Hey, Jeff. Hey, Eric. How are you? I'm pretty good. How are you? Doing well, thank you. Happy July 4th.

Yes, to you and yours, I hope that people listen to this long, in-depth conversation with Stiles P as fireworks go off in the background, lighting up the sky, really highlighting this erudite and esoteric conversation with one of Raps Grates. That's right. And we celebrated another one of Raps Grates this past Thursday at New York City's 4040 Club.

Yes, Jay- Z lives there. Well, he doesn't live there, but... No, it's like when a teacher lives under their desk. He invited, and I'm going to say he invited, I trust he invited a million of his friends, including us, down to the, very, very exclusive club. down to the 4040 club to celebrate the launch of his new album.

And what they were going to do was, as far as I knew, play the album before anywhere else.

Yeah, well, guess what?

They were going to actually play it at midnight, as I guessed.

Who knew?

And so I did.

And so we went down at 10 because we get everywhere early and we get

there and they're playing all of Jay-Z songs from his entire career. And I do want to say, this is

something that I love. Like, we go to all these listening parties and, you know, people go, and we've

talked about this before, people go to just socialize. People are there to eat hors d'oeuvres. People are there to drink drinks. And people are there to chat up people that they haven't seen since yesterday. Oh, and by the way, the two of us are great at chatting at people who haven't seen since yesterday. Like, let's not like, sell ourselves short. Yeah. Yeah. So we went there thinking that this would be different and it was different.

And what I really liked about it was that they were playing, like Jeff said, all of Jayze's

catalog basically in two hours.

And the crowd wrapped every single lyric out loud with excitement along with everyone to their left and everyone to their right.

And I thought that was really awesome. It was genuine. It was dope. And we were there to celebrate something that hadn't happened

in four years, Jay-Z, putting out a new album. So midnight comes around and the lights come down. The

screens light up. And by the way, this could have been a visual album. We didn't know what we were

about to experience. Yeah, we didn't know if Mahershila Ali was about to act out Jay-Z's youth.

We didn't know what it was.

So Elliot Wilson gets on the microphone and says, are you ready?

And we were like, yes.

...