Peak Prosperity - My Top Predictions for Energy, Interest Rates, and the Economy

Episode Date: January 4, 2025

Chris gives his top six predictions for 2025, covering energy challenges, economic predictions, and strategies for resilience.Mentioned during the episode:-- Chapter 19 of the Crash Course-- Peak Financial Investing-- GoldCore-- eQRP

The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Happy New Year, everyone. I'm going to reveal my top six predictions for 2025. Spoiler alert, it's when the S begins to hit the fan. Let's take a look. All right, hello everybody. I am Dr. Chris Martinson to Peak Prosperity. Happy New Year. It's gonna be a doozy, so prediction time. And, you know, predictions are a good way to be wrong about things, but we're going to make them anyway. And you know me,

I don't just predict things really. No crystal ball. I just analyze the trends. So here's some trends that I think are really going to come into play. But first, let me begin by saying that I've just gone through my usual year end review of 2024, how I did, how the Peak Prosperity Tribe did this year. I mean, wow, what a year. Aside from the constant parsing of the signs of our times, we did deep investigative dives into the Great Taking, the Trump assassination attempts, and explored the big theory of everything,

trying to make sense of it all, covering such foundational materials as 5th Gen Warfare, Rats in a Cage, Totalitarianism, Demoralization, Adjustment Reactions, things that help us understand the world around us through a simplified framework. Okay, and the goal, the goal as always, was to explore the world with an open mind and continue to hone our ability to see what's true while discovering what's not true. As Mark Twain said, it ain't what you know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. But what he's talking about here, these are delusions. So we have a lot of delusions running around in our society. I'm not just talking about the obvious ones like a man can be a woman or a woman can be a man.

As a biologist, I'm just going to say no to both of those things. Chromosomes are what they are. It's not things like, you know, you can have a nation without having a secure border. I'm talking about some really big, profound delusions like you can print money and somehow that leads to prosperity or you can install alternative energy and it's going to work just as good as fossil fuel energy and deliver the same prosperity we're going to have to poke holes in these major delusions here today now in 2024 i started to redo the crash course thinking naively really naively that putting the content into fewer long form chapters would be a smart thing to do but um turned out it was not so and

then you know and guess what uh besides that not being a smart thing to do I had to set other things aside such as that because we had the Trump assassination come along and that required my full attention to properly analyze and report on. Now, in 2025, I'm going to focus on three big areas. First, the crash course. Awesome. By the way, if you go to peakprosperity.com, start here, you'll find all our awesome content organized in collections. So you can see the citizens investigation over there to the Trump investigation. You got the COVID reporting, how to survive a nuclear war, believe it or not, that's a collection of material, the great taking, and of course, the crash course. So I'm going to completely redo the

crash course, but this time as a drum roll, please, shorter videos. I know, I know, I'm a genius, right? I'm going to, second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to refocus a lot of my attention on all things financial and economic with a heavy emphasis on energy, specifically oil, natural gas, uranium, okay? You're going to see a little bit of that here today, but I want people to survive, thrive through this next period of time. And if you understand the economic landscape the way I do, you know that there's a good chance this thing really creates a lot of losers and maybe a few winners. And I'll tell you why I think some areas are going to do better than others.

Three, I'm going to do everything I can to help create public support for any and all transformative policies that Trump, Elon, Vivek, RFK Jr. particularly are going to propose. Whatever they want to do, we need some brand new things happening soon and fast. So, yep, a lot more of this

economic content, investing content, all of that. I also run Peak Financial Investing. And I work with Paul Kiker to figure out how to get people into risk-managed portfolios. More on that later. But anything we can do here. The Doge thing, Maha. I think vitamin D.

If everybody had vitamin D, this would be a much better nation. We need small modular nuclear reactors pronto. These are all things that I believe we need. So I'm going to help get them advanced if I can. Everything I can do. Please, your help too. Now, this is the year of the crash course, 2025. Remember, in 2008, when I first released the crash course, I said this. I said the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years now i wasn't being kind of vague or wishy-washy uh you see like oh you gave yourself a 20-year range there i did but i know that big complex systems take time to shift i know that cultures

take time to shift attitudes ideas they just take just take time. I judge that ours, our situation is such a mega bubble of fiscal, financial and psychological delusions that it's going to take some serious time to penetrate our culture's thick skull. And it turns out I seriously underestimated my culture's commitment to ignoring reality. However, as Ayn Rand said, you can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. I think we're going to live by that this year. I think Ayn Rand is going to be proven to be dead nuts on on this. Now, as I said in 2008, all those years ago, the longer we ignore reality, the fewer and poorer our remaining options will be. So if, for example, we decide as a culture to ignore the fact that oil and gas are finite and instead wait until it's painfully obvious that we are past our final peak of production

before we get serious about finding the next energy source, we're going to be filled with regrets and disappointments. We'll be crying. We'll think, oh, why didn't we reconfigure our cities and transportation and electrical distribution systems back when oil was $70 a barrel? Things seemed so much easier then and today at 300 a barrel they're disappointingly difficult right now those of you who know me and have been following my work know why that statement is made and it's because of this chart right you know i'm not

confused about why declining net energy is going to create more and more apparent hardship. OK, now this image right here, this comes from the crash course, the original one back in 2008. In the ultra important chapter on energy economics as chapter 19, there's a link for it right there. All of this, of course, can be found at Peak Prosperity. Now, if you want to understand this better, and you probably do, go ahead and follow that link and take this course, this chapter. All right. Now, briefly, to sort of unpack this briefly, you and I and everything we know and love about the economy and high living standards that we enjoy, all that because we live in the green zone. Green zone is the surplus energy that's left over after we use energy to get energy. And the way to interpret this chart is that once we use one unit of energy to find one unit of energy, there's no energy left over for other things.

The green zone. This chart would be 100% percent red top to bottom we're currently working our way down through super high surplus energy stuff of course the low-hanging fruit we did that as the culture right as a species is what you do right the lion chases down the lame gazelle not the super healthy one you go after the easy low-hanging fruit first not the really difficult high-hanging fruit first, not the really difficult, high-hanging fruit. We've gone after all the easy stuff, and there's still stuff to go after, but it's not as easy as it was before, okay? So it's really not a mystery. Easy stuff is gone.

Now we're going after the harder stuff. It's deeper. It's in tighter, less forgiving rock formations, and it just simply costs more energy to get it out of the ground than it did in prior decades it's just a fact of life or geology or physics if you prefer this is a fact that's going to be coming roaring back into our consciousness here in 2025 it really ought to have penetrated our consciousness back in 1970. It didn't. Here we are. Okay. Currently, one of the most preposterous, gigantic, enormous delusions being paraded about in the media and across the political stages right now is this idea that we can somehow run all this on solar and wind.

Steel foundries, greenhouses, giant cities, refinery complexes, on and on and on, right? It's regularly presented as if shifting away from oil and natural gas and toward wind and solar is just some matter of political will. We just have to decide to do it. It's being blocked somehow by evil oil companies. The truth is, the more solar and wind you install, the more expensive your electricity becomes. We have the data. If we were a data-centric society, we would look at a chart like this

where we see cost per kilowatt hour in cents up the Y axis and then across the X axis. There is the percent of your nation's electricity that comes from solar and wind with Denmark anchoring right there. The far end almost just over 60 percent. I've drawn that crude red line in there. The far end, it's just over 60%. I've drawn that crude red line in there. I kind of just hand drew that in there as a sort of a way to see the trend in this thing. But look, the conclusion off of this is very simple. It's very easy. The more solar and wind you have as a percent of your energy mix, the more expensive your electricity is. Now, that's not what we've been told, but that's what the data is telling us.

And we have lots of data. We have years of data. We have decades of data. Now, this is absolutely the case. I'm not against solar and wind, right? But I am against them being trotted out as being the star in the play, right? They have the lead role. They can have bit roles, but they can't have the lead role.

Not yet, for reasons that should be obvious at this point in time. Now, and these costs right here, these are with extremely generous government incentives and subsidies, okay? And once those are withdrawn, once governments can't afford this folly anymore, this red line is going to get steeper. It's going to demonstrate that actually this stuff is even more expensive than we thought, especially if we include the complete cycle replacement costs. OK, this is just data, but this is running against popular delusions and the madness of politicians and the media at this point in time. So this is going to be a hard message to get across to some people. But those who can see it early, and that's what I do,

I'm an information scout. I like to provide context. Once you understand the story in this way, I think it's possible to make better investment decisions to figure out where the puck is going to be so you can begin to skate there. Maybe this means changing what you do for work, where your family lives, how you invest. A lot of conclusions come off of charts like this okay now in one small ray of light the script writers for paramount the paramount series landman good series by the way i'm just watching it right now but when i came across this chunk in Landman, I was like, oh, man, we got to talk about this online right away. So, listen, Landman centers that that's the title of the thing. It centers on the life of an oil industry.

Landman, whoever the writers were, they sure understood the issues. Let's give it a go. Who owns them? Oil companies. We're using the power of the wells. No electricity out here. We're off the grid. They use clean energy to power the oil wells? They use alternative energy. There's nothing clean about this.

Please, Mr. Oil Man, tell me how the wind is bad for the environment. Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking thing or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on solar panels

and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don't have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It'd take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And hell, it's in everything. That road we came in on,

the wheels on every car ever made, including yours, it's in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines, pretty much anything plastic, your cell phone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that's not made

with animal or plant fibers, soap, fucking hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats, you name it. Every fucking thing. And you know what the kicker is? We're going to run out of it before we find its replacement. It's the thing that's going to kill us all. As a species. No, the thing that's going to kill us all is running out before we find an alternative.

And believe me, if Exxon thought them fucking things right there were the future, they'd be putting them all over the goddamn place. Getting oil out of the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don't do it because we like it. We do it because we run out of options.

And you're out here trying to find something to blame for the danger besides your boss. There ain't nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumping it. Yes. Yes, I'm cheering. Oh, man, well done, Landman script writers. I mean, they got it right there. The infrastructure, the time, the scale, the cost, how embedded it is and everything.

Oil and fossil fuels are like water and we're fish swimming in them like we can't see them this gal can't see them is a very typical representative of a lot of humanity out there because you've been surrounded by your whole life you're like oh well i've been told that we should just get rid of carbon in the atmosphere so let's just let's glue our hands to roads and pour soup on paintings somehow because oil is bad oil is why 90% of people are alive today because of its role in providing us food and medicine and if we didn't have that food medicine in warmth during winter times and cooling during summer times, we would have a lot fewer people around.

That's just how it is. So at any rate, good job. But notice what's happening here. We're starting to see these messages coming out in popular culture. So this is good because this is reality starting to come back. When reality comes back in 2025, this is where it all ends and where it all goes. So listen, before I, and this brings me right to my top six predictions for 2025. Before I reveal those, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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Time to get healthy. We all want to do it. Our children, though, deserve eating healthy again, and we instill those patterns in childhood. So we deserve better health. They deserve better health. They deserve better health. Everybody deserves better health. And we need to be free from the lies and toxic food pushed on us. Health is your most important form of personal capital. And with the challenges we face, economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, who knows what's coming in 2025,

even potential conflicts. Well, being healthy and resilient is critical. And it starts at home with what we eat. Thank you for listening. And now back to our regular programming. All right, welcome back. Let's turn now to my top six predictions for 2025. And here it is. Number one.

Number one prediction. U.S. oil production tops out. This is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people. Even the EIA, that's the Energy Information Agency of the United States, can barely make the case for extremely weak production growth in 2025. Let's look at this. Here we are, millions of barrels per day up the Y-axis across the X. These are years. 2024 is now pretty much in the bag. These little gray bars are showing the average annual.

So you can see we went from 12 to 13 to 13 and a half-ish. And here we're getting just a little, just, you can just, can you see what's happening here? Less and less and less. This is an extremely bull case here because I think i can make a case we're going to see a lot less than that the eia tends to shoot a little high on these things but here we can see from this is from ovi over at peak oil barrel does great analysis on this stuff really admire the analysis ovi does and this is looking at in the green on the top this is u.s total oil production you can see we had the big crash in 2020, almost a straight line growth up here to about

2024, been bouncing and struggling ever since. And you can see from here of December of 2023, clear through to December of 2025, that's a very different trajectory. That's fairly flat compared to this. Again, this comes from United States STEO or short-term energy outlook projections. Okay. Now, here's why I'm even more bearish than the EIA. And it's because I listened to the analysts over at Goering and Rosenquag.

We're going to have Adam on back onto the program here. Watch for this in late January. They've got an incredible model. For those of you who are into these kinds of things and or you're a resource investor, you are going to want to listen to this interview. But here's the punchline. They have their predictive models here in the red lines

that do an extraordinarily good job of modeling different shale plays. It's very complicated. We'll go into it in more detail in January. But suffice it to say, it's a neural model inputs involves a lot of experience and here in the greenish dark thicker line is actual production wow that's pretty tight agreement here's pretty tight agreement this is for the bakken in the eagle ferns down here um the bakken in north dakota this is for the balkan in the eagle ferns down here um the balkan in north dakota this is their red line prediction here's the actual it's been bouncing around more but we would expect that

well possibly the balkans past peak here and as well eagle fern also passed its own peak so with modeling results like that that's incredible and so if they are right the shale growth is over it's not over over like we don't get any more oil out but the idea that we can just drill more or higher prices are somehow going to rescue the situation they've got a compelling case for why that's not true that's what i'm hanging my hat on i believe that's the right view of this at this point in time now as well alternative reality energy realities begin to set in right people finally begin to go hmm this stuff is unreliable more expensive and by the way when you look at the subsidies that are going into this it's extraordinarily a lot more expensive than even this because the subsidies come from the government which is really you and me. And those represent more deficit spending, which creates higher inflation. So we get what

appears to be slightly less expensive energy, but we have to pay more for hamburger and auto insurance. So it doesn't really work out. These subsidies, if we had, if these things just had to stand on their own, it would be a very, very different story. Now, I get it. Sometimes governments want to, you know, goose production. That's totally fine. But at any rate, we're going to start figuring this out for real, but not before some pain happens.

By the way, that's related to prediction number three. We're going to see a rapid resurgence in an appreciation for nuclear energy, especially fourth generation small modular reactor designs. Here you can see, wow, look, Microsoft bets on SMRs. That means small modular reactor. You see all this stuff is from 2024. Oracle to build SMR-powered gigawatt data center. White Paper argues for SMRs over renewables. We're going to see a lot more nuclear coming forward. And again, this has a very powerful investment thesis that underlies it. My prediction for number four is that natural gas demand is going to hit trouble in terms of too much demand for the amount of supply from the eia again this is their

actual prediction here this is the average annual for 2022 2023 2024 but 2025 this is dead flat uh they are not even they're not like well we don't have a lot more supply every molecule of natural gas that comes out of the ground has a destination already. It's not like we just have surplus coming out. We don't know what to do with it. So whether it's already going into storage for winter use, or it's going into domestic, residential, or commercial buildings, or it's going into industry, or it's being shipped out as LNG, everything coming out of the ground has a use.

Now, here's the fun part. Even though the same amount is going to be coming out of the ground as a use. Now, here's the fun part. Even though the same amount is going to be coming out of the ground this year as in 2023, more or less this next year, demand is going through the roof. Here we just had an announcement from Chenier Energy here saying that they brought on their third train set in an LNG export terminal that's going to take over 10 million tons per annum of LNG that's what it's going to make that's going to chew up a lot more supply coming out of the ground in the U.S. you know what else is well Facebook decided that they were going to actually yeah they're not going to use an SMR for this one they're going to use

natural gas to power this data center. There are data centers popping up all over the place. According to Department of Energy at the Berkeley Labs, very interestingly, they projected that data centers are going to fully double or more, double, possibly triple their demand on electricity in the United States by 2028. This is extraordinary, going from 4.4% of total U.S. consumption of electrical power to as high as 12%. And they project all of this. Very big, very long, very detailed report. You know what they didn't do? They didn't tell us where they think all of this stuff is going to, where this electricity is going to come from.

I searched natural gas and it appears once and they're just like, we think maybe somebody will use some of that stuff. So I don't think anybody's looking at the big picture. I'm worried about that. I'm worried that there's a lot of individual decisions like put in data centers, put in more data centers, put a lot of data centers. The electricity will come from somewhere. Markets will figure it out. I don't think that's a good plan. I'm positive it isn't.

I'm being coy. All right. Prediction number five, interest rates are headed higher, not lower. I know everybody's expecting the Fed to go through cutting cycles. There's going to be lower interest rates. But in fact, what are we seeing here? After 40 years of declining interest rates, we are seeing now interest rates going the other direction. Why would we think this would be just a couple of

year process and be done? I don't think that's the case. I'm expecting higher, not lower interest rates through 2025, again, with very profound investment implications for everybody out there. And people are looking at home buying decisions, home selling decisions. These things are going to have a big impact. And my final prediction is that the recession finally arrives officially. You can see here in the New York Fed recession probability model, we've never had the probabilities be this high without a recession occurring. They think we're going to skate right past it this time. that's because this recession was headed off at the past with fake statistics and really aggressive government expenditures mostly by the biden administration probably mostly to try and

get reelected we had fake jobs numbers that are getting revised downward we have fake inflation numbers it should be a lot higher which subtracts from from GDP. If you subtract enough from GDP, surprise, you're in recession. And I believe that there has been an excessive amount of secretive government spending through SFAS 56, which we will look at. But be that as it may, China is leading the way. This is an absolute emergency. It looks like China is imploding here based on their 10-year treasury rates uh i don't know what anyway there's something very profound going on over there so i think that um well there's a recession coming all right now for most people if we do have this recession this is going to be a pretty rough ride right mainly because they aren't paying

attention right and they're going to get blindsided by the consequences of ignoring reality and living in a fundamentally delusional world. Obviously, this happened with the covid jabs. Right. People weren't paying attention. Some of them regretted that. Now, CNN, MSNBC, New Wall Street Journal, New York Times. All these things are quick ways to become slowly ignorant. These guys, these guys, all of them, they mainly provide. Let's be clear about this air cover for government and corporate policies and programs. And as such, their relentless adherence to propaganda it misinforms people explaining probably their

obsessive hatred with misinformation right although we hate misinformation we hate that stuff right oh no fake news social media the death of truth disinformation even experts don't know how to stop it well in psychological terms if you spot it, you got it, right? Well, you know, what typically drives people nuts the most, myself included, is the things that they most hate about themselves on a subconscious level, seeing them out there in somebody else, right? That guy's never on time. I had blah, blah, blah. Maybe you're not on time, right? All right. But this is the media right this is it they are the largest purveyors of complete nonsense and lies and so they put up a big show about wanting to protect feeble minds from misinformation coming from the alt news constellation uh deep down deep down though

media knows that they are culprits spreading dangerous misinformation like this stuff right here. Really sad part. Most of these corporate and government programs that media is running a big a big program, you know, cover program for. These are grifts. They're scams or outright corruption. We're not defending democracy in Ukraine. You don't have any democracy over there. Get out.

Right. But how about this stuff right none none of the delusions none of them are going to be more damaging than energy delusions and misinformation this stuff is gonna really kill now over the long term access to abundant and cheap energy is the determinant of the vitality of any country's economy. The connection between energy and the economy is both intuitively obvious, right? Intellectually clear, can make the case. You need energy to extract, to make and move things, right?

No energy, no things, right? And here they are telling us this delusion about how wind and solar is cheaper. But I just showed you the chart that said, well, the more of the wind and solar you have, the more expensive your energy becomes, not cheaper. They can't line that like the realities in the chart. This is the narrative. This is the propaganda. That's a delusion. A delusion is when reality is over here and your thought pattern is over here heading in an entirely different direction.

All right. Or we could turn to, say, charts like this one from Mark Berman. This tells a tale, right? So he says here, oil consumption and GDP had a statistically perfect correlation in 2020, which is a fancy way of saying that these things are inseparable. It would be like saying, money deposited in my bank account is statistically perfectly correlated with the amount of money I have. Duh. Of course it is, right? Okay. The green energy delusion, it comes with this steady stream of this corporate and government misinformation, right? Dutifully relayed by the mainstream media as if it were capital T truth itself.

And nearly every day, every day, there's another blathering announcement, right? From some politician, you know, about pouring tens of billions into things such as the state of Massachusetts deciding and dedicating maybe $10 billion to grid-scale batteries. Oh, it's going to make our electricity costs get really expensive here. Or maybe this, the UK deciding they have to spend another 240 billion pounds of investment into their national green energy goals. Peel back the happy talk about this stuff and you will immediately discover a vast swarm of disruption and enrichment of lobbyists and relatives and political donors. What you won't find under these green energy goals is a coherent plan that will provide cheap, reliable energy to the populace. Now I focus on this particular delusion a lot, the energy delusion, because energy to the populace. Now, I focus on this particular

delusion a lot, the energy delusion, because it's the one that will absolutely crush future prosperity if we get it wrong. And we're not getting it just wrong. We're burning up our dwindling supplies of energy in the process. The more of this we chase, the worse

and fewer our options become in the future now as i said the longer we wait things just more unpalatable all right we if look if we wait long enough there won't be anything that can be done anymore right except cry about what we should have done if only we'd let thoughtful engineers make the decisions instead of corrupt ignorant politicians be like oh that would have been, that would have been a good idea. Maybe we should have done that. Remember Bob, the engineer? You know? I think he had it right. Not Keir Starmer. Who knew? At any rate, for people who aren't prepared or aren't willing to become prepared, and this mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, right?

If they aren't willing to become prepared, well, they tend to bounce off of my messages, my presentations, you know, kind of like an unrepentant alcoholic at a surprise intervention, right? Just they're not ready for it. Now, for the astute, however, there are plenty of opportunities to become more resilient, right? More resilient, more mentally, spiritually prepared, even financially wealthier. This is all possible at a minimum, at a minimum. There is no need for the resulting hardships to translate into literal starvation, broken spirits, poverty. Now, far too many, for far too many of the people out there, those things I just mentioned, you're like, oh, Chris, that sounds apocalyptic. I don't know.

I don't know. Well, we just found out that actually this is already a reality for far too many people with homelessness surging by 18 percent. It was already at painfully high record levels in the United States. It surged by 18%, another gigantic one-sixth advance of the number of people out there. It's just, ugh. They say amid a lack of affordable housing, like it's this thing that just happens. We don't know.

Where did our affordable housing go? It ran into the bushes. No, the Federal Reserve as a policy made housing more expensive. It was a policy of theirs because they like financial assets. They consider houses financial assets. Heading up and to the right. That's what the Fed likes. And it results in this.

So this is a policy decision. But that delusion around energy and around monetary policy monetary policy results in real harm to real people. That's why I do what I do. That's why I'm intrigued by the possibility of what's possible with the new administration coming in. Because maybe we can get reality back at the table here. At Peak Prosperity, we preach the benefits of becoming more resilient. The four core areas we focus on are home, health, wealth, and community.

Each of these is an entire subject all on its own. I don't have time for here with subsets, plenty of actions to take, things to learn under there. But you want to build up your capital in each of those areas. There they are, wealth, health, home, community. So it is. It's just time to, it's absolutely time to increase your resilience.

Build up your capital in each of these areas here and you will weather the storms way better than people who don't, right? And so naturally at Peak Prosperity, we have a huge body of resources to help anyone, everyone become more resilient.

Many of these things do not require money, right? Learning skills does not necessarily require money. Money can help you learn skills faster usually, but it's not necessary. Anybody, anytime they want can decide to learn how to do things. So it's part of it. Community, again, you can do that entirely without cash. I'm not even sure cash helps that at all. Becoming resilient, though, I want to be clear about this.

It's a process, right? It takes time. It doesn't have a goal line. There's no destination on the resilience map labeled done, right? You're there. Once, you know, you've decided how resilient you want to be, that's great. You give yourself permission, however, to adjust those levels over time, given the news, given circumstances in your life.

Earlier this fall of 2024, I got very concerned looking at signs of imminent nuclear warfare. So I dialed things up around getting prepared for that. And now I think it's changed a little. I'm a lot less worried about that right now. I don't know if that's wise or not, but that's the point. Your resilience can come and go. Your preparations dial up, dial down. That's the invitation.

Please give yourself permission to take as much time as you need. Now, let's get to predicting the future. As I gave you my six predictions, but you know what? Those are painfully easy to predict what's coming next. You don't need a crystal ball, no magic crystal ball. All you need to be able to do is extrapolate the trend that's already traveling in a specific direction. Politicians and mainstream media, being energy ignorant, will not only overlook the importance of cheap, abundant energy for your and my prosperity, but they will continue to do the wrong things in service to a carefully developed green energy

delusion. They've spent a lot of money on the green energy delusion. So they're going to keep doing that. That's the prediction. The fact that more citizens of their citizens are slipping into poverty and homelessness with every new generation of all energy projects it's not even going to register in their minds as connecting those dots they won't be able to do it what does this have to do with that we have homelessness and we have these beautiful wind turbines over here i don't get it right it's not hard to connect those dots but it is if you're ignorant. And most people at the leadership level are energy ignorant. They're money ignorant.

They have no idea how any of this stuff works. Crash Course helps sort of set that frame so you can understand how these pieces come together. And they do. They really do. Now, for its part, the Federal Reserve and the other central banks, they're going to find even more excuses to try and paper over the issues and misery with more money printing. All right. It's what they do to the central banksters to rhyme with gangsters.

The central banksters financial assets must MUST must always be growing exponentially up to the right. You know, this chart of the Nasdaq 100, good visual of their handiwork. This is how they operate. It's just like they just want that happening forever. And but you want to take a look at the see how this chart really begins to take off right here. After 2008, we had this little downturn right here. Remember, that's the great financial crisis.

You can barely see it on this overblow. The hyper response to that great financial crisis, which is that there that was the worst time ever oh no and so they freaked out and did this and off we go right all right but you see how it takes off right there right around that 2008 financial crisis right up to your bottoms in 2009 see that now we're going up like this in this almost perfectly exponential fashion. Now, how did that happen? Well, obviously, you know, this is easily resolved. If all we have to do is take a look, take a look at this. This is a log chart, okay?

Log chart, meaning this is an exponential chart already. So a straight line on a log chart is an exponentially growing line on a regular linear chart. Okay, this is a log chart of an exponentially growing line on a regular linear chart okay this is a log chart of central bank financial assets um and as you can see look at this it's just growing like since 2008 it was just a steady exponential growth of central bank assets with this giant who even knows what the heck happened here for covid and now they are wobbling them down a little bit but this is an extraordinary thing from 2007 here we went from about 3.3 trillion to up here 2022 when inflation really started to bite badly we went up to about 27 25 uh 25 26 25 to 27 trillion i mean it's just what this is crazy and um so how does a how does a central bank

get assets you know uh very simply they print money out of thin air and they don't even print anything they clack keys and create fantasy currency digits and then they buy stuff like government debt mortgage-backed securities things debt they buy debt with it all right so so that that's banking so but i mean if you want to know why your groceries cost more you know look at this chart that's it that's it you want to know why financial assets exploded higher look at this chart this one this one right here this explains the whole thing right you want to know why the future's going to suck take a look at this chart okay either the central banks this is this is it they're caught right now either they reel back all that printing right they cause a massive

deflationary depression everybody hates them not going to happen or they continue their favorite practice of printing more and more and more at every emergency, which are all actually events created by them in the first place. All right. It's an easy call to make. Central banks are going to print more. That's what they're going to do. It's what they do.

And after an entire generation of really kind of doing all that, only that, that's all they know how to do anymore. I don't think there's anybody working there that doesn't know that this is how it is right so it's all and these efforts all this money printing by the way it's only becoming less and less effective over time and creating larger and larger negative effects right like uh politically toxic levels of inflation concentrated wealth in the hands of activists, homicidal billionaires like Bill Gates, a political class that no longer even has the slightest clue what a balanced budget would look like, let alone how one might go about negotiating one. They just don't, they lack that muscle memory. Now, for those that know what's coming, steps can be taken to avoid the resulting inflation and the many economic dysfunctions that are coming from this chart right here. All right.

For those who are simply playing the game, right? Keep your head down, you know, doing a good job, do what you do, play by the rules um do 401k monthly contributions on autopilot well i'm just not sure that there's going to be enough future walmart greeting jobs to go around this is going to immiserate people because that's what money printing always does just how it's how it goes now having a true risk-managed approach to portfolio management is one of the things that everybody with wealth most needs to help them get through the eye of this needle that's coming. And most people have the exact opposite of that. They have a passive exposure to financial markets, right, for the most part. Retirement portfolios, they can be self-managed.

Exposure to gold and silver is a must, as well as other hard assets such as oil, natural gas, farmland, woodland, mining. We cover all of those options here at Peak Prosperity. Again, these are all resources that can help you. This is a retirement portfolio approach, a self-directed retirement fund here. I have one. Love my EQRP with Damien's company, Peak Financial Investing, to talk to financial advisors who have a risk-managed approach, not a passive approach to wealth investing, gold and silver, gold core.

I love them for their storage, et cetera. Now, here's why I care about this um you know what it's never different this time it never is you know why i'm 100 confident that money printing cannot does not will not lead to prosperity because money is not actual wealth. It's a claim on wealth. Real wealth consists of real things. And those only ever arise from the productive efforts of people using energy. Maybe food energy to power our bodies. Maybe oil energy to power the machines and the trucks.

Money printing, that's not the same thing as oil coming out of the ground. Money is a claim on things. It's not the same thing as oil coming out of the ground money is a claim on things it's not real things itself again this is a longer conversation to be had in the crash course i got whole chapters on this but once you know you know right it's definitely worth your time to watch the chapters on money in the crash course because because once you get this concept of what real wealth is what primary secondary tertiary wealth is what what the role of money actually is and what debt really is you'll be able to more clearly identify the true sources of actual wealth in your life and in your

portfolio right now to believe that central banks have magically unlocked the capacity to print up real wealth out of thin air. You have to believe in the most enduring investment delusion of them all, which is it's different this time. You know what? It's not different this time. It never is. It never is. It never is.

Fundamentals matter. Currency units created out of thin air, out of literal nothingness and backed by the same debts that they enable in the first place. Oh, that's no way to go through life, son. You can't create currency units out of nothing backed by the same debts that they backed by the same debts that those currency units gave you in the first place. This is this is that's that's it's nonsense. It's just nonsense all right um all right listen if it did work if there was a way to print your way to

prosperity you and i everybody we'd all be speaking latin because the romans would have they were exceedingly clever people right they tried the currency debasement route over and over and over again. And it didn't work. They kept doing it until everything collapsed. Like, I mean, if it could have been done, the Romans would have gotten it done, right? You know, after perfecting cement that cures even while being poured in salt water, building roads that are still being driven on 2,000 years later our our road falls apart every five years out out where i live it needs resurfacing um you know figuring out currency to basement should have been like child's play to the romans and you know what they tried it and you know what

didn't work didn't work then won't work now you want to know why it won't work now because it rests on the delusion that money is the real thing in the equation, not the stuff, the real stuff that money can buy. It's a completely upside down delusion. It's got it exactly backwards. And we're going to relearn that lesson. The money isn't the wealth. It's just the claim on the real wealth.

The real wealth is the real wealth. The money is just this figurative abstract marker that's supposed to be in balance with the real stuff. All right. So this is going to be a very exciting 2025. All right. I want to let's start here. Let's join forces. Let's let's become healthier and wealthier, more well-connected to each other. Let's live in resilient homes. My commitment is to continue to be your information scout. It's what I'm uniquely qualified and built to do, all right? Together, we'll figure all this craziness out, all right?

But let's not pretend that a white knight is somehow going to appear, grab the reins, and steer the chariot of fate in a better direction. And I've been at this, feels like nearly 20 years, I guess it's 17 years now. And we're still just as far from the most basic of energy and money understandings among those in power as we have ever been. The fantasies and delusions are as powerful and as pervasive as ever. Look, 2025 is the year that the chickens are going to come home to roost. I said the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years. Well, that brings us from 2008 to 2028.

I mean, we are right on schedule for all of this stuff. And I just don't see any way to avoid what's coming and i do believe that this year 2025 is when we begin this process the next from here 2025 to 2030 is going to be an absolutely rough ride and the reason for that sadly is because we failed as a society, as a culture to lionize the people who should have most been in power. We should have had the most thoughtful engineers. We should have had the most daring doctors at the front of these things. We, the people who should have been rewarded during COVID got punished. The people who should have gotten punished, got rewarded. that is painfully true it's equally true when we look at those things in terms of energy policy monetary policy etc and again you can ignore reality you can't ignore the

consequences of ignoring reality that's what's coming home to root so i want you to join me please at peak prosperity uh if you're not already a member there, and join the conversation because our goal, our whole tribe, everything that we're about is becoming resilient because this doesn't have to be a complete unmitigated disaster for everybody. I think it's going to be painful for a lot of people, no question about it. I think a lot of people don't want to know, can't know, are unwilling to know about what's coming, and that's fine, and that's what it is, but that doesn't mean you have to swirl the bowl with them so context is everything look i might i might have it all wrong i might not the point is to have the conversation dispense with it and then you decide what's right and appropriate for you and that's all i care

about you decide what's actually working in your best interest. But I'll serve it up. We'll get this conversation going. And we'll start with fundamental truths that we know are enduring and build from there. And use those as a springboard for capturing intellectual territory so we can know what to do and when, why, how. With that, thank you very much for listening. I'm Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity. Please come on by and check it out.

We have some great offerings, and 2025 is going to be a ripper of a year. Bye for now. Thank you.