00:00I can't say I'm 100% thinking about things differently because I've always thought like
00:07this, you know, and we've, and when I say I, it's me, my partner Shaquem, Flavio and my mom,
00:13we've always thought with the intention in mind to make sure that we gave people opportunities
00:22who would not get them if we didn't do it. And that was just from day one. And maybe it's because
00:27I'm from a hip hop generation. My mother loved hip hop as well. And she was a high school
00:32art teacher who was that cool teacher that you would go to, if you had a problem or you go to,
00:37if it's going wrong in your household or, you know, so I have like a lot of extended family,
00:42just from my mother being, um, a safe Haven for so many hundreds and hundreds of students.
00:49Um, but she also sneakily show them how to become activists by expressing themselves and maybe
00:57it was a sit in in school. If there was no heat in the school, you know, she maybe quietly told
01:02them, well, one should not have to tolerate not having heat in the school, but perhaps one should
01:08sit in one's auditorium and not attend class. You know what I mean? But she would kind of like,
01:14you know, let them know that they had power and they needed to use their power and they needed to
01:19use their voice. So rather than just walking out of school and saying, forget this joining together
01:25to create more of a movement, to be of one voice, um, for a purpose. And so, you know,
01:32it really just solidifies everything we've been trying to do all these years and always coming
01:37back to the hood, always coming back to Irvington, you know, North East orange, you know, Jersey city,
01:43the stomping grounds where we come from and pouring more into that dirt. You know what I mean? Putting
01:48more nutrition into that very soil as we expand ourselves around the world, because we're global
01:55citizens at this point.
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