Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files. TV.

Peter Joseph is the founder of the Zykegeist movement, a grassroots worldwide organization that advocates an

alternative economic system based on sustainability, cooperation, and human need.

His most recent book, The New Human Rights Movement, delivers a startling expose about the violent

oppression that defines our economic order, while issuing an urgent call for global activism

to unite to replace it.

I sat down with Joseph to talk about the contradictions and crises of capitalism and what he

advocates to save the future of the planet from catastrophe.

Peter, you have a very interesting background, having worked both in advertising and equity trading.

Let's talk about advertising first. What function does this industry

serve in today's society? The best way to explain that is to look at the fact that our economy

is based on consumption, and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand. And without that

arm, and it's so polluted, as you know, I can't even imagine what the world would be like without advertising.

But without that arm, you wouldn't have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational, abused by our social inclusion.

When advertising presents something to the community that seems to be something that some people want, it spreads like a virus and then everybody wants it

because it's an issue of social inclusion, which is a part of our biology, because that's how we

identify. We identify and define ourselves by how others see us and how we are included in the group.

So it manipulates our most primal sense of humanity in order to sell things. And again, back to my original point,

if you didn't have that arm in our consumption-based society since the industrial revolution,

the economy would collapse. That's a very unique point to make, because when you first start an

economy of this nature, like in the agrarian society and then in the handicraft industry,

you're meeting demand, right? That's the point. And that makes sense. But at some point, this kernel seed had to change

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