Social Collapse Best Practices | Dmitry Orlov

[Music] you evening I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation it was pretty good for a rainy night thank you for coming as usual when we're here at the collar there'll be a reception afterwards half a block down at the long now Museum office and shop and Alexander reminds me to remind you that this Tuesday February 17th despite Congress a large amount of analog TV will disappear from the air forever and there'll be a gathering to commemorate that or to hear from Bruce Sterling and from Paul Sappho about what analog TV is meant and what the shift to digital means and generally have a week that'll be at the Berkeley Art Museum what time Alexander 7 Tuesday night February 17th when civilizations collapse analog TV is all it's the first thing to go and we scheduled this talk about nine months ago and it seemed to look kind of a reach then you know climate change crisis we call it now and not financial stuff which Dimitri says it's just the first stage we had Jared Diamond here a couple years ago saying in the fullness of time which long now is about civilizations and society saw his collapse they collapsed for different reasons and one gets interested in that and what do they do after they collapse one gets interested in that and so it is very much a long now topic to have an expert on collapse Dmitri or loss thank you very much Stuart good evening ladies and gentlemen thank you for showing up it's certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you even if the occasion isn't a happy one you're here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that's gone wrong I know it's a lot to ask of you because why wouldn't you instead want to go and eat and drink and be merry well perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk I would like to thank the long now foundation for inviting me and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious professional people such as Michael Pollan who will be here in May or some of the previous speakers such as Nassim Taleb or Brian you know some of my favorite people really I'm just a tourist I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights and then I'll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job well I'm also a blogger and I wrote a book but then everyone has a book or so it would seem you might ask yourself then why on earth did I get invited to speak here tonight it seems that I'm enjoying my moment in the limelight because I'm one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower the idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time it doesn't seem so preposterous anymore I take it that some of you are still hedging your bets how is that hedge fund doing by the way I think I prefer remaining a tourist because I have learned from experience luckily from other people's experience that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice I learned that by observing what happens to people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR do you know who and rayann Alaric is see my point exactly he successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR he was off by just half a decade that was another valuable lesson for me which is why I will not give you an exact date when the USA will turn the into the F USA f is for former but even if someone could choreograph the whole event it still wouldn't make much of a career because once it all starts falling apart people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some cassandra like person I hope that I have made it clear that I'm not here in any sort of professional capacity I consider what I'm doing a kind of community service so if you don't like my talk don't worry about me there are plenty of other things I can do but I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times for altruistic reasons mostly although not entirely this is because when times get really bad as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed a lot of people just completely lose it men especially successful middle-aged men breadwinners bastions of society turn out to be especially vulnerable and when they just completely lose it they become very tedious company my hope is that some amount of preparation psychological and otherwise can make them a lot less fragile and a bit more useful and generally less of a burden women seem far more able to cope perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand thing in any case the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire or the Republic or whatever it is they lost and when they do that they become very tedious company and so without a bit of mental preparation the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk so that's my little intervention if there is one thing I would like to claim as my own it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse for now it remains just a theory although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested the theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for roughly the same reasons namely a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies a severe and worsening trade deficit a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt I call this particular list of ingredients the super superpower collapse soup other factors such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens or a systemically corrupt political system and capable of reform are certainly not helpful but they do not automatically lead to collapse because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality please don't be concerned though because as I mentioned this is just a theory my theory I've been working on this theory since about 1995 when it occurred to me that the u.s. is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR as so often as the case having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time the two most important methods of solving problems are one by knowing the solution ahead of time and to guessing it correctly I learned this in engineering school from a certain professor I'm not that good at guesswork but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up straddling the two worlds the USSR and the u.s. I grew up in Russia and moved to the US when I was 12 and so I'm fluent in Russian and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a Russian native can but I also went through high school and university in the u.s. I had careers in several industries here I traveled widely around the country and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all its quirks and idiosyncrasies I traveled back to Russia in 1989 when things seemed still seemed pretty more pretty much with in line with the Soviet norm and again in 1990 when the economy was at a standstill and big changes were clearly on the way I went back there three more times in the 1990s and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse firsthand by mid 1990s I started to see the Soviet American superpower dome as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in a fact eviscerates its host country eventually leaving behind an empty shell an impoverished population an economy in ruins a legacy of social problems and a tremendous burden of debt the symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention and they have been growing more obvious ever since the superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history buffs and various skeptics but they tell us nothing that would be useful in our daily lives it is the asymmetries the differences between the two superpowers that I believe to be the most instructive when the Soviet system went away many people lost their jobs everyone lost their savings wages and pensions were held back for months their value was wiped out by hyperinflation there were shortages of food gasoline medicine consumer goods there was a large increase in crime and violence and yet Russian society did not collapse somehow the Russians found ways to muddle through how was that possible it turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse many institutions continued to function and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food shelter or transportation and could survive even without an income the Soviet economic system failed to thrive and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's paradise on earth was in the end a failure but as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse preparedness in comparison the American system could produce significantly better results for a time but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down Russians still had plenty for them to work with and so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience which we can we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States one that is more likely to be survivable the mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas the United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War war victory getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age and the foreign policy wonks coined the term hyper power and were jabbering on about full spectrum dominance all sorts of silly things were happening professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese made things broke and we paid for all just by flipping houses pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they're really just useless bits of ticky-tacky Alan Greenspan chided us about irrational exuberance while consistently low-balling interest rates it was the Goldilocks economy not too hot not too cold remember that and now it turns out that it was actually more of a tinkerbell economy because the last five or so years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination based on various debt pyramids the whole house of cards as President Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments and now we can look back on all of that with a funny queasy feeling or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo while all of these silly things were going on I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of super super power collapsed to myself during that time I was watching the action in the oil industry because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles heel of the US economy in the mid 1990s oh the all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the century but then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half a decade perhaps you've noticed this too there is a certain refrain here people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be turn out to be off by about half a decade unsuccessful predictions on the other hand are always spot-on as far as timing the world as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January first year 2000 perhaps there's a physical principle involved information spreads at the speed of light while ignorant is instantaneous at all points in the known universe so please make a mental note whenever it seems to you that I'm making a specific prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen just silently add plus or minus half a decade in any case about half a decade ago I finally thought that the time was ripe and as it turned out I wasn't too far off in June of 2005 I published an article on the subject titled post-soviet lessons for a post American century which was quite popular even to the extent that I got paid for it it is available at various places on the internet a little while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the collapse gap concept which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006 the slide show from that presentation titled closing the collapse gap was posted on the internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then then in January of 2008 when it became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway and that other stages of collapse were to follow I published a short article titled the five stages of collapse which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October of 2008 finally at the end of 2008 I announced on my blog that I'm getting out of the prognosticating business I made enough predictions and they all seem to be very well on track if I take half a decade please remember that collapse is well underway and now I'm just an observer but this talk is about something else something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true you see there is nothing more useless than predictions once they have come true it's like looking at last year's amazingly successful stock picks what are you going to do about them this year what we need are examples of things that that have been shown to work in the strange unfamiliar post collapse environment that were all likely to have to confront Stuart brand proposed the title for the talk social collapse best practices and I thought it was an excellent idea although the term practices has been diluted over time to mean little more than good ideas initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations in order to control risk to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome it's a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation and to just go with what works in organizations especially large organizations best practices also offers a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to think out of the box whenever they're confronted with a new problem if your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box they probably wouldn't feel so compelled their entire working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm if there were any good at thinking outside the box they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box so perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box in which in which to think you know a box better suited to the post collapse environment here's a key inside you might think that when collapse happens nothing works that's just not the case the old ways of doing things don't work anymore the old assumptions are all invalidated consent conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant but a different set of goals techniques and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately and the sooner the better but enough generalities let's go through some specifics we'll start with some generalities and you as you'll see it will all become very very specific rather quickly here's another key insight there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se just about everything is a matter of context now it just so happens that most things that are positive spry err to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs and vice versa for instance prior to collapse having high in taury in a business is bad because the business has the businesses have to store it and finance it so that they try to have just-in-time inventory after collapse high inventory turns out to be very useful because they can barter it for the things they need and they can't easily get more because they don't have any credit prior to collapse it's good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization after collapse what you want is a gigantic sluggish bureaucracy that can't unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging prior to collapse what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service after collapse you regret not having an unreliable retail segment with shortages and long bread lines because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them if you notice none of the things I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as economic health prior to collapse the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy after collapse economic contraction is a given and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable so we're forced to listen to a lot of nonsense the situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected we're always either months or years from economic recovery business as usual will resume sooner or later because some television bobblehead said so but let's take it apart starting from the very general what are the current macroeconomic objectives if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment first growth of course get the economy going we learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices so let's just try again that calls for economic stimulus aka printing money let's see how high the prices go this time maybe this time we will achieve hyperinflation second stabilizing financial institutions getting bought banks lending that's important to you see we're just not in enough debt yet that's our problem we need more debt and quickly third jobs we need to create jobs low wage jobs of course to replace all the high wage manufacturing jobs that we've been shedding for decades now and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs mainly once without any job security or benefits right now a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they're sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs that is their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole but of course we need much more of that and quickly so that's where we are now the ship is on the rocks water is rising and the captain is shouting full steam ahead we're sailing to Afghanistan do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats if you thought the previous episode of uncontrolled depth debt expansion globalized Ponzi schemes and economic hollowing out with silly then I predict that you will find the next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomics draws even sillier except that it won't be funny what is crashing now is our life-support system all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive and so I don't recommend passively standing around and watching the show unless you happen to have a death wish right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater they spoke of change but in reality they're terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo but this game will soon be over and they don't have any idea what to do next so what is there for them to do forget growth forget jobs forget financial stability what should their realistic new objectives be well here they are food shelter transportation and security their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis in absence of a functioning economy with Commerce at a standstill with little or no access to imports and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless if successful society will remain largely intact and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transformation and eventually develop a new economy a gradually D industrializing economy at a much lower level of resource expenditure characterized by quite a lot of austerity and even poverty but in conditions that are safe decent and dignified if unsuccessful society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdom given its largely depleted resource base a dysfunctional collapsing infrastructure and its history of unresolved social conflicts the territory of the former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms food shelter transportation security when it comes to supplying these survival necessities the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons as I already mentioned in a collapse many economic negatives become positives and vice versa let us consider each one of these in turn the Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by inconsistent underperformance in many ways this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms collectivization undermined the ancient village based agricultural traditions that had made free revolutionary russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of western europe a great deal of further damage was by the introduction of industrial agriculture the heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the top soil while dosing it with chemicals depleting it and killing the biota eventually the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests United States and Canada and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs the USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the government stores the resulting diet would have been rather poor and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered raised or caught or purchased at farmer's markets kitchen gardens were always common and once the economy collapsed a lot of families took to growing food in earnest the kitchen gardens by themselves were never sufficient but they made a huge difference the year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score something edible I remember one particular joke from that period black humour was has always been one of one of Russia's main psychological coping mechanisms a man walks into a food store goes to the meat counter and sees that it is completely empty and so he asks the butcher don't you have any fish and the butcher answers no here's where we don't have any meat fish is what they don't have over at the seafood counter poor though it was the Soviet distribution system never collapsed completely in particular the deliveries of bread continued even during the worst of times partly because it has always been such an important part of the Russian diet and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and the communist government enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans also it is important to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking distance of food shops and used public transportation to get out to their kitchen Gardens which were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense compact cities this combination of factors made for some lean times but very little manual malnutrition and no starvation in the United States the agricultural system is heavily industrialized and relies on inputs such as diesel chemical fertilizers and pesticides and perhaps most importantly financing in the current financial climate the farmers access to financing is not at all assured the agricultural system is efficient but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free in fact it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight to the tune of ten calories of fossil fuel being embodied in every calorie that is consumed as food the food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks drones for transporting food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets the food pipeline is long and thin and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores not served by public transportation and will be cut off from food sources once they're no longer able to drive besides the supermarket chains much of the nation's nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores in fact in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns fast food and convenience store food is all that is available in the near future this trend is likely to extend even to the more prosperous parts of towns and suburbs fast food outfits such as McDonald's may have more ways to cut costs and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains but they are no substitute for food security because they too depend on industrial agribusiness their food inputs such as high fructose corn syrup genetically modified potatoes various soy based fillers factory farmed beef pork and chicken and so forth are derived from oil two-thirds of which is imported as well as fertilizers are made from natural gas they may be able to stay in business longer supplying food that isn't really food but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain before they do they may for a time sell burgers that aren't really burgers like the bread that wasn't really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade it was mostly sawdust with a bit of rye flour added for flavor can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario the Russian example may give us a clue many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing and based on that decide how many rows of potatoes to plant could we perhaps do something similar there is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States can it be scaled up the trick is to make small patches of farm land available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families in increments as small as 1,000 feet the ideal spots would be fertile fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season and hauled hold the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest an even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raise bed agriculture instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food it is much easier to truck in soil compost and mulch once a season raised highways can be closed to traffic since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case and used to catch rainwater for rent for irrigation rooftops and balconies can be used for hot houses hen houses and a variety of other agricultural uses how difficult would this be to organize well Cubans were actually helped by their government but the Russians managed to do it more or less in spite of to Soviet bureaucrats so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones the government could theoretically head up such an effort purely hypothetically speaking of course because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered for our fearless national leaders such initiatives are too low level if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again the potatoes will simply grow themselves all they need to do is print some more money right moving on to shelter again let's look at how the Russians managed to muddle through in the Soviet Union people did not own their out their place of residence everyone was assigned a place to live which was recorded in a person's internal passport people could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen since most people in Russia live in cities the place of residence was usually an apartment or a room in a communal apartment with a shared bathroom and kitchen there was a permanent housing shortage and so people often doubled up with three generations living together the apartments were often crowded sometimes bored bordering on squalid if people wanted to move they had to find somebody else who wanted to move who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them there were always long waiting lists for apartments and children often grew up got married and had children before receiving a place of their own there's a these all seem like negatives but consider the flipside of all this the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable with several generations living together families were on hand to help each other grandparents provided daycare freeing up their children's time to do other things the apartment bills buildings were always built near public transportation so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat and municipal services are easy to provide and maintain because if the short runs of pipe and cable perhaps most importantly after the economy collapsed people lost their savings many people lost their jobs even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation but there were no foreclosures no evictions municipal services such as heat water and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided and everyone had their families closeby also because it was so difficult to relocate people generally stayed in one place for generations and so they tended to know all the people around them after the economic collapse there was a large spike in the crime rate which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren't strangers and who could keep an eye on things lastly in an interesting twist the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate free and clear switching back to the situation in the u.s. in recent months many people have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine nor is it a nest egg they already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower the question is how much lower a lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit a realistic price this thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity after all everybody needs a place to live well it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is necessary be it an apartment a dorm room a bunk in a barrack a boat a camper a tent a teepee a wigwam a shipping container the list is virtually endless but there is no reason to think at all that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement it is little more than a cultural preference and a very short-sighted one at that most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool inaccessible by public transportation expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road bridge and highway maintenance school buses traffic enforcement and other nonsense they often take up what was once valuable agricultural land they promote a car centric culture that is destructive of urban environments causing a proliferation of dead downtown's many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them and expect others to bail them out as far as this living arrangement as this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned it will also become unlivable municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer water electricity road and bridge repair and police without cheap and plentiful gasoline natural gas and heating oil many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable the inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable more densely settled towns and cities the luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with for the rest it would be very helpful to improvise a solution one obvious answer is to repurpose the ever plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms plenty of partitions and other furniture and all they're really missing is beds putting in bed is just not that difficult the new subsistence economy is unlikely to generate a large surplus that is necessary for sustaining the car and law large population of office plankton the businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back so we might as well find new and better uses for them another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses the American four-year college is an institution of dubious merits it exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools managed to teach an eighth as fewer and fewer people become able to afford college which is likely to happen because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system one idea would be to scrap it and then start small but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards college campuses make perfect community centers their dormitories for newcomers fraternities and sororities for the more subtle residents and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses a college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food or at the very least hay and to graze cattle perhaps some enlightened administrators trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flatlining and endowments dropping to zero without any need for government involvement so so here we have a ray of hope don't we moving on to transportation here we need to make sure that people don't get stranded in places that are not survivable then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow catch or gather their own food and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever lastly some amount of freight will have to be moved to transport transport food to population centers as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings all of this is going to be a bit of a challenge because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long from about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil supply has been holding steady unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a bumpy plateau an all-time record was set in 2005 and then after a period of record high oil prices again only in 2008 then as the financial collapse gathered speed oil and other commodity prices crashed along with oil production more recently the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different bumpy plateau the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can't seem to be able to go lower it would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price now $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment but there is hyperinflation on the horizon thanks to the money printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington and 40 could easily become 400 and then 4,000 a barrel swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market on top of that exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency and would start insisting on payment in kind in some kind of tangible export commodity which the u.s. in its current economic state would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity domestic oil production is in permanent decline and can provide only about a third of current needs this is still quite a lot of oil but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages there will be widespread hoarding quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere vented from various jerrycans and improvised storage containers the rest will disappear into the black market and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that's needed for some small but critical mission I'm quite familiar with this scenario because I happen to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages on one occasion I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing ten liters of peace I brought along my uncle's wife who at the time was eight months pregnant and we tried to use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came no dice that that answer was everybody's eight months pregnant how can you argue with such logic so 10 litres was it for us to belly or no belly so what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages the most obvious idea of course is to not use any fuel bicycles carb cargo bikes in particular are an excellent adaptation sailboats are a good idea - not only do they hold large amounts of cargo but they can cover huge distances all without the use of fossil fuels of course they're restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways they will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls and by bridges that refused to open again due to lack of maintenance funds but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems all very low-tech and reasonably priced of course cars and trucks will not disappear entirely here again some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear in my book I advocated banning the sale of new cars as was done in in the US during World War two the benefits are numerous first older cars are overall more energy efficient than new cars because of the massive amount of energy that went into their manufacturing is more highly amortized second large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing building marketing and financing new cars third older cars require more maintenance reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers and helping reduce the trade deficit fourth this will create a shortage of cars translating automatically into fewer shorter car trips higher passenger occupancy per trip and more bicycling and use of public transportation saving even more energy lastly this would allow the car to be made obsolete on about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible we'll run out of cars [Applause] we will run out of cars just as we run out of gas here we are only a year or so later and I'm most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice on the other hand the government's actions continue to disappoint instead of trying to solve problems they would rather continue to create boondoggles the latest one is the idea of subsidizing sales of new cars the idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly I can take any pickup truck and increase its fuel efficiency by one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws first you pack about a dozen people into the bed standing shoulder-to-shoulder like sardines second you drive about 25 miles an hour down the highway because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn't be safe with so many people in the back and so there you are per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 I believe the Mexicans have done some extensive research in this area with excellent results another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up hitchhikers cars with cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with people who need a lift yet another idea since passenger rail service is in such sad sad shape and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos the energy cost of the additional weight is negligible and the hobos don't require stops because they can jump on and off and only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed because hobos as you know are almost infinitely compressible and they can even ride on rooftops if needed one final transportation idea start breeding donkeys horses are finicky and expensive but donkeys can be very cost effective and make good pack animals my grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent and Central Asia during World War two there was nothing much for the donkey to eat but as a member of the Communist Party my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda the Communist Party newspaper and and so that's what the donkey ate apparently donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose even if when it's loaded with communist propaganda if I had a donkey I would feed at the Wall Street Journal [Applause] and so we come to the subject of security both collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave ethnic mafias ran rampant veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves there were numerous contract killings muggings murders went unsolved left and right and in general the place just wasn't safe Russians living in the US would hear that I'm heading back there for another visit and would give me a wide-eyed stare how can I think of doing such a thing I came through unscathed somehow I made a lot of interesting observations along the way one interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman either for a special occasion or generally just to follow someone around it is even possible to hire a soldier or two armed with ak-47s just to help you run errands not us not only is it possible to do such things it is often a very good idea especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don't want to part with if you can't afford their services then you should try to be friends with them and to be helpful to them in various ways well there that although their demands might seem exorbitant at times it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side for instance they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so they can live in your house this may be upsetting at first but then is it really such a good idea for you and your family to live alone in a big house all by yourselves with so many armed men running around it may make sense to station some of them right in your own house so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood a couple of years ago I half jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation and formulated a platform for the so-called collapse party I published it with the caveat that I didn't think there was of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda much to my surprise I turned out to be wrong for instance I propose that we stop making cars and lo and lo and behold the auto industry shuts down I also propose that we start granting amnesties to prisoners because the US has the world's largest prison population and will not be available to available able to afford to keep so many people locked up it is better to release prisoners gradually over time rather than in a single large general amnesty the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the u.s. invaded and lo and behold many states are starting to implement my proposal it looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60,000 of 270,000 people it keeps locked up this is a good start I also propose that we dismantle all overseas military bases there are over a thousand of them and repatriate all the troops and it looks like that is starting to happen as well except for the currently planned little side trip to Afghanistan I also proposed a biblical Jubilee forgiveness of all debts public and private let's give that one half a decade but if we look at just that just at the changes that are already occurring just a simple predictable lack of funds as the federal government and the state governments all go broke will transform American society in predictable ways as municipalities run out of money police protection will evaporate but the police still have to eat and we'll find ways to use their skills on a freelance basis similarly as military bases around the world are shut down soldiers will soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life barold prisoners will find themselves and much the same predicament and so we will have former soldiers former police and former prisoners a big happy family with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies the end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men most of them unemployed and many of them with border borderline psychotic the police in the United States are a troubled group many of them lose all touch with people who are not on the force and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality the soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder the paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well all of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political this will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them all of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive and the really important point to remember is that they will be doing these things whether or not anyone thinks it is legal for them to be doing them I said this before and I will say it again very few things are good or bad per se everything has to be considered within a context and in opposed to collapse context not having to worry whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing in the midst of a collapse we will not have time to deliberate legislate interpret set precedents and so on having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system it's the last thing we should have to worry about some legal impediments are really small and trivial but they can be quite annoying nevertheless a homeowner's association might say want to give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn or for keeping livestock in your garage or or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don't own without first getting a building permit or some municipal busybody might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic you know little things like that well if the associate Association is aware that you have a large number of well-armed mentally unstable friends some of whom still wear military and police uniforms for old times sake then they probably won't give you that ticket or seek that court order or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and distribute a new agricultural implement it's a sort of flail studded with sharp blades it has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost effective and and reasonably safe provided you don't lose your head while using it although people have taken to calling it the flying guillotine you think that this is an acceptable risk but you're concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability once again it is very helpful to have a large number of influential physically impressive mildly psychotic friends who whenever some legal matter comes up to can just go and see the lawyers you know have a friendly chat demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine and generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably without any money changing hands and without signing any legal documents or say the government starts being difficult about moving things and people in and out of the country or it wants to take too much of a cut from commercial transactions or perhaps your state or your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy and the federal government sees it fit to interfere then it maybe may turn out to be a good thing too if someone has enough firepower to bring the government or what remains of it to its senses and convince it to be reasonable and play nice or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic so that you can provide some relief to people who would wouldn't otherwise have any health care you don't dare call yourself a doctor because these people are suspicious of doctors because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life savings but perhaps you have some medical training that you got in say Cuba and you're able to handle a cesarean or an appendectomy to suture wounds to treat infections at bones etc you also want to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically sent to you to to ease the pain of a hard post collapse life while going through all of the licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary provided you can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed well-trained mentally unstable friends food shelter transportation security security is very important maintaining order and public safety requires discipline and maintaining discipline for a lot of people requires the threat of force this means that people must be ready to come to each other's defense take responsibility for each other and do what's right right now security is provided by a number of bloated bureaucratic ineffectual institutions which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment that is why we have the world's highest prison population there supposedly there to protect people from each other but in reality their mission is not even to provide security it is to safeguard property and those who own it once these institutions run out of resources there will be a period of upheaval but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face and justice will will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department I've covered what I think are the basics based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future if in fact it ever gets that bad you should certainly feel free to think that way the danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new ahead of time and then you will get trapped as I see it there is a choice to be made you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly or you can decide that you must try and stay the course and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later so how do you prepare lately I've been hearing from a lot of high-powered successful people about their various high-powered successful associates usually the story goes something like this my a financial adviser or be my investment banker or see Mike and a commanding officer has recently a foot all his money in gold or be bought a log cabin up in the mountains or sea built a bunker on under his house stocked with six months of food and water is this normal and I tell them yes of course it's perfectly harmless he's just having a mid collapse crisis but that's not really preparation that's just someone being colorful in an offbeat countercultural sort of way so how do you really prepare well let's go through a list of questions that people typically ask me and I will try to briefly respond to each one okay first question how about all these financial boondoggles what on earth is going on people are losing their jobs left and right and if we calculate unemployment the way it was done during the Great Depression instead of looking at the cup numbers the government is trying to feed us now then we're heading toward 20% unemployment and is there any reason to think it'll stop there do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner not only jaws and housing equity but retirement savings are also evaporating the federal government's our stroke state government to stroke some more than others and the best they can do is print more money which will quickly lose value so how can we get the basics if we don't have any money how is that done good question as I briefly mentioned the basics of food shelter transportation and security let's focus on shelter shelter poses a particularly interesting interesting problem at the moment it is still very much overpriced with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand fecund the solution of course is to cut your losses and stop paying but then you might have soon have to relocate this is okay because as I mentioned there's no shortage of vacant properties around finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted because the number of vacant properties will only increase the best course of action is to become a property caretaker legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free and keeping an eye on things for the owner what if you can't find a position as a property caretaker well you might have to become a squatter or maintain a list of vacant properties while keeping your camping gear handy if you do get tossed out chances are the people who tossed you out will will then think of hiring a property caretaker to keep the squatters out and what do you do if you become a property caretaker well you take care of the property of course but you also look out for all of the other squatters because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live a squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush the absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses too and go away but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors having some neighbors is much better than living in a ghost town what if you still have a job how do you prepare them the obvious answer is be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment it really doesn't matter which one of these it turns out to be the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can by spending as little money as possible so that when the job goes away not much has to change while at work do as little as possible because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden environment gently ride it to a stop and jump off if you still have a job or if you still have some savings what do you do with all the money the obvious answer is build up inventory the money will be worthless but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails buy and stock file useful stuff especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food providing shelter and providing transportation and security thank you if you don't own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can put it where you can stockpile stuff then you can rent a storage container pay it a few years forward and just sit on it and until reality kicks in again and there's something useful for you to do with it some of you may be frightened by the future I just described and rightly so there is nothing any of us can do to change the path we're on it is a huge huge system with tremendous inertia and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane what we can do is prepare ourselves and each other mostly by changing our expectations our preferences and scaling down our needs it may mean that you will miss out on some last uncertain bit of enjoyment on the other hand by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances you will be able to give to yourself and to others a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist thank you the questions what I was so rattled by that I dropped all the questions the questions will be in random order then really weird probably in random order before somebody won't give their name says do you get invited to cocktail parties yes yes actually yeah I do get invited to cocktail parties here's an interesting question for Robin Sloane over here in my post collapse neighborhood how am I going to keep tabs on what is going on how does media change this TV work about the Internet should I be keeping a printing press in my basement media was not one of the four things you mentioned yeah that's a that's a really good question I think that we have enough technology that we can plug together in various interesting ways my favorite example of just a complete you know throwback to the 70s and the 70s there was fidonet in in rural Maine that relied on ham radios and I think something like 2400 baud modems all kind of patched together with Atari on trs-80 computers used to exchange mail email at the time and that worked pretty well so I think that if a few people you know they're enough engineers around so if we have some equipment sitting around some some solar panels you know some some radio equipment etc we'll probably patch something together somehow well it's interesting that I've been looking at squatter cities in the world where a billion people live the way you've just described and one of the things that's doing very well there are cell phones and one of the reasons they're doing well there as well as elsewhere is it's a fairly bottom-up entrepreneurial world where you know the guy gets a few handsets and self son built a tower and then from that get sells more handsets appreciating running power and it's a kind of a ground-up infrastructure which is a media form I think that's likely to survive into these circumstances I'm not sure the older the equipment the longer it lasts that that seems to me take the case like the you know the newer stuff seems to be a lot more fragile the technology gets more complicated over time like really old equipment you can fix just by soldering new chips and new equipment forget it you'll love some of the slides by on chip Chase who shows streets in Delhi and Mumbai and so on we're in the slums square they have reverse-engineered all the cell phones in the world the handsets and so the ones that we throw away wind up there and there are local manuals in the local language where they figured out how to fix these things basically forever it's like cars and Cuba mm-hmm and it's so valuable to everybody in terms of this kind of grassroots economy they're talking about that that actually does pretty well there and and it's something that wasn't in Russia in the 90s I'm curious how cell phones are doing in Russia now extremely well yeah yeah the cell phone coverage there is quite impressive but I think there will be enough electronic junk left over for us to communicate non not face-to-face I think the challenge is getting enough people talking to each other face-to-face and not depending on technology Alexander Rose has a question how many citizens in Russia had firearms forthe collapse in the US there are more guns than people and will that make it different I mean this is not a question just of lots of guys that formerly in prison or in the police and the military would that attitudes and weapons but a lot of people who were none of those who also have weapons how does that change I think you know the NGO the gun culture here is you know a big part of it and I think you know there will be a lot of bullet holes and various things things people so I think that will be unfortunate you know a lot of a lot of stuff will get strafed and you know I see that happening I think that that's going to be a part of it tomorrow Spaulding is where over here thank you as there are large cultural is there a larger racial and cultural diversity in America than Russia do you think the more recent American culture will reach different respond differently and more as using in a sense more hybrid vigor than might have been the case with the fairly historically embedded culture in Russia well Russia is an interesting country because it you know it's called Russia well actually it's called Russian Federation for good reason because Russians are an ethnic minority it'll be a majority Muslim country before too long but it's a very inclusive ethnicity people who speak Russian call themselves Russian and and they call themselves Russian something else you know Russian Korean Russian Jew Russian whatever and so that that sort of the the ethnic identity it's a it's a very mongrel identity and and I think that that helps the the this saner more stable parts of Russia because there isn't really an exclusive identity and the places that turned out to be the most fragile were the ones that had some you know newfangled nationalism for a country of you know twenty thousand people you know claimed some exclusive right to a piece of turf and you know that generate degenerated into ethnic cleansing and that sort of happened more more in the perimeter than in the center the other thing that happened in Russia that will probably happen here is ethnic mafias had a big role to play you know the Chechens in particular but a few other ethnic groups as well basically seized certain parts of the the new business they had a new free enterprise business so for a while there in Russia you could buy a lot of stuff from little kiosks little metal locked booths where you would shove your gigantic roll of worthless money through a hole and they would shove back a bottle of vodka you know whatever you wanted those were all run by the Chechen mafia and because nobody could understand what they're saying to each other they had a secret code so because nobody speaks judgin except Chechens so you know they had they had the ability to thrive in that environment and that caused a lot of problems here's question from Ken Wilson and I think over here fertility collapsed in Russia was this an adaptation or a vulnerability how quickly will the u.s. population change how might we prepare for that well I mean I think Russian fertility is sort of a you know a case in point that that issue just keep killing people generation after generation they stopped breeding that well after a while I mean Russia lost so many men and you know during the revolution you know during the civil war afterwards during World War two during the various Stalinist repressions etc was a very disrupted society and the other thing is that you know everybody was short of living space so if you had more than two children you had to stack them vertically you know somehow there was no room for to spread them out so you know people were very much hemmed in by their you know the environment and their living situation the fact that you know Russia has a smaller population now I don't know whether it's a you know a plus or a minus because you know a smaller population is certainly easier to feed given the same amount of land but right now well Putin put a put some measures into place so mothers get ten thousand dollars for for having a child now just think they've gotten quite up to the the France bribe yet yeah they're working on it last I heard Russia had a birth rate of 1.2 children for a woman yeah well it was an extinction three generations yeah and you know it's quite possible that that will happen or it's quite possible that it won't it's it's really hard to see but you know that that's sort of the result of the enormous die offs that occurred throughout the 20th century so Ken's question was do you think any of that maps to here is this just a completely different story here I think it's a completely different story okay I mean to give you an example the United States lost fewer men in all of World War two than my hometown in Russia thank you that's a reminder all this worth making looks like flank revi is that a real name I'm gonna ask it a little more though because he's saying your first for post collapse government priorities of food transportation shelter and security yes what about energy and I would put in terms what about great energy which is not an oil question it's a coal question a nuclear various other things this great energy go away or was that for example kept up in Russia it was kept up in Russia I think it was built a little better in Russia Russians had this engineering culture that caused them to over-design things in ridiculous ways and electrification was one of the things that they over designed ridiculously I mean you can go to Russia and look at gigantic concrete transformer buildings where here it would be just a bunch of exposed transformer sitting behind some chain-link fence and there it's an edifice and and so that that all held together pretty well and amazingly except for for Chernobyl and maybe a few other radiation leaks they you know the nuclear energy sector held together reasonably well and they managed to retrofit it for safety and have been keeping it running that they finally put containment vessels on the reactors or they still I'm not sure I think in some cases they have Kim and Kelly says other empires have collapsed without individual hardship you forecast forecasts for the former USA the British and ottoman empire's sank without social upheaval at home do you have any other scenarios for the breakup of the US reduce military power but without hobos jeepneys donkeys in one way crime do you have any other versions of a gentler kinder gentler collapse well no because the the the Empire's that collapse gently I think didn't have to drastically change their cultures and their ways of living I think you know the Turks still just walk to market to buy vegetables you know they they didn't have to give up an entire you know way of way of life here's a trick question from Tom Hetherington after the collapse of the USSR Russia became capitalist and more like the USA so isn't Russia headed for another collapse just like us I think Russia has if had it for collapse it will be a slightly different one now people think that these Western labels what can can be applied to to Russia more or less directly that you know if you're talking about Russian democracy that would be like democracy somewhere else the fact it probably just means that the Communists get elected again because they're popular same thing with capitalism you know Russian capitalism is not what you'd think capitalism should be it's what Russians think capitalism should be so it's basically a state system was you know big monopolies government monopolies monopolies that in other places would be called you know state champions or something like that and then the money that they accumulate trickles down through or the rest of the economy in good times it's more of a flood than a trickle actually but that's how the entire economy structured it's it's nothing like what capitalism is here and in terms of financial collapse I guess they learn some lessons but not others from the experience in the 90s because at the start of the crisis Russia had fourth largest foreign reserves in the world of any country in the world loss of gold reserves they had a gigantic Stabilization Fund that they could just burn through and it's not working that well and there are a lot of complaints about how it's not working that well but they started from financial strengths not financial weakness they didn't have the equivalent of China backing up their apparatus well they basically started trying to support the currency I don't think if that if that worked particularly well the the biggest problem for them is that the flow of money from abroad in exchange for commodities has slowed down because of the crash and commodity prices question for Michael M who is best prepared for this in America today it's a multiple choice question the mafia the militias burning men illegal immigrants or the super wealthy I think for the rural poor the ones that actually have some kind of a subsistence economy are the ones that probably could go on the longest without noticing that any big changes have occurred because being poor takes a lot of practice and and if you've had practice upfront then once you are forced to be poor then it's not that big a change I think the Amish are fairly well prepared I think those those would be the two groups being poor takes lots of practices a take-home line mmm-hmm interestingly specifics on these guy I can't resist passing on and that's where you want to answer John Perry Barlow right here comes to us from Wyoming since we'll be stockpiling ammunition for our future well armed the turf friends of what calibers will they prefer my preference would be for you know an SKS or an ak-47 they take the same ammo which you can buy at any market anywhere in the world seven six two or something yeah so that's like the obvious thing and the SKS is enough for you know most things and and then shotguns but don't bother with handguns I'll go to a gun fight with a knife bob cut POC I think it is says aren't well-armed psychopaths more skittish and hard to train and control than horses my wife is bringing up because he deals with horses and you know it's a close call well well I guess to be fair you have to compare them to psychopathic horses but they're all well-armed look you live on a sailboat right yes and these many people here how many saw that bay tree was in a New Yorker piece a week or two ago a few here and you were grouped with Nassim Taleb and and with the suburb Peter what's his name yeah say a little more about how you got on this the other boat sailboat what you're learning living in preparation for the collapse that you see and what's sort of the sequence the narrative the arc of that process for you yeah well Ben McGrath who wrote The New Yorker article called what I'm doing bourgeois survivalism and I thought that it's it's strange funny but I think he has my number because you know basically I was living with my wife in a condo in in Boston and I was watching what was going on and you know in in the economy and and so I decided that now is the time to sell and did this was when this was two-and-a-half years ago and and so I pocketed a whole bunch of money from that and the reason I did that was because I wanted to do with the money in in inventory or in gold I won't tell you okay that's why but anyway the reason we moved on to the boat was it was because I wanted to do other things I didn't really want to just work day jobs forever and I wanted to take a year off so moving on to both was a very good way to do it so we moved on to the boat and then we sailed off and sailed the entire eastern seaboard seaboard from from Maine to Florida and back you know had a lot of interesting experiences and then arrived back in Boston where you know we're living at Constitution marina was just very nice a rent this winter is 400 a month and and I have a 15 minute walk to a skyscraper where I have a job so it's sort of where's why survivalism you know it's sort of like okay well I could I could spend all my money on a place to live or I could just like you know save it all and and live within 15 minutes of work and it just makes sense you know the downside is that it's a bit cramped and things get moldy very easily and you know it when there's a storm you know there's a lot of emotion you know a few things like that but in general I I think I you know I like living on a boat well enough that I would like to continue doing that and in the process I've learned all about maintaining a sailboat which is for me you know probably the more interesting part because sailing is actually quite boring you know get out there you set it on the word and it goes until the wind changes so yeah so that's basically my experience well this is one advantage many of the cities around coasts and you know water may be rising but if you live in a place that floats you don't care my wife and I live in a tugboat we've lived on for 25 years and it's all the things you say but we've been there for 25 years because it's actually pretty neat and is the marina you're in have other people in the boats are you kind of one of the loans inhabitants there's over a hundred people who all belong to a newsgroup a yahoo news group and they're always getting together and drinking beer and drama and singing karaoke and you know swimming around in the swimming pool whatever else it's it's like it's a wild social scene there's a party whenever anyone shows up pretty much and there's over a hundred of them very gregarious well there's another thing that we see on the houseboat area Sausalito is the one advantage of a relatively stable relatively dense community is it actually is a community and a lot of security of various sorts goes with that even without weapons and it's also a nice way to live well actually this is you know from this perspective collapse looks like a interesting neighborhood revival event thank you very much thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 72,265

Keywords: Culture, Economics, History, collapse, Soviet Union, Russia, kitchen gardens, housing, security

Id: kySDKESt3_M

Length: 88min 6sec (5286 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020