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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit suitehop.com today. 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.

My name is Josh Rasheeds, and today I'm thrilled to welcome back to Radical Personal Finance, my friend Stephen Harris. Stephen, welcome to the show again. Hey, Josh, 10 years or less. Good news. You're going to make a million in either 10 months or lose your million in 10 months.

I was thinking about that when we talk about what we're going to talk about today. 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. 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.

But we also need to be prepared to function and flourish if and when the financial system breaks down. And we're going to be talking about some of the ways that right now the financial system is breaking down. Let me give a quick background for the uninitiated. Stephen Harris is an engineer, a scientist, a chemist.

He spent a number of years working in automobile development with Chrysler. 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. 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.

So we're going to be... Stephen and I chat from time to time and I give him, "Here's what I'm doing, Stephen. How can I give a better education to my children?" Because he is an autodidact and a polymath. So Stephen, again, welcome. I'm excited to talk to you today.

Yeah, I sent him back a picture of a fireman with a four-inch fire hose. And it's like, "Is this what you wanted?" And he goes, "No, too much, too much." Yeah, exactly. So let's begin, Stephen. You and I have been talking for a while. And here on the show, we've released episodes about a year ago.

We released a podcast here on Radical Personal Finance talking about some of the various shortages happening in fundamental materials. And... Stop the word shortages, okay? Shortage means you can go someplace else and get it. This is like out of stock, outage, not produced, gone from the planet. You got to wait until next year's planting that hasn't been planted yet and harvest.

Right, right. Yeah, we're going to do some off-the-cuff talk between you and I. And a lot about energy finance, investing opportunities, the world, food, deglobalization, the shifting of manufacturing, how this is like incredible opportunity and incredible non-opportunity for a lot of places and what the greater trends are going to be.

And you and I are just going to do what people seem to like the best. And it's called dumping from unconscious competence. You and I are just going to dump back and forth from what we know and let it flow, but continue. Yeah. So I'm going to begin by talking about the food situation.

I will refrain from using the word shortage because I am deeply concerned about what seems the inevitable global famine. I already have friends, some friends in Kenya who are reporting that friends, people in their neighborhood, people in their church are literally already dying of starvation. And as best I can see, we're kind of at the front end of a global famine that is coming.

Let's start with talking about that. They're not dying of starvation. They have died. Two have died. Yes. Correct. Two have died. That's right. They are dead in the ground, buried from starvation, which is famine. And as anyone else said, that's food insecurity. No, they're dead. They're no longer corporeal on this planet.

And that is what is already beginning. And that is what's going to be happening to the tune of, well, both you and I are now fans and purveyors and listeners to a gentleman by the name of Peter Zion, Z-I-E-H-A-N. He's on YouTube. He wrote a couple of books. We've read his books.

And he gets into, he is just like, he is the savant, not the idiot savant, the genius savant on all things, age waves, population, demographics, location, depth reports, you know, how big ships can get in and out, bottlenecks, history, and a lot of other things. So we definitely want to give him credit where credit is due.

But the famine stuff, first of all, we got to erase all of the BS in people's minds. It has nothing to do with Ukraine. Now Ukraine is not making it any better, but it is not the root cause. Now Ukraine invasion started around the 26th or 28th, I think of February of this year, 2022.

Now in 2021, early November of 2021, I saw what was going on in the European theater and the America theater with natural gas and their attempt to regulate, control natural gas, and I've seen it before going all the way back to Obama administration. But I mean, there were some, all of a sudden I saw the teeth of some of the sharks in early November and I wrote just a two page white paper and it was called "Swimming Out to Sea and the Possibility for First World" and I put in parentheses CONUS, which means continental United States, famine.

And I husband my words very carefully. I gave percentages, references, sources, and the way I saw famine in the United States of America. Now famine means not shortage, not food. It means out of stock, gone. You go to a store in this city, the next city, the next state, Amazon, eBay, it does not exist.

Okay? Some of it has been consumed. There is no more to backfill. There's no more coming in. This is a hard concept for people to grasp, but what do you mean there's no more? When's the next truck coming in? There isn't. Is that because there's the truckers? No, it's not because there's a shortage of truckers.

Is there a supply? No. Everything that was grown has been harvested and has been distributed and they are now out until the next planting season. People don't understand that. The same way people go, "Where does milk come from?" The store. "What do you mean I go to the store, I get milk?

Milk comes from the store." No, it comes from a cow, which comes from the cows and the dairy. The cow is fed food in the dairy by the dairy farmer. Many times he grows his own food or imports his own food. The milk is then, you know, that is grown by another farmer that is then transported to his location for food for the cows.

The milk is then processed, goes through a whole bunch of processes, is then transported to a bottling location where it is bottled and filled and transported to a distribution center, which is then transported to the grocery store distribution, then to the grocery stores, and then into your hand, into your shopping cart, into the self-checkout, also called the Walmart IQ test, and then into your refrigerator at home and your stomach.

So I saw all this happening and I wrote this paper and the next thing I know I get some phone calls that's like, "Hey, Harris, what? Your paper got picked up by this think tank." It's like, "Them? Really?" And they go, "Yeah, they spent four hours on it." I go, "They don't spend four hours even on like, you know, nuclear war." He goes, "Yeah, well, they took it pretty seriously." And I got contacted and did some more stuff and that report became what's called embargoed.

And the embargo is off now and that's why I've been talking about the information. Not that people were listening anyways. So I can't release the actual report. I can write another report. I can do a podcast about it, as I've done, and I can talk to you about it and everything else and the information is freely dissembled by me.

But yeah, I was contracted to do the research for a particular subject. And they came and they said, "Yeah, your estimate of 20% is very good. The numbers look to be about right." Again, this is last November. And they go, "We agree with you that if there is to be a famine in 2022, 2023, then it will be like the way no other famine has happened.

Normally a plague of locusts come in or you have like two years of drought or something and it's like all the crops are gone." And keep in mind in ancient times, biblical times, which is mostly where we get the word famine from, we didn't have diesel fuel trucks, trains.

We had mules, asses, things that Mary rode on and wagons. And that was your transportation infrastructure. Now we're a lot more global, but now we're looking at a global famine. So, let's talk about why, because when I talk about my friends and acquaintances in Kenya who have died from the current famine that's happening there, it's much more related to drought crop failures in the way that you just alluded to and exacerbated by the massive price increases, inflation of food that they can't afford to buy imported food.

And so it's more of that traditional model and they just have no money to buy the food and evidently now it's to the point where, again, the reports I have is that two people that are in my circle of connection have died. But that's not a universal thing and that's not the kind of thing where it's actually unavailable.

Wealthy people are still able to buy food. So let's begin with natural gas. What is the connection between natural gas and food? Okay, I actually, if you want the long story, and I'm going to give you the short one here, okay, this is even smaller than the garden hose.

If you want the four inch fire hose, I did my first podcast and thank you Josh for giving me the model for everything that you use successfully for podcasting because I duplicated it as you told me to. I took your advice. Good. So thank you. Thank you, sir. And I got two of them out.

I got more to come out. And the first one is natural gas and its role in human life. Now you have to go back and you have to understand first and foremost that everything in the world that is alive is made of carbon. You, me, my cat, we're all made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and then trace minerals for bones, teeth, and nutrients and stuff like, but everything else is carbon, nitrogen, sorry, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, which is called an organic molecule.

So C, H, and O. And all of our carbon comes from atmospheric carbon dioxide, every bit of it. None of the structure of all you, me, the cat, the dog, your salary, coffee beans, they're all structure physically comes from the carbon. And all that carbon is brought into the plant through the photosynthetic process of absorbing atmospheric CO2, water, and sunlight.

And the thing that makes chlorophyll, because the plant produces chlorophyll that converts CO2 and water with sunlight into organic material. And when I say organic, I don't mean like your organic tomatoes. I mean organic as in organic chemistry. All organic chemistry contains a carbon in it. Okay. Inorganic chemistry is what you had in high school, the periodic table of elements, iron, zinc, sodium, potassium, uranium, et cetera, that is all inorganic chemistry.

So nitrogen, and the nitrogen for photosynthesis does not come from the air. I repeat the nitrogen for photosynthesis does not come from the air. That is bound up nitrogen. That is N2, diatomic nitrogen, just like all of our oxygen is O2, a diatomic oxygen. It is bound up. It is a tight bond.

We need chemically available nitrogen in the soil. And actually one of the ways that happens is through rain, because the rain falls through the sky, it absorbs the nitrogen based upon the temperature of the water droplet, it absorbs nitrogen and oxygen, and then it hits the soil. And then it actually reacts with a few things that may or may not be in the soil.

And you get fixed nitrogen. Now we discovered that the addition of nitrogen to the soil, either through different forms of ammonia or urea, which is human pee, animal pee, et cetera. I mean, a lot of people who are into the permaculture stuff, literally collect their human urine in their bathroom in a container, dilute it one to two, one to three, and they go put it on their garden.

But that is not enough to feed the world. But that was actually one of the original sources for the nitrate that made up gunpowder, which is a whole nother six inch fire hose lecture from Harris. Incidentally, Josh, when your kids start learning chemistry, we're going to teach them pyrotechnics first, which starts with gunpowder, which is yes, very safe, very easy to do.

And that's how they'll learn their chemistry is through the chemistry of pyrotechnics, because you get to see your results, and then all your changes. So anyways, we learned that if we take nitro, or what farmers just call nitrogen, but this is going to be in the form of nitro, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, et cetera, which a lot of it comes from bird droppings.

And there are lots of bird droppings off the coast of Chile. When the birds fly into their nest off the coast or on an island, they're smart enough to take a dump before they fly into their nest. So birds extricate urine, fecal material, and their eggs all through the same spot.

So it's a mixture of everything, and that collects into the ocean or on the island. There's great history of if you found an island full of bird guano, you could claim it as territory of the United States, which is how we got some of our islands in the Pacific.

So this is the late 1800s, early 1900s. And we would import Chilean saltpeter from off of Chile, in Chile, et cetera. And it's saltpeter, which is generally considered potassium nitrate, but it's a flavor of sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite, as well as potassium. It's the whole chemistry, urea, ammonium nitrate, the whole flavors of nitrogen organic chemistry in there.

And then we would bring it over by the shipload as fast as possible. And we would then put that on our soil. And it's no different than putting manure on the soil. And/or what's better is you biodigest manure, make methane from it. And really smart dairies do this. They use this to help power their dairy and heat their dairy.

And then the byproduct is actually doubly enhanced nitrogen fertilizer that they sell. But even this is not enough to feed the population of the world on an industrial scale. People keep going, permaculture, dude. Yes, there's some very good things about permaculture, some very intelligent things about permaculture. But it isn't to scale of 7 to 8 billion people.

So anyways, early 1900s, someone who could actually do math figured out with the population growth of Europe and everything that they were going to run out of fertilizer sometime in the next decade-ish. And they needed more fertilizer. And there was no place else to get it. I mean, it was a biological process to make the diatomic nitrogen from the air freely available in the chemical form.

If you've ever smelled ammonia, you know that that is freely available form of nitrogen. You can smell it. It's great refrigerant too. So Europe was literally going to starve because the addition of the fertilizer was more than doubling your bushels per acre. I mean, we're talking like today corn is well over 200 bushels per acre.

You have to look up the world records on it, but it is very high. And that's because we're adding nutrients to the soil and the plants and the pest load to allow more chlorophyll production that allows more photosynthesis, which allows more bringing of water through the roots and CO2 from the air.

In addition to make it basically the plant makes glucose. Maple syrup is a lot of maple syrup is glucose, which is tree sap. And just like you and I, the majority of what we eat gets turned into glucose. That is the energy of the body. The body then stores that as fat and or the tree then makes cellulose, hemicellulose or lignin from the glucose that it forms through the photosynthetic process.

Sorry, I don't mean to lose you guys, but I mean, understanding the chemistry in the most basics. And then when you see the interruption, you go, oh, who pulled the chair out from underneath my legs? I'm like Wile E. Coyote standing here over the cliff, you know, and gravity has yet to take me over, but I know I'm going to fall.

And there's an anvil, not only are you going to fall off the cliff and not get the road runner, there's an anvil and a boulder above you getting ready to hit you after you hit the ground. So that's how photosynthesis works. And what happens is this brilliant guy by the name of Haber, German chemistry, he's also villainized for making chlorine for World War One for chemical warfare.

And believe me, if you're a chemist, making chlorine is not that difficult. He just made it, bottled it and distributed it. And he was doing it for his country. It was German. Germany was at war. So they say he's the man that has saved billions and killed millions. Both of those are probably an order of magnitude off.

But he figured out how to take atmospheric nitrogen, mix it with hydrogen. Now they had a hydrogen back then and abundance because they were making what was called town gas or coal gas, which is what we use to feed through pipelines before we actually put methane through them. If you remember the old saying, go stick your head in the oven, which meant go kill yourself.

That's because the gas flowing through the town pipes was actually made from coal and a coal distillation process. And it was primarily carbon monoxide and hydrogen and some other volatile organic compounds. So when you stuck your head in the oven, you would kill yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning. So anyways, he figures out how to, incidentally, the first internal combustion engines ran on hydrogen and this type of gas.

So the first internal combustion engines were hydrogen engines. Not a hard thing to do. So he figured out on a laboratory scale, meaning a laboratory bench top, how to combine hydrogen and nitrogen, and he actually got drips of ammonia condensing and coming out of his system. Now we're talking like 1908-ish time frame here and before, and material science, the science of iron and steel was not what it is today.

And he was at the operating limits of temperature and pressure for the iron/crude steels that he had. Well, Haber nevertheless won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for figuring out how to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. It was a breakthrough, but they couldn't make it in volume. Now this guy you probably never heard of by the name of Bosch, another German, I believe there's a chemical company that is named after him, B-O-S-C-H.

Not a big one, just worldwide. He figured out how to industrialize on a commercial scale Haber's process for making ammonia out of hydrogen and nitrogen and enough to feed all of Europe. He quadrupled the production of food in Europe. This is early 1900s. And it's called the Haber-Bosch process because one person fertilized the egg and the other one gave birth to it.

So it's called the Haber-Bosch process. And lo and behold, Bosch wins a Nobel Prize for this. And thus Europe was saved. Now this is the fundamental base of all of our fertilizer in the world. There's three types of fertilizer. There's N, there's P, and there's K. N is nitrogen.

P is not potassium, it's phosphorus. K is potassium. And by far the biggest fertilizer that does the most, yes, rice requires a lot of one of the others and a few others and they are needed, but nitrogen is by and far the largest driver of agriculture in the world.

Now farmers are not dummies. They actually take a sample of their soil. They take it down to the fertilizer company, a lot of which are still mom and pop owned. And some are big, some are small. They do an analysis of the soil to see how much carryover of nitrogen there is from the previous years, what it's deficient in all the way down to individual minerals and nitrogen and everything else.

And they specifically make a fertilizer of the right mix to go onto that farmer's field for the crop that he's going to plant, because maybe he had soybeans last year, he's going to do corn this year. But nevertheless, our source today for hydrogen is natural gas. Natural gas is methane, which is CH4.

Four hydrogens, one carbon molecule. So when I, and all of our fertilizers made from this, basically all of the nitrogen fertilizer, because it's just too damn easy to make hydrogen from natural gas and make ammonia from the hydrogen. The nitrogen's in the air, it's free. And even EPA hasn't regulated nitrogen in the air because it's 78% nitrogen there.

And so now you have this base precursor chemical called ammonia, NH3, which is kind of analogous to methane, CH4, only it's nitrogen and three hydrogens rather than a carbon and four hydrogens. Now from this, we make, you've heard of urea for like diesel trucks. Urea is also a fertilizer that is a nitrogen compound made from ammonia that goes onto the soil.

It's white prills. Ammonium nitrate used to be a lot more popular and used a lot, but it's very easy to make explosives out of ammonium nitrate. So all the insurance companies have kind of dissuaded everyone from using ammonium nitrate. And they also make aqua ammonia, which is ammonia in water because ammonia, you think you had love for your first crush in junior high.

Ammonia loves water more than that. Ammonia loves water more than you love your dog. So aqua ammonia, which is also known as ammonium hydroxide, is a method of distributing it. And also farmers will actually put ammonia directly into the soil. They'll run a plow and inject raw aqueous ammonia, you know, stuff that stinks so bad, directly into the soil.

And the thing is, I said, it has this great affinity for water. Well, it's absorbed into the moisture of the soil, any moisture in the soil. So it gets put in directly like this. And this is roughly responsible for a quadrupling, more or less, sometimes mostly more, sometimes less of our current crop.

So when you see them trying to regulate, tax, restrict natural gas, it's like they are literally trying to take the food out of your mouth. And that is what led me, you know, I have a different type of vision. I see things, I see the entire series of dominoes on the basketball court.

And I go, because I can see the first one falling and the other train of the dominoes that are falling. It's like, if you light the fuse on the stick of dynamite, the dynamite is going to explode unless you clip it or something else like that. And that's what prompted me to write this report.

And it was kind of like an offhand report. But I was scientifically literate. I was careful and understood the audience that might be reading it and everything else. And it's like, you know, better think from Harris. And for whatever reason, it gets picked up by them. But anyways, that is the role of natural gas in human life.

I go into more of it. You can get it. You can type in Stephen Harris Science and Technology Podcast and whatever you like for podcast engines or it's at harris1234.com. I get into it more in there. But let me stop there because I'm sure I probably instigated about 18 questions in your head.

So let me clarify. So as I understand it, to recount, the reason we have such a large and well-fed population on the earth today is fundamentally because we figured out how to feed the world's population. When Thomas Ehrlich wrote his famous book, sorry, Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book, the population...

Don't even mention the default science. Don't even give it the credence of mentioning one of the biggest lies in the world. He was on Johnny Carson. So the point is that it was probable that we would not be able to successfully grow enough food with previous technologies, but due to the input of the chemical processes that you've gone over and the Haber-Bosch process of being able to build a system for creating nitrogen fertilizer, then that led to a massive growth in crop productivity, which has allowed us to successfully feed the world now since World War I and counting.

Today we use natural gas to facilitate that process. But what I don't understand is why there's a danger of having minimal amounts of... of not having enough fertilizer due to natural gas. What's causing the problem now in the current way of producing fertilizer? Oh, well, they're artificially inflating the price of natural gas and they're trying to put restrictions on it for climate reasons and everything else.

Who is that? Whoever you want to see on TV, Greta Thornburg, whoever, whatever. I don't care. The point is it is being done. It is happening. There's a lot of false science behind it. It's like, no, they say carbon dioxide. The thing about carbon dioxide, it's thermally emissive. You can, if I look at it coming out, if it's a different temperature, I can see it coming out of a bottle and I have an infrared camera, I can see the gas coming out because it's thermally emissive.

And so they said, well, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it's 420 parts per million. Remember that word. So if you had a billion, if you had a million dollars to give away, Josh, here's some finance. It's like, I'm going to give away a million dollars. And to you, Mr.

Harris, or to you, Josh, me, Steve Harris, I'm giving away a million dollars in the next 60 seconds. Oh, Josh, you can have 420. Here's $420. What would you say to me? It's not much. It's not much. It's called a trace gas for a reason. It's responsible for all life on the planet, literally.

Okay, so let me restate. Due to the current press to change gas emissions on the world, bureaucratic leaders, government regulators are seeking to minimize the production and the use of natural gas. Is that what you're saying? Well, it's not the, yes. I mean, natural gas is already there. And in fact, everything in the world that, as I was talking about in my podcast, look, I take you out in the woods and I shoot you in the head, you fall down in the forest.

You're going to rot aerobically with atmospheric oxygen and you're going to turn into water and carbon dioxide. Now, if I like take you out in the woods and I shoot you in the head and I bury you, you're going to be in an environment without oxygen and that is called anaerobic.

I know my metaphors. I'm sorry. They're kind of hard to forget, but they get the point across quickly. And you are going to decompose principally because all the bacteria are already inside you to do this. You're going to decompose into methane and carbon dioxide. So everything on the entire planet, every whale that dies, every leaf that falls into the water, every leaf that falls and gets covered up by other leaves, all turn into methane and carbon dioxide.

And carbon dioxide is measured 400 and about 428 parts per million. Now this horrible thing of methane, you know what, how many parts per million it is? I don't. Atmospherically, they'll show you the rise and everything else. The Al Gore chart with the hockey stick, it's about 1.8 parts per million.

But do you know how they label it? I don't. Natural gas is 1800 parts per billion in the atmosphere. Interesting. So they, they changed the units from parts per million to parts per billion so they could make a larger number. And then they say it's got a forcing factor 80 times of CO2.

All right. So, so let me clarify then, because I know I'm not worried. Obviously that's an important conversation, but I want to understand what is happening that is making fertilizer in short supply. Is natural gas production going down? Is natural gas usage going down? What is the connection between natural gas and the increasing desire to regulate natural gas and fertilizer?

The right now, as we're speaking in the United States on August 26, around 10am, the Henry Hub price for natural gas is $9.57. And in the United States, we measure it, what's called MMBTU. M is a thousand, M is a thousand. So a thousand, and these are Roman numerals.

So a thousand, a thousand is a million. So an MMBTU is a million BTUs of natural gas is around $9.57. Now to give you an example, that's the also the spot price. That's not the delivered to you price. The delivered you price is like double. Give you an example, a big furnace in a house in the Midwest, upper Midwest, is going to be 60 to a hundred thousand BTUs per hour.

That's how much natural gas, just to kind of like put it in context for the people listening. I try to like make things relevant. Now in Europe right now, see they don't price it. They don't price it in dollars, obviously, per MMBTU, per million BTUs, which mathematically is coincidentally a thousand cubic feet of that of methane.

They price it in euros, when what's a euro worth today, almost a dollar, right? Yeah, more or less. So they price it in euros per megawatt hours thermal. And they always neglect to say thermal because megawatt hours is a unit of power of energy, which is power over time.

So my power is five watts. If I use five watts for an hour, the amount of energy I've used is five watt hours. So they measure natural gas and they sell it in megawatt hours thermal. And that's different from electricity because if you want to know how much electricity, you got to take the efficiency of your generator, which is going to be 18% to 40 some percent for like a code generation to internal combustion engine.

And there's 3412 BTUs and a kilowatt hour electric. But anyways, if you do the math, it's like the price of natural gas in Europe right now is about six, six and a half times the price of natural gas in the United States. It's so expensive that they have just literally stopped making ammonia in the European Union because it's like it's too expensive.

The price of nitrogen fertilizer in the United States has been varying between this year. Let's pick a and never mind 2021, 2020, it's go all the way back to 2019 when like, I mean, what would you pay for a month of 2019 right now? I mean, really? Right. So, you know, just like transport your back.

Farmers are paying year over year, let alone going back to 2019. Natural gas was around 235, 270 and MMBTU. Now it's 957 and it's been down to seven, up to nine, down to, you know, it's been fluctuating around up there, but it's quite off quite a bit. Yeah. The price of fertilizer for the farmer to buy in the United States is six to eight times.

So 600, 800 percent, six to eight times higher. So what they were paying $220 a ton for, for a particular type of nitrogen fertilizer, they're literally paying $1,200 a ton for the same fertilizer. Right now, as of right now, well, planting season, one of the main planting season is over.

We're actually getting into harvest season. Crop reports are coming out now. Vegas crop reports are coming out in mid-September. It's probably when the rest of the world is going to get that sinking feeling in their legs of looking over like the Empire State Building or a bridge, ever get up to a high place and look down and get that sinking feeling in your legs.

The rest of the world's probably going to get that sinking feeling around the end of September when the crop reports for the September, October, November harvesting finally actually come in because right now we're eating the wheat, the rice, and the corn from last year. - So the connection between natural gas and nitrogen fertilizer is there are significant increases in the cost of natural gas, especially outside of the United States.

In the United States, the price of natural gas has increased from $2.5 per mmBtu to $9.5 mmBtu. But in other regions, specifically in Europe, natural gas is 6.5 times more expensive than natural gas in the United States. Because natural gas is used to make fertilizer through the production of ammonia, that means that fertilizer prices have increased massively.

And farmers, at least in the United States, have gone from paying $220 a ton for nitrogen fertilizer to $1,200 per ton for nitrogen fertilizer. - And the nitrogen fertilizer basically quadruples the output. Some plants, like soybeans, don't require a lot of extra nitrogen. Corn is very nitrogen-intensive. - So now, because of the high price of nitrogen, the concern is simply that farmers will not be able to pay for it and thus have lower crop yields.

- They've already switched to different crops. They've already switched from corn to soy. That happened in the spring. We already have reduced planting. - We know that because of the high price of nitrogen fertilizer, and because farmers around the world were not confident of there ever being a high price for their crops, they switched to other crops and planted less of the staple food crops.

Is that right? - Or they didn't plant, or they planted anyways and just didn't put on any or as much nitrogen as they could. So their crop yield is going to go from, instead of 200 bushels to acre, maybe to 100. Some of the stuff I was just watching today on the USA Private Crop Reports, they're going from 200 bushels an acre or 220 at a high down to 180.

And in other places in the world, they could be literally going from 200 bushels an acre to 140, 80, 160. The numbers aren't fully in yet, but it's going to be a lot less. I mean, it's not a, "Well, we'll just get it from someplace else." It's like it doesn't exist in other places.

And the price of the energy, the diesel fuel, and the other variations thereof, to bring it to you is also now greatly increased as well. - Right. All right. So on a global basis then, it sounds like because there's, and it's my understanding that setting aside the question of regulation, which is obviously important, but the United States has abundant amounts of natural gas.

That's why it is so cheap in the United States compared to other places. Is that right? - No, it's actually at a record price. It's almost at a record high right now. - Comparatively speaking, the United States has much larger quantities of natural gas than other regions of the world, and it's used in the United States.

That's why natural gas, while more expensive than it was in the past, is much cheaper in the United States than it is, say, in Germany. - Well, we got a lot less regulation, but they're trying to put more and more regulation on it. I have a lot of friends that have a natural gas well, which I was going to put a natural gas generator on, and we were going to use that for cryptocurrency off of their stranded well, not on the pipeline system.

And they started getting into some of the regulations, and EPA has yet to come out with their final ruling on rogue methane emissions. And they said, "Steve, there's no way we're uncapping that well, unsealing that well until we get a final ruling on what the rogue methane emissions are, because that methane is still going to be in the ground for my children or my grandchildren.

It doesn't matter. And I'm not about ready to open that Pandora's box until there's a decision made." So there is actually the prevention of a lot of it from coming online in the United States and as much as it could be, as well as the exploration for it. And United States, you know, this goes back to Zion and globalization and everything United States has been doing since the end of World War II to counter to the Soviets.

And then what we've had the residual of for the last 30 years, which is freedom of the seas, which is now the globalization is all coming to an end abruptly. That's why Zion's book is called "The End of the World is Just the Beginning." And so we were getting a lot of our ammonia from outside the United States.

We were literally blowing up our ammonia plants in the United States. You can go to YouTube to control demolition, CDI, part of the Lorenz group. You can see them blowing up coal plants and ammonia plants and, you know, raising them to the ground. So we don't have the ammonia production that we used to have because we would get a lot of it very inexpensively from China and other foreign markets because we had cheap globalization and it was more affordable to get it from other places and to bring it in.

So we are mostly self-sufficient at this moment on ammonia here, but not, you know, it's like saying, well, Steve, how much water do I need? Oh, about a gallon a day. But I'm in Arizona. You're in trouble. So we have about enough, but we're not awash in the ammonia production.

It's still a difficult process. I mean, the Haber-Bosch process is not something Steve Harris, with all his chemical knowledge, is going to do in his research shop or his backyard or his garage or anywhere else. I mean, there are plenty of complications. It's a high temperature, high pressure and a catalytically driven system.

So whereas if you got, you know, a hundred million to throw at it, it's pretty darn easy. In fact, you'll get your money back pretty quickly, but it's not something where like Henry Ford originally wanted the Model T to run off of ethanol because every farmer can make ethanol.

Making alcohol on the farm is pretty easy and straightforward. It's actually hard not to make it. That is not true with the Haber-Bosch process of making ammonia. And there is really no other process anywhere near as efficient as the Haber-Bosch process for the manufacture of ammonia. It's not trivial.

It is PhD level chemistry, master's level, PhD level chemistry and industrial process at the same time and metallurgy and process control. So it's not trivial. So as things stand here on August 26, 2022, the world is consuming last year's crop harvest of wheat and corn and all of the other crops.

We don't yet have crop reports for this summer's production in the Western Hemisphere. We expect those to come in starting in the middle of September. Official ones. There are people out in the fields right now on YouTube doing their own crop analysis right now of the corn, the soybean and the other crops.

It's going to be lower, but not catastrophically lower. And the way I say it is the United States is going to have a famine. The rest of the world is going to have a biblical famine. So let's talk about that because obviously, you know, the commitment that we said at the beginning is we'll use the right words, but also I want to understand why those words are warranted.

So would you guess, and I know this is a guess, but an informed guess, do you think we'll have on a global basis when we're analyzing the official reports two years from now, do you think this year, due to the higher prices of fertilizer, due to farmers putting substitutes or not planting as much, etc., do you think we'll have 20% less global food production, 10%, 30%?

What would you guess? Well, the best thing I can do, and I'm going to give full credit to Peter Zion for this because he is the population expert and not only the geography, but the geopolitical population expert. And he's written about it in his book. And he says a billion people dead and so many others are coming out and independently saying like 1.2 billion, not million, billion people dead solely of famine, starvation.

And the estimates are from a year, 18 months to five years at the outside of what we're looking at. We're literally looking at rolling back the population of the planet to 1992 levels. So obviously that's a heavy, even to talk about that is a heavy and horrific thing to contemplate.

What keeps, why could we not, so let's assume that, let's pretend that we are governed and ruled by intelligent people that have good data sources. Let's pretend that they're able to access smart scientific reports, etc. Why can we not increase the production of natural gas, quickly eliminate regulation and quickly bring back supplies of sufficient fertilizer in order to lower the costs so that the next planting season is abundant?

Because it's going to take at least three years to make the ammonia plants if we started today. But aren't, there were enough ammonia plants a year ago or two years ago. Why are there not enough ammonia plants today? Well, because that ammonia we were using that was abundant and cheap here in the United States, I remember buying ammonia back in the late nineties with Walter Petzold down in Herford, Texas, God rest his soul.

And because I was doing some refrigeration experiments with it and you could just go down to the ag place. It's like, I need, you know, it was a hundred pound propane tank with a brass valve on it. It was like, I see the propane is heavier. It was like, yeah, we fill this up.

And it was like, okay, they charged me for 65 pounds of ammonia. And there was nothing to it, but a lot of that was being imported and or brought from other places. So, I mean, in 2019, let's say you got yourself a thousand pounds of the special metal alloy of aluminum, copper, and titanium.

And I want to buy it. And you're in, say, Korea and you want to ship that to me and it's going to come, it's a 10,000 pounds. So, it's going to be coming by boat. What was the cost of that in 2017, 2018, 2019 compared to the shipping of that to me now?

I don't know. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, the cost of the fuel, the transportation, the logistics, literally the bandwidth of the freighter and the people working on it is not there where it had previously existed. And all of the other sources that are making or could make ammonia, like say Europe, are currently offline because of an incredible high cost of their source material.

So, it's like I'm not buying ammonia from Germany. I'm not buying ammonia from Bosch and having to come in here because their source material for it is so darn expensive. And then there's the cost of the shipping, the marine fuel, the labor for the people on the tanker and everything else to ship it over here.

We have everything that used to go around the globe seamlessly and for pennies on the dollar, that era is ended. In fact, we're going to have to double our manufacturing base according to the Zion here in the United States as well as everywhere else around the world except for China, who is circling the drain and going down.

Mexico, United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, everyone is bringing home their manufacturing and or it's going to be going to India, Pakistan and other places. It's going to be a whole basket of manufacturing that's going to change radically in the next five years. So, that's kind of pivoting to a conversation about deglobalization, which clearly has an impact.

Let's wrap up the food conversation first. Let's put the train of arguments together. Repeating, number one, because we learned how to make synthetic chemical fertilizers, we were able to massively increase crop yields as compared to the old models of exclusively using local animal manure or bringing in freighter loads of bird guano.

So that process of creating NPK, or in this case, but focus mostly on N, on nitrogen, that process is a difficult and intensive process, but of course we've been doing it now for many decades. The major input for… Century, yeah, century literally. The major input at this point in time used for creating nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas.

Natural gas is experiencing a significant increase in price for various reasons, and because the inputs have increased significantly in price, fertilizer, nitrogen fertilizer, has also experienced a huge increase in price. And also non-production. Germany has a choice right now. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is shut down. Nord Stream 1 from Russia to Germany was down.

It's now back up at 20% capacity, and Russia can turn it off at any time, and the Ukrainians can blow it up at any time that they so desire. So they're sending, Russia's sending 20% of Germany's total natural gas to Nord Stream 1. Germany was trying to dump it into their empty natural gas wells as fast as possible to have enough natural gas for the winter, which now they can't do.

All the natural gas coming from Russia is basically going to run Germany's industrial base, industrial furnaces, heating, forges, smelting, everything that you can think of chemically, it's all being done off of natural gas. I mean, it's an incredible chemical feedstock. So I mean, if you want to be warm, do not go to Germany this winter, because they are literally looking at the, I want to be careful here, the significantly measurable price of possibility, like let's roll a die, and say, you know, one chance in six, one chance in four, you know, that there are going to be measurable deaths from freezing to death in Germany and the other areas, because that pipeline, they made themselves dependent on Russian natural gas, and Russia has taken their toys and gone home.

In fact, the entire world, Halberd and the other oil supply companies, which are not just oil, but they're oil, natural gas, and all the petrochemical, everything. There was no law, no sanction that said they had to leave. They just picked up and left Russia in total. Shell, Halberd, and the other companies abandoned everything in Russia.

They took their intellectual property, the people, the intellectual knowledge of how to run it, and they left, completely left everything behind, got on the planes, flew home, and they're not coming back. And the Russian oil lines are literally going to freeze in place in the permafrost zones, and the last time that happened was '92, when the Soviet Union fell, and they only now just got it going 30 years later.

So I think that is helpful, to talk about the broader scale of natural gas. The reason I hadn't gone to Russia and the comments you issued there was I was trying to understand what you were seeing in November of 2021 that was causing you to be concerned, and this is because this was all before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this was before the instability of the pipeline to Germany, these factors.

And so there were some base factors that caused you to write your report in November that have been exacerbated now by these other things. And so to reaffirm or to emphasize what you said, one of the additional factors that makes natural gas for fertilizer production so difficult to come by is that natural gas is a primary mover in many, many other industries.

It's a primary heating fuel, it's a primary fuel for creating energy, for creating electricity that's used in industrial processes, it's a primary fuel for fueling machinery making and virtually everything in the industrial cycle. >>TYLER: Chemicals? Chemicals? Huge. I mean, it is the simplest organic molecule. It's one carbon and four hydrogen.

It is the simplest organic molecule there is. >>STEVE: So the pressure on natural gas doesn't only come from nitrogen. If we diverted more natural gas—excuse me, nitrogen fertilizer—if we diverted more natural gas production to creating more nitrogen fertilizer, that might allow us to produce sufficient quantities of food to minimize the global famine, but that will have massive effects on industry, on people's ability to keep their houses warm, on the home prices they pay for gas heating, et cetera.

So the natural gas disruption, the increases in natural gas prices are disrupting everything and food is perhaps the most pressing and the other things are also very bad. Is that a fair assessment? >>TYLER: Well, that is only the tip of the iceberg because hungry, cold people change entire countries and worlds in days and weeks, not months and years.

Now look around you and look at everything around you, okay? Look at your screen, your microphone, your wood table, your wood floor. Look at your plastic pencil. Look at—put on your Superman glasses, look through your walls, look at the copper wire, look at your asphalt shingles, look at your aluminum computer stand, your steel case on your computer, the magnesium on your Macintosh, whatever you got, it's nice and light, it's made from magnesium.

Look at everything that is around you, okay? Except if you have a meteorite that fell from space, don't look at that. Everything around you in your entire world is either groaned or mined. I'm going to scare the living piss out of you here. You ready? If any of you want to press pause and go pee first, go do it because I'm about ready to make you pee your pants.

Everything around you is either groaned or mined. Is there—am I missing something? Is there something else I'm missing, Josh? Josh: Nothing except the meteor, the incoming asteroid. Well, I guess we could still mine it when it hits the ground. David: No, that's called pick it up, okay? Josh: Right.

David: That's called picking up. So everything around you is groaned or mined. What is the foundation of modern mining? What made the Panama Canal possible? What made the train tunnels through the mountains possible? When they mine coal and surface mining and copper and iron oxide, iron ore, and you see this big rippling going all the way through, you go, "Wow, that was huge." What are they using?

What is the foundation of 98% of all mining in the world? Josh: Explosives. David: Explosives. What are explosives made from? Josh: I wish I knew. It would be fun to make them. That would be my high school chemistry class. I haven't done it. David: Okay. Explosives like that. We're talking about detonating wave explosives, which are called detonation, not a deflagration.

So it's faster than the speed of sound. A slow one is ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, ANFO. They use that for moving earth. It heaves things beautifully. Blasting things apart, like buildings or rock faces. When they make the tunnels for stuff, like for salt, they like to use a higher speed explosive.

You would know it as TNT, but they use different formulations. TNT is tri-nitrous toluene, ammonium nitrate, ANFO, ammonium nitrate, fuel oil. Are you seeing a common word in there? Josh: Ammonia. David: No, nitrate. Nitrogen. Okay? All modern explosives are made from nitric acid as the original precursor to make all the different variations of explosives that we use today.

Where does nitric acid come from? It's made from the, careful of the pronunciation, the Oswald process. Another German. The Oswald process. And guess what the Oswald process uses for making nitric acid? Josh: Natural gas. David: Ammonia! Josh: Ammonia. There we go. Off the front of natural gas. David: And what makes, yeah, which is from natural gas.

Josh: The Haber-Bosch process of natural gas to make ammonia. David: Haber. Josh: Haber. David: Haber. My name is Haber, not Haber. Where are you from? France? Yes, I have a sense of humor. So anyways, so the people, the regulations, the stupidity is messing with the fundamental thing that minds and grows everything.

It was like, well, Steve, I'm not eating corn. Steve, I'm not eating soybeans. The pigs, the bacon you eat from the pigs is made from soybeans. Okay? Everything else, you know, everything, oh God, the things that's made from corn is huge. The world still runs off of a particular staple.

America, the staple is mostly wheat, but also wheat and corn. Central America, a lot of corn, you know, maize is a staple. Russia and Eastern European wheat, China, rice, Asia, rice. Most of the world, the Irish of the days of old, potatoes. Again, most of the world lives off a starch product and anything that you're eating that's a protein product like meat is fed a starch product of one type or another for its food source.

It's literally the thing that makes everything that makes everything that makes everything that we eat that we just made into something that we ate. It's really complex, but it's like, Josh, there's this guy, his name is, pick a scary name Josh. You can't do that to me. Carlos, Josh, Carlos is going to kill you.

Okay. Josh, Carlos is in your town, in your country. Okay. Josh, Carlos was seen in your town. He wants to kill you. Okay. So when I wrote the report about called swimming out to sea, because you know what swimming out sea reference is. People would commit suicide by swimming out to sea so they couldn't change their mind.

So let's say you could swim for six, eight hours and you're swimming. And, and you're six hours out and you, and you say, Oh, I don't want to die. I want to swim back to shore. Well, you don't have enough energy to swim six hours back. You got enough energy to swim two hours back.

So you drown and you die. So it's, it's, it's, it's a metaphor for an irreversible decision. Okay. I decided to swim out to sea. I'm committing suicide. So that's why the report was called swimming out to sea and the potential for first world famine. So when I wrote that report in November of 2021, because I saw what was beginning to happen with natural gas was like me writing the report when Carlos was standing behind you and had his hands around his neck, but he wasn't touching your neck yet.

Right. That's what I saw. Okay. Carlos wasn't in the country. Carlos wasn't in the same city. Carlos was standing behind you with his hands around his neck, but he hadn't started squeezing yet and you didn't know Carlos was there. That is what made me write that report. So now bringing it forward, the major things that have happened, number one, the trends that you saw then have continued.

And then we have factors like Russia invading Ukraine and factors like Russia using its current natural gas supplies as political leverage over Europe and basically... No, no, no, a weapon. Hold on. Okay. As a weapon, sure. As a weapon in Europe, like we talked about with Germany, but worse than that, there are major reasons to believe that Russia, now due to the complete absence of all the international workers, all the international scientists, all the international...

their ability to get parts, et cetera, that very possibly significant amounts or even all of their energy production could go offline due to lack of human intellectual capital. So that you take a huge natural producer and you take them offline and now you have complete disaster. Let's use the words of Peter Zion, "You melon scoop out Russia," which is like five million barrels of oil alone per day out of the market.

Right. So you melon scoop Russia out. I want to find out where he lives. I'm going to send him like a box of melon scoops. And yeah, you melon scoop Russia out and all of a sudden there is a hole there. And the interesting thing is there's one other huge advantage that about doubled or quadrupled our food production.

Before that, Idiot wrote the book about the world population going out of control, which was part of the impetus between Mao doing the one child policy, which basically was the death knell for China. This gentleman by the name of Norman Borlaug, Borlang, I get the pronunciation of his... Oh, they wrote it in a way that I can't read it.

Come on, say it. Pronunciation is a key for... Anyways, he discovered, invented, genetically modified through a variety of methods, either probably the traditional methods that we've been doing GMO for thousands of years. He made a high yield disease resistant variety of wheat and this hit the world market and started doubling wheat production initially in Pakistan and India a year before that moron put his book out that the world was going to have too many people and too little food.

In fact, if you look at the movie Soylent Green with Charleston Heston, they had everything wrong in there. I mean, Soylent Green takes place in 2022 and everything they did was on the fallacy of what we call linear no threshold theory. Whereas if one person jumps off a thousand foot cliff, they're going to die.

If a thousand people jump off a one foot curb, one person will die, which is a fallacy. They extrapolated linear into the future without looking for technology and innovation disruptions and everything that changed from 1972 when the movie was made to 2022. And everything in the entire movie was absolutely fundamentally wrong.

And this guy that wrote this book, he didn't anticipate a technology disruptor coming along like the change in the wheat that doubled production. Now you take a doubling of wheat production, you add it to a quadrupling with fertilizer, you're now making in 1970 eight times the wheat you did in 1902 in the same space.

I mean, that's huge. It is huge. And that's why I, that's specifically what's always in the back of my mind when talking about this, when talking about global famine this year, next year, the following year is humans are adaptable, humans are smart, and we can develop new technologies, I hope, and new processes, new something that can help to mitigate the worst effects.

And when the incentives are there, if people are dying for lack of food, all government regulations on natural gas production will disappear, either because the people will simply ignore them out of moral duty or because the governments will change them based upon their population not dying. And so I'm hopeful that it's not a worst case scenario.

I'm sorry, there's a Kardashian's marathon on and they're all watching it and they don't give a crap. They think there's too many people anyways. You are too cynical. I'm going to be the optimist, you can be the cynic, and hopefully it's somewhere between us. So let's pivot now, because we've talked about food production, and I want to talk a little bit about deglobalization.

I've recently finished the book that we referenced, and you and I have talked a little bit about it, Peter Zahan's The End of the World as We Know It is Just the Beginning. I was planning to do a series of podcasts about it, because I believe it reflects an important perspective that makes a lot of sense of the world that we're living in and some of the trends that we're living in.

It's very hard for me to talk about, because my entire lifetime everything has always gotten better, and yet I've always been aware of the fact that the idea that everything always gets better is not a true fact of life. It doesn't reflect the reality of human history. So he goes through and he argues about some of the trends, but at its core is a trend of deglobalization.

If you were going to encapsulate or give a broad overview of Zahan's arguments for deglobalization, how would you approach that? All of the ships and planes either stopped or got very expensive. And then the knock-on effects of that basically completely disrupt the world that we live in. Yeah, you got this.

I mean, imagine, okay, you got a road between you and the grocery store, okay, and you got one road that you drive to the grocery store, okay. You got one road that you drive, it's a different road, to the hardware store, okay. And you got another road that you drive to the gas station.

Well, imagine the road to the grocery store is gone. It's like mudslide, 80 feet high, gone, okay. The road to the Home Depot is potted and horrible, and you got to go through it five miles an hour, and it shakes the hell out of your pickup truck, and you can't stack anything up, and you're breaking your suspension.

And the road to the gas station is no longer paved, it's a dirt road. In fact, it's two-track, and one car has to pull over to let another car pass and everything else like that. That is basically what deglobalization is to the world, is the marine shipping traffic becoming very labor short, expensive due to fuel, and the whole demand, everything, the just-in-time.

People blame just-in-time inventory. Just-in-time is a miracle of modern manufacturing. And that whole model has now like broken, because the ship could sail from China, show up to the day, get offloaded, be on a truck, and going to the production facility and arrive within eight hours of when it was supposed to, plus or minus eight hours or a day.

That is all now turned upside down. China is going through massive problems, not only with the pandemic that's going on, their inability to handle the pandemic, the availability of energy that is driving their infrastructure. I mean, you know what's going on in China with the entire banking system and everything else right now.

It's just an absolute nightmare. And they're basically becoming non-functional. And you can take this all the way back to colonial America. We were the raw materials. We chopped down the lumber and grew the tobacco and everything, and the sugar, and it was shipped back to England, right? We were the manufacturing hub for, we were the raw material source for England.

It went back to England and got manufactured. While China was like that for us, and you can repeat this throughout history going back 2000 years with the Silk Road and everything. While that entire line of ants, okay, you just put a leaf there and the ants are going, I don't know which way to go.

I don't know which way to go. There's something blocking my path. I can't follow the chemical scent trail anymore. And in a nutshell, it's a lot more complex than that. And you really got to go into Zion's book to get it. But that is, for those of you listening, that is a very simplification of deglobalization.

Someone dropped a leaf in front of the trail of ants and they don't know what to do. So if I were to summarize the basic argument of deglobalization, and I actually finally understood something that it was missing, my critique of that book, which I'll probably do in a standalone chapter, or sorry, a standalone podcast, is that there's this book that is very persuasive and has powerful arguments in it.

But what I don't understand is the why. And that's partly, I think he probably wrote about in his previous books, which I haven't read yet myself. And so, but he made a comment in the back fourth of the book that helped me to finally understand. So if I were to articulate his argument for deglobalization, the United States is pulling back over the last 15 to 20 years, the United States has been systematically pulling back from acting as the police officer of the world, acting as the global security enforcer of the world.

And according to— More like the oceans and the air. Good. Oceans and the air. Fair correction. Continue. So, and this is for a variety of reasons that I don't fully understand, but the United States is pulling back as enforcer of world peace. And basically, this is kind of the closing out of an agreement that the United States made after World War II.

As the victor of World War II, the victor able to basically dictate global policy, the United States, instead of occupying foreign countries, instead of saying, "We're going to take you over and make you part of our nation, or we're going to colonize you," the United States said, "We're going to establish a new system that we will see to the world's security.

We'll make sure that the oceans are available for anybody who wants to use them, to use them free of concerns of attack, of piracy, et cetera, and we will see to the security of the world's oceans and the world's airspace." And as long as you support us and are on our side against the Soviet Union.

So after— As long as you line up in front of us and alongside of us against the Soviets. Fair. Not just stand up, but I mean, link arms with us against the Soviets. And the Chinese said, "Yes." Right. And so the United States is basically responsible for creating the conditions that allowed the mass industrialization of China and the economic miracle that was that mass industrialization, as well as what has happened on a global basis, and has created the truly incredible world that we live in of these magical globalized systems.

Now, as I understand the argument, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has basically systematically pulled back and has become more entrenched in internal affairs rather than external affairs. And it's taken 30 years. Right. Keep in mind, it's taken 30 years. Right. And as I understand it, Zeyhan's argument is that this trend will continue for a variety of reasons.

It's a bipartisan trend. Both Republicans and Democrats have done it. And it's a trend that reflects the wishes of the American people. American people are tired of foreign wars. They don't really understand the previous system, et cetera. And as the United States pulls back from ensuring the world's order and security, then it's probable that other players around the world will start to get involved.

And you'll have everything from localized piracy to nation state piracy to other nation states seeking to expand their control. And the most dangerous effect of this is that global shipping is exceedingly vulnerable to violence. And one freighter, one oil tanker is vulnerable to any nation state or any even just private contractor who can accumulate some very basic weapons to threaten that.

And if that happens, the global trade of shipping could potentially implode for everything from the real risk of having your ship sunk to a destruction of the insurance markets, massive increases in cost just across the board. Go back to the insurance markets. That's the one that is going to hit hardest the quickest.

Right. The insurance. You can't even really go into the Black Sea right now because you can't get insurance for it because it's mined in certain areas. Right. And so we see, so if that continues, then basically the entire, all of the lifestyle that we've become accustomed to because of globalization falls apart on a differing level in many, many regions.

And at its core, one of the things that I think I finally understood, which was really remarkable to me, was, and by the way, this has been a big challenge to me because politically speaking I have been exceedingly anti-intervention, politically speaking. I haven't wanted the United States to intervene in the world.

I've been a Ron Paul acolyte since I was in my teens, have closed down all the military bases around the world, end the standing army, et cetera. And perhaps that, you know, it seems to reflect moral and ethical values that make sense to me, but I struggled to understand the perspective of those who made the opposite point.

But Zion made this statement that I read, and first of all, he said that globalization was invented to isolate the Soviets. That was the basic goal, and that worked. And then he said this, I'm quoting from his chapter called The Map of the Future, and he's talking about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he makes this strong argument as to why North America is going to be the best performing region of the world for the foreseeable future.

And he says this, "When it comes to the fate of the NAFTA system, most indicators look wildly positive. Let's begin with base structure. Part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan. The core precept of the order," and by order he means the American order, the American commitment to secure the world, right, world peace, "The core precept of the order is that the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control.

The American market was supposed to be sacrificed. The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed. American companies were supposed to be sacrificed. Thus, anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the American market, worker, and corporate structure are hyper-competitive. Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are not for export, but instead for consumption within North America." And he goes on and talks about some examples of comparing American firms versus Chinese firms, but at its core, this has helped me to understand why this deglobalized future is probable, because Americans are angry about offshoring, right?

Americans are pissed off about their jobs going to China. They're angry about it. Look at the political waves that happened in 2016. It's a lot more insidious than that. I mean, what you're saying is like a surface explanation, but the real explanation has to do with the age demographics of the countries that were providing those services to us.

Right, right. So I totally agree, and that's a huge other conversation of the population. But I guess what I'm focusing on is I think I understand now, because this helps me to make sense of even the politics of the United States that I know, and that I understand the feeling of the people, that Americans at this point in time are pretty much set on, "Yeah, we don't want to be involved with that." And the people who are making the arguments for American domination of the world don't seem to be very effective in convincing others of why that's the case.

So maybe a deglobalized world would have such difficult effects that all of a sudden the American electorate would swing and go back the other direction and say, "No, let's take it back over." But, and I, Zaihan didn't address that in this book, but it is a rather difficult thing to recognize on how vulnerable the global system is.

You're not going to switch it back either. It is deglobalization. It's already deglobalized. And even if you have had this wonderful revelation and you are correct about what you so wonderfully illustrated verbally for everyone, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. You cannot throw a switch and get it back.

It is gone. It's like you just turned 40. You can't get your 20s back. They're a decade in the past. Everything that you just mentioned took decades to build. And a whole different set of generations and attitudes and everything else. And you just are not going to get that back.

And what this means is, is like a friend of mine said, when the pandemic started, he goes, this is a time when fortunes are made and lost. And what we're talking about now with deglobalization and Josh Sheets of radical personal finance, there are radical finance stuff for us to talk about.

Because now of a time of everyone bringing it home is going to be a time of huge financial gain ability, especially in manufacturing, especially in the automation of manufacturing, especially and this goes all the way down to computer coding. But you were right. We were sacrificed as not the workers of the world.

And so what did we become? We became the people who sent man to the moon and back a dozen times with the equivalent of slide rule calculations, not even computers. We did the 747. We did all the other stuff that we did. We invented the transistor, the silicon chip, the integrated circuit, everything else.

We didn't become the workers of the world. We let other places do that. We became the intellectual property for the world. I mean, much of what the silicon foundries in Taiwan run off of is American intellectual property still held in the United States of America. When Shell and Halliburton and some of the other companies that are as big as those, there's two more, left Russia, they did not only took their workers, but those workers and the intellectual property of exactly which way does that drill bit go on to the drilling rig?

Do you turn it left? Do you turn it right? You know, stuff as simple as that, the intellectual property got up and left. I mean, same thing when Venezuela had the full collapse of their system and the communism, the loss of power and rapid inflation, they couldn't feed people, massive starvation there.

Everyone who could, including by foot, left Venezuela for Colombia, for Peru, for Mexico, for Brazil. The brain drain out of Venezuela was intensive. Yeah, a hundred percent. And guess what we got here? We got a lot of brain here. Right, right. Yeah. So, I guess if I were to try to connect these themes, we're living in a time where at its core the basic building blocks, right?

You talked about mining, but we skipped over it very quickly. If explosives are much more expensive or much more difficult to come by and there aren't enough of them due to the shortages of the base materials, then that can substantially hamper mining and then you have less production from the mines.

And then there's a knock-on effect of not being able to get the basic materials that you need out of the earth all around the world. And so we're living in, I guess, a more day-to-day experience. Basically every industry I talk to in the United States is right now, nothing is flowing, nothing is working like it's supposed to.

And so they're constantly having to come up with workarounds. You have everything from car manufacturers, shipping cars where they have the buttons placed but because they can't get the chips, the function of the buttons doesn't work. I have a family member who's a boat dealer and he's got 30 outboard engines on order from his outboard engine supplier but he can't get them.

They've been on order for a year and a half and so he's constantly taking this part apart and taking that one apart and putting on the lower unit from this one to make it work in this application, etc. And everything down to an electrician not being able to get enough plastic electrical boxes to put for the switch covers and every industry is disrupted.

So the basic expectation that so many of us have had is that this is a disruption due to COVID, due to the government shutting down businesses, due to China manufacturing collapsing, due to weird shipping anomalies and whatnot. But the argument of Zaihan and other people would be this is COVID simply accelerated the already existing problems and the world of COVID and of toilet paper shortages was simply a harbinger of the world that we can expect to live in for the coming years and that these trends are not trends that can be fixed immediately in the same way that the food inflation is not exclusive, excuse me, the price inflation in the cost of food that we can see very visibly each week when we go grocery shopping.

This is not exclusively a financial phenomenon. It may have some financial effects from the growth of the money supply, etc. But at its core, it reflects back, it's the harbinger of these fundamental issues that you're talking about going all the way back to the amount of natural gas in production, the flows of natural gas around the world, the availability of natural gas to be used for fertilizer and all of the knock-on effects.

And that's a very sobering thing to think about, especially for someone like me, right? I don't know what year you were born, but I was born in the mid-80s, which means that for me, Stephen, the most difficult statement that I read in Ziohan's book, I'm going to pull it up here and read it to you, because it was for me just the most sobering thing because he said this, "The Halcyon days of 1980 to 2000," so let me back up, he was talking about birth rates and it's in a chapter called "History Speeds Up" and he says this, "But there was nothing about it that was normal.

Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans' commitment to the global order, and that order hasn't served American strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery, like, I don't know, say a war, breaks the global system beyond repair, assuming that the Americans don't do it themselves.

But even if the Americans choose to continue holding up the world's collective civilizational ceiling, there was nothing about the heyday of globalization that is sustainable. The Halcyon days of 1980 to 2015 are over. The collapse in birth rates that began across the developed world in the 1960s and across the developing world in the 1990s now has decades of steam behind it.

The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization proved equally true for accelerated demographics. In 1700, the average British woman bore 4.6 children. That's almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the early 1970s.

Now in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below. This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030. Now comes the other side of the hill, and it goes on and talks about. But the idea that, and I'll read this final paragraph, "By most measures, most notably in education, wealth, and health, globalization has been great, but it was never going to last.

What you and your parents, and in some cases grandparents, assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living, that is, the past seven decades or so, is a historic anomaly for the human condition, both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980 to 2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time, a moment that has ended, a moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes." And that isn't even the bad news.

And for me, that's just, it's an incredibly difficult thing to understand or to absorb, even emotionally, because as a millennial, my entire lifespan has been lived in this globalized world. As a financial planner, virtually all of the techniques of my business have been developed and proven during this period of time.

Yes, we hearken back a little bit to the history of the stock market since the early 1900s, and we put quotes since the Great Depression, and we look at that. But basically, the entire industry in which I've spent my entire career is built upon this period. And yet, we see the cracks in that period, and while I hope that Zaihin is wrong, because I like living in the globalized world, it requires me to fundamentally try to figure out where we go from here, and then how to find the opportunities in it.

And by philosophy, I believe that times of great transition are the times of opportunity. It's been a thought that I've had, years ago I had a friend on Palm Beach who had made his fortune in the oil business, and he gave me his autobiography. And it was like he was this Texas wildcatter driving around Texas doing deals and wrapping things up.

And I always loved his story, and I always thought, "Poor little old me, why can't I live in a world like that, where I can go out and live an adventure and make a fortune in a changing market?" Well, perhaps there'll be one coming in the next 10 years.

But it is hard, as a young guy, it's hard for me to understand and to even figure out how to deal with the changing world, and then to sort through and say what things are true and what things are not, what things in the investment markets are true, what things are not, how does this apply?

It's a pretty sobering thinking process for me. >>Adam: Zion's statement that the next five years will be a lot harder and rougher and a time of more transition than your grandparents went through in World War II from 1940 to 1946. That is a statement that hardly any, I mean, me understanding World War II history exceptionally well.

I understand it, but everyone else is going, "Huh? What?" They don't get it. And one of the things I said to you, probably, it was probably December of the year when I saw the stuff coming, and I was trying to get you to understand what the potential for famine was, was that I said, "Josh, understand this." I go, "Of the four children that you have, there is the possibility that your children can lose." I said, "The potential exists.

The possibility is there. You might be rolling two or three dice for that possibility to come up, but nevertheless, it is a measurable possibility that you don't like, that your children could lose one of their parents and one or two of their siblings. That is a distinct possibility." I think it was then that you knew the seriousness of what I was trying to foreshadow nine months ago.

No question. When you think about it, as we've talked since then, we spent a lot of time at the beginning of this podcast talking about the fundamental layers. But basically, the news every few months gets worse and worse. You go from massive regulations on price increases to natural gas, to basically the entire supply of natural gas from Russia being cut off from Europe for a time, to the potential of the entire natural gas supply of Russia disappearing due to the equipment failing to work and all of it being frozen in the pipes.

Then you go to—you talk about food supplies being down because of localized drought and people putting on less fertilizer. And then you have the number one and number two—that's not true. Anyway, very high-ranking, very high-level wheat suppliers of Russia and Ukraine being completely cut off from the global markets due to sanctions and due to war and due to their ships not being able to get out and their product rotting in the streets.

And so it's gotten worse and worse and worse every single week since for the last year. I can tell you right now, okay, the biblical part of the famine is really going to hit Arabia and Africa. If you go into Zion's videos on YouTube, and there's many, just type in Peter Zion, get ready to lose three days.

Z-I-E-H-A-N. And he will show you maps of who produces what, who's self-sustaining, who's a net exporter, importer of everything from wheat to corn to energy and everything in and out that you can possibly imagine, metals, commodities. The guy has got to have an idyllic memory for all this. He's got to be like a functional Sheldon Cooper, literally, of the level that this guy is operating at is stupendous.

Not to say there isn't anything, he's not fallible, but he's been working his entire life for these current years. And now is the time that he was put on this planet for to be the voice of education to all of those of us who will listen and comprehend what he is trying to say.

And it is absolutely startling. And it's like, see, what else did I have in the outline that you wanted to talk about? Because we really need to get into some of the financial opportunities here for people, because this is called "radical personal finance," I don't want it to be "Harris End of the World Finance," but it's called "radical personal finance." I want to put some radical into that part of the personal finance aspect of your show.

Right. So let's talk for a moment about the food situation, what practically can be done. Number one, most of us have access to food. And so at a minimum— Today. Correct. Today. Today. At a minimum, stockpiling for your family, your loved ones, your neighborhood, stockpiling the food that you have access to, and the largest quantities that you can make happen is a great idea.

And the audience of radical personal finance, the numbers involved to do that are simply a rounding error in most of our financial lifespans. But if you went out and you spent $5,000 stockpiling food, then that's for most of us a rounding error, but yet that could be the stuff of life for those that you love for a significant period of time.

And I'll get to the resources on that in a moment. Number two, I think it's important to think about supplies of food. What is available for me? And so if you're living in the downtown area of a city and you're far away from agricultural production, that's difficult because there's a lot of people between you and the agricultural production.

So you want to be thinking carefully, "Is there a place or a way that I can get closer to local producers or local supplies of food?" I think on a global level, the place that is best positioned for this is North America, most importantly the United States and Canada.

The United States is the world's largest agricultural producer and exporter. Anyway, a huge, huge production of food. And all of the natural materials, the natural gas, etc., are more abundant in the United States. They're cheaper in the United States than anywhere else. And so if you're looking on a regional level or a global level, the United States is best positioned of any country or region in the world to go through, to do better than other places.

And there are other places in the world that also may do well, but the United States is best positioned. I think even within that, you can look to say, right, one of the pieces of advice that when Steve and I were talking about this privately, Steve told me, he said, "Go, you need to have a plan to go get food from the ocean." So since I have a fairly mobile family, maybe I buy a boat, a fishing trawler, or something like that that I could live on and have easy access to the oceans.

Go ahead. We had two levels there. One, I said, "Start by getting to know the fishing industry in your local locale where you're living." And you go, "I love it." And I said, and another friend and I, we were kind of like war gaming for you. Okay. We were putting ourselves, which is something I do very well.

I can put myself in your shoes mentally pretty well and try to like look out through your eyes and your ears and from your point of view and get a feel for things. And we were war gaming and I was talking with a buddy of mine, Scott, about this as like, I think the Gulf Coast, the Southern Gulf Coast would be a great place, especially the part that gets up, like the Ozarks and a few things, but close to the ocean.

And my friend goes, "Oh, hell, tell him to go down and find like a working trawler that's not being used for fishing and just have him buy that or rent that and go live aboard the trawler." I go, "One, your anchorage is free to cheap, whether you're a dock or not a dock.

You got a place to live, you're isolated, or you can be in a big community. You can literally fish off the boat and you're in the middle of the fishing community. So no matter what happens to nitrogen gas, nitric acid, ammonia, fertilizer, crop reports, the oceans are still going to be there.

And as anyone who has fished a lot in the oceans, they go, "Oh, I can catch my dinner every night on the beach." It's very easy to do. Let alone using other methods of fishing. And see, it's like that way, it's like, let's say, you get the fishing trawler in Alabama and you want to move over to the Panhandle of Florida or Mississippi.

It's like, fine, you and the kids ride in the trawler. It's a little expensive for diesel, but it's okay. You can move to a different spot that has more advantages to you. And your wife drives a car down the road and you meet up at the new port. So you still got your car, yet you got your mobile house, yet you got access to something that is completely unaffected by everything we just talked about.

The fish are going to continue to do what fish do in the ocean, reproduce and grow and eat smaller fish to become bigger fish. And that's one of the things I wanted to put out there is if some of your people want this type of thinking brought to them for their family, for their rounding error corrections, I am available for a period of time to do this for them.

Go to harris1234.com and or email me, Stephen, S-T-E-V-E-N@harris1234.com. And we can try to put some of this best practices, best thinking intelligence for you and your family and what you're concerned with. Because what Josh and I are talking about are, it's the 10,000 foot view. If you get the real 10,000 foot view, you're going to mess your diaper because it's scary.

And it's going to become scary and a lot of uncertainty. Remember the early days of the pandemic, it will be 10 times scarier than that because there won't be nothing on the grocery shelves, potentially. Quite possibly. And that's an example of, that's some of the off the wall thinking that I've been known for, for think tanks and different communities and stuff like that.

It's like, I can see the series of dominoes and the first one beginning to fall and I'm going, and the last one, which will take a half hour for them all to fall, the last one hits the stick of dynamite next to your favorite cat in a cage. It's like, ah, my cat's going to die.

It's like, what do you mean? Because I see the person walking out of the bathroom, who's going to trip over the first domino that starts the whole chain going, that goes for a half hour, that hits the switch for the dynamite next to your cat in the cage drinking the cream.

And I go, ah, your cat's going to die. It's like, you're crazy. No, and by the way, just a strong endorsement, Stephen Harris is an idea generating machine. It's his core skill. So he's very, very good at finding good practical solutions to specific scenarios. And I wholeheartedly endorse anyone who wants to work with him.

You'll find excellent thinking and extremely knowledgeable and connected guy. Yes. And my rates are the same as the Mandalorian. My price is high. The only thing more expensive is walking around in the dark, blindfolded, in the minefield with pterodactyls with night vision waiting to try to pick you up off of the ground for food before you walk into the mines.

Right, right. I think one of the things that is important to point out, we talked about though in terms of financial opportunity, I think there are very good reasons to believe that this next couple of decades will be, next couple of decades. First of all, if this trend towards deglobalization is proven to be correct and continuing in the fullness of time, again, this trend, it bears very strong possibilities for many regions of the world.

In a separate episode, I'll probably go over some of the other regions that can win. But in the United States, for my primarily US American audience, in the United States, this potentially looks like a tremendous boom, a tremendous economic boom. If global manufacturing, excuse me, if global supply lines continue to face pressure, and if we see the continuing trends as far as the collapse of Chinese manufacturing, much of that manufacturing coming back to North America, then some of the long-term trends that hold huge possibilities are the growth of manufacturing in North America, the United States, Mexico, the interaction.

Go ahead. It's more than that. It's more than that. And Zion gets into it. And it's like he gets into secondary smelting or recycled smelting versus primary smelting. And primary smelting is where you use a carbon product like coke or natural gas to reduce the primary ore into the virgin copper or the virgin steel or iron that is used.

And Michigan is an iron ore and a copper ore state. And I'm in Michigan. And I got friends with the natural gas well. And I'm talking to them. And I go, "Oh, you want to know what's more profitable than making electricity with natural gas to go to cryptocurrency than it is to sell the natural gas outright?" I go, "We're going to smelt steel." Because, I mean, we're sitting right here next to the Great Lakes with the well.

And they own a trucking company. And it's like we can get the raw iron ore off of the main Great Lakes freighters that drop it off in Toledo. And it's like we can make virgin iron. Even if it's virgin pig iron, we can make virgin pig iron from natural gas and iron ore.

So, I mean, the opportunities are—the opportunities literally go from the Industrial Revolution, which started with Bessemer. Bessemer was a Gutenberg-type event. And I cover Gutenberg-type events in my second podcast, the one where I talk about APS. It's the theoretical division of Amazon. You know, Amazon made Amazon Web Services, which makes more money than Amazon does because they had spare computational and storage ability for Amazon.

So, they started renting it out. I made something more profitable than Amazon Web Services called APS, Amazon Power Services, because they're going to a fleet of electric vehicles or trying to. And it's like I could talk for eight hours, four on positive, four on negative, about EVs and all the aspects of it.

As a development engineer for Chrysler, Diamond Chrysler for 10 years, I understand the fundamentals of internal combustion operation. I understand how EVs can integrate and how they can decimate the grid, how they can prop it up and how they can decimate it at the same time. And knowing the way politicians and stupidity goes, it's going to go more towards decimation than it is positive.

But I make in my second podcast, and it's going to be at harris1234.com or use the words I told you. I go over the idea of APS, Amazon Power Systems, and how you can stop environmental thinking completely. It's become the litmus test for everything. It's like, is it planet friendly?

Shut up. Okay, stop environmental thinking, think smart. When you think smart, you answer your environmental goals you wanted and you go wildly beyond them. It's like saying, "Hey, can we put Sputnik in orbit?" It's like, "What do you mean? I'm talking to you from Mars." I mean, that is how much better smart thinking is than limited thinking.

Because you just wanted Sputnik, but nevermind the moon, you got the Mars in the same thinking process. And it goes back to a system that I was a six person group that created at Chrysler called Speed the Market, which became the Chrysler Development System, which became the reasons the goddamn Germans bought Chrysler Corporation was to figure out how Chrysler made more money per vehicle than anyone else in the world.

Now Toyota made more vehicles than anyone else in the world, and we made less, but we made more money per vehicle than anyone else in the world. And this started getting implemented with the radical changes that we did in '94, which culminated with the Red Blob commercial going through talking about a new day.

But yeah, so anyways, I go through Amazon, and it's really kind of a fun story of the way I did this, but it's to show you what is possible when you think with no box. And not everyone can do it. I mean, I don't mean out of the, it's like, "Oh, he's an out-of-box thinker." No, it's on my resume.

It says, "Steven Harris, ENTP, no-box thinker." I mean, that is the start of my resume. I do not have a box, nor do I have an ego where I'm concerned about, it's like, "Oh, I'm not going to defend any last idea as the hill to die on. I will come up with 12 ideas for you in five minutes." And it's going to be like, you're going to go, "No, no, done, did it, doesn't work, interesting, no," and it's like, "Oh, crap, what's that one?" And see, because I'm trying to generate that many ideas.

So you get to the, "Oh, crap, I never thought of that one," where things that took three years happened in three days or three weeks, which is the fundamental behind the speed to market Chrysler development system philosophy. But when I apply that to you and your family, that's how we come up with Josh, buy a trawler on the southern coast of the United States.

Right, right, absolutely. So question, what I wanted to wrap up with is finding ideas. Oh, we're a long ways from wrapping up. We're going to do the longest ever episode. This is called Joshua Sheets' Radical Personal Finance. There's not an ending time. They can just press pause and listen to the rest later.

In the meantime, you get half a week off, buddy. So here's my thought. I have solved, in my mind, a lot of problems that we face, and there are very few problems that I ... That's why I retain huge amounts of optimism, because human creatures are fundamentally intelligent, creative, and capable of working together to come up with never-before-heard solutions.

And times of great disruption bring opportunities to create tremendous solutions. And so even with talking about some of these deglobalization trends, this will be a time of tremendous growth and tremendous change, and that creates opportunity. When money is moving, when things are shifting, it creates opportunity for entrepreneurs to get in the way of it and grab some of it by bringing solutions to the marketplace.

The United States is very likely to experience a strong growth in manufacturing. Mexico is very well positioned to have incredible economic growth supporting the United States. There are perhaps other regions ... We're going to have inflationary growth to quote Zion. And the United States doesn't have great demographics, but it has vastly better demographics than most regions of the world, which means that ...

The United States has Mexico. Right. For us, meaning for us as people who are working, who are involved in the marketplace, unemployment I think will continue to be very low. There are jobs available for anybody who can retool, can retrain. You see all across the United States, you just see right now, "Help Wanted" signs everywhere that people are struggling to get workers, and that will continue, which means that ...

Josh, there are jobs for anyone who can breathe. Yeah. And so even for our children, our children live in a world of tremendous employment opportunities and tremendous opportunities. From the food perspective, I think that fundamentally food shortages will lead potentially to massive increases in the amount ... Sorry, we said ...

We're not supposed to use the word shortages. Famine. Josh, food outages. Food outages. Food ... It's gone. Food outages can lead to massive increases in the growth of food. And so here's my optimistic argument in face of food outages. Number one, in the modern world, because food has been so cheap, we pay no attention to creating food.

But every single city, every single suburb, every single town is potentially some of the most productive farmland in the world. Years ago I interviewed, was it Curtis Stone I think it was, who was a backyard farmer. And if you're not familiar with him, Steven, he was a guy who started farming in people's backyards and he created a business where he was farming in ...

I can't remember how many people's backyards, but literally he was sharecropping in people's suburban backyards and producing a business where he was making six figures a year from his farming operation and he was producing huge amounts of food. He was getting ... Oh, I remember this guy. I remember this guy.

He was fantastic. And he was actually doing the entire thing. Hold on, let me finish. He was doing the entire thing exclusively with bicycle transportation. The only element in his system where he was dependent upon fuel inputs was he had a gasoline powered rototiller that he would put on a bicycle and he would transport it between his farms with a bicycle trailer for his gas powered rototiller.

His production per acre on that kind of small scale was huge. So you look at the American ... No, no, no. Completely wrong. All right. Completely wrong. Go ahead. Why is that wrong? He was making an awful lot of food for people, but he was not feeding anyone. I don't ...

I don't ... Okay. Hold on, hold on. So you're talking about the difference between staple crops and calorie crops versus vegetables and kind of ancillary stuff. Absolutely. Now, I have a little private group called Steve's Power Circle, okay? And it's very hard to get into it, okay? And we're very blunt in it.

Now I have this member, her first name is Rachel, and she is role model in quality when it comes to ag. And I was so scared about what I wrote and what was going on. We were talking about this in January on the Power Circle. And she goes, "Steve, what should I plant?" I go, "Potatoes.

Rachel, do potatoes." And she goes, "Well, also there were some like butternut squashes that go good in Michigan." Because she's up in Traverse City. And it's like, we need calorie crops. I mean, I was so scared that if I had the land, I would have planted potatoes because that guy was brilliant in what he was doing, okay?

I saw the videos and everything else. I think Justin Rhodes endorsed him. And it was brilliant the way he was using other people's resources to make himself and them money. But he was doing a lot of what he did. I blame 20% for the billion that are going to die, I blame 20% on it of the crap he was feeding others and that he had swallowed.

That was the all organic, non-GMO, non-this, non-that, with a magnet near the tomato pointing north for three days out of the week that only ended in Y, whatever, okay? And he made a lot of money. He did good. He did it smart. He did like the really good parts of permaculture.

But he was, like you said, he was making the tomatoes and the vegetables and everything else. He wasn't making anything that people could have lived off of as a base. And Rachel did 10 gallons, she didn't weigh them yet, but she did 10 gallons of potatoes and less than a hundred square feet of fertilizer tubs.

And they weren't even that close to each other. And all she did was she took rusher potatoes from the store and she chopped them up where their eyes were and she let them sprout. And then she lightly put them into the soil and put straw over them and she produced a potato crop beyond exception.

But those two things are not fundamentally in conflict. I agree with you that Curtis Stone was not producing in his model. He was not producing high calorie foods that would easily keep someone alive. He was producing money. Exactly. He was producing arugula and herbs and whatnot that have very high prices.

But he could switch over to a calorie. Yes, exactly. I fully agree. The guy's brilliant. It's fantastic. And so if you actually look at a place like the suburbs in the United States and many places of the world, there is so much potential for food production. It's just shocking.

And the food production that that kind of land is suited for is high intensity gardening, which is not necessarily best for staple crops of potatoes and wheat, etc. It's for high intensity gardening that could be done. If any of our great grandparents came to the world today and saw how we despise land and how we despise food, literally choosing in most circumstances non-fruit bearing trees rather than fruit bearing trees because we don't want to clean up the fruit from underneath the ground, they would be shocked.

And we live in that world that we live in is created because of globalization, that I can get my tomatoes from Chile in the northern hemisphere just like anything else. And it's created with cheap oil. It's created by all those things. And so we could, not in a season, but there could be a very quick transformation in terms of that kind of food production.

The second thing that I have a real passion for is I believe that grass pastured animal production is one of the most powerful and most underutilized methods of meat production in the United States that we don't do because of the low prices of corn and soy. And so while you can't live exclusively on tomatoes, you can live exclusively on beef.

And what we could do in the United States where we have huge amounts of land is we could turn so much of our unused land into animal food production because what animals are world class at is taking land that is unsuitable for farming because it's steep or it's rocky or it's anything like that, where you can't produce human food on it, and using the grass and vegetation on it to create human food, which because we can eat the animals and live exclusively on the animal meat.

And so a outage of food. And in this case, I think there's excellent evidence to say that while it's not as productive in terms of the fast growth of grain fed animals, there are so many producers proving grass fed cattle, pastured pigs, etc, that you can produce excellent meat content without those inputs.

And those production methodologies can be genuinely regenerative to the land. That's a huge untapped reservoir. And so I think that's a positive thing that could come out of it. The third thing that I think is, and this is where I don't have the expertise you have, but I would love to see food production spaces like farmland go back to producing food and not to producing fuel.

And so things like the ethanol markets for corn, etc, if that cropland went back to producing food for humans and food for animals, instead of producing food that is being used to turn into gases and we just change those markets, I think that could also be a massive change as well.

So those are just the things off the top of my head. All of the ethanol we need could be synthesized directly from natural gas. You can synthesize natural gas directly into ethanol. In fact, it's done for the perfume industry by the petrochemical industry. It goes directly to 200 proof ethanol.

It's kind of like the Haber-Bosch, it's some temp and pressure and some catalyst, but yeah, it should be illegal to make ethanol fuel from corn because we got an abundance of natural gas. And I got a whole podcast coming up that will blow everyone's mind on what's called methane hydrates, methane clathrates.

It absolutely eclipses the known amounts of natural gas that we have in the land that is under the ocean. Actually just on the bottom of the ocean, it's beyond imagination. And it's a fundamental of chemistry. But all of our vehicles, ethanol is not the problem. Ethanol is the solution.

There is a big witch hunt on ethanol. "Oh, my car died, it must have been that damn ethanol!" And I call it the witch hunt on ethanol because my cow died, well, the witch must have done it. "Oh, my son got sick, well, the village witch must have done it." "Oh, my weed whacker died, well, it must be that damn ethanol fuel." And there's no reason why all of our transportation cannot run on pure ethanol made from natural gas as easily as we do right now on gasoline and diesel.

It can do it just as easily and with the same or better efficiency. It's just an absolute lot of stupid—you know, there is a law that says all of the ethanol we put in gasoline, which was the octane replacement for something that was very nasty called MTBE, because I remember it from the '90s in Chrysler, and the raw stuff had to be handled very, very carefully because it was very nasty.

But there is someone made a law that said all of the ethanol that goes into gasoline has to be a bioproduct, meaning agriculturally derived through a fermentation process that involves a biofeedstock, that they are prevented from actually synthesizing it. You take methane and you make ethylene, which is not hard.

We do it all day long for the plastic industry. Then you do something called the hydration of ethylene, which is basically adding water to ethylene, but it's complicated like Harbor Bosch, and you make ethanol. And it is the most—it is not—it is—you know, people go, "Oh, it eats gas, gets it, beats valves, it causes this." You moron, you drink it, you pour it down your throat, it goes in your stomach.

Just again, how caustic is this stuff? Well, whatever. But yeah, there is a great deal of stupidity in the energy field of what can be done, what is going to be done. Let me tell you, they're trying to eliminate natural gas. If you want a hydrogen future, myself, Roy McAllister, have said for a long time, natural gas is the gateway drug to hydrogen.

Right, and I think that—and that's just the tip of the iceberg, right? So two other—of changes that when the incentives change can and will happen. But I see—my point is that I is simply I see—I believe that humans will change, and so it's almost certainly not as catastrophic as it could be because humans will adapt as quickly as possible.

Two other points that I was going to make, right? We talked about being very cold in Germany. You—if we—if I gave you 30 minutes, you would list off dozens of techniques and tactics that could be implemented in any home in Germany to make sure that that dwelling, even with no external heating, was at least livable, if not in some cases comfortable, by changing the basic structure of the apartment.

I know that because I bought your books on passive solar heating and on passive cooling, et cetera. Yeah, well, in Germany, they have 200 percent of their peak load in solar and wind, but Zion said it best. It is not windy nor sunny in Germany. Right. So they got 8 percent of their base load is from solar and wind when they have installed 200 percent of their base load in wind and solar.

The problem with the buildings in Europe, you know, Jordan Peterson says that, "Wonderfully, Europe is absolutely beautiful." Now, OK, fine. You take—you've seen some nice houses in like Portugal, Spain, and France, haven't you? Yes, definitely. Well, fine. Let's make that thing energy efficient. The first thing I'm going to do is put this beautiful stone mansion and everything that you've seen you've been in.

Well, Harris is going to spray foam six inches of foam on the outside of that thing. I cannot make that dwelling energy efficient without destroying the beautifulness of the architecture of that building. I cannot make it more energy efficient without changing the fundamentals of how that thing was made 300 years ago.

Right. That's the problem. I mean, what do you do right now for air conditioning? You open your window. Right. What do you do if it's getting too hot? You open your window. If it gets too cold, what do you do? You close your windows. Right. There's parts of the world that are like that.

They don't have heating or HVAC or air conditioning or anything because they're in the perfect place to live. And there's nice temperate zones around the world that is like that. Europe does not get super cold. Russia does. Right. But I mean, southern France, Spain, Italy, Greece, they don't get super cold there.

Right. It's like, yeah, go to the hardware store and try to buy screens for your windows in Europe. Right. So and I guess the final comment would be, at its core, our entire civilization can and will be redesigned based upon the products and the environment of the future. The reason...

It's going to be the equivalent of the Black Death in Europe, though. Right. I'm not arguing or saying you're wrong. I'm just trying to focus on the opportunity. And that as human creatures, the Black Death was horrific. And it did also have its knock-on effects that led to a better society.

And so... What do you think a billion people was going to be dead in less than five years? Right. I'm trying, Steven. I'm trying desperately to drag us to the positive side, and you keep dragging me back down. I don't know what to do except laugh and cry. I don't want to spend my time contemplating the death of a billion people.

I want to work hard to try to find solutions for perhaps the 20 to 60 people that I can impact near me. You don't understand. Right. It is pretty much going to happen. All of your praying, all of your positive thinking, all of our "we're going to try" is pretty much not going to affect the death of a billion people around the planet.

In the next single-digit years, less than five. It is pretty much inevitable. Like I said, the domino has already been knocked over by the person coming out of the bathroom. And X period of time, the last one is going to hit the switch that's going to blow up the cat in its cage.

People say, "Let's hope for the worst, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst." Well, I've got news for you. That cat 4 hurricane setting off the Louisiana coast going right for, what's that crap hole in Louisiana? They got flooded out. New Orleans. New Orleans. Okay. I've got news for you.

It's hitting. Okay. In two days. You're not going to change it. And people do not, you know, you got to take that head on that this is like rolling one through five on a six-sided die. It, you know, five out of six chances that this is going to happen now.

My original odds were 20%. And now everyone is going, "F you, Harris. Damn it, you talked about this in November and now it's all about certainty." And it's like, "I'm sorry. I predicted it. I talked about it. It didn't mean I made it happen." But anyways, you know, they're getting to that realization and you got to hit this, you know, and it's almost unfathomable, unfathomable, but you know, that is going to happen.

And now let's talk about how to make money off of it. But yeah. Maybe it's just my, I mean, it could just be my normalcy bias. One of the things that I have learned over the course of the pandemic has, was that I thought I would be less susceptible to normalcy bias because I had spent so much time thinking about disaster scenarios, far more than the average person.

And then the pandemic hit and I experienced strong normalcy bias, basically a refusal to believe that the worst case scenarios that I had thought were going to happen, could happen, were going to happen. And so I could be continuing to suffer under the delusion of normalcy bias. Yeah, there's a saying in the security business, "Security is like oxygen.

You don't realize you need it until it's gone and then you'll pay anything to get it back instantly." It's like being locked in a big bank vault. You go, "Well, I'm breathing fine. Everything is good. Everything is good until it's not." You're still locked. You've been locked in the bank vault, a big one.

You are breathing the air. You are going to start getting carbon dioxide poisoning. You actually don't run out of air. You actually poison yourself with very high, like five, 6% carbon dioxide. But yeah, you are going to run out of air and you're not going to realize it until you start running out of air.

And that is not going to be for hours or days, but nevertheless, you are now in the locked bank vault and the inevitable has got a very high percentage point of happening to you. And people that normalcy bias, which is probably one of the better things about human beings, is that you are going to be in the bank for a long time.

You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time.

You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time. You're going to be in the bank for a long time. We got experience and expertise, wisdom, judgment, decision-making abilities based upon that. That is not an opinion. Now, you are free to ignore the advice that we give you.

You can take the advice, and I very much want you to take the advice, modify it for your own purposes, and implement it as you see fit. That's what I really think you should do. You are absolutely free to ignore it. Please just put my name in your will.

So, let's wrap up with opportunities. The fun stuff. Yeah, exactly. I'll just pitch it to you. Where do you want to focus us for the last, as we wrap up the show? Okay, look, by now, you either think Harris is the biggest a-hole you've ever listened to, or you're going, "He's got a few points," or you're like Eric and Fresno going, "He's back on!" Which I hope is the latter.

So, if you want some of the stuff, if you think I'm saying stuff that is intelligent, and you want to prepare your family, the best thing you can do, let's say your rounding error is in, what my budget is, is well within what Josh calls your rounding error, and you want Harris talent.

You're better off going to my website and getting it all for pennies on the dollar. Get the 101 and the 201 from all the step-by-step videos I have, and I got some really smart stuff, like how to put 20 years of food into a freezer, and you don't care if the power fails.

That one will really warp your mind. People have said, "Gee, Steve, you already made preparedness so simple, and now you went and made it even simpler." You might as well go there to harris1234.com, get the classes, and go through that, and then make yourself a list, and now you got, like, "Hey, Steve, we want a few hours of your time to help our family with primary things to do, secondary, tertiary, contingency, just like we did the thinking for you and other people.

We want some of that intelligence applied to us." Fine, we can do it, okay? Whether you're going to hop on a golf string and go someplace else, we can get you all the communications and all the planning and everything else and where and when and how and what at both locations you can possibly think of.

So, anyway, go to harris1234.com, and we're going to use RPF20 for radical personal finance. Not RFP, RPF20, no space. You will get 20% off for the next couple weeks of anything you want. You can go up there and buy one video and go, "I love it," and you go back and get two more, and then you go back and get a bundle.

You can do whatever you want. There's no limitations on it, okay? And, yes, I am supporting Josh with this. A portion of what you purchase is going direct -- it supports me, and it goes directly to support radical personal finance as well. I'm doing this in cooperation with him and as a thank you to him as well.

But the stuff is cheap, and it will benefit the heck out of you. 100% guarantee. You can say, "Harris, you're an idiot. I hate it. Your stuff is horrible. Give me my money back." It's like, "Okay, fine." It's just money. It's, you know, the most common -- the most available commodity in the world is money.

It's also the most worthless commodity in the world is money. So giving you back your money is not the problem. So RPF20. Now, I have something out there. If you want your mind melted again after you've gone through my free podcast, I have -- you've had this, Josh -- the three real methods of wealth creation, okay, from me, okay, which is how you take things that are outside of the GDP and you put them into what I call the real GDP, okay?

And you're not going to find this on Google at all, anywhere. And it's not what you think it is either. But, you know, it's like what five or six words would you have to say about this three real methods of wealth creation class? I listened to it before you ever made it a product and we talked about it.

And I thought it was excellent. It was something that was genuinely new to me that I had never thought of. And that's from someone who has not consumed everything, but I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on wealth building and listened to a lot of people. And I thought it was genuinely unique and an interesting way to look at the world and look at the aspects of wealth creation.

So I thought it was genuinely good and unique and it's been filed away in the back of my brain. I haven't figured out how to actually implement it in detail, but I love having it there as part of my mental framework. And it's something I've never talked about on the show either.

I got the Harris potential scoring system. So you don't score based on priorities of what you want to do. You score based upon the potential something has for you to decide what you do next. And I got a 63 item scoring system that you apply to every idea or thing that you want to do.

You can pick the ones that you want or use them all or whatever you want. But when you put them all together and you look at it, this is a video, the wealth creation three real methods is just audio. So once your eyes have been blown open by the wealth creation class, you got so many ideas you want to go to the potential scoring system to decide what to do next.

And you go, ah, I do it. That is, I've literally did this myself. And something a mentor of mine taught me that I have then extrapolated out further. I did this over a year ago and I'm doing successful things today based upon me doing this for myself last May.

And I went out in the middle of nowhere for two weeks with my cat, my trailer and my power and my communications. And I just sat there. I went through 110 things. I only had 29 points scoring system. Then now it's like 63. But that's how you implement. That's how you decide what you want to implement.

A good example is like it might be a priority for you to mow your grass because your significant other or will either yell at you or the city or your neighbors will bitch at you or the city will give you a fine. So it's a high priority for you to mow your grass.

Now, unless you're Harris, you're making cellulistic ethanol off of your grass or your Josh and you're feeding it to your rabbits to make it into food. There is no potential. It's got zero potential to your life mowing the grass. It is a waste of time unless you want it for the exercise versus like reading Peter Zion's book or anything else on Joshua Sheets's reading book.

That's got a lot of potential to you in the future. You're listening to this podcast right now, not because it's a priority, because it's got potential for you. That's why you're listening to this. So there's the potential class. But anyways, if you'd want just the three real methods of wealth creation class, if you use money seven, M-O-N-E-Y seven, you'll get it for seven bucks.

Download it right then and there. Listen to it online. You name it. It's yours right then and there for seven bucks. Normally, I think it's twenty nine or thirty nine. But just only if you like really perverted thinking, you go, holy cow, I didn't realize that, then go get it.

But my podcast or Harris1234.com, I'll put links to those or type in Stephen Harris, Science and Technology into your favorite podcast, Engine, Fountains, Picture, iTunes, iPod, Google Play, whatever. It's across all those. I copied everything that Josh did. Thank you, Josh. My pleasure. We need people who, one of the biggest opportunities we have today is the opportunity for people who are learned and people who are learned to share their wisdom with others.

One of the great tragedies of past times is that huge vast amounts of knowledge, wisdom and experience have been lost to us as people have passed away. There are things that were once simple that we can't do today. You could look at a funny example of how did they make the pyramids or how did they make Machu Picchu.

How did they drill these rocks perfectly straight? Well, that was lost to us as far as the techniques. Or you could come to much more recent of the knowledge that our grandmother had about how to do something. What's the name of the guy that did the front lawn and backyard gardening thing again?

Curtis Stone. Okay, let's say Curtis Stone switched over, did everything, redid everything in six months and did nothing but calorie crops. Okay. And he made a YouTube video about it. And then one person like say Elon Musk, he's got 101 million followers. Okay. Let's say he tweets to 100 million Twitters, which would be what, 25 people?

Real people? No. Okay. Let's say 20 million real people read and understand that tweet he sent to 100 million people or entities. Okay. And 20 million people go to YouTube and watch Curtis Stone growing squash and potatoes and sweet potatoes and everything you need to feed yourself and your neighbors.

That's like, I got so many potatoes. Everyone come and pick them up for free. One person tweeting one thing to one piece of knowledge that is digested and like 15 to 30 minutes or less, or it may be that 15 minutes goes. If you want the full class, go watch this video for three hours.

One person can implement what Churchill tried to do with Victory Gardens and the BBC. One person can instantly, one learned person can instantly take tens of millions or hundreds of millions who weren't learned and make them learned in hours. Right. Now that is like a mind blowing concept. That's something we talk about lost knowledge.

Well, I mean, lost knowledge is one thing, but they couldn't do that. No, no. Okay. This is a unique time in history and this is only going to advance quicker. Right. But I mean, the magicalness of that is like beyond exception. Right. And it's one of the many things that fills me with hope because then the knowledge is out there and as we get better and better at searching technology, archiving, etc., we can dramatically improve the well-being of our billions of neighbors around the world.

You're still after my personal library, aren't you? I am. I am still after it because it's only 40 terabytes. I am still after it because it makes all the difference in the world. The knowledge and then the application and what human brains are brilliant at is taking is building on the work of others.

You talked about the Haber-Bosch process, right? You have one person does one thing, another person comes along and tweaks it and that's how we grow as human beings and as we build the world of the future, we need more and more of that. Speaking of which, someone was asking me, "Oh, the guy who invented explosives and everything else, did he win a Nobel Prize?" I go, "No, his name was Nobel.

He's the one who created the endowment for the prize." Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Because I was talking about what makes us live here this long is not just the food production. The three real drivers are antibiotics, what Fleming did, he won a Nobel, fresh water treatment, well water, city water, and removal waste is what has gotten us to live this long.

Now, you talk about your friends died in Africa because the price of the fuel went up for the transportation of the food plus the inflation made the food more expensive plus the transportation of the food that they couldn't afford that they died of starvation from, right? Well, what if you got 60 people in a village in Africa?

I know it's a simplification, but I'll do it. So you got 60 people in a village in Africa and they got one well and that well runs on one gallon of gasoline or two gallons of gasoline a week and they run it once a day for a half hour to bring up fresh water for everyone for the day, okay?

Now, the number one killer of people across the planet, other than stupidity, is intestinal-borne diseases from drinking surface-contaminated water. And that's what, so if that village, it's like how much do people make in Africa a day? I mean, it's literally measured pre-inflation to like 50 cents or a dollar a day, right?

It's extremely low, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, if your fuel price goes from, if your delivered fuel price in remote Africa went from $4 a week for that gallon of gas to $50 and that village can no longer afford that fresh water from the well that's like 80 feet down, run by the gasoline engine that pumps the water, and now they're all going to surface water, like ditch water and rainwater, not purified groundwater that was purified by the filtration method and time and everything going through the earth, what did you just do to the health and the intestinal infection rate of those people?

I mean, the reason the Chinese used to live so much longer than the rest of the world, like the Eastern European, was because they drank tea as their primary source of water. And what do you do to tea to make tea? You pasteurize it. Heat it or boil it.

You heat it or boil it, and that pasteurizes it, which is the same reason why they landed at Plymouth Rock on the ship was because they ran out of beer, because they didn't know have germ theory, but they knew if they drank beer, which was like a light ale, that they didn't get sick.

And if you go to Feeding Nelson's Navy, which was a book written, I think in like 1820, it was about feeding the British Navy from like 1740 to 1810. They had like 12 major components. They carried food components with no refrigeration on the boat. And this was 750 men at sea for six months, no land, doing like 6,000 calories a day.

They carried four times the beer that they did water because they knew if they drank beer for hydration, you know, there's a certain level of alcohol that dehydrates you, but low alcohol beer does not dehydrate you. It hydrates you. They knew that they could drink that safely, but the water might make them sick.

So the water was used for other forms of cooking and/or drinking, et cetera, or, you know, what they needed fresh water for. But their water consumption was in the form of beer because they had to boil the wort in order to, you know, to add and add, to malt the barley, to add it in, to do the acidification, to do the fermentation, to make the beer.

And, you know, thus it got purified. So, you know, we talk about taking food away. Well, what if we take that energy away? As Art Robinson says, there are people being held up on the bottom ladder of life. The lowest rung of the ladder that is life is being held up by affordable access to energy.

And the most simplistic example is, you know, that gallon of gasoline for a week to run the motor that runs the fresh water well for the entire village. And you go, well, why can't they just use solar power? It's like you got no understanding of energy economics in order to, you know, in order to make that statement at this time in 2022 history.

But, yeah, I mean, that can, I mean, that can kill a lot more than inflation and food and, you know, you start messing with people's water and the quality of the water, you can kill an awful lot of people. I mean, we're talking about controlling food to kill people, well, control water to kill people, and you can do a lot more.

Absolutely. Absolutely. On a positive note. Yeah. God, we've gone down some great rabbit holes, hit some great discussions and gone completely off script, which is some of the best things about doing RPF with you. And I love it. Thanks so much. So go to Harris1234.com. Yeah, Harris1234.com. And let me ask you a question.

Why are we having 10% per month inflation and gold and silver haven't moved? It's a good question. But there have been excellent, there have been excellent analysts for a very long time who have said that gold and silver are not a good, anyway, they're not perfect inflation hedges. I would say the first question would be, is it the fact that gold and silver hasn't moved on the spot price, or is it the fact that gold and silver hasn't moved on the physical price that you bring to the local market?

Right. The real price is the price to acquire, not the spot price. The spot price of gold and silver is unreliable. As an indicator, you have to go with what you can actually get in your hand from a local dealer. A friend of mine, after he read my report, in January, started buying freeze-dried food, Mountain House, all of the different ones.

He goes, this is the preparedness for myself and my family and everything else. The value of it has tripled from when he bought it. And he goes, well, either we'll end up eating it, or I'll end up selling it, or selling it and eating it. He goes, this is by far a better investment.

It's light, it's cheap, I can eat it, which you can't do with gold or silver. It's light, it's cheap, it's tradable, it's edible, it's good for 30 years. And it was his investment of choice. He just took some money, and he kept on, like Bitcoin, he kept on throwing it at it, getting in cases of it, I mean, like box cases, not quite pallets, he's got pallets of it.

And for $1 million, I will tell you where he lives. Anyways, and so he has used that as very legitimate. I got a full chest freezer that can do freeze-drying. And I've been trying to get someone to take it off my hands, and so I could show them how to do freeze-drying since 2019.

And I've had like no takers. I mean, if anyone wants to start a freeze-drying business, we can do it. Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, they got those little Harvest Rite ones, they're like $3,500 each. And I know God's gift, a cookie named Sonia, she's done miracles. She's got two of them.

I mean, they've been running all the time for four years. But I mean, I got it on a much larger scale, because I understand the chemistry of the whole process. And I have a cryogenic freezer and a vacuum pump. And so I can get to minus 16, I can pull a vacuum and sublimate the water out, and then we can make freeze-dried food.

But it's just been like, you know, I've been laying it down. There's a lot of people listening to this. It's like, I mean, how many people have we been laying it down for for 30 years have not picked it up? Right. That's true. Absolutely true. All right. We do it for the 1% that do.

That's always what it is. It's always 1%. Every time I start a talk, when I talk to teenagers or present a class in person, I start every talk with, "I'm about to give you some good ideas." Basically, but I know that it's going to be a complete waste of time, because the vast majority are going to do nothing with it.

But for those of you who do, I'm going to give you something really useful here. And if I was a college professor, I'd walk in on the first day, I go, "Everyone here has an A automatically. You all have A's. Anyone who doesn't want to be here, leave now.

You'll still have an A." It's like, "Oh, okay. Well, the eight people that are left, we're going to have a lot of fun. You're going to learn something." Much more productive. All right, if you want to talk to Steven about any particular needs of yours or of his chest freezer, freeze dryer, Steven@Harris1234.com.

Steven, S-T-E-V-E-N @Harris, H-A-R-R-I-S, 1234.com. 1234.com. I'll put the podcast. Or Harris1234.com. Use code RPF20, RPF20 to save 20% on all of his classes there. And to get the Wealth Creation class using Money7. That's also at Harris1234.com. Steven, is that right? Steven: Yeah, that Money7 is there. The Wealth Creation class of the three real methods of wealth creation from absolutely perverted historical thinking is up there, but that's not the real – it's up there.

That's not the actual title, but it's close. Yeah, go there and you'll be supporting me. You'll be supporting Josh. You'll be supporting – really, screw us, okay? Support yourself. I mean, go there because you want the knowledge of it for your own personal self. You can call me. It's like, "Harris, here at AHO, I want a refund." It's like, "You bought 432?" One that's hard to do on my website.

It's hard to get that much stuff in the cart on my website. It's like, "Okay, fine. You got nothing to lose. You got the world to gain, but like I said, you want some perverted thinking for your rounding error for your family, we can do it worldwide by ship, by plane, by hook or by crook, or in the middle of nowhere on the 100th floor.

Sometimes the 100th floor of an apartment is actually easier than being on the ground in the city, but we can absolutely do it for you. I think one of the things you said about the idea of having multiple locations around the world, so it's like we're going to go to Montana in the summertime and we're going to go down to Panama City in the wintertime, is really smart thinking and everything else.

The nice thing is you can actually drive between the two of them. Tom: I am convinced that for many people, it is one of the best solutions that exists to many of the problems that people face. Let me flat out say, Andrew Henderson of his YouTube channel, he was like, "Oh, I've stocked my pantry and everything else." It's like he doesn't get it.

You guys don't understand. When the harvest is gone and the next planting is not for four months, and then another six months of harvest, there is no more to get. It's like running out of moon dust on the earth. You got to go all the way back to the moon to get it and come back.

That takes a Saturn V or a Starship to do it. People don't understand. Once it's gone, it's gone until the next season. Dave: Right, that's true. On this particular topic, I dearly hope, Stephen, that you are completely wrong and that a year from now we're laughing at some silly mistake that you made or I made in our thinking.

Stephen: Let me tell you what my father used to tell me. My late father, he goes, "We were talking about safety and bicycle riding, going across streets and stuff." It's like, "Well, I got the right to the right away and everything else." He goes, "Yeah, you can be dead right." Dave: It's true.

I hope that you're wrong, but I want to make sure that we take it seriously and that we do all we can to warn people and help people to understand about what's going on and to prepare accordingly. Thank you for coming on the show today. Harris1234.com. Stephen: Josh, thanks again.

We got to do it more often than just do unconscious, competent dumps. There's so much radical finance we can get into with what's coming up. It's unimaginable. From primary smelting to lights out manufacturing. If you're a generation Xer, as Peter Zion says, now is your time. Josh: Absolutely. Absolutely.

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