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we're speaking with chris martin soon who's in studio with us today chris is
the trains research scientist and you make a point to say you are not
an economist and so why is that a big deal steve it seems in preparing for
this interview sa as you mentioned that on your website and it said it in some
other interviews
why is that some forty
and asked her about
lenin one involve along
coming up i think we should switch mikes because for some reason we're getting a
little feedback on his there
there we go to the dentist dot
very clubs closed as you want to get with the mike
but it wherever is convenient there we go
did so i think jeter
thanks david
it's just important to me to clarify who i am in who are not i'm not an economist
although i talk about the economy allot needed something that's very
passionately interesting to me
but i did start out as a research scientist and so i also got an m_b_a_
was off in the business world for quite a while
and this makes his uncomfortable numbers uncomfortable data like i'd like to let
the information tell the story
and if there's an incredible story out there to be told about our economy i was
calling for the downturn that we're living through a number of years before
it started
uh... there some other things coming now that i think everybody should be aware
of but i wanna absolutely not misrepresent myself and say are on the
economy stand-up actually i think that's agood thing to be the state's 'cause
let's face it almost all of them missed
this story well you know i don't know if it is because some people tell me that i
make a an economist event n_b_a_ and undergraduate degree in economics and
some people say that that makes me
ostensibly some kind of an economist and i've actual absolutely no idea no four
said about what was going on going to happen specifically be on the fact that
i knew it was really easy to get a mortgage
i saw that there was a lot of a lot of leverage in bizarre
uh... derivative instruments kind of floating around in being inc
increasingly used as hyped
profit centers for a lot of the financial uh... companies so i don't
even know that there is a strong advantage to being
a so-called economist at least not one at my level so to speak i think someone
with
kind of the more technical numbers training you have made even be more
useful
like a man from the outside from the outside in the route their work
like to say there's something so i distrust my god on when i saw that that
they were was there was a hairdresser in las vegas
she had nineteen homes and was was accumulating more and more in the idea
there was that she was just no sell them for more money to someone else
that's like the classic shoeshine boy getting tips to j_p_ morgan nineteen
twenty nine moment another number of moments that were stacking up for me the
said
doesn't smell right doesn't look right and that i would go in without
hypothesis dig around for the data and the more i dug a stinky regatta honestly
it once you put it all in one spot it's
pretty clear that we were going way off the bubble edge
so you are a former fortune three hundred vp can you say what company
that's with which which of these top three hundred congress called science
applications international corporate illicit was private at the time i was
there and it's now public company and what motivated
they do i'll be mostly on
uh... defense contracting and other government contracting that's two-thirds
of business one-third is commercial i was on the commercial side
i was a consultant in the pharma industry at that point
and what such hell i i know your website you you outlined some of brief lee how
are used transitioned out of that and into what you do now
but kind of sum it up for us uh... a little bit
the boat born after stories kind of uh... start for a lot of people
before i came in contact with the information that's now on my website nz
freely available to anybody who wants to see it
i was living in a five bathroom house
on the cosic an eticket waterfront home i had a vote myslef
fortune three hundred vice president
i come in contact with sin for mation starting traveling at look at it my wife
and i decided we had to make some changes at this point i'm forty two have
three young children
completely ditch the job the house everything and uh... moved to this
region of the world appear in montague massachusetts
and we did that because we saw some changes coming that we realized that the
lifestyle that we were living
was not the one that we wanted to be and
when these changes came
so for instance with this economic downturn coming we decided we didn't
really want to be holding a big real estate asset of the kind of rethought
would decline that was a very wise move
and what year was this that was in two thousand three when he made the move
so this is well early on this was the two thousand three really in the middle
of the housing bubbles and that yet we were still running up and uh... the peak
of the housing bubbles two thousand five uh... but i wasn't selling a house that
time specifically to dodge the real state bubble there were other things
that
that i was dodging at that point on i thought and
so we started on this journey that we've been on because we saw some things that
frankly mavis afraid
and once we made this transition to a different lifestyle to new community to
a much deeper richer say connections
now this is something we would actively done because it's it's desirable but
more the carrot
than the stick and we have no regrets his absolute the right decision for our
family
uh... but from the american standpoint it looks like i fell off him hurt
injuring bandwagon with blood
right i i had everything well uh... there make it was their golden parachute
here
no no golden parachute okay because i won't able we will get that question we
will get when you say that you that it's a sad story in a sense earlier it may
seem like a sad story the golden parachute many cannot buy two separate
no no this was uh... the no parachute involved okke secular golden or
otherwise now okay
alright night so here we are now and i've spent the past five years trying to
tell people that there was this big economic pickup coming
but it's a larger story net
the economy is the first yet talked about the second the is energy
and there's a huge story there to be told about
where we're heading with energy the next five ten twenty years ago beatrice cont
pletely unique in human experience we've always had
one more horizon
one new coal seam one new energy source
you know some some critics like to say well the stone age did name capri ran
out of stones
implying that we're not gonna run out of the way lage because we're gonna run out
of oil it's completely different process people moved from stones to bronze to
steal
and so on we went from
to toil uh... now what
and that's the thing nobody can credibly say what stupid question mark around
that he
and then the thirty years around the environment and for me that's really a
story about how we're depleting the resources on this planet up here for
talking about tuna fish
or copper or topsoil
or fresh water napa first we are ripping through
uh... the base resources of this world that they'd give us a lifestyles we like
to read
give us the communities we live in our whole culture our whole sense of
standard of living everything
is dependent on picking out not just a little bit more every year
an exponentially larger amount every year we have to take up more and more
and more in that story of more
is coming to a pretty interesting conclusion
if not my adult life time certainly my children's so there's no n and we'll get
and i have specific questions about that and before we get to that i've been
looking at your website which by the way we're speaking with chris martin soon
the website is chris martin soon dot com
and that's and they are t_p_ and estelle and
uh... i get advertisements all the time for
crash courses evokes learning seminar so on and so forth and his constant and
some of the ones i get in the mail are
an incredible amount of paper just just using the paper i get
from people wanting me to follow their stock picks or learn about
how did they see the economy going in the next couple of years
i could write
scripts for two years for this show literally
are you giving investment advice on the website tell us about this crash course
in how is it it looked to me to be different from some of these others in
in some ways it looked to be the same so i think for our audience who would be
good to know what exactly goes on on chris martin's in dot com
the premier offer we've got is something called the crash course it's twenty
video chapters uniform in its long ten minutes long varying
and i put that out there with absolutely no business model in with with no
expectation this was my mission driven work and i had this information it was
so important cause me to change my life in my family's
and
i thought i'd couldn't just sit on this as a product that i was going to sell
the people so i mean if free
and anybody can watch that uh... it's now translated into three full languages
on the basis of volunteers honest the spanish people came out first got into
spanish french italian or almost done with it
was going to nine other languages all around the world and again all for free
uh... and i do offer a newsletter for subscribers but that's not investment
advice it's really my big picture
looking run gathering data and information i call myself an information
scouts what i do so i read things like
pull it all together i might write about loyal or i might write about
where agriculture's going whatever sort of you know how to that moment for me in
in one interview i read that you said there's no safe place to hide financial
assets during a downturn
and that the system is imminent itself kind of reading ganz small investors
which
almost everybody is a small investor if we look at just a hundred percent of the
indian the number the investors that are around
is does it make sense to just let your money set under the mattress and in what
ways did you save move into the non-financial
types of assets but what does that mean i think some people it would be a little
uh... confusing
david is a huge subject
my primary uh... thesis on all this is that we have this huge runup in stocks
the started in nineteen eighty two
ran up to rent two thousand in fact that we just close the books on this decade
stocks return the negative return for the whole decade
but still after ten years that's not long enough some people are still
fixated on stocks
the way i look at it we had a huge stock bubble through the nineties it burst
and the federal reserve did everything he could get it
watched and it created another bubble this time in housing
that expanded burst
with even larger economic uh... problems for people
my belief is that everybody's going and then get squeezed into the third bubble
this next one which is gonna follow this is going to be in bonds
and if this is true then treasury bonds would be my number one candidate for
something that's an enormous bubble right now
uh... and even though their earning almost nothing right well that's why the
republicans when bonds yield almost nothing it means their prices verified
inversely really got adversely related so the price on treasuries given the
fact
the united states reader one point he truly dollar deficit this year
to the missing i mean this is banana republic territory kinda stopped instill
treasuries are yielding a very low melt
only because the federal reserve's been stepping in and buying in supporting
that market right some help from other foreign central banks
so i believe that that's uh... you know it when everybody knows something that's
when i get uncomfortable
and everybody knows that treasuries are the safest place to park your money
i think that's just another bubble that's waiting to be revealed the
solution
and so the primary purpose of the bear market is to take everybody's wealth
away
and it's not just a bear market in stocks this is a bear market across our
society at this point i'm
so equities first pop
housing pop
i think there's a third one waiting out there whether happens this year three or
five years out
it's really something that people if they can see it coming can position
themselves to avoid it
total i will give us everything give us a few examples of these non i think i
have it here you say
um... net that
out of the financial system altogether is where people should be moving some of
their assets how does how does one do that was an example of that well right
now is if you're in the financial system people say well diversified like my
stockbrokers connie i'm well diversified
realestate stocks bonds writen right but you're not if you're a hundred percent
exposed to the dollar
it means that you still have one primary diversification having undertaken which
is if the dollar really tanks and some meaningful way
all of your other holdings will take in the purposes not to gain wealth it's did
just preserve purchasing power
during the primary bear market
that's where i think we are not everything's tells me were still there
recovery green shoots notwithstanding
so what i like to do is take some of my money inhabit out of the paper dollar
market
i get i'd moved a lot of my wealth and people who listen to me into gold and
silver back in two thousand three
in nineteen twenty working at
primary production of what i think we're going back to the old story if u uh...
took a picture of this town and eighteen eighty
you would see where the wealth was it was located in the most fertile valley
bottoms that was located near the stream that had the water the
flowing he could utilize it was where the best timber was growing those were
the people at the real wealth were sitting on on those primary assets so
farming is where we want to go absolutely i think arming is we're gonna
go everybody should be and we should be working the land is what you're
suggesting improving the land not just working at there's there's farming
restrict minus wellness farming ring prove the soil
it's that latter one that i really think is where the futurists let's assume that
not everybody's going to take that advice for starting to have people
working in the medical field insurance
retail so on and so forth
is cool are gold and silver really the answer i mean in radio right now there's
our huge trend of these gold advertisers theirs
rosin capital gold line so on and so for those there's a whole bunch of these a
feature noncommercial radio you hear advertisements for gold
uh... i didn't want to talk radio seminar and the gold people are at the
talk radio seminar presenting on gold is at the highest value and i don't know
how many years
to me that sounds like it's still the financial market though is it not i mean
it's
it's it's a commodity that has a price that fluctuate similar to a stock
absolutely you know you're absolutely right in fact the number of people who
are now piling into it makes me nervous i am
by definition a contrarian investor
i loved it when everybody hated it i'm a little bit nervous about it now because
more people into gold
yes went way when everybody piles into something it's it's not the place you
want to be at the end of the day
let somebody i don't even so one thing about the reason i like gold is that
it's still the only other thing besides paper currency that i can find
that sits
in the volts of central banks
into stores a monetary role it's not plain one right now
but if it had no monetary value no role
it was just another commodity
i believe the central banks would have distorted all of their gold holdings
they've had thirty years since the breaking of the gold standard nineteen
seventy one
to do that may have it
so i'd like to trust what people do more than what they say in the central banks
have been talking about gold is a barbarous relic and they hate it has a
role
but they still got it
so that's right a quick you on gold let me remind our audience if they're just
tuning in we're sticking with chris martin sent from chris martin sam dot
com that's and a archie e and as spoken
uh... i want to talk a little bit about so-called green jobs this one-sided
that says green jobs are the future and this is these are all
kind of uh... utopian sda very general statements green jobs are the future
green jobs of the future of the u_s_ economy so on and so forth there's
another side which criticizes green jobs and says they are a possible driver of
short term economic growth and recovery but a lot of these jobs are temporary
a lot of so-called green jobs are energy retrofit type of jobs
or installing solar pv solar panels so on and so forth
where you come down on that
i'm absolutely on the side of
of green jobs in that we need them
but i'm gonna have to put a little twist on this
the thing that i care about most of i could create that utopian world we would
no longer ask the question
how much money does it cost to put this project and or how much money are we
gonna get back from this project
we'd be asking the most important question which is what is the energy
return
on the energy work and invest in this project
and by that basis i think we the world steps into clearer focus for me so ***
investing world is not confusing to me at all and i look at it through this
lens which says
net free energy something we care about most that's what's left over after you
put some energy and and you get some energy out
on that basis corn-based ethanol as a dog
is a complete disaster her program
insulating houses is a complete winner
um... and this is going on small-scale we're talking about
the matter energy saved by adding additional insulation is more
then the energy required to make an install
the insulation around that
the kind of comparison that you make absolutely
and so we would start evaluating all of our options are priorities in this
country are based on net free energy
so we would understand jade we wanna put in a maglev train i would be rather
upgrade of the barge system should we be putting more money into this kind of
transportation patient we get carbon fiber cars with electric motors
we don't know because actually we don't know what the net free energy return is
we've never had a serious national commission to study this i think we
ought to have some sort of agency
well-funded
the cancer the specific questions that that's one of the most important things
with a look at
what should we be pursuing as a nation 'cause we've got a shepherd the
remaining energy we've got
but it also makes great business sense and makes good
at its absolutely the right business decision
we don't look at it that way we look at it through the sutherland's which is
where's the money in all of this in the problem with that s is that so much of
that landscape is distorted
by subsidies that create on pricing sometime think ultimately that the
dollar
in the value we see is not giving us the right story
and then you sort of break that down in when we do that i'd investor green jobs
just absolutely step in the clear focus in a lot of them make
incredibly good sense so that all these sort of a you're not too concerned about
green jobs as a whole being highly temporary jobs that may eight make the
economy
seem better on paper in the short term but won't really add long-term too that
the product of the year not that's not a concern for you no quite the opposite i
think that green jobs are going to be with us for a very long time and we're
gonna have to be even smarter and more clever
and we're gonna need bright young shiny kids getting into that a college degree
we understand it's very highly complicated technical
to do these things right
and uh... i'm a huge supporter of it in the last couple minutes we have michael
clare was here a few months ago he is the uh... defense correspondent for the
nation and he's written the the book bloody oil which was turned into a movie
and very interesting guy to talk to and we were talking about alternative energy
and specific alternative energies in renewable sources of energy
he was very very big on right away if we start
i don't know using half electric cars or something like that
right away we're going to see the benefit
and my question to him as as kind of an umbrella question was
if we go to electric cars they need to be charged and where's the other person
coming from it may very well be coming from caller non renewable resources
and he said don't care about that because those will run out
and will have no choice
but to eventually go all the way up the chain to renewable
but i hear you saying that you think they will be changed before they
actually run out that we didn't stop using stones
because we ran out of stones there were new technologies
how can we won't wear what would be a reaction to that is it isn't that likely
that will be off boiled before were out of it because there will be new
technology
or is it more likely that they're just won't be any oil left in will have no
choice well the thing is we're not going to ever just run out of oil we're gonna
run out of it slowly
you know so we're gonna have three percent less per year uh... prolly
starting in a in a couple years
in a lot to me i sat down slope and my hope is that we don't go to war over it
we find more clever ways
if we find the clever ways enough or smart about it we absolutely can start
making the transition over to renewables
the mistake would be in thinking that we can seamlessly just over two renewables
in there's all the energy we need sitting there it's not that easy we're
gonna have to reconfigure nri fashion a lot of things
where we live where we work where products come from how closely with the
food all of that stuff is going to be part of that transition
so i i'm a huge fan of it but we have to get serious about it and
i was just talking with somebody who's spearheading a project to give us a
smart grid in this country
that's gonna really upgrade or electrical lines and give us these
special uh...
uh... utility meters it will allow us to really partitioned and energy we've got
much more creative
they're getting nowhere on it it's really hard it's gonna take forty
billion dollars senators can agree and by the way forty billion
is about a tenth of what the treasury just signed off on
uh... on an unlimited captive fannie and freddie
and when you say smart grid you mean agreed electrical grid that will
actually distribute ellen electricity kind of an on a day namic level as
needed and has produced
yeah as opposed to what what is there now what's what saddam grid so to speak
but dumb bridges basically says you know we think we need a a gain of thirty two
watching the squadron roughly between these hours and so we flip on
you know these giant plants we pump on electricity in their whether it's
actually needed or not
dynamic system looks at all the individual loads ins finding out what's
needed at different points or suspending all that information back
in real time in real time
and it's also giving feedback to the consumer saying
hey you could turn your a c on right now but this is the most expensive
electricity you can buy maybe if you waited a little while so at that price
post both the pushing a poll that's helping to distribute the load so we
don't need to build that max new plant we can possibly get away with once we've
got were maybe than decoded decommission if your display
politically where do you come down everywhere you know by modern mccain guy
you know i i had my sight i don't take any partisan stance whatsoever because i
think my message
has to reach everybody and i'd hate to slam any doors by saying
where i fall on the political spectrum i'd also don't
release my religious views all kinds of things anis because this story is too
important but you provided vote for someone absolutely
and are you happy with how brocco bomb is handling some of these issues of
energy in the economy
uh... unhappy in someone very displeased and others on the economy i'm gonna have
to get muddy minus i couldn't detect any daylight between administrations it
really look to me
like the people who are calling the shots on this whole bail out the
stimulus
uh... really that's because there was no change between administrations agata
obey rediscovering do about who's really calling the shots down there and i don't
think was the administration's at this point
we've been speaking with chris martin's in the website chris martin soon dot com
is and they are to eat the and a spokane
thank you so much for coming in today david le pleasure