My guest, the segment, is my friend and honor colleague, Peter Joseph. He's an American

musician, filmmaker, author, and activist. In 2009, he founded the zeitgeist movement,

a global, non-profit sustainability advocacy group, and has been on the advisory board and

steering committee for Project Peace on Earth since 2013. He's also the creator of the

Culture and Decline web series, and his newest book is called The New Human Rights Movement.

Peter, thank you so much. I'm so glad that you're here. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Marianne. I appreciate you having me.

You know, Peter, when the zeitgeist films came out, it was a huge moment. It sort of brought together

information and feelings that so many people were having, but we weren't quite naming it. It was a

profound cultural explosion when those films came out. Now, in many ways, the culture seems to

have caught up with you, and a large part of the conversation that you were having with the zeitgeist

films is now part of mainstream dialogue, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have

an economic system that clearly is not working for the majority of people, both here in the United

States and around the world. So, once again, you having been in this conversation for so long,

what was the first sign in your life that something was deeply a skew with America's economic

system and that we needed to be having a very different conversation?

I think that would probably go back to my childhood having grown up with my parents, the civil

servants, particularly my mother working in child protective services in deep rural North Carolina,

which is subject, as you might imagine, to great deprivation and then great trauma and abuse,

particularly in families and generations of child abuse and things of that nature.

And I was in that, excuse me, there's a peripheral kind of sensation there, obviously, as a young

kid, I'm not thinking about changing the world, but I was around that subject matter, and it kind of

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