KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

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

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

John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society. He published the Archdruid Report blog for many years, focusing on many themes that overlapped my own in The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic. He has moved on to a new blog, Ecosophia, which explores spiritual and intellectual repercussions of the collapsing industrial paradigm. This conversation is based on his recent blog, “Hate is the New Sex.” He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of Oberlin. Orr is the author of seven books, including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has authored nearly 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Bioneers, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute. He has been awarded seven honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. While at Oberlin, he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy.  

 In this bonus episode, James Howard Kunstler reunites with former KunstlerCast host/producer Duncan Crary for a behind-the-scenes discussion of JHK’s personal connection to the wildly popular S-Town podcast, a This American Life spinoff program. Back around 2010-2013, John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series began an email correspondence with JHK. John B was a real person, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure. He was also a fan of Jim’s books, and, after getting his phone number off his website, took to calling him on the phone. The two probably had a dozen long phone conversations. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled JHK with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. To Jim, the place sounded like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch.” Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, Jim tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going. They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. Jim thought JB had just gotten tired of advising him to move. As it turns out, what happened to John would become the subject of an audio documentary that has broken all the records in podcasting and stirred up a bit of controversy. Because so many of the concepts McLemore espouses in the series are inspired by JHK’s blogs and writings (sometimes John uses Jim’s exact phraseology), Duncan suggests the early KunstlerCast years are a bit like a “prequel” to S-Town. (Note: You can listen to all the previous episodes on the KunstlerCast feed for free, and you can purchase a book of based transcripts from the first five years.)   

Our pal and frequent guest, Dave Collum, suggested we have a chat with his pal Tony Greer, an independent global market analyst with 25 years of trading experience in and around Wall Street. He graduated from Cornell University in 1990 and spent the first ten years of his career trading currencies, commodities, and precious metals at UBS and Goldman Sachs.  In February of 2000, he left Goldman Sachs to start his own firm, Machine Trading, in the belly of the dotcom bubble.  After 2 years and a great experience, Tony segued into a fifteen year career as a top producing equity sales trader at several different broker dealers including Stuart Frankel & Co., Dahlman Rose & Co., and Bank Hapoalim, where Tony ran equity sales and trading.  The common denominator across shops, as the equity market evolved and electronic trading became more prevalent, was the subscriber growth of the daily note Tony wrote to his clients.  As Tony’s subscriber list grew to over 1,000 market professionals he decided to leave the execution business and launch the Morning Navigator, as a subscriber model newsletter.  He describes the Morning Navigator, steeped in technical analysis and behavioral finance, as “the morning note you will read first” and he has met with great success thus far.  Tony lives in Atlantic Beach, N.Y. with his wife of 17 years, Gerianne, and their 3 children.  

I’ll be chatting with Rocky Rawlins who is the man behind The SurvivorLibrary.com, a phenomenal website that contains scans in pdf-file form of hundreds of books on basic technology and the skills for applying them, mostly dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s hard to overstate the scope of this vast trove of practical knowledge — everything from bee-keeping to wagon and coach-building. In other words, what you need to meet The Long Emergency. The scientific elegance of these books and monographs is something to behold, the clarity of the language and precision of the instructions is breathtaking. I think you’ll like Rocky very much. A straight-up good dude.  

[embed]http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3[/embed]   Today I’m yakking with return guest David Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, who has become a popular presence on the internet commenting on the financial system and the related predicaments of our time. He’s also been involved in the campus culture wars and is not too shy to talk about it. Dave is a live wire and lots of fun. This podcast is sponsored by David McAlvany’s excellent firm, ICA, for assistance in adding precious metals to your investment portfolio and advice on managing them. Call 1-800-525-9556. Or go to McAlvany.com/kunstler to request information. Direct download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3 Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com.   World Made By Hand (Fourth and Final) Amazon Hardcover | Kindle Autographed Copy Battenkill Books Northshire Books New Interview with JHK about The Harrows of Spring Praise for A History of the Future: “Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist My local indie booksellers… Autographed copies Battenkill Books   Northshire Books or Amazon Also: Published as an E-book for the first time! The 20th Anniversary edition With an entertaining new introduction by the author Bargain Price $3.99 Amazon Kindle Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!

This episode’s featured interview is with transportation expert and urbanist Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Taras writes: “In the 20th century, our greatest cities were almost ruined by the automobile. Only a global revolution in transportation can bring them back from the brink.” He consults on these matters and reports from cities around world from, Paris, to Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bogota, Vancouver, Phoenix. Taras Grescoe lives in Montreal. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to the podcast. This episode also features a mini-yak with my old podcast sidekick Duncan Crary. Duncan has been working tirelessly, and making great strides, in promoting an urban Renaissance in the small upstate city of Troy, N.Y., where he lives. This March 30 & 31, 2017 he will be offering a New Urbanist-themed two-day class on “The Art of Small City PR & Spectacle,” at a school in Manhattan. For more information, visit his website: DuncanCrary.com  

    It’s a pleasure to welcome back Piero San Giorgio who came on the podcast some time ago to talk about his previous excellent book Survive the Economic Collapse, a Practical Guide.      Today I’m catching up with Piero on Skype at his home in Switzerland to talk about his new book, Women on the Verge of A Societal Breakdown — Preserving Hard-won Victories During an Age of Uncertainty. The book's published by the Club Orlov Press — and yes, that’s our chum Dmitry Orlov, author many splendid books on the subject of how we’re going to greet the future. You can find it on Amazon.      Yeah, i can hear some of you muttering — the effrontery! Two dudes talking about women! Well, There’s no against it, at least not yet, and we’re gonna give it a shot. Let us know if you think it was a fair discussion.