Crazy Town Podcast

25/09/2023

Although we're not exactly a "carbon podcast" Crazy Town is happy to be recognized as one of the 25 Best Carbon Podcasts You Must Follow in 2023!

Best Carbon Podcasts to Listen to ⋅ 1. Catching Carbon ⋅ 2. Carbon Farming Podcast ⋅ 3. Cutting Carbon ⋅ 4. Carbon Removal Newsroom ⋅ 5. The Carbon Copy ⋅ 6. Carbon Copy ⋅ 7. The Carbon Connection

19/04/2023

Today's episode has the best spoof title from Tom Friedman's book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." The Crazy Town take is "Hot, Flat, and Totally Phucking Wrong." Give it a listen and let us know what you think!

Meet Tom Friedman, the mustachioed metaphor maven who thinks we can have our cake and listen to it too. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation.

14/03/2023

Season 5 launches tomorrow and we can't wait for you to see what we've got in store!

A brief update about this FB page: Post Carbon Institute has a lot of exciting things happening, so to consolidate, we'll be posting all Crazy Town updates on our main page, Post Carbon Institute. Make sure to follow to stay in the loop.

We also recommend joining our wonderful group of Crazytownies here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2194935814007370

Thanks for listening, and please stay safe out there on the mean streets of Crazy Town!

Season 5 of our Crazy Town podcast kicks off tomorrow with a new theme: Phalse Prophets. Now you may be wondering: what's a Phalse Prophet? For an in-depth understanding, check out the (surprisingly entertaining) definitive peer-reviewed taxonomic analysis from our very own Jason Bradford, PhD: https://bit.ly/RSIC-Journal

But in a nutshell: we’ve selected fourteen merchants of doom, fourteen real-life, modern-day gurus who manage to be unbelievably influential while pitching all the wrong ideas. Their ideas are dangerous because (at best) they convince people to ignore the social and environmental crises of our times, and (at worst) they push us deeper into crisis.

We hope you’ll join us for some laughs and insights. Maybe you’ll even find a sense of community and shared agency for navigating the cascading crises of the 21st century.

Find us on your favorite podcast app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia and make sure to tell your friends!

12/01/2023

It seems we had a pretty good 2022...

While we're in the process of preparing our fifth season (set to launch in March), make sure you're subscribed on your favorite podcast app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia

11/01/2023

Crazy Town Bonus – An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusbobjensen/

Bob Jensen has written a book with Wes Jackson titled An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. With a title like that, Jason and Bob have lots of heavy ground to cover, including overshoot, the limits to growth, and the cascading environmental and social crises of our times. They conclude that there are no easy answers or silver-bullet solutions, but by focusing on sustainable size of the human population, appropriate scale of social organization, optimal scope of human competence for managing high-energy modernity, and required speed of taking action to avoid catastrophe, they home in on some strategic responses to the crises.

14/12/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – Human Rights and Multispecies Justice with Danielle Celermajer

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusdanycelermajer/

Asher is joined in Crazy Town by Danielle Celermajer, author and professor at University of Sydney, for a far-ranging conversation about human rights and the more-than-human world. Dany shares how her personal relationship with the Shoah (Holocaust) set her on a path of human rights work and impacted her experience of the devastating Black Summer Fires that swept through Australia in 2019-2020. They discuss her journey towards scholarship and activism for the more-than-human world, the intersection of human rights and multispecies justice, and the way that individuals and groups of people have stepped up to care for the billions of non-human lives impacted by the fires and floods that have ravaged Australia in recent years. Finally, Dany shares ideas for how listeners can (re)connect with the more-than-human world.

09/11/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – A Climate Scientist Goes to Jail with Peter Kalmus

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonuspeterkalmus/

Climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus returns to Crazy Town, but this time with a green badge of courage. Earlier this year, he locked himself to the entrance of the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles to protest their ongoing investment in the fossil fuel industry. As you would expect, he was arrested for his troubles. It was an experience he describes (paradoxically) as “scary as f**k,” but also opening and wonderful. In this wide-ranging interview, Rob and Peter cover civil disobedience, climate denial, activism, ego management, and coping strategies for anxiety about climate disaster and collapse. It makes you wonder why we can’t arrest the executives at JP Morgan Chase, ExxonMobil, and all the other truly radical corporations that appear to be on an ecocidal mission from hell!

07/11/2022

If you send a billionaire tech bro down to South America to do Ayahuasca with a shaman, you don't get a hippie, postcapitalist, Crazy Town member. You get a tech bro on acid whose ideology is still extraction, domination, colonialism, and capitalism.

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusdouglasrushkoff/

03/11/2022

How do we know we're dealing with longtermism, effective altruism, etc? Douglas Rushkoff says it's our job (those of us living in Crazy Town) to see the common underlying principles of all these things and ask ourselves, "Is it completely compatible with capitalism?" If it is, chances are there's a problem.

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusdouglasrushkoff/

02/11/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – Tech Bros on Acid with Douglas Rushkoff

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusdouglasrushkoff/

Douglas Rushkoff revisits Crazy Town, where he and Asher discuss why so many billionaires, academic institutions, and “serious” people are drawn to longtermism – the view that our top priority should be ensuring that humanity can spread its wings throughout the physical and virtual universe. What’s the suffering of a few billion people in the here and now, when there’s quadrillions, no quintillions, of potential future people to worry about? Sure, the climate crisis is bad. But is it really an existential threat? Douglas explains why, when you take a tech bro to drink Ayahuasca in the Amazon, he still comes back a tech bro. And why, when you hear buzzwords like longtermism, effective altruism, and transhumanism, all you need to ask is: Does it perpetuate capitalism? Asher and Douglas riff on why longtermism is denialism – denial of death, denial of the body, and denial of responsibility – and why the antithesis is living in the here and now, with our neighbors.

12/10/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – Angry Birds and Hairbrained Humans with Mary Roach

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusmaryroach/

In her latest book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, Mary Roach approaches the topic of human-wildlife conflict with entertaining stories, scientific insight, and a healthy dose of wit and humor. There are plenty of animal stories in this episode, from marauding mountain lions to bothersome bears, from macaques who are jerks to gulls who are dicks, and of course that most meddlesome of all species – the human being. The phrase "going out clubbing" takes on a decidedly macabre meaning when the context is U.S. military attempts to control albatrosses living their lives near an air base. And find out if a scenario seemingly cribbed from an unaired Breaking Bad script portends the collapse of civilization. Hiding amidst all the stories and fun are big implications for ecosystems, biodiversity conservation, and human society.

16/09/2022

A quick wrestling interlude brought to you by Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan...

Catch up on the latest bonus episode on your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Or check out our website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonustaylorbrorby/

15/09/2022

"When you grow up in extractive economies that are inherently monocultures, then you have a monoculture type of thinking."

In this week's bonus episode, Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, shares his thoughts on social issues and narrow-minded perspectives within fossil fuel communities.

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonustaylorbrorby/

14/09/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – Boys and Oil with Taylor Brorby

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonustaylorbrorby/

Taylor Brorby has written one hell of a memoir. It covers many critical topics that come up in Crazy Town, from fracking to civil disobedience to that most inept of policies: aiming for infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Taylor shares both thought-provoking ideas (e.g., the intimidating width of prairies versus the intimidating height of mountains) and lessons learned from growing up gay within the construct of an extractive economy. Two "bonus" topics in this episode: writing and wrestling! But don't worry, the "Macho Man" Randy Savage impersonations remain mercifully brief.

11/08/2022

Catch Noam Chomsky discussing the failures of , and hear his response to George Monbiot's critique of the political center and left for not, in Monbiot’s view, developing viable alternatives to neoliberalism in the new bonus episode this week: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia

10/08/2022

Crazy Town Bonus – The Stench of Neoliberalism with Noam Chomsky

Listen with your favorite app: https://link.chtbl.com/SocMedia
Website: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusnoamchomsky/

As a follow up to Episode 61 of the Crazy Town podcast, Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist, author, and social critic, joins Asher Miller in Crazy Town to discuss the failures and dominance of neoliberalism -- which Chomsky describes as "class war" -- since delivery of the Powell Memo 50 years ago. Chomsky responds to George Monbiot's critique of the political center and left for not, in Monbiot's view, developing viable alternatives to neoliberalism. Disagreeing with Monbiot's (and admittedly Post Carbon Institute's own) views about the limits of Keynesian "green growth" economic policies, Chomsky discusses proposals developed by places like the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) that he believes would meet the needs of the poor and working classes while tackling the climate crisis. Noam's emphasis on community power, going back to his childhood experiences, strongly resonates with "Do the Opposite" themes explored in Season 4 of Crazy Town.

29/07/2022

Episode 51 was all about the Papal bulls, the Doctrine of Discovery, and colonization. Then we interviewed Sherri Mitchell on the legal framework that was put into place. It's good to see these topics getting more exposure. Kudos to Buffy Sainte-Marie!

At 81, award-winning artist and activist is determined to use her platform to talk about realities of residential schools, and call for the dissolution of the Doctrine of Discovery.