While The Rest Of Us Die 1x5

1. - 2020 is the beginning of the age of catastrophe.

2. It's kind of the future warning us

3. about what's on the cards for us,

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

5. is that our civilization is now beginning to collapse

6. in very real in very serious ways.

7. - Most Americans are comforted in the belief

8. that their government

9. and the country's best and brightest

10. will step up to protect them.

11. - The entire idea of American exceptionalism

12. and the illusion of national security

13. is that we are strong and we can take a blow

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

15. or some sort of cataclysm.

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

17. - We're always looking ahead,

18. ahead to an America that never leaves anyone behind.

19. - Just filming, just filming, My God!

20. - But what if it turns out that the greatest threat

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

22. that Americans will pull together in times of crisis —

23. is dead, killed by decades of treating American freedom

24. as the freedom to get ahead at any cost.

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

26. oh, the elite, the one percent,

27. they're actually concerned about everybody's welfare.

28. But then in that moment of crisis,

29. when elites treat it as an opportunity for profiteering,

30. rent seeking, gouging from the public purse,

31. that's the recipe for a failed state.

32. - For over 70 years, our leaders have told us

33. one thing under the bright lights...

34. - The protection of the lives and property of Americans

35. is the responsibility of all public officials.

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

37. as president to protect the American people.

38. - We have it so well under control.

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

40. on secret plans that serve one premise:

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

42. - I have nothing! Nothing!

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

44. the elite suck us dry to fund their own escape.

45. Since the Cold War,

46. the threat of nuclear annihilation was real,

47. but the story that we are somehow all in this together

48. was closer to a cartoon.

49. - The best protection of all is the special shelter

50. built according to specifications

51. of your local civil defense organization.

52. - Instead of protecting the American public

53. by reducing the threat...

54. the U. S. government sinks billions of taxpayer dollars

55. into new and more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction.

56. One of those was codenamed Starfish Prime.

57. In 1962, American military scientists

58. launched an experimental warhead

59. from a remote island in the Pacific.

60. - On Johnston Island, missile preparation for the July

61. launch of the Starfish Prime shot

62. was one aspect of an extensive team effort.

63. - The experiment was designed to test the effects

64. of nuclear explosions in outer space.

65. - Equally important was the need to know

66. the effects of high altitude nuclear bursts

67. on military command and control systems

68. which require long range communications.

69. - The explosion caused a massive electromagnetic pulse,

70. known as an EMP.

71. The pulse fried electronics

72. hundreds of miles away in Hawaii.

73. It even blew out rows of streetlights in Honolulu.

74. The Starfish Prime experiment

75. exposes a frightening new possibility.

76. What if something as simple as a basic infrastructure failure

77. could deal a fatal blow to America?

78. It's a scenario that has troubled

79. doomsday planners ever since...

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

81. in a mushroom cloud over New York City.

82. And when the basic things we all take for granted

83. suddenly stop working,

84. in the end, that may be just as destructive

85. to our way of life.

86. 2020 has shown us that the boundaries

87. between some distant future apocalypse and reality

88. may be thinner than we'd like to believe.

89. It has given us a preview of what things look like

90. when our way of life starts to break down.

91. - The fundamental basic institutions

92. and structures of life

93. that we took for granted have snapped apart like that.

94. - What if the coronavirus

95. is just a shot across the bow,

96. a warning of what the future holds?

97. - I think most people are very conflicted about this

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

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

100. normal isn't coming back — this is it.

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

102. thanks to the pandemic.

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

104. farmers having to harvest their crops

105. or slaughter their livestock,

106. but not being able to bring them to market.

107. And so they just destroyed it

108. because small elements in the logistics broke down.

109. If there's a total breakdown,

110. that's going to be a lot more frightening.

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

112. there was a widespread toilet paper shortage.

113. - It's only one per customer.

114. - So multiply that, you know, minor inconvenience

115. and it probably cascades.

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

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

118. But if a cataclysmic disaster really happens,

119. not everyone assumes that the government —

120. or anyone, for that matter —

121. is really coming to help.

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

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

124. you're absolutely on your own.

125. - In the foothills of the Colorado Mountains

126. is a secluded camp called Fortitude Ranch.

127. It's run by Drew Miller.

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

129. he's a respected figure in what used to be

130. considered a fringe movement.

131. - We kind of had a phrase decades ago

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

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

134. people will react okay,

135. but eventually when there's no food,

136. no water, and panic starts spreading,

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

138. and it's going to be lawless.

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

140. 72 seconds, or 72 minutes to animal.

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

142. - A former Cold War military intelligence officer,

143. Miller has inside knowledge that most people don't.

144. - Government's number one priority

145. is taking care of themselves.

146. Police number one priority, continuity of government,

147. taking care of the elected officials.

148. No one is going to be responding to your call

149. for help in your little house,

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

151. breaking into houses, taking goods and stealing.

152. So if you're a government official,

153. you'll be taken care of.

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

155. - Go! Back up! Back up!

156. - We're prepared to defend ourselves.

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

158. but a lot of the population does not,

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

160. The major weapons we recommend for our members

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

162. It's a defensive rifle.

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

164. this is just for the military" —

165. well, in a collapse situation,

166. if you've got a marauder group coming after you

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

168. you do need a lot of rounds.

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

170. As the U. S. economy ground to a halt

171. and millions of Americans were put out of work,

172. we witnessed how vulnerable our way of life really is.

173. - I think people are scared shitless

174. about two things — they're related.

175. The first is the idea that we have built

176. a technological society

177. whose comforts we are reliant upon,

178. whose coordination we need to sustain our current population,

179. that if you just turned off all the machines tomorrow,

180. the kind of handmade version of our society,

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

182. would provoke mass die-offs.

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

184. which is that our institutions are no longer trustworthy,

185. that they have become not truth-seeking exercises,

186. but rather auction houses in which people

187. who are powerful and wealthy

188. can buy a version of the truth

189. that suits their parochial ends.

190. In a world in which the Sacklers successfully convinced the FDA

191. that opioids weren't dangerous

192. and kick-started an opioid epidemic

193. that killed 200,000 Americans —

194. more than died in Vietnam —

195. and where the Sacklers themselves became richer

196. than the Rockefellers, how do you trust an institution?

197. - Something like an EMP attack would wipe out

198. not just the infrastructure that we have,

199. but we would see very, very quickly the distance

200. between the importance

201. by which the government seeks their own survival

202. and the survival of the American people.

203. This idea of national security

204. would collapse almost instantaneously.

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

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

207. and our basic institutions start to fail us.

208. We all just lived through 2020.

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

210. doesn't have the basic kind of access

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

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

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

214. you press the button and there's no electricity.

215. What happens?

216. Well, history tells us,

217. when people grow suddenly poorer,

218. what happens is massive waves of authoritarianism and fascism.

219. History tells us that in absolutely unsparing terms.

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

221. It's the story of Stalinist Russia.

222. It's the story of the Islamic world.

223. It's also the story of America today.

224. - What if the doomsday scenario that politicians planned for

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

226. than a nuclear bomb or EMP?

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

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

229. most of America is under lockdown,

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

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

232. Borders are closed,

233. lines at food pantries stretch for miles,

234. in cities across America.

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

236. - It feels like this is what the beginning of doomsday

237. and the apocalypse might feel like.

238. - This is a government soup kitchen giving free meals

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

240. - America has seen an economic collapse before.

241. During the Great Depression,

242. the nation was brought to its knees.

243. - These people had come to depend on government relief.

244. And where did this happen?

245. Right here in these United States.

246. - But during the Cold War, government planners

247. imagined something even more catastrophic —

248. nuclear war.

249. Their plans involved almost nothing to ensure

250. the survival of ordinary Americans,

251. but they were concerned with what to do

252. with those who somehow survived.

253. And in order to put them back to work,

254. they would need a way to pay them.

255. Hidden under the Virginia mountains

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

257. There, the Federal Reserve constructed its own

258. mountain bunker, known as Mount Pony.

259. - Walking down there is a series of hallways

260. about as long as a football field.

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

262. they're lit with fluorescent lights,

263. and lining the hallways on both sides

264. are these big, steel, reinforced doors.

265. - On one floor of the Federal Reserve bunker,

266. a massive steel blast door

267. leading to a 22,500 square foot vault.

268. - That's where they stored the billions of dollars

269. of U. S. currency.

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

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

272. 700 million pieces of currency,

273. much of it in the form of $2 bills.

274. - This coincided in the 1970s with the period

275. when the U. S. reintroduced the $2 bill

276. and Americans rejected it widely, so the Fed,

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

278. assuming that after a nuclear attack,

279. Americans would be less choosey

280. about which currency they were using.

281. - The plan was to stockpile enough cash

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

283. long enough for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing

284. to rebuild its précis.

285. Smaller bunkers hidden in abandoned mines

286. and other military bases

287. were scattered around the country.

288. But the government didn't stop with a plan

289. on how to pay citizens to work.

290. They also wanted a plan to take that money back.

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

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

293. death and taxes.

294. And so even in a nuclear attack

295. that held true.

296. And if one didn't get you,

297. the IRS wanted to make sure that the other did.

298. - The IRS and the Treasury Department

299. gave a lot of thought to figuring out

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

301. debating what happens to

302. mortgages on homes that have been vaporized,

303. or wondering how to assess the value of properties

304. post attack.

305. - Part of what makes these plans so strange

306. is realizing just how unworkable

307. they would have been under almost any actual emergency.

308. - While those impractical government plans

309. are sitting on a shelf somewhere...

310. When a real economic emergency actually arises,

311. the government is left scrambling to find a way out.

312. It's 2007, and America's wealthiest

313. financial institutions have been getting rich

314. by pushing loans and mortgages

315. to people who can't afford them.

316. Across America, roughly three million homes are foreclosed on,

317. turning parts of cities into ghost towns.

318. - The housing downturn and the surrounding uncertainty

319. are significantly impacting our financial institutions

320. and capital markets.

321. - But the subprime mortgage crisis

322. doesn't just hurt homeowners.

323. The greed and irresponsible behavior

324. of financial institutions

325. has a ripple effect on the global economy

326. leading to the Great Recession in 2008.

327. By the end of 2009,

328. more than 15 million Americans are unemployed.

329. Facing bankruptcy,

330. the financial giants that caused the crisis

331. are considered too big to fail.

332. - Wall Street bet that the government would rescue them

333. if they got into trouble.

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

335. - Without them, the economy faces a meltdown.

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

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

338. under mountains of concrete,

339. it's under mountains of cash.

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

341. the whole financial system would have melted down.

342. But the fundamental problem was that they extended

343. all of the support to the financial institutions,

344. but didn't actually extend the same level of support

345. to ordinary people.

346. - While foreclosed homeowners are living in their cars,

347. 45 billion taxpayer dollars get funneled to JPMorgan,

348. Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley —

349. institutions that paid out $18 billion

350. in bonuses to bankers and executives.

351. Of a $475 billion bailout authorized by Congress,

352. only 6% goes to help underwater homeowners.

353. Most of the rest goes to banks and financial institutions.

354. In the two years after the recession,

355. the net wealth of most Americans shrinks,

356. while the richest actually increase their wealth

357. by almost 30%.

358. - And that created not just a deep

359. and lasting sense of economic pain

360. for millions of ordinary people,

361. but it also creates this lasting sense of anger and unfairness

362. and a feeling that basically the elites are going to

363. get protected if something bad happens,

364. but ordinary people aren't.

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

366. What happened in the years just after that,

367. where the bailouts were quite controversial,

368. it appeared as the polluters got paid,

369. the people under water in mortgages

370. did not get restructuring.

371. The Tea Party was spawned on the right in America.

372. Occupy on the left.

373. - When do we want it? - Now!

374. - And when inequality was exacerbated by the bailouts,

375. the disintegration of credibility and faith

376. spread like wildfire.

377. - The Great Recession was only the beginning.

378. While the economy gradually recovers,

379. inequality in America worsens

380. and a new class of elite becomes even more powerful.

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

382. and shuttle drivers due to COVID-19...

383. sending his lowest earners home without pay.

384. As these struggling workers join soup lines

385. and food pantries around the block,

386. Tesla's stock price quickly rebounded the following month,

387. and Musk's net worth soon more than tripled

388. to over $90 billion.

389. - Is this really worth it, Mr. Musk?

390. - This is an uncomfortable truth about America today.

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

392. those at the top get the chance to survive.

393. Today, they rise to even greater heights

394. by getting even richer and more powerful.

395. Nine years earlier,

396. the streets of New York City erupt in protest.

397. - All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!

398. All day, all week...

399. - Since the Great Recession,

400. inequality has only gotten worse.

401. The wealth of elites has soared to new heights

402. while ordinary Americans continue to suffer.

403. Poverty in America takes on new meaning.

404. - Why should anybody in a rich country

405. have to choose between their life savings and their life?

406. Have to choose between their home and basic medicine?

407. Have to choose between keeping the water and heating on

408. or educating their kids?

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

410. - These choices don't make sense

411. and they're the choices that everyday Americans make.

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

413. Right? These are the choices that the people formerly known

414. as the American middle class have to make.

415. So America is really a place of extremes.

416. You know, you have trillion-dollar companies now.

417. In a historic — Apple and Amazon,

418. the world's first trillion-dollar companies.

419. You have 50% of all new jobs in America

420. working a low-income service jobs,

421. it's a polite economist's way of saying

422. people are becoming servants again.

423. History is repeating itself.

424. People are falling into peasantry and servitude.

425. - Over the last four decades,

426. the wealth of the richest Americans

427. has continued to climb,

428. but since the 1980s,

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

430. Today, the top 1% in America

431. earned more than 80 times the bottom 50%.

432. - If I say that inequality in America

433. is reaching third world levels,

434. they don't believe me.

435. And in some respect, they're right.

436. But there are people who have to beg,

437. who will never pay off their debts successfully.

438. So there is not maybe perhaps yet the level

439. of absolute deprivation that there is in the third world,

440. but the level of inequality has produced real degradation

441. in America, real relative poverty.

442. - We're here to say enough is enough.

443. In New York City, we have been protesting

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

445. - Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic,

446. a record 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment.

447. In July, an estimated 30 million reported

448. not having enough to eat —

449. that's one in every 10 households.

450. Yet that same month, JPMorgan, the same financial institution

451. that helped cause the 2008 recession

452. and received billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts,

453. posts one of its best quarters ever.

454. During the first weeks of the pandemic,

455. as the unemployment rate in America nears 15%,

456. the billionaires' wealth actually increases.

457. - The American economy has been completely divorced

458. from the fates of the people.

459. This is a sad fact

460. that we can see when unemployment numbers go up

461. but stocks rise.

462. And the truth is that this notion that somehow

463. or another the economy is somehow or another simpatico

464. with the fates of the people is a complete fiction.

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

466. because more is being borrowed,

467. more is being spent.

468. The government printed a trillion,

469. two trillion, three trillion dollars.

470. The more they print,

471. the better the balance sheet is for the lender.

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

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

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

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

476. that's still going up.

477. - Of course, we're seeing one industry

478. after another being bailed out,

479. but it is made more and more clear by the day

480. that the fate of American people themselves

481. is not being taken in consideration

482. and is certainly not given the weight of taking care

483. of businesses and corporations.

484. - During a pandemic

485. and the worst unemployment crisis in modern history,

486. needy Americans scrape by on modest government handouts.

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

488. You don't have health care, you die.

489. Barely anybody makes enough to pay off their debts

490. or afford a decent standard of living.

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

492. any money left over to care about anybody else.

493. - These problems aren't invisible to the people

494. who have the power to do something about them.

495. Think about this:

496. Amazon has 876,000 employees.

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

498. he would still be richer than he was

499. at the start of the pandemic.

500. - If we taxed 60% of the windfall gains

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

502. we could raise over $420 billion.

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

504. expenses for every man, woman and child in this country

505. over the next 12 months.

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

507. - Bernie Sanders gives voice

508. to a popular movement of young Americans,

509. an existential threat to the wealthiest people

510. in the country.

511. - It is morally obscene for billionaires

512. to use a global pandemic

513. as an opportunity to make outrageous profits

514. and to very substantially increase their wealth.

515. - What happens with elites is,

516. when they're left to their own devices,

517. they get greedier and greedier and they get paranoid.

518. They develop a fear of the slippery slope

519. that any infringement on their prerogative

520. will lead to more and more and more,

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

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

523. media theorist Douglas Rushkoff shows up at an exclusive resort

524. to deliver a talk about the digital future

525. to a group of wealthy tech executives.

526. - I was in the green room waiting to go on

527. when five men came in to the green room

528. and sat around this little table they had there,

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

530. that these guys were the talk.

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

532. they just started peppering me with these questions —

533. like, "Bitcoin or Ethereum?"

534. Which one should they bet on?

535. Or augmented reality or virtual reality,

536. which did I think would win?

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

538. that this was more than I signed up for,

539. they said, Alaska or New Zealand,

540. meaning where should they situate their bunkers

541. for the event?

542. - For years, New Zealand has been

543. an apocalypse escape destination for America's elite.

544. Notable home buyers include the tech tycoon Peter Thiel,

545. an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

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

547. if things collapsed,

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

549. Other American elites were getting similar ideas.

550. - The rest of my hour with them

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

552. about how to water test their plans for the apocalypse,

553. for the electromagnetic pulse,

554. for the economic downturn,

555. or the disease or war that would necessitate them

556. leaving their Silicon Valley ranches and retreating

557. to these fortified bunkers in the middle of nowhere.

558. - The government's secret plans to save itself

559. now have competition from the secret plans

560. of the 1%.

561. From converted Cold War bunkers and missile silos

562. to specially outfitted yachts,

563. a doomsday industry caters to the mega rich.

564. Luxury bunkers with indoor pools,

565. artificial sunlight, and supplies

566. to stay sealed off from the world for years.

567. From the Cold War till now,

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

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

570. have helped pushed poverty rates

571. near their highest levels in half a century,

572. it's the rich who fear losing control.

573. Elite anxiety is on the rise.

574. - The billionaires, they understand

575. that they're playing a dangerous game,

576. that they are running out of room

577. to externalize the damage of the way their companies operate.

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

579. that leads to your undoing,

580. which is why these same people

581. are looking at creating bomb shelters,

582. going to Australia or New Zealand.

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

584. of the notion of what we had called gated communities,

585. where you try to insulate yourself from the social discord

586. that's outside.

587. But here it was an evacuation plan.

588. - For the billionaires in the green room with Rushkoff,

589. the biggest concern is protecting themselves

590. from the unruly masses.

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

592. was how do I maintain control of my security force

593. after my money is worthless?

594. So these guys had already secured Navy SEALs

595. and security forces to come

596. and guard their facilities for them.

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

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

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

600. Once they start talking in those terms,

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

602. So you've got 20 Navy SEALs hired to protect

603. you and your family from the marauding mobs

604. of people with Jeeps and bazookas —

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

606. Why are they defending you?

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

608. Why won't they want their commander

609. to be the one in charge?

610. Any monarch or ruler who is depending on their military

611. to maintain their power

612. ends up in — in a military coup! Right?

613. They end up taken over by their junta.

614. That's not — it doesn't work that way.

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

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

617. we could do shock collars,

618. you know, get them to wear shock collars

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

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

621. I mean, shock collars? Really?

622. You really think short collars are going to work?

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

624. the little control button — it's just not going to work.

625. - Rushkoff offers a simple solution

626. overlooked by the billionaires

627. despite all their elaborate planning.

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

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

630. if these guys are already working for you,

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

632. The idea was, if you're nice enough

633. to your security people now,

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

635. because they'll think before they pull the trigger,

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

637. - The arrogance of the American rich is staggering.

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

639. and you realize how ridiculous their ideas are.

640. And they really think that they can play gilded survivalists

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

642. and they can't.

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

644. is a strange mentality.

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

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

647. - These crazy Cold War bunkers, like fantasy landscapes,

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

649. because they won't work, but they embody

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

651. billions of dollars, trillions of dollars

652. in atomic weapons and even use them,

653. and civilization will survive."

654. That's deranged thinking.

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

656. the rough with the smooth.

657. Some of these security facts are reassuring;

658. others are not.

659. They are sternly demanding.

660. - The threat of global annihilation

661. was at its peak during the Cold War.

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

663. - These elites,

664. with this — this kind of bunker mentality,

665. which is inherited from the Cold War,

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

667. - 50s version of it, which was equally insane —

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

669. Right?

670. - The goal is adequate fallout shelter space

671. for every man, woman and child.

672. - Probably many viewers cracked open

673. their parents or grandparents bunkers at some point and found,

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

675. flooded with three feet of stagnant water.

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

677. you know, proving that this — this fantasy

678. of living through an atomic war

679. was just that, a fantasy.

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

681. in the — in the space station

682. where Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk live,

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

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

685. to get away from the civilization

686. that you needed to rape and pillage

687. in order to amass that level of wealth.

688. - Coronavirus has widened

689. the already enormous wealth gap in America.

690. Radical inequality often leads to revolution.

691. And as far as the 1% are concerned,

692. the guillotines are coming.

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

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

695. and that we're now hitting new material.

696. We're not hitting new material.

697. This is just class war all over again.

698. - During normal times, the story we get from elites

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

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

701. Well, when suddenly everybody is suffering economically,

702. that stuff goes out the window.

703. It's ideologically destabilizing,

704. and I think there's a possibility

705. that people will start seeing through all these myths

706. and start seeing the situation for what it is,

707. which is a struggle between classes,

708. between the vast majority of people

709. who work for a living and sell their labor

710. and are dependent on a functional labor market;

711. and this tiny, really, really powerful,

712. really, really rich elite.

713. - As the pandemic death toll surges...

714. new waves of poverty spread around the world.

715. The planet records its hottest month on record,

716. and California burns.

717. Elon Musk announces plans to colonize Mars.

718. - What they were really looking at was,

719. How do I earn enough money to insulate myself

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

721. You can't — you can't go it alone.

722. The only possible solution is to make the world a place

723. that you don't need to retreat from.

724. It's such an easier, high probability strategy

725. for success than the course that they're on.

726. But — but they can't stop.

727. They still think about technology

728. as a way to insulate themselves from the real world.

729. They want to insulate themselves from us because they know

730. what they have to do to us to maintain the privilege

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

732. that — that privileged bubble.

733. The most powerful people in the world,

734. you know, they see themselves as utterly incapable

735. of actually creating a future

736. in which everything's going to be okay.

737. They're going to bet all their money

738. on how do they as individuals

739. somehow survive that disaster?

740. They're destroying the whole thing,

741. they're destroying the whole thing

742. because they can't see a way out

743. because of that paucity of imagination,

744. because they don't want to acknowledge

745. the larger operating system on which they're functioning,

746. and they're slowly waking up to it.

747. But rather than sort of come out of their mental bunkers

748. and look at, wow, how could I operate

749. in a less destructive, extractive way?

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

751. What's my escape hatch?

752. How much food do I need to stick in my basement

753. in order to survive the thing?

754. - People who believe the disinformation,

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

756. If you actually believe

757. the theories that are espoused by QAnon as reality,

758. they would probably warrant some pretty dramatic responses.

759. - Our president walked out there!

760. Went in front of the church!

761. And held a Holy Bible!

762. In front of that American church!

763. - Conspiracy theories can exist and thrive

764. because the world is full of actual conspiracies.