The Eric Metaxas Show - James Kunstler

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

James Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere," focuses on the deteriorating urban condition brought about in part by the "tragic landscape of highways and mega-malls."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Uh-oh. Albin, it's Monday. It is Monday. It is Monday. Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize in advance for what we're going to do this week. We've got a lot of stuff to cover. First of all, first things first. My guest for both hours today is an old friend.

I cannot believe. I don't think I have hung out with him for 30 years. It doesn't make sense, but it's true. His name is Jim Kunstler. Well, we've got one big announcement, but before I get to that, I want to say, Jim Cuncelor, I don't want to brag about him when he's on the air with me because I don't want to embarrass him. But he is an amazing writer. his books are brilliantly written and hilarious, even when he's writing about serious stuff.

So he wrote a book called The Geography of Nowhere that is about kind of what happened to America and how highways and, you know, six-lane highways have just kind of taken over everything. But it's so brilliant that it changed the way I see things. And I read it back in, gosh, this was in the 90s. So I want to talk to him about that. but he's somebody too that he came from a kind of like a liberal, secular, you know, democratic point of view. And I think he has migrated more to where I am. So I'm fascinated with that.

I don't know if I'm going to get into that. But he's just a big deal. And so I am thrilled that I get to talk to him for both hours today. I just want to introduce this audience to Jim Cuncelor. And you can go, I can't even say the name of his blog because it's too vulgar. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not kidding. I'm actually not kidding.

In that case, I'm not kidding. So I want to say my guest is Jim Cuncelor today. Both hours. Both hours. And I really do feel he's a phenomenon. You may not agree with him about everything, but he's brilliant. He's a free thinker in the best sense. He's not afraid to just go where the facts leave.

He's what people call a hidden gem. He's what people call a hidden gem. Or at least I said it. Okay. Tomorrow we have Eugenia Constantinu that's Greek. Oh my gosh. She is one of my favorite guests. She has written a book.

What's the title of the book? It's about the crucifixion. It is spectacular. Ladies and gentlemen, that's amazing. Don't miss it tomorrow. Okay, so Jim Concello today, Eugenia, we've got Tim Tebow coming up. Here's the announcement. I've got a lot I want to talk about.

But the announcement, we're doing a fundraiser with Food for the Poor. Food for the Poor made a tough decision because everybody's so focused on the Ukraine. People have not been as inclined to give. So, as you know, three weeks ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. Right. Okay. So nearly three million Ukrainians have fled the country. And so our friends at Food for the Poor said this month now, while we're doing this campaign,

they reached out to strategic partners who have a footprint beyond their typical 17 Caribbean and Latin American countries. So we've been raising money for starving kids in those countries. But as of today, Food for the Poor has been able to shift everything so that from now to the end of the month, we are able to help people suffering in the Ukraine specifically. So Ed Rain, I almost said Rainy, Ed Rain, who is the CEO and president of Food for the Poor gave us a clip. Why don't we play that? Theater of Operations. So we thought about our partners.

Who is it that we have a relationship with? So Feed My Starving Children quickly came on to the radar. They are an essential part of what we do in our countries. And we understood from them that they have confidence in being able to do the work in the Ukraine because they've been there for the last eight years. Okay, so obviously food for the poor, whatever money we raise from here going forward, So today, go to Metaxis talk.com, click on the banner, please, folks. But that will also help Feed My Starving Children is the name of it.

Food for the Poor is linking with them to help kids not just in our hemisphere, but in the Ukraine to rush emergency relief. Actually, Andy Carr, who's the vice president of Mark in Development at Feed My Starving Children, also gave us a clip. Why don't we play Andy Carr's clip right now? now. We are honored to partner with food for the poor. I've had the privilege of being out and around the world in many places that you serve and seeing what ManaPak meals do. And obviously, we are thrilled to be able to have a partner of the scale and scope of what you do. Okay. So this is,

this is exciting because a lot of people have contacted us. They wanted us to, to help the folks in the Ukraine. So food for the poor from today, this is Monday, um, we, We are going to be working with Feed My Starving Children. So when you go to our website, metaxis talk.com, and click on the banner. You will be also helping millions of refugees who are going through this crisis in the Ukraine. We need your help, folks. I've been saying it throughout the month, but we really need your help. The number is 844-863.

I hope you'll do something today, please. 844-863 hope again because the situation in the Ukraine giving has been dramatically down. So food for the poor said, let's shift if people are interested in helping folks in Ukraine. And the banner is right up there at the top of the page. So do it today. Because a lot of times you forget, you say, like, oh, I'll do it later. Now, do it now. Do it while you're taking.

Metaxistalk.com is the website. Metaxistock.com at the top of the page. And again, if you prefer to call 844-863, hope, 844-863 hope 844-8-6-3 hope we need your help so I don't know how else to put it other than to say it's a big deal

that Food for the Poor decided to partner in this way and so we just hope you'll step up another announcement Nutrametics this week only if you use the code Eric it's 25% off they do this periodically their stuff is spectacular

I keep saying I went into a health food store in Connecticut I was in Connecticut and I had run out of my nutrometics thing. So I went to a health food store. They carry it there. It's like every great store that has all this kind of stuff. Nutrametics is one of the greatest companies. So I say that, but then I want to say on top of it, 50% of their profits go to helping

missions agencies in the third world. So if you need nutraceuticals, you need melatonin, vitamin C, whatever. And I say to everybody for your health, for your immune health, you should be taking vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium every single day. I do, but you might as well get it from Nutrametics because 50% of the profits go to helping missions organizations. When you went into that store, did they say, hey, you're Eric. We're going to give you 25% off. No, they didn't give me 25% off. So I paid full price and it burned me up. I thought, why don't I go to my own website or sorry, go to their website, Nutrimetics.com and put in the code,

Eric and I would get a whopping 20% off and as of today 25% off so I really blew it. You did. That's all right. You're human. We want to, before we go to our guest, Jim Kuntler, I just want to say that I did some gardening this weekend and I'm really tired. I'm really sore. My body is not used to gardening.

Like I work out, I run. I work out with weights, but gardening is a whole different thing. But I'm in Connecticut. And, you know, my parents' house. Let me just say that my father's never been big on landscaping. No. He just kind of like sticks stuff here and there and it grows. Yeah.

And he doesn't. So I decided that on the side of the house where we had all these ferns and stuff, I decided that we need to push the ferns back and plant grass. And it was brutal. Oh. It was brutal. You know, I cleaned off the back deck. Now, we had a pretty nice weekend here in the northeast.

I cleaned off the back deck and I got bit by a bee. You got bit by a bee? Yeah. You're not making this up. I'm not kidding. I'm screaming. My wife is like, do I have to take you to a hospital? She's serious, right?

Why? Why? Well, because there are a lot of strange spiders on our back deck. Are the bees that big? Well, I know. And I thought it was a spider bipe, and I thought, well, what kind of spider do I have like 30 seconds to live? That kind of thing? You actually really thought that you could.

I'm serious. And it's now it's swelled a little and it's red and it's itchy. And it's, I don't know if I have to get rid of the finger in order to live. Wow. What's up where? Wow, I wanted to end on an upnote. I apologize. I'm sorry. Okay, so we're going to go to Jim Cunceler, and at the end of the hour today, I want to tell you what I've been watching on TV. Okay. It's fun. We're going to have a fun time. Don't forget metaxis talk.com. Don't forget, please metaxis talk.com. Check it out. How are you going to find your new favorite piece of outdoor gear? If you sign up for a battlebox, it finds you. Battlebox is your go-to monthly subscription for handpig. Outdoor Survival and Everyday Carry Gear.

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my conversation with an old friend. My gosh, we met in 1985. That's not possible. Yeah, almost 40 years ago. Jim, James Howard Cuncelor, or as you let me call you, Jim, welcome to the program. It's a pleasure to be here. Listen, I said this before. You're just one of these people. You just, make me happy. When I read your stuff, when I talk to you, I remember when our old friend, now deceased, Alan Chews, C-H-E-U-S-E, brought me over, I was 22, I guess, and he brought me over to meet you in Saratoga Springs, and I immediately thought, who the heck is this guy? You had just finished your novel, an embarrassment of riches.

Oh, dear. Which is one of the funniest. It's going a long way back. I know, but it's like one of the funniest things, like, ever. And I've been following you, over the years when I was working with Rabbit Ears productions in 1991, I think I got you involved and you wrote the Davy Crockett book for Rabbit Ears. And then after that, I got married and one day came across your book, The Geography of Nowhere, which changed my wife's and my thinking on many

things. It gave us a vocabulary to think about America and the ugly highway escapes and things like that. So I'm just thrilled to have you on. I want to talk to you about the geography of nowhere. I want to talk to you about you have a blog, which people look up your name, James Howard Kunstler, Kuntzla, which is German for artist. They can find it. But you, why don't we start with current events, Jim? You've written a few pieces. recently, about Ukraine, about everything. Somebody just says to you, hey, hey, I'm confused. What's going on in the world?

What do you say to somebody like that? Well, what's going on in the world is a tremendous, difficult readjustment to the new mandates of reality. You know, reality sends us these signals, and we can either behave accordingly or try to confound them. And right now, we're trying to confound them. and life is kind of going sideways in Western civilization. Correct. That's a little bit general.

Correct. I'm not, I haven't been that specific. But, you know, one of the manifestations is this current conflict over Ukraine. I think that it's not quite what it appears to be. I do think that the Russian invasion or incursion in Ukraine is what it is. basically a cleanup of a territory within Russia's sphere of influence historically. But for the West, and particularly the United States, it's an opportunity to avoid facing some of the more difficult problems in our polity.

Okay, so it's a wag the dog opportunity for the, I don't know if he's incompetent or nefarious or both. So we'll just use neither of those terms. we'll just refer to him as Joe Biden, but it's an opportunity for him and his administration to say, oh, oh, look over there. But when we're talking about the Ukraine, we also have to say that whatever is happening,

it seems clear. I mean, it seems astonishingly clear that by projecting weakness on the global stage, we've effectively invited every tyrant or bully or bad actor or semi-bad actor to take action now before it's too late. Well, they're certainly seizing opportunity. You know, apropos of our situation, we have several very, very difficult problems to confront.

One is what's turned out to be an absolute medical fiasco in which the government appears to have harmed and injured and possibly killed an awful lot of its citizens. Through vaccines and not dealing with the pandemic. correctly, I guess that's what you mean. Absolutely, through terrible misconduct, maladministration, and official misbehavior. And, you know, we haven't begun to process how we're going to account for all that. Or whether. Or whether we will or not. And, you know, there's an excellent possibility that we'll just try to skate through it.

But that's a huge problem. The other thing is, you know, we're going through. an event in world history that I have called in the title of one of my books, the long emergency, which is kind of the unraveling of modern industrial, techno-industrial civilization and the terms for it, which are, you know, most basically a high energy input civilization. And when the cost of running that civilization becomes marginally unaffordable, all of a sudden, the many systems that we depend on start to get into trouble.

And those systems, when they start to fail, ramify each other's failures. Okay. And that's what we're facing. You're very complicated, which is why I love you. And so I want to be clear, I want to be clear. You are, to my mind, like the definition of a free thinker. Like you're hard to put in a category. You're not a person of faith.

you wouldn't really ordinarily describe yourself as conservative, although lately, I mean, categories have kind of exploded since Trump. And people like Naomi Wolf, who I thought of as a hard left feminist, is heroic on the vaccine mandates and all these other things. So a lot of these categories are getting scrambled. And we're talking about a few things at once. but what you just said about energy, for example, you're not like a Jeffersonian agrarian, or are you? Well, that really doesn't apply to the situation. You know, we have developed a certain way of life, and we've made certain investments in it, and especially psychological investments.

And, you know, now we don't have to, we don't know how to make the new required adjustments to live differently. You know, there is going to be a reset, but it's not going to be the reset of Klaus Schwab. You know, what reality is telling us is that we have to probably downscale and relocalize most of the things we do. I think you can state categorically

that anything organized at the giant scale, whether it's a government, a large state university, a big national corporation for selling things. You know, anything organized at the giant scale is going to fail. And, well, it probably will be, you know, in the long run, but in the short run, what it really means is that a lot of our systems and a lot of the things and institutions that we depend on are not going to be working very well.

We can already see that in the federal government. It was one of the basic ideas in my long emergency book that we would see the federal government become increasingly incompetent, ineffectual, and impotent, and really unable to discharge its duties or take care of business. But isn't that the definition? Isn't that exactly what happens when something gets big and bloated? Isn't the whole idea? I mean, the background of the conversation, at least for me, is when I think of the idea,

of America, the founder's idea of America, you know, Lord Acton, power corrupts. We want to keep government small because that enables freedom and self-government. There's really no other way. And when it gets bigger and bigger as it's done, we become less and less free until now, you know, people want to see your papers so you can eat in a restaurant here in New York City. I mean, literally, until, you know, last week. So that, that's part of the conversation, isn't it, that we've, we have taken our eyes off the ball and things have become bigger and bigger. I mean, the federal government, whatever it is at this point, it is just late years from what the founders probably even thought it might be.

Well, look, human societies are social organisms, and they follow the laws of emergence. That is, you know, when they encounter changes in conditions, they, through self-organisms, they, through self-organizing, they change what they're doing. And, you know, the growing size of these institutions that we have to deal with, government, you know, national chain retail, whatever it is, the growing size of this has been an emergent process. We didn't really kind of necessarily will, you know, wish it upon ourselves, but it did happen. And now we're going to have deal with the consequences. You know, when in natural history, when animals sometimes reach their point of extinction, they assume their largest size, like the beluchotherium of the

Asian steppe, you know, of the, of an earlier geological epoch, you know, you get an animal that's three times a size of an elephant, you know, and that's sort of what's gone on with the federal government. and it's just too large an organism now to function. Okay, when we come back, we're going to talk about megatherium and other gigantic beasts of the past with my friend James Howard Cuncelor. You can find him online. I suggest that you do. We'll be right back.

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It works. Folks, talking to an old friend James Howard Cuncelor, the author of a zillion books, I think literally. How many books, Jim, have you? Oh, not quite a zillion. More like maybe 22 or something like that. Oh, is that all? Anybody could do that. It's like loading cinder blocks on a truck. Isn't that true, though?

Yeah. Your book, The Geography of Nowhere. Let's go there because I think it's helpful. Because you're all over the place in some ways. That's, you know, your genius. But you wrote a book called The Geography of Nowhere and then a sequel Home from Nowhere. And it was so helpful to me when it, when did it come out?

I don't know, 2000. It came out in 1993. And the whole idea was, you know, in, that, a long time ago, in midlife, you know, I decided I wanted to write about the fiasco of suburban development and the troubles that it had caused for American life. And destroying our sense of community, destroying children's ability to develop their personal sovereignty. in physical space by learning how to get around from point A to point B by themselves. And all of the other inconveniences, including mandatory mass motoring. And also, you know, the destruction to the physical landscape of the USA.

And, you know, a lot of people look at these shopping strips and six-lane boulevards out there in the housing subdivision. And they come to the conclusion that, you know, it's just all ugly. but that's not really the problem. Not just that it's ugly. The problem is that it's all the same miserable quality. I mean, I can't even, it's amazing to me because I'm thinking that a lot of the thoughts that I have, independent from you,

because I haven't hung out with you in 30 years, is that basically I always think of what, you write about in the geography of nowhere where you describe these extraordinary American downtowns, these little cities where people had the pride that there'd be a gorgeous building, the bank, or they had pride and they created these things and they were beautiful. And then at some point, if I'm remembering your book correctly, all of that changed. You had highway sprawl, and now we have cinder block. horrors everywhere we go with plastic signage.

This is kind of the new America. I mean, that's maybe the best distillation that I could give of your book, that you kind of talk about how that happened. And even I would even say you make it possible for people to realize, aha, yes, yes, that's what happened. Because it's not everybody has thought of it. And you help us to think about how. we went from that kind of an America to this kind of an America physically?

Well, people don't think about it because it's an immersive environment, you know, the way that a fish is in water. You know, we just don't notice all that stuff, really, as being any kind of a problem. It's our environment. But the immersive ugliness of America really represents something very dangerous, which is entropy made visible. And entropy is that force in, you know, physical science in the universe. that you don't want to mess with. Entropy is the force that tends to drive things towards death and stasis. And, you know, when you have created an environment for you that actually represents

entropy, you're in trouble as a culture. And that's, it's a little bit metaphysical, but there you have it. Well, it's interesting because in geography of nowhere and home from nowhere, you're talking about, in some ways, the physical outwork. of what you were referring to a moment ago with regard to the federal government and other things. In other words, if you're not, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting is that if you're not intentional,

I hate that word, but I can't think of a better one. If you're not intentional about things, they just drift of their own accord in these directions. And then before you know it, you have $30 trillion in debt. You have highways like spaghetti, across the landscape and ugly stuff and whatever. And you, you didn't, it's because you didn't realize really where, where things were going. You just kind of, you kind of went along with things.

And I think when we're talking about this issue right now, that's, that's kind of what I think of. And it's not like anybody intended this. It's the idea is that nobody intended this, but they just, they just kind of, you know, they just followed either their greed or their, the passions of the moment, and here we are? I have a new theory of history that kind of simplifies everything. Things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. You know, it seemed like a good idea at the time after World War II to take advantage of all this rambling real estate that we had in America

and, you know, build a lot of stuff, and especially build a lot of stuff that enabled us to drive around to everything. It seemed like a good idea. And now, 70 years later, all of a sudden, maybe it's not such a good idea. Maybe it's caused a lot of destruction in American life and has ended up costing too much for us to sustain a plausible standard of living. And maybe we're going to have to change it. Now, the psychology of previous investment is going to prompt people to not want to change that. But as I said, the mandates of reality will have a way.

of their own and we will probably have to be mindful and attend to them. Well, look, if people take away nothing else before we go to this next break, James Howard Cuncelor is an amazing writer. His writing is extremely readable. And we're talking about a terrific book, the geography of nowhere. I recommend it. Highly, we'll be right back. Hey folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell. Well, Mike has just announced that you will receive one of his books and the book is next level insane. It is called What Are the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO? It's his story. You will receive it absolutely free with any purchase using the promo code Eric. Did you hear that?

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That's 800, 978, 3057. and he used the promo code, Eric. Hey there, kids. I'm talking to James Howard Cuncelor, or as I know him, Jim. Jim, we're talking a little bit about the thesis of your book, The Geography of Nowhere. I want to talk about this a little bit more because I remember when I read it, it was astonishing for many reasons.

Number one, I knew you as a brilliant fiction writer mostly and very entertaining, very funny. But this was a book where you talked about something really serious. And your thinking, not just your writing, but your thinking was original. It was like I'd never encountered this before. It immediately struck me as utterly correct and important. And I guess was this part of what's called the New Urbanism? I mean, was that part of what happened?

No, the New Urbanism grew out of it. And in fact, it was a- That's what I meant. That's what I meant, sorry. Yeah. It was a case of synchronicity because the year that the geography of nowhere came out was exactly the same year that a group of architects, public officials, land development speculators and other people, banded into this group called the Congress for the New Urbanism, which was a movement to try to reform the way property development was done in America and move back more towards traditional walkable communities. and I thought it was a great idea, and it was exactly the remedy for the suburban fiasco. And the people I met in that experience, and I've been associated with them for 30 years,

are some of the brightest people in America doing one of the few things that actually helps, which is helping communities re-pedestrianize themselves and get away from this mass motoring mania that is ending for us, whether we're going to be. like it or not. You know, we're simply not going to be able to carry it on, and we got to make other arrangements for daily life. Well, when I read your book, I remember thinking back in 93 or whenever it was, that this described my childhood, because I grew up in a development that was cut off, a housing development, that was cut off from the city or anything. So if I rode my bike, I couldn't go past, once I got out of the development, I was on a highway. So, you know, you're not going to

let a 10 or 11-year-old kid ride his Huffy 3-speed on a highway or on this danger. So we were kind of trapped. You couldn't get to a store. There's no store in the housing development. And you kind of talk about this, that there was a time when people existed in communities and the kid could go down to the store and he could – and that was changed utterly by highways. In fact, the highway near our home, I-84, that, you know, cut.

It just changed everything. And that went in, I don't know, like in the 61, 62, like early in the 60s, I think was when this interstate highway went through. But it changed everything. It changed the town. It changed the whole area. Well, it's not just about going to the store. It's about children having a direct connection to all the activities and institutions in regular adult life. So that they mix with people of a different age than they are.

And, you know, in that situation, in that kind of environment, other adults really have the right to help manage the behavior of other children, including children who are not their own. So they learn from other people about, you know, what is acceptable behavior or not. You know, you can't go into the shop and start, you know, shoplifting or breaking things or shouting and, you know, being obstreperous. And so, you know, you develop these relationships also, the child. learns how to get around his own environment without the assistance of the family chauffeur, which is mom, right? And so, you know, you have several generations of kids now who are raised without even knowing how to get their carcass from point A to point B in the landscape, and that's been pretty

damaging. So, you know, this whole idea of having a sense of personal sovereignty of control over your own body and your own self in your environment is very important. and it's really affected children badly. Now, of course, it's even gotten worse because to compensate for all that, we've immersed them in this alternative universe of electronic digital garbage.

Shoot me now. Just listening to this. No, we can get through this. We can get out of this, but it's very problematic. Yes, we can. But I want to say to people again, your books, you're writing, you're really just such a terrific writer, often very funny.

you use words like carcass when appropriate, obstreperous. So you're really fun to read, and the geography of nowhere is, you're talking about something exceedingly important. But usually when people write books about stuff like that, nobody reads them except other academics or people at think tanks or whatever it is. Your books are really readable. And so you did first Geography of Nowhere, then Home from Nowhere. Was there a third one? Yeah, there was a third one called The City in Mind. notes on the urban condition.

And it was a sort of a discussion of a whole bunch of cities that were really very different from each other. You know, Atlanta, Berlin, Mexico City. I don't think it's sold very well. And for no particularly good reason, except book publishers these days have no idea how to market books. Did they ever? But maybe in the days of... The system worked better, you know, in decades earlier. Now the whole thing's falling apart.

But anyway, I wrote those three books. It was all over. It really is kind of funny because you, I read all three of those books and they really are, they're superb. And I know that people listening to this program will get the geography of nowhere and begin the process because it really, it answers a lot of questions. That's what it did for me. It kind of made me understand like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Now I get it. Why are you living like this?

Yes. Why was my childhood, you know, circumscribed. in the way that it was physically. And then you realize, yeah, if my mother can't drive me in my friend's house across the highway, I can't see my friend. I can't ride my bike there, even though it's like, you know, less than three quarters of a mile away. I can't ride my bike there because, you know, we've designed life this way right now. And these ideas are actually important, but you said that what you did had helped launch this thing called the new urbanism.

So progress has been made in 30 years along these lines. Yeah, the new urbanists did fabulous work over the last 25 years. They helped a lot of towns and cities reform their codes and their laws for building stuff. So that, for example, it wasn't mandatory to supply seven parking spaces for every business that opened, you know, things like that. They built a lot of new towns from the ground up to demonstrate what, you know, good urban design was, and they were very successful. But now we're moving into a new era now of, you know, what will be understood to be capital scarcity.

Okay, but hang on, because we're going to a break. We're going to come back talking about capital scarcity with James Howard Kuntler. Don't go away. Hey, folks, talking to James Howard Kuntler. Jim, you just used the phrase capital scarcity. Talk about that. What did you mean? Well, you know, we've been to Washington.

in this thing we call money and the things that represent it for many decades. You know, we've had some problems along the way, like the great financial crisis of 2008 and the previous one of 2000, the dot-com crisis. But generally, we've been in an environment where there's a lot of money. And what we're going to discover as we go forward is that a lot of money is going to disappear. and a lot of the things that represent money are going to lose their value, you know, whether they're stocks or bonds, derivatives of all those things. Now, why do you say that?

Because I'm not really particularly conversant in this field. Why do you say this? We're entering on kind of double-edged era of financial trouble in which we're going to, we're going to see monetary inflation, which is going to drive up the things, drive up the price of ordinary things that we need like food and gasoline and other things. At the same time, they were going to see an asset deflation of things like stocks and bonds and derivatives losing their value, which will cause money to disappear from the system, especially when debts are not repaid.

And we have driven up so much debt in our system that is not going to be repaid, that all of the air is going to go out of it. and it will create a serious problem. Well, and obviously just in terms of the federal debt, it's been Democrats and Republicans both horribly guilty of this. Yeah, there's a consensus across the political spectrum for us that it would serve their purposes to spend as much money as possible and to prompt the Federal Reserve to create as much money as possible. But, you know, they've been dealing with another set of problems that have to do

with the distortions and perversities in the banking and financial system and papering over them with even greater perversities like quantitative easing and, you know, the zero interest rate policy. And those things have now created so much trouble in the financial markets that they can barely function and they're going to stop functioning. And, you know, we have mainly destroyed the function of what's called price discovery. Price discovery is what tells you what, it's a signal that comes from the market telling you what things are worth, whether it's the price of gold or the price of oil or the price of that stock over there. And that function has been destroyed by federal reserve policy. And eventually, it will destroy a great deal.

of what we consider to be money and things that are represented as money. You know, you're pretty smart guy. It's not like they say. You're smart. You can do things. You're a lot of fun, but you see things as they are. And this stuff is, it's pretty bleak, but you haven't lost your, it looks to me like a mischievous sense of hope that we will get through this. when we come back, I want to talk about that. But before that, in the remaining 40 seconds,

what are some of the novels? I want to talk about your novels with you. Which novels should we talk about? Well, the most recent ones were the four I wrote after the Long Emergency. It was a series called The World Made by Hand series. The title of the first book was World Made by Hand. And they were novels all set in the same small town. in New England and the same cast of characters who come forward and move into the background with each book. When we come back, I want to talk to you.

And they take place after a collapse of the economic system. Oh, you mean 10 years from now. We'll be right back. Actually, our two with James Howard Cinsler.