The running tab on Operation Epic Burn Rate Fury is already somewhere between $16 and $23 billion, according to an analysis from the American Enterprise Institute. That bill includes damaged infrastructure, lost hardware, and repairs to assets like the USS Gerald R. Ford (which, in a twist no screenwriter would have dared pitch, experienced downtime due to a laundry fire. Man the Tide pods!)

According to Axios, damaged or destroyed materiel include: one Lockheed Martin F-35A costing about $85 million; one Boeing E-3 Sentry costing between $300 million and $500 million; and one RTX AN/TPY-2 radar, which typically costs between $300 million and over $1 billion per unit. The losses don’t stop there:

• Three Boeing F-15E Strike Eagles (roughly $90–$97 million per unit, per 2023–2024 estimates, with fully combat-ready configurations reaching up to $117 million)

• Multiple Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers (roughly $70–$80 million per unit)

• Multiple General Atomics MQ-9 Reapers (around $30-$32 million per unit, though some estimates range from $16 million to over $56 million, depending on the specific variant, sensor payload, and inclusion of ground control systems)

Then there are the human costs, which don’t fit neatly into an Axios graphic: thousands of civilians killed and injured in Iran and Israel, millions of people displaced across the region, more than a dozen US service members killed, and over 200 injured (although some reports suggest those official numbers may be significantly undercounted).

As American hero, Major General Smedley Butler, summed it up: “All wars are bankers’ wars.”

There is serious money to be made in bloodshed and broken infrastructure.

Which leads us to an uncomfortable question: if there is a genuine effort being made to end this war and save innocent lives on all sides, including military lives, why is there a concerted effort to assassinate anyone in Iranian leadership who appears open to de-escalation?

Among the most recent targets was former foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi. He’s not dead yet, but he’s pretty badly injured. And he was back-channelling through a Pakistani intermediator to Vice President JD Vance to try and negotiate some sort of ceasefire.

So it’s worth asking: cui bono? Who profits?

War is good for banks. It’s good for the Military Industrial Complex. And it’s great for governments, especially fiscally broke governments that need a unifying narrative and a reason to rally the public. It’s bad for pretty much everyone else.

Suffice it to say, somewhere, in some meeting room, the people with their hands on the levers of power (and marionette strings) have decided this particular gravy train isn’t supposed to stop.

A political party doesn’t always need policy platforms or campaign slogans to tell people what it stands for. Sometimes all it takes is a series of performative rituals to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Just look at the widely circulating videos from the Canadian New Democratic Party’s leadership convention in Winnipeg last week.

Delegates were reportedly issued color-coded “equity cards,” each tied to a specific identity category — race, gender, sexuality, indigenous status — which could be used to move ahead in the speaking queue. In theory, the system was designed to ensure broader representation in debate. In practice, it seems to have turned identity into a kind of competitive sport.

At one point, competing claims between a “gender equity” card and a “race equity” card became the entire substance of an exchange. Elsewhere, a speaker drew applause for addressing foreign policy, stating Canada should not be drawn into the war in Iran, only to be reprimanded for misgendering the chairperson. You can’t make this stuff up!

On X, users dubbed the event the “oppression Olympics,” a sort of bureaucratic decathlon where the main event is competitive credentialing. Others called it a “clown show,” which feels like a tiny bit of an understatement.

And then there were literal “race card” jokes — because when you introduce actual, physical cards tied to identity, you’re not exactly leaving much room for subtlety.

God help us.

If there was ever any doubt that banksters rule the world, here’s your confirmation: Wall Street just had a banner year.

According to the New York State Comptroller:

Wall Street’s securities industry bonus pool reached a record $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the previous year, while the average bonus rose 6% to $246,900, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli’s annual estimate. The increases reflect a rise of more than 30% in Wall Street’s profits, which totaled $65.1 billion in 2025.

Bankers make money gambling with other people’s money. For doing that, just the average Wall Street bonus is the equivalent of about four median American salaries — around $62,000 per year in 2025 — paid out in one shot, on top of an already generous base.

In a recent Collapse Life podcast, Peter Grandich talked about a “K-shaped” economy — where one segment of society rockets upward while the other slides in the opposite direction. If you’re looking at those numbers and wondering what exactly justifies a bonus worth four times your annual pay, join the club. The question most of us in the disappearing middle class are wondering is, how do we prevent ourselves from slipping onto the bottom arm of the ‘K’?

We talk about how ideas are introduced through popular media long before they’re implemented, how repetition makes the unfamiliar feel inevitable, and how narratives don’t just reflect reality but prepare us for it. Once you start looking for the signs, they become difficult to unsee.

The discussion helps explain how the framing works, because these ideas are rarely presented as something you’re meant to resist. Rather, they come across as compassionate, necessary, or maybe even inevitable: protect the children, defend public health, guard the future.

The conversation presents plenty of examples that help create a framework to start noticing the patterns for yourself.

If you’re trying to make sense of how quickly the world seems to be shifting and why so much of it feels strangely familiar — this is a conversation you’ll want to watch.

Related links:

• Learn more about Actionable Truth https://actionabletruth.media and https://sendfox.com/actionabletruth

• Read Collapse Life’s article about ‘Years and Years’ https://www.collapselife.com/p/bbcs-years-and-years-a-prophetic

• Watch Collapse Life’s interview with David A. Hughes https://www.collapselife.com/p/david-hughes-narrative-warfare-camp-two

For most of our lives, the ocean has been invisible scaffolding of the global economy — vast, neutral, and governed by rules that everyone agrees to follow. Those rules ensure oil and goods can move freely, and ships can pass through narrow chokepoints without stopping to negotiate with whoever happens to live on shore.

That is a four hundred year tradition.

As we wrote about in the first chapter of our new book, Hidden Histories, the Dutch East India Company seized the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina near Singapore in 1603. The cargo was so valuable that it stunned Europe — spices, silk, porcelain, the raw material of an emerging global economy. The problem was not the seizure itself; that was business, as it was practiced at the time.

The problem was legitimacy: on what basis does a private company capture a foreign ship in open water and call it lawful?

Enter a young legal genius, Hugo Grotius, who produced the answer Europe wanted to hear. In Mare Liberum, he argued that the sea could not be owned, that no nation had the right to exclude another from trade routes, and that navigation should be free.

It read like the birth of international law — and it was the groundwork for it — but it started as post-facto justification for a very profitable act of force.

The Dutch wanted to break the Portuguese monopoly over Asian trade routes and needed a framework that would turn disruption into doctrine. Freedom of the seas was a strategic argument that happened to align perfectly with Dutch commercial interests and naval capability.

Over time, that argument became embedded in the architecture of global trade, eventually becoming codified in frameworks like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which formalized concepts like innocent passage through international straits. The idea was simple: chokepoints matter too much to be controlled by any one state. Ships must be allowed to pass.

Like all rules at sea, it came with an unspoken clause: someone has to enforce it.

After World War II, that someone was the United States.

US Navy aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, alliances with coastal states, and a willingness to intervene meant that oil could flow through the Strait of Hormuz without interruption. As we’ve all heard a million times these past few weeks, roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum liquids move through that narrow channel on any given day — a statistic that only works if the passage remains open.

Which it did for centuries. That is until the United States and Israel attacked Iran. What followed was a practical, perhaps even natural, response shaped by geography.

Iran does not control global trade, but it does control one side of a critical chokepoint. So it closed the Strait of Hormuz and suddenly ships started facing delays, restrictions, and demands for payment to ensure safe passage.

There is a tendency to describe this as a breakdown of the rules, but that assumes the rules were ever valid or independent of power.

Go back to the Santa Catarina. The seizure came first, the legal theory came later. Grotius didn’t prevent the act; he just explained it in a way that made it usable for the emerging order.

The United States did something similar, on a much larger scale, in the 20th century, enforcing freedom of navigation not as a neutral principle, but as a system aligned with its interests — a world in which trade flowed, allies benefited, and adversaries could be constrained through sanctions and control of financial and maritime infrastructure. This was the plumbing and support system of globalization.

That system is being unraveled and undone, but not in the way most people think.

Iran is doing something ancient — leveraging its position along a narrow passage to extract value and exert pressure. Chokepoints have always been contested; the Ottomans regulated the Bosphorus; Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and briefly closed it; Panama has always been a managed gateway with rules and a price tag.

But those examples existed inside a world where the broader system still held.

This time it’s different. For a few decades, US naval dominance and a broadly aligned international system made the oceans feel open, not because they were inherently free, but because one power had both the reach and the incentive to keep them that way.

That arrangement is now being fundamentally dismantled, perhaps unintentionally (but likely not).

What Hormuz reveals is not just an old pattern resurfacing, but the beginning of a new order forming on top of it. One where the language of “free navigation” still exists, but where regional powers get to test the limits in real time. Part of that is ‘cost of passage’ — not free based on reciprocal or global understanding, but negotiated — or imposed — at the point of transit. Where friends pass through cheaply or even free, but foe must pay.

The old system hasn’t disappeared completely — vestiges definitely linger — but as of 2026, it no longer goes uncontested. Once a chokepoint becomes a toll booth, the implications don’t stay confined to a narrow strip of water in the Gulf, they ripple outward into energy markets, food prices, insurance, shipping routes, and political alliances.

Slowly, quietly, it also turns into a realization that the infrastructure that was once neutral is very much not.

The Dutch once captured a ship and then argued the sea belonged to everyone. For the last century, the United States enforced that idea at scale. Now, for the first time in a long time, someone is openly testing whether that was ever a good idea.

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Walk into a pub or coffee shop in Britain today and there’s a good chance you’ll be greeted by a boxer or a bulldog, before you place your order at the bar.

That’s no exaggeration. There are 13.5 million dogs in the UK. Over a third of households own one. And the UK has normalized dogs in shared public spaces in a way the United States still hasn’t.

In Britain, dogs are so common in cafés, pubs, and even some shops, that it barely registers as noteworthy anymore. It’s baked into the social fabric. A pub without a dog feels slightly off, like something is missing. In fact, businesses actively court dog owners because they know it drives repeat visits and longer stays.

That’s probably why a BBC Wales story a few days ago is getting so much negative attention. “From puppacinos to doggy high tea - how dog friendly should we be?” the national broadcaster asks.

The framing makes it sound like a simple cultural check-in. But there’s more at play. On the surface, this seemingly innocent story follows a sad and now familiar pattern:

• Take a widely accepted norm.

• Introduce a small group that struggles with it.

• Frame that struggle as exclusion (or oppression?)

• Quietly shift the burden back onto the majority.

Here’s the crux of the BBC’s story:

From independent cafes to restaurants and shopping centres, an increasing amount of retailers are taking the leap in welcoming furry friends, including well-known brands Ikea, John Lewis, Zara, H&M and Lush.

But for those who may be allergic to dogs or live with cynophobia - the extreme fear of dogs or canines - they say the rise of dog-friendly spaces is a growing concern.

One woman with cynophobia, Abi Wilson, 20, said she felt “trapped” and now only goes out on “special occasions” due to the lack of dog-free zones.

This is Abi.

As soon as Abi thinks about leaving the house she starts feeling nauseated and on edge. “I can’t even step out the front door to go to the car without feeling sick and sweating,” she says. Because of her phobia, she only ventures out on special occasions and then only if she is absolutely sure that a place does not allow dogs.

While medical professionals estimate around 7% of people suffer from a specific phobia, extreme cases of fear of dogs such as Abi’s appear to be rare. In other words, we’re not talking about half the population locked out of public life because of the demands of a vocal few who like puppies. We’re talking about a small minority who are allergic to or afraid of dogs who are suddenly being positioned as the reason why a widespread behavior needs to be reconsidered.

Reader responses to the BBC story however, make it very clear where the real social tension lies.

A highly divisive sign appeared in an East London neighborhood just a few years back. Printed on a sheet of paper, the note read: “Do not walk your dog here! Muslims do not like dogs. This is an Islamic area now.”

In America, a prominent New York City pro-Palestine activist called dogs “unclean,” and suggested they should not be allowed as indoor pets. Just last month, Nerdeen Kiswani posted: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam.” She later said the post was just a joke.

These moments — a tweet dismissed as a joke, a sign that caused outrage — aren’t evidence of cultural invasion, per se, but they are signals of a tension that has been creeping to the surface, even when the official conversation avoids naming it directly.

The story very quickly goes from comfort around dogs to competing worldviews. In a Western, secular context, people treat dogs as a member of the family — it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, in fact. Others however, would never allow a dog to cross their threshold. Of course, that’s not the whole story — but it’s a large part of it, and pretending it isn’t there doesn’t make the unfortunate tension go away.

Neither of these positions are new. What is new, and potentially concerning, is forcing them into the same tight urban spaces and pretending they’re minor differences in lifestyle choice — like choosing Coke versus Pepsi, or preferring coffee to tea.

In actual fact, it’s a question of boundaries; we all know that a boundary that keeps slipping is, in effect, no boundary at all. What looks like a debate about dogs is really a convergence of pressures:

• a majority behavior (dog ownership) that has become culturally embedded and embraced;

• a minority set of constraints (allergies, phobias) are translated into policy language under the guise of acceptance and compassion; and

• a more subtle undercurrent of differing worldview (dogs are family vs. dogs are unclean) is what is actually at stake.

Our technocratic system doesn’t resolve the tension, it manages it; softly, incrementally, often without stating what’s actually being negotiated. A country full of dog owners is asked, gently at first, to rethink where dogs belong. Then, soon after, it’s no longer about dogs. It’s about whose norms define the space, and who quietly has to adjust.

That’s the real headline. Dogs just marked the territory first.

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We moved on from ‘Fiat Food’ to ‘The SHTF Anthology: Survival Lessons from the Balkan Wars’ by Selco Begovic.

Using Begovic’s account of life during the Balkan war in the 1990s as a grounding point, the conversation stripped away a lot of the comfortable assumptions people carry about “preparedness.” The idea you can simply stockpile your way through collapse started to unravel pretty quickly.

Yes, having food matters. A few weeks, maybe a few months, can buy you time. But beyond that, the limits start to show — storage space, spoilage, monotony, dependence on water and fuel, the simple reality that most people are not sitting on a three-year bunker of freeze-dried meals.

So the conversation shifted to what actually holds: cooking skills, understanding what your body actually needs (apparently fat matters more than people think), growing even small amounts of food.

But we recognized that even that has its limits: gardening is hard, storage is harder, and many people either can’t or won’t do it.

If you missed this discussion, it’s one worth catching again via replay. Next week we’ll stick with Begovic’s book and start to focus on some of the psychological stressors he experienced and why mindset makes a huge difference in who survives a SHTF situation.

Thanks to , , , and so many others (you know who you are!) for tuning into today. We love being with you, so have a great week and see you again next Sunday!

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The moment that best sums up the insanity, however, came during a televised Cabinet meeting, when the president went off on a seemingly unscripted tangent about how much he loves Sharpie markers.

(As one commenter on the Associated Press story said: “Sounds like grandpa took a long cruise on the USS Sea Nile yesterday.”)

Trump explained that the White House once used “beautiful” pens that supposedly cost $1,000 each, which offended his inner fiscal watchdog when he handed them out at bill signings. So replacing those with $5 black Sharpies, featuring the White House logo in gold print, saved a tremendous amount of money.

Everyone knows, fiscal prudence is much needed at this time of soaring national debt. Naturally, the massive savings from $1,000 pens allows for more money to be directed to the military-industrial complex, which desperately needs the cash influx. Genius!, Mr. President.

Bad news for the bug-eating evangelists: the public would apparently rather keep its dignity. The insect food industry, once sold as the righteous future, is now buckling under bankruptcies, stalled projects, and the minor inconvenience that people do not actually want grubs for dinner. We’d love to think these clever Collapse Life t-shirts are what did the industry in, but really it’s just a matter of mathematics.

Vox reports:

Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

It may be one of the only instances where higher energy costs are actually having a positive impact on the food system: apparently it takes a lot of fuel to keep these ‘farms’ warm enough for insects to be raised in Europe and North America.

Former WEF head, Klaus Schwab, said: “Eat ze bugs” so chances that we’ve avoided them as a future food source are pretty slim. What is obvious is that it feels like the elites got their sequence wrong: Plow massive amount of resources into data centers FIRST, then, as you enslave people in the digital gulag, use the residual heat from those data centers for food bug creation… then you can then feed a desperate, starving population. Pretty obvious, no?

Some industries lobby for subsidies or tax breaks. The exorcists, apparently, are lobbying for an increased headcount.

In a recent meeting with the Pope, the International Association of Exorcists asked the pontiff for his help to ensure every diocese has at least one trained priest ready to deal with what they describe as a surge in cases tied to occult practices and “extraordinary action of the devil.”

In many ways, this reads like any other institutional memo: demand is rising, the workforce is unprepared, and the solution is standardized training, better oversight, and global coverage. What makes it harder to dismiss is the context.

Western culture has systematically dismantled organized religion and outsourced its spiritual needs instead to astrology apps, psychedelic therapy, and in some cases actual worship of the devil. When even exorcists are talking about capacity issues, it’s a reminder that whatever is breaking right now isn’t just economic or political. Something much deeper is fraying — and we’d venture to guess exorcists are only a small part of the solution.

The spiritual battle space is one worth watching in the coming months and years.

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Sure! There’s plenty of so-called ‘content,’ but less conversation; plenty of ‘reactions’ but a lot less range of opinion. Somehow, we keep scrolling anyway, often to the detriment of our intelligence and our communities, like a Pavlovian experiment.

Our guest on the Collapse Life podcast this week, Pickax founder Jeff Dornik, has taken that vague feeling that something has shifted and pinned it down in a way that’s hard to unsee once you see it.

We all know the entire environment on ‘social media’ is being quietly and continuously shaped by systems designed to reward certain behaviors and phase out others. And once you see the pattern that Dornik lays out, you start to notice how much of your own behavior has been formed by it, even despite your best efforts. The algorithms affect what you say, what you don’t say, how you frame things, even what you decide is worth engaging with in the first place.

That’s where Pickax comes in, or at least where it tries to. No algorithmic boosting or hidden throttling. Just a chronological feed and a structure that forces a different kind of interaction that depends on actually engaging with real people.

Watch the full conversation. It’s worth your time — and it might just change how you move through the internet from now on.

About 20 years ago, while working in international development, the Collapse Life team had the opportunity to spend 12 months in Iran. It was one of the hardest years of our lives — and also one of the most instructive.

Among the many things we learned about ourselves (and the world) is that things aren’t always what they seem.

One day, early in our stay, we hailed a taxi near our apartment in the north of Tehran to take us into the center of town, about a 25-minute ride away. We chatted with the driver — him in broken English and hand gestures, us in terrible Farsi (and hand gestures). Somehow, both sides made ourselves understood, and by the time we arrived, we had slipped into that familiar illusion of temporary ‘friendship’ that so often happens when traveling.

At our destination, we asked how much we owed. Our new friend insisted he couldn’t charge us.

“Are you sure?” we asked.

“Balle,” he replied — which is Farsi for yes.

So we got out of the car and started walking to our destination.

“Wait!” he called after us, suddenly flustered. “Don’t go. You still need to pay me!”

We laughed, he smiled, and the correct fare was eventually handed over. Though confusion lingered for us.

In Persian culture, a ‘yes’ doesn’t always land where you think it does. An offer isn’t always meant to be accepted, and a refusal isn’t always final. Words are only part of the exchange. Real meaning sits somewhere underneath the words — in tone, timing, or just the right number of repetitions. (For your information, a taxi ride requires you to insist three times, “are you sure? no we must pay you,” before the fare will be accepted.)

In Iran, there’s a name for this intricate system of etiquette — ta’arof — and it governs everyday interactions in a way that can feel disorienting or even infuriating at first, especially if you come from a culture that takes language at face value.

In the Western world, we’re taught as children to say what you mean and mean what you say. If something is agreed to, it’s settled. End of story.

Not every culture treats language that way. In Iran, even something as simple as sitting in a shared taxi comes with its own quiet script, which must be acted out each ride. A man riding in the front passenger seat will turn and apologize to his fellow rear-seated passengers — “sorry my back is to you.” The response from behind comes automatically: “a flower has no back.”

The exchange is utterly saccharine, but fundamental to the operation of an ancient culture that hinges on respect, politeness, and allowing someone to always ‘save face.’ These niceties are essential to the rhythm of life, where skipping it would make people feel uncomfortable or could even be construed as aggressive.

All these memories are coming back now in a very real and relevant way, especially with regard to what are being called ‘negotiations’.

The White House says talks to end the war are moving forward. Iran’s foreign minister says there are no talks — only “messages” being passed back and forth through intermediaries. At the same time, Washington is shifting from language like “unconditional surrender” to calls for discussion, and Tehran is reading that as an admission of failure.

Two sides see the same moment and have completely different interpretations of what is happening. Everyone is speaking, but no one is quite saying the same thing.

From a Western lens, this all reads like dysfunction. Or stalling. Or underhandedness. But, having lived experience from the very place in the crosshairs, this is the way things work and the reason why diplomacy is so important. It’s both an art and a science. It’s a sophisticated dance of saying something without saying anything, and conveying meaning in the spaces between sentences. Diplomacy in bad faith is a betrayal of a process that has served humanity for thousands of years and the harbinger of unfortunate perils.

All of which makes us wonder: maybe truth, in the way we expect it, isn’t what we should be scanning for. If what’s really going on, from a geopolitical perspective, is hidden in what’s implied, withheld, or contradicted, then it’s foolish for us to take words too literally. It’s foolish for us to understand what’s happening with a narrow-minded view.

What will probably shock most people — it did for us — is that having been told that Iranians hated Americans (and the West more generally), we discovered that such stereotypes were patently false. Our British, American, Canadian, and Northern European colleagues experienced incredible hospitality, kindness, respect, and admiration from almost every Iranian in almost every interaction.

So don’t believe everything you hear, and don’t assume you’re being told everything that matters.

Right now, we’re watching two systems collide. One expects clarity and closure, and another operates through ambiguity and calibration. One says what it means, while the other allows meaning to be revealed over time.

Taking either at face value means you might miss the point entirely.

Fertilizer is made from natural gas and natural gas is now inextricably linked to geopolitics.

You wouldn’t necessarily know we’re on the brink of a food crisis when you pop down to your local grocery store. Most things are still on the shelves. Sure, there are a few holes here and there, but by and large, the abundance appears to remain unscathed.

At least, for now.

What most Monday morning quarterbacks and the armchair pundits who like all-caps posts on Truth Social don’t understand is this: everything that underpins their lifestyle is currently on the verge of being irreparably broken. But don’t take our word for it.

We love the folks at — Chris MacIntosh is one of the smartest investors and geopolitical analysts out there, especially when it comes to energy and commodities. His most recent piece, entitled You Can’t Print Fertilizer, is a masterclass in the taxonomy of this train wreck we’re witnessing. He writes:

Everyone is glued to oil prices right now. Lines at the pump. Flights grounded. Dubai in chaos. And the financial media is doing what financial media does...obsessing over the thing everyone can already see.

What they’re missing is the second order.

And the second order is where empires actually fall.

He’s 100 percent correct. Natural gas is where the real chokepoint exists and that’s because, for better or for worse, roughly half of global food production depends on synthetic fertilizer.

We don’t feel it yet because there’s a lag that occurs as systems break down. But the devastation adds up quickly: as warehouse stock dwindles, as farmers make decisions on what to plant based on the inputs they can (or can’t) afford, as formerly globalized food producers guard their production (and food security) more closely by reducing or eliminating exports, each and every node of the supply chain we’ve come to take for granted begins to evaporate.

MacIntosh again:

Here’s what makes food different from every other supply shock: you cannot restart the harvest. Miss the planting window and you wait until next year. That’s not a quarter you revise. That’s a season gone. Bangladesh, Pakistan, India...roughly two billion people, a quarter of the planet...are already facing fertilizer shortfalls going into planting season.

The system we’ve known for the past 50 (or so) years — the one that runs on an industrial scale, with industrial inputs, tuned for maximum output at the lowest cost, and absorbing inordinate amounts of abundant energy — just came to an end.

What remains to be answered is what happens next. Do we return to an older form of agriculture, one which, while perhaps not as energy dependent, is heavily dependent on knowledge and skills? Those just happen to be two things in very short supply in the West, where we have tossed the small farmer to the dung heap and gutted out farming communities. Another alternative is going down the route of synthetic food — lab grown, bio-hacked, and engineered to fuel, not feed. Could that be what fills the vacuum nature abhors — a Soylent Green solution to a crisis that didn’t need to happen?

It’s true, as MacIntosh says, you can’t print fertilizer. All the pressures listed earlier — reduced yield and output from farmers, food inflation, even the potential for rationing — create volatility and instability in a society that was once the envy of the world for its food abundance and access.

As we often say here at Collapse Life, the demise doesn’t come Hollywood style; it’s a slow grind. So don’t be fooled by the illusion of abundance we still see on shelves — that might very well prove to be temporary and we may witness those living paycheck-to-paycheck slip into something more dire.

Meanwhile, the madmen who rule this world sit down to tables abundant with the choicest morsels. It’s worth remembering these so-called leaders don’t do their own shopping, cook their own food, or give a hoot about the plight of the little guy. We’re not being emotional, we’re just calling it as we see it.

Given everything that’s happening, we bet you never look at natural gas the same way again.

and touched on this very topic in last week’s book chat — i.e., the uncomfortable reality that the system feeding billions depends on a handful of fragile inputs.

This Sunday, we shift from diagnosis to practical action: ways to think about food, resilience, and what comes next. If you like to eat and you have ideas to help others feed themselves, be sure to join us live. Subscribe to receive notifications.

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In 2008, the financial system broke in one place and the chaos spread. Today, the system is being stressed many places at once: food, energy, finance, real estate, labor, infrastructure. Each one is a tough problem to solve on its own, but together they represent something else entirely.

Today, the Collapse Life team hosted two very different live conversations. If you only watched one — or missed both — you may be surprised at how clearly they connect.

In our weekly / book chat with and , discussion was about how fragile our global food system has become, how unhealthy industrialized food has made us at a time when we need our strength and presence of mind more than ever, and how that combination is now being revealed as a growing crisis.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a major artery for fertilizer, will soon have a massive impact on agriculture around the world. Layer that on top of floods in Europe delaying and disrupting planting, farmers in the US leaving fields unplanted because they can’t make money, rising transport and insurance costs, subsidies, a succession crisis — and you start to see the complexity of the picture.

Later in the day, we went live with the inimitable Peter Grandich.

His major concern continues to be debt, and that was one of the first questions from the audience. Peter pointed out that debt is everywhere, layered on top of itself across countries and systems, and because of that, the eventual resolution may not be clean or localized. It may look more like a broad reset, which would be painful, deflationary, and systemic.

The rest of the conversation went over precious metals storage, investment allocations, private equity and much more.

Ultimately, neither the food nor the financial system has broken… yet. But on both fronts, the assumptions people have always relied on regarding growth, markets, and stability are starting to falter.

Put today’s conversations side by side, and a pattern emerges — which centers on the question: “What happens now that the system isn’t behaving the way it used to?”

Collapse Life will keep exploring this — not from a place of panic, or from sounding a doomsday alarm, but with the aim of greater clarity and a steady, rational position. As always, we appreciate you being here and supporting what we do.

If you missed these conversations, it’s definitely worth catching both — not just for the individual topics, but for what emerges when you connect them.

• Book Chat replay
• Peter Grandich replay (plus, don’t miss Peter’s suggestion ‘The Rope’, by Francis Chan)

A 35-year-old structural engineer and former rapper in Nepal just went from mayor to prime minister. Balendra Shah, popularly known as Balen, is set to lead the country as it recovers from youth-led protests in September 2025 that toppled the government and left 77 people dead and hundreds injured when police crackdowns turned violent. The protests were sparked by a government ban on 26 social media platforms, although the simmering anger had been brewing for a while.

As we reported in November, “The uprising was not just about digital censorship; it was the eruption of long-suppressed frustration among a generation that sees no future in the system they inherited.”

Balen ran on big promises, such as wiping out corruption, creating more than 1 million jobs, and doubling per capita GDP to $3,000 in five years. Whether he can fulfill these commitments is an open question, though he has a successful track record; he gained popularity by cleaning up Kathmandu’s streets, but critics say his methods were heavy-handed.

Last November he also took heat for a Facebook post in which he told the United States, India, China and several major political parties to F-off. “Go to hell,” he wrote in the post, which was later deleted. “You guys all combined can do nothing.”

He’s not entirely wrong. Maybe when he’s done with Nepal, he can run for POTUS?

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Apparently the ‘hotel breakfast hustle’ is now a viral trend, though we couldn’t really find much evidence except for one particular video that has been making the rounds. The ‘trend’ involves people who are not guests helping themselves to free breakfast in a hotel lobby and posting the video on social media.

We understand the cost of living is rough these days, but this doesn’t seem like the soundest economic strategy. Maybe this woman should come on our livestream tonight and get some advice from Peter Grandich?

We like this guy’s take. Come to think of it, maybe he can run for POTUS instead of Balen!

@theyaboyant

TheYaBoyAnt on Instagram: "WOMEN GOING VIRAL AFTER DRIVING TO A…

This weekend, a temporary bar designed to let people bet on world events accidentally became the perfect metaphor for our insane times. When Polymarket’s pop-up “Situation Room” opened in the nation’s capital, it promised real-time news feeds, market odds, and wall-to-wall screens tracking global chaos.

Except for one small detail — none of the screens worked. Neither did the wifi. So it just turned out to be a room full of people drinking and betting on wars, elections, and assassinations.

It’s the company’s latest stunt, just weeks after a pop-up grocery store in New York had people lining up for hours for free food. What’s next? A pop-up airport lounge where you bet on how long your flight will be delayed? A hospital waiting room where you can take out odds on your diagnosis?

We really do live in the stupidest timeline.

Still, at some point these folks stopped believing the official story and started questioning things once unquestionable. They started reading different sources and noticing patterns. They left what calls “camp one” — the world of official narratives.

Does that describe you?

For a while, that felt like progress. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: the story doesn’t end there — it just starts to get harder to discern.

In our latest Collapse Life podcast with David Hughes, we dig into what he calls “camp two” — the space many independent thinkers now occupy. It’s a world of alternative media platforms, dissenting voices, and people who no longer trust institutions.

It feels liberating at first, but it’s necessary to stay on guard because the same forces are at play in camps one and two. In camp two, new narratives replace old ones, new authority figures emerge, and new lines get drawn around what you’re allowed to question and what you’re expected to believe. If you’ve spent any time in that space, you probably already know what we mean.

Hughes suggests the real information war isn’t just about controlling people who trust the system, it’s also about managing the people who don’t.

Which raises a more difficult question: If rejecting the official narrative isn’t enough, what is?

This interview tries to answer that question.

Paul Ehrlich, the scientist who warned the world about the dangers of overpopulation, died last week at the age of 93.

A biologist at Stanford University, Ehrlich became famous after publishing The Population Bomb in 1968. The book sold millions of copies and argued that rapid population growth would soon overwhelm the planet’s ability to feed itself. Ehrlich warned that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve in the 1970s as food supplies ran out.

The book reverberated with a generation of young people coming of age and about to enter the most productive years of their lives.

In hindsight, like so much that was predicted, his prognostications did not happen. But Ehrlich’s book helped revive a much older and darker idea: that human beings themselves are a fundamental threat to the planet.

Ehrlich’s thinking drew directly from the theory of Thomas Malthus, an economist who argued in 1798 that population inevitably grows faster than food supply. In the Malthusian view, famine, disease, and war are not tragedies so much as natural “checks” that bring humanity back into balance with the Earth’s limits.

Ehrlich modernized that argument for the 20th century. Instead of medieval agriculture running up against scarcity, it was industrial civilization colliding with planetary boundaries. Either way, the implication was stark: humanity itself had become a destabilizing force within the Earth’s system.

This shift in perspective had profound consequences. If the central problem facing the planet is not a specific policy or economic structure but human numbers and human activity, then the logical solutions begin to look very different. Rather than empowering human ingenuity and growth, the goal becomes limiting them.

Ehrlich himself openly supported aggressive population control measures. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he suggested policies such as taxes on children and stronger state intervention to limit fertility.

“There’s not the slightest question that if we don’t get the population under control with voluntary means that, in the not-too-distant future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many,” he said in a 1970 television interview, which has gone viral since his death.

Soon after, governments around the world began experimenting with mass sterilization campaigns and birth restrictions, most famously China’s one-child policy (which the country did not rescind until 2016, recognizing the insanity of an aging population without replacement). The United States and the United Nations funded fertility reduction programs in the developing world, and Bretton Woods institutions linked economic aid to population reduction.

The idea that humanity might need to be managed, restrained, or reduced had entered mainstream policy thinking, and these ideas quickly merged with a growing systems-based approach to environmental problems.

In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report that used early computer models to argue that exponential economic and population growth would eventually exceed the Earth’s capacity. The report — another hugely influential book on an impressionable younger generation — framed the global economy as a complex system approaching physical limits. Managing that system, the authors suggested, would require coordinated planning at a global scale.

This marked the beginning of a shift that continues today: environmental challenges are increasingly framed not just as scientific problems but as governance problems requiring technocratic management.

The mentality has been so pervasive that it has successfully altered public sentiment around having a family. Just last month, the New York Times ran a front page story headlined: ‘The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing.’

Some of the letters in response show just how influential Ehrlich’s narrative continues to be:

“We are living in what scientists call a sixth mass extinction. In that context, a gradual decline in birthrates — especially when driven by education, opportunity and access to contraception — may not be a crisis. It may be a stabilizing force.” — Mary Beth Fielder, Los Angeles

“If we are truly headed toward a future in which A.I. and robots can do everything from coding to elder care, then perhaps a declining birthrate should be viewed as a relief rather than a catastrophe?” — Frank Rimalovski, Maplewood, N.J.

“What is more selfish? Restraining an urge to reproduce or having children for self-actualization on an earth already beyond its carrying capacity?” — Gordon Garmaise, Montreal

It’s unclear if any New York Times readers sent in letters with an opposing point of view. One reader of the Wall Street Journal did, however, share his viewpoint back in 2023:

”I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.” — Kenneth Emde, Woodbury, Minnesota.

That quiet regret is the most honest epitaph for Ehrlich’s legacy. Even though the famines never came, the planet did not collapse, and food production outpaced every Malthusian nightmare, the idea that people are the problem still lives on in newsrooms, policy circles, and the quiet decisions of millions who now view children as a luxury the Earth can’t afford.

That kind of thinking doesn’t save the planet, it just shrinks our future. We’re living Erlich’s legacy right now.

Before you go, we want to invite you to a special event happening live this Sunday on YouTube:

Peter Grandich has spent decades watching markets and cycles. Collapse Life looks at the bigger picture — the slow erosion of institutions, systems, and assumptions people once took for granted. Put the two together, and you get a conversation worth having.

Bring your thoughts about:

• the economy and where it may be heading

• gold, markets, and the future of money

• financial survival in uncertain times

• what “collapse” actually means in the real world

• or anything else on your mind

Be sure to keep things civil and keep things classy. There will be a moderator behind the scenes to keep an eye on things.

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“Villa lifestyle at affordable prices,” promises Javid Karim of New Life Migration AZ. “In Azerbaijan you can own private villa with the view of the Caspian Sea.” Your Baku dream villa awaits!

Like Karim, many of the people popping up on your social feeds are consultants building lead funnels for migration firms. Still others are lifestyle influencers documenting their new expat lives abroad. Together they form a rapidly growing ecosystem built around a single idea: if things fall apart where you live, you can simply move somewhere better.

It’s certainly a seductive premise and, for a while at least, it seemed plausible. That is, until someone decided to pick a fight with Iran. Dubai, once among the world’s most popular relocation destinations, has suddenly become a target in a widening war.

In the early days of the conflict, drones and missiles began hitting targets in the UAE, including civilian infrastructure. Airspace disruptions followed, flights were canceled, and some foreign residents scrambled to leave the country entirely, booking private jets and minibuses to take them to safety in Oman or Saudi Arabia. Others stayed put, comforted by the thought that UAE missile defense systems were intercepting most inbound missiles while they were still in the air.

@msnowMS NOW’s Josh Einiger is on the ground in Dubai, where the city has fallen quiet after residents were urged to stay home or close to shelter if there is an Iranian attack. Blasts were heard across the city on Saturday morning as air defenses were activated. At Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, passengers were rushed into train tunnels for shelter after alerts sounded. Flights were briefly suspended before operations resumed. But as Einiger reports, residents remain sheltered indoors. #news #iran #dubai

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For years, Dubai has been marketing itself as an oasis in the geopolitical storm. Whatever chaos was unfolding in the world, the Emiratis promised it would stop at the airport lounge. But when shrapnel starts hitting high rises, the fragile assumption behind the entire Plan B passport industry gets quickly exposed.

The world is growing ever more unstable; its pace is moving as fast (or faster!) than any Plan B relocation influencer’s ability to post. Whether it’s Americans moving to Portugal, Europeans moving to Dubai, Pakistanis moving to Azerbaijan, or Russians moving to Serbia, each corridor is based on the same underlying belief: there is always another place to go.

Nope! Missiles in the Dubai night sky made that stark reality abundantly clear.

@keepdubaiDubai's air defenses are in action! An Iranian missile has been shot down. View from the Royal Atlantis Hotel. #dubai #dubai🇦🇪 #iran🇮🇷

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Ironically, the surge in migration influencers on social media is itself a symptom of the problem. People don’t research second passports when they feel secure about the future, they do it when their confidence in where they live now has already begun to erode. Those manic Google searches for “best Plan B country” reflect a growing sense that the ground beneath the global order has already shifted.

When instability is systemic and global, the idea that a change in geography can solve the problem is called into question. Most relocation content ignores that reality. The Collapse Life team has been examining this for many years, even relocating ourselves more than once across multiple continents. We can attest that, when systems break down, your most important assets are not residency permits or cash liquidity: they are relationships.

If you live in a place the State Department calls unstable but you’re surrounded by family, trusted neighbors, and local supply networks, you are likely far better off than someone who lives in manicured luxury but can’t rely on the people next door.

If the power goes out or supply chains falter, people know each other: someone has tools; someone has eggs; someone knows how to fix a well pump; someone’s cousin runs a trucking company. Problems get solved informally.

People who enjoy immaculate lawns and high-speed internet are probably more likely to use the NextDoor app or their Ring camera. The community immune system doesn’t band together to fight an invader, it calls the authorities. So what happens when the authorities aren’t there?

Instead of asking which country is safest, Collapse Life thinks the better questions to ask are this:

• Where are my most trusted relationships?

• Where do people still know how to solve problems locally?

• Where will neighbors help each other when things get difficult?

The answers may not always point to another country. Sometimes they may lead you right back to the place where you are, especially if you have been spending time investing in the people around you.

Looking at those questions may also show how vulnerable you are in your current situation and whether you may need to seek out places with stronger local economies and looser social structures, where life still operates partly outside digital systems and algorithmic oversight.

The Plan B passport industry sells the idea that safety and prosperity can be purchased through relocation. But in a world where instability is spreading, the real safety net may not have anything to do with geography. It may be have everything to do with humanity.

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Last week, from Collapse Life was invited to join Hrvoje Morić from for a live community call with some of his listeners as well as supporters of Collapse Life. It turned into one of those wide-ranging, unscripted conversations that are interesting, inspiring, and so needed in these uncertain times.

We talked about what we mean when we use the word ‘collapse,’ i.e., the slow erosion of institutions, trust, and stability that many of us are experiencing right now.

From there the discussion turned to how people in different places are responding to that realization — relocating, building stronger local networks, focusing on practical skills, or simply trying to live with a little more independence from systems that no longer feel stable.

One theme kept resurfacing throughout the conversation, and it’s not what most people think of when they talk about “preparing for collapse.”

People often ask where the “best place” is to go. But the stories shared during this call suggested that the question might be framing the issue the wrong way entirely.

Paid subscribers can access the full recording below.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, think about upgrading now and becoming part of a growing community of people who see the world with eyes wide open — and who are joining together to figure out how to live well in uncertain times.

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The conversation quickly expanded beyond the book itself to ask an intriguing question: are we really witnessing a natural historical rhythm, or is it something more engineered? From 9/11 and the financial crisis to populism, polarization, and today’s growing sense of global instability, the chat explored whether this moment of upheaval is inevitable or well planned in advance.

Howe says each cycle of history ends with a period of crisis — what he calls the “fourth turning” — and that our current crisis began around 2008 with the global financial collapse and could extend into the early- to mid-2030s. Today we discussed the specific phases that Howe says we go through during each “turning,” and how those seem to map closely to things that have happened in recent years.

It’s certainly a tidy framework, but as we discussed today, maybe it’s a little too tidy. One of the things we focused on was inspired by a comment from a member of the audience, , who said:

Many people now believe that the world-changing events are well planned and executed by a millennia-old group of controlling elites. In this sense, this is actually all well planned, thus in the context of this book we non-elites are controlled to behave and think the way they want.

In other words, if these cycles aren’t historical patterns but rather engineered processes, books like this might function as a kind of narrative anesthesia. If people believe upheaval is simply part of an inevitable cycle, they may become more passive about the forces actively shaping the world around them. After all, if crisis is inevitable, why bother resisting?

That idea sparked a deeper conversation about agency — something Howe’s framework seems to minimize. His theory suggests generational archetypes largely drive historical change: heroes, artists, prophets, and nomads each playing a role at different stages of the cycle. But that framing can also make individuals feel like passengers rather than participants in history.

One of the central insights from today’s chat is that crises are not endings, they’re openings. They create the conditions in which new systems can emerge, but they don’t have to dictate what those systems will look like.

If we are truly living through a historical “winter” — a period of breakdown before renewal — then the question becomes what systems should be preserved, and which ones should be allowed to collapse before the coming spring? What kind of world might emerge on the other side and what role do we play in bringing it forth?

Next week, we’re going to be talking about the global food system. Rising energy costs, fertilizer shortages, and fragile supply chains are already beginning to reshape how food is produced and distributed. Inspired by the book ‘Fiat Food’ by Mark Lysiak and Saifedean Ammous, we’ll begin to explore how the modern food system became entangled with financial markets, industrial agriculture, and geopolitical power.

Please be sure to join us for that chat, since the question of food may prove far more consequential than many people realize.

Until then, thank you to everyone who joins these weekly conversations. We’re truly grateful for your thoughtful insights and your commitment to seeing the world with eyes wide open.

Can’t wait to do it again — see you next week!

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If chocolate and chocolate cookies are on your list of civilizational necessities, you may want to start building a small strategic reserve of Oreos, Cadbury Dairy Milk, and Toblerone. Mondelēz, the conglomerate responsible for those snacks, recently invested in an Israeli biotech startup called Celleste Bio, which is working on producing cocoa butter from plant cells grown in stainless steel bioreactors.

The idea is to take a few cocoa cells, feed them nutrients in a lab tank, and scale production until those cells can generate the equivalent of tons of cocoa butter without ever touching soil, sun, or a farmer.

Of course, chocolate has already been quietly drifting away from its botanical origins for years. In the UK and parts of Europe, Cadbury Dairy Milk can legally replace up to 5% of cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable fats like palm or shea. In the United States, milk chocolate only needs to contain about 10% chocolate liquor to qualify as chocolate at all.

Call it progress if you like, but if your idea of chocolate involves actual trees that grow in dirt under tropical sunlight, you might want to enjoy it while it lasts. The future snack aisle is starting to look suspiciously like a chemistry set.

Earlier this week we were quoted as saying that collapse is not:

“a Hollywood-style Mad Max breakdown — cities on fire, empty highways, bands of spiky-haired marauders roaming a desolate and parched landscape with nothing but wanton violence on the mind and some apocalyse-adapted AMC Gremlin with a turret on top.”

With a slip of the finger, wanton was actually typed as wonton in the original iteration of the story, until we ‘fixed the glitch.’ (Note that no dumplings were harmed during the duration of the error.)

It turns out that wasn’t our only error. Based on news reports from Los Angeles earlier this week, collapse may in fact come in the form of gangs of marauders doing donuts on downtown streets and then bashing in the plate glass windows of luxury apartment buildings.

Would Tina Turner please report to Thunderdome… That’s Tina Turner. Thunderdome. Thank you.

Sam Altman has a vision for the future of artificial intelligence that may sound familiar to anyone who has ever paid an electric bill.

Speaking last week at a summit hosted by BlackRock, the OpenAI CEO said the long-term goal is to sell AI the same way utilities sell electricity or water — metered, billed by usage, and delivered on demand. In Altman’s words, “intelligence” itself will become a utility.

In practical terms, that means the infrastructure controls who gets access, and if supply is limited, the price rises — pushing the most powerful tools toward those who can afford them.

Electricity once separated industrial economies from everyone else. If intelligence becomes a metered service, the same dynamic could quietly emerge again — this time dividing the “augmented” from the “unaugmented.”

Of course, history also suggests that once a technology becomes essential to economic participation, governments and corporations tend to push toward universal adoption, often by making the cost invisible or bundled into other services.

Are we the only ones seeing the term “kill chain” explode in common parlance? Seems like such a sterile term, but it really means an oh-so-dark future for those of us whose eyes are open.

The definition of kill chain is: a sequence of steps a military force follows to identify, track, target, and destroy an enemy asset, including stages such as detection, identification, decision, engagement, and assessment of the strike’s effectiveness.

Just as drone warfare and robodogs are currently confined to the battlefield and security apparatus, it won’t be long until enemies of the state, dissidents, and anyone who the government sees as a ne’er-do-well is the valid target of an algorithmic kill chain.

Remember this — it’s all about the data. That’s why Silicon Valley tech bros are all over Washington like stink on a monkey, under the guise of making the government “efficient.” Vast treasure troves of data — on each of us — sit in disparate databases, among disparate agencies, just waiting to be merged into a single, all-seeing system.

Kinda like Palantir’s ‘Maven.’

Don’t take our word for it. Former UK Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, spelled it out clearly in a recent tweet. And the video he embedded is worth the watch… In it, the presenter with his smarmy smile, literally says: “left click, right click, left click — it becomes a detection” and the kill chain sequence begins.

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Over the past year, job numbers have been repeatedly revised downward. GDP growth continues to look respectable on paper even as inflation erodes purchasing power. And policymakers continue to insist the economy is strong while millions of people feel increasing financial pressure.

The question isn’t just whether the economy is weakening, it’s whether the statistics themselves have become unreliable indicators of what’s really happening.

In this conversation we explore:

• why recent revisions to employment data may point to a stealth recession already underway

• how GDP calculations can obscure the true impact of inflation

• the hidden risks building in private credit markets

• how war, energy prices, and geopolitics could accelerate economic instability

David has spent years analyzing financial crises and systemic risk, and his perspective cuts through the daily noise and focuses on the structural forces shaping the global economy.

If you’re trying to understand where the economy may be headed, and why so many official narratives feel increasingly unhinged from reality, this conversation is worth your time.

Related link:

The Daily Doom

Economic, social and political news with commentary for our chaotic times. A non-partisan weekday collection of the most consequential stories presented with biting editorials and a dose of humor to smoothen its sharp edge. A voice for Independents.

By David Haggith

“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” they said.

“Safe and effective,” they said.

“Trust the science,” they said.

As soon as a crisis happens, there is almost inevitably a script explaining how you’re supposed to feel about it. Forgive us for stating the obvious, but that’s why the table top scenario exercises (e.g. Event 201, Collective Strength) are so important. They’ve already mapped out where they’re going, as well as how to bring us along.

So, how do Americans feel about a widening war that is colliding head-on with a cost-of-living crisis? Miserable.

How does the government want them to feel? Watch this:

Rent is high. Food is high. Insurance is high.

And now, gasoline and diesel fuel, the one price people see plastered everywhere, every single day, are climbing again. That’s all happening as the country rolls towards toward midterm elections, possibly the worst timing for an administration to try to convince voters the economy is under control.

But don’t worry dear Americans, the mockingbirds are here to tell you it’ll all be fine, just you wait.

“This is going to be, it looks like, a bit of short-term pain for the long-term gain of Iran no longer being able to hold the world’s energy supplies hostage,” Mike Waltz, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, told NBC’s Meet the Press a few days ago.

“With respect to what’s happening with gas prices right now, this is a short-term disruption for the long-term gain of taking out the rogue Iranian terrorist regime,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.

At the very least, the mantra acknowledges that pain is, in fact, being felt. But, like “two weeks to flatten the curve,” it dismisses the discomfort as temporary and necessary. Endure it now and you will be rewarded later.

Remember when inflation during the COVID era was “transitory”? Without saying it, that’s what “short-term pain for long term gain” is trying to convey.

Just how stupid do they think we are?

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The idea is simple: bring together members of both and for an open conversation about how people are navigating a world that is changing quickly — economically, politically, culturally, and technologically.

The call, for paid subscribers only, will run about 60–90 minutes on Zoom. It’s meant to be conversational rather than formal, so jump in with thoughts, questions, or experiences of your own. Many of the best Collapse Life discussions happen when readers compare notes about what they’re seeing and how they’re adapting, so don’t be shy or bashful.

Topics we’ll cover include things like:

• how people are thinking about resilience and independence right now

• where the economic and geopolitical trends appear to be heading

• practical ways to build stronger networks and communities

• what it means to “live well” even when systems around us feel increasingly unstable

The audio recording will be published afterward for paid subscribers on both Collapse Life and Geopolitics & Empire.

Event details

Topic: Paid Subscriber Call — Collapse Life x Geopolitics & Empire
Time: Thursday, March 12

• 11:00 am Pacific

• 12:00 pm Mountain

• 1:00 pm Central

• 2:00 pm Eastern

• 6:00 pm London

• 7:00 pm Brussels

These kinds of conversations are one of the things paid subscriptions make possible — a space where readers can speak directly with one another and share ideas about how to navigate the strange moment we’re living through.

Hope to see some of you there.

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