Shaun Newman Podcast - #475 - James Howard Kunstler

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

An American author, social critic, public speaker and blogger. He is best known for his books The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere.  In The Long Emergency he talks peak oil and oil depletion resulting in the end of industrialized society, forcing Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Patreon: www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

This is Matt Osborne. This is Pat King. My name is Martin Armstrong. This is Alex Kraner. This is Franco Tarzano, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. Hope everybody's week is cruising along.

If you haven't tuned into Patreon, me and Tews had a little splash. She's watching me do this right now. That's why I bring it up. More like listening to me, jammer on. But if you haven't tuned into our Patreon, our little bonus clips, you could see the debacle of this week. Anyways, go to Patreon. It's in the show notes.

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a spot here for for different local people to get their message out and I think that's really cool of Caleb Taves and of course Renegate Acres, his company, to grab a spot here on Wednesdays so first off you got

Mar Wayne, they got a fundraiser they need a nice plant, boards, new pipes under the arena floor and they're having a concert on September 8th, 2023 with Gord Banford and Dwayne Steele. You got Paradise Hill this August 12th. They got oh my goodness folks i'm forgetting the i'm forgetting the name right now that's that's that's that's

terrible of me um well i'm just gonna look it up now you know like welcome to the ad reads i'm expecting tuesday to like core blund oh my goodness oh my goodness it's like sean just read the anyways it doesn't matter core blund you know ever since i stopped uh twos is laughing in the background somewhere. Ever since I stopped like editing the front portion, when I have really bad screw-ups like this, I'm like, fuck me. Anyways, here's the human

experience to it, folks. Corb Lund is in Paradise Hill this Saturday at the Bash, Paradise Hill Bash. Anyway, so that's the next one. And then finally, Jim Ness has got a preppers course coming up in Sedalia Hall, August 18th, 19th, North of Oyan, South of Concert, Basic

RV Parkin, and Sedalia, community strategies for a changing world, food supplies and alternative energy systems. John Graf is the speaker, and you can, well, you can head to Sedalia, of all places, to do that. Anyways, look on your map to find that one. Now, let's get onto the tale of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum. For the past 80 years, they've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial oil field locations.

For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum.com. He's an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He's best known for his books, The Geography of Nowhere, a History of American Suburbia and Urban Development, and the Long Emergency. I'm talking about James Howard Cuncelor. So buckle up, here we go. This is James Howard Cuncelor, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.

I got Jim Cunceler on, so, sir, thanks for giving me some time. A pleasure. Now, before we get rolling, well, I mean, I guess the way I always started off is I'm kind of curious about who Jim is. You know, there's going to be a lot of listeners. The reason I stumble into you is I had an architect from British Columbia come on. And he goes, you know, if you want to learn some more about this long emergency, you should have this guy named James Howard on. I'm like, all right, I'll go look into it. So anyways, that leads me to you.

But in saying that, if he hadn't said it, I wouldn't have known nothing about you. So I was hoping for the audience of myself, you could give us a little, you know, a little bit of who Jim is. Well, I'm the author of about 20 odd books, 13 novels, and six nonfiction books about urban design, the fiasco of suburbia.

The Long Emergency Book was a book about the global economy and the future. prospects for Western Civ or actually for advanced techno-industrial civilization. And I was a journalist in the 1970s when I was young man. I worked for Rolling Stone magazine for a spell. And then I dropped out to write books because that was the programming for aspiring people with literary aspirations in my time. And that's what happened to me.

You dropped out of rolling stuff. Also, I write a popular political blog that comes out twice a week called ClusterFuck Nation. Yes, I've been enjoying that. I've been at the lake with the family, so I've been doing a little bit of reading of yours. And I think it's a great blog name, great blog name. I don't think anyone would be... Well, it describes the situation pretty clearly. when you talk about Rolling Stones

was once upon a time was that the like I mean was that easy to drop out of where you're like yeah who cares I want to write books I was a reporter and then a columnist on a daily newspaper on a few newspapers and you know I was fairly content doing what I was doing although I didn't like living in the last place I was at, which was the capital of New York State, Albany, New York, not a wonderful city. But, you know, I got an offer at the time, Rolling Stone,

which started in 1967, by 1974, they were trying to unload some of the hippie deadwood that was around the office and hire young people with newspaper experience. And I was among that group of people who got hired. It turned out I didn't like the job. It was not a pleasant office to be in. And we had, you know, a staff that was basically engineered to run a monthly magazine, but it came out twice a month. So we were doing twice as much work as other magazine staffs.

And it was a dreary kind of a place. You know, it wasn't a dope festival or anything. Many of the people there at the time were kind of alcoholic. and it had a kind of a depressed kind of ambiance. So after about a year of that, I decided to get out and I got up at 4 o'clock in the morning and started writing a horror novel because I figured I could write a better one

than Peter Benchley's Jaws. And, you know, when I finished it, I left San Francisco and returned to the East Coast and settled in upstate New York where I've been ever since. Well, lead me to the long emergency, this idea and certainly give the backstory of it, but how do you get to the idea of the long emergency? Well, it's not that complicated.

The idea itself is the probability that we're looking at a collapse of many of the hyper-complex systems and systems of systems that we depend on to keep. keep this civilization going, you know, everything from transport to our electric grid to all the way that we do business on the large scale. And the upshot of it is that we're probably going to have to downscale all of our human activities and live much more locally. And it might sound to people like a similar thing to the WEF's goal. great reset, but it's really not because the main difference being that the, you know, the World Economic Forum people believe in this highly concentrated, centralized world government

power. And that's exactly the opposite of the direction that we're going in. You know, the trend is to disaggregate and get smaller and get less complex and get more regional and more local. And so that kind of fantasy about global control is really not going to work out. We are nonetheless going to go through kind of a convulsion of civilization. Now, how did I get to that? Well, I had written a couple of books about the the theiasco of suburban development and all that implied for our economy and for our ecology, for the spiritual lives of people living in North America. And towards the end of that book, I had to consider the problem of our dependence on large amounts of petroleum to continue living the way we do. So around that time, a bunch of

senior geologists retired from the oil industry and started publishing their dark and secret thoughts about where the industry was headed. And usually they would have published them solely in obscure industry journals like the Colorado School of Mind's Bulletin or, you know, petroleum today or some other thing that nobody reads. But at the same time that that happened in the mid-90s, the internet was starting to really get traction. So all of those ideas started leaking onto the internet and then they were rather disturbing ideas basically they said we're going to start getting into big trouble with oil in the early 21st century and indeed we did they were correct um then we went through you know we went that led to the convulsion of 2008 and nine the great financial crash or

whatever you want to call it it was a great disordering of the um the money system the investment system in the banking system, and it threatened to bring the whole system down. But we kind of papered it over with more money printed out of nowhere to be used as loans to paper over the problems that we had and the deficiencies in the system. And we continued on. And one of the offshoots of that was that the shale oil industry developed. The shale oil industry was a manifestation. station of more than a decade of extremely cheap money, low interest near zero interest loans.

And the shale industry thrived on that, and they took advantage of it, and they went ahead and they did a lot of projects. And it was a great financial stunt. And it was a great actual demonstration of, you know, engineering prowess. But, uh, it was based on some false premises, you know, the idea that there was an endless supply of this shale oil. And the other false premise was that you could make money in the shale oil business, which turned out not to be true. So there was this tremendous investment during the, from 2009 on in shale oil. And a lot of that was because interest rates were so low that people who traditionally invested in bonds and things like that, safe investments, were desperate to get

something that yielded some profit. So they invested in shale oil. They found to their unhappiness that a lot of companies went bankrupt, producing shale oil. Nonetheless, we produced record numbers of oil in the period from 2009 to 2019. and we actually passed the former oil production peak set in 1970 of roughly 10 million barrels a day. And we got up to about just under 13 million barrels a day in 2019. Excuse me. And then something happened.

We started getting in trouble again with our papered over financial system. and interest rates started going up again, and it became much more problematical to raise investment to continue these shale oil operations at the level that they were happening. At the same time that we were doing that, the so-called sweet spots for finding oil in the Permium shale region and other shale regions

started to run out of sweet spots. There's also a big difference between conventional oil And shale oil, you know, shale oil, conventional oil, you drill a well for the equivalent of about $400,000 in today's money, and it produces for decades, thousands of barrels a day. Well, shale oil wells cost between $6 and $12 million to drill. They produce, you know, about $150 barrels a day for the first year, and after that, they declined by 60 percent, and after three years they're done. The whole mathematics of shale oil was very janky. And they can't raise new investment easily as they used to. And, you know, they're now probably on a track to head down pretty swiftly.

And then we're going to be very disappointed that, you know, that it didn't persist. And we're going to be out of luck. So a lot of the long emergency story ran along the lines of our dependence on petroleum to run this thing, including, you know, the fabrication of so-called alt-energy hardware, you know, solar panels, windmills, turbines, all that stuff, and even nuclear energy, which, you know, may be the only way that we can keep the lights running after a certain period of time, but it, too, depends heavily on petroleum just to keep the nuke plants going, and especially to back them up when, you know, when they go down.

And in the event that there's a grid down situation. So, you know, we're once again facing another round of uncertainty about the oil supply and particularly disruptions in the distribution system now that we've created all this mischief with Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, the Europeans are now going to be deprived of a lot of. lot of the fossil fuels that they depended on. And, you know, it's looking like they're actually going to be going medieval pretty quickly because they don't have anything in back of those prior arrangements that they had for oil and natural gas. And they can't run their industrial economies without them, or for that matter, you know, heat as many homes as they have to. So, you know, we're really

heading into a period of great financial economic uncertainty and probably political, tumultuous political disorder as all of this stuff plays out. And it's not going to be the World Economic Forum's vision of, you know, you'll, you'll own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy. You don't think what? I'm sorry for the long answer. No, no, it's perfectly fine. I was chuckling when you brought up the wharf. I'm like, yeah, we're going to own nothing, eat bugs.

Everybody's going to be happy, Kumbaya. You know, when you bring up 2008, you know, I was still in college then. And so I was playing hockey, chasing tail, and wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to anything. Was that an energy problem back in 2008? Or was that housing market financial stupidity back then? It was both. Plus, throw in financial market cupidity, greed, corruption, crime. But I'm not going to run on the mouth the way I did a while back. But, yeah, the simple answer to your question is, yes, it was very much connected to the oil situation.

Remember, in the summer of 2008, I believe, the price of oil went up to nearly $150. a barrel. And the trouble is, you know, there's a basic kind of equation in the real world, which is that in today's dollars, you know, oil under $75 a barrel crushes oil companies, and oil over $75 a barrel crushes economies. And so we're in a real kind of predicament. Is that because oil companies, like, have become too big? Like, I remember. No, it's because the kind of the operations like shale oil. that I just described are way, way, way, way more expensive than it used to be to drill an oil well in Oklahoma or, you know, or Siberia. It just, you know, the cost of producing this, and not to mention

producing oil on offshore platforms, you know, which are a gazillion dollar pieces of infrastructure, where they have to drill miles under the ocean and then miles under the rock under the ocean to get to the prize and, you know, it's very, very costly. It's not like Oklahoma in 1952. So, you know, the whole, you know, the whole formula for the whole business model for doing this has changed. This comes to, and I'm going to butcher this, is it E.R. OI? Or is it R-O-I return on investment? E-R-O-I, it's energy return on investment. Thank you. Yeah, I knew I was going to. to butcher that, Jim. Basically, that in the beginning, when it was just sitting there on the surface,

you were getting, you know, for every unit of energy put in, you were getting 100 times out. Right, for every equivalent barrel of oil you put into the enterprise, you got 100 barrels of oil out. Now it's something like, I think, you know, 15 or something. So is that a U.S. specific problem, or do you see that across the world? Well, you know, there's a, you know, there's a, There are different kinds of rock and different kinds of oil and different kinds of companies and enterprises all over the world. And they all have, you know, they have some similar problems. They all have, they have some different problems.

You know, the operations in the Permian based in Texas where they're doing shale oil, you know, is not exactly like the, you know, an offshore platform in the North Sea. And that's not very much like drilling in the desert sands of South Sea. Saudi Arabia. You know, they're all kind of different. They have different, for example, the Saudi Arabian oil, first of all, it's very sour crude, meaning it's high sulfur crude. It's hard to refine. Also, they have to pump immense amounts of seawater into the rock to goose out the oil. And, you know, most of what comes back out of the ground in Saudi Arabia, at least from the Gawar, the great Gawar oil field, the great elephant of all elephant oil field.

fields. You know, most of what they pump out is water with some oil in it. You know, the North Sea has the kind of problems that come with drilling in places that are very inhospitable to work in. You know, you've got to work outside on an oil platform, you know, when it's, you know, it's sleeting out in the North Sea and the wind is blowing at 60 miles an hour. Not too groovy. and I've described the operations in Texas, you know, well, I haven't described, you know, the numbers of truck trips that have to be made with the fracking fluid and the water and the chemicals

and the sand that they need to, they use these special particles of sand that they inject along with the water to hold open the cracks in the fracked rock to allow the oil to seep into the cracks. So, you know, it's a very specialized expensive thing. you know, millions of trips with these trucks in and out of the oil pads, you know, great distances carrying all this stuff.

So it's crazy, expensive. So, no, the answer to your question is, you know, there are some similarities and there are a lot of differences around the world. The one, you know, the one major similarity is that oil is fungible, meaning, you know, you can get a barrel of oil in one place and pretty much. much sell it in another. It's not all the same. The shell oil problem is that it's excessively light. It doesn't contain a whole lot of heavy distillates that we need desperately like diesel fuel, you know, in heating oil. It doesn't contain enough of that, if any. It's, it mostly comes out of the

ground as something like gasoline. And, you know, on the other hand, the Saudis have this heavy, highly, highly sulfured, uh, crude oil that is hard to refine. So they've got a different problem. And, uh,

there you have it. So in your thought process then, we're coming closer and closer, whether it's 10 years away, whether it's 20 years away, whether it's five years away, where we will see, um,

societies kind of shrink in because what's allowed us to get to where we are has been cheap energy. Yeah, well, that's pretty much what I think. The, you know, a part of this picture is that, you know, you don't have to disrupt the whole picture in order for it to fail. All you have to do is pull out some strategic pieces and things fall apart. So we don't have to run out of oil to, for the oil industry internationally to become very disordered. and for places, you know, certain places to not be able to get oil anymore or to not have enough or to be shut out of markets.

And, you know, one, you can see what's happening with Ukraine. You know, we, you know, we basically through, through military violence, we shut Europe out of the Russian national natural gas market. Well, that had in blowing up a pipeline. By blowing up a pipeline. We just summarily decided we were going to do that. And that was it for, you know, and so far, they managed to squeak through last winter. I guess the pipeline went down in September, August, September of 22.

They managed to squeak through last winter on stored natural gas reserves that they had. But, you know, further and further ahead, it's going to be ever more difficult for them and really difficult for them to run whatever industries they still want to run. And, you know, they're not going to have the kind of economy that they've had for the last 75 years. And God knows what it's going to be. So, yeah, things becoming very unstable, a lot of political turbulence and friction attending the scramble for resources that's going to go on. But there are, you know, new things have entered the picture which weren't around,

when I wrote the lung emergency, which ought to be very disturbing to people, the whole COVID-19 fiasco, which because we've been deprived of real hard information so sedulously for so long, there are an awful lot of people who are completely in the dark about what's going on. And the main feature of what has gone on is that we introduce this vaccine that is not good for people. It's unhealthy. It's dangerous. It's harmful. And it's creating a lot of injuries and disabilities. And the disabilities will lead to deaths. So we're seeing, you know, large increases in excess deaths and disabilities and in the places where they're keeping records. How long can, like, I mean, is it just willful blindness on the part of

all the COVID nonsense, or is it just still the, the government's ability, the media's ability to just construct a narrative and nobody dig deeper than it. Because I mean, I'm sure with the long emergency, when you start talking, oh, we're gonna run out of oil, or maybe not run out of oil, Jim, more, the oil's going to become very costly to get out. Oh, you're just a worry warrant.

You just, yeah. By the way, it may not actually be costly, It may end up, the price may be going down. And there's an excellent blogger named Gail Tverberg who runs a site called Our Finite World. And her thesis over the last 10 years, and it's been proven, that you get to a certain point in an oil emergency or some kind of a crisis, where the oil price actually starts going down because so much demand destruction has occurred that they basically made their markets smaller.

And we saw that, we've seen that happen in the period between 2009 and 2020. You know, there was a period during the COVID thing when the price of crude oil futures actually went below zero for a period of, I don't know, a day or so. And it stayed very low for a long time. But I mean, in that time, nobody was going anywhere. They were told not to go anywhere. They were literally locked everybody in their homes for, you know, 2009, the price of oil, well, the price of oil went from $150 a barrel in 2008 and plunged to like $30 a barrel in 2009. So, you know, that was a non-COVID occurrence.

And that illustrates what Gail has been saying. So it's not necessarily going to be a high price thing. It may be a sheer scarcity thing. And it also may be a sheer destruction of economic activity. thing, you know, which is something I believe you're going to be seeing in Europe especially. What are you going to see in Europe? Can you explain that? Destruction of economic activity per se. You know, not much manufacturing or manufacturing folding up, leaving, going bankrupt, stopping. You know, Germany in particular has been a country

that depends heavily on, you know, machine toolmaking and other very advanced, uh, manufacturing activities and they're not going to be able to do that anymore. They may not be able to make cars anymore. They may not be able to do a lot of things they were used to doing. Maybe you, I'm forgetting the article now, but last fall, certainly into the winter, I remember paying close attention to Europe and thinking, you know, like, oh my goodness, you know, with the pipelines down and sanctions against Russia and on and on at when, I'm like, are people going to just be freezing everywhere?

And then the brothers, I got three older brothers, we'd been reading an article on the amount of exports coming from different countries to get them natural gas, among other things, to make sure they could heat their homes, run their industries and things like that. Is that something that could be the case for this upcoming winter? You're like, no, that isn't the case at all? I think they're going to have problems this coming winter. And we're going to have problems here this coming winter.

but largely because people are going to be short of money. And, you know, we're entering a new phase of financial disorder. You know, there are two ways of going broke. You can have a lot of money that's worthless or you can have no money. And we're going to be moving, I believe, from the phase of having money that's losing value to the phase of just not having money. And, you know, that's inflation and deflation. You know, deflation was characteristic of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

And we're going to be returning to something like that. But, you know, there'll be a lot of differences in how it works. Because, for example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, we still had plenty of first-rate industrial infrastructure in place. It just wasn't running, you know, and plenty of workers. But there was no money. So I want to get back to something that you started to ask me a while ago before we got off track, which is, you know, how is it that so many people don't know what's happened to them, especially with the COVID-19 business, right?

And the answer to that is, yeah, the governments have been very successful in mind-fucking their populations. And that's just what happened, you know. You could see it explicitly in the USA where, you know, several federal agencies combined to coerce this new transmission method known as social media where most people were starting to get all their news from. And the federal government, you know, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the, you know, the CDC, all of these agencies combined and the White House itself combined to lean on these social media companies explicitly to restrict information from being transmitted,

including truthful information. They invented this new concept called misinformation, which is a bullshit concept. It's just a way of saying, you know, stuff that we don't want you to think about or understand or here, whether it's true or not. And, you know, there's only information. And the information is either truthful or. comports with reality or it's not truthful and it doesn't comport with reality. But the best way to determine that is to let all the ideas into the arena and let people debate them and talk about

and discuss them. But if you don't allow that to happen, then you're going to end up with people who are pretty intellectually disabled. And that's what's happened to us. It's especially tragic in, you know, in the West and in Europe, Canada, and America. because the people who are worst afflicted by this are the thinking classes, the managerial classes, the college-educated people who got the most mind-fucked. And now that they're in this unfortunate kind of semi-psychotic state,

they're liable to not ever come out of it. They're going to be defending their positions until the bitter end. And the bitter end may be that these vaccines are going to kill an awful lot of people, including the dumbbells who took it, you know, including the dumbbells in academia and corporate America and, you know, all these other places that educated people who read the New York Times live in and work in. And I just wonder, you know, LeBron Jameson Brony just had a heart attack. He's 18 years old.

and the one before that that I really remember this stuck out was Justin Bieber, Beaver having Bell's palsy having this, you know, and I'm like, so at what point do people see this and realize like this isn't normal? Like it just isn't. You would have thought that it would have happened by now. By now. You know, it's just extraordinary that it hasn't happened. But, you know, it's still, I mean, I marvel at this. And I meet old friends every day, my old, you know, my old ex-hippie cohorts that I've.

known for 40 years, who, you know, back in the 1960s, they were rallying for free speech and rallying against the war. And now they're rallying for censorship and supporting this stupid imperialistic project in Ukraine. And I struggle to fathom what they've gone through. But having had these conversations lately with them, you know, it's summertime. I've been getting out, I've been meeting them at, you know, art gallery openings and other, you know, social events, they don't know anything. All they do is, the only thing they listen to is national public radio. They don't have any other sources of information. And they are just lied to, uh, incessantly. And they have no idea. And, you know, they believe the authorities. They, they believe the people of their

own class. And it's, I think to understand this fully, you have to consider, you have to consider, that a lot of this is really about maintaining one's status. You know, we're very chimpanzee-like organisms, human beings, and we're very status-driven and hierarchy-driven. And it's very important for you to subscribe to, you know, the narrative or, you know, the reigning beliefs of whatever tribe you're, that you want to be associated with. And if that's the tribe of the well-educated people who are smart who know everything,

you know, then you're going to want to adopt their beliefs and express them. And so, you know, that's the reason that so many people are mindlessly repeating things like, you know, the vaccines are safe and effective when they should know better. But, you know, the upshot is that the major organs for dissemination, disseminating news, the traditional ones that people cannot really let go of their trust in, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network news, NBC, ABC, et cetera, et cetera, and national public radio, and whatever you got in Canada, you know, CBC, etc. You know, people cannot surrender their allegiance to these organs,

despite the fact that these organs are lying to them all the time. spinning these stories in ridiculous directions and, you know, bringing on conditions that are going to lead to a lot of death and suffering. It's interesting when you say they know nothing. I find that almost laughable because it's in a time when you can literally go out and find as much information as you want. Like, I mean, you can literally just hop on a computer and go listen now with podcasts and different shows, like hours upon hours of amazing.

amazing discussions with different doctors, lawyers, professors, all the different, and, you know, on and on and on it goes. It's rather funny. But in saying that, I always forget how good of a job, and I don't know what to call it the other side maybe does at painting a picture of like, nah, you don't want to listen to those guys, they're all bad, they're all like corrupt, they're all, and they literally paint you into a corner. and if you don't give it any second thought, because I said this to Martin Armstrong when I had him on. You know, like, I remember hearing him for the first time, and I googled him because I knew, who the hell is this guy? And then I Wikipedia at it, and it's like convicted felon.

I'm like, why the heck am I listening to a convicted felon? Right? And then you do some more digging, and I mean, geez, now in Canada, you know, I just had on Pat King not that long ago. There's another one in Tamara Leach, and these are all these people who are just regular everyday folk who drove to Ottawa to get rid of the mandate. and now they're all locked away in prison and everything else,

and their Wikipedia pages also have convicted felon among other things. Anyways, all I'm saying is I maybe sometimes glaze over the fact at how much of an effect that has on the everyday regular people if you haven't been, for lack of a better term red pill to what the heck's going on. Yeah, well, you know, both of our countries, our populations in North America are suffering. terribly and it's been just a very successful mind control operation that's worked by you know look when when Hitler and gerbils were doing their thing in the 1930s you know all they really had was

newspapers and radio to work with but you know they they did a superb job and they mind-fucked the whole German population and the whole thing ended in catastrophe for the Germans. But we have many more ways of doing it. And like I said, you know, the educated classes in our countries have these allegiances to certain companies, organizations, news organizations that they can't give up. And it's one of the great mysteries really of our time is exactly how is it that there are so few honorable people. in journalism, apparently. People with absolutely no honor,

utter moral degenerates who have made a career of conveying falsehoods. And I'm reading a book now, which I hope will unlock part of the secret to that. It's called truthophobia by a British journalist named Graham Magis, I think, is his name. Magin. and one of my pet theories is that there must because the newspaper business especially

like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, whatever, because it's become such a bad business, it's so hard for them to make money without the whole advertising structure that they used to have. How do they actually finance their operations and pay all their people and make a profit or do any of that. And my guess is that they're getting huge amounts of backdoor money from the government and from the so-called intelligence community. And they're basically, you know, they basically bought them off. That's a guess, but it's hard to imagine how else they're carrying this off.

You know, I was a newspaper man in the 1970s, and newspaper people generally, you know, who are nice, who were never very well paid. Now, I was a young person then, so it was okay with me. I was having an adventure, you know. But the newspaper business has generally not paid very well. But the people who were in it were very independent-minded,

and, you know, they didn't like to be pushed around. And they were eager to find the truth about things. But now we have a generation of editors and reporters who have no regard for the truth at all and seem to actually have a libido for mendacity. You know, when you go back to Hitler and Germany and, you know, the fact they had newspapers and radios and they did a superb job in mind-fucking the population, you know, I've been, you know, following along with Russia, Ukraine, I'm wondering, you know, what would it take to galvanize a population and want to go over there and, like,

fight Russia? And one of the things I've come back to over and over again is I'm like, I don't know if they could do it. Like, honestly, with the amount of people talking now through channels like this and people hearing it, everything they've tried doing to this point hasn't worked. It's just, I mean... Well, yeah, that's the key to the whole situation for the moment is that we haven't sent any of our people over.

We're just arranging for a lot of Ukrainians to lose their lives. And it shows that we don't care about the Ukrainians who are losing their lives. So for us, it's just another op. You know, it's just a, I wanted to also get back to something you said five minutes ago about, you know, we have all these alternative news media and stuff. one of the strange byproducts of the last 30 years, let's say, is that we're discovering that the blowback from technology is tremendous. It's just full of unanticipated problems and things that we just had no idea we're going to happen.

And this is illustrated very well by the fact that we have thousands upon thousands, of websites that offer news and opinion. And we have the most confused population ever in the history of the USA and probably Canada, too. So, you know, the unintended consequences of having all of these voices out there, some of them big voices and some of them little voices, is this just grand cacophony that makes it ever more difficult for people to come to, to, to, to, apprehend what reality is made of. Well, you can see the narrative being pulled apart as the same time as they're trying to construct it.

Well, there's also this idea that's prevailed in my generation, especially, and it's helped along with certain Marxist ideas that have been kind of insinuated themselves into our culture, that there is no such thing as reality, that it's all constructed. you know, and subjective, and it's whatever you say it is. And that idea has gotten a huge amount of traction so that when people fail to understand what's been done to them, you know, they can invent any cockamamie story they want to account for it. I think all this is going to get much more difficult when we get to the point when

when the vaccine injuries and deaths become more obvious. And, you know, there's not going to be any hiding that anymore. just going to be too many people who have seen friends and relatives drop dead, die, wither away, lose their, you know, have their organs fail in one way or another, come up with dreadful cancers, you know, we'll see. Man, I hope that'll be, well, I mean, it's been going on. I mean, it's not even, you know, but it's a wild period of history. It really is. It's, it's an epic, you know, this mind fuck deal is just one of the epic.

social hysterias of the last 2,000 years. You know, I don't know if we've ever seen anything like this, and certainly not at this scale. I mean, even when the black death swept Europe, people knew what the fuck was going on pretty much. They knew that people were dying, and they knew that it was probably not a good idea to hang out with them, you know, dead people.

And, you know, but this is something else. So you've never seen so many people who ought to know better just, you know, lose it. And, you know, when you see somebody like Rachel Wollenski, the former head of the CDC, who's just only recently replaced by some other little cheerleader, you know, when you see her going to Congress and lie through her teeth about, you know, they just can't come up with the data, with the data. We just don't know how many hospitalizations there actually were, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, these billion-dollar agencies.

So it's either incompetence or it's deliberate. No, it's got to be deliberate. I think so. There's no way you can be a billion-dollar organization, like you say, and not come up with the data. I mean, heads would roll in any private, like, I mean, they just would roll. Well, one of the things that's going on now is that there is data that's coming out of the U.K. and it's being analyzed, you know, among other people, the suddenly well-known Edward Dowd, the former stock analyst.

Yeah, he's been a guest on the show. Okay, well, you know what he's about. Yeah, he talks about it. He's basing a lot of his current statistical analysis on the numbers that are coming out of England because they're at least coming out with numbers. and, you know, there's something in their system of reporting that's cracked a little bit more than the United States. Probably the trouble with the situation in the United States is that there are so many people now who are criminally culpable for doing what they did, that they can't turn around and start telling the truth now.

You know, they're going to have to just lie to the bitter end. And, you know, maybe they'll get away with it. If, you know, if we, if we encounter a really comprehensive collapse that has everybody preoccupied with just, you know, finding enough to eat and staying alive and making enough money to support their family, if our money still exists, you know, they're hoping that by then nobody will care about how this thing happened. But, you know, history will figure it out. When you, once again, I don't know if I'll get this exactly right, you said there's three different ways, I believe it's a long emergency, can show itself.

Maybe I'm a little bit off in this. Can you do what to itself? Show itself. I feel like you'd mention three different things. Climate change, which you said it would probably show in food shortages, peak oil, and that was the global energy predicament. And then you said the banking fiasco. Am I right on those three? Well, I'm not really, I'm not really.

I'm not really an advocate of the climate change story anymore. I've come to different conclusions. Really? Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think things are going on, but they're not what they seem to be and they're being used for further mind-fuckery. I think what's going on is that the climate changes continuously. The weather

certainly changes, but the climate changes continually from one era to another, sometimes sharply, sometimes not so much. But we've had several warming periods in just the last 2,000 years of

so-called recorded history. We had the Hellenic warming, we had the high Roman warming, we had the medieval warming, we had the cooling that that destroyed the Hellenic Greek Empire, the cooling that attended,

maybe didn't cause, but attended the Roman collapse. We had the cooling of the dark ages. We had the Little Ice Age. Jim, was I wrong in that one point in time you thought climate change then was a thing? Yeah.

In my book, in my 2005 books, The Long Emergency, I wrote about climate change. But basically, I wrote a chapter about the Greenland Ice Corps and what they were showing. And really what they just show is, you know, cycles of, you know, ice ages and, you know, inter-ice age warmings. And, you know, we're dealing with

such a short period of history, really, in which it doesn't, it's not the same as geologic history. In human history, we've had all these warming events. And, um, uh, it's, it's, it's not the same as geologic history. In human history, we've had all these warming events. and it really is a matter of how humans adapt to the changes that are presented. And we do adapt, and we will adapt. The current warming, if it is actually happening, and I'm not even sure that that's for real, you know, it may create a lot of food problems that are going to end up killing a lot of people.

Well, this is, you know, people. I wanted to go with the food shortages or even the global energy issue. How much that could you put into Tom Foolery by the government? Like I just think of the government, they want to transition our oil fields into the green, you know, just transit. Yeah, a lot of it. They want to do that. They want to eliminate, you know, I forget what it is. Is it 30% reduction folks in fertilizers?

They want to do it. And nitrogenous fertilizers. They want to do a lot of these things. which I mean is going to create food shortages which is going to create farms in Europe yeah like I mean so how much of it is we are actually going to experience this and how much of this is the government is going to force us to experience it well I don't know look like I said there are always going to be changes and transformations in in the weather and climate and you know we may go

through a warming, we may go through a cooling, whatever it is. I want to raise something that might interest you, though. It was pointed out the other day. I think it was on Dave Colum's Twitter feed that, you know, there was some kind of a tremendous underwater volcano that went off in the South Pacific in the last few years, maybe 2020, 2021, something like that. And it was an underwater a volcano. And there are many of them in the world. They just don't show up that easily because they don't blow off as dramatically as the ones on land. But what this volcano did was that it threw a whole lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. And that water vapor has been circulating for a couple of years up there and creating kind of a heat blanket around the globe. And

giving people the impression that we're in some new ethical climate change when it may not be the case. It may be simply the case that a volcano underwater spewed a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere and you get two years of weird weather. Just like in the early 1800s, you know, the Tambora or whenever it was, sometime in the last 300 years, the Tambora volcano erupted in the South Pacific

and threw all this debris in the air, and you got this condition that Western Siv called the year without summer. I think it was 1816, and all the crops failed, and it was tremendous, you know, tremendous upset, and even a number of evangelical religions kind of erupted out of that discontinuity. So, you know, maybe, you know, there are also all kinds of psychosophiles, within cycles, you know, there are monder minimum, so-called. There are, you know, there are 80-year cycles, there are sunspot cycles.

There are all kinds of things that affect the way the weather and the climate work. But living on Earth, you know, this is a fragile existence for human beings. You know, we've gotten to the point where we think, okay, you plant, you know, ex-bazillion bushels of wheat, and then you go into the supermarket, and there's, you know, there's endless supplies of lucky charms and fruit loops, and that's what life is about. But that's not what life is about. You know, I myself have a little homestead here in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. And, you know, I planted 30 fruit trees when I got here 12 years ago.

And, you know, I've never had a really good season of fruit of all kinds, plums, peaches, apples. pairs, et cetera. I've had some spotty fruit production, but I've discovered it's really hard to grow tree fruit, you know? You got to really be on top of like the whole pruning operation, the spraying. I mean, one of the reasons we get fruit so reliably is that we spray it mercilessly, and I don't spray my trees. So, you know, I get a lot of insect damage. And, you know, this year I had a cold week or maybe 10 days when the fruit trees were blooming and the bees didn't come around and they didn't pollinate. So I have very, very little fruit. The week before Memorial Day in late May here in the USA, we got a King Hell hailstorm. It crushed most of the things I'd planted

with large leaves like eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, you know, anything that had a a big enough leaf, kale. It destroyed these young plants and I had to go out in late May and replant as much as I could of everything. So, you know, it's hard to grow food. It's just not easy. So, you know, you hear people pissing and moaning about the industrial food production system getting into trouble. Well, you know, that was a great luxury that we had, you know, for certain reasons at a certain time and place in history. And those reasons, maybe going away. When you look into the future and see some of the, well, I mean, just take what's, you know,

from COVID and everything else that's going on, you see the amount of money that the government is printing, spending, printing again, so forth and so on. What do you see in the future? I see a, I see a Western Siv, at least, that's going to be really hard up for money. you know, the problem with money is that it has to represent real wealth. And if it only pretends to represent real wealth and the pretense is discovered, then all of a sudden a lot of the things that pretend to represent it just go up in a vapor. And that's kind of where we're at with the financial system,

is that we've got all these instruments out there, you know, bonds and stocks and currencies and derivatives and things that pretend to represent real capital, that is real accumulated wealth, when in fact they don't really. They just, you know, we've just assigned a certain role for them to play in a kind of a fictional financial economy. So, you know, just bottom line, we're going to be a whole lot poorer. We may not be able to depend on the currencies that now exist,

and we don't know what the currencies of, the future are going to be exactly. So tough call, except, you know, just prepare to have less money. And prepare to have other things like skill. Skill, yes. I would, when you look at it then, are you a gold guy? Do you believe in Bitcoin? Do you care for either?

Yeah, I believe in precious metals and gold and silver. I think it's plausible to me. I wrote a series of novels, actually, called The World Made by Hand series. There are four novels that set in a small town like the one I live in, in a post-economic collapse scenario. And so all the characters continue through all four books. Some of them come into the foreground, and then they recede into the background, and they tell different stories.

But in that working out of such a scenario, what has happened is that Silver has returned, silver coins return to circulation as the main means of exchange. And it wouldn't surprise me if that happened in North America at a certain point, at least for a while. You know, we are going to go into some kind of a timeout from modernity or what we think of as this era of these conditions of comfort and convenience that we're so used to. We're going to take a time out from it, and it may be a long time.

out and it's hard to tell exactly what the features of it are going to be excuse me um but you know prepare for it because it's coming well with uh well i i guess we'll do the crude miner crude master final question um it's it's what's next for for jim and if there is a way is there anything that uh the audience can do to help uh do you got books coming out oh would you direct them to uh uh you direct them to uh your well mainly mainly you know come to my my political blog cluster fuck nation comes out every monday and every friday and not the days in between twice a week at uh kunstler dot com just my name dot com i am doing some books i just had a book of my paintings come out because i'm a pretty serious painter and have been since since i was trained as a youth in the visualizing

arts. And I'm finishing a book now called Young Man Blues about the tribulations of adolescence, and that may be out in a year or so, or less, probably less, because these days it takes less time to put out. It used to take a year and a half for a book to come out from a major publisher. Now they can do it a lot more quickly. So, you know, there's that, and there's all my backlist books that are on my website, consular.com. And I'm just keeping on. I'm just keeping on. You know, I'm closer to the end than the beginning. And I'm even closer to the end than the middle at the age of 75. And, you know, I'm fortunate that I'm keeping on.

And I aim to keep keeping on for a while. And then eventually I'll check out and I'll go somewhere else or nowhere at all. When with ClusterFuck Nation, what's been grabbing your attention for the block? What's been, well, the sheer corruption of the U.S. government under Joe Biden is just,

it is more than a Greek tragedy, tragic comedy. It's something that takes place on a different astral plane even than Greek tragedy. It's so exorbitantly crazy. And the lies that have been put over and the trips that have been laid

on the American people are so astonishing. that it's just an amazing thing to have lived through it. You know, I started really blogging intensely about these matters really about seven years ago or so when I, maybe six or seven years ago when I went twice a week. And, you know, this whole epic from the rise of Donald Trump to what is now looking like the fall of Joe Biden

has really been quite an astonishing period of history. And I'm fortunate that. I live through it. I'm glad you've brought up Joe Biden and I'm sitting here. I'm married to a Minnesota girl. So I'm in Minnesota right now. And I'm Minnesota, Blue State,

so I've been bumping into lots of Democrats. Anyways. And I can't help myself. I've been, you know, kind of poking and prodding and just, you know, I just get to be a fly in the wall.

And I, I brought up Biden a couple times. Just hear what thoughts are. What are your thoughts? And I'm not going to, to say it's been a resounding, uh, similar answer, but, uh, the same answer, sorry. But what I've heard is, oh, he's not as bad as Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump or Joe Biden is in the next election, I will vote Joe Biden. It's very similar to what I was describing with my old hippie

friends. You know, I ask him, how's Joe Biden doing? And they say, oh, he's doing great. Yeah, he's getting a lot of his program passed. It's astonishing me. It, it amazes me that they, think this guy has any credibility at all. So, you know, look at it, I, I'm a believer in Mattias Desmetz. Yes. Mass. Mass formation idea. It seems to me that what we're seeing is it really a kind of group psychosis that, you know, so, you know, when you're having these conversations with these people, they're kind of zombie conversations. You know, they're happening with people whose minds have been emptied out in some weird way, that they've really lost their critical faculties.

I find it really amusing and also extremely disturbing. I'm sorry to see what's happened to my old friends. You know, they've just, they've become as mindless as sowbugs. Amusing and disturbing. Yeah, that's a way to put it. Appreciate you giving me some time today, Jim. And all the best. and hopefully a few people

stumble into your website and everything else. ClusterFuck Nation, the blog. There's some good thoughts in there. I can save so from reading it. And I shout out to Dale Wilker. He's an architect out of BC. He came on and he told me all about you. I'm glad he did.

Either way, thanks for hopping on with me. You're quite welcome, Sean. Or Shaun, can I call you that? That's an in-joke. Thanks again. Okay, bye-bye, Sean. Hey, thanks for tuning in today, guys. I hope you enjoyed it.

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