You can't control it once you turn it into the label, so there's the expectation that it'll leak a week before the album comes out. That's the world we live in.

I really embrace my hypocrisy. I embrace that because after I do that, I can move on; I can try and go away from that. You gotta understand what your problem is and know what it is, and then you can change it. You can't just be like, "I'm a hypocrite, and to not be a hypocrite, I'm just going to not do hypocritical things." You can't do that; you don't even understand what a hypocrite is.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

With 'Hip-Hop Saved My Life,' I attempted to make 'Kick, Push,' but for rappers. To give a real basic play-by-play of the life of a rapper before he makes it - if he ever makes it, because you can get stuck in that and be trying to make it for the rest of your life.

I know what tablas sound like, because my father played a lot of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.

The point of Islam is to promote peace.