 Glad to see you all this evening. My name is Wendy Wyman, I'm the Director of Programming for Photographiska, New York. Welcome. On now in the museum, hip hop, conscious unconscious, explores the people, places, and things that hip hop has delivered to all of us for the past 50 years. Together with Mass Appeal, Photographiska has created the definitive destination to celebrate hip hop's global impact on visual expression in an immersive experience bringing together a community of artists that have documented this cultural phenomenon. We'd also like to thank and express our gratitude to our lead exhibition partner, Chase Marriott, Bon Boy Credit Cards for their exhibition support and programming support. I want to welcome you to tonight's program, elevating hip hop, health, and well-being within the community. And I'd like to invite our friend to the stage, Ariel Palitz, founding director, Office of Nightlife for the City of New York to make introductions. Thank you. Thank you, Wendy. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. This is such a great turnout for an amazing and important conversation. I will defer. First of all, again, I just want to thank everyone for joining. I am Ariel Palitz, the founding director of New York City's Office of Nightlife. It's a dedicated office to the nightlife industry within the administration. And also, I want to thank Wendy and Photographiska for welcoming us into this amazing home that is experiencing a beautiful tribute to 50 years of hip hop, which I hope you'll all be able to go and walk through after this panel. This panel came out of a conversation I had with my good friend, Mary Sierra-Cordes, putting my glasses down. I'm going to be brave about it. And yes, it was a conversation that came when we were talking about the importance of, obviously, wellness and mental health in nightlife. We all know a lot of people in the nightlife community, long hours, bad sleep, bad diet. And as I was speaking with Mary, who I actually happened to know for many years when I ran my own little nightclub in the East Village called Sutra Lounge for 10 years. And we sort of bonded over the fact that this is a really tough industry, and we don't really talk about the wellness as much as we should. And she had expressed to me how really dougie, fresh, and her that this was also something that was a really big priority for them and that it was important that we have begin starting to plan for this conversation tonight. So since those days, again, at Sutra, and five years ago now, I was appointed in this position and took all of the experience I knew as an operator, a promoter, a nightlifer, and put it all into this office. And one of the top priorities was to create the elevate nightlife health and well-being initiative. And really what it is is a compilation, an umbrella, of all of the available free resources that are public and private, and to raise awareness so that the community knows that it's there for them. So again, I shared this information with Mary. We planned this panel. We are here tonight because she and dougie also formed an incredible program called Hip Hop Public Health Initiative to address the systemic issues, which you'll hear about more in a moment. And that moment we knew it was important, sorry. So anyway, the issues being addressed tonight, we know that there are inherent challenges of working at night, as I mentioned, but we also know that there are systemic challenges to accessing care for mental health and well-being in the community in which Hip Hop was created. And we really have to spend extra time and effort to make sure that we're addressing those issues but also remedying the systemic challenges that there has been. So we know that there's also systemic stigma around mental health, which can lead to the inclination to impart self-medication instead of seeking help as well as historic barriers to getting care from being uninsured or underinsured. And on top of that, there is the broad lack of access of information about what is available. So in the depths of the pandemic, we created Elevate Nightlife Health and Well-Being to make sure that people know what is available to them. And so we saw also in the tragedy of the pandemic that it also created opportunities to shift the way we were thinking, the old school way of thinking and the old school obstacles to accessing the resources that are really available to people. And so that's why, that's a long way of saying, we're here today to bring together all of the resources and programs that we felt at the Office of Nightlife was important to put under this umbrella and to make it easily available so people know that they exist and what is available to them. So first again, thank you to Photographiska. We will be doing Q and A after that, but without further ado, I will invite the panel that you're really here to see. So Dr. Williams of Hip Hop Public Health will be our moderator. Jennifer Leff of Music Cares, Airfun Karim of the New York Health and Hospitals Express Care Program and of course the legendary artist and founding honorary board member of Hip Hop Public Health, the one and only Dougie Fresh. Please welcome them. Thank you. So hello everyone. My name is Dr. Lajide Williams. And as Ariel said, I'm the founder of Hip Hop Public Health along with my co-founder, Dougie Fresh. My other job rather, I'm a professor of neurology at Columbia and I'm actually the chief of the department of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center uptown. I'm also one of the deans at Columbia and I run a lot of the community research and anti-racism activities on that campus. I'm a stroke expert, which means that I also feel like a part of the nightlife community. In fact, I'm actually working tonight and unlike many of those who work in the nightlife community, I spend a lot of my time trying to keep people alive in the middle of the night. And during COVID, I was asked as a neurologist to be one of the first responders to patients that were coming in to our emergency departments and to our units. And I actually lost a friend who committed suicide during the height of the first wave because of all the trauma that we saw during that time. So this is a conversation about mental health. This is a conversation about trauma. And hopefully this is a conversation that connects people to resources, opens people minds and hearts to opportunities that they might not know have existed and help bridge that access gap to resources, not only for members who are here but those who are listening on the live stream and all your family members. We in the medical community believe that there is still a pandemic within the pandemic and that pandemic is mental health. And so I'm so excited to have such an incredible panel here today who are really working on the front lines of bridging that access gap and supporting anyone and everyone who needs help, especially those in the nightlife community, especially those in the artists community. And so I'm just gonna start by asking the panel, panelists to introduce themselves, say a little bit about the organizations that they're from and why it's important to be having this conversation tonight. And so I'll start with Efron Karim. Thank you. So I'm Efron Karim. I am from New York City Health and Hospitals and I am the executive director of our virtual express care service line. I think it's really important that pandemic within the pandemic that we increase access to care for all individuals, anyone that needs it and to bring that care to the homes of New Yorkers. And that's what virtual express care does by bringing mental health care with access to psychiatrists, mental health practitioners, social workers and addiction counselors within minutes. Typically we'll have someone available 24 seven, 365 within minutes to be there to support anyone that needs help and then get them through whether it's in the middle of the night or during the day to get them care in their own terms. It's not something that you need to go into the physical setting to do. You're able to access it anywhere and everywhere. And I think this conversation is really important in trying to think through other means of getting the care to our individuals when they recognize that they want that care, right? Without having additional barriers built in that might happen in a day to day basis. Thank you. Jennifer. Hi, I'm Jennifer Leff. I'm from Music Cares. We are the charitable arm of the Recording Academy and we provide a safety net of assistance to the wide scope of the music community. So that means anybody from the singer, songwriter, engineer, roadie, tour bus driver. And when someone falls into a time of need or crisis we are there to assist. And really we help the humans behind the music because music gives so much to the world. We see people with boots on the ground and what's happening because of, you know, as Ariel was saying, there are incredible, the rigors and stressors of being in this industry. It takes a toll, physical health, mental health, financial. And our role is to not only assist people during a time of need, but we also educate, we also tap into communities. And I think this conversation in particular is so important because we need to normalize this conversation. And even though we've started it, we need to keep it going even when it dies down. So having said that, I also want everybody to realize it's on all of us. If we're not feeling great, at least ask the next person if they're feeling okay because it takes everybody to watch out for one another. Thanks. So Dougie needs no introduction. I hope, because we are in photographer Fisker and hopefully you've seen the wonderful photographs downstairs and hip hop history could not be written without this man right here. Isn't that right, Dougie? But they don't know, they don't know how me and you got together. Oh my God, here we go. Well, so Doug is the co-founder of Hip Hop Public Health. You know, why don't you tell them how we met? Why'd you tell them? Oh my God. So I'm a little bit of a scrounger and I'm the moderator, so I'm just gonna keep this really quick. Okay? He's the moderator, yeah. But Doug, you know, Chuck D. calls Dougie Lama. And the reason why he's called Dougie Lama is because of the heart that he has for health and for healing. And I just want to say that there are very few artists who have contributed to the genre in terms of, you know, the fifth element, the beatbox was created by Dougie. But his contribution to the health of his fellow artists is what we're here to highlight tonight. And so Doug, I was wondering if you could, you know, so many times when you and I talk, it's off the back of a conversation that you just had with a prominent artist somewhere in the world. You get calls all the time from artists in crisis. And my question to you is why are these artists reaching out to you and why do they delay reaching out for professional help? Very good question. To me, a lot of times, you know, I've been doing hip hop so long that I have seen so many different generations of hip hop. I have seen it from the first generation all the way through to the moment of now. So I'm connected to all of the generations because I perform, I tour, I do a lot of these shows with the artists. So one of the things that happened with me is that the artists come to me because I have a history of health and taking care of myself. You know, back in the days in, I'll say in 80, let's go to 85. So when we were on tour, I would walk around with Deer Park Water. I was the only guy walking around with a jug of Deer Park Water. And they used to be like, yo, why are you doing that, man? Yo, you crazy, man. And they would have a 40 ounce, you know the 40 ounce, y'all know the 40 ounce. You know, you remember the 40 ounce. The 40 ounce to OE, whatever it was and you know, whatever they were drinking. So they would look at me like, is he just trying to be different? You know, and then sometimes it would provoke a conversation. So when me and Chuck was out, or Dean Ice, he would come into my room, I would have a juicer in there. They ain't never seen a juicer. You know, they were like, what's that? You know, and then I would be making different sandwiches like vegetable sandwiches and stuff like that. I'd be like, try it, man, try it. I'll put a little salad dressing on there, you know. Yo, this is good, Ducky, what is this? So I would get him open. And I had a history of just, they started to say, well, this is how this guy is. He's not really pretending. This is really how he is. And I used to tell him, water is the recipe to life. So they would remember that and they would talk to me about it in heavy D. You know, when he started working at MCA, he put a water machine in his office because of me. He said, you see that water machine? I put it in here because of you, yo. You've been talking about water all the time right there. So it's that kind of relationship with them. You know, we're more like brothers and, you know, and cousins and just friends. So each generation I have this kind of relationship with. And so they come to me because they know I talk to talk and I walk the walk. This is real. This is not make believe. It's not perfect, you know, but it's real. And I think that they know that I'm coming to them with a solution or I'm gonna do something about it, whether it's with the herbs, whether it's with, you know, nutrition or whether it's being able to recommend doctors like Dr. Williams or whomever. You know, they know I have a very large, extensive, like just a ton of information in this area because it's a passion of mine. You know, and when I look at my fellow artists, I wanna do everything I can to help them. You know, we performed together, we hang out together, it blew my mind. When Ecstasy from Houdini passed away, it was earth-shaking to all of us that worked together. Got on the phone and we had Jalil. And, you know, and he's going through some things. So to answer the questions in both ways, I think that because of my consistency, I built up confidence with them. And I think because of my humility, they have no problem coming to me because they know I'm not gonna judge them. People tell me everything. I mean, before Kango passed, he got on the phone and told me everything, how it happened, why it happened, what he should have done. I mean, this is like a conversation. I have a few rappers now that had strokes, you know, and they called me up and they was like, well, I'm going through this, I'm going through that. And I'll say, okay, well, let me help you and get you the right people to talk to. Because there's no judgment. And I think that's one of the things that make the artist not wanna really talk to anybody. Because when you're in the public side, they think you got all the paper in the world. They think you ballin' outta control. And then all of a sudden, if you get sick and you don't have your right medical coverage, which is a big thing, because most artists are not covered medically correctly, you know, and if they do, they may have to get a Medicaid help first, something like that. They're not even set up to have a real solid insurance policy to get the right healthcare. So they come to me and they ask me what's going on and they don't know that whether you got Medicaid, Medicare, whatever, you just need to get to a doctor so we can resolve it. I had conversations where they said, nah, man, I can't go, man, they're gonna hit me with a bill and the guy had a stroke. I said, yo, forget the bill, bro. Let's go to the doctor now. We'll work all of that out later. Let's get this handled. But, you know, sometimes they don't know. So what I try to do and why Hip Hop Public Health was created is was to give them a place to go, to be able to be honest, be vulnerable, not be judged, as well as use the kids to educate some of the parents. Because sometimes when the kids talk, the parents listen. You know when they talk, you listen, you be like, you know, you're listening change. So it's all of these reasons together that I feel is important and I don't think we need to lose artists and all they need is a little bit of help. You know what I mean? Sometimes they just don't have the information. So if I can provide them with the information, I will do it every time. I get calls in the middle of the night, three, four in the morning. I'm like, what's up? Yo, this is going on now, it's okay. And what you do and what happened? All right, so we're gonna do this, you good? Okay, we'll hold off until the morning. I'll call him. When I call him, you know, he'll get on the phone and we attack it and we do what we can. I think that's what it's all about, you know? It's about helping each other and not making someone feel bad because they don't know something, you know? So Jennifer, I mean, this brings me to Music Cas. Your organization has done incredible work with artists and I was curious if you could just respond to what Dougie just shared from your perspective in terms of the type of things that you're bringing and the resources that you're connecting and the investments that you're making to try to address some of the issues Doug just brought up. So as Doug was talking, we often hear, I can't go to the doctor, I'm not insured, I don't have money, get to the doctor. There are organizations that can help you. We try to give them the information. There's a big, the obstacle also is around trust, as he was saying and feeling as if people have to jump through how many hoops to get assistance. And at Music Cares, we help, as I said, the wide scope of the community. So we've touched people in every state. We help every genre. We're very intentional in our work. We're very aware of language that we use on every phone call or correspondence. We stress everything you tell us is confidential because when someone is in trouble, it is hard enough to reach out for assistance. It's humbling. And if you add in a community like Hip-Hop perhaps, there's already a stigma in the community about reaching out for help. So now it's even that much more complex. So we have to cut through a few things. We help, I'll just talk a little bit about how we help and then a little bit about the investment. So in a nutshell, we help with basic living needs so we can pay rent, we pay mortgage, utilities, storage, car payments. We do a lot around medical and preventive care for those who are uninsured or limited insurance. So we host dental clinics, we host mammogram clinics, we host hearing health. Everything to either promote awareness so it doesn't get to that point where someone is in trouble or to help that person who already is in trouble. We do work around disaster relief and COVID is a great example of that. And lastly, the industry comes to us when it has to do with mental health and addiction and recovery. So if someone here was to call us and say, hey, I have a problem, I want help, provided you meet eligibility requirements, provided we can get in touch with a provider, we could get you into a facility today. So we act quickly and that is one of the reasons I think music here is trusted because people know we're going to get them the help that's needed. In terms of the investment in the community, we really have our feelers out. So we are at festivals, we are at conferences, we're trying to tap into genres that maybe we haven't tapped into, communities. COVID was really, I mean, for everybody, I mean, for everybody it was incredible, if that's the word, unbelievable. We started getting assistance out a week after everything shot down. And what we have seen two years later is that those people who came to us for our COVID efforts, which were, it was just money in their pocket because we knew that's what they needed, they have come back to us for our clinics, for our financial wellness workshops, for our hearing health workshops. So there needed to be that education that was out there, but they also needed to see, hey, music here is this place we can go to. And someone like Dougie here, whether it's him or a couple of other people, they're the ones who are saying call music hearers because we call them our quote ambassadors, right? You're gonna listen to a trusted friend. And when someone is in trouble, they're not thinking about what's gonna happen three months from now, they're calling at that moment. So it used to be word of mouth, I'm in trouble, who do I call, music hearers. Because of COVID and because of a greater awareness around mental health and opening up the conversation. And certainly the music industry, it is on the map now, it is not under the rug how it used to be. We're really getting into all the pockets to get into labels, getting into management companies, start talking to what's up here so it can trickle down and get people the information, which maybe years ago didn't exist. Thank you for that. And Efron, one of the things I love about HHC is that you guys are really on the ground taking care of the most vulnerable New Yorkers regardless of their ability to pay. The HHC system is one of the systems is truly payuragnostic. They will see you regardless of your ability to pay. And I'm also excited by the fact that you guys have really been supporting Elevate Nightlife and said, I was curious if you could share some of the top issues that people, whether artists, nightlife members, for example, what are the top things that is driving them to seek help within your system and how your system is adapting to take care of those needs both now and what type of adaptations did you need to make before COVID and after COVID? I think you put it greatly at the end, right? Before COVID and after COVID. It required, as you heard from the other panelists, it required a lot of energy for individuals to seek care, to learn about care, to understand it. That activation energy that it required often prevented from people getting the care that they needed in a way that helped them live healthier lives. For us at Health and Hospitals, we recognize that pretty quickly when COVID happened and it catalyzed our model to make it more easy for patients to access it, right? Or individuals to access it. Think about it from other industries, right? We've learned. If you have Amazon Prime, you could get a delivery in the middle of the night now, right? It used to be the next day, now it's in the middle of the night. If you want food delivered, we'll verse right there. If you want healthcare, well, I don't know. I might have to call Doug in the middle of the night. I might have to go to music cares. I might need to know a doctor, you know, or I might have to remember, oh, my dean from my school might be able to help me get a resource, right? That's just difficult. And when you're vulnerable, you don't have that energy to go Google it. I mean, people say that, go Google it, it's just easy. It's not that easy, right? So I think what we did at Health and Hospitals is make it simple. If you go to our website or if you hear about it on the news or the radio or wherever it is, dial a phone number or talk to a doctor now. The button literally says talk to a doctor now, right? Because we wanted to make it that easy. Many times in healthcare, the healthcare system is built for themselves in some ways because there's regulatory needs, there's other needs and so on and so forth, right? So you have to go through, download this app, sign up for this, fill out five pages of information before you speak to a human being. We thought that was a barrier and we needed to change that. We want somebody to talk to you within a minute, right? You could hold a minute and talk to somebody who's going to navigate you. Yes, we have to register you. Yes, we have to get your information and so on and so forth. But what you really care about is speaking to that clinical professional, the doctor, the psychiatrist, the mental health worker that's going to help you with your addiction or some acute issue that you're having. So we did that. We cut out all of those extra processes and it's my job, it's our job to figure out the finances and to help people, right? The city supports us and helps us with that endeavor. But at the end of the day, we have insurance products that might be difficult to navigate. So our team and my team works with the patients to figure out what they're eligible for, right? If you don't have insurance and you're eligible for it, we'll enroll you and work you through the system to make sure that you have coverage. It's not just about that interaction that we have with us, but if you need medication, you have to go get that, right? I could give you the healthcare for free, but if I don't give you the medication, it might not be as helpful, right? The subsequent appointments, subsequent things that you need that might be therapy, that might be talking to a friend, a credible messenger, so on and so forth. Those things are just as important. And I think we built a system that meets the needs of the person that's in front of us and we work with them. We try to figure out what works and what doesn't work and cater it to them. And I think that's how we have been supporting. When it comes to nightlife, I think being available 24-7, 365. I can't stress that enough, right? So if someone wants to go in the back right now and call us, we'll be there within two minutes and somebody's there to help you through that process. I think we see a lot of addiction-related issues that's been coming up, opioid and others. So we created Virtual Beep Center so anytime you wanna talk to an addiction counselor or a psychiatrist, they're there to help you through it and get you Bipinephrine or Suboxone, right? And they're able to get you that. We'll even send it to the patient's home or mail it or deliver it. We wanna enable the care and get to them as quickly as possible to reduce the harm. And then partnerships with the mayor's office of nightlife, partnerships with other trusted organizations help us get the word out and get the care to the individuals as quickly as possible so we can make an impact. Thank you for that. You know, one of the things that Efron just said is help us get the word out. One of the things that the medical community, actually one of the reasons why Doug and I started hip hop public health was really about getting the word out. You know, if you look at public health initiatives, if you look at the penetration of public health messaging in communities of color and medically underserved communities and those who really are the most vulnerable, that penetration, the data is very clear, has been very limited. It's not effective, it's not culturally tailored, it's not simple, it's not connecting, it's not emotionally connecting. And so what hip hop public health has done is we have taken hip hop as a communication medium. We, with the help of Doug, we're partnering with, we have other artists that we've worked with ranging from Ariana Grande, Jordan Sparks, DMC, Chuck, Shanti, Sol, we work with a whole host of artists and all of these artists come together to help us create those types of messages to get the word out. The message could be about the importance of self care through simple tasks like mindfulness, mindfulness, meditation, those types of things. It could be about nutrition and the importance of deconstructing nutrition into really simple actionable items like the work, the video we did with salt and peppercorn, let's talk about salt. It could be about water and the importance of hydration and drinking water like one of the videos that we made with the most recent winner of The Voice, Cam Antony, Cold River of Life. It could be about anything at all ranging from mental health to sleep but it's all about communicating these messages of health and even resources in a way that people will listen, in a way that's emotionally connecting. I think it was Maya Angelou that said that people won't remember what you say to them, people won't remember what you do to them but people will remember how you made them feel and so at Hip Hop Public Health we create those tools, those resources, those products that engage people emotionally, connect with people in a way that they will actually pay attention to that information and so that information gap is I think one of the biggest things that we have to bridge if we are to bring these resources, if we want these resources to be leveraged by the everyday person. And so back to Doug, I'm curious about your approach to mental health as an artist and you've had an incredibly successful career with all the highs and the lows, with all the struggles. I'm curious how have you been able to maintain your own mental health and what do you think are the major challenges for young artists today that makes it difficult for them to really uphold their own mental health? That's a very, very strong question. It's really, really deep because when, you know, we're just paying attention to mental health but mental health has been a problem a long time. Nobody just never talked about it. It's like when my great grandma, they used to say she had, she was seen now before they really understood that there was something called Alzheimer's. So I think that this has been a problem for a very long time and for me, I study this all the time and I'm coming up with more and more information on how do you deal with this and then like you asked, how do I deal with it? Well, I created tools that I would use to make sure that these things that I see have hurt other artists, destroyed them in a lot of ways, you know, to be able to have enough discipline and apply that discipline to make sure that I won't make those same, I won't make those same decisions. Like for example, back in the days, back in 81, believe it or not, rappers used to be on the mic and say, if you like cocaine, put your hand up. You know what I'm saying? Say blow, say cocaine for the membrane. I mean, crazy, this is a Harlem world. Talking to a guy on the side right there, he said he went to Harlem world, this is 81. So I used to be like, I said, damn, everybody, this is cocaine, this is like, you know, I'm like 12 years old, I said, yeah, say cocaine, yeah! You know what I'm like, what the hell are they doing? And then, but, people never understood that part of the influence that was happening in hip hop came out of Rick James. Give you a little history here. Rick James was very influential on a lot of the hip hop artists, but the hip hop artists that we admired, like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but James used to roll with them hard. So cocaine, you know, and then Rick got it from somebody else. So it just went on like this little pattern of a habit, you know, and I would watch it and I would watch how everybody would be happy and then I'd watch how they take a fall and I'd be standing back looking at that or, you know, at a party, drinks in the air, come on champagne, everybody, yeah! What's your favorite drink? A friend of mine owned the club. He said he never drank in his life. He said he went to the club. He said he knew it was a way that people like drinking, he make money. So they made a drink up of him. His name was Louie, called the drink, the Louie. So he come in, you want that Louie? I got the Louie for you. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. Come on, man, you gotta have a drink in your name. So he started drinking the drink every day, every time he had a party. Yeah, get a Louie. Make sure you got a Louie when he come in. God never drank. Guess what? He found out that he got so caught up in drinking because drinking is sneaky. Drinking is a sneaky one. And he come up in there and he drinks all the time and now he had to, you know, he started having a, he knew he became an alcoholic from it because he got caught up in it. He didn't see it coming. You know, I watched it in every generation, whether it was the weed, whether it was the Snoopies that turned into ecstasy, whether it was what's going on now with the pills and the lean, you know, and the synthetic weed. So the way I've always been able to escape a lot of these things is because I really, I really seen so much damage from the beginning all the way through that it made me know not to do that. And then when I looked at the food aspect of it, I started seeing, you know, you're going out every night in the middle of the night, come on, let's eat. Let's go and eat this, eat that, eat this, eat that. You're not even taking account of what you eat no more. You know, you live in this life, you know, you ball and you, you know, the fabulous life. You know, everybody look on TV and you want that life but that life that you're looking at, I mean they eating crazy, they drinking all night. They, you know, all of that is putting on weight, it's putting on pounds, but you're not paying attention to it because you're living a life. So I'd stand back and I watched that and I have a lot of discipline. So all of these things I've seen over the years made me understand that the only way you can make it through this game is to have discipline and discipline is actually freedom. People don't look at discipline like freedom because you think it's holding you back from something, but no, it's you making the decision that you decided to stop. Instead of you being caught up in it so much that you can't stop. So for me, I think mental health has a lot to do with nutrition, I think it has a lot to do with the way we handle our problems. You know, when I get stressed out sometimes I'll go take a run or I'll go take a walk. And I'm trying to tell you brothers and sisters, you have no idea how that walked. After I finished walking, I done damn near solved all the problems in the world. I'll take a walk seven miles, man. Before you know, you'd be like, yo, damn I feel so much better, man. You know, I know it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy maybe because it's so simple that you would never believe that a little walk could change your energy. Running, you know, when I'm running and I was at the new premiere for the movie Air and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, they were, we were talking after and they, one of them was playing Mr. Knight, the one who owns Nike. And they said before he made the decision to do the deal with Michael Jordan, he went and took a run. And when he took the run, he came back. He made the decision. I could relate to that because I'm telling you, sometimes when you take a walk, you take a run, it does something to you that just makes you open up some kind of different channels and it makes you see things that you normally don't see. So for me, my way of handling mental health because you have the ups and downs, the rollercoaster rides, is I think it's about humility. I think it's about trying your best to put the best inside of you. I think it's about taking exercise and using it as a tool and not looking at it as something. Whatever the exercise is, if it's walking for you, if it's riding a bike, if it's dancing, whatever it is, throw some music on. I think we have to figure out healthier ways to channel mental health. Like I think most people, and it's the last thing, but this is heavy because I thought about this today. I didn't know you was gonna ask me this question. So I was laying down, right? And my sister is going through a situation now. My sister just found out she got breast cancer. So this is crazy for us because this is my older sister. So I'm looking at, I'm going, man, and I'm thinking about how each generation, I'm thinking about my grandmother, I'm thinking about my mother, I'm thinking about my sister. I think we all think about these things because we all have family members that go through stuff. So I'm sitting there and I'm thinking and I'm saying, well, you know what, I wanna take a run. I think I'm gonna take a run and then I'm gonna analyze this. And then I sat there and I didn't wanna get up for a minute. So I said, this is interesting. I said, so this place where I'm at right now where I don't wanna get up, and I'm gonna think of so many other things that I could do right now is where most people are. And they can't get past this point to go and run because it's damn near like it had me held down in the chair. It held me down. And I said, oh no, I'm getting up. And I pushed myself through it and I cut the phone off. I blocked everything out of the way and I went and did the run. And when I did the run, it changed the energy. But if I didn't push through that and block everything, cut the phone off, yo, you gotta wait, I'm not doing that right now. I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this for me right now. I don't care what's going on, I gotta do this so I can be able to do everything else. I'd never seen that so close up in person. And it made me say that this is the problem that everybody's going through. They can't get past that. But if you push past that, you'll get to the other side. And I think that would help with mental health. Thank you. I really do. Thank you. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I just want to plug one something. I'm going to be a doctor here for just one minute. So that's six treatments that are very helpful for trauma. Dougie has talked about a few of those things. One is a healthy relationships. Very important. Two is talk therapy. Talk therapy is very important. Three is mindfulness. Mindfulness is very, very important. Doug also mentioned physical activity. Physical activity is not just the great and big rate of the body, but also the great and big rate of your mental health. Five is nutrition. I cannot overemphasize the importance of healthy nutrition. And six is sleep. Proper sleep hygiene. Even if you're working on the night shift, you make sure you catch your sleep on the daytime. It's very important for the brain for its function, for its homeostasis to have good sleep hygiene. So those are the six things. But I want to talk to ask you both the question, both Efron as well as Jennifer, about stigma. And how you guys address the, how do you guys, what strategies you guys used to overcome the kind of help seeking stigma associated with mental health? So I don't know, do you want to go first? You know, I was just thinking about stigma and fear, right? That's the barrier that keeps it away. I think we say mental health because that's how we have learned to think about it. It's mental health is different. Maybe someone's crazy if they seek it out. And that's part of the stigmatizing language that prevents people from seeking that care because they've seen it on TV. They've heard it from maybe coworkers or others that say, oh, something's wrong with you. But if you twist your ankle and you go to the doctor, no one says that. It's like, oh yeah, of course you got to get a bandaid or you got to get this or you got to get that. If you need to get a shot, everyone's okay with it. So I think we have to think about it as help overall, right? Mental health just aspect of another part of your body, another part of something that needs to be taken care of just like you take care of your body. And for us, the way we promote that is to talk about it as just another option within our express care service line, right? There's sexual health. There is maybe behavioral health providers. There are urgent care providers or emergency medicine providers. And it's just another option. And it's available seamlessly within the suite of options through when you connect with a provider. And you pick which provider you wanna speak to at that point in time. The other aspect of it that I think it's very important is to de-stigmatize by taking away the fear, the shame that might come with seeking care, talking about care, so on and so forth. I think in the community we often think of it as specialized but it's really not that special, right? When we talk to a good friend and we reach out and say seek their advice, is that any different from talking to a professional? A little different, because maybe professionals being trained with it and they don't have the same trust that you've built with that friend but it can be that relationship and we have to start talking about it that way, right? It's similar to a trusted friend who has been trained and who's gonna help you through a situation. And I think we've been trying to get that message out to the community and to talk about it as just another thing that you take care of day to day just like you would of any other need. Six things you spoke about is a great example of that and mental health care is one part of that. And Jennifer, how do you address stigma? When you said it, I just thought very, very slowly. I wish it could be quicker. We are always hearing about stigma, yes, and also the fact that people do not want to have other people know that they are seeking help. So someone wants to get help but they don't want the band member to know, they don't want their tour manager to know, they don't want it out in this industry which at some point they think becomes very small because it's going to affect another job, another gig, what have you. We are always encouraging people to seek assistance and we're also very careful about the language because some people don't connect with mental health. Maybe it's mental wellness, anything that maybe has the word mental in it, they're not so great about. And we know that it affects every sphere of their life. So maybe we go in through a back door and that's how we get to the mental health piece. And similar, we also say, hey, if you had a broken leg you're gonna go to a doctor. Let's figure out what's gonna be the most helpful way to address what's currently going on. Absolutely talk therapy and what we also know is that talk therapy doesn't work for everybody. So let's figure out all or perhaps some other ways that might work. One of the barriers in the industry is lack of funds and or even I would say even if you're insured, typically it's not gonna cover behavioral health. So that's another hurdle. Music Cares, we have free recovery support groups. We have affinity groups, so we have a support group for the black music community, LGBT women and our goal is to make the supportive environments so people can relate and they're identifiable. And I think that helps to take away some of the stigma once somebody gets in. But as I said earlier, the conversation has to continue. So for instance, May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I will say every single day is Mental Health Awareness Month or day. September is Recovery Month. Every single day is Recovery Month or Suicide Prevention Awareness. So we just can't forget that and we need to continue the momentum. Thank you for that. And so a question for you Doug and I'm happy for any of the panelists to chime in as we're talking about nightlife and supporting our nightlife community. And a lot of nightlife community members have non-traditional work situations. And going to the doctor's office might be the time where they're trying to get some sleep or catching up with other important things. So I'm curious, what type of, how do we support and make it easy for the nightlife community to be able to access timely care that they might need? I think we bring the care to them. That's the solution, right? I spoke about it earlier, I think integrating the care to their needs, catering to their needs is the way to partially solve the issue, right? We're always going to have some financial challenges that will need to be addressed through advocacy or elected leaders and other means so that we have more awareness but also more funds to cover the needs of the population. And I think the access part of it is bringing the care to them with a credible messenger, with a credible person that is in front of them, helping them navigate that system, right? One of the ways ExpressCare addresses this is our providers represents the communities, right? They're black and brown individuals who are providing the service, right? So when a person gets on the call or they know, right? They already know the community, they're able to relate, they're able to reflect on the needs without having to explain or somebody from another location, right? Telehealth, we're in the telehealth space. Many times it's across borders throughout the country. You might be talking to somebody from Kansas. Kansas is not the same as New York City, right? Brooklyn's not gonna be the same as the Bronx. It's not going to be there as Queens, right? There's many similarities but there is microcultures and differences. And I think the more the provider base and the staff understand that including what the nightlife lifestyle is, what the challenges are, what that working life might look like and we could bridge those gaps by integrating the care into those spaces. Thank you. And Doug, you and I have had a lot of conversations about getting folks to get checked. And I'm just curious, what types of approaches do you use as a credible messenger yourself to get people to understand the importance of getting checked and to actually pull the trigger and actually do it? You know what's crazy about that is that most people do not want to get checked unless something is wrong. You do not want to go to the dentist, definitely to the dentist. Dentist people, look, there's nothing wrong. Nothing happening. I'm eating, everything is cool. I'm not going. That's the norm in regards to doctors. I'm a doctor and I'm scared to go to the doctor. So. Is that right? Is that what I'm saying? Well, I thought I got to talk to the appointment. Right, right. It's like, I don't even, but the one thing that I feel and I always say this too is that an ounce of prevention beats a ton of cure. And if you just take that, for me, getting a checkup is important because I move in a way that most people do not move. I'm traveling all the time. I just flew in for this. So I'm constantly, hey, this is love, baby, this is love. Love. You know, and honestly, I've seen so many people go through things that they didn't have to go through just because they didn't get a checkup. And I watched it. I watched it. And I can go through a series of different artists that I see this happen with all the time. I remember my father, he said he had some tingling in his hand. And I said, okay, well, you know, I said, did you go and get it? Did you go and check it? I said, nah, you know, I was calling you first because you know, I don't trust him. And he's 82. So he's like, I don't trust nobody. He comes from that era, you know, where, you know, the water was just for the white people. It's for the black, he's that guy. So he's like, I don't trust nobody. I said, okay, I got it. I said, when was the last time you got a checkup? He said, 47 years ago. I said, okay, well, we need to go get a checkup. He said, you coming with me? I said, yes. So I went with him. He found out he had high blood pressure. He never knew it. So the tingling is remember this? He said the tingling in his hand was like, and then they were trying to tell him to take this, that he was, I'm not doing none of that. So I had to bring him in on the situation. And my father, we was talking. I said, look, I'm gonna talk to him this way. You go this way. And we sitting there, I'm trying, I know some of y'all fathers or mothers, you know what I'm talking about. I know you know. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna approach this. I said, yo, dad, you don't have to take the medicine but you could take it with you just in case you need it. But you know you gotta change your diet because all of the salt and every year, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm cutting out all the salt. I'm eating garlic. And then so he was on the side and he gave him the side of it where if you don't take this medicine, this might can occur. Now I'm gonna speed the story up and say not too long ago, he was, could my father travel with me to do shows? You know, everybody love him. Like all the hip hop guys with your pop set, man, with your pops, you know, like, and he talks to them and stuff. So this time he was coming to a show and he turned around and he came back because he had a mini stroke. Now he didn't wanna take the medicine. He started getting real happy and started eating salt like crazy again, not really realizing that's what he was doing. But he went back home and then we got on the phone with him after this little thing I just told you about. And now he's listening different. And what I'm trying to tell you is that most people do not wanna listen to this. They don't wanna hear this conversation. But what I do is I keep it so real with the artist, with my father, with all of my friends. And I tell him, I tell him, I say, look man, you will be better off. Even with Kango, he said, Doug, I've seen all of these signs but I never went. I said, why? He said, cause I was scared. He said, and I don't trust him. So I think that there's something in there that's making us feel. And I'm just talking as the hip hop community, just like when I put Jolil on the phone, he was like, yo, is it good, Doug? Is it good? I said, it's good, Joe. And if I didn't say it was good, he's like, I don't wanna talk to them because nobody trusts nobody. You see, so I think the piece that we're missing is that I think that the doctors have to be more personable with you. They have to show that they care. They can't be just, who's next? Who's next on that appointment? Who's next? And I think the system got them running so hard that they can't even take the time out to be personal with you most of the time. Cause they got somebody else coming in, just like with a dentist. A friend of mine told me he don't wanna go. He said, I'm petrified of the dentist. He said, you know why? They sit me in the chair. They do the drill. He said, all I keep hearing is that noise in my ear. And he said, it just stresses me out. He said, I have anxiety attacks and all kinds of stuff because he said, cause the dentist don't even talk to me. He said, he don't even say, hello, y'all, how you doing? You all right? Yeah, is everything, like, you have to put some human connection in this. Without that piece, nobody is gonna go. And if they go, they're only going because they have no choice. You understand what I'm trying to say? Like, I think that that's that missing link on that side. But what we do is we keep pushing it. I talked to my friend, Joe, you gotta go get a checkup. Rick Ross didn't wanna get a checkup. He was having, he had diabetes. He was passing out, having seizures. It's crazy, man. So I take that time to let him know, hey, I've been doing this for a minute. I'm sharing this information with you. I hope you trust me. And they trust me because I'm not coming to them for nothing. They know I'm coming with love. So I think that that's the piece that's missing. That's mine. Thank you so much, thanks. And I just wanna, to wrap this up, I was just maybe, Jennifer, if there's one thing that you want folks to know about music has, what would that be? People do not need to jump through the 50 hoops that they think they might have to. And we get what it is to work in the music community. And we're not gonna question that. We know the rigors. Thank you. And Efron, if there's one thing you want folks to know about express care and the work that you do at HHC. We're here for you. We're here with open arms. You could reach us from any time that's convenient to you. And don't worry about the finances. We're going to help you navigate that process. And if you can't afford to get care, Health and Hospitals will help cover that. Okay, so I just wanna, again, thank Photographiska for putting this panel together. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I think there was a lot of great information that was shared. I wanna thank Ariel, again, for bringing us all together. And I'm gonna ask her to come back to the stage to help with the Q and A part of the night. So let's give her a round of applause to this incredible panel. Thank you, obviously, to Dr. Williams, Efron, Dougie, and Jennifer. You know, it's been an incredible privilege to be the director of the Office of Nightlife at the mayor's office of media and entertainment because the power is being able to elevate all of the good work and resources that are available that people don't know about. That is the real power of having a seat in the mayor's office is to be able to convene and to bring awareness and to promote the good work that people do. When people say there's nothing available for me, there's nothing that's free, there's nothing to help me, my job at the Office of Nightlife has been to say that's not true, there's a lot out there for you. And if you don't remember, can't remember where to go about music cares or hip hop partnership or health in hospitals, you can go to the Office of Nightlife website, go to Elevate Health and find tremendous resources all assembled together to make it even easier for you. And we have night school every month that has webinars and trainings and teachings every month on wellness, harm reduction, navigating and opening a bar or restaurant. And so that's really what the Office of Nightlife is here to be a non-enforcement resource and liaison and advocate for this industry. And this has really been a labor of love and a lot of years in the making to be able to bring these people together under the Elevate Nightlife umbrella to make all of this available and let people know there is help and that you are not alone and that it is available for free and to take care of yourself, right? Because we need you in the world making beautiful music and inspiring us all. So with that said, before we get to Q and A I'll just let you know that right after Q and A the museum has offered to bring Jelaine Bell of the Urban Yoga Foundation who leads a meditation in this museum every Tuesday at six o'clock. And so after the Q and A we're going to have a little meditation and healing in this room for those who'd like to stay. So with that said, does anyone have any questions? I'm curious if any of you can speak on any initiatives that are happening or you would like to see happen to have less of an impact or less of a response of police around mental health, acute issues and more of a response by organizations like yours. I think that's a good question for Efron. So at Health and Hospitals we have something called the Be Heard Program which dispatches a mental health practitioner or social worker with the team with FDNY rather than sending police response. It's something that's been piloted over the past several years and is expanding and we're continuously working to expand that program so that we're able to take care of the patients or the people that need help with individuals that are trained to do that healthcare. I think the other resource that it became national this year is 988, right? Being able to call that number and being able to access for mental health rather than calling 911, it diverts some of that attention and gets the right professional to that individual. Lastly in New York City, we have NYC Well which is another resource for all New York City residents that could chat, that could talk to somebody or get connected to care like Express Care at Health and Hospitals. Hello, my name is Pete Flores. I work for New York City Transit Authority and I wanted to find out about spiritual health. Spiritual health. Do you guys at Music Cat provide any spiritual health? Can you be more specific? What do you mean by spiritual health? Spiritual health in terms of like religion and your spiritual being. There's mental being and then there's spiritual being. I would say without thinking about it for a long time that is one of the examples if talk therapy isn't your thing then you find somewhere that does provide that spiritual fulfillment. It's gonna be different for every person. That's a quick answer to it. What about HHC? I think spiritual health is available, right? There's pastors, there's other professionals that's available within the health system or outside of it, right? We work with our community-based organizations to connect patients to services that they feel closer to. So that's working with churches, mosques, other entities that exist that could provide that spiritual guidance in addition to the professional help from the healthcare field. And we typically have, we make available to the patient depending on what faith that patient is. We have a pastor, we have a rabbi, an imam, different faith denominations. So when a patient is going through a crisis, physical or mental health crisis, those options are available and we can call our pastoral care services whatever denomination the patient is interested in to actually meet with the patient and provide some of those spiritual services. But I really believe in meditation as well. I think meditation is a great way to center you spiritually and hopefully we'll be doing some of it after the Q&A session. All right, you guys doing. From listening to, I think I have two questions. From listening to Dougie and the stories that he's told about some of the artists that have gone to some of these mental issues and some of these things that troubled them. I wanna know, do you guys have a plan or for us a preventing prevention plan as far as like we wasn't really raised to really like love our body and respect our body as much as we need to. So is there like a plan to actually educate people on the importance of health in general and mental health to actually prevent even going to the process when he mentioned where as when he had to push himself through that little hump to actually go for the walk. Like it should be a normalization aspect to where the community around him should be promoting this body health instead of promoting, hey, go get that money and we'll go to work. Yeah, we gotta work. We gotta stay up all night. We gotta do this. But I think this should be a plan or is there a plan to actually make mental health and body health primary versus career and money and getting up in the actual level of your career aspect? So thank you for that question. I'll just answer briefly. So we at Hip Hop Public Health believe that this needs to happen young in school systems, elementary, middle, high school. By the time you get to adulthood, a lot of those stresses of the crude there's damage already to the body, to the spirit, to the soul. And so we truly believe that building that those resources, building those awareness, building that education into young people, into the youngest of us is we have a saying that it's easier to build up a child and repair an adult. And so what we do at Hip Hop Public Health is that we're creating resources, mental health resources. We're creating wraparound curriculums for educators in school systems across this country. And we're creating them in a way that's culturally tailored, culturally adapted that centers the lived experiences of the children that we're trying to reach. And so by educating these children about these issues we begin to destigmatize the topic. We begin to increase their confidence around care seeking behavior. We begin to increase their confidence to have a conversation about these issues. Because if you build up that resistance when you're young that resistance is gonna stay with you as you get older. But if you dissolve that resistance through education, through love, nurture, caring, and culturally tailored education experience through the lived experience of that child and that child's context, then those young people start to grow up with the agency that's required to deal with these stresses. And that's where we at Hip Hop Public Health are putting the focus in. And let me add a last piece to that on what he's saying. He's talking about the children and growing up, it's like planting a new seed in the ground and you're gonna do it right this time. But what about right now? And how do we deal with what we're dealing with? And most of the time we have limited tools on how to deal with life. And we're running around, let's say look at it as a toolbox, we got a hammer in there, but we need a wrench for this, we need a screwdriver for this. We don't even know what tool we need for this. Meaning life is always coming at you with all these different things. So through life we try to get as many tools as we can to handle some of these things that we didn't even know we were gonna be handling. A lot of the stuff that we go through now, you didn't know you was gonna go through this when you grew up. Your mom and your pops didn't tell you how crazy life can really be and how in your mind, sometimes the biggest battles you have is with yourself and your own mind. That voice in your mind is the battle that you have with all the time. How do you beat that voice? How do you handle that voice? You need tools to be able to handle it. He said something about spirit. There's the mind, there's the body and there's the spirit, right? So now the mind is playing little tricks on you. Sometimes it creates doubt on things that you shouldn't be doubtful about. You was confident about it yesterday. What happened? What was it that happened within this little bit of time? This isn't, I think that we have to understand that we're all in the process and sometimes you have to allow the process to take its course and sometimes you're not gonna have the answer now. You're gonna have the answer later on why you went through that just now. But if you're not patient enough to go through the process and do things that relax you, you're gonna trip out. So I watch artists sometimes just trip out and then when you drinking and you smoking and you taking pills and you sniffing and you compile that on top of the same thing we're dealing with when we don't do none of that, can you imagine what's going on in the person's head? So I think that we have to practice better habits. We have to be more disciplined and we have to take more responsibility which gives us the ability to respond. But if we just blame and don't relax like what we're getting ready to do, if you can't relax, if you can't breathe and take a moment and let the process take its course, I think sometimes we make a lot of these things worse than what they are. Tools in the toolbox. Tools, tools in the toolbox. That's my quickest answer cause you can't really answer these deep questions. You're asking without going all the way in but hopefully you get what my spirit is trying to give you cause I don't want to give you a superficial surfacey kind of answer cause that's not the kind of question you asked, you see? But you gotta let the process, you have to breathe through the process, you know? Like last thing man, my mother had Alzheimer's. My mother passed from Alzheimer's. I was like, this is crazy. How can I deal with this situation? I'm on tour, all these different things. And I was like, why is this? And what happened is when my mother went through what she went through and I had to take care of her, I never understood why I had to deal with this but after it prepared me for everything else that came after that. So now I asked myself, what I've been prepared for what I'm dealing with right now if I didn't go through this, probably not. Did I ask for that? No, but the way that I'm handling it, it showed me that this right here prepared me for that. So I learned that life has a process and everybody here, you have your own individual process. Mine is different than yours. But if you don't go through that process or you start trying to medicate yourself through that process, you might make that process worse for yourself. You just have to breathe through the process. So I wanna bring music, I wanna bring Jennifer and Efron into this conversation because Doug mentioned tools in the toolbox. And I think that it's critically important for us to understand that there is a spanner and a screwdriver and a hammer in the toolbox. Some people just don't know where to find them. And so perhaps, Jennifer, you can say a little bit about the tools in the toolbox and you too, Efron. Well, when you were talking about process, what I keep on thinking, and I'm coming for the music makers here or the people who know the music makers here, so I'm gonna kind of skew away from the tools right now, but I think what's really important is we need to debunk the myth of the tortured artist because that is what has been, that's the common thread through the decades. And people can make music, people can be creative without that extra stuff in their heads. There are tools out there for you. There are support groups. There are other sober musicians. There are sober jams that you could find. They exist and I really wanna stress that it's easier said than done, but it's a myth. And we need not perpetuate that myth anymore. I think from the tool's perspective, helplessness comes through, right? People think of that as they don't have any tools. I think everything can be a tool. This talk is a tool. A friend is a tool. A health organization is a tool. All those things are important and they play a different part. So I think we have to get the message across to individuals that it is a process. It is a day-to-day thing that we have to strive towards and we can ask for help and we can leverage whatever's in our disposal that's day, right? And get that to the next phase of life that helps us really navigate it, right? And that could be calling Doug at 4 a.m. or it could be music cares and getting access to a support group or some financial help or it could be going to a healthcare system and getting a doctor to see you, right? Or it could be just one of you in the audience that's a friend that's there to just support, right? So I think the tool is everything around us and it's just recognizing that everything can be a tool. I will take maybe one more question. First of all, I'm a music recording artist and a striving artist from New York City and the first thing I wanna say is thank you, Dougie, for your part of, I'm a hip hop head, so thank you for what you have done in hip hop. That's first and foremost. You guys have tapped in some of the things of my question. My question is something hasn't been directed, which it has a lot to do with mental care, which is a segment of emotional awareness. See what I'm saying? Because we're speaking about the mental, which is logical, but to get to the logic, you have to, it's emotional, it's specifically for an artist because of what we're going through that nobody really, and it goes back to what he said earlier, whether we're low or high, we carry an image that we have to maintain, which is that image to the audience is everything. It's not only okay, it's great. So that's where I believe it's the fear to even come into the middle grounds of saying, I have a problem, and I believe that's an emotional awareness. Do you guys think that you have a special segment in between that mental care awareness that will enlighten some of the artists? Before, maybe I'm sure you want to comment. I just want to use one analogy. And I'm not an artist, but I connected with what you were saying very deeply. The reason why is that as a doctor, we're not really supposed to have emotional problems. We're not really supposed to have depression or anxiety. We're supposed to be doctors. You have an image as an artist to preserve and to protect, but the truth of the matter is we're human, right? And even though it's hard for a doctor to go to another doctor and say, I've been crying for the last week, I can't sleep, I can't eat, you worry about what that other doctor is gonna think of you. And even though you know that your medical record is sealed and protected, you just don't feel comfortable about being vulnerable. And so I understand where you're coming from. And so we have systems in place for physicians to address those types of issues. And organizations like Music Care were established to support the privacy of artists in the same way as I have organizations within healthcare to support the privacy of my emotional needs. And perhaps Jennifer, you can say a couple of things about that privacy and the importance of making artists feel safe about their emotional needs. So I think what you said about having to, right, portray something with the advent of social media, like everything is out there within seconds. That wasn't the case in the 80s, right? People didn't know within seconds if you had a good show or not. Music transcends emotions, right? And I know I connect with an artist if they're showing me some emotion. I mentioned earlier that people will often be fearful about reaching out for help specifically around mental health and or addiction because they think that it will get around and then they will not get the job. I always say, well, you're gonna lose the job anyways if you're gonna continue to use. So speaking specifically to addiction. Music cares, recognizes that fragility. And when someone comes to us and says, hey, I need help. And if they meet our eligibility requirements, whatever comes our way is completely confidential. If a manager is the one who sent you, I would say to you, do you want me to mention anything to the manager if he calls me? If you say no, okay, it's no. The integrity of the artist, crew, whoever it is calling us is paramount. And I think that is one of the things that music cares upholds in the strictest of ways is confidentiality. So I want everybody here to know that and take that away because there always is a fair again of reaching out. But what you said about connection and emotion, that's, and I say whether it's you or somebody else, it's hard to believe when you're in that moment of struggle, but you're not alone. No one here is alone. And I just want to thank everyone here for such an engaging discussion. I want to thank our panelists, Jennifer from MusicCast, the incredible Dougie Fresh icon and just the incredible work that Efron is doing at Express Care at NYC. Thank you to the audience. Thank you to Photograph Fisca. Thank you everyone so much for tonight. And with that, I think we're gonna socialize now. Thank you guys. Oh, meditation, that's right. All again for joining us this evening. We invite you all to take a walk through the Photograph Fisca Museum and to see the exhibit for 50 years of hip hop celebrating this beautiful culture. Thank you again so much for joining.