Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.”
Is there anything crazier than the people in our towns, who are sworn to protect and serve, instead coldly taking the lives of our neighbors? Given this moment in American history marked by outrage, sadness, and massive protest, we discuss the need to address institutional racism and white privilege.
Despite the occasional (and well deserved) insult, we love our listeners and find them to be some of the most intelligent, caring, and committed people in the world. Learn how they’re working toward sustainable transportation, healthy farms, infrastructure repurposing, and community resilience, all while keeping a good sense of humor.
Besides lessons in ethics (and in Asher’s case, lessons in the English language), the Brady Bunch offers up a metaphor about the fault lines in American politics — fault lines that include the undermining of government, extreme individualism, race and class divides, and capitalist and corporate excesses.
In this episode Asher, Rob, and Jason wonder if individualism (not to mention all those other “-isms”… capitalism, socialism, communism) is simply the product of a relatively short period of expansionism, and what of our values must be kept or discarded as we enter a new era of contraction and bureaucratic breakdown.
