Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

And James Dale Davidson joins us on the show. Welcome, man. Thank you. My pleasure.

Well, now, the book is called The Breaking Point, Profit from the Coming Money Cataclysm. Why will there be a money cataclysm?

Well, I have a lot of different answers to that question. I think it's overdetermined,

as they used to say in physics. We have a system which has as exhausted its potential.

The whole era of big government, which was driven by large-scale, fixed industrial

capitalism, has passed away. And we now have dis-economies to scale in mass production.

And we have also dis-economies in the projection of power. There was a time encapsulated by Napoleon when he said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

When it was true that the bigger the battalion, the more likely you were to succeed.

And this led to a growth of government to support the growth of a military establishment

that was large enough and powerful enough

to stand on its own and win in conflict.

So countries that wanted to survive had to have big governments.

And this led to centralization.

We had very rapid growth after the introduction of hydrocarbon inputs into the world economy,

after the Industrial Revolution began in England in the last part of the 18th century.

And then in the 20th century, we used more energy than had been used by human beings since the beginning of time.

And this supported a very rapid growth of the economy,

a very big government, and a lot of centralization.

But the growth that came about because of the huge increase in energy inputs

that basically stalled out some time ago.

In fact, if you look back to the beginning of this century, we were using more energy

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