Hot Money | Global Financial System | Economy | Finance Documentary | Jeff Bridges

- It's a free market economy

but it's also a national security issue.

- Okay well I tend to think-- - You're going to be an indepent

country, you need to be independant of food.

- I tend to think of climate change

as a national security issue.

- I do too.

- They're not gonna be able to do it

in time the way they're doing it.

And every time, well. - Recognize and adapt

and change policies-- - Okay, let's...

Let's look at ourselves right now, okay?

Let's say this road we're on

is the American political system.

And you see past that bridge up there,

we have to get past that bridge in the next minute,

except this is what we're stuck on

because we can't get there.

And you know this as well as I do.

(rain pouring)

I know people in their 20s and 30s

that will not have kids,

because they're like,

"I'm not gonna subject a human being to what's coming."

Do you think my children who are 15 years younger

than that are somehow gonna go,

"God I always wanted my kids to grow up

in Mad Max eating lizards off the road

and murdering their neighbors to get a glass of water."

I mean, things are gonna break down.

- [Wesley] Wesley the passion that you

and so many others have on us this

is what gives me hope in democracy

and hope in the future of the country.

That's what it's gonna take to make change happen.

(soft music)

- [Wesley Jr.] I think we're living in a rigged system.

And I think it's very hard

to break out of that rigged system because money talks.

(soft music)

- I drove down from San Francisco yesterday on Highway Five

and it's bumper to bumper

for 300 miles on (laughs) Highway Five.

And you can think, God, that's just a small part of it.

So we know in these big urban areas

like the Los Angeles Basin, metropolitan New York,

we know that, we live here for convenience.

We live here because civilization works,

but we also know it is relatively fragile.

It depends on power, it depends on water.

It depends on food, it depends on warehousing.

It depends on security and people following the rules

and obeying the laws.

And it only takes small disruptions to that.

Whether through natural disaster, through climate change

through organized crime or through war,

through exogenous forces.

And you'd see catastrophe.

- [Narrator] It's easy to see how things can fall apart,

Long tunnels are now pitch dark.

(cars passing)

Communications and telephone systems have collapsed.

On motorways cars simply pull over,

if they find a place with a signal.

(man speaking foreign language)

People now stand in line

outside supermarkets, not to go in,

they're just hoping that it will eventually open.

(people chattering)

(wind blows vehemently)

(speaking in a foreign language)

- Combination of the weight of scientific evidence.

And the dynamics of the financial system suggest

that in the fullness of time,

climate change will threaten financial resilience

and longer term prosperity.

- All the money in the world will not save us

once it starts to fail.

And then people will discover

that you can't eat a flat screen TV

and you can't eat a German luxury car.

(pressing salt shaker)

(tries to open door)

- What are we gonna do?

(engine revving silently)

- It's war.

And it's a much more serious war than World War II

because if we lose, we're all dead.

I mean, you'll already be dead.

So maybe it doesn't concern you as much

but I don't want my children to starve to death

- You're writing me off really early.

Please don't write me off so early.

- All right, 20 more years

(children screaming)

- Looks good doesn't it?

- It does.

- It's a great part of America.

It's like an American icon.

My generation was the Beach Boys.

- Yeah.

- Surfing USA.

- Yeah. (water splashes)

- So, you know, tourist heaven.

- Yeah.

- But if I were a tourist from another planet

and I was like, "Hey, let's go visit earth."

And then my travel guy was like,

"well it's populated

by about 10 billion carnivorous apes and they're armed."

- My goal is to see... - Let's give you 20 more year

Is to see your children

grown, educated, married

and I wanna have great-grandchildren, that's my goal.

- Okay, if you wanna have great grandchildren,

what you have to do is you have to help build

that environment that they're gonna survive in.

- I want you to see the facts as they appear to me.

I'm a national security guy.

That's what I've spent my life working on

trying to protect America, the constitution,

the way we live and our futures

for our children and grandchildren.

- I love my dad we're both concerned about security.

We're both concerned about the future

but there's definitely a difference

in the generational perspective of this.

Now I understand his generation because they grew up,

right after World War II, the baby boomers.

They grew up in a world that was constantly improving.

(car hooting)

More rights, more money.

The economy constantly expanded.

They saw us go from fairly primitive industrial society

to what we have today.

- There've been empires that formed and collapsed.

And about 200 years ago, mankind suddenly discovered

how to take energy more effectively from the earth.

In the start of the industrial age.

And it was coal and it was England.

And it was a steam engine that could use that coal

and it spread throughout the whole world.

We have taken that energy

and built this civilization from it

and the price that's being paid

is the carbonization of the atmosphere

and climate change.

(car engine roaring)

- Yeah, that's the finale.

(upbeat music)

- You know, when you say in World War II,

everybody chipped in and did their part.

And that was seventy-five years ago.

Now we've been involved in so far, a 19 year war.

And in that 19 year war,

we were told to go shopping

and to buy more stuff.

We were never told to save anything.

We were never told to contribute to a war effort.

They even cut taxes

when we went to war - That's right, twice.

- Twice.

(upbeat music)

With gambling, the house always wins and it's a rigged game.

It just is.

Not unlike the banking system

in our political system nowadays.

It's all rigged. People don't

have an actual choice in a lot of stuff.

Yeah, people have a choice to go to Vegas.

- When you ran for president,

I drove all over New Mexico and other places.

All I could think in 2003 was that,

we can't actually build an economy

off stripping, gambling and crystal meth.

And we've made a concerted effort to do that

in this country for the last 20 years.

- You know, our business caters to what people want.

American societies produced enormous amounts of leisure.

- They've tried to recreate the feel of the Roman Empire

in the heart of Vegas.

And interestingly it's like late Roman Empire.

So it's right, as everything collapsed.

- We have the smarts and the know-how

and the conscience to know

we have to sustain and protect this earth

because this is where we live.

So we love civilization,

but we've got to change

the way we're approaching our economic endeavors.

- The world is suffering

through the worst financial crisis since 1930s.

- There's been a lot of damage done.

- They hear $700 billion package,

and they immediately think the next day

everything is gonna be better.

- You're witnessing so much wealth loss.

- If you connect the financial system

to the other possible shocks that are out there,

you realize it's, we're walking on ice.

- Panic coming through the phones,

on the floor, traders just trying to rush

to get to the point of sale,

to get rid of their stock.

- [Man] You know, what people built up

over years and years and years, has been erased.

(bell ringing) (people applauding)

- At some point, you run a risk that something goes afoul.

We're worried about Greek debt.

We're worried about Italian debt.

- Spanish debt.

- I mean and so far, you know, it's been finessed,

but, and you know,

you can't see what the U.S Treasury is doing behind.

We're doing a lot with the U.S Government

to keep the system working.

And you just don't know what the limits are.

- So if you think,

how can we lead the world in fixing the economy

and fixing the climate?

You have to make the investments now.

Because you can't wait till you're like Somalia.

I mean, you may notice

Somalia doesn't have a lot of infrastructure programs

that they fund.

They're not pushing the boundaries in technology,

and that's not because people in Somalia are stupid,

it's not just because they've lived under civil war,

it's because they don't have capital.

They don't have resources.

- Capitalism is an economic organization.

It's a way of organizing the economy

that is focused on trying to create future returns

over and above of the investments I make today.

So it's all about expansion.

It's all about making more in the future

than we currently have.

- When you borrow money,

well, what happens is,

the banks would like to charge you interest

not only for the risk,

but because they want the capital to come back with babies,

not just to go and that's it.

Because they want to make sure that capital is increasing

and that's how you build wealth

and that's how you increase your assets.

- And it's that debt that has enabled

all of this to be here.

It's the accelerant to economic growth.

- Now, as long as the company

can service that debt, it's okay.

But consumer debt,

if it can't be serviced, is a problem.

Mortgage debt if it can't be serviced,

as we've seen is a problem,

and national debt, if it can't be serviced,

can be a national security threat.

- Alexa, how do we avert a financial crisis?

- [Alexa] Here's something I found on Wikipedia.

A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations

in which some financial assets

suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value.

- Preparing for the future, when the future is unknown,

is obviously difficult,

but we are today taking steps

that are clearly going to make things worse.

- Finance is really making big bets

on an uncertain future.

And you wanna be careful about making too many bets,

especially when there is some indication

that the future might be very different from the present.

(insects flying)

(upbeat music)

- [Wesley Jr.] So much of our energy's caught up

in the financial system

that we've neglected the investment in real things

that are required to take the country forward.

- We do, we haven't really come to grip with this yet,

because the economic system,

the political system just doesn't wanna face it.

(upbeat music)

- The economy has grown,

but debts, indebtedness of households,

firms, banks, governments,

the debts of all these actors in economic system

have increased much more than GDP.

- Really?

- Yeah. So let's say,

I think maybe in the 1970s or so the,

total debt of all these actors, households, firms, banks,

government, the total debt to GDP ratio was maybe of,

of the order 120%.

And now that has increased very steadily

over time to about 290%. So--

- So if no one got paid for three years

and continued working the whole time.

- Exactly. Yup, yup.

- And didn't eat or drive cars or anything,

we could pay that debt?

- Yeah. Yeah.

- But does the debt matter?

- Well, I mean, the debt matters to some,

to the extent that we have a system,

it is called capitalism.

And in that system,

laws are telling us that debts have to be repaid.

(soft music)

How much debt do we need to generate $1 of GDP?

For the economy to create one extra dollar of income,

we need, we are relying on $3.30 of extra debt.

(soft music)

An income is basically wages plus profits.

That is what GDP is, you can also call it differently.

You can say it is value added, created by producing stuff.

- And as a result of emphasizing on the GDP,

we've ended up in a situation where the market is going on.

There is some selling, there is some buying,

but we really don't know how well people are doing.

(soft music)

- [Wesley Jr.] You know, when we were kids, $1 of debt,

pretty much created $1 of GDP.

- Oh wow.

- So, you know, it's like Keynesian economics,

you put the money into social projects

and it recycles back into the economy.

But today it takes more than $3 of debt

to produce $1 of GDP.

And that's all occurred in the last like 30 years.

- Wow.

So in order to create more money,

you've gotta create more debt.

- Three times as much debt.

- That's insane.

- More than three times as much debt.

- It's that access to credit and the kind of ability

to take on lots and lots of debt that hasn't been able

to sustain this kind of trend in consumption.

- So there is a very, very strong relationship

between increases in income

and increases in carbon emissions.

(soft music)

- In the U.S, which is already kind of the most

disproportionately high energy producing,

high consuming country per capita spending grew 42%

overall from 1990 to 2008.

With a 300% increase in spending on furniture,

an 80% increase on clothing and a 15 to 20% increase

on vehicles, housing and food.

Despite the fact that wages were pretty stagnant

over that time period.

(soft music)

- So this is the Wall Street Bull,

which is a symbol of a positive market,

which means more people are spending money,

than spent it the day before.

- Our democracies basically have become dependent

on the idea that there will always be more to go around

that we can expand, expand, expand.

We know that there's fundamental uncertainty.

We just don't know what the future will hold.

(soft music)

- Over the course of my career,

I've worked in mathematical modeling.

I was a space physicist for NASA

and I was on pretty big projects.

I was on the Hubble Space Telescope team as a scientist.

(soft music)

I was on mission to Mars as a space physicist.

And so I'd worked on in some pretty big areas.

When people say, well,

how do you know that the climate models that we have now

will be accurate in 30 years time?

What I can tell you is that the models that we were working

on 30 years ago are actually unbelievably accurate.

(soft music)

What's happened with the atmosphere,

is we're seeing this type of instability, kind of like,

you know, if you had a top just standing there,

it'll just fall over.

And so you're seeing that type of,

that type of wobbling and instability.

I don't exactly know how unstable things are going to be,

but to me, it's the volatility and the instability

that's even more concerning than just

the pure temperature rise over time.

Let's say that inflation were to go over the top,

stock market crashes.

Let's say there are all kinds of sanctions on exports.

You can't even export your tech.

You know, all you're left with,

to survive is you and your environment.

(grasshopper buzzing)

- You know, one of my goals this year was actually

to get more educated on climate change.

And I took the path

that I was gonna see both sides of the argument.

And what was interesting to me was I could find

very little in the climate denial space.

The more I read, the more I see around me,

the more I get concerned.

- [Katie] The officials came out and said,

we're gonna have to release the dams.

And I remember looking at my husband

and looking at my daughter and the dog and the house

and thinking, am I in the middle of some movie?

- So I'm 5.8.

And the water reached to about right there.

Until it happens to you, you don't,

you don't believe that this can happen

in the United States of America.

And all of your financial stability is gone.

So if we have, God forbid,

any other emergency that comes up and believe me,

that is a source of a traumatic kind of panic

that sets in when we go, Oh,

you know, what if something happens,

what if there's another emergency that,

that arises, then we have no funds.

- Never did I ever imagine that everything

that I would work so hard for would be taken

from me in a matter of hours.

And so I do believe that climate change

is going to have a huge economic impact.

And what wealth you have can be eradicated

in a matter of hours.

(soft music)

(helicopter blades slapping)

(helicopter engine revving)

- We had a house up here on the hill

that my wife wanted to get out of

because it was dangerous for the fires, you know.

- Yeah.

And the climate change, everything's getting crispy,

so we'd better get,

to somewhere where we're not gonna get burned up.

- Yeah.

- So we moved to this beautiful place

and the fire didn't get us.

(laughs)

But the debris flow after the fire wiped us out, man.

We had like mud four feet here, huge rocks.

- You were here, right?

- Oh we were. - How did you get out?

- Rescued by helicopter man.

- Jesus.

- I said, you know, I said, my wife, we, you got a sheet?

And she said, yeah.

I said, what are you gonna do with the sheets?

I said, I'm gonna write, help out there, you know.

She said maybe make it SOS, I say that's a good idea.

(laughs)

Went out there and drew SOS, in the mud.

And pretty soon, (smacks)

they come, they let a guy down, and they said,

we weren't sure if it was a SOS or an area code,

it looked like it could have been 805.

And I said, well I gotta work on my esses man.

(laughs)

But we were lucky, you know, we could afford to...

- Well people died, people died in this, right?

- Oh! Terrible, people were washed right through our place.

And we were the lucky ones. You know, we had the money,

to refurbish this place.

- I know, yeah.

- But you know, imagine,

people, you know, struggling all over the world

with this climate change.

- That's the way It starts it's, you read about it

and It seems far away.

But then something happens and bang it's right on you

and it gets very personal. - That's right.

Oh my gosh.

Words can't describe it.

Words can't describe it.

- Global systems of finance are deeply connected

and based on housing finance

in places like the United States.

So if you get in a situation where a homeowner,

can't, can't pay an insurance premium,

can't hold on to their mortgage, for that reason.

Defaults on a mortgage, goes into foreclosure.

You have kind of, your setting in motion,

the sort of early parts of the story

that we know is a very familiar one from 2007 and 2008.

- And we're not particularly good,

at preparing for difficult times way in the future,

when in fact we've got difficult choices right now.

- When you survey people in the U.S

and in the UK about sources of stress, it's work and money.

(slow jazz music)

- Alexa, how do I solve our economic problems?

- [Alexa] Sorry, I don't know that.

- We're heading off the cliff, in terms of climate change.

There's a real urgency on this now that cannot be denied.

- I grew up in the heart of the military industrial complex.

My father became a general, after I went off to college.

I went to the foreign service school at Georgetown.

Madeleine Albright was one of my advisors in college

and I thought, I know how the world works.

There are people in charge. There's some with a plan.

There's someone running stuff.

When my father was head of NATO and I got to go over there

and visit and hear the kind of questions that senators

and congressmen were coming up with.

I realized, whoa, no one's running anything.

And the mistake that the great majority of us make,

is that, there are groups of people running things.

Someone has a master plan, there's a cabal

or a conspiracy behind it all that's running it.

And it's just not the case.

(fire roaring)

(water burbles)

- Hey Wes.

- How was the conference?

- Good.

- Good.

- No, I think, well I think they,

I think they really wanted to hear what's going on

and what the challenges are.

- Yeah.

- And that's what I gave them.

- Kind of reading this thing about Venezuela you see.

What happens when an economy collapses.

- Total collapse.

- I mean, is it, was it just initially the oil prices or...

- They've tried to make it a populist democracy.

You know, where now Maduro is, is a dictator,

but you know, supposedly people like him,

but in an actual fact Cuba's in there.

And I was down about six months ago in Colombia.

And they were telling me that actually,

the Cubans are going up to the Venezuelan army

and they're disarming them,

because they don't trust the Venezuelan.

This is the way you take over a country.

You're getting rid of,

you know, you put your security forces in,

and then you build up your extra military force.

And then you go to the military

that might be loyal to the country

and say, give us your weapons.

So a lot of Venezuelan militaries become refugees.

- Oh wow.

- They were disarmed and sent out of the country, yeah.

And there's millions of people that are just there.

They lived there, they were born there

and they're struggling to survive.

- It's a, I mean, we're heading in that direction already,

before we've even had the economic breakdown.

With armed groups in the streets.

You had 20,000 armed people in the streets yesterday.

- Well that was just a demonstration.

- Brought guns, you don't bring guns to a demonstration,

unless you're demonstrating you'd like to kill people

that don't agree with you.

- Venezuela can be an example of what happens

when civil society breaks down

because you don't have stable,

transparent rule of law government,

and you don't invest in your infrastructure the right way.

In many ways, Venezuela is a leading indicator

of the challenges that will face the whole world.

- [Narrator] Many like Erin Burgos feel they have no choice.

(speaks in foreign language)

What was once one of Latin America's wealthiest countries,

is now its most chaotic and dangerous.

(car honking)

- But that's what happens in these countries.

- But by these countries, you mean countries

that have incompetent leadership.

- Countries that are failing

to take care of their people.

But they compensate for that by,

setting up repressive mechanisms,

to ensure that they stay in power. (laughs)

- I just worry about it happening in the United States.

We have a country like Venezuela where the first thing

that collapsed is their energy infrastructure.

- Yeah. - And then now we're finding out

that it's not just electrical

and oil pumping now their water infrastructure is collapsing

and this is a country that's tropical,

that's filled with water.

- The energy sector has not received the training

or investment it needs, and the experts were kicked out.

They said the energy sector

in particular the oil sector is collapsing.

And that was a major source of revenue for the country.

At the same time, you have significant drought in a country

that has a lot of water,

which means the dams cannot produce

the same electricity as they used to.

So you have collapse of the electrical sector,

along with the oil sector, along with civil society.

And this means you also have

collapsing water infrastructure,

because even if you have the pipes,

if you don't have electricity, you can't operate everything.

So severe strain, which means food shortages,

riots, lack of money, this is a major problem.

United States and Europe is rich,

but if we choose to under invest in our infrastructure

and if we choose to not prepare for the future,

we could suffer these kinda consequences as well.

- The impact of climate change

is not a straight line function.

It's clearly

a progression that is accelerating

in magnitude very dramatically.

And so any lapse at this point in responding

is going to have, I think, a critical impact

down the road, much sooner than we would anticipate.

- This is a crisis waiting to happen.

It's a slow moving crisis in front of our eyes.

- So when you see in a movie,

an asteroid's gonna hit us in six months,

but Mr. President we've been working

on this potential problem for six years.

In real life the asteroid takes everybody out.

The same goes for climate change.

The same goes for a whole host of issues we have

because when people see something on TV

and look, politics is a confidence game.

When people look at the politician and they go,

he must know what he's talking about

or she must know what she's talking about.

That doesn't mean there's an actual plan with any kind

of systemic machinery behind it to produce results.

(upbeat music)

- As the water start to recede

the financial costs will add up.

- Are you tired of living in a home like this

when you really wanna be living in a home like this?

Let's check it out.

We've got tons of waterfront property,

and more coming every day.

Century 22 now serving parts of California.

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♪ The cho--

- For those of you that went to the mountain

and enjoyed that 16 feet of brand new, fresh powder,

nice job.

But as you can see, we've got a hot front coming in,

so tomorrow there's gonna be 155 degrees Fahrenheit.

So you might wanna break out those Speedos.

- You read the big article about Peter Teal,

who's the guy who's made the big fortune off tech,

has bought and built bunkers in New Zealand, right?

Because their plan is we're all gonna die,

and then they're gonna ride it out somehow

even though they won't.

But there's the belief that their money will insulate

and shelter them from what's coming

there have always been people-- - For climate change

- Who predicted doomsday.

- Yeah I mean, I've heard, you know,

I've heard climate change likened to a world war.

You know, the difference is that we know a lot more

about what's coming.

- Come on down to our luxury survival condo

and don't let the Armageddon get you down.

- So unless you can produce thousands of years

worth of water and air and food in your underground bunker,

you're not gonna make it.

And the most likely outcome will be that

the construction workers probably non-union

that you paid to build this bunker for you

know exactly where it is.

And they have access to all the tools to dig you out of it

like a truffle.

The sooner people start using their money as a tool,

instead of a goal in life,

the faster we're gonna be able to dig ourselves

out of this hole.

- Okay, so dad, we've,

I know you don't wanna pay attention

and you don't wanna be... - I do.

- Filmed with miniatures, because it could, you know,

you don't wanna look like the guy in Dr. Strange Love

or any other-- - Exactly.

- Retired General playing with things--

- That's exactly what it looks like.

- But, look, we need to set up something

that people can understand how it works.

We have like a grocery farmer, another store here

a bank, a homeowner, and then emergency services

and over here's like nature,

or we'll even say foreign country

or Africa, or somewhere else.

So, but the first thing I gotta do is change

how everything's set up,

because we need the bank

in between

the country club and everybody else.

- We have a huge financial system compared to what the,

what I can call the real economy

that is where people work and produce, and live.

(upbeat music) (people chattering)

- What we were talking about was trying to explain

capital, structures and insurance

and financing and mortgages using children's toys.

So we have money-- - Is it gonna work?

- I don't know if it's gonna work. (laughs)

- First thing is, the grocery store is a business

and it makes money,

and they deposit the money in the bank.

- Okay. Boom.

- Okay?

John works at the grocery store

and he gets paid by the grocery store

and he decides he wants to buy a house.

- Okay.

- He doesn't have enough money from his earnings

to buy a house, but he goes to the bank and the bank said,

"Oh we'll give you the money, to buy the house,

and in return, you'll give us an IOU."

(upbeat music)

- We have to look at the house

is it, does it pass inspection?

- Yeah, pass inspection.

- And can you afford it based on your monthly income?

- Well,

- The answer, say yes.

- Yes. - Okay, good.

So here's a mortgage.

Okay, so here's the money and-- - And by the way, this is just

like a real bank, because in the real bank,

they're not sure can this guy pay for it?

Just tell him yes, tell him yes, come on,

lets get the money. - So it depends on paying.

- We typically think that bank takes deposits from us

and then lends it out.

The balance sheet equates one entry on this side,

another entry on that side, has sort of claims to come back,

and if it's really comes back as expected,

they make a return on that.

And it's basically making money out of thin air.

- In the old days,

I would put this mortgage, and I would say,

"This is an asset for me,

"because you're gonna pay me every month

"to pay this mortgage off," right?

- So you're telling all your buddies you had that.

- Well, I found a better way to make money, okay?

So the bank takes the IOU, and the bank sells the IOU

into the what's called the secondary market.

- Okay. And it gets a fee for that.

- Then once I have this mortgage and maybe the mortgage

for many other houses in the neighborhood,

and ideally from other neighborhoods as well,

I throw this into what we call a special purpose vehicle,

which really, in legal terms, is typically a trust

or a corporation, these assets-shielding devices,

and then you issue claims

against these new legal shells to investors.

(retro jazz music)

- They package these IOUs up so there's many of them,

and they sell them to people like insurance companies

or foreign banks, and they can be leveraged.

- Which means I can make loans off these things,

which are loans.

- Yes, because you have leverage here.

So you can make more loans.

So the system always generates cash.

(water splashing)

They can reduce their risk

because they're not just buying a mortgage,

they're buying a package of mortgages.

In some cases, they're just buying a slice

of the interest rate off a package of mortgages.

And so, all of these are called derivatives.

And everything works, as long as there's an expectation

that the loan will be repaid,

that John will, at the right time each month,

give the bank money to pay down his share of the IOU.

(old timey piano music)

So the old way the banking system worked,

it used to work that the banker would look you in the eye

and say, "Are you credit worthy?

"Can I trust you?"

- The banks really aren't keeping

the mortgages on their books anymore.

They're selling those mortgages

so that they can be repackaged

as other kinds of financial instruments.

So, they're able to sort of pass the buck,

pass the risk off to the next person.

- Depending on how they're rated by the rating agencies,

these are reputable investment opportunities

for retirement funds, sure.

Yeah, pension funds, sure, put 'em in here.

- So the investors are buying an interest

in the cashflow that comes from the homeowners

into the pool that we've created,

but have sort of a claim against this house as well

because this cashflow is backed

by the mortgage against the home.

So something as illiquid, as formidable

as this building and the land it stands on

can become a globally tradable financial asset

through appropriate legal coding.

- This is your loan.

It travels through this system.

The bank has the loan,

(stamp smashing)

sells it, it becomes a security.

It becomes part of the balance sheet

of money market mutual funds.

These money market mutual funds then basically exchange

your loan, your collateral, your house

in a collateralized cash deal, and the whole purpose

of both the cash and the collateralized cash deal

is that it allows the various actors

to operate in derivative markets

and make very high rates of short-term return.

(wheels creaking) (bell dinging)

- Today, debt is treated like an asset.

It can be traded globally, right?

So we made a huge jump from let's say the 12th century

when the first assignable notes came about,

to treating debt as an asset

that we can just trade on a global market.

(slurping beverage)

(jazzy piano music)

- At the bottom, there's tangible value.

The same value is used, not just one time, but two or three

or four times in the financial sector trading.

It is not going for productive investment in firms.

It is also not going to finance and fund

climate change mitigation and de-carbonization.

Money creates more money.

Wealth creates more wealth.

And this is a circle, and it just rolls on.

At the end of the day, it's our houses,

the value of our houses, which are backing this up.

The IMF has called it "the shadow banking system."

"Shadow" here doesn't mean that it is illegal.

It also doesn't mean that it is necessarily shady and so on.

It is just that it is shadow because there are no rules.

It's hardly any rules.

It's sort of almost the Wild West of the financial sector

(dramatic Western music)

- And a problem with the derivative market

is there is no market.

So it's like one-on-one swaps between bankers.

It's like you and I say,

"Hey, I know what bank you're working for,

"and so I've got some bonds,

"and I want you to insure 'em for me

"in case the interest rate changes.

"Would you insure these bonds for me?

"How much would you charge?"

You tell me a price.

I say, "That's a good deal.

"I'll get a bonus for setting up the insurance.

"You'll get a bonus

"for taking in the money to do the insurance."

- But I work at a different bank.

- It's a good deal.

- And I heard you just bought those.

And I figure I could also get those,

'cause I know a guy in Saudi Arabia or China

that would pay two cents more,

and I could make 50 grand off it.

- You wind up so far from the underlying.

- The thing is, it's like the old insurance principle, it's

"How many people can insure one person's house"?

Can each person in the neighborhood put a $100,000 policy

on that house and each person collect $100,000

when the $100,000 house burns down?

(explosion roars)

(fire crackling)

(explosion booming)

- As Americans, we're shortsighted,

and we don't think long-term

and financial literacy was not this complicated

100 years ago. You had a little bit of money,

and probably didn't even have a bank account.

You paid your bills, and you passed bills around.

- And you kept it under the mattress.

- Right, or you kept it under the mattress.

Shh, that's not where mine's at.

- The critical derivatives for our financial markets today

are actually the ones that brought down the financial system

in 2008 were the credit default swaps

and the collateralized debt obligations.

And the credit default swap is basically

a kind of an insurance contract,

which basically says, "If some assets in the markets

"decline in value, the insurer has to pay me a fee."

And the beauty of the CDS, the credit default swap,

was that you didn't have to hold the asset yourself.

(fire crackling)

It's like me taking out

a fire insurance on my neighbor's house,

and if that house burns down, I get the premium.

- The value of these financial transactions

is much, much larger than the tangible, real capital,

which is basically the houses of the families,

the households, the notional value

of the derivative market is $600 trillion.

And that is about let's say,

eight to 10 times as large as global GDP.

- So an American city with

how many trillions of dollars

of real estate value right there,

or at least hundreds of billions,

will no longer be there.

Like, how does that work?

How does that work in the banking sector?

How does that work in the insurance market,

the re-insurance market,

what's been collateralized off that real estate?

- This is not just different actors,

exchanging in different markets

or in different legal transactions,

our financial system is such that we have huge banks,

mega banks, too big to fail banks,

very often operating both sides of the same market.

- The big banks, they don't necessarily know how much risk

their counterparty bank in some other country

is willing to undertake. - No one really

understands the legal interdependencies

that are built into these contracts,

and that can ultimately bring down

the entire financial system.

- The system is so complicated

that the accountability is lost.

- So the real value is actually here.

These are all the transactions

which are built on top of the real economy.

(soft music)

- Then there's Dougherty.

The small town of Dougherty is not,

not a whole lot there today.

Just it was a town that once had a general store

when I was growing up, had the church,

had a post office, but you know, not anymore.

- Agriculture and rural America has gotten a preview

of the automation that's about to hit

the rest of the country in the next 10 years.

- We're here at the town square in Dewitt, Arkansas.

And if you look around, I mean

there's not a ton of bustling businesses here,

but one of the busiest businesses

is Department of Human Services.

(soft music)

So when we define the real economy, let's not forget farms.

88% are still small family farms.

- So this is a grain storage bin

on my parents' family farm.

(soft music)

- This is my dad's place.

He's gonna be 87, mom's 85.

They've lived here since 1956.

So, a lot of years.

- And we are a team.

- How many times you have to have intense rains,

heat spells, freezings at the wrong point to get the crops

to not come in once?

- We do protect our farmers, we give them crop insurance

and the crop insurance is subsidized.

We have agricultural extension services,

and they pay for that, but they probably don't pay

the full cost of that.

It's a free market economy but,

it's also a national security issue.

(birds chirping)

- Federal crop insurance program

was started as a response to the effects

of the dust bowl and the Great Depression.

Many, many areas throughout the United States were,

were severely affected by the Dust Bowl,

many farmers lost everything.

In addition to most of America

being devastated by the depression,

farmers acutely suffered during that time.

(somber music)

Many parts of the plains

were just completely filled with dust.

Many crops were lost due to the weather,

the extreme weather, due to insects.

(somber music)

- But it's the large scale like my dad said,

the large scale events that everybody kinda worries about,

like a big drought.

- I think that our aquifer in some places

is down to like 20% and then a lot of places at 50%,

and we're actually using more water than

we have at any other time.

We have our pumping plants in

and we're building on canals

and this is actually the first phase.

We're trying to get water to this, this Indian bio

and then we're gonna use that for the main water supply.

In Arkansas, we're gonna have a drought event,

every growing season.

It doesn't matter, if we just came

like this last flood that we had here,

as soon as we came out of that flood event,

we were irrigating because our soil is, it's not real deep.

We have what they call a hard pan underneath it,

pretty close to the surface

- Which helps with the rice growing.

- Yes, very helpful.

It just gets more expensive every day.

We thought we were gonna have

a lot of infrastructure money maybe to come about,

but it hasn't come about.

- And its federal infrastructure money that coming?

- Well, the way that was originally set up was that,

the federal government was gonna be responsible for 65%

the state 10, and our local district, 25.

And there's a lot of people benefit from this

other than just the farmers,

but that's, who's got to pay for it

'cause those are only the ones

that's actually using the water.

- And I'm assuming we'll have to do

a whole bunch of stuff like that.

As temperature rises and rain patterns change.

When every person we've talked to about farming

and different methods of farming

whether it's till or no till or organic or not.

(tractor engine purring)

Each piece of land is different.

And each little community is different.

And the ecosystem there is different.

So how can a giant JP Morgan,

how can they service a community like this?

- Well, and why would they want to? - Yeah.

- That's the rest of the story.

I mean, that's not gonna be a profit center

for them to come out here and look at a man

that's farming 2,000, 3,000 acres.

They're looking for 20, 50,000 acre farms

to where they can justify spending some time on them.

- The relationships with the banks they've gotten big too.

But it used to be these smaller banks

and they knew your dad and his dad.

If you went to a farm sale and "Hey I liked this tractor."

and it was $27,000.

You just call the bank and say, "Hey, I need it."

"Okay, it's in your account."

(gentle foreboding music)

- 60 years ago if you made a crop, you made money period.

If you made a crop, you paid all your bills

and you could send your kids to school

and you buy your groceries.

You were okay.

Today, you can make a crop and lose your assets.

(gentle ominous music)

(tractor engine revving)

- Everybody out here, it's all family and,

I mean, if you were 30 years ago when we did this

we get all, a combine was $35,000.

And now a combine is $400,000.

(light airy music)

- When you're looking at machines that,

so by the time you have your headers

and your everything to go with it

being upward close to half a million dollars.

Where else is someone else buying

half a million dollar equipment

and I'm barely making ends meet.

(tractor engine revving)

It gets more challenging every year.

- The cost of production and agricultural costs

or just to be a farmer and even a small farmer

are almost cost prohibitive

unless your family has been in farming for generations.

- Thank God almighty for such a good looking crop

while others have had to struggle.

(light airy music)

- Oh, here's some fellows.

- Yeah, that's who we're riding with.

Y'all be riding with him.

(phone ringing)

(indistinct)

Alright, thanks Zach.

See you there.

(tractor engine revving)

- Farms are similar to owning a house.

You've gotta clean the gutters.

You've gotta sweep the sidewalk.

And the same thing with a farm

you've got certain maintenance that have to be done

on annual basis to keep it in a working order.

- Before automation, everything in here is handwritten.

- 24th, 1955.

- Yep. And everyday...

- And that's everything that happened during that day

all the money that came in.

- They made four loans.

Like this is, these are the loans that we made that day.

And you see the size of the loans; $150, $500.

- The countryside across America

not just in our rural community but other rural communities

used to have a lot of small community banks

that were very plugged into their communities

and to the people that live there.

And trying to help them

grow their businesses and their lives.

So just afraid of what the landscape holds going forward.

You're just a number,

you're CUSIP number on a bond security

and here's where you mail your check now.

- It's getting harder and harder for those farmers

to stay in business because they cannot get the funding.

Because with each year of them incurring loss

and then no hope of...

The prices don't get better the next year

regardless of the type of natural disasters

and things that happen.

And so the farmer gets further and further behind

and we've had several farmers that are actually

going out of business.

They're having to sell their equipment

and turn the farm over to someone else to farm.

(gentle ominous music)

- It's actually something that I have no control over.

And none of us around in England, Arkansas

have any control over.

And at the last one, like in 2008

when they were saying that,

"The banks wouldn't have money to loan to your farmers."

And I had several farmers that were just

pulling their hair out.

They were just, "Are you gonna be able to loan me

enough money to finish this crop?"

And I finally told him,

"Just go home and watch Andy Griffith

and quit watching CNN and Fox."

And said, "You know, as far as I know

we're gonna have the money and we're gonna take care of you

and you need to quit watching all of those..."

- Stuff to scare you.

- Yeah. That you have no control over.

So a couple of weeks later, he came back and said,

"You know that was the best advice

I've gotten so far this year."

- The rainfall amounts, we don't get an inch anymore.

It's either three inches or nothing.

Everything is extremes.

(gentle ominous music)

(gentle foreboding music)

- Many of those restrictions on banks are being peeled back.

So we still have trading in derivatives.

It's not, we don't know what it is.

There's hundreds of trillions of dollars

maybe 600, maybe 800 trillions of dollars of derivatives

on currency exchanges that can't be covered.

(gentle ominous music)

- It's like after 1980s it was,

"Oh, Gordon Gekko is a great guy.

He taught us greed is good."

Look what it's gotten us.

- It's a cycle in America.

You have to create wealth.

You can't create wealth

by just taking it from other people through taxes.

People have to be incentivized to create wealth.

And this has been the great- - Okay, but wait a minute-

- This has been the great virtues

of Western democracy for 300 years...

- But it's also been the massively misunderstood.

So go back to the post-civil war United States

and the growth.

The growth was made off land

that people were literally killed and chased off of

and they're like, "Hey man, look at all this free land."

And that's how money was made.

- You have to resolve that we can do better going forward.

American capitalism can be pretty heartless.

If you look back at the American Civil War

and what happened right afterwards,

we industrialized America, we went into the Gilded Age.

People look at these "robber barons" and said,

"This can't last."

(somber music)

And we ended up in the progressive movement.

This is the age of Reagan.

The Reagan era was the relaxation

of the administrative state.

It was the sort of, let big firms get bigger.

It's let's make money.

Let's do it all with money.

Let's let charities take care of people.

Forget about government programs.

And that's run since Reagan was elected.

- Thank you very much.

- I was raised red.

I was raised in a red family.

I grew up in the '80s.

(upbeat '80s music)

Fell in love with Ronald Reagan.

I idolized Reagan.

I saw Reagan and I said, "I want his job."

In fact, my parents told me I mailed him a dollar bill.

I defaced the dollar bill with my picture on it.

- The maxim is, Doveryai, no proveryai

trust but verify.

(audience laughing)

- [Translator] (speaking foreign language)

- (speaking foreign language)

- [Translator] You repeat that at every meeting.

(audience laughing)

- But I wanted to be in politics.

I wanted to be the first woman, president of United States.

I thought it was fascinating.

- We can leave our children

with an unrepayable, massive debt and shattered economy

or we can leave them liberty

in a land where every individual

has the opportunity to be whatever God intended us to be.

- People like to say economics is a science

but it really follows politics.

Keynes came out and looked at it, he saw the political need.

That's how we understood macroeconomics.

Friedman came out and looked at it

and he saw deficit spending

and he saw government control and he saw high taxes,

and he said, there has to be a better way.

He reinvented classical economics.

They called it Neoliberal Economics.

- Quoted Milton Friedman and said that,

that how the economy of the United States

oughta be judged by the number of imports that we have

and not exports.

And I thought maybe this was a typo or something.

And so I asked him, I said, "I mean, are you for real?"

- Trickle-down economics starts in 1980.

It's right around in there.

Late '70s, we get into it.

But the bottom line is, has two parts to it.

First fire the cops.

Not the cops on Main Street, the cops on Wall Street.

Turn them loose.

Let those banks do whatever they wanna do.

- And so here we are now, 40 years into the age of Reagan

and people are looking at what it's done, okay.

It's made a lot of people really wealthy.

We won the Cold War during that period.

Not necessarily because of that, but we won the Cold War.

And America became this supreme power.

But for the people of America, it hasn't been so good.

- I know, their real wages went down.

- Real wages went down and people in this country look back

and they wanna make America

as great as it was in the 1950s.

That's when the marginal tax rate was 91%.

- [Man] I know.

- Ronald Reagan, my mother loved him.

She watched him every Sunday night on GE Theater.

At the end, he would say, "At General Electric,

progress is our most important product."

- [Wesley] What would wrong Reagan say,

if you told him that GE spends more money on stock buybacks

than it does on R&D?

In 1950, stock buybacks were illegal.

They were considered market manipulation.

Now, investment analysts look at that company and say

"A lot of companies are really smart.

I think their stocks gonna continue to grow up

because they've got a really great stock buyback program."

It does nothing for the economy.

- The average American is...

they're living in the GDP of 1980.

- Yeah.

I mean, yeah, clearly the world has changed,

and the commodities you can buy

are not the same commodities,

but in terms of your let's say average

to the extent that we can measure living standards,

living standards have not improved.

Firms finance their investment out of their profits,

that's what people think.

Now, if you look at the 500 biggest U.S corporations,

50% of the profits are paid as dividends,

50% of the profits are useful buying back stocks.

All the profits dissipate, are gone.

So how do they finance their investment?

If they-- - Debt!

- Debt.

- [Newsman] The president expressed surprise

about the collapse on the markets yesterday.

He's still enduring popularity as much to the economic boom

that America has enjoyed under his leadership.

- More people are working than ever before in history

where our productivity is up

so is our manufacturing product up.

There is no runaway inflation as there has been in the past.

So as I say, I don't think anyone should panic

because all the economic indicators are solid.

- [Newsman] But the warning signs have long been there

in the closed factories in many American small towns.

- I mean, there is this notion

of billionaires creating employment,

and that is trickle-down economics.

The problem about that is that in history,

it has never happened.

There is no such thing as trickle-down economics.

It simply doesn't exist.

- [Man] It really is voodoo economics.

(bird cawing)

- When you put the smartest people in the world in finance

which is what we've done

for the last 25 years in this country,

you can't hold back their imagination and their creativity.

- The speed and scale of global economic change

has overwhelmed the national systems

of rules and regulations.

So our first test is to agree tougher

and more transparent supervision of banks, hedge funds

and what is known as the global shadow banking system.

- And so when you get right down to it,

I'm a licensed banker.

And so when the regulators come to my bank,

we're very simple little bank.

They look for the SOP, they look for due diligence

on projects we've done.

It's pretty easy.

You go to a big bank, Wells or JP Morgan or Goldman,

and you're a regular like,

"What is this? I see these emails and... " I mean,

they don't understand it because they're not working in it.

They didn't invent it.

- Sure. - It's like trying to teach people

a theory of quantum gravity

when they've had a high school physics course

and they're inspecting Stephen Hawking or something.

(gentle music)

- [Katharina] The earth is like a bounded natural system

that can't expand forever.

The beauty of the legal code

and derivatives are a product of the legal code

is that we can expand it how far we want, right?

So we always create new types of assets,

we create new types of legal tricks in the end,

and the two systems are not easily compatible.

(gentle music)

- If you're very rich and you gamble with your money

and you lose it in Las Vegas,

that is what you want and it's your problem.

But here, if they lose their money here, it is our problem.

- The market can't punish

for things it doesn't know anything about.

- And they haven't factored any of the risks

that all this could change.

- Natural disaster could have major repercussions

for our financial system,

just because they will have an effect on the asset values.

- [Roosevelt] The new law

allows the 12 federal reserve banks

to issue additional currency on good assets

and thus the banks that reopen will be able to meet

every legitimate call.

It is sound currency

because it is backed by actual good assets.

(water gurgles)

(sizzling)

(helicopter engine revving)

(gentle music)

- And so what happens is that there's an event.

And then when the event happens, then everybody wakes up

and sadly there's what we call in a financial system,

contagion, and people unload, they unload stocks,

they try to get their derivatives repaid.

They want their insurance policies cashed.

And the market starts to unravel.

When the market starts to go down,

the plugs get pulled everywhere.

And so what you're dealing with in climate change,

it's not only the direct impact,

but also the possibility of contagion.

- Economic contagion.

- Economic contagion. - Financial.

- Yep.

(air blowing)

- Those views are merely forecasts,

and as always will evolve with the arrival

of new information.

(sirens blaring)

- Mike, they're on the bell, hold the bell.

(indistinct) the bells.

- We actually have made it clear

that we will bail out these financial actors.

We will bail them.

This cannot be sustained.

- If it runs only because the central banks go in

and buy assets, right?

Recently it was proposed that the

European Central Bank

should also start buying shares of companies.

So not only debt, but shares.

So we're effectively socializing the obligation

to create financial returns

for the holders of capital assets.

And that can't go on forever.

(cheerful music)

- Even though every politician says,

"This is the most important election in your lifetime."

These forces aren't tamed or unleashed by a single election.

(audience cheering)

- In the news in the last couple of weeks,

we've read about the coronavirus.

And dude, China's acting like

this is (scoffs) like zombie apocalypse.

- I'm actually kind of afraid of that

corona virus, man. - Yeah. No, I don't wanna get

on a plane.

Do we have a government that's competent enough

and organized enough to handle that kind of response?

- No, man. I mean, we can't even handle

like homelessness in the city of LA.

You know what I mean?

Like we can't even figure out how to properly fund anything,

let alone a pandemic.

(gentle music)

- Americans live under the illusion

that they're incredibly different from other people.

When I was in college just everything started

to melt down in the Balkans,

everyone's like, "These people are savages.

"They've been fighting each other for hundreds-of-years."

It's like they just came down out of the trees or something.

Then you're there and you realize

these people live in houses that have electricity

and two-car garages and refrigerators

and not only children in college,

but several generations that have gone through college

and they all spoke the same language.

(gentle music)

And these people (jet engine roaring)

killed each other.

They committed genocide, 250,000 killed, rape camps,

concentration camps, ethnic cleansing.

- This was a plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo

and get rid of the Albanian population.

Are we going to stand for that?

Is France going to stand for that? I don't think so.

- [Interviewer] Like many countries

as a system starts to break down the,

in their case, it was the communist system,

and in our case, our capitalist system

is starting to break down

and people turn on each other because some leaders think

"Everybody's upset right now and I can motivate my group

"to take stuff from another group."

- [Narrator] Europe has not seen displaced people

in these numbers since the Second World War.

- And those are the kinds of things we have to worry about

with climate change, because it happens when,

resources start to get tight,

and everybody's a human, everybody's prone to these things.

- We've pre-cut boards that we can put over the windows

in the event that there are looters and things like that

to protect the house.

Yeah. You saw what you want right?

- We knew they wanted.

- The UN said just two weeks ago, a billion within 30 years.

- Okay. A billion displaced people, a billion refugees

because they can't grow their food the way they used to

because of the drought or because of floods

or because of collapse of systems.

- [Reporter] How much worse is this gonna get

before it gets better?

- I think the general view

is this is going to continue deteriorating

for the time being,

the next rains are a long while off.

- For the world, this is a very bad thing

because it's billions of people dislocated,

massive economic consequences.

(fireworks cracking)

- Can you have a society that's been

as successful as this one has in a material sense?

And can it transform itself?

You know, in the past empires haven't been able to do that.

What would these Romans say?

Could they help us?

- [Wes Jr.] Unlikely.

- [Wesley] Unlikely.

(gentle music)

The heritage of America is Roman.

All the men who wrote their constitution had studied

the history of Rome,

I mean, the Senate it's Roman.

- And it's failing us just like the Roman Senate failed.

- You know, there was a Greek philosopher who said

that governments go through cycles.

They go from a democracy to oligopoly

to dictatorships and they collapse.

- I know we're talking about Aristotle but..

- Actually it wasn't Aristotle, it was a different guy.

- No, it was Aristotle.

- No, it was maybe it was Polybius,

I forget who it was.

- I'll bet you cash, it's Aristotle.

'cause we're in Vegas, I will bet you cash it's Aristotle,

because Aristotle came up with the definitions

of the three kinds of governments

and their alter egos.

So you have a democracy which when it goes bad,

becomes a mobocracy.

You have a monarchy,

which when it goes bad becomes a tyranny

and you have an aristocracy,

which when it goes bad becomes an oligopoly.

- He's building on the work of a predecessor.

What's the name of the predecessor?

We have to find that out.

- [Wes Jr.] I don't know, you tell me.

- [Wesley] We'll find it.

I don't know, I have to look it up.

- [Narrator] Wealth was obtained largely through trade,

into the warehouses full of goods

from all over the empire and beyond.

It was the wealthy few rather than the many,

who benefited from the riches

and vast resources of the empire.

This imbalance and the irresponsible behavior

of public officials,

would become major reasons for Rome's eventual decline.

- Okay, so dad and I had this bet

and I need you to see if I'm right

or he's right. - Okay.

- It's about Aristotle.

- Oh boy.

- I know, I know.

(laughing)

So I was like well, Aristotle described,

the death of democracy and what happens

to different forms of government as they decay.

(gentle music)

(speaking in a foreign language)

- Well you see Alessia, I know from also from your studies,

that the collapse of the Roman Empire

was mainly a huge, gigantic,

enormous, humongous, financial collapse.

At some point, the emperors had just run out of money.

- There are lots of different theories

why the Roman Empire did collapse.

I think what we know now,

is that there has been a long economic decline

before the Roman Empire collapsed,

before the German hoards came down

and conquered Italy,

and conquered Rome, ultimately, right?

So the question is what triggered the long economic decline?

- Disparity between the rich and the poor.

- Onistorus and Miliorus they...

- Yes, you're speaking Latin now.

- Yeah, yeah Latin.

- Massive amounts of inequality

may not be politically sustainable.

Governments fund themselves through either debt,

or through taxation.

In Rome you would basically go

and try to squeeze more returns out of

provinces that you occupied,

or you might launch another war to get the returns,

to feed Rome and feed those who were

running the system overall.

And I think that's the common denominator

because we live in a quite different system today, right?

So today it's our central banks

who are doing the rescue operation.

- One thing about the financial markets,

one of their real power is,

if they can pull forward action from the future

to the present, if there's credible policy,

after all, most of what central banks do

is effectively that.

- So big trees fall hard.

The market can adapt to anything,

as long as there's clarity,

transparency and honesty

and I don't think we're getting that.

- There were a lot of things that caused the problem,

but, I mean, essentially,

the structure of Rome

held together for a good long time,

until finally it just ran out

of economic wherewithal and leadership.

- Politicians were bought,

what the founders of our republic warned us

about over and over that if you get really wealthy

and you lose your moral character, it's over.

- Well, that's where we are.

- Because we are very close to a moment

in which we could start slowly going down

and if we are not very careful,

we will go down faster and faster and faster and faster.

(exclaiming)

Roller coaster.

It will be a lot of fun, maybe.

You know the ancient malediction,

may you live in interesting times.

(loud bang)

- So, that's how it ended last time.

Except this time, it won't just be barbarians,

it'll be the planet itself that's on fire.

(fire roaring)

- [Man] There's still active fire in that area.

Monitor the conditions and know what you'll do

if the fire threatens (indistinct)

- [Woman] In the smoky aftermath of the worst start

to fire season anyone can remember,

while some search for solutions,

others want someone to blame.

(gentle somber music)

- Probably should take a break and let it settle in,

take an intermission.

- Financial ingenuity has been part of this system

since the Dutch invented the...

- Okay,

- But a lot of it - liability company

- isn't financial - and Lloyds of London.

But dad, listen.

- People get pretty...

- Everybody thought Bernie Madoff was a genius.

- Yeah.

Foreign investors looked at the United States

and said, "the United States they're the best.

"That's the safest place in the world I can put my money".

- [Woman] I mean, we've had, I don't know,

five, six biblical-like events.

We're continuing to have them,

so I need to question the validity

of the value of, and viability

of my land long-term.

(upbeat music)

- A little over seven years ago,

Hurricane Sandy blew through here,

causing tens of billions of dollars in property damage,

and since then, New York has built more,

bigger, taller and more expensive, because we, the people,

are on the hook for the cost of the insurance

if another hurricane comes and hits New York City.

(rain pouring)

(metal banging)

The National Flood Insurance Program

is a federally-run public program of insurance.

It's run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It provides flood insurance for virtually all homeowners

and small businesses in the country.

So this is pretty unusual, actually.

Most other countries have private markets

for flood insurance, but the U.S does not.

(sirens blaring)

- It's a supplementary policy that is subsidized

by the government, and so all citizens are, to some extent,

footing the bill for coastal property owners.

- In order to build a huge condominium development

in a flood plain in New York City, you, of course,

need a lot of capital.

Municipal actors in New York City are very interested

in continuing to promote a version of New York City,

in which as much of the available land remains viable

for continued economic development,

because property taxes are so important there, as elsewhere.

- Well, the original program

of the National Flood Insurance Program

was supposed to stop construction in very high risk areas.

Areas where water moves with velocity,

particularly flood ways along the river,

where water moves the same rate as the river,

hurricane-zoned areas, where the storm surge comes in.

The building is,

it's almost impossible to build a really safe building

against a 14-foot wall of water coming in at you

in a storm surge.

There's a lot of vested interests that don't care,

construction industry, for example.

They'd like to build a house on a beach

while the tide is out, as long as they can sell it

before the tide comes back in.

(water flapping)

And once they've sold it, of course,

the risk is now somebody else's.

- The ways in which financial actors securitized mortgages

in the run-up to the last financial crisis

is still going on.

- So the building contractors all want

to minimize the flood program.

The town wants to minimize it,

wanna hold down the elevations on the maps

and fight that every map that comes out

by the National Flood Insurance Program,

that causes problems, delay in implementation,

maybe never implementation.

- The coastal communities

are on some of the most valuable land in the country,

And as a consequence, people are gonna fight

to protect their investment position.

- I thought, okay, the city's not requiring me

to have flood insurance.

My realtor didn't tell me I had to have flood insurance.

- Honestly, you don't look at the flood maps

when you move into a neighborhood.

You fall in love with the house, and 85% of the people

in my neighborhood were not insured.

- [Narrator] Shelter.

- The United States is uniquely vulnerable

to building into disaster-likely,

physically vulnerable areas, because of our reliance

on local rule, particularly for zoning decisions.

That's part of our bedrock of the United States,

state rights and local rights,

and it's actually has a lot of advantages,

but it has a major disadvantage,

which is that local governments depend on revenues

that are coming from their buildings, from their residents

who are building and living in their localities,

and that means that all residents benefit from development.

- The politics of provision are so tied up with land values

in the United States, that if property values go down,

then the tax assessments adjust to reflect that,

and you're bringing in less revenue for the tax base,

which means less investment in local amenities

and schools and local public transportation.

- In Texas, we don't have state income tax.

That's another reason why you wanna live here,

because it's cheap, but people are taxed on their land.

- The maps that are in existence for where a 100

or 500-year flood will happen are so outdated

and no longer accurate, the risk and the cost of that risk,

even within the insurance industry, is not as accurate

as it needs to be, in order for us to appreciate

what the cost of climate is.

- Insurance actors have found ways

to take an insurance policy and securitize that,

and transfer it to kind of capital risk markets,

so they're not really holding the bag,

which means that they're willing to underwrite more

and more property,

which means that people can kinda continue to build

in risky areas.

- I don't think anyone would wanna come in

and look at the house and come through salt water

and wanna buy it.

(water splashing)

- This is my nest egg. - Yeah, this is your nest egg.

- This is how I'm gonna help my kids and my retirement.

- But now, because you bought it in an area

where there's rising sea level,

maybe that nest egg's not so secure.

In order to convert his nest egg to cash,

he's gotta be able to sell the house,

but now nobody will insure the next 30 year mortgage.

What happens to John?

- [Wesley] John's lost his retirement nest egg.

- Okay, so John is now literally John on the street.

- [Wesley] The nice house that we're gonna buy

in Florida to retire...

- This was their house in Florida.

They were gonna move to Alabama.

- [Wesley] Okay, well, they're not moving.

They may still move to Alabama.

They may be living in a trailer park.

- Flood involves the U.S government

in this really peculiar way,

fire is privately underwritten,

so it's private insurers

and what's happening with fire risk,

is that some of the primary insurers

are going out of business,

in events like the California wildfires,

that can put an insurer out of business,

if they have outstanding liabilities

that exceed what they can pay off.

- [Wes Jr.] Then we started talking

and you told me about buying a house

in Sausalito.

So what happened?

- So we call the insurance company two days before,

two or three days before

and let them know we're gonna close in a few days.

And they call us back and say,

" Hey, we can't insure that house"

And I'm like, "what?"

And they're like " yeah, it's on a list of neighborhoods

"that we don't insure anymore"

So these entire neighborhoods are gonna be uninsured

and they also told us,

they don't know if they're gonna reinsure

the current owner of the house either.

That's an entire,

billions of dollars of houses across the state,

that it's gonna have an insurance problem.

(jet engine roaring)

- The insurance companies are insuring for one year.

So as things get worse, the insurance companies

are definitely not going to be able

to come to the rescue of these homeowners.

- These latent, hidden climate risks

that might exist in different places,

in different housing markets,

should they burst, could take down

the entire financial system.

- And right now this house is listed for $49,000.

At the peak of the market, it went to about $250,000.

- It's not only the owners that lose their assets,

it's the financial intermediaries that lose

their claims against them.

It's those that bought the secularized mortgages

and other assets that are linked to them,

just as we've seen in the 2008 crisis.

- And unless we're prepared to continue to write

the same check over and over again,

we need to start to scrutinize,

are we hardening the utilities and the infrastructure

around these homes sufficiently,

so they can weather these storms going forward?

Or should we in fact not permit

the investment of capital, that is going to be subject to,

climate change conditions in a negative way

and we need to think about that.

- No, that's the really scary thing

because we're not, you know we're not hardening

any of our infrastructure.

(laughing)

I mean, not yet.

It's very expensive.

There's guys thinking about it,

but nobody's done it yet.

(train approaching)

- Well, from an oil company standpoint,

most of the major assets in the United States

and actually globally, are on the coastline.

From that standpoint, the facilities are as vulnerable

as people's homes.

So there's a lot of offshore infrastructure

in the Gulf of Mexico,

but that comes on shore to a lot of pipelines

that are right at the coastline.

And so as the coastline erodes,

those pipelines become noticeable and vulnerable

and have to be buried deeper,

or infrastructure put around it to protect it.

So indeed, yeah, hardening of infrastructure,

utilities and fires have been associated with that,

or the pipelines.

People are worried about how to protect those going forward.

- Nature's gonna be eroding the foundations

of our economy.

(waves roaring)

- So, sometimes I'm out in a place like this,

and I imagine what it would be like to come here

with no money in my pocket,

fleeing an economic meltdown,

'cause you know look, we do have plenty of land,

but if I had to survive out here

and didn't have the money

to buy something to provide me power,

some way to get water,

out of a fairly dry land,

while we love pristine nature

and we like to hike in it,

hunt in it, camp in it,

all those things we do

thanks to the technology that you bought at the store.

The tent, the gun, the flashlight,

the lighter, these things are made in human communities,

in factories, not by people on the run,

not by people out of capital.

(gentle music)

It's all about capital.

So here's what happens,

capital is gonna flow to where it can make the most money

for the capital owner.

A town like this,

which was a silver mining town,

is a good example of foraging theory,

where if you're an animal or,

and these things translate into the human world as well,

and you've got a choice between two things,

one that's easy to get

and one that's hard to get.

If the easy thing to get is worth more,

that's what you're gonna go for.

So that's what produces boom towns,

because at one point the silver was really easy to get to

and worth something

and then when the silver market crashed,

well, it wasn't worth anything.

So they moved on, to find the next easiest thing to mine.

These patterns of capital do not change over time.

Capital is always gonna seek the greatest return

and as soon as that return isn't paying off,

it's gonna pull up stakes and go somewhere else.

- The way to define capital is the money

that is going to be used to create something.

- People are very myopic.

They are just looking at what's in front of their face

and the portfolio that's right there,

how they're gonna make money in the short term.

- How you doing Frank?

(laughing)

So look, we look around and it's like,

this is all the capital,

this is all the capital in the world,

headquartered right here.

- Right.

- And I'm assuming they all wanna live past 2050

and so we gotta change over.

Are they beating down a trail to your door to invest?

- No, they're not.

We have to search for the right type of investors

for our projects.

And when we do find the investors for our projects,

it's extremely difficult to create the value

or pull out the value for our projects that the investors

recognize immediately.

- If somebody can get 15% on their money doing derivatives,

why would they wanna get 5% on their money

doing renewable?

- Because they would be able

to use the investment tax credit.

Everybody wants a return

and everybody wants to maximize their return.

And the only groups that I know can maximize their return

for renewable energy projects today,

are the wealthy individuals that have passive income.

- And, what do we think of as like wealthy individuals?

So I think a lot of Americans think if someone has $500,000,

they are a wealthy individual.

- I'm talking about people who have

hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth.

- So minimum, a hundred million dollars of net worth.

- I would say so, but there's not many people

maybe less than 1% of the population

that has that type of investment portfolio,

or investments generating passive income.

- Any more comments?

- That's pretty close all right, pretty close.

- Perfect.

- All right.

- So when there's not investment

in the market towards the technology

that would help for climate solutions,

and renewables and clean energy,

then that trickles down into the entire,

the entire life stream or life cycle,

you know, the whole flow of business.

- Lord Keynes, who was the founder of macro economics

asked the question, why do people invest?

And honestly, there's no answer.

He called it animal spirits.

I can tell you people are risk averse.

And after 2008, they're even more risk averse.

When I go to these business conferences

and I see my friends,

I asked the guy who's worth a hundred million dollars,

I said, what are you working on now?

He says, you know, he said, I'm just,

I'm pretty happy where I am

and you know, I've got the house in Mexico

and we're looking after the grandkids,

and I mean, he's not investing in taking risks.

He's not creating jobs for the rest of us,

at least not directly.

That's the animal spirits that are out there

in too much of the business community right now.

So the only way you can replace that

is with government leadership.

The Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad,

the Panama Canal, the space program,

the interstate highway system,

in no case did a group of entrepreneurs get together

and say, hey let's build the interstate highway system.

No, it was a dream that Ike pushed in 1955

that came from a study done

during World War II that showed that

you needed these highways for national security purposes.

- This is no partisan policy.

No one has a monopoly on truth,

and on the facts that affect this country,

we must work together.

- The United States is highly dis-aggregated.

We have 50 states, one nation,

many counties, many regions,

tens of thousands of cities

they all have a voice in how things are done.

And it's hard to get us to collaborate on certain projects,

unless we all align and agree it's necessary

and we feel some urgency to get it done.

- If the Australian military study,

the U.S military study,

and the British military study are all correct

we've got about 30 years

if we don't do anything until civilization collapses.

Which I'm guessing doesn't have a good rate of return.

- Correct?

So Wes there are actually those

who would tell you that we may be

beyond the tipping point already,

I don't subscribe to that, by the way.

If you do subscribe to that then

it almost makes the investment in,

you know wind and solar, not pertinent.

- [Wesley] What's the most valuable thing in the world?

The most valuable thing,

it's oil reserves in the ground.

It's worth more than the GDP of the United States,

more than the stock market,

more than the stock markets of all the Western countries,

it's oil in the ground,

and the people that have that oil, they want it to be used.

Whatever you hear about Saudi Arabia

saying they're going to, you know

move beyond a petrol based economy, yell, yell,

but they're going to move at their pace

and they need those petro dollars to get there.

The societal costs right now are much greater

than the economic costs of taking it out of the ground.

So you have to recognize the societal impact

and you have to make the people

who are producing it and selling it,

and the people who are buying it

pay the full cost of using it.

And that, that means a tax.

- But we didn't even do that with security though,

because I mean, realistically

we've subsidized the oil industry for 50 years

by knocking over governments,

by protecting shipping lanes for it, oil lanes,

so we couldn't even do it when it came to like

having them pay for their own extraction and security.

- It's true.

But one of the reasons we couldn't do it is because,

we didn't really have the alternative.

- What's the sound?

- We didn't really have the alternative technically.

(jet engine whirring)

(fire blazing)

- [Narrator 1] Engineers worked under fire

to douse oil pipelines set ablaze

by retreating Iraqi troops.

Animal fats, and tallow could no longer supply

the ever growing need for candles and lubricants.

Whale oil, which had long been the chief illuminant,

was becoming scarce.

Yet the demand for artificial light was increasing.

In 1850, a lamp capable of efficiently burning

a refined product of petroleum was invented.

- Oil!

- Oil!

- Early oil production, they used steam power

for the drilling, for the riggings

of different pieces of equipment,

and that steam power probably was produced

by burning wood or coal.

So you'd use wood or coal to get oil.

Today, we use electricity to get oil.

We use gas to get oil.

So we use one form of energy to get another.

And that's one of the interconnected aspects

of energy that's kinda surprising for people

is how interdependent is.

We don't have an economy that runs on one form of energy,

we have an economy that runs on many forms.

(water splashing)

(soft music)

- Part of this equation,

certainly in the short term

to this time period you're worried about,

is modulating consumption and adjusting cultural behavior.

But people aren't talking about that,

no one wants to blame anybody.

If you wanna blame industry,

well, industry exists because people buy their things

or use their things.

So they're the ultimate consumers.

Are we gonna carbon tax them? Are we gonna punish them?

Or maybe part of the equation is,

we all accept responsibility

and we get a cultural change to take place here

to go back to where we were 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

- We might, but that's hard.

- The vast majority of our individual impact comes from,

housing, transport and food.

These are kinda big structural issues

that can't really be addressed adequately

by changing the brand of paper towels you buy.

- We live in an energy consumption society.

And the way to look at things,

we have to be aware that nothing comes for free.

We have to be aware that everything costs energy,

whatever you do.

(soft music)

- This is not what public space looks like in the U.S,

but I noticed here in the Netherlands,

everybody's riding bikes everywhere.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- And that doesn't strangely require gasoline.

- Nope.

(upbeat music)

- The question is, can we replace

fossil fuels with renewable energy?

And this is a very tricky question.

It raises enormous debates

and people get angry when you asked them this question,

because it is not clear what you mean.

If you mean that you can satisfy people's greed

with renewable energy,

then the answer is no.

If you mean renewable energy could produce

a sufficient amount of energy in order to survive,

then the answer is yes.

- We are in an energy efficient home now, that we've rebuilt

that our household use alone is twice the size

of the average American,

that woke me up,

I can't count the number of trips

that I've taken around the world for business,

but that two international trips,

was equal to one year of utility energy in my home.

And that really had me thinking about travel.

It had me thinking about what I eat.

- [Michael] Another surprise for many people

is how much energy we use in the food system.

- [Narrator] And complete dinners.

- [Michael] In the United States,

we use 100 quadrillion BTU of energy a year.

A BTU is our British thermal unit.

One BTU is about the energy content of a kitchen match.

So in the United States, we use

100 billion million kitchen matches of energy per year.

10 quads, 10 quadrillion BTU is for the food system.

One of those quads is in the food itself.

Food is a form of energy.

We're ingesting at one quad of food energy into our bodies

for 330 million Americans every year.

The other nine quads is for the rest of the food system.

This is in the agrochemicals, the fertilizers and pesticides

diesel for tractors, the energy for refrigeration,

the energy for drying crops at silos,

warehouses, transportation,

plus the energy to cook at our homes.

- [Narrator] Pies are done.

- [Michael] Three or four quads of that

is just for the cold chain.

That's the refrigeration system:

refrigerated trucks, refrigerated warehouses,

and refrigerators and freezers at our homes and businesses.

The energy embedded in the cold chain

of the food system in the United States

is more energy than entire countries

like Switzerland and Sweden consume in a year combined.

The energy embedded in the edible food we throw away

is also enough to power entire countries elsewhere.

Sadly, we throw away like

a fourth to a half of our edible food.

(upbeat music)

- [Wesley] Okay so Michael, here we are.

We're surrounded by water.

- [Michael] Yeah.

- [Wesley] And what's the relationship

between water and energy?

- [Michael] The water energy relationship is twofold.

One is we use a lot of water for energy.

We use water to cool power plants,

we use water to irrigate biofuels,

we use water for oil and gas production,

we use water to make steam at refineries.

In fact, if you look all up and down the energy supply chain

water's at every step.

- Our well went dry.

- Dead.

- Yeah, that's dead.

- This is where the water, that would be the full mark.

It's not a fantasy apocalypse movie landscape.

It's now and it's real.

- So the grid might be strained

if you don't have water available for cooling,

at least the way we have most power plants today,

where they use heat,

they then need a water for cooling.

Modern forms of like solar panels or wind turbines

don't need water coolings.

- The average life for PV panels is what, 20 years?

- 20, 25 years.

- 20, 25 years.

- Maybe 30 years, yeah. - So the people who say,

well, it takes seven years of energy

to produce this PV panel, but then you're getting,

that means you're getting 18 years of energy free.

So you've cut down.

- Even then you're getting 18 years of energy for free.

- So me John Q Public,

I'm like, hey man,

I wanna put some money into your solar farm.

- No, not until the government gets involved with things,

puts us into a pari passu position with fossil fuels.

- I've got a lot of friends

who are in the renewable business,

and there's a really big problem in terms of,

you know, you've got the power purchase agreement,

you've got all the permitting done,

You've even got interconnect agreements,

except what's happening is,

grid companies are delaying

and not letting them on the grid.

What's going on with that?

- I think one of the challenges we have is,

who has access to the infrastructure

and democratizing the infrastructure

is a way to open it up so that

more solutions can be brought forward.

This is something that we did

with telecommunications in the 80s with AT&T,

AT&T had built out all the wires and poles,

and they were required to open up

their infrastructure for other companies.

And that's why we have so many phone companies,

and long distance companies now that we didn't have before.

The same thing could happen

with democratizing the electrical infrastructure.

More solutions would be plugged in more wind and solar,

and we have more technologies along the way.

And this is where long range planning,

stable governance really matter.

- Kind of what I'm hearing is,

it's not a technology problem.

- No, not a technology problem.

- It's not an engineering problem.

- No. - It's a financial engineering problem.

- [Luka] Energy poverty, lack of food, income inequality.

So it's up to us now to form the policy

that is going to help bridge this gap.

- In 1941, when the United States went to war,

and people saved tin cans and aluminum

and gave up, women gave up buying nylon stockings,

and everything was done for the war effort.

But the war was there, was right in front of us.

And young men were being drafted and sent overseas,

and casualties were coming home.

And this is different.

It requires the same type of reorganization or commitment.

- But why didn't they call on me?

I could have done something.

(jazz music)

- That was then, and this is now.

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- Michael, you are now in charge of the United States

Energy policy and you have free reign.

How would we make the transition?

- For national security reasons and for economic reasons

and for environmental reasons

there are many reasons to do this.

We need to harden, improve and expand our grid.

Maybe even using the interstate highways.

We already have the rights of way and put lines

above ground or below ground, create a national network.

And then it will span and reach to the sunny windy areas,

and already connects to the urban areas.

And once we have the network,

we can plug in whatever we want,

build the infrastructure first, then the energy will follow.

But we have to put a price on pollution.

We'll take the money from the price on pollution

to clean up the trash.

So let's take the United States

6 billion tons of CO2 a year,

put in the atmosphere.

And let's say we're willing to pay

I don't know, $30 a ton to remove it.

That works out to if I do my math correctly,

$180 billion a year.

Sounds like a lot of money.

That's less than what we spend

on just dealing with trash from cities.

Why not spend another couple hundred billion cleaning

up the waste in the atmosphere.

Let's take the CO2 and put it into the soil.

Like, let's pay farmers to take the Co2

out of the atmosphere into the soil.

(soft gentle music)

We need to get more of that national security mindset.

- If you have a built to last strategy,

then you do want to look at

what's happening in these longer horizons

and it's absolutely critical.

- It's gonna take all forms of energy

and all people to move us through this transition.

- Otherwise, I don't think we actually stand a chance.

(jazz music)

- I'm trying to get rid of this car,

but it's like quitting smoking, it's not easy.

You are so used to certain things

that it is very difficult.

- The Romans had done a lot of bad things

to the ecosystem.

- Yeah.

- But, they had not destroyed it as we could do.

- FEMA estimates for every dollar spent on hazard mitigation

you save $4 in disaster recovery costs.

So we're already spending the money.

There's the sense that it's perhaps too expensive

to prepare for climate change,

but we are already spending the money.

We're spending it after every disaster hits.

(airplane humming)

(jazz music)

- When I was growing up, there was the draft.

So everybody thought they had an obligation to the country.

If you went to a land-grant college you were drafted.

Now it's different.

The trust in government's gone,

the obligation to government is gone.

If we could take some of that spirit of patriotism

and service and rebuild it into doing something

for the environment.

- This entire thing is built out of carbon

that comes out of the atmosphere.

- We need a hundred thousand young people

to give up part of their summer

and form up and really work this.

We could control these pine beetles

that are destroying the forest.

We could plant new trees, but it should be done not only

for pay as a guaranteed job, but it should also be done

for every citizen's obligation to take care of the land.

That's what I'd like to see.

- It sounds like you're trying to inspire a whole generation

of people to pay for it.

- Well, it sounds like something that old guys would say.

(laughs)

- Whoa.

- Baby baby.

Can you smile for us?

That's a good noise.

It's made me want to be more of a fighter for her sake.

The transformation is potentially exciting,

because we can think not only

about losing things that we have always wanted

but also letting go of things

that we perhaps don't benefit from.

We can lose in order to transform into something else.

It's not as kind of confident that things will be okay,

but it finds possibility in a ways that

things will have to change

in kind of really dramatic ways.

(speaking in foreign language)

- And so we are looking at diversifying the types

of crops that we are wanting to plant,

and also work with conservation type programs

to help preserve species and habitat.

And let nature take it's course

and bring back species that we need

and that the crops actually need to be productive.

(jazz music)

- [Warren] We don't want a hurricane or a tropical storm,

they're already geared up the crops are turned in.

They wanna go ahead and get finished.

People wanna know where their food came from.

Well, at some point maybe people will wanna know

where their banker lives and who he is.

And do I have a relationship with him

that when I need some money to fix something

I can maybe find somebody to help me?

- Yeah, I mean, it's not a matter of

the government telling banks what to do,

or telling us what we can do.

No, I mean, there's still lots of possibilities.

We should have smaller banks basically split them up,

and not make them too big to fail.

If they make mistakes, they should fail without causing

a total systems crisis.

And probably what also needs to be done is introduce rules

which make it impossible for the financial sector

to create within the financial sector itself

so much additional debt.

- We have to somehow correct this market imperfection.

- If you want to have a derivative,

if you want to hedge your risk fine,

but you must have exposure to the underlying asset.

- [Robert] I remember I was watching on TV

after a major flood down in Florida,

and they were interviewing this guy and he said,

"My father rebuilt twice, my grandfather rebuilt twice."

And he says, "And I'm gonna rebuild again".

And the reporter turned into the camera and said,

"That's the American way".

Well, I thought the reporter should say, that's stupid.

You can't keep doing it over and over again

that's the definition of insanity.

- So it's basically trust in the monetary management

and trust in the future productivity of a country

that gives us trust in the currency.

Not the idea that there are some gold barons hidden

in the federal reserve.

(jazz music)

- And so there is a point of resistance

at which governments aren't going to be,

have access to capital to address the problem.

- We're rich.

(thunderstorm rumbling)

- You know, the fear is,

if we cannot bail out the system anymore

it will come crushing down with huge side effects.

The hope and that sounds a little cynical

but I think the hope is we probably can reorder

our system only after a crash.

And I think that human history is such that

we are unable to make really fundamental change

in the way we live and the way we organize ourselves

without such a crash.

Nobody wants it, and I'm the last person who wants it.

And if I think back to the 1930s, and I'm German, right?

And you think about what the repercussions

of a major crisis can be.

We just don't know how we would get out on

the other end of the tunnel.

I think without this crisis, I just don't see

enough political leverage to fundamentally alter

the way we organize our financial system.

- When climate change happens,

there will be real problems and it will be real,

as you said, there will be real scarcities,

and it will be real migrants coming, and there will be an...

- And that's what I,

and then will really be broke because it'll be

after you've had that collapse of the inverted pyramid.

And then it's like, then it's

like asking Somalia to fight climate change.

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Wesley] So your criticism would be

that we're not facing reality

and not adapting to it?

- That's correct.

- My answer to that is, I still have faith in democracy.

I believe we can do it as a people.

I believe we can do it as a society.

And I believe we can take the institutions

of the United States that have served this country very well

for over 200 years, and move into the 21st century

and still help lead mankind forward.

It's an article of faith, but it's the faith

that motivates action.

We have almost all the tools

and all the financial resources,

and all the institutions that could solve this problem.

It's the kind of challenge that could bring mankind together

in a way we've never been brought together before.

- I wish there was more conversation,

more guys on the opposite side talking together.

Because everybody as we feel,

there are people feeling opposite from us

that are just as righteous and all of that stuff.

But we ought to get together to see...

- The thing if you get together with people like this,

what you find is the disagreements

are pretty narrow actually. - Yes, that's what I mean.

- The people are mostly agreed on like 95%.

- Yeah.

- But, but there are forces in the culture

that want to sharpen and popularize those disagreement.

- Yeah.

- It's a human nature issue.

- Okay?

- So what sells?

Tell me, what sells?

What do you pay attention to

when it's happening around you?

- You gotta find people--

- Conflict, conflict, conflict.

- It's true. It's true. - That's it.

- To create that kind of a dialogue

between a father and a son,

that love thing, I mean, this is my kid.

You guys must have some wild conversation man.

- It's what gets me.

I totally... - This is the basis

- disagree with that. - of democracy and capitalism.

- No, I disagree with that.

(wind blowing)

(gentle jazz music)