Hot Money

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 independant

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.

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 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.

- 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.

- I drove down from San Francisco yesterday on Highway Five

and it's bumper to bumper

for 300 miles on 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.

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

Long tunnels are now pitch dark.

Communications and telephone systems have collapsed.

On motorways cars simply pull over,

if they find a place with a signal.

People now stand in line

outside supermarkets, not to go in,

they're just hoping that it will eventually open.

- 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.

What are we gonna do?

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

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, that's the finale.

- 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.

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.

- You know, what people built up

over years and years and years, has been erased.

- 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,