 Hey, this is Ross Miller with The Verge with the CES 2015, and I'm here with the Rizzo. We're here to talk about the boom-botics, talk a little more about Wu-Tang Clan, and probably top five a little bit, maybe some comedy. I don't know, we'll see how it goes. So is this your first CES here? Is this your first time? Yeah, I'm a virgin here, man. It's my first time popping this cherry. Really? What do you think so far? What do you think so far? So far, I'm having a great time. I've seen some great new product that I'm not used to. I mean, if you're into TVs, don't come here because you won't move. Every step you'll see something else. I mean, I was walking by and they had a brand new 3D TV with a kung fu movie on, and I almost sat down and just got popcorn. What movie? What movie? I think it was 14 Blades they had playing over there. All right. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to see curved, you're going to see 4K. Yeah. Not much 3D anymore, no more 3D really. But that one was like a curved 3D or something. Really? I mean, it looked magical. Did you see any like the Walkman, Pong and the audio players yet? I heard about the new Walkman with the new, it's going to have the new, like you could use real AIF files and WAV files. So it won't be compressed, which I think is helpful, man, because people don't even realize, you know, I'm a little old school with the technology and I've been doing it for a long time, but even a DAT player sounds better than an MP3, but people don't realize it because they never heard it. They never heard their music through a DAT player. And so now that these companies are going back. I mean, even what we're doing with our boombox is, you know, we're putting the music back in your hands. You know, it's not dependent on your phone. It's not dependent on if you've got a Wi-Fi connection or not. You know what I mean? So those things are, you know, it's cool, but who wants to be dependent on something when you want it? Right. So let's go ahead and talk about that. Let's talk about the reason you're here, which is the Wu-Tang Boom-Bot-Ix. This came out last year. Was it a limited run of 3,000? Is that the correct? I think it did about 4,000 or 5,000 limited at first. The Boom-Bot-Ix with the A Better Tomorrow album embedded on it. Came out three weeks before the album came anywhere else. Yeah, came out earlier than the album anywhere else, which was a unique idea. And then the new model, which you're holding in your hand, actually launches today. Okay, this is the Ix Plus? No, this is the Ix Plus. This is just more. Now we got more of these. All right. Get another 10,000, 20,000 out there now. Is that how big the reaction's been? It's been a great reaction. That's awesome. Yeah. And this is playing lossless? Do you like the audio quality from this? Why did you go with Boom-Bot-Ix? Yeah, this speaker, actually, I think because the way that this speaker is built, more air is able to circulate through it. It's not kind of put together in a closed cabinet. So the chassis allows for more air to go through. So this is only like a six-watt speaker, but it's pushing up 90 to 95 dBs of music out of it. And you can output to this, too. You guys can hear it. You can output to it. This model will not only come embedded with music, but it will come with a two-gig chip in it. So you could just take your whole playlist from your phone and download it, have it in your boom box, let your phone be a phone. All right? And then take this one and jump in the water because it's waterproof. So this one, it's got Better Tomorrow, but it also has, if we call it, a track, Big Horn B. It's only available on the Boom-Bot-Ix. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. So is that still the case? If it's 10,000-run, you'll get the only chance to see it. Is that song coming anywhere else in the future? I don't think so. How do you feel about that? Because what we're talking now, and this also kind of gets into the secret album you guys did that's up for auction. Most artists are trying to get their music out to everyone. It's the reason Spotify, Pandora, iTunes has gotten so big. This we're talking about in a very exclusive song. You can only get it if you get the album. How does that feel when you're trying to get to your audience? Like dedicated versus like to a broader scope? I got to say, I think that exclusivity is important in life. You know what I mean? It's like when you look at a hot pair of Jordans, everybody don't got... You know what I mean? It's a limited run. You think about guitars. When they made the robot guitar by Gibson, it's a limited run. I had to go wait on line to get mine. You know what I mean? Right. But we're talking about like that's a tangible object, like utilitarian function. This is art. This is expression. You feel... Even art becomes exclusive because if you look at... If you want to see the Mona Lisa, you better have a ticket to France. But there are pictures of Mona Lisa. But it's not the real thing. That's right. All right. So yeah, it's not the real thing. That's all I can say. Fair enough. So this is where it kind of gets into the secret album. I think I understand kind of the why you guys did that now. I just wanted to know, did it really go out for like $5 million? Is it going to vault somewhere overseas? That was the highest offer that came in. I think I could take the... I had a gag order on me. I think, yeah, I mean, because they did a non-disclosure agreement with the auction house. But I think I could talk about them, right? I mean, you want to be the first guy for me to... I would love to know what happened to that album. Man, I'm so nervous if I say this or not. Well, you say this... What if I get in trouble? You want to back me up? Oh, yeah. We have a great legal department. We will back you up. You got a great legal department? All right. Gag orders. So what happened to it? No, we gave it to an auction house and they're going to handle the process. You know, I'm going to say this. There's an auction house called Paddy Wait. Have you heard of them? No, I'm not going to look it up after this. Okay. Paddy Wait is a... They're more modern than like us. They kind of understand the world we're in. There was a bunch of guys that I think maybe they were Southern Bees or one of the older places and they learned the game and they moved on, you know, and they formed their own business. And they've been doing a lot of good auctions and a lot of good product. I think they did some great bones recently. They did some great things. And what I liked about them was that they were fresh with the idea. It wasn't like a... They understood it. That's the most important thing about anything we do. If you collaborate with somebody that understands your vision, then the vision could be achieved. So even if you say, okay, we're going to build a wall and it's going to have all these windows and all these colors in it, and if I don't see the vision, I could be potentially useful. I'm useless to you because I don't see the vision. So there is a group of guys that see the vision of what we're doing. They respect the idea of music being returned to art. And the same thing with Boombl4x. To me, this is all part of this idea of me of making music tangible and making it have a value within itself instead of just becoming something that is being devalued. Now I'm a big fan of technology. I've been a geek since 1986, since exactly. Some of us wasn't born. I was spending all my paper money on gadgets. And now we're up to the level of streaming through Spotify and all these guys. And you can use this, of course, Spotify can't be streamed through your Bluetooth speaker. But the trick of it all, to me, is that somebody will go and pay $300 for a pair of headphones, $600 for a phone or for some device, and yet the device is most useful when music is playing through it and you won't spend a dollar for a song or $10 for an album. It's not logical. You know what I mean? Because the reason why you got these great headphones, the reason why you got these great gadgets is because of what it does for your media. So now, I'll end with this, but if the consumer don't pay attention to him devaluing his media, where's the new content going to come from? That's right. But the interesting thing there, just to follow up with that, is Wu-Tang is on Spotify. We've seen Taylor Swift and a horror label saying that is devaluing. The business model doesn't work. But you guys are staying on there. Is that something you guys are looking to? I mean, is it a devaluation of quality? Well, to me, what Taylor did was swan for her business. But to me, no, I like Spotify. It's like a new radio station. So I like the fact that the music is accessible, but that's when you're listening. That's when you're maybe in your car, you're somewhere just kind of going through it. But I also like you having the music. I like you having a...people don't have turntables, so I don't expect you to go buy a vinyl. People don't have cassette players. I don't expect you to buy a cassette. You know, if you put out an exclusive cassette, people will buy it. Well, I mean, that'd be a limit. But we all are reaching towards our Bluetooth speakers now. We all are looking for ways to hear our music. So how about you get the Bluetooth speaker, but you have your favorite artist, not just Wu-Tang. I think the whole music industry could use this. You think about if a company like Warner Brothers say, okay, you're going to take Warner Brothers Honey classic rock and roll songs and put it inside a personal portable speaker for the consumer. So he could be somewhere...he don't have to depend on his phone or depend on the internet or depend on any other force to enjoy music. I actually want to go in and talk about a little more background of Wu-Tang. You are the principal producer, not just for Wu-Tang, for a bunch of people. You do say you're a gadget person. What is your setup right now? What is your setup when you make beats? Don't get jealous, anybody. Okay? I'm a gadget geek, so I have multiple setups. So if you go in my dining room, which should be a dining room, I have the machine hooked up to my laptop. It's called the machine by Native Instruments, which is very cool. And I use that like if I'm eating and I get an idea, I beg on the patch there. Now if you go up to my living room, it's just strictly digital piano, Kawai digital piano that records for composing music. Then if you go to the next room, right, I've got the new Motif. Of course I've got the new Korg. There's a company out of Sweden. I'm gonna mention them. They got a company called Electron. I got all their product. You just have a room for Electron. Yeah, I love them. They only make about four or five products, but I got every product they make. And then if you go to my studio, which is up in my guest house, that's where you'll find all my rolling material. Of course I love Pro Tools as industry standard, but I'm into New Window, I'm into Sonar, but I love Ableton. Ableton, yeah, Ableton is, I think, is very unique on their approach to music programming. I didn't know about Ableton until Mikey Dean, he's a producer who works with Kanye, he was working on an album, he's like, I do all the things at Ableton. I was like, yeah, but I need to touch my stuff, right? But then I got the Push that comes with it, and I'm actually having a lot of fun with that. Has your style kind of evolved over the years? Have you, like, do you see what you do now versus what you did back when Wu-Tang first formed, you're talking like 20 years ago, versus even like 15, 10 years ago when you started doing scores like Ghost Dog and beyond? Yeah, I think my style has evolved, and I think I'm able to go back and forth. You know, on a new album, you hear a song like Felt, where it sounds like I could have made that 20 years ago, or a song like Pioneer the Frontier, those are the same drums from 36 Chambers. But then you hear a song like Ruckus and B Minor, and you're hearing live instruments, you're hearing Ableton, you're hearing the Pioneer DJ set, you're hearing all these different elements that make that one song, you know what I mean? So you know, technology causes us to be more creative, and to experiment more. I mean, in the old days, just to get a quarter note delay, you had to patch one thing to another, patch another, walk over, twist it, and maybe get the tempo right. Now it's just like, yo, drag and drop. Check box, drag and drop, easy. Yeah, just let it dial. I hate to ask this, but I kind of got, I have to ask, just because we saw things kind of late November, all y'all were going on doing interviews for A Better Tomorrow, and you talked about this Wu-Tang pay tier. Can you set the record straight on that? Wu-Tang what? The pay tier, the different tiers. Can you set the record straight on this thing? I mean, no, no. There was a pay tier. There was or there is? Well, there was. I mean, it should be over. I agreed to not contest it for a year, because I didn't agree with the tier system at all. I thought that it should be equality. You know what I mean? That's what makes brotherhood. I know other bands in rock and roll, whether it's System of a Down, who I hang with. When I was hanging with John Fushante, he told me the Chili Peppers, everybody, we equal. The Beatles broke up because they started talking about who wrote the songs and all this stuff like that. You know what I mean? So I thought equality was the key to keeping a band together, because I know we all have a value. But anyway, but I was out voting, and everybody wanted to, not everybody, the upper tier guys wanted a tier system. And so I said, okay, let's try it for a year. And my idea was, if it works, it works. But what happens if somebody on the lower tier becomes more valuable than the higher tier? Are we willing to switch the system? You know what I mean? So all these different equations came out. But I put myself on the lower tier. You know what I mean? Yeah. I said, you know what? Because I didn't agree with the concept. I said, just throw me in the lower tier, and I'll stay here for a year, and you upper tier guys better do yours. Now, here goes a little bit of bad news about it. It didn't really work. The reason why it didn't work is because the upper tier started wanting to get upper. There's no end to it. Cast on, cast on, cast on. Yeah, there's no end of it. Once you start something like that, you know, and I understand that it works in basketball, it may work in football, but when you're dealing with a band like Wu-Tang Clan, and that means when they pay to see Wu-Tang Clan, they're not paying to see RZA, they're not paying to see Juzza, they're not paying to see Method Man, or Ghostface or Raekwon, or Masterkiller. They're paying to see all of us. Right. All together. Are you guys going to tour anytime soon? I think we will, you know, and hopefully the system will be diminished by then. But if not, you know, I'm just one voice, you know, it's a democracy. If it was a dictatorship, I'd be like, yo, man, hey, that's a democracy, so I'll go with the votes. You know, it's your beats, though. It's my beats card. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I'm not, I'm not, I do not want to break up the Wu-Tang Clan. I do not want to break up the Wu-Tang. Have you seen this thing called the largest vocabulary in hip-hop? I saw that. What do you think about you and Juzza and Raekwon, all y'all are in the top 20 right now. How does it feel to make some of the most sophisticated lyrics in hip-hop? You know, that was very flattering, actually. You know what I mean? And even to have the other guy, Aesop, who I don't know, I don't know his music. Aesop Rock? I mean, I knew him from some years ago, but I never really knew his music. But he had the highest. So it just shows that for us, it shows a lot of work goes into what we're doing. I looked at it, I was like, well, all he had as a solo, I mean, because they didn't count Wu-Tang Clan, they only count our solo albums. I was like, well, all he had are like three or four solo albums. Right? Three, actually. And I made it into the top 10. So I'm about to drop some more albums. I might move up a rank. Just read a dictionary over four forms and see what happens. I think they said unique words. So it's not only that you got to have a dictionary. For instance, I had a lyric that says, you know, when I use the word achievement, rhyme with deviant. You know what I mean? So I think of words that have different kind of context, but using words to define words. I like to do that when I write lyrics. I don't have a word. Because you may not understand the first half of my sentence until the second half explains it to you. All right, we're getting the wrap up signal. So I got one last question. What is next for you? What is next for the Wu? Well, this comes out this summer. The Boombox Rex Plus. Two gigs of memory inside it. We're thinking about putting an album on it. So we'll see what happens, yo. But until now, I'm going to have a great time at CES and I'm happy to sit down with Verge. Thanks for having me, yo. And Bong Bong. Thanks, man. Thanks, brother.