RZA: Wu-Tang Clan, Kung Fu, Chess, God, Life, and Death | Lex Fridman Podcast #228
the following is a conversation with rizza 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 rizza in the tao of wu you're right 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 now learn life itself for my mother you know being one of 11 children and seeing the sacrifice that she gave to us therefore given to life uh it's really the greatest lesson of life the thing that uh 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 do the supreme being in order to be the supreme being you got to be supreme amongst other beings um 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 here 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 but uh so i'm asking your question what did my mother teach me about life i learned that day on physical passing okay and i mean there's a physical me do you think about her you miss her of course i keep my mother my prayer every day and the thing i pray the most uh 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 right even though if you watch my movie love beats rhymes i named the school in that movie after my mother just leave it somewhere else in physical space yeah exactly but yeah painful the pain of my mother's passion 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 um 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 the what you're looking at here physically i won't say my soul is mortal right i'll say it's immortal because at the end of the day it's just like i could sit here and i could just hum please please please by james brown but james brown is not going to come in here and do that so in some sense james brown is still here in another sense so the soul is here well it lives through you by you singing it enlists through you by you listening to it celebrating it and the hope is that uh the human species continues to celebrate the the great minds and the great creations of the past i would 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 why where's the fire at right now it's in the air you just gotta spark this 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 you know i'm not rushing that nowhere near me right because all i know is life right my life is living um you know i read a lot of ancient texts people probably know about me and i love one of the great teachers named bodhidama uh and there was a thing written in you know one of the uh books of his or one of the teachings of his and the question somebody asks him similar question you know you're scared of death or what are you going to be after you die and his answer was i don't know he had answers to everything but he's like i don't know this 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 i mean you know i was actually watching horror movies and i believed in all type of uh supernatural things that could uh can happen i thought i saw things as well and uh you know whether it was being projected for my own mind or whether it was there visible to me i don't know right um but life is beautiful and if we have it and we should use it all the way to the last job realizing the mortality the 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 uh quincy jones i read said to odbnu 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 uh i probably could have had you know what i mean and he was just saying when it rains to get wet enjoy this man it's raining on you you know i mean let me pick 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 i took some heat by that time i didn't take heat and and when i took heat 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 the experience of every moment yeah and i'll share this with you because we this is seem to be a very open conversation and i haven't had this conversation so definitely impart to my mother than impart 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 at the thought she was beautiful and actually built a friendship with her uh but a few years later when the relationship became like you know this is this is gonna be my woman it was actually doing it 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 i mean my wife would have already found we were separated and do i run wild and i didn't run wild a little bit but not too wild right and uh you know i'm still a man right yeah 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 and we ended up uh dating um got engaged and then her mother passes and so now there's a total understanding of everything and we actually helped build each other back up so when so of course i have to thank my mother for the awareness um then i thank my wife for bringing that awareness to actual actualization like to actually feel it i don't think i'll 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 to both lost here yeah your mom have you learned from quincy about music about business about life quincy jones is a great mind a great artist uh you know a treasure in all reality he's seen it from when it was he couldn't walk on this 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 um he's the type of guy you spend one hour with him you get you got a lifetime of information and i was blessed to spend multiple hours with him in days with him and you know just a certain period of time where we came across each other and he was always there to share the knowledge like that's another thing about him that i think was special and hopefully i picked that up is that he's he he's always willing to share share with his experience his knowledge i mean i think he'll even share his home to the right person if he feels that that's what they need to get back on their feet he's a very beautiful man just the kindness the goodness of the man is like the thing that really rubbed off on you yeah i mean minimum i 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 that's 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 uh exactly how yourself yeah you have a few people you've worked with who are fascinating like yourself quentin tarantino you worked with him uh when somebody asked you to describe him with one word you said encyclopedia what have you learned from the guy about filmmaking about life again a very generous man with his knowledge and for me he shared it i think in a way that was unique in the sense of you know at a point in time you know we just was super duper tight like you know like going to his crib and watching movies and and just having long conversations about art and about life you know i mean um 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 um you know i 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 with i mean it was a year it was past the year 2000 already so like 2001 2002 that i asked him to mentor me so i was the lizard yeah you know 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 uh paddling on that i was a nervous at it um 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 uh 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 yeah i mean it's god's brain both of you have pretty good memory i'd love to be a fly in the wall that conversation yeah and kung fu movies mostly you guys we actually started i think we we started our relationship trying to outdo each other knowledge-wise or what yeah movie knowledge-wise fu movie knowledge wise and i think that cat if it wasn't another category i wouldn't had a chance but at least in that category yeah 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 further yeah he could go back to 72 but i didn't see one yet you know what i mean yeah yeah well we uh he said master the flying guillotine that i got a chance to uh that you commentate over today and i got a chance to see the screening of he said that's one of his favorites uh for you uh the 36th chamber of shaolin now the master killer is your favorite best best ever would you say that's the greatest kung fu i mean movie ever it def 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'll 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 uh he basically when he does kung fu he does a 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 this director always wanted to keep his movies pure and the brain hung guard 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 champions it's my favorite movie but the action director of master of flying guillotine is the director of 36 chambers of charlotte yeah and some of the things that's happening in mass of the fl 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 clinton's age and now i'm seeing his work so some symbionic 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 uh and the dragon those are the five that's the five patterns some people go sevens some go 12 but let's just stick to the fire pattern fist how do a man emulate a tiger and you see a tiger's fears he curls before he spawns on you how does a man emulate a snake it doesn't have to be only in the kung fu move it's in the ideology of the snake it's in the the the agility of the crane at any moment sometimes punching a person is not going to work as they were saying leopard fists or tiger paw so sometimes you may have to poke them in the eye with the crane's beak so having your mind able to adapt the instinct of the animal when you are being attacked or when you are being the aggressor that's something that you don't need 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 uh home 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 gonna tighten up on you and take that instinct and prance when i'm a prance or slop fly away like the stalk you know 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 uh 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 struck i mean if you see it right even i watched a great mma fight recently and uh just interesting because he was on top of the god you know and the way he got from under him you know it had to be you know his spirit got from under some like mixture of crane and uh whatever snake ill either slippery ill technique yeah no i love that when people are 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 talented guy could win because he could deal with the pressure or the other guy he could have beat him there was someone else but not in this arena so you're a scholar of history including hip-hop history you've uh i've listened to so many of your interviews uh you've spoken brilliantly about some of the big figures in in hip-hop history tupac biggie nas many others maybe uh 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 spent a lot of time with them that could speak on it but just as a fellow artist um i think not only was big or dope lyricists 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 fight 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 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 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 um 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 park once again immaculate voice but what park had i think was a way of touching us on all of our emotions and especially on like pog had the power to infuse your emotional thought like brenda has a baby dear mama but then he had the power to arouse your the rebel in you you know yeah and those two things uh actually he's he was probably more dangerous uh than big no no choice b.i.g like notorious b.i.g we could party with him to this day we were still but park was probably going to a point you know he was more going into the malcolm x of things and yeah and and and society fears that yeah so he was really good at communicating love and and and at starting revolutions yeah and that's dangerous very dangerous and they communicated love but he wasn't starting revolutions well it's it's interesting to think about what the world would be like if they were still with us but it's the way of the world hendricks a lot of those guys just go to tucson yes it's a peculiar thing you know so now you asked me earlier am i scared of death um and i answered you know not scared of death i mean i'm not trying to see it though you know i mean yeah it's like that was the block of death it's like i'm not really going right there right now i'm making a left for a right turn you know i mean unless it was mandatory for some greaterness greater good it's like okay i gotta drive through that you know 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 or death well dying and death i think it's two different things personally um the process you mean of death or just yeah i mean you could die i guess 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 um reza the producer becomes somebody else completely when you're making a film becomes somebody else completely when you're um i don't know playing chess becomes completely something different when you uh 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 described now i would describe that it's all life though yeah it's fun outside of you and uh 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 let's name a few i mean you're going to have to start with rock him you know you're going to have to pick kuji rap in there you know i mean so going back you're gonna you're gonna have to pick up with those brothers first you might have to even if you want to get technical you might have to start with grand master cass you know i mean who you might not you may not have heard of no you know what i mean but you may have sung his lyrics every time you sing sugar hill rappers delight because that's his that was there they copied his they copied this and they made it theirs but point being made but i i'll name a couple more i gotta put knives in that category you know we got a chess board in front of us and one of the greatest chess players uh the youngest grandmaster you know and you know before i think uh carlson was uh um bobby bobby fisher all right so this is bobby fish as american one of the greatest american chess players of course susan pogar may have tied his record as the youngest grand master 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 of wu-tang most of us had 10 years of rapping in us already so that's why you you met us at mastery level the jizzer was already a master when nas was a master but joseph was 21. the house was 15. nas is like the mozart of rap yeah just bobby fisher bobby fischer just born some something in him or maybe those early years just because he's uh 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 uh like mastery of the the word smithing it's just the message you actually get sent across yeah into a small phrase right that's the whole thing of energy how do we condense all that energy into death so that it could fuel that and he's definitely one of those artists emcees 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 us 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 yeah we got when he turned 19 then we got automatic yeah from you or what are the best and most memorable lyrics you've ever written well that's a hard question for me the stuff stand out like stuff you're really proud of that was like important in your career yeah i i i mean i think i did a song called sun sun shower i don't know if it we put it on the wu tank 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 percent of your life's problems uh well there's a good one uh sunshine you're where you talk about religion and god that's that's good i think it's on a diagram i'm not a record guy yeah i'm a song it might have been a diagram why do you have a lyric for me 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 this is such a this is so good a mission impossible is purely philosophical but you can call on your death bed when you're laying in the hospital you will call them on your deathbed i had a big i have a scientist friend well my wife's best friend rebecca uh she married a sign they both signed it they're both for scientists and she married uh dr neil i don't know i'm gonna say their last names but neil and rebecca you know you know there's 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 because now you got a child thinking about when you're thinking about yourself i ask him if he's about to die do you you don't think you're going to make that call he's like i'll make that call and 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 alert that is one of my favorite lyrics but that's part two to sun shower was the uh prequel to sunshine yeah so if you ever get a chance to check out sun shower uh 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 but 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 land of thermal nuclear heats that burns you firmly and permanently upon the journey through the journal of the book of life for those who took a life without justice will become just ice it's been taught your worst enemy couldn't harm you as much as your own wicked thoughts but people ought to be naught and listen wrought so they find themselves persecuted inside their own universal court so that it's 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 going to have to make a distinguishable separation here all right um and it's funny because i heard recently uh i heard a rabbi was debating with uh this historian dr ben i can't believe stock the band name but it 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 um i've already agreed in my heart in my life that the father this universe proper name is allah um and of course in the law i get all you know um and i don't think that god is the same as that i think a law 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 uh to the you know 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 a law aborns god but god don't bone allah how does how does that god how does allah connect to the oracle the that you're you're going to be calling for when you're laying in the hospital well what i was saying in that particular verse was that we're looking for the oracle we're looking for somebody else or something to help us that nobody can really help you at the end of the day you know and we're speaking on 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 uh 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've ever read is actually the holy quran it's stronger to me than my than the bible which i read is stronger than quantum physics which i've read is stronger than the bhagavad-gita's it's just and and i read once uh 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 though 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 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 uh yeah you have uh actually joe rogan i think you talked about how uh a joke of dave chappelle's hit you like a long time after this so this is kind of like the quran it it uh i tend to believe that we human beings cannot possibly understand anything as big as these ideas so uh 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 can say the word of god pronounced words funny the omni the omnipotence the omniscience the magnitude i'm humbled within 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'm 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 and and that's the reason why you have all this many guards you can find a whole bunch of them i mean but you're not going to find many there's nobody beside allah i mean law 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 uh 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 so if i say if if somebody walk up your 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 it will turn into god's a rap there's wisdom there there's strength there there's beauty then 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 are 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 well even if it's thousands years i hope we don't get rid of the humans but you know look whatever happens is gonna happen but i think that uh my philosophy on it is that we're gonna continue to advance and continue to advance things around us but i don't see us becoming extinct well i mean the reason i bring up sort of wu-tang in that context and this is a special moment in human history it's like a hundred years and we've created all of this music just if you think of all the richness of music that's been created over 100 years it's like it's not obvious to me that that's not going to stop right like there's a flourishing here so it's it's funny because that i could see where the the book of human history is written there's a chapter on this period of time right and one of the things we did well is like all the technological innovation with like with rockets and with the internet but then there's also the musical innovation and film innovation right just so much art that's being created and wu-tang is a huge part of that so i just wonder what like if there's a few sentences written about [Laughter] it just uh makes me wonder how they remember i would hope that people no matter you know how many years are inspired by us but i will say if i could just use wu-tang as itself so we 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 or law nation god it's just like so this is 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'll say we're the greatest country in the world what makes us the greatest that's to be a question we act is it our wisdom is it our strength is it our beauty now just say off the easiest answer you know it's our strength we got the nukes nobody can really you know between america and russia they said we're just you know they that's the argument who could beat them but where's the wisdom then they gonna argue well we got the technology right 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 and the imperfect but wise founding documents of that celebrated freedom that celebrated all the ideas sort of having a lot of nukes having a lot of airplanes and tanks that's not that's not uh 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 man we started unpredictable and just like yeah just yeah but like got deep pretty quick i gotta talk to you bob 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 a martial arts he just seems to have changed the game yeah you know i i went as i guess i don't know what 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 it was nobody else to talk to so he had to talk to the bush i don't know it could have been the bush yeah but point being made it says that there are minor prophets and i see bruce lee as one of them uh because what he brought to the world through it through martial art uh 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 uh in the physical sense he was also philosophy in the same process uh and he was also striving to be the best of himself so you got three things going on i studied bruce lee multiple times at first of course um when i saw my first kung fu movie it was the fake it was it wasn't really bruce lee it was a few green hornet clips cut together and then i saw a black samurai then my following kung fu movies was like fearless fighters uh the ghostly face uh you know to fit the double k but basically and phillips 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 spearmen and 36 chambers and these movies are beautiful and yet they're all heightened bruce they're heightened beyond doable you're not gonna yeah it's like surreal they play with us the world that's not of this world yeah bruce played with this world so when i was somebody when someone i first saw bruce i obviously didn't think he was as good as these guys he can't fly he's not flying in the movies right um but then when i saw the first one i saw was the big boss which they re-titled fist to fury but then when i saw chinese connection which is uh the real festival right i saw something different there and i got enamored and then of course into the dragon right just really complete that's why my first album was into the wu tang 36 chambers of shaolin so it's into the dragon at 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 out for 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 the real or the surreal or the dance between the two yeah i'd like to dance between the two because a moo 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 he's like run luke 1. 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 yeah so for me uh i like to mix the two yeah it's funny how the 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 we're trying to make it yeah we're trying to make it it's when we a young kid it gets inspired and watch that 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 uh do you have any classmates that you think that's the time machine uh i thought you were going to back to the future like the what is it the the the hoverboard or like yeah yeah at least yeah yeah somebody they got you know they've seen the one on the water no no you know what's close in the water they're so hover it's great it's dope nice it's dope it actually it actually if you were back to a future fan you feel like you made it to you made it there yeah all right well now we just got to work on the on the time travel and it was cool to hear you uh talk about the the master of the flying gay team today that that inspired the uh the lyric for the you know wu-tang clan ain't nothing to f with yeah how does that go again or the coast world order not that i said i'd be tossing and forcing my style is awesome i'm causing more family foods than richard dawson and the survey said you're dead the fatal flying guillotine chops off your head yeah yeah and it was interesting to see the guillotine in 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's just and then it it uh it adds this chaos into this real world that and then challenges everybody think what you're gonna do with that yeah how you're gonna beat it yeah how 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 um and it connects in a cinematic way as well the difference i think with me and the godfather was i seen it during the period of time when my father was absent and therefore family structure and family values was actually adopted in my family because of that you know me and my brother devine we actually you know took so much heed to that movie and our family life and uh 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 was the younger michael was younger than sonny and fragile you know 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 divine calls king fragile and i know king wants the king goes but you're michael yeah and not not by choice like just by definition of that's what i am you know i and uh it's just a blessing for me to have my older sister my older brothers uh and my younger brothers look to me as uh just as a as a good light in the family and like i said though 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 a diagram pole fighter master killer father venus 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 our communication so the godfather you know 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 know you got to be you got to plan ahead you know he didn't want to deal with the drugs but that time of business was upon him 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 delhi's right they would sell him and we would go in there and complain to them and make them like they they just get mad at us when we can't 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 fido cody didn't want to sell the drugs okay he didn't have to do it he didn't do it and it cost him some bullets to eventually somebody in the family ended up doing it yeah what about this idea that's family before everything else so like you're you know there's there's different laws you live up according to in this world and family is first yeah that's that's that's mathematically i correct like that i mean there's uh there's a certain sense of um 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 yeah 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 our brother he was talking about that community yeah when that other lady who the samaritan say hey jesus i'm not feeling my brother not feeling so well and because he said give not that which is holy unto the dogs if you're gonna tell a woman i'm give not that which is holy unto the dogs and she's a woman you just called her a dog if i translate that in hip-hop yeah female you call the dog i know how that goes but she tried 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 yeah he helped now let's go back to what you said about putin or vito colon 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 did they be had their own king with the guillotine right because that once the family was strong they didn't let the the wealth the opportunity expand out you know look at wu-tang yes our family was made strong first but then all the women 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 uh 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 is good you grow that like 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 yeah 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 bowl but whether it's a cow or the ball they grow to about 1500 pounds and if it's a ball it's all muscly muscle and it's only eating grass yeah yeah there's there's yeah it's possible to uh both as an athlete and just as a human being to perform well without meeting me 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 um to hate and to love to feel emotion how do we deal with that it starts asking the same questions 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 and self-preservation if you are in the desert and there's nothing else to eat but that lizard yeah yeah okay you gotta do what you gotta do melissa's 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 how the way we do our dominion we dominate it eat it cook it yeah like who who who's the first guy that looked at the lobster he was like i'm going to eat this thing like it's it's hard to eat it yeah you got to go through a process to get that a crab i remember we see 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's hell getting that thing getting it out it's like it's not worth it in all reality you could have gave me a you could have gave me a banana and did better for my body and my appetite and my being fulfilled that's full like look look at the blessings of of of life right if you take a seed or you get an apple and you eat it and 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 done yeah if you kill a cat it's done it's not it's not they're 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 a 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 or something because you're basically put in in the water like cold water and then it heats up slowly until until it's no more torture yeah it must have been like they started eating lobsters in the inquisition yeah they just enjoy so they they will 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 asked me the questions but i want to talk a little bit about the ai and you said something about trying to uh put the emotion in it yeah right um 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 um i have i've worked with quite a few robots i've a very simple version of that i've had you know roomba vacuum cleaners they're i've had them make different sounds and one of them is like screaming and 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 right so the emotion okay so the emotion you're saying is impulse back on the human yeah but i'm asking do you think there's an algorithm for the emotion to being post from machine to machine yeah that that's a really good way to ask it um 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 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 uh i just okay i'm not gonna come hit you with this because i've been thinking about this thing this is just your field yeah well do you think the emotion is wave like light is wave and 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 a wave or a particle i haven't i haven't thought about that i have thought about it whether it's there's something like um whether consciousness or emotion is the law of physics like if it's that fundamental to you i had a lyric i had a lyric i had a lyric that said this it comes out uh they did this documentary about the planet and i gave i wrote a song it's called the world of confusion and uh i'll try to paraphrase the lyrics 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 in a deeper understanding about mental health the doctor prescribed the physical solution the psychiatrist wants to build a bigger institution but neither have the solution or the equation to make an instrument to measure the weight of the hate vibration what is the weight of hate is it heavier than the weight of love is it heavier than the weight of lead inside of a slug with just 10 milligrams that's all it takes to kill a man but anyways they're not going from there but damn that's good but the question you see the question there yeah yeah yeah and that can be measured yeah can that be measured i think so i think so just look at the estimate yet yeah i yeah so 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 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 uncertainty but if there's not an uncertainty what happens so i'm only saying that it's not that last because you look at quantum computers they're going to give you the o the one the one the oh they're gonna get they're gonna take two things and make it eight things and by the time you multiply four of those things together it's like this chess board right the moves goes into the millions but the thing that's introduced is the uncertainty right you're 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 the next move i like the weight of these they add they add the certainty i think it's just like quitting unpredictable that there's something about uh us humans that really doesn't like everything to be fully predictable i mean chess two is uh perfectly solvable there's nothing unpredictable about chess right i could agree to that because bobby fischer said in one of his books watch which i actually love what he said he said every game of chess is a draw yeah the only way somebody wins is when one of us makes a mistake i mean it doesn't get any better than 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 i it's the most stimulating passage of time for me that's also it's a it's like it's a pastime that stimulates my mind my music my thoughts about life at the same time so while some past times it's like say baseball is watch it's 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 be 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 chess board and thought and the nations have fought over the chess board right right the soviet union versus the united states bobby fischer represented the united states basket representative yeah i gotta uh before i lose track of it when we were talked about the godfather you were an american gangster great film uh you said it's one of your favorites too what um you were in it with denzel washington what makes that movie meaningful to you what what uh what was it like making that movie because it was a great great america 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 uh because even if i even if i wasn't a part of it uh it this course such great filmmaking and and to me a really cool great story um the thing that i love about it the most really is the process of it you know 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 great feeling but even the process of making it was like a 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 cuz i got a lot of friends that's gonna probably but he's probably the best living director because watching him allow 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 i think he keeps him 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 he was or not and he placed the cameras there and he and he he saw it like in his own way and i peeped it you know i peep this yeah 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 uh and 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 can at least see three or four things i can't see eight yet i'm i'll be there though um 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 look boom come on on him 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 matter 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 went both teams but pedro the editor who you know edited many great films once again he has i will call deciphering power but 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 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 it's even when they when the brothers all started 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 you knew it all you knew you saw the whole rise of fame so you watched the palmer in scarface uh who does it in two minutes uh 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 gets 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'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 so that's all in the edit oh man but also all in the director knowing that as well and you got to keep track you got to keep thinking about them because that was a story right there yeah while i was hearing it i don't know if they was taking pictures of them or everybody's having a little party over here yeah chess i think yeah i like it they're playing chess this is great um you uh you said that you were always an old soul and see the world as if you're 200 years old i like this thing because your creative vision allows you to see the final piece you've created or you're creating very quickly quicker than others i i heard that as if you've almost like lived many lives you have this experience that allows you to see the vision so let me ask you on creativity where does this creativity behind reza come from this both musically and film-wise that i don't i don't know if i have the answer to that one right but is it no seriously where does it come 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 gizza you know he introduced me to mathematics he introduced me to hip-hop itself to break dancing you know i got other cousins that introduced me to graffiti uh the cousins that introduced me to dj and like i realized that i had a lot of introductions but the judges 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 since 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 taught me how to dj i didn't see them move from dj into making the beast you know my cousin that uh you know who actually got me into instruments i didn't see him leave funk and rock he didn't call like i'm an orchestra composer now yeah so so i just said to myself i just accept myself as a artist as a creative artist that's what i am i got that i have to accept that now where it comes from i don't know if i was just trying 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 feel like it's hard work or you're just waiting wow it's not even waiting or no 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 emceeing to me as easy as breathing so it's like breathing yeah it's just like in fact there's actually a scientific scientific thing i read about that now that you might be nanny 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 how can they in our atmosphere 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 all 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 what 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 yeah you might sneeze it out yeah but they're going to make their way out how do you digest the atoms if you just breathe in galileo right how and that's what i think a 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 in the game 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's just this right it's not yeah we not have the frequency i said this to about artists and even you know new york 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 yeah good if you divide that into the population what would that what what part of the table would it be a tiny part yeah it might be that right yeah um and yeah 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 so i said i don't know i don't have the answer but i if i was to be forced to say or something you're not twisting my arm but yeah i would say i can if you want me no thank you i'll say life yeah yeah life in the 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 uh 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 dowels let's start with the wu tang manual first yeah no you gonna do that second second yeah i think you could read the dial roof first and then do the manual because the manual is that's not 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 dow wu goes beyond goes beyond that so i would actually start there which is not normally what happens i always tell people started knowledge then go to wisdom yeah but since the style skip ahead to the wisdom i like it yeah i think for the for that for a young man in uh high school go to the dao of wu and then go back it's just like sometimes uh you know you have you know like my my son's generation they had to watch the other the second round of star wars yeah they go back you know i mean this generation is watching the force awakens and then they go back yeah but what um 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 one million right at the corner of the table if somebody once strives dreams to become one of those how do they do it well the beautiful thing is that there are footprints left by those who've done it 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 you know we live on the civilizations we say this is the greatest country in the world but our sale is a pyramid with an eye on it you know i mean because they did it before and they you know they may have failed for some reason or something happens but it was just a strong enough example right to take us further you know 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 uh 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 krsna's just 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 the 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 uh you know i was 15 16 years old one of the brothers you know was studying in mathematics and the letter i itself was means i islam i mean in the individual right being a total accord with islam let me just 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 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 casual everything around me and they broke it down to i stimulate light and matter and i was like 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 they 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 religious point of view 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 lead 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 reza i'm a huge fan of such a huge honor that you spend your valuable time with me thank you so much peace thanks for listening to this conversation with rizza to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from plato poetry is nearer to vital truth than history thank you for listening and hope to see you next time