Peak Prosperity

James Wesley Rawles is a former Army Intelligence officer who runs the popular disaster and emergency preparation website SurvivalBlog.com. As an expert who has spent over a decades advising people on how to plan for a wide array of crises — including pandemics — we wanted to sit down asap with Jim to learn his practical recommendations for defending your home and family from the coronavirus threat.

Is the coronavirus the pin that will end the 10 year-long Everything Bubble? Quite possibly, cautions Sven Henrick, technical analyst and lead market strategist for Northman Trader. For too many years now, the financial markets have been conditioned that “dips don’t last”. Confident that the Fed will always provide the liquidity needed to push assets higher, investors have come to believe that risk doesn’t matter.

Given the continued spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, we urgently reached out to John Barry, author of the award-winning New York Times best-seller The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. Two years ago, we interviewed John about the expected implications should a pandemic of similar scale break out in today world. Little did we realize at the time how quickly his insights would prove relevant. John was the only non-scientist to serve on the US government’s Infectious Disease Board of Experts and has served on advisory boards for MIT’s Center for Engineering System Fundamentals and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has consulted on influenza preparedness and response to national security entities, the George W. Bush and Obama White Houses, state governments, and the private sector. John remains quite concerned at how the world’s readiness for a pandemic is woefully lacking, exacerbated by the hyper-connectedness of our modern society (i.e., the ease and speed with with people can travel).

In the midst of our furious coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Chris is giving interviews to numerous interested media outlets. Here's an interview he just recorded hours ago on the TFMR Podcast, which gives a good breakdown of what we know so far about the unfolding situation (as of Saturday, Jan 25, 2020).

The only thing nearly as enlightening as reading David Collum’s epic Year In Review is listening to him and Chris Martenson riff about its highlights. Strap in, grab some eggnog, and listen to this year’s recap.

Revisiting one of the most seminal studies of our era. Fifty years ago, an international team of researchers was commissioned by the Club of Rome to build a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth on a finite planet. In 1971, its findings were first released in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro, and later published in 1972 under the title The Limits To Growth. Few reports have generated as much debate, discussion and disagreement. Though it’s hard to argue that its forecasts made back in the early 1970s have proved eerily accurate over the ensuing decades. But most of its warnings have been largely ignored by policymakers hoping (blindly?) for a rosier future. One of the original seventeen researchers involved in The Limits To Growth study, Dennis Meadows, joins us for the podcast this week. Fifty years later, what does he foresee ahead?

Every week in our Off The Cuff Series, we interview expert minds on the premium side of PeakProsperity.com. These discussions are unscripted and informal, where my partner Chris Martenson and his guest react to recent macro developments and predict the likeliest repercussions. Every once in while, when we have an exceptionally timely conversation, we'll make it available to the public. And we're doing that this week. Chris caught petroleum geologist Art Berman right before he went on stage to deliver a presentation on the limitations of shale oil. The world is finally starting to realize that the profit-making potential of this space was drastically over-hyped. But more important, warns Art, is that the souring sentiment on shale oil is a reflection on the bigger challenge ahead of us: How we will power the world in a future of declining net energy?

One the most personally meaningful podcast interviews we’ve done over the years was Our Evolutionary Need For Community, recorded with Peabody award-winning author Sebastian Junger. Junger is well-known for his NYT-bestselling books The Perfect Storm and War, the latter of which was written after a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Based on his observations while in Afghanistan, Junger noted how much troops in combat valued the social solidarity of their units. In fact, he noted that the loss of this cohesive community, with its sense of purpose and shared responsibility, created prodigious psychological strife when these soldiers returned and tried to re-integrate into civilian life. This dynamic is not just limited to the military; any collection of humans working in tight-knit groups under stress, united in purpose, evidences similar behavior (Peace Corps volunteers, trauma care physicians, etc). In his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Junger explored our evolutionary wiring for community, and paradoxically, how our modern aspirations for “success” and “wealth” attempt to distance ourselves from it — making us unhappier and emotionally unhealthier in the pursuit. Since recording our initial interview with Sebastian, we’ve often shared the insights from it with the Peak Prosperity tribe at live events and in our writings. So this week we decided to reconnect with Sebastian, and hear how his thoughts and conclusions on the topic have evolved since we last talked with him. It’s clear that he believes more than ever that the future prosperity of our society will be rooted in rediscovering how to create and foster the communal bonds our tribal ancestors lived by. And that begins by taking an honest look at the narratives, behaviors, and modern conveniences and temptations that keep us trapped in unhappy, unhealthy isolation.

While at the New Orleans Investment Conference this past weekend, Chris and I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Grant Williams, publisher of the economic blog Things That Make You Go Hmmm and principal of Real Vision TV. There will be no smooth transition back to sustained economic growth, he warns. Instead, the distortion of today’s excessive asset prices will require a systemic reset to fix. Either by a deflationary event that destroys the malinvestment, or by an inflationary event that destroys the currency. Either way, a shock to the system awaits us.

Prolific and exceptionally perceptive author Charles Hugh Smith returns to discuss the insights in his just-launched book Will You Be Richer Or Poorer? Profit, Power and AI in a Traumatized World. The current narrative that our standard of living is not only the best it has been in human history, but thanks to modern technology, is now improving at an accelerating rate. Smith turns this belief on its head, pointing out the many and various ways — many of them “intangible” and not currently measured in dollars — the human condition is fast worsening. Health, purpose, social connection, civil liberties, access to natural resources, career mobility; these are but a few examples.

We all intuitively know that it’s important to have access to locally grown food, especially if it’s grown organically. It gives us calorie resilience in case our standard thousand-mile supply chains become disrupted. It’s more nutrient-rich and healthier for us. It tastes (much) better. Growing it increases our connection to nature. The list of additional benefits is long. Marjory Wildcraft, founder of The Grow Network and author of Grow Your Own Groceries, explains how we can contribute to the local food production movement by using our own windowsills, planters and backyards as a food production system.

Peter Boghossian, co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, shares straightforward conversational ‘hacks’ for having constructive, respectful discussion on any controversial topic — including climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control.

History teaches us that there is no free lunch, reminds Dr. Ben Hunt, publisher of EpsilonTheory.com. And science informs us that even the most simple systems become nearly impossible to predict or control with 100% precision as time and variables change. But our society today is ignoring these lessons. It’s betting that the increasingly excessive distortions required to keep the status quo continuing will succeed, and come at no cost. That’s a losing bet, warns Hunt.

Why do we have the economic policies we do today? These policies drive decision-making on Capitol Hill, corporate boardrooms, and on Wall Street. But who made them, why, and how did they come about? And how well are they serving us? Binyamin Appelbaum has made these questions the focus of his new book The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society, which shines a bright light on the rise of modern Economics and its dominating influence on society. From anti-trust law to central banking, Appelbaum explains how Economics has evolved (metastasized?) into its current form, where the solutions it now offers may be no better (and possibly substantially worse) than the problems it's designed to address.

Paul Wheaton, proprietor of the websites Richsoil.com and Permies.com, has just published a Kickstarter-funded book replete with solutions that most of us can start implementing today. It’s titled: Building A Better World In Your Backyard (Instead Of Being Angry At Bad Guys) In this week’s podcast, Paul provides a romp through a wide swath of the insights within his book, from rocket mass heaters to going ‘poo-less’ to hugelkultur — with a large side helping of his infectious humour. His main point is that there is a TON each of us can do to reduce our impact on nature while boosting our quality of life, while having fun along the way.