Collapse (2009) Movie Script
You know... There's been a lot of talk
about Abraham Lincoln.
But the president we need today
is not Abraham Lincoln.
The president we need today
is Thomas Jefferson.
He said that we needed a revolution
every generation.
Thomas Jefferson said you have to be ready in order to
preserve the vitality of your liberty and your freedom,
to defend it, nothing by overthrowing anything else
except for what you've been holding in your head,
that may not be applicable anymore.
We've gotten very lazy, where many generations
are overdue for revolution, and are thinking.
I'm not talking about blood and violence,
although I'm afraid that's already happening.
I'm talking about a revolution that's
probably the hardest kind.
The kind that takes place in the human soul,
in the human mind.
To be able to tear everything down,
throw everything out, and start with
a completely fresh paper and say...
okay, how do we solve this problem?
Uhm, can you talk to me a little bit-
Who-who are you?
Listen, this is not a plan that would
make sense to anybody except God.
You know, I gave up trying to figure
that out a long time ago.
I was born into a family deeply connected to
the US intelligence community.
My mother had been a cryptanalyst at the
army security agency at NSA
in World War II.
Her work product went to
president Roosevelt,
and to the secretary of war, Stimson,
and Cordell Hull, secretary of state.
My father was an airforce aviator who went to work for
contracts for the CIA and the airforce,
namely the Titan III-c, which put up the
CIA's keyhole spy satellite.
Uhm, at age 19,
when I was interning for LAPD,
I was pulled into the chief's office, because
somebody discovered I had a cue clearance.
I didn't know anything about it.
I went home and asked dad,
and he said, yeah, because you're my son
and they have to do that,
because I might leave my briefcase open.
But a cue was a secret, compartimentalized
clearance above top secret.
I went through UCLA as a republican,
who didn't like anything about the war in Vietnam,
who didn't like, uhm,
anything about government with this naive belief that you
can get inside the system and change it from the inside.
I became an LA policeman.
Worked in South Central, Los Angeles,
in the Jungle, and the CIA tried,
unofficially, to recruit me into an operation where
they were smuggling drugs into the country,
back in 1976, 1977.
And I wouldn't get involved in that.
You know, I thought, geez, this must be
an isolated incident of corruption.
This must be something that everybody's
gonna wanna try to correct right away.
And of course that was a mistake.
Basically, my life desintegrated because
I was betrayed by a woman who worked for CIA,
who was my fiance. And when I said I wouldn't
get involved in drugs, she disappeared,
and people started shooting at me.
And then, it was a matter of saving my life.
The tools which I acquired to save my life then,
which were, you know, writing letters to congressmen,
getting on the record,
trying to get newspaper stories written,
those were survival skills, but it was
also a part of learning how things worked.
I was a map maker, if you will, a cartographer.
Going out to try and map how
the world really worked,
as opposed to the way we were told it worked.
And the map that we had made,
has proved so startlingly accurate over 10 years,
whether they had to do with gold prices,
or geopolitical developments,
or economic events.
The only thing that amazes me, is the speed
with which things are falling apart.
And that message now is the single
most important thing in my life.
It's the only thing in my life. Well, except for
rock and roll music, good music,
playing with my dog,
and long walks on the beach.
Rex, come here.
I first became focused on energy issues in late 2001.
Uhm, just at maybe a month or two after 9/11.
I was contacted by a geologist,
a brilliant guy named
Dale Allen Pfeiffer,
who introduced me to the concept of peak oil,
and the basic issues about energy, and helped me
to realize that there was a great deal of evidence
in 2001, not only that peak oil was very real,
but that government agencies were acting
and responding as if it was very real.
All plastic is oil. Most paints,
all pesticides are made from oil.
Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes,
is made from oil.
There are seven gallons of oil in every tire.
There is nothing anywhere,
in any combination that will replace
the edifice built by fossil fuels.
Nothing.
Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain.
Much easier than it was a long time ago.
People have felt what 147 dollar
a barrel oil feels like.
Essentially, peak oil is like
if you know what a Bell curve is,
goes up, comes down.
Peak oil is the point of oil production when
you're at the top of the Bell curve.
And essentially, what that means,
is you've used up half of the resource.
Uhm, but in the case of oil, or any other substance
like that, no matter how much money you throw at it,
you're never gonna be able to increase
oil production above where it was at peak.
As of 2008, the international energy agency
has admitted that there is a global 9%
decline rate in oil production.
That's the equivalent of about 8 million barrels a day.
There is no way, having plucked all the low
hanging fruit and found the big reservoirs,
that we're gonna be able
to offset a 9% decline rate.
From a detective stand point,
if you're trying to assemble a case,
you know,
the multidimensional aspects of a case,
means, motive, opportunity,
to understand what kind of force drives events.
Uhm, peak oil was almost with the stroke
of like a diamond cutters knife,
the single piece which started to make everything
resonate and make sense, together.
You will recall that when the Bush
administration took office in January 2001,
a national energy policy development group,
the NEPDG,
was formed and placed under the exclusive, private,
absolute control of vice-president Dick Cheney.
Its records were kept a secret,
its minutes were kept a secret,
seven pages were released as a result of two lawsuits.
And it clearly shows that that taskforce
was looking, saying,
how much oil is there,
where is it, who owns it.
They knew that this was coming for a long time. It's been
know that this event, this collapse, this crash was coming.
Who they were.
We can't even get information
as to who was involved.
First of all, if you think there might be oil someplace,
then what you do,
is you go drill a test well.
Then what you have to do, is to take
that one well in the center and then
you drill a series of appraisal wells around that well
to determine where the oil field might go.
You don't know how much oil you're gonna get,
how deep it is, what kind of oil it's gonna be.
There are many different grades of oils,
a lot of which are more expensive to refine.
So all of that has to do with how long
it takes to make something produce.
How much energy do you get back
for how much energy you invested.
When oil was seeping out of the ground in Pennsylvania,
you got a return of, I don't know, 200 to 1.
When you have to go offshore,
to deep water,
drilling in 15,000 feet of water,
uhm, and your first well costs
that's being invested to get energy.
And the moment you start burning more energy
to get a barrel of oil out of the ground
than it's worth,
forget about it.
The world's been thoroughly explored
over the last 120 years,
there's no new major oil finds left.
As a matter of fact, no field the size of Guar,
the largest field in Saudi Arabia,
has ever been discovered since.
Saudi Arabia has 25% of the known
oil reserves on the planet.
Twenty-five percent.
Why, if Saudi Arabia has all these
untapped reserves on shore,
are they moving into offshore drilling?
Now, if it's 5, 10, 50 times more expensive
to drill offshore than on land,
doesn't that tell you that Saudi Arabia
knows they've got no more oil to find?
It's axiomatic that if Saudi Arabia
has passed its peak and is in decline,
the whole planet is, just because of
the size of the reserves that are there.
Iraq is oil that's not only accessible,
it's right close to the Persian Gulf,
which means it's a short distance to ships.
They can put the pipelines,
they can get that into the global supply stream.
As everything else declines.
And Iraq was all about the oil. You know,
a lot of people have admitted that and like 'duh'.
Eleven days after 9/11,
when there was no clear evidence that
Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11,
of course he didn't,
that the plans were started to invade Iraq.
Of course!
That was the objective.
Get control of that oil.
Because Saddam Hussein had been talking about
pricing his oil in Euros, taking it away from the dollar.
We got in there, we restructured everything,
we put in a friendly government,
using the US dollar,
and we assured the oil companies their quote on quote
fair access and fair share of Iraqi oil.
We have no intention of leaving Iraq.
We're never gonna leave Iraq.
Going back to 2004, we started building the largest,
most permanent military bases, three of them, in the world,
plus the largest embassy compound
that's ever been built.
We built an embassy compound in Bagdad
that's bigger than Vatican City.
That's not a temporary deal.
Nobody's gonna take that oil,
we're sitting on it.
But there's not enough oil in Iraq
to change anything.
But Iraq probably has around
That sounds like a lot of oil.
But when you consider that in 2008,
the world was consuming 85 million in barrels a day,
that means a billion barrels of oil only lasts
for about 11 and a half days.
So that ain't that much oil.
They knew exactly what was coming.
That's what's in the National Energy
Policy Development Group report
that's been classified, because
if that report got declassified,
we would be building scaffolds to hang
Dick Cheney and everbody
in that administration tomorrow.
Let's assume just for the sake of discussion
that there's 600 billion barrels in the arctic.
First of all, it happens to be under the polar ice cap.
That's a problem.
The polar ice cap happens to be on,
what, 10,000 - 15,000 feet of water.
The problem with the polar ice cap is,
it floats, it moves.
So you can't drill a well on tuesday.
and expect it to be in the same place on thursday.
That's why a lot of conservative
think tanks and oil companies,
are cheering the melting of the polar ice caps.
If there is oil in A.N.W.R.,
there's no more
than about a six month supply
for the entire United States.
There are no pipelines across the thousand miles
of tundra that's melting
due to global warming,
which means you can't sink
pipes to support a pipeline
in tundra that's turned to mud.
There's no tanker routes,
the wells aren't drilled and yet we are spending
our future as if that oil is there.
We gotta drop all this lying right now.
We don't need transparancy about
anything other than how much oil is really left,
because we don't know.
Oil is a commodity, it's an asset.
You make loans based
upon what's in the ground.
So you have all these accounting terms.
Possible reserves, proven reserves,
ultimately recoverable reserves.
Verified reserves, estimated reserves...
But, actual reserve estimates are state secrets.
The Saudi's don't dare announce that they've
passed their peak of oil production. Why?
They have a very restive population,
that have been sold an expectation of a
rising standard of living and the moment
Saudi Arabia acknowledges it's passed peak
it may well have a revolution.
Now what happens if there's a revolution in Saudi Arabia,
with 25% of the world's known oil,
where is that oil gonna get replaced from?
It can't be.
Very complex problem.
It's a very complex situation.
Just start working now, otherwise we won't have time.
They're gonna be out of oil within a few years.
And doing this sort of pulling archive
of footage for this film,
I found at least 10 examples of people
in the late seventies,
talking about this is the end of oil.
This is like end of the way of life,
we're hitting a new era.
This situation is destined to continue.
People look at that footage and I think that
they can feel that it's somewhat alarmist,
given that we were able to continue
our way of life for another 35 years.
Do you see any parallels
between that time and now?
The seventies was really a critical decade.
In the seventies, Marion King Hubbert,
the original prophet of peak oil,
in late 1949, he did the math
that said US domestic oil production
will peak in 1970.
So that's not some feat of Nostradamus
communicating with some entity.
It's math, it's science.
It's simple.
But in the seventies, M. King Hubbert
testified before congress,
that was 1974.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter said,
man, we cannot use as much energy
as we have been using.
That's when solar panels went up, that's when-
he knew- they had known in Washington...
I have published on my website,
as have others,
declassified CIA documents from 1976,
showing that CIA was perfectly
aware of peak oil.
In those days, of course,
when the situation appeared to be normal,
when people had jobs, they had vacations,
they had credit cards, they had
credit lines, everybody's talking about
growth buy, spend, consume,
and everything seemed to be working.
Yeah, we were called alarmists.
We don't live in that world anymore.
Americans were on the way to
owning millions of cars.
on the planet.
They all run on oil.
It takes uncounted barrels of oil,
to make those cars and engines
in the first place.
And you cannot plug any new technology into
an internal combustion powered engine.
With 7 gallons of oil in every tire,
nobody will ever make
because there ain't gonna be enough oil.
Ethanol is an absolute
joke.
First of all, a very brilliant scientist,
David Pimentel, took the concept of net energy,
how much energy do you invest,
versus how much do you get in return,
and he concluded about a decade ago,
I guess,
that it takes more energy to make ethanol,
than you get from burning it,
which is absolute stupidity.
Because you drive the oil powered machines, et cetera,
you irrigate, you produce the fertilizers,
you're burning all that oil and natural gas to grow it.
Then you make steam,
which is more hydrocarbon energy,
you add more chemicals,
and you come up with ethanol,
which you can put in a car.
Now the Bush administration had annouced
a goal of having 15%
of all fuel in the United States made from ethanol,
I think, by the year 2015.
They forgot to tell you that that would take
all the arable land used
to grow corn to do it.
Canadian tar sands is an oil.
It is a very, very thick,
sticky, obnoxious substance,
that's mixed in with sand,
at levels two, three, four, five hundred feet
in layers beneath the soil, this is in Alberta.
And they literally stripmine
thousands of tons a day.
They put them in these huge oil powered
dumptrucks and drive them to a place where
they then wash the sand.
They take billions of gallons of freshwater
at which we're running out of everywhere,
and boil it buy burning natural gas.
There is not a possibility anywhere,
that Canadian tar sands production
will exceed maybe
three and a half million barrels a day.
The first thing that the uneducated mind
that's in denial says,
well, what about hydrogen.
Can we make electric cars?
And I have to bring them back to the fact
that there's 7 gallons of oil in every tire,
there are thousands of gallons of oil in every car,
in the plastics, the paints, the resins.
Everything. All of that's made by oil.
The oil that's used to manufacture the car,
and ship it around to heat the metals, et cetera.
There will never be 800 million
electric powered vehicles,
and electricity is not an energy source.
electricity is generated
by burning or using
some other kind of energy.
It's clear that electricity
is the key to industrial civilisation,
in that it powers our refrigeration,
it runs the water pumps,
that pump water out of the New York
subway system every day.
It allows us to communte electronically,
charge our cellphone batteries,
preserve food, run operating rooms,
et cetera.
The subject of alternative energies...
There is no such thing
as clean coal.
And there never ever will be.
Why? Carbon sequestration
is enormously expensive.
What it says, is essentially you capture the CO2
and any other greenhouse gases emitted,
in the burning of the coal, you exert
enormous amounts of energy to compress it,
then you move it over
enormously long distances,
and you pump it into some airtight chamber
in the ground, where
somebody will figure out with technology what to do
with the greenhouse gas in 10 or 15 000 years.
Nuclear process requires something
like 10 to 30 years of incubation
to get the permitting done,
all the regulations satisfied,
and the construction of nuclear powerplants is
one of the most energy intensive processes.
in the world.
The steel, the lead containment, the enrichment
of uranium is a horribly intensive process.
You just don't throw a rock of uranium in
and start making nuclear energy.
Can't do that.
The first and obvious problem
with tidal energy is
is that it has to be generated
or collected near coastline.
Salt water is extremely corrosive.
There's an enormous energy cost
in manufacturing the machines.
There are only two alternative energies, which can
really have an immediate impact, an immediate benefit.
Now, the problem with plans like
enormous wind farms in Texas, Oklahoma,
Colorado, ...
The fundamental law with electricity is
that it's drawn off right where it's used, first.
Yes, you can transmit electricity
over long distances, but
people don't think about the energy
that goes into transformers,
and how much copper's in power lines,
and all the maintenance that has to go that grid.
So, when you see
really ridiculous commercials that say,
we could have a solar array
they don't even think about the fact that
that electricity is gonna get used
in California before it goes any place else.
Just, uhm you know, if you saw this movie
and you didn't know who you were,
and you wanted, you were just curious
what your credentials are in terms of
understanding this information?
I have a bachelor's degree
in political science,
with honors from UCLA,
uhm, in 1973.
Graduate of the Los Angeles police academy,
valedictorian,
class of 1173.
Uhm, was sent to do DEA,
Narcotics Enforcement School,
by LAPD.
I have 30 years of experience as an
investigative journalist.
I've broken major schandals,
that have had national impact.
Of course, I got to know
many members of congress.
I've been trying to testify for a long time,
and actually,
I have never testified in congress.
I did at the request of the senate
select committee on intelligence,
submit written testimony.
But after they read the written testimony that
I was going to submit, I never got called to testify.
I've written two books,
one of which is in the Harvard
business school library.
Uhm, I've lectured at universities
all over the country,
and in many countries.
Uhm, people wonder how this guy with a
bachelor's degree from UCLA, came to know all this shit,
Well, this comes from thirty years
of learning how to scan mainstream media,
and read it.
A way of finding stories
from around the world,
that tell you all the things
that are really going on,
that are not played on the headlines,
but they're the kind of stories that
people who really make decisions
know how to look for.
Uhm, and then how to connect them-, how to place
the dots close enough so that they can be connected.
The soil is the place from which all plant matter
gets its nutrients.
And if you keep sucking the nutrients out,
the soil is useless.
For all of history, the way that the soil was
replenished, the nutrients were
returned in some measure to the soil,
was that plant matter was allowed to decay,
to compost, to restock the soil.
That's why crop rotation is so important.
You may have one crop of
celery, which will suck
certain chemicals out of the soil.
Another crop, wheat or something else,
may return those same chemicals to the soil,
so the soil maintains a balance.
It's kind of sad, because we as a species
have become so disconnected from the earth.
We don't have any real contact with the earth.
We don't have any sense of its functions, its feel,
its nature, its seasons, its timing.
First of all, the top soil
on which food is grown now,
is nothing more than a sponge,
unto which we pour chemicals,
that we get from oil and natural gas.
And without those chemicals, the soil has
been turned into a junkie, the soil is worthless.
Uhm, so when you plant a crop now,
what happens, is you drive an oil-powered machine,
It drives along and it plows.
Then you drive another oil-powered machine,
and it drives along and it plants.
And then you irrigate.
Well, how do you irrigate? Well...
That water is pumped by pumps
that are powered by electricity.
Where does that electricity come from?
In the US, it's either coal or natural gas.
So, next thing you do, is come along in your fertilizer.
All commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia,
and the feedstock for ammonia
is natural gas.
So you have ammoniumnitrate fertilizers that are then
sprayed on by another oil-powered vehicle,
Then the cropdusters come along
that are powered by oil,
that spray pesticides
that are all made from petroleum.
Then, when it's time to harvest the food,
what do you do, you drive another oil-powered machine,
and you harvest it.
You use another oil-powered machine
to drive it to a place where it's processed.
Ahem, then you wrap it up in plastic,
which is oil, and you put it in another
oil-powered machine and you drive it
x-number of miles to a
food distribution warehouse,
the oil-powered machine to your supermarket.
The way food is grown, produced and moved
around the world today, it's an enormous
waste of hydrocarbon energy,
which doesn't make sense.
Why do we have strawberries from Chili,
why do we have spinach from China,
why do we ship anchovies
halfway around the world to be
packaged in tin cans
and, you know.
There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy
in every
calory of food consumed
in the industrialized world.
Three times in my life
I tried to
walk away from, forget about
the things that I had seen,
that were so...
out of whack.
That were so crazy, that were so wrong.
You know, and that's what many people urged me to do,
but what inevitably happened every time I tried to
walk away from this path that I've walked,
was that everything else in my life would be
taken away from me, so this path was
the only thing left. I had no other choice.
And uhm, yeah, anger and resentment
do build up when you see
and document as much corruption,
as much dishonesty, as much illigality,
as much murder, as much betrayal
as I have from people who
pretend to be otherwise.
And I reached a point, it was about 1993,
when I first became involved and learned of the murder
of marine Colonel Jim Sabow
at El Toro marine airstation.
He was the chief of air ops and he had caught CIA
C-130's flying two and three thousand kilos of cocaine.
onto his base and he was suicided.
Uhm, I crossed my own Rubicon at that point,
there was no turning back for me.
And I knew that wherever this path
was gonna go, I had to follow it.
In the eighties, because I had some skill
as a writer, I started freelance writing.
I got published a few times.
I realized that I could be a writer.
I wrote about 109 mysterious deaths
or suicides in the US military,
in a very short period of time
and I found that most of those were
connected to covert operations
in one way or another.
The next real revolution came in 1996
after my confrontation with CIA director
John Deutch at Locke highschool,
you know, and I remember saying up something like
I am a former Los Angeles Police
Narcotics detective.
I worked in South-Central Los Angeles
and I can tell you, director Deutch,
emphatically and without equivocation,
that the Agency has dealt drugs
in this country for a long time.
And the room exploded.
I had been saying that CIA was dealing
drugs for 18 years. I mean,
I'd been shot at for, I'd been forced
out of LAPD, I'd been trashed, I'd been called crazy.
If, in the course of the IG's investigations,
in Fred Hitz's work,
you come across evidence of severely
criminal activity, will you tell
the American people the truth?
We will bring the people to justice
and make them accountable.
Like so often, when they promise justice,
there isn't any. It was widdled and tweeted down
There were some very mysterious deaths involved.
Congressman Julian Dixon
was at that meeting,
had a very sudden heart attack,
which led to the publishing of the first issue
of my first newsletter in may of 1998,
From the Wilderness.
I sat down, wrote a few pages out,
I mailed it to 68 names,
and over the next eight and a half years,
From the Wilderness grew to have,
as many as 60 members of congress
as subscribers,
professors at universities around the world,
government officials.
One of my first exposs after CIA and drugs,
was that I proved CNN was absolutely lying
in something called the Tailwind scandal
of 1998,
where CNN had correctly reported,
their producer April Oliver had reported that
CIA had used sarin gas in Laos
during the Vietnam War,
and Henry Kissinger authorized it.
... were different A1 pilots,
who brought the gas.
In spite of what the Pentagon said...
CNN rolled over, Henry Kissinger called,
Olliver was fired.
Patt Tillman series that I broke
in my newsletter, all seven parts,
that was what broke the Patt Tillman Expos,
that brought down nine officers, got them disciplined.
... Patt Tillman, the governement violated
its most basic responsibility.
But my economic predictions then...
uhm, we had it so right.
... problems are sevenfold behind the economic
crash that is coming, that will be nothing
like we have ever seen before.
In, uhm, 2006,
we said get out of debt right now.
Check your mortgage carefully,
especially if you have an ARM,
Get into gold, reduce debt as much as possible,
stay away from any kind of financing,
and heavy credit card.
We issued a whole series of warnings.
... How many people have ever heard of the fact
that they're trading at mortgage backed securities?
Like mutual funds, but it's all mortgages?
Those books are as cooked
as the books on Enron!
But it was like 11, 12 days after we issued that
economic alert in the middle of running the Tillman series,
that our offices were burglarized,
all seven computers smashed.
Uhm, and a whole chain of events
that took place up there which was...
... which actually worked out ok,
because I needed to evolve,
and I have since then.
There was a period after so many years
of deliberate attempts to sabotage my operations,
four of which we connected
in one way or another to the FBI...
I published that I had retired.
I said officially that I had retired.
What I had... And at that point, given the way
I felt, that was a pretty honest statement.
I didn't know that I would bounce back, or that
there was a third or a fourth wind to come inside of me,
but that also is the image that I wanted out there,
just to take the heat off me,
at least until Bush and Cheney got out of the White House,
because that's where the heat was coming from.
From them personally, I mean, from their administration,
from the people that ran the CIA, that ran the FBI,
who was that pressure coming from?
I have absolutely no doubt that
Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
took an intense personal interest in me
and what my newsletter had published
for all the years of the Bush administration.
That's about as specific as I care to get.
There was a guy named Von Clausewitz,
who said that
war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Politics is a continuation of economics
by other means.
To understand all of this mess, you need to understand
one term, that's a big financial term,
that's real simple to understand,
it's called derivative.
A derivative is any financial instrument
which is derived from the inherent value
of something else that's tangible.
In other words, an ear of corn has value.
a barrel of oil has value.
If you have a house and a mortgage, that's fine.
When you start doing mortgage backed securities,
packaging and bundling,
that's called a derivative.
As of the start of the collapse,
which, let's peg at september of 2008,
there were derivatives with a notional value,
meaning that if you added up all the pieces of paper,
were worth 700 trillion dollars.
In other words, if they all cashed out at once,
you would need to have 700 trillion in cash,
and of course there isn't that much money.
So with all of these hedges and derivatives and puts and calls,
those are all derivatives, and all these other things they do,
All they cared about was making the minimum
monthly payment on their credit card bill.
In other words, to service the 700 trillion dollars
in notional value derivatives,
they had to pay a certain amount of cash every month,
and God forbid they should all come due.
What's happening with all of these bailouts,
which are now around
They're chasing a 700 trillion dollar
derivatives bubble down the drain.
The people who have run the monetary paradigm,
the economic paradigm,
since money was first invented, have wanted to mystify it
and to make everybody believe that only some expert
could understand the mumbo-jumbo
of the priesthood of money.
Three things only anybody needs to know about
the way money works around the world today,
One. Fiat currency.
What is money?
If I were to take a bill out of my wallet,
and I reach into my wallet, and I pull out this bill,
it's 20 dollars.
Whow, okay.
Can I eat it? Can I roll it up and chew it?
Do I get calories and vitamins?
No, I don't.
Can I fumble it up, throw it in my gas tank?
Is the car gonna go anywhere?
No, it's gonna clog the fuel injectors, maybe.
This is only a symbol.
This doesn't mean anything, it's fiat.
It's created out of thin air,
because somebody turned on a printing press.
That's all it is.
Before the great growth of population,
which occured with the advent of oil,
came this revolution
in the monetary system as well.
There was time when
the pound sterling actually meant
a pound of sterling silver.
There was only so much silver out of the ground,
it was tangible, you couldn't print silver,
it was something real.
You cannot print anymore money
than there is energy to back it up.
It's that simple.
So we have fiat currency.
Then we have something called fractional reserve banking.
If you were to bring me in a 10 dollar deposit,
I could make, uhm,
Based on just having
that 10 dollars in my drawer,
because it's all calculated on the premise
that not everybody is gonna come in
and want their cash all at once.
That's called a run on the bank.
So, they have calculated the odds,
much as, uhm, Vegas odds makers do,
and said ok, well, very little odds
under normal conditions.
When I lend now a total of 100 dollars
based on that 10 dollar deposit,
that's more money
that I create out of thin air.
Well gee, that means that,
in order to pay off whoever gets that money,
has to make more money still to feed it
at the bottom to pay the bank,
so that the bank can create still more money.
You know, I think it's probably pretty safe
at this point in time with the collapse of the US economy,
to say that pretty much everybody is understanding
how compound interest works.
the higher the interest rate on your credit card,
for those people who had,
you know, 20-25% cards,
that means they're creating that much more money,
if they don't pay cash every month.
What I have just described,
is a pyramid scheme.
We live in an infinite growth paradigm,
which requires growth forever.
It's not that Bernie Madoff was a pyramid scheme,
or Stanford was a pyramid scheme,
the whole economy is a pyramid scheme!
The whole global economy cannot be sustained,
it requires infinite growth.
But infinite growth collides with finite energy.
First law of thermodynamics,
energy can neither be created, nor destroyed.
The second law,
energy converts in only one direction,
from usable to unusable,
that's called the law of entropy, things break down.
An in every energy transaction, some energy is always lost.
So you have finite energy and you have
a financial paradigm which demands
infinite growth and we're at the point of human history
where the infinite growth paradigm
collides with something
that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent,
that there would be a major implosion
of the US economy.
I actually missed it by about a year,
maybe a little bit more. I thought it was
gonna happen sooner, but it happened.
And now that it is happening, these pieces
are falling exactly as everything else
had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists,
all the sustainability advocates.
Our map was proving deadly accurate.
Things don't break up,
they break down.
When a government collapses,
what happens?
The mail stops getting delivered.
Air traffic controllers don't get paid, so they
don't go to work, which means planes don't fly.
Bridges and highway inspections don't get made.
Food and drug administration inspections don't get made.
Maintenance is going to be defrayed,
Law enforcement stops working.
I mean, it's no secret now.
You see the headlines every day.
California's bancrupt, Michigan's bancrupt, Ohio...
They're shutting down services left and right.
There are tent cities springing up all over the country,
there are homeless, displaced people.
The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites,
the many very, very wealthy people are getting
crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don't hear, is the fact that all
over the world economies are collapsing
much faster than the US economy.
Brittain is an absolute basket case.
There is a curtain of despair
descending across Eastern Europe.
There's a revolution underway in Greece,
it's not riots, it's not civil unrest,
it's a revolution.
Drug violence right across the border in Mexico.
This is all part of the collapse.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, there's lots of violence.
The people who have run the planet to this point
and who are running the planet now, are losing control.
Have I ever been called a conspiracy theorist?
Of course I've been callled a conspiracy theorist!
But I don't deal in conspiracy theory,
I deal in conspiracy fact.
Somebody said to me a long time ago,
and this was probably back in '84,
climb down off the cross, asshole,
we need the lumber!
I am not a messiah.
I am not responsible for saving anybody.
the only person I'm responsible
for saving, is me.
What I see now, is the end of a paradigm
that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that
killed almost all life on the earth
and certainly the dinosaurs.
Now, the dinosaurs were kings of their paradigm.
And a paradigm is what you think about,
something before you think about it.
Somebody thinks about money, and you
automatically accept without thinking that
compound interest, fractional reserve banking
and fiat currency is ok and we have to protect that
because if we don't protect that,
it's gonna be bad for us.
If you know anything about darwinism,
basically what it said, was that those species
that had evolved, or were able to adapt to changing
circumstances, were the ones that survived,
and those that were not equipped, or had become
evolutionary dead ends, were destined to die.
Mike, you better be careful, it sounds
like you're advocating social darwinism.
I'm not advocating social darwinism,
I am witnessing actual darwinism.
If you're in a camp with a bunch of campers,
uhm, and a bear attacks,
you don't have to be faster than the bear.
You only have to be faster
than the slowest camper.
There is one and only one
graph image that I have used,
in, I would guess, 60 to 70 lectures
in eight countries,
and that's a graph of human population.
And if one looks at that graph,
what you see, is human population
roughly stable at around
a billion people or so.
Then maybe a little bit more,
around the time of Christ.
Then it stays pretty stable, until we get
to the Bubonic-, it starts to rise some,
as some primitive technology emerged,
but then you get to the Bubonic plague,
there's a little dip.
Then after the Bubonic plague, you begin the start
of what we would call the Renaissance,
uhm, and the early stages
of the Industrial Revolution.
Uhm, the discovery of steam,
the population starts to go like this.
The introduction of coal,
the population starts to go like this,
but around 1900, around the turn of the 20th century,
what you see, as oil became ubiquitous,
was that the population went like this.
And it goes up to 6,5 billion people,
we may be at 7 billion people
by the time anyone sees this interview.
All of those people exist
on this planet only because of oil.
So it's axiomatic that if you take the oil away,
the population must go away also.
In all of science, in all of biology,
there is no case where any population,
be it bacteria in a petry dish,
or caribou in an arctic island,
runs into a set of favorable circumstances
and goes to that point,
without an immediate crash,
down.
It's a law. It's a law as fundamental as gravity,
a law as fundamental as thermodynamics,
and if one thinks about it, it might also
be viewed as true of the stock markets,
or the financial markets, which go like this,
and when they go like this,
they automatically go like this.
That's the history of every bubble.
I think it's a mistake,
to ask if people,
and make all people the same as one entity,
if they will understand it.
I don't care if all people understand it.
When you're faced with, uhm, with
an overwhelming life threatening crisis,
as in the Titanic being hit by an iceberg,.
and you happen to be aware before anybody else is,
that the ship is gonna sink,
and there aren't enough lifeboats,
and you know how to build lifeboats,
and you try to deal with that in
however long the Titanic had
before it went down,
you're likely to come across three types
of passenger on the Titanic.
You'll run across a type that's basically
dear in the headlights.
Ship's been hit, what does that mean? What do I do?
I don't know what to do, I don't know where to go.
That's one group.
There's another group that says,
we get that the ship's gonna sink, we get that.
We're all gonna die, unless we make some lifeboats,
and do it fast. Show us what to do.
And then you have a third group,
that says, this is the Titanic,
it's absolutely unsinkable.
Un-fucking-sinkable.
And, uhm, so we're going back to the bar for a drink
and all you doomsday sayers can actually just take a hike.
Now, if you're the one who knows
how to build lifeboats,
which group of people
are you gonne help?
Certain things are inevitable right now.
FDIC insolvency,
I will tell you, is coming.
Insolvency of the Federal Reserve, is coming.
Federal Reserve can go bancrupt.
Uhm, Treasury bill defaults, uhm, we're looking at
major bancrupty, starvation, dislocation.
All these things are already on the way.
Everything is gonna break down
differently in different places.
The best that I can do, is give you
some ideas of some markers,
that are gonna come.
The bumpy plateau has been described
by peak oil activists and researchers
for many, many years.
And it's actually happening.
Basically, you com up
the growth curve of oil prices,
and the oil prices go up,
until you start running out of oil.
Then what happens, is you have to destroy demand,
which is what's happening.
with this collapse.
Demand gets destroyed, the price of oil drops.
But as you start to recover, you start back up again
and you collide again with the finite oil.
And the rising energy prices, which shuts
everything down again. This is the bumpy plateau.
I think it's fairly certain that the mortal blow
to human industrialized civilization,
will happen when oil prices spike again,
and nobody can afford to buy that oil,
and everything will just shut down.
The collapse must happen fast,
in order to leave infrastructure standing.
We've all heard the stories about infrastructure,
you know, the sewers, the bridges, the roads and all that.
Well, the point is that as economic collapse
continues, or accelerates, those structures
will fall into more disrepair.
There's not gonna be any money or anything
running to fix those,
so what you want to have,
is that change to a new paradigm,
getting the old one out of the way,
while there's still infrastructure left
to start building something new.
We have to survive the transition fase
of human civilization, which I anticipate,
could last anywhere between 20 years,
and oh my god,
would that be fast and hard...
You know, to 50 years, or 100 years,
before some kind of stable civilization
starts to emerge.
You need to survive the transition fase,
so don't panic, don't freak out.
Use your heads, analyze your
local situation where you live,
don't worry about rebuilding sewers,
you're gonna be able to get water for a few years.
People say, there's either oil, or no oil.
There's either food, or no food.
And people say, well, we're gonna have food in the
supermarkets on tuesday. We're never gonna see it again.
That's not the way it's gonna happen.
As things break down,
we will see specific shortages
in specific areas for periods of days,
before it gets to the point where there's nothing left.
So what you need to prepare for,
is not the end result, but you need to
prepare to survive the transition.
Uhm, people say, I'm gonna run for the hills,
I'm gonna go build a cabin, I'm gonna buy
they're probably gonna be the first to die.
Number one, it's too late.
If you don't know how to live off the land,
and if you're not already on the land right now,
don't even try to go,
because you're gonna fail miserably,
and you might be shot by the people
who got there ahead of you.
You know, the one factor that you're not including,
in selling this, is this sort of discounting human ingenuity,
uhm, or ability to sort of problem solve.
Because my father was an airforce aviator,
combat veteran,
he was very much trained in a military style
of decision making and analysis,
where it's motivated by life and death decisions,
where you are trained how to think critically,
and respond critically
in response to emergency.
So I was trained at an early age
in the skill of critical thinking.
And maybe I have a gift for it too, I believe there are
some people who have a gift for critical thinking.
Uhm... And my own experience on the streets
in South-Central Los Angeles as a cop,
there were quick decisions sometimes,
decisions which changed people's lives,
or could end people's lives...
And it gave me an ability to respond
and think to separate
the icecream from the bullshit.
Probably one of the biggest impediments
I removed to critical thinking,
was I stopped taking mainstream media
seriously a long time ago.
Uhm, we were talking about human ingenuity.
No amount of technology
and no amount of human ingenuity
can possibly overturn the laws of physics,
the laws which govern this planet.
Uhm, those are intracktable, immutable, real.
And scientists have never been able to do that.
Man's great arrogance, I believe,
and one for which she's paying a price now,
is to believe that mankind
really could become God,
and even turn over and upset and revoke
somehow the laws of the universe.
I am a great advocate of
buying and owning physical gold,
not paper gold.
You buy gold, you own it.
When hyperinflation occurs, after deflation here,
and all these trillions of dollars come back,
and we are wheeling wheel barrels of
thousand dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread,
the only thing people will accept for goods,
is gonna be gold.
Do whatever you can to reinsulate your house
if you need to, if you have a house.
If you have soil, you immediately
get it off petrochemicals,
and start learning how to restore it.
What I do in the yard that I'm renting,
I'm mixing barbeque and wood ash,
and then I go out and pee on everything, because
then you get the root elements of ammonium nitrate.
that starts to bring the soil back.
If you are dependent upon a cell phone,
get a land line.
All of the telecommunication companies
that operate the satellites,
the cell towers, the fiberoptic cables and all the stuff
that makes your wonderful cellphone work,
are cutting back on maintenance
as the stock market collapses,
and we're gonna see failures
in cellphone service.
A landline is a redundancy
that can help you.
Get books on first aid and holistic medicine.
Moderate fresh water supply,
a reasonable amount of food storage,
you can't store enough to live on.
What you need to store, is seeds.
Seeds that are not manufactured by Monsanto,
that are not Franken-seeds that only work
one time you plant them,
and then you gotta go buy more.
You get good organic, whole seeds
and you store them.
That could be a great currency
in the future.
Unlike the great depression,
this is a vastly different scenario.
We do not have infinite resources left to be tapped.
We don't have lots of land. We don't have... We're
peak-everything, all the commodities, everything else.
And what they had in the 1930's,
that my grandparents told me about,
was the ability to grow food right where they live.
And local food production is perhaps
the most fundamental key to human survival,
in the collapse of industrial civilisation.
We've had examples of
what happens when oil disappears,
and how civilizations respond and what
works and what doesn't.
In 1991, the Sovjet-Union collapsed,
and there were two nations
that were absolutely and totally dependent upon
Sovjet oil for their survival, because they had none,
Cuba and North-Korea.
And what they did in response to that,
was completely opposite,
and the proof, as they say,
was in the pudding.
North-Korea was a rigid, hierarchical, top-down,
Sovjet style, bureaucratic regime,
where everything came from the central goverment,
they managed everything,
and North-Korea starved.
I mean, it was...
In human terms, the suffering was amazing.
All of a sudden, there's no oil,
there's no natural gas,
there's no fertilizer,
cars don't run,
trains don't run, you get to a point
where you run trains on some day,
and generate electricity on others,
but you can't do both at the same time.
But the Cuban government reverted
to one of the purest forms of capitalism.
It said, everybody start restoring
the soil and grow food,
you will grow food where you live. If you find
any piece of arable land that's not being used,
you occupy it and you start farming it
and you start growing food right now.
The Cuban goverment did everything it could
to liberate local food growing.
And what happened was, is,
after a very tough period,
the Cuban people were eating better
than they had ever eaten,
because they were free of this whole agro-biz,
you know, Franken-food nightmare.
Everything was organic, and you had
every square inch in Havana that had soil,
on rooftops, or flower boxes,
was growing food.
And, there was a degree of sustainability,
everything became organic.
And all you had to do, was separate the people
from the way money worked, and top-down control,
explain to them, you grow it where you eat it
and you're gonna make it.
And Cuba survived.
And thrived.
And that's the essence of where everything
is going to in the new human paradigm.
Everything will be local.
Jack London was one of my favourite writers.
And uhm, wrote about animals a lot.
One thing you know about animals,
is that they all want to go home
when they know that
they are gonna face death.
They don't wanna be in their tribe,
or their pack, or whatever it is.
Uhm, they want to be on familiar ground,
it's a natural animal instinct.
In Dubai,
the economic crash has hit so hard,
that Indians who were living and working in Dubai,
lost their jobs and they just drove to the Dubai airport and
abandoned their cars, and there was a story
talking about all the cars that were abondoned
as these Indians caught a
one-way ticket home to go home.
And it's happening in Britain too.
You have lots of Poles and Eastern Europeans,
who were the latecomers in the EU,
fleeing Britain to go home.
In some areas, and certainly
in the Southern Californian basin,
with 13 to 14 million people
and a 4-day food supply,
it's clear that people are
gonna migrate out of this area,
as it's not sustainable.
We get most of our water from Northern California.
That's a problem.
We get a lot of our electricity
from Hoover Dam out in Las Vegas.
Phoenix, for god's sake, Las Vegas,
those people have to worry about where to go,
and community is what will save us.
You're gonna have to do it in conjunction with your
neighbors and your family and people around you.
You will fail as a rugged individual, you will
survive as a member of a tribe or a family.
I have emotion about this,
I'm losing it.
We have waited, have waited for so long
for somebody to listen to us.
When the mainstream press
and the government says
nobody could have predicted this,
they're lying through their fucking teeth!
We all saw exactly what was gonna happen,
and how it was gonna happen,
and remarkably,
when it was gonna happen.
None of us expected the collapse to be as severe
as it's proving to be, or as fast as it's proving to be.
But we've been screaming for years,
and we've been watching everything
we said come to pass,
and we have felt so
angry.
I haven't lost emotional connection to it. What I have
learned to do over the course of my life, is to balance
the, uhm, the horror,
with love, with play, with making people smile.
I take my dog out for a walk and we count how many
smiles we can inflict in the course of one walk.
I walk through downtown Culver City and,
you know, I usually come with say,
oh, that was 23 smiles we created today.
And for some reason at this moment in time,
that's a very precious little treat for me.
There was a, uhm, psychologist, psychiatrist,
Elisabeth Kbler-Ross,
who talked about the five stages of grief.
Uhm, and when you're hit with
an overwhelming life changing situation,
the first is denial. This can't possibly be happening,
it's not true. No, it's not happening.
And you stay in denial,
and you fight to stay in denial.
Then comes anger.
I really believe that mankind is now entering
just barely and has just barely crossed
the treshold of the anger fase.
We have to get through the anger fase,
and how we get through that anger fase,
is going to be critical.
The way we're going under current
government and monetary rule,
the only kind of anger that's going to be produced,
is the destructive kind.
born of absolute frustration and bitterness that
nothing that's being sold to us as being a solution,
is making us feel any goddamn better.
Then of course after that, we have the bargaining.
Well the bargaining is kind of going on now too.
Maybe I could've done something different,
maybe I should've though of this.
M-m-maybe if I do this now,
it won't be different.
Then you go through the bargaining and you finally get to
a place of depression, where it's really starting to sink in.
And these are all emotional stages,
that one goes through, whether they're
an individual or a culture,
or a civilisation.
And the final stage is acceptance.
And it's really only when people reach the point of
that you can find those people who are like
part of the ones on the Titanic, saying,
okay, show us how to build a lifeboat.
You know, there's different ways to look at-
You can find stories that
support arguments that you wanna make,
just because there's different authors
that sort of support your world view,
and there's others that don't.
Is it possible to sort of create,
uhm, a reality
based on picking new stories
that support your worldview?
I don't do debates anymore. And the reason why
I don't do debates anymore, is because I don't have to.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the fact
that what I've been writing about,
what I've saying,
is actually happening all around us.
So why do I need to debate anything?
Why does the peak oil movement,
why does the sustainability movement
need to debate anything?
Everything that we said was gonna happen,
is taking place right now.
Every aspect of human existence is
on the table.
As far as political parties go,
they're all anachronisms.
They're all products of centuries gone by.
The human race now is only going to be concerned,
not with an ideology,
but what allows them to survive.
Capitalism, socialism and communism
are all terms that need to be tossed
in the trash can immediately,
because all of them were created
on the assumption of infinite resources.
Not one of those ideologies that are now
dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils,
are no longer relevant to our way of life.
Not one of them recognizes
that there must be a balance between
growth, and the resources,
and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have
as much as you want,
because until mankind surrenders to the fact
that it lives on a finite planet,
and it must have balance with that planet,
with the planet's resources,
with the animal life and all the other life,
there can be no happiness for anything.
Anything.
It's all about getting balance back.
And who sold me the idea
that it was my destiny to grow-,
nothing grows forever, there's no such thing
as infinite growth, it's not possible.
Look around at everything you see
around you that's living, that there is a cycle.
Birth, growth, maturation, decline and death.
The challenge being faced by the human race now,
is either evolve or perish.
Either grow up, or die.
God doesn't care.
God's not gonna play babysitter for us.
The challenge is either
you grow up and mature, change your minds
in the way you think that you're gonna perish.
Everything is on the table now, God is on the table,
every religion in the world is on the table now.
They'll all be measured as standards by,
this is reality and this is what the religion says.
And every religion in the world is
gonna be under huge microscop-
This is gonna be the greatest age of evolution
in human thinking that's ever taken place.
You walk towards your fear, you embrace your fear,
you don't try to hedge it,
that a part of real living as a human being,
as a spiritual being, is to embrace and encompass
your fear, your love,
and not run away from anything,
because that's the life experience.
And it's in that richness that, I think,
we find the most beautiful art,
the most beautiful music, we find the richness
of what the human soul can offer,
and I see all that richness buried under such
bullshit.
Can you talk about your own spirituality?
You talk about a lot of different religions.
How do you define your own spirituality?
I quote a Christian Saint, Timothy,
and I find it to be true what he said,
that the love of money is the root of all evil.
That's the end result of my spiritual,
intellectual quest.
It is the end, it is the fundamental truth
that I have verified through three decades,
of empirical, investigative,
legal, academic research,
trying to answer some fundamental
questions about human existence,
and why we behave the way we do,
why we think the way we do,
why we act the way we do.
The love of money is the root of all evil,
and it is the love of money which has the potential
to exterminate, to render extinct
the entire human race.
Alright, so here we have this, uhm, this
likable, sincere guy in the White House.
And he is as imprisoned as we all are.
I need to cut, I need to cut.
I'm just having a real powerful wave
of emotion right now.
Because I-, a whole new realization is opening
to me about what I'm actually saying,
and this is some serious fucking shit,
so I gotta get my head around it for a second.
Fuck.
Okay, I'm ready.
He's a prisoner of government, he's a prisoner
of politics, he's a prisoner of economics,
he's a prisoner of the Federal Reserve bank of New York,
of the Federal Reserve, of a governmental system, that's
archaic, and not quickly responsive,
so we should not make the success,
or failure of human civilization
rest on his shoulders.
The only thing in the world that you and I
can possibly change,
to give ourselves a chance of survival
and to give our children a chance at
some kind of human, civilized life,
is our minds.
You have to believe, not wish,
not hope, not pray, not beg,
you just have to believe that there's a way
out of it, and you're gonna find it.
This is perhaps the greatest part
of the American characterism.
When we get pissed off and we put
our minds to something, we clearly understand
what needs to be done.
We believe in it, we really can
change things.
I plan on living joyfully and happily
for the rest of my life.
A free man.
Shit.
How can you possibly say there's no hope?
Just change your mind and see what we see.
Stop thinking like dinosaurs.
So do you feel that
the work that you do,
you just kind of do it, regardless of
what the possible consequences are.
It just would've been so much easier
to have walked away.
If there was a German
in 1932, 1933,
who had the foresight to look ahead and to see
what the inevitable endresult of the Third Reich would be,
if there was somebody who had seen that coming,
do you honestly think
that they could in good conscience turn around
and walk away from it and pretend it wasn't there?
When every passing day, from the first election
of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933,
to Kristallnacht, to the Night of the Long Knives,
to Anschluss, the occupation of Austria,
Sudetenland, Poland. As all of those things happened
that were right on the map, how do you think
that person would have felt?
Do you think that person could have walked away?
We are all collectively as a species,
responsible for what may be the greatest
preventable holocaust
in the history of planet earth.
Our own suicide.
How do you walk away from that?
How do you sleep at night?
Who is anybody?
Who are you to tell me
it would have been easier to walk away?
You aren't in my skin.
It was never easier for me to walk away,
because to walk away would have meant
to compromise, to walk would have meant selling out.
You know, I'm still a guy
who, 30 years ago,
approached his goverment as a citizen,
asking for redress of grievance.
I cut the CIA deal in drugs,
it's wrong.
Somebody needs to talk about this.
I'm still that same guy.
I'm still the 27 year old,
about to be promoted,
perfect record, perfect rating report,
LAPD dedicated, clean LAPD cop.
He's still alive in me
and he very much wants some answers.
There is a legend, or a fable
that really speaks to my life.
About the 100th monkey.
Long time ago, in the late '40's, early '50's,
when Atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked
with above ground testing,
we set off an atom bomb
on an atol in the Pacific.
And then we waited a number of years,
because we wanted to answer questions like
how soon after we nuked something,
would it be possible
to get any kind of life started again?
So they went back to this island and
they decided to repopulate it with monkeys.
And the monkeys ate coconuts.
Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact
that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive.
So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so,
and taught them to wash the coconuts
in the fresh water stream on the island
before they cracked them open,
and turned the whole thing loose
to see what would happen.
Well, you know, pretty soon
maybe 12 monkeys
out of a population of 10 000
were washing their coconuts.
and then 20,
and then 47.
But a funny thing happened.
As soon as the 100th monkey
started washing his coconut husk,
all 10 000 started washing simultaneously.
I-, I guess one way that I have always looked
at my life, especially since I clearly understood
what this issue was in late 2001,
is, this is my quest for the 100th monkey.
about Abraham Lincoln.
But the president we need today
is not Abraham Lincoln.
The president we need today
is Thomas Jefferson.
He said that we needed a revolution
every generation.
Thomas Jefferson said you have to be ready in order to
preserve the vitality of your liberty and your freedom,
to defend it, nothing by overthrowing anything else
except for what you've been holding in your head,
that may not be applicable anymore.
We've gotten very lazy, where many generations
are overdue for revolution, and are thinking.
I'm not talking about blood and violence,
although I'm afraid that's already happening.
I'm talking about a revolution that's
probably the hardest kind.
The kind that takes place in the human soul,
in the human mind.
To be able to tear everything down,
throw everything out, and start with
a completely fresh paper and say...
okay, how do we solve this problem?
Uhm, can you talk to me a little bit-
Who-who are you?
Listen, this is not a plan that would
make sense to anybody except God.
You know, I gave up trying to figure
that out a long time ago.
I was born into a family deeply connected to
the US intelligence community.
My mother had been a cryptanalyst at the
army security agency at NSA
in World War II.
Her work product went to
president Roosevelt,
and to the secretary of war, Stimson,
and Cordell Hull, secretary of state.
My father was an airforce aviator who went to work for
contracts for the CIA and the airforce,
namely the Titan III-c, which put up the
CIA's keyhole spy satellite.
Uhm, at age 19,
when I was interning for LAPD,
I was pulled into the chief's office, because
somebody discovered I had a cue clearance.
I didn't know anything about it.
I went home and asked dad,
and he said, yeah, because you're my son
and they have to do that,
because I might leave my briefcase open.
But a cue was a secret, compartimentalized
clearance above top secret.
I went through UCLA as a republican,
who didn't like anything about the war in Vietnam,
who didn't like, uhm,
anything about government with this naive belief that you
can get inside the system and change it from the inside.
I became an LA policeman.
Worked in South Central, Los Angeles,
in the Jungle, and the CIA tried,
unofficially, to recruit me into an operation where
they were smuggling drugs into the country,
back in 1976, 1977.
And I wouldn't get involved in that.
You know, I thought, geez, this must be
an isolated incident of corruption.
This must be something that everybody's
gonna wanna try to correct right away.
And of course that was a mistake.
Basically, my life desintegrated because
I was betrayed by a woman who worked for CIA,
who was my fiance. And when I said I wouldn't
get involved in drugs, she disappeared,
and people started shooting at me.
And then, it was a matter of saving my life.
The tools which I acquired to save my life then,
which were, you know, writing letters to congressmen,
getting on the record,
trying to get newspaper stories written,
those were survival skills, but it was
also a part of learning how things worked.
I was a map maker, if you will, a cartographer.
Going out to try and map how
the world really worked,
as opposed to the way we were told it worked.
And the map that we had made,
has proved so startlingly accurate over 10 years,
whether they had to do with gold prices,
or geopolitical developments,
or economic events.
The only thing that amazes me, is the speed
with which things are falling apart.
And that message now is the single
most important thing in my life.
It's the only thing in my life. Well, except for
rock and roll music, good music,
playing with my dog,
and long walks on the beach.
Rex, come here.
I first became focused on energy issues in late 2001.
Uhm, just at maybe a month or two after 9/11.
I was contacted by a geologist,
a brilliant guy named
Dale Allen Pfeiffer,
who introduced me to the concept of peak oil,
and the basic issues about energy, and helped me
to realize that there was a great deal of evidence
in 2001, not only that peak oil was very real,
but that government agencies were acting
and responding as if it was very real.
All plastic is oil. Most paints,
all pesticides are made from oil.
Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes,
is made from oil.
There are seven gallons of oil in every tire.
There is nothing anywhere,
in any combination that will replace
the edifice built by fossil fuels.
Nothing.
Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain.
Much easier than it was a long time ago.
People have felt what 147 dollar
a barrel oil feels like.
Essentially, peak oil is like
if you know what a Bell curve is,
goes up, comes down.
Peak oil is the point of oil production when
you're at the top of the Bell curve.
And essentially, what that means,
is you've used up half of the resource.
Uhm, but in the case of oil, or any other substance
like that, no matter how much money you throw at it,
you're never gonna be able to increase
oil production above where it was at peak.
As of 2008, the international energy agency
has admitted that there is a global 9%
decline rate in oil production.
That's the equivalent of about 8 million barrels a day.
There is no way, having plucked all the low
hanging fruit and found the big reservoirs,
that we're gonna be able
to offset a 9% decline rate.
From a detective stand point,
if you're trying to assemble a case,
you know,
the multidimensional aspects of a case,
means, motive, opportunity,
to understand what kind of force drives events.
Uhm, peak oil was almost with the stroke
of like a diamond cutters knife,
the single piece which started to make everything
resonate and make sense, together.
You will recall that when the Bush
administration took office in January 2001,
a national energy policy development group,
the NEPDG,
was formed and placed under the exclusive, private,
absolute control of vice-president Dick Cheney.
Its records were kept a secret,
its minutes were kept a secret,
seven pages were released as a result of two lawsuits.
And it clearly shows that that taskforce
was looking, saying,
how much oil is there,
where is it, who owns it.
They knew that this was coming for a long time. It's been
know that this event, this collapse, this crash was coming.
Who they were.
We can't even get information
as to who was involved.
First of all, if you think there might be oil someplace,
then what you do,
is you go drill a test well.
Then what you have to do, is to take
that one well in the center and then
you drill a series of appraisal wells around that well
to determine where the oil field might go.
You don't know how much oil you're gonna get,
how deep it is, what kind of oil it's gonna be.
There are many different grades of oils,
a lot of which are more expensive to refine.
So all of that has to do with how long
it takes to make something produce.
How much energy do you get back
for how much energy you invested.
When oil was seeping out of the ground in Pennsylvania,
you got a return of, I don't know, 200 to 1.
When you have to go offshore,
to deep water,
drilling in 15,000 feet of water,
uhm, and your first well costs
that's being invested to get energy.
And the moment you start burning more energy
to get a barrel of oil out of the ground
than it's worth,
forget about it.
The world's been thoroughly explored
over the last 120 years,
there's no new major oil finds left.
As a matter of fact, no field the size of Guar,
the largest field in Saudi Arabia,
has ever been discovered since.
Saudi Arabia has 25% of the known
oil reserves on the planet.
Twenty-five percent.
Why, if Saudi Arabia has all these
untapped reserves on shore,
are they moving into offshore drilling?
Now, if it's 5, 10, 50 times more expensive
to drill offshore than on land,
doesn't that tell you that Saudi Arabia
knows they've got no more oil to find?
It's axiomatic that if Saudi Arabia
has passed its peak and is in decline,
the whole planet is, just because of
the size of the reserves that are there.
Iraq is oil that's not only accessible,
it's right close to the Persian Gulf,
which means it's a short distance to ships.
They can put the pipelines,
they can get that into the global supply stream.
As everything else declines.
And Iraq was all about the oil. You know,
a lot of people have admitted that and like 'duh'.
Eleven days after 9/11,
when there was no clear evidence that
Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11,
of course he didn't,
that the plans were started to invade Iraq.
Of course!
That was the objective.
Get control of that oil.
Because Saddam Hussein had been talking about
pricing his oil in Euros, taking it away from the dollar.
We got in there, we restructured everything,
we put in a friendly government,
using the US dollar,
and we assured the oil companies their quote on quote
fair access and fair share of Iraqi oil.
We have no intention of leaving Iraq.
We're never gonna leave Iraq.
Going back to 2004, we started building the largest,
most permanent military bases, three of them, in the world,
plus the largest embassy compound
that's ever been built.
We built an embassy compound in Bagdad
that's bigger than Vatican City.
That's not a temporary deal.
Nobody's gonna take that oil,
we're sitting on it.
But there's not enough oil in Iraq
to change anything.
But Iraq probably has around
That sounds like a lot of oil.
But when you consider that in 2008,
the world was consuming 85 million in barrels a day,
that means a billion barrels of oil only lasts
for about 11 and a half days.
So that ain't that much oil.
They knew exactly what was coming.
That's what's in the National Energy
Policy Development Group report
that's been classified, because
if that report got declassified,
we would be building scaffolds to hang
Dick Cheney and everbody
in that administration tomorrow.
Let's assume just for the sake of discussion
that there's 600 billion barrels in the arctic.
First of all, it happens to be under the polar ice cap.
That's a problem.
The polar ice cap happens to be on,
what, 10,000 - 15,000 feet of water.
The problem with the polar ice cap is,
it floats, it moves.
So you can't drill a well on tuesday.
and expect it to be in the same place on thursday.
That's why a lot of conservative
think tanks and oil companies,
are cheering the melting of the polar ice caps.
If there is oil in A.N.W.R.,
there's no more
than about a six month supply
for the entire United States.
There are no pipelines across the thousand miles
of tundra that's melting
due to global warming,
which means you can't sink
pipes to support a pipeline
in tundra that's turned to mud.
There's no tanker routes,
the wells aren't drilled and yet we are spending
our future as if that oil is there.
We gotta drop all this lying right now.
We don't need transparancy about
anything other than how much oil is really left,
because we don't know.
Oil is a commodity, it's an asset.
You make loans based
upon what's in the ground.
So you have all these accounting terms.
Possible reserves, proven reserves,
ultimately recoverable reserves.
Verified reserves, estimated reserves...
But, actual reserve estimates are state secrets.
The Saudi's don't dare announce that they've
passed their peak of oil production. Why?
They have a very restive population,
that have been sold an expectation of a
rising standard of living and the moment
Saudi Arabia acknowledges it's passed peak
it may well have a revolution.
Now what happens if there's a revolution in Saudi Arabia,
with 25% of the world's known oil,
where is that oil gonna get replaced from?
It can't be.
Very complex problem.
It's a very complex situation.
Just start working now, otherwise we won't have time.
They're gonna be out of oil within a few years.
And doing this sort of pulling archive
of footage for this film,
I found at least 10 examples of people
in the late seventies,
talking about this is the end of oil.
This is like end of the way of life,
we're hitting a new era.
This situation is destined to continue.
People look at that footage and I think that
they can feel that it's somewhat alarmist,
given that we were able to continue
our way of life for another 35 years.
Do you see any parallels
between that time and now?
The seventies was really a critical decade.
In the seventies, Marion King Hubbert,
the original prophet of peak oil,
in late 1949, he did the math
that said US domestic oil production
will peak in 1970.
So that's not some feat of Nostradamus
communicating with some entity.
It's math, it's science.
It's simple.
But in the seventies, M. King Hubbert
testified before congress,
that was 1974.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter said,
man, we cannot use as much energy
as we have been using.
That's when solar panels went up, that's when-
he knew- they had known in Washington...
I have published on my website,
as have others,
declassified CIA documents from 1976,
showing that CIA was perfectly
aware of peak oil.
In those days, of course,
when the situation appeared to be normal,
when people had jobs, they had vacations,
they had credit cards, they had
credit lines, everybody's talking about
growth buy, spend, consume,
and everything seemed to be working.
Yeah, we were called alarmists.
We don't live in that world anymore.
Americans were on the way to
owning millions of cars.
on the planet.
They all run on oil.
It takes uncounted barrels of oil,
to make those cars and engines
in the first place.
And you cannot plug any new technology into
an internal combustion powered engine.
With 7 gallons of oil in every tire,
nobody will ever make
because there ain't gonna be enough oil.
Ethanol is an absolute
joke.
First of all, a very brilliant scientist,
David Pimentel, took the concept of net energy,
how much energy do you invest,
versus how much do you get in return,
and he concluded about a decade ago,
I guess,
that it takes more energy to make ethanol,
than you get from burning it,
which is absolute stupidity.
Because you drive the oil powered machines, et cetera,
you irrigate, you produce the fertilizers,
you're burning all that oil and natural gas to grow it.
Then you make steam,
which is more hydrocarbon energy,
you add more chemicals,
and you come up with ethanol,
which you can put in a car.
Now the Bush administration had annouced
a goal of having 15%
of all fuel in the United States made from ethanol,
I think, by the year 2015.
They forgot to tell you that that would take
all the arable land used
to grow corn to do it.
Canadian tar sands is an oil.
It is a very, very thick,
sticky, obnoxious substance,
that's mixed in with sand,
at levels two, three, four, five hundred feet
in layers beneath the soil, this is in Alberta.
And they literally stripmine
thousands of tons a day.
They put them in these huge oil powered
dumptrucks and drive them to a place where
they then wash the sand.
They take billions of gallons of freshwater
at which we're running out of everywhere,
and boil it buy burning natural gas.
There is not a possibility anywhere,
that Canadian tar sands production
will exceed maybe
three and a half million barrels a day.
The first thing that the uneducated mind
that's in denial says,
well, what about hydrogen.
Can we make electric cars?
And I have to bring them back to the fact
that there's 7 gallons of oil in every tire,
there are thousands of gallons of oil in every car,
in the plastics, the paints, the resins.
Everything. All of that's made by oil.
The oil that's used to manufacture the car,
and ship it around to heat the metals, et cetera.
There will never be 800 million
electric powered vehicles,
and electricity is not an energy source.
electricity is generated
by burning or using
some other kind of energy.
It's clear that electricity
is the key to industrial civilisation,
in that it powers our refrigeration,
it runs the water pumps,
that pump water out of the New York
subway system every day.
It allows us to communte electronically,
charge our cellphone batteries,
preserve food, run operating rooms,
et cetera.
The subject of alternative energies...
There is no such thing
as clean coal.
And there never ever will be.
Why? Carbon sequestration
is enormously expensive.
What it says, is essentially you capture the CO2
and any other greenhouse gases emitted,
in the burning of the coal, you exert
enormous amounts of energy to compress it,
then you move it over
enormously long distances,
and you pump it into some airtight chamber
in the ground, where
somebody will figure out with technology what to do
with the greenhouse gas in 10 or 15 000 years.
Nuclear process requires something
like 10 to 30 years of incubation
to get the permitting done,
all the regulations satisfied,
and the construction of nuclear powerplants is
one of the most energy intensive processes.
in the world.
The steel, the lead containment, the enrichment
of uranium is a horribly intensive process.
You just don't throw a rock of uranium in
and start making nuclear energy.
Can't do that.
The first and obvious problem
with tidal energy is
is that it has to be generated
or collected near coastline.
Salt water is extremely corrosive.
There's an enormous energy cost
in manufacturing the machines.
There are only two alternative energies, which can
really have an immediate impact, an immediate benefit.
Now, the problem with plans like
enormous wind farms in Texas, Oklahoma,
Colorado, ...
The fundamental law with electricity is
that it's drawn off right where it's used, first.
Yes, you can transmit electricity
over long distances, but
people don't think about the energy
that goes into transformers,
and how much copper's in power lines,
and all the maintenance that has to go that grid.
So, when you see
really ridiculous commercials that say,
we could have a solar array
they don't even think about the fact that
that electricity is gonna get used
in California before it goes any place else.
Just, uhm you know, if you saw this movie
and you didn't know who you were,
and you wanted, you were just curious
what your credentials are in terms of
understanding this information?
I have a bachelor's degree
in political science,
with honors from UCLA,
uhm, in 1973.
Graduate of the Los Angeles police academy,
valedictorian,
class of 1173.
Uhm, was sent to do DEA,
Narcotics Enforcement School,
by LAPD.
I have 30 years of experience as an
investigative journalist.
I've broken major schandals,
that have had national impact.
Of course, I got to know
many members of congress.
I've been trying to testify for a long time,
and actually,
I have never testified in congress.
I did at the request of the senate
select committee on intelligence,
submit written testimony.
But after they read the written testimony that
I was going to submit, I never got called to testify.
I've written two books,
one of which is in the Harvard
business school library.
Uhm, I've lectured at universities
all over the country,
and in many countries.
Uhm, people wonder how this guy with a
bachelor's degree from UCLA, came to know all this shit,
Well, this comes from thirty years
of learning how to scan mainstream media,
and read it.
A way of finding stories
from around the world,
that tell you all the things
that are really going on,
that are not played on the headlines,
but they're the kind of stories that
people who really make decisions
know how to look for.
Uhm, and then how to connect them-, how to place
the dots close enough so that they can be connected.
The soil is the place from which all plant matter
gets its nutrients.
And if you keep sucking the nutrients out,
the soil is useless.
For all of history, the way that the soil was
replenished, the nutrients were
returned in some measure to the soil,
was that plant matter was allowed to decay,
to compost, to restock the soil.
That's why crop rotation is so important.
You may have one crop of
celery, which will suck
certain chemicals out of the soil.
Another crop, wheat or something else,
may return those same chemicals to the soil,
so the soil maintains a balance.
It's kind of sad, because we as a species
have become so disconnected from the earth.
We don't have any real contact with the earth.
We don't have any sense of its functions, its feel,
its nature, its seasons, its timing.
First of all, the top soil
on which food is grown now,
is nothing more than a sponge,
unto which we pour chemicals,
that we get from oil and natural gas.
And without those chemicals, the soil has
been turned into a junkie, the soil is worthless.
Uhm, so when you plant a crop now,
what happens, is you drive an oil-powered machine,
It drives along and it plows.
Then you drive another oil-powered machine,
and it drives along and it plants.
And then you irrigate.
Well, how do you irrigate? Well...
That water is pumped by pumps
that are powered by electricity.
Where does that electricity come from?
In the US, it's either coal or natural gas.
So, next thing you do, is come along in your fertilizer.
All commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia,
and the feedstock for ammonia
is natural gas.
So you have ammoniumnitrate fertilizers that are then
sprayed on by another oil-powered vehicle,
Then the cropdusters come along
that are powered by oil,
that spray pesticides
that are all made from petroleum.
Then, when it's time to harvest the food,
what do you do, you drive another oil-powered machine,
and you harvest it.
You use another oil-powered machine
to drive it to a place where it's processed.
Ahem, then you wrap it up in plastic,
which is oil, and you put it in another
oil-powered machine and you drive it
x-number of miles to a
food distribution warehouse,
the oil-powered machine to your supermarket.
The way food is grown, produced and moved
around the world today, it's an enormous
waste of hydrocarbon energy,
which doesn't make sense.
Why do we have strawberries from Chili,
why do we have spinach from China,
why do we ship anchovies
halfway around the world to be
packaged in tin cans
and, you know.
There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy
in every
calory of food consumed
in the industrialized world.
Three times in my life
I tried to
walk away from, forget about
the things that I had seen,
that were so...
out of whack.
That were so crazy, that were so wrong.
You know, and that's what many people urged me to do,
but what inevitably happened every time I tried to
walk away from this path that I've walked,
was that everything else in my life would be
taken away from me, so this path was
the only thing left. I had no other choice.
And uhm, yeah, anger and resentment
do build up when you see
and document as much corruption,
as much dishonesty, as much illigality,
as much murder, as much betrayal
as I have from people who
pretend to be otherwise.
And I reached a point, it was about 1993,
when I first became involved and learned of the murder
of marine Colonel Jim Sabow
at El Toro marine airstation.
He was the chief of air ops and he had caught CIA
C-130's flying two and three thousand kilos of cocaine.
onto his base and he was suicided.
Uhm, I crossed my own Rubicon at that point,
there was no turning back for me.
And I knew that wherever this path
was gonna go, I had to follow it.
In the eighties, because I had some skill
as a writer, I started freelance writing.
I got published a few times.
I realized that I could be a writer.
I wrote about 109 mysterious deaths
or suicides in the US military,
in a very short period of time
and I found that most of those were
connected to covert operations
in one way or another.
The next real revolution came in 1996
after my confrontation with CIA director
John Deutch at Locke highschool,
you know, and I remember saying up something like
I am a former Los Angeles Police
Narcotics detective.
I worked in South-Central Los Angeles
and I can tell you, director Deutch,
emphatically and without equivocation,
that the Agency has dealt drugs
in this country for a long time.
And the room exploded.
I had been saying that CIA was dealing
drugs for 18 years. I mean,
I'd been shot at for, I'd been forced
out of LAPD, I'd been trashed, I'd been called crazy.
If, in the course of the IG's investigations,
in Fred Hitz's work,
you come across evidence of severely
criminal activity, will you tell
the American people the truth?
We will bring the people to justice
and make them accountable.
Like so often, when they promise justice,
there isn't any. It was widdled and tweeted down
There were some very mysterious deaths involved.
Congressman Julian Dixon
was at that meeting,
had a very sudden heart attack,
which led to the publishing of the first issue
of my first newsletter in may of 1998,
From the Wilderness.
I sat down, wrote a few pages out,
I mailed it to 68 names,
and over the next eight and a half years,
From the Wilderness grew to have,
as many as 60 members of congress
as subscribers,
professors at universities around the world,
government officials.
One of my first exposs after CIA and drugs,
was that I proved CNN was absolutely lying
in something called the Tailwind scandal
of 1998,
where CNN had correctly reported,
their producer April Oliver had reported that
CIA had used sarin gas in Laos
during the Vietnam War,
and Henry Kissinger authorized it.
... were different A1 pilots,
who brought the gas.
In spite of what the Pentagon said...
CNN rolled over, Henry Kissinger called,
Olliver was fired.
Patt Tillman series that I broke
in my newsletter, all seven parts,
that was what broke the Patt Tillman Expos,
that brought down nine officers, got them disciplined.
... Patt Tillman, the governement violated
its most basic responsibility.
But my economic predictions then...
uhm, we had it so right.
... problems are sevenfold behind the economic
crash that is coming, that will be nothing
like we have ever seen before.
In, uhm, 2006,
we said get out of debt right now.
Check your mortgage carefully,
especially if you have an ARM,
Get into gold, reduce debt as much as possible,
stay away from any kind of financing,
and heavy credit card.
We issued a whole series of warnings.
... How many people have ever heard of the fact
that they're trading at mortgage backed securities?
Like mutual funds, but it's all mortgages?
Those books are as cooked
as the books on Enron!
But it was like 11, 12 days after we issued that
economic alert in the middle of running the Tillman series,
that our offices were burglarized,
all seven computers smashed.
Uhm, and a whole chain of events
that took place up there which was...
... which actually worked out ok,
because I needed to evolve,
and I have since then.
There was a period after so many years
of deliberate attempts to sabotage my operations,
four of which we connected
in one way or another to the FBI...
I published that I had retired.
I said officially that I had retired.
What I had... And at that point, given the way
I felt, that was a pretty honest statement.
I didn't know that I would bounce back, or that
there was a third or a fourth wind to come inside of me,
but that also is the image that I wanted out there,
just to take the heat off me,
at least until Bush and Cheney got out of the White House,
because that's where the heat was coming from.
From them personally, I mean, from their administration,
from the people that ran the CIA, that ran the FBI,
who was that pressure coming from?
I have absolutely no doubt that
Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
took an intense personal interest in me
and what my newsletter had published
for all the years of the Bush administration.
That's about as specific as I care to get.
There was a guy named Von Clausewitz,
who said that
war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Politics is a continuation of economics
by other means.
To understand all of this mess, you need to understand
one term, that's a big financial term,
that's real simple to understand,
it's called derivative.
A derivative is any financial instrument
which is derived from the inherent value
of something else that's tangible.
In other words, an ear of corn has value.
a barrel of oil has value.
If you have a house and a mortgage, that's fine.
When you start doing mortgage backed securities,
packaging and bundling,
that's called a derivative.
As of the start of the collapse,
which, let's peg at september of 2008,
there were derivatives with a notional value,
meaning that if you added up all the pieces of paper,
were worth 700 trillion dollars.
In other words, if they all cashed out at once,
you would need to have 700 trillion in cash,
and of course there isn't that much money.
So with all of these hedges and derivatives and puts and calls,
those are all derivatives, and all these other things they do,
All they cared about was making the minimum
monthly payment on their credit card bill.
In other words, to service the 700 trillion dollars
in notional value derivatives,
they had to pay a certain amount of cash every month,
and God forbid they should all come due.
What's happening with all of these bailouts,
which are now around
They're chasing a 700 trillion dollar
derivatives bubble down the drain.
The people who have run the monetary paradigm,
the economic paradigm,
since money was first invented, have wanted to mystify it
and to make everybody believe that only some expert
could understand the mumbo-jumbo
of the priesthood of money.
Three things only anybody needs to know about
the way money works around the world today,
One. Fiat currency.
What is money?
If I were to take a bill out of my wallet,
and I reach into my wallet, and I pull out this bill,
it's 20 dollars.
Whow, okay.
Can I eat it? Can I roll it up and chew it?
Do I get calories and vitamins?
No, I don't.
Can I fumble it up, throw it in my gas tank?
Is the car gonna go anywhere?
No, it's gonna clog the fuel injectors, maybe.
This is only a symbol.
This doesn't mean anything, it's fiat.
It's created out of thin air,
because somebody turned on a printing press.
That's all it is.
Before the great growth of population,
which occured with the advent of oil,
came this revolution
in the monetary system as well.
There was time when
the pound sterling actually meant
a pound of sterling silver.
There was only so much silver out of the ground,
it was tangible, you couldn't print silver,
it was something real.
You cannot print anymore money
than there is energy to back it up.
It's that simple.
So we have fiat currency.
Then we have something called fractional reserve banking.
If you were to bring me in a 10 dollar deposit,
I could make, uhm,
Based on just having
that 10 dollars in my drawer,
because it's all calculated on the premise
that not everybody is gonna come in
and want their cash all at once.
That's called a run on the bank.
So, they have calculated the odds,
much as, uhm, Vegas odds makers do,
and said ok, well, very little odds
under normal conditions.
When I lend now a total of 100 dollars
based on that 10 dollar deposit,
that's more money
that I create out of thin air.
Well gee, that means that,
in order to pay off whoever gets that money,
has to make more money still to feed it
at the bottom to pay the bank,
so that the bank can create still more money.
You know, I think it's probably pretty safe
at this point in time with the collapse of the US economy,
to say that pretty much everybody is understanding
how compound interest works.
the higher the interest rate on your credit card,
for those people who had,
you know, 20-25% cards,
that means they're creating that much more money,
if they don't pay cash every month.
What I have just described,
is a pyramid scheme.
We live in an infinite growth paradigm,
which requires growth forever.
It's not that Bernie Madoff was a pyramid scheme,
or Stanford was a pyramid scheme,
the whole economy is a pyramid scheme!
The whole global economy cannot be sustained,
it requires infinite growth.
But infinite growth collides with finite energy.
First law of thermodynamics,
energy can neither be created, nor destroyed.
The second law,
energy converts in only one direction,
from usable to unusable,
that's called the law of entropy, things break down.
An in every energy transaction, some energy is always lost.
So you have finite energy and you have
a financial paradigm which demands
infinite growth and we're at the point of human history
where the infinite growth paradigm
collides with something
that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent,
that there would be a major implosion
of the US economy.
I actually missed it by about a year,
maybe a little bit more. I thought it was
gonna happen sooner, but it happened.
And now that it is happening, these pieces
are falling exactly as everything else
had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists,
all the sustainability advocates.
Our map was proving deadly accurate.
Things don't break up,
they break down.
When a government collapses,
what happens?
The mail stops getting delivered.
Air traffic controllers don't get paid, so they
don't go to work, which means planes don't fly.
Bridges and highway inspections don't get made.
Food and drug administration inspections don't get made.
Maintenance is going to be defrayed,
Law enforcement stops working.
I mean, it's no secret now.
You see the headlines every day.
California's bancrupt, Michigan's bancrupt, Ohio...
They're shutting down services left and right.
There are tent cities springing up all over the country,
there are homeless, displaced people.
The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites,
the many very, very wealthy people are getting
crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don't hear, is the fact that all
over the world economies are collapsing
much faster than the US economy.
Brittain is an absolute basket case.
There is a curtain of despair
descending across Eastern Europe.
There's a revolution underway in Greece,
it's not riots, it's not civil unrest,
it's a revolution.
Drug violence right across the border in Mexico.
This is all part of the collapse.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, there's lots of violence.
The people who have run the planet to this point
and who are running the planet now, are losing control.
Have I ever been called a conspiracy theorist?
Of course I've been callled a conspiracy theorist!
But I don't deal in conspiracy theory,
I deal in conspiracy fact.
Somebody said to me a long time ago,
and this was probably back in '84,
climb down off the cross, asshole,
we need the lumber!
I am not a messiah.
I am not responsible for saving anybody.
the only person I'm responsible
for saving, is me.
What I see now, is the end of a paradigm
that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that
killed almost all life on the earth
and certainly the dinosaurs.
Now, the dinosaurs were kings of their paradigm.
And a paradigm is what you think about,
something before you think about it.
Somebody thinks about money, and you
automatically accept without thinking that
compound interest, fractional reserve banking
and fiat currency is ok and we have to protect that
because if we don't protect that,
it's gonna be bad for us.
If you know anything about darwinism,
basically what it said, was that those species
that had evolved, or were able to adapt to changing
circumstances, were the ones that survived,
and those that were not equipped, or had become
evolutionary dead ends, were destined to die.
Mike, you better be careful, it sounds
like you're advocating social darwinism.
I'm not advocating social darwinism,
I am witnessing actual darwinism.
If you're in a camp with a bunch of campers,
uhm, and a bear attacks,
you don't have to be faster than the bear.
You only have to be faster
than the slowest camper.
There is one and only one
graph image that I have used,
in, I would guess, 60 to 70 lectures
in eight countries,
and that's a graph of human population.
And if one looks at that graph,
what you see, is human population
roughly stable at around
a billion people or so.
Then maybe a little bit more,
around the time of Christ.
Then it stays pretty stable, until we get
to the Bubonic-, it starts to rise some,
as some primitive technology emerged,
but then you get to the Bubonic plague,
there's a little dip.
Then after the Bubonic plague, you begin the start
of what we would call the Renaissance,
uhm, and the early stages
of the Industrial Revolution.
Uhm, the discovery of steam,
the population starts to go like this.
The introduction of coal,
the population starts to go like this,
but around 1900, around the turn of the 20th century,
what you see, as oil became ubiquitous,
was that the population went like this.
And it goes up to 6,5 billion people,
we may be at 7 billion people
by the time anyone sees this interview.
All of those people exist
on this planet only because of oil.
So it's axiomatic that if you take the oil away,
the population must go away also.
In all of science, in all of biology,
there is no case where any population,
be it bacteria in a petry dish,
or caribou in an arctic island,
runs into a set of favorable circumstances
and goes to that point,
without an immediate crash,
down.
It's a law. It's a law as fundamental as gravity,
a law as fundamental as thermodynamics,
and if one thinks about it, it might also
be viewed as true of the stock markets,
or the financial markets, which go like this,
and when they go like this,
they automatically go like this.
That's the history of every bubble.
I think it's a mistake,
to ask if people,
and make all people the same as one entity,
if they will understand it.
I don't care if all people understand it.
When you're faced with, uhm, with
an overwhelming life threatening crisis,
as in the Titanic being hit by an iceberg,.
and you happen to be aware before anybody else is,
that the ship is gonna sink,
and there aren't enough lifeboats,
and you know how to build lifeboats,
and you try to deal with that in
however long the Titanic had
before it went down,
you're likely to come across three types
of passenger on the Titanic.
You'll run across a type that's basically
dear in the headlights.
Ship's been hit, what does that mean? What do I do?
I don't know what to do, I don't know where to go.
That's one group.
There's another group that says,
we get that the ship's gonna sink, we get that.
We're all gonna die, unless we make some lifeboats,
and do it fast. Show us what to do.
And then you have a third group,
that says, this is the Titanic,
it's absolutely unsinkable.
Un-fucking-sinkable.
And, uhm, so we're going back to the bar for a drink
and all you doomsday sayers can actually just take a hike.
Now, if you're the one who knows
how to build lifeboats,
which group of people
are you gonne help?
Certain things are inevitable right now.
FDIC insolvency,
I will tell you, is coming.
Insolvency of the Federal Reserve, is coming.
Federal Reserve can go bancrupt.
Uhm, Treasury bill defaults, uhm, we're looking at
major bancrupty, starvation, dislocation.
All these things are already on the way.
Everything is gonna break down
differently in different places.
The best that I can do, is give you
some ideas of some markers,
that are gonna come.
The bumpy plateau has been described
by peak oil activists and researchers
for many, many years.
And it's actually happening.
Basically, you com up
the growth curve of oil prices,
and the oil prices go up,
until you start running out of oil.
Then what happens, is you have to destroy demand,
which is what's happening.
with this collapse.
Demand gets destroyed, the price of oil drops.
But as you start to recover, you start back up again
and you collide again with the finite oil.
And the rising energy prices, which shuts
everything down again. This is the bumpy plateau.
I think it's fairly certain that the mortal blow
to human industrialized civilization,
will happen when oil prices spike again,
and nobody can afford to buy that oil,
and everything will just shut down.
The collapse must happen fast,
in order to leave infrastructure standing.
We've all heard the stories about infrastructure,
you know, the sewers, the bridges, the roads and all that.
Well, the point is that as economic collapse
continues, or accelerates, those structures
will fall into more disrepair.
There's not gonna be any money or anything
running to fix those,
so what you want to have,
is that change to a new paradigm,
getting the old one out of the way,
while there's still infrastructure left
to start building something new.
We have to survive the transition fase
of human civilization, which I anticipate,
could last anywhere between 20 years,
and oh my god,
would that be fast and hard...
You know, to 50 years, or 100 years,
before some kind of stable civilization
starts to emerge.
You need to survive the transition fase,
so don't panic, don't freak out.
Use your heads, analyze your
local situation where you live,
don't worry about rebuilding sewers,
you're gonna be able to get water for a few years.
People say, there's either oil, or no oil.
There's either food, or no food.
And people say, well, we're gonna have food in the
supermarkets on tuesday. We're never gonna see it again.
That's not the way it's gonna happen.
As things break down,
we will see specific shortages
in specific areas for periods of days,
before it gets to the point where there's nothing left.
So what you need to prepare for,
is not the end result, but you need to
prepare to survive the transition.
Uhm, people say, I'm gonna run for the hills,
I'm gonna go build a cabin, I'm gonna buy
they're probably gonna be the first to die.
Number one, it's too late.
If you don't know how to live off the land,
and if you're not already on the land right now,
don't even try to go,
because you're gonna fail miserably,
and you might be shot by the people
who got there ahead of you.
You know, the one factor that you're not including,
in selling this, is this sort of discounting human ingenuity,
uhm, or ability to sort of problem solve.
Because my father was an airforce aviator,
combat veteran,
he was very much trained in a military style
of decision making and analysis,
where it's motivated by life and death decisions,
where you are trained how to think critically,
and respond critically
in response to emergency.
So I was trained at an early age
in the skill of critical thinking.
And maybe I have a gift for it too, I believe there are
some people who have a gift for critical thinking.
Uhm... And my own experience on the streets
in South-Central Los Angeles as a cop,
there were quick decisions sometimes,
decisions which changed people's lives,
or could end people's lives...
And it gave me an ability to respond
and think to separate
the icecream from the bullshit.
Probably one of the biggest impediments
I removed to critical thinking,
was I stopped taking mainstream media
seriously a long time ago.
Uhm, we were talking about human ingenuity.
No amount of technology
and no amount of human ingenuity
can possibly overturn the laws of physics,
the laws which govern this planet.
Uhm, those are intracktable, immutable, real.
And scientists have never been able to do that.
Man's great arrogance, I believe,
and one for which she's paying a price now,
is to believe that mankind
really could become God,
and even turn over and upset and revoke
somehow the laws of the universe.
I am a great advocate of
buying and owning physical gold,
not paper gold.
You buy gold, you own it.
When hyperinflation occurs, after deflation here,
and all these trillions of dollars come back,
and we are wheeling wheel barrels of
thousand dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread,
the only thing people will accept for goods,
is gonna be gold.
Do whatever you can to reinsulate your house
if you need to, if you have a house.
If you have soil, you immediately
get it off petrochemicals,
and start learning how to restore it.
What I do in the yard that I'm renting,
I'm mixing barbeque and wood ash,
and then I go out and pee on everything, because
then you get the root elements of ammonium nitrate.
that starts to bring the soil back.
If you are dependent upon a cell phone,
get a land line.
All of the telecommunication companies
that operate the satellites,
the cell towers, the fiberoptic cables and all the stuff
that makes your wonderful cellphone work,
are cutting back on maintenance
as the stock market collapses,
and we're gonna see failures
in cellphone service.
A landline is a redundancy
that can help you.
Get books on first aid and holistic medicine.
Moderate fresh water supply,
a reasonable amount of food storage,
you can't store enough to live on.
What you need to store, is seeds.
Seeds that are not manufactured by Monsanto,
that are not Franken-seeds that only work
one time you plant them,
and then you gotta go buy more.
You get good organic, whole seeds
and you store them.
That could be a great currency
in the future.
Unlike the great depression,
this is a vastly different scenario.
We do not have infinite resources left to be tapped.
We don't have lots of land. We don't have... We're
peak-everything, all the commodities, everything else.
And what they had in the 1930's,
that my grandparents told me about,
was the ability to grow food right where they live.
And local food production is perhaps
the most fundamental key to human survival,
in the collapse of industrial civilisation.
We've had examples of
what happens when oil disappears,
and how civilizations respond and what
works and what doesn't.
In 1991, the Sovjet-Union collapsed,
and there were two nations
that were absolutely and totally dependent upon
Sovjet oil for their survival, because they had none,
Cuba and North-Korea.
And what they did in response to that,
was completely opposite,
and the proof, as they say,
was in the pudding.
North-Korea was a rigid, hierarchical, top-down,
Sovjet style, bureaucratic regime,
where everything came from the central goverment,
they managed everything,
and North-Korea starved.
I mean, it was...
In human terms, the suffering was amazing.
All of a sudden, there's no oil,
there's no natural gas,
there's no fertilizer,
cars don't run,
trains don't run, you get to a point
where you run trains on some day,
and generate electricity on others,
but you can't do both at the same time.
But the Cuban government reverted
to one of the purest forms of capitalism.
It said, everybody start restoring
the soil and grow food,
you will grow food where you live. If you find
any piece of arable land that's not being used,
you occupy it and you start farming it
and you start growing food right now.
The Cuban goverment did everything it could
to liberate local food growing.
And what happened was, is,
after a very tough period,
the Cuban people were eating better
than they had ever eaten,
because they were free of this whole agro-biz,
you know, Franken-food nightmare.
Everything was organic, and you had
every square inch in Havana that had soil,
on rooftops, or flower boxes,
was growing food.
And, there was a degree of sustainability,
everything became organic.
And all you had to do, was separate the people
from the way money worked, and top-down control,
explain to them, you grow it where you eat it
and you're gonna make it.
And Cuba survived.
And thrived.
And that's the essence of where everything
is going to in the new human paradigm.
Everything will be local.
Jack London was one of my favourite writers.
And uhm, wrote about animals a lot.
One thing you know about animals,
is that they all want to go home
when they know that
they are gonna face death.
They don't wanna be in their tribe,
or their pack, or whatever it is.
Uhm, they want to be on familiar ground,
it's a natural animal instinct.
In Dubai,
the economic crash has hit so hard,
that Indians who were living and working in Dubai,
lost their jobs and they just drove to the Dubai airport and
abandoned their cars, and there was a story
talking about all the cars that were abondoned
as these Indians caught a
one-way ticket home to go home.
And it's happening in Britain too.
You have lots of Poles and Eastern Europeans,
who were the latecomers in the EU,
fleeing Britain to go home.
In some areas, and certainly
in the Southern Californian basin,
with 13 to 14 million people
and a 4-day food supply,
it's clear that people are
gonna migrate out of this area,
as it's not sustainable.
We get most of our water from Northern California.
That's a problem.
We get a lot of our electricity
from Hoover Dam out in Las Vegas.
Phoenix, for god's sake, Las Vegas,
those people have to worry about where to go,
and community is what will save us.
You're gonna have to do it in conjunction with your
neighbors and your family and people around you.
You will fail as a rugged individual, you will
survive as a member of a tribe or a family.
I have emotion about this,
I'm losing it.
We have waited, have waited for so long
for somebody to listen to us.
When the mainstream press
and the government says
nobody could have predicted this,
they're lying through their fucking teeth!
We all saw exactly what was gonna happen,
and how it was gonna happen,
and remarkably,
when it was gonna happen.
None of us expected the collapse to be as severe
as it's proving to be, or as fast as it's proving to be.
But we've been screaming for years,
and we've been watching everything
we said come to pass,
and we have felt so
angry.
I haven't lost emotional connection to it. What I have
learned to do over the course of my life, is to balance
the, uhm, the horror,
with love, with play, with making people smile.
I take my dog out for a walk and we count how many
smiles we can inflict in the course of one walk.
I walk through downtown Culver City and,
you know, I usually come with say,
oh, that was 23 smiles we created today.
And for some reason at this moment in time,
that's a very precious little treat for me.
There was a, uhm, psychologist, psychiatrist,
Elisabeth Kbler-Ross,
who talked about the five stages of grief.
Uhm, and when you're hit with
an overwhelming life changing situation,
the first is denial. This can't possibly be happening,
it's not true. No, it's not happening.
And you stay in denial,
and you fight to stay in denial.
Then comes anger.
I really believe that mankind is now entering
just barely and has just barely crossed
the treshold of the anger fase.
We have to get through the anger fase,
and how we get through that anger fase,
is going to be critical.
The way we're going under current
government and monetary rule,
the only kind of anger that's going to be produced,
is the destructive kind.
born of absolute frustration and bitterness that
nothing that's being sold to us as being a solution,
is making us feel any goddamn better.
Then of course after that, we have the bargaining.
Well the bargaining is kind of going on now too.
Maybe I could've done something different,
maybe I should've though of this.
M-m-maybe if I do this now,
it won't be different.
Then you go through the bargaining and you finally get to
a place of depression, where it's really starting to sink in.
And these are all emotional stages,
that one goes through, whether they're
an individual or a culture,
or a civilisation.
And the final stage is acceptance.
And it's really only when people reach the point of
that you can find those people who are like
part of the ones on the Titanic, saying,
okay, show us how to build a lifeboat.
You know, there's different ways to look at-
You can find stories that
support arguments that you wanna make,
just because there's different authors
that sort of support your world view,
and there's others that don't.
Is it possible to sort of create,
uhm, a reality
based on picking new stories
that support your worldview?
I don't do debates anymore. And the reason why
I don't do debates anymore, is because I don't have to.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the fact
that what I've been writing about,
what I've saying,
is actually happening all around us.
So why do I need to debate anything?
Why does the peak oil movement,
why does the sustainability movement
need to debate anything?
Everything that we said was gonna happen,
is taking place right now.
Every aspect of human existence is
on the table.
As far as political parties go,
they're all anachronisms.
They're all products of centuries gone by.
The human race now is only going to be concerned,
not with an ideology,
but what allows them to survive.
Capitalism, socialism and communism
are all terms that need to be tossed
in the trash can immediately,
because all of them were created
on the assumption of infinite resources.
Not one of those ideologies that are now
dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils,
are no longer relevant to our way of life.
Not one of them recognizes
that there must be a balance between
growth, and the resources,
and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have
as much as you want,
because until mankind surrenders to the fact
that it lives on a finite planet,
and it must have balance with that planet,
with the planet's resources,
with the animal life and all the other life,
there can be no happiness for anything.
Anything.
It's all about getting balance back.
And who sold me the idea
that it was my destiny to grow-,
nothing grows forever, there's no such thing
as infinite growth, it's not possible.
Look around at everything you see
around you that's living, that there is a cycle.
Birth, growth, maturation, decline and death.
The challenge being faced by the human race now,
is either evolve or perish.
Either grow up, or die.
God doesn't care.
God's not gonna play babysitter for us.
The challenge is either
you grow up and mature, change your minds
in the way you think that you're gonna perish.
Everything is on the table now, God is on the table,
every religion in the world is on the table now.
They'll all be measured as standards by,
this is reality and this is what the religion says.
And every religion in the world is
gonna be under huge microscop-
This is gonna be the greatest age of evolution
in human thinking that's ever taken place.
You walk towards your fear, you embrace your fear,
you don't try to hedge it,
that a part of real living as a human being,
as a spiritual being, is to embrace and encompass
your fear, your love,
and not run away from anything,
because that's the life experience.
And it's in that richness that, I think,
we find the most beautiful art,
the most beautiful music, we find the richness
of what the human soul can offer,
and I see all that richness buried under such
bullshit.
Can you talk about your own spirituality?
You talk about a lot of different religions.
How do you define your own spirituality?
I quote a Christian Saint, Timothy,
and I find it to be true what he said,
that the love of money is the root of all evil.
That's the end result of my spiritual,
intellectual quest.
It is the end, it is the fundamental truth
that I have verified through three decades,
of empirical, investigative,
legal, academic research,
trying to answer some fundamental
questions about human existence,
and why we behave the way we do,
why we think the way we do,
why we act the way we do.
The love of money is the root of all evil,
and it is the love of money which has the potential
to exterminate, to render extinct
the entire human race.
Alright, so here we have this, uhm, this
likable, sincere guy in the White House.
And he is as imprisoned as we all are.
I need to cut, I need to cut.
I'm just having a real powerful wave
of emotion right now.
Because I-, a whole new realization is opening
to me about what I'm actually saying,
and this is some serious fucking shit,
so I gotta get my head around it for a second.
Fuck.
Okay, I'm ready.
He's a prisoner of government, he's a prisoner
of politics, he's a prisoner of economics,
he's a prisoner of the Federal Reserve bank of New York,
of the Federal Reserve, of a governmental system, that's
archaic, and not quickly responsive,
so we should not make the success,
or failure of human civilization
rest on his shoulders.
The only thing in the world that you and I
can possibly change,
to give ourselves a chance of survival
and to give our children a chance at
some kind of human, civilized life,
is our minds.
You have to believe, not wish,
not hope, not pray, not beg,
you just have to believe that there's a way
out of it, and you're gonna find it.
This is perhaps the greatest part
of the American characterism.
When we get pissed off and we put
our minds to something, we clearly understand
what needs to be done.
We believe in it, we really can
change things.
I plan on living joyfully and happily
for the rest of my life.
A free man.
Shit.
How can you possibly say there's no hope?
Just change your mind and see what we see.
Stop thinking like dinosaurs.
So do you feel that
the work that you do,
you just kind of do it, regardless of
what the possible consequences are.
It just would've been so much easier
to have walked away.
If there was a German
in 1932, 1933,
who had the foresight to look ahead and to see
what the inevitable endresult of the Third Reich would be,
if there was somebody who had seen that coming,
do you honestly think
that they could in good conscience turn around
and walk away from it and pretend it wasn't there?
When every passing day, from the first election
of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933,
to Kristallnacht, to the Night of the Long Knives,
to Anschluss, the occupation of Austria,
Sudetenland, Poland. As all of those things happened
that were right on the map, how do you think
that person would have felt?
Do you think that person could have walked away?
We are all collectively as a species,
responsible for what may be the greatest
preventable holocaust
in the history of planet earth.
Our own suicide.
How do you walk away from that?
How do you sleep at night?
Who is anybody?
Who are you to tell me
it would have been easier to walk away?
You aren't in my skin.
It was never easier for me to walk away,
because to walk away would have meant
to compromise, to walk would have meant selling out.
You know, I'm still a guy
who, 30 years ago,
approached his goverment as a citizen,
asking for redress of grievance.
I cut the CIA deal in drugs,
it's wrong.
Somebody needs to talk about this.
I'm still that same guy.
I'm still the 27 year old,
about to be promoted,
perfect record, perfect rating report,
LAPD dedicated, clean LAPD cop.
He's still alive in me
and he very much wants some answers.
There is a legend, or a fable
that really speaks to my life.
About the 100th monkey.
Long time ago, in the late '40's, early '50's,
when Atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked
with above ground testing,
we set off an atom bomb
on an atol in the Pacific.
And then we waited a number of years,
because we wanted to answer questions like
how soon after we nuked something,
would it be possible
to get any kind of life started again?
So they went back to this island and
they decided to repopulate it with monkeys.
And the monkeys ate coconuts.
Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact
that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive.
So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so,
and taught them to wash the coconuts
in the fresh water stream on the island
before they cracked them open,
and turned the whole thing loose
to see what would happen.
Well, you know, pretty soon
maybe 12 monkeys
out of a population of 10 000
were washing their coconuts.
and then 20,
and then 47.
But a funny thing happened.
As soon as the 100th monkey
started washing his coconut husk,
all 10 000 started washing simultaneously.
I-, I guess one way that I have always looked
at my life, especially since I clearly understood
what this issue was in late 2001,
is, this is my quest for the 100th monkey.