Crazy Town: Episode 134. Finding Crazy Town Part 6: Facing the Future

Alex Leff:

Okay. It’s all been leading to this. After weeks of searching, I have one episode left to find Jason, Rob, and Asher, the real hosts of the Crazy Town podcast. If I don’t succeed on this quest, I don’t know what Post Carbon Institute will do, but dear listener, my compatriot and comrade on this journey, I don’t intend to find out.

Welcome to Finding Crazy Town. I’m Crazy Town producer Alex Leff and poor substitute for the three glorious hosts whose return we seek. You see, it all started five episodes ago when I turned my back for one minute and Jason, Rob, and Asher vanished. Since the last thing I heard them say had something to do with modern techno-industrial civilization, I set forth on an epic adventure to understand the systems that make up our globalized world. Together, we’ve journeyed across the high seas to study global trade and international shipping. We’ve tried to unspool the workings of complexity itself. We’ve interrogated the logic of unlimited economic growth. We’ve questioned the myth of progress and acquainted ourselves with the adaptive cycle. Today, there’s only one place left to look: The future.

You see, when your current predicament is unbearable and seems riddled with problems, it helps to think of a future where things could be different. Sure, our global civilization may be teetering on the edge of collapse and the community of life as we know it is struggling to hold on, but we’ve got to be bold enough to imagine a future where things could be different and envision the steps we could take to get there. If we do that, it’s there, I’m confident, well, at least confidently hoping, that we’ll find Jason, Rob, and Asher. Okay. I know they’ve floated some crazy ideas on how to face the polycrisis before, but where to begin?

Jason Bradford:

Alright guys, you know how here at Post Carbon Institute, we’ve been talking about the fact that, hey, fossil fuels aren’t going to last forever and the climate’s got some issues. We may not want to burn so much of them.

Asher Miller:

Yeah, just a little.

Jason Bradford:

So it makes me think like maybe, maybe I’m just possibly someday we’re going to have to use less of them, right?

Rob Dietz:

No.

Jason Bradford:

Okay. Well, just stick with me. Thought experiment.

Asher Miller:

This is a theoretical.

Jason Bradford:

A theoretica. So one policy change that could help us is to actually reduce the speed limit. That would save fuel. I recommend 35.

Rob Dietz:

35.

Asher Miller:

35 miles per hour.

Jason Bradford:

Yes. Because that would match the speed limit that was imposed by the U.S. government during World War II.

Asher Miller:

Are you kidding? They lowered it to 35 miles per hour?

Jason Bradford:

To 35, which was a blessing because gas was rationed. And if you weren’t some special person that was a long distance trucker or something like that, if you’re just a regular person with it, you got the A sticker, which entitled you to three or four gallons a week of fuel.

Rob Dietz:

Wow. So I mean, you got to go back then though. I mean, there wasn’t even a federal highway system. So I mean, when was there ever a need to go more than 35? It must have been really just lovely visiting grandma, take you six hours to get there.

Asher Miller:

Well, obviously there was a need if they felt like they had to set a limit.

Jason Bradford:

Set a limit.

Asher Miller:

So you only have three or four gallons a week?

Jason Bradford:

A week, right.

Asher Miller:

Wow. That’s inconceivable to imagine. Can you imagine if we had a president stand up there and say, “Well, guess what guys? 35 miles per hour. That’s all you can do. Oh, and by the way, you can only use three gallons a week.”

Jason Bradford:

Right. Our behavior would change so fast though, right?

Alex Leff:

35 miles per hour speed limit, three gallons of gas a week. I mean, yeah, I know to stop destroying the world, we’re going to have to make some serious changes, but man, those changes are so lame. Can’t we invent some cool new technologies so we don’t have to change? No, I know. We learned back in part four of Finding Crazy Town that part of our problem is waiting for technology to come save us rather than accept we might have to actually live with less. Fine, fine. What other limits did they set in World War II?

Jason Bradford:

But of course, fuel wasn’t the only thing rationed. They rationed all kinds of stuff in World War II. It was incredible. And this was not just the U.S., all around the world there probably different countries that rationed.

Asher Miller:

Like what?

Jason Bradford:

Well, the main things that were first rationed actually were tires. Rubber was in short supply, but food of all kinds was rationed and not just like gasoline, but fuel oil. So burning heavy oil to heat homes and things like that.

Asher Miller:

Oh really?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. That was rationed. Dog food was no longer allowed to be manufactured in cans. It had to be in dried because tin was in short supply.

Asher Miller:

Well, people were recycling all that.

Jason Bradford:

All that. There were salvage boards. And then they really wanted you to save any fat that was left over after cooking. If you cook something and you had grease, whatever, collect that because that went for munitions.

Asher Miller:

Really?

Jason Bradford:

Yes. It was huge. Well, then they stopped manufacturing in 1942, all metal office furniture, all radios, all phonographs, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines and sewing machines for civilians. The military could still probably get stuff.

Asher Miller:

So if your fridge just broke down –

Rob Dietz:

Repair it.

Jason Bradford:

We’ve got to fix stuff. We’ve got to fix stuff. But then they ended up by November of 1943, typewriters were rationed, bicycles, footwear, silk, nylon, stoves, firewood and coal.

Asher Miller:

Firewood and coal.

Jason Bradford:

So it ended up being like all these major key consumer products were essentially rationed.

Asher Miller:

Right.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. And we accepted it completely.

Alex Leff:

Wow. They make all sorts of epic World War II movies about the heroes on the battlefield, the bombs, the blood, the glory. But without the conserving of resources and civilian sacrifices in everyday life, the war effort wouldn’t have been possible. When is Steven Spielberg going to make a movie about that? I mean, picture it, a Steven Spielberg blockbuster starring Tom Hanks about rationing. I know Rob loves movies. If Rob were here, he’d think that was a good idea. Maybe that would help us imagine what it would be like to do the unthinkable and use less.

Rob Dietz:

We know a guy named Stan Cox who really got into this topic. He wrote a book called, “Any Way You Slice It.” His premise was asking, is this the worst thing that could happen to us, this rationing?

Jason Bradford:

Going 35.

Rob Dietz:

Is this really –

Asher Miller:

A lot of people would be like, that is . . .

Rob Dietz:

I mean, that is the reaction, right?

Jason Bradford:

They canceled automobile racing too. Indianapolis 500 was done.

Rob Dietz:

We do think of it that way. It’s like, this is horrible. I don’t want to face that. No way. And yet I think his main premise is this may not be the worst way to think about what we’re facing in the future and you can still have a good life. You could still live well under some kind of rationing scheme.

Asher Miller:

You brought up, Jason, as this theoretical idea, but I think you could argue it’s not going to be theoretical at all. I mean, if you look at the issues that we’re facing, we’ve got climate change that’s really requiring us to ratchet down really dramatically our fossil fuel consumption. We talk a lot at Post Carbon Institute about the fact that fossil fuels are finite and depleting anyway, right? So in some ways, this is not a theoretical question at all. This is something that we’re going to have to grapple with. Maybe it’s not the worst thing that we could imagine. We can imagine a lot worse, right? But then –

Rob Dietz:

Well, especially if you’re comparing to, again, what we talk about often at Post Carbon Institute, these crises that are raining down on us now with climate and with the depleting supplies of energy. ,

Alex Leff:

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, using less fossil fuels and buying fewer things really sucks, but your hometown flooding every winter and burning every summer really, really sucks. Okay. I’m warming up to the idea. What would rationing look like today?

Rob Dietz:

We’re not in World War II, so I go to how the hell are we going to do this? Just practically speaking, how do you do this?

Asher Miller:

How did it work in World War II?

Jason Bradford:

Well, they literally had the federal government and then through these rationing boards, there were hundreds around the country, and so there were all these regional differences in demand for energy and these kind of things. They set quotas, essentially said, “The civilian economy can only consume this amount, therefore we can only allow this many coupons.” They didn’t let people hoard. If they had a lot of money, they didn’t let people buy a bunch of extra food and then resell on the black market. It was like, no, no. If you went to a store, you would still pay money for something, but you had to also not just give them money, but say, “Here’s my weekly coupon for this amount of cooking oil or this amount of meat or this amount of milk.” So you had to have both, and then the store had to destroy that coupon basically.

And so the boards were there to make sure that the stores understood that this is for this amount and they would print out new books that had different quantities and they would add items to them like, “We’re rationing this now.” So it was a coordination between where you could go buy stuff and then these boards that would give the coupons out to essentially households. And of course, larger households got more, number of people they had.

Asher Miller:

It’s so hard to imagine, just thinking about these stores, right? Stores going along with this. All the stores that we have now, a lot of them that exist in this country now are large corporate owned big box type stores. And their entire business model is to increase sales all the time.

Jason Bradford:

To sell more, right.

Asher Miller:

So if you ration things and you set a maximum that could be sold, that just blows up their entire business model.

Jason Bradford:

Well, it’s interesting because the stores ended up, the stores would often say, “Board, please start rationing this because we’re starting to run low on these things and we’re getting a run on our inventory and we don’t like it because it starts to feel unfair and people are coming in getting upset.”

Rob Dietz:

So that almost seems like some people would want it, right?

Jason Bradford:

Yes, they wanted it.

Rob Dietz:

Because otherwise you can’t get the product. It’s sold out by the time you get to the store.

Jason Bradford:

Yes. So it was this thing where with the rationing system, there was no ability to hoard if you had extra money. And so those who either weren’t as quick to get to the store right away or got paid at different times of the month or were not as wealthy who were living paycheck to paycheck, they at least knew that when they got their money and they got their ration book, they could go to stores and get what they needed and they would be okay. They’d survive. They’d have enough fuel, they’d have enough food, they’d have enough basic consumer goods that were wearing out at a reasonable rate.

The key thing though is not just the practical side in terms of how you do this, but it’s that there is a psychology behind this. So how it also worked is that everyone believed that it was fair, that there was shared sacrifice, that they were guaranteed their basic needs being met. Where it came to be really kind of hard was when things were generally scarce and life-threatening. Penicillin was a new product at this point and there wasn’t the ramped up production of penicillin. And so they needed penicillin for the war too, like when soldiers would get hurt. So the civilian stock of penicillin was really, really low. And so it became a big deal of how do you ration drugs as well?

Rob Dietz:

So the psychology that you’re talking about is people say they buy in because it’s fair. Yeah. But I assume with World War II, they’re also buying in because they believe in the cause, right?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. They have to have a shared purpose and a sense of fairness at the same time, I think.

Asher Miller:

Yeah. It’s interesting to also think about the fact that they were rationing because there wasn’t necessarily a scarcity of all of these resources and the aggregate. It was that they had to take so much of what they could get and direct it to the war effort. And I wonder how different it is for us now in the sense that we’re not talking about redirecting these resources for some cause. We’re talking about basically rationing and reducing them so that we don’t kill ourselves and other species on this planet.

Jason Bradford:

It’s a cause that’s even bigger than most wars, right? It’s the existential threat of, are we going to have a survivable future for complex life and will civilization hold together with rule of law?

Rob Dietz:

It’s a bigger deal, but it’s not the same, for some reason it’s not the same psychological threat as some outgroup who’s got guns pointed at you.

Alex Leff:

That’s what I’m saying. We need a Steven Spielberg movie about courageous everyday people who come together to sacrifice for a common cause. We can call it, “Saving Private Ration.” Nah. I’ll keep thinking. But first, we need to establish the polycrisis as a common cause that can unite us rather than tear us apart.

Jason Bradford:

Well, you hear about this like, why should I have any personal virtue and curtail my consumption when it’ll just free up that unconsumed stuff for the market for someone else to purchase? And so it actually, it harms the ability for people to collectively or individually even say, “No, I would like to ration myself, but what’s the point? If I ration myself, some Yahoo doesn’t care or think about this is just going to have more.”

Asher Miller:

Well, you were talking, Rob, about kids and we already do all this. We actually ration in our households all the time.

Jason Bradford:

Yes, it’s true.

Asher Miller:

I mean –

Jason Bradford:

I can only drink so much wine according to my wife.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Screen time for kids. You only get a certain number of hours a week.

Asher Miller:

I mean, maybe some parents are letting their kids have as much sugar as they want, but usually you find out what the cost is of them binging on that stuff.

Rob Dietz:

Marshmallows for breakfast, pixie sticks for lunch.

Asher Miller:

There are a puddle and tears on the floor when they get their sugar crash at the end. So as parents, I think we all have had experience with rationing stuff and it’s not just a budgetary thing. We can’t afford to get all that. It’s more like what are we instilling in our kids? We want them to be healthy. We also want to teach them they can’t just have anything that they want.

Rob Dietz:

Restraint is a good thing.

Asher Miller:

That’s right. So we do it in our personal lives.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I feel like it’s a whole idea of finding a balance between meeting your needs, but being careful not to get to this level of unhealthy over consumption. The way you do in the household with the parents being able to kind of set the rules and the level of rationing, we don’t have that at the community scale. It certainly doesn’t exist in our capitalist style of economy right now.

Jason Bradford:

No, it hasn’t. It only comes up during these times of crisis right now. And that’s the question is will we see these crises that are going to necessitate that if society wants to hold together, it has to figure this out.

Asher Miller:

Okay. Well, how could people actually get behind something like this? I think part of it is they need to understand why it’s necessary. In World War II, we had an enemy. We were sending our troops overseas. There were people that we knew. We are saving for them. At the Post Carbon Institute office, we actually have all these posters up on the wall from World War II, which is all around rationing, saving, conserving, recycling, all these things for the war effort. We’re doing that because we had this clear enemy and we had people that we were rationing this stuff for. In this case, we’re doing it maybe for our own preservation, for future generations. I think we need to have that strong sense of what is the purpose of doing this and also have fairness be at the center of it.

Alex Leff:

If we really were to embrace a contracting economy in order to stop the destruction of the world, it wouldn’t just be about using less stuff. It would affect every aspect of our society. The political systems we’ve gotten used to would have to change too.

Rob Dietz:

If we do face a powering down of society, what kind of politics do we have? What could it possibly look like?

Jason Bradford:

I was reading Ecology in the Politics of Scarcity by William Ovals, which was written in 1977. And his argument is that the isms, the communisms, the capitalisms that we take for granted, the enshrinement of individual liberty, libertarianism, as you could say, that is a product of the expansionism, first from colonial era, Western Europe going out and colonizing and relieving the ecological constraints that was in Western Europe at the time, and then industrialism when fossil fuels were starting to be exploited. And he says, so all our political theories are basically based on this unique period in history.

Rob Dietz:

So you’re telling me that all of our philosophy, all of the ways we organize life, all of that is due to this expansionism that, as the three of us have been talking about, can’t continue indefinitely.

Asher Miller:

It’s not just hyper-individualistic free market societies, neoliberalism, which so many people in the progressive left see as this great evil, right? And I would agree with that myself, but it’s not just that. It’s actually flip it all the way almost to the most extreme other form in our imagination, and that’s communism. Where communism came from is also actually industrialism. It’s like this idea that it’s the workers taking control over the means of production. In fact, Marx argued that you couldn’t do this with agrarian cultures. There had to be industrialized societies doing this, right? Yes. So even that idea of, okay, well, everything is shared by the people, and you could say that’s collective, is still born out of this belief that we can just continue to usemore resources and technology.

Alex Leff:

If capitalism and communism, as we’ve understood them, have both been based on industrialism, what other systems can we look to to imagine life beyond industrialism? If we’re not going to find Jason, Rob, and Asher living the capitalist dream or in a communist utopia, where else could they be?

Jason Bradford:

For most of human history, we’ve been living more in sort of a communitarianism type way because we’re such social species and we’ve relied on everybody else all the time. It affects psychology so intimately, and I don’t think we really have a concept of that. There’s some theories of that part of the existential crisis of Westerners, so to speak, of the modern cosmopolitan person, is that because there’s such a focus on the self and identity with the self and with transactions monetized as opposed to being relational, that the questions like, “Who am I and what is this for? And why am I here?” That kind of stuff wasn’t something that these older traditional people ever had, that they knew that they were connected to a place, they were connected to nature, they were connected to people, and they knew they were just part of something bigger than themselves, which was ironically one of the things that, of course, the modern human really struggles with.

But this is what critics of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the age of rationality often will talk about, of course, is like, well, we’re missing that. And maybe it would be better if we went back to simpler times, more times in community, more times focused on local issues. And so there’s something there, there’s an attraction there, but we don’t have really a political system or an 

economic system that helps us understand how to do that.

Alex Leff:

So instead of capitalism or communism, Jason is suggesting we look to communitarianism of traditional societies. Well, we can maybe look to them for inspiration, but we’re not searching for our podcast hosts in the past. We’re searching for them in the future. We’ve got to imagine how a more communal, localized society would play out in the decades ahead of us. What would we stand to lose and what might we gain?

Asher Miller:

All the incredible advances we’ve had around health and those kinds of things are the capacity of our society to really embrace cultural diversity. Obviously, this is still an area that we struggle with, but compared to previous societies, the advances that we’ve gained in medicine and technology and other things, our recognition of the value of diversity and human rights and dignity for individuals, these are all things that I think most of us would say are highly valuable, things that we want to retain. The question then here is, are those two products of this expansionist period?

Rob Dietz:

Or stated another way, can we have that contraction in our societies down to a community scale and hang on to those things that we care so much about?

Asher Miller:

Yeah. How do we maintain these values when things are tough, things are uncertain, we’re facing crises, there’s a shortage of things, there’s all kinds of change happening. How do we maintain the values and the benefits of a pluralistic society that does embrace the rights of individuals in the minority in a world that is dealing with constraints and shocks and crises? And I think that we, like I was saying before, and I’m not trying to make it too simplistic by having this sort of binary people on the left, people on the right kind of thing, but if you say that people that tend to be more culturally conservative might be more skeptical of science, but people on the left are more readily embracing of science. But we, I think are a little bit ignorant of recognizing that people’s embrace of authority, security, simple answers to things, cohesiveness, maybe a bit of insularity and homogeneity are things that are also part of human nature.

Jason Bradford:

And they’re valued in times of stress.

Rob Dietz:

Some basic human needs, security, cohesion.

Asher Miller:

Yeah, and they come out in times of stress. And so are we recognizing that we’re going to be facing these things? And it is interesting to think about some of the communities that we’ve interfaced with, and I’m not trying to pick on anybody, but look at the transition town movement. So for listeners who aren’t familiar with the transition movement, it’s this very grassroots movement that started over in the United Kingdom. It’s been more than 10 years, maybe a dozen plus years ago.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, more than 10 years, yeah.

Asher Miller:

And it really became very popular for a while. It took off like wildfire actually in the United States about 10 years ago. And the whole idea there was on the one hand, a recognition of some of these realities that we’re dealing with, climate change. It was also a recognition of peak oil that at some point we’re going to be dealing with the limits of fossil fuels and how dependent we are on those. So kind of grounded in that understanding, but had this approach to say, “Well, the future could be better.”

And part of it was, I would say, a critique of the current sort of global consumer extraction based economic system that was not only destroying the planet and our prospects for the future, a viable future, but it was also leaving people unhappy, disconnected, community broken down. So a lot of the focus was on the benefits of bringing community together. And the response was, “Hey, let’s re-localize our food. Let’s re-localize where our energy comes from. Let’s do in a way that’s more sustainable and then we can recreate connections.” And a lot of the appeal to it was that it was this positive vision of the future. But in the conversations that you get into sometimes, there was a real hesitance or an outright antipathy to talking about issues of security. And what happens when here we have in our transition town, we’ve done this great job of re-localizing our food system and having solar panels everywhere and all this stuff. And then the next town over, they didn’t do shit and then everything collapses and they come over knocking on our door. Yeah.

Jason Bradford:

What happens then if I have enough, but everyone around me does not?

Rob Dietz:

You become the feudal lore. Yes.

Asher Miller:

King Jason The First.

Alex Leff:

That’s the paradox we’re in. Fossil fuels helped power the industrial economy and eventually the globalized growth dependent systems that are driving ecological destruction, but that same energy abundance also helped create the conditions for many of the gains we value, greater mobility, education, public health, individual freedom, and cultural diversity. So if we’re facing a contraction towards smaller, more localized and communal societies, how do we preserve those gains without preserving the system that produced them? Is it possible to have contraction without a complete breakdown of society? Are there any examples in history of a society contracting without total disorder?

Jason Bradford:

I found a paper by Joseph Tainter, this historian. It was written in 2000. This prior to the transition town movement and all this localization stuff that’s gone on. And he says, “The Byzantine Empire,” which I will just say was once part of the Roman Empire and became the Eastern Roman Empire, but then became known as the Byzantine Empire. “The Byzantine Empire responded with one of history’s only examples of a complex society simplifying. Much of the structure of ranks and honors based on urban life disappeared. Civil administration simplified and merged in the countryside with the military. Governmental transaction costs were reduced. The economy contracted and there were fewer artisans and merchants. Elite social life focused on the capital and the emperor rather than on the cities that no longer existed. Literacy, writing and education declined. Barter and feudal social relations replaced the millennium old monetary economy.” So they had a thousand year old monetary economy with a big central government and they said, “We can’t support this anymore.”

Rob Dietz:

Kind of a mix though because if literacy declined, that’s an opposition to what we’re hoping for.

Jason Bradford:

Right. So history suggests that when you lose this complex society, you go through a simplification process, you’re likely going to lose some of that literacy. You’re going to lose some of the stuff that we think of as modernity and cosmopolitanism. And I would rather keep some of that and what kind of work needs to go into keeping the best of what we’ve developed while still maybe having to follow the energy descent path into a more simple social structure like the Byzantines did?

Rob Dietz:

Well, I think you said a share starting point at least is grappling with it, that being willing to engage both on the right and the left with the notion that first of all, a contraction in how much available energy there is is coming. And second, let’s not throw out real concerns about security and how do we live with each other and maintain some ideals when we’re facing what we would view as a crisis. Just sit with it a while, think about it, grapple with it, talk about it.

Alex Leff:

Sit with it? Grapple with it? Talk about it? I was looking for solutions, guys. I’ve been searching for answers. Wait a second. We’ve been searching for answers. Maybe the searching itself has been the most important part. I mean, here we are exploring how a civilization built on abundant energy and expansionism might reorganize around a local community while preserving the best of its values. Of course, there’s not going to be some simple answer waiting for us at the end of all this. If the point is to grapple with the questions themselves, even just to ask them to start these conversations in our communities, then Oh my God! That’s it. That’s where they must have been this whole time. Jason, Rob, and Asher wouldn’t go hide in some distant place running from all this, searching for easy solutions. No, of course not. They’d be sitting with the trouble and boldly facing the questions that don’t have simple answers. Yes, that’s it. I can see them. I can see them now. Jason, Rob, Asher. It’s really you.

Jason Bradford:

Oh, hey Alex.

Rob Dietz:

Oh, hey Alex.

Asher Miller:

Dude, why are you bugging us so much? I’ve gotten like 70 messages from you in the last few weeks, man. Yeah. Is there some kind of emergency? What’s the deal?

Alex Leff:

I’ve been looking all over for you guys. I’m so glad you’re okay.

Jason Bradford:

Okay.

Asher Miller:

Dude, we’re better than ever.

Alex Leff:

Have you been working on new visions for how we can get ourselves out of crazy town and lead to a sustainable energy future?

Asher Miller:

I’ll be honest, man, I bought into the system.

Jason Bradford:

If you can beat them, join them, baby. What?

Asher Miller:

Well, I left Corvallis, couldn’t live there anymore. People are too nice. It’s annoying, too beautiful. I’m spending my time between D.C. and the Bay Area. I went to this talk at the Long Now Foundation, and I met Peter Diamandis and Stuart Brandon. I got to say, spending time with those guys, I kind of got convinced we need the technologists to lead us out of this Crazy Town situation that we’re in, and we just should just rely on the wisdom of AI agents, man. If our politics is so flawed, it’s because we’re human. So I just think we needed to turn to the machines. So I’ve been working with people to basically create a crop of new political candidates. They’re going to run in every congressional district. They’re going to run for Senate. Not president yet. We’re going to work our way up there. But yeah, we’re going to field candidates everywhere. And they’re smart enough to be able to speak the language, the local petois of these different places. I’m feeling pretty confident.

Jason Bradford:

So let me get this clear. The AI agents will be the candidates?

Asher Miller:

Yeah.

Jason Bradford:

And we’ll be then running things as elected officials?

Asher Miller:

Yeah. They’re going to represent us. They’re wiser than we are, man.

Jason Bradford:

Freaking genius, dude.

Asher Miller:

Thanks.

Jason Bradford:

I’m so proud of you.

Asher Miller:

What have you been doing, Rob?

Rob Dietz:

I’ve been holed up here in Vegas.

Alex Leff:

Vegas?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, I’ve got a bit of an apartment at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel here.

Alex Leff:

What?

Jason Bradford:

Beautiful, beautiful. Congratulations.

Rob Dietz:

These guys contacted me. They were listening to a bunch of our old episodes and they’re looking for screenwriters for all these updates that they’re doing to the John Hughes movie catalog.

Asher Miller:

They bought the IP, huh?

Rob Dietz:

Stuff like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, 16 Candles, all that.

Asher Miller:

Cool.

Rob Dietz:

They’re looking to do sequels for the new generation.

Jason Bradford:

Oh, Perfect. Perfect.

Rob Dietz:

And they thought, this guy here, he seems to have all this in his head, so we could probably hire him cheap. And it turns out their cheap is like a fricking gold mine compared to what I make in nonprofit land, Crazy Town and Post Carbon Institute. Those are good gigs.

Asher Miller:

Dude, I’m sorry we couldn’t give you that raise. Is that the reason? That’s the reason you left?

Rob Dietz:

Well, I mean, look at my view out my apartment window here. I’m looking out over the strip. I get to watch the dance of that fountain that I love so much right there in downtown Vegas.

Asher Miller:

Oh, I can see the sphere. That’s cool.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of gig that you dream of. And I’m working inside my own head with my favorite characters. I get to spend time with Ferris.

Jason Bradford:

I don’t want to make this a pissing contest, but okay, D.C., LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, whatev. Have you ever seen Riyadh? All right. I mean, talk about modern, talk about sleek and talk about bling, bling, ching, ching. I mean, Rob, the Saudis know how to pay. Let me just tell you this. So I got recruited from LinkedIn of all places, of course, and what they needed was a way to manage vegetation on the side of skyscrapers. So Riyadh, poor design in a sense that they’re not doing vertical farming on the skyscrapers, but they’re envisioning a new city. It’s called the Neom Line Project, and I’m working closely with the architects, and we are going to do pastoralism vertically in the desert.

Asher Miller:

Oh right, that city is going to be basically hermetically sealed behind glass or something, right? And air conditioned. Is that the idea?

Jason Bradford:

There’s so much going on that it would be even hard to explain to you because it’s so sophisticated, but I’m involved. I’m deep now into this. My company’s called Vertical Caprine Solutions, and I’m breeding a bespoke goat, sort of a hybrid of a wild progenitor to domestic goat and then sort of the goats that endemic to the Southwestern Saudi Arabian peninsula. And yeah, no, it’s wonderful. I mean, the future is urban. We know this. We know what the trends are.

Alex Leff:

But Jason, you wrote a book that the future is rural.

Jason Bradford:

Some people could admit when they’re wrong, Alex, and that’s a sign of maturity and growth. And right now, because I’m getting paid so well, I believe the future is urban and that’s sustainable, Alex.

Alex Leff:

But I’ve spent the last six episodes going on a journey with the listeners, reflecting on all the insights you’ve shared about the fragility of complexity, the limits to growth, and questioning the idea of progress. We’ve learned about the adaptive cycle. You made a case for rationing and embracing contraction. I was counting on you guys.

Jason Bradford:

Hey, Alex, I am sorry to burst your fucking bubble. Okay? Grow up, kid. It was exhausting day in and day out to tell people everything they didn’t want to hear.

Asher Miller:

I’ve got to say, there’s something about spending time with AI agents and they just fluff your ego constantly. It’s kind of nice after a while of dealing with all this shit.

Rob Dietz:

I feel like we’ve embraced the Ferris Bueller philosophy, right? I mean, he says right there in the movie, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” He doesn’t say life needs to slow down, life needs to have some rationing, life needs to critique what’s going on out there in the skyscrapers and the AI. You got to go with that flow, right? Am I right? Am I right?

Jason Bradford:

Go with the flow. The pipeline. The pipeline’s flowing. Go with it.

Alex Leff:

But what about the realities of ecological overshoot? What about runaway capitalism? What about dad jokes?

Asher Miller:

Wait, did you say dad jokes? Yeah, I got to say, man, I do miss that a little bit. I miss getting a genuine reaction to a good one. I throw dad jokes at the AI candidates all the time and they laugh a lot. I’m just not sure that they really mean it.

Jason Bradford:

That kind of hit home a little bit, man, because nobody understands my dad jokes here. I tell dad jokes to the ghosts and they go, “Bahh,” but I don’t know if that’s a genuine laugh or that’s just what they do. You know what I mean?

Rob Dietz:

I have to agree. I’ll say that scripting these movies, I’m the only one laughing when I write stuff, which frankly seems a little self-centered and weird. I write a line and just laugh to myself.

Asher Miller:

We didn’t laugh at your jokes that much either, Rob, let’s be honest.

Rob Dietz:

That’s not how I remember it.

Asher Miller:

Every once in a while. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

Alex Leff:

So really, that’s what’s selling you guys the dad jokes?

Asher Miller:

Yeah, I kind of forgot how much fun that was.

Rob Dietz:

Well, money aside, Crazy Town was some of the most fun I’ve had in a whole work environment. I mean, I love riffing with you guys and trying to figure stuff out and make each other laugh.

Jason Bradford:

I hate to admit this because I hate sincerity, but it would be nice to spend more time together and make stupid jokes.

Asher Miller:

Alex, maybe you’re right, man. The people of Crazy Town need us. I think maybe we’ve got to come back

Alex Leff:

To help envision a better future?

Asher Miller:

No, no. To make jokes, dude.

Alex Leff:

Well, I guess that’s good enough. So will you guys come back and be hosts again?

Asher Miller:

Alright. I’m coming back.

Rob Dietz:

We’re back, baby.

Jason Bradford:

I’m catching the next flight out of Riyadh.

Asher Miller:

What are you going to do with all the goats, dude?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, Alex, can you help me with that a little bit? There’s a few that I got stuck at the top of a skyscraper in Riyadh that haven’t been able to make it down. Just handle that for me, all right? 

I’m on my way.

Alex Leff:

Oh, man.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Alex, could you tie up a couple loose ends for me too? Of course, in writing these sequels, I’ve got cameos from Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald. It’s already contracted. I need someone to break those contracts, otherwise I’m out all my gambling winnings.

Asher Miller:

I’ll do it, dude. I could change my AI candidates to AI lawyers.

Rob Dietz:

Awesome.

Asher Miller:

I’ll put them on it. Okay.

Rob Dietz:

To the studio, Batman.

Jason Bradford:

I am freaking so pumped to studio it up with you guys again.

Asher Miller:

All right guys, let’s do this thing.

Alex Leff:

And that my friends is the story of how one brave podcast producer searched far and wide across the modern techno-industrial civilization we call Crazy Town to fearlessly find three podcast hosts who went astray. Some call him a hero, some say he should win a Pulitzer Prize, but no, he’s just a normal guy, a heroic normal guy who single-handedly saved the Post Carbon Institute. In fact, some say he may even have saved the whole world.

Asher Miller:

Hey, Alex, will you cut that out, man? We said we’d be the hosts again.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, go back to doing your producer thing. Get out of here.

Alex Leff:

Right. Yes, right away.

Jason Bradford:

It’s good to be back.

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.