Original subtitles

-2020 is the beginning of the age of catastrophe.

♪♪

It's kind of the future warning us

about what's on the cards for us,

because the grim truth that I think we're not facing

is that our civilization is now beginning to collapse

in very real in very serious ways.

-Most Americans are comforted in the belief

that their government

and the country's best and brightest

will step up to protect them.

-The entire idea of American exceptionalism

and the illusion of national security

is that we are strong and we can take a blow

or that we'll protect Americans from some sort of major attack

or some sort of cataclysm.

But the truth is that we are very brittle right now.

-We're always looking ahead,

ahead to an America that never leaves anyone behind.

-Just filming, just filming, My God!

-But what if it turns out that the greatest threat

in this age of catastrophe is that this idea...

That Americans will pull together in times of crisis...

Is dead, killed by decades of treating American freedom

as the freedom to get ahead at any cost.

-During normal times, it's easy to think,

oh, the elite, the one percent,

they're actually concerned about everybody's welfare.

But then in that moment of crisis,

when elites treat it as an opportunity for profiteering,

rent seeking, gouging from the public purse,

that's the recipe for a failed state.

-For over 70 years, our leaders have told us

one thing under the bright lights...

-The protection of the lives and property of Americans

is the responsibility of all public officials.

- I care we're trying... - And it is my first duty

as president to protect the American people.

-We have it so well under control.

-But America's shadow government has spent trillions of dollars

on secret plans that serve one premise:

when the shit really hits the fan, we're on our own.

-I have nothing! Nothing!

-And while the government leaves us to fend for ourselves,

the elite suck us dry to fund their own escape.

♪♪

♪♪

Since the Cold War,

the threat of nuclear annihilation was real,

but the story that we are somehow all in this together

was closer to a cartoon.

-The best protection of all is the special shelter

built according to specifications

of your local civil defense organization.

-Instead of protecting the American public

by reducing the threat...

[ Explosion ]

the U.S. government sinks billions of taxpayer dollars

into new and more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction.

One of those was codenamed Starfish Prime.

In 1962, American military scientists

launched an experimental warhead

from a remote island in the Pacific.

-On Johnston Island, missile preparation for the July

launch of the Starfish Prime shot

was one aspect of an extensive team effort.

-The experiment was designed to test the effects

of nuclear explosions in outer space.

♪♪

-Equally important was the need to know

the effects of high altitude nuclear bursts

on military command and control systems

which require long range communications.

-The explosion caused a massive electromagnetic pulse,

known as an EMP.

The pulse fried electronics

hundreds of miles away in Hawaii.

It even blew out rows of streetlights in Honolulu.

The Starfish Prime experiment

exposes a frightening new possibility.

What if something as simple as a basic infrastructure failure

could deal a fatal blow to America?

It's a scenario that has troubled

doomsday planners ever since...

because it's a lot easier to imagine the lights going out

in a mushroom cloud over New York City.

And when the basic things we all take for granted

suddenly stop working,

in the end, that may be just as destructive

to our way of life.

♪♪

♪♪

2020 has shown us that the boundaries

between some distant future apocalypse and reality

may be thinner than we'd like to believe.

It has given us a preview of what things look like

when our way of life starts to break down.

-The fundamental basic institutions

and structures of life

that we took for granted have snapped apart like that.

-What if the coronavirus

is just a shot across the bow,

a warning of what the future holds?

-I think most people are very conflicted about this

in the sense that we long for a return to normalcy.

But there's also a part of us that says, you know,

normal isn't coming back... This is it.

-We've already seen how fragile our supply chains are,

thanks to the pandemic.

We've got a little preview of it through things like

farmers having to harvest their crops

or slaughter their livestock,

but not being able to bring them to market.

And so they just destroyed it

because small elements in the logistics broke down.

If there's a total breakdown,

that's going to be a lot more frightening.

You'll recall that at the start of the pandemic,

there was a widespread toilet paper shortage.

[ Indistinct ]

-It's only one per customer.

-So multiply that, you know, minor inconvenience

and it probably cascades.

[ Siren wailing ]

-The government will tell you that when there's a disaster,

you could be on your own for the first 72 hours.

But if a cataclysmic disaster really happens,

not everyone assumes that the government...

Or anyone, for that matter...

Is really coming to help.

-Rich people in government, they take care of themselves,

but for the middle class and for lower-income folks,

you're absolutely on your own.

-In the foothills of the Colorado Mountains

is a secluded camp called Fortitude Ranch.

It's run by Drew Miller.

With a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard,

he's a respected figure in what used to be

considered a fringe movement.

-We kind of had a phrase decades ago

in the prep industry called "72 hours to Animal,"

saying, you know, for the first couple of days,

people will react okay,

but eventually when there's no food,

no water, and panic starts spreading,

people are going to get to their basic instinct of survival,

and it's going to be lawless.

We don't believe that anymore... We believe it's more like

72 seconds, or 72 minutes to animal.

Chaos is going to break out within the first hour or hours.

-A former Cold War military intelligence officer,

Miller has inside knowledge that most people don't.

-Government's number one priority

is taking care of themselves.

Police number one priority, continuity of government,

taking care of the elected officials.

No one is going to be responding to your call

for help in your little house,

saying, hey, there's a marauding group coming through,

breaking into houses, taking goods and stealing.

So if you're a government official,

you'll be taken care of.

But the rest of us are pretty much on our own.

-Go! Back up! Back up!

-We're prepared to defend ourselves.

We don't just stockpile food, we have guns and ammo too,

but a lot of the population does not,

and they're going to be victims, unfortunately, in that case.

The major weapons we recommend for our members

are either an AR-15, which is not an assault rifle.

It's a defensive rifle.

People say, "Oh, you don't need this,

this is just for the military"...

Well, in a collapse situation,

if you've got a marauder group coming after you

and they got a lot of people, got a lot of weapons,

you do need a lot of rounds.

♪♪

-In 2020, fear spread far and wide beyond Fortitude Ranch.

As the U.S. economy ground to a halt

and millions of Americans were put out of work,

we witnessed how vulnerable our way of life really is.

-I think people are scared shitless

about two things... They're related.

The first is the idea that we have built

a technological society

whose comforts we are reliant upon,

whose coordination we need to sustain our current population,

that if you just turned off all the machines tomorrow,

the kind of handmade version of our society,

where all the crops were brought in by hand and so on,

would provoke mass die-offs.

And the story we've been sold is part of the other fear,

which is that our institutions are no longer trustworthy,

that they have become not truth-seeking exercises,

but rather auction houses in which people

who are powerful and wealthy

can buy a version of the truth

that suits their parochial ends.

In a world in which the Sacklers successfully convinced the FDA

that opioids weren't dangerous

and kick-started an opioid epidemic

that killed 200,000 Americans...

More than died in Vietnam...

And where the Sacklers themselves became richer

than the Rockefellers, how do you trust an institution?

♪♪

-Something like an EMP attack would wipe out

not just the infrastructure that we have,

but we would see very, very quickly the distance

between the importance

by which the government seeks their own survival

and the survival of the American people.

This idea of national security

would collapse almost instantaneously.

♪♪

[ Indistinct chanting, explosions ]

-But in the age of catastrophe, it doesn't really take an EMP

to see what happens when the lights go out...

and our basic institutions start to fail us.

We all just lived through 2020.

-So what happens when somebody now doesn't have a job,

doesn't have the basic kind of access

to resources that we take for granted in the rich world,

you turn on the tap, water doesn't come out,

you go to the store and there's not enough food,

you press the button and there's no electricity.

What happens?

Well, history tells us,

when people grow suddenly poorer,

what happens is massive waves of authoritarianism and fascism.

History tells us that in absolutely unsparing terms.

So that's the story of Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany.

It's the story of Stalinist Russia.

It's the story of the Islamic world.

It's also the story of America today.

[ Explosion ]

-What if the doomsday scenario that politicians planned for

since the Cold War turned out to be a lot less obvious

than a nuclear bomb or EMP?

What if it's our economy and the collapse has already begun?

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-It's the first wave of a deadly pandemic:

most of America is under lockdown,

the country's economy grinds to an almost complete halt.

It's the worst economic drop off in modern history.

Borders are closed,

lines at food pantries stretch for miles,

in cities across America.

-You're all set, have a wonderful apocalypse.

-It feels like this is what the beginning of doomsday

and the apocalypse might feel like.

♪♪

-This is a government soup kitchen giving free meals

to these men who were once skilled workers in a factory.

-America has seen an economic collapse before.

During the Great Depression,

the nation was brought to its knees.

-These people had come to depend on government relief.

And where did this happen?

Right here in these United States.

-But during the Cold War, government planners

imagined something even more catastrophic...

Nuclear war.

Their plans involved almost nothing to ensure

the survival of ordinary Americans,

but they were concerned with what to do

with those who somehow survived.

And in order to put them back to work,

they would need a way to pay them.

♪♪

Hidden under the Virginia mountains

is one of the least known chapters of the Cold War.

There, the Federal Reserve constructed its own

mountain bunker, known as Mount Pony.

-Walking down there is a series of hallways

about as long as a football field.

And they're cold, they're made of concrete,

they're lit with fluorescent lights,

and lining the hallways on both sides

are these big, steel, reinforced doors.

-On one floor of the Federal Reserve bunker,

a massive steel blast door

leading to a 22,500 square foot vault.

-That's where they stored the billions of dollars

of U.S. currency.

-It was one of the largest vaults in the world.

It contained row after row of nine-foot-high stacks of cash.

700 million pieces of currency,

much of it in the form of $2 bills.

-This coincided in the 1970s with the period

when the U.S. reintroduced the $2 bill

and Americans rejected it widely, so the Fed,

rather than pulp the money, set it up in its own bunkers,

assuming that after a nuclear attack,

Americans would be less choosey

about which currency they were using.

♪♪

-The plan was to stockpile enough cash

to replenish the supply east of the Mississippi for two years...

Long enough for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing

to rebuild its précis.

Smaller bunkers hidden in abandoned mines

and other military bases

were scattered around the country.

But the government didn't stop with a plan

on how to pay citizens to work.

They also wanted a plan to take that money back.

And so the engineers of the apocalypse turned to the IRS.

-The joke is that there are only two constants in life:

death and taxes.

And so even in a nuclear attack

that held true.

And if one didn't get you,

the IRS wanted to make sure that the other did.

-The IRS and the Treasury Department

gave a lot of thought to figuring out

how they could assess and raise taxes after a nuclear holocaust,

debating what happens to

mortgages on homes that have been vaporized,

or wondering how to assess the value of properties

post attack.

-Part of what makes these plans so strange

is realizing just how unworkable

they would have been under almost any actual emergency.

-While those impractical government plans

are sitting on a shelf somewhere...

When a real economic emergency actually arises,

the government is left scrambling to find a way out.

It's 2007, and America's wealthiest

financial institutions have been getting rich

by pushing loans and mortgages

to people who can't afford them.

Across America, roughly three million homes are foreclosed on,

turning parts of cities into ghost towns.

♪♪

-The housing downturn and the surrounding uncertainty

are significantly impacting our financial institutions

and capital markets.

-But the subprime mortgage crisis

doesn't just hurt homeowners.

The greed and irresponsible behavior

of financial institutions

has a ripple effect on the global economy

leading to the Great Recession in 2008.

♪♪

By the end of 2009,

more than 15 million Americans are unemployed.

Facing bankruptcy,

the financial giants that caused the crisis

are considered too big to fail.

-Wall Street bet that the government would rescue them

if they got into trouble.

It appears that bet may be the one that pays off.

-Without them, the economy faces a meltdown.

And so the government steals a page from its nuclear playbook,

the elite get saved, only this time it's not in bunkers

under mountains of concrete,

it's under mountains of cash.

-And you can sit there and say, well, if they hadn't done that,

the whole financial system would have melted down.

But the fundamental problem was that they extended

all of the support to the financial institutions,

but didn't actually extend the same level of support

to ordinary people.

-While foreclosed homeowners are living in their cars,

45 billion taxpayer dollars get funneled to JPMorgan,

Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley...

Institutions that paid out $18 billion

in bonuses to bankers and executives.

Of a $475 billion bailout authorized by Congress,

only 6% goes to help underwater homeowners.

Most of the rest goes to banks and financial institutions.

In the two years after the recession,

the net wealth of most Americans shrinks,

while the richest actually increase their wealth

by almost 30%.

-And that created not just a deep

and lasting sense of economic pain

for millions of ordinary people,

but it also creates this lasting sense of anger and unfairness

and a feeling that basically the elites are going to

get protected if something bad happens,

but ordinary people aren't.

-In 2007 and '08, the unmasking was quite shocking.

What happened in the years just after that,

where the bailouts were quite controversial,

it appeared as the polluters got paid,

the people under water in mortgages

did not get restructuring.

The Tea Party was spawned on the right in America.

Occupy on the left.

- When do we want it? - Now!

[ Indistinct shouts, whistle blowing ]

-And when inequality was exacerbated by the bailouts,

the disintegration of credibility and faith

spread like wildfire.

-The Great Recession was only the beginning.

While the economy gradually recovers,

inequality in America worsens

and a new class of elite becomes even more powerful.

♪♪

[ Cheering and applause ]

♪♪

-In March 2020, Elon Musk laid off nearly 300 janitors

and shuttle drivers due to COVID-19...

sending his lowest earners home without pay.

As these struggling workers join soup lines

and food pantries around the block,

Tesla's stock price quickly rebounded the following month,

and Musk's net worth soon more than tripled

to over $90 billion.

-Is this really worth it, Mr. Musk?

-This is an uncomfortable truth about America today.

It's not just that when the world is facing collapse,

those at the top get the chance to survive.

Today, they rise to even greater heights

by getting even richer and more powerful.

♪♪

[ Indistinct shouting ]

♪♪

Nine years earlier,

the streets of New York City erupt in protest.

-All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!

All day, all week...

-Since the Great Recession,

inequality has only gotten worse.

The wealth of elites has soared to new heights

while ordinary Americans continue to suffer.

Poverty in America takes on new meaning.

-Why should anybody in a rich country

have to choose between their life savings and their life?

Have to choose between their home and basic medicine?

Have to choose between keeping the water and heating on

or educating their kids?

-Why can't I have a home, why I can't afford my rent?

-These choices don't make sense

and they're the choices that everyday Americans make.

These aren't the choices of like a small kind of underclass.

Right? These are the choices that the people formerly known

as the American middle class have to make.

So America is really a place of extremes.

You know, you have trillion-dollar companies now.

In a historic... Apple and Amazon,

the world's first trillion-dollar companies.

You have 50% of all new jobs in America

working a low-income service jobs,

it's a polite economist's way of saying

people are becoming servants again.

History is repeating itself.

People are falling into peasantry and servitude.

-Over the last four decades,

the wealth of the richest Americans

has continued to climb,

but since the 1980s,

the average working-age American has seen almost zero growth.

Today, the top 1% in America

earned more than 80 times the bottom 50%.

-If I say that inequality in America

is reaching third world levels,

they don't believe me.

And in some respect, they're right.

But there are people who have to beg,

who will never pay off their debts successfully.

So there is not maybe perhaps yet the level

of absolute deprivation that there is in the third world,

but the level of inequality has produced real degradation

in America, real relative poverty.

-We're here to say enough is enough.

In New York City, we have been protesting

over three months now, and we're just getting started.

-Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic,

a record 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment.

In July, an estimated 30 million reported

not having enough to eat...

That's one in every 10 households.

Yet that same month, JPMorgan, the same financial institution

that helped cause the 2008 recession

and received billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts,

posts one of its best quarters ever.

During the first weeks of the pandemic,

as the unemployment rate in America nears 15%,

the billionaires' wealth actually increases.

-The American economy has been completely divorced

from the fates of the people.

This is a sad fact

that we can see when unemployment numbers go up

but stocks rise.

And the truth is that this notion that somehow

or another the economy is somehow or another simpatico

with the fates of the people is a complete fiction.

-As people do poorly, the banks can still do well

because more is being borrowed,

more is being spent.

The government printed a trillion,

two trillion, three trillion dollars.

The more they print,

the better the balance sheet is for the lender.

And that's... that's the thing that matters.

So you can end up with everybody poor and out of work,

two-thirds, three-quarters of the people out of work,

but the ones who've got that S&P 500 index fund,

that's still going up.

♪♪

-Of course, we're seeing one industry

after another being bailed out,

but it is made more and more clear by the day

that the fate of American people themselves

is not being taken in consideration

and is certainly not given the weight of taking care

of businesses and corporations.

-During a pandemic

and the worst unemployment crisis in modern history,

needy Americans scrape by on modest government handouts.

-You don't have a job, you don't get health care.

You don't have health care, you die.

Barely anybody makes enough to pay off their debts

or afford a decent standard of living.

You have to care about yourself the most and you barely have

any money left over to care about anybody else.

-These problems aren't invisible to the people

who have the power to do something about them.

Think about this:

Amazon has 876,000 employees.

If Jeff Bezos gave each employee a $100,000 bonus,

he would still be richer than he was

at the start of the pandemic.

-If we taxed 60% of the windfall gains

these billionaires made from March 18th until August 3rd,

we could raise over $420 billion.

That's enough revenue to pay all of the out of pocket health care

expenses for every man, woman and child in this country

over the next 12 months.

So that's the choice that we have to make.

-Bernie Sanders gives voice

to a popular movement of young Americans,

an existential threat to the wealthiest people

in the country.

-It is morally obscene for billionaires

to use a global pandemic

as an opportunity to make outrageous profits

and to very substantially increase their wealth.

-What happens with elites is,

when they're left to their own devices,

they get greedier and greedier and they get paranoid.

They develop a fear of the slippery slope

that any infringement on their prerogative

will lead to more and more and more,

and pretty soon the... their heads will be in the guillotine.

-It's 2017, just after Trump's inauguration,

media theorist Douglas Rushkoff shows up at an exclusive resort

to deliver a talk about the digital future

to a group of wealthy tech executives.

-I was in the green room waiting to go on

when five men came in to the green room

and sat around this little table they had there,

and I found out that there was no talk for me to go do...

That these guys were the talk.

And they didn't want to hear the whole thing I had prepared,

they just started peppering me with these questions...

Like, "Bitcoin or Ethereum?"

Which one should they bet on?

Or augmented reality or virtual reality,

which did I think would win?

And then the third question, the one that made me realize

that this was more than I signed up for,

they said, Alaska or New Zealand,

meaning where should they situate their bunkers

for the event?

♪♪

-For years, New Zealand has been

an apocalypse escape destination for America's elite.

Notable home buyers include the tech tycoon Peter Thiel,

an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

He's also bet that America was not the place to be

if things collapsed,

so he arranged for a New Zealand passport just in case.

Other American elites were getting similar ideas.

-The rest of my hour with them

was them asking me all these, like, really specific questions

about how to water test their plans for the apocalypse,

for the electromagnetic pulse,

for the economic downturn,

or the disease or war that would necessitate them

leaving their Silicon Valley ranches and retreating

to these fortified bunkers in the middle of nowhere.

-The government's secret plans to save itself

now have competition from the secret plans

of the 1%.

From converted Cold War bunkers and missile silos

to specially outfitted yachts,

a doomsday industry caters to the mega rich.

Luxury bunkers with indoor pools,

artificial sunlight, and supplies

to stay sealed off from the world for years.

From the Cold War till now,

the most powerful people end up being the ones most afraid.

And today, even as the actions of a few at the top

have helped pushed poverty rates

near their highest levels in half a century,

it's the rich who fear losing control.

Elite anxiety is on the rise.

♪♪

-The billionaires, they understand

that they're playing a dangerous game,

that they are running out of room

to externalize the damage of the way their companies operate.

Eventually there's going to be, you know, the social unrest

that leads to your undoing,

which is why these same people

are looking at creating bomb shelters,

going to Australia or New Zealand.

-What I would say is this was sort of an acceleration

of the notion of what we had called gated communities,

where you try to insulate yourself from the social discord

that's outside.

But here it was an evacuation plan.

-For the billionaires in the green room with Rushkoff,

the biggest concern is protecting themselves

from the unruly masses.

-The question we ended up spending the majority of time on

was how do I maintain control of my security force

after my money is worthless?

So these guys had already secured Navy SEALs

and security forces to come

and guard their facilities for them.

But if the U.S. economy goes belly up,

if the government's gone, if dollars are worthless,

then why are those guys going to stay and protect them?

Once they start talking in those terms,

it's really easy to puncture a hole in their plan.

So you've got 20 Navy SEALs hired to protect

you and your family from the marauding mobs

of people with Jeeps and bazookas...

Let's say that they've got great weapons and great strategies.

Why are they defending you?

You know, why are they letting you be in charge?

Why won't they want their commander

to be the one in charge?

Any monarch or ruler who is depending on their military

to maintain their power

ends up in... In a military coup! Right?

They end up taken over by their junta.

That's not... It doesn't work that way.

So what can we do? And there's like,

so one of them said, oh, I was thinking, you know,

we could do shock collars,

you know, get them to wear shock collars

so I could, you know, zap them if they're going to go off

and they understand that that's the price of...

I mean, shock collars? Really?

You really think short collars are going to work?

They're going to wait till you're as sleep in order to grab

the little control button... It's just not going to work.

-Rushkoff offers a simple solution

overlooked by the billionaires

despite all their elaborate planning.

-They were like saying, "So what do we do?

What do we do?" And I said, well,

if these guys are already working for you,

like, pay for their kid's bat mitzvahs now.

The idea was, if you're nice enough

to your security people now,

then they're going to be more reluctant to kill you

because they'll think before they pull the trigger,

"Aw, he paid for my daughter's bat mitzvah," right?

-The arrogance of the American rich is staggering.

It's so interesting when one gets to deal with them

and you realize how ridiculous their ideas are.

And they really think that they can play gilded survivalists

when the society that they're ripping off collapses...

And they can't.

♪♪

-Behind the thinking of the Cold War's doomsday planners

is a strange mentality.

It's okay to destroy the planet and kill nearly everyone on it,

because if you're one of the elite, you get to survive.

-These crazy Cold War bunkers, like fantasy landscapes,

they're kind of like monuments to elite delusion and paranoia

because they won't work, but they embody

this self-justification... "Yeah, sure, we can invest

billions of dollars, trillions of dollars

in atomic weapons and even use them,

and civilization will survive."

That's deranged thinking.

-I'm going to lay the facts before you...

The rough with the smooth.

Some of these security facts are reassuring;

others are not.

They are sternly demanding.

-The threat of global annihilation

was at its peak during the Cold War.

So was the belief that you could really survive an apocalypse.

-These elites,

with this... this kind of bunker mentality,

which is inherited from the Cold War,

it's kind of like gentrified from the... the middle class

-50s version of it, which was equally insane...

The family of four will dive into a basement in the backyard.

Right?

-The goal is adequate fallout shelter space

for every man, woman and child.

-Probably many viewers cracked open

their parents or grandparents bunkers at some point and found,

"Oh, lo and behold, this is like, you know,

flooded with three feet of stagnant water.

And, you know these cans of beans are all corroded,"

you know, proving that this... This fantasy

of living through an atomic war

was just that, a fantasy.

[ Indistinct shouting, cheering ]

[ Weapons firing ]

♪♪

[ Respirator hissing ]

♪♪

♪♪

-When you're up in God knows where, you know,

in the... in the space station

where Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk live,

you don't have to worry anymore about the regular people.

Or if you do, that's why you're building your space station...

To get away from the civilization

that you needed to rape and pillage

in order to amass that level of wealth.

-Coronavirus has widened

the already enormous wealth gap in America.

Radical inequality often leads to revolution.

And as far as the 1% are concerned,

the guillotines are coming.

-We love to ignore the history and we love to pretend

that we've progressed, you know, beyond the old challenges

and that we're now hitting new material.

We're not hitting new material.

This is just class war all over again.

-During normal times, the story we get from elites

is that anyone can become rich if you just work hard enough,

and anyone who's poor, it's basically their fault.

Well, when suddenly everybody is suffering economically,

that stuff goes out the window.

It's ideologically destabilizing,

and I think there's a possibility

that people will start seeing through all these myths

and start seeing the situation for what it is,

which is a struggle between classes,

between the vast majority of people

who work for a living and sell their labor

and are dependent on a functional labor market;

and this tiny, really, really powerful,

really, really rich elite.

-As the pandemic death toll surges...

new waves of poverty spread around the world.

The planet records its hottest month on record,

and California burns.

Elon Musk announces plans to colonize Mars.

-What they were really looking at was,

How do I earn enough money to insulate myself

from the reality I'm creating by earning money in this way?

You can't... You can't go it alone.

The only possible solution is to make the world a place

that you don't need to retreat from.

It's such an easier, high probability strategy

for success than the course that they're on.

But... but they can't stop.

They still think about technology

as a way to insulate themselves from the real world.

They want to insulate themselves from us because they know

what they have to do to us to maintain the privilege

that they're... that they're trying to live in...

That... that privileged bubble.

♪♪

The most powerful people in the world,

you know, they see themselves as utterly incapable

of actually creating a future

in which everything's going to be okay.

[ Reporters shouting over each other ]

♪♪

♪♪

They're going to bet all their money

on how do they as individuals

somehow survive that disaster?

♪♪

♪♪

They're destroying the whole thing,

they're destroying the whole thing

because they can't see a way out

because of that paucity of imagination,

because they don't want to acknowledge

the larger operating system on which they're functioning,

and they're slowly waking up to it.

But rather than sort of come out of their mental bunkers

and look at, wow, how could I operate

in a less destructive, extractive way?

Instead, they're just thinking, what's my safety plan?

What's my escape hatch?

How much food do I need to stick in my basement

in order to survive the thing?

♪♪

-People who believe the disinformation,

misinformation, we've seen will do some pretty extreme things.

If you actually believe

the theories that are espoused by QAnon as reality,

they would probably warrant some pretty dramatic responses.

-Our president walked out there!

Went in front of the church!

And held a Holy Bible!

In front of that American church!

-Conspiracy theories can exist and thrive

because the world is full of actual conspiracies.

♪♪