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Dec. 9, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:16:40
"No One Is Talking About This!” - M.I.A - #043 - Stay Free with Russell Brand
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So I can get an anonymous chat from my spouse or someone that I trust.
I can get an anonymous chat from my spouse or someone that I trust.
Brought to you by Pfizer.
In this video, we're going to be doing a little bit of a test run. We're going to be doing
In this video, you're going to see the T-34.
Hello and welcome to today's show, Subcutaneous, where I have a deep dive, cut to the bone, under the skin conversation with a guest on the issues that you care about most.
Today I'm talking to M.I.A., Maya, the rapper, hip-hop artist, recording artist, and sensational thinker and writer.
It's a wonderful conversation with someone who's been on the Who's been on the inside of the celebrity machine, who's experienced fame, who's experienced establishment power from both sides.
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Let me know in the comments, let me know in the chat what you think about it.
Thank you for joining us today.
See you after.
The modern world in stage nine made men and women seek boundaries.
They made borders to divide money, land, identities, ideas, Families, tribes, beliefs of all sorts constantly searching for the edges of the boundaries of what their type of human is through constantly defining themselves.
They wanted to be safe, so they always found ways to box themselves in.
Then, they became heritable, like sheep.
So a box did not seem so bad.
Humans believed they evolved from a single-celled bacterium.
In this sense, they felt they had more time.
Billions of years, in fact, to evolve.
Earth was born with a sense of sun and nine planets surrounding it.
Seven god planets and two demon planets.
These planets are represented by nine gems found in the Earth's dust, Navarathinam, named in the first and oldest surviving language, called Tamil.
Ruby, Pearl, Coral, Emerald, Yellow Sapphire, Diamond, Blue Sapphire, Hessanite, and Cat's Eye.
Towards the end, these resources were considered common, and the water and air began to be considered precious.
Then it goes on to the god bit, explaining who the gods are and then who the demons are and the war.
And the war between the gods and the demons sucks up like everybody on planet earth and they're confused or under the impression.
Stay on mic mate.
Under the impression between Yeah, everything.
All the wars between the gods and the demons.
It's really beautiful.
I can hear you just from the extract that you're reaching for a deep truth that the function of mythology is to connect with something interior and ulterior.
And I can see You know you're obviously a brilliant artist so it's beautifully rendered even in the 60 seconds or so that I've just heard and I can see why in this time of chaos you would see its relevance but you're saying that you started writing this when?
I started writing it after I made Borders and then fell out with the, well not really fell out, my record contract came to an end I didn't know what I was going to do as an artist, whether to go more into actual painting art, you know, that kind of stuff, or make a movie, you know, but while I was thinking about these things, cause everyone was like, you know, maybe work on a TV series, which I, which I was thinking about, about, about sort of the Tamil struggle, but this just kept happening, you know,
There was a deeper thing that just kept happening, which was a spiritual thing that I was going through.
And it sort of wrote itself, you know, and I didn't really show it to anyone for three years or something until the day I actually put it down and recorded it.
It was the first time two people heard it, you know, and to this day, no one's really heard it.
So, It's going to be on, I'm making a website called Omni.com and Omni was again, one of those spaces I wanted to build that was away from YouTube and everywhere else where you get censored and can't have
Free speech or speak about things that are just like a bit bigger than, I don't know, making a record.
Something weird's going on, isn't it, mate?
Like, I think that we've been in the public eye for a sort of during a similar period.
And even though we're working in some regard in different fields, the way that you're talking to me now makes me feel that we might have had comparable experiences in some ways.
And I'm talking about you from how it looked from the outside.
Is it look like you Like, exploded into the culture, became very feted, celebrated, awarded, presumably super rich, and all those kind of things that come with being famous and that.
And then, like most people, what happens to them, it seems to me, again, from the outside, is most people recognize that they're doing a deal, and that the deal is you stay within that system.
But now speaking for myself, it's like something happened in me that I didn't like.
Something that was reawoken in me that was always there from when I was a little kid.
Like this ain't real and this isn't serving the thing that I thought it was going to serve.
And I was feeling, instead of full up, I was feeling like I was being emptied.
And I started to feel a major, major distrust for the thing that I was being co-opted by.
And it scares me because, you know, speaking plainly, I still like attention.
I like power.
I don't want to be poor ever again.
All those kind of things I imagine a lot of people have.
But it feels like you're very deliberately breaking away from the culture.
Are you aware of the kind of things that happen when you try and do that?
And as much as that sort of thing started to happen to you yet, what I mean specifically is that you get attacked and all of that kind of stuff.
Oh, I've been through it about 20 times.
Yeah, have you?
Yeah, from day one.
Right.
What do you mean?
And how?
And tell me about it.
Well, when I first came out in 2005, they wanted to edit out Sunshowers, the first song that ever came out, because it said, like, PLO, I don't surrender.
So that already got me on.
That was the first thing that got me on the scene of the You know, people watching.
And then I think I just did a lot to sort of around the mainstream, you know, that I made a new scene because of that sort of thing.
You know, it gave people that weren't into the mainstream somewhere else to go.
And that's kind of how this thing became what it is.
And it is that now, you know, that, that what popular culture is, is the music that I did put out 2005, but at the time I put it out, it, it, it wasn't mainstream.
It was the fringe, you know?
And I had FBI turn up to like one of the first few venues handing out leaflets outside saying, don't book her cause she's a terrorist sympathizer, you know?
I would have all kinds of, you know, you name it, I've been cancelled for it, you know, from terrorism to Islamophobia, you know, cause I, I wore a burka to some awards show once and that was seen as very hostile and, um, the Maya album, I, you know, Talking about the Arab Spring and stuff like that, that got me in a lot of trouble.
Then I supported WikiLeaks, got me in loads of trouble.
Then I was called racist, which got me in loads of trouble.
So these are like big things, you know, and also part of me.
Also, I think I had personal problems because I split up with my partner who Was the music industry, you know, and yeah, so there you have it.
So you recognize that when, if you are an artist, you make these choices.
You obviously, you have a creative impulse and a great creative ability, and then you move into this place where it becomes commodified and it's a series of compromises.
And then it seems like some pretty aggressive attempts to control and manipulate what the world does.
That's really interesting you want to talk about this because I did think about this because I was like, I need to go on there and say, I'm setting up Omni.com as a safe space, a safe space where I could just be creative, upload some free content.
There's going to be like a donate button where people could donate to it.
It's not a subscription.
If you want to keep the information free, from those tethers, you know, from those restrictions, from it becoming politicised content or agendered content, you know, for creativity to exist completely in its limitless form.
And ultimately everything is about creativity and You know, even this book itself, it's about God and creation and the creation of the universe and having to fight 50-50.
You know, the demons want 50% of it.
And gods are like, no, we control the universe and that's the war.
So there's two sides and, you know, they both deal in propaganda in order to win the war.
You know, and they use humans and propaganda machines in order to win this war, you know, and so this piece of work needed to exist somewhere that was pure, you know, I didn't want it to be a monetized space and I'm trying to not even have cookies on that, you know, I want it to be really clean and Also, I need to feel that I can exist on the planet and make work that I don't have to compromise who I am and my journey and my exploration into what being a human is, you know, just to suit the times that you're born in.
Yes, it's very challenging, Maya, because when you're in this kind of territory, and by that I mean the territory of myths, when you're dealing with ulterior truths, when you're dealing with things that are not mechanised and observable, but things that are deeply felt and have been prevalent as you say in your reading and of your reading in arcane cultures and pre-civilized cultures and themes and ideas that recur throughout you know christianity islam there's loads veda when you're dealing in this territory do you feel like that the terrain that you're taking it into is quite opposed to it and is very keen to frame it as like crazy and i don't think they have i would not i i i
I have a problem with this because first I took this to Harper, you know, at Publishers and they were up for it and they're like, we'll publish it.
But then a part of me, it was just before COVID, or just as COVID, we didn't know what COVID was at this point, but we'd heard like, it was like the first week or something.
But then I felt that There was so much narrative, there's so much like, I don't know how to put this, but I just didn't trust the system to put my book through it because the fairness in which a creative is judged or work is judged or your IP is
I don't feel comfortable because I've gone through that as an artist.
People say that I'm very ahead of the time with whatever I do and that's a blessing and a curse because sometimes people just use you for that.
You know, and when I first came out as a musician, all my managers used to say, Oh, you're an artist, artist, you make work to inspire artists to make other work.
And they're the ones that get rich, you know?
So I didn't become as rich as everybody thinks I did because you're the thing that inspires the thing.
And then they, everyone takes that inspiration, but they're the ones that are actually, you know, promoted and, Because they don't question the narrative or the agenda or whatever, you know.
So they've been able to achieve way more success or fame but with The essence of what you do, you know?
Yes.
But this is very personal, this story to me, because it's almost like a, you know, it's a little bit autobiographical, I would say, is, you know, these are the complications I was having as a Tamil artist in the West, you know, having spent time in Hinduism And obviously my dad is super political and was an atheist, but comes from a Catholic background.
And then I had like a vision of Jesus Christ and I've been quite public about it.
So I was very confused about all these things and needed to make something, you know, and it needed to be discussed in something, a longer format than making a record, you know, and I didn't want producers or any other people involved.
Like it had to be your own record, you know, of what you saw.
But anyway, there is a line now when I, so I, I kind of wrote it and then didn't listen to it for ages.
And, um, there's a thing, there's a line in there about Agenda 2020, but I didn't know about it, you know, at the time.
So it just sort of comes from somewhere, you know, and, um, So it was and also just like the fact that it's um so this book is called Omni9 and it's nine chapters that are nine minutes long and it's about the nine stages of evolution in one universe like cycle and
It connects, basically, the importance of, say, in Hinduism, we have this thing called Navaratri, where you fast for nine days, and it's dedicated to the three goddesses.
So, our trifecta in Tamil culture, it's not like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but it's Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, you know, and that's where the sound Aum comes from.
So, Aum, which is A-U-M, is um the creator which is basically your base you know and where your reproductive organ is and then um the or sound or or you is from your like middle part of your body that's your heart so
Um, that's basically the sustainer who keeps you alive is the heart.
And then Shiva, which is the mental one, and that's the ending syllable, which is mm.
So that's a heady sound where you make it in your head.
And that's basically Shiva's, uh, role is he's a destroyer and he's supposed to destroy ignorance, you know?
So those are the trifectas in Hinduism of creation, sustaining and destroying ignorance.
I love the way, excuse me, carry on.
Yes, and then in Christianity they have the same sort of concepts and I really wanted to explore, you know, the interconnectedness of those things.
I like the way you describe the process of sterilization, that when you come into a culture that is driven by commodity and commerce, they will recognize that there is a value in true creativity.
But it goes through a process of homogenization, and there are enough people that are willing to represent on that level.
The culture ultimately wants artifacts that do not challenge the system in and of itself.
Sterilized and sanitized versions, imitations of creativity that lack creativity's dangerous,
serrated edges. I like that it sounds like what you're attempting to do in this piece of work
is re-engage the sacred and that which the organic ulterior pre-existing truths that we've perhaps
lost connection with.
I'll just share a little personal story with you.
Yesterday, I went back to the town I'm from, Greys, in Essex, which has been inveigled in this mad corruption where £1.5 billion has been lost through shady investments and has meant that local amenities like the Thameside Theatre and Library are being closed down.
I was involved there in some campaign and we were talking about how corruption has become sort of normal in government and how creativity and art is sidelined.
And certain communities, you don't even think they deserve creativity and art.
Gray's just some normal town in Essex.
They don't need no art or anything there.
They'd be lucky if their bins get collected.
And there was a moment in the conversation where we were talking to one of my mates who's like a fireman and this woman, Dr. Chetna Kang, I think is her name.
And we're talking about like how leaders have lost their values and have been consumed by systems of darkness.
And It's very hard because I think everyone recognises that we are at the end of a cycle.
People recognise things are falling apart.
That even the stuff that we do on our channel, we're continually reporting about centralised global power that's infiltrating and bypassing democratic authority in ways that can be demonstrated, like the response to coronavirus, which was broadly speaking adopted everywhere in the world without a democratic process.
And without being fully, like, the complexities of that have never been addressed.
Even now we're seeing them celebrating Chinese protesters, even though when they were protesting, like, these Western-type countries.
It's mental, isn't it?
And what it seems like you are expressing, and in a way that I imagine must be pretty hard for you to carry, mate, I know that it is hard to do this stuff, that it sort of takes you out of, well, speaking for myself, it takes me out of my route of, like, oh, God, I don't know who the fuck I am, like, when I give myself over to this stuff.
Is reaching for some real values because people have not got any principles or values to turn to because everyone's been told I like to even that minute there you said everything unfolding from a single cell when all you have is materialism when all you have is the spatial and temporal dimensions to refer to that it limits you it does put you in a box and it makes it easier to put you in other boxes but once you start alluding to and referring to things that sound occultist or mystic people think you're a nut And they want to define you as such.
Well, this is, this is not, you know, this is something that I created, you know, from the ether.
And it's, it's my experience as being a musician and working with sound, you know, and basically there's five elements, which is Like, it does sound nutty to be like, okay, before, before science came along, people knew that it was water, fire, earth, air.
And in India we have, um, Akash, which is the fifth element.
So Hollywood makes movies like the fifth element, but we've never had it defined what the fifth element is.
So the fifth element is considered sound and universe was made with sound.
And in Christianity, they say, It's made with word, you know, so word is sound.
So I'm interested in, um, words and sounds.
And it was only a matter of time before I kind of took a deeper interest in it, you know, beyond making records that people could go to Spotify and stream my new record.
It only came out a month ago.
You know, that exists, but this is something else that I feel like that suits where I'm at right now, you know?
And my thing is, since YouTube and Google and all of these things, which is one of the things that I got banned for a long time ago for saying connected to the Google, connected to the government 13 years ago or something.
Yeah.
13 years ago I said that.
So I was banned by Google straight from the beginning, you know, and when they reset my YouTube views, when views became a thing where as an artist it's so important, that's how you get judged.
They were already resetting my views every year.
So it would just constantly, you know, and some of it is to do with monetization where companies were changing hands.
So YouTube Interscope will, Go and make a deal with YouTube and then Apple and then, you know, sell their catalogue to somebody else.
And so every time that happens, always my views get reset to zero, you know?
So if you go on YouTube and look at my song, it will say uploaded 15 years ago, but it will have like, you know, 50,000 views, which is not true.
I'm literally the artist that happened in the time of YouTube blowing up, you know?
And even made all these spaces like MySpace and YouTube and all these spaces cool because I created all these extra content that went with my record, unlike other artists who just totally walk the line of how to make a record and do promo content.
You know, that's all very corporate and calculated.
I was making way more reactionary work, which was, you know, sort of reflective of the times and connected to what
people were actually going through in society.
So all these little, little videos, like 2007, I filmed police brutality in New York, you know,
of the police beating up this black kid outside my flat and in New York City and Pepper spraying
him and all this sort of stuff. And even things like that, I would just put straight on YouTube
and people would talk about it and be informed by it and stuff like that. And so.
Being somebody, I feel like, who inspired the Silicon Valley kids who would come to your show and be inspired, and they're now the leaders of Silicon Valley, to be censored is very annoying, you know, but that is because it became more and more political and, you know, like Google did become political and did change their ethos from We don't do evil or something like that and changed it.
I can't remember what it was.
But, um, so I think in these times, someone had to just put all these things together.
You know, it's, it's sort of a way of saying, and, and I, I watch all these things on YouTube and, or Ted talks and this and that, and I just don't get, I never feel it hits me because Everything's put through this also this like white man thing, you know, where they see it in a very, in a very, it's very hard to say, but not really monetized sense.
But the understanding is, even watching, say, Jordan Peterson, his understanding does just go back to the beginning of the Abrahamic religion, you know, and the importance of that, but it's very difficult for him to speak about
anything before then, you know.
And I feel like even he has certain parameters that he's working in, you know, and it's very
difficult to bring him over to certain other parts of understanding.
I think even the most expansive thinkers and intellectuals do have parameters.
And I even consider myself to be someone that is quite capable of three thinking, mobile, four open to difficult and opposing ideas.
But of course, I don't know where I am unconscious.
I don't know what lies beyond my various No.
No.
I think I'm really into wisdom.
have a kind of a cultural heritage that's connected to rebellion that makes you adversarial
to the censorship and authoritarianism of what might be called the current regime?
No, no. I think I'm really into wisdom and I think wisdom, you know, like you speak to Vandana Shiva and she's
fighting a system, right, that believes it's doing the right thing.
And it's very difficult to criticize this system and the people involved, right, that they're untouchable.
Ultimately, they all speak the words that they've learnt in India.
They all go off and do this little moment where they, you know, whether you're talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or all of these people have taken the wisdom of the East, but even the conversation that Kanye is having now about the Star of David and the swastika, you know, the wisdom from the East always gets perverted when it comes to the West, you know?
It never gets put right.
And there is a political context, like my father's one of those main people that writes very boring reference books about history and politics and started a revolution and did all of these things.
And those factual academic elements exist and they exist in my, you know, life.
But beyond that, just the philosophical and spiritual level, I think, you know, my dad wasn't very interested in the spiritual level, but I am because, because something is happening.
We're all going through it.
You're talking about it.
And I think, you know, everyone's having this moment where truth is kind of coming out and We're in this massive change where they're saying, this is it.
This is the moment where humans evolve to the next cyborg level.
You know, this is the human beings that we are now will never exist again in the future.
You know, this is, we are the last generation of this organic material human.
And yet nobody's having this conversation except for everyone saying, yeah, great.
Let's bring on transhumanism.
Bring on all the stuff, but these ideas just came from the seventies.
Like they're not even that old.
It's probably as old as me, you know?
And, and so to straddle something in your mind where you're pushed to follow something that just got invented 50 years ago and then come from a culture that maybe is, you know, 30,000 years old or something.
And you haven't even been given the time to explore it.
You know, and discuss these things.
Meanwhile, you know, tech comes along and they're just like, humans are hackable.
They're all useless.
Let's just get rid of them.
You know what I mean?
And, but you're like, wow, each, if each in Africa, they believe each person is like a library.
When somebody dies, you know, you lose a library.
And I just feel like we haven't explored enough.
What we are capable of before we ruin it, you know?
Like, I just, I want to, like, learn this software, you know, before we go on to the next one.
Vandana Shiva talks a lot about desacralisation, that we've lost our connection to the sacred, that because there have been evident advances in certain spheres, like in medicine and technology and science, there's been a steep trajectory, steep advances, it seems that we have neglected these other arcane territories, these 30,000 year old libraries, these
deep wisdom traditions have been lost.
And perhaps, Maya, that's not a coincidence, because perhaps to advance in the direction
that it appears that we are, into transhumanism, into centralized power, into people being
neutered, censored, curtailed and controlled, invited to live quiet, dim lives.
So dim.
You can't have people that have got fire in their bellies from thousands of years ago,
people that have got Shiva energy and Kali energy and deep, deep fire in their belly.
That's not the kind of thing you can have unleashed in this culture.
You know what it's like when you look around, when you walk around everyone bouncing back at themselves from a flat blank screen.
People are being lost in a loop of self.
Even if they're not looking at a screen, like I walk around London and I'm so surprised like how dim and dull it is.
It's almost like It's almost like, you know, this new technology that they want to put inside your body to track your whatever.
And, and last week your Harari uploaded a thing saying, consciousness is your ability to suffer.
And it's like, no.
And who is he to define that?
Who is he to define that?
How does he get to decide the fate of 7 billion people on this planet?
And who is right and who's wrong and who's in and who's out and who's cool and who's, who is making these decisions about human beings.
And that's like, so bizarre to say, Oh, the consciousness.
And that's what my book is.
It's about the definition of consciousness and the demons realize that the only way to get hold and take over the entire universe is through consciousness.
but gods have put in like a backdoor thing on consciousness and the demons are trying to find it to hack it.
You know, it's like literally my book.
So when he comes out and says that in real life, like this is not fiction.
My book is fiction.
It's not real.
It is complete mythology I made up in my head, you know.
But this guy just came out and said, that is a fact, you know, that they wanna hack your consciousness
and consciousness is this very limited thing about you suffering, which means it's okay for you to
suffer and we're gonna make you suffer
because it just means you're more conscious, doesn't it?
And it's like, no, consciousness can mean anything.
We don't even know yet.
You know, we haven't, none of us have the ability to define that because we haven't even raised our society in that way to know.
Because we've dimmed people down and we've suppressed their intellect into this rigid structure that they wouldn't even be able to know what is consciousness.
You know, removed from its, like you said, the walls and the parameters that we put on culturally, politically, identity politics, the time that we're alive.
And, you know, the thing is also the human Being our lifespan is pretty short and I feel like we suffer from amnesia, which is why we're so obsessed from collecting data.
Like our entire existence is just obsession with data collection right now.
How are you going to tell me about consciousness when it's such a, you know, cold thing to collect data on this thing and
think you're going to analyze it and define what it is, you know. To me that's just like, what if this
tool is not good enough yet to study that?
I think you're right.
And this is, I think, part of the nature of prophecy is attunement to ideas that are atemporal and aspatial, beyond space and time, perennial, ever-present, constant, circular, as you have indicated.
I've spoken to Yuval Noah Harari on a couple of occasions, come on here, to promote books,
you know, a few years ago, and I'd not heard of his, like, connections to Davos and WF.
In fact, I didn't even really know what those things are or were, like, I learned about
those things since I've been involved in this game.
And what I feel is that there are certain intellectuals, and like, on a personal level,
he was like a nice guy, and I think he was there with his boyfriend and that, or maybe
husband, and I thought he was, like, cool and quite nice.
But when I was listening to his ideas, the ideas that he espouses and underwrites academically
ultimately all lead to support of centralized power and the inevitability of technological
advancement and technocratic power, a cadre of experts imposing dictatorship.
Through technological power.
And I think that, let's call it the system.
Yes.
And also, you can see, also, Maya, the perversion of ideas like both Christianity and Buddhism, of course, explore the significance of suffering.
The cause of suffering is desire, is of course sort of a central tenet of the idea of Buddhism.
And the central image of Christianity is the crucified deity, the suffering of the deity.
But I enjoy what I have understood of Vedic literature's advocacy of bliss consciousness.
The potential... Can we have a bit more of that?
I'd like some.
That is why I'm here.
Thanks for bringing the bliss.
Yeah, bliss, joy, and yeah, I think that is a great way to see consciousness.
Your ability to tap into the bliss.
You know what's happening, mate, is it feels like the potential of the future is being curtailed.
The people saying, we've got reality all stitched up and all sewn up.
This is what we are.
We're going to manage your, like in politics, they're just about managing decline.
In technology, they're just about creating like the cyborg transhuman movement and even maybe getting off the planet.
There's no sort of sense that there may be other layers of reality that we're not accessing.
If they haven't designed technology, To look at themselves, to be like, why are we such psychopaths?
I don't believe in the technology they make.
Exactly.
Well, why wouldn't you make a piece of technology that lets you know what is wrong with you and that why you want that much power and to destroy the world and make everything really boring?
And why?
You know, and, and The adverts that I get in terms of, you know, when, when the computer listens to you and gives you ads that suit your thing.
Yeah.
And today the one that I'm getting is that, um, you know, cows are really dangerous for global warming.
They're going to give it pills.
So they're going to give cows, you know, so all of these, this, Young girl was pitching her startup company where she's made this company which is supposed to be great so I'm sure she's getting billions in funding right for this climate change thing that she's doing where she's basically making pills out of algae
To give to feed to cows and the cows are just going to fart less, right?
And not produce methane, which is going to save the planet.
And I'm like, that makes crazy like sense.
Not sense as in it's like, but for a 25 year old in a university in New York, I get how it makes sense to her, but it makes no sense to me.
And probably not to Vandana Shiva, where you're going to have to open up a new factory to produce all these pills.
You know, all this electricity is going to take to collect data on that.
Then you're going to store the data of that pill-taking cow, you know, and monitor all these things.
So you're just like, surely that can't be the answer.
And weren't cows around forever?
I mean, Indian people, I think that the kind of solutions that are presented are the sorts of solutions that centralise power, materialise power, commodify power.
I know there is more complexity to the contributions to excess methane than just stopping a cow far in with Algae.
I know that having listened to Vandana on this very subject and numerous agricultural activists, the type of methane that's released at this level is there's more to it.
There are different types of it, different strands of it.
But it seems like that all of the solutions that we're offered are solutions that do not interrupt the trajectory of the powerful and their objectives and their agenda.
That's what I'm saying.
They never use it on themselves.
Like they never use the machines on themselves to ask Why their choice, you know, 50 years ago, whatever choice they made got us to this point with climate change.
If that is the point they're making, whatever they made 50 years ago, whatever decision they took and whatever they thought was great and funded, you know, brought us to this point.
So if you cannot ask yourself, what the hell am I doing now?
You know, so I don't do this 50 years from now.
I'm not interested in what that person's got to say.
You know, I don't think that person is thinking right, you know, and we need more accountability.
We need the UN and WEF, IMF, World Bank, whoever it is.
You know, the American government, every company that Vandana Shiva's fighting, we need them to be like, 50 years ago, we made this decision.
And we thought it was great.
We thought it was really great to stop people dying.
So we gave them all these vaccines, you know, to save them.
So the population of earth would be better and bigger.
We thought that, so we did it.
You know, we went to all the countries 50 years ago and we made sure that it was mandated that all children took polio vaccines and took typhoid vaccines and took all these things, which is all great because that's how the population grew.
So.
If you look at the population growth from 19, say 1920 to 2020, it went from like 1.5 billion to now, which is 8 billion, right?
Which is like an insane amount of growth.
But that is obviously to do with science.
It's to do with science and medicine, you know, and access to clean water and things like that.
And so we have to look at decisions that have been made in the past.
And my dad, this is a personal story.
So, and you met my father, so I'm telling you this, but when I was a little girl, I had to give up spending like four or five years with my dad because my dad was employed by the Indian Ministry of Agriculture.
And so the compromise was that we were going to starve to death and he'd have no job or
he would take this job, even though he was a revolutionary in Sri Lanka.
And that's what he was doing.
He was the leader of Eros.
He took this job with the Indian government because he had an engineering background.
He took a job and he went.
So at the time, India was 90% agricultural.
Okay.
90% of India was agricultural.
And they sent my dad around all of India researching for four years, where my dad combining his engineering skills, designed all these machines where farmers would live off their land and would not be on the grid.
So they wouldn't need all this sort of infrastructure and they could just self-generate using what they had.
And he built very simple machinery that worked with cows plowing and, you know, water, bicycles, like lots of sort of self-sustaining things.
And so they were like ideas that you could implement all across India, didn't cost anything and didn't, wasn't taxing on fossil fuels to run.
Okay.
So four years came up.
And my dad takes the briefcase and my mom basically says, F you, you know, you're not here.
I'm leaving.
And so we lived in India that whole time in hiding.
And my mom and my dad split up over the fact that he was gone doing this job for so long and was never there for the kids.
And my sister actually contracted typhoid and she was going to die.
So we had a choice of either saving my sister in hospital and leaving or staying there for my, you know, for my dad to finish.
So my mom moved us back to Sri Lanka to the war zone and, you know, got family to help.
In that time, my dad took the briefcase to the Indian government and he was like, here's what I've done, but now I gotta go and find my wife.
And the Indian government happened to be, this is 1983 or something like that.
Yeah, 83.
And they turn around and it was the same time that Monsanto and all of these glamorous, beautiful Western companies with technology coming in.
And so in the office, the Indian government had two briefcases.
One is my dad's boring briefcase, which was self-sustaining.
90% of Indian farms.
Yeah.
Or the shiny golden briefcase of modern technology and modern Ways to monetize farming or fertilizers.
It's going to give you more product and all of this stuff.
And obviously the guy in office at the time told my dad to F off and took the shiny briefcase.
He was probably in power for about four years or eight years.
Then he Fs off, you know, Leaving India within 40 years of that happening from 1983 to the minute you're interviewing Wandana Shiva, the destruction of Indian agriculture, the dependency on fertilizer in the West, the monetization of their food industry and now, you know, people buying off farmlands and farmers killing themselves.
All of this happens, and it's happening in my lifetime.
I've witnessed that.
Like, I've actually sacrificed my time with my father, yeah, for him to come up with ways that India could have sustained itself without these things.
But they said no, because the idea wasn't sexy and cool, you know?
And at the time it was not a cool thing.
My dad was very depressed after that.
So he came back to Sri Lanka and so late 80s, the Sri Lankan government banned the Tamil Tigers from energy and power and water, you know, resources, food, everything.
So the leader of the Tamil Tigers bought this information from my dad and sustain the Tamil people in the Bundy area in the north, you know, which is like a million people in the north, on this information.
And that's how they survived from the 80s to 2008.
From building their own infrastructure, where they survived for 25 years without power and water and, you know, a bit like Palestine, I guess, in that sense, when they cut off from everything, they were able to build organic farming and, um, you know, good irrigation systems and were able to generate electricity using a bicycle or whatever, you know, people did that and survived.
And so whatever was in that briefcase works and it worked, you know, and then you fast forward to now 2020.
That's what you have.
You have India, you know, having to do this insane change and become, you know, dependent on the technological structure that's in place, which is like, we need to regulate everything.
We need to know how many potatoes everyone's eating.
And then we're going to give them credit scores on it, you know, have they lit their plate, are they chugging food away, you know?
And it's sort of like, so interesting.
The creation of dependency and the harvesting of data appear to be fundamental components of this modality.
You create dependency, you create dependency in areas where people were somewhat independent or interdependent, you create dependency.
Clearly, that region was not without its struggles around food.
As I recall, in the 1970s, there were issues with famine, perhaps, somewhere in that region.
And I like what you said earlier about how perhaps some of these organisations, these vast, grand, glistening, gold-briefcased organisations, may have come in sincerely with the intention of resolving problems.
Monsanto, we can solve your food crisis with these patented seeds.
We can Bring about solutions.
But I like that you, you know, whilst weaving in your personal biography, referenced the idea that there is a kind of amnesia that we suffer from, and that they will not illuminate.
So they don't say that, oh, 50 years ago, we did think that these methods were going to work.
But actually, we can see now that it's created dependency and famine and crisis in Indian agriculture.
And that's why we'd like to move forward.
No, they advance further through new means.
Exactly.
Oh, let's put plaster on the plaster.
And then put another plaster on the plaster and just make a plaster mountain.
And then that's going to be earth.
You know?
Yeah.
Wound on top of wound.
Unaddressed.
Unaddressed wound.
Yeah.
So it's like, no, what we need to psychologically fix this, which is what's interesting as well, is that Jordan Peterson is the person that's floated to the top during these times.
And he's like a, you know, clinical psychiatrist.
Exactly.
And you think, wow, can you fix the madness of what's happening here?
So it doesn't affect everything on the planet.
You know, you don't see, I just feel like that is, I think, a very important thing being able to, Self-reflect, own some stuff, say, maybe that decision was not very good.
Yeah.
You know, and then go, okay, well, we are looking at a picture where it's not like, you know, Africans and Indians are invading on these countries and causing all these problems.
And the thing about Indian philosophy and Indian religion is, you know, that's based in bliss and trying to figure yourself out is that it says, you know, any knowledge and wisdom from the Eastern philosophy is for the good of humanity.
Therefore, it's free.
They don't even claim it.
So if you take the thing and start doing your yoga company over here in Hollywood or, you know, in Malibu, Chillin' on a piece of rock.
No one's claiming it.
No one's like, that's my culture.
Like, because the whole point of yoga and the whole point of Indian wisdom or Eastern philosophy is to help you.
So why would anyone stop you using that?
You know, that it would go against what they're preaching.
So the whole way that works is that it's there.
And it, and you know, you're, you're supposed to, um, it's not, it's not an identity thing.
Like Indians wouldn't say, that's mine.
You can't use it.
Or this is our thing and, you know, fight for it or anything like that.
Cause the whole point of their thing is very inclusive.
It was about the humanity as a whole and everyone's supposed to spiritually attain a certain thing.
With this knowledge.
So the knowledge is free.
You know, nobody owns this knowledge.
It's free.
Yes.
Whereas I think in the West, we're very used to everything being owned and it's like our thing and we did this and did it.
And it's kind of like we're teaching that to more people just because the power of technology, you press a button and it goes out to the world, you know?
And that's only been around Like since the internet, like what, you know, 20 years or something where mass marketing can be done like that, you know?
And so that thought process of, you know, this sort of weird kind of power hungry thing is being beamed to the world on a mass level for the last, say 20 years, you know?
And that's a whole generation or two.
And if you think fast forward 50 years from now, psychologically, we're going to be more and more like that if we carry on, you know, unless we check people.
When people say CEOs, psychopaths, you know, and, and being so obsessed with wealth and greed and, uh, all of these sort of ideas, um, And that you have to take someone out in order to sort of be better or, you know, like these ideas have been around, but they've always been sort of in history books or in, you know, some sort of, I don't know, biology books or they're in academia, hidden or in politics, you know, but now I think these ideas are sort of like,
Spreadable very quickly.
Yeah.
And they're going to everywhere or, you know, kids, adults, whoever's got a phone, it's got this, you know, and so we have to be really careful psychologically that we are constantly practicing the inclusiveness, humility, awareness, self-assessment, You know, and the free speech conversation that's been happening in the last few weeks and with everybody freaking out about Twitter and Elon Musk making a whole thing about free speech and obviously Julian Assange is in jail over it, you know, over words and publicizing stuff, not actually killing anyone.
So in these times, I think it's a really important thing to address when they have so much power to curb speech, you know, and define what hate speech is and what is the correct way of seeing something.
And when these are being defined, you know, on A scale where I don't think they're aware of the planet, but they're only aware of their small group, you know?
And so this is very, this is very important that there are more people in this conversation that expand the idea out to be like, look, this needs to be inclusive of these people and these people and these people.
You know, there's so much, there's so much stuff involved here, you know, and that They should be able to say, 50 years ago you guys made us do this, that's destroyed our thing, you know?
So when you want to do it again, can we have another conversation?
Yes.
You know?
Yes.
But, obviously I understand, I'm sure the Indian government's under a lot of pressure to comply now with whatever's being put on them, like, do this, because this is shiny and new and it's like, you're modern and you're going to be included in this new thing and it's like, look at this.
You're going to come to this event and look good and shake hands and, you know, everything's going to be great.
And we're going to give you a little credit at the end of, end of this, you know, and points.
If you have enough cows not doing, you know, releasing methane or whatever, whatever the thing is, is it's like the Indian government is Under pressure to move along and get with it, you know, so they're like, yeah, we're building rockets, we're doing this.
And that's kind of the futures on robotics and data collection.
And you know what I mean?
So I, I, I like, I get it, you know, I get, I get technology and being excited about it and human evolutions.
Probably going to go there.
It's inevitable that yes, technology is going to get embraced and da-da-da-da-da.
But we got here somehow where we're at the end of something and something's going to happen if we don't make this new technology, you know.
We got here somehow and it ain't that great, you know, and It's okay to relax a bit.
You know, modernization for the sake of modernization is a bit lame, I think.
And I just don't think that culturally anyone's paused for a second to be like, what is going on?
And I think I've been in that and maybe you have too, but I've been around people where it is just super exciting to have like these ideas and then power to just actualize them very quickly and then it's
like da da da da da and everyone's excited around you and you're excited and then it's like go
go go and then you're getting reactions and it's you know you plug the machine on there's people
there and like this right now you know it's all exciting you know so i get this level of like living in
the moment and pushing things forward but certain things needs to be zoomed out and you have to
look at it over a long period of time you know and be like okay it's not that long ago a hundred
years ago And within a hundred years ago, if you, if you blown up the population, you know, times three folds, yeah, then there is going to be a major drain on the food source or the natural resources on the planet.
And there's just like all this other stuff.
You know, then we have to, we've done it now.
That's history.
So you can just hit pause, zoom out, look at it, what's going on.
And also I think a lot of this stuff, the technological advancing mechanism in place now, they're a lot more dangerous than, you know, A hundred years ago when someone's like, let's invent a tractor.
You know what I mean?
It's like a lot more dangerous.
Yeah, you're right.
It's not so immersive.
It was much more local parochial tractor.
Do a bit of plowing.
Now with these vast and rapid advances, I was having this idea earlier that 500 years ago, the amount of documented material that constituted history, the libraries of Alexandria would have, that amount of data would now be produced in half an hour.
So we have this sort of sense that things are getting faster and faster and everything's immersive.
And like you say, that the surface of the planet, all patented, everything not what it seems.
You walk through the green and pleasant lands of England and know that it's all owned elsewhere.
There's even utilities that are meant to be for the service of the people are owned externally and extraneously, all bolted on to profit motives.
We are living in a kind of holographic reality in so much as what we look at is not the administrative reality.
Forget the molecular.
It seems that while we're racing forwards on this trajectory towards a kind of technological utopia, we are neglecting to look back or to zoom out.
We're seemingly as a species simultaneously incredibly ambitious and yet myopic.
And this evocation of gods and goddesses and primal forces and the source of material and source energy I think is precisely what has to happen.
The challenge, I think, for us is how to present that to people who have been trained to extract mythology from the discourse.
Like flat rationalism and this dimming that we have discussed is what is considered orderly and ordinary now.
If you start talking to people about mythic energies that are within you and powers that can be unlocked.
And for a moment, our conversation, I felt like suddenly a wave of optimism of like, we're only just beginning to understand what consciousness is and what it could be.
There's a difference between data, intelligence and consciousness, the crucible of it, the source of it.
We have access to the source.
We don't need to be We're limited to the narrow lines and slim planes of prescribed reality.
We're not being ambitious enough.
There is the opportunity for bliss.
There is something beyond suffering.
We can get beyond technocratic, bureaucratic limitation.
But it's a frightening conversation to have, I think, because, you know, personally, I feel afraid a lot of the time, you know, like I've experienced a lot of fear.
My book is cyclical and this is cycle one of the nine stages happening once, but then it can happen a hundred times.
And I think that each time you have the power to write that cycle.
So it's just like you writing it.
You have the power to make it as optimistic as you want.
You know, you can make it as technologically advanced as you want, but, um, It, it, it, it, the optimism is there because of that.
It's like, okay, we can start again and rewrite this, you know, and we can dictate where it goes.
But in order to do that, you can't have, you can't have any group of people in society that are untouchable, where you can't talk about them, speak about them, point holes in the theories or criticize what they might've done 50 years ago that was wrong.
You know, like, You just can't have that.
You know, you need debate.
You need to be able to hold people accountable.
I'm sorry, but in the last five years, the only person that society has scapegoated as the baddie in the universe is Julian Assange.
Like, that already shows you, you know, like, who have we put away in society for any kind of crime that's been happening in everybody's face?
You know, the only person who's gone in is Julian Assange for, you know, press freedom, and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, I guess.
You know, apart from that, no one in the finance industry has been questioned.
Nobody in the tech world has gone in.
Nobody in the, you know, like, any banking, housing market, you know, pollution, climate change, Nobody has been held accountable for all of these apparently big extinction, you know, like life-threatening thing that could wipe out humanity from the face of this earth, you know, for the first time we're faced with extinction apparently from climate change and we might all be dead in 20 years.
Who is accountable for that then?
Yeah, there's a curious lack and misplacement of justice in most areas after that 2008 crash, after the period of the pandemic which has induced a kind of spellbound, hypnotised and limited mentality.
There is no willingness to scapegoat people other than in the case of Julian Assange, someone who's clearly interested in revealing the truth about the way that power operates.
It's interesting that so many crises can be inflicted and yet the most powerful interests in the world remain profitable.
In a time where there's an energy crisis, energy companies are making a profit.
In a time where there's a health crisis, pharmaceutical companies are making profits.
It feels like we are being distracted from the real sites, the real location, the locus of this problem.
It's curious to me to understand where is the power?
How is all of this happening?
They're saying it's AI.
They're like, oh, it's not even us.
It's the machine.
It's the machine that's like deciding we're wrong and we need to be curbed.
So that's already being passed on to the machine.
You know, and even that you're like, well, who decided to hand that over to the machine?
That job, the job of like being watched 24 seven in the streets of London through every security camera to edit it, whatever, like who said, yeah, let's go and trust this machine after like Watching Terminator or whatever, you know, like somebody that, that to me is also really funny to be like, well, how do we create the society where we think, you know, and everyone's like, AI is smarter than us, therefore they should make that decision.
But it's biased because 50% of the news or we've all learned 50% of the information fed into this system is wrong.
Yes.
Or that you've just learned this week from Elon Musk saying Twitter did have a part in You know, elections in the US, and so if there's manipulation going on, then the information fed into the AI is manipulated.
Therefore, the outcome cannot be great.
It cannot be positive.
It cannot be blissful or joyous, because the base and the root and the seed is not blissful and joyous.
Yes, yes.
How can anything beautiful grow from it?
I sometimes feel that we are trying to create a theological paradigm materially, i.e.
we have omniscience through perpetual surveillance.
We have omnipresence and omnipotence through the gathering of technology and intelligence.
It's like everything is being externalized.
Everything is being measured and managed.
I came up with Omni in 2017.
I've had like seven lawsuits to keep the name Omni.
And I just came up with the name because it's like Omni, right?
Every company in the world that specializes in robotics, surveillance, creation of the matrix, you know, all of these things, they all want to be called Omni.
And they are the people I'm fighting behind the scenes.
And I haven't been able to put work out on Omni.com.
Because behind the scenes I'm in so many patent lawsuits with so many people trying to take it from me and it's just insane.
So that's why the book is called Omni9 and the website's called Omni.com and you know it's really important to for me to hold on to this name because it has all this meaning that you're mentioning.
You know to me it's like about The real sense of this thing, you know, that we all know and feel but is threatened and we're being told it's not there, like whatever, you know, this spirit essence of the divine, you know, and I guess
Vandana Shiva will call it Gaia or, you know, the language of whatever that frequency is that we are recreating through science and technology.
But the thing that already exists without replication is omnipresent.
Yeah, omnipresent.
A primer materia from which all things emerge, that there is variation in frequency, but one true frequency from which all reality has proceeded forward from, that we all have access to and a connection to, but it requires a kind of quietness and introspection, and it requires us not to be continually tethered to stimuli of fear and desire.
I'm very susceptible to this kind of stimulants, you know, and I've been grown in a culture of individualism and individualistic pursuit.
And it's only really latterly that I'm awakening from the illusion of self.
It's only really latterly that I begin to recognize something that you've said, is that the power of creativity is almost boundless because we are imagining new realities into being.
When we say that we are not separate from God, this means that we have a role in creating reality, that we become a conduit, a vessel, an expression of divinity when cleansed of the toxins and pollutants of a culture that sees to deluge us in the kala, yoga, material grossness.
Very, very hard to extricate yourself.
Very, very difficult to sort of unpick it.
I feel it almost neurological.
I feel it almost vascular.
I feel it sort of seeped into me.
It's difficult to get cleansed and it's lonely, you know.
So I feel like you're doing some amazing work and you've been very either intuitively brave or brave in some other way that I don't understand.
Ignorance is bliss.
Well done.
I feel a bit sick.
Why?
No, I love it.
I love talking to you.
It's very, very intense.
I feel like I've been a bit enchanted and sort of on one.
I don't often spend time on that because see, look at all the things.
I meant to get you into different categories, like talk about Julian Assange for a bit, talk about Elon for a bit, talk about big pharma and COVID.
Oh yeah, we didn't even... I mean, we kind of tried.
You've done nothing but cause trouble.
You've caused problems on MTV from the get-go.
finger salute while performing as part of Madonna's Super Bowl halftime. You've always
been difficult, haven't you? You've done nothing but cause trouble. You've caused problems
on MTV from the get-go. You were labelled an anti-vaxxer in 2020 for tweeting, don't
panic, you're okay, you're not gonna die. I'm not against vaccines.
I'm against companies who care more for profit than humans.
You know, at the beginning of it, I'm sure you're aware that Albert Baller said it would be reprehensible if Pfizer made a profit from something that was so humanely necessary.
And of course, Pfizer went on to have the most profitable year in their history.
It's just, again, this amnesia.
Again, this amnesia.
We're being invited to continually forget And when there are revelatory figures that appear that we just have to shut that shit down and silence them because we can't confront the truth of what's happening somehow collectively.
Yeah, and just saying that data collection is mechanical thing that's over here, but
you can't use your eyes and your own ears to store the data in your brain and bring
it back up from memory to be like, oh, but I remember, you know what I mean?
You can't even be like, hey, you know when you said this like two years ago, I remember
it.
No, you can't remember that.
It's like phone numbers when you were a kid, when you knew 20 phone numbers.
Now I can only remember my mum's phone number for where she lived then.
She doesn't even live there anymore.
So we've forgotten everything.
Why does that happen?
They've stripped us of our facilities and our faculties as sacred beings.
We need to get back into some avatar illuminosity awakening in some tropical forestry.
Yeah, yeah.
Should we help each other with it a bit?
Yeah, definitely.
Is that what you're here doing?
Trying to do that within my own limitations and then not try to tumble into the narcissism and everything and all that.
Yeah, it's tough.
But you know, obviously, it's difficult because that is the other thing of like watching people, you know, I partly I don't want to get into Going on these types of shows because then it becomes about you, maybe, you know, and that it's better to just keep making work and putting it out on a site where they can find you.
Who does that well though?
Who does that well?
No one.
I don't think anyone has.
No.
Eventually, you know, with social media, like we've had to come out and actually just say everything all the time, you know, We don't as artists or writers or you know people even if you take JK Rowling who can literally disappear from the face of the earth on Mars because she's so rich but even she has to get on Twitter and contribute her you know thoughts to what's happening around and it's like we don't have that.
I feel like as artists we don't have the luxury to just be MIA from the situation.
Thanks for joining me for that episode of Subcutaneous.
Join us next week for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
On Monday we'll be talking to Barry Weiss.
She's been given access to the Twitter files along with a friend of the show, Matt Tybee.
You can join us on Monday for that show.
Also next week I'll be speaking to Silky Carlo from Big Brother Watch.
About the surveillance state and big tech.
Also, Glenn Greenwald, friend of the show, will be on.
He's a fellow Rumble host, and we'll be talking about the kind of things that Glenn Greenwald's always talking about.
And Tim Robbins, the Oscar-winning actor, is joining us for a conversation about his, well, new views on the pandemic and the introduction of laws, regulations, the shaming that went on.
That will be a fantastic conversation.
It's all here first and in full on Rumble.
Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different
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