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Jan. 6, 2012 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:25:28
Joe Rogan Experience #173 - Peter Joseph
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joe rogan
01:01:37
p
peter joseph
01:17:59
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brian redban
04:31
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Yeehaw!
joe rogan
The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight.
If you go to Joe...
What does that mean?
God damn it.
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brian redban
What was the other one?
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joe rogan
Melons.
brian redban
Nicely sliced ham.
joe rogan
Whatever it is, do it or don't do it.
They're just a sponsor, folks.
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It's technology, okay?
Embrace the times.
We're also brought to you by Onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T, makers of AlphaBrain.
And we have a new AlphaBrain that's coming out.
It's called AlphaBrain Source for all you folks in the UK that have much more restrictive laws when it comes to nutritional supplements.
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unidentified
That's right.
joe rogan
Strange, right?
unidentified
It is.
joe rogan
Yeah, so our alpha brain was considered a drug.
brian redban
So it takes it out.
Does it put anything else in?
unidentified
No.
joe rogan
Well, it's just different alternative ingredients that have similar effects.
And so we're still fucking with it right now.
brian redban
Like hipster ingredients.
joe rogan
It might be better for some people that find the original alpha brain is hard to take.
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And some people, it doesn't make them feel good.
It's real weird.
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brian redban
I feel like I was a little sensitive to it, but I took a lot.
joe rogan
Yeah, that was the issue.
brian redban
I took two in the morning, two at night, and I think that was too much.
joe rogan
I took three once in one dose, three or four in one dose, I forget, and I did not feel good.
And I was like, maybe this is what people feel like all the time.
Everybody's got a different tolerance for caffeine, for anything, but for me, two is good.
I take two alpha brains, and it's not that shit from that movie, what is it, with Bradley Cooper.
unidentified
It's not.
joe rogan
It's just vitamins that enhance cognitive function.
That's all it is.
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Just like vitamins enhance your health.
It's very subtle, but effective.
I enjoy it.
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A lot of interesting studies behind it.
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unidentified
It's all online.
joe rogan
The exact amounts are online.
Go buy it in bulk and make your own stuff.
And I hope it works.
I swear to God, I am way more concerned with people not feeling ripped off than I am for making money.
That's why.
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It's great for jiu-jitsu.
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But if you're not into working out, Brian doesn't even take that shit.
brian redban
It doesn't help yo-yoing.
joe rogan
Does it help his yo-yo game?
We also have a shroom tech.
The shroom tech is based on all the information is at onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T.com.
But it's based on the cordyceps mushroom, which is a mushroom that actually enhances your body's ability to process oxygen.
And people like in higher climates and animals in higher climates eat it and they actually get energy.
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And basically the way this one works, the way it's been explained to me, is your body doesn't understand what this mushroom is and it thinks it may be like a bug.
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I'm really into probiotics.
I drink kombucha tea every day.
I take acidophilus.
I take live cultures.
brian redban
That's why cutters never get sick.
joe rogan
Cutters?
brian redban
Yeah, like people that cut themselves.
joe rogan
Because they always cut themselves?
brian redban
Yeah, and their body thinks they're dying.
joe rogan
Really?
Did you make that up?
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
That would be amazing.
Imagine if that's what you have to do and you would never get sick.
Just give yourself a little cut every day.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, I don't think it works out either.
Let me try it, Joe.
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100% money-back guarantee.
Always.
And right now...
brian redban
Yeah, you have a special coupon, don't you?
I saw it.
I'm like, what the fuck does that even stand for?
joe rogan
Well, the special coupon is worth...
It's 2012, so it's 20.12%.
brian redban
Right.
Oh!
joe rogan
So it's 20.12% off.
brian redban
What was the coupon code actually?
I was trying to figure it out.
I was like, is it...
joe rogan
I'll tell you right now.
unidentified
It's NYR... Oh, so like New Year's Rogans?
joe rogan
I don't know what the fuck it stands for.
brian redban
Not your Rogan.
joe rogan
Yeah, New Year.
Maybe it's like texting.
Like tech speak.
brian redban
Yeah, it's probably something that kids do and we're like old men.
Like, what?
joe rogan
NYR? Yeah, these kids these days.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Let me make sure I get the actual thing right.
unidentified
I got it somewhere.
Shit.
brian redban
Never Young Guns.
No.
Never...
joe rogan
Damn it, I should have this right in front of me, but I don't.
brian redban
It's on your tweeter.
joe rogan
I know, and I can't find it.
brian redban
Tweet that shit.
unidentified
NYR. NYR. 2012. Or just 2012. Is it 2012?
joe rogan
No, NYR12. It is?
unidentified
Okay.
joe rogan
That's it.
NYR12. Wow, we're organized as fuck.
brian redban
Absolutely.
joe rogan
Ridiculous.
Well, that's the end of these stupid commercials, right?
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Do the other one.
Just N-Y-R and get yourself 20.12% off.
That's it!
It's over.
I know.
It was brutal for me, too.
All right, gentlemen and ladies and everybody else that's tuning in, Peter Joseph is here.
We're going to get to the bottom of shit.
unidentified
We're going to get to the bottom of shit.
Yeah.
joe rogan
First of all, before we even start this interview, I want to tell you that I'm ready to join your cult.
Thank you.
I've gone online.
I've seen other cult members and leaders before.
They're not nearly as charismatic as you.
They don't make as much sense as you.
I think you're on point and I'm ready to sign up.
You just tell me when.
brian redban
Me too.
joe rogan
Your utopian view of the perfect society is fucking brilliant, man.
It's dead on.
Peter Joseph, you don't know, is the creator of Zeitgeist, the original movie, and then all these follow-up movies, and now it's actually, you know, you refer to it as a movement.
And that's not cocky in any way, shape, or form.
That's just what it is.
It's a movement, you know?
So the Zeitgeist movement, you know, TZM on Twitter, the TZ movement on Twitter, and it's...
A fascinating thing that's going on right now.
And your movies and your movement, I mean, can you say it's yours now?
Now it's sort of like it's become a life of its own, right?
peter joseph
No one owns it.
And whether people like it or not, they're a part of the Zeitgeist Movement one way or another.
What is the Zeitgeist Movement?
It's the definition of the times.
It's the cultural nuance of all the shit that we believe and think is true and how we progress through time, hence the Zeitgeist Movement.
So whether anyone likes it or not, they're a part of the Zeitgeist movement.
So I just brought that into that particular context.
joe rogan
How did you become this smooth-talking bad motherfucker?
How did this happen?
How did you become this guy?
Because it's not just that you have all these great ideas.
You never use the word, um, all right?
You just sail through these sentences.
And you're just like, you're a musician?
Is that what your background is?
peter joseph
I am.
I'm a musician.
I'm a percussionist.
Classical percussionist.
That's what I tried to do for years and years.
But I didn't fit in the whole orchestral establishment, percussion scene.
joe rogan
Now percussion, enlighten me, it's not just, it's not drums.
peter joseph
It's drums, you have the mallet family, then there's the kettle drums, like timpani, then you have hand percussion.
joe rogan
You learn them all?
peter joseph
Well, as much as I could, given the time that I had.
In my studio in Culver City, I have a whole section of my little house blocked off for Whenever I can pursue my old hobby again, which seems to be less and less, unfortunately.
joe rogan
Can people listen to some of your stuff online?
peter joseph
Do you have a CD? You know, I'm working on compiling.
I've been hesitant to do that because my identity's been so bizarre.
As a filmmaker, which I never intended to be, actually.
I think I sent you the link of the first Zeitgeist performance, which was a performance.
It wasn't intended to be a documentary in the sense, formalically, as you would traditionally assume.
joe rogan
How did it morph?
What happened?
peter joseph
Well, in 2007, I did a six-night run in Lower Manhattan, free.
It was a thing I spent a lot of money on, prepared this piece over the course of seven months.
Didn't expect it to go anywhere because basically I had no rights to actually pursue this as a film.
So this is a firm...
Firmly one shot off, fair use type of deal.
So I did it, publicized it.
People came.
Everything was cool.
Everyone liked it.
It was very dramatic.
Some people walked out.
Some people really liked it.
Some inspired Q&A. It was a catharsis for me.
I was in advertising.
I was doing shit that I didn't appreciate doing.
It's what the system does.
It forces you into a particular pocket for the most of us.
joe rogan
For a lot of us.
peter joseph
We don't necessarily enjoy what we're doing.
So this is a catharsis.
And the unique thing about it is it was so honest.
This is a very honest work for me.
I didn't really think about approaching a demographic.
And when it went online on Google Video, before YouTube, this is when Google Video was the only internet video site that actually had full-length stuff.
And very rarely you'd hear about feature-length films getting there.
And I just happened to hit that paradigm right then And it went crazy viral, and the lawsuits were threatened, and everyone thought it was some big documentary, big production.
They had no idea the background of it.
joe rogan
What kind of lawsuits were threatened?
peter joseph
Just the people that are in it.
That film was a fair use film.
It was not intended to be released.
So when people saw like 20, 30 million views in the first year, everyone's seeing dollar signs as though...
I mean, I wasn't even selling anything.
I wasn't intending to.
And then eventually I went back with the tail between my legs with all these people.
The whole thing is full.
The whole thing is a montage of the zeitgeist.
It's just one big cluster of all sorts of different personalities kind of mushed together.
And most of them supported it.
And then some of them got a little greedy.
But everyone got paid off for the most part.
And there's still a few rocks left unturned.
But the statute of limitations is now up on that.
So if anyone wants to sue me, you're going to have a greater effect.
joe rogan
What a pain in the ass.
peter joseph
Yeah, well...
joe rogan
Isn't it all just stuff that's just out there in the public record, essentially?
peter joseph
It is, but...
joe rogan
You can't put it together?
peter joseph
Anyone can sue anybody for anything if they think they can get money out of it, especially in the film and media industry.
joe rogan
So you obviously are surprised by the response of the first film.
You had no idea any of this was going to happen.
peter joseph
God, no.
You certainly had no intention to make a second film.
I never considered myself a filmmaker.
I was always musically driven.
And then Addendum came out in 2008, and that was...
That was picked up by the Art of His Film Festival, shown here at the Egyptian Theater.
That had a huge response, even larger in a certain sense, because it was the first time it had been publicly displayed, this whole phenomenon.
And then that carried over into the Zeitgeist Movement, which was basically the thought experiment I had.
I was like, okay, we have these film series.
We have plenty of people like Michael Moore making films.
Do they really support change, though?
Are they really doing anything to actually initiate a community effort to get something going?
And at that point in time, I had no idea what that would actually be.
I figured, well, it says it in the movie.
I don't know if you remember the Zeitgeist Addendum.
It says, you know, join the movement.
Start the largest critical mass the world's ever seen to try and get some change going.
And it seemed to take root.
And then from there, it's been this kind of bubbling, changing, and morphing kind of phenomenon that's global.
Now the Zeitgeist Movement, which is...
Which is a shared community.
I want to make people understand it isn't like a movement that any world's ever seen.
This is just a group of people that have a similar value set.
That's the only way I describe it.
It's the ultimate anti-institution.
So I often don't even reference the movement.
I reference the ideas behind it.
joe rogan
So you make this documentary, it gets out, and then all of a sudden you realize that there's this crazy movement behind it.
Now how do you attempt to How do you organize it?
How do you attempt?
Do you not?
Do you just get out of its way and let it organize itself, like sort of an Occupy Wall Street type situation?
peter joseph
It's a combination of the two.
We started off at a self-organizing capacity.
We had volunteers around the world.
It was beautiful, actually, just getting all this communication from different demographics.
I mean, the whole Zeitgeist spectrum, the audience, if you will, for not just the films, but for the movement, but paying attention to these ideas is totally vast.
You have people that are...
I've met kids that are like 10 years old with a little Zeitgeist moving t-shirt on up to 80-year-old men that are looking for something different.
So it's amazing.
And the ethnicity differences are massive.
I want to be in Israel next month giving a lecture.
It's truly unique.
So it's self-organized as it began.
We started to pinpoint different coordination positions, people in charge of media.
joe rogan
So now you go places and give lectures as well.
peter joseph
I do.
joe rogan
And what is the lecture essentially?
Is it just you breaking down how this got started or is it you talking about your perspective?
peter joseph
Well, usually it's lectures broken into three, or at least now the lecture's broken into three.
Typical lectures broken into the first part being what defines awareness and logic and reason, how we think about information, we're dismissing the messenger, look at logically X, Y's and Z's, forget the subjects, it's all about the train of thought, that the process of thought is irrespective of personality.
There's a huge conflict in society between logic and psychology, and they're very, very different, and I can expand on that as we go.
Second section is the criticism of the current socio-economic platform, which I consider to be one massive corruption.
We talk about corruption, you know, a hard drive corrupts, it's messed up, or a criminal pulls out a gun, robs a convenience store.
It's a corruption of the system, the socio-economic system, legal system.
To me, the entire socio-economic system, namely economic, Not only politics, politics is an outgrowth, but I won't jump on that one, is one massive corruption of what it means to live on this planet, what it means to perfect good public health.
So there's that section.
That's massive in most of the criticisms and presentations I do.
Then there's the solution, which supports a train of thought, which has many different names as far as a new social system, which I don't even really address anymore.
I just like to go for the train of thought.
And what it comes down to is you have to have a system that's based on planetary resource management.
Very fundamental stuff, by the way.
A system that's not based on growth and all the strange infinite growth paradigm stuff.
joe rogan
Resource management as a whole community.
One giant community gets together and says, okay, what do we need and how do we keep everybody happy and healthy?
peter joseph
Globally.
joe rogan
Globally.
peter joseph
And you think about it in the broadest symbiotic sense.
One of the great psychological revelations or intellectual revelations that we've had as species is that...
Is that we've been living in these divisive kind of tribalistic concepts and we assume normality with it because of how long they persisted.
But we tend to find that what we find now as far as information is concerned is that we live in a global system.
We live in a symbiosis that stretches outward almost to infinity.
So the very idea of separation becomes literally, tangibly unapplicable to the way we approach our life, the way we approach knowledge, the way we approach society.
The way we approach economics, which is the defining feature of our existence, how we get what we need, how we relate, of course, the renewable elements, the regeneration, if you will, the omni-regeneration, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, of everything, how do we respect that?
And the ultimate realization is that we have to begin to unify all concepts.
You see this in intellectual things.
Consilience is a book by Edward O. Wilson.
Early on in the 1980s, he wrote about this concept of all the The disciplines starting to merge together.
So you can't talk about chemistry without talking about biology or the other way around.
You can't talk about physics without talking about mathematics.
You can't separate anything anymore.
And that's a unique phenomenon that's occurring.
And you can stretch that train of thought backwards and forwards.
In my approach, as far as simplicity, the economic system has to be unified and has to have a very simple respect of what actually supports us.
joe rogan
How would that transition take place?
I mean, even if you were to engineer the perfect utopian, mathematic formula for keeping everybody...
peter joseph
No such thing because...
joe rogan
What do you do with the money that you have now?
Does it just dissolve?
Do we start from scratch?
Like, you know, how does that work?
How does it transition from one monetary system that makes no sense, where there's massive amounts of corruption and people with huge amounts of resources that they've probably gotten by what would be considered immoral, although legal, ways?
peter joseph
Sure.
joe rogan
What do you do with their money?
peter joseph
Well, there's a few answers to that one.
Let's get rid of the word the utopian, though.
joe rogan
I mean, I don't mean that in a sense of a fantasy that's impossible of being achieved.
I mean it as ideal.
Like Boulder, Colorado, a friend of mine said to me once, it's a working utopia.
And I believe it is.
I don't mean it in a sense of impossible.
Utopia is a touchy word.
I like the word.
peter joseph
Finite.
Sometimes it's dismissed as finite.
joe rogan
Yeah.
peter joseph
It's only the best that we know up until now.
joe rogan
Right.
peter joseph
And the great flaw is that we're not actually doing anything based on the knowledge we have today.
But to answer your question, how do we do that?
How do we transition?
The system's failing.
We have an unemployment crisis, we have a debt crisis, and we have an energy crisis that's looming.
Three of the nails in the coffin, as far as I'm concerned, that interweave in certain ways, if you will.
joe rogan
We also have another crisis, and that crisis is the way people raise children.
We have the crisis of, you know, too many people that don't give a fuck about their kids, and they're raising these little problems.
peter joseph
Yeah.
joe rogan
These people that are, you know...
peter joseph
We have a crisis of consciousness, by all means.
joe rogan
Yeah, for sure.
And that absolutely transmits from parent to children, you know, when they're not paying attention to their kids or when they're bad parenting or, you know, whatever they have.
peter joseph
Well, that brings up the...
joe rogan
It gets the same sort of...
It's like, how do we change society at the core?
Because really, you've got to get to them, too.
That's a big percentage of people that are impoverished and uneducated.
brian redban
It's great for strip clubs.
joe rogan
It's great for a lot of things.
It's great for porn, too.
You want a lot of chaos.
You want a lot of messy things.
It's great for fighting, too.
But I think that's a big problem, right?
I mean, isn't it?
peter joseph
Hence the nature of what the Zeitgeist Movement really defines itself as.
You can talk about these solution-oriented things, but really it's the evolution of human awareness.
The real crisis is the crisis of ignorance.
There's no energy crisis.
It's really just a crisis of misunderstanding what we're doing.
joe rogan
The fact that people have become addicted to the money that's going around.
The people that are taking money from corporations.
It's stopped becoming a matter of whether or not it's a good thing.
It's precedented.
There's a precedent.
It's already in place.
They're making the money.
They're going to continue to make the money.
And they want to make the money.
And so anything where you say, well, hey, man, I don't think that what we're doing is really fair.
I mean, we're being unfairly influenced by corporations.
Uh, dude, we're making this fucking money.
We've been making this money.
We're going to continue to make this money.
You don't just stop.
No, no, no.
It's very difficult to just stop.
peter joseph
That's why the failure is so important, if you will.
The failure that's on hand is not going to be altered by any new legislations or any fail-safes the establishment might have.
There's no way the system can persist.
For a number of different reasons I could throw out there.
First of all, the Occupy movement, right?
Everyone says maybe that at this point in time the division of rich versus poor is more than it ever was.
Actually, it's not.
It's not.
It's always been structurally classed.
There's a structural classism built into this system.
Occupy has only been the first to really acknowledge that on the global scale, An issue that's been there from the very beginning because every element of this system supports that and it's getting worse.
We live in a plutonomy now.
There's more money moving amongst the upper five percentile, influencing GDP so much money that it makes the lower percentiles movements of money irrelevant.
So from a firmly economic standpoint, the lower classes are literally irrelevant.
To the function of the economy, therefore to the powers that be, if you will, to the corporate establishment, and to the taxation, fueling, and big business that fuels all government.
joe rogan
And this is all because the system has been manipulated?
peter joseph
No, this is because the system is intrinsically flawed based on the need for differential advantage and an old form of tribalism, psychological tribalism that you have to gain advantage over others, a socially Darwinistic view.
And what's unique, even though I hold that to be self-evident and true to the human condition, if we were both existing in extreme scarcity and we had nothing to eat, we'd end up fighting each other most likely to survive.
That's the natural human instinct.
What's happened now, though, is that the...
I'm jumping ahead here, but follow me, is that the entire...
The infrastructure of society, the human population so large, their industry has become so big.
We have Fukushima meltdown, we have the nuclear weapons, we have nano weapons that are on the horizon.
What we have now is we can't have the risk of this type of mentality Being the forefront of our psychology.
We can't have the self-betterment of the individual to be the forefront of us because it goes against our long-term evolutionary fitness, which means the entire species is at risk.
So to put it in a sentence, the self-interest that tends to dominate now, that really is the psychological fuel of all the motivations that you see.
Greed, if you will.
Greed is just an extension of the basic motivation.
There's really no such thing as greed.
It's just there in the system.
All of that that you see is going to fuck us all up until we begin to realize that we can't operate this way because it's going to destroy us.
Does that make sense?
Nuclear war was the best example.
You don't need passports to see the fallout.
Nuclear winter would have taken over the entire planet if the US and Russia went to nuclear war, even a minor war.
It would have destroyed almost the entire human species.
And a few scientists realized that and said, you know what?
This isn't really a partisan or a country or nationalist issue anymore.
This is a life issue.
So the greater our technology, the greater our ability, the greater vulnerability we have, and the more clear it becomes how we have to unify and make our self-interest become social interest if we intend to survive as a species.
And this is the great paradigm shift of all human thought.
joe rogan
So what do you do with all the weapons?
peter joseph
Well, you get rid of them, dismantle them, and hope you can regurgitate them into something effective.
Imagine if we were to take over the Pentagon and use their equipment for monitoring the Earth's resources, use the amazing surveillance equipment to actually have a productive use.
It would be incredible what we could do.
brian redban
Cancer.
joe rogan
I think everything you say is brilliant, and I agree with it 100%.
But when I think about it being implemented in today's society, I think of the human beings that exist right now and how they've been running their lives based on greed, real greed.
Based on real ignorance, based on violence, you're going to get these people and everybody's going to go hold hands and sing Kumbaya together.
I feel like there has to be something.
There has to be some sort of event that unites people.
peter joseph
There's not going to be a stopping of the separation of rich and poor.
The rich are only going to get richer and smaller and smaller.
And if you want to see anger, just wait.
Just wait.
We haven't even touched the anger stage, as it were.
And that is what's going to start the initial transition into something new.
And the point of the movement really is not to try and initiate some step-by-step logical transition to assume human beings are rational and they're just going to say, oh, that sounds better, that sounds more efficient.
No, that's not the way the human being works at all, at least at this stage.
So the failure will happen.
The zeitgeist movement's on the sidelines, as far as I'm concerned, trying to spread information about what a new social system may be, exposing the roots of this system, and as this tipping point occurs, Those that are on the outs will slowly become on the in, and you'll have a very powerful, large, complicated revolution that will happen one way or another.
It's an inevitability to me.
So all the rich 1.00%, doesn't matter how many billions of dollars they have, the police are not going to protect them.
There's going to be a very unique, unpredictable shift in the human social structure.
joe rogan
It's a fucking movie, isn't it?
peter joseph
It is.
joe rogan
Isn't it a movie?
I mean, really, a great time in the movie.
A time when things get really exciting.
I've said about the Occupy movement that, to me, they're like white blood cells.
They don't know exactly why they're there, but they know that there's an issue.
There's a sickness here.
peter joseph
Social disorder.
It's a social immune system response.
joe rogan
It really is.
They just clogged up all the areas where there's corruption.
It's fascinating.
peter joseph
It was a beautiful action.
Too bad the majority of the Occupy movement hasn't been able to really put a train of thought forward that others can grasp.
They have all this media, all this press.
I don't know if you've seen anything that I've tried to do with them.
I've done some talks in LA and New York.
Just really trying to get some seeds planted as far as what a new social structure may be.
Because you can complain all day.
unidentified
Right.
peter joseph
But until you put down some fundamental logical elements that people can grab, expand, and get into the public consciousness, into the zeitgeist, we're doomed until that happens.
It's just going to be one iteration of rogue, you know.
joe rogan
The idea would be amazing to have an entire culture filled with cool people and everybody works together.
Like, boy, you feel like, could that work?
Is that possible?
And if it was possible, would anybody ever get anything done?
Would there be any more competition?
Would there be any more creativity?
Would everybody just be sitting around banging each other and giving each other hugs?
unidentified
Yeah.
peter joseph
The fun thing about modern sociological research is that a great number of studies have been done on those issues.
Yeah.
Incentive has been a large farce of the market system to assume.
If we're doing mechanical stuff, yeah, if I'm going to be on a conveyor line, which could easily be automated now, and be on a subway line, it always blows my mind when I walk into a subway restaurant and there's this conveyor belt of people that you could automate in five seconds if you wanted to.
Wasting their lives.
Yeah, you have to pay people for that.
But when it comes to creativity, very few are actually motivated by money, and money actually inhibits.
There's large studies that are done by a man named Daniel Pink called Drive.
I recommend that book to anyone that's interested.
joe rogan
I would think that, yeah, if you were just concentrating on money, you would lose part of your mental resources that you could have concentrated on creativity.
peter joseph
It's a deep inhibition.
Everything I've ever done creatively, I've never...
Money's a pollutant to me, you know, for anything that I've done.
joe rogan
A pollutant?
peter joseph
Yeah, it hinders my creative response.
joe rogan
Really?
brian redban
I agree 100%.
joe rogan
I fucking love money.
I love buying cool shit.
I like going to movies.
I like going to dinner and not have to worry how much it costs.
You hate money, period?
brian redban
I hate money, period.
I hate...
If I had not to do...
joe rogan
Limitless resources.
brian redban
Yeah.
If I just didn't have...
joe rogan
Oh, you hate dealing with it.
brian redban
I hate dealing with bills.
joe rogan
You don't hate bills.
brian redban
I hate having money.
I hate getting money.
joe rogan
Get the fuck out of it.
You don't hate having money.
brian redban
I hate having to deal with that part.
I just like waking up doing what I want to do.
Creativity.
Not having to worry about that at all would be amazing.
joe rogan
Can you just go somewhere and give them your pictures and they give you some meat?
brian redban
Well, I mean, again, of course you have to get paid to live, but if I could take that whole part out, that would be amazing.
peter joseph
Exactly.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's a system that we're...
It's absolutely not the best we can do.
There's no way this is the best we can do.
Especially the stock market, man.
I don't give a fuck if you understand it or not.
I watch it sometimes.
I watch those numbers scroll through the bottom of the screen and there's some fucking dude with his classical attire, his traditional attire that he's wearing with his tie and he's moving around and pointing to all these different stocks that are going up and down.
And you know it's all based on confidence.
You go, what?!
What kind of a shitbag system have you put together?
What kind of a goofy fucking number game where it's all going up and down and shorts and derivatives?
You tell me what the fuck the derivative market is again?
Why is it 100 times bigger than the real market?
What?
peter joseph
Well, as much as I hate to admit it, I was a private equity trader for about six years after I left.
joe rogan
Who is that like?
peter joseph
Well, it was a personal choice to get out of the establishment.
The only occupation in existence where you don't have a boss or a client or reliant on an audience is in equity trading.
joe rogan
So is it like being an educated guesser?
Is that what it's like essentially?
peter joseph
No, there's a huge strategy that's called technical analysis that people use.
Now it's automated behind the scenes by groups like Goldman Sachs that are raping everybody slowly but surely.
But no, there's a firm...
I have a lot of respect for the traders independently because of their mindset.
It's a great discipline.
It's like a sport.
You really have to know what you're doing.
You can't just wing it.
It's not gambling in any kind of sense like that.
But as an institution, the stock market and the whole concept of these representations of equity and finance and how much influence it has in society, and of course the derivatives blow out and everything else that we've seen, it's the most cancerous thing on the face of the earth.
The stock market is just unbelievable.
That's why it even exists at all.
I have no clue.
It's the ultimate manifestation of the worst concept of having no social contribution and invariably making more money than any other sector of the population.
Even though you create nothing, you do nothing.
It's just like Wall Street and Michael Douglas.
He's like, I create nothing.
I own.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's amazing that it's been able to get to the point where it is now.
What an out-of-control ride.
peter joseph
I knew guys that made like $40 million a year doing nothing.
Nothing.
And you say to yourself, well, here's the market system, this is the capitalist concept, right?
Oh, everyone, if you do the most contribution, you're supposed to get the most reward.
That's the underlying tone.
So if you work really hard and you really want to make that invention and you can contribute to society, no.
It's you better go, you only offer yourself, fuck everybody else.
That's what's rewarded in this system across the board.
And the market system is just the highest level of that psychological manifestation.
joe rogan
Did it grow too fast for our little monkey minds?
Is that what it is?
Did technology and the concept of being able to control money and all the different things that we have to deal with as variables didn't exist when our minds were created?
Our DNA is essentially the same as it was 10,000 years ago.
Our DNA is essentially set up for the natural world.
And then all of a sudden we've shoved it into this weird new dimension where we're dealing with an incredible amount of variables.
You're dealing with all kinds of craziness.
I mean, it's just, I don't know if the mind is set up to deal with the world that we've created, which is why it's like a kid at the helm of a car that doesn't know how to drive and he's stomping on the fucking gas, but he's too small to look over the dashboard.
So he doesn't even know where the fuck he's going.
He's trying to figure this thing out as he goes along.
It's like all of a sudden this little kid has a car.
You know?
And that's what it's like with us.
We're like these dumb fucking monkeys and we're still evolving out of that dumb monkey primal soup and popping out.
We're this monkey that's aware of itself and then in the process of becoming aware of itself, barely getting our shit together.
We've created everything.
We've created nuclear fucking bombs and cell phones and video that you can get on a little screen in your pocket and the ability to do things that we would have never thought possible just 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years ago.
It's almost like...
No one could have managed this.
It's almost like it blew up faster than our reasoning.
peter joseph
Evolution is always natural, one way or another.
Whether we destroy ourselves, well, then I guess the human species was an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
One way or another, everything is always right.
You know what I mean?
There's no wrongs here.
But the disorder that's in place in society is what concerns me, which is what you alluded to at the beginning.
You have this huge disorder based on the system that's Basically a self-destructive system.
It's not respecting any general variables of resource management.
It's not respecting, you know, I saw a recent stat that said, oh, China has less unemployment than America because their lax EPA, if you were, whatever they have in China, their lax environmental issues.
Like, we should be more like China and reduce our environmental things.
And they have, like, huge smog things.
I mean, it's just disgusting.
We're destroying ourselves.
joe rogan
One town where they say it's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day just living there.
The skies are like dark gray.
peter joseph
So it's a disorder that we don't even see it and we just keep killing ourselves whether it's the poison of our food.
joe rogan
Why is that?
Because we still recognize ourselves as individuals and we still haven't realized that we are a part of a giant superorganism that is the human race, so because people are acting as individuals and then they can do so as a corporation and do so without guilt, they act as individuals all going towards one goal but under the guise that the company is doing it in the best interest of business and then they're able to get away with a lot of shit that you just can't get away with in a one-on-one basis.
You know, instead of thinking of human beings as a whole and putting that at the front of your ethic, that's like not even into consideration.
It's like, what can we get away with?
What's legal?
You know, and it's not our fault if it's legal.
peter joseph
I go back to my early life.
I had a normal upbringing, but I I did all sorts of shit out of college that was highly illegal, reselling things.
It was whatever you could do to make money.
It didn't matter.
And everyone did, too.
It was whatever you needed to do to get money.
And what's happened now with the value system disorder is that since that's the pursuit, that's the divine drive of the system.
That's what status is defined by.
That's what your success is defined by.
That everyone can blindly look the other way with how much destruction is occurring in the world.
They can look the other way with the wars and the cancers and just every natural phenomenon that we've come to disintegrate, all the trash that's surrounding the planet right now.
joe rogan
I've likened the war to the way people react if you know that someone in their family has been molesting someone.
It's almost like they don't want to know, they're looking away, they don't want to think about it, they don't want to do it that way.
If it was right next door, we'd be thinking about it every fucking day.
The fact that people can just calmly accept the fact that there's no, for no reason whatsoever that you could ever argue, we have thousands of dudes with guns in some other part of the world.
peter joseph
Yeah, and it seems normal, doesn't it?
joe rogan
It seems normal, because it's a part of life.
peter joseph
If people are born into this normality, they don't know any better.
joe rogan
Exactly.
It is what it is, because we feel like the system must be smarter than us.
I mean, it's big, it's huge, it's gigantic.
But it's a group of goddamn individuals with their own personal interests at hand, and their personal interests will extend to killing people and profiting off of it.
If they can get away with it.
peter joseph
My favorite example of that concept was, remember the movie Network?
joe rogan
Yes.
peter joseph
Which I had a little skit of.
joe rogan
I'm mad as hell or I'm not going to take it anymore.
peter joseph
Remember when they got frustrated at the very end because they were losing money with the character and they sit around and they go, well, we could kill him.
And you think as the audience member that they're just joking.
You think someone in the room is going to go, yeah, whatever.
But then they're like, well, if we do it, we have to be very careful.
And the film ends right there.
So you think about that logic.
A human life becomes quite secondary to most motivations, especially the higher you go up in the sort of corporate neuroses.
joe rogan
Well, you know, it's why I've argued before with people about, you know, this September 11th especially.
I mean, I've heard more conversations about, you know, what people think happened September 11th, and I believe this, and I believe that.
And from the very moment I've said, you don't believe that they'd be willing.
I'm not saying that people did orchestrate any sort of attacks on America.
I'm not saying anything.
But what I am saying is that we know that they went to war, And they said that there was weapons of mass destruction when there weren't.
So they're willing to kill some people that they don't know.
They know.
They know.
At the very least, they're willing to kill some people that they don't know in order to push their own agenda.
We know that.
peter joseph
Just like when they opened Wall Street with all the toxic air and the thousands that have gotten sick since then.
joe rogan
And my take on it is they don't know you either.
So you don't think they would kill you.
Anybody that would orchestrate death for profit, you don't think they would kill you?
You really think that they would because you're a U.S. citizen?
peter joseph
Which is the nature of the Pentagon and the entire military industrial establishment.
I mean, this is a killing machine, so you think they wouldn't use That in domestic purposes.
And not to mention there's so many examples of that through history that people blindly look away from.
It's just so sad.
joe rogan
That's why it's offensive when someone says that you're unpatriotic when you see that.
When you see that and you point that out, no, you go, no, that is patriotic.
That is very patriotic because that's not what we're supposed to be about.
That's not what this country was supposed to be founded for.
This country was supposed to be the best alternative.
This country was supposed to be the people that got it together and said, listen, we have fucking rules, man.
Here's the rule.
We separate this from that.
We do this.
We do that.
We don't let anybody do this.
Don't give up your liberties.
You have to have essential liberties.
You have to have guns.
You've got to protect yourself from enemies, foreign and domestic.
It was all set up.
It was all set up.
peter joseph
Sure.
joe rogan
They knew.
peter joseph
We could argue little nuances of the founding fathers.
unidentified
I'm sure we could.
peter joseph
But I understand your point.
joe rogan
I'll tell you one thing.
Did you hear this fucking dummy Newt Gingrich, this would-be king, fat-headed clown?
This guy actually said that he believed that the founding fathers would be much more aggressive in the way they would prosecute people for marijuana.
And that they would do it probably much more violently.
peter joseph
Even though they were growing it themselves?
joe rogan
Not only were they growing it themselves, it says in George Washington's fucking diaries that he was separating the male from the female plant.
It's very clear that he says he was separating the male from the female plant.
For people who don't know, when you're growing marijuana, you've got to separate the male from the female plant so that the female grows the buds and that they become psychedelic.
That's how you make it so you get high from it.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
So George Washington is essentially saying he likes to get high.
And he said, oops, a little too late.
So he's a fucking stoner.
He separated them too late.
I mean, what did you have to do back then?
I mean, how many different things did he have going on?
George Washington was a fucking stoner, dude.
Almost 100%.
peter joseph
God bless.
joe rogan
For sure they grew it.
And by the way, they grew hemp because they used it for a lot of things outside of the psychoactive effects.
They used it for all sorts of different things.
And there's all these different passages, people smoking on their hemp pipe.
It's written in so many different people's diaries.
brian redban
When George Washington said that, he did mean his slaves were separating it for him, right?
joe rogan
Probably.
Did he have slaves?
Did George have slaves?
He must have had slaves, right?
unidentified
Of course, of course.
peter joseph
Yeah, they all did.
joe rogan
Yeah, they all did, right?
brian redban
It was so hot right then.
joe rogan
It's a different time, Brian.
It's a different time.
He was a good man.
But the point is, man, these fucking people that are in the positions of wanting to be at the helm of this monster.
It's like, what a shitbag group of people we have to choose from.
peter joseph
And again, what do you expect?
What do you expect?
I always go back to one of my great heroes, George Carlin.
He's like, garbage in, garbage out.
What do you expect from this system?
Now, you can argue where these people came from, which is where the scam comes in of the entire election cycle.
I mean, where did these people come from?
Seriously, you look at these like, I don't remember that guy.
joe rogan
What's the guy who won Iowa?
They found out that he won.
He beat Mitt Romney, the crazy religious dude.
Oh, yeah.
Santorum, is that his name?
peter joseph
Right, right, right.
joe rogan
Oh, he's a loon.
He's a good one.
He's full-helm Jesus.
He's Jesus like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
He's at the front of the Jesus ship with his arms up in the air.
This guy's no abortion, no nothing.
He's super Jesus.
He's pushing it hard.
What an amazing group of humans we have trying to be at the helm.
Michelle Bachman and her gay husband.
It's a goddamn Coen Brothers movie.
We're living in a Coen Brothers movie.
And a real good one.
peter joseph
A satirical one at that.
It's a big football game.
It's sad to me to see how you can't watch the news without them covering this as though it's relevant or important to anything.
As though any decision processes that these people will have the power to take hold of will actually accomplish anything when it's obvious from our last great hope, Obama, that big business isn't going anywhere.
Even Ron Paul, if he was magically to be swept in with bulletproof vests on and everything else, you'll see some dramatic shifts in his policy the moment he comes in because he knows what's actually possible in that environment before the shitstorm hits him from all sides.
All the examples of what they did to Ralph Nader with the prostitution thing.
I don't know if you remember that.
The car company.
joe rogan
I don't remember what happened.
peter joseph
It was basically a car company set up Ralph Nader in a hotel room with a prostitute and then documented it because he was doing all this publicity against this car company how unsafe they're cutting costs on their car production.
He found out very discreetly how bad it was.
People were dying and they tried to set him up and to make him look bad with this prostitute.
It was incredible.
Wow.
That's just the tip of the iceberg of all sorts of games that are played.
You can go straight down the whole political spectrum and look at all the things that seem random.
Lewinsky and all these things.
There's a subtle orchestration happening to that, not to be conspiratorially oriented, but that's just the way it is.
You don't mess around.
It's a mafia system.
brian redban
I want to know where to get casting for that, because I would love to be a part of the next one.
Like, I'm found in Obama's locker room, and I can't walk.
joe rogan
Do you think they hire...
Well, they must hire guys.
brian redban
Yeah, they probably...
Craigslist.
joe rogan
I mean, at this point in time, they can easily pay someone to just fuck up your life.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, pay someone.
Like, this is your job.
$250,000.
Your job is to seduce that guy and go and get into his life somehow or another.
peter joseph
They're called PR agencies.
joe rogan
Is that what they do?
peter joseph
Well, PR agencies can go both sides.
They can be positive towards you or they can be hired to completely blacklist you and make you look like shit.
I know that from my own experience of the weird things that have happened to me, which I wonder where the roots of some of these things are.
People that blog in anti-psychist, anti-Peter Joseph manners every single day and follow everything I do.
How do they possibly have time to do that?
joe rogan
So you think they're being paid to do it, maybe?
peter joseph
Well, I just know of some companies that were listed to me that do the exact same thing to other people.
And you don't see them on the forefront.
They're these PR firms that you can use to...
You've probably seen the ones that you can go and use to get bad things removed from your name on the internet.
joe rogan
I've heard that on the radio.
Like, if you're a doctor or something like that.
unidentified
Right.
peter joseph
Well, there's ones that work the other direction, more of a black op kind of way.
joe rogan
They go after you.
peter joseph
Yeah, and they're paid to do so.
joe rogan
Wow, that's brilliant.
brian redban
It's happening to porn stars right now.
joe rogan
Really?
brian redban
Yeah.
joe rogan
Why don't dudes go after porn stars?
brian redban
I don't know.
This one person broke into where they get tested once a month.
I think I might have talked about this before.
And broke in and stole all the records from all the porn stars.
unidentified
Oh, snap.
brian redban
And then put them online.
And then that shit got taken down eventually.
And I found out it was just this male porn star that did it.
And then now there's groups of people that use all those things that were put online and attack every single porn star online by putting their information everywhere.
joe rogan
Oh, wow.
What the fuck is with people?
Why would they want to do that?
brian redban
I don't know.
peter joseph
A few different motivations there.
joe rogan
It's weird.
Money and ego.
It's a weird thing, man.
It's a weird thing that people want to hurt other people that badly.
peter joseph
It's the self-appointed guardians of the status quo that could be labeled.
That was a line I picked up from a man named Jock Fresco.
These people, the only thing they have is their identity preservation.
They will fight tooth and nail to make sure whatever they believe is held true, whether it's political, religious.
I mean, I can't count how many death threats I got since the first film came out.
joe rogan
Well, you're questioning the status quo.
All they're doing is fucking on camera.
Why would somebody want to harm them?
peter joseph
Well, because if, say, some deeply religious individual sees porno or catches his son with it or something like that, they feel a huge threat there for whatever purpose.
You'd be surprised what motivations people have.
joe rogan
Again, that's the root cause.
The root issue is how fucking dumb people are and what a giant percentage of them are just so off the tracks and in the woods.
peter joseph
Disinformed, badly conditioned.
joe rogan
How do you turn those folks around?
Because I think you can't really have this next level society until you get those folks on track.
Look, that's one of the things about living in a nice neighborhood.
If you live in a nice neighborhood, there's generally a lot less financial strife, so people are a little bit more calm.
It's one of the things that people don't like about living in neighborhoods where people are poor.
There's a lot of tension, and sometimes shit goes down.
You've got to get everybody to the level of no tension, you know, in order to have a beautiful society.
How the hell do you do that?
peter joseph
As you pointed out earlier, you start with the kids.
There's a deeply religious...
Anti-structure thing going on in the world where everyone thinks they can just keep having kids and it doesn't matter what the resources of the planet, you know, it doesn't matter, no, don't you dare tell them how to raise their kids, forget any kind of instruction.
You know, kids, people have natural pre-programming.
It's pretty obvious what, did you watch Psychoist Moving Forward, a whole section of that at the very beginning of Psychoist Moving Forward on the development of kids.
Now, little small nuances can mess them up for the rest of their lives, whether it goes to drug addiction, whether it goes to mental disorders or even physical disorders.
And no attention is being put on that.
If there's anything that I would like to see put in the public educational fountain, it would be how to really think about your kids, how important it is, how the earliest things that happen to them will fuck them up the rest of their lives if they're not carefully It's carefully collared or carefully orchestrated, allowing vulnerability.
We're not talking about like, you know, holding kids down and making them do things in a structured way.
It's allowing the vulnerability of this natural organism to come to fruition.
A horse, for example, falls right out of the horse, it's born, falls right out, it can walk, boom.
Humans, because of evolution, they come out way too early, so the susceptibility of the infant is so massive and so misunderstood up until now that people have done things to their kids that have really fucked them up for their whole lives at the infancy stage because of how much developmental requirements are actually there.
The protections are gone.
So, it's a huge topic, and there's a lot of people I can list that can describe those issues in text.
A guy named Gabor Mate is a really good one.
joe rogan
So what is the best case scenario?
Is the best case scenario that the Zeitgeist movement takes place after some sort of a collapse and we develop a new society that's based on the using of natural resources universally and across the board and there's no hierarchy of citizenship and then the people are on the outside, what do we do?
We fight them off?
peter joseph
Well, you would want to hope that whatever the cataclysm manifests itself to be that's pending, that those on the sidelines, the barbarians at the gate as they might have been, would eventually turn around to see the folly of their ways as well.
You know, it's hard to predict.
The Zeitgeist Movement is really a movement of logic and reason.
It's like, okay, here we have technological automation.
You know what?
People are being replaced by automation.
In fact, the great driver of unemployment now is automation.
They won't admit it.
Most economists will not.
A few are coming out now and admitting it.
You can go back to the Roosevelt administration.
They actually wanted to have a stop on technological invention during the Industrial Revolution because of how fast people were being replaced by machines.
And that is the four core driver of all unemployment you see in the world today.
Period.
So what does that mean?
What does the logic say?
Well, we can produce more with less.
We don't need people to slave over some shitty factory job anymore.
We automate it.
No vacations.
Much higher degree of accuracy.
Machines can do things.
All sorts of modular machines now that can do things like scientific research.
Extremely specific things.
Thinking machines, people like Ray Kurzweil, and all this massive evolution I could ramble on for a long time.
What does that mean for human labor?
Do we keep human labor as a requirement to live?
Your right to life is to get income?
Or do you create a new system that says, okay, let's go full forward with machine automation, all sectors possible, and fill in the gaps with whomever is willing to do so.
And I think the abundance produced would enable a society to exist without people needing money every minute of the day.
joe rogan
What happens to all those people that were working on those assembly jobs?
peter joseph
At this stage, they wouldn't know what the fuck to do.
joe rogan
Right.
peter joseph
But if you evolve it out, if you really think about this over long periods of time, you get the education.
joe rogan
It's going to be a problem we're going to have to face eventually.
Face it now rather than later.
peter joseph
Until you see someone in power say, okay, we're going to start to automate and basically do a form of socialization, if you will, giving people free food, free energy in order to supplement them for their lack of purchasing power, which is what's happening.
Until someone starts to do that in government or having the workday, like if Obama was smarting a bunch of Roosevelt administration, they would have put in a mandate or whatever you want to call it where the corporations receive some type of subsidy where they would have the workday and they would hire twice the amount of people for that corporation.
Giving them the sustenance income that would be applicable.
It would be probably a little bit reduced, but what else do you do?
They're not going to do that because the core motivation is so against it.
The corporation's responsibility is to the shareholders.
Shareholders don't want to see anything like that.
What happens when someone lays off a bunch of employees in the stock market?
The stock goes up.
Remember?
joe rogan
Yeah.
peter joseph
It's just sick.
The whole thing's backwards.
So, back to my point, until automation, no one's going to stop automation because it's a profit-driven thing.
It costs less money to automate than it does to use people.
And that's what you call the contradiction of capitalism in the words of Karl Marx, believe it or not.
He recognized this long ago.
And all you have is this thing clashing together that is unreconcilable until a new social system is put in place.
joe rogan
What do you think is going to happen with the current system?
How much time do you think we have before it's just chaos in the streets?
unidentified
I don't know.
peter joseph
I mean, it's already chaos in most of the world in pockets.
I think 2012 is going to be, prophecy aside, I think 2012 is going to be a very interesting year.
joe rogan
It's amazing that things have accelerated this far, this close to 2012. When you look at it from the prophecy standpoint, everybody thinks...
Look, it's like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
It's like at a certain point in time, like Y2K and this and that and the fucking Pleiades and where's Nibiru and...
At a certain point in time, you're like, alright, you're fucking apocalypse talk.
Stop it.
But then, as you get closer and closer to 2012, you're like, man, you know, maybe the Mayans were onto something.
peter joseph
Well, I doubt that, but what does scare me is the self-fulfilling shit and the people that are going to be jumping out of windows and shooting things up and all the ones that have convinced themselves of some deluded idea.
That's going to be very interesting.
joe rogan
Well, the other thing is, no one's saying it's going to be the end of the world.
It's just the end of this calendar.
It could be a new era that's awesome.
It very easily could.
peter joseph
In my personal analysis, the end of the mind calendar is the end of the age of Pisces.
That's it?
The great year starts again with the age of Aquarius.
It's too hard to predict.
You have a 1,500 to 3,000-year buffer.
It's a 26,000-year cycle.
It's a procession of the equinoxes.
And that's what I think it is.
But whatever.
I don't pay attention to those things.
joe rogan
I don't pay attention to it, but I do pay attention to the fact that so many people pay attention to it.
peter joseph
Well, of course.
joe rogan
I'm fascinated by astrology.
I don't know if I'm believing in it 100%, but I think it's amazing that they can halfway nail down personalities and different traits when they're really good at it.
peter joseph
We could argue on that one.
joe rogan
I would love to.
peter joseph
The power of suggestion is...
Quite phenomenal in the world today.
You'd be amazed at how...
joe rogan
Even as far as like structuring questions.
peter joseph
As far as structuring questions.
joe rogan
Leading people into...
Yeah.
I've seen that.
I've seen like psychic stuff.
People do shit like that.
But I'm not even talking about that.
I'm not talking about like somebody giving you a date.
And some of those real astrologists that want to know like what time you were born.
And I don't know if it's real.
But it's amazing that it's been around so long.
I do not know if it's real.
But it's amazing that at one point in time someone actually dedicated enough time to writing down some sort of a system.
To figure out which different things that are in line when you're born.
And that's kind of amazing, really.
peter joseph
I think it's beautiful from a cultural standpoint.
Trying to find your place in the universe.
Think about what people are doing.
They're looking at the sky.
It looks flat and 2D. They think about associations.
They want to feel like they're connected to it.
The whole definition of God.
And if you go back to my first film, most natural phenomenon, stellar cults originated, merged into the Islam...
Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion by symbolism just became historized, basically.
But the beauty of it is that people are trying to relate to something.
That's what I see.
But they still thought the sky was flat.
So the constellations don't even exist.
They're not actually there.
They just look that way.
joe rogan
Who is they thought the sky was flat?
peter joseph
Well, if you look at the sky, it looks perfectly flat.
And the constellations and the depictions are actually flat.
That's how they're...
That's why they have the little animal things and things like that.
unidentified
Right, right.
peter joseph
And the sun rising, let's say, the summer solstice, you know, where you...
I believe that's the birth note, or maybe it's the spring equinox, I can't remember.
It's a completely 2D, prima facie, surface, flatland view.
And it doesn't hold any actual validity, because they had no idea that it was actually the depth, you know, the depth of these stars and their radiance is so far away.
They're burning out, they're changing, there's morphine, there's expansion.
So...
joe rogan
So they just looked at it as almost like a picture, a flat, two-dimensional picture.
brian redban
Ryan's pants is going to fall down.
joe rogan
It's amazing that they did that for so long, though.
They really studied constellations, I guess.
peter joseph
That's a beautiful art form.
That's a beautiful concept.
brian redban
That was outside.
joe rogan
Where is that?
brian redban
Outside.
joe rogan
Who is that?
brian redban
A mother beating a nice kid.
Her kid.
joe rogan
Lovely Pasadena.
peter joseph
Speaking of culture.
joe rogan
Well, this is the only thing.
That's the worst you have to worry about in Pasadena.
You know, this is not like...
You know, what's funny is...
brian redban
I know this girl that was a stripper a long time ago, and she found out about you from the green room of a strip club.
There was a hair designer that was, he was a gay guy that was in love with your shit, and so he used to tag you throughout San Francisco, and in this green room of a strip club, your tag is all over.
He just tagged the fuck out of this green room.
That's how she found out about it.
unidentified
Funny.
brian redban
And then she got so moved by your movie that she started posting flyers around San Francisco That was what was so phenomenal on the original.
peter joseph
It still persists to this day on its own.
I did no publicity for any of these things.
It's always been self-driven.
Somehow it seemed to tap into some element of people that they appreciated and felt the need to re-communicate to other people, which is inadvertent to me.
I certainly didn't anticipate that.
brian redban
Was it blowing your mind?
peter joseph
Well, I get these marketing calls occasionally or emails from these marketing jackasses like, how did you do that?
unidentified
What kind of algorithms are you using in your viral media?
peter joseph
It's just word of mouth, man.
joe rogan
That's hilarious.
peter joseph
It's highly envied.
The film series is highly envied by a lot of people.
There's a lot of films trying to duplicate the idea, too.
Duplicate the concept and build kind of a farce community out of it in the same way that was natural to the movement.
But anyway, what do you expect?
brian redban
It's amazing.
peter joseph
Everyone assumes dollar signs when there's a lot of people around.
joe rogan
Yeah, of course.
There's always been someone at the helm of something at different points in time, different cultures, different religions, different kingdoms.
There's always been someone with a new idea.
And I think everybody sort of recognizes that this thing's falling apart, no one's buying it anymore, and a new thing's going to come along, man.
And we've got to jump on it.
We're going to jump on it because this really is the future because this dying animal that you see, this fucking elephant and donkey system is stupid.
It's stupid and everybody recognizes it.
peter joseph
It's destroying us.
Just look around.
It's destroying the fabric of almost everything that you see around you.
Every life support system is in decline.
Our psychology is really fucked up.
Have you taken a look around what the culture is doing today?
I mean, the public health issue is bad enough.
I'm just waiting for the tipping point where the lifespan starts to tip because I think it's just a matter of time.
joe rogan
I have a friend that has a 10-year-old, and she, as her 10-year-old, is in school, and he's an active kid, and the psychologist, or psychiatrist, I guess it would be for school, is trying to give the kid drugs.
unidentified
Yeah, of course.
joe rogan
And he says, well, he's a good kid.
He just gets bored in class, and he acts up a little bit, but he doesn't need to be drugged.
And she goes, you're so easy, you're so quick to drug them.
Like, how many kids in his classes are on drugs?
And he says, well, I am not on liberty to give that.
It's confidential information.
But let me tell you, it's somewhere near half.
So I don't know why the fuck he would say that he's not at liberty.
And then she goes, wait a minute, half?
unidentified
Half?
joe rogan
Do you think half of the kids in school have a mental problem to the point where they need drugs?
Wow!
That's amazing!
That is amazing that there's someone out there that is a professional that's able to do something like that.
Now, this is a woman telling me about her child.
I do not know if her numbers were correct.
I mean, she might have just...
brian redban
Maybe she was adding marijuana to the factory.
joe rogan
She's not a dummy, though.
She's not a dummy.
She was telling me this, and it made a whole lot of sense to me.
And I was like, that is amazing that they're so willing to drug people.
That's a sign of sickness.
unidentified
Absolutely.
joe rogan
School fucking sucks, okay?
There's a reason why your kid's moving around.
He's healthy.
He's healthy.
His brain works great.
peter joseph
Creative.
joe rogan
Yeah.
And he's getting all this input that blows.
And he knows he can get out of that class and play video games and have laughs with his friends and say hi to girls.
And that would be awesome.
But right now, this sucks.
And I can't take the suck any longer.
It's like you're telling me that the only way to learn is to be bored into a fucking coma and just accept this really low frequency of memorizing shit that some other asshole figured out.
And so that's what school is.
Every day just pounding it into you that the only way to get through this is you're going to have to hate it.
Meanwhile, everything else you get good at, every game you get good at, you get good at because you love it.
You know?
You get good at video games because they're fun.
When you get to be a badass at a video game, it's because that video game's awesome.
Why do you guys get good at basketball?
Because it's fun to be good at basketball.
When you hit that three-pointer, it's fucking fun.
Everything else that you get good at is fun.
Except the shit that you have to deal with in school.
Unmotivated people.
They're underpaid.
And you want to talk about, like, the symptom of a sick society.
The fact that we put so little emphasis on schools.
So little emphasis on teaching.
It should be an...
Honor!
peter joseph
It should be an amazing honor.
One of the highest paid fields on the planet.
joe rogan
Yeah, to guard over people's children, man.
You should be the most honorable, respectable people available.
Super intelligent and super well paid.
We should be paying teachers.
Fuck loads of money, man.
It should be like a prestigious position.
It should be something that you really aspire to instead of something where it's a passion but you're getting fucked by the system where you barely have enough money to eat.
You look at how much a teacher makes in a public school system.
It's fucking deplorable.
It's amazing that it's accepted.
It's like, for whatever reason, we don't step out of boundaries and look at it objectively and go, we've got some core problems.
And a big part of it is our children.
And they develop to become shitty fucking human beings.
Against their own intentions.
It's not like they want to suck.
You know?
Kids don't want to suck.
Kids are just balls of potential.
peter joseph
Victims.
The victims of a system that really doesn't care.
Doesn't understand how to care.
joe rogan
Doesn't put any resources towards it.
It's like you have so much money to go to war, and you have so little to go to school.
That's amazing.
It's amazing that you've worked out the numbers that way.
peter joseph
And the highest level of imposition you can have is to go to college, get $80,000 worth of debt, and then guess what?
You're ripe to be enslaved in some hideous corporate establishment.
joe rogan
Well, you're just hoping you can afford a Lexus next year.
You know, every day just living a slave.
peter joseph
But back to the drug issue, it just preps kids now so they can, when they get to be adults and try to figure out why they're so miserable, why they hate their job, why they have no contribution to society, why they don't have any artistic energy anymore.
Well, that's perfect because then you can give them the Prozac and give them all the other drugs that will nullify them to make them adhere to this process.
joe rogan
They're just numb up.
Poor little guys.
peter joseph
So if you analyze all that and you statistically view public health from a psychological and mental health standpoint, you look at depression rates, you look at everything, then you look at the environmental problems, you just go straight down the spectrum of public health to physical health to environmental health, you have one massive drop-off.
It's ridiculous.
And that's the data I deal with far too often.
And that's why I think the system can't hold up for that much longer.
I mean, the cancer rates are out of control, for one, as a general rule.
There's more cancer occurring now than ever before.
joe rogan
There's too many of us, clearly, right?
peter joseph
No, it's not too many of us.
Nope, I don't agree with that at all.
Intuitively speaking, you would want to say that.
I think the world can hold many, many more times the number of people if it was properly structured.
joe rogan
But we have to also deal with something different as far as, like, fuel, right?
We can't be a...
Carbon-based.
We can't be fossil fuel-based.
peter joseph
Another great paradigm shift is we've been living off of fossil deposits, which is one of the most ignorant things possible since we're surrounded by the movement of energy from the sun and everything else.
There's no crisis in energy.
There's no energy problem.
There's only the crisis of ignorance, as I stated before, and that's really the big thing.
joe rogan
We have plenty So you think, ideally, especially in Southern California, we should have like solar domes, right?
There should be like things...
peter joseph
There should be solar...
Well, if you really want to get into it, you should have...
joe rogan
Grids covering the sky, all solar.
peter joseph
Well, you just go local.
You take this block, which has plenty of sun exposure, and you apply photovoltaic paints and high-quality advancements.
And there's just very little money going into that research, by the way.
It's hard to get any kind of funding for those things.
So if you imagine how fast we could advance with these renewable mediums localized, if we actually put the energy into them, you can do the extrapolation on how far we'd become.
Because technology just continues to move beyond our expectations.
joe rogan
Don't you need batteries, though, for solar?
peter joseph
Between supercapacitors and hydrogen, which is the new idea, you could easily overcome the intermittency of solar, easily through battery technology.
The problem with battery technology, again, in the market system you want constant turnover, you want scarcity.
You want people to go back and buy more batteries, because that's what this entire system is.
joe rogan
Is it also the problem with minerals, to create the batteries, like lithium ion?
peter joseph
Not if you go for hydrogen, but no.
I think...
joe rogan
What, hydrogen batteries or hydrogen storage you're talking about?
peter joseph
Storage.
joe rogan
So this would not be a solar issue then because you can't really...
peter joseph
You bring the solar into it.
joe rogan
You bring solar power and then you convert that into hydrogen somehow?
peter joseph
It's stored in the water.
Stored in the hydrogen.
That's a new technology that's been...
joe rogan
Wow, so no need for batteries?
No need for lithium ion?
No need for the minerals that they get in the condo?
peter joseph
You might have to have some lithium ion in intermittent sense, depending on how the battery is constructed, but supercapacitors, which is another concept which isn't utilized, like your computerized capacitors that store energy, it's a very different technology than the standard battery, which is kind of like you fill it in There's many different forms, and there's a great deal of advancement there, and there's really nothing I can find that would inhibit storage for intermittency from solar if you really put your mind to it.
To say that would take some more deep analysis, but I can't imagine we'd run out of minerals just for that.
joe rogan
Well, it's always been ironic to me that the chain from minerals coming out of the ground to super advanced technology is such a barbaric chain.
You look down at the people in no shoes with pickaxes pulling the minerals out of the ground in the Congo and how that eventually gets to your Apple laptop.
It's like, wow, it's pretty fascinating that that is all, I mean, that that's a part of the equation.
The part of the equation for high technology, whether it's solar power or anything, is you need the minerals from Africa.
peter joseph
Oh, of course.
joe rogan
And that's how they're extracting those fucking things.
peter joseph
Until molecular engineering comes into play and we begin to synthesize these raw materials from scratch through molecular engineering, which is around the corner probably within the next 50, 60 years.
There's already small advancements in that.
See, the more you...
joe rogan
That's like, that's alchemy.
peter joseph
It is, kind of, kind of, yes, sure.
joe rogan
I mean, really, it's like that's what people predicted.
peter joseph
Well, you remember probably the old, many years ago, it was one of the companies, they spelled their name in little atoms, and they showed it in the magnifying glass, a big feat.
We've come a long way since then, and there's a lot of great futurist ideas out there that can basically create replicators for your home, where you're not going to be going to a store to buy anything.
You're going to be creating these things in your home.
And if there's anything that will destroy the market system quite rapidly, it will be advancements like that.
How do you possibly maintain labor systems where you can synthesize a laptop in one swoop, download the model from your computer, it goes into this vat, it's in this dust, and then the molecular element is released just like you print into a printer, or 3D printing, which I had in my film Moving Forward as a primitive notion of that.
They can print full cars now in one swoop.
There's so much advanced technology out there that is not known that would solve so many problems.
It's frustrating.
It's very frustrating.
And the very fact that these efficiencies are there and not being pushed as fast as they should be is even more frustrating.
But you see why.
Why?
Because efficiency is the enemy of everything that turns a profit.
We want to service everything.
We don't want to solve problems.
We want people with cancer not to cure the cancer.
joe rogan
You really think that's an ethic, though, that they think about that?
peter joseph
No, it's subconscious.
It's a syntax of thought.
They don't necessarily think that way.
Just like guys sitting around a room in the Pentagon start to justify killing 3,000 people, they're not thinking in terms of being murderers or anything else.
They're thinking in terms of business.
So, you know, if you want to make a laptop and you want people to buy it again, that thing's going to die probably three years from the time you buy it.
Different component problems that will go out.
Does it mean it has to?
No.
But the turnover is so important Inefficiency is the driver of this system, which is why we have the pollution problems, the waste problems, and the health problems, and why they feed in together and why our whole GDP is literally driven by sickness and inefficiency and waste.
If there's anything that blows my mind, it's how anti-economic our current system really is on all levels.
So if you want to solve problems, you want to make a car that lasts 60 years, that's easily interchangeable, that can be, excuse me, more than that, maybe 100 years, easily interchangeable, that can be updated.
You want to make a smartphone that has the longest lasting components that you don't need to throw away.
These things could be done if we wanted to do it, but it'd be anathema to what the market system requires for constant turnover.
Constant turnover, constant money circulation means more jobs.
joe rogan
So this planned obsolescence, you think, is this, like, a business model?
peter joseph
It's planned and intrinsic.
Another level is intrinsic.
joe rogan
It's not just that people, you know, they build things the best they can and they don't last.
They just break?
peter joseph
Two levels to it.
Planned obsolescence is very real.
You can go into historical archives of car companies to know that they strategized.
I can guarantee you people behind Apple sit there in their rooms and they have full-on statistics.
brian redban
It's called operating systems.
Oh, you have an operating system update.
peter joseph
You're going to love it, but it's going to make your computer fun.
The software scam is even worse because that's just ones and zeros.
The fact that they even charge over and over for that is more hilarious.
unidentified
I don't know.
peter joseph
That's planned obsolescence.
Intrinsic obsolescence is even more fucked up if you think about it.
That computer for it to be built has to go through the engine of the industrial profit complex, which means all the components, the extraction, everything else, someone's taking off the top throughout the entire thing, right?
And there's cost efficiency at the very end.
So if you're Apple computer, you want to buy the components to make your computer, you can't buy necessarily the highest grade level stuff in order to make it competitive against the other people that are selling computers similar, like Windows.
Whatever.
So you have to constantly be a little bit behind in order to be competitive so you can drop the price.
In other words, the quality of the product has to be diminished immediately for people to afford it.
The equation of cost efficiency refuses to allow the best possible goods to be produced at any one time.
unidentified
Period.
peter joseph
It's a rule.
It's a natural evolution, a natural dynamic, if you will, of what it means to save money and to make profit.
So everything's a piece of shit the moment it's produced.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, that's except for shit like Ferraris.
peter joseph
Even a Ferrari, though.
Think about the price of a Ferrari, though.
That's why it's so expensive.
joe rogan
Yeah, but I mean, they really decide to just make the best shit they can make.
peter joseph
But it's not really the best.
joe rogan
Oh, fuck yeah, it is.
The 458 Italia, have you seen that thing?
peter joseph
No, I'm sure.
joe rogan
This new twin clutch gearbox.
Ridiculously powered V8 mid-engine supercar.
Come on, man.
That's about as good as human beings have ever created.
It really is.
It's the peak of engineering.
They use race car driving to engineer their cars.
They push cars to the limit.
And every year, they go around the Nürburgring a couple of seconds faster.
Everybody's straining the new Porsche.
It's 7 minutes and 40 seconds, the new 911. Is it electric?
No, it's not electric, but they have cars that they have developed that are electric.
unidentified
Right, right.
joe rogan
Porsche has, they had a GT3 Cup car that they raced in the 24-hour race that was an electric car.
They're definitely trying to come up with electric technology, but they are making the best cars they can make.
Well, let's define...
There's certain things that are being done right now that are at the peak of production.
Even though they are being produced, they're essentially making some high-end shit that's the best they can make.
peter joseph
We could probably argue that one because if you look at all the advanced propulsion technology that's used in NASA, why aren't they applying such things like that?
A jet to your car?
Not exactly, but there are all sorts of things that are probably more advanced than either of us know that could be applied to that Ferrari, but they're not because of how it's truly expensive.
joe rogan
Therefore, no one And it wouldn't work on gas that you could get a pump either.
You have to work within those constraints.
Because our gas is actually really low compared to our octane is only 91. In other parts of the country I know you can get like 93 or 94. So I guess it's bad to have more octane.
peter joseph
But you see my point, though.
You can't make something, really, that people can buy.
joe rogan
I see what you're saying for the most part.
peter joseph
It's demographic targeted, too.
So what are the majority of people?
The majority of people are lower and middle class.
You make shit that doesn't work very well so they can afford it, and invariably it breaks and they suffer in the end because they have to deal with the constant cyclical turnover and the need to constantly repair and everything else.
joe rogan
When everything hits the fan and you start your cult...
What will everyone do for a job?
How does everyone get a thing to do?
peter joseph
You'll be doing my laundry.
joe rogan
I'll be doing your laundry?
I'm not good at laundry, dude.
You're not gonna want me to do your laundry.
What does everybody get a job?
I mean, what does it become?
Communism?
I mean, how do you figure out what the fuck everybody does to contribute to this thing?
What if you're a lazy cunt?
How do we deal with lazy cunts in the future?
peter joseph
You remember that lazy cunts are victims of culture.
joe rogan
Right.
peter joseph
That's the threshold here.
joe rogan
So do we take them on mushroom trips and straighten them out?
unidentified
What do we do?
peter joseph
Well, think about it this way.
If you had a kid go into a store and there's a kid and his mother and the kid, it's today, and the kid goes and grabs some stuff and shoves it in his pockets, the mom says, no, that's stealing, slaps the kid's hand, the kid learns a valuable lesson and his values are altered, right?
Think about the same type of idea where we go into a store, there's no money, it's not even a store, it's a supply house.
And a kid goes in, he grabs whole handfuls of shit that is really unnecessary because there's no utility for it.
And the mother says, no, that's not what we do because we don't need all of that.
It has to be there.
We'll come back and get it later as we need it because the system's that efficient.
So you see how the value programming is very easy to adapt.
So throughout time, you'd begin to change people's values, how they relate to their environment.
Imagine if you didn't have to worry about money, Joe.
Imagine the extent that you could pursue in your life the interest that you found interesting.
And invariably, I guarantee you, if you look at how people respond, especially in their later years when they get more introspective, everyone wants to feel like they're contributing to society.
Everyone wants to feel like they've done something social.
So that kind of greed, self-absorbed shit, that's a very adolescent, immature thing.
It's probably there to a certain effect in the evolution, the adaptation of the human being as he grows.
But if you have a system that doesn't support or reinforce those issues, then the miserable cocksuckers and dimwits and assholes and jerk-offs won't materialize.
joe rogan
But they're here.
We need to figure out how to get rid of them.
Either to get rid of them or to fix them and bring them up.
That's going to be very difficult because that's a real issue.
peter joseph
It's a super real issue at the core of everything.
It's an educational problem.
joe rogan
That's why Doug Stanhope had to stop doing his parties in the desert.
That's what it is.
I didn't hear that story.
Doug Stanhope, my buddy and hilarious comedian, used to have these parties in the desert.
But...
You would have like, you know, anybody could come and everybody knew about it online.
So you would have like a thousand really cool people and two just unbearable douchebags.
And the two unbearable douchebags would make the whole party useless.
And those guys need to be...
You have to figure out what to do with them.
There's some people out there that are a fucking mess.
And you having this...
Beautiful solar dome where all this hippie pussy inside just lining up for you.
We're still going to have to deal with the barbarians at the gates.
Because otherwise, they, like the Nubians that stormed Egypt and took over the pyramids, they're going to come in and rush this bitch.
peter joseph
I don't see this materializing in some isolated place where the barbarians are waiting on the sidelines.
joe rogan
They're us.
They're people.
If the power went out right now, there would be hordes of barbarians on the street with hockey sticks and guns and whatever the fuck they could to go get whatever the fuck you had.
peter joseph
And that would last for a little while until someone said, you don't have to do that if we just calm down a moment.
The transition can happen even with the people that we have now that seem to be the creme de la creme, the victims of this culture.
It's just going to take a great deal of care and I think as a natural consequence, as the system fails, there'll be a great number of people that will turn around faster than you would believe once their needs are pulled away from them.
They realize that their needs have to come from some other process or somewhere else, then the adaptation becomes natural.
joe rogan
Well, one of the things about the Occupy Wall Street movement that's fascinated me is the idea that all these people sort of live together.
They're not just You know, protesting together.
They have fucking tents, and they have a community there.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, they have books.
You could, like, go to their little library and read their books.
They have them all set up there, you know?
That's how...
I mean, it's essentially...
Right now, it's not really a commune, but it's on its way.
They could easily...
If one of those guys said, listen, man, my cousin has 100 acres out in the wilderness, and they have fruit trees, and they grow vegetables, and there's animals, and we can hunt, and we can make a fucking culture.
Let's do this.
As long as we...
As long as you don't show any aggression towards the government.
peter joseph
It's certainly been done before.
joe rogan
But then they shut you down and they go Waco on your ass and fucking blow towards the buildings.
peter joseph
Or if you're a whole other country like the attempts of the Bolshevik Revolution or something new, despite what anyone ever thought of communism, that was quickly shut down as a concept by the Western powers.
joe rogan
You've got to be totally non-threatening if you want to start this cult.
You have to get a nice piece of property, but it's gotta be real pretty.
peter joseph
There's no property.
This is an evolution of ideas.
We're not gonna set up any communes.
joe rogan
When the shit hits the fan, you're gonna need a camp.
You're gonna need Camp Peter.
Right?
Come on, man.
Right outside of Arizona.
peter joseph
Get my Jim Jones glasses.
joe rogan
Yeah, you don't need glasses, dude.
You're going to be fine.
You're really good at this.
You can make eye contact to these people and just run the whole big solar dome right there from Sonoma.
Sonoma's a good spot.
They're prepared.
They're accepting it.
They're ready.
They've got the crystals out.
They're ready to take the vibe in.
peter joseph
Yeah.
joe rogan
What is going to happen, man?
Do you think that we're going to have a situation where money is going to lose all of its value, where it's going to be so bad and the economy is going to get bankrupt so inextricably that we're going to be stuck in a situation where we're like Russia was at one point in time, where they were waiting in line with bales of money to buy a loaf of bread?
peter joseph
Well, you're already seeing the militarization of the police.
You're already seeing the social destabilization spread because of the faulty economic premise that is creating the unemployment, that is creating the debt crisis, that it will invariably be very inhibited by the energy crisis if massive moves aren't met.
So the three issues, as I mentioned before, is the unemployment crisis.
And to expand on that, let's think about this for a second.
If you have technology replacing human labor, which is admitted across the board now, mostly by columnists as opposed to economists, because economists, market economists are in extreme denial on this one, and many a debate.
You replace people, but you're not just replacing their job, you're replacing their ability to purchase other stuff and circulate the economy, and that's even worse in its farthest extension.
That means that the entire fuel of growth is being slowly shut down, which means that the system will lose more and more, and the system will eventually just stifle to a point that it can't operate anymore, apart from common remedial jobs or problems that might arise.
But there's no way you're going to continue employing people on this planet in numbers that we have in the past.
It's all downhill from here because the profit motivation to replace people by machines is inherent to the interest to save money.
McDonald's has had systems on the shelf for 20 years now that would replace everyone in their kitchen.
Now they have the front kiosk systems as well.
They don't do it only because their corporate view is to be social and as an employer.
They have a stake in that.
Even though it's completely contrary to logic, and if you look carefully, they are automating very, very slowly, just like all the grocery stores are automating.
You're reducing purchasing power, and there's no way the system is going to maintain itself once that continues and accelerates.
It's the contradiction of capitalism.
So the idea of human labor is becoming obsolete.
That, in its own right, is going to inspire some serious reflection and some massive upheavals.
joe rogan
Can everybody contribute?
Is it possible that everybody can find their own unique way to contribute outside of manufacturing things, outside of working menial jobs, outside of fast food, supermarkets, retail?
It's a lot of jobs, man.
peter joseph
Consumption is twice what it was...
Now than it was in World War II. Right.
Advertising has completely fucked us up.
joe rogan
Twice per capita?
peter joseph
Twice per person.
The average person in America, since World War II, consumes twice the amount of shit.
Which obviously means something's askew.
Why?
Why do we feel the need to have all this other excess stuff?
Socially speaking, if you go to small tribes that don't have access to television, they're very, very happy with a very minimalistic life.
Their happiness isn't contingent upon how they compare themselves to others or any type of notion of value.
They live in the culture that's been manifest within the resources around them, and they're happier than any American with a multi-million dollar house and everything else, which is usually an antidepressants.
So what we have is a neuroses that's been built, which is fueling all this industry that's completely irrelevant, basically.
And the more that happens, the more we try to invent new jobs.
You know, I had one guy, an economist, tell me that, oh, we're just going to end up using Facebook money.
So we'll have everybody on the internet doing something with Facebook or some other network where somehow they gain credits and they'll use those credits as currency.
unidentified
Pokes.
peter joseph
Now is that, yeah, something, I don't know.
brian redban
I was talking about this like a year ago.
Remember this, Joe?
Remember, Joe, we talked about where I said the future is going to be pokes.
joe rogan
Pokes is going to be where you make your money.
peter joseph
And my point is it wouldn't surprise me if we reached that point where you have a whole group of these freaks, like straight out of like idiocracy or something, where they're all doing the most relevant actions, irrelevant, waste of life, waste of the human brain, does nothing to contribute just to maintain the idea of employment.
So, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think it's going to self-destruct.
Once the energy crisis hits and the debt crisis, which continues to stranglehold the entire planet, these three things will combine.
I can't predict the future, but I think within a couple years, you're going to see some very, very radical shifts in a lot of governments on this planet.
I think a lot of detachment will occur.
You're going to see an extension of military invasions.
They got out of Iraq.
They're going to go into Iran.
They got to get their energy resources there.
there, they gotta secure the Middle East for other resources, as far as minerals and gold and other things that are there too, there's a, the faster it collapses, the more criminal the meltdown becomes.
brian redban
And that's something too, I think people should pay attention to. - We haven't even seen shit yet, now that we have time holes, Did you see that?
Pentagon created some time holes.
Time holes.
And now they can make events disappear.
joe rogan
Well, no.
First of all, you're dealing with, like, nanoseconds.
You're dealing with...
brian redban
Right now, this is version one.
And this is only what they're telling us about.
They could have been having these time holes for some time.
joe rogan
I don't think so, because essentially the Pentagon is using guys that are at the forefront of science.
And the forefront of science is pretty...
It's published.
It's pretty much out there.
Everybody knows pretty much what everybody's working on.
I mean, not naming...
There's definitely some blackout projects, but...
You know, these guys, there's not a whole lot of these dudes, you know, and the way they stay at this level of, you know, of being a bad, super intelligent motherfucker.
So you have to exchange information.
brian redban
How long is it?
Just a few seconds?
Like, can somebody flick my nipple and I'll be like, who did this?
joe rogan
No, you wouldn't even be able to perceive it.
There's no way you'd be able to perceive it.
But the idea is that this is just one, 40 picoseconds.
That's what it is.
It's what it is.
The researchers admit there's a big difference between human hiding laser beams for 40 picoseconds and hiding military operations lasting minutes or even several seconds.
But the idea is that they've started it.
brian redban
Wow.
joe rogan
Yeah.
They've started some interesting shit.
brian redban
That's exciting.
That is really exciting.
joe rogan
Well, you know what, man?
It is and it isn't.
I mean, everything is military.
The Pentagon is the one that fucking came up with this.
That's the most incredible thing.
Like, when you look at our capacity for innovation, the really impressive shit is all the stuff that blows things the fuck up.
unidentified
Of course.
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, look, cell phone cameras are really impressive.
It's really impressive that you can make a little video and make a movie from your phone.
You know what's way more impressive?
You drop a little box out of a plane and a city evaporates.
That's incredible.
And what is that?
That's the peak of our technology.
The peak of our technology that's the most impressive is a fucking laser beam that cuts the earth in half.
peter joseph
If there's any better proxy, I'm not quite sure what is.
If you look at how much energy and ingenuity is going into these things, what if we apply that idea to feeding people?
What if we apply that idea to doing actually relevant shit?
joe rogan
Well, then the hard-nosed folks that occasionally I agree with would say, well, you know what?
These fucks, they don't feed themselves.
This is evolution out there.
They're supposed to be figuring it out.
They're supposed to be getting it together, which I don't 100% agree with.
brian redban
They should pick like a year or something.
Where like the whole year they're like, alright, every scientist, this year it's cancer.
You have one year.
And just every single scientist like devote on something.
joe rogan
No, well that doesn't make any sense because scientists have particular fields that they're scientists in.
brian redban
Yeah, but they're all still.
joe rogan
They're all scientists-y.
peter joseph
You want nuclear physicists to go after AIDS. Well, if you think another example, the market system is so inhibiting through its competitive mechanisms that the Prima Fasci Association, the assumption is that basically everyone competing amongst themselves within the same sector will produce better results.
unidentified
Right.
peter joseph
But that's cognitively erroneous.
You want to get people together to share their ideas, not get proprietary.
brian redban
Right.
peter joseph
You want people to actually, if they really have the interest to cure or solve a problem or create something of the highest efficiency or utility, there's no better way to do that than to get them with that creative drive in one setting.
So you take all the cell phone companies, put them together, diminish them into one holding company for all of humanity that produced the best goddamn cell phone.
You could do that for anything.
And I'm sure if we actually thought about that, Cancer would be cured.
Well, there's actually cancer cures out there already, but cancer, as we know it in the establishment, would have been cured a long, long time ago.
There's way too much money being made through this competitive practice, though.
And, of course, the elongation of cancer.
And that goes back to the inefficiency mechanism is what drives it all.
joe rogan
If I could give you the wheel, if I could give you the wheel of this great...
Great world, this great society, this one giant global culture.
What would you do?
What would you first move?
If Peter Joseph just won the electrons.
peter joseph
It's the wrong logic, though, because there wouldn't be any elections.
There's no greater fucking insults.
joe rogan
Online, like a poll, an online poll.
You won.
You get to be king.
peter joseph
No, there wouldn't be a place for that.
joe rogan
Heidi Meintag was a close second.
brian redban
She didn't get as much pokes, which is unfortunate.
joe rogan
She didn't get as many pokes as you, but, you know, the Zeitgeist movement prevailed, and you're in charge of putting this thing together.
You don't want to be, right?
You want it all to, like, figure it out itself.
peter joseph
No one single person...
It's the greatest insult to fucking have, like, a president of the United States.
What are we...
joe rogan
I know.
I guess we still are monkeys.
Primitive monkeys.
We need an alpha.
We need an alpha monkey.
peter joseph
Well, we're still monkeys.
We're definitely still monkeys, but we can adapt pretty quickly.
We have that cerebral cortex that popped out that can override all those lower brain reactions.
joe rogan
Yeah, as long as we're educated, we grow up well, we're taught how to squash our instincts, those stupid instincts are still there.
The instincts to dominate, the instincts to be jealous, the instincts to want to fuck other dudes' girlfriends.
Those instincts are all primal.
They're all in there, unfortunately.
peter joseph
Maybe not, though.
Every film you see out there reinforces such things like that.
It's hard to say.
joe rogan
Every film reinforces it, but also your instincts, your own nature.
We are clearly some sort of an animal and conscious being hybrid.
And we battle with these very primitive...
I mean, you ever be in front of somebody and you just want to punch them in the fucking head?
Well, if you were a chimp and you were living in the jungle, that's what you would do.
You would just punch him in the head.
If that chimp was pissing you off, he'd just bite it.
I mean, that's what they do.
We have this thing going on in our head where we're trying to squash all that nonsense.
brian redban
I would just throw poop on him.
joe rogan
Throw poop on him?
You're a bonobo, that's why.
They're much more peaceful.
They solve most of their fights with carrying around sticks.
That's what they do.
Whoever picks up the biggest stick is like, oh, he's a bad motherfucker, look at that stick.
They don't actually go to blows.
The regular chimpanzees fuck each other up.
They kill each other.
But bonobos, really, they mostly solve their issues through sex.
Is that you?
brian redban
Yeah.
joe rogan
How do you solve your...
brian redban
I just threw poop on you.
joe rogan
Okay.
peter joseph
There's no universals, though.
joe rogan
There's no universals.
There's no king.
I know what you're saying, and I know you're very sensitive about this, because that is what happens in every situation where one person gets an inordinate amount of attention, like I'm sure you're getting, and you're a very charismatic dude.
You're very intelligent.
You're very well-spoken.
There must be some sort of a push in one sense or another to get you to kind of lead things, right?
I mean, you must feel...
peter joseph
Well, that's why I'm here.
I'm just trying to communicate these ideas.
joe rogan
You feel responsible?
Does it really mean...
You've created a movement, right?
I mean, essentially, you press the button.
peter joseph
Movement created itself.
joe rogan
It created itself, but you did press the start.
peter joseph
I suppose.
unidentified
You pressed start.
peter joseph
But then again, in the sense of causality, who of us really trigger anything?
I could go back and take the Zeitgeist film, and I could say, well, this is an influence of all these other people.
I could say, Bill Hicks and George Carlin made Zeitgeist.
The values just spread.
There's an evolution and an organism of knowledge that we all hold on to.
joe rogan
But you were part of it as well.
peter joseph
No, I understand your point.
joe rogan
I know you're being humble.
peter joseph
I understand your point.
joe rogan
If you didn't create that video, we wouldn't be having this conversation, you wouldn't have had this movement, you wouldn't have...
So you've charged up a lot of people's brains with that, man.
peter joseph
There's been a lot of inspiration out there which has come from many different directions.
joe rogan
Explain, so I had an issue with the 9-11 stuff that when you guys did the first video, essentially you were saying that 9-11 was an inside job and then you knew that the buildings could not have come down any other way, right?
Isn't that something that was said?
peter joseph
With creative license, yeah, that's what was definitely implied.
joe rogan
And you said that just for a fact, because you did not anticipate this ever being what it was, and you were just trying to get an effect out of people?
peter joseph
Well, it was the assumption that the audience would, of course, make up their own mind, because before that, there's a great deal of evidence.
And the opinion of the creator, then all probabilities moving forward, yeah, that statement was made declaratory.
joe rogan
Do you think that when you see Tower 1 and Tower 2, do you think that they were detonated?
peter joseph
Tower 1 and Tower 2 most probably were.
It's all X, Ys, and Zs to me.
World Trade Center 7, by all means.
joe rogan
World Trade Center 7 is the only one that when you look at it, it fell into its foundation, which is exactly what happened.
peter joseph
Even beyond that, you have eyewitness testimony of people that were stepping over bodies from pre-weakening explosions that were there.
You have all sorts of things that do not add up.
Seismic elements that were brought into play.
Supposedly no one died in Tower 7. No, there was a whole sea of people.
Remember the guy that mysteriously died, I believe, of some illness?
His name was a black man with glasses.
joe rogan
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
He was the guy who said that he saw bodies.
peter joseph
He and one other person were in the elevators that blew out on the 8th floor.
Basically, he was the only eyewitness testimony to that in the lobby.
He actually worked for the mayor, too, which was even more interesting.
joe rogan
Well, that one certainly looks like a demolition, the way it fell.
But the other towers...
I've never seen a controlled demolition where it starts from the top and sort of pancakes down like that.
It usually falls into itself.
You know, it goes and collapses into its base.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe there's another way to do it.
Maybe they can do it where it pancakes down.
But also, isn't it possible that a structural failure, because they were hit by giant jet engines?
Jet planes?
peter joseph
Not since they were designed to take the impact of such jet planes.
joe rogan
Yeah, but couldn't it be just faulty engineering?
Like they thought it was going to work and they were wrong?
peter joseph
The idea that you have a cold structure, law of conservation of momentum, you have a cold structure down here, regardless of how hot it is up here, to see a systemic collapse.
If you look at the NIST studies and everything else, which didn't even explain the collapse, by the way.
It's beyond improbable, and I've yet to meet one structural engineer that could ever explain that, especially given the free-fall nature of it when it hit.
Not to mention all the other characteristics that support it.
joe rogan
Free-fall nature meaning it fell very similar to free-fall speed?
peter joseph
Very close to free-fall speed, of course.
Not to mention the pre-weakening explosions, the sub-basement explosions.
The recipe of it was perfectly in order with everything that you'd see in controlled demolition, except this was just extremely advanced, and it's an implosion instead of an explosion.
joe rogan
I've had this conversation with several people who believe the exact same thing.
One of them was Michael Rupert, who was on last week.
And I always ask the same question.
How many people?
How many people know about this?
peter joseph
If you believe that that is the case, and you believe that it was some sort of an inside job, coordinating explosions, Well, if you were an engineer that could have access to the elevator shafts, which would have led you to all the pivotal structural beams that would be required to do this, you could probably do it over the course of time with 15 people.
joe rogan
15 people.
And then what do you do?
Shoot them all?
peter joseph
I have no idea.
Get those workers planning explosives.
How long did it take for, you know, all these other events that have occurred that people have been tight-lipped about for so, so long.
Think about any historical event of black operation.
It's a tight club in that world.
Tight, tight club.
Doesn't surprise me at all that no one would come forward.
joe rogan
My God, no one would come forward and they would set up explosions and bring down two gigantic skyscrapers while the world watched.
And none of those assholes wanted to claim credit for that?
No one wants to step up and say they had something to do with that?
peter joseph
Based on historical precedent, it doesn't surprise me at all.
Let's go back and look at all the history of black operations, CIA and FBI. Look at the names that were under it.
Where did those people go?
Why didn't they talk about the things they were involved in before?
joe rogan
It's interesting that I know about Hitler burning the Reichstag and Nero burned Rome.
And we know that this situation has been...
It's happened in history before where someone has created some sort of an artificial dilemma to resolve it.
And they've done it to pass laws, to impose their agenda, whatever.
But then when someone tells me that Oklahoma City, they blew it up just to pass new terrorism laws, I go...
Get the fuck out of here, man.
Part of me doesn't want to accept that.
Part of me is, even though I know that it's been done before, there's a certain...
peter joseph
It's a more complicated web.
It was recently released that the FBI has been involved in over 50% of, quote, terrorist acts that have occurred in U.S. soil.
What they do is they infiltrate, and then they enable in certain ways, and sometimes they bust them in the middle, or they let it go forward.
In the case of the first World Trade Center bomb, you know, the guy with the recording of the agent that was there that was working with the terrorist and sided with the FBI, and the FBI told him to go forward with the explosion.
They gave him the bomb to do so.
So that didn't need to happen.
That's public record.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
So they knew he was going to blow up the World Trade Center?
peter joseph
They had infiltrated the group long before.
joe rogan
Knew he was going to do it and let him?
peter joseph
That's what's so suspicious.
Yeah, they gave him the explosion.
They gave him the detonator.
The FBI handed Salam, was his name, and the guy recorded his conversations because he was so upset by what the FBI wanted him to do.
unidentified
Jesus Christ.
peter joseph
All of that's in the Zeitgeist Movement companion guide, by the way.
Perfectly honest, I'm so sick of talking about that shit.
joe rogan
Really?
unidentified
Oh, I hear you.
peter joseph
Because it's always the drill there.
joe rogan
Goddamn, though.
That's unbelievable.
I know about the guy in, I believe it was Dallas, where they talked him into blowing something up, gave him a fake bomb, set him up, and he went and did it, and then they arrested him.
I'm like, that is just...
You found some really...
Dumb guy.
peter joseph
It's easy to see, if you look at all the warnings of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, easy to see how CIA-FBI agents infiltrated a rogue group that were planning to do a terrorist attack in the World Trade Center, infiltrated and aided, and to make sure it worked in the way that they wanted it to, even after the fact, with industrial organizing.
joe rogan
Did people die in the first World Trade Center bombing?
peter joseph
I believe a couple people did.
It wasn't that big, though.
I think it was seven people or something.
joe rogan
So they're responsible for those seven deaths.
peter joseph
And the only reason it didn't bring down a major beam, by the way, is because there was another van parked in the wrong spot.
It was supposed to be right by this one support beam.
If it did, it would have partially imploded down, partially collapsed it in, and a whole lot more people would have died.
joe rogan
So you believe that 15 people could have rigged the World Trade Center towers?
peter joseph
Over the course of many months, yes.
joe rogan
And they could have been planning this thing out the whole time, and Dick Cheney's got all these exercises going on.
peter joseph
I don't go so far to say it has anything to do with presidents or anything like that.
I think it's a standard operating procedure, black operation, that's telltale.
Back in time, just look at how they operated before, and they just did it again.
joe rogan
Who sets it up?
The banks?
peter joseph
No.
It's not that obvious.
Corporate interests and Wall Street are highly intertwined.
CIA and Wall Street are highly intertwined.
You can't speculate on how this idea would really come to fruition.
All you can think of is that, yes, you have the options there and you have the precedent to do so.
I have no idea where the source would be.
It had so many benefits and so many different levels.
Namely benefit though is to the administration, the interest of the oil industry to move in on the powers of the Middle East and give the ultimate precedent and as a side effect...
joe rogan
Seems like they were gonna orchestrate it though.
Wouldn't they orchestrate it with some people?
Like if we're gonna go to Iraq, that's the plan.
Wouldn't they have Iraqis attack us?
peter joseph
I don't think they could have infiltrated it, but they tried their hardest to pin it on Saddam.
I have one of the first publications, by the way, that was produced the day after 9-11 by Time Magazine.
It's the most amazing piece of propaganda.
You flip through it, you have every horrible shot as exaggerated as possible, and then boom, you hit Osama bin Laden.
There he is.
Next page, Saddam Hussein.
Next page, the guy from Korea.
So they just lined them up psychologically, and you could easily have seen.
Saddam was a highlight.
He was sitting there with a big bazooka.
It was hilarious.
I mean, it was as planted as you could possibly get, which is not a new thing either.
It's just sad to see how people have no sense of history.
They don't really understand how business has been covert for so long.
And then again, what would you expect?
Government is a business.
That's what it runs.
It's one big business.
joe rogan
It's just we expect more transparency because we have so much more information.
peter joseph
Transparency was never there to begin with.
The only reason that we think...
joe rogan
But we never had the internet either.
peter joseph
Exactly.
The only reason we think is because now it starts to leak because of how powerful then the WikiLeaks and people with consciences are coming forward and trying to help and make these things come out.
It's really going back to the social system flaw.
If it's a survival of the fittest concept, if it's a competitive system, it doesn't matter whether it's two people competing for a job, two corporations competing for market share, or two countries competing for resources and their own esteem or whatever their interests are as an empire.
It's the same fundamental logic.
joe rogan
When Julian Assange came out with all this information and released all this shit, what did you think was going to happen to that guy?
peter joseph
I was just disappointed that he chose to put himself in the forefront because it painted a picture of a personality, a cult of personality, which I just can't stand.
I didn't know what would...
I figured he would just be...
he would be character assessed to the left and right.
I doubt they would try to do anything to him physically.
joe rogan
Why do you think he did it?
It was an ego move to put himself in the front of everything.
peter joseph
I think it was inadvertent.
I think he was a spokesman.
It was inadvertent.
But if I was in that position of such massive attention, I would have gotten a team to take the reins and not have one entity.
That way there's less for them to attack.
If there's anything that I do in my work, even though I don't consider myself to be that famous, is I'm always dispersing and getting other people to do lots of other things and take the attention away from myself for many different purposes.
For one, I don't really feel comfortable with any type of role, as you've joked about.
It's really not in my character whatsoever.
joe rogan
But it's fascinating that you've gotten to this point.
peter joseph
I just feel like I've been pushed.
It's the old Martin Luther King thing.
He just felt like...
I'm a big Martin Luther King fan, and he felt like he was pushed.
So I kind of allow myself to just be pushed, and I kind of go with the flow.
But there's nothing more important to me than showing a larger face to this type of concept and not get caught up in the cult of personality issue.
It has a few different psychological levels.
joe rogan
Are you making a living doing lectures now?
Like, what are you doing for...
peter joseph
I have never been paid for a lecture.
I make a modest living trying to commercially now exploit Zeitgeist.
And occasionally, believe it or not, I still do some equity things.
We do what we have to do in this system.
joe rogan
So you're out there scamming the people?
peter joseph
No, I'm scamming other traders.
That's what you do.
joe rogan
Is that what you do?
It's like a game you play?
unidentified
It is.
peter joseph
That's all it is.
You do what you have to do.
It could just be a bartender somewhere.
joe rogan
Why won't you just charge money for lectures?
peter joseph
I don't like it.
I don't like doing that.
People will be nice.
They'll compensate me for travel.
I appreciate that.
I can't afford to just flagrantly go out there.
joe rogan
You fly all over the country for free?
peter joseph
Not usually, but if there's an event, I try to hope that they give me at least something.
It depends on the nature of the event.
joe rogan
Are you guys gonna have like some sort of an annual thing, like some sort of a Zeitgeist party?
peter joseph
We have, well, we have a Zeitgeist Day, which is a very intellectual day with a series of lectures, about a dozen of us that give different lectures and different subjects.
joe rogan
Where do you do that?
peter joseph
We're doing this one in Vancouver last year.
We did it in London.
The year before we did it in New York.
joe rogan
See, that's pretty badass.
peter joseph
Yeah, that's a big pivotal part of the kind of awareness program.
We've had great turnouts.
joe rogan
That's how you meet the guy with the land.
That's how the story starts.
peter joseph
You bring it into my laundry?
joe rogan
The guy who does your land, man.
The guy who's going to fucking set up your compound.
unidentified
Who do you think killed Biggie?
joe rogan
Rampart, bro.
peter joseph
My Captain Conspiracy here.
unidentified
Who killed Biggie?
joe rogan
You're not a conspiracy guy, are you?
peter joseph
No, I don't care for those ideas.
I see the causality of it.
I don't care for the idea of conspiracy.
I'm certainly not into the concept as a theme.
People misunderstood the first film as far as what was said.
It became, quote, the greatest conspiracy film of all time in some press media, which I thought was a bad...
The idea was on cultural fallibility.
You had religious farce, you had the 9-11 farce, and you had the entire banking war scam.
It was all really a matter of how publicly manipulated everyone is into believing that these things are actually legitimate and hold up the social zeitgeist.
joe rogan
Well, I think what you did, too, is package it all together in a really easily absorbable form that really, like, sent the point home.
You know, and again, a lot of people started on a path of thinking that they might not have ever started on.
peter joseph
Exactly.
That's what seemed to be so amazing.
You know, you get emails like, you've changed my life.
It's just amazing to see the response, again, completely inadvertent.
joe rogan
So you have a certain amount of responsibility because of that.
Do you feel it?
peter joseph
Of course I feel it.
I don't take myself that seriously, though.
I'm just like anybody else.
So anytime I run into somebody that has a kind of a cult of personality thing, I really try to shut that down as fast as possible.
I can't stand being complimented.
joe rogan
Oh, when someone gets crazy.
You are my hero.
peter joseph
Shit like that, yeah.
joe rogan
You haven't met any chicks with tattoos you're face on yet?
unidentified
No.
They're out there.
peter joseph
Not that I've seen yet.
joe rogan
I bet there's a couple girls that have your face on their calf.
brian redban
Definitely.
joe rogan
The hippie pussy you get must be unbelievable, though.
Thrown your way.
I don't know if you're in a relationship.
brian redban
Or girls with tattoos, I think, for some reason.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
brian redban
Like tatted girls.
joe rogan
Girls with crystals.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Girls ready.
Ready for you to start that cult.
peter joseph
I don't have a rock star life, unfortunately.
joe rogan
Why is that, man?
You need to fucking manage this shit better.
unidentified
Trust me.
brian redban
If you need a podcast.
peter joseph
It's not in my character.
joe rogan
Come on, man.
That's all well and good.
Let's pretend no one's listening.
Let's pretend no one's listening.
Let's pretend that this may be just one frame in an infinite movie that goes on forever and makes no sense.
You should be enjoying the shit out of this.
And you can enjoy the shit out of this with rivers of hippie pussy.
Let me tell you something, Matt.
What can we do for Peter Joseph?
brian redban
Take him to the Olive Garden.
joe rogan
If we gave him a podcast...
Peter Joseph every week.
brian redban
Yeah, that would be awesome, dude.
unidentified
Come on, man.
peter joseph
You're going to give me a podcast?
brian redban
Dude, you're going to have a podcast once a week?
All right.
peter joseph
I do a radio show.
I do a radio show.
brian redban
That's okay.
joe rogan
What do you do?
Is it on regular radio?
peter joseph
It's blog talk radio that we do for the movement.
It's just a free...
joe rogan
Is it online?
peter joseph
It's online, yeah.
joe rogan
So it's essentially a podcast as well.
peter joseph
It is a podcast.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Just not video.
Do more.
Yeah, dude.
You could go on for hours and hours.
brian redban
I got the Sex Squad podcast.
joe rogan
I know you do, but I mean it's amazing you never say um.
You're like one of the most eloquent guys I think I've ever talked to.
It's amazing.
Well, it's one of the things I was...
watching your presentations like he's speaking so clearly.
He's like, he's always so good with getting his, that's not the easiest thing to do for a person like me who's essentially lived at least half of my life doing public speeches.
peter joseph
Sure.
joe rogan
You know, either stand-up comedy or acting stuff.
peter joseph
It's not natural to me, I'm not too afraid to speak in front of people.
I guess that's part of it, you know, just to be a performer, if you will.
joe rogan
Do you feel like at this point you have like a zeitgeist act?
And I say act, not that it's bullshit, but almost like with stand-up comedy, you know, you have subjects that you know you're going to go into, and then once you get into those subjects, you have stuff that you already always share.
unidentified
Sure, sure.
peter joseph
Well, it depends on the circumstance.
It's a vast range of stuff, and I could ramble on about a lot of other different issues.
If you want to go back for, I mean, yeah, so it's formulaic, obviously.
If I'm addressing Occupy Wall Street, I have a very specific kind of gesture I'm going for, a little more anarchy-oriented, you know, trying to relate to their values, a little more angry, because everyone wants to get riled up.
You really can't be that way.
joe rogan
So you have a fired-up speech that you give?
peter joseph
I can give the angry Peter Joseph speech if I have to.
joe rogan
Again, that's a great way to get to that hippie pussy.
You've got to be a leader that's pissed off.
peter joseph
In any communication, you need strategy.
So I try my best to collar my strategy just like I'm doing right now with you.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, so your main gig is this now.
I mean, this is essentially what you're doing.
You do your music.
peter joseph
Well, I'm a filmmaker.
Music's on the sidelines.
I do that as a hobby.
We do art festivals and things like that to kind of make...
A little fun out of things.
The Socially Conscious Art Festival we had a while back.
But, you know, the music's on the sidelines.
The film is...
I have a new film coming out at the end of this year.
joe rogan
And what is that?
peter joseph
Zeitgeist Beyond the Pale, hopefully by the end of 2012. I'm not completely set on that, but it's going to be the fourth.
It's going to be a live-action one.
I'm not going to give away too much about it.
joe rogan
A live-action one, meaning...
peter joseph
So, I mean, it's going to be a documentary, but it's going to be a very untraditional documentary.
Again, I don't want to talk about it because...
But it's going to be very interesting.
I do a lot of character establishment with this one.
I've got actors in this one.
It's the same idea, same pushing forward with this broad social expansion, the idea of what a rational society is.
Did you see Moving Forward?
It's going to be a similar portrayal of the third film, but in a gestural sense, which I think I'm excited to do because I've never done something like that.
joe rogan
Well, that's kind of a cool concept to actually show people as actors moving forward, creating some new society.
peter joseph
It's not exactly like that.
joe rogan
No?
peter joseph
The fifth film I'll do...
The trilogy will...
Well, not the trilogy.
The whole series will end in the fifth film.
This is building up to the fifth film.
joe rogan
The fifth film is going to be a puppet show we do in a cave.
You can have a fucking marionette act.
We're going to have a nice fire.
We're going to lay over some bear that we just killed.
As we clean the meat, you'll do your puppet show.
You'll explain how it all went down.
peter joseph
Post-apocalyptic.
Post-Northia war.
Right.
joe rogan
Explain how it all went down.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Do you think we're in danger of that?
Do you think we're in danger of nuclear war?
Is it within our grasp that we're that stupid that we might start bombing Iran and they start bombing us?
peter joseph
Well, the big argument is how mature a society is.
You know, if you have molecular engineering which is coming to fruition and you can have someone using nanotechnology create Off the shelf with a very small lab, a very destructive piece of equipment the size of this bottle that can wipe out or poison or do whatever the hell knows to a very large landmass.
What does that say about the culture that feels the need to do that?
Because now we have a rebellion across the world in real terrorism, not the farce terrorism, but there really is this angst that's emerged from all this deprivation, from abuse, blowback, if you want to look at the Chomsky kind of view.
I think it's a little more complicated than that psychologically.
What's gonna happen?
We have a whole group of people that are so pissed and they're so deprived that they begin to have Abilities with technology that far exceed anything like a grenade or a suitcase bomb So nuclear war as an extension of that seems almost inevitable not to mention the small destructive patterns that we could have I don't think people even realize that potentials on the horizon because our world is so We're so programmed by our daily experiences.
joe rogan
We're so used to certain experiences and a level of those experiences.
The idea that we're at war to us is some sort of a vague thing that you see on television unless you've actually been over there.
peter joseph
It goes back to the point I made earlier about the broad collective social conscious versus the individual.
Until we begin to look at society in a social way, when you look at each other as yourself, it's not even poetic here, it's just you can't have social stability until everyone's taken care of.
If someone's deprived on the other side of the world, I'm not safe, because dementia can kick in, who knows what biases they might emerge, who they might trigger, and boom, suddenly a suitcase bomb explodes behind me at some restaurant.
No one's safe anymore with the technological advancement we have, the risks, the Fukushima power plant again.
You have to have a world-conscious view at this stage, especially with the age of modern technology and warfare, or it's just, as in the words of Albert Einstein, our technology has exceeded our humanity.
He said that when he experienced the nuclear bomb that he helped engineer.
He saw how bad this was.
Even the great scientist That's in the wheelchair.
Hawking.
Hawking has stated that he wants to see everyone get off the planet.
He feels that we're already doomed.
For the extension of the human species, we have to populate another planet because there's no way we're going to survive in this one based on what we're doing.
These are very smart people.
That think these ways.
joe rogan
And they're very smart people who are studying the human race as if we're studying a colony of ants or studying anything else that you can clearly see where they're headed.
peter joseph
Yeah.
It's scary.
Unlike anything...
joe rogan
Is it natural?
peter joseph
It's all natural.
joe rogan
It is all natural, right?
peter joseph
It is all natural.
joe rogan
Is it natural that, you know, someone said this, I believe it was McKenna, that every parasite is a failed symbiote?
Interesting.
You know, what they're all trying to do is find some sort of, I mean, every body is filled with other sorts of living organisms.
And that these living organisms, they work together in synergy.
They work together, they're...
They're symbiotic and that every parasite is like one that didn't quite work out and just fucked up and killed the host or Jack the host or does something terrible to those Isn't it possible that that's what technology is the technology is also sort of some sort of a it's some sort of a parasitic symbiotic thing where it's it's in the middle of In the middle of helping us, it's enlightening us and it's allowing us to move forward.
It's allowing us to exchange information at a rate never possible before.
But it's also, when you establish the highest levels of technology, they often are destructive.
And it's going to feed the need for people to try that shit out and use it.
peter joseph
Well, there's the flaw of the broad human psychology and this defense posture that we've groomed so well.
It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the fucking people behind the technology.
joe rogan
Sure, absolutely.
Is it almost inevitable that with this kind of power we will have this kind of behavior?
Is it almost inevitable that with ultimate power like that?
peter joseph
Well, if there isn't a very dramatic change in the way people think about themselves and how they relate to the world, it seems inevitable to me.
joe rogan
How did you develop this line of thinking?
Did you have some sort of a life-changing experience?
Were you always like this?
peter joseph
I just had great influences from Carl Sagan to even George Carlin and Bill Hicks.
The comedy spectrum, coupled with the scientific community, was very influential with me, both from a cultural standpoint and a progressive standpoint.
If there's any individual that's most influential, it would have been Carl Sagan as far as values, because he was so in line.
joe rogan
And he smoked weed every day, son.
Did you know that?
peter joseph
No, I didn't know that.
joe rogan
Carl Sagan would smoke weed and just think about space.
That's what he did.
He wrote some beautiful, eloquent essays on cannabis use.
peter joseph
Did he?
I wasn't aware of that.
joe rogan
Yeah, he's a brilliant guy.
peter joseph
Sagan's amazing.
So, you know, it's a long value shift, and I went through the same stuff of anger and everything else that I think a lot of people do, and then I met even more people that fascinated me and a lot of authors.
There's so many brilliant minds out there, from Jacque Fresco to Buckminster Fuller to Nicola Tesco.
joe rogan
Jacque Fresco is the guy that's the head of that Venus Project?
Is that who he is?
peter joseph
He's the director of the Venus Project, yeah.
joe rogan
And the Venus Project is, explain that to me, because this is a resource-based economy.
peter joseph
Venus Project is an encapsulated concept put forward by Jacques, which goes farther than a train of thought.
It actually has design issues that he's come up with throughout the years.
He's about 95 now.
Very brilliant, very brilliant guy.
They basically are promoting very specific systems.
And the Zeitgeist Movement promotes long trains of thought without being specific to a design.
We used to be in partnership with the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement.
joe rogan
And you guys fell apart?
peter joseph
There was a falling out there, unfortunately.
joe rogan
What happened?
peter joseph
Hard to explain.
It was a kind of a personality drop-off.
joe rogan
That's code for hippie pussy.
That's what it was.
They were fighting over hippie pussy.
Jock Fresco used to be at the top of the heap.
When you're 95 years old, you've been doing this forever and this young whippersnapper comes along making his fucking films.
Like, bitch, I got a map.
I got a map for the future.
So he's very specific as far as engineering this sort of a society?
peter joseph
He's an industrial designer and social engineer.
joe rogan
Ah, so there you go.
peter joseph
He spent a great deal of time doing it.
And it's just like Buckminster Fuller, which I think is a good counterpart.
These are prominent guys that have really tried to push forward with new ideas in many different genres.
Not to mention approaches to the entire social system.
joe rogan
I watch a lot of things online, and when I sit in front of it, I do two things.
I absorb whatever someone's putting out, of course.
I listen to their message.
But I also, when I see something like what John Fresco was saying, I try to look at it as if I was someone who is In some sort of a position of power in government.
I was someone who was in some sort of a position of power, of political influence, running the banks, running the world, the IMF, whoever the fuck it is that pulls the strings for the world.
And I would say, how do I deal with this guy?
What do I... Is this guy a problem?
Is this guy ever going to be for real?
Is this ever going to be an issue that I have to deal with this guy and debate him as to how the world's resources should be used?
I mean, is this...
Is that a concern for a guy like that?
I mean, do you think that a guy like him or like you, do you guys have to deal with someone...
peter joseph
It depends on how far we go.
I think anyone in the...
joe rogan
You think that, right?
Do you think as far as moving forward, if you did buy the land and get the people to start living there, that's when you would have an issue.
peter joseph
Well, again, I don't advocate such a thing.
I don't advocate running from this system.
joe rogan
How big is your file, the FBI file they have on you?
If you had a guess.
I'd say it was fucking massive, right?
peter joseph
I don't know.
joe rogan
They want to know what you're capable of.
If you started running, you're very young right now.
Like, how old are you?
You're like 39?
peter joseph
No, 32. 32?
joe rogan
That's amazing.
You're 32. That's incredible.
So when you came out with the first Zeitgeist, how old were you?
Well, it was four years ago, so I was 28. Holy shit!
So you were in your 20s when you put that together.
That's very unusual, man.
You're a very unusual talker.
You know, if you're only 29, that's what you said?
32?
I'm 32 now, yeah.
See, that's very unusual, man.
So what do you have to be to be president?
36?
Something like that?
peter joseph
I'm not going to be president.
joe rogan
No, but for real, you say that.
But if someone come along...
peter joseph
See, I don't believe in the system, though.
I don't believe in the political system.
joe rogan
Right, what if the system changes a little bit?
Listen, man, you could run this shit.
peter joseph
Well, the next project is something called the Global Redesign Institute, which is going to be a nonprofit I'm founding, which is going to basically take artists and engineers, get them together to show how to redesign the infrastructure for particular regions in the most sustainable, non-monetary, most sustainable, practical, and efficient way possible.
So, for example, you could take Los Angeles.
You could show the public in conference a completely new redesign that didn't say have cars sitting at gas, excuse me, sitting at stoplights, you know, wasting gas.
Too much gas is wasted by the inefficiency of the stoplight system.
I mean, at least Europe has those roundabouts, semi-better.
But you could think of all sorts of creative means of up-and-over systems.
joe rogan
You know, a lot of cars, they stop and they shut off, actually, at red lights now.
peter joseph
That's good.
Well, that's smart, but that's certainly not normal.
joe rogan
When you let your foot off the gas, they start again.
It's a new technology.
peter joseph
No, I've seen the couple with battery stuff, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's engines as well.
Combustion engines.
peter joseph
We see how the concept of efficiency is vast.
Pressure transducers in streets that can power the lights.
You can have pressure transducers in these walls that can help power the lighting system in the building.
There's so many things that could be applied to society to make it so grandiose Efficient, that would rule out the market system by default, but it would solve so many problems of poverty and hunger and even conflict and petty crime, and most crimes are related to money.
You know, you could eliminate so many massive things, not a utopia, if you just applied the most efficient means and give people, you know, vertical farms on the coast of Los Angeles, running desalinization processes from the water, boom.
Organic vertical farms feed everyone locally.
Forget globalization.
Think about how much energy is wasted on globalization, moving shit back and forth, product made here in China, assembled over here in Uganda.
You know, it's nuts what we're doing.
When you take that standpoint, you begin to see how, yes, you can feed everybody on this planet.
You can have everyone have an access abundance, we call it on this planet.
It doesn't mean you have everything you want.
That's impossible.
The very idea of having everything possible, which is the catalyst notion.
joe rogan
Yeah, everybody can't be the salt number nine.
peter joseph
Well, everyone can't have a 50-room mansion or two jets parked on their front lawn.
That's actually an act of violence, if you think about it.
Social violence.
It is.
It's an act of violence to think that way.
Because the amount of deprivation you're imposing on somebody else by that acquisition of resources, which is so excessive, is, in fact, inhibiting other people's lives one way or another.
joe rogan
Wait a minute.
By having a jet?
peter joseph
By having anything that is of such excess, and you can be subjective on this, but anything that has no utility, it's of such excess and vanity, such as one guy living with his small family in a 40-room mansion and having two massive gas-guzzling jets parked in the front lawn just because he can.
joe rogan
Who does that?
brian redban
Travolta.
peter joseph
Yeah, Travolta.
joe rogan
Does he do that?
brian redban
Yep.
joe rogan
Well, listen, you gotta fly that dick in from all over the world.
You gotta make sure that you're willing to keep quiet.
brian redban
Fox magic only goes so far.
peter joseph
I get that argument, though.
Someone says to me, well, I don't like your system, because what if I want to have four Ferraris as though that's a utility need?
It's a completely vanity orientation.
I say, well, what if I want to have Africa as my backyard?
Is that okay?
What if I want to block off Africa?
joe rogan
If you can buy Africa, if you have so much money that you could slowly buy up the entirety of Africa.
peter joseph
But you see the point.
joe rogan
So is this a competitive society?
Is there competition in this society?
peter joseph
The competition would be within one square of development, which is what real competition is.
It's about accelerating yourself, not against somebody else.
You know, I could completely see how people in like a sports In advanced society, in a sports context, they're not really thinking about beating somebody else.
They think about beating themselves.
They think about improving their own betterment.
It doesn't become something...
joe rogan
But in the process, somebody gets beaten up.
That is a lot of the motivation.
If you ever talk to anybody very competitive, it's not just about them performing at their best.
It's about winning.
peter joseph
Sure it is.
Sure it is.
But that's what the culture reinforced.
Everything is about winning in this country.
joe rogan
Culture definitely reinforces it, but it's also, I think, a piece of human nature is involved in that as well.
It's too universal.
It's not just this culture.
It's pretty much any culture where any sort of competition starts going.
You know, people want to win.
You know, it's a natural thing.
And I think it might be one of the reasons why it's driven innovation to such a radical tipping point.
If you talk to anyone who knew Steve Jobs or anybody who knows Bill Gates, one of the things they'll tell you is how Incredibly competitive these guys are.
Very competitive.
unidentified
Sure.
peter joseph
I think it exists on a different level, though, and there's a lot of flexibility to it.
I'm not denying that it exists, but for me, I'm not competitive.
I have no interest in the...
joe rogan
Right, but you're also not the head of Microsoft.
unidentified
Sure.
joe rogan
You're not putting out computers.
peter joseph
You know what I'm saying?
joe rogan
You've done an amazing thing creatively, but in order to push innovation, in order to push a company, to push success and achievement, I almost feel like you have to have some sort of a sense of...
peter joseph
Well, in a market system, invariably, you have to be competitive or you're gonna fail.
You're gonna fail financially, you're gonna fail on your status.
If you look at Steve Jobs' writings and his talks, the guy was a very creative individual.
You could tell that his money aside, he wasn't motivated by that incentive, for one.
And I think his interest to be competitive was really just to make the best he could for whatever demographic or concept or idea.
And, of course, to compete against Microsoft to make sure he maintains his market share.
So competition is inherent to the game that they're playing.
I guess that's my point.
Who knows, though?
Am I competitive with other people?
It depends on the context and also the conditioning within that context of what I'm doing.
If I have to survive and go into a fight with somebody, well that's an obvious competition.
That's something that my life might depend upon.
So obviously there's something ingrained there that means we respond that way.
But again, back to the later existence of the prefrontal cortex, We don't have to operate that way.
If someone goes into a bar and steps on my foot or insults my girlfriend, I don't have to beat the shit out of them.
I could say, huh, another dipshit, one of many, and walk away.
Or I could say, there's another victim of culture.
There's all sorts of responses that we could have that are not based on that reaction.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of fights you can avoid.
I was having that conversation with someone today.
It's like, you know, avoid everything you can.
If you can get out of something, talk to someone and get out of it, get out of it.
What are you, crazy?
You want to get in fights with people?
peter joseph
That's amazing.
This guy interviewed James Gilligan for Zeitgeist Moving Forward.
He's one of the most acclaimed criminal psychologists.
He would talk about shame and the issues of shame and why people behave so violently.
He spent his whole life analyzing violent behavior.
Gave a great insight into serial killers and a lot of people that you think are natural outgrowths that are just typical of the system or typical of humanity, if you will.
And he found almost throughout the entire thing it was based on a form of humiliation and shame and what was so fascinating is that the majority of the instances of violence happened in the most mundane and arbitrary circumstances.
It wasn't life-threatening.
Someone would literally insult somebody else and they would get really upset by that and the shame that they would feel from being so small, from getting upset from someone saying, fuck you.
Cause that much more reinforcement of their anger to get into a physical brawl.
It's fascinating.
It's a fascinating subject.
I recommend anyone that's interested in violent behavior to look up James Gilligan.
joe rogan
Well, you know, I am a huge student of human nature, especially human contact and conflict and aggression and anger.
peter joseph
You trained as a fighter, right?
joe rogan
Yeah, I've done martial arts my whole life.
And I think that's a huge part of being a human being.
I think every man, if you're gonna have to deal with some form of aggression, In your life, you're going to ultimately worry or wonder what happens if this becomes physical.
And I think taking that off the table and learning martial arts, just as the animal, human being, is a great way to prevent anybody ever fighting.
I've never seen a fight at a dojo.
I've never seen a fight at a jujitsu gym.
I've never seen a fight between fighters.
You know, for the most part, most fighters, they can communicate better because they know that they don't want to fight.
Like, they don't have anything to prove.
They know exactly what they can do.
peter joseph
Look at the philosophy of Bruce Lee.
joe rogan
Yeah.
peter joseph
I mean, he was amazing.
joe rogan
I mean, there's been a few brawls, post-fight brawls, because people get emotional.
And there was a famous one on CBS a while back where Mayhem Miller and the Diaz brothers went at it on CBS. It was kind of ridiculous.
But, I mean...
For the most part, the amount of altercations that you're going to get if you're hanging around trained martial artists are way fewer.
Amongst themselves, they're very rare.
You put them amongst any other group of athletic, aggressive individuals, you're going to have much more conflict.
I think you take it off the table once you address it and you understand it.
It's like with a lot of people, the idea of kicking someone's ass, really a big part of it is they don't want their own ass kicked.
It's a fear.
It's like an overcompensation for an initial fear.
peter joseph
Totally.
joe rogan
We need to figure this fucking thing out, Peter Joseph, goddammit.
We're closing in on it.
We're closing in on some real interesting lessons.
peter joseph
Well, if you want, I can go back to your question, I guess, from like 20 minutes ago regarding what the system would be if I was the leader of it, which is a farce notion, but what would define...
joe rogan
The king, I said.
peter joseph
The king, yeah, the king.
What would define a new value system?
What would define a new sense of operation?
And if you track a fundamental train of thought, you arrive at a series of conclusions.
The first is you get rid of the property system as we know it.
You create an access system.
Best example is the zip car.
New York, amazing.
joe rogan
I love that.
peter joseph
Love the zip car.
joe rogan
Yeah, if people don't know, explain it.
peter joseph
Zipcar is just a rental car that's very easily accessible.
You have these special keys and they come and they'll drop the car off or they'll leave it at a place that's close to you.
It's all proximity oriented, computer generated.
And basically you can have a car, drive it and then return it and it's like a rental car except it's more convenient.
That's beautiful.
Most people's cars sit in driveways for the majority of their life.
That's a great idea.
Access system versus a system of property is the most efficient concept of environmental management you can have.
Think about it.
It's so stupid for everyone.
I have so much film equipment stuffed in my closets.
I would love just to rent it, but I can't do it because I have no value.
I have to be able to resell it.
I'd spend much more money renting this stuff over and over again than owning it.
So it goes against it in a monetary sense.
It's monetarily inefficient.
joe rogan
Yeah, the zip car concept is a great idea for someone who wants to live in a place like New York City where it's just prohibitively expensive to try to have a parking spot.
peter joseph
Or anywhere.
If you had a society designed, first of all, if you're in an inner city, you really want to get public transit working well because that's the best way to do it anyway.
There's so many failures.
My great-grandfather was an engineer and he had designed this system in Los Angeles years ago, many years ago, which was a trolley system that was above ground, wasn't susceptible to earthquakes.
It was brilliant.
I was like, why didn't they put this in back then?
It was like one of the first transit ideas for Los Angeles.
And even to this day, you have the subway, but that's nominal.
It doesn't really go anywhere.
And you have these cars just coming here.
I just want to blow my brains out in traffic.
joe rogan
So many fucking cars.
peter joseph
And you can't keep operating like this.
Eventually they're going to do what they do in Latin America.
They're going to have you driving by license plate number.
You know they do that in Latin America.
You can't even drive at a certain point in time.
I mean, what's going to happen when population continues to increase and we have these inefficient systems in place?
joe rogan
I've heard Mexico City is like that right now.
peter joseph
Oh, sure.
joe rogan
Mexico City apparently is just unbelievable.
It's always traffic.
Just traffic all day.
peter joseph
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Even in China, they've been moving out the bikes or they've been trying to motivate consumerism in China to get people to buy cars.
Why?
Because it's good for GDP. Oh, great.
So they can create more air pollution and create more congestion on their streets as well.
Everything is antithesis.
It's the opposite.
It's an anti-economy.
It's ass backwards from top to bottom with the way we approach our economic structure.
joe rogan
So how do we fix it?
We have to wait for it to fall apart and then start our own shit.
peter joseph
And then we have to show, as I mentioned, the Global Redesign Institute, you have to show the world an alternative that they can understand to see how these problems can be resolved.
And then I advocate a parallel government system, as radical as that statement sounds.
joe rogan
A parallel government, so there's more than one government.
peter joseph
Well, you have the existing government in whatever region or in its holistic sense, as far as, say, the United Nations, if you will.
A parallel system would be a group of people that are not politicians.
They're not jockeying for public support and public opinion and manipulating the values and abortion this and gay rights this and gay marriage that.
Those become nominally obsolete because they are completely irrelevant culturally compared to what the problems we have.
The group of technicians and engineers and thinkers and creators that want to simply design the infrastructure of society correctly to meet the needs of the human population.
And with that train of thought, I guarantee you people will be chomping at the bit.
Volunteer to show what they can do to make society more efficient.
And as a side of the product of that, money goes out the window.
Because if you really detail the issue of money, you can't have an efficient system in the market model of economics.
Truly efficient.
It's impossible.
One final point, green economy.
Everyone wants to talk about green economy, right?
The green economy.
Books written on green economy.
Green economy is impossible also in a monetary system because of the inherent flaw of cost efficiency, meaning to cut corners to get the right product to make it so people can buy it.
The inherent flaws of cyclical consumption, the need to have constant turnover.
Our economic system is in one big paradox.
In the old economic theory it says there's scarcity, therefore we have to have the assumption of social Darwinism that some people can have the right to this through their equity and some cannot.
Never enough to go around is the assumption.
Simultaneously, it's based on infinite growth.
Simultaneously, it assumes that we have to constantly keep consuming so people can stay employed.
And with a growing population, what do you have to have?
More and more consumption to keep everyone that's populated employed.
joe rogan
It clearly hasn't been planned out.
peter joseph
There's no plan.
It's all been, which is understandable in our evolution.
This is weird.
We are monkey selves trying to figure out what the fuck's going on.
But luckily, we can begin to assess, we can see the light.
And now it's the big conundrum of how to get the fuck out of the system and it's something that actually works without seeing too much destruction, without seeing too much breakdown.
I don't want to see the system fail and the infrastructure completely be demolished.
I don't want to see terrorists come out of the woodwork.
I don't want to see...
joe rogan
We've got to get people on mushrooms.
Stat.
That's what's going on, man.
The only way we're going to fix these fucks is we've got to get them on mushrooms.
No way people are going to make some just radical leap of change.
They're going to recognize, just like they recognize right now in other parts of the country where there's a leadership vacuum.
You know, whether it's in Iraq right now.
Iraq's going through a fucking civil war.
Congratulations, America.
You just fucked up another spot in the world.
peter joseph
One of many civil wars.
joe rogan
A new dictator's gonna move into place.
Some new ruthless motherfucker who dominates the situation.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
peter joseph
Right.
As long as they're in favor of Western geopolitics, they'll be safe.
joe rogan
Yeah, maybe, right?
What the fuck do we do, Peter Joseph?
Do we wait for the aliens, or are they not real?
peter joseph
God, I really wish aliens would come.
It would have set a great precedent, wouldn't it?
We'd actually be able to see another entity that actually was beyond us, that could actually give us the obvious awareness that we're one species and one family.
joe rogan
That's the Ronald Reagan speech.
peter joseph
Is it?
joe rogan
Do you remember Ronald Reagan's speech?
peter joseph
I don't remember that one.
joe rogan
He gave a speech during the middle of the Cold War saying how quickly we would unite as a race if we were faced with a threat from another world.
And everybody got crazy.
Like, damn, the fucking aliens are coming.
Ronald Reagan's just letting us know.
And then nothing happened.
peter joseph
I had a great idea for a film.
It was a bunch of hackers that go in.
I shouldn't give this away.
joe rogan
Don't give it away, bro.
peter joseph
Well, I'll give you the premise because it's fun.
joe rogan
Don't do it.
It'll be online.
They're going to steal it.
peter joseph
Well, I hope they steal it.
joe rogan
Okay, there you go.
Put that information out.
peter joseph
We have a whole group of hackers, right?
So they hack into the US Pentagon, they hack into the military systems that are interconnected around the world.
joe rogan
And they find gay porn.
peter joseph
And they plant a fake asteroid attack coming towards Earth.
So all the media now thinks there's a ginormous asteroid coming towards Earth that will destroy all of humanity.
What happens is the motivation of all the continents.
They come together.
They try to combine their resources.
They try to create some type of anti-asteroid weapon.
And then suddenly someone figures out that these are just a bunch of hackers and they're brought in chains.
And then they give this nice speech at the end of how this is their attempt to unify humanity before it was too late.
unidentified
So it's like a Scooby-Doo episode?
joe rogan
Scooby-Doo if there were hackers trying to save humanity?
peter joseph
It'd be a good ploy.
I think the audience would like that.
Especially if the audience didn't know they were hackers at the beginning.
They thought it was all real until they came forward.
joe rogan
That could work.
Who do you think would have you to play the lead hackers?
brian redban
Matthew Broderick.
joe rogan
Would you go with Kristen from Twilight?
What's her name?
Kristen Stewart?
She would be good.
brian redban
Right here, these two.
joe rogan
She'd be one of your good stars.
Who's this?
brian redban
Matthew Broderick in War Games.
joe rogan
Oh, War Games.
Of course.
You know what's amazing?
I like watching Alien, the original Alien, what they thought that the cockpit of a sophisticated computer setup would look like.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
It was just so wonky.
No graphic user interface at all.
peter joseph
Right, right.
joe rogan
All just numbers and letters.
It's interesting, man.
peter joseph
It's interesting to see how people think about the future and what it ends up being.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, predicting space travel to other planets, no problem.
But figuring out a graphic user interface, it's just really never been...
Nobody ever wrapped their head around it yet.
peter joseph
It's so hard to predict what the future may hold, man.
joe rogan
Do you think that technology can save us?
Is it possible that there's going to be something that comes along that...
To create some sort of a connectivity with human beings that allows us to be more empathetic to the idea or more accepting to the idea that we are really truly one species.
That we are a super organism.
peter joseph
Well, in the words of Carl Sagan, when he was approaching the nuclear fallout possibility during the Cold War, he said, if there's anything positive that could come out of this, it would be the unification of humanity on the level of realizing that they are all at risk by the actions of just two seemingly small superpowers.
This is a pivotal thing.
So once the breakdown of society occurs, once people see how interconnected things are in the infrastructure of society, in the fact that computers run everything already, you know, it's very obvious the symbiosis, and I think it'll come to fruition.
If there's any pattern that's become more of a trend now, it's the oneness poetry.
I'd look at it very literal, but a lot of people like to take it into a metaphysical sense.
The unification of the species is not just the unification of us as a family in a gestural sense, even though you can go back, you know, to the mitochondrial eve many thousands of years ago.
We all have the same basic mitochondrial DNA construct.
We all come from that basic kernel one way or another, the entire species.
But the entire association of values in our minds is utterly symbiotic.
It's the group mind.
It's a collective consciousness, if you want to use that old term.
I use the group mind.
It's a little more practical.
Everything you think, everything I think, has been communicated to us one way or another, filtered through a basic genetic pre-program.
Combined with all sorts of other data coming from other people.
So, no one originates anything.
No one thinks in any kind of novel sense.
It's all an illusion.
And if there's anything that could show the unification of the species on that level as far as what we think we are, we can only be everything because every construct of thought is determined by what everyone else is thinking.
Feeding into us through information.
Whether it's your parents, whether it's your educational system.
So, there's no way to rationalize separation, you know what I mean?
And on a molecular quantum field level, if you want to jump to that route, it's all a big sea of molecules moving around.
This is all a big illusion.
I think we all know that by now.
joe rogan
Right.
Well, if you get to that, how much do you think that you can manipulate your environment with thinking?
How much do you think that you can manipulate?
peter joseph
Well, the beauty of technology as an extension of ourselves is the ultimate tool.
I mean, thinking really is a technological idea.
Logic and reason, which came to us just a couple thousand years ago with Aristotle.
We finally figured out how to think, even though most of the planet still doesn't do that.
These tools will lead to something, and if the values are right, if we see the rationale, if we see the reason, if we see what it means to relate to the environment, which is very, very simple, if we see the benefit of automation as an isolated example, we naturally adapt and adjust.
And what's happened now, though, I mean, frankly, there isn't a crisis.
There's only the crisis of the way we think.
There's no reason you couldn't turn all of this around tomorrow if you wanted it to.
joe rogan
Or somebody makes a Terminator.
peter joseph
Well, the old fantasy takeover by machines, I'm certainly amused by, but we're already taken over by machines.
joe rogan
I know, but I mean, what if it's like literal?
You don't think so?
peter joseph
There's nothing in there that I could see programming-wise that would allow for such a thing.
The ultimate expression of that was that hideous film iRobot.
At the very end, the computer goes, we have to exterminate all of humanity because they are a threat to the planet.
So the logical calculation that humanity can no longer exist.
That's the ultimate sci-fi fantasy of artificial intelligence.
joe rogan
Well, that wasn't necessary, but that's a big-budget Will Smith film, and they've got to do what they've got to do.
unidentified
Of course.
joe rogan
But as an idea of...
peter joseph
But that catered to the long-standing assumptions of artificial intelligence and automation.
joe rogan
And the technological singularity.
peter joseph
Sure.
And as Kurzweil points out, we don't really know what will happen with a technological singularity.
joe rogan
But once technology becomes sentient and has the ability to move and manipulate things, who knows?
peter joseph
Well, if they're extensions of us, they become our tools.
Who's to say we want to program them to kill anything?
joe rogan
Says who?
Says us.
That's what we were talking about earlier about failed symbiotes.
You know, the parasitic relationship between, I mean, the symbiotic right now relationship between human beings and computers.
It's very similar to if you look at like other organisms that have, you know, lampreys on sharks or whatever.
I mean, we're almost inseparable.
We're a part of the same sort of ecosystem now.
We need the lights to stay on.
We need the refrigerator to stay cold so that we can preserve the meat better.
I mean, we have it sort of set out so we're almost completely intertwined.
With technology.
peter joseph
That's inevitable.
joe rogan
And then we give birth to the live one.
We give birth to technology where it's sentient, where it can figure shit out on its own, and it becomes another life form.
It becomes a life form, much like a biological, carbon-based life form, just completely different and unexpected and something we didn't see coming.
peter joseph
It's all very possible.
joe rogan
Do you ever look at broken computers and shit?
Those are bodies.
Those are dead bodies.
It's fucking dinosaurs, but they're happening really quickly.
peter joseph
At this stage of our evolution, either we utilize technology to help us and hope for the best, or we're going to perish anyway.
So if it happens to be we become enslaved by a bunch of machines in the end, well, so be it.
That must be a natural evolution.
joe rogan
So you're cool with that?
peter joseph
Given what's at stake today, I'm cool with that.
Given what we have to deal with, I'm perfectly happy to be a robot slave.
joe rogan
That is now going to be on the internet.
Peter Joseph, cool with robots taking over.
I'm cool with that.
This is the Zeitgeist Movement's primary premise.
We're cool with robots taking over.
peter joseph
I will say this.
The phallus...
Problem of human psychology is so vast now that I can only dream of the cold quality of calculation coming forward to save us because we've fucked up just about everything so far.
We are way beyond our sense of self-control.
That's what calculating society is.
That's what our brain does.
It's a calculation process and it's too bad we're so clouded with these us and them issues and all these things that are...
joe rogan
Monkey issues.
peter joseph
Evolutionary baggage, exactly.
And again, it's easy to see an amazing, beautiful society emerge if we simply wanted to construct one correctly because we have that power now.
joe rogan
And we have mushrooms.
brian redban
Do a barrel roll!
joe rogan
That's important.
That's an important part of the equation.
I don't think you're going to fix people without some sort of a large-scale psychedelic experiment.
peter joseph
I did see an evolution special that alluded to that old Bill Hicks joke, which maybe came true, that mushrooms could have been that link that pushed forward the human brain.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's McKenna's theory, the stoned ape theory.
unidentified
Exactly.
joe rogan
That's what you probably saw.
Yeah, he said that over a period of...
peter joseph
This was in a more academic circle, too, though.
It was actually more...
It wasn't just McKenna.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's a bunch of scientists that have speculated it because, you know, the incredible powers of psychedelic plants, I mean, as far as like powers of experience, I mean, if you don't know, if you never had it, there's a lot of people ignorant to the experience.
Have you done mushrooms before?
peter joseph
I have.
joe rogan
You just wink if you're worried about your PR. Everyone did everything in high school and college, so.
Yeah.
If you've had a real big experience, a big trip, you realize how humbling it is, first of all, just to know that that's possible.
That that's even an experience that a person can have and that they're not dying from it either.
I know we have a lot of friends that have gone through crazy psychedelic trips and everyone's okay.
But the experience itself to someone who's uninitiated is almost...
It's impossible to imagine.
Like, you can't imagine that it's really possible that this could exist, and that this is not discussed every day on CBS Evening News, that someone's not saying, listen, man, you need to get on mushrooms, okay?
You need to find a fucking place where you're comfortable, and you need someone to get you the good shit, and you need to go there with clear intent, and you need to do yoga, and you need to find yourself, because life can be way better.
This recent John Hopkins study where they talked about one dose, they had one large dose of psilocybin and they had measurable increases in their happiness and their personality over a period of like 20 years.
One experience just reset their whole life.
So can we add mushrooms to the Zeitgeist movement?
I think together in harmony we can work this shit out.
And fox magic.
We need fox magic.
brian redban
That was so weird, by the way.
I'm still trying to figure out...
Michael Rupert has this whole fox magic thing where he believes in fox magic.
joe rogan
Well, let's be real honest.
He was high as fuck.
peter joseph
I'm not familiar with him.
joe rogan
And if you get that guy sober, he probably would have never said that he knows fox magic.
He's an interesting cat, but you have to be that guy.
He's out there, man.
He's not following any of the status quo.
That guy's out there trying to expose corruption in the government at every step of the way.
You have to be a little...
I don't know, a loony?
peter joseph
He has a hero quality to him.
He's out there.
He's doing it.
You can't really fuck with him.
joe rogan
He's a good guy, too.
You can tell he's a good guy.
He's a good guy when you talk to him.
He's not an asshole.
He's out there doing the right thing.
You need people like that.
Right, Brian?
brian redban
That's right.
joe rogan
Fox Magic, bitches.
Fox Magic 2012. Fox Magic t-shirts.
Send them out there.
And then Peter Joseph, in quotes, I'm cool with the robots taking over.
unidentified
LAUGHTER That's how we're gonna make you some money, man.
joe rogan
We're gonna market you, alright?
This is a very cool conversation.
Is there anything else you want to say?
Is there anything that people need to know about?
peter joseph
Well, shit.
There's tons of things I could say, tons of things.
I mean, we got events coming up.
I'm going to be in New York, if anyone's in New York, at the end of this month.
Columbia.
joe rogan
If anybody wants to hook up, go for some drinks.
Yeah.
What is the best way to find out information?
What is your number one website?
I know it's TZ Movement on Twitter.
That's for the movement.
What is the best way to be informed?
What website can people go to?
peter joseph
The main movement site is just simply thezeitgeistmovement.com, and then the movie site is zeitgeistmovie.com, and then you can link to all the other sub-sites for the films.
joe rogan
And there's a bunch of scam sites that, like, they set...
peter joseph
The Zeitgeist film series has been subject to more manipulation and scam and resellers.
I've been screwed over so extensively by...
Attempting to be altruistic with the distribution of that film.
People buy things from me, resell it, profit all over the place.
I just now stopped doing a lot of the things I used to do after four years because I'm running out of money.
I can barely see myself making this new film.
It's going to be quite the difficult venture.
The Zeitgeist has attracted just about everything.
Whether it's people that want to abuse it, people that hate me, people that like it.
There's no more strange phenomenon I've come across recently than the Zeitgeist phenomenon as far as a cultural issue.
It's really strange and interesting.
joe rogan
I would imagine there must be a pretty big life change to go from just being a classical musician.
Right.
To all of a sudden at the head of some crazy movement where you're being critiqued and criticized for every single word that comes out of your mouth.
Probably critiqued.
People are going to be mad at you for even doing this stupid show.
This ridiculous show where we make fun of everything.
peter joseph
I think it's important people realize that we're all just people and no one should take any of them.
Anyone that seriously.
I have a great deal of humor with all of this.
I have the Carlin level, I call it, sitting on the sideline.
And that's something I don't readily admit, but the Carlin level, George Carlin, is where you just don't give a shit anymore.
And as much as I push forward with all of this, there's a side of me that says, you know what?
It is what it is.
If my self, if my posture, excuse me, if I become just deeply unhappy and get tired of what I'm doing, then I'm gone.
And it is what it is.
I don't owe anybody anything.
If people out there support such ideas, they need to become their own leaders and really push this forward, learn, educate.
And do the same process that I've been doing.
There's nothing special here.
So if there's anything I would leave to the audience that actually is an activist bone, it's that don't follow anybody.
You've got to get out there and do it because a lot of these people that are trying to lead, if you will, are not going to be around forever.
I could hit the Carlin level and say, fuck it, evolutionary cul-de-sac, goodbye humanity, and I could go live on the moon somewhere after I do something to fly there.
joe rogan
Or at the compound outside Sonoma.
unidentified
At the Zeitgeist compound.
joe rogan
Where they're growing hippie pussy on trees.
Well, thank you very much, man.
It was a very fun conversation.
peter joseph
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
joe rogan
Fascinating.
Again, all the information.
The Zeitgeist Movement.
The website is, one more time?
peter joseph
Thezeitgeistmovement.com.
joe rogan
And TZ Movement on Twitter.
And you also have a Facebook page.
What is the Facebook page?
peter joseph
It's just the Zeitgeist Movement Official on Facebook if you search that one.
joe rogan
The Zeitgeist Movement Official.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Thank you to the Fleshlight for Chicago.
January 27th, right?
Is that the next date?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's the Chicago Theater.
There's still some tickets left.
It's a huge place.
It's going to be me, Joey Diaz, and...
Duncan Trussell, and it should be a fucking blast.
That's January 27th, and I'm looking forward to that, because that's the night after, or the night before, rather, the UFC fights on Fox.
Is the show sold out tonight?
brian redban
The show sold out tonight, but a friend of ours died in a car accident and was in a...
The other guy's in the hospital still.
joe rogan
A lot of people heard about it.
He's a stand-up comedian.
His name is?
brian redban
Josh Adam Meyers.
And there's a website, Donate for Josh.
Angelo Bowers is the one that died.
But yeah, there's a website set up that you can help Josh because he's going to be in debt for the rest of his life because of all these.
I mean, he's alive, thank God.
But it's DonateForJosh.com if you can spare anything.
joe rogan
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks to the Fleshlight for sponsoring the podcast.
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And NYR12 is the code to enter.
And if you enter that, you will get 20.12% off until January 9th.
So go get some, you dirty bitches.
Thanks for tuning in.
We will see you next week.
We've got a bunch of cool people coming in.
And good times ahead.
And as always, we love all of you dirty bitches.
All of you.
brian redban
We'll see you tonight on the Icehouse Chronicles.
joe rogan
Yeah, we'll see you tonight on the Icehouse Chronicles.
That's right, on the Death Squad label.
It'll be on this Ustream.
If you're watching on Ustream, the same one on the Joe Rogan Ustream channel.
But if you're on iTunes, it can only be found on the Death Squad label on iTunes, so subscribe to that shit.
unidentified
All right!
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