HHDX: Speaking of lyrics and lyricists, are you offended when somebody says you aren’t a lyricist?
Yung Joc: I don’t care because I’m not. I’m not a lyricist; I never claimed to be one. I leave that up to the Nas’, the Jiggas’, the Talib Kwelis’ and the KRS-Ones’. I make club music, music you could dance to. I make feel good music. There are times when I hear a Jay-Z lyric and I’m like “Damn, that’s crazy.” But, if you’re in the club sometimes you don’t wanna think about what the rapper is saying. You just wanna have fun. I mean even Diddy, Diddy ain’t no lyrical dude and he’s real well off.

HHDX: So you were doing well financially from the start. You had the Block money and the Bad Boy money?
Yung Joc: Well I had a percentage of the Block money and then whatever money I got from the deal with Bad Boy. I’m doing well overall. A lot of artists wanna talk about certain things but like me, I just got listed in Forbes as one of the Top 20 highest paid rappers for the year. I just did that interview today and it’ll be in that publication soon.

DJ Booth: For those who are looking to enroll themselves in a Hustlenomics course, myself included of course, give a brief synopsis of how you came to that topic...

Yung Joc: Well, I was looking around me, and I was always questioning: why is it that cats was gettin’ on the same time I was gettin’ on, with big records or bigger records than mine, when they wasn’t around as long as me, or they wasn’t working as hard as me? And I figured it out: their hustle game wasn’t up to par; the staff, or the team around them didn’t have that supreme hustle dream, you know what I’m saying? So I was just like, “Well, maybe it’s ‘cause I hustle.” I was like, “Well what can I call it, what I do?” So I said, “I will call it ‘Hustlenomics’”

"It’s hard when I can’t go to the grocery store by myself just to get some shit. And always looking over my back," Joc explained. "You don’t know what cats intentions be, man. They see me with something like this on [points at chain] and like, 'oh yeah. We got us a live one.'"

"I decided not to do the deal then, with him[Nitti]. I felt the other route going with Bad Boy South, Block Entertainment was a better route for me. And that's what I did. And I think it was a blow to the system over there," Joc told SOHH. "What ended up happening is the shit took off so crazy, so fast and so big, that, it was trying to hold on to me, but it couldn't be done. And I think that when everybody was like to his face, 'damn you let that slip.' I think that in itself kinda fueled the fire for this dude.