Crazy Town
With equal parts humor and in-depth analysis, Asher, Rob, and Jason safeguard their sanity while probing crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we’re all deluding ourselves. Each fortnightly episode helps you understand the “Great Unraveling” of our environmental and social systems and describes how we can make the transition to a sustainable and equitable world. If you’re someone who questions the trajectory of society and struggles to understand why most people would rather eat nachos on the deck of the “SS Denial” than face reality, you’ll find community and plenty of laughs in Crazy Town.
Brought to you by https://www.resilience.org/ and the unconventional minds at Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank that builds awareness of the polycrisis and prescribes community resilience-building as the most appropriate response.
Your hosts:
Asher Miller - Nonprofit executive director by day, apocalypse comedian by night. Feels most at home exploring insanity-inducing topics while trying not to spill coffee on his keyboard as he convulses over the latest ecomodernist fantasy. In danger of losing his mind every time he encounters someone using a gas-powered blower to move leaves from one spot to another.
Rob Dietz - Jack-of-all-trades environmental scientist, conservation biologist, and ecological economist with a penchant for relating planetary overshoot to the catalog of movie scenes that play on a continuous loop in his colonized brain. Known for inserting random ecological facts into casual conversation, often in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice. His friends call him “pessimistically hilarious.”
Jason Bradford - Activist farmer and former encyclopedia salesman with a PhD in plant ecology who gets genuinely excited discussing soil microbes and societal collapse in the same breath. Morally opposed to doomsday prepping, but predisposed toward sharing everything he keeps in his bunker, er root cellar, including potatoes, wine, and a 47-month supply of scientific esoterica and embarrassing anecdotes.
These guys are the Three Stooges of sustainability podcasting, although they tend toward scientific analysis, righteous outrage, and self-deprecation rather than beating each other up with hand tools. How can they have this much fun while contemplating collapse and navigating the Great Unraveling?
Heartfelt thanks to the team at Post Carbon Institute, our volunteers, and all our fellow Crazy Townies out there who help bring this podcast to life.
Crazy Town
Who Can Fix the Housing Crisis - NYT Pundits, German Shepherds, or Bilbo Baggins?
Jason, Rob, and Asher are taking out a huge, unaffordable mortgage on the housing crisis. What’s behind the shortage in housing? Why is it that no one, except canine Tik Tok influencers with billion-dollar bank accounts, can afford to own a home? While mainstream pundits press for an energy-blind buildout of desert sprawl and gleaming towers of glass and steel, we propose a surprising change of course inspired by little people with hairy feet. Originally recorded on 5/21/25.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- The story of Gunther, the world's most moneyed canine.
- You can't make this stuff up: Gunther offers to buy Nicholas Cage's island.
- David Wessel, "Where do the estimates of a 'housing shortage' come from?," Brookings Institute, October 21, 2024.
- Alex Fitzpatrick and Alice Feng, "Americans' average daily travel distance, mapped," Axios, March 24, 2024.
- Jon Gertner, "America Is on Fire, Says One Climate Writer. Should You Flee?," New York Times, March 22, 2024.
- U.S. News and World Report, "Fastest-Growing Places in the U.S. in 2025-2026."
Good Ideas for Addressing the Housing Crisis:
- Jason Bradford, "Growing the Shire, Not the 'Burb: Facing the Housing Crisis with Ecological Sanity," Resilience, May 27, 2025.
- Global Ecovillage Network
- Nate Hagens, "Alexis Zeigler — Living Without Fossil Fuels: How Living Energy Farm Created a Comfortable Off-Grid Lifestyle," The Great Simplification, April 9, 2025.
Energy-Blind Non-Solutions for the Housing Crisis:
- Conor Dougherty, "Why America Should Sprawl," New York Times, April 10, 2025.
- Binyamin Applebaum, "Build Homes on Federal Land," New York Times, April 15, 2025.
- Ezra Klein, "Abundance and the Left," The Ezra Klein Show, April 29, 2025.
- Samuel Moyn, "Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?," New York Times, March 18, 2025.
- Tyler Cowen, "Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda (Ep. 236)" Conversations with Tyler, March 7, 2025.
Related Episode(s) of Crazy Town:
- Episode 37. Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos, or… the Story of the Dueling Economists
