A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out of Love with Modernity

Recovering technology booster Tom Murphy visits Crazy Town to discuss his journey from shooting lasers at the moon, to trying to "solve" the energy predicament, to falling out of love with modernity itself. Asher, Jason, Rob, and Tom discuss the roots and short-lived nature of modernity, which has not only shaped the world we inhabit but conquered our very imaginations. They reminisce about aspects of hi-tech society that have already fallen away in its hubristic march towards mastering (or should we say undermining?) nature. They close by contemplating what it means to detach from humanocentric delusions of grandeur and make peace with living with one foot in and one foot out of the modern world. Originally recorded on 3/4/25.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• "Acceptance and Agency at the End of Modernity," a live online Resilience event on April 1, 2025 featuring Vanessa Andreotti and Dougald Hine
• Tom Murphy's Do the Math

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 shooting lasers at the moon reminds us of a simpler time. 

Melody Allison  
Hi, this is producer Melody Allison. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town where Jason, Rob, and Asher tackle crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we're all deluding ourselves. Here's a quick warning: sometimes this podcast uses swear words (Language!). Now on to the show.

Asher Miller  
Okay, guys, before we get to the conversation we're gonna have today, can we just do a little like nostalgia tour? Would that be okay with you? 

Jason Bradford  
That's all I want to think about is the past. 

Asher Miller  
I want to take you back to the 80s. 

Jason Bradford  
Yes. 

Rob Dietz  
That's my decade. 

Asher Miller  
Mid to late 80s. Back in the days where I had like a real long mullet. 

Jason Bradford  
You were beautiful, I'm sure.

Asher Miller  
 It was a mane of hair. It was incredible. 

Jason Bradford  
It's still amazing. 

Asher Miller  
But, you know, bangs up top. 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, did you wear leg warmers and a jean jacket?

Asher Miller  
Yes, I did. And I would watch Victoria Principal Jazzercise videos.

Jason Bradford  
Who did the Maniac video?

Asher Miller  
Oh, I don't remember. Any case, but I'm glad you're bringing up music. This is what I wanted to get to because I was prepping the other day for an event that we're going to be doing on April 1. 

Jason Bradford  
Oh, I thought you were like, getting your beans and grains together, or something like that.

Asher Miller  
No, no, not that kind of prepping. Prepping for this event. So I'm going to be hosting a conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Dougald Hine. We'll be talking about navigating the end of modernity, right? And I was reflecting on that word modernity, and for some reason, you know what, came to my mind? You won't be able to get this ever.

Rob Dietz  
No, no one can get inside your mind other than you. You're just gonna have to reveal it. 

Asher Miller  
The album Quadrophenia.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, The Who. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah. 

Jason Bradford  
I mean, I don't know it super well, but I'd recognize tons of songs, I'm sure, right away.

Rob Dietz  
 But just time out for a sec. You said you were going back to the 80s, I'm pretty sure that was pre 80s. 

Asher Miller  
No, I'm talking about me listening to it.  Okay.  I've gone through phases with music, right? So I had my little Who phase, and The Who, like some other bands, like to do these rock operas. So Quadrophenia was basically a rock opera. The whole album was like one story. In fact, they made it into movie later. Quadrophenia was basically about these guys, you know, these teenagers, and they were part of this group called the Mods, like mod for modern. And they liked to dress up in these, like fancy suits. They called them zoot suits. And they were right around on Vespas. For some reason, I don't know, that album came to mind, so I had to go down memory lane listen to it, which is a lot of fun. But it made me think of something I wanted to ask you guys. Which is, albums, you know, I used to listen to albums. I would get these albums. I would buy them. I would save up my money, and I'd go buy these albums. You know, in opening up the album, reading the liner notes, sitting there, listening to it, like repeatedly listening to albums over and over and over again, you know? My boys, the way they listen to music is, I don't even know if they've ever -- I'm sure they've listened to an album all the way through, but they don't experience music as an album, right? They just experience it as a sort of instantaneous thing on their phone, you know? So maybe think of elements of modernity that have actually already left us, right? They're extinct already. And I know vinyl is not totally extinct. 

Jason Bradford  
It's coming back. 

Asher Miller  
But that experience feels like it's largely extinct, you know? So curious what you guys, what piece of modernity of your previous life that's now gone would you say you miss?

Rob Dietz  
That's a really interesting question. It's like modernity technology is evolving so fast that some of it's just already gone. Even though you would still classify it as being a modern thing. Well, I'm gonna stick on the music scene for a little bit. Not not specifically the music, but the way that that you tune your radio. So do you guys remember how car stereos used to have these mechanical buttons, and you would actually chunk it in, you would push it in, and the little dial would move to your presets. I just love that -- That was fancy. That was incredible -- tactile, mechanical feel of some old stuff. And in fact, I have this problem, right? Like, you know those sinks that you put your hands in, and they're, like motion sensors, or somehow they know your hand is there? Like they don't recognize me. I don't know. I don't think I put off a stong electrical field.

Asher Miller  
You're a ghost, man. 

Jason Bradford  
Oh, I know what you're talking about. For washing your hands.

Rob Dietz  
Another example would be all these push button things, like a microwave or a stove.

Asher Miller  
Wait, those don't work for you either? They don't recognize you?

Rob Dietz  
A lot of times they don't. So I'm just like, can I just get an old mechanical dial? They work so well.

Asher Miller  
This is why you use an Easy Bake Oven, isn't it? 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, yeah. I just eat everything raw. There's no point in trying to cook.

Asher Miller  
There you go. What about you? Jason. 

Jason Bradford  
Well, okay. Since we're on food, on Easy Bake, Chuck E. Cheese pizza time theaters. Do you remember those? Now, there was one not far from my house in Cupertino, California. They experimented with this Chuck E. Cheese, a different business model. And it was the best because you paid one fee to get in, and all the video games were just open, and all the pizza was just laid out for you. So you just, you show up with like your 10 bucks, or whatever. 

Asher Miller  
You were there all day? 

Jason Bradford  
And you could have unlimited games, unlimited pizza, and unlimited, like, animatronic shows.

Rob Dietz  
Unlimited brain rot when you're leaving. 

Jason Bradford  
As an 11-year-old, do you have any idea how great that was?

Asher Miller  
So that was your version of TikTok, basically. It was the unlimited -- 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah. Unbelieveable. I'd just go there for hours. 

Asher Miller  
Interesting. Well, thank you for going down memory lane. 

Jason Bradford  
Unlimited sodas, too.

Asher Miller  
Of course they had sodas. Okay, well, thanks for going down memory lane with me. But I would want to have actually a more serious conversation about modernity, if we can. And I thought we should bring in somebody who's been thinking about this a lot more than I have, I would say, and that's our good friend, Tom Murphy. So what do you guys think about us seeing if Tom would would join us? 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, we're gonna bring him in. 

Jason Bradford  
Let's go. 

Rob Dietz  
And I'm gonna introduce Tom, because he is our favorite astrophysicist. 

Asher Miller  
How many astrophysicists do even you know? 

Rob Dietz  
Everybody needs a favorite astrophysicist. Tom's a professor emeritus from the University of California, San Diego. I don't know that I can get this right, but he used to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of these mirrors that were left on the moon by Apollo astronauts. 

Asher Miller  
All of these things are lies. I mean, there's so many things you just said didn't actually happen, but okay, I'll just pretend.

Rob Dietz  
And I genuinely love hanging around Tom as a friend. Asher, you and I got to spend some time at his house, and Tom took us out kayaking. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, that was fun. 

Rob Dietz  
And I think I was even paddling a kayak that Tom had built, which is incredible. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, and you did drown or anything. It was amazing.

Rob Dietz  
I don't know, Asher, you were probably doing some work, but Tom took me back to his workshop and showed me the project that he kind of does in his spare time, where he's the Co-inventor of this aircraft detector. So the idea is that telescopes are shooting lasers into the sky, and you don't want to hit an airplane that's passing by.  You'd get a hole through the airplane?  Yeah, just cut it right in half. So Tom's got this thing that he made. He's like soldering parts on a computer. I don't know. I can't even use the terminology right.

Asher Miller  
We should talk about this because Elon Musk's DOGE will come around and just cancel that contract. 

Rob Dietz  
Right. But anyway, after spending time in that world, you know, what's really interesting is Tom's turn toward the limits to growth. So anyway, let's get you in here Tom and find out what's what. 

Tom Murphy  
Sure, just send me the link and I'll show up. 

Jason Bradford  
Oh my gosh. He's here.

Asher Miller  
It's a miracle. 

Jason Bradford  
You happened to be free. 

Rob Dietz  
Thanks for joining us, Tom. 

Tom Murphy  
Sure. 

Jason Bradford  
So we want to throw this question that we've been asking ourselves: Extinct modernity, right? So I had Chuck E Cheese pizza time theater. Rob and Asher, I don't even remember their stuff. It was stupid. But anything that happened in the past that's now extinct that's part of modernity. What's your favorite?

Tom Murphy  
Well, I really liked the discussion that you had. And you know, at first, I thought things like the space shuttle and the Concord represented a vision of where we thought we were going. And in fact, I put the space shuttle on the front of my textbook. And I didn't ever explicitly mention this, but in my mind is, where the hell does it think it's going? You know, it just sort of seemed like we all knew what was happening. I miss the the extinct threat of nuclear war.

Jason Bradford  
I'm glad it's extinct. I didn't even know that. 

Asher Miller  
It's coming back, Tom. It's coming back. 

Tom Murphy  
I know, but didn't we have this period where that was just no longer on the radar.

Jason Bradford  
Right. Ohhh. You miss when we thought it was extinct?

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, I misinterpreted that too. I thought we got real dark there for a second.

Asher Miller  
Like I love the duck and cover drills that we used to do.

Tom Murphy  
Somewhat intentionally, you know, playing both sides there. But you know the radio button discussion, you know, still, when you design a GUI, which I've done a number of times, there's one choice for radio button. You know, because you can only select one of the boxes at a time, and that still harkens back to that mechanical, you know, push this thing and the dial actually zips to where you want it to go. And tha reminded me of, well, dialing is a thing that we still talk about on the phone. But there's no dial anymore, which is great, because, you know, if you had a number with a lot of eights and nines in it, you're waiting forever. 

Rob Dietz  
It was terrible. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, your friends never called you. 

Rob Dietz  
This about the delayed gratification when you were making a 1-800 call to order whatever the album, Asher, that you were buying off a TV  

Asher Miller  
From Time Life. 

Rob Dietz  
You had to really want that album.

Tom Murphy  
Zeros are the worst. And how many of our youth know? That zeros were terrible. So you know an area code, like 212, whoa. That was a special -- Yeah. So anyway, but it reminded me of observatories because I cut my teeth, in a sense, at Palomar Observatory on the 200 inch telescope, which is just a marvelous machine. It's really a piece of art. It's crafted. It's lovingly made. It was made during the depression years, and things slowed down a lot, but that meant that they took their time. Well, and they just did things differently in any case. And then you go to a telescope like the Keck telescope, you know, which I also worked at in Hawaii, which is a modern 10-meter telescope, and it just seems rickety. You know, the stair, just the stairs that you're walking on, the hand rail doesn't feel very substantial. It's all just sort of cutting corners. But the thing that reminded me of the Palomar was the radio button, because Palomar had this great thing called the Phantom. The Phantom was this mechanical analog to the telescope that was, you know, recognizably telescope shaped and it sat in a little sort of cabinet. And it mimicked the actions of the telescope. So, it moved as the telescope did, just mechanically through whatever moved the telescope, moved the Phantom. But the reason they had the Phantom was they needed to know where to point the dome. And the dome was -- Basically, the Phantom had two wires on either side of it. And if it touched one wire, it would say, "Oh, we need to move the dome this way to keep it aligned. "So, it was a very mechanical, ingenious solution. And, you know, since then, they've replaced it with barcode scanners. So, you know, they have barcodes all around the periphery and a little scanner so they always know where it is. And I don't know what the price accumulates to during a night as it beeps and, you know, adds up the items, but you know, I really missed that age when you had this really clever mechanical approach. And now it's replaced with more computerized things that can fail. And when they fail, it's hard. Like cars, also. I miss the car that I grew up, starting when I was 16 and started to drive, was a Chevy 1974, Chevy pickup truck, with a six-cylinder inline engine. And I am not exaggerating when I say that you could stand in the engine compartment with your feet on the ground next to the engine on either side, because you had that much room. And now you look at a car, and there are about 12 things in between you and the pavement. If you shot a laser, you know, you would hit 12 things. No matter where you go, it's just so completely packed, there's no standing in it. And there was just a simplicity. You could point to everything and say, "That's what this does, that's what this does," and you could fix it. Now, when something breaks, it's kind of irreparable. Planned obsolescence. Yes. All in the name of efficiency. 

Asher Miller  
Well, so Tom I wanted to invite you into a conversation with us before we actually do this event that we're going to be hosting with Vanessa and Dougald because I know you've been on a bit of a journey around modernity and it's been interesting as someone who's been so steeped in it, I would say, to see you go through that journey a little bit. But before we get to that, maybe, I'd be curious how you define modernity, like if somebody asked you. Because I would think for a lot of people, they don't even know what we mean when we question it.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, at some level, I kind of like the ambiguity of the term, because it doesn't have baggage yet associated with it. And so, people are more willing to entertain the idea that modernity has a time limit, and that it's temporary. And there are a lot of things about modern life that people don't like and wouldn't mind seeing going. So, if you say civilization, people have a much greater attachment to that word, because it feels like the opposite is barbarism and violence, and that's a false kind of dichotomy. But the point is, modernity doesn't have that kind of emotional attachment, and so it can mean many things. It's obviously how we live today. It's our culture, it's fossil fuels, it's high energy, it's high material use, it's science, it's technology. And these things have been with us for, you know, centuries, but not millennia. But I would actually, in my mind, I extend modernity to, I mean, there are different ways to think of it, but it's also an attitude, it's an approach, it's a culture. And it's a culture of believing in mastery of we are the pinnacle species, the evolutionary end point, if you will. And this is all kind of a mythology, a cultural mythology, and I borrow heavily from Daniel Quinn's Ishmael here, where our mythology is that the world belongs to us, and you know, we were made to rule it and conquer it and master it. And once you have that attitude, which is pretty old -- that's older than modernity -- thousands of years. 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, that's older than modernity. 

Tom Murphy  
That is the central shift that paved the way for modernity because we just got better and better at enacting that attitude. But the attitude is thousands of years old, not millions like humans, or hundreds of thousands like Homo sapiens. And so, it's relatively new, and certainly in ecological evolutionary timescales, it's a flash. Even 10,000 years is a flash. So the agricultural revolution was one of conquering. It was one of control. It was deciding what should live and what should die, plants and animals. And it's all for us. It belongs to us -- Fences, animal enslavement, all kinds of things came with it. And then we just got better and better at it, and perfected the art of control. And science really helped that technology, really helped that fossil fuels, really accelerated it so, you know, but I don't see those elements as major turning points. The turning point was, I think, a much earlier one that really set the stage for modernity. And we've been that recognizable culture ever since. We don't identify culturally with, say, hunter gatherers, but we sure identify with a Mesopotamian. You know, we understand what they were after and how they approached the world. So that, to me is the big definer of modernity is, it's our attitude of how we comport ourselves on this planet.

Rob Dietz  
So Tom, I don't want to like ascribe some attribute to you, but you know you're talking about the, you know, how we enacted this attitude of mastery and this art of control, but you were kind of ensconced in an arena that was really playing out that story, right? I mean, you're in an astrophysics department. You're doing things that are, you know, super, super high tech. I mean, honestly, I mean, I'm still, I find myself impressed, right? Like, I'm like, wow, you built this thing. Or, you know, how do you know how to do that? You know, I remember asking you that in your workshop. And you just talked about tinkering a lot with things as a kid, and just being really interested in it. Being steeped and at a place like that, in the university system, and kind of being in that culture in a big way, how did you get out of that? What's the journey to, you know, to saying the kinds of things that you just said, where you're recognizing this human supremacy in this culture that maybe won't work. One does not logically follow the other. So I'm curious, how did you get there? 

Tom Murphy  
I mean, I was definitely fully invested. I mean, I was all in as a member of modernity, doing exactly what you would hope a member of modernity would do. You know, shooting lasers at the moon. That's everybody's dream, right? So I think the way I see the journey is that I was always interested in understanding the path that we're on and trying to imagine where things are going. I grew up with Star Trek in the next generation as a teenager, and really loved it. And I think, you know, I never liked the original Star Trek because it just seemed too campy and nerdy. And I was not a real nerd kid. I only learned to do that later. But I really liked Spock because my family was so illogical. The guy was a beacon of logic, and so I really aspired to have that mental discipline and so forth. And so I think that was really influential. And I really loved the sort of fantasy world of, you know, the prime directive and all this, you know, enlightened future that we could embrace. And, you know, this was our path. And I was not questioning that really. It was exciting. The space shuttle was exciting. Here's, you know, our path into the stars and so forth. But, you know, as a kid, and now I associate those ideas with juvenile fantasy, right? And it's almost surprising to me to see the other people who have become adults and are still, you know, still there.

Asher Miller  
Including the richest among us. 

Tom Murphy  
Absoletely. I mean, the biggest blind spot you can imagine. So, I think I was always interested in the future, and so I knew that energy was an important part of how we get things done. I mean, as a physicist, I clearly understood energy, and sort of physics owns energy, to some extent. And so, I was interested in teaching a course my first year at UC San Diego on energy in the environment. It's a general education course for non-science majors. And I thought, I'll pick this one. You know, I had a menu of what courses would you like to teach, and so nobody had claimed that one. And then I thought I would learn a lot. And I did. You know, I already knew that solar was so abundant that it's almost a no brainer that, of course, we'd just switch to solar when fossil fuels go away and it helps the CO2 problem and everything. So, you know, done, right? A simple premise and a simplistic, stripped down, decontextualized world has very simple solutions. And so it just seemed pretty obvious. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's hard. And I did my own solar setup. And I started small with one panel and a battery and a charge controller. And then I said, what about this other kind of panel, and this other kind of battery, and this other kind of charge controller, and let me just sort of get my feel for this. And I put just my television on it at first, and then I got another panel and another battery and put the living room lights on it. And then I thought, you know what'd be really cool is to run my refrigerator off of this. So more panels and more battery, and, you know. And it basically was an off grid system. And I was in a condo at the time, and, you know, had the landlord's permission to put a hole through the wall for an extension cord. And so I was just really kind of crude, but I learned so much, and the energy became very personal because I worked so hard to get it. And so watching TV, and I learned this was back in, you know, in a cathode ray tube, and it turns out that the darker the movie, the less energy it takes. Because you're lighting up the electron beam les. And that's not true now with, you know, LCD TVs where you have a backlight that's just full on, and then you have things to suppress the light coming through, but there's some variance on that. But still, I learned so much about living with your own energy, and the difficulties of off grid storage, intermittent power supplies, what do storms mean, what do, you know, periods of bad weather mean? But my approach was, let's technology our way out of this. You know, we're smart and clever people, and this is what we do. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized how much of a kind of House of Cards this whole business was and how there were some glaring weak spots. You know, growth itself is just a non-starter for long term success. But even at steady state, you can't maintain a steady state at billions of humans living a modern lifestyle. It's just a temporary stunt. So yeah, the more I realized -- And it's sort of came to closing exits, one after the other, where I just always assumed that we would figure it out. And now I've gotten to the point where I realize how naive that vision is because, you know, we construct mental models in our brains that -- Our brains are limited, by the way. I mean, they're organs. They're evolved to do certain things, and they do certain things pretty well, and they give us flexibility, but they're limited. They have, you know, only so much capacity, and something like an evolved ecology is so complicated and so many interconnections and dependencies and relationships that we barely scratch the surface of understanding. Our brains are just incapable of the kind of wisdom that an ecology expresses that's formed over deep time. And we're just simply incapable. And I think of it kind of like the ravenous bug bladder beast from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide. That's so stupid that if you to evade it, all you have to do is cover your eyes, because it figures if you can't see it, it can't see you, right? But we're almost as bad as that. Because if an ecology can't see its way into our brain, we assume it doesn't exist. And there are a lot of things that don't fit into our brains, into our mental models. Most things don't. And so we have this bias toward our models, toward the map and not the territory, so that we assume if it doesn't fit in our brain, it might as well not exist. And you'll see this all the time with, I don't see why not, iss a common response to why we won't go to Mars, or why we won't keep modernity going forever. I don't see why not. It's like, yes, that's precisely the problem, you know, but thanks for admitting it. That's very big of you and an important step to realize that you don't see why not, and that's okay. We're not expected to see everything. 

Asher Miller  
I think you're right that that is actually progress for someone to say, "I don't see why not." Because a lot of what we see, we had a conversation not too long ago talking about this series of articles that the New York Times published on the future of the food system. And one of the things we talked about was that you start from these assumptions of how things must be, and then you try to figure out how those assumptions are going to get fulfilled, right? So, the assumption is people are going to continue to want to live in the desert. We're going to still need to consume the food the way that we do. It's like, of course, more people in the future are going to be consuming more energy. Like, that's just obvious. And so we just have to figure out how to how to solve that problem, versus questioning whether or not that assumption is even true in the first place. 

Tom Murphy  
Right. Yeah. I mean, the world doesn't bend itself to our will, which is why we've thought we had to conquer, you know, when the pests come in to eat our row crops. We have to, you know, how dare they? That's ours. We have to do something about it. And so, yeah, the universe is really not on board with just making sure that our schemes work. And you know, it's going to fight back. 

Jason Bradford  
One of the things that I have trouble with continually is knowing all this and then still living in modernity and wondering, you know, is there a way where I can start practicing or trialing post modernity ways of life.And it becomes really hard to do. I often joke that I'm sorry I didn't grow up as a Romanian peasant because I was spending time with Chuck E Cheese pizza time theater instead of, you know, learning how to do all the things that someone as a kid would just normally get up and do. And so, when you see people from these other cultures, and I know Rob has a fan, he's like watching some of these YouTubes of these people that like, know how to live out in nature and have these incredible skill sets. And what do I do? I teach tennis. I teach kids how to hit a fuzzy yellow ball with a graphene racket and and poly strings on a concrete court with painted lines. I love doing it. It's a lot of fun. But I almost wish, like, could these parents pay me to teach their kids to do something else? But it's not just not part of our culture, right? It's like, it's easy money to teach people how to play tennis, but if you say, I'm going to try to teach us and learn how to live without all the trappings of modernity. You know, it's just like, good luck. That's not much of a viable business, I don't think. Or maybe it is. Maybe I should try that. But I don't think I'd get very much interest, honestly. So what do you do? What do you do? Like, you know, as somebody who grew up in all this and knows the BS, but you don't have the skill set, and the vast majority of people around you aren't even interested.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, I think I look at the longer game here, because I don't think I am personally going to exit modernity. I mean, I'm steeped in it. It's all I know. I don't have the skill sets, or, most importantly, the community, because it's not an individualistic approach. We're not the rugged individuals we pretend to be. We're a species that's, you know, contextualized to group survival and working cooperatively within that fairly small band. So that's very unlikely to ever be my reality. And I don't stress about it too much. I don't think that by next week I have to be out. You know, it's not going to happen, and modernity took a while to build. It's not going to necessarily take 10,000 years that it took to get to this point to unwind, but it can take generations. And it will take generations. I mean, some things will go away fast, and then some things will, you know, cling for for maybe centuries, recognizable elements of modernity. And each child that's born into the conditions that exist at that time will just accept those conditions as normal and get on with life. We're very plastic and adaptable, not necessarily as individuals, but as a species because we're just sort of almost blank slates, but with some decent instincts that are honed by evolution to work together, to be cooperative, to be observant, to be creative in how we adapt to a changing situation. And so that's, I think, going to be the story. And the people listening to this don't have to stress about not getting it right and propagating this machine. But the thing that I try to do most is just, I'm no longer in love with modernity, and talk of it as an abusive partner that said nice things to me occasionally and brought me flowers, but really, you know, at the cost of a sixth mass extinction. And so, there's kind of this dark side to it that I shouldn't really embrace. And so, I just don't care to propagate all of those trappings. And I can dial it down. I don't have to stop it, but I can be part of the off ramp by just sort of not playing the game the same way, not being a consumer, not supporting fantasies politically. 

Jason Bradford  
The problem is, it's hard not to be a consumer. I mean, Asher gets pissed off every time he's like, "Oh God, I've gotta order something from Amazon." And he's just mad. He's just mad because he's like, I don't have another -- What choice do I have? And I kind of feel like, every once in a while, my family says, "Can you please go pick something up at Safeway?" And I'm just like, "Argh." And then they know, like, I'm gonna break out in hives when I walk in and see the mylar balloons, you know, right in the front because of whatever holiday is coming up, and the stacks of soda cans. So it jars me. Like you're saying, it's like, you know, oh, do I have to go back into this abusive relationship here and just dip my toe in it continually. And that's kind of what it feels like. Because I sort of see through what it took to fill this store up with, you know, all this junk, all this cargo, and I'm mad sometimes because I feel like everybody around me is in this cargo cult, and I don't want to be there all the time. So I guess, you know, you find your ways to sort of stay out as much as you can, is what you're saying, even though you you can't help it a little bit. Because, like you say, we're really a social species, and so without -- Like I said, if I had 50 kids that wanted to learn something besides tennis, but I don't. So what do I do? Right?

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, well, I know what you do, Jason. I know you go look at birds. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, I do, yeah.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, exactly. And that's fantastic, because they don't care about tennis, and they don't care about what's in Safeway, yeah. And if you ask them about what's going on in, you know, Trump world right now, they don't care. And there's a wisdom there. And I'm not being flippant about the word wisdom here because a wisdom that took millions upon millions of years to establish itself and establish itself as survivable, as you know, a presence, has gotten a lot of things right. And the fact that the birds, and I see newts around my place and love them to bits, and I really take a lesson from the fact that they're just living by the laws of life. So what we've done is we've created an artificial world out of our brains. And I think of modernity as a big brain fart. You know? And I might be a little hesitant to use such foul language on any other podcast, but you guys, you know, I've listened to your show. So yeah. I mean, it's just this concoction, this fabrication that's not grounded and doesn't have the same kind of wisdom. It's just sort of a look what I can do stunt. No hands. Wow, look at that. The animals and the plants don't go in for all that, and they're better for it. And so we ought to actually take something from that and realize that we can't just make it all up on our heads and expect it to work.

Rob Dietz  
Jason, you would be one of those bowerbirds that is pulling mylar balloons and plastic spoons and other stuff to build your nest.

Jason Bradford  
I sometimes wish I was a bird because then I could just fly around and I could land in that tree, and I could take my little beak into the lichen and moss and find little bugs and, you know, make a little nest and yeah. You know, they just know how to live in that forest or whatever, or stick their bill in the ground and pick out things. I can't even see what they're eating. I know they're finding food. You know, who does that around here are the orioles when they make their nest. It really bums me out.

Asher Miller  
Well, they're just, you know, they're, working with what's in the environment. Yeah, the thing that I appreciate what you said Tom just about not beating yourself up for participating in modernity, but also maybe practicing some sort of detachment, I guess a little bit. I feel batted back and forth between feeling trapped, frankly, in the reality that we currently live in, when I know, to the degree that I do the consequences of it. will you end already? You know, like I have sometimes this sort of this impatience though. I don't want it to end, and certainly not end badly or quickly. I also, I think there are moments where I deeply appreciate the benefits we've had from modernity and like wanting to appreciate it as much as I possibly can if I recognize that it's fleeting. 

Jason Bradford  
Like Quadrophenia. 

Asher Miller  
No, like we're able to have this conversation and not be in the same room together. It would be much more lovely, frankly, to be in a room together. But I am fortunate in my work to have conversations on a weekly basis with people all around the world that I would have never gone to meet or learn from. That's an absolute gift of modernity. So . . . 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, or when you have a tooth problem, you go to a dentist. You don't have to, like, knock it out with a rock, you know? That's a pretty sweet deal in modernity.

Asher Miller  
That's true. But the other thing that I really struggle with is the fact that we're actually on an acceleration path with modernity still, or at least the technological elements of modernity. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, AI stuff. 

Asher Miller  
And in fact, I feel like the people, you mentioned that maybe modernity as a concept is more it's less loaded for people as something to question than something like civilization, right? Because that feels more threatening to them. And I see that. I think people are increasingly feeling the ill effects of how modernity manifests itself in their lives now. I mean, you look at, we talked about the food system earlier, you look at just the deeply unhealthy nature of the modern food system and what it's doing to people's bodies, I think. But also communications technology, the internet, social media, these kinds of things. I think that might actually be the fact that it's accelerating so much, and it's so ubiquitous, and it's sort of conquered us on some level. That might be the actual thing that has people be more receptive to a message of modernity coming to an end. They may not recognize that it's going to come to an end, whether we fucking like it or not. But, they may be more open to thinking about it ending because they're seeing that it's not benefiting them as much. I don't know.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, I do think a lot of people are aware that things aren't quite right, and that things are maybe going a bit sideways, and the dream is not being fulfilled. I believe that, you know, 75 years ago, it was fairly widespread sense that we're aiming for, you know, ever better world. We're going to craft it. We finally have the tools to craft it the way we want. We have the energy and the power, and it hasn't gone so well. And it's also, by the way, initiating a sixth mass extinction, which is pretty serious, because a heavy primate that is high maintenance and, you know, hungry, is not going to fare well in a six mass extinction scenario. Short of that, you said that like it or not, modernity is going to end. And that's absolutely true. And even just from a materials point of view. I mean, you know, we've taken the low hanging fruit in just a few centuries, and most of it in the last 50 years. I mean, the pace is extreme. And so, you can't really keep this pace up for even 1,000 years, 10,000 years. So modernity will starve itself of metals on that time frame. And the other thing that I recognize is that, you know, the materials that we use in modernity are not of this ecological world. We dig them out of the ground, and they're not part of the circulation in the community of life that we use. In fact, 96% of our mass comes from air and water, reconstituted, reorganized. But the, you know, the oxygen, the carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, is all from air and water. And then only 4%, you know, a lot of calcium, phosphorus --

Jason Bradford  
Potassium. 

Tom Murphy  
Potassium, yeah, are in common circulation in community of life. But not copper, not magnesium. Well, little, tiny bit of magnesium. But, you know, titanium.

Asher Miller  
Well, you know, trying to put that into our bodies as much as possible, Tom.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, aluminum, you know, these are weird, exotic things that we're spewing. You know, maybe not intentionally, maybe not, you know, immediately, but if it comes out of the ground, it ends up in the environment, You know, on the Millennium timescale that's just out there. And the community of life doesn't know what to do with it. And sometimes it's innocuous, but more often than not, it actually causes problems. And so not only are we going to starve ourselves of these metals if we tried to continue modernity, but it's contributing that their use and dispersal contribute to sickness and ailing in the physical world, biophysical world. So yeah, we don't really have a choice to continue it. It's not a long-term viable mode of living on this planet. I think you know in terms of giving it up or letting it go, a little bit of detachment goes a long way. That's something that can be a little bit contagious in the sense that we take cues from each other in our culture, and we're a social species. And so, if a number of us react to this sense that things aren't going according to the dream, and that the dream was never realistic, maybe more detachment among more people will have pretty serious consequences and will kind of get out in front. All the video, you know, TikTok and whatever is part of the phenomenon that detaches us from ourselves, and that is having consequences in terms of fertility. And so we're going to see this big demographic shift in this second half, or maybe even the first half of the century. We'll see possibly a peak of global population, and it's going to be big news. And how we react to that is going to be fascinating. I mean, some people are saying we just need to make more babies. Elon Musk is on like, is on the job, man. He's trying to make as many babies as he can right now. That's right. And, you know, JD Vance, similar. I mean, a lot of these folks are like, we need to become baby factories. But I don't think it's gonna work, and so  But then some people will embrace it and say, "You know what? This is actually -- maybe we can make this into a good thing." And so that's kind of where I am on it.

Rob Dietz  
So Tom, I really appreciate the way you framed the idea that modernity is a temporary stunt. You know, it's like a Red Bull mountain biker coming down a cliff, doing a double back flip without touching the handlebars, or whatever. You know, it's like, "Wow, look what we can do."

Tom Murphy  
Or the show "Jackass" comes to mind. 

Rob Dietz  
Well especially when I'm talking it does. I actually can't believe that I'm not talking about the other thing. You called it a big brain fart. That's more up my alley, but anyway, this this idea of a temporary stunt, and then falling out of love with temporary stunts like, you know, eventually kind of saying, yeah that's fine that I could do that, but did I really need to, you know, and at what cost? And so, you know, I've heard your recommendation is try to detach yourself from that. But what I'm wondering that maybe you could share with listeners is, how do you talk to other people about that? Do you just tell them about your experience and what's happened with you to kind of start what you called a contagious detachment. Like, how? How do you, you know, let's say you're wandering around the physics department at your university, and people are like, this is not on their radar whatsoever. I mean, how would somebody out there broach the topic and start to make some headway? You know, what does Jason tell his tennis students, you know, that gets them on a path towards wanting to be birds as well? 

Tom Murphy  
So I was reminded of a, and by the way, before I forget this one, you talked about, you know, being enamored of the stunt and falling out of love with the stunt, but you also prefer brain fart. So you need to fall out of love with the smell of your own brain fart. I mean, people like their own brand sometimes, but you just -- That's disgusting. So yeah, I was reminded of the secret handshake kind of thing where I had a friend who moved to Utah. It was a couple who moved to Utah. And he was describing, you know, it's Mormon country, and he's not Mormon, but he was saying that when you plan some event with somebody who you barely know, you're just trying to get to know people, and you're trying to find a time when you can do something. You're like, well, Saturday, I'm doing something, but what about Sunday? And you just totally float out there because if they're Mormon then absolutely not. And if they're like, "Yes, Sunday would work," You're like, "Great, let's be friends." You know? It's like, you like cream soda? I like cream soda too. We'll be best friends. So, um, yeah, it is kind of like that.

Asher Miller  
So we need certain like secret words or secret signals to the other modernity questioning people.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah. because I would have my ears out and, you know, listen for any hints from other people. And I would drop some hints, you know, about how I think about things. And occasionally you'd run into somebody who catches the hint, and then you start talking. But it's not something that I could walk up to anybody in my department and just sort of have an interesting, fruitful discussion about modernity and its temporary nature. And same among my friends. I mean, I've got a lot of really good friends who basically just don't want to talk about this stuff and d I don't push it, you know, because I want to stay friends. And I had a friend that came from, you know, that I hadn't seen in 30 years. A college roommate who came and stayed with me and his wife, and, you know, it was great fun to catch up. And I might have dropped a few little hints of where I am now, but I didn't really want to burden that fun experience with, oh, by the way, here's why I think this is all going, you know, south. So I don't know. It is a bit isolating. AnI was thinking about that Asher, when you were talking about how you're able to connect with people internationally. But I think when you're in such a rarefied place of having this view, you kind of need that community, and you need to go far and wide to find it. 

Asher Miller  
That's true, yeah. 

Tom Murphy  
Because, you know, you can't just go to your next door neighbor and expect to connect over this kind of issue. 

Rob Dietz  
When they complain like traffic's bad, you can't go,  Yeah, and civilization is collapsing.  It doesn't really work, does it? 

Asher Miller  
Well you can if you want to end conversations quickly, which is what I like to do sometimes, you know, because I'm an introvert and I don't like people. I think it's a good recommendation, maybe for our listeners, who obviously -- The ones who bother to listen to more than one episode I think are folks who kind of are inhabiting the same sort of space as us, and maybe this is a secret handshake kind of community that they're also part of. So, what I'm taking away is not riddling ourselves with guilt, not expecting ourselves to completely detach, but to maybe detach a bit emotionally or in terms of our identity to what is modernity now. And then, maybe, you know, dropping little seeds every once in a while in interactions with people that maybe some people pick up and ask a question about it. You know, I think even just naming things as not being permanent can be useful.

Tom Murphy  
Well, and we make decisions all the time that might have some long-term ramifications, like. Like, you know, the road that I live on is private road, and it's in fine shape. It was paved, you know, probably 30 years ago. And it's okay. It's a light use road, but at some point it'll need resurfacing. And it makes sense to resurface it if modernity is just continuing for a long time, but a lot of things don't make sense anymore if it's just a temporary stunt. And that's what part of the falling out of love is about. It is in the detachment. It is recognizing that, wait, why am I doing this thing if our future doesn't look like what we were all told our future was going to look like. What does it really mean, and why am I doing this? And so that that's a big part of it is always asking yourself, why am I doing this in the context that this is temporary.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, I guess a takeaway I'll throw out there is that falling out of love with modernity just opens up more space to fall more deeply in love with the complexity of the ecosystems that you inhabit. 

Tom Murphy  
You bet. 

Rob Dietz  
I try really hard to be observant of what's going on in the places that I inhabit. And observant of the things nature is doing, not observant of all the hubbub of modernity. And it's hard to do, but I think the more you can focus on that, the healthier you are, and the more in the future you'll be able to make decisions like, yeah, let's not resurface this. Let's let it return to a path and eventually to a forest, or whatever it's going to be.

Asher Miller  
I appreciate you coming and sharing this with us, Tom. Just a little bit about your journey and the way that you think of it. I think it's inspiring and hopeful for me to know someone who I would say, you could have been very well excused to have stayed embedded in modernity, you know, considering the work that you're doing, what you studied, and all that. And for you to not only step out of it and question it, but I think in what you do at Do the Math, your blog. 

Tom Murphy  
Which you started by the way. You realize that? 

Asher Miller  
Yeah, no, we talked about that. You did it, nan, that's all you.

Tom Murphy  
No, but that's part of the journey. And I forgot to mention it. Is that you're an important part of that in encouraging me to put these ideas out.

Asher Miller  
We've heard from a lot of people who have been following your writings, and I think it's helped them on their journey. So anyways, I hope that folks listening maybe want to join the conversation that we're going to have with Vanessa and Dougald, who also have been thinking very deeply about this, and just naming something that every one of us has tended to take for granted as an absolute. Just naming it as sort of the emperor s clothes thing, you know, is an important first step. So maybe we'll see you in person soon and we can go back out on those kayaks. Yeah, I'd love to have you come up here, or, you know, I want to go down your way sometime soon. And Jason will have you harvesting potatoes.

Tom Murphy  
Sounds like he's going to have me working on my forehand. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, that too. We can do both. 

Asher Miller  
With potatoes. You could be hitting the potatoes with the racket.

Jason Bradford  
I could show you the local newt pond we have here, you know, so  They're probably mating right now if you want to come by.

Tom Murphy  
Yeah, actually here they're heading to the mating zone. I see them heading north to their little mating pond.

Rob Dietz  
Alright you guys, leave the newts alone to do their thing. 

Asher Miller  
Alright thanks guys.

Jason Bradford  
Alright. Good seeing you, Tom.

Melody 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.