Michael Ruppert, former LAPD officer turned whistleblower, exposes CIA heroin trafficking (1978) and systemic corruption tied to fossil fuel dependency, warning that collapse is inevitable by 2008’s financial crisis. He links $147/barrel oil to economic crashes, critiques Wall Street-controlled governments, and highlights NDAA’s detention provisions as a threat to U.S. freedoms. Occupy movements, like Scott Olson’s fatal shooting in Oakland, reveal police brutality and elite control, while Ron Paul’s banking reforms offer a rare path forward. Ruppert’s Gaianist warnings—urban density, resource exhaustion, and profit-driven destruction—suggest civilization’s unsustainable model risks extinction unless radical change occurs. [Automatically generated summary]
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This is an unusual, very unusual man that's with us today.
First of all, thank you very much for doing this, man.
I really appreciate it.
It's an honor.
I bought your book.
You gave me a copy of it today, but I already have it because I bought it about five years ago, which is Crossing the Rubicon.
That's when it came out, right?
When did that come out?
It came out in August of 2004. When I first became aware of you was that speech that you gave.
I don't know where you were, but it was a speech that you gave where you were talking in front of some judge in some sort of a courtroom somewhere, and you were explaining how you were an L.A. Police Department officer, and you caught the CIA selling drugs, and you were just fucking saying it.
You're a fighter, and you know about war and battle and stuff.
This was one of those circumstances.
One of my favorite axioms about combat, about fighting somebody, was given to me by a Chief Warrant Officer 4 from Army Criminal Intelligence Division.
Don't shoot unless you get a headshot.
And I had the headshot that day on the director of Central Intelligence.
And, you know, it's kind of like something that you can spend your whole life in a fight or combat waiting for everything to line up.
But you know when it lines up and it's like that's what happened.
So 18 years I'd been trying to...
Make somebody pay attention to the fact that CIA had been bringing drugs into the United States.
And I had lost a career because I blew a whistle on that.
I'd been 18 years and I finally got a chance to nail a guy.
He's the guy who died with George Bush's phone number in his pocket.
You know, I mean, that's a fascinating story.
There's a guy who says that he was bringing in drugs for the CIA for...
A long time right from South America and they would have a spot where they would drop it off and apparently two kids saw it and these two kids they killed these two kids and then they said it was suicide.
So the parents forced some sort of an autopsy and the autopsy found out that these kids had been murdered and then it just it spirals into this thing unwinding but who would have ever believed Before there was something like that.
Well, I came out with it publicly after I resigned from LAPD in November of 78. And I resigned because Chief Gates was going to let me get killed and he wouldn't give me backup.
And it was a really sick scenario.
I had perfect rating reports and all this stuff.
So then I resigned and then I went to the LA Times.
So my clock on being public started in 79. But here's what's interesting about all that stuff.
You go back to...
CIA's been dealing drugs ever since before there was a CIA. Long story.
It's an economic issue more than it is anything else.
You have to remember that Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan CIA director, was a stockbroker.
The CIA was created by the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Alan Dulles, who were partners in Sullivan Cromwell.
They created, founded the CIA, Alan Dulles.
So the CIA and Wall Street have always been one and the same thing.
And the deal with drug money, which when I wrote a lot of the stuff that's in Rubicon, Is that you can move it with profits-to-earning ratios off books in a crooked economic paradigm.
And with price-to-earnings, if you launder a million dollars worth of drug money onto a corporation, let's say GE, who has a price-to-earnings of 30 to 1, you've just created 30 million dollars in stock value.
There's a huge multiplier, and this is all part of the same corrupt economic paradigm, which is destroying us now.
That's the case that I started on then, trying to find out what the fuck is going on around here.
Well, when I saw it with my eyeballs, it was proof.
But see, how I got into it's a completely different deal.
I have a special birth.
My mother was a senior cryptanalyst for the Army Security Agency in World War II. Her work product went to Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and President Roosevelt.
She worked on Japanese codes, the Russian codes.
My father was a decorated Air Force hero, a veteran.
He was in B-17s, World War II, then he became on all this stuff.
Both were connected with CIA. I came from a CIA family.
So, I mean, I used to come home from grade school and say, Mom, what's for dinner?
And she'd say, I can't tell you.
Gotcha.
So anyway, so I was marked, and plus I was gifted, you know, I was a good, smart, you know, guy.
And so I was being groomed because the CIA has people in police departments all over the country, and they have for years, law or no law, that's what they do.
So, I was being recruited into that because I already had a Q clearance, which I had just from living with my parents.
And so that kind of marked me as somebody who was like on the inside.
But I wasn't really.
You know, I wasn't going to go along with drugs when that's when I saw what it was.
Well, what happens is, and I'm sure you understand this, is that we live in a world that's full of sellouts.
We're surrounded by sellouts.
We're surrounded by, and this came up really recently with Occupy and my friend Shamar Thomas and all of this stuff that we got together involved with that.
It's about honor.
Some people just aren't capable of selling out, I guess, and I guess I'm one of those.
But most people resign themselves, and not everybody knows this.
Like, not every LAPD cop knows this happens.
You know, it's compartmentalized.
There's a lot of people out there in law enforcement, and I think we've seen this with the Occupy movement and the way veterans and some cops have responded to it.
There's a lot of people inside the system who are really honest, and they're just waiting for somebody else to show them how to do it.
Well, what I was exposing, now you have to bear in mind that when I was at LAPD and I resigned, I had pulled like the tail of something out of a hole.
I didn't know what was attached to the rest of, it's like, I'll just pull on this one worm.
And it's the can of worms, so.
But clearly what I had, The CIA was directly involved in bringing heroin into this country illegally of using police officers in their pay or control with the clearances to protect those drug shipments and they were laundering the drug money and that it had to have been known at a White House level and that was in 1978. That's incredible and they just thought they could just keep getting away with it.
Well, yeah, but Those who win in a rigged game get stupid.
If it's always playing your way and this and that, you get real sloppy.
Certainly if you look at what we're doing, while we're struggling at home so badly, we insist on engaging in all these things overseas that pay strange dividends.
There's nothing tangible about it, but tangibly in this country right now, people are having a really fucking hard time, but yet all of this money and all these resources are going overseas.
To fight wars that almost no one agrees with.
And when you look at it, that is just sloppiness.
That just seems sloppy.
It's so preposterous.
It's so without merit.
If there wasn't some sort of a 9-11 attack and you proposed this sort of a ridiculous war, everybody would be like, get the fuck out of here.
But because of the initial 9-11 attack, because there was something so big, They capitalized on it, and now they've ridden the bad intentions right into the ground.
And really, that's why I think Ron Paul's such a threat right now.
Because if Ron Paul wins in Iowa...
Knock wood.
It's a whole new political ballgame in this country because all of a sudden it's going to be the norm, a substantial norm for people to see somebody like Ron Paul not believing all that bullshit.
But they can rig within certain, because there are people who see the polling places, there are people, and people know, you know, we had 80 people come in who were on poll, so they can't just say if 80% of the people vote green, the 80% voted red, because nobody would believe it, right?
All right, so.
I think that Ron Paul is, so far, way much further ahead than he's being shown in the polls.
I really think that there is...
Let's say Ron Paul is in the 40s and 50s in Iowa, which they wouldn't dare let be known.
And the point is, if he wins or wins with a landslide, it's now Democrats and Republicans no more.
It's Ron Paul and the Democrats and the Republicans, and we've got a whole new paradigm.
Well, it seems to me that we have a pretty limited idea of what life is or what's conscious.
We feel like if it can't react and communicate with us, it can't be conscious.
But apparently there's been some studies that show that it's very possible that plants recognize people when they're in the room and they feel energy and they can actually React to someone doing something to them.
They might have some sort of consciousness that we can't understand.
We just only assume that consciousness is human consciousness.
There might be rock consciousness.
I mean, everything might have a consciousness.
It might just be in able to express itself.
The idea of this as a giant super organism is so fascinating.
It's so amazing because we know that everything, nothing exists on its own.
I mean, every single body is a mixture of all sorts of different bacteria and, you know, microbiotic particles and all sorts of different things that are constantly helping you or macrobiotic.
You know, like when you're eating yogurt, you know, you're taking in troops.
You know, when you're taking acidophilus, you're bringing in, like, healthy animals, living organisms.
I mean, it's so fascinating that we absolutely need that in order to stay healthy and be alive.
and it's specially bred compost but everything is alive and it's warm and you become and it just it sucks stuff out of you that's just you know really cool wow yeah wow that's freaky yeah it's so weird what a different you know like a soup You know, we're not just one ingredient.
It's really fascinating and to think of the Earth as being that, just expressing itself in a larger way.
There's a great movie that just came out this year called Anima Mundi, M-U-N-D-I, out of Australia.
And it's got big names in it.
It's got Noam Chomsky in it.
It's got, you know, a whole bunch.
And it's all about, and there's some tremendous, tremendous awakening things in there.
You just look at, and the science is really good to support that too.
See, I think the big problem is now is if, let's say you and I are Martians or from another planet, we just came down here to check out what's happening with these creatures down here, right?
And I really think that that originates with Genesis 1. I mean, I'm at war with God, or at least the religion, the God of old, the gods that brought us to this point.
And I'm at war with the God that gave man dominion over the planet.
Bullshit.
That's why we're destroying it.
We've been separated from it.
We were taught that we, and I don't believe that that's true.
And I believe that If there's any one lie that's enabled all this corruption, a lot of it to be hidden under the guise of religion, that's the big one.
So you think that if you can get enough people to recognize this earth as a living thing, we could change the way people behave and change the practices?
I mean, it doesn't seem to have been that long ago that people didn't destroy the earth at all.
I mean, just a few hundred years ago, the oceans were clean, right?
I mean, how many hundreds of years ago was there no pollution?
Tom Brown of Tom Brown Tracker School is a friend of mine.
And I went to his tracker school.
Max, my assistant, I went to his tracker school in February.
And that's what they teach too.
But anyway, so our ancestors 40,000 years ago running around, right?
They didn't all of a sudden stop one day and going, why am I having this wilderness experience?
What mankind's task is now with the collapse of human industrial civilization, which is here, which cannot be stopped, is not so much to learn but to remember stuff that we've known inside of us forever.
You've got to clear a lot of garbage out of the way to get there.
I'm pretty optimistic about what I see.
I mean, I started CollapseNet, my company, CollapseNet.com.
So there's post-petroleum human, and there's a new consciousness emerging.
And there are tens of millions of us around the world.
And truly, I think there may be hundreds of millions or a billion or more of us around the world.
We just haven't been allowed to see each other yet.
There's something with that matrix that keeps you from seeing all the other people who feel.
That's why with you and Ron Paul on Leno, when the audience started cheering, it was like that was a bitch slap bucket of cold water in the face of Barack Obama and everybody in Washington.
You know, who thought they could actually get away with this stuff again?
I was the press spokesman for Ross Perot in Los Angeles County in 1992, at a time when Ross Perot was ahead of both George Bush and Bill Clinton in the polls.
I remember that time.
Hi, I'm Ross Perot, short, floppy-haired Texan with a big nose.
There was a guy, I had a source, somebody who was in a position to know, when William Casey had his first briefing as DCI, Director of Central Intelligence under Ronald Reagan, would have been in January of 81. He said to those in the room, he said, we will know that we have been successful when everything the American people believe is true is false.
When all was going down, when the bailouts were happening, and Obama actually had the nerve to say that he was going to limit the bonuses that these guys got to half a million dollars.
You're like, as if someone actually talked him into thinking that that made any sense to regular people.
The regular people are going to go, yeah, you know, he had to get his half a mil.
The bank is falling apart.
People are bailing out the bank with their tax dollars.
And then somehow or another, it's rigged in the way that the CEOs get bonuses?
I had a good friend, Matthew Simmons, a colleague who had been the world's largest energy investment banker.
He was a colleague of mine in the peak oil movement for many years.
He died, I think.
I won't say that yet, but he died under mysterious circumstances to me.
But he knew all about the Gulf, and it was a total blowout.
No, the seabed is destroyed.
He was telling the truth.
There's the shaft from deep water rise and it went down and what's happened is that the whole seabed is now fractured all around it and the oil is seeping up and there's no way to control it.
Because, you know, this is one of the things that I'm hearing from people lately, the Occupy folks, is not just the standard, you know, we want these motherfuckers out.
They're saying, we could all live together here.
We could grow our own shit.
We could, you know, we could form a community, just take this somewhere else.
That's what I keep hearing now, that you never used to hear before.
It's like everybody wants to open up their own Waco compound, you know?
How about these cunts who are running the world just get their shit together without us having to...
But you know, rise up.
Can't you guys evolve?
They're going to have to die off, right?
The older ones are going to have to die off.
They're just way too set in their ways.
The people that were willing to call Waco and actually have that happen, they didn't understand the impact of the media because it hadn't really become apparent yet.
They didn't know.
They thought they were going to get away with business as usual because they come from a long career of doing that, and that's just how they get shit done.
Where we are right now is like the mega end to climax at the end of act two, okay?
The global economy is imploding right now.
Europe is dead.
And there's 1.4 quadrillion dollars in derivatives out there that are imploding.
Because money, like I said in the movie, that's exactly the point I was on.
Whoa, this is spooky.
Anyway, money has no power.
Money only has power because of energy and resources.
Okay?
And you can print an infinite amount of money but we live on a finite planet and we're running out of all the stuff that makes that money have any power.
The money itself has no power.
And that's the big adjustment that civilization is collapsing.
There are six billion people living here now only because of cheap energy.
And our population has gone straight like that since the discovery of oil.
Or it crashes to the point where we have a thermonuclear war that we're on the cusp of right now over an invasion of Iran for bullshit reasons, a regime change in Syria, which will bring in China immediately on Iran's side in a thermonuclear conflict.
Well, you know, I think it's really fascinating to think that there could have been alternate paths for intelligence.
You know, the path that Western civilization went on with our interpretation of reality and our construction methods and all the different things, the way that we have expressed our intelligence, that it could very well be.
And it's been proven to be in Egypt and in the Mayans.
And there was an incredibly brilliant society that operated very, very much different than ours.
An amazing, different way to think.
While one group part of the world was thinking about something else, they were studying constellations and building these amazing stone structures that really are mind-boggling.
And then when they find out that there's thousands of them still undiscovered in Mexico and South America, that they're just...
The trees grew over them.
But there was a...
Great culture down there, an amazing culture, completely alien to what exists right now.
I very rarely fly in at night, but I did recently.
And flying in, you see it, you're like, how is this not science fiction?
How is this not some crazy Blade Runner fucking movie?
Just the way it looks.
You know, flying into this giant grid of artificial light.
Motherboard.
It's amazing.
Yeah, it's such a thing that we take for granted.
You remember my friend Larry?
Larry had this house in the Hollywood Hills, and you would look out at night, and I never realized, like, why does everybody want to live in the Hollywood Hills?
I also have a theory that it's bad for our consciousness to have these things at night because we're not allowed to see the stars then.
We're not able to see the stars.
I think that's not good for people.
I think a couple stars in the sky, those are too abstract.
You know, the moon, like, oh, there's my friend the moon.
I'm used to him.
The image of the starry nights in Nebraska when you're driving on the highway and you just pull over the car and you open the door and look up and you go, holy shit!
And you lie on the hood of your fucking car for hours just staring up at the goddamn Milky Way.
But we don't get to see that.
We don't get to see that because we want to keep everything lit up at night.
And because of that, you're...
You don't get that humility, that realization that you're in front of the infinite, that you're experiencing an impossible vision of incredible beauty.
For streetlights, we've sacrificed the most incredible thing you could ever see, and very few people ever get to see it, and it's right above your head.
Dominating to the point where we don't have to worry about them eating our children.
You know?
Right there, I think that's good.
Because this is a rare point in history.
People have sort of forgotten that at one point in time, just 50,000 years ago, fucking blink of the eye, everywhere you went, you could have got eaten.
You know?
Everywhere you went.
You just animal, wild animals everywhere.
50,000 years ago, there was fucking saber-toothed tigers were still around.
Isn't it possible that there could be some sort of a scientific discovery?
Something that changes the game as far as the way we can harness energy that could possibly pull us in a more positive direction than a complete and total collapse?
I mean, they had that big blackout down here, down in San Diego, and whoa, whoa, that was a bucket of cold water in the face because that was real panic.
In the movie, I told a story about campers being attacked by a bear.
If you're in a camp and a big bear attacks the camp, you do not have to be faster than the bear.
You only have to be faster than the slowest camper.
Period.
That's the lesson for everybody here who becomes aware of collapse.
The slow campers, the zombies, as we call them, are going to be out there zombies until the last minute, you know, when nothing is working anymore and people are starving to death and they're going to go and say, well, gee, I don't understand.
This is going to come back any second.
The faster campers, the ones worthy of Darwinian selection, there are tens of millions of us around the world already moving.
Local food production, First and foremost, start growing food wherever you are right now.
And then building communities and disengaging from that paradigm.
I mean, it wasn't George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Hank Paulson or somebody like that flipping a switch saying, okay, we're going to put gas at five bucks.
No.
It was a superheated economy.
We were growing then.
At the end of 2007, we were...
And so the faster you grow, the more energy you consume, again.
But you reach a point as a result of peak oil where you need more cheap oil than you can find.
You've eaten all the low-hanging fruit.
You found all the cheap oil.
It's not inexhaustible.
Deepwater Horizon is a result of us being desperate to go out and get oil.
It's more and more expensive to get.
So the economy got so hot that the oil prices spiked because that was what demand was doing at the time.
There was some minor stuff, but it's fundamentally peak oil.
And 147 a barrel oil is what shut us down in 2008. And we're just about to hit another place right now with oil at 100, 105. That's going to shut everything down because people are so much more broke than they were in 2008. And we're looking at a possible attack on Iran.
We're looking at Saudi Arabia possibly collapsing.
Iraq's now in civil war just a week after we pulled our troops out.
Actually, on the same day that the last US troops left Iraq, Nouriel Maliki had a delegation fly to Syria, to Damascus, to meet with President al-Assad because the US is trying to overthrow Assad because he's an ally of Iran.
And al-Maliki, who was a Shiite, was starting to side with Syria.
So the U.S. and Israel have been very intent on attacking Iran, which is a stupid suicidal move.
I mean, it'll kill all of us because the world can't do without oil.
And that'll shut down the Gulf and China will beg.
This is like, we've stepped out of the, okay, we're just going after, you know, banana republic, fucked up countries that are run by crazy dudes, and, you know, who have no power, who are obviously humiliated by us just a decade earlier.
It's the moment in the old Soviet Union when everybody went, Aha!
It's collapsed.
It's not working.
It's not credible.
Nobody believes it.
And Ron Paul is bringing that aha moment.
You know, like the Emperor's New Clothes when everybody in this country looks at every other sane person in this country and says, Jesus Christ, this is all corrupt, crooked.
I mean, that is the only argument whatsoever about suppressing other nations.
The only argument that's like, yeah, we've got nuclear power, but nobody else can have it because it's fucked up, we used it once, we feel real bad about it, but we don't trust you with it.
I mean, the idea that you would want to stop all these bad guys from creating nuclear power, not nuclear power, rather, but nuclear weapons, It's a consideration if you're dealing with a really volatile country in the first place.
I think our biggest concern now is not some other nation getting, because it's enormously expensive and energy intensive to enrich uranium and to make the warheads.
Believe me, that's the background that I come from when I had the clearance when I was living with my parents.
So I don't think we need to worry about anybody learning how to do it or making new.
What we've got is hundreds of thousands of nuclear...
Enriched uranium is uranium that you process with heavy water, with centrifuges, and various ways to concentrate the atoms of the U-235 or U-238 that give you the energy, but it's like packing the punch to enrich it, to make it fissile, so that in a reactor, when you pull the radio, it'll create the heat, because all a nuclear reactor really is is a boiling water pot.
Albert Einstein looked at the first nuclear reactor.
He said, it's a hell of a way to boil water.
And that's where all the energy comes from out of every nuclear plant.
What kind of a weird thing are people where they have such an amazing ability to control their environment and to influence their environment and we can't, for whatever reason, we can't feel what we're doing bad to the environment.
It's almost like we have much more power and much more ability than we have the natural ability to To perceive the impact of this power.
I mean, do you think that the way humans have to evolve at an incredibly rapid pace, like sociologically or consciously, just to try to catch up with the technology that's evolving around us?
It's almost like this mad scramble is in place.
It almost has to be in place just to keep up with where technology is going.
So they feel victimized by ones and zeros and the manipulation and corruption of the system that manages the ones and zeros.
And they're screaming out from the visceral part of their, from the mind, from the instinct that's telling them, this is a fucking mess.
So when that woman says, or when they say, what do you occupy?
And she says, everything!
That's it.
You know, when I was saying that the Occupy people are sort of like white blood cells, and they're just gathering around this illness, and they don't even know what they're going to do with it, but they're gathering around all the sick spots.
There was a reason why, and I got deeply involved in that when I saw the violence, and I've been an activist a long time, and I know a lot of veterans.
I know a lot of special forces and SEALs.
When I saw Oakland and when I saw all the unforgivable violence, I was a good cop in the city.
I was sick.
I was as sick as I was when I saw the Rodney King beating happen.
You know, I was just sick to my heart.
But so were many of us.
And when Shamar Thomas did his thing, Shamar's been a guest on my radio show, I love him.
He's way cool.
He's having a hard time dealing with a celebrity.
I say, get used to it, you know.
But there were so many of us at so many levels who stepped up because we were so totally offended by that.
But Occupy was threatening.
And the reason Occupy threatened, and there was a Homeland Security coordinated the shutdown of all the cities.
We had that on CollapseNet.
We threatened them.
The tent was such a powerful symbol because you've never seen a fucking mortgage on a tent, have you?
This is a big science that, you know, in mass psychology when you reach a certain percentage of the people, 7% solution, whatever it is, all of a sudden everybody starts getting it.
I had read somewhere that when it was first being proposed that people weren't worried if it got through the Senate because the president said he would veto it.
It's just so shocking that they would literally change what America is.
The whole idea of America is land of the free, home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all.
That was like the founding principles of this great experiment.
Liberty and justice.
Those words are so fucking important because people don't understand that this idea of security being more important is absolutely fucking crazy because guess what?
You're pretty goddamn secure.
Do you feel bad?
Do you feel like the enemy's all around you and terrorism is everywhere?
It's not!
It's not!
There's a few isolated examples, and they're using those isolated examples to fuck you and to control you completely.
And it's so terrifying to think that it's possible that there's people out there that would allow things to happen just to tighten down security.
They would allow things that they knew could possibly be taking place to let it happen.
And that way, once it does, we'll tighten up this, and this will pass immediately, and then we'll just stick that right in the back door, and no one's ever going to say a word.
Plus, they make nice businesses and nice government contracts for people where the money gets laundered through all the guys.
I mean, it's sick.
The whole thing is...
The world is governed by organized crime.
And if you think about it, man, can you point to any government anywhere in the world that you think is doing a good job that its people are going, yeah, my government's really taking care of me?
Well, that's aside from getting to the owners of the Fed, the Bank of International Settlements, City of London, finding out who those financial powers would be.
Because I don't believe the planes caused the buildings to crash.
But what I have said throughout the course of my career, I finished writing Rubicon in 04, was that I wouldn't touch it because you couldn't prove it in court.
The book that I wrote is legally admissible in court.
There's a chain of evidence.
There's no chain of evidence with the buildings.
You can't prove it in court.
And I'm still that good cop on the street.
I'd like to see somebody's ass go to jail for this.
So when I built my case, I built it from the framework of, can I get this into court?
You can't get building collapse into court because there's no chain of custody on the evidence from the day of September 11th until now.
Well, I would wonder how you would possibly prove it unless you built something just like it and had the same thing happen to it.
How could you really prove it?
That's the mistaken issue.
I mean, if something happened like that, which is an unexpected event, and it caused the building to collapse, which nobody anticipated, I mean, that obviously, there was some engineering involved in the construction of those buildings, some serious engineering.
Well, obviously, that engineering wasn't up to par, wasn't what it should have been.
Shouldn't there be some sort of a lawsuit about that?
I mean, shouldn't people be freaking out?
Like, hey, how come you guys built this thing to take an airplane hit, and it can't take a fucking airplane hit?
That's what's called in the intelligence business.
That's called a red herring.
That's called an issue of the answer to which takes you completely away from the fact that I proved without arguing building collapse that the U.S. government did execute the attacks of 9-11.
If you could explain it, there's a lot of people that would never believe that anybody in the position of government would ever do anything like that, anything similar to that, especially anyone who is at the head of a position of power in the United States of America, the greatest country in the world.
But on the day of September 11th, will you backtrack a little bit?
In May of 2001, George Bush gave control of all war game exercises in the country to Dick Cheney.
Never been heard of before.
He also, NORAD scramble procedures were rewritten before the attacks of 9-11.
But on the day of September the 11th, I discovered, and I have the evidence in the book, including an on-the-record email from an Air Force major, Don Arias at First Air Force in Tyndall Air Force Base, And there were war game exercises that were scheduled.
Now, normally the Northeast Air Defense Sector, ANG, Air National Guard pilots, there's like, you know, 50, 60 planes available in all the states in need.
But there were war game exercises that Dick Cheney has scheduled that sent like 80% of the fighters from Northeast Air Defense Sector to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland for war game exercises on the day of September 11th.
Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern, they're all in the book, and I have the records of all of them.
But then there was one war game exercise, Vigilant Guardian, I believe it was, that injected 24 false radar blips onto the screens of the Northeast Air Defense Sector as the hijackings took place.
Now picture, you're an air traffic controller looking at your screen, right?
You got a hijack alert, boom, and you got this war game exercise, and you cannot pick the hijack out of the 24 false blips.
Yeah, but how would you explain, like, the stewardess?
How would you explain all the people on there?
Because, I mean, I doubt, like, if the stewardess were, like, getting the plane ready and they opened up the cockpit and Teddy Ruxpin was sitting there, they're like, hey, what is the pilot?
I mean, it's amazing that, you know, you look back in Teddy Roosevelt, you look back in Eisenhower, and you know, you feel like that's a real goddamn president.
That's the president, that's the commander-in-chief looking at the people with leadership and trying to move us forward, and that that was a guy.
I mean, look, when he left and he started talking about The military industrial complex and warning people about the dangers.
The United States of America was mortally wounded on November 22nd, 1963. But the coup de grace was administered with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. And I was alive then.
And I have some connections to Bobby Kennedy.
As a result of my CIA stuff.
I was only a sophomore in high school, but LAPD handled that.
And I was groomed by the same people in LAPD who had done the Bobby Kennedy thing.
Because of the fact, it couldn't have been coincidental, it couldn't have been that maybe someone knew that he was doing these war games, so they figured that's a time to attack, because, you know, they had some inside people in the army that knew this, and then they leaked the information, and they said, well, we'll get you another week.
If you think that the planes were taken over at remote control, do you think that people were, that hijackers were actually really on the planes and attacked?
Well, there were 12 I call patsies who were like sacrificial hijackers.
They were never meant to live anyway.
They were on the planes, definitely.
Planes were flown by remote control because pilots like Al-Hazmi or Al-Midar, whoever was supposedly flying the plane into the Pentagon, You know, that's a maneuver like one of the most experienced pilots in the world couldn't make.
And this was a guy who couldn't get a multi-engine license.
He couldn't get an instrument rating.
He had no hours.
It's not possible.
None of those maneuvers could have been performed by any of those people.
Wow.
And I hold some question as to whether Mohamed Atta and several of the ones that I and Michelle Chosodoski and some great work was done On the flight training by Daniel Hopsicker.
Enlighten me about the argument when it comes to the physics of actually flying a plane.
I had read that it's much more difficult to do, like physically difficult to do what they were doing by steering it than it is to do it by remote control.
What they were doing is physically hard to do because of the G-force of the turn and everything.
If you had to guess, if you said, okay, there's Dick Cheney and he's the guy that you perceive as being the mastermind...
And then there's a bunch of people who also have to be in on it, because they have to rig these planes with remote control capability, and they have to order NATO to stand down.
They have to do all these different things that they did that day.
It's terrifying that 40 or 50 people would be willing to do that and they could all find each other and form a gang, you know, and actually make something like this happen.
And you must have practiced that one turn 10,000 times.
You practice moves in martial arts.
How often do you work a kata before you...
The Pentagon sits in a bowl.
I was born in Washington, D.C. I know it.
And 395 runs around the Pentagon.
You can look.
Right down, and you see the whole Pentagon sitting down there.
It's like sitting in the Rose Bowl, okay?
Now, there were more than 400 witnesses on I-395.
Truck drivers, cab drivers, soccer moms, you name it.
They all saw an airplane hit the Pentagon, and they would testify in court.
That's what they saw.
So, regardless of what anybody thinks, I'm not going to argue the point is, The fact is to try the case in court and to hang Dick Cheney, which I can do without going down that side alley.
In the intelligence business, there's a program called COINTELPRO and many other programs that have been used and developed by CIA and Army Intelligence on the creation of false legends and false stories.
And one of the biggest deals in the intelligence trade is to do a dangle.
A dangle, let's say I'm a spy, a dangle would be like a 5 foot 10 woman right out of my ultimate sexual fantasy, you know, blah blah.
That's a dangle.
But sometimes a dangle comes in the form of information.
Sometimes a dangle comes in the form of a tempting lead that looks like it's going to really take you somewhere.
Now disinformation, in order to be effective, has to be 90% true.
Otherwise you won't swallow it.
You won't buy it.
So there's a poison pill that they put in.
You swallow the 10% poison pill, and then if you ever get enough traction, They activate the poison and kill you.
So, I do believe a plane hit the Pentagon and what we saw, we never saw a jetliner hit in any of those films.
Okay, I think that was bait.
To see if that action got enough traction, then at some point they would come up and actually show you the video of a jetliner hitting and all of a sudden everything else you bought into as a result is discredited.
Yeah, I've always thought that was fascinating, like, when you read someone's stories and, you know, you read something, like, that guy, Behold the Pale Horse guy, William Cooper, is that his name?
Because he was one of those guys, let me just say before you even tell me, he was one of those guys that I would read his stuff and I'd go, well that makes sense, that makes sense.
And so that made me think, well what if this guy is like working for them, like making everything else look retarded by coming up with this one idea that he tosses in about bases on the moon where they're processing fucking compound race tires for the Corvette team.
You know what I mean?
He would say something like that and be like, the fuck is this guy talking about?
Well, what's really funny is a lot of you guys, and I don't want to lump anybody into a category, and I'm certainly not putting you in with anybody else because I love your work, but a lot of you guys think that it's not you, not you, but people along those lines are calling out the government.
They think that there are people out there that are shills.
Like other guys that are successful, like their competition.
Because I've been saying all this shit, and like, the US government spent, the State Department spent $3 million refuting every other 9-11 theory out there.
So do you feel like they don't have to address you because you don't have as much mainstream exposure as, say, you know, any of these other guys that you, you know what I mean?
So you're saying that all these people that are in any position of power that are, you know, saying the sky is falling, it's all falling apart, but whatever you do, don't talk about Michael Rupert?
But then I'm going to prove that CNN, that ABC, that all the corporate-owned media is absolutely criminally corrupt and complicit in all the economic criminality that's been taking place in covering up all these other crimes.
Every major media outlet in this country trades its shares on Wall Street and they're all part of the same economic paradigm.
And they can't afford to see me.
And it's not just me.
I mean, all the people who did Peak Oil, who've done the work on, you know, they see me because I give credit to everybody else.
They've got to see all this other body of work that they've ignored.
It's just so ridiculous that things have gotten so bad that they think they need to pass that.
It's not that bad.
So you've got a few people protesting.
Yeah, really, you don't need to have the military in the fucking streets, alright?
It's really, it's not that big a deal.
But what the problem is, is they're looking at the next step.
They're saying this is unpredicted.
They never thought that they would see this.
They never thought they would see hundreds of thousands of people, you know, just ranting in the streets, chanting in the streets, holding signs, wandering around.
But they have also been very aware, Joe, that there are...
50, 60 million hardcore unemployed homeless people and the number is growing.
They're aware that now it's one in two of the people in this country can be classified under the poverty line.
Half of the population.
One in every six Americans is on food stamps.
People are starving.
They're freezing.
They've lost their jobs.
They've lost their money.
They've known this was going to be coming too.
But I think there's another reason for this with the planned attack on Iran is so that they can do a roundup of Arab Americans like they did with the Japanese right after World War II and put them in camps.
If you think to what the powers that be, the money people did during the Great Depression, They didn't put all the homeless starving in camps.
No.
They let them drag themselves across the country from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and if they starved along the way, the government wasn't paying a penny.
It cost nothing.
It weeded out the population and the strongest made it to California to work for slave wages.
That's The evil of the beast.
They will have camps, you know, for people like me, or if there's major civil unrest in some cities or something like that, but no long term because the resources don't exist to do that.
We just have crazy laws so we can just lock people up.
You know, who's locking people up, though?
That's where it gets really ridiculous.
At one point in time, someone has to realize that this The structure of this monarchy, this fucking kingship that's taken over the world, it only works if people are willing to take up guns.
It only works if the common folk are willing to push around everybody else.
I mean, that's the only way it works.
It can't really work if everybody goes, wait, what?
Fuck you.
I mean, you need the cops.
A guy like you who steps out, and when you were a cop, and you saw this corruption, and you stepped away, you were a regular person.
Instead of identifying yourself with this organization that was obviously sick, you identified yourself with your morals and your character and your upbringing, and you said, fuck you, the CIA's selling drugs.
At some point in time, isn't that the real solution?
Is it everybody sort of realizes that they can't do that?
I know it sounds ridiculous, but when he started quoting Pokemon and using the fucking Grand Theft Auto tax program, you know, I was like, wait a minute, man.
During the Occupy Oakland demonstrations, late at night, Scott Olson was one of several guys that were out front.
He was a military veteran and the cops were firing 40 millimeter flight right projectiles out of M79 bloopers.
I've shot those.
They're little grenade launchers.
They're kind of fun.
And somebody shot him in the head.
It was accidental, okay?
But after his skull was fractured and he was on the ground, you see the cops lobbing CS canisters, gas canisters, right into the group of people.
And there was so much brutality.
And this was after watching the White Shirts in New York, you know, and Shamar Thomas hadn't come up yet.
I don't think he had yet.
But we went to Occupy Santa Rosa and it was like, which is a town close to where I live.
It's a town of about, we had the highest per capita turnout in the country.
So we had like 3,000 people turnout.
But we were gonna put up camps and the chief of police had said, we will use any means necessary to tear down the camp.
Now what happened was, I went there and I said, they're gonna fuck these people.
I'm putting my body in front of them.
I took an oath, and when I got there, there were all these veterans.
There were Vietnam veterans, and there were Gulf One veterans, and there was one active duty guy, there was an Army Ranger Special Forces medic, and we had all showed up there with all, we all had the same idea.
We are gonna get in front of the cops so that when they start shooting the gas, they're gonna hit us, and if they wanna beat on somebody, let them beat on us, because we know that we can take that without throwing back.
And this groundswell from the veterans community, the honorable warriors, the Shamar Thomases.
You know, what is so sad, and I've had a really close connection over the years from doing investigating on murders of a lot of Army Special Ops personnel.
For all these years, we have had really good men go off to war.
And never in my lifetime has there been an honorable war.
Vietnam, none of it was honorable.
It was all crooked bullshit.
But there are guys who went out there who did the deed, who put their lives on the line, got their combat infantry back, whatever, and didn't commit atrocities in really...
Horrible wars and came home and they've never been able to shine like that.
And when Shamar Thomas did that, Shamar Thomas was speaking for everybody who'd been to war in this country's military, who served honorably, who didn't commit atrocities in wars that we all know were totally fucked up, fraudulent, and lying.
The best teacher, the most powerful teacher I've ever had, I gave a talk at Portland State University right after 9-11.
It became my video, Truth and Lies of 9-11.
And a Native American showed up, knocked on my hotel room door.
He's about five foot four.
And his name was Skip Mayhawk.
And what a presence.
You know, have you ever looked a fighter in the eye and there's just some guy's got a look in the eye.
Yeah, a lot of people probably don't know what you're talking about, but there's a video out there of this guy who's a big dude, and he's got all these medals on, and he's, like, pointing to the medals, like, these aren't lies, you know?
And he's, like, explaining all the shit that he's been through.
Brian, find it on YouTube and watch it, because it's hilarious.
He talks about, you know, different presidents that have accomplished more, and he only lists, like, three that he thinks have accomplished more than they have.
Those of us who are smart enough to start moving in that direction ahead of time, yes.
But peak oil has already happened.
And there are, in this country, with all of the tens and hundreds of millions of people who are unemployed or below the poverty line, people who can't afford gas at any price right now.
It's codependent to want to go in and fix that system.
Picture somebody wanting to go to the Nazis in 1938 and say, okay, let's have a campaign to organize to teach the Nazis that the Jews are really good people.
The smart people were just saying, I'm getting the fuck out of Europe.
The Jews, the smart Jews, were getting out of the way.
The world knew what was coming with that.
And it's not mentally sound to try and fix this system.
This system needs to be redone.
Ron Paul's got a good idea.
And the Fed.
Until you change the way money works, you change nothing.
That's the big start.
Then you've got to end fractional reserve banking, compound interest, and fiat currency.
As you said yourself, Steve, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president, with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln, but just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history.
Some other criminal in the White House, you know, they're going to become harder to find.
But we're fighting to determine how far this system is going to run everything down before we put our foot down and say this has got to change.
That's what's going to make the difference because this system I wrote an essay called Global Corp some years ago, and in it I said, the way the system works, infinite growth, mergers and everything now, the last CFO of the last corporation in the world, Global Corp, when the world is in total ruins, when four, five, six billion people are dead, when one guy has acquired all the ones and zeros of wealth, and that company goes bankrupt, he's going to say, hooray, we did it.
That's where that ends until and unless we stop it, human beings.
Stop it.
And the consciousness is here that understands that the infinite growth economic paradigm will kill us in order to make a profit.
Well, if there's an attack launched on Iran within the next week or two or before the January 3rd Iowa caucuses and China comes in to back up Iran and the Russians have said they will back up Iran and nuclear weapons are exchanged, it could be over in two weeks.
And I'm seeing very strong signs that the United States is getting bitch-slapped around the world right now.
Since we killed 24 Pakistani troops, ISAF, Hilos killed 24-pack soldiers, all the supplies going into the NATO forces in Afghanistan have been cut off through Pakistan.
Well, first of all, you've been predicting it for a long time, so while it's happening, you're like, see?
I fucking told you.
There's a lot of that, right?
But there's also, you're happy to see the system fall apart, not because you want people to die, but because it's a fucked up system that doesn't work, and it needs to die like anything that doesn't work.
I'm doing everything I possibly can to accelerate the breakdown of the United States government and the economy and the banking system and everything else.
Could you imagine what kind of an asshole you have to be to say you're not allowed to grow tomatoes?
I think we've already fixed all the problems in the world.
Let's concentrate on people growing food.
Think about all the shit that we have problems with.
Prison overpopulation, war on drugs, all the different issues that we have to deal with, pollution of the environment, and someone chose to concentrate on people growing fucking food.
But our whole civilization now is predicated with corporate control, the banking control, on us not being independent, not being able to function outside of a system that they control, that the giant agribiz corporations, Monsanto and Cargill control.
Yeah, they can't tell who bought a controlling steak.
They couldn't tell if it was one of the people that owns Monsanto because there's a lot of crazy paperwork you've got to go through.
But the idea that that was even thought of, that the country, or a company rather, that controls food growth in hundreds of countries, and not hundreds, but A lot of countries.
But not only does that, but it's been shown that politically they force their GMO foods on these countries that don't want it, can't afford it.
They have suicides all over the world where people can't keep up.
But we've had some stories on CollapseNet recently that shows that Monsanto's supposedly bulletproof seeds are producing mutations which Monsanto can't control.
But now get that around the world, there are tens and hundreds of millions of people moving to relocalize, to grow organic food, that's what I'm doing, and to take control where we can.
And those are the faster campers.
Those are the ones who aren't going to get eaten by the bear.
And when you see things like Egypt, like these crazy beatings that they're doing, the protesters in Egypt now, and you see this battle to control Iraq, do you think that that was engineered?
That they knew that in a vacuum that these puppet governments they put in place would quickly fall apart?
I really think the U.S. government was flamboozled and cocky because we built, and I have this in Rubicon, three mega bases there that were meant to be permanent installations.
And I mean some of the largest, most expensive military bases ever built.
We built an embassy compound larger than Vatican City.
The world's starting to move much more closely into alignment with China.
And China is imploding also.
That's the other catch to this.
And the same thing is happening with money as it is with life and everything else, is that people are jumping to the next safest, and all they're doing is moving up one deck on the Titanic to a deck that hasn't gone underwater yet.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, there were some small towns that survived its pockets, you know, of wisdom and, you know, where some civilization was held for a while.
That's the way this is going to play.
There are going to be places around the world that by virtue of climate, their orientation to permaculture, sustainable economies, and the skill sets they have that will fare better than other regions.
I think basically the people in the cities are fucked, and if you stay in the big city, you're gonna be fucked.
I'm seeing this happen much, much faster than I thought it would.
Especially with the deterioration of the quality of U.S. government and the legality or honorable nature of the U.S. government and the economic situation.
And those of us who work to build community, there's a great movement, Transition U.S. There's transition initiatives about 100 and...
11, I think, all over the country now, in cities all over the country, where people are forming communities.
They're growing food locally.
They're networking with each other.
They're working outside of the economic system.
They're learning skills that they're going to need, that we're all going to need at some point, to learn how to live with less power and things like that.
And this movement is, we have a directory on CollapseNet, the lighthouse directory, absolutely free.
1,600 hand-picked entries.
And you go in and you look around this directory and you realize that all over the world there's all kinds of people working really hard and have been for quite some time to prepare to transit, to live outside.
So, what do you think about the, I guess it was the ATF saying that they were going to stop people with medical marijuana prescriptions from buying new guns.
They weren't going to allow you if you get a prescription for medical marijuana to own a gun, which is hilarious.
What I believe is, and I think enough time has passed where I can say this, and again, I know a great many people in the service, and I know Special Forces, I know Rangers, and I know a lot of guys.
But what we do know is that what the Army did after that, they destroyed evidence, they burned his clothing, they immediately started the write-up for a silver star, and all of that criminality that followed rather than admit that he was killed in a friendly fire accident by his own people.
Let's give the credit where it's due to Stan Goff.
I was the publisher and the editor.
In other words, I put my money and my balls on the line and gave Stan Goff everything he needed to write a seven-part series that tore the U.S. Army and Donald Rumsfeld, New Assholes.
When computers were smashed, my life was in danger and it was obvious.
The only thing that could have prevented us from finishing the Tillman series would have been my death.
I knew that they were coming after me, and so I went to Venezuela because Hugo Chavez had spent the last four years going like that to George Bush and Dick Cheney.
But we got Tillman out and Tillman was published and right after Donald Rumsfeld resigned I flew back to Canada then I came back to New York and stayed in Brooklyn for 14 months before I came back out to Venice.
No, I, you know, Venezuela was a very specific purpose because, you know, I was, we had something huge with Tillman and I was firmly convinced they were going to kill me.
I came into an inheritance from my father that I had to fight for for three years, but in 2008. And I had this time, this first time in like 30 fucking years of fighting.
To breathe and catch my breath where I didn't have to worry about shit.
And so I kind of caught up with myself.
You know, it's like you stop long enough and then all the shit you did for like the last three catches up and you absorb it.
And then it was right about then that Cynthia McKinney, my friend, former black congresswoman from Georgia, Atlanta, very dear friend, she was the Green Party nominee, and she mentioned that she might like to have me be her running mate in 2008. I said, are you out of your mind?
But that's when I decided, well, we need a presidential energy policy.
This needs to get put into the peak oil and all the issues about this.
And that became my book, Confronting Collapse.
But then Chris Smith showed up from Blue Mark Films also in February of 2009. And said, hey, we'd kind of like to make a movie.
I did that once when I was working for Dave Chappelle.
We did a Dave Chappelle show.
We filmed this Fear Factor parody with Tyrone Biggums, the crackhead that he used to do, the character.
He was on Fear Factor.
And we were doing this in a warehouse in Brooklyn, and it was fucking freezing, man.
And we all, like, huddled in front of these blast furnaces, and then I would have to get out there in a short-sleeved shirt, you know, or whatever the fuck I was wearing at the time, and be like I was on Fear Factor.
Oh, this is the Three Stooges school of spiritual evolution.
I mean, it's like, I have no doubt that something larger than me tapped me and gave you the ball.
Yeah, and has kept me and sustained me and really kind of made jokes of any other plans that I had along the way for what I thought I wanted to do with my life.
And I'm really aware of that now and I'm living that, you know, spiritually connected to the fact that, you know, there is something really good out here.
There is something that's showing itself on this planet now.
That's just and that it's fair and that it's loving and it does have power.
I'm seeing crack.
It's like watching The Matrix, you know, when The Matrix starts and the little bits of light start coming through and, you know, and all these people out here in the world right now, they're living in a matrix that's falling apart exactly like it did in the movie.
It's like, oh, wait a minute, there's a big hole in that building over there and that's metaphorically what we're seeing happen all around us.
And there's a lot of people Who really get that they're in a matrix and are starting to move out, and there's others who are equally moved to try and go back and reinforce it.
And those are people making their own choices, I think, about which way they're going to go.
It's an amazing time to be at the point in human history and the history of this planet and the history of, you know, It's all very strange that it's all taking place in our lifetime right now.
I hope we all keep our eyes open because even though these are the darkest of times, this is also an age of miracles and we need to just keep ourselves open to the expectation.
Good things can happen without our permission.
There's a lot of other wisdom out here.
There's a lot of light showing through.
And that's one of the reasons why Occupy just makes my toes wiggle.
We can just be human beings and enjoy our time here because it is in fact temporary and like all sort of patterns of behavior that people get stuck in whether it's fucking gambling or Excessive masturbation or whatever the fuck you get hooked on.
You can also get hooked on running the world.
You can also get hooked on fucking over the world.