Transcript of #2490 - RZA New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.

We're up.

So the guy that did your bar, Flying Guillotine, is the same guy that did the Mothership.

Oh, wow.

Richard Weiss.

Yeah, Richard.

Yeah, Richard, the same designer, architect who did your bar. I have a Flying Guillotine t-shirt that I wear sometimes. I was trying to find it this morning. I couldn't fucking find it.

I wore mine yesterday. I went to the Alamo Drafthouse and did a screening of the film. And I said, would it be appropriate to wear my Staten Island Alamo Drafthouse to them? And the guy there, he was like, he thought he wanted to wear his, but because he stole a stack in Staten Island, but he couldn't find no more. But the Flying Guillotine.

I've got it somewhere. I've got it somewhere in my house. And I was scrambling this morning looking for it, looking for that t-shirt. I couldn't find it.

Well, we got to send you some more.

Definitely, definitely. So it's great to see you again, man.

Back at you, man. Back at you. Just, it's like, I got questions for you and shit.

What do you got?

Well, I was thinking, like, well, remember you had this place in Woodland Hills?

Yes.

That was what, 8 years now?

We've been out here for 6, 6 years.

So about 6 years ago.

Yeah, you were there like 8 years ago, I think.

Yeah. And I just remember you having the hyperbolic—

Hyperbaric chamber?

Yeah, the hyperbaric chamber.

Do you still, are you still doing that?

Yeah.

Was that what it was, or was it the sensory deprivation tank?

Oh, the one where you float.

Yeah, is that that? 'Cause we had that at the studio. Okay. We didn't have a hyperbaric at the studio.

Okay, so.

But I do have a hyperbaric.

You have that now here?

Yeah, not here, I have it at my house, yeah.

I just was always impressed at just your consciousness on things that are unique, right? And as time goes on, sometimes, you know, sometimes as we evolve, whether we evolve physically, mentally, spiritually, or economically, sometimes we leave certain things behind. Right. And I was, I said, I wonder if Joe keep moving his chi in the same direction. So that's my question to you.

Well, sometimes it gets caught up in momentum and you gotta step back and just realign yourself. That's, that's definitely a factor. Like sometimes I'm too busy and I get too caught up in momentum of things and you kind of like lose, like, why am I doing this? Like, what is the— what's the process? Like, what is the reason for doing all this? But vacation always fixes that. Like, you take a few days off, you go, okay, right now, enjoy it.

Yeah, I feel the same, to be honest. I've been running around for like, I don't know, for like 8 days straight. And I like to kind of make sure I exercise, do my tai chi or something, or stretch my body. But I was telling my wife last night, like, yo, I haven't worked out since we've been moving. And, but I've been drinking every night. You know what I mean? So I'm like, I gotta— so today, this morning, before I came here, I got up a little bit earlier and I went and stretched and got all that out. And that's what made this question come to my head. It was like, I wonder, like, as we grow and we become more and more involved and we get whatever it is in life that's given us, how we getting these blessings, but how far do we get away from the blessings that kind of made us solid, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I try not to get as far. I try to stay as close as possible to like centering my body. Like if I don't work out like just a couple days in a row, I start feeling weird. Just 2 days. 2 days I just start feeling like— Yeah, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. Antsy, I feel antsy, I feel irritated. Just I don't think I'm thinking clear. I don't feel relaxed.

I think I'm the same. Maybe for me it's 3 and a half days.

Well, what drives me nuts is like how many people out there, that's their whole life. There's no exercise in their life. Like, my God, you're doing yourself such a disservice.

Yeah.

You're not, you're not, your mind, not just your body, but your mind needs that. You need to blow out some steam and run the machine and stretch it out and relax it afterwards and recenter yourself. And if you don't do that, you're gonna be anxious. There's so many people are dealing with like constant crippling anxiety all the time. And how many of those people don't exercise?

Right. I think that in Shaolin philosophy, we, you know, there's qigong, right? And there's the chi travels through your blood. So you gotta always continue to have the blood moving because the blood is the supply you have, but the oxygen, you know, gets it in and oxidates it and just keeps it flowing. And when you do stretching or you do exercises or you build up your respiration Uh, it actually energizes the blood, which energizes every part of your body. That chi travels through every vessel and, uh, every meridian of your body, and it actually does enhance you and, and reinvigorate you 100%.

Yeah, fires up your endorphins, fires up your endocrine system. Everything just feels better, and it calms you down. I, I feel like human beings are almost like batteries. Like, you're storing energy all the time, but if you've got too much energy, it's leaking out of the battery, and you're not purging some of it. You gotta purg— you gotta— your body has like human requirements for movement, right? And if you don't, if you don't use those requirements, if you don't meet those requirements, you're just gonna feel like shit. And I think that's a big part of what's wrong with society today. There's just way too many people that aren't doing that, and they're just tense and their, their tense, anxious feeling that, and the mental health problems that come with that, it just spills over into everything else.

Right. I gotta agree with you. And, um, I know that people that, like my Sifu, Shi Yanming, who, uh, he probably works out like 6 times a day because he has to train, he has individual clients.

Right, right, right.

But, um, I think Sifu is maybe 10 years, 10 years old, 10 years older than me. Look 10 years younger than me, right? Of course. You know what I mean? Because he's just constantly, uh, moving that chi and exercising.

He's—

he still could kiss his toes, all right, in his 60s.

Wow.

Babies could do that, right? Right. He still could kiss his toes like a baby. Um, but he said something to me that I, that I, that I took just heed to for myself. I said, uh, Sifu, why do you— like, why do you work out So much, right? He gave me two answers. He says, one, it feels good. It makes me feel so good. But then the other answer he gave me was that because in Shaolin, when you get up in the morning, you have to exercise, run up a mountain, run back down the mountain, do chores and all that before you eat. And he said, if you don't do that, you don't eat. And so I was like, well, that sounds like something from the Bible where it says that, uh, Man should work to the sweat of his brow, you know what I mean? And I took that philosophy. So I know I don't normally eat in the morning. I would normally get up. I mean, I drink coffee now, so I've been drinking coffee about 10 years, I think. But I will have some coffee, some water, and bamalama. I get into my exercise routine when I'm home.

I think that's the best way to start a day. Yeah, I do the same. I don't work out. I don't eat, rather, before I work out.

Right.

I always work out first, right?

So, because we didn't— then the water is fresher, the food tastes better.

Yeah, you earned it too.

Exactly. Yeah, it's just a good way to start the day too.

You already did the hard part. The most difficult part of your day is done, right? And then everything else— and also like that difficult thing makes the mental difficulty of the rest of the day work smoother.

Yeah, you have a— remember that old commercial, um, the Army commercial?

Which one?

It was like We do by 6 AM. Oh yeah. Yeah. Some shit like, we do before 6 AM what most people do all day.

Yeah.

It's like, back when you first, you know, when I saw that, I was young, I was like, I don't know what the fuck they talking about. But as a man, I'm like, you know, that's wisdom. Get up in the morning, get your chi going, and have a beautiful day.

There's something too to getting up early where you force yourself to work. You force yourself to rise. The comfort of your bed calls you, but you go, fuck you. You get up, you get shit done, and you're like, I already won. I won today. I've got a victory. I've got a victory over my inner bitch. You know, I got out there, I did something.

I'm laughing, no, 'cause you say you told the bed, "Fuck you." Yeah, that's what you have to say.

You have to get up almost angry. Fuck you. No, you're not gonna call me in there with your octopus tentacles and suck me into your depths. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building a website that actually looks legit and helps you stand out online. And I should know. My site, jorogan.com, is powered by Squarespace. They make it easy to lock down the right domain for your business or project, and they've got built-in privacy and security tools to keep everything protected. Head to squarespace.com/rogan to try it out for free, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The depths of warmth and comfort— no, fuck you. Get up, get up, get going. That's why I like to get in the cold first thing. That's my morning routine is cold plunge before I work out.

That's deep. Yeah. I can't do that. Now that is, that's kind of extreme for me. I'm not fucking with the cold like that.

You get used to it. I'm telling you, you get used to it. It becomes like a normal thing.

How long you stay in there?

3 minutes.

Wow.

It sucks. But every time I do it, I almost don't do it. Every time I do it, I'm almost like, don't do this. I don't want to do this. Fuck this.

Right.

And then I get in like, oh, we're doing it.

We're doing it.

And then I take my phone and I set I got a little kickstand on the back of my phone, you know, so I put the timer on there and I look at it and it's at a minute. So I'm like, alright, we're good, we're past the minute.

Once you get past the minute.

Yeah, the minute mark is the tough part. Once you pass the minute, it's pretty easy to get to 3 minutes. You just relax.

I only did one ice bath and it was, they had brought this Tibetan llama to New York and it was me, I forgot the brother name, we was doing this TV show thing. And they was trying to find out, they like, they was scanning our brains and see what would happen if we got in the cold bath before meditating, then meditated, and then get back in. Like, so whatever, some, some science shit. And I said, yeah, I'll do it. I don't know why I agreed to it, but I did it. Right. But, uh, I got in that motherfucker, bro. And when I got in there, I was like, this is not the shit. Right. I'm like this. And the host, he got in too. Now I don't know if that was his first time or not, but he was younger than me, skinnier than me, you know what I mean? And when I couldn't take it no more, around 1 minute and whatever, it was past the minute mark, I got the fuck out, but he was still in there. And I was like, I can't have this motherfucker beat me. And yo, I got back in.

Nice. You know what I mean?

Um, and I, um, they got some footage of that. I think I stayed in, I don't think it was 3 minutes, but I think I really impressed myself because I'm super anti-cold. Yeah. You know what I mean? I, I run hot, I stay hot. I'm the hot part of the, of getting, you know, when my wife is cold, she says, put her hand on me and I'm, I'm the heater. So, so cold is like something that—

yeah, I don't like it, right? I don't enjoy it, but there's a little mind game that goes on, and the mind game is almost immediately like, oh, fuck this, let's just— just let's get out of here, let's get out of here. You gotta ignore that and just concentrate on breathing. So what I do is I breathe to a count of 10. So I do this: 1, 2, 2, 3. And I just concentrate on the numbers, and then by the time I get to 10, it's basically like a minute and I'm relaxed. And then I just settle in there. It's just you concentrate on breathing and don't think about that part of you that wants to get out.

Right. So maybe I think I'm gonna try a cold shower.

It's really good. Cold shower in New York is great if you, uh, like in the winter. Because that's real cold, right? That's real cold. Like, that's like— I used to take cold showers. And my friend Bob Caffarella, he used to do this at our taekwondo school. He would take cold showers after training. And I was like, that guy is a fucking animal. And I tried it a couple of times, but I was a bitch. I did it like 15 seconds and jumped out. But he would just stay there and lay in the cold, freezing cold, winter cold water and just wash himself. And I was like, this guy's an animal, man.

I think my brother Kung Lee. I haven't seen Kung Lee in years.

Kung Lee the fighter?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember we was— we did a movie years ago in China, but he was, he was the cold plunger of the crew.

He, yeah, Kung, he's ahead of the curve on all that shit. Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's the mental thing is where really where it benefits you, and not just while you're in it, like doing it because you don't want to do it, but when you get out, you feel so good. Your brain just is flooded with all these endorphins, right? He feels so good, and it lasts for hours and hours.

I'm gonna revisit that.

And I think there's like, there's numbers on the dopamine increase, but I forget what they are off the top of my head. But there's a giant increase in dopamine that lasts like 2 to 3 hours after you're getting out of the cold plunge.

Wow, I didn't know that.

I know you are, you're a longtime martial arts student, and I think anybody that does martial arts for a long time realizes that it is as much for your mind as it is for anything else.

Yes.

Like, it's not just a workout. It's a workout, but it's also like there's something about going through the motions of martial arts and training in martial arts. It's so— it requires so much concentration and it requires so much of your focus that the rest of the world just kind of fades away and the impact of it is relaxed.

Right.

Because of that.

It's mental, physical, and spiritual.

Yeah.

It's emotional. Yeah, um, it's will, you know. There's a, there's an esoteric thing, um, you know, 7 planes of energies or 5 stages of consciousness. I don't know if you ever came across these type of terms, but probably have. But, but sometimes we, we get stuck on the, on just the 3 dimensions, you know what I mean? Just 3 planes, you know. And, and you don't get to the emotional, you don't get to the will part of it, you don't get to the realization, the control, right? If you could get to realization, then you can control what's going on because you realize what it is. It's almost like you can now have the foresight of what it is. And then if you could get to that type of plane of energy, then the possibilities become infinite because you realize that you— like, you know, they say we all have a free will. Right? But then you realize that the will can be controlled, right? You also realize that with a strong will, you can control others as well. Yeah, because some people are walking around with weak wills. Um, that's how you start a cult.

Oh, bye. By having the strongest will. You come here. Yeah, hold on, you made me, uh, I have a, uh, I have, I do have a film and shit, right? Um, called One Spoon of Chocolate, and I watched half of it.

I had a problem. There was a problem with the early screener. I was mirroring it on my television and it kept breaking up. It kept fucking up where like the sound would cut in and cut out. Okay, I did it a couple of times and then the screener ran out because I guess you can only watch it a few times. So then I had to contact your people and then they gave me another one, but then they gave me one on Vimeo and I watched that in the gym today. So I watched the first half of the movie and I'm gonna watch the second half at home.

Oh good, take your time. Take your time. It's a crazy one. It's a fun watch. It's a lot of ways, but—

And you did it with Tarantino.

Yes, yes, yes. Which is amazing.

And it seems like kind of a Tarantino vibe. Yeah, it's definitely got kind of a flavor to it.

But I brought it up just to say that there's a character who actually takes ice plunges, right? Yes. And—

The bad guy.

Yeah, the villain.

Yeah.

So you're talking about cults and things. In a way, there's a scene where when we introduce him, you could tell that everybody else there are bending to his will, right? He shows them how to do this and, yo, you do this and you do that. And then there's the fucking, I guess, the weak-willed guy, and he's like, and that's why Jimmy's the fucking king, man.

I laughed at that.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it was— so that's the point I'm making is that So will can control, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

But if you realize yourself and have that self-realization, self-actualization, you gain control over yourself, you know what I mean? And control your planes of energy. So we're talking about martial arts, and martial arts help you achieve that goal.

Yeah. My instructor used to say that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.

Mm. I like that.

That it's so difficult that in learning how to get— I don't like the term mastery because I don't think you ever really master martial arts, but in learning martial arts, the difficulty that's involved in that, it expands your potential in everything that you do.

I agree. And for me, I actually, you know, I always tell people on a physical level, I don't know if I'm good or not, to be honest. You know, I mean, took up some hung gar and Shaolin, of course, a little bit of Wing Chun here and there. But, but I don't claim to be like a martial art fighter, but I will claim to be a martial artist because of the mind, because the way I think, because the way it allowed me to think. You know, it's like, it's like I have probably 20 books on Tai Chi and I read them. And so I understand it, the application of it. Like, there's a meditation called the 8 Pieces of Brocade. You ever come across that one? No. So, uh, it's—

what's the word? Brocade?

Yeah, brocade, meaning blockage.

Oh, okay.

So it's 8 ways to unblock yourself, like to unblock your chi. Uh, one of the first ones, of course, you sit in lotus, you just take your thumbs and you bang on the back of your— basically your medulla oblongata. Like, even if you could touch this real quick, if you don't mind.

Back of your head?

Yeah, right here. Okay, you see how loud that— you see how loud that is?

Yeah.

Right? So you cover— so you cover your ears and you bang on those drums first thing in the morning, and it exactly— and it opens up some of your chakras. So that feels weird because it's loud. It's as loud as it could be, right? Yeah. The point being made by studying all these different, uh, books is like the physical part, of course, is exciting, but to me The mental part is even became more exciting. The more that I can apply, therefore I can apply it to my music, I can apply it to business, I can apply it to how to be a better father and all those things versus me just punching and trying to break a brick, you know what I mean? Right, right, right.

Yeah, there's, I mean, that's Tai Chi, right? It's all mental. Tai Chi is a martial arts sorta. I mean, I guess like you would learn how to move your body better that could kind of help you applied in a self-defense situation, but it's much more of a mental martial art. Yeah. And I used to— when I lived in San Francisco, I used to watch people in the park. These old Chinese people would go out there and practice, practice tai chi. I was like, what are they doing? I was a kid, I was, you know, I was 8, I was dumb. I was like, what is the purpose of doing this all day, right? Like, and then once you do it a few times, you're like, oh, this is not easy to do, right? And then in doing that, it cleans your mind of everything else that's going on because all you're concentrating on is these movements. Movements, these very difficult— they're not stupid. Like, they've been doing this for thousands of years for a reason, because it helps them.

Well, the crazy thing about Tai Chi, um, um, give you a little, uh, information about it that you may or may not know, but the idea with Tai Chi is that if you master it or if you have that control over it, you should be able to move 1,000 pounds with just 4 ounces of energy. So the idea of them pushing constantly means if something ever came to them, that's— they push that aside without even thinking about it, right? Because just 4 ounces of energy can divert— it's almost like tripping a giant.

I think it's great on paper. An actual giant, I don't care how much tai chi, you know, a dude is like a 300-pound All-American wrestler, he comes charging out, you ain't gonna use 4 ounces of energy and divert him.

Well, I'm gonna argue that, right? Okay, the 4 ounces you use is just step to the side.

Yeah, everybody says that stuff.

It ain't easy.

It doesn't work, right? It doesn't work. They grab you, right? You're not getting up.

But then, then another— well, I mean, a fight is a fight. Yeah, that's a, that's a difference between a martial art and a fight, right?

Well, it's also just the reality of physics, right? You know, I mean, it's, it's one thing if you're doing that to an unskilled person, but to a skilled person really, you need to know the skill that they're applying. Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's the difference between, like, someone who is practicing something that is great in theory. But I mean, it's not— it's not just in theory. Like, physically and mentally, it's great for you, but it's just— it's not the right application in terms of actual hand-to-hand combat.

Yeah, I mean, a fight is a fight. I don't care I mean, in my opinion, a fight is a fight. I don't care which— I don't care, you know, if you're the best boxer in the world that knocked motherfuckers out, like, like, like one of our greatest fighters, Mike Tyson, who wasn't just that he was a fighter, he was a fighter, right? Of course he had a skill set and he was well trained, but it— but in the peak of his fights, I don't care how much somebody else trained, when he got in the ring to fight, there weren't better fighters. They could have been better boxers, better athletes, better whatever. So I think a fight, and this is my opinion, uh, it's an instinct. It's a, you know, like, would you, you know, like when Mike bit his ear, right, right, that's a fight.

That's—

that has nothing to do with boxing.

I think that was frustration, you know, unfortunately. You know, that was, uh, Evander was beating him up. Yeah, I don't think he liked it.

Evander was beating him up. Yeah, uh, professionally, skillfully in boxing, but then Mike went to fighting. Yeah, and fighting like in, like an MMA, you can't bite in MMA. You can't bite in no sport, right? Yeah, uh, you ain't supposed to hit the nuts. Right, you ain't supposed to.

I know, which is crazy because in a fight the nuts are one of the best spots to hit.

Exactly.

In the eyes.

You ain't supposed to poke the eyes.

My friend Eddie had an idea for a comedy sketch called Ultimate Sack Fighting, where it's just dudes, just, just the nuts are the only target. It's amazing how vulnerable we really are, our balls just sitting on the outside like that. Yeah, fights, you poke in the eye. I mean, you poke in the eye in an MMA fight, the referee stops the time and you get a point deducted. But it's a very good technique in an actual fight.

Yeah, well, that's what I meant by saying like, so you could train and train and train, but when you are— when it's life against life or life or death, it's a whole nother chamber of fighting for survival, you know what I mean?

There's some horrible videos of no-rules fights. They have these no-rules fights in Russia and a bunch of other places, but they do them outside in a field, and these guys fight, and this wrestler gets this guy down and he just shoves his thumbs in his eyeballs. He gets on top of him and he just grabs his face and shoves, and the guy's just screaming, is trying to move his head away, and he taps his blood all over his eyeballs.

Party over.

Party's over. Yeah, you realize like how devastating that is, like the pain and the just the And you know what's so crazy?

The person who did it, like the— maybe the guy who got the chance to do it, it's not easy. And tell me if you agree with this, you could disagree, but it's not easy to do that either. No, I don't mean not easy that you can't do it. It's not easy for your spirit to do it, right? You see what I mean?

It's evil.

Yeah. So, so that's, that's a whole nother chamber. It's like, yo, will you Will you blind a man? Yeah, will you do it, right? And it's like, maybe you won't. And but if he will and you won't, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

That's, that's the, that's what I, that's when my Sifu says that about, because he doesn't train nobody how to fight. He said, I can't teach nobody how to fight. You know, I mean, I could teach you how to build your body, how to build your chi, how to build some strength, but a fight, bro, it's different. There's no rules. It's life and death. It's like And your will, going back to the will we talked about, your willpower has better be strong to survive. I love what Bruce Lee said. He practiced the art of not fighting. You know what I mean? So, and I told that to my son. I was like, yo, bro, listen, if you could run, bro, run.

Yeah.

I mean, be up out of there. Them motherfuckers chase you, you know, you gotta think on something, but If you could just, yo, that's right now, yo, yo, Riz, you wanna fight? Oh yo, you know what, Joe? I'll see you later, bro. You know what I mean?

I know there's too many people that get into fights for no reason and you wind up changing the rest of your life. You got a scar that's gonna be with you forever or you accidentally kill somebody. It's stupid. It's a stupid thing to do. And there's so many men that feel like they just have to prove themselves, which is what a gym is for. Go to the gym. Go to the gym. Work out with other fighters. Train. Get beat up. Realize where you're at, get a realistic sense of your actual ability, and then improve upon them. Yeah, don't go getting in street fights. Please God, don't do it. Don't do it.

And for me, I put all my aggression and all my energy into my art. You know, you think about some of my early songs, you know, "Bring the motherfucking ruckus, bro." That was, that was like, I used to have a, I had a I had like a problem of, uh, I don't know if it was anger management maybe, uh, but I, but I would just like, like, I don't know, like I needed to hear the sound of breaking glass. I used to scream, like Jizzle was like, yo, this dude, like, because I was— and I realized that I had so much, uh, anger in me that, you know, I couldn't really get it out. I was kind of Hulkish in a way, like, like Bruce Banner or some shit, right? But then through music, it started to come out and it started to come out. And by the time I got to Wu-Tang Forever, a lot of my anger was in the song. If you want beef, then bring the rockets. And like all that stage and all that energy. So it really helped me. And then I realized, going to bring it up today to my new film, I'm watching it and I'm just like, okay, once again I took all the anger and I put it into the art.

You know what I mean? There's actually a character in the film named, his name is Unique. Did you catch that when you saw the piece? Unique is the name of Ol' Dirty Bastard. His original name was A'son Unique. Ah. And so that was my way of of giving homage to him by naming the lead character of my new film, Unique. And it says in the film, he says, uh, you got a problem with anger management, right? He says, yeah, I'm working on that. And, um, and what I love about, uh, the art of it is that the problem that he had with anger management was his reaction. Like, a lot of us, we just react too much. We react before we think, right? Because they say a man could think 7 times before he reacts. That's how fast your mind can move. But we go on that first impulse. But this character, he keeps— he holds the anger until one morning he's at a veteran home, right? And he's sitting there and he's having breakfast and he has this can, right? You seen this thing, right? And he's like, he digs the spoon in there and it's like, fucking, there's nothing in it.

Like, it's not even— it's like one spoon of chocolate in it. And he gets what? Angry. And he bangs it. Boom! Who the fuck left one spoon of chocolate in the can? But then it took an old man that was settled to tell him one spoon of chocolate—

Change a whole glass of milk.

Changed the whole glass of milk. And then you notice that character from that, then he calmed down. He started reading to the kids.

Yeah.

So, and that was kind of me taking some of my personality, some of you, some of Old Dirty's personality, some of the personalities that I see in my community, and putting it into this character, this to say like, yo, sometimes, yo, calm down, listen to the wisdom of your elders, right? Have you ever, have you ever, um, in your life— I'm gonna ask you— have you ever like come across some old person, whether it's a homeless guy, definitely a guy, your uncle, somebody that you kind of didn't look up to in no way, just kind of— they was— but then they say something to you that's profound and changed your life?

Oh man, I try to find an example. I mean, I've definitely gotten a lot of advice from old-timers, but definitely people, especially people that have done a lot of things, you know, people that have accomplished things and made mistakes and recovered from their mistakes.

Yeah. I mean, I asked because I was maybe 11 and there was a like a dope fiend that was dating my aunt, and he was at the table and shit, and he was like nodding, but he was just— he was kind of in his— in the chamber, bro. You know, you know, kids will be looking. Yeah, looking at this guy and shit. And he said something about like, you know, I don't care, man, you got to get knowledge, man. You got to get knowledge, man. God says, right, man, you got to get knowledge. I started reading since that day, bro.

Really?

Seriously.

The Dope Fiend inspired you to read?

Yeah, he said, because he said you got to get— what happened was he had knowledge of self, I guess, back before the drugs hit him. And now he's like dead. And he was like, he was just saying, you got to get knowledge. The gods are right. The gods are right.

And, and so what was he on? What was the drug of choice?

He was on fucking— he shot that shit up.

Heroin.

Yeah, that's the old days, back when they shoot it. Now everybody's on pills, right?

Yeah, I never— I don't know about that.

I don't know about it either, but I mean, I don't know about it personally, but that's essentially what oxycodone is. All those pain pills that you see all these people dying of, right?

Opioids.

Yeah, opioids. Yeah, the number one problem. I mean, I think the deaths in America, it's upwards of 70,000 a year. I know, it's crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah, just from the— just from overdosing on pills.

Yeah, and most of it happened because of the Sackler family.

The what?

The Sackler family. This one family that convinced people that taking these incredibly potent opioids— did you ever see that Netflix docu-series Painkiller?

I didn't see that.

It's really good. It's all about the Sackler family. It's— Peter Berg made it. Same guy, you know Peter? He's great. Lone Survivor, made a bunch of excellent movies. He's great. He made this documentary on documenting how— well, it's not a documentary, a docudrama series, a recreation showing how this one family, they wanted to figure out a way where they could sell opioids to everyone. And the way they did it was like giving people pain management tools. Giving people medication that you could be on forever. And they made it, and they pushed it through these different doctors, and they had all these hot ladies who were representatives of the pharmaceutical drug companies that come to the doctor, and they were the reps that would come and sell the things. Yeah, I mean, really. And they were all financially incentivized to sell it, and they tried to pretend that it wasn't addictive, and they lied about that, and they got who knows how many thousands and thousands and thousands of people ruined their lives because of it. Like I said, 70,000 die every year just in America, just from opioids.

That's crazy, bro.

From overdoses. I mean, and how many more would there be of that if it wasn't for Narcan?

That's the counter, right?

Yeah, that's the stuff that the EMTs give you if they find you overdosing. They give you Narcan and it kills it and brings you back to life. And that one family, you know, no one's gone to jail. No one's gone to jail. They— I mean, I don't even know how much they've been fined. But if it wasn't for what they did, and again, well documented in that Netflix series, it's horrific, man. It's really terrifying because it's not just the people that died, the people that are addicted, it's all the family members that were affected by them, all the children of those people and what happened with their lives, all the spouses and the brothers and sisters of those people and what happened with their lives.

That's crazy. When you were saying that, the imagery in my head was that scene in American Gangster. When, uh, it was like Thanksgiving and, and they showed, uh, Frank Lucas at the table with his whole family. They had a nice spread of food and then they— the camera went and showed all the families that was hooked on the Blue Magic drug. Yeah, they had like the lady dying over here, the kid, the kid looking at her mother dead, or so the, with the difference, I guess That's the image that came to my head when you said that, but I guess the difference is in that particular case, somebody goes to jail and pays the price for the crime. But in this particular case, you're saying that nobody—

nobody went to jail. They did it legally. Somehow or another, they pimped it out and then sold it to everybody legally. I mean, it's, it's, it's sick. They're the biggest drug dealers that have ever existed. Fuck all these street drug dealers. I mean, these guys killed 70,000 people a year during who knows how many years, and it was probably more than that before they figured out Narcan. And, and part of it is also because people get addicted to it, and then they get stuff from the cartel that has fentanyl in it, and that's why they're dying. But there's a bunch of people that just died from straight-up overdose of opioids too. It's terrifying.

And it's over-the-counter?

Yeah. And yeah, no, it's not over-the-counter. You have to get prescribed, but doctors are happy to prescribe it for you. I got my nose fixed. I had a deviated septum and they cleaned it out. And the— I was leaving the doctor's office and he gave me 2 prescriptions for opioids. And I said, uh, but I don't— I'm not in pain. He goes, but you probably will be. And I go, but is it going to be worse than this right now? Like, we're just out of the operation. My nose was— I have like this— these things stuffed up your nose to keep your nostrils open. And I was like, are you sure it's going to be worse than this? And he gave me 2 prescriptions. And I went home and I was like, I don't need these. Like, I didn't fill them, but I'm like, this is not— but this guy was giving me two different opioids to take.

You would have been— you would have had— you would have went back.

I probably would have been hooked.

Yeah, you would have been back.

I know a lot of people that got hooked, man. I'm not— I'm under no illusion that I'm stronger than those people, that I would have figured out a way to not get hooked.

Right.

So many people that I know got hooked.

So you're saying like, let me just go back on this because I actually don't take nothing, bro. Like, yeah, I drink tea or, you know, I'm very, um, I mean, I do pump an asthma inhaler. Yeah, yeah, when I get, when I get it because I had asthma since, yeah, my whole life. Other than that, I don't really take no Tylenol or nothing, bro.

Yeah, fuck all that stuff.

But you're saying though, at the end of the day, just taking throwing this back at you, the doctor basically sling— gave you some free shit. Yeah. To kind of have you as a customer.

Because when crack came out, I think he's financially incentivized.

That's what I mean.

They're financially incentivized to prescribe you this medicine because he didn't say, if you're in pain, contact me and I'll fill you a prescription. Because it's just my nose, right? It's just the nose. It's not that big a deal. Like, I slept fine. It was nothing.

That's crazy.

And I tried to tell him, I'm like, I don't understand why you're giving me— we had a conversation. I go, is it gonna be worse than it is right now? Like, right now I'm not in any pain. He goes, it could probably get worse. Like, how much worse? Because right now I don't feel anything. It's like nothing. It's like mildly uncomfortable because I have these tubes stuffed up my nose, right? But this is not— this doesn't require heroin. This is crazy.

I'm not laughing at you. I'm not laughing. I'm just—

but it is kind of nuts. It's kind of financially incentivized.

Let me go back to the film. No, because in the film there's an article that our hero opens up in the paper. It's not the same subject, but it's a medical thing. And it's just like this particular county is leading in this particular process because there's money in it. If it's money, sadly, yeah, you know, I mean, and that's, it's a movie, but sadly, if there's money involved, uh, people can become insidious, right?

Yeah.

People can become like, uh, yeah, you, you, you could get strung out. You could get strung out. I done sold, you know, I got, I wrote 20 prescriptions this week and they not cheap, right? How much is the prescription when they, when you fill it? Is that like 40 bucks, 100 bucks?

I don't know, it's not cheap. But more importantly, the doctor gets incentivized. That's when you hear some dark shit. I was reading about this doctor that was an oncologist, so he's dealing with cancer patients, and he was giving chemotherapy to people that didn't have cancer because it would get him more money.

You kind of fucked me up with that. Yeah, then you kind of hit my emotion because I just lost my brother to cancer. My brother Power. Yeah.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Please take a moment.

I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, it's one of the most profitable medications, unfortunately, for physicians. Well, not unfortunate. Look, if it saves your life, that's wonderful. But the reality is this one doctor that I'm discussing, this one doctor decided that he was going to get paid more by just giving chemotherapy to people that didn't have cancer. So he diagnosed a bunch of people with cancer. They didn't have it. Said, oh, unfortunately you have cancer. The good news is we get you on chemotherapy right away. We think we can kick it. And they were regular people with nothing wrong with them, and these— this fucking guy gave them poison.

You know how much the chemo costs?

It's very expensive.

Yeah, it's about $30,000 to $60,000 a hit.

Yeah, I'm not— I'm not surprised. And the doctors profit off of that. It's one of the most profitable medications that doctors prescribe, unfortunately. And look, most doctors would never fucking imagine doing that in a million years, but this one doctor, like, his, his thought process was, hey, this is how I get paid, you know. I'm dealing with all this overhead, I'm dealing with all this liability insurance, I'm dealing with medical school bills, I'm dealing with all this. Fuck this, I'm just gonna start prescribing a little bit of chemotherapy here and there to people that don't actually have cancer. And I don't know how he got caught. I don't know what happened, but I think it was just—

they got him though.

There was some red flag. Yeah, they got him. He's in jail. There was some red flag where they noticed, like, why are so many people getting cancer with this one doctor? Like, why is his number so high? It doesn't— it's not representative of the norm.

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's crazy, bro.

But that's what— that's what's hard to imagine, is that money would incentivize someone to tell a person— like, how many people just commit suicide because they think they're dying of cancer and they go, fuck, I'm not on— I don't want to do this, I don't want to suffer, I'm just gonna fucking go out on my own terms, you know? Yeah, well, how many people— how many people's lives did that ruin?

Well, I don't— well, that's— first of all, that was terrible. I had to kind of emotionally rebound from that because it's just— you kind of made me think like I don't know, like, like, you know, we don't have the answer to shit, you know what I mean? And things happen in life and sometimes you just like, you know, but I, I do have instinct and I always, I, you know, I just felt that something wasn't, uh, I don't know, I won't even go there. But you said that money, why would that, why would he do it for the money? It's like, yo, everything is for the money, bro. Motherfuckers is doing You know, cash rules everything around me, bro. You know what I mean?

The money. Yeah.

And people were stuck on that, you know what I mean? The goal, hopefully, because we live in a capitalist society, but the goal should be that cash doesn't rule you. Money shouldn't rule you. Right. We need it, you know what I mean? You know, food, clothing, and shelter. You're going to need that. Ain't nothing given here. But it doesn't surprise me You know, that's the motivation for insidious behavior, you know. I was, um, I'm gonna go back a little history here. Um, it's, um, we're working on another project where we tap into, uh, it's kind of fantasy. I just write off my imagination, but I had the, this family, uh, they are, they are, their ancestors are from Congo. And in the Congo, they trace their ancestry back to the Leopold days. And you think about the Leopold days, millions of Africans were mined, chopped off their arms and shit, all because the gag was they wanted them to work and to get the rubber from the rubber tree. So the rubber at one point became the main gold of the world, right? And King Leopold went over to Congo, and you get Tarzan out of this shit, all right?

That's the fictional story. But he goes over, and I think they said at minimum 2 million people, but I think it's 5 million that were just mined or killed just for the economic profit of what those rubber trees was offering to Western civilization.

You know, that's happening right now with cobalt. I had this guy Siddharth Kara on the podcast. He wrote a book. Jamie, do you remember what the name of that book was? His book on cobalt mining in the Congo. So cobalt is a critical mineral that's used in cell phone batteries.

Yeah.

And many electronics. And that is Cobalt Red: The Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. It's a very disturbing conversation, and he had— he snuck in cameras and got some footage of these people doing what, you know, you think that this stuff is mined in some sort of industrial process. Look at this. This is how these people are mining, and you've got women who have babies on their backs, and all this cobalt that they're knocking out of the ground is completely toxic. Some of them just have like a bandana over their mouth that they're using to protect themselves from But look how deep that is with human beings that are just pulling cobalt. They live on dirt floors. They, they live at the lowest level of poverty imaginable. They don't have clean water. They don't have good food. And they are pulling out a mineral that's essential to the most technologically sophisticated aspect of our society, which is our connectivity through the internet, through cell phones. And this is at the, which is kind of crazy if you think of like, The most technologically sophisticated aspect of our society, if you follow it all the way down to the very bottom of the food chain, you've got slave labor.

And that's a giant percentage of the cobalt that's in our cell phones and our electronics is coming out of this place.

You know, so I never seen that before.

A lot of them are run by China. Yeah, and it's, it's very scary, man.

I never seen it, but, but I wrote a lyric that touches upon it. I never seen those images before.

He's got video. See if you can find the video. The video's dark.

I think my lyrics said, uh, let's see if I can remember my lyric. It was a song I wrote called The Fate of the World Is in Your Hand. It was me and DJ Scratch. And, uh, what I— I knew that— I knew that cobalt, or I knew that they was getting the mineral from Congo, um, but I didn't know it like that. It was something like, you know, as an artist, you're fucking antenna, right? You get shit. But I said something, uh, I said, I'm trying to remember the lyric. I said it was like, uh, um, hey, could you pull up the lyrics to the song? There's a video as well. How do you do this?

Yeah, play that video real quick, but please look at this. How crazy is this? By the way, all this seen almost biblical toil, the prize is cobalt. And here's the thing, all this shit is super toxic. So all these people are breathing in this insanely toxic dust, and they're knocking it out of the ground with hammers and carrying it off in bags.

Look at this shit, yo. Yeah, this is— this is— this looks biblical, bro.

Right? And imagine how fucking heavy these bags are, and they're doing this all day long. Look at these guys struggling to pick those bags up, and they're carrying this shit all day long, and they're just knocking into the ground trying to pull out this cobalt. And the thing is, like, This is what we need to power our phones, which is so crazy. If you think about all these people that are virtue signaling about how wonderful and ethical and moral they are, they're doing it on a phone that is literally powered by slave labor.

That's crazy.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

And it's crazy that this is going on in 2026 and most people aren't even aware of it.

Well, this is, well, you're back. Like I just said, the project I'm working on now, we just talk about it. We're tracing it back to the rubber tree, but yeah. It's still going on.

Still going on. And that's just cobalt. There's other stuff that they're mining there too. It's very similar. There's other, what they call conflict minerals.

Pull up my lyric for "The Fate of the World." I just want to just point out what I said there, if you got that on Genius or something. Here it is. Yeah, it says, "A thousand years of darkness, the world got struck with sorrow. Hallowed be thy name, we need a better tomorrow." Go to the second, uh, the second verse. Let me see. Uh, uh, let me see. Wait. Oh no, wrong song. That's what it is. I got too many songs.

Uh, it's called, uh, you forgot the name of your own song. That's hilarious. Yeah, you got too many songs.

What's the other one on that one? Uh, um, Go open that. No, not that one. Go to the other, uh, the other— what do you call it? The other, uh— go to the album title. Yeah, hit the, the album. Saturday Afternoon. You're gonna edit some of this, right? No, you don't edit. Okay, well, we're gonna— y'all gonna bear with us.

Saturday Afternoon.

No, no, no, go to the, uh— oh, it's called the, uh, The Great Fisherman, right? Let me see the titles of the songs. Fisherman. Fisherman. Yeah, pull that one up.

So what is Genius? Genius is it shows all the lyrics? Yeah, that's what it is. And then it actually has a song underneath it.

Oh, that's cool.

I didn't even know that existed.

People can annotate and tell you what people were meant by what they said.

Oh really? Yeah, on Genius.

Yeah.

Oh, okay, right there. There you go. Look, the great fisherman, official man, are trying to make a remedy for the elixir of sin, a premonition. We need divine intervention. This whole world of The whole world is a stage, so it's time for intermission. In the middle of the Congo jungle, there's a combo of concentrated elements that make the world's phones glow.

Wow.

But they got a small zone for their phones though, 'cause they don't even got reception out there. But we used to communicate just banging on the bongo. That's when the village was more motherly and more brotherly. But then the Dutch came through and killed them all for the rubber tree.

Ooh.

King Leopold City was built from a sea of gold. And the resurrected still trading on a silky road. Yeah.

Those are some bars.

Respect. But point, but not doing that to show off or nothing, but it's real.

Yeah.

Yeah. But you just gave me, but you gave me like the full, you gave me the connotation and the annotation of the lyric. Yeah. 'Cause I didn't even see none of, I never seen that before.

Oh, that's crazy.

I just heard that they gotta get it from there. And I knew the history of King Leopold, but I did not know that. This is still— still, this is crazy.

Yeah, it's still going on, and it'll continue going on as long as no light is shown on it. And this is what Siddhartha Kara was trying to do with his book and, you know, the tour that he was doing and doing podcasts and trying to let any— mean, he risked his life, man. I mean, they questioned him, and he got very lucky that he got out of there with that footage, right? Because they want to make sure that nobody knows about this shit. They don't want any outrage. They want the mining to keep going as planned.

I mean, It's dark. It's dark, yeah.

Because it's a multi, multi-billion dollar industry that's powered by abject poverty.

Probably trillion.

Probably trillion.

Yeah, 'cause like, it's like you just saying, like if it's in all our phones, that means—

Not just our phones, but I think it's in a lot of electronics. I think it might be, is cobalt in electric cars? I think they're trying to make new formulations of batteries without cobalt. So there's a— Jamie, what is that? I know a lot of the Chinese cell phones are using a different battery technology instead of lithium-ion. They have something else that's more dense.

Well, that's what— yeah, cobalt's a critical component in lithium batteries, right?

That's crazy.

Yeah, lithium-ion batteries. What are the— what is, uh, like OPPO? There's a bunch of these new Chinese companies that have cell phones that have much more battery. Like, instead of like, like a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a 5,000 milliamp, uh, battery in it. I think these OPPO phones have 7,000 plus, but it's— I think it's carbon silicon-based batteries. I wonder if they have cobalt in them. They've, you know, as technology for batteries changes and advances, they need different kinds of components in them, right? But I mean, then you gotta find out where are they getting that shit from? Is that another like conflict mineral that they have people digging out of the ground with sticks?

Well, the other thing to think about, you know, just okay, let's say it is worth trillions of dollars. Like, when do, um, the people who, you know, like if that's on my property, bro, you know what I'm saying? It's my— you coming to my crib for it, I should get be getting paid off of that, right? I should be—

I mean, well, you know how it works. China comes in, it's a lot of these are Chinese-run. China comes in, they pay off the people that are in power in these areas, and those people will get wealthy. And then all the people that are with the workers, they all get like pennies, as small a wage as you could possibly pay them to keep them alive. These people live on dirt floors, it's crazy, no food. It's horrible. It's, it's really dark, man, because it's what powers electronics, which is nuts because that's the most sophisticated aspect of our society in terms of technology.

Well, the government of those places— and not to get here, like, I'm like, you know, I'm an artist and I'm a spiritual man— but they should be like, yo, hold on, bro. Yeah, like, like in Alaska, right? There's a pipeline that goes through Alaska. You know about this pipeline?

Sure.

But the citizens of Alaska, they get a royalty for that. Yes. Yeah. Like if I'm in Congo and I got this cobalt that's worth trillions and I got all these people, give them a royalty.

100%. If that was America, that would probably be the only way to do it. But obviously you couldn't pay people the way you pay people in the Congo in America anyway. We have laws. But this is also why they want illegal immigration. That's part of the reason why they like illegal immigration is because you don't have paperwork. You don't have to pay people what they're supposed to get paid. Do you pull that back up again? Again, Jamie, please, about the silicon carbide batteries. So it seems like one of the reasons for utilizing this new technology is because it's not using as much cobalt. So, uh, advanced lithium-ion technology using silicon to replace traditional graphite anodes, offering roughly 20 to 40% higher energy density and faster charging, especially in smartphones. Does it say anything? I thought the—

Yeah, so it has cobalt in that as well, but less.

Maybe enables more sustainable cobalt-reduced designs, so you have less cobalt, less, and it's more energy density. So these Chinese phones are— yeah, here it is, Honor Magic 5 Pro. A lot of these, uh, OnePlus 13, a lot of these, um, Chinese-made Android phones are using much more advanced battery technology.

So they're trying to ease up on it a little bit, basically?

I mean, I don't know. The question is like, well, where are you getting everything else? Where's all that other shit that's in your phone? And how are you mining that? If you're hiding how you mine cobalt, how are you mining all the other stuff? Because they're all conflict minerals. And a lot of these minerals, unfortunately, are mined out of the third world. They find them in these places where people are really poor. And the people that live there, they don't benefit from it. Their lives don't get any better. In fact, they get worse. 'cause they get poisoned.

Well, the thing that, but here go, here go, let me add some wisdom to that. The people gotta realize that they're not poor, right? Because if that is valuable and you're standing on it, then you're standing on value.

And that's why they keep them poor because they can't organize then.

But think about the Holy Quran for a moment, right? Let me go here for a little spiritual here, right? So in the Holy Quran, it mentions, that, uh, you know, if the Muslims were to do what they was going to do, that they would have many wells, right? Because, you know, they living in the desert basically, right? And it says they're going to have abundant of wells. It's not an abundant of water wells in the Middle East, right? And these are people that are living nomadic economically not really at the level of the rest of the world, but it's a prophecy telling them that they're going to have wells. But what kind of wells they end up having?

Oil.

Oil wells, right? And so now all of a sudden they become the most richest small region in the world, right? So the promise is fulfilled, right? But the gag is that the people got to realize sometimes where you stand, where you stand. On your land, you know what I mean? The value of it, as the Bible would say, yo, work to the sweat of your brow to dig and plow and make your land valuable. But now, if you— if so, if I'm just saying that the people where they're going to get whatever they're going to get, bro, okay, I don't care if you're going to get some berries in the Amazon. If the berries is worth money, then the dude who got all the berries got to realize that, yo, bro, Let's make a deal. But it seemed like that ain't happening.

No, no, it's not happening. And the reason why it's not happening is because you have enormous corporations to come in from other countries. They get contracts and they pay off the people that are the leaders of these countries, or the people that are the leaders of the military. And then those people keep these people oppressed, right? And that's what I mean. It's, it's the people that are running these countries that are making sure that these people don't get paid what they deserve so that they can keep them working there for slave wages. So they keep their profits as high as possible. They also keep the options as low as possible. These people don't have any options. If you're living in the Congo and you're near where these cobalt mines are, what are your other options?

Right.

You know?

I remember, I'm gonna shout out Burna Boy. Burna Boy's a good dude. He had told me some, gave me some insight about Nigeria. And like he was saying to me, like how Wu-Tang, when we was young, you know, we had to sling street pharmaceuticals, right? But out there, oil is like a street pharmaceutical. Like dudes was slinging petrol and slinging oil and shit. I was like—

In Nigeria?

Yeah. Wow. Like, that's crazy, right?

It's crazy.

But the gag I'm saying is that still, you know, of course the government controls all that, but, but sometimes the people got to just, uh, snap, you know, just, yo, I don't know, stand on your land, yo, and, and, and, and realize the value of where you stand. You know, every man, um, has a value, um, right? We, we all walk with a living value. Every life is precious. Every life that's born one changes the world. As soon as somebody is born today, yeah, this ain't the same world it was yesterday, right? As soon as somebody returned to the essence, this ain't the same world. But so we got to kind of— but the people, I'm going back to the people, not to the military or to the government. The people got to realize that, yo, hold on, bro, it's you. You're the value. Because without them, right, until they do get, uh, 10 million robots to do that shit, which I don't— I'm not opposed to Right. Send 10 million robots to dig it up, bro. And still though, if it's on my land, break me off. You know what I mean? But people gotta snap into that.

Well, these places are all guarded by the military. So it's all people with guns. You can't leave. You're doing their bidding. You'll get shot. They kill people, they bury you. No one notices. No one cares. The value of human life is extremely low. Yeah, it's satanic. It's dark.

Well, let's jump back on my film because in my film, the value of life is once again, we talking about the world, but yet I gotta relate it back because in our film, the value of life seems low as well.

Yeah.

Right? Low for the person living, more for the valuable for the person that kills them. Right.

Yeah, without giving too much of the film away, what happens in the film actually happens in real life. I mean, that, that is— it's based— I mean, you say it's based on real life, but there's been real-life cases where people— they've harvested people's organs for profit. And that's a thing. I mean, that's a big problem with people in China. You know, people go to China for, for organs. Like, there's a tourism to get organs replaced. Like, say, if you need a new kidney or you need a liver or whatever, we got it. Yeah, they have it. And what they'll do is they'll take their fucking prisoners Oh, look, AB blood type, perfect. Whack. And then now you got some dude's heart.

Business. Yeah.

Crazy.

There's another element that, um, this is the RZA right here, I'm live on Joe Rogan Podcast. I got a new film coming out May 1st. It's called One Spoon of Chocolate. Written and directed by the RZA. Starring Shameik Moore, Paris Jackson, Blair Underwood, Rockman Dunbar, to name a few. It's produced by Quentin Tarantino and my wife Talani Diggs. Hey, baby. I did a little unofficial radio drop because—

That sounded like we're on the radio.

Yeah, it did. That's like, ladies and gentlemen, this is the RZA coming in at 5 after the hour. And, um, but I love how art can touch upon, uh, things even if it's, uh, unintentional, right? What I mean by unintentional is that, you know, as an artist, I just let the shit flow. Like I didn't, like when you showed all that Congo Cobalt, I never seen it.

But yet it's in your lyrics.

Yeah, but that's in my lyrics. And even as you're telling me this China stuff here, I don't know about that. I do know some things that happened with some articles, but I wasn't, I'm not in depth with all the, in depth. Yeah, depth. I don't have in depth knowledge of it. But I strive as an artist, Joe, is to actually to at least show the surface so that, you know, I don't know how deep the pool is, but I will show the surface through my art. And I think in this film, which is a, it's an action film though. So Joe only seen the first half of it. So he doesn't know about the revenge-o-matic ass kicking. And I'm not gonna spoil it for you.

Well, I believe it. There's already plenty of ass kicking already. Right, right. Exactly.

Seen some, okay. But it gets fucking, you gonna have to see it. Have a good time. I'm sure you wanted to have a good time. But still, once again, the art of it, um, it has a— I'm realizing as I'm watching with different audiences, like when I watched it in, uh, New York, I had motherfuckers yelling at the screen, fuck that. They was on some shit. When I watched it in LA, the audience was like, it was like a sense of nervousness was in the When I watched it in Chicago, it was standing ovation. You know what I mean? I watched it in San Francisco and the Q&A was very intellectual. So I'm realizing that, okay, this is touching. Then when I watched it this other place, the girl, with Dave actually, I watched it with Dave Chappelle. He said that, you got bars in this motherfucker. I said, what you mean by bars? He said, well, the guy says, the girl says, First, the girl— listen, this comes— you haven't seen this scene yet, but Paris Jackson is telling him that everybody in this town goes to church on Sunday except for Jimmy and his gang of degenerates.

They party all night Saturday, and they sleep all day Sunday. She said, "And I guess they're not afraid to go to hell." And then the hero says, "Well, where I come from," They say heaven is what you make it and hell is what you gotta go through to get it. And she was like, that sounds right. And Dave was like, that's a fucking bar. Hey yo, hold on. So last time I was here, it was Donnell Rawlings was here, right? So check it out, bro. I was showing the film to Dave, right? And we gonna do a Q&A. I went to Yellow Spring, Ohio, bro.

Was Donnell there?

Bro, he was there, yo. And then he got up and he asked the question and he started, uh, he, he interrupted, he talked about the day we was here and he, and, and you inspired him to do a podcast. I remember you said, yo, start a podcast, boy, you might even help them. Right. And then he said, uh, and I said, yo, yeah, if you need something, hit me. So he hit me up, say, yo, let me get a, a, a opening theme track. And so I got like a, a bunch of beats that's on my little thumb drive. I sent them like 5 of them, right? And he chose one.

Yeah, he told me about this.

Yeah. So now he choose one and that becomes his theme. And this is— it was a nice fucking— but that same 5 tracks, uh, my manager is sending it to other people too and shit. So I did give it to Donnell. I gave it to him gratis. But he comes up in the middle of my Q&A with Dave about my film and he starts talking about the beat and he RZA is an Indian giver. He said, he said, I was playing, he said, I had it on my podcast for almost 2 years. And then one day it said flag, license, whatever they do and shit. When you can't use it, motherfucker shit. And I was like, I said, oh yeah, bro. Yeah. The people from the Minions, they had got those 5 tracks as well, and they chose it, and they put it, and they paid us a lot of money. Not going back to the money of it all, but so I told him, I said, yo, let's choose another beat. He said, nah, son, that was the one.

Oh no.

That was the one. I said, bro, they chose it. My manager made the deal.

Oh no.

It's off the table now.

Oh no. So he had to change his opening?

Yeah, so I owe him.

Oh no. I owe him. That gives him more to complain about. Yeah, oh no, bro. Almost worth giving him the beat just so he doesn't have to complain.

Yeah, I owe you, Darnell, and I'm gonna hook you up with something. Actually gonna cook you up something nice.

All right, I can't wait for this phone call. Son, you know what he did to me, son? He took it back.

He said that shit in front of the audience. I couldn't deny it and shit. I was like, yeah, they, they, you know.

That's hilarious. That's hilarious.

Oh But anyway, but they loved the film too. Like, the audience and— I'm only saying that 'cause I love when my peers react to something.

Is this your first feature-length film?

It's my fourth.

Fourth. Yeah. I know you've done other stuff, but did you— have you written and done other things like this? The way you're doing it this way?

This is my second one writing. So I wrote my first film, Man with the Iron Fist. Right. Right? Which was a Quentin Tarantino present as well. And then it was a, you know, kung fu movie. So then I didn't want to get stuck in like, oh, that's all he does. So my second film I didn't write, uh, was written by Nicole, and she, um, she— it was called Love Beats Rhymes, uh, and, uh, that was like a movie about poetry and a female lead. And it was actually, um, John J.D. John David Washington. It was his first feature film. Film as well. And then my third film was called Cutthroat City, which I didn't write. Just once again, I hired Gunn as a director. And in that film, I had Shameik Moore as the lead actor, and I kind of like fell in love with his talent. So that's why he was in Cutthroat City. He's in the Wu-Tang series. He plays Raekwon. And now he's the star of my new film. So he's kind of— we kind of got this I hate to say it, but we kind of got this Denzel Spike Lee energy, this Coogler, Michael B.

energy. I really like this guy. But on this particular film, yes, I decided to write it and direct it. And I'm back to the basics, right? Quentin Tarantino presented my first film, and now here's my fourth film, and he's back in the building.

And one of my favorite songs from that first soundtrack is Baddest Man Alive that you did with Black Keys.

Oh, sick.

With the Black Keys. Dude, that song. That song killed it.

Shout out to, um, shout out to Dan and Patrick, yo.

Yeah, I love those two guys. They're cool as fuck, and that song kills it. That song kills it. That's such a good song. A bunch of dudes use that song as walkout, walkout for the UFC.

I, I seen it on a fucking car commercial one day.

I was like, okay, did you guys listen to the lyrics?

Right, I guess all you need is that hook, right? Right, yeah. On this, how we doing on time, we good?

Yeah, we're plenty good.

On this particular film, I got a guy named Jason Isbell.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so Jason Isbell did a song in the film. It's called Comic Book Life. And it was my first collaboration with him as well. And it was a pleasure. Lyrics go, Jesus Christ walked— Jesus Christ may have walked on water and Superman flies through the sky. The immigrant crossed the border, he's looking for a better life. Trying to find it, he's reminded that dreams are born to die. His reality kills his fantasy. It's not a comic book life, you know what I mean? And so it goes on. And so I try to, when I do films, to try to make like a unique musical collaboration. Of course, that was me and the Black Keys back then. But on this film, we got like music from Jason Isbell. We got clearances from the Isley Brothers, who, check this out, bro. I'm on a plane 3 days ago, heading to Atlanta to show the film. Guess who's sitting in first class in the seat right there? Ron Isley. I never met him before. I'm like the big fan. I love his music. I got 2 of his songs in my movie. And I'm like, I'm going to show, and I look over, I'm like, my wife's like, yeah, that's why.

And I was like, I got a chance to get up and thank him, uh, for, you know, for his work and for even allowing his music to be in my film because that was special.

Oh, that's cool.

Are you a Von Isley fan?

Not really.

You're not an Isley Brothers, bro? Listen, bro, you gotta— let me— I gotta put you on some Isley Brothers, bro. Please. Because if, you know, I'm quite sure your love life is good, alright? I'm quite sure you got a good love life, bro. But if you ever get into any love life trouble, okay, put on the Isley Brothers, it will smooth it out.

Tell me what to get.

I'm gonna say Sensual.

Sensual?

Yeah, put that one on. And, um, and, uh, yeah, I'm gonna just give you that one because when that— the way that comes on, bro, your shoulders gonna start moving and shit. Okay, you come in with two glasses of wine, I'm telling you, bro, you're gonna be good.

Yeah, I'll check it out.

Who's your favorite musician?

Oh boy, I don't think I have a favorite musician. I don't even have a favorite genre. You know, I like all kind— I mean, if you look at my Spotify Green Room playlist, it's all over the place. It goes from Nina Simone to Bill Withers to Wu-Tang to Leonard Skinner to Led Zeppelin. It's all over the place. To Gary Clark Jr. To— it's everywhere. I move around.

You name it, some dope shit.

I like to move around. I like all kinds of shit. I'll listen to Dwight Yoakam, and I'll follow it up with, you know, Cool G Rap. I like— one of my favorite albums ever is when Brand New Heavies— did you ever listen to Brand New Heavies when they got Heavy Rhyme Experience? I don't listen to that.

I don't know if I know that particular—

oh, Brand New Heavies got together with like Cool G Rap. They got together with a bunch of different different rappers. Um, who else is in there? God, it's like there's, there's a ton of different people that they did these tracks with. So they have like the Brand New Heavies playing the music and like, like Heavy Rhyme Experience is the name of the track. Gangsta Main Source.

Yeah, what year is this, bro?

'92, I think. Wow, '92.

Yeah, right, right. Because I remember that first album.

Oh my God, you got to listen to some of this shit.

Yeah, because by now in '92 You know what happens to me in 1992? I'm on my own dick now. I don't listen to nobody. I'm just Wu-Tang'd out trying to—

Oh, okay.

You know, trying to make it.

So I'm like, "Nah." Yeah, oh, I get it.

But so I missed it.

Oh, yeah.

I actually missed a lot of things during my career, bro. I realized, like, I'm going backwards. Like, there was a point in my life where I couldn't stand R&B.

Really?

It made me nauseous. I'm serious. Like, if I'm driving, and R&B's on, I felt— no, I was so fucking hip-hop, bro.

Because you're so concentrated. Yeah, yeah, it was weird. Like, that makes sense though.

Yeah, it makes sense.

But yeah, because you were on the grind, you were really trying to make it happen.

Now you give me— now I play R&B, me and my wife, we'd be dancing around the motherfucking house. It's—

I mean, there was a point in time where I was only into '90s hip-hop. Like, '90s hip-hop was my shit, right? Because like that was when I was young and I was on the road a lot, and that was like my getting fired up music, was like '90s hip-hop. But then I started expanding, and then I got into like a lot of like old classic rock and roll. And I just think it's all dependent upon your mood, but there's so much different shit that you could listen to, right? But this, you got to listen to some of this Heavy Rhyme Experience.

Yeah, I'm gonna put that on my— yeah, that's right there.

Play him that, uh Kool G Rap, Death Threat. This is like one of my all— so in the green room, we'll have to cut this out of the podcast unfortunately because we don't want to get dinged, but at a— in the green room playlist, this is like one of my first beginning of the night when the comedy show starts and we're in the green room getting fired up, pouring a couple drinks, everybody's getting fired up, someone's rolling a blunt. This is one of my favorite songs to start the green room playlist.

Hit me with with it.

This is Cool G Rap and the Brand New Heavies. Okay, it's great. And, uh, the Gangstar Hectic, that's another one of my favorites.

You know what's so cool about it for me? So I never heard it, but it immediately like put me right back in Stapleton projects, like right back in that time of me, like my— because Cool G Rap is—

love that dude.

So put me right there. Thank you.

Cock Blocking, one of my all-time favorite songs.

Right, right. Talk Like Sex. I mean, so many. Ill Street Blues.

Ill Street Blues is amazing. And Coogee Rap, I just think in mainstream just doesn't get the respect he deserves from like the influence that he had in the '90s. Yeah, I think that, I think that the artists, we get into him, but yeah, you're right, the mainstream people, there's so many people I bring up Coogee Rap and they're like, who?

Right.

I'm like, oh, sit down, sit down, let me play some shit for you.

And I didn't never— he told me this years later that the G G stood for genius. Ah, and he's a, he's a fucking genius. Even though we, we got the Jizza, the genius in our crew, Coogi Rap is a genius, man. I was blessed to, um, I was blessed to do a couple of tracks with him in my catalog. We actually, nice, we actually, um, got a couple that we did together and a couple that I just produced with, uh, like him and Inspector Deck and, um, and things of that nature. So that's one of the greatest blessings of, uh, of the art is that I'm sure you do the same as, you know, whether you're doing comedy, whether you're doing your physicality, that you have people that you admired and then all of a sudden they're your peers.

You're collaborating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're doing shit with them. Yeah, no, it's very exciting just being able to hang out with them, you know? We did, we went to dinner with Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avery, and then they came to the comedy show and then we were all hanging out in the green room.

Right.

And everybody's like, this is the fucking coolest night of all time. Chilling, hanging out with Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery at the Mothership green room.

How you gonna beat that?

It's hard to beat, man. Everybody the next day were like, did last night really happen? Like, that was so fun.

Shit, when, when, um, when I— this is speaking of Quentin— when I, um, had a cut that was, you know, worthy to show him, our buddy Javid and my buddy Abizar they, uh, so Jared kind of owns the old Desi Arnaz studio.

Oh, wow.

He's the guy that started RED cameras. So, and he has this amazing screening room. And so he said, yo, you can screen it here for Quentin. I said, all right, cool. So we finally got the date to do it. And I go there and his plus one is Fincher.

Oh, wow.

Exactly. So I'm just like, oh, crazy. Yeah. So yeah. So now I'm like, okay, whoa. Okay. Okay. And it was, and I played the film to them and it's, once it was another great night, some great, what was we sipping on? We were sipping on some great scotch. Yeah, we had some great scotch. I don't smoke weed like that no more. So, you know, that's, do you still smoke weed?

What happened where you stopped?

I just, I don't function good in public with weed.

Who does?

Who does? Well, okay.

People think they do.

Exactly. I don't want to see that photo. I don't want to—

that photo.

Yeah, I don't want to be that guy no more. It's like, if I'm home— also, to be honest with you, if I smoke weed, bro, I start doing kung fu, bro.

Really?

Yeah, I'm either going to sit quiet and like be a total—

oh, you start—

yeah, and motherfuckers like, yo, what's this? Yeah, exactly. I'll start doing shit like that. I mean, with a fucking suit on or some shit. Yeah, so that sounds fun. Yeah, well, you know, so yeah, I kind of— 2015 was when I, when I stopped.

Really?

Completely?

Maybe. I mean, not— yes, for completely, but then I said I will only smoke with, uh, with 2 or 3 people in the world. One of them is Quentin Tarantino, um, because we watch our kung fu movies. We're not going nowhere. I smoke— if I have some weed with him, I know that I'm is, you know, no photos is happening. You're not going to see this, the zongi RZA. Uh, my other brother I smoke with, I won't say his name cuz I don't know if people know he smoke. I think everybody knows he smoke, but I won't say his fucking name and shit. Um, and I only see him once a year, twice a year, you know what I mean? Um, and that's really it. And even like, I haven't smoked a blunt with Method Man in over 12 years Wow. And that's my, that's my, that was my, he's the king of smoking anyway, but that was like my, but I just, like I said, I just don't like how, it just doesn't fit my today's personality. So I'm a sipper now. I just sip on some, not no syrup.

I know what you mean. Yeah. A little scotch.

A little scotch, a little tequila. I love tequila. Mezcal. Mm-hmm. You know?

Well, there's nothing wrong with all those things. I think they're all tools. And I think one of the things about tools is you can misuse them.

Them.

And I think there's a lot of people that just live in the cloud and they just get high all the time and then they just feel like their life is out of control. And then pure abstinence becomes the only solution. But it's really— you just started abusing the tool. I think marijuana is an excellent tool for creativity.

Mm-hmm.

And the way I like it the most is writing. I think it's the greatest thing ever for writing. There's something that happens with just not a lot, just a little bit of weed, just all of a sudden, bing, ideas start sparking off in your head that I go, I don't think that these ideas would exist without this stuff. That's one of the things that Carl Sagan said. Jimmy, what's that famous Carl Sagan quote on cannabis? But Carl Sagan, who's obviously like one of the most famous astronomers of all time, he had and wrote that great movie Contact, the great book Contact, He had this quote about cannabis that I always like to say to people that want to say it's for dummies. Because it's like, no, man, there's something to it. You could look like a dummy if you abuse it, just like you could look like an idiot if you get so drunk that you can't walk.

Exactly.

It's the same thing. But a little bit, just a— just a little bit sometimes just fires up. The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. That was one quote, but there was another quote that he had about ideas that are available through cannabis that aren't available without it. That his perception— and obviously, here's a guy that— I mean, what better way to utilize weed than to smoke a little and stare at the fucking vastness of the cosmos and just try to— Well, open up your mind to that.

That's exactly what I mean for me, right? So, so if I— so it's only two things gonna happen for me. I'm gonna smoke. I'm gonna just be like— even if I'll be in here finding fucking constellations and shit. You see what I mean?

Yeah. Or kung fu.

I'm doing kung fu.

That's— those sound like two good things.

Yeah, I'm not knocking them, but it's definitely, uh, my schedule, it doesn't— yeah, it doesn't fit in.

That's the thing is like, what is life? Is life about schedule? Is life about enjoying moments. And I think there's something to be said for enjoying moments, and there's certain things that will help enhance moments. And I think that's where cannabis comes into play. I think the problem with it is the problem with anything that human beings abuse, whether it's soda, chocolate, whatever, alcohol, food. People abuse things. They go too far with it. You don't use it correctly. And I think it's also part of the problem with it being illegal. One of the things about alcohol being legal is we understand what a dose is. If I give you a shot of tequila and we both clink glasses and we do a shot, we understand the dose. That is one shot of tequila. It's not confusing. Whereas we all know weed, you know, you get a hold of some of Snoop's weed or some people are just, they're dealing with botanists that are on another planet, man.

Let me say one thing about Snoop's weed one day, bro. When I was smoking, I did an interview with him and that's when he had that GNC. He had the G, he had some network that he had. And we was talking about my movie and then I was going, everything was fine. Like then, you know, he's, he rolling it, you know, he was talking. Then he lit that motherfucker up and passed that shit, bro. I hit that shit, hit it back, hit it again. I was like, I'm getting the fuck outta here. And yo, I was gone.

Yeah, that's Joey Diaz weed too. Joey Diaz got that same kind of weed. I've given it to some people, I'm like, careful, that's Joey Diaz weed.

And they get scared, like, oh Jesus, you gotta go home and put a pillow, get a pillow ready, because that shit is gonna fucking— and he could do it all day. Like, him, that's what's crazy. Him and Method Man, out of— for my— and I'll give Burna Boy in that category as well. Those are the three most people that I've seen very weed tolerant. Like, like, like, like they could be on the third one and then you hit it and you're like, what the fuck, yo? How the fuck are y'all all going like that?

They going all day long. Yeah, when Snoop was in here, he just kept rolling blunts and I was like, how are you still awake? How are you? How do you function? But they're so accustomed to it, right, that their tolerance is so high, and that feeling of just being in the cloud all the time, they're fine with it. Do you find that other quote?

There's multiple quotes.

He had an essay, so it was something about ideas being available, um, that aren't— that was the big quote.

Yeah, it didn't say, uh, understand himself.

It doesn't say that. That's okay. No worries. I should have found— I should have had I got it ready. But the point is, it's like, it's a tool. And you could use any tool correctly, or you could use it and abuse it incorrectly.

So what's your frequency of smoking? Like, do you smoke once a day, once a week?

I just wish it was legal. If it was legal, then people could—

It is legal many places, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's not federally legal. It's just got changed to Schedule III. So Schedule III is the same as Tylenol with codeine. So what does that mean? Does it mean that you have to get a prescription for it? So it doesn't carry the same— the crazy thing is it's completely legal in California and it's generating tax revenue. It's completely legal in Colorado, generating tax revenue. And then people always want to point to the negative aspects of it, but like, you could, you could have negative aspects with everything else that's legal too. Think about how many people die from obesity every year, obesity-related diseases. Diseases. Let's put that into perplexity. Put that into our AI sponsor. What is— how many people die because of obesity-related diseases every year?

So you're saying—

so should we regulate food? Should we regulate the amount of food that people are able to consume? Should we stop people? Should we— should we make cake and Ring Dings and Ho-Hos illegal? No, you have to have some personal responsibility and some self-control and an understanding of like what the ramifications are. What is the— what are the dangers of overeating or eating the wrong kinds of food. That's the same with cannabis, the same with alcohol. If you think that alcohol should be illegal, well, you're gonna— people are gonna drink it, and then you're just gonna empower organized crime like they did during the Prohibition. Okay, how about this? World Health Organization reports that at least 2.8 million people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. That's fucking crazy.

That's crazy.

Globally, it's 3 to 5 million people a year.

Wait, so where's the 2.8 at? That's here?

I don't know. No, here is, uh, okay, okay, US is here. So US, it's 280,000 to 325,000 per year.

They knocked out opioids, knocked it out of the park.

So that— so we're, we're all worried about opioids and no one's worried about pizza. Hey, but that doesn't mean that pizza should be illegal.

Yeah, that's the thing, especially New York pizza, bro. That's the best pizza.

Connecticut, New Haven. There's— you just have to have an understanding of what to do and not to do, you know. Don't eat pizza 24 hours a day every day, you'll die, right?

Right.

Don't eat a pound of salt. You eat a pound of salt, you'll be dead.

Wasn't there a documentary with a guy— I'm not talking Super Size Me. Me. Yeah, that's— yeah, was he eating every day?

He's eating McDonald's. Yeah, all day, every day, for every meal.

And that was like 30 days before like the Grim Reaper started knocking at the door.

Yeah, he wasn't doing well. He had all sorts of liver problems. Didn't McDonald's just release some subscription where you get like— it's like $52 a month and you could eat as much as you want? I think they just did that today. What's that look, Jerry? What's that face? I know it doesn't make any sense.

$52.

I think they just did that today. I saw it on my Google News alert this morning.

Did that make sense?

No, it doesn't make sense unless they're limiting the amount of meals that you can have in a day. But if you have a subscription, say if you have a McDonald's subscription and it's $52 a month and they— and that's all you eat, you could live off of $52 a month.

Wow. No. Not according to that documentary.

No.

That's 2 months, you outta here.

Well, what if you only ate their salads and you only ate their beef patties without any bread?

So—

You'd probably be better off.

You'd be better off? Okay.

You'd probably be okay. But even their beef probably has like fillers in it and shit.

I'm still living a vegan lifestyle.

Still?

Yeah.

Yeah? Yeah. What do you get mostly for your protein?

Mostly beans. I probably do consume a little bit too much soy, I think. I think, because I do eat tofu.

Shout out to our friend CK.

Hey, in the building. Oh yeah, he bought in.

Yeah, that place rules.

Yes, he bought us lunch, which we will eat after we finish this phenomenal Chinese restaurant here in Austin.

Phenomenal.

You know what he got that I realized?

What?

He has those Sichuan peppers.

Oh yeah.

That shit is crack, bro.

They kick. Yeah, they kick. They make my bald head sweat. Yes, no, they start dripping down to my eyebrows.

Exactly.

I'm sorry, what were we looking up again, Jamie?

McDonald's Unlimited.

Oh yeah, did you find it? Is it fake?

Well, I'm just, uh, the only places that it pops up are a, there's one Instagram post.

It was in my Google News feed.

People are reporting it, but it seems to be only based off of a photo, which is most likely AI.

Oh yeah, $54 a month.

This photo is going around, but there's no links to— McDonald's isn't saying it.

There's no like press release about it. Oh, because so it's bullshit. It's bullshit. Because I was thinking like, how could they afford—

Now, what also I would say, they do do test stuff, and it is claiming it's a pilot program being tested somewhere. So potentially they're trying something out somewhere.

But again, I don't see any reporting of it. Unlimited meals is a weird if you're gonna limit it, you can't say unlimited, because if you don't, if it's unlimited, then you could just feed your whole family for $54 a month.

Right. You go like, take one, hey, go back in, you don't get nothing.

Well, you could just say unlimited. I like to eat 7 Big Macs. Give me 7 Big Macs, 7 orders of fries, 7 sodas, and then you're feeding everybody for $54 a month. That's crazy.

Does McDonald's own Chipotle? I don't know. Do they own Chipotle? Seems to own Chipotle. I'm bringing up Chipotle 'Cause I got Chipotle, I did a campaign with them, and they gave me a card, lifelong card. I could eat at Chipotle for free for the rest of my life. Really?

And— That's part of the campaign?

No, this was like the gift.

For you, yeah. I didn't even know that that was a thing.

And I could have 10 people with 24-hour notice, and I think it's, I could do a case study free to eat at least once a month.

Wow.

For the rest of my life.

That's a pretty good deal.

That is a real thing.

Really?

That's like a celebrity gold card thing.

They all— oh, nice.

Their hands on it through different ways. Like Travis Barker has one here.

Interesting.

I got one.

Travis is a— he's a vegan too.

Yeah, I'm a vegan too.

Eating the— just the bean burritos and stuff.

But it's sofritos. They got some shit called sofritos. Vegan keto.

What is that? Hopefully there's no chicken in there.

No, I don't think it's no chicken. I think it's like, uh, it's like a vegan, vegan meat.

So most of your animal pro— or most of your protein is from what? Tofu?

Beans? Chickpeas? I love chickpeas, lentils. I'm crazy for lentils. Um, my wife will throw a pot of lentils on.

Pea protein is really good.

Pea protein.

Hemp protein's really good.

Hemp is good.

Hemp protein is I think it's one of the few plant-based proteins that contains all the amino acids, and it's very bioavailable too.

Pumpkin seeds, bro.

Pumpkin seeds.

Pumpkin seeds.

Really?

Yeah, look up pumpkin seeds, bro. Pumpkin seeds probably have the most best protein. Really?

Pumpkin seeds? I keep them good too.

I keep them in my car.

When they're roasted?

Yeah, roasted pumpkin seeds.

Mmm.

Trust me, every time I get in the whip, Pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds.

What does this say about the— oh, and reduce the risk of cancer and improve bowel and prostate health.

Pumpkin seeds, bro. That's it.

Rich in protein, fiber, unsaturated fats, and must-have minerals. Pepitas are a great healthy snacking option. All right. Yeah, pumpkin seeds are delicious.

Yeah, so you get those, you get some chickpeas.

Isn't it weird that people, when they make like they're fucking jack-o'-lanterns, they scoop that shit out and throw it away.

Yeah, give it to me.

It's like the most— the healthiest part of the pumpkin. That's weird. It's weird what we throw away. Like, we're just so used to like waste. Yeah, so used to like having an abundance of food that we're not concentrating on this part of the plant that has the most protein, right, in the plant. Probably the most nutritious part of the pumpkin. Wow.

So, you know, my buddy was here yesterday. He, uh, they don't throw away too much of that, uh, too much of that meat for that Texas barbecue you guys got. This motherfucker boy. No, they don't fuck around. Yo, there was a 15-minute wait line around the corner, 200 people.

Where were you at? Which place?

Um, it was, I don't know the name of it.

Terry Black's?

I don't know, because I just drove at my man Abizal went there and said, you know, he couldn't come come out to Texas and not get some Texas barbecue, you know? I'm a vegan, what I'm gonna do, you know what I mean?

Well, they have some good beans and macaroni and it's just a bunch of different stuff that you can get there. Potato salad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, potato salad, oh, that's right, it's got mayonnaise and milk and eggs.

Yeah, you've been on— you've been a vegan for a lot, since the '90s, right?

Yeah. Well, no, I started vegetarian, uh, in the '90s, and by the time I got to 2000, I started—

you don't fuck with eggs at all?

No, I got rid of the eggs. Yeah, I don't know. The eggs, what got me off the fucking eggs, bro? I think my personality got me off the eggs. Personality.

Why is that?

I don't know. So, you know, it's like, like, like, I'm, I'm like, what's the word? I could be scornful. Is that the word? Like when you like, like, like, I don't know. Like, I, like, I'm like, I, like a Felix Unger type of shit. You know, you ever watch Felix Unger?

Odd Couple.

Yeah. Like you don't want pits in his orange juice or some shit. So eggs, like one day it's just the slime of the egg. It's just—

Yeah, just cook it.

Yeah, but it then got that little white shit in it, bro. I'm just saying.

It's so good for you. And if you have your own chickens, like I have my own chickens, eggs are karma-free protein. They're like pets that give you free protein.

Right, right.

Because they're laying an egg that will never be a chicken. Because it's not fertilized. Exactly. So it's just free protein, right? And they lay them every day basically, or close to it. And you feed them and they run around the backyard and they pick bugs and grass.

What do you feed them?

Chicken food. You know, you buy chicken feed. And we also feed them some table scraps and vegetables and different things. But they're carnivores, man, which is really wild. Like, you see them eat a mouse, it's crazy.

What?

They tear mice. You never seen a chicken eat a mouse?

I've never seen the chicken.

Chickens are straight up Dinosaurs. There's some great videos of chickens around a cat, and a cat's playing with a mouse, and the chicken just runs up on the cat and steals the mouse from him and tears it apart.

I didn't see that.

Yeah, I fed a chicken that I had— well, one chicken stole the mouse, but this is what happened. So in my house in California, we used to have a wrought iron fence, and we replaced it with a glass fence. Unfortunately, hawks couldn't tell that it was a glass fence fence, and we lost a few hawks.

Boom!

And they slammed into it headfirst and got KO'd, and some of them— we lost like 2 hawks, died. It was really sad. But one of them survived, and my family, my wife and my daughters, took the hawk and put it in like a large cardboard box. It couldn't fly, and they had to feed it over the weekend because the rescue shelter couldn't take it over the weekend. We had to bring it in on Monday. And so they go, well, what do hawks— how do you feed it? We went to the store, and the the pet store, and the pet food store had these things called pinkies. And what they are is like little baby mice.

Mm.

And so you put these little baby mice in with the hawk, and the hawk ate most of them, but one of them lived. One of them, the hawk didn't eat it.

Enough. Had enough.

Yeah, pinkies. It ate enough. So my daughters are like, I want to keep that one alive. I'm like, it's not gonna live. It doesn't have the milk, it doesn't have its mother, it hasn't been weaned, it's going to die. And I said, let me just feed it to the chickens. I didn't even know if they're gonna eat it. I didn't know what's gonna happen. I put that little mouse down in the cage and that chicken just ran up and snatched it, and they all stole it away. So watch this cat. This cat's fucking with this mouse. The cats— you think cats are ruthless, and they are.

He's playing with this motherfucker.

He's playing with it. He wants to watch it hop away. And then the chicken gets annoyed after a while, and the chicken's like, give me that shit, bitch. And when the chicken runs up on the mouse, I watch this instantaneous Seriously, as soon as the chicken realizes this, look, fuck outta here, give me that shit, bitch, and just starts tearing it apart. Chickens aren't into playing with things at all.

They just want to eat shit. Nah, that's right, this is dinner.

Yeah, just chicken it and mangin'.

I'm outta here.

Well, they were all chasing each other around the chicken coop where this one chicken had the mouse in its mouth and they were all trying to steal it from her mouth. Oh, they wanted it more than anything.

That's crazy.

They don't act like that with chicken food. Food at all. Right, right.

They want some, they wanted some meat, bro.

Yeah, or dried worms, or that's one of them, like worm meal. You buy these like boxes of dried and you shake it and they come running and you'll like leave that out for them. They love that.

So, okay, so now your chickens, you got your own, how many?

I have 15, 15 chickens.

Wow.

So you're getting what, 2, how many?

A bunch of eggs, like probably at least 10 eggs every day.

Wow.

And so, because they don't always lay them every day.

Of course.

But it's free protein and it's healthy for you. You know exactly where it came from. There's no hormones, no pesticides, no herbicides, no nothing.

Let me, let me interrupt our podcast for a moment.

Okay.

This is the RZA. I'm sitting here with Joe Rogan. I have a new film coming out May 1st. It's called One Spoon of Chocolate starring Shamik Moore and Paris Jackson, produced by Quentin Tarantino, in theaters everywhere May 1st.

And that's only a couple days from now. Today is the 27th, so it's this Friday. Friday.

This Friday.

There it is. One spoon of chocolate.

Because one spoon of chocolate can do what?

Change a whole glass of milk.

Change the whole glass of milk.

Um, but anyway, eggs, it's good for you. They're really good for you. Healthy and karma-free. You don't worry about anything suffering.

Right. Now the only thing is, only thing that I don't complain about as a vegan, and I don't cook with it or use it. But if some butter slipped on my shit, I'm not gonna flip out.

Yeah, you shouldn't, because it's just milk that comes out of a cow. It doesn't, you know, especially if you get it from an organic farm, it's no big deal, right?

So that's the only thing that, you know, I don't, you know, I don't, I use all that plant-based butter. And they got this thing called, well, now Country Crock got plant-based avocado oil vegan mayo butter. Really?

Yeah.

How the fuck do they make that? That's the problem with all that stuff that's like fake meat and fake this is that it's really processed, right? You know, I think if you want to eat vegetables and vegetarian diet, like the way to do is the way the Indians do it. It was like Indian food from India.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Amazing Indian vegetarian food.

I stay in Indiana.

Oh, so good. So spicy and so delicious. And they've been cooking just vegetarian dishes for probably thousands of years.

Cleans you right out too.

Oh, that's true. It opens up the gates.

Bama lama.

Let's go.

Let's go, baby. Don't have a flight.

Yeah, exactly. If you do, get a seat in the back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's— but it's— there was a place that I used to live near, near my old house in California. California that was in an Indian neighborhood, and it was this Indian restaurant. It was like a, you know, like a cafeteria style where you just go and— I didn't even know what the fuck the names of these things were. They had photos of whatever it was, but it was all in Indian, and I would just point it, and it was all— everyone who ate there was Indian, right? It was very few regular, uh, I mean, no white people, no African Americans.

Where's that? Wait, I feel like I might have fucking been in the valley. In the valley?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not restaurant.

No, it's like a store in the back of the store.

You've been to that place and you can buy some fucking spices of your own.

Yes. Yeah, bro. God, I wish I remembered the name of the place because the spices were awesome too. It had— it was a great place. And in the back they had this like cafeteria style. It was fun. It was all Indian people.

Yep, yep.

Phenomenal, phenomenal restaurant.

I'm the kind of guy that do that too. Like, I'll go to the Asian market and shit. I don't give a fuck. I go— I know that I'm getting a bunch of good shit.

Oh, that's it. India Sweets and Spices. Damn, Jamie's a wizard.

Nice.

Where's that joint? That's it, Canoga Park. That's exactly it. That's the spot.

That's not far from that. That is our old office.

Oh, that's real close to where my old studio was too.

And, um, my— I was on my— so I still got the same office though, right over there. Yo, bro, your old studio, right?

Yeah.

You know what happened to it, right? No, bro, that whole shit, they tore that shit down. They did. It's now the LA Rams training facility. Oh, remember that AMC? Yeah, bro, really tore it down, bro. They building some other shit there. Wow, that's crazy.

That is crazy because back—

that's what the fans, you know, I could, I could see Joe's office from my window or his studio from my window back in those, back in those days and shit. Wow. But now all that is the LA Rams training facility. So I watched the Rams train and shit from my window.

Well, that's crazy.

Yeah, right?

That neighborhood is very interesting. There's a lot of cool stuff. There's a phenomenal Mexican spot down there. What is it called? The Big Burrito? That's what it's called, right? I think that's it. There's this phenomenal Mexican joint, and you go in there, it's all like Mexican soap operas playing. Everybody speaks Spanish. No, no one there is speaking English. English, and the food is sensational. That's it.

El Big Burrito.

El Big Burrito. That place fucking rules. I— when I lived there, I didn't tell people about it because I didn't want to blow up the spot. I wanted to be able to go in there. I would never bring it up on the podcast, and they've reached out to me thanking me because we've brought it up a few times. But that place fucking rules. You want to get like a legit burrito, legit quesadilla, legit tacos, like lengua tacos, like cow tongue.

I know I don't eat meat.

But if you did, and even their burrito, their bean burritos are fucking phenomenal. It's just like real legit spicy Mexican food.

Well, to me, it's all about the sauce. If you got good salsa, mm-hmm.

Yeah, oh, that place is so good. That's, I mean, there's those places that you find in LA, they're real hard to find in Texas. Texas, you get a lot of Tex-Mex, you know, whereas in LA you get straight Mexican. Mexican.

Let's talk about that for a moment because I actually thought about that because New York, you, you, you, I mean, now it's okay, but New York, we for years, bro, we didn't have good Mexican food, bro.

They do now.

Yeah, because now it's been more, some more brothers come, came in and there's some, there's some pocket communities. But trust me, in New York, bro, for you, I didn't, I thought I was eating Mexican food until I went to California. Point.

Yeah.

Then I was like, okay, San Diego has some of the absolute best Mexican food in the world. But, but I, I find Texas and, uh, New Mexico— like, I find this part of the country as well having, having, uh, a lot of good flavors. But I'm interested, how do you— like, if you were to say from your travels, the best Mexican food, is it California? Is it the US, what would you say?

Well, there's really good Mexican food in Texas, but you gotta seek it out, whereas there's a lot of Tex-Mex here, which is also really good, but you could tell it's not straight Mexican, you know what I mean? It's like a fusion, right? And in California, you don't have any of that. And California is just Mexican, and there's so many great Mexican restaurants in California, right? San Diego was filled with them, but LA's filled with them too. But it's spots like that, like the Big Burrito, right, where you go to a place like that, you walk in, you're like, oh my God, home because it's like the smells, and then you see the Spanish soap operas playing, right? This is legit.

Yeah, I was driving down the street, uh, last night and shit, and, um, I just found this really funny, right? So I'm driving down the street— I mean, I'm not driving personally, I don't drive, but the car— my car—

you don't drive at all?

I don't drive. I've been driving since 2012. I haven't driven a car.

How come?

I just, I just let go. You know what happened?

Bro. What happened?

I was in China.

Um, you don't want to drive in China.

Well, I gotta be honest, like, we was doing a film there, and every time, every morning that they— I would go to work, it all almost like every day it almost happened. Like, it almost like that's almost car accident. Yeah, every day.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

So, and even, even, even, even like when my brother Russell Crowe Oh, like, we'll get to set in the morning.

I love that, dude.

And yo, he'll say the same thing, like, yo Bobby, like, yeah bro, we made it, right? But so, so then when I came home, I just stopped driving, bro.

You just didn't want to be a part of it anymore?

Nope, I haven't drove since, since then.

Have you ever fucked with any of those Waymos? You ever gotten any?

No.

Of those things?

You? No.

No, no, but I do have a Tesla that'll drive me.

Have you did it?

Yeah, I've had to drive me all the way home. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, how do you feel though?

Uncomfortable. I don't like it. I like driving. I do, I enjoy driving, but with my Tesla, I'll put an address, like say if I want to go to a restaurant or something like that, and go doo-doo, and it'll drive me. It'll stop at stop signs and stoplights. It'll change lanes if there's anything in the way. It hits the blinkers to change lanes, it turns, it does everything, right? I mean, it literally can drive you from point A to— do you ever fuck with it, Jamie? You ever use it?

I just found out through the update that, like, I didn't—

I'm not—

I haven't been using full self-driving. I've been using whatever was right before that, which to me I thought was the exact same. It drives itself too.

What's the difference?

I don't know, looks like it said that you're at it like gave me an option to turn it on. I thought I was—

what?

Hold on, what am I doing then? Oh, that's good.

It still drives itself.

I don't remember because I turned— I got my— it's a part of a subscription, right? Isn't it?

That's when I got— I was like, wait, I thought I had it. Yeah, well, whatever, whatever it's been doing, whatever it is, I definitely have it.

Part of a subscription, you mean? Yeah, any automatic?

I think so. I think you pay more for for it. I'm not sure. I don't want to talk out of turn.

I also didn't understand it either, but yeah, I think so.

I think you pay for it because I think it's more complex. It's using a bunch of different— I don't know, making things up. I don't know. But I do know it works.

I saw Waymo on the way here to you, and it was right beside us. I looked in there and I'm like, yo bro, why have a steering wheel with the old school fucking With a gear changer? Yeah, if nobody gonna drive this shit.

Well, in case it breaks, and then if somehow or other maybe there's an override where you could just drive it.

Yeah, but still, that's the grandma thing, bro.

The shifter on the column?

Yeah, it's like, this is— we in the future. This shouldn't be no steering wheel like that.

My Cadillac has that. My Cadillac shifts on the column like that.

That's for the What, an Escalade? Yeah, does it?

Putting drive on—

I thought shit is right here. Uh-uh, I got my shit right here, bro.

Pretty sure, right?

That might be for your Cadillac Escalade.

No, I'm pretty sure.

Okay.

I mean, I have a bunch of cars, but I'm pretty—

I don't even know how to drive.

We're going to put a, um, a studio in at the racetrack, Circuit of the Americas. I'm going to take you around the racetrack. I'm going to put you in the car, you're going to drive around the racetrack, and then I'm start driving.

Thing for the Escalade.

Yeah, that's it. That's the suit.

Not the new one.

Yes, it says 2023.

No, 2026 Escalade, uh, V. Escalade gear shift. Yeah, but it doesn't— that's not how it works. I'm 90% sure. There it is right there on the column. See it?

Oh yeah, right there.

That's how it is. That's what mine looks like.

Okay, see that little— they put it back up there.

Yeah, they put it back up there because it clears all the room on your console.

Right, for the cops.

Yeah, that's where mine is. I love that.

But I'm— so anyway, I'm coming— well, I'm gonna escalate yesterday, right? I don't know where the gear shift was at, but I got the window down getting some of this beautiful, uh, Austin air, and a, a truck drives up beside me, uh, playing this Spanish song. He's blasting this shit. This shit sound cool like a motherfucker. Right? I'm like, yo, what is this shit? So I Shazam it, right? So I Shazam it, and then I get the song, right? Right. And then I start playing it in my car, and the truck keeps going on. But then we, you know, we still driving slow. Then I could see the car beside me, they Shazammed it. You know what I mean? I was like, wait a minute, that's— that's— that doesn't happen. I mean, that's what we need again. Yeah, like where, like, somebody's just playing some fucking music, you never heard the song before, you like it.

Yes, you got it. Yeah.

And so I love Shazam. I got two Spanish songs now in my, in my, uh, in my joint that, um, is part of my, my new playlist. Yo, they just got from listening to people's cars, just driving by, like, yo, hold on, that shit sound dope.

Yeah, that's a new thing, right? Because we don't have radio as much anymore. There's not a lot of people listening to the radio. A lot of times you're getting new songs, like oftentimes, like, I'll be at dinner someplace and they'll be playing music. I'll go, oh, what is this?

Right.

And I'll put my phone up in the air and try to catch it.

Right. You know, that's dope. That, that's one of the greatest things about technology to me, because it is that ability to know. Mm-hmm. You know, like, you can know now if you want to know. Yeah, you gotta wait to know.

Yeah.

Like everything we, every time you get a thought here that we not too sure about, we could hit, he could hit that button.

Exactly.

And give us a reference now.

I know sometimes we leave a podcast and I'm like, maybe we should have looked that one up. Cause it turns out that shit's not true.

Well, I have, I have beaten Google a few times now.

You've won? You've beat Google?

Yeah.

Well, Google's a little deceptive, I think. But if you use AI, like we use Perplexity, it searches for the whole internet. It doesn't just, you know, use whatever Google The problem with Google— not, it's not, not that it's a problem, but it's— these are curated searches. So like, like, say, like, here's a perfect example. Say if you want to find a Mexican restaurant, right, and you use Google. What Google is gonna do is some people are paying so that their restaurant gets to the top of the search list. That's a little bit of a problem, right? Because that might not be the best restaurant. That might just be a restaurant that paid Google Google. Whereas if you go to like Perplexity and say, in terms of like restaurant critics, what is the favorite authentic Mexican restaurant in Austin? And it'll tell you, right? It'll say these people believe that this is it, and there's no curation yet, right? I mean, what— my wife is actually— we were talking about this today, like one day they're gonna fuck that up too, and people are gonna pay to get that to, but right now they haven't done that.

So right now you could find spots, like cool spots that haven't, you know, with no curation.

No sponsored.

Exactly.

And let's check, let's do a test real quick.

Okay.

Okay. So there's 196,940,000 square miles on the planet, right?

Whoa.

There's 63,360 inches. Right? And, um, in a mile, because it's 5,280 feet in a mile. So I'm gonna start over. There's 196,940,000 square miles in the country, on the planet, on the planet. Okay, okay. For 1 mile, there's 5,280 feet.

Okay.

And of course there's 12 inches in a feet, so you multiply that by 12, you'll get 63,360 60 inches. I want Perplexity to tell me how many square inches on the planet. Oh, let's see what you get.

Boy, that number's got to be bananas. That— I, I guarantee we're going to look at a long fucking number, a lot of zeros. That's a good question. That is a good Dun dun dun. Does it even have an answer? It's probably confused.

He's like, hold on, what the fuck you talking about?

You perplexing me. What are you doing? We perplex perplexity.

Yeah, okay, there.

There you go.

Okay.

Answer correctly the first time I typed it in.

8 times 10 to the 17 square inches on Earth's surface. What does that look like in a raw number? Ask it what it looks like in a raw number.

8 was 17.

17 zeros?

Pretty much.

10 to the 17th? That's what that is? 17 zeros?

So basically it took the 63360 and they squared it.

Uh-huh.

And that's how they got to there. Wow. But it didn't give us no fucking a direct answer, right?

Well, it did, but it did it with 10 to the 17th.

Okay, so let's do this now.

Type that out.

Type that number out and divide it by 4.

Okay, let's see. Type it out. I'm gonna see what this looks like. This must look bananas.

Whoa! And now divide it by 4.

Before you do that, can you ask ask it, how would you say that?

I was trying to figure it out.

Like, it's not a trillion, it's not a quadrillion. Like, what is that?

It's a quintillion.

Is it a quintillion?

This is billion, right? Yeah, this is trillion.

So it's a quad trillion. Wait, no, how— just saying, just—

sorry, just to ask it, how would you say that, please? How would you say that? 800 quadrillion square inches.

Wow.

Remember when you were a kid, you think that was a fake word? Yeah, bro, I want a quadrillion money.

Would you believe that the Earth weighs— the atmosphere weighs 15 quintillion tons? Let's see, let's see.

Just the atmosphere?

Yeah, that's the atmosphere. Because the planet Earth—

gases—

the planet Earth weighs 6 sextillion.

Kanye said the wildest shit on my podcast once. He goes, how much does the Earth cost?

Mm-hmm.

Right? And at the time I was like, what? And then I thought about it, I was like, oh shit, like property is valuable. You can own property, right? Right? Like everybody kind of— everything is owned. Like how much is the Earth.

That's a big— that's a, uh, well, you could get the number there too because, well, if you count the minerals, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you got a whole nother hustle.

And then there's the ocean.

In the ocean.

The ocean and the fish. Yeah, right. And then all the animals.

Wow. Yeah. And then, and then it has to appreciate day by day, right?

Why don't I put that into perplexity? If you were going to sell the worth, how much would it be worth? Oh, including everything on it. That's a mind-fucking half. Economists usually estimate the world's real estate, all land plus the buildings on it, a few hundred trillion US dollars, not counting oceans, polar ice, or unowned space. That sounds like a bargain. Yeah, a few hundred trillion, that's it. Not okay, let's say, let's add ask, what is the worth of the earth, all its property, all its minerals, animals, and objects? That's a crazy question. That's a crazy question.

Yeah, it's a good one though.

Yeah, everything on earth, every watch, every diamond ring, every hat, $1, every piece of art, Well, I mean, the question I typed in was property and land, right?

What is the value, animals, of everything on earth? Every—

like what you said it to her, bro.

Every electronic value of everything on earth, including, including animals, minerals, property. And objects. Oh boy, I wonder how it's gonna figure this out. I bet it will.

It's gonna look off of—

it's gonna freak out, it's gonna blow a gasket.

It's not figuring it out.

It's— yeah, it does give you something.

No precise number. Oh, it's somewhere in the quadrillions to sextillions of US dollars, depending on what you count and how you value it.

It says plausible attempts to add it up, right?

There's no single agreed-upon price tag for everything on Earth. But this is the answer to Kanye's question.

But you know what though, now look, hold on, we just learned something there. It said quadrillion to what?

Sextillions.

Now ask, how much does the planet Earth weigh?

That's right. I mean, I already did that, but we had moved past it before I could show you. Atmosphere weighs quintillion.

12 quintillion in pounds.

Yeah.

In total.

Yeah. I said 15, so I was off. I forgot that number. But ask, how much does the planet Earth weigh? Whoa.

How much does the entire Earth weigh? Let's guess.

No, no, no, don't do the atmosphere. We're just trying to get the value. I want to see if it gives you— I mean, the atmosphere should already be included, right?

I think that's why I think it won't include it.

So basically, what is that word? What is that in a word? Ask that what that is, that 13. Yeah, tell them put it in pounds, not kilograms, because that's not even 7, that's 8. What does that mean? Right. But what does that— ask it to say that. Can you say that?

Yeah.

What does it mean? How do you say it? Septillion. 13 septillion pounds.

That doesn't sound impressive. No, no, it doesn't.

It sounds like a couple of lizards.

But, you know, I believe it's wrong.

Well, why?

Because when you take the square miles, the circumference, right, and you multiply the, uh, there's a formula to get that weight, right? It doesn't come out to that.

What does it come out to?

6 sextillion. 6 followed by 21 zeros.

This was more. This was 3 more zeros on top of that.

Yeah, but it, it sounds good, but if you take the formula of, of, of, of a sphere of the mass.

Like, this, this number is closer, but does it take into account the density of the inner Earth? Because I think that's probably where a lot of the weight is coming from, right? The density of the inner Earth is immense. Yeah, I mean, so if it's—

yeah, it's compressed energy.

Yeah, if it's hollow, it could be hollow. If it's hollow, Okay, hold on.

Let's take a— we got to take a, uh, uh, a sponsor break. This is the RZA live on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Joe Rogan Experience. I have a new movie coming out May 1st. May 1st. It's called One Spoon of Chocolate starring Shameik Moore, Paris Jackson, Blair Underwood. It follows an ex-military convict who comes home and trying to find a better life for himself, ends up in a small town where everything go those fucking bananas. In theaters everywhere, May 1st.

When is it going to be available on streaming?

I don't know, soon, right?

How do you usually do that?

Well, to be honest, I'm like, um, like Iron Fist was—

what year was that out?

That was 2011, 2012.

And there was a different atmosphere back then, right? Pre-COVID. COVID changed a lot of like moviegoing habits, everything.

Yeah, I want the moviegoing experience to come back though.

Uh, yeah, I do too. Yeah, I mean, there's something about going to see a great movie with a bunch of people that's experience.

Yeah, I think I, I'm so much— I mean, my, my art, my career is based on sneaking into a fucking movie theater and watching 3 kung fu movies.

Yeah.

So I'm a big into cinema. I think what we did— so, so, so this, so this particular film is actually coming through my own distribution company called 36 Cinema. And I think we did a deal with the theaters that they can have at least 30 days. A lot of people were doing 17 days in the theaters or 21 days. And cinema is suffering because of that, because why go to the theater if I got it at home? You know what I mean? And home is, of course, a great place to watch a movie. But when you making a movie, right, you're making it for the theater. We haven't— TV is made for home, but cinema is made for cinema. Like, we haven't— what can I say? Like, the sound, the color, the framing. Like, I use anamorphic lenses. Lenses.

What does that mean?

Anamorphic, like the lenses of the '50s where you fucking get this whole fucking scope, you know what I mean? And so yeah, you could watch it on your phone.

What is the difference with an anamorphic lens and a regular lens?

A regular lens would be, uh, the way, the way, the way it bends the light in all reality. So, so like you could have like, uh, 16:9. Okay, see, that's— so that's most lenses are spherical now. That's that, right? Which is cool, right? But look at anamorphic. It's the way it controls the light, the way the subject is happening. And so it kind of gives you more of a cinematic feel.

Well, your focus, it's certainly like a little more blurry in the background.

Yep.

Yeah, okay.

And it kind of, it's the way it's compressing that light differently.

And so you, with this lens, do you do everything on film or is it digital?

I actually shot this on digital. So yeah, so I mean, I'm in the digital age, so I did shoot digital. But I did, we did make 35mm prints of the movie. So if you were in California and you would go to the theater called the Vista, have you ever been to the Vista?

No.

Cool theater.

Where's that?

I think it's in Los Feliz or some shit like that. Okay. I'm bad at my Hollywood neighborhoods. I'm still a New Yorker.

Right, I get it.

But the Vista Theater will show the film on 35mm for like 2 weeks. It'll be there starting May 1st. Oh, that's cool. So if you wanna see it, yeah, if you wanna see, and 35mm, oh, there you go, the Vista. I love this guy. Hey, Jamie, you do it.

Jamie's the best.

Yeah, his trigger finger is a motherfucker.

Oh, he's a GOAT. Well, he's psychic. He knows what you're talking about before you—

Exactly, he's like, the Vista, duh.

Yeah. Um, so that's the Vista. So that— so what is the difference, like, the way it looks to you when you see it on 35mm versus digital?

Well, it's— I think the 35mm kind of— it makes the colors a little more richer and darker, like kind of how the '70s films look, even up to the '80s. The digital one, because I've watched my film on both formats, the digital was more brighter and actually more familiar. Now to us.

Right, we're accustomed to it.

Yeah, we're accustomed to it. But when we— I played it on April 22nd. In fact, I want to talk about that a little bit, if you don't mind. But on April 22nd, we had our premiere in California on 35mm, and it was my first time seeing it on 35mm. I mean, so, and it felt, it felt very nostalgic. I felt like I was back. It felt like a movie only. Like, I mean, not, not, not like a movie and a TV show or a movie. It felt only like a movie, only a movie experience. The flickering, uh, when you, when you, you know, when you're doing 35mm, you need, you know, a real camera, right? And so the light is going from this camera, from this one, then they got to switch the reel from this, from this. And it's like, it's a certain thing that's happening, a certain pacing, a certain grand, grand singular thing that's happening that for me, for my film, it felt almost like an honor to watch it like that.

Oh, that's cool.

I want to make a, make a, so check this out, bro. So we talked about this last time I was here, but April 22nd, right? That was the day that I was acquitted from a crime. And started my life over. I was facing 8 years. April 22nd, that's back in 1992, okay? As you can see, a year later, I'm a platinum producer. But before that, I was heading to hell. April 22nd, serendipitously, is the day that my film premieres on 35mm in at the Vista Theater in Hollywood.

Wow.

April 22nd. But you've seen the opening of the film as well. So when my character gets outta jail, he marks on the calendar the day he gets out, April 22nd.

Mm.

It's special, bro. This is a special film.

It's special.

It's for my life. I'm saying for me, it's like— Oh, that's cool. And it was my buddy Chavo from System of a Down birthday. We actually celebrated I celebrate April 22nd every year because it wasn't my birthday, but it was the birth of the RZA, because before that I was known as Prince Rakeem. But after that acquitting and my mother telling me, you know, you got a second chance, I was like, exit Prince Rakeem, enter the RZA.

Nice. That's amazing.

Yeah.

So when you were talking about the streaming thing, so do you— is that something that's negotiated beforehand? Like, it'll be in the theaters for X amount of time, Do you, once it's in the theater, do you then, like, depending on how well it does in the theater, is that how you negotiate a streaming deal, or how does that work?

No, it works, no, it works, it's usually negotiated ahead of time.

Okay.

And, or the streamers kind of dictate what's gonna happen. So since we had this on our own company, we had a chance to make the rules ourselves. So I didn't make a streaming deal, but I made the theatrical deal first. First, and I gave the theaters 30 days first. And so now my streamer, he would go— my streaming distribution, which is Samuel Goodwin, uh, they would, they would go and, uh, hope I pronounced that right, bro. I could fuck a word up sometimes.

Yo, I think that's the right word.

Okay, okay. What up, Peter?

I'm the wrong guy to ask though.

Yeah, I could fuck a word up. But anyway, So it is, so yeah, he'll solicit to streamers, but we wanted a 30-day cinema experience. If, and in the future, I'm gonna try for 45 days, bro. Remember when we was kids, bro? Star Wars was in the theaters 3 times before you had a chance to see it come home. Yeah. And what did you do? You went back to the theater. Yeah. Because the lights, the sound, the vibe of what you're creating creating. I make it for the theater. I got to be honest with you, I make film for the theater. My— when my other film came out during the pandemic, Cut Throat City, since it was a pandemic, you know, even though my contract said it should be in theaters, the pandemic of it kind of made it a force majeure, like maybe not in theaters. But my producer, um, Michael Mendelsohn, who, you know, is a guy, he, um, he said, all right, but I said, yo, bro, I didn't make no— I didn't make this shit for no streaming, bro, okay? I shot my shit on anamorphic lenses. I got all the sound like I made it for the theaters.

He was like, yeah, but the theaters ain't not popping, bro. Nobody's going to the theaters. I was like, well, I don't know, then hold it. But he said, I can't hold it, bro, like, you know, it's business. But he still— no, but he still say, okay, I'mma pitch you on 200 screens and you could go and get your, you know, and he did it, you know what I mean? So all my films has always go to the cinema first. And if I have my way, every film I make will always start at a cinema.

Have you ever tried using those? What are the— what's the Apple one, Jamie? The— those Apple AR goggles?

Vision Pro?

Apple Vision Pro? Yeah.

I heard watching movies on those is phenomenal. Phenomenal.

Yes. Okay, but you have to also design it for that too.

Oh really?

Yeah, I mean, to get the full experience, because come on, you're going like this. And some— there's been some artists who have been able to create stuff for that. It's almost like, uh, I mean, I won't say it's like the Sphere. Have you been to the Sphere?

Yes, but only for a fight, right? No, they had a UFC there. It was amazing.

Oh, I love it there. But Darren Aronofsky had did a movie made directly for the Sphere. In fact, there's another movie They're doing another movie right now that they showed me a clip of that's gonna be made in the Sphere, and it's actually very sports-based, and so it's crazy. And of course, The Wizard of Oz.

I heard that's nuts.

Yeah, I seen that there.

You saw The Wizard of Oz?

Yes.

I heard there's all sorts of crazy new effects, and they added a bunch of stuff to the movie.

It's amazing. Yeah. It's amazing, and it's fucking, but the Sphere is amazing anyway, right?

It's an incredible experience.

This is a new thing AMC's doing. DC has just shown recently and announced called ScreenX. It's 270 degrees. It's going to surround the, the audience in some way.

Well, that, that's how you get people to go back to the movie theater. Give them something like this where they're like, what?

It's kind of like recut, so it might be a fun way to go back and maybe see a movie you really like.

Oh, let's see Avatar in that.

Like that. They got The Matrix like that now.

That's that Cosm. That's kind of like— this is a— this just sort of announced, it's only in 2 cities right now.

There's a place, I know there's a place in Dallas where they show UFC fights in—

Cosm.

That's Cosm.

Yeah, that's where the Matrix thing—

that's nuts, man.

I love that he got the answers.

Yeah, he's a genius. But with the, the place in Dallas, the Cosm place, like, you're seated here and the screen is like 60 feet tall and it's right in front of you, so you're watching the fight as if this is The Matrix. Oh, so this is The Matrix.

Yeah, they worked with the film company to sort of like remake it and add extra stuff.

Oh wow.

There's also a new screen I just saw. I think it's gonna be in Clearwater, Florida.

It's gonna—

it's gonna be the world's biggest screen.

See if you can show you the fight thing. Yeah, show me the fight scenes. Like, people were watching the fights there. I was like, okay, that might actually be better than being there live. Live. Like, look how crazy the size of the screen is, right? Like, look who you're watching. Like, you're sitting right there. I mean, that fight is gigantic. It's huge. Because the thing about going to see the fights live— look at how big that is. Yeah, show that again. Like, look at that. Look how nuts that is, right? That is nuts.

You don't get to see these camera angles at home either, which is awesome.

Not like that. Not like that.

I love this because this is giving me hope, bro. Like, everything you just showed me is giving me hope for cinema, you know?

Right.

This is like—

and this is like cheaper than buying tickets, and this is better than any ticket you could ever buy for the fights. Like, better than anything. Better than my seat, and I'm sitting cage side.

How much— how much a ticket like this would cost?

That's a good question.

They do sell tickets for this.

I don't know. Um, click That one, May 9th. How much does that cost? $40? $100 if you want to sit probably real close.

You had $20 to get inside.

Okay, general admission is $20. What is the front row? Where's the screen? The display's right there. What are those, like right there where it says 2?

You'd want to be—

well, like $67. How much? $167? That's a, that's a bargain compared to how much it would cost if you actually went to see the fight.

Nice.

And it's probably a better experience. Plus you get commentary, you get to hear everything and you're right there. And then it's not just like being at home, which is great because there's a bunch of people you're experiencing with. So it adds to the excitement and the energy.

That's the knock I was going to say with the Vision Pro is you're, it's still to right now, you're by yourself.

By yourself.

It's kind of, for me, I'm a single guy in my apartment with a dog. Perfect. But yeah, if you're at home with anybody, you're like, well, I can watch it.

Yeah, I know, right, right.

5 of these.

Yeah, catch up with me, catch up to me later.

Like, could you watch it with a chick where you hold hands and you both have Vision Pro and you both start at the same time? 3, 2, 1, go!

That's funny. That's me and my wife on a plane.

Oh, you do that?

We even on the way here, bro. Will we watch? We watch. Oh, uh, Sebastian, uh, what's— how'd you say Sebastian last name is? He's a maniscalco. Yeah, thank you.

Oh, the comedian.

Yeah. Yeah, we watched him. Uh, he's hilarious. Funny motherfucker, bro.

Very funny.

And so yeah, so we do that every time though, but we watch them on the way. So I don't want— she wouldn't want to see me laughing and she ain't laughing yet, so we hit the button at the same time. And, uh, yeah, that guy's crazy. Yeah, he's funny.

Yeah, that's the thing. They should have like simultaneous viewing option. Are you gonna watch it with someone else? Would you like to view it simultaneously? And then have us sync up with each each other.

One plane does that. One plane does that. What airline was that? Qantas. Oh, okay. I think Qantas is up on it.

Well, they got those 16-hour flights. They gotta make things interesting.

Yeah, they got, it actually says watch with a friend.

Oh, that's smart. That's smart. Yeah, it's interesting, like what is the next level past AR with those goggles? It's gonna be an immersive experience where you're actually, we had the people from Perplexity who were here earlier today. And we were talking about how people with AI and all this stuff, they're gonna want more human experiences, like going to see a live concert or seeing, you know, a sporting event live. I'm like, yeah, until it's completely immersive, and then it's like you're playing a video game, but you're in World of Warcraft, or you're in Battlefield Earth, or whatever, whatever game you're playing?

I think, yeah, I think for that form of entertainment, a video game, yes. But I still think, because even, you know, it's more senses, bro. It ain't just the sight and sound, it's the smell.

Yeah, but what if they can recreate that? Like, what if, what if they get the technology where you can create a movie, but the person who is watching the movie is standing on the street, like in the opening scene where those girls pick that dude up and in that Saab convertible. Like, what if you're standing, you feel the street, and you watch the dude get in the car?

I think that's amazing.

Right.

But you're saying at home by yourself? Yeah. Well, you'd be terrified in my film.

Yeah, of course, but you'll be in it.

Yeah.

You'll be in it.

That'd be interesting.

I think that's coming, man. I think that's coming.

Well, if that comes, reach out to me and I'll write a script to make sure that we fucking hit you with it right.

Right, you're gonna have to like capitalize all the different things that can take place.

What do you think about that, uh, that— do you remember the Saab fucking 900?

Oh yeah, like a friend of mine had one of those.

It was a cool car when it was there.

They were interesting looking, they were like futuristic, they were different than any other car.

That's why in the film I was like— they was like, well, what kind of car you want? I was like, give me a Saab.

It's like, why?

I said, well, you still make them? I don't think so. I think, uh, they they might have— no, I don't think they definitely don't make new ones. Oh, hold on, this is good.

I don't know, that's a good question. I know they make Volvo still.

Yeah, I was in a Volvo.

I don't know if they still make Saabs.

Bankrupt in 2011.

Yeah, no more Saabs. But, um, the punchline for me was that this Saab— oh, and I'll give you one spoiler of the film, um, even as you know, as you finish the second half of it, um, there's no time. So I removed the time from the film so you don't know what year you're in. And that's why you'll see the Saab, but then you'll see when they, when they playing their video game and shit, uh, they playing it.

Oh right, with, yeah, AR goggles and a glove that don't exist, right? I thought that too when I was seeing them move around. I go, is that real?

Yeah, the idea is that—

I'm glad you brought that up.

I want that to happen. I want to see one day someday I could play a basketball game like this.

Right, right, right.

That'd be dope, right?

That would be. Yeah, they're getting real close to stuff like that. They're getting real close to stuff like that. We have an AR game out there that you, you, it's a zombie game and you put the headphones on, the headset on, and you run around and you have an actual gun and you're shooting zombies.

Right, yeah.

And you pointing it at it and it's like they're getting really close.

I'll show you something I discovered. This— shout out to this guy. I think he's doing this all on his own. Uh, I found him and tweeted at him one day, but he didn't answer. Daniel Habib is his name. He's got this company called True3D. He's done this with 2 movies so far, and I think you have to be in the theater to experience it, but it's kind of exactly what we're talking about. He converted a movie, I think Insidious, a scary movie.

Oh, that's a scary movie.

Yeah.

He's not showing you what, because he's being smart. He's also developing it still. And he also did it with Interstellar just recently.

Whoa.

And I almost flew to New York just so I could go see it because I was very curious and it looks awesome.

Yeah, it looks cool.

So he adapted it to the Vision Pro?

Yeah, it's just in Meta Quest headsets, I believe. And you probably have to be at the theater because I think that's where the sound's coming from. You probably had to end up. As the user watching it, you get to decide how in-depth this becomes, because if you want to see the people next to you, you can sort of like go like level 2 and still see your neighbor, or go level 4 and be like fully in the room and you can't see anybody else. You can maybe just touch them because you know they're there.

I like how some people are jumping, then there's some people that are like dead on the inside.

Well, yeah, so moving because these are jump scares, he has that built in so you know when a jump scare is coming, or you don't know when jump scare is coming.

Ah, interesting.

Super scared be scared, or you can, you know, and not be scared that, you know, someone's gonna come from behind you.

Why would you pass up—

maybe it's on— this seems like it could fucking give you a heart attack.

Yeah, maybe it's people with weak hearts. Like, let me know, let me know when I'm gonna get it free.

And also, Dolby— I saw— you seen that? I saw Dolby made this thing, uh, these glasses. Have you seen these Dolby glasses, bro?

No.

That, that Uh, did you could hear shit, bro? Like, like surround sound with glasses on. Dolby. Yeah, I mean, I hope I'm not revealing a secret.

What is it doing different? Like, what do you mean you can hear things? You can watch, see, and hear?

Yeah.

And don't surround sound? Yeah, glasses.

Yeah.

And so the glasses, is it projecting it into your inner ear? Like, how is it doing? Is it— does it plug into your No, it doesn't even plug into your ear. So it's one of those things that sits above the ear on the outside, like pressing against your skull. Yeah, they kind of have headphones like that, right? I've seen that.

Yeah, I've seen some headphones that give you 12.1.

Yeah, like earbuds, and they don't go in your ear. They like sit on the skull.

Yeah, see if you can find those Dolby glasses. I don't know if I went to Dolby some months ago, and they—

is this a spoiler alert?

That's why I said you can't edit this shit.

We good if we can't, if you're not supposed to know.

I don't know if there's something in here that doesn't, it's showing some 3D glasses they have, but it didn't say sound is coming out of them. I would imagine if Dolby's making them, sound is involved.

It has to be, right?

Yeah.

Dolby Cinema.

Oh, it's 3D. They're 3D glasses.

I don't know.

No, no, no, bro. Listen, I put them on, bro. You can hear shit. Mm.

So did you put them on to watch a movie? Like, what did you put them on to watch?

Yeah, I did. I put them on, like, they had a whole demo room. I thought I was looking at something, and it sounded like I was in the room with— it sounded like I was in the movie theater, but I took the glasses off.

Oh, look, this is what it is. So it's showing you everything in 3D.

You need to have the glasses, I think, to get the test.

And this— and the sound is, is, is, is, is, is connected.

So that's 2021. So this is 5 years old already.

Again, I don't— this might not—

so this is a Vision, but it— but what about this Adobe Atmos? Atmos is the sound. Yeah. Plus Dolby Vision HDR. 12. Yep, 12.61. What year is that?

Hmm.

And that's 2024.

Whoa. Oh, okay.

That's, that's different. That's for your— okay, that's for your home. That's, that's having your system, but they got some shit with it. It's in the glasses, bro. Hmm.

Anyway, well, we're, we're in an interesting time when it comes to technology and all this.

Yeah. And entertaining our VR stuff and yeah, and where it's going. I'm happy about it. Are you?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I know a lot of people are freaked out about AI. There's a lot of that. A lot of people are freaked out about AI music. A lot of people are freaked out about AI replacing actors and their ability to generate images and video.

I believe AI to be a tool. I'm from the hip-hop generation, right? So we sampling a record. Record, and therefore it's a digital replication of the record. It's not the record, right? Right. And especially when sampling at 16-bit or 12-bit or some bit that's not even where the, the computer or the AI or the, the chip has to fill in the pieces. This is why you get that sound you hear from hip-hop. So, so I always embraced, embraced it, the technology. Technology. I also know that it's nothing like the real thing. You know, I put on a, you know, even if, even if I put on a piece of vinyl and put that needle on it and play it, because in my house I have it, I got all type of setups, right? But when we really want to have a good time, we just put on the fucking vinyl and it sounds so much better, different, It's got depth to it.

Exactly. It crackles.

Exactly. It's something else.

Yeah.

So it's nothing like the real thing, but in, but in, in the, in between time, in the meantime, let's enjoy, you know, like you said, if you could, if I could make you feel like you in Hawaii and you don't have to leave your house, right? Cool. But if you could go to Hawaii, right, right, right. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Go to Hawaii. Um, you know, I was trying to tell the AI industry or AI community that we got to change the A. It shouldn't be considered artificial.

It's digital intelligence.

Well, keep the A because you can't— but, but don't change the A. Could be assisted, accumulated, depending on the situation. Find the, find the A word that makes it describe what you're doing. Like, for instance, it's right now, it's assisting him, right? This is an assist— it's assisting intelligence, right?

Artificial sounds cheap.

Yeah, it's all, bro, you don't want artificial nothing. If I— if you came to your girl and you proposed to her with some artificial diamonds, right, it ain't working, okay?

Girls don't even like real diamonds that are man- made. That weird? That is, they have a hard time selling real diamonds that are made in a laboratory.

I don't— yeah, is that a real diamond?

It's a real diamond. I mean, molecularly, yeah, it's a real diamond. Yeah, it's just not created by the earth over time. That's created in a laboratory.

So it's still—

but if you look at it, it's a real— I mean, it's not like a fake Ferrari. It's a fucking diamond, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't have to do things. Like, if you, if you go to China and you buy a fake iPhone, who knows what the fuck's in there, right? All kinds of— it probably won't work with Apple, won't work with the iTunes Store, the Apple Store. But a diamond is just a fucking rock. They can take that carbon and compress it and make an artificial diamond, and ladies like, "No, I don't want it." Yeah, I want a real one.

I'm gonna stick with the ladies on that one. Weird. The reason I'm gonna stick with the ladies on it, because I think the value of the diamond is the time that it took to become existence. Unfortunately, that's not—

diamonds are harvested in a similar way as cobalt.

Oh well, now you put it—

yeah, that's why they call them blood diamonds, right?

Right. Yeah.

So if you get a diamond from a lab, no, there's no blood. It's just a machine that's compressing carbon. Yeah, it looks beautiful. And I would— if I look, I'm not a chick and I don't want any diamonds. Diamonds, but if I did, I'd want the lab diamond. I'm like, give me that dope shit that some scientist figured out how to make.

Basically, you'll go vegan on the diamonds.

Yeah, how big can they make them? How big do they make a lab-grown diamond? And how do they even tell? Like, how do you tell whether or not a diamond's a lab diamond? Like, is there a way that they can test them, or is it just like provenance? Like, you know, based on like it coming from from De Beers or wherever.

But if there's a way that they could test them—

Bless you.

Bless you. If there's a way that they could test them, then it's not real.

Yeah, right, right, right. Unless there's a way— maybe they're perfect in a way that doesn't exist in the diamond world. I don't know, I'm guessing, completely guessing. Look at the size of that fucking rock.

75 carats. 70. The Largest ever grown.

Okay, so that's a fake— I'm not a fake diamond, a real diamond made in a lab that's 75 carats. How much does that bitch cost? 42-carat diamond for $88,000. Is that real? Is that how much it costs? That's how much it costs?

That's nothing.

That—

buying it from this website. Oh, BrillianceEarth.com.

Jamie, just give them your credit card. Don't worry about it. That's real, you could tell. Yeah, that might not be real. That one might not be real. But let's, let's find out like what is a reputable site and how much is a reputable lab-grown diamond. How much, how much does that cost? Largest faceted lab-grown, $375,000. Do you know how much money that would cost if that was an actual diamond from the earth? Yeah, it'd probably be $100 million.

Exactly.

That's crazy.

Well, that— well, that's— that's—

mm, how much would that cost? Find out how much that would cost if it was a real— I mean, is there even a real diamond that exists? It's that big? But $375,000, what?

Weighed— the biggest one weighed 3,100 carats.

Whoa.

When it was found in 1905.

That's a real one.

Yeah.

Whoa.

And it was cut into smaller ones.

Look at that. Holy fuck. That's what I'm saying. It took a long time.

The girl's like, I want that one. Give me that one. Geez.

How old— ask my man Perplexity, how old is that diamond? Diamond.

Oh my God, it has to be millions and billions of years old. Let's see, what is it? What does it say here? Does it say the age of it? That's nuts. 1.18 billion years old when it reached the surface. Oh my God.

Now how you going— how you going to replicate that? You can if you think so.

Machine.

You said with a machine?

Yeah, it's So like, if you buy a lab-grown diamond versus a diamond that came from the earth, how can they tell the difference? Find that out. Can you discern— put this into perplexity— how do you discern between a lab-grown diamond and a diamond that came from the earth? Whether or not— how do you discern? Make a girl smell it. Get up on a tumbly.

She—

I don't smell blood.

Yeah, men can't tell, but women can.

Their hair on the back of their neck sticks up. I don't like it. Seems fake.

It says you can't.

You can't.

It says you can't.

Real— I mean, specialized scanners, which almost means—

hold on, I mean, let me, let me read that to the audience.

It says appearance is the same. Lab-grown and natural diamonds have the same sparkle, hardness, and basic optical properties, so they look identical in jewelry. Naked eye tests don't work. Standard home tricks— fog test, scratch test— only distinguish diamond from non-diamond, not lab versus natural. Standard diamond testers don't help. Thermoelectric testers will say diamond for both lab-grown and natural stones because their physical properties are essentially the same. In other words, you cannot reliably discern the origin of your— on your own just by looking at it or using a simple test tester, a jeweler. How do they do it? Let's see, what does it say here?

They literally— it seems like they write the word lab-grown that you can see under a microscope or something.

Amazing inscription on a mini lab-grown diamond is inscribed. Why would you inscribe it?

Because you're an asshole.

Okay.

I don't know.

Okay. Inclusions of growth features.

If you make better— if you're like the best at it, if you're the Rolex of making lab-grown diamonds so people can't copy maybe.

Well, no, no, here goes something that's interesting. It says lab-grown HPHT and CVD diamonds can show characteristic of metallic inclusions and geometric patterns or growth striations that differ from most natural diamonds.

But this is subtle and not always present.

But there's a chance to dance, right?

Yeah, there's a chance. Natural diamonds tend to have more irregular geologic-looking inclusions Fluorescence patterns under UV, differences in how the stone fluoresces under shortwave and longwave UV light can hint at lab-grown versus natural, but interpretation requires training and comparison. Okay, those are hints.

That's interesting.

But it says hints, not guarantees, and many stones look ambiguous without proper instruments.

Okay, so she got to be a— she got to complain at the end of the day, right?

She's got to bring it to a university.

Yeah.

Test this.

Yes, because she has to be— she's dissatisfied. She has to— has she really has to complain?

Interesting though that it's the same thing, but some women want it to be from the earth and not from a lab, even though it's the same thing. It's like if they could make you a banana and it tasted like a banana, it had all the vitamins of a banana, it looked like a banana, but it wasn't grown on a banana tree. It just came out of a banana lab. Would you be upset if somebody gave you the fake banana if it's exactly the same?

Hmm, that's a good question.

Weird.

Well, well, bananas aren't—

there's no status attached to a banana, right? It's a food that we eat.

But yeah, but what about GMO? Aren't we anti-GMO?

Yeah, but is it genetically modified if it's just a replica of a banana? I mean, bananas probably a bad thing because you're putting it in your body, right? But if it's something that is a complete—

like, like, here's a good one, okay? Faux fur versus a real fur, right? Why would you— why would you complain if I came home with a faux mink?

Because some women want the actual animal to die so they could wear it. I want something to suffer in the snow and a trap around its neck. I don't know, it's weird.

What movie was that? Uh, The Revenant, right? Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, it was, it was good because it also let us understand, you know, just— I love the idea that, that there was a business, sadly, and motherfuckers going looking for animals to kill to bring back and make a jacket.

Yeah, still Still, it still is. You know, there's a company in China that makes Rolexes exact to a real Rolex, but it's not a real Rolex. They— because, because of 3D printing now, because of— they can scan every individual part that a Rolex— so they buy a Rolex and then recreate exactly to the, the same type of steel that they use, the same quartz for the, the, the, the, the whatever the fuck is the face, the bend. What is the term I'm looking for? The lens? It's not the lens. What is it called? No, no, no, the glass part that's in the front.

God, how can I forget the face?

No, I forget what it's called.

How I—

it's one of those brain farts where my brain is like just not remembering what it means.

The watch crystal is all the same.

The crystal crystal. That's it, just a crystal. Jesus. But they take it and they recreate everything with the exact same materials, but it's like $500 as opposed to $11,000, right? But it is exact. Like, you bring it to a watch person and it'll take them hours to figure out whether or not this is an actual Rolex or not. They have to use microscopes, they have to get up in there and look at the finish and the way the hands are made.

So what you—

so we're getting better and better and better, right?

Would you wear it?

Yeah, I would wear it. I mean, I wouldn't because I have a real one, but if I didn't have a real one, I would wear it.

But that's— see, now, you know who has a fake one? Who?

Usyk, the heavyweight champion of the world. Alexander Usyk wears a fake Rolex. He thinks it's hilarious.

You know what? That's my big question. Like, we were just talking about, you know, the AI or talking about whatever it is. I think anything is good until the real thing shows up. You know, I think when the real thing shows up, it's going to be real. And you— and it's something about the real thing, whatever that is, whatever that thing is, that's just like, it ain't gonna never not be real, right?

You know, there's something about like a real Rolex. It comes from the company Rolex. It's been making watches for 100 years, and it's— they figured out the technology, they figured out how to, you know, because these— why, like, a Rolex is an automatic watch, so it's got it's moving on— like, this is an Omega, and this, this watch is automatic too. So this is moving on— it's working on my movement. So my movement winds it. So every time I move my arm, it winds it up, and the second hand— and it's incredibly precise, accurate within like a couple seconds a day, right? And somebody had to figure that out, right? And they figured it out a long fucking time ago. These guys figured out how to make the perfect amount of spring tension, these little tiny gears that move around in there.

And how long, how long, how long does it last?

How long would it stay charged for?

Yeah, yeah, like, like, I don't have too much. I do got a couple of Rolexes, but I don't know.

Oh wow, they'll last for decades and decades. I mean, you could buy— there's a place called Bob's Watches online. You could buy like a 1967 Rolex Rolex, okay, and it still works perfectly. Okay, yeah, yeah, I mean, they last forever, and sometimes they need service, and all that means is like they need to clean them out and maybe they replace a spring or some shit, right? But then it's back to work.

I seen one in, um, well, for the, for the, for the ones that's making in China, you know what I mean? That's, you know, and the guys, super clones. Yeah, the super cloners. And you can't afford a real one and you want to be cool with a fake one.

We're on a budget.

Baller on a budget. We're not looking at. But I saw one that my wife wanted. She didn't get it. I told her to get it, but she, um, she thought she'll get it somewhere else. In Brussels, right, they had— have you ever seen an orange Rolex? No. Exactly, bro. They had it on display for sale, and she never seen it either. I'm not into watches, but she's kind of getting there into it. So she— and we was kind of moving fast and shit, and she like, you know, she saw it and she wanted it. I said, well, go ahead and get it, I'll wait. Said, no, we can— I'll get it somewhere else. You can't get it nowhere else. You only could get it from that one location in Brussels.

Oh, so Rolex makes it specifically just for them?

Yeah.

Well, there's some companies that customize watches that you could buy where they take a regular Rolex and they customize it, and the problem with that is is even though it's expensive, it's not worth as much to some people because they've altered it, right?

This is not altered though.

Oh, it comes only from— only from Rolex, and they only sell—

they only sell it there.

Oh wow.

You know, I mean, take it— if you could see if you could— you might see if you could find that one.

People love exclusivity. Hall of Time in Brussels. Rolex Explorer II, the primary model, featuring a single bright orange 24-hour Often found authorized dealers like Hall of Time in Brussels. Wow, interesting.

I got to take all the way back to Brussels to get it.

Oh, it's so pretty though. I bet you could buy it online. Could you buy it online? You probably have to pay a premium. Look at that, $11,000. You could buy it online. $210,000.

Yeah, that's more like it right there.

Yeah, $210,000.

Maybe I won't be going back to Brussels.

It's just crazy how much cheaper those super clones are that look exactly the same.

I bet you after this podcast, a super clone, they're gonna say he gonna make those now.

See if you can find, uh, one of those super clone sites from China, because what they're doing is just taking advantage of the fact that like everybody wants these status symbols, and that's what a lot of it is, you know. It's like, so here it is. What is this company called? Superluxuryreps.com. Um, let's go with the— scroll up a little bit, please. Right there, the Daytona. That's the classic black dial Daytona. That's a cool— look at that blue one right there to the right. The one— yeah, look at that motherfucker. Click on that. $1,600, right? Yeah. Boy, that would be so much more money. Look how pretty that is.

Is.

That looks perfect. So no one would ever know. So for $1,600, no one is ever gonna fucking know.

There's a pretty good chance that's a picture of a real one too.

Good. Oh, good point. Damn, Jamie's thinking levels ahead.

I like that. I like that. That's true.

They might be fucking with you.

Yeah, when you get it home, it ain't like it was in the front of— in the picture. The Whopper is not the size it is on the commercial.

Good though. Okay, so luxury, super luxury reps. Let's put this into a search: super luxury reps reviews. See how good are the watches from super luxury reps.

That's crazy.

Yeah, look at that. Super clone Datejust 36mm floral dial. $1,000.

Oh, Trustpilot, that's a good guy.

That's crazy, they just stuck that on there. Come on, this is in China. WhatsApp us. Yes, this is in China. Video proof.

Okay, video proof on every website.

Show me video proof. Oh, how about— okay, go to Richard Mille, cuz those watches are like a million bucks. Oh, video proof. Show me the video.

Who's opening it? Vertical.

Oh, so they're getting very close to it.

Oh yeah, I guess maybe they're trying to show the microscope.

Yeah, so you're seeing all the action and all the movement. So Richard Mille watch, click on those please, because that's like a million-dollar watch. Those watches are insanely expensive from here. How much they cost? $1,400. Yeah, so $1,400 or a million, half a million, right?

Shop. You know what I just learned from watching that thing though? What? The other one you had with the moving gears, it reminded me of the quantum computer. Oh, okay. Yeah, something in my brain is bugged out, but those things are weird. But I saw, I saw, I saw the science of a quantum computer there, right?

So all that stuff moving.

Yeah, because it, it takes all those gears, it takes that.

Well, the quantum computers are so crazy because all that shit is all cool cooling, and the actual computer is like the size of a, like, a Triscuit, right?

You kind of— you think about the human heart, right? It's, it's, it's doing a lot of fucking work. Oh yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. And it's—

do you know it's not really a pump?

That's what they're saying now.

Yeah, it's like a cycle. It's like, yeah, a vortex.

Yeah. But it's—

I used to think it was a pump, but it makes sense, right?

The quantum computer, the brain, all these It's more— it's almost like our biology is teaching— it's— science is now catching up to the science of our biology and now finding a way to mechanically emulate our biology.

So what SuperLuxuryReps.com is, they sell— Perplexity says they sell super clone luxury watches, emphasizing that their pieces mirror the design, weight, and performance of genuine models. They present themselves as a premium alternative to cheap replicas replicas, focusing on workmanship, durability. And we just did an ad for these people. We just— we basically just gave them an ad. I guarantee you some fakers are gonna go there.

You're not thinking you're buying the real thing here, and you shouldn't.

That's right.

No, but the thing is, it's like it mirrors the performance. It looks exactly the same. That's my point, is like, why does a Rolex cost that much money? Money then? If they can make it for $1,400, why is it— like, how much does a Daytona cost if you bought it retail? Like, what is a Rolex? Let's take a guess. I gotta imagine it's $15,000. I gotta imagine it's at least 10 times more. What does a Rolex Daytona cost?

You're saying that the material is all the same, but yeah, this— but they're stealing the idea.

Yes, they're stealing everything. They're stealing the design.

You're paying $15,000, you're paying for the idea, the design, and everything, not just the material.

So $30 grand. So it's more than $10. Look at that.

Yeah.

So that black one, the black-faced one, is exactly like the one that they had there. White, that's pretty— But you could sell that though. The thing is that comes with paperwork and you could sell it probably for even more than $30 afterwards. That's the difference.

That's the difference, right? Yeah. It can appreciate and not depreciate.

And it has serial numbers and paperwork and all that. It's an actual investment.

I wanna take a moment to once again, this is the RZA on the Joe Rogan Experience. Can I, can I do this?

Yes, please.

Okay, thanks. It's the RZA on the Joe Rogan Experience. I have a new film coming out May 1st in theaters. It's called One Spoon of Chocolate. Quentin Tarantino presents the RZA's One Spoon of Chocolate in theaters everywhere May 1st. It follows the story of an ex-military convict trying to find a better way in life. Ends up in a small town and shit goes bananas.

Chaos ensues. Dun dun dun. Action-packed, bone-shattering, and available in streaming in maybe a month or so.

Yeah, maybe a month or so, maybe 45 days. Go see it in the movie theaters. You know what? Go to the theaters, yo. You know how come? Because, tell me if you agree with this, I don't care where you get popcorn from anywhere else. I like Disneyland, I like the amusement park parks, but no popcorn touches movie theater popcorn.

They know what they're doing.

They got something going on there.

But whatever that butter is, what is that shit? That stuff when you go to the machine, you press the button.

Oh, I don't know what that is.

What's in there?

I think it's vegan.

It can't be good for you.

It can't be good.

It can't be good for you.

Well, at the Alamo Drafthouse, they use real butter.

Oh, they use real butter.

Yeah, Alamo Drafthouse. Uh, you ever been to Cinnapolis?

Yes, yes, Cinnapolis is awesome. Oh, they have everything there.

Is that a date night?

Yeah, Yeah, man, beautiful seats. You like lean back. They have waiters and waitresses.

Did you and the wife like going to see movies?

Oh yeah, yeah.

What's your favorite theater?

I love Cinnapolis. That's my favorite. Yeah, that's the place because the seats are the best. They recline, they're perfect.

Yeah, the space is good.

They know what they're doing. Plus it costs a little bit more to go there, so like no one's on their phone making noises. People aren't talking. In, you know what I mean?

I agree. So now the crazy thing I will say though, Cinepolis is my favorite theater as well for date night with my wife, but I strongly believe, first from my experience, that it was the Alamo Drafthouse that pioneered that whole concept of food. Yeah, bro. Yeah, I remember coming out here, I don't know, it might have been 2004 or something, like it was just one Alamo Drafthouse I think guys had it on, on 6th Street. On 6th Street.

That's my building now.

That's your building?

That's the mothership. Yeah, I bought that place. That's the Ritz, bro.

That's my, that's my school, bro.

Yeah, that's the reason.

That's why I used to come out to the QT. I mean, that's my, that's my film college. Yeah, I've seen so many movies there. I've, I've talked about 6 movies in one day.

Tarantino screened Death Proof there. Yeah, yeah, they, they had so many movies out that place. That place was everything, man. It used to be a rock and roll club. It was at one point in time was a pool hall, right? It's been a bunch of different things.

Well, you own my college now.

Yeah, it's a dope spot too. It's, it's a perfect place. And it's— we still have the original marquee because it's all the historical side, right? So it's a building from 1927.

You got fried pickles in there?

Because we don't sell food. No, no food. No food. No comedy club. There's food next door. Pizza joint on one side, the Mexican joint on the other side. Just plenty of food. You don't want to be eating while you're laughing. We have one thing, we sell jokes.

Nice.

Jokes and drinks, that's it.

I gotta pop in. And who's your next guest?

Oh, we always— I mean, I do shows there every Tuesday and Wednesday, and every weekend we have national headliners that are there. I don't even know who's there this weekend. Who's there this weekend? Again, gentlemen. But it's, you know, it's set up with two rooms just like the Alamo was. There was two theaters there, so we have two rooms. We have a small room that seats like 110 people.

Nice.

And then the big room, it's like 250 people.

Nice, nice.

And it's set up perfect. We had it all like the ceilings lowered and everything tightened up and set up.

Mothership.

Comedy mothership.

Rich Voss.

Rich Voss, my boy. My boy Rich, he's awesome. Uh, the RZA, I'm glad we did it this time without Donnell. Sorry, Donnell, I love you to death, but it was better without you.

Better without you.

And I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Indian gave you—

yeah, I got something coming to you, kid.

Uh, a Spoonful of Chocolate out everywhere, everywhere, May 1st. Uh, all movie theaters, see it in the movie theater first. That's definitely where you want to see it. You want to have that experience with a bunch of people. Indeed. And, uh, thank you, brother. It was always good to see you. And Wu-Tang forever!

Wu-Tang forever! Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, bong bong, here we come!

Here we go. All right, bye everybody.