because i'm a fucking idiot so i got rid of their cell phone accounts boom i had every single channel on direct tv and i had like so many different extra boxes like wait okay one we don't need 12 televisions in the house we have 12 flashbacks it's fucking stupid okay so we need to figure that but but i basically had an overhead of 71 000 a month with my bills before i ate a chicken sandwich that was my bills that includes my kids food not my personal whatever i got that down to

47 last month and i just got it two days ago down to 35 000 a month now that means i've cut my entire overhead 50 and i'm still technically living the same lifestyle i live and i'm just trying to figure that out as we go venture into into into new waters um i have to use my entrepreneur skills of how I can do this without and some people I understand at this point if you're fucked up you're unemployed or whatever and you're hustling as long as you're not stealing or you're like selling fucking I don't know what's a hydroxychloroquine whatever or some or fucking putting you know um disinfected in your arms or bullshit like that as long as you're not hurting anybody but you're out there hustling hey man I can't be mad at you right

because people have to feed their kids or whatever so with that said i think i've been pushing my podcast it's the thing i enjoy the most out of anything that i've been doing i think i've been meant to talk shit you know and i was like you know what i talk so much shit i should talk into a fucking microphone and and and you know put it out there it became popular it's doing well it's something i can do until i'm 70 80 years or 60 years old so i've been focusing on that now with the podcast. Okay, yes, there's sponsor money here and there. How do we take it to another level? Well, believe it or not, and this happened before, before the pandemic started, my birthday is January 27th. Someone gave me a really small ball of sanitizer. I'm a germaphobe.

For the last two or three years, I've always carried small ones like an ounce, but I saw this half-ounce size was really small. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. I contacted that company in January. And I was like, you know what? I want to make Ben Baller did the chain sanitizers for my podcast. I order it. And then this shit happens. So as the bottles are being finished, boom, we're ready to go out. They hit me and say, hey, listen, we can't send you your sanitizer bottles because we have millions of gallons of sanitizer we have to fill orders in. Boom. So I find a guy who can finally do it. So I mean, I'm not going to make a profit. I'm sorry. I'm not going to sell it for $10, $20, whatever. But if I sell my sanitizers at a one ounce, two ounce size for

three or $4, which would be anything, I'm just competing against other companies. What do people do after that? Fuck it. That's their problem, right? And I just figured out other ways where I can do things and not fuck people up because it can bring value to them. Like my Ben Ball of the Chain appliance collection, like I have a money counter, I have a gold vacuum sealer, I have things like that. Those items sold out in eight seconds for $150 to $200. The resale value of them have been from $800 to $1,200. So the things that I'm selling are bringing value to people. My baseball cards, they're $19 for the regular ones. The artist poos are $99. $99 ones are going for $1,000 one week after. The regular cards are going for $150. So it's like, look, man,

as I've said, everyone hates on old people. They think the old people hate on young people. I just troll a lot and talk a lot of shit. I have a lot of respect for young people, and I've always been attracted and I gravitated towards younger people because they have very cool innovative ideas and things and I don't steal them I just you know like I'm like okay how do we enhance this how do we magnify this how do you monetize while these people are out there in their early 30s and feel like they're washed up or whatever I'm still relevant and becoming more relevant at 47 you know and as I get older so it's like I'm just I've never been this busy i've never stayed put in my entire life in 20 years i would stay put you know i took 118 flights

last year i went on some early flights in january i did a mandatory one in february and i canceled everything after that because of my family but now that i've been staying put for 60 days right i'm like holy shit this is crazy i've spent so much more time with my kids even though i'm very hands-on with my family and my three kids there's different types of time i'm learning things about my children i've never knew about and i'm spending time but at the same time now my wife is you know the principal of the school she's the head teacher i'm the fucking vice principal of school i'm also a teacher we have parent teacher conferences with each other we get in arguments and it's just like crazy because you know it's it's difficult because our kids have

so much homework so with that said that amongst zoom amongst my podcast and taking a lot of meetings for content i've never been busier it's crazy i'm so fucking busy with this so you know i don't know if that addresses the entrepreneur thing but i've used that to navigate myself through these through these and and it's helped yeah well i think part of like uh you know as uh as people have kind of gotten to know you and you've been really public and uh talks about podcasts and stuff first of all you got to make the motto of the podcast i was born to talk shit i mean that's like an all-time motto right there but but uh as part of like being an innovator and all the innovation that you've done you got to tell the story about the 10 million dollar saudi uh rig whatever you could

say about it because i think that was like the one piece of jewelry that you've made that people are like hey we got to hear whatever story he's got there that that he could tell uh what's behind that piece so with that story it's like now i'm doing everything right now i think had i not made joy for michael jackson um like the sultan of bunai uh dr phil people who are like very outside my hip-hop demographic clients um i get a call from somebody and uh every time we go out to the nightclubs and stuff in the late 2000s to the early 2010 11 12 this you know sabi dude this arab guy he'd come around in the sickest lamborghinis i'm talking about like supercars coming in the hypercar hypercar is technically anything above i think a million dollars right

and he'd have a security guard and certain things but he drove like in regular clothes he'd wear his his his outfit with his with you know with with the um um god damn i can't think of the word the with the headdress yeah but what forgot the the anyways um not the turban but i'm not i'm sorry but anyways yeah the whole thing and i finally found his instagram page i never pushed jewelry on him i think he always knew what i did and um when i saw the page i showed my boy and i'm like hey man what you know about dubai and stuff i went to dubai in 2008 but i never like you know and i show him this picture of my boy wearing all the traditional clothes when he's in la he's not wearing that plus he doesn't like the pictures being taken to him so no one

ever takes pictures they'll take pictures of the car but he's not part of their culture they're not supposed to be popping i'll be out there boom so i didn't know he was a prince i had to find out you know through his instagram page and how i found out was the headwear you know it's like red white headwear i didn't know that there was like patterns in it and when you have a pattern in it those patterns mean something it could be regular just a regular facility whatever but if you see it a certain way immediately anybody in abu dhabi saudi or like you know whatever they'll see that holy shit he's royal family and my boy he knows that immediately and then he goes you know do me a favor man he goes uh he got car pictures on his page

i was like yeah he got some car pictures so i show a picture of a range rover and a rolls royce and he goes ben man he has a single digit license plate and he goes when you have a single digit to us to even to like two or three digit you want even a regular even a police or civilian anyone a car you could be rich you know mercedes benzo rolls west you have to stay at least 100 feet back from that car even police have to stay there they're not allowed not allowed to get next to that car everything else they have different different rules out there they're royalty king right so i saw that shit one day the guy who always is his liaison for la was like hey man he's gonna get married and i'm like all right cool man dope man what's gonna happen fucking

like you know seven billion dollar wedding he's like no it's gonna be you know traditional and um he needs a backup ring what the fuck does that mean he goes well cartier is making his ring and i was like of course they are fuck you know like what do you want me for you know i'm saying this is like ridiculous he goes well i mean you know you're big and you know he respects you and you know he thinks you're pretty cool and you do for all these people he can't tell his mom he likes all these hip-hop people but or his family but you know that's what he does on his personal time and you know he sees what you're making could you make something really cool for his wife to be and i was like yeah man i was like in my head i'm like dude this motherfucker's gonna

spend two million dollars it's gonna be like three million dollars it'll be my you know it's crazy and i had made joy for a million two billion he hits me with a stone that he wants and um i like to think i'm the biggest thing in the world right and then you go to these jewelry trade shows and you realize how okay yes i'm the biggest popular person but when it comes to significance in the diamond game i am so insignificant because people have these boots that have 30 40 60 million dollars of diamonds and there's like not that many diamonds there And you're like, Holy shit. You know, like the most expensive thing in my store at any given moment might be a quarter million or 400,000, whatever. Do these people have a $20 million

diamond here? 30 million here, 17, six, like their shitty shit is like 1.6 million, like the little bullshit. So I reached out to somebody and I said, Hey man, I'm looking for this stone here. It's a pink diamond. And, um, I need to get this. I need this color, this everything. and the only thing that they wanted was they didn't want me to specifically say what it was because it goes it could kind of genetically go back to the person whatever and i could say princess everything else just didn't want me whatever so going on i hit my cousin up because he's the part of the back end that deals with the diamond dealers and we text and he goes all right so he calls me and i'm like what's up man and then he goes is this a joke or did you did you

did you add an extra number on the back end it was the first number that's how big the diamond is i was like no bro it's both numbers that's the number and he goes who the fuck is it and i said it's the prince and he goes holy shit okay um let's try to figure this out so we hit up our diamond dealer who has got us everything like everyone for this stone and the guy goes get the fuck out of here i was like no i'm looking for the stone so now it became like a fucking a whole mission to find the stone um even the big places like like graph harry winston van clef they have a hard time finding the stone the size of this thing anyways i ended up finding it i had to give somebody a million dollars to get the diamond

not i'm talking about they got a million for finding the diamond do you understand what i'm trying to say to you right so my cost on the stone which he understands whatever it may be was six and a half million so you know i made two and a half million dollar profit just off that ring and it was fucking crazy and just my flight there which was the fucking worst flight i ever had it was probably second worst flight i ever had in my entire life flew private private is cool you're flying to if you had a really big like jumbo jet yeah go to new york private that's not bad if you're like in a small if you're in a g4 even flying to like vegas you know la to seattle not bad flying to fucking saudi arabia is not fun in that motherfucker like it was terrible

refueling everything scary shit i get there um and i i delivered the stone and at that point meet his mom i meet the king i mean the chic you know and meet them they all see everything boom and uh they were like wow this is a beautiful stone mind you it's 90 something degrees outside i'm dying i can't cover my tattoos anymore you know i'm like this is crazy my head is shaved clean i may try everything else my earrings everything i was wearing was super classy it's just i had a button-down shirt on and i'm like bro i gotta take my shirt i can't do this oh don't take if you want to roll your sleeve don't take your shirt off you know i I mean because I'm like you know I'm like all the way through he's like don't and I was like

um his dad pulls me aside he's like hey man I really appreciate it you know that's this is amazing you know um um leave your information I was like well he has everything you know and so the 10 million dollar ring was cool he spent 10 million dollars in a year with me just on gifts for his his his family members and like that so it led to a whole different you know thing um when i go to dubai now and i was there two times last year was there you know a couple times before that i enter a restaurant let's say for instance zuma zuma's one of them it's like i think zuma's better than nobu zuma's like you know the high-end sushi place and i'll be at zuma in dubai and i'll order 1100 with the food with like another person whatever and then no bill will come

and they just knew and they've taken care of it i'll go to cipriani in dubai which is much nicer than the original cipriani on either 42nd or the one in uh in um in uh in soho it's crazy anywhere i go out there it's like i have carte blanche it's so amazing it's just like a it was just it was it was a dope thing you know and to him that's nothing like when this guy shows me his watches he'll show me watches i can even show john mayer but you've seen this before he goes honestly i haven't but remember i even get one of one custom beast book watches made by patrick philippe or by rolex these dudes are getting like and it's notorious for saudis and like even some of the stuff that they have some of the gucci things they have they were made by gucci for them

and i'm like holy shit this was a fucking amazing thing being in the right place at the right time you know being able but if i didn't find that diamond he was going to get it from somebody else probably he'd have to because that's what she wanted and on top of that um i would never met his dad you know so it ended up being it was a beautiful situation man yeah it's pretty cool to see how uh just kind of be in the right place right time leads to one thing and then you do a good job right and do something that they think is not possible next thing you know it rolls into a whole other part of the business uh but that's kind of the whole the whole thing of being an entrepreneur right yeah for sure uh what what uh what are you most excited about once we get out

of uh coronavirus stuff what's the kind of the things that you're looking forward to most um as as you kind of keep building this empire of yours as crazy as it sounds i feel like i've probably done i think there's a couple goals i haven't hit in my life and a couple of those goals were like you know i had aspirations early on to be a billionaire and then i realized like you know man it's gonna happen by a fluke or something's for two and i was like i'm not trying to be too smart anymore let me fucking focus on what i mean smart i'm not trying to fucking create the next uber i just you know and there's a lot of proposals to sit here it's like listen to demo tapes right when i was at anr it's like hey i got this group boom here i got this idea everyone has an idea

everyone has this everyone has this it's like you know man I have to I have you know I have enough wealth to where I couldn't retire and maintain the lifestyle I have but I have a lot and and uh because I want my kids to be set up but my thing is I'm excited about showing my kids the world right with this pandemic now all three of my kids aren't going back to school for at least two or three years. So now, which never in a million years that I ever think this is going to happen, they're going to have to be homeschooled now until something happens to where my son doesn't have that risk. If my son didn't have the risk, I wouldn't even give a fuck. I mean, I'd be worried about me, but I'm very careful as it is. But because his situation and my mom,

who's old and everything else, I just have to be very careful. So with that said, you know i want my kids to they all have passports i'm looking forward most to traveling i want to show them all through europe i want to go i can't wait but the thing is again this is a global pandemic this is not a you know so it's difficult um i miss being in my apartment in san francisco looking over the fucking skyline and looking at you know being here and having my little fucking private time to think and think about this and whatever and like i mean i have 12 custom chains that are backed up right now that you know who knows i'm gonna be able to finish them but um i'm excited for my for for fatherhood you know i always say that i tell people i'm a

husband and father before i'm for anything else in life before entrepreneur you know that's why i waited so late in life to have kids you know like i was talking to my boy two hours before i talked to you today it's just like fuck man he just found out he's gonna be a grandfather and he's two years younger than me and it's just like a lot of my friends kids are in high school whatever and my oldest is seven and a half years old so it's like i just started late but i started late because i wanted to be able to provide for my kids now with that said you know i am working less but i'm working smarter and um but i'm still working a lot it's just you know some it's not it's i don't have so much tedious shit i have to do but but but again i know it sounds silly but i'm

looking forward to getting on a fucking plane and getting the fuck out i'm going a little crazy you know and and even though i'm telling people stay at home it's like trust me if i didn't have a big home um you know and i tell people look this ain't a dickhead thing to say i'd rather tell you what it is and what's on my mind than you think man that guy doesn't understand fuck you zero dollars is zero dollars when i was broke and homeless that's zero dollars i had nothing else you you have a phone you have a lot of shit you're entitled go fuck yourself i know it's such you just lost your job i'm sorry you live in a fucking 800 square foot apartment you know man i earned all this this is you know what i mean like i don't feel bad at all i never will ever you ever make me

to try to, you know, shame me for working hard. I wanted to fight for my family. I prepared for this. This was all planned. So we're here now. And with that said, you know, um, I just can't wait to, you know, show my kids sports and things like that, or like, you know, and do it on a bigger level. And just, but I do want to get out of the house. Um, I'm excited about my podcast. I'm excited at, you know, meeting more people, even though I don't want to meet anybody. I want to meet people to talk to because you know i've been an enormous fan of mike tyson and you know there was like this there was a rumor going around that he's like oh he's not very smart you know he talks like this and whatever mike is actually fucking brilliant he is so insane

the stories now that podcast is there his stories of what he's done is like i'm like i'm blown away and um you know there's a lot of people out there that i want to reach out to whether it be even i'm not a big fan of Tony Robbins but I'd love to get him on the show and talk to him about things and you know even Mark Cuban I remember when Mark when the Dallas won the championship Mark used to party with us we used to get fun and he was like he was a gangster I was like yo Mark is cool as fuck um but the podcast is I know it sounds silly but I'm excited for that you know I'm excited to just chill I'm excited to to do more state pudding you know and but I am excited obviously to get on a fucking plane I do want to go somewhere I do want to go to an island I do

want to go to the beach oh at least cabo shit's two hours away but i i do want to get the fuck out of the house but you know i also want to go back to work one of the beautiful things about my podcast setup is it's professional but it's still very portable so i can record a lot of my shows in the hotel room i can do this this and this and um you know that's that's i know it sounds boring but but uh um you know i just want i just wanted to to you know extend all my travel shit look i think that's a great life to live i got two questions to uh to wrap up with and then you get asked me one to end it uh what's the best or most important book you've ever read i know you say you don't read that much but what's the one book that you're like damn everyone should go read

this it's it's completely specific and it's really crazy it's a book called everything you want to know about the music business, whether everyone or not, whatever it's today in 2020, 90% of these kids that are signing deals, whether the age from 17 or younger, or the ones that are 22 or getting deals, 90% of them, it doesn't matter if you have a good attorney, the attorney is not looking up your best interest, no matter how cool you are with them. Do you know, these deals are structured for you to fail. now people are making more money because there's 360 deals right which is crazy never in a million years in the 90s could you could you fucking ever ask an artist to give up

your merch or your touring money like no you give up album sales you know i'm saying like boom like you know there's certain things you do that book is the general basic of everything you should know it's more than even record executives know it tells you everything about the business the fine print and everything. Once you understand that, you will truly understand how not to fuck yourself. And at that point, after finishing that book two or three times, every situation you go into and you fail in, you purposely failed it. You wanted to go in there and fuck up your business because someone threw a check for $500,000, not realizing that there was 7 million on the back end, but you needed that money right then and there. You couldn't survive without that money because you

had to post a watch or a car on Instagram to look like you were doing okay. But yet there was other ways to flex. If you had some patience, there'd be other things. There's other deals that people signed because they didn't want to shop around. The first deal came around with that book. It's by Kashif. There's other people. My boy Clinton Sparks just put out a book about the record business. I didn't read it and he's my friend and I don't want to say anything bad, but I don't know how in-depth this, this book is super in-depth. And the reason why it was important to me was because doing deals in life, you have an attorney, you know, never in a million years, I think I have an attorney on retainer. And people were like, why? Well, like when I got NDAs, two, I'm

being sued. Three, I have other shit and I have, you know, contracts I need to let, because I don't understand the English, the language on them. And people like, they're not written in English. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, I don't mean English. I'm saying, you know, the terminology and everything and some of these things so basically that book changed the way i look because you look at somebody who has a lemonade stand and i don't mean that verbal i'm saying like a mom and pop or let us that they don't understand how much more they can enhance that business because they have no you know they're just like oh it is what it is don't fuck that why go in there even if you do it for a hobby you know what you're gonna open a store you know your wife is you know you're you're

rich and you're like oh let me give my wife something to do because she's at home and she's at home mom she's going crazy all right why do that i mean happiness is one thing sure but why do that and take a loss or take an l or certain things you know there's sometimes you take an l in life and that's why i mean you read that book and you start understanding that because it's not just the technical side but it's a reason why you take a loss somewhere um louis vuitton in this one mall loses about 400 200 000 a month every month for like 10 years they'd lost $200,000. And people were like, that's the stupidest thing in the world. Why are the doors still open? Because it's the fucking best billboard in the fucking entire world. And their

marketing right there is crazy. So them losing there, okay, great. All the other stores are doing well. And I was like, whoa, some people won't see eye to eye on that. And if you have it, boom, it's like, you have to really just understand this book kind of talk. It just taught me about business, even though it is the music business. It could apply to film. It could apply to a lot of things you know it's just a lot of my people i'm i deal with on a regular basis are part of the music business yeah for sure um and it's also when you read a book right it's not just what's in the book but what time of your life do you read it to it that's always uh helpful uh what about aliens believer non-believer in short no um in in semi-long look man i smoke a lot of weed man

I've done a lot of mushrooms. I've done a lot of acid. They say what you do LSD like five times. I've done acid a lot, man. You know, I went to school in San Francisco. You know, it's like, you know, the Grateful Dead and all that shit. With that said, again, look, man, when someone tries to tell you that the earth is like a molecule, grain of sand in the galaxy, and this galaxy is like one galaxy, like the fucking solar system, like that's like one out of, like,

how the fuck like how do you not sit there and get high and think okay well how is the english language created right what was the first word says oh this means fire okay how do you know what this means and how you know what fire means and how do you know what you know and you could go crazy thinking about it okay we like fire stick i them what's them what's i you know like how do you the language was created at one point right and it makes sense to all of us two plus two equals explore mathematically you can understand how it makes that how is there not another galaxy because we're one grain right has to be this oh there's no living no one fucking knows so yeah there could be somewhere 70 trillion zillion miles away and they might have a different language that's their

language and how it makes sense whatever and like you know or based on whatever and they have different i don't know what it is and it could be a whole different thing so i think it's possible but do i think like et's here i don't fucking know man i wish there was you know what i mean i don't really i don't believe in the bigfoot or the loch ness monster and shit like that but i don't know why did you ask that question i ask every single person um and uh and i would say that uh like 95 or more say uh yeah there's something out there i don't know what it is or uh is it little green men or is it just some bacteria you know there's gotta be something but uh the only thing i take away from all of it is just let's hope that we find them they don't find us because

whoever's uh the one getting invaded yeah i mean come on it's a similar mindset right it's just like the world's so fucking big how is there not uh aliens or some sort of life out there um the thing i always go to is like it's not a question of is their life it's are they actually more intelligent or more developed than us right and uh my guess is uh probably not uh but i also think that that's somewhat uh me just wanting to go to sleep tonight thinking that there's nobody out there that's going to come invade the earth and you know kill us all so uh what question you what you get asked me one question to finish this shit up what uh one question you got for me let me tell you something funny i've never heard your show before until the mark cuban

one i don't know where that came from and i just came with my own every question i asked somebody on my interviews the last question i ask them is hey ask me anything you want i've never heard that before my entire life really that's weird that's crazy last question i say last question is there anything you want to ask me i always say that i have two things to ask you if you don't mind but that's crazy you said that first thing is when'd you make your first million and what was it off and what was the first thing you bought after that yeah um so uh when i saw my first company uh or i'm sorry second company um was the the first time that i was like damn like this is real right and uh and you kind of get in this position where you're just sitting there and

you're like nothing changed but everything changed right it's kind of at the same time um and uh actually didn't buy anything i literally bought nothing oh you suck here's why here was my logic was uh it was one of these things where um uh i was in the military for six and a half years right and uh and when i came back i'd already gotten a lot of the like i want to go buy shit out of my system so uh i went to iraq for a year made a bunch of money uh you know for a kid at 20 years old at the time all tax-free and you know it's not a lot of money for real but when you're 20 years old coming back and you've been in college all stuff and so i bought a motorcycle you know i bought a gun you know all this kind of crazy shit and uh it was

one of these things where uh i remember you know i've been flying down the highway on a on a you know uh ninja and doing all this crazy stuff and then after like a year or two of that you kind of get it a little out of your system and you start to realize like hey man if i keep doing this like there's a chance i might die right like i i um i got a very minor uh motorcycle accident uh like literally in a parking lot type thing right which is just enough to cut open my chin whatever and you're like oh shit like i'm lucky that i was going 15 miles an hour not you know 75 miles an hour and so i think i just like got a lot of that out of my system and then you overlay it with all the military stuff like that's like the adrenaline rush of adrenaline rushes right is uh is kind of

all the combat stuff so i think that it's just one of these things where i was kind of over it at that point and i just kind of had a different bent uh but at the same time i look back and i hear stories of guys you know i i ask uh pretty much every guy who comes on who's a billion i say what'd you do when you first realized you had a billion dollars they got wild stories right and it's kind of like the the excitement of that i said if i become a billionaire i'm gonna have my head removed i'm gonna make it look like optimus prime or i might do like i don't know something crazy it's gonna be all metal though and then on top of that I'm never gonna walk ever again I'm just gonna have people carrying me everywhere I go um I'm sorry so my second

question is the funny thing is let me go back to you real quick I was an avid motorcycle rider since I was eight even living in the hood we had dirt bikes in the hood um I was in the motorcycle gang I rode bikes heavily I had a Hayabusa I did 195 on it I don't think I left my house and did under 160 on a motorcycle in traffic even and when I had my first kid there was my my wife and i'm a hooligan i've been on the news three times being chased by helicopters high speed chase and i got away every time um and i had to get rid of the bike so i was crazy with bikes anyways my last question is is do you think there's any correlation between 5g and coronavirus oh no i'm probably not there on that one i i here's my take is uh so i was real early

uh, in taking it more serious than others. I won't say that I was like full on super serious, but there's a picture, uh, in January, uh, last year I did 120 flights. So you and I are very similar in that we took a bunch of flights last year. My goal for 2020 was to not travel that much. So I had to take one flight in January, uh, to go to this board meeting in San Francisco. And I, uh, went in New York to go find the, uh, like N95, like the real good masks and they were all sold out. And I was like, that's weird. So I ended up, the only thing I could get was like one of these uh construction like dusk masks yeah so i said look it's better than nothing and i was super freaked out i'm really not a germaphobe but just for whatever reason i was like man this is kind

of freaking me out to get on this plane and sit there breathe the same air with everybody all the stuff so i get on the plane put the mask on take a picture you know screwing around post on the internet everyone's like oh you're an idiot whatever and now i'm looking back hey man i got proof back in january this shit was you know uh but but here's the thing is to me it was less about like i thought it was this serious it was just more of like why not be overly cautious uh but the the big moment for me was uh when zero hedge zero hedge is like a big uh twitter account have like 800 000 followers or something they were one of the first people to really surface the idea of uh the coronavirus wuhan the virology lab there in wuhan and like start trying to like

really like highlight some of these data points and I remember saying look the odds that the like conspiracy theory is true is very low right at the time probably five percent or less but I said there's more information here than we've currently been told that seems like a pretty big important fact that I haven't heard yet right that there's a virology lab that studies coronaviruses in the city where the outbreak happened whatever and so it just set me off on this path of like man I gotta learn about this myself, because I'm questioning the information that I'm receiving from the traditional sources. And so I think 5G coronavirus falls into that, the lab falls into that. It's hard to tell what's true and what's not true, right? But it just, I walk away just knowing that

like, we're probably not getting all the information and that's upsetting. Hear me out. I don't know who the CEO of T-Mobile is. I don't know who the CEO of Verizon is or the CEO of AT&T. Currently, the actual only company that carries real 5g is team mobile in the country just because your iphone says lte 5g does not mean you're getting 5g on that phone i found that out um why would the ceo of verizon in america want to kill his family because there's no way to get you can't you know you're going to get radiation period you're putting them up people see the towers going up they're not going up like that that's one thing number two you can't give somebody you can't handshake somebody and all of a sudden 5g boom guess what now now they got 5g that's not

how it gets you know transmitted you know i'm saying that's one thing but coronavirus is in currently 214 and more countries in the world 5g is not even in 100 countries so that's that's why i want to understand how to explain it like it can't travel again you can't cough on somebody and now all of a sudden they got the 5g and their immune system is weaker now and things but you know what i'm saying it's just it sounds so fucking crazy like i couldn't imagine being ceo of or the the founder ceo of verizon and being like yo you know what we're gonna put these 5g towers up and then my son my grandkids they're all going to get sick because it just sounds fucking crazy i was just curious what you thought and i just yeah i'm definitely uh i think

that part of this is people are sitting at home and they're bored i ain't got shit else to do right so it's like what crazy things can we come up with what's funny after everyone got their stimulus checks no one talked about it i think i've heard i've heard very less i've heard less and let's talk about it but right before that it was just going ham and i was like oh my god i i don't know if you saw this video i'll have to send it to you uh somebody went and uh they basically went through like black twitter right and they found all these uh people who were tweeting who had been like very anti donald trump and the current administration and all stuff and then when those checks hit there was people tweeting like ah damn you got my vote bro like you know

you you were real one for this and like all stuff because they because they were saying that they got their Trump bucks. And I was sitting there and they made a whole like montage of this thing. And I was just laughing because I was saying, listen, this, this is the game of the internet now, right? As you go and you pick up a bunch of pieces of information and you can twist it however you want to tell whatever story. And I was just sitting there and I was just like, that's probably going to be one of the biggest, uh, things that we have to pay attention to over the next few years is just what information are you getting and how accurate is that information, right? Cause you can literally make the internet say anything.

scary man scary man absolutely all right where uh where can we send people where do you want them to go uh after i listen to this um you know obviously any social platform uh i'm at ben baller just like it says b-e-n-b-a-l-l-e-r but what i'd love people to do because we're obviously in the same thing and i don't look at like competition or anything we are obviously two different people i'm just in the business category but if you go to apple go to spotify or go to stitcher go to anything anywhere you listen to podcasts um you know listen to behind the baller because behind the baller means it's no jewelry no flash it's more my journey getting there my journey where i'm going me being a husband maybe even a father me being a renaissance man how i help people get free game

i like to talk about people there's there's people who are celebrities on my show of course most of them are but like i have people on my show who were bottle waitresses and now own a 25 million our logistic company somehow some way you can hear these stories it's like i want everyone to understand that if you apply yourself and you are smart you know it's it's possible now is it gonna happen i don't know but you have to at least look at things at half glass full you know it just it just i would love you to send people to behind the baller podcast and other than that man look man i'm a big supporter of you now because you know we've had a really cool conversation absolutely behind the baller born to talk shit i love it

all right man well i'll i'll definitely link to it in the show uh description and we'll send people that way i appreciate doing it all right thanks man