Thank you. Thank you. Oh, yeah. Eminem made that for me. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back. Newsflash for everybody. I’m not sure if you heard, but there’s a presidential election going on. You might not know that. We all have guilty pleasures, right? We’ve all got our guilty pleasures. Sometimes it might be going into the kitchen late at night, 3 a.m., go get some chocolate, go back home from work, and perhaps getting down the couch and watching the Kardashians. Or maybe for some of us, it’s, you know, you go into your room and you close the door, you look into the mirror, and you practice lip-syncing all night. Not saying that I do that? Not understanding? Some people, that might be your guilty pleasure. I don’t know. For me, my guilty pleasure is politics. All right? I hate it, but I love it at the same time. Now, since 2016 is a presidential election year, it means that we’re at a pivot point. So a new president is going to be stepping into the Oval Office. They’ll have their own priorities, their own ideologies, and they’re going to make some really big decisions. They’ll have a huge impact on our lives. Look at Obamacare. Are we going to repeal it? Are we going to keep with it? The Middle East? Are we going to step back? Are we going to step forward in the Middle East? Income inequality? Do we want to take a bigger role or a smaller role? So these are really big questions. They’re going to have a really fundamental impact on the way we live our lives, and maybe even for generations to come. But why is it that even though we know about these questions, we know about these issues, so many of us feel helpless? So I love this image here, because I feel like it says so much about our society. It’s like the chicken or the egg. Are we helpless because we’re bystanders, or are we bystanders because we’re helpless? So I’ll give you a couple of examples, a couple of reasons as to why people might feel helpless, and there are a lot of them. You think about politics and the presidential candidates. They spend so much time arguing with one another and throwing labels back and forth, even more time fundraising, and not spending enough time representing their constituents. So you can have Democrats who maybe don’t want to talk about the national debt, Republicans who don’t want to talk about gun control. So I could just keep going and going and going. What results is this system that is just fortified and it won’t move, it won’t get anywhere, and it’s like it’s protected by moats and orcs and drones and dementors and the Death Star. So of course you’re not going to vote, right? Of course you’re going to feel helpless. This is the system that we’re operating in. But let’s think about this picture from a different angle, and let’s think about the power of numbers. What is happening in this moment? What is it that we’re doing, or better yet, what we’re not doing that is actually making the system what it is? So I’ll give you an example as a hip-hop artist. So I’ve always felt that music needs to represent the moment for people in everyday lives. So what is happening right now? That’s what music needs to be about. It doesn’t need to be about me. It doesn’t need to be about the formulaic stuff that you hear on the radio that just kind of goes in one ear and out the other, the stuff that you hear when you’re going out, taking shots at the bar, you have no idea what’s going on. That’s not what I think music needs to be all about. I think it needs to be something a little bit more authentic. But let’s look at what music really is today. So I’m going to share with you guys some lines from hip-hop’s top 10, or Billboard’s top 10 hip-hop songs of 2015. All right? These are actual lyrics. Party on a Sunday, do it all again on Monday, spend a check on a weekend, I might do it again. All right? Man, I swear I love her how she worked the damn pole. Hit the strip club, we be letting bands go. Everybody hating, we just call them fans though. In love with the money, I am never letting go. That is profound. These days, all I do is wonder if you’re bending over backwards for someone else. Wonder if you’re rolling up a backwards for someone else. Man, that’s mind-blowing, mind-blowing stuff. You guys might hear that you might like some of those lyrics, you might like some of those songs, and that’s cool, that’s fine. But think about where we are in this moment. Again, what does music need to represent? Are we struggling with societal injustices and fulfilling our potential, or are we struggling with the hate that comes along with going out every night and going out to strip clubs? I’m not so sure, not so sure about all that. If we keep pressing play, if we keep putting our desire for authentic music on the sidelines, if we fail to hold fans and artists accountable, we’re enabling the system that is perpetuated on our apathy and on our complacency. Now, as an artist and as you guys might realize as someone who’s not a millionaire, I fight with that system all the time. I’m always struggling with that. What is the direction that I need to take, but I’ve heard too much and I’ve seen too much and I’ve suffered too much to just play by those old rules. So that’s why for me, I make songs like Headphones, which is a track that I’ve written that’s about escaping the realities of today and finding a better tomorrow, and here’s a verse from it. A bottle is a trouble, a rock will provide the bass, the feet will keep a stompin’, a barkin’ upon the gates, no harmonies and talkin’ with enemies of the state, no pause, another tape just repeatin’ once fate. A blank pad is a canvas where he channels thoughts, the window panel shakin’ from another bomb, no alarm, no arrival of the cops, just a regular recurrence. There’s no way to make a stop. His life is not the subject to write as our reporters, cause it’s boredom and oppressor, if they’re in horror and the slaughter. The glamour of the moment is what is being abolished, but it’s passion in his own is on trying to get into college. Holy Book said to be the best you, not a martyr lost in the next coup. Moving through the war for Sura’s a jet fuel. Zoom with his headphones on, and so I run away with my headphones. Find a better place I was meant for. Spin dials to the right, send denial to the left. Fly away from the world with my headphones on. Thank you. Thank you. So, that’s not a safe verse, right? But there’s too much at stake for us to just play it safe. So think about it, if we just keep playing it safe and we don’t take a stand in this moment, what’s gonna happen? Like, look at racism for example. I know it’s tough to talk about racism, but what’ll happen if we don’t ever talk about it? I know it’s easy for social media for example to attain likes by posting selfies and cute kittens, things like that. But don’t you want to speak out when kids are getting shot in the city? Politicians, I know that it’s tough when it feels like they’re not listening to us, but how are they gonna listen to us when we’re always silent? So when you convert silence into noise and helplessness into action, you’re being a troublemaker. You’re saying enough is enough, and you’re gonna change the system, you’re gonna write a new future. But what’s important to remember is that you can’t write that new future if you’re playing by the old rules. So something that is incredibly frustrating for me, and we see this a lot in political debates and presidential debates, is when somebody proposes a great idea and somebody responds by saying, that is impossible. So let me tell you, those ideas that are deemed impossible, they’re not impossible because of the idea. They’re impossible because we are judging them with criteria that is based in a flawed system. Talking about systems like business, education, justice, areas that haven’t been serving us properly for a long time, even politics, you know, my love-hate relationship with politics and all its earmarks and quid pro quo relationships and the obstructionism that we’re seeing today, they are not working for us. So what you gotta realize is that systems are perfectly designed for the results they attain. Again, systems are perfectly designed for the results they attain. So if you want to see different results, but you’re working within the rules of the same system, what do you think is going to happen? That’s why we need to be troublemakers. That’s why we need to look at the system in the eyes, face to face and say, I’m going to take you apart brick by brick until we see the type of change and the type of results that we want. And that, everyone, is the side of history that we need to be on. Not the side of history with low voter turnouts or anonymous complaints on message boards or just hiding away taking shots at the bar pretending that the tough realities of the day aren’t happening or maybe flimsy marketing campaigns with a shelf life of 30 seconds. No, that’s not the side of history we need to be on. The side of history we need to be on is activism and entrepreneurialism, authentic music, social innovation. That’s the side of the troublemaker. That’s where we need to be in this moment. And only then can we say goodbye to helplessness. Thank you.