Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes. They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real; he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses and gave their families a better life.

The experiences that I've had growing up with music, you know, I couldn't trade them for any money in the world. Dancing in the living room to enjoy myself. 'Enjoy Yourself,' Michael Jackson.

When you're growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you've let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again.

It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.

Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.

At the end of the day, money is just a proxy for votes. That is what makes politics so vulnerable to social media.

They have acted like carnivores who used the world to enrich only themselves, and whether it's the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, the elites have realized that the people have stopped listening to them, that the people want to determine their futures and, in a perfectly democratic framework, regain control of their destiny.

Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.