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Oct. 5, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast
01:26:06
RZA: Wu-Tang Clan, Kung Fu, Chess, God, Life, and Death | Lex Fridman Podcast #228
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The following is a conversation with RZA, the rapper, record producer, filmmaker, actor, writer, philosopher, kung fu scholar, and the mastermind of the legendary hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, here's my conversation with RZA. In the Tao of Wu, you write, when my mother left the physical world, I lost one of my main links to the universe.
They say that you have an umbilical cord and an 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 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 scientist.
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.
And yeah, we could have that.
But the power to control life and death is something that you would assume is a God trait.
So now, here you are, saying that you're a God.
Right? And you're reading the Bible how Jesus brought back Lazarus.
And, you know, now it'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?
So you can't truly be God.
You're powerless. Yeah, or God is not the definition.
That we need to use to describe it.
Because it's a translation of wisdom, strength, and beauty.
So you could be that. So I'm answering your question, what did my mother teach me about life?
I learned that day on her physical passing, that okay.
And I mean, there's a physical me.
Do you think about her?
Do 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 if you watch my movie, Love Beats Rhymes, I named the school in that movie, helping my mother just to leave it somewhere else.
Yeah, in physical space.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, painful.
The pain of my mother's passing is indescribable.
Only until it happens to a person they know, and then they won't describe it either.
Only the people that lost their mother, they could look at each other and they got this nod.
You know what I mean? But one other thing happened to me was the joy of life hit me differently.
And I think it was the realization of my own mortality versus my immortality.
It's a big, big thing, and I don't know if we'll get to expound on that, but there was a joy that overcame me because I was kind of free of a certain illusion that 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, and I'll say mortal and what you're looking at here physically.
I wouldn't say my soul is mortal.
I'll say it's immortal because at the end of the day, it's just like I could sit here and I could just hum, please, please, please, by James Brown.
But James Brown is not going to come in here and do that.
So in some sense, James Brown is still here.
In another sense, he's gone.
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 creations of the past.
I will add this to that equation.
When I say it's immortal, I don't think not just only because somebody sings it, right?
It's like, where's the fire at right now?
It's in the air.
You just gotta spark the spark.
Yeah. So it's always there.
Are you afraid of death?
Nah, 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, right?
My life is living. You know, I read a lot of ancient texts that people probably know about me.
And I love one of the great teachers named Bodhi Dahmer.
And there was a thing written in, you know, one of the books of his or one of the teachings of his.
And the question, somebody asked him, Similar question, you know, you're scared to 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.
Well, the uncertainty to some people is terrifying, not knowing what's on the other side of the door.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah. On this topic, Quincy Jones, I read, said to ODB and you, when it rains, get wet.
What do these words mean to you?
Well, I think what Quincy was saying at that time was, you know, I think I was more conservative, like, as a person.
And, like, you know, I had money.
Women wanted me. Anything I kind of wanted, I probably could have had.
You know what I mean? And he was just saying, when it rains, get wet.
Enjoy this, man. It's raining on you.
Don't put up the umbrella.
Don't go back in the house.
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, I took some heed.
But at that time, I didn't take heed.
And when I took heed, I think that I may have misinterpreted by looking at his example of getting wet versus my example of getting wet.
And I can tell you right now, I'm getting wet right now in my way.
In part, thanks to your mother, but overall, you just learned how to appreciate the rain, just like the experience of every moment.
Yeah, and I'll share this with you because this is seen 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 going to be my woman, it was actually when I was doing the middle of my Of my divorce.
And I was like, you know, do I run wild?
And hey, you know, me and my wife already fouled.
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 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.
Of course, I have to thank my mother for the awareness.
Then I thank my wife for bringing that awareness to actualization, 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.
And like you said, you now share that look of having both lost your mom.
What have you learned from Quincy about music, about business, about life?
Quincy Jones is a great mind, a great artist, a treasure in all reality.
He's seen it from when it was He couldn't eat in the same places he played his music at to owning places bigger than ours.
So what a beautiful life, you know?
He's the type of guy, if you spend one hour with him, you got a lifetime of information.
And I was blessed to spend multiple hours with him and days with him.
There's a certain period of time where we came across each other and he was always there to share the knowledge.
That's another thing about him that I think is special.
Hopefully, I picked that up is that he's always willing to share.
Share with his experience, his knowledge.
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, minimum.
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.
I think 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 strive for yourself, yeah.
You have a few people you've worked with who are fascinating, like yourself, Quentin Tarantino.
You worked with him. When somebody asked you to describe him with one word, you said encyclopedia.
What have you learned from the guy about filmmaking and 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...
No, at a point in time, you know, we just was super-duper tight, like, you know, like I'm going to his crib and watching movies and just having long conversations about art and about life.
You know what I mean? So I learned a lot.
I consider him, you know, especially when it comes to anything cinematic in my life, I consider him the godfather of that for me.
I think, you know, I humbly asked him, To mentor me, which is a very humbling thing to do, coming from my neighborhood, coming from who I am, coming from...
I was already a multi-platinum artist.
I mean, it was past the year 2000 already.
So it was like 2001, 2002 that I asked him to mentor me.
So I was the result already.
You know what I mean? But I humbled myself because I saw 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, trying to make videos.
And here was a man who was a master of it and an encyclopedia of it as well.
Like film history?
Film history from whether it's the actor, the director, the cinematographer, maybe even the costume designer.
He may know 50, 60, he may know the 50 greatest costume designers in his memory.
I mean, this guy's brain.
Both of you have pretty good memory.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall with that conversation.
And kung fu movies, most of 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 if it was another category, I wouldn't have had a chance.
But at least in that category, I was pretty holding my weight.
Who won? You know what?
I'll be honest and say that I may have said a few he didn't see, but Quentin is older than me.
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. He said Master of the Flying Gay Team that you commentate over today and I got a chance to see the screening of.
He said that's one of his favorites.
For you, the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the Master Killer is your favorite.
Best ever?
Would you say that's the greatest kung fu movie ever?
It's hard to say the greatest ever, right?
Because somebody may make another one and it depends on your own phase of life, but...
I will put that first.
If I want to introduce somebody to kung fu movies, that's a beautiful entry.
You talk about knowledge. You talk about wisdom.
What kind of wisdom do you draw from kung fu movies?
You know what? The martial art itself and the movies.
It's endless wisdom to be drawn, and I draw it.
I draw it in a way that I could decipher it in my own life.
So, for instance, in the movie Master Killer, he basically, when he does Kung Fu, he does really a style called the Hangar technique.
And the director of the movie is actually a Hangar 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 Hong Kong 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 that 36 Chambers is my favorite movie.
The action director of Master of Flying Guillotine is the director of 36 Chambers of Shadowline.
And some of the things that's happening in Master of the Flying Guillotine is really the infant stage of what this action director is going to learn and then use later on in his movies.
So that's the beauty of it.
It's almost like... 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 symbionist relationship there.
And I'll end this question by saying, Hung Gar deals with the five animal technique, the tiger, the crane.
The leopard, the snake, and the dragon.
That's the five patterns.
Some people go seven, some go twelve, but it's a 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, 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, then I'm going to tiger up on you and take that instinct and prance when I'm a prance.
Or fly away like the stork.
You know what I mean? That's the mentality.
It's much more than the technical moves.
It's much deeper.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, when I see the kung fu movies, because I love martial arts, all martial arts, and competitive ones, too, like the actual competitions and so on.
It just seems like kung fu movies go much deeper than just, like, the techniques.
I mean, if you see it, right?
I watched a great MMA fight recently, and it's just interesting, because he was on top of the guy, you know, and the way he got from under him, you know?
It had to be, you know, his spirit got from under him.
It's some like mixture of crane and whatever.
Snake, ill, the slippery ill technique.
Yeah. No, I love that when people become artists in the cage.
That's much bigger than just like winning, much bigger than particular techniques.
It's just art, especially at the highest level competition where millions of people are watching.
Which is pressure within itself.
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 someone else, but not in this arena.
Yeah. So you're a scholar of history, including hip-hop history.
I've listened to so many of your interviews.
You've spoken brilliantly about some of the big figures in hip-hop history, Tupac, Biggie, Nas, many others.
Maybe let's look at Tupac and Biggie.
What made them special in the history of music?
That's a good question.
So I don't know if I'm the authority to answer it, But I'll just speak my piece on it and maybe I 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 B.I.G a dope lyricist, I think he had a voice that was really immaculate in the sense that some rappers Get on top of music and you got to get used to them or you got to vibe with them.
But he make a record sounds like a record immediately.
If you go back and listen to his music, you could take his voice and put it on anything and for some reason It sounds like a record.
You know what I mean? You mean just like the raw voice of the man?
Yeah. So you could just listen to it raw and it sounds like a record.
Yeah. But if you put a beat, take his voice and put it on any beat, he just has a voice.
It's immaculate, you know?
So his lyrical skills and all that was great.
And you got to think once again, he's doing all this.
He's not even 25 years old.
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, their mama.
But then he had the power to arouse the rebel in you.
And those two things...
Actually, he was probably more dangerous than Big, Notorious B.I.G. Notorious B.I.G., we could party with him to this day.
But Pac was probably going to a point...
He was more going into the Malcolm X of things.
And society fears that...
Yeah, so he was really good at communicating love and at starting revolutions.
And that's dangerous.
Very dangerous. And they communicated love, but he wasn't starting revolutions.
Well, it's interesting to think about what the world would be like if they were still with us.
But it's the way of the world.
Hendrix, a lot of those guys just go too soon.
Yeah, it's a peculiar thing.
You asked me earlier, am I scared of death?
And I asked you, no, I'm not scared of death.
I'm not trying to see it, though.
You know what I mean? It's like, that was the block of death.
It's like, I'm not really going right there right now.
I'm making a left or right turn, you know what I mean?
Unless it was mandatory for some greaterness, greater good.
It's like, okay, I got to drive through that, you know what I mean?
Yeah, 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 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 other chamber.
I mean, there's some sense in which RZA, the producer, becomes somebody else completely when you're making a film, becomes somebody else completely when you're, I don't know, playing chess, becomes completely something different when you do kung fu, or watch kung fu, or when you're a family man.
All of those are little deaths when you transition from one place to another.
So it's not like you're one being.
You're many things.
Yeah. Now I would describe that as our life, though.
Yeah, it's fun. Outside of you and anybody on Wu-Tang, who is 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 Cool G Rap in there.
You know what I mean? So going back.
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 even have heard of.
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. That was it.
They copied his and they made it theirs.
But point being made. But I'll name a couple more.
I got to put Nas in that category.
You know, we got a chess board in front of us, and one of the greatest chess players, the youngest grandmaster, you know, before, I think, Carlson, 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.
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 of lyricists.
It takes about 10 years to become a master of lyricists.
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 Jizu was already a master of When Nas was a master, but GZA was 21, Nas was 15.
Nas is like the Mozart of rap.
Yeah, or the Bobby Fischer.
Just the Bobby Fischer, just born something in him.
Or maybe those early years, because he's not just good at the lyrics.
He goes deep with it, just like you.
So there's depth.
It's not just... Like mastery of the word smithing.
It's just the message you actually sent across.
Information into a small phrase.
That's the whole thing of energy.
How do we condense all that energy into this so that it can fuel that?
And he's definitely one of those artist MCs that does that.
And he was doing it at 15, you know, like I said, I'm thinking five years or four or five years older than Nas.
So I was always feeling, you know, my confidence of what I was doing, but I was like, this kid is only 15.
I gotta step up my game.
When he turned 19, then we got Illmatic.
Yeah. From you, what are the best and most memorable lyrics you've ever written?
Wow, that's a hard question for me.
Does stuff stand out?
Like stuff you're really proud of that was like important in your career?
Yeah, I mean, I think I did a song called Sun Shower.
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 good. I think it's on A Diagram.
I'm not a record guy. I'm a song guy.
It 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 so good.
A Mission Impossible is purely philosophical, but you can call on your deathbed when you're laying in the hospital.
You will call on your deathbed.
I have a scientist friend, well, my wife's best friend, Rebecca, She married a scientist.
They're both scientists. They both were scientists, and she married Dr.
Neal. I ain't going to say their last names.
But Neal and Rebecca, they're my wife's best friend, so they come over.
And me and Neal, we go through the longest debates of science and religion.
We just go. We could go break day with it.
You know, before he had a child, he was more adamant and, you know, they don't believe in God.
You know what I mean? After a child, he still kept his thing, but I just hit him with the question.
If you was about to die, because now you got a child to think about, right?
It's different when you're thinking about yourself.
I asked him, if you was about to die, you're going to think you're going to make that call?
He's like, I'll make that call.
And it kind of inspired my lyric because it was like, yeah, who you gonna?
And I just want to say, so you mentioned lyric, that is one of my favorite lyrics, but that's part two to Sun Shower was the prequel to Sunshine.
So if you ever get a chance to check out Sun Shower, it starts off with, trouble follows a wicked mind.
2020 vision of the prism of life, but still blind because you lack the inner.
So every sinner could end up in the everlasting winter of hellfire.
With thorns and splinters prick your eye out, you cry out, your words fly out, but you remain unheard.
Suffering internal and external, along with the wicked fraternal of generals and colonels, letting off thermal nuclear heat that burns you firmly and permanently upon the journey through the journal of the book of life.
But 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 and wrought till they find themselves persecuted inside their own universal court.
So, that's a long one.
It's like a three-pager.
Wow, that is about life.
That's like character, integrity, how to be in this world.
And that ultimately connects to God.
Yeah. Who is God to you?
I'm glad you just asked that question because I actually...
I'm going to have to make a distinguishable separation here.
All right. And it's funny because I heard recently...
I heard a rabbi was...
Debating with this historian, Dr.
Ben. I can't pronounce Dr.
Ben'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 God.
And it was, when they pronounced it on this particular debate, it was Allah.
And they said from that, they got Elohim.
I've already agreed in my heart and 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 gets 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 7.
And the number 7 is going to bring you right back to that letter G. So Allah borns God, but God don't born Allah.
How does that God, how does Allah connect to the oracle that you're going to be calling for when you're laying in the hospital?
Well, what I was saying in that particular verse was that we're looking for the oracle.
We're looking for somebody else or something to help us that nobody can really help you at the end of the day.
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...
The book that is the most strongest book I've ever read is actually the Holy Quran.
It's stronger to me than the Bible, which I read.
It's stronger than quantum physics, which I've read.
It's stronger than the Bhagavad Gita.
And I read once a British scholar said it's the most stupidest book ever written and it doesn't make sense.
And so I said, oh, I see why he says that.
I understand exactly why he said that as well.
Why is that? Because the structure of the words are just, it's peculiar.
You know what I mean? But it's almost like how some people's songs, you don't really know exactly what they say until years later.
Yeah, you have actually with Joe Rogan, I think you talked about how a joke of Dave Chappelle's hit you like a long time after.
So this is kind of like the Quran.
I tend to believe that we Human beings cannot possibly understand anything as big as these ideas.
Are you humble in the face of just the immensity of it?
To be honest, yes.
I'm humble in the face of the, you can say the word again, I pronounce words funny, the omnipotence, the omniscience, the magnitude, I'm humble in the face of Allah.
The problem that I may have had was that I wasn't humble in the face of God because It's just a definable thing.
And that's why I think a lot of us, and I'm not 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 beside Him.
And that's the reason why you can have as many gods.
You can find a whole bunch of them.
You know what I mean? But you're not going to find many.
There's nobody beside Allah.
Allah is one. So I know it's a whole thing, but 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 of 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, they the gods of rap.
There's wisdom there, there's strength there, there's beauty, then we'll take that.
So Wu-Tang is one of the greatest musical, artistic, philosophical groups ever.
Let's look hundreds of years from now, when humans or robots or aliens or whatever that's left here, they look back, what do you hope they remember about Wu-Tang?
What do you hope the legacy is?
Well, even if it's thousands of years, I hope we don't get rid of the humans.
But you know, look, whatever happens is going to happen, but I think that my philosophy on it is that We're going to continue to advance and continue to advance things around us.
But I don't see us becoming extinct.
Well, I mean, the reason I bring up 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, 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 is a huge part of that.
So I just wonder if there's a few sentences written about Wu-Tang.
It just makes me wonder how they remember.
I would hope that people, no matter how many years, are inspired by us.
But I will say, if I could just use Wu-Tang as itself.
So, we first started off the witty, unpredictable talent and natural game.
Natural game meaning natural wordplay.
And then we went to The wisdom of the universe.
The truth of Allah.
For a nation of God.
Wisdom, universal, truth, Allah, nation, God.
It's just like, so let's just go back to a nation of God.
Let's just take the last two letters.
A nation of wisdom, strength, and beauty.
Right? You know, and I'm going to go a little political here, but not going political.
As we say, we're the greatest country in the world.
What makes us the greatest?
That's to be a question we ask.
Is it our wisdom? Is it our strength?
Is it our beauty? Now, let's say off the easiest answer, you know it's our strength.
We got the nukes.
Nobody can really, you know, between America and Russia, that's the argument.
Who could beat them? But where's the wisdom?
Then they can argue, well, we got the technology.
But then where's the beauty when there's so much suffering in the people?
So it's not complete? 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. Well, that's what I mean.
So if we go back to the Wu-Tang, you know what I'm saying?
That's what we're striving for.
We're striving for that.
You know what I mean? But you started on predictable and just like...
Yeah. Yeah.
But like got deep pretty quick.
I gotta talk to you about Bruce Lee.
Who's Bruce Lee to you?
Who is he to the world? What ideas of his were interesting to you?
Like what, you know, you talk about like Hendrix and music.
Bruce Lee is that in 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.
There was nobody else to talk to, so he had to talk to the bush.
I don't know. It could have been the bush.
But point being made, it says that there are minor prophets and I see Bruce Lee as one of them because what he brought to the world through martial art was a whole shift in the dynamic of thinking.
And that happens when certain entities are born.
But he didn't do it only in a physical sense.
He was also philosophizing in the same process.
And he was also striving to be the best of himself.
So you got three things going on.
I studied Bruce Lee multiple times.
First, of course, when I saw my first kung fu movie, it 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.
the double K, 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 going to- Yeah, it's like surreal.
They play with the world that's not of this world.
Yeah. Bruce played with this world.
So when I first saw Bruce, I 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 re-titled Fist of Fury.
But then when I saw Chinese Connection, which is the real Fist of Fury, I saw something different there.
And I got enamored.
And then of course, Enter the Dragon.
Just really complete.
That's why my first album was 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 that's young me.
Then teenage me studies him again.
And I realized, wow, look at his physicality.
Look how 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 the dance between the two because 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 where as things that we saw imagined by our artists, we strive to create in our real world.
Thus, Star Trek to me is just a precursor to our cell phones.
So for me, I like the mix, the two.
Yeah, it's funny how, like, science fiction, like, pushing into the impossible actually makes it realized eventually.
Yeah. Yeah, we humans, like, once we see an idea on screen, no matter how wild it is, we...
We're trying to make it. Yeah, we're trying to make it.
There's some weird young kid that gets inspired when we 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 hoverboard?
Or like the... Yeah, we're there at least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody...
They got... You seen the one on the water?
No. It's close on the water?
No, the surf hover?
It's great. It's dope. Nice.
It's dope. It actually...
It actually, if you're a Back to Future fan, you feel like you made it.
You made it there.
Yeah. All right. Well, now we just got to work on the time travel.
And it was cool to hear you talk about the Master of the Flying Guillotine today, that that inspired the lyric for the Wu-Tang Clan, nothing to F with.
Yeah. How does that go again?
The curse word or the lyric?
I am Russian, but the lyric.
I said, I 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 that movie today.
How... I don't know.
That's surreal, right?
But it's not. It's engineering, it's both surreal, and it adds this chaos into this real world and then challenges everybody to think what you're going to do with that.
Yeah, how are you going to beat it?
Yeah, how are you going to beat it? Both when you have 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 guilty 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? All.
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.
Me and my brother, Devon, we actually Took so much heed to that movie and our family life.
And we kind of, you know, we kind of mimic that family in its structure of somebody has to be the leader of the family, even if it was the younger.
Michael was younger than Sonny and Fredro, you know what I mean?
But he was worthy. And my brother, Devon, is older than me, and my brother, King, is older than me.
And it's funny, sometimes Devon calls King Fradro, and I know King wants to, because King was actually, he actually was, he could beat our ass, that's my language.
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 just as a good light in the family.
And like I said, that movie helped us.
And my sisters too. The cool thing about my family, I don't know if I share this a lot, we all watch these movies together.
And so, The Eight Diagram, Pole Fighter, Master Killer, Five Deadly Venus, my family knows these movies.
It's not just I know them.
And then you extend it further, my friends know them too.
So there's a language that we all can have that actually film has informed a communication.
So The Godfather, which also is still a fictitional 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 got to plan ahead.
He didn't want to deal with the drugs, but that time of business was upon him.
It's almost like, and this is a tough one, sometimes when the Muslim brothers come from the Middle East to America, and they open up Delhi's, They would sell ham.
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, that's as a kid.
But as a man, I'm like, yo, he's here to sell.
Now, he still just don't have to sell to ham.
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.
So eventually, somebody in the family ended up doing it.
You see what I mean? What about this idea that it's family before everything else?
So there's different laws you live according to in this world, and family is first.
Yeah. That's mathematically correct.
I like that.
I mean, 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 there's a different set of ethics under which you operate for those people.
Well, Jesus said the same thing.
When he said, love thy neighbor and thy brother, he was talking about that community.
When that other lady, the Samaritan, Say, hey, Jesus, I'm not feeling, my brother not feeling so well.
He's like, 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 said to him...
But even the dog is allowed to eat the crumbs that falls from the master's table.
And he went and helped.
He helped her. Now, let's go back to what you said about Putin or Vito Cotolone and 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 once the family was strong, they didn't let the wealth, the opportunity, expand out.
Look at Wu-Tang.
Yes, our family was made strong first, but then all the Wu members were able to form their own corporations, and they had their own subfamilies.
It has to grow out.
And they took over the world.
You've talked about being vegan.
I don't think I heard you explain this because it connects somehow about how you think about life.
So you talk about when your family'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.
No animal. The plants...
Themselves, right? So let's just say, you know, you want a steak, which is probably the most, you know, I don't know, the most expensive piece of meat, but let's just say the steak is, you know, top of the line, nice steak.
And you're eating the steak for the protein to help build your muscle.
And I don't know if you got it from a cow or a bull, but whether it's the cow or the bull, they grow to about 1,500 pounds.
And if it's a bull, it's all muscly muscle.
And it's only eating grass.
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.
I'm a robotics person, AI person, and I think a lot about, I don't know if you think about this kind of stuff, but building AI systems as they become more and more human-like, you start to ask the question of, are we okay?
If we give the capacity for AI systems to suffer, first to feel, but then to suffer, to hate and to love, to feel emotion, how do we deal with that?
It starts asking the same question as you ask of animals.
Are we okay adding that suffering to the world?
Right. And I don't think we should add the suffering because it's not necessary.
Like, 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 got to do what you got to do.
Well, this has got to go. Yeah, you got to go.
You got to do what you got to do because at the end of the day, man is...
When they say man has dominion over these things, his dominion is almost like a caretaker.
The way we do our dominion, we dominate it, eat it, cook it.
Who's the first guy that looked at the lobster?
It was like, I'm going to eat this thing.
First of all, it's hard to eat it.
You got to go through a process to get that.
A crab, I remember we used to eat crabs when we were kids, and I didn't know why I was always getting itchy throats and all that.
You know, you're a kid, you don't know, just eat.
But at the end of the day, a crab didn't provide no more than a finger worth of meat, maybe.
And it 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.
Look at the blessings of life, right?
If you take a seed or you get an apple and you eat it, then 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. If you kill a cat, it's done.
It's nothing coming back.
But when you deal with the plants, even after you eat the apple and then you defecate, Your defecation is what feeds the ground, the cause of apple to grow more.
Yeah, it's a circle of life.
And especially, there's a guy named David Foster Wallace.
He wrote a short story called Consider the Lobster.
If you actually think philosophically about what, from a perspective of a lobster, That's like symbolic of something because you're basically put in the water, like cold water, and then it heats up slowly until it's no more.
Yeah, it must have been like, then they started eating lobsters in the Inquisition.
Yeah, they just enjoy, they probably enjoy torturing animals and they realize they're also delicious after the torture is finished.
That's probably how they discovered it.
Let me ask you a question. I know you're asking me the questions, but I just want to talk a little bit about the AI. You said something about trying to put the emotion in it, right?
So are you thinking there's an algorithm for emotion?
Yes, but I think emotion isn't something that there's an algorithm for, 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.
I've a very simple version of that.
I've had, you know, Roomba vacuum cleaners.
I've had them make different sounds, and one of them is like screaming in pain, like lightly.
And just having them do that when you kick them or when they run into stuff, immediately I start to feel something for them.
Right. So the emotion, okay, so the emotion you're saying is Impulse back on the human.
But I'm asking, do you think there's an algorithm for the emotion to be imposed from machine to machine?
Yeah, that's a really good way to ask it.
It's difficult because I think ultimately I only know how to exist in the human world.
So it's like, it's the question of if a tree falls in the forest, 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 wave, or do you think it's particle?
So emotion is just a small, it's like a shadow of something bigger, and I think that bigger thing is consciousness.
So emotion is just- Don't know if it's a wave or a particle?
Y'all haven't thought about that?
I have thought about it, whether 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 that said this.
It comes out, they did this documentary about the planet and I wrote a song, it's called The World of Confusion.
And I'll try to paraphrase the lyric, but in the world of confusion, where there's so much illusions, we suck the blood from the planet.
Now it needs a transfusion and a redistribution of wealth, of health, and wealth of self, and a deeper understanding about mental health.
The doctor prescribed the physical solution.
The psychologist wants to build a bigger institution, but neither have the solution or the equation To make an instrument to measure the weight of the hate vibration.
What is the weight of hate?
Is it heavier than the weight of love?
Is it heavier than the weight of lead inside of a slug with just 10 milligrams?
That's all it takes to kill a man.
But anyways, then I'll go on from there.
Damn, that's good. But the question, you see the question there, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can it be measured?
Can that be measured?
I think so. I think so.
I just don't got the instrument yet, right?
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.
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 know, you think about quantum, right?
As long as you say that there's an uncertainty and you have me believe there's an uncertainty, then there's an uncertainty.
But if there's not an uncertainty, what happens?
So I'm only saying that because you look at quantum computers, they're going to give you the O, the 1, the 1, 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 gonna come in or make your next move.
I like the weight of these.
They add the certainty.
I think, just like who you're saying, unpredictable.
There's something about us humans that really doesn't like everything to be fully predictable.
I mean, chess too is perfectly solvable.
There's nothing unpredictable about chess.
Right. I 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.
The only way somebody wins is when one of us makes a mistake.
I mean, it doesn't get any better than that.
Yeah, it doesn't. What is chess?
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?
See, it's the most stimulating passage of time for me.
That's also... It's a pastime that stimulates my mind, my music, my thoughts about life at the same time.
So while some pastimes, it's like, say baseball is 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 a game of baseball.
I mean, the player maybe, but not the...
Chess is something that I can engage in too.
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 then nations have fought over the chessboard.
The Soviet Union versus the United States.
Bobby Fischer represented the United States.
Spassky represented the Soviet Union.
Yeah. Before I lose track of it, when we talked about The Godfather, you were in American Gangster.
Great film. You said it's one of your favorites too.
You were in it with Denzel Washington.
What makes that movie meaningful to you?
What was it like making that movie?
Because it's a great, great.
That was a great American film.
There 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 it, it 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, Joy is 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.
And this is a bold statement if I say this here, because I got a lot of friends that's going to probably...
But he's probably the best living director.
Because watching him allowed me to understand a principle that I've coined to him, and I don't know if people use it yet, called multi-vision.
He seems to have the capacity to see eight people.
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?
I seen him do it when he went to the monitors with the video playback guy.
Yeah. I seen him bring everything back to a point, but nothing was the same on the frame.
He was already there.
Yeah. And he knew if he had what he was or not.
And he placed the cameras there.
And he saw it like in his own way.
And I peeped it.
You know, 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 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 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. Come on on him.
There's a story there. There'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, he has this.
And even though this is the scene.
Yeah, you're 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 cool guy.
I had a chance to play rugby with him.
He was on... Was he on my team?
Yeah. Well, we were on both teams.
But Pedro, the editor, who, you know, edit many great films, once again, he has...
I will call it deciphering power.
A good editor is a decipher, almost like breaking the enigma because he's dealing with thousands or we'll call it a film with millions of feet of film, at least a million feet of film.
That's a lot of film for a feature.
He's dealing with that, but he's dealing with multiple cameras.
So it ain't like it's like two cameras, he got an A, B, and he could just go back.
No. He may have six cameras and he has to go back and deal with that process.
And you know what? He knows how to tell the story again.
And he proved it on American Gangster as me being a witness.
Because it's so much information.
Even when the brothers all started getting their little business and he picked 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 to fame.
You watched the Palmer and Scarface, who does it in two minutes, but it's only one character.
So you see him go to the bank.
He drops the money off. You see him buy the lion.
You see him gets his wife or the tiger.
You see him gets his wife. You see all that.
Then it ends on the big side of him in the big house with all the TV screens.
And you've seen him go through it, right?
But in American Gangster, you're going to tell that story of rising, but you also got to include these five brothers.
Yeah. And that's all in the edit.
Oh, man. But also all in the director knowing that as well.
And you got to keep thinking about them because that was a story right there.
Yeah. 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, 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 if you've almost like lived many lives.
So you have this experience that allows you to see the vision.
So let me ask you on creativity.
Where does this creativity behind RZA come from?
This both musically and film wise?
I don't know if I have the answer to that one, right?
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 JZA, you know?
He introduced me to mathematics.
He introduced me to hip-hop itself, to breakdancing.
You know, I got other cousins that introduced me to graffiti.
The cousins that introduced me to DJing, like, I realized that I had a lot of introductions, but the jizzle 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.
The cousins that taught me how to DJ, I didn't see them move from DJ into making the beats.
My cousin who actually got me into instruments, I didn't see him leave funk and rock.
I'm an orchestra composer now.
So I just said to myself, I just accept myself as an artist, as a creative artist.
That's what I am. I have to accept that.
Now, where it comes from, I don't know.
If I was to try to say where it comes from, like, hey, give me some type of answer.
I would 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 do you feel like it's hard work or you're just waiting?
Wow. It's not even waiting, nor is it hard work.
It's almost like I said in one of my other lyrics, this is for the MC part of it.
I said, MCing to me is easy as breathing.
So it's like breathing. Yeah, it's just like...
In fact, this actually was a scientific thing I read about that, now that you said that.
You heard this? I know you've 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're in our atmosphere.
Mm-hmm. And so there's a chance that at least one million atoms that you breathed 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?
Let's start at the fact that most of the atoms that we're made of is from stars.
We're all really connected fundamentally somehow.
And then the atoms that make up our body come and leave.
And the same with the cells that are in our body.
They die and are reborn.
And we don't pay attention to any of that.
That all just goes through us.
I don't know. That...
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, 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're sweated out.
You might sneeze it out, but they're going to make their way out.
How do you digest the atoms if you just breathe in Galileo?
And that's what I think an artist does.
I think something in the artist, it's like some people eat things and they're going to gain weight.
Some people ain't going to gain weight.
They're going to gain muscle. I'm just giving you an analogy here.
I'm thinking that the artist breathes in and translates it into the art.
First, they got to hear it.
I think most of us don't hear that.
Like, don't... We receive it, but it just doesn't...
Right, it's not... Yeah, we not have the frequency.
I said this to our artists.
And even, you know, we all consider ourselves artists in a certain way, but not, you know...
But let's just say... There's only one million artists in the world.
Good. If you divide that into the population, what part of the table would it be?
A tiny part. It might be that, right?
And yet it's that that inspires that.
And 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.
The artist is just watching this, all of this, all 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 don't have the answer, but if I was to be forced to say an answer, and you're not twisting my arm, but...
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?
We, the Dao of Wolves.
Let's start with the Wu-Tang manual first.
Yeah. No, you can do that second.
Second? Yeah. I think you can read the Dao of Wu first and then do the manual.
Because the manual is not to pick 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 Wu goes beyond that.
So I would actually start there.
Which is not normally how I prescribe.
I always tell people, start at knowledge, then go to wisdom.
Skip ahead to the wisdom, I like it.
Yeah, I think for a young man in high school, go to the Tao of Wu and then go back.
It's just like sometimes...
My son's generation, they had to watch the second round of Star Wars and then go back.
This generation is watching The Force Awakens and then they go back.
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.
You talk about that one million at the corner of the table.
If somebody once strives, dreams to become one of those, how do they do it?
Well, the beautiful thing is that there are footprints left by those who've done it.
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 sail is a 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 that say things to confirm because this way people could take it verbally, physically, and then maybe even spiritually.
But Krishna 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's answer first, and I'll give you my answer.
I remember asking this, and...
You know, I was 15, 16 years old.
One of the brothers, you know, we're studying in mathematics.
And the letter I itself means I, Islam.
I meaning the individual, right, being in total accord with Islam.
Let me just finish this. Then they took the word Islam and they defined it as 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...
I never forgot it and I'm going to decipher it.
But then they took the word Islam And they broke it down by the letter into an acronym like cash rule everything around me.
And they broke it down to I stimulate light and matter.
Because what hit me is 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 brother just said, love Islam forever.
Right? I ain't saying the religious point of it.
I'm just saying all those other elements I just spoke about in front of it.
I stimulate light and matter.
I love that. That's powerful.
And let me give you my definition of life.
I think life It's that simply 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. Thanks for listening to this conversation with RZA. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you some words from Plato.
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
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