The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 2The Lens: How to See the Future

I would like to share with you the method of thinking that led me to buy an irresponsible quantity of gold and silver in 2001, allowed me to skirt the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, and why I now live on a farm in rural Massachusetts. When I am not working at my desk to serve the community assembled at PeakProsperity.com, my partner Evie and I work daily to increase our resilience so that we cannot just survive the coming years and decades, but thrive while we help others do the same.

This method is a “lens” through which the world can be viewed. It combines the economy, energy, and the environment—which I introduced in Chapter 1 (The Coming Storm) as the three Es—into a single, comprehensive whole. It is a systems‐level approach, but one founded on common sense instead of complicated math. If you want to make any sense of the world at all, then the deep expertise of the narrow specialists dominating the mainstream media must be set aside in favor of a generalist's panoramic view. If you find it compelling, then it might change your life and how you see the world, as it has for thousands of other people. If it's not your cup of tea, then that's perfectly fine, too; we need lots of different viewpoints to get through these next few trying years.

The first E, the economy, is founded on a workable understanding of how our money system actually operates, as well as basic economic information about debt, savings, and inflation. Not too ...