Peter Joseph - The Zeitgeist Movement

Full transcript: Peter Joseph on London Real

9:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr. Peter Joseph, who is an independent filmmaker and social activist who founded the Zeitgeist Movement. You directed and produced three documentary-style films, Zeitgeist, the movie, in ’07, Zeitgeist: Addendum a year later, and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward in 2011. You produced the web series Culture in Decline with a healthy dose of satire, sorry, satire featuring Lee Camp, who’s been our guest here before.

9:54 You at the Occupy movements in Los Angeles and New York City. You produced the annual Zeitgeist Media Festival, which is in October this year in LA. Peter, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to London Real. Oh, it’s my pleasure, Brian.

10:06 Thank you for having me. It’s, you know, you have been on our radar for a long time. You know, I have a bit of an interesting story. I usually don’t share a lot on this show, but I think I’m going to share it with you a little bit. Okay.

10:17 You know, I didn’t always spend my time speaking with interesting people like yourself and Jacque Fresco and Ben McLeish from Zeitgeist over here in the UK. You know, I used to work on Wall Street in Manhattan and I was actually an engineer by trade and you could argue that I could have gone on and built you know domes at the Venus Project, but I went straight to Manhattan. I was sold kind of this Wall Street dream and you know, about 10 years later after you know living in Manhattan, which I think magnifies for me everything both everything about capitalism to me.

10:49 I was kind of put placed in Manhattan. I was sitting next on a trading floor on the 33rd floor. We looked at the World Trade Center and everything north of Manhattan. I was 22 years old and you know, I was sitting next to guys that were you know making thousands of times what I was making and you know what New York City is like. You see these ultra rich pieces.

11:07 You’re constantly kind of advertised to and you just, I don’t know. I think it all came down to me when I got caught up in a further wave of greed in the dot com boom. I saw the Trade Center come down in front of me. I was living in the East Village and I must say that my kind of capitalistic dreams definitely went to a place where I think that we should be doing something different. I don’t know what that is and I don’t know if that is the Zeitgeist movement, but I want to find out.

11:34 So I hope you enjoyed that story. Of course. We share a similar background. I know you have some experience in some equity trading. You spent time in New York and in advertising.

11:44 You were, were you there for 9/11 as well? I was. Walked out the door and everyone was in shock. It was quite a spectacle. I think it was a time where I think we all kind of reflected and you know, I know your stage show came, you know, I think it was six years later, but maybe everyone was trying to compile in their head all the things going on around them and I still don’t think to this day I figured it out out, but there’s a lot of emotions that were going on there.

12:08 I was just wondering what it was like for you in Manhattan and then leading up to, you know, the Zeitgeist performance and then the film. Well, I give you a quick rundown then of my background. I was a classically trained musician in North Carolina. I went to school in North Carolina. I was accepted into a university at the age of 13.

12:24 I pursued classical music up until graduating from high school. I quickly went off to the New School for Social Research as a and it was called the Mannes Conservatory that’s there. Pursued it for two years, went into an enormous amount of debt. And even in that point in time where I really wasn’t as socially conscious, I was smart enough to say, well, you know, what? I don’t know if I want to walk out of this institution with a 100 plus thousand dollars debt for as a musician, which is probably one of the most improbable careers, especially as a classical progressive percussionist who does contemporary music.

12:53 Very improbable, I would say. Right. So from there I had to figure out how to make a living as we all do. So I went and learned video editing and eventually landed a job and worked my way up in this rather small advertising company. There was a few of them over the course of maybe seven or eight years that I worked with.

13:10 And you high end real estate advertising, high end commercials, people spending $40,000 a minute or actually less than that. We’re like $40,000 every 30 seconds. You know, all this money being thrown around for what? Manipulating public perception. I mean the advertising is the largest expense for most corporations today, which when you think about that, it’s a little wacky.

13:29 Think about what it means to be living in a consumption society and why we think this way. Well, you can blame the well, the impression of advertising over the course of a whole century as of now. And then I realized advertising was horrible. I never enjoyed it, but it did give me a chance to do music composition. I did stuff like that.

13:46 It gave me a chance to do somewhat creative things such as video editing. But in the midst of that I wanted to get out. I said, well, what can I do that has no boss and no client? And the only thing that popped out was independent equity trading. So I scratched up a little money I had, got a brokerage account and I started to study with real traders that traded from home.

14:05 It wasn’t institutionalized. Day trading. Day trading from home. And this is kind of 02 03 04? Yeah.

14:10 Okay. Yeah, roughly up until about roughly until basically the time of Zeitgeist and maybe a little bit after when things were settling to figure out what the hell was going on in my life since it was turned upside down. Okay. Was this kind of I will I will sell sell my soul and make the money here to pursue my art? Was it that?

14:24 Precisely. I was like, I just wanted to make. I even back then I was like, money, clearly this is a game. The market economy, everything about it is just a game, and that’s why game theory is the ultimate is the ultimate traders’ study, right? It’s what actually everyone studies whether they know it or not when they engage in marketing.

14:41 Marketing and trading are all games. They’re all entire business acumen of dealing with you know, go negotiation, everything. It’s all game theory, which is why all the major utilitarianist economists out there like John Nash, the Nash equilibrium stuff, like that. These guys in the one of the 20th century, they plot all these theories about how people would gain and that’s where they win the Nobel Prizes and everything else. They talk about incentive structures and all this complex nonsense that really doesn’t add anything to society whatsoever.

15:11 It’s just about how business is supposed to work and how human behavior is supposed to work. Long story short, it’s all a game. I knew that. So I’m like, well, I’m going to divide my life up. I’m going to try and get this equity trading under my belt, make whatever I can get out of it, hopefully enough to survive, trade for three, four hours a day and then have the rest of my day to do my art and pursue Right.

15:28 Many artists make the sacrifice in their minds, right? And I did. I did it all at once though. It was very, very grueling. I get up in the morning I’d trade the market.

15:37 I did a very specific type of high high liquidity trading where you basically use shock events. You shock events and you trade very, very rapid price vacuums and people can make an enormous amount of money trading the first hour of the market. And I learned that, studied that, and then I would go to work part-time because I was still in the midst of all of this, and then I come home and I do my music and my art. Literally it was nuts when I think about it in my 20s.

16:00 I worked 15-hour days just trying to keep all of this together. And then something erupted in Zeitgeist. The performance happened before Zeitgeist the movie arrived. Just, I, in my free time, I had displaced my music a little bit, even though it was a performance piece with live percussion, and I came home at night and I started to work on this piece. Pure catharsis.

16:18 Didn’t expect anything to have it. I never wanted to be sold. And downtown Manhattan, I did a six-night run. Whereabouts in Manhattan town was it? It was a I can actually name the theater.

16:28 It was called the Access Theater. I still remember. Little black box, 50 people. Kind of close to Chinatown. Okay.

16:33 And it was a horrible walk up. It was ridiculously awkward to get to. Very cheap, obviously. Couldn’t afford a nice theater, but it was just for me. Had you performed anything besides music before?

16:43 Had you done kind of speeches, or had you done? I had never done speeches. No, I had a very big fear of public speaking before that. I was very introspective as a kid. I never, I did music, of course, you perform music, but that’s very different from speech engagement.

16:54 Okay. It takes, it comes from a different place. So as a performer, I guess I had some experience with that obviously. I did that for many, many years. So that happened.

17:03 I didn’t much have it. People came. A lot of frightened tourists that somehow stumbled upon the advertisements I put out, and many people just walked out right in the middle of it as you might imagine. And then I put it on the internet at the suggestion of a friend thinking it was over, you know, realigning myself back to my advertising and trading. And it erupted.

17:22 And the performance was called Zeitgeist? It was called Zeitgeist. And it was a similar length? Was it, you know, 90 minutes? It was the full film that you see.

17:29 Okay. That’s out there today with I did I didn’t update in 2010 because when you make a performance piece there’s the kind of thing people don’t understand what that work really was. It was a creative expression that was for a one-time viewing. It was for an audience where they go in, they see it and they’re like, holy Christ, what is all of this? I’ve never heard before.

17:47 And then they step out and they’re forced, hopefully, to have some type of critical thought. They might not believe everything, nor should they. I mean that’s what critical thought’s all about. There’s a lot of gesture in that film. There’s a lot of creative license, and it’s deliberately so, because at the very core of that work it is a creative expression, less a documentary.

18:04 But in 2010 when the whole storm came in and all the debunkers and all this stuff, no one, no one got it. No one got the point of the film. So I went and I made some adjustments to make it more documentary-esque. Okay. Cuz it was a performance piece in the beginning and you would play that video while you’re performing.

18:19 I had a huge percussion. There’s a photograph somewhere online of this big percussion set up with gongs and [expletive]. And I had these two big screens next to me and I’m performing and I played all the lines and there was some musical things didn’t make it into the final score cuz it was all live, but I think the score’s still pretty fun. And yes, that’s what it was. Very…

18:37 It was a… It was kind of a vaudevillian concept. Yeah, if you remember early vaudevillian film, they had live amazing pre-musicians back in the day in the early 20th century that would perform all the music that you would see on the silent screen. It was a beautiful art form. So that’s what it was based on, and then it erupted, and then the next year I made Zeitgeist, and then as a follow up, because everyone said to me, you know, what do we do about all this stuff?

18:58 I’m like, well, all right. We need solutions. And I racked my brain and that piece came out and then roughly, three years less, three years later, Zeitgeist Moving Forward came out and that closed the trilogy. Even though I did mention planning on making a fourth one, but I thought, you know what? This is exhausting.

19:15 The Zeitgeist phenomenon has to close at least in the film for makes sense. And I want to make sure new ideas come forward without all the general association that’s that are currently exists with Zeitgeist, whether good or bad. You know, that’s why the Inner Reflections trilogy that I’m working on now and building out of sound stage in LA is so important to me, right? And this all happened at the same time when financial crisis was happening, kind of ’07, ’08, and YouTube was happening.

19:39 I think you first put it up on Google Video, which is now shut down. I remember YouTube, you couldn’t upload anything more than 10 or 15 minutes anyways in the early days. Exactly. I don’t think YouTube was even there when I first did it. Might not have been, yeah.

19:50 Um, yep, and that revolution had a, you know, there was a couple feature-length films and documentaries up at that point. Um, and I was just shocked when I, you go to the Google thing and you’d see the top, you know, the top 100 and it’s like I stayed up there for number one or actually within the number top three, I remember, for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, tens of millions of views immediately. So, that was amazing. And it was also fearful because that was a performance piece for free.

20:17 I didn’t even charge the audience to come to it and I had no legal clearance for anything. Okay. So, now all the lawyers and all the people that saw themselves in it, I get all the emails and calls and I’m like, “Oh my god.” That’s why my first name was Peter J. If you remember a long time ago, it was Peter J.

20:31 Cuz I was like, “Oh, I’m not going to release my name. I don’t want anyone to know who I am because this is as legal as legal gets when it comes to distribution, the distribution of media.” And of course everyone took it, downloaded it, started to sell it. So, I’m like, “Okay, I got to get my hands on this because if people are selling this without any inclusion of me, that’s even worse legally.” So, I finally paid off everyone, got lights clearances from just every most people were very nice about it and they just said, “We like your film.

20:54 We’re going to give it to you for free.” But there were many thousands that were also paid out to people to get the clearance. And where did the film come from? Was it from videotapes that you would rip, cuz there wasn’t YouTube yet? Carefully, I mean there’s some, there’s some shot stuff, very little, little DV stuff and then there’s animation stuff that was done by myself and some other people that helped me.

21:10 But overall it was extracted from other documentaries. If you look carefully, it’s just especially the 9/11 section. People misunderstand that section too. It’s actually a documentary about the documentaries that were out there because there was so many documentaries on that subject at that point in time. By the thing came out and if you look at the credits, every single clip has a little credit of where the documentary came from.

21:29 That’s another thing that people often miss with that. But no, that piece, I don’t mean the final value with all the payoffs, it maybe was a $20,000, probably $20,000 piece. Okay. That you had to pay out to other people. Okay.

21:41 Exactly. And then that you at one point created the Zeitgeist Movement as a movement. This was after Addendum. After Addendum. Okay.

21:49 And were you reluctant to do that? Of course. Okay. I mean, I didn’t want to be to do a lot of these things. I’m just pushed.

21:57 I kept thinking of that line from Godfather 3, you know, just when I try to get out, they pull me back in. And that seems to be your story to a certain extent because you’ve been kind of a reluctant leader of this movement. You’re not the leader, it’s a leaderless movement. Yeah. But it seems like they keep pulling you back in.

22:11 Well, I guess because it, I had to put forward the most effort at the very beginning. You know, there’s so much communication needed to happen, and since there was a very peak of popularity around Moving Forward of the whole Zeitgeist phenomenon. At least I think globally. I mean, Zeitgeist the first one was enormously successful, I guess, when it comes to public awareness. It was a household name.

22:31 Yeah. I could walk down the street and then a friend of mine used to torture me and go ask every single person on the street in New York, “Hey, have you ever seen Zeitgeist?” And almost 90% of them said yes. It was crazy. Yeah.

22:41 It was a running joke. But when Zeitgeist Moving Forward happened, Well, I’m sorry, once Zeitgeist Addendum happened, I tried my best to get out there and promote the film, of course. And at that point really heavily promoted Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project, which we were in partnership at that point. And which, you know, is the start of it all, obviously. And then in being in that role, obviously people looked to me for more guidance.

23:00 They looked to me ‘cuz I’m, I’ve done the research. I’ve done so much. I mean, I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours. It’s almost my mind just melts when I think about how much time I’ve spent, you know, on things like books and the videos and the lectures. And so there’s a confidence that’s associated to me.

23:15 They say, “Oh, there’s an interview, Peter. You got to do that interview. You know, we need someone that can actually talk about this stuff, like that.” So, and I don’t like it. But if you hadn’t have done it, would it have happened otherwise?

23:25 Or is it did it need you to kind of put this message out there? I don’t know. I mean, that’s to be to be decided. I don’t history you can’t really say what happened if something changed throughout history per se. Things have so many different avenues, it’s too complicated to think of.

23:39 Obviously I was the Zeitgeist guy. And I had to do what I needed to do and what I felt obligated to do because of all the pressure from all the thousands and thousands of people that wanted to see social change. And, you know, if you know, the association to the Venus Project, of course, is worth bringing up because there was a communication problem I noticed immediately with the Venus Project’s work and why they hadn’t had much attention after 30 years.

24:05 Right. So, in ’08 for the Addendum, you featured Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project. He’s been a guest on our show about 2 years ago. He’s 96, 98 now. And you know, you can say a lot of things about Jacque, but Jacque was doing this back in the day.

24:20 Yeah. And you’re right, he wasn’t getting a lot of recognition at all. Sure. And it’s just like Buckminster Fuller. Jacque and Buckminster Fuller are a pair.

24:27 Even though people tend to see Jacque and they forget about the influence of Bucky Fuller on Jacque, which is very substantial. None of these guys, or you can even go back even farther to Thorstein Veblen, a tremendous economic mind, economist at Columbia many years back. Who put forward the very basic principles Jacque talks about, who also was the main influence of what’s called Technocracy Inc., which doesn’t really exist anymore. It might be in some kind of weird pocket in, I think it’s actually here in England somewhere now.

24:53 But generally speaking, it started and it was kind of a movement like the Zeitgeist movement during the Great Depression. And it was all about scientific management, all literally everything that’s generally talked about. But they, again, the actual applications were not there. They didn’t have systems. They had ambiguous notions of energy credits and using replacements for money, missing a lot of the nuances that make a lot of that stuff actually inapplicable, which I we could talk about more at length.

25:19 So, the communication thing has been there forever because what is the market? It’s constantly reinforcing the same values on all of us because of our own need to survive. It’s a real luxury to think about social activism. You most people are trying. I mean, one in three, a recent statistic in the UK, one in three are one paycheck away from eviction in the UK.

25:37 Same in the United States. I mean when you think about what it means to be. I mean, if I ran out of all my money, which I have very little putting forward this new film trilogy, I wouldn’t be able to do this. So, it’s a certain luxury to have the time. I mean, I don’t have kids.

25:51 I have a girlfriend, but you know, these things add in where you just… it gets to a point where you can’t actually pursue it because of the stress inherent to just simply survival and trying to keep things going. And that’s something that needs to be brought up and why it’s taken so long for this awareness to come forward because it’s terrified of people. You mentioned Fresco, so let’s just finish up with that. That came up in a way, and you were saying about the Venus Project awareness.

26:17 And what happened there? As far as what? Did split? Or as far as with the… How did you…

26:23 How did it first come up that you wanted to include him in the movie? Originally, many people know this, but Buckminster Fuller was the original solution for Zeitgeist Addendum. Before I knew about Jacque, the whole end section was going to be about Buck’s work, Bucky’s work. Because it’s, he really is the iconoclastic scholar when it comes to this with all the literature he’s produced and all the community efforts he’s done with the World Game. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it was a project that he put forward, actually, to have educational, and excuse me, educational system, mainly universities, get together and figure out how to actually implement creating enough for all.

26:58 A real technical approach. There was some ambiguity to it, ambiguity to it, which is worth addressing at another point. But he really tried, and he really tried to engineer and make this type of civilization happen based entirely upon technical efficiency, not market efficiency. He never went so far to talk about the grand redesign, but it was always implied in his work. So, in other words, what separates Bucky and Jacque is that Jacque went forward and put it all together brilliantly and said, “Resource-based economy.

27:25 If we put this all together, we can’t use money. It’s going to counteract everything that we’re trying to do with efficiency.” Fuller hadn’t quite gotten there yet. But Fuller’s technical contribution was actually larger because Fuller went into so much detail and went through. He was fortunate to have many grants and honorary degrees.

27:40 He actually had a lot of respect, even though he was mainly ignored by the mainstream, but he persisted in the academic community quite well. And Jacque, you know, of course, is distant from the academic community. So, he was the original focus. But when I learned about Jacque, I’m like, “Well, this guy’s taking the same basic ideas, but he’s actually a living. I can interview him and he has an institution that’s putting these things forward as best as best they can.”

27:59 Right. And for the first Zeitgeist movie, you had never heard of Jacque before. Okay, right. Okay. No, I never thought about these ideas.

28:04 To understand, I’ve always been interested in society, interested in religion, philosophy. But I was never the kind of person. I was more George Carlin-esque. I just like, “Oh, let’s look at the spectacle, the spectacle, this freak show of our society. Look at how crazy and apathetic and the ridiculous beliefs.”

28:21 And I separated myself in an elitist way. That was my mindset back then. I was not trying to save the world, but I did have an outrage for it. And I did wonder, and it did create angst, obviously, or I wouldn’t have made that film. And I think it was deeper in me than I realized.

28:35 And once the Zeitgeist phenomenon hit, it really lifted out of me. I’m like, “Wow, this actually is who I am. This is what I need to do. I can’t live with myself if I don’t talk about this [expletive] because it’s… it’s… it’s not right, so to speak. It’s not…

28:47 I can’t… It’s like having all these solutions for all these struggling people and not caring enough to apply those solutions and help them. And that’s a basic empathic response. So, my empathic response to society was very much energized with all of this. And then you had Jacque, you could interview Jacque.

29:05 Then you guys were kind of the activist arm of the Venus Project. That was for a while, and then that kind of fell apart. That fell apart, and I mean, I don’t like to talk about this stuff because it creates divisive tensions between the two groups. But ultimately there was a very a very childish reaction after Moving Forward occurred, where out of nowhere the Venus Project decided that the movement wasn’t promoting them properly even though the movement had facilitated their world tour.

29:29 Jacque had been given every moment to speak to everybody in the movement. Jacque went publicly and said, Peter Joseph and the movement knows nothing. He did a little bunch of rather aggressive things, childish things in my mind. And I think they stem, unfortunately, from a kind of ego association. He felt like it was getting away from him because other people were promoting, other people were, you know, sourcing all of this stuff that Jacque had.

29:50 And why it bothered him so, I’m not quite sure. That’s for someone else to decide. I don’t really like to harp on that because I don’t like seeing any more divisive stuff. Right. No, and I agree.

30:00 I and I don’t like that people want to bring it up just as something to talk about, like the rubberneckers. But at the same point I had Jacque here and I asked him point blank what happened with the split, and he was like, “No, it wasn’t about this, wasn’t about this.” And then I asked him again, and I think it did come down to a bit of an ego issue. He had done this thing all his whole life, and I guess if you look at a man’s life work and it’s one thing to kind of promote it, and then when he feels like it’s not going exactly how he wanted it, that’s the feeling I got that maybe he just…

30:24 I can only, I can only sympa- sympathetically understand how much frustration he must have after so long and working so hard and trying to get this type of stuff across. So, I can see it. I don’t, I don’t, I frankly, the split was natural. The Venus Project needs to be the Venus Project. It’s the think tank, it’s Jacque’s work.

30:44 It has a kind of a detached element. It doesn’t really merge with anything else. The Zeitgeist Movement really tries to merge. We try to bridge, we try to think, even when it comes to people that are for the market, we’d like to try and bridge, you know, libertarian concepts and create a common ground and really try to see if we can get relatability going and then hopefully change minds. I don’t see much of that happening in the Venus Project, which might explain why that they were kind of dormant for so long, and it took some… some kid to come along and throw them in a movie that was a lot of was very controversial and had a very heavy communicative lure as those films seem to have had to bring them and to into a focus for globally, excuse me.

31:23 And I’m very happy that I was… I was a part of that. But things have changed and things evolve, and sometimes evolution isn’t pretty. The Zeitgeist Movement has evolved greatly. Our detail with what we describe and the type of research our lecture team, everybody in fact have come forward and put together this tremendous new ways of thinking about these ideas and specifics, design criteria, how to actually implement an algorithm to create this society, how to really think about what it means to be technically efficient on multiple levels.

31:53 Systems theory is something that Jacque will talk about, but it’s not given the detail. If there’s any criticism I have of the Venus Project’s communicative work is that they’re too ambiguous sometimes. You know, you go through Jacque’s book, which is wonderful if you know how to think critically and research, but there’s not one source in the whole thing. You know, you have to… If you’re going to be scientific, you have to give evidence-based reasoning for everything, and you have to give causality.

32:14 Chains of causality, I mean, you have to show the evolution. You can’t just say nanotechnology will resolve this in the future. That doesn’t help anything. You’re not going to get anybody on your side by saying that, you know what I mean? Right.

32:24 And… Go on. And I think a lot of people ask, you know, you guys and them, cuz they want a pinpointed solution to how we get to one place in the future. And you look at a lot of Jacque Fresco’s, and it’s like you see these big ideas, but you don’t see the road map. But… that’s probably something you get criticism for as well.

32:41 You get questioned about. Oh, well, that’s why this book… Ah, yes. exists, which I want to plug. What is that book? Tell me.

32:47 This is The Zeitgeist Movement Defined. You can read it free online. We sell it at cost cuz people like to have paperback. We also promote the digital download of course for whatever device, Kindle, iPad, whatever. But this was 3 years of work by a small group of us and it has about 900 sources.

33:05 It walks through just about everything anyone needs to know about how to think about achieving a post-scarcity society, cuz that’s what we’re talking about. That’s at the core of all this natural law, resource-based economy, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with achieving a level of post-scarcity where the stressors that we see inherent to the market, which preserves scarcity, unfortunately no longer exist, and we can elevate humans to a new level, get rid of all the horrible detrimental behaviors, aberrant behaviors, really engineer society to be super efficient to take care of everybody, which we can.

33:36 Market system will never do that. Anyway, this book is very important. Anyone that wants to really understand the movement, and it’s a tremendous accomplishment. Hopefully we’ll make we’re going to make a video series out of it soon for those that don’t really read anymore since video culture. Maybe no one reads anymore.

33:50 So just to finish up with Venus, you guys worked together for maybe a year or 18 months. About it was more. 2011, it was 3 years roughly. Okay. And then split.

33:59 It might have been a natural thing and progression of the Zeitgeist Movement. Anyway, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day that it split or was it a big deal at the time? Well, at the time of course it, it’s a very controversial thing. I mean, all these insults were thrown around. I was…

34:10 My feelings were deeply hurt because I spent thousands of dollars promoting them and helping them and doing things and spending all this energy promoting them only to have it be thrown back in my face in a certain sense. Now, I don’t like to harp on that because I can kind of understand the frustration again. And I was so burnt out when Moving Forward came out. I literally worked 20-hour days at the very end because the deadline had been set. I was burnt out…

34:37 I worked probably 3 months, 20-hour days. I think I slept every 3 days, and I joked to my friends I basically lived off of coffee and beer because of the stress. Those are the two, the two extremes. Much all I had in my diet. Yeah, I know.

34:51 Well, none of it was. And once that thing was released, it was one of the biggest releases in independent releases in almost 400 theaters in 60 countries and 30 languages. We did all that at once. It was a ridiculous amount of labor. And I was so just gone.

35:06 I didn’t want to hear the name of the Venus Project ever again, at least in my… in my gesture of it. I didn’t want to hear about the Zeitgeist Movement ever again. And once that happened, came out, I heard criticism from them that they thought Jacque would be featured more, and I explained to them, you know, we need a film that gives corroboration to these ideas. We need other scientists to come forward. You can’t just make a film about Jacque or any singular individual and think that people are going to latch onto it.

35:27 It’s too guru-esque. You have to get other people, other side, which is why I spent a fortune and I… I took great liberty to talk all these scientists to come into this. There’s about a dozen of them, very high-profile figures, to talk about the nuances that basically define everything that we talked about, but not alluding to the larger structure because that’s how academia works. They’re not focusing on solutions in the larger logic.

35:49 They simply keep it compartmentalized. You see that in… You see that in evolutionary theory, you see that in behavioral theory, anthropological theory, in the study of violence, such as Dr. James Gilligan. I mean, he doesn’t think about the fact that I… This isn’t a…

36:04 This isn’t a criticism of him whatsoever. It’s just the general nature of academia. He talks about structural violence, which is a very important concept. And most specifically, that the more… any… the more inequality or inequity you have in a society, the more violence you have. So what’s the logical solution?

36:17 Get rid of that inequity. What’s the best solution to do that given current means? Get rid of the market economy and create an equalized structure and create a new method for people to engage. But he would never go that far. So I… you know, they don’t… they don’t.

36:29 That’s the problem with what I find. I mean, there’s all the answers are out there. You see it with Kurzweil, you see it with Peter Diamandis, you see it with all these great thinkers and engineers, but they don’t put it all together. Again, I… I can talk at great length about how frustrating that is.

36:43 And it’s a kind of a mental block. I’m sorry to change the subject, but it’s kind of a mental block that people have, cuz they’re so used to their… their general condition of dealing with money, especially if they’re fairly financially successful. You know how hard it is to be financially successful in this world, and once you achieve it, you don’t want to rock the boat. It’s just even that the cognitive dissonance of thinking about a world without… about without this type of market.

37:03 I want to get… and I want to get into the basic tenets of Zeitgeist, because you know, a lot of people are the noobs, the ones that you didn’t stop on the street in Manhattan that haven’t heard of Zeitgeist. I want to break down exactly what you’re talking about. But you know, just quickly… you talked about for example, let’s say not featuring Jacque in that movie, and it… it comes to this whole question of a… a leaderless movement, a movement with a leader.

37:21 Like you said, you didn’t want it to be about one guy. Exactly. Let’s be honest, Venus Project is about one guy, and… Zeitgeist is all about you not being that guy. And so you don’t think a movement can really grow without it being leaderless.

37:34 Is that right? Can you just talk about how a leaderless movement works? Well, let’s… let’s define the term leader. Okay. In fact, my friend Jen Wilding, one of the coordinators in the US, she made a great point.

37:45 A leader is simply about going first. A leader is having the courage to do something and give others the courage to follow. Not follow in the sense to blindly go and do whatever you’re doing, whatever you say, but when you go first in some type of activism, just like Occupy, what happened? Somebody went forward and published an article, a very controversial one, about this little, little, little, little gathering that was going to happen in downtown New York.

38:08 And it went first, and it tricked, and, excuse me, it clicked something in people’s minds like, “Okay, I could identify with that.” And boom, Occupy. Right. All the uprisings. They happen from small little exertions of energy where someone, just like Zeitgeist, they made a little movie.

38:22 It wasn’t even intended to be a movie. Boom, sparks all of this stuff. So someone goes first, whether they were verted or not. And that’s what a leader really is. The idea of a leader, though, in a traditional sense, is a president where you listen to everything the president says, and you… you assume that they know what’s best.

38:36 And that’s dangerous. That’s what dictators do. I mean, you can’t. If people… If you want a society that’s really free, you want a society where people know what’s happening, and you want people to know what’s happening, then generally people need to understand all the facets of their environment and the system that they live in.

38:52 In this society, you don’t… they don’t want… I say, they’re not, in a sense of conspiracy, but those that do reach the higher echelons of political and wealth gain, the last thing they want is an is an educated public by default. It’s not to say again, it’s not a conspiracy. That’s just the last thing that’s needed because there’s so much foul play in this system. There’s so much structural rigging in this system that if people really knew what was happening, there would be uprising overnight.

39:16 So the leader concept means that leaderless concept means that yes, you go first and you try to get people to step up and do what they can and initiate new projects, but don’t sit there and assume that someone’s going to tell you what to do at any point. You have to learn that for yourself. I firmly believe that everyone in their basic intelligence has the capability to understand the fundamentals of what’s happening in their environment. I don’t think it’s an elitist mental thing where you have to be just so smart.

39:39 That’s… that’s not true. Do you think it’s lazy for us humans to try to sit back and… and… and be like, “Oh, what, what is Peter think we should do now? What is Peter think we should do now?” Is that is that ultimately not being self-sufficient or being a self-starter? Well, there’s also one angle to it, that’s what you just brought up, and that’s the idea of expertise, specialization.

39:57 Obviously, I go to a dentist, and the dentist is specialized in what they do. So, I trust their leadership, even though they’re not really forcing me to do particular anything except open my mouth, but I trust their expertise. If I was to engage industrial design, you know, this, I wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t know how the experience or the… the education to do that. If I had the principles for it, I would present those, and I would go to somebody who’s an expert in that field.

40:21 That’s the nature of specialization in human development. So, you know, when you ask people for advice, that’s simply part of the learning process. It shouldn’t be a… a default dismissal of critical thought. It shouldn’t be like, “Oh, what is Peter Joseph or Jock saying? Let’s just do whatever they say.”

40:36 You take that information in and you evaluate it for yourself. Okay, and you have done a lot of research on this. So, let’s get into this. Basic tenants of the Zeitgeist movement for someone on the street in London that doesn’t know what it is, what would you tell them? I would say that it’s based on systems theory.

40:52 I’m jumping to a more advanced stage cuz I think you know the principles. Well, you said the basic individual, but I think systems theory is what underlies it all. And here’s the punchline. If we get away from this detached and anarchistic market system where everyone fights for resources and fights for their ability to create, and they work through this strata of interaction where no one’s really listening to each other. Everyone’s trying to one each other up.

41:16 They’re hiding information. If we get rid of all of that and think about the world as one system, one, one architecture, one synergistic whole, and actually think about industry the same way. Meaning, for example, universal standardization of all components for a given good genre, a car. I think in the future cars will be phased out for the majority with mass transit if we were to go down a sustainable path. But let’s just assume that we had the system we have now.

41:44 We need a bunch of cars. There are thousands of varieties of parts for any given car. You have to go to different companies and different locations to order parts. I’m sure if you drive, you have the same problem if anything goes out in your car. The mechanic, oh, we got to order it from BMW and, and wherever in Switzerland or whatever.

42:00 If you standardize an automobile, which has its basic, in its basic function is very simple, and you can make it extremely efficient and updatable, and it doesn’t need to have the variety that’s been generated through competition, then you’d have one car, you’d have amazing amount of resources to fix that car all over the world very inexpensively because all of those component parts could be mass produced with high efficiency because of what the nature of large scale production means. It means cost and resource energy goes down. That’s what you know, that’s why things get cheaper when an investment, when they finally get them, get it past the prototype stage and they mass produce, you know.

42:32 And once you do that, you have a system that’s actually recognizing that particular item across the entire world. Meaning that there’s no waste anymore because everyone’s using the same basic system. Now, people hear that and they think, oh, well, that means everything’s standardized. I’m going to have the same thing as everybody else. Soviet communism.

42:47 They think things like that. Right. Not necessarily. Cuz the nature of capitalists are quickly to group you with the capitalist. There’s with, with the new advancements in 3D printing and the way you can build facades of cars, everyone could have their own facade.

42:59 You can make your own idealized facade very easily, customizable with big uniform standardized 3D printing machines. Right. I mean, you’re talking about system standardized protocols. It sounds a lot like the web. Sounds a lot like other major systems that we’ve had.

43:12 Okay. I mean, computers are the worst. Computers have all sorts of components across the all the manufacturers that are non-standardized. Film, I do film stuff. It drives me crazy when I go into a film shop.

43:22 There are so many little parts and gadgets and adapters that are made by in proprietary manners that are a complete waste of resources and time and energy. If you did that systems thinking, you create a larger architecture, excuse me, you create a holistic view of the entire architecture of society and you work on that level. And once you do that, the ex- the I’d say exponential increase of efficiency. I would say more thousands and thousands and thousands of times of efficiency increase would exist to meet the needs of the human population beyond if we did that.

43:51 Okay. And what does that mean for the human population? We become happier? We become healthier? Well, let’s…

43:56 Well, if you remove… Well, that’s another level. If you were to get rid of the labor for income system which is on its way out anyway due to technological unemployment, we have a… It’s being replaced by machines. Yes, exactly.

44:07 Now, it’s also a social imperative to replace um, excuse me, to replace people with machines now because of the ability to create an abundance. That’s how it’s actually happening. So, the fact that we preserve human labor in the wake of these advents of replacing humans with machines which do not need vacations, do not need all the things that make us human that require us to continue our health. Also removing all the dangers and everything else. Machines can run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, especially if you really optimize the production and you use these standardized protocols I just mentioned.

44:38 You really thought about it holistically. So, you don’t have to worry about all these different parts. I mean, the reason manufacturing fails today, even in the automated automation sector, is again cuz nothing’s standardized. And that’s, if that’s a big part of it. You elevate human society to a new level.

44:53 So, you create this industrial level where we can actually, we can do it. Statistically proven. It’s in that book where we can automate the majority of everything that we need to elevate society out of this, this epic period of our history where we have, where we have done nothing but try and survive through labor and income. Okay, so no more worker bees and we all become, we become creative. Creative.

45:13 Okay. You know, there’s a great book. People talk about incentive a lot and they think that if you don’t have the drive of money or competition that you won’t have incentive. And you’ve quoted Daniel Pink before. We’ve had him on the show.

45:24 Fascinating what he says is one of his tenants or one of his observations is once people make enough money to be comfortable, that added extra compensation does not make them better. Matter of fact, I think he argues makes them less. And the more you get, more property you get, the more you’re basically kind of owned. The more requirements you have, the more you need to sustain that level. And that’s a cultural neurosis, too.

45:45 It’s built in status and advertising. It’s unfortunate. People think that they need to get more and more and more stuff. I envision a world where people have everything access- accessible within their community and they rent it, so to speak, even though it’s not rental in the sense of currency. And you have, you live in a clean mobile world.

46:00 Just imagine not having. I’m moving right now into a space where I’m building out of a sound stage. I’m looking at all my stuff. Like, god, I can’t believe I have all this stuff. But it’s the stuff I need.

46:08 It’s, I’ve done very… but I have film equipment. I’m a production guy. I can’t rent this stuff cuz over the long haul it’s too expensive. You need to buy it and invest in it and then resell it, and that’s how you sustain yourself when you buy anything, any expensive equipment. So, I envision a world eventually where people actually marvel and they want no stuff.

46:28 They have access to it all. Imagine, most people these days would admit that we do have this neurosis when it comes to the western world with acquiring things and acquiring jets, and I mean, you know, don’t get me started if you watch a music video of what’s important in this world. But I think even most people, you could sit them down and say, yeah, this has gone way too far. And why not pool some of these resources and own less? There’s these clubs in New York City where people try to own 100 things, and you know, Fight Club, the things you own end up owning you.

46:54 I mean, Yeah. I think as humans we’re starting to agree that there is a problem. It’s completely an unsustainable value system. I mean, do you have a hard time even getting people to admit? Do most people admit, yeah, Peter, yes, we do have an issue here when it comes to our purest form of capitalism in the…

47:09 I think, well, [expletive] to begin. It’s hard to say. Not most people, I don’t think. Again, it’s a status association driven by a consumer culture. Remember in the early 20th… first early 20th century, excuse me, a mechanization… the industrial revolution, industrial revolution happened the late industrial revolution and mechanization came in, Great Depression hit, and everyone blamed mechanization.

47:29 And it was partly true, but it was also the massive economic decline that happened because of the banks and fraudulent banking behavior. But it was all inherent to capitalism, and people, excuse me, the theorists out there in advertising and people like Bernays, Edward Bernays, they said we need a consumption society. We need… we don’t need people to think in this early American puritanical is the wrong word, but it was conservative. Early America did not have a status driven need for property.

47:55 It wasn’t it was… it was more of a Christian simplistic puritanical is the wrong word. There’s another word I could use. I can’t remember what it is, but you get the point. That value had to be created. And cuz it, what’s… what is it, what is our society?

48:07 What is our economy? We have laborers, we have consumers, and we have employers. And money has to constantly move. It’s like a gas pedal on a car. It has to…

48:17 This is economic growth. This is, you know, this is 5% unemployment. This is 10% unemployment. So, what is… what is causing this? Buying and selling and creating and using resources and wasting energy and materials nonsensically just to keep the machine going.

48:37 So, with that, advertising came forward, and it’s huge. As I said earlier, advertising is the biggest expense for most corporations now because it’s really about social manipulation at this point. People have, in a lot of ways, especially in western society, what they need. I would say there’s a little bit of an argument to that, but they have the ability to get what they need, but they want more and more and more because that is what the culture has taught them.

48:58 And it’s required. It’s required. If we didn’t have that value, the entire economy would collapse. I think the perfect example of that is De Beers and the diamond will last forever. And I’m sure you know that story.

49:08 And I think most people don’t even know that 100 and 120 years ago, diamonds weren’t even used for wedding rings and it was this entire demand that was created by the De Beers mining company. What they taught everyone is that you need to spend two weeks of your salary to put a rock on someone’s finger. There’s no secondary market. You can’t, you never sell your ring. Perfect.

49:26 I mean, and in the meantime, De Beers has been found historically to actually burn their diamonds in the background years ago because they wanted to maintain artificial scarcity. Right. So, if you have too many diamonds, price value drops. Now, that isn’t the way you achieve an abundance or post-scarcity. It’s the exact opposite.

49:43 So, the market, back to the book, and what the movement is about is that it recognized that the market economy has reached a point in its evolution where it’s working against everything that supports good public health and ecological sustainability. It’s really destabilizing society. All of the uprisings you see, even though there might be religious fervor and ideological fervor, but really underneath the surface it’s about scarcity and resources and deprivation.

50:08 Mhm. There’s very few affluent cultures out there that are willing to go to war with each other, even though they might disagree on their belief system. And that’s been the case even since the Middle Ages. If you really examine closely, even the Crusades, underneath the surface of that was always land acquisition, was always resource theft. Right, a power grab, or a.

50:25 Which is the nature of war. We went to Iraq to steal oil. We went to Afghanistan to run a pipeline and also secure a lot of mineral resources that were there. All of the US, you know, all of the imperial interests of the West have been the same, more or less, just like the US, just like London and the British Empire. The British East India Company.

50:45 They were the corporate head of all the thievery and enslavement that we saw in that prior multiple generations ago. Yeah, I mean you can track a lot of all warfare really to power plays and that are based on economics. I’m not convinced that we’re in Afghanistan to get minerals. I don’t know how the hell we’d ever get them out of there, too. But yeah, well, and I think it’s also a power play that, you know, just keeps America going.

51:07 Also geopolitical strategy to maintain a body of people in there to preserve to preserve whatever we need to maintain stability for ourselves and our industries. Absolutely. You know, all you have to do is read a Zbigniew Brzezinski. I can’t say his name. You know, Brze- Brzezinski.

51:23 Yeah. I can’t say it. He wrote The Grand Chessboard and he details everything that the US is doing right now. He wrote it in the 1990s. Right.

51:33 It just… Anyway. I think there’s countless examples. I mean, you look at genocides in Africa and the US didn’t get involved while there wasn’t necessarily an economic reason to get involved. And you can kind of go on and on.

51:41 Resource-based economy, resources in the world, how does that come into Zeitgeist? And then money. Please talk about money. Of thought. Okay, well, if you follow what it means to be sustainable, what it means to create positive public health, what it means again to create ecological stability where you’re not violating what’s called dynamic equilibrium, you’re not over-foresting, you’re not over-fishing, which we’re doing all of these things right now.

52:03 You’re not running all these coal plants because you have no other way to generate electricity, and all the coal is creating mercury in the atmosphere, dropping into the ocean, creating all the mercury poisoning that’s occurring as well with the produce that we get out of the ocean. When you look at all of these behaviors and you look at how they’re linked, you establish two trains of thought. First, you see the market train of thought. And the market’s not going to change.

52:26 It is the leading cause of death on the planet Earth at this point. The very basic nature of it says we are going to preserve scarcity. We need it. We need all this consumption to keep things going. We’re going to use up the Earth’s resources as fast as possible.

52:36 We’re also going to have massive wealth divide because the game of capitalism is explicitly based on advantage. And any game of advantage is going to create imbalance, no matter what you do. I mean, the huge wealth gap we see today is reminiscent of all the wealth gaps in history because of different levels of advantage that are achieved by a corporation or political institution. Of course, we all know corporations and political institutions are one today.

52:58 And they always really have been. If you go back to kings, the kings usually ran the ships, they got everything back, and then they would distribute it to their traders and everything else. The kings had everything in feudalism. Mercantilism was very similar, and then we ended up with capitalism, and when you have that train of thought, you see that there’s no solution within the market economy. There’s no way to twist it.

53:16 You can’t twist the arm of the market system unless you over-legislate the s*** out of it. Right. I mean, you just have to go in there and, you know, for example, what I… people talk about transitional ideas, and I want to get to the other train of thought here in a second. They talk about, well, you know, how we don’t know how to make this transition. What can we do in the meantime?

53:31 And there’s one suggestion I have, which of course requires the state, unfortunately, and that’s, you create universal guaranteed income in every country. And how do you get that universal guaranteed income? I mean, a livable wage for people, you know, so someone makes here, I don’t know what the living standard is here. It’s very high, obviously, but I assume if someone made 3,000 lb a month, they might be able to survive fairly well. Yeah.

53:51 If you had that, where does it come from? You take it off the top of the exuberant 1% and 0.1% that are making thousands of times more than the vast majority of population anyway. So, it’s pure socialism, straight wealth distribution. Right. It’s going to have to happen, and it will happen if the type of destabilization, both ecologically and socially, means all the uprisings.

54:12 I mean, there’s uprisings every week. I mean, it’s all over the world right now. Someone tried one in the United States, it failed, of course. The US will be the last in all of this cuz the US is still the most brainwashed and the most resource-intensive and they don’t really know what it means to what it means to live like the rest of the world. You know, Western society is just a tiny little pocket, at least the majority of Western society, of what the actual world looks like with all the deprivation and disease and scarcity.

54:39 So, that’s going to have to happen on some level if we intend to maintain stability. And I’ll make one final point about this kind of collapse reality. We… By 2050, we’re going to have water shortages, food shortages, energy shortages, and we have rampant escalating pollution, both land, atmospheric, and ocean. And we have an unemployment crisis and a debt crisis.

54:58 All of these things by 2050 are going to make a perfect storm of anger, resentment, problems. Think about just all it takes, like in the West Coast of Los Angeles, I figured this out. All it takes is two trucking companies, two unions, to go on strike to limit food being traveled across the coast. All it takes is really high gas prices to make that happen. Because that’s almost happened.

55:20 So, it’s very fragile is what you’re saying. Very fragile society right now, and it’s going to… it’s really unfortunate that the news doesn’t give enough credence to the dire straight of the ecological circumstance, mainly because it’s really the water and food and energy issue that will disassemble everything we know as a stable civilization. going to make it break. Yeah. Okay. You know, you were, you came to popularity in ’08, ’09, ’10 when the economy was collapsing, right?

55:49 We had banking crises, real estate crises, et cetera, et cetera. And that couldn’t have been coincidence that so many people were watching that Zeitgeist movie. I mean, that was that definitely helped. I think if that would have happened in the greatest bull market of our generation, it might have been less popular, right? Well, again, it depends on where you are in the world.

56:08 Okay. The vast majority of the world, once again, doesn’t live like the West does. Right. But it was the Western people that were watching. It was…

56:14 New York City was… it was globally, though. I mean, I was amazed to see how diverse… I mean, it was instantly translated into 30, 40 languages within the first couple of months on people’s own time. Right. They just did it and re-uploaded it.

56:26 But also everyone was predicting the pending banking collapse, the pending real estate collapse. And now fast forward to 6 years later, and okay, this is the market economy, which you’re not even agreeing we should have, but now the US is posting growth and low unemployment, et cetera, et cetera. Low unemployment. No one’s… They’re all What’s happening is that…

56:44 Here’s what happens. You reach a point where you drop down, and then it goes for so long, people get acclimated. It goes up a little bit, and everyone cheers. Suddenly, we’re fine again. There are still rampant massive unemployment throughout the majority of the United States, upwards of probably 16, 17% because of all the people that are not on the radar anymore.

57:03 Right. There’s people that aren’t looking for jobs anymore. But the banking system didn’t fail. The banking system… And I’m not convinced it’s going to.

57:09 Well, the banking system, you have to understand, the banking system is one massive rigged institution that had… They hold all the cards. There’s very little… If the banking system wants to fail, it will. The housing collapse and all the things that happened was a natural tipping point of all the shenanigans of the banking system, and a natural outgrowth of all the intentions of the market, by the way.

57:29 Yeah. And all the things that happened in ’07, ’08, that was all the incentive structure of the market, all about greed, all about these loans. Didn’t matter. It looked like real estate wasn’t going to… That’s the thing about the market, it creates bubbles.

57:40 Yeah. And the bubbles are always destructive in the end. We get greedy, we get, yeah, exuberant, we try to make those extra fees, we try to buy houses we shouldn’t, we try to sell houses to people that… which is the incentive structure. So, we… I use that word greed.

57:51 People sometimes think greed is somehow excessive. It’s all just the basic psychology of self-maximization. We all have to self-maximize because self-maximizing means we preserve for the future. It’s the way we survive in this. Exactly.

58:03 So, there’s no… I don’t use the word greed. Usually I don’t. That’s not the best word, cuz it has all these connotations with it. Yeah, we think that greed is somehow on the outskirts, that it’s a negative quality, that someone’s, oh, you’re just being greedy.

58:13 No, everyone is greedy. If you want to live and be, and be have a decent quality of life in this system, there’s a level of greed that you have to maintain. That doesn’t mean people can get super neurotic with it. You know, obviously, people can get obsessed, and neuroses can be developed where they need more and more and more, and their whole value and self-worth is associated… associated to money and gain. That exists.

58:33 And that, of course, again, only exists because of the market. And it’s just the nuance of the personality. And that’s in the minority, but everyone self-maximizes is my point. And that’s just what everyone does. So, you… that.

58:45 Anyway, that I think we drilled that into the ground. And… and what do you say to people that is say, okay, that the market hasn’t collapsed, there hasn’t been anarchy in the streets, the banking system’s still around. de- centuries ago. There’s a billion people start… Look, I look at the system.

58:58 Okay. Only the Earth. Right. Forget Western society. Look at the actual statistics of what the dominant market ethic has done to the entire planet.

59:06 That’s the real statistical evaluation. You can take the anecdotal stuff. You know, I talk to market people all the time, and they use all these horrible anecdotal examples of some small country that brings in the market, and they get some new loans from the IMF, and boom, they have a great market economy. Oh, remember Iceland? I was on a… after, as I guess the addendum, Iceland had this big boom cuz they brought in the… the international transnational banks, right?

59:27 A little crazy when Iceland, yeah. And, well, well, I mean, that’s what everyone was doing. That’s… I get it. It’s… it’s what the psychology is.

59:32 And I was watching this… Remember when the collapse happened, obviously, and I was watching on the plane this video documentary on Iceland, and it was right when the collapse happened when Iceland just bottomed, bubble destroyed. And it was a… it was a documentary on how successful Iceland has become with their new market incentive structure. It was… And that’s what I’m talking about.

59:53 So, you have to look at the long-term statistical analysis of what’s actually happening, happening with these ebbs and flows. Look at the true measures of a healthy society, of course, are poverty, rates of disease, how much water there is, how the ease of food, all the basic staples have to be taken into account first. And then, of course, you have to look at what the market system requires, and that’s what levels of growth, employment, all of that stuff is in dire straits holistically across the world on the whole with a billion people starving, 3 billion in general poverty.

1:00:22 We have the Third World right now is doing what China’s done. China has 16 of the most polluted cities on the planet. Why? Because they’ve been using older industrial methods mainly based on coal and all the stuff that we used to do that we eventually kind of evolved out of, and they are destroying everything for their economic growth. And that’s what all the Third World is going to do.

1:00:40 All the Third World is going to do exactly what China’s doing. They want to get up there. We want stuff. We want to get off, get off our bicycles and drive cars. Do you imagine how destroyed our ecology will be the moment everyone tries to live like the West, in the way the West lives, as far as the manner of creation that they get our stuff?

1:00:54 China embodies almost everything bad about the emerging capitalism. It’s just, let’s sacrifice, let’s pollute. Let’s sacrifice our resource. Let’s do everything to create more capital. And…

1:01:05 And it looks like a… a bunch of ants. Like they don’t even know why they’re doing it. They’re just trying to build a bigger anthill. And everything gets sacrificed along the way, including the health of your baby because of the river water. I mean, it seems almost preposterous to hear the stories.

1:01:19 But it, it’s not, it’s… it’s totally expected. I mean, this is just what the system is. And it’s only in, you know, America and… and UK and in the West, we’ve learned our lesson. We have high regulation, and we’re trying our best to collar all of the natural inclinations of the market. And we’re doing that, and there’s some, you know, the EPA.

1:01:37 That was really comedic, though, where the congresswoman against the EPA a little while back because the EPA, because of their new standards, were restricting economic growth. I’d laugh my ass off when I heard that. It’s cuz they don’t give any ecological concern. It… They…

1:01:50 The total world hasn’t realized we live on a finite planet, a habitat that has to be respected and maintained, balance with. And we can’t… And back to my point about this market train of thought, you cannot have a consumption economy and ever expect to be sustainable ever. You can’t focus on that. You can’t focus on growth.

1:02:06 You can’t even focus on… on the very mechanics of the market. Some people I know, even Max Keiser, said that we live in a growth system that used to not be a growth system. That’s not true. It was always a growth system. It just had different tiers.

1:02:17 There used to be more stability. But now with everything that’s happening with technological unemployment, namely, and all the efficiency and all the stuff we can make rapidly, we need to get people to buy this stuff. And that’s where this growth concept has come in, because if you don’t have growth, you don’t have employment. You don’t have purchasing power, and that whole cyclical thing just slows, slows down, which is going to anyway. Right.

1:02:36 And it sounds like a mess as you describe it that way. What does the… the future world look like if and when we make this transition? Well, let’s go to my other train of thought. So, I’m sorry to be so long-winded. So, the other train of thought is what defines ecological and social sustainability.

1:02:53 And these are concepts that were never talked about 100 years ago. We have always approached the Earth again as an inventory. We never thought… The Native American culture was the closest to any sustainable culture as far as their philosophy. Native American, namely on the western side, they always respected nature.

1:03:10 You don’t pee in the stream that feeds you, you know, that you drink from. You had a very deep respect for the environment. That was quickly lost in the world we have today. But they’re the closest of all the earlier societies that I think that our work relates to, even though we’re high-tech, so to speak. So, what creates social and ecological stability?

1:03:28 Ecological stability demands equilibrium. It demands efficiency. The definition of economy is efficiency. It means doing more with less. Buckminster Fuller came along and said we can do more with less at an ever exponential increase.

1:03:41 What that means is that we are able to… A satellite is a tiny… not tiny, but it’s a pretty big object that can connect people, connect communication on multiple levels, internet and cell phones, right? Think about how hard it would have been to run arduous copper wire all around the world as we did. But I think all of it, compared to this little satellite. So, there’s less resources, less energy put into it.

1:04:01 You can manufacture these things through automated means, less human labor, and yet it’s so much more powerful than all of the arduous copper wire in the… in the… in the deaths and everything that would go along with trying to install that stuff. That is ephemeralization. That’s the big trend that needs to be… That’s the big reality that we have to be able to come to terms with as far as achieving post-scarcity. We have to hone in and we have to make that… that phenomenon as aggressive as possible right now.

1:04:25 We’ll have 9 billion people by 2050. It’s a race against time given all the problems I just… I just talked about. So, this planet can sustain 9 billion people if we do it right. Absolutely.

1:04:35 It can sustain more than that. When you look at the efficiency ratio comparison of what we’re doing based on what we could do, like that car example I gave, but you… you know, think about a city system and you think about getting rid of the market, getting rid of all the corporations that are competing and wasting resources as they… as they try to one-up each other step by step, you create certain mandates. This is just basic logic of efficiency. Certain mandates have to exist scientifically where you optimize every attribute of industry from how design occurs to how production is made to how distribution is done to how recycling occurs.

1:05:07 That’s the big one, man. Recycling is so not even remotely… I mean, all of this stuff is not made to be recycled. Odds are this camera will break, and you’re going to have to throw it away. Probably.

1:05:16 And it’s going to… And you… But in truth, what should happen is you should have industry centers should manufacture the same types of genre goods, and they should take all of that stuff back and reuse them. E- At least have the recycling components built into their existing factories. I often talk again, back to transition.

1:05:34 This relates to the point that maybe other people can relate to more so. Imagine if Apple said we will guarantee everything we make for 10 years. If it breaks or anything happens or you need to upgrade, return it to us within that time span, we’ll give it back to you. I mean, they could do it, but they would, their entire market share would collapse because of their planned obsolescence. They have some of the most robust planned obsolescence under the surface.

1:05:55 That’s why we want their new stuff. We want the new design. But the new stuff can come in. The new stuff can get the new iPhone. That’s the thing.

1:06:02 There’s also a loss, and again, it comes back to this compatibility issue, the standardization and this forethought. A lot of this stuff is made for specific purposes. You could take a lot of the camera designs. I’ve looked at this cinematography, and there’s only the set number of components that are used in just about every single type of camera, even professional cameras. So, you make maybe five or six really great cameras of different sizes for different purposes, and that’s all you need.

1:06:27 You standardize everything, and then you have upgradeable components within those that are in slot systems. It can be done. There was a guy that did the phone blocks concept. It was a very primitive idea. Did you see that, phone blocks?

1:06:36 It’s a cell phone that has these little inserts where you can do upgrades without having to throw away the phone. It’s a sustainability concept, very primitive though. It’s not. They’re doing it with a very primitive means… Yeah, just a very primitive means to get these new components in there and to create new forms.

1:06:51 It can be much more advanced when you use real technology, meaning you actually have systems and machines that are designed to make these adjustments as opposed to today where we don’t do that at all because they need the turnover of market share. So, standardization of everything is where the new stage of efficiency will be. It was what will create an abundance where we have so much of everything that no one needs to scramble to find resources in the way that we do now.

1:07:17 So, that’s… That I touched upon a few different things there. Let’s go to the very beginning of this logical reasoning. The market creates things by competition, right? You have people sitting in little rooms, and they come up with a cell phone design, and they know what other people are doing.

1:07:30 They say, “Oh, well, this camera phone just had, you know, 7 megapixels. We need to get our camera updated to 7 megapixels to compete with them.” And they do this game throughout the whole competition. Highly efficient, the market system, you must say. For what it’s trying to accomplish, it does it efficiently, now.

1:07:44 Not as efficient as it could be. I’m saying, cuz if you have these protocols where you’re suggesting in the future where everything, you know, is designed to be interchangeable, whoever tries to mandate that or make that call, that system might be inefficient. I’ll… I’ll explain. I’m not making it out to communism or anything.

1:07:58 Imagine if you took all the cell phone companies and you took all the engineers. There’s probably a couple dozen now cell phone companies. Put them in a room and put all their heads together at once. Now, would that mean that somehow they’re going to be less efficient because there’s not some other third party trying to compete with them? Not necessarily.

1:08:15 It’s hard to answer, answer question, answer that. But if you had all those minds in one place to think about to make the best, most efficient, sustainable cell phone that can last the longest, be most upgradeable, and have the highest level of recycling integrity so it can be pushed back in the system and re-output with the newest designs or what have you, then there… you can’t think of anything more optimized than the systems theory concept. You know, more heads together are always going to be better.

1:08:37 So, what do you do on a global scale? You create a design infrastructure as detailed in this book. You create a… You’ve seen programs like CAD and all these engineering programs that are… that you take a while to learn, but they can be minimized. And you create online databases where people go in and they help and they do collaborative design, kind of like a Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is a terrible example because of how overrun it is with bias.

1:09:01 I hate using that example. Wikipedia is a horrible system in many ways. But when it comes to collaborative design, I can’t think of any Linux was a great example. I’ll take use that one. Linux was a free system mainly.

1:09:09 They had some funding in the very end. But they came in. All these engineers came in, boom, and they made one of the best operating systems on the planet. Too bad it’s not more in more use. They did it mainly through group mind interaction.

1:09:21 So, if you create this type of interface, you could do it online where people can… Someone makes a complete design in CAD of a cell phone or a camera. Someone comes in and says, “You know what? I have a better idea for this.” and they input that idea. And thousands of people slowly build out this.

1:09:33 That is true market of ideas. That’s what I call it. Cuz the real base of the market and its defense is the incentive structure. It says, “Well, we have all these people thinking and competing, we get the best, so to speak.” No, we don’t.

1:09:44 We get this limited output of things that are very slowly evolving because they have to maintain their lives so the market share can be held up. And we don’t want things to be replaced and come out too fast because then we’re… we’re good, you know, you know the story. Okay, I do see this ideal world that you’re talking about in the future that could get there. I got to ask you about transition. You said in the short term we could redistribute the wealth to get that minimum wage that you’re saying.

1:10:10 One, my point on the… I’ll do this real fast. Yeah, yeah. So you have the design mechanism, and this is a massive interface, and people, that everyone agrees on that makes everything sync. And it had… it had, well, everyone designs, and they do it up in the most optimized way, and the main judgment is efficiency and optimization.

1:10:24 Is it accomplishing the goal as best as we know how on this planet based on the advent of technology with all these minds working together? And is it the most sustainable, meaning it’s most ecologically friendly across the world? Those cannot be separated. So, these protocols are built into it, and eventually, and this is where it gets harder for people to understand it. An artificial intelligence will be the intermediary.

1:10:44 Artificial intelligence will come and say, “Listen, your design is good, but you can’t do this, this, and this because it’s going to have this type of negative retroaction. This polymer creates this chemical byproduct that will go into the atmosphere. You have a substitute right here. Boom.” You’re going to end up with an AI system that can put these things together and make the final decisions for you as the ultimate filter system.

1:11:02 It gets humans out of the loop. It gets our biases out of the loop. It gets our failures out of the loop. First of all, in a non-market system there’s no more intention to want to one-up or to… well, you could, you could, you could establish ego if on an industrial level and say, “Oh man, this guy designed this whole thing. He’s amazing.

1:11:18 Good job, buddy.” That’s great. That could be competitive in the sense that people want to beat each other in design. I think that’s beautiful. That’s fine.

1:11:24 That’s healthy competition. It’s different in the market system where people are beating each other to maintain market share. They literally are just hurting each other because they’re taking money away from each other’s families. So, in this you have all of these people working together to do that, and it’s the market of ideas. It’d be absolutely amazing to get the infrastructure together, and people would enjoy it, and there’s no reason for you to want to do something negative or half-assed.

1:11:45 First of all, someone’s going to catch them most likely. Someone’s going to see that they’re doing something poor, and I guarantee you the intention would never be to make again the planned obsolescence and all the waste we have here, which is a complete explicit element of the market system. There’s planned obsolescence, which is deliberate, and then there’s intrinsic obsolescence. Even if people wanted to make the best, the very nature of what’s called competitive self-regulation, all that simply means is that in the battle of competition, everyone’s looking for cost efficiency, and no one can make the best because everyone has to save money.

1:12:16 And the moment you try to do something a little bit better, someone else is a little bit cheaper, and the public doesn’t know any better usually, so they’re going to have to undercut. They undercut, so you… you can’t really… you can’t do it. It’s impossible. Everything is obsolete in a certain sense the moment it’s produced in the society. On to production.

1:12:31 You centralize all production. What’s happened in the world is we used to talk about means of production, socialism and capitalism. The difference between the two was who owns the means of production, right? Communism was owned by a private clique of people, right? It was supposed to be owned by everybody, but in historical practice it never was.

1:12:44 It was an elitist group of people that basically got a round table. Right, Russia for example. Exactly. In capitalist production, of course, the free market as it’s called, you have the… you have the interaction, the constant gaming strategy that’s occurring between corporations. What you need to do is you create an integrated system of production.

1:13:02 Excuse me, I want to reiterate this point. The means of production has changed now because of 3D printing and because of automation. Basically what’s called capital goods, which are the machines that produce our stuff. Capital goods, you know, they are it’s been merged into consumer goods and into automation of labor. So labor automation of labor and consumer goods like 3D printing, where you can actually have a production facility at home, have merged together and there’s one other thing.

1:13:30 Sorry, my jet lag. I’m, my point being is that the entire concept of the means of production has been deflated because people can have the means of production themselves in the form of consumer goods in their own home. It’s becoming increasingly more prevalent. People talk about 3D printing all the time as the way of the future, where people no longer buy cameras, they buy machines that make cameras and all sorts of other electronics of such. You see this in some towns, they have 3D printing hubs where you can go and you can actually send your 3D printing objects.

1:13:56 It’s very primitive at this stage. But they’ll print it for you. And so that’s really a small means of production that is existing independently. And the possibility of this is so vast that eventually, just like you have a printer and you send something to print, you’re in charge of that means of production of that paper coming out with that idea on it. You’re going to have centers, and this is the idea of in the Zeitgeist Movement, where you send all of your designs, where all of industry and architecture and engineers, they go forward and they send everything to the central hub of automated production.

1:14:24 There are people overseeing it, and I want to eliminate that fallacy right now. This isn’t a society where no one works. People are going to want to contribute creatively, obviously, and people are going to want to make sure everything is functioning, just like they make sure things function in their homes. But we won’t have to work. That’s what we’re getting to.

1:14:38 No, there will be requirements in what you call the domestic economy. The domestic economy are things that mothers do. The domestic economy are things that you do around your home to make sure that your living space is clean. The basic survival that all of us have in keeping things well equipped. That will be extended into the system of production and commerce because that’s what you need.

1:14:56 Why would people not care about the systems that I’ve just described to take care of them, because that’s where they’re going to get all of their stuff, too. So self-interest in this model becomes social interest. It’s one unifying mechanism. Okay. Now I’m going to move quickly to distribution.

1:15:12 I’m sorry, I’m jumping quickly to distribution cuz I got to hear about the transition here. Mine was that’s a conversation that I’m not going probably not going to have the answers you want. But distribution is the same mechanism. It’s easier for distribution because once you have these production centers that can produce mainly anything, and it’s localized by the way. No more globalization.

1:15:27 Everything is done locally as much as humanly possible, and with the nanotech revolution, which will eventually happen, it will make it a lot easier to do this, and you won’t have to extract minerals and resources. But even without nanotech technology, you can still bring these things in locally and deal with distribution, which simply has to do with bringing things to people and create infrastructure where you don’t have mailmen and delivery men, where people can go to their local hub and just get it themselves. You can create pneumatic tubes in people’s homes where these prepackaged systems come in.

1:15:57 You order something, it comes your way, and it’s in biodegradable container. You send it all back. No waste in packaging. All of those things come into play. Distribution is very, very easy.

1:16:06 You call it a proximity strategy if you’re to think about it logically. Okay, I’m sold on that. Are you going to tell me about transition or not? Okay. You don’t have to give me all the right answers.

1:16:14 I just want to know an idea of, cuz we talked about redistribution of wealth as a temporary way of doing it, but the big transition, is it going to take some anarchy to get there? Cuz, here’s what I think. Here’s what I think will happen. Well, that’s okay. All transitions are kind of ugly, unfortunately.

1:16:28 Right. But here’s what I think will happen. Once, maybe, if things go, with the exponential increase of information technology, which, which applies… excuse me, which turns into applied technology, we are going to see this revolution of 3D printing and the like fairly soon and maybe in two decades if it’s not too inhibited. And same with other automated facilities, automated machines for different purposes.

1:16:50 Everything will get smaller, and eventually you’re going to see a high-tech set of communes emerge on the world. If the market system stays in play, you’re going to continue to see the economic decline, and people are going to get more and more desperate. Either they’re going to rise up or they’re going to get out. Just as we’ve tried to do, different pockets and communities have tried to get out for God knows how. I mean, there’s still communes all over the world.

1:17:11 Off the grid, is that get out? I, it would. Off the grid is a good way to define it, but not off the grid just in the sense of water and electricity. Meaning they’re going to go and they’re going to start their own society with this high-tech technology. And they, and because the technology is so efficient because the ability to use resources in such an efficient way will exist in this technology, the need to get lots of resources from the external won’t be even remotely as, as, as much of an imperative, excuse me.

1:17:37 So they can isolate. They can actually isolate, but they don’t live in tents like you see commies. They’ll be high-tech. They’ll use different forms of… there’s lots of technology out there I could talk about, um, that people have been talking about for years that will eventually come to fruition outside of 3D printing. There’s modular home construction that you basically create a machine that can do modular home construction, and then you create varieties of it through CAD engineering, and you can have printing machines build all your homes.

1:18:00 You can have geothermal energy in most regions in the world once that, once the technology happens, we can go down far enough into the earth and it’s no longer inhibiting with some of the destabilization that happens. It, which is EGS, is a big new technology out there that can do that. So long story short, yeah. People will go out and they will start to develop their own off-the-grid communities but in a high-tech way. And once that happens, and by the way, this is kind of goes into my film, cuz I’m going to depict this transition.

1:18:26 Okay. I’m hesitant to give too much away. Is this the new series? Is this the Inner Reflections trilogy? Yeah, this, and I’m not going to give too much away on that, but I’m, I’m never give too much away.

1:18:34 The reason I don’t want to say much is because it’s so related to this film trilogy that my transition is the biggest interest for me, and, and, but I do believe that this is what’s going to happen, and once a nation, cuz we’ll still have these nations in there, once all the deprivation occurs, a nation will step up and say, step up and say, “This makes perfect sense. We don’t need to listen. We don’t need to abide by the globalization rules and the market ethic and the banking system anymore.

1:18:59 We are going to do this on our own.” Do what they’re doing over there, cuz they got it right. Exactly. They’re going to start it. Someone will start it independently and it will carry forward in principle, and I think a nation, probably a Latin American nation which has a lot of abundant resources still.

1:19:13 Rica or something. Sure. They’ll go there first. And they will, they will block themselves off and they will do it and they will set the new precedent. And here’s the thing about human psychology.

1:19:22 There’s old Louis C.K. joke that I saw recently, and he goes, Becoming so famous. He is. He’s smart. He’s a smart guy. And he has a…

1:19:29 He has a underlying of social awareness that he never quite gives away, but I really appreciate it when it leaks through. When it’s as far as… It’s very subtle, isn’t he? He is. And he talks about being on a plane, and the guy next to…

1:19:40 There’s internet on planes on most domestic flights now, and it was out on his plane, and the guy next to him got all huffy and upset. And Louis responds like, “You know, we we’re… we’re sending satellites to space and back. We’re flying on a plane moving hundreds of miles through the air, and we just got internet on the plane, and this guy is already complaining about not having it as though it was always there, as though the guy is so deserving of it.”

1:20:02 But there’s an element of human psychology that that’s very… that we’re very true with. And the moment people see this type of transition idea in its in motion, and see the way the world could be, they’re going to expect it. They’re going to want it because they’re going to know how much easier their lives will be, and how much more productive, and how much safer their kids will be, an almost instantaneous that this is what we need to do. A bloodless transition.

1:20:24 I see blood. Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen when the… Obviously, the establishment will fight anything as they have when it comes to people separating. Look at… And the ultra-wealthy will fight as well, or not?

1:20:35 Or will they see the light as well? It depends on how it’s done. If… If the community… If the communities are harassed, meaning, you know, as I think most any country out there that tried to do something different, you know, from, you know, my second film with John Perkins, he talks about all these socialist countries that were really trying to redistribute wealth, and then the corporatocracy came and assassinated leaders and said, “No, we’re not letting you do that.

1:20:57 We need your resources, and we’re going to take control.” This could happen. I mean, no one, I mean, the whole Russian experiment was just… The West was just on high. You know, “We’re not letting you do any of this because this is our way of life, and this is our power structure.

1:21:12 So, we’re going to make sure this is destroyed.” Right. We’ll fight communism in Cuba and Vietnam or whatever. Exactly. That propaganda was… arose.

1:21:18 Anything counterculture, anything not the market, basically been labeled communism and therefore evil, Hitlerian, whatever. Yeah. And that propaganda will probably exist in this world. But if it’s done in a way where no one’s offending anything, and it’s made public, the good thing about the world today is everything’s on camera, for better or for worse, and you can see what’s actually happening pretty much everywhere. And I think that this, people won’t stand for the abuse of a lone, quiet colony of people that want to simply detach, and they’ve already bought their property from some country in the South, in the, you know, in the Latin America, South America, and they’re doing this.

1:21:51 And then eventually the country again sees the merit, and they step up, and they apply it. And that’s when international, national tensions will happen. I can’t say what will happen at that point, but that’s the way I think it. That’s the logic of it will be just that. The imposition of the solution, and people waking up and seeing the merit of it, and the biosocial pressure of all the failures that I mentioned earlier, they’re going to force something.

1:22:11 2050, huh? I think 2040, 2050. If trends remain the same, it’s going to be a very ugly… I think that’s a reasonable estimate. I…

1:22:18 When people, I thought people might say 2025 or something, but given that… always slower than we… than we imagine. And cost more. I don’t… I hesitate from being predictive like that, but I… If you look at the trends, again, at the very end of this book, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to the current trends.

1:22:33 Okay. And it’s ugly. You’re in LA. You seem like a New York guy. What are you doing in LA?

1:22:39 It seems like a crazy place. I’m from Southern California, but I can’t stand LA. It seems like there’s so much media, there’s so much madness. What are you doing out there? Do you like it?

1:22:47 I like the people that I’ve become friends with that help work with the movement. The movement in LA is very robust. They’re very healthy group, and they do a lot of great stuff. And of course, as a film production, as a film producer, a lot of resources are there. Okay.

1:23:01 So, I’ve been there. I wanted to be on the West Coast after living in New York for 14 years, and LA was my initial attraction. I had a lot of friends there. I didn’t think I was going to stay very long. I’ve only been there a couple years as of now.

1:23:11 But I’m right now building out a little sound stage to save some money in the long run from renting sound stages, cuz they are cost a fortune. So, I’m going to be there for a little while longer, but I’ll probably inch to a less populated area. I mean, LA is the most efficient city probably on the planet. Just the traffic alone is the… It is the ultimate spectacle of what bad design is, that city.

1:23:32 So, anyway, do I like it? It’s cuz I like the people, and I like the weather, but… Right. And they are a bit more open-minded on the West or open-minded to things, or… It’s pockets.

1:23:42 I mean, a lot of people think of LA as just Hollywood and all the glamour and falseness, but you have a lot of great counterculture and underground stuff going on there as well. You’ve alluded that your projects going forward are going to be… I might be phrasing this wrong, maybe less didactic and more artistic and more, you know, presenting visions or artistic ways of showing your views, as opposed to more, you know, documentary style. Is that accurate?

1:24:04 It is. But when it comes to the films, I mean, with this book and all the work of the movement, I’ve given, you know, 15 or so lectures, very high, very intense lectures that took forever to create, and I’ve done my gamut of super intellectual analysis and all of that stuff. Very specific stuff. Very specific. Not mincing words, not trying to be utopian or being flamboyant and just gesturing about how the future will be.

1:24:28 I’m very much a realist. One of the things about this book when I talk about advanced technologies, I only pick technologies that are actually in play. I don’t sit there and project about what the next 15 years should have and how that will make everything better. Of Fresco? I don’t want to bring him up.

1:24:41 I don’t like, I hate to say that, but there is a tendency. Maybe he’s smarter than all of us. Maybe. And he knows that this will be the case in 10, 15 years, but when it comes to convincing people, they need to see what’s happening now. Projecting on the future and future technologies is, you know, we’ve been doing that for…

1:24:56 I mean, all the great sci-fi guys have been doing that forever with quite good predictive accuracy, by the way. But that’s not how you communicate a very scientific principle when you want to get people on your side. Right, cuz in this book and in your lectures, you get very specific and very scientific about every single one of these points. If people do want to dive into it further. There’s no ambiguity in the movement anymore.

1:25:13 Right. And that was a… the big transition, I guess you could say, away from the Venus Project was to rehone and think about what it takes to get people to understand this thoroughly. And I also, to teach them how to communicate it, cuz this is a communication process. And then we’re actually going to build a… I’m helping with a companion source guide to this that reduces the entire book to about 360 individual concepts, and it will be a lecture team tool, and anybody that actually reads it will… it actually goes through and it teaches you how to explain and understand these ideas as far as our communication team.

1:25:43 That’s really what it’s about. I mean, we can talk about engineering all day long, but until people start to communicate it properly, it’s… We have a long road ahead of us. But back to the film trilogy, yes. So, we got three coming.

1:25:50 Why three trilogies? You know, art comes first. You get away from the art for a while, and you felt yourself not necessarily happy, and you went back to it? Of course, my musical stuff used to be my real meditation, and I’ve had to sell off a lot of instruments in order to make way for equipment, for stuff. Do you still play music?

1:26:07 Of course. Okay. I’m not as much as I would like to, yeah. Drums and marimba, and you know, I used to be a big classical guy, timpani, orchestral timpani, you know, frame percussion. I ran the gamut.

1:26:16 It was… It was definitely… It still was my passion, but I obviously can’t torture myself with a huge gamut. I mean, percussion is anything, you know, it’s… Anything can be a percussion instrument.

1:26:24 My… You see a guy play a… a guy in Southeast Asia, he can… he’s a… he’s an expert virtuoso on a little leaf. I’ve seen this on YouTube, and the guy can play a leaf like there’s no tomorrow. You’re like, “Oh my god, how can they do that?” That’s the beauty of the human condition.

1:26:38 It’s just amazing what we’re capable of doing and honing in on. But anyway, so the film trilogy will be less of an intellectual expression, obviously more of an artistic. I really want to get under people’s skin with this, and get them… The beauty of art is it sneaks behind your ego. You don’t quite know what you’re doing, you know?

1:26:57 George Carlin was the most brilliant cuz he got… He got people to laugh at themselves without really knowing that they’re laughing at themselves yet. He just planted these seeds, and the comedy and entertainment, well, not entertainment per se, but comedy and poetry and the specific, you know, high-integrity arts of really communicating in something and using ambiguity and using values and using pop culture things, all that stuff is wonderful. Unfortunately, on the other extreme of that, it’s propaganda.

1:27:23 So, there’s always that dividing line between art and propaganda, I’m sorry to say. And that comes in a lot of ways down to the people. I mean, my works have been called straight propaganda, which I think is hilarious considering that all it is is presenting an angled view. It’s saying, “Yes, I believe this.” And that’s why a lot of politicians or a lot of economists out there that do have different beliefs, they won’t actually put them forward because they’re afraid of looking like they’re angling.

1:27:47 I should say that more about economists, actually. I speak a lot of great scientists as well. Scientists and economists that do understand the flaws of the market, they’re terrified of actually angling their bias because of the labels that will be thrown on them. You know what I mean? And that’s a big problem.

1:28:01 So, you want to avoid that propaganda label, or you already have it anyways, so you’re just going to move past that. Will call the new trilogy propaganda, too. So, I’m not… I mean, it’s just the nature of the eye of the beholder. Um, but I’m looking forward to it.

1:28:12 In a lot of ways, I consider this to be my first real film trilogy. I did the documentary thing, but documentaries are a different animal entirely. Yeah. I… I did Culture in Decline.

1:28:19 I’m going to do another season of it, of course. But I want to get into this live action with actors and really flesh out a really wonderful trilogy. It’s going to kind of be almost like a TV series like thing. Each one ends with a cliffhanger. And then.

1:28:33 So, I, I don’t give action, mean? What does that mean? It’s all actors. Okay. All right.

1:28:36 It just means, yeah, all actors. So, is there a narrative here? Narrative. It’s… It’s a three, takes place in three different time frames.

1:28:42 There’s a present day, 2015. Then there’s a 2070, and then there’s a 2150. And they all interweave. And it’s… Part of it’s about hindsight, looking back at the way the world used to be.

1:28:54 Part of it’s about… The middle layer is about this conflict and transition, which is a fantasy, but it’s building on a lot of memes of the Occupy movement and Anonymous and Snowden and intelligence corruption and all these things that the establishment’s doing right now to preserve itself by spying on everybody. I mean, if that isn’t an indication of fear, I don’t know what is. And then of course, the current layer is about realizing the flaws of the world initially.

1:29:18 So, it… Each person that watches it will probably take away something different, which I… which is the goal. I don’t… I don’t want it to be one clear-cut thing. I want there to be a certain level of ambiguity.

1:29:27 And that’s what I love about art, that I… I see, you know, and I listen to, is it forces thought. It doesn’t just tell you what to think, per se. I think it’s a powerful medium. I think the Zeitgeist trilogy was so necessary at the time, cuz I think a few people almost needed you to kind of just say, wake up and look at these things.

1:29:44 And then obviously I think Culture in Decline, you threw some satire in there and and found that maybe you needed to find a new way to talk to those people again. And I guess this is the evolution of that. Yeah. It’s also a resurgence of my creative… like, I’ll do all the scoring and all… I mean, I…

1:29:58 I did that for the film trilogy, but I just didn’t have enough time. Um, these is my… These are my little babies. So, I’m… I’m very excited about it.

1:30:05 Okay, year… 2 years before we see… It’ll be hopefully early next year. It was supposed to come out this year, but it’s the movement stuff has been so… it just drags on and on as far as projects. I had to push back.

1:30:16 Okay, and how is the movement? Movement is doing great. Movement has reinforced itself with a high degree of character and a high degree of integrity when it comes to the data. Specifically with this book and our new emerging lecture team. The big problem with the movement, again, you mentioned leaders, is that there’s too much like Ben and myself and Matt Berkowitz and a couple of other people have sort of… we forced ourselves to really try and take the… the reins and talk to people and get on TV shows or whatever.

1:30:41 And now other people are doing lectures. Now I get sent lectures all the time. And this is what… We need a… a a holographic type of communicative structure where each chapter can speak in their own language to their own groups. So, that’s what’s happening, and we’ve… we had a drop in numbers after the Venus Project thing happened.

1:30:57 But what we did have as well was an increase in integrity. There’s a lot of people that just latch on to a new movement. You know, it’s like I said, a phenomenon that was that transcended purpose in a lot of ways. Everyone just like “Ooh, Zeitgeist.” And some of the people were so confused.

1:31:08 They thought it was about 9/11. They thought it was about religion. Eventually we had… we had weeded all that away. They say, “No, we’re about a new social system.” And this is what we need to focus on and energize in local communities.

1:31:19 And so I’m very, very proud of what’s happened. And it’s independent of itself. I don’t… I luckily I don’t have to do a whole lot as of the past 6 months or so. Apart from some little projects.

1:31:29 We just released an app. You know, we’re just getting into the app game, for free, of course, just to give people that better sense of community. It lets people talk to each other across the world through a chat system. It’s actually… It’s a lot of fun.

1:31:40 So, that’s the big thing. The big problem with any kind of movement like this is you do have small pockets. You do have maybe 10 people in a small town somewhere in the south of the United States. And they need to feel the community. And that’s what… that’s the big thing I’ve learned about any kind of movement of this nature is you’ve got to find a way to really make them feel part of the larger thing.

1:31:56 And so that app and the book and the lecture stuff and all the things are trying to unify it. That’s the big goal now is to really just keep pushing events. We’ll be on our seventh Z Day next year in March. We had our sixth in Toronto. It was great.

1:32:09 Sold out event. Really wonderful people came. Very smart questions. That’s the other thing. I can monitor the… the level of, you know, projection by how… who comes and what the kind of questions they ask.

1:32:19 Yeah, Z Days are great. We had… Rou Reynolds from Enter Shikari, the lead singer on here right before he spoke at Z Day. We’ve had Miles Dyer here before as well. Is great.

1:32:28 Yeah. Yeah, all guys kind of speaking that message. A couple more things. Occupy in retrospect, what was that movement successful? I know there was a kind of wave of action that came after it.

1:32:39 When you think of Occupy, what do you think of? I see a temper tantrum and a… well, a well-needed one. Okay. I see a… a generally spontaneous, largely disorganized, but necessarily so. I mean, it was… it’s one step of a… of a further progression of awareness.

1:32:55 I… I’ve been expecting it for a long time. They… the Marker called me the herald of Occupy because 3 months, 4 months before Occupy, Zeitgeist Moving Forward was released. At the very end there’s that big mass group of people that approach the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. And it was really kind of comedic that pretty much the exact same thing happened just a number of months later.

1:33:15 I don’t know whether it was planted that seed. I have no idea. But nevertheless, memes are crazy. Occupy was important and is important. Okay.

1:33:22 What is needed now is a new level. I… I consider the movement an extension of Occupy and its values of creating equality and ecological balance, stopping war and all the mechanisms that generated it and so forth. Except they need organization. And… and there’s no shortage of social movements out there.

1:33:36 I mean, if you look, if there’s any barometer for the… the despairing nature of our society as it’s emerged, there are more nonprofits and NGOs and movements than any time in human history. I mean, there’s millions. There’s a guy did a TED Talk and he listed all of them. It was unbelievable. A sign.

1:33:51 Is that a… a barometer? A cry for help? Yeah, it’s like we’re going to do something different eventually. Okay. It’s unfortunate that most of them don’t quite get that the market is at the root of just about all of it as of yet.

1:34:02 Even Occupy didn’t go after the market economy, per se. They just went after the imbalance and the greed and the all the… the 1% of course. But just a flare up and a temper tantrum, and not necessarily didn’t have the whole message thought out. They just kind of said… It was a needed warning sign.

1:34:16 It is what it is. It was a warning sign to those that are engaging the system in differently because they have all this wealth. The prior… there’s a news report by the C… the prior CEO of Amazon, multi-billionaire, and he… the title of his article, if I remember correctly, was “The Pitch They’re Coming With Pitchforks.” And he… he made a very acute, astute observation that the… the imbalance that is increasing rapidly is only going to create huge class war tension.

1:34:41 And it’s going to get ugly if it continues at this route, which is why some level of wealth distribution is going to be required, I think, inevitably, just like Franklin D. Roosevelt did to try and soothe the Great Depression. This is different, cuz it’s different nuance, but the… the very idea of… of this imbalance just reeks of racism and bigotry and all the things that human civil… excuse me, civil rights has been trying to move forward for… for so long.

1:35:08 It… it mesmerizes me when people claim they want a democracy and all this stuff, and yet they don’t look at the wealth imbalance. They accept that as though… Oh, well, people get what they deserve in the market. You know, you put forward your effort. They accept this imbalance to a certain degree.

1:35:20 When you cannot have democratic anything. You can’t have democratic balance or civil rights or anything else when you have these massive wealth gaps and this huge uneven distribution of wealth. It’s like the ultimate civil rights abuse is… is economic inequality. It is. That’s what you’re pointing at.

1:35:35 It is. It’s… I’m writing a book, by the way, and it’s mainly about civil rights development. And I’m trying… This is a new angle for it all.

1:35:43 It’s all about how all of the major bigoted systems, from slavery to segregation to all of that stuff, even going back to Greece, where it was subjugation, you know, by gender, subjugation by… by conquering. All of them had economic elements. You know, people look at, say, you know, women’s suffrage. You know, this… this recently women were able to vote in the United States, and people don’t really They can’t relate to the economic system. But think about it.

1:36:09 Men are the dominant force. Men have been given this role to… to work. And they therefore can enslave women, cuz they have to attach to them. This has been the whole goal the whole idea of arranged marriage historically. Women have been subservient to men for so long.

1:36:24 It has a core economic basis because women haven’t been given the role. They haven’t been given permission for a long period of time to have men’s job roles. So, all of the entire spectrum of racism and bigotry and sexism and inequality in general comes in, most cases, I’d say 95% from the economic basis of a given society. I would agree with that. Don’t agree with everything you say, but I actually agree with that.

1:36:46 Do you ever want to take a break from this stuff? I mean, everyone’s always looking to you even when you do, seems like you take a break, you come back with more I have a serious feeling of obligation that’s built almost on 7 years? Jesus. I just feel like some things need to be completed. This again was a 3-year development.

1:37:05 And I’m very happy this is out there. There are some other things that need to occur. But I’ve… I’ve explained to all the chapters and everything, and I did this in my last lecture. I…

1:37:13 I’m… I’m not giving any more lecture for some time. I might, unless they’re very high profile, and I just feel like I can’t… I can’t not do it. This is a rare interview right here.

1:37:21 I… I was… I, you know, I told a lot of interviewers, even Abby Martin. I was like, “I’m not doing any more interviews. Don’t ask me.”

1:37:28 I need to focus on my work. But I… you… I… I appreciate what you’re doing. And I was since I was coming here I was like, “Okay, I can squeeze this one in.”

1:37:34 And I, and I know, and I know you’re a kind of a guy that… that chooses his media carefully, or you choose not to do that a lot of times. And I mean, I guess is this trilogy your new way of expressing? I have… My strength is in this type of production. I…

1:37:46 I think I can talk relatively coherently. I think I’m a little too verbose sometimes and I get tired. And I do get burnt out on the subject matter and where you just can’t even form the thought cuz you’ve been thinking about it so much. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. I’ve heard you in interviews before where you’re just like, “I’m tired of explaining that.”

1:38:01 And that’s when I was really careful in this cuz I didn’t want to get asked too many in the very beginning of like, “What is the Zeitgeist movement?” Cuz you’re like, “Okay, I’ve answered that probably 10,000 times.” I try to give you a different angle. That’s the thing with my personality. I never…

1:38:12 I try to explain the same thing twice in the same way. Not usually anyway. I give it a new… cuz there, there are many ways to think about it. But no, I… My great strength is in film production.

1:38:21 I realized that after, you know, it’s been it’s been 3, 4 years since Moving Forward. And I really hope to have something else out there in… in a feature film context before that. And I think when it comes to affecting public consent, affecting public in general, the films are the strongest tool I have. Right. And I think I should…

1:38:39 I should harbor that. Keep that and work on that mostly. Like being recognized as Peter Joseph saying in LA? Or do they always want you to be the old guy, the old Peter Joseph, that from 2010, who’s preaching the old message? Or is it okay?

1:38:51 Are you like, yeah, you mean, what do you mean the old message? I don’t know. It’s just like I wonder if they stop you and be and be like, “Oh, yeah, you’re Peter Joseph, the guy that did that.” And that was something, you know, that was Addendum. But you’re, you’ve moved past that and you don’t really want to talk about that anymore.

1:39:01 Yeah, well, Zeitgeist 1 is still the hub of the majority of controversy. My god, I still have… I still have reviewers come out of the woodwork all these years later that just bash that film and just had their… on their high horse. It’s amazing, and I know I don’t care about the subject of 9/11 anymore. It’s… it’s a dead issue.

1:39:20 What’s what’s been in play is in play. It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to change. Even if you were to find and prosecute people that had criminal corruption in the US government or CIA or FBI, whatever, it wouldn’t matter. Everything’s been set in motion.

1:39:32 Just like the JFK assassination. Just imagine if you found it happened to be that there were other people besides Oswald. What would it change? And that’s my big thing. What does it change?

1:39:41 I don’t talk about religion much anymore, even though it is a little disconcerting that 51% of the planet believes in an invisible man in the sky. It’s hard to relay rational thought when people are so absorbed in irrational premises in their very fundamental belief structure. I understand that. But I really think that even you… I mean, the point is I don’t like to talk about that stuff anymore.

1:39:59 I don’t prefer it cuz it’s not productive. And I… and I, I mentioned religion not to be critical even though it’s easy to be critical, and I think it… there is a need for discussion on a large scale. But this type of work doesn’t exclude religion. I want to make that point very clear. A lot of people have… think that the movement is somehow anti-religious probably an echo from my first film, and it’s not actually.

1:40:18 It’s really embracing what most religions have talked about. It’s about human identification. It’s about the ultimate common ground that we all share as brothers and sisters and you see this rhetoric in the entire Judeo-Christian Islamic philosophies. It’s just too bad that the wrong angles of it get exploited for violent reasons and the like and separation. I mean, there are like 4,000 different sects of Christianity at this point.

1:40:41 How, how can you have unity in religion when you’re all believing slight nuances? It’s unfortunate the divisive nature, but the movement is not anti-religious. I want to make that point on… on the area here. If it is really what about most religions have aspired to before they’ve gotten so hideously corrupted mainly by politics. I think it’s good that you’re concentrating on what’s wrong with us now and where we want to be and you’re not associated with any specific theory of conspiracy or religion.

1:41:08 I don’t know. It’s… it’s hard enough to communicate this message as it is. It is. So there’s a lot of noise in the system, and I understand that. That’s one of your biggest burdens, is because your message is hard to break down even in a 30-minute interview or even in this or that, and so it… it’s…

1:41:21 I think, cuz you’re, you’re thinking of this new ideal that’s complicated and important, and yet it can’t be described in a 1-minute YouTube bit. Yeah. You know, hence your burden. And that’s why we need your films as well. Yeah.

1:41:32 Which is why the films are so important to me, and I… I mean, again, I’m looking forward to the series. I think when people walk out of this trilogy, especially when it ends, they’re going to really question what their beliefs are, and they’re really feel hope for the future and feel a great deal of irritation with the current model. That’s the goal. I love it.

1:41:47 I love to see these… these future worlds and what they look like. It could be interesting. A few last questions I ask everyone that comes here. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Peter Joseph, give that man, a young man, a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do? Well, the 20-year, the pre-Zeitgeist Peter Joseph was a… your general run-of-the-mill narcissist looking to self…

1:42:08 Narcissist, really? Looking to self-maximize with very little social interest, who looked at the world as a… as more of a… a TV show that was separate from myself. And the great realization is that no one, no one can escape this condition. It’s just like I talked to people that are very wealthy, and they, they think, well, terrorism has nothing to do with me. That’s way over there.

1:42:30 Like, yeah, well, all it takes is one guy to get upset at Western policy, come into this coffee shop and blow you up right now. You just happen to be the victim of that moment. Improbable, but it could happen, as it does constantly. So no one can escape this system. So I would remind myself back then that I needed to wake up and realize that the only true interest that self is social, cuz there’s no escaping this.

1:42:53 We’re all going to come down, especially more than ever, because the world is so connected, both in its globalization, unfortunately, but it’s also in its… in its… in the internet and everything else. There’s no way to escape from just about anything. Everything’s documented. And if there is a major crisis, we’re all going to suffer in the end. No one, even the upper 1%, can’t build enough walls to stop people that have no resources that want to take their stuff.

1:43:16 Well said. We are all responsible, whether it means, you know, you… you bought the iPhone, so you contribute to a mineral that’s being mined in Africa, or you’re not taking care of your neighbor’s kid after school and making sure, you know, that they become a positive citizen. Right. Yeah, I think we all are a bit. Second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received.

1:43:37 Best advice I’ve ever received. Well, that’s probably something that ebbs and flows in my mind, but I always go back to there’s something about the… in my musical environment is highly competitive, and everyone wanted to focus on the next tier of development. If you… you know, you… you do training stuff too. So you… you know, you’re working and you’re always trying to better yourself, and when it comes to musical performance, you reach a certain age, and… and this will apply to just about anything that you have to focus on your strengths and start to let your weaknesses go.

1:44:08 And I realized this in public speaking. I realized this when I engage the movement in general and I try to do different things. I realized this in production stuff. What I do now is I don’t beat myself up anymore for any particular failure of communication or performance. I, in the sense that it’s a new territory and it’s hard to do and I haven’t quite aspired to there.

1:44:29 I’m focusing more on what I’m good at. I think it’s a ton of maturity, and I used to I was the… I’m the most self-critical person I know, and probably the most self-critical person, one of the most on the planet as far as I’m concerned. I’ve always wanted to keep that new level of aspiration and get more and more and more and more and more, and that’s just been my character, and I’m… that’s what I realized is actually detrimental. We think it’s a virtue to do that, but you destroy your psychology if you always focus on your weaknesses and don’t really embrace.

1:44:55 And in my mid-30s now, I’m realizing how important it is to embrace my strengths and then to let the weaknesses go and really hone in, cuz you know, there’s life is too short to keep trying for more and more when it might be unattainable and you might again lose your confidence if you keep doing it that way. Did you have any mentors along the way, cuz this always seems like… All of my musical teachers were great. Philosophical mentors and of course your musical influences obviously.

1:45:19 And of course I had talked to lots of guys in trading when I did all my stuff in trading. They were actually decent people that just wanted out too. Yeah. And of course that reinforced more of a narcissistic perspective naturally as inherent to it. But yeah, I…

1:45:30 I can’t think of any… I mean, I… I often attribute a lot of my social work to my mother, cuz she worked in social services in rural North Carolina when I was growing up and I got to actually see all the horrors of what poverty does to the world, what does to people. The all the… the spectrum of disorder from child abuse to basic criminal activity to drug abuse. I mean, poverty is the ultimate…

1:45:51 That’s why I refer to capitalism and structural violence as the leading cause of death on the planet Earth, unnecessarily so. It really… it’s, it’s sparks out all of this stuff, from the physical mental health disorders to, of course, the outward behavior. Of course, to patterns of… of deep abuse to each other. It’s all built into it. So she was a big influence.

1:46:11 Mainly her work. It wasn’t that I sat down and had a philosophical relationship. I just got to watch everything that she had to deal with. So I always attribute my general social consciousness that was deep in there that I denied for many years. That I…

1:46:21 I deep empathy when I look around, mainly because of that, cuz it’s not their fault. People want to blame everybody for their behavior and blame everybody in the legal concept of free will and all this nonsense. We don’t have free will. We can’t control all of our thoughts. We can’t really control our behavior.

1:46:35 There are so many things that influence us that we’re not conscious of. So many value systems, our language obviously. You can’t just conjure up a thought out of nowhere without this… this complex array happening in your brain. So many different ways to think about it, both cultural and in your neurology. And that’s important because you realize that we’re all in part of a continuum and all of our actions are actually in the chain from other actions and other influences.

1:47:02 There’s no me and no you in a lot of ways. It’s one big massive continuum. There’s no singular act of violence. There’s only the process of violence, for example. I think that’s a really hard concept for people to get their head around, especially when they’re told all their life that, you know, they’re responsible for their own thoughts.

1:47:15 When in fact you carry the legacy of… I even think about it now. My grandparents and great-grandparents influenced my behavior and I will influence my children’s behavior based on what they… and it could be subtle things. It could be little things they did. Your… your adaptation is so subconscious.

1:47:30 We adapt. That’s why people will talk about nature versus nurture in a very misguided ways. They don’t realize that early stage of development, there’s so much adaptation that happens immediately. When you know, you look at a kid and you make a facial expression, you notice the kid makes the same expression. They don’t know they’re doing it.

1:47:44 You see that phenomenon, right? There’s so much imprinting in the way we walk and everything else that we get from our parents. And people think it’s genetic. It’s actually imprinting that’s happening. Not imprinting specifically, scientifically, but it’s actually this impressionism where we’re absorbing what the world is.

1:47:57 But yeah. I can ramble on a lot of… Last part of that question to the 20-year-old listening all over the world, what can they do? What’s a one or two things that they could do even this week to… to bring themselves, I guess, more into the Zeitgeist movement? If you’re in your 20s and you’re probably still dealing with education, I would hope that most people are going into educational routes that deal with engineering, that deal with advancement of… of the arts and sciences, and they… they of course, the arts and sciences are one, creative thinking and not, say, going to school for economics or going to school to learn how to market or going to school for a business degree.

1:48:35 I… I… There’s a little bit of merit. I don’t like to put down whole subcultures of people pursuing interests, but really if you really want to get into the creative, really want to help society get into the creative development arts, which is industrial design, engineering, programming. That’s huge.

1:48:48 We have more programmers, we have, the better off we are, cuz the new world will be based on technology, guys. It already is now. Pretty much computers basically control everything now, but it will be reached to a high new level. And just like Kurzweil points out, and I don’t agree with everything he says, it’s not a issue of singularity, but there will be a level of complexity at some point, and if we’re not aware of it, it’s going to leave us and we’re not going to really understand what’s happening in the world because things will become too complex, especially if AI systems come forward.

1:49:16 So, anyway, the kids in their 20s, they need to not only focus on relevant things to pursue and hopefully they enjoy it, of course. I mean, obviously do what you enjoy. Don’t do things you don’t enjoy. That’s, that doesn’t help anything. You’re just going to eventually, you know, inhibit yourself and then join the community.

1:49:32 So, joining the community is huge, and that doesn’t mean you have to go out and start a thousand-person chapter in your community. You just go out and get people that think like you. Hopefully you identify with them and enjoy being around them because they have similar ideas and they have similar values, obviously, and be willing to stick your neck out and be a leader and start to do things. I mean, all the people that have come in the movement that are there now, like Ben McLeish and all the others, they didn’t they weren’t solicited.

1:49:54 They weren’t asked. They just stepped up and did it. And that’s what… that’s what everyone needs to do that believes in this… this new approach. It’s hard to build a community. It’s really hard.

1:50:03 We had a guy in here by the name of Charles Eisenstein, and he’s wrote all about this, but it’s like he found that when he just invited people over football games, he couldn’t form a community because no one needed each other. No one really owed each other and had to do things. Like, you really have to go out there and do something. People need each other to build that. Well, I…

1:50:20 I also think that because the vast majority of the planet is in deprivation, if they could just get their head around this, you pretty much have the value system already. People that want a better world, they want a better life. It’s actually a selfish notion. They say, “Well, I’ve been living in this… all this deprivation, my family. This makes sense.”

1:50:38 And if there’s any… I mean, the people will talk about, you know, power and control, the 1% is just that, the 1%. They… if people literally… I mean, the… the great control mechanism in the world is limiting people’s sense of creativity and possibility. And it’s not a deliberate.

1:50:53 It’s just the way the system unfolds, the way the educational system unfolds. There might be some deliberateness to it, but it happens naturally because that’s what an elitist society is, which is what market capitalism is designed to be or what it’s manifest to be is elitist pockets. You have people working for the benefit of the few, and that’s what it always has been, and since even before capitalism, you go back millennia, it was always that way with the slave systems and in Greece and Egypt and the like.

1:51:17 But if people do know the possibility, if they do feel it, and they can understand it, the game is over because all it takes is a small percentage of that 99% to step up. One big act of civil disobedience across the world that shuts this system down for a day, for example. People just don’t go to work. You know, I… I think about these little protest ideas all the time.

1:51:37 Right. Mandela used to do that. He just gave everyone to stop working for the… My greater, greatest social influences are of course Verghese and Martin Luther King Jr. And I… I admire them greatly on multiple levels.

1:51:46 Also levels, I actually… I’m… I’m fallible in my… my irritation. I can easily get angry, and I’ve dealt with a lot of people where I get pissed off, and I get… When I look, when I talk to market economists sometimes, what I see when they… they try to defend their ideas, it’s like this blood washes over my… my eyes, and all I see is the death tolls and the structural violence and the two holocaust that happen every single year because of the market system, which gets statistically proven because of poverty and deprivation.

1:52:10 All I see is the waste and imbalance and the atmospheric destabilization and climate change. All I see is all the problems and sometimes I get angry, okay? And that’s why I admire those guys so much is they were able to contain themselves and that’s why I read them still, cuz it reinforces that I really try to, you know, not take it so personally, but you know, we are human and it’s very hard not to get emotionally involved sometimes. Great role models. I watched the movie, if that’s a good representation of his life, and Hey, that wasn’t too bad.

1:52:39 It was hard to believe everything, not to mention the way he could structure a civil protest. That was impressive, not to mention his whole mindset and, you know, etc. How do people get a hold of you? I don’t think you’re a guy that likes to get to get a hold of? How can they find out when the films are coming out, etc.?

1:52:55 I… I started a… a new website where I’m actually documenting my whole history. I sent it to you. I’m doing it, it’s a blog website, but it’s peterjoseph.info. It has the contact page.

1:53:05 You know, I answer those directly. You know, I… I can’t promise to answer all emails. I will skim through them. If someone sends me a five-page email, probably not going to read it.

1:53:12 Okay, so be short. But I try my best to keep an open communication and all the updates, which is why I started this. I… I had a temporary page a long time ago with just basic data. This is for people to actually learn about what I’m doing.

1:53:25 After all these years, I really had no outlets, so this little page, peterjoseph.info, will have everything from Culture in Decline to Inner Reflections. So, they keep tabs on that and they’ll find out everything that I’m doing. Will we be able to help you fund your films? Well, I’m… I have a… must, I have a cognitive dissonance in any type of crowd sourcing, the like, at this stage.

1:53:44 I just don’t like the idea. I have taken general donations, I do for maintaining the… the current film series and all the distribution and the torrents and the like, and people have been… I get like $5 donations, a couple every week, which helps. But you know, I… I’m not going to go that route out of pure principle until it’s absolutely necessary.

1:54:04 I have been saving my pennies. I prefer to be independent. I feel really bad about hitting up the community for any money, cuz this is a poor community. I cringe when I see these flagrant Kickstarters and the like, because people want change and they are willing to give for it, and they… it’s false hope in many circumstances. I have never asked for any kind of money on a larger scale than simple donations to try and help with the film series out.

1:54:27 I mean, if anyone wants to help out with donations, it’s definitely needed at this point, but I don’t solicit it. It’s just there on the website. So, if again, if worst comes to worst, I have investors approaching me, and I’m like, they… they just want to interfere and of course they’ll turn it into a market scheme, marketing scheme where I want to keep this independent and hopefully release it immediately for free. I’m not sure if the final stage will be that.

1:54:49 I might have to release it theatrically independently and then have it online VOD for paid for a little while to recoup some money, and then I’ll release it for free. These are all variables, but no, I don’t really solicit, but if people do want to donate, they can go to the… they can go to my… my website. You know how to do that? Yeah, I know you’re very serious and idealistic about that kind of thing, so I appreciate your standpoint you’re making from, but yeah, I mean, hopefully you’ll, you know, you will accept some type of donation in the…

1:55:18 I… it is a cognitive dissonance. I just I don’t… I don’t… I… I see what giving money does, and I see how people get their aspirations up and they’re spending their resources on things that don’t accomplish anything in most, most circumstances.

1:55:29 So, maybe I’m just being irrational, but the Zeitgeist movement has never asked for money, and I… I mean, I have a great deal of pride with that. We’ve literally never asked for money for anything. It’s all been independent. All chapters fund things themselves, fund things themselves with whatever spare cash they have, cuz I don’t want to turn it into an establishment.

1:55:45 The moment you have an institution like this people getting paid to administer, it’s the moment people start to rely on it. It changes everything as far as the psychology once that happens. Yeah, and that’s noted and that comes through in the movement, you know, from my perspective, so. Peter, thank you so much for coming. Oh, my pleasure.

1:55:59 Thank you, Brian. I hope we got through everything necessary. It’s nice to see a personal side of you. I know a lot of the shows you do, it’s just all about the… the minutia of the movement, but there is a real dude behind this stuff, you know? And it’s great to see your transition.

1:56:13 I can’t wait to see these films. I think that the narrative is such a powerful it’s like right up there with comedy when it… when it’s done really well is, you know, like you said, it gets you, it gets behind the frontal cortex and kind of approaches from the back and plants that seed and makes people really kind of make changes in their life, maybe even subconsciously at first. Yeah, exactly. So, it’s big stuff. If you listen to us on iTunes, come check us out on YouTube.

1:56:37 I wish you best in your trip in London and going back to LA. As we say, it’s about the journey. Thanks so much, Peter. All right. Thank you very much, Brian.

1:56:46 Appreciate it. All right, take care.