The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment (3 page)

Acknowledgments

Where do I begin thanking all the people who helped make this book possible? This book represents the most intellectually rigorous and honest work of my life. Without the persistent efforts of my wife, Becca, who has ever urged me see more, try new things, go deeper, and question the ways in which I might be wrong as well as right, this book and the rest of my work would have been pale shadows rather than my best, if they happened at all.

Our three children, Erica, Simon, and Grace, deserve thanks for their tremendous patience throughout my arduous process of researching and creating both the
Crash Course
video and this book. I apologize for having spent our entire 2010 family vacation in a tent in Maine, working on a laptop instead of playing with them on the beach. My family’s unflagging, unconditional love and support sustains everything I do.

I’d like to thank Judy Hyde and Helen Armstrong for their love, early and ardent support, and for trusting my reckless business decision to give away the
Crash Course
video series for free.

I am a storyteller, researcher, and data hound who needs to acknowledge the extent to which this book rests upon the work and ideas of others. I owe Michael Browning for invaluable conversations over the years as my early thoughts took shape, to the folks at ASPO and
TheOilDrum.com
for helping me to deepen my understanding of Peak Oil, and to the blogosphere in general for bravely exploring essential subjects when the mainstream media wouldn’t go there.

I’d like to thank the individuals whose donations over the years have funded the considerable work and research necessary to write this book. Special thanks go to Michael Höhne, Erik Townsend, Arthur Tunnell, Mark Klarich, Melissa Wedig, Carrie Pine, and the many others whose sizable donations have allowed my staff and me to invest our time in this work.

I’d especially like to thank my staff, as each member was instrumental in bringing this book to fruition:

Amanda Witman, for her unparalleled gifts as an editor and her masterfully organized working style, and who helped me hone and housekeep this book to within an inch of its life.

Megan Walsh, for her immense competence, intensive project management, help with research and editing, and coordination in weaving together the multiple components of this book.

Jeanine Dargis, for her diligent work in building the charts and graphics, and her patience in fielding the most irksome requests.

Ron Shimshock, for bringing both incredible technical expertise and a rare business mind to bear on the creation of our web site.

Adam Taggart, for his attention as an early editor and for taking charge as ship’s captain, keeping our site and business sailing smoothly when I was absorbed in this project.

Finally, I’d like to thank the
www.ChrisMartenson.com
community for their passion, enthusiasm, and interest in these ideas, for the intelligent conversation they provide on a daily basis, and for their faithful support of this work. Together we are achieving a tipping point of awareness, which is possible thanks to the early adopters of this mission. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped us get here.

Introduction

Not long ago, I was firmly seated on the American Dream bandwagon. I had done everything that you are supposed to do—and more. In the 1990s, I earned my PhD in Pathology/Toxicology from Duke University and did two years of post-doctoral research with the intention of becoming a full-time professor. But life takes its twists and turns; I went on to get an MBA from Cornell and spent the next 10 years working my way through and up the corporate ladder, ultimately becoming a VP at SAIC, a Fortune 300 company. These details are helpful in understanding three things about me: (1) I bring a scientist’s understanding and love of data to my work, (2) I am thoroughly at home with financial concepts, and (3) I gave up a very lucrative and promising career to work on the material that now appears in
The Crash Course
.

I first noticed something was awry in 2002, when my portfolio of hard-earned investments hit a new low. At that time, my wife Becca, my three children, and I lived in a 6-bedroom, 5-bathroom house in Mystic, Connecticut. Our boat was in a slip less than a mile away, we had numerous friends and acquaintances, and our children were tracked into the local elementary school. I recall several increasingly uncomfortable conversations with our broker at the time, not because of the losses
per se
, but because he kept giving me reassurances when I wanted information and context.
How did this downturn compare to prior events? What was driving it? How long did people have to wait to recoup their losses in the past? What sort of time horizon should we be expecting before things recover? What will drive that recovery
? None of these questions was ever answered to my satisfaction, so I set about researching the answers myself. What I found shocked me to my core.

I discovered that my nation, far from being the economic ocean liner of the world, was instead like a leaky rowboat. Our levels of debt were extraordinary by any historical measure. Our entitlement programs alone were quite obviously underfunded enough to sink the ship, or at least put a few holes in the hull at the waterline. Our primary sources of wealth creation, manufacturing jobs, were leaving for distant shores, and I could not fathom how merely shuffling paper, a massive growth industry at the time, created any real or lasting wealth. If our 2003 trade deficit were a nation, it would have had the twentieth largest GDP in the world, indicating that Americans’ overconsumption exceeded the entire economic activity of all but the largest countries. I was thoroughly stumped by how these things could possibly go on forever, or even for much longer, and so I began to dig deeper.

My wife calls this the period when I “fell down the rabbit hole” like Alice in Wonderland, but to me it seemed more like an entire interconnecting warren of rabbit holes. There was data everywhere, and some of it did not make any sense to me—or at least I could not understand why I had not heard these important things before. I began to share what I was finding with everyone who would listen, especially my wife.

By 2003, our views of the future had become closely aligned, and we decided to move from Mystic to . . . somewhere, anywhere . . . with more community, ample resources, and a few defining characteristics that we thought would provide a better match to the future we saw coming. By July of that year, we had sold our house, moved into a rental home in semirural western Massachusetts, sold most of our stocks, bought gold and silver, and began living a life that contained far fewer physical possessions but offered more direct control over the things that now mattered most to us. I took over complete control of all of our financial investment decisions (no more broker), we took up gardening again, and we started putting serious time into finding and developing deeper community connections. My passion for learning about the economy and financial matters grew as I read dozens of books and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of articles from magazines, trade journals, and the Internet.

By 2004, my research had expanded to include an appreciation for an idea called “Peak Oil,” which describes an eventual cresting of oil production leading to a permanent condition of less and less thereafter. By joining this understanding of energy and its role in our daily lives to my newfound clarity on the role of money and how it is produced and managed, I came to a fairly startling conclusion: Our current system of money was unsustainably designed—and it was destined for failure; I just didn’t know when.

I felt urgently enough about this revelation that I developed an entire seminar on the subject and called it
The End of Money
. My presentation began with the history of money itself, then romped through slide upon slide of economic statistics, including debt, savings, derivatives, bubbles, economic and monetary history, and energy.

In July of 2005, I left my position at SAIC on good terms, determined to spend more time pursuing the issues that were consuming me. I took a sabbatical from my corporate responsibilities so that I could spend more time researching, distilling, and communicating what I was learning to others.

Friends and family found less humor in my choice to become what I jokingly called “self-unemployed,” wondering what sort of person, at 42 years of age and with three young children, would drop his career to pursue a passion without any thought for how that whim might pay the bills. For the next four years we lived entirely off savings, our dwindling bank account ostensibly proving their skepticism to be well-founded.

But the work felt too important, and I threw myself into it. I gave seminars, lots of seminars. I started a blog, I spent the better part of a year working with a documentary filmmaker, and I continued to read everything relevant that I could get my hands on. After more than a year and a half of full-time development,
The End of Money
had reached maturity.

I recall its impact on audiences throughout 2007. At one venue outside of Hartford, Connecticut, I remember how I kept waiting for someone to stand up and challenge my work. That test never came, not even from audiences that included a former president of a State Street financial firm and a member of the board of directors of a large regional bank. All I ever received were heartfelt congratulations and thank yous.

In late 2007, one audience member, Alejandro Levins, a former owner of a Silicon Valley Internet company, convinced me that my seminar was too important not to be shared on the Internet. I didn’t see how this was possible, as the seminar was now a four-part series, requiring over eight hours to deliver and involving hundreds of slides. The idea of condensing it gave me nightmares. Yet the idea of producing eight hours of video material also felt prohibitive. I finally relented and spent nearly the entire spring of 2008 working through various technical formats and other issues while condensing the material. In May of 2008, I uploaded the very first video chapter of what is now called the
Crash Course
. It would take me five more months of intense work to complete what would become an additional 19 chapters, comprising 3½ hours of instructional video material housing the core elements of my thinking and research. On October 23, 2008, the last chapter was finally loaded to the site, and we sat back to see what might happen next.

While I had been successful in shrinking the content down to far less than the original eight hours, I was certain that this online series would appeal to only a very limited audience due to its length and content. But I was wrong. Again I waited for the critiques and rebuttals that seemed sure to follow, but aside from some minor errata found by diligent eyes, my work stood mainly unchallenged. Even more surprisingly, the
Crash Course
became an Internet success, drawing well in excess of a million and a half views in its first year.

Determined to try to seek a tipping point of awareness that I believed could pave the way for positive change on a large scale—or perhaps just to exercise my well-ingrained habit of
not
earning a living—I decided to give away the best work of my life for free the
Crash Course
was made available online in a format that anyone could copy and distribute at no charge. We also produced and sold a professionally produced DVD version, initially offered at cost to maximize its distribution. Twenty-five thousand copies were sold within the first few months of its release.

Accolades began to roll in, and volunteers came forward to put an enormous amount of work into translating the
Crash Course
into other languages, first Spanish, then French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Italian. Donations came in to support the continuation of my work. I amassed a team of four part-time staff members, whose considerable skill in handling administrative and technical tasks enabled me to keep my focus centered at the heart of our work. Our subscription newsletter service began to attract a significant number of enrolled members, who overwhelmingly encouraged us to continue moving forward with our efforts. We devoted ourselves to making the web site,
www.ChrisMartenson.com
, more robust, useful, and navigable. We developed further seminar materials, which we presented at numerous locations in the United States. We created an online archive of original articles and resources, built online forums where likeminded community members could connect, published support materials for volunteer-run
Crash Course
presentations, and produced podcasts and additional video materials to supplement the
Crash Course
. We connected with thousands of individuals through our web site, seminars, and e-mail, most of whom offered overwhelming thanks and encouragement.

Finally, in 2009, the very first dollar of profit flowed out of these efforts and into my life, slowing the exodus of money out of my savings account. We had done it. We had turned passion into income while simultaneously giving our very best content to the world for free.

At the end of 2009, Becca and I finally bought the house that we had been renting, knowing full well that from a purely economic standpoint, it wasn’t the optimal time to buy. We decided that, given the state of the world, we valued time more than money, and we wanted to make use of that time to make prudent improvements to our home and invest ourselves permanently in our community.

In 2009 and 2010, I presented the
Crash Course
or related material to the United Nations, the U.K. Parliament, U.S. State Legislatures, the Audubon Society, the Commonwealth Club, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, global corporations such as Yahoo! and Honda, capital management firms, and many other noteworthy organizations, large and small. I regularly appear in or am cited by major media, from cutting-edge econoblogs to more traditional publications such as
The Wall Street Journal
and
The Washington Post
. My web site,
www.ChrisMartenson.com
, receives over 100,000 unique visitors every month. Most gratifying, our message is resonating with a wide and diverse audience: The 800-plus sites currently linking in to
ChrisMartenson.com
are nearly impossible to classify as a whole, as they represent a diverse social, economic, and cultural spectrum. The material that comprises my web site and the contents of this book has been launched from the obscurity of my home office to the highest courts of public opinion. But perhaps the biggest testament to the
Crash Course’s
success is the many letters that we receive from people who tell us how happy they are to have come across the
Crash Course
—and the ways in which they have changed their lives because of it.

Deciding to change on your own terms, while frightening at times, can be incredibly rewarding. Even though by traditional measures our family’s
standard
of living has been cut in half, our
quality
of life has doubled. We now measure our wealth in things like the depth of our community relationships, our free time, our children’s joy and curiosity, and the ways in which we are more self-reliant than before. We are living proof that it is indeed possible to step off the American Dream bandwagon and not only survive, but thrive. I will be honest: There are enormous changes, possibly disruptive ones, ahead for all of us. But I want to assure you that there is much in this story that is still within your control.

So that is my story: from research scientist, to corporate executive, to satisfied and never-been-happier husband, father, and economic futurist. Becca and I took a short detour through some fearful thoughts and big decisions, but we discovered something pleasant and unexpected along the way—a better life. Given the opportunity to go back in time, we would do it all over again. Everything that led to those changes, and what I have learned along the way, is now contained within the pages that follow.