2022-08-29_Steven_Harris_interview_on

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00:00:30.920 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:41.520 | My name is Josh Rasheeds, and today I'm thrilled to welcome back to Radical Personal Finance, my friend Stephen Harris.

00:00:46.520 | Stephen, welcome to the show again.

00:00:49.120 | Hey, Josh, 10 years or less.

00:00:50.880 | Good news. You're going to make a million in either 10 months or lose your million in 10 months.

00:00:56.840 | I was thinking about that when we talk about what we're going to talk about today.

00:01:00.160 | I think that we're all going to be thinking about wealth in a different perspective and what financial independence and financial freedom means in different perspective.

00:01:08.920 | And this has been a drum that I've been beating for, I mean, almost 10 years now in Radical Personal Finance, that we need to be prepared to function and flourish in a financialized world.

00:01:19.840 | But we also need to be prepared to function and flourish if and when the financial system breaks down.

00:01:25.360 | And we're going to be talking about some of the ways that right now the financial system is breaking down.

00:01:30.400 | Let me give a quick background for the uninitiated.

00:01:32.640 | Stephen Harris is an engineer, a scientist, a chemist.

00:01:36.200 | He spent a number of years working in automobile development with Chrysler.

00:01:40.640 | And for many years, he's been a purveyor of high quality information, publishing books on energy, publishing books on disaster preparedness, publishing books on all kinds of things.

00:01:52.280 | And he's my go-to science guy that I'm recruiting little by little to help me prepare the science education for my homeschooled children.

00:02:00.600 | So we're going to be...

00:02:02.600 | Stephen and I chat from time to time and I give him, "Here's what I'm doing, Stephen.

00:02:06.360 | How can I give a better education to my children?"

00:02:09.120 | Because he is an autodidact and a polymath.

00:02:11.400 | So Stephen, again, welcome.

00:02:12.880 | I'm excited to talk to you today.

00:02:14.680 | Yeah, I sent him back a picture of a fireman with a four-inch fire hose.

00:02:19.960 | And it's like, "Is this what you wanted?"

00:02:21.880 | And he goes, "No, too much, too much."

00:02:24.600 | Yeah, exactly.

00:02:25.600 | So let's begin, Stephen.

00:02:27.480 | You and I have been talking for a while.

00:02:29.560 | And here on the show, we've released episodes about a year ago.

00:02:33.040 | We released a podcast here on Radical Personal Finance talking about some of the various

00:02:37.960 | shortages happening in fundamental materials.

00:02:40.480 | And...

00:02:41.480 | Stop the word shortages, okay?

00:02:46.960 | Shortage means you can go someplace else and get it.

00:02:49.840 | This is like out of stock, outage, not produced, gone from the planet.

00:02:54.800 | You got to wait until next year's planting that hasn't been planted yet and harvest.

00:03:00.960 | Right, right.

00:03:01.960 | Yeah, we're going to do some off-the-cuff talk between you and I.

00:03:07.480 | And a lot about energy finance, investing opportunities, the world, food, deglobalization,

00:03:17.440 | the shifting of manufacturing, how this is like incredible opportunity and incredible

00:03:24.200 | non-opportunity for a lot of places and what the greater trends are going to be.

00:03:31.240 | And you and I are just going to do what people seem to like the best.

00:03:35.880 | And it's called dumping from unconscious competence.

00:03:40.000 | You and I are just going to dump back and forth from what we know and let it flow, but

00:03:45.400 | continue.

00:03:46.400 | Yeah.

00:03:47.400 | So I'm going to begin by talking about the food situation.

00:03:50.320 | I will refrain from using the word shortage because I am deeply concerned about what seems

00:03:58.240 | the inevitable global famine.

00:04:00.200 | I already have friends, some friends in Kenya who are reporting that friends, people in

00:04:06.520 | their neighborhood, people in their church are literally already dying of starvation.

00:04:12.200 | And as best I can see, we're kind of at the front end of a global famine that is coming.

00:04:19.360 | Let's start with talking about that.

00:04:21.560 | They're not dying of starvation.

00:04:22.800 | They have died.

00:04:23.800 | Two have died.

00:04:24.800 | Yes.

00:04:25.800 | Correct.

00:04:26.800 | Two have died.

00:04:27.800 | That's right.

00:04:28.800 | They are dead in the ground, buried from starvation, which is famine.

00:04:34.000 | And as anyone else said, that's food insecurity.

00:04:37.040 | No, they're dead.

00:04:40.320 | They're no longer corporeal on this planet.

00:04:44.160 | And that is what is already beginning.

00:04:47.120 | And that is what's going to be happening to the tune of, well, both you and I are now

00:04:54.040 | fans and purveyors and listeners to a gentleman by the name of Peter Zion, Z-I-E-H-A-N.

00:05:01.400 | He's on YouTube.

00:05:02.400 | He wrote a couple of books.

00:05:03.680 | We've read his books.

00:05:05.840 | And he gets into, he is just like, he is the savant, not the idiot savant, the genius

00:05:12.440 | savant on all things, age waves, population, demographics, location, depth reports, you

00:05:23.240 | know, how big ships can get in and out, bottlenecks, history, and a lot of other things.

00:05:31.560 | So we definitely want to give him credit where credit is due.

00:05:37.080 | But the famine stuff, first of all, we got to erase all of the BS in people's minds.

00:05:46.560 | It has nothing to do with Ukraine.

00:05:49.280 | Now Ukraine is not making it any better, but it is not the root cause.

00:05:55.280 | Now Ukraine invasion started around the 26th or 28th, I think of February of this year,

00:06:03.440 | 2022.

00:06:04.720 | Now in 2021, early November of 2021, I saw what was going on in the European theater

00:06:15.560 | and the America theater with natural gas and their attempt to regulate, control natural

00:06:23.360 | gas, and I've seen it before going all the way back to Obama administration.

00:06:30.600 | But I mean, there were some, all of a sudden I saw the teeth of some of the sharks in early

00:06:36.560 | November and I wrote just a two page white paper and it was called "Swimming Out to

00:06:44.200 | Sea and the Possibility for First World" and I put in parentheses CONUS, which means continental

00:06:50.840 | United States, famine.

00:06:53.960 | And I husband my words very carefully.

00:06:57.600 | I gave percentages, references, sources, and the way I saw famine in the United States

00:07:05.440 | of America.

00:07:06.440 | Now famine means not shortage, not food.

00:07:08.880 | It means out of stock, gone.

00:07:11.060 | You go to a store in this city, the next city, the next state, Amazon, eBay, it does not

00:07:18.520 | exist.

00:07:19.520 | Okay?

00:07:20.520 | Some of it has been consumed.

00:07:22.580 | There is no more to backfill.

00:07:25.200 | There's no more coming in.

00:07:26.680 | This is a hard concept for people to grasp, but what do you mean there's no more?

00:07:31.800 | When's the next truck coming in?

00:07:33.920 | There isn't.

00:07:34.920 | Is that because there's the truckers?

00:07:37.560 | No, it's not because there's a shortage of truckers.

00:07:41.400 | Is there a supply?

00:07:43.440 | No.

00:07:44.560 | Everything that was grown has been harvested and has been distributed and they are now

00:07:52.240 | out until the next planting season.

00:07:55.520 | People don't understand that.

00:07:57.280 | The same way people go, "Where does milk come from?"

00:07:59.680 | The store.

00:08:00.680 | "What do you mean I go to the store, I get milk?

00:08:02.440 | Milk comes from the store."

00:08:03.440 | No, it comes from a cow, which comes from the cows and the dairy.

00:08:07.760 | The cow is fed food in the dairy by the dairy farmer.

00:08:11.360 | Many times he grows his own food or imports his own food.

00:08:15.120 | The milk is then, you know, that is grown by another farmer that is then transported

00:08:19.920 | to his location for food for the cows.

00:08:22.720 | The milk is then processed, goes through a whole bunch of processes, is then transported

00:08:29.160 | to a bottling location where it is bottled and filled and transported to a distribution

00:08:35.720 | center, which is then transported to the grocery store distribution, then to the grocery stores,

00:08:43.160 | and then into your hand, into your shopping cart, into the self-checkout, also called

00:08:47.360 | the Walmart IQ test, and then into your refrigerator at home and your stomach.

00:08:56.400 | So I saw all this happening and I wrote this paper and the next thing I know I get some

00:09:03.520 | phone calls that's like, "Hey, Harris, what?

00:09:07.480 | Your paper got picked up by this think tank."

00:09:10.520 | It's like, "Them?

00:09:12.520 | Really?"

00:09:13.520 | And they go, "Yeah, they spent four hours on it."

00:09:17.480 | I go, "They don't spend four hours even on like, you know, nuclear war."

00:09:23.720 | He goes, "Yeah, well, they took it pretty seriously."

00:09:27.040 | And I got contacted and did some more stuff and that report became what's called embargoed.

00:09:37.120 | And the embargo is off now and that's why I've been talking about the information.

00:09:44.520 | Not that people were listening anyways.

00:09:48.320 | So I can't release the actual report.

00:09:50.040 | I can write another report.

00:09:51.440 | I can do a podcast about it, as I've done, and I can talk to you about it and everything

00:09:56.160 | else and the information is freely dissembled by me.

00:10:01.200 | But yeah, I was contracted to do the research for a particular subject.

00:10:08.320 | And they came and they said, "Yeah, your estimate of 20% is very good.

00:10:15.120 | The numbers look to be about right."

00:10:16.840 | Again, this is last November.

00:10:19.600 | And they go, "We agree with you that if there is to be a famine in 2022, 2023, then it will

00:10:26.800 | be like the way no other famine has happened.

00:10:30.200 | Normally a plague of locusts come in or you have like two years of drought or something

00:10:35.040 | and it's like all the crops are gone."

00:10:37.520 | And keep in mind in ancient times, biblical times, which is mostly where we get the word

00:10:42.600 | famine from, we didn't have diesel fuel trucks, trains.

00:10:50.080 | We had mules, asses, things that Mary rode on and wagons.

00:10:57.760 | And that was your transportation infrastructure.

00:11:01.040 | Now we're a lot more global, but now we're looking at a global famine.

00:11:05.440 | So, let's talk about why, because when I talk about my friends and acquaintances in Kenya

00:11:12.640 | who have died from the current famine that's happening there, it's much more related to

00:11:19.320 | drought crop failures in the way that you just alluded to and exacerbated by the massive

00:11:25.640 | price increases, inflation of food that they can't afford to buy imported food.

00:11:30.560 | And so it's more of that traditional model and they just have no money to buy the food

00:11:34.600 | and evidently now it's to the point where, again, the reports I have is that two people

00:11:39.160 | that are in my circle of connection have died.

00:11:42.520 | But that's not a universal thing and that's not the kind of thing where it's actually

00:11:47.360 | unavailable.

00:11:48.680 | Wealthy people are still able to buy food.

00:11:50.800 | So let's begin with natural gas.

00:11:52.840 | What is the connection between natural gas and food?

00:11:56.040 | Okay, I actually, if you want the long story, and I'm going to give you the short one here,

00:12:02.360 | okay, this is even smaller than the garden hose.

00:12:05.640 | If you want the four inch fire hose, I did my first podcast and thank you Josh for giving

00:12:11.520 | me the model for everything that you use successfully for podcasting because I duplicated it as

00:12:17.800 | you told me to.

00:12:18.800 | I took your advice.

00:12:19.800 | Good.

00:12:20.800 | So thank you.

00:12:21.800 | Thank you, sir.

00:12:23.640 | And I got two of them out.

00:12:25.000 | I got more to come out.

00:12:26.380 | And the first one is natural gas and its role in human life.

00:12:31.480 | Now you have to go back and you have to understand first and foremost that everything in the

00:12:39.360 | world that is alive is made of carbon.

00:12:41.600 | You, me, my cat, we're all made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and then trace minerals

00:12:49.640 | for bones, teeth, and nutrients and stuff like, but everything else is carbon, nitrogen,

00:12:55.520 | sorry, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, which is called an organic molecule.

00:13:00.720 | So C, H, and O. And all of our carbon comes from atmospheric carbon dioxide, every bit

00:13:10.080 | of it.

00:13:11.080 | None of the structure of all you, me, the cat, the dog, your salary, coffee beans, they're

00:13:17.320 | all structure physically comes from the carbon.

00:13:21.860 | And all that carbon is brought into the plant through the photosynthetic process of absorbing

00:13:29.100 | atmospheric CO2, water, and sunlight.

00:13:34.280 | And the thing that makes chlorophyll, because the plant produces chlorophyll that converts

00:13:40.900 | CO2 and water with sunlight into organic material.

00:13:45.460 | And when I say organic, I don't mean like your organic tomatoes.

00:13:49.200 | I mean organic as in organic chemistry.

00:13:52.320 | All organic chemistry contains a carbon in it.

00:13:55.700 | Okay.

00:13:56.700 | Inorganic chemistry is what you had in high school, the periodic table of elements, iron,

00:14:02.380 | zinc, sodium, potassium, uranium, et cetera, that is all inorganic chemistry.

00:14:08.940 | So nitrogen, and the nitrogen for photosynthesis does not come from the air.

00:14:17.100 | I repeat the nitrogen for photosynthesis does not come from the air.

00:14:22.380 | That is bound up nitrogen.

00:14:24.200 | That is N2, diatomic nitrogen, just like all of our oxygen is O2, a diatomic oxygen.

00:14:31.700 | It is bound up.

00:14:32.700 | It is a tight bond.

00:14:35.460 | We need chemically available nitrogen in the soil.

00:14:40.300 | And actually one of the ways that happens is through rain, because the rain falls through

00:14:46.180 | the sky, it absorbs the nitrogen based upon the temperature of the water droplet, it absorbs

00:14:51.780 | nitrogen and oxygen, and then it hits the soil.

00:14:55.260 | And then it actually reacts with a few things that may or may not be in the soil.

00:15:02.760 | And you get fixed nitrogen.

00:15:05.900 | Now we discovered that the addition of nitrogen to the soil, either through different forms

00:15:13.280 | of ammonia or urea, which is human pee, animal pee, et cetera.

00:15:18.980 | I mean, a lot of people who are into the permaculture stuff, literally collect their human urine

00:15:25.020 | in their bathroom in a container, dilute it one to two, one to three, and they go put

00:15:30.140 | it on their garden.

00:15:32.660 | But that is not enough to feed the world.

00:15:35.220 | But that was actually one of the original sources for the nitrate that made up gunpowder,

00:15:42.220 | which is a whole nother six inch fire hose lecture from Harris.

00:15:46.220 | Incidentally, Josh, when your kids start learning chemistry, we're going to teach them pyrotechnics

00:15:53.300 | first, which starts with gunpowder, which is yes, very safe, very easy to do.

00:16:00.900 | And that's how they'll learn their chemistry is through the chemistry of pyrotechnics,

00:16:04.900 | because you get to see your results, and then all your changes.

00:16:09.900 | So anyways, we learned that if we take nitro, or what farmers just call nitrogen, but this

00:16:17.660 | is going to be in the form of nitro, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, et cetera, which

00:16:26.260 | a lot of it comes from bird droppings.

00:16:29.320 | And there are lots of bird droppings off the coast of Chile.

00:16:33.140 | When the birds fly into their nest off the coast or on an island, they're smart enough

00:16:38.460 | to take a dump before they fly into their nest.

00:16:42.900 | So birds extricate urine, fecal material, and their eggs all through the same spot.

00:16:51.140 | So it's a mixture of everything, and that collects into the ocean or on the island.

00:16:57.540 | There's great history of if you found an island full of bird guano, you could claim it as

00:17:03.500 | territory of the United States, which is how we got some of our islands in the Pacific.

00:17:09.380 | So this is the late 1800s, early 1900s.

00:17:14.660 | And we would import Chilean saltpeter from off of Chile, in Chile, et cetera.

00:17:22.020 | And it's saltpeter, which is generally considered potassium nitrate, but it's a flavor of sodium

00:17:31.140 | nitrate, sodium nitrite, as well as potassium.

00:17:37.180 | It's the whole chemistry, urea, ammonium nitrate, the whole flavors of nitrogen organic chemistry

00:17:45.540 | in there.

00:17:46.540 | And then we would bring it over by the shipload as fast as possible.

00:17:52.860 | And we would then put that on our soil.

00:17:56.940 | And it's no different than putting manure on the soil.

00:18:01.120 | And/or what's better is you biodigest manure, make methane from it.

00:18:07.780 | And really smart dairies do this.

00:18:09.940 | They use this to help power their dairy and heat their dairy.

00:18:13.120 | And then the byproduct is actually doubly enhanced nitrogen fertilizer that they sell.

00:18:19.140 | But even this is not enough to feed the population of the world on an industrial scale.

00:18:26.820 | People keep going, permaculture, dude.

00:18:29.140 | Yes, there's some very good things about permaculture, some very intelligent things about permaculture.

00:18:35.820 | But it isn't to scale of 7 to 8 billion people.

00:18:43.980 | So anyways, early 1900s, someone who could actually do math figured out with the population

00:18:49.380 | growth of Europe and everything that they were going to run out of fertilizer sometime

00:18:54.220 | in the next decade-ish.

00:18:56.740 | And they needed more fertilizer.

00:19:00.140 | And there was no place else to get it.

00:19:02.340 | I mean, it was a biological process to make the diatomic nitrogen from the air freely

00:19:08.660 | available in the chemical form.

00:19:11.900 | If you've ever smelled ammonia, you know that that is freely available form of nitrogen.

00:19:19.380 | You can smell it.

00:19:20.860 | It's great refrigerant too.

00:19:23.160 | So Europe was literally going to starve because the addition of the fertilizer was more than

00:19:29.580 | doubling your bushels per acre.

00:19:31.740 | I mean, we're talking like today corn is well over 200 bushels per acre.

00:19:40.020 | You have to look up the world records on it, but it is very high.

00:19:44.460 | And that's because we're adding nutrients to the soil and the plants and the pest load

00:19:51.100 | to allow more chlorophyll production that allows more photosynthesis, which allows more

00:19:57.900 | bringing of water through the roots and CO2 from the air.

00:20:05.820 | In addition to make it basically the plant makes glucose.

00:20:11.460 | Maple syrup is a lot of maple syrup is glucose, which is tree sap.

00:20:16.060 | And just like you and I, the majority of what we eat gets turned into glucose.

00:20:20.940 | That is the energy of the body.

00:20:23.700 | The body then stores that as fat and or the tree then makes cellulose, hemicellulose or

00:20:29.860 | lignin from the glucose that it forms through the photosynthetic process.

00:20:36.020 | Sorry, I don't mean to lose you guys, but I mean, understanding the chemistry in the

00:20:42.940 | most basics.

00:20:44.500 | And then when you see the interruption, you go, oh, who pulled the chair out from underneath

00:20:49.980 | my legs?

00:20:50.980 | I'm like Wile E. Coyote standing here over the cliff, you know, and gravity has yet to

00:20:55.980 | take me over, but I know I'm going to fall.

00:20:59.500 | And there's an anvil, not only are you going to fall off the cliff and not get the road

00:21:04.140 | runner, there's an anvil and a boulder above you getting ready to hit you after you hit

00:21:09.780 | the ground.

00:21:12.340 | So that's how photosynthesis works.

00:21:15.300 | And what happens is this brilliant guy by the name of Haber, German chemistry, he's

00:21:21.260 | also villainized for making chlorine for World War One for chemical warfare.

00:21:27.660 | And believe me, if you're a chemist, making chlorine is not that difficult.

00:21:33.740 | He just made it, bottled it and distributed it.

00:21:36.660 | And he was doing it for his country.

00:21:39.020 | It was German.

00:21:40.020 | Germany was at war.

00:21:41.680 | So they say he's the man that has saved billions and killed millions.

00:21:46.140 | Both of those are probably an order of magnitude off.

00:21:51.140 | But he figured out how to take atmospheric nitrogen, mix it with hydrogen.

00:21:58.300 | Now they had a hydrogen back then and abundance because they were making what was called town

00:22:02.980 | gas or coal gas, which is what we use to feed through pipelines before we actually put methane

00:22:10.700 | through them.

00:22:11.700 | If you remember the old saying, go stick your head in the oven, which meant go kill yourself.

00:22:16.300 | That's because the gas flowing through the town pipes was actually made from coal and

00:22:21.780 | a coal distillation process.

00:22:24.300 | And it was primarily carbon monoxide and hydrogen and some other volatile organic compounds.

00:22:30.300 | So when you stuck your head in the oven, you would kill yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning.

00:22:36.420 | So anyways, he figures out how to, incidentally, the first internal combustion engines ran

00:22:42.720 | on hydrogen and this type of gas.

00:22:45.740 | So the first internal combustion engines were hydrogen engines.

00:22:50.220 | Not a hard thing to do.

00:22:51.860 | So he figured out on a laboratory scale, meaning a laboratory bench top, how to combine hydrogen

00:22:58.940 | and nitrogen, and he actually got drips of ammonia condensing and coming out of his system.

00:23:07.020 | Now we're talking like 1908-ish time frame here and before, and material science, the

00:23:14.100 | science of iron and steel was not what it is today.

00:23:18.620 | And he was at the operating limits of temperature and pressure for the iron/crude steels that

00:23:26.180 | he had.

00:23:27.580 | Well, Haber nevertheless won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for figuring out how to make

00:23:35.900 | synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

00:23:38.900 | It was a breakthrough, but they couldn't make it in volume.

00:23:43.460 | Now this guy you probably never heard of by the name of Bosch, another German, I believe

00:23:52.380 | there's a chemical company that is named after him, B-O-S-C-H.

00:23:57.700 | Not a big one, just worldwide.

00:24:04.980 | He figured out how to industrialize on a commercial scale Haber's process for making ammonia out

00:24:15.540 | of hydrogen and nitrogen and enough to feed all of Europe.

00:24:22.060 | He quadrupled the production of food in Europe.

00:24:28.060 | This is early 1900s.

00:24:31.540 | And it's called the Haber-Bosch process because one person fertilized the egg and the other

00:24:39.380 | one gave birth to it.

00:24:40.900 | So it's called the Haber-Bosch process.

00:24:43.620 | And lo and behold, Bosch wins a Nobel Prize for this.

00:24:51.180 | And thus Europe was saved.

00:24:53.340 | Now this is the fundamental base of all of our fertilizer in the world.

00:24:58.860 | There's three types of fertilizer.

00:24:59.860 | There's N, there's P, and there's K. N is nitrogen.

00:25:03.260 | P is not potassium, it's phosphorus.

00:25:06.060 | K is potassium.

00:25:08.820 | And by far the biggest fertilizer that does the most, yes, rice requires a lot of one

00:25:14.300 | of the others and a few others and they are needed, but nitrogen is by and far the largest

00:25:22.900 | driver of agriculture in the world.

00:25:27.620 | Now farmers are not dummies.

00:25:30.420 | They actually take a sample of their soil.

00:25:32.980 | They take it down to the fertilizer company, a lot of which are still mom and pop owned.

00:25:40.300 | And some are big, some are small.

00:25:42.300 | They do an analysis of the soil to see how much carryover of nitrogen there is from the

00:25:47.380 | previous years, what it's deficient in all the way down to individual minerals and nitrogen

00:25:53.340 | and everything else.

00:25:54.580 | And they specifically make a fertilizer of the right mix to go onto that farmer's field

00:26:00.500 | for the crop that he's going to plant, because maybe he had soybeans last year, he's going

00:26:04.580 | to do corn this year.

00:26:07.200 | But nevertheless, our source today for hydrogen is natural gas.

00:26:15.960 | Natural gas is methane, which is CH4.

00:26:19.720 | Four hydrogens, one carbon molecule.

00:26:23.200 | So when I, and all of our fertilizers made from this, basically all of the nitrogen fertilizer,

00:26:32.000 | because it's just too damn easy to make hydrogen from natural gas and make ammonia from the

00:26:39.160 | hydrogen.

00:26:40.160 | The nitrogen's in the air, it's free.

00:26:44.040 | And even EPA hasn't regulated nitrogen in the air because it's 78% nitrogen there.

00:26:53.040 | And so now you have this base precursor chemical called ammonia, NH3, which is kind of analogous

00:27:00.280 | to methane, CH4, only it's nitrogen and three hydrogens rather than a carbon and four hydrogens.

00:27:09.120 | Now from this, we make, you've heard of urea for like diesel trucks.

00:27:13.480 | Urea is also a fertilizer that is a nitrogen compound made from ammonia that goes onto

00:27:19.160 | the soil.

00:27:20.760 | It's white prills.

00:27:23.880 | Ammonium nitrate used to be a lot more popular and used a lot, but it's very easy to make

00:27:29.200 | explosives out of ammonium nitrate.

00:27:31.360 | So all the insurance companies have kind of dissuaded everyone from using ammonium nitrate.

00:27:39.280 | And they also make aqua ammonia, which is ammonia in water because ammonia, you think

00:27:45.640 | you had love for your first crush in junior high.

00:27:51.460 | Ammonia loves water more than that.

00:27:56.120 | Ammonia loves water more than you love your dog.

00:28:00.560 | So aqua ammonia, which is also known as ammonium hydroxide, is a method of distributing it.

00:28:07.960 | And also farmers will actually put ammonia directly into the soil.

00:28:13.720 | They'll run a plow and inject raw aqueous ammonia, you know, stuff that stinks so bad,

00:28:22.240 | directly into the soil.

00:28:23.240 | And the thing is, I said, it has this great affinity for water.

00:28:27.760 | Well, it's absorbed into the moisture of the soil, any moisture in the soil.

00:28:33.760 | So it gets put in directly like this.

00:28:36.600 | And this is roughly responsible for a quadrupling, more or less, sometimes mostly more, sometimes

00:28:43.320 | less of our current crop.

00:28:45.640 | So when you see them trying to regulate, tax, restrict natural gas, it's like they

00:28:53.920 | are literally trying to take the food out of your mouth.

00:28:59.440 | And that is what led me, you know, I have a different type of vision.

00:29:05.120 | I see things, I see the entire series of dominoes on the basketball court.

00:29:10.320 | And I go, because I can see the first one falling and the other train of the dominoes

00:29:18.840 | that are falling.

00:29:19.840 | It's like, if you light the fuse on the stick of dynamite, the dynamite is going to

00:29:24.640 | explode unless you clip it or something else like that.

00:29:30.600 | And that's what prompted me to write this report.

00:29:35.280 | And it was kind of like an offhand report.

00:29:39.040 | But I was scientifically literate.

00:29:41.640 | I was careful and understood the audience that might be reading it and everything else.

00:29:46.160 | And it's like, you know, better think from Harris.

00:29:49.280 | And for whatever reason, it gets picked up by them.

00:29:53.400 | But anyways, that is the role of natural gas in human life.

00:30:01.800 | I go into more of it.

00:30:03.740 | You can get it.

00:30:04.740 | You can type in Stephen Harris Science and Technology Podcast and whatever you like for

00:30:09.800 | podcast engines or it's at harris1234.com.

00:30:14.920 | I get into it more in there.

00:30:16.800 | But let me stop there because I'm sure I probably instigated about 18 questions in your head.

00:30:23.200 | So let me clarify.

00:30:24.200 | So as I understand it, to recount, the reason we have such a large and well-fed population

00:30:34.540 | on the earth today is fundamentally because we figured out how to feed the world's population.

00:30:42.320 | When Thomas Ehrlich wrote his famous book, sorry, Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book,

00:30:46.800 | the population...

00:30:47.800 | Don't even mention the default science.

00:30:51.000 | Don't even give it the credence of mentioning one of the biggest lies in the world.

00:31:00.280 | He was on Johnny Carson.

00:31:03.480 | So the point is that it was probable that we would not be able to successfully grow

00:31:12.260 | enough food with previous technologies, but due to the input of the chemical processes

00:31:19.980 | that you've gone over and the Haber-Bosch process of being able to build a system for

00:31:26.460 | creating nitrogen fertilizer, then that led to a massive growth in crop productivity,

00:31:34.540 | which has allowed us to successfully feed the world now since World War I and counting.

00:31:41.300 | Today we use natural gas to facilitate that process.

00:31:47.140 | But what I don't understand is why there's a danger of having minimal amounts of... of

00:31:55.380 | not having enough fertilizer due to natural gas.

00:31:59.260 | What's causing the problem now in the current way of producing fertilizer?

00:32:03.500 | Oh, well, they're artificially inflating the price of natural gas and they're trying to

00:32:12.020 | put restrictions on it for climate reasons and everything else.

00:32:19.220 | Who is that?

00:32:22.740 | Whoever you want to see on TV, Greta Thornburg, whoever, whatever.

00:32:28.860 | I don't care.

00:32:29.860 | The point is it is being done.

00:32:32.620 | It is happening.

00:32:35.940 | There's a lot of false science behind it.

00:32:39.220 | It's like, no, they say carbon dioxide.

00:32:41.340 | The thing about carbon dioxide, it's thermally emissive.

00:32:44.260 | You can, if I look at it coming out, if it's a different temperature, I can see it coming

00:32:49.060 | out of a bottle and I have an infrared camera, I can see the gas coming out because it's

00:32:55.420 | thermally emissive.

00:32:58.100 | And so they said, well, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it's 420 parts per million.

00:33:06.780 | Remember that word.

00:33:08.740 | So if you had a billion, if you had a million dollars to give away, Josh, here's some finance.

00:33:14.260 | It's like, I'm going to give away a million dollars.

00:33:17.340 | And to you, Mr. Harris, or to you, Josh, me, Steve Harris, I'm giving away a million dollars

00:33:23.620 | in the next 60 seconds.

00:33:24.620 | Oh, Josh, you can have 420.

00:33:25.620 | Here's $420.

00:33:26.620 | What would you say to me?

00:33:27.620 | It's not much.

00:33:28.620 | It's not much.

00:33:29.620 | It's called a trace gas for a reason.

00:33:30.620 | It's responsible for all life on the planet, literally.

00:33:31.620 | Okay, so let me restate.

00:33:32.620 | Due to the current press to change gas emissions on the world, bureaucratic leaders, government

00:33:52.500 | regulators are seeking to minimize the production and the use of natural gas.

00:33:56.980 | Is that what you're saying?

00:33:59.220 | Well, it's not the, yes.

00:34:03.220 | I mean, natural gas is already there.

00:34:06.060 | And in fact, everything in the world that, as I was talking about in my podcast, look,

00:34:14.500 | I take you out in the woods and I shoot you in the head, you fall down in the forest.

00:34:18.720 | You're going to rot aerobically with atmospheric oxygen and you're going to turn into water

00:34:24.860 | and carbon dioxide.

00:34:26.860 | Now, if I like take you out in the woods and I shoot you in the head and I bury you, you're

00:34:32.980 | going to be in an environment without oxygen and that is called anaerobic.

00:34:38.620 | I know my metaphors.

00:34:39.620 | I'm sorry.

00:34:40.620 | They're kind of hard to forget, but they get the point across quickly.

00:34:45.300 | And you are going to decompose principally because all the bacteria are already inside

00:34:51.260 | you to do this.

00:34:52.940 | You're going to decompose into methane and carbon dioxide.

00:34:57.700 | So everything on the entire planet, every whale that dies, every leaf that falls into

00:35:04.620 | the water, every leaf that falls and gets covered up by other leaves, all turn into

00:35:14.780 | methane and carbon dioxide.

00:35:17.660 | And carbon dioxide is measured 400 and about 428 parts per million.

00:35:25.620 | Now this horrible thing of methane, you know what, how many parts per million it is?

00:35:33.500 | I don't.

00:35:34.500 | Atmospherically, they'll show you the rise and everything else.

00:35:41.020 | The Al Gore chart with the hockey stick, it's about 1.8 parts per million.

00:35:48.980 | But do you know how they label it?

00:35:52.540 | I don't.

00:35:53.540 | Natural gas is 1800 parts per billion in the atmosphere.

00:35:57.900 | Interesting.

00:35:58.900 | So they, they changed the units from parts per million to parts per billion so they could

00:36:05.580 | make a larger number.

00:36:06.940 | And then they say it's got a forcing factor 80 times of CO2.

00:36:12.100 | All right.

00:36:13.660 | So, so let me clarify then, because I know I'm not worried.

00:36:19.740 | Obviously that's an important conversation, but I want to understand what is happening

00:36:24.260 | that is making fertilizer in short supply.

00:36:27.680 | Is natural gas production going down?

00:36:30.100 | Is natural gas usage going down?

00:36:32.820 | What is the connection between natural gas and the increasing desire to regulate natural

00:36:38.780 | gas and fertilizer?

00:36:42.500 | The right now, as we're speaking in the United States on August 26, around 10am, the Henry

00:36:53.100 | Hub price for natural gas is $9.57.

00:37:04.260 | And in the United States, we measure it, what's called MMBTU.

00:37:08.660 | M is a thousand, M is a thousand.

00:37:11.700 | So a thousand, and these are Roman numerals.

00:37:14.260 | So a thousand, a thousand is a million.

00:37:16.660 | So an MMBTU is a million BTUs of natural gas is around $9.57.

00:37:25.260 | Now to give you an example, that's the also the spot price.

00:37:28.580 | That's not the delivered to you price.

00:37:30.820 | The delivered you price is like double.

00:37:34.940 | Give you an example, a big furnace in a house in the Midwest, upper Midwest, is going to

00:37:42.100 | be 60 to a hundred thousand BTUs per hour.

00:37:48.780 | That's how much natural gas, just to kind of like put it in context for the people listening.

00:37:53.020 | I try to like make things relevant.

00:37:55.340 | Now in Europe right now, see they don't price it.

00:37:58.940 | They don't price it in dollars, obviously, per MMBTU, per million BTUs, which mathematically

00:38:08.100 | is coincidentally a thousand cubic feet of that of methane.

00:38:12.500 | They price it in euros, when what's a euro worth today, almost a dollar, right?

00:38:18.420 | Yeah, more or less.

00:38:20.420 | So they price it in euros per megawatt hours thermal.

00:38:26.980 | And they always neglect to say thermal because megawatt hours is a unit of power of energy,

00:38:36.100 | which is power over time.

00:38:39.220 | So my power is five watts.

00:38:43.060 | If I use five watts for an hour, the amount of energy I've used is five watt hours.

00:38:50.420 | So they measure natural gas and they sell it in megawatt hours thermal.

00:38:58.620 | And that's different from electricity because if you want to know how much electricity,

00:39:02.980 | you got to take the efficiency of your generator, which is going to be 18% to 40 some percent

00:39:10.940 | for like a code generation to internal combustion engine.

00:39:14.260 | And there's 3412 BTUs and a kilowatt hour electric.

00:39:21.100 | But anyways, if you do the math, it's like the price of natural gas in Europe right now

00:39:26.020 | is about six, six and a half times the price of natural gas in the United States.

00:39:32.700 | It's so expensive that they have just literally stopped making ammonia in the European Union

00:39:38.420 | because it's like it's too expensive.

00:39:41.060 | The price of nitrogen fertilizer in the United States has been varying between this year.

00:39:48.140 | Let's pick a and never mind 2021, 2020, it's go all the way back to 2019 when like, I mean,

00:39:57.100 | what would you pay for a month of 2019 right now?

00:40:00.260 | I mean, really?

00:40:01.260 | Right.

00:40:02.260 | So, you know, just like transport your back.

00:40:07.940 | Farmers are paying year over year, let alone going back to 2019.

00:40:13.420 | Natural gas was around 235, 270 and MMBTU.

00:40:18.700 | Now it's 957 and it's been down to seven, up to nine, down to, you know, it's been fluctuating

00:40:26.820 | around up there, but it's quite off quite a bit.

00:40:31.780 | Yeah.

00:40:32.780 | The price of fertilizer for the farmer to buy in the United States is six to eight times.

00:40:40.300 | So 600, 800 percent, six to eight times higher.

00:40:44.180 | So what they were paying $220 a ton for, for a particular type of nitrogen fertilizer,

00:40:53.300 | they're literally paying $1,200 a ton for the same fertilizer.

00:41:00.100 | Right now, as of right now, well, planting season, one of the main planting season is

00:41:07.060 | over.

00:41:08.060 | We're actually getting into harvest season.

00:41:09.980 | Crop reports are coming out now.

00:41:12.340 | Vegas crop reports are coming out in mid-September.

00:41:14.940 | It's probably when the rest of the world is going to get that sinking feeling in their

00:41:19.180 | legs of looking over like the Empire State Building or a bridge, ever get up to a high

00:41:24.060 | place and look down and get that sinking feeling in your legs.

00:41:27.620 | The rest of the world's probably going to get that sinking feeling around the end of

00:41:30.580 | September when the crop reports for the September, October, November harvesting finally actually

00:41:37.780 | come in because right now we're eating the wheat, the rice, and the corn from last year.

00:41:46.180 | - So the connection between natural gas and nitrogen fertilizer is there are significant

00:41:54.740 | increases in the cost of natural gas, especially outside of the United States.

00:42:02.580 | In the United States, the price of natural gas has increased from $2.5 per mmBtu to $9.5

00:42:10.660 | mmBtu.

00:42:13.820 | But in other regions, specifically in Europe, natural gas is 6.5 times more expensive than

00:42:19.180 | natural gas in the United States.

00:42:22.540 | Because natural gas is used to make fertilizer through the production of ammonia, that means

00:42:30.040 | that fertilizer prices have increased massively.

00:42:34.060 | And farmers, at least in the United States, have gone from paying $220 a ton for nitrogen

00:42:40.400 | fertilizer to $1,200 per ton for nitrogen fertilizer.

00:42:46.260 | - And the nitrogen fertilizer basically quadruples the output.

00:42:51.620 | Some plants, like soybeans, don't require a lot of extra nitrogen.

00:42:55.900 | Corn is very nitrogen-intensive.

00:42:58.780 | - So now, because of the high price of nitrogen, the concern is simply that farmers will not

00:43:06.300 | be able to pay for it and thus have lower crop yields.

00:43:11.540 | - They've already switched to different crops.

00:43:13.940 | They've already switched from corn to soy.

00:43:16.100 | That happened in the spring.

00:43:20.420 | We already have reduced planting.

00:43:23.340 | - We know that because of the high price of nitrogen fertilizer, and because farmers around

00:43:28.860 | the world were not confident of there ever being a high price for their crops, they switched

00:43:35.620 | to other crops and planted less of the staple food crops.

00:43:38.780 | Is that right?

00:43:40.620 | - Or they didn't plant, or they planted anyways and just didn't put on any or as much nitrogen

00:43:48.540 | as they could.

00:43:49.540 | So their crop yield is going to go from, instead of 200 bushels to acre, maybe to 100.

00:43:58.100 | Some of the stuff I was just watching today on the USA Private Crop Reports, they're going

00:44:03.500 | from 200 bushels an acre or 220 at a high down to 180.

00:44:10.260 | And in other places in the world, they could be literally going from 200 bushels an acre

00:44:15.540 | to 140, 80, 160.

00:44:20.700 | The numbers aren't fully in yet, but it's going to be a lot less.

00:44:24.700 | I mean, it's not a, "Well, we'll just get it from someplace else."

00:44:28.060 | It's like it doesn't exist in other places.

00:44:32.060 | And the price of the energy, the diesel fuel, and the other variations thereof, to bring

00:44:38.620 | it to you is also now greatly increased as well.

00:44:42.140 | - Right.

00:44:43.140 | All right.

00:44:44.140 | So on a global basis then, it sounds like because there's, and it's my understanding

00:44:51.260 | that setting aside the question of regulation, which is obviously important, but the United

00:44:57.100 | States has abundant amounts of natural gas.

00:45:01.660 | That's why it is so cheap in the United States compared to other places.

00:45:06.500 | Is that right?

00:45:07.860 | - No, it's actually at a record price.

00:45:10.180 | It's almost at a record high right now.

00:45:12.140 | - Comparatively speaking, the United States has much larger quantities of natural gas

00:45:19.260 | than other regions of the world, and it's used in the United States.

00:45:24.060 | That's why natural gas, while more expensive than it was in the past, is much cheaper in

00:45:29.900 | the United States than it is, say, in Germany.

00:45:32.660 | - Well, we got a lot less regulation, but they're trying to put more and more regulation

00:45:37.140 | on it.

00:45:38.140 | I have a lot of friends that have a natural gas well, which I was going to put a natural

00:45:43.180 | gas generator on, and we were going to use that for cryptocurrency off of their stranded

00:45:49.620 | well, not on the pipeline system.

00:45:53.100 | And they started getting into some of the regulations, and EPA has yet to come out with

00:45:58.380 | their final ruling on rogue methane emissions.

00:46:01.340 | And they said, "Steve, there's no way we're uncapping that well, unsealing that well until

00:46:06.340 | we get a final ruling on what the rogue methane emissions are, because that methane is still

00:46:12.020 | going to be in the ground for my children or my grandchildren.

00:46:15.820 | It doesn't matter.

00:46:17.660 | And I'm not about ready to open that Pandora's box until there's a decision made."

00:46:23.380 | So there is actually the prevention of a lot of it from coming online in the United States

00:46:29.460 | and as much as it could be, as well as the exploration for it.

00:46:35.700 | And United States, you know, this goes back to Zion and globalization and everything United

00:46:43.500 | States has been doing since the end of World War II to counter to the Soviets.

00:46:48.660 | And then what we've had the residual of for the last 30 years, which is freedom of the

00:46:54.420 | seas, which is now the globalization is all coming to an end abruptly.

00:47:01.460 | That's why Zion's book is called "The End of the World is Just the Beginning."

00:47:07.300 | And so we were getting a lot of our ammonia from outside the United States.

00:47:14.240 | We were literally blowing up our ammonia plants in the United States.

00:47:19.940 | You can go to YouTube to control demolition, CDI, part of the Lorenz group.

00:47:26.660 | You can see them blowing up coal plants and ammonia plants and, you know, raising them

00:47:32.460 | to the ground.

00:47:34.140 | So we don't have the ammonia production that we used to have because we would get a lot

00:47:39.940 | of it very inexpensively from China and other foreign markets because we had cheap globalization

00:47:49.660 | and it was more affordable to get it from other places and to bring it in.

00:47:54.180 | So we are mostly self-sufficient at this moment on ammonia here, but not, you know, it's like

00:48:06.020 | saying, well, Steve, how much water do I need?

00:48:08.420 | Oh, about a gallon a day.

00:48:10.180 | But I'm in Arizona.

00:48:11.180 | You're in trouble.

00:48:15.540 | So we have about enough, but we're not awash in the ammonia production.

00:48:23.100 | It's still a difficult process.

00:48:25.260 | I mean, the Haber-Bosch process is not something Steve Harris, with all his chemical knowledge,

00:48:31.460 | is going to do in his research shop or his backyard or his garage or anywhere else.

00:48:39.140 | I mean, there are plenty of complications.

00:48:42.620 | It's a high temperature, high pressure and a catalytically driven system.

00:48:47.020 | So whereas if you got, you know, a hundred million to throw at it, it's pretty darn easy.

00:48:54.340 | In fact, you'll get your money back pretty quickly, but it's not something where like

00:49:00.940 | Henry Ford originally wanted the Model T to run off of ethanol because every farmer can

00:49:06.060 | make ethanol.

00:49:07.780 | Making alcohol on the farm is pretty easy and straightforward.

00:49:12.220 | It's actually hard not to make it.

00:49:14.940 | That is not true with the Haber-Bosch process of making ammonia.

00:49:18.780 | And there is really no other process anywhere near as efficient as the Haber-Bosch process

00:49:27.460 | for the manufacture of ammonia.

00:49:30.180 | It's not trivial.

00:49:31.900 | It is PhD level chemistry, master's level, PhD level chemistry and industrial process

00:49:39.340 | at the same time and metallurgy and process control.

00:49:44.100 | So it's not trivial.

00:49:48.220 | So as things stand here on August 26, 2022, the world is consuming last year's crop harvest

00:49:56.940 | of wheat and corn and all of the other crops.

00:50:02.160 | We don't yet have crop reports for this summer's production in the Western Hemisphere.

00:50:06.680 | We expect those to come in starting in the middle of September.

00:50:10.420 | Official ones.

00:50:12.220 | There are people out in the fields right now on YouTube doing their own crop analysis right

00:50:17.660 | now of the corn, the soybean and the other crops.

00:50:26.620 | It's going to be lower, but not catastrophically lower.

00:50:30.660 | And the way I say it is the United States is going to have a famine.

00:50:34.580 | The rest of the world is going to have a biblical famine.

00:50:37.980 | So let's talk about that because obviously, you know, the commitment that we said at the

00:50:42.940 | beginning is we'll use the right words, but also I want to understand why those words

00:50:48.780 | are warranted.

00:50:50.700 | So would you guess, and I know this is a guess, but an informed guess, do you think we'll

00:50:55.380 | have on a global basis when we're analyzing the official reports two years from now, do

00:51:01.020 | you think this year, due to the higher prices of fertilizer, due to farmers putting substitutes

00:51:06.540 | or not planting as much, etc., do you think we'll have 20% less global food production,

00:51:12.340 | 10%, 30%?

00:51:13.820 | What would you guess?

00:51:14.820 | Well, the best thing I can do, and I'm going to give full credit to Peter Zion for this

00:51:21.620 | because he is the population expert and not only the geography, but the geopolitical population

00:51:31.820 | expert.

00:51:32.820 | And he's written about it in his book.

00:51:35.020 | And he says a billion people dead and so many others are coming out and independently saying

00:51:44.820 | like 1.2 billion, not million, billion people dead solely of famine, starvation.

00:51:54.740 | And the estimates are from a year, 18 months to five years at the outside of what we're

00:52:03.180 | looking at.

00:52:04.180 | We're literally looking at rolling back the population of the planet to 1992 levels.

00:52:10.940 | So obviously that's a heavy, even to talk about that is a heavy and horrific thing to

00:52:17.300 | contemplate.

00:52:21.340 | What keeps, why could we not, so let's assume that, let's pretend that we are governed and

00:52:26.940 | ruled by intelligent people that have good data sources.

00:52:29.940 | Let's pretend that they're able to access smart scientific reports, etc.

00:52:34.540 | Why can we not increase the production of natural gas, quickly eliminate regulation

00:52:42.060 | and quickly bring back supplies of sufficient fertilizer in order to lower the costs so

00:52:53.420 | that the next planting season is abundant?

00:52:58.020 | Because it's going to take at least three years to make the ammonia plants if we started

00:53:02.380 | today.

00:53:04.260 | But aren't, there were enough ammonia plants a year ago or two years ago.

00:53:08.940 | Why are there not enough ammonia plants today?

00:53:12.580 | Well, because that ammonia we were using that was abundant and cheap here in the United

00:53:18.500 | States, I remember buying ammonia back in the late nineties with Walter Petzold down

00:53:24.420 | in Herford, Texas, God rest his soul.

00:53:28.980 | And because I was doing some refrigeration experiments with it and you could just go

00:53:36.180 | down to the ag place.

00:53:37.700 | It's like, I need, you know, it was a hundred pound propane tank with a brass valve on it.

00:53:45.420 | It was like, I see the propane is heavier.

00:53:50.260 | It was like, yeah, we fill this up.

00:53:52.180 | And it was like, okay, they charged me for 65 pounds of ammonia.

00:53:56.980 | And there was nothing to it, but a lot of that was being imported and or brought from

00:54:04.580 | other places.

00:54:05.580 | So, I mean, in 2019, let's say you got yourself a thousand pounds of the special metal alloy

00:54:17.180 | of aluminum, copper, and titanium.

00:54:21.140 | And I want to buy it.

00:54:23.580 | And you're in, say, Korea and you want to ship that to me and it's going to come, it's

00:54:30.860 | a 10,000 pounds.

00:54:31.860 | So, it's going to be coming by boat.

00:54:34.700 | What was the cost of that in 2017, 2018, 2019 compared to the shipping of that to me now?

00:54:43.540 | I don't know.

00:54:46.460 | Yeah, right.

00:54:48.060 | Yeah, I mean, the cost of the fuel, the transportation, the logistics, literally the bandwidth of

00:54:56.620 | the freighter and the people working on it is not there where it had previously existed.

00:55:05.220 | And all of the other sources that are making or could make ammonia, like say Europe, are

00:55:14.180 | currently offline because of an incredible high cost of their source material.

00:55:19.300 | So, it's like I'm not buying ammonia from Germany.

00:55:24.100 | I'm not buying ammonia from Bosch and having to come in here because their source material

00:55:28.660 | for it is so darn expensive.

00:55:31.060 | And then there's the cost of the shipping, the marine fuel, the labor for the people

00:55:36.820 | on the tanker and everything else to ship it over here.

00:55:40.400 | We have everything that used to go around the globe seamlessly and for pennies on the

00:55:46.500 | dollar, that era is ended.

00:55:49.100 | In fact, we're going to have to double our manufacturing base according to the Zion here

00:55:57.780 | in the United States as well as everywhere else around the world except for China, who

00:56:01.980 | is circling the drain and going down.

00:56:06.060 | Mexico, United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, everyone is bringing home their manufacturing

00:56:15.660 | and or it's going to be going to India, Pakistan and other places.

00:56:21.140 | It's going to be a whole basket of manufacturing that's going to change radically in the next

00:56:27.060 | five years.

00:56:28.060 | So, that's kind of pivoting to a conversation about deglobalization, which clearly has an

00:56:34.220 | impact.

00:56:35.220 | Let's wrap up the food conversation first.

00:56:39.060 | Let's put the train of arguments together.

00:56:42.620 | Repeating, number one, because we learned how to make synthetic chemical fertilizers,

00:56:48.660 | we were able to massively increase crop yields as compared to the old models of exclusively

00:56:54.700 | using local animal manure or bringing in freighter loads of bird guano.

00:57:00.740 | So that process of creating NPK, or in this case, but focus mostly on N, on nitrogen,

00:57:08.420 | that process is a difficult and intensive process, but of course we've been doing it

00:57:15.300 | now for many decades.

00:57:17.220 | The major input for…

00:57:18.740 | Century, yeah, century literally.

00:57:21.560 | The major input at this point in time used for creating nitrogen fertilizer is natural

00:57:28.340 | gas.

00:57:29.820 | Natural gas is experiencing a significant increase in price for various reasons, and

00:57:37.340 | because the inputs have increased significantly in price, fertilizer, nitrogen fertilizer,

00:57:45.540 | has also experienced a huge increase in price.

00:57:50.820 | And also non-production.

00:57:52.140 | Germany has a choice right now.

00:58:00.420 | The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is shut down.

00:58:04.220 | Nord Stream 1 from Russia to Germany was down.

00:58:09.540 | It's now back up at 20% capacity, and Russia can turn it off at any time, and the Ukrainians

00:58:16.740 | can blow it up at any time that they so desire.

00:58:20.100 | So they're sending, Russia's sending 20% of Germany's total natural gas to Nord Stream

00:58:26.620 | 1.

00:58:27.620 | Germany was trying to dump it into their empty natural gas wells as fast as possible to have

00:58:33.340 | enough natural gas for the winter, which now they can't do.

00:58:37.820 | All the natural gas coming from Russia is basically going to run Germany's industrial

00:58:43.140 | base, industrial furnaces, heating, forges, smelting, everything that you can think of

00:58:49.940 | chemically, it's all being done off of natural gas.

00:58:54.140 | I mean, it's an incredible chemical feedstock.

00:58:57.940 | So I mean, if you want to be warm, do not go to Germany this winter, because they are

00:59:05.620 | literally looking at the, I want to be careful here, the significantly measurable price of

00:59:13.100 | possibility, like let's roll a die, and say, you know, one chance in six, one chance in

00:59:19.260 | four, you know, that there are going to be measurable deaths from freezing to death in

00:59:27.860 | Germany and the other areas, because that pipeline, they made themselves dependent on

00:59:33.780 | Russian natural gas, and Russia has taken their toys and gone home.

00:59:39.340 | In fact, the entire world, Halberd and the other oil supply companies, which are not

00:59:47.940 | just oil, but they're oil, natural gas, and all the petrochemical, everything.

00:59:54.060 | There was no law, no sanction that said they had to leave.

00:59:57.540 | They just picked up and left Russia in total.

01:00:02.660 | Shell, Halberd, and the other companies abandoned everything in Russia.

01:00:09.340 | They took their intellectual property, the people, the intellectual knowledge of how

01:00:14.900 | to run it, and they left, completely left everything behind, got on the planes, flew

01:00:24.100 | home, and they're not coming back.

01:00:30.420 | And the Russian oil lines are literally going to freeze in place in the permafrost zones,

01:00:38.620 | and the last time that happened was '92, when the Soviet Union fell, and they only

01:00:43.620 | now just got it going 30 years later.

01:00:47.980 | So I think that is helpful, to talk about the broader scale of natural gas.

01:00:52.700 | The reason I hadn't gone to Russia and the comments you issued there was I was trying

01:00:56.500 | to understand what you were seeing in November of 2021 that was causing you to be concerned,

01:01:07.540 | and this is because this was all before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this was before the instability

01:01:13.540 | of the pipeline to Germany, these factors.

01:01:15.840 | And so there were some base factors that caused you to write your report in November that

01:01:22.300 | have been exacerbated now by these other things.

01:01:24.780 | And so to reaffirm or to emphasize what you said, one of the additional factors that makes

01:01:32.420 | natural gas for fertilizer production so difficult to come by is that natural gas is a primary

01:01:40.580 | mover in many, many other industries.

01:01:43.980 | It's a primary heating fuel, it's a primary fuel for creating energy, for creating electricity

01:01:49.580 | that's used in industrial processes, it's a primary fuel for fueling machinery making

01:01:55.060 | and virtually everything in the industrial cycle.

01:01:57.740 | >>TYLER: Chemicals?

01:01:58.740 | Chemicals?

01:01:59.740 | Huge.

01:02:00.740 | I mean, it is the simplest organic molecule.

01:02:03.740 | It's one carbon and four hydrogen.

01:02:06.020 | It is the simplest organic molecule there is.

01:02:08.940 | >>STEVE: So the pressure on natural gas doesn't only come from nitrogen.

01:02:14.280 | If we diverted more natural gas—excuse me, nitrogen fertilizer—if we diverted more

01:02:18.140 | natural gas production to creating more nitrogen fertilizer, that might allow us to produce

01:02:23.540 | sufficient quantities of food to minimize the global famine, but that will have massive

01:02:28.700 | effects on industry, on people's ability to keep their houses warm, on the home prices

01:02:33.560 | they pay for gas heating, et cetera.

01:02:35.780 | So the natural gas disruption, the increases in natural gas prices are disrupting everything

01:02:42.960 | and food is perhaps the most pressing and the other things are also very bad.

01:02:46.700 | Is that a fair assessment?

01:02:47.700 | >>TYLER: Well, that is only the tip of the iceberg because hungry, cold people change

01:02:54.020 | entire countries and worlds in days and weeks, not months and years.

01:03:00.420 | Now look around you and look at everything around you, okay?

01:03:04.060 | Look at your screen, your microphone, your wood table, your wood floor.

01:03:10.100 | Look at your plastic pencil.

01:03:13.020 | Look at—put on your Superman glasses, look through your walls, look at the copper wire,

01:03:20.740 | look at your asphalt shingles, look at your aluminum computer stand, your steel case on

01:03:29.020 | your computer, the magnesium on your Macintosh, whatever you got, it's nice and light, it's

01:03:37.340 | made from magnesium.

01:03:39.340 | Look at everything that is around you, okay?

01:03:41.820 | Except if you have a meteorite that fell from space, don't look at that.

01:03:47.980 | Everything around you in your entire world is either groaned or mined.

01:03:57.900 | I'm going to scare the living piss out of you here.

01:04:01.220 | You ready?

01:04:02.220 | If any of you want to press pause and go pee first, go do it because I'm about ready to

01:04:06.580 | make you pee your pants.

01:04:09.220 | Everything around you is either groaned or mined.

01:04:14.900 | Is there—am I missing something?

01:04:17.300 | Is there something else I'm missing, Josh?

01:04:20.340 | Josh: Nothing except the meteor, the incoming asteroid.

01:04:23.900 | Well, I guess we could still mine it when it hits the ground.

01:04:27.820 | David: No, that's called pick it up, okay?

01:04:31.260 | Josh: Right.

01:04:32.260 | David: That's called picking up.

01:04:33.260 | So everything around you is groaned or mined.

01:04:36.340 | What is the foundation of modern mining?

01:04:41.020 | What made the Panama Canal possible?

01:04:44.060 | What made the train tunnels through the mountains possible?

01:04:48.380 | When they mine coal and surface mining and copper and iron oxide, iron ore, and you see

01:04:57.540 | this big rippling going all the way through, you go, "Wow, that was huge."

01:05:03.980 | What are they using?

01:05:05.700 | What is the foundation of 98% of all mining in the world?

01:05:11.300 | Josh: Explosives.

01:05:12.660 | David: Explosives.

01:05:14.220 | What are explosives made from?

01:05:15.980 | Josh: I wish I knew.

01:05:17.740 | It would be fun to make them.

01:05:19.540 | That would be my high school chemistry class.

01:05:21.660 | I haven't done it.

01:05:23.220 | David: Okay.

01:05:25.540 | Explosives like that.

01:05:27.500 | We're talking about detonating wave explosives, which are called detonation, not a deflagration.

01:05:35.220 | So it's faster than the speed of sound.

01:05:37.900 | A slow one is ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, ANFO.

01:05:41.860 | They use that for moving earth.

01:05:43.860 | It heaves things beautifully.

01:05:46.660 | Blasting things apart, like buildings or rock faces.

01:05:50.420 | When they make the tunnels for stuff, like for salt, they like to use a higher speed

01:05:55.820 | explosive.

01:05:56.820 | You would know it as TNT, but they use different formulations.

01:05:59.700 | TNT is tri-nitrous toluene, ammonium nitrate, ANFO, ammonium nitrate, fuel oil.

01:06:07.660 | Are you seeing a common word in there?

01:06:09.820 | Josh: Ammonia.

01:06:10.820 | David: No, nitrate.

01:06:12.820 | Nitrogen.

01:06:13.820 | Okay?

01:06:14.820 | All modern explosives are made from nitric acid as the original precursor to make all

01:06:21.740 | the different variations of explosives that we use today.

01:06:26.260 | Where does nitric acid come from?

01:06:31.940 | It's made from the, careful of the pronunciation, the Oswald process.

01:06:40.180 | Another German.

01:06:41.180 | The Oswald process.

01:06:43.620 | And guess what the Oswald process uses for making nitric acid?

01:06:47.860 | Josh: Natural gas.

01:06:49.860 | David: Ammonia!

01:06:50.860 | Josh: Ammonia.

01:06:51.860 | There we go.

01:06:52.860 | Off the front of natural gas.

01:06:53.860 | David: And what makes, yeah, which is from natural gas.

01:06:58.020 | Josh: The Haber-Bosch process of natural gas to make ammonia.

01:07:01.380 | David: Haber.

01:07:02.380 | Josh: Haber.

01:07:03.380 | David: Haber.

01:07:04.380 | My name is Haber, not Haber.

01:07:05.380 | Where are you from?

01:07:06.380 | France?

01:07:07.380 | Yes, I have a sense of humor.

01:07:10.500 | So anyways, so the people, the regulations, the stupidity is messing with the fundamental

01:07:24.140 | thing that minds and grows everything.

01:07:27.860 | It was like, well, Steve, I'm not eating corn.

01:07:30.500 | Steve, I'm not eating soybeans.

01:07:32.500 | The pigs, the bacon you eat from the pigs is made from soybeans.

01:07:36.180 | Okay?

01:07:37.180 | Everything else, you know, everything, oh God, the things that's made from corn is huge.

01:07:44.540 | The world still runs off of a particular staple.

01:07:49.740 | America, the staple is mostly wheat, but also wheat and corn.

01:07:56.700 | Central America, a lot of corn, you know, maize is a staple.

01:08:02.820 | Russia and Eastern European wheat, China, rice, Asia, rice.

01:08:11.820 | Most of the world, the Irish of the days of old, potatoes.

01:08:16.500 | Again, most of the world lives off a starch product and anything that you're eating that's

01:08:22.100 | a protein product like meat is fed a starch product of one type or another for its food

01:08:29.020 | source.

01:08:30.020 | It's literally the thing that makes everything that makes everything that makes everything

01:08:35.220 | that we eat that we just made into something that we ate.

01:08:40.380 | It's really complex, but it's like, Josh, there's this guy, his name is, pick a scary

01:08:47.140 | name Josh.

01:08:48.140 | You can't do that to me.

01:08:53.140 | Carlos, Josh, Carlos is going to kill you.

01:08:57.780 | Okay.

01:08:58.780 | Josh, Carlos is in your town, in your country.

01:09:04.060 | Okay.

01:09:05.060 | Josh, Carlos was seen in your town.

01:09:07.980 | He wants to kill you.

01:09:09.900 | Okay.

01:09:11.020 | So when I wrote the report about called swimming out to sea, because you know what swimming

01:09:16.900 | out sea reference is.

01:09:18.820 | People would commit suicide by swimming out to sea so they couldn't change their mind.

01:09:22.980 | So let's say you could swim for six, eight hours and you're swimming.

01:09:28.380 | And, and you're six hours out and you, and you say, Oh, I don't want to die.

01:09:33.180 | I want to swim back to shore.

01:09:34.500 | Well, you don't have enough energy to swim six hours back.

01:09:38.820 | You got enough energy to swim two hours back.

01:09:41.540 | So you drown and you die.

01:09:43.780 | So it's, it's, it's, it's a metaphor for an irreversible decision.

01:09:49.420 | Okay.

01:09:50.420 | I decided to swim out to sea.

01:09:52.260 | I'm committing suicide.

01:09:53.260 | So that's why the report was called swimming out to sea and the potential for first world

01:10:00.140 | famine.

01:10:02.860 | So when I wrote that report in November of 2021, because I saw what was beginning to

01:10:11.100 | happen with natural gas was like me writing the report when Carlos was standing behind

01:10:18.900 | you and had his hands around his neck, but he wasn't touching your neck yet.

01:10:25.100 | Right.

01:10:27.180 | That's what I saw.

01:10:30.860 | Okay.

01:10:31.860 | Carlos wasn't in the country.

01:10:33.260 | Carlos wasn't in the same city.

01:10:35.820 | Carlos was standing behind you with his hands around his neck, but he hadn't started squeezing

01:10:41.860 | yet and you didn't know Carlos was there.

01:10:45.420 | That is what made me write that report.

01:10:48.220 | So now bringing it forward, the major things that have happened, number one, the trends

01:10:53.740 | that you saw then have continued.

01:10:57.140 | And then we have factors like Russia invading Ukraine and factors like Russia using its

01:11:05.260 | current natural gas supplies as political leverage over Europe and basically...

01:11:10.500 | No, no, no, a weapon.

01:11:11.500 | Hold on.

01:11:12.500 | Okay.

01:11:13.500 | As a weapon, sure.

01:11:14.500 | As a weapon in Europe, like we talked about with Germany, but worse than that, there are

01:11:19.180 | major reasons to believe that Russia, now due to the complete absence of all the international

01:11:28.700 | workers, all the international scientists, all the international... their ability to

01:11:33.380 | get parts, et cetera, that very possibly significant amounts or even all of their energy production

01:11:40.700 | could go offline due to lack of human intellectual capital.

01:11:44.340 | So that you take a huge natural producer and you take them offline and now you have complete

01:11:52.060 | disaster.

01:11:53.060 | Let's use the words of Peter Zion, "You melon scoop out Russia," which is like five million

01:12:00.540 | barrels of oil alone per day out of the market.

01:12:04.260 | Right.

01:12:05.260 | So you melon scoop Russia out.

01:12:07.180 | I want to find out where he lives.

01:12:09.500 | I'm going to send him like a box of melon scoops.

01:12:12.300 | And yeah, you melon scoop Russia out and all of a sudden there is a hole there.

01:12:20.620 | And the interesting thing is there's one other huge advantage that about doubled or quadrupled

01:12:26.940 | our food production.

01:12:28.660 | Before that, Idiot wrote the book about the world population going out of control, which

01:12:34.460 | was part of the impetus between Mao doing the one child policy, which basically was

01:12:42.900 | the death knell for China.

01:12:47.660 | This gentleman by the name of Norman Borlaug, Borlang, I get the pronunciation of his...

01:12:56.220 | Oh, they wrote it in a way that I can't read it.

01:12:59.220 | Come on, say it.

01:13:02.920 | Pronunciation is a key for...

01:13:05.140 | Anyways, he discovered, invented, genetically modified through a variety of methods, either

01:13:15.060 | probably the traditional methods that we've been doing GMO for thousands of years.

01:13:23.220 | He made a high yield disease resistant variety of wheat and this hit the world market and

01:13:34.120 | started doubling wheat production initially in Pakistan and India a year before that moron

01:13:41.280 | put his book out that the world was going to have too many people and too little food.

01:13:45.960 | In fact, if you look at the movie Soylent Green with Charleston Heston, they had everything

01:13:51.660 | wrong in there.

01:13:52.660 | I mean, Soylent Green takes place in 2022 and everything they did was on the fallacy

01:13:59.840 | of what we call linear no threshold theory.

01:14:04.120 | Whereas if one person jumps off a thousand foot cliff, they're going to die.

01:14:09.080 | If a thousand people jump off a one foot curb, one person will die, which is a fallacy.

01:14:15.280 | They extrapolated linear into the future without looking for technology and innovation disruptions

01:14:22.080 | and everything that changed from 1972 when the movie was made to 2022.

01:14:28.760 | And everything in the entire movie was absolutely fundamentally wrong.

01:14:34.680 | And this guy that wrote this book, he didn't anticipate a technology disruptor coming along

01:14:43.000 | like the change in the wheat that doubled production.

01:14:48.780 | Now you take a doubling of wheat production, you add it to a quadrupling with fertilizer,

01:14:53.800 | you're now making in 1970 eight times the wheat you did in 1902 in the same space.

01:15:01.120 | I mean, that's huge.

01:15:03.120 | It is huge.

01:15:05.040 | And that's why I, that's specifically what's always in the back of my mind when talking

01:15:10.360 | about this, when talking about global famine this year, next year, the following year is

01:15:15.320 | humans are adaptable, humans are smart, and we can develop new technologies, I hope, and

01:15:21.640 | new processes, new something that can help to mitigate the worst effects.

01:15:27.700 | And when the incentives are there, if people are dying for lack of food, all government

01:15:34.120 | regulations on natural gas production will disappear, either because the people will

01:15:38.080 | simply ignore them out of moral duty or because the governments will change them based upon

01:15:45.280 | their population not dying.

01:15:47.320 | And so I'm hopeful that it's not a worst case scenario.

01:15:50.640 | I'm sorry, there's a Kardashian's marathon on and they're all watching it and they don't

01:15:55.640 | give a crap.

01:15:57.820 | They think there's too many people anyways.

01:16:00.720 | You are too cynical.

01:16:01.960 | I'm going to be the optimist, you can be the cynic, and hopefully it's somewhere between

01:16:05.120 | us.

01:16:06.120 | So let's pivot now, because we've talked about food production, and I want to talk a little

01:16:10.720 | bit about deglobalization.

01:16:14.280 | I've recently finished the book that we referenced, and you and I have talked a little bit about

01:16:18.640 | it, Peter Zahan's The End of the World as We Know It is Just the Beginning.

01:16:23.640 | I was planning to do a series of podcasts about it, because I believe it reflects an

01:16:29.120 | important perspective that makes a lot of sense of the world that we're living in and

01:16:35.200 | some of the trends that we're living in.

01:16:37.280 | It's very hard for me to talk about, because my entire lifetime everything has always gotten

01:16:41.640 | better, and yet I've always been aware of the fact that the idea that everything always

01:16:46.960 | gets better is not a true fact of life.

01:16:49.000 | It doesn't reflect the reality of human history.

01:16:51.960 | So he goes through and he argues about some of the trends, but at its core is a trend

01:16:59.360 | of deglobalization.

01:17:01.600 | If you were going to encapsulate or give a broad overview of Zahan's arguments for deglobalization,

01:17:09.180 | how would you approach that?

01:17:11.980 | All of the ships and planes either stopped or got very expensive.

01:17:20.000 | And then the knock-on effects of that basically completely disrupt the world that we live

01:17:24.640 | in.

01:17:25.640 | Yeah, you got this.

01:17:27.440 | I mean, imagine, okay, you got a road between you and the grocery store, okay, and you got

01:17:32.920 | one road that you drive to the grocery store, okay.

01:17:37.000 | You got one road that you drive, it's a different road, to the hardware store, okay.

01:17:42.520 | And you got another road that you drive to the gas station.

01:17:46.240 | Well, imagine the road to the grocery store is gone.

01:17:50.880 | It's like mudslide, 80 feet high, gone, okay.

01:17:56.760 | The road to the Home Depot is potted and horrible, and you got to go through it five miles an

01:18:05.840 | hour, and it shakes the hell out of your pickup truck, and you can't stack anything up, and

01:18:11.560 | you're breaking your suspension.

01:18:13.800 | And the road to the gas station is no longer paved, it's a dirt road.

01:18:17.640 | In fact, it's two-track, and one car has to pull over to let another car pass and everything

01:18:23.200 | else like that.

01:18:25.360 | That is basically what deglobalization is to the world, is the marine shipping traffic

01:18:37.160 | becoming very labor short, expensive due to fuel, and the whole demand, everything, the

01:18:49.640 | just-in-time.

01:18:51.000 | People blame just-in-time inventory.

01:18:52.960 | Just-in-time is a miracle of modern manufacturing.

01:18:57.680 | And that whole model has now like broken, because the ship could sail from China, show

01:19:02.720 | up to the day, get offloaded, be on a truck, and going to the production facility and arrive

01:19:09.400 | within eight hours of when it was supposed to, plus or minus eight hours or a day.

01:19:15.840 | That is all now turned upside down.

01:19:20.080 | China is going through massive problems, not only with the pandemic that's going on, their

01:19:28.440 | inability to handle the pandemic, the availability of energy that is driving their infrastructure.

01:19:37.240 | I mean, you know what's going on in China with the entire banking system and everything

01:19:41.560 | else right now.

01:19:42.560 | It's just an absolute nightmare.

01:19:46.840 | And they're basically becoming non-functional.

01:19:50.200 | And you can take this all the way back to colonial America.

01:19:57.040 | We were the raw materials.

01:19:59.900 | We chopped down the lumber and grew the tobacco and everything, and the sugar, and it was

01:20:08.720 | shipped back to England, right?

01:20:10.560 | We were the manufacturing hub for, we were the raw material source for England.

01:20:16.120 | It went back to England and got manufactured.

01:20:20.520 | While China was like that for us, and you can repeat this throughout history going back

01:20:25.480 | 2000 years with the Silk Road and everything.

01:20:29.640 | While that entire line of ants, okay, you just put a leaf there and the ants are going,

01:20:36.960 | I don't know which way to go.

01:20:38.120 | I don't know which way to go.

01:20:39.720 | There's something blocking my path.

01:20:41.320 | I can't follow the chemical scent trail anymore.

01:20:46.480 | And in a nutshell, it's a lot more complex than that.

01:20:49.960 | And you really got to go into Zion's book to get it.

01:20:53.480 | But that is, for those of you listening, that is a very simplification of deglobalization.

01:21:03.600 | Someone dropped a leaf in front of the trail of ants and they don't know what to do.

01:21:08.440 | So if I were to summarize the basic argument of deglobalization, and I actually finally

01:21:13.880 | understood something that it was missing, my critique of that book, which I'll probably

01:21:18.880 | do in a standalone chapter, or sorry, a standalone podcast, is that there's this book that is

01:21:27.760 | very persuasive and has powerful arguments in it.

01:21:31.780 | But what I don't understand is the why.

01:21:36.040 | And that's partly, I think he probably wrote about in his previous books, which I haven't

01:21:39.800 | read yet myself.

01:21:41.480 | And so, but he made a comment in the back fourth of the book that helped me to finally

01:21:48.040 | understand.

01:21:49.040 | So if I were to articulate his argument for deglobalization, the United States is pulling

01:21:53.680 | back over the last 15 to 20 years, the United States has been systematically pulling back

01:22:02.160 | from acting as the police officer of the world, acting as the global security enforcer of

01:22:09.640 | the world.

01:22:10.640 | And according to—

01:22:11.640 | More like the oceans and the air.

01:22:14.400 | Good.

01:22:15.400 | Oceans and the air.

01:22:16.400 | Fair correction.

01:22:17.400 | Continue.

01:22:18.400 | So, and this is for a variety of reasons that I don't fully understand, but the United

01:22:26.200 | States is pulling back as enforcer of world peace.

01:22:29.400 | And basically, this is kind of the closing out of an agreement that the United States

01:22:34.760 | made after World War II.

01:22:37.300 | As the victor of World War II, the victor able to basically dictate global policy, the

01:22:42.880 | United States, instead of occupying foreign countries, instead of saying, "We're going

01:22:46.680 | to take you over and make you part of our nation, or we're going to colonize you,"

01:22:49.640 | the United States said, "We're going to establish a new system that we will see to

01:22:56.560 | the world's security.

01:22:57.560 | We'll make sure that the oceans are available for anybody who wants to use them, to use

01:23:02.240 | them free of concerns of attack, of piracy, et cetera, and we will see to the security

01:23:07.200 | of the world's oceans and the world's airspace."

01:23:11.360 | And as long as you support us and are on our side against the Soviet Union.

01:23:18.720 | So after—

01:23:19.720 | As long as you line up in front of us and alongside of us against the Soviets.

01:23:25.520 | Fair.

01:23:26.520 | Not just stand up, but I mean, link arms with us against the Soviets.

01:23:32.440 | And the Chinese said, "Yes."

01:23:34.840 | Right.

01:23:35.840 | And so the United States is basically responsible for creating the conditions that allowed the

01:23:41.640 | mass industrialization of China and the economic miracle that was that mass industrialization,

01:23:47.940 | as well as what has happened on a global basis, and has created the truly incredible world

01:23:52.600 | that we live in of these magical globalized systems.

01:23:57.440 | Now, as I understand the argument, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States

01:24:03.400 | has basically systematically pulled back and has become more entrenched in internal affairs

01:24:09.140 | rather than external affairs.

01:24:11.640 | And it's taken 30 years.

01:24:13.640 | Right.

01:24:14.640 | Keep in mind, it's taken 30 years.

01:24:16.800 | Right.

01:24:17.800 | And as I understand it, Zeyhan's argument is that this trend will continue for a variety

01:24:22.160 | of reasons.

01:24:23.160 | It's a bipartisan trend.

01:24:24.160 | Both Republicans and Democrats have done it.

01:24:26.080 | And it's a trend that reflects the wishes of the American people.

01:24:28.880 | American people are tired of foreign wars.

01:24:30.760 | They don't really understand the previous system, et cetera.

01:24:34.400 | And as the United States pulls back from ensuring the world's order and security, then it's

01:24:41.240 | probable that other players around the world will start to get involved.

01:24:46.440 | And you'll have everything from localized piracy to nation state piracy to other nation

01:24:51.640 | states seeking to expand their control.

01:24:55.040 | And the most dangerous effect of this is that global shipping is exceedingly vulnerable

01:25:01.540 | to violence.

01:25:03.320 | And one freighter, one oil tanker is vulnerable to any nation state or any even just private

01:25:12.520 | contractor who can accumulate some very basic weapons to threaten that.

01:25:18.200 | And if that happens, the global trade of shipping could potentially implode for everything from

01:25:24.440 | the real risk of having your ship sunk to a destruction of the insurance markets, massive

01:25:31.640 | increases in cost just across the board.

01:25:35.000 | Go back to the insurance markets.

01:25:37.080 | That's the one that is going to hit hardest the quickest.

01:25:39.840 | Right.

01:25:40.840 | The insurance.

01:25:41.840 | You can't even really go into the Black Sea right now because you can't get insurance

01:25:47.920 | for it because it's mined in certain areas.

01:25:51.000 | Right.

01:25:52.000 | And so we see, so if that continues, then basically the entire, all of the lifestyle

01:25:58.920 | that we've become accustomed to because of globalization falls apart on a differing level

01:26:05.120 | in many, many regions.

01:26:07.440 | And at its core, one of the things that I think I finally understood, which was really

01:26:12.440 | remarkable to me, was, and by the way, this has been a big challenge to me because politically

01:26:20.240 | speaking I have been exceedingly anti-intervention, politically speaking.

01:26:26.560 | I haven't wanted the United States to intervene in the world.

01:26:30.200 | I've been a Ron Paul acolyte since I was in my teens, have closed down all the military

01:26:34.160 | bases around the world, end the standing army, et cetera.

01:26:38.120 | And perhaps that, you know, it seems to reflect moral and ethical values that make sense to

01:26:42.840 | me, but I struggled to understand the perspective of those who made the opposite point.

01:26:51.200 | But Zion made this statement that I read, and first of all, he said that globalization

01:26:55.720 | was invented to isolate the Soviets.

01:26:58.860 | That was the basic goal, and that worked.

01:27:02.080 | And then he said this, I'm quoting from his chapter called The Map of the Future, and

01:27:10.040 | he's talking about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he makes this strong

01:27:14.400 | argument as to why North America is going to be the best performing region of the world

01:27:19.840 | for the foreseeable future.

01:27:22.280 | And he says this, "When it comes to the fate of the NAFTA system, most indicators look

01:27:26.240 | wildly positive.

01:27:28.240 | Let's begin with base structure.

01:27:30.800 | Part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan.

01:27:38.160 | The core precept of the order," and by order he means the American order, the American

01:27:42.960 | commitment to secure the world, right, world peace, "The core precept of the order is that

01:27:50.080 | the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control.

01:27:56.600 | The American market was supposed to be sacrificed.

01:28:00.320 | The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed.

01:28:03.920 | American companies were supposed to be sacrificed.

01:28:06.680 | Thus, anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the

01:28:11.200 | American market, worker, and corporate structure are hyper-competitive.

01:28:15.440 | Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are

01:28:20.920 | not for export, but instead for consumption within North America."

01:28:25.360 | And he goes on and talks about some examples of comparing American firms versus Chinese

01:28:29.080 | firms, but at its core, this has helped me to understand why this deglobalized future

01:28:36.400 | is probable, because Americans are angry about offshoring, right?

01:28:42.440 | Americans are pissed off about their jobs going to China.

01:28:45.000 | They're angry about it.

01:28:46.520 | Look at the political waves that happened in 2016.

01:28:49.760 | It's a lot more insidious than that.

01:28:54.440 | I mean, what you're saying is like a surface explanation, but the real explanation has

01:29:00.760 | to do with the age demographics of the countries that were providing those services to us.

01:29:06.880 | Right, right.

01:29:08.080 | So I totally agree, and that's a huge other conversation of the population.

01:29:11.760 | But I guess what I'm focusing on is I think I understand now, because this helps me to

01:29:17.360 | make sense of even the politics of the United States that I know, and that I understand

01:29:23.840 | the feeling of the people, that Americans at this point in time are pretty much set

01:29:30.240 | on, "Yeah, we don't want to be involved with that."

01:29:33.240 | And the people who are making the arguments for American domination of the world don't

01:29:38.080 | seem to be very effective in convincing others of why that's the case.

01:29:41.600 | So maybe a deglobalized world would have such difficult effects that all of a sudden the

01:29:46.400 | American electorate would swing and go back the other direction and say, "No, let's

01:29:50.120 | take it back over."

01:29:51.120 | But, and I, Zaihan didn't address that in this book, but it is a rather difficult thing

01:29:58.480 | to recognize on how vulnerable the global system is.

01:30:02.960 | You're not going to switch it back either.

01:30:05.000 | It is deglobalization.

01:30:06.000 | It's already deglobalized.

01:30:09.240 | And even if you have had this wonderful revelation and you are correct about what you so wonderfully

01:30:17.280 | illustrated verbally for everyone, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

01:30:22.560 | You cannot throw a switch and get it back.

01:30:24.920 | It is gone.

01:30:27.480 | It's like you just turned 40.

01:30:31.600 | You can't get your 20s back.

01:30:33.480 | They're a decade in the past.

01:30:36.600 | Everything that you just mentioned took decades to build.

01:30:43.200 | And a whole different set of generations and attitudes and everything else.

01:30:48.800 | And you just are not going to get that back.

01:30:53.520 | And what this means is, is like a friend of mine said, when the pandemic started, he goes,

01:31:00.800 | this is a time when fortunes are made and lost.

01:31:05.680 | And what we're talking about now with deglobalization and Josh Sheets of radical personal finance,

01:31:15.520 | there are radical finance stuff for us to talk about.

01:31:19.440 | Because now of a time of everyone bringing it home is going to be a time of huge financial

01:31:30.720 | gain ability, especially in manufacturing, especially in the automation of manufacturing,

01:31:39.200 | especially and this goes all the way down to computer coding.

01:31:43.360 | But you were right.

01:31:46.000 | We were sacrificed as not the workers of the world.

01:31:50.720 | And so what did we become?

01:31:52.840 | We became the people who sent man to the moon and back a dozen times with the equivalent

01:31:58.720 | of slide rule calculations, not even computers.

01:32:04.800 | We did the 747.

01:32:06.720 | We did all the other stuff that we did.

01:32:09.200 | We invented the transistor, the silicon chip, the integrated circuit, everything else.

01:32:16.160 | We didn't become the workers of the world.

01:32:20.400 | We let other places do that.

01:32:22.880 | We became the intellectual property for the world.

01:32:27.120 | I mean, much of what the silicon foundries in Taiwan run off of is American intellectual

01:32:34.720 | property still held in the United States of America.

01:32:39.040 | When Shell and Halliburton and some of the other companies that are as big as those,

01:32:48.400 | there's two more, left Russia, they did not only took their workers, but those workers

01:32:55.840 | and the intellectual property of exactly which way does that drill bit go on to the

01:33:03.680 | drilling rig?

01:33:04.680 | Do you turn it left?

01:33:05.680 | Do you turn it right?

01:33:06.680 | You know, stuff as simple as that, the intellectual property got up and left.

01:33:12.800 | I mean, same thing when Venezuela had the full collapse of their system and the communism,

01:33:19.120 | the loss of power and rapid inflation, they couldn't feed people, massive starvation there.

01:33:29.040 | Everyone who could, including by foot, left Venezuela for Colombia, for Peru, for Mexico,

01:33:38.040 | for Brazil.

01:33:39.440 | The brain drain out of Venezuela was intensive.

01:33:43.600 | Yeah, a hundred percent.

01:33:46.960 | And guess what we got here?

01:33:48.520 | We got a lot of brain here.

01:33:50.920 | Right, right.

01:33:53.480 | Yeah.

01:33:54.800 | So, I guess if I were to try to connect these themes, we're living in a time where at its

01:34:05.960 | core the basic building blocks, right?

01:34:11.640 | You talked about mining, but we skipped over it very quickly.

01:34:14.240 | If explosives are much more expensive or much more difficult to come by and there aren't

01:34:21.000 | enough of them due to the shortages of the base materials, then that can substantially

01:34:26.560 | hamper mining and then you have less production from the mines.

01:34:29.520 | And then there's a knock-on effect of not being able to get the basic materials that

01:34:33.120 | you need out of the earth all around the world.

01:34:36.240 | And so we're living in, I guess, a more day-to-day experience.

01:34:40.440 | Basically every industry I talk to in the United States is right now, nothing is flowing,

01:34:48.240 | nothing is working like it's supposed to.

01:34:51.080 | And so they're constantly having to come up with workarounds.

01:34:53.200 | You have everything from car manufacturers, shipping cars where they have the buttons

01:34:57.920 | placed but because they can't get the chips, the function of the buttons doesn't work.

01:35:02.960 | I have a family member who's a boat dealer and he's got 30 outboard engines on order

01:35:08.720 | from his outboard engine supplier but he can't get them.

01:35:12.840 | They've been on order for a year and a half and so he's constantly taking this part apart

01:35:16.840 | and taking that one apart and putting on the lower unit from this one to make it work in

01:35:20.080 | this application, etc.

01:35:22.280 | And everything down to an electrician not being able to get enough plastic electrical

01:35:27.280 | boxes to put for the switch covers and every industry is disrupted.

01:35:32.520 | So the basic expectation that so many of us have had is that this is a disruption due

01:35:37.760 | to COVID, due to the government shutting down businesses, due to China manufacturing collapsing,

01:35:43.840 | due to weird shipping anomalies and whatnot.

01:35:46.720 | But the argument of Zaihan and other people would be this is COVID simply accelerated

01:35:54.200 | the already existing problems and the world of COVID and of toilet paper shortages was

01:36:00.080 | simply a harbinger of the world that we can expect to live in for the coming years and

01:36:05.040 | that these trends are not trends that can be fixed immediately in the same way that

01:36:12.160 | the food inflation is not exclusive, excuse me, the price inflation in the cost of food

01:36:18.840 | that we can see very visibly each week when we go grocery shopping.

01:36:24.140 | This is not exclusively a financial phenomenon.

01:36:27.680 | It may have some financial effects from the growth of the money supply, etc.

01:36:32.440 | But at its core, it reflects back, it's the harbinger of these fundamental issues that

01:36:38.600 | you're talking about going all the way back to the amount of natural gas in production,

01:36:42.720 | the flows of natural gas around the world, the availability of natural gas to be used

01:36:46.480 | for fertilizer and all of the knock-on effects.

01:36:50.480 | And that's a very sobering thing to think about, especially for someone like me, right?

01:36:53.800 | I don't know what year you were born, but I was born in the mid-80s, which means that

01:37:00.120 | for me, Stephen, the most difficult statement that I read in Ziohan's book, I'm going

01:37:07.400 | to pull it up here and read it to you, because it was for me just the most sobering thing

01:37:12.600 | because he said this, "The Halcyon days of 1980 to 2000," so let me back up, he

01:37:27.960 | was talking about birth rates and it's in a chapter called "History Speeds Up"

01:37:32.280 | and he says this, "But there was nothing about it that was normal.

01:37:36.160 | Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans' commitment to the global order,

01:37:40.000 | and that order hasn't served American strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

01:37:46.680 | Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something

01:37:51.200 | in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery, like, I don't know, say a war,

01:37:56.680 | breaks the global system beyond repair, assuming that the Americans don't do it themselves.

01:38:01.280 | But even if the Americans choose to continue holding up the world's collective civilizational

01:38:05.680 | ceiling, there was nothing about the heyday of globalization that is sustainable.

01:38:10.160 | The Halcyon days of 1980 to 2015 are over.

01:38:14.100 | The collapse in birth rates that began across the developed world in the 1960s and across

01:38:18.360 | the developing world in the 1990s now has decades of steam behind it.

01:38:23.520 | The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization

01:38:27.520 | proved equally true for accelerated demographics.

01:38:30.860 | In 1700, the average British woman bore 4.6 children.

01:38:34.680 | That's almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian

01:38:39.000 | woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the

01:38:44.520 | early 1970s.

01:38:46.640 | Now in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below.

01:38:51.960 | This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030.

01:38:57.280 | Now comes the other side of the hill, and it goes on and talks about.

01:39:00.400 | But the idea that, and I'll read this final paragraph, "By most measures, most notably

01:39:07.080 | in education, wealth, and health, globalization has been great, but it was never going to

01:39:11.280 | last.

01:39:12.280 | What you and your parents, and in some cases grandparents, assumed as the normal, good,

01:39:16.520 | and right way of living, that is, the past seven decades or so, is a historic anomaly

01:39:21.520 | for the human condition, both in strategic and demographic terms.

01:39:25.440 | The period of 1980 to 2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment

01:39:32.040 | in time, a moment that has ended, a moment that will certainly not come again in our

01:39:36.280 | lifetimes."

01:39:37.600 | And that isn't even the bad news.

01:39:40.480 | And for me, that's just, it's an incredibly difficult thing to understand or to absorb,

01:39:46.080 | even emotionally, because as a millennial, my entire lifespan has been lived in this

01:39:52.480 | globalized world.

01:39:54.280 | As a financial planner, virtually all of the techniques of my business have been developed

01:40:01.760 | and proven during this period of time.

01:40:04.840 | Yes, we hearken back a little bit to the history of the stock market since the early 1900s,

01:40:09.520 | and we put quotes since the Great Depression, and we look at that.

01:40:15.680 | But basically, the entire industry in which I've spent my entire career is built upon

01:40:21.600 | this period.

01:40:22.900 | And yet, we see the cracks in that period, and while I hope that Zaihin is wrong, because

01:40:27.840 | I like living in the globalized world, it requires me to fundamentally try to figure

01:40:35.080 | out where we go from here, and then how to find the opportunities in it.

01:40:39.720 | And by philosophy, I believe that times of great transition are the times of opportunity.

01:40:45.320 | It's been a thought that I've had, years ago I had a friend on Palm Beach who had made

01:40:49.780 | his fortune in the oil business, and he gave me his autobiography.

01:40:52.960 | And it was like he was this Texas wildcatter driving around Texas doing deals and wrapping

01:40:58.480 | things up.

01:40:59.480 | And I always loved his story, and I always thought, "Poor little old me, why can't I

01:41:02.240 | live in a world like that, where I can go out and live an adventure and make a fortune

01:41:06.800 | in a changing market?"

01:41:08.080 | Well, perhaps there'll be one coming in the next 10 years.

01:41:11.400 | But it is hard, as a young guy, it's hard for me to understand and to even figure out

01:41:17.280 | how to deal with the changing world, and then to sort through and say what things are true

01:41:23.240 | and what things are not, what things in the investment markets are true, what things are

01:41:26.560 | not, how does this apply?

01:41:28.600 | It's a pretty sobering thinking process for me.

01:41:32.400 | >>Adam: Zion's statement that the next five years will be a lot harder and rougher and

01:41:42.400 | a time of more transition than your grandparents went through in World War II from 1940 to

01:41:50.200 | 1946.

01:41:51.240 | That is a statement that hardly any, I mean, me understanding World War II history exceptionally

01:41:57.120 | well.

01:41:58.120 | I understand it, but everyone else is going, "Huh?

01:42:01.880 | What?"

01:42:02.960 | They don't get it.

01:42:03.960 | And one of the things I said to you, probably, it was probably December of the year when

01:42:11.960 | I saw the stuff coming, and I was trying to get you to understand what the potential for

01:42:18.040 | famine was, was that I said, "Josh, understand this."

01:42:24.280 | I go, "Of the four children that you have, there is the possibility that your children

01:42:32.680 | can lose."

01:42:34.640 | I said, "The potential exists.

01:42:38.440 | The possibility is there.

01:42:40.960 | You might be rolling two or three dice for that possibility to come up, but nevertheless,

01:42:46.520 | it is a measurable possibility that you don't like, that your children could lose one of

01:42:54.680 | their parents and one or two of their siblings.

01:42:59.480 | That is a distinct possibility."

01:43:02.640 | I think it was then that you knew the seriousness of what I was trying to foreshadow nine months

01:43:13.400 | ago.

01:43:16.480 | No question.

01:43:19.320 | When you think about it, as we've talked since then, we spent a lot of time at the

01:43:24.840 | beginning of this podcast talking about the fundamental layers.

01:43:27.840 | But basically, the news every few months gets worse and worse.

01:43:32.680 | You go from massive regulations on price increases to natural gas, to basically the entire supply

01:43:39.760 | of natural gas from Russia being cut off from Europe for a time, to the potential of the

01:43:44.480 | entire natural gas supply of Russia disappearing due to the equipment failing to work and all

01:43:49.680 | of it being frozen in the pipes.

01:43:51.840 | Then you go to—you talk about food supplies being down because of localized drought and

01:43:58.240 | people putting on less fertilizer.

01:44:00.040 | And then you have the number one and number two—that's not true.

01:44:03.840 | Anyway, very high-ranking, very high-level wheat suppliers of Russia and Ukraine being

01:44:10.920 | completely cut off from the global markets due to sanctions and due to war and due to

01:44:16.760 | their ships not being able to get out and their product rotting in the streets.

01:44:20.640 | And so it's gotten worse and worse and worse every single week since for the last year.

01:44:26.680 | I can tell you right now, okay, the biblical part of the famine is really going to hit

01:44:32.760 | Arabia and Africa.

01:44:34.280 | If you go into Zion's videos on YouTube, and there's many, just type in Peter Zion,

01:44:40.640 | get ready to lose three days.

01:44:43.000 | Z-I-E-H-A-N.

01:44:45.880 | And he will show you maps of who produces what, who's self-sustaining, who's a net exporter,

01:44:53.400 | importer of everything from wheat to corn to energy and everything in and out that you

01:45:01.760 | can possibly imagine, metals, commodities.

01:45:07.560 | The guy has got to have an idyllic memory for all this.

01:45:12.120 | He's got to be like a functional Sheldon Cooper, literally, of the level that this

01:45:18.840 | guy is operating at is stupendous.

01:45:24.240 | Not to say there isn't anything, he's not fallible, but he's been working his entire

01:45:33.680 | life for these current years.

01:45:37.320 | And now is the time that he was put on this planet for to be the voice of education to

01:45:45.640 | all of those of us who will listen and comprehend what he is trying to say.

01:45:54.680 | And it is absolutely startling.

01:45:57.600 | And it's like, see, what else did I have in the outline that you wanted to talk about?

01:46:03.400 | Because we really need to get into some of the financial opportunities here for people,

01:46:08.920 | because this is called "radical personal finance," I don't want it to be "Harris

01:46:12.920 | End of the World Finance," but it's called "radical personal finance."

01:46:18.400 | I want to put some radical into that part of the personal finance aspect of your show.

01:46:24.600 | Right.

01:46:25.600 | So let's talk for a moment about the food situation, what practically can be done.

01:46:30.000 | Number one, most of us have access to food.

01:46:33.080 | And so at a minimum—

01:46:34.560 | Today.

01:46:35.560 | Correct.

01:46:36.560 | Today.

01:46:37.560 | Today.

01:46:38.560 | At a minimum, stockpiling for your family, your loved ones, your neighborhood, stockpiling

01:46:41.360 | the food that you have access to, and the largest quantities that you can make happen

01:46:47.640 | is a great idea.

01:46:50.120 | And the audience of radical personal finance, the numbers involved to do that are simply

01:46:54.520 | a rounding error in most of our financial lifespans.

01:46:58.400 | But if you went out and you spent $5,000 stockpiling food, then that's for most of us a rounding

01:47:04.880 | error, but yet that could be the stuff of life for those that you love for a significant

01:47:09.760 | period of time.

01:47:10.760 | And I'll get to the resources on that in a moment.

01:47:12.800 | Number two, I think it's important to think about supplies of food.

01:47:18.400 | What is available for me?

01:47:19.680 | And so if you're living in the downtown area of a city and you're far away from agricultural

01:47:26.760 | production, that's difficult because there's a lot of people between you and the agricultural

01:47:30.960 | production.

01:47:31.960 | So you want to be thinking carefully, "Is there a place or a way that I can get closer

01:47:35.760 | to local producers or local supplies of food?"

01:47:40.560 | I think on a global level, the place that is best positioned for this is North America,

01:47:48.080 | most importantly the United States and Canada.

01:47:50.760 | The United States is the world's largest agricultural producer and exporter.

01:47:54.680 | Anyway, a huge, huge production of food.

01:47:57.960 | And all of the natural materials, the natural gas, etc., are more abundant in the United

01:48:02.840 | States.

01:48:03.840 | They're cheaper in the United States than anywhere else.

01:48:05.320 | And so if you're looking on a regional level or a global level, the United States is best

01:48:11.120 | positioned of any country or region in the world to go through, to do better than other

01:48:18.080 | places.

01:48:19.560 | And there are other places in the world that also may do well, but the United States is

01:48:25.880 | best positioned.

01:48:27.400 | I think even within that, you can look to say, right, one of the pieces of advice that

01:48:33.360 | when Steve and I were talking about this privately, Steve told me, he said, "Go, you need to

01:48:38.520 | have a plan to go get food from the ocean."

01:48:41.200 | So since I have a fairly mobile family, maybe I buy a boat, a fishing trawler, or something

01:48:46.720 | like that that I could live on and have easy access to the oceans.

01:48:49.720 | Go ahead.

01:48:50.720 | We had two levels there.

01:48:52.360 | One, I said, "Start by getting to know the fishing industry in your local locale where

01:48:59.560 | you're living."

01:49:00.560 | And you go, "I love it."

01:49:02.680 | And I said, and another friend and I, we were kind of like war gaming for you.

01:49:11.080 | Okay.

01:49:12.080 | We were putting ourselves, which is something I do very well.

01:49:15.440 | I can put myself in your shoes mentally pretty well and try to like look out through your

01:49:24.040 | eyes and your ears and from your point of view and get a feel for things.

01:49:31.400 | And we were war gaming and I was talking with a buddy of mine, Scott, about this as like,

01:49:39.320 | I think the Gulf Coast, the Southern Gulf Coast would be a great place, especially the

01:49:46.520 | part that gets up, like the Ozarks and a few things, but close to the ocean.

01:49:53.000 | And my friend goes, "Oh, hell, tell him to go down and find like a working trawler that's

01:50:01.160 | not being used for fishing and just have him buy that or rent that and go live aboard the

01:50:08.200 | trawler."

01:50:09.200 | I go, "One, your anchorage is free to cheap, whether you're a dock or not a dock.

01:50:16.200 | You got a place to live, you're isolated, or you can be in a big community.

01:50:22.280 | You can literally fish off the boat and you're in the middle of the fishing community.

01:50:26.440 | So no matter what happens to nitrogen gas, nitric acid, ammonia, fertilizer, crop reports,

01:50:37.840 | the oceans are still going to be there.

01:50:39.880 | And as anyone who has fished a lot in the oceans, they go, "Oh, I can catch my dinner

01:50:45.000 | every night on the beach."

01:50:47.640 | It's very easy to do.

01:50:49.640 | Let alone using other methods of fishing.

01:50:58.320 | And see, it's like that way, it's like, let's say, you get the fishing trawler in Alabama

01:51:06.160 | and you want to move over to the Panhandle of Florida or Mississippi.

01:51:10.080 | It's like, fine, you and the kids ride in the trawler.

01:51:15.160 | It's a little expensive for diesel, but it's okay.

01:51:17.640 | You can move to a different spot that has more advantages to you.

01:51:21.400 | And your wife drives a car down the road and you meet up at the new port.

01:51:26.720 | So you still got your car, yet you got your mobile house, yet you got access to something

01:51:34.040 | that is completely unaffected by everything we just talked about.

01:51:38.680 | The fish are going to continue to do what fish do in the ocean, reproduce and grow and

01:51:44.120 | eat smaller fish to become bigger fish.

01:51:46.960 | And that's one of the things I wanted to put out there is if some of your people want this

01:51:57.560 | type of thinking brought to them for their family, for their rounding error corrections,

01:52:08.720 | I am available for a period of time to do this for them.

01:52:13.960 | Go to harris1234.com and or email me, Stephen, S-T-E-V-E-N@harris1234.com.

01:52:23.960 | And we can try to put some of this best practices, best thinking intelligence for you and your

01:52:33.520 | family and what you're concerned with.

01:52:36.720 | Because what Josh and I are talking about are, it's the 10,000 foot view.

01:52:41.360 | If you get the real 10,000 foot view, you're going to mess your diaper because it's scary.

01:52:48.040 | And it's going to become scary and a lot of uncertainty.

01:52:52.680 | Remember the early days of the pandemic, it will be 10 times scarier than that because

01:52:57.860 | there won't be nothing on the grocery shelves, potentially.

01:53:02.960 | Quite possibly.

01:53:06.720 | And that's an example of, that's some of the off the wall thinking that I've been known

01:53:14.360 | for, for think tanks and different communities and stuff like that.

01:53:20.280 | It's like, I can see the series of dominoes and the first one beginning to fall and I'm

01:53:26.760 | going, and the last one, which will take a half hour for them all to fall, the last one

01:53:32.400 | hits the stick of dynamite next to your favorite cat in a cage.

01:53:37.560 | It's like, ah, my cat's going to die.

01:53:39.560 | It's like, what do you mean?

01:53:42.400 | Because I see the person walking out of the bathroom, who's going to trip over the first

01:53:47.120 | domino that starts the whole chain going, that goes for a half hour, that hits the switch

01:53:54.880 | for the dynamite next to your cat in the cage drinking the cream.

01:53:58.440 | And I go, ah, your cat's going to die.

01:54:00.400 | It's like, you're crazy.

01:54:02.400 | No, and by the way, just a strong endorsement, Stephen Harris is an idea generating machine.

01:54:07.640 | It's his core skill.

01:54:09.520 | So he's very, very good at finding good practical solutions to specific scenarios.

01:54:14.000 | And I wholeheartedly endorse anyone who wants to work with him.

01:54:17.760 | You'll find excellent thinking and extremely knowledgeable and connected guy.

01:54:22.720 | Yes.

01:54:23.720 | And my rates are the same as the Mandalorian.

01:54:27.040 | My price is high.

01:54:29.840 | The only thing more expensive is walking around in the dark, blindfolded, in the minefield

01:54:37.800 | with pterodactyls with night vision waiting to try to pick you up off of the ground for

01:54:42.840 | food before you walk into the mines.

01:54:45.480 | Right, right.

01:54:46.840 | I think one of the things that is important to point out, we talked about though in terms

01:54:50.560 | of financial opportunity, I think there are very good reasons to believe that this next

01:54:56.200 | couple of decades will be, next couple of decades.

01:55:01.400 | First of all, if this trend towards deglobalization is proven to be correct and continuing in

01:55:08.720 | the fullness of time, again, this trend, it bears very strong possibilities for many regions

01:55:14.920 | of the world.

01:55:15.920 | In a separate episode, I'll probably go over some of the other regions that can win.

01:55:19.360 | But in the United States, for my primarily US American audience, in the United States,

01:55:25.560 | this potentially looks like a tremendous boom, a tremendous economic boom.

01:55:31.280 | If global manufacturing, excuse me, if global supply lines continue to face pressure, and

01:55:38.160 | if we see the continuing trends as far as the collapse of Chinese manufacturing, much

01:55:43.880 | of that manufacturing coming back to North America, then some of the long-term trends

01:55:48.320 | that hold huge possibilities are the growth of manufacturing in North America, the United

01:55:53.920 | States, Mexico, the interaction.

01:55:56.640 | Go ahead.

01:55:57.640 | It's more than that.

01:55:58.640 | It's more than that.

01:55:59.640 | And Zion gets into it.

01:56:02.360 | And it's like he gets into secondary smelting or recycled smelting versus primary smelting.

01:56:10.480 | And primary smelting is where you use a carbon product like coke or natural gas to reduce

01:56:16.600 | the primary ore into the virgin copper or the virgin steel or iron that is used.

01:56:25.920 | And Michigan is an iron ore and a copper ore state.

01:56:30.840 | And I'm in Michigan.

01:56:31.840 | And I got friends with the natural gas well.

01:56:35.080 | And I'm talking to them.

01:56:36.520 | And I go, "Oh, you want to know what's more profitable than making electricity with natural

01:56:41.800 | gas to go to cryptocurrency than it is to sell the natural gas outright?"

01:56:47.400 | I go, "We're going to smelt steel."

01:56:50.080 | Because, I mean, we're sitting right here next to the Great Lakes with the well.

01:56:55.680 | And they own a trucking company.

01:56:57.440 | And it's like we can get the raw iron ore off of the main Great Lakes freighters that

01:57:07.280 | drop it off in Toledo.

01:57:09.280 | And it's like we can make virgin iron.

01:57:13.760 | Even if it's virgin pig iron, we can make virgin pig iron from natural gas and iron

01:57:19.120 | ore.

01:57:20.120 | So, I mean, the opportunities are—the opportunities literally go from the Industrial Revolution,

01:57:32.000 | which started with Bessemer.

01:57:34.720 | Bessemer was a Gutenberg-type event.

01:57:37.920 | And I cover Gutenberg-type events in my second podcast, the one where I talk about APS.

01:57:45.480 | It's the theoretical division of Amazon.

01:57:47.520 | You know, Amazon made Amazon Web Services, which makes more money than Amazon does because

01:57:53.000 | they had spare computational and storage ability for Amazon.

01:57:58.040 | So, they started renting it out.

01:58:01.480 | I made something more profitable than Amazon Web Services called APS, Amazon Power Services,

01:58:07.520 | because they're going to a fleet of electric vehicles or trying to.

01:58:14.600 | And it's like I could talk for eight hours, four on positive, four on negative, about

01:58:18.600 | EVs and all the aspects of it.

01:58:20.560 | As a development engineer for Chrysler, Diamond Chrysler for 10 years, I understand the fundamentals

01:58:25.920 | of internal combustion operation.

01:58:28.280 | I understand how EVs can integrate and how they can decimate the grid, how they can prop

01:58:33.960 | it up and how they can decimate it at the same time.

01:58:37.280 | And knowing the way politicians and stupidity goes, it's going to go more towards decimation

01:58:42.640 | than it is positive.

01:58:44.600 | But I make in my second podcast, and it's going to be at harris1234.com or use the words

01:58:51.560 | I told you.

01:58:53.280 | I go over the idea of APS, Amazon Power Systems, and how you can stop environmental thinking

01:59:04.400 | completely.

01:59:05.400 | It's become the litmus test for everything.

01:59:08.880 | It's like, is it planet friendly?

01:59:11.640 | Shut up.

01:59:12.640 | Okay, stop environmental thinking, think smart.

01:59:16.520 | When you think smart, you answer your environmental goals you wanted and you go wildly beyond

01:59:24.480 | them.

01:59:25.480 | It's like saying, "Hey, can we put Sputnik in orbit?"

01:59:29.000 | It's like, "What do you mean?

01:59:30.200 | I'm talking to you from Mars."

01:59:31.640 | I mean, that is how much better smart thinking is than limited thinking.

01:59:38.160 | Because you just wanted Sputnik, but nevermind the moon, you got the Mars in the same thinking

01:59:44.560 | process.

01:59:45.560 | And it goes back to a system that I was a six person group that created at Chrysler

01:59:50.960 | called Speed the Market, which became the Chrysler Development System, which became

01:59:55.000 | the reasons the goddamn Germans bought Chrysler Corporation was to figure out how Chrysler

02:00:00.440 | made more money per vehicle than anyone else in the world.

02:00:05.000 | Now Toyota made more vehicles than anyone else in the world, and we made less, but we

02:00:10.920 | made more money per vehicle than anyone else in the world.

02:00:15.480 | And this started getting implemented with the radical changes that we did in '94, which

02:00:24.360 | culminated with the Red Blob commercial going through talking about a new day.

02:00:35.840 | But yeah, so anyways, I go through Amazon, and it's really kind of a fun story of the

02:00:44.640 | way I did this, but it's to show you what is possible when you think with no box.

02:00:52.960 | And not everyone can do it.

02:00:54.160 | I mean, I don't mean out of the, it's like, "Oh, he's an out-of-box thinker."

02:00:57.720 | No, it's on my resume.

02:00:59.600 | It says, "Steven Harris, ENTP, no-box thinker."

02:01:03.120 | I mean, that is the start of my resume.

02:01:05.880 | I do not have a box, nor do I have an ego where I'm concerned about, it's like, "Oh,

02:01:12.880 | I'm not going to defend any last idea as the hill to die on.

02:01:16.880 | I will come up with 12 ideas for you in five minutes."

02:01:20.920 | And it's going to be like, you're going to go, "No, no, done, did it, doesn't work,

02:01:26.800 | interesting, no," and it's like, "Oh, crap, what's that one?"

02:01:31.480 | And see, because I'm trying to generate that many ideas.

02:01:36.560 | So you get to the, "Oh, crap, I never thought of that one," where things that took three

02:01:42.000 | years happened in three days or three weeks, which is the fundamental behind the speed

02:01:49.360 | to market Chrysler development system philosophy.

02:01:53.560 | But when I apply that to you and your family, that's how we come up with Josh, buy a trawler

02:01:59.800 | on the southern coast of the United States.

02:02:02.680 | Right, right, absolutely.

02:02:04.760 | So question, what I wanted to wrap up with is finding ideas.

02:02:09.880 | Oh, we're a long ways from wrapping up.

02:02:13.000 | We're going to do the longest ever episode.

02:02:14.720 | This is called Joshua Sheets' Radical Personal Finance.

02:02:18.520 | There's not an ending time.

02:02:21.320 | They can just press pause and listen to the rest later.

02:02:24.960 | In the meantime, you get half a week off, buddy.

02:02:28.080 | So here's my thought.

02:02:31.440 | I have solved, in my mind, a lot of problems that we face, and there are very few problems

02:02:36.280 | that I ... That's why I retain huge amounts of optimism, because human creatures are fundamentally

02:02:42.680 | intelligent, creative, and capable of working together to come up with never-before-heard

02:02:47.920 | solutions.

02:02:48.920 | And times of great disruption bring opportunities to create tremendous solutions.

02:02:55.120 | And so even with talking about some of these deglobalization trends, this will be a time

02:03:01.400 | of tremendous growth and tremendous change, and that creates opportunity.

02:03:07.000 | When money is moving, when things are shifting, it creates opportunity for entrepreneurs to

02:03:12.640 | get in the way of it and grab some of it by bringing solutions to the marketplace.

02:03:17.120 | The United States is very likely to experience a strong growth in manufacturing.

02:03:22.800 | Mexico is very well positioned to have incredible economic growth supporting the United States.

02:03:28.200 | There are perhaps other regions ... We're going to have inflationary growth to

02:03:33.680 | quote Zion.

02:03:36.320 | And the United States doesn't have great demographics, but it has vastly better demographics than

02:03:41.440 | most regions of the world, which means that ...

02:03:45.720 | The United States has Mexico.

02:03:47.520 | Right.

02:03:48.520 | For us, meaning for us as people who are working, who are involved in the marketplace, unemployment

02:03:54.680 | I think will continue to be very low.

02:03:57.160 | There are jobs available for anybody who can retool, can retrain.

02:04:01.380 | You see all across the United States, you just see right now, "Help Wanted" signs everywhere

02:04:05.120 | that people are struggling to get workers, and that will continue, which means that ...

02:04:09.480 | Josh, there are jobs for anyone who can breathe.

02:04:12.920 | Yeah.

02:04:13.920 | And so even for our children, our children live in a world of tremendous employment opportunities

02:04:18.780 | and tremendous opportunities.

02:04:22.400 | From the food perspective, I think that fundamentally food shortages will lead potentially to massive

02:04:31.520 | increases in the amount ... Sorry, we said ... We're not supposed to use the word shortages.

02:04:36.880 | Famine.

02:04:37.880 | Josh, food outages.

02:04:39.640 | Food outages.

02:04:40.640 | Food ...

02:04:41.640 | It's gone.

02:04:42.880 | Food outages can lead to massive increases in the growth of food.

02:04:46.920 | And so here's my optimistic argument in face of food outages.

02:04:53.120 | Number one, in the modern world, because food has been so cheap, we pay no attention to

02:04:58.000 | creating food.

02:04:59.520 | But every single city, every single suburb, every single town is potentially some of the

02:05:05.240 | most productive farmland in the world.

02:05:08.360 | Years ago I interviewed, was it Curtis Stone I think it was, who was a backyard farmer.

02:05:13.560 | And if you're not familiar with him, Steven, he was a guy who started farming in people's

02:05:17.360 | backyards and he created a business where he was farming in ... I can't remember how

02:05:25.440 | many people's backyards, but literally he was sharecropping in people's suburban backyards

02:05:30.320 | and producing a business where he was making six figures a year from his farming operation

02:05:35.080 | and he was producing huge amounts of food.

02:05:38.340 | He was getting ...

02:05:39.340 | Oh, I remember this guy.

02:05:41.120 | I remember this guy.

02:05:42.120 | He was fantastic.

02:05:43.300 | And he was actually doing the entire thing.

02:05:45.000 | Hold on, let me finish.

02:05:46.000 | He was doing the entire thing exclusively with bicycle transportation.

02:05:50.640 | The only element in his system where he was dependent upon fuel inputs was he had a gasoline

02:05:56.600 | powered rototiller that he would put on a bicycle and he would transport it between

02:06:02.680 | his farms with a bicycle trailer for his gas powered rototiller.

02:06:06.640 | His production per acre on that kind of small scale was huge.

02:06:11.280 | So you look at the American ...

02:06:12.280 | No, no, no.

02:06:13.280 | Completely wrong.

02:06:14.280 | All right.

02:06:15.280 | Completely wrong.

02:06:16.280 | Go ahead.

02:06:17.280 | Why is that wrong?

02:06:18.280 | He was making an awful lot of food for people, but he was not feeding anyone.

02:06:26.120 | I don't ... I don't ...

02:06:27.120 | Okay.

02:06:28.120 | Hold on, hold on.

02:06:29.120 | So you're talking about the difference between staple crops and calorie crops versus vegetables

02:06:32.060 | and kind of ancillary stuff.

02:06:35.400 | Absolutely.

02:06:36.400 | Now, I have a little private group called Steve's Power Circle, okay?

02:06:42.200 | And it's very hard to get into it, okay?

02:06:46.760 | And we're very blunt in it.

02:06:48.960 | Now I have this member, her first name is Rachel, and she is role model in quality when

02:06:59.440 | it comes to ag.

02:07:00.920 | And I was so scared about what I wrote and what was going on.

02:07:05.880 | We were talking about this in January on the Power Circle.

02:07:10.480 | And she goes, "Steve, what should I plant?"

02:07:12.400 | I go, "Potatoes.

02:07:14.120 | Rachel, do potatoes."

02:07:17.060 | And she goes, "Well, also there were some like butternut squashes that go good in Michigan."

02:07:22.360 | Because she's up in Traverse City.

02:07:23.680 | And it's like, we need calorie crops.

02:07:25.840 | I mean, I was so scared that if I had the land, I would have planted potatoes because

02:07:32.880 | that guy was brilliant in what he was doing, okay?

02:07:36.840 | I saw the videos and everything else.

02:07:38.680 | I think Justin Rhodes endorsed him.

02:07:41.560 | And it was brilliant the way he was using other people's resources to make himself and

02:07:46.920 | them money.

02:07:48.440 | But he was doing a lot of what he did.

02:07:52.800 | I blame 20% for the billion that are going to die, I blame 20% on it of the crap he was

02:08:04.560 | feeding others and that he had swallowed.

02:08:08.320 | That was the all organic, non-GMO, non-this, non-that, with a magnet near the tomato pointing

02:08:18.360 | north for three days out of the week that only ended in Y, whatever, okay?

02:08:26.360 | And he made a lot of money.

02:08:27.880 | He did good.

02:08:28.880 | He did it smart.

02:08:30.840 | He did like the really good parts of permaculture.

02:08:34.400 | But he was, like you said, he was making the tomatoes and the vegetables and everything

02:08:38.880 | else.

02:08:39.880 | He wasn't making anything that people could have lived off of as a base.

02:08:46.280 | And Rachel did 10 gallons, she didn't weigh them yet, but she did 10 gallons of potatoes

02:08:54.800 | and less than a hundred square feet of fertilizer tubs.

02:08:59.360 | And they weren't even that close to each other.

02:09:01.440 | And all she did was she took rusher potatoes from the store and she chopped them up where

02:09:07.400 | their eyes were and she let them sprout.

02:09:10.720 | And then she lightly put them into the soil and put straw over them and she produced a

02:09:18.480 | potato crop beyond exception.

02:09:21.960 | But those two things are not fundamentally in conflict.

02:09:26.040 | I agree with you that Curtis Stone was not producing in his model.

02:09:29.480 | He was not producing high calorie foods that would easily keep someone alive.

02:09:34.800 | He was producing money.

02:09:35.800 | Exactly.

02:09:36.800 | He was producing arugula and herbs and whatnot that have very high prices.

02:09:41.960 | But he could switch over to a calorie.

02:09:44.960 | Yes, exactly.

02:09:45.960 | I fully agree.

02:09:46.960 | The guy's brilliant.

02:09:47.960 | It's fantastic.

02:09:49.520 | And so if you actually look at a place like the suburbs in the United States and many

02:09:54.240 | places of the world, there is so much potential for food production.

02:10:00.280 | It's just shocking.

02:10:01.520 | And the food production that that kind of land is suited for is high intensity gardening,

02:10:08.720 | which is not necessarily best for staple crops of potatoes and wheat, etc.

02:10:14.320 | It's for high intensity gardening that could be done.

02:10:18.240 | If any of our great grandparents came to the world today and saw how we despise land and

02:10:23.240 | how we despise food, literally choosing in most circumstances non-fruit bearing trees

02:10:29.320 | rather than fruit bearing trees because we don't want to clean up the fruit from underneath

02:10:32.640 | the ground, they would be shocked.

02:10:34.560 | And we live in that world that we live in is created because of globalization, that

02:10:41.480 | I can get my tomatoes from Chile in the northern hemisphere just like anything else.

02:10:46.960 | And it's created with cheap oil.

02:10:48.800 | It's created by all those things.

02:10:50.120 | And so we could, not in a season, but there could be a very quick transformation in terms

02:10:56.320 | of that kind of food production.

02:10:57.640 | The second thing that I have a real passion for is I believe that grass pastured animal

02:11:05.880 | production is one of the most powerful and most underutilized methods of meat production

02:11:15.920 | in the United States that we don't do because of the low prices of corn and soy.

02:11:22.040 | And so while you can't live exclusively on tomatoes, you can live exclusively on beef.

02:11:28.440 | And what we could do in the United States where we have huge amounts of land is we could

02:11:33.400 | turn so much of our unused land into animal food production because what animals are world

02:11:41.360 | class at is taking land that is unsuitable for farming because it's steep or it's

02:11:45.720 | rocky or it's anything like that, where you can't produce human food on it, and

02:11:51.840 | using the grass and vegetation on it to create human food, which because we can eat the animals

02:11:56.440 | and live exclusively on the animal meat.

02:11:58.980 | And so a outage of food.

02:12:03.880 | And in this case, I think there's excellent evidence to say that while it's not as

02:12:09.140 | productive in terms of the fast growth of grain fed animals, there are so many producers

02:12:17.000 | proving grass fed cattle, pastured pigs, etc, that you can produce excellent meat content

02:12:23.840 | without those inputs.

02:12:26.040 | And those production methodologies can be genuinely regenerative to the land.

02:12:34.440 | That's a huge untapped reservoir.

02:12:36.120 | And so I think that's a positive thing that could come out of it.

02:12:39.400 | The third thing that I think is, and this is where I don't have the expertise you have,

02:12:45.360 | but I would love to see food production spaces like farmland go back to producing food and

02:12:52.360 | not to producing fuel.

02:12:54.300 | And so things like the ethanol markets for corn, etc, if that cropland went back to producing

02:13:02.280 | food for humans and food for animals, instead of producing food that is being used to turn

02:13:09.360 | into gases and we just change those markets, I think that could also be a massive change

02:13:17.080 | as well.

02:13:18.080 | So those are just the things off the top of my head.

02:13:21.600 | All of the ethanol we need could be synthesized directly from natural gas.

02:13:27.740 | You can synthesize natural gas directly into ethanol.

02:13:31.320 | In fact, it's done for the perfume industry by the petrochemical industry.

02:13:35.800 | It goes directly to 200 proof ethanol.

02:13:40.760 | It's kind of like the Haber-Bosch, it's some temp and pressure and some catalyst, but yeah,

02:13:46.360 | it should be illegal to make ethanol fuel from corn because we got an abundance of natural

02:13:55.000 | gas.

02:13:56.000 | And I got a whole podcast coming up that will blow everyone's mind on what's called methane

02:14:01.160 | hydrates, methane clathrates.

02:14:03.920 | It absolutely eclipses the known amounts of natural gas that we have in the land that

02:14:10.120 | is under the ocean.

02:14:11.880 | Actually just on the bottom of the ocean, it's beyond imagination.

02:14:15.520 | And it's a fundamental of chemistry.

02:14:19.320 | But all of our vehicles, ethanol is not the problem.

02:14:23.200 | Ethanol is the solution.

02:14:24.200 | There is a big witch hunt on ethanol.

02:14:26.760 | "Oh, my car died, it must have been that damn ethanol!"

02:14:30.920 | And I call it the witch hunt on ethanol because my cow died, well, the witch must have done

02:14:34.880 | it.

02:14:35.880 | "Oh, my son got sick, well, the village witch must have done it."

02:14:38.320 | "Oh, my weed whacker died, well, it must be that damn ethanol fuel."

02:14:42.640 | And there's no reason why all of our transportation cannot run on pure ethanol made from natural

02:14:52.000 | gas as easily as we do right now on gasoline and diesel.

02:15:01.320 | It can do it just as easily and with the same or better efficiency.

02:15:06.560 | It's just an absolute lot of stupid—you know, there is a law that says all of the

02:15:12.280 | ethanol we put in gasoline, which was the octane replacement for something that was

02:15:17.880 | very nasty called MTBE, because I remember it from the '90s in Chrysler, and the raw

02:15:23.320 | stuff had to be handled very, very carefully because it was very nasty.

02:15:29.440 | But there is someone made a law that said all of the ethanol that goes into gasoline

02:15:34.680 | has to be a bioproduct, meaning agriculturally derived through a fermentation process that

02:15:43.200 | involves a biofeedstock, that they are prevented from actually synthesizing it.

02:15:49.120 | You take methane and you make ethylene, which is not hard.

02:15:52.720 | We do it all day long for the plastic industry.

02:15:54.800 | Then you do something called the hydration of ethylene, which is basically adding water

02:15:59.280 | to ethylene, but it's complicated like Harbor Bosch, and you make ethanol.

02:16:05.680 | And it is the most—it is not—it is—you know, people go, "Oh, it eats gas, gets

02:16:10.320 | it, beats valves, it causes this."

02:16:12.800 | You moron, you drink it, you pour it down your throat, it goes in your stomach.

02:16:18.160 | Just again, how caustic is this stuff?

02:16:21.760 | Well, whatever.

02:16:23.600 | But yeah, there is a great deal of stupidity in the energy field of what can be done, what

02:16:29.440 | is going to be done.

02:16:30.440 | Let me tell you, they're trying to eliminate natural gas.

02:16:33.280 | If you want a hydrogen future, myself, Roy McAllister, have said for a long time, natural

02:16:39.720 | gas is the gateway drug to hydrogen.

02:16:42.840 | Right, and I think that—and that's just the tip of the iceberg, right?

02:16:47.600 | So two other—of changes that when the incentives change can and will happen.

02:16:53.560 | But I see—my point is that I is simply I see—I believe that humans will change, and

02:17:00.600 | so it's almost certainly not as catastrophic as it could be because humans will adapt as

02:17:06.040 | quickly as possible.

02:17:07.680 | Two other points that I was going to make, right?

02:17:09.400 | We talked about being very cold in Germany.

02:17:12.280 | You—if we—if I gave you 30 minutes, you would list off dozens of techniques and tactics

02:17:20.360 | that could be implemented in any home in Germany to make sure that that dwelling, even with

02:17:26.920 | no external heating, was at least livable, if not in some cases comfortable, by changing

02:17:35.120 | the basic structure of the apartment.

02:17:36.960 | I know that because I bought your books on passive solar heating and on passive cooling,

02:17:42.240 | et cetera.

02:17:43.240 | Yeah, well, in Germany, they have 200 percent of their peak load in solar and wind, but

02:17:49.840 | Zion said it best.

02:17:51.360 | It is not windy nor sunny in Germany.

02:17:54.520 | Right.

02:17:55.520 | So they got 8 percent of their base load is from solar and wind when they have installed

02:18:02.320 | 200 percent of their base load in wind and solar.

02:18:06.800 | The problem with the buildings in Europe, you know, Jordan Peterson says that, "Wonderfully,

02:18:13.040 | Europe is absolutely beautiful."

02:18:15.400 | Now, OK, fine.

02:18:18.560 | You take—you've seen some nice houses in like Portugal, Spain, and France, haven't

02:18:22.800 | you?

02:18:23.800 | Yes, definitely.

02:18:24.800 | Well, fine.

02:18:25.800 | Let's make that thing energy efficient.

02:18:27.040 | The first thing I'm going to do is put this beautiful stone mansion and everything that

02:18:32.080 | you've seen you've been in.

02:18:33.080 | Well, Harris is going to spray foam six inches of foam on the outside of that thing.

02:18:40.280 | I cannot make that dwelling energy efficient without destroying the beautifulness of the

02:18:50.160 | architecture of that building.

02:18:52.580 | I cannot make it more energy efficient without changing the fundamentals of how that thing

02:18:59.760 | was made 300 years ago.

02:19:01.960 | Right.

02:19:02.960 | That's the problem.

02:19:03.960 | I mean, what do you do right now for air conditioning?

02:19:08.640 | You open your window.

02:19:09.640 | Right.

02:19:10.640 | What do you do if it's getting too hot?

02:19:14.280 | You open your window.

02:19:15.280 | If it gets too cold, what do you do?

02:19:16.600 | You close your windows.

02:19:18.120 | Right.

02:19:19.120 | There's parts of the world that are like that.

02:19:21.320 | They don't have heating or HVAC or air conditioning or anything because they're in the perfect

02:19:28.120 | place to live.

02:19:29.120 | And there's nice temperate zones around the world that is like that.

02:19:35.000 | Europe does not get super cold.

02:19:37.600 | Russia does.

02:19:38.600 | Right.

02:19:39.600 | But I mean, southern France, Spain, Italy, Greece, they don't get super cold there.

02:19:46.720 | Right.

02:19:47.720 | It's like, yeah, go to the hardware store and try to buy screens for your windows in

02:19:52.600 | Europe.

02:19:54.160 | Right.

02:19:55.880 | So and I guess the final comment would be, at its core, our entire civilization can and

02:20:05.360 | will be redesigned based upon the products and the environment of the future.

02:20:12.200 | The reason...

02:20:13.200 | It's going to be the equivalent of the Black Death in Europe, though.

02:20:17.640 | Right.

02:20:18.840 | I'm not arguing or saying you're wrong.

02:20:20.520 | I'm just trying to focus on the opportunity.

02:20:23.480 | And that as human creatures, the Black Death was horrific.

02:20:29.260 | And it did also have its knock-on effects that led to a better society.

02:20:34.160 | And so...

02:20:35.160 | What do you think a billion people was going to be dead in less than five years?

02:20:38.760 | Right.

02:20:39.760 | I'm trying, Steven.

02:20:40.760 | I'm trying desperately to drag us to the positive side, and you keep dragging me back down.

02:20:46.840 | I don't know what to do except laugh and cry.

02:20:52.280 | I don't want to spend my time contemplating the death of a billion people.

02:20:57.600 | I want to work hard to try to find solutions for perhaps the 20 to 60 people that I can

02:21:03.240 | impact near me.

02:21:04.240 | You don't understand.

02:21:05.240 | Right.

02:21:06.240 | It is pretty much going to happen.

02:21:09.840 | All of your praying, all of your positive thinking, all of our "we're going to try"

02:21:15.200 | is pretty much not going to affect the death of a billion people around the planet.

02:21:22.000 | In the next single-digit years, less than five.

02:21:25.760 | It is pretty much inevitable.

02:21:29.760 | Like I said, the domino has already been knocked over by the person coming out of the bathroom.

02:21:35.240 | And X period of time, the last one is going to hit the switch that's going to blow up

02:21:40.120 | the cat in its cage.

02:21:45.880 | People say, "Let's hope for the worst, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst."

02:21:51.080 | Well, I've got news for you.

02:21:53.520 | That cat 4 hurricane setting off the Louisiana coast going right for, what's that crap hole

02:22:02.280 | in Louisiana?

02:22:03.280 | They got flooded out.

02:22:04.280 | New Orleans.

02:22:05.280 | New Orleans.

02:22:06.280 | Okay.

02:22:07.280 | I've got news for you.

02:22:09.520 | It's hitting.

02:22:10.520 | Okay.

02:22:11.520 | In two days.

02:22:12.520 | You're not going to change it.

02:22:15.000 | And people do not, you know, you got to take that head on that this is like rolling one

02:22:26.000 | through five on a six-sided die.

02:22:28.200 | It, you know, five out of six chances that this is going to happen now.

02:22:34.800 | My original odds were 20%.

02:22:38.600 | And now everyone is going, "F you, Harris.

02:22:41.240 | Damn it, you talked about this in November and now it's all about certainty."

02:22:45.160 | And it's like, "I'm sorry.

02:22:47.320 | I predicted it.

02:22:48.400 | I talked about it.

02:22:49.640 | It didn't mean I made it happen."

02:22:51.400 | But anyways, you know, they're getting to that realization and you got to hit this,

02:22:59.040 | you know, and it's almost unfathomable, unfathomable, but you know, that is going to happen.

02:23:05.580 | And now let's talk about how to make money off of it.

02:23:08.520 | But yeah.

02:23:10.840 | Maybe it's just my, I mean, it could just be my normalcy bias.

02:23:13.680 | One of the things that I have learned over the course of the pandemic has, was that I

02:23:18.800 | thought I would be less susceptible to normalcy bias because I had spent so much time thinking

02:23:25.400 | about disaster scenarios, far more than the average person.

02:23:29.600 | And then the pandemic hit and I experienced strong normalcy bias, basically a refusal

02:23:37.980 | to believe that the worst case scenarios that I had thought were going to happen, could

02:23:44.120 | happen, were going to happen.

02:23:45.960 | And so I could be continuing to suffer under the delusion of normalcy bias.

02:23:51.560 | Yeah, there's a saying in the security business, "Security is like oxygen.

02:23:56.520 | You don't realize you need it until it's gone and then you'll pay anything to get it back

02:24:00.320 | instantly."

02:24:01.320 | It's like being locked in a big bank vault.

02:24:04.120 | You go, "Well, I'm breathing fine.

02:24:05.880 | Everything is good.

02:24:07.160 | Everything is good until it's not."

02:24:09.240 | You're still locked.

02:24:10.920 | You've been locked in the bank vault, a big one.

02:24:15.160 | You are breathing the air.

02:24:16.900 | You are going to start getting carbon dioxide poisoning.

02:24:19.920 | You actually don't run out of air.

02:24:20.920 | You actually poison yourself with very high, like five, 6% carbon dioxide.

02:24:27.740 | But yeah, you are going to run out of air and you're not going to realize it until you

02:24:31.960 | start running out of air.

02:24:33.240 | And that is not going to be for hours or days, but nevertheless, you are now in the locked

02:24:39.540 | bank vault and the inevitable has got a very high percentage point of happening to you.

02:24:51.320 | And people that normalcy bias, which is probably one of the better things about human beings,

02:25:00.200 | is that you are going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:04.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:07.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:10.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:13.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:16.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:19.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:22.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:25.320 | You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

02:25:28.320 | We got experience and expertise, wisdom, judgment, decision-making abilities based upon that.

02:25:35.320 | That is not an opinion.

02:25:38.320 | Now, you are free to ignore the advice that we give you.

02:25:43.320 | You can take the advice, and I very much want you to take the advice, modify it for your

02:25:49.320 | own purposes, and implement it as you see fit.

02:25:53.320 | That's what I really think you should do.

02:25:56.320 | You are absolutely free to ignore it.

02:25:59.320 | Please just put my name in your will.

02:26:02.320 | So, let's wrap up with opportunities.

02:26:08.320 | The fun stuff.

02:26:11.320 | Yeah, exactly.

02:26:14.320 | I'll just pitch it to you.

02:26:17.320 | Where do you want to focus us for the last, as we wrap up the show?

02:26:22.320 | Okay, look, by now, you either think Harris is the biggest a-hole you've ever listened

02:26:29.320 | to, or you're going, "He's got a few points," or you're like Eric and Fresno going, "He's

02:26:36.320 | back on!"

02:26:40.320 | Which I hope is the latter.

02:26:42.320 | So, if you want some of the stuff, if you think I'm saying stuff that is intelligent,

02:26:48.320 | and you want to prepare your family, the best thing you can do, let's say your rounding

02:26:56.320 | error is in, what my budget is, is well within what Josh calls your rounding error, and you

02:27:04.320 | want Harris talent.

02:27:06.320 | You're better off going to my website and getting it all for pennies on the dollar.

02:27:10.320 | Get the 101 and the 201 from all the step-by-step videos I have, and I got some really smart

02:27:17.320 | stuff, like how to put 20 years of food into a freezer, and you don't care if the power

02:27:24.320 | fails.

02:27:26.320 | That one will really warp your mind.

02:27:28.320 | People have said, "Gee, Steve, you already made preparedness so simple, and now you went

02:27:32.320 | and made it even simpler."

02:27:35.320 | You might as well go there to harris1234.com, get the classes, and go through that, and

02:27:42.320 | then make yourself a list, and now you got, like, "Hey, Steve, we want a few hours of

02:27:48.320 | your time to help our family with primary things to do, secondary, tertiary, contingency,

02:27:58.320 | just like we did the thinking for you and other people.

02:28:01.320 | We want some of that intelligence applied to us."

02:28:04.320 | Fine, we can do it, okay?

02:28:06.320 | Whether you're going to hop on a golf string and go someplace else, we can get you all

02:28:11.320 | the communications and all the planning and everything else and where and when and how

02:28:16.320 | and what at both locations you can possibly think of.

02:28:20.320 | So, anyway, go to harris1234.com, and we're going to use RPF20 for radical personal finance.

02:28:28.320 | Not RFP, RPF20, no space.

02:28:34.320 | You will get 20% off for the next couple weeks of anything you want.

02:28:39.320 | You can go up there and buy one video and go, "I love it," and you go back and get two

02:28:45.320 | more, and then you go back and get a bundle.

02:28:47.320 | You can do whatever you want.

02:28:49.320 | There's no limitations on it, okay?

02:28:52.320 | And, yes, I am supporting Josh with this.

02:28:57.320 | A portion of what you purchase is going direct -- it supports me, and it goes directly to

02:29:02.320 | support radical personal finance as well.

02:29:05.320 | I'm doing this in cooperation with him and as a thank you to him as well.

02:29:14.320 | But the stuff is cheap, and it will benefit the heck out of you.

02:29:18.320 | 100% guarantee.

02:29:19.320 | You can say, "Harris, you're an idiot.

02:29:20.320 | I hate it.

02:29:21.320 | Your stuff is horrible.

02:29:22.320 | Give me my money back."

02:29:24.320 | It's like, "Okay, fine."

02:29:25.320 | It's just money.

02:29:27.320 | It's, you know, the most common -- the most available commodity in the world is money.

02:29:32.320 | It's also the most worthless commodity in the world is money.

02:29:36.320 | So giving you back your money is not the problem.

02:29:40.320 | So RPF20.

02:29:42.320 | Now, I have something out there.

02:29:44.320 | If you want your mind melted again after you've gone through my free podcast, I have -- you've

02:29:50.320 | had this, Josh -- the three real methods of wealth creation, okay, from me, okay, which

02:29:56.320 | is how you take things that are outside of the GDP and you put them into what I call

02:30:02.320 | the real GDP, okay?

02:30:05.320 | And you're not going to find this on Google at all, anywhere.

02:30:10.320 | And it's not what you think it is either.

02:30:13.320 | But, you know, it's like what five or six words would you have to say about this three

02:30:18.320 | real methods of wealth creation class?

02:30:20.320 | I listened to it before you ever made it a product and we talked about it.

02:30:26.320 | And I thought it was excellent.

02:30:29.320 | It was something that was genuinely new to me that I had never thought of.

02:30:32.320 | And that's from someone who has not consumed everything, but I have read hundreds and hundreds

02:30:38.320 | of books on wealth building and listened to a lot of people.

02:30:41.320 | And I thought it was genuinely unique and an interesting way to look at the world and

02:30:47.320 | look at the aspects of wealth creation.

02:30:49.320 | So I thought it was genuinely good and unique and it's been filed away in the back of my

02:30:55.320 | brain.

02:30:56.320 | I haven't figured out how to actually implement it in detail, but I love having it there as

02:31:04.320 | part of my mental framework.

02:31:05.320 | And it's something I've never talked about on the show either.

02:31:08.320 | I got the Harris potential scoring system.

02:31:11.320 | So you don't score based on priorities of what you want to do.

02:31:15.320 | You score based upon the potential something has for you to decide what you do next.

02:31:20.320 | And I got a 63 item scoring system that you apply to every idea or thing that you want

02:31:28.320 | to do.

02:31:29.320 | You can pick the ones that you want or use them all or whatever you want.

02:31:32.320 | But when you put them all together and you look at it, this is a video, the wealth creation

02:31:37.320 | three real methods is just audio.

02:31:39.320 | So once your eyes have been blown open by the wealth creation class, you got so many

02:31:46.320 | ideas you want to go to the potential scoring system to decide what to do next.

02:31:51.320 | And you go, ah, I do it.

02:31:53.320 | That is, I've literally did this myself.

02:31:56.320 | And something a mentor of mine taught me that I have then extrapolated out further.

02:32:01.320 | I did this over a year ago and I'm doing successful things today based upon me doing this for

02:32:09.320 | myself last May.

02:32:13.320 | And I went out in the middle of nowhere for two weeks with my cat, my trailer and my power

02:32:19.320 | and my communications.

02:32:21.320 | And I just sat there.

02:32:23.320 | I went through 110 things.

02:32:26.320 | I only had 29 points scoring system.

02:32:28.320 | Then now it's like 63.

02:32:31.320 | But that's how you implement.

02:32:33.320 | That's how you decide what you want to implement.

02:32:35.320 | A good example is like it might be a priority for you to mow your grass because your significant

02:32:40.320 | other or will either yell at you or the city or your neighbors will bitch at you or the

02:32:45.320 | city will give you a fine.

02:32:46.320 | So it's a high priority for you to mow your grass.

02:32:49.320 | Now, unless you're Harris, you're making cellulistic ethanol off of your grass or your Josh and

02:32:55.320 | you're feeding it to your rabbits to make it into food.

02:32:58.320 | There is no potential.

02:33:00.320 | It's got zero potential to your life mowing the grass.

02:33:04.320 | It is a waste of time unless you want it for the exercise versus like reading Peter Zion's

02:33:13.320 | book or anything else on Joshua Sheets's reading book.

02:33:16.320 | That's got a lot of potential to you in the future.

02:33:19.320 | You're listening to this podcast right now, not because it's a priority, because it's

02:33:24.320 | got potential for you.

02:33:26.320 | That's why you're listening to this.

02:33:28.320 | So there's the potential class.

02:33:30.320 | But anyways, if you'd want just the three real methods of wealth creation class, if

02:33:36.320 | you use money seven, M-O-N-E-Y seven, you'll get it for seven bucks.

02:33:43.320 | Download it right then and there.

02:33:45.320 | Listen to it online.

02:33:46.320 | You name it.

02:33:47.320 | It's yours right then and there for seven bucks.

02:33:50.320 | Normally, I think it's twenty nine or thirty nine.

02:33:54.320 | But just only if you like really perverted thinking, you go, holy cow, I didn't realize

02:34:02.320 | that, then go get it.

02:34:04.320 | But my podcast or Harris1234.com, I'll put links to those or type in Stephen Harris,

02:34:13.320 | Science and Technology into your favorite podcast, Engine, Fountains, Picture, iTunes,

02:34:21.320 | iPod, Google Play, whatever.

02:34:25.320 | It's across all those.

02:34:27.320 | I copied everything that Josh did.

02:34:30.320 | Thank you, Josh.

02:34:31.320 | My pleasure.

02:34:34.320 | We need people who, one of the biggest opportunities we have today is the opportunity for people

02:34:40.320 | who are learned and people who are learned to share their wisdom with others.

02:34:48.320 | One of the great tragedies of past times is that huge vast amounts of knowledge, wisdom

02:35:01.320 | and experience have been lost to us as people have passed away.

02:35:07.320 | There are things that were once simple that we can't do today.

02:35:10.320 | You could look at a funny example of how did they make the pyramids or how did they make

02:35:15.320 | Machu Picchu.

02:35:16.320 | How did they drill these rocks perfectly straight?

02:35:20.320 | Well, that was lost to us as far as the techniques.

02:35:22.320 | Or you could come to much more recent of the knowledge that our grandmother had about how

02:35:26.320 | to do something.

02:35:27.320 | What's the name of the guy that did the front lawn and backyard gardening thing again?

02:35:33.320 | Curtis Stone.

02:35:34.320 | Okay, let's say Curtis Stone switched over, did everything, redid everything in six months

02:35:40.320 | and did nothing but calorie crops.

02:35:42.320 | Okay.

02:35:43.320 | And he made a YouTube video about it.

02:35:46.320 | And then one person like say Elon Musk, he's got 101 million followers.

02:35:53.320 | Okay.

02:35:54.320 | Let's say he tweets to 100 million Twitters, which would be what, 25 people?

02:36:01.320 | Real people?

02:36:02.320 | No.

02:36:03.320 | Okay.

02:36:04.320 | Let's say 20 million real people read and understand that tweet he sent to 100 million

02:36:15.320 | people or entities.

02:36:16.320 | Okay.

02:36:17.320 | And 20 million people go to YouTube and watch Curtis Stone growing squash and potatoes and

02:36:26.320 | sweet potatoes and everything you need to feed yourself and your neighbors.

02:36:32.320 | That's like, I got so many potatoes.

02:36:34.320 | Everyone come and pick them up for free.

02:36:38.320 | One person tweeting one thing to one piece of knowledge that is digested and like 15

02:36:48.320 | to 30 minutes or less, or it may be that 15 minutes goes.

02:36:53.320 | If you want the full class, go watch this video for three hours.

02:36:57.320 | One person can implement what Churchill tried to do with Victory Gardens and the BBC.

02:37:07.320 | One person can instantly, one learned person can instantly take tens of millions or hundreds

02:37:18.320 | of millions who weren't learned and make them learned in hours.

02:37:24.320 | Right.

02:37:25.320 | Now that is like a mind blowing concept.

02:37:28.320 | That's something we talk about lost knowledge.

02:37:31.320 | Well, I mean, lost knowledge is one thing, but they couldn't do that.

02:37:38.320 | No, no.

02:37:39.320 | Okay.

02:37:40.320 | This is a unique time in history and this is only going to advance quicker.

02:37:45.320 | Right.

02:37:46.320 | But I mean, the magicalness of that is like beyond exception.

02:37:51.320 | Right.

02:37:52.320 | And it's one of the many things that fills me with hope because then the knowledge is

02:37:57.320 | out there and as we get better and better at searching technology, archiving, etc.,

02:38:02.320 | we can dramatically improve the well-being of our billions of neighbors around the world.

02:38:09.320 | You're still after my personal library, aren't you?

02:38:12.320 | I am.

02:38:13.320 | I am still after it because it's only 40 terabytes.

02:38:18.320 | I am still after it because it makes all the difference in the world.

02:38:22.320 | The knowledge and then the application and what human brains are brilliant at is taking

02:38:28.320 | is building on the work of others.

02:38:31.320 | You talked about the Haber-Bosch process, right?

02:38:35.320 | You have one person does one thing, another person comes along and tweaks it and that's

02:38:39.320 | how we grow as human beings and as we build the world of the future, we need more and

02:38:43.320 | more of that.

02:38:45.320 | Speaking of which, someone was asking me, "Oh, the guy who invented explosives and everything

02:38:52.320 | else, did he win a Nobel Prize?"

02:38:56.320 | I go, "No, his name was Nobel.

02:38:59.320 | He's the one who created the endowment for the prize."

02:39:03.320 | Yep.

02:39:04.320 | Yep.

02:39:05.320 | Absolutely.

02:39:06.320 | Because I was talking about what makes us live here this long is not just the food production.

02:39:14.320 | The three real drivers are antibiotics, what Fleming did, he won a Nobel, fresh water treatment,

02:39:26.320 | well water, city water, and removal waste is what has gotten us to live this long.

02:39:31.320 | Now, you talk about your friends died in Africa because the price of the fuel went up for

02:39:37.320 | the transportation of the food plus the inflation made the food more expensive plus the transportation

02:39:43.320 | of the food that they couldn't afford that they died of starvation from, right?

02:39:50.320 | Well, what if you got 60 people in a village in Africa?

02:39:55.320 | I know it's a simplification, but I'll do it.

02:39:58.320 | So you got 60 people in a village in Africa and they got one well and that well runs on

02:40:05.320 | one gallon of gasoline or two gallons of gasoline a week and they run it once a day for a half

02:40:12.320 | hour to bring up fresh water for everyone for the day, okay?

02:40:17.320 | Now, the number one killer of people across the planet, other than stupidity, is intestinal-borne

02:40:25.320 | diseases from drinking surface-contaminated water.

02:40:29.320 | And that's what, so if that village, it's like how much do people make in Africa a day?

02:40:35.320 | I mean, it's literally measured pre-inflation to like 50 cents or a dollar a day, right?

02:40:42.320 | It's extremely low, yeah.

02:40:44.320 | Yeah.

02:40:45.320 | So, I mean, if your fuel price goes from, if your delivered fuel price in remote Africa

02:40:52.320 | went from $4 a week for that gallon of gas to $50 and that village can no longer afford

02:41:03.320 | that fresh water from the well that's like 80 feet down, run by the gasoline engine that

02:41:09.320 | pumps the water, and now they're all going to surface water, like ditch water and rainwater,

02:41:18.320 | not purified groundwater that was purified by the filtration method and time and everything

02:41:24.320 | going through the earth, what did you just do to the health and the intestinal infection

02:41:31.320 | rate of those people?

02:41:33.320 | I mean, the reason the Chinese used to live so much longer than the rest of the world,

02:41:38.320 | like the Eastern European, was because they drank tea as their primary source of water.

02:41:44.320 | And what do you do to tea to make tea?

02:41:47.320 | You pasteurize it.

02:41:48.320 | Heat it or boil it.

02:41:49.320 | You heat it or boil it, and that pasteurizes it, which is the same reason why they landed

02:41:55.320 | at Plymouth Rock on the ship was because they ran out of beer, because they didn't know

02:42:02.320 | have germ theory, but they knew if they drank beer, which was like a light ale, that they

02:42:09.320 | didn't get sick.

02:42:10.320 | And if you go to Feeding Nelson's Navy, which was a book written, I think in like 1820,

02:42:15.320 | it was about feeding the British Navy from like 1740 to 1810.

02:42:21.320 | They had like 12 major components.

02:42:23.320 | They carried food components with no refrigeration on the boat.

02:42:27.320 | And this was 750 men at sea for six months, no land, doing like 6,000 calories a day.

02:42:35.320 | They carried four times the beer that they did water because they knew if they drank

02:42:41.320 | beer for hydration, you know, there's a certain level of alcohol that dehydrates you, but

02:42:48.320 | low alcohol beer does not dehydrate you.

02:42:51.320 | It hydrates you.

02:42:53.320 | They knew that they could drink that safely, but the water might make them sick.

02:42:57.320 | So the water was used for other forms of cooking and/or drinking, et cetera, or, you know,

02:43:03.320 | what they needed fresh water for.

02:43:05.320 | But their water consumption was in the form of beer because they had to boil the wort

02:43:13.320 | in order to, you know, to add and add, to malt the barley, to add it in, to do the

02:43:19.320 | acidification, to do the fermentation, to make the beer.

02:43:23.320 | And, you know, thus it got purified.

02:43:26.320 | So, you know, we talk about taking food away.

02:43:29.320 | Well, what if we take that energy away?

02:43:31.320 | As Art Robinson says, there are people being held up on the bottom ladder of life.

02:43:37.320 | The lowest rung of the ladder that is life is being held up by affordable access to energy.

02:43:46.320 | And the most simplistic example is, you know, that gallon of gasoline for a week to run

02:43:54.320 | the motor that runs the fresh water well for the entire village.

02:43:59.320 | And you go, well, why can't they just use solar power?

02:44:02.320 | It's like you got no understanding of energy economics in order to, you know, in order

02:44:09.320 | to make that statement at this time in 2022 history.

02:44:15.320 | But, yeah, I mean, that can, I mean, that can kill a lot more than inflation and food

02:44:23.320 | and, you know, you start messing with people's water and the quality of the water, you can

02:44:29.320 | kill an awful lot of people.

02:44:31.320 | I mean, we're talking about controlling food to kill people, well, control water to kill

02:44:35.320 | people, and you can do a lot more.

02:44:37.320 | Absolutely.

02:44:38.320 | Absolutely.

02:44:39.320 | On a positive note.

02:44:41.320 | Yeah.

02:44:42.320 | God, we've gone down some great rabbit holes, hit some great discussions and gone completely

02:44:49.320 | off script, which is some of the best things about doing RPF with you.

02:44:54.320 | And I love it.

02:44:57.320 | Thanks so much.

02:44:58.320 | So go to Harris1234.com.

02:44:59.320 | Yeah, Harris1234.com.

02:45:00.320 | And let me ask you a question.

02:45:06.320 | Why are we having 10% per month inflation and gold and silver haven't moved?

02:45:15.320 | It's a good question.

02:45:23.320 | But there have been excellent, there have been excellent analysts for a very long time

02:45:27.820 | who have said that gold and silver are not a good, anyway, they're not perfect inflation

02:45:35.560 | hedges.

02:45:36.560 | I would say the first question would be, is it the fact that gold and silver hasn't moved

02:45:41.560 | on the spot price, or is it the fact that gold and silver hasn't moved on the physical

02:45:45.920 | price that you bring to the local market?

02:45:46.920 | Right.

02:45:47.920 | The real price is the price to acquire, not the spot price.

02:45:52.240 | The spot price of gold and silver is unreliable.

02:45:55.200 | As an indicator, you have to go with what you can actually get in your hand from a local

02:46:00.600 | dealer.

02:46:01.600 | A friend of mine, after he read my report, in January, started buying freeze-dried food,

02:46:09.040 | Mountain House, all of the different ones.

02:46:12.680 | He goes, this is the preparedness for myself and my family and everything else.

02:46:17.760 | The value of it has tripled from when he bought it.

02:46:21.560 | And he goes, well, either we'll end up eating it, or I'll end up selling it, or selling

02:46:28.760 | it and eating it.

02:46:29.760 | He goes, this is by far a better investment.

02:46:33.160 | It's light, it's cheap, I can eat it, which you can't do with gold or silver.

02:46:38.280 | It's light, it's cheap, it's tradable, it's edible, it's good for 30 years.

02:46:44.360 | And it was his investment of choice.

02:46:48.800 | He just took some money, and he kept on, like Bitcoin, he kept on throwing it at it, getting

02:46:55.880 | in cases of it, I mean, like box cases, not quite pallets, he's got pallets of it.

02:47:05.000 | And for $1 million, I will tell you where he lives.

02:47:09.760 | Anyways, and so he has used that as very legitimate.

02:47:17.240 | I got a full chest freezer that can do freeze-drying.

02:47:24.040 | And I've been trying to get someone to take it off my hands, and so I could show them

02:47:28.280 | how to do freeze-drying since 2019.

02:47:31.840 | And I've had like no takers.

02:47:34.680 | I mean, if anyone wants to start a freeze-drying business, we can do it.

02:47:38.720 | Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, they got those little Harvest Rite ones, they're like $3,500

02:47:44.360 | each.

02:47:45.360 | And I know God's gift, a cookie named Sonia, she's done miracles.

02:47:50.760 | She's got two of them.

02:47:51.760 | I mean, they've been running all the time for four years.

02:47:55.920 | But I mean, I got it on a much larger scale, because I understand the chemistry of the

02:48:01.320 | whole process.

02:48:02.600 | And I have a cryogenic freezer and a vacuum pump.

02:48:06.920 | And so I can get to minus 16, I can pull a vacuum and sublimate the water out, and then

02:48:12.000 | we can make freeze-dried food.

02:48:15.000 | But it's just been like, you know, I've been laying it down.

02:48:19.520 | There's a lot of people listening to this.

02:48:21.560 | It's like, I mean, how many people have we been laying it down for for 30 years have

02:48:25.680 | not picked it up?

02:48:26.680 | Right.

02:48:27.680 | That's true.

02:48:28.680 | Absolutely true.

02:48:29.680 | All right.

02:48:30.680 | We do it for the 1% that do.

02:48:33.160 | That's always what it is.

02:48:34.160 | It's always 1%.

02:48:35.400 | Every time I start a talk, when I talk to teenagers or present a class in person, I

02:48:40.760 | start every talk with, "I'm about to give you some good ideas."

02:48:43.360 | Basically, but I know that it's going to be a complete waste of time, because the vast

02:48:48.320 | majority are going to do nothing with it.

02:48:49.960 | But for those of you who do, I'm going to give you something really useful here.

02:48:54.080 | And if I was a college professor, I'd walk in on the first day, I go, "Everyone here

02:48:58.960 | has an A automatically.

02:49:00.760 | You all have A's.

02:49:02.680 | Anyone who doesn't want to be here, leave now.

02:49:05.080 | You'll still have an A."

02:49:06.080 | It's like, "Oh, okay.

02:49:08.080 | Well, the eight people that are left, we're going to have a lot of fun.

02:49:11.080 | You're going to learn something."

02:49:12.440 | Much more productive.

02:49:13.440 | All right, if you want to talk to Steven about any particular needs of yours or of his chest

02:49:19.720 | freezer, freeze dryer, Steven@Harris1234.com.

02:49:24.160 | Steven, S-T-E-V-E-N @Harris, H-A-R-R-I-S, 1234.com.

02:49:30.160 | 1234.com.

02:49:31.160 | I'll put the podcast.

02:49:32.160 | Or Harris1234.com.

02:49:33.160 | Use code RPF20, RPF20 to save 20% on all of his classes there.

02:49:40.840 | And to get the Wealth Creation class using Money7.

02:49:45.080 | That's also at Harris1234.com.

02:49:46.080 | Steven, is that right?

02:49:47.080 | Steven: Yeah, that Money7 is there.

02:49:49.960 | The Wealth Creation class of the three real methods of wealth creation from absolutely

02:49:54.680 | perverted historical thinking is up there, but that's not the real – it's up there.

02:50:00.360 | That's not the actual title, but it's close.

02:50:03.160 | Yeah, go there and you'll be supporting me.

02:50:07.360 | You'll be supporting Josh.

02:50:09.440 | You'll be supporting – really, screw us, okay?

02:50:13.000 | Support yourself.

02:50:14.000 | I mean, go there because you want the knowledge of it for your own personal self.

02:50:23.320 | You can call me.

02:50:24.320 | It's like, "Harris, here at AHO, I want a refund."

02:50:27.320 | It's like, "You bought 432?"

02:50:30.800 | One that's hard to do on my website.

02:50:33.400 | It's hard to get that much stuff in the cart on my website.

02:50:37.000 | It's like, "Okay, fine.

02:50:41.720 | You got nothing to lose.

02:50:44.840 | You got the world to gain, but like I said, you want some perverted thinking for your

02:50:49.880 | rounding error for your family, we can do it worldwide by ship, by plane, by hook or

02:50:58.360 | by crook, or in the middle of nowhere on the 100th floor.

02:51:03.160 | Sometimes the 100th floor of an apartment is actually easier than being on the ground

02:51:07.440 | in the city, but we can absolutely do it for you.

02:51:16.400 | I think one of the things you said about the idea of having multiple locations around the

02:51:20.800 | world, so it's like we're going to go to Montana in the summertime and we're going to go down

02:51:27.120 | to Panama City in the wintertime, is really smart thinking and everything else.

02:51:33.520 | The nice thing is you can actually drive between the two of them.

02:51:36.440 | Tom: I am convinced that for many people, it is one of the best solutions that exists

02:51:43.480 | to many of the problems that people face.

02:51:46.920 | Let me flat out say, Andrew Henderson of his YouTube channel, he was like, "Oh, I've stocked

02:51:58.520 | my pantry and everything else."

02:52:00.240 | It's like he doesn't get it.

02:52:01.800 | You guys don't understand.

02:52:03.680 | When the harvest is gone and the next planting is not for four months, and then another six

02:52:10.560 | months of harvest, there is no more to get.

02:52:14.280 | It's like running out of moon dust on the earth.

02:52:17.160 | You got to go all the way back to the moon to get it and come back.

02:52:21.200 | That takes a Saturn V or a Starship to do it.

02:52:27.720 | People don't understand.

02:52:28.720 | Once it's gone, it's gone until the next season.

02:52:33.960 | Dave: Right, that's true.

02:52:36.480 | On this particular topic, I dearly hope, Stephen, that you are completely wrong and that a year

02:52:42.320 | from now we're laughing at some silly mistake that you made or I made in our thinking.

02:52:48.040 | Stephen: Let me tell you what my father used to tell me.

02:52:52.920 | My late father, he goes, "We were talking about safety and bicycle riding, going across

02:52:57.560 | streets and stuff."

02:52:58.560 | It's like, "Well, I got the right to the right away and everything else."

02:53:03.120 | He goes, "Yeah, you can be dead right."

02:53:05.960 | Dave: It's true.

02:53:08.800 | I hope that you're wrong, but I want to make sure that we take it seriously and that we

02:53:12.640 | do all we can to warn people and help people to understand about what's going on and to

02:53:18.760 | prepare accordingly.

02:53:19.760 | Thank you for coming on the show today.

02:53:21.160 | Harris1234.com.

02:53:22.160 | Stephen: Josh, thanks again.

02:53:27.840 | We got to do it more often than just do unconscious, competent dumps.

02:53:37.440 | There's so much radical finance we can get into with what's coming up.

02:53:41.760 | It's unimaginable.

02:53:42.760 | From primary smelting to lights out manufacturing.

02:53:48.120 | If you're a generation Xer, as Peter Zion says, now is your time.

02:53:53.480 | Josh: Absolutely.

02:53:55.440 | Absolutely.

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2022-08-29_Steven_Harris_interview_on_famine