Is Peak Prosperity legit? Should you join to help take control of your future? Will this service help you grow your wealth and keep it safe from future crises?
The answer to all of these questions is Yes. Overall the services offered here are pretty good. In this review I'll be going over all you need to know about what Peak Prosperity is and what they offer, the cost & refund policy, complaints and more.
Overview
- Name: Peak Prosperity
- Website: peakprosperity.com
- Founders: Chris Martenson & Adam Taggart
- Membership Price: $30/mo, $80/quarterly, or $300/yr (don't have to join - lots of free information available as well)
What Is Peak Prosperity?
Peak Prosperity is a popular online resource for keeping up-to-date with the future of the economy so that you know what steps to take in order to grow and protect your wealth. You will be able to find information on world events, investment ideas, and even things like gardening and growing your own food, making what they offer a lot different from your typical investment advisory publishers like Brownstone Research and Rogue Economics. The idea behind it all is to help people take more control over their lives and their futures, and there is practical advice offered for going about this.
How the information is presented is based around the theory of action, in which solutions are found from a place of understanding. Often people start out in denial, move on to awareness, develop an understanding, and are then ready for pragmatic solutions. Denial >> Awareness >> Understanding >> Solutions.
As they state on their website, "It is not enough for people to be aware that inflation exists... If effective actions are to be formulated, then understanding is essential." And the method of teaching they put to use is to simply take small steps towards a much bigger goal, such as eliminating small amounts of debt in order to become more financially free.
This is an approach I really like and agree with. They aren't out to just make a bunch of money spoon-feeding people advice.
Who's Behind It?
Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart are the founders of the website. And by the way, a quick WHOIS search shows that the peakprosperity.com domain was registered in 2008, but it seems that the site didn't really go live until around 2010.
Chris' background is impressive. He holds a PhD from Duke plus a MBA from Cornell, and is an economic researcher and futurist that specializes in the area of resource depletion. He got his start in the investment research realm while econoblogging in the early days, in which he forecasted the housing collapse among other big events. But it was his video seminar turned book, The Crash Course, that really got his name out there. He used to work as a VP for an international Fortune 300 company, but has since quit this job and sold his 5-bedroom waterfront home in Mystic, CT to live on a homestead in rural Massachusetts where he gardens, raises chickens, brews beer, homeschools his children, and of course runs Peak Prosperity.
Adam handles the business side of Peak Prosperity. He holds a Stanford MBA and comes from a background working in an executive position in Silicon Valley. In fact, he was actually the VP of Yahoo! for nine years... a pretty impressive position.
And besides the founders, other experts in different areas provide content on the website as well. Some others you may hear from include James Howard Kunstler, Charles Hugh Smith, Alasdair Macleod, Gregor McDonald, and others.
Other FAQs
Is Peak Prosperity legit?
Yes, Peak Prosperity is legit and in no way a scam. Although they cannot guarantee that you will make money and prosper following their advice, the information and guidance they provide is good quality and this is far from one of those hyped-up investment services that are heavily marketed in deceptive ways.
Are there refunds?
There are not any refunds available. I'll be going over more about this a bit later.
What They Have to Offer
Once you land on the website there is quite a bit going on so it might be overwhelming and you might not know where to start.
If you go to the Learn section you will find a breakdown of what you should do first and how to take action.
Most people out there looking into this material are going to want to start with the fundamentals covered in The Crash Course. Then it's suggested that you read over some books and online articles that they maintain a list of. And lastly there is a step-by-step guide that puts it all together so that you can start building resiliency.
- Go through The Crash Course
- Read suggested books and online articles (there are quite a bit and you don't have to read over everything before moving on)
- Go over step-by-step guide for building resiliency
The Crash Course
The Crash Course paints a picture of a very bleak future, yet offers practical solutions and provides real value. This course focuses on the unsustainability in our trends when it comes to economics, energy, and the environment, such as that with our dwindling oil supplies, which is what you'd expect to hear about from a guy that specializes in resource depletion. There are lot of pessimistic viewpoints offered, yet with sound reasoning. The truth is that our future of decreasing resources and increasing waste is a real problem that we can't just ignore... and Chris offers solutions on this matter.
The course consists of 27 chapters and takes 4 hours and 36 minutes to complete....
However, there is also an "accelerated" version that is only 1 hour long and the course has also been published in book format (can be bought on Amazon).
Blog
The blog consists of short articles and videos from their Youtube channel by Chris and Adam on all sorts of different topics - gold price updates, COVID vaccine news, the possiblity of the dollar collapsing, market patterns, and even homeliving topics such as gardening.
The articles and videos you'll find here are all free, but just provide brief bits of information for the most part. For many of them you'll have to pay for more, which I'll talk more about in a bit.
Insider
The Insider section is very similar to the Blog section. There is a large variety of information published here on all sorts of topics, mostly focused on personal wealth, economics and politics, but not entirely.
Much of what's listed here is for the "Off The Cuff" podcast, which is a weekly podcast where Chris and Adam talk about different subjects and often bring experts in the topics they're covering onto the program.
To give you a better idea of what type of content you can expect to find here, here is a list of some recent publishings...
- Welcome To The Movement - About confidence in the US eroding, COVID-19, the likelihood of higher inflation rates and more.
- Off The Cuff: Fed Printers Go Brrrrrrrrr - Goes over the Fed's gameplan and solutions, and talks about what you can expect along with why you should be bullish on gold.
- Personal Safety & Home Security (PP Seminar) - Video by a 19-year veteran inner-city police sergeant on personal safety and home security.
- Off The Cuff: Get Your Exit Strategy Ready - Talks about flaws in society, reducing independence on central institutions, producing your own food and more.
*You'll also be required to enroll in their paid subscription service to access much of this information.
Podcast
This is different from the "Off The Cuff" podcast mentioned above, which is found in the Insider section of the website.
This podcast features experts from different areas and brings their knowledge to the listerners. Topics covered here, as with everything else, range far and wide. I've seen episodes on the limitations of shale oil, the limits to growth on a finite planet such as Earth, the real facts of the coronavirus, new technologies and their potential to help save the world, how to prepare for life after COVID and more.
These recordings are available on the website as well as on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, directly on YouTube, and Stitcher. The transcript is also available on the website if you prefer to read.
Daily Digest
Here you can find very short briefings on what's going on in the world. Not much detail is provided and these daily briefings usually only take a few minutes to read through, but at least you can stay up-to-date on a broad range of things by reading them over.
Peak Prosperity Weekly Newsletter
This is free to sign up for and is "a complete digest of the articles and reports we publish during the week". Navigating all over the website and checking out all the different categories can be difficult, so if you want to simply stay up-to-date with all that is going on and being published at Peak Prosperity then you can simply sign up for this newsletter service.
Consultation
Chris also offers consultation services for individuals, foundations, and companies. For individuals the focus is on wealth preservation, precious metal investment strategies, and building reliliency; for foundations it's all about portfolio planning; for companies he looks at how one can prepare for a future of rising costs and slowing economic growth.
To schedule a consultation you'll first have ot fill out a waiver form, send that in to the company and pay a $250 deposit for the first half-hour of the consultation. The fee is $500/hr.
Forum
There is also a forum that is fairly active with members of Peak Prosperity. In this forum you can discuss general news, controversial topics and so on. This is where you can hear unfiltered and unedited commentary from like-minded people, which can be very beneficial.
Cost & Refunds
There is a lot of free material provided on the website, but much of it also costs money. Often what you'll find is that you can read "Part 1" of an article, but in order to get to "Part 2" you will have to enroll as a paying member.
The cost of enrolling is either $30/mo, $80/quarterly, or $300/yr, and they also rely on donations to some extent to keep their operations moving along.
When enrolled you get access to all the Insider content, all the expert analyses and premium reports, alerts when something important comes up, and so on...
There is no doubt you can still get a good bit of helpful information and keep yourself informed just by using the free information, but this often leaves you wanting more and is usually incomplete without reading the additional information provided to members.
Refunds
The refund policy is cut and dry... there are no refunds. The reason for this is because "the enrollment fees and donations received by PeakProsperity.com are immediately applied toward site maintenance and projects that benefit site readers" and they "simply do not have the resources to process refunds".
It sounds pretty ridiculous to be honest, because processing refunds of completely digital memberships like this couldn't get any easier, but it is what it is. No refunds.
So if you do buy into their service I'd recommend just paying for 1-month and seeing how you like it.
*Note: If you want to attempt to get a refund, you can find the contact information here.
Complaints
The complaints section is always an important part of a review post, but fortunately for us here there isn't much to talk about. I really haven't been able to find much in the way of complaints, so this is going to be short.
That said, here is one thing I have came across that should be mentioned... you can interpret this as you'd like...
Fear Mongering
There was actually an article published on Mother Jones criticizing Chris Martenson's hype around the coronavirus. Apparently he released a video titled “Coronavirus Is Worse Than You’ve Been Told: Scientist Explains.” that takes a fear-mongering approach to help sell a product for Pandemic Preparations. Martenson is also criticized for calling himself a doctor, which is true but gives people the wrong impression that he is some sort of practicing physician. Yes, he is a doctor... but this is from a PhD he earned in 1994 specializing in toxicology.
Are they taking advantage of people's emotions to make money? Some people think so, but it's too hard to say for certain.
Pros v Cons
Pros
- Lots of information provided from experts in their respected fields
- Wide variety of information and much of it free of charge
- Well laid out Crash Course, which is where it is suggested that you start out
- Cost of membership isn't too bad
- They actually try to help teach people to take control of their lives, not just tell them what to do
Cons
- No refunds
- Complaints about fear-mongering marketing approach
- Website layout is a bit hard to navigate (too much going on)
Who It's Best Suited For
Peak Prosperity is for those who are looking to improve their lives from many different angles. This isn't just about investing and keeping your nest-egg safe from future crises. Yes, the information provided here can help out with this, and should, but there is also all sorts of general information on current events in the news and even things, such as I mentioned, like gardening.
Anyone can join, but it might be a better fit for those with a more libertarian viewpoint on matters... those who prize freedom and liberty above all and want to take control of their lives and ensure they don't end up homeless under some bridge when the next crisis hits.
Conclusion Worth Joining?
Peak Prosperity is all about helping individuals gain more control over their lives and their futures, but is it actually worth joining? Well, this is a question you'll have to answer for yourself, but what I will say is that here at Green Bull Research we won't tell you not to join. This is a legit company and we like what they have to offer... and the cost of their membership is very reasonable.
That said, the best option might be to start out with their free Crash Course and see how you like it. This is where they suggest starting out anyhow, and it's free so you could get a feel for things before actually spending any money.
As always, let us know what you think in the comment section below. Have you joined or are you thinking about joining Peak Prosperity?
Martenson is a complete fraud who works with a gang of other scammers including Mike Maloney and Robert Kiyosaki.