… But before that I have one
of the most important thinkers
of our time: Peter Joseph.
He created the viral Zeitgeist movies
which then spawned the Zeitgeist Movement,
which has hundreds of chapters and
thousands of members around the world.
He also wrote and created a series
called ‘Culture in Decline’
and now he has a new and in my
opinion incredibly important book out
called ‘The New Human Rights Movement.’
Here is my conversation
with my friend Peter Joseph.
Peter! thanks for being here.
- Oh, my pleasure Lee, always a pleasure.
- So, I'm just going to jump straight in.
We're going to get some of the basic,
basic structural stuff out of the way.
When we grow up, as we're growing up,
we're sold a religion.
And this religion is bigger than
Christianity, it's bigger than Judaism,
it's the market economy.
And we're sold it every day of
our lives and we're told it's good
and it makes everything right
and it will solve the world's problems
and you just got to believe in it.
What's wrong with that?
- Ahh, the faith in the
invisible hand of the market
which eventually,
like all religions, evolved into the
Orthodox intolerant view of neoliberalism.
So, you know it's very convenient to think
that there's some internal dynamic in
our economy that's self-regulating -
that's the term - that there's
an equilibrium to be found.
And what isn't talked about
which I point out in this book
is for about 70 years, true economic
theorists - micro economic theorists -
have sat there trying to formulate
their equations, utilitarian equations,
beliefs about human behavior
to figure out how equilibrium is generated,
because that's what the
“invisible hand” implies,
that's what the stability is supposed to be.
- And then when we get to equilibrium it'll be stable.
-Yeah.
There's an assumption and it's been
prevailing, it's a mythology and guess what?
It doesn't exist. And they're
the first to admit it.
There's whole books that have been
written now, there is no equilibrium.
The only equilibrium that could
be created involve variables that
literally these pure economists
think are irrational and
have no place to begin with. So that's one of the
groundbreaking things no one talks about.
So it's not just “we can speculate” and
“we can do this type of analysis” as done
say in the book or by other theorists
that are working against market economics.
It's been well established
that there's no equilibrium.
We have complete imbalance, we have
poverty, we have all the externalities.
We have a general move towards
disequilibrium through the entire system,
which is where the state comes in.
Of course you talk to a libertarian:
“Ooh the state’s now the enemy!”
They don't realize the dynamic,
the synergy between the two historically.
And a whole bunch of things that
I could spiral out of control and ramble,
and start yelling eventually.
- That's alright, your rambling's enjoyable.
And you can see the systems collapsing,
kind of around our planet,
whether it's the acidifying of the oceans or-…
- Well let’s just start with
close to a billion people in poverty,
they don't get their basic nutrition.
To me that's in a collapse right there.
The system never formed itself,
it's always been in a state of collapse.
There's the “ins” and the “outs.”
If you're on the outs,
you're just ignored effectively by
the theories of this system
which you're in;
it's a negative externality.
That's an important term that
people need to understand.
"Negative externalities" are things
that the market doesn't recognize
or can't navigate or control.
So for example, poverty.
What do we have? You have charity.
That's the only form of wealth
redistribution that society accepts.
You can leave it up to the billionaire class to
decide how they're going to take care of all the,
all this exhaust effectively
that has come out of this system,
to try and correct it.
Same goes for the fact [of]
massive global pollution,
every life support system in decline.
A recent stat I just read, there will be
more plastic in the ocean than fish, by 2050.
So how do you deal with that?
You create all these NGOs
and all these people that are trying to
do something outside of the market system
even though they have to
be slightly within it.
I mean that's truly really what
all of the NGOs and the NPOs and
grassroots organizations, the thousands and
thousands of them, they keep multiplying.
They are there to clean up the
disaster wake, that's left.
- It's the Band-Aids on the open wounds.
- And it's astounding to me that people don't
really put that together to realize that
that's where the activist
community needs to focus
and that's why the book is focused
in the direction of those things.
- And the externalities aren’t even,
they're not even really calculated
in most of these equations.
So you see that a hamburger at
McDonalds still cost a dollar to this day,
it's like 96 cents or something.
Meanwhile, if it calculated
for all those externalities,
the pollution, everything else, the oil,
the water used to raise the cow,
it'd be $200 for a hamburger.
Sure, or the fact that they
analyzed all the major corporations,
there was a study done
about two years ago,
finding that if you took the
negative externalities into account,
there's no profitability in any
of these major corp[orations]
which effectively means there's no
profitability across the whole of capitalism,
if you factor in real-life concerns.
- All right, so I know
we're moving fast here but
one of the keys to the
market economy is debt,
and you say in your book that
it's estimated that by 2060,
60% of all countries in
the world will be bankrupt,
while the US alone will have
a debt of 415% of GDP by 2050.
Now on a certain level
debt is a customary fiction
and can be erased with the flick of a pen.
So I guess, people might be
left feeling like, which is it?
Is debt this incredibly
powerful thing and people are
dying and suffering and societies are
crumbling under the load of this debt?
Or is it just a fiction?
It's both at the same time amongst
many paradoxes in this system
and it's basically based
on class hierarchy.
The higher up you are,
the more immune you are.
Just like the wealthy get bailed out,
the rich countries get bailed out.
It doesn't matter if the United States has $19 trillion
worth of debt or $190 trillion worth of debt
if it remains at the peak of the
global empire of stratified countries.
That's because there's so many
underlying geopolitical stratums and
backdoor deals that understand
that this debt is fiction,
understand that there's more interest
in debt in existence than money.
There's $200 trillion of debt,
only $80 trillion in global currency.
What does that result into?
It means that the lower class just
gets screwed over and over again.
You have the boom and bust cycle.
There's always the boom, everyone's all
happy, capitalism works and the bust happens.
Oh, everyone suffers, right? No.
The lower classes get destroyed by this.
- Like Greece for example.
- Oh yeah.
It can work on international level or
domestic level, it's the same type of dynamics.
And so when the bust happens,
you have all of these...
Large corporations can
absorb smaller corporations.
They have the capacity to withhold.
And then when they -
make a long story short -
when the boom starts happening,
when they start
lowering interest rates,
when they do QE [Quantitative Easing]
all that money effectively goes straight
into the financial and corporate sectors,
high-level corporate sectors anyway.
And that's just a statistic proven,
that's also in the book.
So in other words it's
a vehicle of class war.
So debt has multiple levels,
the point being. Is it is a fiction? Yeah.
And we should recognize it as such.
People should be clamoring to remove debt,
student debt loan,
government debt, countries should NOT be held
in austerity, there SHOULD be mass riots.
But, within the structure of capitalism they
have to make the math look like it works.
If the math doesn't work in capitalism
well, maybe people might question it.
And what is interest as well?
I want to point this out because I talk to a
lot of people that look into currency reform.
They want to use complementary currencies,
they want to move to blockchain and Bitcoin.
But they miss the fact that
when you're in a banking system
and it's based on capitalism,
based in capitalist structure,
you have to do something then create fees.
Interest is the fee.
Interest is the profit margin.
Interest is the surplus value so to speak.
So that's why the system is what it is,
it's inherent to the structure.
Does that make sense?
So you can't just have capitalism and somehow
have a different kind of currency without-…
If you want to do that you have to
nationalize the entire US banking system
so there's no profit involved.
And since this is the
hub of the one percent,
the wealthy 5% of this
planet that own so much now.
40% of, excuse me.
Since the 1970s we went from about
3% working in the financial
services sector to about 5%,
and the financial services sector was
about 5% of GDP and now it's about 30%.
So that 30% of GDP is going
to 5% of the population.
That’s how powerful the
small financial services,
Wall Street conglomerate is,
so back to my point:
You want to nationalize the banks?
Well you're going up against the
strongest political force in history.
- And a lot of these people,
hedge fund managers and the such,
don't actually do anything,
they don't create anything of substance.
It's just moving of
numbers around a screen
and it makes them incredibly wealthy.
- It is the evolution-…
In economically mature
nations like the United States,
that evolution is consistent.
You see this happening with all countries.
You go from merchant capitalism
to financial capitalism.
We outsource all our production,
we are increasing dramatic
efficiency meaning that there’s
so much that we need to
sell that we can’t.
So we subsidize that so to speak
with all the financialization.
Subsidize is the wrong word, we compensate
for it, through financialization.
And that's why financialization
has become so large and accepted
because it's really a driving force
of the entire global economy now,
even though it does nothing,
even though it creates nothing
and it causes more imbalance. In fact
many theorists have argued that
it's actually worse for Main Street
that financial,
that Wall Street even exists.
It doesn't help Main Street at all;
that's well accepted.
- Well hold on,
Wall Street and capitalism,
and I saw in another interview
you brought this up as something
you find frustrating where people keep
saying it to you so that's why I'm doing it.
"But Wall Street and capitalism is how
you got your cell phone and your computer
and it gave you all these
wonderful things Peter."
- Yeah I love that, love that.
All that capitalism is, is an incentive
system and a distribution architecture.
So what happens inside of that is left
to the will of the individuals gaming.
So yeah, you can get efficiency.
With the rise of technology
since the Industrial Revolution,
exceptional levels of efficiency
has been created through design,
through intelligent ingenuity,
not through just the incentive
structure of wanting profit.
- So basically technology came along with
capitalism and everybody is always saying
that capitalism is the thing
that got them all those
good health devices and
all that stuff but-…
- I'll put it this way.
During the Second World War there was this
emerging hatred of communism.
Obviously the US capitalist hegemony did
not want to have anything interfere with it,
which of course led into
the Cold War for a long time
and still basically exists in
its weird echoes as you know.
And what they did,
the social planners so to speak,
government and big business,
got together and they tried to
convince everyone after World War 2 -
and keep in mind the United States just
terrorized the entire world with the atomic bomb -
and that set a whole new precedent in
terms of its new found place as Empire.
It also had the infrastructure
and this new industrialization that
happened while Europe was in ruins.
So it started to produce like mad,
and it convinced the public that
buying and consuming and working
was going to create an egalitarian system
that paralleled the claims of communism.
This is something that not
many people know about.
So it bullshitted the people to think that
the more they consume they're helping
the society, they're fighting communism,
and they're creating more of an egalitarian
structure because the more they consume
the more they create jobs
and the cyclical consumption.
Of course, it doesn't quite
work out that way, does it?
That's funny how this historic-...
- And now what percentage of America
is under some form of debt-…
- Oh, 60% have less than
a thousand dollars in savings.
- Oh yeah and it was something like 50%
can't get past a $500 emergency.
- Yeah, oh yeah.
- And so that's the you know
bounty that we've been promised?
- 43% spend beyond their means every year
because of saturation of debt.
It was the 1970s the credit
expansion came forward
because with the surplus goods
that were being created -
again this very positive thing that
happened since the Industrial Revolution -
this increase in efficiency
and the ability to move from-
factories produce, thousands of percent
increase in factory production.
So what do you do? You have to
get people money to buy this stuff
to get more money fueled to
the upper percent, upper 1%.
So that was when credit
expansion really really hit.
And that's actually something that we can talk
about this, and I don't want to deviate too far but
people talk about universal basic income.
I'm in favor of this
because it can help poverty
but there's a certain caveat.
- Basic income seems like it's getting
a lot of people talking about it.
- It is. And even like Zuckerberg
and these billionaires, and now why?
Because it satisfies that need
to give the population something
so they can spend back into the
system to keep supporting it
and effectively, invariably, whether
it's intentional or not, doesn't matter,
it will just funnel right back
up to the upper class anyway.
- So that's the problem, but you
support it because it's a half step.
- I support it because it
would increase public health.
I don't want to see poverty,
I don't want to see this kind of suffering
that we see across the world.
So if the United States did do that you could
see the massive increase in public health,
but it would still preserve
the system in a negative way.
- Okay I want to jump to the
violence we see in our society
with our military,
but with our police militarization
and really just one-on-one citizens,
the rise of violent groups
and things like that.
Can that be connected back to the
market economy? (he says knowingly)
[Both laugh]
- Any student of history will
see that social inequality
by whatever perceived level,
whether it's economic,
whether it's racial,
whether it's nationalistic,
whether it's Aborigines versus settled,
colonization,
all of that is produced conflict.
And what is the root of that?
It's exploitation.
Slavery, when I was in school I was
taught that slavery in America was
"oh the whites just felt so superior,"
and they would just enslave people because they
looked different and had different beliefs.
That's not what is was.
We were using white indentured
servants in the American colonies
until it was discovered through the
African slave trade which existed prior
that - and which by the way these
kings in Africa were selling
these slaves outright, had nothing to do
with anything but money on both sides -
So we realized it was a better
investment to invest in slaves.
It didn't make any difference what
they looked like, it was just easier
that they looked different because you
could catch them if they ran away.
So there was more value
to it as an investment.
That's the way it was,
that's cost efficiency.
That is the driving
mechanism of capitalism.
So not to deviate from your
question regarding the violence but,
why is it that we have all this
interracial tension after 200 years?
It’s because we started with this
foundation of exploiting an entire subclass.
And via the Black Panthers
movement and Martin Luther King,
all of the tumultuous civil rights,
the violence, the deaths:
this is an echo of a basic kernel
of the capitalist structure.
And it's sad to me that most
people don't see it that way.
They think that somehow slavery was
separate from the new "free labor" of today.
Yeah it's free labor
in the abstraction of free labor
when you're backed into a corner.
So yeah, I'm sure the people that
are making 15 cents an hour-…
- So you're saying there's not just
something ingrained in us that makes us
force another class down.
- Well I'll say this.
Lower reptilian brain reactions,
basic biological behaviorism.
There are clearly reactions that
we can see in our primate brethren
that when in fear, when in threat,
we stratify, we get dominant.
We create these things based on
whatever the circumstance requires.
Usually it's just like
physical brawn and so on.
But we also have the prefrontal cortex.
We have this new emerging thing,
an amygdala, the hippocampus.
We have consciousness basically.
And the question is:
what are we pinging now?
And I argue that the
system we have now is just
constantly pinging the
lower reptilian brain,
not allowing the fruits of our consciousness
and empathy to actually come forward.
So it IS a part of us.
- And in fact there's great
examples of where the goal of
let's say a store or shopping
center is to get past to that
that deeper thought, you know.
And I think it’s called the Gruen transfer when
you get into one of these shopping centers and
slowly the lights and the sounds and the
smells overwhelm you and you get to a point
where you finally are just like putting
things in a bag without even thinking
about what you're doing!
- Oh sure. Well think about
the ethic of shopping for fun!
thinking “where did this come from?”
People, women, I've heard this on a
show “Saturdays are for shopping.”
It's such an abusive thing that's
happened through advertising
that has made people feel comfortable
with the act of consuming,
when it really should be the opposite.
It should be an issue of
social reflection when you
engage in this system of
economics where you know that
what you're doing does have
repercussions across society.
It's a basic sense of ...
integration in society as opposed
to the douchebags driving around in
their car, their $250 thousand cars,
or the women with their
$2,000 handbags
which are basically
signatures of violence.
- Melania Trump: $56,000 jacket the other day.
- I saw that, yeah.
How detached from reality can you be?
At least in the Great Depression,
all the Rockefellers,
they wised up and they would drive around
in little cars. They wore old jackets.
Now, no one cares. Now it's just
flagrant materialism, flagrant vanity.
- I have part two of my interview with Peter
Joseph, creator of the Zeitgeist Movement.
He's out with a new book,
and the last time we talked about
the problems with our system.
This time, he and I discuss the solutions.
How do we fix this mess
and start moving forward?
Take a look.
Well the advertising gets to actually
something else I wanted to ask you which is
a while back for your other
series ‘Culture in Decline’
I did a thing on advertising and about
how abusive they are to, you know,
ads in general,
to what they're trying to get,
make us think and act.
But what I don't think I explicitly said is that
it's basically, the estimate is a thousand
to 3,000 ads in brand names a day,
and they're all really selling one thing:
it's need,
and solving that need with consuming,
with consumerism.
Is it possible to get past that system
when we have that much
advertising for this way of life?
Like there's just endless thousands
and thousands of ads telling you
this is the way it has to be.
- Well here's the way I look at
advertising and the rise of consumerism,
which by the way I don't know if
people know that consumerism,
I consider it a pejorative.
But actually this an economic
policy in the mid-20th century.
Consumerism is a theory that people
should behave this way to help each other.
It's nuts, completely again-...
- And after 9/11 Bush said keep shopping,
and they went.
- So, what I see it as,
it's a structural transfer of the need to
consume and to keep money moving,
buying things over and
over again to keep jobs
into the social psychology of people.
That's what's happened.
And again there was a massive
campaign as I said earlier
in part that led people to this
ethic of constant consumption
as though it was a moral duty and ethic:
You're helping society by doing this.
So you have to change the social system,
that's what goes back to the book once again.
It's the new human rights movement because
if you want to change the way
people think, if you want to change
their general incentives, you have to
change the structure that's organizing them.
It's very fundamental.
It's very simple really.
- And you're saying that achieves
a new level of Human Rights.
- Well it achieves a new level
of consciousness, awareness.
It's forces that,
that constant pinging of the lower
fear reactions and that threat of survival,
and it enables people to finally
break out and realize the humanity
in our advancement, and what we CAN do.
We know human variability can
exist in many different ways.
There's nothing that says we have to live
in this competitive cutthroat world at all.
Plenty of examples throughout history of
pockets of people that have lived differently.
And you see it in fact in the pockets
within the structure,
say in a corporation of course.
Generally a corporation
is fairly collaborative
while it may be highly competitive
against other corporations.
Same for the military: very compatible
and then of course they're supporting an
extremely violent war against some other group.
So the group-istic thing is a
problem and that's been completely
amplified by the current system.
Which brings us back to the
new human rights movement
because at the root of all of this we
have this constant group antagonism.
That's the flaw of the
way we exist right now
and it's perpetuated by our economy.
- Absolutely. I want to jump to some solutions
because I think we've got people depressed enough.
In the book you say there are
five shifts that need to happen
in order to increase economic
efficiency and to get to this new place,
to these new human rights really,
and I just want to
basically go through these.
The first one you list is
"automation" and I actually,
last week on Redacted
Tonight I did a piece on,
I guess a study just came out of,
or survey of AI experts
and they believe,
like most of them believe that
AI will at least be
capable of doing every job
and we're talking including
creative jobs like bestselling
novels and pop songs and stuff,
be capable of it in 50 years and
perhaps replace those
jobs in a hundred years.
Most of them believe that,
that that's happening.
- I think people go a little extreme,
and I'm for all of this by the way,
but I think the interest in
sort of creative dominance
and then the fear of the sentient rise and
even Stephen Hawking has talked about the
tremendous dangers of giving birth to AI
and all the Matrix and
Terminators movies all over again.
But I think there's a speculative
side to it that is a little gratuitous
as far as what we expect to happen but
I don't think we should go that far.
I think we just look at it
from the standpoint of
“what can we do to free
ourselves from labor? ”
Remember labor is at the root
of the civil rights battle
going all the way back to
ancient slavery in Egypt.
It's all about the abuse of labor,
the lower labor class,
the fighting of unions in early America,
you know,
instantly berated as communist-socialist,
union busters, mafia,
people getting killed. Yeah, absolutely.
So that is at the root of it. Now we
can talk about the other elements too but
if we really want to get to the heart of
stopping effectively the ongoing class war,
the removal of labor for income would be
the most profound thing that we could do.
Or at least subsided substantially.
- What do you mean by removal?
- Removal meaning ... replaced with
automation and then you start to
subsidize so to speak,
you start to support people
by lowering the work, lowering the hours,
reducing the workday, excuse me,
reducing the workweek,
reducing the work hours,
and then these things
like universal basic income.
And there’s other things I could rattle on
that would compensate for the automation shift.
But that's what needs to
happen as one core step
which invariably has to
happen to some degree.
- And with the jobs disappearing,
you know people
are suffering when in fact that should
be a good thing where people have
more time, they make
the same amount of money,
if we're still in a money system but
it should be a good thing.
The analogy that I try and use
to explain to people is like:
It's basically like we're
all hamsters on treadmills.
And they're slowly taking
away the treadmills.
And so the hamsters start beating
the crap out of each other
to try and get what's left. And then,
politicians come along and
they say one of two things.
They say either "I'll bring back
the treadmills" and we go "Yay!"
or they say "We'll make the treadmills
go faster" and we say "Yay!"
No one says
"Why are we running on the treadmills?"
- Exactly. And then the identity
is so locked into labor, you know.
People retire, it's statistically proven that
they die sometimes after quite frequently.
48,000 suicides are noted
to have occurred between America
and 63 European countries
during the Great Recession
because not only deprivation
but they have no job.
And there's that identity of
having to work, especially men.
They have this identity that's been
ingrained in them that they're supposed to be
the caretakers you know
and all that stuff.
So the cultural ramifications
are very strong,
we have to undo a lot of that.
- But my argument against
that is sometimes it's good
when people die when they lose
their job like Roger Ailes.
So-... [both laughing]
- There's always an exception.
- But I want to ...
Let's move to the next one: access.
Do we not have free access now?
We're in a free country!
- I love that.
The freedom and democracy
of it all, right?
Access is at the root of everything
whether we know it or not.
Property is really just access
because you don't really own anything,
you don't take it with you.
It's the labor, the ideas, what went
into the construction of anything,
it’s a social phenomenon.
So it's an illusion that's been
propagated in a very primitive view
and born in the Malthusian period which
you had to hoard and you
had to be protective.
So property rights today
dominate the majority of legislation
out there if you look at it.
Almost all the crime legislation
on the books relates to property,
and most of the violence you see comes
down to a property relationship as well.
- And the police are largely defending property.
- Exactly.
- The perfect analogy or
metaphor is Standing Rock
where you have cops
protecting a pipeline against the people
they've sworn to protect. - Exactly.
Yeah that brings another subject of
the role of the police in
their structural position but
I don't want to go on that tangent.
So access is at the core of it.
We've slowly started to see
the interest in access, from sharing cars,
from AirBnB’s, from sharing homes,
to people that have gone a little bit
farther, they have tool-sharing libraries
or even just the functional idea
of the ancient library itself
and the implications of that.
So if you have an access
society where you're not,
where you're not using property or you've
deviated away from it as much as you can,
where you allow for people
to gain access to things
through a system that's
not based on exchange-…
- This actually gets into the next one,
open source.
- Yeah, we can …
We can overlay that a little bit as well.
So open source
brings in the subject that
effectively you have more
efficiency generated through
more minds focusing on something
than just a boardroom.
And that goes back to what I
just said about the evolution,
the social relationship to
everything that we’ve created.
What goes into a computer is
hundreds of years of investigation
by countless people.
I mean honestly, thousands of years
when you think about the
evolution of science.
So on that historical level that that
exists in the sense of collaboration,
and then on the parallel level, if you,
as has been proven by
people that developed Linux,
by all these other math projects,
all these things I list in the book as well,
creative collaborative Commons
where people have access
in an organized capacity to design and
innovate can now be extended to anything.
Cars: you can use CAD, computer-aided
design, computer-aided engineering.
In the future people will sit at a laptop
with thousands of others
working on a single project
to try and make the best
of the best "something"
that could be made at that point in time,
best of the best.
And that would open the
floodgates of innovation.
So in other words,
you're far more innovatively efficient.
- Yeah without all this proprietary
code you could have people,
things move along much quicker.
- Less waste, you'd have universal
standardization and people actually have
an interest in sharing the
ideas since you don't have all
the crap, the noise and the waste,
like planned obsolescence.
- Right, what about localization?
- Localization, the fourth one.
Fourth one or third one?
- We're at 4. - We're at 4 already, wow!
So localization I think will happen
naturally due to ephemeralization,
a term coined by Buckminster Fuller
which basically means
things are always - the process,
technology and design -
are always going to get smaller and
smaller and smaller and more efficient.
And the computer is
just another example of that.
- And this decreases a lot of waste ...
- Absolutely. It also incentivizes
moving out of globalization
which is simply another form of
colonialism or exploiting labor
and resources in foreign lands that
can't defend themselves or they're so,
there's such destitution they
have no other option but to,
to adhere to 15 cents an hour and so on.
- Right, right.
Just because a country's willing to sell
you its resources because it's so desperate
doesn't mean that that's good for them.
- “Free labor!” Free labor.
So localization is critically important
for the stability of this planet.
I mean again,
the average American plate, food,
travels about 14, 15 hundred miles
for the average American.
That's nuts, that's crazy.
- Yeah and we have things like
you could buy a $28 table let's say,
a wooden table at Walmart.
Those trees were cut down in Vancouver,
then they were shipped to China
to be turned into the pieces to be put
together then shipped back to Walmart.
Then Walmart sells it to you,
it lasts 4 months,
but that's good because
you go buy another one!
- Yeah.
So you see the point.
It's obvious that we need to do that,
and again I think it will be an
in-the-market system luckily or unluckily,
it depends how you look at it.
People will gravitate towards
localization eventually
because it just will be less efficient
financially for them to do globalization,
especially with the rise of automation.
- And then the last one is
networked digital feedback.
- OK that's a big one.
- Explain that one.
- Well, we have this thing,
echoes of old anti-socialist rhetoric.
Author Ludwig von Mises
years ago wrote that
basically you can't have any
kind of non-market system
because you'd never be able to understand
the preferences of the individual,
you’d never be able to
track supply and demand
and all those basic economic
parameters and metrics.
That is thoroughly
ridiculous in the modern day,
especially with the Internet,
with sensor systems.
You could have a city that is -
well and this will happen,
it's already happening around the world,
I'm surprised DC doesn't have it yet -
but you'll have a citywide Wi-Fi.
And then you connect sensors to all
the transactions that are occurring,
boom! you have instant feedback of all the
transactions that are happening in the economy.
And I'm not necessarily referring
to economic financial transactions.
I'm referring to transactions of people
just simply getting what they need.
As this book progresses the
logic becomes more and more clear
that the highest state of efficiency,
which would also create the
highest level of social amiability,
hence the alleviation of all
the group-versus-group woes,
is a system that doesn't have money!
Now I don't push that in the sense,
I know how irrational that
sounds to most people,
how foreign that is to most people,
they just can't even field that.
But that's something that I talk about
and I eventually lead to but I'm,
I'm very transition oriented.
So those five things you just mentioned,
if we could get anywhere with
any of those in a substantial way
you're going to see a dramatic
alleviation of social tensions,
reduction of poverty,
the increase in efficiency,
the decrease of waste,
more sustainability and so on.
They all have those factors
built in, as an outcome.
- So, why don’t we hear these ideas
and even really just a deeper questioning
of capitalism and the free market?
I mean it's basically a
third rail of politics,
but even on most of our media,
even people that,
that a lot of the country
respects as kind of thinking,
forward-thinking people like Elon Musk and
let's say Neil deGrasse
Tyson and these people
that can look at the numbers
the same way you can.
Why don't you hear it?
- It’s bias.
It’s bias! There's an overriding bias
with people born [into wealth],
especially if they've been rewarded.
It doesn't take a degree in social science to
see the operant conditioning of
the wealthy that reach a point
where they have been so rewarded
that their brain's like
“What? You're not going to counter
this system! What are you doing?
This is your survival.
This is what has been rewarding you.”
And that's why the only thing that
any of these guys have talked about
is universal basic income.
It's the only socially acceptable
plausible thing to do besides charity.
Really it's a form of charity.
And they can't justify the lack of it now
in the sense of trying to demean it
into some kind of social welfare thing
which you know has a
terrible connotation to it,
because of they see the efficiency,
"they" meaning the whole of the high
business community and government
understands what we're doing with technology,
understands the efficiency,
understands that all of this efficiency
that’s been generated over the past 50 years
has gone to the one percent, with 8 people
with more money now than the bottom 50%.
They know they have to do something if
they want to preserve their hierarchy,
it's an intuition they feel.
So universal basic income is
the most logical step for them.
But there's plenty more
that needs to be done.
And I stand with you in
the sense of the disgust:
Anyone that claims to be for
science that hasn't taken the time
to just look at their own world!
Forget about the cosmos for a second.
Let's not terraform planets yet,
let's not send rockets.
Let's worry about
what's happening here for a moment!
And I think it's just disappointing.
I don't think these concepts are that foreign
or that difficult to get people's heads around,
it's just it's the social
indoctrination and fear,
and the fear of being ostracized
and labeled as something
that will be inconvenient
for their reputations.
- Yeah! I think when
your bread is buttered
from doing one thing
it's tough to change course.
But Peter, thank you so much for taking the time.
- My pleasure.
- The new book is
‘The New Human Rights Movement.’
It's amazing and excellent
as all your work is
and I’m looking forward to the movie
I guess will come out, in a little while?
Interreflections hopefully will find
its release by the end of the year
but no promises,
it just keeps getting pushed back.
- That's alright. Thank you Peter!
- Alright man, thank you, appreciate it.
