Crazy Town

By Post Carbon Institute: Sustainability, Climate, Collapse, and Dark Humor

What's Crazy Town about?

With equal parts humor and in-depth analysis, Asher, Rob, and Jason safeguard their sanity while probing crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we’re all deluding ourselves.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Crazy Town episodes:

04.24.2024
Escaping Globalism: Rebuilding the Local Economy One Pig Thyroid at a Time
From the top of a skyscraper in Dubai, Jason, Rob, and Asher chug margaritas made from the purest Greenland glacier ice as they cover the "merits" of globalism. International trade brings so many things, like murder hornets, piles of plastic...
04.17.2024
Escaping Technologyism: Dreams of AI Sheep and the Deadliest Word in Film History
Modern humans have a Stockholm Syndrome relationship to technology, which has kidnapped us while convincing us it has our best interests in mind. But when one looks back at the history of plastics or the current frenzy around AI, it...
04.10.2024
Escaping Speedism: How to Slow Down and Enjoy the Collapse
Consult your inner tortoise to find novel ways of slowing down and living the good life. In a world haunted by just-in-time delivery, hyperactive business, accelerating environmental calamities, and metric tons of stress, Jason, Rob, and Asher work at a...
04.03.2024
Escaping Urbanism: Green Acres, Climate Migration, and the End of the Megacity
Did a whimsical 1960s TV sitcom presage climate migration and a reversal of urban growth? We're not calling for a Godzilla-esque teardown of cities, but climate change is forcing a serious urban rethink. Jason, Rob, and Asher offer visions of...
03.27.2024
Escaping Consumerism: Why Crocheted Codpieces Are the Perfect Antidote to Fast Fashion
If American consumers ever come up for air under the pile of crap in their storage units, they find themselves face to face with a materialistic hellscape of megastores, McMansions, endless fleets of delivery trucks, and evil hordes of targeted...
03.20.2024
Escaping Industrialism: How to Avoid Pancakes on a Stick and Other "Miracles" of the Industrial Age
Jason, Rob, and Asher take a tour of New Caledonia, California's Central Valley, Bhutan, and Cuba to uncover the ins and outs of industrialism, especially as it has been applied to agriculture. Along the way they riff on how the...
03.13.2024
Escape Routes: Let's Get the F**k out of Crazy Town
Escape Routes! That's the theme of the sixth season of Crazy Town. We're exploring how to escape industrialism, consumerism, globalism, capitalism, and all the other -isms that are causing a polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown. Most of all, Jason,...
03.06.2024
Crazy Town Season 6 Trailer
Join us on March 13, 2024 for the launch of our sixth season, in which Jason, Rob, and Asher explore escape routes from industrialism, capitalism, consumerism, and a bunch of other "-isms" that are causing the polycrisis of environmental and...
02.15.2024
Bonus: Grief and Making Connections with LaUra Schmidt
LaUra Schmidt visits Crazy Town to discuss her work with the Good Grief Network and her book, How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet. Along the way, she shares...
01.17.2024
Bonus: New Year's Dissolutions
Asher, Jason, and Rob reflect on 2023 – a year filled to the brim with Crazy Townisms like the COP climate conference being held in Dubai, an anti-aging nutbag who parasitizes his own son, and the hijinks of the world’s...
12.13.2023
Bonus: Vanilla Andreessen, Pygmy Marmosets, and Hi-Tech Delusions
The most vomit-inducing document of 2023 has to be the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," written (oh so obviously) by a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Join Jason, Rob, and Asher if you feel like sharing in some outrage and learning about a...
11.15.2023
Bonus: Bundyville and Stories that Need to Be Told with Leah Sottile
Investigative journalist Leah Sottile writes articles teeming with insights, and she produces and hosts podcasts filled with ah-ha moments. Rob tries not to sound like too much of a fanboy as he interviews Leah about political extremism, environmentalism, and the...
10.19.2023
Bonus Riff: Infinite, Unlimited, Forever - Water in the Desert
Just how much has the extractivist growth mindset come to dominate Phoenix and other cities in the desert Southwest of the United States? Prepare to turn your indignation meter up to 11 as Jason, Rob, and Asher consider desalination, pipelines,...
10.16.2023
Bonus: Holding the Fire - Indigenous Voices on the Great Unraveling
We are pleased to share the new podcast from Post Carbon Institute, Holding the Fire. Award-winning journalist and author Dahr Jamail hosts in-depth interviews with leaders from around the world to uncover Indigenous ways of reckoning with environmental and societal...
09.20.2023
Bonus: Going Wild with Rae Wynn-Grant
Wildlife ecologist and communicator extraordinaire Rae Wynn-Grant visits Crazy Town to talk human-wildlife interactions, the social side of environmentalism, diversity and equity in the sciences, and ideas for young people (don't worry if you're older—the ideas apply to you, too)....
08.30.2023
Bonus: Bagdhad Bob Visits Climate Town
What do Saddam Hussein’s information minister and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have in common? Hint: it starts with a “d,” ends with “enial,” and isn’t just a river in Egypt. A new and virulent strain of climate denial...
08.09.2023
Bonus: Choose Your Own Adventure in the Great Unraveling
After hearing a story of woe on the streets of Portland, Oregon, Jason, Rob, and Asher cover the four critical ways of cultivating personal resilience to navigate the Great Unraveling. The report we reference several times is Welcome to the...
06.21.2023
The Surest Paths to a Hard Collapse: The Delusional Doctrines of the Phalse Prophethood (Season Wrap-up)
Asher, Rob, and Jason explore the lessons and dangers of the brotherhood of Phalse Prophets and consider better ways to achieve a sustainable and equitable society. Along the way, they examine how to start a cult, turn the insufferability index...
06.14.2023
The Elon Musk Episode about Elon Musk Brought to You by Elon Musk
Meet Elon Musk, the Muskian mogul who Elon Musks his way to the pinnacle of Muskitude. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme...
06.07.2023
How to Fast-Track Collapse: Manipulating the Masses While Massaging Megalomaniacs
Meet Steve Bannon, the Molotov mixologist who wants to light the world on fire. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season...
05.31.2023
How to Lose Friends and Demoralize People: The Science (sic!) of Near-Term Extinction
Meet Guy McPherson, the extinction enthusiast who undermines legitimate climate concerns by predicting we’re all going to die yesterday. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive...
05.24.2023
Prepping for the Apocalypse: Elites' Foolish Fantasies for Surviving a Collapse of Their Own Creation
Meet Barrett Moore, the bunker-building bullshit artist who helps capitalists survive the apocalypse with beans, bullets, and bravado. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive into...
05.18.2023
Announcement: 2023 Crazy Town Hall
How would you like to hang out with Asher, Rob, and Jason (well, virtually anyway)? Your chance is coming up at the fourth annual Crazy Town Hall. The town hall is our most fun event of the year, where you...
05.17.2023
How Longtermism Became the Most Dangerous Philosophy You’ve Never Heard of
Meet William MacAskill, the puerile professor who helps crypto capitalists justify sociopathy today for a universe of transhuman colonization tomorrow. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep...
05.10.2023
Sucking CO2 and Electrifying Everything: The Climate Movement's Desperate Dependence on Tenuous Technologies
Meet Mark Jacobson and David Keith, the leading techno-fixologists who overpromise overhyped “solutions” to the climate conundrum. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive into the...
05.03.2023
How Ecomodernists Hijacked the Environmental Movement: Technotopian Bullshit and a Raging Case of God Complex.
Meet Stewart Brand and his band of merry dematerialists, the Silicon Valley salesmen who undermined environmentalism with planet-saving fantasies that reek of technofetishism. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For...
04.26.2023
Kinder, Gentler Colonialism: Bungling Billionaires and Their Arrogant Adventures in "Saving the World"
Meet Bill Gates, the philandering philanthropist who attempts to remake the world's operating system in his own image. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive into...
04.19.2023
Hot, Flat, and Totally Phucking Wrong: The Perilous Platitudes of a Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Propagandist
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. Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language. For an entertaining deep dive...
04.12.2023
How Boomer Politicians Found a Third Way to Phuck Over the Working Class
Meet Bill Clinton, who converted the Democratic Party into slightly less loathsome neoliberals. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five (Phalse Prophets), read the definitive peer-reviewed...
04.05.2023
How to Become the Winningest Winner Who Wins: The Twisted Logic of the World’s Greatest CEO
Meet Jack Welch, celebrated wrecker of real jobs and leading light of Wall Street wankers. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five (Phalse Prophets), read the...
03.29.2023
How to Have Sex with Yourself: The Bizarre Cult of the Singularity
Meet Ray Kurzweil, who combines Moore’s Law with nanobots in a faux recipe to cheat death. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five (Phalse Prophets), read...
03.22.2023
Why the Polycrisis Is a Statistical Anomaly: The Willful Delusions of the World’s Leading Pseudointellectual
Meet Steven Pinker whose denial of limits increases the likelihood of his worst fear: the end of the Enlightenment. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five...
03.15.2023
What the Phuck Is a Phalse Prophet?
Meet the unelected leaders of Crazy Town, who keep our collective heads in the sand while the planet burns. Please share this episode to your friends and start a conversation. For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five...
02.22.2023
Bonus: Drawing Insights with Stuart McMillen
Stuart McMillen is a systems thinker disguised as a cartoonist. His long-form comics condense important academic topics into understandable and entertaining works of art. Stuart tackles topics in the fields of ecology, economics, psychology, and sociology. With original drawings, thought-provoking...
01.11.2023
Bonus: An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen
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...
12.14.2022
Bonus: Human Rights and Multispecies Justice with Danielle Celermajer
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...
11.09.2022
Bonus: A Climate Scientist Goes to Jail with Peter Kalmus
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...
11.02.2022
Bonus: Tech Bros on Acid with Douglas Rushkoff
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...
10.12.2022
Bonus: Angry Birds and Hairbrained Humans with Mary Roach
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,...
09.22.2022
Announcement: Power Podcast with Richard Heinberg
Please check out our newest podcast, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival featuring Richard Heinberg. How have humans become powerful enough to disrupt the world's climate, trigger the sixth mass extinction, and cause serious harm to the biosphere? And...
09.14.2022
Bonus: Boys and Oil with Taylor Brorby
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....
08.10.2022
Bonus: The Stench of Neoliberalism with Noam Chomsky
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...
07.06.2022
Skyrocketing Population and Carbon Dioxide: Watershed Moments Wrap-up
The astute listener will recognize the trends in population and greenhouse gas emissions over the course of our chronologically arranged episodes on watershed moments in history. Describing these trends in one word: growth. In two words: massive growth! And in...
06.29.2022
Buying and Dying: How Online Shopping Grew from a Small Weed Deal into a Global Environmental and Societal Disaster
Talk about cascading consequences: when a few nerds wanted to get high and orchestrated a small exchange of cannabis, they kicked off the age of ecommerce. Now that online shopping and the technology supporting it have ramped up commercialization and...
06.22.2022
Greed over Need: Why Neoliberalism Sucks and How It Sabotages Community
Free trade, private property, and limited government – these policies might seem well-intentioned and even benign. But when a couple of colluding, power-tripping, wealthy blockheads packaged them into a political system that would become known as neoliberalism, it was like...
06.15.2022
Chillin' and Killin': How Air Conditioning Has Altered Human Behavior and the Environment
For such tame technology, air conditioning really packs a punch when it comes to enabling environmental obscenities, indefensible infrastructure, and shortsighted settlement patterns. In the story of how A/C came to underpin human overshoot, you couldn't make up a better...
06.08.2022
Throwing Superman through a Cigarette Truck: The Insidious Manipulation of Advertising
Are shameless product placements keeping you from enjoying your movie-viewing experience? Have you ever felt assaulted by pop-up ads and sidebars while trying to read something on the internet? These are some of the less insidious advertising techniques deployed to...
06.01.2022
Highway to Hell: How Road Infrastructure Traps Us in an Unsustainable Nightmare
Don't you wish we could power daily life on road rage, frustration, and righteous indignation? If that were possible, the U.S. highway system would be the best investment of all time. As it stands, the unintended consequences (e.g., pollution, habitat...
05.25.2022
Hippos in the Bayou: Human Hubris and the Ecological Mayhem of Introduced Species
What kind of thinking leads to the unleashing of exotic species on unsuspecting ecosystems? Hint: it's certainly not systems thinking or critical thinking – in fact, thinking may not be involved at all! Learn about three charter members of the...
05.18.2022
The Stopwatch of Doom: How the Cult of Productivity Torpedoes Sustainability and Equity
Welcome to the dehumanizing world of scientific management, where business gurus and middle managers view workers as resources, and where a cult-like devotion to productivity has invaded almost all facets of daily life. From fairy tales about strapping steel workers...

What's Crazy Town about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Crazy Town episodes:

Escaping Globalism: Rebuilding the Local Economy One Pig Thyroid at a Time

Escaping Technologyism: Dreams of AI Sheep and the Deadliest Word in Film History

Escaping Speedism: How to Slow Down and Enjoy the Collapse

Escaping Urbanism: Green Acres, Climate Migration, and the End of the Megacity

Escaping Consumerism: Why Crocheted Codpieces Are the Perfect Antidote to Fast Fashion

Escaping Industrialism: How to Avoid Pancakes on a Stick and Other "Miracles" of the Industrial Age

Escape Routes: Let's Get the F**k out of Crazy Town

Crazy Town Season 6 Trailer

Bonus: Grief and Making Connections with LaUra Schmidt

Bonus: New Year's Dissolutions

Bonus: Vanilla Andreessen, Pygmy Marmosets, and Hi-Tech Delusions

Bonus: Bundyville and Stories that Need to Be Told with Leah Sottile

Bonus Riff: Infinite, Unlimited, Forever - Water in the Desert

Bonus: Holding the Fire - Indigenous Voices on the Great Unraveling

Bonus: Going Wild with Rae Wynn-Grant

Bonus: Bagdhad Bob Visits Climate Town

Bonus: Choose Your Own Adventure in the Great Unraveling

The Surest Paths to a Hard Collapse: The Delusional Doctrines of the Phalse Prophethood (Season Wrap-up)

The Elon Musk Episode about Elon Musk Brought to You by Elon Musk

How to Fast-Track Collapse: Manipulating the Masses While Massaging Megalomaniacs

How to Lose Friends and Demoralize People: The Science (sic!) of Near-Term Extinction

Prepping for the Apocalypse: Elites' Foolish Fantasies for Surviving a Collapse of Their Own Creation

Announcement: 2023 Crazy Town Hall

How Longtermism Became the Most Dangerous Philosophy You’ve Never Heard of

Sucking CO2 and Electrifying Everything: The Climate Movement's Desperate Dependence on Tenuous Technologies

How Ecomodernists Hijacked the Environmental Movement: Technotopian Bullshit and a Raging Case of God Complex.

Kinder, Gentler Colonialism: Bungling Billionaires and Their Arrogant Adventures in "Saving the World"

Hot, Flat, and Totally Phucking Wrong: The Perilous Platitudes of a Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Propagandist

How Boomer Politicians Found a Third Way to Phuck Over the Working Class

How to Become the Winningest Winner Who Wins: The Twisted Logic of the World’s Greatest CEO

How to Have Sex with Yourself: The Bizarre Cult of the Singularity

Why the Polycrisis Is a Statistical Anomaly: The Willful Delusions of the World’s Leading Pseudointellectual

What the Phuck Is a Phalse Prophet?

Bonus: Drawing Insights with Stuart McMillen

Bonus: An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen

Bonus: Human Rights and Multispecies Justice with Danielle Celermajer

Bonus: A Climate Scientist Goes to Jail with Peter Kalmus

Bonus: Tech Bros on Acid with Douglas Rushkoff

Bonus: Angry Birds and Hairbrained Humans with Mary Roach

Announcement: Power Podcast with Richard Heinberg

Bonus: Boys and Oil with Taylor Brorby

Bonus: The Stench of Neoliberalism with Noam Chomsky

Skyrocketing Population and Carbon Dioxide: Watershed Moments Wrap-up

Buying and Dying: How Online Shopping Grew from a Small Weed Deal into a Global Environmental and Societal Disaster

Greed over Need: Why Neoliberalism Sucks and How It Sabotages Community

Chillin' and Killin': How Air Conditioning Has Altered Human Behavior and the Environment

Throwing Superman through a Cigarette Truck: The Insidious Manipulation of Advertising

Highway to Hell: How Road Infrastructure Traps Us in an Unsustainable Nightmare

Hippos in the Bayou: Human Hubris and the Ecological Mayhem of Introduced Species

The Stopwatch of Doom: How the Cult of Productivity Torpedoes Sustainability and Equity