Ben McLeish - The Zeitgeist Movement

Full transcript: Ben McLeish on London Real

0:00 Hi guys, it’s Nick and Brian from London Real. Today we had Ben McLeish on from the Zeitgeist Movement UK. Super intelligent cat. He gave us a bunch of fresh perspectives on the world and where it’s headed. It’s an excellent hour. Check it out.

0:11 Check it out. Hoorah! Welcome back to London Real. My name is Brian Rose. With me is the host of The Hour, Mr. Nick Gabriel.

0:32 And joining us today is Ben McLeish, who is one of the most prominent public speakers for the Zeitgeist Movement UK. Thanks for having me guys. Hello. Welcome. Thanks for coming down. You know, I don’t know if every one of our listeners is familiar with the Zeitgeist movement I don’t know enough about it But I was wondering for a complete newbie out there if you could tell people how it got started Maybe some of the films that made it the movement it is and where it is today. Sure Okay, so I mean a general description of what we are is I suppose a non-political critical sustainability movement that is trying to advocate a model of economics, a model of life, if you like, on Earth that is really sustainable, that has maximised the use of technology to free humanity, essentially.

1:19 So how did it get started? Well there was a film called Zeitgeist that came out in 2007. It was not actually originally a film, it was a sort of an art project, live art project by a New York filmmaker called Peter Joseph. He used to perform it in New York, right? Yes, he performed it over about five or six nights in Brooklyn, that’s right.

1:40 And it was just two big screens with video and he did live percussion music and stuff like that and he had his own voiceover. And it essentially gave a sort of a long perspective on three major big issues, all which relate to the idea of myth, hence the name Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist being spirit of the times, shared values of the day, those kinds of things. And it touched on religion and its possible astro-theological roots. It touched on 9-11 and the general history of false flag terror or conspiracies if you like.

2:14 And then finally it touched on banking and how the modern financial system works and the effects that it has and all of that kind of stuff. And he just threw it up online afterwards because some people said, oh, I really like that. It’d be really good if it was online. So he sort of made an edit, shoved it online. It got 29 million views before Google stopped counting.

2:31 And with no advertising and him being absolutely nobody as well. And he started getting lots and lots of emails from people going, what do we do? What do we do about this system that seems to have inbuilt corruption, seems to be very much unfocused on the idea of supporting humanity, seems to divide human beings, seems to retard progress, seems to be based at its very core on outdated myths that really have a lot of damage when we come to trying to discover new ways of doing stuff or developing And he sort of thought to himself, what do we do then?

3:04 Because that was a big pile of complaining and anger and sort of personal venting. So he started doing some research and amongst the research he did, a chap called William Gosecki who had done a film on a gentleman called Jacques Frusco contacted him and said, look, you might be interested in this and gave him a copy of his film which is called Future by Design. That’s a resource-based economy guy. Exactly. And Miles talked about him a little bit.

3:26 Yes, that’s right. That’s the way I want to contextualize him basically. So Jacque Fresco now, I think he’s 94 now or something. He’s getting on 93, 94, I do apologize if I’m inaccurate. He had been working for something like 70 years along the likes, alongside the likes of Buckminster Fuller and even Albert Einstein whom he met in developing an idea of how you might use the scientific method to essentially power society, to enable society to grow and revise itself and not have any of these myths or kind of outdated ideas that are sort of kept there artificially almost by vested interests that are now doing quite well of those myths.

4:05 The wonderful thing about science is it does revise itself deliberately. It quite happily says, this is now, we know this is now wrong and we now have this following understanding. And that one day might well be disproved or added to. Think about the Higgs boson, for example, and it’s come out and now suddenly we have a completely different understanding of mass. What actually, just being a bit tangential here, What did happen with the explosive?

4:27 I know they were doing a big test last week. Did they discover the particle? So this is an interesting area. Of course, I’m a layman in this, so I’m not going to be 100% accurate. But they’ve been building this collider for many, many years, decades actually.

4:41 And they’ve been smashing atoms together at extreme speeds to see if they could locate a predicted particle, a particle that would have to exist for the modern standard physics model to be correct. Imagine it a little bit like this. If you’ve got a 99 100 piece puzzle and 99 pieces are in the right place There’s one missing there’s certain things you can say about that you can say well There’s going to be a certain pattern on it because we can see from the picture that it would be probably something like this We can tell what shape it’s going to be, but we just can’t find it. So what they then did they managed to Witness, I think it’s the effects of the of this boson. Don’t ask me what a boson is I’ve looked it up and it’s extremely complicated I think some kind of field that turns energy into matter and then that’s how the universe was built.

5:24 We’re still not sure about it, but this guy, when he was 29, he proposed it and everyone thought he was absolutely insane, which is crazy about theoretical physicists. I mean, like Einstein, he worked in a room with pieces of paper, like he didn’t have all this equipment. That’s right. Thought of these ideas. That’s right.

5:39 Yeah, I know. It’s kind of crazy. So the big thing that Zeitgeist got noticed for with these very, very well-made films, right? Yes, because then there was another film after Zeitgeist was Zeitgeist Addendum that and said, okay, we’ve got all those problems. And they went through economics again.

5:51 It said, look, this is what fractional reserve banking is. Every time you spend money from a credit card, that money’s just invented into the system and then you have to pay it back with interest that isn’t created in the money supply. That’s gonna eventually contract ultimately when people keep doing that. And we’ve seen that. And in fact, when it was released, Addendum, it came out about a week after the big 2008 crash was publicly noticed.

6:12 They said, whoa, Lehman Brothers disappeared. So when that came out, people were like, how did they get that right? they make this film last weekend, that kind of thing. So that got a lot of attention as well. And then in 2011, he made the final one, we think, called Zeitgeist Moving Forward, which is then a comprehensive scientific overview with sort of talking heads like Dr. Robert Zapolsky from Stanford and people like Richard Wilkinson from the Equality Trust, sort of really combining it into a, like it was quite long as well, it was about two hours 40, just saying, look, here from start to finish the whole argument with all the supporting science that we have now, and this is what the model is, and this is what we mean by it, and thank you very much.

6:54 It’s an economic, it rejects the modern banking system, it’s a new economic proposal, and it also has some other conspiratory theories, or theories about 9-11 and government? No, the thing is, when you’re proposing a society based on actual real world referent, if you like, then you don’t need to keep hammering on about things like the conspiracy theories throughout history. We don’t need to keep talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to be able to admit that our society is very corrupt. What’s very important to say is where that corruption actually comes from. It does not come from a bunch of bad people, and if you just lock them all up, everything would be fine. There is a systemic product of a system that relies on restriction, on scarcity, on there being more value to restricting something than not, and the system will reward the people with the most money, ultimately.

7:45 And so the inherent goal, therefore, is to just keep maximising money over and over again. If you make that clear to people and say, listen, as long as you have a medium of exchange in society that requires people to earn money first, get an indentured servitude, and then buy at usually a loss anything that they need, because you need to make profit off it, which means you’re spending more money than it would actually be worth for the sake of of paying the person who’s paying you. Ultimately, that’s just going to produce more failed states, more restriction, a worse ability to look after people’s health care, for example, the most extreme look at the US health care system, which is entirely private.

8:23 I don’t think capitalism is innately flawed the way you say it is. No, I don’t. I think making a profit in a business is nothing wrong with that. I think it does spur innovation to a certain extent. But before we go there, I want to just go back on something And you said there, because you said the conspiracy theory isn’t these 10 guys that look like Dick Cheney that are making the world do this.

8:41 You’re saying it’s systemic. It’s almost built in because of the way we reward people. And that’s something I can sign on to much easier than I can when I hear someone talking about this conspiracy that happened here. And it’s big tobacco keeping marijuana out of being legal, though that might be true. But that’s something I can buy onto a little bit more because the system is built to reward people differently as opposed to this evil empire of guys behind the curtains.

9:03 And if you think about it, it would make, I mean, it’s so obviously self-debunk because many of the people throughout history who have been in control of a great portion of society, of course, they’re dead now, but we still have these problems. In fact, they’re much worse now and it’s new people. And often they’re hijacked by people who weren’t in that circle, who’ve just somehow made their way up and done that. So it’s this pyramid to the top. It’s the pyramid itself rather than the people on it.

9:27 And it is about time that we got past all this. And the wonderful thing about having a society really is attuned to the way that the Earth works as a system, is that that top-down model actually doesn’t work very well anymore. It might have worked well when, for example, the railroads had to be built in the States. You needed a massive capital, you need to top-down, build it, and then we can do our business on it. But it doesn’t work very well, for example, if you’ve got things like solar panels everywhere on every building contributing to a decentralized grid.

9:56 Then a top-down model doesn’t work well anymore. So we try and not just say, oh, get the people out of power because we don’t like them having power. That’s a really oversimplified way of saying it. What you have to say, and what we do say, is that based on the logic of where we need to go, how we need to engineer society so that people really are individual and free and have autonomy and have a sustainable element built into their lives, into their infrastructure, is that you don’t need to have this ruling class of people anymore.

10:23 And in fact, they themselves would live much better lives in a society that really focuses on real, real human action if you like. So Ben, let me ask you, personally I’m very much for what the Zeitgeist Movement stands for but you know it’s been going for what, two, three, four years now? Since end of 2008, always 2008. What has, what real world examples of change have you guys achieved? What can you, can you tell us about that?

10:56 Sure. thing is that we aren’t at the moment in in a position to ourselves creates if you like life-supporting systems but other people are and they’re people who share the same values they might not call themselves Zeitgeist but we don’t care I mean the ideal end goal to all of this is that we get to a point where Zeitgeist is just dissolved because we are now with there’s the values have taken over and you don’t have to have us anymore you don’t need to have anybody advocating something that’s now evident for everybody and they go Yeah, we understand actually we need the environment and that there are correct ways of interacting with it So I’ll give you some examples of people who have done it. There’s a great Great couple of people called open source ecology. We come across them These guys have identified a set of machine tools that you need to be able to live off the land in a way That’s admittedly very low-tech, but it’s actually very high-tech compared to old-style farming and they’ve created out of certain numbers of pieces which are non-branded, they’re essentially generic pieces.

11:58 How to build a tractor, how to build an earth compressor that can compress bricks so you can build a house. And they’ve loaded all of this stuff onto the internet and said, we’ve got places where you can come and join us and you can just get involved in the projects, develop these things, make them better, and all the rest of it. So there’s people like that, there’s things like the transition movement, that do transition towns, that are sort of experimenting with moneyless economies.

12:19 We’re really more of an educational resource for people who are unfamiliar with this whatsoever and think at the outset maybe that it might just be a bunch of hippies. We’re there really to just provide as many educational materials as possible and maybe media events that have a particular event towards you know social cohesion all the rest of it so that we can if you like make it fashionable to look at this stuff again I mean look at the way the word hippie has been co-opted by you just used it yeah absolutely I did exactly in the terms of how people would think about this that’s been that’s been co-opted into a negative term because it runs against just normal life you know the normal life where we go to work and we shut up and we all dress in a particular way I mean you know you just said you kind of support what they’re talking about but if I if I wake up tomorrow and like I’m with this like guys movement what steps what are the five things I change about my life in order to be now part of this site guys what do I do it was it where I bank is who I vote for what’s the whole mentality change it’s a huge question man and I certainly am not in a position to tell you what to do but I’ll tell you some of the things that that I’ve done, and I am also a very poor example of this because people do it in lots of different ways.

13:28 For one, I don’t vote, and I probably never will again, because when you vote, you’re voting for people and not really for anything else. The general agenda is very much set very, very far in advance of any electoral system, actual voting process, and you can predict these things, and we’ve predicted these things in the past. Are you saying the candidates are chosen before you vote? Oh, essentially. I mean, where did Barack Obama come from?

13:54 I mean, he suddenly appeared. Who was he chosen by? Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, he, no, I mean, he very much was a banking president and is a banking president. And look at what has happened. I mean, he, I mean, he’s a wonderful guy, right?

14:04 He can write well. He can speak well. He’s extremely intelligent. He has way more, you know, educational achievements than I do. And it’s, it’s not down to him not being good enough.

14:15 It’s that he’s just, that’s not his job is to change stuff. I mean, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been put in there, but politics tends to function the following way. It tends to keep things the same. It tends to maintain things. Okay.

14:30 So that’s your protest by not voting? Yeah. I mean, I just don’t see the point of it, you see. Okay. So George Carlin once put it very well.

14:35 We always say, well, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. He said, well, if you do vote, then you can’t complain because what you’ve essentially said is, yep, that’s enough for me to just be involved in this. That’s my voice. And now whatever he does, I’ll complain about if it’s not the same as what he said. And if he does, then I’ll consider it something that I voted for.

14:49 What’s that in Germany right now? They have the Green Party and they have this pirate party that they voted in Germany and they’re like these these kind of internet pirate kids and they call the pirate party and now they have a few seats. I know it’s only a few seats, but is that not a way in or do you just would rather not go down that route? I do have a lot of respect for the pirate party. Pirov to Buran, I think they’re called, in Sweden, aren’t they?

15:09 There’s a guys… Sweden? Yeah, a rich vote, right? But they know there’s… I think Germany has a few there.

15:14 I think they do. I think we even got someone over here. pirate party running as well. I respect that because what they’re doing is they’re deliberately going for you know information needs to be free, what you call piracy we call correct use of information those kinds of things. I think that there is some value to that. They almost have no platform either so it’s kind of a zeitgeist thing as in they’re like we’re here to not tell you what to do or we’re here to ask the internet what to do. The libertarians in America have a similar one as well and I’ve been recently chatting to a libertarian and he said that you know one of the one of the things that’s good about, for example, Ron Paul, is that he’s almost running as a critique of what it means to run for president, which on one side sounds a little bit like hedging your bets, like, yeah, if he loses, it was all a protest anyway.

15:56 But on the other side, I can understand that as well. And in fact, there was a guy called Scott Keller, who ran for president in the US based on the Venus Project, which is Jacque Fresco’s essential entity for this. And a lot of people in our movement had problems with it. They were like, well, what happens when you get voted in? You’re going to be beholden to all the people that funded you.

16:14 Are you really going to be able to change anything, given the fact that we’ve already seen people like the heads of J.P. Morgan or similar city banks essentially giving the president their marching orders, or at least the government their marching orders, or making certain things impossible through lobbying. But I do understand, and I will admit, that there is a certain amount of mindshare to be won by a political, what becomes a political stunt, I suppose.

16:37 It’s just that I personally wouldn’t do it because I wouldn’t want to involve myself. I don’t think I could involve myself. I don’t think I’m skilled enough. Okay. So you wouldn’t vote.

16:45 That’s one. I just want to get like two more things. Sure. What you would do to be the zeitgeist guy. I think buying locally as much as you can is extremely important.

16:52 Okay. I mean, I, for example, I’m very lucky. I mean, I travel a huge amount, so I can’t really coherently buy all the time, like I’m at the airports a lot. And a lot of that is just horrific waste that’s been imported from so far. But when I live at home, there’s a really great like farmer’s market that comes once a month.

17:06 Month I go down with like six of these big cloth bags and I just fill it up with local produce and the reason that’s good is for a start you’re not directly funding giant supermarket corporations anymore. The other one is that you of course take away less packaging home with you and you can even take the old egg cartons and bring them back and use them again. And you’re funding local smaller guys you know even though of course you’re still involved in the monetary stuff you have to be at the moment you can’t just do a completely money free life. Some people have managed but unfortunately how I live at the moment it’s impossible to do that so I mean that’s a good one buying buying local and from a health perspective that’s fairly good as well so you know Ben there are more extreme activists that would argue that even doing things like recycling and making sure all the lights are switched off when you go to bed and not voting those things aren’t enough and what we actually need is the entire system to collapse for us to be able to start again and to start fresh. What are your thoughts on that and do you think this system can be repaired and patched over or or do we need everything to be raised to the ground so we can start at square one again? I can I can understand that point of view too and and I think that more extreme action is just that what I outlined is absolutely needed that’s really why I spend most of the time that I have and

18:21 I’m not having to work really putting stuff together and trying to get it to a wider audience in my small way and if everyone tried to do that that’s quite good if you if you’re okay talking but in regards to the system collapsing. What do we mean by that? Do we mean the death of billions of people? Yeah. By any chance? Yes, we do. That for me, it would be, wouldn’t it? Billions? Yeah.

18:40 Okay, like a third of the population of the world. Well, okay, imagine the following. You go to… Even hundreds of millions is a lot. Yeah, absolutely.

18:47 You can be wrong. I think any amount is horrifically unnecessary if you knew that you’d have avoided it, and that’s not something I don’t want. Could you live in a post-collapse world like that, knowing that? I mean, it would be kind of exciting for a very short while, but you’d probably get very bored of of seeing your fingernails glow in the dark and stuff pretty soon, right? It would be mayhem getting there.

19:06 People also forget what that means. Let’s say, for example, hydrocarbons start running short, which they might do. Then you don’t have any more refrigeration, you also don’t have any more transport or very limited transport. You also have a lot of people who live in cities. You have a lot of people who live in cities in hot or cold climates.

19:22 So you’ve got no AC, no heating. You’ve also got no food in the shops and if they are in the shops, they’re not being kept cool, which means mass starvation in about three days. We have about three days worth of food in the UK. That is it, right? So the collapse comes quickly when it comes like that.

19:39 Now I don’t think it’s this sort of doomsday, oh, 2012 sort of bullshit, right? It’s going to be, people think very, in a binary way, they go, everything’s fine or everything’s going to just end in one day, like, you know, this kind of Ragnarok end of day sort of thing. I think that’s very much false, but it is an extremely precarious existence. We already live on a climatic knife edge on this planet anyway, and any major energy stress is it going to be quite significant with the way that we’ve ended up being so reliant on fossil fuels?

20:08 Something I had to accept, to quote someone you mentioned earlier, George Carlin, he throws out a statistic 98% of all the species that have ever existed on this planet are extinct. In fact, it’s higher than that, 99.9, that’s right. So I’ve just realised- Because they’re not needed anymore. Yeah, well maybe. But if it’s our time to go, it’s our time to go, right?

20:30 If humanity needs this huge cleansing, then that’s what we need and that’s what we’re gonna get. Well, we, yeah, that seems rather fatalistic to me. For example, think about, I mean, don’t you think there’s anything that’s worth at least trying to save? Isn’t it worth maybe trying to live within nature’s boundaries? In fact, Stephen Jay Gould put this very, very well once where he said, you know, people often say, well, the planet will replenish itself in 10 billion years.

20:52 10 billion years, we’re not gonna be around anyway, right? That’s a long time. How could it ever matter to us that it’s gonna be fine in 10 billion years. However, we could sort of look at nature, mother nature, as he calls it, this way, we say, well, you know, she isn’t required to look after us, but we can at least not, you know, cut her and make her bleed slightly before she then wipes us out. There is a way that you can drastically improve the life that we have, so that even the remainder of our days on this planet as a species, which I don’t know how many years that would be, but it’s gonna be a significant amount if we did it properly.

21:23 It would actually be itself already free from the most amount of stress and in the most amount of comfort and ability to sort of survive. I just want to jump back into like the number three on your day. What do you do with your money? Who do you bank with? And what would you recommend as that guy’s person to do with them?

21:40 Oh, I can’t tell people what to do with their money. I quite like the idea of going for cooperatives or going for sort of what is called an ethical bank. Now, you’ve got to be honest with yourself. Since you are still, of course, in the monetary system, your hand is essentially forced by what you do. If you can exchange with people, so you can say, for example, look, I’m a drum teacher.

22:01 I’ll teach your kid drums if you clean my pool, because you’re a pool cleaner. That’s kind of good. I like that. And not pay bad as well. Exactly.

22:08 Where there is that. But I mean, again, cooperatives and sort of those sort of non-corporate money lenders and sort of bank things are slightly better. They’re, I suppose, the best of a bad bunch. I just noticed two things when you said that. One is to buy local and not support the Tesco’s, the world, the Wechos is the world.

22:26 One is to use a cooperative bank that might not have all the shining bells and whistles that a Barclays would have. I also think one thing, Nick, when you buy your iPhone, when you choose to buy an iPhone, do you not take responsibility to the fact that they’re employing people in China to a certain extent? Or do we not go to Wechos because the food is so fucking awesome there? Because the mom and pop, they have these old radishes and you’re like, I don’t really want those.

22:49 So isn’t it a little bit hypocritical and that we do make actions, we use our wallet every day and yet when then we complain about these corporations not being X, Y and Z? Well I mean if you think about it, what the real complaint is is not against these corporations particularly but against the fact that any choice that we have is still within a very horrific system and that it’s very hard to act very well. But there are ways that you can do this, there are ways that certain people have done it I think without even noticing.

23:14 There’s a great website called Kickstarter, do you know it? Yeah. Just watch about hard funding, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s very much like Indiegogo as well as a few others.

23:21 Just launched here, I think. Yeah, that’s right. UK, yeah. There was a guy who designed something called a Printerbot, which is a 3D printing machine. Very simple, so average goes like me can use it, and it’s essentially so you can manufacture three-dimensional items in your home. You can print off a clothes, so you can print off toys. Now, that doesn’t maybe seem like a massive global solution. However, think about the fact that you can now locally, ultra-locally produce your own goods that you would be getting from a hardware store otherwise. How did those goods get to that hardware store?

23:48 Were driven there in giant great lorries that burn fossil fuels from carriers from maybe China. That’s a vast amount of energy you’re using. This guy who produces a Printerbot, it’s I think it’s $250 to get one, is essentially circumventing a huge amount of energy lost that way. So I think ultimately the big changes are going to come from innovations that don’t appear to have the effects that they are, having sort of consequent effects on the existing systems that we then no longer need to use. We’ll think how many trees have been saved from being able to send an email as opposed to mailing a letter across the world.

24:20 And lives as well because you get the information much quicker. What about the guy in China who loses his job because he can’t make your plastic toy? Well, you’re now touching on something very important, which is that the general trend in society, in modern society, is now towards a sort of jobless world, mostly jobless world. There was a book in 95 that talked about this very well called The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin, who’s an economist. He’s one of the few economists who really talks about this.

24:45 It’s called technological unemployment and it manifests itself in multiple different ways. One of them is, for example, yes, that 3D printing technology is essentially an automated factory worker. It’s also the automated lorry driver because you’re no longer using him or any lorries whatsoever. And it has this sort of effect. But there’s also the general move towards automation in the face of having to drop prices and become more competitive.

25:08 And if one corporation automates, for example, McDonald’s automates its cashiers into sort of touch pads, which we’ve already started doing in France, and in certain areas in Britain as well, and in America, and which actually increases during times of economic hardship. So just as people need the jobs, you’re actually getting rid of a great many of already pretty terrible jobs. Automated checkout desks in supermarkets, for example, are now absolutely standard.

25:33 No one’s surprised. Everyone knows how to use them. I love those things. Oh, they’re great, aren’t they? They’re great.

25:38 Oh, I don’t have my human interaction anymore. They used to try and just ignore you and beat the thing anyway. And because they were beeping, that’s already an automated process too, they used to put the actual numbers in themselves. So that’s also on the rise, and that’s going to happen anyway, because that’s what technology really is, that’s what automation is, is a robot or a machine or a cyber-native system taking over what people used to do manually.

26:00 Of course, now agriculture is almost completely automated, we have about 1% of the population that work in agriculture. It used to be almost everybody. You know, Brian, I just, I get the feeling like, tell me if I’m right or wrong, but you don’t really, would it be correct in saying that you don’t really believe that there is a problem with the incumbent systems, like the global economic and political systems, or do you, what are your thoughts? I don’t think it’s perfect, by any means, but I also see things that capitalism brings, you know, all of our iPads and iPhones and things like that, and all the innovation which we love.

26:35 So I have a hard time when everyone points the finger and says corporations are horrible because it was the original limited liability corporation that allowed all of these countries to grow back in the 1700s or 1800s when American capital was invested in British companies. Because just to clarify what a limited liability corporation is, if you go buy a share in Apple and it’s not a limited liability corporation, then if it gets sued, then you get sued and you can lose all of your money. I know that’s an extreme example.

27:02 I just have a hard time with a lot of these conspiracy theories. That’s why I like what Ben is saying a little bit when he says the economy is built in such a way that it rewards people for bad behavior. Maybe it doesn’t punish people enough, like corporations and banks and things like that. Well, if you think about the nature of a corporation, it’s not accountable to anyone and it solely exists to generate profit. Yeah, and that’s fine.

27:26 Is it though? A decision has to be made over whether to expand a shopping mall or build a shopping mall in a new area that will destroy the habitat of some species of waterfowl, right? Something like weird goose or duck that once it’s gone, once that area is destroyed, it’s gone forever. We’ll never see it again. Our kids will never see it.

27:46 The corporation will… That’s like 99.9% of all the species. The corporation will always choose profit and effect. We’ll try. And that’s why there’s so many national parks in America.

27:55 It is our job to try to regulate that and then you can go back and say well the money always wins and that kind of thing and that’s when you lose me because I do think there is a place for regulation. Let me present you with something that might change your view about how capitalism produces things like iPads. I doubt it. That’s fine. I don’t want to have to convince you or do your business.

28:16 I’m just going to convince myself. The behavior of technology predates and outdates and runs counter to the trend of capitalism or the trend of any different particular system in the most fundamental way, which is that, for example, let’s wind all the way back to the Cambrian explosion, right, the first time when we suddenly had lots of different types of animals on the planet, all within very few hundred million years. That happened because nature had developed RNA and then DNA in order to be able to essentially have the information to quickly assemble what had sort of come about by the sort of Darwinian mechanisms that we now understand, right.

28:48 There’s no longer the need to reinvent the wheel every time, literally. You can now suddenly have a sprawling mass of new animals based on this DNA, this shared DNA. It’s a good thing I’m not stunned because that would have totally fried my brain. Well, you can do it later. So what happens then is, of course, you know, the end, not the end product of that, but one of the byproducts of that is human beings come about, right?

29:07 We develop a thumb, which is a form of technology that allows us to interact with tools differently to the chimp. We then gradually have stone tools. We then invent things like books. Voice. Voice was big, right?

29:17 Mm-hmm. Voice was big, right? Yeah, the small mouth noises that I can make that tells you to go over there and get me that thing exactly That of course, you know allows us to also start developing Particular ideas and those particular ideas can be solidified into things like books and the Gutenberg press comes along now every time that there’s a new Level of something you can essentially plot it this way every year that humanity goes forward We know twice as much as we knew last year Because we use the existing technological systems to generate a thing to say no I mean, we know in terms of, let’s say, we can measure it in multiple different ways.

29:54 Number of megabytes of information that we have about the human brain doubles every year. The size of the computer shrinks by a factor of two every year as well. 18 months, I guess. Quite a morsel of it. Mm-hmm.

30:05 Okay. But morsel was speeding up. And so all of these other things. We’re now actually faster than 13 months for knowing things. But what’s happening is this is sort of determined by the prior level of technology.

30:14 Having wheels allows you to design other stuff quicker. And then those things… Yes, exactly. Exactly right. And that’s how we’ve got to iPads, not because someone was paid to make money off the idea of an iPad.

30:25 If we were the Soviet Union, I don’t think an iPad would have been created, because it would have been no profit and Steve Jobs would have not wanted to do that. Maybe I’m wrong, actually. That’s okay, because I mean, the reason that the Soviet Union fell was the, again, exponential increase of information so that they could actually look outside the Soviet Union to tell them machines and see what was going on in the outside, and that brought about it. created a machine to compete with another machine and make it better, or would it just be arrow-flat over and over again?

30:52 Soviet tanks during World War I and II were just as good as everyone else’s, weren’t they? I’m talking about an innovative consumer product that they can make a profit with. In terms of innovation, let’s look at it this way. There are many examples in history of where innovation has actually been met with blind prejudice and disregard and, well, on one side, for example, battery technology is being bought up that are much better than the incumbent ones, bought up in terms of patents and then just sat on. They just don’t bring them in because it’s a disruptive technology that would make existing systems quite obsolescence and make them unearning. So even though there is some benefit to be had with the idea of competing for making a better this or that, or indeed a cheaper one, which means it’s worse.

31:34 But I mean, the socialist communist Soviet structure, I know I’m being general, but I don’t see them innovating products. Can you argue with that? No, but I’m of course not into their ideas either. The idea of… You see my point though.

31:47 Yeah, I see your point. But is product innovation, is that necessarily a good benchmark for any society or like standard of living? I’m sure we have loads of iPads but iPads and things like your Nespresso machine or your frozen margarita maker or whatever but does this necessarily mean becoming happier people and… That’s a whole other issue obviously. What it all interconnects, that’s the thing, is that this focus on blind consumption is being marketed as what makes you happy.

32:15 That is true. And if that isn’t true, then take these pills. Is zeitgeist about that? Is zeitgeist questioning why we consume? Yes, mostly.

32:22 Not mostly, but significant portions to do with consumption, because consumption also comes down to resources. And the kind of resources we’re using that make, for example, iPads, it’s unfair to pick on Apple. Let’s pick the Samsung Galaxy. Those are things that regenerate extremely slowly, and because we build them so cheaply as to make the most amount of profit and make them, you know, at least sellable to the market, we then also make them so they don’t really break down or can’t really be recycled in a truly efficient way, in real recycling terms.

32:51 We throw those down things into landfill, or we sell them to a company, then strip a little bit out and throw the rest of the landfill. You know, the thing that I keep coming back to is if you, we’re part of the natural world, right? We’re animals at the end of the day. If you look at nature, there is no waste. There’s absolutely no waste in any ecological system.

33:09 If a fox in the forest dies, it’s decomposed by bacteria and then put back into the system. And look at us, I mean, the waste we produce is staggering. Every week, even more often than that, every few days, I have to empty this big black bag in my apartment and I put it outside my front door in the bin. Where does that go? Where is that going, dude?

33:31 You throwing it away? I mean, you complain about your behaviors. No, dude, I’m part of the system. I’m not saying I’m perfect. Then why are you complaining? I don’t know. Where’s your solution? You put your money where your money is every day. I don’t have a solution, but I want one. I want one that will help me to be able to not have to do that. But yeah, I want to go buy my box of eggs from Sainsbury’s because it’s cheaper and they’re there all the time, but still there’s got to be a better way. It does have to be a better way.

33:58 Yeah. I mean, there are various ideas that you can tout about how we can improve things like packaging issues, for example. Imagine if anything that came in a particular box was that box itself was absolutely optimized for downgrading. So it uses the least amount of resources. Rather than, have you bought like a kid’s toy recently?

34:19 Oh, the plastic. Oh, man. So it’s actually significantly hard to get the things out. You actually cut yourself getting it open. Jeff Bezos was like, yeah, it’s ridiculous.

34:28 Exactly. Now, this is done because it’s cheap, not because it’s good. And it uses a bunch of stuff that’s not downgraded. But you could solve this issue if we all got together. We have the information and the technology to make this stuff way better.

34:41 But we also live in extremely large, outdated cities that would need ground-up rebuilding, or at least some sort of significant transition. And it’s extremely hard to do that when you have a divided society, where there are different areas of expertise that don’t really talk to each other. So that’s changing now. We are becoming a little bit more interdisciplinary, but we also have countries, countries which are the age old byproduct of old localized scarcity systems and the sort of the borders just sat where they could after a significant to and fro of power structures and all the rest of it.

35:12 Do you think that perhaps what I feel Brian might agree with this is that things like Zeitgeist, although noble, what they’re trying to do is fundamentally flying in the face human nature like Brian always says that we are naturally lazy we are naturally greedy I mean is there enough time for us to rewire what a human being actually is okay the human nature arguments a good one and it’s it was actually the reason that Peter started his third film with a significant treatment on human nature so what do we mean by human nature just that what human beings all other things considered equal naturally revert to or naturally gravitate towards or the actions they will naturally take. OK. So if I were to tell you that there’s a tribe called the Buid that are absolutely non-violent and actually abhor the idea of heroism as something that’s rather bleak and weird, would that fit in with your idea of human nature?

36:06 Maybe they’re a rarity, an anomaly. Well, the fact there’s an anomaly means that we have to ask it. Are you saying it’s been taught in human nature? Is that the point you’re kind of making? Well, let’s put it this way, and I can only tell you what I’ve read from the people that I’ve read.

36:20 There is such a thing as greed. However, the word greed immediately makes you think of people just taking money and doing anything to be number one. But that originally was actually aspiration, the drive that sends humans to know and invent and become better, like self-betterment and indeed a lot of things like betterment of others, that altruistic stuff, I think is all part of that same drive. Something inherently wrong with the acquisitive nature of a human being, not just for things but for knowledge as well.

36:50 That’s really what makes us human, I think. That’s really why we have all this stuff, right? So those kinds of things actually need to be refocused, and we do talk about a sort of a shift in values. It’s not just about sustainably upgrading with the best technology, the transport systems, the sewage systems, the communication systems, and all this kind of stuff, and health and all the rest of it. There has to be a value shift as well, because at the moment the whole point is that we are based on a competitive mentality.

37:15 We’re based on a divisive and owning mentality, whereas we could actually, if we understood what it means to live in a finite system that is essentially pretty wasteless, that does have a high amount of regeneration. What does that mean for how we behave? What does that mean with things like altruistic behavior? What does that actually mean? Might it mean that if I had the idea that what’s good for me is actually what’s good for everyone, that having a clean water source is an important thing because I need it and other people need it, and if they don’t have it and I do have it, that actually makes it quite dangerous for me to be around them because it’s again dividing us and there’s a jealousy thing involved and all the rest of that. So we sort of come to a crossing point of sustainable and sensible technologies that that can be revised that can be improved and also a value system that is happy with upgrading and being proved wrong and being outdated and a new sort of focus on what it means to have a human relationship with others and the the whole planet as well.

38:15 So it’s very much a mixed bag of all of those things because one informs the other and they both inform each other. And I think that’s where most of modern human nature comes from. If you had been born in a very different circumstance, you would not look the way you look now. You would not sound the way you do now. And you would not hold dear the things you hold now.

38:31 Those are all not inherent. Because they’re taught, you’re saying. Well, so as opposed if we lived in avatar, like think if we live in avatar then everything is like very different. It’s a community. It’s about the nature of our own aspects of nature, and that’s how everyone’s brought up, so that’s what they do.

38:46 And did you see how people left that film as well? They got killed. There was stories. I don’t mean to hide the Avatar people back. Yeah, that’s right.

38:51 But there were people coming out of that film in America depressed at the fact that they are now so divided from nature. I believe that, yeah. Really unhappy. And what was the difference? They were shown an alternative.

39:01 They were shown a type of life that no longer shares what is a basic fundamental truth about humanity. Is that what the Zeitgeist wants to be, in a certain way, the Avatar community? Well, not really, because it’s very hard, if you were to say… To romanticise the ideal, right? Yeah, romanticise the ideal of flying birds and we’re all blue and we connect with our hair.

39:20 But some of the basic values are what you’re talking about now, buying local and not making waste. Well, an earth system, yes, if you like. That was a resource-based economy, right? I suppose it would be. The only thing is that it’s very dangerous if you say, we want what’s in Avatar.

39:33 People go, you want me to live in a mud hut and stuff, but we actually think you You can take all that wonderful technology with you and still have that connection. Is it not just as dangerous, though, to not be able to … I can’t tell you what the Zeitgeist Movement’s about, and I’m always wondering, is it not dangerous not to be able to say this is what we’re about in 20 seconds? Not that you want to say we want to be Avatar, but sometimes I have a hard time getting my head around the movement itself.

39:57 Yeah, fair enough. I mean, there was a chap yesterday who asked me what it was on my t-shirt, and I always And this says One Planet Project, right? One Planet Project, the Zeitgeist Movement, that’s right. And I said, well, look, we’re essentially a movement that wants to… You see, it’s actually quite tricky.

40:16 I do it differently with every different… You want to make the world better, ultimately. We say that we face particular crises in education, in energy and in employment, and we think that we can actually put science and technology at the centre of society to create a truly humane society for everybody on the earth provide basic the basic resources that everybody requires nutrition you know all the rest of it and that we can only do that by really all working together and getting rid of this sort of competitive model that we’ve sort of had inherited down from prior generations it’s about as short as I can make it I sometimes wonder if there’s like this planets or worlds in the solar system with a galaxy or the universe where where they’ve just got it right you know there’s no war there’s no poverty there’s no hunger things just work, smoothly. I wonder if there’s places like that in the universe. I hope there are.

41:07 There was a really interesting, I’m not into UFO stuff, but there’s been a single story that I’ve read that really caught my imagination. It was partly because the teller was such an interesting guy. There was a chap in the 70s, I’ve forgotten his name now. He goes under the name of Stefan van der Erde, which means Stephen from the Earth, which is what these aliens called him. He had this vision. He’s a Dutch banker. It was really high up in a company. He had no prior interest in UFOs and he didn’t even have interest in UFOs after this happened to him. And the story told was that he was approached in this sort of sequence by these aliens that had come from another planet. And they just basically explained to him how they build their spaceships, how they work, what their cities look like.

41:51 And then they told him that their religion was efficiency. And that’s about as short as maybe I could make it with the Zeitgeist movement, that we want maybe the new religion to be efficiency. The thing is that it’s not a religion in that sense. It’s that if we maximise efficiency in absolutely everywhere, you would end up with such a big abundance that people would have way more stuff, even though you wouldn’t be on an ownership model anymore. You would actually have so much more in freed up resources.

42:16 That’s very interesting. And so much more in truly modern teaching and real learning, lifelong learning and all this kind of stuff. And not putting a human being, which is an incredibly complex, brilliant pattern-recognizing algorithm into a fucking factory job where they spend 20 odd years only there because they have to earn money to buy the shit that you tell them that you need. This is really about as much as you can do it, and if I may not use that, were you recording?

42:40 I hope you were. No, no, that was a great last two minutes because now I kind of get in the field for what you guys are doing and what you’re talking about. Because it is very tallow-jurdened. I mean, working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need. That I get.

42:51 That I recognize as being the problem with consumer culture. And that’s you, dude. You’re the efficiency guy. And I’m walking I’m staying away from consumers and more and more as I get older and I get it now It’s just crazy cuz you got all the cash to buy this shit that do I know what else does I’ve been going from like crazy Capitalist to now like looking around but anyways speaking of capitalism.

43:42 You know, it’s something we talked briefly on the phone about, and I wanted to ask you, how did the Occupy movement interact with Zeitgeist? And ultimately, yeah, how did that work? And how were they different in mentality than what you guys were doing?

44:01 That’s a really good question. There’s actually multiple answers too, because of course, well, look, there’s a nice synergy between the two movements. The very end of Zeitgeist moving forward features huge numbers of people on foot marching towards the banks and throwing all their money at it and basically putting a big pile and burning it and going, we don’t need this anymore. And eight months later- Burning the banks or burning the money? No, no, burning the money.

44:22 Just go, well, I don’t think they even burn it. I think they just throw it and go, we don’t need this anymore. No thanks. It’s that same thing, I guess. And yeah, and then what, eight months later Occupy did the same thing after Adbusters released their thing going, listen, we’re going to occupy them like they occupy the Gaza Strip.

44:34 And so what happened was that appeared. Then we had a few of their guys on the radio show. people were sort of coordinating the New York one as well just to give their perspectives and saying you know what what is the endgame how is it going and how are you managing to be leaderless and all that kind of stuff just you know from one movement to another how’s it going sort of thing and offering sort of a general solidarity I went down to occupied London a few times with big bags of food to just you know keep their massively abundant kitchens overflowing and listen a little bit to their sort of they had free lectures and stuff was really wonderful St. Paul’s we went down there just like but we’re always said and done, what happened to the Occupy Movement? It just fizzled, right?

45:10 We didn’t finish. Well, yeah, we’ll get to that in a minute. And then, yeah, so a lot of our members went down there. There was sort of a tent there. Now, in some places, we actually organized the Occupy things, and it was very clear from the start that we had done. So the guy from Zeitgeist, Amsterdam, helped organize Occupy Amsterdam. And, you know, anybody who wanted to Occupy came along there. In most of the cases, we were just there to sort of address them or speak with them or at least get some of the ideas going and a lot of them actually also rejected us and they said oh no we don’t really need a conspiracy stuff they really only saw the sort of very prima facie sort of associations you get from looking at our stuff for maybe five minutes and they were just they didn’t want to talk to us in which case fine you know we’re not going to push ourselves on anybody the whole point of this movement is here’s our train of thought and it’s based on what we try and be as rational about as possible right and if you’ve got anything that you can like prove incorrect about it, that means it’s an improvement in the ultimate goal of what we’re after. We’re after it being correct. And we can’t force you to live in this system or to advocate it. You have to understand it. And if you don’t, there’s nothing I can do, all right? I can only do my best to tell you what it means. And that was the truth with Occupy 2. There were some

46:21 Ones that got it straight away, understood that it wasn’t just the evil bankers, and that it was actually the systemic issue of banking itself, as it is now playing out in sort of modern needs scenarios. And there were some people who didn’t believe They just thought it was the nasty bankers the sort of the daily mail type of people and you know You can do your best to present them with information, but you cannot you can’t try and force them to do anything And then what happened with occupy? Well, it went for a long time considering that it had no resources The guys actually in St. Paul’s did some cool stuff They had a technology tent where they were pumping out Wi-Fi and they had a generator and all that stuff Yeah, we went down there in November. Yeah, it was early days. Maybe four weeks in and that’s when I checked it out.

47:03 Yeah, we just walked around, talked to a few people, very little interaction, but it was a decent setup. I think it was also before kind of the bad elements came in, whatever that means. I know it’s tough when you do a movement. How do you know who to let in? Exactly.

47:17 And that’s in fact where the American Occupy went, if you saw it. I mean, you had Occupy Oakland, I think it was with that idiot, just that campus guy spraying people with pepper spray. You had Fox News saying, oh, don’t worry, it’s just a kind of food, isn’t it? It’s just a food. And you get the sort of, I mean, I was, I was, there was a campus security, a campus security guard.

47:36 I think it was Oakland. I’m sorry. Oakland. If it’s not true. Um, uh, and he just sprayed all these nonviolent protests who just sitting on the ground with a lot of wonderful news for the movement.

47:46 Isn’t that wonderful news for zeitgeist? It took great. Yeah. Because you see what the incumbent system does. We often get accused with the idea that this sort of a system that we advocate would end in violence.

47:56 And that’s only true in the following way. The current system will happily use violence against anybody proposing a nonviolent system or in acting in a nonviolent way. Violence when he flows down. Exactly. And the absolute proof was that all of the, when the occupiers in America, in New York actually put down their definite demands, they said an end to the Delaware corporation functions.

48:16 Do you know how that works? Yeah. But they all are just headquartered in Delaware so they can get around all the tax, which means that all of those wonderful profit-making corporations in America that are touted as being the reason the system is so great are in fact not contributing as significantly. Liability issue I think in Delaware as well. I think yes, there’s all kinds of things But I mean they there’s no sales tax no income tax or the rest of it He said no more of that get the money out of politics, you know lobbying equals whoever has the most money gets to choose which Environmental laws they get to ignore right get that out and they had three or four other very definite ones a couple of days later Outcome the truncheons and the and all the rest of it and they shut all those people down. It was like no Thank you. We’re not having that conversation. So what happened to occupy I would say they succeeded I would say they succeeded because they got people thinking I guess yeah, and they’re still around they’ve now become a sort of a buzzword Like you can now say occupy the media occupy journalism And there is this sort of way and I think that’s true of zeitgeist too I mean the first it was films and it’s a movement ultimately becomes a set of attitudes towards Being able to critically evaluate everything around you and being aware of them I think that’s that’s part of it occupy really branded themselves really well

49:22 Yeah, you know that that that whole word and the 1% as well. Yeah, that was a that was very strong In fact, Lawrence Lessig, the American former copyright lawyer who now is trying to battle corruption in the American legal system. I think he’s doing it the wrong way, but it’s very great that he does it because he’s brilliant. Look him up if you can. Lawrence Lessig, really, really good.

49:38 You should get him on the show if you can. He said it’s actually mathematically inaccurate to call them the 1% because if you look at where all the money is, it’s really like we’re the 99.993% or something like that. It’s just so much more. But yeah, you go for the simple, no one’s going to remember, we are the 99.993. I talked to people in London about Occupy, I talked to everybody, anybody I could meet and they all just had a hard time figuring out what they were about, they didn’t know what to do, they didn’t know the action, which I guess part of what they’re doing was just kind of occupying and I know people, they weren’t frustrated but there wasn’t a message, I know even you, my liberal friend, you were like, what are these guys doing, I don’t understand.

50:19 We got that impression too, and look, it’s really hard when you have a deliberately leaderless movement, you have something that tries to be as open as possible. You guys are as well, right? You have to work very hard to try and form a common message that everyone’s happy with, and you have to also realize that not everyone’s going to be happy with it all the time, and that you’re as happy as possible with trying to update that as well, but I mean, for example, one of my friends who’s in a different movement called the Molecularists, he went over to Oakland, California and met them there, he lives in Berlin, he went over, and he He said the way that it was failing and it was going to fail was that there was this weird tall poppy syndrome thing where anybody who stood up and spoke automatically was decried for trying to be a leader, even if they were just trying to make themselves known about something.

51:01 Yeah, because it goes against human nature, right? I mean, like… Well, there’s that buzzword again. Yeah. So I have one question.

51:08 How would you guys fund yourselves? Independently, man. I, for example, whenever I travel anywhere to do a talk, I fund my own costs on the way there. I write my lectures on my own computer. I thought you were going to say recycled toilet paper.

51:27 Yes, I do. I hand them out on recycled toilet paper. This lecture has been used eight times before. So yeah, I mean, it’s self-funded, essentially. We don’t have a bank account.

51:36 We don’t have any money, really. And I’m lucky enough that I have just about enough that, for example, if I’m being asked down to Petersfield in August for like the little green gathering, so the green party have a gathering. So they said, do you want to talk? Do you want to have a sort of interview and do a lecture? I was like, sure.

51:53 I won’t ask them for anything for going down there, even though it’s the other side of the country from where I live. Because it matters to me that I can go there and do it without money intruding on anything. And for them, I mean, they’ve given me a free ticket, okay. They’ve done that. But I mean, I think that’s normal.

52:08 But anything like that, for example, if we go and fly festivals, I buy the tickets myself. If we’re traveling, last year I traveled to the media festival in the States just to be that I bought the tickets again. So those of us who can do it off our own backs. What’s your relationship with Peter Joseph in the States and how do you interact with the creator of the Zeitgeist Movement and is he still involved in the movement? So I met Peter for the first time, I would say in April 2010, it would have been yes.

52:34 He was over here and we had that big shutdown where all the flights weren’t working anymore He was stranded here for a few days, so I had some, had a couple of drinks with him. But the volcano picture. That’s right. That’s right. So that was like the first time I met him.

52:45 I’d emailed him a few times before. My emails to him are like one line, they’re like, hey man, do you want me to do this? Or hey, have you seen this? That’s it. You can write long pages and nonsense, no one’s going to read it.

52:55 And of course he’s very busy and so am I, so I don’t really have time for it. But I mean, you know, we talk very briefly, I would say once every couple of weeks via a three-line email, something like, do you want to do this week’s radio show? Because we have a radio show on Blog Talk Radio. That’s about it, to be honest with you. There’s no need for anything else.

53:11 There’s no need for lengthy phone calls or anything. What are we talking about? We know the inherent logic. We know we have recommended reading lists, so we’re all telling each other what’s kind of good to read. Imagine I’m a company where we’re on like that, Brian.

53:24 Yeah, but what if someone goes off topic, or what if he gets a new idea and wakes up and says, I believe this, and then you’re over here saying something opposite, and then you’re like, wait, we didn’t talk? Well, I mean, the wonderful thing with the word belief is that you can then say, well, What is the rationale for asserting that particular viewpoint? Because maybe it would be right. For example, recently there was a article by George Monbiot, I think his name is, in The Guardian saying, peak oil was rubbish and we’ve got lots of oil and we’ll have enough for all to fry in it.

53:52 His angle was actually having a lot of oil is even worse because the devastation and pollution is not going to go away by not having enough oil or having enough of it. And we started discussing, saying, well, how does this actually change what we talk about then? The thing is, ultimately, hydrocarbons still are completely unsustainable because they, as far as we can tell, they don’t regenerate except over millions of years. Which by the way, if you worked out what that costs in terms of how much you should be paying, you’re paying like a million dollars a litre because it takes so long to regenerate.

54:21 But we don’t do it that way, you can’t sell it that way. So we then said, well, does this have an effect on our argument? And what’s the evidence? Most importantly, who’s going to read the MIT report and go through it and make sure it is correct? then how do we change how we talked about you know do we need to revise anything so we try and we try and remain open-minded to that too if anyone turns up with things like free energy machines where they go this machine just turn on a good go forever right that runs against the standard model of physics right and it’s very unlikely that that’s true but we will at least look at it and go well is there any actual evidence for this and most of the time the the sites you go to we’re trying to sell you this thing for $50 and don’t explain how it works and that is inherently unscientific so that kind of stuff gets shut down again. So this is just the age old idea about a free energy machine. That kind of stuff is filtered out. But we try and remain as open as we can about other stuff.

55:09 You know, we’ve got a bunch of questions from people, but I think we should just round off this hour and then I’m just going to do an extra 20 minutes of questions for you. But just briefly, if people want to get in contact with you, I know one of our guys, Adrian Flavin, said, how do I start my own zeitgeist community? You know, he’s in Ireland and stuff. So if you can just briefly answer those questions and then we’ll get some more questions later. There is a website called Tzmchapters.org, I think it is, which actually comes with templates and with guides.

55:32 There’s actually a new chapter’s guide being written now. It’s about 50 pages long that can give you an idea of how to go about doing it. We even do, yeah, website templates and stuff. We originally used to host all of them, but that’s changed. So there is actually a step-by-step.

55:44 If you can’t find it, my email is ben.mccleish at the zeitgeistmovementuk.com. And if they wanna follow what zeitgeistmovement’s doing, what is it, is it the TMZ site? Yeah, not TMZ. that’s the people who take pictures of Coney 2012 guys naked. I can’t spend time on that, I really don’t.

56:03 No, one guy from our own Facebook actually called it TMZ, multiple times in one question. I was like, you need to proofread. But yeah, I mean, what’s the best place? We do have a Facebook, the best place is probably the zeitgeistmovement.com. We also have the zeitgeistmovementuk.com.

56:17 And we even have a London chapter as well. But the good thing about the main zeitgeist site is it filters in from outside. We have like a related website for news called like zitenews.org, which is just all the amazing developments that we’ve done. You know, no commentary about alternative social systems. Just look here, we’ve worked out smart materials, this is what we can now do with hydrogen just over and over and over again. So you get a fill-in from that for just just to show what we can do. Latest news from us, latest radio shows from us and where they are, latest videos, latest, you know, if there’s a lecture tour going on or if there’s like a media festival coming up. It’s all brought in there so it’s quite useful place to start and then you can go to the local things as well.

56:54 Awesome. That’s some great resources. We’re going to have you on for another 20 minutes to answer some questions, but Ben, thanks so much for coming. Yeah, man. I can tell from the start this was going to be dope.

57:01 Well, thank you very much. He had some good questions. He was dropping some science. I thought it was pretty dope as well. He was quite literally dropping some science.

57:07 He was, right? So we’ve got some questions coming, but we’re going to say goodbye for now for our iTunes people and thanks for coming on. Thank you for listening, guys. Thank you for having me.