Good morning everybody. Everybody stand up for me, stand up, stand up. No keep that rolling, keep that music going, keep it going, keep going. Everybody put your hands up in the sky as early as you can. It’s early, let’s wake up. Turn up, turn up. We can cut it, we can cut it, we can cut it. How’s everybody doing this morning? Wooo, everybody’s doing fine. Nobody was like, I’m kind of sleepy, I’m hungover. Y’all starting the morning off alive to me. My name is Professor Tune. I’m from Durham, North Carolina. I decided to start the morning off with as much ratchetness as possible. So I made sure that we played Gucci Gang first. Gucci Gang is pretty lit, it’s by artists named Lil Pump. If you don’t listen to trap music, then don’t listen to Lil Pump. Because that’s not where you want to start. Lil Pump. Brian never had shit. And as it continue not to have, on my bras they feel like closet with shopping bags. And every rapper that tests me leaving a body bag on the quest for my daughter have everything that I never had. See Jay said numbers never lie. Shoulda told it to my pops, one sibling number five. Cause real men never cry. Roger died from overeating. Didn’t listen when mama said I was over feeding. Jordan almost didn’t play for Chicago either. And I swear I almost never played with my pedic. He almost really don’t count cause now I change his demeanor. Are you getting my rondo? That’s the point if you missing mentions. And why the fuck this skinny n***a could never listen. Tired of penny pinching me, why the fuck I ain’t rich yet? Cause my flow been nasty. Who is the profession that’s look n***a this step. Same feeling that I got. Fighting step pops. And I was only opt. And he was 35 man, how am I still alive? There really must be a guy. Where the fuck my some pops at? Where the fuck you at? My shoes wouldn’t stay tied. The advice when I couldn’t keep a steady job. With some guidance with a big killer rappers. I was chasing after buckets. Waiting for you in the rafters. Cause I didn’t know my talus. Dog I didn’t know your middle name. I think my mama said that shit was Alex. Assing out class clown. Used to lay his head down in the middle of the lessons until the last bell sound. Fighting for attention didn’t last 12 rounds. Want to do you looking mirrors just to face yourself now. Just in case you hear me now. The rent still due. Your grandchild cool. Mama back in school they taught to pop up in weeks. So if you go check on them texts n***a at least. And if you wrote a kid a letter, daddy give me peace. A few calls in the coming weeks like your son a beast. Man where the fuck was my pops at? My name is Professor Toon. That is a story that I wrote probably about three or four. Don’t quote me on the time frame. I wrote it one day. But that is a little bit of who I am in a quick go. Quick verse is a little bit more than the 16, but we would call that a 16. That’s what rappers call a verse. And that is who I am. And that’s one of the pillars that we’re going to stand on this morning. And hip hop there are five pillars. I’m not going to preach about those right now. Ask me a bottom later. But we’re going to stand on five pillars and the first one is who. Who you are. Who you play with. I choose to play with my mentors. I got super lucky in Durham, North Carolina. Just a little bit about me. I dropped out of high school and I dropped out of college. I went back to high school eventually. But I didn’t go and get a formal education. But through the people I played with, I ended up getting doused into the school. Getting doused into this startup world. Google moved into Durham, GFE, Google for Entrepreneurs. They started funding things and through play with my mentors, who I got super lucky. And my mentors are 58 year old white woman. Yes. Yeah. My biggest mentor so far has been Casey Steinbacher. He’s the former CEO of the Durham Chamber of Commerce. That woman has taught me everything I know almost about business. One of my other mentors is actually here and spoke to you guys. Salim Reshemwala. Multimedia guy has worked for, y’all heard anything he did yesterday. One of my other mentors, Chris Hively, who started and sold MapQuest to AOL for a bajillion dollars with five other dudes. But those people look nothing like me. They do nothing that I do. And that’s the next pillar, it’s what. It’s the who, it’s the what. What you do does not fucking matter. It does not. When you’re in this space, when you’re around all these people, what you do doesn’t necessarily matter. Who you play with is important. It’s your network. Blah, blah. And what you do is your job, work, blah, blah. But what you do isn’t necessarily important when you’re mingling with people, you’re touching other people’s lives, you’re influencing them. So what you do doesn’t matter to you or them. But what they do absolutely matters to you and them. You get it, y’all with me? You sure? Alright. When, when you do those things that don’t matter, you do them all the time. Right? Whenever you’re playing, whenever you’re working, you’re still influencing people. You gotta remember that. All the time, every fucking second of your life, I have a five year old, I’m a father. When I’m at work, am I not a father? What? Somebody said no, no, I am a father. I’m that dude all the time. You’re a journalist, when you go home, you’re asleep, you’re a sleeper. But you’re also still a journalist all the time. Where? Everywhere. Wherever you go. When are you you? You are you all the time and everywhere. So what we got so far is who, what, when, where, and why. Why do we do this? Whatever it is that you do. Do you do it because it makes you feel good when you pat yourself on the back like, you wrote a good story, bro. That song was dope as shit, bro. You touched my life, patting yourself on the back. No. You do it because the answer is simple as fuck. To live. That’s why you do it. You wake up every morning to live. You go to work to live. It’s called making a living. You do it to live. And that answer is the simplest answer that you can do. I know my subject was supposed to be follow the paper. I was going to come up here and give you a speech about how the entertainment industry follows influxes in economic development. And that’s all cool. You can give you a bunch of bullshit stats about this and that. If you really want to be serious, entertainment industry boomed really around the drug trade, but we’re not going to get to that part. I can give you the whole disco storyline. I don’t even have to use hip hop. I’m not going to use hip hop. But I decided to change it up because I had an opportunity to keep it simple. S-A-F. Simple as fuck. You should text that to your best friend, like, bro, keep it simple as fuck this morning. The answer is simple. Live. L-I-V-E. You wake up every morning to live. I got to feed my kid. I got family members who depend on me for certain things. I depend on music myself. Therapeutic release. Get the anger out. I can’t just walk around slapping fools in the face. I’m mad. BAH! That’s a charge, especially since I wear black hoodies all the time and I look like this. But, uh, it’s to live. This is how I make my living. I speak and share my story with everyone. People look like you. Also, young, raging, dread head, twisted up dudes in the middle of the club who like to mosh. It doesn’t matter how we look. It doesn’t matter what we do at all. It does not matter. I’m a rapper. My background may not look like anybody else’s background in this room, but we’re all in the same room. And I should speak to the simplicity of we’re all just living. We all have something to learn from each other and it’s through living life. Our experiences come to us through life, through living. The answer is fucking simple. It’s simple as fuck. If you do one thing when you leave here today, you’re going to live, right? And that’s all you have to do. Live positive, play positive, mix, mingle, be diverse, not by shades of crayons and shit. Be diverse in thought. Be diverse in the people that you hang around in the way that they think. If you’re going to hang with your mentors, you got to hang with your homies who turn up too. Mix that room full of people and be intentional about it. Because if I just hang with all my homies, then probably all just going to make ratchet rap songs about money and drugs and turn up and sit and lean or whatever rappers do these days. If I hang with my mentors and we’re going to sit and they’re going to coach me on how to pitch and raise funds and get money for festivals that I help with and shit like that. And that can get boring all fucking day. But if I mix the homies and the mentors and the peers, especially the peers, a lot of people want to network up. So even when you play, you want to play with people who got more money than I did. I want to play up. Instead of playing across the board because there are way more peers than there are big homies, right? You never know the connection that you’re going to get going across the board. And that connection is made by doing one thing. Keeping it simple. Contacting somebody and be like, hey, let’s go do something. Let’s live. My name is Professor Toon and I hope you got one thing for me today. Keep it simple as…