B-Real on Giving Up Gang Life for Music, "Music Saved My Life" | Joe Rogan

You know, occasionally I'll have my lungs checked and they tell me they're great. Isn't that amazing? It's crazy, you know, because I think if you keep active, you know, like you train and a lot of us train now, like this generation, they're not like lazy stoners, they don't just sit back and do nothing. There still are those, but you know, I don't think it has the same carcinogens as, you know, people expected. It doesn't. You don't have a cigarette? It doesn't. And so, you know, you might look at someone's lungs who smokes cigarettes and you might see something there like, hey, you need to, you know, slow the fuck down over here. But in every time that I've had my lungs checked or whatever for whatever, whether I've, you know, gotten sick or whatever, they're always telling me lungs are in good shape. And it's a funny thing because, you know, in, I think in 1987, you know, I was 17 and I was gang banging, I got shot and, you know, I got hit by a 22 and as hollow points do, it broke into three pieces, the hollow point. And one of them punctured my lung on my left side. And you know, they were telling me, well, you know, do you smoke? No, I don't really smoke because I didn't smoke cigarettes. I smoked weed, but I wasn't going to divulge that at the time. I was 17 and, you know, and they said, well, you know, well, that's good because you'll never smoke again. It was like you, they punctured your lung and blah, blah, blah. They thought I was going to have to work off one lung. But in the three days, you know, they were able to get the blood out of the lung and I was able to get it back, you know, through the exercises they told me, you know, to get it back to its regular size. And I've never had a problem since then knock on wood. Did they take the piece of metal out? No, I still got the three pieces. That's like when I go do my physicals and they do the, you know, the MRIs and the X-rays and all that. The doctors, you know, sometimes they forget because they see so many patients. Mr. Freeze, these appeared to be bullet fragments. What is that? Well, you just said it, doctor, bullet fragments. You've seen them a dozen times, you know, and yeah, I was very lucky. I was very lucky because, you know, punctured my lung and then two of the pieces, one was by the heart and one was by my spine. But I was at Martin Luther King Hospital in Linwood and we call that place Killer King because you go in there for something small and end up dying or come out, you know, gimped out or something. So you know, I wasn't going to allow them to try and get to those bullets or those fragments. They'll open you up? Yeah, no, no, no. Because, you know, they didn't have a great success rate. What kind of lung exercise they give you? Try to pump your lungs back up. They give you this breathing apparatus that has like a ball in it, right? And it has two lines and, you know, the first line you're trying to, they're telling you every day for five minutes, 10 minutes to blow that, you know, not all in one shot, but like to keep practicing getting the ball up there and that will help inflate the lung and get it back. So I had to do that for probably like three weeks. And you know, the puncture wound, it healed itself pretty much. And the pieces are still in your lungs? Not in the lung. No, it went past the lung. It shot past the lung. So you know, it's, I got a piece up here. One off to the side in the back. Well, when it's really cold due to the nerve damage, I'll get like stinging like, you know, like when your hand falls asleep, the little needles, I'll get that here and then back here where it entered. They had to cut right in between a rib here to stick the tube in to put the hose into the lung to get the blood out of the lung. Damn. Yeah. I was, you know, I was living crazy before I got into the music. The music saved my life pretty much. Really? Yeah. How long were you gang banging for? For some years, you know, I started, I started young. I was probably 13 years old. Whoa. Gang banging. And I got out of it probably, I didn't necessarily get out, but I changed up what I was doing because you don't never really get out per se unless they jump you out. And you know, I was too into it to be jumped out like that. You know what I mean? That wasn't something I was going to do because, you know, for as negative as it was, it taught me a lot. So my boys that I, you know, ran with, they understood I was trying to do something different. You know, I made a choice to try the music and leave that shit alone because there was no way that you do both. If you do both, you see the results of that, what's happening today with a lot of cats. You know what I mean? Yeah. They try to ride the line, be professional and be in the music, but they're still kind of in this world over here. And when it bleeds in, one bleeds into the other, it, you know, it fucks everything up, you know. And so I chose, you know, I was going to do music and just talk about those life experiences and whatnot. And that was probably at 18 that I started taking on the music and that's where it went, you know. Like when you said you learned a lot from it, like what did you learn from it? Well you know, your street, you know, there's common sense and then there's common sense on the streets and then there's being aware and looking out and you know, not being a doormat and just, it's a whole different type of schooling when you're gangbanging. You know, that's the way you carry yourself, the way you communicate with someone and know whether they're disrespecting you or not and how you deal with that disrespect, which is, you know, a whole different world in the gangbang shit. But it's a different kind of education, you know. I wouldn't take it back. Some of the things I would, you know, I definitely regretted while I was doing it for sure. But it made me see things from a different perspective, you know, and why, you know, things are the way they are in gangs and stuff like that. From lack of opportunities, you know, for these kids to be doing something, you know, because not everybody's good at sports, you know, but there has to be other opportunities other than that to get kids interested in doing something else. Because falling into the gangs, it's easy. If you don't have a good home life at home, the guys on the street are your second family and they eventually become your first family, you know what I mean? And if you don't have a father figure at home, one of the guys in the gang, you know, becomes your mentor, he could become like the guy you look up to as like your father figure, you know, there's that. And then, you know, again, there's not enough programs out there to keep people into doing something different than falling into that. And then sometimes, you know, it's just a matter of, you know, you growing up in this neighborhood. If you have to walk down that street and they approach you and say, hey, you live in this hood, you got to be with us. If you don't, we're going to make it hard for you. So there's that peer pressure. And then there's the legacy shit. Like so if my father was a gangster in this gang and he still lives in this neighborhood, pressure's on for me eventually to take up where father left off, you know? And it's all those things. And then some people just start thrill seekers and they choose it. They have nothing, you know, in common with none of that, they just choose it. For some people too, it's so appealing to have somewhere that you belong. Right. And that's the thing because if you don't feel like you belong in your school or you don't belong in your family and that shit can totally take hold and you end up there. You know, fortunately, I had good friends that weren't gang thingers, you know, that they had talent for music, which is Muggs and Sen's brother, Mello. You know, they were, you know, I did music as a hobby, you know, before I got into gangs and they got me back into the music because they recognized something in me and said, hey, we want you to come back. We got these opportunities over here. Come join us.