#228 – RZA: Wu-Tang Clan, Kung Fu, Chess, God, Life, and Death

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.

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Know what I'm talking about.

It's a line from the movie. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is 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 etheric 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 coming up young with arrogance, confidence, knowledge of myself. They called me the scientists. We was taught, you're the Supreme Being. In order to be the supreme Being, you got to 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. 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'll read in the Bible how Jesus Brought back Lazarus, and, you know, now here's your turn to do something. And when my mother was laying there in the hospital bed and air was no longer coming out of her lungs and going into her lungs, where's my power to bring her back to life?

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. But. So I'm asking your question. What did my mother teach me about life I learned that day on her physical passing. 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 her.

Right.

Even though if you watch my movie Love Beats Rhymes, I named the school in that movie after my mother just to leave it somewhere else.

Yeah. In physical space.

Yeah.

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 gonna come in here and do that.

So in some sense, James Brown is still here. In another sense, the soul is here.

The soul is here.

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.

I would add this to that equation when I say it's immortal. I don't think not. It's only because somebody sings it, right? It's like, why? Where's the fire at 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 rushing that. Nowhere near me, right? Because all I know is life. 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 the question, somebody asked him similar question, you know, you 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's like, I don't know. They said, oh, he doesn't know that. So. Yeah, because I haven't died yet.

Yeah, 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 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. 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.

Yeah.

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, I mean, only put up, 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, took some heat. But at that time, I didn't take heed. And, 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 could 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. The experience of every moment.

Yeah. And I'll share this with you because this seemed 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 girl I met thought she was beautiful and actually built a friendship with her. But a few years later, when the relationship became like, you know, this is gonna be my woman, it was actually doing. When I was doing the middle of my, of my divorce, and I was like, you know, do I run wild? And hey, hey, hey, you know, me and my wife, already five, 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 when. 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. I don't think I'd be talking to you right now and talking 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, so.

And like you said, you now share that look of having both lost your. Yeah, your mom. What have you learned from Quincy about.

Music, about business, about life?

Quincy Jones is a great mind, a great artist, you know, a treasure in all reality. He seen it from when it was. He couldn't walk in the. He couldn't eat in the same places he played his music at. To owning places bigger than those. 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. And you know, there's 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 is special and hopefully I picked that up, is that he's, he is 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 their feet. 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, minimal. I mean, Quincy Jones, Also in his 50s as a producer, produced one of the greatest albums of all time and one of the greatest selling albums of all time. Not just great, critically, economically great. And I mean he may, I think he's, he did it at the age I am right now, so I might have a great year coming up.

Timing well, yeah, so now you got a taste of what greatness is. You get to see what greatness is. So you know what, exactly how to.

Do it for yourself.

Yeah, you've have a few people you've worked with who are fascinating like yourself. Quentin Tarantino, you work 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 a sense of 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, 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 the year, it was past the year 2000 already. So it was like 2001, 2002 that I asked him to mentor me. So I was the rizza 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 patamon at it. 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.

And like film history.

Film history from whether it's the actor, the director, the cinematographer.

Yeah.

Maybe even the costume designer. He may know 50, 60. He may know the 50 greatest costume designers in his memory. I mean, it's God's brain.

Both of you have pretty good memory. I'd love to be a fly on the wall. That conversation and kung fu movies, mostly. You guys.

We actually started. I think we started our relationship trying to outdo each other.

Knowledge wise or what?

Yeah, movie knowledge wise.

Movie knowledge.

Actually, kung fu movie knowledge wise. And I think that category. 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. Yeah, but Quentin is older than me. Yeah. So he could go back farther. Yeah. He could go back to 72 when I didn't see one yet. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we.

He said, master of the Flying Guillotine. That I got a chance to. That you commentated 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. Best ever. Would you say that's the greatest kung fu, I mean, 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. That's a beautiful entry.

You talk about knowledge, you talk about wisdom. What. What kind of wisdom do you draw from kung fu movies? The. 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 a 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 hangar 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 in 36 chambers it's my favorite movie. But the action director of Master of Flying Guillotine is the director of 36 chambers of Shadowland. And some of the things that's happening in Masters 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, you know, 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 now I'm seeing his work. So some symbiont's relationship there. And I'll end this question by saying Hungar deals with the five animal technique. The tiger, the crane. Right. The leopard, the snake and the dragon. Those are the five. That's the five pattern. Some people go seven, some go 12. But it says stick to the five pattern fist. How do a man immolate a tiger? And you see a tiger's fist, he curls before he spawns on you. How does a man immolate 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 might 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 a form for. That's the mentality. So kung fu, like I said, it informs me endlessly. Because at first I was trying to learn all the. 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 a prance or fly away like the stalk, you know what I mean? Like, yo, it's this. That's the mentality.

It's much more than the technical moves.

It's.

It's much deeper. Yeah, yeah, it's Interesting. I mean, when I see the kung fu movies, because I'm. 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 stop. I mean, if you see it right, even. I watched a great MMA fight recently and 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. Ew. The slippery ew technique.

Yeah, No, I love that. When people become artists in the cage or they. That'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.

Yes, yes, 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 and lose. And sometimes the less talent guy could win because he could deal with the pressure, but the other guy, he could have beat him. There was somewhere else, but not in this arena.

So you're a scholar of history, including hip hop history. You've. 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 could just add on, because I'm sure it's a lot of people that spend a lot of time with them that could speak on it. But just as a fellow artist, I think not only was Big a dope lyricist, I think he had a voice that was really immaculate in a sense that some rappers get on top of music and you gotta get used to them or you gotta, you know, you gotta 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 know what I mean?

You mean just like the raw voice of the man, so you could just listen to it raw and it sounds like a record?

Yeah, but if you put a beat, take his voice to put it on any beat, it's. 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.

Yeah, yeah.

Then you go to Pac. Once again, immaculate voice. But what Pac had, I think, was a way of touching us on all of our emotions and especially on, like. Pac had the power to infuse your emotional thought, like, Brenda has a baby, dear Mama. But then he had the power to arouse. You're the rebel in you, you know?

Yeah.

And those two things. Actually, he was probably more dangerous than Big Notorious B. Like, Notorious B, I G. We could party with him to this day. We are still. But Pac was probably going to a point, you know, he was more going into the Malcolm X of things and.

Yeah.

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 big 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. Hendrix, a lot of those guys just go, too soon.

Yeah. It's a peculiar thing, you know. You asked me earlier, am I scared of death? And I answered you, no, I'm not scared of death. I mean, I'm not trying to see it, though. You know what I mean? It's like if 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 gotta drive through that. You know what I mean?

But it can still happen. That's the meditation on death part, where you could die at the end of today.

Yeah, you could die. Well, dying and death, I think, is two different things. Personally, the process.

You mean of death or just.

Yeah, I mean, you could die, like I said, 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, 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. You're many things.

Yeah, I was a squad. Now, I would describe that. It's all life, though.

Yeah. It's fun.

Outside of you and anybody on Wu Tang, who's the greatest rapper from a. Lyrics like a wordsmith perspective in hip hop history, or some of the greatest. Maybe some candidates.

Just name a few. I mean, you're going to have to start with Rakim. You know, you're going to have to pick Coogee Rap in there. You know what I mean?

So going back.

Yeah, you're going to. You're going to have to pick up with those brothers first. You might have to. If you want to get technical, you might have to start with Grandmaster Cass. You know what I mean? Who you might not. You might not even heard of.

Nope.

You know what I mean? But you may have sung his lyrics every time you sang Sugar Hill Rapper's Delight. Because that's his. Yeah, they copied his and they made it theirs. But point being made. But I'll name a couple more. I gotta put Nas in that category. You know, we got a chessboard in front of us and one of the greatest chess players, the youngest grandmaster, you know, before I think Carlsen, was Bobby Fischer. So let's use Bobby Fischer as American. One of the greatest American chess players. Of course, Susan Polgar 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. Joseph was already a master when Nas was a master, but Jose was 21. Nas was 15.

Nas is like the Mozart of rap. Yeah.

Or just Bobby Fischer, because he.

Bobby Fischer just born. Something in him. Maybe those early years. Just because he's. He's not just good at the lyrics. He's also. He goes deep with it.

Yeah.

Just like you. So he's like, there's. There's depth. It's not just like mastery of the. The word smithing. It's just the message you actually send across information. Yeah.

Into a small phrase. Right. 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 artists, MCs. That does that. And he was doing it at 15. You know, like I said, I'm thinking I'm five years or four or five years older than Nas. So I was always feeling, you know, my confidence over what I was doing. But I was like, this kid is only 15.

I gotta step up my game.

Yeah. When he turned 19, then we got illmatic.

Yeah. From you.

Oh.

What are the best and most memorable lyrics you've ever written?

Wow, 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, I, I, I mean, I think I did a song called Sun, 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 that 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, that's good.

Tomorrow. I think it's on a diagram.

I'm not a record guy.

Yeah.

I'm a song.

Might have been a diagram. Do you have a lyric from it? Yeah.

The answer to all questions. You're talking about God.

Yeah.

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. That's a good line. Man. This is such a good, 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 him on your deathbed. I had a big. I have a scientist friend. Well, my wife's best friend, Rebecca, she married a scientist. They both scientists. They both were scientists. And she married Dr. Neal of the. I ain't gonna say their last names, but Neil and Rebecca, you know, my wife's best friend. So they come over and me and Neil, we go through the longest debates of science and religion. We just go, we'll break. 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. Cause now you got a child to think about, right. It's different when you're thinking about yourself. I asked him 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.

Yeah.

And I just want to say, as far as. So you mentioned lyric. That is one of my favorite lyrics. But that's part two to Sunshower was the prequel to Sunshine. Yeah. 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 thermonuclear 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 be naught unless in wrought. So they find themselves persecuted inside their own universal court. So that is a long one. That's like a three pager.

Wow. That is about life. That's like character, integrity, how to be.

Yeah.

How to be in this world. And that ultimately connects to God.

Yeah.

Who's God to you?

I'm glad you just asked that question, because I actually. I'm gonna 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's name. But they was debating, and in 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 they was going deep. And they really went far, far back to kind of the first word of. Of God. And it was when they pronounced it on this particular debate, it was Allah. And they said for now, 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 the last denominator, you're going to get the number seven. And the number seven 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 could 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've read many books, of course, and I could say there's no book that my. The book that is the most strongest book I ever read is actually the Holy Quran. It's stronger to me than the Bible, which I read is stronger than quantum physics, which I read is stronger than the Bhagavad Gitas. It's just. And, and I read once a British scholar said it's the most stupidest book ever written, and it doesn't make sense. And I. So I said, oh, I see why he says that. I can understand exactly why he said that as well.

Why is that?

Because the, 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.

Yeah.

You have actually, with Joe Rogan, I think you talked about how a joke of Dave Chappelle's hit you like a long time after this. 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. Do you think that, like, are you humble in the face of just the, the immensity of it?

To be honest? Yes. I'm humble in the face of the. You could say the world cannot pronounce words. Funny. The omnipotence, the omniscience, the magnitude. I'm humbled in the face of. In the face of Allah. The problem that we. 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 saying that, you know, I know when we say God, we're trying to say a lot like people was saying that. But you're actually not saying the same thing because you're actually putting something besides. And. And that's the reason why you can have all 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. I mean, 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 with her. So if I say, if somebody woke up, yo, peace God, I could take that because they're telling me that, yo, 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 ain't the gods of rap. There's wisdom there, there's strength there, there's beauty that we'll take that.

Yeah.

So.

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 thousands years. I hope we don't get rid of the humans. But you know, look, whatever happens going to happen. But I think that my philosophy on it is that we are 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 100 years and we've created all of this music. Just if you think of all the richness of music that's been created over 100 years and it's not obvious to me that that's not going to stop. 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 all the technological innovation with 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's 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 will, 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 word play. 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. 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 gonna go a little political here, but not going political. As we're saying, we're the greatest country in the world. What makes us the greatest? That should be a question we ask, 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 could really, you know, between America and Russia, they. What they said, we just, you know, they. That's. 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?

The hope is that the wisdom is in the founding documents, in the imperfect but wise founding documents 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.

Yeah, you said, well, that's what I mean. So if we could get. So if you 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 unpredictable and just like. Yeah, just. Yeah, but like, got deep pretty quick. I gotta talk to you about Bruce Lee. Who's Bruce Lee to you? Who is he to the world? What ideas of his more interesting to you?

Like what?

You know, you talk about, like, Hendrix and music. Bruce Lee, is that a 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 Allah is merciful, even a man who's deaf has to somehow get a sign. I don't know. If Moses saw a burning bush, was nobody else to talk to, so he had to talk to the bush. I don't know. It could have been the bush. This way too.

Bush.

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 it, through martial art, was a whole shift in the dynamic of thinking, you know, and that happens when certain. 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. The first, of course, when I saw my first kung fu movie, it was the fake. It was. Wasn't really Bruce Lee. It was a few Green Hornet clips cut together. And then I saw Black Samurai. Then my following kung fu movies was like Fearless Fighters, the Ghostly face.

You.

Know, the fist of Double Kid. But basically, in Fearless Fighters, the lady put the little kid on her back and flew across the ocean, across the lake. Right. 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 gonna.

It's like surreal. They play with the world that's not of this world.

Yeah, Bruce played with this world. So when I. Somebody. So when I first saw Bruce, I actually 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. Because the first one I saw was the Big Boss, which they retitled Fist the 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, Enter the Dragon. Right. Just really complete. That's why my first album is Enter the Wu Tang 36 chambers of Shaolin. So it's enter the dragon and 36 put together, because those are the two epitomes. So what happened is, you know, that's young me. Then teenage me studies him again. And I realized, wow, look at. Look at his physicality. Look at 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'd like to dance between the two. Because, I mean, a movie to me is to entertain you. So 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. Whereas 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 to mix the two.

Yeah, it's funny how, like, science fiction, like pushing into the impossible actually makes it realize eventually. Yeah, yeah. We humans, like, we. Once we see idea on screen, no matter how wild it is, we're trying to make it. Yeah, we're trying to make it. Some we a young kid that gets 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 the. What is it the, the. The hoverboard or like, we were there at least somebody.

They got. Yo, they 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 are Back to a Future fan, you feel like you made it to. You made it there. Yeah. All right, all right.

Well, now we just gotta work on the time travel. And it was cool to hear you, the master of the flying guillotine today. That, that inspired the. The lyric for the, you know, Wu Tang Clan and nothing to F with. Yeah, how does that go again?

But the curse word or the lyric.

I am Russian.

But the lyric, I said, I'll be tossing and forcing. My style is awesome. I'm causing more family feuds than Richard Dawson. And the survey said you're dead. The fatal flying Guillotine chops. Off your head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was interesting to see the guillotine in the movie today.

How?

I don't know that. That's surreal. Right. But it's not. It's like. It's an engine. It's engineering. It's both surreal and it just. And adds this chaos into this real world that. And then challenges everybody to think what you're gonna do with that.

Yeah. How are you gonna beat it?

Yeah. How are you gonna 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. Like you said, then the question of who was good, who was evil. But they all had a similar problem when the guillotine 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, oh. I mean, every one of those themes connects in the real, and it connects in a cinematic way as well. The difference, I think, with me and the Godfather was I seen it during a period of time when my father was absent. And therefore, family structure and family values was actually adopted in my family because of that. You know, me and my brother Devon, we actually, you know, took so much heed to that movie in our family life, and we kind of, you know, we kind of mimic that family in this structure of somebody has to be the leader of the family, even if it's the younger. Michael was younger than Sonny and Fredro. 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 Fredro, and I know King wants to, because King was actually. He actually was. He said he could beat our ass. Excuse my language.

Yeah, yeah, but you're Michael.

Yeah. And not by choice. Like, 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 just a good light in the family. And like I said, that movie helped us. My sisters, too. We. You know, the cool thing about my family, I don't know if I share this a lot. It's a big. We all watch these movies together. And so the eight diagram, Poe Fighter, Master Killer, Five Deadly Venoms. My family knows these movies. It's not just I know them. Right, and then you extend it further. My friends know them right, too. 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 fictitious 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 gotta be. You gotta 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, sometimes when the Muslim brothers come from the Middle east to America and they open up delis, right? They would sell Hamilton, and we would go in there and complain to them and make them, like, they used to get mad at us when we came in. But, you know, and that's as a kid, but as a man, I'm like, yo, he's here to sell now. He still don't have to sell to him. Like. Like, Vito 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. Yeah.

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 like that. You know, I mean, there's. There's a certain sense of. You look at powerful people, you look at Putin, 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 thy neighbor and thy 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 could you. He say, give not that which is holy unto the dogs. If you're going to tell a woman, give not that which is holy unto the dogs, and she's a woman, you just called her a dog. If I translate that into hip hop, she's a female. He called her a dog.

I know how that goes.

But she trans. But she said to him, but even the dog is allowed to eat the crumbs that falls from the master's table. And he went, helped. He helped. Now, let's go back to what you just said about Putin or Vito Kodalon or 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 do they behead their own king with the guillotine? Right? Because that once the family was strong, they didn't let the wealth, the opportunity expand out. You know, you look at Wu Tang, yes, our family was made strong first. But then all the Wu men was 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, and 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's 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.

Yeah.

No animal. The plants themselves. Right. So let's just say, you know, you want a steak, which is probably the most, you know, 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 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 a 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, 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, 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.

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, look, if it's necessary, right, because we're, you know, 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.

Yeah. Okay. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Lizards gotta go.

Yeah, you gotta go. You gotta do what you gotta 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. 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 gonna eat this thing. First of all, it's hard to eat it. You gotta 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 care. 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 was hell getting that steak, getting it out. It's like, it's not worth it. In all reality. You could have gave me a. You could have gave me a banana and did better for my body and my appetite and my being fulfilled as full. Like, look. 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 reproduce, it's done. Yeah, if you kill a cat, it's done. It's not. 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 that cause the apple to grow more. Yeah.

It's a circle of life. And especially there's. There's a guy named David Foster Wallace. He wrote a short story story called Consider the Lobster. If you actually think philosophically about what from a perspective of A lobster that's like, symbolic or something, because you're basically put in a. In water, like cold water, and then it heats up slowly until. Until it's no more torture.

Yeah. It must have been like. You think they started eating lobsters in the Inquisition?

Yeah, they just enjoy. They'll probably enjoy torturing animals. And they realize they're also delicious after the torture is finished. That's probably how they discovered.

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.

Yeah.

Right. So do we. So are you thinking there's an algorithm for emotion?

Yes, but I think emotion isn't something that there's a algorithm for 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 screaming in pain. Lightly. And just having them do that, when you kick them or when they run into stuff, immediately I start to feel something.

So the emotion. Okay, so the emotion, you're saying is imposed back on the human. Yeah, but I'm asking, do you think there's an algorithm for the emotion to be imposed from machine to machine?

Yeah, that. That is a really good way to ask it. It's. 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, 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 hit you with this, because I've been thinking about this, and this is your field. Well, do you think emotion is wave, like light is waving, or 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.

I don't know if it's a wave or a particle. I 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. I had a Lyric that said this, it comes out. They did this documentary about the planet and I gave. I 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 of 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 10mg is all it takes to kill a man. But anyways, then I go on from.

There, but damn, that's good.

But the question, you see the question there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can be measured. Can that be measured? I think so. I think so.

Just not got the instrument 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. You know, we tend to think we humans are distinct entities and we move about this world, but I think there's some deeper connection and. 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. 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 last. That last. Because you look at quantum computers, they're going to give you the O. The one, the one, the O. 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 chessboard, right? The moves goes into the millions, but the thing that's introduced is the uncertainty, right? You gonna make a move? This, 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 your next move.

I like the weight of these. They add. They add the certainty. I think just like Huang unpredictable, that there's something about us Humans that really doesn't like everything to be fully predictable. You mean chess too is perfectly solvable. There's nothing unpredictable about chess.

Right. I could 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 win 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 pastime that stimulates my mind, my music, my thoughts about life at the same time. So while some pastimes is like, say baseball is watched as a pastime 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 the game of baseball. I mean, the player maybe, but not the viewer. Chess is something that I can engage in to. And even though it's a pastime, 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 chessboard and thought through. And then nations have fought over the chessboard.

Right, Right.

The Soviet Union versus the United States. Bobby Fischer represented the United States.

Spassky represented the Soviet Union.

Yeah, I gotta. Before I lose track of it, when we were talking about the Godfather, you were in 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. What was it like making that movie? It was a great, great American film.

That was a great American film. It was so many things in that film. Being a part of that film was probably a blessing and a treasure because even if I wasn't a part of just caught such 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 wouldn't have known the process if I wasn't part of it. So as a film, joyous 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. Cause I got a lot of friends that's gonna 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 see, I seen him do it when he went to the monitors with the video playback guy.

Yeah.

I seen him bring everything back to. To a point. But nothing was the same on the frame. He was already there.

Yeah.

And he knew if he had what it was or not. And he placed the cameras there. He saw it like, in his own way. And I peeped it, you know, and I peeped it and I said yo. And I just, you know, humbly asked him. He was like. He was gracious enough to speak to me and talk to me and confirm of 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'm. I see I could at least see three or four things. I can't see eight yet. I'll be there though. But I could definitely, like, even right now, just. If 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 dramatic? Look, Boom.

There's a story there, It's a story there.

And I might just go off his hanging watch or his hanging wristband.

Yeah.

You know, because there's something else there too.

Is he dead? We don't know exactly.

So.

So he has this. And even though this is the scene.

Yeah. You keeping that in mind? All of this in mind?

Yeah.

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. Pedro. I don't pronounce Pedro last name. Right. He's a. He's a cool guy. I had a chance to play rugby with him. He was on. Was he on my team? Yeah. Well, we win 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 before a feature. He's dealing with that, but he's dealing with multiple cameras.

Yeah.

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. Even when the brothers all start getting their little business. And he put one in the Bronx. And he just captured every neighborhood within one minute. And you knew what would happen. You knew it all. You saw the whole rise of fame. So you watch De Palma 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 by the lion. You see him against his wife or the tiger. You see him against his wife. You see all that. And then it ends on the big side of him in the big house with all the TV screens. And you seen them go through it. Right. But in American Gangster, you're gonna tell that story of rising. But you also gotta 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 gotta keep track. You gotta keep thinking about them. Cause that was a story right there.

Yeah, well, I was hearing it. I don't know if they was taking pictures of him or. Everybody's having a little party over there.

Yeah, yeah. Chess, 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 line. 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 a. 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? This both musically and film wise?

Dad. I don't know if I have the answer to that one right. But is it. No, seriously, where does it come from? Only 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 jizza. You know, he introduced me to mathematics. He introduced me to hip hop itself, the breakdancing. You know, I got other cousins that introduced me to graffiti, cousins that introduced me to DJing. Like, I realized that I had a lot of introductions, but the judge are definitely, you know, 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 like the wide span of creativity. I don't see him doing that. Right. And I don't see my cut. You know, the cousins that told me how to dj, I didn't see them move from DJ into making the beats. You know, my cousin that, you know, who actually got me into instruments, I didn't see him leave funk and rock. He didn't go like, I'm orchestra composing now.

Yeah.

So. So I just said to myself, I just accept myself as an artist, as a creative artist. That's what I am. That I have to accept that. Now, where it comes from, I don't know if I was to try to. Try to say where it comes from, like, hey, give it, give me, give me, give me some type of answer. I'll say from life itself.

But 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 like, do you. Do you feel like it's hard work or you're just waiting?

Wow, it's not even waiting or. 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 MC into me as easy as breathing.

So it's like breathing.

Yeah, it's just like. In fact, this actually was a scientific, scientific thing. I read about that. Now that you may be. Now that you said that you heard this. I know you had 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. Right. Because they. In our atmosphere. And so there's a chance that at least 1 million atoms that you breathe in your life was breathed by Galileo. You heard this before, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

It's very accurate.

Okay. How does your body digest it?

Well, let's start at the fact that most of the atoms in our. That we're made of is from, like, stars, right? From Stars, bursts. So, like we're all really connected fundamentally somehow. And then they get. 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 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.

Yeah.

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 breathed in Galileo. Right. How do. And that's what I think an artist does. I think something in the art is like, some people eat things and they're going to gain weight. Some people ain't going to gain, but they're going to gain muscle. My. I'm just giving 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. Like, don't we receive it. But it just is.

Right. It's not. Yeah. We not have the frequency. I said this to. About artists and even, you know, New Yorker consider ourselves artists in a certain way, but not, you know, but let's just say there's only 1 million artists in the world. Yeah, good. You know, it's probably.

Yeah.

If you divide that into the population, what would that. What part of the table would it be?

A tiny part.

Yeah, it might be that. Right?

Yeah.

And yet it's that. That inspires that.

Oh, yeah.

You know what's 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 the. 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. I don't have the answer. But I. If I was to be forced to say an answer. And you're not twisting my arm, but.

Yeah, I'll say I can if you want me to.

No, thank you. I'll say life.

Yeah, yeah, life. In Tao of Wu, 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. Seek detachment and become the producer of your life. So I gotta 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 they can be proud of?

Read the Dao of Woe.

Let's start with the Wu Tang Manual first.

Yeah, no, you go do that second.

Second.

Yeah, I think you could read the Dao Wu first and then do the manual. Because the manual is actually 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. And the Dao of Woo goes beyond that. So I would actually start there, which is not normally what I prescribe. I always tell people, start in knowledge, then go to wisdom. Yeah, but since the dao, skip ahead to the wisdom. I like it. Yeah. I think for the. For that. For a young man in high school, go to the Dao of Wu and then go back. It's just like sometimes, you know, you had, you know, like my son's generation, they had to watch the other. The second round of Star Wars.

Yeah.

And then go back. You know what I mean? This generation is watching the Force Awakens and then they go back.

Yeah, 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. Like if somebody. You talk about that like 1 million.

Right at the corner of the table.

If somebody wants. 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. You know, and the best way is to study that, to study those who've already done what you want to do. You know, we live on a civilization. We said this is the greatest country in the world, but our sailors are pyramid with an eye on it. You know what I mean? 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. 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 of 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 is living.

And those who live before you study the masters.

Yeah.

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 asking this. And you know, I don't know. I was 15, 16 years old. One of the brothers, you know, we're studying in mathematics. And the letter I itself was means I Islam. I mean the individual right. Being a total accord with Islam. Let me finish this. Then they took the word Islam and they defined it that Islam is an Arabic word for peace. Then they said, peace is the absence of confusion. Okay. So then they took. This is something that really hit me when I was. And I never forgot it. And I. I'm going to decipher it. But then they took the word Islam and they broke it down by the letter into a acronym like Castle everything around me. And they broke it down to I stimulate light and matter. And I was like. 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 Islam forever.

Right?

Yeah.

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 simple for each and every one of us to add on to.

Build. Like you said, the masters 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. Rza, I'm a huge fan. It's such a huge honor that you spend your valuable time with me. Thank you so much.

Peace.

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