Today I’m yakking with Kate Wagner, the antic voice behind the marvelous website Welcome to MacMansion Hell, a humorous and opinionated blog that aims to educate the general public about architecture, design, and urbanism by making examples of America’s most despised architectural style. She is currently a master’s student in Acoustics as part of a joint venture program between Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory. Merry Christmas everybody!

283  Today I’m chatting with David Collum of Cornell University. Dave is Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Chair of Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He’s better known in the blogosphere as a witty and dauntless forecaster of finance and politics, and it’s always good to check in with him during times of turmoil

The Jonathan Haidt lecture at Duke, Oct, 2016, referenced in this podcast, “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice,” can be accessed here:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justice/

Dmitry Orlov is back to talk about his new book, “Shrinking the Technosphere,” which can be ordered at his website: cluborlov.com. Dmitry is the author previously of “Reinventing Collapse,” “Communities That Abide.” “The Five Stages of Collapse,” and several books of essays. The video trailer for his new book can be viewed by clicking THIS. Dmitry is a leading voice in the effort to think clearly about the predicament of our time.

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002.  Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper assets, and the overall economy. His website with frequent postings is: https://srsroccoreport.com.

Dmitry Orlov, the author of “Reinventing Collapse” and many other books, has become a publisher lately and, in his capacity as publisher and publicist, Dmitry and I will be chatting about the new book he just brought out,150 Strong; A Pathway to a Different Future by Rob O’Grady. 150 Strong is a valuable handbook for understanding the proper scale to successfully manage human affairs in the political scene of the coming decades, when the economies of everyday life contract to a far more local level than has been the case in late-stage Modernity. Rob O’Grady is an engineer and father of three who has been stirred to action by his reflections on environmental issues and his everyday encounters with the perversity of our current system. Trained in the discipline of “sustainability engineering,” he discerned early in his career that to talk of sustainability in the world of business and politics was “to pour from the empty into the void,” because the underlying context is subversive of such efforts.

Kirk Bostrom is the Managing Partner and Chief Portfolio Manager of Strategic Preservation Partners LP, located in Silicon Valley. Kirk began his career as a teenage “runner” on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and has spent over 30 years in the securities investment realm. He was named repeatedly as one of the top-performing investment advisors in the nation as a member of the Chairman’s Club at Citigroup (Nation’s Top 1%) and Piper Jaffray’s “Baker’s Dozen” (Nation’s Top 13 Advisors).

#278 Alice J. Friedemann is the author of "When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation.”  She is also the creator of the excellent website: http://energyskeptic.com/. Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for “Peak Soil,” edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of “Geodestinies”). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her interest in oil began at 10 on a family vacation when the car was running on empty in Death Valley and it was 120 F in the shade.  After researching Hubbert's Peak in 2000, Alice realized the world couldn't run on empty beer-cans-painted-black solar collectors like the one she'd help build in the 1973 energy crisis, and became a science writer, focusing on Peak Oil and related issues.

Steve Ludlum is a native mid-westerner who has spent most of his 65 years on the East Coast. Steve is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who has also been at various times an amateur naturalist, artist, designer and writer. He currently studies economic issues, resource- and energy depletion, monetary policy and the cause-and-effect relationship with American-style culture. His excellent and original blog, Economic Undertow is at http://www.economic-undertow.com. Don’t forget the hyphen! Steve is currently working on a book on macro-economics.

“Christopher Cornelius” is the nom de guerre of a black American international humanitarian aid worker who has put years of service in some of the world’s most dangerous places: Pakistan, Afghanistan, West Africa, Kenya, the Balkens, Cambodia, Sudan,and others. We have that “conversation about race” that the US race commentary pundits have been promising for years — but never actually ventured to have. We could have covered even more territory, but as it is, this is a long interview for this podcast. Christopher Cornelius continues to work in dangerous lands overseas and is concealing his identity to protect himself and his wife. We spoke over Skype from his current perch in East Timor.

#275 Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 37 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector. Berman has published more than 100 articles on oil and gas plays and trends. He has been interviewed about oil and gas topics on CBS, CNBC, CNN, CBC, Platt’s Energy Week, BNN, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He worked 20 years for Amoco (now BP) and 17 years as consulting geologist. He has an M.S. (Geology) from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.A. (History) from Amherst College. 

His website is artberman.com

Bill Kauffman is a founder and contributor to the Front Porch Republic website. He’s also the author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette; Ain’t My America; and the recent collection of essays, Poetry night at the Ballpark. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 motion picture Copperhead, about community strife on the home front during the Civil War. He’s a supporter and defender of the American small town and its economic interests. Just out of college, he joined the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and he is deeply acquainted with Inside-the-Beltway culture. He abandoned Washington DC to return to his hometown of Batavia in far, far western New York (near Buffalo) where I chatted with him by phone.