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  • Hi everybody, welcome to the Jimmy Dore Show.

  • We have a special guest with us:

  • the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement and author of this new book

  • 'The New Human Rights Movement,' it's Peter Joseph is with us.

  • Say hello to Peter Joseph. Hi Peter! - Hey, how you doing there Jimmy.

  • - Now first of all, I read this book,

  • I'm not a good reader so I probably missed a lot of stuff.

  • It is a great book and, for me

  • what I took away from it, you really examined

  • capitalism and the effects of capitalism

  • on societies and people's psyches and

  • there was so many mind-blowing things in this book

  • I can't- I don't even know where to start so let me just ask you Peter

  • you could maybe tell people what this book is about and summarize it for us.

  • - Sure. So the New Human Rights movement -

  • the NEW human rights movement, how dare I?

  • What was the OLD human rights movement?

  • The focus being we have to take kind of a broader

  • sociological structural view of society,

  • to think about all the interplays that produce human behavior,

  • that produce our social systems, our institutions moreso.

  • Like what has fomented all of this, how have we gotten here?

  • And that is a public health debate.

  • That is an issue of what defines public health, what defines

  • actually, progress as we know it,

  • has to be defined in terms of actual health regards,

  • not necessarily what we're producing in society,

  • not how much productivity we have or

  • the extent of GDP or how many people are employed,

  • but how happy are we?

  • And this is the core of it as a public health treatment.

  • And I put it in the context of human rights

  • because I feel that when people realize that we have a structural problem,

  • and when I use that word "structural" I mean that there's larger order things

  • that are happening that influence our behavior,

  • just as there are biological things that influence our behavior.

  • So structuralism, sociology effectively,

  • it's an interdisciplinary kind of study, which means

  • you have to take a lot into account to figure out what the hell is going on in the world.

  • And that's really what this is about at it's very core is that approach.

  • And what I conclude in the text is that with

  • this old economy that we have, you can call it

  • market system, you can call it capitalism,

  • I think of it more broadly, I say it's an economy run by market forces;

  • that more gets to the point of it.

  • Market forces embodies all the motivations people have,

  • it generates the infrastructure so to speak, the procedural dynamics,

  • all the things we have to do to game in this reality to survive.

  • And then you have all these people, suddenly 7 billion of us,

  • pulling levers on a giant machine

  • and we're not paying attention to what this machine's actually doing.

  • We're getting our little treats and we're throwing it in our mouth

  • and our little stupid rewards, and we keep going on our short-term interest,

  • and yet this machine is a big train that's flying straight off of a cliff into oblivion.

  • And until we get our heads around that we're gonna have a serious public health crisis

  • in terms of socioeconomic inequality, one of the most destructive forces

  • on the face of the earth, shattering human trust,

  • 'social capitalists' they call it, we don't trust each other anymore.

  • We have disparate groups that are going out of control,

  • we have a whole new level of insurgencies and terrorism.

  • The United States of course is the forbidden example of all of this,

  • the forbidden experiment I should say.

  • Sort of like when you lock a kid in the closet, and you don't look at them for 10 years,

  • and they come out and they're all deranged with this kind of primalness,

  • that's the way I see the United States experiment at this point because

  • look at the violence, look at everything that we're doing, look how weird

  • the culture has become, look at the political system.

  • It's become this amalgamation of so many things that in my mind

  • is indicative of the worst outcomes, the most predictably at worst

  • peak outcomes of the kind of social system we have:

  • the capitalist market-force-driven system.

  • So that in combination with the ecological crisis,

  • again those levers that we're pulling on the machine.

  • - So let me just stop you at the market forces. - Sure, yeah.

  • - So, your critique is talking about that this "free market system"

  • first of all isn't a free market system, that

  • it's really manipulated by the people

  • with the most money which means they're the most powerful

  • that manipulate a "free market" into their favor.

  • Correct? Would that be correct?

  • - As would be expected, so here's one differentiation that I want to make.

  • So a lot of people say this, they'll bring up this debate

  • "Well, if we could only have a more robust free market,

  • if we could stop the 'crony' capitalism,

  • if we could stop all the apparent things that are anomalous!"

  • But they're NOT anomalous.

  • They're part of the competitive gaming strategy

  • of group versus group.

  • And capitalism is the embodiment of that primitive behavior

  • coming from again, eons of evolution of our most core and base instincts

  • of keeping your tribalism together and not caring about the external,

  • and it's that very problem that in our high-tech society is again flying us off

  • of the cliff, so go back to your point -

  • What we have in terms of the free market,

  • everything you see around you, this is it: this is the free market.

  • It's the free market that buys politicians just like you buy pizza.

  • It's the free market that takes and

  • gouges people in the medical community to get as much as they possibly can,

  • to extract for the self-interest of one group or corporation.

  • It's the free market that lobbies, that does everything that you consider to be unethical

  • but within the game of competition there really aren't any lines anymore.

  • I mean it just depends on what corner you're backed into.

  • - And so, because,

  • so now why is it that some places

  • institute a form of free markets or capitalism, say like Denmark,

  • which they have a very strong social safety net

  • and they're now the happiest country in the world I'm pretty sure or one of the top.

  • - Finland and Denmark, yeah.

  • - Okay. And they have less income inequality than we have here.

  • So why does it seem that our version of capitalism in the United States

  • is so much more brutal than places like Denmark?

  • - First of all I'm glad you bring that up because that goes back to

  • democratic socialist policies and with Bernie Sanders and

  • the very simple public health issues that he's brought up in terms of comparing

  • our society and what we can do in terms of increasing public health

  • and say "yes it can be done, it's already been done in these countries."

  • And that is absolutely important information that everyone listening

  • should look into because it proves

  • when you look at the happiness indexes, when you look at

  • the way they go about their lives, their public health metrics,

  • they are doing so much better than we are.

  • And that is amazing information. Now why can't we just superimpose

  • that type of capitalism upon the United States? (- right), is a great question.

  • The difference is that we live in the global society

  • and the fleeting middle class of the United States is like

  • the fleeting middle class of Denmark and Finland,

  • and the Gini coefficients are still rising amongst all of these countries as well

  • as more stress on the planet,

  • the more social stress, the more tensions between nations increases.

  • So my point here is that you can't just look at the United States as some isolated bubble

  • and then look at Finland as an isolated bubble

  • and say that this policy should just be implanted here

  • without regard to the evolution of ALL the countries,

  • the colonization that has produced the landscapes that we see, the borders that we see,

  • without the globalization and the power of transnational corporations.

  • Sweden might be a very happy country.

  • One of its biggest exports are massive military war machines.

  • So there's a synergy to all of this that,

  • my analogy is you drive down the middle class [neighborhood] in Los Angeles.

  • "Oh, look at these people, there's a dentist there's a doctor.

  • These people are doing great, they like their jobs, they have their nice home,

  • they have their family, the ideal American dream."

  • But yet what's on the other side of that middle-class neighborhood?

  • Extreme slums, and extreme wealth.

  • And that's the way the world is.

  • So that's why Finland and Denmark exist in the class middle-ground that they do,

  • because of all the extremes around them.

  • - Okay. Oh I see what you're saying.

  • So you look at them,

  • they're like the middle class of the world (- exactly) in a sense

  • so you can't extract that ... So you look at it as one whole.

  • - Now that's not to discount the important information we learn from them.

  • We should be looking at these countries to see what's working in terms of

  • increasing public health and ecological stability because some of these countries and even

  • in areas of Germany and so on, they're doing robust things to create more sustainability.

  • But they still exist in pockets, and as long as the empires

  • maintain themselves as they do (China, the United States, Russia)

  • their gravity - what they actually do - will continue to affect the entire planet

  • and the extremes of their behavior

  • are gonna make a lot of the stuff that's happening in these other smaller countries kind of moot,

  • especially in terms of development of sustainability.

  • - Let's start with how- I don't think people realize, I think

  • people individually realize how tough they have it

  • and how hard it is to tread water and we can say things like

  • gofundme's number-one campaigns are for medical expenses.

  • You have a great statistic, you have many great statistics

  • that are great examples of how bad things have gotten with our system, our economic system.

  • And one of those things that I've been repeating ever since I read it was:

  • 63% of people in the United States can't afford a $1,000 emergency.

  • And so this is the richest country in the world! right?

  • and the history in the world.

  • And yet 63% of its population is poor, it can't afford a thousand dollar

  • emergency, 50% of people are poor or low income,

  • 50% of all wage earners are $30,000 or less.

  • So do you have any more of these great statistics to show how our system has failed?

  • - I should have made a statistic list, but look at the debt.

  • It's from a couple years ago but if I remember correctly 43%

  • of people live beyond their means every year.

  • - Here in the United States?

  • - Yeah, not because they're just greedy people that want their new TVs.

  • There's an element of social inclusion that's inherent to us as a species

  • where yeah- people want to be included in what the society as a whole is doing.

  • So that's what poor really, to be poor, really means: you're not included, right? (- Right.)

  • If we lived in Mexico (kind of an aside),

  • if we lived in a rural area of Mexico and everyone has great happiness indexes out there

  • and they have good public health but they're poor!

  • But they don't KNOW they're poor.

  • It's like the public health research in Cuba.

  • When they're isolated and they're not experiencing this massive wealth divide

  • and the feeling of kind of marginalization

  • because they don't have certain economic means or certain elements of inclusion

  • and they can't go out and do this-or-that that other rich people can do,

  • this creates sickness when people experience that and if you don't have that,

  • and this gets to the heart of what it means to have relative poverty

  • and why socioeconomic inequality is so destructive.

  • If you go through epidemiological research, any peer reviewed studies, just look at it.

  • I encourage anyone to do this, look at what economic inequality

  • correlates to in countries that have the most of it.

  • The United States: off-the-chart violence.

  • - So the correlation (- drug addiction...), you use the term precondition, that capitalism

  • is a precondition for violence, murder, could you explain it that way?

  • - Yeah. From a public health standpoint a precondition is something that comes before.

  • So a precondition to getting a certain disease

  • is to have exposure to certain things, so to speak.

  • You could also say a precondition to driving a car is to get the license and so on.

  • But the point being is if you have

  • a certain foundation in your society that you can correlate to

  • (which has been statistically done) to numerous outcomes then

  • that state becomes a precondition, predictably so.

  • (I didn't explain that very well.)

  • A precondition - here's a better example - to getting cancer would be to smoke cigarettes.

  • Not everybody who smoke cigarettes gets cancer I should say.

  • But there's a statistical probability

  • that people that are involved in that exposure are going to have that problem.

  • And that's where we are with say American economics, the American zeitgeist as it were.

  • So a good percentage of the population

  • is going to turn into really hideous materialists

  • or is gonna become more authoritarian since the rise of Trump,

  • or is going to condone really brute policies in the Middle East

  • and all of this, again, this exceptionalism in America.

  • So the idea of a precondition means something that comes before and if you want to

  • get rid of all those caustic outcomes you get rid of the precondition.

  • And that's my whole argument in the book is

  • we have to do something different with our economy; it is the foundation of everything.

  • The Neolithic Revolution happened 12,000 years ago,

  • it set the stage for agriculture, settlement,

  • cities, trade, exchange, labor specialization.

  • Suddenly the entire architecture of what we know as our market economy was built

  • from that point on, and we've been in this

  • this disputed groupistic in-group out-group

  • warring machine ever since.

  • Now keep in mind, before that, 99% of human history:

  • no money or markets; we lived egalitarian.

  • So anyone that gives you that human-nature argument

  • "Humans are just mean!" you know, the whole Western philosophy,

  • from John Locke to Adam Smith, to any of those folks,

  • to Thomas Malthus of course, they all look at human society as this

  • this mean cruel thing, that we are just these beasts

  • and that this is the way it is but that is absolutely debunked

  • by the historical record.

  • - So another way of saying that is

  • people who advocate for selfishness (- yeah), right? correct?

  • and you make that point in the book that

  • that's not actually a good way to form an economic system

  • based on self-interest, right?

  • - I would say that because of the determinism that happened

  • when we created agriculture, we created this warring machine

  • that before that time didn't actually exist.

  • I'm trying to put this in terms that are very-...

  • - So there was a time when human beings were hunter-gatherers. (- Yes.)

  • And then they made the switch to agriculture.

  • - Yes, and that set the stage for all the, I call it geographical determinism,

  • which is, I hate to sound technical but ultimately what it means is that

  • you have all the characteristics that you define of our, so let me-...

  • We have property rights in our society.

  • Obviously if you do something you want to protect it,

  • or someone else might steal it that doesn't have the resource.

  • You have security issues, obviously, it's similar to property rights.

  • You have capital, which is that engine of creation

  • that's done mostly through money but also relates to labor and so on.

  • And all of that was codified at that period of time.

  • I want to make sure this point is very clear, I apologize if I didn't explain it very well.

  • We are on the trajectory we are because of the Agricultural Revolution,

  • and we have to get out of this trajectory and reorganize our economy

  • if we expect there to be any kind of harmony on this planet

  • and if we expect to maintain ecological stability or homeostasis with the habitat.

  • This is where we are at this point in time

  • and how we organize that is going to be the defining feature of the next century.

  • Because as of right now, not to jump to the end here

  • but I just want to make this point before I forget,

  • with the advent of the pollution crisis,

  • with everything that's happening in terms of resource overshoot, biodiversity loss,

  • about 30 years from now

  • the refugee crisis is gonna go from 65 million to probably about 200 million

  • as the climate change starts to dry out more regions in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia,

  • while the other lush regions start to flood because of the rise of the oceans.

  • So what is that going to mean?

  • All of our ponderances of democracy and so on become rather moot

  • when the Western society in Europe is gonna have an influx of people from these regions

  • that have nowhere else to go.

  • - And this is because of climate change

  • getting not only the encroachment of the sea

  • but the reduction in topsoil, correct?

  • - There's a whole litany of things and I want to point out

  • it's not because of those things,

  • it's because we have an economic system that [has] absolutely no regard

  • for any balance with the environment.

  • Here's the paradox of our market economy in the 21st century.

  • We have a system based on scarcity,

  • which justifies our political nonsense so it's politicized:

  • "Oh we can't have health care for the American public because we can't afford that!"

  • Then we can go bomb a country with trillions of dollars into infinity.

  • So the contradiction is immense, but that's the argument: scarcity.

  • But then what do we do? We promote infinite consumption.

  • "Go out and buy everything! Keep buying and consuming because that fuels jobs."

  • That fuels again GDP and everything that denotes survival.

  • So we have this backward system that is completely antithetical to sustainability

  • and in many ways antithetical to any kind of group harmony and social justice.

  • I firmly argue that, you look at the whole world, all these movements,

  • you look at all the people that want to see balance, they want to see fairness, right?

  • That's the whole drive of our progress as a species,

  • to see fairness: gender fairness, creed fairness, ethnicity fairness,

  • national fairness in the sense of immigration and so on.

  • But no one, very few stop to say

  • "Well, what about economic fairness or economic democracy?" Everyone stops short

  • because they know they're gonna get that label as a communist or Marxist. (- right)

  • They're gonna be a NATIONAL socialist and suddenly they're compared to Hitler!

  • I've had these comparisons made to myself. (- Really!)

  • Seriously it's unbelievable how the propaganda, as you know very well Jimmy,

  • the nonsensical polarization left-right,

  • Republican, Democrat, Marxist, communist, socialist.

  • Instead of thinking about it in terms of that let's think about what actually works.

  • Instead of looking at our system of economy as some,

  • some part of a dyad of "ooh is it socialism, is it capitalism?"

  • well how about we just ask the question "does the system even work?" (- does it work?)

  • That's it! It doesn't goddamn work!

  • - I mean you can look around it's not working, right? (- No!)

  • So all those statistics that we just gave,

  • it shows you and the question that I've been asking since I started reading this book

  • is what do you call a system that takes the richest country in the world

  • and renders half of its population poor or low income?

  • You call that a failed system! And no one talks about this so

  • let's just talk about the system a little bit more.

  • So automation, everyone's talking about automation:

  • we're gonna have driverless cars, driverless trucks,

  • no cashiers anymore.

  • Automation, you say in the book, it spurs inequality

  • and the fruits of... is that true? - Well keep going.

  • - And that the fruits of robots go to the upper class.

  • - As in the current system, absolutely. I think in fact [since] the big

  • since the great crisis, the Great Recession whatever they call it 2007-2008,

  • and then you had the recovery, right? And it's been well acknowledged that

  • 90, 95% of that recovery money went straight to the upper five... - Right! Went straight to them.

  • - So that money really, that wealth is actually

  • output by the process of automation and industrial efficiency.

  • (that's a slight aside) In other words

  • all the automation and technological progress we've seen in industry and business

  • has gone to the upper five/one percent.

  • That is unfortunately where the driving force of rapid inequality is coming from.

  • Why? Because we're not using automation in the way that we should as a species

  • and that is to replace monotonous and boring labor to free people to enable

  • people to actually have creativity and to do things that they want to do.

  • So that's because of the system that we have, the inequality.

  • Automation itself is the ultimate contradiction of the system at this point,

  • the 21st century because, how are you gonna keep people employed if

  • you're gonna be replaced by machines? what do you do at that point?

  • It means you have to find another way to compensate, hence

  • the dawn of universal basic income promoted by

  • Elon Musk and other people that are aware of this.

  • - Yeah and I was gonna say what people don't realize, when they say

  • "Oh well if those McDonald's workers want $15 an hour just replace them with a robot."

  • What those people don't realize when they say that is that

  • when a McDonald's worker gets paid

  • they take that money and put it right back into the economy.

  • When a robot at McDonald's gets paid it does not go back into the economy.

  • That money now gets actually extracted from the economy

  • and it goes into a bank account probably offshore somewhere

  • or it goes into the pocket of a millionaire or a billionaire

  • who already has all the stuff he needs to buy.

  • So that creates this emptiness inside of our economy,

  • and the way I heard someone else describe it, I think Mark Blyth said

  • "The problem with robots is robots don't buy stuff."

  • And our whole economy is based on us buying stuff.

  • That's why after 9/11 George Bush said go out, go out shopping,

  • and go to your destinations, right?

  • And so- because this is what our whole economy is based on.

  • If we're afraid to shop, our economy will constrict.

  • So automation is gonna mean constriction

  • and all that extra money being saved by robots is not gonna go back into our economy

  • but go back to the 1%, right? do I have it correct?

  • - You do absolutely and of course the pundits will say "Well,

  • if you give more money to the business class it will just trickle down as it always does," right?

  • - But that evidence is in, right?

  • We've tried this trickle-down economics now going on 40 years,

  • and by the way just the sound of that: "Please sir, may I have a trickle?

  • Is there a trickle of money for me please sir? a trickle!"

  • That's what that sounds- that's exactly what it is!

  • And we're living in the- it doesn't work!

  • One more thing I want to just-

  • I've heard someone talking this morning about

  • the reason why Trump may get reelected in 2020

  • is because we're very close to full employment

  • and that

  • just by sheer economic force people are going to start getting raises.

  • And the reason why Bill Clinton was so popular in the '90s

  • even while being impeached (which he was!)

  • was because that was the first time in a long time workers saw a raise in pay.

  • It hasn't happened since and it didn't happen before since 1980,

  • and so it might happen right now with Trump

  • because we're in very close to full employment.

  • And is that- what do you say about that, is that true?

  • - Since the end of the Obama administration and the Trump administration's beginning to now,

  • 90% of those new jobs are gig economy jobs.

  • They're not real jobs with benefits, they don't have health insurance.

  • - What does that mean, gig economy?

  • - It means that they're just freelancers. (- yeah)

  • Freelancers that have no liability, they can be fired at a whim.

  • - Like an Uber driver or a Lyft driver.

  • - Absolutely, and I think it's really depressing that we hold up this statistic.

  • Well first of all as you know there's a whole,

  • there's a massive percentage, probably 12-13% of people that are off the grid so to speak

  • when it comes to unemployment.

  • They're just not even in the system anymore because they don't try.

  • And they live in the outskirts,

  • and they do complementary things in their neighborhood.

  • So unemployment's actually a lot higher than ...

  • - So the REAL unemployment, what would you say?

  • - I'd think like 14 percent. - Really!

  • - Yeah, there's people that track these metrics every year,

  • and I'd say, it may be a little less than that now but it's close to that

  • because they're not counting these folks; these people live on the outskirts,

  • they're off the grid literally, they're not metrically denoted.

  • So getting back to the gig economy, okay yeah so we've had,

  • we apparently have more people employed but they're employed in terrible jobs

  • that don't have any future.

  • - Just to speak to that, 44% of homeless people have a job.

  • So what does that tell you about the jobs in America?

  • - Exactly.

  • Obviously that's not, just like GDP, it's not a metric of progress.

  • You have to go deeper (- right!), you don't just throw this stuff out there.

  • And of course Trump being the-... whatever he is-

  • he'll give you the superficial everything (- yes)

  • as the Republican Party will to support him.

  • One thing I want to say about the unemployment thing, just to make a point,

  • a broad social point not to distract, is that:

  • what has been the greatest driver of oppression on this planet since human history?

  • and that is oppression of Labor.

  • So the automation thing, if we can allow it to have fruition,

  • will create an amiable society, if we can start to remove the need of labor for income,

  • we will remove that pressure that has been the most oppressive force

  • from abject human slavery, up into the 60-

  • what is it, the 64 million slaves in the world today based on UN standards?

  • I apologize if that metric's not current, I think it's like 50 million, yeah.

  • And they're being manipulated through

  • the sex trafficking or through domestic house trafficking.

  • Like I'm sure you heard about the people in Washington,

  • political leaders that basically got slaves doing their laundry.

  • So all of that could go away

  • if we start to reorganize our economy, just that simple notion of

  • generating a new social construct where we're not constantly at war with each other,

  • employees aren't at war with other employees,

  • companies aren't at war with other companies.

  • That's what I talk about the end of the book, is you can do it.

  • - So yeah you do say, in fact I wrote it down:

  • "Everyone can enjoy a life of leisure

  • if the wealth created by machines is shared."

  • - That's actually what Stephen Hawking said, I quoted him.

  • He's absolutely right, even in his general intuitive brilliance when it came to social issues.

  • It makes perfect sense if you-...

  • Here's one thing that I think is worth bringing up before I forget,

  • is that we have this infinite wants culture.

  • We have people that think that we're insatiable, right?

  • "Humans are insatiable, they WANT the ten Lamborghinis,"

  • they want the room with the 700 rooms, the mansion, whatever.

  • - So it's all not true, right?

  • - It's preposterous on its head to say that that would be true.

  • I think it's a burden

  • to see that anyone would even want to have that kind of liability.

  • It's a value system problem that's been generated through our status,

  • market-driven status system, that says you are what you own

  • and you are how much money you have in your bank account.

  • But back to my core point though is that, that value system - if that's true -

  • then we might as well just slit all their throats right now!

  • This is what mainstream economists, political economists,

  • philosophers of economy have been saying forever.

  • And it's held up by all the libertarians like

  • "Oh you can't have any kind of balance or equal distribution.

  • You can't do that because people are irrational basically, and they have infinite wants!"

  • And that is absolutely preposterous that this idea, this myth-

  • - In fact there was a study done

  • (you could probably remember the name of it, I don't but)

  • the numbers that I remember being in the study was that

  • they tried to figure out your level of happiness as relates to your income.

  • - Oh right, the $75,000... - So talk about that.

  • - So that's a good metric, I think that's a little loose but

  • based on the polls that they did, once you reach a threshold of $75,000 a year.

  • I'm not sure what region they're accounting for,

  • assuming they're compensating and averaging it out.

  • - Like real estate would be a bigger factor in Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco

  • than it would be in Des Moines. - Exactly.

  • - So roughly there's a number

  • and they said it was 75,000, I'd say if you live in LA it would be probably $100,000.

  • - You're right. Or New York. - But after that point-

  • - After that point it doesn't influence their happiness. (- you don't get happier!)

  • They become probably more confused. (- yes!) You might like in my book how

  • I denoted all that what happens to rich people as they go up the economic ladder ...

  • where it talks about all the studies that have been done,

  • a lot of them (- oh yeah) from UC Berkeley,

  • how people when they get more and more wealth (- yes, less empathy)

  • they get less empathy, they can't recognize empathy!

  • - They can't even-... they don't talk about...

  • - They don't donate to anything but like museums (- yes!) and churches

  • or colleges, universities for like higher education.

  • They never contribute to poverty-... (- that's the greatest part of the book)

  • The poorest people of our world

  • (especially the United States but statistically denoted across the world)

  • are so much more kind!

  • because they have an actual identification to common folk.

  • But the more you get wealthy, the more you separate yourself,

  • the more you become like Trump!

  • the more it becomes some kind of weakness to care.

  • And these people, as denoted in the book,

  • a whole litany of things that would just make you cringe.

  • It seems counterintuitive, like you think you get more and more,

  • the more relaxed you become.

  • It's not what happens to these folks (- no!), they become much more ...

  • I'd say socially Darwinistic (- yes!), Malthusian, in the sense that they feel so entitled

  • and they relay that, and then what happens not to disrupt you,

  • what happens? where do those people go?

  • They go into politics, and they go into lobbies. (- yes!)

  • So then we wonder "Oh well, how did we get here?"

  • Well because the sickness of elitism driven by money and wealth

  • is what runs the government and most governments of the world

  • and that's why we are in this paralyzed state that we're in.

  • - Yes, so in a sense, being wealthy

  • starts to impact you in a mental health position in a negative way. (- It does.)

  • You start to lose empathy for other people to the point where you can't even-

  • They did- those studies are awesome where they

  • they couldn't pick up on social cues. (- right.) The richer you got

  • you lost your ability to pick up on the people's social cues from their face! (- Right.)

  • They've done other studies where they've even played games with Monopoly.

  • And so they would give one person way more money at the start

  • and then when that person won at the end they would say

  • "What did you think, it was fair? and they go "Yeah I think I played better than everybody."

  • So people who end up winning,

  • even when the game is rigged in their favor and they KNOW it,

  • still think they deserve what they got.

  • - Now relate that back to the sickness of the billionaire class.

  • Here's what I look for whenever I think of a billionaire,

  • may be positive ones, there's always something

  • philanthropic that has its role that we should commend, some nuance,

  • commend some element of their behavior but, here's the clincher.

  • If you're a billionaire, and you don't admit

  • that there's something very wrong with a system that allows you to be a billionaire

  • then you're kind of off the moral radar as far as I'm concerned.

  • You can go out and promote all the things that you think are positive,

  • you can be the Elon Musk humanist,

  • or the Richard Branson or the Bill Gates or whatever.

  • But if you're not acknowledging the fact that it's wrong for that to even exist,

  • just like it's wrong for there to be a homeless person on the street,

  • those extremes should not exist in human society and they do nothing positive.

  • Anyone that justifies this in terms of the innovation and so on (- right!),

  • that's another conversation we can have.

  • No single person innovates things.

  • Everyone builds upon everything else

  • laterally in terms of our communication actively,

  • and through generational time.

  • So this whole idea that "you get what you work for," well if that's the case

  • then every single person should be born into a blank space (- right)

  • with no streets or infrastructure;

  • they'd have to build everything themselves to get what they work for.

  • So these preposterous philosophical notions, they need to be shut down.

  • - You make points about the charity-giving from billionaires

  • and it's really interesting about

  • they don't want their tax dollars to go to the government

  • so like there's these billionaires; I met one of them.

  • And they have this,

  • I forget the name of the project but they're gonna give away half of their wealth

  • or something like- do you know about this?

  • - Supposedly, right? Are you referring to the old billionaire pact?

  • - Yes! Talk about that.

  • - So Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, a bunch of billionaires got together,

  • and it was a response to Occupy Wall Street by the way, it's just a big PR move. (- Yes!)

  • They say "Oh we're gonna set up this fund

  • and everyone's gonna make an agreement to give half if not more of their wealth

  • to charity when they die."

  • And this is their poetry, and that's all it is, because no one's really done it.

  • And if they do they do it to their own private foundations! (- That's it.)

  • So Bill Gates is like "I gave away all my money!" No he didn't!

  • He started a foundation and dumped his money inside of it

  • with numerous tax loopholes to benefit off of.

  • Not to say that he doesn't mean well,

  • but it's part of an elitist narcissism that these people actually think

  • they're more important in their views: they can influence countries,

  • they can change the health care like the Gates Foundation in some country

  • without any democratic presence at all! (- Right!)

  • That is totalitarian philanthropy and that's just wrong.

  • - That's it. So, these billionaires,

  • they don't want democracy in their philanthropy...

  • - And that's why they keep money out of the government, they keep it offshore.

  • They do everything to keep it in the pocket of their little crew

  • because they're always libertarian, like people like (- yes)

  • Peter Thiel, have you heard of this guy? - Yeah. - The founder of, oh my god!

  • He is the poster child of just everything ideologically wrong with the way-

  • He's the one that started the idea of 'seasteading,' have you heard of this thing? (- No.)

  • Well this is great. He wanted to, (he talked about this years ago)

  • he wants to build artificial islands off the coast in international waters because there's no law.

  • And he wants to create basically an "Ayn Rand utopia"

  • where you can have your libertarian values, there's no government,

  • everyone's just gonna be trading and it's gonna be a utopian market system!

  • Absolutely unbelievable what I read about that,

  • I couldn't believe how delusional you could possibly become.

  • Only if you're a billionaire could you do that obviously. (- Right.)

  • Like if it's a whole island of billionaires that's great!

  • But if you set in motion, I'll say this, if you set in motion on an island

  • the mechanics of this system in and of itself with no regulation, no government,

  • it would self-destruct in a matter of moments

  • because you can't have a warfare system without regulation.

  • There's got to be something without it self-destructing, in other words warfare meaning-...

  • The market externalities of this, not to change the subject,

  • I just wanted to just bring this up.

  • What this system does is create externalities in the form of poverty,

  • in the form of war, in the form of insurgencies, in the form of terrorism,

  • of course in the form of pollution and climate change.

  • All of these things are things that the system can't account for,

  • so it just dismisses them into the ether as things that aren't related.

  • And when people argue for the system (you know, the pro-libertarian folks),

  • they always think that those things are anomalous.

  • "Oh! it's the state government that messed up the free market and now we have poverty.

  • It's the state government that's not doing their job right,

  • and so now we have pollution." No!

  • The government exists in a middle ground between

  • trying to organize and stop the anarchy of this system of self-interest and competition,

  • and it's also a tool of differential advantage for the most privileged of the business class.

  • Point being the Koch brothers.

  • Koch brothers are right there influencing government as you would expect them to be

  • while at the same time there are people like Bernie Sanders

  • that are trying their best to stop this kind of behavior.

  • And that's the dynamic. And who's gonna win?

  • Who's gonna win in that circumstance? - The money's gonna win. - Yeah!

  • So I always joke, I say "Well if you have a whole society based on money,

  • self-interest, profit,

  • you know what? The Koch brothers SHOULD own and run America!

  • That would be consistent with our policy as a philosophy

  • in general in this country, and the world.

  • So why do we object? It's just hypocrisy in my mind when people don't see that.

  • - I want to stay one more, just one more moment on this charity idea.

  • There's a real, that to me seems like

  • a real nefarious reason why these billionaires like Bill Gates

  • want to have control over their own charity functions

  • with their money, right? Instead of having to pay

  • a reasonable amount in taxes and then have democracy

  • distribute that money where it's needed in society,

  • they don't want that; they don't want a democracy to decide where their money goes.

  • They want - just like they do in their own corporations -

  • (you know Richard Wolff talks about this, Professor Wolff, 'Democracy at Work')

  • there is no democracy at work where you spend most of your life, (- good point)

  • you're in a totalitarian system which is what a corporation is, right?

  • It's a top-down, totalitarian system.

  • There's no democracy, you're not voting to who's gonna be on the board.

  • The people with the money do, so ...

  • Instead of- they don't take their money and do charity like

  • "hey we're gonna go solve homelessness" which Jeff Bezos could do like that. (- yeah!)

  • Jeff Bezos is worth around $120 billion.

  • It would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States yet he doesn't do it!

  • - It would cost $30 billion (- to end world hunger!) and extreme poverty, yeah.

  • - He could end world hunger and homelessness in the United States

  • and still have about $70 billion left over

  • which would still make him one of the richest guys in the world, yet he doesn't do it! (- nope)

  • And to me that's because people like Jeff Bezos are megalomaniacs

  • and that's a real thing.

  • - You know the statistic regarding people of high business power

  • are almost - not always but a very high percentage of them - are psychopaths (- yes)

  • by the very definition of how, what it takes for them to get to where they are,

  • the type of gaming mentality and indifference.

  • They actually have medical psychopathology. (- yes!)

  • And that's a well-established statistic ...

  • Just go back to the values of the president and the corporate concept.

  • He approaches his work as a president like he's the CEO of a country! (- yes!)

  • And that shouldn't be a surprise. But one thing I will say, remember

  • Thomas Piketty, he wrote the great book 'Capital in the 21st Century'

  • and he criticizes the wealth inequality.

  • And Bill Gates made a big article in rebuttal to it.

  • And what does he say? He goes

  • "You shouldn't want me in with those people that just buy a bunch of yachts.

  • I want to use my money for good."

  • And he implies that it's his right to make the decisions for the world effectively

  • in an undemocratic way (-that's right) to do that!

  • And that is definitely a sick state of mind.

  • - So what people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos end up doing

  • is they don't go end homelessness or give money directly to help,

  • they'll go "I'm gonna fund a law school for women"

  • and "I'm gonna ..." you know, that's the kind of stuff they do,

  • and we don't get to decide how we need the money used so

  • that's really an interesting ...

  • People don't realize that; they go "Oh well they're rich, they deserve it,

  • they should be able to do what they want with their money."

  • Just like you said, they weren't born into a blank space,

  • they were born, they're standing on the shoulders of giants. (- exactly)

  • And because of our system, the way it's been so rigged

  • in the powerful people's favor, meaning the people with money,

  • the way it's been so rigged is that someone like Jeff Bezos can now

  • be the richest person in the history of the world including Pharaohs. (- yeah)

  • And at the same time the people generating that income for him are on food stamps. (- yep)

  • And what kind of person does that? a megalomaniac psychopath. (- yep)

  • And people don't realize that Jeff Bezos is a psychopath.

  • Yet, he owns the Washington Post,

  • he's into bed with the CIA to the tune of $600 million,

  • and he also sits on the board of the Pentagon!

  • So the richest man in the world who literally looks like Dr. Evil

  • owns the newspaper of note, is in bed with the deep state intelligence community,

  • has all your information stored because we live in a surveillance state,

  • that's why the CIA contracted him to store your information,

  • and then he sits on a Pentagon board and we're living in an endless war!

  • We are living in an Orwellian nightmare of perpetual war right now.

  • Right now we're spending 40% more on our military

  • than we were at the HEIGHT of the Afghanistan and Iraq war!

  • 40% more! And we never had a meeting about that,

  • there was never a town hall, there were no op eds.

  • They just spent that money, and you make the point in the book

  • that it's because rich countries

  • can spend as much as they want. Why is that?

  • - If you're an empire, which the US is the cliché Empire,

  • but China's an empire and Russia's an empire,

  • you have so much dominance in the way that things unfold that

  • when you take loans from other countries like the United States does as a debtor nation,

  • it's not expected that they're ever gonna pay this stuff back

  • as long as the US dollar is strong.

  • Now you saw Iran recently ...

  • ... applied the euro as opposed to the dollar for petrol trade and other things.

  • That's a good sign in terms of deflating the power of the US dollar,

  • not necessarily for us because it's all systemically related

  • but in terms of the broader kind of moral view.

  • So the United States, it's been estimated across the world that by 2040

  • 60 to 70% of all nations will be bankrupt by their own metrics.

  • The United States isn't susceptible to that because it just makes its own money. (- yeah)

  • It has this arrangement with the central bank which is just a fraudulent show,

  • a sleight of hand! (- yes)

  • It's a sleight of hand between this big banking cartel that makes money out of nothing

  • in exchange for bonds that we make out of nothing in the Treasury,

  • and so suddenly all this fake debt is made between literally just,

  • it's just one big group of people that don't really care.

  • The Federal Reserve doesn't care if the United States pays its money back.

  • It just needs its cartel to be respected

  • and the power of the financial class and the financial system

  • to be as strong as it ever has been which is why you see Goldman Sachs

  • sitting next to the president, across every administration.

  • - So, please let me stop for a second. - Yeah, sure.

  • - So let me explain what you're saying.

  • So a poor nation goes to the IMF, gets a loan.

  • Now, they're immediately in debt.

  • Now they can't pay that debt back.

  • The IMF goes back to that country and says

  • "Now you have to sell off some of your public space to our corporations

  • so you can pay your debt, because you're in debt!"

  • Now the United States is in debt to the tune of $19 trillion right now,

  • we're never gonna pay that back.

  • And it doesn't matter because as you say in the book,

  • money is made out of thin air and

  • they only care about regulations and the public perception. (- yeah)

  • And that any dominant country meaning the United States

  • can extend debt to infinity

  • moving the goalposts as they go along,

  • and by 2050 you say 60% of the world's countries will be bankrupt,

  • but we'll never be bankrupt (- yeah)

  • because we print our own money.

  • - Well other countries do that too mind you,

  • but the difference is those countries aren't empires, they don't have the strength-...

  • 80% of all the major transnational corporations are US-based.

  • So, all these huge companies- they don't really care about nations anymore

  • as you can imagine, the trade agreements, the TTP.

  • - There are no nations! There's only corporations.

  • - But there's still some grounding to US policy and US favoritism

  • and of course US political power,

  • because US political power is really global political power.

  • So the "nest" of the US Empire is alive and well when it comes to the merger of

  • politics, geopolitics and of course business, trade agreements and all that stuff;

  • that's why the US is so untouchable.

  • The joke you know, every couple years,

  • "Ooh! We're gonna shut down the government because we have to increase the debt limit!"

  • It's a complete comic routine - what are they gonna do, not do it?!

  • So that's the point there, but other countries, just like the poor of the world that suffer with debt,

  • they DO get screwed. So they're the ones that get their resources taken through austerity

  • and through different trade agreements-

  • remember the IMF in the World Bank are basically Western institutions.

  • They are an extension of Western hegemony.

  • Their interest IS the neoliberal interest,

  • which goes back again to a think tank years ago in the '70s

  • that was trying to counter communism

  • that said "We need something to counter communism to start to

  • end any kind of socialist ideology across the world,

  • so neoliberalism is our new philosophy

  • and we're gonna put it out there like a religion,"

  • and that's what all these institutions do.

  • Which is why you can't have any country such as

  • almost all the Latin American countries that have been overthrown

  • as they tried to do something different throughout the '50s, '60s and '70s.

  • One thing I recently did a talk of, was a man named Salvador Allende, from Chile.

  • Salvador Allende was democratically elected,

  • he was a stern - not a Marxist in the traditional sense,

  • he didn't like the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union,

  • he wasn't supported by the Soviet Union -

  • but in Chile he said "Okay, I'm gonna turn this around."

  • He was so sick of the US transnational corporations taking all the resources,

  • owning all the land, US-based, as they did.

  • (I'm sure you know people like John Perkins, he talked about a lot of this stuff.)

  • And so he said "I'm gonna nationalize these industries and I'm gonna set up

  • a new system of economic organization."

  • Now this is an important tidbit of history

  • in terms of the kind of solutions I talk about at the end of this book.

  • In the 1970s a man named Stafford Beer -

  • he was really famous in systems engineering,

  • all about how to make systems work, be viable as he would call it.

  • What does it mean to have a working engine, that's self-contained?

  • What does it mean to have a working economy?

  • What does it mean to have a working social system?

  • How do we approach that subject scientifically, and this is what

  • the work of cybernetics, Stanford Beer,

  • Ross Ashby, all these guys that no one's ever heard of,

  • but actually very important in history. - Is this called Systems Theory?

  • You can call it that but, they call it cybernetics, for many years.

  • Basically it's an interdisciplinary view

  • of how things work in both science and humanities.

  • It's very deep. (-yes)

  • And it also relates to sociology and social constructs as we would imagine.

  • These are systems, they have properties.

  • Systems have properties that are shared throughout the universe, in fact.

  • No metaphysics needed there; there's certain things that

  • that are inherent to your body that can be emulated

  • in the way we organize society: biomimicry. But I won't go too far down that road.

  • But anyway in the 1970s he was called up by Allende,

  • he said "I want you to develop a new system for my country

  • to figure out how we can organize and optimize our economic flows

  • with my new nationalized industries."

  • Because the companies just bailed

  • and Allende was considered the enemy of the world at this point.

  • Because you don't do that in a capitalist society.

  • You don't knock out your corporations and start nationalizing.

  • - Because then they're gonna call the Marines!

  • - Exactly, which is what they did; he was overthrown and he died in the overthrow.

  • But before he died for 2 years he had this amazing project called 'Project Cybersyn.'

  • Cyber-Syn. So cyber and then "syn," people can look this up.

  • It's a tidbit of history, it's been propagandized, they put a big

  • thing in the New York Times: 'Chile now run by socialist computer.' No!

  • What they did is they tried to figure out how to take into account

  • all the dynamics and variability of a robust, national economy

  • and figure out how to organize it as a unit,

  • not in the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union; these guys hated that.

  • Allende hated it, Stafford Beer the organizer of this, hated it

  • because it was just this big horrible bureaucracy, it was extremely inefficient,

  • and didn't have real time information; it didn't work, as we've come to find out,

  • in the way that it needed to work. - You mean the communist system.

  • - Yeah. So this was the only attempt in history

  • where the actual scientific approach - things I advocate in this book - was applied.

  • And it almost, almost got into fruition

  • if Allende wasn't overthrown by the CIA.

  • It's one of those moments in history-

  • there's actually a guy that wrote a whole book about it, it's in Spanish.

  • He wrote a book, sci-fi book, to describe what happened

  • if it actually would have worked; I want to read it.

  • - So you're saying that in Chile he was

  • trying to institute what you are prescribing as the fix

  • to our current system.

  • - An interdisciplinary approach to economic management that's democratized,

  • and we have the technology to do that.

  • Back then they used telex machines, they had one computer,

  • they had to engage very crudely

  • with all the people that were organized in different areas of industry.

  • It's a big thing, I won't go in the details of it.

  • But what I advocate is that we have all this amazing technology,

  • we have the ability to communicate instantly.

  • We have the ability to track what we're doing to say be sustainable; imagine that!

  • Imagine if the industries of our world actually cared about tracking say

  • rain forest depletion or biodiversity loss,

  • and then they stopped their behavior based upon those limits when they're reached.

  • We don't do that. We don't have any contingency plan,

  • which is why we're again flying off that cliff on this train.

  • And we could talk about the five things,

  • remember I talked about five different transitions at the end of the book.

  • The application of automation,

  • the move from property to access

  • which we've already seen trends of that occur with say Uber and so on.

  • People don't need to own one of everything, they need access to what they need,

  • create a more communal environment.

  • - So you're talking about like, that's like when you see zip cars, things like that?

  • - Exactly, but more specific, like

  • I envision in the deep future where people don't really own anything!

  • They have access to what they need at all times, it doesn't mean they don't have things.

  • I mean you'll have a laptop and computer,

  • or whatever your property may be that you use it frequently.

  • But imagine the freedom of being able to get up, fly somewhere,

  • and have access to the resources that you may need whether it be clothes or technology,

  • a place to stay, all systemically designed,

  • and interactive and updated and dynamic, not- we're not talking about a static thing.

  • I know it sounds very sci-fi when I talk about this this way.

  • But imagine that kind of freedom. I see freedom as NO property!

  • I see freedom as being a part of this home, this planetary home,

  • and moving around freely, and having access to what you need as you go along.

  • That's a hard concept.

  • - That's a such super-hard concept for people to wrap their minds around

  • because it's never been seen anywhere before.

  • - Except before the Neolithic Revolution (- right)

  • where the value systems were very communal, the value systems were sustainable.

  • To the extent you want to talk about the solutions I propose-...

  • - I want to talk about the solutions, go ahead.

  • - So the five things as I mentioned.

  • So automation, let's stop this ... this tension.

  • We should be moving to automate everything as fast as possible.

  • I find it offensive, I go to a restaurant these days and I see the most

  • amazing person, the most amazing culmination of the history of the universe -

  • the nervous system, the human being, the most complicated thing, this end peak of entropy,

  • and they're waiting on you.

  • This amazing brain and they're sitting there waiting on you, like a slave.

  • It's an offensive thing to even occur at this point in time in the 21st century;

  • nobody should be doing this, they're wasting their lives, their potential.

  • People, they retire now and they die soon after because they don't even know what to do with themselves!

  • They've been so destroyed and bankrupted, their creativity just ruined

  • by the process of market slavery which is effectively what it is.

  • So, automation needs to be put forward deliberately.

  • - When you go to a restaurant, how are you gonna get your food?

  • - You automate it! It's very simple, just like they do in San Francisco now.

  • They have these systems in Japan, they do them now.

  • There's always going to be some kind of oversight with any system.

  • There's management, that's important, but the more efficient you become

  • with the development of systems technology (- yeah)

  • like in a big factory, like a shoe factory. These people aren't-

  • they're making 300 shoes an hour! (-right)

  • And they're not sitting there doing it, they're watching and managing the machines.

  • And they're making sure the system is working, and then they take proper action.

  • And I think that's kind of where the roles of humanity will end up in the future

  • which doesn't necessarily need to be paid for either.

  • In a domestic economy, people do tons of things,

  • billions and billions of dollars a year, women, men do in their homes.

  • They do it because they want to survive; they do it because it's their world.

  • And this is the way it extends out to the rest of the society and the community.

  • Which leads me to say localization, so we have globalization.

  • So I talked about automation, let's go to localization.

  • We've had globalization, this blight.

  • The food you eat every day, travels about 2,000 miles before it hits your plate.

  • That's preposterous!

  • And we have now advanced types of farming, agricultural systems,

  • advanced production systems, 3D printing,

  • where you don't need to have all this constant dynamic and waste.

  • You bring things back home and you produce things for your - imagine that! -

  • you produce things for your actual community as opposed to the globalized ethic.

  • It's just too destructive. Gandhi saw this, I mention him in the book too.

  • He hated industrialization; he's like "Well you're gonna have

  • a high propensity for power consolidation and corruption

  • if you go through globalized industry."

  • And he talked about oceanic circles overlapping in communities.

  • Imagine Los Angeles as an oceanic circle

  • within the other terrain, other city terrain of California.

  • And we've localized all of our food production as best as we can through advanced means.

  • Just that fundamental logic that needs to be applied,

  • you would reduce energy consumption and waste

  • probably by 70% almost instantly if you did that

  • because of how rampant and how wasteful globalization is today.

  • So automation, localization.

  • Now there's access as I mentioned briefly before and I'll just reiterate that.

  • An access society means you move away from property as much as you can,

  • inspiring the ethic of actually sharing.

  • So, like in the Zeitgeist Movement there's people in Toronto that have a tool library.

  • No one uses their tools every minute of every day

  • so they share it in a community,

  • and everyone accesses these tools as they need them in a kind of rental system.

  • Brilliant! A library, the library itself:

  • one of the oldest institutions of sharing knowledge.

  • I'm surprised it actually hasn't been shut down frankly,

  • because it's against the market ethic. (- yeah)

  • So you can take and build upon that

  • where you don't- no one owns a car anymore, you don't need it,

  • you have automated systems; Uber's already on the edge of this.

  • And you just extend that logic out to just about anything you think of

  • depending on how much you use, you need,

  • that is how much access you need and that's where the metrics come in.

  • In the book, I talk about having, there's like 257 million cars in America,

  • but yet the people only use it about 5% of the time

  • as far as the ownership of an individual vehicle.

  • Which means if I remember correctly only about 25 million cars are actually needed

  • to assist anyone moving around in America.

  • So if you create an automated system to do that

  • that's a, you know, thousand percent decrease or whatever

  • of how many cars you're actually producing.

  • Incredible sustainability potential right there.

  • It's antithetical to the market of course

  • because the market wants you to buy more and more and more!

  • So anytime you move towards a conservative ethic,

  • anything where you're trying to do that,

  • you're slamming up against the entire driver of so-called "progress"

  • which is this incessant need to buy and consume. So that's another aside.

  • So access, automation, localization.

  • Okay now this is a big one: open source.

  • Open source in the intellectual community has been a godsend in their view.

  • People open source things, they share it amongst the community digitally.

  • Everyone can contribute to the development of a given idea whether it's a good

  • or a software as is most commonly.

  • - So open source means to someone like me

  • meaning that if a company like Apple,

  • which they don't open source correct? - No. - That's a bad example.

  • So another company-... explain what that means.

  • - Like Tesla open-sourced [via Elon Musk]. - So what does that mean?

  • - It means he releases all the blueprints and the design information.

  • Now, that's a very specific thing. - And why would you do that?

  • - Well for his reasons- there's a couple reasons for that aren't as altruistic.

  • But you do that because if you share knowledge as we've talked about prior,

  • you get more minds working on a given problem,

  • you're gonna have more rapid progress, as opposed to sitting in a boardroom-

  • So imagine all the cell phone companies, however many there are.

  • Instead of this constant warfare of

  • "let's design this cell phone with a little button here that does this."

  • Oh, and that other company says "Oh I saw that button,

  • let's put that button on our thing because people seem to like it."

  • So you have this back and forth, this wasteful back and forth (- right)

  • that 's constantly mimicking and creating new things

  • and constantly one-upping itself and everyone's wondering whether they should spend

  • another thousand dollars on another iPhone the next year and the next year.

  • Instead of you doing that you open-source it and you let people go on digitally

  • and design this stuff directly because

  • with CAD, 3D engineering and other programs now we can-

  • you can crash cars digitally and have virtually the exact same effect

  • because of how accurate the replication of software is.

  • So you can test these things.

  • Open-source would destroy the entire corporate industry if it was done properly.

  • Imagine a world where you,

  • say you're interested in a microphone.

  • You're like "I need a new microphone! I like a-..."

  • You go into a web site and you are able to look at all the existing designs.

  • But you have a background in engineering like

  • "I don't like any of these, they aren't accomplishing what I want."

  • So you go in and you actually start to design it yourself.

  • You open-source that; everyone else sees what you're doing.

  • And through AI systems which are already out there as well

  • that can do certain things to correct analysis that people are putting in.

  • For example AI systems can now design cars and stuff like that.

  • - Artificial Intelligence. - Exactly.

  • That's where the future rests in terms of really good decision making

  • because it can take in the parameters more rapidly than humans can.

  • But we have a bunch of people designing something and then you,

  • eventually you end up with the most advanced cell phone possible at that point in time period,

  • because everyone's input democratically is in there, and it's collated,

  • it's combined. So in this world

  • you end up with a democratic economy where people are engaging and building,

  • and then what happens? Where does it go?

  • And that's where 3D printing advents are coming to fruition.

  • So imagine instead of globalization where you have corporations stretched across the world

  • you come back to localization once again.

  • And you're using advanced 3D printing systems, and here's what's gonna happen.

  • R. Buckminster Fuller coined a term called ephemeralization

  • and it means more with less. If you look at the whole of human society

  • we're constantly being able to increase our productivity and efficiency

  • with less and less resources. So the first computer was gigantic,

  • weighed tons, enormous amounts of power.

  • Now this chip in your phone is a thousand times more powerful

  • It's almost non-existent how,

  • how small and light and how much power it takes.

  • That's called ephemeralization.

  • Jeremy Rifkin came up with a similar term I want to present called "more with less"

  • or zero marginal cost, so if you have a machine

  • that produces - say it cost a thousand dollars - and it produces its first good,

  • that first good technically cost a thousand dollars all things being equal.

  • The second good $500, the [fourth] good $250 and so on.

  • Eventually if you have machine that's robust enough

  • you end up with zero marginal cost.

  • It doesn't cost anything to say make a book

  • or to output even technology

  • because we've become so advanced and efficient with it.

  • So what you're gonna end up having as far as I'm concerned

  • is a democratic economy where people are designing in open-source constantly online,

  • creating the goods that we all share,

  • and then when they get manufactured we have

  • very specific 3D manufacturing systems that are localized

  • in regions to produce those goods.

  • Because with that ephemeralization process,

  • you will eventually have systems, mark my words,

  • that will not only produce cars, they will produce televisions, they will produce computers.

  • They'll reverse any kind of engineering electronics

  • that you can think of because that's where it's all leading down to.

  • Not to use the ploy of Star Trek, remember Star Trek had the replicator ...

  • It's a sci-fi fantasy but when it comes to let's say molecular engineering,

  • I guarantee you a laptop will be 3D-printed within the next 5 years.

  • Someone will develop the technology that has enough

  • interdisciplinary, so to speak, capacity

  • where it can build the chips and everything else in one swoop

  • at zero marginal cost.

  • I mean we're already almost there; look how cheap laptops are

  • just by the general force of the market,

  • through mass consumption, right? That's how things become cheap.

  • - I buy Macintosh so I have no idea.

  • (both laughing) It's real expensive.

  • - Yeah, exactly. - They've made it still expensive.

  • So we go automation, localization-

  • - Access (- access), open source (- open source),

  • and then the final thing is real fundamental, it's just

  • how we network information together.

  • We don't actually track anything as I said earlier.

  • So you know the 'Internet of Things,'

  • the idea of connecting all your devices to the Internet and (- yes)

  • I don't quite know the merit of connecting your

  • toaster or your refrigerator to the Internet but people are doing it,

  • but that's just pop culture stuff right there.

  • But what that actually sets the groundwork for is an ability to in real time

  • know exactly what your society is doing economically.

  • You track it in a very fundamental sense.

  • In our economy now money is transferred, you buy things and

  • this metric is slowly generated literally over months.

  • And the reports that people in the Federal Reserve or the Treasury or the US

  • government or any of those economic entities,

  • they get that stuff months late!

  • Like it doesn't mean anything, it's not important information at that point.

  • These numbers that we get about unemployment, that's really old numbers actually.

  • So, when you have the Internet of Things and digitized network feedback you have

  • literally a consciousness for a society, a country or a planet,

  • where you actually know what you're doing. So what does that mean?

  • "Oh, well we're producing this good

  • and we're running out of timber in this area,

  • let's check to see instantly if we have other areas that have a surplus,"

  • meaning that they have natural regenerative and we're not depleting

  • and then suddenly you have things that are gonna self-regulate our society

  • so we don't self-destruct, something that we don't have the discipline to do now

  • because of the drive of the market force,

  • the drive of overconsumption and so on.

  • Does that make sense? (- Yes.)

  • We need all that, and it's fundamental economic principles that I'm putting forward but

  • how you put them together is where people need to start to think, be thinking moreso.

  • - And if you came close to having that actually implemented

  • they would kill you.

  • - I think the powers that be

  • have a moral ... "scapegoatism."

  • So what has happened with all these other countries that try to do something different once again?

  • What do they say? they say "Oh,

  • there are human rights abuses. Cuba!"

  • Cuba did incredibly well, incredibly well with its embargoes,

  • even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (- Right.)

  • Cuba was able to work with what it had to build industries,

  • to take care of its people in a way- the United States can't even do it.

  • Because it had a fundamental ethic of working with what they had, and what do we do?

  • "Cuba is basically a cult" is the way they present it.

  • Oh, and then the anti-oppressive forces and oh! how dare they not

  • bring in the free market, hence that

  • "free" word that almost always pollutes everything as though it actually means that!

  • All the history - and that's what troubles me greatly -

  • is I think some country eventually will follow these principles, similar ones.

  • I don't claim to have all the answers; it's just logic to me as far as we're headed.

  • And someone will try to go off the grid like a house does, and say

  • "We're done with globalization, we're done with all you people.

  • We're gonna do something different because we know we need to."

  • And that's when the big guns come out because this country, specifically,

  • and all the other ones that are hell-bent on maintaining the neoliberal religion,

  • they won't tolerate this, (- right!) that's really unfortunate. (- they never have!)

  • They never have.

  • - In fact, if even you read General Smedley Butler from 1935,

  • he wrote about it, 'War is a Racket,' the name of his book,

  • and he talked about every war he was involved with in South America,

  • he was there at the behest of a corporation and it was to steal the natural resources

  • from a leader who wanted to give it to his own people.

  • And we've been doing that ever since.

  • That's not stopping, that's happening right now in Syria.

  • That's happening in- well it happened in Libya because

  • Qaddafi went off the dinar,

  • I mean he went off the petro dollar and he wanted to have a currency for Africa.

  • We can't have that. (- No.) You can't have that so you go

  • "Oh he's gonna kill his own people, so we have to overthrow him." ...

  • - And it's funny how people- all this history is there, and no one picks up ...

  • - Right now we're doing the same thing we did in Iraq with Syria.

  • It's just unbelievable (- yeah)

  • that every time the government wants to have a war for a corporation

  • they invent some kind of human rights- "Oh my god, Saddam has ... rape rooms!"

  • So we have to go replace them with American rape rooms, which is what we did.

  • Which is what we did and nobody goes to jail for it.

  • I think a real concrete way to fight back against this

  • "free-market capitalism" which is wrecking the earth, environmentally and all that...

  • Professor Richard Wolff says 'Democracy at Work' coops, right?

  • That takes that totalitarian nature of corporations

  • out and then workers get to decide,

  • what do you think about that idea?

  • - I agree with it in the microcosm of it, I think it's great

  • that there are people in Europe and the United States that have been doing it.

  • But it takes a certain kind of community to pull that off.

  • It also takes a competitive benefit

  • where you can maintain that type of

  • egalitarianism against other corporations that don't.

  • See this is the problem of the competitive system: when people try to do something good

  • it tends to make them less profitable generally speaking.

  • It tends to influence how much market share they're going to get.

  • And it's the same argument I use:

  • people that talk about green entrepreneurialism or green capitalism or

  • the companies that come forward and they try to NOT use

  • slave-manufactured textiles or chocolate or whatever.

  • But in order for them to do that

  • they have to basically increase their prices.

  • And that's where the whole moral debate of

  • voting with your dollar comes forward and so on.

  • And all of that stuff is good but I think the real problem is

  • if you have a cooperative that does that

  • you're gonna be susceptible to the ruthlessness of all of your competing industries

  • and I think it's why it hasn't really persisted.

  • It's the wearing away that people realize that they have to maintain more of a

  • cutthroat hierarchical and stratified, and any unequal type of profit-sharing

  • in order to make it work?!

  • That seems to be why this hasn't taken hold.

  • Remember, that idea goes back a hundred years.

  • People were talking about that long before Karl Marx.

  • And the question is, why hasn't it become more popular?

  • And it's because it really goes against the natural grain of the system

  • and it's hard to maintain stability if you're gonna operate that way

  • unless you're a small company in the Midwest, and you don't have a lot of competitors,

  • and you're willing to build kind of a Lo-Fi, so to speak, communal corporation.

  • But I have a very hard time believing that that's gonna take root

  • and somehow change the system. I'm all for it! I'm all for it.

  • but you know, it goes against the grain.

  • - So, recently Bernie Sanders

  • hosted a town hall on income inequality which I watched.

  • Why is Bernie Sanders' ideas on how to solve income inequality wrong?

  • His ideas are-...

  • first of all his ideas are to get corporate money out of politics so we can have

  • more democracy. So tell me why he's misguided.

  • - Well I don't use the word misguided.

  • I did a critique of that Town Hall because I was so frustrated with the fact that

  • they didn't get to the root of the issue, meaning the market-force capitalism that is underscoring

  • all these problems that they speak of.

  • No one brought it up. That just frustrated me, which is why

  • I continue to push that very fundamental structuralist perspective.

  • If people don't understand that,

  • then they're not gonna be moving in the right direction, they're gonna keep running in place.

  • But all the things he talks about in terms of social democratic policy,

  • democratic socialism, I completely agree with

  • in terms of a step-by-step process. But it's gonna take more than that.

  • That it's gonna take more than you know-...

  • First of all, getting money out of politics, well good luck with that!

  • Money is what runs everything!

  • and it's like, "where do you draw the line?" in terms of how much money.

  • If lobbying's legal which it is, as it is across the world,

  • well, what part of that lobbying is the corrupt part? It's ALL corrupt!

  • To me that strikes me as you know, just kind of platitudinal.

  • But in terms of, should people reorganize unions? Yeah, to whatever effect they can,

  • but the problem is the unions have been destroyed in America because of outsourcing!

  • The company's not gonna sit there and tolerate their union

  • for more rate if they can go to China or go to India or wherever, and outsource,

  • as has happened! That's why the union movement died in America

  • and the middle class floundered after the World War 2 finally,

  • upon like 1960s and '70s because everyone outsourced, they said Fuck it!

  • And now we're left with a service economy.

  • Yeah, we're left with a service and a WAR economy.

  • The fruits of that economy don't necessarily trickle down the way they did

  • in World War 2 where you had wives creating munitions.

  • But the war economy is still very much a part of the United States economy

  • in terms of just how it supports itself.

  • People say "Well oh, the money is spent on war!" remember, that money is spent

  • into the pockets somewhere (- yes) and it contributes to GDP somewhere.

  • It doesn't just get wasted.

  • - Let's try to conclude this way. Let's say

  • you were running for president

  • and someone asked you "Well what's your plan?" What would you say?

  • - Yeah that's a tough one,

  • because it assumes that I would be

  • thinking about America as a separate institution.

  • And I think that we really have to think more deeply than that

  • in terms of the way the economic system is.

  • My plan would be to try and communicate with the rest of the nations of the world

  • to get this information across that what we're doing

  • is only gonna lead to more conflict and war

  • and it's gonna lead to ecological decline, and they fuse together.

  • As I said before, the refugee crisis and so on,

  • if we think it's bad that Trump wants to build a wall now

  • wait until most of Europe starts to think this way

  • when they start getting influxes of refugees,

  • when we hit 9 billion people by 2050,

  • and we have water shortages and everything else that all the trajectories show.

  • I'm not trying to be a doomsday guy, in fact I warrant against that.

  • But if you look at what the actual statistics show,

  • there's nothing positive on the horizon in terms of any of this.

  • The only saving grace is the Buckminster Fuller ephemeralization.

  • We're literally in a race against time

  • between our advanced technology trying to solve all the problems in the wake of capitalism.

  • So the market externalities are producing this problem

  • and we're trying to counter it with this technology

  • such as people trying to pull carbon out of the air now.

  • So that's the race but if I was,

  • I would try to make a global sense immediately.

  • I would try to bring people together to realize that we are much more

  • capable as a global society in terms of efficiency

  • and that all of the disparate pluralism, the religious ideologies,

  • all that is back door - it's secondary - to our economic survival.

  • And if we can't get the economic stuff right,

  • which isn't some esoteric subjective thing. The economy -

  • Greek economia: "management of a household." How do you manage your household?

  • Do you take everything out of the refrigerator and consume it all at once

  • and then stare at it because there's nothing left?

  • The logic of a homeostatic existence of the human species on the planet

  • isn't rocket science; it's just something that needs to be properly digested.

  • And we have to get away from these "isms"

  • and just the polarization I should say,

  • where people can't even think clearly anymore

  • because they're so looking for boxes,

  • or they're so being conditioned into thinking that they HAVE to be in a box,

  • which is the way the whole political discourse is now.

  • So no one's thinking clearly anymore, they're just thinking in terms of bubbles and boxes

  • and categories, and that's terrible.

  • And going back to systems thinking you brought up earlier,

  • the beauty of systems thinking is you're looking at relationships,

  • you're not just looking at things that we see intuitively. This is a book.

  • Well it's not just a book it's a lot of things, a lot of things went into the book.

  • It's made out of materials, there's a process, there's intellectual development

  • that went on for thousands of years produce something like this.

  • So there's a depth to everything that happens around us that people keep missing.

  • And until we can kind of just rediscover that sense of relationship,

  • an interdisciplinary sense of relationship,

  • we're really at a disadvantage intellectually as a species, does that makes sense?

  • We can't think, we have a serious problem thinking systemically.

  • A guy goes and kills somebody, you blame the guy!

  • We don't know what happened to that person that fostered that.

  • We don't know what his parents were like. We don't know what kind of poverty they were in.

  • Or the terrorism thing ...

  • Cynically, I love the fact that we still look at people that go into a

  • cafe and blow themselves up, as though THEY are the problem,

  • as though that would be the only thing that could possibly have-...

  • that's the causality. That's NOT the causality.

  • Causality is a whole sea of desperation, of ideological influence,

  • of say empires that have gone to your land and screwed you over so badly

  • that you have nothing else to lose anymore, and to maintain your dignity

  • you want to go kill people that just resemble those folks that destroyed your lives.

  • All that causality, if we can get that sense together,

  • we would be more on the right track. It's gonna be hard.

  • - Well listen, the book is called 'The New Human Rights Movement,'

  • there it is right there, by Peter Joseph.

  • I encourage everybody to get it, it's a fantastic read,

  • all the statistics and ideas in here are mind-blowing

  • and it's really well done, really great work on this.

  • - Thank you. - And there it is; check it out.

  • Peter, thanks for being our guest.

  • - My pleasure, thank you Jimmy, I appreciate you having me on.

Hi everybody, welcome to the Jimmy Dore Show.

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ピーター・ジョセフとジミー・ドーアインタビュー全文、2018年4月 [ ツァイトガイスト運動] (Peter Joseph with Jimmy Dore. Full Interview, April 2018 [ The Zeitgeist Movement ])

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