It's Complicated

Introduction: It’s Complicated

KMOIf you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.

Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 555, "It's Complicated," with guest Brent Bednarik¹, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Thursday, April 9th, 2020.

Anyway, this conversation that you're about to hear is not a whole conversation. It's the first half of a conversation, maybe a little more, with Brent Bednarik, who has been a guest on the KunstlerCast and who contacted me via email after my last podcast, which featured James Howard Kunstler. Like me, he's somebody who used to really subscribe to the peak oil worldview and now hasn't divorced it, but is not so convinced. Although he's still more in that camp than I am. I won't say a whole lot here at the beginning of the podcast. I have received a lot of great feedback since the last podcast. I can't share it all with you in this episode, but C-Realm Vault subscribers will get quite a dose of it in the next episode. All right, here is my conversation with Brent Bednarik.

You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.

All righty. Hey, I'm here with Brent Bednarik, and this is the second time we've spoken, although the first time was like half an hour ago and it was maybe three minutes. We have James Howard Kunstler in common.

BrentYeah. I was on his podcast last year. I've been following both him and you for a while, and I consider Jim a friend as well. So, yeah, some common lineage, I think.

KMOVery good. So you're familiar with the C-Realm Podcast beyond just the crossover with James Howard Kunstler.

BrentYes. You know what? I really don't know how long I've been listening to you. Probably about six or seven years. And kind of going into what we're going to talk about, I listened to you and Jim and Chris Martenson² and just a plethora of all the same names that probably everyone's listened to religiously. I was pissed that y'all wouldn't come out with more content, right? Because I'm waiting for it. And then about, I don't know, maybe three years ago, four years ago, I just stopped cold turkey, and for a couple years I didn't listen to anyone, go search y'all out. And then I recently started listening to you again, and I heard how you've changed your stance, and I was like, okay, I've had my own journey with a lot of similar check marks, if that makes any sense.

KMOWho was it that said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

BrentOh, no, I don't know. Who did say that?

KMOAh, somebody can look it up right now.

BrentYeah, yeah. I mean, do you want to just jump into the topic of—

Peak-oil hangover and “lost” years

KMOWhy don't you paraphrase the email that you sent to just get this correspondence started?

BrentSure, yeah. Okay, so I listened to you and Jim talk, and my interpretation was that you have just completely exited the doomer side of things. You just don't think it's possible. You are—I'm going to say upset or whatever the word you want to use is—that the last 10 years of your life might have been negatively influenced by this mentality, and Jim is still of the mind of the Long Emergency still going on, especially with everything that's going on now, this is the collapse. And, you know, y'all are going to bet to see who won. Is that about right?

KMOCheck in in one year. Exactly. He said that the Dow Jones would be down around 5,000. I said it would be above 20. So we'll see. We'll see. Now, I don't think that the collapse of industrial civilization is impossible. I just—I agree with John Michael Greer that it is a process that will play out over centuries, and a lot can happen between now and, you know, the new medieval Dark Age. I don't think we're going medieval, as Jim likes to say. Just, you know, we know too much. I mean, so much of what we think of as the medieval European social structure was a product of the very limited knowledge that folks had on a wide swath of topics, so I don't think we're going back there. Now, what we're going to is going to be complicated, weird, messy, scary, and more difficult to visualize than simply a return to, say, the 1400s. I think a major advantage that worldview has is it's very easy to see it in your mind's eye.

BrentYeah. See, I'm on the same line as you now. It's going to be emergent. What that is, I don't know. I just kind of look at it as math now. What are the probability that we go back to the 14th century? I mean, there's a number. What that is, is just what we decide.

KMOAnd that's higher than zero.

BrentYeah, but maybe not much higher. Yeah, who knows? Maybe not, right? But we can all come up with all these different ideas of what it's going to be. But let's just talk about kind of two things. One, that's just the idea of emergency. Well, let's not talk about what it's going to be; let's just talk about the process in history. In history, it kind of shows that it's chaotic, painful, and can last a long time, right? And, yeah, do I think that our technology is just going to poof and go away and never be used again? No, I don't. But I think more in time of like, okay, today we're going to go through a trough. Now, how deep is that trough, and how long does that trough last?

And that's where—so now let's go to the second thing, which is just our mindsets. And I think this is for the last 10 years, this mindset of, oh, this is going to happen for sure. It's right around the corner, and whatever theme you particularly enjoy thinking about it, whether it was zombies—my particular brand was, one, a financial collapse, or two, an EMP. I thought it was not only from, you know, the Russians or whoever, but just from a solar flare. I was like, these I think are actually probable. So that's where my doomer mentality came from.

And then that doomer mentality, man, what did it do to my life, both good and bad? And that's what I emailed you the other day, where my sense of you is—well, it's really just my sense, you know, because I'm just projecting what I feel onto you. And that is, you lost 10 years. In the most blunt way to put it, because I feel like there's definitely a time that I felt like I lost 10 years of my life with the mentality of being a doomer, and not, "Hey, this system's great. All puppy dogs and ice cream, keep that corporate job, get that white picket fence, the 401(k), and I'm going to have the same life that my mother and my father and my grandparents had." And I never thought that that was a possibility. So I made a lot of decisions in my life that were—I think you and I are on the same page of a possible wasting of 10 years. Is that right?

KMOWell, you know, those 10 years happened, and experiences accumulated, and I made contacts, and, you know, it wasn't entirely wasted. But for me, the tragedy of my doomer phase was that it came at exactly the wrong time. It made me seem absolutely insane to my now ex-wife, and I basically didn't get to live with my kids as they were growing up. That's what it cost me.

BrentThat's a big cost.

KMOYeah, yeah. Just career and financial stuff, I've always been kind of a career-suicide guy anyway. You know, give me a good corporate job, and I will burn out very quickly and quit in a huff. Very quickly means two years; that's about my usual span.

BrentHey, if we're not the same, we rhyme, so yeah. And I wonder if that doomer mentality magnified that, right?

KMOI think a deep-seated anti-authoritarian streak, probably genetic, and that puts me in a bad position, you know, with regard to employers.

Who is Brent

Hey, all we've revealed about you so far is that you know who I am, and you know who Jim Kunstler is, and you know who Chris Martenson and probably John Michael Greer and Dmitry Orlov—you know all those names. But who are you, and what are you about, and how'd you get to what you're doing, and what are the salient details?

BrentSure. I guess trying to figure out the starting point is always tough for me, but I think my best thing is when I got into the military. I got in at 26, and I became an officer in the Army. And why I say that is because when you go through Officer Candidate School, you're eligible for a $25,000 loan from USAA for like 0% or something incredibly small. So I had a college degree, you know, I thought I was a little bit smarter than the average Joe, so I took that 25 and I put it—I went to, who was it, Edward Jones, and I put $25,000 in the market. I took whatever advice she gave me.

KMOWhat year was that?

Brent2007. Right? So I was like, man, I'll get a little bit of interest. Everyone seems to be killing this. Everyone's telling me to do it. So even if I make 2%, I'll be up 2%, because I'm paying zero interest on this loan. Like, that's all I knew.

And I got deployed in all of '08. I went to Afghanistan, and I just watched that $25,000 do this and then all the way down. And I got back to my next duty station in the beginning of '09, and it was in Hawaii, and it was just house after house after house foreclosed on out there. And it was a big problem with the military, because people would buy homes, they'd get transferred three years, and they were making money, but these mortgages were huge, $400,000, $500,000. And all of a sudden the price started dropping, that these military guys couldn't sell their home. And they're sitting there telling the Army, like, "I'm going to go bankrupt. I can't leave."

So what I'm doing is I'm telling you how my doomer mentality started coming up. So that's where it all started. I learned everything about gold. I started investing

Brentinvesting in precious metals and silver and guns and bullets and all that kind of stuff. Like I was starting to prep, and I was a military guy, so I was prepping in the way that I knew how to prep. Spent seven years, two deployments in the military.

My last tour was '12–'13. I was on an SFAT—Security Forces Advise and Assist Team. And what it was was it was us training the Afghans to be a professional military. So we were advisors. So me and three of the guys went out with 30 Afghans every day advising, being the liaison between the ANA—that's the Afghan National Army—the Afghan Border Patrol, like all different levels of their military and police. And we were a coordination center.

So I did that, and that's just a rough job. Our battalion and brigade commanders, they wanted to run missions, which, hey, if I was them, so would I. The president had this idea that we were just going to be advise teams and that's no direct action. But if you're a lieutenant colonel and you want to be a colonel, if you're a colonel and you want to be a general, you've got to kind of make a name for yourself and do something. You've got to do something, you know.

And after that deployment I got home, and I was like, you guys are cool, but you ain't that cool. And I left. I also had this fear of financial collapse because I'm watching what's going on with the banks. I'm watching what's going on with TARP, Cash for Clunkers, all these different things. I had the Ron Paul mentality at that point—libertarian, like, you know, finances to me is kind of simple. I know there's a government accounting thing, but that was shenanigans. Those shenanigans. And we should just call it what it is: shenanigans. And I was just like, they're not going to be able to do it. We're in the eye of the storm. And I thought that eye of the storm was going to be two, three years. And now this comes back full circle: it turned out to be 10.

From the Army to Ernst & Young to Texas

But after I got out of the military, I went to work for Ernst & Young in New York City. I was working for all the major banks doing financial services—JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, all that kind of stuff. Did that for two years. It's just corporate welfare. And I'm kind of like you: I kind of just thought, and I was like, this isn't me. I love the city, but it just burnt me out.

So I came back home to Dallas, Texas, went and got my MBA, have been doing business consulting, doing my own thing, and completely out of it. I got into yoga. I was a huge yogi. Got out of the doomer, sold all my ARs, went vegan for a while to try to heal my stomach. So then I got into all types of organisms and soil. I became a huge fan of just soil and learning about it, and that's what I'm kind of doing now.

I was doing business consulting in Fort Worth, loving my life, making a decent amount, doing yoga, had a girlfriend, and completely out of the mindset until about two years ago when I started watching society collapse with what I consider this kind of disease of the mind with the social justice warrior. It pulled me back into the political realm. And then through that, I started seeing what was going on. And now the last three months, man, I'm right back into the doomer lifestyle.

So, that's kind of me right now. I've got some plans where I'm at in a small town in Oklahoma, because I left Fort Worth. I got out of there three weeks ago. I'm not going to be in a major city. I'm just not. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me right now. So I'm in Durant talking to my MBA guys in Fort Worth and my army buddies all over the country who are working at major corporations and getting ready for that emergency that's coming. And I just think this one's going to hurt.

KMOAll right. Well, you are starting to toy around with vlogging as well. I was watching a nearly an hour-long sort of unscripted ramble. And something that you said in it repeatedly was that right now everything is in play. Stuff that wasn't possible a year ago and won't be possible a year from now is possible right now. And that's me elaborating on what you said. What you said is "everything is in play." So let me let you elaborate on that.

BrentYeah. That kind of stream-of-consciousness video I put out there for family and friends—I just got to the conclusion, I fast-forwarded three weeks ago when the whole supply chain things really started coming out and the disease, you started to see what was coming. I extrapolated a couple years. And what I see is what I consider the world is in play on an economic front, on a societal front, on a geopolitical front.

And what I say is not only has the United States never been more vulnerable, the world has never been more vulnerable. And why I say that is it seems to me in history when debt gets too big—or really not even debt, let's just say when resources start getting restrained from big countries—a leader has one of two options. One, they take responsibility and they try to dig themselves out. Or two, they refocus people's anger onto an enemy and they go and have a war for resources. And to the victor goes the spoil. Debts get erased for the winner.

It's just kind of what happened for us in World War II. We weren't in a good spot after the Depression. It lasted 15 years, and a lot of people say that the economy of the United States got better because of World War II. That's partially right. The economy of the United States got better because of World War II and we won it, and we've got to remember that.

So what's in play right now: every major country with a major military has options, and they've all got their own versions of Henry Kissingers. They probably have 10 of them, and they're looking at the chessboard.

So my girlfriend's from Italy, and her family's in a small town. They're doing fine. They've got their own garden, they've got a place on the countryside. It's great. Her brother's in Rome. Her brother's locked down. He can't get to the country. He'd love to be able to. He waited too long.

The European Union is in a lot of trouble, I think. I mean, I think we can look at the tea leaves and go: they're going to have some struggles. They've closed down the borders between each other. Italy is remembering this. France did the same thing. Everyone's each for themselves. Well, they don't have a unified military.

Well, if I'm Russia, maybe I've got a neighbor right there that has potentially a lot of wealth that I can scoop in and get pretty quickly with not much effort. I mean, the Germans don't have a standing army. The UK might a little bit. What does the EU have? And America, we might be able to go help, but we've got our own problems right now.

Geopolitics, China and complexity

The world has never been more vulnerable. Maybe we do a preemptive strike and make Europe a colony of us just to protect them. That sounds incredibly crazy. I told that to my Italian girlfriend. She's like, "I'd rather be a colony of the United States than of Russia." And that's her immediate response.

And I can hear the war drums from our side. Go read the comments of people. You're starting to hear "China" over and over again. "Whose fault is this? China's." You're starting to hear the newscasters blaming China a little bit more each day. And all that is to me is, in the background, those war drums.

I'm kind of a follower of Jordan Peterson. I kind of like that idea of responsibility. But what helped me understand this world was when he talked about IQs and there's actually a uniform distribution, and what that means mathematically. And you understand what people's cognitive levels are, and you understand that some of these high concepts have to get filtered over and over, and it's got to be dumbed down—and I'm not saying that in an insulting way, but it just has to get consumable. And when the mass of people—just the crowd, the zombies, the herd, whatever—when the mass of people go, "Well, this is China's fault that I'm hungry, that I don't get my stuff from Walmart, that life has become more difficult"—well, we've got 12 carriers. We've got lots of dudes in uniforms with lots of guns. And I'm not even saying we're wrong to do it, but that's what I can see happening.

And anything is possible. You and Jim were talking about the Dow being 5,000 or 20,000 in a year. I say look at a map today and then look at a map in a year, and I would put a lot of money that something's going to change. I was watching the news last night. In Hungary, he just got that he has unlimited power for as long as he wants—dictatorship for the coronavirus. I mean, hey, maybe he's legit about that, but power corrupts, right? And if they get pissed, there's some country I would guess around him that he can go get pretty quick. And now it's—you hear what I'm saying? Like so much can change. You're talking about the Dow; I'm talking about the map.

KMOYeah. My suspicion is the map won't change that much in the next year. I think over the next 10, 15, 20 years, I think there's a more than negligible chance that China is going to break up into a few different regional powers, because they don't have the geographical advantages that the United States has. They're basically a bunch of little island nations inside of this really mountainous area. They don't have good overland transportation between the different areas. Their really prosperous cities are down on their southern coast, pretty far from the political and military capital. They are dependent on energy resources from their far west that is next to all the -stans—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan. And they have their own internal Muslim population that they are really brutally repressing, so they're not making a lot of friends over in the -stans, although they do have some sort of pragmatic, of-the-moment business partners.

But I think China is facing some problems that the United States doesn't have. The United States isn't even close to facing the problems that China has. I don't see any reason or advantage for the U.S. military to invade China or to attack them, bomb them, send nuclear missiles. I think the best thing to do is going to pull back to our Pacific allies, which are all in this chain of islands around outside of China, and just sit back and watch China sort of disintegrate and flail. And then if they get desperate and they try for a military solution, as you say, the U.S. Navy is bigger than the rest of the world put together. There is no challenging the U.S. Navy, even with their supersonic carrier-busting cruise missiles.

BrentYeah, and hey, I'm with you. You said I said one year, you said ten. I don't really mean one year. This stuff, like Greer talks about, it happens over a longer period of time, right? It's not a movie. So I'm with you on that. And you know, what you were telling me about China and everything you just said, all I hear is it's complex. And what do we know about complexity theory? Well, there's just that many more things where it can break. And then what's going to be the—you know, what's going to be the line right now with the global supply chain as it is?

I mean, this is how I see it, okay? When I talk to business owners, I go, "You got a business and it's a circle, and half of it is whatever your service or product is. The other half is running your business, right?" So what is that other side of the coin? Well, it's keeping sixteen plates all spinning at the same time, and it's an art form, right? All right, so you get that going, you got all those plates spinning. Now extrapolate that to all the companies all over and how they're all intertwined. With the oil shock, with what that did, I think it just poked that global supply chain. It's easy for me to say we don't have the resiliency built in. We just don't have the resiliency put in, and we've got it to the razor edge of profitability, just-in-time, all these different things. Even if our economy was good, there's no escaping this. That virus shutting everything down, it just knocked it all over.

So, I mean, it's just complex. We just have complex structure after complex structure after complex structure, and it's a bullwhip, and it's just going all the way through it, and it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that sounds reasonable, and I think there's evidence every night on the news that this is what's going to be happening, right? Also—now that I think, I think I just went on a rant for nothing, so that's all right.

KMOWell, I was going to say, even when I was deep into the peak oil scene, there's good information to be gleaned there. There's some rock-solid thinking that a lot of people—the world would be better off if more people understood the concept of energy returned on energy invested.

BrentYep.

KMOBut unfortunately, a guy named Joseph Tainter made a name in the peak oil scene with his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, and he's the one who really introduced the concept into the peak oil conversation that the more complexity you layer into a system, the more breaking points it has, and the more expensive it is to maintain those higher levels of organization.

There's some truth to that, but really the thing you should understand when it comes to complex systems is the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more you get seemingly nonlinear behavior and counterintuitive outputs. Complex systems don't crash catastrophically because they don't tend to be brittle. It is simple, brittle systems that are either working or they're failed. The more complex a system is, the more potential states it has. And when it does fail, it tends to fail in weird ways, but it doesn't crash all the way to the bottom level of potential complexity; it collapses down to what is sustainable, which might not be that much of a drop. Which is why John Michael Greer is talking about the cascading, sort of catabolic collapse that takes place over these many stair-step episodes over a long period of time.

That makes sense to me, because every time there is a new shock which knocks out some of the supports in this structure—it is a very complex structure—it's going to collapse into a shape that almost nobody anticipated, and it's not going to be a total collapse. And there is going to be the opportunity to start to rebuild. And in some ways, you know, things really will be hitting new highs; they'll be working better than ever in some ways.

One thing I really appreciate—I mean, I'm always looking for the silver lining in our current situation—the obvious one is we are going to realize that the more efficient you make a just-in-time delivery system, the more sacrifice you make in terms of the resiliency of the system. So hopefully we're going to try to source more, build more, get our resources locally here on the continent. And what a wealth of natural resources we have in the North American continent. We are better positioned to do that than just about anybody. It's just we're going to have to sacrifice some profits from people who can afford to make that sacrifice, point-blank. The people who just got trillions of dollars handed to them as the opening gesture in, "Hey, can we do something to help workers?" I mean, they didn't need the money. But those are the folks that are going to have to take a haircut in order to bring manufacturing, bring raw resource production back to this country, and that has to be done.

So that's wish number one, and that's sort of the obvious one. But I'm also hoping that, the longer this lockdown goes on, the more obvious it becomes that it isn't really required that everybody be doing everything they can to generate economic activity so that they can make money so that they can buy food and pay the rent. It's pretty clear that it takes a tiny fraction of the total potential working population to supply all of us with our basic needs. I mean, the more automation progresses, the more we're going to have to come to grips with that reality.

Automation, resilience and local capacity

But this virus is showing it to us right now. We don't need automated burger-flipping robots to demonstrate to us that it doesn't take that many people to feed all of us. And the fact that all of us need money to pay rent and to maintain our credit ratings and to buy various things, it's just not necessary that we all be scurrying around like hamsters on a wheel all the time trying to make as much money as possible. We would be better off, a lot of us, putzing around in our garden, learning about soil, studying things, playing chess. There's a lot better uses for a human mind than being on a phone all day harassing people, trying to collect debts. There's a lot of economic activity that we would be better off if it just went away.

BrentYeah, I hear you. I don't disagree in theory on a lot of that stuff. But also I've kind of—I don't know, I think it's my age. I had some health problems a few years ago. I don't know if there's a right way or a wrong way with all this stuff. What you're talking about, I agree with you, a lot of it's annoying.

I don't agree on that it takes so few of us to do this thing, and I think only time will tell on that. I think that we're stressing it out. But on the automation, and then on the people who didn't need the money were the first ones who got a lot of it—listen, I listen to you and Jim, and I'm in complete agreement with you, complete agreement with you. If this reset happens, it's not going to make everyone square. The rich are going to get rich, and the poor are going to suffer. It's like to accelerate the process that was already underway, has been for a long time.

KMOAbsolutely.

BrentOkay. But I take a step back from that, and just think—I'm a science teacher, and remember those stories they said where when you have a ton of rabbits, the hawks eat all the rabbits and reproduce until they get to be such a big number there's no more rabbits anymore, then they have to die out and the rabbits come back, and it's always this kind of balance? I just think the human colony tipped past its cues. I just think worldwide we got too big.

It was a hell of a thing we did. I mean, going down the highway in a Honda going 80 miles an hour, looking at a BMW from Germany and some other car from London, and me in this Japanese car just racing down—that was amazing, what we did. It's amazing. I'm impressed, even with all the pollution and even with all just the silliness that we as humans are. You're right, complex systems are what we're good at. I just think we just went a little too far.

And then this thing happened, right? And even if the economy was good—because people are blaming the bad economy—even if there was no tensions, this thing, where we're at in time of history with what we've done, and the fact that we just didn't have the foresight, because no one's perfect, but we didn't have this foresight to put the resiliency in there, I don't see this as a conspiracy theory doomer thing anymore. I go, okay, this is what we did, kind of. This is a pretty scientific, I think, model of what happened and what's going to happen.

And yeah, we're going to have all different types of personalities doing all different types of things, and that's just humanity. And it's a show, and we get to watch it and hope for the best, right?

And you want to talk about some positive things that's going on here? Okay, again, I'm kind of a Jordan Peterson fan. I am so thankful that he came out there and started preaching this idea of responsibility to all these young men. They were soaking it up, all these twenty-something-year-old men. Great! Maybe they're the ones that shoulder the burden of what we're about to go through. Maybe they're the ones that, whatever is emergent, they are the next wave. Because I look at a lot of the generations out there, and I don't see resiliency in their mindset and emotional state. I don't see resiliency and strength. I see a lot of victimhood stuff out there. I see a lot of laziness. I mean, we're the fattest country in the world. We're just the most obese. We're the richest. We had a little comeuppance that we're going to have to—we're going to have to come down a little bit. And I'm okay with that, because there's opportunity.

Hey, you can do just as well in times of chaos as you can in good times. You're smart, you're capable. They did kind of hit the reset button. People like you and I, a lot of different people, hey, we know some things. Maybe it's a sign we start capitalizing on it, because plumbers are going to start doing very well. We're not going to need so many people who are good at Excel or programming. I just don't think we are. We're going to need some people who know how to do things. And hey, take it for what it is.

Gardens, skill sets and a bumpy ride

I can tell you what I'm planning on or what's going on in my mind and some of the things that we're thinking about doing: worm farms. We're two hours north of Dallas. All of a sudden people want to start gardening because they need food, because the supply chain is still interrupted and they're not getting the amount they want to. Oh, and also they're like, "Hey, we just don't want to depend on some government to bring it to us. Let's have a little bit source of our own food. Local fertilizer, get local." And what does that mean? That means there is going to be a lot of customers trying to figure out what they need to survive. A lot of opportunity out there, and I'm encouraged by that.

Now, how we as a society do it with the guns and the obesity and the Prozacs and all that kind of stuff, and the left versus right—there's a lot of people who are pissed off right now. Well, we're going to have to see how that all plays out. And it's just, I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it's going to be a bumpy ride. Now, how bumpy it'll be, every city will be different. And who comes out of it—well, I don't know. I think every mayor—

BrentEvery mayor of any town should be going and saying, "Okay, where I'm at there's a local butcher, great. Not only is he a butcher, he's a slaughter[house], so that's a really nice resource to have with a lot of cows around. Well, there were about four people that work there. And then, okay, so, not insulting them, but who are they? Well, that wasn't a very highfalutin job that someone with a degree would have. And you don't see a lot of kids doing that. Well, I don't want any of those four people to work their ass off, run themselves down, get sick, and die. They have a skill set that we need." We should be identifying every skill set we need in a mirror [wording unclear] of 15,000 and start putting interns—go to the senior class, which one of these people are capable—and then subsidizing all these essential businesses.

And I'm not talking about liquor stores, right? I'm talking about, we should double up on people who do the water treatment. We should double up, right? That's where we need to be sitting there going, "What's a good insurance policy?" Well, gardens are a good insurance policy. Doubling up on butchers is a good insurance policy. We've got to get local. And if we do that, we'll get out of this better. If not, we're coming in for a rocky road. It's going to be a rough landing.

KMOYou know, I live in rural Vermont and there are various farms around, and all of the bigger farms import seasonal labor from Jamaica, because the Jamaicans know how to work. They know how to do agricultural work, and they come over and they work their asses off for six or eight months, and then they head back to Jamaica. In Vermont we have a brain drain problem. The ambitious young people, the smart young people, as soon as they graduate from high school, they're gone. Or if they go to college in-state, as soon as they're out of college, they're gone.

And you know who's left? Well, there's a solid cohort of nail bangers around here—guys with solid construction skills, manual labor, a good work ethic. But we also have a lot of heroin addicts around, and we have multigenerational people living on public assistance—people who have never known a situation where mom and dad lived together and dad had a job and paid the rent. That's as alien to their experience as going to Afghanistan is to mine. Right? You've served in the military, so, yeah.

I don't like to harp on this because it makes me sound like an arch-conservative, but there are a lot of people who are absolutely unsuited just based on their life's experience to do anything for themselves, anything at all. And I agree with you. I'm not really in the Jordan Peterson demographic, I'm a little old for that, but I did buy his book for my son. I really appreciate that Jordan Peterson is on college campuses, he's in the same arena as the social justice warriors who are preaching that anything that makes you the slightest bit uncomfortable is the equivalent of a war crime committed against you by the evil patriarchy. Life isn't like that. Life is uncomfortable. And if you are actually going to do something that you haven't done before, you're going to experience a period of just cognitive discomfort. That is a sign that you're working, that you're doing something. If you're comfortable all the time, you're degenerating.

BrentNo, you don't do any shadow work. And yoga is not comfortable. You're absolutely right, that's the whole point of it. When you get in an uncomfortable situation, learn how to breathe. Right? And that's what it is: life is uncomfortable.

Okay, so it was impressive what we did. We got to a place that was so good that they had to come up with a term like "microaggression," because we got rid of all the big ones. And then that was the next thing. I mean, it was so ridiculous. I watched feminists—the people who were fighting the feminists were the trans rights activists. They had turned on themselves at that point.

But where I'm at now, and why I think that nonsense is already over, is: hey man, five million people have already lost their job, another two million are right around the corner, and then two million after that. Everyone's about to be a victim, so no one's going to care about all this silly nonsense. It's going to go away. And this cancel culture and all this other thing—these are positives of what's just happened, because people are not just going to be on their phone on BuzzFeed wasting time because they've got nothing to do. It can't happen.

So, you said it sounds like a starch Republican—hell, I'll be that guy. I'll be it. Living life, you're walking on a tightrope. Survival, I mean: get a job, get money, food. You still have to do it. But what was amazing about what we did was we had safety net after safety net after safety net. Well, what happened? I don't even dislike Trump. I don't like him, I don't dislike him. He gave all the money to the corporations. He did. That's what happened. So now, if he's going to bail out everyone, including all these social programs, the money is not going to be worth anything, right? So that's not going to happen. He already chose. So all these people that you've identified in your town and that are everywhere, who are completely incapable of handling anything, that wealth transfer just happened. It already happened.

So that's coming down the pike, and I don't see us handling that too well. So I'm looking at good news of there's opportunity, there's things you can do, but at the same time, the day the Russians and the Saudis had that oil war, oil market share, whatever they want to call it, and the oil price dropped, it sent that shockwave through the financial market. Because now they can never value the shale industry again. They have to price in that risk factor of—they can have those shocks. It was just too big of our economy, it's just sending ripples throughout it. Literally, that was the day the world changed. So I'm no longer a doomer. This is the new world, and the play-out is going to be huge.

And what do you do? What is your plan? Do you have a plan yet?

KMOWell, I was just in the process of moving to Puerto Rico when this lockdown put everything on hold. But my plan is to keep drawing comics and making podcasts and shooting videos. I just wanted to do it in a place with more people, a place with a bit more social dynamism, because I am not cut out for small-town Vermont. It's not simpatico with my personality. Four years was enough.

BrentNo good yoga.

KMOYep. Well, I mean, I can still do yoga here, but I can't do it by myself. I have to go to a studio. I'm so lazy that way. I need someone to tell me what to do.

BrentYeah, I agree. I will not sit down, I will not roll out the yoga mat and do a solid 90 minutes on my own.

KMOForget it.

BrentWell, let me ask you this then, because I like to know the holes in my argument. Where do you think I was either unreasonable, or I went too far, or anything you think that I'm just kind of wrong about? Because I'd love to know.

Shale, financing and peak-oil leftovers

KMOCombining some stuff that you said just now with some things that I heard in your vlog, sounds like you're holding on to some peak oil talking points that the last decade has just demonstrated never held any water. Okay, most of the hydrocarbons in the ground are in shale seams. What we consider to be conventional oil, where it's near the surface, it's a pool rather than in the pores of rocks, and it's under such pressure that you can just pierce the ground and it comes up—that was the icing.

BrentI agree with this, yeah.

KMOThat's not the bulk of the hydrocarbons available to us. And the supermajors, the big multinational oil companies, they don't do shale. They don't like it. It doesn't produce enough money for them. It's too technically complicated. There's too much variation. Even in one play, there's all kinds of different variations. You have to use this very sophisticated microseismic technology to find out exactly where to drill that next well or where to redrill, at what depth to redrill an existing well. They don't go in for it.

So you've got this whole ecosystem of new fracking companies—some going for oil, some for gas, some doing both, but mostly not both. Mostly, they're pretty specialized. And they have a dozen executives each, maybe 25 employees total. And they pop up out of nowhere. They operate until something goes wrong, the company goes broke, they file for Chapter 11. And then the various people who are doing that go off and start different companies, and they get financed again.

And you can say that that's all chicanery. But as long as we run on oil, the advantages of having it here, getting it from home rather than having to have this military apparatus that allows us to lay claim to oil on the other side of the planet and to get in bed with evil fuckers like the Saudis—there's so much advantage to having this domestic source that who cares what chicanery we get up to? It's cheaper than a global military. It's basically just a nationalized endeavor at this point, but we don't acknowledge that it's nationalized. We let various players pop up and make a killing at it in a short period just to keep it going. But if you compare that to the price of a global military police force, it's free.

It's not going to collapse tomorrow. It's no more going to collapse tomorrow than it was going to collapse in 2007 when Jim Kunstler was making these exact same arguments: that the financing is irrational. It doesn't matter that the financing is irrational. We need that oil for reasons other than just making money.

BrentSo, yeah, I don't disagree with a single thing you said at all. And in this new world, yeah, it might not matter how much it costs, because we do just nationalize and we use it for ourselves. I don't think anything you said there was unreasonable, and I think, yeah, why couldn't that be a possibility?

What I'm just saying is, because the banks had such low interest rates since '08, '09, banks still had to make money—or they wanted to make money; the people wanted the bonuses. So what they did was they improperly priced the risk of these small ones. They kept on getting financed over and over and over again, just like you said. Well, that was because that was the only yield they could get. I mean, not the only one, but those were yields that were making the banks money, and these companies just kept on rolling over their debt, right? That's what I think Jim Kunstler was talking about, is it's an all-financial three-card monte thing. Just because the interest rates were so low on the federal level, because the Federal Reserve didn't want anything to upset the apple cart, banks had to go find yield. They improperly priced it with this shale spot, especially the small- to medium-sized guys, not the majors. But that made so...

Brentmuch money for the banks that when that financing part—that's what I'm talking about—that financing part has to go away now for the banks as a money generator. And that alone, not having to do anything with the hydrocarbon, the oil in the ground, you know, if the banks aren't able to provide the capital necessary to continue the production, then the federal government might have to step up and do it in a more, you know, honest and direct way.

KMOBut yeah, that is nowhere near the top of my list of concerns. Financing for hydrocarbon extraction, that's going to happen. Worrying about that is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Maybe someday in the distant future that's a problem, but there's much more acute things we have to deal with in the here and now.

BrentWell, okay. So that is where I think it's just people's experiences and their education and what they know, right? You're probably right. I mean, what do I know, right? But my experience is in finance world, right? My experience is going and understanding what happened, why '08-'09 happened and why the Federal Reserve did what they did. Okay, well, it was because of this idea of, you know, the banking system is like the heart of an economy and cash is like the blood, and they want to keep this thing all going.

And look, I'm not a Keynesian, and I'm not a, you know, whoever the other guy—what was the other guy's name? It's Keynesian or I don't know the sound money...

KMOTypically contrasted with like Austrian economists. Was that one guy—there was Hayek or something like that.

BrentYeah, it doesn't matter. He's one—yeah, I'm not saying I'm on one side of the fence or the other. What I'm saying is how our system runs on debt. That's why this small shale debt thing is so important and it sends shock waves through the system. So that's just my experience, and that's me reading the tea leaves saying that's a really interesting, complex, hard-to-understand problem that's going off right now.

And yeah, man, unless you have a finance degree or you understand that world, it's like the overpopulation on Mars. And my understanding of it, I believe, is at a certain level why I think this is the important thing. And I can give examples of the bullwhip in the economy right now. The simple fact that the Dow goes up a thousand, down two thousand, up a thousand—that simple fact alone is all you need to know that this thing is unwinding pretty violently. And if you know anything about the system, knowing that there's a violence in there, and knowing how options work, contract puts and margin calls and all these different terms, that's where, yeah, finance is a huge problem. It's a huge, huge income. That's why the Federal Reserve said QE to whatever you need, and that's why the poor people are getting screwed. Like, now...

KMOI hate to say this. I hate to bring this up, but you know, I'm totally partisan on the class level. I am against the oligarchs; I'm for the working people. But when you give unlimited money to the ownership class, they don't go out and spend it on stuff. They try to lock it up and just keep it as, you know, wealth, so they put it into the stock market. So when the stock market—one of these places, but you know, they put it in the stock market or, if they own a public company, they buy back their own stock, you know, to increase the value of their stock, which increases their personal wealth. It's probably also going to increase the bonus they get.

But they have all this money that they're not really spending on stuff, and if money is not circulating, then it's not functioning as the blood of the economy. And if it's not circulating, it's not playing that role, then you don't really get inflation. Like people worry about hyperinflation; that again is one of these, you know, overpopulation on Mars scenarios. I'm not worried about hyperinflation or even regular inflation. I think deflation is probably going to get us, because the money that gets given to the rich people just basically disappears. It goes away. They want it to grow, and so they move it around to different, you know, growth areas.

But those are all sort of distinct from the actual physical economy of stuff that we all depend on. And hydrocarbons and fuel for machinery, that is real stuff. But when we're talking about 2008, we haven't mentioned mortgage-backed securities. That was a huge abstract creation that dwarfed the real economy in terms of how much money was at play, how much counter risk was set up, leverage, right? All of our talk of, you know, the 2008 financial chicanery and its relationship to hydrocarbon production, that is such a minuscule little sideshow in terms of that whole play. It was mostly, well, abstract bullshit that was falling apart, and if abstract bullshit falls apart, it's not a death blow.

BrentSo, different abstract bullshit system. I hear you. And how we got out of the last ten years, I look at as a gift. Like, they did paper over it. They figured out a way to paper over it, and smart people figured it out. And that's why I got out of it. That's why I kept all my precious metals, but there got to a point where I just looked at them and hated them. I was resentful for them. I'm a military guy, and I sold all my ARs. I'm like, "I am out of this." I put all that stuff in storage, and I was like, "I'm never doing it again. They're smarter than me; they figured it out." And I did not think the other eye of the storm was coming, okay?

China factories, supply chains and goods

But this is what propelled me to leave Fort Worth, and it wasn't the virus. If this is true, if these photos are true and not doctored—NASA had these photos of all of China pollution from January 1 to January 20th or something like 19th. And then there was Chinese New Year, which is that week long or however many days, and then a month after. And it showed in 2019 how the pollution was before New Year, how it decreased during New Year, and then how it ran back up, right? Well, if these photos are real from 2020, same time period, there's no pollution. There's no pollution. I mean, the factories were already shut down. And now you're starting to hear that they started shutting this down in December. They already knew; they were already clamping down on it.

So what I hear from that is the factories that refill not only all of America's stores—because pretty much pick the number of percentages made in China—but all the world. China was the manufacturing engine for the world, so we weren't the only ones who got conned into this. They've been down since, let's just say Jan 1, and they haven't still come back up yet. Some of them have, with masks and some other things, and they're still producing whatever, but a big, big percentage was down, and I don't think things come back up. I don't trust the news that it is coming back up.

Now, I could be wrong, and I'm more than willing to accept that. But from what I hear, what I think makes sense, I don't think they're back up. And I think that all countries have shut down their borders because they realize this. They're all hunkering down. Like name the countries who've shut down their borders, that nothing's going in or out: Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore. They've all shut down trade stuff. You can look at the ports; it's empty.

Well, we're talking about abstract stuff with MBSs and all that. I'm talking about goods. I'm talking about real things. And you've got to think about it, too, in a way where it's like, okay, let's say there's a plant here that cans beans, and we grow the beans here, and everything's here. All right, do we get the cans from China? Well, probably, because we get raw materials from them. And if we don't get the cans, we get the raw materials from China, because not only did we offshore manufacturing and our jobs, but we also offshored our pollution. So none of that stuff's getting built here or mined here or anything. It's all over there.

Okay, well, what about the machinery? What about a machine that washes the beans? There's going to be a circuit board that goes out, and they've got some repair guy that comes in, diagnoses it, and says, "Okay, let me call and order this part." And because we're just-in-time, that probably came from China, because that's where we get everything. Or enough where the probability of something failing keeps on going up and up.

So my contention—and I could be wrong; someone could prove this and then I'm going to have to rethink everything—is a lot of stuff in China is still shut down. So that means it's on month three or four. How long does it take to get back up? Well, being in the corporate world, I mean, I don't know manufacturing. I'm going to guess three or four months, maybe longer, because up and down that supply chain, you don't know what's going to open when and you're going to be waiting.

So now that's a disruption. So not only are their goods not going to be in Walmart, but there might not be repair parts and the stuff that keeps the semis on the road or the chemicals that keep all the water companies disinfecting our water, because probably all that stuff comes from China. I mean, I'd make a bet that it came from China. Everything does. And if they're not producing any stuff, maybe they're down 30%. Well, in that 30%, what do we have to have that we are not going to get? There's going to be one item; it's probably going to be a lot. And I'm just playing math. I don't have a social agenda here. I don't have a political philosophy. I don't have an economic theory. I just go: stuff's not coming.

KMOYou're talking about beans, and here's the thing: you don't have to put beans in a can. You can ship beans in a bag, dry. They don't need to be refrigerated, you know? And then people, instead of just opening the can and pouring them in the pot, you soak them overnight.

BrentYep. We're going to have to get creative.

KMOWe have to do that because of this. That will be a benefit.

BrentI agree. I agree, but how many humans do you know that can change overnight like that, or who had the forethought?

KMOPeople get into rigid patterns when they can afford to, but when you come to the point of, okay, you either have to do something different or you don't eat today, that's when people decide, "You know what? I think I'm willing to do something that's outside of my comfort zone."

BrentMy mother started a sentence with, "If people were smart—" and I said, "Stop. You're right, but throw it off the table." And I don't even hate humans. Like I heard you say, you know, "Human beings suck" or "Humans suck." I don't believe that.

KMOI don't either. I made a video with that title, and so many people want that message that that video has done very well. It was not my intention to feed that beast.

BrentYeah, me neither. I am not talking down to anyone. They did not become aware of what I think is important because of a ton of different reasons. I'm not talking down to them. And hey, this was a line I told you in the email...

Emergence, training wheels and wrapping the conversation

Brentwhere if this isn't the thing that brings emergence, then the system is the most resilient thing I've ever seen, and I will never believe that it can ever get destroyed. A comet can be coming down, and I will believe that we will make it through. Because I'm with you: if this thing works, if people do what they need to do and change, and it all becomes a better thing, I'm in. Good for us.

KMOWell, let me back off my position a little bit if this is how it's coming across, because an extinction-level event, you know, a dinosaur-killing comet, will kill our civilization, too. We're not surviving that, right? And you talked about a magnetic pulse or an EMP. If that was an attack from another country, it's got to be detonated at a high altitude, which means it has to come in on a missile. Not many countries that are willing to get into a war with the US have access to that technology.

BrentThat was just my flavor of choice back in the day.

KMOBut a coronal mass ejection that hits the Earth head-on—those things are directional. That's not an omnidirectional pulse that goes out from the sun; it is definitely directional. So most of them miss us. But one that hits us square is going to take down the electric grid on half the planet, and it will be down for years. That won't be the end of our species, but it very well could be the end of our civilization.

It's just that these events, while utterly catastrophic, and they're absolutely guaranteed to happen eventually, the timescales on which you estimate these things are huge. So if you're deciding what you're going to major in in college, don't think about the coronal mass ejection or the extinction-level impact. Those are not the problems of an individual human lifetime. If they happen when you're alive, well, that sucks. I mean, that sucks because you can't prepare for that.

BrentSo that's all I think just happened. That event you talk about was the corona, and it was the pin that popped this economy thing—whatever this economy thing is, popped it. So it was no one's fault. It just happened at this moment in time. So, I mean, I feel like it's doing the damage, though.

KMOI think it's our maladaptive response to it and our lack of rational preparation that's really causing the damage. But I think this virus has training wheels on it. This is what I've been saying.

You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.

After the conversation: pandemic notes and Jasper’s email

KMOThat was Brent Bednarik. And the conversation with Brent will continue in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast, and that will be C-Realm Vault Podcast episode number 361⁵.

All right. So a few things about the pandemic and the response to it, and financial matters. I am by no means a rich man, at least when wealth is measured in dollars. But at the same time, I don't have a job—I mean, I'm not a W-2 employee anywhere, where I have not been laid off. I have lost a little bit of income shooting video at meetings here in Bellows Falls, but for the most part, my main sources of income remain stable.

And in fact, after my last free podcast, a couple of folks sent me very generous donations. I can always use the money, believe me, but at this particular moment in history... I have lost a few paying subscribers to the C-Realm Vault Podcast since the start of the lockdown, but I've gained about as many. So that income source is holding steady.

The comic strip, GEBB.io, is also an ongoing source of revenue for me. So this is a crazy thing for me to say, but if you are looking to support independent artists in this moment, I shouldn't be at the top of your list. I'm doing okay. I am always happy to receive feedback from you, and you don't need to make a PayPal donation before sending me your long, heartfelt, well-researched, well-reasoned correspondence. I'm happy for the correspondence on its own.

That said, I have feedback here from Jasper. I searched my inbox for previous messages from Jasper, and he first contacted me back in 2011. So this is an infrequent but longstanding correspondence. And before I read Jasper's email, let me just say that those of you who don't follow my YouTube output have missed quite a bit of what has captured my interest in the past year. Jasper is clearly following that and also the C-Realm Vault Podcast, so he's up to speed on a lot of stuff that those of you who just listen to the free C-Realm podcasts might not be aware of.

For example, in the past year, I have taken in three books, all on very similar subject matter, by a geopolitical strategist and consultant named Peter Zeihan³, who has a whole staff of researchers working for him in his office, and he puts out really excellent graphics and daily or almost daily updates via email. And the books that I'm referring to are The Accidental Superpower, The Absent Superpower, and Disunited Nations, all of which are largely about how the United States came to be the global power that arguably it still is, and how, since the Cold War ended thirty years ago, the United States has been moving toward disengagement from the global economy—as weird as that sounds, given how obviously dependent we are on China to manufacture our material goods.

But the US has been urging Europe to do more for its own defense, particularly to pay more for its own defense. And this goes on under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It's just that under Trump, it is accelerated because Trump is really good at insulting and alienating our allies. And while you might take that as evidence of his incompetence, again, he's simply accelerating a trend which has been ongoing for thirty years. This is what Americans want, for the most part—at least the Americans that Andrew Yang would call "normal people."

I should also mention, just to pin this episode down in time, Bernie Sanders dropped out yesterday. Joe Biden is now the guy. He will most likely be on the ballot against Trump. My prediction is that he will lose badly to Trump. This morning, I changed my Twitter profile. It had ended with #NeverBiden, and I thought that was negative. I'm still never Biden—I will not vote for the man—but I replaced #NeverBiden with #HumanityFirst.

So, in recent weeks, or the last couple of months anyway, I've spoken to a couple of people who were working in Europe toward the fall of the Berlin Wall—so late '80s—both working either for the U.S. military or for NATO. And they both agreed with me when I said that France was not a NATO member. And that's because when they were active in that theater, France wasn't a NATO member. France was one of the founding members of NATO when it got started in 1949 [ASR: 1947], but they left in 1966. But they came back again; they rejoined the alliance in 2009. So I had been saying for a while that France was not a NATO member, unaware that they had rejoined the alliance in 2009.

So keep that in mind as I read this email from Jasper. This came in five days ago. Jasper writes:

Dear KMO,

Thanks for your excellent output over the past weeks. It is becoming harder and harder to stoke the mental fires when it is just the two of us in the house. Still, there are more academic odds and ends to finish up, but life in the outside world is becoming increasingly abstract to me. I'd hoped in a situation like this that village life would pick up, but the nature of the crisis makes that impossible.

I wanted to point out two things that keep coming up when I listen to you regarding geopolitics.

Firstly, there's China. Since the 2000s, I had naively subscribed to the liberal idea that the economic rise of China would precipitate a political change, and that this would entail China blowing itself to pieces once more, allowing a clique to rise to power that does not cling to the imagery, if not the practice, of Maoist communism. In light of long-term trends in Chinese history, I have come to reconsider this idea. The idea of a unitary state called China, more or less coterminous with the current area occupied by the People's Republic of China, is ancient. It has been, throughout most of its history, an economically dominant player on the world stage. This stability is regularly punctured by shorter periods of disintegration and/or invasion: the Three Kingdoms period, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, etc. This period between the end of the Qing Dynasty and the rise of the PRC—that's 1912 to 1949—can also be characterized as such a period. Many of the issues you cite have always been there. China has always been a diverse place ethnolinguistically. The southern part of the country has always been the economic center of gravity. The Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers have always flowed from west to east.

Here's a show idea: the podcaster Carl Zha, last name spelled Z-H-A, might be an interesting conversation partner regarding all things Chinese.

Secondly, I have been meaning to talk to you about France. Americans have a tendency to discount the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," but the French regard themselves as a martial culture with a thousand-year tradition of spirit and glory. They are presently a full member of NATO, but the story of their membership is complicated. The reason for this complicated relationship was their refusal to place their nuclear arsenal under alliance control. Hence, the EU has its own nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis Russia.

The French are also the Kmart of neo-imperialism. That is, they do every dastardly thing the U.S. is commonly accused of, only they're not the biggest player, so they don't attract as much attention.

So Jasper doesn't spell it out, but obviously the United States is the Amazon/Walmart of neo-imperialism. Back to Jasper:

Ever since the decolonization, they have enforced an informal empire over their former African colonies. They control their currency. They arbitrate election disputes. They secure the resources they, and especially their nuclear industry, needs. By some estimates, France is ranked fifth in absolute military expenditures, just above Russia, and spends 2.3% of its GDP, 2% being the NATO commitment. Britain spends 1.8%, Japan 0.9%. They are the only power other than the U.S. that has a nuclear carrier.

Now, the reason the EU does not have a collective military is that NATO provides for the integration of the command structure. And I should add that the U.S. has often been a spoiler in European attempts to form its own power bloc. There's a tension in U.S. policy regarding Europe: pull your own weight, but only at our behest. If the U.S. were to abolish NATO, it leaving NATO would be like Russia leaving the USSR, which also happened, but spelled the end of the USSR. The European countries would rapidly integrate their command structure by other means.

The French military capabilities and imperial interests could well form the core of an EU geopolitical strategy for a post-Order world, especially now that the British have left.

So much more to say, but I have droned on for long enough.

As always, with best regards, Jasper

And in one of Jasper's final sentences: "the French military capabilities and imperialist interests could well form the core of an EU geopolitical strategy in a post-Order world." The "O" in "Order" there is capitalized. He's referring to Peter Zeihan here, and Peter Zeihan's metanarrative—you might call it his geopolitical metanarrative—about the geopolitical tensions, interventions, opportunities, and phenomena that have grown up in the post-World War II Bretton Woods global trading alliance. That is what Peter Zeihan describes as "The Order," with a capital O.

All right. First let me say, Jasper, thank you very much for sending that. I see that I have not replied to your email. I should have said at least thanks, even if I wasn't in a position to write anything lengthy. And I don't do much writing these days, I have to say.

Closing and sign-off

So I'm going to wrap it up here. And I will remind you that the conversation with Brent Bednarik continues in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast, which I hope to get published tomorrow.

The story about the aliens under the ice in Antarctica continues each week in GEBB, my ongoing webcomic. That's G-E-B-B, Golf Echo Bravo Bravo dot I-O. And you can also find it on Facebook, although you won't find me on Facebook. And I post links to the new installments on miwi.com⁴ and also on Twitter.

I don't do them every day anymore, but I'm still putting up YouTube videos. I won't repeat for you how to find my channel—it's a source of ongoing chagrin for me—but if you look for it, "Out of My Head" on YouTube, and you don't find it, send me an email and I will send you a link.

All right, well, wherever you are, however you are riding out this weird piece of history, stay safe, practice common sense, and if you're not already sick, please stay well.

Editorial notes

The title is KMO’s episode title. Guest surname: Bednarik, following KMO’s own correction at the start of C-Realm Vault episode 361 (footnote 1). Words or names the recording does not settle are marked [wording unclear]. Jasper’s email is set as block quotes; KMO’s interruptions are his own paragraphs. Vault continuation: mid-episode KMO names Vault podcast episode 361 at approximately [01:02:50]–[01:02:54]; the closing at [01:13:06] repeats the continuation without restating the number. Reciprocal link confirmed in the vault-361 intro at [00:03:23]-[00:03:36] and [00:08:25].

1. At the start of C-Realm Vault episode 361 ([00:03:28]-[00:04:04]), KMO apologizes for having pronounced the guest’s name “Badnarek” in this episode, which he puts down to having said Michael Badnarik’s name many times, and gives the right pronunciation as Bednarik. The name is not spelled out in either recording; this edition uses Bednarik, as the catalog guest field does. The automatic transcript was prompted with “Brent Bednarik”, so its spelling is not independent evidence; the Vault episode’s original notes spell it “Badnarik”. ↩

2. Spelling corrected to Chris Martenson (heard “Martinson” in related archive ASR). ↩

3. Spelling corrected to Peter Zeihan (heard “Zayhan” / “Zyhon” in the machine transcript). ↩

4. As spoken in the machine transcript (“miwi.com”). Likely MeWe; the reading edition does not invent the domain. ↩

5. Vault episode number 361 as spoken at approximately [01:02:54]. The closing at [01:13:06] says the conversation continues in the next Vault episode without repeating the number. Catalog / batch-5 plan already named vault-361 as slot 4; reciprocal intro pending vault-361 ASR. ↩