Thanks for the counterpoint to Shryock's BS article. I was appalled at how much positive feedback that guy received. Oh well.
And on another note about JW Powell... yes, he did say that the desert lands of the American west would not support heavy settlement,. However, his solution was to advocate for CLEAR-CUTTING the entire Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains, because those pesky pine trees sucked up all the water and snow melt. Think of it... the ENTIRE western slope, denuded.
Powell envisioned making Utah and northern Arizona into green paradises, by using all that "wasted" runoff from the western slope. In many ways, by today's standards, the man was a bigger nutcase than this guy Shryock.
Thanks for the balance. best, --je
(PS: here's a simple reference, done in a hurry. But there are many more to support it):
But it helps if a person like Shyrock...what a name...has the LOOK of a generally accepted authority figure (older, white male, huge beard...OR young, pretty, "look like a person I can score with."..someone the "common folk" will pay attention to) for them to get traction.
If he had just written "I have a teenage daughter/granddaughter, and I'm deeply concerned about where all this is headed and think we should be getting ready for the worst" that would've been a nice article. But alas...
It’s especially bad to read that kind of an article at midnight…you can swing right into Amazon and wake up the next day to remember that you bought 100 pounds of lentils before you went to sleep. Seriously, though, I do think we aren’t prepared for the high prices and the shortages. Parts of Asia are already rationing fuel and shortening work weeks so people don’t have to drive.
The US is awash in gasoline. The gas companies are making a ton of money. Fertilizer and other commodities won’t be so easily replaced. On the upside, I think this “war” has done a better job prompting support for renewable energy than the Green New Deal.
I agree with you. We're in for a bad time, and it doesn't have to reach famine levels to hurt or even kill the most vulnerable Americans. I have no problem with stocking up on lentils. We have a whole system of dry goods with enough to share, and we donate regularly to food pantries. I believe in being ready for prolonged disasters, but there's definitely practical and sustainable ways to do it.
I read his piece yesterday. And while I don’t buy the mysticism angle for even a moment (that he listens to trees for god’s sake), his warnings, while exaggerated, are not to be taken lightly. There are a number of authorities who have been espousing similar theories in recent days.
We don’t wish to believe our systems are nearing collapse, but when we do a little math on subtraction issues due to oil rollbacks, a fairly clear picture emerges. We are in trouble. The folks who deliver our food and other goods will be unable to afford the diesel to run the semis. Immigrants are being removed from planting and harvesting crops. It does not take rocket science to game this out. Grocery store shelves WILL begin to show the ramifications of the Iran war in weeks. That’s reality, like it or not.
You're not alone. I was taking it all in until the article got to the part about mortgages and bills. Then his facts and conclusions just seemed, out of fit. And then I read his follow-up article where he pulls back and says U.S. won't experience famine, other parts of the world could, which is something already happening...
We're in a similar situation. It's hard to talk about any of our real problems with our friends and family, etc., and that makes us vulnerable to this rhetoric.
As I said in other articles, I'm a prepper. I fully believe in building a dry goods system, building rain/dew harvesting systems, victory gardens, sustainable agriculture, etc. We should be working on this throughout the year, every year, and not just when we think we've only got 8 weeks of food left. Thank you for reading.
I’m all for reducing fear-mongering, etc. However, that doesn’t make some of what he said wrong. There will be no oil. The repercussions of that fact are true.
The shelves might not be empty because of someone’s spiritual premonition…but the food that is on them will be decidedly more expensive. That’s a fact. You will be paying much higher prices by September. Do we not understand how petroleum effects every aspect of our convenient lives?
I noticed that. I’ve been doing a little “light stocking up.” Just some items I use that I wouldn’t want to pay double for this fall. People roll their eyes. This is not prepper stuff, this is betting on higher costs with solid info.
After I read that article, when I got back to the home page, Substack asked if I wanted “more like this”. I hesitated, because I love reading preparedness and prediction articles. But I said “No”. I draw the line at Shryock’s rot. I’ve never felt like you exaggerate, or give disingenuous advice. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and your generosity, you deserve the followers you have.
I'm glad we're on the same page. It's sad that algorithms will probably lump the work of real preppers in with that fearmongering stuff, and it's another good example of how much harder it makes the job for those of us actually committed to realism.
Climate change will indeed cause mass starvation amongst many other forms of death and destruction to millions upon millions all over the world; and it’s happening faster than data models are predicting.
Food shortages and Skyhigh prices will start to occur in many areas around the world this summer. Not bc of some spiritual reasoning/prognostication but bc of math.
In 2025 there were 55% more US farm bankruptcies compared to 2024. This year is already at a 30% increase since 2025.
The US only has around 5-7% regenerative based/sustainable farms; compared to Australia, Germany, and Uruguay who have over 70% regenerative/sustainable farms.
U.S. farmers are drug addicts. Their drugs OF CHOICE ( wanna emphasize that farmers CHOSE this) are agrochemicals, agrochemical seeds, and petrochemical fertilizers. Bc they chose to get addicted based on the promises of 1-3% profit increases, they now have expensive seeds, pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, and fertilizers that erase all their profits and then some.
For the last few decades non-profit AG and Earth scientists have begged US farmers to switch ASAP to regenerative farming. Maybe some could’ve had the excuse that the upfront costs to change were unaffordable, only they’ve had grants for the last 10+ yrs that would cover the majority of their upfront costs AND years of operating expenses.
Let me repeat that.
These farms were offered FREE expertise, FREE funding, and FREE access to AG scientists; they refused.
Farmers take plenty of FREE subsidies handouts so it makes no sense to not take FREE money to make your farm profitable for the foreseeable future without ever needing to buy another agrochemical, fertilizer, or agrochemical-corporate-owned-seeds.
So why didn’t farmers take this FREE help? Politics mainly. They saw NPO scientists with no skin in the game as tree hugging hippies and decided to trust the snake oil salesman corporations who lied and made false promises all while poisoning their land, crops, soil, water tables, and the farmers own bodies; many who are now suffering major health problems.
So all these farms are going bankrupt. Some have tried to get grants to help pay to switch to regenerative farming. Those grants no longer exist. They were “DOGE’D” out of existence.
NPO scientists like myself have very few job options in the US that are ethical. We refuse to work for agrochemical/petrochemical companies that are some of the biggest producers of fossil fuels in addition to their high output of “forever chemicals”.
Farm soil in the U.S. is dead. Water tables are full of PFAS. Biomes have been destroyed. Flying insect biodiversity is 80% less than it was in the 1970’s.
Let’s focus JUST on the flying insect biodiversity. If we wanna discuss fearmongering and catastrophic global events this is the “canary in the coal mine” for me.
Flying insect biodiversity is extremely important. Every single time in geological history when we’ve had a mass extinction event the flying insect biodiversity loss is show in our fossils and the earths crust.
We can see how insects millions of years ago had major biodiversity losses over a short period of time ( geological time). And it’s been well documented and proven that when an extinction even has occurred the biodiversity loss of flying insects was between 80-90%.
What’s this all mean? It means we’re already in the window of a mass extinction event, and we’re speeding it up by fossil fuels, biodiversity losses, and the pillaging of our resources.
Will we see a famine in the US this year? Depends on how ppl wanna define famine. Would that include poisoned food that causes long term health problems? Would that include little to no accessibility to fresh non-poisonous foods? Would that include large portions of the population who can no longer afford more than one meal a day?
My kundalini rose when I saw that you said Mr. Shryock, the mystic, reports hundreds of thousands of views for an article with 194 likes. So let's say hundreds of thousands of views = 100,000 views and not one more.
I'm not particularly good at math, and I don't trust AI, so I whipped out my trusty calculator and determined that if his article received hundreds of thousands of views (100,000, to be exact), that means only .002 percent of the people who read his article "liked" it.
I probably shouldn't make fun of other people's kundalini, but that's not very much enlightenment getting registered for all those views. Also, I consider his use of the word "kundalini" kundalini appropriation in a Substack article that reminds me more of a Taboola ad than the stuff I enjoy here.
I might be being too harsh. I'm not getting any younger, so I sometimes say mean things.
In fact, I'm old enough to remember a whole lot of other imminent empty shelves during many other events out of our control. The aftermath of the Covid pandemic among them, when the supply chain was legit broken because ports couldn't handle the backlog of ships waiting outside of port.
I'm also old enough to remember the early warnings about climate change in 1969 by Paul Ehrlich and many others, all ignored.
I would have liked those warnings to have been heeded, and because they weren't, there will indeed be consequences, but I don't think we fully understand what those will be quite yet. They're shaping up as we type away at our keyboards, asking ChatGPT to suck more water out of the ground to tell us exactly when all this horrific stuff will happen.
Summary: It’s hard to know with likes/reads, but the article with 3K likes definitely got far more positive attention than it deserved. I agree that, at least, a lot of us see this stuff for the bs it is. (I deleted the other comments, because there’s no need to keep that out there.)
Okay, but I had just explained how nobody listens to me. And if you had actually done what I said, and read or even skimmed the articles in the links, or reread the paragraph, then you would've understood.
And now two people have liked your post, explaining to me how I'm wrong and exaggerating the situation. You see, this happens to me a hundred times a day, and it's why Mr. Famine gets 3K likes and people freak out over empty shelves while ignoring airborne diseases, and writers like me get squat. And over what? A slightly misplaced pronoun? I guess it tracks.
But to your broader point, yes, it would've been nice for the early warnings to be taken seriously.
I think there's a disconnect here, and it's my fault because I haven't explained myself well. I was trying to reinforce your opinion with the numbers I suggested. The numbers are also bad for the article with more views.
3,253 "likes" for an article with 100,000 views (the minimum number to qualify as hundreds of thousands that Shyrock is claiming) is still only 3%.
But hundreds of thousands suggests at least 200,000, which translates to 1.6%. I'm challenging Shyrock's gaudy numbers claim here, not you, not you in any way. I completely agree with you. I am suggesting by these numbers that other people agree with you, too. Obviously, not everyone who agrees with a Substack article "likes" it. That's definitely not the case. But I think Shyrock is bragging about something that isn't there.
Even if his view numbers are real, my contention is that, most likely, many of those who read his stuff came to your conclusion as well.
I think I haven't explained myself well, though, so apologies for that. I don't disagree with anything you've said.
To be clear: I don't think you're exaggerating at all. I think Shyrock is, but that isn't meant to be dismissive of your concern that an article like his gets 3,500 likes. That's a lot of likes for something like that.
As for reading his articles, I read most of them. But I will miss stuff because I had a stroke that screwed up my eyes. Nothing I can really do about that. Let's be friends. I like your work.
I appreciate the context. I see what you're saying. It's hard to know one way or the other regarding likes/reads. I just know that 3K likes on an article in less than a week dwarfs anything I've ever posted on here, and it's up there in Robert Reich territory. Far too much positive attention and praise, even if a lot of us see that article for the B.S. it is. Yes, we're friends.
Thanks for the counterpoint to Shryock's BS article. I was appalled at how much positive feedback that guy received. Oh well.
And on another note about JW Powell... yes, he did say that the desert lands of the American west would not support heavy settlement,. However, his solution was to advocate for CLEAR-CUTTING the entire Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains, because those pesky pine trees sucked up all the water and snow melt. Think of it... the ENTIRE western slope, denuded.
Powell envisioned making Utah and northern Arizona into green paradises, by using all that "wasted" runoff from the western slope. In many ways, by today's standards, the man was a bigger nutcase than this guy Shryock.
Thanks for the balance. best, --je
(PS: here's a simple reference, done in a hurry. But there are many more to support it):
https://tinyurl.com/PowellReference
Oh jeez. Thanks for the extra context. I guess we're just a country full of nutjobs.
Without nutjobs, America wouldn't exist!
So true!
But it helps if a person like Shyrock...what a name...has the LOOK of a generally accepted authority figure (older, white male, huge beard...OR young, pretty, "look like a person I can score with."..someone the "common folk" will pay attention to) for them to get traction.
From that author's description of the how and why he was "chosen" to spread that drivel, I strongly suspect he's of an evangelical bent. Just my take.
If he had just written "I have a teenage daughter/granddaughter, and I'm deeply concerned about where all this is headed and think we should be getting ready for the worst" that would've been a nice article. But alas...
It’s especially bad to read that kind of an article at midnight…you can swing right into Amazon and wake up the next day to remember that you bought 100 pounds of lentils before you went to sleep. Seriously, though, I do think we aren’t prepared for the high prices and the shortages. Parts of Asia are already rationing fuel and shortening work weeks so people don’t have to drive.
The US is awash in gasoline. The gas companies are making a ton of money. Fertilizer and other commodities won’t be so easily replaced. On the upside, I think this “war” has done a better job prompting support for renewable energy than the Green New Deal.
I agree with you. We're in for a bad time, and it doesn't have to reach famine levels to hurt or even kill the most vulnerable Americans. I have no problem with stocking up on lentils. We have a whole system of dry goods with enough to share, and we donate regularly to food pantries. I believe in being ready for prolonged disasters, but there's definitely practical and sustainable ways to do it.
Yup!
I read his piece yesterday. And while I don’t buy the mysticism angle for even a moment (that he listens to trees for god’s sake), his warnings, while exaggerated, are not to be taken lightly. There are a number of authorities who have been espousing similar theories in recent days.
We don’t wish to believe our systems are nearing collapse, but when we do a little math on subtraction issues due to oil rollbacks, a fairly clear picture emerges. We are in trouble. The folks who deliver our food and other goods will be unable to afford the diesel to run the semis. Immigrants are being removed from planting and harvesting crops. It does not take rocket science to game this out. Grocery store shelves WILL begin to show the ramifications of the Iran war in weeks. That’s reality, like it or not.
I hate to admit I fell for his rant. And such a public admission.
I believe it is because I am isolated in a state where most of my neighbors do not align with my values.
For whatever reason, I feel foolish, and do not like it. Nonetheless, I was wrong.
Thank you for this article.
You're not alone. I was taking it all in until the article got to the part about mortgages and bills. Then his facts and conclusions just seemed, out of fit. And then I read his follow-up article where he pulls back and says U.S. won't experience famine, other parts of the world could, which is something already happening...
We're in a similar situation. It's hard to talk about any of our real problems with our friends and family, etc., and that makes us vulnerable to this rhetoric.
As I said in other articles, I'm a prepper. I fully believe in building a dry goods system, building rain/dew harvesting systems, victory gardens, sustainable agriculture, etc. We should be working on this throughout the year, every year, and not just when we think we've only got 8 weeks of food left. Thank you for reading.
As I have said before, as a 73yo disabled 9-11 survivor there’s ideas are brilliant, but beyond me. Feels crappy.
I’m all for reducing fear-mongering, etc. However, that doesn’t make some of what he said wrong. There will be no oil. The repercussions of that fact are true.
This was worth a sub. Thank you. I was really deep into depression over that article
I'm really glad it helped. I deal with some very dark stuff, etc, but I try to offer some perspective on it and not leave people in depression.
Excellent writing. The real scientists who predict trends based on evidence are the prophets who are ignored.
Btw anyone who visits Palm Springs or Phoenix should immediately get what Powell predicted. It is so evident how dry
the land naturally is. Instead we built tons of golf courses.
Sure, but I was having so much fun. God knows what I’m gonna do with 1200 rolls of paper towels…
Send them to Mar-a-Lago marked, "For your next trip to Puerto Rico."
I'm sorry. I'll pack up my things and leave now.
lol
Preparedness for any emergency is never wasted. Use common sense … something that seems to be lacking for a vast segment of the population.
I just figured it was an old white guy. The kind that has a garage full of nothing but toilet paper.
Au contraire! Old white guys don't hoard toilet paper. They hoard guns, ammo, and MREs.
The shelves might not be empty because of someone’s spiritual premonition…but the food that is on them will be decidedly more expensive. That’s a fact. You will be paying much higher prices by September. Do we not understand how petroleum effects every aspect of our convenient lives?
Most ppl do not and they don’t even know there is a problem.
I noticed that. I’ve been doing a little “light stocking up.” Just some items I use that I wouldn’t want to pay double for this fall. People roll their eyes. This is not prepper stuff, this is betting on higher costs with solid info.
After I read that article, when I got back to the home page, Substack asked if I wanted “more like this”. I hesitated, because I love reading preparedness and prediction articles. But I said “No”. I draw the line at Shryock’s rot. I’ve never felt like you exaggerate, or give disingenuous advice. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and your generosity, you deserve the followers you have.
I'm glad we're on the same page. It's sad that algorithms will probably lump the work of real preppers in with that fearmongering stuff, and it's another good example of how much harder it makes the job for those of us actually committed to realism.
Brings to mind for me Floyd Crow Westerman's song, "They Didn't Listen" (to me). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReDLMLbQ5zM
Soil Scientist here 👋
Climate change will indeed cause mass starvation amongst many other forms of death and destruction to millions upon millions all over the world; and it’s happening faster than data models are predicting.
Food shortages and Skyhigh prices will start to occur in many areas around the world this summer. Not bc of some spiritual reasoning/prognostication but bc of math.
In 2025 there were 55% more US farm bankruptcies compared to 2024. This year is already at a 30% increase since 2025.
The US only has around 5-7% regenerative based/sustainable farms; compared to Australia, Germany, and Uruguay who have over 70% regenerative/sustainable farms.
U.S. farmers are drug addicts. Their drugs OF CHOICE ( wanna emphasize that farmers CHOSE this) are agrochemicals, agrochemical seeds, and petrochemical fertilizers. Bc they chose to get addicted based on the promises of 1-3% profit increases, they now have expensive seeds, pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, and fertilizers that erase all their profits and then some.
For the last few decades non-profit AG and Earth scientists have begged US farmers to switch ASAP to regenerative farming. Maybe some could’ve had the excuse that the upfront costs to change were unaffordable, only they’ve had grants for the last 10+ yrs that would cover the majority of their upfront costs AND years of operating expenses.
Let me repeat that.
These farms were offered FREE expertise, FREE funding, and FREE access to AG scientists; they refused.
Farmers take plenty of FREE subsidies handouts so it makes no sense to not take FREE money to make your farm profitable for the foreseeable future without ever needing to buy another agrochemical, fertilizer, or agrochemical-corporate-owned-seeds.
So why didn’t farmers take this FREE help? Politics mainly. They saw NPO scientists with no skin in the game as tree hugging hippies and decided to trust the snake oil salesman corporations who lied and made false promises all while poisoning their land, crops, soil, water tables, and the farmers own bodies; many who are now suffering major health problems.
So all these farms are going bankrupt. Some have tried to get grants to help pay to switch to regenerative farming. Those grants no longer exist. They were “DOGE’D” out of existence.
NPO scientists like myself have very few job options in the US that are ethical. We refuse to work for agrochemical/petrochemical companies that are some of the biggest producers of fossil fuels in addition to their high output of “forever chemicals”.
Farm soil in the U.S. is dead. Water tables are full of PFAS. Biomes have been destroyed. Flying insect biodiversity is 80% less than it was in the 1970’s.
Let’s focus JUST on the flying insect biodiversity. If we wanna discuss fearmongering and catastrophic global events this is the “canary in the coal mine” for me.
Flying insect biodiversity is extremely important. Every single time in geological history when we’ve had a mass extinction event the flying insect biodiversity loss is show in our fossils and the earths crust.
We can see how insects millions of years ago had major biodiversity losses over a short period of time ( geological time). And it’s been well documented and proven that when an extinction even has occurred the biodiversity loss of flying insects was between 80-90%.
What’s this all mean? It means we’re already in the window of a mass extinction event, and we’re speeding it up by fossil fuels, biodiversity losses, and the pillaging of our resources.
Will we see a famine in the US this year? Depends on how ppl wanna define famine. Would that include poisoned food that causes long term health problems? Would that include little to no accessibility to fresh non-poisonous foods? Would that include large portions of the population who can no longer afford more than one meal a day?
My kundalini rose when I saw that you said Mr. Shryock, the mystic, reports hundreds of thousands of views for an article with 194 likes. So let's say hundreds of thousands of views = 100,000 views and not one more.
I'm not particularly good at math, and I don't trust AI, so I whipped out my trusty calculator and determined that if his article received hundreds of thousands of views (100,000, to be exact), that means only .002 percent of the people who read his article "liked" it.
I probably shouldn't make fun of other people's kundalini, but that's not very much enlightenment getting registered for all those views. Also, I consider his use of the word "kundalini" kundalini appropriation in a Substack article that reminds me more of a Taboola ad than the stuff I enjoy here.
I might be being too harsh. I'm not getting any younger, so I sometimes say mean things.
In fact, I'm old enough to remember a whole lot of other imminent empty shelves during many other events out of our control. The aftermath of the Covid pandemic among them, when the supply chain was legit broken because ports couldn't handle the backlog of ships waiting outside of port.
I'm also old enough to remember the early warnings about climate change in 1969 by Paul Ehrlich and many others, all ignored.
I would have liked those warnings to have been heeded, and because they weren't, there will indeed be consequences, but I don't think we fully understand what those will be quite yet. They're shaping up as we type away at our keyboards, asking ChatGPT to suck more water out of the ground to tell us exactly when all this horrific stuff will happen.
Yay us.
Summary: It’s hard to know with likes/reads, but the article with 3K likes definitely got far more positive attention than it deserved. I agree that, at least, a lot of us see this stuff for the bs it is. (I deleted the other comments, because there’s no need to keep that out there.)
I honestly wasn't trying to correct you. I based my "calculations" on this sentence:
"Read this one, too. The author himself told us it got hundreds of thousands of views just over its first couple of days. "
Where, "this one" linked to this:
https://markashryock.substack.com/p/i-am-a-mystic-here-is-the-data
Either way, I agree with you. It's all just clickbaity stuff.
Okay, but I had just explained how nobody listens to me. And if you had actually done what I said, and read or even skimmed the articles in the links, or reread the paragraph, then you would've understood.
And now two people have liked your post, explaining to me how I'm wrong and exaggerating the situation. You see, this happens to me a hundred times a day, and it's why Mr. Famine gets 3K likes and people freak out over empty shelves while ignoring airborne diseases, and writers like me get squat. And over what? A slightly misplaced pronoun? I guess it tracks.
But to your broader point, yes, it would've been nice for the early warnings to be taken seriously.
I think there's a disconnect here, and it's my fault because I haven't explained myself well. I was trying to reinforce your opinion with the numbers I suggested. The numbers are also bad for the article with more views.
3,253 "likes" for an article with 100,000 views (the minimum number to qualify as hundreds of thousands that Shyrock is claiming) is still only 3%.
But hundreds of thousands suggests at least 200,000, which translates to 1.6%. I'm challenging Shyrock's gaudy numbers claim here, not you, not you in any way. I completely agree with you. I am suggesting by these numbers that other people agree with you, too. Obviously, not everyone who agrees with a Substack article "likes" it. That's definitely not the case. But I think Shyrock is bragging about something that isn't there.
Even if his view numbers are real, my contention is that, most likely, many of those who read his stuff came to your conclusion as well.
I think I haven't explained myself well, though, so apologies for that. I don't disagree with anything you've said.
To be clear: I don't think you're exaggerating at all. I think Shyrock is, but that isn't meant to be dismissive of your concern that an article like his gets 3,500 likes. That's a lot of likes for something like that.
As for reading his articles, I read most of them. But I will miss stuff because I had a stroke that screwed up my eyes. Nothing I can really do about that. Let's be friends. I like your work.
I appreciate the context. I see what you're saying. It's hard to know one way or the other regarding likes/reads. I just know that 3K likes on an article in less than a week dwarfs anything I've ever posted on here, and it's up there in Robert Reich territory. Far too much positive attention and praise, even if a lot of us see that article for the B.S. it is. Yes, we're friends.
Which, unfortunately, was a misreading of the prior text.
It’s okay to say “sorry”.