What if the greatest strength of modern civilization—its incredible complexity—is also its greatest weakness?

In Part 2 of our six-part summer series, Finding Crazy Town, producer Alex Leff continues investigating the mysterious disappearance of Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller. Following the trail leads from a simple podcast microphone into the astonishing complexity of modern techno-industrial civilization, where every solution creates new layers of coordination, specialization, and dependence.

We'll revisit one of Crazy Town's core ideas: that complexity creates complexity. As societies become more interconnected, they also become more fragile—raising difficult questions about resilience, simplification, and what it would take to build a civilization that's durable enough to weather the challenges ahead.

Originally recorded on 7/15/26 with archival episodes.

Alex Leff:

I'm Rob Dietz. I'm Jason Bradford, and I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where everything is totally fine. Modern civilization is ecologically sustainable, socially just, and economically sound. Oh yeah. And all the podcast hosts are not missing at all.

Previously on Crazy Town.

Wizard of Oz Audio:

We're not in Kansas anymore.

Jaws Audio:

We’re going to need a bigger boat.

Taken Audio:

But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.

Dude, Where's My Car? Audio:

Dude, where's my car?

Alex Leff:

Jason? Rob? Asher? Guys? Where'd they go? They're missing. The podcast hosts are missing.

Crazy Town:

You must find Jason, Rob, and Asher. Bring them back safely. Only then can peace be restored to Crazy Town.

Alex Leff:

I don't think I can do it.

Crazy Town:

You must.

Alex Leff:

Okay. Okay. I'll try my best. Hey everyone. Hello and welcome to Crazy Town. I'm Alex Leff, Crazy Town producer. I'm sure glad you're here for our six-part series called Finding Crazy Town. Today's episode is about complexity. Last time, we learned that our illustrious podcast hosts went missing. And I realized the only way to find where they went is to better understand how they see the modern world, how they think about systems, energy, economics, ecology, and all the ways those things connect. So in the last episode, our search for Jason, Rob, and Asher took us all around the world.

We followed container ships through international trade networks, dug into fossil fuels, and learned that more energy is used in one flight from Cairo to New York in all the human energy that was required to make the ancient pyramids. What we did not do was find Jason, Rob, and Asher. But don't worry. I think I was just approaching this wrong the whole time. You see, maybe the problem is that we've been looking everywhere. We might need to narrow our search. You know, specialize. Pick one thing and stick with it. Let's see, where to begin. Well, I know they needed a new microphone for the podcast. Maybe we start there.

Rob Dietz:

We're going to have to get a fourth microphone. And I've been having this moral dilemma about that because we talk about consumerism. And so kind of the last thing I want to do is buy some specialized piece of electronic equipment from an Amazon store that's sourcing parts out of China or something like that. So I have a proposal for the two of you.

Jason Bradford:

Okay.

Asher Miler:

What's that?

Rob Dietz:

Let's make our own microphone.

Jason Bradford:

When the three of us do this, not just the two of us? You said a proposal for the two of you.

Rob Dietz:

Oh, well, it would be better if it was the two.

Asher Miler:

He wants the bosses around.

Jason Bradford:

That's how I interpret it.

Rob Dietz:

Don't you need someone to coordinate this process?

Jason Bradford:

You could be the manager.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I like that. I like that.

Jason Bradford:

Okay.

Rob Dietz:

No, okay. I'll tell you what, I'll roll up the sleeves too. Let's all three of us go out and make a microphone. You think we can do this?

Jason Bradford:

From scratch here.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Okay. What would a final product look like?

Asher Miler:

I could draw one.

Rob Dietz:

It's a microphone made out of dirt.

Jason Bradford:

I could grow some fiber crop and something like that

Asher Miler:

Just so I understand, you're saying not just build it with parts that we are able to order. You mean actually all the parts, manufacture all the parts too?

Rob Dietz:

Let's mine and manufacture everything we need, or grow it. Like you're saying, Jason. We can make a hemp microphone.

Jason Bradford:

Sure. I actually have no idea how to do that. I know how to grow plants, but beyond growing the stuff, I let it go from there.

Asher Miler:

Well, honestly, it would have to be tin cans and string that we just found laying around.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I mean, we would have to find it because I'd like to see us try to make a tin can.

Asher Miler:

No, no, no.

Jason Bradford:

There's a great story actually. This brings up the story of this guy, Thomas Thwaites, British. And I don't know, I think about 10 years ago or so, or maybe a little longer than that, he tried to make a toaster from scratch.

Rob Dietz:

Wow. That might be easier than a microphone. I don't know.

Jason Bradford:

Probably. He tried to think of something that he thought he could actually do. And he bought the simplest toaster, the cheapest toaster he could buy. And he disassembled it and it had 400 parts.

Asher Miler:

400? That was the simplest thing.

Jason Bradford:

400 parts. The simplest toaster. Then he classified the parts by the materials that were in them, metal, plastic, mica, types of metal, iron-based copper. And he weighed it all. So he said, "Okay, I need this much copper and this much iron that I make a steel out of somehow." And the mica was for insulation. So you can go see YouTube videos, there's a book about it, and it took him a year and cost him tens of thousands of dollars.

Asher Miler:

That's the most expensive toaster.

Jason Bradford:

And it blew up as soon as he tried to plug it in. It just started catching on fire.

Asher Miler:

He needed Robert to pedal. Remember Robert on the bicycle?

Rob Dietz:

Oh, right. The guy who can generate 500 watts or whatever.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. So it was an epic failure, but he kind of thought it was successful. It's one of these success-failure.

Rob Dietz:

Sounds like he should have set out to make a landmine instead of a toaster. He would've been totally successful.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. But yeah, he apparently had to find some 15th or 16th century metallurgy book because metallurgy is so complex and industrialized now that he had to figure out, well, how did they do it in the olden days?

Rob Dietz:

Well that's what I was saying.

Asher Miler:

They poisoned the rivers.

Rob Dietz:

He had to get copper. He's like out there with a pickaxe. And then what? So you got some broken rock. How are you going to make copper wire out of that?

Jason Bradford:

Well, he had to figure it out. So he went to professors at the local universities and historians, and it's not easy. So that's, I think, an important hidden driver really is how complex the world is nowadays and how specialized you have to be to understand how to do anything. I could grow food and that's a specialty, but I wouldn't know how to take that hemp fiber and turn it into a microphone.

Rob Dietz:

So you're saying that the level of complexity involved in making stuff in the world today is a hidden driver that's led us into crazy tech.

Jason Bradford:

Yes, because what ends up happening is you get locked into this complexity. Once you're part of this, once this thing that's rolling, there's an evolution that happens where complexity begets complexity. And what ends up happening is you end up having to manage all the complexity. So for this toaster to happen, obviously there are mines in one part of the world and a smelter in another for one set of products. And then there's probably like the plastics are happening over here based upon some natural gas production that gets piped at the plant, which then gets turned into pellets, which then gets reformulated into something else, which gets put in some injection molding, which then gets shipped and assembled and then it gets sold.

Rob Dietz:

You lost me at Smelter. I don't even know what that is.

Jason Bradford:

Right.

Alex Leff:

Dang it. I really though Rob was just going to buy a microphone. And all we'd have to do is drive down to the mall, walk to the podcast microphone aisle, and boom, he'd be right there. I should have known it's never that simple with these guys. Everything's part of a larger system. Why does everything have to be so complex? I though the last episode on global trade was complicated enough, but really all those shipping containers and international transactions were part of something much larger. What Jason, Rob, and Asher often call high energy modernity. A civilization built from countless interconnected systems, all dependent on one another. As Jason was saying, complexity creates complexity. And once you build a complex system, you need more systems to coordinate it, manage it, repair it, finance it, regulate it, and educate people on how to operate it, which is not exactly helping narrow down our search. But if understanding their worldview will help us find them, then understanding complexity is absolutely essential.

Asher Miler:

I think you're right. I think this is an important topic and something that maybe we don't tend to think that much about. We just assume that this is the normal state of affairs. Maybe it's useful to just step back and think about where all this complexity and specialization came from in the first place. Because it's not like, yes, we have a modern form of this. But I think that societies, there is this idea, this concept of complex societies that we've talked about before.

Jason Bradford:

I mean, look at the original toaster and the Flintstones. It was not the same as the ones we have today.

Asher Miler:

No, but it was pretty complex.

Rob Dietz:

The Flintstone toe, is that just a rock? Or what is that?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, they heat a rock up and they -

Rob Dietz:

A paradactyl farts in a slot or something.

Asher Miler:

Right. So yeah. So where did this come from? I mean, wouldn't you say that it all comes back to when we decided to domesticate plants and animals and we became agrarian societies and sedentary and started living in cities and shit?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, I think that's what allows that evolutionary treadmill we get on. It allows it to get started, I believe. Yes.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I think going back in economic history, that's the whole idea. An agricultural surplus frees up all this labor to do all the other tasks out there.

Asher Miler:

It's a surplus thing. So again, it comes back to energy. We had more energy at our disposal in terms of caloric energy than we had to expand. We didn't have to have quite as many people involved in growing food. We weren't just hunting and gathering stuff, which pretty much everyone was involved in for the most part.

And so that created cities and that created sort of complex elements of society where you had specialization of priests. And every once in a while, a very small number of people got to be kings and queens and what have you.

Jason Bradford:

In sports, we recognize our music, we recognize easily the expertise of someone. We can see somebody play a guitar or we can see someone do a pole vault or an incredible serve and we go, wow, the incredible years of training that they've had, the ability they had not to grow potatoes. They've had time to do this other stuff. And they've had this -

Asher Miler:

It's Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours, right?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah.

Asher Miler:

To have those 10,000 hours means . . .

Jason Bradford:

To have those 10,000. Somehow you've gotten your other needs met, right?

Asher Miler:

Someone else is meeting them.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. But I think it's true. It's not just in these sports and these things that are visible to us. It is the people that are involved in the sciences and the industrial arts who are making the metallurgists or whatever, or the food scientists.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to put in the time to get a PhD in chemical engineering if you have to be mounding up your potatoes.

Asher Miler:

I guess my point is even before we had the level of complexity and specialization we have now, there was complexity in society. So we've been doing this for a while and got probably more and more complex over time.

Rob Dietz:

Well yeah. According to Jason, that complexity begat more complexity.

Asher Miler:

Exactly.

Rob Dietz:

I got to say begat. I've been wanting to say that for a while.

Jason Bradford:

Yes.You could think of the rise of the mercantile class and trade and spices. Well, then what do you need? Do you need all the ships and navigation expertise and language expertise?

Rob Dietz:

You need the pirates to raid those ships. That's a whole nother job class complexity. The ARGH class.

Jason Bradford:

You need parrot tenders.

Asher Miler:

Parrot tenders.

Jason Bradford:

Eye patchmakers. Right.

Rob Dietz:

Skull and crossbone weavers.

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Asher Miler:

But fossil fuels obviously did put this all in hyperdrive. I mean, what we have now with the level of complexity and specialization that we see in the modern world now, all that stuff that we're just talking about on hyperdrive.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. When you talked about the caloric surplus from say growing weed or corn or something like that, but the caloric surplus from digging up fossil fuels, that was exponential growth. It freed us up to do - I mean, even talking about the farm situation, labor on the farm has been steadily dropping until now. It's what? Less than 3% of the economy.

Asher Miler:

And I think it was probably this sort of reinforcing dynamic where you had more people, not everybody obviously, but you have more people with available time that provides more opportunity for education for some. You have people who are then able to spend their free time and their education to think about new inventions, ways of innovating things, understanding the natural world, which leads to new products, new technology, new ways of harnessing not only free human time, but also the capacity of these resources, right?

Rob Dietz:

Right.

Asher Miler:

Which creates more complexity.

Rob Dietz:

Well, and thinking about another way that complexity begat more complexity, if you have fossil fuels that enable the levels of transportation that we have, that lets you create these hubs, cities, hubs, universities, a hub like Silicon Valley, where you can just locate all of these specialists who are then combining to make whatever, all the wonders of the world while they don't have to worry about the food situation because that's just all being trucked into them.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. No, that's really true. And I had this hypothesis when I was thinking about this situation. I said. Well, let's back up for a second. You guys ever had to fill out this form for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that codifies the job you're in or the job code for someone who's working for you?

Rob Dietz:

That sounds like something a responsible person has to do. I haven't done much of that.

Asher Miler:

I don't think the Bureau of Labor Statistics cared what I was doing. They didn't want to hear from me. You're worthless.

Rob Dietz:

They actually shunned you. Didn't want your answer. What are you talking about here?

Jason Bradford:

Well, so you think of economists say, "Well, there's so many jobs in this sector or that sector. There's job growth in this sector, but there's job loss in that sector, or this part of the country has more jobs in this sector." Where do they come up with that? Well, they're keeping track of everybody's job. So everyone who's employed is coded and it's standardized. So the U.S. has their own standard.

Asher Miler:

Talk about specialization. So there's somebody who made that shit up in the first place.

Jason Bradford:

Yes. And that person is classified as well. Yes.

Asher Miler:

They're at the top.

Jason Bradford:

They put themselves at the top.

Rob Dietz:

The ruler all.

Asher Miler:

The very top. Exactly.

Jason Bradford:

So I looked into the - First, my hypothesis was this. You can divide, kind of like ecosystems, right? We talked about there's the primary kind of level of the ecosystem, which would be like plant life. And then there's stuff that eats plants. So you can think of this in the economy. They're sort of the primary productive sectors of the economy like growing food, having wood products, let's say forestry, or having energy products, so mining for oil and gas, or mining minerals. Those are getting the raw material inputs and delivering them then to what would be called the secondary level of the economy.

Those are the folks that take those raw inputs and get them into forms that we start to recognize and be able to then use. So manufacturing and value-added processing. Everything else above that's tertiary. So sales and managerial classes and professional classes. So my hypothesis was that our society is so advanced through this complexity, kind of complexity on complexity that we would have this bloated tertiary class and we would have this sort of tiny little primary sector class. So I decided first I'd look for the U.S. I'd say, "What's the US like?" The problem was there was somewhere between 800 and 900 job classifications in the U.S. And I can only pay attention for about half an hour. I only wanted to do this for half an hour. And I'm like, "I'm not going to run through these in a half." So I went to this international standard and found 137 jobs.

Asher Miler:

Oh, that's better. More manageable.

Jason Bradford:

More manageable. And I did that. I broke them up. And they're awesome.

Rob Dietz:

Can I just jump in here and say that your hypothesis needs a name? I think it's the Lloyd Dobbler hypothesis.

Jason Bradford:

Oh.

Rob Dietz:

You know who that is?

Jason Bradford:

No, I don't know.

Rob Dietz:

Lloyd Dobbler was the main character in, of course, a late '80s movie called -

Asher Miler:

Shocker. This is a shocker.

Rob Dietz:

It's called "Say Anything."

Asher Miler:

Oh yeah.

Rob Dietz:

And it was a good movie. It was really formative for me, but I remember this quote from it that I got to read to you now. Okay. Lloyd was, I'll set it up. He's at a dinner at his girlfriend's house, or the girl that he's hoping will be his girlfriend. And her dad is there with a bunch of his business associates. And they're kind of like, "So Lloyd, what are you going to do after you graduate high school?" And he's like, "Uh." And so he launches into this answer. He says, "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought or processed."

Jason Bradford:

Hey, come to the farm, buddy. That's a guy that wants to be in the primary sector.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I think if he were, that's why it's the Lloyd Dobbler hypothesis. He's anti-secondary and tertiary levels.

Jason Bradford:

Right, right. Excellent. Thank you. Lloyd Dobbler. Okay.

Asher Miler:

So you had this hypothesis named after Lloyd.

Jason Bradford:

Lloyd Dobbler. So I find the International Standard Classification of Occupations on Wikipedia, and it has 137 jobs. They're in 10 major groups, and they're divided into these groups. Managers, professional, technicians, clerical support workers, service and sales, skilled agriculture, forestry, fishery, craft related trades, plant and machine operators and assemblers, elementary occupations, and armed forces.

Rob Dietz:

So where do the pirates go? Are they in the armed forces?

Asher Miler:

Where are podcasters? Where am I on this?

Jason Bradford:

Well, you go through and find it.

Asher Miler:

That's a major group of its own, isn't it?

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, exactly. Now it is.

Rob Dietz:

I'm afraid we'll never find ourselves in this classification. We're just banned from it.

Alex Leff:

Okay. Let me see if I understand Jason's argument here. There are the primary sectors of the economy, the people actually obtaining the resources that make modernity possible, growing food, chopping down trees, drilling for oil. Then there are the secondary sectors which take those resources and turn them into usable products. And then there are the tertiary sectors, all the salespeople and consultants, marketers, managers, all the other jobs that are now needed to coordinate increasingly complex societies. If Jason's Lloyd Dobbler hypothesis is correct, then way more jobs today are in those tertiary sectors. Essentially, we have more managers and managers of managers than we have people actually obtaining resources.

Jason Bradford:

What's amazing is that if you scroll through this and you count, you say, okay, how many jobs go into each one? Each of these. Essentially, what we've come to is that there are 89 of the 131 jobs. 130. Is it 130 or -

Asher Miler:

137, you said.

Jason Bradford:

Shit, I could be wrong. 131 jobs. 89 are in tertiary. 31 are in secondary. There's only 11 fricking jobs in the world left that are primary.

Asher Miler:

You mean all this stuff that we actually really rely on?

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Rob Dietz:

There's actually only 11 people doing those jobs.

Jason Bradford:

And that's because we've been able to take all this energy in these machines and say, "Yeah, let's just put a person on a tractor." And so yes, basically now we've inverted this pyramid. Usually the pyramid is like the base is the biggest. Our base is now this little point.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah.

Jason Bradford:

And it's teetering now because we've got this heavy weight of all these tertiaries and this poor little base of primary trying to support it all.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. A few years back, Kurt Cobb, you guys know him, right?

Jason Bradford:

Oh yes. He's great.

Rob Dietz:

Energy nalyst, writer. He often publishes stuff on our resilience.org website. He actually put this figure together. We'll put it in the notes, but he's got exactly what you're talking about where he's got basically industries and agriculture and forestry is at the bottom, this tiny little wedge. And as you go up, he's putting stuff like construction and retail trade, and they're bigger and bigger chunks of the economy. And on the top is FIRE, which stands for finance, insurance, real estate, and it's the biggest chunk. It's like over 20% of the economy.

Jason Bradford:

That's the amount of money going into it.

Asher Miler:

Yeah, I think we need to distinguish between the number of people and the proportion of the economy. And so it feels like there are a few different things here. There's only 11 types of jobs in the primary, right? But that's not necessarily a reflection of how many people. In the case of the U.S., I would imagine there's actually not that many people. In the global context, there's probably still a significant number of people that are involved in primary, depending upon where you are in the world, right?

Jason Bradford:

Yes. It's less and less every year now, but yes.

Asher Miler:

Right. But the key thing in the United States, in particular, is that there are not very many people, for example, involved in growing food. But it's also, you think about it from the standpoint of who gets paid, right?

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Asher Miler:

Not only are there so many more different roles and jobs in the tertiary, they get paid the big bucks.

Rob Dietz:

Because they're mostly just paying each other. They're like, "Yo, you're like me. You must be worth a lot of money."

Asher Miler:

Well, they're decision makers. They get to decide where capital flows probably.

Alex Leff:

So in wealthy industrialized countries like the United States, only a small minority of people work in primary sector jobs. So what? What's the problem? I mean, who wants to do the hard work of growing food and digging for critical minerals anyway? The rest of us get to stay inside behind a computer all day. What's so wrong with that?

Jason Bradford:

That's just one little piece of it. Just one little consumer product. And so these tertiary sector folks are doing absolutely key things, many of them, except for some bullshit jobs out there. But they're doing absolutely key things that hold the entire civilization together. Like the electric grid, for God's sakes. There's some damn important specialists out there. And I would have no ability to step in and take over any of those person's jobs.

Rob Dietz:

But isn't Tainter's thesis then that if you have all this complexity and you start running into these problems like you're talking about, your society tends to go more complex to try to solve them. So you've got to have a toaster consultancy industry that builds up to take care of your toaster problem.

Jason Bradford:

Or there's a pollution that comes as a result of the smelting. You're smelting more ore. I'll use that word for you again. Okay.

Rob Dietz:

I though a smelt was a kind of fish.

Jason Bradford:

Yes, it is.

Rob Dietz:

Are they involved in the process? Are we outsourcing our metallurgy to a school of fish?

Jason Bradford:

You overfish smelt and then you have to manage the fishery. So you have fisheries managers. Anyway, so what I'm saying is that yes, it's what we do causes problems as we grow, especially this is a problem of growth. We use complexity to solve problems of kind of growth and complexity itself. And so it ends up then just becoming overburdensome managerially.

Alex Leff:

Oh, okay. I see why this is an issue. If our only way of solving the problems created by complexity is to add more complexity, that's just going to create more problems. Society then gets so complex, it's impossible to manage. And I think this is where a lot of people would say, "Well, yeah, that's why we need AI. If society is too complex for human intelligence to manage, maybe artificial intelligence will help. But I don't know, wouldn't AI just be another layer of complexity? Think of all the data centers and semiconductors and cooling systems and global mining operations required to keep AI going. That's not really solving our complexity problem. It's just adding onto it. So that's the dilemma of high energy modernity. If complexity is actually causing problems like over-consuming limited resources, and the only way we're trying to solve these problems is by creating more complexity, then we're not averting disaster. We're accelerating towards it.

Asher Miler:

So I feel like you're pointing out the snake chasing its own tail dynamic in a sense of complexity. The more complex we get, the more we need specialists.

Jason Bradford:

Yes. To figure it out.

Asher Miler:

And the system becomes so complex that no single person can manage it or figure it out or anything.

Jason Bradford:

You don't even understand your taxes.

Asher Miler:

And there's a lot of vulnerability within that system, especially when we've created a situation where you have these global supply chains and other things that are so complex where there's this specialization of different elements within a supply chain. And if any single one of them breaks down, the whole system doesn't operate anymore. But can we just name some of the other challenges here? We're running, and we've talked about this on this podcast, we're running up against limits to our ability to continue to grow and consume and harvest nature without massive implications, whether it's depleting these non-renewable resources or it's climate change and other forms of pollution that there's a reckoning with those. And I think that when we're trying to deal with those issues, we're extremely fucked. We're not just fucked guys. We are extremely fucked.

Rob Dietz:

Trying not to picture what that entails, but -

Asher Miler:

No, I'm serious. Think about this. We can't keep doing what we're doing for many, many reasons. And we don't know how to simplify it or pull it back because we're all specialists, or so many of us are specialists. And the people that are responsible, one, we don't have generalists. We don't have people who are like, "Hey, have you thought about this thing and this thing and this thing? Holy shit. If you think about them together, we might have our problem here." So we don't have people that are in a situation where they're sort of pulled out far enough to be able to see the overall picture to say, "We might have a problem here."

But also the people that are, all these tertiary people or whatever you want to call them, who are highly rewarded for being specialists. I got a master's degree in business or whatever the fuck it is. The mentality is to double down, partly because it's a justification for their role. I think for many people, getting an education feels like you must specialize in order to justify the cost of that education. So you're just completely locked in. It's actually not rational to become a generalist or to focus working at that primary level or maybe even secondary level because it's not even being rewarded or having status or being able to go to some far off place.

Jason Bradford:

It's like trying to sell yourself in the professional sports market and you say, "I'm pretty good at ping pong and I'm a really decent tight end. And I can swim a pretty fast 400 meter freestyle."

Rob Dietz:

It's like James Thorpe back in the old days. He could do all those things.

Jason Bradford:

And I like high jumping. I'm not great. I like it though. It's fun. I'm working on this. So you're right. And so I think you have this holding mentality where - And also you feel like if you're highly specialized, you have actually a sense of competency in what you're doing and you're like, "Well, I know what I'm doing. I got this. So I'm going to expect that all the other specialists out there have got everything else handled." But really the problem becomes more at these things that you don't see. You've got blinders on. It's the weight of the entire system. Them and the fact that the energetic and material basis for propping it all up ends up -

Asher Miler:

And we all just assume somebody else has got that figured out. It's not our specialty, it must be someone else's.

Jason Bradford:

It must be someone else's, right.

Asher Miler:

So how do we tangle that?

Alex Leff:

It's funny. We like to call modernity advanced, but what does advanced even mean? Do we really just mean more complex? Because now I'm not so sure that's necessarily a good thing anymore. Complex systems don't just have a lot of moving parts. They produce outcomes nobody intended. Man, we've got ourselves in quite a pickle here. If complexity creates complexity and the only way to address complexity is with more complexity, then what do we do? It's like a positive feedback loop. We're spiraling out of control and our search for Jason, Rob, and Asher is starting to feel like a positive feedback loop too. The more clues we uncover, the more clues we need to investigate. Wait a second. Positive feedback loops. I remember they had an episode on positive feedback loops once. What did they say about that? Maybe it'll shed some light on all these clues.

Rob Dietz:

Well, the three of us have done some studying and research in systems dynamics and in the idea of feedback loops. I'm wondering for those listening, if we could just step it back a bit and kind of define what we're talking about here with positive feedback loops.

Asher Miler:

Yeah. I think one of the challenges is that the language is a little confusing. Terminology's a little confusing. So I think a lot of people, when they think about a positive feedback loop, they think about something that has a positive outcome.

Rob Dietz:

Right.

Asher Miler:

And actually -

Rob Dietz:

It's a happy feedback loop.

Asher Miler:

And a negative feedback loop is something that has a negative outcome.

Rob Dietz:

Oh sad.

Asher Miler:

It's actually not that. So a positive feedback loop is something that is self-reinforcing. So you have a situation where there's a factor that gets amplified and that leads to another factor getting amplified.

Jason Bradford:

I'll punch you and you're going to punch me back harder.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah,

Asher Miler:

Exactly.

Rob Dietz:

Punch me back with a baseball bat.

Asher Miler:

Yeah. So a positive feedback loop is also known as a self-reinforcing feedback. There are a bunch of positive feedback loops that are happening that are amplifying our climate becoming destabilized. So the one that I think people often hear about is the albedo effect. So that's where basically when you have warming temperatures will melt ice and snow in cold regions. That ice and snow is reflecting a lot of sunlight back off into the atmosphere. When that's gone, it's warming temperatures. So you actually start getting oceans to be exposed that warms the temperature even more, that melts more of that snow and ice. It just keeps amplifying, right?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Yeah. You have a polar ice cap that shrinks and then next season it shrinks more because the ocean absorbed more heat.

Jason Bradford:

Or the permafrost starts to thaw. And so then you get these bacteria start chewing on the now unfrozen biomass and it releases methane because it's kind of an anaerobic condition where it's really wet still. And of course methane's a greenhouse gas. There's another amplifying effect.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. And you get that in the ocean too. As they warm, you get methane bubbling up from the depths. Yeah.

Asher Miler:

You have it with drought, warmer temperatures drying out places, vegetation disappearing, that feeds to that climate being warmer and drier again. It just keeps escalating. So there's a lot of this happening with climate systems and there's a lot of concern about some of these becoming runaway.

And we can't influence them, can't control them. There's a lot of runaway stuff that happens in terms of human behavior. You think about asset bubbles or on the flip side, runs on banks. So a stock gets hyped, people start buying it up. Other people are like, "Oh, I got to get in on this thing." They buy it too. That just keeps feeding on itself. The reverse happens obviously when you get these massive downturns in the stock market or people start worrying about the safety of their money in the bank. Everyone wants to get their money out of the bank. That just feeds on itself.

Rob Dietz:

It's like that shoebox full of Bitcoins that you've got in your closet.

Asher Miler:

Don't be telling people where it is, man. Well, so the reason I want to bring up positive feedback loops in the context of Crazy Town is that we talked about it with climate change, for example. Obviously it's something that people think about in that context in terms of natural systems. But I think it's also important to think about it in terms of human systems and the decisions that we're making that have brought us to this place and maybe influence how we get out of it or if we get out of it.

Jason Bradford:

Well I look at it also in the context of our entire, what's called built environment. All the infrastructure that's already out there that we've invested in. And the notion there is that our past investment really then determines what kind of levels of consumption we have to have today to get by. So if we've already invested in sort of freeway systems and suburban sprawl and giant houses with poor insulation, it's very hard for us to actually curtail our energy use and for societies as a whole to curtail its necessary maintenance costs even. So you've locked yourself in, in other words, to the levels of energy and resource consumption going forward. And so that's sort of like a self-reinforcing dynamic. And then all these next decisions you make are to double down on that.

Rob Dietz:

Well, you can see that. I mean, if you have a town that's built around roads and driving and trucking products from here to there, it's not like the next town over can decide that it wants a monorail or a blimp network for its transportation system. It's just not going to fly if the whole matrix of the country is roads.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, to be connected and everyone's got to have the same loading docks for trucks. If you want to be a business that has a warehouse, you're locked into accepting a certain way of shipping and receiving. And so all these things then interlock, right?

Alex Leff:

So if complexity creates a positive feedback loop that spirals out of control, what do societies do when they can no longer sustain the level of complexity they've built?

Rob Dietz:

Okay. So if we're painting ourselves into this corner, you're saying complexity, one, has this problem of beginning more complexity and eventually the inverted pyramid will fall over.

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Rob Dietz:

And we're also saying that you're rewarded for specializing within the kind of economy we've developed. So is there any time that anybody's -

Jason Bradford:

Once.

Rob Dietz:

Gotten out of that corner?

Jason Bradford:

Once.

Asher Miler:

You mean historically?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, historically or just some examples that we can look at.

Jason Bradford:

Asher Miler:

So that's an example of a society that simplified in order not to collapse.

Jason Bradford:

Well, I think Tainter would call this sort of a managed collapse. There's collapse with a big C, and there's a collapse with a little C.

Asher Miler:

I guess it's a question of control.

Jason Bradford:

It's control.

Rob Dietz:

I think a progressive European economist would call it degrowth.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. I don't know how many. This is a great question. How many people who are promoting that realize how much simplification needs to happen of the social structure and this pyramid we're talking about? And the tertiary has to shrivel, the primary has to expand. Do they understand that is what I wonder.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I would expect that some do, and some probably are too specialized and focus on some aspect of it.

Alex Leff:

Okay. Very interesting. So maybe it's not a question of going backwards. Maybe the question is, if a society can't expand complexity forever, how do we build one that's durable? Maybe that's where Jason, Rob, and Asher are headed. Not to the collapse of modernity, but what comes after? Maybe those are our clues to look at what parts of modernity are worth preserving and which parts can be simplified. I mean, wouldn't that be nice if the very thing that helps create a livable future also helps us find Jason, Rob, and Asher?

Asher Miler:

So I guess the next question is for us to try to figure out, well, what do we actually do with this information? Where do we go with it?

Jason Bradford:

Because even if we want to pull out of the complexity and civilization specialization cycle, it's hard to do so. A lot of the things we would want to do are not rewarded. It's like, apply more labor instead of mechanization for work. Become a generalist. And then you can't live yourself. So enroll others in this grand task of becoming a more labor-intensive generalist society. Tough ask.

Rob Dietz:

Well, we're all about the tough ask here in Crazy Town. I mean, why wouldn't we be? If we're like what you said earlier, Asher, about this complexification, that's a complex word, but this complexification is leading to these problems that, what did you say? We're not just fucked. We're what?

Asher Miler:

We're really fucked.

Rob Dietz:

I think you actually stepped it up further. You said extremely fucked.

Asher Miler:

Extremely fucked. Yeah, extremely fucked.

Rob Dietz:

Which might be a new sport. But if we're getting to that, then yeah, why can't we ask people some tough questions or propose something difficult?

Asher Miler:

Yeah, I think talk about being in Crazy Town because as our complex systems are shuttering or are manifesting their fragility, we need the people. You're talking about electricity, right? The grid, for example. If we're starting to have issues with the grid, which we've recently seen, we do need those specialized people to be able to fix that or else people freeze. So it's understandable while we are in this system that is complex, that we need specialized people to help figure out the problems, but then we're just doubling down. It's like we have to simultaneously operate.

Jason Bradford:

Yes. The simpler way, as Ted Trainor said.

Asher Miler:

And maybe it's a matter of, I don't know the history well enough to say, but I like the idea of, if you want to think of it as the Byzantine model, if we said, okay, we can't get from A to B overnight. Getting from A to B overnight is basically a shit show because it's a Seneca cliff collapse.

Jason Bradford:

It's the Roman model.

Asher Miler:

So if we want to get from A to B in a gradual way, which is now we have a system that's hugely complex with way too many people in this tertiary level, and we need to get to a place where it's much more simplified and people much more engaged in primary activities. How do we get from here to there? That means X percent of our focus and money and time needs to continue to be on managing the complexity we have while we're investing. And maybe it's childhood education, investment in generalized thinking, various skills building, that kind of thing.

Rob Dietz:

I think you can at least start by deciding you're not going to process anything, buy anything sold, bought or processed, or repair any bought, sold, processed stuff.

Asher Miler:

And as we just pointed out, if that were the case, we would be starving.

Alex Leff:

Okay. I see it now. I thought it would help to specialize, but maybe what Jason, Rob and Asher are saying is we need to avoid getting too narrowed by expertise. It's okay to be a generalist. We've got to learn how to see the whole system and to simplify our lives so we're not dependent on the brittle complexities baked into that system. That doesn't sound easy, but if that's what it takes to find them by the end of the summer, then that's what we've got to do. Our search was starting to get too complicated. It just kept growing and growing, but nothing can grow forever. Maybe that's where we should head next. I know that's something Jason, Rob and Asher talk about a lot: The limits to growth.

Melody Travers:

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.