Jaden Smith Is Changing Professions: ‘I Am Becoming a Full-Time Inventor’ + talks A$ap roc

Jaden Smith is changing things up.

“I want the world to know that I am switching professions and that I am becoming a full-time inventor,” the multi-hyphenate tells Complex. “I’m going to spend all of my time inventing new technologies because I think I’m better at that than making music.”

This might sound jarring considering he just dropped a new album, ERYS. But don’t worry, music is still aligned with his purpose. “I’m still going to make music because I invent new songs,” he assures us. “I invent new ways to make music, but I’m not a musician.”

At just 21 years old (his milestone birthday came just three days ago on July 8), Jaden has already begun to live up to the flashy new title. He is inventing new fashion trends, new systems with a purpose of changing the world, and of course, a new sound. In 2019 alone, he expanded his JUST Water brand and created filtration systems for the people of Flint, Michigan; he dropped ERYS, the antagonistic alter ego to 2017’s SYRE; and he launched the first “I Love You” restaurant on wheels in Los Angeles, which delivered dozens of vegan meals to the homeless.

That’s only the beginning. Jaden speaks about each project with intense calculation and passion. “I’m not going to stop until I’m like Elon Musk,” he declares.

What are your thoughts on ASAP Rocky’s current detainment in Sweden? You said you were boycotting on Twitter.
Yeah, no, I can't do it. We can't do it right now. Definitely not right now. Us as the hip-hop community. I really feel like what's happening right now is not okay, and I'm so, so, so upset. I want to get Rocky out and they keep not allowing people to visit him, unless it's his lawyer, and changing his time when his trial is going to happen, and pushing it back two weeks. It's so sad because I want to be with him right now to celebrate. And beyond all that, that's just my homie and I don't want him to be in jail—especially not somewhere he can't be visited, or where we don't know how he's doing. It's just really sad. Me and my family are continuing to reach out to his team to try to figure out how we can get involved and what we can do to.


So no more music?
No, no. I'm still going to make music because I invent new songs. I invent new songs, I invent new ways to make music. But I'm not a musician. I'm an inventor. And Elon Musk is my idol and I'm not gonna stop until I'm like Elon Musk.


What responsibility did you feel personally to go out and create a Water Box for the people of Flint when the government was not doing as much?
What inspired that was we have water engineers at JUST that build water filtration systems for us, but massive ones. We were able to put a water filtration system in the bottom of the Cedar Sinai here in L.A. that saves Cedars-Sinai up to a 100,000 gallons of water a day. This new water filtration system that we put in helps them recycle water and reuse water to cool down the machine. So the engineers that designed the JUST Water filtration systems that we have in Glens Falls, we just thought, “Can we make a super small filtration system?" I had a meeting with the One World Vision Board, and we were talking about filtration systems. I was like, "Yo, let's make a filtration system and let's put it in Africa in places where they have water but it's just not clean. Let's put a filtration system in Africa and let's provide for an entire village. Then let's get that village portable solar panels, and let's keep doing that to different places in Africa and keep going and going."


We were like, "Okay, cool. But we really need to pilot this project before we go all the way to Africa and do this. If we don't know if it's going to fully work." So we said, let's try to find someplace closer to us that has serious water problems and let's pilot the project there. Then we'll eventually take it to Africa. And then we were like, Flint is having serious water problems right now. So let's do a Water Box, a small filtration system, one that's portable. Let's design a new one and put it in Flint.

Do you ever get upset or disheartened at the fact that water, which is basically the most important thing for humans, is hard for people to access? Does that ever blow your mind in a sense?
Everything blows my mind, but yes, it does. That does blow my mind. That does make me very upset and that's why we started it. So by 2020 we're going to have five water filtration systems in place.

Can't that just change the situation significantly for them?
It's not an infrastructure change, but that definitely does tell everyone in Flint that, “Hey, even if people stop donating bottles of water to you, you still have another source within the city. You have five sources within the city.” And one of the Water Boxes that we're building, we're actually teaching Kettering University in Flint how to build it. Now these university kids can be like, “Oh sh1t. We know how to build it now. If we really raise the money for ourselves, at least we know how to do it.” We just want to teach people how to fish, you know? This isn't the ultimate fix for Flint, but at least the people of Flint know that we're open to the conversation of how to make it better, and that we care about them, and that they have a source of clean water within their own city for the first time in so long. It does 10 gallons every 60 seconds. So if you have a 10 gallon drum of water, if you had two 10 gallon drums of water, you can take all of that back to your house.

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