KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

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

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

Richard Vague, from Texas originally, is a Philadelphia-based managing partner of the venture capital firm, Gabriel Investments. He's the author of A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises and T he Next Economic Disaster: Why It's Coming and How to Avoid It . He's been in and around the policy world for years and is considering a run for president as a Democrat. He intends to...

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

#317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus.   In his "day job," he works on the repeating waves of electrical signals that drive the heart beat. Over the last decade he has developed an interest in another re...

Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as a Board Member. After earning his doctorate at Washington University in St Lous, he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG...

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

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

Brent Bednarik is a former Army Officer with two deployments in Afghanistan. After that he worked at one of the Big Four accounting firms in Manhattan, and is currently an entrepreneur in the tech start up space. Brent and I have been corresponding about what I like to call the new religion of Wokesterism, which has emanated from the university campuses and is finding a beach-head in corporate lif...

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

Bill Holter writes and is partnered with Jim Sinclair at the newly formed Holter/Sinclair collaboration. Prior, he wrote for Miles Franklin from 2012-15. Bill worked as a retail stockbroker for 23 years, including 12 as a branch manager at A.G. Edwards. He left Wall Street in late 2006 to avoid potential liabilities related to management of paper assets as he foresaw the Great Financial crisis com...

Shaun Chamberlin is an author, activist and the editor of both Lean Logic and the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy .  He has been involved with the Transition Network since its inception, cofounding Transition Town Kingston [UK] and authoring the movement's second book, The Transition Timeline .  He worked closely with David Flemi...

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

Jasun Horsley is an English cultural critic, metapsychologist, conspiracy researcher, and podcaster, and the author of several books, including Seen and Not Seen , Prisoner of Infinity , and the upcoming The Vice of Kings : How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse . To earn a living, he currently runs a thrift store in Canada with his wife. This is the link...

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

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002.  Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper as...

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

DOUGLAS FARR (FAIA, F-CNU, LEED-AP) is an architect, urbanist, author, and passionate advocate for sustainable design thinking. Doug is the founding principal and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm that plans and designs lovable, aspirational buildings and places. Doug co-chaired the development of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and ha...

Jack Alpert is director of Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, a Lab which he started in 1978 at Stanford University. In 1992 the Lab left Stanford and became a non profit research foundation. The research focused on how people gather and process information to understand dynamic systems. Over the years the Lab has transitioned its focus to the relationship between human cognition and civilization...

Chris Nelder is a Manager in the Mobility practice at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he heads the EV-grid Integration team. Chris has written about energy and investing for more than a decade. He is the author two books on energy and investing, as well as more than 200 articles on energy in publications such as Nature, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Quartz, Fin...

Tom Whipple is a former US Intel analyst who has put out the PeakOilNews for more than a decade. His newsletter is now associated with the PostCarbon institute and can be found at Peak-oil.org . Tom is not a tin-foil hat guy, but we get into a discussion in the heart of the interview about exotic alt. energy matters, including new developments in fusion and cold fusion. I disagree with Tom about t...

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

Arthur Berman has been an independent oil analyst for 17 years after an earlier 20 years with the Amoco Oil Company. He's a regular commentator at NBC, CNN, CBC, BNN, OilPrice.com, Bloomberg, Platt's, Financial Times, and The New York Times. He is a Director of ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA). He was a Managing Director and  frequent contributor at The Oil Drum, and is a...

David Blittersdorf's passion for renewable energy and earth-friendly technology started early. He built his first wind turbine at age 14 to light up the small shack where he boiled sap into maple syrup. After he got his driver's license in 1973, the year of the OPEC oil embargo, he vowed to help the U.S. transition away from dependence on fossil fuels. In 1982, after getting his engineering degree...

David Collum, an old friend of this podcast, is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University... but he may be better known these days as a wicked funny commentator on the financial scene. He writes an annual end-of-year wrap-up and forecast, which I interrupted him working on when I hauled him over to Skype to yak about the current situation. There's some weird Skype background...