Peak Prosperity - When Cheating Becomes a Way of Life: A Survival Guide

Episode Date: March 22, 2025

The Fourth Turning, or the “crisis” stage is underway. Everything is at stake. If global war is the unavoidable outcome, then literally everything you love about your life is at stake, including your life itself.Mentioned:Peak Financial InvestingAlert from March 17Update 1Update 2

Why has everybody been going crazy lately? Have you been wondering? Well, I'm going to explain it to you today. 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. Hello everyone, Dr. Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity here and I've got a very special scouting report that I'm sharing with the public and it explains how we got here and where we're

going. Look, we're in the middle of the fourth turning or the crisis stage It's underway Everything's at stake if global war is the somehow unavoidable outcome of all this well Then literally everything you love about your life is at stake including your life itself Now look our path through this if we're have one, it must involve a clear-eyed view of how we're wired up. I mean humans, right? What truly drives our behavior?

What can we do maybe to alter it in time so that we can actually avoid that truly awful outcome of, say, global war? I'm not sure if Europe can avoid it at this point. Now the answer to this begins with noting a few things about ourselves that frankly aren't all that flattering. You know, all problem solving must go through to the root itself. So that's what we're doing, a root cause analysis.

Now, here I'm gonna connect our current events to those of our evolutionary path and I'm gonna ask and answer this question, which is, do you have what it takes to survive the revolution that's underway? Now those who can't or won't face the truth that we're gonna discuss here today I think they're destined to continue to angrily lash out They're gonna impotently throw cucumbers out of the bars of their cage and I'll explain what that means in a minute

And they're gonna just experience fits of of rage but impotent rage. They're going to be out of the game. Now what do I mean by fourth turning? Forth turning is a book by Straus and Howe. I've interviewed Neil Howe a few times. Wonderful guy. And it talks about how we pass through these cyclical parts of evolutionary history or cultural history.

And one of the key defining traits of the fourth turning or crisis era besides war is loss of faith in our governing institutions. Now think about the faith we've lost in government institutions, financial institutions, health institutions, educational. Now it's a very big list. And if you look at this, let me full frame this. You can see fourth turning way over there on the right. It's a decisive era of secular upheaval when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. And it's kind of marked by maybe a global financial crisis. It could be war and multiple signals point to this being the final crisis

stage here and that should end sometime around 2033 but between here and there oh that is going to be tough now question what happens when humans gain access to a system say one that's tied to I don't know money or political power say an election system, right? And they realize they can game that system without any consequences. Okay, my theory is simple. They're going to cheat. They're going to cheat.

Even more than that, as Bastiad said way back when, cheating or plundering, when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men and women in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it. So give these systems enough time. Cheating doesn't just sort of happen. It becomes a way of life. It's passed down through convention and custom until those within the system

Barely even are capable of recognizing their actions is a moral right? That's what Bastiott was getting at here now History and science and human nature all back this up So let's explore how cheating starts how it spreads how it sticks the way I look at This is here's my premise. This is the premise for today, and you need to understand this is very important humans exploit systems when risk is low and gain is high You know we're opportunists. That's what I'm saying humans are opportunists. It's baked into our biology Now behavioral economist Dan Ariely who I've also interviewed a few times, in fact he ran a really nice series of studies with the peak prosperity tribe a few years back. Got some great results by the way, that was fun.

Dan, we should do that again. He says, look, Dan Ariely says here in this book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, he shows how people cheat just a little when they think they won't get caught. He calls it, you know, it's the fudge factor you know you pad an expense report maybe tweak a vote count maybe skim a little profits right it's not outright villainy right it's just a nudge over the line when the risk feels kind of low Ariely says that the first dishonest act then is the most important one to prevent aka this is the slippery slope

philosophy you get started and all of a sudden next thing you know you are greased all the way down this is just how we're wired now evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers he takes this deeper in a book called the folly of fools arguing that deceit is a survival strategy. We're wired to exploit advantages, especially in systems like markets, elections, where money exists, where rewards, say wealth and power, they're tangible, especially when oversight is lax to non-existent, to in fact, maybe being morally glorified.

Now, this was an interesting review by Neil Van Leeuwen about the Folly of Fools. I like how he framed the beginning part of this so here's from the beginning of that book review. Neil here, Van Leeuwen is writing quote, it's an intriguing evolutionary puzzle. Why, we may ask, would natural selection equip us with sensory and

reasoning capacities Designed to give accurate information about the world only to give us this treat the capacity for self deception that undermines that accurate information at critical moments in our lives like What is this self deception all about like come on nature? Why'd you wire that in it's kind of a weird thing It's as if evolution were a cruel parent who gives us sophisticated cognitive toys But restricts our ability to enjoy them properly and the fitness value the fitness value of Accurate information seems so obvious Right survival and reproduction depend on knowing where to find food

Right? Survival and reproduction depend on knowing where to find food, where the predators are, who your mates are, who your enemy is, and what your abilities are for dealing with the challenges of your environment. But self-deception seems to threaten such hard-won informational gains. So why was it not selected out? Why are we built this way? And knowing that we're built this way gives you critical insights that other people don't have. Now I don't struggle with this at all. I just accept this kind of stuff, right? And Trivers in his book posed it this way. He said, together our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us navigate it more effectively. So far so good. Carrying on.

But once this information arrives in our brains, it's often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others. See if this reminds you of anybody you've heard about lately. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves and then attack them We were pressed painful memories. We complete completely false ones rationalize immoral behavior act

Repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion and show a suite of ego defense mechanisms now again How and why did this particular? Evolutionary thing get started? Right? It's a good question. I'm going to have to leave that for later. It's a whole other subject. But for now, let's just agree, let's hold on to this.

It's a well-documented observation about human behaviors and wiring. This is, this is it. This is just how we're wired. So we'll just accept that. We can explore why later, but the what of it, that's what it is. Now in the 19th century, we know that America's robber barons, right?

Industrialists like Jay Gould gamed the stock market with impunity. Gould's manipulation of the eerie railroad shares, eh, it wasn't a one-off. It was a master class in exploiting weak regulation. No jail time, no real pushback just profits Now a system open to rigging like that with no one to stop it Eventually, it becomes a fertile ground sprouting entire ecosystems

Supporting it and glorifying its activities at its core. It all boils down to this humans are just like any other organism We want that we want a free lunch. We want the easy life. That's just how we're built Here's the thing about this though you start a little bit of cheating in the cheating doesn't stay small So let's consider election fraud right in a 2012 study by Daniel Adano and nasos russias Called does cheating pay They found that when misconduct goes unpunished, of course, it warps democracy itself. How? Well parties that cheat win more Competition shrinks and soon the whole system tilts towards cheating and if you don't cheat, you know what happens you lose

So guess what you cheat eventually that becomes the moral code. I mean after all your side You cheat eventually that becomes the moral code. I mean after all your side You're the good guys, right and what starts as a single act that Dan Ariely that first act that slips you down that fudging that Vote tally it becomes a playbook and the spreads and eventually it becomes machines so fraudulent that entire Lists of documented vulnerabilities get entered into the Georgia court system like we see here There's the document case and number down there a lot of text. We're not gonna go through all that I'll just note that they noted seven critical vulnerabilities. Here's six of them, right? You can read through these these vulnerabilities are so Profound each one of them is a deal-killer and yet

They think it are not actually vulnerable vulnerabilities a weakness you you didn't expect and it just sort of showed up. These were built in on purpose, full stop, okay? And an actual IT and cryptographic expert weighed in on that and said, yeah, these machines are super bad. In fact, just this one, just number five, this alone. When I said remember if there's low consequence for getting low risk for getting caught, low consequences. When I said remember if there's low consequence for getting low risk for getting caught low consequences Number five says that these voting machines contained numerous

unnecessary Android applications including a terminal emulator that provided Root-shell access that means you can come in change stuff and leave no audit logs You can't get caught if you know what you're doing. Because of that, you now have to prove to me that cheating did not happen. It's not incumbent on me to prove that cheating did happen. You show me a system that has power, privilege, prestige, money involved, and humans, and it has a capability coded into it to allow

cheating you have to prove to me the cheating did not happen because I know that humans are primates we are wired to cheat therefore it happened now what's fascinating is um Raffensperger the Georgia State Secretary of State, it went confronted with that court document said, well, you know, this is at see that top one in June 21 2023, the election isn't going to be till November 2024. It's in June, the year before that. He's like, I really wouldn't be practical to upgrade the voting software, there just isn't time. And then that didn't fly. So on

June 29th, he said, well, you have to just disregard these reports, identifying vulnerabilities. It's no more than conspiracy theories. A. Raffensperger. This is a, I forget how many pages. It's like a very thick document. It's fully documented. Conspiracy theories, would you believe? Conspiracy theories, right? It's crazy, crazy talk. All right, okay, so here's the thing. Here's the kicker. Over time, cheating stops feeling like cheating, right?

Basjiat, he saw this coming when plunder becomes a way of life, right? Whether it's monopolies, gouging consumers, cronies, siphoning public funds, people stealing elections. Look, it just gets legalized. It's no longer theft, actually. It's business. It's politics.

It's just how things are. The moral code shifts to match. Now Trivers added that psychological twist. We deceive ourselves, he said, to justify it. That's how we justify it. We deceive ourselves. The railroad tycoon calls this price-fixing industry leadership the vote rigger, calls it securing the will of the people.

You know, after a while, they actually believe it. It becomes their actual moral code. It's not this cul-de-sac of corruption that you root out and expose and they hang their heads in shame They will go to their graves believing with self-deception That they were in the right because their moral code was fashioned around the cheating. It's a Rationalization process now think of Wall Street in 2008 right the meltdown risky bets those were all financial innovation until the House of Cards fell and really nobody faced any consequences for that

And guess what the game rolls on? Nothing got fixed now all of that leads to what I call Martin Sins law If people are given a chance to cheat with a low possibility of getting caught a significant number of people will cheat. And as the possibility of getting caught drops towards zero, the probability of cheating goes to 100%.

That's, this is just, this is just simple observation about humans, right? I'm not stuck with this whole idea that we're fundamentally all good and we're tempted by the devil and we stray off the path. The path to righteousness is narrow. You know what the big fat wide path is? Cheating. Okay. Now, this was astonishing because we just had this thing where Elon Musk came out and

called these computers, 14 computers he found in the US government, magic money machines, meaning they just are making money. Not the magic money machines at the Federal Reserve, where we all know they're already creating money. Not the magic money machines of banks, which already create money when they issue loans, but just government computers, right? This speaks to a level of fraud and corruption that's off the charts. It led me to issue a very rare alert for my subscribers.

And so there's the first alert, came out on March 17th. I've since had two more updates to that, and I'm now putting this piece out in public to begin to explain why this is so startling and just why I'm so sure that we have systemic endemic cheating. And it's because nobody got caught. 14 computers with no reconciliations,

just issuing payments, and nobody's ever gotten caught, nobody's ever lost their job, nobody's gone to jail. Nobody's been swinging from a yard arm. Because none of those things happen and enough time has passed, this is not just how things are, it's now glorified in a moral code the people operating this Believe in their hearts of hearts. They are good people doing the right things even though

It's very obvious to us on the outside They're plundering they're stealing they're cheating. They are immoral people But they don't see it that way and that's the thing that i'm here to explain and talk about Okay, and as well, if you come to peak prosperity, you'll get updates, you'll get great advice. I am constantly on the job for my subscribers. They are very happy. If you're not a subscriber, you really should become one

because you need to understand where the world is going. You have to get this context to be able to make the decisions you have to make so you can be resilient. This thing is not going to fix itself. First step is understanding what's happening so that you can begin to adjust your thinking, your belief systems, your finances, your portfolios for reality. So peak financial investing with Paul Kiker, you see in that second thumbnail down on your

left, he can help you figure out where to put your money to survive and thrive in these troubling times. And then my most recent update, which just came out yesterday evening, afternoon, about plus a little less than 24 hours ago, talking about making the case for Elon's magic money machine. So this is looking at it from a system standpoint. Now I'm going to explain the psychological standpoint of all this right now Now that all this stuff. This isn't just a theory this stuff. We're talking about here. It is a lens for today's world, right? That's what we're providing this lens

Money systems from crypto pump central bank policies. They thrive on opacity, right? Especially as we sail under full power into the fourth turning, an era defined by crisis, loss of faith in our governing institutions, all of that, right, as we discussed. Now, Elon here revealed the existence of these magic money machines, okay? This potentially undermines the very concept of money

and also fairness. Right? If cheating pays and no one's punished, well, why wouldn't it spread? Of course it will. And once it's spread enough, it becomes custom. It's taught in boardrooms, CIA boot camps is coded into law. Question, can it be stopped? Can it be stopped in time canopy repaired before

catastrophe strikes is this just the normal arc of Empire Empire start they grow they die maybe they die for the same reasons maybe it's just meh you know it's the wrong things get codified into law now Anthropology actually hints at the root of this though anthropology gives us a hint and Brian Hair I love the work that he's done his primate research here It suggests that cheating emerges in any social system any Social system with weak enforcement Chimps will routinely make choices based solely on personal gain with no regard for the outcomes of one of their fellow chimps.

That's what that part in yellow down there says. The main result across every study they did was that chimpanzees made their choices based solely on personal gain with no regards for the outcomes of a conspecific, a fellow chimp. These results raise questions about the origins of human cooperative behavior. I indeed indeed it does look, look, we're humans.

We're not chimps, but actually we're no different, but we take it further because we don't just make choices based solely on personal gain. We then make complicated systems around our selfishness to make it all seem okay and So that leads to this mechanism right over time unchecked Cheating embeds itself into institutions and culture. That's the mechanism. It's just over time So this has all been going on for a very long time if you've seen the JFK papers released that have just come out you find

out We may not be the good guys and there's been a lot of double dealing and really Things that would actually have you call into question things like are we the good guys? Just how bad is this? Wait a minute. Are there any lines we wouldn't cross to starving children sort of fit into some any lines we wouldn't cross, do starving children sort of fit into some political gain that seems important to us and so we would do it. That's what those files just released.

I'm gonna have to do a whole episode on that sometime. All right. I think now, back on track here, that a lot of what we're up against comes down to very typical human cycles of expansion contraction. You breathe in, you breathe out, empires swell, empires crumble. The fourth turning eventually becomes the first turning again.

Winter turns to spring. But knowing the underpinning biology is like a superpower. It allows me to spot things that others struggle to fit into some rational frame. Now, if I would have us remember, humans aren't rational. fit into some rational frame. Now, if I would have us remember, humans aren't rational. We're rationalizers. And we can learn about ourselves, a lot about ourselves from monkeys, as I've just been mentioning, right?

But if we wanna avoid this nasty, forth-turning thing, we're gonna have to understand ourselves again in that unflattering way to understand who we really are, and I think monkeys give us a bunch of insights. So I mentioned the cucumbers, I mentioned rattling the cages, I mentioned this is what happens when we perceive as monkeys unfairness. We get angry, we shake the bars of our cage, which impotent rage. What am I talking about?

I'm talking about this, one of my favorite two and a half minute videos of all time So final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study And so this became a very famous study and there's now many more because after we did this about ten years ago It became very well known very quickly Fairness and compassion those are the twin pillars of morality Very quickly, fairness and compassion, those are the twin pillars of morality. You're going to see in those JFK files, which don't really talk about JFK, but do talk about what the CIA has been up to, overthrowing this, poisoning that, starving those. Not a lot of compassion in there.

And we're going to find out from Elon's releases that there hasn't been a lot of fairness. The basic pillars of morality are under assault right now. That's a true revolution. I'm not saying it's inappropriate. They actually need to be questioned, examined, maybe rebuilt. This is how we begin to understand why it's so important. And we did that originally with capuchin monkeys. And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did.

It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees. But with Sarah Brosnan, we started out with capuchin monkeys. So what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side by side. Again these animals they live in a group, they know each other, we take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber, and there's a very simple task that they need to do. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side by side, they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's really only water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes, the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket, and so

if you give them grapes, it's a far better food, then you create inequity between them. Inequity. So that's the experiment we did. Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who had never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is a monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber, note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine, the first piece she eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape and you will see what

happens. So she gives a rock to us, that's the task, and we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us, and that's what she does. And she gets a grape grape And she eats it The other one sees that She gives a rock to us now Gets again cucumber I love that. She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us.

And she gets cucumber again. So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. And we laugh because we can see ourselves in that so clearly, right? Now that was the Wall Street protest. That's sort of the context of the time when this TED talk was given. What about today? Well, today we see people attacking Tesla cars and trucks, right? And the outcome of all of this behavior is that over time cheating just becomes a self perpetuating norm. It's invisible is unethical to the insiders.

And eventually you get statements like this. See if you can hear possibly any slightly coded threat from a senior senator from New York State. Obviously, you can see the crisis building the background, right? A senior senator, Chuck Schumer, see if you can find the coded threat in this. See if it's somehow his moral code has been rationalized to the point where he can no longer, it's invisible to him that he's operating in an unethical way. We are mobilizing in New York.

We have people going to the Republican districts and going after these Republicans who are voting for this and forcing them to either change their vote or face the consequences. To either change their vote or face the consequences. This is a to either change their vote or face the consequences long relentless fight that we fight every day. And I am confident that we will bring Trump's popularity numbers and strength down if we keep at it and keep at it and keep at it. And keep at what exactly what exactly is the threat that that's so profound for these people again they're going to have a very hard time articulating that but I think you can be I'm pretty sure you are beginning to understand where I'm driving with this right.

So here's the second thing Bostiat said it's very important I think you could we don't need to re-examine and reinvent what we could re-examine But we don't need to reinvent what he came up with he said the state is The great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else This is the free lunch model. Okay now Look, you know The people who are really angry who are shaking the cages throwing the cucumbers back They're very mad because honestly these people have all gotten cucumbers right Chuck Schumer is a grape dweller

And he doesn't want his grapes to go away either But he's inciting the cucumber eaters to do things and he should know better and of course he does But I but I don't think he really cares so we saw like this just came out yesterday That would be on March 19th the masked male hunted down a woman She's driving a Tesla in the Seattle area that a great crime of driving a Tesla He follows her swerves around in front cuts her off stops in the middle road exits his vehicle He's got a mask up over his face Honestly, if she's armed and this is gonna happen soon sooner or later people you write

This is a very violent situation and he's berating her because tell you telling her She's driving a Nazi car Okay Now this is a cucumber thrower right here. He's very mad, but he doesn't know why he doesn't understand Why the game is unfair he doesn't get any of that, but he can detect that the game is unfair But he's taking it out now by throwing the cucumber at the wrong person. It's unfair. It's unfair like how about this guy? You know he he said that thing which I'll let you read He's at Mardi Gras a little drunk so that un inhibits people

But he sees a Tesla truck drive by a cyber truck and he just comes up to and he just starts wailing on it Just some white dude looks suburban his wife comes over all embarrassed and hustles him off after he's like smashed into this thing and Anyway, he's super he's super mad like why is the person driving a car a Goddamn Nazi right he can't explain it. Nobody can explain it. Here's the issue He is Facing this idea that he's had this free lunch and he can feel that that free lunch is going away.

And he's very mad about that. He just doesn't have the context to understand why it's happening. How about this? This is for the guy who would have been vice president if the election had gone the other way. Tim waltz saying on my phone, I don't know. Some of you know this on the iPhone. They've got that little stock app.

I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day 225 and dropping so Okay, he's a he's a known communist went to China a lot has a lot of sympathy for communist things He's been a communist his whole life and obviously one defining feature of communists is they tear things down They're less good at building things and having people survive by the millions in their home countries But that's what his ideology is and look at him. He's cheering on the destruction of the seventh largest company in America People in his home state have pensions Invested in this company and he's cheering it on and getting applause because this is this is actually politically incoherent at no point

are you the good guy if you are cheering for the destruction of Of a large American company, and you're an American you're just you're just not okay Now this is the nature and I put the free lunch upside down because this guy's taking us to the opposite of a free lunch He's about to give us A thing where we actually have no lunches anymore Given enough time this guy and people who think like him and all the people clapping and supporting all of this They're gonna destroy what we have in this country, and I'm not sure they can be reformed I'm not sure they could be I'm not sure you could sit down and spend enough time talking with him To get him to understand that what he's doing is wrong Why because he's glorified it he has a moral code

That says I'm gonna hate on Elon and everything associated with Elon and we're gonna destroy his entire company if we can because That's what my moral code justifies, but at the end of the day this guy's moral code Boils down to this it's a great fiction his great fiction and the people who follow him is That they get to live at the expense of everybody else That's the ideology the monkeys tell us that that's a very understandable thing, okay? So here's the conclusion Trump and Elon you know what they're doing they are rapidly undoing decades of institutionalized plunder they're doing? They are rapidly undoing decades of institutionalized plunder. They're exposing it Excuse me. It's been glorified right sanctified innumerable paychecks deposited and

Excuse me The DOJ the SEC EPA all of them rule books written extensive rule books the amount of graft and plunder Cannot even be estimated at this point, but it's been running for decades I am 99.9999 percent sure That trillions of dollars have been secretly created out of thin air hidden secreted and offshore accounts by the hundreds of thousands if not millions and my worry my worry is that those millions of offshore account holders all wake up one day and go musical chairs, right? Wow. Too many dollars in created. How many trillions and trillions that nobody knew

about? You know what? I better get rid of these dollars while I can. And next thing you know, hop, skip and a jump. Everything suddenly costs 100 times as much as the day before and that's called the destruction of your currency system involved. This is how empires end, folks. When people lose faith in the most important, basic primal system of distributed trust we have, money itself. So I produced a bunch of three full pieces of content

relating to this very topic. It's that important for my subscribers. If you are a subscriber, thank you. And if you aren't please consider becoming one I want you to be safe I want you to be secure everything begins with having the right mental model of understanding why these things are happening and from that whiness understanding the context of this you will come to the same conclusion I think I've come to which is this is not gonna

fix itself this boat does not right itself. It capsizes and then sinks That's just how it is. There's a huge disruptive path before us and it's rooted in our biology It's rooted in our evolution It's rooted in our cultural traditions and that's what the revolution is to try and see if we can get this ship righted again in time I'm not sure it can be. I'm hopeful. I'm going to work towards that end. But at the same time, I'm going to be planning as if maybe it's not going to work out quite like I want it to. So hope for the best, plan for the worst. That's my motto. So as I'd rather be a day. I'd rather be here early than a day late to this

particular story of becoming resilient. With that, thanks very much for listening. Come by Peak Prosperity. We would love to have you there. We're always having a rockin' good conversation. So until next time, thanks very much and enjoy your weekend and let's talk about this topic down below in the comments. Can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Bye for now. Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity, signing off.