Crazy Town

With the churn of daily news growing more apocalyptic by the headline, and with earth scientists competing ferociously for the title of “gloomiest doomer,” it’s time for some fun (or at least making fun) with a new fantasy-football-style draft. This time, Jason, Rob, and Asher are making their way through their top 3 signs of civilizational collapse, in 3 categories: Earth systems, pop culture, an...

It’d be easy, with the clusterf**k of crazy-making economic, geopolitical, and democracy-in-decline news dominating the scene, to forget that the unraveling of environmental systems waits for no person. That’s why we’ve asked Emily Schoerning to return to Crazy Town. Asher and Emily sit down together (uh, virtually) to discuss the oceanic dynamics – from worrisome to downright apocalyptic – that c...

Join your fellow Crazy Townies by registering at resilience.org/crazytownhall The Crazy Town Hall is a live, online get-together for our most engaged listeners, affectionately known as Crazy Townies. The Town Hall is your chance to hang out with Jason, Rob, and Asher – and your fellow Crazy Townies – as we continue our arduous journey to the center of a collapsing techno-industrial, politically in...

Is hypocrisy the one thing that can grow infinitely on our finite planet? When you learn that humanity’s fossil fuel burning, including your own, is contributing to climate chaos, what can you do? When you understand that economic growth and consumption are causing habitat loss and the sixth mass extinction, can you opt out? As long as you are embedded in an unsustainable society, it’s hard not to...

Chris Smaje visits Crazy Town for some farmer-to-farmer straight talk with Jason Bradford. Are these two long lost cousins? Both dropped out of academia years ago to become philosophizing farmers (can we call them “pharmers” with a “ph,” as in PhD?!?). Chris’s latest book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft explores how we can move from modernity’s unsustainable political e...

People REALLY love their impervious surfaces. Concrete structures practically permeate human-built landscapes. Rather than layering ever more concrete on top of living soils, in waterways, and all over the countryside, what if we re-established our connection with natural ecosystems and put a stop to the concrete madness? One of the most inspiring developments of environmental and cultural restora...

It’s really refreshing to hear from you, our listeners and fellow strugglers living in high-energy modernity (affectionately known as Crazy Townies). This mailbag episode offers the element of surprise, as it gives Jason, Rob, and Asher a chance to respond with delight and spontaneity to your questions and comments. Join the guys as they apply their dubious intellectual powers, subpar comedic tale...

What happens when technology and competition start to invade our experiences in nature? For example, what if you’re so focused on documenting a bird sighting in your iPhone app that you fail to appreciate the majestic songs of the bushtit or dickcissel on the branch in front of you? In this episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher explore the world of competitive birding, the relationship between those who...

Have you ever had that feeling in your gut, when you suddenly realize that the person you’re talking with might have a screw or two loose? What about when you’re the one others are trying to slowly back away from at the punch bowl? The question of who’s the real nut often arises for us collapse-aware folks living here in Crazy Town. Since Mr. Peanut is no longer returning their phone calls, Rob, J...

Immortality projects represent an often irrational, and sometimes even unconscious, way to tamp down anxiety about death. There are some shocking examples of people, especially those with lots and lots of money, who try to leave some sort of mark in a futile attempt to keep from facing death. In this episode, we run a special fantasy-football style draft to take a look at immortality projects, som...

What can we learn about death from the X-Men, small screaming rodents, and unwitting college students in psychology experiments? It turns out that the fear of death (or death anxiety) affects human behavior in all sorts of surprising and deeply troubling ways. Especially disconcerting is the way such fear entices people to cling to cultural beliefs so tightly that they will attack anything or anyo...

What if there were a news outlet that actually covered the most important environmental stories of our time? Dr. Emily Schoerning and her nonprofit, American Resiliency, translate the latest and most urgent climate science into useful information for communities across the United States. Jason and Emily discuss the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the m...

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 not much of the excellent reporting on the environmental, energy, and financial risks of the AI boom address the googleplex-sized elephant in the room – that both AI success and failure lead to immisera...

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 problems. But the little-understood Jevons Paradox intervenes to overwhelm any progress that comes from improved efficiency. We skewer the efficiency gains of electric vehicles, lighting, and plenty of o...

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 energy - what does a realistic and positive future look like? Alex Leff of the Human Nature Odyssey podcast joins Jason, Rob, and Asher to imagine life in the 22nd century: walking from our family farms...

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 delusional as the old fossil-fueled, drill-baby-drill mentality? Alex Leff of the Human Nature Odyssey podcast hosts this special Crazy Town highlights compilation. Alex revisits some of the most thought...

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 like have had a storied and critical role in public life. That is, until government programs and technology gave us an out from having to deal with each other. But with modernity failing, will clubs and...

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 The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species. The three eco-explorers connect over wondrous habitats and critters in Costa Rica's cloud forest and swap stories that cover Laz...

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 hurts everyone; healthy humans need community, and it’s more fun to laugh than to cry. But where did principles like these originate? In this episode, Jason, Asher, and Rob use the format of a fantasy...

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 things to extract even more wealth, harm your health, diminish democracy, and rig the whole system in their favor. How did this happen? Why do we tolerate it? How can we stop the billionaires? And ca...

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 power whenever constraints allow. Given the way humans adhere to this principle, especially by overexploiting fossil fuels, we often do behave like supervillains, wielding power in wildly irresponsible...

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 contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. When Bhutan embraced “Gross National Happiness” and a sane notion of progress...

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 of us left – judge the things everyone sees as normal today? Jason, Rob, and Asher take turns serving as expert curators of this future museum, nominating items that best encapsulate how foolish and...

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 source: positive net energy. Having surplus energy in the form of thirteen pounds of food per day enables a very big man, Hafthor Bjornsson, to lift very big objects. Similarly, having surplus energy in...

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 glorious plasticity. We're on the hunt for microplastics – and we won’t have to go very far, as they're present everywhere – in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in our bodies. We'll be looking...