KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

Dr Tim Morgan is a leading exponent of the view that the economy is an energy system, not a financial one. This was set out in the report Perfect Storm – when Tim was global head of research at leading international finance firm Tullett Prebon – and in the book Life After Growth.  Since that book was published in 2013, his focus has been on modelling the economy as an energy system. His model – the Surplus Energy Economics Data System (SEEDS) – produces results that differ radically from models which accept the premise that energy and resources play no more than supporting roles in an economy shaped and driven by money. His research can be found at https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

The Anonymous high school physics teacher has been corresponding with me for a while and I asked him to come on the podcast. He teaches in New England, and that is all I can reveal of his identity. Of course, we will chat about the current scene in secondary education. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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