Last October, Jay-Z and Nas were seen publicly together for the first time in almost 10 years, coming together twice onstage to declare unity. But this time it’s different. It’s been a couple of months since they first shocked the world, and now the alliance has become official: Nas is signed to Def Jam, and he and Jay are on the same team.

Nas agreed that even though he and President Carter were each other’s toughest opponents in a war of words, they never lost respect for one another.

“In the midst of a battle, you never know how it’s gonna turn out,” Nas explained. “All you know is that you’re gonna fight to the finish. In the middle of it, that’s how it was. It was always respect, it wasn’t that he wanted to gun me down or I wanted to gun him down. It was never that. That’s not how real bosses move or real men move.”

Now that Nas is officially partnering with Jay-Z, the two said, they’ll definitely be working together