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220621_ep66_part-1_Economic Collapse is Unavoidable

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:00] Economic collapse is on the way. Come on. Let’s go take a look at what I’m talking about. Hello, everyone. Dr. Chris Martenson here. And today we’re going to talk about the economy and things financial. As you know, I spend a lot of time in the past, maybe I don’t know. I have spent a lot of time in the past looking at systems, economic systems, how they come together, how they relate to our energy systems, also our environment, as well as looking at things like exponential growth. That’s the suite of ease that I typically look at. And to me, everything I’ve been doing about reporting around COVID is merely a fractal representation of things we’re seeing play out in other places, meaning that if you can decipher how people behaved or failed to behave appropriately during COVID, you’ll probably understand you have some insights into how people are going to behave or failed to behave when it comes to other important things. Now, COVID matter of life and death, we learned some things. We learned that that didn’t really matter to administrators, to certain institutions, that that somehow their narratives and the systems of incentives, perverse though they may be had combined to create a system where, hey, your health, my health were somewhere way down at the bottom of the list of things to be worried about.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:01:21] So today we’re going to be talking about economic collapse. This is the age of consequences. What we’re talking about today is something that’s been a long time in the making. These chickens are coming home to roost. And so I want to talk to you about that. If you understand these systems, you have a chance of being prepared. You have a chance of being coming resilient.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:01:38] You have a chance of understanding what’s about to happen in normal times. You can ignore all of this stuff I’m about to tell you. Macro macro stories, macroeconomics, macro energy trends. Who cares, right? It really doesn’t matter. Run your business, run your life, pick your kids up from school. Do what you need to do. Keep your focus on your own life. And hey, you know, everything else will sort itself out. That’s not the time we live in now. We’re in a very different time. It’s exceedingly important that you pay attention to the macro stories that are out there. So it is all about the systems. Here was a comment in a reply to this playing Russian roulette where I was talking about, well, I asked the question, is Europe committing economic suicide today? I would put a Y in front of that and ask, why is Europe committing economic suicide? I don’t know. But they are. And that’s all related to the energy story that’s just breaking over there every day. It’s just I’m astonished what I’m seeing. But Love Sees wrote in response to that, he is rocking it. Your last video covered so much of the complexity of intertwined failing systems. We need to change direction and fast back to life, love, community and planet. Back to the garden. Shine on Peak Prosperity. Thank you for that. Love Sees. It’s about the systems. We have to understand these systems. And so this would be the year if you haven’t done it yet. I put out a really big body of work in 2008, updated in 2014 due for another upgrade update this year. But it’s the crash course and it covers all these different things like that. 26 separate chapters talking about things like the money system, inflation, discerning the difference between growth and prosperity, what the Fed is up to, how it operates, what we need to understand about debt, liabilities, demographics, all of these things bubbles, oil, cheap oil, energy, economics, all these things actually are a system view which combine the economy, energy, environment into a single whole.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:03:38] And if you see that a lot of people report this is a real life changing body of work that I put out. Well, it changed my life. Honestly, I didn’t. As I was creating it, it emerged. And once I had the whole thing in one spot, I said, Well, I got to do some different things. And boy, have I as a consequence of doing this work and seeing the world in this way, I changed where I live, what I do, how we garden friends. Everything changed as a consequence of that. So I guess if you’re not in a position where you feel like your life needs to change and don’t watch this because it might change it, it has for a lot of people, this is called the crash course. That’s how you find it at Peak Prosperity. Com. It’s right there on the front page. There’s a tile click that or you can go directly. There’s the other link down there below Peak Prosperity dot com slash courses slash Crash Course. Well worth your time and we’re going to cover some of the topics from that here today. So I say economic collapse is unavoidable. Now, Jamie Dimon, the president of Jp morgan, maybe is a little bit more diplomatic and says to brace yourselves for an economic hurricane. He says now usual banker speak. They’re usually on the sell side, know us, want to keep us happy and fully invested. When I say economic collapse, what do I mean? A lot of people misinterpret that to mean it goes to heck in a straight line. And we’re at Mad Max by next Tuesday at 930 in the morning. It’s not what I mean. I mean that we’re going to experience certain sectors of the economy are going to decline and they’re going to stay that way for a really long time.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:05:11] Why? Couple of reasons. First, the regime of endless printing is over. The Fed had to print and print in print and print has been doing that for about 50 years now. That’s coming to an end. Hey, could they print more? Sure. But that means then the currency or the dollar comes to an end. So I’m going to talk about that dynamic today. And it means all of this is that when I say economic collapses, it’s that we have to begin living within our means. So we have economic means that we’ve lived outside of borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, living beyond our means here in the United States. But this is true for a lot of the world. We’ve been living beyond our planetary means as well, in terms of what we are doing, in terms of converting beautiful, rich, thick soil into lifeless dirt, sucking down aquifers that take 10,000 years to recharge, to use today to grow things, we’re doing things that are frankly unsustainable. So we’re beyond our budgets there, but we’re way beyond our energy budget. Such an important story there. If I could just have everybody understand one thing would be that energy story not come by that kind of honestly, because in my own way, because I’m a biologist by training my pathology degree from Duke University, I was doing a lot of cell biological research. Neuro toxicology was my specialty, fancy way of saying I would take nerve nerve tissue neurons out of animal models, in this case, chicks that were in eggs and pull some nerves out and we’d grow them and then we’d look at them. And I learned from being a graduate student that if you fed the cells in the little plates as they were growing, they would become marvelously complex.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:06:53] They would express all kinds of things. They would get on with life. They would form axons and dendrites and synapses and begin communicating. And those were the things we were studying. If you forgot to feed them, these nerves would shrink down into little balls and become a lot simpler, a lot less interesting, a lot less exciting. And from that, watching this dynamic over and over again, I began to get that intuitive, embodied sense of the importance of energy to life, the importance of energy to the concept of complexity. A well-fed set of neurons, very elaborate, exceedingly complex, a poorly fed set of neurons became much simpler, and you forget to feed them long enough and they die, which is the simplest state for a neuron to be in at all. No, nothing interesting going on there at all. So energy, economy, complexity, they all come together. And unfortunately, our leadership is not yet they’re up to the task. So the Federal Reserve I have a lot of contempt for the Federal Reserve because their words don’t match their actions. That means they’re wildly out of integrity. They say we want full employment and low prices or price stability. And what they do is create maximum wealth gaps and they create enormous hardship for a lot of people. When capital has year after year of amazingly hot or awesome returns, the Federal Reserve is like, Well, what are you going to do? They just shrug and go, Oh, that’s kind of all above blah blah. But as soon as labor begins to catch a break first thing within a month or two, Jerome Powell is out there. We need to get wages down right away. So Capital Federal Reserve loves it. Labor not so much. The uber wealthy loves them.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:08:34] You not so much. Right? So that’s the system we live in. And so here’s the Federal Reserve there between I’m not even going to say a rock and a hard place. They’re stuck between a rock and a rock. What is that? Well, over here on the right, one rock is the Federal Reserve now raises rates and they’re going to crater stocks and bonds and real estate. And the reason for that is the the way the Fed makes rates go down is they buy bonds, which makes their price go up and rates go down. So they’re pushing cash currency out into the marketplace. So. Well, how do you raise rates that the opposite. You have to pull cash out of the system, throw these bonds back out into the marketplace and rates go up. That’s on one side. What’s on the other side are, hey, they don’t raise rates and of course, they let inflation ruin lives and the dollar, so I should say lives down there. Any rate, that’s the rock and hard place. Raise rates. Don’t raise rates. Lot of pain in either direction. This is because the Federal Reserve has made policy errors for decades, and now we have to live with it. So here’s the crime scene. This is what’s called the Federal Reserve balance sheet, which is their assets because their assets are somebody else’s liability. When the Fed put something on his balance sheet, what is it? It’s a treasury bond. It’s an asset. If you own a U.S. Treasury bond, you have an asset. But that’s the liability of the U.S. government. Or they might hold mortgage backed securities. Oh, my gosh. Mortgages. Mortgages. Yeah, that’s an asset. If you own the mortgage or the mortgage backed security, that’s your asset, but it’s the homeowner’s liability.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:10:10] So to the Fed, it’s just a bank. So their assets are somebody else’s liability. So what are their assets? Total assets. Look at his crime scene. So here we are. Here was the Federal Reserve. Let me get my drawn to a lot because this is just such an astonishing story. I can’t even what can I tell you right here? The Federal Reserve tried to reduce its balance sheet for a little while in September of 2019, the repo market blew up, so they had to reverse course. And thankfully for the Federal Reserve, they’re like, Oh, thank you, coronavirus, because COVID came along and gave them the perfect excuse to do this, commit this crime right here and. Okay, fine. So what’s an emergency? You know, people were staying home, getting STEMI checks, weren’t producing anything. So I guess we have to print something so that the Federal Reserve can support the federal government. Send in STEMI checks. Makes sense, right? Yeah. Okay. But then this should have happened. But they tried to start reducing. And of course, immediately the stock market, the precious stock market wasn’t going up. Jerome Powell says we need an orderly stock market. By orderly, that means going up, up and to the right. You know that that’s Jerome Powell said so orderly. So then what’s this? What was the emergency? What’s all this? Printing, printing, printing, printing. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. And so that’s the crime scene. But it wasn’t just the Fed. This is all central bank while major central bank. So we have the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, we’ve got the People’s Bank of China. So we got these four right here. It is a global crime scene because before we were looking at a few trillions.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:11:43] This starts at 5 trillion here before the great financial crisis. This is how much printing was required right here, that little bump to get through the great financial crisis of 2008. Well, then what happened? Well, the central banks really got on that that path, and they just started printing and printing and printing. It was a lot more fun. Here’s where they tried to smear sort of real it back. And then this. This right here is the crime scene. So that one from about 21 to 31, trillions like $10 trillion of printing across these four central banks. And that, of course, ignited massive amounts of inflation. It always does. It always does for them to play stupid and act like we didn’t know that inflation was going to happen. And it’s just they’re lying. It’s just liar, liar, pants on fire moment there. So we’re actually this is the Highway to Hell. Great AC DC Tune June 1987 The Federal Reserve. There’s a panic in the markets. Alan Greenspan is then chairman of the Federal Reserve. And we call that there was a big there was 25% one day decline in the Dow. So panic and Alan Greenspan came in and saved the day. Yeah. So this is an intervention. 1994, again, there’s a hiccup in the corporate bond market. There’s the great tequila crisis down in Mexico. And so the Federal Reserve rides to the rescue and does something really dumb and removes reserve requirements from banks so they can lend like crazy. This gives us the roaring nineties blows up in 1998 with long term capital management that blows up. Fed rides to the rescue, takes moral hazard and inserts it right into the equation. Because if you’re big enough and you blow up large enough, the Fed will be there to make sure you don’t experience losses as long as by you you happen to be a Wall Street bank.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:13:34] 2000 happens, of course, the great dot com bust boom. Then the Fed rides to the rescue and then we have a housing bubble and boom that blows up. And then in 2011, another hiccup boom. The Fed has to write in again 2013, 2019. And here in 2020, we saw the coronavirus. These are all increasing Fed interventions which collectively look like this on the 2015 to 2022 time scale. That’s just the Federal Reserve intervening and trying to keep markets orderly, which means stocks go up, bonds go up. They like the financial assets. They like them to go up. So that’s what the Fed’s been up to. But here’s what it looks like on a ten year Treasury interest rate going back decades. That’s from 1970, way over there on that side. 1980, there’s a peak in the interest rates, and then it’s been nothing but down and down and down and down ever since. Now, this little pokey pokey thing here where this ten year Treasury rate is poking its head above that trend line, it’s a big deal and it tells us that there’s a change in the air. Will the Fed get rates back under control or will we go into a regime of much higher interest rates? Well, frankly, we can’t, because the opposite side of this chart where you have constantly falling rates of interest is what? Well, it’s constantly increasing amounts of debt. So the debt levels are just climbing, climbing, climbing state debt, federal debt, local debt, municipal student debt, auto loans, credit cards, all of it. Debts are just going up and up and up and up and up because we live in a system. Where the Federal Reserve had come to the erroneous conclusion that the way you keep all of this working happily is you just allowed debts to expand and expand and expand.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:15:18] And that’s what their model has been. Well, this is what’s finally coming to an end. And this is a really big deal because, again, a rock and a hard place. What’s the Fed going to do, make rates go lower for longer? There’s really not a lot of room left on this highway unless the Federal Reserve wants to entertain going to negative interest rates. Now, their story there don’t have time for right now, but that’s where the central bank digital currencies begin to enter the story. Because if you and I have central bank digital currencies, the Fed can say, guess what? There’s a -4% rate of interest on your holdings, which will encourage you to not have your holdings. It’ll encourage you to go out and spend it. Cash. Cash makes things hard because the Fed could tell you there’s a negative interest rate, but you can just take your cash out of the bank and then you’re experiencing a 0% rate of interest. That’s no good. Fed wants to control your lives better than that. They want you to spend when they want you to spend, save when they want you to save. And on and on. Because they have the misconception that free markets don’t work, that you need central planning, their central planning in order to make it all go according to the right plan. But when we look at who they are, maybe, maybe, maybe we could grant them a couple of of of credits on this if they had any success in making all of us equally prosperous. But they don’t. Only thing the Fed has actually proven adept at is making the ultra wealthy even ultra wealthier, because that’s the system they’re actually the guardians of. All right. So let’s take a look at what this means.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:16:45] First, the Federal Reserve has claimed that it’s going to begin reducing its balance sheet by $95 billion a month. This is the same balance sheet I was just showing you, but it’s a blowup. So we’re looking at a shorter little window of time and you can see it sort of sort of set its way up Wednesday, by Wednesday, which is where we get our snapshots. We can see that this went from, oh, a high of 8.965 trillion to a low here on June 15th. Last snapshot of 8.932. So it looks like the Federal Reserve balance sheet is reduced by some $33 billion. That’s pretty cool. Well, let’s take a look at this in context. Here’s what the Fed has said it’s going to do. This is what it’s committed to doing. I think it has to do this through the elections for reasons. So they said beginning on June one in yellow, they’re going to do two things. They hold two big types of assets Treasury securities, mortgage backed securities for Treasury securities. They’re going to cap $30 billion a month for the first three months. So that’s June, July, August, 30 billion a month. They’re going to peel off their balance sheet and that’s going to increase to 60 billion a month. So 32 then 60 billion. So but for June, for sure, Earth should be 30 billion in Treasuries alone. And then for agency debt, which is mortgage backed securities, the cap is going to be 17 and a half billion a month, going up to 35 billion a month. So at peak, at 60 plus 35, that’s $95 billion a month. That’s what they said they’re going to do. But June should be 47 and a half billion dollars a month, which is 30 plus 17.5.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:18:20] So how are they doing so far here in June, reducing the balance sheet by 47.5 billion? Well, let’s look on June 1st, the balance sheet was 8.915, and on June 15th, it’s 8.932. I’m not a math genius, but I’m pretty sure that $17 billion higher not on a path to make it $47 billion lower. So the Federal Reserve, they have all this talk about, oh, we have to reduce our balance sheet to undo this craziness we did. And you know what’s happening instead. They’re actually expanding their balance sheet here in June. So far, that’s what they’re doing. And hey, maybe that changes by the end of the month. But I’ll tell you why. They’re why they are not expanding their balance sheet, why they’re not reducing their balance sheet here in June. Why? Because stocks were behaving in a disorderly way. They were. They went down in June. So this is the reason the Fed chickened out. They have this stock market. They’re scared of it going down. They always want it to go up and to the right. Obviously, stocks are not held equally by everybody across the economy. Obviously, when the Federal Reserve picks winners and losers. It’s social engineering. It’s saying who should be wealthy, who shouldn’t be on the basis of their decisions, not on the basis of what’s right or what’s appropriate or what socially makes sense or what’s, you know, appropriate to do for the long term health of the country. Actually, it has no make so has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that the Federal Reserve’s are the guardians and keepers of a system which is there to enshrine the already wealthy and keep them that way. That’s who they are. They’re like the courtiers of a rather corrupt court where the king and the queen don’t work all that hard and don’t actually add all that much value.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:20:03] But the Federal Reserve is there to make it look legitimate. So that’s what they’re up to. And so they’ve already freaked out. So is the Fed actually going to get to 95 billion a month? I don’t think so. Powell recently just said, hey, you know, soft landing, this soft landing, we’re going to reduce our balance sheet, achieve this thing called a soft landing. He says it’s not going to be easy, he said, but there’s a pathway to get there. So Jerome Powell says there’s a pathway to get there. Now, I’ve mocked it up, but I think this is going to be Powell in a month. He’s he’s going to tell us about. He’s going to be on TV. Tell us about fiery but mostly soft landing, says Jay Powell. Come on. I mean, this we are just being lied to over and over again. And the only question is, why do we put up with it as much as we do we collectively? But this whole idea that the Federal Reserve is going to be able to engineer a soft landing when they can’t even reduce their balance sheet for more than a week without reversing course. June is higher, not lower, at least through the first half of the month. Why? Because the markets are just completely inflated on the basis of Federal Reserve printing. All right. So I mean, here’s what it looks like, right? So here’s a chart that’s showing a the central bank liquidity, the amounts the central banks are throwing into the markets. This is big central banks. And then looking at in blue, light blue, the market cap of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Tesla. So look at the correlation here. These stocks are all powering higher.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:21:40] It will exactly along with central bank liquidity. And then central bank liquidity is supposed to be coming down. This gray is forecast. I don’t think we’re going to hit that forecast because if we look what happened here, you can see that these stocks right here started to come back down sharply, even at the hint that this gravy train was going to come to an end. That’s what we’re seeing here on this chart. So central bank liquidity is just just stalling out a tiny bit and already there’s a correction. But what we might notice here is that the trillions so these these those stocks right there went from roughly 1 trillion in value back there in 2010 to almost 12 trillion in value. That’s an extraordinary explosion in value. So how bad would it be if they went back to six or what if they went back to the beginning of COVID here and they went back to a combined value of, say, just around $5 trillion? Would that be the end of the world? But the Federal Reserve and other central banks are going to pretend it is the end of the world because that’s how they roll. By the way, this inflation, super punishing, it’s just getting started at this point in time. We’re looking at these year over year increases in the CPI report, which itself is fraudulent. It’s more government lies. If you didn’t like the CDC, you’re going to hate what the BLS does. They torture these statistics so much. I mean, look at this shelter. They said shelter, shelter. You’re home up 5.5% year over year when house prices were up 20 some odd percent and rents were up 17%. Don’t even get me started on property taxes. So how could that all combine into 5.5%? It can’t.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:23:24] It’s a tortured statistic. So they bastardize it and torture it heavily, at any rate. Fuel up 100%. Gasoline 48. Utilities, cars, electric, everything just through the roof. And the only way that stops being that way is if the Federal Reserve and other central banks stop their printing. But they can’t. So if they stop printing, they crash. Their precious markets can’t have that. So they’re going to keep printing. That’s my guess at some predictions around that, and I’ll share those later. But when Jerome Powell first decided to raise interest rates by 25 basis points on the first part of this rate hike cycle, back a couple of months, inflation was roaring down like this is a scene from Saving Private Ryan. That’s Tom Hanks in his role there, pointing a 45 pistol at this tank coming at him. That was. Yeah, Jerome Powell. Is there a point in his 25 basis point, squirt gun and inflation come roaring down? And that was totally an inadequate response. It didn’t get the job done quite predictably. And so I don’t think we’re going to see inflation come down. Any time soon. So this economic collapse, we’re going to track it. It’s coming. Here it is. It comes from the what I call the outside in. I have a bunch of framing pieces that I use with my tribe, people who follow me. They help us understand where things are coming from. And this idea from the outside in is an important concept to simply says that when you’re tracking a system and you want to know if when it’s going to change, you have to track the change at the edge of the system. So. But well before wealthy people really experience the effects of inflation. Or people get crushed by it before healthy people die sicker.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:25:08] More co-morbid people end up getting ill first before a core central country with a powerful economy really gets hurt. You’re going to watch the weaker peripheral economies in countries get hurt first. So very simple concept always from the outside in. So if we want to see what’s going to happen in Germany, in the United States, core countries, we don’t start there. We look at the outside and we see what’s happening from the outside in. So turkey, two things. They’ve got a CPI, which is consumer price index or inflation, PPE, producer price index or inflation at the producer level. Whoa, look at this. Turkey’s got 132% official inflation. Of course, it’s much higher than that. Unofficially, in the black market, in the street, people know that living there and it’s their regular inflation, 73%. This is just extraordinary rates of inflation. But I want you to see the pace of change. This what we’re going to talk about in part two of this. It’s never the change that gets you. It’s the pace of change that really gets you. Sri Lanka obviously very, very high levels of inflation. Food inflation surging 54.7% on this last report. That’s in May. We’ll see what that comes in in June. This is really, really high, obviously creating a lot of social unrest in Sri Lanka. In fact, anywhere you look in the world when you have very high food inflation, what that means is you end up with very high social pressures and social unrest as a consequence. But look at this. In Germany now we’re at the core. Last print just came in yesterday, 3.6% on the German producer price index. The PPE and the CPI is at 7.9%. This is astonishing. The Consumer Price Index has to follow.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:26:54] Eventually, the producer price index can lag a little, but ultimately it’s going to have to catch up some because otherwise. Producers are paying this. Consumers are paying this. What lives in that gap between what the producers pay and what the consumers pay? Well, that’s corporate profits. There’s only so long corporations can eat a gap that large before they have to figure out what they’re going to do. Raise prices, fire a lot of people. Those are the choices when you’re a company and you’re hemorrhaging like that, what we see in that gap right there. So there’s really nothing the Fed can do to avoid this economic calamity that’s coming first. Hey, they could raise rates and crater stocks and bonds and real estate. That’s what they’re doing currently. I think their pain threshold will be exceeded before too much longer, in which case they’re going to reverse course and say, well, let’s not raise rates and let inflation ruin lives in the dollar and or whatever currencies are in the countries that are going to follow along and do the same stuff. Why do I think that’s the case? Why do I? Why do I prefer prefer? I don’t prefer it, but why do I wait in inflationary? How come more than a deflationary outcome cratering stocks and bonds by withdrawing liquidity? Deflationary. Continuing to print. Lowering interest rates means shoving cash out into the market creates more inflation. Why would I favor that over the deflation? I’ll tell you why. Very simple. In a deflationary environment, the holders of stocks and bonds get crushed. Those are wealthy people. They’re the people who have the reins on power. They’re the people who make the rules. So they tend to get a little cranky when they get directly hit by falling financial asset prices.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:28:34] Inflation, on the other hand. Excuse me. Inflation, on the other hand, steals from everybody. Everybody gets hurt, but not the wealthy people because they have access to the money first. So the money is printed and is handed to Wall Street or to the U.S. government. They get to buy stuff before the value of that money that they’ve just been handed goes down in value. By the time it trickles all the way down to the little person, it’s fully devalued. So they end up taking most of the loss. If you’re a little person and you have $100,000 in the bank or 50,000 or $50, whatever the number is, and you hold on to that, your purchasing power goes away. It used to be $100,000 of purchasing power. Next year, it’s $50,000. The purchasing power. Oh, inflation. Wait a minute. Where did that purchasing power go? Good question. Because it’s an accounting identity. It couldn’t have just evaporated. Where’d it go? It went to somebody and actually it was transferred away from the little person towards the government and the elites. That’s why they love that process so much. That’s why I think the favoring the wading in this story is going to be towards creating more inflation and just living with the consequences of that, rather than allowing this punishing deflation to come forward. Punishing inflation. Punishing deflation. That’s why we end up here between the rock and the rock for the Federal Reserve trapped. I do believe they’re going to make a show of cratering stocks and bonds in real estate, but they’re going to they’re going to fold and they’ll call it folding, but it won’t really be that is that they’re going to protect capital. They’re going to protect the wealthy. So in the face of all that time, to get resilient.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:30:21] That’s my answer to everything. Resilience, according to the Webster Dictionary, is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. I have a slightly different view of it, which that’s close. But actually I think of resilience is having the ability to thrive, to fully engage with life and recover from challenges and setbacks. And resilience itself. It’s formed from having a diverse set of assets and skills to rely upon. And so that’s the book Prosper that that myself and Adam Tiger co-wrote. It talks about having eight forms of capital. And if you’re rich in all eight forms of capital and financial capital is important, we’re going to spend a lot more time and prosperity going into financial capital because this is a critical moment. That’s cool. But you actually need to have multiple forms of capital, including social capital, the health of your body, your living capital, knowledge capital, emotional capital, things like that. That’s the complete set by Peak Prosperity to see what that’s about. And so our model, what do we do with Peak Prosperity if you come and join our awesome tribe? Step one Educate yourself. That’s what you’re doing. By watching this, hopefully I’ve made a few light bulbs go off and you’re going to continue to research this and read more and study more and follow other people who can explain things you don’t understand because you need to understand the larger context. And it’s a lot of stuff right now, but there’s a real edge if you can get fully educated. Well, education without like taking action is stupid. That’s just like anxiety producing. So step two of this is always to act. We favor action in Peak Prosperity, whatever that is, plant a garden, buy some replacement pieces for things.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:32:05] You need to take action to become more involved in your local community. Whatever it is, lots of things learn and then take action and then finally find your tribe. This is an image taken, a first gathering we had here at the farm that Evie and I have here in western Massachusetts. Hey, we’re having another one of these gatherings this fall. And these people are our tribe. These are the people we love and respect and who are going to form the core of our local and also separate, you know, separated by distance community. So find your community those that’s our model three steps. And so I’d rather be a year early than a day late when it comes to being prepared. When it comes to being resilient. Absolutely. Here’s a VIP supporter of ours at Peak Prosperity said, quote, You’ve been warning your viewers about the events that are occurring now for years. As you say, Chris, better a lot earlier than a little late, my paraphrase. Thank Nick there. Yeah, that’s exactly the model we have. That’s my motto. I’d rather be a year early than a day. Like, you just can’t be too early to these particular stories because the response, the adjustment to them takes a lot of time, takes a lot of time to learn how to grow things and adjust your mental maps and models and figure out how to get your financial assets squirreled away and hidden and recession proofed and inflation proofed and things like that. It just takes time. It does. So this is what we’re do and this is our motto here. And so if you want to be. Part of that, we’d say, Oh yeah. John Bethea said recently in a comment. This is best and truly informed a program that has ever been introduced to the people of the world.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:33:50] I am sure that most leaders have been told by petroleum experts about this for years, yet these warnings have gone unheeded. That was again in response to my tour through the energy industry, particularly petroleum. What a huge story. John, I don’t know if our leaders don’t seem to get it. In the United States, it’s beyond corruptly ignorant at this stage. I don’t know what to tell you, but their response is to bash the oil companies and and hope that they can shame them and bash them into doing what they want, when they want, how they want, but not later. It’s strange. At any rate, bad leadership. Corrupt leadership. Who cares? Same outcome. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to be pretty hard if you want to hear my full thoughts. Of course you have to become a member over at Peak Prosperity. We have membership plans ranging from quite affordable to very affordable. And so pick the pick the model that works best for you. But this is what I do for a living. I go out there, I scour, I scour, I scour. I work hard to turn it into a story that you can understand. Hey, that’s my model. That’s what I do. By the way, we’re going to be exploring in part two of this what are the root causes of this collapse? It’s coming. Why is it unavoidable? I’m going to be connecting energy and economy again because we can’t do it too many times. And then, of course, what to do about this. So this is something we’re going to be discussing over at Peak Prosperity. You can come on by any time you want. Check that out and we’d love to have you there. We’ve got a big, thriving community of people, and that’s the best part.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:35:24] The real value of our community is it’s not really a commune. It’s almost like a family at this stage. We’re back. We’re busy banding and gathering together so that we can learn from each other, draw emotional sustenance from each other, because these are crazy times and the people around us have gone a little insane on a lot of dimensions. And of course, hey, you have to keep moving. Taking action is the most important thing. So whatever you do, please take the actions you feel you need to to become resilient. Maybe that means doing things at your household. Maybe that means moving. Some of you have taken that step. Maybe it means having a plan B location. Maybe it means learning more so that you can take actions in new areas that you haven’t taken actions in before and find your tribe. Those are my advice for what we’re seeing at this point in time. Listen. There’s really nothing the Federal Reserve or the central banks can do at this point in time. The sooner we let go of our adoring devotion to these money printers, the better. They don’t have your interests at heart. They don’t have my interests at heart. They’re just trying to keep together a system that’s clearly gone off the rails. They want to keep that on the rails, and it’s just too late for that. So pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Pay attention to what’s right for you, what you know to be right and follow that, please. And if we can help it, Peak Prosperity, we’ll do the best we can. Until then, until I see you over Peak Prosperity or until I see you here on this channel at a future point in time.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:36:56] Please be safe. Be well. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.