The story, which finds Ocean answering questions from other artists and creatives (John Waters, Nile Rodgers, Billy Porter, and Amandla Stenberg), includes a question from rapper JPEGMAFIA asking about the Def Jam situation.
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"How did it feel fucking over a label like that? Old white niggas do that to us all the time, but how did it feel giving them a taste of their own elixir?" JPEG asked.
"You know, it's funny talking about it these days because I couldn't really tell anybody anything for a couple of years. Couldn't tell anyone at the label, obviously. But I also couldn't talk with anyone at Apple because the industry is too small and it would've gotten back to the label for sure. So I kept it to myself and a few in my circle," Ocean said. "I carried my hard drives around with me when I travelled because I used to not store anything online. Those drives became a physical representation of the stakes. If the files had leaked, everything would have worked out very differently for me. When August came around and both projects were uploaded I felt the euphoria, yeah, but mostly I just needed to sleep. I probably slept something like 15 hours."
The musician Cosima also asked a question related to the subject, asking Ocean if he had something of a blueprint to follow for his leave from Def Jam.
"Not exactly, no. I thought sometimes about what Steve Jobs did with NeXT," he said.