Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, argues that capitalism’s structural greed—exemplified by fossil fuel inefficiency, corporate PR manipulation (like discrediting Ralph Nader), and systemic overmedication—fuels societal collapse, with automation and debt accelerating breakdown. His 2007 viral film sparked legal battles but framed a resource-based economy as the only sustainable alternative, critiquing infinite growth models despite Joe Rogan’s skepticism about peaceful transition. The Zeitgeist Beyond the Pale documentary (2012) and Global Redesign Institute push decentralized solutions, blending art, science, and empathy—inspired by Chomsky, Hawking, and Gilligan—to dismantle scarcity-driven competition before it triggers nuclear or nanotech wars. [Automatically generated summary]
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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