In this episode of Subcutaneous, I speak to M.I.A. Maya, a rapper, hip hop artist, recording artist, and sensational thinker, about his new album 'Borders' and his relationship with the celebrity machine. We talk about his early life growing up in the streets of New York City, how he got his start in the music industry, and how he went on to become one of the most successful artists of all time. We also discuss the meaning of the word 'god' and how it can be applied to the world, and what it means to be a human being in the modern world. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and let me know in the comments what you think of it! See you after. See you in the chat! -Subcutaneous. - Music: "Borders" by m.i.a.m.a Maya - "Something Strange Is Going On" by Zeena - "The Devil's Triangle" by Yoda - "A Good Omens" by KRS-One - "Noah's Ark" by P.E.R.D. - "I'm With You" by Sivakant - "Innate" by Jeezy - "Goodbye" by Vaynerchandler - "Omah" by D'Angelo - "Out" by Cephalon - "This Is My Name" by M. I. Maya - "Something Weird Is" by , "Outro" by R. I'm With Us, I'll See You" (feat. , "Outtro" by Mr. & by , I'll Be With You, and , we're With You , , and ( ) , we talk about the power and influence of celebrity culture and how they shape our culture, how they influence us, how it affects us, and why we need to be more aware of it, how we should be more than just the things we think we want to be aware of them, and the impact they can have on us, more so than we can have a better day to day life , how we can be a better version of ourselves, and more so so we can better understand them, How can we have a more meaningful relationship with them? How to be better at it, we can learn from them, can they help us be better?
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to today's show, Subcutaneous, where I have a deep dive, cut to the bone,
00:00:27.000the skin conversation with a guest on the issues that you care about most.
00:00:31.000Today, I'm talking to M.I.A., Maya, the rapper, hip hop artist, Recording artist and sensational thinker and writer.
00:00:40.000It's a wonderful conversation with someone who's been on the inside of the celebrity machine, who's experienced fame, who's experienced establishment power from both sides.
00:00:57.000The modern world in stage nine made men and women seek boundaries.
00:01:06.000They 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.
00:01:24.000They wanted to be safe, so they always found ways to box themselves in.
00:01:29.000Then, they became heritable, like sheep, so a box did not seem so bad.
00:01:36.000Humans believed they evolved from a single-celled bacterium.
00:01:39.000In this sense, they felt they had more time.
00:01:43.000Billions of years, in fact, to evolve.
00:01:49.000Earth was born with a sense of sun and nine planets surrounding it.
00:01:54.000Seven god planets and two demon planets.
00:01:58.000These planets are represented by nine gems.
00:02:01.000Found in the Earth's dust, Navarathinam.
00:02:05.000Named in the first and oldest surviving language, called Tamil.
00:02:10.000Ruby, Pearl, Coral, Emerald, Yellow Sapphire, Diamond, Blue Sapphire, Hessanite and Cat's Eye.
00:02:20.000Towards the end, these resources were considered common, and the water and air began to be considered precious.
00:02:31.000Then it goes on to the God bit, explaining who the gods are, and then who the demons are, and the war.
00:02:42.000And 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.
00:02:54.000Under the impression between everything, or the wars between the gods and the demons.
00:03:03.000It's really beautiful, I can hear even 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?
00:03:35.000I 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.
00:04:02.000But while I was thinking about these things, because everyone was like, you know, maybe work on a TV series, which I was thinking about, about sort of the Tamil struggle.
00:04:16.000You know, there was a deeper thing that just kept happening, which was a spiritual thing that I was going through.
00:04:22.000And 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.
00:04:37.000It was the first time two people heard it, you know, and to this day, no one's really heard it.
00:04:43.000So 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 you can't have
00:05:01.000Free speech or speak about things that are just like a bit bigger than, I don't know, making a record.
00:05:08.000Something weird's going on, isn't it, mate?
00:05:10.000Like, I think that we've been in the public eye for a sort of during a similar period.
00:05:16.000And 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.
00:05:25.000And I'm talking about you from how it looked from the outside.
00:05:29.000Is it look like you've 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.
00:05:40.000And then, like most people, what happens to them, it seems to me, again from the outside, is most people recognise that they're doing a deal and that the deal is you stay within that system.
00:05:51.000But now speaking for myself, it's like something happened in me that I didn't like.
00:05:55.000Something that was reawoken in me that was always there from when I was a little kid.
00:05:59.000That like this ain't real and this isn't serving the thing that I thought it was going to serve.
00:06:03.000And I was feeling, instead of full up, I was feeling like I was being emptied.
00:06:07.000And I started to feel a major, major distrust for the thing that I was being co-opted by.
00:06:12.000And it scares me because, you know, speaking plainly, I still like attention.
00:06:20.000All those kind of things I imagine a lot of people have.
00:06:22.000But it feels like you're very deliberately breaking away from that, from the culture.
00:06:26.000Are you aware of the kind of things that happen when you try and do that?
00:06:29.000And 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.
00:06:35.000Oh, I've been through it about 20 times.
00:06:44.000Well, 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.
00:06:59.000So that already got me on, that was the first thing that got me on the scene of the You know, people watching.
00:07:08.000And 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.
00:07:25.000You know, it gave people that weren't into the mainstream somewhere else to go.
00:07:31.000And that's kind of how this thing became what it is, and it is that now.
00:07:36.000What popular culture is, is the music that I did put out in 2005, but at the time I put it out, it wasn't mainstream, it was the fringe.
00:07:48.000And I had FBI turn up to one of the first few venues, handing out leaflets outside saying, don't book her because she's a terrorist sympathizer.
00:08:01.000I would have all kinds of, you know, you name it, I've been cancelled for it, you know, from terrorism to Islamophobia, you know, because I wore a burka to some awards show once and that was seen as very hostile and the Maya album, you know, Talking about the Arab Spring and stuff like that.
00:08:46.000Also, 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.
00:09:03.000So you recognise 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 work does.
00:09:22.000That'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.
00:09:34.000A safe space where I could just be creative, upload some free content.
00:09:40.000There's going to be like a donate button where people could donate to it.
00:09:45.000If 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.
00:10:11.000And ultimately everything is about creativity.
00:10:15.000You know, even this book itself, it's about God and creation and the creation of the universe and having to fight 50-50.
00:10:28.000And gods are like, no, we control the universe and that's the war.
00:10:33.000So there's two sides and, you know, they both deal in propaganda in order to win the war.
00:10:42.000You know, and they use humans and propaganda machines in order to win this war.
00:10:47.000You know, and so this piece of work needed to exist somewhere that was pure.
00:10:55.000You know, I didn't want it to be a monetized space and I'm trying to not even have cookies on there.
00:11:04.000You 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.
00:11:20.000And my journey and my exploration into what being a human is, you know, just to suit the times that you're born in.
00:11:31.000Yes, it's very challenging, Maya, because when you're in this kind of territory, and by that I mean the territory of myth, 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-civilised cultures and themes and ideas that recur throughout, you know, Christianity, Islam... There's loads.
00:12:02.000When 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, untethered?
00:12:13.000I don't think they have... I would not... I... I...
00:12:19.000I 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.
00:12:31.000But 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.
00:12:45.000But 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
00:13:22.000I don't feel comfortable because I've gone through that as an artist.
00:13:32.000People 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.
00:13:47.000When I first came out as a musician, all my managers used to say, Or you're an artist's artist.
00:13:52.000You make work to inspire artists to make other work.
00:13:57.000And they're the ones that get rich, you know?
00:13:59.000So I didn't become as rich as everybody thinks I did, because you're the thing that inspires the thing.
00:14:05.000And then everyone takes that inspiration, but they're the ones that are actually, you know, promoted.
00:14:15.000And 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?
00:14:29.000But 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.
00:14:51.000And obviously, my dad is super political and was an atheist and, you know, but comes from a Catholic background.
00:15:00.000And then I had like, a vision of Jesus Christ.
00:15:04.000And I I've been quite public about it.
00:15:08.000So, 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.
00:15:21.000And I didn't want producers or any other people involved.
00:15:26.000Like, it had to be your own record, you know, of what you saw.
00:15:35.000I kind of wrote it and then didn't listen to it for ages.
00:15:41.000There's a line in there about Agenda 2020, but I didn't know about it at the time.
00:15:49.000So it just sort of comes from somewhere.
00:15:56.000So it was, and also just like the fact that it's, so this book is called Omni9, and it's nine chapters that are nine minutes long.
00:16:10.000And it's about the nine stages of evolution in one universe-like cycle.
00:16:19.000It 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.
00:16:30.000So, 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.
00:16:45.000So, Aum, which is A-U-M, is the creator, which is basically your base, you know, and
00:17:52.000Yes, and then in Christianity they have the same sort of Concepts, and I really wanted to explore, you know, the interconnectedness of those things.
00:18:04.000I 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.
00:18:30.000Imitations of creativity that lack creativity's dangerous serrated edges.
00:18:36.000I 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 have perhaps lost connection with.
00:18:48.000I'll just share a little personal story with you.
00:18:51.000Yesterday 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 Thamesside Theatre and Library are being closed down.
00:19:06.000I was involved there in some campaign and we were talking about how corruption has become sort of normal.
00:19:11.000in government and how creativity and art is sidelined.
00:19:15.000And certain communities, you don't even think they deserve creativity and art.
00:19:18.000Gray's just some normal town in Essex.
00:19:19.000They don't need no art or anything there.
00:19:21.000They'll be lucky if their bins get collected.
00:19:24.000And there was a moment in the conversation where we was talking to one of my mates
00:19:27.000who's like a fireman and this woman, Dr.
00:19:31.000And we're talking about like how leaders have lost their values
00:19:34.000and have been consumed by systems of darkness.
00:19:38.000And it's very hard because I think everyone recognises that we are at the end of a cycle.
00:19:44.000People recognise things are falling apart.
00:19:47.000That 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 due democratic process and without being fully addressed.
00:20:04.000The complexities of that have never been addressed.
00:20:06.000Even now we're seeing Yeah, it's crazy.
00:20:15.000And 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 room of like, oh god, I don't know who the fuck I am, like when I give myself over to this stuff.
00:20:39.000even that minute there you said everything unfolding from a single cell when all you have is
00:20:43.000Materialism when all you have is the spatial and temporal dimensions to refer to that it limits you
00:20:50.000It does put you in a box and it makes it easier to put you in other boxes
00:20:53.000but once you start alluding to and referring to things that sound a cultist or mystic people think you're a nut and
00:20:59.000They want to define you as this is this is not you know, this is something that I
00:21:04.000created, you know from the ether and it's it's
00:21:11.000my experience is being a musician and working with sound, you know and
00:21:17.000Basically there's five elements which is
00:21:26.000Like, it does sound nutty to be like, OK, before science came along, people knew that it was water, fire, earth, air.
00:21:35.000And in India, we have Akash, which is the fifth element.
00:21:39.000So Hollywood makes movies like The Fifth Element, but we've never had it defined what the fifth element is.
00:21:45.000So the fifth element is considered sound, and universe was made with sound.
00:21:50.000And in Christianity, they say, It's made with word, you know, so word is sound.
00:21:57.000So I'm interested in 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.
00:22:16.000You know, that exists, but this is something else that I feel like that suits where I'm at right now, you know?
00:22:25.000And 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.
00:22:42.000So I was banned by Google straight from the beginning, you know.
00:22:46.000And when they reset my YouTube views, when views became a thing where, as an artist, it's so important and that's how you get judged, they were already resetting my views every year.
00:22:57.000So it would just constantly, you know, and some of it is to do with monetization where companies were changing hands.
00:23:04.000So YouTube Interscope will Go and make a deal with YouTube and then Apple and then, you know, sell their catalog to somebody else.
00:23:12.000And so every time that happens, always my views get reset to zero.
00:23:18.000You 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.
00:23:29.000I'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 this 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.
00:23:55.000You know, that's all very corporate and calculated.
00:24:00.000And I was making way more reactionary work, which was, you know, sort of reflective of
00:24:08.000the times and connected to what people were actually going through in society.
00:24:14.000So all these little, little videos, like 2007, I filmed police brutality in New York, you
00:24:22.000know, of the police beating up this black kid outside my flat and in New York City and
00:24:30.000pepper spraying him and all this sort of stuff.
00:24:32.000And even things like that, I would just put straight on YouTube and people would talk
00:24:38.000about it and be informed by it and stuff like that.
00:24:45.000Being 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.
00:24:56.000To 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.
00:25:18.000But, um, so I think in these times, someone had to just put all these things together.
00:25:27.000You know, it's, it's sort of a way of seeing.
00:25:30.000And, and I, I watch all these things on YouTube and, or TED talks and this and that, and I just don't get, I just 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
00:26:08.000but it's very difficult for him to speak about anything before then, you know, and
00:26:13.000I feel like even he has certain parameters that he's working it, you know, and it's very
00:27:43.000And ultimately, they all speak the words that they've learnt in India.
00:27:50.000They 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.
00:28:02.000But 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.
00:28:15.000And there is the 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.
00:28:30.000And those factual academic elements exist and they exist in my, you know, life.
00:28:40.000But 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 something is happening.
00:28:59.000And 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.
00:29:10.000This is the moment where humans evolve to the next cyborg level.
00:29:14.000You know, this is the human beings that we are now will never exist again in the future.
00:29:20.000You know, this is, we are the last generation of this organic material human.
00:29:25.000And yet nobody's having this conversation except for everyone saying, yeah, great.
00:29:41.000And 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.
00:30:02.000Meanwhile, you know, tech comes along and they're just like, humans are hackable.
00:30:34.000Learn this software, you know, before we go on to the next one.
00:30:40.000Vandana 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.
00:31:01.000And perhaps, Maya, that's not a coincidence, because perhaps to advance in the direction that it appears that we are, into transhumanism, into centralised power, into people being neutered, censored, curtailed and controlled, invited to live quiet, dim lives...
00:31:18.000You can't have people that have got fire in their bellies from thousands of years ago and people that have got Shiva energy and Kali energy and deep, deep fire in their belly.
00:31:26.000That's not the kind of thing you can have unleashed in this culture.
00:31:29.000You know what it's like when you look around, when you walk around, everyone bouncing back at themselves from a flat blank screen.
00:31:34.000People are being lost in a loop of self.
00:31:37.000Even 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.
00:31:46.000It's almost like It's almost like, you know, this new technology that they want to put inside your body to track your whatever.
00:31:57.000And last week, your Harari uploaded a thing saying, consciousness is your ability to suffer.
00:32:11.000How does he get to decide the fate of 7 billion people on this planet?
00:32:18.000And 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?
00:32:27.000And that's, like, so bizarre to say, oh, the consciousness... And that's what my book is.
00:32:34.000It's about the definition of consciousness.
00:32:36.000And the demons realize that the only way to get hold and take over the entire universe is through consciousness.
00:32:45.000But gods have put in, like, a backdoor And so when he comes out and says that, in real life, this is not fiction.
00:33:39.000None of us have the ability to define that because we haven't even raised our society in that way to know.
00:33:45.000Because 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.
00:33:57.000You 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.
00:34:12.000And, 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.
00:34:26.000Like our entire existence is just obsession with data collection right now.
00:34:34.000How 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.
00:34:53.000To me that's just like, what if this tool is not good enough yet to study that?
00:34:59.000I think you're right, and this is that 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.
00:35:15.000I'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
00:35:51.000Of centralized power and the inevitability of technological advancement and technocratic power, a cadre of experts imposing dictatorship through technological power.
00:36:02.000And I think that, let's call it a system.
00:36:05.000Yes, 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.
00:36:25.000But I enjoy what I have understood of Vedic literature's advocacy of bliss consciousness, the potential... Can we have a bit more of that?
00:37:27.000Well, 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?
00:38:05.000So 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.
00:38:18.000So 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.
00:38:27.000To give to feed to cows, and the cows are just gonna fart less, right?
00:38:32.000And not produce methane, which is gonna save the planet.
00:38:36.000And I'm like, that makes crazy, like, sense.
00:38:42.000Not 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.
00:38:52.000But it makes no sense to me, and probably not to Vandana Shiva.
00:38:57.000Where 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.
00:39:06.000Then you're going to store the data of that pill-taking cow, you know, and monitor all these things.
00:39:12.000So you're just like, surely that can't be the answer.
00:39:21.000I mean, Indian people, I think that the kind of solutions presented are the sorts of solutions that centralise power, materialise power, commodify power.
00:39:36.000I know there is more complexity to the contributions to excess methane than just stopping a cow farting.
00:39:45.000I 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.
00:39:53.000There are different types of it, different strands of it.
00:39:55.000But 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.
00:40:05.000They 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.
00:40:23.000If 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, borders to this point.
00:40:35.000So if you cannot ask yourself, what the hell am I doing now?
00:40:39.000You know, so I don't do this 50 years from now.
00:40:42.000I'm not interested in what that person's got to say.
00:40:45.000You know, I don't think that person is thinking right, you know, and we need more accountability.
00:40:53.000We 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.
00:41:27.000You 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.
00:41:41.000So, 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?
00:41:56.000Which is like an insane amount of growth.
00:41:59.000But that is obviously to do with science.
00:42:18.000So, 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.
00:42:34.000And 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.
00:43:03.000And 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.
00:43:18.000So they wouldn't need all this sort of infrastructure and they could just self-generate using what they had.
00:43:23.000And he built very simple machinery that worked with cows plowing and, you know, water, bicycles, like lots of sort of self-sustaining things.
00:43:34.000And so they were like ideas that you could implement all across India, didn't cost anything and wasn't taxing on fossil fuels to run.
00:44:02.000And so we lived in India that whole time in hiding.
00:44:06.000And 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.
00:44:15.000And my sister actually contracted typhoid and she was going to die.
00:44:20.000So we had a choice of either saving my sister in hospital and leaving or staying there for my dad to finish.
00:44:31.000So my mum moved us back to Sri Lanka to the war zone and got family to help.
00:44:38.000In that time, my dad took the briefcase to the Indian government and he was like, here's what I've done, but now I've got to go and find my wife.
00:44:47.000And the Indian government, Happened to be, this is 1983 or something like that.
00:44:55.000And they turn around and it was the same time that Monsanto and all of these glamorous, beautiful Western companies with technology coming in.
00:45:10.000And so in the office, the Indian government had two briefcases.
00:45:14.000One 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 that's going to give you more product and all of this stuff.
00:45:37.000And obviously the guy in office at the time told my dad to F off.
00:45:47.000He was probably in power for about four years or eight years.
00:45:51.000Then he Fs off, you know, leaving India within 40 years of that happening from 1983 to the minute you're interviewing Madana Shiva, the destruction of Indian agriculture, the dependency on fertilizer in the West, the monetization of their food industry.
00:46:10.000And now, you know, people buying off farmlands and Farmers killing themselves.
00:46:17.000All of this happens and it's happening in my lifetime.
00:46:22.000Like, 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.
00:46:34.000But they said no because the idea wasn't sexy and cool, you know?
00:46:40.000And at the time it was Not a cool thing.
00:46:44.000So my dad was very depressed after that.
00:46:49.000So 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.
00:47:08.000So the leader of the Tamil Tigers bought this information from my dad.
00:47:14.000And 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.
00:47:24.000And that's how they survived from the 80s to 2008.
00:47:28.000From 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, you know, good irrigation systems and were able to generate electricity using a bicycle or whatever, you know, people did that and survived.
00:47:57.000And 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.
00:48:10.000You 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.
00:48:31.000We need to know how many potatoes everyone's eating.
00:48:34.000And 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?
00:48:43.000And it's sort of like, so interesting.
00:48:45.000The creation of dependency and the harvesting of data appear to be fundamental components of this modality.
00:48:54.000You create dependency, you create dependency in areas where people were somewhat independent or interdependent, you create dependency.
00:49:03.000Clearly the that region was not without its struggles around food as I recall in the 1970s there was issues with famine perhaps somewhere like in that region so it's not and I like what you said earlier about how perhaps some of these organizations these vast grand glistening gold briefcased organizations may have come in sincerely with the intention of resolving problems.
00:49:23.000Monsanto we can solve your food crisis with these patented seeds we can bring about solutions.
00:49:30.000But I like that you, whilst weaving in your personal biography, reference the idea that there is a kind of amnesia that we suffer from and that they will not illuminate.
00:49:42.000Though 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 withdraw.
00:49:53.000No, they advance further through new means.
00:50:10.000So 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.
00:50:21.000And he's like a, A clinical psychiatrist.
00:50:26.000And you think, wow, can you fix the madness of what's happening here so it doesn't affect everything on the planet?
00:50:34.000You 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.
00:50:53.000You 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.
00:51:11.000And 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.
00:51:45.000Like, because the whole point of yoga and the whole point of Indian wisdom or Eastern philosophy is to help you.
00:51:53.000So why would anyone stop you using that?
00:51:57.000You know, that it would go against what they're preaching.
00:52:00.000So the whole way that works is that it's there.
00:52:06.000And, you know, you're supposed to... It's not an identity thing.
00:52:15.000Like, 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, because the whole point of their thing is very inclusive.
00:52:25.000It was about the humanity as a whole, and everyone's supposed to spiritually attain a certain thing.
00:52:39.000Whereas I think in the West, we're very used to everything being owned.
00:52:46.000And it's like our thing and we did this and did it.
00:52:50.000And 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?
00:53:01.000And 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?
00:53:13.000And 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?
00:53:47.000When people say CEOs are psychopaths, you know, and being so obsessed with wealth and greed and all of these sort of ideas.
00:54:01.000And 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.
00:54:23.000But now I think these ideas are sort of like, Spreadable, very quickly.
00:54:30.000And they're going to everywhere, or, you know, kids, adults, whoever's got a phone has got this, you know.
00:54:37.000And 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.
00:55:23.000So 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 saying something and when these are being defined, you know, on
00:55:55.000A scale where I don't think they're aware of the planet, but they're only aware of their small group, you know.
00:56:03.000And 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.
00:56:17.000You 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?
00:56:31.000So when you want to do it again, can we have another conversation?
00:56:37.000But, 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.
00:56:59.000And we're going to give you a little credit at the end of this, you know, and points if you have enough cows not doing, you know, releasing methane or whatever, whatever the thing is.
00:57:49.000What do you think, because Elon Musk of course exists in both of these worlds advocating free speech on the platform of Twitter but also advancing through Neuralink and stuff the transhumanism and he's plainly someone who thinks that the solutions are technological but in this instance he's advocating for free speech.
00:58:07.000What do you feel about those potentially conflicting ideas or do you not think that they are conflicting?
00:58:13.000It's a very complicated question because it's new that he's just taken over Twitter But I get it.
00:58:26.000I get technology and being excited about it, and human evolution's probably going to go there.
00:58:36.000It's inevitable that, yes, technology is going to get embraced and da-da-da-da-da.
00:58:41.000But we got here somehow, where we're at the end of something.
00:58:50.000Ooh, something's going to happen if we don't make this new technology.
00:58:53.000You know, we got here somehow and it ain't that great, you know, and it's okay to relax a bit.
00:59:03.000You know, modernization for the sake of modernization is a bit lame, I think.
00:59:09.000And I just don't think that culturally anyone's paused for a second to be like, what is going on?
00:59:19.000I 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 these ideas and then have 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, it's all exciting, you know?
00:59:47.000So 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.
01:00:04.000And within a hundred years ago, if you, if you've blown up the population, you know, times three folds.
01:00:27.000So you can just hit pause, zoom out, look at it to be like, what's going on?
01:00:32.000And 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.
01:00:54.000It was much more local, parochial, tractor, do a bit of ploughing.
01:00:58.000Now 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, that amount of data would now be produced in half an hour.
01:01:15.000So we have this sort of sense that things are getting faster and faster and everything's immersive.
01:01:20.000And like you say that the surface of the planet all patented Everything not what it seems.
01:01:24.000You walk through the green and pleasant lands of England and know that it's all owned elsewhere, that even utilities that have meant to be for the service of the people are owned externally and extraneously, all bolted on to profit motives.
01:01:37.000We are living in a kind of holographic reality in so much as what we look at is not the administrative reality.
01:01:46.000It 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.
01:01:57.000We're seemingly, as a species, simultaneously incredibly ambitious and yet myopic.
01:02:03.000And 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.
01:02:14.000The challenge, I think, for us is how to present that to people who have been trained to extract mythology from the discourse.
01:02:22.000Like, flat rationalism and this dimming that we have discussed is what is considered orderly and ordinary now.
01:02:30.000If you start talking to people about, like, 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, We're only just beginning to understand what consciousness is and what it could be.
01:02:42.000There's a difference between data, intelligence and consciousness, the crucible of it, the source of it.
01:03:03.000We can get beyond the technocratic, bureaucratic limitation.
01:03:08.000But 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 it last year.
01:03:16.000Well, this is why my book is cyclical, and this is cycle one, yeah, of the nine stages happening once, but then it can happen as A hundred times, right?
01:03:27.000And I think that each time you have the power to write that cycle.
01:03:36.000You have the power to make it as optimistic as you want.
01:03:39.000You know, you can make it as technologically advanced as you want, but it The optimism is there because of that.
01:03:51.000It's like, okay, we can start again and rewrite this, you know, and we can dictate where it goes.
01:03:56.000But in order to do that, 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 have done 50 years ago that was wrong.
01:04:13.000You know, like, you just can't have that.
01:04:18.000You need to be able to hold people accountable.
01:04:21.000I'm sorry, but in the last five years, the only person that society has scapegoated as the baddie in the universe is Julian Assange.
01:04:30.000Like, 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?
01:04:40.000You know, the only person who's gone in is Julian Assange for, you know, press freedom, and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, I guess.
01:04:53.000You know, apart from that, no one in the finance industry has been questioned.
01:05:03.000Nobody 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.
01:05:28.000You know, for the first time we're faced with extinction, apparently, from climate change, and we might all be dead in 20 years.
01:05:39.000Yeah, 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.
01:05:57.000There 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 It's interesting that so many crises can be inflicted and yet the most powerful interests in the world remain profitable.
01:06:14.000In a time where there's an energy crisis, energy companies are making a profit.
01:06:18.000In a time where there's a health crisis, pharmaceutical companies are making profit.
01:06:22.000It feels like we are being distracted from the real sights.
01:06:27.000The real location the locus of this problem.
01:06:31.000It's curious to me to Understand where is the power who how is all of this happening?
01:06:42.000It's the machine that's like Deciding we're wrong and we need to be curved So that is 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?
01:06:58.000That job, the job of like being watched 24 seven in the streets of London through every security camera to edit it, whatever.
01:07:07.000Like 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.
01:07:27.000But it's biased because 50% of the news or we've all learned 50% of the information fed into this system is wrong.
01:07:36.000Or that you've just learned this week from Elon Musk saying Twitter did have a part in You know, elections in the U.S., and so if there's manipulation going on, then the information fed into the A.I.
01:07:57.000It cannot be blissful or joyous, because the base and the root and the seed is not blissful and joyous.
01:08:05.000Yes, yes, how can anything beautiful grow from it?
01:08:07.000I sometimes feel that we are trying to create a theological paradigm materially, i.e.
01:08:12.000we have omniscience through perpetual surveillance, we have omnipresence and omnipotence through the gathering of technology and intelligence.
01:08:25.000It's like everything is being externalised, everything is being measured and managed.
01:08:33.000I've had like seven lawsuits to keep the name Omni.
01:08:37.000And I just came up with the name because it's like Omni, right?
01:08:44.000Every 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.
01:08:53.000And they are the people I'm fighting behind the scenes.
01:08:56.000And I haven't been able to put work out on Omni.com.
01:09:00.000Because behind the scenes, I'm in so many patent lawsuits with so many people trying to take it from me.
01:09:12.000So that's why the book is called Omni9 and the website's called Omni.com.
01:09:18.000And, 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 is 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
01:09:58.000The language of whatever that frequency is that we are recreating through science and technology, but the thing that already exists without replication is omnipresent.
01:10:17.000A primer material 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.
01:10:34.000And it requires us not to be continually tethered to stimuli of fear and desire.
01:10:39.000I'm very susceptible to this kind of stimulants, you know, and I've been grown in a culture of individualism and individualistic pursuit.
01:10:49.000And it's only really latterly that I'm awakening from the illusion of self.
01:10:54.000It'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.
01:11:05.000When 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.
01:11:25.000Very, very hard to extricate yourself.
01:11:28.000Very, very difficult to sort of unpick it.
01:11:34.000It's difficult to get cleansed and it's lonely, you know.
01:11:38.000So 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.
01:11:59.000I feel like I've been a bit enchanted and sort of on one.
01:12:03.000I don't often spend time on that because, see, look at all the things.
01:12:06.000I 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.
01:12:18.000How you did the middle finger salute while performing as part of Madonna's Super Bowl halftime.
01:12:23.000You've always been difficult, haven't you?
01:12:25.000You've done nothing but cause trouble.
01:12:27.000You've caused problems on MTV from the get-go.
01:12:31.000You were labelled an anti-vaxxer in 2020 for tweeting, don't panic, you're okay, you're not gonna die.
01:12:36.000I'm not against vaccines, I'm against companies who care more for profit than humans.
01:12:41.000You 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 their most profitable year in their history.
01:12:55.000It's just again this amnesia, again this amnesia.
01:12:57.000We'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.
01:13:11.000Yeah and just saying that data collection is a 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?
01:13:27.000Like you can't even be like, Hey, you know, when you said this like two years ago, I remember it.
01:14:12.000But, you know, obviously it's difficult because that is the other thing of, like, watching people, you know, 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.
01:14:42.000Eventually, you know, with social media, like, we've had to come out and actually just say everything all the time, you know.
01:14:49.000We don't, as artists or writers or, you know, people, even if you take J.K.
01:14:57.000Rowling, 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.
01:15:12.000I feel like as artists we don't have the luxury to just be M.I.A.