many people blame Obama or even past-president George Bush

for the country's current problems and though we have seen

a slew of bad news out for Obama, just to give you a handful:

his approval ratings are 43%. They used to be 69%.

A NY Senate seat historically held by a Democrat

went to a Republican for the first time since 1923.

Solyndra, the solar panel making plant who got stimulus money

is facing bankruptcy and is now a scandal for the administration

and poverty has hit record highs.

But my next guest argues this is not about Obama.

It's not even about politics.

It is about needing a total overhaul of society.

And Peter Joseph, filmmaker and founder of the Zeitgeist Movement

coming off of his inaugural Zeitgeist Media Festival

is here to talk about his solutions.

Thank you for being here. It's nice to see you.

So to start out...- Thank you for having me. - Absolutely!

You argue the solutions to social problems are not politics.

What exactly are the solutions called for by the Zeitgeist Movement?

To understand the solutions you really have to understand

what the problems are.

In the broad view what we're faced with right now is basically the end

of a paradigm with respect to our social system.

It's not ending because of some bad policy

or some political malfeasance or any kind of economic issue.

It's ending because it can no longer sustain itself

by the natural evolution of human society and technology

and the inherent mechanisms that define this system

which are slowly growing out of control like a cancer.

We have a debt-based currency system.

Interest is charged on the money that's loaned

that doesn't exist outright in the money supply.

That, at its very core seed

is really why you see these sovereign debt defaults

corporate debt defaults, personal debt defaults across the world.

We have $60 trillion of private and public debt in America alone.

You can do the math on how much that is per person.

It's only going to grow as well and this is just the nature of this system.

We have an unemployment crisis, which is really driven by technology.

Technological unemployment has been the major attribute

that has moved people from sector to sector.

The illusion of most economists is that they say

"Technology is actually creating jobs."

That's actually a convoluted logic.

What happens is (and you can see this if you track

the industrial revolution to the modern point you see this very clearly)

but what happens is we start off with a certain sector: everyone's employed.

Technology comes in, displaces human labor and slowly other sectors emerge

usually on the basis of other technologies. It's a natural consequence

but it actually isn't a resolution and actually isn't creating anything.

What we're going to end up with is the necessity to have everyone either a lawyer

or working in the entertainment industry because there's no way

you're going to have a manufacturing sector with people actually employed.

There's no way you're going to have a service sector with people actually employed

because the cost efficiency that's enabled by technology

overrides the need for human labor.

What happened to Bank of America recently? They just laid off 40,000 people.

Do they understand what they're doing? They're actually laying off...

I just want to get in here to continue the conversation

because how do you separate out... I hear what you're saying about technology

and about the entertainment industry. I've lived in LA

but I do want to know how you can separate out

all of the jobs that we've seen go overseas to countries like China

and all of the people we've seen move into

a financial system that people say is overbanked in this country.

There have been a transition in industry and jobs.

There absolutely have been, but the question is

when you have 96% of the human population mostly in the West

which has the majority of the labor working in the service sector

which is now being replaced by automated kiosks

and many other advanced technological mediums, where is the next sector?

I want to point out that I look at this on a global scale.

I'm not interested in American unemployment or in any country's specifics

because it's one society. It's one world, one economy.

The question to be asked is:

Why will the majority of people eventually be unemployed on the planet?

That's because of technology. You can forget about outsourcing and all of that.

The only thing to learn from that is that industry and its prime motivation

to corporation shareholders, is to make sure they maintain a profit.

Displacing human labor because of the cost-efficiency

enabled by technological automation

is the contradiction and collapse of capitalism

that many economic theorists have talked about for the past 100 years

including John Maynard Keynes. - Right

This is an inevitable evolution and it's not going to stop.

You're saying the problem is capitalism.

What are you saying is the solution?

The solution is a completely different reordering

of how we actually engage materials, how we create production

and how people actually contribute to society. If you recognize this reality

that the market system as we know it which is the bedrock

of the capitalist free enterprise system, whatever you want to call it...

If we recognize this phenomenon as phasing out and mark my words

the jobs are not coming back across the board. They can't!

The system will not enable it by its inherent logic.

When you realize this, you start to open up your mind.

You think to yourself "If technology can provide

all of these tools to enhance production..."

By the way, technological unemployment

is inverse to productivity across the world

which means the less people we have working in industry

the more we apply technology, the more production capabilities

we actually have which is amazing.

What this means is that we can use technology. We can free ourselves

create an entirely different social system

based on maximizing our efficiency hence our sustainability

through advanced methods of production and eventually providing

for literally the entire human species if we put our mind to it

and overcome all the traditionalized barriers that are stopping us

because of this traditionalized notion we think is empirical in society.

- You're calling for something really untraditional, but what is it?

It kind of sounds like getting rid of capitalism and putting in what?

You can give it names. It's about appreciating a train of thought

about what we're doing and how it can actually benefit human society

and create the best public health and safety

providing for as many people on the planet as possible.

If you want to give it a name, you can call it a Resource-Based Economy

or a resource-based economic model because really

what is the foundation of human society? It's resources.

It's resources, not only of the physical gold

food and all of those attributes, it's also the mental resource.

We have people wasting their lives as secretaries

and in industries that don't produce anything

such as Wall Street and advertising.

Can you tell me what they're producing that actually helps anybody directly?

There really isn't anything. These are filler concepts

that actually don't contribute. If you take the approach

that we live off of resources and you organize those resources

you make the most efficient production system you can

based on what technical knowledge allows us to do: scientific understanding.

You reorient society to let people actually engage in occupations

that actually do something, instead of spending all of our high...

taking all of our scientists and putting them on military operations right now.

They could be using that same engineering resource and mental capacity

to benefit all the world's people and create a material abundance.

No one could ever be starving on this planet.

This is statistically proven, even with the current inefficiencies we have now.

To summarize, we have resource-based economic model.

It's a ground-up approach to resource management

and we make everything as efficient

and productive as possible, technically. No monetary evaluation

no monetary association because all that does is interfere

and cause more problems and limit our possibility.

- I want to keep this conversation going because I do want to hit on

a number of things here: What about government?

What does that look like?

What about individual freedom?

- Ask yourself a question: What is individual freedom?

Is it walking into a job that you probably had no control over

in the sense of your necessity for income

more or less a private dictatorship that people go into from 9 to 5?

Is that freedom? Is freedom what you get money for to go and buy?

Is it your freedom to go into a store and pick between 28 different

varieties of cereal that you can choose from. What is freedom?

Maybe not. - The system that we talk about...- Go ahead.

The system that we speak of actually will enable

a level of freedom for human society never before seen.

To answer your question: what is government?

Government is really a failure of the economic system.

What does a government do? They create laws

to regulate economic functions, not to mention all the aberrations

that come from the lack of economic efficiency that we have

meaning violence, property crimes which is the majority of it.

They also engage in military operations against other sovereign nations

so they can better themselves and protect themselves over time.

These are basically the only two things that government actually does

if you really sit down and look at it. Politicians have no technical orientation.

They mirror value systems. They manipulate people's values

so people will identify with them and say "Oh, I like them!" It doesn't matter

if they have a plan. None of these politicians running for the US presidency

have any plan whatsoever as far as what the unemployment issue

and the debt issue really require

what the energy issue really requires, which are firmly technical.

Government in the future will literally be

the management of the planet, producing exactly what we can produce

with the highest efficiency to benefit the world's people.

This is what a true economic model would be. What is economics?

It's defined in Greek as the management of a household.

The planet is our household. A true economic model is proper

efficient management of this household

not the use of money as a commodity

and all the distortion that has emerged from that process.

- But Peter, it sounds a little bit like this is a utopic vision of society.

What is one example you have seen

that you believe that this will work because you've seen it happen?

- First of all, utopia assumes a finality. There's no such thing as a finality.

We're just trying to update society to present-day knowledge.

Remember our notions of economics and politics are based on traditional ideas

that go back hundreds if not thousands of years.

These are completely outdated social structures that do not

resemble any of our scientific ingenuity at this point in time

and our ability to actually to care for the human population

which is what a society is supposed to do, right?

The best example you can have are first nations' people

that actually understood what it meant to live off the land.

They understood the carrying capacity of their region

and that you don't pollute the stream that they drink from

which is something industry does every single day right now

for its necessity to maintain cost-efficiency. The very simplistic notion...

- Let me ask you this then. I don't want to go back and work the land.

I love what I do. I'm a journalist. I enjoy it a lot.

I'm not just going to give that up.

How do you actually make what you're talking about, happen?

The bio-social pressures that will emerge and inhibit your life

and that of your family and everyone else on this planet

through time as this system completely deteriorates will make you question

what you value with respect to what you like to do.

It's not an issue of what any of us like. It's an issue of what is right

and what's sustainable for the human species

what will actually work for us a society

without causing conflict and all the deprivation and problems

that continue to deteriorate our standard of living

and create much less safety through society.

If you ask the question "I like to do this"

you'd have to ask yourself why.

Is there anything in your history maybe that you liked to do other than that?