{"id":3500272,"date":"2024-03-20T07:51:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T07:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3500272"},"modified":"2024-03-20T07:55:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T07:55:00","slug":"crazy-town-episode-80-escaping-industrialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-03-20\/crazy-town-episode-80-escaping-industrialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazy Town 80. Escaping Industrialism: How to Avoid Pancakes on a Stick and Other &#8220;Miracles&#8221; of the Industrial Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"height:15px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div><div id=\"buzzsprout-player-14648473\"><\/div><script src=\"https:\/\/www.buzzsprout.com\/244372\/14648473-escaping-industrialism-how-to-avoid-pancakes-on-a-stick-and-other-miracles-of-the-industrial-age.js?container_id=buzzsprout-player-14648473&#038;player=small\" type=\"text\/javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><div class=\"gb-button-wrapper gb-button-wrapper-af35d9a5\">\n<a class=\"gb-button gb-button-736fa41c gb-button-text btn res-btn-blue\" href=\"https:\/\/lnk.to\/crazytownWB\">Listen on your favorite app<\/a>\n\n<a class=\"gb-button gb-button-f8db5292 gb-button-text res-btn-yellow\" href=\"\/crazy-town-podcast\/episodes\">See all episodes<\/a>\n<\/div><div class=\"gb-container gb-container-b18365bc\">\n<p><strong>Show Description\/Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p>Jason, Rob, and Asher take a tour of New Caledonia, California&#8217;s Central Valley, Bhutan, and Cuba to uncover the ins and outs of industrialism, especially as it has been applied to agriculture. Along the way they riff on how the hell we can escape from an -ism that completely engulfs us.<\/p>\n\n<p>Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Sources\/Links\/Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Tom Murphy \u201cdoes the math\u201d on <a href=\"https:\/\/dothemath.ucsd.edu\/2023\/08\/ecological-cliff-edge\/\">declining wild mammal mass<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n<li>Understanding the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary <a href=\"https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/terms\/s\/sector.asp\">sectors of the economy<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n<li>USDA <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usda.gov\/media\/blog\/2020\/01\/23\/look-americas-family-farms#\">graphic and statistics<\/a> on the scale of family farms.<\/li>\n\n<li>Our World in Data: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/farm-size\">Farm Size and Productivity<\/a>\u201d.<\/li>\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cc.com\/video\/1fupdb\/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-intro-pancakes-sausage-on-a-stick\">Video clip<\/a> from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.<\/li>\n\n<li>Hossain, S., Jami, A.T. (2023). \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/chapter\/10.1007\/978-3-031-24545-9_5\">Opportunities and Challenges in Sustainable Development and Governance in South Asia: Case Study of Bhutan.<\/a>\u201d In: Wu, HH., Liu, WY., Huang, M.C. (eds) <em>Moving Toward Net-Zero Carbon Society<\/em>. Springer Climate.<\/li>\n\n<li>Arch Ritter, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/thecubaneconomy.com\/articles\/2011\/09\/can-cuba-recover-from-its-de-industrialization-i-characteristics-and-causes\/\">Can Cuba Recover from its De-Industrialization?<\/a>\u201d.<\/li>\n\n<li>Julia Wright, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/41945973\">The Little-Studied Success Story of Post-Crisis Food Security in Cuba: Does Lack of International Interest Signify Lack of Political Will?<\/a>\u201d <em>International Journal of Cuban Studies<\/em>, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012, pp. 130\u201353.<\/li><\/ul>\n<\/div><div class=\"wp-block-pb-accordion-item c-accordion__item js-accordion-item no-js\" data-initially-open=\"false\" data-click-to-close=\"true\" data-auto-close=\"true\" data-scroll=\"false\" data-scroll-offset=\"0\"><h2 id=\"at-35002720\" class=\"c-accordion__title js-accordion-controller\" role=\"button\">Transcript<\/h2><div id=\"ac-35002720\" class=\"c-accordion__content\"><pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\">Rob Dietz  \nI'm Rob Dietz.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI'm Jason Bradford.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where Jimmy Dean and Mayor McCheese sponsor your local school lunch program.\n\nMelody Allison  \nHey, this is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in Season 6, we're exploring escape route pathways that just might get us out of Crazy Town. In today's episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher are escaping industrialism. 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 on to the show.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYou guys know that I used to be this kind of gallivanting botanist?\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, it's like your glory days. Sure.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI should. I should put it on my LinkedIn account.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI love that title -- gallivanting botanist. Can you put that on a business card?\n\nRob Dietz  \nThat would make a lot more students interested in botany in college, that's for sure.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, I had a series of grants and stuff and National Geographic, bla, bla, bla. Anyway. . .\n\nAsher Miller  \nLa di da\n\nRob Dietz  \nLook at that name dropping!\n\nAsher Miller  \nExactly. MacArthur Genius!\n\nJason Bradford  \nNot yet. Anyhow. So I went looking for this plant because I go to museums, and I look at the specimens in museums. And there's this one species, it was only known from like these collections in 1800s from the single mountain in New Caledonia.\n\nRob Dietz  \nBasically, you're the biological equivalent of Indiana Jones. He's archeological, you got like the hat and whip.\n\nJason Bradford  \nPretty close. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYou have a whip?\n\nJason Bradford  \nI'm not saying the based his character off of me, but anyhow. . . I had a plant press. Anyway. . .  And I had clippers. So, it was cool\n\nRob Dietz  \nInstead of a whip --\n\nAsher Miller  \nYou had clippers\n\nJason Bradford  \nIt was good. Anyway, so I'm like, can I find this again? Because it happens. Like I've found stuff -- like undescribed species. I found stuff that haven't been seen in a long time, right, you know, 100 years or more. \n\nAsher Miller  \nBigfoot. \n\nJason Bradford  \nThat kind of stuff, but plants and trees. No one really cares. Anyhow, I go to this place and I drive to this mountain. And the entire mountain is essentially being whittled away by a mining company. And I drive up this mountain. And the only thing left is ditch weeds because it's this huge road. It's all dirt. It's just like --\n\nAsher Miller  \nWhere was this? \n\nJason Bradford  \nNew Caledonia.\n\nAsher Miller  \n Okay.\n\nJason Bradford  \nIt was on the on the on the east coast of New Caledonia. Anyway, they have just basically spent the last, I don't know how many decades, harvesting this mountain. And you've heard of mountaintop removal of coal? This is just mountain removal.\n\nRob Dietz  \nFull mountain.\n\nAsher Miller  \nThe whole mountain is gone?\n\nRob Dietz  \nWe don't want to take the top. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah because the whole thing is just rich in ores, nickel, and cobalt, and silver, and all these kinds. . .\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo my guess is you didn't find this plant there.\n\nJason Bradford  \nNo. It was rather upsetting.\n\nAsher Miller  \nThank God. They saved one specimen in some museum somewhere.\n\nJason Bradford  \nIn Paris. Yeah. \n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, the crazy thing about the mountain top and full mountain removal is we also do that in the valleys. Right? \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, it's from the mountains high to the valleys low. Let's rip the shit out of the planet.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI don't know if removal is the right word. But you and I, Jason, we used to work in the Central Valley of California. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. \n\nRob Dietz  \nMan, I don't know anybody who's been there -- you want to talk about an altered landscape. And it's not just that we've turned it into, you know, fields of monocrop farms. But the scale of that sucker. . . I mean, miles and miles in every direction. It's just all altered.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, the fields are huge. Like you go out into one of these fields and it might be a 100 acre field, but it's part of a farm that might be 2,000 acres. And it's just hard to imagine. I remember one time taking a map of the farm and putting it over San Francisco.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOh that's interesting. \n\nJason Bradford  \nLike, \"Oh.\"\n\nRob Dietz  \nThe farm is bigger than San Francisco. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAwesome. Did you give you a moment of pride? A sense of power?\n\nJason Bradford  \nOh, it is unbelievable. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd then we hatched an ecological restoration plan to dig out the valley, take it over to New Caledonia, and put it back on a mountain.\n\nAsher Miller  \nDid it work?\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, it totally worked. \n\nJason Bradford  \nIn Silicon Valley a lot of those minerals are there, so. . . \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, you get another National Geographic grant for that work.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI'm sure you put it in a proposal for that, right? \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. \n\nAsher Miller  \nWell you know, there's this expression, right? The industrial revolution, we've all been taught it in school. It's used to describe the period that started in the 19th century where we kind of supercharged modernity and all the progress that came with it. But if you live in Crazy Town like we do, right, you look at that -- People think of the Industrial Revolution as this huge wonderful, generally wonderful, thing, right? It is progress. When you live in Crazy Town like us, you might tend to see more of the dark side. You know that. And that's what you guys are describing. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, what happened to my tree? \n\nAsher Miller  \nExactly. Describing that a little bit. My favorite factoid that sort of describes or encapsulates the dark side of industrialism comes from our good friend Tom Murphy, who's also been on this podcast. He did the math for us in a post that we actually published on resilience.org. So in 1800, right? About the started the Industrial Revolution. There was about 80 kilograms of wild mammal for each 50 kilograms of human. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd humans are mammals, so that's why they're doing it that way. \n\nAsher Miller  \nExactly. Thank you for explaining that. I appreciate that.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. taxonomy\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo as Tom shared, 80 kilograms is about the size of a jaguar. \n\nJason Bradford  \nSo each human had about a jaguar. \n\nAsher Miller  \nEach of us had a jaguar. \n\nRob Dietz  \nI want a Jaguar. They've got pretty spots. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYou mean the car or the --? \n\nRob Dietz  \nNo, the animal. \n\nAsher Miller  \nBecause the car is way more than 80 kilograms. Well today there's 2.5 kilograms of wild mammal.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYou guys remember when we did that episode on how all the cars are named after things disappeared? There's another one: The Jaguar.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. So we've gone from 80 kilograms down to 2.5 kilograms, right? That's the size of a small house cat, a small chicken. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI know how to get this ratio rebalanced. You remember the episode we did on the dehumanism manifesto? \n\nAsher Miller  \nOh, yeah. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd turning us into marmosets, right? \n\nAsher Miller  \nOh right.\n\nJason Bradford  \nSo we get us down to like, you know, a couple 100 grams or so.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYou're the rebalancing guy. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSo you're trying to do that with mountains and valleys. And you're trying to do that with you know, our relationship with kilograms of mammals.\n\nRob Dietz  \nJust to not disappoint our listeners, we're gonna have better escape routes than this crap that we're spouting right now. Later.\n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd eugenics? Is that what you're saying. Better than eugenics.\n\nRob Dietz  \nBetter than that.\n\nAsher Miller  \nWhat can be better than that?\n\nJason Bradford  \nOkay, so we're talking about industrialism, okay? That's what this episode is about. And so let's start by some just basic definitions. If you look it up in the dictionary on the computer, which is what you do nowadays.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI just ask Chat GPT.\n\nJason Bradford  \nOf course, you could do that, too. It might get it wrong, but it's going to be close. It's typically defined as a socio-economic system based on mechanization of manufacturing, as opposed to, or rather than agriculture and crafts. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah well, I think a lot of people could see it that way. It's sort of this dichotomy between a factory and the city life versus the farm and the rural life. But I think that definition is pretty damn narrow. And in fact, if you look at agriculture, you know, as we were just talking about the Central Valley, it has become industrial. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, it didn't disappear. \n\nRob Dietz  \nRight. And I think that's where we should focus. Our critique of industrialism is in the sector of agriculture, and looking at escape routes from industrialism in light of that.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI think that's entirely appropriate because industrialism leads to this great reduction in the labor of what are called the primary sectors of the economy. Agriculture as the key primary sector. Mining would be as well. So you know, we talked about mining and agriculture in our stories of destruction early on. And what that allows is then more labor into the secondary sector of the economy, which would be the manufacturing. But then also as economies, quote unquote, \"mature or develop,\" then there's even more labor goes into the services, you know, the tertiaries, sales, finance. . . That side of the economy.\n\nRob Dietz  \nRight. Or what David Graeber refers to as bullshit jobs.\n\nJason Bradford  \nRight. And if you look at GDP have of nations in the more advanced, you know, that's where a lot of this quote unquote \"value\" is. The GDP is in these tertiary sectors, and maybe even what are called quaternary like education and research.\n\nAsher Miller  \nRight. So the further you get away from sort of the primary sectors, right, the more money you actually get paid.\n\nJason Bradford  \nExactly.\n\nRob Dietz  \nSo basically, what you're saying is when we work on this podcast, we're in the quaternary sector.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYes. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd we're getting paid some serious big bucks. Especially you, Jason.\n\nRob Dietz  \nBut every once in a while Jason goes out in the field.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSlumming it.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI helped him weed one time. \n\nJason Bradford  \nThat one time was nice. \n\nRob Dietz  \nSo, I was in the primary sector for a few minutes there. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, you dipped your little pinky toe.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd we've talked about this sort of ad nauseam. But you know, all of this is only possible through cheap energy to power industrialism, all the machinery that goes behind that, and to replace labor in the primary and secondary sectors, right? So if it wasn't for cheap energy, we wouldn't have cheap food and all the other cheap manufactured goods that we have. And interestingly, food becomes just another manufactured good, right? It's just viewed as a product, rather than like an essential fucking need that if we didn't have, you know, we'd be dead. If you think about the food system, like where's the money in the food system, right? It's probably the quaternary sector of the food system where they're trying to come up with like whiz bang new flavors. You know, how do you turn Cool Ranch Doritos and combine them with, I don't know . . . Taco Bell enchiladas.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThere's so many kinds of Doritos nowadays. You know, when we were kids there was like one Doritos.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI know, progress.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIf I'm not mistaken, sorry for my usual pop culture brain, but I think the Clark Griswold character from \"Vacation\" was a food additive and flavor specialist.\n\nJason Bradford  \nNo way. Was he really? See, the comedians know it's all bullshit.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. Well, in addition to the cheap energy, I think industrialism also plays into something that is kind of innate in humans. And that's that we're really good at building stuff. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd you know, you speak for yourself, man. I can't even put an IKEA set together.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThat is true. I helped you put your basketball hoop together one time. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYou just told me what to do. \n\nRob Dietz  \nBut some people, then, are pretty good at building stuff. And even pre-industrially, right? Like the pyramids got built. You had all kinds of ecological disasters. But the thing that's different is that industrialism, the mechanization, the immense power that's densely packed into fossil fuels, of course, has let us take this up to a new level. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, we've leveled up. \n\nAsher Miller  \nProgress.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThere's probably not many examples in ancient times of people taking down a mountain with some digging sticks, right. So you know, all you have to do to think about the scale of change, look at the growth of cities in the Middle East, like Dubai. Or look at the Central United States and the conversion of an entire swath of a continent into farmland.\n\nAsher Miller  \nIf you want to trip out, just go on, you know, Google Earth has this -- I don't know what they call it, but it's basically a way of like tracking through satellite imagery changes and landscapes over time. So looking at some cities in China, for example. It's amazing. Just in the span of you know, since we've had satellite imagery over these places. It's pretty amazing.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, it's intense. So I mean, that's one of the issues, right? We love building stuff. And the Industrial Revolution and all that came with it has amped that up to a new level.\n\nAsher Miller  \nNow, we love to get into the depths of how fucked, you know, the systems are of the modern world, right? What makes us so crazy. We're trying not to do that quite as much. \n\nJason Bradford  \nWe're trying to strike a balance.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, but we've got to just try to encapsulate it a little bit.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWe gotta stay in our lane a little bit. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. So we're not going to spend a lot of time, but just some interesting factoids, I think, to give us a sense of like how the global food system in this case has changed due to industrialism, right? So we could throw things out like, 10 to 13 calories of hydrocarbons go into every calorie of food that we produce. But let's just look at the number of farms, like statistics around farms in the United States specifically, right? So in 1920, according to census data in 1920, there were six and a half million farms. And the average size of farm was 148 acres. And 100 years later, 2020 -- \n\nRob Dietz  \nBefore you give another stat, like how big is that? What's 148 acres? \n\nJason Bradford  \n148 football fields. Everyone knows football. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAlright. Well, that's helpful. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYep. \n\nAsher Miller  \nThat's a lot of land. \n\nRob Dietz  \nThat is. That's still pretty -- I mean, even in 1920.\n\nJason Bradford  \nA golf course is about 100 acres. A typical 18 hole golf course.\n\nRob Dietz  \nOkay.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo we're talking about six and a half million farms, 140 acres on average. 100 years later, 2.2 million farms. So reduced by a third. And the average size is 444 acres.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThat's not reduced by a third that's reduced to 1\/3. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSorry that's what I meant to say. Thank you for doing simple math for me.\n\nJason Bradford  \nBig changes. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, big changes. \n\nJason Bradford  \nNow, that doesn't really capture all of the situation because average is going to kind of skew things a little bit, your perspective. Most farms of that 2.2 million, most farms according to USDA records are still considered small family farms. And you know, people have off-farm jobs, they've got a little thing going on. They only make $10,000 a year, or something, and they still qualify as a farm. They may grow some corn and they're small, but it feeds into this industrial scale. \n\nAsher Miller  \nLike one buyer basically. \n\nJason Bradford  \nLike Archer Daniels Midland down the street, or whatever, is going to take all their corn and do something with it. So there are huge amounts of consolidation conglomerates in there. And so 90% of farms are categorized as the small family farms, but nearly 67% of \"value of production,\" quote unquote, came from these large scale farms. And that's in terms of dollars, right? It roughly will correspond to acres.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo what we're saying is, not only are there far fewer farms, the farm sizes have grown, but the percentage of valuable products, right, the value of what's being produced is actually also even been further consolidated into these larger, bigger farms.\n\nJason Bradford  \nRight. And if you look at, you know, globally, this is the case where if you look at -- I looked at a chart on Our World in Data on farm size related to GDP, and generally if your nation has high GDP, it's going to have large farm sizes. It's almost a perfect correlation.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOkay, so then we should have large farm sizes. This is the -- come and get with it everybody.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThat's what Our World in Data suggests actually. They have a little editorial side to them.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOh do they?\n\nJason Bradford  \nOh yeah. \n\nRob Dietz  \nSo let me just recap for our listeners: Asher reports really shitty statistics, and then Jason tells you it's way shittier than what he just reported. That's where we are. \n\nJason Bradford  \nSo far.\n\nRob Dietz  \nOkay. \n\nJason Bradford  \nWe're gonna make a turn eventually.\n\nAsher Miller  \nThat's a perfect explanation or encapsulation of what this entire podcast is.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThat's what we do. And then I come in with some pop culture reference.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSix seasons of this. Do we still have listeners?\n\nJason Bradford  \nIn Australia we do.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOh, thank God. Yeah. \n\nRob Dietz  \nSo all these gloomy stats are just fine. But could we have a real world example? Would that be possible? \n\nJason Bradford  \nWell, when you walk into a contemporary modern grocery store, do you feel how assaulting that is? At every core of your sense of being.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI hate it. \n\nAsher Miller  \nI love it. I revel in it. The music, the bright lights, the people walking around with scowls on their faces. It's incredible.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI like that you now do self-checkout in these places. \n\nAsher Miller  \nRight. Because you don't have to talk to anybody.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIt takes like several more hours for me to get through that as I screw it up every time.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWell, the local Safeway here, you know, goes \"Swoosh.\" The doors open and I grab the cart. I try not to go ever. It's really hard on me. And then you know, I start pushing, and then I like brace myself for it because there's gonna be like a nearly floor-to-ceiling display of mylar balloons of whatever is coming up. It's gonna be Valentine's, it's gonna be Easter, it's gonna be Fourth of July. They're gonna throw some birthday ones in on the side. \n\nRob Dietz  \nFlag day, Groundhog Day, St. Patrick's Day, there's a lot of them.\n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd I end up picking them up later on the field. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSome mylar balloons? \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, somebody's got a quincea\u00f1era and the next thing I know, I've got quincea\u00f1era mylar balloons all over the field. It's like, it's awful. But what also kills me is that there's warning labels on everything., rght? So we're going to this place to supposedly get the nourishment of life, right? And half of the products in there, especially if you're not on the perimeter of the store, like you go to the interior where the boxes are and stuff, and the BPA laden cans, and the plastic wrap that's probably got you know, forever chemicals in it.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIf you eat this Little Debbie, good luck. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. Is it cancer? Is it heart disease? Is it some neurodegenerative problem we're going to have? I don't know. Is my liver gonna get shot? Are my kidneys gonna, you know, age fast? Whatever it is, I'm like, this is the place you go to eat and die fast.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIn fact, they should just start putting a hospital wing right in the Safeway.\n\nAsher Miller  \nWell, consolidation is going to lead to that, right? It's a full, what do they call that? Verticalization?\n\nRob Dietz  \nNext season we'll report stats on how countries with the most square footage devoted to combined grocery store hospitals have the highest GDP.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOf course they do. Yeah. Not only is it just an overwhelming experience, like you walk into into one of these places and the products there could kill you. I find it incredibly difficult to find food products that don't have 1,000 ingredients in them. Even the most basic thing, right? You think, oh okay, this is just whatever, you know. \n\nRob Dietz  \nKetchup or something. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. And we've, in my family, we've had a real issue with this. My oldest son, he's allergic to legumes and that includes soy. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd soy is in everything almost. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd soy lecithin, in particular. They use it in fucking everything. It's everywhere. \n\nRob Dietz  \nI don't even know what that is. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, it's basically a way of processing fat or binding to fat, or something. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYou should go to a food science school. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, of course. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, you'd get paid a lot of money. Yeah, but the bottom line is even the most basic things have got this stuff in it. And that is industrialization, right? Like, these manufactured processes to like throw the shit together. And a lot of it's just to preserve it, or for a certain texture or flavoring, or whatever that is.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThey take the raw product, they discombobulate it into molecules, and then they reassemble in a factory.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, but here we are bitching about this stuff. And I think that, you know, in fairness, trying to be fair and balanced like we are.\n\nRob Dietz  \nLike Fox News. \n\nAsher Miller  \nLike a news agency, which we are.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYes. \n\nAsher Miller  \nI want to talk about some of the benefits of all this industrialism. \n\nJason Bradford  \nOkay, let's make a turn to the positive. \n\nAsher Miller  \nOkay, so can I share one of my favorite products? Which I learned about through the the great Jon Stewart, who also had a fantastic news program for many years.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYes, very good news.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo, you know, here's him sharing one that came out a number of years ago.\n\nJon Stewart  \nPancakes and sausage on a stick! On a stick! Finally! The classic taste of chocolate chip, pancake wrapped sausage with the convenience of a stick.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI mean, totally. I mean, it's a logical next iteration. The next step beyond a corndog is not a traditional breakfast food, but this is.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI'm sorry, but I'm picturing you Jason going through those whooshing open doors at the Safeway and every single food is just on a stick hanging off the aisle.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI'm picturing him actually just eating a frozen one of those as he walks around, you know, paying for it later because you're so famished. \n\nRob Dietz  \nLook, we're pounding on the retail side of industrial food system here. But how about the manufacturing side? So I used to live in Albuquerque. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI'm so sorry. It was a wildlife refuge at the time.\n\nRob Dietz  \nDon't pound on Albuquerque. Come on. I think \"Breaking Bad\" already did that to a fine extent. But anyway, when I lived there, I used to bike a lot. It was actually a good biking city, aside from the wind, but some cool places. And there's this big loop ride there around the city that they call the Froot Loop. \n\nAsher Miller  \nOh, and that's a great hearty breakfast cereal.\n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd that is spelled f-r-o-o-t, the Froot Loop. \n\nJason Bradford  \nReally?\n\nRob Dietz  \nBecause the reason is that it used to pass by a General Mills breakfast cereal, used to and still does, passes by this General Mills factory that makes Froot Loops and other really hearty nutritious cereals. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI'd love a tour. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd you could smell the stuff coming off of it. The thing about it, though, I remember thinking like, \"Oh, let me look at this place.\" you know. And I go on Google Earth -- \n\nJason Bradford  \nThey got two cans out front.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYou're just thinking like, is this . . . this is food? Like, it's just a giant factory with smokestacks and trucks. And it's like -- \n\nJason Bradford  \nRight, right. A parking lot.\n\nRob Dietz  \n What is the relationship between this and eating? \n\nAsher Miller  \nAt least they're honest. They didn't spell it fruit as in f-r-u-i-t, right?  Because that's not actually what it is. It has none of it in it, right? \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. Well, they probably would have been sued if they had actually put that on the box. \n\nRob Dietz  \nThis is a message to all you Crazy Townies out there. Sometimes Jason, Asher, and I wish you could be here in the room with us when were riffing on ecomodernist nightmares, the end of capitalism, the collapse of civilization, and lines from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Since you can't be here, maybe we could still be in contact in another way. If you've got a comment about the show, or you want to throw some shade at us, or you've got a question . . .\n\nAsher Miller  \nOr you have a suggestion of escape route stuff. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, maybe you've got a story of your own you want to share. Go over to Apple podcasts or iTunes and leave us a review and write your comment there. In your comment, include your idea, whatever it is, and we'll think about sharing it in an episode. \n\nJason Bradford  \nHow's this, \"I'll be back!\" Is that any good? \n\nRob Dietz  \nOh my God, that's terrible.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYou try it. You try it.\n\nRob Dietz\n\"Get to the chopp-ah!\"\n\nRob Dietz  \nWe got an email from a fellow named David. He sent us an email called, \"News item for Crazy Town podcast. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI love these. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. So here's his item. He said that in the middle of summer in Adelaide, South Australia. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI'm so glad to have another Australian listener. Thank you Austrailia. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. So in Adelaide, a city on the edge of the desert, an ice hockey game was being played in a rink in an arena. \n\nAsher Miller  \nIn the summer.\n\nJason Bradford  \nIt's like we'll be doing this in Las Vegas and stuff. No judgement.\n\nRob Dietz  \nBut here he says - \n\nAsher Miller  \nDo they skate backwards there?\n\nRob Dietz  \nOf course. Yeah. Yeah, they only can turn to the left, yeah. So he said it all went terribly wrong as some carbon monoxide from the Zamboni - \n\nJason Bradford  \nThey have Zambonis down there? \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, to clean the ice. It basically poisoned the place. 38 people went to the hospital. It's a great Crazy Town story.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI'm glad to know it's not just isolated to the United States.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI heard about Adelaide first through Paul Kelly and The Messengers. Great song about Adelaide. So I want to throw that out, too.\n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, maybe . . . maybe, you know, rugby is an Australian sport for a good reason. There's no ice necessary. \n\nJason Bradford  \nNo ice.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI mean, there's other kinds of hospitalizations, but not from carbon monoxide poisoning.\n\nJason Bradford  \nLet's stick with rugby, people. \n\nAsher Miller  \nOkay, so we're gonna try to take the Marvin Harris Memorial lens of doom, and look through it at industrialism. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAlright, well you got to remind us of Marvin Harris's cultural materialism then.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. So got our attentive listeners could probably recite this themselves because we've talked about this quite a bit. And over this season we're going to be doing it on the regular, so I will try to be very brief about it. So Marvin Harris, anthropologist. Cultural materialism, basically a theory of how change basically happens in societies or how they're formed. And there's basically three levels involved. There's infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. So infrastructure is the physical world. It's not just roads and buildings and bridges, the way people tend to think about infrastructure now. It's the physical world, even things like food, right? And land. Structure is how we organize ourselves, our economic system, our political systems, you know, social, all that stuff. And then superstructure is our belief systems. So we're going to look at industrialism, and particularly industrialism in terms of the food system, through each of these kind of structures, infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. \n\nJason Bradford  \nSo yeah, let's start off with then the infrastructure of industrial agriculture. We'll just use that as our lens with the food system. It's amazing if you like go on to farms and you look at how they're actually managed. And we're sitting in a studio right now that overlooks farms. And we can watch this. And actually, you know, we've been watching this particular field near us for years. And what you notice is, the equipment rolls in, and it's huge. It's like nobody is here, and then a crew will show up. And they'll there'll be trucking in equipment, or the big tractor will drive on the road. And they come in, and then they'll be working with this huge machine for hours. And they'll run it for 12 hours straight easily. Across the field, across the field, across the field. Back and forth, back and forth. . .\n\nRob Dietz  \nSo this farm that's next door to you, I felt some kind of like deeply emotional offensiveness when they did this last year -- So it was a weird kind of epiphany. Like when they brought in a giant machine and plowed the field, you know, just turned all the soil over. And I was just looking at it as, that is heinous destruction. They're just, I don't know. I really had this very deep emotional reaction to it. And it's just conventional. It's what we do on all the farms, all the time. \n\nAsher Miller  \nWell, and that actually is something that sticks in my craw. The fact that we call it conventional. How did that happen? It's so unconventional, you know. Like, it's so contrary to how we have as a species fed ourselves for the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our history. And how most people still get their food, or a lot of them in the world, right? But we call that conventional, right? \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. \n\nAsher Miller  \nDumping lots of chemicals and bringing in these huge trucks.\n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, and of course that's what they do, right? And it devastates the soil. You've got all these synthetic fertilizers that are wreaking havoc in the ecosystem, flows into the creeks, and then we overuse that water, and pump out the aquifers. I mean, that's the infrastructure of the modern farm, too.\n\nJason Bradford  \nIt basically hits you that it's big machines doing all the work really. It's incredible.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd we've talked about consolidation of the players in the industrialized food system. One of the things that industrialization has fostered is that ability to consolidate, right? They put in terms of efficiency and markets and all that stuff. But really, what it's done is put the power of the food system in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, that gets to the structure, I think. Because the structure itself is leading to that consolidation.\n\nAsher Miller  \nBut again, the infrastructure of us being able to use industrial machinery, and all those fossil fuels, and all those petrochemical inputs -- If that didn't exist, the structure wouldn't matter, right? \n\nJason Bradford  \nRight. \n\nAsher Miller  \nThey couldn't do that. But you're right. I mean, when you think about the structure of the rules of industrialism, right? It's all the incentives that we've decided collectively to point them towards. So we do that, you know, we have a Farm Bill that in the United States get passed every 10 years, right? Is it 10 years? \n\nJason Bradford  \nI think it may be five. \n\nAsher Miller  \nOkay. And so this enormous bill with all of these subsidies thrown into it. It's all these economic incentives that create these, what I think are weird distortions.\n\nJason Bradford  \n Yeah, the crop insurance program. That kind of stuff.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. Can't you get some money for not growing stuff? \n\nJason Bradford  \nWell, that's actually one of the good programs I like because it's actually trying to keep people from farming everything, especially marginal land.\n\nRob Dietz  \nOh, you're talking like wetland protection? Because I was talking about like, I don't know, with corn or something. Can't you get some money for not growing corn, or. . . ?\n\nJason Bradford  \nI don't know if they do that anymore. They try to get you to do conservation work and take acres out that aren't as useful, or not as productive. But then it gets to loans. Like a little small farmer can't get a loan, but the bigger farm you are, the easier it is for you to get money at better terms to buy even bigger equipment, and if you do even more consolidating.\n\nAsher Miller  \nMore equipment, buy more land, further consolidation that way. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYes. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd the subsidies distort things, obviously. I mean, we're growing a lot of produce to feed animals that we then eat.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWell, they wouldn't call it produce, they would call it like the commodity grains. As opposed to fresh fruits and vegetables - they often call that produce.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThen the quaternary guys in Chicago can trade futures on those grains.\n\nJason Bradford  \nCorrectamundo. Yeah, they'd be tertiary. Finance is tertiary. Research and education are quaternary.\n\nRob Dietz  \nOh, sorry. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah.\n\nAsher Miller  \nWasn't that orange juice futures? That was orange juice.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI'm bad at these labels like the primary secondary, tertiary, superstructure, structure, infrastructure.\n\nJason Bradford  \nBy the time we're done with the season, you'll be fine. \n\nRob Dietz  \nOkay, good. \n\nJason Bradford  \nBut you know, all this is also part of this sort of specialization, do the same thing and get really good at it. That will make your commodities even cheaper, because these farms are all trying to like chase efficiencies. Because as they're over producing all these commodities that are subsidized by insurance programs and stuff, the price is always pretty damn low. So they're working with tiny margins. And so that's part of industrialization, also, is they want to make these raw commodities super, super cheap. That's sort of part of policy.\n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, I think that cheapness feeds over into the cultural system, the cultural beliefs around industrialized farming, too. Because the idea there is that you mass produce food using these giant machines, the food is cheap. And now people are able to get off the farm and go do a bunch of other things. And it's actually fed into this culture of, hey, you're a smart person, you don't want to go into these primary sectors at all. You've got to get out there and trade futures on those farm commodities, right? It really reminds me, I know I've said this before on the podcast, but it reminds me of farmer day. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAt your high school? \n\nRob Dietz  \nAt my high school, yeah. Farmer day, it is no longer there, but at Henderson High School we would dress as farmers to make fun of the rival high school which was Tucker.\n\nJason Bradford  \nBecause they were more rural? \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah, we thought of them as the more redneck. . .\n\nJason Bradford  \nThey were hicks? \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. And it was sanctioned by the whole school. It's like, you'd go to school on Monday and over the intercom the principal would say, \"And don't forget Farmer Day is on Friday!\"\n\nJason Bradford  \nI think farmers should be a protected class. That's what I think. How dare you.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIt's weird how it got . . . the cultural . . . That's I think, part of what industrialism did to it. It's like, yeah, you're not going to do this if you've got the brains. You've got to get off the farm. You've got to get away.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, I remember back in the aughts talking to some folks that with you know, organizations that were really pushing green jobs. And I asked them, I was really curious, like, what do they consider to be a green job or not? And it was essentially focused on manufacturing, right? \n\nAsher Miller  \nSolar technology or whatever.\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, solar, wind, you know, maybe some EV stuff. And I asked about food, you know, the food system, would you consider working on farms and doing regenerative ag as part of the green job kind of cause? And they were absolutely opposed to it because they saw that as going backwards. These are the worst paying jobs. You know, what we're trying to create are good paying union jobs working at some manufacturing plant. Not working on a farm.\n\nRob Dietz  \nSo what we need is a foodless economy.\n\nAsher Miller  \nWell, yeah. We're working towards that I guess. \n\nRob Dietz  \nI guess with those 1000s of ingredients, maybe you couldn't even call what we have food anyway.\n\nAsher Miller  \nIt's spelled f-0-0-d.\n\nRob Dietz  \nOkay, look, before we get into how we're going to escape from this industrialized system, and industrialism in general, we really have to step back and acknowledge how friggin hard that's going to be to pull off. We're right now completely dependent on this industrial food system for our survival. I mean, I know there are pockets of people that are not. But by and large, there's zillions - that's the technical term - zillions of us that if we don't have this food system trucked in (f-0-0-d) to us, we're not gonna make it through the week.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd one of the things about cultural materialism is that infrastructure, in a sense, drives structure and superstructure, not the other way around, right? And we're here in a situation where we're absolutely, like you just said, Rob, completely dependent upon this infrastructure. So if we decide somehow collectively, do you know what I mean, that we need to transition and deindustrialize, let's say. And we've done that at a superstructural and structural level, right. We have the shared recognition that we need to do this. We change the rules, you know, incentives of the economy and all that stuff. We have to be really careful about how that happens. And it's a big question of if you could do that quickly. We've seen other nations do this, and it hasn't gone particularly well, right? \n\nJason Bradford  \nThey've deindustrialized? \n\nAsher Miller  \nThey've transformed their food systems very quickly. \n\nJason Bradford  \nOkay, got it. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSo they've changed the infrastructure of their food system. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, quickly. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSo you have the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.\n\nRob Dietz  \nThat's always where you want to go for an example of something that maybe didn't quite work out the way they wanted.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd I think this is a good point to make which is that industrialism, including industrialism in the food system is not synonymous with capitalism. You can industrialize a food system in a communist country. In fact, that's what they did. So you know, Stalin, they had this huge campaign towards collectivism. And it's estimated that between 5 and 9 million people died directly due to famines caused by that collectivism push. And then later in the late 1950s, early 1960s, in Mao's China -- the Great Leap Forward -- the death estimates there are range massively. But they're in the 10's of millions. \n\nJason Bradford  \nThat was in the 60s, yeah. This was the destruction of the peasanthood basically in both of these cultures. They wanted to free the peasants from the yoke, you know, of the land and that dependency, and get them into manufacturing and able to like transition these cultures. So I agree, industrialism was a thing whether you were Communist or Capitalist, or whatever. But what ends up happening then in either situation once you've made that transition, is I think we all get this sort of Stockholm Syndrome related to industrialism. And you know what I mean by that is that we're captured by it. Like we've been kidnapped. \n\nRob Dietz  \nIndustrialism took us hostage.\n\nJason Bradford  \nTook us hostage. And now we're in all this constant negotiation with it about like, you know, be nice to me. Feed me, but don't give me too many toxins, please. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd I still want it super cheap. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd I still want it super cheap, please. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd is there a high paying job for me in this somewhere? \n\nJason Bradford  \nExactly.\n\nRob Dietz  \nDo I get to be mayor McCheese?\n\nJason Bradford  \nDo I get to put away for retirement and then just eat my Doritos, you know, and not work? And so we're now constantly making excuses in bargaining with our captor because people are afraid of losing access to it all.\n\nGeorge  Costanza  \nEvery 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. \n\nJerry Seinfeld\nIf every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.\n\nAsher Miller  \nWe're trying to explore, how do we escape, right? How do we escape from industrialism?\n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, I wonder if first we can take two examples of other places that are maybe on the opposite side of the scale from the Soviet Union and China and what you described, Asher. And one of the places that comes to mind for me is Bhutan, right? The Himalayan kingdom. So I have this friend from Bhutan, a guy named Sonam. And we met at a wildlife conservation and environmental leadership course.\n\nJason Bradford  \nOh nice. \n\nRob Dietz  \nThis was out in Shenandoah National Park. And for the weekend once, I invited him back to my house in DC and we were walking around the city. He was just floored. \n\nAsher Miller  \nWell he hadn't been?\n\nRob Dietz  \nNo, he hadn't been. But he was looking up at the sky and the airplanes that were coming over. He was kind of like counting them. You know like the Count, \"One, one airplane ah ah ah. Two, two airplane..\" But it was kind of like that. He was kind of blown away because he said in Bhutan it'd be like one plane a day, maybe comes in right and lands. And you never you never see them. The noise in DC of course was constant, right? It's not that more planes couldn't go there. They decided we're not going to have more planes going here.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, they basically made a conscious decision to not fully industrialize. And they've tried to preserve traditional ways of being. And if you look at the statistics on them, they have some of the lowest carbon emissions per capita.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI think they're carbon negative. \n\nJason Bradford  \nThey are carbon negative, in a sense, because they have so much forest protected. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd they also export hydro-energy. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd they export electricity from hydropower.\n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd the forest protection is actually written into their constitution. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYes, nature has rights in the Constitution. It's quite amazing. And they have a very low political partisanship. They have a very high bar to become a civil servant. And it's a very good status to have a position like that.\n\nRob Dietz  \nIt's a very low bar here. I was a civil servant once.\n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd they measure wellbeing using what they call the 3G model. So GDP, which we're used to hearing about blah, blah, blah. GHDG, greenhouse gases, and GNH, gross national happiness.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd they're well known in our circles for really being the biggest sort of ambassadors\/proselytizers of gross national happiness, you know. They've organized conferences around this, and it was really a campaign, I think, from the kingdom to really push that as an alternative measurement of wellbeing. Now, I think we have to note that there are characteristics of Bhutan that were conducive in some ways to make this decision to not fully industrialize, right. It's landlocked in the Himalaya, low population, only 800,000 people living there. It's culturally homogenous, right? They're I think all Buddhists. They have a benevolent king, you know. So it's not an apples to apples.\n\nRob Dietz  \nHas there ever been a benevolent king in a European country or are they all malevolent?\n\nAsher Miller  \nThat's a really good question.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI had to throw that out for my history buff friends here.\n\nAsher Miller  \nThere are probably degrees of how bad they are. Are we grading on a sliding scale or not?\n\nJason Bradford  \nIs it Vlad the Impaler, or. . . ?\n\nAsher Miller  \nRight, exactly. I mean, Queen Elizabeth, she didn't fuck too much up, right? So we also should talk about de-escalation of industrialization, right? \n\nJason Bradford  \nYes, because they sort of didn't really adopt any of it. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. And so let's talk about Cuba in that case. Okay. Now, we talked about the Soviet Union earlier, Cuba was very strongly tied to the Soviet Union. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba went through what they called their special periods. \n\nJason Bradford  \nNice euphemism. \n\nRob Dietz  \nIsn't that special?\n\nAsher Miller  \nIt was quite a sudden version. So, you know, I was just saying earlier, we have to be careful when we're talking about de-industrializing, especially the food system. If you do that, too, suddenly, it could suck when we're dependent upon it. And they went through a version of that.\n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd that's what happened, right? The Soviet Union stopped shipping oil and other fossil fuels.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThey stopped buying all their sugar at high prices. \n\nAsher Miller  \nSo before the Soviet Union collapsed, they were following the standard development model for a communist country, you know, state owned versions of all these industrialized kind of commodities, sugar cane, tobacco that they're exporting. There were folks there that were doing sort of alternative forms of like, organic food experiments and things like that.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThese are in the quaternary economy sector because these are the researchers.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI don't think they're getting paid big bucks.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThese were like academics. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, I don't think they were getting paid big bucks for this at all. \n\nJason Bradford  \nNo, they weren't baseball players in Cuba. \n\nAsher Miller  \nI don't know what the exact stats are but they lost, you know, like massive amounts of their diesel imports. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAbout half. \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd oil imports. And it really, like, screwed them up. So they went on this crash course of trying to quickly train people to grow food. And they were growing food everywhere. They were motivating people, incentivizing people to actually leave cities. But there were people growing food in every kind of available space that they could, even in the cities. They tried to organize a means of transporting things locally. And again, they're doing this without a lot of fuel to work with. So you know, they went through this process and thankfully, they had some of these key ingredients in place to do that. Now this special period did lead to I think the average Cuban losing 15 pounds and they weren't . . .  Like a lot of Americans could probably stand lose 15 pounds. I don't know that they were in a situation like that to begin with. So it wasn't necessarily the easiest time.\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. So, you know, it is important to recognize that Bhutan and Cuba have some characteristics that aren't not easily applicable to places like the US. So there's physical barriers, right? One is an island nation, one is very mountainous. And there are cultural barriers. In other words, these barriers sort of allow them to have the isolation, or forced isolation on them, that kept them separate from the industrialized world in the large sense. And so both of these countries now are looked upon by some awe by outsiders, as they have some amazing outcomes in the context of these limits that have been either self-imposed, or imposed because of some catastrophe. And again, this is a reveal, I believe, on sort of the downsides of all the affluence that we have through industrialism. And the benefits of showing some restraint, you know. I kind of think of it like, you know, those who are very rich, very wealthy, often they get into really bad habits. They become addicted to alcohol, or whatever, or to shopping, and Anhedonia becomes a problem. \n\nRob Dietz  \nWhat becomes a problem?\n\nAsher Miller  \nWho's Anhedonia?\n\nJason Bradford  \nIt's the notion that everything in your life is a pleasure and so it's hard to find pleasure again. Like, you know, you need the struggle, you need the pain, the balance, and life becomes too easy. And industrialism does that to people who have the money to like purchase all the benefits. So this sort of reveals that a lot of positives happened. Like the people - wellbeing went up actually in Cuba, ironically, even though they had to ration their diet and stuff. \n\nAsher Miller  \nThe other thing to reflect on here is, we've been talking about all the downsides of industrialism, specifically with a food system, and why we should try to escape it. But we haven't talked about the fact that it's going to go away at some level, right? So it's a little bit like we could say, hey, we don't necessarily want to go through what Cuba went through, but we could see how dependent and vulnerable we are to that industrial food system. And you talked about a Stockholm Syndrome, but in a sense, we are a captive, right, of the system. And if we try to escape it, you know, suddenly, it can kill us. But at the same time, we either escape it, or it is gonna kill us. So we really should be thinking about, you know, how do we at least move towards a better way. Weaning ourselves from the teat of industrialism.\n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd think we need to have a very strong disclaimer here that just like everything we talked about, there's nuance, right? Like, the idea of industrialism and the food system is, you know, we don't have so many people producing food anymore. Well, then they can specialize in other things that we need. Now sometimes they specialize in shit that nobody needs. But sometimes they specialize in things that really everybody needs.\n\nAsher Miller  \nLike creating sausages wrapped around pancakes. \n\nRob Dietz  \nRight, right.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThe idea is, are we gonna be a complete romantic and say we should all be peasants? Well, maybe there was something good about the fact that you didn't have to have 90% of the people in the peasant class anymore. And there was some science, there was some advance, right? Like infant mortality and the probability your wife would die in childbirth is really low right now. It used to be pretty darn scary, right? \n\nAsher Miller  \nThe lowest ever I think. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. So like I say, we have to realize there are some things that I appreciate about -- \n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd as we were saying before, we also have to acknowledge just how difficult it is for those of us in the modern world to escape from industrialism. We were just talking about the risks of it at a systemic level. But even for us as just individuals deciding that we want to escape from it, when you compare it to a form of addiction, you see how difficult it is to walk away from something. But in some ways, I'm not trying to downplay how difficult addiction is, but you know, if you think of that as sort of the analogy, you know, like an alcoholic, some of the advice that you get would be don't hang out with the people that you drank with. Don't go to the bar or whatever.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWe live in the bar. \n\nAsher Miller  \nExactly.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWe live in the bar.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo it's really hard to do that. \n\nJason Bradford  \nI sleep in the bar.\n\nRob Dietz  \nWe live in the bar of industrialism. That's what you're saying?\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah. And I also I don't want us to drop - I don't want everyone to drop out of society altogether. Do the whole Ted Kaczynski thing and live in a cabin in Montana.\n\nAsher Miller  \nNo, we need people. We need our listeners to stay in the game. \n\nRob Dietz  \nThat's another disclaimer that we have to make every episode. Don't be a Unabomber, okay?\n\nAsher Miller  \nThat's a low bar, guys. \n\nRob Dietz  \nWell, if we're gonna think about escaping, maybe it's gonna be more like Andy Dufresne in \"Shawshank Redemption.\"\n\nJason Bradford  \nYou remember the name?\n\nRob Dietz  \nOf course. Who doesn't remember the name? It's Andy Dufresne. \n\nJason Bradford  \nWhat was the actor?\n\nRob Dietz  \nTim Robbins.\n\nJason Bradford  \nOkay, okay. I didn't know which one.\n\nRob Dietz  \nSo yeah. Red was played by - \n\nAsher Miller  \nMorgan Freeman.\n\nJason Bradford  \nThank you.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYou know, you gotta do it a little at a time if you're gonna get out of Shawshank Prison, or industrialism prison. You can't just suddenly escape. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYou need a spoon to start scraping. \n\nRob Dietz  \nWell he had a rock hammer, but yeah. Hidden in the Bible. Sorry -- spoiler alerts. You should have seen Shawshank by now though, people.\n\nAsher Miller  \nAnd do it on the downlow, you know. Like people don't have to know. You don't have to be a total radical. You can just sort of work on it at night while the guards are sleeping.\n\nRob Dietz  \nDo some little bits. So yeah, maybe we can go through some of the Marvin Harris stuff and figure out how to escape as individuals from the Crazy Town of industrialism. \n\nAsher Miller  \nRight. So, let's talk about -- How would you do that from infrastructural, structural, and superstructural level? What do you guys think?\n\nJason Bradford  \nWell, there's people that take breaks from drinking, like dry Januarys or whatever.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI'm on one right now. \n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah, actually so my family's done this not as much as we should have. But there are folks that we know that do a tech Shabbat, which is basically like you unplug from all your devices, your phones, TV, computer, everything, during the Sabbath, right? So maybe you're not doing a full 24 hours, maybe you're doing a stretch of it. \n\nJason Bradford  \nPick a day. \n\nAsher Miller  \nBut you're just basically detoxing in a sense. And that's around technology. But you could sort of try to apply a similar thing towards industrialism, right? But it could be other things like you could, I mean this sounds stupid, but you could bake your own bread instead of going to the store to buy bread with soy lecithin.\n\nRob Dietz  \nInstead of getting a chocolate chip pancake sausage wrapper on a stick. \n\nJason Bradford  \nYou can shear your own sheep, you can straighten your own wool, you can make your own yarn, you can knit your own socks. This is the thing, all these things just sound so ridiculous when you can just go to Goodwill and get industrial made products. It's so frickin' hard.\n\nAsher Miller  \nIt's hard to do, but it's maybe good practice. \n\nRob Dietz  \nGoodwill? What are you talking about? You should go to Walmart, or Costco, or Target, or Amazon.com.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWell here's how to make it easier, okay? It's very hard to do anything by yourself, right? We always say this. So part of, then, to think from a structural perspective, is organizing yourself. So invite others, you know, like they say also with addiction, you know, you have to have friends who aren't addicts. Hang out with them. So try to get friends who are also willing to go along with your ride and your hobby, right? So I met a bunch of people that do crafts stuff, the Tarweed Folk School kind of things. Then you have a place to go. You have a social group. Join others, even if it's a few hours. The other thing you know, we first started the episode talking about the stats on wildlife and loss of plants on my dear mountain in New Caledonia. So repairing that as much as you can. There's a notion of everything we build, we talked about how we like to build things, whether it's pyramids or in Dubai. All the stuff that we build, decays. It degenerates. If you help restore an ecosystem, you're putting something together that will regenerate itself. So it's a regenerative investment. So make those regenerative investments that help other forms of life, besides humans, have a better chance?\n\nAsher Miller  \nWell, and as you said, do it with others. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd do it with others.\n\nAsher Miller  \nSo volunteer with other things that exist, or start something. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAnd that's easy. Anywhere you can look, there's groups that would like you to help them do nature restoration.\n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. I was thinking about this notion of the cultural side. And how do you get out of the culture of industrialism that like you said, Jason, we're living in it. We live in the bar. So this thing happened to me the other day -- I was trying to hang these shelves in my house. I gotta hang shelves so I can organize all the shit that I don't need, right? But these shelves have these brackets that I screw into the wall using these hex screws, right? And I could screw it in by hand with a socket wrench that I've got. It takes a while. These are long screws. I'm screwing them into a stud, and --\n\nJason Bradford  \nOh, that's a lot of work. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd I'm just cranking away on these things. \n\nJason Bradford  \nOh, you need a power tool. \n\nRob Dietz  \nAnd I thought, \"Wow, I should get a socket attachment for a drill.\" I could just put -- like when you watch people changing tires.\n\nAsher Miller  \nOh like F1? \n\nJason Bradford  \nOr NASCAR?\n\nAsher Miller  \nIt's like 0.3 seconds - Four tires on.\n\nRob Dietz  \nLike I should get me one of those, right, and I'd be done with this project. \n\nAsher Miller  \nActually, you need a whole crew. You need eight guys to show up. \n\nRob Dietz  \nI thought about it. I was like, \"Oh, I should go get the tool.\" And then I was like,  Do you know how much time it would take me to drive or go over to some shitty hardware store? And I'm not talking the mom and pop hardware. You have to go to Home Depot or something.\n\nJason Bradford  \nI mean it's massive. Yeah, you're walking so many miles.\n\nRob Dietz  \nHow did it get made? How did it get shipped there? And by the time I get that back home and Like, no, just frickin' turn the damn wrench, and put the thing in, and have some time with it. I don't know. There's something where I needed to readjust my mindset, the culture that I have around that stuff.\n\nAsher Miller  \nI don't know, dude. I don't think you went far enough. You're still using a wrench. I think you got to do it by hand. Bloody those fingers, man. \n\nRob Dietz  \nMaybe by teeth?\n\nJason Bradford  \nYeah, use your teeth. Come on. Step it up, Rob.\n\nRob Dietz  \nI start banging in nails with my head. \n\nAsher Miller  \nWith your head, exactly.\n\nJason Bradford  \nWhat were the pre-industrial false teeth? Were they wood?\n\nAsher Miller  \nYeah. \n\nJason Bradford  \nThat's cool. Let's do that. \n\nRob Dietz  \nYeah. \n\nJason Bradford  \nAlright\n\nMelody Allison  \nThat'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.\n\nJason Bradford  \nAs the poly- perma- meta-crisis gets underway, it is time to slow down, degrow, focus on the local, and find purpose in a culture that cherishes family, community, and nature. Mattel Corporation recognizes and supports this Great Turning. And their response is once again refurbishing its most iconic product to maintain cultural relevance. Welcome, Bhutan Barbie. A doll that captures the spirit and grace of the kingdom of Bhutan. Dressed in a traditional Kira, this Barbie celebrates Bhutanese culture and elegance. But she is not just a fashion icon. She also embodies the values that Bhutan holds dear, with a warm smile representing the happiness and contentment of the simple Bhutanese way of life. Let Bhutan Barbie enchant and inspire you as you embark on your own path towards enlightened living through the Great Unraveling.\n<\/pre><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jason, Rob, and Asher take a tour of New Caledonia, California&#8217;s Central Valley, Bhutan, and Cuba to uncover the ins and outs of industrialism, especially as it has been applied to agriculture. Along the way they riff on how the hell we can escape from an -ism that completely engulfs us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3500273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[251744,79718,251746,79720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3500272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crazy-town","category-environment","category-podcasts","category-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3500272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3500273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3500272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3500272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3500272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}