Escaping Escapism: What a Bizarre Rodent Ritual Can Teach Us About Navigating a World We Can't Really Escape

After a full season of trying to escape more than a dozen evil -isms (fun things like capitalism, industrialism, extremism, and otherism), Rob, Jason, and Asher come to one conclusion: there is no true escape -- at least not for those of us who want to help their communities collapse and re-emerge gracefully. Join the boys as they explore what the cult classic Groundhog Day has to teach us about navigating the endlessly insane world of modernity and reflect on key lessons and actionable steps we can all take to navigate the Great Unraveling of environmental and social systems.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Trailer for the cult classic Groundhog Day
• Article: "Harold Ramis didn't intend 'Groundhog Day' to be Buddhist, but it's a dharma classic" by Perry Garfinkel in Lion's Roar
• Article: "Was Modernity Inevitable?" by Tom Murphy in Do the Math
• Article: "Hospicing Modernity: Not a new idea" by Eliza Daley in Resilience
• Article: "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" by Donella Meadows, published by the Donella Meadows Project
• Multisolving Institute
• Book: A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century by Daniel R. Brooks and Salvatore J. Agosta, published by MIT Press

Transcript

Rob Dietz  
Hi, I'm Rob Dietz.

Jason Bradford  
I'm Jason Bradford.

Asher Miller  
And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where we do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

Melody Travers Allison  
Hi, this is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in season six, we're exploring escape routes, pathways that just might get us out of crazy town. In today's episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher are escaping escapism. And here's a quick warning. Sometimes this podcast uses swear words. Language! If you like what you're hearing, please let some friends know about Crazy Town. Now onto the show.

Rob Dietz  
Hey,Jason, hey Asher, let me take you guys back to the last millennium. Okay, we're gonna go all the way back to the year 1993. I was in college at the time. And my roommate was actually the manager of the college TV station.

Asher Miller  
You had a college TV station?

Rob Dietz  
We did. It piped in through cable to all the dorms.

Asher Miller  
Did you have the "boom goes the dynamite" guy as your sports caster? 

Rob Dietz  
I wish we did. Our listeners probably aren't aware of "Boom goes the dynamite guy," but I was essentially "boom goes the dynamite" guy as a movie reviewer. So my roommate was looking for somebody to do movie reviews as part of a show. And the cool thing was he got free tickets. So I'm like, "Yeah, I'll do it." So I got free tickets to two movies in 1993 that are reviewed for one of the programs. Now one of those movies was a real jem called "Aspen Extreme." You guys remember that one? 

Jason Bradford  
That one? That one - not on my radar.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, not on anyone's radar. It's about these two guys from Detroit who go to Aspen and become ski instructors. Okay, really like grade D schlock. Yeah, but the other one, which I had no expectations for, turned out to be pretty memorable, awesome. And it is now in the pantheon of greatest comedies of all time, which is Groundhog Day.

Asher Miller  
That is easily in my top five. It's on my Mount Rushmore of favorite films.

Rob Dietz  
Well, that means in your top four, then, not just top five.

Asher Miller  
That's true.

Rob Dietz  
You're talking of all movies or comedies?

Asher Miller  
It could be all movies, to be honest. I love that movie. And I'm glad you brought it up. Because I think it's a perfect parable for our season on escaping Crazy Town.

Jason Bradford  
Well, I think then, there may be a few viewers who haven't seen it. So let's summarize the film. And maybe we should start with even Groundhog Day as it might just be an American thing. We have so many so many people who listen.

Asher Miller  
US and Canada, maybe.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, but we have so many people from the southern hemisphere.

Rob Dietz  
I think we should explain what a groundhog is.

Asher Miller  
Yeah, I think we should explain what the ground is

Jason Bradford  
Yeah. Okay. So there's a there's this animal in North America that likes to bury itself in the ground. It's like a larger rodent like, and it lives under the ground. And then it will come out of the ground at a certain time of the year when in the mythologies that it knows when spring is coming. It's like in sense because it's got animal spirits or whatever.

Rob Dietz  
I mean, it's it's kind of real, isn't it? I mean, animals come out of hibernation.

Asher Miller  
It hibernates and then it comes out.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, so when it comes out of hibernation is sort of indicative of how long the winter is going to last or how soon spring is coming. So it started back in 1887. They would pull a woodchuck or groundhog (there's two names for these things) out of hibernation. And if it sees its shadow, then it's supposed to portend six more weeks of winter weather. If it doesn't, the rest of winter is supposed to be mild. I mean, that's stupid, because you just have this random cloudy day so I don't understand this

Jason Bradford  
Let's not  apply science. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, you get the idea. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, I loved it as a kid. We would track it, like, "Well, is winter over?"

Asher Miller  
Right.

Jason Bradford  
And what day is it again?

Asher Miller  
It takes place February 2

Jason Bradford  
Kind of mid winter actually.

Rob Dietz  
That period where it happens is actually halfway between the start of winter and the start of spring, right? So maybe there's real significance there, but that date has special importance in a lot of Indigenous cultures and religious traditions. And this one, I don't know where we got the research on this, but it kind of floors me because Christianity adopted Groundhog Day or that date as something called Candlemas, which is the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, whatever the hell that means. 

Asher Miller  
I don't know how that relates to the groundhog, what the groundhog has to do with it. Its' very confusing.

Asher Miller  
It's just a co-opted date -- they had to do come up with something. It was kind of a weak one.

Rob Dietz  
I'm not a religious guy, but we should not be purifying anything, okay? Let's just stay away from that kind of stuff. 

Asher Miller  
What kind of blessed virgins are you? Anyways, let's talk about the movie. So the movie is about this guy named Phil Connors. He's an egotistical jerk, basically, he's totally self-centered, cynical, kind of rude to people. His job is to be a TV weatherman for some local news channel. And he goes to this town that's famous for doing this grand tradition -- Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania -- to film the tradition of yanking this poor creature out of the ground and seeing if it has as a shadow, right? So he's supposed to do his weather bit, you know, for the day there, right. And he can't wait to get out of there. But through some mysterious cosmic event, and we still don't understand, he finds himself trapped in a time warp of some kind, where no matter what he does, he wakes up each morning, right back in Punxsutawney. And he has to relive Groundhog Day. So it takes him a while to figure this out. But over 10s of 1000s of days... In fact, there have been people who study the film and try to interpret -- well, he did this thing and had to take him this many days to perfect that...

Jason Bradford  
Like he became a concert pianist. Saxophone. Ice sculpting.

Asher Miller  
Exactly, he learned French fluently. So people try to figure out, calculate, well, how many days would it take you to perfect that, right? Basically, the running theory is it was about maybe 30 or 40 years that he was stuck in this thing where he was reliving the same fucking day over and over again, with the same interactions, with people showing up in the same spot at the same time. And he goes through these various stages of grappling with it. And that's what's comedic genius with this movie, just the different phases he goes through.

Jason Bradford  
It's like the stages of grief.

Asher Miller  
Yeah, almost.

Rob Dietz  
And of course, he's played perfectly by Bill Murray. I mean, a lot of people would say Ghostbusters is his top role, but I think we gotta go with Groundhog Day.

Asher Miller  
So he goes from trying to figure out ways to kill himself, you know, more and more elaborate ways of trying to do that. Trying to stay up all night to see if he could break the spell that way. He decides he's gonna learn everything you can about the interests of this woman who's a producer for the television station, that he wants to sleep with. She's not interested in him, so he decides he's going to try to figure out everything about her and try to impress her. So that's why he learns to play the piano, learns French, learns ice sculpting. And then he becomes a Good Samaritan. You know, he helps these old women with their car, which gets a flat tire.

Jason Bradford  
He knows what every single problem is going to be in this town, and he just runs around. 

Asher Miller  
He goes and saves a guy who's choking, gave him the Heimlich maneuver. He saves a kid who falls out of a tree, right? He doesn't know what else to do with himself, so he just goes through all these stages. At one point he becomes convinced that he's immortal. And he tries to tell Rita, this woman, that he's a god. Let me just play you that clip real fast. 

Rita  
I'm sorry. What was that again?

Phil Connors  
I'm a god.

Rita  
You're a god?

Phil Connors  
I'm a god. I'm not the god. I don't think.

Rita  
Because you survived a car wreck...

Server  
You folks ready to order?

Phil Connors  
I didn't just survive a wreck. I wasn't just blown up yesterday. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.

Rita  
Oh, really?

Phil Connors  
Every morning, I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal. 

Asher Miller  
So yeah, it goes through this whole kind of long journey in experience that like I said, it takes like 40 years. There's lots of speculation about what ends up breaking the spell. The spell is broken at the end when he wakes up in bed with Rita the next day.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, he sleeps in actually.

Asher Miller  
And he had first wanted just to sleep with her, but he actually winds up falling in love with her. And people have basically speculated that the lesson of this movie, the reason why the spell is finally broken after all that time is that he finally let go of his ego, right? That was driving everything for him. And finally caring about other people and for who they genuinely are. Now other people come up with other theories, right? This is what's great about the internet. So there's this character Ned Ryerson, who he went to high school with.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, annoying.

Asher Miller  
Annoying guy, and every day he has to experience this guy running up and being like,

Rob Dietz  
Phil, Phil Connors?

Asher Miller  
And Ned's thing is selling life insurance. He's trying to convince Phil to buy life insurance from him. And some people speculate that actually Ned Ryerson is satan. And getting him to purchase life insurance is actually trying to get him to sell his soul to the devil.

Rob Dietz  
That's amazing because satan is such a nerd. He's like, "No Don't tell me you don't remember me. I sure as heck fire remember you. Ned the head. 

Asher Miller  
Well, the devil is great at coming in disguise, right? And Phil actually did finally get life insurance at the very end of the film and lo and behold, you know, maybe that's the reason.

Rob Dietz  
I'm sorry. I'm still stuck on Ned Ryerson. He s probably one of my favorite side characters of all time. You know, he's like, "Watch the first step. It's a doozy." I don't know, he's scene stealing. And when I realized we were going to be talking about Groundhog Day, I, I looked up, of course, the trivia about the movie, and the very first thing on on the trivia page of IMDb, or of the actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who plays Ned Ryerson, is it said he was almost murdered twice in one week.

Asher Miller  
What in real life?

Rob Dietz  
In real life in Hartford, Connecticut by different people.

Asher Miller  
Are we sure these were not fans of the movie?

Rob Dietz  
I don't know, whatever, man. This is why I bring it up. -- it's crazy. He said, he admitted, "Well, that's unusual." The first instance occurred when he was in a pub with a woman and some other pub patron attacked the woman. So he got into a fight with that guy, and was held at gunpoint in the pub.

Asher Miller  
Steve's got balls on him.

Rob Dietz  
So later that week, he goes out with the same woman to a pizza joint that's near the pub, and he got stabbed. But the knife only partly penetrated his belt buckle. 

Asher Miller  
Okay, so here's the thing. What is clear here is that this woman paid hitmen to take him out. Yeah,

Rob Dietz  
I think what's clear is that there's some kind of death cult surrounding anybody associated with Groundhog Day.

Jason Bradford  
Well, there are various theories of the meaning of the film, how it's become a cult hit for Buddhists, Jews, Christians. It's seen as this allegory for purgatory, or the Buddhist belief in suffering and unattachment. And this film has become so popular that the Museum of Modern Art showed it as the opening night feature in a film series in 2003, called "The Hidden God: Film and Fate. And there was a fight between 35 critics about who would produce the catalog for the series. You know, they were working on the catalog for the film series and the 35 -- who would get to write about this film -- they all wanted this one as their film that was their special film.

Rob Dietz  
Can you imagine the makers of this movie, if they thought that that was going to happen? So the movie was directed by Harold Ramis. And he said that the key to Groundhog Day is "learning to have insight, courage, energy to make changes when you come to those moments, when you're about to make that same old, same old mistake again." And it's part of the quote, he said, "We face those changes every day, large and small, every single day. If you change one little thing, one little behavior, then everything might change." So maybe Harold Ramis was thinking, you know, this movie is going to be at the museum 30 years from now.

Asher Miller  
I think he's dismissed a lot of the reading that people have put into the film. He wasn't at least consciously setting out to tell a Buddhist story or an allegory about purgatory or whatever. But that's one of the reasons I love the film is there is a deep kind of story to it, and his struggle to find meaning and sense. But the reason I thought it was so great to talk about this movie, and I know we talked about it for a while here, is that it really is a great (to me) it's a great parable for our own experience here, thinking about how we escape Crazy Town, right? This guy couldn't escape, he couldn't figure out what it would take to escape. And it's odd because, in a sense, he does kind of escape. We don't know exactly what life is like after, right? But he does wake up on a new day at the end of the film. And so you can say look, the guy actually got out. It took a long time and I would say the theory I like the most is that it was about him letting go in order to do that. And I think that that is really a big thing for us when we reflect on this season. This is our wrap-up episode for this season, where we try to think about all the different -isms in Crazy Town that we'd like to escape, and the bottom line is that maybe there is no escaping.

Jason Bradford  
Maybe there is no escape.

Rob Dietz  
That's why we have to escape escapism.

Jason Bradford  
Okay, well let's let's review this season real quick -- a broad review. We attempted to frame this season around cultural materialism, the anthropological theory of Marvin Harris dealing with infrastructure, sort of the material conditions of society; structure, its rules and norms; and then superstructure, the mythologies and belief systems. And we tried to then group our episodes emphasizing infrastructure first, and then working towards the others. So for example, infrastructure we had early shows on industrialism and consumerism and urbanism, speedism, technologyism, and globalism.

Rob Dietz  
Like the whole water that we all swim in, in modern times.

Jason Bradford  
Then we followed that with more about structure and rules like growthism, capitalism, and imperialism. And then finally ones that were more about the superstructure. And that was like individualism, humanocentrism, extremism and otherism.

Rob Dietz  
We really tried to identify these visions or stories or examples where we could escape from those -isms. And some were a lot easier to do than others, right? But oftentimes, it felt like some of the things we were proposing to do -- they fit multiple different ones of them. You know, like, if you're gonna escape capitalism and consumerism, you might do some of the same things. But that's not bad. Maybe that helps us identify the low hanging fruit that we can try first.

Asher Miller  
So this is our reflection episode. So I want to start with the questions, "What was fun about the season? What was hard about the season? What was surprising about the season?" And maybe I'll start, so I think I laughed the most was probably when we did our episode on globalism. We were talking about the Ever Given and trying to get unstuck.

Rob Dietz  
The big cargo ship that was stuck in the Suez Canal.

Jason Bradford  
Was that the joke where we wanted to get the lube out?

Asher Miller  
Yeah, I have to say, that made me laugh pretty hard.

Rob Dietz  
Shows our juvenile sense of humor, which hopefully, at least some of our listeners share.

Asher Miller  
Probably the most difficult was talking about the history of Nauru. You know, I did a deep dive on that. And, and on the one hand, I feel like it really is so emblematic of everything. That is the expression of imperialism. Goddamn, is that that depressing! And then, you know, maybe what was surprising: let's be honest was you, Jason, confessing to us that you had a girlfriend when we did the episode on individualism. I was like, "What is going on?"

Asher Miller  
Jason is a true podcaster.

Asher Miller  
He committed to the bit.

Rob Dietz  
He's gonna do the research that's required to get the point across.

Asher Miller  
Thank god he didn't submit for reimbursement to PCI, you know, whatever it was, $10 a month, to actually be your girlfriend. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, my wife wouldn't let me upgrade my relationship status, so I didn't, and so I kept it clean. And anyway, she still reminds me of my old girlfriend once in a while when she wants to kind of jab at me, but of course, we're doing fine. We're doing fine.

Rob Dietz  
Well, I heard that -- I think her name was Sarah. I heard she quit birding, so you could just put her behind you. 

Asher Miller  
Now she's got a new boyfriend who's into crypto. Crypto and NFTs, Jason.

Jason Bradford  
Good for her good for her. I really enjoyed the ways that we included pop culture in our episodes. I had a lot of fun with that. The most fun for me was -- I was doing the research on the show on urbanism and discovered that the same dude, Paul Henning, was behind "Green Acres," "Beverly Hillbillies," and "Petticoat Junction." I did not know that. And so I thought, "Boy, these seem like they're kind of, you know, similar and stuff." And it's like, "Oh, my god, it's one dude." So that was pretty fun. The hardest episode for me was otherism, perhaps also extremism. Doing those, I just got this feeling -- I still feel this way -- sort of the inevitability of this sort of really awful mass delusion and mob mentality that I see sweeping across societies and wrenching and more and more violent ways as the great unraveling unfolds. And this is kind of brutal to accept, and you know, when is it going to hit home? We're going to hear about it, but will it hit home? When's it going to come to my doorstep, will it come to my doorstep? The surprising thing, to me is watching myself go through processing this information and these discussions with everybody, with you three, or you two, the three of us.

Rob Dietz  
You have lost your ability to count. That's part of the symptoms.

Jason Bradford  
Well, it's a little bit of yeah, you get flooded. You get overwhelmed, you know, but what's interesting is how well I'm able to compartmentalize and dissociate. Like, I can go from this to doing very normal things and be a normal human being that gets along with other people in society.

Asher Miller  
Which is, by the way, let me just point out, you call that normal. And the whole thing that we're talking about here is how actually abnormal all of that stuff is.

Jason Bradford  
Well, right. That's what's so bizarre is like, we absorb and process this hard information. And you get this feeling that everything around us is horrifically wrong. And yet we go about the day and we function. And it's weird. It's a weird feeling. And perhaps we don't cope perfectly, but I do try to strike this balance, where I'm not deadened and just kind of participating blindly, but I'm choosing where to put my efforts and letting that be enough. And I guess the thing is, if I'm constantly like, if I'm wearing a sandwich board or wearing tinfoil hats, I wouldn't be able to stay in a lot of these supportive, wonderful relationships that I have. And so I'm not dropping out and giving up, which if I was always carrying this with me all the time and sort of radiating these feelings, I don't know if that's a good thing to do.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, you're reminding me of our very first episode right about the activist Ken dressing up in a Santa suit. Like if if you feel it as harshly as he does, then it becomes really difficult to go through daily life. I didn't know you were going to talk about Paul Henning and doing those various programs. It reminded me of something from a previous season where -- remember we talked about the sculptor Gutzon Borglum? He put the frickin Confederate guys on the side of Stone Mountain in Atlanta, and he also did this sculpture that's near my backyard. It's been taken down, but it was of the newspaperman, who was a racist. And he didn't want women to have the right to vote. And I was like, This guy's following me around. He's a dead sculptor, and I got to look at his crap. Yeah, that whole one person having an effect like that. Okay, that's kind of dark. So I'll switch this back to the light for mine. What I found funny, I gotta hand it to you, Jason. The sponsor ad reads at the end of our episodes really got me laughing. A little bit of behind the scenes of how we produce this: after we record we, we give the audio to Melody and she puts together a rough cut. And then I listen to it and give her feedback and we finalize the episode. But almost every time at the end, you're doing your reads, I just started laughing. And I think maybe you know this -- this goes back to what you were saying about compartmentalizing. You can get a side gig as an ad man.

Rob Dietz  
Oh, thank you. I have fun doing this.

Rob Dietz  
As far as what I found the hardest -- sometimes when the three of us are here, and we're talking, we kind of know what we're going to talk about. But we also have plenty of surprises for each other. And we had a recent episode on humanocentrism and Asher, I didn't know you were going to talk about visiting somebody's house where they had all this taxidermy, and they had an elephant head on the wall. And it really, it's a very visual thing for me. It reminded me of the episode we did before where people were abusing elephants and it like, it's such a majestic animal. And I don't know, it just hits me in the heart when people are like, "Oh, this is just something to be shot and put on a wall" to say I am greater than this.

Asher Miller  
There are some things about human behavior that are still so profoundly perplexing to me. And that is one of them. Yeah, you know, like I try and largely fail to have empathy for other people and decisions that they make. But I try in the regard to those things like big game trophy hunting.

Rob Dietz  
It's easier to have empathy for the elephant. So that stuff's hard. Surprising to me was, so far this season, our most popular episode is escaping capitalism.

Asher Miller  
That surprises you?

Rob Dietz  
It surprises me because I just didn't think coming from our generation, where it was basically capitalism versus communism, communism is evil. Capitalism, you equate to freedom, democracy. I felt like maybe some of that culture just lingers in a real hard way. But maybe it's like a little miniature sign that people are ready for a different economic system and are willing to explore the limits to growth and equitable distribution of wealth and income and the kinds of policies that we need. So it's an encouraging thing. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised, because I thought that it's been done a lot. In other words, there's a lot of people that are anti-capitalist now. I feel it's sort of common. So I wouldn't think whenever an episode's about something so common would be popular and maybe that our audience would be geared towards stuff that they don't hear elsewhere.


Yeah, I don't know. That's weird, because that's two very different takes on why it's surprising to us. I gotta get in your crowd and find these anti-capitalists.

Jason Bradford  
A lot of the young people, I tell you. Maybe we have more young people in our audience than we know about. Okay, so now we're gonna go over a bit of like, what -isms did we miss or didn't have a chance to cover. And I'll start, and this is actually something that we sort of didn't cover, but also did in a sense, and that is modernism, or, alternatively, we call it modernity. So when you look up the term, modernism, in Wikipedia or wherever, you get a bunch of stuff about the arts and cultural expressions, think of the superstructure. So that's sort of that superstructure level. We often use the term modernity to also include the dominant infrastructure and structure of our society. And in some cases, you add an "-ity" to a word or an "-ism," it's a very different meaning. But it turns out for modernity and modernism, they really aren't that different, so we can use them interchangeably. So modernity was the background for almost all the -isms of the season and a topic we covered a great deal last season. If you remember the Phalse Prophet taxonomy I did, my most important paper. I had I had a hypothesized clade of the ultramodernist species.

Rob Dietz  
Is it bad that I still don't know what a clade is?

Jason Bradford  
A clade is a is a natural grouping of sort of terminal taxa that share a common ancestor and diverge from that common ancestor. Anyway.

Asher Miller  
So there's a whole group of...

Rob Dietz  
Is it bad that I still don't know what a clade is?

Asher Miller  
There's a whole group of phalse prophet species that come from a common ancestor of around modernists?

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, so they all share this strong belief in modernism as opposed to someone like Steve Bannon, who's a traditionalist. So the modernists clade was the most -- there's more species in that clade, and there's a lot of individuals there. It's the dominant clade in society right now. So, anyway, we've also published a few essays on resilience.org about modernity by Tom Murphy, a friend of ours, so you want to look at those if you want to see more. So to summarize, modernity is a belief system about progress and the sort of faith in humanity's ability, using logic, reason, experimentation, to shape the environment with the aid of science technology, and it gives people the permission to throw out old ways that hold us back and replace them with what's perceived as a new and obviously then better. And so, this has led us into this evolution of the infrastructure that supports industrialism, globalism, capitalism, urbanism, structural elements around nationalism, private property laws, trade agreements, banking regulations, and all these superstructural changes such as growthism and individualism.

Asher Miller  
You said modernity and modernism there -- they can be kind of interchangeable. But if you think of modernism is more maybe the belief system. What's interesting about what you just said around this idea that it's about having permission to throw out old ideas -- a lot of what we talk about as the the ways of escaping Crazy Town are actually probably viewed in the kind of dominant culture as a throwback, and completely antithetical not just to the high gadgetry, complexity, high energy form of modernity, it's also the idea of modernism, that everything's supposed to be progressing in a certain way. So to be going back to land, for example, to be repairing shit, to be using less, to make your own broom by hand, you know, that's so antithetical to this belief system.

Jason Bradford  
Yes. And that's what's so hard about it. And at the same time, I like the fact that we know that we don't burn witches anymore, that we've got rid of a lot of the...

Asher Miller  
Because we don't make brooms anymore.

Jason Bradford  
And so there's an actually, you know, there's some nuance potential here. And there's a book by Vanessa Andreotti called "Hospicing Modernity." And it covers a lot of the same ground here, as well as this nuance. And our friend Nate Hagens had a great interview with her recently on the Great Simplification podcast. And what she talks about in modernity is, it emphasizes this sort of separation of people from what she calls Earth metabolism, being out of relationship with living processes. And that's a conversation we actually got into in our individualism episode.

Rob Dietz  
And let's be real. I mean, if you're talking about threads that have run throughout the entire run of this podcast, we've been talking about high energy modernity, we've been talking about technology. And certainly one of the repairs that we've emphasized over and over is that lack of connection between ourselves and in the places we inhabit. And that's, that's what this is all about. So yeah, it was kind of hard to think, oh, let's just do an episode on that, when we've woven it into every episode.

Asher Miller  
Now, there is another topic, and I shared this with you guys. I was debating whether or not we would do a whole episode on it because I've been feeling over the course of us doing this season, I've been feeling more and more, that this is an -ism that I'm seeing in the world right now that I find deeply concerning, which is, I guess, for lack of a better term, I call it absolutism. And it's this idea and we've talked about it before in different ways on this podcast where people kind of fall into these false binaries, just false camps. You know, we've talked about it when people debate if it's overpopulation or overconsumption, right? We talked about as some people believe that we can completely transition the energy system to renewable energy and continue on the path that we're on, while other people feel like renewable energy is a complete boondoggle, and there's nothing really in between, right? What we're seeing now -- and I don't want to get into the whole debate over what's happening in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza and the war with them, as I just I find it very concerning -- I've seen people become more and more rigidly polarized in their positions on this because obviously it's a very emotionally charged issue. It's horrific, the situation. And it feels like nuance gets lost in situations like that. And people fall into these camps. So we've talked about it, we talked about it with otherism and extremism where people try to find sense of security and certainty. We don't like to live in a place of uncertainty and dissonance, we'll fall to answers or fall into certain communities to belong to, because we find safety there. We find a coherence, so it's not dissonant for us anymore. And so I understand the reasons why people might fall into that. But what we see with situations like this is that the truth, quote/unquote, almost always lies somewhere between these absolutist position. But it's so hard to hold that nuance, that subtlety. You know, if I could quit my job tomorrow, and I was like, "What am I going to do with myself?" I'd be tempted to write a book about the end of nuance, because that's what I feel like we're seeing, and I'm just so deeply worried that, and I agree with a lot of the positions, for example, with folks on the left, and a lot of students you see on campus that are very mindful about capitalism, they're very mindful about colonization. But to reduce a complex problem, like what we're seeing right now, and the very, very complex history of this place where there are multiple peoples who have legitimate and certainly in their view, legitimate rights to claim Indigeneity, for example, to this land, to just break it down to this group are settlers in this group are -- they colonize -- this group are oppressors, this group is the oppressed. And I just use that as one example of absolutism that we're seeing everywhere in society, we see the political polarization, Democrats are evil, Republicans are evil, whatever it is. 

Rob Dietz  
I thought we covered this pretty well in the capitalism episode where it's easier to take a stance: just be anti-capitalist. Let's replace that system. But we made a distinction between the sort of Wall Street over-the-top corporate capitalism versus a main street kind of small mom-and-pop outfits and wanting to have the freedom to try to run an enterprise, and your community is very different. And you have to you have to go into that nuance that you're talking about Asher. So I appreciate that. In thinking about what we covered and what we missed. I had an interesting experience, kind of about three quarters of the way through the season. I happen to have a correspondence with Gus Speth, who's one of our heroes here in Crazy Town -- huge, influential environmentalist. And we've gotten the chance to meet him before he used to chair President Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality way back in the day, he was a founder and president of several big nonprofits and Dean of the Yale School of Forestry. Anyway, impressive character, and really thoughtful.

Jason Bradford  
For like, 50 years, he's been saying the same things we've been saying, Groundhog Day.

Rob Dietz  
And way better. But he sent me this list of the 24 evil -isms. And it was interesting, because there was a lot of -- it coincided with a lot of what we picked for this season, things like anthropocentrism or humanocentrism, as we called it. Consumerism, growthism, capitalism, individualism, imperialism, but he had some other ones too that we missed, although a lot of the ones we missed, I think we kind of were folding into others, like, you know, if you take sexism and antisemitism, you could put that in the otherism category. And it's funny, one of his was dualism, which I think, Asher, ties really nicely to your absolutism, and I was thinking about how we talk about this all the time. It's not black and white. It's gray it's not yes or no. It's maybe.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, we don't really know enough. There's a lot of uncertainty.

Rob Dietz  
The one that I think we really missed, guys, is escaping embolism. Rolling around in all this dark shit all the time, okay, is like having a brain bleed.

Jason Bradford  
I'm glad we missed that one.

Asher Miller  
Okay, yikes.

Rob Dietz  
Well, let's turn to some ah-has and takeaways, major reflections that each of us could come up with on this season. And one of the first things that I thought of just thinking of the season as a whole -- escape routes -- is the idea of escape as a concept. We did not actually advocate escaping a whole hell of a lot because if you think about what escaping is, it is taking yourself out of a situation, which is pretty selfish when you get down to it. And we didn't advocate going out there and getting your Kaczynski cabin on your own piece of land and becoming your own homesteading hermit. We were kind of like, "Stay in the game, do things to combat the systems rather than just escaping." 

Jason Bradford  
But did we make a mistake? There are days, yeah, certain days I'm like, "Man, I want to dig a hole. You know, but I don't want to do it by myself."

Rob Dietz  
A grave you mean?

Jason Bradford  
Like a Hobbitville, right? You know, I'm filing for these Hobbitvilles, right? You know, you think of all these derechos and tornadoes going on? And would we be better off if we just kind of lived a life kind of semi-underground like the groundhog?

Rob Dietz  
Right, we'll pull you out on February 2nd.

Jason Bradford  
So I think in community, I really don't mind promoting the notion that hey, the Hutterites do this or these nutty hippie communes try this stuff, maybe. It's impossible to do it on your own like the Ted Kaczynski thing or the hermit and no, but boy, you can get a group of people and work together and find some way to have a livelihood in a place.

Rob Dietz  
You'd better be careful. There's going to be a pilgrimage over to our podcast studio and they're gonna be like, "Jason, where's that community?"

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, yeah, I know, I. And that's the thing. It's like, it would be a lot easier to be doing all this weird stuff. Like you're saying, Asher, you know, like, if you weren't the only one trying to do it. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, it's a tricky one. Because on the one hand, we don't want people dropping out. We need prosocial, wiser, humble, thoughtful, nuanced people in the game, especially to serve as -- sometimes I think of it as a population of pre-inoculated people, who could serve to aid others as they actually face what we're talking about here with the great unraveling. So we want people to stay in the game. At the same time, it's important to have people who are leading the way. They're at the edge out there, who are folks that we could turn to, for models of doing things in a different way, which is a form -- you can call it escaping, but maybe it's not a full escape. It's one foot out, at least, it's like, it's beginning to build the other while you're still in the current. And that's, of course, a very difficult thing to navigate in your daily life, in your emotional life, in your mental space. But yeah, I think we definitely did land in a place of like, "We're not talking about a form of escape -- that's a pretty simple thing to do, which gets to one of the takeaways I have, and it's like a really, in some ways, a really dumb sort of obvious one. But in some ways, all this just comes back down to the fear of death, right? Like, so many of these -isms, are a manifestation of the fear of that. You know, all the things that we're trying to do to perpetuate, to grow, to progress, to distract ourselves with things -- a lot of it is just driven by this inability to come to terms with our own mortality, to reckon with what is the reason we're here, the purpose of life, and the meaning of it. But I think it's hard for people who don't have a faith-based view of what life is, for example, and I think a lot of our listeners may relate to that. I'm not a person who's driven by faith here, so I think that's a pervasive underlying struggle. We've talked about this. We did a whole episode on that, which might be one of my favorite episodes we've ever done, and maybe one of the most important ones, because I think in some ways, if we can reckon with that, process that a little bit and then let go, you know, it harkens back a bit to what maybe the lesson is of Groundhog Day.

Rob Dietz  
So are you suggesting that we should all take part in the Purification of the Blessed Virgin?

Asher Miller  
I do it on a weekly basis, this whole thing about once a year... 

Rob Dietz  
That came out of my mouth, but I have no idea what that's all about. So just realize that's coming from an ignorant fool.

Asher Miller  
To our Catholic friends, we apologize.

Jason Bradford  
You know, there was a lot of a lot of the criticism of modernity was about that, Asher, that replacing the idea of the spiritual realm and god, and the humans then set themselves up with secularization and the scientific method and the idea that you have all this knowledge, as now the gods, as we no longer need that God.

Asher Miller  
Remember the episode we did on Stuart Brand, right? He was like, "Yes, we are now God."

Jason Bradford  
So this is what this is. What's interesting is that now we're getting to the AI, a moment in history where this is now the next. This is our God.

Asher Miller  
We just gained its wisdom by just basically scouring the internet --stupid things that we've written over the millennia.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, like teenagers on Reddit, or "The Onion" is now treated as equal to "Time." 

Asher Miller  
That's our source of wisdom.

Rob Dietz  
It truly threatens to supercharge all this shit that we talk about.

Jason Bradford  
And the accelerationists believe it must. The ecomodernist types that know about the bad trends related to modernity are just believing that technology is going to be some sort of savior. So it is a very, very strange moment to be in. And it all seems to be coming to a head.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, I think one of the other things that struck me on this season, and it's an important thing to remind yourself of, is that we're a bunch of hypocrites over here. And I think most people trying to live in this sort of balance that we've been talking about, like stay in the game, but realize what's really going on. And it's like, you can't help but having some hypocrisy. So an example of this is, we did that episode on escaping technologyism. So you know, you want to get away from technology. But what are we doing here? We're using technology to get our message out to as wide an audience as we can. Whoever that audience is. They're listening on some high-tech device somewhere. We just heard from somebody who listens, somebody named Ynez who works in Ecuador, growing cacao, sustainably, and I was amazed. I'm like, "That's so cool." This person likes what we're doing, and we're from totally different parts of the world, different kinds of jobs. And it's amazing to be able to reach out to somebody like that and be able to hear back. And they're not here at the table with us, you know, able to jump in the conversation. But you still get a little bit of connection that way. At the same time, we're saying we've got to escape doing this, but it's like we're sort of stuck in it for the time being, that's the best way that we can come up with to get these ideas more widespread, effective, right?

Jason Bradford  
You have to participate.

Asher Miller  
Yeah, it's interesting, because it comes back to the whole idea of attachment. So maybe we try to use, we operate within these -isms, as benevolent and light-footed a way as we possibly can. And there's just ways we can be mindful about it, but not be too attached to needing this technology. Which obviously work. Uh, you were able to go to Squirrels. You found your way to Squirrels, and you had lunch with somebody who paid for your lunch? Because you left your phone at home? Yeah. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Lewis and Clark has got nothing on you.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, yeah. Who was that guy that got stuck in Antarctica?

Asher Miller  
Are you talking about Shackleton? Yeah, those guys? Yeah, I mean pikers compared to you. I want to talk about escaping cultural materialism. We oriented the entire season around Marvin Harris's theory of cultural materialism. If anyone's listening to this episode, I would guess you've listened to a previous one, so we don't necessarily need to go ad nauseam and to describe what it is. But you know, his theory of infrastructure, structure, and superstructure -- we use that as a rubric in the sense of looking at these -isms. And we particularly emphasize the idea that infrastructure is the driver, you know, and in our defense, I think most people tend to believe that the world is constructed, starting first from our belief systems and our values, and then goes out from there. So we build the world, the way that we envision the change you want to see, and I think the emphasis on infrastructure is not so much to say it all comes from infrastructure, and the infrastructure is the only place to intervene. But it's just recognizing that the thing that we take for granted changes how we actually see the world and what we think is possible.

Jason Bradford  
I think that's important. I also the way I've tried to soften it is when you read, it gets critiqued often as like, "Well, that's deterministic." But I would say that the way you look at it, it's weighing probabilities. So think of it more as infrastructure puts weights on the probability...

Asher Miller  
Infrastructure weighs a lot.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, we've already said that it outweighs biomass, right? 

Jason Bradford  
But it's going to shift the probabilities towards certain outcomes. And if you see the same infrastructure occur in different locations, you know, like the agricultural revolution independently occurred in different parts of the world. And guess what it led to? Monumental architecture and imperialism in many of these cases. And so this is what they mean. It doesn't always mean that any agriculturalist is going to turn into an imperialist, but it means you're weighing the probability that it provides the opportunity for that to happen through things like concentration of stored food and wealth and hierarchy and specialization. So people have hackles raised when they think about determinism, but it's really about weighing probabilities.

Asher Miller  
Well, I think that to me, cultural materialism has been a useful construct. When I first really grappled with the idea of particularly the role of infrastructure, it was a profound aha for me and very useful. But it doesn't mean talking about absolutism, it doesn't mean that we're saying, see the world only through this one prism, and so there's a question about, what other theories of change or ways of interpreting the world and understanding how we move through it and how we escape what we're currently in do you think that that we might want to learn from?

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, well, on that front, I had a pretty cool exchange with Mike Packard, who is friend of the show, former PCI intern, and now a man of the world working on conservation. And the exchange was about a sort of a Marvin Harris versus Donella Meadows, which have...

Asher Miller  
Like a prize fight?

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, a boxing match. Okay. No, he was talking about their ideas. So if you look at the the Marvin Harris idea of, "Hey, change the infrastructure, or maybe that's a key way into making a whole worldview change in society." If you go back and read Donella Meadows's ways to intervene in a system where she's trying to talk about how do you make change? What are the big leverage points? Her number one on that list is that you have to change people's mindsets, their paradigms. So it's kind of that superstructure, turning the Marvin Harrison direction. Again, credit to Mike for thinking of that idea. Because, you know, it had really escaped my attention. But it's really good to think about, and I think we got there on a number of times. It's never a, this is the one way in, right? There's multiple ways in if you want to make changes, and some people are communicators, some people are going to go out and change the soil or unpave the concrete zone, or hammer on that infrastructure. And we've also mentioned Beth Sawin, who was a student of Donella Meadows, and she runs the Multisolving Institute. And she has an interesting perspective on this, which is: you have to start with a vision. Hopefully, it's a deeply positive vision of what you want society to be. So that's kind of superstructure. But when you have that, people go off and do various different things. And you can have this multisolving approach where, you know, Jason, you're gonna be growing the stuff. Yeah, me, I'm gonna be making the poop jokes. Asher is gonna be brooding. But you combine those three things and you got something. But you know, it's like trying to find different ways to address what's wrong and have them align into something that...

Asher Miller  
Like fractals, you know, operating fractals, where there's a coherence around them, we're operating at different levels, you know, and simple rules are applied to all those different levels. 

Jason Bradford  
You know, poop jokes, by the way, aren't my favorite, but they're a strong number two.

Rob Dietz  
Wow, that's...

Jason Bradford  
Sorry about that.

Asher Miller  
You just had to do that.

Jason Bradford  
I just had to, I had to get that in. It's the last episode of the season, and I've been holding that for a long time.

Asher Miller  
Oh my God!

Rob Dietz  
Let's just flush this conversation.

Asher Miller  
I'm leaving. Those are my footsteps walking away.

Jerry Seinfeld  
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be.

Jerry Seinfeld  
If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

Rob Dietz  
If we can't really escape, and we have to face that we're sort of stuck in the times and the situation that we're given, and we have a certain infrastructure that surrounds us, what is it that we ought to do? And one of the things that comes up, I think, among the three of us over and over is just don't be fatalistic about this. Sure, things are bad. Sure, there's tragedy in the world, but to fall prey to cynicism and fatalism, it's not going to help you and your own mental state of mind. And you're not going to be the life of the party, that's for sure.

Asher Miller  
I think people turn to it because it is a form of escape. Yeah. So I think what we're saying is escape that escape. Escape that temptation.

Rob Dietz  
I think there are some helpful ways to think about it. One is to look into stoic philosophy. Basically get to the understanding of the things you cannot control. And you're gonna have to stop fretting about those. It's not easy. I fall prey to this very often. And I think about it a lot, you know, I get really upset by certain things that happen around me that I have zero control over them, and my tendency would be, "Why don't they know what I know? Why don't they think like I think? Why don't they do what I want them to do?" And there's no forcing that. So you have to let that go and focus on the things that you can control. And I think this ties into Joanna Macy's vision of what she calls active hope, right? I mean, we could all just fall into fatalism and just hope things are gonna go alright and not deal. But active hope is just that -- it's being active, it's understanding that there is beauty, there is goodness here, and that we can act on behalf of that. And we people, we humans are part of this world. We belong to it, we're in the ecosystem, and we have a part to play. So go play it.

Jason Bradford  
Not trying to do everything, right, because it's impossible to do everything. But what feels natural for you. What would you find compelling? Give it a try. We need a huge variety of people trialing models, or just getting their own skills together, their own perspectives -- there's not one thing to do, there's no silver bullet, this is a polycrisis. And we need so many different kinds of responses from all different places. And I just want people to find their role in that. And maybe they even let go the idea of success and whatever term that might be. Emphasize the process of you becoming something new, like Bill Murray did, in Groundhog Day.

Jason Bradford  
Your your role might change over and over again. You don't have to do the same thing for the whole... 

Jason Bradford  
You're gonna be an ice sculptor, and then you're gonna be a classic pianist. You're gonna have 40 years to perfect all these skills.

Asher Miller  
It feels like there's some themes here in what we're talking about. There's the embracing and accepting the uncertainty of where we are. It's a letting go a little bit in terms of our attachment to outcomes, which is hard to do. Because not only is our own safety and the security of our loved ones at stake, we see a lot of pain and suffering in the world that we don't want to exist. And it's not to say to become heartless, but it's back to what we're talking about with the fear of death, maybe the Buddhist approach to unattachment. It's not giving up on living, it's just about accepting things that we can't control and that there are forces that are bigger than us. But if we operate with coherence, like a coherent set of values, you can see all of these openings and opportunities for places to engage. And that's even true for those of us who are straddling two worlds, right? We're straddling the current world of modernity and capitalism and all the -isms that we're trying to escape from, but we can have one foot out, trying to build the alternative. And maybe we could put out a challenge to our listeners and challenge ourselves to make a commitment to learn one skill to develop an expertise or knowledge of something that might be helpful, either in the transition out of what we're in, or the creation of what comes after that. So yeah, just wondering if there's for each of us, if there's something that we might make a commitment to.

Jason Bradford  
It's a little insight into your brain, always trying to add a next step.

Jason Bradford  
Like me, I made the commitment 20-something years ago to learning how to grow stuff. I didn't know how to do anything related really to gardening or farming. And I just made a commitment to it. And I'm trying to stop at that too, because I always have these ideas like, "Well, if I grow this, then I can process it and I can turn it into something fermented and yummy. This can turn into this wonderful high-value product." I just don't want to I don't want to do that.

Jason Bradford  
And I'm trying to say no, no, no. I want to find someone who will do something with this, right?

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. For me the idea of mastering some skill, I would want it to be some cool thing like an Indigenous master used to do. Like they would find the perfect branch off of a yew tree with a curve in it and carve it into a bow. I think that would be really amazing. But I worry about my actual craftsmanship, if you don't have the person who knows how to do it teaching you. So one of the things that I've started on that I think I can do is intervening in messed-up situations. So it takes a toll sometimes when I've done this, but when the pandemic hit and the streets of Portland got kind of chaotic, a lot of times I would see stuff happening that's like, well, that's not cool. Like that person seems to be attacking that person. And I could just ignore it. But I would intervene and try to do something about it. Or somebody's on some kind of drug, looks like they're going downhill fast. You could walk away and that person might end up dead, right? So I think there's this, this thing that happened where I was like, "I'm just going to intervene. And I'm going to, I'm going to see if I can stop this from turning violent or turning bad." And I'm not saying I've mastered that or I'm skillful at it. But I've started on that path. And I think I'd like to get more skillful. When we've talked to people and talked in episodes about mutual aid, one of the key ideas is the cavalry ain't coming, so figure out how you can be of assistance and do so safely.

Asher Miller  
Otherwise, you'll end up like your buddy, Ned, stabbed in a bar.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah. Stay away from women name Henley, I think is what her name was.

Asher Miller  
That's a good rule of thumb.

Rob Dietz  
If you've learned one thing this season, it's stay away from people named Henley.

Asher Miller  
Well, I've been dipping my toes in growing food. It's something my wife has done for a really long time. We had a really great garden before we moved to Oregon and started living under trees. But joining your farm club, Jason. Right now, I'm just following orders. You basically boss me around with your one good arm, telling me what to do? I'm good at following orders. 

Jason Bradford  
Good for you. Yeah, you're learning a lot of skills fast. I'm very proud of you.

Asher Miller  
For your own soul too. I mean, playing live music with friends and singing. that's...

Asher Miller  
There's something else that I picked up and then put down and picked up and put down. But maybe I will make a redoubled commitment to it. And that is actually learning how to play the guitar well enough to actually play it. And the reason is, because it's one of those technologies, especially the acoustic guitar, we joked before about technologies that were post carbon ready. So much of our entertainment now comes through devices, you know, produced by multimillion production from far away. But you know, in the future, creating art, bringing joy to people or feeling or whatever it is, you know, creative pursuits, I think, are really key to keep people sane, to help them be connected. So maybe that's something.

Jason Bradford  
if you become a mediocre guitarist, I'll be your mediocre vocalist. But I think we need a neo-luddite movement of some kind. Okay, so we're kind of talking about that. So if you look at the Luddites...

Asher Miller  
So we need to burn down factories?

Jason Bradford  
I'm not sure about that. But like we're saying, like, let modernity do its thing, I guess, but as it's failing, have these skills that are pre modern in some ways.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, like when you're in the market for real estate, just think about whittling your next house, instead of buying it

Jason Bradford  
Or building out of cob or something.

Rob Dietz  
 Or what did you say? Dig a hole in the ground?

Jason Bradford  
Yes, yeah. Figure out your local -- What are the best places to make a Hobbit town?

Asher Miller  
But actually, when you think about some of the structures that were built, pre industrial revolution, unbelievable.

Jason Bradford  
Incredible. Unbelievable. The pyramids...

Asher Miller  
Cathedrals...

Rob Dietz  
Taos Pueblo.

Asher Miller  
I think there is something there about where we talked about Kris de Decker and low tech stuff, which really straddles that line between high energy modernity stuff and being so anti technology that you're...

Asher Miller  
Digging sticks...

Rob Dietz  
Nothing, nothing beyond a digging stick and a fig leaf. Those are the two technologies.

Asher Miller  
I think our listeners are probably, if they're listening to us, and they actually like what we have to say, they're probably fairly good at this already, but strengthening our ability to not conform to what's happening out there. We're constantly being put in front of us these absolutist propositions. Belong to this camp or that camp or new technologies being shoved down our throats, like AI is going to become ubiquitous, and it's gonna be hard to avoid it. And even as we're using some of these things, to be nonconformist in our use of them, to be judicious in our use of these things in our participation in the current system, recognizing that this is either a short-lived phenomenon that nobody's aware of, like everyone's at a party that's about to end, right? Or is kind of a form of collective insanity, which is hard to do, but trying to keep that lens on the world while you're still moving through it. And to your point, I think, Rob, which is like, there are times to actually speak up and speak out and be an active nonconformist. There's two things that are sending us down a really bad path. And that might even be doing direct action, in opposition to things that we see as just utterly devastating. So you know, think about who you run with and who you spend time with, what groups you belong to, in a sense, that's a form of conforming, but to think that you're going to do it all on your own is, I think asking too much of ourselves. And we -- it's part of why we at Post Carbon Institute have launched Resilience Plus, which is kind of a membership area of resilience dot org that we really hope to grow into a community. And it's a weird, you can call it hypocrisy, you can call it living in that bizarre space between, but we're using technology to connect people so that they don't feel alone, and they can maybe connect with other nonconformists who are struggling to try to figure out where they can make a difference in the system and how to escape. Because the truth is trying to do this on your own is, I think, an impossible task.

Rob Dietz  
I think it's a really key concluding point of the season is Jason, you were saying some pretty eloquent things earlier. It's a first I mean, it's taken -- this is our sixth season. You were talking about how do you deal with your own feelings as you consider all this heavy stuff. And yet you gotta compartmentalize so that you can have relationships and go about your life. And I think one of the very, very key things to do if you are contemplating that it's 125 degrees in the city, and the place is so politically polarized, and there's all this misinformation, and we can't burn anymore fossil fuel -- all that -- you need to find some people that you can discuss these things with. It's one of the therapeutic things that happens right here in the studio with the three of us is that we've shared these ideas, we're not perfectly in sync on all of them. But we can discuss with humor and with honesty, and in some way we can test the waters on different ideas and responses. And it's really important to find people like that not only who you can talk to, but think about who would you want to be with when things get kind of shaky? How can you find some folks to ride out some storms? And you know, it's not easy, but I think a really important thing is building community.

Asher Miller  
Are you sure you want to be asking that question right now? Because when I started thinking about it, and I'm looking at the two of you. I'm not sure.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, well, we each have a dog who was mentioned. So there's a companion. And while we're talking about communities, I do want to express really heartfelt appreciations to the people that helped us with this podcast. Producer Melody, we've got help from Cassady doing research this season, had volunteer help from Tyson also on research. And then Clara helps us communicate the episodes, get it out to the public. Taylor has been instrumental for many seasons now and helping us with transcripts.

Asher Miller  
She has to actually listen and correct the transcripts, our stupid... all my "ums" and "likes" and "you knows."

Rob Dietz  
And of course, we have to give some thanks to the listeners and the people who tune in and who send us feedback. And I also want to note people who have helped us in past seasons, too. We've just had a lot of community support and really appreciate it.

Jason Bradford  
Love the listener feedback.

Asher Miller  
And of course, we have to thank all the people out there -- the individuals and institutions that give us fodder for this.

Rob Dietz  
Yes, thanks to all you people and your othering and your capitalist nightmares.

Asher Miller  
I mean, if there's one thing I could feel confident will grow is fodder for this podcast. 

Rob Dietz  
That's got to be our next one. It's all about the growth. How do we grow?

Asher Miller  
Be Well, everybody, talk to you later.

Melody Travers Allison  
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.

Jason Bradford  
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