KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

Hobbs Magaret is a regenerative cattle rancher in Central Oregon. Raised on the ranches of the Texas Panhandle and further educated at The University of Oregon, he has experienced two extremes of the contemporary American Experiment. Hobbs, his wife, and his daughter live in Sisters, Oregon, where they use regenerative and fossil fuel averse techniques to rehabilitate degraded ag land and sell beef directly to regional consumers. Visit his website at SistersCattleco.com and checkout his interesting videos at TikTok. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Derrick Jensen is an author, teacher, activist, and small farmer. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He was named "the Poet Philosopher of the Ecological Movement" by Democracy Now! and one of Utne Reader's "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He is the co-author of the new book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. He lives in Northern California The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

John Michael Greer, an old friend of the podcast, blogs at Ecosophia -- subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of the Western world's arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the Future We Ordered. Star's Reach, is a novel set 400 years ahead in America's neo-medieval future. We chat about his latest book, coming out this spring, The King in Orange, a meditation on the relationship between archetype psychology and the occult as acted out in politics and culture. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Adam Ellwanger is a professor of English at the University of Houston - Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. In addition to those topics, his varied research interests include popular culture, political philosophy, media studies, and the American Mess writ large. Check out his dangerous new book on the modern politics of identity, entitled Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self. You will also like his essay on the Human Events website: Toward a Woke Metaphysics. Recently, he authored an open letter signed by over 180 professors that outlines forms of non-compliance that signatories will undertake in an effort to resist the current ideological trends on campus. Ellwanger also offers regular commentary at sites like Human Events, New Discourses, American Greatness, Quillette, and more. In his free time, he writes, plays guitar, drinks beer and ruby port, and listens to music. Follow him @DoctorEllwanger on Twitter. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

#338 —Andres Duany is a key founder of the New Urbanist movement. His Miami-based firm, DPZ, with wife and partner Lizz Plater-Zyberk, designed the iconic new town, Seaside, Florida, and scores of other excellent projects in the USA and around the world. Andres continues to lead the way in urban design and in these turbulent times, I think you'll appreciate communing with his fierce and humorous intelligence. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is the intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary, covering all the bases: culture, politics, finance, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. Here we attempt to make sense of the fast-moving corona virus story and the increasingly weird and troubling second-order events spinning off of it into the global economy and fractious American politics du jour.

Doug Casey is an American writer, financier, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist influenced by the works of novelist Ayn Rand. Casey is known as a real estate investor as well as an advisor on how to profit from market distortions and periods of economic turmoil. He's lately turned his talents to fiction and his new book Assassins, is the third installment in the Charles Knight series of International thrillers. He has lived abroad for many years — visiting over 100 other countries for sheer sport — and currently hangs his hat on a ranch in Uruguay. I caught up with him on a brief stopover in Aspen, Colorado, as he prepared to drive the back roads of America to Washington, DC. He blogs at Doug Casey's International Man

This podcast speaks to a subject I've written about a lot lately — the demographic movement of Americans leaving the big cities for small cities and small towns. New York City alone has lost over 300,000 residents since the onset of the corona virus. John Boone and Hunter Renfro are the young principals at Orchestra Partners, a real estate investment company working to rehab old neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama, (pop. 212,000) and elsewhere in the south. Neither of them are trained architects or urban planners, nor are they card-carrying New Urbanists, but they're working very much in that vein and have a lot to say about creating towns and neighborhoods that are worth living in and worth caring about. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Charles A. S. Hall was born in Eastern Massachusetts in 1943, attended Colgate University, then Penn State University for a Masters in Ecology, then a PhD in Systems Ecology under Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina. He was professor at Cornell University, University of Montana and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is author, coauthor or editor of 14 books and 300 scientific papers, many in our leading scientific journals. Dr. Hall is noted especially for the concepts of Energy Return on Investment and BioPhysical Economics, both applying the natural sciences to what is traditionally studied with conventional economics. Currently he is retired and lives in Western Montana with his wife and their dog, but is very involved in developing a BioPhysiccsl Economics Institute.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is the author of the recently published book, 'The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, January 1, 2020. Dr. Rasmus currently teaches economics at St. Marys College in Moraga, California, on subjects of US economic policy, US political change, financial business cycles, history of economic thought, American Labor and unions, and US Economic History. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (BA Economics) and University of Toronto, Canada (MA, Ph.D Political Economy). Dr. Rasmus is author of several prior books on the USA and global economy, including Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed, Lexington Books, March 2019; Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes, Clarity Press, August 2017; Looting Greece: A New Financial Imperialism Emerges, Clarity Press, September 2016; Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy, Clarity Press, January 2016; Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression, Pluto Books, 2010; Obama's Economy: Recovery for the Few, Pluto Books, 2012; and The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Reagan to George W. Bush, Kyklos Books, 2006. His stage plays include '1934', 'Fire on Pier 32', and 'Hold the Light'. He blogs regularly at Znet & Counterpunch (USA), Global Research (Canada), and Telesur (Caracas). Prior to teaching and publishing, Dr. Rasmus was formerly an Economist and strategic market analyst for various global tech & market research companies for twenty years. Before that, for more than a decade, he was a local union president, contract negotiator, strike coordinator, and organizer for various unions, including the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981, CWA Locals 9455 & 9415, Hotel & Restaurant Local 19, and Service Employees International Union Local 715. Dr. Rasmus blogs at jackrasmus.com. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com & his twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. He hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network (podcasts available at http://alternativevisions.podbean.com) and may be contacted at: [email protected], [email protected] .

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is the intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary, covering all the bases: culture, politics, finance, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. Here we attempt to make sense of the fast-moving corona virus story and the increasingly weird and troubling second-order events spinning off of it into the global economy and fractious American politics du jour. Dave tweets most entertainingly at @DavidBCollum

JHK chats with architect and neuroscientist Ann Sussman about our damaged everyday surroundings of buildings, streets, and cities in the USA — and how they got that way. Ann Sussman, RA, is passionate about understanding the human experience of the built environment. Her book, Cognitive Architecture, Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (Routledge, 2015) co-authored with Justin B. Hollander, won the Place Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) in 2016. Her new book, Urban Experience & Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm, (Routledge 2020) also co-edited with Hollander, is due out in October. It explores the role PTSD — specifically veterans' brain trauma post-WWI — had in creating Modern Architecture. Ann believes new understandings from neuroscience on how the brain works and what humans need to see to be at their best, will transform architecture, including the narrative of how Modern Architecture came to be. Ann recently co-founded the non-profit The Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc (theHapi.org) to help people better understand how humans experience buildings. She currently teaches a new course on perception called Architecture & Cognition, at the Boston Architectural College (BAC). She blogs on the biology behind design that delights at GeneticsofDesign.com.

JHK hunkers down with Simons Chase, a new voice on the financial scene. Mr. Chase is the CIO and owner of independent investment firm, SC Capital Management LLC. He has over 20 years of media, finance and early-stage investing experience on the frontiers of emerging trends. He started his career as a structured finance banker in the oil & gas sector in Russia in the 1990s. His blog, LBS.co, explores trends in investing, economics and society.

Art Berman is an independent oil geologist and industry analyst. We go pretty deep into the recent alarming price crash of crude oil, the vagaries and destiny of the shale oil business, and the implications for the American economy. Art is based in Houston. He publishes his own blog at: https://www.artberman.com/blog/ The theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Charles Hugh Smith founded his blog Of Two Minds in 2005 after 17 years of free-lance journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of Two Minds has grown to thousands of posts that have logged tens of millions of page views on his site and many others such as Zero Hedge and Peak Prosperity. He is the author of eight novels and fourteen non-fiction books on socio-economic-political dynamics. He lives by Winston Churchill's dictum that "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Charles's Blog: OfTwoMinds.com Charles's Books: Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic Money and Work Unchained

Gail Tverberg is an analyst who has been researching the connection between oil limits and the economy for nearly 10 years. She writes a widely-followed blog called Our Finite World. Her background is as an actuary, working as a consultant to insurance companies. She also has a foot in the academic world, where she has lectured and written academic articles, and taught at the China's University of Petroleum in Beijing.

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is the intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary, covering all the bases: culture, politics, finance, science, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. Here we attempt to make sense of the fast-moving corona virus story and the increasingly weird and troubling second-order events spinning off of it into the global economy and politics. Dave tweets at @DavidBCollum

Nir Buras is a PhD architect and planner with over 30 years of in-depth experience in strategic planning, architecture, and transportation design, as well as teaching and lecturing. His planning, design and construction experience includes East Side Access at Grand Central Terminal, New York; International Terminal D, Dallas-Fort-Worth; the Washington DC Dulles Metro line; work on the US Capitol and the Senate and House Office Buildings in Washington. Projects he has worked on have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, local newspapers, and trade magazines. Buras, whose original degree was Architect and Town Planner, has watched first-hand how architecture and urbanism impact each other. After the last decade of applying in practice the classical method that Buras absorbed in his practice, his book, The Art of Classic Planning (Harvard University Press, 2019), shows how we can best face the future by once more building beautiful, balanced, and durable urbanism. The theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Ben Hunt is the Chief Investment Officer at Second Foundation Partners, a consultant for large institutional investors, and the author of Epsilon Theory, a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lenses of game theory, history and nature. Over 100,000 professional investors and allocators across 200 countries read Epsilon Theory for its fresh perspective and novel insights into market dynamics. In prior positions, Ben has managed a billion dollar hedge fund and served as Chief Strategist for a $13 billion dollar asset manager. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, was a tenured Political Science professor, and has co-founded three technology companies. Ben spends lots of time on a family owned farm, which inspires many original ideas on the parallels between human and animal behavior The new theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. His books include Developing an Economics for the Post-crisis World (2015) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017). He lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The new theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Larry Kummer is The editor of the Fabius Maximus website. FabiusMaximus.com He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles, retiring as a VP and Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He was a Boy Scout volunteer leader for 15 years, running a Troop for 7 years and retiring as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles. He began writing about geopolitics in 2003 A sampling of important posts from Fabius Maximus: America isn't falling like the Roman Empire. We're falling like the Roman Republic. Welcome to ClownWorld, the final meme for America- It is the next phase of the "crazy years", long ago predicted by Robert Heinlein. A new, dark picture of America's future- our institutions are falling like a line of dominoes. Larry says, "I've written 140 posts about ways to reform America. They are the least popular posts. We want simple morality tales, to cheer the good people and boo the bad. We flee from talk about responsibility and work like vampires from daylight. None of the risking 'our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor' for us. We see ourselves as customers in a restaurant, whining that the menu isn't good enough for people so awesome."

Larry Kummer. Are these the Crazy Years in America? Larry is The editor of the Fabius Maximus website. FabiusMaximus.com He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles, retiring as a VP and Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He was a Boy Scout volunteer leader for 15 years, running a Troop for 7 years and retiring as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles. He began writing about geopolitics in 2003 A sampling of important posts from Fabius Maximus: America isn't falling like the Roman Empire. We're falling like the Roman Republic. Welcome to ClownWorld, the final meme for America - It is the next phase of the "crazy years", long ago predicted by Robert Heinlein. A new, dark picture of America's future - our institutions are falling like a line of dominoes. Larry says, "I've written 140 posts about ways to reform America. They are the least popular posts. We want simple morality tales, to cheer the good people and boo the bad. We flee from talk about responsibility and work like vampires from daylight. None of the risking "our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" for us. We see ourselves as customers in a restaurant, whining that the menu isn't good enough for people so awesome."

#321 — Charles Hugh Smith writes the popular Of Two Minds blog (at https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html) and is the author of many books, most recently Will You Be Richer or Poorer; Profit, Power, and A.I. in a Traumatized World.) He lives in the world capital of Wokesterdom: Berkeley, California.

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, an intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary. He covers all the bases: culture, politics, finance, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. He tweets at @DavidBCollum

Richard Vague, from Texas originally, is a Philadelphia-based managing partner of the venture capital firm, Gabriel Investments. He's the author of A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises and The Next Economic Disaster: Why It's Coming and How to Avoid It. He's been in and around the policy world for years and is considering a run for president as a Democrat. He intends to make his decision about that sometime this fall.

Doug Hill is a journalist and independent scholar who has studied the history and philosophy of technology for more than twenty-five years. His work has appeared in numerous national publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Salon and Esquire. He is coauthor of the bestseller Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live and lives in Pasadena, California.

#317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus. In his "day job," he works on the repeating waves of electrical signals that drive the heart beat. Over the last decade he has developed an interest in another repeating pattern - waves of price volatility in oil - that he speculates are a Peak Oil-related phenomenon. His writings as Tom Therramus on oil market instability, and its impacts on economics, politics and climate change, have been posted at OilPrice.net, Greentechmedia.com, Resilience.com, RealClearEnergy.org, Nouriel Roubini's Economonitor.com, and EuanMearns.com Energy Matters. His LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-therramus-602b3721/) lists his SKILLS as including "Asperger's", "Mild Numeracy", "Vague Literacy" and "Being Kiwi".

Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as a Board Member. After earning his doctorate at Washington University in St Lous, he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He bailed out of academia to learn and practice sustainable agriculture, trained at the Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm. For four years he hosted The Reality Report radio show on KZYX in Mendocino County. In 2009 he moved to Corvallis, Oregon, as one of the founders of Farmland LP, a farmland management fund implementing organic and mixed crop and livestock systems, where he worked until early 2018. He sits on the Economic Development Advisory Board for Corvallis and Benton County, and serves as an advisor for the OregonFlora Project based at Oregon State University. He lives with his family outside of Corvallis on an organic farm.

Blake Pagenkopf is the author of The Great Conflation; Why Left Versus Right Isn't Right Versus Wrong, which asserts that a simple spatial model can be used to explain the political misunderstanding that now rages across America. (See the chart below in these show notes.) He is also an architect and construction manager currently renovating mixed-use buildings on small town Main Streets in the Midwest. He lives in the Kansas City metro area.

#314 David Stockman is the Author of the new book, Peak Trump: the Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of Mega. David representing Michigan's Fourth Congressional District for three terms and served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan — the youngest cabinet member in history. He was previously the author of The Great Deformation,a comprehensive history of crony capitalism. His excellent daily blog appears at www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com

Brent Bednarik is a former Army Officer with two deployments in Afghanistan. After that he worked at one of the Big Four accounting firms in Manhattan, and is currently an entrepreneur in the tech start up space. Brent and I have been corresponding about what I like to call the new religion of Wokesterism, which has emanated from the university campuses and is finding a beach-head in corporate life. Brent is interested in what he considers a consciousness shift happening in western societies, and speaks to business owners and c-suite executives about these impending changes and the challenges they'll face.

#312 John Michael Greer, an old friend of the podcast, blogs at his Ecosophia Website, and is the author of a score of books ranging from the social and political commentary of The Wealth of Nature and Not the Future We Ordered, to a large body of science fiction and fantasy.

Bill Holter writes and is partnered with Jim Sinclair at the newly formed Holter/Sinclair collaboration. Prior, he wrote for Miles Franklin from 2012-15. Bill worked as a retail stockbroker for 23 years, including 12 as a branch manager at A.G. Edwards. He left Wall Street in late 2006 to avoid potential liabilities related to management of paper assets as he foresaw the Great Financial crisis coming. In retirement he and his family moved to Costa Rica where he lived until 2011 when he moved back to the United States. He was a well-known contributor to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) commentaries from 2007-present. Bill has retained a working relationship with Miles Franklin and can help with any of your precious metals needs including transacting, shipping, storage and even safe deposit boxes in non bank vault facilities. Feel free to contact him with any of your questions or needs. He can be reached via email at [email protected]

Shaun Chamberlin is an author, activist and the editor of both Lean Logic and the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. He has been involved with the Transition Network since its inception, cofounding Transition Town Kingston [UK] and authoring the movement's second book, The Transition Timeline. He worked closely with David Fleming until his death. His website is: www.darkoptimism.org On Twitter, he is @DarkOptimism Dr. David Fleming (1940 – 2010) was a visionary thinker and writer who played significant roles in the genesis of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement, and the New Economics Foundation, as well as chairing the Soil Association. He was also one of the early whistle-blowers on oil depletion and designer of the influential TEQs carbon/energy rationing system. He read Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, and later earned an MBA and then an MSc and PhD in economics (in 1988). These enabled him to better engage with and confound the mainstream, in support of his true passion and genius: understanding that diverse and mysterious thing "community." Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It was the work of over thirty years. www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk David Fleming's posthumous masterpiece of wit, whimsy and rebellion: Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It Shaun Chamberlain's concise short version of David Fleming's central ideas: Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

Raul Meijer runs The Automatic Earth Website. He puts out the Debt Rattle news aggregator there every day, and posts his own frequent commentaries on a broad range of current events, especially on subjects of finance and economy. He's based in Europe, dividing his time between Athens and the Netherlands. He lived in Canada for many years.

Jasun Horsley is an English cultural critic, metapsychologist, conspiracy researcher, and podcaster, and the author of several books, including Seen and Not Seen, Prisoner of Infinity, and the upcoming The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. To earn a living, he currently runs a thrift store in Canada with his wife. This is the link to Jasun's excellent podcast, The Liminalist. Here is the link to his Auticulture Blog. And here is a link to Jasun's fascinating essay series on the sexual confusions and hysterias of our time: The Age of Advanced Incoherence: Identity Politics & Identity Crisis, which is at the center of today's conversion.

Doug Henwood is an American journalist, economic analyst, and financial trader who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective. His own excellent podcast, Behind the News is available at iTunes. He is a contributing editor at The Nation Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002. Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper assets, and the overall economy. His website with frequent postings is: https://srsroccoreport.com.

Informal Q and A session with questions from listeners with Jim Kunstler, host of The Kunstlercast. I've enjoyed other people's AMA shows around the web so here we go. This is an experiment, of course, and I understand now why I haven't done it before. It's not easy spouting off into a microphone by yourself and remaining coherent. I hope it works for all y'all. I'll be back in the usual format with a guest interview in a couple of weeks. Hope you're having a great summer.

DOUGLAS FARR (FAIA, F-CNU, LEED-AP) is an architect, urbanist, author, and passionate advocate for sustainable design thinking. Doug is the founding principal and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm that plans and designs lovable, aspirational buildings and places. Doug co-chaired the development of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and has served on the boards of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Bioregional, EcoDistricts, and Elevate Energy. A native Detroiter, he is an architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Doug wrote Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature (November 2007, Wiley) and Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future (April 2018, Wiley).In 2017, Planetizen readers named him one of "the 100 most influential urbanists of all time."

Jack Alpert is director of Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, a Lab which he started in 1978 at Stanford University. In 1992 the Lab left Stanford and became a non profit research foundation. The research focused on how people gather and process information to understand dynamic systems. Over the years the Lab has transitioned its focus to the relationship between human cognition and civilization viability. The current work is on discovering and implementing behavior that "changes our course" and creates a sustainable civilization. His Website is called SKIL. Or just Google Unwinding the Human Predicament.

Chris Nelder is a Manager in the Mobility practice at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he heads the EV-grid Integration team. Chris has written about energy and investing for more than a decade. He is the author two books on energy and investing, as well as more than 200 articles on energy in publications such as Nature, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Quartz, Financial Times, Greentech Media, SmartPlanet, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. In his spare time, he hosts the Energy Transition Show podcast. He enjoys bantering with other energy geeks on Twitter at @chrisnelder.

Tom Whipple is a former US Intel analyst who has put out the PeakOilNews for more than a decade. His newsletter is now associated with the PostCarbon institute and can be found at Peak-oil.org. Tom is not a tin-foil hat guy, but we get into a discussion in the heart of the interview about exotic alt. energy matters, including new developments in fusion and cold fusion. I disagree with Tom about the role that electric cars might play in the years ahead, but we didn't have a debate about it per se during this chat, which i believe you'll find very interesting.

Hayes Martin is President of MarketExtremes. com., which provides quantitative analysis of stock market psychology, and specifically of extremes of crowd behavior. He has a selective clientele of high net-worth individuals and money managers. For more information, interested individuals can go to his website: marketextremes.com, or call him at 718-598-5034. This show is sponsored by the McAlvany ICA wealth management team.

Arthur Berman has been an independent oil analyst for 17 years after an earlier 20 years with the Amoco Oil Company. He's a regular commentator at NBC, CNN, CBC, BNN, OilPrice.com, Bloomberg, Platt's, Financial Times, and The New York Times. He is a Director of ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA). He was a Managing Director and frequent contributor at The Oil Drum, and is an associate editor of the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) Bulletin. He was past Editor of the Houston Geological Society Bulletin (2004-2005) and past Vice-President of the Society (2008-2009). He has published more than 100 articles on geology, technology, and the petroleum industry during the past 5 years. His blog commentary can be found at http://www.artberman.com/blog/.

David Blittersdorf's passion for renewable energy and earth-friendly technology started early. He built his first wind turbine at age 14 to light up the small shack where he boiled sap into maple syrup. After he got his driver's license in 1973, the year of the OPEC oil embargo, he vowed to help the U.S. transition away from dependence on fossil fuels. In 1982, after getting his engineering degree at the University of Vermont, he founded NRG Systems—one of the nation's most successful wind-energy companies. Twenty-two years later, he founded All Earth Renewables a leading player in Vermont's wind and solar scene. David is involved in all aspects of All Earth Renewables' day-to-day operations. He also makes frequent public-speaking engagements and serves on the board of many energy-focused institutions at the national and state levels.

David Collum, an old friend of this podcast, is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University... but he may be better known these days as a wicked funny commentator on the financial scene. He writes an annual end-of-year wrap-up and forecast, which I interrupted him working on when I hauled him over to Skype to yak about the current situation. There's some weird Skype background noise a couple of places in the recording -- like the Exorcist working over a couple of demons-from-hell in an elevator shaft. It doesn't last more than a minute or two, so hang in there. There are apparently strange forces in the Skype-o-verse.

Richard Fossey is the author of Student Loan Catastrophe: Postcards from the Rubble, published in September, 2017. He's the Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his doctorate in education policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research concentrates on the student loan crisis; and much of his work is focused on student loans and the federal bankruptcy courts. He is an active blogger on the student loan crisis. His blog sit can be accessed at condemnedtodebt.org

Neil Howe is a renowned author and speaker on economic, demographic, and social change in America. He is the nation's leading authority on social generations—who they are, what motivates them, and how they will shape America's future. Howe is the originator of the term "Millennial Generation" and has written over a dozen books on generations and generational research, a field of research he single-handedly invented. His landmark 1997 book The Fourth Turning (co-authored with the late William Strauss), has become an indispensable lens for viewing world political history. Howe is also a recognized authority on global aging, long-term fiscal policy, and migration. He served as Senior Policy Advisor to Blackstone Group and has testified on entitlement reform many times before Congress. Howe is currently the Managing Director of Demography at Hedgeye Risk Management and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he helps lead the Global Aging Initiative.

Richard Heinberg published his excellent and influential book, The Party's Over, the same year as The Long Emergency and we met many times since then on the conference circuit. Richard is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He's the author of 13 award-winning books, including six on the subject of fossil fuel depletion. He has written for Nature, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and The Christian Science Monitor among other publications, and has delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences around the world. You may be interested in his latest essay at the Post Carbon Inst website: There's No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss. His latest books are: Our Renewable Future (with David Fridley) Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.