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Chris: Welcome, everyone, to this Peak Prosperity podcast. I am your host Chris Martenson, and it is August 22, 2017. And today, I’m really happy to welcome back to the program my friend, James Howard Kunstler. You know Jim as a well-known author, social critic, whose ideas have been extremely influential to myself and the Peak Oil and Sustainable Living Movements. His best-known work, for myself, is The Long Emergency, which really got me kicked off in many ways thinking about the things that lead to the crash course. And in that book, he argues that declining oil production will result in the reversal of modern industrialized society and compel Americans to return to smaller scale. So, he also wrote the book series that brings that concept to life that began with World Made by Hand, it’s sequel, The Witch of Hebron, and A History of the Future. And most recently, The Harrows of Spring, which used fiction to really entertainingly transport use in to what a future of less might look and feel like. And that, to me, is a world with less net energy.

He also wrote Too Much Magic, Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation which is just a – reads like a complete prediction of what we’re in today as we look around the world. And, of course, he continues to write regularly at his excellent weekly blog found over at Kunstler.com where he now writes and posts twice a week. Jim, really happy to have you back on as a guest, particularly with everything going on today.

Jim: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, and let’s get to it.

Chris: Well, let’s get to it. So, I think we just have to start on the social side of all of this. We’ve had the incidents at Charlottesville and the left and the right, Antifa, the alleged rise of Nazi’s – I say alleged because I’m not sure that there’s more than there ever used to be, but the media is focusing on them. We just, if you remember, you have to think way back, like a month ago it was Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. It was everywhere. Certainly, we were about to – this was the biggest danger ever – and then almost without skipping a beat, it was North Korea all over the airwaves. Everybody’s getting really freaked out, and then it switched right over to Nazi’s, and here we are today. And I got to tell you, I know people personally who didn’t skip a beat just flipping from one of those traumas to the next, and focusing on them fully. And what do you make of that?

Jim: Well, a couple of things. The failure of the Democratic end of the political spectrum is pretty spectacular. And I say that as someone who remains, even now, a registered Democrat. And I just find the implosion of what used to be the middle to be spectacular. And the adoption of really bad ideas by the remnants of the Democratic Party to also be just astonishing. We’ve got people in that major party now who are affecting to believe that freedom of speech is no longer important, and that the violence on the left has no equivalent to the violence on the right, which I happen to believe it does.

I was not a Trump supporter, didn’t vote for the guy, I’ve been dissing him continually in my own blog, but I think he was correct when he said that the misbehavior on both sides was pretty much the same. We may deplore the ideas and the ideologies of the Nazi’s, but the first amendment is all about having to tolerate ideas that make you uncomfortable. That’s the whole point of it.

And the idea that the left is no longer willing to be uncomfortable with other people’s ideas is very troubling. So, I’ve said for a while now that I thought that both political parties were going down the laundry shoot of history, and it seems like a neck in neck race between who’s gonna get there first. But right now, it’s sort of looking like the Democratic Party wants to get there first in terms of just sheer irrelevancy and incredibly bad ideas.

Chris: I totally agree. And I wouldn’t want either of those two sets of characters who showed up in Charlottesville hanging out in my living room. I don’t really like extremists no matter where they show up. One side intolerant for different reasons than the other side, who is also intolerant. You put two mixers of intolerance together and you probably have a volatile mixture. So yeah, I agree with all that, and here’s the thing. You and I both know that if we back out a couple of steps. We know that both parties are completely irrelevant because they're still talking as if we live in a world of infinite resources and all we have to do is tweak a few policies, throw a little more money into the markets, goose the stock market a little higher, we’ll get jobs going and everybody will keep just on with the program as is. And I haven’t seen anything from either of the two parties that even remotely begin to align with the reality of the world that we live in right now, which is where, if you have my eyeballs, you notice a lot of the ecology is diminishing. It’s like Mother Nature is retracting her web of life, and that’s disturbing.

You will notice that specific central bank policies specifically enrich the already rich who have financial assets at the expense of everybody else, because if we were honest either party could come out and say, hey, the Federal Reserve is not a wealth creating organization. They are a wealth redistributing organization. And they've taken it from the many and given it to the few, and they think that’s a good idea. Both parties are thumbs up okay with that. That’s a shock to the system. Of course, these young people who grow up knowing that if they take on student debt, which is a requirement now to get ahead in this country, you will be the proud owner of the only non-dischargeable form of debt in bankruptcy court. That’s how we treat our young.

And on the other side, my Obamacare premiums are slated to go up another high double digits this year. That’s just gonna keep going until it literally breaks the entire back of the middle to upper middle class. These are, Jim, to me these are just shocks, shocks, shocks, shocks. And the tragedy is that you have these people who don’t know where the shocks are coming from, but they can look around and they see a Nazi or they see an Antifa leftist and they point their fingers at each other, and they get all mad. Both they're like two rats in a cage who just can’t unravel where the shocks are coming from, so they fight each other, but they would do well to notice that these are systematically delivered shocks, and neither party is even remotely addressing anything about that, Democrat or Republican.

Jim: Well, I see that also, and I have a way of looking at it. What we have here is – our system dynamics that are in the driver’s seat and not personalities or offices. And what we’re seeing is that the behavior of people who have no idea what they're doing. And the system dynamics can be discussed, I think, pretty specifically. Most of the major systems that we rely on are entering a state of failure of one kind or another. And, of course, the larger problem is that they're interlinked, and that their failures will be mutual and self-amplifying.

These systems include the energy system that has powered industrial civilization, the oil and gas industries, which you’ve talked about a lot, and I think that our listeners understand it pretty well. I don’t think we have to rehearse that necessarily. Although the finer points of it, like the energy return of investment, is something that’s certainly not understood by you, the general public, or probably most of the officers in the government, and certainly not in the New York Times, Washington Post or other major media outlets. They just don’t get that.

But all of that energy problem is reverberating in things like agriculture and our ability to use the oceans in some way that is not gonna destroy the oceans. And the medical system, the education system – all these systems are really kind of blowing up. And in the absence of being able to run coherently in an economic way, they’ve turned into rackets. And that basically means that people are trying to run them and make a profit off of them dishonestly one way or another. And because we’re immersed in comprehensive dishonestly in our culture, we no longer really recognize what we’re doing or what the truth of our situation is, so it’s pretty dismaying to see our culture to flounder, and particularly to flounder in trivialities and bad ideas.

Chris: Well said. So, we really have a pretty significant metabolic disease going on here, where the significant force of motivation for our body, the thing that animates us, our very life blood, has diminishing returns as you just wrote about in a piece titled Diminishing Returns. So we have that happening, and we should be detecting that and coming up with coherent strategies for that. And instead, people ask me, hey Chris, how are you doing, I’ll say, oh, I’m fine. But if you get a little deeper, I’m disturbed. I’m really disturbed that this many years of what seems to be a fairly easily analyzed system failure problem, right, which is that we have a complex system that requires energy to feed it, and we have no comprehension at any level of the power structure that says, wow, we can’t run that model forever. In fact, if we look at if properly, we might say, hey, we’ve detected the early symptoms of system failure, organ failure here. And so what are we gonna do about that? And the answer is shriekingly, more of the same with an extra heaping of divided and distract divisive politics thrown in just to make sure everybody’s not really paying attention.

Jim: Well, it’s very easy to see how this moves thoroughly through all levels of the culture. And one of the examples that, I think, is most visible right now is the way we’re thinking about car culture and personal transportation. And the so-called solution to the problem of oil, the internal combustion engine pollution and climate change, the purported solution is electrifying the car system. And that’s something that’s seemed to be believed by people of all classes and the media and people in government. We’re all sort of striving to get to that point where the car system is totally electrified. That’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen for financial reasons, it’s not gonna happen for ecological reasons, but we never think about living in walkable communities. We never think about altering the living arrangement that we’re stuck with and that we’ve over invested in. And that’s really what’s going to – we’re gonna be compelled to do that whether we like it or not – to return to traditional living arrangements, but we’re not willing to think about it.

I just came back from France a couple of weeks ago, and I spent time in a small town about 60 miles from the Mediterranean. And it was a walkable community. You didn’t need to get in the car to get anything. They level of civilization there was demonstrably so much higher than anything you find in the United States. And the people, for all the troubles they may be having in Europe, the people generally seem better adjusted, happier, more content with reality and more likely to be able to continue living in the decades ahead. There was not even much of the visible pathology that you see in the flyover places that I live in. I live in rural, upstate New York, flyover America, where clearly more than half the people in the county are morbidly obese. You didn’t see that at all in France. Why is that? It’s because they don’t hop in their car 16 times a day, and they actually have to move their bodies around and they're not all going on 11-mile hikes or spending the whole day in the gym. They're just going about their daily life. But it hasn’t made them morbidly ill.

So, I don’t know. We’re really not able to think about any of the systems problems that we have. Agriculture is one of the more interesting ones because so much of our bad behavior in agriculture, industrial farming, mega farming, giant animal food factories, giant pig farms, all these terrible things are not sustainable, and they're heavily subsidized by the government. And nobody is really interested in the one thing that would do the most good, which is smaller farms, more localized agriculture done with more human attention, less mechanical intervention. And that’s where history is going to be taking us anyway, and it is pretty obvious. And we’re not getting any encouragement for the practitioners to get to that point, to go there. We’re just giving them incentives to stay away from that. So, I’m not very optimistic about the systems problems that we face.

Chris: That whole idea of we’re just gonna Elon Musk happy motor Tesla electric car our way into more brilliant future, I find that one really, really hard to swallow because all you have to do is literally spend ten minutes about the actual numbers involved, and you discover quickly it’s a delusion. And the ferocity with which most people cling to that delusion is telling. And so it feels to me like our country is really headed towards a mid-life crisis. And they talk about mid-life crisis as if it’s a bad thing. Crisis. It’s a crisis. But a good thing that can come from the mid-life crisis is you might wake up and go, hey, wait a minute, I’ve been doing everything I thought I was supposed to do, I’m not actually happy, I'm not actually healthy, maybe I should fix those things. I only have one life. Hey, maybe I should start leading it the way I want to.

So by the numbers, you talk about the number of morbidly obese. I recently wrote about the number of people – one in six, Jim, one in six – on psychoactive compounds in the United States. That’s a pretty high number. You look at how the opioid deaths have now overtaken auto accidents and gun deaths by both suicide and intentional homicide and things like that and accidents. So, it’s the number one leading cause, and there have been some – you know, this has been the market to me of a really sick culture. I think Trump said, oh, it’s an epidemic, and we’re gonna look at it. And various states and sort of said, oh, we have an opioid epidemic, but if you really peel that back, it’s very unsavory what you find under there. You find pharma companies that know they make a ton of money off opioids because they tend to be a lifelong addictive thing and you can make a lot of money selling them. And various companies that are in the business of manufacturing some of these drugs have specifically spent a lot of money in the anti-marijuana legalization campaigns in various states, because they know – the data shows clearly – when people have access to legal, very safe cannabis that they can get off the opioids. And this is all okay.

We live in a culture where it’s okay for a company that makes an addictive compound that kills people, to give money like that and nobody shames them and runs them out of the county club and they aren’t just pilloried as disgusting exemplars of humanity. Instead, I think they probably enjoy very comfy lives as genius executives of successful companies. And to me it just very emblematic of what’s going on here. But when you add it up we’re the most over medicated, most overweight, least happy by every measure, least satisfied, least content, so maybe a mid-life crisis would be a good thing right about now.

Jim: Well, the mid-life crisis is one model for understanding this, but there is probably another one. I have not really participated that much in therapeutic culture. I’ve never had to be a twelve-step program guy. I’ve never been a substance addict or anything like that, but it seems to me that probably a better model than the mid-life crisis is the model of the addict that has to hit bottom before they will make any changes in their life. And sometimes they don’t. In fact, probably more often than not, the morbidly addicted person just simply fails. They die, they lose their life, they're ruined.

But some people do hit bottom and find a way to bounce up. So what we’ve got, since I haven’t been involved in the twelve-step program, I do know a little bit about enabling behavior. And I think what we’ve got is enabling behavior that is combined with racketeering, which gives a tremendous amount of incentive to the enabling behaviors that you're describing in, for example, the pharmaceutical industry. So, those two dynamics form a kind of nexus of pervasive dishonestly in culture that can’t tell itself the truth about where it’s at.

Chris: But we’re number one in the United States. We know that.

Jim: Well, we’re number one in an awful lot of bad behavior that’s destroying our culture and destroying our economy. So, we can continue to believe that we’re number one, but it’s not gonna really help us get to where we have to get. It’s not gonna help us understand that the solution to our living arrangement problems is not gonna be more cars of a different kind, that it’s gonna be returning to tradition towns and neighborhoods, and that the solution to the agriculture problem is not gonna be bigger pig farms. It gonna be smaller farms distributed more equitably around the parts of the country where you can still do agriculture. And the solution to the medical problem is not going to be larger combined, corporate hospital chains and so-called provider services. But it’s probably gonna be more like local clinics with brave doctors who are willing to actually look at their patients and touch them and not spend their whole career buried in their laptop or dickering with insurance companies.

The solution to the college problem is probably gonna be that fewer people are gonna go to college, and that college is, once again, if it continues to exist at all, going to be a more or less elite experience. And we just have to understand that colleges may not be for everybody. That’s just a highly unrealistic idea, and there’s no evidence that sending more people to college is actually helping our economy. It’s only kind of furnishing a fantasy for politicians to hide behind while they try and figure out what else to do. And they don’t know what else to do. But a good thing would be if we were able to get regular trades going again in this country and revive local economies so that they had a finely grained, many layered system that there would be more jobs for people, that there would be more businesses that could be formed, there would be more social roles and economic roles that people could play.

There would be opportunities for kids to get into vocations that required something like an apprenticeship, so that they could learn from the people who are already doing carpentry, doing plumbing, doing things that are on the ground. Important things, rather than just getting into bureaucratic niches or marketing or shuffling paper or shuffling investment accounts or doing a lot of unnecessary and kind of dumb things that don’t really add anything to the economy. But we don’t want to do any of those things. We just want to kind of burnish this fantasy that if you just go to a community college you’ll come out and be able to work as a marketing drone for Old Navy. So our fantasies are really getting in the way of our ability to find a way to make the transition into whatever the next economy is gonna be. I think you and I would agree that it’s gonna be an economy of probably less stuff than we have been wallowing in for the last thirty years. But that might not be the worst thing in the world.

Chris: Well, let’s turn back to this college experience for a second. My wife and I, we homeschooled our children all the way up through high school, I guess, because they all went off to community college at the age of sixteen, each of them. But we did that because we looked at the way that the school systems were choosing to teach, and having read the books of John Taylor Gatto and really understanding that, school is, as it’s being practices, it’s oppression model, it’s very much designed to churn out people with a certain sort of bent with a certain amount of knowledge. And when you look at the way the do that and the various adjectives you would use to describe the creatures that come out of these public-school systems very often, or even good private school systems, they're obedient. They know that there are right answers and there are wrong answers. They’ve been trained to believe that what you have to do is prepare yourself to get a job. It doesn’t prepare you to be an entrepreneur necessarily although those are the people we look to most. Like, wow, look what Bill Gates did, or most of the people who we really look up to are entrepreneurial in mindset. And it really teaches a faith in authority. The right answer is at the front of the room, and you have to follow the rules and it does all that stuff.

So, it does all this wonderful, enculturating stuff that when my wife and I looked at it we looked at this future that you see, that I see, that many people see, and we go, wow, wait a minute. Some descriptors for that future might be that you want to be creative, adaptive, free thinking, really open minded in a lot of ways, and our belief, which is part of the home schooling belief system, is that learning is natural. School is optional. As long as you know how to learn, as long as your curiosity is there, listen, you can learn anything you want online. So you had some experiences going to colleges where I think you had a fairly successful, at least fairly full calendar, going and speaking at colleges, but that dried up on you at some point. And I think that’s, too, emblematic of a shift. Was it a shift in how colleges are operating, or was it an exposure of how they’ve been operating? And talk to us about that exposure.

Jim: Yeah. I’m not that special. I actually have a lecture agent, and I’ve been told that they're having a problem with many of their authors, especially their environmental authors, that the deans and the department chairs at the colleges just don’t want to invite speakers on campus who traffic in ideas that make the kids uncomfortable. Their experience with it has been so difficult and probably in some cases ruinous that they just don’t dare to do it right now. So people like me who are offering ideas that are not comforting, we’re just out of luck right now, and the kids are maybe out of luck too, because they're not hearing these ideas.

I do want to say something about a point you make a minute ago which is you kind of suggested there was kind of transect of work between being an entrepreneur and having a job. And that’s probably true. There are people who are absolutely self-directed and then there are people who are directed by others. But there’s something in between, too. It actually used to probably be, at some point in human history, and for a long time in human history, the larger group. And that is, there’s something called a vocation between being an entrepreneur and just having a job. And having a vocation means being something that you're interested in, that you're good at, that you worked to become good at, something that is of practical use to other people. And a dynamic relationship between you and the world that is comprehensible, understood, and productive, and allows you to thrive.

So, the real question for young people right now is what can you do that will allow you to thrive in the years ahead? And I think they have to ask this question in a pretty clear eyed and hard way. And it’s probably not gonna be just going to college.

Chris: Well, particularly if college is going to be preparing you for a job set that doesn’t really exist out there. When I look into the future I see a future of less, and I know you think our audience is pretty well versed in this, but let me just cycle back to it really quickly, because it’s a very dominant narrative, a piece of programming that even Donald Trump said, the United States is now an oil exporter, which is false. We do export some oil, but we import even more than that, so on a net basis not a net exported, so kind of a faux pas there, but it’s okay. The marketing has been so good on this point that, I believe in his 2012 State of the Union, Obama said the United States is now energy independent because they lumped all the energy sources together and came out on a slight plus side on a BTU basis which is meaningless when you're talking about energy.

But one of the more important charts I’ve seen showed that for the shale operators every single year from 2012 on one thing has always been true. The revenues they’ve gotten from operations have been less than the cost to run their business. And so even though they say, well, we’re drilling successfully for forty now, but the cost of operations is still fifty. And they're still getting forty-five at the wellhead, or whatever. So, you look at this chart and it says they’ve been losing money every single year they’ve been in business, and so that’s the law of receding horizons. Like no matter what the horizon is, well, we’ll make tons of money when oil is seventy. Yeah, but it’ll cost you eighty to get it out of the ground. It’s the magic of the business. Whatever.

And we can detect that so easily when you look at the absolutely skyrocketing debt offerings and equity offerings they’ve had to put forward to stay in business. And Wall Street’s continued to funnel that. And, of course, Wall Street makes money at this, because they all pitch all of this. They help do the equity offerings, they underwrite the debt offerings, and then they sell them off to hapless future victims. And it’s just astonishing to me, Jim, that we have very intelligent analysts that look at this. How can you look at a chart that says a business that has lost money every single year that it’s been in operation is one you want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars of new equity and debt into on a yearly basis? It’s just astonishing to me. But the main point is this. The shale business is a bust, it has been, it’s produced a lot of oil, it’s produced it at a loss, and that’s not a healthy thing. That’s tied into the EROI story at a deeper level. But it’s just astonishing to me how many people think that shale has now saved the world, saved the bacon, we can safely go back to sleep forever or maybe at least another three decades.

Jim: Well what you're describing really is not so much the effect of the shale industry on the national psychology, but the effect of advertising. And I don’t think we pay enough attention to the fact that America is a culture that pretty much gave birth to the industry of advertising as a kind of national enterprise. And we’ve been sucked into believing our own advertising which, in many cases, is just dishonesty and nonsense. So, we have a giant industry that is dedicated to producing to disinformation and nonsense, and we’re conditioned to accept that nonsense. And I think that’s a simple explanation for it. And there are a lot of people who are employed at it, and there are a lot of people who benefit from that, and I think as a political question, it’s gonna be a threshold issue where, eventually, we reach a critical mass of nonsense and then stuff just flips. And then all of the sudden you're in a new world.

It’s the old Schopenhauer model, which is that new ideas are first greeted with ridicule, and next they are violently opposed, and next they are accepted as self-evidently true. And the flip is just so complete. There’s no cultural memory of left of when you believed something that’s not true. And so I think that’s what is gonna happen. My own guess is that it’s going to involve the disorder in the financial realm, because finance is kind of the life blood of this techno industrial society we live in. And when that gets into trouble the problems are gonna thunder through all the other realms our culture, and then we’ll be forced to pay attention. And I think that those financial disorders are not far off. And that when that happens things are gonna change.

You and I, I think, have been quite frustrated over the last eight years at the ability of certain authorities in our culture to manipulate prices and levitate markets and intervene in the physics of our economy. And that just can’t go on forever. Even though it’s frustrating to watch it looks to me like it’s kind of climaxing. What to me is the tail of the whole thing is just the present of the existence of Trump as president, the election of Trump. And what that tells me is that the disorders that are already present in our economy are manifesting now in our politics. And that to me is a pretty dangerous sign. It’s like when you have a metabolic disease, a chronic metabolic disease that all of the sudden really starts to present shocking and alarming symptoms. And that should be an alarm to us that we’re really in trouble. And that it’s the economy stupid.

Chris: So then Trump becomes the yellowish orangish hue on the skin of a sclerosis victim.

Jim: But also, he’s in a peculiar historic situation because he’s also gonna be the guy holding the bag for all this when it begins to seriously unravel. And he was kind of – history or fate put him in office as the designated bag holder – I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for him, but I do think that’s what’s gonna happen. And that’s how he’s going to be viewed. He’ll be left with this heap of smoldering problems and wreckage, and I think that’s how it’s gonna play out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it played out in the remaining five months of the year.

Chris: I don’t think he’s gonna make it through his whole term, obviously.

Jim: I don’t either.

Chris: He’s got the whole apparatus of the deep state against him. He’s got every major newspaper outlet. He’s got both parties. He really doesn’t have any allies that I’m familiar with at this point in time. And what’s astonishing to me is to just see the level of absolute hypocrisy – they're so transparent, of course – so we had John McCain come out and excoriate, like the president sided with Nazi’s, and I couldn’t find anything in Trump’s statements that said that. He said something that you harkened to which is like, hey, both sides got looks like they're at fault here. And I don’t know what he was supposed to say –

Jim: What he said – excuse me for interrupting – but what he said that was so obnoxious, especially to the mainstream press – was that there were “good people on both sides”. And you know there were Nazi’s on one side, and there w