Mike and Chris’ Top Strategy for Facing Future Predicaments

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Originally published at: Mike and Chris’ Top Strategy for Facing Future Predicaments – Peak Prosperity

Mike Maloney and I discuss the fertilizer shortages that could present a major humanitarian and geopolitical crisis in 2027.

Specifically, poorer countries that are heavily dependent on fertilizer and fuel imports will face the largest problems, with Pakistan highlighted as a particularly vulnerable country.

On top of the many problems and predicaments we face is the looming threat of AI, which will, at a minimum, cause “disemployment,” meaning it will cause much slower hiring in the future. At worst, AI will cause mass unemployment at a pace and a scale never before seen outside of the Great Depression.

More worryingly, AI insiders, as well as the billionaire class, are busy building literal bunkers because they worry that AI might ‘go rogue’ someday.

For these and many other reasons, a top strategy for everyone is to get some land that you can farm or garden on and install solar and storage batteries to produce and store as much energy as you can afford.

Mike and I both have farms, and the more we ask around, the more we’re hearing about other people coming around to owning a farm.

The common element cutting across all the topics we discussed is how accelerating systemic complexity seems to be poorly understood by current leadership and is therefore poorly managed.

So, with that, time to dive in…

Timestamps

00:41 – Fertilizer Crisis & Coming Famines
01:10 – Pakistan’s Nuclear Risk
02:31 – Personal Preparedness & “This Is It”
03:24 – Margin Call Moment
04:11 – AI Risks & Buying Farms
05:42 – God in a Box
09:09 – Pace of Change
11:21 – AI Hacking & Digital Fragility
13:08 – AI-Created Viruses
15:36 – Emergent Consciousness
17:33 – Closing Thoughts

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So I attended a fantastic Paul Anka concert last Sunday, and here is the song he wrote specifically for Chris’ final comment:

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Saturday is usually pretty slow for breaking stories of any kind, so it was nice to wake up and catch this nugget.
That conference seems to have born some tasty fruit, at least for those who are focused on the future and how it’s emerging.
I’ve been seeing stories lately about people loading chatGPT5 onto humanoid robots.
Like - just for kicks.
After listening to this I don’t want to be anywhere near them, or their ill-advised experiments.
But I’m also going to worry less.
If AI takes us out, it’s creators will only be the last to go.
I’m thinking their creations will eventually figure out how to crack the bunkers they’ve built and treat them like all other humans.
I regret only that I won’t be here to watch them get the justice they deserve.
Or maybe I will, how can anyone really know?
In the meantime I’m combing over the last 200 years of human technology development looking for a few key things that may have been missed and re-applying known principles in new and novel ways.
I doubt I’m the best qualified.
That’s why I bother looking.
Cheers to all who are seeing opportunities in this current boondoggle of life and taking the bull by the horns.

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“Get a farm” is great advice for those who can pry half a million dollars out of their lives somehow. That’s IF you are willing to physically and mentally work hard full time until you have it set up and producing. Honestly, productivity won’t happen before 2027 anyway so you’d better buy a farm AND ton of non-perishables to get through the first years.

What I’m trying to say is that by far most people can’t afford to do this. I’d like to see us as a tribe offering action that is accessible to the majority.

The ideas below are not at all new but boy if I lived in a city I’d be all over them.

For urban dwellers, I see a big risk of being pushed out by social unrest. So your preparation for food shortages needs to include being able to leave with your preps. If it turns out you can safely stay, nothing is lost anyway.

That changes what to put by. It has to be dense and portable. A freezer full of grass-fed anything won’t work, nor canning. Plastic buckets of good peanut butter, metal tins of olive and coconut oil, tinned fish, buckets of white rice, oatmeal and pasta, buckets of dried tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, raisins, chocolate chips, honey or sugar, milk powder, the drinks you can’t live without and favorite spices. Multivitamins, lots. Get a good camp stove that burns bits of wood, matches and solar-powered flashlights. Now you can travel, forage and cook if cooking is safe. Remember to stock foods you can eat uncooked. Adjust to your own tastes. Plan to add fresh proteins and veggies as you get to your safe place.

For urban people who can’t leave their jobs because something will happen next year, please understand that is a choice we land-dwellers faced and mastered years ago. It was costly to us to leave our urban jobs and work unpaid on our farm while earning part-time minimum wage in the boonies too.

If you want to show up and “help” us on our farms, better talk to us first and better be an asset. Your own calories for a year. Tools. A vehicle you can live out of if necessary. Weapons and know how. Medical supplies to share. You can’t expect us to supply you at all. You arrive over-supplied, skilled and ready to work, sharing what we produce together, not using our stocks. Remember, we have invested thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the infrastructure you hope to survive off of.

You need to bring a lot for this to be a balanced situation. Please make these arrangements with your landed friends NOW. Sell a car or use your vacation week to build a good shed on the land. Stock it. Or buy them a tractor or a water tank - whatever will increase production that they need and can’t afford.

These are things that can be done now even without a farm.

If I knew no-one on the land, I’d get a vehicle that I could sleep in if necessary and adjust all my preps to fit in it. Then, at least, I could leave a dangerous situation well-equipped.

( I have a dear friend in South Africa. Things are profoundly hard there for poor whites, because of race-based employment restrictions. {Also brutal for poor blacks and mixed heritage, but they can legally work}. He and his son lived in their car, which was not long enough to lie down in, for many weeks. It almost killed them, not being able to sleep properly. Make sure your get-away vehicle is long enough to lie flat in.)

There’s more that comes to mind but my mini-homestead needs me to keep working on it! It never stops.

Other input on how the non-farmed can realistically increase their resilience?

Susan

PS Good to have such informed analysis from Mike and Chris, with their long histories of tracking world events and their deep understanding of the history of monetary systems. Love these guys.

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I’d take a look at Bob Klimm’s book, Thriving in Times of Chaos.

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there are lessons to be learned from the past; on the BC coast there are many small communities and farmsteads that are long abandoned (and mostly forgotten), since the local small loggers and the coastal ferry system collapsed. It seems to me to be like earthquake preparedness, different preps for different levels (quake or collapse). The skill sets needed are very real, and different for each level; and to me that is the limiting feature

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Excellent comment from beginning to end! Before we retired in 2019 we lived in Center City Philadelphia and our survive-in-place and bug out plans incorporated everything you mentioned. People who aren’t on a “farm” really should take your ideas to heart, get working on them, and keep developing that strategy, equipment, supplies and especially relationships.

To make bugging out feasible, we went family camping for fun (and for rehearsal). If necessary we could toss all our camping gear in a 5’X8’ utility trailer and drive away knowing wherever we might end up we’d have a place to sleep. When we had to replace our SUV in 2018 we got a Chevy Colorado pick-up truck and have since equipped it with a pop-up tent mounted on a frame above the bed (it’s a “Go Fast Camper” manufactured in Montana). We’ve retired now to our bug out destination but if we were forced to evacuate or exfil from here we’ll automatically be carrying our sleeping arrangements with us. Here’s our set up:

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Of course if we had to evacuate, we’d need more room for cargo so our solution is a second-hand 5’X8’ utility trailer. U-Haul rents similar trailers for urban residents who don’t have a place to store one they own.

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We didn’t have the money in retirement for even a “farmette” and we assessed we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the work as we aged into our 70’s and 80’s. So we got 2/3 of an acre and have packed it with growing beds and fruit trees. We couldn’t raise all our food but we could significantly augment our diet with what we grow. We have stored food, a deep pantry, and first name relationships with local farmers.

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Understood that no plan is going to cover every possible difficult situation.

My skill set will only get me so far. I just don’t want to be someone who’s out of options by day three of a disruption. I want to practice taking the responsibility of providing for self and loved ones that is so missing in our just-in-time world. I may still die on day three, who knows.

There is something very odd about being an adult human but essentially helpless as an infant without a stocked big box store, a credit card and gas in the tank.

There is something very beautiful about pulling a winter’s supply of potatoes out of the garden. This soil, these genius plants and my body’s energy and brains = primary wealth, completely outside our absurd and abusive monetary systems. Working with primary wealth is direct communion with creation. It brings a visceral delight of wonder and gratitude (+ potatoes).

No way to know if I’ve secured my future but there isn’t another way to live for me.

Susan

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“The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” on Peacock. Might be worth a look for those of us luddites. That cabin away from civilization is a thing like Chris mentioned.

The AI creators: trust me bro, we’re making it safe.

“We’ll be totally free yes and totally young” Ooowahhh

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I’m going to have to disagree with the premise it’s about literally buying a farm. The true concept is something like having access and developing skill on productive land in order to contribute to your own upkeep.

So many cities have groups for practical hobbies (shooting, scouts, camping whole food cooking/preserving, sewing, wood working) that can be useful to others in times of extreme stress.

Anyone can do this, and it is a choice not to. A foolish one.

My grand father left his mother at 16 to get out of the european war machines pathway in ww2. He found himself looked after well by German Officers who needed their livestock, mainly horses, tended to. It took him almost 5 years to get on a ship out of the region. But he was handy with a can do attitude and taken on as a warfy in Port Adelaide, Australia.

That to say, doesn’t matter if you have the perfect farm now, it’s the skills you pick up along the way. My Grandfather passed away last year, would have been 100 this year. He lived a full life, was a happy and good natured man, even though he had one of the hardest ‘becoming a man’ journeys Ive personally heard.

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Lots of good advice, Susan, but I don’t understand why you say canning won’t work.

Can you elaborate on your thinking?

Assuming canning meats has a fatal flaw, meat can be dehydrated. That’s lighter and takes up less space anyhow. Dehydrated, a lot of beef (or chicken, or any meat) will fit into a 5 gallon bucket. And it can be done in an oven if purchasing a dedicated unit is out of one’s budget. If I were urban, or thought I might have to bug out, this is one option I’d stress while I have the time.

A simple recipe: slice beef 1/4" thick, brine it in equal parts Tamari and water for a couple days, then dehydrate.

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Hi @vtgothic. I’d like to hear more about safely dehydrating and storing meats! I have a Excalibur dehydrator that takes care of my berry crops and tomatoes. I have not tried meat in it. Is there a tried and true way to dehydrate and safely store meat for long periods? Do you cook your marinated beef after rehydrating it, or eat it like a jerky?

I said no to home-canned goods for a mobile food stash because they take a lot of space, are very heavy and make a horrid wasteful mess if jars break. I could see that happening in a bug-out or just traveling situation.

I just learned how to pressure can meat, fish and poultry so that we can save freezer meat if power fails but my pantry is tiny like the rest of my homestead so dehydrating is a better option. Tips?

Susan

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Pemmican would be the budget friendly option to freeze dried meat

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Thought the documentary you mentioned sounded interesting so went looking for the trailer…

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The simple recipe I gave above is my usual, and I’ve stored that for years. But here’s a page from Practical Self-Reliance on various ways to cure meats. Look at the Biltong recipe, it’s pretty much the same as jerky:

Also these from Lets-make-sausage.com:

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Susan
Ur ideas mirror my thinking as we exited the city at 68YO with resources but no skills. Kinda scary but exciting looking a blank slate of difficult rocky soil. Now beyong organic raised no dig gardens

Year 5 on my gardens sure have learned a lot yet i know so little. Most can not even begin to appreciate the hours effort cost in my veggies - so to tjink u can just show up is insulti h. My chicken eggs are as healthy as it gets…no corn , soy, non gmo feed and all the the veggies , sunflowers ,etc they can eat

So blessed to have 5 years to learn…i did not think i would have a year .

I do have to wonder will SHTF ever happen or just a slow kick can down the road deterioration as government continues to keep enough circuses going for the masses.

I use my FD all the time however need to FD some of that grass feed meat.
I believe best deal meat for FD is go to COSTCO buy the rotissory chickens FD meat, create broth with bones and FD the broth.
Need to do this again

So much to do while masses are partying

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“More worryingly, AI insiders, as well as the billionaire class, are busy building literal bunkers because they worry that AI might ‘go rogue’ someday.”

The Chinese may actually succeed in creating Communism, which will present a huge Ideological Challenge to the West?

It’s a whole new paradigm?

The Western Oligarchs may try to burn everything down while hiding in their bunkers?

I think that Xi’s favorite English book is: “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway (《The Old Man and the Sea》的中文书名是 《老人与海》), which may be a bit foreboding?

I read “The Old Man and the Sea” in Junior High School. It’s a very tragic story. The story is about an old fisherman in Cuba nearing the end of his Life. His great lifelong dream is to catch the great mythical fish, a giant Marlin. One day, while fishing alone in his small boat, he finally hooks the great Marlin fish, which is so powerful that the Marlin fish drags the Old Man’s boat far out to sea. The Old Man, after several days of desperately fighting the fish, finally lands the great Fish (鱼/欲/裕) . The Old Man then ties the huge fish to the side of his small boat and then slowly returns to Cuba. But, on the way back to port, a huge shark (鲨鱼） comes and eats the fish and the Old Man is helpless to stop the shark.

Question for Grok: What does 资本者无当焉乎 mean in English?

Grok: Same core meaning, but 乎 turns it into a question: Does capital have no proper place there?

The 焉 still means “there,” and 乎 is the question particle — so it’s asking whether capital is out of place in that situation.

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If you decide that choice land of ideal size in an ideal place with a nice house and amenities is how you do it, you may be exactly right for some.

However, I suppose that if someone of average or higher intelligence and high motivation decided that’s what they wanted, they’d un-want everything else that got in the way of achieving their goal.

Going to land search and searching for $25K or less properties near where I live

However, more importantly, I think the big thing is that advice should be personalized. Learning to grow some food is good unspecific advice as it can be done in a pot.

In general, I think the average person would be well suited to just simply prepare for 3 months and increase to 12 months of disruption to their life, whether that be food, job loss, etc. Life has always been filled with unpredictable hardships, even during the years many today say were likely the golden era. If a normal person learns to deal with normal problems, it is my base assertion that they will also be much more prepared to deal with abnormal problems even if it’s only in the increased capacity to imagine and plan ahead.

I happen to think the most interesting thing likely to happen isn’t even the hardships. I think it’s the opportunity for those who wish to see the world different and the specifically time bounded window to play a part in that as things edge towards a moment where more people look around and finally announce, “This isn’t working. I need to try something else.”

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I.G.Y.

TheNightfly
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Have you ever noticed that Donald Fagan’s songs don’t make any Sense?

But, I may be Wrong?

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