“My message has always been ‘mindset,’” Jeezy tells Ebro during episode four of Apple Music’s The Message. “If you think that success is tangible things—a big crib you bought to live in, and this life you about to live—you already lost. When I jumped off the porch, I knew that I wanted to elevate and do things different. I didn't jump off the porch and be like, 'Yo, I'm going to be the illest MC in the world,' it wasn't that. It was like, 'How do I get from A to Z and put myself and the people around me in a better position without getting caught up?'” Jeezy’s mission was clear from the outset: As a young rapper in Atlanta, he told us every chance he got that he’d come to “motivate the thugs,” and album by album he doled out wisdom universal enough to motivate whoever it was that was listening. He got his start making trap music, but even at their most celebratory, Jeezy albums have always been about survival. “All of these things and these stories I tell you in music, I've went through them,” he says. “But somebody else has went through them and they didn't come out on top because they let it break them. I've had friends that I love right now to this day that got caught up and still smoking crack. I got friends that was robbing when we was young and got 20-, 40-, 50-year sentences. So I knew right then and there that wasn't the way that I wanted to go.” In 2008, Jeezy broke the naming convention of his highly successful Thug Motivation series to release The Recession, a sort of State of the Union address for the streets that received a sequel in 2020's The Recession 2. For his The Message playlist, Jeezy selected the most pertinent songs from both projects as the best representation of who he is both in and out of the booth. “If you listen to the new album, if you see what I'm doing on any of my platforms, to my personal life, to anything that I stand for, I'm just being the best version of myself,” Jeezy says. ”When I get up every morning, I want to give the world everything I got to give, because I know once I'm no longer [here], I can't take none of that with me. I want to live full and die empty.”