Vandana Shiva: Bill Gates’s Book Is Rubbish!

vandana shiva the indian scholar and activist ain't shy when it comes to digging out and heavily criticizing bill gates is she in my conversation with her on my luminary podcast under the skin we talked about the impact and power that bill gates and other tech giants have and the negative impact it's had on indian agriculture and farming in general and vandana shiva was very clear in her opinion this is a new wave of colonization every bit as potent and as destructive as the previous one that created the great or vast european empires in this brilliant conversation vandana shiva talks about bill gates's power the power that we have as the citizens of earth the subjects of earth the inhabitants of earth the uh what do we want to call ourselves the custodians of earth it's a very very beautiful conversation from an incredibly powerful human being and a true leader in the necessary movement to reverse the dreadful actions that are currently taking place that are preventing us having access to our birthright and living in harmony with the planet and one another check it out and russell i think you'll have to do a lot of work in the next few years because they're going to do a lot of colonization in the name of sustainability just by chance i was reading the rubbish in bill gates new book i i normally don't read rubbish but when they want to be rulers through rubbish i read it and it's lovely because he says the greenhouse gases from factory farms are not because of factory farms and putting animals in prisons but it's because the cows were the problem they had four stomachs and the four stomachs make them a methane say no you walk behind a good cow on a grazing pasture she's not stinking goes even further talk colonization he has put the indian plow that has existed for 10 000 years and says this primitive technology must go i call this as the future technology of a partnership between our bodies the body of the earth and the body of the animals realizing that we are not masters but we are there to serve through what gandhi called bread labor the labor of our body in the service of the earth in the service of community so we are for sure at an epic moment where everything wrong is being given a new life just at the time when the world was waking up and say oh you know this dissection doesn't work lack of faith doesn't work desacralization doesn't work that's precisely when everything is being crushed again and i think this is happening russell because of us arrogance that we have create created such immunity for ourselves we've destroyed every international law we've destroyed all democracy we have locked people into fear we no one can hold us to account i mean look at the debate right now on the gmo question in europe where we created laws on gmo regulation and they want to knock it down and bill gates again is financing the lobbies for that deregulation so there is an arrogance i can't be touched and you know the british empire had that arrogance the sun never sets on the british empire and it said i think if we if we realize that we live in a power powerful world full of energy and that energy is a creative energy of the universe and upper is the spiritual power of aligning ourselves which we call rita and the right action you know that's what dharma is aligning yourself with that power then we are very powerful and these people who think they are beyond all accountability can be brought to account we just have to ensure that none of us allow our ego to overtake us none of us allow hate and division to become the way we start to think and third none of us ever give up the power we have we are powerful beings in a powerful world i like the thing you said about um the sort of the uh the arrogance you know the um of the the uh colonial arrogance and just the perhaps unconscious phrasing of the sun never setting on the british empire and the indication the syntactic indication of an unawareness of shadow an awareness of shadow an awareness of in hered darkness i i wondered too vanda if um when you're saying that i think about the unaccountability of bill gates and how that kind of mimics this kind of monotheistic authoritative deity a kind of a deity that asserts power and dominion how this motif is recurrent historically i'm i wonder if in a a with a a a theology with a different origins such as the pantheonistic ideas in vedas and maharabata if there are you find tech um ideals that mobilize for example divine feminine power or spiritual principles that are plainly neglected in this um materialistic ideology well i think the first very important gift of the vedas is to recognize that the universe is divine the smallest grass the tiniest privilege is an expression of the divine and that's why it's not an accident you know we hold our rivers a sacred except that now with industrialism where an urbanization we are polluting them um our trees are tulsi the seeds and can you imagine this is so touching to me when i go to the villages women will do sacred ceremonies with indigenous seed they will never use a hybrid seed for a sacred ceremony for sacred ceremony with animals they will only use the indigenous cows with the hum they will never use a jersey cow it's quite amazing no one told them but they have that understanding of integrity and what the sacred means it means to treat without violation yeah to hold the integrity so we live in a divine universe and the energy of this universe is a divine feminine yeah shakti we call her shakti and nature prakrti is her first action and that's why even though we have you know we've said maya maya as play but not maya as an illusion maya as play when you realize you're in a sacred universe but the part that has always been a very very powerful idea from the opnisha it's from the ishopnisha and this openation the first parish says we live in a sacred universe which is for the well-being of all enjoy her gifts without greed taking more than your share is theft so they have defined as theft taking more than your share which is why india for 10 000 years lived a very high level of living without taking from anyone else but it wasn't just as a civilization each individual and we never adopted anthropocentrism because we had all these antidotes that we are part of a web of life we are part of one earth family and i'm very you know it's that thinking and where did i get it i didn't begin with the texts russell i began with my life in the villages where ordinary women were practicing this so my question is saying this let me go read a text i went to the text following the practice of very ordinary people that's why when people say oh it is now a consumerist culture i said you're looking at a thin slice of consumerism there's an ocean out there that is only surviving because they're spiritual beings you know millions had to go home on the day of the lockdown of the corona you might have seen the march of the migrant workers they could not have walked a thousand miles without a deep deep resolve within them and a deep sense of their inner resources and they and not giving up hope otherwise they'd be committing suicide in the city they did not commit to suicide they walked with babies in their arms i think the other part that for me is extremely important because see part of the dualisms that have been created are the idea that there's spirituality and there's materialism right but india and our thinking and our vedas and our opnishas have constantly sacralized the material world so because i work on food now over the last 36 years not through choice you know i did my phd on non-separability in quantum theory and it's 84 and punjab and bhopal that made me look at agriculture why were we practicing agriculture in a way that kills thousands in gopal and 30 000 people in punjab where does this violence come from and i wrote the violence of the green revolution and since then i've been going deeper and deeper into the food question and i just want to share two or three of the really inspiring parts of a sacred relationship with food which is what they want to break right now it's been broken partly with industrialism but now with the digitalization they would like to end it forever and that's where we can recover it so the first is everything is food everything is food in the vedas and if you think of it ecologically what is the nutrition cycle but the movement of food so everything is food yeah an ecological cycle is the movement of food and that's why i call food the currency of life second the highest duty is to grow and give good food in abundance it's your dharma it has been put into a dharmic text into the mahabharata into the uh operation and the worst sin is to let someone go hungry in your neighborhood not grow good food and worse sell bad food so we've got to bring to the center of our everyday life the rituals that make life sacred our breath you know why is pranayama so important why is breath so important because breath is what connects us to the world water connects us to the world food connects us to the world these are not fuels you know yeah food as a fuel for a machine that's they call the body you know this cartesian construct has so outlived this time and the digital barons are trying to give it a little longer life you know they're putting their foot on the accelerator say go more cartesian and we have to say no go more spiritual go more interconnected go more celebrate free through the abundance we can create excuse me well i because i actually found the conversation very very um moving in ways that i didn't in ways i didn't anticipate do you feel and is this even a kind of is even this critique um if not reducted reductive somewhat abstract to a um a separate philosophical narrative i hear um do you feel that there is you have a somewhat uh russoian regard for pre-colonial india which surely must have been beset with its own forms of feudalism and the caste system uh for example like and if you feel that india that's only experienced this form of colonization relatively recently and is suffering so radically what hope is there for new world companies and uh old nations you know old white european nations um if if it is so deeply if these ideas are so deeply embedded and the extraction of the sacred so um endemic and historic or do you feel that like you said our species is young and these cultural differences are therefore all quite recent and perhaps the reversal and reawakening and re-engaging of these sacred principles might be possible at a kind of comparable consistent and um you know in tandem you know like is it possible that such different cultures with seemingly different challenges can have commensurate goals and can form alliances in support of one another from what ideological template are we to draw for what archetypes are we doing engage and other distinctions and yes do you what do you say about my the earlier part of the question about like uh pre-colonial india and uh some of the ideals and presumably contradictions that were present if you enjoyed that video then you should have a look at the rest of my conversation with vandana shiva it's on luminary which is 2.99 a month which i know is money but it's worth it coming up we've got edward snowden on the show we've got uh jordan peterson who else glenn greenwald on the show bill gates is coming on i'm joking bill gates ain't coming on but it's a great podcast under the skin on luminary subscribe link in the description thank you well i hope you enjoyed that conversation if you want to hear the rest of it and believe me it's really worth it go join me over at luminary now for the rest of our discussion and for all the latest episodes of under the skin and my brand new meditation podcast above the noise go to lumerypodcast.com to start your free trial and for as little as 299 per month you could be uh listening to all this content we do a podca we're going to do two podcasts a week for the foreseeable future we're just looking at a vast limitless expansive podcast god willing thank you

Channel: Russell Brand

Views: 604,223

Rating: 4.9114738 out of 5

Keywords: Russell Brand, Brand Russell, BrandThe, Russell Brand video, Russell Brand news, Russell Brand politics, News, Brand, politics, Russell, vandana shiva, russell brand vandana shiva, russell brand podcast, russel brand, under the skin russell brand, under the skin, under the skin podcast, vandana shiva interview, vandana shiva podcast, bill gates, davos, the great reset

Id: 3_8owv2dtP0

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FungiForTheFuture]

SS: Vandana Shiva - An Indian activist/leader, talks about how the rich are destroying the things that actually are our only hope to avoid collapse, under the guise of philanthropy and technohopium.

[u/Shabd4]

What about the comments in this thread? Bots?

To others, please listen to what Vandana Shiva is saying. I also recommend other interviews on youtube. It's intelligent first class criticism of western culture and the industrial world. NOT hopium-filled and definitely suitable for collapse community.

[u/ilikecchiv]

Russell Brand poster lol, memes on Friday mate

[u/oldagecynicism]

I love them both, but I'm shocked "Get him to the Greek" was a documentary.