The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [5]
By 2004, my research had expanded to include an appreciation for an idea called “Peak Oil,” which describes an eventual cresting of oil production leading to a permanent condition of less and less thereafter. By joining this understanding of energy and its role in our daily lives to my newfound clarity on the role of money and how it is produced and managed, I came to a fairly startling conclusion: Our current system of money was unsustainably designed—and it was destined for failure; I just didn’t know when.
I felt urgently enough about this revelation that I developed an entire seminar on the subject and called it The End of Money. My presentation began with the history of money itself, then romped through slide upon slide of economic statistics, including debt, savings, derivatives, bubbles, economic and monetary history, and energy.
In July of 2005, I left my position at SAIC on good terms, determined to spend more time pursuing the issues that were consuming me. I took a sabbatical from my corporate responsibilities so that I could spend more time researching, distilling, and communicating what I was learning to others.
Friends and family found less humor in my choice to become what I jokingly called “self-unemployed,” wondering what sort of person, at 42 years of age and with three young children, would drop his career to pursue a passion without any thought for how that whim might pay the bills. For the next four years we lived entirely off savings, our dwindling bank account ostensibly proving their skepticism to be well-founded.
But the work felt too important, and I threw myself into it. I gave seminars, lots of seminars. I started a blog, I spent the better part of a year working with a documentary filmmaker, and I continued to read everything relevant that I could get my hands on. After more than a year and a half of full-time development, The End of Money had reached maturity.
I recall its impact on audiences throughout 2007. At one venue outside of Hartford, Connecticut, I remember how I kept waiting for someone to stand up and challenge my work. That test never came, not even from audiences that included a former president of a State Street financial firm and a member of the board of directors of a large regional bank. All I ever received were heartfelt congratulations and thank yous.
In late 2007, one audience member, Alejandro Levins, a former owner of a Silicon Valley Internet company, convinced me that my seminar was too important not to be shared on the Internet. I didn’t see how this was possible, as the seminar was now a four-part series, requiring over eight hours to deliver and involving hundreds of slides. The idea of condensing it gave me nightmares. Yet the idea of producing eight hours of video material also felt prohibitive. I finally relented and spent nearly the entire spring of 2008 working through various technical formats and other issues while condensing the material. In May of 2008, I uploaded the very first video chapter of what is now called the Crash Course. It would take me five more months of intense work to complete what would become an additional 19 chapters, comprising 3½ hours of instructional video material housing the core elements of my thinking and research. On October 23, 2008, the last chapter was finally loaded to the site, and we sat back to see what might happen