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