El Niño is not a storm or a single weather event. It is different from a hurricane with a name and a projected path. It’s a natural climate pattern that begins in the tropical Pacific, when sea surface temperatures become warmer than usual and disrupt normal wind and rainfall patterns. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes El Niño (and the similar La Niña) as a pattern that shifts irregularly every two to seven years and has global side effects.

In ordinary language: the ocean changes, the atmosphere responds, and weather patterns around the world get rearranged.

That doesn’t mean everyone is going to get the same weather. One region may get drought, while another may see flooding. Some areas may have warmer winters, other areas get stronger storms, crop stress, fire risk, weaker monsoons, coral bleaching, or added pressure on energy and other infrastructure.

In its June 8th update, the NOAA Climate Prediction Center said El Niño is likely to emerge soon, with an 82% chance during May–July 2026 and a 96% chance of continuing through the winter of 2026–27 in the northern hemisphere. The World Meteorological Organization said on June 2nd that El Niño conditions are developing in the tropical Pacific and are expected to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns in the months ahead, increasing the risk of extreme weather.

These bulletins are worth paying attention to, but not panicking over. In order to whip up a frenzy, the mainstream media is using words like “dreaded Super El Niño” to describe what they think is going to unfold.

Panic is what happens when people sense an impending risk but don’t have a plan. Preparedness is what happens when people look at the risk sanguinely, and take sensible action.

That distinction matters, because every major weather story now gets pulled into the same exhausting machine: alarm, denial, politicization, expert-speak, social media hysteria, and thousands of people trying to sell you something. By the time ordinary people are done scrolling, they are either terrified or paralyzed, neither of which is a useful response.

The takeaway is not to prepare for El Niño, as such, but to prepare for how El Niño might impact already brittle systems we all depend upon. That’s preparing at the right level.

If El Niño results in a heavy rainfall event, don’t stockpile toilet paper, but do know if local drainage systems near you have been chronically neglected. You don’t necessarily need canned food to get through a heat wave, but if the grid in your area is already over-capacity, extreme heat might result in power outages or prolonged blackouts, so think about how to prepare for that possibility. If you rely on local farmers as a source of clean food (and we all should, really!), ask them how they plan to mitigate the impact of droughts; there might even be an opportunity to glean a few pointers from those whose living relies on lived experience.

Modern life has trained too many people to outsource resilience. The utility company will fix it. The store will restock it. The government will warn us. The insurance company will cover it. The experts will explain it.

We should all know better than that. Your best source of safety, your best source of security, and your best source of stamina is you. To bolster confidence that this is actually true, try reclaiming a few ordinary competencies that never should have been lost in the first place.

Do you have enough stored drinking water for a few days? Do you know how you would collect, filter, or boil water if service were interrupted? If you rely on a well, do you have a plan for power outages? If you live in a flood-prone area, do you know where water moves on your property when it rains hard?

Then look at heat. Do you have a way to stay cool if the power goes out this summer? Do you have battery-powered fans, shade, ventilation, electrolyte packets, and a plan for vulnerable people or animals? Do you know which medications are affected by heat? Have you thought through what you would do during several days of extreme temperatures — either heat or cold?

Then look at your food stores. This does not mean panic-buying pallets of beans, it just means keeping a reasonable pantry buffer so that price spikes, storms, delayed deliveries, or short-term disruptions do not immediately become a personal emergency. Rice, oats, beans, canned fish, canned tomatoes, broth, shelf-stable milk, coffee, tea, pet food, basic medicines, and the foods your household actually eats are all more useful than buckets of freeze-dried meals you’ll probably never touch.

Look around the outside of your house: gutters, drainage, roof leaks, trees, erosion, sump pumps, flash-flood risk, fire breaks, and insurance documents. Take photos of your home and major belongings before you need them. Make sure important papers are backed up digitally and physically. Boring? Yes. Absolutely the kind of thing you want to procrastinate doing. But is it useful? You won’t know until you need it and then you’ll understand why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Get a battery-powered weather radio, charged battery banks and extra batteries, flashlights, printed phone numbers, and a way to receive local alerts.

Finally, think about neighbors. The most underrated preparedness tool is knowing who nearby has a chainsaw, a truck or tractor, medical knowledge, extra water, a generator, and a good head on their shoulders; and knowing who is elderly or may need to be checked on when the power is out. Do the utmost to channel what it means to love your neighbor.

The impending impact of El Niño is a good excuse to do some simple stocktaking. Weather is one of the best reminders that civilization is more fragile than it looks, and also that human beings are less helpless than we actually are.

In an age when every stressor becomes a spectacle, sanity may be the most underrated prep of all.

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(Thanks to , a friend and loyal reader, for suggesting we write about this subject.)

Peter shared his view that the metals bull market remains intact, even after an overdue pullback, and offered detailed thoughts on North Isle…

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Bank of America is encouraging investors to “take profits.” In a note on Monday laying out their bear case for the S&P 500, they said, “We see opportunity in S&P 500 stocks, but not the overall cap-weighted index.”

Goldman Sachs says we’re this close to a stock market bubble, driven by enthusiasm over artificial intelligence.

Société Générale is warning that oil prices will need to rise moving forward, as global inventories are depleted and strategic reserves require rebuilding.

Meh! Analysts issue warnings all the time. Better yet, each of these signals can be explained away on their own.

However, when taken in the aggregate, and coupled with the many other apparent (and not necessarily bullish) signs and signals, they point to the fact that the economic buffer that has sustained Americans thus far is shrinking.

For the past several years, we’ve all witnessed the economy survive one shock after another: lockdowns; inflation; supply chain stress; war; political instability; consumer exhaustion; market mania. Somehow, almost inexplicably, the engine keeps running.

(Has anyone noticed any slowdown in purchasing activity at the local Costco or Sam’s Club? The team at Collapse Life hasn’t. All these folks surely aren’t there just for the free samples. Leave a comment as to how things look where you live.)

A resilient system absorbs shocks because it has depth, redundancy, savings, trust, and room to maneuver. An exhausted system keeps going because it has no other choice. In other words, fumes still count as fuel… and that’s where we appear to be at the moment.

When signals start flashing across markets, households, restaurants, oil, debt, and geopolitics at the same time, it is worth listening to people who have spent a lifetime watching cycles unfold.

This Wednesday night, paid subscribers are invited to join us for a live conversation with Peter Grandich, the original “Whiz Kid of Wall Street,” who has spent more than 40 years riding the market roller coaster.

Peter has seen bubbles inflate and panics unfold. He has been right. He’s been wrong. And after four decades in and around markets, money, debt, gold, risk, and human psychology, he brings perspective, which these days is far more useful than certainty.

Our gathering on Wednesday will not include crystal ball predictions. That’s not the point at all. What is the point — and why we’re thrilled to have access to Grandich Gray Matter — is to ask better questions so we can anticipate what may be coming.

What is the market really pricing in? What is it ignoring? Where is the stress showing up first? How should ordinary people understand the gap between official confidence and lived reality? And what has Peter learned from decades of watching people lose their heads at exactly the wrong moment?

Come gather some wisdom from someone who has seen a lot.

Wednesday night.
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Bendell’s central argument is that collapse is already underway, not some future event. The question, then, is not what do we do to stop it, but how do we adapt to life under these new circumstances: what do we preserve, what do we relinquish, what can we restore, and how we reconcile ourselves to uncertainty?

Today’s conversation ranged from preparedness and denial to financial fragility, local food, community, climate narratives, freedom, and the emotional burden of being collapse-aware. One of the hardest questions we kept circling was: if awareness is supposed to be liberating, why does it often feel so heavy?

Bendell is best known for his 2018 paper on “Deep Adaptation,” which went viral after he argued that since societal collapse was a reality already underway, much more attention needed to be paid to resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation.

You can find that paper here: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

This is the first in a series that will culminate in a live conversation with Professor Bendell on June 28. Whether or not you’ve read the book, we’d love to have you join us for the entire series of conversations.

The book can be downloaded here: https://lifeworth.com/BreakingTogetherEPUB.epub

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A sea of red is the only way to describe the markets this past Friday. Approximately $1.75 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market, alongside roughly $130 billion from the cryptocurrency market.

If those numbers confuse you, alarm you, or make you wonder about your investment strategy, you won’t want to miss our upcoming exclusive session with Wall Street veteran Peter Grandich, happening this Wednesday, June 10, at 7pm ET.

We want to be clear: Peter is doing this without compensation or remuneration. He likes what we’re doing at Collapse Life and wants to support our efforts and for that, we are eternally grateful. Who benefits? You.

This will be the first of three intimate and interactive discussions with Peter, and it’s exclusive to paid subscribers only — that way, there’s a chance for you to interact and get your questions answered. So upgrade today to reserve your spot, then look for the link in your email over the next day or two and we’ll see you on Wednesday!

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Have you heard about the “Freedom Ship”? It’s making headlines recently: a proposed mile-long floating city that would carry up to 80,000 people, including 50,000 permanent residents, 20,000 crew, and thousands of visitors. The concept includes homes, schools, banks, shops, hotels, a stadium, museums, parks, a water park, helipads, and a “state-of-the-art hospital.” It would be too large to dock, so it would remain offshore in international waters and ferry people to and from land.

The pitch is part cruise ship, part sovereign startup city, part techno-utopian escape pod. Its backers say it could be nuclear-powered, environmentally friendly, economically self-sustaining, and even capable of cleaning the oceans as it travels.

But the paragraph that matters is the one about medical research.

“We also want a state-of-the-art hospital. We’ve been approached by medical research facilities because we would be outside the reach of regulatory bodies, so the Freedom Ship would be an ideal venue for that,” CEO Roger Gooch told The Telegraph.

And now the picture starts to come into focus. This is not just another absurdly large cruise concept. It points toward a familiar fantasy: build a private jurisdiction beyond ordinary public accountability, then call it ‘innovation.’ Cruise ships already struggle with deadly outbreaks (Hantavirus anyone?) and evacuations. Scaling that up to the population of a small city while advertising ‘freedom’ from regulatory oversight does not exactly inspire confidence.

The floating city becomes a place where finance, biotech, gambling, residency, education, security, and governance can be bundled into one corporate-controlled environment that is offshore, mobile, and deliberately hard to regulate.

The unspoken promise is about exit — from national rules, public scrutiny, and democratic constraint. The risk is that the people most excited by that model may not be the ones you want designing your future.

A few weeks ago, The Economist profiled “passport bros” — Western men who move abroad in search of women they describe as more traditional, feminine, and accommodating than the apparently terrifying species known as ‘The American Woman.’

The most interesting part is not that some men are finding love overseas. People have always married across borders. What’s revealing, and left unsaid in the utterly sloppy reporting of The Economist, is that several of the men profiled are not just participants in the trend. They are monetizing it.

One couple, Mike and Pafan, admit to making their living as social media influencers. Another man, Austin Abeyta, combines remote data analytics work with content creation and coaching. In other words, these are not neutral case studies of men looking for women. These are business relationships, under the guise of personal relationships. Whether love is actually found is masked by the fact that this is a for-profit enterprise, selling men hope of love via a lifestyle commodity.

That changes the story dramatically.

When Mike posts a video captioned “Point of view: you have a Thai girlfriend”, with Pafan kneeling on the floor clipping his fingernails, that’s not just a snapshot of a specific relationship dynamic in action. It’s content aimed at an audience of men who feel rejected, resentful, lonely, economically squeezed, or simply tired of competing in the American dating market.

That means The Economist should have asked harder questions, like:

• Who benefits when American men believe Western women are ruined?

• Who monetizes the idea that moving abroad will solve loneliness, status anxiety, sexual frustration, and economic precarity?

• How much of this “traditional femininity” is real, and how much is staged content for men scrolling alone in a Cleveland, Ohio basement at 1 am?

• What happens when a private relationship becomes a recurring content format?

• And most importantly: are these men finding wives, or building funnels?

Passport bro culture is not just about the politics of sex, love, marriage, or even misogyny. It is also an influencer economy built on grievance. The product being sold is restored male status at a discount. And it’s downright predatory.

(Note: If you’re familiar with the 1980s British rock band, The Smiths, you’ll know the subhead at the top of this edition of Notes comes from the 1986 single, Panic. Whether there’s panic in Dundee and Humberside, we cannot actually say. We do not condone hanging DJs.)

The Telegraph reports rising UK interest in panic rooms and private bunkers, with some builders claiming inquiries have jumped since COVID and the wars in Ukraine and Iran. “A wave of new buyers is paying six-figure sums to prepare for an uncertain world,” they write.

As wars rage on Europe’s borders and geopolitical tensions rise, more Britons are exploring a question that once seemed the preserve of Cold War survivalists: if the worst happens, where can you go?

But let’s not confuse six-figure underground shelters with a national awakening. A handful of wealthy homeowners installing air filtration systems, blast doors, and backup power is not a new outlook on preparedness.

This weekend on the Collapse Life podcast, we spoke with Amy Edelman and Chris Begley, the co-authors of a new preparedness book who made the opposite point: it is exceedingly difficult to get most people to take even basic, modest steps like stocking up a few weeks’ supply of food, water, and first aid.

While the wealthy are building themselves boltholes, most people are putting their heads down and hoping the grid, the grocery store, the government, and the just-in-time economy will all still show up on schedule. Broad preparedness continues to be culturally embarrassing, psychologically uncomfortable, easy to postpone, and even easier to mock.

Towards the end of the article, The Telegraph mentions that sheltered spaces are “no longer necessarily a perk for the rich.” And maybe that’s partly true. A £32,000 home reinforcement project on a £250,000 property or a working couple outside London adding an overground shelter is not exactly Bond-villain territory, but it is still a very particular kind of “ordinary.”

The most interesting signal coming out of all of this is that the desire to bunker down may no longer be confined to the ultra-wealthy, but it also hasn’t translated into a wider public awakening. Instead, it is being privatized by the few who can afford to act individually.

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We all lived through COVID. We all watched global supply chains break. We’ve all seen how storms, fires, floods, blackouts, and boil-water notices ransack communities. We see rising prices, institutional failures, and billionaire bunker stories all around us. Most of us know, at some level, that things are not quite as stable as we once assumed.

And yet most people still behave as if life will still go on as it always has.

That’s the real subject of this week’s conversation with Amy Edelman and Chris Begley, co-authors of a new book called The Emergency Playbook. The discussion didn’t focus so much on how to prepare, but on why people don’t, and what it might take to make preparedness feel normal, sane, and necessary again.

Amy brings the perspective of an ordinary suburban household. She is not trying to sell fear to anyone. She is just trying to make preparedness approachable again — the kind of practical readiness that makes life easier when something goes wrong, which is always does.

Chris comes at the subject from a historical and archaeological lens. Across time, people have survived hard moments not because they had all the perfect gear, but because they had skills, social bonds, adaptability, and the ability to cooperate under pressure.

The most interesting point to emerge from the discussion is that fear alone won’t wake people up. Responsibility for neighbors may not work either, at least not everywhere. Amy’s more persuasive hook is discomfort: people may wake up when they personally experience being caught short and decide they never want to feel that helpless again. Chris thinks preparedness may need to be recast as citizenship, care, and being useful to others rather than as fear, ideology, or consumer gear.

Related links:

• Order The Emergency Playbook
• Find Amy Edelman on Instagram (Pretty.Prepared)
• Explore Chris Begley’s work

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In May, the American Gaming Association released its annual State of the States report, which revealed the US had set a new record: in 2025, legal commercial casinos, regulated sports betting, and online casino gaming generated over $78 billion in gross revenue, up 9% from the year before.

And that’s just the official casino economy, which captures only one regulated slice of a much larger betting landscape.

It does not include tribal gaming, lotteries, offshore gambling, or sweepstakes casinos. It does not include crypto speculation, meme stocks, day trading, or the everyday financial gambling that now passes for economic opportunity. It also does not include prediction markets, where Kalshi and Polymarket alone topped $40 billion in combined trading volume in 2025.

Americans have always gambled. That’s nothing new. But now, more and more of American life seems to run on the logic of gambling.

When my brother was in college in the 1980s, he interned for a senator on Capitol Hill. One of the things I remember him saying is that the place was crawling with adrenaline junkies. People moved fast, talked fast, and lived on caffeine, gossip, and risk (probably a little cocaine, too). They were so conditioned to turn everything into a contest that they would bet on which elevator would arrive in the lobby first.

That memory has stayed with me because it says more than it should.

Many people at the bottom of society gamble because they feel they have no future. Many people at the top of society gamble because they don’t have to live with the consequences. Somewhere in between, the rest of us have been handed a phone app and invited to join the game.

As financial planner , author of , recently told me: “When we’re in a financially precarious time, which I think a lot of people feel we are right now, you’re more likely to make risky decisions because, if you feel like the old playbook isn’t working you’re gonna take that big risk. If you’re out drowning in the ocean, you’re gonna grab onto anything that looks like a life raft.”

Sports betting, crypto speculation, meme stocks, prediction markets, lottery apps, day trading, online casinos, even the gamified churn of social media all run on some of the same psychological machinery. Anticipation, reward, loss, recovery. The next hit. One more chance. Try again.

Peter Grandich, who will be joining Collapse Life for a series of exclusive paid subscriber sessions beginning next Wednesday, recently wrote that gambling and speculation are now serious enough societal and economic issues that they may soon elbow their way onto his list of the top ten challenges facing America.

That may sound dramatic until you look around and realize how much of modern life mimics a casino, with the underlying logic migrating into everything. The financial message increasingly sounds like this: Don’t save and put money aside, just chase the upside. Don’t build something patiently and with diligence, just time the market. Don’t work toward stability, just find the next GameStop, Dogecoin, or political outcome. Everyone is looking for their miracle exit from an economy that increasingly feels impossible to navigate otherwise.

When people believe work will be rewarded, they will work. When life demonstrates to them that saving matters, they save. When they see institutions as basically fair, they may grumble, but they’ll still participate. But when housing is out of reach, debt is normalized, wages feel inadequate to support what used to be considered a normal life, politics is theater, and the future looks like a trap, speculation starts to feel like one of the last available forms of agency.

That’s how nihilism ends up at the core of the gambling economy.

Society is basically telling people, ‘You might not be able to build your way out, but you just might be able to win your way out.’

“Our brains didn’t evolve in a world of guaranteed paychecks and retirement accounts, but rather in environments where uncertainty was the norm and survival often depended on making a risky bet,” explains Professor Michael L. Platt, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “When you’re in trouble, a long shot might be the only shot you have.”

The undeniable danger is that gambling reinforces living for the moment and chasing a payout. It replaces patience with stimulation, prudence with appetite, and responsibility with the fantasy that one lucky break will mean a penthouse in South Beach and a Lamborghini in the driveway.

That’s why this topic belongs in a serious conversation about the economy.

A gambling society is not just a society with too many casinos. It is a society that no longer believes the normal rules for life lead anywhere worth going… and this appears to be where we are in America.

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If you stand at a tram shelter in central Amsterdam this month, the colorful, glossy billboards that usually punctuate a modern European commute are no longer there. No images of thick, juicy beef burgers; no deeply discounted weekend getaways to Ibiza; no diesel-powered SUVs helping you escape to the country or family-friendly cruise ship holidays.

On May 1, 2026, Amsterdam officially became the first capital city in the world to enforce a legally binding ban on public advertisements for products that promote a “high carbon” lifestyle, such as meat or petrol-powered vehicles. The move builds on a rapidly growing global trend, following in the footsteps of neighboring Dutch cities like Haarlem, which became the first in the world to outlaw meat advertisements in 2024, and UK hubs like Edinburgh, which passed a landmark ban targeting ads for high-carbon aviation, SUVs, and fossil fuel companies.

Amsterdam’s measure, driven by a coalition of the GreenLeft party and the Party for the Animals, targets city-controlled public spaces — including its billboards, bus stops, metro stations, and tram shelters. The objective was explicit: align the city’s physical streetscape with its ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality and halving local meat consumption by 2050.

To proponents, getting the ban passed was a historic triumph. They frequently refer to it as their “tobacco moment” for the climate crisis. Advocates have stepped forward to defend the policy against allegations of authoritarian overreach. Chief among them is Anke Bakker, the politician from the Party for the Animals who instigated the restrictions. Speaking to the BBC, Bakker argued that the ban is not a paternalistic effort to tell people what they should and shouldn’t eat:

“Everybody can just make their own decisions,” she said. “Actually we are trying to get the big companies not to tell us all the time what we need to eat and buy. In a way, we’re giving people more freedom because they can make their own choice instead of putting it in their face.”

Put another way, no one is prying burgers from your gullet. Citizens still possess the total freedom to eat meat or buy gasoline-powered cars. The state is simply freeing its citizens from the subconscious psychological manipulation of multi-million dollar corporate advertising campaigns. By removing the temptation, the state is restoring the consumer’s authentic free will.

Essentially, they are saying: ‘corporations shouldn’t be allowed to manipulate you into doing things… that’s OUR job!’

There was a time when liberty meant individuals were trusted as autonomous agents. You were expected to encounter competing, messy, and adversarial messages — say, a fast-food ad right next to a public health warning — and use your own critical faculties to make a decision for yourself.

Now, however, there’s a new model in which your environment is curated by authorities so that your choices automatically become “healthier,” “safer,” or “more sustainable.”

There’s an exquisite double-speak at play here: You are being freed from manipulation by having your information environment manipulated on your behalf. The state assumes the role of an invisible architect, deciding which of your desires are “authentic” (eating less meat) and which are “manufactured” (craving a cheeseburger), and then adjusting the physical world to filter out the latter.

This exposes a glaring political and economic contradiction in what the state deems “harmful.” If the ban is strictly a mathematical response to carbon footprints, then the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, data centers, and digital infrastructure should logically face the same public censorship. AI data centers consume astronomical, ever-increasing amounts of water and electricity. Indeed, a recent study highlighted by Universiteit van Tilburg’s Univers magazine revealed that the massive tech data centers operating across the Netherlands now consume a combined volume of energy equal to nearly two million Dutch homes.

Yet, as far as we can tell there are no municipal bans on advertising cloud computing or generative AI tools.

So why the double standard?

Maybe because a billboard for a juicy burger is a highly visible trigger on a public street. A data center humming in a secure corporate compound outside the city, quietly straining the national energy grid to train a large language model, is abstract and invisible to the average voter. Furthermore, high-carbon legacy sectors like agriculture and automotive are politically expendable to urban progressives; AI is viewed as the untouchable engine of the future economy.

The battleground for civil liberties is no longer just about overt bans or explicit prohibitions; it is about who controls the architecture of our daily lives. By keeping products legal but engineering them into invisibility, governments can claim they still respect individual rights and liberties while structurally manipulating people toward a pre-determined outcome.

As public spaces across the West continue to be scrubbed of “harmful” ideas, a haunting question needs to be asked: If we accept that the state must curate our environment to ensure we make “correct” choices for the planet, what happens when the authorities change their minds about what those choices are?

Get your Happy Meal while you can. If the government has its way, the Happy goes away.

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Join us on June 10 for a paid-subscriber-only session with ‘Wall Street Whiz Kid’ Peter Grandich. We’ll put him in the hot seat with a set of contrarian scenarios and ask him to respond in real time. Upgrade your subscription today to go beyond the usual market-and-metals conversation.

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What a thrill to have Joel Salatin join us live for Book Chat today!

It came together at the last minute, so apologies to anyone who couldn’t make it on such short notice — and thank you to everyone who did show up, ask questions, and help make it such a lively conversation. Looking at you , , , , , and so many others.

We covered a lot of ground, including:

• Why Joel is calling for a “Food Emancipation Proclamation” that would allow voluntary exchange between informed adults without requiring bureaucratic permission for direct farm-to-consumer food transactions.

• How industrial food has separated people from cooking, farming, and common-sense food knowledge, leaving consumers fearful of anything that hasn’t been officially “approved.”

• Why farmers are receiving a shrinking share of the retail food dollar, and why new farmers need the freedom to sell value-added, ready-to-eat local food if they’re going to survive.

• Why Joel argues for “environmentalism by participation” rather than abandonment — restoring land through active human stewardship, managed grazing, compost, soil biology, and ecological patterns.

If you missed it live, the replay is well worth your time — especially if you care about food freedom, local resilience, regenerative farming, or the simple but apparently radical idea that adults should be allowed to buy food from each other without asking permission first.

We look forward to welcoming Joel back when his forthcoming book, Food Emancipation, is released.

In case you missed our previous discussions on Joel’s book, ‘Everything I Want to Do is Illegal,’ you can find them here:

Courageous Conversations

We are in a 10 month window to make our food supplies more resilient.

“The Wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever …

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17 days ago · 14 likes · Susan Harley (M)

Courageous Conversations

Everything I Want To Do Is Illigal by Joel Salatin -Book Chat LIVE

Sunday’s Book Chat hit a nerve — and the book title *Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal* tells you exactly why. Published in 2007 its subtitled “War Stories from the Local Front making this book even more relevant today.. So do watch and add your thoughts to this most important subject FOOD…

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24 days ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Susan Harley (M)

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Silicon Valley’s pitch used to be that AI would free us from boring, repetitive work, giving us more time to spend on creative and productive endeavors. The reality, of course, was always something else.

But there’s a new pitch in town!

Please perform boring, intimate, domestic, physical, emotional, and creative tasks so we can record them, learn from them, automate them, meter them, and sell them back to you on a monthly subscription basis.

Turns out we’re not completely useless eaters after all. They’ve found a use for us… at least for now.

At BlackRock’s 2026 Infrastructure Summit in March of this year, Sam Altman described a future where intelligence is sold like electricity or water, metered by usage, with compute capacity determining access and price.

That’s the top of the pyramid: intelligence as infrastructure. But underneath, the raw material still has to come from people — their homes, bodies, habits, preferences, gestures, labor, and awkward little private rituals. It’s the digital equivalent of Soylent Green — AI, it’s made out of people!

To understand what we mean, have a look at the following examples:

• A company called Joi AI is reportedly hiring ten “masturbation consultants” who will get paid $2,000 a month to test AI-guided sexual wellness sessions and report the effects on their stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.

• A company called Shift is offering free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work, generating footage to train household robots. The company’s own site says the deal plainly: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

• A company called SPAN is letting you host a mini-data center inside your house in exchange for subsidized electricity, internet, and backup power.

You get convenience, cash, or lower bills; they get data, behavioral mapping, embodied instruction, and another chunk of human life converted into machine-readable form.

The first step to being replaced, apparently, is being paid to document yourself into obsolescence. Do not comply.

Washington State just unwittingly gave us a peek into how the control grid expands. The state passed House Bill 1596, also known as the BEAM Act, which will come into effect on January 1, 2029.

Under the new law, repeat reckless speeders will be required to install GPS-based “intelligent speed assistance” devices before they can regain limited driving privileges. The law was passed in response to a devastating 2024 crash that killed a woman and three children — the kind of tragedy no civilized person would easily shrug off.

But as usual, the question is not whether we should do something about reckless drivers. That answer is obvious. The question is what kind of infrastructure do we need to build in the name of stopping them?

The BEAM act demonstrates how this rolls out: a horrific tragedy creates a moral opening; a seemingly reasonable fix follows; the machinery is installed, in this case GPS monitoring, monthly override limits, state-approved installers, monthly fees, tampering penalties, and a vehicle that now decides whether you are allowed to exceed a programmed threshold.

It all seems to make sense and all appears reasonable, right? We must do something about dangerous repeat speeders.

Once the infrastructure is there, however, who says it won’t be applied to address unpaid parking fines, or carbon overuse, or people with high credit card debt… or whatever new ‘social emergency’ requires just a little bit more control.

The slippery-slope concern is, to be fair, an inference and not something the law explicitly states. But so was the idea of getting a jab not too long ago — it was a simple enough instruction, until those who wanted to exercise bodily autonomy didn’t comply. Then the claws came out — vax passports, quarantine camps… you remember.

For now, the idea of GPS-based vehicle restriction tied to legal permission to drive is very much real. More of it is to come.

Of all the wild things to come out of what might be the wildest White House in history, Thursday’s X post takes the gold medal.

It’s click bait at its finest, enticing the viewer with the promise of revelations about extraterrestrials and bringing them directly into something… quite different. Official government communication has now apparently wrapped immigration enforcement, meme warfare, UFO cosplay, and gay disco anthems into a radioactive little propaganda burrito. Watch (above) to see what we mean — it’s only 11 seconds long, but packs a spicy punch.

Here’s the gist: “YMCA” plays beside what appears to be the US side of the border wall (inferred) while a UFO abducts a hoodie-wearing figure and deposits him on the other side. Click to Aliens.gov and you’ll see an “Alien Arrest Map,” and an ICE tip line for reporting “suspicious aliens.” Apparently the government spent decades denying UFOs only to reveal the real extraterrestrial threat was your landscaper.

The weird part isn’t the administration’s hardline immigration enforcement; that’s totally on-brand. The weird part is how they’re communicating like an intern with a Canva subscription and a Village People obsession.

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That’s the uncomfortable territory we enter in this latest conversation with evolutionary psychologist Dr. Dani Sulikowski.

The jumping-off point is the recent Tickle v Giggle case in Australia, involving a female-only app, a transgender-identifying male applicant, and a court ruling that Dr. Dani argues has profound implications for sex-based rights, women-only spaces, and the legal hierarchy now being built around gender identity.

But what Dr. Dani is really interested in is the machinery of enforcement: not merely what is being said, but who is making it impossible to disagree. Her argument is provocative — and may be uncomfortable for many. She argues that much of the enforcement comes through female-dominated institutions and female-coded social behaviors: HR departments, universities, health systems, journalism, social shaming, reputational policing, and the relentless moral pressure to prove one belongs to the “nice” side of history.

Dr. Dani brings an evolutionary psychology lens to these questions, arguing that women’s social networks have always carried powerful incentives around belonging, exclusion, status, and reproductive competition. In her view, modern ideological enforcement is psychological, social, and deeply rooted in the human need to remain inside the group.

The conversation goes beyond gender ideology to tackle something much larger: how societies build taboos, how institutions launder absurdity into policy, and how ordinary people learn to say the approved thing even when their eyes tell them otherwise.

As is often the case with Collapse Life conversations, this discussion pushes boundaries and may unsettle some. But if we exist for anything, it is for promoting this kind of discourse, which asks why certain truths now require courage, and why so many people have quietly decided that being brave is too costly.

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HAPPENING TOMORROW!
Legendary farmer Joel Salatin will be our guest LIVE on Sunday, May 31 at 1pm ET (note the time has changed).

What happens when legality and morality drift apart?
Join Zahra Sethna from Collapse Life and Susan Harley from Courageous Conversations for a very special Book Chat tomorrow. This week you’ll get a chance to hear from and interact with farmer, author, and cultural dissenter, Joel Salatin, with a focus on his book, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

Don’t miss it!

Artificial intelligence crept into our lives in stealth mode. At first it was a mere novelty, then it became a convenience, and soon it was an inevitability. It wrote emails for us, summarized meetings, answered questions, generated images, and helped the kids with their homework. We thought of it all as part of “the cloud.” But soon, it began to help companies cut labor and now it is moving everyone a little faster towards a future we may not even want.

Data centers are demanding space in our communities, massive amounts of water and electricity, and sprawling land to house their servers and supporting infrastructure. They need new transmission lines, substations, cooling systems, diesel generators, tax credits, zoning changes, and industrial buildings the size of small towns.

While some communities across the country are pushing back and successfully blocking, stalling, rejecting, or reshaping data center projects, others are finding out too late that the decision to install the infrastructure has already been made.

Earlier this week we noted that infrastructure like facial recognition cameras often arrives quietly, without meaningful oversight or debate beforehand. With data centers, it seems as though some public oversight is happening, but typically a few steps behind the industrial machinery, trying to catch up with approvals that were signed before most people even knew what was coming.

In Kenilworth, New Jersey, CoreWeave is building a massive AI data center on a former pharmaceutical campus right off the Garden State Parkway. The project has been described as a roughly $1.8 billion facility of nearly 400,000 square feet in a borough that spans just two square miles. The data center will draw roughly 66 times more electricity than the entire residential population of the town it sits in. The company received a $250 million state tax credit — $50 million a year for five years — under New Jersey’s AI incentive program. CoreWeave has stated the project will create all of 143 jobs.

In a recent video from The Garden State podcast, host Josh Sobo talks to ordinary people who live nearby who are trying to understand why enormous new electrical poles were going up and why nobody seems to have meaningfully informed them.

“I’ve been here over 10 years and they did not tell anybody they were doing it,” one resident says. He describes the day trucks arrived and started putting up the huge new poles: “There was at least 15 trucks here and they just put them up.”

When asked whether he had spoken to neighbors and what their reaction was, the man’s answer reflected his resignation: “Everybody’s saying, ‘what the hell are we going to do?’ Nobody knew.”

In community after community, residents are discovering late in the process that enormous AI infrastructure projects have been planned for their towns with little public awareness, little plain-language explanation, and little meaningful consent. When they raise their voices to object, they are often confronted with local and state administrations who promise prosperity, economic development, and the old familiar claim that ‘progress’ cannot be halted because of “NIMBYism’ (Not In My Backyard).

These residents are acting exactly as engaged citizens should act when they ask how a massive data center will affect the grid, electricity rates, local infrastructure, noise, emergency planning, land use, and the character of their towns.

All of a sudden, the story has taken a darker turn.

This week, WIRED reported that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have started tracking and warning about a new category of threat: “anti-technology extremism.” WIRED’s scoop, based on more than 1,000 pages of documents obtained through public records requests, describes federal and local agencies that are tracking anti-tech sentiment tied to AI, job displacement, CEO violence, and data center opposition.

The article quotes from a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that uses a novel term for what it purports to be an emerging extremism threat:

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,” the report reads. The term “anti-tech violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

To be clear, there have actually been some real and serious incidents related to this issue. In 2021, a Texas man who plotted to blow up a data center in Virginia was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. In 2025, a Tennessee man was charged with an act of terrorism after he bought explosives and threatened to burn down a data center in Memphis belonging to Elon Musk’s xAI. This February, a man in Illinois was charged with threatening public officials negotiating a data center in the city of Troy, while an Indianapolis city councilman had 13 bullets fired through his front door in April after he voted for a controversial data center.

These attempts to target infrastructure and public administrators should not be minimized or excused, but they stand apart from communities raising opposition to major development projects happening on their doorstep. Protest is democracy. Sabotage and assault are not.

But those cases of isolated violence can become politically useful if they allow a much broader field of civic opposition to be viewed through the lens of ‘threat’. The town hall meeting attendee, person filming a construction site, or neighbor sharing a petition be seen as potential risks through this sleight of hand. It almost certainly puts a chill on the reactions of people in places like Kenilworth, who might be hesitant to ask practical questions for fear of being labeled ‘domestic extremists.’

The timing of this is significant. Just weeks ago, the activist Erin Brockovich launched an AI Data Center Reporting Map to track data center development and community complaints. Her site lists thousands of operational data centers, projects under construction, proposed facilities, and user-submitted locations across the country.

The concerns being reported are not exotic: water, electricity, health, safety, land use, and the feeling that communities are being left in the dark until after permits are already signed.

In other words, the backlash is not fringe. It is local, practical, and growing because people are beginning to understand that AI is an industrial project with neighbors. Those neighbors want answers: Why was this approved? Who benefits? Why does a private, venture-backed AI company deserve a quarter-billion dollars in tax credits? What does the town get in return? Why are public servants ignoring the public?

Their frustration is directed as much at the companies as at the elected officials who are supposed to represent them. Thing is, that’s not extremism. It is local democracy arriving late to a process that seems designed to move faster than they can organize and framed as necessary for the AI economy.

So while communities debate whether or not they want data centers, the real fight is over whether or not they will be allowed to say ‘no’. And that is a debate worth having — loudly, clearly, and on every sidewalk and council chamber where the industrial future is being imposed and democracy is being eroded.

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There was a time when surveillance was difficult by design.

A police officer had to physically follow a suspect, obtain a warrant, wiretap a phone. Surveillance was targeted because of how expensive, labor-intensive, and conspicuous it was. But now, in an age when computerized cameras follow our every move, surveillance is (as the kids say) frictionless.

None of this is surprising to Collapse Life readers. We — and many other outlets on Substack and beyond — have been sounding a warning. Yet, given how complex life has become with a flood of constant news taking up mental bandwidth (are we actually close to a peace in the Middle East?), it’s worth reminding readers that the cliché ‘show me your papers’ is no longer necessary — your face gives you away.

Last week, London’s Metropolitan Police expanded live facial recognition after a legal challenge to the technology failed. The force says scanning faces using live facial recognition cameras and checking them against a police watchlist has helped arrest around 2,500 wanted individuals over the past 18 months.

Supporters argue these numbers are clear evidence of a system that works, while critics say millions of ordinary people were subjected to ambient biometric surveillance in order to identify a relatively small number of suspects.

The thing is, both sides are missing the deeper transformation underway.

The relevant question is not: can facial recognition assist law enforcement? Clearly it can. The question needs to be: at what cost? What are we giving up as a society when we are willing to normalize mass identity scanning as a routine condition of everyday civic life?

For decades, we’ve seen a slow and steady creep of cameras in public spaces: on streets, in stores, airports, offices, and apartment buildings. Most people move through modern life appearing on dozens or hundreds of cameras each day with little thought. But AI-empowered facial recognition fundamentally changes what those cameras can do.

In the past, a closed circuit camera would record footage that a human could review later. But often that footage was never screened unless there was a reason for it.

The kind of facial recognition systems in place today, like the ones being expanded in London, turn every camera into a real-time identity checkpoint — continuously scanning, matching, categorizing, and flagging individuals. So it’s not just that public spaces are being observed; it is that every time you go out in public you are being checked against a database to see if you might be a criminal.

There was a time when you could walk through a city, attend a protest, browse a bookstore, visit a doctor, or simply move through society without automatically generating an identity trail that was tied into a centralized system. Facial recognition has done away with that. Your movement is data and before too long, AI pattern recognition of your day-to-day movements will be overlaid on a behavior map in order to predict your movements, your purchases, your likes and dislikes, and ultimately your crime.

Some readers will no doubt respond with: “going out in public always meant a loss of privacy,” or “I think it’s a good idea that we round up all the criminals!” Consider some recent examples that illustrate the human cost of this so-called development.

In the United States, the ACLU has documented more than a dozen wrongful arrests caused by the police relying on flawed facial recognition matches. One Oklahoma woman spent six months in jail for a crime she had nothing to do with, in a state halfway around the country, all because Maryland police, using facial recognition technology, thought she looked like the suspect. Similarly, in the UK, innocent shoppers who were falsely identified by retail facial recognition systems have struggled to clear their names of suspected shoplifting.

We are entering an era where we are all just one mis-identification away from the violence of the State.

Each use case sparks its own political debate, but the broader pattern is more significant: facial recognition is moving from being a specialized tool for investigations to a normal part of civic infrastructure.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. Just think back to the aftermath of 9/11, and you’ll recognize when the logic of surveillance began being sold to us as a preventative screening tool for our “safety.” As increasingly affordable technologies made mass biometric scanning even more practical it began its spread. As a result, we have real-time identity matching at scale — pioneered in China, coming to a neighborhood near you in America.

At one time, societies would have demanded a public conversation before surveillance was widely deployed. NIMBY — Not in My Back Yard — used to be a real thing when building power generating stations or landfill sites or wind farms. But these days, infrastructure arrives first… often quietly, with meaningful oversight or debate happening afterward, if at all. Once the tools get erected and embedded in transportation, employment, law enforcement, and retail systems, it becomes very difficult to roll them back. So people just learn to live with them. Mission creep happens gradually, and then we forget what it was ever like beforehand.

Technology doesn’t have to be overly dystopian to transform society. It only needs to become ordinary and ubiquitous. That’s the line now being crossed. It’s not even the presence of cameras themselves, but the normalization of continuous facial scanning as a background condition of public life. Once we accept that as routine, we’ll never again default to being anonymous in society.

Your privacy then becomes a temporary privilege, rather than an absolute right. And privileges can be granted and revoked by an institution according to your behavior.

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Last week, we brought you Waymos swarming an Atlanta suburb like a futuristic merry-go-round. This week, we see Elon Musk — the man who promises Mars colonies are just around the corner — confronting reality: the driverless future still struggles with fences, chains, construction barricades, and basic spatial awareness.

Newly unredacted crash reports submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reveal that Tesla Robotaxis have crashed at least twice while being remotely piloted by human teleoperators, with a human safety monitor sitting in the front seat. In one case, the remote operator drove the vehicle into a fence. In another, it scraped a construction barricade at 9 mph. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if even the backup human can’t reliably operate the thing at golf-cart speeds, what exactly is the revolutionary breakthrough we’re being sold here?

The incidents are small enough to sound almost comical. Tesla robotaxis clipped mirrors, tangled with parking lot chains, and failed to avoid a dog darting into the street. The dog escaped unharmed, but sadly our faith in ‘frictionless’ AI perfection did not.

To be fair, every autonomous vehicle company has incidents. Tesla is hardly alone. But the mythology around AI increasingly depends on the belief that human beings are the weak link and that software can smoothly manage the chaos of the real world. Yet reality keeps intervening. Who knew that things like uneven streets, confusing construction zones, random dogs, or bad weather would provide humanity’s defense against the singularity?

“Stop Hiring Humans” is the kind of deliberately provocative marketing messaging that sounds edgy and solicits enthusiastic nods in a Silicon Valley pitch deck.

But when billboards started showing up on the streets of New York and San Francisco, and more recently in the skies over the Bay Area, it landed a bit differently than in the tech bro echo chamber, particularly at a time when millions of people are already anxious about layoffs, stagnant wages, and automation creeping into knowledge work.

The human backlash to AI has been on full display this commencement season, with graduates repeatedly booing speakers who praise AI. At a ceremony at an Arizona community college last week, the wrong names were read and in some cases the graduates' names were not read at all. "We're using a new AI system as our reader," the college president said, leading to loud boos from the audience. (That’s some clever use of AI there, institution of higher learning!)

Graduates in Tennessee were told by their commencement speaker that, “the things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete.” In his speech at Middle Tennessee State University, record executive Scott Borchetta said the quiet part out loud, telling graduates, “AI is rewriting production, as we sit here.” When they booed him, he said: “Hey, then do something about it. It’s a tool. Make it work for you. You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

That particular part of Borchetta’s speech at once condemns higher learning as the useless institution it has become, as well as illustrates that the “great bifurcation” — as yesterday’s podcast guest, Mark Jeftovic, calls it — is underway at full speed. Pretty much everyone is going to be steamrolled because of how fast it’s all moving and how long it will take most people to adapt… cognitively and otherwise.

At the University of Arizona on May 15, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduates not to fear AI and instead to reclaim their agency and figure out how to help shape it, he was repeatedly met with jeers and boos from the audience.

The same thing happened to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield during her remarks to graduates at the University of Central Florida on May 8. She was caught off guard by the reaction when she said, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.”

The reaction is significant, because college graduates are normally the demographic most culturally aligned with technological progress. They are supposed to be the optimistic adopters already inhabiting the future. If even they are beginning to recoil, it suggests something deeper is shifting psychologically.

The older generation of commencement speakers, comfortable in their own success, largely view AI as a tool for increased efficiency and creative breakthroughs. To them, replacing a dozen workers with one AI-assisted operator is a gain. But to the students saddled with debt and hoping to break into their first employment, it evidently sounds like the people holding the reins have no intention of bringing them along.

Just when when you thought that great national nightmare was finally memory-holed, Texas steps up with a reminder. It’s true that everything is bigger in Texas, including the delusion.

to the rescue.

She says some institutions are defying Texas state law and still mandating COVID vaccinations. This includes some medical schools and training institutes. Dr. Bowden recently posted this, for anyone who may need the support:

And if you’re in Utah, there’s this:

A shout-out to both doctors for their courage and bravery in supporting individual choice and bodily autonomy.

Now gird your loins for Ebola and/or Hantavirus. Incoming in 3… 2… 1…

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That’s the tension at the heart of this week’s Collapse Life conversation, a broad-ranging and candid chat with entrepreneur and writer Mark Jeftovic. He argues that the systems now emerging around us are not sudden departures from the past, but the natural acceleration of trends that have been building for decades.

The immediate catalyst for the discussion was Palantir’s now-viral “manifesto” on X — 22 distilled points from Alex Karp’s new book that triggered intense backlash online. But as Jeftovic points out, the outrage itself revealed something important: many people reacted as though these ideas had suddenly materialized out of nowhere, when in reality the infrastructure, incentives, and institutional logic behind them have already been taking shape for years. The difference now is that the euphemisms are beginning to disappear.

Surveillance systems once framed as temporary security measures are becoming normalized parts of everyday life. Digital identity systems are expanding through age verification requirements, financial systems, and online platforms. AI agents increasingly mediate what people see, what they believe, and eventually what decisions they make. Meanwhile, the institutions that once helped buffer ordinary people from massive centralized systems — journalism, churches, unions, local civic structures — no longer inspire much confidence at all.

One of the most compelling ideas in the conversation is Mark’s distinction between the classic “panopticon” model of surveillance and what he calls the “synopticon”: a world where everyone watches everyone else simultaneously. In that environment, surveillance stops feeling exceptional because it becomes ambient. Constant visibility simply becomes the cost of participation.

As the pace of technological acceleration increases, many people appear less interested in freedom than in relief from complexity. The modern world demands constant decisions, constant navigation, constant vigilance. Under those conditions, systems that promise convenience, stability, and frictionless management become deeply attractive — even when they require surrendering autonomy in return.

That is where the conversation becomes especially unsettling.

Jeftovic argues that privacy itself may increasingly become a luxury good: something available mainly to those with enough resources, knowledge, and agency to carve out distance from the systems most people will simply accept as unavoidable. In that future, society bifurcates not just economically, but cognitively — between people capable of navigating increasingly abstract technological systems and those overwhelmed by them.

At the same time, he believes new forms of informal community may emerge to replace collapsing institutions. Smaller networks built around trust, skills, aligned values, and mutual support may become more important than formal political structures themselves. Rather than mass movements, the future may belong to what he calls “high-agency” individuals and tribes learning to build parallel systems beneath increasingly centralized ones.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, this conversation forces an uncomfortable question into the open:

If the technocratic future is no longer hiding behind softer language and corporate branding, what kind of human beings will be capable of navigating it without being absorbed by it entirely?

Relevant links:

Bombthrower: https://bombthrower.com

EasyDNS: https://easydns.com

Ready Network: https://ready.ca

Books mentioned (affiliate links):

Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide for the New Renaissance (W. R. Clement): https://amzn.to/42tt6fZ

What is the Mafia (Gaetano Mosca): https://amzn.to/42Nhl57

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Alex Karp): https://amzn.to/49c2bdi

TV 2000: A Choice Collection of Super Science Fiction (Isaac Asimov, Editor): https://amzn.to/3PzIk0T

Future Shock (Alvin Toffler): https://amzn.to/4dEWDJC

Toxic workplaces appear to be surging at precisely the moment workers have the fewest alternatives.

An industry report released in February indicated a staggering 900% year-over-year increase in the number of employees who reported unsafe, threatening, or intimidating workplaces. Other data corroborates this: roughly 75% of workers in a December 2025 iHire survey and 80% in a Monster survey described having experience with toxic work environments.

Beneath those statistics lies something deeper: workplaces are becoming psychologically harsher environments because they are losing the flexibility they once had to absorb problems.

Managers, under pressure from executives and investors to produce higher output with fewer resources, have less time and incentive to be empathetic. Employees, under pressure from the external economic insecurity they bring with them to work every day, are more defensive, territorial, exhausted, and emotionally volatile than ever before.

In the past, workers could escape a bad workplace by leaving. As recently as the early days of the COVID pandemic, millions did exactly that, leading to what has now been dubbed the Great Resignation.

But just a few years later, labor markets have weakened, competition for jobs has intensified, stimulus checks have dried up, and workers have lost that freedom and mobility.

Toxicity is now harder to flee.

Once people begin feeling trapped inside systems they no longer trust, the psychological effects rarely remain confined to the workplace. That may explain why public civility is tanking, air rage is spiking, restaurant tipping is abominable, and a majority of retail staff say they regularly face verbal abuse and direct threats at work.

That’s how societal contraction first becomes visible in everyday life, as we indicated in our guide, The Collapse Clock: 7 Signs Trouble Is Brewing (available to paid subscribers).

When people no longer believe they can safely exit dysfunctional systems, resentment accumulates, cooperation declines, passive aggression spreads, and workers disengage emotionally.

People think collapse begins with visible ruin, but more often, it begins with the slow deterioration of institutional relationships and a growing realization that the system is no longer designed for human flourishing, but for extraction and maintenance.

The office is one of the first places where people feel that transition intimately because it sits directly at the intersection of economics, hierarchy, identity, and survival.

And perhaps most revealingly, many people now remain inside openly unhealthy environments not because they believe in them, but because they fear the instability outside them even more.

In a healthy system, a dysfunctional institution flounders and eventually dies because there’s choice in the marketplace — healthy work environments attract competency from organizations without healthy workplace cultures. In a system devoid of choice, dysfunction accumulates and compounds leading to quiet quitting, potential sabotage, and even deep resentment. In the absence of a departure option, imprisonment takes a genuine mental toll.

That may be why survey respondents feel toxic workplaces are ubiquitous and unescapable. The details of actual hostility matter, but the deeper warning sign is the inevitable reality there’s nowhere else to go.

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Gigiri is a leafy enclave in Nairobi often dubbed the city’s “Beverly Hills.” Diplomatic vehicles regularly glide down tree-lined streets, past golf clubs, swimming pools, fancy hotels, and gated communities currently preparing for a new influx of international civil servants.

Just over a mile away, the roads narrow into crowded passageways in the Githogoro informal settlement. A recent article in Al Jazeera tells the story of 36-year-old Agnes Karimi, who manages a stall selling meat in Githogoro. Every day, she stands over a wooden table cutting meat in the heat. And every day, she watches part of her stock spoil because she has no electricity to power a refrigerator.

The reality gap between those two locations is now at the center of a growing tension surrounding the United Nations’ proposed expansion in Kenya’s capital. As part of a broader restructuring agenda, the UN is relocating major operations and staff from expensive Western hubs like New York and Geneva to Nairobi, a move framed by officials as both financially responsible and symbolically important for the “Global South.”

The UN argues that operating costs in East Africa are dramatically lower, that Kenya has already established itself as a regional diplomatic center, and that decentralization represents a long-overdue redistribution of global institutional power.

Yet on the ground in Nairobi, stories like Agnes’ highlight how the arrival of thousands of highly paid international staff is not actually an act of empowerment, but rather the expansion of a parallel economy that threatens to deepen the very inequalities international institutions claim to address.

“I only wish that the UN community could help us get electricity,” Agnes told reporters. “I could buy a refrigerator to add to my stock and ensure I have fresh meat and food for my clients.”

It’s not inconsequential that the UN recently warned of a worsening liquidity crisis and budget shortfalls severe enough to affect operations. “The crisis is deepening, threatening programme delivery and risking financial collapse, and the situation will deteriorate further in the near future,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote in a letter to ambassadors in late January.

At nearly the same moment, the UN General Assembly approved close to $340 million for major construction projects at the Nairobi campus, including a new Assembly Hall and infrastructure upgrades intended to accommodate expanded operations. That work is already underway, with the new office buildings inaugurated in early May along with groundbreaking of the conference facility.

Officially, there is no contradiction here. The budget crisis facing the UN and the Nairobi development budget, come from separate funding mechanisms; the investment is being presented as a long-term cost-saving measure. New York and Geneva are among the most expensive administrative cities in the world, while Kenya donated land for the complex. Relocating staff to Nairobi could significantly reduce long-term real estate and operational expenditures, UN officials say.

But the costs avoided by an institution do not disappear, they are simply redistributed. In Nairobi, that is already becoming brutally obvious.

Al Jazeera’s report indicates that the city’s upscale districts — Runda, Muthaiga, Kitisuru — have begun preparing for the expected influx of international personnel. Luxury housing developments are being accelerated. International schools are expanding. Restaurants and long-stay hotels are repositioning themselves toward a new diplomatic clientele. According to Joachim Ombui, chairman of the Landlords and Tenants Association of Kenya, rental prices could rise by 10-15% by 2026 as developers target incoming UN staff with gated communities and mixed-use luxury developments.

Rents of just a few thousand dollars a month may sound like a dream compared to Geneva or Manhattan, but they skew the market for local people in Nairobi. In districts like Ruaka, located near the UN complex, journalist Rwamba Njagi told Al Jazeera that rents that recently sat near $155 per month have climbed beyond $380 in only a few years, driven by speculation, infrastructure expansion, and investor anticipation surrounding international demand.

Housing costs already consume between 40% and 60% of many middle-class incomes in Nairobi, according to local real estate reports cited by Al Jazeera. The arrival of thousands of globally salaried professionals into an already strained housing market will not go over particularly well.

Njagi described how families who inherited land in these rapidly developing areas sold to investors and developers, only to return later as watchmen and caretakers on the very properties their families once owned. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of Nairobi residents continue living in informal settlements occupying only a tiny fraction of the city’s land area.

The geography begins to resemble something older than globalization likes to admit.

Colonial administrative capitals were often organized around insulated districts where foreign officials lived beside, but not within, the societies they governed. Roads, electricity, sanitation, and security concentrated around those enclaves first. Economic activity flowed toward them. Land speculation followed. Entire urban landscapes reorganized themselves around the needs of a relatively small international class whose purchasing power vastly exceeded local norms.

The modern diplomatic ecosystem insists it represents the opposite of that history. Its language is development, inclusion, sustainability, partnership. Yet the polished rhetoric collides with the material reality of rising rents, speculative housing markets, and infrastructure increasingly optimized around globally connected corridors.

Years of development promises have also produced visible exhaustion. One resident of Githogoro, Simon Awene, told Al Jazeera that “the only time anyone helps us is when they are pushing for their agendas.” International organizations arrive carrying the language of development and opportunity for all, yet for many communities living beside these projects, daily life changes very little except for the cost of remaining where they already are.

The deeper question hanging over Nairobi is whether global institutions still understand the environments they create around themselves. The UN presents Nairobi as evidence of decentralization and empowerment — a transfer of institutional weight away from expensive Western capitals toward Africa. Yet the mechanics of the move increasingly resemble a familiar form of administrative offshoring, where wealthy institutions relocate operations to lower-cost regions while importing wage structures capable of distorting the surrounding economy.

The result is a schizophrenic city, one torn apart by two parallel realities existing side by side. Ultimately, the question becomes whether the UN’s relevance in a rapidly changing world actually unleashes forces it purports to combat and bifurcates places like Nairobi into K-shaped economies where everything flows to the wealthy internationals at the expense of locals eking out a living.

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Princeton University just killed a 133-year-old honor system, which allowed students to take exams unproctored, because too many students were cheating with AI.

One of the most prestigious universities in the world — an institution whose entire brand rests on cultivating intellectual excellence, character, and self-discipline — has concluded that the scaffolding that holds its exam system together no longer functions in the age of ChatGPT.

A 2025 survey found that more than 1 in 4 Princeton seniors admitted to using AI to cheat. Roughly half said they knew of honor code violations. And that’s at Princeton — meaning the actual situation across the broader education system is likely much, much worse.

Needless to say, this is bigger than “Pffft — kids these days!” or technology changing classroom dynamics. It points to something deeper: the collapse of trust in institutions that once depended on internalized norms rather than external enforcement.

The irony is almost too perfect. Students are taking on life-altering debt to obtain elite credentials while increasingly outsourcing the intellectual labor required to earn them. Then, many will graduate into a labor market where the same AI systems they used to cheat are rapidly consuming the entry-level white-collar jobs their degree was supposed to secure in the first place.

Debt-financed credentialism meets automated cognition.

For years, the “worst case” climate scenario, the one behind countless headlines about earth becoming uninhabitable, mass extinction events, and civilization-ending warming, was treated as the default future.

It was a very useful tool to scare an entire generation into believing they were inheriting a dying planet. It spawned activists like Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion movement, the media had a field day with it, and a certain brand of politicians used it to curry favor and create policy.

Now, climate scientists are retiring the scenario, admitting it was never really plausible. It assumed exploding population growth, endless coal expansion, and virtually no meaningful technological shift toward cleaner energy — in other words, a world that does not resemble the reality we inhabit.

The so-called RCP8.5 scenario didn’t just shape climate science, it normalized a culture of permanent emergency, amping up the hysteria (to use a Spinal Tap reference) to 11. Armed with RCP8.5, every problem was existential and every demand for skepticism was treated like heresy. The hypothetical modeling became the eschatological doctrine of the high-priests of climate and end-time prophecy for the laptop class.

Turns out the world may not be ending quite as advertised. But once a narrative gets entrenched it’s very hard to dismantle. It’s also worth remembering that this is what the future looks like — Silicon Valley is betting on technocrats displacing the political system with an unelected, unaccountable expert class. We saw what this did with a doctor who headed the COVID response in America; consider this a second example of what happens when the grip of hysteria fomented by experts is revised downward. No one is held accountable for the costs of the error, and real science dies slowly from yet one more papercut.

Late-stage societies often look bizarrely decadent and financially stressed at the same time. People cut back on groceries, delay children, live with roommates into their 30s — then queue overnight for a luxury collaboration object manufactured to create artificial scarcity and social buzz. Rome had bread and circuses. We have riots for Swatch watches.

Swatch announced its newest collaboration — with watch maker Audemars Piguet. The watch is called Royal Pop, comes in eight colors, and costs around $400. Potential re-sellers hoping to score a few and flip them for thousands of dollars have been queuing up in places like New York, London, and Bangkok.

Those gamblers may be sorely mistaken — after all, we expect to see these hit Ebay and other marketplaces for a significant mark-up to capture the initial excitement. But honestly, the Royal Pop pocket watch feels more like infantilized luxury for people who want to cosplay eccentric aristocracy while standing in line at the mall. All that’s missing is a monocle, top hat and cane — a modern, Mr. Peanut aesthetic!

Beneath all of this is a deeper psychological shift: when the future feels uncertain, people increasingly optimize for the present — instant gratification. Why save patiently for a stable middle-class future that no longer feels guaranteed when you can at least participate in the spectacle now? Which creates one of the greatest contradictions of this era: people simultaneously insisting the economy is collapsing while stampeding each other in shopping malls to buy a $400 plastic watch on a lanyard.

Civilization may be fraying, but the merch drop starts at 9 am sharp.

A chilling glimpse of our dystopian future came this week via a local news story out of Atlanta, Georgia.

Residents of a neighborhood in the city’s northwest say dozens of self-driving Waymo cars end up endlessly circling their cul-de-sac.

There’s something almost darkly comic about the image: empty robot taxis looping through a suburb where they don’t belong, unable to comprehend why they are there or find a way out.

The best part of the story is when neighborhood parents put out a plastic “Kid Alert” warning sign, which effectively confused the ‘advanced’ AI vehicles into gridlock.

The official metrics say the system is working — Waymo points to “500,000 weekly trips” and improved safety statistics — but the lived experience of ordinary people feels increasingly surreal and invasive. Parents watching empty cars orbit their street at 6 am are not experiencing “innovation.” They’re experiencing loss of agency over the physical space where they live.

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Modern agricultural equipment has become astonishingly expensive, deeply computerized, and often impossible to repair without specialized technicians. In some cases, machinery worth over a million dollars can be disabled by something as absurd as a failed radio module tied into the tractor’s communication system (a.k.a. its CANBus system).

Wilson’s answer is so simple that it’s radical: build a machine that owners can actually afford, understand, repair, and maintain — with minimized technology touch points.

Beneath the surface discussion of tractors sits something much larger. As societies move toward increasingly software/app-driven infrastructure — from appliances to vehicles to farming itself — more people are beginning to question whether “smart” technology is genuinely improving their lives, or simply creating new forms of dependency, surveillance, and economic extraction.

The conversation also explores the mounting pressure on farmers themselves, from fertilizer shortages and tariff disruptions to shrinking profit margins and rising consolidation. Wilson argues that many farmers already understand the fragility of the system better than anyone else — because they live inside and with its constraints every day.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Relevant links:

UrsaAg official website

That “viral” Farms.com video

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Last summer, during a two-month long drought in Nova Scotia, a province on Canada’s east coast, the public was told the forests had become too dangerous for human presence.

As memories of the province’s devastating 2023 wildfire season still lingered, Premier Tim Houston’s government invoked sweeping emergency powers, and effectively banned citizens from entering “the woods.”

The definition was so broad it extended far beyond dense forest. It suddenly became illegal to enter marshes, rock barrens, trails with some tree canopy, even sparsely wooded areas. Busy-body ‘Karens’ — some of whom even installed trail cameras — helped conservation officers monitor access points marked with yellow police caution tape, while emergency alerts and signs on highways warned residents to stay out. Violators faced fines beginning at $25,000, climbing to nearly $30,000 once court costs were added.

The message was clear: ordinary human activity itself is an unacceptable fire risk in an era of climate instability.

But while hikers, fishermen, campers, and tourists were being locked out of the landscape, a very different kind of activity was allowed to continue inside those same forests. That’s because the ban largely exempted industrial forestry operations. In some areas, those operations include helicopters spraying forests with glyphosate — the controversial herbicide at the center of years of lawsuits, scientific disputes, and growing public concern over links to cancer and ecological harm. The irony could not be clearer — humans were the dangerous impact, not the chemical sprays of industry.

What emerged in Nova Scotia last summer was not simply a debate about wildfire prevention. It was a revealing portrait of how modern governments increasingly interpret environmental risk through the behavior of ordinary people. The contradiction could hardly be starker. People walking quietly along a wooded trail were the public threat, but an industrial helicopter dispersing a potentially toxic herbicide across thousands of acres remained classified as forest management and so for them, it was business as usual.

For decades, industrial forestry practices in North America have transformed diverse mixed forests into tightly managed softwood plantations optimized for commercial yield. Broadleaf species like birch, maple, and aspen are often viewed as undesirable competitors because they slow the growth of commercially valuable conifers destined for pulp, lumber, and export markets.

Glyphosate spraying became one of the tools used to eliminate them. A recent investigation by Mother Jones highlighted how forestry spraying programs across North America continue at near-record levels even as public concern over glyphosate intensifies and legal pressure mounts against manufacturers like Bayer.

The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.

But mixed forests do not behave the same way in fire conditions as dense conifer monocultures. Broadleaf trees tend to retain more moisture, interrupt canopy continuity, and burn differently than tightly packed softwoods. Scientists and environmental groups have long warned that this practice alters forest composition in ways that heightens wildfire vulnerability, noting that monoculture forestry can create landscapes simultaneously more efficient economically but more fragile ecologically.

The immediate aftermath of aerial spraying may also leave behind large amounts of dry organic debris across the forest floor, creating additional combustible material during drought conditions.

In other words, the same industrial processes justified as “managing” the forest likely contribute to making it far more combustible.

Yet public messaging rarely focuses on the structure of industrial forestry itself, instead putting the responsibility entirely on individuals. Closing “the woods” in Nova Scotia last summer was reportedly because of the danger posed by human presence: a cigarette, a campfire, a spark from an ATV, a hiker simply stepping into the woods.

The system creating the broader ecological conditions remained politically untouchable until last month, when the contradiction eventually collided with the courts.

On April 17, 2026, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia struck down the woods ban following a constitutional challenge launched by Canadian military veteran Jeffrey Evely, who intentionally violated the restrictions in the presence of police — an act of peaceful civil disobedience — in order to receive a citation, by doing so having legal standing, and thus forcing judicial review.

In a sharply worded ruling, Justice Jamie S. Campbell found the order “unreasonable,” noting that the province’s definition of “the woods” was so vague that citizens were forced into absurd interpretive exercises simply to determine where they could legally walk.

More damaging still, court proceedings revealed that provincial authorities had failed to meaningfully consider the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms before implementing the restrictions. According to reporting and legal filings surrounding the case, commercial forestry interests had secured operational exemptions while ordinary Nova Scotians absorbed the burden of the emergency measures.

Despite the important constitutional rebuke, the ruling passed with relatively little national attention compared to the wall-to-wall global media coverage the original emergency declaration garnered. The emergency alerts, press conferences, and fear-driven messaging surrounding the ban reached millions. The court decision invalidating it arrived quietly, many months later, through scattered headlines and a lengthy if somewhat convoluted, judicial ruling.

Premier Tim Houston responded to the ruling — not with retreat or regret — but defiance, telling reporters he “would do it again.”

That statement may ultimately reveal more than intended: Nova Scotia’s woods ban was never just about wildfire prevention. It reflected a broader governing instinct increasingly visible across the Western world. Large centralized systems are treated as necessary and legitimate even when they generate systemic fragility, while ordinary decentralized human behavior is recast as the primary source of risk.

The citizen is the hazard; the industrial monoculture a critical business interest. The hiker is restricted; the helicopter continues to its deadly overhead spraying.

When a perversion like this takes hold, governments gain extraordinary power to regulate daily life under the banner of public safety. There were many, many people in Nova Scotia who gladly complied with the ban. There were many citizens who gladly snitched on their fellow citizens. But the most unsettling lesson of all? The ability for democratically elected governments to speak the language of ecological stewardship, while protecting the very systems that simplify ecosystems, erode resilience, and increase dependency on industrial and chemical intervention.

When one activity is framed as environmental stewardship while another becomes a punishable public threat, it’s no longer merely a contradiction. We’ve entered the age where the human has become the problem — and that means all of us eventually become expendable.

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