HS 186 - The Long Emergency with James Howard Kuntsler

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

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It's my pleasure to welcome James Howard Kunstler to the show. I have been a fan of his work for several years now and he publishes a lot of interesting stuff. He has a weekly blog, podcast, many books, and I originally found him when he had his book out entitled the Long Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging catastrophes of the 21st century. It's a pleasure to have him with us on the show today. James, welcome. How are you?

I'm fine. It's a beautiful day in upstate New York.

Well, fantastic. Give us a little bit of your background. You are making some pretty big and dire predictions, if I may say, and just wanted to kind of dive into your work and, and what your latest thoughts are.

Gee, I didn't. You know, it's funny because I don't consider them dire.

I'm really okay.

I'm a journalist, I'm an author. I don't pretend to be an academic. I published a number of books on the fiasco of suburbia back in, you know, 20 years ago. I started that series and about urban design because I was interested in, you know, why the human habitat in America was just so unrewarding and, and so lacking in grace and amenity. And so I wrote the Geography of Nowhere and then I published Home from Nowhere, a sequel which was kind of about the New Urbanist movement and some of the remedies for bad town planning and bad architecture. And then I wrote a book called the City in Mind about cities. And then in 2005, I published the Long Emergency. And that was about this, you know, what was developing to be a set of predicaments that the human race faced, and America in particular, because of our lifestyle and the way we do things. And so, you know, what I predicted was we were going to get into trouble with oil and we were going to get into trouble with finance, and indeed, we have gotten into trouble with both of them. And also that we would get into trouble with something else that has now become an especial problem, which is delusional thinking. And I think the reason for that is that as a society becomes distressed, the wishful thinking and belief in magic and the supernatural kind of increases. And in fact, I wrote another book published in 2012 called Too Much Magic, Technology, Wishful Thinking, and the Fate of the Nation. And it was largely about how we. We're trying to tell ourselves that shale oil and shale gas would allow us to keep driving to Walmart forever. And I just don't think it's going to work out that way. So I hope that's not too much information.

Yeah, well, no, that's. That's great. Because one of the areas where I was going to pick a debate with you, if you will, is on shale oil and how the US Seemingly, to me, correct me if I'm wrong, but is slated to be the next big energy exporter if our government will let it happen.

It's complete nonsense.

Okay, tell me more.

Yeah, well, we're not going to. That's not going to happen. The shale oil enterprise is going to prove to be very ephemeral. And the way I would encourage your listeners to think about it is in the following way. We had many, many decades of cheap oil, and that's pretty much what made the current version of the American economy, or at least the most recent version of the American economy, what it was.

Absolutely. Now, before you go on, I just want you to maybe define cheap oil a little bit. I mean, how much per barrel? And you can cite real or nominal dollars, but just tell us which one we're talking about. You know, when you say cheap, what.

Does that mean to me in today's dollars? It probably means oil under $35 a barrel. And we stopped seeing that in really the early 2000s. Ease.

We're nowhere near that.

Yeah, I mean, we briefly touched it you know, during the crash of 2008, when the price of commodities crashed. But that was only a very brief thing. And, you know, oil has basically been in the $75 to $110 range since then.

Right, right. Okay, go on.

Well, so the way to think about it is this. You know, we had this era of cheap oil. And compare a Texas classic Texas oil well of the mid 20th century to a shale oil well, classic Texas oil Well, East Texas, 1930s. It cost about $400,000 in today's money to drill. It produced thousands of barrels a day for decades of tremendously high flow. Tremendously cheap to produce, easy to work with room temperature. You could drive to work. Didn't have to worry about, you know, being up in the Arctic Ocean or anything. Very easy to go there. Okay, North Dakota, the average well in North Dakota costs between 6 and $12 million in today's dollars. The average flow of the Bakken North Dakota shale oil is about 80 barrels a day. That's compared to thousands of barrels a day in Texas. Okay, 80 barrels a day. It depletes by over 50% the first year and over 20% the second year. So unlike the Texas oil that produces for decades at high rates, the Bakken shale oil craps out after a few years. And that's what you're going to see. And you're also going to see something else. You're going to see that the capital is not there to do the production, because one of the problems with expensive oil is that it impairs capital formation in the kind of financial system that we have evolved into. And the capital is not going to be there to perform these expensive operations to get the shale oil out of the ground. So not only is it going to deplete very quickly, but we're going to find that we don't have the money even to pursue it after a certain point. So I think that what you're going to see is that this is a delusion, that the media has been suckered into this story by the oil industry, which is desperate to get as much investment as possible to keep up doing what they're doing because they got nowhere else to go. Most of the other places where they did business, where they did oil exploration and production in foreign countries, that oil has been nationalized. And so they can't go there anymore. The only thing that's left for them is the dregs of what's in North America. So that's what you're seeing. You know, what's going to happen with Shale oil is. The American people are going to be hugely disappointed and they're going to feel that they were lied to. This will be just another thing that they will have been lied to about, and it will be just another thing that will erode the legitimacy and the authority of the people who run things in this country. And that's a very dangerous thing to do politically.

Well, hey, I don't think there's much legitimacy and authority of the people who run things anymore. Whether it be at the highest levels of government or the financial system.

They're still running this stuff.

Fair enough. There hasn't been a revolution yet.

There's no revolution going on. So bread and synthesis, all that shows is that. All that shows is that we haven't reached the tipping point of people really being disgusted with it.

Yeah, fair enough. And they should be more disgusted, no question about it. But we've got this complacent society, we've got the bread and circuses, we've got enough comfort and food stamps to keep people fat and stupid. And it's just ridiculous. But that's almost another discussion which I know you'll have something to say about. So it's fair to say then that you're a peak oil guy, right?

Yeah. And peak oil is not yesterday's story, contrary to a lot of the other propaganda out there. It's still. It's still with us. Very much with us.

Okay. And what about natural gas?

Yeah, well, natural gas is a very similar story there. There's a kind of a myth going around that we have a hundred years of shale gas, 100 years of natural gas, and, you know, it's just not going to happen. We produced a lot of it in a short amount of time. We drilled a lot of Wells since 2007, 2008, and we drove the price down. And by the way, a lot of those drilling rigs have now gone to the shale oil plays, so they're not there anymore. The price of shale gas will probably be going up. That will help the producers because at the current price, they can't actually make a profit drilling for shale gas at three and a half dollars a unit. So that's just another thing that's going to end up disappointing the American people that, you know, we don't have enough shale gas to keep on running Walmart forever.

Right, right. And what about alternative energy? I mean, do you have any hope that there's something that works out there or that anything we have now works or something will?

There are a lot of things that work but they don't, they don't work in the way that people expect. And this is, this is another rather tragic problem is that we're going to be disappointed by what renewables and alternative energy can do for us. You know, they can, they can do things, but we're not going to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World, suburbia, Walmart, the US army and all of our other stuff on any combination of solar, wind, algae, secretions, ethanol, biomass, dark matter. You know, it's just not going to happen. And it's going to be another one of those things that will disappoint people about technology. And you know, all of these things that I'm saying are not, they don't amount to an invitation to be depressed and become suicidal. The message here is that we gotta change our behavior. We have to live differently in this country. This question that you asked me about, you know, what about alternative energy? Well, the subtext to that which your listeners did not hear because you did not state it is, and I don't even know if you thought this, but, but it's really in there. The subtext is how can we keep on running all the stuff we're running now by other means? And the answer is we're not we and we should.

And in your mind we shouldn't, we should, we should run on less, right?

Yeah. Well, that's because in my mind, you know, I'm interested in reality. I like to live in a reality based world rather than a wishful thinking based world. And reality has plans for us. And what reality wants us to do is find some new ways to live and to change the way we operate many of the basic systems for daily life, including agriculture, we got to do that differently. The way we do commerce and trade, we got to do that differently. The way we make our household goods got to do that differently. The way we do transportation, we're definitely going to have to do that differently.

Well, that's a great statement. So drill down on those, if you would, those bullet points you just mentioned. How should we do them differently?

Well, let's start with transportation because the automobile is behind a lot of our desperation. Having built a society that is tragically dependent on automobiles for everything we do every day, we can't imagine what might happen if we can't do that. And I think the truth is we won't be able to run our cars the way we have been probably in a very short time. The same thing is true. By the way, the airlines, I think the airlines are going to go out of business. They're already kind of in the process of dwindling. They've been doing it by increments and by merging and by dropping routes and by firing everybody they could fire and eliminating the pensions of their former employees, et cetera, et cetera. They've done everything they can now. And the only thing that's left for them to do is to fly fewer routes and fly fewer passengers. And that's what's happening now. So basically we're going to lose the passenger airline system and we're going to see the happy motoring system dwindle. What do we do? Well, one of the things we ought to do that we should have started doing three decades ago was rebuilding the railroad system in America. We're going to need it desperately. Nobody's interested in doing it. And that includes most members of the public and most leaders, including leaders in business and politics. Nobody sees any benefit in it. But I'm telling you, if we don't do that, we're going to be in terrible trouble. We're not going to be able to go anywhere in this very large country. So that's one project that's terribly important. And the reason I mention it first is that it's something that we could do if we just had the political will to do it. And if we did do it, we would accomplish something very important. And on top of accomplishing something important.

We would set an example for ourselves to demonstrate to ourselves that we were capable of doing the other things that we have to attend to. You know, we're going to have to reform agriculture because we can't just keep on turning oil into food. You know, we're going to have to make agriculture smaller, finer, more local. We're going to have to grow our food closer to home on smaller farms, probably using more human labor, probably using more animal labor. You know, we're making no plans for these things. In the meantime, you know, we're destroying the soil and we're running out of capital because the other big input for industrial agriculture, after oil based fertilizer, oil and gas based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, the biggest input is capital. You have to borrow a lot of money to get the crop in every year and we're moving into a capital scarce economy. So. And I think that the way these things are going to work out will surprise people. For example, the whole motoring thing does not just hinge on the price of gasoline. A lot of people, you know, that's the only metric they can understand this with you know, is the price of gasoline up at the pump or is it down at the pump? Well, guess what? When you enter a period of capital scarcity, what that means also is that there are going to be far fewer car loans available and far fewer people who qualify for them.

Right. So the cost of ownership goes up a lot.

Well, it's not that it goes up, it's that the fewer people can afford it, whatever the price is.

Right, right. Yeah, but most people buy a car on a payment, not the price of the car. So even if the price of the car drops, but the cost of financing or the unavailability of financing with financing is scarce, the little that's out there will be more expensive.

Well, the point is that they have to buy the cars on installment loans, period. And if the money for loans is scarcer and if fewer people qualify, there will be fewer people participating in the motoring system. And, you know, you can say the same thing about maintaining the infrastructure for motoring, because we're seeing already that states and municipalities and counties are going broke, the capital's not there, and we're going to enter a period of triage where we have to make very difficult decisions about what stuff we fix and what stuff we don't fix.

Okay, so I've got so many questions for you. This is so fascinating. So, first of all, I mean, you've been very critical of suburbia, and I know the reasons why the, you know, the car and the dependency on the car, it just. The whole equation doesn't work.

It's also a, you know, it's generally a miserable place to live.

Yeah. Now why is it miserable? Because there's not enough to do because all the houses are cookie cutter. Why do you say that? I'm. That's part of it.

Because it's, it's, it's monotonous to an unbelievable extreme. And, but it also, it has no connection at all with the things that make life rewarding. It has no connection to amenity other than having a lot of bathrooms in proximity to where you live.

Okay, so what kind of amenity? Like culture, performing arts? What are you talking about?

Okay, culture, commerce, social interaction. I was in Irvine, California.

Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. That's the prime example. You know, I spent most of my adult life in Irvine and I used to love it and now I hate it.

Well, you know, I was just amazed at how dead every place was that I went to, you know, except for the strip mall.

James, I'm going to tell you something funny about that. You know, I sold real estate there for many, many years. Okay. And in Irvine, it frequently wins the FBI crime ranking for one of the safest cities in America. Over a hundred thousand.

Yeah. Is that the only thing that we care about?

Listen, hang on, you're going to like what I have to say. So, you know, it frequently wins this. And a couple of years ago when it won it again, I posted on my Facebook, I said, here we go again. Irvine wins the safest city in America. So at least we know if we live there, we'll probably never die. The only problem is we may never live because it's so boring.

True.

Yeah. No, I agree.

Well, that's just a stupid metric, you know, it's just such a one dimensional, stupid way of understanding the human habitat.

I know, but if you talk to the typical, like family person there, and I'm single, so I hated it, but you know, you talk to the typical, like family person there with 2.2 kids and a dog and a couple, you know, they seem to like it pretty well. I don't know.

Well, that may be what they would tell you superficially, but I think if you dug a little bit deeper, you'd find that, you know, they're spending half their day in the car, that they rarely see people, anybody besides their own.

They go in and out of the garage. I know, yeah.

You know, and that in fact there's a tremendous amount of ennui, boredom, anime, purposelessness, and, you know, just plain depression.

Well, it's like the show Desperate Housewives, you know, that's sort of a metaphor for it. So who do you think is doing it right? Or is anybody doing it right? Like, is Europe doing it right with the cafe culture and the high density inner city core?

We're talking strictly about the human habitat now, right?

Yeah.

Well, there's no question that, you know, anybody who has gone to Europe, anybody who spent any time in France or Italy or Spain or Denmark, you know, or other places, there's no question that their towns and cities are just better than anything in America by orders of magnitude. Just the richness and rewarding quality of these places. You know, they have problems with their economy. Oh, with their economies. They have problems that are every bit as complex as ours. But at least they didn't screw up their towns and their cities.

Yeah, well, they built them a long time ago when they didn't have the car and the cheap oil. And so America was afflicted with a different point in time.

That's true. And I think that what that points to is A certain theory of history that I subscribe to, which is that societies do things because they seem like a good idea at the time. And, you know, American society did what it did in the mid 20th century. We made the choices that we made because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now the catch is that life is tragic and sometimes groups and societies make bad choices and then you're stuck with the consequences. So, you know, what seemed like a good idea at the time is now a banquet of consequences that we have to feast at rather unhappily.

And so who, like, I get. I get the picture of suburbia and kind of like, who's to blame for that? It's just sort of history and the way we made choices at the time. But when. When you look at all of this overall and all of these challenges that we face, and we haven't even jumped into the monetary policy side of things, which I really would like to cover that with you as well, but because you have some interesting thoughts on it. But who's to blame? I mean, is it. Is it this sort of fake prosperity? Is it getting off the gold Standard back in 71 and expanding the money supply? And, you know, I look at it as like this just smoke and mirrors economy in which we live. It's a joke. It's just a. It's really a Ponzi scheme.

Well, we're trying to offset our inability to create more wealth or to form capital with really a banking system and a financial system now that's based on accounting fraud and interventions and manipulations. And the people behind it at the Federal Reserve and probably even the Wall street banks are not necessarily evil guys twirling their mustaches. You know, they're human beings with families and feelings like everybody else. But, you know, they're doing something which is a tragic thing. You know, they're trying to replace an economy that is in the process of contracting with tricks. And it's not gonna. It's gonna end up producing a lot of hardship and a lot of misery.

Two books I want to ask you about. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but I get really negative on the future a lot. For many good reasons, I think. But then I kind of turn a little bit after I read a book like Abundance by Peter Diamantis. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. I had Steven Kotler as co author on the show, and gosh, you know, it's like there are.

The basic premise is, will technology save us from Ourselves, you know, maybe it will.

That's not my opinion. You know, I think that we're investing too much hope and too much wishing that.

Some mythical, they in quotes will quote, come up with a set of rescue remedies that will allow us to keep driving to Walmart forever. You know, that's sort of the master wish in America these days, to keep on driving to Walmart forever.

The American mentality, more is more instead of less is more.

You know, that's the master wish. I think that the fact of the matter is that the money's not going to be there and we're in a comprehensively contracting economy and we have to. The biggest task that we face, that is kind of a comprehensive task is managing contraction. It's very, very difficult because, you know, so many of the mechanisms of our economy and culture that we have depended on just don't work in the context of contraction. Like credit issuance and the repayment of debt does not work in a contracting economy. And so we have to find some other way to do our stuff. You know, in the old days, you know, let's say in the 19th century, a lot more business was done on the basis of money that had already been saved, not just on loans. You know, people started. Started corporations with capital that had been saved up by people.

You know, whether it was actual, real, honest to God capital formation. Yeah, right.

And we probably have to get back to something like that if we're even going to continue operating civilization at a lower level. But I don't know how we're going to get to that point. My guess is, and this is probably one of the reasons that people think that I'm, you know, a doomer gloomer, although I don't see myself that way. But it seems very, very likely that we will go through some kind of a bottleneck that will be. That will represent.

Considerable amount of hardship for people. And you know, nobody likes to think about it, but.

We'Re probably heading into it and we're not doing anything to avoid it. You know, we're not making any plans, we're not reforming any of the systems that we need to reform. You know, we need to reform agriculture and do it differently. There's no conscious effort, there's no leadership to do that. We need to rebuild and change the transportation system. We're not doing that.

Before you go on, on the agriculture issue, I mean, you know, you've got so all these entrenched interests, like these huge food companies.

No, no.

I mean, listen, I don't like it I'm just saying it's.

I don't like it either.

The corporatocracy is the reality. The corporatocracy and their affiliation with government. I mean, we're in this sort of socio fascist environment.

Well then, you know, the consequence of that is that we won't do what we gotta do and then we will live in a disorderly contracting economy and a disorderly society. People might say I'm a doomer, but one thing I don't believe is making. I don't believe in making excuses for why you're not doing stuff and I don't believe in being a crybaby and I don't even particularly believe in casting a whole lot of blame on people. You know, there's really an awful. There's an awful lot that we can do and we're wasting our time wringing our hands.

Yeah, right, right. So is the future on the monetary and economic side? Is the future inflationary or deflationary?

Well, my just sort of gut take on it all is that we are heading into.

A very serious deflation that could easily mutate into a hyperinflation if we do the kinds of things that we have been doing, namely creating more money out of thin air to try to make up for the fact that we've got a crippled economy.

So all the trends right now seem to indicate that we're heading into a very serious deflationary contraction because for the simple reason that we have too much debt that can never be repaid and those debts will be repudiated. And when they are, you know, money vanishes and wealth vanishes and capital vanishes.

So when you talk about debt, are you talking about the debts of the nation? Are you talking all the debts of the individual? Yeah, but it works out so differently. I mean, well, it's all, look, it's.

All borrowed money and it's all money that it all amounts to a set of promises that cannot be met one person or one group or entity has made to another group or person or entity. And you know, obligations that can't be met are obligations that can't be met. And it doesn't really matter that much whether they're public or private. Ultimately they will all be expressed in the disappearance of wealth and money or the disappearance of the value of money.

So couple things there and really we should call it currency, probably just to be more accurate. It's not money. But James, do you think the US could lose its reserve currency status?

Sure, of course, yeah. I think we could destroy the dollar But I'm not sure that any of the other currencies in the world would take its place. Well, that's in the novels that I wrote in World Made by Hand and the Witch of Hebron. The situation had gotten to the point in the not very distant future that the American people were using circulating silver coins because there were no paper currencies that people that had any credibility anymore. So, you know, I think that that's a possible, you know, mid to longer term outcome.

Yeah. You must be fascinated by this whole bitcoin situation. I bet you've been following that.

Yeah, I have been, but I think that it's really just another kind of.

It's a fad. I think they'll put it out of business.

Kind of a technological scam. That seems to have a lot of appeal right now because, you know, there are things you can do with computers that appear to protect people, but you know, it's not real. It's, you know, it's. It's just ephemeral wealth that has no real anchor to anything. So I'm not persuaded that bitcoin is going to. I'm also.

Oh, me neither. I've always said, I think that anything that is a competitive force to the Federal Reserve, to the fiat money system will be destroyed. They will figure out a way, whether it be FBI regulatory, try to destroy.

It, but they won't succeed.

Oh, really? Okay. All right.

Well, what are they going to do? Go gather up all the silver coins in America, all the pre1965 silver coins? I don't think they're going to. That can happen, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's awfully hard to do that with the metals. But we did it a little bit in 1933. Right. But you know, with bitcoin they can just say it's illegal. You know, like they said pyramid schemes were illegal or something. I suppose they can just outlaw it.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know either. It's interesting. Well, any thoughts on just to kind of wrap up here on what we should do as individuals?

Well, I think that young people especially have to be very careful about the place that they decide to move to and start to try to make a life in. There are parts of the United States that are just not going to make it.

And so do you want to call.

Some of those out?

Like, any recommendations?

I just wouldn't move to Phoenix, Arizona. I'd stay out of Southern California.

Southern California is going to be the worst of all. Why is Phoenix so Bad?

Well.

The climate is terrible and will get worse.

Oh, so you're saying because of global.

Warming it's liable to get worse, but it's already bad enough so that if this became a poorer society, I mean, the only reason that Phoenix works is because absolutely everybody can have air conditioning.

Right, right.

Including the guy who cleans your pool.

Yeah, yeah, but remember, that's only an issue about four months of the year. The other eight, it's pretty nice.

Going to be a problem. What will be a bigger problem probably is that, you know, you can't really grow a lot of food there without heroic irrigation. And it's also the way it's been designed, it's so drastically automobile oriented that there's. The capital's not going to be there to retrofit it for, you know, walkability or anything that we really need to do. So it's just going to prove to be a throwaway city.

Okay, so give us a couple others. Say Southern California when the government aid stops. You know, I grew up in la and I hate la, but I did grow up there. And you know, that's just going to be a disaster. I mean, the civil unrest is going to be immense in Southern California. That's going to be a very dangerous place if you ask me.

Well, I think it might be. I'm generally a little bit. I don't think that the entire Sun Belt is going to be a very favorable place. I think it's going to end up being, you know, an agricultural backwater.

What is favorable? Oregon?

Well, I think that Oregon has some appeal and I think the Pacific Northwest in general has, you know, there's reasons why people might want to be there. I think the Great Lakes region is highly undervalued because it's excellent agricultural land, great farmland. I think that. But our economy in the years ahead, as we de. Globalize and decomplexify, I think our economy is going to become much more internally focused in North America and that the Great Lakes and all the inland waterways are going to be much more important than they have been for the last 60, 70 years.

You know, Jim, I forgot to mention that other book I mentioned, Abundance, which is pretty interesting. But also Chris Martinson's new book called Makers, which is a lot about 3D printing, another technology could rescue us type of thing. But I don't know, he makes a pretty good case.

I don't know enough about 3D printing, so I'm really not equipped to talk about it.

Fair enough.

The globalization will actually subside rather than increase.

Well, it's not a permanent fixture of the human condition, contrary to what Tom Friedman would like everybody to believe.

Yeah, the world isn't that flat. I don't think so.

The world's not that flat. And in fact we're now going in the other direction that a lot of, look, globalism happened because of a set of special circumstances in a particular time and place in history. And you can actually state what those conditions were about a century of relatively cheap energy and about a half a century of relative peace between great powers. And that allowed these long manufacturing supply chains and resource supply chains to evolve. And now we're in a different situation. We no longer have cheap energy and we're beginning to get friction between the great powers in what Michael Clare has characterized as a race for what's left, resource wars, or at least.

Sort of a fight over the table scraps of the global resources. So, you know, this is going to create a certain amount of friction and conflict and already is between, especially between us and China. So, you know, I think that that's only going to develop further and that globalism will be unraveling and unwinding.

You know, there's this pervasive thought. I think it's like it's just the whole backdrop, the whole context in which we all live, that in order to have a good economy, you must grow. You must grow. And your October 16 entry on your blog is growth is obsolete, which is an interesting idea that growth does not equal prosperity. Can you just comment on that real quickly?

Well, that was actually an essay I wrote for Chris Martenson's website and the full essay is there. But the point is simply this is that growth is a word that's getting us into a lot of trouble because of the. Because our energy is no longer cheap, we're having a big problem now with capital formation, and we're not going to get the kind of growth that is expressed in the beloved metrics of the economists in the statistics that they're comfortable with, with GDP and et cetera. And so my proposal is that we really have to replace the word growth with the term economic activity, because we certainly want to have activity. We certainly want people to be occupied and to be eating good food and living in clean, well lighted places and to be comfortable and have culture and have civilization. But we may have to express that wish differently and certainly not in just the stupid metrics of statistical analysis. And there's one other final thing about that, is that we have this as part of the huge cargo of stupid beliefs that we have subscribed to lately in America.

This thing behind econometrics and statistical analysis, which is so pervasive now, we're always turning to studies for the statistics to try to prove some point. Well, the reason behind that is this neurosis that we think that if we can just measure everything, then we can control everything. And it is a neurosis. And we're going to discover that we can't control everything. That, you know, to some extent, reality has mandates of its own and reality has plans for us.

I love that saying, by the way. Reality has plans for us. Yeah.

We have to get on board with what reality wants us to do and then try to arrange our lives around the demands and requirements of reality.

One last time before you go, I'll just play devil's advocate with you. I mean, back in the 1700s, you had these, you know, you had Thomas Robert Malthus. You had these Malthusian ideals that we were the scarcity. We had a population problem, and certainly the population is much higher now. I mean, hasn't technology rescued us to some extent? I mean, what. What is. Why do we know this now? And it was wrong back then. Tell me.

Dumb idea.

Okay.

You know, obviously, you know, we blundered into a. We blundered into a reserve of fossil oil of this liquid fuel that allowed us to postpone that particular reckoning for 200 years.

That didn't happen 500 years later.

Well, we had coal first.

Okay.

You know, Malthus published his famous essay in 1798. So it was virtually the takeoff point of the Industrial Revolution. And so the Industrial Revolution happened. We took advantage of those fossil fuels. We made food out of them, basically, and we supported an enormous population which is now doing so much damage to the ecosphere, to the planet itself, that there's just no way that we're going to accommodate another billion or two billion or three billion people. So we have to get with the reality that we really have reached the limit for increasing human population, and we're not going to solve it with technology. We're not going to fly off the planet within any imaginable period of time and inhabit other planets like this. So, you know, we have to get real with living here in a practical way, and we're not interested in doing that. So, you know, the upshot will be that we'll go through a rather painful collapse. The population will go way down, and then we'll have to reckon with the damage that we've done to our soils, to our aquifers, to many of the things that we depend on this planet. And we're probably going to go through a very long period if the human race does survive of relative austerity.

Well, good to hear all of this stuff. It's certainly a warning call. James Howard Kunstler, thanks for joining us. Give out your website if you would and tell people where they can find out more about you.

My website is www.kunstler k-u n s t l e r dot com. My books are on there, my weekly blog is on there, my essays are on there and you can find out about me.

Fantastic. Jim, thanks for joining us and appreciate it.

Okie dokie.

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