KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

JHK chats with architect and neuroscientist Ann Sussman about our damaged everyday surroundings of buildings, streets, and cities in the USA — and how they got that way.

Ann Sussman, RA, is passionate about understanding the human experience of the built environment. Her book, Cognitive Architecture, Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (Routledge, 2015) co-authored with Justin B. Hollander, won the Place Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) in 2016. Her new book, Urban Experience & Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm, (Routledge 2020) also co-edited with Hollander, is due out in October. It explores the role PTSD — specifically veterans' brain trauma post-WWI — had in creating Modern Architecture. Ann believes new understandings from neuroscience on how the brain works and what humans need to see to be at their best, will transform architecture, including the narrative of how Modern Architecture came to be. Ann recently co-founded the non-profit The Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc (theHapi.org) to help people better understand how humans experience buildings. She currently teaches a new course on perception called Architecture & Cognition, at the Boston Architectural College (BAC). She blogs on the biology behind design that delights at GeneticsofDesign.com.

JHK hunkers down with Simons Chase, a new voice on the financial scene. Mr. Chase is the CIO and owner of independent investment firm, SC Capital Management LLC. He has over 20 years of media, finance and early-stage investing experience on the frontiers of emerging trends. He started his career as a structured finance banker in the oil & gas sector in Russia in the 1990s. His blog, LBS.co, explores trends in investing, economics and society.

Art Berman is an independent oil geologist and industry analyst. We go pretty deep into the recent alarming price crash of crude oil, the vagaries and destiny of the shale oil business, and the implications for the American economy. Art is based in Houston.

He publishes his own blog at: https://www.artberman.com/blog/

The theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Charles Hugh Smith founded his blog Of Two Minds in 2005 after 17 years of free-lance journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of Two Minds has grown to thousands of posts that have logged tens of millions of page views on his site and many others such as Zero Hedge and Peak Prosperity. He is the author of eight novels and fourteen non-fiction books on socio-economic-political dynamics. He lives by Winston Churchill's dictum that "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

Charles's Blog: OfTwoMinds.com

Charles's Books:

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic

Money and Work Unchained

Gail Tverberg is an analyst who has been researching the connection between oil limits and the economy for nearly 10 years. She writes a widely-followed blog called Our Finite World. Her background is as an actuary, working as a consultant to insurance companies. She also has a foot in the academic world, where she has lectured and written academic articles, and taught at the China's University of Petroleum in Beijing.

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is the intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary, covering all the bases: culture, politics, finance, science, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. Here we attempt to make sense of the fast-moving corona virus story and the increasingly weird and troubling second-order events spinning off of it into the global economy and politics. Dave tweets at @DavidBCollum

Nir Buras is a PhD architect and planner with over 30 years of in-depth experience in strategic planning, architecture, and transportation design, as well as teaching and lecturing. His planning, design and construction experience includes East Side Access at Grand Central Terminal, New York; International Terminal D, Dallas-Fort-Worth; the Washington DC Dulles Metro line; work on the US Capitol and the Senate and House Office Buildings in Washington. Projects he has worked on have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, local newspapers, and trade magazines. Buras, whose original degree was Architect and Town Planner, has watched first-hand how architecture and urbanism impact each other. After the last decade of applying in practice the classical method that Buras absorbed in his practice, his book, The Art of Classic Planning (Harvard University Press, 2019), shows how we can best face the future by once more building beautiful, balanced, and durable urbanism.

The theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Ben Hunt is the Chief Investment Officer at Second Foundation Partners, a consultant for large institutional investors, and the author of Epsilon Theory, a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lenses of game theory, history and nature. Over 100,000 professional investors and allocators across 200 countries read Epsilon Theory for its fresh perspective and novel insights into market dynamics. In prior positions, Ben has managed a billion dollar hedge fund and served as Chief Strategist for a $13 billion dollar asset manager. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, was a tenured Political Science professor, and has co-founded three technology companies. Ben spends lots of time on a family owned farm, which inspires many original ideas on the parallels between human and animal behavior

The new theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. His books include Developing an Economics for the Post-crisis World (2015) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017). He lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The new theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Larry Kummer is The editor of the Fabius Maximus website.

FabiusMaximus.com

He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles, retiring as a VP and Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He was a Boy Scout volunteer leader for 15 years, running a Troop for 7 years and retiring as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles. He began writing about geopolitics in 2003

A sampling of important posts from Fabius Maximus:

America isn't falling like the Roman Empire. We're falling like the Roman Republic. Welcome to ClownWorld, the final meme for America- It is the next phase of the "crazy years", long ago predicted by Robert Heinlein. A new, dark picture of America's future- our institutions are falling like a line of dominoes.

Larry says, "I've written 140 posts about ways to reform America. They are the least popular posts. We want simple morality tales, to cheer the good people and boo the bad. We flee from talk about responsibility and work like vampires from daylight. None of the risking 'our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor' for us. We see ourselves as customers in a restaurant, whining that the menu isn't good enough for people so awesome."