Killer Mike: Failing Was the Best Thing That Happened to Me | Joe Rogan

Failing was the best thing that ever happened to me. I think for everybody. Some people get stuck at their failure and they become bitter and they become envious, they become hateful, at least out of my community. They can, yeah. But failure can be one of the best things that ever happens to you. Failing and having to learn to become a business person, I'm very thankful for. Removed from the failure now. Don't you think that about your rap career as well? That's what I was talking about. Yeah, from a business perspective as well. I failed at rap first. I was a good rapper, but Outcast, Aquilment, Out Records, my first record that went gold at a time where every other record was going 10 million. It was a failure, it didn't work, right? It didn't work for me. So I had to go to Texas and people like Camillionaire and Paul Wall, Bunby, Zero, Slimthug, Trader Truth, right? People like Flip and Hump. These people taught me how to press up my own CDs, put them in the marketplace, sell them at profit, reinvest and sell. They taught me that and selling drugs in the trap. They taught me to rudimentary fundamentals of business. And when I met my wife, I can remember dating two, three, four, five little hot chicks and her just mentally being, you know, our wife caught her right freshman year of college, but just mentally she was light years ahead of everyone because her grandmother had raised her in that way. Grandmother had a shot house, you know, around a shop, like a Chitlin' Circuit, you go get a shot for $2 on Sundays because the South is a weird place we didn't use to sell alcohol on Sundays. So my wife, I recognize, had a sharper mind in me for business. What I had was good ideas for what would sell or what would be well in the marketplace and what she had was a discipline. The organization had it done. Did you have any failures in your business practice? Yeah, man, first few years I had a barber shop, I wanted to kill every barber I knew. Barbers are like independent rappers. You know, everyone wants to be more famous than they need to be and the artist. Barbers want to be famous? Yeah, barbers like being famous. I mean, they're artists. Local famous, yeah. Yeah, they're artists, absolutely they do. And they should be, you know what I mean? But with that said, man, it can just get frustrating. You know, one barber comes in one day like, I want to wear a glitter cape today. You know, and the next barber's coming like, yeah, I want to cut hair in the nude, I want to use your shop to do it. And you're like, bro, it doesn't work like that. Like, this is the right, but I had to learn for us that the boof rent model, like you paying boof rent and us not making any more profit, that doesn't it. So we had to kind of say, well, what does Supercuts do? What does Great Clips do? Oh, you want it by commission and then you split. That means they have to beat it. And that's how we kind of learned business. When we got an offer from the Hawks to put our place in the space of the arena and we want to be in more arenas, we started to understand, okay, this is how you do business business. You know, this is not just how you, you know, make two to $4,000 extra a month and that's just some good income for your wife to be able to enjoy. This is how you start to say, you know, more than a barber shop, this is a lifestyle and retail brand. We happen to barber. But if you're a guy, I don't like going to beauty shops or beauty stores to buy my brushes or buy my combs. Or, you know, if you want to get a little gray out of your beard, you know, you don't want to be in the RX section of your local Walmart or your, I was like, hey, where do I get the gray for my beard? Because I want to go get hot, young chicks, you know. You want to go and shop. And so we develop products, we have cool stuff, you can just buy it right there. And we've learned to be business people and hopefully I would like to become the chick fillet of barber shops. I like for people to want to have us in their town and pay us a lot of money to come. Well, it's a man's hangout too. And man, you can say anything you want and no one judges you can talk. You can watch Joe Rogan talk shit, you know what I mean? Yeah, barber shops are uniquely masculine. They are. Like beauty shops are for girls. Girls can go into a beauty shop and get their nails done and know there's not gonna be any men there that can talk, all kinds of crazy shit. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why they like it. And the women that do come to barber shops are some of the best shit talkers. So even they fit in.