He now lives in western Massachusetts and speaks to audiences around the globe. Eventually Taggart came across Martenson's work, and the two joined forces three years ago. While they contract for certain services, it's basically a two-man operation, with Taggart running the business side and Martinson writing and speaking.
PeakProsperity's audience is 79 percent male. Sixty-seven percent of readers still have children living at home. Many site visitors don't subscribe and receive access to a limited amount of free material.
In his writings and talks, Martenson focuses on the stresses facing the three Es: economy, energy and environment. To put his ideas in context, it helps to understand a controversial concept he subscribes to known as Peak Oil: the idea that the world is quickly reaching or has passed a point of maximum oil output. The implications of declining oil production in a time of growing demand are enormous, Martenson writes.
A decline would put the brakes on economic growth even as too many nations are strapped with enormous debt and still wobbly from the global recession of Without a way to grow, economic decline inevitably would follow, along with the inability of both governments and companies to keep basic bargains with individuals who did their part by paying taxes, working decades to receive pensions and saving for retirement. In regard to such bargains, Martenson said in a phone interview, "Our view is they won't be kept.
Past Sebastopol city officials have voiced sympathy for Peak Oil — another reason Taggart was drawn to the town. However, the theory ranks as one of the more contentious among energy experts today. In the last two years, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have run opinion pieces dismissing Peak Oil — including one by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, who said in the Journal that the peak of global oil production "is still not in sight.
As well, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government last year published a paper concluding that, "Contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. Peak Oil adherents fired back, saying Yergin is biased toward Big Oil and the Harvard report exaggerated the true potential of new production while underestimating future declines in existing oil fields.
Regardless, Martenson and Taggart maintained what's most important to their projections is that future energy production will be increasingly more expensive. He started to feel as if he could peer through the facades of McMansions to the ugly lurking mortgages.
I was full of young children. He compares his state of mind back then to that of a man who had just survived a heart attack. People sniggered. It turned out to be the best investment of a decade. Yet Martenson found it was lonely to be so out of step. He and Becca longed for fellowship. Martenson overwhelmed his audiences.
It was the middle of the housing boom, and the stock market was doing great. People came because they knew something was wrong with the economy and wanted to understand monetary policy. After one Rotary Club lecture, Martenson fled to his car to avoid an enraged Realtor. They searched Google for a crash-proof New England town.
First they tried Bernardston, about miles northwest of Boston; the town turned out to be full of older folks who kept to themselves. They rented their house as they waited for the real estate market to collapse; and when it did, they bought. In , Alejandro Levins sat in a Greenfield auditorium with about 80 other people, electrified. Levins is the quintessential Cambridge guy, the son of a feminist poet and a Harvard ecologist, reared among manifestos on pacifism.
He enjoyed the kind of anticapitalist childhood that breeds the best entrepreneurs. In the s he cofounded SF Interactive in San Francisco, one of the first marketing agencies to specialize in the Internet. Now he lived in Montague and worked as a strategic-marketing consultant.
Yet at the same time, he sensed the makings of a new American brand, a household name. The way Levins saw it, Martenson had managed to bind together the worldviews of both blue and red states, making the environment and the economy seem like yin and yang, two sides of the same crisis.
Instead of arguing about what the government should do or how big it should be, he had imagined a future in which the government was in shambles, useless.
In the days after the lecture, Levins found himself waking up at night, buzzing with ideas about how Martenson could hone his message. Together, Levins and Martenson began the huge job of creating video Web tutorials. Levins was struggling with his own crisis; his mother, who was seriously ill, needed him. Every other week, he shuttled to Cambridge, driving Route 2 in a haze of worry. Their actions are being condemned by some as trying to make a "viral fortune.
However, many of them have also been causing alarm by spreading unsubstantiated claims, scams and sometimes outright disinformation. It's a very serious thing," he continues. Hewlett noted that while his titles could lean towards alarmism, the content of his videos, keyed to spiking interest, appeared to be reasonable. People are just hungry for information in general. A social media analytics website, Social Blade, shows a spike in new subscribers—in a radical jump from his normal rate, he earned over 12, in the past week.
Other accounts reviewed by Mother Jones have shown similar attempts to pivot to videos about the coronavirus, with mixed results. Some, however, have taken off.
One video offers a mishmash of conspiracies about the virus that, beyond being baseless, are contradictory. The Atlantis Report videos seem to be narrated by a computer generated voice, and make small but consistent grammatical errors that a native English speaker would be unlikely to make, all overlayed on sometimes unrelated stock footage.
Other small-time creators, with moderate followings, appear to be trying to ride the same wave that has boosted Martenson and the Atlantis Report—with less success. One, Sarah Westall, who runs advertisements for fat burning supplements in her videos about right-leaning conspiracies like QAnon to her , subscribers, released several conspiracy videos about the coronavirus that have have failed to significantly outstrip her normal fare.
Westall, not unlike Alex Jones , runs her own supplement store with products offering unclear medical benefit. Though such videos may not have not gone massively viral on YouTube, they sometimes show how, even with algorithms meant to stem their spread, misinformation and dubious information can still leak out of the platform to other social media groups. Inae Oh. Jackie Flynn Mogensen.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak.
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