Crazy Town: Episode 126. The Hypocrite’s Guide to the Galaxy: Muddling Toward a Sustainable Footprint

Jason Bradford:
I am Jason Bradford.


Asher Miller:
I'm Asher Miller.


Rob Dietz:
And I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town where our favorite sport is cliff diving. And our favorite mammal is the lemming. Is hypocrisy the one thing that can grow infinitely on our finite planet? When you learn that humanity's fossil fuel burning, including your own, is contributing to climate chaos, what can you do? When you understand that economic growth and consumption are causing habitat loss in the sixth mass extinction, can you opt out? As long as you're embedded in an unsustainable society, it's hard not to be a hypocrite. At the same time, dropping out seems isolating and ineffective, even if you can do it. Join Jason, Asher and me, Rob, as we hit the confessional to examine the challenges and psychology of hypocrisy.


Asher Miller:
Rob and Jason, nice to see you guys.


Rob Dietz:
Good to see you too, Asher.


Asher Miller:
I appreciate you guys taking the time to get together. Even though I know I didn't explain why I wanted to get together, but I'm feeling the need to get some things off of my chest. As you know, I am not a lifelong Catholic, so I've never been to confession, but that's what I'm here for today. So I was hoping you guys could serve as - Do they do this?


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Hail Mary full of Grace -


Asher Miller:
Do you usually do confessionals with two people? Can they fit in the little closet?


Rob Dietz:
My knowledge of confessionals and Catholicism pretty much comes from the movies.


Jason Bradford:
I went once.


Asher Miller:
Do they fit?


Rob Dietz:
Well, I mean, the movie I'm thinking of is Spotlight. That's not painting it in the best category.


Jason Bradford:
I've done a lot of those gangster movies with the Italian mafia, they go in. And then the priest steps in the back and falls out.


Asher Miller:
So I actually want to confess some hypocrisy to you guys. I've been wrestling with this. I want to come clean. I'm glad that we're doing this in the privacy of the recording studio and all of our listeners. Thank God we don't have very many of them.


Rob Dietz:
Well I love it when people around me talk about how hypocritical they are and then I don't have to feel bad about my own issues.


Asher Miller:
Well, guess what? I think this is actually going to move from a confessional to a group therapy session.


Jason Bradford:
I love that.


Asher Miller:
But I think before we get into this, I think we probably need to define hypocrisy, right? We are learned men, we're erudite. We like to be grounded in the actual, using terms correctly. So when we talk about hypocrisy, I want to make sure that -


Jason Bradford:
Define the term.


Rob Dietz:
I've been called a lot of stuff in my time. Erudite is not one of 'em. I'll tell you that.


Asher Miller:
Can you spell erudite? See? If you can spell it then you are it. So let me define that. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, a hypocrite is a person whose behavior contradicts their stated beliefs or feelings. So basically it's a gap between our awareness and our actions. Now, I think we'll get to this later, but I think that there are variations on hypocrisy.


Jason Bradford:
Sure. What's your confessional?


Asher Miller:
We'll get to that in a second.


Jason Bradford:
Okay.


Asher Miller:
I need to set this up because I want to put it in the context of many, many worse people. Okay?


Jason Bradford:
Got it.


Asher Miller:
Thank you. It's all relative. Okay. So we should talk about other folks, for example, that we could think of. Let's just look at some of our American presidents, for example.


Jason Bradford:
That's easy.


Asher Miller:
Right? So we'll start with Thomas Jefferson. The man at a very young age wrote an incredibly powerful statement, the Declaration of Independence.


Jason Bradford:
In cursive.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. I know that was the hardest part.


Jason Bradford:
No one's going to be able to read it.


Asher Miller:
But pretty beautiful, brilliant writing in it. He writes that all men are created equal. Can we just point out the fact that he owned what like 600 slaves. Just a little hypocrisy there.


Rob Dietz:
I think old TJ - Thomas Jefferson there defined men about how Bill Clinton defined sexual relations. He's like, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."


Jason Bradford:
I mean, one of our greatest presidents, many people believe was Franklin Roosevelt. Because he got us out of the Great Depression, led us through the Second World War. I mean, just -


Asher Miller:
New Deal. Yeah.


Jason Bradford:
Unbelievable legacy. And Japanese internment camps.


Asher Miller:
Oh, right. Ouchipoo.


Jason Bradford:
Ouchipoo. Just horrific history. That doesn't really get a lot of attention, but I can't imagine what that would've been like to lose your home and farm and get put in a camp.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. I mean, he was speaking against tyranny overseas and enforcing it here at home.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, hypocrisy.


Rob Dietz:
Well, the hypocrite in chief of the day, of course, is Donald Trump. Remember when he was lobbying to be given the Nobel Peace Prize?


Asher Miller:
He accepted it from the person who won it.


Rob Dietz:
He did that just before his big campaign of war crimes and before he put out that threat on his social media that a whole civilization will die tonight.


Asher Miller:
Right.


Jason Bradford:
Okay. That sounds very hypocritical. But I don't even know if he's capable of hypocrisy. I do actually think you actually can't be sociopathic.


Asher Miller:
So actually that gets to this - Let's coin a new term, the hypocrisy spectrum. So that gets to this a little bit, right? I think there is - The definition of it talks about a person whose behavior contradicts their state of beliefs or feelings. I think there are variations, shades of gray on this thing a little bit. Because Trump, I think you're right, very hypocritical, that statement. But in many ways, he's far less hypocritical than a lot of presidents who did a lot of corrupt shit. You know what I mean?


Jason Bradford:
Because he's in the open like I'm just a scumbag trying to make money.


Asher Miller:
We're open for business. Come to my house. If you buy enough of my -


Rob Dietz:
Was that his famous, I'm just a scumbag speech? I didn't see that one.


Asher Miller:
So we should talk about, let's use the Olympics. Okay? Olympics. So we've got gold medals, silver medals, bronze medals. Right? So maybe I'll give what I think of as a pretty egregious, so like a gold medal hypocrisy.


Rob Dietz:
Top of the podium hypocrite.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. I'm going to stick in the realm of politics. And I'm not going to name names. We've seen a number of examples of this, but you have conservative politicians who espouse quote unquote "pro-family values," anti-gay rhetoric and actually anti-gay legislation policy. And then you find out later they've been having homosexual affairs.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. There's a lot of projection that happens.


Asher Miller:
Because it's not just that they're living a double life. It's that they're very actively in their work espousing things that are completely against what they practice in their personal life.


Jason Bradford:
And they hate themselves in some deep way, which is really sad. I mean, these poor people. And they're awful, but -


Rob Dietz:
But they got a gold medal out of it.


Jason Bradford:
But they got a gold medal.


Asher Miller:
They get a gold medal. Yeah, that's right. Trump will just take it away from them.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah.


Rob Dietz:
Right. He'll be up there lobbying. I am the top gold medalist on the hypocrite spectrum.


Asher Miller:
Give me that.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, no, I mean, I'll go for a silver medal here and I'll take my example from the silver screen.


Asher Miller:
Oh nice. I like what you did there.


Jason Bradford:
Thank you. So yeah, I'm pretty proud. Anyhow, there's this guy, Leonardo DiCaprio. You may have heard of him.


Asher Miller:
Yeah, I think.


Jason Bradford:
Okay. So he was this movie called "Titanic," and anyhow, he died. Anyway, at the end of that -


Rob Dietz:
Leonardo DiCaprio did not die.


Asher Miller:
You mean his character?


Jason Bradford:
His character dies at the end. Okay. Thank you. Really sad.


Rob Dietz:
Spoiler alert.


Jason Bradford:
I know. Spoiler. If you haven't seen "Titanic," I'm sorry.


Asher Miller:
The door just wasn't big enough.


Jason Bradford:
I know. So anyway, he's like this incredibly big environmentalist and 11th hour project funding and all kinds of stuff.


Asher Miller:
He had a foundation. Has done a lot of work on -


Jason Bradford:
He picks up plastic with kids. And he owns all these big international properties and he takes private jets to them. He's got a hundred acre island in Belize, and he's got at least two homes that are a few miles apart in Los Angeles. Like what the hell is all this about? And so his consumption level is outlandish because he's a gazillionaire. And so anyway, that's -


Asher Miller:
While he's making speeches to the UN Climate Conference.


Jason Bradford:
So anyway. . .


Rob Dietz:
He's in some good movies though, so I'm glad to see him on the podium.


Jason Bradford:
I also am doing this because I'm trying to get attention from him and I want our podcast to go -


Asher Miller:
So you're a hypocrite.


Jason Bradford:
Well, no.


Asher Miller:
Except you called him out. That's true. You didn't kiss his ass.


Jason Bradford:
I didn't. I want him to come on the show -


Asher Miller:
And defend himself


Jason Bradford:
And to talk about this. I'm not going to attack him. I think our show will get into how difficult it is.


Rob Dietz:
I wonder if -


Jason Bradford:
We're a men's group here. We have some understanding.


Rob Dietz:
I wonder if he could give us one of those houses to be our new podcasting studio. That would be pretty cool.


Jason Bradford:
I don't want to -


Asher Miller:
I want a house like that dog owned.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. I was thinking of the dog. Yeah. Yeah.


Asher Miller:
A call back folks.


Jason Bradford:
Gunther.


Asher Miller:
Gunther the dog. Yeah. You'll have to go back into our archive to listen that one.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Okay. So we've got a gold medalist, silver medalist. How about a bronze medalist? I'm going to get away from politics and away from celebrities and go to something that happened to me once. So I was pretty fresh out of college, working at my first job, and I think we went somewhere crappy like McDonald's or whatever, and we're eating. And this woman comes in, she comes in and really gives us a big heavy lecture on what are you guys doing eating meat? That's horrible. And kind of gives us a big animal rights thing. And then I just look at her, I'm like, "You're wearing leather shoes. What are you talking about?" And then she kind of gave me this whole, well, that's okay. Eating them is bad, but wearing them is all right. And then I was like, "Well, what about footballs? Are footballs allowed?" So basically she had this weird set of rules of you can use animal parts for some things, but not others. I mean, I would say, okay, grant, I'm kind of a hypocrite. I was trying to be an environmentalist and I'm eating McDonald's or 
whatever, but that's bronze level stuff.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Okay.


Rob Dietz:
I think we should also just look at what's the most minor. You didn't even make it to the podium. Maybe you didn't even qualify for the Olympics.


Jason Bradford:
You didn't qualify for the team.


Asher Miller:
Right.


Jason Bradford:
You're just watching it on television.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. What kind of hypocrite would that be? Like somebody who's got the bumper sticker on their car, like the Sierra Club member, and they're driving their Subaru up to go camping in the mountains and burning fuels.


Jason Bradford:
Right.


Rob Dietz:
Something like that. Pretty minor.


Asher Miller:
That's a form of hypocrisy I think most of us can relate to.


Rob Dietz:
Right. Well, the good thing is that none of us have ever exhibited or displayed any level of hypocrisy. We couldn't make that podium no matter what.


Asher Miller:
Well, so let's get to confessional time. In fact, we've got to do this in -


Jason Bradford:
I see that what the long setup was


Asher Miller:
true Crazy Town style, which is not - I mean, if we were really supportive, like you said, this is a men's help group. We're listening deeply and attentively to each other. Air out.


Jason Bradford:
I've got some white sage right here on burning.


Asher Miller:
Yeah, but we're not going to do that. We're going to mock each other. Okay. So the whole exercise here is which one of us is the biggest hypocrite?


Rob Dietz:
You are. Not me. Not me.


Jason Bradford:
Well, none of us are at Leonard DiCaprio levels is what you're getting at.


Asher Miller:
No, I'm saying between the three of us.


Jason Bradford:
No, I know that. But at least we're not at Leonard DiCaprio levels.


Asher Miller:
No, I had to set it up so that we felt a little better about ourselves.


Rob Dietz:
First of all, we don't know this yet. I mean, when I hear what you've been doing that's hypocritical. You might surpass Leonardo.


Jason Bradford:
I doubt it. Well, let's go. Okay, let's go game on buddy. Game on.


Asher Miller:
Well, what I need to confess to you guys is I've actually been working on the side as a PR hack for big oil.


Jason Bradford:
Right.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. I've got a good confession I'm going to throw out there for you guys. Okay? The three of us people know who are listening. We talk about ecology. We talk about the limits to growth. We talk about not burning fossil fuels.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. We talk about eighties movies.


Rob Dietz:
So when we moved into the house we live in now, it was actually being built at the time. It was kind of a new neighborhood, and we got there in time to tell 'em, "Hey, can we have electric appliances instead of gas?" But only a few things. We were able to get the stove that way, but they had already put in a water heater and there was already this fireplace, which is -


Asher Miller:
Is it gas fire?


Rob Dietz:
It's a gasoline, not gasoline, but natural gas. Just throw a cup of gas on the fire. So it's a natural gas burning thing, and it has fake logs. And to turn it on, you flip a light switch.


Asher Miller:
I've got three of those in my house.


Rob Dietz:
Right. Okay.


Asher Miller:
We don't use them, but -


Rob Dietz:
So we were like, we're not going to use this. This is a stupid ass thing. Forget it. Well, this last winter, our system stopped working very well. It wasn't =


Jason Bradford:
Like your normal heating system.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah, it wasn't going. The house was getting kind of cold. And so we would wear a jacket, but still ended up flicking the goddamn switch.


Jason Bradford:
It still worked.


Rob Dietz:
Oh yeah.


Asher Miller:
Wait, this is your confession.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. I'm burning a bullshit fire in my house, just burning when I didn't even want the gas line hooked up.


Jason Bradford:
You bastard.


Rob Dietz:
Exactly.


Asher Miller:
That's pretty . . . I think I got that beat, dude. I think you're trying to game this game.


Rob Dietz:
No, I will say I felt bad. I'm like, I'm flipping this switch to all it does literally in the moment burns natural gas. I'm trying not to burn fossil fuels and here it is, just lighting it on fire right in front of my face.


Jason Bradford:
Oh God. Okay. Okay.


Asher Miller:
If it makes you feel any worse, it's probably fracked gas.


Rob Dietz:
Excellent.


Jason Bradford:
I mean, okay. I think that's one little thing, and I get that. And I would say that if I really pay attention, every single fucking thing I do day in and day out feels like that. And Bill Reese had this essay out recently, and this is, he recycles a lot of the same stuff and just sort of repurposes.


Rob Dietz:
Bill is an ecologist. He's been at it for decades and decades.


Asher Miller:
Like 60 years.


Rob Dietz:
The co-creator of the ecological footprint concept, super brilliant, super kind, kind of like, I'd say a hero of ours in this program.


Jason Bradford:
But he got his shtick.


Asher Miller:
Pretty fucking depressing reading his stuff.


Jason Bradford:
And so I read one of his new ones recently, and I'm like, I've heard it all before, but he's kind of reorganized and got a few new quips and he's tied it to new recent events. We all do this stuff. But his big thing is, we've got modern industrial civilization and arguing with that about what you should and shouldn't do is impossible. It's like saying, make this hurricane change direction. There's no way. Basically because I'm embedded in modern techno industrial civilization. Every single thing. I'm looking around the room. We did this before in one of our episodes. Which one was the episode we talked?


Rob Dietz:
That's the one about the hemp microphone.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. That every object around me was made in some industrial plant that was burning natural gas, or was coal fired, or a nuclear plant. And there was a machine that went out and mined the materials and it was shipped around the world. We did the 10,000 mile cod. Every item that I'm looking at and touching is basically from some process like that. That is devastating. And Bill outlines that we're stuck in this, we're trapped. And so if I take the time and realize that every moment of my life -


Rob Dietz:
I got you. But give me one. Give me something you've done recently where you're just - I mean, I'm the priest here in your confessional box.


Jason Bradford:
I drove in my Toyota Tacoma 1997 truck to my job at the tennis club where I got balls out of a basket that was made of stainless steel where it had rubber wheels on it, and these balls got plastic felt and the synthetic rubber. And I got a graphene racket, and I got a concrete tennis cord, and I've got a plastic net.


Rob Dietz:
Didn't I say one thing?


Jason Bradford:
And I've got LED lights and I've got insulation made of fiberglass in here. I mean everything!


Asher Miller:
But you brought your reusable water bottles.


Jason Bradford:
Yes.


Rob Dietz:
Made out of plastic.


Jason Bradford:
No, this one's metal. I don't want plastic microfibers everywhere.


Asher Miller:
But the top of it is probably plastic.


Jason Bradford:
There's a plastic kind of gasket thing. You know what I mean? So everything I do, everything I do.


Asher Miller:
Your confession is basically that it's all of the, the accumulation of all of the small little life choices that you have. That is your form of hypocrisy.


Jason Bradford:
And in many ways, I don't even know if I have a choice.


Asher Miller:
Oh, sure. But this is confession time, right?


Rob Dietz:
I don't feel like that's that . . .


Asher Miller:
I think you both are guys are being pansies about this, or you're a lot purer than me because -


Rob Dietz:
What are you doing? Lay it on us.


Asher Miller:
I mean, I don't even know how many cross continental flights I've taken in my life. I mean, as a kid, I did that a lot. I didn't have agency of making those choices. But I was born in the Netherlands. My mother's family is from there. We would go summers, many summers we would go to the Netherlands. So you think about the missions of that, but it's not just from when I was a kid, I mean as an adult. And I've taken my kids on planes to go visit family. So the emissions of those flights, those trips are enormous. They're greater than the lifetime emissions of many, many people on this planet.


Jason Bradford:
What was the statistic that I remember? It was like a New York or LA, I don't know if Cairo jumbo jet flight uses more energy than was used to building pyramids.


Asher Miller:
To build the pyramids. Yeah.


Jason Bradford:
I know. We have no concept. Yeah. Wow. You're really evil, aren't you?


Asher Miller:
Well, and it's tough. I mean, in my defense, my parents, both of my parents decided to move to Europe.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. It's their fault.


Asher Miller:
Well, but I know what I know. I do the work that I do, and I still make the choice. Not every year, but I make the choice to get on a plane to go see relatives in Europe.


Jason Bradford:
It's your fault then.


Rob Dietz:
Jason. There's a reason you're not the priest in the confessional box. I don't think they say stuff like that.


Jason Bradford:
Out Father who art in heaven. Repeat after me. Hallowed be thy name.


Asher Miller:
I'm a Jew, dude. It's not going to work on me.


Rob Dietz:
You just make him do some pushups or something.


Jason Bradford:
Okay burpees then. If you're a Jew, you've got to do burpees.


Asher Miller:
Okay, I can do that. Okay.


Jason Bradford:
20 burpees.


Asher Miller:
I'll be right back.


Rob Dietz:
I mean, that's cool, flying to see family. You evil bastard. But I've been on a cruise before. A full on -


Asher Miller:
Which you went on because of family.


Rob Dietz:
That's true. That's true. Yeah. We've talked about this on this podcast. It was after my uncle died and my mom was wanting to get together with everybody who would help take care of him and treat us for an Alaska cruise. And I remember the best part of it was when the cruise backed up into this cove -


Asher Miller:
They just dumped all the waste.


Rob Dietz:
No, no, the point was to get a great look at this glacier, and I was just sitting here. Wow, we're melting it in real time. Right here. Right now.


Jason Bradford:
The exhaust pipes were coming out 180 degrees Fahrenheit, and just you're seeing ice melt against the face.


Rob Dietz:
It was like they were just about ready to turn it into a water slide.


Jason Bradford:
And then they turned on the turbo jets and the flames that came out of the back. And they're like, "Hey, watch this. We're going to make it glow."


Rob Dietz:
I mean, it was weird. You'd be on the deck of a cruise. I remember me and my daughter, we were playing soccer on the deck of the cruise. And I'm just thinking, this is absolutely nuts.


Jason Bradford:
So you could play tennis on some cruises, you think?


Rob Dietz:
I'm sure you could.


Jason Bradford:
Oh interesting. I could be maybe a tennis pro on a cruise and get free - I could be one of these people that goes on a cruise as a staff. But all I do is teach tennis in eight hours a day. And I have three sessions during the day.


Rob Dietz:
This is getting to gold medal stuff. You're dreaming about how hypocritical you can be.


Asher Miller:
Yeah, I think that's true. Okay.


Jason Bradford:
That would be cool.


Asher Miller:
That makes me feel better about myself.


Jason Bradford:
Oh god, that would be cool. Okay. Anyway, I got to put that on my LinkedIn page.


Rob Dietz:
Well, I think we need to get back to you, Jason, because you brought up this whole, everything you do makes you a hypocrite. Can you explain that a little more? The challenge of living the way we're living?


Jason Bradford:
Well, that's the thing. Like Bill Reese says, the modern industrial civilization we're in, if you're in it, you're participating in every single way. I pay taxes. I'm paying the salary of some numb nut to plan out the new freeway system. Right?


Asher Miller:
Yeah.


Jason Bradford:
I mean, let alone the military economy, we know that. Okay. But every single basic thing we think about. I'm paying some other numb nut to think about how they're going to expand the water, the sewage treatment plant, so that people can keep pooping and flushing their feces away instead of us saying, let's collect those feces


Asher Miller:
Night soil, baby.


Jason Bradford:
Because we're going to run out of fucking fertilizer because the Straight of Harmuz -


Asher Miller:
We are right now.


Jason Bradford:
So we don't do anything right. We don't do anything right. There's not a single thing we do. Like I'm saying, everything we do, everything we do every day. You just bought - On Earth Day. On Earth Day. I got a confession for you. On Earth Day, you bought what? You bought what? Okay.


Rob Dietz:
I bought a washing machine.


Jason Bradford:
And where was that made?


Asher Miller:
On Earth.


Rob Dietz:
So in some ways -
Take a breath, dude. Geez.


Jason Bradford:
In some ways because we're embedded we can't blame ourselves too much. The system actually needs to change. But of course the system isn't changing. The system's going to collapse. And then of course, the dilemma is that you don't see any workable alternatives around. So you're like, I can't get out of this. It's going to collapse. But what are the alternatives that are maybe resilient in the face of the collapse? It's not part of modern industrial civilization. And you end up essentially making all these compromises where you calibrate. So I have a great compromise I did recently. Plastics suck, microplastics. They're all over the place. They're probably embedded in my brain and my prostate.


Rob Dietz:
Well, every time you smack a tennis ball, a whole cloud of microplastics erupts right by your face.


Asher Miller:
And then you breathe it in.


Jason Bradford:
Trust me. I've thought about that. Okay. I do have natural gut strings.


Rob Dietz:
But you don't have natural felt balls.


Jason Bradford:
No. Okay. But that's what I'm saying. The compromise is I don't have plastic strings. I get natural gut, and I'm hoping that I'm having my plastic aerosol intake fly while I'm on the court. If you try to go buy clothes, athletic clothes, like yoga pants or whatever, they're all fricking plastic. I got rid of all that stuff and I have an all natural fiber wardrobe. But again, where does that come from? There's a whole industrial supply chain with all the emissions and crap, the diesel to get here, the Amazon truck, the plastic packaging it comes in.


Asher Miller:
Well, let's talk about some of that calibration that I think we can all relate to and probably our listeners can relate to as well, right?


Jason Bradford:
I'm trying to be slightly less horrible of a person.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. I'll give an example of how I do that and how much of a hypocrite it makes me feel. Right. Which is, I drive an EV car. I drove one here.


Rob Dietz:
That's redundant, by the way. That's an electric vehicle car.


Asher Miller:
That's true.


Rob Dietz:
I think you just drove an EV.


Asher Miller:
I drove an EV. Anyway, I drove an EV here. I got this little Chevy bolt.


Rob Dietz:
Me too.


Jason Bradford:
Copy cats.


Asher Miller:
That's a compromise, right? That's me calibrating. That's me saying, well, I'm still participating in this system. I'm still basically driving to get to places. I could have walked here, I guess. Could have ridden my bike here. I drove here. Right? Is it less bad than driving like a Hummer or -


Jason Bradford:
A teeny weenie bit.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. A teeny weenie bit?


Jason Bradford:
A teeny weenie bit.


Rob Dietz:
Well, I want to lean into what you were saying, Jason. The hypocrisy, you sort of have to be a hypocrite if you're in the system. And I've been geeking out lately on housing, just sort of learning some stuff. It started probably, I'm sure on YouTube or something like that with somebody making a house out of Adobe bricks.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. You love that stuff. You love that stuff.


Rob Dietz:
I love how people show how they make stuff. I mean, maybe it's all fake, I don't know. But I started looking into the reality of this, and I learned of this guy, Hassan Fai. He's an Egyptian architect, and he was actually the first recipient of the right livelihood award, which we've got other heroes. One of my big personal heroes is Herman Daley, the ecological economist who won that award and I think -


Asher Miller:
Nimmo Bossey. Yeah, there's a few folks.


Rob Dietz:
And this guy, Hassan Fati won it in 1980. So it was like the first year the award was given.


Jason Bradford:
Wow.


Rob Dietz:
And what he wanted for was he wrote a book that he titled something like, An Architecture for the Poor. And basically what he was talking about is the materials you need to build your structure, especially in a place like Egypt, are right under your feet. And not only can you make a building for cheap, but you can also make it with incredible temperature regulating properties. It's like in the desert, the sun hits these thick walls and it won't immediately heat up the inside. It'll basically store energy in the wall. Nighttime comes in the desert, the temperature drops and the walls are radiating heat at night. And so it's like this perfect setup. And for me, I think like, oh, okay. So I moved into a crappy American stick house with all kinds of toxic materials and plastic all over it. And it would be illegal for me to even attempt to have a house like that. Or I could do it if I just built it. But it is not insurable. I couldn't sell it. But now that I have this knowledge of a kind of clean "green" building, now I feel like a hypocrite just living in my house.


Jason Bradford:
Oh, I feel like that all the time. My house got some award. It's like earth steward zero energy ready award.


Rob Dietz:
Not zero energy, just zero energy ready? All houses are zero energy ready. Just don't ever flip this switch.


Asher Miller:
Don't turn anything on.


Jason Bradford:
Apparently I didn't have a big enough PV array to be totally neutral, but close. That was sort of the idea. But yeah, it's crazy. I had to have a power outlet every six feet on the wall or was not up to code. It is just one nutty thing after.


Rob Dietz:
Oh yeah, that's like parking lots. To be up to code you have to have so many miles of pavement to place cars.


Jason Bradford:
Like getting a composting toilet that's approved in a residence is almost impossible. So you have this flush everything and it's into a septic system. No, it's crazy. It's crazy. I think about this all the time. The housing thing too. I was thinking, I'm going to convert my farm to this permaculture model where I'm thinking about the future of this place over decades. And I'm literally planting willows and other things I can coppice so that I can make coppice buildings where you have woven wood and then you put mud on it.


Rob Dietz:
Copus means you can take cuttings and replant them.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. Well, when you cut it, it sprouts from the base and you get all these little long wood fibers that you can bend. And so coppice and dob housing is very, very amazing. And it's like this adobe on the outside, but wood framed on the inside. So there's a side of farming that I can see if you manage lands properly, and you have really local recycled. So if you're actually using the human poop and manure for your fertilizer and you're integrating the animals and you're essentially eating from your land, and that's one extreme. And the other extreme, of course, is this massive industrial system that all everything's tied to commodity food system. But again, in between there's all these compromised positions, and there's actually a schema that I saw from these authors talk about those bookends, but in the middle might be industrial organic. And I've done this kind of thing where I've converted large tracks of farmland to organic, and it's kind of like it's industrial. We're still using inputs. We're still selling into these big markets, but we're doing the better things for soil health.


Rob Dietz:
You use only organic diesel in those organic tractors.


Jason Bradford:
Exactly. It smells like french fries. It's all bio - No. But then you can see smaller scale, more place-based local food system farmers who reduce their use of things and start thinking about this whole farm design. So anyway, I think what we're getting at is that you're always making these compromises and you're figuring out, what can I do in this completely crazy system and how can I find the place that I can make an incremental difference?


Asher Miller:
I think the thing that I want to focus on here is the toll that it takes. The challenge of doing that. And I would argue, I don't know if it's to say this in simplistic terms, but almost to me sometimes feels like it's a lot easier to live at one extreme or the other than to try to navigate in the middle.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah.


Rob Dietz:
I want to dig a little deeper into this idea of, I think you're getting at it, Asher, with living in the middle. I think Jason, you're getting at it, we have to make choices that we don't necessarily want to make. We have to compromise. And I found an article on our website resilience.org. This podcast is featured there. The article is by a writer named Charlotte Del Senor, and she wrote this article, "A Short History of Endurance," and she describes two double binds that we're in. And so a double bind arises when every option carries some loss, right? It's like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't, but you have to make a choice. It's mandatory, and you're going to get penalized no matter which choice you make. So the first of these double binds she mentions is you can stay in the mainstream culture, you participate in it, but then your values erode. The other side of that is you could withdraw from the mainstream culture, but then you lose your income and security or maybe belonging falls away. So that's one, double bind. Participate, values erode, withdraw, lose your income, lose your belonging. The second double bind that she mentions has to do about your voice. If you speak up, speak out against the mainstream, you can intensify the amount of polarization out there. That's what we need, more polarized discourse. But the other side of that double bind, if you stay quiet, then the harm continues.


Jason Bradford:
Yes.


Rob Dietz:
So I was wondering if we could come up with some examples of these double binds that you get around this hypocrisy of trying to live in a, what'd you call it, Jason? Bill's term? A modern techno-industrial society.


Jason Bradford:
Well, they're very common. I gave the example of my house already. Okay, wonderful house. It's considered state of the art, but in my world, what I think of as state of the art for modern techno industrialization, it's still a mess. I still would like to have something like this Egyptian guys talking about, or waddle and dob housing from the materials from my own land and have a composting toilet and live really simply like that. But like I said, I can't get a building permit for these things. And where are the craftspeople around to do that, right? And so you're stuck. You need a house and it's illegal to do what you think is the right thing. Again, then values erode. I'm in this double bind.


Rob Dietz:
Or at least your ability to express that value erodes.

Jason Bradford:
Exactly.


Rob Dietz:
I still think you have a good heart, Jason.


Jason Bradford:
Okay.


Asher Miller:
Well, that's the thing is that if you can't express that value, right, you're living inconsistently with it. In this case, because the system sort of forces that on you, then you have to carry the weight of that incongruence.


Jason Bradford:
That incongruence.


Asher Miller:
You have to carry that with you. Hopefully you don't feel that every time you open a fucking door in your house.


Jason Bradford:
No, not too bad.


Asher Miller:
I mean, every time you go take a leak.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, a little bit.


Asher Miller:
Okay.


Jason Bradford:
I go outside. I try to go outside.


Asher Miller:
Well, that's true.


Jason Bradford:
That's true. You've seen me.


Asher Miller:
I have seen you.


Jason Bradford:
I try not to let the neighbors see me. I try not to let the neighbors see me. I go behind bushes.


Asher Miller:
Good.


Rob Dietz:
Well, let's take the other side of that double bind, which is if you withdraw your income or your belonging falters, I think the withdrawal, the classic story from history is the Unabomber. This was a guy who had real critique of modern industrial society and made some valid points. But what did he do? He took himself out of that society, and certainly his belonging fell away and he became completely just evil about it. I mean, he was willing to murder people. Totally lost touch. I think for me, I've got the example of income. I had this nice job with the federal government, which probably would've gone away if it were in modern times anyway, but I used to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service working on big landscape conservation issues. Near and dear to my heart. But once I learned all this stuff that we talk about in Crazy Town here, I was like, oh, I need to go work on this. So I quit my job to take a position to run this little nonprofit, so my salary just basically went bye-bye.


Asher Miller:
Yeah, but you used that as a stepping stone to your current job, which is what? Seven figure salary, I think.


Rob Dietz:
Well, I'm trying to get it to 8.


Jason Bradford:
We'll talk about that later.


Asher Miller:
Yeah, let's talk about this speaking up piece. She writes about polarization intensifying. I think that that probably happens in situations where you get, if you have movements of people, not like an individual speaking up necessarily, but you have movements of people speaking up against something and then you often get a counter reaction, which has happened a lot in history. We've seen examples of this recently in this country, but I'm thinking more about it, less from the polarization standpoint, but more of the impact. It relates a little bit to the one you talked about, Rob, which is belonging faltering. If you're speaking up within your social circles, it's very easy to basically lose relationships, be the person that people kind of try to avoid at the family reunion.


Rob Dietz:
Oh yeah, we talked about this with Douglas Rushkoff. When you start talking to somebody and they start looking at you like you're absolutely nuts, like you're some conspiracy theorists.


Jason Bradford:
Well, the other day we had some people over for dinner. And this is their first time to our house. They're kind of work colleagues of Kristen.


Asher Miller:
The were wearing clothing with plastic in it.


Jason Bradford:
And they had plastic clothing.


Asher Miller:
And you just, "Get out!"


Jason Bradford:
No, here's what did. They say, "Well, you have a beautiful home. This is wonderful." I said, "Well, actually . . . This is a product of modern techno industrial civilization, and it sucks."


Rob Dietz:
He took his award and he smashed them over the head with it.


Asher Miller:
This is the worst house ever!


Jason Bradford:
Ideally, I'd be living in a mud shack down by the river, made out of materials that I had scraped out the earth by hand and willow coppicing.


Rob Dietz:
Then you're like, "That's what beauty is, Motherfuckers! Now get out of my house."


Asher Miller:
And they slowly backed away like Homer into the bushes. "We've just got to go to the bathroom," and then they'd never come back.
I think so much of this hypocrisy conundrum, let's say, really is a psychological one. I mean, there are the actual logistical, practical, pragmatic choices that we make, which are real and have real impact. But I feel like it's the psychology of it all. That is why, in some ways, I think so few people actually live with their hypocrisy as they consciously live with it because it's so hard. And I think that what happens, because we're living in a system like this, it's so painful when you're aware of the faults of the system, or our collective basically collaboration with things that are against our values. It's so toxic, I think, emotionally and psychologically. People tend to fall into these, I would say to these extremes. And I think about in the field of psychology, they talk about this window of tolerance. We actually did, a couple of years ago, we did a whole deep dive series at resilience.org around building emotional resilience. And we had one of our advisors, Leslie Davenport, help us with this. And we had some experts talking with us about it. And one of the topics that we covered was this idea of a window of tolerance, which basically is kind of this range that everyone has where you're able to deal with difficulty. You're able to deal with, whether it's just the difficulties of a day by day situation or even challenging moments or whatever. If you're in a healthy place psychologically . . .


Jason Bradford:
It's like your emotions are there, but they're regulated enough so that you can think clearly, problem solve, and handle the situation.


Asher Miller:
Yes. So you could actually be with a situation and handle a situation where you're present. You're not fight, flight or freeze, right? You're not going into what they call hyperarousal, which is you get totally agitated, you flip your lid because you're super angry and you lash out, you yell. Sometimes people get violent, whatever they do. Do you know what I mean? Or people flee and freak out. Their cortisol, everything is like, triggered.


Jason Bradford:
It's like when the tennis game isn't going well and you're really frustrated and you're going to smash your racket, or you're going to tense up and not be able to get double fault because you can't get fluid motion. So we actually trained people on how to breathe -


Asher Miller:
Exactly.


Jason Bradford:
How to reset.


Asher Miller:
The other side of this is the hypoarousal side, which I think I experience more. And that's like a withdrawal. If it's prolonged, you might go into depression or something, but you basically check out and you can't deal. I think that this happens a lot for people in stressful life and they're not doing self-care and all this stuff. So it doesn't even necessarily relate to hypocrisy. But I do think hypocrisy, this does relate to hypocrisy as well in the sense of living in the world that we live in when we understand what we understand. You could see how people might even vacillate between these states where they lash out because they're like, I'm not living according to my values. They might lash out at other people who are actually doing the same thing. Do you know what I mean? Because they're actually upset with themselves for that. And so they lash out, they're hyperaroused. Or they shut down and they're like, I can't deal with this. And they give up with that situation.


Rob Dietz:
Well, on the shutdown front, that article that I brought up before by Charlotte Del Senor, and we'll put the resilience.org link in the show notes for that. But she, in that article, talks about this trauma therapist, Deb Dana, who describes, I think what you're getting at Asher is how people, they're faced with these impossible double binds. They are neither able to fight nor flee, and their whole system basically shuts down. And the way it was said in the article is that the nervous system, your own nervous system, is choosing to be immobilized, rather than having to flee or to fight at every moment. And when that happens, your energy levels drop, connections become difficult, and you might look like the most apathetic person on the planet, but it's really just your nervous system trying to protect you.


Jason Bradford:
Oh gosh. I do know people in that situation. It's like a depressed state. It's very hard.


Asher Miller:
Frankly, every time I'm with you, Jason, that's the state that I fall into.


Jason Bradford:
I understand, Rob. I mean I understand, Asher.


Rob Dietz:
You've flummoxed him so much he can't tell the difference between us. That's what happens. He's shut down. He's immobilized.


Jason Bradford:
I see you.
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Rob Dietz:
So we have a time tested tradition on this show of not just wallowing in the mess, but we try to think about what could go better, what could we do differently? And it got me thinking, what's the opposite of a hypocrite? I don't even know if there's a word. Is there like a sincere assist, a fourth writer, a genuine matrix? I don't know. Maybe there's not a word, but I'd kind of like to put an assignment on you guys before we were in the confessional of all the bad shit we've done in our lives. How about something that you do or have done that aligns with your values and what you know about ecology and economics and humanities overshoot predicament?


Jason Bradford:
Alright, well I got one. It's easy. Remember when I talked about peeing outside? Well, once in a while, a few times a year. Not enough. Okay? Not enough. But when I do do this, it feels great.


Asher Miller:
Do-do


Jason Bradford:
I poop in the composting toilet down on the farm. Alright. Alright. Enough said.


Rob Dietz:
There you go. That's a start. That's a start. And it's really heartening to me that I'm not the one talking about bodily movements this episode. You've inherited my mantle too.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Pass it around, share it.


Asher Miller:
So this is where we tout ourselves as being like upstanding gentlemen.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Not so horrible. Not so horrible.


Asher Miller:
I guess I got out of the stock market back in 2007.


Jason Bradford:
Wow. You missed the whole - Phew!


Asher Miller:
I lost so much money, probably. I can't even imagine how much it is. It doesn't matter. I don't have it, but I just couldn't deal with it. And I will say that was based on feeling like I had the flexibility, I guess, on some level to make that choice. I don't judge people who feel like they have to invest in the market because they need to save for their retirement or something like that. But that was a choice I made.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah, I think that's amazing. Especially -


Asher Miller:
Everyone is laughing at me for being a fucking idiot.


Rob Dietz:
Well no, but even if you are invested in, say, a mutual fund that was claiming to be socially upstanding, you can still, you look at the stocks that are listed -


Jason Bradford:
It's all bullshit.


Rob Dietz:
It'll have Microsoft in there. It'll have Amazon in there.


Jason Bradford:
It's all part of the MT - modern techno industrial civilization. That's all you're investing in. You're just putting your money to grow that, to grow that, to grow that. It's stupid.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Well, on my part, I recently hosted a resilience.org event that one of the guests, and it was a guy named Doug Tallamy. He's an entomologist, and he wrote a book called, "Nature's Best Hope."


Jason Bradford:
Great book.


Rob Dietz:
He's got some other books too. He has this idea of, I don't remember exactly what he calls it, but it's like a home-based national park system.


Jason Bradford:
Homegrown National Park.


Rob Dietz:
Okay. Homegrown. So rather than you have these conservation areas where you're doing good, it's like we should all be doing good at home. So the idea is plant natives have your yard if you have that or if you have access to some spot that you can have it be habitat for critters out there. So at my house, I've been, I'll call it pretty slowly doing this, but trying to roll out any kind of grass that's not really serving much purpose and plant the native Pacific Northwest meadow kind of stuff. And I noticed when that stuff, first of all, when it blooms is beautiful, but what really gets me jazzed is seeing the bee life and especially the native bees, the bumblebees that love it. And it's weird. I know it's a tiny, small thing, but it feels really congruent with the idea of ecosystem repair and with doing something that's against this dumb ass mainstream culture of, why do we need a lawn exactly?


Jason Bradford:
To play tennis on.


Asher Miller:
I'm all into weaving connections between people and things, and I'm just seeing a beautiful one right here. Take your droppings in the composting toilet and bring it to Rob in Portland so that he can use it as fertilizer for -


Jason Bradford:
Oh he's got his own composting toilet. You can use your own compost. 


Rob Dietz:
Let's do that. How about I dump my shit at your house and you dump your shit at my house?


Jason Bradford:
We could do a swap like that. Sure.


Asher Miller:
It makes a lot of sense if you burn hydrocarbons to go back and forth between your two homes.


Rob Dietz:
We should get a helicopter and we can fly back and forth.


Asher Miller:
Just drop the shit out like Donald Trump's whatever.


Jason Bradford:
Oh yeah.


Rob Dietz:
We could play the music from Apocalypse Now. Then this giant poop comes out. Brilliant.


Jason Bradford:
That'd be fine.


Rob Dietz:
I've taken back over the poop corner of Crazy Town.


Jason Bradford:
Bound to happen. Bound to happen


Asher Miller:
Where you belong.
Dear listener, I know that you like to slum it with us listening to Jason, Rob, and, myself talking about stuff in our inimitably stupid way. If you would like to get more sophisticated, insightful, inspirational content -


Jason Bradford:
Erudite.


Asher Miller:
Erudite.


Jason Bradford:
Erudite.


Asher Miller:
Erudite.


Jason Bradford:
Okay.


Asher Miller:
Check out resilience.org, which is Post Carbon Institute's flagship website. It's where our podcast and a few other podcasts have their home, but we also publish articles there every day that are carefully curated and selected, trying to cover the gamut of the polycrisis, but also explore responses to it and what people are doing. So I would suggest signing up for our newsletter, which is our daily digest that you can get.


Rob Dietz:
You can get that weekly too if daily is just too much of a deluge for you.


Asher Miller:
So just go to resilience.org and then look at the top right hand corner. There's a big subscribe button there. Click on that and then you could sign up for the digest.


Jason Bradford:
Let's do this.


Asher Miller:
I think the way, honestly, the way to navigate this, the fact that we're living in a world that the many of us are living in a world that requires us on some level to be hypocrites is to own it.


Jason Bradford:
Don't fight it


Rob Dietz:
Go to the confessional.


Asher Miller:
It's the only way I can see of living with the trouble because unless, we talked about this before, you drop out basically so that you're living congruent with your values, but then there are all these costs to that and you're also, in some ways, you're participating in the complicity of not trying to change a system or bring other people along. So you've got to do that. Either do that or you basically are like, fuck it, I guess if the whole system's going to keep doing this, I just going to give up on this.
So if you're trying to navigate living in this world while still holding onto those values and working towards something, I would say give yourself permission to be hypocritical. Give yourself some space and some grace to do that, but don't succumb to it. You stay on the path of trying to address the things that you can address. When you name the hypocrisy, and you could even do it in a way where you're either being humbled, or you're making fun of yourself a little bit. It gives others permission to do the same. And it's not about staying in the place of like, yeah, we just, I'm cool with it. I'm good with being a hypocrite. It just means recognizing that's the challenge that's being posed in front of us and we can work on making the changes that we can make. I would say particularly preparing for the world as it collapses and the opportunities that arise or the needs that arise. It's the only way to stick with it, in my view. Really.


Rob Dietz:
I hadn't thought of it, but I think that works for me all the time. I talked about that flick the light on, or light switch and the fireplace.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, you're a terrible person.


Rob Dietz:
But it was an easy rule to basically say we don't do that. Right? But what I noticed is you mentioned driving a EV car. Jason, you mentioned driving.


Asher Miller:
I said EV car.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah, I know. I've got to get the grammar police on myself. And Jason you went to the automatic teller machine, the ATM machine.


Jason Bradford:
Yes.


Rob Dietz:
Alright. Back to what I was trying to say is that when you name your hypocrisy, if you think driving is antithetical to a sustainable society, it definitely influences me to ride my bike more often or walk more often or just decide not to make that car trip. It definitely helps undo that hypocrisy.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. I also think part of this for me is I want to really know what's real. I want to be truthful. There's a value to me in that. I hate phoniness. I dunno what it's called, but phoniness drives me crazy.


Asher Miller:
I guess I've got to leave.


Jason Bradford:
And so the worst kind of phoniness is when you're lying to yourself. And that's going to cause all these psychological problems. It's when you're lying to yourself that you get in the most trouble, I think mentally. But because you're not going to be able to get to disentangle yourself from the hypocrisy that you're going to be engaging in, then you have to deal with what you were talking about, Asher of managing sort of the hype - What you're getting? Hyperarousal like I've been in a lot in this episode.


Rob Dietz:
No kidding.


Jason Bradford:
I don't know. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's all the play time I'm getting with baby lambs or something like that and the lack of sleep. I don't know.


Asher Miller:
That should be regulating actually. Lack of sleep, maybe not. But the playing with lambs.


Rob Dietz:
I don't know. You said everywhere you go, everything you see, I mean, everything I see becomes a Tootsie Roll to me. Everything you see becomes a Bill Reese nightmare to you.


Asher Miller:
Only Gen Xers get your Tootsie roll reference.


Jason Bradford:
I mean, I had to buy these bottles for the baby lambs and they're plastic. But anyway, what you got to do is figure out how to not be in that freeze mode, that nervous system shutdown mode and regulate this stuff. Right? So how?


Asher Miller:
Well, there are lots of exercises and what I will do folks is I will go and get some resources and we'll put 'em in our show notes for people.


Jason Bradford:
Like kegels and stuff.


Asher Miller:
I mean you could do those too. Different purpose.


Jason Bradford:
My pelvic floor, is it anything?


Asher Miller:
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about exercises you could do. I mean, people talk about meditation. There are lots of great resources out there. They're actually great apps for meditation that people can use. There's deep breathing exercises. There's even an exercise that I've done not too long ago where you actually write down for yourself things that you do, signs of when you're in hyperarousal and signs where you're in hypo arousal. What are the indications that you're in that state so that you can actually recognize them when they're happening? What are indications when you are in that window of tolerance, when you're in a well-regulated place? And then you can also write down for yourself, what are the things that you could do that can help return you into that window of tolerance. So for me, for example, when I'm hyper aroused, I'm mad, I'm upset, I'm angry. I basically throw darts at a picture of you, Jason.


Jason Bradford:
I see. That makes sense.


Asher Miller:
I pet my dog Willow. I go lay down with Willow. I hug him and I pet him and it totally relaxes me.


Jason Bradford:
I wish my dog would let me do that.


Asher Miller:
Well, you can always come over.


Jason Bradford:
I got the baby lambs right now.


Asher Miller:
That's true. So anyways, we'll list some resources in the show notes for folks, and I really highly recommend it. It's been a practice that's helped me quite a bit.


Rob Dietz:
And as you get inside your window of tolerance, that's the place where you can chip away at some of your own lifestyle hypocrisies, like you said. I mean, I like the idea of a well-regulated mind. It allows you to maybe approach this stuff with some logic. And one example that I wanted to give of somebody taking that hypocrisy away is our friend of the show, Peter Kalamas. We've interviewed him a couple of times. He's a climate scientist who with his family undertook the process of lowering his footprint down by 95%.
And the book details that. It's called, "Being the Change." And I just think you can take a resource like that and emulate it. And sometimes you don't even need a manual. You can be like Jason and see every little thing in the world and maybe just deal with one of those at a time. The other thing that I want to point out is that what we've listed so far are things that you do kind of on your own, in your own mind and in your own life, but critical is finding the others who are doing it. I genuinely love coming here with you guys, making a bunch of jokes, but actually figuring out how we're going to ride out these storms that are hitting us. And you can kind of get the good peer pressure going where it's like, oh shit, Jason has an energy, what'd you call it? An energy zero ready house.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. Energy zero ready.


Rob Dietz:
I need an energy zero. I've got to take that light switch off of my fireplace so I can't flip it anymore.


Asher Miller:
So you're talking about your relative social status as being a motivator for you. You want a plaque that's bigger than Jason's plaque.


Jason Bradford:
Yes, a bigger plaque. That's good.


Rob Dietz:
Right. And then I think the idea over time hopefully would be that somehow we can influence the broader culture as more people are undertaking these lifestyle changes. But it's really tough. I mean, cultural change does not happen fast as we've all noticed. For some reason this podcast has not ignited the cultural revolution that we thought it would.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. Well, we just have to work in UFOs, Bigfoot . . .


Jason Bradford:
Sasquatch Chronicles should be our name.


Asher Miller:
Some celebrity gossip. Sports. Sports gambling?


Rob Dietz:
For our listeners who aren't aware, we sometimes are able to look at the analytics behind this show and we're in the Earth Sciences category, which is a little odd, but it was the closest fit we could get. And the top shows are always about Bigfoot.


Asher Miller:
Earth sciences.


Rob Dietz:
We don't care about the fate of the biosphere or of humanity. What we care about is a fake animal.


Asher Miller:
Actually, listeners, you could help us with that. If you haven't, please go and rate us. So maybe we can get into what, 6th spot behind the five Sasquatch.


Rob Dietz:
Either that or we're switching to all Bigfoot all the time.


Asher Miller:
That's right. Your choice listener. You choose.


Jason Bradford:
We've got to throw in the Lochness monster and Yeti and these sort of things.


Rob Dietz:
I don't know. Are they as popular as Bigfoot?


Jason Bradford:
The jackalope.


Asher Miller:
I think he could do that. I just had this vision. by the way, when you were talking Rob about the plaque thing. Would Jason completely lose his mind if we took that plaque and actually hung it on his on this front door?


Jason Bradford:
Right, right.


Asher Miller:
You'd probably lose it.


Jason Bradford:
I would be so pissed.


Asher Miller:
You would be pissed at us.


Jason Bradford:
It's would a beautiful home. It's net zero ready. Oh!


Asher Miller:
Oh my God. Congratulations on winning the award!


Jason Bradford:
Must be so proud!


Rob Dietz:
This is a good, every April Fools and we get a bigger plaque each year. Made out of less and less sustainable material.


Asher Miller:
Right. That's good. Yeah. I guess for me, and maybe we give some examples of this too. We're sitting here talking about living with our hypocrisy, right? Navigating between these worlds, being willing to live with that, which I think is hard. I mean so much of, I would say this is a common theme to the work of Post Carbon Institute and the issues that we explore, the stuff that we've talked about on this podcast repeatedly, where we talk about how both sides are wrong in debates and that the reality is nuanced. And that is true in this case as well, which is that for very many of us, the vast majority of us who are engaged with these issues, we practice some form of hypocrisy. So instead of trying to deny that or castigate ourselves endlessly about it, embrace it and then use that to think about the steps that you can take. So living in both worlds, make the choices where you can, engage with others in constructive ways. And I think I can give an example for me of trying to think about making some choices while I'm still part of this system that are pointing in a more sustainable, more resilient, maybe even more just direction. So food, the food that we eat, where does it come from? The furthest edge for us in terms of trying to have one foot out of the current system is what we do with you, Jason, right?


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. The farming club.


Asher Miller:
The farming club. We could talk about the tools and the things that go, the inputs that go into that, but we are actually using our bodies to grow food without -


Jason Bradford:
But that steel was mined on that broad fork and it was forged in a factory that was -Yeah, exactly. You can just go crazy.


Asher Miller:
We're not doing that. No, no, no. This is actually about trying to learn how to grow food ourselves, getting as much of our own produce that we eat every year from that, and then for the other food that we buy, making the choice to go to - We're lucky here we have a local cooperative that has healthy food, a lot of it coming from local producers, so we make the choice to buy that food versus buying food that we could probably get more cheaply or in larger amounts at Costco or something like that. But we're still part of the system. We're absolutely still part of the system and in every step of the way, there are elements of it that are still completely embedded in the industrial complex.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah.


Asher Miller:
What about you guys?


Rob Dietz:
You go ahead, Jason.


Jason Bradford:
I mean, I already said the most I've done is instead of plastic strings, I got the gut strings.


Asher Miller:
Do they work as well?


Jason Bradford:
They work better. I highly recommend gut strings for your tennis racket. Way better. Way better than anything I've ever had.


Asher Miller:
Is it your own gut that you've taken it from?


Jason Bradford:
No it's cattle gut.


Rob Dietz:
That would be more in line with his values if he just were stripping out gut pieces of his -


Asher Miller:
Hello kids!Before I could teach this lesson, I got to restring my -


Jason Bradford:
And no plastic clothing anymore on court. Like I said, cotton, wool.


Rob Dietz:
Think about it. If he were using his own gut and he kept a little tether line, he wouldn't even have to put his racket down. He could just hang it from his body.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Keep re-stringing. Auto restring.


Asher Miller:
Bite it off. And then you can restring.


Rob Dietz:
Unbelievable. Well, the idea of being willing to live in two worlds, it got me thinking about this trip that I have planned this summer. I'm going to be away. My daughter is graduating from college and she and I are planning to hike from around Mount Shasta in Northern California across the whole state of Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail back to the Columbia River. I'm super excited for this trip. One of the reasons for doing it is to really reconnect with nature, drop off of the whole technology scene. Obviously spend this quality time with my daughter. Now my body is probably not the best ever designed for hiking 650 miles, so there's a real race to limit the size of the backpack, the amount of stuff that I'm carrying, and so the number of things that I've bought or that I already had for camping that are made of plastic or whatever.


Jason Bradford:
Rip stop nylon.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Some kind of thing where you're just like, I'm trying to get close to nature. I'm trying to be out in it from my yes, rip stop nylon tent or whatever. Or it's been a little frustrating, crazy making, but I am willing to be that hypocrite and make that compromise for hopefully the greater good of getting that connection with my kid and with nature.


Jason Bradford:
It's way better than this dude over here flying across the world to visit people. So yeah, go easy on yourself. Yeah.


Rob Dietz:
Thankfully Jason, you and I have never flown anywhere. Only this jackasses Asher has done it.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. While you're hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I'm flying to Disneyland France, or whatever they call that place.


Jason Bradford:
Do you think there'll actually be any jet traffic between the U.S. and Europe come summer?


Asher Miller:
Well, hopefully. I mean, I trust our fearless leader.


Rob Dietz:
Whatever. I figured out how to really gather up the microplastic, and I'm just going to be dumping it on the trail along. I'm trying to pave the PCT in Microplastic.


Jason Bradford:
Well, good luck with that.


Melody Travers:
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.