The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [6]
While I had been successful in shrinking the content down to far less than the original eight hours, I was certain that this online series would appeal to only a very limited audience due to its length and content. But I was wrong. Again I waited for the critiques and rebuttals that seemed sure to follow, but aside from some minor errata found by diligent eyes, my work stood mainly unchallenged. Even more surprisingly, the Crash Course became an Internet success, drawing well in excess of a million and a half views in its first year.
Determined to try to seek a tipping point of awareness that I believed could pave the way for positive change on a large scale—or perhaps just to exercise my well-ingrained habit of not earning a living—I decided to give away the best work of my life for free the Crash Course was made available online in a format that anyone could copy and distribute at no charge. We also produced and sold a professionally produced DVD version, initially offered at cost to maximize its distribution. Twenty-five thousand copies were sold within the first few months of its release.
Accolades began to roll in, and volunteers came forward to put an enormous amount of work into translating the Crash Course into other languages, first Spanish, then French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Italian. Donations came in to support the continuation of my work. I amassed a team of four part-time staff members, whose considerable skill in handling administrative and technical tasks enabled me to keep my focus centered at the heart of our work. Our subscription newsletter service began to attract a significant number of enrolled members, who overwhelmingly encouraged us to continue moving forward with our efforts. We devoted ourselves to making the web site, www.ChrisMartenson.com, more robust, useful, and navigable. We developed further seminar materials, which we presented at numerous locations in the United States. We created an online archive of original articles and resources, built online forums where likeminded community members could connect, published support materials for volunteer-run Crash Course presentations, and produced podcasts and additional video materials to supplement the Crash Course. We connected with thousands of individuals through our web site, seminars, and e-mail, most of whom offered overwhelming thanks and encouragement.
Finally, in 2009, the very first dollar of profit flowed out of these efforts and into my life, slowing the exodus of money out of my savings account. We had done it. We had turned passion into income while simultaneously giving our very best content to the world for free.
At the end of 2009, Becca and I finally bought the house that we had been renting, knowing full well that from a purely economic standpoint, it wasn’t the optimal time to buy. We decided that, given the state of the world, we valued time more than money, and we wanted to make use of that time to make prudent improvements to our home and invest ourselves permanently in our community.
In 2009 and 2010, I presented the Crash Course or related material to the United Nations, the U.K. Parliament, U.S. State Legislatures, the Audubon Society, the Commonwealth Club, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, global corporations such as Yahoo! and Honda, capital management firms, and many other noteworthy organizations, large and small. I regularly appear in or am cited by major media, from cutting-edge econoblogs to more traditional publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. My web site, www.ChrisMartenson.com, receives over 100,000 unique visitors every month. Most gratifying, our message is resonating with a wide and diverse audience: The 800-plus sites currently linking in to ChrisMartenson.com are nearly impossible to classify as a whole, as they represent a diverse social, economic, and cultural spectrum. The material that comprises my web site and the contents of this book has been launched from the obscurity of my home office to the highest courts of