You can feel ‘something’ coming, can’t you? I sure can, as do many others as the population wakes up to the true nature of our poly-crises.
Things are breaking quickly on a lot of different fronts all at the same time. It’s almost as if we’re surrounded by exponential functions each driving off of the others to make things really speed up toward the end. Which, of course, is exactly what is happening.
Our mission at Peak Prosperity is to help as many people as we can…while we still can. So, we are urgently and extensively reinvesting in the website and this community.
My biggest concern is that we may not be moving fast enough.
Like a Maniac
In 2008, I was driven. I researched, wrote, produced, recorded, and edited the entire video series of “The Crash Course” all by myself. I can’t tell you what seized me, but I just had to get it out into the world.
I was driven to create it as if by some force, urgently applying myself to the task day after day.
Now I understand that it was time for that piece of work to come through someone and into the world. That person was me, but If I hadn’t put the work in someone else would have.
Today I am equally driven but this time it’s not about surfacing more data and doing a better job at problem definition, it’s about helping people who see the world as we do connect with each other. Both at Peak Prosperity but also “out there” in the real world.
Covid proved to everybody (who was paying attention) that groupthink was deadly. Groupthink forced people onto ventilators where the majority died, administered organ-toxic Remdesivir to anybody testing positive after a 40-cycle PCR test, and put booster after risky booster into people who faced no plausible risk from Covid. Hewing to the consensus was harmful and sometimes deadly for far too many people.
From that, we learned that our “experts” could not be trusted.
Those who thought for themselves and stood their ground eventually were proven right but at a tremendous personal and financial cost. It wasn’t easy. It was hard. Very hard.
Some of us lost good friends, relatives, immediate family members, neighbors and colleagues, not to Covid, but to their insistence on mindlessly following harmful and obviously incoherent instructions from so-called authorities.
This next period of time we’re entering is even more dangerous and promises to do even more harm to vastly more people. The experts in charge of the Federal Reserve are just as callous and just as clueless as the NIH Covid treatment panel. The only way you can trust them is to do whatever will harm the most people.
What Do I Do?
This is the question we are asked the most.
Peak Prosperity’s answer to this fundamental question involves three things:
- Access to trustworthy information presented with excellent framing and context
- Surrounding yourself with an incredible group of people to discuss things with
- Taking concrete actions that will build your resilience, whatever may come
It is the aim of the Peak Prosperity team to deliver on these three things better and better, and deliver we will!
Progress to Date
Those of you with Peak Prosperity from the beginning know about the huge and important changes that have taken place over the past 2 years.
Let’s start with what’s already been improved
- More premium content. We are now producing more than seven pieces of new premium content per week to help keep you up to date on information you can’t live without.
- A daily feed directly from my desk to your screen. This is called the “Happening Now” section of the Forums. It’s BY FAR my favorite feature, as I’m able to provide daily digestible content.
- A faster, cleaner way for me to provide more content to you whether by video or in written form.
- Drag and drop picture and video loading in the Community area.
- Significantly improved Private Messaging, allowing you to directly reach out to fellow members.
- Personalized notifications, and bookmarks. Now you can choose how you’d like to be notified when people interact with you on the Peak Community area.
- Referenceable bookmarks. Save sections or comments you’d like to revisit.
- Chatting with your PP tribe in a Chat Box, either one-on-one or in group chats. Keep a running log of meaningful discussions with ease.
- Enhanced search
- Faster performance. No more spinning wheels of death.
- Introduced “Ivor Mectin,” our friendly chatbot to resolve your access and other issues quickly. Ivor is utilized to help reference tutorial videos and articles on how you can get the most out of the new Peak platform.
- Peak Help Center, housing and growing tutorials and explanations to provide a seamless service.
- Upgraded ALERTS. A dedicated section for any and all Alerts issued by me. Providing a log of past Alerts demonstrating my accuracy (or inaccuracy).
- Revamped Forums.
- Groups features (which are pretty ‘meh’ and so are a huge area of investment for us behind the scenes right now).
- A de-Googled “Find Others” map. That’s right – your data is your data. It will only be kept on the Peak Prosperity servers. You can choose whether or not you’d like to display your location.
- Additional de-google “Groups” map. Showing where various groups are located around the world.
- A Peak Guarantee – we’re confident in the information and community behind Peak Prosperity. New people are now able to join as an Insider and if they don’t find any value in the first 30-day period, they can request their money back with no questions asked.
As extensive as the list might be. We aren’t even close to being done with our improvements this year.
Here are the planned future improvements several of which are already in development
- Community 2.0 – we have an extensive list of improvements to groups and how we communicate with each other already defined, designed, and is now being built.
- A Peak Prosperity App – that will allow you to more easily be notified and stay in touch through your phone, and also to receive critical push ALERTS from me if you opt into that feature.
- Online courses to create a baseline understanding of specific topics to help promote members to take action. Getting what’s in my head, and some of our member’s heads, out and into structured resilience ‘courses’ that can be taken again and again, or shared with others.
- Members will have the ability to build, publish and monetize their own online courses to the Peak Tribe. The team will be creating structured guides on how to best do so.
- Podcasts will be back and better than ever. Allowing you to consume on the go. Both public and private member-only podcasts will be available for your listening experiences.
- Monthly drawings; who doesn’t like raffles?! We are excited to bring many prizes to the community.
- Affiliate programs. We are constantly building out existing and new relationships with other networks to save our members money on items they’d purchase anyway.
- Prosperity Pathfinders Program – we want to reward you for referring new members to Peak Prosperity. This is vital in building a large resilient-focused community that can drive change to alternative systems.
- Customizable content newsletter – you’ll have the ability to choose how frequently you receive emails about new posts that are released on Peak’s website.
- A guided self-assessment with a suggested outline of content to take. Members will be able to take a questionnaire that’ll assess the current situation, then provide articles to review and actionable items to tackle.
- Monthly Webinars to promote camaraderie and connection. This schedule is being built out as we speak.
- E-Books – Actionable guides that are built by industry experts to bridge the educational gap to help you take meaningful action.
- Peak Emojis to spice up those heated conversations around the Fed, geopolitics, artificial intelligence, etc.
- Peak Mentor Club – the amount of knowledge, wisdom, and experiences this community has is unlike any other. We want to harness those who are doing it or have done it to help onboard newly awoken folks.
- Local Peak-endorsed meetups. Community, community, community – one of the greatest assets is a local network. We want to help nurture and keep this at the forefront of our vision.
Of course, this ambitious list will require the focused efforts of a lot of dedicated and experienced people, which brings us to…
The Team
Fortunately, Peak Prosperity finally has the right team of dedicated contractors in place to deliver all this. Together we will take this community to the next level.
Advising us in the role of Chief Technology Officer Nick Cianciolo brings a wealth of strategic technology development. And, oh, he’s been a Peak Prosperity member (and power consumer) since 2010. We also have the services of Wesley Malott who is a full-stack developer along with a mature stable of other contractors who know the site and its inner workings. Together they are a skilled and potent team who are working feverishly behind the scenes to build what we’re internally calling “Communities 2.0,” a project we’re undertaking because none of the platforms out there do what we feel needs to be done. By building the software, we’ll own it and thereby offer better privacy to all of our members and won’t be at the potential mercy of a woke corporation that doesn’t like our free-thinking ways.
Privacy is first and foremost with your website and online community. We are all seeing the rapid increase in artificial intelligence’s capabilities and it won’t be long before you won’t be able to trust a single interaction ‘out there’ on the internet. Aaron McKeon has stepped up and is delving into all things AI, both so we can leverage it where appropriate, and understand how to keep it at bay when necessary> But one thing we cannot do is ignore it any longer.
Dane Larsen, heading up our marketing and customer experience areas, is fully engaged with helping to get the Peak Prosperity message out to the world and making sure that your experiences at the website are as smooth and productive as possible. He’s 100% committed to this site and to you, and he definitely wants to hear of any and all possible improvements or upgrades to your Online Peak Prosperity experience.
Michael Congero is keeping all the operations running smoothly and helping to strike deals with partners, helping with all things regulatory, and helping to secure approval so that we can once again help promote great financial service companies.
Ryan Tiefen continues to improve our studio and our edited products so we can produce the highest quality content in the most efficient ways possible.
And, of course, Evie is the beating heart of this household, Honey Badger Farm, and is the person most responsible for keeping yours truly healthy and balanced.
An Updated Peak Prosperity Business Model
Because of all those improvements and additions, and because of what I’ve learned over the years (and my core mission of helping people become more resilient) it’s time to update the Peak Prosperity business model.
A while back I made the decision to introduce the Information Scout level of website access, at a lower cost point for essentially partial access to premium content. Having this additional lower-priced tier caused me to try and service three levels of subscribers which split my attention too much. That simply didn’t pan out on a number of levels.
The original idea was lower costs would lead to reaching more people. However, while we did reach a few more people, that was outweighed on my end by diluting my attention.
I give my very best at all times. When you sign up here you get my scouting every single day (even when I am not writing, I am always “on call” and always scanning the world) and my thinking cap firmly on my head with every piece of content.
It is also true I sincerely want people to pay close attention to the content here at Peak Prosperity and then act on it. Generally speaking, people value and act on things more when they pay more. If I charged $10,000 for a report, every single person buying that report would feel compelled to pay very close attention and wrestle every ounce of value out of it they could. The same reports given away for free would almost certainly result in no actions, no changes, and no additional resilience.
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
~Warren Buffet
Because of all this I have made the decision to eliminate the Information Scout level membership. If you have one, you can keep it, but no new Scout-level memberships can be initiated. With the new site, while you may not have access to everything, you do have access to my daily Happening Now posts and my weekly two-part reports.
If your scout membership lapses, there won’t be any way to get it back and you’ll have to re-subscribe as an Insider or Key Supporter.
I know that the quality of the conversations, the content, and the camaraderie we have here is exceptionally valuable. Also, to be direct, the cost to build and maintain this amazing community is not insignificant. We have added Key Supporters whose expertise and unwavering support for our mission is greatly appreciated. Their expertise and background has honestly helped us all by building our knowledge capital, and becoming even more resilient together.
What does all of this mean to you?
Well, the subscription cost for Insider membership has not changed since 2008 when it was first introduced. It’s still $30/month or $300/yr.
As we introduce expanded content and new community features down the road, new subscribers are going to have to pay more.
The good news for all current subscribers is that your membership costs won’t be going up at all.
When we implement the new business model, we are going to honor every single one of you who helped get us here by permanently grandfathering in your subscription at that same 2008 level for all Insiders and the current rate for Key Supporters for as long as you keep it active.
It will be new subscribers who will be paying more because, frankly, the information we provide and the connections we foster are worth more. We haven’t quite settled on that price yet but it may be quite a bit more than the current price.
Because all of you have been here for us and with us, and helped to fund our expansion and improvements, we will keep you “as is” from a membership cost perspective, but with all of the current benefits as well as the many new benefits and features that are forthcoming. But new people will be experiencing all the benefits and value of the new site when it finally comes online with all of its new community and course features, and they will be paying more.
If you are an Information Scout, and you want to keep being part of this community, then nothing changes for a while. At some point in the future, we will give you notice, and the opportunity to upgrade to the insider or Key Supporter level at the grandfathered rate prior to updating the site to the new model.
This is the fairest way I could think of both honoring you and your support, while also charging more in line with the actual value provided by this site to its membership.
As always, I and the entire Peak Prosperity team care deeply about what you think, what you want, and any feedback you have to help us improve things here. Please do not hesitate to share.
My goal is to make Peak Prosperity durable, constantly improving, and an important source of content and connection.