Busta Rhymes Finally Opens Up About His Grief, Depression & Recovery!

This is the Busta Rhymes that none of us have ever seen before. Busta Rhymes says it himself, this is a Busta Rhymes that nobody's ever seen before. You will walk away from this conversation understanding not only what it takes to reach the very peak of your powers, but to stay there for 33 years, to have the insane consistency, discipline, dedication, and in his words, addiction to something that will take you to the very top. But then also, you'll see the forces in life that take you from that peak to the deepest depths of darkness, and once you're in that darkness, how do you rise from it? How did Busta take himself from the darkest moment of his life, that he's really not talked about ever before, back to the peak of his powers? This is a human story. It's one of the most inspiring stories we've ever had on this show, and it's a side of a guy that we've known for many, many decades that I have never seen before. Thank you to Busta for this conversation, and if you like this conversation, if you like what we do here on The Diary of a CEO, before we get started, I've got a 10-second favor to ask you. About 62% of you roughly that listen to this podcast frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button. So if you can hit that subscribe button, it is the reason why we're able to get guests like Busta Rhymes to come here and have these conversations with me. I feel like we're a team here. Give a little, take a little. So if you could hit that subscribe button, that'd be absolutely amazing. It's the only favor that I'll ever ask from you, and I promise you in return that I'll do everything to give you more guests like this one, and guests that you love. Enjoy this episode. (instrumental music plays) Busta, sometimes I think that with maturity and with age, we're able to look back at our earliest years and connect dots that only our maturity and only our own growth and development allow us to connect, and those dots sometimes indicate to us why and how we became the person we are today, and that's really what I'm so compelled to understand with you is, what is that early context that you look back on now and you go, "The reason I am the man I am today sat here is because of this early context and these things and these people"? What is that?

I honestly have to say it starts with my mother and my father. Um, my mother and my father was- was strict, you know what I'm saying? And- and they also made sure that I didn't need for nothing. I was able to really enjoy what it was to be a child, and, you know, I don't- I don't have to sit here and- and mislead people, like I come from some poor struggle and I come from this- this hood shit, like, yeah, I was in the hood. I was in Brooklyn, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, and I was in the hood with enough of the- the goons and the hooligans, but the difference about our era and the way p- you- you mostly hear artists try to portray it now is, even the guys that was the goons and the gangsters and the troublemakers in the street, they had respect and they had integrity and they understood what it was to have proper manners. Like, if my mother, as serious as she was, saw any of the other kids in the street, it was the, we- we, like, I'm giving you an example of how it really literally took a village to raise a child, like none of the neighbors on the block would see another child that they watched grow from a little boy into becoming a teenager or something and see that kid misbehaving and not reprimand them in the street, even if they're not his parent. So my neighbors had permission to- to bust my ass if I was misbehaving, and then they would tell my mother, and if my mother felt like I misrepresented her to make another neighbor have to discipline me, that was gonna get me another ass beating. So you ended up getting two ass beatings (laughs) -