Crazy Town: Episode 132. Finding Crazy Town Part 4: The Myth of Progress – Are We There Yet?

Alex Leff:
Dear Diary, it's been weeks since Jason, Rob and Asher have gone missing. You know Jason, Rob, and Asher. They're the hosts of the Crazy Town Podcast, a humorous yet in-depth analysis of the polycrisis facing modern global society, probing crazy making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we're all diluting ourselves. Anyway, as Crazy Town producer, it was my job to watch them. Now it's my job to find them. Luckily, our listeners are doing everything they can to aid with our quest. The goal is to piece together the Crazy Town worldview, utilize systems thinking, ecological sensibility, and energy literacy to track down our missing hosts. Together, we've sailed the high seas, jumping from container ship to container ship, investigating global shipping and international trade, and that led us to a study of complexity itself and why complex societies inevitably contract or collapse. Then we question the concept of infinite growth that dominates mainstream economic thought.
But no sign of the Crazy Town guys. Are they alone? Are they afraid? Is Rob applying enough suntan lotion? I'm worried, diary. But diary, I wonder, am I just going in circles or am I actually making any progress?
Wait a second. Progress. Rob said something about progress once, didn't he?


Rob Dietz:
That's what I wanted to talk about with you guys today. It's this idea of progress. Are we actually achieving progress or is it a myth? And if it's a myth, what is that doing to us?


Alex Leff:
That's right. Our whole society is obsessed with the idea of progress. I've never quite understood what we mean by that. Who decides what's progress? Progress towards what? And progress for who? Or whom? Progress to me would be getting a good lead in solving the disappearance of Jason, Rob, and Asher. Maybe the first thing we need to investigate to uncover that lead is progress itself.


Jason Bradford:
Let's get clear on what we mean by or what we think our culture means by progress. So for example, it's easy to measure progress in say athletics feats. Track records seem to get broken all the time. So athletes are getting stronger and faster or whatever. So there's metrics involved. So what are the sort of the progress and metrics that we pay attention to?


Asher Miller:
For example, the economy. We have certain things that we look at as indicators and we use those as a means of gauging our progress. So we have GDP and GDP growth. Is the economy growing? We have the stock market. There's an obsession. Every time you listen to the news every day, they have to give you a report on if the market is up or down and by how many points. So we've got that on the economy. We look at life expectancy and life expectancy has been up for generations. The wealth of people, household wealth, incomes, what average incomes are.


Rob Dietz:
And when you're talking about GDP, that's the macro. And then I think you were getting to the microeconomic idea of your personal wealth or how many awesome gadgets you have or what you're able to buy.


Alex Leff:
I mean, I get it. It's easy to see why people believe in progress or at least want to believe in it. People live longer. GDP keeps growing. Child mortality has gone down. Literacy's gone up. And we have so much stuff, so many toys to play with. By many measures, life is improving. A lot of people out there see nothing but progress. And there's even a cottage industry of progress pundits out there who see progress everywhere they look.


Jason Bradford:
These new optimists, they call them, have come out like Steven Pinker. And this has been a very influential movement. So like Bill Gates just has a book now, "Enlightenment Now."


Rob Dietz:
No, that's Pinker's book.


Jason Bradford:
Oh, that's Pinker. Bill Gates said that's his favorite book, "Enlightenment Now."And I agree, it's intoxicating.


Asher Miller:
I think we do want to believe in the positive. Certainly when we're thinking about the future, and we have kids, we want to imagine that their future's going to be better. The other thing though is that it does correlate a lot with people's experience. We've had generations now in certain conditions. Again, I think we've got to be clear that we're talking about people in advanced economies for the most part and not equitably distributed.


Rob Dietz:
Or high consuming economies


Asher Miller:
I should have said quote unquote advanced economies who for generations now, their lot has generally improved if we're following these certain indicators of life expectancy and material wealth and those kinds of things.


Alex Leff:
Okay. Interesting. Very interesting. Progress as history is a pretty compelling idea. Have people always imagined history as a story of progress?


Asher Miller:
Can we just talk about where this idea of progress even comes from?


Jason Bradford:
Well, you know what it's interesting is to think about stories of the original sin, the Garden of Eden and eating that apple, how could she? And Pandora's box. And so if you go way back in the good old days, we actually, there was -


Asher Miller:
The good old days.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, there was a fall from grace. And so I don't think this has not been an idea that has been out there in human societies forever.


Asher Miller:
Right. So actually that maybe for most of our history, we didn't actually believe in progress.


Jason Bradford:
Correct. I don't think we did.


Asher Miller:
We believed in a fall maybe, if anything.


Jason Bradford:
Yes.


Asher Miller:
This is the worst of all possible worlds. It's our fault.


Jason Bradford:
Right.


Rob Dietz:
And almost like the life we're living - The life we're living is all about suffering and you got to get through that so you can actually get back to the promised land, right?


Asher Miller:
Right. Yeah, heaven, whatever it is. Yeah. I think from my reading and understanding of these things, I think things really changed in the enlightenment. When we, and by we, I should say probably Western civilization. We went through this cultural educational transformation where we felt like it was a movement towards rationalism in a sense that we could know the world and know the universe and understand it. And we started applying science to the world and to kind of improve people's law. This increase in knowledge, increase in democratic institutions, more rights for more people.


Jason Bradford:
The early famous scientists, the Galileos and the Newtons and the Capernicai.


Rob Dietz:
Can we just not overly rosify this though? Is that a word, to rosify? Because you got colonialism really taking off at this time as well.


Asher Miller:
Of course. And I think when we talk about this idea of progress, we should be really clear about whose progress we're talking about. Because in fact, you can argue that maybe our "progress" came at the cost of many others.


Rob Dietz:
Oh yeah.


Alex Leff:
If we haven't always thought of history as a story of progress, and that's a relatively new concept, how did we end up adopting it so fully? What was going on in Western Europe during the enlightenment? Did everyone wake up one morning and say, "Today's the day when we improve things or was it something else?


Rob Dietz:
At the same time, you had the burning of fossil fuels, which really supercharged all of this. You have enlightenment, you have all these ideas coming together, and you have institutions that are pushing you towards some idea of progress. But then we suddenly had the means to do all kinds of stuff because we had this huge energy surplus that came from starting with coal and then onto oil.


Asher Miller:
Yeah. I think with the enlightenment you had, it wasn't just more education, more knowledge, the advancement of science. It was applying it to the world and feeling like you could actually improve the lot of people. And then you add, you basically just take a whole bunch of fossil hydrocarbons and pour it on there and just light the fucker on fire. And here we are.


Rob Dietz:
So roughly we've had 200 to 300 years of this happening where our population is going way up, our life expectancy is rising, our material goods are expanding exponentially. We have this huge footprint, all this consumption, all this advancing technology. And it seems like that's now the story, isn't it?


Asher Miller:
I think that we have this expectation these trends are going to continue, right?


Jason Bradford:
Okay.


Asher Miller:
Are consuming nature. We are pushing forward all of these consequences for this exponential growth and acceleration of all these things that have led to these certain areas of progress that we not only glorify, but we are absolutely tethered to.


Rob Dietz:
Even in the material progress, think about how we've used debt to achieve that. And what is debt? That's a borrowing from the future, meaning people in the future have to pay this back. So how do you expect progress to continue when you're pushing all of this on the future?


Asher Miller:
But what you're describing is why progress has to continue because it can't get paid back unless progress does continue. Yeah,


Jason Bradford:
The Ponzi scheme of it all. If you look at the lifespan of this built environment we have and in places like the US or any of the advanced economies, you realize, oh, that concrete infrastructure doesn't last forever. The heaviest stuff we build has actually got a lifespan where it decays. We think of this stuff as permanent, but the reason we're decommissioning a lot of dams right now is because they were built in the 20s and 30s and now they're dangerous. So yeah, how do we replace that stuff? We think it's done, but it's not. It's this treadmill you get on.


Asher Miller:
I think it's an important point here that in the critiques of these new optimists, right? A lot of the critique is, I think you touched on this a little bit, Rob, is that in a sense, these new optimists are justifying kind of neoliberal economic policy, right?


Alex Leff:
Man, the more time I spend looking for Jason, Rob, and Asher the more I realize fossil fuels really are key to everything. It's one thing to have new ideas for changing society. It's another to suddenly have the energy to do it. And especially in the form of super dense and easily transportable fossil fuels. Is it possible that our progress comes with a cost? Not just at the expense of other human communities that are being exploited, but to the entire natural world and future generations? If we're just borrowing from the future to prop up progress today, is that really progress or just an illusion with a short lifespan? That makes me think of this parable that author Daniel Quinn told about this tower that keeps getting taller because people keep pulling bricks from the bottom and stacking them on top. It looked like that tower's height was progressing, but it was actually becoming dangerously unstable.
Is that what we're doing? Playing a game of Jenga where the health of the biosphere is at stake? Surely the world's most powerful people are concerned with this, right?


Asher Miller:
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire. He started this new space exploration effort.


Jason Bradford:
What? Blue Origin?


Asher Miller:
Yeah. And there's this just amazing presentation. When he launched the company, he gave this incredible presentation that basically Bezos is talking about the role of energy, how energy and the growth, exponential growth of energy has led to all of these things, the critical role that energy plays, all the advancements have come from energy. And he's talking about the fact that we might be faced with a situation of running out. We've got diminishing returns on efficiency. This guy is like speaking our language.


Jason Bradford:
He knows it all.


Asher Miller:
Speaking our language.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Asher was sitting there watching that going, yeah, yeah. Speak the gospel. Come on Bezos. You got it right. Now what are you going to say?


Asher Miller:
The worlds are just managed with us here. And then he's like, oh no, we're hitting these limits. Limits efficiency. We're going to run out of energy resources. That might mean that we have to ration, that we can't continue to progress. That's fucking unacceptable. We've got to go harvest the moon and go to space. The idea that we're going to go harvest the moon and have a trillion people living in orbit around the earth is more plausible to him than the idea that we could ever stop progressing.


Jason Bradford:
Yes. It's the religion. It's that religion of progress.


Alex Leff:
Whoa. I think they're right. We don't just believe in progress. We have absolute faith in it. We just assume tomorrow will solve today's problems. The perfect innovative technology will just fall out of the sky. Wait a second. Are we a cargo cult? Is that where they went? Should I go looking in the South Pacific?


Jason Bradford:
But I've been to the South Pacific a number of times when I was a research botanist. It's glorious. But I never got to a place called Vanuatu. I wanted to, but they've got one of those volcanoes that you can look into it and it's bubbling like lava.


Asher Miller:
All the time?


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, yeah. One of the few places on earth.


Asher Miller:
Nice.


Jason Bradford:
But the other thing it's known for is it continues to have what are called cargo cults. You guys heard of these before?


Asher Miller:
They love cargo pants.


Jason Bradford:
It's like the '80s, right? Well, cargo cults kind of emerged when South Pacific people who had this culture of sort of reciprocal gift giving and these big men would try to give more than other people. And that's how would they get social status.


Asher Miller:
Oh, so their social status was about giving more, not taking more.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, pretty much.


Asher Miller:
Interesting.


Rob Dietz:
That's a little different from modern times, isn't it?


Jason Bradford:
But it was still kind of materialistic in a sense. So they would try to acquire so they could give and that would give them social status.


Asher Miller:
Interesting.


Jason Bradford:
Now here's what happened. But imagine World War II and there's a war going on in the South Pacific. And suddenly there are these airplanes, and this is back in the '40s, and there really wasn't global air traffic at that point. So these folks didn't know what was going on, but there's these giant birds in the sky and suddenly things started floating out of them and landing on their beaches.


Asher Miller:
Like what?


Jason Bradford:
Cargo.


Asher Miller:
Ah, cargo. I get it.


Jason Bradford:
And so they would find these boxes and you'd open them up and there'd be cargo pants or whatever.


Rob Dietz:
Or what about that minute work CD, Cargo from the 80s? I have to be at work at 8am every day and am there until 3:15. Create a daily and weekly schedule for me including


Asher Miller:
Wow, that's time travel.


Rob Dietz:
We're 40 years off here.


Jason Bradford:
But it's like industrial manufacturing and the abundance of the fossil fuel era. Suddenly the accoutrements for armies landed in these places.


Rob Dietz:
So this was about base building on these islands.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. So the Japanese, the Americans would just sort of like -


Asher Miller:
Accidentally drop these things?


Jason Bradford:
No, no. They'd be like, "We need to set up operations here in order to have a base to repel the invasion or whatever."


Rob Dietz:
But before they could get there and start setting it up, these guys would find the box on the beach and then they would get all the stuff.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Stuff would happen and they were just like, "Wow." But the military was there and they would interact with these people. But then suddenly they left, right?


Asher Miller:
The military left.


Jason Bradford:
Right. The war's over. They're gone. And these people who are just like, "Bring it back."


Rob Dietz:
Where's our cargo?


Asher Miller:
Where's our cargo?


Jason Bradford:
Where's our cargo? What happened to it?" They didn't understand how this stuff could have been made, where it actually came from.


Asher Miller:
It came from the sky.


Jason Bradford:
It came from the sky with these giant birds. And so there was no education or explanation. There wasn't an exchange program between - The big man of Vanuatu didn't get sent to London to understand the industrial revolution. They were just sort of at a loss. And then they started creating these religions, essentially, what now was termed cargo cults, to try to recreate the scene that led to the arrival of this cargo.


Rob Dietz:
Try to get their cargo back.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. So they would make mock airports and -


Asher Miller:
So they're trying to basically recreate all the conditions that existed that allowed this stuff to come out of the sky.


Rob Dietz:
No. Wait, were they recreating war conditions?


Jason Bradford:
No, but they would march around and stuff in uniforms and things.


Asher Miller:
They made themselves uniforms?


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. You can look online and see all these pictures of John Frum, cargo cult and all that stuff.


Asher Miller:
Did it work? Did they give more shit?


Jason Bradford:
They're still waiting. Have faith. Have faith.


Rob Dietz:
Who's John Frum?


Jason Bradford:
I don't know. It was like some mythological U.S. soldier.


Rob Dietz:
Oh, nice.


Jason Bradford:
Who probably gave them cigarettes.


Rob Dietz:
Johnny Frum.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, exactly.


Asher Miller:
He's the messenger from God.


Jason Bradford:
Right, right. Right. So that's interesting. Anthropologists look at it as sort of this big man culture is trying to bring back the cargo. It's sort of recreating the conditions that led to this extreme materialistic wealth. And I kind of feel like, interestingly, this is kind of funny, and it's absurd to think about from what we know today. But at the same time, I think we're no better.


Asher Miller:
We're no better than the cargo cults.


Jason Bradford:
We're doing the same kind of stuff.


Rob Dietz:
I'd say we're even worse. They're not destroying their island while practicing their cargo cult. Most of what we do, we're wrecking the place as we do it.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah.


Alex Leff:
Okay. So they're not on the island of Venuatu, even if some of their 1980s cargo shorts might have ended up there. But man, we really seem like one big global cargo cult. Not only are we counting on cargo ships to deliver the goods, but we're counting on breakthroughs to deliver even more technology. We think that if we have a problem, the solution must surely be some miraculous technology coming to save the day.


Asher Miller:
We are sort of hoping for answers from the sky. I think for technology or something to sort of fix our problems. I definitely think that that's true when it comes to climate change. If you think about it, we sort of know now that climate change is a real thing. There are obviously some folks going who continue to deny this.


Rob Dietz:
Wait. What kind of craziness is this?


Asher Miller:
Until the seas go over their heads and they will still deny it. But putting aside those folks, I think it's pretty evident to most people that this is a real thing. And now we're in this oh shit moment. What are we going to actually do about this? So we are waiting for this sort of magical solution to fall out from the sky.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah, they're going to think of something. They will think of something.


Jason Bradford:
They will think of something. I was reading this, the president of the European Academies of Science Advisory Council, and it's like Terry Corvoisier. I hope I -


Asher Miller:
That's a beautiful pronunciation.


Jason Bradford:
I hope I pronounced it right.


Asher Miller:
He probably pronounces it like Corvacier.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Anyhow, here's what he said. This was in February of 2018. "Having achieved a global consensus at the Paris meeting of the UN Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, there may be a tendency to think the problem of climate change is finally on the way to being solved. This may be one reason for the lack of recognition in the public and political debate of the severity of the emission reductions required to achieve the target of restricting warming to within two degrees of pre-industrial levels, let alone the 1.5 degree Celsius aspiration enshrined in the Paris Agreement." Now this is the beautiful part of this quote right here.


Rob Dietz:
Okay. So I'm waiting expectantly. I need some beauty.


Jason Bradford:
"One factor possibly contributing to a lack of urgency may be the belief that somehow,"and he put quotes here, "technology will come to the rescue. The present report shows that such expectations may be seriously over optimistic. Intergovernmental panel on climate change, future scenarios allow Paris targets to be met by deploying technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, putting a hypothetical." This is hysterical actually, if you think about this guy.


Asher Miller:
So this guy would say it.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. "However, putting a hypothetical technology into a computer model of future scenarios is rather different than researching, developing, construction, and operating such a technology at the planetary scale required to compensate for inadequate mitigation."


Asher Miller:
You mean it's a lot easier to put numbers into computer than actually move -


Jason Bradford:
Do anything.


Asher Miller:
This many billions tons of rock?


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. I mean, there's all kind of great computer games you can play and pretend are a model of how things are going to go.


Jason Bradford:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.


Rob Dietz:
Well, that guy's such a doom saying chicken little sky is falling nutter. Of course, technology can help us.


Asher Miller:
We deal with that a lot at PCI where we have - I think we help people kind of do a reality check on some of this techno optimism stuff. But sometimes we get people to give us a kind of a different version of that. They'll think of somethingism. I swear to God, I can't tell you how many emails I got from people who say, if we just legalized hemp production, hemp, hemp, hemp, we could use hemp for everything. We can make clothes out of it. We can make houses out of it. We could use it for fuel. I mean, hemp is it.


Rob Dietz:
We can smoke it.


Asher Miller:
We could smoke it. Yeah. I mean, hemp is like this magical solution. If we just unleashed it, then it would fix all our problems. Of course it would.


Jason Bradford:
If it mellows us out enough, we might just not need as much.


Asher Miller:
There's an interesting argument there. You know what I mean? No, but they're talking about, you could use this as material for everything.


Rob Dietz:
No. Think how much more food we're going to have to grow if everybody's smoking marijuana all the time.


Asher Miller:
The munchies. That's true. So I think people tend to want to believe that there's going to be some magic solution. It either exists below our feet or exists - It's going to come from the sky somehow. It's going to be delivered to us. And what that really tells me is that people are scared and they're hoping that somebody's going to fucking figure this thing out.


Rob Dietz:
Oh yeah. I think that's the root of they'll think of somethingism. I don't want to stop doing what I'm doing, but I want to have the problem solved.


Jason Bradford:
Well, it's politically very expedient, of course. You don't have to do anything if they will think of something to take care of it all. There's no need to address the real problem. The fact that we're in ecological overshoot, we're too big.


Alex Leff:
I've been hearing from folks who really do care about climate change, that we don't have to give up economic growth or technological progress. And that in fact, growth and progress will provide us the solutions we need to climate change. But now, I'm not so sure.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. And something that doesn't ever get mentioned is this repetition of problem generation. So if progress is about solving problems, we've done a lot of that. We've gone a long way and think about medical solutions, vaccines, having access to food. But all along the way, we create new problems with all these solutions. To me, the obvious one is agriculture. Jason, you could probably chime in on this, but we invented synthetic fertilizers to increase crop yields. Of course, we got the pollution problems associated with that, which are by no means trivial.


Jason Bradford:
They're legendary.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. I mean, the dead zones in the bays and gulfs around the world.


Jason Bradford:
Or just the groundwater in Iowa right now or whatever. It's just awful.


Rob Dietz:
But I don't even think that's the real issue. It's that, okay, now we have a population that's so expanded that we're starting to get up against the limits of the food productivity we can achieve with synthetic fertilizer. So what's the next thing we've got to do to solve the problem?


Jason Bradford:
I'll ask Jeff Bezos.


Rob Dietz:
That's right.


Asher Miller:
That's why we have to get off this planet. I don't know what we're going to eat, but we'll figure that out later.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah.


Asher Miller:
Many people are being left behind. And we see here a great anger and resentment because the story of progress is so ingrained that if people's actual wellbeing is not materially progressing, I think we've stalled out for a lot of people, just even on those merits, that they're angry and they don't have another story.


Jason Bradford:
That's right.


Rob Dietz:
You're right. If that's the dominant story and we're all supposed to be living it, what happens when you're not? Then you start going down QAnon and storming the Capitol or whatever.


Asher Miller:
Right. It's got to be somebody's fault. There's got to be a reason why this is not happening rather than saying, you know what? Maybe this whole idea of progress is something that we have to question, which is a really tough thing to do. I mean, do we want to think that our own children, their lives are going to be worse than ours?


Jason Bradford:
Shorter, more iffy.


Asher Miller:
More difficult.


Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Well, they can't be worse than ours. I mean, come on, let's get real here.


Asher Miller:
It's a really, really hard thing on a personal level to do. And it's a really hard thing to do on an aggregate level. What politician is going to stand up and promise that the future's going to be worse than the present?


Alex Leff:
So if we want to find Jason, Rob, and Asher we definitely won't catch them scheming up some techno utopian vision of the future. They're beginning to sound like doomsday preppers to me. Should I get a metal detector and start scanning for hidden underground bunkers? If they don't think things are getting better, then surely they think things will get worse.


Rob Dietz:
So before the break, Asher, you were talking about questioning the myth of progress. And here in the do the opposite, we try to figure out how we might actually tackle that. And when I started thinking about it, it reminded me of that favorite childhood board game. You guys ever play shoots and ladders?


Jason Bradford:
Oh, I still do. Yeah. Still do.


Rob Dietz:
Jason loves games where you spin something and move a piece.


Jason Bradford:
It's so easy.


Asher Miller:
After a year of being locked in his house because of a pandemic, he's run out of -


Jason Bradford:
I regressed.


Rob Dietz:
Well, what I remember about shoots and ladders, it's this dumb game where if you land on a space with a ladder, you go up the board towards the finish line. And if you land on a space with a shoot, which you never use that word, it should be slides. It should be ladders and slides. You slide back down to closer to the beginning. And so it's really this idea of the ladder as progress. And if you get to the right one, you always win the game.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah, I know.


Rob Dietz:
There's this huge ladder.


Asher Miller:
There's one of them. Yeah.


Jason Bradford:
Gigantic.


Asher Miller:
There's also a huge slide at the end that takes you all the way to the bottom.


Rob Dietz:
Right, right. Well, if you think about the shoots or the slides, it's like that's the original conception that humanity is on this fall from grace. And the ladder is kind of like the current conception that humanity is on this ascendancy of progress. And the point here -


Jason Bradford:
You've taken all of human history and its conception and you've narrowed it down, you've reduced it to shoots and ladders.


Rob Dietz:
That's right. This is what I do with -


Asher Miller:
No, he didn't do this. There's a backstory to the origin story of this game. Yo guys know the backstory of Monopoly, right? Yeah. It was like a critique of capitalism. So I think that the originator of Shoots and Ladders was talking about the myth of progress. Right, right.


Rob Dietz:
That's true. I think I'm some kind of genius analyst for figuring this out, but that was actually the intention.


Asher Miller:
Exactly. You're the first person to figure it out. Somewhere this person who created this game is clapping.


Jason Bradford:
Finally, finally. That's my genius.


Rob Dietz:
William Key Shoots and Ladders, the inventor of the game.


Asher Miller:
He's clapping in his coffin right now.


Rob Dietz:
He's got one convert. Or maybe three. I think you guys are buying this metaphor.


Alex Leff:
So they're saying it's not necessarily about progress, but it's also not about backsliding. That society isn't just one giant game of shoots and ladders. But then what the heck is it? If it's not just about going up and down, forward and back, what other ways can we understand humanity's existence on earth?


Rob Dietz:
Really, the idea is that it's not a shoot and it's not a ladder, right?


Asher Miller:
Right.


Rob Dietz:
Instead, it goes back to what we've talked about before.


Asher Miller:
The adaptive cycle.


Rob Dietz:
Yes. Systems thinking and it's a cycle.


Asher Miller:
People are probably tired of us talking about the adaptive cycle.


Rob Dietz:
Hey, we're not!


Alex Leff:
The adaptive cycle. What the heck is the adaptive cycle? They may have talked about it before on the podcast, but not in this finding Crazy Town series. Could this be a new lead?


Asher Miller:
Yeah, the adaptive cycle. The idea that maybe experience existence is not either a fall from grace or an ascendance sea to whatever, this utopia. It's a process.


Jason Bradford:
Yeah. This phase of the adaptive cycle where we actually go through this collapse or contraction of some kind and then have to reorganize to some new phase that maybe starts to improve things again, right?


Alex Leff:
So if history isn't a ladder towards progress or a slide towards the past, but instead some kind of cycle that grows, then matures, then declines, then reorganizes, maybe that's the map we need to finally track these guys down and end our search. I sure hope so. After all, we've only got two episodes of the Finding Crazy Town series left.
Dear Diary, good news. I'm trading in my copy of Shoots and Ladders for a whole new game, and it's not Jenga. It's the adaptive cycle. Next time, that's the game we're playing. Don't worry, Jason Rob, and Asher. We're coming for you.


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.