Busta Rhymes: "His Death Stopped My Career!" Busta Rhymes Finally Opens Up About His Grief, Nearly Dying & How He Turned His Life Around!

If you enjoy hearing about inside the music industry and its artists, I recommend you check out my conversation with will.i.am, which you can find here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-2QhqdlfI
From Trevor to Busta, love of the rap game to global success, and rock bottom to rebirth. This is Busta Rhymes as you’ve never heard him.
Trevor George Smith Jr. or ‘Busta Rhymes’, first reached fame with the hip-hop group, ‘Leaders of the New School’, and began his solo rap career in 1996, since then has released 11 studio albums and received 12 Grammy Award nominations for his work.
In this conversation Busta and Steven discuss topics, such as:

Growing up in the hood

Starting out in music

Becoming an MC by accident

Using rap as a way out of work

Becoming addicted to entertaining and the reaction of people to his raps

Rapping to protect himself

Selling crack at 12 years old

Failure not being an option for his father

His father standing in the way of his musical career

Getting booed off stage early in his career

His mother signing his record deal at 17 years old

What lessons he would tell his kids to reach success

Why you need to be selfish to reach success

His manger dying in 2012

How his manager taught him ever he knew

His emotional down turn

How his whole life was going in a totally different direction

Why he couldn’t figure himself out

Being on steroid pills

How his son thought he was going to die


You can listen to Busta’s newest album ‘Blockbusta’, here: https://spoti.fi/40UxsvS

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The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett is a podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett, the CEO of the social media management company, Social Chain. The podcast features Bartlett's reflections on his experiences as a CEO, as well as interviews with other business leaders and entrepreneurs. The show provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of running a successful business, as well as the personal journeys of its guests. The Diary of a CEO is known for its honest and candid discussions on the realities of being a CEO, and is aimed at helping listeners understand the inner workings of successful businesses.

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I was a broke, university dropout, at 18 I built an industry leading social media marketing company, and at 27 I resigned as CEO. At 28 I co-founded Flight Story – a marketing and communications company, and thirdweb - a software platform, making it easy to build web3 applications. I then launched private equity fund, Flight Fund, to accelerate the next generation of European unicorns. During this time I decided to launch 'The Diary Of A CEO' podcast with the simple mission of providing an unfiltered journey into the remarkable stories and untold dimensions of the world’s most influential people, experts and thinkers.

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• No. of episodes: 694
• Latest episode: 2025-06-27
• Business Society & Culture

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