Young Guru, best known for producing Jay-Z’s albums, may be on tour in Europe. But he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remix the teenage singers, MCs and thinkers who contributed their vocals at TEDYouth. At the event on November 17, World Up — a non-profit dedicated to making the world smaller through hip hop, technology and education — set up their Living Remix Project and recorded dozens of teenagers sharing how TEDYouth inspired them through harmonies, rhymes and beats. Here, Young Guru’s remix of this amazing material, starting with his own talk from session 1 of the event.

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And here is a longer version of the track, spun together by World Up’s Interactive Music Director, Spazecraft, on the spot during session 2.

“I have this sticker on one of my books that says, ‘Who’s gonna rock the spot?’ And it’s there for a reason. It’s like, okay, no matter what you did, no matter how many hits I have, no matter how many number one albums I have, what am I doing today?” —Young Guru interviewed by Nia Ashley

“Growing up in Hawaii and speaking the two languages tuned me into English. For starters, we do weird things with verbs in pidgin. We conjugate verbs strangely. If in English we would say, ‘I went to the store yesterday,’ in pidgin you would say, ‘Yesterday, I went go store.’ You say, ‘I went go.’ So I think you become aware of verbs, because you do them differently. But mostly I focus on verbs because after years and years of teaching and writing and editing myself, I realized that’s the one thing you can do to most change your writing.” —Connie Hale interviewed by Sadie Cruz

“I think it’s such a natural human endeavor to understand: what is our place in the universe? We have this amazing planet, and all this amazing stuff going on around us, but where does that fit into the scheme of things? And we can look out there and see the other planets and they’re visible. And you can see they’re not so different from us, and you think, ‘Why isn’t there life there?’ If you look further, you see other stars and other solar systems, and what if there’s life there? What if it’s like us? What might be different? I think it’s just a human desire to explore and to understand.” —Bobak Ferdowsi as interviewed by Nia Ashley