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July 21, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:02:37
Dr. Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity talks with Mike Adams about currency, ENERGY...
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and I've been a fan for several years of our next guest, but I've not yet had the chance to interview him.
He's gracious enough to join us today.
His website is called peakprosperity.com, and he's the author of a new book called The Crash Course.
It's Dr.
Chris Martinson, Ph.D., and his analysis of world events, starting with COVID and now into economic and financial issues, I think is just absolutely spot on.
Well, it's a real honor to be with you, Mike, and all your listeners today.
So, can't wait to have this conversation.
Oh, me too.
I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.
Now, I would characterize your voice as one of reason.
You are cautious in your conclusions.
You are well-read.
You're obviously highly intelligent.
You have quite a background in the sciences and, I believe, epidemiology as well.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
Well, I came out of the Department of Pathology at Duke, got a PhD in that, but toxicology was my subspecialty, so...
That's where I started.
But then I got an MBA and I went off and I did corporate finance for a while.
So I kind of speak science.
I speak numbers, you know, economic things.
Well, no wonder everything you're saying makes so much sense because you really have to have a big picture view these days to understand the dynamics and the interaction of what's going on.
So you and I both agree we don't want to talk about COVID that much today because it's all been said.
And there are other even, I think, more drastic things happening in the world.
So how about this?
Your book, your course called The Crash Course.
And tell us what that is about.
It's available at booksellers everywhere.
There's also an audio version at audible.com.
Tell us about that book and then that will start off the questions that I have for you.
Sure.
I'd love to.
So the crash course, it's a big picture kind of a synthesis because, as you said, I think we really have to look at the big picture now.
There's so many giant moving pieces.
So my particular gift is to be able to take pretty complicated things and explain them in a way.
So that people can understand them.
You know, people without a whole lot of training or jargon or all of that.
In fact, I think that stuff works against you.
So part of the reason I think I've been so successful at it is I'm not an expert in any of these things.
But I learned enough about economics, about our energy systems, fossil fuels in particular, how they operate, how our debt-based money system really operates at a fine enough level to sort of have the light bulb go off.
And then connect all of that, too, with the environment, which is both pollution we put in, resources we take out.
And when I put all those pieces together, listen, I can save people a bunch of reading.
The Crash Course basically says, no surprise, we're on a really unsustainable trajectory here as a species, not America.
I mean, individual mileage will vary.
Individual countries have different challenges.
But together, on the globe, man, where are the tips of our skis on this?
Seems obvious.
Mike, I've got to be honest.
One of the things I've learned I have in abundance, which is both a curse and a gift, is just common sense.
Right.
Just like you.
I mean, we just add things up and we go, doesn't this make sense?
But only to people who don't already have a pre-conditioned belief system that's standing in the way of them understanding that thing.
It turns out it's a lot of folks.
So to me, it's just I'm giving people common sense stuff.
Honestly, the most Typical and also actually, I think, reasonable feedback I get is, man, Chris, your book scared me, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.
But you, Dr.
Martinson, you have a unique ability, I think, to talk about scary subjects without sounding scary.
So you're very matter of fact.
And like you say, it is common sense.
But I think common sense, rational thinking, and being able to do the math and look at the numbers, even just basic accounting skills, has to lead us to the conclusion that this global debt-based Western financial system will end.
There's no other outcome.
So it's rational to say that, but you're able to say it in a way that doesn't cause people to panic and jump off tall buildings.
Which is a great skill.
So thank you.
Well, thank you for that.
I've worked hard at that skill.
But I've learned something, which is...
So I'm a quick learner, eventually.
It took me forever, Mike, to figure out that data doesn't change people.
Because I make this mistake over and over again.
I think people are built like me.
So I learn slowly that that's not true.
I have this extraordinary ability to shift how I think based on data.
Maybe it's my training.
Maybe I'm just built that way.
Maybe because I'm built that way, I got that training.
You know, however that worked out.
So I've learned that actually to be an effective communicator around these topics, it's really important that you do your own emotional work around it first so that you're not asking people on some level to have to join you in some strange emotional territory.
Like, let's say, like, I'll tell you.
So the first time I read Creature from Jekyll Island, right?
This is the book about the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin.
Nothing but facts, right?
I tell you, that was like ripping a cover off of a sleeping baby.
The whole summer I was just angry, and I'm telling my wife at the time, like, wait a minute, I'm screaming paragraphs at her from this book, because I couldn't believe it, you know?
And it wasn't effective.
And so I learned over time that to be effective, I had to first Yeah, well, you do a great job with that.
So let me start with my questions for you.
So one of the things that I think a lot of people are coming to realize the hard way is how economic abundance is tied to energy consumption.
And if energy starts to get shut down, and I'm curious to hear your views on green energy, the future of it, how viable is it?
Are we far from it?
We need, obviously, increases in energy storage density of storage devices.
But when we start shutting down energy as an end in and of itself, we destroy economic activity as a result.
And that is happening.
Would you agree with that or disagree?
And it's okay.
It's okay.
I mean, we don't have to agree on everything.
We obviously don't.
But but please give us your straight take on these things.
This is an area of violent agreement because because energy is the economy.
And I can make this simple.
Let's imagine that I give you an option to go on one of two rocky islands.
That's it.
There's just a bunch of rocks.
Plus, one of these islands has a pallet full of hundred dollar bills.
And this other one has a pallet full of like pineapples.
Right?
Hope you choose the pineapple.
Because that's your energy source, right?
The money itself is useless in this context.
You know, maybe you could start fires with it if you could bang rocks or something, but get it going.
But energy's everything.
So I was a mountain climber for a long time.
You know, I did high peaks, all this and that.
And sometimes we did these multi-day things.
And here's the truth.
You carried your food, your energy, your calories with you.
Your ability to grow your economy, to make it higher up that mountain was a function of did you have enough calories?
If you got socked in for a couple of days with a storm and you burn through your calories, you might, if you were lucky, you had enough to get back down.
But you didn't have enough to carry on.
Right.
So so energy is is really intimately tied.
So what I do with people is I ask them to put on their energy goggles.
So you're in an airplane, you're in a crowded city, you're you're you're, you know, looking at a picture of the earth from space.
Think about the energy you're seeing there now.
Not the beautiful space scape, not, you know, oh my god, there's a traffic jam here that's driving me nuts.
None of that.
Just think about energy.
And when you put those goggles on, Mike, to me, all I see is energy, right?
It's like seeing the green code when you're Neo in the Matrix in that final scene, right?
Once you see it, energy's everything.
And so it's not just energy, though.
It's surplus energy.
So let's imagine...
Our wonderful gals and guys in the oil business go out and they find a barrel of oil.
Well, that's wonderful, but what if it took them a barrel to get the barrel?
That's right.
Well, now the net returns zero, and great, we have this industry that's taken a barrel to get a barrel, we get nothing.
You and I and everybody listening to this, we're all here because there's surplus left over after that exercise, right?
So they go out and they use a barrel, but they get 100 back like they used to in the 30s.
And then it was, oh, well, now we got 50 back, you know, and then it was 20, and then it was 10.
And now it looks like, you know, whether we're talking tar sands in Canada or the shale wells in Bakken or the Permian in the U.S., now we're getting 5 to 1, maybe 6, 7 to 1.
It's hard to say because the accounting is kind of weird, but we're not getting what we used to, so there's less and less surplus.
All right, what does that mean?
Well, if we run our economy on the surplus and there's less surplus, we're going to end up with less economy.
But the way people are going to experience that is job classifications are going to go away.
It's going to be hard to maintain the complexity.
Businesses are going to have a hard time managing it all.
This is what it's going to feel like.
I submit to you, it's going to feel exactly like it does today.
And if you want to just hop forward in the story and see what the future looks like, go to Germany.
They've already run this experiment.
They hobbled themselves.
First, they shot one foot by taking out their coal plants and dismantling their new plants and going with their Energy VN program, solar and wind.
Brilliant program.
Spent a couple hundred billion.
Worked it out.
They have exceptionally, exceedingly, punishingly high electricity rates to show for it.
And then they shot the other foot by cutting off the gas that they got from Russia and Without a real fallback plan.
Gazprom.
And then Nord Stream, too, on top of that.
And then Nord Stream, right?
So anyway, fast forward, we're going to...
German energy-intensive industries are down over 20%.
That's a crater.
We're talking Great Depression.
We're talking lower than the depths of COVID, which was a political shutdown.
This is an economic shutdown.
That's what the future looks like when your energy starts to go away.
Fossil fuels are extraordinary, but to one of your points, we already saw in the state of New York Bless their hearts.
They decided legislatively they were going to shut down their gas peaker plants where they get 50% of their electricity because they wanted to stimulate more investment in green energy.
And that's the Cortez strategy.
Your dudes are all tired from sailing across the big ocean.
So you burn the ships.
There's no way but forward.
That's what the work is doing.
But here's...
And I know you know this, but this is something probably maybe you don't get a chance to discuss this with many people.
But you and I both understand the delicate web of how affordable energy creates the capacity for global supply chains because transportation, right?
So in order to have global supply chains and get your parts from Korea or China or wherever, you have to have very, very affordable energy.
And that energy that powers, for example, the trans-Pacific container ships, those ships don't run on batteries, right?
And those ships don't run on sails or solar or wind.
And they can't, actually.
There's not a long enough extension cord, despite what people might argue, in order to do that.
So there are certain sectors of the economy, and I know that you know this, Dr.
Martinson, I'm just clarifying for the audience, but certain sectors of the economy that will, for many decades to come, absolutely depend on combustion engines.
For example, farming, diesel tractors, And I own a couple of them myself.
I have some old John Deere tractors.
You know, 110 horsepower at the PTO. Well, there's no battery system that can produce that, right?
Diesel does it, and it does it reliably and cheaply, and you can store the diesel very safely because it's practically non-combustible, which a lot of people don't recognize for some reason.
But your thoughts, Dr.
Martinson, on global supply chains, And what costs of energy and forms of energy, what their impacts are on the collapsing supply chain itself that we are beginning to experience in the West.
This is such an important line of questioning and thanks for setting it up that way because...
There's so much hype, particularly in the West.
By the way, let me separate this.
China's not deluded about this at all.
Their energy minister, which would be the equivalent of our Jennifer Granholm here, head of DOE, laid it all out, six-point strategy.
I understood it all.
They understood the resource issues, the constraints, the adoption cycle, the intermittency, the need for keeping close relations with energy-producing countries still, all of that.
So they get it.
I'm saying I'm principally talking West here, you know, Europe, U.S.
And the energy delusions we're under right now are exceedingly dangerous because, yeah, you know, I can draw a direct connection to our living standards, prosperity.
You know, we need energy for those things.
But to the point, there's we live in not just a complicated economic system.
It is complicated.
Right.
Right.
I don't even know how logistics happens for Walmart, keeping that toothpaste tube tracked and barcoded and stamped in your system so that you can get another one there on time.
It's complicated, but it's also complex.
And the difference between those two words is complex systems, they have emergent behaviors.
You can't predict what's going to happen, right?
So we have a complex global economy, and when we starve it for energy...
It's now not just an economy we have to puzzle through.
It's the intersection of complex humans and complex social organizations and complex politics and geopolitics all trying to sort through a complex thing, which is going to be a terrible time to try and sort through all of that while we're in an energy shortfall.
It's going to be exceedingly different.
But all these people, Mike, just totally delusional, wind now cheaper than coal.
Like, dudes, if that was true, we wouldn't see wind companies going belly up for financial reasons.
We would see it just taken off like wildfire all on its own because nobody has to sell a better energy system.
It does it all by itself, right?
If something better than diesel came along, we'd all use it.
Nobody would have to convince us of anything, right?
No sales job.
So I'm really worried about what happens when we finally sort of blunder American style.
Okay, we'll take this seriously now.
Maybe it was a bad idea to burn the boats, right?
At that point, it's going to be very, very difficult to pick up and keep moving because the analogy would be like, hey, I remember when I pulled a hamstring when I was 18 on the basketball court, but now I'm 60.
Eh, it'll be kind of the same.
No, it won't, right?
I won't have the same recovery energy to go through this the same way.
So, you know, that's how I see it.
And this is...
I mean, let's talk about the environment here for a minute because I think you and I both agree that we want a sustainable, clean environment.
We want energy sources to be as clean as possible.
And, you know, down the road, maybe hot fusion is something that is going to be commercially viable, but it's many, it's probably a couple of decades away before that could even happen, assuming everything works correctly.
And like I said earlier, battery storage technology is not good.
It's ancient, actually, at this point.
Lead-acid batteries are still being used.
I mean, come on.
Didn't they find artifacts of that in ancient Egyptian tombs or something?
It's ancient stuff.
So we don't really have better systems right now, and yet we're being told that we have to transition to these forms of energy that cannot power tractors and boats and also trains.
So think about barges and trains, and I know you've covered this before, but if you can't transport heavy materials such as gravel or beans or coal on river barges up and down the Mississippi, for example, at just, I mean, we're talking fractions for example, at just, I mean, we're talking fractions of a penny per kilogram per mile, right?
That's the kind of math that you have to look at.
If you can't do that, then you can't actually get coal affordably to coal-fired power plants to produce kilowatt hours of energy that is affordable somewhere, you know, in the 10 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour range.
And then everything...
If you lose that efficiency, which is powered by coal and diesel, then your electricity prices go through the roof, and then to charge your EV car can cost $500.
So it's all intertwined.
Your thoughts, please.
Absolutely correct.
So let's take it from the tractor side, because I know this pretty well.
I got a couple tractors, too.
And I talk with farmers about this.
So every so often we see these ivory tower, I'll call them ivory tower eggheads.
And I was one, by the way, for a period of time before I wised up and left.
But, you know, I see these guys out of Stanford, right?
And they put out these big 60 page PowerPoint decks like, look, it's all possible.
I'm like...
Can we please just talk to real-world people quickly?
You know, scale utility operators, you know, electrical engineers, farmers.
Because they're like, oh, it's possible.
Look, and they have these demonstrators.
They have a tractor that they put batteries on, and it sort of worked for a little while, right?
Well, but just come out into the field, because when the farmers have to Do their harvesting.
Typically, they can't all afford a million and a half dollar combine, so they share it.
By the way, everybody needs their crops cropped within the same two-week window.
So if you're spending eight hours charging it and five hours operating it, now everybody has to have their own and they can't afford that.
The whole system breaks down.
It's just a reality, even if you could make it work.
It doesn't work within the actual process that it would need.
It's not fit for purpose because it's not like the farmers could just sort of share this out and go, well, why don't you harvest in January, Mike?
I'll take April.
Right.
By that time, the crops are all rotted and molded and gone.
It doesn't work that way.
So yeah, we have a lot of this pie in the sky.
It's very detached.
It's delusional.
And that's my concern.
All right.
So let's take it to a different bullet point here then.
For a person listening to this, and I think you have a course of some kind here that I want to get to here so people can learn this as well.
Remind me to get to that.
But what's the world going to look like to people Who have grown up in America and they've only known artificially low interest rates and artificial abundance from counterfeit money printing their entire lives.
They've never actually lived in anything resembling price discovery, really, or real markets or real money.
And so they've never seen reality, economic reality, I would argue.
But what's it going to look like for them in the years ahead?
Well, this is where I get very concerned because I'm worried a lot of people aren't prepared.
And it's not just financially prepared, physically prepared, all that.
It's emotionally prepared.
They don't have the right mindset to understand what we're about to come up against.
And we've had it really easy for a long time.
So a lot of people are probably soft, softer than they might want to be coming into this period of time.
Now, because the United States had this thing called the world's reserve currency, this is post Bretton Woods II, this is post August 15, 1971, when we temporarily closed the gold window.
So, what's happened is the United States, we've exported a lot of dollars, and they were petrodollars.
So so the meaning of that is that if anybody in the world, any country wanted to conduct trade and buy oil and almost every country does, then they needed dollars to affect that transaction.
Great.
So they're doing that.
That's fine.
If we had used we, the United States, politically had used the dollar in what I would call a responsible fashion.
But, you know, politics, we couldn't resist using it as a club, as a tool every so often.
And then we started clubbing more and more often.
And while Mike, everything changed February 28th, 2022, when the United States, because of the Russia, Ukraine situation, said to the world, said to Russia, oh, we're freezing your sovereign central bank reserves.
Hundreds of billions.
They're frozen in the system because we're America.
That was old suicide for our currency.
That was a big moment right there because it told the world that Russia's sovereign reserves were neither sovereign nor reserves, and the world started making other plans, right?
Well, they'll never get by without the SWIFT system.
Whoops, they coded one up in a couple weeks.
Well, they'll need MasterCard Visa.
Whoops, they're ready to do that on their own.
Well, they'll never conduct cross-border trades with bank messaging.
Whoops, they're doing it, right?
And this has all been happening way faster than I thought it was going to, so the de-dollarization is happening.
Now let's get back to this mythical American person we're talking about who's not ready.
I liken this to somebody explained it to me once.
It's like we were born on third base, but we thought we hit a triple.
Oh, we're exceptional.
We're America.
That's why we enjoy these high living standards.
But in fact, if our trade balance, which is always in the red, was a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world.
So that's living beyond our means.
We export dollars.
We get all this awesome stuff from the rest of the world.
Now, if the rest of the world says, don't want your dollars no more, what else do you have?
That's when we find everything just shoots up in pricey.
And I'm talking big time.
I mean, Mike, I'm talking $300, $400 a barrel oil.
I'm talking $20, $30 a bushel for corn or oats or something.
I mean, like real hard impacts that people are going to find.
If you think it's shocking at the grocery store now, and it kind of is, just wait.
There's no way this can turn out well.
Because we would have to, to repair this, well...
Do you see China just actually brokered a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia?
Chias and Sunnis got them to shake hands and open diplomatic relations.
I'd love to be in that meeting.
Like, what did you say?
That's pretty impressive.
But it's showing that we've lost our currency in the region with the largest remaining pools of exportable oil.
That's an important distinction here.
And we've also lost our connection and contact with Russia for God knows how long at this point.
So that's another point.
So basically we've cut ourselves off from the number one, the number two, the number three exporters of oil at this point in time.
You know, that's tricky to come back from.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the implications of this are going to be felt...
I could say for years or decades, but really, it's going to be felt until the end of the empire, in my opinion.
This is a pivot point for the American empire.
Now, let me go back to something you said that I think is really key.
The SWIFT system, perhaps a lot of people don't know this, but the SWIFT system is really a messaging system.
It's simply banks trade messages and then they're audited to make sure that one bank added this amount to its ledger and this other bank deducted this amount from its ledger.
That's it.
That's really what Swift is.
And Russian programmers are some of the best programmers in the world, it turns out.
And they can build systems, even decentralized systems, peer-to-peer messaging systems or transactional systems, you know, cryptocurrency systems.
And so I want to ask you then about this announcement of what's coming up in August.
Russia has announced that as part of this BRICS meeting, they intend to roll out an international transactional clearinghouse system that is rumored to be somehow backed by gold and yet based on a decentralized ledger system, I suppose, resembling cryptocurrency, they intend to roll out an international transactional
system, I suppose, resembling cryptocurrency, which, and let me preface this by saying, it would make it the only honest ledger in international trade, because every other ledger can be cheated by the governments that run them, as we have seen, as you just mentioned.
So what's the upshot of this?
The BRICS meeting, a new transactional clearing system, and also Russian programmers versus American clubbers, to use your metaphor.
They're running around clubbing people with dollars.
Yeah, it's a weapon.
So, this is great, great.
I love it, having conversation at this level, because this is where it happens.
So, they might have upgraded by now, but Mike, it was probably 10 years ago.
I just, I didn't even, I knew, I'd heard about the Swift system.
So, I'm in a banking office.
I'm like, can you show, can I see this thing?
It's like, oh, sure, there's a special terminal.
They open up the Swift system.
You'll love this.
So, the screen that pops up, though, as it's loading, Vista.
You remember that old operating system?
Oh my, from the 1990s.
Yeah, it's still running on Vista.
I'm like, okay.
He's like, oh, that's an upgrade, because it was coded in the 70s on COBOL. So the idea that, like, oh, you couldn't recreate the Swift system, like, listen, some dudes did it in the 70s on COBOL. I'm pretty sure Russian programmers probably, what did that take, like, a couple days?
Open source code can do better.
Absolutely.
So we think about, oh, what's money?
You know, it's got to be unit of account, store of value, fungible, all that.
Actually, it has to have this other thing, which is trust.
And so people have lost faith and trust, or actually they do trust, now that the United States is going to club people with the dollar.
And so if they set up, this would be just, you build a better mousetrap.
If they announce that they've set up an open ledger settlement system and messaging system that has a full faith and credit because it's backed by something like gold, just watch.
All these countries are going to be, you know, like Nairobi, like, hmm, I'll use that instead, right?
You're going to see all these countries just stream towards it because, frankly, it's a better way to go forward.
And, you know, I was in China a long time ago, maybe 10 years ago again.
And I was talking with a fairly high level Chinese official about all this kind of stuff.
And and he said to me, Chris, the business of China is business.
The business of the United States is war.
We think that business is a better strategy going forward.
Right.
And they always have.
So you gave me this this longish tale about how in 1492, when Columbus came over and was skinning Hispaniola people alive, China had a trade delegation running around a big armada of ships, two silver ships, a big flagship.
And they went to places like South Africa and, you know, current, you know, modern day Chile.
And they brought trade emissaries back as revere dignitaries and they opened trade routes.
It's just different model.
Right.
So I see the old way of the United States.
We project our power with aircraft carrier groups as being kind of anachronistic and possibly dangerously so in a world of hypersonic Kinsall, you know, Mach 15 missiles and all this.
I just don't think we're going to be able to fight our way through this thing and project our power because we're America.
I just I don't think it's going to work out.
I think I think the past Yeah.
Good point.
I think you're exactly right.
They do not know that yet.
It's very clear from people like Blinken and Nuland and others and Sullivan in the State Department.
They do not know that they're living in the present.
I'm really glad you stated that because here we are always constantly talking about the conflict in Ukraine as if the West is beating Russia.
And so the U.S. State Department is firing press releases, but Russia is firing artillery.
And I've said that artillery is the ultimate fact check because when those rounds burst and crater near you, you can't dismiss it with propaganda.
It's a kinetic shrapnel event with concussive qualities that are life-changing or life-ending.
And so here we are looking at America just pushing out propaganda and stories and Not even manufacturing the ammunition, Chris, that is necessary to engage Russia in a land war.
I mean, you'd have to fire 100,000 artillery rounds a month.
We don't make even a fraction of that right now.
And in order to build the factories, to build that much artillery would take years and would also take a labor pool that no longer exists in America.
There's nobody in America that wants to work in an ammunition factory.
Period!
Right.
I'm so glad to hear you say this.
Actually, I think the Ukraine war It's a huge game-changer.
You wouldn't know it from reading the press, right?
They're grudgingly admitting that the offensive that didn't happen in spring and now has managed to go one kilometer instead of, you know, all the way to the sea is somehow stalled.
No, it's a complete failure, and it didn't work out.
But against that, we have to understand that NATO emptied its combined warehouses down to the pain point, right?
So they said, ah, I can't send more than this many leopards and all this and that.
And so now the United States is sending cluster munitions because we're out of other stuff.
But here you go.
Here's some stuff nobody else will let us use.
How about some, you know, flares or whatever?
Yeah.
And so and so this is something I actually tracked really aggressively was was because I don't believe either side that was like this was the most heavily propagandized war I've ever seen.
All right.
So what do I go for?
I go for source videos and I'm watching these little these these little Lancet I'm very keen to see if I've seen a video before.
I'm watching like 10 to 12 new ones a day, right?
And I'm just like, oh my gosh.
This has changed.
And I feel like we're at that moment, Mike, like in World War I, there was this famous French general sent 600,000 horsemen to their death, the Cursairs with the chest plates, right?
Sent them to their death because he couldn't figure out that machine guns kind of changed the game a little bit, right?
Just wave after wave.
So I think we just learned that because of the robotics and the drones and all this and that, that We have now a whole new game.
So here's what the United States and the NATO military now excel at.
We excel at building really expensive stuff that can't be done or redone very quickly, right?
Remember, you're hearing about high Mars missiles, high Mars, high Mars, and you stopped hearing about them because they ran out.
There was nothing to report.
They were all out.
And those are built down in Huntsville, Alabama, by Raytheon technicians with white gloves one at a time.
They probably named them.
It's just not fit for purpose.
So I just think we learned that all those years and trillions of dollars got us nothing.
I would say I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's the perfect metaphor for our economy.
So you have a highly complex economy which has extreme vulnerabilities because complex systems, as you mentioned earlier, not only do they have emergent properties that are not well understood, but they also have very high vulnerabilities.
So one part breaks the system.
And you think about just automobile manufacturing, much less tank manufacturing, but also the elements and minerals that go into the manufacturing...
For example, just making artillery relies on what's called cotton linters, which come almost exclusively out of China.
It actually has to be grown and harvested from cotton in order to stuff the charges that go into the artillery rounds, and cotton linters are in short supply.
And that's just one example, but we have a society that is built on such complexity, and I think, Dr.
Martinson, I think that we kind of Inadvertently, we've been sleepwalking as a species into the surrendering of the simplicity that once gave us redundancy and reliability.
And now we find ourselves in such a highly complex society that when the internet goes down for a day or some service goes offline like Amazon, AWS, 5,000 websites fail and people lose their minds.
And I think it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Well, it is.
And to get to the root of this, all complex systems, that's what we're really talking about, right?
You know, cotton linters and, you know, where do all these components come from?
It's a complex system, and so it needs to keep operating.
But all complex systems owe their order and their complexity.
To the energy that's flowing through them.
That's right.
I'm a complex system.
So are you.
You stop the food going in.
If you stop the energy going into my body, I'm going to simplify in about three weeks, right?
That's true.
Get a lot simpler.
But, you know, the earth is a complex system.
If the sun wasn't there beaming its energy across that complex system, a lot of order and complexity would go away, right?
All this beautiful thing we call nature and life.
So, that's true of our economy as well.
And what's happening is it's slowly, slowly, slowly starting to get starved because all that really high net energy stuff of the past, we're working our way through it.
It's not gone, but we're working our way through it.
And we're slowly replacing it with tar sands and Shale oils and stuff like that, which, again, it might be an economically useful or even energetically useful thing to do, but it's not the same activity.
It's not like, well, we got a barrel of oil out of the Bakken.
It's just like Spindletop in 1938, right?
No totally different beasts.
And so that's what's happening.
And the thing that concerns me is my first edition of that Crash Course book came out in 2011, and the video series came out in 2008.
I thought Ta-da!
You know, people would sort of wake up to this idea.
Like, nope, I got some interest from China.
Some people who think this way all on their own, and so that's who we have at Peak Prosperity, but it's basically people who have common sense and can think and stuff.
So it's wonderful to be able to hang out with them.
But this is really serious.
I feel like if I'm going to be that guy out on the sandwich board on the street, the end is near.
But I want to tell people, this is serious.
We don't have any serious plans.
We only have plan A, which is somehow we'll get more oil somehow.
We're America.
We're special.
And there's lots of things, though, that we could be doing nationally.
And we're not.
We're just not doing anything.
China is.
We're not.
Well, in fact, I want to talk about your website, peakprosperity.com, and I love the fact that even the name of your site includes the word prosperity, because really, I think what your information wants to achieve with people is to show them how to navigate these somewhat scary issues that we're talking about.
How do you make it through with your assets intact or your sanity intact?
Or on a more macro scale, how do we make it through with a constitutional republic intact, right?
Or international trade or all the things that go with international trade.
So how about this?
Could you just give us kind of an overview of the Peak Prosperity website and community and your course and whatever you have that our audience can connect with?
Sure, I would love to.
Thanks for the opportunity.
So this Peak Prosperity, this website's been up since about 2008 or so, and we have a really nice community of people who are all over the world who fundamentally, they want to be educated, they want the appropriate context, they want to have conversations like this.
So we set the context.
But context without action is just anxiety producing.
So we're really about the actions we can take.
It looks like we're talking some stuff that some people on First Blush are like, no, this is liberating because, in fact, we're getting away from these destructive lifestyles and we're learning about all the things you talk about, which is, hey, there's better health available here.
These people over here are trying to keep us fat, dumb, stupid, and angry, right?
So let's get rid of what our culture wants.
So it's about taking responsibility, fashioning our own lives.
The solution space of this is a book called Prosper!
We walk people through eight different forms of capital.
Financial capital, absolutely, I believe people should get to financial freedom.
It absolutely killed me.
The people said, well, I had to get the magic holy shot and a booster because I'd lose my paycheck.
That's when you're a slave, right?
That's, you know, I hate that people got forced.
So financial freedom, sure.
But none are so poor as those who only have money, right?
So we talk about social capital.
What is it?
How do you build it up?
Why is it so important?
Your emotional capital, really important, related to your spiritual capital.
Your knowledge capital.
Like, yeah, you can Google and YouTube some things up, but it's different when you've run your first batch of whiskey, you know, or kept your first hive of bees, right?
So get the skills, do those sorts of things.
Big, big fans of that.
And ultimately, so we're a community of people that are attracted to this kind of thinking.
And it's very positive at its heart.
We have a subscription service.
I keep the trolls out.
We got to keep the AI bots out.
And this is how I sustain the business.
So the subscription service is you get a lot of content and access to the community.
And for your listeners, if they go through the process, first 30-day money-back guarantee, you don't like it, no questions asked.
We're straight up about that.
But for your listeners, if they put in a promo code, ADAMS50, they'll get 50% off.
So whether they want to buy a year or a month, yeah, just for your tribe.
So just try us out.
So is that on your website, do they click membership or how do they get to that?
Yeah, there's a membership that's right at the top.
There's a tab there, membership.
It'll take you to a page.
You'll pick.
Got it.
Do I want to be, you know, there's two flavors.
We have these, we have our...
Our key supporters, these are people who believe in the mission, and their benefit is any of the events we're going to hold, they get to come to for free.
So we have an event coming up here at my farm.
This is my home studio, and we're around about 250 acres here in Western Mass.
We've got cows and all that stuff.
And so people come here once a year for what we call our Honey Badger Gathering, and about 300 people or so show up.
So the key supporters show up for free.
My insiders get a much reduced ticket count.
Everybody else pays full freight.
So a lot of fun.
Wow.
Well, that's great.
I'm not surprised that you live on acreage.
Because I do too, and I take care of a lot of animals and so on.
And I find that that's an important part of the mental health.
We have to maintain contact with the real world, even as we spend so much time talking about these abstractions like money.
But if you lose sight of reality, then you can go too far down the rabbit hole and never come back.
I've seen that happen to people.
Absolutely.
Me too.
Okay.
Yeah.
So peakprosperity.com.
And then the book, again, is The Crash Course.
It's available as an audio book.
What's the duration of that book, by the way, in terms of audio?
Maybe it'll say here.
I should know.
No, I'm trying...
Oh, here it is.
12 hours and 23 minutes.
I got it.
Okay.
That sounds about right.
Okay, that's great.
See, this is...
I like to recommend this to a lot of people because sometimes I get people...
Maybe this happens to you too, but sometimes I'll get people who will discover one of my podcasts and, you know, it's like podcast number 5722 or whatever, and they're like, oh my gosh!
Um...
How could that be?
And I need a way to bring people up to speed, which is the crash course, right?
It's perfect because it gives people the big picture view of what's happening and maybe makes them more literate about what is money and how it works.
So I think your book, your course is perfect for that.
Are you getting feedback like that from a lot of people?
Yes, it does a really good job.
Since it's been out long enough, I've got Probably at this point, thousands of pieces of feedback from people saying, big stuff, too.
You'll recognize this.
Well, I read the book.
I had to sit on it for a while.
I tried to prove it wrong, but now I own a farm in Georgia.
They make big changes as a consequence because it's pretty inescapable logic.
There's...
This whole thing's going to crack at some point.
It just has to.
We've overdone the monetary system.
When your money system breaks, your society breaks.
That's Venezuela and all its looting today.
That's Zimbabwe at the time.
Our money is our social contract.
It's been abused.
It's going to break.
That's just math at this point in time.
So, I want people to be ready for that, and it doesn't mean it's the end of the world, though, because we create our parallel systems, and I believe in the lifeboat philosophy, which is that if the whole world goes mad, there'll be people in my own town that get kind of hurt by that.
We're going to be here producing food, got plenty of junk silver to restart the local economy.
We'll have a way of operating already, which, if we're lucky, will put us on a par with, say, the Mormons or the Amish or other communities that, like...
I was just talking about the Amish and the Mennonites the other day and how they would be just minimally impacted by a collapse event.
And by the way, as you know, new studies talk about the Amish children have virtually none of these chronic degenerative diseases that plague the rest of society.
What the Amish do, and Mennonites and so on, that's very wise, is they live close to their food.
Their supply chain is very small, which creates resiliency, redundancy, locality, you could say, right?
And so they can make it through a lot of things.
In fact, I think the greatest threat to the Amish is going to be the non-Amish that try to raid their farms to get food.
And so I was wondering if Amish...
Have AR-15s or not, but I didn't come up with an answer in my mind.
Do Amish own firearms?
You would think they would have to as tools on a ranch.
Any idea?
Yeah, well, I've met a few that do have it, but only as tools, right?
As tools.
Maybe a shotgun, a.22, you know, just working things.
Yeah, exactly.
Probably not battle rifles, but you've got to have a ranch rifle, you would think.
Yeah.
Something else I'd like your take on here.
Are you doing okay on time if we go another five minutes?
Sure.
Okay.
I was listening to Robert Kiyosaki, and he was quoting somebody who said that what makes people poor is that they don't know the difference between real money and fake money.
I thought that was...
A very insightful quote.
And can you share with our audience what that means to you?
First of all, do you agree with the quote?
And what's behind that in your view?
Yeah.
So Robert and I are good friends.
And I may have helped influence at least some of that.
I know Mike Maloney influenced the rest of it.
Oh, yeah.
Mike Maloney is great.
With all the rest of it himself, too.
So the way I deal with this, and this is actually in the Crash Course book, I think people need to understand what wealth is.
We have to differentiate wealth from money and then money from currency.
So here's how I break this down.
Primary wealth, that's the land you own.
It's the soil.
If you have rich soil, you're wealthier than if you have really cracked dirt, bad dirt.
It's having rich coal seams, fishing grounds, thick timber, all of that.
That's primary wealth.
A nation with primary wealth can actually develop a high standard of living if it organizes itself well.
If you don't have any of that stuff, what are you going to do?
You've just got sand.
You're in the desert.
Not much happens, right?
So primary wealth is necessary for secondary wealth to come out of this story.
And secondary wealth is the means of production.
It's lumber in the lumber yard.
So we went from trees, the primary, to the secondary.
So secondary wealth is when humans have done something to it, we've transformed it.
It's the factories, means of production, productive real estate, productive land, arable land, all of that stuff, right?
That's been worked in some way.
Then tertiary wealth, then, is this thing.
It's an abstraction, as you said, right?
So it's the money we layer on top of that.
So money is supposed to be a call on that stuff.
As I mentioned in my little island rocky example, you could have all the money in the world, but what are you going to do with it?
Well, you're going to spend it on either primary or secondary wealth, right?
You're going to buy something with it.
I like money because I can get food at the store and make the lights come on and do things with it, right?
People have gotten, I think, a little away from this idea that money isn't real wealth.
Money is a marker.
It's a claim on that wealth.
And then debt is a claim on future money, which is a derivative concept.
But what we have today isn't even money.
It's currency.
And Mike Maloney does a great job of distinguishing this.
And what's the difference?
Well, a currency violates one or more of the tenets of money.
Remember, store of value, unit of account, fungible.
Our money violates that first one.
It's not a store of value.
In fact, the Federal Reserve tells you they have a target for how fast they want it to violate that principle.
That's true.
2% a year, 3% a year, whatever they're saying, right?
So because of that, we have a currency system.
And as well, money has that other thing I talked about that should envelop trust.
I don't trust the Fed.
They're going to do what they're going to do.
Listen, next emergency, they're going to have to print again.
But if you look at what the Fed did, it's like, well, we had a little emergency in 87, so we had to print a little.
Then we had an emergency in 94, so we had to print some more.
Then we had one in 98, so we had to print a lot more.
Then 2000, well, that was a real emergency.
Now we had to print a lot more.
Then 2008, now we had to print a lot, lot.
And then for whatever reason, we bring it even more than that over 2011, 12, 13, 15, 17, and then COVID. That was a real bad note.
And that dwarfed everything else.
Everything.
So to me, it's like a car that got into a light skid.
Now we're just spinning the wheel randomly, you know, hoping to not end in the ditch, right?
It's going to end in the ditch at some point.
And that's when people discover that money, or what we call money, is not real wealth.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just not.
And it's...
Well, I want to ask you about crypto, too, as one of the last questions here today, because...
I have come to realize the intrinsic properties of crypto is being able to have rapid borderless transactions, for example, that governments can't weaponize and governments can't control.
They can't control the supply of Bitcoin, for example.
So it's an honest ledger.
But I've had some people ask me, well, what about the price volatility?
You don't know if your crypto is going to go up or down.
And my answer is, well, I know for sure the dollar is losing value every day.
That's 100% certainty.
So I'm willing to take crypto risk because it might go up.
The dollar is not going to go up.
I don't think they're going to shrink the money supply.
Not on purpose.
Not on purpose, yeah exactly.
What's your take, just out of curiosity, on crypto and the future of digital money?
Well, as long as there's a functioning internet, I think it's a great thing.
I do have some concerns there longer term, you know, for reasons.
But because Bitcoin has that one thing, right?
It's got 21 million total supply, plus some have already been lost.
So it's going to be less than that, right?
And that's it, right?
So that gives it its value.
And I think that's what's attractive about it, is this idea that it's out of human hands.
That, to me, is any legit money system.
I don't care if it's gold.
I don't care if it's, you know, rocks from the moon.
I don't care what you use, but it has to be something that humans can't artificially inflate the supply of, right?
So I like the idea that Bitcoin handcuffed in the code through the ledger system and said, yeah, no, that's it.
That's how many you get, right?
And so that's really important because that puts that trust envelope around the currency again.
And if I was going to be, you know, wave my magic policy wand, I would say, okay, here's what we do.
The Federal Reserve, they can keep doing what they do, but they now have a parallel competing currency.
And...
And if we could pay our taxes in either or, then let the better currency win.
I'm a big believer in competition.
I think it starts to right a lot of ships.
Fed hasn't had any competition.
Remember, they're a private banking cartel.
Your listeners know this, right?
But they've run amok, and they've done what they've done, and they've lost the plotline entirely.
So I do like gold as that parallel currency.
I do like gold.
Primary wealth, trees, rocks, land, soil.
And I do like crypto, not cryptos, let me just say digital assets like Bitcoin that you know that the supply is finite and fixed.
There's a lot of other ones out there I'm a little more dismissive of.
of.
I think they have interesting features that I can sort of make a value case for, but since they can be sort of expanded infinitely, I know how the story ends because it's people involved.
Oh yeah, exactly.
This is one of the things that gives gold its intrinsic value as well, is that it's very difficult to get it out of the ground, and it's a rather predictable inflation rate of 1.5% per year or something added to the Gold supply.
And, by the way, it takes diesel fuel to get gold out of the ground, right?
A lot of diesel.
So there's an automatic limitation, a throttle of that.
No one's just going to come up with millions of kilos of gold overnight unless a giant gold rock falls out of the sky, in which case you may have other problems.
You will.
Right.
Yeah, like maybe the sun being blocked for three years and food crops not growing, but whatever.
Well, Dr.
Martinson, this has been really fascinating.
Yeah.
Did you want to add some final thoughts here?
One last thing.
It's related to that 1.5% per year expansion of the gold supply.
I can make a case that in the next 10 years that goes pretty close to zero.
And the reason for that is that, probably complicated a little, but this is the kind of analysis I do all the time back at my site.
The United States, we're about two years away from understanding that the Permian, which is our only remaining shale basin that is not past peak, right, starts to hit its plateau.
We're going to have to wake up and listen to the oil executives operating there and find out that, oh, Well, we're now fully at peak oil here in the U.S. Maybe there's more off the coast, but those aren't opened up and yada yada.
But that's when I think things get serious.
So honestly, for your listeners, I don't want to put false urgency on anything, but I think at best, somewhere between 2025 and 2030, this whole story changes.
And as you said, it's not just like a bump in the Empire's story arc.
This is a long twilight of this thing.
And I think it's based on the idea...
That we simply don't have the resources to carry on, as we have been.
So unless Area 51's got some magic alien technology energy system, and I'll change my story if that's true, This story is pretty well locked in right now.
Well, don't tempt the commenters who will put...
They will document all those in the comments beneath this video, I'm sure, of all these different systems that perhaps might exist or not.
But nevertheless, in terms of practical matters, it's very clear that...
If we don't have abundant, affordable, excess energy, then the lifestyle that we've come to know comes to an end.
And also, by the way, the dominance of the U.S. empire comes to an end as well.
And so does its currency.
And Mike Maloney nails it.
I've listened.
He's educated me on so many issues.
I really have to thank him.
He's been an amazing educator this entire time.
So, Dr.
Martinson, just in wrapping this up, let me just give out your website again.
Peakprosperity.com is the site.
And go there, folks.
Read the articles.
Listen to the updates.
And, again, if you want to become a member, the discount code is, what, ADAMS50? Is that right?
Yep.
That's it.
Okay.
Adam's 50.
So see, folks, I made it worth your while saving you some bucks right here.
Just type in Adam's 50.
Okay.
And then, let's see, on Amazon and other booksellers, you can find The Crash Course and An Honest Approach to Facing the Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment.
So, Dr.
Martinson, I just want to thank you for the body of work that you're doing and for taking the time to join us today.
I'm honored that you would do so, and I'm a fan of your work, and I think you're going to help a lot of people get squared away here for what's coming.
Well, likewise, Mutual Admiration Society in play, so thank you for what you do, and thanks for the opportunity to be here today.
Well, absolutely.
You're very welcome.
The thing is, I make it sound scarier, though, sometimes.
People tell me, like, why can't you just talk like Chris Martins and make it all sound, you know, very...
Very ordinary, kind of.
No, not ordinary, but at least manageable.
And I'm like, well, okay, it is going to be manageable for those of us who make it.
So how do we make it?
That's the thing.
We've got to navigate all this.
But, folks, it takes different approaches.
Some people resonate with different messages, and that's why we love to have people like Dr.
Martinson on.
If you know someone who his message will resonate with, Spread the word about peakprosperity.com.
Get his books, share his books, and help other people wake up to this, and you may help save lives.
So, once again, thank you, Dr.
Martinson.
It's been a pleasure.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
And thank you for watching.
As always, feel free to repost this interview on other websites and other platforms.
You have our permission to do so.
Just give a link to peakprosperity.com.
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
You'll notice we did not censor ourselves in this interview because we believe in free speech at Brighteon.com.
Thanks for listening.
God bless you all.
Take care.
All right.
Well, that was an interesting interview.
No kidding.
Yeah, and just what an amazing individual, incredibly well-informed.
I did not know until right before the interview that he was going to offer that discount code for membership on his site.
I just wanted to let you know that's not an affiliate code.
We don't earn anything on that.
It's just a discount for you.
And that's ADAMS50. I think the numeral is 50, I think is the way that works.
So, A-D-A-M-S-5-0.
Which, funny thing, that's what I've written on the side of my Barrett rifle, come to think of it.
Hmm, what a coincidence.
But nevertheless...
I just want to say, be ready for what's coming.
All of the smart people that I know agree that the end of the dollar is near.
That the end of Western civilization actually is near.
And almost mercifully, the end of the criminal cabal running the United States government right now is also coming to an end because the end is near of that as well.
And that might be the one piece of positive news in all of this because the regime in power is committing so many crimes against America and the people of the world, innocent people everywhere, and crimes against children and crimes against mothers and crimes against reason and crimes against the church and so on that, you know, frankly, if something radically changes and we have to Sort of reboot society.
That's not such a bad thing, is it?
I mean, how do we end this madness?
And I think the only answer is the madness eventually leads to collapse.
I don't think we vote our way out of this.
I really don't.
I'm not even sure we get to the next election in 2024.
I don't think the bureaucracy will ever change.
I think collapse is the only way forward, actually.
And so we should be ready to navigate that collapse and be ready to rebuild on the other side.
And also, be ready to arrest the pedophiles, the liars, the propagandists, the traitors, the murderers.
You know, the child mutilators, the child traffickers, the groomers, all these people.
We should be ready to arrest them all on the other side of this, especially those who have committed treason against this nation.
Many of them will try to flee to other countries, of course.
I mean, we're living under a criminal cabal.
We are living under tyranny, terrorism, by an illegal, illegitimate regime of child mutilating pedophile lunatics.
And it's going to end at some point.
It'll probably end itself.
It'll probably implode and it'll collapse or something will break.
You're starting to see the signs of that now.
And then we need to step in and we need to try to rebuild society rooted in reason and rationality and true justice, true rule of law.
And individual liberties and rights and free speech and all the things that the Bill of Rights talks about and that the Constitution mentioned.
Maybe with a few enhancements as well.
Such as, the right to keep and bear arms shall really not be infringed.
What part of this do you not understand?
Like, we should add that language.
But anyway, those are my thoughts.
It's Friday.
Unbelievable.
So I'll probably have some special reports for you over the weekend, but I don't know exactly what my plans are.
Kind of depends on the way things go.
So thank you for tuning in.
Thank you for...
Thank you for listening to this combination of news and entertainment and satire.
Because half of what I talked about is a joke, isn't it?
I mean, we're watching a joke run our country into the ground.
It's crazy.
But thank you for listening.
And I'll be back with you probably over the weekend sometime.
All right.
This is Mike Adams here for Brighttown.com and NaturalNews.com.
Take care.
I want to give you some resources that can help you prepare, given the topics that we just covered today.
Of course, we mentioned the satellite phone store, SAT123.com.
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Hoplite Armor is American-designed and American-made ballistic body armor that is extremely effective and also relatively lightweight.
They've got a lot to choose from here, not just this one armor kit, but I have their armor and it is outstanding.
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Again, shieldarms.com is where you can check that out.
If you're looking for food supplies, be sure to check out my online store, healthrangerstore.com.
And we've got the organic Ranger buckets available.
We have pallets of these right now.
They won't last, especially as the nukes start to fly, obviously.
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And then also, if you're looking at gold and silver, in addition to checking out Steve Quayle, don't forget to check out metalswithmike.com, which will take you to the Treasure Island page here and Treasure Island page.
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So those are just some resources.
Let's see, arcseedkits.com, also for garden seeds and plants.
There are other resources that I'll mention from time to time.
Just check out my podcast at brighteon.com and you'll hear about a lot of survival and preparedness strategies and action items that you can take to survive the difficult times that are in some ways already here, but certainly accelerating and getting worse.
Thank you for watching today.
God bless you all.
I'm Mike Adams of brighteon.com.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
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