The Attention Economy and Nature Depletion, or… the Story of Einstein Watching Cat Videos (Episode 41 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
There’s an insidious feature of modern life: as the economy and technology continue to grow, attention becomes ever more scarce. Nowadays footage from Russian dash cams and the latest “wisdom” issued on social media by people who are good...
Nature Detachment and Ecocide, or… the Story of the Marauding Mountain Lion (Episode 40 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
Velcro pants and legs. Booster rockets and spacecraft. Humans and nature. What do these three pairs have in common? They’re all things that get detached from one another. That’s right, we modern humans seem hellbent on detaching ourselves from...
The Myth of Progress and Limits to Growth, or… the Story of the World’s Largest Shovel (Episode 39 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
Who in their right mind is against the idea of progress? You’d be hard-pressed to find a candidate for public office with a platform of maintaining the status quo or regressing to days of yore (as bad as the...
The Year of Choosing Daringly
2020 took a big bite out of our complacency and our “it-can’t-happen-here” denialism. The shocks to our personal and global systems will reverberate for the rest of our lives. The harvest of these ruptures, though, begins now. We can’t...
The Evolution of Social Power
This article, the second in a series, is based on the author’s forthcoming book, POWER: LIMITS AND PROSPECTS FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL. You can read the first article in the series here. For information about the book and how to...
Complexity and Armageddon, or… the Story of the Hemp Microphone (Episode 38 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
Society has become so complex that all the complexity begets more complexity. And if that’s not complex enough for you, jobs have become so specialized that hardly anyone knows how anything is made or works. Join Jason, Rob, and...
Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos, or… the Story of the Dueling Economists (Episode 37 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
April 15, 2021 An argument between economists is usually as exciting as reading the phone book (what’s that?), especially about something as boring-sounding as the discount rate. But it’s an argument that underlies how governments and businesses solve (or...
Conspiracy Theories and Collapse, or… the Story of UFOs and Free Energy (Episode 36 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
First things first, we try not to confuse ourselves or our listeners as we distinguish between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. Then we unpack a bunch of questions about why people (even some of the smart ones) are so...
Self Domestication and Overshoot, or… the Story of Foxes and Russian Melodrama (Episode 35 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
Self domestication, the process by which humans became a more cooperative and less aggressive species, paradoxically contributes to humanity’s overshoot predicament. While trying to wrap their heads around that nugget, Asher, Jason, and Rob geek out on evolutionary biology,...
Fear of Death and Climate Denial, or… the Story of Wolverine and the Screaming Mole of Doom (Episode 34 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
Thursday March 25, 2021 What can we learn about death from the X-Men, small screaming rodents, and unwitting college students in psychology experiments? It turns out that the fear of death (or death anxiety) affects human behavior in all...