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 not by overthrowing anything else
except for what you have been holding in your head
that may not be applicable anymore.
We've gotten very lazy.
We're many generations overdue
for a revolution in our 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 inside the human soul
and the human mind,
to be able to tear everything down,
throw everything out,
and start with a completely fresh piece of paper
and say, "Okay, how do we solve this problem?"
Can you talk to me a little bit, like...
I mean, 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 U.S. intelligence community.
My mother had been a cryptanalyst
at the Army Security Agency and NSA in World War II.
Her work product went to the President Roosevelt
and to Secretary of War Stimson and Cordell Hull at State.
My father was an Air Force aviator
who went to work for Martin Marietta
on contracts for the CIA and the Air Force,
namely the Titan IIIC
which put out the CIA's Keyhole spy satellites.
At age 19 when I was interning for LAPD,
I was pulled into the chief's office
because somebody discovered I had a Q clearance.
I didn't know anything about it.
I went home, and I asked Dad he said,
"Yeah, because you're my son,
"and, you know, they have to do that
because I might leave my briefcase open."
But a Q was a secret compartmentalized 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 anything about government
with this naive belief that, you know,
you can get inside the system
and change it from the inside.
I became an L.A. 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, "Well, jeez, this must be
"an isolated incident of corruption.
"This must be something
"that everybody is gonna want to correct right away.
My God."
And of course that was a mistake.
Basically my life disintegrated
because I was betrayed by a woman
who worked for CIA, who was my fiancée,
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,
and 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 mapmaker 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 have made
has proved so startlingly accurate over ten 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.
Rags, come here. Rags, come here.
I first became focused on energy issues in late 2001,
just 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 tooth brushes 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 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.
In the case of oil or any other substance like that,
no matter how much money you throw at it,
you're never going to 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 are gonna able to offset a 9% decline rate.
From a detective's standpoint,
if you are trying to assemble a case, you know,
the multidimensional aspects of a case...
means, motive, opportunity...
to understand what kind of force drives events,
peak oil was almost with the stroke
of, like, a diamond cutter's knife
the single piece which started to make
everything resonate and make sense together.
An economy that runs on petroleum,
some 20 million barrels of it a day.
You will recall that when the Bush administration took office
in January of 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 task force 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 has been known that this event,
this collapse, this crash, was coming.
Who they were,
we can't even get information
as to who was involved and what they were doing.
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 to 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
and your first well costs $150 million to build,
all that's energy 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 major oil finds left.
As a matter of fact, no field the size of Ghawar,
the largest field in Saudi Arabia,
has ever been discovered since.
Saudi Arabia has 25%
of the known oil reserves on the planet.
25%.
Why, if Saudi Arabia has all these untapped reserves on shore
are they moving heavily 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.
A lot of people have admitted that, and like, duh.
11 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...
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 U.S. dollar,
and we assured the oil companies
their "fair access" and fair share of Iraqi oil.
International oil companies into Iraqi oil fields
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 Baghdad
that's bigger than Vatican City.
That's not a temporary deal.
Nobody is gonna take that oil.
We are sitting on it.
But there is not enough oil in Iraq to change anything.
Iraq probably has around 90 billion barrels
of recoverable oil.
That sounds like a lot of oil.
But when you consider that in 2008 the world was consuming
85 million barrels a day,
that means a billion barrels of oil
only last for about 111/2 days,
so that ain't that much oil.
That's only the first of the good things
that will come to Iraq, thanks to 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 were declassified,
we would be building scaffolds to hang Dick Cheney
and everybody 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 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.
Developing this tiny section of ANWR,
could eventually yield up to a million...
If there is oil in ANWR
there's no more than about a six-month supply
for the entire United States.
There are no pipelines across a 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 got to drop all this lying right now.
We don't need transparency about anything
other than about 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...
But actual reserve estimates are state secrets.
The Saudis 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 past 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 going to 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.
We're gonna be out of oil within a few years.
In doing this sort of pulling archival footage for this film,
I found at least ten examples of people in the late '70s
talking about, this is the end of oil.
This is, like, end of a way of life,
we are hitting a new era.
This situation is destined to continue.
People look at that footage,
and I think they can feel that it's somewhat alarmist,
given that we were able to continue
our way of life for another 30, 35 years.
Do you see any parallels between that time and now?
The '70s was really a critical decade.
In the '70s, Marion King Hubbard,
the original prophet of peak oil,
in late 1949 he did the math
and said U.S. 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 '70s, M. King Hubbard testified before Congress.
That was 1974.
In 1976, President Jimmy Carter said,
"Man, we cannot use as much energy as we have been using."
To use energy more efficiently.
That's when solar panels went up.
That's when he start... he knew.
They have known in Washington.
I have...
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 is talking about growth, growth, growth,
buy, buy, buy, spend, consume, 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.
800 million internal combustion-powered vehicles
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 seven gallons of oil in every tire,
nobody will ever make
800 million new internal combustion anything
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, etcetera,
you irrigate, you use the fertilizers,
you're burning all that oil and natural gas to grow it.
Then you make steam which is...
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 announced 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 200, 300, 400, 500 feet in layers
beneath the soil.
This is in Alberta.
And they literally strip mine thousands of tons a day.
They put them in these huge, oil-powered dump trucks
and drive them to a place where they then wash the sand.
They take millions and billions of gallons of fresh water,
which we're running out of everywhere,
and they boil it by burning natural gas.
There is not a possibility anywhere
that Canadian tar sand's production
will exceed maybe 3 million, 3.5 million barrels a day.
The first thing that the uneducated mind
that's in denial says,
"Well, what about hydrogen?
Can't we make electric cars?"
Then I have to bring them back to the fact
that there's seven gallons of oil in every tire,
that there are thousands of gallons of oil in every car,
in the plastics, the paints, the resins, everything.
All of that is made by oil.
The oil that's used to manufacture the car
and ship it around, to heat the metals, etcetera, etcetera.
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.
Today freedom and power are woven together.
The invisible battalions of electric power...
It's clear that electricity
is the key to industrial civilization
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 commute electronically,
charge our cell phone batteries,
preserve food, run operating rooms, etcetera.
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 essentially is, 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 10,000
or 15,000 thousand years.
Nuclear process requires something
like 10 to 13 years of incubation
to get the permitting done, all the regulations satisfied,
and the construction of nuclear power plants
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,
it has to be generated or collected near a 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,
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 is in power lines,
and all the maintenance that has to go to that grid.
So when you see really ridiculous commercials
that say we could have a solar array 96 miles in the desert,
they don't even think about the fact
that that electricity is going to get used in California
before it goes any place else.
Just, 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 bachelors degree in political science
with honors from UCLA, 1973.
Graduate of the Los Angeles Police Academy, Valedictorian,
class of 1173,
was sent to do DEA Narcotics Enforcement School by LAPD.
I have 30 years of experience as an investigative journalist.
I've broken major scandals that have had national impact.
Of course, I got to know many members of Congress.
I had 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 a call to testify.
I have written two books,
one of which is in the Harvard Business School library.
I've lectured at universities all over the country
and in many countries.
People wonder, you know,
how this guy with a bachelors degree from UCLA
came to know all this shit.
Well, this comes from 30 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...
and then how to connect them,
how to place the dots close enough together
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 the soil was replenished
and 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 topsoil on which food is grown now
is nothing more than a sponge onto 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.
So when you plant a crop now,
what happens is you drive an oil-powered machine.
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's that electricity come from?
In the United States, it's either coal or natural gas.
So next thing you do is come along,
and you fertilize it.
All commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia,
and the feedstock for ammonia is natural gas.
So you have ammonium nitrate fertilizers
that are then sprayed on by another oil-powered vehicle.
Then the crop dusters 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.
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
and an 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 Chile?
Why do we have spinach from China?
Why do we ship anchovies halfway around the world
to be packaged in tin cans?
There are ten calories of hydrocarbon energy
in every calorie 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 is what many people urged me to do.
But what inevitably happened every time
I tried to walk away from this path that I have walked
was that everything else in my life
would be taken away from me
so that this path was the only thing left.
I had no other choice.
And, yeah, anger and resentment do build up,
especially when you see and document as much corruption,
as much dishonesty,
as much illegality, 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
or learned of the murder of Marine Colonel Jim Sabow
at El Toro Marine Air Station.
He was the chief of Air Ops, and he had caught CIA C130s
flying 2,000 and 3,000 kilos of cocaine on to his base,
and he was suicided.
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 '80s, 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 U.S. 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 evolution came in 1996
after my confrontation with CIA Director Deutch,
John Deutch at Locke High School.
You know, I remember standing up saying something like,
"I am a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective.
"I worked 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 it.
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
and Fred Hinson'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 whittled and tweetered down.
There were some very mysterious deaths involved.
Congressmen Julian Dixon, who was at that meeting,
had a very sudden heart attack...
which led to the publishing of the first issue of my newsletter
in May of 1998, From the Wilderness.
I sat down and wrote a few pages out,
like, eight pages I think.
I mailed it to 68 names,
and over the next 81/2 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 exposés 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.
Four different A-1 pilots who dropped the gas.
In spite of what the Pentagon said.
CNN, you know, rolled over.
Henry Kissinger called.
Oliver was fired.
Pat Tillman series that I broke in my newsletter.
All seven parts, that was what broke the Pat Tillman exposé
that brought down nine officers or got them disciplined.
The government violated its most basic responsibility.
But my economic predictions then,
we had it so right.
The problems are several-fold
behind the economic crash that is coming
that will be nothing like we have ever seen before.
In 2006, we said, "Get out of debt right now.
"Check your mortgage carefully,
"especially if you have an A.R.M.
"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 pools of 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
and a whole chain of events took place up there
which was... which actually worked out okay,
because I needed to evolve, and I have since then.
There was a period after, you know, 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,
or, you know, 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.
It's a big financial term that is real simple to understand.
It's called a derivative.
A derivative is any financial instrument
which is derived from the inherent value
of something else that is 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.
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 the credit card bill.
In other words, to service the $700 trillion
in notional-valued 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 $11 trillion
if you add up all the U.S. bailouts,
they're chasing a $700 trillion 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 in my wallet, and I pull out this bill,
it's $20.
Wow. 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 crumple 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 occurred with the advent of oil
came this revolution in the monetary system as well.
There was a 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 any more money
than there is energy to back it up.
That simple.
So we have fiat currency.
Then we have something called fractional reserve banking.
If you were to bring me a $10 deposit,
I could make $90 worth of loans
based on just having that $10 in my drawer,
because it's all calculated on the premise
that not everybody's 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 Vegas odds makers do, and said,
"Okay, well, you know, there are very little odds
under normal conditions."
When I lend now a total of $100 based on that $10 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 in 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 U.S. 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 20%, 25% cards,
that means they are 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.
And 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 are 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 U.S. 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 if everything else we 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?
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 is bankrupt, Michigan is bankrupt, Ohio.
They're shutting down services left and right.
There are tent cities springing up all over the country.
There are homeless displaced people.
A great many billionaires, who we would call the elites,
a great 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 U.S. economy.
Britain is an absolute basket case.
There is a curtain of despair descending
across Eastern Europe.
There's a revolution under way 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 called a conspiracy theorist.
But I don't deal in conspiracy theory.
I deal in conspiracy fact.
Somebody once 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 am 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 the 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 talks about money,
and you automatically accept without thinking
that compound interest, factional reserve banking,
and fiat currency is okay,
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
is 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 been... 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 are in a camp with a bunch of campers
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
with maybe a little bit more at 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
and the early stages of the Industrial Revolution,
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.
That's it.
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 petri 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.
It's a law as fundamental as thermodynamics,
and if one thinks about it,
it might also be viewed as true of the stock market
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 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 tried to deal with that
in however long the Titanic had before it went down,
you're likely to run across three types of passenger
on the Titanic.
You'll run across a type
that's basically deer 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 where to go. Should I do that?
I don't know."
That's one group.
There's another group that says,
"We get that the ship is gonna sink.
"We get that we're all gonna die
"unless we make some lifeboats and do it fast.
Show us what to do."
Then you have a third group that says,
"This is the Titanic.
"It's absolutely unsinkable.
"Un-fucking-sinkable.
"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 gonna 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 bankrupt.
T-bill defaults.
We're looking at major bankruptcy,
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 come 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 a recovery 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 have all heard the stories about infrastructure, you know,
the sewers and the bridges and the roads and all that.
Well, the point is,
is that as economic collapse continues or accelerates,
those structures will fall into more and more disrepair.
There's not gonna be any money
or anything running to fix those,
so what you want to have is the change to a new paradigm,
getting the old one out of the way
while there is still infrastructure left
to start building something new.
We have to survive the transition phase
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 phase.
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,
and 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.
When people say, "Okay, I'm gonna run for the hills.
"I'm gonna go build a cabin.
I'm gonna buy ten million cans of baked beans."
Well, 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 some of this
is just sort of discounting human ingenuity,
or our ability to sort of problem solve.
Because my father was an Air Force 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.
In 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 ice cream 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.
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.
Those are intractable, immutable, real,
and science has never been able to do that.
Man's great arrogance, I believe,
and one for which he is 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 wheelbarrows 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 where I am 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 the telecommunications companies
that operate the satellites, the cell towers,
the fiber optic cables,
and all this stuff that makes your wonderful cell phone work
are cutting back on maintenance as the stock market collapses,
and we're gonna see failures in cell phone service.
A land line 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 Frankenseeds,
that only work one time you plant them
and then you got to 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 are at peak everything,
all the commodities, everything else.
What they had in the 1930s 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 industrialized civilization.
We've had examples of what happens when oil disappears
and how civilizations respond
and what works and what doesn't.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed,
and there were two nations that were absolutely
and totally dependent upon Soviet 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 the say, was in the pudding.
North Korea was a rigid, hierarchical, top-down,
Soviet-style, bureaucratic regime
where everything came from the central government.
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 can run trains on some days
or 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 is not being used, you occupy it,
"and you start farming it,
and you start growing food right now."
The Cuban government 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 agri-biz, you know,
Frankenfood nightmare.
Everything was organic,
and you had every square inch in Havana that had soil,
on rooftops or in 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 favorite writers,
and he wrote about animals a lot.
One thing you know about animals
is that they all want to go home
when they know that they're gonna face death.
They all want to be in their tribe
or their pack or whatever it is.
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.
There was a story talking about all the cars that were abandoned
as these Indians caught a one-way ticket home to go home.
It's happening in Britain too.
You have lots of Poles and Eastern Europeans,
who were the latecomers into E.U.,
fleeing Britain to go home.
Now in some areas, and certainly in the southern California basin
with 13, 14 million people and a four-day food supply,
it's clear that people are going to migrate out of this area,
because 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.
Hmm.
Phoenix, for God's sake, Las Vegas,
those people have to worry about where to go,
and community is what will save us.
You are gonna have to do it in conjunction
with your neighbors and your family
and the 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...
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 home, you know, and say,
"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 psychologist... psychiatrist,
Elizabeth Kübler Ross,
who talked about the five stages of grief,
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...
it has just barely crossed the threshold of the anger phase.
We have to get through the anger phase.
And how we get through that anger phase
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,
borne 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,
you know, we have the bargaining.
Well, the bargaining is kind of going on now too.
"Maybe I could've done something different.
"Maybe I should have thought of this.
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 civilization.
And the final stage is acceptance,
and it's really only when people
have reached the point of acceptance
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 want to make,
just because there's different authors
that sort of support your world view,
and there's other ones that don't.
Is it possible to sort of create a reality
based on picking news stories that support your world view?
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
and what I've been 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,
and 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.
So 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.
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 and the way you think,
or 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 a huge microscope.
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, St. 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.
All right, so here we have this...
this likeable,
sincere guy in the White House,
and he is as imprisoned as we all are.
I need to cut.
I'm just having a real powerful wave of emotion right now,
because a whole new realization is opening to me
about what I'm actually saying,
and this is some serious fucking shit,
so I got to get my head around it for a second.
Fuck.
Okay, I'm ready.
He is 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.
He's a prisoner of the Federal Reserve.
He's a prisoner 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 character is,
when we get pissed off
and we put our minds to something
and we clearly understand what needs to be done
and 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're just gonna do it
regardless of what the possible consequences are?
It just would be 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 end result
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,
to 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 away would have meant selling out.
You know, I'm still a guy who, 30 years ago,
approached his government as a citizen
asking for redress of grievance.
I caught the CIA dealing drugs.
It's wrong.
Somebody needs to talk about this,
and 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.
A long time ago in the late '40s, early '50s
when atom bombs and H-bombs were in vogue
with above-ground testing,
we set off an atom bomb on an atoll in the Pacific,
and then we waited a number of years,
because we wanted to answer questions like,
"Gee, 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 coconuts
were slightly radioactive.
So the scientists took ten monkeys or so
and taught them to wash the coconuts
in a 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 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.