1 00:00:06,250 --> 00:00:09,981 [Intro Music] 2 00:00:21,130 --> 00:00:23,113 The Empire Files . 3 00:00:23,120 --> 00:00:24,750 The Empire Files with Abby Martin 4 00:00:26,280 --> 00:00:28,621 [Abby] Peter Joseph is the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement, 5 00:00:28,730 --> 00:00:32,812 the grassroots worldwide organization that advocates an alternative economic system 6 00:00:32,929 --> 00:00:35,895 based on sustainability, cooperation and human need. 7 00:00:36,406 --> 00:00:39,520 His most recent book 'The New Human Rights Movement' 8 00:00:39,636 --> 00:00:44,116 delivers a startling expose' about the violent oppression that defines our economic order 9 00:00:44,424 --> 00:00:48,240 while issuing an urgent call for global activism to unite to replace it. 10 00:00:48,950 --> 00:00:52,873 I sat down with Joseph to talk about the contradictions and crises of capitalism 11 00:00:52,980 --> 00:00:56,763 and what he advocates to save the future of the planet from catastrophe. 12 00:00:57,120 --> 00:00:58,935 Peter you have a very interesting background 13 00:00:59,187 --> 00:01:01,735 having worked both in advertising and equity trading. 14 00:01:02,116 --> 00:01:03,870 Let's talk about advertising first. 15 00:01:04,030 --> 00:01:06,843 What function does this industry serve in today's society? 16 00:01:07,160 --> 00:01:10,744 [Peter] The best way to explain that is to look at the fact that our economy 17 00:01:10,855 --> 00:01:12,455 is based on consumption, 18 00:01:12,640 --> 00:01:16,166 and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand. 19 00:01:16,812 --> 00:01:20,393 And without that arm - and it's so polluted as you know, 20 00:01:20,535 --> 00:01:22,793 I can't even imagine what the world be like without advertising - 21 00:01:23,150 --> 00:01:24,178 but without that arm 22 00:01:24,356 --> 00:01:27,396 you wouldn't have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational, 23 00:01:27,987 --> 00:01:30,873 abused by our social inclusion. 24 00:01:31,126 --> 00:01:33,600 When advertising presents something into the community 25 00:01:33,710 --> 00:01:36,227 that seems to be something that some people want 26 00:01:36,363 --> 00:01:38,713 it spreads like a virus and then everybody wants it 27 00:01:38,830 --> 00:01:41,901 because it's an issue of social inclusion which is a part of our biology, 28 00:01:42,264 --> 00:01:43,772 because that's how we identify. 29 00:01:44,006 --> 00:01:46,867 We identify and define ourselves by how others see us 30 00:01:46,978 --> 00:01:48,763 and how we are included in the group. 31 00:01:49,070 --> 00:01:52,880 So it manipulates our most primal sense of humanity 32 00:01:53,200 --> 00:01:56,000 in order to sell things, and again back to my original point: 33 00:01:56,129 --> 00:01:57,372 if you didn't have that arm 34 00:01:57,600 --> 00:02:00,633 in our consumption-based society since the Industrial Revolution, 35 00:02:00,867 --> 00:02:02,209 the economy would collapse. 36 00:02:02,350 --> 00:02:04,307 That's a very unique point to make because 37 00:02:04,609 --> 00:02:06,467 when you first start an economy of this nature 38 00:02:06,584 --> 00:02:09,969 like in the agrarian society and then in the handicraft industry, you're MEETING demand right? 39 00:02:10,190 --> 00:02:11,735 That's the point! and that makes sense. 40 00:02:11,920 --> 00:02:14,104 But at some point this kernel seed had to change 41 00:02:14,215 --> 00:02:17,556 because when you have such a highly efficient productive society that we have now, 42 00:02:17,760 --> 00:02:19,089 at least in the technical sense, 43 00:02:19,220 --> 00:02:21,372 (not in a distribution sense because we have poverty and all that) 44 00:02:21,630 --> 00:02:24,584 at least in the technical sense of what we can create, the efficiency, abundance, 45 00:02:25,107 --> 00:02:27,427 you have to have demand CREATED now. 46 00:02:27,640 --> 00:02:31,741 And that's basically the kernel seed of one of the central flaws 47 00:02:31,850 --> 00:02:33,507 of market economics, your capitalism, 48 00:02:33,612 --> 00:02:34,793 that has come to fruition today. 49 00:02:35,046 --> 00:02:36,830 Not only in destroying human psychology 50 00:02:37,030 --> 00:02:38,812 but destroying the environment simultaneously 51 00:02:39,010 --> 00:02:42,313 because you have an insatiable culture that's been literally generated! 52 00:02:42,570 --> 00:02:45,772 And as I detail in my book, in the National Association of Manufacturers 53 00:02:45,900 --> 00:02:47,778 in the 20th century, they were actually arguing 54 00:02:48,516 --> 00:02:53,698 that consumerism was the best defense against communism and totalitarianism. 55 00:02:54,012 --> 00:02:56,572 They had this incredible PR campaign that went on for, 56 00:02:57,260 --> 00:02:59,975 well it still goes on really but it's echoes of the original intent 57 00:03:00,090 --> 00:03:03,876 to transform society into one that just wants to buy and consume, 58 00:03:04,098 --> 00:03:07,150 and then progress of course being defined by what we produce, 59 00:03:07,335 --> 00:03:09,704 the more stuff we produce, the more you buy the more you own: 60 00:03:09,913 --> 00:03:11,286 that must be progress now! 61 00:03:11,513 --> 00:03:12,812 - It's an incredibly disturbing, 62 00:03:13,850 --> 00:03:16,486 just realization that this does nothing to benefit society, 63 00:03:16,590 --> 00:03:18,104 in fact it's just literally 64 00:03:18,430 --> 00:03:21,052 created to keep society afloat, the economy afloat. 65 00:03:21,169 --> 00:03:23,581 - Yeah, it's a kind of cultural violence. 66 00:03:23,698 --> 00:03:26,073 The more people promote consumeristic values, 67 00:03:26,210 --> 00:03:29,452 vain materialistic values, the more they want, more and more 68 00:03:30,049 --> 00:03:33,476 this and that, the more they flaunt that kind of phenomenon, 69 00:03:33,581 --> 00:03:37,729 the more they create what is termed by Johan Galtung "cultural violence." 70 00:03:38,030 --> 00:03:42,240 Because if you create a society that thrives in this type of self-identification 71 00:03:42,578 --> 00:03:45,550 you're basically also promoting not only the destruction of the environment 72 00:03:45,772 --> 00:03:48,787 but the diminishment of others because you're saying that 73 00:03:48,898 --> 00:03:51,938 "I can afford this, I have the status, and I'm better for that, 74 00:03:52,070 --> 00:03:52,996 and this person can't." 75 00:03:53,140 --> 00:03:56,375 And we see that phenomenally amplified today in the modern world 76 00:03:56,480 --> 00:04:00,160 with the "winning" community and our lovely president and his rhetoric. 77 00:04:00,473 --> 00:04:03,409 It also carries over into misogyny and everything else as I'm sure you know. 78 00:04:03,661 --> 00:04:05,187 Fairly recently he said 79 00:04:05,580 --> 00:04:07,476 "We want to have rich people in charge of the economy 80 00:04:07,587 --> 00:04:09,440 because clearly they must be good at it!" 81 00:04:09,729 --> 00:04:12,387 So we have a complete absence of "where's the sympathy?" 82 00:04:13,500 --> 00:04:14,800 Where is the actual binding 83 00:04:16,092 --> 00:04:18,996 purpose of an economy which is to provide for everyone ideally? 84 00:04:19,320 --> 00:04:22,135 No. So the sickness has become increasingly more palpable. 85 00:04:22,270 --> 00:04:24,578 I often wonder what a world would be like without advertising, 86 00:04:25,083 --> 00:04:27,261 which would be a world without marketing and markets. 87 00:04:27,507 --> 00:04:29,464 And I can tell you it would be a whole lot different 88 00:04:29,606 --> 00:04:31,883 and far more peaceful and sustainable and 89 00:04:32,067 --> 00:04:36,572 amiable, and just humane than what we see today. 90 00:04:37,300 --> 00:04:40,775 - From an insider's perspective how exactly does the stock market work? 91 00:04:41,390 --> 00:04:44,412 The stock market is a proxy system that was developed-... 92 00:04:45,347 --> 00:04:48,220 It was contrived out of the original foundation which 93 00:04:48,360 --> 00:04:50,720 were a board of directors for a company, so a bunch of people, 94 00:04:50,990 --> 00:04:53,230 each have a million dollars, they get together, they invest say 10 of them, 95 00:04:53,335 --> 00:04:56,061 $10 million into a company and then they get dividends, right? 96 00:04:56,412 --> 00:04:59,384 That made basic sense, you know, years ago. 97 00:04:59,575 --> 00:05:02,104 But someone said "You know what? I want to sell this stock 98 00:05:02,424 --> 00:05:05,452 and this guy's gonna buy it from me for a little bit more and I make money off of that." 99 00:05:05,624 --> 00:05:08,369 And then suddenly the exchange system began. 100 00:05:08,855 --> 00:05:13,963 And slowly but surely, the idea of selling artificial shares of nothing effectively, 101 00:05:14,230 --> 00:05:16,024 became a means of making money. 102 00:05:16,330 --> 00:05:18,104 I call it drone warfare economics. 103 00:05:18,633 --> 00:05:20,295 It's just like people that drive drones. 104 00:05:20,400 --> 00:05:23,723 They don't see any kind of humanity as they drop bombs across the world. 105 00:05:24,020 --> 00:05:26,572 The people that trade the stock market have no idea what they're doing 106 00:05:26,680 --> 00:05:29,206 when they're shorting say the currency of some small country, 107 00:05:29,335 --> 00:05:31,370 effectively contributing to that country's decline. 108 00:05:32,356 --> 00:05:35,747 But back to your question, it started off as an innocuous kind of investment strategy 109 00:05:35,852 --> 00:05:38,326 and then it moved into this thing where you have 110 00:05:38,584 --> 00:05:40,744 people artificially trading things for no other purpose. 111 00:05:40,855 --> 00:05:43,150 83% of all stocks are owned by 1% of the population. 112 00:05:43,273 --> 00:05:45,384 It is one giant money-making machine for the elite. 113 00:05:46,326 --> 00:05:49,556 And the financialization of it all because financial services had become so large, 114 00:05:49,858 --> 00:05:54,504 and the money! Only 5% of the US population is in financial services yet 115 00:05:54,670 --> 00:05:56,400 30% of all GDP is taken by that, 116 00:05:56,541 --> 00:05:59,138 and that doesn't even count for all the growth over the years 117 00:05:59,366 --> 00:06:02,738 that is attributed that we know to the upper 1%, upper 10%. 118 00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:05,963 So this is one of the most powerful political centers now simultaneously. 119 00:06:06,516 --> 00:06:09,803 And it's truly despotic that you have 120 00:06:09,926 --> 00:06:13,249 effectively the most powerful and profitable system on the planet now, 121 00:06:13,390 --> 00:06:15,015 one that creates nothing! 122 00:06:15,372 --> 00:06:17,569 It's there to simply make money out of money. 123 00:06:18,180 --> 00:06:20,049 So it's a cancerous disease. 124 00:06:20,387 --> 00:06:22,916 It's what happens in financially mature nations that have 125 00:06:23,070 --> 00:06:27,495 pretty much run out of the angling required to keep 126 00:06:28,073 --> 00:06:30,793 as maximizing profits in a given industry, 127 00:06:30,960 --> 00:06:33,009 so instead they move to financialization 128 00:06:33,113 --> 00:06:35,206 and then it moves into all sorts of other despotic things like 129 00:06:35,610 --> 00:06:36,867 dead peasants insurance. 130 00:06:37,370 --> 00:06:40,270 These are companies like Walmart that would take out insurance on their employees 131 00:06:40,387 --> 00:06:41,550 and get paid when they die! 132 00:06:41,820 --> 00:06:44,738 Things like that. So it's just this commodification of everything, 133 00:06:45,040 --> 00:06:47,636 put a dollar sign on it, no relationship to anything any more, 134 00:06:47,760 --> 00:06:49,532 abstraction become reality once again. 135 00:06:49,640 --> 00:06:52,375 - And high-frequency trading is almost just done with computers-... 136 00:06:52,480 --> 00:06:54,172 - Oh yeah. When I was in trading 137 00:06:54,461 --> 00:06:57,581 it was the start of artificial intelligence and the traders around me were like 138 00:06:57,692 --> 00:06:59,089 "Oh man this is, it's over!" 139 00:06:59,230 --> 00:07:01,710 Once Goldman Sachs gets their supercomputers together-... 140 00:07:02,215 --> 00:07:03,636 Most of these companies when they trade - 141 00:07:04,172 --> 00:07:06,313 it's just a little detail some will find interesting - 142 00:07:06,970 --> 00:07:09,692 the amount of time they're in a trade is pretty much seconds 143 00:07:09,800 --> 00:07:11,913 because they're fronting other orders, 144 00:07:12,024 --> 00:07:13,710 because that's what these companies can do; in other words 145 00:07:13,833 --> 00:07:15,803 they're trading tiny little spreads of pennies 146 00:07:15,987 --> 00:07:19,476 but with heavy amounts of shares in front of other orders. 147 00:07:19,760 --> 00:07:21,655 And then they use computers to do this. 148 00:07:21,827 --> 00:07:26,196 And then they can generate literally millions of dollars off of fractions of time 149 00:07:26,387 --> 00:07:28,590 spent in and out of the market on a 150 00:07:29,200 --> 00:07:30,836 giant micro processing level. 151 00:07:31,310 --> 00:07:34,040 Anyone that thinks today especially that 152 00:07:34,153 --> 00:07:36,135 Wall Street isn't rigged needs to wake up because 153 00:07:36,240 --> 00:07:38,523 there's no way artificial intelligence isn't dominating. 154 00:07:38,646 --> 00:07:42,455 It's pretty much all the big investment banks with their artificial intelligence 155 00:07:42,566 --> 00:07:44,793 versus other people's artificial intelligence at this point. 156 00:07:45,710 --> 00:07:47,624 There's no there's no rhyme or reason to it when it comes to human perception. 157 00:07:48,180 --> 00:07:51,815 So in effect you have this giant money-making machine 158 00:07:51,963 --> 00:07:53,944 that the public has been roped into 159 00:07:54,104 --> 00:07:55,618 such as their retirement 160 00:07:57,027 --> 00:08:01,030 and all the things, the IRAs that for some reason are now connected to the market. 161 00:08:01,320 --> 00:08:06,067 The market is inflationary-driven which gives it its artificial sense of progress, 162 00:08:06,172 --> 00:08:09,180 meaning the more money that we pump into our society 163 00:08:09,298 --> 00:08:11,895 the more it goes into the market, the more it keeps rising. 164 00:08:12,043 --> 00:08:14,849 So yeah, if you put in your retirement into the stock market 165 00:08:14,960 --> 00:08:16,787 it will probably rise. 166 00:08:16,892 --> 00:08:19,640 It'll crash periodically and then people will make a fortune off of that too. 167 00:08:20,080 --> 00:08:24,467 So anyway the whole society has been coerced into this nonsensical participation 168 00:08:24,570 --> 00:08:28,523 that effectively holds up the most giant and powerful political subclass, 169 00:08:28,658 --> 00:08:29,747 the financial sector, 170 00:08:29,932 --> 00:08:33,064 and if anyone wanted to see another level of sanity emerge on this planet 171 00:08:33,396 --> 00:08:35,981 in a step-by-step process rather than complete structural change, 172 00:08:36,098 --> 00:08:38,418 I suggest the abolishment of Wall Street. 173 00:08:38,960 --> 00:08:41,298 There's nothing positive about what this institution does. 174 00:08:41,409 --> 00:08:44,313 And those that say that it's there to help investment, 175 00:08:44,461 --> 00:08:47,261 you can invest in anything with direct money 176 00:08:47,384 --> 00:08:48,966 without the need to go IPO. 177 00:08:49,144 --> 00:08:52,387 The $700 billion float of Apple has nothing to do 178 00:08:52,646 --> 00:08:54,523 with what it actually produces, at all. 179 00:08:54,701 --> 00:08:57,907 It's just what the people are trading and buying and moving the stock around; 180 00:08:58,012 --> 00:08:59,076 it's just a game, 181 00:08:59,390 --> 00:09:01,864 and it's too bad that people are so ignorant about that. 182 00:09:02,516 --> 00:09:05,690 It's a siphoning machine that is taking basically money from the lower class 183 00:09:05,809 --> 00:09:07,690 and bringing it to the upper class through different mechanisms. 184 00:09:08,018 --> 00:09:11,540 - And a lot of people who are middle class/lower class don't invest in Wall Street 185 00:09:11,667 --> 00:09:13,310 because it's just completely too abstract for them. 186 00:09:13,421 --> 00:09:15,827 But everyone participates in debt-based currency 187 00:09:16,215 --> 00:09:18,730 and the way that the currency operates. 188 00:09:18,898 --> 00:09:22,720 How does it make sense that there is more debt than there is currency? 189 00:09:22,916 --> 00:09:25,323 - That's a good question. Mainly because of the interest that's charged. 190 00:09:26,750 --> 00:09:31,218 In capitalism every product has to have something, that makes a profit, 191 00:09:31,470 --> 00:09:34,060 and then in the sale of money, which is what banks do, 192 00:09:34,172 --> 00:09:36,363 they create and sell money effectively. 193 00:09:36,843 --> 00:09:38,504 When they lower and raise interest rates 194 00:09:39,040 --> 00:09:43,403 they're changing the price of what it's going to cost you to get money in a loan. 195 00:09:43,650 --> 00:09:46,566 And then they produce interest obviously and that interest doesn't exist in the money supply. 196 00:09:46,756 --> 00:09:50,073 So you have today about $200 trillion in debt in the world and about 197 00:09:50,240 --> 00:09:52,652 $80 trillion in currency. So what does that mean? 198 00:09:52,763 --> 00:09:55,606 It means that those that are holding the bag in the lower class 199 00:09:55,778 --> 00:09:58,080 are the ones that get screwed when you have economic declines. 200 00:09:58,200 --> 00:10:00,775 There are always going to be bankruptcies and things like that, that happen 201 00:10:01,009 --> 00:10:03,920 in a kind of classism, this structural classism that I call it, 202 00:10:04,172 --> 00:10:05,981 that effectively hurts the lower class. 203 00:10:06,221 --> 00:10:09,440 And the fact that people don't see that either- I mean that goes back 5,000 years. 204 00:10:09,550 --> 00:10:13,606 It has been in lockstep of something else that we're familiar with called slavery! 205 00:10:13,920 --> 00:10:16,381 So debt peonage, slavery, convict leasing. 206 00:10:18,055 --> 00:10:21,243 Even today in certain areas of Asia 207 00:10:21,415 --> 00:10:24,098 they have debt that's passed through generations, 208 00:10:24,295 --> 00:10:26,030 from farmer to child, 209 00:10:26,184 --> 00:10:28,676 and that child has to continue working off its father's debt 210 00:10:28,781 --> 00:10:31,815 and effectively a kind of post-neofuedalism. 211 00:10:31,981 --> 00:10:33,810 So this phenomenon is there, 212 00:10:34,073 --> 00:10:36,233 and it's unfortunate that more people don't see the actual 213 00:10:36,984 --> 00:10:38,867 intrinsic problem of debt. 214 00:10:39,249 --> 00:10:40,529 And the solution to that, 215 00:10:41,003 --> 00:10:44,036 you can argue that you could get rid of a debt-based currency and so on, 216 00:10:44,338 --> 00:10:46,480 and I've had many conversations with people about that 217 00:10:46,670 --> 00:10:48,160 but the question is: why hasn't it happened? 218 00:10:48,412 --> 00:10:51,710 Because it's intrinsic to the function of capitalism. 219 00:10:52,110 --> 00:10:53,950 And it's not even that they act insidiously, 220 00:10:54,060 --> 00:10:56,326 it's just what their job is. 221 00:10:56,775 --> 00:10:58,769 Their job is to make money on nothing and sell it to people 222 00:10:58,873 --> 00:11:00,787 and then when the people can't pay it they take their property. 223 00:11:00,960 --> 00:11:02,707 And that property goes- it's just another funneling system. 224 00:11:03,052 --> 00:11:04,301 Here's another thing I'll mention. 225 00:11:04,953 --> 00:11:06,904 All the money that's made in the world 226 00:11:07,030 --> 00:11:09,169 comes from the lower class taking loans. 227 00:11:09,476 --> 00:11:14,123 So, right now less than 63% of Americans have a thousand dollars in savings. 228 00:11:14,449 --> 00:11:16,615 Yet the lower class, that same subclass 229 00:11:16,726 --> 00:11:18,627 is what takes on all the major loans: 230 00:11:18,740 --> 00:11:21,550 home loans, car loans. That money comes in, 231 00:11:22,098 --> 00:11:23,772 the people buy all this stuff, 232 00:11:24,018 --> 00:11:27,415 and then that money that's spent goes basically right back 233 00:11:27,526 --> 00:11:29,212 up to the upper class again. 234 00:11:29,580 --> 00:11:32,080 Because as we know from the growth of the past ten years 235 00:11:32,200 --> 00:11:35,384 all of the major income has gone to the upper ten, 236 00:11:36,080 --> 00:11:37,415 5 to 10 percent. 237 00:11:37,600 --> 00:11:39,335 So it's even worse now, so you see my point? 238 00:11:40,240 --> 00:11:44,215 The people take on all the loans of the entire collective money in society 239 00:11:44,381 --> 00:11:47,969 and then that money is extracted through them through various forms of structural classism 240 00:11:48,141 --> 00:11:50,098 and goes right back up to the upper 1% 241 00:11:50,203 --> 00:11:51,341 and people should be enraged by that. 242 00:11:51,544 --> 00:11:53,778 But they don't see it because it's a structural phenomenon. 243 00:11:54,049 --> 00:11:57,046 It's something that's happening under the surface that isn't readily apparent 244 00:11:57,212 --> 00:12:00,006 and that's why, due to ignorance, no one really reacts on it. 245 00:12:00,215 --> 00:12:02,036 - It seems like no matter who's in the White House - 246 00:12:02,141 --> 00:12:04,276 Obama, Hillary, or Trump - 247 00:12:04,400 --> 00:12:06,160 Goldman Sachs turns out to be the winner, 248 00:12:06,338 --> 00:12:08,941 and even Trump based his whole campaign saying 249 00:12:09,630 --> 00:12:12,664 "I am not a Goldman Sachs shill" and look what his cabinet is stacked with. 250 00:12:14,258 --> 00:12:18,461 How powerful is Wall Street in terms of controlling the political spectrum? 251 00:12:19,101 --> 00:12:22,233 - It's very covert but it's definitely an enormous power 252 00:12:22,340 --> 00:12:25,809 because the financial sector is like the polluting 253 00:12:26,233 --> 00:12:28,276 force that underlies everything. 254 00:12:28,492 --> 00:12:31,101 And it's very difficult for people to understand that 255 00:12:32,104 --> 00:12:35,563 the major corporations have to be in bed with these major banks 256 00:12:35,753 --> 00:12:39,680 and due to financialization they ultimately bleed over into investment banks. 257 00:12:39,889 --> 00:12:42,227 So much money is made by major corporations 258 00:12:42,500 --> 00:12:44,670 that people don't even know about it, has nothing to do with goods and services. 259 00:12:44,781 --> 00:12:47,040 They have to do with this recycling and financialization 260 00:12:47,187 --> 00:12:48,756 and reinvesting and this and that. 261 00:12:48,867 --> 00:12:52,461 There's a whole subclass of all major corporations that reinvest everything that they've done 262 00:12:52,610 --> 00:12:54,356 and they employ Wall Street to do so. 263 00:12:54,990 --> 00:13:00,129 Wall Street, as people have talked about since the American Revolution, 264 00:13:00,233 --> 00:13:04,227 the banking the system has been given this privilege. 265 00:13:04,344 --> 00:13:07,864 I'll say it this way: There's a privilege that banks, 266 00:13:08,012 --> 00:13:11,267 investment banks, commercial banks and effectively the financialization has had, 267 00:13:11,624 --> 00:13:14,560 and it's been unquestioned and that's basically the control 268 00:13:14,904 --> 00:13:18,732 of money and artifacts that relate to money but have no intrinsic value. 269 00:13:19,070 --> 00:13:21,673 Again what's why I advocate the abolition of Wall Street and the entire thing, 270 00:13:21,820 --> 00:13:23,427 these derivatives upon derivatives. 271 00:13:23,673 --> 00:13:25,920 And so we create this housing bubble, right? 272 00:13:26,098 --> 00:13:30,110 So the housing market, abusing the people that are in need 273 00:13:30,689 --> 00:13:34,412 and basically triggering the systemic crisis that 274 00:13:34,800 --> 00:13:36,966 these people at the top made a fortune off of, 275 00:13:37,310 --> 00:13:41,261 but then contributed to public health outcomes such as 500,000 people 276 00:13:42,356 --> 00:13:44,375 that died of cancer because they couldn't get treatment. 277 00:13:44,670 --> 00:13:48,541 And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the financial relationship to public health. 278 00:13:49,230 --> 00:13:50,490 - Let's talk about Empire. 279 00:13:51,236 --> 00:13:53,150 Of course we see US military presence 280 00:13:53,292 --> 00:13:55,766 in over 70% of all the nations on earth. 281 00:13:56,104 --> 00:13:59,366 When you look at military personnel it's almost every single country. 282 00:13:59,790 --> 00:14:02,941 But beyond military hegemony there's the hegemony of US capital of course, 283 00:14:03,052 --> 00:14:07,778 this is more hidden. But how does this financialization underpin the Empire? 284 00:14:08,676 --> 00:14:10,941 - Since the fall of the Soviet Union 285 00:14:11,050 --> 00:14:15,483 and the development of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, NATO, 286 00:14:15,932 --> 00:14:21,870 underlying all of these higher structure institutions is 287 00:14:22,480 --> 00:14:25,643 neoliberal globalization and financialization. 288 00:14:26,141 --> 00:14:29,692 Those three words have to kind of go together because it's one synergy. 289 00:14:30,104 --> 00:14:35,390 And since the attempt at a different type of social order has been officially squashed-... 290 00:14:36,090 --> 00:14:39,907 The World Bank and the IMF have gone out of its way to make sure neoliberal policy 291 00:14:40,010 --> 00:14:42,652 is employed everywhere and any country that doesn't have an interest, 292 00:14:42,867 --> 00:14:46,492 such as Iran, such as Iraq, such as Syria, 293 00:14:46,603 --> 00:14:48,695 such a long list of countries, there's Libya, 294 00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:52,449 that have tried to do something different or have been on the outs for whatever reason, 295 00:14:52,560 --> 00:14:55,920 that usually have economic roots that go back in history to some degree. 296 00:14:56,830 --> 00:14:58,775 And any country that tries to step out of the way 297 00:14:59,320 --> 00:15:02,744 gets hit with the idea that they are violating human rights 298 00:15:02,855 --> 00:15:06,418 because in this world, at least in the perception of democracy that we have, 299 00:15:06,600 --> 00:15:09,950 neoliberalism is supposed to be right next to it, the idea of free markets. 300 00:15:10,090 --> 00:15:12,043 Of course it's not really free at all. 301 00:15:12,540 --> 00:15:15,249 That's the thing about, it's not really neoliberalism, 302 00:15:15,353 --> 00:15:17,206 because that would mean everything would be open. 303 00:15:17,390 --> 00:15:19,495 That's the TRUE idea of neoliberalism, 304 00:15:19,690 --> 00:15:22,707 that when the people that came up with this word decades ago, they said 305 00:15:22,812 --> 00:15:25,427 "Well, we need some kind of philosophy to counter communism, 306 00:15:25,580 --> 00:15:27,316 we want to promote open free markets across all borders" 307 00:15:27,433 --> 00:15:28,892 and of course no one actually did that. 308 00:15:29,132 --> 00:15:31,649 So it's that war of neoliberal thought 309 00:15:31,901 --> 00:15:34,270 but it's really just a function of 310 00:15:34,498 --> 00:15:37,815 the wealthy class gets the socialist support as usual 311 00:15:37,987 --> 00:15:41,347 and the lower class countries or individuals are the ones that have to suffer through 312 00:15:41,452 --> 00:15:45,181 neoliberal free-market outcomes; they're the ones that get to fight and lose. 313 00:15:45,353 --> 00:15:48,147 But the upper-class states like the United States and Empire, 314 00:15:48,450 --> 00:15:51,433 the United States Empire, it's not susceptible to any of this 315 00:15:51,606 --> 00:15:53,803 because it's just the bully in the room. 316 00:15:53,920 --> 00:15:57,003 It's the big Empire and it has its vassal states that help, 317 00:15:57,236 --> 00:16:00,898 and it has its arm of NATO and it has all its World Bank/IMF institutions 318 00:16:01,058 --> 00:16:04,738 to support its economic worldview, which eventually leads to its territorial 319 00:16:04,960 --> 00:16:07,033 and geopolitical control of other nations, 320 00:16:07,273 --> 00:16:09,415 because that force won't tolerate anything else. 321 00:16:09,575 --> 00:16:13,095 So it's really insidious, so we have now an empire that's built 322 00:16:13,230 --> 00:16:16,227 really on economic coercion more than anything else. 323 00:16:16,664 --> 00:16:20,910 And the military bases are still powerful, they're there and they're clearly functional. 324 00:16:21,187 --> 00:16:25,747 But the economic power yielded in the ideology of neoliberalism 325 00:16:25,930 --> 00:16:28,873 has been the true driving force of control. 326 00:16:29,070 --> 00:16:32,436 But I would definitely argue that their fear of communism 327 00:16:32,843 --> 00:16:37,060 and their fear of losing American Western and effectively capitalist hegemony 328 00:16:37,747 --> 00:16:41,181 brought in this idea of neoliberalism and the idea that 329 00:16:41,378 --> 00:16:46,603 if we don't employ and force this old Adam Smith invisible hand idea across the world then 330 00:16:46,867 --> 00:16:49,587 we're going to lose our seat of control ultimately. 331 00:16:50,430 --> 00:16:53,840 - Expand more on the notion that all wars are class wars. 332 00:16:54,024 --> 00:16:57,298 - You can look at society as a stratified structure 333 00:16:57,410 --> 00:17:00,886 both in the domestic, in any domestic society such as the United States, 334 00:17:01,550 --> 00:17:04,720 where of course you have the rich and the poor and the dwindling middle class, 335 00:17:04,830 --> 00:17:08,430 then you can apply that exact same macro view 336 00:17:08,553 --> 00:17:11,046 to the states, the nation states of the world, 337 00:17:11,163 --> 00:17:14,498 and it's amazing to see how close in resemblance they are. 338 00:17:15,101 --> 00:17:19,230 After World War 2 any country that simply wanted to do something different 339 00:17:19,340 --> 00:17:22,233 outside of again the neoliberal order, had to suffer the same fate. 340 00:17:22,344 --> 00:17:24,332 So the World Bank, what do they do? they impose austerity. 341 00:17:24,892 --> 00:17:27,020 They keep those countries poor, and destroyed! 342 00:17:27,372 --> 00:17:28,276 And that's a great way. 343 00:17:29,095 --> 00:17:33,083 If there's no infrastructure in these countries to start to develop new ideas or new patterns 344 00:17:33,372 --> 00:17:35,249 then there's no threat so ... 345 00:17:36,301 --> 00:17:37,723 And of course there's "The Grudge." 346 00:17:37,930 --> 00:17:39,027 There's always going to be an element 347 00:17:39,501 --> 00:17:42,790 that is an echo of our economic dominance, US economic dominance, 348 00:17:42,900 --> 00:17:45,187 or just this pattern of economic dominance 349 00:17:45,655 --> 00:17:47,766 that builds in other forms of bias. 350 00:17:47,930 --> 00:17:52,313 And I have no doubt, that Western society with its increasingly jingoistic views and 351 00:17:52,570 --> 00:17:55,316 this reversion back into the xenophobic presence whether it's 352 00:17:56,270 --> 00:17:58,400 claiming that Mexicans are stealing their jobs 353 00:17:58,996 --> 00:18:02,443 or that the Arab communities and Muslim communities are now the hub of 354 00:18:02,550 --> 00:18:04,547 this terrorist ideology and so on, 355 00:18:05,181 --> 00:18:07,753 these things foment AFTER the fact 356 00:18:07,870 --> 00:18:10,603 and create long-term patterns of bias and bigotry. 357 00:18:10,916 --> 00:18:14,461 - I like that you brought up the macro and micro in terms of the 358 00:18:14,953 --> 00:18:17,421 classism in America and also the global classism, 359 00:18:17,563 --> 00:18:20,000 because people talk about the developed world and the underdeveloped world 360 00:18:20,110 --> 00:18:22,923 as if that's just the way it is, instead of the underdeveloped world 361 00:18:23,033 --> 00:18:27,698 actually giving way to why we have a developed, Western world today. 362 00:18:27,840 --> 00:18:29,532 - Colonization as you know very well, 363 00:18:29,667 --> 00:18:34,141 is effectively a sprawling class antagonism. 364 00:18:34,301 --> 00:18:35,483 It's a subjugation. 365 00:18:36,178 --> 00:18:40,363 The poor of the world are not poor because they've been left behind in market capitalism. 366 00:18:40,473 --> 00:18:41,987 They're poor because of these 367 00:18:42,221 --> 00:18:45,606 years of colonization that have destroyed Africa and areas of Latin America. 368 00:18:46,307 --> 00:18:49,273 - You call your new book "a logical train of thought" 369 00:18:49,420 --> 00:18:51,150 from a social psychology perspective. 370 00:18:51,261 --> 00:18:54,455 And let's start with the notion that poverty is violence, right? 371 00:18:54,732 --> 00:18:58,775 Go over some of the casualties that arise from the structural violence 372 00:18:58,904 --> 00:19:00,123 that exist today in this system. 373 00:19:00,873 --> 00:19:03,409 - The big word I use is socioeconomic inequality, 374 00:19:03,526 --> 00:19:05,224 which poverty falls under the umbrella of. 375 00:19:05,384 --> 00:19:09,353 Socioeconomic inequality - basically class stratification - 376 00:19:09,700 --> 00:19:12,966 has been held up as some kind of innovator force, 377 00:19:13,076 --> 00:19:14,055 some force of innovation. 378 00:19:14,763 --> 00:19:16,147 That's about the only defense of it that you'll hear. 379 00:19:16,250 --> 00:19:20,055 They'll say "Well, you got to have poor people that aspire to be rich people, 380 00:19:20,160 --> 00:19:22,147 and that will create the engine of innovation" - 381 00:19:22,264 --> 00:19:24,369 more nonsense that's produced by industry. 382 00:19:24,470 --> 00:19:27,378 That's effectively the only defense I've ever heard, of stratification 383 00:19:27,480 --> 00:19:29,956 other than people claiming it's a biological reality 384 00:19:30,393 --> 00:19:34,473 and there's no other choice than for us to be these primitive primates that stratify 385 00:19:34,633 --> 00:19:37,489 and therefore the bottom rungs will suffer. 386 00:19:37,883 --> 00:19:40,652 It's not just poverty that's the worst form of violence as Gandhi stated. 387 00:19:40,860 --> 00:19:44,738 To be IN a stratified system is against well-being and public health. 388 00:19:45,003 --> 00:19:47,686 That's been proven by a lot of different theorists in epidemiology 389 00:19:47,870 --> 00:19:52,140 where they measured all of these artifacts such as the level of violence. 390 00:19:52,258 --> 00:19:54,480 In fact Dr. James Gilligan which I know you've interviewed, 391 00:19:54,609 --> 00:19:57,218 he's the former head of the study of violence at Harvard, 392 00:19:57,420 --> 00:19:59,864 extremely brilliant man who studied this as a prison psychologist 393 00:19:59,975 --> 00:20:01,876 and his core statement: 394 00:20:02,135 --> 00:20:05,581 "You want to reduce violence in society, reduce inequality." 395 00:20:06,147 --> 00:20:10,916 There's also the psychosocial stress that we are killing each other 396 00:20:11,101 --> 00:20:14,560 through plaques in our arteries from the release of certain stress hormones 397 00:20:14,750 --> 00:20:17,735 that are directly attributed to socioeconomic inequality as well. 398 00:20:17,950 --> 00:20:21,175 In other words the more you're involved in a class-based society, the more you witness 399 00:20:21,809 --> 00:20:24,701 the haves and the have-nots, the more it messes you up. 400 00:20:24,818 --> 00:20:27,643 And there's- it's biologically associated. 401 00:20:27,846 --> 00:20:29,655 So this is an unnatural state. 402 00:20:29,932 --> 00:20:34,055 So poverty and socioeconomic inequality kill about 18 million a year 403 00:20:34,160 --> 00:20:35,470 based on one estimate. 404 00:20:35,760 --> 00:20:39,735 So that is, a couple holocausts in one year. 405 00:20:39,840 --> 00:20:43,852 They say the Soviet Union killed 100 million people in one century of its existence. 406 00:20:44,055 --> 00:20:48,160 We're killing in capitalist inequality, capitalist generated inequality, that many in 6 years. 407 00:20:48,713 --> 00:20:51,901 So the defense of a class-stratified society 408 00:20:52,300 --> 00:20:54,910 is no longer existent in the public health research. 409 00:20:55,250 --> 00:20:58,787 - Under capitalism "there's always going to be people who are poor," right? 410 00:20:58,972 --> 00:21:00,470 Why is this notion that 411 00:21:00,867 --> 00:21:03,490 this is just a constant inevitability that we have to accept: 412 00:21:03,700 --> 00:21:06,763 poverty, unemployment in this system, booms and busts. 413 00:21:06,970 --> 00:21:09,138 This is the most odd thing to me about capitalism 414 00:21:09,240 --> 00:21:11,286 is the acceptance that these things are natural. 415 00:21:11,686 --> 00:21:13,292 - First of all they're massive vehicles of class war. 416 00:21:13,720 --> 00:21:17,600 Every time there's a bust, it doesn't affect- the wealthy can endure that. 417 00:21:17,889 --> 00:21:21,353 So they can find ways to work around it but that creates cheap labor, 418 00:21:21,470 --> 00:21:25,618 boom, better for the owners of the country and the owners of big business and finance. 419 00:21:27,015 --> 00:21:28,867 They take foreclosures, 420 00:21:28,978 --> 00:21:31,569 the financial services sector effectively booms during this 421 00:21:31,673 --> 00:21:33,193 because they're the ones to get to grab up 422 00:21:33,341 --> 00:21:35,550 everything the lower class can't pay for anymore. 423 00:21:36,360 --> 00:21:39,858 And then when the boom starts happening again, 424 00:21:40,578 --> 00:21:43,830 the QE [Quantum Easing] or all the things that the central banks do 425 00:21:44,430 --> 00:21:48,012 invariably go into the powerful corporate and financial sectors 426 00:21:48,120 --> 00:21:50,067 because we still have that philosophy of trickle-down. 427 00:21:50,461 --> 00:21:53,907 We still have the idea that you have to pump money into big business 428 00:21:54,061 --> 00:21:57,144 and effectively the stock market in order to generate more activity that will 429 00:21:57,255 --> 00:21:59,140 "float down" to the lower class. 430 00:21:59,360 --> 00:22:02,467 So yeah, it's really transparent, and no it doesn't have to exist. 431 00:22:02,627 --> 00:22:04,972 - Let's talk about the inefficiencies of the capitalist model 432 00:22:05,083 --> 00:22:07,907 versus the possibilities that exist today with modern technology. 433 00:22:08,030 --> 00:22:11,852 Paint a picture juxtaposing this crazy comparison from food to energy. 434 00:22:12,960 --> 00:22:15,981 - Well the greatest inefficiency would be the fact that 435 00:22:16,153 --> 00:22:17,593 we have poverty at all! 436 00:22:17,932 --> 00:22:22,504 So we talk about this advancement of society and this great productivity. 437 00:22:23,273 --> 00:22:26,264 The most powerful force, the most positive force we do have 438 00:22:26,650 --> 00:22:30,418 of the whole of human civilization is, since the Industrial Revolution 439 00:22:30,830 --> 00:22:33,170 we're able to do more and more and more with less and less and less. 440 00:22:33,560 --> 00:22:38,012 And that is the driving force that can create equitable distribution 441 00:22:38,129 --> 00:22:39,350 and peace on this planet. 442 00:22:39,690 --> 00:22:42,529 So the fact that you have five people now with more wealth 443 00:22:42,689 --> 00:22:44,418 than the bottom half of the world 444 00:22:44,904 --> 00:22:48,129 and you have close to a billion people not getting nutrition met, 445 00:22:48,504 --> 00:22:52,584 and you have what, by Peter Edward of Newcastle University put out 446 00:22:52,695 --> 00:22:54,141 what he called the ethical poverty line, 447 00:22:54,307 --> 00:22:57,181 which is based on lifespan, not the metrics put out by the UN. 448 00:22:57,420 --> 00:23:00,129 And when you use this ethical poverty line you find that 60% 449 00:23:00,246 --> 00:23:01,526 of the world is actually in poverty. 450 00:23:02,190 --> 00:23:05,181 That is lunacy from an efficiency standpoint. 451 00:23:05,300 --> 00:23:07,821 No one can sit there and claim that this is an efficient system 452 00:23:07,932 --> 00:23:09,587 when that's the outcome on the social level. 453 00:23:09,716 --> 00:23:11,563 Now we can talk about the efficiency of a factory and 454 00:23:11,760 --> 00:23:15,144 all the great fruits of technology that people will claim are associated with capitalism 455 00:23:15,255 --> 00:23:16,750 which is nonsense too. 456 00:23:17,550 --> 00:23:19,015 It's our ability to design and 457 00:23:19,360 --> 00:23:21,570 our ingenuity through science and technology that's created this, 458 00:23:21,680 --> 00:23:24,849 not some weird mechanism that's attributed to capitalism. 459 00:23:24,960 --> 00:23:26,141 - And what about food and waste? 460 00:23:26,550 --> 00:23:28,775 - The waste is absolutely insane, you have 461 00:23:28,898 --> 00:23:33,440 40% of all food being wasted because of inefficiencies in the distribution pipeline, 462 00:23:34,123 --> 00:23:38,473 which is staggering. We have globalization moving food all around. 463 00:23:38,664 --> 00:23:41,649 The average American food plate moves about 1400 miles. 464 00:23:42,480 --> 00:23:44,240 There's no reason for any of that, especially now. 465 00:23:44,547 --> 00:23:47,403 If you go down the line of what's possible, you remove 466 00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:51,655 the chaos of human society and its strange beliefs and everything else 467 00:23:51,800 --> 00:23:53,686 and you actually look at what we can do, 468 00:23:54,140 --> 00:23:56,941 then there's no reason for anyone to be hungry obviously. 469 00:23:57,130 --> 00:24:01,636 There could be an incredible state of efficiency and abundance across 470 00:24:01,750 --> 00:24:03,403 food and energy and production. 471 00:24:03,796 --> 00:24:07,101 So when we talk about abundance it so confuses people because they like - 472 00:24:07,329 --> 00:24:10,978 I get attacked all day long with "The world is finite, you can't make an abundance!" 473 00:24:13,064 --> 00:24:14,516 Obviously it's a relative notion! 474 00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:16,695 The Sun will eventually burn out. 475 00:24:16,800 --> 00:24:18,873 It's abundant to us in the long term of time. 476 00:24:19,261 --> 00:24:22,240 So it's not about, suddenly there's a magical amount of everything, 477 00:24:22,356 --> 00:24:24,849 it's about using the efficiency and of course focusing 478 00:24:25,329 --> 00:24:27,932 the economy on the interest to HAVE an abundance 479 00:24:28,043 --> 00:24:31,218 because in our current society, it's the antithesis of what's rewarded: 480 00:24:31,458 --> 00:24:32,701 we reward scarcity. 481 00:24:32,880 --> 00:24:35,267 We want things to be generally scarce; the corporate construct does. 482 00:24:35,987 --> 00:24:38,135 Business doesn't want there to be abundance of anything. 483 00:24:38,289 --> 00:24:40,486 So the pollution of the water supply, that's great! 484 00:24:40,713 --> 00:24:42,295 ...for the water bottling companies. 485 00:24:42,610 --> 00:24:44,941 So we're rewarding the exact opposite. 486 00:24:45,273 --> 00:24:49,550 So you can't have sustainability, preservation, efficiency, in a society that rewards the opposite. 487 00:24:49,901 --> 00:24:53,692 And therein lies the great contradiction of the capitalist system. 488 00:24:53,938 --> 00:24:57,267 - And in terms of energy, what is possible right now? I remember reading that 489 00:24:57,501 --> 00:25:00,966 just such a small area in like Africa can power the entire continent 490 00:25:01,083 --> 00:25:02,012 plus part of Europe. 491 00:25:03,501 --> 00:25:05,895 - I do an analysis in the book that just looks at, 492 00:25:06,129 --> 00:25:09,501 it looks at all the basic renewables and each one of them has the capacity 493 00:25:09,618 --> 00:25:11,575 to create a global abundance and meet the current needs. 494 00:25:11,680 --> 00:25:13,280 And you put them all together in a synergy, 495 00:25:13,495 --> 00:25:16,473 then make basic, what's called mixed-use systems. 496 00:25:16,707 --> 00:25:18,535 It's a little bit technical but we don't have 497 00:25:18,843 --> 00:25:22,572 any kind of systemic incorporation in our cities, not like they should be. 498 00:25:23,944 --> 00:25:26,221 Every single house today should have solar panels that not only 499 00:25:26,356 --> 00:25:27,821 power the home as much as possible, 500 00:25:27,960 --> 00:25:29,784 but they run the energy back out into a central grid. 501 00:25:30,209 --> 00:25:34,006 Suddenly everything becomes an attribute of energy development; it's shared. 502 00:25:34,260 --> 00:25:36,461 And you do that, if someone created a society that- 503 00:25:36,578 --> 00:25:39,993 there's a few smaller cities in Europe that are doing that 504 00:25:40,120 --> 00:25:42,240 with outrageous efficiency potential! 505 00:25:42,670 --> 00:25:46,707 So when you put all that together, it's absurd, it's absurd. 506 00:25:47,341 --> 00:25:50,880 Everyone in small pockets and these entrepreneurs are doing their best, 507 00:25:51,230 --> 00:25:53,729 even like Elon Musk and the battery technology, 508 00:25:53,830 --> 00:25:56,787 and they're trying to do something but there's no concentrated focus. 509 00:25:57,310 --> 00:25:59,569 There needs to be basically a Manhattan Project 510 00:25:59,810 --> 00:26:02,381 to figure out what the best solution is globally 511 00:26:02,516 --> 00:26:04,664 to unify the synergies of all of our renewables 512 00:26:04,880 --> 00:26:07,027 and to make them all work! And if we did that, 513 00:26:07,130 --> 00:26:09,840 if we actually got the minds to say all the universities together right now, 514 00:26:10,024 --> 00:26:12,240 a university project across the entire world and said 515 00:26:12,360 --> 00:26:14,135 "We're going to focus on this problem right now!" 516 00:26:14,430 --> 00:26:17,606 What is the combination of renewables? How do we distribute it across the world? 517 00:26:17,740 --> 00:26:21,230 And how do we make it, create an abundance at zero cost effectively? 518 00:26:21,440 --> 00:26:24,290 I guarantee if you did that, it would happen probably in 6 months. 519 00:26:24,424 --> 00:26:29,513 The intent of the business class isn't that they willfully want to repress 520 00:26:29,790 --> 00:26:33,273 sustainable abundant resources and products. 521 00:26:33,464 --> 00:26:34,812 It's that they know deep down 522 00:26:34,923 --> 00:26:37,501 just like everyone knows about a lot of things in their subconscious, 523 00:26:37,686 --> 00:26:39,975 that if they did that they'd make themselves obsolete. 524 00:26:40,430 --> 00:26:43,138 And no business on this planet is trying to make itself obsolete, 525 00:26:43,250 --> 00:26:44,978 no matter how green it claims to be. 526 00:26:45,150 --> 00:26:47,624 But that's what it leads to. If anyone really wants 527 00:26:48,080 --> 00:26:52,120 to improve the ecological state, specifically the type of transformations required 528 00:26:52,898 --> 00:26:55,520 would effectively, [dramatically], would cut 529 00:26:55,815 --> 00:26:58,363 energy industry back by half at a minimum. 530 00:26:58,726 --> 00:27:01,335 There would not be that many people employed, money would not be made anymore, 531 00:27:01,532 --> 00:27:03,390 because we have that ability in technology now 532 00:27:03,575 --> 00:27:05,249 to create things that last, that will work, 533 00:27:05,420 --> 00:27:09,538 that will be modular, updatable, without that need of the servicing and constant 534 00:27:10,806 --> 00:27:14,676 turnover that we see in the current energy industry sector. 535 00:27:15,520 --> 00:27:17,846 - Really quickly let's go back to just what's possible. 536 00:27:17,950 --> 00:27:19,858 Can you explain the notion of vertical farming? 537 00:27:19,969 --> 00:27:22,178 because I don't think a lot of people realize what that is and the potentiality. 538 00:27:22,289 --> 00:27:24,356 - So I did an extrapolation in the book regarding vertical farming 539 00:27:24,461 --> 00:27:26,516 based on a study out of Columbia University, 540 00:27:26,726 --> 00:27:29,163 and what I've calculated crudely - 541 00:27:29,280 --> 00:27:31,643 and I did this deliberately to show the extremity of it - 542 00:27:31,753 --> 00:27:34,966 if you apply vertical farms to the existing agricultural land, 543 00:27:35,446 --> 00:27:38,658 just in theory and it goes to 15-story, 544 00:27:39,030 --> 00:27:41,563 you would produce enough food for 34 trillion people. 545 00:27:42,793 --> 00:27:45,790 Now people say "Well, obviously you have different regional things" 546 00:27:46,430 --> 00:27:49,210 and irrigation so on, but it makes it moot 547 00:27:49,538 --> 00:27:51,501 when you look at that type of number of potential. 548 00:27:51,741 --> 00:27:54,516 And the reduction of- basically vertical farms allow for 549 00:27:54,880 --> 00:27:58,086 extreme reduction in any fertilizer, the need for light and energy, 550 00:27:58,270 --> 00:27:59,310 and the need for water. 551 00:27:59,556 --> 00:28:03,741 And the study, the examples of this that exists in different places- 552 00:28:03,858 --> 00:28:06,683 granted, you're obviously not producing meat. 553 00:28:07,015 --> 00:28:11,255 In truth, human society has to get away from animal agriculture anyway 554 00:28:11,400 --> 00:28:12,935 if it expects to be sustainable. 555 00:28:13,323 --> 00:28:15,150 You have an incredible potential for abundance 556 00:28:15,261 --> 00:28:16,923 and you put these in localized areas. 557 00:28:17,150 --> 00:28:20,043 In New York they've been converting some warehouses to start doing this. 558 00:28:20,812 --> 00:28:24,652 Very small amounts of investment is slowly being put into this but it needs to be 559 00:28:24,775 --> 00:28:27,556 amplified rapidly because with the loss of topsoil, 560 00:28:27,680 --> 00:28:30,412 with 70% of our fresh water going to agriculture?! 561 00:28:30,633 --> 00:28:33,476 In the midst of what is effectively a water crisis? 562 00:28:34,880 --> 00:28:36,744 By 2030 I think the stat was 563 00:28:36,850 --> 00:28:39,433 60% of the world would be in a water-stressed area. 564 00:28:40,443 --> 00:28:42,313 There's nothing positive in those trends at all. 565 00:28:42,535 --> 00:28:46,400 So that's one great potential way to not only feed local populations well, 566 00:28:46,658 --> 00:28:51,310 but also to remove the incredible ecological footprint that agriculture is doing today. 567 00:28:51,483 --> 00:28:54,781 - Automation is also used constantly as a talking point 568 00:28:54,892 --> 00:28:57,575 against the rise in labor standards, right? against wage increases 569 00:28:57,680 --> 00:29:00,098 because it will take away these skilled jobs. We saw this in the 80's 570 00:29:00,410 --> 00:29:04,418 with car manufacturers. We see it today with restaurants, fast food industry, 571 00:29:05,175 --> 00:29:07,132 stores, right? CVS, etc. 572 00:29:07,483 --> 00:29:10,904 You encourage automation because you say that it will liberate people. 573 00:29:11,243 --> 00:29:11,723 How? 574 00:29:11,840 --> 00:29:13,520 - Well there's a few levels do it, first - 575 00:29:13,636 --> 00:29:17,378 what has been the greatest source of oppression on this planet 576 00:29:17,640 --> 00:29:19,993 since recorded history? - Labor - Yeah! 577 00:29:20,332 --> 00:29:21,575 So, not only 578 00:29:22,584 --> 00:29:26,486 is it irresponsible for us not to apply automation because it's more efficient, 579 00:29:26,812 --> 00:29:31,513 it's safer, we can create more of an abundance, with less resources. 580 00:29:32,252 --> 00:29:37,698 It's also a dramatic shift in the way human relations has been! 581 00:29:38,067 --> 00:29:41,095 So if we can finally remove that ownership/labor, 582 00:29:41,218 --> 00:29:43,316 that old classist duality, 583 00:29:43,452 --> 00:29:46,166 with the use of automation, that would be profound! 584 00:29:46,290 --> 00:29:47,353 just on that level. 585 00:29:48,640 --> 00:29:51,421 People say silly things too like "Well if you increase the abundance, 586 00:29:52,012 --> 00:29:54,049 we'll just have overpopulation, people will keep reproducing." 587 00:29:54,166 --> 00:29:54,953 It's actually the opposite. 588 00:29:55,310 --> 00:29:57,470 That was the case at the end of the Malthusian trap, 589 00:30:00,141 --> 00:30:02,080 a huge burst of population when we found 590 00:30:02,627 --> 00:30:04,818 hydrocarbons and then the technology boomed. 591 00:30:05,003 --> 00:30:09,101 But when you look at stats now in countries that have overpopulation, they're poor countries. 592 00:30:09,329 --> 00:30:11,963 And when you have countries that actually have decent affluency, 593 00:30:12,523 --> 00:30:14,440 they're NOT reproducing rapidly anymore. 594 00:30:14,713 --> 00:30:18,363 So if you want to stop what people perceive as apparent overpopulation, 595 00:30:18,486 --> 00:30:21,046 which is a dubious word because it's not quantifiably viable-... 596 00:30:21,809 --> 00:30:24,769 There's only overpopulation in our society because our society is so inefficient. 597 00:30:25,064 --> 00:30:26,953 It's not overpopulation because 598 00:30:27,236 --> 00:30:29,723 suddenly we're outdoing the resources of the planet. 599 00:30:30,240 --> 00:30:32,972 But if you create an equitable playing field and you meet people's needs 600 00:30:33,169 --> 00:30:34,701 the population issue will not be an issue. 601 00:30:34,890 --> 00:30:36,381 It would completely create a-... 602 00:30:37,556 --> 00:30:41,366 I can't even emphasize enough what it would do to the psychology of people 603 00:30:41,544 --> 00:30:45,870 to be free of that drudgery and that sense of exploitation of each other. 604 00:30:46,080 --> 00:30:50,147 - How does intellectual property prove to be one of the biggest flaws of this system? 605 00:30:51,630 --> 00:30:55,680 - The main reason is that intellectual property restricts the open flow naturally 606 00:30:55,790 --> 00:30:59,243 and it restricts people's contribution to given ideas. 607 00:30:59,556 --> 00:31:01,852 So intellectual property-... 608 00:31:02,412 --> 00:31:06,356 The whole of industry is pushed by sharing, one way or another. 609 00:31:06,467 --> 00:31:08,387 So some cellphone company makes something, 610 00:31:08,492 --> 00:31:10,381 they invent some kind of proprietary something or another. 611 00:31:11,415 --> 00:31:14,227 They release it under the auspice of all secrecy and then 612 00:31:14,338 --> 00:31:16,000 finally another cellphone company experiences that, 613 00:31:16,215 --> 00:31:20,049 it imitates it, and suddenly a little competitive war that people call innovation continues; 614 00:31:20,153 --> 00:31:21,895 extremely wasteful and completely unnecessary. 615 00:31:22,030 --> 00:31:25,212 So why not just open source all intellectual property across the entire sector 616 00:31:25,320 --> 00:31:26,664 if not in cross-business in general? 617 00:31:26,904 --> 00:31:28,898 You would see exponential increase in efficiency. 618 00:31:29,101 --> 00:31:32,664 If I could sit back and design my own camera 619 00:31:32,775 --> 00:31:36,313 along with millions of others in an open-source community, a collaborative Commons, 620 00:31:36,652 --> 00:31:39,292 you would see the efficiency of that given technology 621 00:31:39,667 --> 00:31:43,864 far transcend what any given boardroom or any even small group of technicians 622 00:31:43,975 --> 00:31:44,880 could ever come up with. 623 00:31:45,052 --> 00:31:46,424 That's the wisdom of crowds. 624 00:31:46,744 --> 00:31:48,190 And that's happening, 625 00:31:48,381 --> 00:31:51,809 like that's what drives our industry in the long run. 626 00:31:52,116 --> 00:31:55,618 But it does it in such a slow way because we're not sharing it directly. 627 00:31:55,815 --> 00:31:58,960 So [if] you want to see a dramatic innovation in this world, 628 00:31:59,193 --> 00:32:02,990 then drop capitalism, because it's inhibiting innovation more than it is anything else, 629 00:32:03,107 --> 00:32:04,055 especially now. 630 00:32:04,443 --> 00:32:06,683 - Yeah, completely inhibiting the medical field as well 631 00:32:06,793 --> 00:32:09,267 just all these patents on medicine, it's disgusting. 632 00:32:09,660 --> 00:32:12,006 - Think about the people that wanted to make generics. 633 00:32:12,110 --> 00:32:13,766 I document this in the book as well. 634 00:32:13,870 --> 00:32:17,255 There are people suffering from tuberculosis and HIV-related diseases 635 00:32:18,363 --> 00:32:19,926 and they were looking to make their own generics. 636 00:32:20,086 --> 00:32:22,904 And the Western pharmaceutical industry including all the way up to the White House said "Nope!" 637 00:32:23,273 --> 00:32:25,390 "Intellectual property restricts you from 638 00:32:25,610 --> 00:32:27,064 producing this, you have to buy it from us." 639 00:32:27,170 --> 00:32:30,603 And finally they gave them like a, a little bit of a discount. 640 00:32:31,292 --> 00:32:33,741 - Only hundreds of dollars, not thousands per pill! 641 00:32:33,956 --> 00:32:34,861 ...per cancer pill. 642 00:32:35,770 --> 00:32:37,569 - You bring up a good point: the medical industry 643 00:32:38,110 --> 00:32:40,449 is the best example of artificial scarcity. 644 00:32:40,830 --> 00:32:42,953 The idea that these pills cost-... 645 00:32:43,267 --> 00:32:44,689 I have a family member that had cancer 646 00:32:44,793 --> 00:32:46,775 and they gave her this little thing and stuck it on her arm 647 00:32:47,160 --> 00:32:51,255 and it was $17,000 for this little piece of plastic 648 00:32:51,366 --> 00:32:53,910 that simply injected the fluid into her. 649 00:32:54,473 --> 00:32:56,050 $17,000! 650 00:32:56,387 --> 00:32:57,390 There's no way! 651 00:32:57,770 --> 00:33:00,203 - You're paying for yachts, you're not paying for plastic. 652 00:33:00,313 --> 00:33:03,470 - This is made by a machine in some pharmaceutical company 653 00:33:03,606 --> 00:33:05,095 in about five minutes 654 00:33:05,330 --> 00:33:08,855 with chemicals that are being mixed that are far from rare or scarce. 655 00:33:08,960 --> 00:33:11,704 It'd be different if they had to go all the way to the Amazon and find something and ... 656 00:33:12,160 --> 00:33:14,580 Yeah, it's the biggest fraud industry out there. 657 00:33:15,255 --> 00:33:16,770 - I think another fraudulent 658 00:33:17,640 --> 00:33:21,316 fundamental basis of the whole system is competition, because 659 00:33:22,060 --> 00:33:25,384 we're all ingrained with the notion that all these technological advancements come from 660 00:33:25,513 --> 00:33:28,030 competition incentivizing of course, the development of these ideas. 661 00:33:28,418 --> 00:33:31,606 You discuss the need to move from competitive to collaborative. 662 00:33:32,055 --> 00:33:34,676 Why is competition not all it's made out to be? 663 00:33:34,810 --> 00:33:36,590 - The first problem with competition in a market system 664 00:33:36,700 --> 00:33:39,433 where everyone's competing for market share, meaning money, 665 00:33:40,227 --> 00:33:43,427 the competition becomes, the innovation that's produced, is artificial. 666 00:33:44,055 --> 00:33:46,810 They're not trying to improve on something to meet a human need 667 00:33:46,929 --> 00:33:48,720 they're trying to improve on something to sell. 668 00:33:48,972 --> 00:33:51,704 A healthy industrial system 669 00:33:51,926 --> 00:33:54,621 isn't trying to artificially create demand once again! 670 00:33:54,830 --> 00:33:56,012 It's there to MEET demand. 671 00:33:56,190 --> 00:33:58,313 In fact you don't want to artificially create demand 672 00:33:58,430 --> 00:34:00,873 because that means you're going to be reducing your sustainability. 673 00:34:01,076 --> 00:34:02,695 You WANT a minimalistic culture. 674 00:34:02,836 --> 00:34:04,516 You don't want what advertising is driving now. 675 00:34:04,621 --> 00:34:07,292 So that's an aside of what you're asking but I think it's a very important point 676 00:34:07,495 --> 00:34:09,310 that people miss when they talk about innovation 677 00:34:09,876 --> 00:34:10,880 through competition especially. 678 00:34:10,996 --> 00:34:13,698 So competition has been proven in many academic journals 679 00:34:13,809 --> 00:34:16,978 to be hideously hindering and neuroses producing. 680 00:34:17,298 --> 00:34:20,966 There's little evidence to say that the competitive industry of capitalism 681 00:34:21,101 --> 00:34:24,947 actually innovates in a way that's somehow superior to a collaborative system, 682 00:34:25,107 --> 00:34:26,596 especially if people have the same intent. 683 00:34:26,996 --> 00:34:27,772 So you can imagine, 684 00:34:28,178 --> 00:34:30,695 anyone can sit and imagine the building of something - 685 00:34:30,806 --> 00:34:33,181 once again and like an open-source collaborative Commons - 686 00:34:33,630 --> 00:34:35,378 and they know what they want, 687 00:34:35,932 --> 00:34:38,330 they can infer what the next stage would be. 688 00:34:38,486 --> 00:34:41,753 It doesn't take this sort of imposition built on 689 00:34:42,787 --> 00:34:46,818 competitive coercion effectively, to impose the demand upon them. 690 00:34:47,083 --> 00:34:51,427 So if we know what we want and we can infer the next stage of things, 691 00:34:51,612 --> 00:34:53,378 why do we need companies competing against each other? 692 00:34:53,778 --> 00:34:55,261 Now we have the technology to work together. 693 00:34:55,458 --> 00:34:57,975 And again it would be that much more innovative if we did that. 694 00:34:58,233 --> 00:35:01,021 - Yeah, I mean when you look at just even your childhood development, 695 00:35:01,224 --> 00:35:04,880 in school people are incentivized to cheat to get ahead. 696 00:35:05,606 --> 00:35:07,501 And there's always going to be way more losers 697 00:35:07,610 --> 00:35:09,956 and what does that do to the psychology of humanity? 698 00:35:10,060 --> 00:35:12,092 - The general competitive neuroses and fetish, 699 00:35:12,215 --> 00:35:15,526 it reinforces once again the in-group/out-group underlying 700 00:35:16,270 --> 00:35:18,529 hierarchy-enhancing tendency. 701 00:35:18,683 --> 00:35:21,458 Because if you have a society that believes in this type of competitive ethic, 702 00:35:21,649 --> 00:35:22,646 you have a society that, 703 00:35:22,916 --> 00:35:25,907 that says winners and losers are a part of this system and I want to be a winner, 704 00:35:26,050 --> 00:35:28,744 then suddenly you can justify walking over homeless people in the street. 705 00:35:28,850 --> 00:35:31,003 You can justify the bombing of this or that country. 706 00:35:31,110 --> 00:35:33,870 You can justify just about anything that hurts another human being 707 00:35:33,993 --> 00:35:36,966 under the guise that it's just the competitive nature of our world. 708 00:35:37,163 --> 00:35:40,012 - Our whole system today is based on the idea of scarcity 709 00:35:40,166 --> 00:35:42,695 but the opposite of course is true; we have an overabundance 710 00:35:43,027 --> 00:35:44,603 as you're explaining so clearly. 711 00:35:45,070 --> 00:35:47,735 Talk about how the development and stages of market capitalism 712 00:35:47,840 --> 00:35:49,058 got us to where we are today. 713 00:35:49,624 --> 00:35:52,553 - There's a geographical determinism that isn't talked about enough. 714 00:35:52,787 --> 00:35:55,501 When people talk about markets of capitalism they tend to 715 00:35:55,987 --> 00:35:58,018 go back to Adam Smith and say "Well, some 716 00:35:58,440 --> 00:36:01,126 theorists got together and realized that we should have specialized labor" and so on. 717 00:36:01,230 --> 00:36:02,326 That's not how it happened at all. 718 00:36:02,646 --> 00:36:05,630 You go back to the agrarian revolution 10, 12 thousand years ago, 719 00:36:06,756 --> 00:36:10,689 and once people decided it was more efficient for themselves to start to settle 720 00:36:10,836 --> 00:36:14,910 and create farms and the slight scientific advancement that happened with tools, 721 00:36:15,169 --> 00:36:19,513 suddenly you had all the prerequisites for things like property, and protection, 722 00:36:19,993 --> 00:36:21,575 labor specialization and trade. 723 00:36:21,741 --> 00:36:24,732 And within trade, trade strategizing dominance. 724 00:36:24,849 --> 00:36:27,292 And that's the core characteristic: in the book I refer to it as 725 00:36:27,403 --> 00:36:30,209 the root socioeconomic orientation of our society 726 00:36:30,467 --> 00:36:33,907 which again is based on that scarcity and it's also based on competition, 727 00:36:34,060 --> 00:36:36,652 and it's based on trade strategizing dominance which leads to 728 00:36:36,769 --> 00:36:39,920 oppression and deprivation and so on as a competitive outcome. 729 00:36:40,535 --> 00:36:42,744 So the Neolithic Revolution happened and suddenly 730 00:36:42,855 --> 00:36:46,603 society started to build in these structures with all of those things into it. 731 00:36:46,720 --> 00:36:49,280 So, there hasn't been much of a shift. 732 00:36:49,409 --> 00:36:51,760 There have been pockets of people that have lived differently: 733 00:36:51,956 --> 00:36:53,938 aboriginal cultures, Native American cultures. 734 00:36:54,043 --> 00:36:56,529 So the geographical determinism has to be taken into account, 735 00:36:56,930 --> 00:36:59,895 and you see the force of this dominant kind of desert-based culture 736 00:37:00,010 --> 00:37:02,849 and then the stratified societies taking hold 737 00:37:02,960 --> 00:37:06,566 and slowly eradicating all the other groups trying to live a little bit differently. 738 00:37:06,843 --> 00:37:09,206 And suddenly it's manifested as we have today, 739 00:37:09,513 --> 00:37:13,396 with trade strategizing dominance as the virtue of our existence, 740 00:37:13,667 --> 00:37:15,421 the need to compete and win, 741 00:37:15,587 --> 00:37:18,707 and of course the development of countries, borders, and empires. 742 00:37:19,015 --> 00:37:20,061 Empires ... 743 00:37:20,215 --> 00:37:23,427 If it wasn't the United States in this type of climate it would have been someone else, 744 00:37:23,680 --> 00:37:26,658 because it's simply the most efficient state for any group dominance, 745 00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:30,270 to maintain as much total global dominance as they can. 746 00:37:30,460 --> 00:37:32,750 You have to break it, and the only way to break it is to start 747 00:37:32,867 --> 00:37:35,433 with root changes in what STARTED all this 748 00:37:35,569 --> 00:37:37,821 which is effectively the economic perception, 749 00:37:39,015 --> 00:37:40,800 the perception of your survival in your group. 750 00:37:41,064 --> 00:37:42,369 And if you change that 751 00:37:42,763 --> 00:37:46,160 then you'll be able to slowly morph society back into 752 00:37:46,467 --> 00:37:49,076 what was really a pre-Neolithic kind of worldview, 753 00:37:49,193 --> 00:37:51,046 which was all based on community, gift-giving. 754 00:37:52,290 --> 00:37:54,504 99% of human society existed without money and markets; 755 00:37:54,615 --> 00:37:55,698 a lot of people forget that too. 756 00:37:56,104 --> 00:37:58,806 So this isn't some inevitability, the way we live. 757 00:37:58,916 --> 00:38:00,283 What is the Silver Bullet 758 00:38:00,615 --> 00:38:03,692 that can possibly transform this negative trajectory that we're on? 759 00:38:03,920 --> 00:38:07,292 And that is structural change of the economy. 760 00:38:07,470 --> 00:38:10,430 Morality's not going to do it, our free will's not going to do it. 761 00:38:10,652 --> 00:38:13,218 Our rational sense is not going to do it in and of itself 762 00:38:13,323 --> 00:38:15,200 because we are so inhibited and dominated 763 00:38:15,452 --> 00:38:18,553 by the structural psychology generated from our social system. 764 00:38:18,689 --> 00:38:21,267 - And reforms aren't going to do it either, which is 765 00:38:21,464 --> 00:38:24,283 one of the main points of your book is that 21st century activism 766 00:38:24,390 --> 00:38:25,729 has been far too localized. 767 00:38:26,070 --> 00:38:29,987 - Yeah. I don't like to be one to criticize all the well-meaning people 768 00:38:30,090 --> 00:38:32,664 in the activist community but I think it's a constructive conversation to say: 769 00:38:33,255 --> 00:38:36,147 If we don't, if we don't focus on the root 770 00:38:36,516 --> 00:38:40,492 and we keep sparsely drawing attention and this or that protest, 771 00:38:40,609 --> 00:38:42,067 or this or that activist initiative, 772 00:38:42,258 --> 00:38:44,547 to certain pockets of effectively problems, 773 00:38:44,707 --> 00:38:46,080 it just ends up running in place. 774 00:38:46,196 --> 00:38:49,353 The activist initiatives that are required now have to grasp that, 775 00:38:49,500 --> 00:38:50,621 and realize that now 776 00:38:50,730 --> 00:38:54,301 it's time for galvanization towards removing the foundation of our social system, 777 00:38:54,523 --> 00:38:55,421 and that's the market. 778 00:38:55,606 --> 00:38:58,043 We have to start to move away from market economics 779 00:38:58,153 --> 00:39:00,350 as rapidly as we possibly can to save our ecology 780 00:39:00,621 --> 00:39:03,920 and to save the stability of our society in terms of group relationships. 781 00:39:04,338 --> 00:39:06,695 The antagonism that's created with our class system 782 00:39:07,064 --> 00:39:09,286 builds into all the other antagonisms we see 783 00:39:10,073 --> 00:39:12,596 whether it's gender, whether it's race, whether it's nationalistic. 784 00:39:12,830 --> 00:39:17,021 So, it's like that central kernel that keeps amplifying the worst 785 00:39:17,290 --> 00:39:20,430 of our group or anti-group associations. 786 00:39:20,640 --> 00:39:23,015 - How do we socialize and localize the enterprise 787 00:39:23,120 --> 00:39:25,415 and who is standing in the way of this being done? 788 00:39:25,920 --> 00:39:29,580 - Obviously the forefront of it are the ownership classes, 789 00:39:29,700 --> 00:39:30,750 historically called. 790 00:39:31,107 --> 00:39:33,575 The power structure is defined by the ownership class. 791 00:39:33,803 --> 00:39:36,480 I mean going back to the state, the state has always been comprised 792 00:39:36,590 --> 00:39:38,873 of the heavy business interests of any given society 793 00:39:38,984 --> 00:39:40,307 the heavy economic interests, 794 00:39:40,621 --> 00:39:42,590 even before business was a thing so to speak. 795 00:39:43,200 --> 00:39:43,907 And ... 796 00:39:45,729 --> 00:39:48,824 what incentive do they have to want to alter their position? 797 00:39:49,083 --> 00:39:51,667 That's why it's going to take a galvanized force of activists 798 00:39:51,778 --> 00:39:53,366 as the world probably has never seen 799 00:39:53,766 --> 00:39:55,230 in order to overcome this hurdle. 800 00:39:55,624 --> 00:39:57,987 And I'm not promoting any kind of violence or anything 801 00:39:58,092 --> 00:40:01,107 but there has to be something that stops this thing in its tracks 802 00:40:01,587 --> 00:40:02,787 before the ecological ... 803 00:40:03,206 --> 00:40:07,575 The ecological crisis, if it is allowed to materialize in the way the trajectories show, 804 00:40:08,024 --> 00:40:11,729 between climate change, between the water scarcity, 805 00:40:11,830 --> 00:40:13,698 between all the other levels of pollution 806 00:40:14,270 --> 00:40:16,436 that are coming to fruition, the incredible amount of waste, 807 00:40:16,855 --> 00:40:20,541 more plastic in the ocean by 2050, more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. 808 00:40:20,646 --> 00:40:21,249 - Good god! 809 00:40:21,350 --> 00:40:23,667 - The general destruction of the oceans overall because of 810 00:40:24,129 --> 00:40:25,495 various factors that are happening. 811 00:40:26,547 --> 00:40:29,384 If this is allowed to materialize, and this is what I argue at the end of the book, 812 00:40:29,930 --> 00:40:32,400 it will just create that much more class antagonism 813 00:40:32,516 --> 00:40:36,430 and make it that much more difficult for us to pull out of this horrible 814 00:40:37,655 --> 00:40:40,400 in-group/out-group phenomenon and the oppression that we see. 815 00:40:40,670 --> 00:40:42,590 So there's a time limit ticking down 816 00:40:42,701 --> 00:40:44,984 because if things start getting literally scarce-... 817 00:40:45,113 --> 00:40:48,264 Remember the first and second world war were dominance wars. 818 00:40:48,424 --> 00:40:49,772 They weren't based on scarcity. 819 00:40:50,252 --> 00:40:53,772 The kind of wars in the future if scarcity hits like it's going to 820 00:40:54,210 --> 00:40:56,836 if we don't change, it's going to be cataclysmic. 821 00:40:57,409 --> 00:40:59,058 The human society hasn't seen that yet, 822 00:40:59,323 --> 00:41:01,876 hasn't seen an actual resource war, not a real one. 823 00:41:02,375 --> 00:41:06,252 Not when water is now limited and people are going to go to war over it. 824 00:41:06,621 --> 00:41:08,572 And it's ridiculous to even think that would happen, 825 00:41:08,929 --> 00:41:10,676 frankly because we have all the technology to resolve it. 826 00:41:11,027 --> 00:41:13,076 But the arrogance of the people that are in power and 827 00:41:13,513 --> 00:41:16,676 the myopic view of the business community is such that again, 828 00:41:16,812 --> 00:41:20,683 they blinker these things out in favor of the general structure 829 00:41:20,830 --> 00:41:25,138 and they're willing to forego the well-being of others, euphemistically 830 00:41:25,590 --> 00:41:28,061 in order to preserve their positions so ... 831 00:41:28,670 --> 00:41:32,486 No more respect needs to be placed on the billionaires of this world or the political establishment. 832 00:41:32,947 --> 00:41:37,058 I'm not saying that people should be just arbitrarily ridiculed 833 00:41:37,200 --> 00:41:40,701 but we have to break the cultural violence, this need, 834 00:41:40,867 --> 00:41:44,030 this incessant impulsive thing that's happened in society where we worship 835 00:41:44,283 --> 00:41:47,236 class and status and billionaires! and it hasn't gotten better! 836 00:41:47,532 --> 00:41:48,880 It hasn't, it's gotten much worse, 837 00:41:49,027 --> 00:41:52,190 as again I think the Trump selection signifies. 838 00:41:52,596 --> 00:41:55,052 And we can't, we should loathe people: 839 00:41:55,169 --> 00:41:56,824 anyone that's a billionaire that doesn't say 840 00:41:56,935 --> 00:41:59,156 "I'm sorry I'm a billionaire but I'm gonna do my best," 841 00:41:59,267 --> 00:42:00,418 that's someone you would respect. 842 00:42:00,690 --> 00:42:02,283 Anyone that doesn't question the fact that, 843 00:42:02,769 --> 00:42:06,473 that doesn't raise the issue that it's wrong for it even to be possible 844 00:42:06,627 --> 00:42:08,470 that a billionaire can exist in this planet, 845 00:42:08,690 --> 00:42:12,264 it's just as it's wrong that someone should be sleeping on the street in their life. 846 00:42:12,707 --> 00:42:13,932 If that isn't pointed out 847 00:42:14,320 --> 00:42:16,492 then the neuroses will continue. 848 00:42:16,658 --> 00:42:18,910 - It certainly is not going to last, and your book 849 00:42:19,569 --> 00:42:22,738 is incredible, again everyone check it out: The New Human Rights Movement. 850 00:42:23,030 --> 00:42:25,132 The end vision for this book 851 00:42:25,458 --> 00:42:28,301 is a beautifully democratized symbiotic ecosystem almost 852 00:42:28,412 --> 00:42:31,821 where people are collaboratively growing society. ( - Yeah.) 853 00:42:32,036 --> 00:42:34,338 Talk about how you lay that vision out. 854 00:42:35,778 --> 00:42:38,689 - Well, in terms of transition there are 855 00:42:38,870 --> 00:42:40,683 five steps, so I try to be 856 00:42:41,716 --> 00:42:45,170 as direct as I can because it's very easy to just bring up a theory. 857 00:42:45,378 --> 00:42:48,720 So the five steps are (1) the application of automation that we've talked about, 858 00:42:49,169 --> 00:42:52,332 (2) the access of things as opposed to property, 859 00:42:52,738 --> 00:42:55,723 which doesn't necessarily mean that suddenly no property exists, 860 00:42:55,830 --> 00:42:59,107 it means that the society is incentivized to share what it has. 861 00:42:59,624 --> 00:43:01,827 Then there's (3) open source which builds into the access phenomenon; 862 00:43:01,932 --> 00:43:03,766 open source is what will create the innovation. 863 00:43:04,141 --> 00:43:05,710 Then there's (4) the localization phenomenon, 864 00:43:06,012 --> 00:43:08,744 that's where we finally realize, we keep a global sense, 865 00:43:08,966 --> 00:43:12,793 but we realize we don't need to have all of this industry spread all over the world 866 00:43:12,904 --> 00:43:15,132 in order to satisfy the community on the other side of the world. 867 00:43:16,393 --> 00:43:18,763 That one and then the other one is this more 868 00:43:19,070 --> 00:43:21,433 difficult thing to bring up called (5) digitized networked feedback, 869 00:43:21,810 --> 00:43:22,996 which all that really means [is] 870 00:43:23,670 --> 00:43:27,335 you track all the transactions that are happening, economic transactions, 871 00:43:27,464 --> 00:43:29,452 and it can be within a monetary system or without. 872 00:43:29,729 --> 00:43:32,030 And you have all the feedback that you need 873 00:43:32,258 --> 00:43:33,840 to know what's happening in an industry. 874 00:43:34,440 --> 00:43:35,372 So you put all these together 875 00:43:35,723 --> 00:43:38,486 and you end up with a system that incentivizes people working together, 876 00:43:38,818 --> 00:43:40,203 incentivize people sharing, 877 00:43:40,480 --> 00:43:42,566 all those Kindergarten things that we're taught, remember? 878 00:43:42,730 --> 00:43:44,935 all those things that we're supposed to have in our values that are 879 00:43:45,040 --> 00:43:48,055 completely robbed of us as we grow older and we realize that 880 00:43:48,190 --> 00:43:52,160 all the things we were taught as children that are ideal values were apparently wrong 881 00:43:52,547 --> 00:43:54,129 because no one ascribed to them anymore, 882 00:43:54,547 --> 00:43:56,633 And you have a non-competitive society obviously, 883 00:43:56,806 --> 00:43:58,726 and you have a society that's actually sustainability-focused 884 00:43:58,836 --> 00:44:00,603 because we're understanding what we're doing. 885 00:44:00,756 --> 00:44:04,067 So, it creates peaceful coexistence, 886 00:44:04,240 --> 00:44:05,606 more peaceful coexistence, 887 00:44:05,747 --> 00:44:07,827 and peaceful coexistence with nature 888 00:44:07,950 --> 00:44:09,206 meaning we're not over-exploiting. 889 00:44:09,450 --> 00:44:11,464 And the only caveat to that and I want to bring this back up, 890 00:44:11,570 --> 00:44:14,978 because this isn't a totally deterministic mechanistic view, 891 00:44:15,372 --> 00:44:18,529 is that we have to have a mature culture that doesn't thrive 892 00:44:18,830 --> 00:44:21,667 on this over-consuming, materialistic, 893 00:44:21,833 --> 00:44:24,460 vain idealism. 894 00:44:26,270 --> 00:44:28,024 That's the great argument I hear from people. 895 00:44:28,646 --> 00:44:30,520 But I envision a world where people are actually able 896 00:44:31,150 --> 00:44:34,289 to get what they need and it becomes a social reality as opposed 897 00:44:34,393 --> 00:44:37,840 to a material and vindictive and status-based reality. 898 00:44:37,963 --> 00:44:40,061 It doesn't mean that hierarchy doesn't exist 899 00:44:40,233 --> 00:44:42,012 in the future or in an idealized society 900 00:44:42,160 --> 00:44:43,126 because there are other things that we do. 901 00:44:43,230 --> 00:44:45,901 I'm not a visual artist, you're a visual artist. I'm a musician. 902 00:44:46,049 --> 00:44:47,900 There are natural hierarchies that happen 903 00:44:48,049 --> 00:44:51,446 and we respect those hierarchies because we appreciate the talents of people, 904 00:44:51,692 --> 00:44:52,849 not because they're, 905 00:44:53,353 --> 00:44:55,827 they had more money than you, therefore you're supposed to glamorize them 906 00:44:55,932 --> 00:44:57,667 and look up to them as though they're better than you. 907 00:44:57,833 --> 00:44:59,144 That is a complete contrivance. 908 00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:01,876 So there's always going to be a natural hierarchy which is good, 909 00:45:02,073 --> 00:45:05,033 because that proves our group mind, it proves our collaborative sense that 910 00:45:05,218 --> 00:45:07,716 you can do things that I can't do, and so on and so forth, 911 00:45:07,944 --> 00:45:10,935 that's what motivates the collaborative sense and the power 912 00:45:11,144 --> 00:45:13,390 of our society as a civilization. 913 00:45:13,840 --> 00:45:16,381 And if we can bring that formula together 914 00:45:16,610 --> 00:45:18,510 we could get everything back on track. 915 00:45:22,120 --> 00:45:24,609 The Empire Files 916 00:45:24,818 --> 00:45:26,320 Produced by teleSUR 917 00:45:26,596 --> 00:45:28,590 Directed & Written by Abby Martin 918 00:45:28,738 --> 00:45:30,510 Produced & Written by Mike Prysner 919 00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:40,080 teleSUR (c) 2017