This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, my name is Tonya Pinkins, and I'm the host of the podcast You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:07] Tonya Pinkins: This fall, I have a special treat for you.

[0:11] Tonya Pinkins: In honor of my debut feature film RED PILL, Marissa Lynn Daniels Studios has been hosting weekly conversations with my fellow Broadway colleagues and co-host Sierra Renee about the red pilling of America.

[0:26] Tonya Pinkins: These conversations create a safe space for us to talk about the things that are on our mind with an election and a global pandemic.

[0:37] Tonya Pinkins: So join us for the Red Pilling of America, a spotlight series every Saturday at 5 p.m.

[0:45] Tonya Pinkins: Or on the Broadway Podcast Network, You Can't SAY THAT, BPN.fm forward slash YCST.

[0:54] Tonya Pinkins: Join the conversation.

[0:57] Tonya Pinkins: We gotta speak live.

[1:01] Tonya Pinkins: We gotta say what's true for you.

[1:15] Tonya Pinkins: You is kind.

[1:17] Tonya Pinkins: You is smart.

[1:18] Tonya Pinkins: You is important, you is dead.

[1:22] Tonya Pinkins: Tonya Pinkins' horror film RED PILL brings African American perspective to the progressive movement.

[1:30] Tonya Pinkins: We are a majority in this country.

[1:33] Tonya Pinkins: And we're gonna win the election.

[1:39] Tonya Pinkins: Do you know what the red pill is?

[1:41] Tonya Pinkins: A red pill is someone who infiltrates a group and then destroys them from the inside.

[1:50] Tonya Pinkins: This place is spooky.

[1:51] Tonya Pinkins: Some people like to live dangerously.

[1:54] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, why are you so jumpy tonight?

[1:57] Tonya Pinkins: You know what, guys? I'm gonna go back tomorrow.

[2:00] Tonya Pinkins: Did you hear about the creature woman that attacked a father and son hunting down here?

[2:04] Tonya Pinkins: I don't see the case.

[2:06] Tonya Pinkins: This place creeps me out.

[2:11] Tonya Pinkins: I think we should call the sheriff's office.

[2:28] Tonya Pinkins: The only people missing or dead are brown people.

[2:34] Tonya Pinkins: They're after all of us.

[2:38] Tonya Pinkins: What do we do, Amelia?

[2:40] Tonya Pinkins: We die.

[2:42] Tonya Pinkins: But we take some of them with us.

[2:47] Tonya Pinkins: So I just learned about Clubhouse four days ago.

[2:50] Tonya Pinkins: I was just telling Marissa about it, and I opened a room so that other people who may be somewhere in the world can hear us as well.

[2:57] Tonya Pinkins: Because there's no recording there.

[2:59] Tonya Pinkins: It's just a live room, and people can come in and hear it.

[3:01] Tonya Pinkins: So never done it before.

[3:02] Tonya Pinkins: I'm a burgeon.

[3:05] Tonya Pinkins: So we're gonna that sounds perfect.

[3:07] Tonya Pinkins: I like that.

[3:09] Tonya Pinkins: I spent one night till like three in the morning.

[3:11] Tonya Pinkins: I was in a room called Talk Nerdy to me.

[3:14] Tonya Pinkins: And it was all these AI and gamers and neuroscientists talking about things way over my head, but it was fascinating because you can just listen, or you can ask, raise your hand and ask to participate, but you can also just listen in, and then there's like a button for leaving quietly, but there's no texting, or it's just conversation, and you can so like we're about to have a conversation.

[3:38] Tonya Pinkins: So your book, SAND TALK, it changed my brain very early in the process.

[3:47] Tonya Pinkins: Someone was telling me a story, a linear story, and I suddenly started seeing it in a new way.

[3:54] Tonya Pinkins: I don't know what you're doing, but it changed my brain and just made it possible for me to I don't know, and the and that languaging that you call pattern brain, I realized that that was a more comfortable way for me to talk about something I experience, which is a kind of I can't sometimes quote know things like this movie RED PILL, which is what inspired these talks, is that I would know things, and when I would tell them about things, people just treat me with contempt, and I knew how this political thing was gonna go down this fall, and I made a movie about it because people just treated me so contemptuously for even having the idea, and I thought, oh, that's really pattern mine.

[4:45] Tonya Pinkins: I'm not seeing a future or predicting anything, I'm just seeing the patterns that are very obvious to me.

[4:53] Tonya Pinkins: So I would love you to talk more about that because it's just it's just not magic, is it?

[4:58] Tonya Pinkins: It's like I wake up this morning and I see Charlie Pride has passed away.

[5:06] Tonya Pinkins: And I know that by the end of next week I'm gonna have to be eating starch again.

[5:11] Tonya Pinkins: And it's like, well, how do those two things connect?

[5:14] Tonya Pinkins: Well, those things connect because Charlie Pride is really big over here in the Aboriginal community, like all over Australia.

[5:24] Tonya Pinkins: But particularly, you know, in a lot of the remote communities where I have really strong relations and family and all that sort of thing, that's gonna go, that's gonna really, that's gonna oh my goodness like I just I don't want to pick up my phone because I don't want to like people are gonna be really really upset.

[5:46] Tonya Pinkins: So that's so your local Aboriginal radio stations, they're pretty much three quarters of all the music is just Charlie Pride because for some reason everybody likes country music except me, but particularly Charlie Pride.

[6:00] Tonya Pinkins: That's like the cornerstone of everything.

[6:02] Tonya Pinkins: There's even informal rules that between the hours of such and such and such and such, you can only have Charlie Pride.

[6:08] Tonya Pinkins: So there's gonna be a lot of group, people are gonna want to drink.

[6:13] Tonya Pinkins: And so there'll be people who will probably, you know, have like a wake.

[6:21] Tonya Pinkins: There's gonna be lots of wakes for Charlie Pride, and that's not gonna affect me immediately.

[6:29] Tonya Pinkins: But by next week, when people have run out of money for, you know, because they had to have that wake, there's not enough money.

[6:37] Tonya Pinkins: They're gonna run out of money for, you know, food and nappies for the babies and stuff like that, and then they're all gonna call me, and I know that next week it's gonna cost me at least $500 just in nappies, and I'm not gonna be able to eat protein for the next month.

[6:56] Tonya Pinkins: I'm gonna have to start eating noodles and rice again, you know, which is gonna affect my performance.

[7:03] Tonya Pinkins: And it's so it's, you know, it's Charlie Pride is gonna ruin my bowel movements for the next two months.

[7:10] Tonya Pinkins: Anyway, I get it, I get it.

[7:14] Tonya Pinkins: But that's my selfish pattern.

[7:16] Tonya Pinkins: That's if I just look at my life.

[7:19] Tonya Pinkins: But I guess the book isn't about that.

[7:21] Tonya Pinkins: That's about turning around the other way and looking out at the world.

[7:24] Tonya Pinkins: Not just looking inwards at the subjective and local, but turning that gaze out and seeing what falls out of it.

[7:31] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, and I guess like you when I first because it was like God nearly a couple of years ago now, put the book out and when it was getting published, you know, the reaction from a lot of people was, oh yeah, Tyson, I don't think things are that bad.

[7:47] Tonya Pinkins: You know, it's I think you've gone, you know, the sky's falling, you're a bit chicken little.

[7:52] Tonya Pinkins: I think you're overestimating the extent of the crisis in the world, you know, human ingenuity will be fine.

[7:59] Tonya Pinkins: Not that many sold, and then all of a sudden the world's on fire, and everybody's like grabbing that book and reading it and going, Wow, this gives us hope.

[8:11] Tonya Pinkins: So it's gone so far the other way.

[8:13] Tonya Pinkins: You know, what people thought was pessimism before, they think it's optimism now.

[8:18] Tonya Pinkins: And I guess like you, you know, you suddenly come off like a genius, but it's really just everybody knows this stuff.

[8:25] Tonya Pinkins: Well, it's available for them to see, they just don't want to see it or they don't want to face it as a possibility.

[8:32] Tonya Pinkins: I was particularly taken with your whole concept that here in these what we you call domesticated cultures, that we get to pretend we're nonviolent and we're so holier than thou and sit in judgment, but that we export our violence and that our violence is evidenced in our phones and our, you know, that we our seafood, our gas.

[8:56] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah.

[8:58] Tyson Yunkaporta: Well, it's yeah.

[9:00] Tyson Yunkaporta: I mean I don't know if it's evidenced in it, but yeah, I know what you're saying.

[9:05] Tyson Yunkaporta: It's just there, it's in these little safe, you know, anywhere where you're not experiencing sort of violence, you know, in the world as it is, it's a world that's really set up on violence and a very violent system.

[9:19] Tyson Yunkaporta: If you're not experiencing it, then you're certainly benefiting from it.

[9:25] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, but basically that's about that's what civilizations do.

[9:31] Tyson Yunkaporta: They like outsource their entropy, so their decay that they outsource that to other places, you know, violence, incredible violence has to be done in order to confer this much privilege.

[9:44] Tyson Yunkaporta: And then they send that out elsewhere, and people grow people they even now covet, you see people going, you know, oh yeah, we're all I hear it all the time.

[9:56] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, humans right now, we're all just in our rooms on our laptops, and we're we're having to work from home.

[10:07] Tyson Yunkaporta: That's the tiniest percentage of the population of the world are doing that, you know.

[10:13] Tyson Yunkaporta: And um, you know, so you've got people, you know, doing coaching uh and stuff like that. And um, you know, the people like you know, Jordan Peterson and all those are getting up there and and making millions of dollars by cleaning, telling people to clean their room. Like, wow, what an idea. Like, um, you get your life together, just clean your room, start with that, eh? And then um, yeah, but it it's this assumption that everyone has their own room. I've never had my own room, like I I don't know what that would be like to have my own room, you know. Um yeah. I mean, I've got I wake up this morning, there's bloody 12, 13 people in my house. Tomorrow there'll be five. It's you know, these things uh shift around, but you certainly don't get to have your own room, like most of the people on the planet.

So it's these little bubbles, and and I don't know, privilege is probably not the right word. It just it kind of makes it sound like I don't know, it's not it's not the right word for what it is. Well, I consider that it's not just privilege, it's a it's a grand sort of theft, and this just this invisibility of these little these little safe uh havens that are not very safe, like they're they're gonna burn soon, right? Yeah, my quote uh the word privilege like becomes this dual-edged sword, because for me it was a privilege to grow up with five generations under one roof, yeah. And I knew you know, I saw birth and death in under my roof, and so there's a a way of being and a connection to before me and beyond me that my own children don't have.

Yeah, that's it. Look, I and and you try to put your finger on it, and there's lots of I guess in in sort of aboriginal ways of looking um uh sort of looking at the world and and doing inquiry into things, is that when new knowledge comes in, you you've got to get to the foundational story of that new knowledge. Like you really look deeply at that, and where is that coming from? So, what's the story for this? And then that has to sort of come in, you know, ritually through everything that you do, and you work with that and figure it out, and then you go from there. And I guess um, I don't know. I think the foundational story of this thing, we're we're calling privilege is a um, it's a it's a wrong definition of of belonging, and and because so that affects all your relations, your relationship with people, uh, particularly with the people you fuck, and and but but with the relationship with every single human and non-human entity in the world, because belonging in this weird Anglosphere culture that's all over the world, belonging means um owning something, so there's an ownership to that.

So even with your most closest, your closest intimate partner, that's about even that at the deepest and tenderest feelings in you, that is about ownership. So you you that person belongs to you, but that when we say this in my culture, when we say, you know, belonging, who do you belong to, or like you know, I belong to her, or you know, um, so I'll say, like, uh, I say all the time, like, oh, my woman, such and such, you know, that's that's that's my woman, and and people like they recoil, like you can't say that. That's like you misogynist, you know, you think you own that woman. And I'm like, no, no, no, like that's that's my woman, and you know, and if I say she if she belongs to me, then that's that doesn't mean I own her, although we use the word own with the same thing.

That means that we're in relation, and that means I can't do anything, you know, without it lining up with her first. You know, it has to go through a filter of us two, the two of us. So we belong, we belong together, we're a pair, that's the central pair of my life, and uh, and that's who I am because who you are and all your knowledge is is not in you, it's in your relationships, you know, with other people, but also particularly with place. We places are sentient, so you're in relation to them, and that knowledge sits in that relation, but then all the human and non-human things all around you. So, this idea of belonging, that's a human idea, that's not unique to Aboriginal culture. That's how we're supposed to all be, you know, but it's this silly sort of uh tinkered system that's been placed on the top, you know, for a few people to think that they're greater than everyone else, you know.

This this other system's been placed on top, and we all have to live by it, even in our intimate relations. We have to think that belonging means um owning, holding, keeping, trapping something. I I've always known in an intuitive way that trees and rocks are sentient beings, like rocks are in a different time way than we are, they move, they travel, they I just known that, and I have tree families all over the world. I can come into a town at midnight and it's pitch black, and I will be like, my family's over there, I've got to go and find so I was deeply um, and I've also felt like you know, if there's a devil, it's God's devil. So when you talked about um the greatest sin or the devil or Lucifer being the belief that you are above anything, that struck me very strongly because um I j I I don't feel like it's a sinful thing for me to look at anyone anywhere and feel like they're but the grace of you know this goddess universe, go I. I could be anything that anyone is, I could be it.

And I I walk in my life that way, so it was a resonant thing because that's not I live in New York City, so you know that is not a philosophy of New York City. It's it's funny, isn't it? Um see we we kind of accept we accept this system. Uh we accept a system of structural inequality, uh, because we we hope that we might climb within that. You know, that we might because we all all of us have swallowed that not red pill. You know, we've swallowed that pill of, yeah, I'm I I think I'm, you know, I'm greater than I'm better than other people. I I I wish everybody knew this. If people could just see, you know, how great I am. And so we, you know, we think, ah, so so we let them do this to us. We let them do it to us because we know that we might have a chance to do the same. And so off we go. And I guess as we go through the conversation, I wouldn't mind talking about like what structural inequality really is.

[17:35] Tonya Pinkins: Tell us.

[17:36] Tyson Yunkaporta: Because I don't think most of the left even understands what the hell they're talking about when they say structural inequality. What is it?

[17:44] Tyson Yunkaporta: Oh, what now? Ah, so okay, it's not okay, like racism, prejudice, all this stuff, that's not something that's inside of us. Like I said before, knowledge is is in our relations, you know, outside of us anyway. There's not much inside you at all. There's certainly not evil in there, you know. Um so all this uh prejudice, racism, etc. We keep thinking that it's a problem of a few bad apples, that there's just there's these racists out there, and if we could just get rid of them, or if we could just re-educate them, then that that inequality would go away. And so, even when we talk about systemic equality, we talk about it in terms of well, there are people in positions of power, there are people in powerful positions, you know, all the way through the administration of this nation, and um, and that's what makes structural inequality.

No, it's not. Well, what is it? So, racism is just an a function of uh growth-based economy. Okay, so if you have a growth-based economy, like just read the first chapter of any economics handbook, and you'll go, oh, okay, I see it. You know, so basically, nothing in a growth-based economy can have a price unless it's limitable and excludable. So you have to be able to make sure that that what you're selling can't be abundant, it's got to be scarce, so you have to limit it, and you have to be able to exclude some people from having it, because then it will have value to the other people who are greater than that. So you need at least 50% of your people of your population at any time to be in lower castes.

And it doesn't really matter who they are, but it might make it easier to police that and keep them there if you pick you know ones that all have one arbitrary characteristic or something. You know. And basically, that's all it is. You need basically it's it's it's the law of supply and demand. And you've heard of that, right?

[19:52] Tonya Pinkins: I have heard a little bit about the law of supply and demand.

[19:56] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, and you you you must keep hearing about this GDP that that has to keep growing every year, forever, otherwise the entire economy will collapse. Yeah, but there it's GDP. If the GDP stops growing, it's a recession. If it goes backwards, it's a depression. You know, basically the way that works is that you there has to be more demand than supply in order for the economy to grow.

[20:20] Tyson Yunkaporta: You've got to have more demand than supply. So that means there needs to be there has to be more people needing shit than there are people getting shit. So there's only so much shit that you can make, and there's so many people, but and there has to be quite a lot of them missing out on it in order for any of that to have value. But what about some of the economy to grow? What about some of the artists now who are starting to give away their product? Like artists are starting to like here, I'm giving it away. How does that appear?

[20:49] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, well that's the economy. Well, I think um I hope that goes everywhere. That's a huge revolution. Because it's funny, there's two things taken um that really make all this system work. Um, one of them's art, and strangely enough, because art, I mean, for a start, you look at any indigenous language, you won't find a word for art. You know, art doesn't exist as a separate thing. That's what we do. That's how we make meaning in the world. That's how we that's how we make knowledge, that's how we express, that's how we connect with spirit every day of our lives. Every single one of us is a genius artist.

[21:30] Tyson Yunkaporta: But you know what I said about limitability and excludability? Yeah, no, you have to like shame everybody and make sure that everyone's policing each other and telling each other don't give up your day job if they try and draw a nice picture, you know. You're not an artist. No, that's that's special people. So they we choose oh my god, they're screaming out there. Um they choose they choose a few people to elevate and go, well, these are the artists, and they pay them heaps of money, and then they have a few stragglers like who are hoping to climb that ladder, and you know, and then we've all got to worship these ones at the top of the pyramid making the art.

[22:10] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, stuff that basically what it's for is that create art is capital for rich people. Exactly, and it's a fake. Yeah, and the margins, and and that there's nothing creative about centers of privilege. So, you know, where where all the wealth goes, those people can't create anything because they've got nothing, they're not in the world, they're not in struggle, they're not in life. So you gotta go to the margins and either steal from people at the margins, you know, you know, or you've got to, you know, elevate a couple of individuals from the margins in order to have anything coming through.

[22:45] Tyson Yunkaporta: So most of the fashion in the world comes from you know, African Americans. You know what I mean? Like that's what drives the fashion industry. It's all basically plundered knowledge, you know, from people who have very innovative ways of adorning themselves because they're they're just living in you know horror every day. So you got to be creative, you know. People at the center can't create those things. So all art, etc. It comes and all creativity comes from the margins. Um basically that becomes capital, you know, for the for the rich, and capital's the key because then you come to the other thing that makes the whole thing work, which is land.

[23:26] Tyson Yunkaporta: So two-thirds of the capital in the world is land, and it hasn't always been thus, you know. Mortgages were only invented a relatively short period of time ago, and they were invented as a legal trick to to get uh land off Indians on your big island over there. You know, it was invented as a legal trick to do that, and it worked so well they decided to just survey every inch of the planet and bring everyone under that. So you have uh land is no longer land, land is something that you can borrow against and enclose and that can be foreclosed against, and you hold it and it's capital, and you can borrow into infinity against that if you hold it, yeah.

[24:08] Tyson Yunkaporta: But in order to do that and enclose it, you have to remove the people from the land, and that's only been happening for a couple of centuries. All the people have to be removed from the land. A hundred years ago, most of the people on the planet were still living on the land. That was only a hundred years ago, and this idea of nations that was only invented a century ago. So they had to pull everybody off the land and put everybody into these urban or rural town kind of environments, um metropolitan environments, and remove them from the land.

[24:40] Tyson Yunkaporta: And the land is what gives you your art, it what it's what gives you your meaning, it's what gives you your shelter, it's what gives you your food, your sustenance, everything. It gives you that for free. But they've enclosed that and turned it into capital for the basis of this financial system. So we can't have access to that. If we want to have access to the things we used to get from the land for free, you know. If we want to have that, then we have to sell a third of our life to um you know state and corporate. It's the the state and the economy is what provides the things for us now that land used to give us for free.

[25:17] Tyson Yunkaporta: But you gotta sell a third of your life, your your work, your labor, in order to get that. In order to get back to what was given to you by for free, exactly, and in a really bad form, you know. Like, you know, starch is not a good thing to eat too much of, and that's pretty much all most of us can afford is a lot of starch. So we get a pale shadow of what the land used to give us for free, and we're all locked up, we're all like just feedlot pigs, and we need to get out.

[25:49] Tonya Pinkins: I love what you said about art as something that we do. That was something I experienced when I was in Bali, and I I noticed that the people, the way they made a bag for the to carry the thing you bought away, like everything they made was a piece of art. Art was what they breathed, and they didn't even put a value on it, it was just how they did things.

[26:11] Tonya Pinkins: So you'd go into stores and there wouldn't be prices because it's like, well, whatever you think it's worth, because I was gonna do it this good anyway. That's it. Great. Yeah, and I'll be making another one tomorrow. Because that's what I do, you know.

[26:27] Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, and then so that that doesn't work in a market because we have to make it exclusive. We you got only four of these because we want to sell it for a million dollars.

[26:37] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[26:37] Tyson Yunkaporta: You can't keep on living your life and doing what you just do naturally because we've now turned your life into a commodity. Well, if you look at um, say you look at weaving in Indonesia and you look at weaving just you know, a few hundred Ks away, kilometers away, you know, weaving in an Aboriginal community.

[26:55] Tyson Yunkaporta: If you uh if you went to Indonesia and you killed 95% of all the people there, and there was so there was only a few hundred weavers left, then that would be worth something. Because everything they weaved would be so so scarce.

[27:14] Tyson Yunkaporta: It would be rare and exclusive, and once it's rare and exclusive, you're okay. So, you know, you go a few hundred kilometers away to where people are doing the same thing in the north of Australia, um, and kind of a lot of times very similar styles with the weaving and making baskets. That basket um is worth quite a bit, you know, you're gonna pay a hundred dollars for that basket um from an Aboriginal community, you know, because it's rare.

[27:43] Tyson Yunkaporta: It it's very rare. But if you go to Indonesia, you know, there must be a million of those being produced today over there. So, yeah, um, they they they're the same quality of basket, but one of them's worth 50 cents and one of them's worth a hundred dollars. But it's worth that based on this this growth-based economy, which requires this invention of some.

[28:06] Tyson Yunkaporta: It requires that things must be scarce and rare. It requires that you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Right. In order in order for that golden egg to be worth anything.

[28:14] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[28:19] Tyson Yunkaporta: It's a terrible thing. So and that's why I mean, you know, you can't have you can't have a prison industrial complex in place that that's grounded in that growth-based economy, and then and just somehow tweak that and make it fairer. You can't just put pre you can't just go, oh well, oh, black lives matter because I've got that bumper sticker, you know.

[28:44] Tyson Yunkaporta: Oh Amazon's putting Black Lives Matter poster up on its wall there. Um that's that's all right now, that's gonna be fair. Uh, we're gonna make sure that you know, you know, everybody has equal access to this and that, and we're gonna feel better about it. But it's just um, you know, you can't have equality in in a growth-based economic system.

[29:04] Tyson Yunkaporta: So how you can't tweak it, you can't tweak it all. Okay, if you want to be so basically, um, so if I don't know, let's say my community, if we wanted to be equal with the rest of the Australian community, we'd have to import um a group of people from somewhere else and put them beneath us, and they would have to take our place, then we could go up.

[29:30] Tyson Yunkaporta: Um I don't know, if you you try try putting all this stuff on a bell curve and tweak the stats as much as you can, and you'll find that you can't close those gaps statistically, mathematically, in any other way. It doesn't work in this in this system of metrics that we have, the maths doesn't work.

[29:47] Tyson Yunkaporta: So, what are we for equality? So you you have to end growth, basically, you have to end the idea of growth-based economies and go to a a different, a completely different economic system if you want people to be equal. You can't make a dog a vegan.

[30:10] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, I'm Tonya Pinkins, and I would love to hear from you. You can text me at 917-724-8998. Tell me what you're up to, and I'll let you know what I'm up to. Text me 917-724-8998. Let's keep in touch.