I feel like people didn't understand where I was about to go. And a lot of people still don't.

From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.

So I'm in the library, and I have keyboards out and my headphones out. Everybody's like, "Mike are you making beats right now?" and I'm like, "Yeah... sorry!"

Most people go to college to get a job, and here I am sitting in class with a job, making exponentially more than whoever's teaching me, you know what I'm saying? At the end of the day, I wanted to finish what I started, and make my mom proud. A lot of people put a lot of hard work and investment to allow me to go to school, and for me not to finish would have been like a slap in the face to my family and those people.

My smiles don't result from good things, they result in good things.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

A lot of people considered my career as an artist largely over. Two albums got shelved. But I've made music since I was a little kid, and for the majority of that time, I wasn't paid for it. So I will always be making it.