Clusterfuck Nation: Podcast

KunstlerCast 442 — Elizabeth Nickson on Globalism and its Dark Mysteries

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:57:21 GMT

Elizabeth Nickson is a Canadian journalist, author, and blogger who writes the weekly Welcome to Absurdistan newsletter on Substack, focused on politics, threats to individual liberty, and restoring rural economies. She began her career reporting for Time Magazine before becoming European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine and has since written for an extensive roster of publications including Harper’s, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Her first book was The Monkey Puzzle Tree, an investigation of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control program. Herr second was Eco-Fascists: How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.

KunstlerCast 441 — Heather Mac Donald on the Exhausting Journey back to Normal

James Howard Kunstler — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:35:20 GMT

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. A New York Times bestselling author, she has written extensively on policing, criminal justice, race relations, higher education, and the pursuit of merit in American institutions. Her influential books include The War on Cops and When Race Trumps Merit.

A non-practicing lawyer with a J.D. from Stanford, she holds a B.A. in English from Yale (summa cum laude) and an M.A. from Cambridge University. Mac Donald is a frequent commentator on Fox News and other outlets, known for her data-driven, fearless analysis of cultural and policy issues.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.

KunstlerCast 440 — Dr. Shane Simonsen on Zero Input Agriculture, Taming the Apocalypse, and the Neo-Medieval Future

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:15:38 GMT

Dr. Shane Simonsen is an Australian experimental farmer, author, podcaster, and thinker based in the subtropical Sunshine Coast hinterland of Queensland (on around 40 acres among the Glasshouse Mountains). He holds a PhD in biochemistry and previously worked in academia and as a teacher before leaving in his late 20s — disillusioned by institutional structures, the global financial crisis, and concerns over peak oil— to pursue independent work in biology, ecology, and sustainable systems. For the last decade he obsessively developed hardy staple crops for his little mountain village. Australia is uniquely vulnerable to energy system disruptions and totally unprepared for post-industrial agriculture.

Shane blogs weekly at Recombination Nation. His podcast of the same name interviews amateur plant breeders, geopolitical experts and culture innovators.

His non-fiction book Taming the Apocalypse explores a post-industrial future built purely on biological technology

He also wrote a novel under the nom-de-plume Haldane P. Doyle, Our Vitreous Womb, imagining a biotechnological civilization in the distant future.

This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold and silver. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK

KunstlerCast 439 — Alex Krainer on Disturbances in the Geopolitical Field

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:24:51 GMT

Alex Krainer is a Croatian-born market analyst, author, and former hedge fund manager based in Monaco. Coming of age in socialist Yugoslavia, Krainer’s unconventional path took him from serving in Croatia’s war of independence to becoming one of the few fund managers to generate positive returns (+27-percent) during the 2008 financial crisis. He founded his own investment management firm in 2007 and later joined Altana Wealth, where he developed systematic portfolio allocation strategies bridging technology and finance. Krainer is the author of Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading“(ranked #1 by Financial-Expert.co.uk), The Grand Deception, and Alex Krainer’s Trend Following Bible. A sought-after voice on geopolitics, commodities markets, and global finance, he publishes regular market analysis through TrendCompass and his Substack, offering sharp, unconventional insights shaped by his unique background navigating both socialist regimes and Western financial markets.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 438 — Stephan Sanders-Faes on Europe's Glide Path to Suicide

James Howard Kunstler — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:40:22 GMT

Stephan Sander-Faes is a professor of history teaching European civilization at the University of Bergen, Norway (faculty profile: https://www4.uib.no/en/find-employees/Stephan.Sander-Faes). His work focuses mainly on post-mediaeval (Central) Europe. He blogs semi-anonymously about European affairs at https://fackel.substack.com/ (click and sign up, it’s free). When he’s not teaching, he tends to his livestock (follow his sheep at https://bsky.app/profile/ramsesandhisgang.bsky.social).

In whatever spare time he has left, he explores our analogue, pre-internet world cataloging his late grandfather’s vintage picture postcard collection, which you may as well check out over at

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 437 — Dr. Drew Miller, Col. USAF (Ret.) on the Touchy Subject of Social / Political / Economic Collapse

James Howard Kunstler — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:19:41 GMT

Dr Drew Miller, Col USAF (Ret) holds a masters degree and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. He had a distinguished career as an intelligence officer serving overseas in Iraq and as a senior executive in the Department of Defense (Now Dept, of War). Today he is CEO of Fortitude Ranch the nation’s largest catastrophe survival community and he is also Managing Director of the consulting firm Fortitude Collapse Preparedness. His new book is Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse, from Skyhorse Publishing.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 436 — Elizabeth Nickson on the Fall of Canada and Other Sorrows of Western Civ

James Howard Kunstler — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:32:06 GMT

Elizabeth Nickson is a distinguished veteran of American and Canadian journalism. She was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine and became European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine in its last years of monthly publication. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MK-ULTRA mind control program. She followed with Eco-Fascists: How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. Her next is The Green Book, a collection of her essays on the environmental junta, coming in February 2026. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. Elizabeth Blogs at Welcome to Absurdistan on Substack.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK

KunstlerCast 435 — JHK yaks about his new book, "Look I'm Gone," with Literary Compadre, Ted Clear

James Howard Kunstler — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:59:16 GMT

This one’s a little break from the usual — it’s me talking to a friend about my new novel, Look, I’m Gone with a particular emphasis on the iconic American author JD Salinger, who has a meaty role as a character in my book, playing himself, kind of a first for Salinger, who passed away in 2010. My friend Ted Cleary is a writer, artist, and musician from New York City. He studied English and history at Columbia University and has taught writing and literature for several decades. He’s been a landscape gardener, assistant district attorney, and stroke oar for an American rowing team racing traditional Irish fishing boats in western Ireland. Two energetic novellas, At the End of the World and Song of the Cicada, are available on Amazon, and he has recently launched Substack as (tedcleary1) .

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 434 — Charles Marohn on Strong Towns and the Battle to Reform the Fiasco of Suburban Sprawl

James Howard Kunstler — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:48:04 GMT

Charles Marohn is the founder and president of Strong Towns. With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous through classic, traditional town planning. He’s the bestselling author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis. Like your host, JHK, Chuck is a member in good standing of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national movement to repair and reform the fiasco of Suburban sprawl lanes development.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 433 — Piero San Giorgio Has Just Returned from Russia

James Howard Kunstler — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:57:10 GMT

Piero San Giorgio is one of Switzerland’s best selling authors. After 20 years as an executive in the software business, Piero decided to write essays about the future. His first book Survive —The Economic Collapse was in the top-50 best selling books of 2012 in France and has sold over 200,000 copies, with translations into English, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Romanian, Polish, Turkish etc. and has a foreword by JHKunstler. His other books are , CBRN (How to Survive Nuclear, Radiological, Biological,and Chemical events), and Giuseppe: A Survival Story, a biographical novel about his grandfather’s ordeals in WW2.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 432 — Jeffrey Tucker of The Brownstone Institute on his new book, The Spirits of America

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:55:25 GMT

Jeffrey Tucker is founder and president of Brownstone Institute, Senior Economics Columnist at Epoch Times, and author of 15 books. His newest book, The Spirits of America, is a reflection on American values – cultivated deep in US history dating back to the founding. The book is meant to inspire us to a restoration of our once-sturdy common culture in this period of great political turbulence. Please take the time to visit the Brownstone Institute’s excellent website and its stable of fine writers.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 431 — Thomas Fowler on the Diminishing Returns of Artificial Intelligence

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:51:41 GMT

Thomas B. Fowler is the author of five books and over 150 articles and reviews, ranging over philosophy, theology, engineering, physics, and mathematics. He is an expert in analyzing systems and procedures for the U.S government. He says he is “keenly aware of the rapid politicization that has occurred not just in the humanities, but increasingly in the science, technology, and mathematics (STEM) areas, and is devoted to debunking the shoddy reasoning behind many contemporary trends such as the extravagant claims made for Artificial Intelligence.” His latest book is Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Limitations, Benefits and Dangers — and is the subject of this conversation. He is president of the Xavier Zubiri Foundation of North America, and has translated several of the Spanish philosopher’s books into English. Currently an independent consultant and Adjunct Professor of Engineering at George Mason University, he has lectured widely in the U.S., South America, and Europe on science and philosophy. His doctorate from George Washington University is in system theory.

KunstlerCast 430 — Charles Hugh Smith, blogger at "Of Two Minds," Talking Finance and The Ultra-Processed Life

James Howard Kunstler — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 02:08:52 GMT

Charles Hugh Smith founded his blog Of Two Minds in 2005 after 17 years of free-lance journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area. His 4,600 posts on the economy, society, housing and technology have logged over 150 million page views. He is the author of 9 novels and 20 non-fiction books on socio-economic-political dynamics, including The Mythology of Progress and Ultra-Processed Life. His work can also be found on Substack and Patreon.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 429 — Matt and Maxim Smith on "The Preparation" — Becoming a Man in Uneasy Times

James Howard Kunstler — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 18:59:22 GMT

Matt Smith is an American entrepreneur and economic commentator who relocated to Uruguay in 2021, where he operates a regenerative cattle ranch. He co-hosts the podcast Doug Casey’s Take with author and economist Doug Casey, offering analysis on global markets, monetary policy, and geopolitical trends. Matt also publishes the financial newsletter Crisis Investing on Substack. He is also co-author, with his 20 year old son Maxim Smith and Mr. Casey, of the superb new book, The Preparation: How to become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous about making boys into effective autonomous men in these uneasy times.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 428 — Swimming in Deep Waters with Author Jasun Horsley

James Howard Kunstler — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 17:09:37 GMT

Jasun Horsley is the author of many books, including Seen & Not Seen, Prisoner of Infinity, 16 Maps of Hell, and Big Mother, which examine how popular culture, politics, occultism, science, and pseudo-spirituality all overlap on a covert, multigenerational social-engineering continuum that includes secret societies, intelligence agencies, and organized crime networks. His own Children of Job podcast can be found on Substack and iTunes. Jasun currently keeps goats and chickens and tends grapes in Galicia, Spain, while reading about Jesus. He describes himself as a lifetime truth-seeker and "hell-mapper” and he does not use AI programs.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 427 — Eugyppius on the Retardation of Europe and "Schoolmarmocracy"

James Howard Kunstler — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:00:36 GMT

"Eugyppius” is a former academic who blogs about the pandemic aftermath and the pathological politics of modern Germany. He spent much of his life abroad and over a decade in American universities as a grad student and a teacher. He writes in English on Substack. He is very careful about revealing more of his identity given the extreme censorship and cancellation action in his country these days. You can find him at Eugyppius.com.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 426 — John Seaman, Retired DEA Investigator on Prosecuting Conspiracy Cases

James Howard Kunstler — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 21:22:19 GMT

John Seaman has corresponded with me over a year proposing a straightforward way to prosecute government officials who, so far, have gotten away with crimes committed in the RussiaGate Hoax and other high-level mischief due to the five-year statute of limitations. John is is a retired Supervisory Federal Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with 30 years of experience. His special area of expertise there was as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in conducting conspiracy investigations for federal prosecutions. He writes the Substack series, The Rule of Law — Corruption and National Security. He’s on social media: Twitter handle: @John30113715761 or Truth handle: @johnRuleoflawmatters

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 425 — Mike McCormick on Joe Biden, the Democrats' Interminable Nightmare

James Howard Kunstler — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:22:17 GMT

Author Mike McCormick was a stenographer with the White House Press Office from 2002 to 2018. His duties included being a world traveler on Air Force One and Air Force Two, even into combat zones. He saw the presidency up close, with Oval Office and West Wing duties 24/7.

His books, available on Amazon, include The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, and An Almost Insurmountable Evil.

He is determined to testify under oath about the Joe Biden crimes he witnessed.

His Substack Midnight in the Laptop of Good and Evil led to him being interviewed by congressional investigators looking into the Biden Crime Family.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

KunstlerCast 424 — Ray Jason Navigating the Shoals of Collapse with the Sea Gypsy Tribe

James Howard Kunstler — Tue, 20 May 2025 14:39:11 GMT

Ray Jason has been writing the Sea Gypsy Philosopher blog, for the last twelve years largely touching on politics and social issues. His commentary is filtered through his unusual lived experience of being a longtime ex-pat open water sailor living on his boat, the Aventura.

Ray’s greatest contribution to the blogosphere is his Sea Gypsy Tribe concept — his belief that small bands of ocean-dwelling cruisers can both survive and flourish after any type of catastrophe which is the main thrust of our conversation here Ray’s personal life path has been quite out of the ordinary. Right after college graduation, he was drafted and ended up in Vietnam on a U.S. Navy ammunition ship.

Post-service malaise steered him away from the so-calleed Real World and he spent the next 20 years as a highly successful San Francisco street performer — juggling, his specialty. When that scene began to deteriorate, he commenced his sea gypsy life and has not lived on land since 1992.

We speak with Ray today aboard his sailboat somewhere in the Banana Latitudes of Central America.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

KunstlerCast 423 — Dr. Meryl Nass on the Echoes of Covid and Medicine's Nervous Breakdown

James Howard Kunstler — Sat, 03 May 2025 23:31:11 GMT

Meryl Nass is an internal medicine physician and was the first person in the world to prove that an epidemic (anthrax in Rhodesia) was due to biological warfare, in 1992. She has given 6 Congressional testimonies regarding anthrax, biological warfare, Gulf War syndrome and vaccine safety, and has consulted for the Cuban Ministry of Health, the World Bank and the Director of National Intelligence. She blogs at Meryls Chaos Newsletter on Substack

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger