I send an email to Peter Joseph requesting an on-camera interview...

...No Response

November 3rd, 2009:

I send another email to Peter Joseph...

Response!

Response! (November 10th)

"Charles, I am very busy at this time... I will be in and out of town this month.

Try me in early Dec. thx, Peter"

December 1st, 2009:

December 1st, 2009: I send another email to Peter Joseph requesting the interview...

...(waiting)

December 5th: "...fine- I'll give you 2 hrs. I'm in Bushwick..." P

Who is Peter Joseph?

A Mini-Doc by Charles Robinson

www.whoispeterjoseph.com

Background

My name is Peter Joseph. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm 31 years old.

I am an independant film maker and I suppose the de facto founder of an organisation called;

"The Zeitgeist Movement"

As far as my background, I was born to what I consider to be a middle class family.

My father was a... is now a retired postal employee,

and my mother is a retired Child Protective Services employee.

In fact, a lot of my social dispositions on society I think might come from

the experiences I had listening to the stories coming from my mother.

I started getting interested in music I think at about eight or nine.

I seemed to fall into a love of percussion and drums and rhythm.

I was very lucky to be accepted to a school in North Carolina,

an art school in a university,

which allowed me to grow up in a very different upbringing

than I think most people grow up into

in a rural town in a place in the south such as North Carolina.

And I was exposed to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different interests,

a lot of things that you wouldn't find in a typical highschool, say, in the south.

I was exposed to a large variety of people

and artistic and creative people, specifically,

which I think imprinted on me, so to speak,

and I continue those trends today.

Music and percussion are coupled straight into my identity.

People say to me: "Well, you know, you work with this social organisation,

but yet, you're just a musician". You know, "just a musician".

There is the credentialism tendency that comes up a lot

with anyone that talks about the issues that we talk about in the movement

or that have been talked about in the films.

And, we can talk about that a little bit later as well.

But, what I'd like to say is that, I look at music now as a form of meditation.

It's something that's an outlet, it maintains my balance.

So I continue to practice in a very personal sense,

it's not that I go out and perform that much anymore,

I don't have time to anymore.

After my second year of college, I dropped out

realizing that the debt that I was accruing was absolutely not worth it.

Even then I knew there was something wrong with going to school,

getting a ridiculous amount of debt, $80 to $100,000

and then being thrown into the work force,

automatically in a position of indentured servitude, if you will.

Automatically having to give yourself to the system because you're already in so much debt.

My original interest was to be a solo classical marimbist,

a laughable concept when I think about it now,

but we all have our bouts of naivety as we grow.

Once music became difficult for me to pursue as a career choice,

I started to get into video and editing, and I got a job in New York,

many jobs in New York, doing various freelance video editing,

shooting, whatever related to video work, film work.

You have to do whatever pays you in this society,

and I couldn't really find the niche to make money in music so, I ended up in advertising.

I always had a problem with people telling me what to do in the labor force,

and I did not like advertising, obviously.

I did not like the nonsensical manipulation of peoples' perceptions so corporations can sell their crap.

So I began to pursue work in the financial arena.

I began to do day trading, pattern training.

I was moderately succesful. I never had a big capital base, which you really do have to have.

I pulled some change out of the market,

and I continued to do it on and off for many, many years.

I don't do it anymore because I despise the market system.

The way I justified this was it was the only job I could come up with,

that didn't have a boss or a client, so it represented freedom to me.

Granted, trading the stock market has absolutely no social relevance,

it contributes nothing to society.

You could blow up Wall Street tomorrow and it wouldn't make a damn difference to anything

in regard to the natural order of affairs on this planet.

So at that stage in my life, I just wanted a way out.

I wanted to not have to deal with being a slave to the corporate system anymore.

So anyway, that's when I started first investigating economics,

and we can... I'm sure you have other questions about that, so I'll stop there.

Zeitgeist began as a public performance,

an attempt at a vaudevillian concept.

What I did was I set up two screens,

and I had a huge percussion setup in the middle where I performed,

with the videos that were on the two screens.

Some of the equipment you see here was used.

I've actually sold off most of my equipment.

But regardless... I think I have some photographs I can give you.

There's only a few that actually were captured, believe it or not, at the original event.

I wish I had documented the original event,

because people keep asking me about it.

But never the less, it started off as a creative work,

a variation on an early vaudevillian concept.

Film and live music. Live performance.

And once it was over, you know there was a...

it was a free event. I did it for six nights, I believe.

And people came, I advertised it like crazy.

I spent thousands and thousands of dollars.

I did it mainly because I had been stuck in the corporate reality,

and I just wanted to do something for myself to make myself feel better

about a world that's going to shit, essentially.

A world that's being dominated by finance, a world that's sick and distorted,

through religious processes, financial oligarchs.

It was just an expression, it was in fact a very angry, but solemn expression.

I never expected it to turn out to be what it was, at all.

After it was over, I just found myself in a little bit more debt.

And I took the work which, by the way, I had no clearance for,

I didn't clear any of the aspects with it.

But, since the internet is what it is, tossed it up online to see what would happen.

Maybe some people would like it, they'd download it, I'd get some feedback.

Whatever.

What happened completely blew my mind.

I posted it on one website, and from there, a chain reaction occured, and I...

It's pretty much all history from that point on, I couldn't even tell you how it unfolded.

All I know is that,

I got wind of the fact that it was getting a tremendous amount of hits,

and talked about a lot, so I built a website for it:

www.zeitgeistmovie.com

And I just had it up there for free.Then I realized that people wanted it on DVD.

Like ok, I guess I should try to do that.

So I was forced into a very difficult position of getting clearance from all the participants involved,

which was very difficult, by the way because,

everyone saw dollar-signs,

because it's an internet film that's getting millions of views.

So I had to pay out a lot of money to a set number of people to get it going.

But there were also people that were just happy to see this information get out there,

and didn't have any problems with me doing

what I call a "non-commercial distribution".

A $5 DVD, for it to be released, in some capacity.

From there I got an email from an organization called the Artivist Film Festival.

And, to my amazement, they wanted to show the film in their festival,

which was a packed audience, sold out audience.

At this stage it was still utterly bewildering to me.

This was the same organization of course that showed Zeitgeist: Addendum the next year.

"In a world where media is often used to keep us a little dumbed down

more than anything else, as far as my opinion is concerned."

(Applause)

I've often said, art without conscience is meaningless,

and I think action without conscience is futile.

So, I think it's so great to have a festival that represents these types of ideas.

As far as the film itself,

I guess all I can really say is that the whole point of the film

is for people to start looking at the very fundamental root causes

of all of these problems that we see in society.

So, that's a general run down of what happened.

The Zeitgeist Movement.

The Zeitgeist movement was a very difficult decision for me.

I could have just made Zeitgeist: Addendum like other socially conscious film makers do

in the sense that I could have just said: "Oh, well here's a bunch of stuff,

here's a bunch of problems. Hey, here are some possible solutions.

Take what you will with it, and just roll with it and see what happens."

I really was on the fence about putting at the very end;

"Join the movement www.thezeitgeistmovement.com"

And 6) Join the movement.

Go to thezeitgeistmovement.com and help us create

the largest mass movement for social change the world has ever seen.

I knew that the moment that it became something more than just a film phenomenon,

that my life would likely change dramatically, which it has.

Zeitgeist: Addendum was sparked out of people emailing me saying,

"Well, what do we do about all of these cultural problems?

What do we do about a corrupt banking system?

What do we do about people that are locked into establishment social programs, if you will?"

I consider the trains of thought and mind to be a program.

I consider society itself to be a program that's running.

And the programing locks people into a specific frame of reference.

How do we deal with these issues?

How do we do, what do we do?

And Zeitgeist: Addendum was an attempt at answering that question.

After Zeitgeist 1 was released, it got into the hands of Jacque and Roxanne.

And after reading Jacques book, which they sent me,

I realized that this was really important information.

I realized that, even I was backwards on a lot of issues that needed to be corrected.

And in order to get society in line,

we have to think about the fundamental problems.

This was something that I was attempting to do in part, I had a notion of,

but it wasn't until I met Jacque Fresco that the lense became focused.

It was like all these things that I sort of had an inkling of,

Jacque's experience, life experience, what he had talked about for so long,

just focused me in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned.

So I made a whole section with him in Zeitgeist: Addendum,

and that's how it took off.

ATTACKS

Anyone that chooses to challenge establishment orthodoxy,

traditional world views, not to mention the system that we live in,

sets themself up for vehement attacks.

I'm well aware of this.

If you look back at the history of anyone that has chosen to challenge the establishment,

it's a very dark history.

There are a great number of people out there that know that something is wrong.

But, they do not understand the source of that wrongness,

because they are in the box of indoctrination.

Socrates. Socrates never speculated on the slavery that was existing during his time.

That was normality to him.

This goes with every type of political philosopher that's ever existed,

whether it's Carl Marx, whether it's Plato.

They're all locked into an established paradigm,

and their thought processes can only go so far.

And this includes, probably, myself.

People are locked into a box.

They see the box around them,

they see the leaks and the holes and the cracks and they go up to the cracks

and they try to fix them; they try to patch the holes.

But they don't stop to think that maybe there's something wrong with the box, itself.

Maybe the integrity of the box that they exist in is inherently invalid, it's inherently void.

The economic system that we live in is a parasitic paradigm,

that is only going to lead to self-destruction.

But people don't see that.

So if you attack the economic system for what it actually is, everyones' feathers go up.

Everyone says: "Well, wait a minute. This is the world we all live.

We live in a profit-based, labor-for-income world, cyclical consumption.