Welcome to 'Redacted Tonight VIP.' I'm Lee Camp.

There are ideas that are so dangerous

they're not allowed on our mainstream media at all.

Usually the reason is because these ideas, if accepted,

would mean the end of our profit-over-people

war-for-wealth greed-over-environment wage-slavery system.

The Zeitgeist Movement is one of those ideas.

Even though it has millions of followers

with hundreds of chapters worldwide,

and films that have been gone viral

and been viewed over 100 million times,

you will never hear it uttered on a corporate media outlet.

Think about that! The media will talk about

war and death, rape and genocide,

pedophilia and racism.

They don't shy away from those things.

Yet the Zeitgeist Movement is too dangerous.

Why? Because it questions capitalism.

It says you are not being given the full picture

of what humankind is capable of.

It says a world without

poverty, war, and environmental disaster is possible.

And look: if it's a bad idea, if it's stupid,

if it's a flawed concept, then let's argue about that!

Let's have the discussion like f*cking adults,

rather than being scared of an idea,

terrified of a thought paradigm

that could upend the current cultural template.

Earlier today I talked with Peter Joseph,

the creator of the Zeitgeist films,

the web series 'Culture In Decline,'

and the Zeitgeist Movement.

Peter, thanks for joining me.

- Oh my pleasure Lee, it's great to be back on campus.

- And thanks for wearing the same colors as me,

that's very important, that people know the teams here.

(Peter laughs)

I hope to have saved humanity by the end of this interview

so I hope you're cool with that.

- That's cool; the clock is ticking, so it's all on us now.

- Exactly. The Zeitgeist Movement, it basically wants to

move beyond capitalism but

capitalism has done a lot of good, has it not?

There's been massive innovation in-…

massive innovation, there's been huge leaps in technology,

leaps in human rights for women, minorities, gay people,

potheads, juggalos.

So that's all thanks to capitalism, right?

- I know. Capitalism made your smartphone.

It basically made you Lee;

capitalism impregnated your mother and produced you. - Absolutely!

- It's just sad how people have no sense of

of where things have come from, through

knowledge and science and technology and

the beauty of all this scientific development that has

really been the underscoring element that's increased lifespans

and helped us. And capitalism has been along for the ride, man.

I've heard this over and over again,

and when you … look deep down,

all the major civil rights movement stuff- that hasn't happened

from anything but the outskirts.

That's happened from people that have been pushing things

like socialism as they call it.

I mean people talk about democratic socialism today

like it's some kind of new thing when FDR did it, 80 years ago.

And what would we do without those safeguards

that have helped improve things over time? so...

From technology to the advancement civil rights,

it's all based on the development of technology-

in part, I'm not saying that's the only issue. But if you look for example

the abject slavery, chattel slavery,

when did that really resolve? It happened when

automation processes and mechanization started to be applied to agriculture.

So if you look in tandem, we really didn't start alleviating

all of this labor oppression until technology started to replace it.

And that's of course continuing this to this day

with technological unemployment, - Right.

- and we could talk a lot about that as we go along.

But the trend keeps going; it's actually very powerful

if we can just jump on board and not fight it,

which is unfortunately what capitalism is now doing.

- Well okay, as long as you brought it up

let's talk about technological unemployment.

It's increasing exponentially, I mean with self-driving vehicles

we could lose a third of the current US workforce

or at least their jobs in, very soon, 10 years maybe.

And I want to hear what your plan is,

how you would view we should deal with that.

My plan is:

I think if we kill the robots now while they're babies

they wouldn't know what hit them, right?

- Yeah (laughing) robot wars is upon us for sure.

Sadly enough, it's two things

that have been polluting our need for labor freedom

and that apparently are robots and brown people

if you listen to American politics. But nevertheless-...

And of course, we'll let the orange,

the orange monster Donald Trump lead the way

with the latter of that one.

Technological unemployment should be a godsend, man.

It should be everything that we've been striving for as a species.

Even John Maynard Keynes, you know,

the early Keynesin economist famous for realizing that

capitalism is fundamentally unstable and we need safeguards,

he said, even though he thought it was going to be a minor issue, that

we're really resolving our economic problem.

Literally the economic problem of our society is

a lack of means, and it's scarcity.

And with this new capacity for efficiency

which is being birthed in technology that's replacing labor,

we should be harnessing than and happy about it,

and instead we're still trying to “create jobs” and “create growth,”

and these arcane ideas are just gonna hit a wall.

And with the advent of universal basic income

(something that will be a big subject at

the ZDay event in Greece that I'll be speaking at, Zeitgeist Day,

we could talk about that moreso),

this is probably the first step to alleviate that issue,

to give people a standard of living fueled

by this increased efficiency without them having to,

to struggle and pay for everything.

And not having just the base welfare stuff that you see as well

which is nominal and looked down upon,

but to really realize that we can support society as a society

for the first time in human history.

And that's a powerful powerful state.

If we could just jump on board with that and stop

this need for labor for income,

and turn the tides and say “You know what?

Maybe we should NOT focus on people needing jobs,

and focus explicitly on replacing these jobs

and adjusting as we go along,"

we'd have a much healthier society.

A much more peaceful society too because all the conflict

that happens with the scarcity reality that would be resolved.

It's far-reaching what this step forward could do.

And I'll say that I think the force is fantastic. I think

it's really, it's the door being cracked open by the contradiction,

because labor for income is needed by capitalism obviously,

it's the bedrock of it, and this contradiction is

cracking that door open for people like myself.

I believe in a design economy and in collaborative systems,

all these things have been proven to be more efficient than

competition and all the other myths that

support capitalist structure today.

The door's cracking open. I think we're going to push through

as a new generation very soon, hopefully.

Well nevertheless GDP, growth,

all that stuff is old, arcane.

Needless to say, you can't have a society based on growth,

you need a society that lives in coexistence

with itself and the habitat; I don't know how

that logic has eluded us for so long on the political ...

the political economic level.

And political economy, no one seems to talk about the

problem with assuming the interest of growth.

And of course it's like a cancer. Capital accumulation,

you can use that old Marxism term

but it's just as relevant today as it was then.

All the corporations, like a disease, like cancer,

they stretch out, and they want to get more and more,

they make a million dollars one year, they need to make

$2 million the next year, they get more employees,

the last thing you want to do is contract.

And you know, infinite growth, I think there's only one,

literally one type of mechanism that does that on earth

apart from our economy, and again that is cancer itself.

So it's a cancerous system and

something's gonna have to happen to shut this thing down

before it eats itself alive or we literally

get to that point of no return which I'd,

I'd say about 2030, 2040

when you look at the biodiversity loss, when you look at climate change,

you look at the debt crisis, when you look at

the resource overshoot: about a sixth of the way through [the year]

on this planet we consume more resources that we're actually

able to produce by the planet.

We need many more planets in the future, by one estimate

27 more planets by 2050 if we're to keep the current rates going.

And the sad thing is the Global South

is never ever going to reach a high level of,

of public health and sustainability, and alleviation of poverty,

because all the mechanisms we're using based on growth

are just rapidly tearing things apart

to affect where the long-term repercussions are going to

settle down in the Global South, Africa and Latin/Central America -

they're the ones that are going to suffer from all this because

they're not going to have a chance because of all the negative externalities

that are being birthed from all the activity of the Global North.

Remember the Global North consumes everything.

80% of all the goods and services produced on this planet

are consumed by less than 20% of the population stuck

in America and Europe, so it's sad.

- Doesn't that just mean we're winning, Peter?

- That's exactly what it means, we are absolutely winning!

… it's obnoxious. - Hashtag winning.

To shrink that down to kind of one little point maybe mixed in

with what you're saying, like for example, clean water.

Thousands of people, especially children,

die every day due to lack of clean water.

I saw a documentary about the same guy who invented the Segway

invented a water purification system called Slingshot,

that, you know, you could dump diarrhea in one end

and you'd have a clean glass of water out the other end.

And it's affordable, it's only the size of a mini-fridge or something and

he's gone around to various organizations to try and

get those in the towns and cities in Africa and South America

that would need, that definitely need clean water,

and basically no one says that's what they do.

The UN says No, the Clinton Foundation says

we can't really do that. Ultimately,

he's ended up partnering somehow with Coca-Cola,

because they need clean water to create Coke

so they're willing to put some of these things in these towns

in order to get, use his machine for their water to make Coke.

So that shows capitalism works, right?

- (Chuckles) It's the trickle-through trickle-around affect.

I don't know quite how people defend it anymore.

No, I completely agree, if industry wants it,

then it will move forward, but if the individual or poverty-

I mean there's still people dying of tuberculosis on a massive scale in Africa.

Tuberculosis has been off the chart in the Global North for

forever, and literally the pharmaceutical companies have decided to stop

investigating it. In fact I believe if I remember correctly,

it's been 50 years since anyone has attempted to perfect

any treatments for tuberculosis

given the circumstance in the epidemic in Africa,

and literally they said this:

that it's just not profitable.

- Right, it does, it does come down to profit.

I also want to go back to something else you mentioned: basic income.

Do you support that in the-