“I’m in the building with the future,” Lil B proclaimed as he took the stage at NYU last night for his much-anticipated speech. Gearing up for the event, he had said the speech would change lives. I don’t know if it did that, exactly, but it sounds like it was pretty awesome.

The rapper framed the speech like a Quaker wedding, inviting anyone to talk and chime in on the conversation if they were so moved. And from there he began advocating a utopian vision of peace, love and understanding.

“I specialize in love. I love to spread love – that’s what I’m here to do,” he said. “I didn’t come here with a scripted speech. All I can do is come here and spread love.”

Along with hilarious impromptu bits like, “I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat. I adopted it straight from the ASPCA, you feel me?” he did, as promised, drop some heavy-duty inspirational wisdom:

• “This is the big thing I want to speak on – nobody asked to be born. I didn’t ask to be who I was – nobody did that. You didn’t ask for that. So when you see people, forgive and accept. You gotta open your mind, and say life is hard. Kinda. Kinda hard…”

• “A lot of the tone I see is like, If you get hit, hit back. Why is that? You can have million stones thrown at you, and you can still be positive.”

• “I had a lot of hood credibility. I worked hard to get some of my imaginary hood respect. But at the end of the day, there’s no respect in being violent and a coward for no reason. There’s no honor in picking on people. There’s no honor in senseless violence. There’s no honor in war.”

Check out video excerpts as well as a stream of the full speech below.