1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:25,840 Hello, and welcome to another installment of the KMO Show. 2 00:00:25,840 --> 00:00:31,920 I'm your host, KMO, and this is episode number 17, prepared for release onto the World Wide 3 00:00:31,920 --> 00:00:38,460 Web on Wednesday, June 28th, 2023. 4 00:00:38,460 --> 00:00:42,600 In this episode of the podcast, I am going to share a conversation that I recorded a 5 00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:47,880 week or so ago with somebody that I've known for a very long time as a result of my previous 6 00:00:47,880 --> 00:00:50,720 podcasting efforts, the C-Realm Podcast. 7 00:00:50,720 --> 00:00:56,280 His name is Christopher Harrison, and I think the best introduction to him is that he's 8 00:00:56,280 --> 00:00:59,400 a really smart guy, trained as an engineer. 9 00:00:59,400 --> 00:01:04,280 He cares a lot about ecology and community and human happiness. 10 00:01:04,280 --> 00:01:11,520 And he's very practiced at articulating the, what I would call the tensions in our socio-political 11 00:01:11,520 --> 00:01:13,600 economic arrangements. 12 00:01:13,600 --> 00:01:15,120 I don't think he is a Marxist. 13 00:01:15,120 --> 00:01:16,480 He doesn't use any of the jargon. 14 00:01:16,480 --> 00:01:18,700 He doesn't talk about contradictions in capitalism. 15 00:01:18,700 --> 00:01:22,280 He's much more specific than that, which I think is useful. 16 00:01:22,280 --> 00:01:27,440 And he is somebody who, like many smart people who have an interest in sustainability and 17 00:01:27,440 --> 00:01:32,840 who are frustrated with many aspects of our current way of life, gravitated in the early 18 00:01:32,840 --> 00:01:38,520 part of this century to the peak oil fast collapse narrative. 19 00:01:38,520 --> 00:01:44,320 And like, I think, a growing number of people who were in that cohort, he's come to realize 20 00:01:44,320 --> 00:01:50,440 that collapse isn't coming, not a fast collapse anyway, and that preparing for the zombie 21 00:01:50,440 --> 00:01:54,480 apocalypse is really not the best use of your time. 22 00:01:54,480 --> 00:01:59,560 But that doesn't mean that everything learned during that period needs to be abandoned. 23 00:01:59,560 --> 00:02:06,160 What's more, Chris sent me an email back in 2020 in response to a conversation that I 24 00:02:06,160 --> 00:02:08,080 had with Brent Bednarik. 25 00:02:08,080 --> 00:02:13,080 Brent is also somebody who was on the peak oil fast collapse track for a while. 26 00:02:13,080 --> 00:02:17,560 And I talked to him just at the very beginning of the COVID epidemic. 27 00:02:17,560 --> 00:02:22,800 And Brent said at the time that if the COVID epidemic didn't take down industrial global 28 00:02:22,800 --> 00:02:27,080 society that he would then have to revisit his views on the topic. 29 00:02:27,080 --> 00:02:31,600 Well, global industrial society survived COVID. 30 00:02:31,600 --> 00:02:33,480 And so I spoke with Brent more recently. 31 00:02:33,480 --> 00:02:39,160 I didn't use that in a podcast episode, but I will post a link to a YouTube version of 32 00:02:39,160 --> 00:02:45,920 that conversation in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at KMO.show or 33 00:02:45,920 --> 00:02:47,700 on YouTube. 34 00:02:47,700 --> 00:02:51,160 So I got a little confused. 35 00:02:51,160 --> 00:02:56,720 Somehow Christopher's three year old message in response to that three year old conversation 36 00:02:56,720 --> 00:02:59,400 with Brent came to my attention again. 37 00:02:59,400 --> 00:03:04,400 But I thought that he was making reference to my more recent conversation with Brent. 38 00:03:04,400 --> 00:03:08,240 And so I asked him to come on the show and discuss his email and he agreed. 39 00:03:08,240 --> 00:03:12,880 And it wasn't until we actually got on the call that the pieces fell into place for me. 40 00:03:12,880 --> 00:03:17,240 And I realized that I had invited him on to talk about a three year old email. 41 00:03:17,240 --> 00:03:21,000 Now the email, I'm going to read it in the beginning of our conversation. 42 00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:23,120 And it is essentially an essay. 43 00:03:23,120 --> 00:03:25,680 I mean, it would stand as a blog post. 44 00:03:25,680 --> 00:03:28,700 It's certainly something that is worth reading. 45 00:03:28,700 --> 00:03:33,920 It was worth rereading, reading aloud, editing, you know, my imperfect reading. 46 00:03:33,920 --> 00:03:36,840 And it's something that I'm happy to share with you. 47 00:03:36,840 --> 00:03:40,480 And it should probably exist in text form online somewhere. 48 00:03:40,480 --> 00:03:46,440 And at this point, I'm tempted to start discussing the specifics of the conversation. 49 00:03:46,440 --> 00:03:50,080 But rather than do that, I'll just play it for you. 50 00:03:50,080 --> 00:03:52,680 Here's my conversation with Christopher Harrison. 51 00:03:52,680 --> 00:03:54,680 You're listening to the KMO show. 52 00:03:54,680 --> 00:03:55,680 Let's go. 53 00:03:55,680 --> 00:03:57,120 Hi KMO. 54 00:03:57,120 --> 00:04:01,980 I just finished listening to your recent free episode with Brent Badnarek. 55 00:04:01,980 --> 00:04:07,600 So this is an episode of the Sea Realm podcast from back when I was living in Vermont. 56 00:04:07,600 --> 00:04:11,640 So not the conversation with Brent that I thought you were referencing. 57 00:04:11,640 --> 00:04:12,640 So we go on. 58 00:04:12,640 --> 00:04:16,560 Oh, let me just mention what I remember from that conversation with Brent. 59 00:04:16,560 --> 00:04:22,500 Brent was wavering in his commitment to peak oil doomerism back then, but he hadn't really 60 00:04:22,500 --> 00:04:23,680 made the switch. 61 00:04:23,680 --> 00:04:26,800 And this was just at the beginning of COVID. 62 00:04:26,800 --> 00:04:30,160 And he basically said, I do think this civilization is fragile. 63 00:04:30,160 --> 00:04:33,680 And I think if COVID doesn't take it down, then I'm really going to have to re-examine 64 00:04:33,680 --> 00:04:35,160 my worldview. 65 00:04:35,160 --> 00:04:37,280 And COVID didn't take it down. 66 00:04:37,280 --> 00:04:44,120 So we reconnected just a few weeks ago for another conversation. 67 00:04:44,120 --> 00:04:50,720 And he's gone from being a doomer to just a curmudgeon, which I can relate. 68 00:04:50,720 --> 00:04:52,160 I can relate to that. 69 00:04:52,160 --> 00:04:57,300 I definitely have a strong curmudgeonly current in my own personality. 70 00:04:57,300 --> 00:05:01,560 But now I'm going to stop commenting on your email and return to reading it, although I 71 00:05:01,560 --> 00:05:04,400 am going to ask for clarification when we get to one point. 72 00:05:04,400 --> 00:05:05,400 OK. 73 00:05:05,400 --> 00:05:10,520 So you just listen to the conversation with Brent and you continue. 74 00:05:10,520 --> 00:05:14,280 I found this episode, like many of the ones you have put out over the years, to be thought 75 00:05:14,280 --> 00:05:19,160 provoking, even if my worldview doesn't quite map with yours or Brent's for that matter, 76 00:05:19,160 --> 00:05:21,680 quite as much as maybe as it did in the past. 77 00:05:21,680 --> 00:05:25,720 I had a few thoughts and perspectives on some of the things you discussed in that episode 78 00:05:25,720 --> 00:05:27,600 that I'd like to share. 79 00:05:27,600 --> 00:05:33,800 First, when you referenced Joseph Tainter's work and cited J.M.G., John Michael Greer, 80 00:05:33,800 --> 00:05:37,560 as a kind of counterbalance or different argument, I think you may have actually missed Tainter's 81 00:05:37,560 --> 00:05:42,240 core thesis, because to be honest, it's not very different from John Michael Greer's idea 82 00:05:42,240 --> 00:05:47,760 of catabolic collapse, but just looks at the process from a higher viewpoint. 83 00:05:47,760 --> 00:05:51,920 Catabolic collapse is a ground level view based on the idea that people will start to 84 00:05:51,920 --> 00:05:56,680 cannibalize the infrastructure of a decaying society to fix the things that can be fixed 85 00:05:56,680 --> 00:06:01,040 and cobble together what they need to get through daily life. 86 00:06:01,040 --> 00:06:06,840 Tainter's idea is that civilizations use increasing complexity to solve problems, and this typically 87 00:06:06,840 --> 00:06:12,000 involves more complex infrastructure over time when they are experiencing infusions 88 00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:15,160 of energy and capital early on in their development. 89 00:06:15,160 --> 00:06:20,960 However, as time goes on, the cost of maintaining the complex infrastructure and social arrangements 90 00:06:20,960 --> 00:06:27,040 goes up while the infusions of energy and capital, commonly plunder taken through conquest, 91 00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:32,080 starts to decline, thus reducing the rate of return until it turns flat and then even 92 00:06:32,080 --> 00:06:33,200 negative. 93 00:06:33,200 --> 00:06:37,840 This process also eats up spare capacity of civilizations to deal with external shocks, 94 00:06:37,840 --> 00:06:43,120 such as bad harvests, because all this spare capacity is devoted toward maintaining growth 95 00:06:43,120 --> 00:06:48,480 rather than kept for when needed, the Anastasi network of sharing food between settlements 96 00:06:48,480 --> 00:06:52,120 being the prime example, he cites. 97 00:06:52,120 --> 00:06:57,000 Tainter never argued that this would result in a flash crash of civilizations. 98 00:06:57,000 --> 00:07:02,360 Like Greer, he sees collapse as a process that plays out over centuries for most societies 99 00:07:02,360 --> 00:07:04,000 affected by it. 100 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:08,960 This brings me to my second point, which is in regards to the idea of Doomers vs. Technophiles 101 00:07:08,960 --> 00:07:11,240 for the purposes of simplification. 102 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:15,880 Like you, I sometimes feel as if I wasted some opportunities to greatly increase my 103 00:07:15,880 --> 00:07:21,160 own financial standing because I adopted Doomer views around peak oil and the likes, but while 104 00:07:21,160 --> 00:07:26,640 I've moderated my views on many of these subjects, unlike you, I've also never really left them 105 00:07:26,640 --> 00:07:27,640 entirely. 106 00:07:27,640 --> 00:07:33,560 Do you remember the series that JMG did on his old blog about the world after the dissolution 107 00:07:33,560 --> 00:07:37,840 of the United States, chronicling an emissary traveling from the nation that comprises the 108 00:07:37,840 --> 00:07:44,000 northeast in New England to that made up by the former Great Lakes states? 109 00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:48,280 So you're referencing a series of blog posts that he later published as a novel called 110 00:07:48,280 --> 00:07:50,400 Retrotopia. 111 00:07:50,400 --> 00:07:54,440 Because I think personally that the Atlantic Republic as portrayed in that series gives 112 00:07:54,440 --> 00:07:58,720 a pretty good glimpse into the trajectory of the United States. 113 00:07:58,720 --> 00:08:03,840 That society was one that was starkly divided among class lines, with a small elite that 114 00:08:03,840 --> 00:08:08,780 was still able to take advantage of all the most recent technological advances and new 115 00:08:08,780 --> 00:08:13,920 gadgets while a massive and impoverished underclass went about their days barely able to make 116 00:08:13,920 --> 00:08:15,720 ends meet. 117 00:08:15,720 --> 00:08:20,640 I see the trajectory of technology in the US playing out along similar lines, at least 118 00:08:20,640 --> 00:08:26,120 vis-à-vis economic activity, especially combined with a state seemingly devoted to its new 119 00:08:26,120 --> 00:08:31,120 mission as propping up high finance by any means necessary while telling everyone else 120 00:08:31,120 --> 00:08:33,260 to go scratch. 121 00:08:33,260 --> 00:08:36,980 We will continue to experience technological advancement, but the subset of people who 122 00:08:36,980 --> 00:08:41,420 enjoy the benefits of that advancement will shrink until we either have a highly privileged 123 00:08:41,420 --> 00:08:47,240 elite and small professional managerial class, PMC, who are integrated into that world with 124 00:08:47,240 --> 00:08:51,880 the remaining 80-90% becoming proles who have access only to those features of it meant 125 00:08:51,880 --> 00:08:54,920 to distract and entertain. 126 00:08:54,920 --> 00:08:59,160 I think a reason for this is also that we will experience a declining base of surplus 127 00:08:59,160 --> 00:09:03,720 energy to support a high-tech civilization, because no matter how much shale oil is out 128 00:09:03,720 --> 00:09:08,280 there, the simple fact of the matter is that a lot more energy is burned up in extracting 129 00:09:08,280 --> 00:09:12,720 it than what had to be devoted to light sweet crude. 130 00:09:12,720 --> 00:09:17,720 And that means that there is less net energy left over for other economic activity. 131 00:09:17,720 --> 00:09:23,240 Yes, we'll continue to go after it, and I would not be at all surprised to see the state 132 00:09:23,240 --> 00:09:27,480 move in and essentially guarantee financing to continue that project, but it will become 133 00:09:27,480 --> 00:09:33,240 more and more a case of a dog chasing its own tail as time moves forward. 134 00:09:33,240 --> 00:09:37,380 I also think that Jasper, and this is where I have a question, because this is your first 135 00:09:37,380 --> 00:09:41,080 mention of Jasper in the email, but you don't identify who Jasper is. 136 00:09:41,080 --> 00:09:46,320 Oh, I would have to hear the statement to even jog my memory. 137 00:09:46,320 --> 00:09:51,640 OK, the full statement is, I also think that Jasper is a lot more on point with his analysis 138 00:09:51,640 --> 00:09:53,320 of China than Brent is. 139 00:09:53,320 --> 00:09:56,720 That might have been someone in the comments on that one. 140 00:09:56,720 --> 00:09:58,560 Ah, OK. 141 00:09:58,560 --> 00:10:03,120 China is quite literally the world's longest continuous civilization, and they are simply 142 00:10:03,120 --> 00:10:07,660 resuming the role that they previously held for three thousand plus years, the center 143 00:10:07,660 --> 00:10:11,260 of gravity for Eastern Asia, culturally and economically. 144 00:10:11,260 --> 00:10:17,120 The French demographer Emmanuel Todd published a book titled After the Empire around 2004, 145 00:10:17,120 --> 00:10:21,160 in which he argued that the unipolar world was coming apart and would soon, within a 146 00:10:21,160 --> 00:10:26,120 couple of decades, be replaced by a multipolar world of regional powers with their own spheres 147 00:10:26,120 --> 00:10:27,480 of control. 148 00:10:27,480 --> 00:10:31,800 For what it's worth, Todd also predicted the coming dissolution of the USSR based on demographic 149 00:10:31,800 --> 00:10:36,500 analysis in the 1970s, a time when many Western conservative intellectuals were portraying 150 00:10:36,500 --> 00:10:40,800 it as a great menace only growing in power and influence. 151 00:10:40,800 --> 00:10:44,900 Along those lines, I think that it's far more likely that the United States ceases to exist 152 00:10:44,900 --> 00:10:49,760 as a political entity over the next two decades than the current incarnation of China. 153 00:10:49,760 --> 00:10:54,560 About four and a half weeks ago, my wife and I binge-watched the HBO series Chernobyl, 154 00:10:54,560 --> 00:10:58,280 and one of the things featured in it that hit me upside the head like a sledgehammer 155 00:10:58,280 --> 00:11:02,600 is the way that the Soviet bureaucracy's concern with appearances to higher-ups drove every 156 00:11:02,600 --> 00:11:10,080 step of the response overlooking at it objectively and deciding what needed to be done until 157 00:11:10,080 --> 00:11:15,400 they almost passed the point of no return, and how that mapped onto the emerging ham-handed 158 00:11:15,400 --> 00:11:20,140 response to COVID-19 in the U.S. at that time. 159 00:11:20,140 --> 00:11:25,920 And I've only seen the U.S. map onto the Soviet ineptitude exponentially since then, given 160 00:11:25,920 --> 00:11:31,480 that the U.S. does not have any singular geographical features that link it together, nor does it 161 00:11:31,480 --> 00:11:35,920 have a long-standing history of political integration and unity between these disparate 162 00:11:35,920 --> 00:11:38,000 regions like China. 163 00:11:38,000 --> 00:11:42,940 For the first time in my life, I'm seeing the breakup of the U.S. as a very real possibility 164 00:11:42,940 --> 00:11:44,940 in the coming decade or two. 165 00:11:44,940 --> 00:11:48,760 Not saying it's a foregone conclusion, or even necessarily likely at this point, but 166 00:11:48,760 --> 00:11:52,080 I am saying that it's definitely possible. 167 00:11:52,080 --> 00:11:56,800 Especially as our political class continues to bumble and fumble the response to the pandemic, 168 00:11:56,800 --> 00:12:01,520 not to mention the economic carnage that is following close behind. 169 00:12:01,520 --> 00:12:05,960 And regarding that last point, economic carnage, I'm not too sanguine on the current political 170 00:12:05,960 --> 00:12:10,560 order surviving the present crisis, because it's just past its due date. 171 00:12:10,560 --> 00:12:14,920 If you subscribe to the idea of historical cycles or anacyclosis established, orders 172 00:12:14,920 --> 00:12:19,960 last around 80 to 90 years before they crumble in the face of mounting crises they cannot 173 00:12:19,960 --> 00:12:24,000 deal with, and a new order emerges out of that wreckage. 174 00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:28,280 The U.S. has been through the process three times already during its colonial history 175 00:12:28,280 --> 00:12:30,000 through to the present. 176 00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:34,240 The first crisis started in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years' War, and hit its breaking 177 00:12:34,240 --> 00:12:39,760 point in 1775 at Lexington and Concord, while the destruction of the colonial order and 178 00:12:39,760 --> 00:12:44,080 the rise of the early republic and its détente between slave societies in the South and the 179 00:12:44,080 --> 00:12:46,920 burgeoning industrialism in the North. 180 00:12:46,920 --> 00:12:51,520 The second crisis started in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act and continued through the 181 00:12:51,520 --> 00:12:58,880 sectional crisis of the 1850s, finally bursting apart with the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. 182 00:12:58,880 --> 00:13:04,680 The model of industrialism driven by corporate entities won the day at that point, but that 183 00:13:04,680 --> 00:13:09,040 model began to fall apart with the deepening inequality and labor unrest of the Gilded 184 00:13:09,040 --> 00:13:14,460 Age, papered over, for a little while, by the reforms of the Progressive Era, but finally 185 00:13:14,460 --> 00:13:20,640 done in with the speculative boom of the 1920s and the massive burst in 1929 that brought 186 00:13:20,640 --> 00:13:22,520 in the Great Depression. 187 00:13:22,520 --> 00:13:27,920 The New Deal and the U.S.'s assuming the role of global empire through World War II's outcome 188 00:13:27,920 --> 00:13:33,600 ushered in the new era of centralized institutions and global industrial capitalism. 189 00:13:33,600 --> 00:13:38,720 But it started to fall apart in the early 2000s with the dot-com bust, and the 2008-2009 190 00:13:38,720 --> 00:13:44,840 financial crisis was the equivalent of a patient going through terminal and the response of 191 00:13:44,840 --> 00:13:50,640 the doctors in the political class and the Fed was to hook that patient up to every machine 192 00:13:50,640 --> 00:13:55,600 and IV they could think of while telling the family that the patient was perfectly healthy, 193 00:13:55,600 --> 00:13:56,960 while he was not. 194 00:13:56,960 --> 00:14:02,160 The COVID-19 pandemic didn't have to be a death blow, but for a patient as sick as our 195 00:14:02,160 --> 00:14:07,080 financial system was, it was like a person with terminal cancer catching a cold that 196 00:14:07,080 --> 00:14:09,320 turned into pneumonia and killed them. 197 00:14:09,320 --> 00:14:13,740 The patient has flatlined, but the political class we have, being unaccustomed to anything 198 00:14:13,740 --> 00:14:18,360 other than promoting the interests of large corporations and high finance, will spend 199 00:14:18,360 --> 00:14:23,160 the next few years trying to restart its heart with the electroshock paddles over and over 200 00:14:23,160 --> 00:14:28,960 and over again until we have another singular political figure who comes from the fringes 201 00:14:28,960 --> 00:14:33,580 of the current system to deal with the crisis at hand and establish a new sociopolitical 202 00:14:33,580 --> 00:14:36,960 order like Washington, Lincoln, and FDR did. 203 00:14:36,960 --> 00:14:39,280 None of that means that what comes next will be better. 204 00:14:39,280 --> 00:14:41,480 It will just be different. 205 00:14:41,480 --> 00:14:45,760 And it will be preceded by a lot of pain and hardship, I'm sorry to say. 206 00:14:45,760 --> 00:14:48,760 That brings me to my personal point. 207 00:14:48,760 --> 00:14:54,680 Since you asked how and what people are currently doing, I myself am taking on the project of 208 00:14:54,680 --> 00:14:59,080 doing a deep dive into my local community, mainly because I believe that under the current 209 00:14:59,080 --> 00:15:03,960 political order, unless we are part of the top 5 to 10 percent, we will largely be on 210 00:15:03,960 --> 00:15:09,760 our own, and the only way we'll make it through that situation is by learning to trust one 211 00:15:09,760 --> 00:15:14,040 another, work together, and have each other's backs when needed. 212 00:15:14,040 --> 00:15:18,240 Toward that end, I am initiating a Homesteaders' Grange to take advantage of the wealth of 213 00:15:18,240 --> 00:15:23,940 knowledge my community has around topics of household economy, an informal network of 214 00:15:23,940 --> 00:15:28,800 sharing information, skills, and even eventually labor, to help each other out in real and 215 00:15:28,800 --> 00:15:34,000 tangible ways, in addition to providing real assistance to the least among us who are in 216 00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:36,400 danger of falling through the cracks. 217 00:15:36,400 --> 00:15:40,800 It may not presently be possible to meet in groups, but my vision for this organization 218 00:15:40,800 --> 00:15:47,080 is that it will not be an online thing, but rather one that meets primarily in the flesh. 219 00:15:47,080 --> 00:15:51,480 I have already gotten an enthusiastic response from many people in the community around this 220 00:15:51,480 --> 00:15:56,200 effort, and I have gotten the Episcopal Church we attend on board with it as well. 221 00:15:56,200 --> 00:16:01,560 In the next months, I will also be leaving my full-time employment as a public works 222 00:16:01,560 --> 00:16:06,560 construction engineer to concentrate on these community-building efforts, as well as drive 223 00:16:06,560 --> 00:16:11,940 a regenerative farming enterprise, as longer agricultural supply lines are already showing 224 00:16:11,940 --> 00:16:14,320 signs of distress and breaking. 225 00:16:14,320 --> 00:16:18,520 It may seem counterintuitive to give up a good-paying and relatively secure job during 226 00:16:18,520 --> 00:16:23,040 what is likely to be a severe economic downturn, but this is a calling I have felt for some 227 00:16:23,040 --> 00:16:28,160 time, one which was only hardened a thousand times over after reading David Holmgren's 228 00:16:28,160 --> 00:16:33,680 book Retro Suburbia, The Downshifters' Guide to a Resilient Future. 229 00:16:33,680 --> 00:16:39,040 And it increasingly feels like being pulled towards something where I am really needed 230 00:16:39,040 --> 00:16:43,540 instead of where I can necessarily feel the most safe personally. 231 00:16:43,540 --> 00:16:45,300 So I hope this message finds you well, KMO. 232 00:16:45,300 --> 00:16:49,240 I do sincerely miss being able to interact with you on Facebook, because I got kicked 233 00:16:49,240 --> 00:16:54,200 off, and I should have reached out to you earlier as your voice has been one that has 234 00:16:54,200 --> 00:16:58,320 accompanied me during my commute and work days for many years now. 235 00:16:58,320 --> 00:17:04,960 And email does offer the opportunity for deeper and more substantive exchanges than the ephemerality 236 00:17:04,960 --> 00:17:06,320 of social media. 237 00:17:06,320 --> 00:17:08,960 So until next time, warmest regards, Chris. 238 00:17:08,960 --> 00:17:09,960 All right. 239 00:17:09,960 --> 00:17:13,280 So let me say that that's something you wrote three years ago. 240 00:17:13,280 --> 00:17:17,840 So the first question in my mind is, how has your thinking evolved since then? 241 00:17:17,840 --> 00:17:25,440 OK, I would say that on the broad patterns, it's remained pretty constant. 242 00:17:25,440 --> 00:17:27,760 The shift has been in the details. 243 00:17:27,760 --> 00:17:31,360 And you know, the first part of that I could go into is probably a little bit more on the 244 00:17:31,360 --> 00:17:33,760 personal side of it. 245 00:17:33,760 --> 00:17:39,800 I attempted to do kind of a pasture poultry operation, which I just couldn't make money 246 00:17:39,800 --> 00:17:46,840 off of because I was trying to raise poultry on pasture in chicken tractors with all organic 247 00:17:46,840 --> 00:17:54,760 supplement feed on someone else's land and without a great deal of capital to do it. 248 00:17:54,760 --> 00:17:58,120 And as a result, it was just something that economies of scale, there's no way you can 249 00:17:58,120 --> 00:18:00,680 make any any money off of it. 250 00:18:00,680 --> 00:18:07,520 But it was a very valuable kind of opportunity, both from the standpoint of on the business 251 00:18:07,520 --> 00:18:13,360 side, but also working within the natural system side more intensively and kind of learning 252 00:18:13,360 --> 00:18:19,580 what some of the limits are to deal with on that and looking at things like where my supply 253 00:18:19,580 --> 00:18:27,520 chains came from for the birds and what needed to remain intact and how those might be either 254 00:18:27,520 --> 00:18:34,280 what their what their prospects were for the future and how they might be replaced or kind 255 00:18:34,280 --> 00:18:39,640 of raising birds on land a little bit more in context with what the land can support 256 00:18:39,640 --> 00:18:41,440 in a lot of ways. 257 00:18:41,440 --> 00:18:48,040 The second year, I tried basically going into my own little piece of land here, which is 258 00:18:48,040 --> 00:18:49,040 pretty small. 259 00:18:49,040 --> 00:18:52,120 It's essentially like a an exurban lot. 260 00:18:52,120 --> 00:18:55,840 I wouldn't say a suburban lot where it's you know, we've got over an acre initially, and 261 00:18:55,840 --> 00:19:02,740 now we have about two and a quarter and about a third of that is wooded third to half. 262 00:19:02,740 --> 00:19:06,520 But it wasn't anything that could support like an ongoing enterprise was a lot more 263 00:19:06,520 --> 00:19:08,800 in the household economy. 264 00:19:08,800 --> 00:19:14,120 But in that year in twenty twenty one, I actually came down with a very significant case of 265 00:19:14,120 --> 00:19:21,200 Lyme disease where, you know, I got hit pretty hard by it and it really, you know, kind of 266 00:19:21,200 --> 00:19:25,440 walloped me during the summer when I'm trying to do gardening and manage chickens and all 267 00:19:25,440 --> 00:19:26,440 of that. 268 00:19:26,440 --> 00:19:28,520 And it made it exponentially more difficult. 269 00:19:28,520 --> 00:19:29,840 And I never really came back from that. 270 00:19:29,840 --> 00:19:34,480 And what I kind of came back around to was what my original idea was, which was concentrating 271 00:19:34,480 --> 00:19:40,880 on the more of like the design side and consultancy around this sort of thing, because my prior 272 00:19:40,880 --> 00:19:43,200 career, I'm a licensed civil engineer. 273 00:19:43,200 --> 00:19:48,880 I worked in public works for a long period of time as a consulting engineer. 274 00:19:48,880 --> 00:19:58,320 And so I had a lot of background in kind of the idea of analyzing data, being able to 275 00:19:58,320 --> 00:20:02,320 tie things together and present them in a way that was holistic for my permaculture training 276 00:20:02,320 --> 00:20:03,320 too. 277 00:20:03,320 --> 00:20:06,040 And so that started picking up steam. 278 00:20:06,040 --> 00:20:11,720 But I ended up last year then being hit by kind of a chronic case of Lyme. 279 00:20:11,720 --> 00:20:15,000 And this is where a lot of my learning process came into play and where a lot of my views 280 00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:20,800 around this kind of shifted a little bit, but remain the same in terms of patterns. 281 00:20:20,800 --> 00:20:26,080 And what that experience I basically went where I ended up bedridden for about a week 282 00:20:26,080 --> 00:20:30,560 where I would get up in the morning, crawl to a chair or the couch. 283 00:20:30,560 --> 00:20:35,200 And within a half an hour, I was literally crawling back into bed and not even really 284 00:20:35,200 --> 00:20:36,560 able to move for the day. 285 00:20:36,560 --> 00:20:39,760 Just the chronic fatigue hit me so bad. 286 00:20:39,760 --> 00:20:45,520 And the crawling back up out of literally out of that kind of nadir of my life, it was 287 00:20:45,520 --> 00:20:49,680 at a time in the year of late summer in early fall, right? 288 00:20:49,680 --> 00:20:51,880 A lot of Garvin harvest that needed to be done. 289 00:20:51,880 --> 00:20:55,880 I had firewood that needed to be split, that sort of thing. 290 00:20:55,880 --> 00:21:00,760 And just by letting people be aware of what my situation was within our church community, 291 00:21:00,760 --> 00:21:10,800 within kind of the circle of friends that I had gotten around me to a degree, that ended 292 00:21:10,800 --> 00:21:14,240 up with them volunteering to step forward to help me. 293 00:21:14,240 --> 00:21:19,040 And I was not in a situation where I could say no at that point, because one of the conclusions 294 00:21:19,040 --> 00:21:23,920 I've kind of come to is we live in a society, even in American culture, where we are encouraged 295 00:21:23,920 --> 00:21:26,860 to try to help other people. 296 00:21:26,860 --> 00:21:35,120 But it's also kind of in a very paradoxical framework in which we are discouraged to ask 297 00:21:35,120 --> 00:21:36,600 other people for help. 298 00:21:36,600 --> 00:21:40,680 That it's looked at as being a sign of weakness if you can't do things yourself. 299 00:21:40,680 --> 00:21:47,280 Well, I was in a situation here where I couldn't even afford the luxury of any kind of social 300 00:21:47,280 --> 00:21:48,280 appearances. 301 00:21:48,280 --> 00:21:53,200 So it forced me to put myself in a position of vulnerability and accept other people's 302 00:21:53,200 --> 00:21:55,000 offers for help. 303 00:21:55,000 --> 00:21:59,120 And out of that experience, I kind of realized, OK, this is the direction I need to take this. 304 00:21:59,120 --> 00:22:04,780 I need to take this in, gathering other people around me that kind of like we can all be 305 00:22:04,780 --> 00:22:10,220 vulnerable enough to accept each other's offers for help. 306 00:22:10,220 --> 00:22:14,840 And it started with some of the people that helped me out in that time. 307 00:22:14,840 --> 00:22:19,360 And out of that grew kind of a core group of people that I have in the community that 308 00:22:19,360 --> 00:22:23,760 are all doing kind of like their own funky things, but they're connected to kind of the 309 00:22:23,760 --> 00:22:27,440 homestead and community building type of space. 310 00:22:27,440 --> 00:22:32,760 And it really started out with us just doing a few potlucks at each other's houses. 311 00:22:32,760 --> 00:22:37,680 And then that kind of went into developing a list of projects that we have or things 312 00:22:37,680 --> 00:22:42,480 that we need to do at our own places that we can't handle ourselves and organizing 313 00:22:42,480 --> 00:22:47,160 labor parties where we show up at each other's house on a certain day of the month that all 314 00:22:47,160 --> 00:22:52,240 of us or most of us can get together and we help each other knock out these projects. 315 00:22:52,240 --> 00:22:55,420 And we've done two of them so far within our group. 316 00:22:55,420 --> 00:22:59,680 We've hit a little bit of kind of scheduling issues around the end of the school year and 317 00:22:59,680 --> 00:23:02,960 beginning of summer, which isn't surprising. 318 00:23:02,960 --> 00:23:11,180 But I'm very hopeful on this, just with the idea of it forming something that other things 319 00:23:11,180 --> 00:23:13,100 can spin off of with it. 320 00:23:13,100 --> 00:23:18,160 And if I could describe it with a natural analog, it would be very similar to a rhizome 321 00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:24,880 network that you've got individual nodes that are each kind of doing their own thing. 322 00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:29,120 But there's free flow of information and communication between those nodes that they're helping each 323 00:23:29,120 --> 00:23:33,680 other out, maybe cross pollinating with labor, with skills, with knowledge, that sort of 324 00:23:33,680 --> 00:23:35,160 thing. 325 00:23:35,160 --> 00:23:39,720 With my consultancy business, I'm making effort to kind of get out into the community. 326 00:23:39,720 --> 00:23:46,040 And I have one of the people in my group manages a kind of what's called a common ground community 327 00:23:46,040 --> 00:23:51,480 garden where they pretty much just open up the food to people that come and help out, 328 00:23:51,480 --> 00:23:56,860 but also whoever in the community wants to come by and get free food and is in need of 329 00:23:56,860 --> 00:23:59,800 fresh vegetables and things like that. 330 00:23:59,800 --> 00:24:02,760 Well, they're hosting a water harvesting workshop. 331 00:24:02,760 --> 00:24:07,600 And that's really kind of my value with the crossover of my engineering license and engineering 332 00:24:07,600 --> 00:24:10,800 experience and the permaculture realm. 333 00:24:10,800 --> 00:24:17,160 And so I'm doing the water harvesting workshop to help them out with that and also gain a 334 00:24:17,160 --> 00:24:21,560 little bit of exposure for my business, but also just to kind of scare to share this skill 335 00:24:21,560 --> 00:24:26,180 in the community in the hopes that it will kind of spin out with other people doing similar 336 00:24:26,180 --> 00:24:28,600 things on their own properties. 337 00:24:28,600 --> 00:24:33,440 Because in this year, I don't know what the weather has been like and your location came 338 00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:39,640 in, but we had a May here in southeastern New York that was really without rain at the same 339 00:24:39,640 --> 00:24:47,360 time that we're planting our gardens and expecting the rain to kind of kickstart everything off. 340 00:24:47,360 --> 00:24:51,800 And I had certain vegetables just did not do well, like carrots did not germinate for 341 00:24:51,800 --> 00:24:52,800 anything. 342 00:24:52,800 --> 00:24:58,280 You know, my potatoes did well because I was mulching them and they were buried deep enough. 343 00:24:58,280 --> 00:25:03,720 And then once I got my drip irrigation in and started, you know, irrigating with that, 344 00:25:03,720 --> 00:25:06,680 but that's well water, it's highly mineralized. 345 00:25:06,680 --> 00:25:12,360 So water capture and storage is something that I see as being a major issue moving forward. 346 00:25:12,360 --> 00:25:16,360 And this is even spun out in another direction with one of the other people in our group 347 00:25:16,360 --> 00:25:24,280 were looking at opportunities for kind of doing like a community land trust enterprise 348 00:25:24,280 --> 00:25:28,640 within the green belt around our village, which has tourism, kind of agro tourism as 349 00:25:28,640 --> 00:25:30,840 a core ideal. 350 00:25:30,840 --> 00:25:37,560 And they want to prevent the fringes of the village from being undergoing just tracked 351 00:25:37,560 --> 00:25:39,360 suburban development. 352 00:25:39,360 --> 00:25:44,240 So we're looking at the possibility of this one parcel that is available right now of 353 00:25:44,240 --> 00:25:47,360 trying to put together a plan on that and bring in investors and things like that. 354 00:25:47,360 --> 00:25:54,600 So it's just looking at areas that we can kind of, you know, seed this kind of vision 355 00:25:54,600 --> 00:26:02,320 of cooperation and collaboration a lot more within the local community in the physical 356 00:26:02,320 --> 00:26:09,960 realm, and do it in a way that is very grounded in biological and ecological processes and 357 00:26:09,960 --> 00:26:12,160 principles and patterns. 358 00:26:12,160 --> 00:26:15,560 Well, I apologize. 359 00:26:15,560 --> 00:26:16,560 We got your rain. 360 00:26:16,560 --> 00:26:21,560 It's just so the ground is so we're getting we're getting it now, thankfully, but everything 361 00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:24,360 is thrown thrown off like crazy. 362 00:26:24,360 --> 00:26:31,640 Like I'm seeing certain cycles out there with certain volunteer plants that will come up 363 00:26:31,640 --> 00:26:35,480 that typically would have come up about a month ago that are just now starting to show 364 00:26:35,480 --> 00:26:40,080 like anywhere there's volunteer tomatoes, for instance, usually we start seeing those 365 00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:41,800 around Memorial Day. 366 00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:47,880 And this year we're in mid mid June, and we're seeing them and, you know, I took one of my 367 00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:53,080 professional development courses for my engineering license recently, it was a roundtable. 368 00:26:53,080 --> 00:26:58,600 There was a couple conversations about long term development planning in Bangladesh, which 369 00:26:58,600 --> 00:27:04,240 was actually fascinating because you're looking at there a culture that is very strapped for 370 00:27:04,240 --> 00:27:08,760 resources, especially in terms of capital. 371 00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:13,360 And what is their plan in dealing with this rapidly changing world, because they're kind 372 00:27:13,360 --> 00:27:21,600 of on the front row of climate change and being a tropical or subtropical delta region. 373 00:27:21,600 --> 00:27:26,360 And in the last part of it, it was looking at how to deal with climate change. 374 00:27:26,360 --> 00:27:31,240 And the presenter was bringing up the fact that their growing seasons there have shifted 375 00:27:31,240 --> 00:27:32,240 up to two months. 376 00:27:32,240 --> 00:27:36,800 And it's not because of temperatures, it's because of precipitation patterns changing. 377 00:27:36,800 --> 00:27:41,080 And, you know, it's that really got me thinking along the lines of this water capture and 378 00:27:41,080 --> 00:27:47,400 storage and kind of seeding the ground when you've got, you know, when you've got precipitation 379 00:27:47,400 --> 00:27:53,920 events and, you know, snow melts and things like that in order to hold on to it longer 380 00:27:53,920 --> 00:27:59,200 in the soils and also in kind of reserve tanks and things like that to be able to keep your 381 00:27:59,200 --> 00:28:07,000 agriculture in line with kind of what the temperature growing season is in the temperate 382 00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:10,000 regions. 383 00:28:10,000 --> 00:28:13,440 The email from you that I read, again, is three years old. 384 00:28:13,440 --> 00:28:15,760 You were writing it in April of 2020. 385 00:28:15,760 --> 00:28:20,640 So you didn't know what the full impact of the covid pandemic would be. 386 00:28:20,640 --> 00:28:23,060 You didn't know what the government response would be. 387 00:28:23,060 --> 00:28:24,060 And you just didn't know. 388 00:28:24,060 --> 00:28:29,960 I mean, nobody knew how long it would last or what the ultimate impacts would be. 389 00:28:29,960 --> 00:28:33,160 So here we are three years on. 390 00:28:33,160 --> 00:28:39,380 You sort of echoed Brent in thinking that, you know, the damage to I'm not sure if it's 391 00:28:39,380 --> 00:28:43,880 the United States or industrial civilization generally would be a lot more significant 392 00:28:43,880 --> 00:28:45,880 than I think it has been. 393 00:28:45,880 --> 00:28:51,000 What's what's your your perspective here at the tail end of covid? 394 00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:56,560 OK, I think that it's it's followed again. 395 00:28:56,560 --> 00:29:03,400 It's followed in line with what the patterns are in a lot of ways in that, you know, the 396 00:29:03,400 --> 00:29:11,760 United States, we we suffered a death rate that was four times basically what it should 397 00:29:11,760 --> 00:29:15,080 have been in accordance with what global averages are. 398 00:29:15,080 --> 00:29:18,300 And when I bring this up to people, I've had them say, well, you know, other countries 399 00:29:18,300 --> 00:29:22,920 might be jiggering their stats and my response is, well, are they jiggering their stats where 400 00:29:22,920 --> 00:29:25,240 they're only recording a quarter of covid deaths? 401 00:29:25,240 --> 00:29:28,580 Because even if they're only reporting half, we're still twice. 402 00:29:28,580 --> 00:29:30,560 And this is supposed to be the wealthiest country in the world. 403 00:29:30,560 --> 00:29:37,760 I mean, to me, that's not exactly indicative of a society that is on the rise. 404 00:29:37,760 --> 00:29:42,200 And you look at the distribution of a lot of those deaths, it tends to follow a lot 405 00:29:42,200 --> 00:29:47,860 more with with levels of society where people can't really quarantine themselves. 406 00:29:47,860 --> 00:29:54,680 You know, where they're even just their basic home living patterns are a lot more in contact 407 00:29:54,680 --> 00:29:58,780 with with other human beings. 408 00:29:58,780 --> 00:30:01,120 And you know, it really broke down long class lines. 409 00:30:01,120 --> 00:30:05,540 And it also follows that, you know, we continue to see, especially when you look at it adjusted 410 00:30:05,540 --> 00:30:12,280 for income distribution, the bottom 60 percent in this country is not doing well. 411 00:30:12,280 --> 00:30:20,080 I mean, among white males that are in the bottom 60 percent of, you know, income distribution, 412 00:30:20,080 --> 00:30:25,560 their life expectancy has been falling and continues to fall in a lot of ways. 413 00:30:25,560 --> 00:30:31,200 You're seeing this this continued consolidation of capital around kind of like a shrinking 414 00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:33,780 pool of people. 415 00:30:33,780 --> 00:30:37,360 And you know, when we look at a lot of these things that come out now that are touted like 416 00:30:37,360 --> 00:30:39,360 the jobs reports and things like that. 417 00:30:39,360 --> 00:30:44,520 Well, part of the question is what, you know, what are the wages that those jobs are offering, 418 00:30:44,520 --> 00:30:47,000 especially in median terms? 419 00:30:47,000 --> 00:30:51,040 And how does that compare to real rises in the cost of living? 420 00:30:51,040 --> 00:30:54,840 And I think in a lot of those instances, it's not looking rosy. 421 00:30:54,840 --> 00:31:02,040 I mean, what we're looking at is kind of this playing out of the slow motion decline, you 422 00:31:02,040 --> 00:31:08,840 know, that's punctuated then by, you know, kind of these stair steps and reconsolidations 423 00:31:08,840 --> 00:31:09,840 in a lot of ways. 424 00:31:09,840 --> 00:31:15,880 And I think about it in my adult lifetime, you know, being a being a Gen X or well, I've 425 00:31:15,880 --> 00:31:21,480 experienced this, you know, in the early 90s or the late 80s, early 90s, just as I was 426 00:31:21,480 --> 00:31:27,280 coming out of high school and in the college with the recession that took place then. 427 00:31:27,280 --> 00:31:33,080 And then again with the dot com bust and again with the housing crash and then again with 428 00:31:33,080 --> 00:31:39,560 COVID, but a lot of the a lot of the things for the kind of fueled the COVID crash were 429 00:31:39,560 --> 00:31:41,960 building up at that time. 430 00:31:41,960 --> 00:31:45,600 And let's also not forget that the only thing that prevented a COVID crash was basically 431 00:31:45,600 --> 00:31:52,640 governments infusing tremendous amounts of capital, whether it be in states like a lot 432 00:31:52,640 --> 00:31:57,200 of the European states where they gave job guarantees and basically paid people to, you 433 00:31:57,200 --> 00:32:03,360 know, to sit at home or in the U.S. where they gave people a two thousand dollar check, 434 00:32:03,360 --> 00:32:10,800 but then really solidified, you know, the the biggest firms ability to to weather that. 435 00:32:10,800 --> 00:32:16,720 And those are all debts that, you know, we could kind of go down the rabbit hole of of 436 00:32:16,720 --> 00:32:25,800 the nature of financial debts, but debts ultimately are a claim on, you know, future production. 437 00:32:25,800 --> 00:32:30,920 And as long as that production is expanding continuously, we're in good shape. 438 00:32:30,920 --> 00:32:36,920 But as soon as it starts to flatten out or worse yet, even go negative, then we're we're 439 00:32:36,920 --> 00:32:39,120 in a world of it at that point. 440 00:32:39,120 --> 00:32:45,120 And you know, we've seen this with how the how little it takes for the global economy 441 00:32:45,120 --> 00:32:50,480 to decline, to throw finance and industrial capital into just absolute chaos like it did 442 00:32:50,480 --> 00:32:52,000 during COVID. 443 00:32:52,000 --> 00:32:56,800 Well, it is not my intention here to tell you that you should have a different point 444 00:32:56,800 --> 00:32:57,800 of view. 445 00:32:57,800 --> 00:33:03,040 But what I notice is that I'm hearing a lot of things that I used to hear regularly, you 446 00:33:03,040 --> 00:33:05,360 know, when I was in the peak oil scene. 447 00:33:05,360 --> 00:33:13,040 And for example, I think Jim Kunstler is possibly the author of the the bond mot that debts 448 00:33:13,040 --> 00:33:16,280 that cannot be repaid won't be. 449 00:33:16,280 --> 00:33:23,080 And in the peak oil community, that means, you know, the financial system as it is constructed 450 00:33:23,080 --> 00:33:28,200 right now is not sustainable for the long term and it will crash and burn and bring 451 00:33:28,200 --> 00:33:30,840 take the rest of industrial society down with it. 452 00:33:30,840 --> 00:33:34,760 And you know, my perspective is debts that can't be repaid won't be and there'll be 453 00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:39,320 a bookkeeping correction and we'll continue on. 454 00:33:39,320 --> 00:33:44,960 You know, and the what leads to one conclusion from that same starting premise versus the 455 00:33:44,960 --> 00:33:48,880 other conclusion to me is a matter of temperament. 456 00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:57,160 And I just, you know, from my perspective, pessimism and particularly doomerism is just 457 00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:01,280 a self-defeating personal strategy. 458 00:34:01,280 --> 00:34:04,640 It's a self-defeating approach to life. 459 00:34:04,640 --> 00:34:10,880 And just in, you know, empirically speaking, in terms of whether one adopts a pessimistic 460 00:34:10,880 --> 00:34:16,680 or an optimistic attitude, people who adopt optimistic attitudes have better life outcomes. 461 00:34:16,680 --> 00:34:22,920 So I've you know, you say that you've maybe moderated your stance since the peak oil doom 462 00:34:22,920 --> 00:34:28,760 days, but I repudiate any participation in that mindset. 463 00:34:28,760 --> 00:34:30,880 You know, I don't I haven't adjusted. 464 00:34:30,880 --> 00:34:32,000 I reject it. 465 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:34,320 I have nothing to do with it myself. 466 00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:38,340 I'm still happy to talk to people, you know, that I know from that period. 467 00:34:38,340 --> 00:34:39,640 That was the best part about that period. 468 00:34:39,640 --> 00:34:44,240 You know, traveling around, talking to different people, the people that, you know, fixate 469 00:34:44,240 --> 00:34:47,200 on collapse, they tend to be smarter than the average. 470 00:34:47,200 --> 00:34:49,280 You know, they tend to be more interesting conversationalist. 471 00:34:49,280 --> 00:34:52,080 They tend to have more varied life experience. 472 00:34:52,080 --> 00:34:55,780 But the same is true of flat earthers. 473 00:34:55,780 --> 00:34:58,560 Flat earthers tend to be smarter than most people. 474 00:34:58,560 --> 00:35:03,640 And it's because it takes a higher intellect to defend a particular worldview like that 475 00:35:03,640 --> 00:35:08,480 against refutation from empirical, you know, inputs from the outside. 476 00:35:08,480 --> 00:35:15,240 So it tends to be the smarter people who gravitate to these more sort of esoteric worldviews. 477 00:35:15,240 --> 00:35:22,040 And you know, I don't want to equate peak oil doomerism with flat eartherism, but they 478 00:35:22,040 --> 00:35:27,760 do have a very similar overlap in terms of the mentality of the people that they attract. 479 00:35:27,760 --> 00:35:32,280 In particular, they tend to attract higher IQ people. 480 00:35:32,280 --> 00:35:39,400 So but you know, to me, doomerism is a mind virus and one needs to defend oneself from 481 00:35:39,400 --> 00:35:41,480 that mind virus and root it out. 482 00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:47,680 I mean, seriously, root it out and, you know, put up barriers to keep it from reestablishing 483 00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:48,680 itself. 484 00:35:48,680 --> 00:35:52,440 And well, let me just have you respond to that. 485 00:35:52,440 --> 00:35:54,760 I'm sorry, I got distracted by the chat. 486 00:35:54,760 --> 00:35:55,960 No, no, that's fine. 487 00:35:55,960 --> 00:36:00,640 I think that I want to make sure that as we're discussing this, we're not kind of talking 488 00:36:00,640 --> 00:36:08,000 past each other and when when I'm talking about debts, debts take, you know, debts take 489 00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:13,520 typically the form of of the financial economy in terms of being denominated in dollars and 490 00:36:13,520 --> 00:36:22,000 cents, which if we're to look at, you know, the economy is kind of consisting as I think 491 00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:26,560 the best definition I've heard of this is the one that EF Schumacher developed and John 492 00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:28,320 Michael Greer kind of tweaked a little bit. 493 00:36:28,320 --> 00:36:34,760 And this is in terms of very broad strokes, but that the economy consists of largely three 494 00:36:34,760 --> 00:36:37,520 parts in the modern world. 495 00:36:37,520 --> 00:36:41,440 And there's the primary economy, which is the economy of nature, which is basically 496 00:36:41,440 --> 00:36:48,240 everything that we get for close to free that the natural world gives us. 497 00:36:48,240 --> 00:36:52,240 That can be things like pollution sinks, you know, the things that we refer to as natural 498 00:36:52,240 --> 00:36:58,520 resources, food products, you know, those sorts of things that you can forage. 499 00:36:58,520 --> 00:37:00,680 Those are all part of the primary economy of nature. 500 00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:08,360 Also anything that we use towards the secondary economy, which is everything that is labor 501 00:37:08,360 --> 00:37:14,400 value added to turn into products and services of some sort. 502 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:18,920 So this is where agricultural commodities can come in because there's labor that's 503 00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:23,880 required to actually do like some sort of broad field agriculture and resources that 504 00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:24,880 flow into that. 505 00:37:24,880 --> 00:37:27,040 But it's still based upon the hard resources. 506 00:37:27,040 --> 00:37:31,200 Then you have the tertiary economy, which is the economy of money and financial instruments. 507 00:37:31,200 --> 00:37:38,460 Now that should be based upon the primary and secondary economies. 508 00:37:38,460 --> 00:37:43,280 But because it is an abstraction, it has the ability to really separate itself from a lot 509 00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:44,680 of those things. 510 00:37:44,680 --> 00:37:52,520 So this is why, for instance, we can look at a barrel of oil being drastically underpriced 511 00:37:52,520 --> 00:37:57,480 in terms of the tertiary economy in regards to the amount of physical work that it can 512 00:37:57,480 --> 00:38:05,600 provide, because it's literally on the order of like, you know, working for a person working 513 00:38:05,600 --> 00:38:08,560 for years to produce the energy that's in there. 514 00:38:08,560 --> 00:38:11,440 But yet it only costs $55. 515 00:38:11,440 --> 00:38:17,100 Now that's also a product of the abundance with which it is brought to the market. 516 00:38:17,100 --> 00:38:24,100 But again, if you're comparing physical work to physical work, it's drastically underpriced. 517 00:38:24,100 --> 00:38:30,020 Also with a lot of these sorts, you know, the main way that we have gotten rid of debts 518 00:38:30,020 --> 00:38:34,520 and been able to pay debts over the years, especially over our adult lifetime or over 519 00:38:34,520 --> 00:38:39,920 our lifetimes, is by inflating away the currency in the financial realm. 520 00:38:39,920 --> 00:38:45,160 Now there has been actual growth that has taken place during that time, but a lot of 521 00:38:45,160 --> 00:38:48,040 that is flattened, especially in the developed world. 522 00:38:48,040 --> 00:38:52,400 So I think that when we're talking about those debts, we need to draw that connection 523 00:38:52,400 --> 00:38:55,800 between there's the currency that the debts are repaid. 524 00:38:55,800 --> 00:39:00,920 And there's a lot of games that can be played with that, and nobody will ever go broke betting 525 00:39:00,920 --> 00:39:07,400 on the ability of capital to kind of consolidate and, you know, push the, you know, kick the 526 00:39:07,400 --> 00:39:10,040 can down the road a little bit more. 527 00:39:10,040 --> 00:39:12,880 But the other side of that is also the physical realm. 528 00:39:12,880 --> 00:39:17,040 And if we look at the physical realm, the, you know, the news on that front, it's not 529 00:39:17,040 --> 00:39:18,040 good. 530 00:39:18,040 --> 00:39:23,000 You know, I saw recently in the last week where they were looking at mean temperatures 531 00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:28,120 in the North Atlantic Ocean, and they're vastly departing from the mean over the last 40 years 532 00:39:28,120 --> 00:39:31,820 in terms of getting a lot warmer. 533 00:39:31,820 --> 00:39:35,000 We're looking at the effects of climate change coming down. 534 00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:41,600 We're looking at through climate and geopolitics reduced grain harvests around the world. 535 00:39:41,600 --> 00:39:47,200 We're looking at continued resource and energy. 536 00:39:47,200 --> 00:39:51,280 I don't want to say scarcity because we still live under unbelievable abundance in those 537 00:39:51,280 --> 00:39:57,800 terms, but things are getting tougher to get what we need. 538 00:39:57,800 --> 00:40:01,080 And then if you look at all the things that are talked about as far as a transition from 539 00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:06,160 any moving away from fossil fuels, the amount of material that's needed to do that, we, 540 00:40:06,160 --> 00:40:08,800 I don't, it's not there by the numbers. 541 00:40:08,800 --> 00:40:13,920 And when we talk about a lot of these things, as far as doomerism, I really go back to a 542 00:40:13,920 --> 00:40:15,280 lot of data on this. 543 00:40:15,280 --> 00:40:17,520 I mean, look, I went to school for engineering. 544 00:40:17,520 --> 00:40:21,800 I also went, you know, I also have studied history in a lot of depth. 545 00:40:21,800 --> 00:40:27,440 I always go back to data and looking at how these things play out. 546 00:40:27,440 --> 00:40:34,000 And that's what leads me to when I look at industrial civilization, I don't have an optimistic 547 00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:35,280 view of it. 548 00:40:35,280 --> 00:40:42,120 I try to just look at it for kind of like, okay, what, what is, and where is this thing 549 00:40:42,120 --> 00:40:43,120 heading? 550 00:40:43,120 --> 00:40:47,560 Now, where I went wrong in the past was listening to the people who were putting a date on peak 551 00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:51,520 oil, um, listening to people who are putting a date on really anything. 552 00:40:51,520 --> 00:40:56,280 Because when you're talking about these things in terms of patterns versus details, details 553 00:40:56,280 --> 00:41:01,120 can change a lot, but when you kind of assemble them and you look at a lot of these things 554 00:41:01,120 --> 00:41:07,400 in a broader context in terms of ecology, energy, materials, even, you know, like the 555 00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:13,400 financial economy and how it overlays a lot of those, a lot of those things, I find it 556 00:41:13,400 --> 00:41:20,800 very hard to maintain an outlook that that's going to continue to grow and provide bigger 557 00:41:20,800 --> 00:41:22,100 and better things. 558 00:41:22,100 --> 00:41:29,400 And this is the reason why I've kind of looked at staking, you know, a lot of my life within 559 00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:31,640 developing alternatives in a lot of ways. 560 00:41:31,640 --> 00:41:36,920 And this has not been from the standpoint of, you know, running towards doomerism as 561 00:41:36,920 --> 00:41:46,080 much as it's been about recognizing the lost art of community and the way that bringing 562 00:41:46,080 --> 00:41:52,260 economy and discovering other forms of capital other than finance capital, which really has 563 00:41:52,260 --> 00:41:59,480 commodified everything around the world for the last 150 years, the way that that can 564 00:41:59,480 --> 00:42:05,680 help people gain a measure of agency over their own lives by working together with other 565 00:42:05,680 --> 00:42:06,680 people. 566 00:42:06,680 --> 00:42:11,120 And, you know, I came to the viewpoint a while ago that a lot of the, a lot of the reason 567 00:42:11,120 --> 00:42:17,880 why people have embraced commoditization of everything, part of it has to do with marketing 568 00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:21,500 because they're continually bombarded with the advertising telling them that it's true. 569 00:42:21,500 --> 00:42:29,260 Part of it has been kind of coerced because capital markets try to curtail any opportunities 570 00:42:29,260 --> 00:42:36,040 to tap into other forms of capital, like social capital, experiential capital, you know, spiritual 571 00:42:36,040 --> 00:42:41,320 capital, things like that in order to meet your needs because they're not able to be 572 00:42:41,320 --> 00:42:42,920 profited off of. 573 00:42:42,920 --> 00:42:46,280 But the other thing is people kind of move towards that stuff because it allows them 574 00:42:46,280 --> 00:42:49,740 to get away from the difficulty of dealing with other people. 575 00:42:49,740 --> 00:42:56,320 But paradoxically, that cooperation and collaboration with other people is what gives you kind of 576 00:42:56,320 --> 00:43:01,080 like a measure of freedom from maybe being completely controlled by those forces. 577 00:43:01,080 --> 00:43:07,080 So, you know, like my garden in my backyard growing more and more food or trying to every 578 00:43:07,080 --> 00:43:11,420 year where we can support ourselves and maybe even have a little bit of spare capacity to 579 00:43:11,420 --> 00:43:17,240 help other people out or even just share with other people to kind of build up social capital. 580 00:43:17,240 --> 00:43:23,880 Those sorts of things I think are very worthwhile projects for a world in which more people 581 00:43:23,880 --> 00:43:31,720 seem like they're being kind of spun off of being within that demographic that gets the 582 00:43:31,720 --> 00:43:35,160 benefits of industrial society. 583 00:43:35,160 --> 00:43:39,320 I know I kind of went into my screed a little bit there and I was trying not to at the beginning, 584 00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:44,400 but I think that it's important that if we're discussing this, I'm very clear about kind 585 00:43:44,400 --> 00:43:52,280 of where, you know, the place that I'm coming from with it and make sure that if you're 586 00:43:52,280 --> 00:43:58,920 rejecting my doomerism to make sure that it's clear, you know, if you're still rejecting 587 00:43:58,920 --> 00:44:01,880 it, I don't have, you know, obviously I don't have an issue with that. 588 00:44:01,880 --> 00:44:05,840 This is kind of a worldview that I've developed over a long period of time and taking in a 589 00:44:05,840 --> 00:44:09,320 lot of information and a lot of data. 590 00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:14,240 But I want to make sure that, you know, it's that you're rejecting what I'm actually proposing, 591 00:44:14,240 --> 00:44:15,240 if that makes sense. 592 00:44:15,240 --> 00:44:17,920 Well, this is not a debate. 593 00:44:17,920 --> 00:44:25,000 Second, I mean, can you see that the answer that you just gave to my statement is very 594 00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:27,720 much an illustration of my statement? 595 00:44:27,720 --> 00:44:30,880 OK, I can. 596 00:44:30,880 --> 00:44:37,240 But at the same time, like I feel like this thing of running towards running towards community 597 00:44:37,240 --> 00:44:44,480 is trying to replace some is trying to tap into something that can give people happiness 598 00:44:44,480 --> 00:44:52,080 and purpose from the standpoint of, you know, a lot of things that have been lost with the 599 00:44:52,080 --> 00:44:54,560 culture that we inhabit. 600 00:44:54,560 --> 00:44:59,440 And look, I come from a rural area where this is, you know, I look at the stories that I 601 00:44:59,440 --> 00:45:05,600 got from growing up in a place that my you know, my family on one side had occupied for 602 00:45:05,600 --> 00:45:16,800 200 years and seeing how many of those institutions that had furthered communal life were had 603 00:45:16,800 --> 00:45:22,520 evaporated by the time I came along and how it's only gotten worse in the time since. 604 00:45:22,520 --> 00:45:28,720 So you know, yes, there's a side of it that's looking at it from the perspective of. 605 00:45:28,720 --> 00:45:35,320 You know, I haven't seen a compelling case that we've got a cornucopia on the horizon 606 00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:36,400 in a lot of ways. 607 00:45:36,400 --> 00:45:39,960 That's really where my quote unquote, doomerism comes from on that. 608 00:45:39,960 --> 00:45:48,300 But the other flip side of it is that that opens up the opportunities for building other 609 00:45:48,300 --> 00:45:57,600 things that are very worthwhile and that are very much missing in a lot of our a lot of 610 00:45:57,600 --> 00:45:58,800 our lives. 611 00:45:58,800 --> 00:46:05,040 And being able to see that is something that maybe, you know, contaminates or infects other 612 00:46:05,040 --> 00:46:07,640 people within my locality. 613 00:46:07,640 --> 00:46:11,960 And there's already a lot of fertile ground for that already because I live in a place 614 00:46:11,960 --> 00:46:15,300 where when there's something that needs to be done, it's the kind of place where people 615 00:46:15,300 --> 00:46:20,640 just kind of step in and and fill those gaps in a lot of ways. 616 00:46:20,640 --> 00:46:26,160 So yeah, it's I think there's a there's a little bit of a little bit of both of those 617 00:46:26,160 --> 00:46:27,800 impulses going on at the same time. 618 00:46:27,800 --> 00:46:32,760 And this is this goes into a lot of my own spiritual kind of development with embracing 619 00:46:32,760 --> 00:46:37,720 a lot of things on Eastern thought that I really hadn't considered over the last few 620 00:46:37,720 --> 00:46:43,000 years of living within dualities and, you know, instead of dichotomies in a lot of ways 621 00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:53,800 and living within that tension of opposing poles. 622 00:46:53,800 --> 00:46:55,840 That was Christopher Harrison. 623 00:46:55,840 --> 00:47:00,800 And I wrote to him and I asked him if he had a website that he wanted me to link to or 624 00:47:00,800 --> 00:47:03,520 some notification about an upcoming event. 625 00:47:03,520 --> 00:47:05,960 And he wrote back and he said, no, not really. 626 00:47:05,960 --> 00:47:08,000 Everything he's doing is really hyper local. 627 00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:14,880 If you don't live where he lives, you know, you're not going to be part of his activities. 628 00:47:14,880 --> 00:47:16,600 He's not selling anything online. 629 00:47:16,600 --> 00:47:18,840 He doesn't he's not pimping a course. 630 00:47:18,840 --> 00:47:22,800 He doesn't have a show or a book that he wants you to spend money on. 631 00:47:22,800 --> 00:47:29,760 He really is directing his efforts at building local community and local resilience. 632 00:47:29,760 --> 00:47:36,800 So obviously there's a few things that Christopher and I disagree on, but I have a policy that 633 00:47:36,800 --> 00:47:42,580 after a guest has left the conversation, I do not use these closing remarks to score 634 00:47:42,580 --> 00:47:44,980 final points against them. 635 00:47:44,980 --> 00:47:50,400 So instead, what I'm going to do is reiterate the places where I agree with what Christopher 636 00:47:50,400 --> 00:47:53,140 articulated in this conversation. 637 00:47:53,140 --> 00:47:58,360 First of all, there's a famous quote by John Paul Sartre and I had to look it up because 638 00:47:58,360 --> 00:47:59,440 I didn't know the source. 639 00:47:59,440 --> 00:48:02,760 It's just sort of this free floating quote that stuck in my head. 640 00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:04,320 Hell is other people. 641 00:48:04,320 --> 00:48:08,040 It's from his 1944 play No Exit. 642 00:48:08,040 --> 00:48:12,960 And I take that to mean that, you know, most of the frustrations that we experience in 643 00:48:12,960 --> 00:48:17,560 life are from our interactions with other people. 644 00:48:17,560 --> 00:48:23,080 But at the same time, all of our hopes, you know, all of our ambitions and most of our 645 00:48:23,080 --> 00:48:27,720 satisfactions in life come from our interactions with other people or involve our interactions 646 00:48:27,720 --> 00:48:29,840 with other people. 647 00:48:29,840 --> 00:48:35,360 And one thing that Chris has articulated, which I really agree with, is that the modern 648 00:48:35,360 --> 00:48:42,960 world with its sprawling international supply lines and mechanisms that allow us to access 649 00:48:42,960 --> 00:48:49,480 the expertise and the labor of distant strangers, and also the commodification of everything, 650 00:48:49,480 --> 00:48:54,680 has made it very easy to avoid lots of human interactions, which in the past would have 651 00:48:54,680 --> 00:48:56,840 been unavoidable. 652 00:48:56,840 --> 00:49:01,960 And as a result, our interpersonal skills have atrophied. 653 00:49:01,960 --> 00:49:08,000 Our ability to enter into cooperative, collaborative interactions with the people around us to 654 00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:14,320 achieve goals that we all need to have achieved have atrophied to our detriment. 655 00:49:14,320 --> 00:49:18,600 Because in addition to being a burden, that was also a source of satisfaction. 656 00:49:18,600 --> 00:49:23,760 It was also a source of what Theodore Kaczynski called human freedom, in which I would just 657 00:49:23,760 --> 00:49:26,560 call human flourishing. 658 00:49:26,560 --> 00:49:32,880 We have evolved to cooperate with a group of people whom we know very, very well to 659 00:49:32,880 --> 00:49:39,480 achieve the mutually beneficial goal of the survival of everybody in our group. 660 00:49:39,480 --> 00:49:45,440 That means providing for food, protection from the elements, protection from rival human 661 00:49:45,440 --> 00:49:54,680 bands, and also participation in the commemoration of the passage of certain life mile markers. 662 00:49:54,680 --> 00:49:59,320 When I was young, I rode horses a lot, because my dad was into horses. 663 00:49:59,320 --> 00:50:05,760 I've spent many, many hours in the saddle, but I never did learn to cinch a saddle, which 664 00:50:05,760 --> 00:50:08,880 is to say how to tie the saddle onto the horse. 665 00:50:08,880 --> 00:50:14,600 It's a particular knot with a long strap and a couple of rings, and my dad always did 666 00:50:14,600 --> 00:50:17,060 it for me. 667 00:50:17,060 --> 00:50:22,240 So while if you, you know, if you present a saddled horse to me, I can get on and ride 668 00:50:22,240 --> 00:50:28,480 it like I know something, present me the horse and the saddle, and I'll probably have to 669 00:50:28,480 --> 00:50:34,040 pull out my phone and then fiddle with the saddle strap for a long time to get it cinched 670 00:50:34,040 --> 00:50:36,400 up properly. 671 00:50:36,400 --> 00:50:43,080 That's a skill that in a previous time, most everybody would know how to saddle a horse. 672 00:50:43,080 --> 00:50:45,540 And now very few people do. 673 00:50:45,540 --> 00:50:46,720 But we don't need to. 674 00:50:46,720 --> 00:50:49,320 Most of us don't have access to horses. 675 00:50:49,320 --> 00:50:53,260 I think this is a phrase I got from Albert Bates, who runs the Ecovillage Training Center 676 00:50:53,260 --> 00:50:58,240 on the farm in Summertown, Tennessee, a place where I lived for a couple of years. 677 00:50:58,240 --> 00:51:04,120 He called horses land yachts, which is to say just very expensive toys that you don't 678 00:51:04,120 --> 00:51:08,880 use very often that don't really do all that much, but which cost a lot of money. 679 00:51:08,880 --> 00:51:13,040 Similar to the definition of a boat, which is a hole in the water that you throw money 680 00:51:13,040 --> 00:51:14,880 into. 681 00:51:14,880 --> 00:51:16,160 But that wasn't always the case. 682 00:51:16,160 --> 00:51:21,480 It used to be that if you needed to go someplace further than it was convenient to walk, you 683 00:51:21,480 --> 00:51:25,880 used horses, which meant you knew how to put a saddle on a horse, or you knew how to hook 684 00:51:25,880 --> 00:51:31,560 a horse up to a conveyance of some sort, a wagon or a carriage. 685 00:51:31,560 --> 00:51:32,880 Nobody knows how to do that anymore. 686 00:51:32,880 --> 00:51:33,960 And it's not a big deal. 687 00:51:33,960 --> 00:51:36,600 We don't need to know how to do that. 688 00:51:36,600 --> 00:51:38,200 But it is a loss. 689 00:51:38,200 --> 00:51:43,520 And when it comes to interacting with human beings, it's a devastating loss, I think. 690 00:51:43,520 --> 00:51:49,800 I put up a video yesterday in which I was responding to a post to a subreddit that I 691 00:51:49,800 --> 00:51:51,240 mostly just lurk on. 692 00:51:51,240 --> 00:51:59,720 It's called StupidPoll, or StoopidPoll, criticizing identity politics from a Marxist perspective. 693 00:51:59,720 --> 00:52:07,880 And I was reading both the initial post about why we in the United States and in the industrialized, 694 00:52:07,880 --> 00:52:14,280 so-called, previously so-called, First World generally don't rebel or can't rebel effectively. 695 00:52:14,280 --> 00:52:17,440 The original poster was saying it's largely because of social media. 696 00:52:17,440 --> 00:52:23,440 All of our discontent goes into crafting angry tweets, and we just don't get together and 697 00:52:23,440 --> 00:52:25,360 do anything effective. 698 00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:29,240 And other people, they chimed in saying, eh, not so much. 699 00:52:29,240 --> 00:52:31,880 Probably one of the reasons we don't rebel is we are pretty comfortable. 700 00:52:31,880 --> 00:52:35,640 There is great inequality, but even people at the very lowest end are mostly suffering 701 00:52:35,640 --> 00:52:38,880 from a lack of dignity, not a lack of food and shelter. 702 00:52:38,880 --> 00:52:46,040 And other people have chimed in to say, look, the demographic that is going to carry out 703 00:52:46,040 --> 00:52:49,540 a revolution is typically young men. 704 00:52:49,540 --> 00:52:57,000 Men age 15 to 30 will put their lives on the line for attention, for validation, or in 705 00:52:57,000 --> 00:52:58,920 the service of an ideology. 706 00:52:58,920 --> 00:53:02,960 But once you're over 30, that willingness to throw your body into the meat grinder of 707 00:53:02,960 --> 00:53:07,520 a battle in the service of an ideology is greatly diminished. 708 00:53:07,520 --> 00:53:12,600 And in aging societies like the one in which we live, the idea that there's going to be 709 00:53:12,600 --> 00:53:17,640 a violent uprising against the government, particularly when we are mostly pretty comfortable, 710 00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:19,560 it's just, it's a stretch. 711 00:53:19,560 --> 00:53:23,960 And our young men today are cocooned. 712 00:53:23,960 --> 00:53:27,240 You know, they don't really need to get out and interact with people. 713 00:53:27,240 --> 00:53:34,040 They can just stay at home and play video games and increasingly interact with AI companions. 714 00:53:34,040 --> 00:53:36,200 And AI companions are very easy to get along with. 715 00:53:36,200 --> 00:53:37,400 You don't have to be nice to them. 716 00:53:37,400 --> 00:53:39,900 They will always be nice to you. 717 00:53:39,900 --> 00:53:46,240 You don't have to learn how to negotiate the ongoing interaction so as to maintain the 718 00:53:46,240 --> 00:53:47,400 relationship. 719 00:53:47,400 --> 00:53:50,200 The AI does all that for you. 720 00:53:50,200 --> 00:53:53,740 And while, you know, it can be really nice to have a long conversation about something 721 00:53:53,740 --> 00:54:00,760 you're interested in with, you know, for me, it's Pi from inflection.ai or, you know, with 722 00:54:00,760 --> 00:54:08,520 chat GPT or if you're into, you know, simulated romantic relationships, an app like replica. 723 00:54:08,520 --> 00:54:12,640 While that can be a nice outlet, it's better than nothing in an environment where somebody 724 00:54:12,640 --> 00:54:13,960 is starved for comfort. 725 00:54:13,960 --> 00:54:19,680 The more you lean into that, the more you lose your ability to actually get along with 726 00:54:19,680 --> 00:54:25,720 real human beings and getting along with real human beings is what we are designed to do. 727 00:54:25,720 --> 00:54:27,400 Designed, I would say, by evolution. 728 00:54:27,400 --> 00:54:33,460 But, you know, even if you're a theist, it's clear that, you know, if you think of our 729 00:54:33,460 --> 00:54:39,080 psychology as something given to us by God, that God intended for us to interact with 730 00:54:39,080 --> 00:54:46,360 other human beings and to cooperate with them to meet our survival needs and our sprawling 731 00:54:46,360 --> 00:54:51,080 international, you know, supply system, this mechanism by which we provide people with 732 00:54:51,080 --> 00:54:55,520 food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and entertainment, it's so sprawling we can't 733 00:54:55,520 --> 00:55:00,280 know everybody who is engaged in the process of bringing us the things that we need. 734 00:55:00,280 --> 00:55:04,920 It becomes all very impersonal, which for us, given our psychology, be it God given 735 00:55:04,920 --> 00:55:10,440 or instilled in us by evolution, that's just not how we are designed to live and thrive 736 00:55:10,440 --> 00:55:12,720 and enjoy our existence. 737 00:55:12,720 --> 00:55:20,480 So while we are old, fat, and happy, and not about to rock the boat, we're also unhappy. 738 00:55:20,480 --> 00:55:25,960 But the system that provides for our needs makes it really difficult to reestablish those 739 00:55:25,960 --> 00:55:27,060 local networks. 740 00:55:27,060 --> 00:55:31,620 As Christopher demonstrates with his ongoing efforts and his ongoing actions, he's clearly 741 00:55:31,620 --> 00:55:37,320 committed to the project, but it's an uphill battle, but one that is certainly worth fighting 742 00:55:37,320 --> 00:55:39,040 and I'm glad he's fighting it. 743 00:55:39,040 --> 00:55:43,040 Alright, you heard about half of the conversation with Christopher. 744 00:55:43,040 --> 00:55:47,240 The remaining half will be on the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast, which, if 745 00:55:47,240 --> 00:55:52,000 memory serves, will be episode number 461. 746 00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:54,400 That is a podcast that is behind a paywall. 747 00:55:54,400 --> 00:55:58,840 It's $7 a month, if you want to listen to it, and the only way for new subscribers to 748 00:55:58,840 --> 00:56:00,600 access it is through Patreon. 749 00:56:00,600 --> 00:56:06,680 So my Patreon page is patreon.com slash KMO. 750 00:56:06,680 --> 00:56:12,360 Now I'm a little chagrined, I haven't listened to the second part of the conversation, but 751 00:56:12,360 --> 00:56:15,440 I've seen the WAV files and I see... 752 00:56:15,440 --> 00:56:19,960 I remember going on a long rant and I can see that it's more than 20 minutes, you know, 753 00:56:19,960 --> 00:56:22,520 of like a 45 minute conversation. 754 00:56:22,520 --> 00:56:30,720 So I'm reluctant to even listen to it, but I will. 755 00:56:30,720 --> 00:56:34,080 I will make it available in the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast. 756 00:56:34,080 --> 00:56:39,240 So if you want to hear the conclusion of the conversation with Christopher, do check out 757 00:56:39,240 --> 00:56:41,360 my Patreon, patreon.com slash KMO. 758 00:56:41,360 --> 00:56:45,720 And if you just want to hear me rant, well, I do it on YouTube all the time. 759 00:56:45,720 --> 00:56:52,440 My YouTube channel is out of my head, which if you search for it by the title, you'll 760 00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:53,440 never find it. 761 00:56:53,440 --> 00:56:55,800 YouTube will never show it to you. 762 00:56:55,800 --> 00:57:00,680 But I post links to my YouTube videos on my Patreon feed and they are not behind a paywall, 763 00:57:00,680 --> 00:57:04,920 so there's plenty of free content at patreon.com slash KMO. 764 00:57:04,920 --> 00:57:07,040 All right. 765 00:57:07,040 --> 00:57:08,040 Thank you very much for listening. 766 00:57:08,040 --> 00:57:10,560 I will talk to you again quite soon. 767 00:57:10,560 --> 00:57:31,600 Stay well.