My mother and my father taught me to look at the actual problem, not the face of it, not the veneer of it. So for me, I was never - I was impressed that it - racially, I was impressed, right, but now in America it's about economics, and it's been about economics, and honestly, everything's been about economics since I don't want to say the beginning of time, but it's been about economics for a long while.

My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.

I think you have to ask yourself does voting work on the level that you are trying to effectuate change; that is the conversation you must have.

I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.

Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts.

Every life is good. This [luxury] doesn't make life. It's a lifestyle. It's a style of life. Style is what you are, but everybody has life. And everybody's life should be good. Some of the happiest people in the world have nothing. Nothing. And they find happiness in being in the world. They wear the world with a smile.

This nation was founded by rebels and revolutionaries, and its flags were carried across the battlefields by people who were very, very against the status quo and who questioned and criticized.