I hope you aren't piling into his advice with money you can't afford to lose. There are undoubtedly many fine aspects of his advice, but there are some areas where I think he is slightly wrong, and some others where he is catastrophically so. His investment advice is basically to follow the futures market into a commodities bubble, and then to hold. You could end up very poor that way unless you are careful and lucky in your choice of which commodities to own. Silver seems good short and long term, gold much less over the long term though (unless you are convinced that both China and India will maintain present growth in their jewellery consumption).
I think he is largely right about the oil price not having anywhere to fall to this decade. And his saw tooth price prediction is probably accurate although I would dispute some of his reasoning on that score too, perhaps the longer version or the book is more accurate. But the ability of the market to respond by purchasing smaller vehicles and using them more efficiently is something he dramatically underestimates in my view. In this respect he is making the classic Malthusian mistake, and would do well to reconsider his cursory dismissal of his intellectual predecessor at the end of the presentation.
He also fails to take into account the fact that economic output per unit of energy increases - not at a steady exponential rate, but also not a linear one. If the market adjusts to lower oil production, then that entails that this rate will increase. So his claim that exponential growth cannot continue is false although I could not possibly offer any guarantee that such growth would immediately match the best years of recent memory.
His graph linking GDP growth and credit market growth is selectively biased. It starts at 1970, presumably because of the collapse of Bretton Woods in 71 created a lot of better data? but the relevant historical data set would need to extend past a couple of depressions, so he is short by about a century there.
He also seems to abandon his talk of exponential change whenever it suits. Consider the 40 year transition from wind to sail power, which he explains in terms of ROI. There were very few steam ships in the first decade of it, but no clippers at all in the last,sail remained only for short coastal and estuary routes. Our economy can adapt now far faster than the Victorian one could, and we can cope with high commodity prices in more ways too.
If we need to shift resources from oil to alternatives, we can actually do so on an exponential basis, something Martenson seems not to take into consideration fro some reason. It would require a huge up front investment to turn out a few units of the chosen resource, but after that the tooling process would increase at great pace. This applies especially to the conversion of cars for instance to shale gas, which would need a large roll out of existing technology. Such a thing could and would be funded by debt in the usual way, using corporate bonds. And it wouldn't necessarily happen first in the USA, where existing plant remains to be paid for, but in emerging markets where new plant is needed anyway. There is a clear and obvious example of just this sort of thing in Africa where in many countries land line telephones are incredibly rare, but mobiles ubiquitous. This is because the investment opportunity was huge for mobile, and the accrued investment in copper wire was negligible.
There are massive reserves of all kinds of fuels that do not require 30%energy input to extract, and huge investment in reducing that burden further. And while as consumers we don't want to see commodity prices high because it eats away at our purchasing power, it is a mistake to imply that this means economic stagnation. It is a redirection of the flow, which continues still to increase. What does cause economic stagnation or retreat is falling demand.
Technology already exists to replace fast water reactors with much more efficient fast breeder reactors that extend the shelf life of our uranium stocks exponentially; what holds it back is availability of uranium and the price of competing energy sources - barrels of oil and equivalents. A permanent change in both those factors would create an investment bonanza. Unless new tech such as thorium or fusion or whatever proves better, in which case those become the source of the gold rush. Again, usual financing rules apply.
He also used his exponential hockey stick graph to imply that the human population will continue to grow at the same exponential rate as has been experienced in his own lifetime. Even though he warned one of his questioners against that fallacious assumption. The reality is that fertility is dropping worldwide. Only Somalia and Afghanistan have high rates now, most countries are at around replacement level, several of the larger ones far below (Japan, China in particular). Even India is heading down fast - the well off regions are at below replacement, the overall is still above though. If we assume India will continue to prosper and develop, we should see it head below replacement within a decade or two. Bear in mind that even so, fertility was declining even when the economy was in the 70s and 80s.
We may still reach ten billion, but the claim that it is exponential and that each new billion is therefore added more quickly than the last is already untrue, so he shouldn't be using a hockey stick graph there, a bell curve would be more appropriate. In fact, we can say with relative certainty that peak population growth preceded peak oil.
. Actually, I think I can download stuff from Youtube, I may do that and watch it later on
He's not predicting the end of the world of WWIII, he's predicting a shift away from the current market fashion of trading in debt itself, in to putting value instead in to physical, finite and rapidly dwindling resources.