Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If all goes well, by the end of this episode, you’ll feel inspired to shut down your electronic devices, stow your earbuds, and go outside to scan the skies, dig in the dirt, watch the wildlife, or find some other healthy way to pay attention to the natural world.
The more we wall ourselves off from nature, the more likely we are to continue on the path of climate chaos and extinction. Join Asher, Rob, and Jason on their search for how to reconnect with nature.
But what, exactly, is progress, and is humanity preordained to achieve it? What if the modern concept of progress costs more than it’s worth and turns out to be a harmful myth?
Society has become so complex that all the complexity begets more complexity. And if that’s not complex enough for you, jobs have become so specialized that hardly anyone knows how anything is made or works.
Jason, Rob, and Asher explore why the discount rate, and discounting the future more broadly, is so deadly important, and why the number 0 is what our kids and grandkids deserve.
Are we experiencing a spike in conspiracy theories akin to the days of the Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials? What’s the role of science and technology in spreading such theories? Have lizard people infiltrated the government in order to hide the truth about how flat the Earth really is?
Self domestication, the process by which humans became a more cooperative and less aggressive species, paradoxically contributes to humanity’s overshoot predicament.
What can we learn about death from the X-Men, small screaming rodents, and unwitting college students in psychology experiments? It turns out that the fear of death (or death anxiety) affects human behavior in all sorts of surprising and deeply troubling ways.
How can the climate disaster and humanity’s overall sustainability crisis be explained by 80s sitcom characters, birdbrained hats from the late 1800s, and a dubious new use for scratch-and-sniff technology?
Jason, Rob, and Asher take a tour of ice cream shops, Scandanavian DMVs, and the chess team to explain such cognitive biases as the Dunning-Kruger effect, confirmation bias, default effect, and sunk cost bias.
Green Dreamer with Jason Bradford (Season 2 – September 14, 2020) The Practical Stoic with Richard Heinberg (Season 2 – August 10, 2020) Decolonizing the Mind with Sherri Mitchell (Season 2 – July 13, 2020)
In the season finale of Crazy Town during this upside down year of 2020, it’s only fitting that a return to “normal” actually means a return to “crazy.”
