When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it's going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics.

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

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.

You need to think about the system that you live in and the comforts that you have. But the comforts that you have that are causing the discomforts of a massive amount of people around the world.

The rewards we get by being those weird guys going against the grain to me are way more massive than selling a million billion records. I like climbing mountains or going on undersea dives for whales and stuff like that.

Success is a very dangerous thing and I think we have to be very careful about when we dictate what success is for somebody else. Because you don't know what it's like.

People see your reviews sometimes, and it's so good that they think I wrote it. And I'm like, "OK, yeah, I wrote it. And I own the company that put it out."