Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with RZA.
00:00:03 The rapper, record producer, filmmaker, actor, writer,
00:00:06 philosopher, Kung Fu scholar, and the mastermind
00:00:10 of the legendary hip hop group Wu Tang Clan.
00:00:14 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:17 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:19 in the description.
00:00:20 And now, here’s my conversation with RZA.
00:00:24 In the Tao of Wu, you write,
00:00:27 when my mother left the physical world, I lost one
00:00:30 of my main links to the universe.
00:00:32 They say that you have an umbilical cord
00:00:35 and an etheric cord, which is the invisible cord
00:00:38 that attaches you to your soul, your mother’s soul
00:00:41 and all other souls.
00:00:43 When one passes away, you really lose something.
00:00:46 It’s physical and mental.
00:00:48 It’s real.
00:00:49 Part of you dies.
00:00:52 What have you learned about life from your mother?
00:00:54 I mean, I learned life itself from my mother.
00:01:00 You know, being one of 11 children
00:01:05 and seeing the sacrifice that she gave to us,
00:01:10 therefore given to life.
00:01:13 It’s really the greatest lesson of life.
00:01:16 The thing that shook me as I wrote those words
00:01:21 was coming up young with arrogance, confidence,
00:01:31 knowledge of myself.
00:01:34 They called me the scientist.
00:01:36 We was taught you’re the supreme being.
00:01:40 In order to be the supreme being,
00:01:41 you gotta be supreme amongst other beings.
00:01:47 I understand that more now than I did then
00:01:50 because then it was so literal.
00:01:53 You know, the word God derived basically
00:01:57 from the Greek language, as they say,
00:01:58 and it meant wisdom, strength and beauty.
00:02:03 Yeah, we could have that.
00:02:06 But the power to control life and death
00:02:09 is something that you would assume is a God trait.
00:02:14 So now here you are saying that you’re a God, right?
00:02:20 And you’re reading the Bible,
00:02:21 how Jesus brought back Lazarus.
00:02:24 And you know, now it’s your turn to do something.
00:02:28 And when my mother was laying there in the hospital bed
00:02:32 and air was no longer coming out of her lungs
00:02:34 and going into her lungs,
00:02:37 where’s my power to bring her back to life?
00:02:39 Yeah, so you can’t truly be God.
00:02:44 You’re powerless.
00:02:46 Yeah, or God is not the definition
00:02:48 that we need to use to describe it
00:02:51 because it’s a translation of wisdom, strength and beauty.
00:02:54 So you could be that.
00:02:56 But so I’m answering your question,
00:02:58 what did my mother teach me about life?
00:03:00 I learned that day on her physical passing,
00:03:03 that okay, you know what I mean, there’s a physical me.
00:03:07 Do you think about her, do you miss her?
00:03:12 Of course, I keep my mother in my prayer every day.
00:03:17 And the thing I pray the most beyond giving thanks
00:03:23 is I pray that her name is honored
00:03:27 and remembered by my family.
00:03:30 I don’t know if the world’s gonna remember that, right?
00:03:33 Even though if you watch my movie, Love Beats Rhymes,
00:03:36 I named the school in that movie after my mother
00:03:39 just to leave it somewhere else.
00:03:41 Yeah, in physical space.
00:03:43 Yeah, exactly.
00:03:45 But yeah, painful.
00:03:47 The pain of my mother’s passing is indescribable.
00:03:51 Only until it happens to a person they know
00:03:55 and then they won’t describe it either.
00:03:56 Only the people that lost their mother,
00:03:58 they could look at each other and they got this nod.
00:04:00 You know what I mean?
00:04:01 But one other thing happened to me was the joy of life
00:04:07 hit me differently.
00:04:10 And I think it was the realization of my own mortality
00:04:17 versus my immortality.
00:04:21 It’s a big, big thing.
00:04:22 And I don’t know if we’ll get to expound on that,
00:04:25 but there was a joy that overcame me
00:04:26 because I was kind of free of a certain illusion
00:04:30 about the immortality of my physical being
00:04:35 versus the mortality of my physical being.
00:04:39 And I was like, okay, wow, I understand.
00:04:42 So that was the first or the hardest realization
00:04:45 you’ve experienced that you’re mortal.
00:04:48 Yeah, that, yeah.
00:04:49 And I’ll say mortal and what you’re looking at here
00:04:53 physically, I won’t say my soul is mortal.
00:04:58 I’ll say it’s immortal because at the end of the day,
00:05:02 it’s just like I can sit here and I could just hum,
00:05:05 please, please, please, by James Brown.
00:05:10 But James Brown is not gonna come in here and do that.
00:05:16 So in some sense, James Brown is still here.
00:05:18 In another sense, he’s gone.
00:05:19 His soul is here.
00:05:20 His soul is here.
00:05:22 Well, it lives through you by you singing it.
00:05:25 It lives through you by you listening to it, celebrating it.
00:05:28 And the hope is that the human species continues
00:05:32 to celebrate the great minds
00:05:34 and the great creations of the past.
00:05:36 I will add this to that equation.
00:05:41 When I say it’s immortal,
00:05:44 I don’t think it’s not just only
00:05:45 because somebody sings it, right?
00:05:48 It’s like, where’s the fire at right now?
00:05:52 It’s in the air.
00:05:54 You just gotta spark the spark.
00:05:56 Yeah.
00:05:58 So it’s always there.
00:06:01 Are you afraid of death?
00:06:03 Nah, I’m not afraid of death.
00:06:05 I’m not trying to see it.
00:06:08 I’m not watching that nowhere near me, right?
00:06:10 Because all I know is life, right?
00:06:12 My life is living.
00:06:15 I read a lot of ancient texts,
00:06:17 people probably know about me.
00:06:19 I love one of the great teachers named Bodhidharma.
00:06:21 And there was a thing written in one of the books of his
00:06:29 or one of the teachings of his.
00:06:30 And the question, somebody asked him similar question,
00:06:34 you’re scared of death or what are you gonna be
00:06:37 after you die?
00:06:39 And his answer was, I don’t know.
00:06:41 He had answers to everything.
00:06:43 But he was like, I don’t know.
00:06:44 They said, oh, he doesn’t know that.
00:06:46 So yeah, because I haven’t died yet.
00:06:48 Yeah, well, the uncertainty to some people is terrifying.
00:06:52 Not knowing what’s on the other side of the door.
00:06:55 Yeah.
00:06:56 I mean, especially when you’re young.
00:06:58 You know, as a kid, fear permeated my life.
00:07:03 You know what I mean?
00:07:04 You know, I was actually watching horror movies
00:07:06 and I believed in all type of supernatural things
00:07:10 that could or can happen.
00:07:12 I thought I saw things as well.
00:07:14 And you know, whether it was being projected
00:07:17 in my own mind or whether it was there visible to me,
00:07:19 I don’t know, right?
00:07:22 But life is beautiful and we have it.
00:07:28 And we should use it all the way to the last drop.
00:07:32 Realizing the mortality, the gift your mother gave to you
00:07:36 is realizing the immortal.
00:07:38 And in so doing, help you realize that life is beautiful.
00:07:42 Yeah.
00:07:43 On this topic, Quincy Jones, I read, said to ODB and you,
00:07:48 when it rains, get wet.
00:07:51 What do these words mean to you?
00:07:54 Well, I think what Quincy was saying at that time was,
00:07:58 you know, I think I was more conservative,
00:08:02 like as a person.
00:08:03 And like, you know, I had money.
00:08:07 Women wanted me.
00:08:09 Anything I kind of wanted, I probably could have had.
00:08:13 You know what I mean?
00:08:15 And he was just saying, when it rains, get wet.
00:08:17 Enjoy this, man.
00:08:18 It’s raining on you.
00:08:20 You know what I mean?
00:08:21 Don’t put up the umbrella.
00:08:22 Don’t go back in the house.
00:08:24 Get wet.
00:08:25 Experience the moment.
00:08:27 Yeah, and enjoy it.
00:08:28 And I didn’t take total heed to him at that time.
00:08:32 A couple of years later, I took some heed.
00:08:35 But at that time, I didn’t take heed.
00:08:36 And when I took heed,
00:08:39 I think that I may have misinterpreted
00:08:46 by looking at his example of getting wet
00:08:48 versus my example of getting wet.
00:08:51 And I can tell you right now,
00:08:52 I’m getting wet right now in my way.
00:08:56 In part, thanks to your mother.
00:08:57 But overall, you just learned how to appreciate the rain,
00:09:01 just like the experience of every moment.
00:09:04 Yeah, and I’ll share this with you
00:09:05 because this is going to be a very open conversation
00:09:08 and I haven’t had this conversation.
00:09:09 So definitely in part to my mother,
00:09:12 then in part to my wife.
00:09:15 I meet my wife, it’s my second wife,
00:09:19 but I met her after my mother passed.
00:09:22 And she was just a friend.
00:09:23 You know, some girl I met, I thought she was beautiful
00:09:27 and actually built a friendship with her.
00:09:31 But a few years later, when the relationship became like,
00:09:35 you know, this is going to be my woman,
00:09:37 it was actually when I was doing the middle of my divorce
00:09:42 and I was like, you know, do I run wild and hey, hey, hey,
00:09:45 you know, me and my wife already filed, we were separated.
00:09:48 And do I run wild?
00:09:51 And I didn’t run wild, a little bit, but not too wild.
00:09:55 And you know, I’m still a man, I’m a hip hop guy, so.
00:10:00 I read you know how to party.
00:10:01 Yeah, exactly.
00:10:02 But the funny thing is that my wife now, her name is Talani,
00:10:08 my uncle said, she reminds me of your mother.
00:10:15 He knew my mother before I knew my mother.
00:10:18 And he saw that and we ended up dating, got engaged
00:10:26 and then her mother passes.
00:10:28 And so now there’s a total understanding of everything.
00:10:35 And we actually help build each other back up.
00:10:38 So of course I have to thank my mother for the awareness.
00:10:43 Then I thank my wife for bringing that awareness
00:10:47 to actual actualization, like to actually feel,
00:10:52 I don’t think I’ll be talking to you right now
00:10:54 and talking as much as I do these days,
00:10:56 if it wasn’t for the security and peace and harmony
00:11:00 that I was able to gain at home, you know, so.
00:11:05 And like you said, you now share that look
00:11:07 of having both lost your, your mom.
00:11:13 What have you learned from Quincy about music,
00:11:16 about business, about life?
00:11:19 Quincy Jones is a great mind, great artist, you know,
00:11:24 a treasure in all reality.
00:11:27 He seen it from when it was, he couldn’t walk in this,
00:11:30 he couldn’t eat in the same places he played his music at
00:11:34 to owning places bigger than ours.
00:11:36 So what a beautiful life, you know?
00:11:41 He’s the type of guy, if you spend one hour with him,
00:11:45 you got a lifetime of information.
00:11:48 And I was blessed to spend multiple hours with him
00:11:50 and days with him.
00:11:51 And, you know, there’s a certain period of time
00:11:54 where we came across each other and he was always
00:11:58 there to share the knowledge.
00:11:59 Like that’s another thing about him that I think is special.
00:12:01 And hopefully I picked that up,
00:12:04 is that he’s always willing to share,
00:12:09 share with his experience, his knowledge.
00:12:12 I mean, I think he’ll even share his home
00:12:17 to the right person if he feels that that’s what they need
00:12:19 to get back on their feet.
00:12:20 He’s a very beautiful man.
00:12:22 So just the kindness, the goodness of the man
00:12:26 is like the thing that really rubbed off on you.
00:12:28 Yeah, I mean, minimum, right?
00:12:31 I mean, Quincy Jones also in his fifties,
00:12:34 as a producer, produced one of the greatest albums
00:12:38 of all time and one of the greatest selling albums
00:12:41 of all time.
00:12:42 Not just great critically, economically great.
00:12:45 And I mean, I think he did it at the age I am right now.
00:12:49 So I might have a great year coming up.
00:12:51 I don’t know.
00:12:52 Yeah.
00:12:55 Time and well, yeah.
00:12:57 So now you got a taste of what greatness is.
00:13:00 You get to see what greatness is.
00:13:01 So you know what you need to do for yourself.
00:13:04 Exactly, how to strive for yourself, yeah.
00:13:06 You have a few people you’ve worked with
00:13:08 who are fascinating like yourself.
00:13:10 Quentin Tarantino, you worked with him.
00:13:14 When somebody asked you to describe him with one word,
00:13:16 you said encyclopedia.
00:13:18 What have you learned from the guy
00:13:19 about filmmaking and about life again?
00:13:22 A very generous man with his knowledge.
00:13:25 And for me, he shared it, I think,
00:13:27 in a way that was unique in a sense of,
00:13:31 you know, at a point in time,
00:13:34 you know, we just was super duper tight.
00:13:35 Like, you know, like I’m going to this crib
00:13:38 and watching movies and just having long conversations
00:13:42 about art and about life.
00:13:44 You know what I mean?
00:13:46 So I learned a lot.
00:13:48 I consider him, you know,
00:13:49 especially when it comes to anything cinematic in my life,
00:13:53 I consider him the godfather of that for me.
00:13:56 I think, you know, I humbly asked him to mentor me,
00:14:02 which is a very humbling thing to do
00:14:04 coming from my neighborhood, coming from who I am,
00:14:07 coming from, I was already a multi platinum artist,
00:14:11 you know, I mean, it was a year,
00:14:13 it was past the year 2000 already.
00:14:16 So like 2001, 2002 that I asked him to mentor me.
00:14:20 So I was the wizard already, you know what I mean?
00:14:23 But I humbled myself because I saw in him
00:14:28 a craft of brain power that to me resonated with me,
00:14:34 but I was just a Patamon at it, I was a novice at it
00:14:38 because I was trying to make movies in my music,
00:14:42 you know, trying to make videos.
00:14:44 And here was a man who was a master of it
00:14:46 and an encyclopedia of it as well.
00:14:50 Like film history.
00:14:51 Film history from whether it’s the actor,
00:14:54 the director, the cinematographer,
00:14:56 maybe even the costume designer.
00:14:58 He may know 50, 60,
00:15:00 he may know the 50 greatest costume designers
00:15:02 in his memory.
00:15:04 Yeah, I mean, it’s a guy’s brain.
00:15:06 Both of you have pretty good memory.
00:15:08 Yeah.
00:15:09 I’d love to be a fly on the wall of that conversation.
00:15:12 And kung fu movies, most of you guys want.
00:15:14 We actually started,
00:15:16 I think we started our relationship
00:15:19 trying to outdo each other.
00:15:21 Knowledge wise or what?
00:15:22 Yeah, movie knowledge wise.
00:15:24 Actually kung fu movie knowledge wise.
00:15:27 And I think that, if it wasn’t another category,
00:15:29 I wouldn’t have had a chance,
00:15:30 but at least in that category,
00:15:33 I was pretty holding my weight.
00:15:35 For one.
00:15:36 You know what?
00:15:37 I’ll be honest and say that I may have said a few,
00:15:42 he didn’t see, but Quentin is older than me.
00:15:44 Yeah.
00:15:45 So he could go back.
00:15:47 Farther.
00:15:48 Yeah, he could go back to 72
00:15:50 when I didn’t see one yet.
00:15:51 You know what I mean?
00:15:52 Yeah.
00:15:53 Well, he said Master of the Flying Gate Team
00:15:55 that I got a chance to,
00:15:56 that you commentated over today
00:15:58 and I got a chance to see the screening of.
00:16:00 He said that’s one of his favorites.
00:16:03 For you, the 36 Chamber of Shaolin,
00:16:08 the Master Killer is your favorite.
00:16:10 Best ever, would you say?
00:16:11 That’s the greatest Kung Fu movie ever?
00:16:15 It’s hard to say the greatest ever, right?
00:16:18 Because somebody may make another one
00:16:20 and it depends on your own phase of life.
00:16:22 But I will put that first.
00:16:28 If I want to introduce somebody to Kung Fu movies,
00:16:30 that’s a beautiful entry.
00:16:32 You talk about knowledge, you talk about wisdom.
00:16:35 What kind of wisdom do you draw from Kung Fu movies?
00:16:38 The, you know what?
00:16:39 The martial art itself and the movies.
00:16:42 It’s endless wisdom to be drawn and I draw it, you know?
00:16:47 I draw it in a way, you know,
00:16:49 that I could decipher it in my own life.
00:16:53 So for instance, in the movie, Master Killer,
00:17:00 he basically, when he does Kung Fu,
00:17:04 he does it really a style called the Hung Ga technique.
00:17:08 And the director of the movie
00:17:10 is actually a Hung Ga expert who has a lineage
00:17:14 that traces all the way back to Shaolin Temple.
00:17:17 And this director always wanted to keep his movies pure
00:17:21 and to bring Hung Ga to the world.
00:17:23 It’s like he wanted to show the world this lineage.
00:17:26 In fact, you just said Master of the Flying Guillotine
00:17:29 is Quentin’s favorite movie.
00:17:30 And we mentioned that 36 Chambers is my favorite movie,
00:17:33 but the action director of Master of Flying Guillotine
00:17:36 is the director of 36 Chambers of Shaolin.
00:17:40 And some of the things that’s happening
00:17:43 in Master of the Flying Guillotine
00:17:45 is really the infant stage
00:17:47 of what this action director is going to learn
00:17:50 and then use later on in his movies.
00:17:53 So that’s the beauty of it.
00:17:54 It’s almost like, you know,
00:17:57 Quentin is seeing him in his generation.
00:17:59 So Quentin might have been the same age I was
00:18:02 watching that movie.
00:18:03 And then when he becomes a director,
00:18:05 I’m at Quentin’s age and now I’m seeing his work.
00:18:08 So some symbionic relationship there.
00:18:10 And I’ll end this question by saying,
00:18:14 Hung Ga deals with the five animal technique,
00:18:18 the tiger, the crane, the leopard, the snake, and a dragon.
00:18:24 Those are the five, that’s the five pattern.
00:18:26 Some people go seven, some go 12,
00:18:27 but it’s a stick to the five pattern fist.
00:18:30 How do a man emulate a tiger?
00:18:37 And you see a tiger’s fists.
00:18:40 He curls before he spawns on you.
00:18:43 How does a man emulate a snake?
00:18:47 It doesn’t have to be only in the Kung Fu move.
00:18:50 It’s in the ideology of the snake.
00:18:54 It’s in the agility of the crane.
00:18:58 At any moment, sometimes punching a person
00:19:02 is not going to work,
00:19:04 as they would say in leopard fist or tiger paw.
00:19:07 So sometimes you might have to poke them in the eye
00:19:10 with the crane’s beak.
00:19:12 So having your mind able to adapt the instinct
00:19:17 of the animal when you are being attacked
00:19:20 or when you are being the aggressor,
00:19:24 that’s something that you don’t need a form for.
00:19:26 That’s the mentality.
00:19:27 So Kung Fu, like I said, it informs me endlessly
00:19:30 because at first I was trying to learn how to hold my,
00:19:34 like, I can’t really hit you with that
00:19:35 and really hurt you unless I’ve been banging my hand
00:19:37 a thousand times on some bricks
00:19:39 and made it so callous or muscles are so strong.
00:19:43 But the idea that if me and you was to get into a fight
00:19:47 and I’m going to tiger up on you and take that instinct
00:19:50 and prance when I’m a prance,
00:19:53 or fly away like the stork, you know what I mean?
00:19:58 Like, yo, that’s the mentality.
00:20:00 It’s much more than the technical moves.
00:20:02 It’s much deeper.
00:20:04 Yeah.
00:20:06 Yeah, it’s interesting.
00:20:07 I mean, when I see the Kung Fu movies,
00:20:08 because I love martial arts, all martial arts,
00:20:11 and competitive ones too,
00:20:13 like the actual competitions and so on.
00:20:15 It just seems like Kung Fu movies go much deeper
00:20:18 than just like the techniques.
00:20:20 Yeah, they start, I mean, if you see it, right,
00:20:23 even I watched the great MMA fight recently,
00:20:27 just interesting because he was on top of the guy,
00:20:32 and the way he got from under him,
00:20:38 it had to be his spirit got from under him.
00:20:42 It’s some like mixture of crane and whatever.
00:20:45 Snake, ill, with the slippery ill technique.
00:20:48 Yeah.
00:20:49 No, I love that when people become artists in the cage
00:20:52 or that’s much bigger than just like winning,
00:20:56 much bigger than particular techniques.
00:20:57 It’s just art, especially at the highest level competition
00:21:00 where millions of people are watching.
00:21:02 Which is pressure within itself.
00:21:04 Yeah, that’s art under pressure
00:21:07 is even more beautiful art.
00:21:10 You know, you look at some of these fights
00:21:11 and you wonder like why somebody wins and lose.
00:21:16 And sometimes the less talent guy could win
00:21:19 because he could deal with the pressure.
00:21:21 But the other guy, he could have beat them
00:21:23 if they were somewhere else, but not in this arena.
00:21:28 So you’re a scholar of history, including hip hop history.
00:21:33 I’ve listened to so many of your interviews.
00:21:35 You’ve spoken brilliantly about some of the big figures
00:21:38 in hip hop history, Tupac, Biggie, Nas, many others.
00:21:44 Maybe let’s look at Tupac and Biggie.
00:21:47 What made them special in the history of music?
00:21:49 Mm, that’s a good question.
00:21:52 So I don’t know if I’m the authority to answer it,
00:21:56 but I’ll just speak my piece on it.
00:21:58 And maybe I could just add on.
00:22:00 Cause I’m sure it’s a lot of people
00:22:02 that spent a lot of time with them that could speak on it.
00:22:05 But just as a fellow artist,
00:22:09 I think not only was B.I.G a dope lyricist,
00:22:14 I think he had a voice that was really immaculate.
00:22:19 In a sense that some rappers get on top of music
00:22:25 and you gotta get used to them
00:22:27 when you gotta vibe with them.
00:22:30 But he make a record sounds like a record immediately.
00:22:37 If you go back and listen to his music,
00:22:40 you could take his voice and put it on anything.
00:22:43 And for some reason, it sounds like a record.
00:22:47 You know what I mean?
00:22:48 You mean just like the raw voice of the man?
00:22:50 Yeah.
00:22:51 So you could just listen to it raw
00:22:52 and it sounds like a record.
00:22:54 Yeah, but if you put a beat,
00:22:56 take his voice and put it on any beat,
00:22:59 he just has a voice, it’s immaculate, you know?
00:23:04 So his lyrical skills and all that was great.
00:23:07 And you gotta think once again, he’s doing all this,
00:23:11 he’s not even 25 years old.
00:23:12 Yeah, yeah.
00:23:14 And then you go to Pac, once again, immaculate voice.
00:23:18 But what Pac had, I think,
00:23:22 was a way of touching us on all of our emotions.
00:23:27 And especially on, like Pac had the power
00:23:30 to infuse your emotional thought.
00:23:33 Like Brenda has a baby, their mama.
00:23:37 But then he had the power to arouse the rebel in you.
00:23:41 You know?
00:23:43 Yeah.
00:23:44 And those two things, actually,
00:23:49 he was probably more dangerous than Big, Notorious B.I.G.
00:23:56 Like Notorious B.I.G., we could party with him.
00:23:59 To this day, we are still,
00:24:01 but Pac was probably going to a point,
00:24:04 he was more going into the Malcolm X of things
00:24:07 and society fears that.
00:24:12 Yeah, so he was really good at communicating love
00:24:15 and at starting revolutions.
00:24:18 Yeah.
00:24:20 And that’s dangerous.
00:24:21 Very dangerous.
00:24:22 And they communicated love,
00:24:24 but he wasn’t starting revolutions.
00:24:27 Well, it’s interesting to think about
00:24:29 what the world would be like if they were still with us.
00:24:32 But it’s the way of the world.
00:24:35 Hendrix, a lot of those guys just go too soon.
00:24:39 Yeah, it’s a peculiar thing.
00:24:41 Now, you asked me earlier, am I scared of death?
00:24:47 And I answered, you know, I’m not scared of death.
00:24:50 I’m not trying to see it, though.
00:24:51 You know what I mean?
00:24:52 It’s like, that was the block of death.
00:24:55 It’s like, I’m not really going right there right now.
00:24:57 I’m making a left or right turn.
00:24:59 You know what I mean?
00:25:00 Unless it was mandatory for some greaterness, greater good.
00:25:05 It’s like, okay, I got to drive through that.
00:25:07 You know what I mean?
00:25:08 Yeah, but it can still happen.
00:25:09 That’s the meditation on death part,
00:25:11 where you could die at the end of today.
00:25:14 Yeah, you could die.
00:25:16 Well, dying and death, I think,
00:25:17 is two different things, personally.
00:25:21 The process you mean of death or just?
00:25:23 Yeah, I mean, you could die.
00:25:24 Like I said, you could die every day.
00:25:26 You could die and not be yourself.
00:25:29 You know what I mean?
00:25:30 Which is crazy.
00:25:32 But to get to a point of no return,
00:25:35 you know, that’s a whole nother chamber.
00:25:38 I mean, there’s some sense in which
00:25:41 RZA, the producer, becomes somebody else completely
00:25:46 when you’re making a film,
00:25:47 becomes somebody else completely
00:25:49 when you’re, I don’t know, playing chess,
00:25:51 becomes completely something different
00:25:53 when you do kung fu or watch kung fu
00:25:57 or when you’re a family man.
00:25:58 All of those are little deaths
00:25:59 when you transition from one place to another.
00:26:02 So it’s not like you’re one being.
00:26:04 You’re many things.
00:26:06 Yeah.
00:26:07 I would describe, now I would describe that
00:26:08 as all life, dawg.
00:26:10 Yeah, it’s fun.
00:26:14 Outside of you and anybody on Wu Tang,
00:26:18 who is the greatest rapper from a lyrics,
00:26:21 like a Wart Smith perspective in hip hop history
00:26:24 or some of the greatest, maybe some candidates?
00:26:27 Let’s name a few.
00:26:28 I mean, you’re gonna have to start with Rakim.
00:26:31 You know?
00:26:32 You’re gonna have to pick Coogee Rap in there.
00:26:34 You know what I mean?
00:26:35 So going back.
00:26:36 Yeah, you’re gonna have to pick up
00:26:37 with those brothers first.
00:26:38 You might have to, if you want to get,
00:26:41 technically you might have to start with Grandmaster Cass.
00:26:43 You know what I mean?
00:26:44 Who you might not even heard of.
00:26:46 Nope.
00:26:47 You know what I mean?
00:26:48 But you may have sung his lyrics
00:26:49 every time you sang Sugar Hill, Rapper’s Delight.
00:26:52 That’s his?
00:26:52 Yeah, they copied his and they made it theirs.
00:26:56 That’s my point being made, but I’ll name a couple more.
00:27:02 I gotta pick Nas in that category.
00:27:05 You know, we got a chess board in front of us
00:27:07 and one of the greatest chess players,
00:27:10 the youngest Grandmaster, you know, before I think Carlson,
00:27:16 was Bobby Fisher.
00:27:21 All right, so let’s use Bobby Fisher as American.
00:27:23 One of the greatest American chess players.
00:27:25 Of course, Susan Polgar may have tied his record
00:27:27 as the youngest Grandmaster
00:27:29 and she’s the youngest female Grandmaster, I think to date.
00:27:32 But he was a master at what, 14?
00:27:37 Yeah, something like that.
00:27:38 Right?
00:27:39 So now to me, I met Nas when he was 15.
00:27:44 He was already a master lyricist.
00:27:46 It takes about 10 years to become a master lyricist.
00:27:49 So by the time the world heard Wu Tang,
00:27:52 most of us had 10 years of rapping in us already.
00:27:55 So that’s why you met us at mastery level.
00:27:58 The Jizzer was already a master when Nas was a master,
00:28:02 but Jizzer was 21, Nas was 15.
00:28:06 Nas is like the Mozart of rap.
00:28:09 Or the Bobby Fisher.
00:28:10 Just Bobby Fisher, just born something in him.
00:28:13 Or maybe those early years,
00:28:15 just because he’s not just good at the lyrics.
00:28:20 He’s also, he goes deep with it.
00:28:22 Just like you.
00:28:23 So he’s like, there’s depth.
00:28:25 It’s not just like mastery of the word smithing.
00:28:30 It’s just the message you actually get sent across.
00:28:34 It’s information.
00:28:35 Yeah.
00:28:36 Into a small phrase, right?
00:28:40 That’s the whole thing of energy.
00:28:42 How do we condense all that energy into this
00:28:46 so that it could fuel that?
00:28:49 And he’s definitely one of those artists,
00:28:52 MCs that does that.
00:28:54 And he was doing it at 15.
00:28:56 Like I said, I think I’m five years
00:28:58 or four or five years older than Nas.
00:29:00 So I was always feeling my confidence
00:29:03 of what I was doing.
00:29:04 But I was like, this kid is only 15.
00:29:07 I gotta step up my game.
00:29:09 When he turned 19, then we got Illmatic.
00:29:12 Yeah.
00:29:15 From you, what are the best and most memorable lyrics
00:29:18 you’ve ever written?
00:29:22 Well, that’s a hard question for me.
00:29:24 The stuff stand out?
00:29:25 Like stuff you’re really proud of
00:29:26 that was like important in your career?
00:29:29 Yeah, I mean, I think I did a song called Sunshower.
00:29:35 I don’t know if we put it on the Wu Tang Forever double CD,
00:29:38 but only on the international version.
00:29:42 But if anybody could go get those lyrics
00:29:44 and write those lyrics down,
00:29:46 you could just put that in your pocket.
00:29:47 And I’m sure that it’ll answer at least about 25%
00:29:50 of your life’s problems.
00:29:52 Well, that’s a good one.
00:29:53 Sunshine, where you talk about religion and God,
00:29:56 that’s good.
00:29:58 I think it’s on A Diagram.
00:30:01 I’m not a record guy.
00:30:02 Yeah.
00:30:03 I’m a song guy.
00:30:04 Might have been A Diagram.
00:30:05 Do you have a lyric from it?
00:30:06 Yeah, the answer to all questions.
00:30:09 You’re talking about God.
00:30:10 Yeah.
00:30:11 The spark of all suggestions, of righteousness,
00:30:14 the pathway to the road of perfection,
00:30:16 who gives you all and never asks more of you,
00:30:19 the faithful companion that fights every war with you.
00:30:22 Before the mortal view of the prehistorical historical,
00:30:25 he’s the all in all you searching for the oracle.
00:30:28 That’s a good line, man.
00:30:29 This is so good.
00:30:31 A mission impossible is purely philosophical,
00:30:33 but you can call on your deathbed
00:30:36 when you’re laying in the hospital.
00:30:37 You will call on your deathbed.
00:30:39 I had a big, I have a scientist friend.
00:30:42 Well, my wife’s best friend, Rebecca,
00:30:47 she married a scientist.
00:30:48 They both scientists.
00:30:49 They both were scientists, and she married Dr. Neil.
00:30:53 I ain’t going to say their last names.
00:30:55 But Neil and Rebecca, my wife’s best friend, so they come over.
00:31:00 And me and Neil, we go through the longest debates
00:31:05 of science and religion.
00:31:07 We just go.
00:31:08 We could go break day with it.
00:31:10 And before he had a child, he was more adamant.
00:31:18 And I don’t believe in God.
00:31:22 You know what I mean?
00:31:23 After a child, he still kept his thing.
00:31:25 But I just hit him with the question.
00:31:27 If you was about to die, because now you
00:31:29 got a child to think about, right?
00:31:31 It’s different when you’re thinking about yourself.
00:31:33 If you was about to die, you don’t
00:31:35 think you’re going to make that call.
00:31:37 He’s like, I’ll make that call.
00:31:40 And it kind of inspired my lyric, because it was like,
00:31:43 yeah, you’re going to.
00:31:45 And I just want to say, as far as you mentioned lyrics,
00:31:48 that is one of my favorite lyrics.
00:31:49 But that’s part two to Sunshower was the prequel to Sunshine.
00:31:57 So if you ever get a chance to check out Sunshower,
00:32:00 start us off with, trouble follows a wicked mind.
00:32:04 2020 vision of the prism of life,
00:32:07 but still blind because you lack the inner.
00:32:11 So every sinner could end up in the everlasting winter
00:32:14 of hellfire.
00:32:16 But thorns and splinters prick your eye out.
00:32:19 You cry out.
00:32:20 Your words fly out.
00:32:22 You remain unheard.
00:32:24 Suffering internal and external,
00:32:28 along with the wicked fraternal of genitals and kernels,
00:32:31 letting off thermal nuclear heat that burns you firmly
00:32:34 and permanently upon the journey through the journal
00:32:37 of the book of life.
00:32:39 For those who took a life without justice
00:32:41 will become just ice.
00:32:44 It’s been taught your worst enemy couldn’t harm you
00:32:47 as much as your own wicked thoughts.
00:32:51 But people ought to be not unless in war.
00:32:55 So they find themselves persecuted
00:32:57 inside their own universal court.
00:33:00 So it’s a long one.
00:33:02 It’s like a three pager.
00:33:03 Wow, that is about life.
00:33:05 That’s like character integrity, how to be in this world.
00:33:10 And that ultimately connects to God.
00:33:12 Yeah.
00:33:13 Who’s God to you?
00:33:15 I’m glad you just asked that question because I actually,
00:33:19 I’m going to have to make a distinguishable separation here.
00:33:23 All right.
00:33:24 And it’s funny because I heard recently,
00:33:28 I heard a rabbi was debating with this historian, Dr. Ben.
00:33:35 I can’t pronounce Dr. Ben name, but it was debating.
00:33:38 And in the debate, they started going back
00:33:42 through the etymology.
00:33:44 They went way back beyond antiquity
00:33:47 because they was debating.
00:33:48 And so there was some things that was going deep.
00:33:52 And they really went far, far back to kind
00:33:54 of the first word of God.
00:33:58 And when they pronounced it on this particular debate,
00:34:01 it was Allah.
00:34:04 And they said from that, they got Elohim.
00:34:07 I’ve already agreed in my heart and my life
00:34:11 that the father of this universe, proper name is Allah.
00:34:18 And of course, in Allah, I get all.
00:34:23 And I don’t think that God is the same as that.
00:34:28 I think Allah gives birth to God.
00:34:33 In fact, if you take the word Allah, A L L A H,
00:34:37 and you take it through numerology or numbers,
00:34:40 the number letter A being 1, L being 12,
00:34:44 and you add it all up to the last denominator,
00:34:49 you’re going to get the number 7.
00:34:51 And the number 7 is going to bring you right back
00:34:53 to that letter G. So Allah borns God,
00:34:57 but God don’t born Allah.
00:34:59 How does that guy, how does Allah,
00:35:01 connect to the oracle that you’re
00:35:05 going to be calling for when you’re laying in the hospital?
00:35:08 Well, what I was saying in that particular verse was that we’re
00:35:11 looking for the oracle.
00:35:12 We’re looking for somebody else or something
00:35:13 to help us that nobody can really help you
00:35:16 at the end of the day.
00:35:21 So now that we, I don’t want to say we’re speaking on religion,
00:35:24 but we’re speaking on a way of life and a way of thinking.
00:35:29 And I’ve read many books, of course.
00:35:32 And I could say there’s no book that my,
00:35:36 the book that is the most strongest book I’ve ever read
00:35:38 is actually the Holy Quran.
00:35:40 It’s stronger to me than the Bible, which I’ve read.
00:35:43 It’s stronger than quantum physics, which I’ve read.
00:35:46 It’s stronger than the Bhagavad Gita.
00:35:48 It’s just, and I read once a British scholar
00:35:52 said it’s the most stupidest book ever written.
00:35:56 And it doesn’t make sense.
00:35:59 And so I said, oh, I see why he says that.
00:36:02 I understand exactly why he said that as well.
00:36:04 Why is that?
00:36:05 Because the structure of the words are just, it’s peculiar.
00:36:13 You know what I mean?
00:36:14 But it’s almost like how some people’s songs,
00:36:16 you don’t really know exactly what
00:36:18 they say until years later.
00:36:22 Yeah, you have, actually with Joe Rogan,
00:36:24 I think you talked about how a joke of Dave Chappelle’s
00:36:28 hit you like a long time after this.
00:36:30 So this is kind of like the Quran.
00:36:33 I tend to believe that we human beings cannot possibly
00:36:38 understand anything as big as these ideas.
00:36:41 So just, I don’t know.
00:36:44 Did you think that, like are you humble in the face
00:36:48 of just the immensity of it?
00:36:51 To be honest, yes.
00:36:53 I’m humble in the face of the, if you could say the word
00:36:57 again, I pronounce words funny.
00:36:58 The omnipotence, the omnescence, the magnitude,
00:37:04 I’m humble in the face of Allah.
00:37:07 The problem that I may have had was
00:37:09 that I wasn’t humble in the face of God
00:37:12 because it’s just a definable thing.
00:37:15 And that’s why I think a lot of us, and I’m not saying that,
00:37:18 you know, I know when we say God we’re trying to say Allah.
00:37:22 Like people are saying that, but you’re actually
00:37:24 not saying the same thing because you’re actually
00:37:27 putting something beside him.
00:37:31 And that’s the reason why you can have as many gods.
00:37:37 You can find a whole bunch of them, you know what I mean?
00:37:41 But you’re not going to find many.
00:37:42 There’s no body beside Allah.
00:37:45 Allah is one.
00:37:45 So I know it’s a whole thing, but that’s my heart is there.
00:37:50 I’m humbled by it.
00:37:51 I’m at peace with it.
00:37:54 And it doesn’t take nothing or demerit anything from myself.
00:37:59 That’s the beauty of it.
00:38:00 It doesn’t take nothing from me from being who I feel.
00:38:03 So if I say, if somebody woke up, yo, peace, God.
00:38:06 I could take that because they’re telling me that, yo,
00:38:09 I’m a man of wisdom.
00:38:10 I’m a man of strength.
00:38:11 I’m a man of beauty.
00:38:13 Or some attribute of that, you know what I mean?
00:38:15 So Wu Tang, they the gods of rap.
00:38:17 There’s wisdom there.
00:38:18 There’s strength there.
00:38:19 There’s beauty.
00:38:19 They will take that.
00:38:21 Yeah.
00:38:23 So Wu Tang is one of the greatest
00:38:25 musical, artistic, philosophical groups ever.
00:38:29 Let’s look hundreds of years from now
00:38:31 when humans or robots or aliens or whatever that’s left here,
00:38:34 they look back.
00:38:35 What do you hope they remember about Wu Tang?
00:38:37 What do you hope the legacy is?
00:38:40 Well, even if it’s thousands of years,
00:38:43 I hope we don’t get rid of the humans.
00:38:45 But you know, look, whatever happens is going to happen.
00:38:48 But I think that my philosophy on it
00:38:51 is that we’re going to continue to advance and continue
00:38:59 to advance things around us.
00:39:01 But I don’t see us becoming extinct.
00:39:04 Well, I mean, the reason I bring up Wu Tang in that context,
00:39:08 and this is a special moment in human history.
00:39:11 It’s like 100 years, and we’ve created all of this music.
00:39:13 Just if you think of all the richness of music that’s
00:39:16 been created over 100 years, it’s
00:39:18 not obvious to me that that’s not going to stop.
00:39:21 There’s a flourishing here.
00:39:23 So it’s funny because I could see
00:39:25 where the book of human history is written.
00:39:29 There’s a chapter on this period of time.
00:39:32 And one of the things we did well is
00:39:34 all the technological innovation with the rockets
00:39:39 and with the internet.
00:39:40 But then there’s also the musical innovation
00:39:42 and film innovation.
00:39:44 Just so much art that’s being created.
00:39:45 And Wu Tang’s a huge part of that.
00:39:47 So I just wonder if there’s a few sentences written
00:39:50 about Wu Tang, it just makes me wonder how they remember.
00:39:56 I would hope that people, no matter how many years,
00:40:00 are inspired by us.
00:40:02 But I will say, if I could just use Wu Tang as itself.
00:40:07 So we first started off the witty, unpredictable talent
00:40:15 and natural game.
00:40:16 Natural game meaning natural wordplay.
00:40:19 And then we went to the wisdom of the universe,
00:40:27 the truth of Allah for a nation of God.
00:40:34 Wisdom, universal, truth, Allah, nation, God.
00:40:39 So let’s just go back to a nation of God.
00:40:41 Let’s just take the last two letters.
00:40:44 A nation of wisdom, strength, and beauty.
00:40:50 And I’m going a little political here, but not going political.
00:40:53 As we’ll say, we’re the greatest country in the world.
00:40:56 What makes us the greatest?
00:40:58 That should be a question we ask.
00:40:59 Is it our wisdom?
00:41:01 Is it our strength?
00:41:03 Is it our beauty?
00:41:04 Now, let’s just say, off the easiest answer,
00:41:07 you know it’s our strength.
00:41:09 We got the nukes.
00:41:11 Nobody can really, between America and Russia,
00:41:14 they say, that’s the argument.
00:41:17 Who could beat them?
00:41:18 But where’s the wisdom?
00:41:21 Then they can argue, well, we got the technology.
00:41:24 But then where’s the beauty when there’s
00:41:26 so much suffering in the people?
00:41:29 So it’s not complete.
00:41:30 The hope is that the wisdom is in the founding documents,
00:41:33 in the imperfect but wise founding documents
00:41:37 that celebrated freedom, that celebrated all the ideas,
00:41:41 sort of having a lot of nukes, having a lot of airplanes
00:41:45 and tanks.
00:41:49 That’s not important.
00:41:50 And the hope is whatever we’re doing here with this, quote,
00:41:53 greatest country on Earth, that we preserve the ideas
00:41:56 and help them flourish, just like you said.
00:41:59 Well, that’s what I mean.
00:42:00 So if you go back to the Wu Tang,
00:42:03 that’s what we’re striving for.
00:42:05 We’re striving for that.
00:42:07 But you started unpredictable and just like, yeah.
00:42:12 But got deep pretty quick.
00:42:16 I got to talk to you about Bruce Lee.
00:42:19 Who’s Bruce Lee to you?
00:42:20 Who is he to the world?
00:42:22 What ideas of his were interesting to you?
00:42:27 You talk about Hendrix and music.
00:42:29 Bruce Lee is that in martial arts.
00:42:31 He just seems to have changed the game.
00:42:36 I don’t know if the word bold is the right word to say,
00:42:39 but I wouldn’t as bold as to say that he was a minor prophet.
00:42:44 And I got that concept from the Holy Quran
00:42:47 where it says that we send prophets
00:42:49 to every nation, every village.
00:42:52 We don’t let nobody not hear the word in some form
00:42:55 because it won’t be fair.
00:42:57 And so if a law is merciful, even a man who’s deaf
00:43:01 has to somehow get a sign.
00:43:03 I don’t know if Moses saw a burning bush.
00:43:05 There was nobody else to talk to,
00:43:06 so he had to talk to the bush.
00:43:08 I don’t know.
00:43:09 It could have been the bush this way too, right?
00:43:11 But point being made, it says that they are minor prophets.
00:43:15 And I see Bruce Lee as one of them
00:43:17 because what he brought to the world through martial art
00:43:22 was a whole shift in the dynamic of thinking.
00:43:27 And that happens when certain entities are born.
00:43:30 But he didn’t do it only in a physical sense.
00:43:36 He was also for the philosophizing
00:43:38 in the same process.
00:43:41 And he was also striving to be the best of himself.
00:43:45 So you got three things going on.
00:43:48 I studied Bruce Lee multiple times.
00:43:54 And first, of course, when I saw my first Kung Fu movie,
00:44:00 it wasn’t really Bruce Lee.
00:44:03 It was a few Green Hornet clips cut together.
00:44:07 And then I saw Black Samurai.
00:44:08 Then my following Kung Fu movies was like Fearless Fighters,
00:44:13 the Ghostly Face, the Fist of Double K.
00:44:17 But basically, in Fearless Fighters,
00:44:19 the lady put the little kid on her back
00:44:21 and flew across the ocean, across the lake, right?
00:44:25 So Bruce wasn’t doing that.
00:44:28 And then I went on to Five Deadly Venoms, and Spearman,
00:44:31 and 36 Chambers.
00:44:32 And these movies are beautiful, and yet they’re all heightened.
00:44:39 Bruce, they’re heightened beyond doable.
00:44:42 You’re not going to.
00:44:43 Yeah, it’s surreal.
00:44:44 They play with the world that’s not of this world.
00:44:47 Yeah.
00:44:48 Bruce played with this world.
00:44:51 So when I first saw Bruce, I actually
00:44:55 didn’t think he was as good as these guys.
00:44:57 He can’t fly.
00:45:00 He’s not flying in the movies, right?
00:45:03 But then when I saw, because the first one I saw
00:45:07 was The Big Boss, which they retitled Fist of Fury.
00:45:11 But then when I saw Chinese Connection, which
00:45:15 is the real Fist of Fury, right?
00:45:19 I saw something different there.
00:45:21 And I got enamored.
00:45:24 And then, of course, Enter the Dragon, right?
00:45:26 Just really complete.
00:45:28 That’s why my first album was Enter the Wu Tang,
00:45:32 36 Chambers of Shaolin.
00:45:33 So it’s Enter the Dragon and 36 put together,
00:45:35 because those are the two epitomes.
00:45:38 So what happened is that’s young me.
00:45:40 Then teenage me studies him again.
00:45:43 And I realized, wow, look at his physicality.
00:45:46 Look how he’s really moving for real.
00:45:50 And then I studied him again.
00:45:52 Wow, look at what he’s saying.
00:45:55 Then I studied him again.
00:45:56 Wow, look at what he stands for.
00:45:59 Which do you like in the realm of martial arts, the real
00:46:04 or the surreal, or the dance between the two?
00:46:07 Yeah, I like the dance between the two,
00:46:09 because a movie, to me, is to entertain you.
00:46:15 So I’m cool with Obi Wan Kenobi disappearing out of the cloak
00:46:23 when Vader strikes him down.
00:46:25 And then I’m like, yo, what happened?
00:46:27 And he’s like, run, Luke, run.
00:46:30 I’m cool with that, right?
00:46:31 Because that’s the imagination.
00:46:34 And the imagination gets stimulated to the point
00:46:36 to where as things that we saw imagined by an artist,
00:46:40 we strive to create in our real world.
00:46:42 Thus, Star Trek, to me, is just a precursor to our cell phones.
00:46:47 So for me, I like to mix the two.
00:46:51 Yeah, it’s funny how science fiction pushing
00:46:54 into the impossible actually makes it realize eventually.
00:46:57 We humans, once we see an idea on screen,
00:47:00 no matter how wild it is, we’re trying to make it.
00:47:02 Yeah, we’re trying to make it.
00:47:04 Some weird young kid, he gets inspired and watch that.
00:47:06 Be like, I’m going to build that.
00:47:08 Exactly.
00:47:09 So I don’t know who’s going to come with the Back
00:47:11 to the Future time machine.
00:47:13 But do you have any classmates that you think
00:47:15 this is going to be a time machine?
00:47:17 I thought you were going to Back to the Future, like the,
00:47:20 what is it, the hoverboard?
00:47:24 Or like the, uh?
00:47:25 Yeah, at least.
00:47:26 Somebody, they got, you see the one on the water?
00:47:29 No.
00:47:30 No, you know the surf hover?
00:47:33 It’s dope.
00:47:34 Nice.
00:47:35 It’s dope.
00:47:36 It actually, if you are a Back to the Future fan,
00:47:40 you feel like you made it to, you made it there.
00:47:43 Yeah.
00:47:43 Well, now we just got to work on the time trial.
00:47:46 And it was cool to hear you talk about the Master of the Flying
00:47:49 Gaijin today, that that inspired the lyric for the Wu Tang
00:47:57 client, Nothing to F with.
00:47:58 Yeah.
00:48:00 How does that go again?
00:48:02 What, the curse word or the lyric?
00:48:03 Nothing.
00:48:04 OK.
00:48:05 No, I remember the curse.
00:48:06 I am Russian, but the lyric.
00:48:09 I said, I be tossing and forcing.
00:48:12 My style is awesome.
00:48:13 I’m causing more family feuds than Richard Dawson.
00:48:17 And the survey said, you’re dead.
00:48:20 The fatal flying guillotine chops off your head.
00:48:23 Yeah.
00:48:24 Yeah.
00:48:25 And it was interesting to see the guillotine in the movie
00:48:27 today, how, I don’t know.
00:48:32 That’s surreal, right?
00:48:33 But it’s not.
00:48:34 It’s like, it’s engineering.
00:48:36 It’s both surreal and it just, and it adds this chaos
00:48:42 into this real world that, and then challenges everybody
00:48:44 to think what you’re going to do with that.
00:48:46 Yeah.
00:48:46 How are you going to beat it?
00:48:47 Yeah.
00:48:48 How are you going to beat it?
00:48:48 Both when you have like the good and the evil
00:48:51 and the mix of the bad guys and good guys
00:48:54 and you’re not sure who the bad guys are.
00:48:56 It’s the old question of good versus evil, right?
00:48:58 Yeah.
00:48:59 Like you said, then the question of who was good, who was evil.
00:49:03 But they all had a similar problem when the guillotine came.
00:49:07 But in terms of the real, you mentioned The Godfather,
00:49:11 good and evil.
00:49:12 That’s your favorite movie.
00:49:13 Yeah.
00:49:14 What makes it great, do you think?
00:49:16 The characters, the study of family, of justice, of power.
00:49:20 What connects with you?
00:49:21 Oh, oh, I mean, every one of those themes
00:49:25 connects in the real and it connects in a cinematic way
00:49:29 as well.
00:49:31 The difference, I think, with me and The Godfather
00:49:34 was I’ve seen it during a period of time
00:49:36 when my father was absent.
00:49:38 And therefore, family structure and family values
00:49:44 was actually adopted in my family because of that.
00:49:49 Me and my brother Devon, we actually
00:49:54 took so much heed to that movie and our family life.
00:49:59 And we kind of mimic that family in its structure of somebody
00:50:08 has to be the leader of the family,
00:50:10 even if it was the younger.
00:50:11 Michael was younger than Sonny and Fragile.
00:50:14 You know what I mean?
00:50:15 But he was worthy.
00:50:17 And my brother Devon is older than me.
00:50:19 My brother King is older than me.
00:50:20 And it’s funny, sometimes Devon calls King Fragile.
00:50:23 And I know King wants to.
00:50:24 King was actually, he actually was,
00:50:26 he said he could beat our ass, to use my language.
00:50:30 But you’re Michael.
00:50:31 Yeah.
00:50:32 And not by choice, just by definition of that’s what I am.
00:50:38 You know what I mean?
00:50:40 And it’s just a blessing for me to have my older sister,
00:50:44 my older brothers, and my younger brothers look to me as,
00:50:52 just as a good light in the family.
00:50:55 And like I said, that movie helped us.
00:50:57 My sisters, too, we, the cool thing about my family,
00:51:01 I don’t know if I share this a lot,
00:51:02 it’s a big, we all watched these movies together.
00:51:05 And so the A Diagram, Pole Fighter, Master Killer,
00:51:10 Five Deadly Venoms, my family knows these movies.
00:51:12 It’s not just I know them.
00:51:15 And then you extend it further, my friends know them, too.
00:51:19 So there’s a language that we all can have that actually film
00:51:26 has informed our communication.
00:51:29 So The Godfather, which also is still a fictitional story
00:51:34 of something, but since it was based in reality,
00:51:39 based on something real, and it was human,
00:51:42 it wasn’t so heightened, I think the purity of it resonates.
00:51:48 And the purity of it is something
00:51:50 that resonates with me.
00:51:53 You got to plan ahead.
00:51:56 He didn’t want to deal with the drugs,
00:51:58 but that time of business was upon him.
00:52:02 It’s like, it’s almost like, this is a tough one,
00:52:05 like sometimes when the Muslim brothers come from the Middle
00:52:08 East to America and they open up delis, they would sell ham.
00:52:14 And we would go in there and complain to them,
00:52:17 and make them like, they used to get mad at us
00:52:19 when we came in.
00:52:20 But that’s as a kid.
00:52:22 But as a man, I’m like, yo, he’s here to sell.
00:52:25 Now, he still don’t have to sell to him.
00:52:28 Vito Corleone didn’t want to sell the drugs.
00:52:32 He didn’t have to do it.
00:52:33 He didn’t do it.
00:52:34 And it cost him some bullets to eventually,
00:52:37 somebody in the family ended up doing it.
00:52:42 What about this idea that it’s family before everything else?
00:52:45 So there’s different laws you live according to in this world,
00:52:52 and family is first.
00:52:54 Yeah.
00:52:55 That’s mathematically correct.
00:52:59 I like that.
00:53:01 I mean, there’s a certain sense of you look at powerful people.
00:53:06 You look at Putin.
00:53:08 There’s a certain sense in which the people who
00:53:10 are in the inner circle, that’s who you take care of.
00:53:13 That’s family.
00:53:14 And anyone else that crosses you,
00:53:18 that there’s a different set of ethics under which you
00:53:21 operate for those people.
00:53:23 Well, Jesus said the same thing.
00:53:28 When he said, love thy neighbor and thy brother,
00:53:30 he was talking about that community.
00:53:32 When that other lady, the Samaritan, say, hey, Jesus,
00:53:37 my brother not feeling so well, and he said,
00:53:39 give not that which is holy unto the dogs.
00:53:42 If you’re going to tell a woman, give not
00:53:46 that which is holy unto the dogs.
00:53:48 And she’s a woman.
00:53:49 He just called her a dog.
00:53:51 If I translate that into hip hop, she’s a female.
00:53:55 He called her a dog.
00:53:57 I know how that goes.
00:53:58 But she said to him, but even a dog
00:54:02 is allowed to eat the crumbs that
00:54:04 falls from the master’s table.
00:54:07 And he went and helped.
00:54:09 He helped her.
00:54:10 Now, let’s go back to what you just said about Putin
00:54:12 or Vito Corleone or myself and my family.
00:54:15 Of course, the family is first.
00:54:17 But once the family is good, it has
00:54:20 to then spread to the community, then
00:54:23 to the state, country, world.
00:54:27 The problem we have sometimes is that,
00:54:29 and this is the reason why a lot of powerful families
00:54:31 was overthrown, like why do they behead
00:54:33 their own king with the guillotine, right?
00:54:36 Because once the family was strong,
00:54:40 they didn’t let the wealth, the opportunity expand out.
00:54:48 You look at Wu Tang, yes, our family was made strong first.
00:54:53 But then all the Wu members were able to form
00:54:56 their own corporations.
00:54:57 And they had their own subfamilies.
00:55:00 It has to grow out.
00:55:01 And they took over the world.
00:55:03 You’ve talked about being vegan.
00:55:05 I don’t think I heard you explain this,
00:55:09 because it connects somehow about how you think about life.
00:55:14 So you talk about when your family’s good,
00:55:16 you grow that circle of empathy.
00:55:19 You grow the community.
00:55:21 Is that how you think about being vegan,
00:55:24 that just the capacity of living beings on Earth to suffer,
00:55:29 that you just don’t want to add suffering to them?
00:55:33 Yeah, I mean, you said it clear.
00:55:36 It’s like nothing, in all reality,
00:55:40 I came to a realization that nothing really
00:55:42 has to die for me to live.
00:55:46 No animal.
00:55:47 The plants themselves, right?
00:55:49 So let’s just say you want a steak, which is probably
00:55:53 the most, I don’t know, the most expensive piece of meat.
00:55:57 But let’s just say the steak is top of the line, nice steak.
00:56:01 And you’re eating the steak for the protein to help
00:56:03 build your muscle.
00:56:05 And I don’t know if you got it from a cow or a bull,
00:56:07 but whether it’s a cow or a bull,
00:56:09 they grow to about 1,500 pounds.
00:56:11 And if it’s a bull, it’s all muscly muscle.
00:56:16 And it’s only eating grass.
00:56:20 Yeah.
00:56:22 Yeah, it’s possible to, both as an athlete
00:56:26 and just as a human being, to perform well
00:56:28 without eating meat.
00:56:29 That’s something, especially in the way
00:56:32 we’re treating animals, to deliver that meat to the plate.
00:56:37 I think about that a lot.
00:56:38 So I do, I’m a robotics person, AI person.
00:56:42 And I think a lot about, I don’t know if you think
00:56:44 about this kind of stuff, but building AI systems
00:56:47 as they become more and more humanlike,
00:56:49 you start to ask the question of, are we okay?
00:56:55 If we give the capacity for AI systems to suffer,
00:56:59 first to feel, but then to suffer,
00:57:02 to hate and to love, to feel emotion,
00:57:05 how do we deal with that?
00:57:07 It starts asking the same question as you ask of animals.
00:57:11 Are we okay adding that suffering to the world?
00:57:14 Right.
00:57:15 And I don’t think we should add the suffering
00:57:17 because it’s not necessary.
00:57:19 Like, look, if it’s necessary, right,
00:57:22 because we’re survival or the first law of nature,
00:57:25 self preservation, if you are in a desert
00:57:28 and there’s nothing else to eat,
00:57:30 but that lizard, yeah, okay, you gotta do what you gotta do.
00:57:33 Lizard’s gotta go.
00:57:34 Yeah, you gotta go, you gotta do what you gotta do.
00:57:36 Because at the end of the day, man is,
00:57:38 when they say man has dominion over these things,
00:57:41 his dominion is almost like a caretaker.
00:57:45 The way we do our dominion, we dominate it,
00:57:48 eat it, cook it.
00:57:49 Like who’s the first guy that looked at the lobster?
00:57:53 He was like, I’m gonna eat this thing.
00:57:56 Like, first of all, it’s hard to eat it.
00:57:59 You gotta go through a process to get that.
00:58:01 A crab, I remember we used to eat crabs when we was kids
00:58:04 and I didn’t know why I was always getting itchy throats
00:58:06 and all that, you know, you don’t know, just eat.
00:58:09 But at the end of the day, a crab didn’t provide
00:58:11 no more than a finger worth of meat maybe.
00:58:15 And it was hell getting that thing, getting it out.
00:58:18 It’s like, it’s not worth it in all reality.
00:58:20 You could have gave me a banana
00:58:25 and did better for my body and my appetite
00:58:30 and my being fulfilled as full.
00:58:33 Like, look at the blessings of life, right?
00:58:38 If you take a seed or you get an apple and you eat it,
00:58:45 in that apple is multiple seeds in it.
00:58:49 If you plant that seed, it’ll give you a whole tree
00:58:53 with a whole bunch of apples with all multiple seeds.
00:58:56 But if you kill a fish, it can’t reproduce, it’s done.
00:59:02 If you kill a, it’s done, it’s nothing coming back.
00:59:04 But when you deal with the plants,
00:59:07 even after you eat the apple and then you defecate,
00:59:11 your defecation is what feeds the ground
00:59:14 to cause the apple to grow more.
00:59:16 Yeah, it’s a circle of life.
00:59:18 And especially there’s a guy named David Foster Wallace,
00:59:21 he wrote a short story called Consider the Lobster.
00:59:24 If you actually think philosophically about what,
00:59:27 from a perspective of a lobster,
00:59:30 that’s like symbolic of something
00:59:32 because you’re basically put in the water, like cold water,
00:59:36 and then it heats up slowly until it’s no more.
00:59:41 It’s torture, yeah, it must have been like,
00:59:43 do you think they started eating lobsters
00:59:44 in the Inquisition?
00:59:45 Yeah, they just enjoy,
00:59:47 they would probably enjoy torturing animals
00:59:50 and they realize they’re also delicious
00:59:51 after the torture is finished,
00:59:52 that’s probably how they discovered it.
00:59:54 Let me ask you a question,
00:59:55 I know you’re asking me the questions,
00:59:56 but I just wanna talk a little bit about the AI,
00:59:58 and you said something about trying to
01:00:01 put the emotion in it, right?
01:00:07 So are you thinking there’s an algorithm for emotion?
01:00:12 Yes, but I think emotion isn’t something
01:00:15 that there’s an algorithm for for a particular system,
01:00:19 we create emotions together.
01:00:21 So emotion is something like this conversation,
01:00:25 it’s like magic we create together.
01:00:27 So I’ve worked with quite a few robots,
01:00:30 I’ve a very simple version of that,
01:00:33 I’ve had Roomba vacuum cleaners,
01:00:36 I’ve had them make different sounds
01:00:37 and one of them is like screaming in pain, like lightly,
01:00:41 and just having them do that when you kick them
01:00:43 or when they run into stuff,
01:00:44 immediately I start to feel something for them.
01:00:47 So the emotion, okay, so the emotion you’re saying
01:00:50 is imposed back on the human,
01:00:53 but I’m asking, do you think there’s an algorithm
01:00:55 for the emotion to be imposed from machine to machine?
01:00:58 Yeah, that’s a really good way to ask it.
01:01:04 It’s difficult because I think ultimately
01:01:06 I only know how to exist in the human world.
01:01:09 So it’s like, it’s the question of
01:01:11 if a tree falls in the forest, nobody’s there to see it,
01:01:13 does it still fall?
01:01:15 I still think that ultimately machines will have to
01:01:20 show emotion to other humans
01:01:22 and that’s when it becomes real.
01:01:24 I’ve been thinking about this a lot too.
01:01:26 And I just, okay.
01:01:31 No, I’m not gonna hit you with this
01:01:32 because I’ve been thinking about this
01:01:33 and this is your field here.
01:01:36 Well, do you think the emotion is wave?
01:01:38 Like light is wave or do you think it’s particle?
01:01:45 So emotion is just a small,
01:01:47 it’s like a shadow of something bigger.
01:01:49 And I think that bigger thing is consciousness.
01:01:52 So emotion is just.
01:01:53 I don’t know if it’s a wave or a particle.
01:01:55 I haven’t thought about that.
01:01:59 I have thought about it, whether it’s,
01:02:00 there’s something like whether consciousness
01:02:04 or emotion is a law of physics.
01:02:06 Like if it’s that fundamental to the universe.
01:02:09 I had a lyric that said this, it comes out.
01:02:14 They did this documentary about the planet
01:02:15 and I wrote a song, it’s called The World of Confusion.
01:02:19 And I’ll try to paraphrase the lyric,
01:02:21 but in the world of the confusion,
01:02:22 where there’s so much illusions,
01:02:23 we suck the blood from the planet.
01:02:26 Now it needs a transfusion
01:02:28 and the redistribution of wealth,
01:02:31 of health and wealth of self
01:02:35 and a deeper understanding about mental health.
01:02:39 The doctor prescribed the physical solution.
01:02:45 The psychiatrist wants to build a bigger institution,
01:02:51 but neither have the solution or the equation
01:02:56 to make an instrument to measure
01:02:58 the weight of the hate vibration.
01:03:02 What is the weight of hate?
01:03:06 Is it heavier than the weight of love?
01:03:10 Is it heavier than the weight of lead inside of a slug?
01:03:15 With just 10 milligrams, it’s all it takes to kill a man.
01:03:19 But anyways, do not go on from there.
01:03:20 Damn, that’s good.
01:03:21 But the question, you see the question there, right?
01:03:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah, can it be measured?
01:03:26 Can that be measured?
01:03:27 I think so, I think so.
01:03:29 Just look at the instrument, yeah.
01:03:30 Yeah, we’re in the dark ages of that,
01:03:35 but I think it could be measured.
01:03:36 I think there’s something physical,
01:03:39 like something that connects us all this much.
01:03:42 We tend to think we humans are distinct entities
01:03:44 and we move about this world,
01:03:46 but I think there’s some deeper connection.
01:03:48 And, but we’re so, listen, science is in the,
01:03:53 we just had a few breakthroughs in the past 100 years
01:03:55 from Einstein on the theoretical physics side.
01:03:58 We don’t know anything about human psychology.
01:04:00 We barely know much about human biology.
01:04:03 We’re trying to figure it all out.
01:04:05 Yeah, I had another theory,
01:04:08 because, you know, you think about quantum, right?
01:04:13 As long as you say that there’s an uncertainty
01:04:18 and you have me believe there’s an uncertainty,
01:04:20 then there’s an uncertainty.
01:04:22 But if there’s not an uncertainty, what happens?
01:04:26 So I’m only saying that, it’s not,
01:04:28 because you look at quantum computers,
01:04:29 they’re gonna give you the O, the one,
01:04:32 the one, the O, they’re gonna take two things
01:04:35 and make it eight things.
01:04:36 And by the time you multiply four of those things together,
01:04:39 it’s like this chess board, right?
01:04:41 The moves goes into the millions.
01:04:44 But the thing that’s introduced is the uncertainty, right?
01:04:51 You’re gonna make a move.
01:04:52 You know this already, right?
01:05:00 Because this has been played a thousand times,
01:05:04 but sooner or later, something uncertain is gonna come in
01:05:06 or make your next move.
01:05:13 I like the weight of these.
01:05:15 They add the certainty.
01:05:18 I think just like what we were saying, unpredictable,
01:05:20 there’s something about us humans
01:05:22 that really doesn’t like everything to be fully predictable.
01:05:25 I mean, chess too is perfectly solvable.
01:05:30 There’s nothing unpredictable about chess.
01:05:32 Right, well, I could agree to that
01:05:34 because Bobby Fischer said in one of his books,
01:05:39 which I actually love what he said.
01:05:42 He said, every game of chess is a draw.
01:05:48 Yeah.
01:05:49 The only way somebody win is when one of us makes a mistake.
01:05:54 I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.
01:05:56 Yeah, it doesn’t.
01:05:57 What is chess?
01:05:59 Like, how do you think about chess?
01:06:00 What’s at the core of your interest in chess?
01:06:02 Do you see Kung Fu, music, film, all of it, life,
01:06:07 all just living through chess?
01:06:09 Yeah, I see, it’s the most stimulating passage of time
01:06:14 for me that’s also, it’s like, it’s a pastime
01:06:21 that stimulates my mind, my music,
01:06:24 my thoughts about life at the same time.
01:06:27 So while some pastimes is like,
01:06:28 say baseball is a pastime.
01:06:30 And baseball could stimulate you
01:06:31 depending on how you look at it, right?
01:06:32 But most likely, you’re not gonna get
01:06:36 this much brain activation, this much calculation,
01:06:39 and this much thinking about yourself
01:06:42 in a game of baseball.
01:06:43 I mean, the player maybe, but not the viewer.
01:06:47 Chess is something that I can engage in too.
01:06:51 And even though it’s a pastime,
01:06:54 it’s given me all the stimulation of real time in my life.
01:06:59 It’s funny because it’s also, it’s a funny game
01:07:02 because it’s connected through centuries of play.
01:07:06 Just some of the most interesting people
01:07:09 in the history of the world have played this game
01:07:11 and have struggled with whatever,
01:07:14 have projected their struggles onto the chessboard
01:07:17 and thought, and the nations have fought
01:07:19 over the chessboard.
01:07:20 The Soviet Union versus the United States,
01:07:22 Bobby Fischer represented the United States.
01:07:24 Spassky represented the Soviet Union.
01:07:26 Yeah.
01:07:27 I gotta, before I lose track of it,
01:07:30 when we were talking about The Godfather,
01:07:32 you were in American Gangster, great film.
01:07:35 You said it’s one of your favorites too.
01:07:37 What, you were in it with Denzel Washington.
01:07:41 What makes that movie meaningful to you?
01:07:44 What was it like making that movie?
01:07:47 Because it’s a great, great American film.
01:07:49 That was a great American film.
01:07:50 It was so many things in that film.
01:07:52 Being a part of that film was probably a blessing
01:07:55 and a treasure, because even if I wasn’t a part of it,
01:08:00 it just caught such great filmmaking
01:08:02 and to me, a really cool, great story.
01:08:07 The thing that I love about it the most
01:08:12 really is the process of it.
01:08:18 Which part of the process?
01:08:19 I wouldn’t have known the process if I wasn’t part of it.
01:08:22 So as a film joy, it was a great film,
01:08:25 but even the process of making it
01:08:27 was like high level education for me on multiple levels.
01:08:32 I’m working with Ridley Scott, which is,
01:08:36 and this is a bold statement if I say this here,
01:08:38 cause I got a lot of friends that’s going to probably,
01:08:41 but he’s probably the best living director.
01:08:46 Because watching him allowed me to understand
01:08:51 a principle that I’ve coined to him
01:08:54 and I don’t know if people use it yet, called multi vision.
01:08:57 He seems to have the capacity to see eight things
01:09:08 at one time.
01:09:09 I heard on Robin Hood, he had 18 cameras.
01:09:11 I wasn’t there for that.
01:09:13 And you think he keeps them all in his mind, just seeing.
01:09:15 I seen him do it when he went to the monitors
01:09:19 with the video playback guy.
01:09:22 I seen him bring everything back to a point,
01:09:26 but nothing was the same on the frame.
01:09:30 He was already there.
01:09:32 And he knew if he had what he was or not.
01:09:36 And he placed the cameras there.
01:09:39 And he saw it in his own way.
01:09:43 And I peeped it.
01:09:46 I peeped it.
01:09:47 And I said, yeah.
01:09:48 And I just humbly asked him.
01:09:50 He was gracious enough to speak to me and talk to me.
01:09:56 And confirm what I thought I saw.
01:09:59 He confirmed it.
01:10:00 He confirmed it.
01:10:01 And I was able to utilize it, as I’m a filmmaker now.
01:10:05 And I see, I can at least see three or four things.
01:10:09 I can’t see eight yet.
01:10:10 I’ll be there though.
01:10:12 But I could definitely, even right now,
01:10:15 just I could go like this in the room, OK?
01:10:21 I got it now.
01:10:22 I got how to make this right here,
01:10:25 which is just us all sitting.
01:10:27 How do I make this dramatic?
01:10:28 Look, boom.
01:10:31 Come on on him.
01:10:31 There’s a story there.
01:10:32 There’s a story there.
01:10:34 And I might just go off his hanging watch
01:10:36 or his hanging wristband.
01:10:38 Yeah.
01:10:38 Because there’s something else there too.
01:10:40 Is he dead?
01:10:40 We don’t know.
01:10:41 Exactly.
01:10:43 So he has this.
01:10:45 And even though this is the scene.
01:10:47 Yeah, you keeping that in mind, all of this in mind.
01:10:50 Yeah.
01:10:51 What about like, can you give an inkling
01:10:53 of other parts of the process, like the editing?
01:10:56 Like where does the magic happen?
01:10:58 Another thing.
01:10:58 Pedro, I don’t pronounce Pedro last name right.
01:11:02 He’s a cool guy.
01:11:02 I had a chance to play rugby with him.
01:11:04 He was on, was he on my team?
01:11:06 Yeah.
01:11:06 We were in both teams.
01:11:08 But Pedro, the editor who edited many great films,
01:11:15 once again, he has, I will call, deciphering power.
01:11:24 A good editor is a decipher, almost like breaking
01:11:27 the enigma, because he’s dealing with thousands,
01:11:33 or we’ll call it a film, with millions of feet of film,
01:11:36 at least a million feet of film.
01:11:38 That’s a lot of film for a feature.
01:11:40 He’s dealing with that.
01:11:42 But he’s dealing with multiple cameras.
01:11:47 So it ain’t like it’s like two cameras.
01:11:48 He got an A, B, and he could just go back.
01:11:50 No.
01:11:51 He may have six cameras, and he has to go back
01:11:54 and deal with that process.
01:11:56 And you know what?
01:11:58 He knows how to tell the story again.
01:12:03 And he proved it on American Gangster
01:12:06 as me being a witness, because it’s so much information.
01:12:11 Even when the brothers all start getting their little business
01:12:14 and then he put one in the Bronx,
01:12:16 he just captured every neighborhood within one minute,
01:12:21 and you knew what would happen.
01:12:23 You knew it all.
01:12:24 You saw the whole rise of fame.
01:12:26 You watched the Palmer and Scarface,
01:12:29 who does it in two minutes, but it’s only one character.
01:12:34 So you see him go to the bank.
01:12:35 He drops the money off.
01:12:36 You see him buy the lion.
01:12:37 You see him gets his wife, or the tiger.
01:12:39 You see him gets his wife, you see all that.
01:12:41 And then it ends on the big side of him in a big house
01:12:44 with all the TV screens.
01:12:46 And you seen him go through it, right?
01:12:49 But in American Gangster, you’re going
01:12:50 to tell that story of rising, but you also got
01:12:53 to include these five brothers.
01:12:54 Yeah.
01:12:56 And that’s all in the edit.
01:12:57 Oh, man.
01:12:58 But also all in the director knowing that as well.
01:13:02 And you got to keep thinking about them, because that
01:13:05 was a story right there.
01:13:06 Yeah.
01:13:07 While I was hearing it, I don’t know
01:13:08 if they was taking pictures of him,
01:13:10 or they might have a little party over there.
01:13:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:13:13 Chess, I think.
01:13:15 Yeah, I like it.
01:13:16 They’re playing chess in the distance.
01:13:19 This is great.
01:13:22 You said that you were always an old soul
01:13:26 and see the world as if you’re 200 years old.
01:13:28 I like this line.
01:13:29 Because your creative vision allows
01:13:31 you to see the final piece you’ve created,
01:13:33 or you’re creating very quickly, quicker than others.
01:13:38 I heard that as if you’ve almost lived many lives.
01:13:42 You have this experience that allows you to see the vision.
01:13:45 So let me ask you on creativity, where
01:13:47 does this creativity behind RZA come from,
01:13:51 both musically and film wise?
01:13:54 I don’t know if I have the answer to that one, right?
01:13:57 Seriously, where does it come from?
01:14:00 Only thing I could say about that
01:14:02 is that for some reason, it seems endless.
01:14:07 And that’s peculiar when I think about it myself,
01:14:13 because I was taught a lot of things from the JZA.
01:14:20 He introduced me to mathematics.
01:14:22 He introduced me to hip hop itself, to break dancing.
01:14:27 I got other cousins that introduced me to graffiti,
01:14:31 cousins that introduced me to DJing.
01:14:34 I realized that I had a lot of introductions,
01:14:37 but the JZA definitely, my older cousin,
01:14:40 gave me a lot of early inspirations.
01:14:44 And not saying that he’s not creative,
01:14:50 as creative as he was then or now,
01:14:55 the wide span of creativity, I don’t see him doing that,
01:15:00 right?
01:15:02 And I don’t see the cousins that taught me how to DJ.
01:15:06 I didn’t see them move from DJing to making the beats.
01:15:13 My cousin who actually got me into instruments,
01:15:20 I didn’t see him leave funk and rock.
01:15:25 I’m an orchestra composer now.
01:15:27 So I just said to myself, I just accept myself as an artist,
01:15:35 as a creative artist.
01:15:37 That’s what I am.
01:15:39 I have to accept that.
01:15:40 Now, where it comes from, I don’t know.
01:15:43 If I was to try to say where it comes from,
01:15:45 like, hey, give me some type of answer,
01:15:48 I would say from life itself.
01:15:50 But what does it feel like?
01:15:51 Because you mentioned during this pandemic,
01:15:53 for example, for some reason, more
01:15:55 came to you in terms of writing.
01:15:57 And so do you feel like you’re just receiving signals
01:16:00 from elsewhere, or do you feel like it’s hard work,
01:16:05 or you’re just waiting?
01:16:07 Wow.
01:16:07 It’s not even waiting, nor is it hard work.
01:16:10 It’s almost like I said in one of my other lyrics,
01:16:13 this is for the MC part of it.
01:16:15 I said, MCing to me is easy as breathing.
01:16:19 So it’s like breathing.
01:16:20 Yeah, it’s just like, in fact, there’s
01:16:23 actually was a scientific thing I read about that.
01:16:26 Now that you’ve said that.
01:16:28 You heard this?
01:16:28 I know you’ve had to hear this.
01:16:30 They say that the atoms in our atmosphere, which
01:16:37 seem to be infinite in number, are not infinite
01:16:41 in the space they occupy.
01:16:44 Because they’re in our atmosphere.
01:16:48 And so there’s a chance that at least 1 million atoms
01:16:52 that you breathe in your life was breathed by Galileo.
01:16:58 You heard this before, right?
01:16:59 Yeah.
01:17:00 OK.
01:17:02 It’s very accurate.
01:17:04 OK.
01:17:05 How does your body digest it?
01:17:10 Oh, let’s start at the fact that most of the atoms that we’re
01:17:15 made of is from stars, right?
01:17:18 Stars burst.
01:17:19 So we’re all really connected fundamentally somehow.
01:17:22 And then the atoms that make up our body come and leave.
01:17:25 And the same with the cells that are in our body,
01:17:28 they die and are reborn.
01:17:29 And we don’t pay attention to any of that.
01:17:31 That all just goes through us.
01:17:33 I don’t know.
01:17:37 That makes me feel like I’m not an individual.
01:17:41 I’m just a finger of something much bigger,
01:17:45 some much bigger organism.
01:17:47 Well, because you’re drinking the coffee there, right?
01:17:51 You’re going to digest that.
01:17:54 You’re going to digest those atoms,
01:17:56 whether you’re going to put them through the bowel
01:17:58 or through the urination, it’s coming out.
01:18:00 Or maybe you’ll sweat it out.
01:18:01 Yeah.
01:18:02 You might sneeze it out.
01:18:03 Yeah.
01:18:04 But they’re going to make their way out.
01:18:05 How do you digest the atoms if you just breathe in Galileo?
01:18:10 Right?
01:18:11 And that’s what I think an artist does.
01:18:14 I think something in the artist, it’s
01:18:16 like some people eat things and they’re going to gain weight.
01:18:18 Some people ain’t going to gain weight.
01:18:19 They’re going to gain muscle.
01:18:22 I’ll just give you an analogy here.
01:18:23 I’m thinking that the artist breathes in and translates it
01:18:28 into the art.
01:18:29 First, they got to hear it.
01:18:30 I think most of us don’t hear that.
01:18:33 We receive it, but it just doesn’t come out.
01:18:35 Yeah, we not have the frequency.
01:18:37 I said this to a lot of artists.
01:18:40 And even we all can consider ourselves artists
01:18:42 in a certain way.
01:18:44 But let’s just say there’s only one million artists
01:18:50 in the world.
01:18:51 Good.
01:18:53 Because it’s probably 10.
01:18:57 If you divide that into the population,
01:19:01 what part of the table would it be?
01:19:03 The tiny part.
01:19:04 It might be that, right?
01:19:07 And yet, it’s that that inspires that.
01:19:11 And you know what’s so crazy about that, though?
01:19:13 There’s also a chance.
01:19:15 I’m just going numbers and I’m just hypothesizing with you.
01:19:18 But there’s also a chance that all of this
01:19:22 is actually informing that.
01:19:24 Yeah.
01:19:26 The artist is just watching this, all of this,
01:19:29 all the chaos of this.
01:19:32 Yeah, so it’s hard to know where the beauty comes from.
01:19:34 Is it the artist or the chaos from the?
01:19:36 So I just say I don’t have the answer.
01:19:39 But if I was to be forced to say an answer,
01:19:41 and you’re not twisting my arm, but I’ll say.
01:19:44 I can if you want me to.
01:19:45 No, thank you.
01:19:46 I’ll say life.
01:19:48 Yeah, life.
01:19:51 In Tao of Wu, you write something about confusion,
01:19:54 which I really like.
01:19:56 Confusion is a gift from God.
01:19:58 Those times when you feel most desperate for a solution,
01:20:01 sit, wait.
01:20:03 The information will become clear.
01:20:06 The confusion is there to guide you.
01:20:08 Seek detachment and become the producer of your life.
01:20:12 So I got to ask you advice.
01:20:15 If a young person today in high school, college
01:20:20 is looking for some advice, what advice
01:20:22 could you give them to be a producer of a life
01:20:24 that can be proud of?
01:20:26 Read the Tao of Wu.
01:20:29 Let’s start with the Wu Tang manual first.
01:20:31 Yeah.
01:20:32 No, you could do that second.
01:20:33 Second?
01:20:34 Yeah.
01:20:34 I think you could read the Tao of Wu first
01:20:36 and then do the manual.
01:20:37 Because the manual is not to put the two books against each
01:20:41 other, but the manual is talking about things
01:20:43 that is so deeply connected to the music.
01:20:47 And the people in the Tao of Wu goes beyond that.
01:20:51 So I would actually start there, which is not normally
01:20:56 what I would prescribe.
01:20:57 I always tell people, start in knowledge, then go to wisdom.
01:21:00 But since the Tao of Wu.
01:21:01 Skip ahead to the wisdom.
01:21:02 I like it.
01:21:03 Yeah, I think for a young man in high school,
01:21:06 go to the Tao of Wu and then go back.
01:21:08 It’s just like sometimes you have my son’s generation,
01:21:13 they have to watch the second round of Star Wars.
01:21:17 Yeah.
01:21:17 And then they go back.
01:21:19 You know what I mean?
01:21:19 This generation is watching The Force Awakens.
01:21:22 And then they go back.
01:21:23 Yeah.
01:21:24 But what, because if you just look at your life as an example,
01:21:29 that’s one heck of a life.
01:21:31 There’s very few lives like it.
01:21:33 You’ve created some of the most incredible things
01:21:36 artistically in this world.
01:21:38 Like if somebody, you talk about that like 1 million, right?
01:21:43 At the corner of the table.
01:21:44 If somebody wants, strives, dreams to become one of those,
01:21:49 how do they do it?
01:21:50 Well, the beautiful thing is that there
01:21:53 are footprints left by those who’ve done it.
01:21:58 And the best way is to study that.
01:22:02 To study those who’ve already done what you want to do.
01:22:09 We live on a civilization.
01:22:10 As we said, this is the greatest country in the world.
01:22:13 But our seal is a pyramid with an I on it.
01:22:17 You know what I mean?
01:22:17 Because they did it before.
01:22:19 And they may have failed for some reason
01:22:22 or something happens.
01:22:24 But it was just a strong enough example to take us further.
01:22:29 Elon Musk is sitting here trying to do better than what
01:22:31 the rocket builders did before.
01:22:33 He’s not the first one to build the rocket.
01:22:36 He’s not the first guy to think of with the electric car.
01:22:39 He’s doing it better.
01:22:40 He’s advancing it to the point that whoever
01:22:43 picks up after him, maybe they’ll
01:22:45 get to that flying car.
01:22:47 So that’s the beauty.
01:22:51 There’s a good verse.
01:22:52 I love finding verses to say things to confirm.
01:22:55 Because this way, people could take it verbally, physically,
01:22:59 and then maybe even spiritually.
01:23:01 But Christmas has said a verse.
01:23:02 He said, the fastest way to heaven
01:23:05 is by spending time or studying the wise people.
01:23:08 Meaning the wise people who are living
01:23:10 and those who live before you.
01:23:13 Study the masters.
01:23:14 Let me ask you a big, perhaps ridiculous question,
01:23:17 but give it a shot.
01:23:18 What is the meaning of this whole thing?
01:23:20 What’s the meaning of life?
01:23:23 Big question.
01:23:24 I’m not going to rush into the answer.
01:23:30 I’m going to give you somebody else’s answer first,
01:23:33 and I’ll give you my answer.
01:23:34 I remember asking this when I was 15, 16 years old.
01:23:42 One of the brothers was studying in mathematics.
01:23:45 And the letter I itself means I Islam.
01:23:55 I meaning the individual being in total accord with Islam.
01:24:02 And let me finish this.
01:24:03 Then they took the word Islam, and they
01:24:05 defined it as Islam is an Arabic word for peace.
01:24:13 Then they said, peace is the absence of confusion.
01:24:20 OK?
01:24:21 So then they took them.
01:24:23 This is something that really hit me when I never forgot it.
01:24:26 And I’m going to decipher it.
01:24:28 But then they took the word Islam,
01:24:31 and they broke it down by the letter into an acronym,
01:24:34 like cash, with everything around me.
01:24:37 And they broke it down to I stimulate light and matter.
01:24:45 And I was like, what?
01:24:48 Because what hit me is that if you’re not here,
01:24:52 then light and matter don’t exist to you.
01:24:55 So you’re stimulating it, or it ain’t here for you.
01:24:59 So anyway, taking all that.
01:25:00 But then I said, so what’s the meaning of life?
01:25:03 And the brothers just said, love Islam forever.
01:25:06 Right?
01:25:07 Yeah.
01:25:08 And I said, I ain’t saying the religious point of it.
01:25:12 I’m just saying all those other elements
01:25:14 I just spoke about in front of it.
01:25:15 I stimulate light and matter.
01:25:17 I love that.
01:25:18 That’s powerful.
01:25:20 And let me give you my definition of life.
01:25:24 I think life is simply for each and every one of us
01:25:30 to add on to.
01:25:33 Build.
01:25:34 Like you said, the masters.
01:25:36 Build on top.
01:25:37 Life gave you life.
01:25:38 Give life back.
01:25:41 I don’t think there’s a better way to end it than talking
01:25:43 about the meaning of life.
01:25:44 RZA, I’m a huge fan.
01:25:46 It’s such a huge honor that you spend your valuable time
01:25:48 with me.
01:25:49 Thank you so much.
01:25:50 Thank you for inviting me.
01:25:50 Peace.
01:25:52 Thanks for listening to this conversation with RZA.
01:25:55 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
01:25:58 in the description.
01:25:59 And now, let me leave you with some words from Plato.
01:26:03 Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
01:26:08 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.