With equal parts humor and in-depth analysis, Asher, Rob, and Jason safeguard their sanity while probing crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we’re all deluding ourselves. Each fortnightly episode helps you understand the “Great Unraveling” of our environmental and social systems and describes how we can make the transition to a sustainable and equitable world. If you’re someone who questions the trajectory of society and struggles to understand why most people would rather eat nachos on the deck of the “SS Denial” than face reality, you’ll find community and plenty of laughs in Crazy Town.
Brought to you by https://www.resilience.org/ and the unconventional minds at Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank that builds awareness of the polycrisis and prescribes community resilience-building as the most appropriate response.
Your hosts:
Asher Miller - Nonprofit executive director by day, apocalypse comedian by night. Feels most at home exploring insanity-inducing topics while trying not to spill coffee on his keyboard as he convulses over the latest ecomodernist fantasy. In danger of losing his mind every time he encounters someone using a gas-powered blower to move leaves from one spot to another.
Rob Dietz - Jack-of-all-trades environmental scientist, conservation biologist, and ecological economist with a penchant for relating planetary overshoot to the catalog of movie scenes that play on a continuous loop in his colonized brain. Known for inserting random ecological facts into casual conversation, often in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice. His friends call him “pessimistically hilarious.”
Jason Bradford - Activist farmer and former encyclopedia salesman with a PhD in plant ecology who gets genuinely excited discussing soil microbes and societal collapse in the same breath. Morally opposed to doomsday prepping, but predisposed toward sharing everything he keeps in his bunker, er root cellar, including potatoes, wine, and a 47-month supply of scientific esoterica and embarrassing anecdotes.
These guys are the Three Stooges of sustainability podcasting, although they tend toward scientific analysis, righteous outrage, and self-deprecation rather than beating each other up with hand tools. How can they have this much fun while contemplating collapse and navigating the Great Unraveling?
Heartfelt thanks to the team at Post Carbon Institute, our volunteers, and all our fellow Crazy Townies out there who help bring this podcast to life.
📻 Siste episoder av Crazy Town
Her er de nyeste episodene tilgjengelige via RSS-feeden:
Choose Your AI Adventure: Immiseration or Extinction (00:34:09)
Jason and Asher replace Rob with a much more humane and humble co-host, Elon Musk, to explore the feasibility of harnessing the entire sun to power AI superintelligence. We come away perplexed that no...
EVs on Speed: The Jevons Paradox Strikes Again (00:43:18)
Mainstream economists and environmentalists share something in common. Both tend to tout efficiency -- think better light bulbs -- as the solution to climate change and all our other environmental pro...
Sane Town: A Realistic Vision of Life 100 Years from Now (00:55:30)
Picture the future 100 years from now. What do you imagine? Flying cars? Space colonies? AI talking toasters?But if we can’t sustain an endlessly growing economy - even with a transition to green ener...
Toasting Bread Is WAY Harder Than You Think: The Challenges of a Renewable Energy Future (00:37:11)
What does a livable future look like 100 years from now? If we unlocked unlimited green energy, what would we actually do with it? And are our dreams of a renewable-energy utopia sometimes just as del...
Worried about the Future? Join the Club (00:51:54)
There’s the book club, the Rotary Club, the Mickey Mouse Club, and the club sandwich. Whatever your preference, you might want to think about joining a club. Social clubs, fraternal orders, and the li...
Searching for the Golden Toad with Kyle and Trevor Ritland (00:51:11)
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of Th...
Unsung Heroes: Sustainability Gurus Who Influenced the Crazy Town Worldview (00:57:05)
Some key understandings in Crazy Town: the Earth is finite; the economy cannot grow forever; people can harm ecosystems and cause global warming; physics, chemistry, and biology are real; inequality h...
Burned by Billionaires, with Chuck Collins (00:44:46)
Billionaires. They should be objects of scorn rather than envy. While they ride around in their super-yachts and private jets, producing the climate-damaging pollution of entire nations, they’re doing...
Crazy Town Classics - Maximum Power and Scarcity, or... the Story of the Birdbrained Backhoe on the Beach (00:59:28)
The “maximum power principle” may sound like the doctrine of an evil supervillain, but it actually applies to all living creatures. The principle states that biological systems organize to increase po...
Et Tu, Bhutan? Cryptocurrency and Late-Stage Capitalism (00:36:08)
Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a...
Artifacts of Collapse: Touring the Crazy Town Museum (01:02:51)
In this episode we travel in time to the year 2125, to visit the Crazy Town museum, which showcases today’s world of wanton consumption and profligate waste. How will humans in 2125 – if there are any...
Crazy Town Classics - Net Energy and Sustainability, or… the Story of the Overstuffed Strongman (01:26:55)
All of humanity’s feats, whether a record-setting deadlift by the world’s strongest man or the construction of a gleaming city by a technologically advanced economy, originate from a single hidden sou...
Just One Word: Microplastics, with Matt Simon (00:53:17)
Put on your best polyester pants, grab a bunch of gleaming mylar balloons, and crack open a case of bottled water. In today's episode, we're entering the plastic world of plastic pollution in all its ...
Crazy Town Classics - Lord of the Swans: The Tragedy of the Enclosure of the Commons (00:57:02)
The “tragedy of the commons” is an idea that has so thoroughly seeped into culture and law that it seems normal for people and corporations to own land, water, and even whole ecosystems. But there’s a...
Will Trump's Tariffs Fuel or Foil the Degrowth Movement? (00:47:53)
As Trump’s tariffs kick in, the Republican party is suddenly spouting anti-consumerist rhetoric that would make the Lorax smile. Should we cheer on this accidental experiment in economic shrinkage, or...
Blinded by the Light - Facing Reality with Renewable Energy (00:56:39)
Solar panels and other modern energy technologies can be really useful, but the belief that we can technologize our way to a bigger and better society powered by clean energy is tragically flawed. Ash...
Who Can Fix the Housing Crisis - NYT Pundits, German Shepherds, or Bilbo Baggins? (00:51:46)
Jason, Rob, and Asher are taking out a huge, unaffordable mortgage on the housing crisis. What’s behind the shortage in housing? Why is it that no one, except canine Tik Tok influencers with billion-d...
Bunkers, Bazookas, and Bespoke Moats: How to Be Safe in an Unsafe World (00:42:13)
The world has gone bunking mad. The bespoke security industry is burying bunkers stocked with arsenals of automatic rifles and surrounded by flaming moats. Is there a better way to prepare for the pol...
It Was Never Your Democracy Anyway: Thomas Linzey on Rethinking the Constitution (00:51:19)
Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher s...
Going #2: The Dueling Rules of Nature That Every Good Earthling Needs to Know (00:50:32)
Happy Earth Day! There are two concepts that every person should understand to be a better Earthling: entropy and self-organization. It seems like a paradox, but systems on Earth are simultaneously br...
Even AI Chatbots Hate Us: The Rise of the New Luddites, with Brian Merchant (01:09:46)
Who knew that the breakthrough moment of AI sentience would come from interacting with an annoying neo-Luddite?After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI’s newest initiative — the $350 billion Tra...
A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out of Love with Modernity (00:54:22)
Recovering technology booster Tom Murphy visits Crazy Town to discuss his journey from shooting lasers at the moon, to trying to "solve" the energy predicament, to falling out of love with modernity i...
Eating the Future: The NY Times Goes Full Ecomodernist on Food and Farming (00:47:01)
How will we feed people living in the megacities of the 21st century, especially while confronting climate chaos and the depletion of fossil fuels and fossil water? According to the mainstream media: ...
Bargaining With Collapse: A Superabundance of Lab Grown Meat and Dryer Balls (00:37:32)
Do you contemplate topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the risk of civilizational collapse? If so, then you probably understand something about bargaining – a psychological defense mech...
The House Is Quite Literally on Fire: Peter Kalmus on the Climate Emergency Hitting Home (00:53:49)
Peter Kalmus, climate scientist and returning friend of Crazy Town, used to live in Altadena, California, where one of the disastrous Los Angeles wildfires struck on January 7th. Having learned that h...