August 29, 2024 • 55 mins
Is it possible to escape industrialism, capitalism, imperialism or are we trapped? Crazy Town podcast hosts Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller join us for a wide-ranging discussion of big topics like modern civilization’s converging crises, the concept of 'red pilling', and the 1993 Bill Murray classic film Groundhog Day.
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.
In addition to hosting the Crazy Town podcast, they are also leaders of the Post Carbon Institute in Corvallis, Oregon. Founded in 2003, PCI’s mission is to lead the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world by providing individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the 21st century.
If you’d like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, leave us a review, and visit humannatureodyssey.com.
Join us on Patreon and get exclusive access to audio extras, writings, and notes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
You were born in Crazytown.
You've lived your whole life
among denizens of delusion.
Stuck in a culturethat believes unlimited growth
(00:24):
on a finite planetis perfectly reasonable.
You've watched as they clearcut the forests,
removed whole mountain tops,smothered the earth in asphalt,
and most unforgivably rantheir gas powered
leaf blowers from dawn to dusk.
And despite your concern,
you have participatedin all this reluctantly, perhaps,
(00:48):
but in Crazytown,all must participate in order to survive.
You've voiced your growing skepticismthat things are not quite right
and headed towards obvious disaster.
You've been called a romantic idealist,a primitive ist hippie.
Get back to work.
They've said Crazytown needs youand you need crazytown.
(01:10):
So quit your whining.
But you were not alone.
There are others in Crazytown
who see what you seeand share your concern.
Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz
and Asher Miller have dedicatedtheir lives trying to bring sanity
to our collective confusion,and they do so
(01:32):
with sincerity and humor.
If you combine their bios and resumes,you'd learn that among them
they have expertisein ecological economics,
environmental science, conservationbiology, and climate organizing.
One is an organic farmer and all three
are dads and lovers of 80s films.
(01:53):
They are also the executivedirector program director and board
president of the Post CarbonInstitute, based in Corvallis, Oregon,
whose mission is to lead the transitionto a more resilient,
equitable and sustainable worldby providing individuals
and communities with the resourcesneeded to understand and respond
(02:13):
to the interrelated ecological,economic, energy,
and equity crises of the 21st centurytoday.
The next stop on our odyssey is theirfarmhouse attic turned podcast studio.
Out their window
you can see the flaxgrowing at full summer height,
and on the horizon are a couple snowcovered peaks
(02:34):
of the Cascade Mountains.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast
trying to find some semblance of sanityin our global civilization.
I'm Alex Leff.
(03:09):
Well, I appreciategetting to be here with you guys.
It's a funny thing of, like,
thank you for having me,but you're hosting me physically.
I guess I'm hosting you metaphorically.
This is awesome.
You're hosting us electronically?
Yes. Yes. Why?
I don't know. How are you a metaphor?
You're like, right here in the room.You're.
You're like a cross. Me? You're here.
You want me to.
(03:30):
On his podcast, you are in charge.
I knew what you were saying, Alex.
They're just not as sharpas they used to be.
I mean, your state, your house. Yeah.
I'm completely out of my element.
It is our state.
It's true. Yeah.
I'm talking to the threemayors of the state of Oregon.
Yeah, well, crazy town.
It's an unincorporated. Yeah.
(03:51):
State of being.
State of being?
Well, you guys aren't the mayors of CrazyTown by any means.
You'rethe three curmudgeons on the outskirts.
The only residents of Crazy Town, I guess.
No, there's so many people in crazy.
Well, they come and visit.
Yeah.
Here, you got all the behind the scenespeople making it happen, too.
That's true.
Driving their big Dodge trucks.
Shooting.
(04:12):
The inspiration was the inspiration.
Oh, I thought you were talking more nicelyabout the people who help us
with our crazy town.
Well, there's the there'sthe Crazy Town podcast, and then there's
the proverbial crazy townthat you're investigating.
Yeah. So that's interesting.
So are we investigating a crazy townor are we inhabiting a state of being?
Well, that was the whole premise,was that we live in Crazy Town
(04:35):
because you see all the problemsand all the things that are going wrong
and the fixes are available,but nobody is talking about them.
Nobody's really making it happen.
Well, and in a way,you three are anthropologists.
Yes. And you're documenting something.
You're exoticized something that is sofamiliar that people take it for granted.
Makes it sound like more seriousand less erudite.
(04:57):
Thank you.
Now it's true. Then. Then it's true.Let me have a sip of my wine.
Whether you, accept it or not.
I see you as anthropologists,
and I want to get really specificabout what we mean by a lot of the terms
that we're using.
And so, like, because wordslike capitalism and Western civilization
or the United States of America, these areall just completely made up terms.
(05:18):
We're just slapping ona very complicated reality.
And so you're bringing to the conversationyour own term.
You have termed what I imagineto be somewhat
analogous to our global civilization,industrial civilization, as crazytown.
And so I wanted to really talk with youabout this town that you have encountered
and you've talked a lot about,and how you've broken it down.
(05:38):
And first, what you mean by crazy.
I see that you're not referring to peoplestruggling with mental illness.
You mean it's, a perspectivethat is inherently unsustainable?
You know, the mentality of town?
You're not saying it's bad townor hurtful town.
I see you using the word crazybecause there is a
(05:58):
it seems like a delusional aspectto the mindset that people have
that think that unlimited growthis reasonable,
that we can be separate from the Earthand try to conquer it,
even though we're just one speciesthat's dependent on it.
Right? And
it's almost like you're trying to catalog
what is this placethat we all like this in.
(06:19):
What is the mindset of it?
And that you see your selvesas kind of outside of that.
But so if you could kind of describe to melike take me on a tour of crazy Town
to someone who has never viewed the worldthis way, like, what would you describe
as the mentality of this strange place?
What's the culture there?
Yeah, I wonder if we actually interestingto use our Marvin Harris
(06:39):
lens to describe Crazytown a little bit.
Yeah.
And which is something that you,
in your Crazy Town podcast in the mostrecent season was a very effective
kind of three step processto understanding.
Yeah. So it wasmaybe it start with structure.
And then the main thing we talk aboutfirst maybe I can do structure.
And then we'll give uswhat's the overview of the Marvin Harris
cultural materialism. Yeah.
(07:00):
So an anthropologist that this is realanthropology a real anthropologist.
Yeah.
And he, a very famous anthropologist,and he basically said
that the societies develop, they evolve
based upon the material conditionsof their existence.
So what does our means of subsistenceand that means of subsistence,
the basic material sideis called the infrastructure.
(07:23):
And then a particular infrastructurewill lead to the requirements
for social norms and lawsthat we would call structure.
So for example,
if you have an industrial food system,you're going to have to have food safety
inspectors and regulatorsto make sure that things are labeled
properly and packages and there's coolingthat's properly done for transport.
They're off industry standards like thatlevel of complexity requires
(07:45):
then organization, bureaucracy,laws, norms,
and then above that,what we call the superstructure.
And this would be then the mythologiesand general belief systems.
So the idea like the progressmyth would be a superstructure
that comes from, if you back it up,the infrastructure that I'll focus on now,
we also call high energy modernity,or the idea that every individual
(08:08):
in an advanced industrial societyhas access to fossil fuels
when it gives you superpowers to be like,you can whip across the landscape
in a car
or in a plane or train or whatevercan fly at the speed of sound comfortably.
Yeah, we can broadcast this episode, all over the world, but what's crazy about
it is we use that bounty
(08:29):
for all these dumb things.
there's so much waste in the systemright?
We talk about this all the time.
You know, the two stroke enginesthat were surrounded by,
you know, basically people blowing leavesfrom one spot to another spot.
Don't get me started with blowers.
It's like, don't get me startedso that we can clear off,
you know, leaves from trees from our lawnthat shouldn't exist.
(08:50):
This is all the infrastructureof Crazytown that you're talking about.
These are all the thingsthat are at our disposal.
Yes, the material and the crazy.
So there's parts of itthat are truly miraculous, right,
that have led us to it'snot just in medicine.
Yeah.
We're not just using most of that bountyto really benefit people.
(09:11):
There's a disproportionatelysmall number of people who are benefiting,
you know, the most from it, right?
It's now being sharedequally among the population.
And we are frivolous in how we use itbecause we were born into it
and think, this is how it is.
This is the normal state of affairs.
I think you're getting to the world view,the superstructure space.
(09:34):
But I think we got to take that
pit stop it structure,because you just outlived all this stuff
that came about from fossil fuelsor even the stuff before that.
But as the industrial revolutionwas getting going,
you also had kind of an economicsrevolution, right?
The whole idea of AdamSmith and capitalism
and basically everybodyfollow your own individual self-directed
(09:58):
path, and it's going to formkind of a utopian society, right?
Individualism will lead to utopia.Yeah, yeah.
So you have all these policiesabout individualism,
like individual property rights and,you know, a share.
You're lamenting somebody'sgrabbing a blower,
or maybe that maybe picture of this.
So you got a big black Dodge pickuptruck running diesel,
(10:19):
and the fumes are coming out the back.
And there's 12 guys standing in the bedwith blowers, you know, just for whatever
reason, just going down the street,running their blowers.
That's completely legaland completely fine.
You know, it's a so our this idea ofyou can do what you want individually
within this economy, as long as you havethe funds to make it happen,
(10:41):
goes so hand in hand with this
blown upinfrastructure of high energy modernity
to make quite literally paved the roadsfor for us to do whatever it is we want.
But that's a key thing.
This is why infrastructureis so important,
because if the infrastructuredidn't allow that to happen, it wouldn't
matter that we had thosethose freedoms, right?
(11:02):
One comes in the sense from the other.
Well, that's the one of the big thingsin Ishmael by Daniel Quinn,
which in the first seasonwe explored a lot.
It really focuses onlike the mindset of our culture,
which in this Marvin Harris, perspectivewould be the superstructure, right?
Yeah.
And the fact that we believethat the world belongs to us means
that we're creating a worldwhere we're trying to enact that story.
(11:22):
Yeah, exactly.
But you guys are bringing up
the point that then it iskind of like a feedback loop, right?
Because we've created a societythat's enacting the story
that the world belongs to us.
But then we're also kind of seeing theevidence of what it kind of looks like.
The world. Right?
It does belong to usbecause I have my nice manicured lawn.
The river flowing throughmy city is covered in concrete.
It's all managed from us. Right.
(11:43):
So in this most recent season of CrazyTown, you have a great way of structuring
all these episodesand describing the different components
of Crazy Town, and you organize thembased on infrastructure, structure
and superstructure.
You list about how many, nine,a dozen isms.
Yeah, that are making up Crazy Town.
(12:03):
And I think there was just like a reallygreat way of focusing on specific town.
Yeah, there's the infrastructure ismslike industrialism, consumerism, urbanism,
technology ism, technological ism,
and more pronouncedthan something like globalism.
Then there's the structure,isms, growth ism,
capitalism, imperial ism,and then the superstructure isms,
(12:26):
individualism, homocentrism, extremism and other ism.
And I kind of wanted to like, usethat as the model to maybe
go through some of these as well,because you bring up a lot
of really interesting thingsin each episode.
Like for that, I remember.
Well, then that helped me.
In the urbanism episode,you bring up the point that there's more
at this point in history,anthropogenic mass than biomass.
(12:49):
Yeah, this kill me, which can you explainwhat you mean by that?
Oh, okay.
So anthropogenic mass is stuffthat people basically make for themselves.
Most of it ends up being actuallylike stuff that we manufacture.
So concrete, steel, glass, plastic,
these are thingsnot really found much in nature.
Right.
And we've extracted raw materials,
(13:12):
manipulate them throughan industrial manufacturing process
and then deploy them for our quoteunquote infrastructure needs.
And now all that added up weighs morethan all the living biomass on the planet.
So all the trees,the phytoplankton in the ocean,
the fish in the sea, blah, blah, blah.
That's whatthat's just astonishing to me.
(13:34):
So if you took likea giant cosmic scale in space
and you piled up all the concreteand plastic,
that would now weighmore than all of the living beings and
and the key thing is,
in that how short of a period that we'retalking about this whole having occurred.
Yeah.
Because the bulk of that really
is the concrete and asphaltand the hard scapes that we've made.
(13:58):
And yeah, that's a few hundred years when actually you think about doubling time.
So, you know, economic growth, substance.
I was born 55 years ago.
That probably has gone from
maybe like or a third of the biomassto now we exceed it.
And that's what's astonishing.
On the other sideis happening at the same time.
The biomass is declining.
(14:19):
And, hammered along the wayas we replace it with our stuff.
I think in that urbanism episode,I was talking about how I was
at a friend's placewho lived in a high rise
building in downtown Portland,and we're up on the rooftop
kind of terrace,looking out over the city.
And I was just havingone of those moments of,
wow, look at the
(14:40):
amount of pavement and stuff
and all the people just moving through itand not freaking out.
And what are we? Yeah,I didn't jump. It was.
But the people downthere aren't freaking out. Yeah, right.
And it's also like
my understanding is that it's not justthat you guys don't like pavement,
because pavement scrapes your kneeswhen you fall off your skateboard.
(15:01):
Is that you're seeing what's so dangerousabout Crazy Town isn't also just
what we've destroyed and what we've lost,but you're looking into the future
and the trajectory of this placeand the mindset that enables it
and the systems that are perpetuatingit seems to,
not be going to a place that you think isthat, oh, it's scary.
Yeah.
It, it and so let's talka little bit attainable will collapse.
(15:24):
And when it comes down to scale right.
Like you could have some pavementlike I love riding bikes.
I love a good bike path.
but when you have superhighwaysand then more superhighways and more, it's
the doubling time, the exponential growth,that's the problem.
It's if we had a wind to stop rule
or a little bit of abilityto limit our own desires for power,
(15:48):
then I think we'd we'd be okaywith some of this technology.
So describe the great unraveling
that seems to be a key component.
Have you read the news?
It seems like everything's goingreally well
and we're on top of it. And,
yeah.
So the great unraveling is actually a termthat was coined by Joanna macy,
(16:09):
who I think your listenerswould really appreciate a lot in June,
as I think 95 years old now close to it,
has been presidential aged, right.
She's been I guess you can call an ecophilosopher for a long time.
And this helped a lot of people tryto navigate emotionally, psychologically,
(16:29):
you know, with their whole selves,kind of the state of the world.
In a sense.
It probably is a healthier responseto living in Crazytown than our response.
Our response is like pulling our hair out,
you know, gnashing our teeth, laughing.
I think Julian has come to this kind ofsimilar perspective with a lot more heart
and maybe compassion than I wouldthan I have, I guess, in in my life.
(16:52):
But yeah, she's like, she's like monklike, whereas we're, we're Grinch
like with whack into anold shriveled hearts.
Think,
you know, it takes all kinds.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
in any case, you know,she coined this term the Great Unraveling,
which is actually part of a larger story
that she has of a great turning.
(17:13):
And their unraveling is basically a phase,a part of the undoing of
what is now for something new to emergethat is much healthier
and more sustainable and more just.
And this is what we do withthis is what we do across town,
and probably what we doat Post Coven Institute.
For good or bad.
I think we sometimes lean a little bitinto trying to help
(17:33):
people stay in the moment
of what we're actually grappling with,because the tendency that I think so
many of us have and I haveis either we compartmentalize,
we catastrophize in the senseof we're like, it's all fucked, forget it.
Right?
Or we solution eyes and we think, okay,this is this is going to get solved
somehow or whatever.
(17:54):
And we don't stay in that space of like
because it's frankly, it's hard, you know,looking out over from the rooftop
at a scene where for most people,looks like this is normal.
Oh, this is normal. Yeah.You know what I mean?
And for us, it's like,
what have we done?
What did this land look like beforewe pave the shit out of it?
(18:14):
And what is it going to look like when thefuels run out and like, yeah, whatever.
So we're we're in that place.
And I think because peoplehave such a hard time staying with it,
we've kind of leaned into, you can call itthe phase of this collapse,
the Great Unraveling, which is just namingwhat we're experiencing already.
Right.
So and bring you back to the MarvinHarris stuff in infrastructure, whatever.
(18:36):
It's likely going to be that our behaviorschange
the rules that we setup, our belief systems,
a large scale are going to changebecause we're forced to change.
And that's in some waysmeaningful structural change.
And that may be drivenbecause we can no longer
ignore the hurricanes, the heat waves,the droughts, the floods, the whatever,
which is the climate.
You know, consequences of whatwe've been doing or it's something else,
(18:59):
but there's an unravelingthat's already happening.
It's not equally distributedaround the world.
It's manifesting itself in different ways.
Because what happens is, is sort of playson the dynamics that are exist.
So you have a crisis that happens
and it just feeds, you know,these underlying things that maybe
have been covered up for a long time,like racial ethnic tensions
(19:20):
or other kinds of things that are socialdynamics, exposes corruption.
It creates opportunities for peoplewho want to consolidate power to do so.
You know,it's like weakens democratic institutions
where there's a needfor more drastic action.
Right?
Yeah.
And and I think what happens.
So there's social unraveling.
And I think we seelots of signs of, of that around us.
You know, you're talkingabout democratic institutions,
(19:42):
this political polarizationthat we're seeing we're seeing dynamics
even in termsof the impacts of technology,
God knows what will happen with AI,for example, in terms of,
you know, what it does to labor marketsand those kinds of things,
and then you have all these environmentalunraveling that are happening.
And it's kind of that that multiplicityof crises coming together,
(20:02):
which some people callpoly crisis that we're experiencing. And
we have to somehow
chart a path forward
in a way where we recognizethat our options are limited
and they're not just limited politicallyin a certain way, but they're limited
infrastructural, biophysical, right.
And that's part of our criticism of peoplewho just believe all we need to do
(20:25):
is ramp up renewable.
Some will be fine, but we have to navigateit as things are getting worse.
And that's what's so difficult.
And you have to livewith the tons of uncertainty.
Like this is the thing is,like the solution is more avoidance.
It's comfortable to have either an answeror just to be able to ignore, but to know
that you're probably never going tobe comfortable with a full understanding,
(20:49):
with a comprehensive knowledgeof what your best role is.
How to apply yourself in this.
Because the situations are dynamic,
they're kind of unprecedentedin your lifetime.
What should you do?
What's the best thing I can do?
You're probably going to be challengingyourself with that all the time.
A lot of it is living,you know, trying to be comfortable
in a state of unknowing and uncertainty.
(21:10):
One of the amazing thingsI've noticed in in the years of doing this
podcast and studying all these issuesaround the great unraveling,
is that I can pretty clearly see whereI'm compartmentalizing.
And then that puts youin a pretty strange mental space.
So I think it's
it's the same thing, like you're talkingabout the discomfort of uncertainty.
(21:30):
There's also the discomfortof being a hypocrite.
Yeah, right.
I think we have to deal withbecause that's a really tough. Yeah.
How do you both be how do you bothbe complicit and then also do something
that is maybe compensatory in some wayand is looking towards the future.
And it's it's almost impossible not to becomplicit while you're also working on
(21:51):
I don't know if you call it solution,but we would need more to talk about,
like response or adaptation as opposedto solution because there's no solution.
A solution isyou can identify a goal that's clear
and you can do somethingrelatively straightforward to address it.
But then these kind of poly crisisunraveling situations where you see them
with whole systemsthat are kind of collapsing and
(22:12):
and trying to reorganize,there's no simple path like that.
And that's really hard to manage,especially as an individual
when you're dealing with,
you know, the madness of crowds and mobmentality and, asymmetrical power.
And so you can quickly feel helpless.
And that's what, you know,we struggle with all the time.
How do you have some sense of agencyand purpose in life?
(22:33):
And I imagine the way that you guys relateto Crazytown,
the, the global civilizational crazytownthat you're describing, is similar
to how I feltwhen I was 16, studying for the SATs.
And I was, you know,I did the cities once.
I got pretty low score.
My mom was like, okay,this is like not going to be good.
(22:53):
and so
she put me in this classI had to do after school,
and they were really upfront about it, though.
There was this Russian ladyshe was teaching us.
This is like how you're goingto get a better SAT score.
It wasn't about like,this is how you're going to learn more.
This is not about being moreof a critical thinker.
This is justhow we're going to like raise the numbers.
So this is for the peoplethat weren't rich enough
to hire somebodyto take the S.A.T. for their kids.
(23:15):
Is that right? Amazing.
So what?
I would have learnedso much through that method, but so I.
You know, it'sthe night before the cities, and
I was just so viscerally upset by
not just this test,but also just the whole school system,
you know, like spending, you know,was wasting away my childhood indoors
(23:36):
doing bullshit 10% of the timeI was learning.
And I could have learned that in waymore effective ways than having to go home
and do homework and just felt like,you know, this is, to me,
such a bizarre, ridiculous thingthat I'm wasting my life doing.
And just because everyone does it,and my parents did
it and my grandparents did it,and my great grandparents did it.
(23:58):
And also,
like we talk about how it's a societalgood, you know, and I just felt like this
very normal, mundane, everyday thing to mewas, was very obviously crazy.
Yeah. It's like a trap.You feel like you're trapped. Yeah.
And it's so it's
what you guys are doing with crazy Townand why I'm calling you anthropologist.
Trying to exoticized,
you know, our own cultureand take away the normal aspects of it.
(24:20):
It is this upsetting thing because, like,we're witnessing the destruction
of the world, but it's like, well, yeah,I mean, this is what humans do.
This is what advanced countries do.
And the countries that aren't are poor.
Like need a jump on to thisso they can embody what we're doing.
You're going to break a few eggs, right?
Crack a few eggs, make an omelet.
And so what you do with this most recentseason is you talk about escaping
(24:43):
from Crazytown and, you know, likewith all the different infrastructure,
structure, superstructure stuffwe talked about,
each episode is structuredby escaping industrialism,
escaping consumerism ism, escapinggrowth ism, escaping capitalism.
And I found, I noticed guys,
that it was much easier for you to talkabout how shitty these things are.
(25:03):
Yeah, than it was to imagine,how we could escape from them.
I know, I'm sorry. Everybody.
Well,here, I mean, here's part of the challenge
that we havethat we have to be honest about, which is
it has to do with agencyand skill on some level.
So we don't have the agency the capacity
(25:25):
to change the global economic systemto stop externalizing,
you know, environmental impactsor to basically halt,
you know, speed trading or whatever,you know, kind of structural changes.
We might if we could, you know,snap our fingers, you know, leaf blowers.
Yeah.
I mean, so we don't havethe agency ourselves to do that.
(25:47):
What do we have the agency to do?
That's much more at a localand personal kind of scale,
which also is not
sufficient to, in and of itself, changethe entire trajectory of the system.
So we're still caughtin the system. Right.
And when I think the most
important insights at the beginning ofthe journey is to recognize, like,
we're not just taking up, some residencyat Crazytown, we actually like.
(26:11):
Yeah. Held captive. Yes. Here we are.
And all of these things likeindustrialism, capitalism, consumerism.
What's so strange?And you talk about this in the podcast.
We're held captive,and there's so many ways
that these systems are hurting us,but it's also enabling us
to live our livesdepend on these systems, too.
And so it's when I think it's so hard.Yeah.
(26:33):
For I mean, you talked about Robis compartmentalization.
I think people manifest this in differentways, but it is exceedingly difficult
to go day to day in a very conscious way,living in a world
that you know is pathologicalor you fundamentally disagree with,
but you have to still participate in itand literally
(26:55):
have to participate in, in order for your,your existence.
And so holding both of those things,doing both of those things simultaneously
is incredibly challenging,which is why I think
is very difficult for people to sort ofbe there, right.
Be in that space between.
I completely get why most people's never,
(27:16):
never even have thereckoning like you were having in school.
You know, being aware of the school systemis kind of totally flawed bullshit.
That is, your body is not the same thing.
yeah, I mean, I, I basically dropped out.
Rob and I left school.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we were we were good littles. Yeah.
I mean, I was biasedbecause I was a very bad student.
Yeah. I did not dowell at that same thing.
(27:36):
That's amazing.
Actually, Jason, that we're in this, roomdiscussing the things that we discuss
because we were such rule followers.
Yeah, we were good at following rules.
I came to follow rules later, but, what's
challenging about trying to escape
for the audience that we have of people,at least what
we're arguing for, people that maybeare like us, who are still in it.
(27:58):
The simplest way to escape is literallyjust go off grid, you know?
Yeah,but you probably don't have any skills
and you're probably goingto be doing something illegal,
but then you die and then whatever.
Yeah, that's a great result.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an escape,but it's packing up.
Death is your first and best as well.
Is that what you're saying?
Well,I mean, this is a challenging podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
(28:19):
Nobodylisten to anything we say for anyhow.
But this is the dilemma, right?
Is a lot about youchange your change your internal story.
Right. And then talk to othersabout it. Change their story.
The issue becomes,
okay, you have that news story,but the infrastructure doesn't support it.
Right.
And so if you want to thenhave some agency that is aligned with that
(28:39):
new story, you run into one barrierafter the after another.
Oh, I want to becomea more simple agriculturalists
that also does some huntergathering on the side.
It's going to be in modern daywe would call regenerative.
Yeah, I want to do this communally
so I have more of my own tribe,blah blah blah.
how?
Well, I was hunting and gathering at theChase Bank and they did not like that.
(29:03):
I mean, I just had wads of cash.
I was hunting,gathering at the Whole Foods. Yeah,
you're one right.
But you said free pens. Yeah,I don't know. So.
So the structure is makes that illegal?Mostly. Right.
Unless you have enough money to buy landand now you have title.
And so now you're part of the systemin a sense of the property class.
(29:24):
But okay, let's say you're a partof the property class like I am.
And most people landed gentry.
Yeah, but you're a modern squire.
Yeah.
Now that's what that wig is for.
Okay? We always want a powder.
Yeah, we get ready with our powdered wigshere and so.
So you're going to livewith the contradiction.
Even in that situation,you make compromises the entire way.
(29:47):
None of it's perfect.
Like there's no path to a quick utopia.
So we're always going to live in thisplace of, like, I'm not quite satisfied.
I'm kind of disappointed, but I'm tryingand you'll be ridiculed for it, too.
I want to get back to somethingyou touched on, Jason.
I feel like is super importantand that is not going it alone.
(30:07):
And I actually feel likethat is the secret code, in a sense,
to navigating all this stuff.
Because trying to do this on your ownis frankly, impossible.
You're still going to be locked inthe system.
You're still going to have to dealwith all the dissonance,
all the contradictions, all the hypocrisy,all that whatever.
Even if you're doing itwith a group of people,
unless you all completely drop outtogether, but trying to do it on your own,
(30:30):
where you're not having conversationswith people about the state of the world
as you see it, peoplethat you could work with to sort of
take these baby steps to kind of likehave one foot out.
Trying to do that by yourself,I think, is just exceedingly difficult.
Now, here's here's the problem.
The problem is to get people to join you.
(30:51):
It's kind of like you have to tell them,look, there's a there's a virus coming.
It's going to be really bad.
And what you need to dois get preoccupied.
You basically need to get it beforeeverybody else.
Right?
You won't get sick with me, you know?
Do you want to get ill with me?This is a terrible picture.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah,but that's kind of what the equivalent is.
(31:13):
It's like I feel bad for the peoplethat I have converted
to this crazytown view of the world,you know?
Well,the anti crazytown view of the world.
The Crazytown podcast view of the that.
Yeah. Well well because it's.
And yeah, what I hear you sayingis that it's like you're the pitch
you're making the people.
Is that like, we are going to experiencereal significant shocks to the system,
(31:36):
and it's going to force us
to have systemic changewhere we're more immediately
getting our resources on a local level,perhaps.
And so you're telling peoplethese are things that
we want to anticipate,but even psychologically
to be able to let go,like if you're not already kind of
turn on to this way of seeing the world,you don't have those
crazy glasses,you know, the Crazytown podcast glasses.
(31:57):
Yeah. Antidote. Crazytown.It's really weird.
Thank you. That's right.Just trying to sort it out.
Yeah,well, it's not kind to do that to people.
Have them, make them, put them on.
You know, it's like,I guess maybe the The Matrix is.
Well, so it's it's funny you say thatbecause I have a bullet point here on my,
my shit.
I'm looking at about, that exact thing,the red pill option in the matrix.
(32:19):
I think that's somethingthat's really interesting.
That has changed significantly since Thematrix came out, you know, 25 years ago.
And Ishmael talks.
It was not 25 years ago, 1999. Wow.
So I was six years old. Wow.
That's of yeah,these guys were Anyway, yeah.
You go back and look at that movieand they have technologies.
(32:41):
They're antiquated in there now,
like his little discs that he's giving outthat some kind of drug or something.
Probably. Probably phones.
Right. Like huge.
So, Ishmael, you know, what came outin 1992 talks about this phenomenon.
Two was Ishmael the telepathic gorilla?
Yeah.
It's telling the narrator, like, I'mgoing to open your eyes on certain things
and you're going to feel really lonely.
Yeah. Kind of.
(33:02):
That's the disclaimer going into it.
And what's interestingis that in the 90s and the 2000,
the world that I grew upin, like the mainstream,
was full of many peoplewho were operating on this level.
Things are fine.
And, you know,
the great unraveling you're talking abouthadn't really expanded to the point
where it was like undeniablefor masses of people.
But I think in the last 30 yearsor 25 years,
(33:24):
the mainstream that used to be so largeand there is just this small
fringe of people being like, excuse me,but I think there's some problems here.
The fringe that was on the peripheryis a completely different situation, is
the mainstream is kind of fadedand almost has disappeared.
And I see societyis just a bunch of fractions of fringe.
(33:44):
And I think that's kind of like a reallydifferent phenomenon than The Matrix
and Ishmael were contemplating in this,you know, concept of red pilling.
Have you heard this term like used in,like the alt right sense? Yeah.
It's like the idea that I'm
seeing the problems of societyin a way that, like most people
don't see and I'm going to like, informyou and wake you up.
(34:06):
That is not just from folks like us.
You see, the ecological crisisis really concerning.
It's that there's so many fringesthat are not really on the fringe.
And so now you guys are not alonein the fact that actually,
like most people in society,I'd say I don't know, but
maybe I'm just talking to people that seethis are saying some level of like,
(34:28):
everything is wrong and actually, like,I know what is wrong.
So how do we address this
weird phenomenon now where crazytown isfilled of all these fringes
that are really upset with Crazytown,how do we know that our fringe view
isn't just another one of these ridiculousfringe views that, you know?
(34:52):
yeah.
Well, it's been revealed to me
that you went out into the into the woodsand, Yeah.
Oh, you found a.
Yeah. An angel who gave you a book?
I know the aliens told the aliensand Jason in the head with stone tablets.
That'll do now.
Yeah, that'll be having vision.
That'll do it.
That's all. That's been there. Yeah.
(35:13):
And these lizard people, I saw their eyes,you know, that's the way they blink.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's been oneof your points I share about Crazytown.
and the great unravelingis as more crises come to bear
and you get kind of, one thingafter another,
that over time, that erodesyour, your ability
(35:35):
to act cohesively and to actrational kind of opens the door.
And that's whywe had the episode on extremism.
It's like you have to watch out thatyou don't.
I mean, you could do it yourself.
People in your familyor the whole society can be devolving
into extremism in response to the stressesand the pressures
(35:55):
that are visiting us all the time with,you know, whether it's too much heat
or flooding or you can't get a jobor you can't make ends meet
or drug addictions or whatever.
But I think his question is, is all of a,how do we know what we know?
And how much confidence do we have
that our version of the situation is moreor less the truth?
(36:17):
Yeah, yeah.
And that that's a tough one.
And I'll give you, two minutes. Okay.
I would say that one of the thingsit gives me
some level of comfort,
in my view, is that I come to itrather reluctantly.
That's one thing.
The other thing isthat a lot of what I think is problematic
(36:37):
is anyone who claimsthey have the answer or the solution.
When you're dealing with
an unraveling like thisand the poly crisis and systemic crisis,
you should
run away fast from peoplethat think they have all the answers.
And we may come acrossas kind of know it all in a sense,
but a lot of what we knowis that it's almost unknowable.
(36:58):
And so honestly,like that's uncomfortable.
So this is the time where you
should actually try to get as comfortableyou can with the uncomfortable.
And so you list all these thingsconsumerism,
capitalism, industrialism, imperialism.
And each episode is dedicated tohow do we escape that phenomenon?
(37:19):
Ultimately, you're trying to, imagine escaping from Crazytown,
and that's when you bring up the classicBill Murray film Groundhog Day.
Yes, that's basically has all the answers.
So why, is Groundhog Day a good metaphorfor escaping from Crazytown?
Well, it's a great film for one.
(37:40):
So you just want to talk about.
Yeah, I just really like movies, know it.
You know, I think it was just instructivebecause it was interesting that that film
resonatesso much for so many people in the sense
that it has like kind of a spiritualmeaning or a philosophy to it,
but it was really about the kindof the journey of this guy
(38:01):
who was a selfish prick, you know,and living effectively 40 years of life of
the same day over and over and over againbefore he finally broke the spell.
And it was said 40 yearsbecause people have like calculated,
calculated based on like how longit would have take him to learn the piano.
And he went through all stages sculpting.
Yeah.
(38:22):
We talked about thiskind of like stages of grief,
you know, like
he went through these stageswhere he like,
he tried to kill himselfin all kinds of ways.
He's trying to escape, right?
He's trying to escape this fate.
And so he of waking up every morningand experiencing this exact same text.
Itani, Pennsylvania.
And so he went to more and more outlandishways of trying to kill himself.
And nothing worked.
He would wake up the next morning,you know, back in the same place.
(38:43):
Is that a real place, by the way? Yeah,yeah it is. Okay. Thank you.
Okay, let's check in herefrom here. From there in that area.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Philadelphiais somewhat close to Punxsutawney.
Thank you. Okay.So I want to thank state. Continue.
and the groundhog is really is Phil okay?
Yeah.This is great. It's historically accurate.
Yeah it is.
What's it. Everything.It was a documentary. Yeah. Yeah.
It's amazing.
(39:03):
the the cameraman were with himfor that entire.
Right? Yeah.
And then,you know, he he basically he's also
there's this woman that he's there withand he basically wants to bed her.
And so he sets out to like,try to figure out everything she loves
and to master that thing,
you know,so he and this is where people start
calculating how long would it take himto perfect that?
Because he learns how to play the piano,learns how to speak French?
(39:25):
Yeah, all these thingsbasically just try to better.
Then he spends time like trying to.
I think he startsbeing more empathetic to the world.
And he's like rescuing people,you know, doing all these things
when a little girl is goingto, like, fall from a tree,
he knows everything that's happened,you know,
because it happens every day, every dayat the same time, the same way.
So he's just like, intervenes that way.
And eventually it's about him kind ofgiving up himself, you know, in a sense.
(39:49):
And we were using that as kind ofan exploration into the whole recognition
that the last thing to escape is the ideathat we can escape effectively.
You know, in all of the episodes,we've struggled in the sense we owned it
to point to really tangible
ways of truly escapingthat ism that we talked about.
(40:09):
I think we can escape extremism.
We may not escape itin terms of like it exists in the world,
but we can try to escape it in ourselves,like there's some things we could escape
consumerismor greatly reduce our participation
in consumers, and we can't escape itas kind of the driver of the economy.
But a lot of the ismsyou can't escape from,
we can't escape from industrialism,you know, at this point.
(40:31):
But even the idea of just escaping ingeneral is, is something that we have
to let go of, because at least for,I think for the choices
that we're making and the choicethat we're asking our listeners to make
is to stay with the trouble, in a sense,to stay in the game.
If we can't escape Crazytown, we'regoing to have to try to transform it.
(40:52):
All of these ismswe can't just push away from,
we at least can validate other peoplewho are speaking
from this outsider perspectivejust to remember, like, yeah, no,
this is pretty ridiculouswhat we got going on.
Yeah, you're right,this is pretty ridiculous.
It seems to be one of the foundationalthings
you're trying to dois to allow people to exist in this
(41:12):
discomforting place,and to recognize this is ridiculous.
Here we are.
I think if you take
an ecological worldview in the sensethat you recognize a web of life
and are codependence in that web of life,there's a respect that occurs and
the recognition that diversity out thereis key, actually for our own survival.
(41:33):
And when we think about this unravelingand all the uncertainty
that happens in it,I would say we want to just,
prodigious growthof all kinds of different experiments
and different ways of peopletrying to navigate this because we
don't know what works and differentthings will work for different people.
That generally prioritizes certain things,right?
(41:55):
The well-being of lifeand respect and mutuality, and that
people can go their different paths.
They can experiment with different things.
And even within the sphereof like the community, people
who are trying to navigate Crazytown,
our approach to talking about this,to dealing with it, works for some people.
It doesn't work for other people.
There are others out there,thank God, in this ecosystem,
(42:18):
they're taking a much more, maybeheart centered, more mature, more mature,
maybe more
feminine perspective.
You know, that's a lot more, frankly,kind and gentle than in our approach.
Well, and I'm glad for those. Yeah, yeah.
Let me back you on.
You said you
we need prodigious growth in experiments,ways of living I totally agree.
(42:39):
If you, tune it up a little,if that growth is infinite
and exponential, I'll deal then.
And I can figure out how to profit from itsomehow.
Well, I actually brought you guysa little, gift for today.
I thought it would help our conversation.
So I'm going to take it out here.
It's, it's not very big a contraption.
and, you can see it's.
(43:00):
Yeah, it's a little heavy,
and I'll pass it around,and it's a it's a window into the future.
You can see I like I haven'tbeen able to clean it for a long time.
So it's kind of it'skind of foggy, a little dark.
And so you're not going to see like thatbroad.
That's just a magiceight ball or something like that.
No no, no, don't ignore that. That's,
but I'm going to pass this aroundand I want you to look through it.
(43:23):
And maybe there's, you know, 1or 2 things that you can see, and this is
a future that you look at,and it's a future where our society
and multiple versions of our society,because it's a diverse future,
have navigated responsiblyand wisely the great Unraveling
and are living in a waythat makes you think like, wow, all right.
(43:45):
Okay, that's thank God.
So, Rob, I'll, pass it to you first word.
What's the 1 or 2 things that you see?
Careful there. It's very fragile.
That's heavy.That must be LED glass. Okay.
Gosh.
To be put on the spot like thisif you want, like a sort of a.
This will be ironic.
We'll call it a concrete thingbecause it's about removing the concrete.
(44:05):
Yeah. What's something maybe.
Yeah. This is I guessan infrastructure question as well.
Well, so you see,I've just started, kind of hearing about
and haven't done much looking into,but the idea of paving,
you know, trying to say, like,
okay, we've been on a paving bingefor such a long time,
how can we have a societythat doesn't need that much pavement?
Let's start having natural.
(44:27):
Well, wait, wait. The mirror. What?
What is what do you see?
Okay, so, so, like I talked about thisactually, not this season,
but like last season, I biked downto Corvallis from Portland to record.
And there were parts of that bike ridethat were just heinous.
You know, I was like, I feel likeI was taking my life in my hands.
But there was a section in south of Salemwhere I'm riding
(44:48):
these really small little trailsthrough the woods by the water.
It was beautiful.
And there were other people out
on non-motorized vehicles,you know, making their trips.
And it's quiet.
It was not it was likeso in the realm of personal mobility,
I know not everyone can jump on a bikeand ride a big distance, but, for people
(45:10):
who can, it was a absolutely wonderful wayto get here.
And somethingthat's required in our culture is that we
accept the slowing down.
It doesn't always have to be at speed.
You know, you could take a day
to go 100 miles instead of having to do itin an hour and a half or whatever.
And I could see us allbreathing a little better
(45:33):
and having a kind of ajust happier, slower life.
In a sense.
If we could just have that infrastructurewhere it was okay
and have the culture where it was okayto just ride your bike, that's beautiful.
It was careful.
I said, over to Jason, you.
So what do you see in through the window,the foggy window of the future?
(45:58):
I don't know if you want to hear anything.
I want to say.
It's a great fire in the missilesor raining.
That's the problem.
I don't know if I have anythingnice to say.
Well, it's not it doesn't.
It doesn't matter.I'm not asking you to make something up.
What do you think this isjust a look through the mirror.
Shit. And see what's something.
And it doesn't have to.
You don't have to tell mehow they build it.
(46:20):
What's the context of it?
What's something that into this foggy
window of the futurethat makes you think like,
I man, I don't know howwe're going to get to that,
but thank God that they have that.
Okay, okay.
hi. In the Andes,
there are people who made it through.
(46:41):
Because it didn't
get too hot and they were already,
you know, they're already livingpretty simple lives in communities.
So they had an intact culture.
Oh, look, I see others
high in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
where?
Yes, they havethey have, a sustained society
(47:04):
similar to what they had in the past,but with highly adjusted ecosystems.
boy, elsewhere,
it's been tough because the infrastructureis ever adapted to the rapid change
that happened in climateand the decline of complexity,
and these vast urban landscapesare just kind of wastelands.
(47:26):
And there are some peoplewho make trips to them and find, you know,
pieces of steel, etc., and concrete
that they usefor helping build new settlements
that are in remnant pockets of good water
and good soil, etc., etc.. So,
you know,
(47:46):
that's not a very nice vision, butthat's kind of like what I see right now
because we aren't really doing anything
that would stray from that path.
Honestly.
at the moment.
Fair enough.
Well,thank you for looking through the mural.
Let's pass it over to a share to see what.
(48:06):
It's funny,
because I'm not I'm not typically viewedas the the, optimistic, cheery.
You're going to seem like one now. Okay.
Thanks for lowering the bar so much.
Yeah.
Hey, there's still people at the.
I see three people in the future.
Remember that scene in Terminator?
We're all related to each other,but they still need to procreate.
(48:27):
It's kind of awkward.
No. when I take a super long view.
And this is definitely my bias of, like,what I think
I'm enamored with or whatI love to envision.
And that is a world of just,vibrant life, of diverse life everywhere.
And I k sort of pictureand I'm talking about
(48:48):
a thousand plus years hence,you know, it's a good window.
It's a window,
you know, where there's kind ofwhat would Jason was talking about there.
They're myths, mythologies and stories,you know,
that have been shared about the remnants.
And I could see that theremaybe there are vision quests that happen
or journeys that are taken for peoplegoing through, read to passages
(49:10):
where they're taken tothe it's not going to be Vegas
because that's going to be,you know, whatever, impossible.
But maybe in northern climates city,you know, Seattle, Quebec, or,
you know, whatever
where they go and see the remnantsand it's a precautionary tale.
It's a precautionary experience for thembecause the stories that are
told is not not about the greatnessof those past societies.
(49:32):
It's about their folly. Right.
and that's part ofwhat's embedded in them,
but that there's just vibrant lifeand that there are kids
who are finding incredible joy,
spending a lot of free time out in naturewith one another and beating up.
And maybe there arethese regular annual gatherings
that happen in centralized places, butthey haven't seen each other in a year.
(49:54):
There's a great celebration there.
You know, down the road
for down the road,
you know, in the near term it's like,can we have dentistry?
Is there a way?
Yeah, like it would be a win.
Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
If we still had like a way that peoplecould get inoculated for just basic shit,
(50:14):
we had something like antibioticsand there was.
Does the main, dental toolbeing a cinder block.
Is that still dentistry?
It's an ice escape,you know, from by the cast.
Castaway. yeah.
Film. Well, and alsothis is something I want to help clear.
What you're saying is a good way toclarify your guys's position on Crazytown,
because you're not necessarily, like,trying to have us return to.
(50:38):
And you talk about thislike you're not just Luddites.
You're not anti-technology.
In fact, like, you're very concernedthat our irresponsible use of technology
is going to make it impossible
for future generations to enjoythe positive aspects of technology.
Exactly. Oh, okay. Great.
That's the thing.
We underestimatethe resilience of humans ability to adapt.
(50:59):
Now we're doing shit to the planetthat maybe just yawned.
You know how much microplasticis in your brain right now.
It's the synapses. Can't.
Yeah.
The neurotransmitterscan't cross that gap anymore.
There are people who've gonethrough unbelievable traumas
and they have persisted, you know.
So as long as the rate of change,which is not a guarantee,
(51:20):
is in so fast that we can't adapt,I think we all care deeply.
I think there's actually
a lot of pain in all of us,and we cope with it in different ways.
And sometimesthat's just getting our hands dirty.
Sometimes it's uslaughing at the darkness, watching
Aids movies, you know,listening to music, exercising, whatever.
Like, I don't think it's necessarilya bad thing to compartmentalize.
(51:42):
We want to call it thator to care for ourselves.
Yeah.
It is a common threadamong people in our movement.
And I think it's,
if you really want to get down to it,I think that the deep care is is there.
But it's also love, right?
It's a love for what we were giftedthe world we came into.
But then in experiencing that, youyou love the people that you're with to.
(52:03):
And I do think you find
you love the place that you arein, what's being lost.
And you want to have a life of meaning,
trying to make it workand trying to do it better.
And you find people that you lovethat you can do that with.
And I think that's, you know, whatever.
(52:24):
That'skind of the recipe is the key word to me.
And what you just said was movement.
And I want to differentiate
between people who
are part of this community,
who are part of the movementand people who are not, because
movement implies that there'ssome kind of action happening.
Right.
And I think that there are peoplewho have come to maybe a similar diagnosis
(52:47):
of what we're what we're seeing,and they're not part of a movement.
They have resigned themselves.
Maybe it's a defense mechanism
because they're scared to have any hopeor invest in anything.
When they feel like God,everything is against us
and there's no waywe're going to have a better outcome.
And so they become resigned
and fatalistic and curmudgeonlyand just locked in a place.
(53:09):
So basically looking at everythingand shitting on it, you know,
and we do our fairshare of shitting on things.
We are trying and engaged intrying to move things on some level.
It's not a movement towards a utopia,but it's a movement towards something,
you know, and, and I would say the peoplethat we have been lucky enough
to get to know these podcasts have beencathartic for me in a lot of ways.
(53:30):
And I feel like you have the opportunityto have these kinds of conversations
and have the relationships with thesetwo guys, but also meet people like you.
Alex,and all these other people have gotten
to me is the best part of the workthat I get to do.
And it's
because there's a characteristic of peoplewho are trying to stay in this space.
It's a really hard place to stay inand move towards something without
being Pollyanna ish or oversimplisticabout what it is we can achieve.
(53:54):
You know?
And I love those peoplebecause there's a humility,
I think, to them,and a love that they carry, you know,
that's beautiful guys.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for for hosting and.
Yeah. Yeah. And for the work you're doing.
Thank you for hosting meso I can host you.
(54:14):
Nice going.
Thanks for listening.
And thank you to Jason Roband a share for joining us today.
You can listen to the Crazytown podcast
on all podcast platforms and learnmore about the work they do at resilience.
I'll include all the good linksin the show notes.
Until next time, I hope you'll consider how you might bring
(54:38):
some sanity to Crazytown and endureand adapt to the great unraveling.
I'd love to hear what you think,
so feel free to reach outand leave a comment on our Patreon.
And speaking of our Patreon, that'swhere you'll find
the full two hour extended conversationwith the Crazytown guys.
That's right,
there's a whole other hour of insightsand silliness on the human HRC Patreon.
(55:00):
You'll also find audioextras, transcripts of episodes,
and some audiobook readings of booksthat have influenced the show.
By joining our Patreon, you will also help
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This was the
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(55:22):
Next month.
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Okay.
Talk with you soon.
You were born in Crazytown.
You've lived your whole life
among denizens of delusion.
Stuck in a culturethat believes unlimited growth
(00:24):
on a finite planetis perfectly reasonable.
You've watched as they clearcut the forests,
removed whole mountain tops,smothered the earth in asphalt,
and most unforgivably rantheir gas powered
leaf blowers from dawn to dusk.
And despite your concern,
you have participatedin all this reluctantly, perhaps,
(00:48):
but in Crazytown,all must participate in order to survive.
You've voiced your growing skepticismthat things are not quite right
and headed towards obvious disaster.
You've been called a romantic idealist,a primitive ist hippie.
Get back to work.
They've said Crazytown needs youand you need crazytown.
(01:10):
So quit your whining.
But you were not alone.
There are others in Crazytown
who see what you seeand share your concern.
Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz
and Asher Miller have dedicatedtheir lives trying to bring sanity
to our collective confusion,and they do so
(01:32):
with sincerity and humor.
If you combine their bios and resumes,you'd learn that among them
they have expertisein ecological economics,
environmental science, conservationbiology, and climate organizing.
One is an organic farmer and all three
are dads and lovers of 80s films.
(01:53):
They are also the executivedirector program director and board
president of the Post CarbonInstitute, based in Corvallis, Oregon,
whose mission is to lead the transitionto a more resilient,
equitable and sustainable worldby providing individuals
and communities with the resourcesneeded to understand and respond
(02:13):
to the interrelated ecological,economic, energy,
and equity crises of the 21st centurytoday.
The next stop on our odyssey is theirfarmhouse attic turned podcast studio.
Out their window
you can see the flaxgrowing at full summer height,
and on the horizon are a couple snowcovered peaks
(02:34):
of the Cascade Mountains.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast
trying to find some semblance of sanityin our global civilization.
I'm Alex Leff.
(03:09):
Well, I appreciategetting to be here with you guys.
It's a funny thing of, like,
thank you for having me,but you're hosting me physically.
I guess I'm hosting you metaphorically.
This is awesome.
You're hosting us electronically?
Yes. Yes. Why?
I don't know. How are you a metaphor?
You're like, right here in the room.You're.
You're like a cross. Me? You're here.
You want me to.
(03:30):
On his podcast, you are in charge.
I knew what you were saying, Alex.
They're just not as sharpas they used to be.
I mean, your state, your house. Yeah.
I'm completely out of my element.
It is our state.
It's true. Yeah.
I'm talking to the threemayors of the state of Oregon.
Yeah, well, crazy town.
It's an unincorporated. Yeah.
(03:51):
State of being.
State of being?
Well, you guys aren't the mayors of CrazyTown by any means.
You'rethe three curmudgeons on the outskirts.
The only residents of Crazy Town, I guess.
No, there's so many people in crazy.
Well, they come and visit.
Yeah.
Here, you got all the behind the scenespeople making it happen, too.
That's true.
Driving their big Dodge trucks.
Shooting.
(04:12):
The inspiration was the inspiration.
Oh, I thought you were talking more nicelyabout the people who help us
with our crazy town.
Well, there's the there'sthe Crazy Town podcast, and then there's
the proverbial crazy townthat you're investigating.
Yeah. So that's interesting.
So are we investigating a crazy townor are we inhabiting a state of being?
Well, that was the whole premise,was that we live in Crazy Town
(04:35):
because you see all the problemsand all the things that are going wrong
and the fixes are available,but nobody is talking about them.
Nobody's really making it happen.
Well, and in a way,you three are anthropologists.
Yes. And you're documenting something.
You're exoticized something that is sofamiliar that people take it for granted.
Makes it sound like more seriousand less erudite.
(04:57):
Thank you.
Now it's true. Then. Then it's true.Let me have a sip of my wine.
Whether you, accept it or not.
I see you as anthropologists,
and I want to get really specificabout what we mean by a lot of the terms
that we're using.
And so, like, because wordslike capitalism and Western civilization
or the United States of America, these areall just completely made up terms.
(05:18):
We're just slapping ona very complicated reality.
And so you're bringing to the conversationyour own term.
You have termed what I imagineto be somewhat
analogous to our global civilization,industrial civilization, as crazytown.
And so I wanted to really talk with youabout this town that you have encountered
and you've talked a lot about,and how you've broken it down.
(05:38):
And first, what you mean by crazy.
I see that you're not referring to peoplestruggling with mental illness.
You mean it's, a perspectivethat is inherently unsustainable?
You know, the mentality of town?
You're not saying it's bad townor hurtful town.
I see you using the word crazybecause there is a
(05:58):
it seems like a delusional aspectto the mindset that people have
that think that unlimited growthis reasonable,
that we can be separate from the Earthand try to conquer it,
even though we're just one speciesthat's dependent on it.
Right? And
it's almost like you're trying to catalog
what is this placethat we all like this in.
(06:19):
What is the mindset of it?
And that you see your selvesas kind of outside of that.
But so if you could kind of describe to melike take me on a tour of crazy Town
to someone who has never viewed the worldthis way, like, what would you describe
as the mentality of this strange place?
What's the culture there?
Yeah, I wonder if we actually interestingto use our Marvin Harris
(06:39):
lens to describe Crazytown a little bit.
Yeah.
And which is something that you,
in your Crazy Town podcast in the mostrecent season was a very effective
kind of three step processto understanding.
Yeah. So it wasmaybe it start with structure.
And then the main thing we talk aboutfirst maybe I can do structure.
And then we'll give uswhat's the overview of the Marvin Harris
cultural materialism. Yeah.
(07:00):
So an anthropologist that this is realanthropology a real anthropologist.
Yeah.
And he, a very famous anthropologist,and he basically said
that the societies develop, they evolve
based upon the material conditionsof their existence.
So what does our means of subsistenceand that means of subsistence,
the basic material sideis called the infrastructure.
(07:23):
And then a particular infrastructurewill lead to the requirements
for social norms and lawsthat we would call structure.
So for example,
if you have an industrial food system,you're going to have to have food safety
inspectors and regulatorsto make sure that things are labeled
properly and packages and there's coolingthat's properly done for transport.
They're off industry standards like thatlevel of complexity requires
(07:45):
then organization, bureaucracy,laws, norms,
and then above that,what we call the superstructure.
And this would be then the mythologiesand general belief systems.
So the idea like the progressmyth would be a superstructure
that comes from, if you back it up,the infrastructure that I'll focus on now,
we also call high energy modernity,or the idea that every individual
(08:08):
in an advanced industrial societyhas access to fossil fuels
when it gives you superpowers to be like,you can whip across the landscape
in a car
or in a plane or train or whatevercan fly at the speed of sound comfortably.
Yeah, we can broadcast this episode, all over the world, but what's crazy about
it is we use that bounty
(08:29):
for all these dumb things.
there's so much waste in the systemright?
We talk about this all the time.
You know, the two stroke enginesthat were surrounded by,
you know, basically people blowing leavesfrom one spot to another spot.
Don't get me started with blowers.
It's like, don't get me startedso that we can clear off,
you know, leaves from trees from our lawnthat shouldn't exist.
(08:50):
This is all the infrastructureof Crazytown that you're talking about.
These are all the thingsthat are at our disposal.
Yes, the material and the crazy.
So there's parts of itthat are truly miraculous, right,
that have led us to it'snot just in medicine.
Yeah.
We're not just using most of that bountyto really benefit people.
(09:11):
There's a disproportionatelysmall number of people who are benefiting,
you know, the most from it, right?
It's now being sharedequally among the population.
And we are frivolous in how we use itbecause we were born into it
and think, this is how it is.
This is the normal state of affairs.
I think you're getting to the world view,the superstructure space.
(09:34):
But I think we got to take that
pit stop it structure,because you just outlived all this stuff
that came about from fossil fuelsor even the stuff before that.
But as the industrial revolutionwas getting going,
you also had kind of an economicsrevolution, right?
The whole idea of AdamSmith and capitalism
and basically everybodyfollow your own individual self-directed
(09:58):
path, and it's going to formkind of a utopian society, right?
Individualism will lead to utopia.Yeah, yeah.
So you have all these policiesabout individualism,
like individual property rights and,you know, a share.
You're lamenting somebody'sgrabbing a blower,
or maybe that maybe picture of this.
So you got a big black Dodge pickuptruck running diesel,
(10:19):
and the fumes are coming out the back.
And there's 12 guys standing in the bedwith blowers, you know, just for whatever
reason, just going down the street,running their blowers.
That's completely legaland completely fine.
You know, it's a so our this idea ofyou can do what you want individually
within this economy, as long as you havethe funds to make it happen,
(10:41):
goes so hand in hand with this
blown upinfrastructure of high energy modernity
to make quite literally paved the roadsfor for us to do whatever it is we want.
But that's a key thing.
This is why infrastructureis so important,
because if the infrastructuredidn't allow that to happen, it wouldn't
matter that we had thosethose freedoms, right?
(11:02):
One comes in the sense from the other.
Well, that's the one of the big thingsin Ishmael by Daniel Quinn,
which in the first seasonwe explored a lot.
It really focuses onlike the mindset of our culture,
which in this Marvin Harris, perspectivewould be the superstructure, right?
Yeah.
And the fact that we believethat the world belongs to us means
that we're creating a worldwhere we're trying to enact that story.
(11:22):
Yeah, exactly.
But you guys are bringing up
the point that then it iskind of like a feedback loop, right?
Because we've created a societythat's enacting the story
that the world belongs to us.
But then we're also kind of seeing theevidence of what it kind of looks like.
The world. Right?
It does belong to usbecause I have my nice manicured lawn.
The river flowing throughmy city is covered in concrete.
It's all managed from us. Right.
(11:43):
So in this most recent season of CrazyTown, you have a great way of structuring
all these episodesand describing the different components
of Crazy Town, and you organize thembased on infrastructure, structure
and superstructure.
You list about how many, nine,a dozen isms.
Yeah, that are making up Crazy Town.
(12:03):
And I think there was just like a reallygreat way of focusing on specific town.
Yeah, there's the infrastructure ismslike industrialism, consumerism, urbanism,
technology ism, technological ism,
and more pronouncedthan something like globalism.
Then there's the structure,isms, growth ism,
capitalism, imperial ism,and then the superstructure isms,
(12:26):
individualism, homocentrism, extremism and other ism.
And I kind of wanted to like, usethat as the model to maybe
go through some of these as well,because you bring up a lot
of really interesting thingsin each episode.
Like for that, I remember.
Well, then that helped me.
In the urbanism episode,you bring up the point that there's more
at this point in history,anthropogenic mass than biomass.
(12:49):
Yeah, this kill me, which can you explainwhat you mean by that?
Oh, okay.
So anthropogenic mass is stuffthat people basically make for themselves.
Most of it ends up being actuallylike stuff that we manufacture.
So concrete, steel, glass, plastic,
these are thingsnot really found much in nature.
Right.
And we've extracted raw materials,
(13:12):
manipulate them throughan industrial manufacturing process
and then deploy them for our quoteunquote infrastructure needs.
And now all that added up weighs morethan all the living biomass on the planet.
So all the trees,the phytoplankton in the ocean,
the fish in the sea, blah, blah, blah.
That's whatthat's just astonishing to me.
(13:34):
So if you took likea giant cosmic scale in space
and you piled up all the concreteand plastic,
that would now weighmore than all of the living beings and
and the key thing is,
in that how short of a period that we'retalking about this whole having occurred.
Yeah.
Because the bulk of that really
is the concrete and asphaltand the hard scapes that we've made.
(13:58):
And yeah, that's a few hundred years when actually you think about doubling time.
So, you know, economic growth, substance.
I was born 55 years ago.
That probably has gone from
maybe like or a third of the biomassto now we exceed it.
And that's what's astonishing.
On the other sideis happening at the same time.
The biomass is declining.
(14:19):
And, hammered along the wayas we replace it with our stuff.
I think in that urbanism episode,I was talking about how I was
at a friend's placewho lived in a high rise
building in downtown Portland,and we're up on the rooftop
kind of terrace,looking out over the city.
And I was just havingone of those moments of,
wow, look at the
(14:40):
amount of pavement and stuff
and all the people just moving through itand not freaking out.
And what are we? Yeah,I didn't jump. It was.
But the people downthere aren't freaking out. Yeah, right.
And it's also like
my understanding is that it's not justthat you guys don't like pavement,
because pavement scrapes your kneeswhen you fall off your skateboard.
(15:01):
Is that you're seeing what's so dangerousabout Crazy Town isn't also just
what we've destroyed and what we've lost,but you're looking into the future
and the trajectory of this placeand the mindset that enables it
and the systems that are perpetuatingit seems to,
not be going to a place that you think isthat, oh, it's scary.
Yeah.
It, it and so let's talka little bit attainable will collapse.
(15:24):
And when it comes down to scale right.
Like you could have some pavementlike I love riding bikes.
I love a good bike path.
but when you have superhighwaysand then more superhighways and more, it's
the doubling time, the exponential growth,that's the problem.
It's if we had a wind to stop rule
or a little bit of abilityto limit our own desires for power,
(15:48):
then I think we'd we'd be okaywith some of this technology.
So describe the great unraveling
that seems to be a key component.
Have you read the news?
It seems like everything's goingreally well
and we're on top of it. And,
yeah.
So the great unraveling is actually a termthat was coined by Joanna macy,
(16:09):
who I think your listenerswould really appreciate a lot in June,
as I think 95 years old now close to it,
has been presidential aged, right.
She's been I guess you can call an ecophilosopher for a long time.
And this helped a lot of people tryto navigate emotionally, psychologically,
(16:29):
you know, with their whole selves,kind of the state of the world.
In a sense.
It probably is a healthier responseto living in Crazytown than our response.
Our response is like pulling our hair out,
you know, gnashing our teeth, laughing.
I think Julian has come to this kind ofsimilar perspective with a lot more heart
and maybe compassion than I wouldthan I have, I guess, in in my life.
(16:52):
But yeah, she's like, she's like monklike, whereas we're, we're Grinch
like with whack into anold shriveled hearts.
Think,
you know, it takes all kinds.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
in any case, you know,she coined this term the Great Unraveling,
which is actually part of a larger story
that she has of a great turning.
(17:13):
And their unraveling is basically a phase,a part of the undoing of
what is now for something new to emergethat is much healthier
and more sustainable and more just.
And this is what we do withthis is what we do across town,
and probably what we doat Post Coven Institute.
For good or bad.
I think we sometimes lean a little bitinto trying to help
(17:33):
people stay in the moment
of what we're actually grappling with,because the tendency that I think so
many of us have and I haveis either we compartmentalize,
we catastrophize in the senseof we're like, it's all fucked, forget it.
Right?
Or we solution eyes and we think, okay,this is this is going to get solved
somehow or whatever.
(17:54):
And we don't stay in that space of like
because it's frankly, it's hard, you know,looking out over from the rooftop
at a scene where for most people,looks like this is normal.
Oh, this is normal. Yeah.You know what I mean?
And for us, it's like,
what have we done?
What did this land look like beforewe pave the shit out of it?
(18:14):
And what is it going to look like when thefuels run out and like, yeah, whatever.
So we're we're in that place.
And I think because peoplehave such a hard time staying with it,
we've kind of leaned into, you can call itthe phase of this collapse,
the Great Unraveling, which is just namingwhat we're experiencing already.
Right.
So and bring you back to the MarvinHarris stuff in infrastructure, whatever.
(18:36):
It's likely going to be that our behaviorschange
the rules that we setup, our belief systems,
a large scale are going to changebecause we're forced to change.
And that's in some waysmeaningful structural change.
And that may be drivenbecause we can no longer
ignore the hurricanes, the heat waves,the droughts, the floods, the whatever,
which is the climate.
You know, consequences of whatwe've been doing or it's something else,
(18:59):
but there's an unravelingthat's already happening.
It's not equally distributedaround the world.
It's manifesting itself in different ways.
Because what happens is, is sort of playson the dynamics that are exist.
So you have a crisis that happens
and it just feeds, you know,these underlying things that maybe
have been covered up for a long time,like racial ethnic tensions
(19:20):
or other kinds of things that are socialdynamics, exposes corruption.
It creates opportunities for peoplewho want to consolidate power to do so.
You know,it's like weakens democratic institutions
where there's a needfor more drastic action.
Right?
Yeah.
And and I think what happens.
So there's social unraveling.
And I think we seelots of signs of, of that around us.
You know, you're talkingabout democratic institutions,
(19:42):
this political polarizationthat we're seeing we're seeing dynamics
even in termsof the impacts of technology,
God knows what will happen with AI,for example, in terms of,
you know, what it does to labor marketsand those kinds of things,
and then you have all these environmentalunraveling that are happening.
And it's kind of that that multiplicityof crises coming together,
(20:02):
which some people callpoly crisis that we're experiencing. And
we have to somehow
chart a path forward
in a way where we recognizethat our options are limited
and they're not just limited politicallyin a certain way, but they're limited
infrastructural, biophysical, right.
And that's part of our criticism of peoplewho just believe all we need to do
(20:25):
is ramp up renewable.
Some will be fine, but we have to navigateit as things are getting worse.
And that's what's so difficult.
And you have to livewith the tons of uncertainty.
Like this is the thing is,like the solution is more avoidance.
It's comfortable to have either an answeror just to be able to ignore, but to know
that you're probably never going tobe comfortable with a full understanding,
(20:49):
with a comprehensive knowledgeof what your best role is.
How to apply yourself in this.
Because the situations are dynamic,
they're kind of unprecedentedin your lifetime.
What should you do?
What's the best thing I can do?
You're probably going to be challengingyourself with that all the time.
A lot of it is living,you know, trying to be comfortable
in a state of unknowing and uncertainty.
(21:10):
One of the amazing thingsI've noticed in in the years of doing this
podcast and studying all these issuesaround the great unraveling,
is that I can pretty clearly see whereI'm compartmentalizing.
And then that puts youin a pretty strange mental space.
So I think it's
it's the same thing, like you're talkingabout the discomfort of uncertainty.
(21:30):
There's also the discomfortof being a hypocrite.
Yeah, right.
I think we have to deal withbecause that's a really tough. Yeah.
How do you both be how do you bothbe complicit and then also do something
that is maybe compensatory in some wayand is looking towards the future.
And it's it's almost impossible not to becomplicit while you're also working on
(21:51):
I don't know if you call it solution,but we would need more to talk about,
like response or adaptation as opposedto solution because there's no solution.
A solution isyou can identify a goal that's clear
and you can do somethingrelatively straightforward to address it.
But then these kind of poly crisisunraveling situations where you see them
with whole systemsthat are kind of collapsing and
(22:12):
and trying to reorganize,there's no simple path like that.
And that's really hard to manage,especially as an individual
when you're dealing with,
you know, the madness of crowds and mobmentality and, asymmetrical power.
And so you can quickly feel helpless.
And that's what, you know,we struggle with all the time.
How do you have some sense of agencyand purpose in life?
(22:33):
And I imagine the way that you guys relateto Crazytown,
the, the global civilizational crazytownthat you're describing, is similar
to how I feltwhen I was 16, studying for the SATs.
And I was, you know,I did the cities once.
I got pretty low score.
My mom was like, okay,this is like not going to be good.
(22:53):
and so
she put me in this classI had to do after school,
and they were really upfront about it, though.
There was this Russian ladyshe was teaching us.
This is like how you're goingto get a better SAT score.
It wasn't about like,this is how you're going to learn more.
This is not about being moreof a critical thinker.
This is justhow we're going to like raise the numbers.
So this is for the peoplethat weren't rich enough
to hire somebodyto take the S.A.T. for their kids.
(23:15):
Is that right? Amazing.
So what?
I would have learnedso much through that method, but so I.
You know, it'sthe night before the cities, and
I was just so viscerally upset by
not just this test,but also just the whole school system,
you know, like spending, you know,was wasting away my childhood indoors
(23:36):
doing bullshit 10% of the timeI was learning.
And I could have learned that in waymore effective ways than having to go home
and do homework and just felt like,you know, this is, to me,
such a bizarre, ridiculous thingthat I'm wasting my life doing.
And just because everyone does it,and my parents did
it and my grandparents did it,and my great grandparents did it.
(23:58):
And also,
like we talk about how it's a societalgood, you know, and I just felt like this
very normal, mundane, everyday thing to mewas, was very obviously crazy.
Yeah. It's like a trap.You feel like you're trapped. Yeah.
And it's so it's
what you guys are doing with crazy Townand why I'm calling you anthropologist.
Trying to exoticized,
you know, our own cultureand take away the normal aspects of it.
(24:20):
It is this upsetting thing because, like,we're witnessing the destruction
of the world, but it's like, well, yeah,I mean, this is what humans do.
This is what advanced countries do.
And the countries that aren't are poor.
Like need a jump on to thisso they can embody what we're doing.
You're going to break a few eggs, right?
Crack a few eggs, make an omelet.
And so what you do with this most recentseason is you talk about escaping
(24:43):
from Crazytown and, you know, likewith all the different infrastructure,
structure, superstructure stuffwe talked about,
each episode is structuredby escaping industrialism,
escaping consumerism ism, escapinggrowth ism, escaping capitalism.
And I found, I noticed guys,
that it was much easier for you to talkabout how shitty these things are.
(25:03):
Yeah, than it was to imagine,how we could escape from them.
I know, I'm sorry. Everybody.
Well,here, I mean, here's part of the challenge
that we havethat we have to be honest about, which is
it has to do with agencyand skill on some level.
So we don't have the agency the capacity
(25:25):
to change the global economic systemto stop externalizing,
you know, environmental impactsor to basically halt,
you know, speed trading or whatever,you know, kind of structural changes.
We might if we could, you know,snap our fingers, you know, leaf blowers.
Yeah.
I mean, so we don't havethe agency ourselves to do that.
(25:47):
What do we have the agency to do?
That's much more at a localand personal kind of scale,
which also is not
sufficient to, in and of itself, changethe entire trajectory of the system.
So we're still caughtin the system. Right.
And when I think the most
important insights at the beginning ofthe journey is to recognize, like,
we're not just taking up, some residencyat Crazytown, we actually like.
(26:11):
Yeah. Held captive. Yes. Here we are.
And all of these things likeindustrialism, capitalism, consumerism.
What's so strange?And you talk about this in the podcast.
We're held captive,and there's so many ways
that these systems are hurting us,but it's also enabling us
to live our livesdepend on these systems, too.
And so it's when I think it's so hard.Yeah.
(26:33):
For I mean, you talked about Robis compartmentalization.
I think people manifest this in differentways, but it is exceedingly difficult
to go day to day in a very conscious way,living in a world
that you know is pathologicalor you fundamentally disagree with,
but you have to still participate in itand literally
(26:55):
have to participate in, in order for your,your existence.
And so holding both of those things,doing both of those things simultaneously
is incredibly challenging,which is why I think
is very difficult for people to sort ofbe there, right.
Be in that space between.
I completely get why most people's never,
(27:16):
never even have thereckoning like you were having in school.
You know, being aware of the school systemis kind of totally flawed bullshit.
That is, your body is not the same thing.
yeah, I mean, I, I basically dropped out.
Rob and I left school.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we were we were good littles. Yeah.
I mean, I was biasedbecause I was a very bad student.
Yeah. I did not dowell at that same thing.
(27:36):
That's amazing.
Actually, Jason, that we're in this, roomdiscussing the things that we discuss
because we were such rule followers.
Yeah, we were good at following rules.
I came to follow rules later, but, what's
challenging about trying to escape
for the audience that we have of people,at least what
we're arguing for, people that maybeare like us, who are still in it.
(27:58):
The simplest way to escape is literallyjust go off grid, you know?
Yeah,but you probably don't have any skills
and you're probably goingto be doing something illegal,
but then you die and then whatever.
Yeah, that's a great result.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an escape,but it's packing up.
Death is your first and best as well.
Is that what you're saying?
Well,I mean, this is a challenging podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
(28:19):
Nobodylisten to anything we say for anyhow.
But this is the dilemma, right?
Is a lot about youchange your change your internal story.
Right. And then talk to othersabout it. Change their story.
The issue becomes,
okay, you have that news story,but the infrastructure doesn't support it.
Right.
And so if you want to thenhave some agency that is aligned with that
(28:39):
new story, you run into one barrierafter the after another.
Oh, I want to becomea more simple agriculturalists
that also does some huntergathering on the side.
It's going to be in modern daywe would call regenerative.
Yeah, I want to do this communally
so I have more of my own tribe,blah blah blah.
how?
Well, I was hunting and gathering at theChase Bank and they did not like that.
(29:03):
I mean, I just had wads of cash.
I was hunting,gathering at the Whole Foods. Yeah,
you're one right.
But you said free pens. Yeah,I don't know. So.
So the structure is makes that illegal?Mostly. Right.
Unless you have enough money to buy landand now you have title.
And so now you're part of the systemin a sense of the property class.
(29:24):
But okay, let's say you're a partof the property class like I am.
And most people landed gentry.
Yeah, but you're a modern squire.
Yeah.
Now that's what that wig is for.
Okay? We always want a powder.
Yeah, we get ready with our powdered wigshere and so.
So you're going to livewith the contradiction.
Even in that situation,you make compromises the entire way.
(29:47):
None of it's perfect.
Like there's no path to a quick utopia.
So we're always going to live in thisplace of, like, I'm not quite satisfied.
I'm kind of disappointed, but I'm tryingand you'll be ridiculed for it, too.
I want to get back to somethingyou touched on, Jason.
I feel like is super importantand that is not going it alone.
(30:07):
And I actually feel likethat is the secret code, in a sense,
to navigating all this stuff.
Because trying to do this on your ownis frankly, impossible.
You're still going to be locked inthe system.
You're still going to have to dealwith all the dissonance,
all the contradictions, all the hypocrisy,all that whatever.
Even if you're doing itwith a group of people,
unless you all completely drop outtogether, but trying to do it on your own,
(30:30):
where you're not having conversationswith people about the state of the world
as you see it, peoplethat you could work with to sort of
take these baby steps to kind of likehave one foot out.
Trying to do that by yourself,I think, is just exceedingly difficult.
Now, here's here's the problem.
The problem is to get people to join you.
(30:51):
It's kind of like you have to tell them,look, there's a there's a virus coming.
It's going to be really bad.
And what you need to dois get preoccupied.
You basically need to get it beforeeverybody else.
Right?
You won't get sick with me, you know?
Do you want to get ill with me?This is a terrible picture.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah,but that's kind of what the equivalent is.
(31:13):
It's like I feel bad for the peoplethat I have converted
to this crazytown view of the world,you know?
Well,the anti crazytown view of the world.
The Crazytown podcast view of the that.
Yeah. Well well because it's.
And yeah, what I hear you sayingis that it's like you're the pitch
you're making the people.
Is that like, we are going to experiencereal significant shocks to the system,
(31:36):
and it's going to force us
to have systemic changewhere we're more immediately
getting our resources on a local level,perhaps.
And so you're telling peoplethese are things that
we want to anticipate,but even psychologically
to be able to let go,like if you're not already kind of
turn on to this way of seeing the world,you don't have those
crazy glasses,you know, the Crazytown podcast glasses.
(31:57):
Yeah. Antidote. Crazytown.It's really weird.
Thank you. That's right.Just trying to sort it out.
Yeah,well, it's not kind to do that to people.
Have them, make them, put them on.
You know, it's like,I guess maybe the The Matrix is.
Well, so it's it's funny you say thatbecause I have a bullet point here on my,
my shit.
I'm looking at about, that exact thing,the red pill option in the matrix.
(32:19):
I think that's somethingthat's really interesting.
That has changed significantly since Thematrix came out, you know, 25 years ago.
And Ishmael talks.
It was not 25 years ago, 1999. Wow.
So I was six years old. Wow.
That's of yeah,these guys were Anyway, yeah.
You go back and look at that movieand they have technologies.
(32:41):
They're antiquated in there now,
like his little discs that he's giving outthat some kind of drug or something.
Probably. Probably phones.
Right. Like huge.
So, Ishmael, you know, what came outin 1992 talks about this phenomenon.
Two was Ishmael the telepathic gorilla?
Yeah.
It's telling the narrator, like, I'mgoing to open your eyes on certain things
and you're going to feel really lonely.
Yeah. Kind of.
(33:02):
That's the disclaimer going into it.
And what's interestingis that in the 90s and the 2000,
the world that I grew upin, like the mainstream,
was full of many peoplewho were operating on this level.
Things are fine.
And, you know,
the great unraveling you're talking abouthadn't really expanded to the point
where it was like undeniablefor masses of people.
But I think in the last 30 yearsor 25 years,
(33:24):
the mainstream that used to be so largeand there is just this small
fringe of people being like, excuse me,but I think there's some problems here.
The fringe that was on the peripheryis a completely different situation, is
the mainstream is kind of fadedand almost has disappeared.
And I see societyis just a bunch of fractions of fringe.
(33:44):
And I think that's kind of like a reallydifferent phenomenon than The Matrix
and Ishmael were contemplating in this,you know, concept of red pilling.
Have you heard this term like used in,like the alt right sense? Yeah.
It's like the idea that I'm
seeing the problems of societyin a way that, like most people
don't see and I'm going to like, informyou and wake you up.
(34:06):
That is not just from folks like us.
You see, the ecological crisisis really concerning.
It's that there's so many fringesthat are not really on the fringe.
And so now you guys are not alonein the fact that actually,
like most people in society,I'd say I don't know, but
maybe I'm just talking to people that seethis are saying some level of like,
(34:28):
everything is wrong and actually, like,I know what is wrong.
So how do we address this
weird phenomenon now where crazytown isfilled of all these fringes
that are really upset with Crazytown,how do we know that our fringe view
isn't just another one of these ridiculousfringe views that, you know?
(34:52):
yeah.
Well, it's been revealed to me
that you went out into the into the woodsand, Yeah.
Oh, you found a.
Yeah. An angel who gave you a book?
I know the aliens told the aliensand Jason in the head with stone tablets.
That'll do now.
Yeah, that'll be having vision.
That'll do it.
That's all. That's been there. Yeah.
(35:13):
And these lizard people, I saw their eyes,you know, that's the way they blink.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's been oneof your points I share about Crazytown.
and the great unravelingis as more crises come to bear
and you get kind of, one thingafter another,
that over time, that erodesyour, your ability
(35:35):
to act cohesively and to actrational kind of opens the door.
And that's whywe had the episode on extremism.
It's like you have to watch out thatyou don't.
I mean, you could do it yourself.
People in your familyor the whole society can be devolving
into extremism in response to the stressesand the pressures
(35:55):
that are visiting us all the time with,you know, whether it's too much heat
or flooding or you can't get a jobor you can't make ends meet
or drug addictions or whatever.
But I think his question is, is all of a,how do we know what we know?
And how much confidence do we have
that our version of the situation is moreor less the truth?
(36:17):
Yeah, yeah.
And that that's a tough one.
And I'll give you, two minutes. Okay.
I would say that one of the thingsit gives me
some level of comfort,
in my view, is that I come to itrather reluctantly.
That's one thing.
The other thing isthat a lot of what I think is problematic
(36:37):
is anyone who claimsthey have the answer or the solution.
When you're dealing with
an unraveling like thisand the poly crisis and systemic crisis,
you should
run away fast from peoplethat think they have all the answers.
And we may come acrossas kind of know it all in a sense,
but a lot of what we knowis that it's almost unknowable.
(36:58):
And so honestly,like that's uncomfortable.
So this is the time where you
should actually try to get as comfortableyou can with the uncomfortable.
And so you list all these thingsconsumerism,
capitalism, industrialism, imperialism.
And each episode is dedicated tohow do we escape that phenomenon?
(37:19):
Ultimately, you're trying to, imagine escaping from Crazytown,
and that's when you bring up the classicBill Murray film Groundhog Day.
Yes, that's basically has all the answers.
So why, is Groundhog Day a good metaphorfor escaping from Crazytown?
Well, it's a great film for one.
(37:40):
So you just want to talk about.
Yeah, I just really like movies, know it.
You know, I think it was just instructivebecause it was interesting that that film
resonatesso much for so many people in the sense
that it has like kind of a spiritualmeaning or a philosophy to it,
but it was really about the kindof the journey of this guy
(38:01):
who was a selfish prick, you know,and living effectively 40 years of life of
the same day over and over and over againbefore he finally broke the spell.
And it was said 40 yearsbecause people have like calculated,
calculated based on like how longit would have take him to learn the piano.
And he went through all stages sculpting.
Yeah.
(38:22):
We talked about thiskind of like stages of grief,
you know, like
he went through these stageswhere he like,
he tried to kill himselfin all kinds of ways.
He's trying to escape, right?
He's trying to escape this fate.
And so he of waking up every morningand experiencing this exact same text.
Itani, Pennsylvania.
And so he went to more and more outlandishways of trying to kill himself.
And nothing worked.
He would wake up the next morning,you know, back in the same place.
(38:43):
Is that a real place, by the way? Yeah,yeah it is. Okay. Thank you.
Okay, let's check in herefrom here. From there in that area.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Philadelphiais somewhat close to Punxsutawney.
Thank you. Okay.So I want to thank state. Continue.
and the groundhog is really is Phil okay?
Yeah.This is great. It's historically accurate.
Yeah it is.
What's it. Everything.It was a documentary. Yeah. Yeah.
It's amazing.
(39:03):
the the cameraman were with himfor that entire.
Right? Yeah.
And then,you know, he he basically he's also
there's this woman that he's there withand he basically wants to bed her.
And so he sets out to like,try to figure out everything she loves
and to master that thing,
you know,so he and this is where people start
calculating how long would it take himto perfect that?
Because he learns how to play the piano,learns how to speak French?
(39:25):
Yeah, all these thingsbasically just try to better.
Then he spends time like trying to.
I think he startsbeing more empathetic to the world.
And he's like rescuing people,you know, doing all these things
when a little girl is goingto, like, fall from a tree,
he knows everything that's happened,you know,
because it happens every day, every dayat the same time, the same way.
So he's just like, intervenes that way.
And eventually it's about him kind ofgiving up himself, you know, in a sense.
(39:49):
And we were using that as kind ofan exploration into the whole recognition
that the last thing to escape is the ideathat we can escape effectively.
You know, in all of the episodes,we've struggled in the sense we owned it
to point to really tangible
ways of truly escapingthat ism that we talked about.
(40:09):
I think we can escape extremism.
We may not escape itin terms of like it exists in the world,
but we can try to escape it in ourselves,like there's some things we could escape
consumerismor greatly reduce our participation
in consumers, and we can't escape itas kind of the driver of the economy.
But a lot of the ismsyou can't escape from,
we can't escape from industrialism,you know, at this point.
(40:31):
But even the idea of just escaping ingeneral is, is something that we have
to let go of, because at least for,I think for the choices
that we're making and the choicethat we're asking our listeners to make
is to stay with the trouble, in a sense,to stay in the game.
If we can't escape Crazytown, we'regoing to have to try to transform it.
(40:52):
All of these ismswe can't just push away from,
we at least can validate other peoplewho are speaking
from this outsider perspectivejust to remember, like, yeah, no,
this is pretty ridiculouswhat we got going on.
Yeah, you're right,this is pretty ridiculous.
It seems to be one of the foundationalthings
you're trying to dois to allow people to exist in this
(41:12):
discomforting place,and to recognize this is ridiculous.
Here we are.
I think if you take
an ecological worldview in the sensethat you recognize a web of life
and are codependence in that web of life,there's a respect that occurs and
the recognition that diversity out thereis key, actually for our own survival.
(41:33):
And when we think about this unravelingand all the uncertainty
that happens in it,I would say we want to just,
prodigious growthof all kinds of different experiments
and different ways of peopletrying to navigate this because we
don't know what works and differentthings will work for different people.
That generally prioritizes certain things,right?
(41:55):
The well-being of lifeand respect and mutuality, and that
people can go their different paths.
They can experiment with different things.
And even within the sphereof like the community, people
who are trying to navigate Crazytown,
our approach to talking about this,to dealing with it, works for some people.
It doesn't work for other people.
There are others out there,thank God, in this ecosystem,
(42:18):
they're taking a much more, maybeheart centered, more mature, more mature,
maybe more
feminine perspective.
You know, that's a lot more, frankly,kind and gentle than in our approach.
Well, and I'm glad for those. Yeah, yeah.
Let me back you on.
You said you
we need prodigious growth in experiments,ways of living I totally agree.
(42:39):
If you, tune it up a little,if that growth is infinite
and exponential, I'll deal then.
And I can figure out how to profit from itsomehow.
Well, I actually brought you guysa little, gift for today.
I thought it would help our conversation.
So I'm going to take it out here.
It's, it's not very big a contraption.
and, you can see it's.
(43:00):
Yeah, it's a little heavy,
and I'll pass it around,and it's a it's a window into the future.
You can see I like I haven'tbeen able to clean it for a long time.
So it's kind of it'skind of foggy, a little dark.
And so you're not going to see like thatbroad.
That's just a magiceight ball or something like that.
No no, no, don't ignore that. That's,
but I'm going to pass this aroundand I want you to look through it.
(43:23):
And maybe there's, you know, 1or 2 things that you can see, and this is
a future that you look at,and it's a future where our society
and multiple versions of our society,because it's a diverse future,
have navigated responsiblyand wisely the great Unraveling
and are living in a waythat makes you think like, wow, all right.
(43:45):
Okay, that's thank God.
So, Rob, I'll, pass it to you first word.
What's the 1 or 2 things that you see?
Careful there. It's very fragile.
That's heavy.That must be LED glass. Okay.
Gosh.
To be put on the spot like thisif you want, like a sort of a.
This will be ironic.
We'll call it a concrete thingbecause it's about removing the concrete.
(44:05):
Yeah. What's something maybe.
Yeah. This is I guessan infrastructure question as well.
Well, so you see,I've just started, kind of hearing about
and haven't done much looking into,but the idea of paving,
you know, trying to say, like,
okay, we've been on a paving bingefor such a long time,
how can we have a societythat doesn't need that much pavement?
Let's start having natural.
(44:27):
Well, wait, wait. The mirror. What?
What is what do you see?
Okay, so, so, like I talked about thisactually, not this season,
but like last season, I biked downto Corvallis from Portland to record.
And there were parts of that bike ridethat were just heinous.
You know, I was like, I feel likeI was taking my life in my hands.
But there was a section in south of Salemwhere I'm riding
(44:48):
these really small little trailsthrough the woods by the water.
It was beautiful.
And there were other people out
on non-motorized vehicles,you know, making their trips.
And it's quiet.
It was not it was likeso in the realm of personal mobility,
I know not everyone can jump on a bikeand ride a big distance, but, for people
(45:10):
who can, it was a absolutely wonderful wayto get here.
And somethingthat's required in our culture is that we
accept the slowing down.
It doesn't always have to be at speed.
You know, you could take a day
to go 100 miles instead of having to do itin an hour and a half or whatever.
And I could see us allbreathing a little better
(45:33):
and having a kind of ajust happier, slower life.
In a sense.
If we could just have that infrastructurewhere it was okay
and have the culture where it was okayto just ride your bike, that's beautiful.
It was careful.
I said, over to Jason, you.
So what do you see in through the window,the foggy window of the future?
(45:58):
I don't know if you want to hear anything.
I want to say.
It's a great fire in the missilesor raining.
That's the problem.
I don't know if I have anythingnice to say.
Well, it's not it doesn't.
It doesn't matter.I'm not asking you to make something up.
What do you think this isjust a look through the mirror.
Shit. And see what's something.
And it doesn't have to.
You don't have to tell mehow they build it.
(46:20):
What's the context of it?
What's something that into this foggy
window of the futurethat makes you think like,
I man, I don't know howwe're going to get to that,
but thank God that they have that.
Okay, okay.
hi. In the Andes,
there are people who made it through.
(46:41):
Because it didn't
get too hot and they were already,
you know, they're already livingpretty simple lives in communities.
So they had an intact culture.
Oh, look, I see others
high in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
where?
Yes, they havethey have, a sustained society
(47:04):
similar to what they had in the past,but with highly adjusted ecosystems.
boy, elsewhere,
it's been tough because the infrastructureis ever adapted to the rapid change
that happened in climateand the decline of complexity,
and these vast urban landscapesare just kind of wastelands.
(47:26):
And there are some peoplewho make trips to them and find, you know,
pieces of steel, etc., and concrete
that they usefor helping build new settlements
that are in remnant pockets of good water
and good soil, etc., etc.. So,
you know,
(47:46):
that's not a very nice vision, butthat's kind of like what I see right now
because we aren't really doing anything
that would stray from that path.
Honestly.
at the moment.
Fair enough.
Well,thank you for looking through the mural.
Let's pass it over to a share to see what.
(48:06):
It's funny,
because I'm not I'm not typically viewedas the the, optimistic, cheery.
You're going to seem like one now. Okay.
Thanks for lowering the bar so much.
Yeah.
Hey, there's still people at the.
I see three people in the future.
Remember that scene in Terminator?
We're all related to each other,but they still need to procreate.
(48:27):
It's kind of awkward.
No. when I take a super long view.
And this is definitely my bias of, like,what I think
I'm enamored with or whatI love to envision.
And that is a world of just,vibrant life, of diverse life everywhere.
And I k sort of pictureand I'm talking about
(48:48):
a thousand plus years hence,you know, it's a good window.
It's a window,
you know, where there's kind ofwhat would Jason was talking about there.
They're myths, mythologies and stories,you know,
that have been shared about the remnants.
And I could see that theremaybe there are vision quests that happen
or journeys that are taken for peoplegoing through, read to passages
(49:10):
where they're taken tothe it's not going to be Vegas
because that's going to be,you know, whatever, impossible.
But maybe in northern climates city,you know, Seattle, Quebec, or,
you know, whatever
where they go and see the remnantsand it's a precautionary tale.
It's a precautionary experience for thembecause the stories that are
told is not not about the greatnessof those past societies.
(49:32):
It's about their folly. Right.
and that's part ofwhat's embedded in them,
but that there's just vibrant lifeand that there are kids
who are finding incredible joy,
spending a lot of free time out in naturewith one another and beating up.
And maybe there arethese regular annual gatherings
that happen in centralized places, butthey haven't seen each other in a year.
(49:54):
There's a great celebration there.
You know, down the road
for down the road,
you know, in the near term it's like,can we have dentistry?
Is there a way?
Yeah, like it would be a win.
Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
If we still had like a way that peoplecould get inoculated for just basic shit,
(50:14):
we had something like antibioticsand there was.
Does the main, dental toolbeing a cinder block.
Is that still dentistry?
It's an ice escape,you know, from by the cast.
Castaway. yeah.
Film. Well, and alsothis is something I want to help clear.
What you're saying is a good way toclarify your guys's position on Crazytown,
because you're not necessarily, like,trying to have us return to.
(50:38):
And you talk about thislike you're not just Luddites.
You're not anti-technology.
In fact, like, you're very concernedthat our irresponsible use of technology
is going to make it impossible
for future generations to enjoythe positive aspects of technology.
Exactly. Oh, okay. Great.
That's the thing.
We underestimatethe resilience of humans ability to adapt.
(50:59):
Now we're doing shit to the planetthat maybe just yawned.
You know how much microplasticis in your brain right now.
It's the synapses. Can't.
Yeah.
The neurotransmitterscan't cross that gap anymore.
There are people who've gonethrough unbelievable traumas
and they have persisted, you know.
So as long as the rate of change,which is not a guarantee,
(51:20):
is in so fast that we can't adapt,I think we all care deeply.
I think there's actually
a lot of pain in all of us,and we cope with it in different ways.
And sometimesthat's just getting our hands dirty.
Sometimes it's uslaughing at the darkness, watching
Aids movies, you know,listening to music, exercising, whatever.
Like, I don't think it's necessarilya bad thing to compartmentalize.
(51:42):
We want to call it thator to care for ourselves.
Yeah.
It is a common threadamong people in our movement.
And I think it's,
if you really want to get down to it,I think that the deep care is is there.
But it's also love, right?
It's a love for what we were giftedthe world we came into.
But then in experiencing that, youyou love the people that you're with to.
(52:03):
And I do think you find
you love the place that you arein, what's being lost.
And you want to have a life of meaning,
trying to make it workand trying to do it better.
And you find people that you lovethat you can do that with.
And I think that's, you know, whatever.
(52:24):
That'skind of the recipe is the key word to me.
And what you just said was movement.
And I want to differentiate
between people who
are part of this community,
who are part of the movementand people who are not, because
movement implies that there'ssome kind of action happening.
Right.
And I think that there are peoplewho have come to maybe a similar diagnosis
(52:47):
of what we're what we're seeing,and they're not part of a movement.
They have resigned themselves.
Maybe it's a defense mechanism
because they're scared to have any hopeor invest in anything.
When they feel like God,everything is against us
and there's no waywe're going to have a better outcome.
And so they become resigned
and fatalistic and curmudgeonlyand just locked in a place.
(53:09):
So basically looking at everythingand shitting on it, you know,
and we do our fairshare of shitting on things.
We are trying and engaged intrying to move things on some level.
It's not a movement towards a utopia,but it's a movement towards something,
you know, and, and I would say the peoplethat we have been lucky enough
to get to know these podcasts have beencathartic for me in a lot of ways.
(53:30):
And I feel like you have the opportunityto have these kinds of conversations
and have the relationships with thesetwo guys, but also meet people like you.
Alex,and all these other people have gotten
to me is the best part of the workthat I get to do.
And it's
because there's a characteristic of peoplewho are trying to stay in this space.
It's a really hard place to stay inand move towards something without
being Pollyanna ish or oversimplisticabout what it is we can achieve.
(53:54):
You know?
And I love those peoplebecause there's a humility,
I think, to them,and a love that they carry, you know,
that's beautiful guys.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for for hosting and.
Yeah. Yeah. And for the work you're doing.
Thank you for hosting meso I can host you.
(54:14):
Nice going.
Thanks for listening.
And thank you to Jason Roband a share for joining us today.
You can listen to the Crazytown podcast
on all podcast platforms and learnmore about the work they do at resilience.
I'll include all the good linksin the show notes.
Until next time, I hope you'll consider how you might bring
(54:38):
some sanity to Crazytown and endureand adapt to the great unraveling.
I'd love to hear what you think,
so feel free to reach outand leave a comment on our Patreon.
And speaking of our Patreon, that'swhere you'll find
the full two hour extended conversationwith the Crazytown guys.
That's right,
there's a whole other hour of insightsand silliness on the human HRC Patreon.
(55:00):
You'll also find audioextras, transcripts of episodes,
and some audiobook readings of booksthat have influenced the show.
By joining our Patreon, you will also help
keep the Odysseygoing far into the future.
Your support makes this podcast possible.
This was the
third of three Summer conversationepisodes.
(55:22):
Next month.
On September 19th, will usher in autumnwith season two of Human Nature Odyssey.
The first episode of seasontwo will continue.
The themes startedtoday of escaping society by exploring
the story of Christopher McCandlessand into the wild.
Make sure to subscribewherever you enjoy your podcasts
to be the firstto hear next month's episode.
(55:44):
And as always,our theme music is Celestial
Soda Pop, by which you can find the linkin our show notes.
Okay.
Talk with you soon.
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.