The Highwire with Del Bigtree - PLANDEMIC THE MUSICAL’S DYNAMIC DUO

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Director, Mikki Willis, and musician, DPAK, join Del with details on the latest installment of the ‘Plandemic Series’, ‘Plandemic: The Musical’. Hear how the filmmaker and musician became collaborators and how their inspirational work has become a perfect union.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We've talked about Mickey Willis and Plandemic, the musical. They had a huge screening in Las Vegas having screenings all around the country. They're winning awards. But what is it like to be a part of watching it and seeing it? Take a look at this. So for freedom, everybody, let's all make some noise out there for yourself. So being here to Planned Demic musical screening. The message in this film is so important.

It just gives you so much joy and so much relief. I loved it. I found it, very uplifted. The movie brought tears some eyes. I just can't wait to share it with everybody. Absolutely epic. Now we've come, we've always been free. And we just be.

It's all inside, shot to lie and sing it. And the free will be. No, he's one of the greatest filmmakers on the planet today, but great filmmakers are made great because the people they surround themselves with. And today, Mickey Willis joins me with his secret weapon to Plandemic Deepak. Welcome to the Highwire.

Hey, how you doing? Good to be here. Good to see you, Mickey. Good to see you, though. Always a pleasure. You are, I haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen this long version. I have my little cameo. I can't wait.

It's coming up. First of all, it's just dates. Austin, is it, is the next screening? The next one is actually in Los Angeles at the Directors Guild of America as part of the Malibu Film Festival. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, and then next month.

All right, and what's that? What's the dates in Austin? So, Austin is June 15th. and Malibu Film Festival is the 25th, so we're leaving tomorrow. All right, fantastic. Okay, Deepak, first of all, how did you guys connect? Well, I think we're looking at about 15 years ago, 14 years ago or something like that. We lived in a...

15 or 16, yeah. Yeah, we lived in a big community house. We had a live-work environment with our entire production company in Ohio, California. And we would have amazing events every single weekend, musicians and speakers on the property. and Deepak graced us with his presence one time and fell in love with him and his gift for music. And so we've been wanting to collaborate for a number of years, and this is our first official, real deep collaboration.

And, man, what an incredible experience it was. Absolutely. What's your background? How did you get into music? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I started out growing up learning music. You know, as a very young kid, I was listening to Michael Jackson and trying to always copy sounds and bands that I liked and had violin lessons when I was very young, but it was sort of like the ADD Rebellious kid.

kid and became more of a street musician playing by ear. But I went to school for pre-men and pre-law, but the whole time I had bands, I was singing a cappella groups, and, you know, I was following the Indian path of being either a doctor or a lawyer, engineer, or some kind of scientist. But once I graduated, my parents were happy, and I branched off and came to Los Angeles to be an artist. Is they still happy? You got a degree?

What are you doing with your life? Well, I mean, the first couple years, they might have been a little bit, hey, what's going on? This isn't our normal path. Probably just because they came first generation, the security was, like, kind of a main value. But I think when they started seeing successes coming through, I was doing gigs with Rihanna, NDIRI, you know, I was on Modern Family as a co-star, things like that started coming through and, you know, they were getting validation from, you know, a lot of it's about also,

what are the other family I'm going to say? Like, hey, our kids at Harvard, our kids here. And they started getting calls from like aunts and uncles and cousins that were like, hey, we just saw Deepak on Modern Family or on Cadillac commercial. And so they're like, oh, okay, we're getting validation with this crazy path. All right, we're down, we're down. They're very proud now. I got to meet there in our Vegas showing and they're there. little tiny sweetest people you ever made and they stood there looking at their son and it was it was beautiful to see how proud they were you know I feel like I'm a little part of this we were having a party at our house you oh yeah where I met you yeah yeah you pulled out a guitar

and it just like you know there's a lot of people that like will like pull out and jam like campfire music but there's something different when someone pulls out a guitar and like just like I mean neighbors are like what is going on in here just really captivated and we were talking about being the middle of this pandemic. This is insane what's going on and what we're, you know, going through. So four years ago, Thanksgiving, Del had a Thanksgiving gathering at his house and a group of probably 50 of us or so in total. We're all together. And Del always has really great wine. And so I will admit we had a little bit too much of that. He pulls out his guitar and we start singing songs just to make light of the situation that everyone was going through

such torture at the time, you know, being separated from their families and all of the confusion. So we started singing songs, comical songs, making up names, you know, reversing the names. We had Phantany, Fianthi, Alchie, Gilbates. Yeah, exactly. So we're making up parody songs. And then someone said behind us when we were singing probably way too loud and probably irritated the rest of the party. I apologize for that, whoever was there. They said, wow, this would make a great Broadway musical.

Right. And I stopped and I looked around and I said, A musical, we're going to do it. And everyone laughed and my wife, who knows me, goes, I know that look, he's not joking. So here we are. So at the heart of it, I mean, look, you've done this series of pandemic movies. You've really been going after the establishment.

But it's risky musician to get involved with someone that's sort of speaking the truth that way. Was this sort of perspective that Mickey has new to you? Not at all. I mean, I've always been curious. As a young kid, I always thought there was weird stuff going on, just even in high school, middle school, questioning things, staring at the dollar bill and, you know, using magnifying glasses on a personal check. And, you know, if you guys don't know, if you look at the personal check on the signature line,

that's not a line. Those are words. And little, you know, it says authorized signature. And little weird clues like that led me down a path of curiosity and discovery of to, oh, things may not be what they seem. The media may not be accurate. There might be more things, you know, behind the scenes. And so that led me down all these different questions, curiosity, studying economics.

I was a mathematician, as I mentioned, doing pre-med and pre-law. Okay. So the math didn't work out when I was studying Keynesian economics. Something about it wasn't right. It's set up to create debt. I was like, this isn't weird. This is weird. They're doctrinating people with a mathematical way that's actually designed to create debt,

central banking systems, Jekyll Island. You know, you can go back into the history. We can go down a rabbit hole here. Okay. That's what led me into Ron Paul, Austrian business cycle. Mises, Rothbard, all that, free markets. And so that's kind of been the path that been on. And then, you know, led into like understanding politics a little bit more. You're way too smart for musician, man. Like, you're not supposed to be. So they clearly,

like, he must, like, who was there first then? I always thought, this guy. He was there before I was. I was still a useful idiot, as they called us. And, and wanting to look away from all this stuff. I had people warned me years ago and come to me and say, you know, your position in meat is very important. And maybe you can help get this truth out to the world and they'd lay it out for me and they talk about the big conspiracy and all the tyrants that are trying to take over America from within and I thought this is just crazy these people you know they're looking for they're looking to feel important somehow this this is this can't be real and it wasn't really until um you know what began my my deep dive behind the

curtain was when my wife and I noddy and I decided to have a child and then said what are we going to do when in terms of vaccination and then I started Our decision at the beginning was, well, we'll just get what's needed because one thing I'm clear on is the schedule just seems over the top. Yeah. 70-some-odd vaccines before they're at age six or something like that. Just I don't know any body that would require that. So let's figure out what the child really needs. And I started to go down the rabbit hole. And that's kind of when things open up for me because I started to see the evidence pointing in a different direction than the mainstream media was directing us.

And that really opened me up to look deeper that there was a possibility that, you know, you know my story that I had a brother killed by A-Z-T and then a mother died bad cancer treatment. So I was already kind of keyed into this major problem within Western medicine. But then when I started to realize it's not incompetence, there's something corrupt here. And there's there's a movement that really wants to keep us sick and dependent. And the further I went down that rabbit hole, the more I learned. And really, the more unbelievable it became, and it still is today. It's still, even though we know what's going on, I still grapple with the idea that there are people that are consciously doing harm on a mass scale, you know.

But it's so evident, but I still just have a hard time computing that in my mind, that there are people that have so lost their soul that they can perform that way. Yeah, we've had a lot of very deep, intense conversations. We've, yeah, I feel like sometimes you jump on that side. I'm over here, I was like, wait a minute, then I come back and you're like, wait, I'm back, because it's really mind-blowing.

That's just, the music very quickly, you know, this is a very serious topic, yet there's so much beauty. How do you approach a project like this as a musician? What was like, is there a goal, is there a feeling, Absolutely. Feeling drive it? Does it start with an intellectual mathematical structure of music? Yeah, I mean, for me, art is feeling-based, but I think having a purpose has a little

bit of a balance of a brain and right brain. I think the balancing of the hemispheres is really key for society in general. So as an artist, I'm thinking, hey, what's the feeling I can create that can move, touch, and inspire people, but also with a little bit of thought behind an intention that can create, you know, change, create a movement, create unity. And so I think when, you know, working with Mickey especially, he's a great storyteller. And as an artist, that's my job to be a storyteller. It was amazing partnership to work with him because he's providing narratives that I align with already about unity, freedom. Team humanity is like a big, you know, a big passion of mine.

And so writing songs that can unite people lyrically and also with hooks and melodies that are coded to be remembered. That's kind of like how I'm like to think about it. What is this pattern or, you know, shape that could be encoded that we're going to remember, we're going to sing it. Even, you know, we're going to sing the melody and we're going to sing the word. So the melody has to be really important. and so to the lyrics so that you're going to repeat it. Because to me, it's a mantra. A mantra is something you repeat, right?

So lyrics are a mantra. Like we sing those Beatles songs that we remember, and if they have meaning and you can remember them, then we're actually reprogramming, just like affirmations, have power. So to songs. Songs are like affirmations, but they're musical and you can sing them to each other.

You know, being in a Coldplay concert or any other place where everyone's singing together, that's when we put down our differences. That's when we're in joy, is when we're singing together. So that's kind of my divine vision as Deepak World and Team Manate is to create the one world sing-along that goes on forever like Michael Jackson, heal the world, things like that. I think I'd like to be able to contribute to the world in that kind of way as well.

One of the things that I ran into early on in my storytelling career too was recognizing that language is limited. This thing we call language that gets produced through the mind can only take us so far, but the true magic of life is ineffable. We cannot describe it. We can do our best to come close to kind of paint a picture of it, but language is so limited that the stuff that really transcends the human experience, the stuff that goes into the other dimensions of reality, where truly the healing power is, where we find peace and connectedness with each other. Music is one of the only languages. They call it the language of the soul for a reason. It's one of the only languages that will help us get beyond the thinking mind that is limited based upon the scope of our vocabulary.

Music will take us, will have us transcend beyond that. It heals the body. It also carries vibrational properties, which we spoke about the last time I was on the show, that's happening simultaneously, which is why cultures, since the beginning of the time, have beat on drums and bearskins and whatever it might be just to create that unified experience. And so for me, you know, years of telling stories, I've recognized that we've kind of reached the end of that. We can fill our minds with so much data, but at what point does that just become an overloaded hard drive to where nothing happens? The computer no longer computes.

And that's where music takes over for me. And that's why I chose to work with Deepak here so we can take this to the next level of creating an experience beyond the spoken word. It's amazing. You know, we've talked about when I was a young kid, I wanted to get in, like, I remember sitting in movie theaters. And as a boy, you know, you're living in an uptight society and, you know, tears would run. run down my face. I just remember thinking, I want to be able to make everybody feel like this, like what movies do for me. And I was in film school. And I remember the music, like the sound teacher, like you're in sound class. And he said, I'm going to, if you, you know, how much,

how many people think music's important in film? Like it was 50%? Most people thought it was like 50, 50, 50, 50. And he's like, I'm going to argue with today 80% of film and the experience is music. And I remember he played a scene of Last Temptation of Christ with just just the visuals. And then he played with Peter Gabriel's sound. You know, then he played just Peter Gabriel's soundtrack by itself. He's like, which one made you feel something? He's like, yeah, definitely the music. Then you put them together.

And it was sort of off the charts. You've been winning awards, Mickey. In, I mean, like, it was crazy about it. Like, in the place that rejected us, like, cast us out. California. Santa Monica, right? Santa Monica film festival, just very quickly. What does it feel like to go back, like, into the Lions Den,

with films about the Lions and be winning awards. Like, tell me about it. Well, each time I think it must be a sting operation. They're luring me in with the awards. Right, right, I'm gonna arrest me and I'll come to the door. Turn around, put your hands behind your back. It's been really mind-blowing because not only have, matter of fact, I want to say that your previous guest, Nate,

that's another incredible story to tell because I don't know if you plan this or not, Nate and Sprite Gum and Clear, they are our first major brand sponsors. So if you look at our posters or step and repeat and everything, you'll see their logos on it right down at the bottom of our poster there. And so just really kudos to people like Nate that have stepped forward because of their personal experience with the tyranny that we're all facing to say, even if this might hurt my business, I'm going to stand for the truth and stand for these people because they're telling the truth.

And what we're witnessing now is everyone who stepped out yourself big time on top of the list for being so brave to go, you know, to leave the mainstream, to take the chance that you took, Dale, and I know as your friend what that took to leave a very profitable, lucrative career. Once you built your status in Hollywood, it's kind of like being in the military, right? You never lose those stripes and you can always, you can always fall back on, you know, that title to score jobs. in Hollywood. You've earned it and you earned it and then you let it go. All in favor of telling the truth. And people like Nate and all these corporations now that are... An accident, by the way. Or, I mean, you had no idea you two were connected, but it is sort of

what we're getting used to, right? Just these amazing synchoniscities. Which is a whole other subject that maybe one day we can talk about because we're recognizing that so much in life that when you stand up for what's true, when you stand up for life, which is probably the easiest way to say. We're here to procreate. We're here to procreate. and to create life. We are here as a holographic fragment of the creator. And when we are here in support of life itself, there's some magical thing that happens and all these synchronicities happen and all these things that the chances are a gazillion to one that you would meet in the oddest of places, but we're all brought together because we're an

alignment with nature itself, with God itself. And that just keeps happening and happening in our lives. But the fact that we're now getting called into these experiences with people who just three years ago were thinking that we were the worst people on the planet. Friends of yours, I know, were really harsh back in California. Very, very harsh. Now, the sad part is when I really dig into it with most of them and we've recircled to become friends again, and I find out, like, what turned them around, it's, they've had a direct experience now. They've either been injured or they've lost a loved one. And now, you know, it almost takes that for some people to swallow their pride,

forget about all the shaming they did against others to say, okay, now I've had something so dramatic happen in my life that I can no longer avoid looking at it. And so that's what we're seeing a lot of. And it's a, as we've talked about many times, it's a bittersweet experience to be perfectly honest with you. I agree. Because I would love, as I've mentioned before, I would love to have been wrong in 20. 2020 when we released the film. I would love to have just been embarrassed and put my shoe in my mouth and say, we totally got this wrong. But it turns out we totally got it right.

And but the, you know, where we might want to take a bow for that, it doesn't warrant that for me. It's really a sad thing. You know, that that we that it was something that was so invisible to so many people, good people, highly intelligent people. And they had to wait to actually feel the suffering before they could see it. But the good news is they're seeing it and they're waking up. And we are starting to now be invited into arenas that we never thought we'd be in a million years. And people that have a lot to lose are now supporting us, mainstream people, reporters, media starting to tell the truth. And so I think that there's truly this, which is why the film before this one, we called the Grand Prix. awakening because there truly is we're in the middle of a great awakening right now. I agree.

And I think the musical is a great way to try and bring us all back together. Let's laugh. Let's have some fun around this. Let's bring some joy. What's the best way to, I mean, you have so many brilliant projects going. Where do we check in if we want to see one of these screenings or get to? Is there a place that just has the calendar of all the amazing things you're up to? Pretty much, yeah.

If you just go to Plandemic.com, everything is on there with the Austin premiere, which we're super excited about. It'll be the first time that you'll see the film. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm bored to it. You're so good in it. Really, I think my favorite moment is what you brought to it. And I don't know if your viewers know that you have a background, your incredible wife, Lee,

and you are both musicians. You have a beautiful singing voice, and she's just an angel of plays guitar and sings. And so there's this, again, I find myself, sometimes when I connect with someone on a deep level, I'll ask them, are you a musician? Yeah. Because I find there's something about the people that know how to speak the language of music. Yeah. I just find there's an alignment there.

And so it was just a pleasure to have you as part of this. And I'm excited that you've actually waited and not even seen a rough cut. No, I was like, I'm going to just tell me what it's done. You guys been tweaking, tweaking. Deepak, how do we follow your music in the work that you're doing? Yeah, just launching right now as we speak, Deepakworld.com spelled D-P-A-K World,

and everything's on there, including Plandemic, other music coming out. And the song I'm about to do on the show with you today is actually called It's Our Time. Together We Rise. It was actually originally written as the Independent National Convention Anthem. this September, which I'll be doing the song at again, too. So we're going to do that here on your show.

It's also the closing credits for Plandemic. And so really excited to get this new song out there. It's not released yet. And that'll be the beginning of a series of more movement-based songs. And I've done a lot of work in the industry. I've worked with artists, done stuff with Disney. But it's always been like separate where part of me is an activist, part of me is out there, spreading truth, doing the research on the politics. And then I keep my music separate. And I felt like it's now calling to bring it together and bring art and music together, being an artispreneur and artivist, whatever you want to call it, in order to actually make music that makes an impact as well, not just on the front line speaking and, you know, public

speaking, which I do as well, but actually making the music a part of that message. And so this is one of the first songs that you'll be hearing that has that intention in mind. I've heard this song. I'm looking forward to hearing it in just a moment. Rise up from the ashes, rise up from the flames, see through the lies through the lies that feed the that we creep Come out from the shadows

Come out in plain sight Nothing to lose It's time to move into the light Together United, denying or fighting No more hiding anymore Our story rewriting or losing We can't keep quiet anymore

Because together we will rise, oh, together we will rise. Oh, together we will rise. Can't wait any longer. It's our time, yeah, because it's our time. Together we will rise. Oh, together we will rise. Oh, together we will rise. Yeah, wait a time, yeah, because it's our time.

The couple's everything. The talking heads that gonna make us shoot love into the sky Denying or fighting no more hiding we fight it we can't keep quiet together we will rise Oh we will rise can't wait any lock since our time together we will rise