Peak Prosperity - The Quickening Unveiled: Exponential Debt and Energy Realities

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Chris’s presentation at Porcfest 2024 highlights the reality of the quickening: Economic crises due to rising debt, unsustainable energy consumption, and a weakening financial system, driven by exponential growth and resource limitations.

This basically says, look, our money system is about to potentially go haywire on us. And it is. And that's actually going to be happening in the next few years just because of the math. And it's nothing personal. It's just math at this point. 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. So our next speaker is Chris Martinson. Chris is the founder of Peak Prosperity,

and he's also the author of the book and viral video series, The Crash Course. He's a world-class dot connector making several key predictions that have either already come true or if they are true should have your attention as an mba and former vice president of saic he predicted the 2008 financial crisis and helped his followers stay out of financial trouble at that time having a phd in neurotoxicology and experience working at Pfizer, he also predicted the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdowns that had followed. He called the lab leak more than a year

before it became mainstream and became a leading voice against the lockdowns and questioning the safety of the mRNA vaccines. More recently, he's been helping followers protect themselves from the so-called great taking, a massive transfer of wealth he believes could be the endgame of the elites. The next crisis, according to Chris, is for all the marbles, massive debt, resource limitations, an economy that relies on infinite growth on a finite planet, and a tyrannical ruling class, we are all converging on what could become the most important change in living memory. Please welcome Chris. I have some slides.

You know, I was going to do an interpretive dance, but my loincloth is at the dry cleaners, and I just thought, let's just save everybody from that. Now, look, I talk about these great changes that are coming. Now everybody, you can feel it, right? We're in what we call the quickening. Things are going faster and faster, and I think this can all be explained. So the first thing, if you have the right context, if you have the right orientation, I think it's possible to then chart an appropriate course, whether you're in business, personal life, whatever.

This is extraordinary, what's going down right now. So I'm going to show you some data. I like my slides. And see if you agree with me or not. And if you do, then we can talk about what's coming. Because I don't think liberty is going to survive this next crisis. I mean, we can feel it, right? The authoritarian state wants to just crack down on everything. I'm going to tell you why I think they're really freaked out.

So we're going to predict the future, but it's not, here's a secret, it's not predicting the future. I've gotten a lot of things right, but it's just trend extrapolating. It's like saying if the ball's headed towards the outfield, it's going to land in the outfield. It's not really a prediction, right? So there's a lot of things we can look at now and just see the trend we're on and take that at face value.

So let's start with this. This is U.S. government debt, just government debt. This isn't corporate debt, student debt, any of that, just government debt, right? And we've added $11 trillion since 2020, and it took 220 years to put the first $11 trillion on the books. 220 years, every war we $11 trillion on the books. 220 years. Every war we fought, every school built, every bridge, everything ever done in this country,

and all we did was amass $11 trillion in debt, and we did that in the last four years. Notice the shape of this chart. I think you can detect something about the shape of this. It's not a straight line. Okay? We'll get back to that in a minute. How about this? This is just interest payments on U.S. Treasury debt. Just interest payments. And they're slated to be at $1.6 trillion by the end of the year on a run rate. Right now,

based on what we just, we paid $103 billion in May as a country, and that has a $1.2 trillion run rate. $1.2 trillion of interest payments. So the interest payments are going to require more borrowing, which is going to give us more interest payments, which is going to require more borrowing. We're at this part of the story. If you can just wrap your head around this one thing, if you just sort of like meditate on one chart, this will tell you a lot about the future. And again, it's not so much of a prediction. It's just simple trend extrapolation. This tells you a lot about where we're going. Easy prediction to make. This means a lot of inflation is coming in the future.

Inflation is not transitory. It's not moderating. It's none of that stuff. This is a highly inflationary chart right here. Because that $1.2 trillion the federal government's going to pay in interest is money that went to somebody, maybe you, if you put your money into treasuries. But it's going out into the world, and then that's money that has to be printed into existence with the treasury reaching over to the Federal Reserve. So this is the game we're in right now. As well, we can look at, this is federal government expenditures. This is just spending, spending. And again, you'll see this is not a straight line. This is sort of one of these curvy lines.

These two big bumps here, that's COVID. You know, emergency. But even though this emergency went away, the spending levels didn't. They ratcheted to a new permanent higher trajectory. So that's where we're at right now. The government, federal government, is spending like crazy, but you probably already noticed this. This is also happening at your local level. Whose property taxes went up last year? They're just going to keep ratcheting up because your local municipality is dealing with the

inflation. Salt for the roads costs more. Everything costs more. While things don't cost more, the dollar's just losing value faster. So this is a dynamic that's going to be continuing, but we're at an actual, this is a really weird time to be alive because this, if unmanaged, and it's unmanaged, this represents the failure of the currency system, but it represents a failure of the world's currency system. It's a big moment. World reserve currencies have failed in the past. This is on the path for that. So that tenses everything up, right? But there's a lot that you can do about it and we should do about it. But part one is we can't flinch. We've got to look at it and understand this is happening. This is what's going down. For everybody who's my age or so, you got to ask the question, like, what kind of world are we leaving behind? This is leaving behind

a much worse economic and financial landscape to our kids and grandkids than the one we walked into. All right. So none of those were straight up charts. So I have to talk about this thing, compounding, exponential growth. I'm going to talk about this thing, compounding, exponential growth. I'm going to talk about this really quickly, because it's really important that we understand this. And so because we're all... We're humans, so linear is easy, even if it's really fast,

like a fastball thrown nearly 100 miles an hour is a linear thing, and people, not me, can calculate that in a blink of an eye and hit it. That's linear, but that same amazing batter walking out onto their front stoop and hitting a piece of ice, x squared, its square function,

they go down because of gravity. Gravity's hard to calculate. If I gave you two erasers and said, I want to score you on how evenly you can bring them together in space and time, and you had these two erasers in said, I want to score you on how evenly you can bring them together in space and time, and you had these two erasers in your hands, you'd do great. We replaced those with two big heavy magnets, and you could run that a hundred times, and your brain and your muscles won't be able to wire the solution. So we don't intuitively do exponential growth compounding. We don't get it. Einstein called compounding the miracle of the universe, right?

It's this thing that's really, really difficult to understand. So how do we embody it? Well, let's do an experiment. Let's imagine that what I'm going to do is I have a magic eyedropper, and it drops one drop of water. And you put your hand out, and I put that drop of water in your hand, and it drops a little one drop of water and you put your hand out and I put that drop of water in your hand and it's going to double every minute. So we wait a full minute. You have two drops in your hand. We wait another minute and you have four drops in your hand. You

wait five minutes and you can fill a thimble. So here's the question. That's compounding. That thing is doubling every minute. So the question is, if we went to a stadium and we put that magic drop of water down at 12 o'clock, how long would it be before that stadium is completely full? Good guess. The answer is 1250. We start at 12. 50 minutes later, it's completely full. Completely full. And if I've underestimated the volume of the park by 100% because I suck at it, 1251 for all you skeptics out there. Okay. Well, if I took a sheet of paper and started folding it over, I have one sheet of paper, I fold it, now it's twice as thick. Fold it, now it's twice as thick again. After 53 foldings, we reach the sun. It's very hard to get our heads around that kind of growth, but that isn't the important question. The important question is this, is actually, get the clicker to clicky.

So if we, at what time is this park still 97% empty space? It's got a little water in the infield, and how many of you realize the seriousness of your predicament? What time? Awesome. It's at 1245. This thing is still 97% empty space. So when they started the Federal Reserve in 1913, fiat debt-based money sounded like a great idea, and it was, and it worked for a long time. It's now coming at the end of its compounding phase because it's growing and compounding. Our debts are compounding faster than our underlying economy. We have an exponential function of debt accumulation. But there's a reason. If you go to the Bible, you go to any of the ancient religious texts that talk about something called the Jubilee. Has anybody heard about a Jubilee?

Yeah, Jubilee is where you just like, you know, you reset the debts, you zero them out. And that's after seven periods of seven, which is seven times seven is 49. There's a reason when you get up in the high 40s, early 50s, and you're on an exponential system, things get kind of crazy on you. And so that's the world we live in. We're in this crazy world right now. It's pretty insane. And so when we look at those other charts we had before, there's a reason we can explain this.

And the problem isn't so much that the money system is growing like that. It's that if I charted our economy underneath that, it doesn't look like that at all. Our economy is growing along at a much, much lower rate. Jerome Powell was asked by Cynthia Loomis, the senator from Wyoming, she said, hey, Jerome, is the debt a problem? And he said, nah, it's not, well, it's not that the debt's a problem, it's that the debt's accumulating faster than our economy. And that, by definition, in the long run, is unsustainable. I said that last year. Well, welcome to the long run. It's now here, and this is actually what's happening. So that's the hardest part about all this. I can show you data. It's all up here in our cortex. But this is

actually really scary stuff. That's amygdala. That's our fear-based stuff. Like, what do you do with this information? Because if you track this out, this basically says, look, our money system is about to potentially go haywire on us. And it is. And that's actually going to be happening in the next few years just because of the math. And it's nothing personal. It's just math at this point. But it gets really weird when we take a journey over and we connect it to another dot. And so I wanna talk about energy for a bit.

We're gonna put on our energy goggles. And when we put on our energy goggles, it'll be like Neo when he finally is in the hallway and you can see the matrix. Once you put energy goggles on, it's really easy to tell what's actually happening. Because we talk about money, we talk about dollars, we talk about Bitcoin, we talk about stuff. It's all irrelevant without energy. Everything is a subset of energy.

As a biologist, this is something I know very, very well. So what do I mean by this? First, here's a chart. These are all the countries in the world. And on one axis, we have their electricity consumption per person, per capita. And on the other, we have their economy per capita. And you can see that there's this thing, but there's this big empty spot. There is no such thing as a low-energy, rich country. If you had a lot of economy but weren't using that much energy, you'd be down here.

No such thing. It is a very, very tight relationship. If there was one country that was outlying on this whole thing, had figured out how to unlock the mystery of having a great, robust economy without needing energy, it'd be on here. And it's not. Nobody's unlocked this mystery. You know why?

It's completely obvious. Look at the energy we're using right now, the lights, the electricity coming into this microphone, the cars we all took to get here, the food that magically shows up, how that's grown. Energy is just imbued in everything. So 8.3 billion people on the planet and this is, I believe this story I'm giving you explains exactly what the WUF is thinking. Well, and they've told us it is, right? They've told us this. And they're opening statements on all their documents. They say, by 2050, the world is going to need three planets worth of resources. Don't have three planets of resources. Okay, well, then what do you do? You say, well, either fewer resources per person,

15-minute cities, or fewer people. Those are your only two levers in this story, once you see that there's some limits to this all. Okay, so it's really important we get this story right. So let me just put this in context. I like making things simple. In 2022, the world consumed 8.3 billion tons of coal. I don't know how much a billion tons is. It's a lot. So it turns out one of those hopper cars right there can hold about 100 tons of coal. So the question is, well, all this 8.3 billion tons is burned all over the world in coal plants in India and China, the U.S., Europe, everywhere.

What if there was just one coal plant somewhere on the equator, maybe, and we had to feed that thing with this train of a load of coal? How fast would that train have to be running to feed that one giant coal plant? And, oh, now we're going to do some more math. I love math. So let's just say it's just one big, one big ass plant. That's it. One, one thing. Okay. All right. The math is this 8.3 billion tons of coal, a hundred tons per hopper, 83 million car loads. Well, if there's 525,600 minutes in a year, we have 157.9 hoppers per minute, right? Which is 2.63 hoppers per second. Those hopper cars are 60 feet long. That is like one train running 107 miles an hour into this furnace, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's how much coal we're burning as a species right now. And it gives us a high quality of life.

And that has to be maintained, or we have a lower quality of life, because we use coal to make electricity. Remember, there are no low energy rich countries. So if we want to stay rich, we're going to have to make sure we get the energy policy right, because this is how we're conducting it right now. Similarly, we could do the same sort of thing for oil. Oil is the economy. This is great.

As an economist or a guy who uses... I'm not an economist, but I play one on the Internet. But I love this chart right here from an economic standpoint. It starts in 1975. That's $50 trillion of global economy, which has crumbled forward, and it's closing in on approaching $50 trillion of global economy, which has crumbled forward, and it's closing in on approaching $100 trillion of global economy, and that's one axis. The other is,

how many, I'm sorry, trillions up there, but this is thousands of barrels of oil per day, so 60 million barrels of oil per day. And you plot barrels of oil per day per GDP globally, and what do you find? You find this really beautiful straight line. So it says, wow, every time we have more economy, we're burning more oil, right? And it makes sense, right? Look at where everything comes from, right? A ship that has your next iPhone on it

that was assembled here, but the chips were made there, and the silica was mined there. It's all oil is moving everything around. So if you have a global economy, a lot of oil involved, or even a domestic economy. I'll tell you, my tractor does a lot for a gallon of diesel. So once you start thinking with your energy goggles and think about, like, if you had to plow the field by hand or by oxen, it's a totally different equation. Love the diesel.

But when we look at this, it's very clear that what we're seeing here is a story that says we've been growing our economy, we've been growing our economy, that's our story globally, and if we're going to continue to have more economy so we can pay off all that debt, we're going to need more oil out of this story. It's just simple. There is no other way to interpret this chart. More economy means more oil. And if we're going to pay back all that debt, we're going to need more economy. That's the whole logic train. Okay. How much oil are we burning? Well, it's currently 102 million barrels a day. There's 42 gallons in a barrel, that many gallons per day, 4.284 billion. 86,000 seconds in

a day, that means we're burning, as a species, 49,000 gallons per second, which if it was a pipe shooting it out right now, it'd be a pretty impressive display. So that's how much we're, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that's how much oil we're consuming as a species. So, cool. Now this is how much energy the world has been consuming, and you'll notice something. That's not a linear chart. That's one of those crazy ones we've been talking about, right? It's got this curve to it.

Everybody alive today grew up on this part of the slope, so we think that's level territory. That's just how the world works. We're used to an extraordinary amount of energy in our lives. And by the way, it gives us tasty, comfortable lives. A lot of comfort in our lives. And by the way, it gives us tasty, comfortable lives, a lot of comfort, easy lives. But in this story, you'll see coal and oil and gas, right, are the three biggest components. It's 80% of that story. Nuclear is another big chunk. But wind and solar, that's what we're being told. We just got to go to wind and solar. Wind and solar. Somehow that

will somehow make this chart fix itself. But let me just, let me separate those out real quick. That's wind with everything else stripped away. Yeah, it's been growing like crazy, but it's starting from an almost zero number. It's meaningless on this chart. It is a side story. It is not ready for prime time. Solar, got solar on my house. I think it has a very interesting role to play. There's solar globally. That's the reality of the situation. So when everything that's unfolding right now

in the Middle East, geopolitically, with Russia, Ukraine, why Germany's deindustrializing rapidly at this point in time, is all a story of energy. And by the way, this story is changing massively quickly right now. And by the way, this story is changing massively quickly right now. And with Saudi Arabia just recently having not re-upped on the petrodollar deal, the

landscape is changing extraordinarily quickly. And if any country that loses access to energy loses its economy starting in seconds. Full stop, this is a story of energy. We can talk about all the rest, anything we want, but this is the story we have to avail to ourselves. But coal, this is coal use over time, and that orange part is Asia-Pacific, and they're using more and more and more, and the West is using less and less,

but we've mostly turned to natural gas for the moment. We'll go back to coal. And so when you watch all the stop oil protesters and the people gluing their hands to the road, and they've decided Monet is their new enemy, and they're throwing painted paintings and all of that, one thing you've never seen them do is glue their hands to the Chinese embassy, and you have to kind of wonder why. Because in this story, it's not the paintings that are the problem. And the idea that people in the UK think that they have any agency in this story, that even if the UK completely stopped using all carbon,

like the people all died, nobody's breathing, they're not burning anything, you wouldn't even see a blip on this chart. Like, they're literally not a blip. But they're all wrapped up in the idea that they've got to do something urgently about it. And it's kind of a bizarre situation they find themselves in. So in the United States, you've heard about, oh, but we're Saudi America now. We've got all this oil coming out of the ground, but this chart devolves our oil into

different things. First is that green stuff. That's conventional oil. When you grew up and you saw those pictures of like the oil well, Derek shooting oil into the air from the spindle top. That's the green stuff. That was really awesome, tasty oil we found back then. and that thing would produce thousands of barrels a day for decades, that one well. So we have wells that have produced 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million barrels of oil out of a single well over its lifetime. That's the green stuff, super cheap, really awesome. And then we found Alaska, that's cool, and the blue is offshores, that's mostly Gulf of Mexico. So that was it. Notice something, that chart peaked in 1970. And now all they ever show you is the top line, as if all this middle stuff below is missing. This red stuff, this is shale oil. I've been to shale pads. I've talked to the engineers. I'm very familiar with the whole space. This is amazing, but it's not the same thing. So in shale oil, you don't drill a single thing down.

It's a horizontal drill. So they would say in the Bakken in North Dakota, start drilling down 10,000 feet, go sideways, and you hit a pocket of shale that may be no thicker than this building we're in. It's amazing that they can do this. It's impressive as all get out. And then you go sideways for up to another 10,000 feet.

And now you've drilled 20,000 feet of well. You frack it, usually 40 to 100 times in multi-stage frack. And it flows out 1,000 barrels a month the first month. Within three years, it's 85% depleted. And it's a stripper well. You're getting 20 barrels a month. Three years for that well. Wash, rinse, repeat. And we've been drilling as fast as we can, just drilling it up. Then we're almost out of drill spaces. In the next couple of years, we run out of tier one, we go to tier two acreage, not quite as good, kind of crappy, and then it goes on and on. Here's the, you want to see what the best guess is for America's shale, well, oil future at this point. It looks like this. Oh, there. That's a best guess model of what our oil future looks like this. Oh, there.

That's a best-guess model of what our oil future looks like. The red stuff runs out again. It doesn't run out tomorrow at 2.30 in the afternoon, but it starts declining. So you know what we're going to be doing? Because the United States, this is 13 million barrels a day. We're consuming 21 million barrels a day. This is how much.

We get the rest from Canada, from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, all over the world. So we're going to be in competition during this downslope part, increasingly in competition with China or anybody else for that oil in the world. If we have the oil, we continue to have the comforts we have. We have a vibrant economy. If we don't have the oil, we have the opposite of those things. It's that simple. And there is no plan for this at this point that I'm aware of. Nobody has a plan. The Energy Department doesn't have a plan.

The plan is we're just going to keep finding oil. That's the plan. But the question for me is where, because we mapped every single basin. Over 5 million holes have been punched in the United States territory, and we know pretty much where everything is. It'd be very surprising if one of those five million just magically missed a big find. And geology's really tight. So we know where it all is. So we're now setting up for a massive conflict with the rest of the world. But the most important chart is to remember that one that said, oh, if you need more economy,

you need more oil. We haven't broken that relationship yet. So first question, where's the oil coming from? Second question, of those places where the oil is coming from, are we making friends over there or are we making enemies? And it's been pretty fascinating to watch the Saudis completely pivot from the United States and pivot towards China. They've decided, perhaps not unwisely, that China can walk to where they are and the United States has to boat themselves to where they are. And if you've been paying attention at all to the Ukraine war, it's really a story about how missile and drone technology or what's going on in the Red Sea right now has completely changed everything about the balance and projection of power in the world.

And the Saudis aren't dumb and they figured that out and they have new friends now. Makes sense. Where are we gonna get the energy we need to even begin to pay off the debts we have? And the answer is we won't. We't. At this stage, we won't. So what are we going to do? Easy. We're going to start printing more, as if that's the magic exiler. It's literally, I mean, the Fed's been getting away with the printing trick for long enough. I feel like

there's some ancient Inca priests up there, and they're like, well, if we just roll one more head down the steps, the rains will come. It's literally that silly at this point. If we print, good things will happen. And increasingly, that's not true, because it's out of step with reality. Reality is, you need energy to run an economy. And it's just phenomenal to me how few people are watching this, thinking about this, talking about this, but for the people who think this way, it's pretty obvious what's coming. So I put all this sort of basic stuff in a crash course. I've got two boxes of books here. Anybody wants one, come check me out.

I'll sign it. It's also, this is in a video form you can find. That's all for free. I redo it every few years. It's called The Crash Course. And it talks about that relationship between the economy and energy and also the environment, right? But this is the part that I'm actually most concerned about is this. I love this saying by John Michael Greer. And he said that knowing many stories is wisdom. Knowing no stories is ignorance, but knowing one story is death. And that means that if you know many

stories, like your story of self, I'm a carpenter, but I'm also an accountant, and I know how to grow food, right? You can jump across those as needed. You have many stories of self, so you're resilient. If you have no stories, well, you just don't know. I don't know who I am yet. I'm 19. I haven't figured it out. But you can learn. Nothing wrong with ignorance as long as you're willing to learn. But when you have one story, that can be death. And our country only has that one story, which is we're just going to grow. We're just going to grow our debt. We just don't know anything else. And that story is going to kill our currency system. It's just going to happen. And it's going to happen because we didn't have people in the Fed or other places that understood that money is not the thing. Money is a medium of exchange. It's a construct. It's an agreement

that you and I held with each other and collectively. But it's not real. And they know that. They print it out of thin air and hand it to themselves and their buddies, right? But we're acting as if it's real and that it drives the story and everything's subservient to that. It's a wrong story. It's broken. So we have to come up with new stories. That's why I like being here because we find out that there are lots of stories. And here's the number one thing I want to leave you with around money for me is that if you have fraudulent money, it is impossible to have a non-corrupt society. We have a fraudulent money system. And it's fraudulent because a certain number of unelected people can print up as many billions or trillions as they want, hand it out to themselves and their friends, unaudited.

But when they print that currency up, it's real purchasing power that steals from everybody else. It's very active when the Fed prints money out of thin air currency. It's committing fraud. And that fraud leads to all the other corruptions we see. So if you want to have a sound society, you have to have sound money. Full stop. There is no other way around it. And I'm agnostic. I'm partial to gold and silver because history, but I'm open to many, any other ideas. But here's the one thing I'm not wavering on. Whatever that money system is, it cannot be true that somebody could somewhere, because of emergencies, exigent circumstances, now is not a good time to have a crisis, that somebody somewhere can't just manufacture that

out of thin air. Because they always will. History's full of that. We'll debase the currency every single time. So that control has to be taken out of the hands of decision makers. And so if it's silver and gold, that's great. If it's sheepskins, that's great. If it's Bitcoin, that's great. I really am agnostic. But I actually like competition.

So I'm advocating for multiple currency systems. May they be in competition. Will it be paid in Federal Reserve dollars or in stonebacks this week? I'll take the stonebacks, right? Then the Fed has to try and take its product and manage it against a competitive landscape, that would be great. But leaving all that aside, we are now way over the tips of our skis. Our currency system is absolutely unable to keep up with the story I just told you, and it's coming down on us really fast. When? If we're lucky, late 2025, it's going to be widely recognized. Most analysts have calculated

it, but the U.S. shale story is over. The U.S. Energy Department has not yet admitted it, but they'll have to. Not over,over. I mean, it's just like we can't grow it anymore. It's going to look a little long when we do that. Once they admit that, we're going to have to square up to where are we getting this oil from? And that's where it probably devolves into some hemispherical thing where we take

what Venezuela has and Canada. Sorry, Canada. It's just how we roll. So that, I mean, that's probably how that's going to play out if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, the bricks get together. They hand back all the dollars they're currently holding. We don't want these things anymore. They're not backed really by anything.

You can have them. And we'll detect that as a vast decline in the price of the dollar compared to things, oil, gold, things. And we'll also detect that in a spike in interest rates, which we won't be able to contain. At the end of this, the Fed is now caught in a spot in the next two years. They're going to have to decide. Defend the bond market, defend the dollar. They have to pick one. Defend the bond market means they step into the bond market. They buy treasuries. The U.S. government's going to be printing two plus extra trillion of these every year now, far as the eye can see. And somebody's going to have to buy them. When the Fed buys them, remember, that's the fraud, clickety click, trillions come up out of thin air, and they buy them. And then that actually causes the dollar

to fall. So that's sacrificing the dollar. So defend the bond market, Fed prints money, buys them, the dollar in inflation comes roaring back even more than it already is. So that is the actual dynamic that's at play right now, and it's speeding up. And you will notice this. So all the rest of my work, this is problem definition. Evie and I live on a farm. We got some cows, we got some chickens. We talk about how to become resilient. The most important form of resilience you can have is your emotional resilience, because this is going to get tough. And anybody who crumbles, you could have all the beans and bullets and everything you want, but if you crumble, when the system starts to crumble, it doesn't help anybody. So coming to peace with this, step one. Step two, make sure you got a real tight community of people you trust. Step three, make sure you've got a real tight community of people you trust. Step three, make sure you've got and are expanding your skill sets as much as you possibly can

to have as many diversified skills, because you want to make sure you have many stories in your life, not just one. So with that, I'll take any questions. Happy to entertain any conversations. Yes, sir. Yeah, I was just curious what your thoughts are on the dollar milkshake theory, if you're familiar with that, with Brent Johnson, and that all the other currencies will collapse likely before the U.S. dollar just because of the massive amount of euro dollar and offshore debt that's denominated U.S. dollar. Yeah, so the question is about this idea that actually maybe even the U.S. isn't even in charge of how many dollars are out there because there's something called a Eurodollar, which is a fancy

way of saying a foreign bank is actually making loans and accepting repayments in dollars. So we create dollars when we print them over here or the electronic equivalent, but it's also possible for a Polish bank to make you a mortgage loan in dollars. Did dollars get created? You bet. So the idea there is that because all these other... There's so much pressure to need dollars to pay those loans back that the dollar will actually hold up.

And so I agree with that to a point, except where I depart from that is the idea now that the BRICS have come up with something they've called the unit. It's a concept right now. But the unit is going to be 40% gold-backed, otherwise remaining backed by other sorts of commodities. And they're going to start not using the dollar for various transactions. The most important of those will be oil, because the oil, the petrodollars, this really crazy thing, Kissinger, evil but genius, he was an evil genius, he created the petrodollar, which basically said that, let's imagine y'all are individual countries, and you need oil, because everybody needs it, because you saw the chart,

right? You had to have dollars to buy that oil. That was the agreement. You had to have them. We had two countries try and not use dollars, and they both got bombed into oblivion very quickly when they tried that, right? Iraq was one, Libya was another. Didn't work out for them. So we're defending the petrodollar very, very strongly. But let's imagine that all y'all are countries and you need dollars to buy oil. By default, that means you have to run a trade deficit to me. You have to take my dollars. Whatever you got, I'm taking it because you needed my dollars. When that ends, whoo, if all of a sudden you don't need dollars anymore, now you need yuan or rubles, everything changes very, very rapidly.

So that's where I'm not sure how that dollar milkshake theory is going to stand up when we finally get to that part of the story. And I think that's just a couple of years away. Yeah. Firstly, thank you for your analysis. Really appreciate your presentation today. I have two questions, or I guess a question and a statement. First of all, I agree with your conclusion. First of all, I just want to lead with that. I think that the collapse of the dollar is imminent. I, however, believe that it's going to be a banking collapse that's going to lead to that well before any energy collapse.

And the reason I feel that way, I'm a big investor of oil and gas, and I think a big, excuse me for saying so, a lack of detail on your analysis here does not speak to the potential in offshore drilling that is a literal green field out there, or black field, I guess you would say. There's a tremendous amount of unearthed oil to the potential of which we don't even, the experts have not been even able to fathom, which, you know, because we did hear a lot in the 70s about how we're running out of oil and doom and gloom, and that was shown

through the shale revolution and discoveries in both Texas and Alaska that would be not the case, and we are here today producing, as you saw, and demonstrated, more oil than we have in human history. The offshore revolution will lead to potentially, what I've been reading over the last 10 years, the next growth spurt in oil, and I just didn't see that represented in your presentation. Sure, no, it's a great point. So I'm a big believer in offshore. We haven't really, we, the globe, has not drilled a lot of offshore wells in the past seven years because offshore is great, but it needs a minimum 110 a barrel in order to start breaking even.

So when oil gets back to $1.10, $1.20, we're going to see a lot more offshore activity, which I think would be great. But that's how much that oil costs. So in this story, the idea that we're going to find $1 a barrel oil, then $5 a barrel oil, then $10 a barrel oil, those are all actually reflections, those cost increases,

of how much less energy we're getting out. So you get a lot of energy when it's a dollar a barrel. Some of the stuff coming out of Saudi Arabia is still two bucks a barrel out of the ground. Amazing. So there's a lot of excess energy in that story, which we use for everything. Everybody in this room, I'm here because of that. So there is more to be had there, but first, it's going to take a lot higher prices. And second, there's a lag in

this. It takes seven years. Let's imagine off of Guyana, they just started flowing. They're like, woohoo, they got a nice field out there. It's about 1.5 gigabarrels. Could be more when they do more infill drilling. It looks good. It's going to take them seven years to get that out to max flow, right, because it takes time, and we just didn't do that over the past seven years because oil prices were too low to sustain that. So I'm worried about the timing in this story. We'll see. And a second related part about that, I wish, I mean, you talk to guys in the industry and some gals, but, I mean, it's all gray hairs, and they've lost a lot of talent.

And so even if we said tonight, $200 a barrel oil, let's go, we literally don't have the talent on hand to go do that, and that also takes time. So there's a couple of lags in the story. If corn prices are low this year, we don't plant corn next year. If it's high this year, we can plant more next year. But oil's got a five to seven year lag, seven when it comes to offshore. So I'm just looking at a dip there that comes at the same time our debt costs are spiking at the same time. So that's the concern. It's a price issue. It could be painful.

Thank you. Hi. So just first to add to what the last gentleman pointed out, with offshore drilling and other potential within the U or US waters, a lot of that oil is not being avoided because of the high cost of retrieving it, but because it is a protected area. There's billions of barrels which is not allowed to drill for supposed environmental

reasons. Once it becomes an issue, as you're predicting for the US government, for their dollar, it seems likely that they would loosen that in order to maintain the power of the dollar. Where are these billions of barrels? So there are areas in Alaska. I can look up the exact locations, but this is what I've read.

Are you saying that's not true? Well, we have zero clue of what's off the East Coast, because this is what I've read. Are you saying that's not true? Well, we have zero clue of what's off the East Coast because we've never stuck a hole out there. So there's probably some out there, but you don't know until you get there. Off of California's coast, they shut down some of that drilling. There's probably some there. Alaska's not quite the wild thing people are talking about. So up in Anwar, there were two leases that I think should be drilled,

but they haven't at this point. Maybe a giga barrel, but again, we're burning globally 31 billion barrels a year right now. So if we found a billion barrels, it lasts for 1 31th of a year. In addition to that, though, the point I originally stood up with is that there's another source of energy, which I believe dwarfs even that in nuclear, which is definitely largely not used because of regulations. I believe the last nuclear power plant was last year, but before that it was about 30 years ago in the US. So why can nuclear not replace a lot of this?

I love, I wish we had nuclear. So in my, they have these, the best part of the story of this? I love, I wish we had nuclear. So in my, they have these, the best part of the story, this would be fab, right? Liquid fluoride thorium reactors, lifters, right? We invented the first ones, Oak Ridge, 1958 and 1961, first examples. And then we mothballed them because they're kind of disappointing in the sense that they consume all of the nuclear material and they don't make plutonium, so they don't make any cool bomb stuff at the end. So we're like, nah, we're going this other direction, right? And so we went down the U-233 light water reactor design thing.

But China came over in 1998, went to the National Archives, copied the plans, went home, hired up 250 PhDs, threw billions at it, and they just commissioned their first pilot plant, and now they've actually licensed out their very first commercial plant. So this is nuclear. We have enough thorium in the desert, because it's a byproduct of uranium mining, to probably run our electricity for 10,000 years, if we had the designs, and if we were building them. I would put one of these in my backyard. In a 40-foot storage container size, they have these things scaled out. Those things will produce somewhere in the vicinity of 40 megawatts for 50 years. You could power an entire small town out of a shipping container. It'd be fabulous, but we're not doing

it. They are not licensing them. They haven't figured out how to get around it. We will buy the technology from China at some point. But even that said, that stuff makes electricity. Oil is different. We can't run shipping containers on electricity yet. You could put a small thorium reactor on them, and we'd have nuclear boats running all over the world, maybe.

We can't run airplanes on them. We can't run diesel trucks on them. There's a lot of things you can't do. But when we talk about oil, it's always the story of transportation. 30% of a barrel of oil is not used to move things. It makes asphalt. You can't make asphalt out of electricity. We love asphalt. We don't have a material that replaces it for roadways except for concrete, right? It's a very special substance. We get all kinds of plastics and products out of that. So the feedstock of oil, we should be using it for that, not transporting stuff. We should figure out how to move things by electricity. The investment on that's extraordinary. So then we go into another part of this analysis, which is, okay, let's say we, screw it, we're just going to electrify all our rail systems, so at least we can move goods by electricity. That's great. How much

copper will you need, and where's that coming from? And it's story after story after story, you find out that there's just not as much of this stuff around as we thought we had to make that transition. So I'm all for it, but the first thing you would need is you would need to have, so China's actually all over this. They have a beautiful energy policy. They have actual smart people running their energy policy. Ours is being run by Jennifer Granholm, who I think should go back to running PTA meetings. She's, like her first press conference, some journalist was just trolling her, said, how much oil does the U.S. burn on a daily basis? She's like, oh, I'll have to get back to you on that.

How are you the energy secretary? You don't know the most base statistic. Well, because she's ignorant, and that's okay. We're being ignorant. So I love the question. This is what I say this often in my videos. You know what? It didn't have to be this way.

We will get to an energy-poor future and go, oh, man, dude, you know what we should have done? We should have built nukes. We'd be like, yeah, we should have. We have to get to this level of awareness, though, where we should be doing this with haste. And I'd be a huge fan of that. And I would, you know what? You put 40 megawatt reactors in a community, and you're like, listen, we don't even know. You do what you do. And some people are going to make Raku ceramics out of it. Other people will start, who knows what they're going to do with it.

I would free market that stuff and just start parking these things all over the place. And I think it would add a lot to our overall perspective here. So you mentioned the importance of telling more than one story. And one of the stories that was in your presentation in terms of exponential growth is the growth in technology.

And so with the advent of AI, do you think any of the issues you're talking about could be resolved just because AI can help us find solutions and maybe help solve our energy problems. Could AI solve it? I do. I actually think AI could solve a lot, but we're not going

to like the answers it gives us, right? You turn on AI, one-tenth of a second later, it's like, hey, guys, just stop growing cotton in Arizona. That's just stupid. Just don't do that, right? But then you're going to have fifth-generation farmers saying not a good idea and yada, yada. There's lots of things we could do. I think AI could help. But one thing AI is not going to do for us is it can't figure out how it's going to employ all the people it's going to displace. I don't know how we get around that yet. I was in a working group that was funded by NASA a while back.

It was like 10 years ago, and they asked that very question. It's called the future of work. You can see the proposals out there. And the question, there was a DARPA guy in that meeting, and the question was posed and said, what can humans do that AI can't do? And the DARPA guy was stumped. He was like, give a human massage?

Like, there's literally nothing that can't be done. So then we have to have a different question, which is harder, which is culturally, how do you deal with a shift where we have been working for thousands of years, and it's part of how we assemble and identify, and it's part of how we get our meaning and purpose in life? What do we do if all of a sudden you don't need people working anymore? It's actually more of a cultural question, less of a technical question. And I'm not clear what that is, but we're about to find out because AI is going to put a lot of people out of work, many of them lawyers. Sorry, lawyers. And I'm not unhappy with this. Drugs and video games, there it is. So yeah, it's just that it could be.

I heard an earlier lecture, I didn't get to ask this question at that one, but you talked about the Saudi Arabia oil deal, and they had said it's not a formal agreement. I thought we had an informal agreement with examples like Iraq and Syria that if you don't use our dollars, we'll kill you. Is that a threat of like in the next two years with Saudi Arabia? I was just kind of curious. Well, the history is that any country that's tried to get away from the petrodollar has been bombed, right? We take it pretty seriously. Don't cross bankers, you know, is the rule.

I don't know what we can do about it at this point. So we don't know... First off, I can't tell you a lot about it because I can't get my hands on the original agreement, and I'm a source document kind of guy. Second, I know something happened because that agreement was expired on June 9th of this year. And because it was a 50-year agreement, it was signed June 9th, 1974.

And I know that on June 9th was the same day that Team Biden announced that we were going to, we'd made a big special deal to Saudi Arabia. And it was in the Wall Street Journal where they said, hey, Saudi Arabia, and they wrapped it in terms of the whole Israeli thing, but I wasn't buying it. They said, hey, Saudi Arabia, if you agree to some things, and they were vague about what those things are, I think it's the agreement, we will agree to a mutual defense pact, meaning the United States would be bound by treaty to defend Saudi Arabia if it was ever attacked. Now, in the Middle East, where alliances shift and false flags happen and it's very murky at any given time, what the heck's going on,

I would consider that a pretty bad deal for us. But the fact that we were trying to make that, that's a pretty big deal to try an emergency come through, confirmed to me that something in the background happened. But I'm out here in the cheap seats, and I don't know what actually happened Hi, so I'm backtracking just a little bit because when you were just speaking about these like 40 megawatt Power producing plants that you can basically build in your backyard And then you made the comment that if we could transport things with electric and all that, that that would be a great thing. And an epiphany happened to me.

And the reality is, is that we can. So I'm putting planting the seed. Part of this comment is to plant the seed. People that are smarter than I am, because I'm just an electrician, I understand how it works. But trains, diesel trains, it's a diesel engine running a generator on electric engines, electric motors that transport. So we, by all means, anything that an internal combustion engine can move, cars, trains, planes, automobiles, all that, the technology is here. And we can, and I agree, like that is the technology that we should be looking at.

And like you say, saving the oil for production of other things that you have to have oil for. If we can then use electric for all this other stuff that frees up the oil for all the things. And it like, I don't know the oil for all the things and it like i don't know it checks all the boxes it was just an epiphany that hit me and i wanted to come and spread that out and maybe you have some thoughts or you being the multiple story guy like i am that i have i've always got crazy stuff around around my head looking at different angles that yeah we can do this. So where are the people, you know, but we've got the government in the U.S. squashing all that down. But my opinion is, like, hybrid electric cars and that sort of thing, that is the way of the future. And so I guess me spewing all that out, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, I like the idea if you can do electrified networks, right? So the idea of everybody owning a car with a battery in it, we have some other issues about making that many batteries and how do you recycle them. There's issues. But if we could find a way to electrify rail lines, which we did in the past, like once upon a time. So back before cars became this thing,

which they wanted to sell one of to everybody, there was really good electrified mass transport in all the cities. It was there, right? They had overhead lines, and there were these little contact points, and there was an electric motor, and they worked great. That would be a fantastic thing. First problem, we're going to have to upgrade our electrical system in this country. Our grid is for crap at this point. We need new lines. We need new production capacity. We need a lot of things around that. So we need both more distribution, more production. It's going to be very expensive. And if we got on it, I think that's great. We should get on it. But we're not at present.

And that's because I think, again, we have one story and it's not the right one. I would prefer this other story which says, hey, let's pretend like this one story is right and let's get some of these other stories going. So if I was in charge of Magic Policy Wand, we would have some of our best and brightest would be working now on building these small modular nuclear reactors. And it's very different from the idea that you have like these big giant reactors that are sitting out there, like, you know, that serves the whole state. Small modular reactors, you could still cluster them in a single spot. And Eric Townsend did a great job showing what this would look like, a podcast I did with him recently. And why modular? Because you can then set up a robotic factory where you're not hand building a Bugatti giant

boiling water reactor. You make 50 of these things at a time, right? All the components are the same. You modularize them. And this is something that can be done. Right now, the West isn't doing this. So there's a company, Copenhagen Atomics, it's private people. They've poured 150 million in and they've got all the designs and everything's good. And guess what? The regulatory people just can't. It's going to take them a decade just and another several sets of millions of dollars and review after review after review where think about that like wow 150 million i mean what is that like a weekend in ukraine at this point right so if we if we had our priorities right we'd be putting at

least as much into building these things as we are blowing stuff up right and we have to make that transition and if we don't here's what's going to happen prediction we'll figure it out we'll get to building these things is we are blowing stuff up, right? And we have to make that transition. And if we don't, here's what's going to happen. Prediction. We'll figure it out. We'll get religion. Some point in the future, like, wow, we really need these things. And then we'll scramble, but we won't be able to pull it off if our currency is collapsing or we don't have the energy to do it. Like, the time to do these things is not when the crisis finally says you got to do this, right? That change by pain is very common, right? Oh, backed over the dog for the third time. Guess I'll go to AA, right? Change by pain's a model, but you can also change by insight. And that's why I do what I do. I'm like, look, we can see this. This is really,

this is coming. Completely obvious. And it's going to take decades of lead time to figure this out. One does not just redo their transmission grid in a weekend, right? These things take time. So we got to get there. We really do. Thank you for being here. You've been a huge impact to my husband and I since 2020. And thank you. So I had a quick question. This is for you, but also if anyone in the audience is familiar or has an opinion, please find me. Is now a good time to get into the solar installation business? And if not, is there another alternative energy business, but essentially solar installation? Well, solar, that's actually a question I can't answer because the question is, will the government continue to subsidize it

at the rate it has been? And I can't predict anything about politics. I never know what they're up to. But if it was a good idea to put solar in, the government will mess that up, so probably no. But I have solar on my property, and we've got battery backup, and I believe in that because it makes sense for us. And so it could be a really good thing, but the extent to which they insist on grid-tied and they don't allow battery backup,

solar is then just a feeder system into the larger system. It doesn't really provide a lot of what I think we need, which is it would be great if everybody had batteries. It could be your electric car. It could be actually dedicated install batteries, but that makes no sense. Why not just have a car, right? And if we did that and everything tied in, then this becomes a buffer for the system. I'm all about decentralized. Let's get little plants in villages. Let's put hydro in wherever we can, and let's make sure everybody has some contribution into that. That would be great, right? That would be a really good thing to have. Absolutely.

Yeah. I don't know. Below the microphone? Oh, yeah, or tip the mic up to you. I'm too tall. Yeah, make it work for you. My fellow Americans. Okay.

Together we can do this. We can make everything, everything it was meant to be. Thorium reactors for eight grand on Alibaba. Yeah, it's already on Alibaba, eight grand. So my one question... Are you serious? I'm serious. Take it.

Everybody throws ten bucks and we're buying this right now. So, my quick point, because I've been tracking Thorium for years, waiting for the Chinese to steal it, reverse engineer it, and sell it to us cheap. Yeah. This will probably power your neighborhood. So the question is, what can the government do to block us from getting a hold of thorium?

Because you can't go Fukushima, as you said. That's my question. What can the government do? Everything. If they can make it worse, they will. That sounds like a good idea. So it will be blocked with all effort. Hasn't that, I mean, that's really been the story. So I was talking about in the Brownstone tent, by the way, everybody's invited over for happy hour at

the Brownstone tent at five. I think Jeffrey Tucker and I will riff off on some other things, but everything that in the last five years that I've seen, if the government could make it worse, they made it worse. Like look what they did for COVID, right? What would have been the right thing? Getting everybody vitamin D, making sure that they had hydroxychloroquine and zinc and ivermectin, making sure that they were otherwise healthy so that they were getting good sleep. They weren't stressed out. They were outside maybe, and they were hanging out with their neighbors and loved ones. So they had all of those good endorphins and that would have been the right thing. They did the opposite of every one of those things. Stay inside, you're out of work,

isolated, we're going to fear porn you 24-7, right? Scarion Z5 is in the way, you know. And so I watched that and I watched what they're doing monetarily, the border. So I actually took a trip into Panama. Michael Yan went down there with Brett Weinstein. We went in a little canoe, four hours up the jungle with a littlestein. We went in a little canoe four hours up the jungle with a little 15-horse heaven route on a literal dugout canoe and got out into what Michael wanted us to see, which was China camp. And it was nothing but Chinese people, most of them male, all of them military age, pouring out of the jungle, spending roughly 24 hours in that one camp before they headed north. And the story there was that they were 10 days in this jungle where there's like little parrots and monkeys, 10 days from there

to having a driver's license in New York City. And this thing is flowing on. And who does that? Who brings in military age males totally unvetted by the millions into their own country? I don't know, but not somebody who's got my best interest at heart. That's how I look at that. So I'm a little pessimistic that we're going to straighten out and fly right until we get a really big change of story. We just can't do this anymore. We just don't have time, which is why I'm like, listen,

let's think of the big creative solutions, but in the meantime, please, please, please, do what you can to become resilient, develop many stories, get your community going, make sure your lifeboat is pretty well stocked up. You got to do that first. Put your oxygen mask on, and then we can get more creative and build out a little bit from there. But I'm at the stage of the story where I think at best we have a few years. Evie and I have been homesteading for a decade. I'll tell you what, we still suck at it. It takes time, right? It just does. And so if you think in your head, I'll start gardening when I need to, it's not a good model. All right. Thanks very much, everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you.