Crazy Town Podcast

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

Support the show

The world has gone bunking mad. The bespoke security industry is burying bunkers stocked with arsenals of automatic rifles and surrounded by flaming moats. Is there a better way to prepare for the polycrisis, the zombie apocalypse, or whatever hard times are on the horizon? Jason, Rob, and Asher have some fun at the expense of the bunker builders before examining the positive aspects of peasanthood and stressing the need to build community.

Originally recorded on 5/5/25.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Coralie Kraft, "The 'Panic Industry' Boom," New York Times Magazine, April 10, 2025.
• The SAFE company offers "bespoke, fortified residences" and other silly signs of our times. 
• Aaron Gell, "'All of his guns will do nothing for him': lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday," The Guardian, April 17, 2025.
• Will Petersen, "Nuggets star Nikola Jokic is again living a good life back in Serbia," Denver Sports, June 20, 2023.

Related Episodes of Crazy Town:

• Episode 73. How Longtermism Became the Most Dangerous Philosophy You’ve Never Heard of
• Episode 34. Fear of Death and Climate Denial, or… the Story of Wolverine and the Screaming Mole of Doom
• Episode 100. A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out of Love with Modernity

Support the show

Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher speaks with Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights to uncover how the source code of the U.S. Constitution and the body of environmental laws that follow it are actually designed to allow corporations to override the will of the people. After pinpointing the problem, Thomas explains what can be done, especially at the local level, to reach sustainable and just outcomes that provide wellbeing for people and ecosystems.

Originally recorded on 4/2/25.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Bio for Thomas Linzey
• Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights
• Matt Wuerker's cartoon: "The Closed-Door Constitutional Convention"

Support the show

Happy Earth Day! There are two concepts that every person should understand to be a better Earthling: entropy and self-organization. It seems like a paradox, but systems on Earth are simultaneously breaking down into disorder and arranging themselves into complex superorganisms. Everything on Earth (well, really in the whole universe) is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which means it all dies and decays. But with access to steady flows of energy, organisms, ecosystems, and human societies can hold back the death and decay for a spell. After dropping the kids off at the pool, Asher, Rob, and Jason cover the interplay of entropy and self-organization and contemplate how to manage the inevitability of entropy with elegance (beyond morphing into a lizard person).

Originally recorded on 4/8/25.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, Penguin Books, 2018.
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Scribner, 2024.
• William Rees, “End game: the economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change,” Real-World Economics Review, 2019.
• The laws of thermodynamics, as explained by the website “Physics for Idiots"
• "Telegraph Road" - song by Dire Straits
• David Owen, "Green Manhattan," The New Yorker, October 10, 2004.

Other Crazy Town episodes you might like:

• Crazy Town 100 - A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out or Love with Modernity
• Crazy Town 35 - Self Domestication and Overshoot, or… the Story of Foxes and Russian Melodrama
• Crazy Town Bonus Riff - Vanilla Andreessen, Pygmy Marmosets, and Hi-Tech Delusions

Support the show

Who knew that the breakthrough moment of AI sentience would come from interacting with an annoying neo-Luddite?

After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI’s newest initiative — the $350 billion Transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Prophet Studies and Education (TIPPSE) —  Jason, Rob, and Asher devise the only profitable pitch for raising capital: using AI technology to cure the loneliness that technology itself causes. The only problem is that AI chatbots won’t talk to us, as evidenced by Asher’s experience of being blocked by an AI “friend.” So Asher turns to the flesh-and-blood author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant, to discuss the rise of the neo-Luddite movement — the only people who might be able to stand your humble Crazy Town hosts. 

Brian Merchant is a writer, reporter, and author. He is currently reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute and publishes his own newsletter, Blood in the Machine, which has the same title as his 2023 book. Previously, Brian was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at Motherboard.

Originally recorded on 1/3/25 (warm-up conversation) and 3/24/25 (interview with Brian).

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Press Release announcing closure of TIPPSE
• Funding for Friend
• Screenshot of Asher’s conversation with Friend’s bot, Faith
• Lyrics to “Not Going to Mars” by Pyrrhon
• Brian Merchant’s Substack, Blood in the Machine
• Brian’s book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech  
• New York Times article on the Luddite Club: “‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes”
• Crazy Town Episode 72: Sucking CO2 and Electrifying Everything: The Climate Movement’s Desperate Dependence on Tenuous Technologies
• Brian’s essay in The Atlantic, “The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down”

Support the show