The following is a conversation with RZA, the rapper,
record producer, filmmaker, actor, writer, philosopher,
Kung Fu scholar, and the mastermind
of the legendary hip hop group Wu Tang Clan.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, here's my conversation with RZA.
In the Tao of Wu, you write,
when my mother left the physical world,
I lost one of my main links to the universe.
They say that you have an umbilical cord
and an aetheric cord,
which is the invisible cord that attaches you to your soul,
your mother's soul, and all other souls.
When one passes away, you really lose something.
It's physical and mental.
It's real.
Part of you dies.
What have you learned about life from your mother?
I mean, I learned life itself from my mother.
You know, being one of 11 children
and seeing the sacrifice that she gave to us,
therefore given to life,
it's really the greatest lesson of life.
The thing that shook me as I wrote those words
was,
was coming up young
with arrogance, confidence, knowledge of myself.
They called me the sciences.
We was taught, you're the supreme being.
In order to be the supreme being,
you gotta be supreme amongst other beings.
I understand that more now than I did then,
because then it was so literal.
You know, the word God derived basically
from the Greek language, as they say,
and it meant wisdom, strength, and beauty.
And yeah, we could have that.
But the power to control life and death
is something that you would assume is a God trait.
So now here you are saying that you're a God, right?
And you're reading the Bible,
how Jesus brought back glass of us.
And you know, now here's your turn to do something.
And when my mother was laying there in the hospital bed
and it was no longer coming out of her lungs
and going into her lungs,
where's my power to bring her back to life?
So you can't truly be God, you're powerless.
Yeah, or God is not the definition
that we need to use to describe it
because it's a translation of wisdom, strength, and beauty.
So you could be that.
So I'm answering your question,
what did my mother teach me about life?
I learned that day on her physical passing,
that okay.
You know what I mean, there's a physical me.
Do you think about her, you miss her?
Of course.
I keep my mother in my prayer every day.
And the thing I pray the most
beyond giving thanks is I pray that her name
is honored and remembered by my family.
I don't know if the world's gonna remember that, right?
Even though if you watch my movie, Love, Beach, Rhymes,
I named the school in that movie after my mother
just to leave it somewhere else.
Yeah, in physical space.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, painful.
The pain of my mother's passing is indescribable.
Only until it happens to a person they know
and then they won't describe it either.
Only the people that lost their mother,
they could look at each other and they got this nod.
You know what I mean?
But one other thing happened to me
was the joy of life hit me differently.
And I think it was the realization
of my own mortality versus my immortality.
It's a big, big thing.
And I don't know if we'll get to expound on that,
but there was a joy that overcame me
because I was kind of free of a certain illusion
about the immortality of my physical being
versus the mortality of my physical being.
And I was like, okay, wow, I understand.
So that was the first or the hardest realization
you've experienced that you're mortal?
Yeah, that, yeah.
And I'll say mortal and what you're looking at here physically,
I won't say my soul is mortal, right?
I'll say it's immortal because at the end of the day,
it's just like I could sit here
and I could just hum, please, please, please,
by James Brown.
But James Brown is not going to come in here and do that.
So in some sense, James Brown is still here
in another sense.
It's gone.
It's sold us here.
It's sold us here.
Wow.
Well, it lives through you by you singing it.
It lives through you by you listening to it, celebrating it.
And the hope is that the human species continues
to celebrate the great minds and the great creations of the past.
I will add this to that equation.
When I say it's immortal,
I don't think it's not just only because somebody sings it, right?
It's like, where's the fire right now?
It's in the air.
You just got to spark the spark.
Yeah.
So it's always there.
Are you afraid of death?
No, I'm not afraid of death.
I'm not trying to see it.
I'm not watching that nowhere near me, right?
Because all I know is life, right?
My life is living.
I read a lot of ancient texts.
People probably know about me.
And I love one of the great teachers named Bodhidharma.
And there was a thing written in one of the books of his
or one of the teachings of his.
And somebody asked him a similar question.
You're scared of death.
Or what are you going to be after you die?
And his answer was, I don't know.
He had answers to everything.
But he was like, I don't know.
He doesn't know that.
So yeah, because I haven't died yet.
Well, the uncertainty to some people is terrifying.
Not knowing what's on the other side of the door.
Yeah.
I mean, especially when you're young.
You know, as a kid, fear permeated my life.
You know what I mean?
You know, I was actually watching horror movies and
I believed in all type of supernatural things that could
or can't happen.
I thought I saw things as well.
And you know, whether it was being projected from my own mind
or whether it was there visible to me.
I don't know, right?
But life is beautiful.
And we have it.
And we should use it all the way to the last drop.
Realizing the mortality, the gift your mother gave to you
is realizing the immortal.
And in so doing, help you realize that life is beautiful.
Yeah.
On this topic, Quincy Jones, I read, said to ODB and you,
when it rains, get wet.
What do these words mean to you?
Well, I think what Quincy was saying at that time was,
you know, I think I was more conservative.
Like as a person and like, you know, had money.
Women wanted me.
Anything I kind of wanted, I probably could have had.
You know what I mean?
And he was just saying, when it rains, get wet.
Enjoy this, man.
It's raining on you.
You know what I mean?
Don't put up the umbrella.
Don't go back in the house.
Yeah.
Get wet.
Experience the moment.
Yeah.
And enjoy it.
And I didn't take total heed to him at that time.
A couple of years later, it took some heed.
But at that time, I didn't take heed.
And when I took heed, I think that I may have misinterpreted
by looking at his example of getting wet versus my example
of getting wet.
And I can tell you right now, I'm getting wet right now
in my way.
In part, thanks to your mother, but overall,
you just learned how to appreciate the rain,
just like the experience of every moment.
Yeah.
And I'll share this with you because this is going to be
a very open conversation.
And I haven't had this conversation.
So definitely in part to my mother,
then in part to my wife.
I meet my wife.
It's my second wife.
But I met her after my mother passed.
And she was just a friend.
You know, some girls, I met her because she was beautiful
and actually built a friendship with her.
But a few years later, when the relationship became like,
you know, this is going to be my woman.
It was actually when I was doing the middle of my divorce
and I was like, you know, do I run wild?
And hey, you know, me and my wife already filed.
We were separated.
And do I run wild?
And I didn't run wild a little bit, but not too wild.
Right.
And, you know, I'm still a man.
I'm a hip hop guy.
I read you know how to party.
Yeah, exactly.
But the funny thing is that my wife now, her name is Talani,
my uncle said she reminds me of your mother.
He knew my mother when, before I knew my mother.
And he saw that and we ended up dating, got engaged
and then her mother passes.
And so now there's a total understanding of everything
and we actually help build each other back up.
So, of course, I have to thank my mother for the awareness.
Then I thank my wife for bringing that awareness
to actualization, like to actually feel it.
I don't think I'll be talking to you right now
as much as I do these days.
If it wasn't for the security and peace and harmony
that I was able to gain at home, you know?
And like you said, you now share that look
of having both lost your mom.
What have you learned from Quincy about music,
about business, about life?
Quincy Jones is a great mind, a great artist,
a treasure in all reality.
He's seen it from when it was, he couldn't walk in this,
he couldn't eat in the same places he played his music at
to owning places bigger than ours.
So what a beautiful life, you know?
He's the type of guy, if you spend one hour with him,
you got a lifetime of information.
And I was blessed to spend multiple hours with him
and days with him.
There was a certain period of time where we came across
each other and he was always there to share the knowledge.
Like that's another thing about him that I think was special.
And hopefully I picked that up is that he's always willing
to share, share with his experience, his knowledge.
I mean, I think he'll even share his home to the right person
if he feels that that's what they need to get back on that field.
He's a very beautiful man.
So just the kindness, the goodness of the man
is like the thing that really rubbed off on you?
Yeah, I mean, minimum.
I mean Quincy Jones also in his fifties as a producer
produced one of the greatest albums of all time
and one of the greatest selling albums of all time.
I just great critically, economically great.
And I mean, I think he did it at the age I am right now.
So I might have a great year coming up.
Time and well.
Yeah.
So now you got to taste what greatness is.
You get to see what greatness is.
So you know what it's like to do for yourself.
You've had a few people you've worked with who are
fascinating like yourself, Quentin Tarantino.
You worked with him.
When somebody asked you to describe him with one word,
you said encyclopedia.
What have you learned from the guy about filmmaking,
about life again?
A very generous man with his knowledge.
And for me, he shared it, I think,
in a way that was unique in the sense of,
you know, at a point in time, you know,
we just was super duper tight, like, you know,
like I'm going to his crib and watching movies
and just having long conversations about art
and about life.
You know what I mean?
So I learned a lot.
I consider him, you know,
especially when it comes to anything cinematic in my life,
I consider him the godfather of that for me.
I think, you know, I humbly asked him to mentor me,
which is a very humbling thing to do,
coming from my neighborhood, coming from who I am,
coming from, I was already a multi-platinum artist,
you know, I mean, it was a year,
it was past the year 2000 already.
So like 2001, 2002, that I asked him to mentor me.
So I was the result already, you know what I mean?
But I humbled myself because I saw in him
a craft of brain power that to me resonated with me,
but I was just a pattern on that.
I was a novice at it
because I was trying to make movies in my music,
you know, trying to make videos.
And here was a man who was a master of it
and an encyclopedia of it as well.
Like film history?
Film history from whether it's the actor, the director,
the cinematographer, maybe even the costume designer.
He may know 50, 60,
he may know the 50 greatest costume designers in his memory.
Yeah, I mean, it's God's brain.
Both of you have pretty good memory.
I'd love to be a fly in the wall of that conversation.
And kung fu movies mostly.
We actually started,
I think we started our relationship
trying to outdo each other.
Knowledge wise or what?
Yeah, movie knowledge wise.
Actually kung fu movie knowledge wise.
And I think that if it wasn't another category,
I wouldn't have had a chance,
but at least in that category,
I was pretty holding my weight.
Who won?
You know what?
I'll be honest and say that
I may have said a few he didn't see,
but Quentin is older than me.
Yeah.
So he could go back further.
Yeah, he could go back to 72
when I didn't see one yet, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, he said master of the flying gay team
that I got a chance to,
that you commentate over today
and I got a chance to see the screening of.
He said that's one of his favorites.
For you, the 36th chamber of Shaolin,
the master killer is your favorite.
Best ever?
Would you say that's the greatest kung fu movie ever?
It's hard to say the greatest ever, right?
Because somebody may make another one
and it depends on your own phase of life,
but I will put that first.
If I want to introduce somebody to kung fu movies,
that's a beautiful entry.
You talk about knowledge, you talk about wisdom.
What kind of wisdom do you draw from kung fu movies?
You know what?
The martial art itself and the movies.
It's endless wisdom to be drawn and I draw it, you know?
I draw it in a way, you know,
that I could decipher it in my own life.
So, for instance, in the movie Master Killer,
he basically, when he does kung fu,
he does really a style called the hungar technique.
And the director of the movie is actually a hungar expert
who has a lineage that traces all the way back to Shaolin Temple.
And this director always wanted to keep his movies
pure and to bring hungar to the world.
It's like he wanted to show the world this lineage.
In fact, you just said Master of the Flying Guillotine
is Quentin's favorite movie and we mentioned it in 36 Chambers.
It's my favorite movie.
But the action director of Master of the Flying Guillotine
is the director of 36 Chambers of Shaolin.
And some of the things that's happening in Master of the Flying Guillotine
is really the infant stage of what this action director is going to learn
and then use later on in his movies.
So that's the beauty of it.
It's almost like Quentin is seeing him in his generation.
So Quentin might have been the same age I was watching that movie.
And then when he becomes a director, I'm at Quentin's age
and I'm seeing his work.
So some symbiont relationship there.
And I'll end this question by saying,
hungar deals with the five animal technique,
the tiger, the crane, the leopard, the snake, and the dragon.
Those are the five.
That's the five pattern.
Some people go seven.
Some go 12.
But let's just stick to the five pattern first.
How do a man emulate a tiger?
And you see a tiger's fist.
He curls before he spawns on you.
How does a man emulate a snake?
It doesn't have to be only in the kung fu move.
It's in the ideology of the snake.
It's in the agility of the crane at any moment.
Sometimes punching a person is not going to work,
as they would say in leopard fist or tiger paw.
So sometimes you may have to poke them in the eye with the crane's beak.
So having your mind able to adapt the instinct of the animal
when you are being attacked or when you are being the aggressor,
that's something that you don't need to form for.
That's the mentality.
So kung fu, like I said, it informs me endlessly
because at first I was trying to learn how to hold my...
Like, I can't really hit you with that and really hurt you
unless I've been banging my hand a thousand times on some bricks
and made it so callous or muscles are so strong.
But the idea that if me and you was to get into a fight
and I'm going to tiger up on you and take that instinct
and prance when I'm going to prance
or fly away like the stalk.
You know what I mean? Like, yo, that's the mentality.
It's much more than technical moves.
It's much deeper.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, when I see the kung fu movies,
because I love martial arts, all martial arts
and competitive ones too, like the actual competitions and so on,
it just seems like kung fu movies go much deeper
than just like the techniques.
Yeah, they start... I mean, if you see it, right?
Even I watched a great MMA fight recently, you know?
Just interesting because he was on top of the guy, you know,
and the way he got from under him, you know?
It had to be, you know, his spirit got from under him.
It's some like mixture of crane and whatever.
Snake, ill.
The slippery ill technique.
Yeah.
No, I love that when people become artists in the cage
or that it's much bigger than just like winning,
much bigger than particular techniques.
It's just art, especially at the highest level competition
when millions of people are watching.
Which is pressure within itself.
That's art under pressure is even more beautiful art.
You know, you look at some of these fights
and you wonder, like, why somebody wins the moves.
And sometimes the less talented guy could win
because he could deal with the pressure.
But the other guy, he could have beat them.
There was someone else, but not in this arena.
So you're a scholar of history, including hip hop history.
I've listened to so many of your interviews.
You've spoken brilliantly about some of the big figures
in hip hop history, Tupac, Biggie, Nas, many others.
Maybe let's look at Tupac and Biggie.
What made them special in the history of music?
That's a good question.
So I don't know if I'm the authority to answer it,
but I'll just speak my piece on it
and maybe I can just add on
because I'm sure it's a lot of people
that spent a lot of time with them that could speak on it.
But just as a fellow artist,
I think not only was B.I.G. a dope lyricist,
I think he had a voice that was really immaculate
in the sense that some rappers get on top of music
and you got to get used to them
and you got to vibe with them.
But he make a record sounds like a record immediately.
If you go back and listen to his music,
you could take his voice and put it on anything
and for some reason it sounds like a record.
You mean just like the raw voice of the man?
You could just listen to it raw and it sounds like a record.
Yeah, but if you put a beat, take his voice and put it on any beat,
he just has a voice.
It's immaculate, you know.
So his lyrical skills and all that was great.
And you got to think once again,
he's doing all this, he's not even 25 years old.
Then you go to pop once again, immaculate voice,
but what pop had, I think, was a way of touching us
on all of our emotions.
And especially on like,
pop had the power to infuse your emotional thought
like Brenda has a baby, they have mama.
But then he had the power to arouse the rebel in you.
You know?
Yeah.
Two things.
Actually, he was probably more dangerous than big.
Notorious B.I.G.
Like, notorious B.I.G, we could party with him to this day.
We were still, but pop was probably going to a point,
you know, he was more going into the Malcolm X of things
and society fears that.
Yeah, so he was really good at communicating love
and at starting revolutions.
Yeah.
And that's dangerous.
Very dangerous.
And they communicated love, but he wasn't starting revolutions.
Well, it's interesting to think about
what the world would be like if they were still with us.
But it's the way of the world.
Hendricks, a lot of those guys just go too soon.
Yeah, it's a peculiar thing.
Now, you asked me earlier, am I scared of death?
And I asked you, no, I'm not scared of death.
I mean, I'm not trying to see it, though, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's like, that was the block of death.
It's like, I'm not really going right there right now.
I'm making a left or right turn, you know what I mean?
Unless it was mandatory for some greatness, greater good.
It's like, okay, I got to drive through that, you know what I mean?
That can still happen.
That's the meditation on death part, where you could die at the end of today.
Yeah, you could die or die in death, I think it's two different things, personally.
The process, immune of death or just...
Yeah, I mean, you could die.
You could die every day.
You could die and not be yourself, you know what I mean?
Which is crazy.
But to get to a point of no return, you know, and that's a whole nother chamber.
I mean, there's some sense in which Reza, the producer, becomes somebody else completely
when you're making a film, becomes somebody else completely.
When you're, I don't know, playing chess, becomes completely something different
when you do kung fu or watch kung fu or when you're a family man.
All of those are little deaths when you transition from one place to another.
So it's not like you're one being, you're many things.
Yeah.
I would describe, now I would describe that as all a life, though.
Yeah, it's fun.
Outside of you and anybody on Wu Tang, who's the greatest rapper from a lyrics,
like a Wortsmith perspective in hip hop history or some of the greatest, maybe some candidates?
There's name of few.
I mean, you're going to have to start with Rockham, you know?
You're going to have to pick Fuji rap in there, you know what I mean?
You're going to have to go back.
You're going to have to pick up with those brothers first.
You might have to, if you want a good technical, you might have to start with Grandmaster Cass.
You know what I mean?
Who you might not have even heard of.
You know what I mean?
But you may have sung his lyrics every time you sang Sugar Hill, Rappers Delight.
Because that's his.
That was it.
They copied his and they made it theirs.
But point being made, but I'll name a couple more.
I got to put Nas in that category.
We got a chessboard in front of us and one of the greatest chess players, the youngest
Grandmaster, you know, before I think Carlson, was Bobby Fisher.
So he's just used Bobby Fisher as American, one of the greatest American chess players.
Of course, Susan Polka may have tied his record as the youngest Grandmaster.
And she's the youngest female Grandmaster, I think, to date.
But he was a master at what, 14?
Yeah, something like that.
Right?
So now, to me, I met Nas when he was 15.
He was already a master lyricist.
It takes about 10 years to become a master lyricist.
So by the time the world heard Wu-Tang, most of us had 10 years of rapping in us already.
So that's why you met us at mastery level.
The Chuseok was already a master when Nas was a master, but Chuseok was 21.
Nas was 15.
Nas is like the Mozart of rap.
Yeah, on a Bobby Fisher.
Just a Bobby Fisher, just born something in him, or maybe those early years.
Because he's not just good at the lyrics.
He goes deep with it, just like you.
So he's like, there's depth, it's not just mastery of the words smithing.
It's just the message you actually get sent across.
Instinct of information.
Yeah.
Into a small phrase.
That's the whole thing of energy.
How do we condense all that energy into this so that it could fuel that?
And he's definitely one of those artist MCs that does that.
And he was doing it at 15.
Like I said, I'm thinking five years or four or five years older than Nas.
So I was always feeling my confidence of what I was doing.
But I was like, this kid is only 15.
I gotta step up my game.
When he turned 19, then we got Illumatic.
Yeah.
From you, what are the best and most memorable lyrics you've ever written?
Well, that's a hard question for me.
The stuff stand out, like stuff you're really proud of that was like, important in your career?
Yeah.
I mean, I think I did a song called Sunshower.
I don't know if we put it on the Wu-Tang Forever double CD, but only on the international version.
But if anybody could go get those lyrics and write those lyrics down,
you could just put that in your pocket and I'm sure it'll answer at least about 25% of your life's problems.
Well, that's a good one.
Sunshine, where you talk about religion and God, that's good.
Tomorrow, I think it's on A diagram.
I'm not a record guy.
I'm a song guy.
Might have been A diagram.
Do you have a lyric from it?
Yeah, the answer to all questions.
You're talking about God.
The spark of all suggestions, of righteousness, the pathway to the road of perfection,
who gives you all and never asks more of you, the faithful companion that fights every war with you.
Before the mortal view of the prehistorical, historical, he's the all in all you searching for the oracle.
This is so good.
A mission impossible, it's purely philosophical, but you can call on your deathbed when you're laying in the hospital.
You will call on your deathbed.
I have a scientist friend.
Well, my wife's best friend, Rebecca, she married a scientist.
They're both scientists.
They're both scientists, and she married Dr. Neal.
I ain't gonna say their last names.
But Neal and Rebecca, you know, they're my wife's best friends, so they come over.
And me and Neal, we go through the longest debates of science and religion.
Let me just go. We could go break day with it.
And, you know, before he had a child, he was more adamant.
And, you know, there's, you know, I don't believe in God, you know what I mean?
After a child, he still kept his thing, but I just hit him with the question.
If you was about to die, because now you got a child to think about, right?
It's different when you think about yourself.
If you was about to die, you don't think you're gonna make that call.
He's like, I'll make that call.
And it kind of inspired my lyric, because it was like, yeah, who you gonna?
And I just want to say, so you mentioned lyric.
That is one of my favorite lyrics, but that's part two.
To Sunshower was the prequel to Sunshine.
So if you ever get a chance to check out Sunshower,
it starts off with, Trouble Follows a Wicked Mind.
2020 vision of the prism of life, but still blind because you lack the inner.
So every sinner could end up in the everlasting winter of Hellfire.
With thorns and splinters, prick your eye out.
You cry out, your words fly out, but you remain unheard.
Suffering internal and external, along with the wicked fraternal of generals and colonels,
letting off thermal nuclear heat that burns you firmly and permanently upon the journey
through the journal of the Book of Life.
For those who took a life without justice will become just ice.
It's been taught your worst enemy couldn't harm you as much as your own wicked thoughts.
But people ought to be nought and listen wrought.
So they find themselves persecuted inside their own universal court.
So that is a long one.
It's like a free pager.
Wow, that is about life.
That's like character, integrity, how to be, how to be in this world.
And that ultimately connects to God.
Who's God to you?
I'm glad you just asked that question because I actually, I'm going to have to make a distinguishable separation here.
All right.
And it's funny because I heard recently, I heard a rabbi was debating with this historian, Dr. Ben.
I can't pronounce Dr. Ben name, but there was a debate and then the debate, they started going back through the etymology.
They went way back beyond antiquity because they was debating.
So there was, you know, some things that was going deep.
And they really went far, far back to kind of the first word of God.
And it was when they pronounced it on this particular debate, it was Allah.
And they said for that, they got Elohim.
I've already agreed in my heart in my life that the father of this universe, proper name is Allah.
And of course, in Allah, I get all, you know, and I don't think that God is the same as that.
I think Allah gives birth to God.
In fact, if you take the word Allah, A-L-L-A-H, and you take it through numerology or numbers, the number A being letter A being 1, L being 12,
and you add it all up to its lowest, to, you know, the last denominator, you're going to get the number 7.
And the number 7 is going to bring you right back to that letter G.
So Allah borns God, but God don't born Allah.
How does that God, how does Allah connect to the oracle that you're going to be calling for when you're laying in the hospital?
Well, what I was saying in that particular verse was that we're looking for the oracle.
We're looking for somebody else or something to help us that nobody can really help you at the end of the day, you know.
And we're speaking on, so now that we, I don't want to say we're speaking on religion, but we're speaking on a way of life and a way of thinking.
And I read many books, of course.
And I could say there's no book that, the book that is the most strongest book I've ever read is actually the Holy Quran.
It's stronger to me than the Bible, which I read.
It's stronger than quantum physics, which I've read.
It's stronger than the Bhagavad Gita.
And I read once a British scholar said it's the most stupidest book ever written.
And it doesn't make sense.
And so I say, I see why he says that.
I can understand exactly why he said that as well.
Why is that?
Because the structure of the words are just, it's peculiar.
You know what I mean?
But it's almost like how some people's songs, you don't really know exactly what they say until years later.
Yeah, you have, actually with Joe Rogan, I think you talked about how a joke of Dave Chappelle hit you like a long time after.
So this is kind of like the Quran.
I tend to believe that we, human beings cannot possibly understand anything as big as these ideas.
So just, I don't know, did you think that, like, are you humble in the face of just the immensity of it?
To be honest, Jess, I'm humble in the face of the, you can say the word again, I pronounce words funny, the omnipotence, the omnessence, the magnitude.
I'm humble in the face of Allah.
The problem that I may have had was that I wasn't humbled in the face of God because it's just a definable thing.
And that's why I think a lot of us, and I'm saying that, you know, I know when we say God, we're trying to say Allah.
Like people were saying that, but you're actually not saying the same thing because you're actually putting something beside Him.
And that's the reason why you can have as many gods.
You can find a whole bunch of them.
You know what I mean?
But you're not going to find many.
There's no body beside Allah.
Allah is one.
So I know it's the whole thing, but that's my heart is there.
I'm humbled by it.
I'm at peace with it.
And it doesn't take nothing or demerit anything from myself.
That's the beauty of it.
It doesn't take nothing from me, from being who I feel.
So if I say, if somebody woke up your peace guard, I could take that because they're telling me that, y'all, I'm a man of wisdom.
I'm a man of strength.
I'm a man of beauty or some attribute of that.
You know what I mean?
So Wu Tang, they the gods of rap.
There's wisdom there.
There's strength there.
There's beauty there.
We'll take that.
So Wu Tang is one of the greatest musical, artistic, philosophical groups ever.
Let's look hundreds of years from now when humans or robots or aliens or whatever that's left here, they look back.
What do you hope they remember about Wu Tang?
What do you hope the legacy is?
Well, I, well, even if it's thousands of years, I hope we don't give it to the humans.
But, you know, look, whatever happens is going to happen.
But I think that my philosophy on it is that we're going to continue to advance and continue to advance things around us.
But I don't see us becoming extinct.
Well, I mean, the reason I bring up sort of Wu Tang in that context, and this is a special moment in human history.
It's like a hundred years and we've created all of this music.
Just if you think of all the richness of music that's been created over a hundred years, it's like, it's not obvious to me that that's not going to stop.
Like there's a flourishing here.
So it's funny because I could see where the book of human history is written.
There's a chapter on this period of time.
And one of the things we did well is like all the technological innovation with like, with the rockets and with the internet.
But then there's also the musical innovation and film innovation, just so much art that's being created.
And Wu Tang is a huge part of that.
So I just wonder what, like if there's a few sentences written about Wu Tang, it just makes me wonder how they remember.
I would hope that people, no matter how many years are inspired by us, but I will say if I could just use Wu Tang as itself.
So we first started off the witty, unpredictable talent and natural game, right?
Natural gaming and natural wordplay.
And then we went to the wisdom of the universe, the truth of Allah for a nation of God.
Wisdom, universal truth, Allah, nation, God.
And it's just like, so let's just go back to a nation of God.
Let's just take the last two letters.
A nation of wisdom, strength and beauty.
Right?
You know, and I'm going to go a little political here, but not going political.
As we'll say, we're the greatest country in the world.
What makes us the greatest?
That's to be a question we act.
Is it our wisdom?
Is it our strength?
Is it our beauty?
Now, let's just say, off the easiest answer, you know, it's our strength.
We got the nukes.
Nobody can really, you know, between America and Russia.
That's the argument.
Who could beat them?
But where's the wisdom?
Then they can argue, well, we got the technology.
Right?
But then where's the beauty when there's so much suffering in the people?
I mean, the hope is that the wisdom is in the founding documents, in the imperfect,
but wise founding documents of that celebrated freedom, that celebrated all the ideas,
sort of having a lot of nukes, having a lot of airplanes and tanks.
That's not important.
And the hope is whatever we're doing here with this, quote, greatest country on Earth,
that we preserve the ideas and help them flourish.
Well, that's what I mean.
So if we go back to the Wu-Tang, I'm saying, that's what we're striving for.
We're striving for that, you know what I mean?
But you started on predictable and just like...
Yeah.
Yeah.
But like, got deep pretty quick.
I got to talk to you about Bruce Lee.
Who's Bruce Lee to you?
Who is he to the world?
What ideas of his were interesting to you?
Like what, you know, you talk about like Hendrix and music, Bruce Lee is that and martial arts.
He just seems to have changed the game.
Yeah.
You know, I went as...
I guess I don't know if the word bold is the right word to say, but I went as bold as to say
that he was a minor prophet.
And I got that concept from the Holy Quran where it says that we send prophets to every nation,
every village.
We don't let nobody not hear the word in some form because it won't be fair.
And so if a law is merciful, even a man whose death has to somehow get a sign.
I don't know if Moses saw a burning bush.
It was nobody else to talk to.
So it had to talk to the bush.
I don't know.
It could have been a bush.
This one too, right?
Yeah.
But point being made, it says that there are minor prophets and I see Bruce Lee as one of them
because what he brought to the world through martial art was a whole shift in the dynamic of thinking.
And that happens when certain entities are born, but he didn't do it only in a physical sense.
He was also philosophizing in the same process.
And he was also striving to be the best of himself.
So you got three things going on.
I studied Bruce Lee multiple times.
And first of course, when I saw my first Kung Fu movie, it wasn't really Bruce Lee.
It was a few green horned clips cut together.
And then I saw Black Samurai.
Then my following Kung Fu movies was like Fearless Fighters, The Ghostly Face, The Fist of Double K.
But basically in Fearless Fighters, the lady put the little kid on her back and flew across the ocean, across the lake.
So Bruce wasn't doing that.
And then I went on to Five Deadly Venoms and Spearman and 36 Chambers.
And these movies are beautiful, and yet they're all heightened.
Bruce, they're heightened beyond doable.
You're not going to...
Yeah, it's like surreal.
They play with the world that's not of this world.
Yeah.
Bruce played with this world.
So when I first saw Bruce, I honestly didn't think he was as good as these guys.
He can't fly.
He's not flying in the movies, right?
But then when I saw...
The first one I saw was The Big Boss, which they retitled, Fist of Fury.
But then when I saw Chinese Connection, which is the real Fist of Fury, right?
I saw something different there.
And I got enamored.
And then of course, Into the Dragon, right?
Just really complete.
That's why my first album was Into the Wu Tang, 36 Chambers of Shaolin.
So it's Into the Dragon and 36 Put Together, because those are the two epitomies.
So what happened is, you know, that's young me.
Then teenage me, he studies him again.
And I realized, wow, look at his physicality.
Look how he's really...
He's moving for real.
And then I studied him again.
Wow, look at what he's saying.
Then I studied him again. Wow, look at what he stands for.
Which do you like in the realm of martial arts, the real or the surreal?
Or the dance between the two?
Yeah, I like the dance between the two, because a movie to me is to entertain you.
And I'm cool with Obi-Wan Kenobi disappearing out of the cloak when Vader strikes him down.
And then I'm like, yo, what happened?
And he's like, run, Luke, run.
I'm cool with that, right?
Because that's the imagination.
And the imagination gets stimulated to the point to where as things that we saw imagined by an artist,
we strive to create in our real world.
Thus, Star Trek, to me, is just a precursor to our cell phones.
So for me, I like the mixture, too.
Yeah, it's funny how the science fiction, like pushing into the impossible actually makes it realize eventually.
Yeah, we humans, like, once we see an idea on screen, no matter how wild it is, we...
We're trying to make it.
Yeah, we're trying to make it.
It's something we, a young kid, get inspired and watch that.
And be like, I'm going to build that.
Exactly. So I don't know who's going to come with the Back to the Future time machine,
but do you have any classmates that you think...
Time machine?
I thought you were going to Back to the Future.
Like, what is it? The hoverboard?
Or like...
Yeah, we're there at least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Somebody, they got...
You seen the one on the water?
No.
No, you know, the surf hover?
It's dope.
Nice.
It's dope.
It actually...
It actually, if you were Back to the Future fan, you feel like you made it to...
You made it there.
Yeah.
Well, now we're just going to work on the time travel.
And it was cool to hear you talk about the master of the flying gear team today, that
that inspired the lyric for the, you know, Wu-Tang Clan and Nothing to F with.
Yeah.
How does that go again?
But the coast word or the lyric?
Yeah.
I am Russian.
But the lyric.
I said, I'd be torsing and forcing.
My style is awesome.
I'm causing more family foods than Richard Dawson.
And the survey said, you're dead.
The fatal flying gullotine chops off your head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was interesting to see the guillotine in a movie today.
How...
I don't know.
That's surreal, right?
But it's not.
It's like...
It's engineering.
It's both surreal.
Right.
And it adds this chaos into this real world that...
And then challenges everybody to think what you're going to do with that.
Yeah.
How are you going to beat it?
Yeah.
How are you going to beat it?
Both when you have like the good and the evil and the mix of the bad guys and the good
guys.
And you're not sure who the bad guys are.
It's the old question of good versus evil, right?
Yeah.
And then the question of who was good, who was evil, but they all had a similar problem
when the gullotine came.
But in terms of the real, you mentioned The Godfather, Good and Evil.
That's your favorite movie.
Yeah.
What makes it great, do you think?
The characters, the study of family, of justice, of power, what connects with you?
Oh, I mean, every one of those themes connects in the real.
It connects in the cinematic way as well.
The difference, I think, with me and The Godfather was, I seen it during the period of time when
my father was absent.
And therefore, family structure and family values was actually adopted in my family because
of that.
Me and my brother, Devon, we actually took so much heat to that movie and our family
life.
And we kind of mimic that family in its structure of somebody has to be the leader of the family,
even if it was the younger.
Michael was younger than Sonny and Frazier.
You know what I mean?
But he was worthy.
And my brother Devon is older than me.
My brother King is older than me.
And it's funny, sometimes Devon calls King Frazier.
King was actually, he could beat our ass in my language.
But you're Michael.
Yeah.
And not by choice, just by definition of that's what I am.
You know what I mean?
And it's just a blessing for me to have my older sister, my older brothers and my younger
brothers look to me as a, just as a good light in the family.
And like I said, that movie helped.
My sister's too.
You know, the cool thing about my family, I don't know if I shared this a lot.
It's a big, we all watch these movies together.
And so the eight diagram pole fighter, master killer, five deadly winners, my family knows
these movies.
It's not just, I know them.
Right.
And then you extended further, my friends know them.
Right.
Two.
So there's a language that we all can have that actually film has informed a communication.
So the Godfather, you know, which also is still a fictional story of something.
But since it was based in reality, based on something real, and it was human, it wasn't
so heightened.
I think the purity of it resonates.
And the purity of it is something that resonates with me.
You know, you got to be, you got to plan ahead.
You know, he didn't want to deal with the drugs, but that time of business was upon them.
It's like, it's almost like this is a tough one.
Like sometime when the Muslim brothers come from the Middle East to America and they open
up delis, right, they would sell him.
And we would go in there and complain to them and make them like, they used to get mad at
us when we came.
But, you know, and that's as a kid, but as a man, I'm like, yo, he's here to sell.
Now he stills don't have to sell to him.
Like, like Fido Corleone didn't want to sell the drugs.
Okay.
He didn't have to do it.
He didn't do it.
And it cost him some bullets to eventually somebody in the family ended up doing it.
Yeah.
He said, I'm in it.
What about this idea that it's family before everything else?
So like you're, you know, there's, there's different laws you live according to in this
world and family is first.
Yeah.
That's, that's, that's mathematically correct.
I don't like that.
You know what I mean?
I mean, there's a, there's a certain sense of, you look at powerful people, you look at
them.
There's a certain sense in which the people who are in the inner circle, that's who you
take care of.
That's family.
And anyone else that crosses you, that, you know, there's a different set of ethics under
which you operate for those people.
Well, Jesus said the same thing.
You know, when he said love that neighbor and our brother, he was talking about that
community.
When the other lady, the Samaritan say, Hey, Jesus, I'm not feeling, my brother not feeling
so well.
And he said, give not that which is holy unto the dogs.
If you're going to tell a woman, I'm give not that which is holy unto the dogs.
And she's a woman.
He just called her a dog.
If I translate that in hip hop, female, he called her a dog.
I know how that goes, but she trans, but she said to him, but even a dog is allowing
him to eat the crumbs that falls from the master's table.
And he went and helped.
He helped.
Now let's go back to what you just said about Putin or Vito Codrona, myself and my family.
Of course, the family is first, but once the family is good, it has to then spread to the
community, then to the state, country, world.
The problem we have sometimes is that, and this is the reason why a lot of powerful families
was overthrown.
Like why did they behead their own king with the gulleteam, right?
Because once the family was strong, they didn't let the wealth, the opportunity expand out.
You know, look at Wu Tang, yes, our family was made strong first, but then all the Wu
members were able to form their own corporations and they had their own sub-families.
It has to grow out.
And they took over the world.
You've talked about being vegan.
I don't think I heard you explain this because it connects somehow about how you think about
life.
So you talk about when your family is good, you grow that circle of empathy, you grow the
community.
Is that how you think about being vegan, that just the capacity of living beings on
earth to suffer, that you just don't want to add suffering to them?
Yeah.
I mean, you said it clear.
It's like nothing in all reality, I came to a realization that nothing really has to
die for me to live.
No animal.
The plants themselves, right?
So let's just say, you know, you want a steak, which is probably the most, you know, I don't
know, the most expensive piece of meat, but let's just say the steak is, you know, top
of the line.
Nice steak.
And you're eating the steak for the protein to help build your muscle.
And I don't know if you got it from a cow or a bull, but whether it's the cow or the
bull, they grow to about 1500 pounds and if it's a bull, it's all muscly muscle and it's
only eating grass.
Yeah, yeah, there's, yeah, it's possible to both as an athlete and just as a human being
to perform well without eating meat.
That's something, especially in the way we're treating animals, to deliver that meat to
the plate.
I think about that a lot.
So I do, I'm a robotics person, AI person.
And I think a lot about, I don't know if you think about this kind of stuff, but building
AI systems as they become more and more human-like, you start to ask the question of, are we okay?
If we give the capacity for AI systems to suffer, first to feel, but then to suffer,
to hate and to love, to feel emotion, how do we deal with that?
It starts asking the same question as you ask of animals, are we okay adding that suffering
to the world?
Right.
And I don't think we should add the suffering because it's not necessary.
Like when you look, if it's necessary, right, because we're survival or the first law of
nature is self-preservation, if you are in a desert and there's nothing else to eat but
that lizard, yeah, okay, you got to do what you got to do.
Lizards got to go.
Yeah, you got to go.
You got to do what you got to do because at the end of the day, man is, when they say
man has dominion over these things, his dominion is almost like a caretaker.
And the way we do our dominion, we dominate it, eat it, cook it.
Like who's the first guy that looked at the lobster?
He was like, I'm going to eat this thing.
It's like, it's first of all, it's hard to eat it.
You got to go through a process to get that, a crab, I remember we used to eat crabs when
we was kids.
And I didn't know why I was always getting itchy throats and all that.
You know, you kid, you don't know, just eat.
But at the end of the day, a crab didn't provide no more than a finger worth of meat, maybe.
And it's hell getting that thing, getting it out.
It's like, it's not worth it in all reality.
You could have gave me a banana and did better for my body and my appetite and my being fulfilled
as full.
Like, look at the blessings of life, right?
If you take a seed, or you get an apple and you eat it, in that apple is multiple seeds
in it.
If you plant that seed, it'll give you a whole tree with a whole bunch of apples with
all multiple seeds.
But if you kill a fish, it can't be produced, it's done.
If you kill a cat, it's done, it's nothing coming back.
But when you deal with the plants, even after you eat the apple, and then you defecate,
your defecation is what feeds the ground, the cause of apple to grow more.
Yeah, it's a circle of life.
And especially there's a guy named David Foster Wallace, he wrote a short story called Consider
the Lobster.
If you actually think philosophically about what, from a perspective of a lobster, that's
like symbolic of something, because you're basically put in the water, like cold water,
and then it heats up slowly until it's no more.
It's torture.
Yeah, it must have been like, they started eating lobsters in the inquisition.
Yeah, yeah.
They just enjoyed, they were probably enjoyed torturing animals, and they realized they're
also delicious after the tortures finished.
That's probably how they discovered it.
Let me ask you a question.
I know you're asking me the questions, but I just want to talk a little bit about the
AI, and you said something about trying to put the emotion in it, right?
So are you thinking there's an algorithm for emotion?
Yes, but I think emotion isn't something that there's an algorithm for a particular system.
We create emotions together.
So emotion is something like this conversation, it's like magic we create together.
So I've worked with quite a few robots, a very simple version of that, I've had Roomba
vacuum cleaners, I've had them make different sounds, and one of them is like screaming
in pain, like lightly.
And just having them do that when you kick them or when they run into stuff, immediately
I start to feel something for them.
So the emotion you're saying is imposed back on the human, but I'm asking, do you think
there's an algorithm for the emotion to be imposed from machine to machine?
Yeah, that's a really good way to ask it.
It's difficult because I think ultimately I only know how to exist in the human world.
So it's like, it's the question of if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to
see it, does it still fall?
I still think that ultimately machines will have to show emotion to other humans and that's
when it becomes real.
I've been thinking about this a lot too.
And I just, okay, I'll come into it with you because I've been thinking about this and
this is just your field.
Well, do you think emotion is wave?
Like light is wave, or do you think it's particle?
So emotion is just a small, it's like a shadow of something bigger, and I think that bigger
thing is consciousness.
So emotion is just a wave or a particle, you haven't thought about that.
I have thought about it, whether it's, there's something like, whether consciousness or emotion
is a law of physics.
Like if it's that fundamental to the universe.
I had a lyric, I had a lyric that said this, it comes out, they did this documentary about
the planet and it gave, it wrote a song, it's called The World of Confusion and I'll try
to paraphrase the lyric, but in the world of the confusion where there's so much illusions,
we suck the blood from the planet, now it needs a transfusion and the redistribution
of wealth, of health and wealth of self and a deeper understanding about mental health.
The doctor prescribed the physical solution, the psychiatrist wants to build a bigger institution
but neither have the solution or the equation to make an instrument to measure the weight
of the hate vibration.
What is the weight of hate?
Is it heavier than the weight of love?
Is it heavier than the weight of lead inside of a slug with just 10 milligrams is all it
takes to kill a man.
But anyways, they're not going from there.
Damn, that is good.
But the question, you see the question there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can it be measured?
Can that be measured?
I think so.
I think so.
I just don't got the estimate yet.
Yeah, we're in the dark ages of that, but I think it could be measured.
I think there's something physical, like something that connects us all this much.
We tend to think we humans are distinct entities and we move about this world, but I think
there's some deeper connection.
But we're so, listen, science is in the, we just had a few breakthroughs in the past
hundred years from Einstein on the theoretical physics side.
We don't know anything about human psychology.
We barely know much about human biology.
We're trying to figure it all out.
Yeah, I had another theory because you think about quantum, right?
As long as you say that there's an uncertainty and you have me believe there's an uncertainty,
then there's an uncertainty.
But if there's not an uncertainty, what happens?
So I'm only saying that, it's not, it's not, because you look at quantum computers, they're
going to give you the old, the one, the one, the old, they're going to take two things
and make it eight things.
And by the time you multiply four of those things together, it's like this chess board,
right?
The move goes into the millions, but the thing that's introduced is the uncertainty, right?
You're going to make a move.
You know this already, right?
Because this has been played a thousand times, but sooner or later, something uncertain is
going to come in or make the next move.
I like the weight of these, the add, the add, the certainty.
I think just like Wu-Tang, unpredictable, that there's something about us humans that
really doesn't like everything to be fully predictable.
I mean, chess too is perfectly solvable.
There's nothing unpredictable about chess.
Right.
I'm not going to agree to that because Bobby Fischer said in one of his books, which I
actually love what he said, he said, every game of chess is a draw.
Yeah.
The only way somebody wins is when one of us makes a mistake.
I mean, it doesn't get any better than that.
Yeah, it doesn't.
What is chess?
Like, how do you think about chess?
What's at the core of your interest in chess?
Do you see kung fu, music, film, all of it, life, all just living through chess?
Yeah.
I see, it's the most stimulating passage of time for me.
That's also, it's like, it's a past time that stimulates my mind, my music, my thoughts
about life at the same time.
So while some past times is like, say baseball is watched, it's a past time.
And baseball can stimulate you, depending on how you look at it, right?
But most likely, you're not going to get this much brain activation, this much calculation,
and this much thinking about yourself in a game of baseball.
I mean, a player maybe, but not the viewer.
Chess is something that I can engage in too.
And even though it's a past time, it's giving me all the stimulation of real time in my
life.
It's funny because it's also, it's a funny game because it's connected through centuries
of play, just some of the most interesting people in the history of the world have played
this game and have struggled with whatever, have projected their struggles onto the chess
board and thought, and then nations have fought over the chess board.
The Soviet Union versus the United States, Bobby Fisher represented the United States.
The Spassky represented the Soviet Union.
I got a, before I lose track of it, when we were talked about The Godfather, you were
an American gangster, great film.
You said it's one of your favorites too.
What, you were in it with Denzel Washington, what makes that movie meaningful to you?
What was the like making that movie?
Because it's a great, great American film.
That was a great American film.
There was so many things in that film.
Being a part of that film was probably a blessing, a treasure, because even if I wasn't a part
of it, it just sets great filmmaking and to me, a really cool, great story.
The thing that I love about it the most really is the process of it.
Which part of the process?
I wasn't known the process if I wasn't part of it.
So as a film enjoyer, it was a great film.
But even the process of making it was like high level education for me on multiple levels.
I'm working with Ridley Scott, which is, and this is a bold statement if I say this here
because I got a lot of friends that's going to probably, but he's probably the best living
director because watching him allowed me to understand a principle that I've coined to
him and I don't know if people use it yet called multi-vision.
He seems to have the capacity to see eight things at one time.
I heard on Robin Hood he had 18 cameras.
I wasn't there for that.
And you think he keeps them all in his mind, just sees it?
I've seen him do it when he went to the monitors with the video playback guy.
I've seen him bring everything back to a point, but nothing was the same on the frame.
He was already there and he knew if he had what he was or not and he placed the cameras
there and he saw it in his own way and I peeped it and I said, yeah, and I just humbly
asked him.
He was gracious enough to speak to me and talk to me and confirm what I thought I saw.
He confirmed it?
He confirmed it and I was able to utilize it as I'm a filmmaker now.
And I could at least see three or four things.
I can't see eight yet.
I'll be there though.
But I could definitely, even right now, just I could go like this in the room, okay.
I got it now.
I got like how to make this right here, which is just us all sitting.
How do I make this, look, boom, come on on him.
There's a story there.
It's a story there.
And I might just of course, it's hanging watch or it's hanging wristband.
Yeah.
You know, because there's something else there too.
Is he dead?
We don't know.
Exactly.
So he has this and even though this is the scene.
Yeah.
You keeping that in mind, all of this in mind.
What about like, can you give an inkling of other parts of the process like the editing?
Like, where does the magic happen?
Another thing.
Another thing.
Patriot?
I don't pronounce Patriot last name, right?
Oh God, I had a chance to play rugby with him.
He was on, was he on my team?
Yeah.
Well, we went both teams.
But Pedro, the editor who, you know, added many great films.
Once again, he has, I will call deciphering power.
A good editor is a decipher almost like breaking the enigma because he's dealing with thousands,
or we'll call it a film with millions of feet of film, at least a million feet of film.
That's a lot of film for a feature.
He's dealing with that.
But he's dealing with multiple cameras.
So it ain't like it's like two cameras, he got an A, B and he could just go back.
No, he may have six cameras and he has to go back and deal with that process.
And you know what?
He knows how to tell the story again.
And he proved it on American Gangster as me being a witness because it's so much information.
It's even when the brothers all start getting their little business and he picked one of
the Bronx.
And he just captured every neighborhood within one minute and you knew what would happen.
You knew it all.
You knew it.
You saw the whole rise of fame.
You watch the Palmer and Scarface who does it in two minutes, but it's only one character.
So you see him go to the bank, he drops the money off, you see him buy the lion, you see
him get his wife, or the tiger, you see him get his wife.
You see all that and then it ends on the big side of him and the big house with all the
TV screens.
And you see him go through it, right?
But in American Gangster, you're going to tell that story of rising, but you also got to
include these five brothers.
Yeah.
And that's all in the edit.
Oh, man.
But also all in the director, knowing that as well.
And you got to keep thinking about them because that was a story right there.
Yeah.
And I don't know if they were taking pictures of them or if I was having a little party
over there.
Yeah.
Jess, I think.
Yeah.
I like it.
They're playing chess in the distance.
This is great.
You said that you were always an old soul and see the world as if you're 200 years old.
I like this.
Because your creative vision allows you to see the final piece you've created or you're
creating very quickly, quicker than others.
I heard that as if you've almost like lived many lives, so you have this experience that
allows you to see the vision.
So let me ask you on creativity.
Where does this creativity behind RZA come from, both musically and film-wise?
Dad, I don't know if I have the answer to that one, right?
No, for sure it's where does it come from.
One thing I could say about that is that for some reason it seems endless.
And that's peculiar when I think about it myself.
Because I was taught a lot of things from the juzza.
He introduced me to mathematics.
He introduced me to hip-hop itself, to breakdancing.
I got other cousins that introduced me to graffiti, cousins that introduced me to DJing.
I realized I had a lot of introductions, but the juzza definitely, my older cousin gave
me a lot of early inspirations.
And not saying that he's not creative, as creative as he was then or now, I just didn't
see the wide span of creativity.
I don't see him doing that, right?
And I don't see the cousins that taught me how to DJ.
I didn't see them move from DJing to making the beats.
My cousin who actually got me into instruments, I didn't see him leave funk and rock.
He didn't go, like, I'm orchestra-composed in there.
So I just said to myself, I just accept myself as an artist, as a creative artist.
That's what I am.
I have to accept that.
Now, where it comes from, I don't know if I was to try to say where it comes from.
Like, hey, give me some type of answer, I'll say from life itself.
What does it feel like, because you mentioned during this pandemic, for example, for some
reason, more came to you in terms of writing.
And so do you feel like you're just receiving signals from elsewhere, or do you feel like
it's hard work or you're just waiting?
Wow.
It's not even waiting, nor is it hard work.
It's almost like, I said in one of my other lyrics, this is for the MC part of it.
I said MCing to me is easy as breathing.
So it's like breathing.
Yeah, it's just like, in fact, there's actually was a scientific thing I read about that now
that you said that.
You heard this?
I don't even have to hear this.
They say that, you know, the atoms in our atmosphere, which seem to be infinite in number,
are not infinite in the space they occupy, because they're in our atmosphere.
And so there's a chance that at least one million atoms that you breathe in your life
was breathed by Galileo.
You heard this before, though, all right?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's very accurate.
Okay.
How does your body digest it?
Let's start at the fact that most of the atoms that we're made of is from like stars, right?
From stars birth.
So like, we're all really connected fundamentally somehow, and then the atoms that make up our
body come and leave, and the same with the cells that are in our body.
They die and are reborn, and we don't pay attention to any of that.
That all just goes through us.
I don't know.
That makes me feel like I'm not an individual.
I'm just a finger of something much bigger, some much bigger organism.
Well, because you're drinking the coffee there, right?
You're going to digest that.
You're going to digest those atoms, whether you're going to put them through the bowel
or through the urination, it's coming out, or maybe you'll sweat it out.
You might sneeze it out, but they're going to make their way out.
How do you digest the atoms if you just breathe in Galileo?
Right?
And that's what I think an artist does.
I think something in the artist, it's like some people eat things and they're going to
gain weight.
Some people ain't going to gain weight.
They're going to gain muscle.
I'm just giving you an analogy here.
I'm thinking that the artist breathes in and translates it into the art.
First they got to hear it.
I think most of us don't hear that.
We receive it, but it just doesn't.
Right.
It's not.
Yeah, we not have the frequency.
I said this to an artist, we all consider ourselves artists in a certain way, but not
artists.
But let's just say there's only one million artists in the world.
Yeah.
Good.
If you divide that into the population, what part of the table would it be?
That tiny part.
It might be that.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's that that inspires that.
Oh, yeah.
Ain't no so crazy about that though.
There's also a chance, I'm just going numbers and I'm just hypothesizing with you, but there's
also a chance that all of this is actually informing that.
Yeah.
The artist is just watching this, all of this, all of the chaos of this.
Yeah.
So it's hard to know where the beauty comes from.
Is it the artist or the chaos from the?
So I just, I said, I don't have the answer, but if I was to be forced to say or something
on the answer, you're not twisting my arm, but yeah, I would say I can if you want to.
No, thank you.
I'll see life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Life.
In the title of Woo, you write something about confusion, which I really like.
Confusion is a gift from God.
Those times when you feel most desperate for a solution, sit, wait, the information will
become clear.
The confusion is there to guide you.
Take detachment and become the producer of your life.
So I got to ask you advice.
If a young person today in high school, college is looking for some advice, what advice could
you give them to be a producer of a life that can be proud of?
Read the Dao of Wu.
Let's start with the Wu Tang manual first.
Yeah.
No, you can do that second.
Second.
Yeah.
I think you can read the Dao of Wu first and then do the manual.
Because the manual is not to put the two books against each other, but the manual is talking
about things that is so deeply connected to the music and the people in the Dao of Wu
goes beyond that.
So I would actually start there, which is not normally how I prescribe.
I always tell people to start at knowledge, then go to wisdom.
But since the Dao...
Skip ahead to the wisdom.
I like it.
Yeah.
So if you're a young man in high school, go to the Dao of Wu and then go back.
It's just like sometimes, you have like my son's generation, they had to watch the second
round of Star Wars and then go back.
I mean, this generation is watching the Force Awakens and then they go back.
But what...
Because if you just look at your life as an example, that's one heck of a life.
There's very few lives like it.
You've created some of the most incredible things artistically in this world.
If somebody...
You talk about that like one million right at the corner of the table.
If somebody once strives dreams to become one of those, how do they do it?
Well, the beautiful thing is that there are footprints left by those who've done it and
the best way is to study that.
To study those who've already done what you want to do.
We live on the civilizations, we said this is the greatest country in the world, but
our seal is a pyramid with an eye on it because they did it before and they may have failed
for some reason or something happens, but it was just a strong enough example to take
us further.
So Elon Musk is sitting here trying to do better than what the rocket builders did before.
He's not the first one to build the rocket.
He's not the first guy to think over the electric car.
He's doing it better.
He's advancing it to the point that whoever picks up after him, maybe they'll get to that
flying car.
So that's the beauty.
There's a good verse, I love finding verses to say things to confirm because this way
people could take it verbally, physically, and then maybe even spiritually, but Christmas
has said a verse, he said, the fastest way to heaven is by spending time or studying
the wise people, meaning the wise people who was living and those who lived before you.
Study the masters.
Let me ask you a big, perhaps ridiculous question, but give it a shot.
What is the meaning of this whole thing?
What's the meaning of life?
Big question, I'm not going to rush into the answer.
I'm going to give you somebody else answer first and I'll give you my answer.
I remember acting this, you know, when I was 15, 16 years old, one of the brothers, you
know, we're studying in mathematics and the letter I itself means I, Islam.
I meaning the individual, right, being a total accord with Islam.
And let me just finish this, then they took the word Islam and they defined it as Islam
is an Arabic word for peace.
And they said peace is the absence of confusion, okay?
So then they took, this is something that really hit me when I was, you know, I never
forgot it and I'm going to decipher it, but then they took the word Islam and they broke
it down by the letter into an acronym like casual, everything around me and they broke
it down to I stimulate light and matter.
Because what hit me was that if you're not here, then light and matter don't exist to
you.
So you're stimulating it or it ain't here for you.
So anyway, taking all that, so then I said, you know, so what's the meaning of life?
And the brothers just said, love is Islam forever.
Right?
I ain't saying the religious point of it.
I'm just saying all those other elements I just spoke about in front of it.
I stimulate light and matter.
I love that.
That's powerful.
And let me give you my definition of life.
I think life is that simply for each and every one of us to add on to.
Build, like you said, the master's build on top.
Life gave you life.
Give life back.
I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about the meaning of life.
Riza, I'm a huge fan and such a huge honor that you spend your valuable time with me.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Riza.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you some words from Plato.
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.