Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species. The three eco-explorers connect over wondrous habitats and critters in Costa Rica's cloud forest and swap stories that cover Lazarus species, global pandemics, self-taught naturalists, birding, and even pregnancy tests. Spliced into the nostalgia and stories are reflections on how to cope in a world where biodiversity is declining and how to regain the connections that modernity has severed between humanity and wild nature. Originally recorded on 10/9/25.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Kyle and Trevor Ritland, The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species, Diversion Books, 2025.
• Adventure Term, Kyle and Trevor's nonprofit experiential learning initiative

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

• Episode 40, "Nature Detachment and Ecocide, or… the Story of the Marauding Mountain Lion"
• Episode 49, "A Day at the Zoo Is No Walk in the Park: Humanity’s Overexploitation of Animals and Nature"

Some key understandings in Crazy Town: the Earth is finite; the economy cannot grow forever; people can harm ecosystems and cause global warming; physics, chemistry, and biology are real; inequality hurts everyone; healthy humans need community, and it’s more fun to laugh than to cry. But where did principles like these originate? In this episode, Jason, Asher, and Rob use the format of a fantasy football draft to pick the pundits who most influenced their thinking on sustainability, resilience, community, science, economics, and politics. Like starry-eyed fanboys (but hopefully a bit more articulate) they gush over their heroes and tell behind-the-scenes stories about how they came to be influenced. And they ask listeners to share their top picks for influencers (in the best sense of the term).

Originally recorded on 9/29/25. Visit Crazy Town on the web.

Billionaires. They should be objects of scorn rather than envy. While they ride around in their super-yachts and private jets, producing the climate-damaging pollution of entire nations, they’re doing things to extract even more wealth, harm your health, diminish democracy, and rig the whole system in their favor. How did this happen? Why do we tolerate it? How can we stop the billionaires? And can we get a hold of our own super-yacht for Crazy Town pleasure cruises? Chuck Collins returns to Crazy Town to offer insights from his new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. Originally recorded on 10/3/25.

• Chuck Collins, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, The New Press, October 2025.
• Chuck Collins, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2016.
• Chuck Collins, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Polity, January 2022.

• Episode 10, "Tackling Inequality, One Pair of Lederhosen at a Time"
• Episode 43, "Overproduction of Elites and Political Upheaval, or... the Story of Rich People Doing Stupid Things"

The “maximum power principle” may sound like the doctrine of an evil supervillain, but it actually applies to all living creatures. The principle states that biological systems organize to increase power whenever constraints allow. Given the way humans adhere to this principle, especially by overexploiting fossil fuels, we often do behave like supervillains, wielding power in wildly irresponsible ways and triggering climate change, biodiversity loss, and other aspects of our sustainability predicament. Sometimes it seems like we’re using a backhoe to dig our own grave. Fortunately, once you understand efficiency and its different flavors, you can see opportunities to optimize power rather than maximize it. While considering the outlook for humanity, the Crazy Townies ponder a weird question: are we smarter than reindeer? Richard Heinberg, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, joins the team to share his research on how people can optimize power. Originally recorded on May 6, 2021.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Richard Heinberg’s book is Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.
• John DeLong’s definition of the maximum power principle is that biological systems organize to increase power whenever the system constraints allow.
• DeLong also wrote: “The maximum power principle predicts the outcomes of two-species competition experiments“.
• Statistics on the Bagger 293 bucket-wheel excavator
• Dams powered airplane and ship building in the Pacific Northwest (Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams).
• The cross-Atlantic sailing voyage of Greta Thunberg
• Short comic with the story of reindeer on St. Matthew Island
• Episode of the Radiolab podcast with a wild story about mTOR

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Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. When Bhutan embraced “Gross National Happiness” and a sane notion of progress, environmentalists and social reformers rejoiced. They spotlighted Bhutan as an example of how we can build a better economy. But now it seems that no one can escape the gravity field of techno-capitalism’s black hole of cryptocurrency and bullshit investments. In today’s episode, we explore Bhutan’s dark turn and go on the hunt for other examples of nations doing things to curb overexploitation of people and the planet.

Originally recorded on 7/21/25. Visit Crazy Town on the web.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• To be fair, Bhutan is still working on Gross National Happiness. In fact, there's a Global GNH Forum being staged November 7-12, 2025 in Dungkar Dzong, Paro, Bhutan.
• Steven Anderson, "Bhutan Uses Bitcoin to Boost Salaries and Curb Brain Drain," The Currency Analytics, April 15, 2025.
• The creation of Nunavut

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

• Episode 37, "Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos"

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In this episode we travel in time to the year 2125, to visit the Crazy Town museum, which showcases today’s world of wanton consumption and profligate waste. How will humans in 2125 – if there are any of us left – judge the things everyone sees as normal today? Jason, Rob, and Asher take turns serving as expert curators of this future museum, nominating items that best encapsulate how foolish and environmentally ruinous our priorities are. At the end we call on you, dear listener, to share what you would include in the museum.

Originally recorded on 7/11/25. Visit Crazy Town on the web.

(Spoiler Alert) View Artifacts in the Museum:

• Sportscar hopping from skyscraper to skyscraper (from the movie Furious 7)
• "Ronnie Fieg Has Mastered The Art Of Collecting" in Haute Magazine
• Echo PB-9010T backpack leaf blower
• SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, California
• Ronald Reagan’s 1985 inaugural address
• Barbie Pool Party Playset
• The world's biggest landfill in Las Vegas, Nevada
• The world's largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean Icon of the Seas
• Jimmy Dean blueberry pancakes and sausage on a stick

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All of humanity’s feats, whether a record-setting deadlift by the world’s strongest man or the construction of a gleaming city by a technologically advanced economy, originate from a single hidden source: positive net energy. Having surplus energy in the form of thirteen pounds of food per day enables a very big man, Hafthor Bjornsson, to lift very big objects. Similarly, having surplus energy in the form of fossil fuel enables very big societies to build and trade very big piles of stuff. Maybe Hafthor has a rock-solid plan for keeping his dinner plate well stocked, but no society seems ready to have a mature conversation about how our sprawling cities and nations will manage as net energy declines. Calling our conversation “mature” might be a stretch, but at least we’re willing to address climate change, sustainability, and the rest of the net energy conundrum head on. Alice Friedemann, author of Life after Fossil Fuels, joins the conversation. Originally recorded on April 10, 2021.

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Put on your best polyester pants, grab a bunch of gleaming mylar balloons, and crack open a case of bottled water. In today's episode, we're entering the plastic world of plastic pollution in all its glorious plasticity. We're on the hunt for microplastics – and we won’t have to go very far, as they're present everywhere – in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in our bodies. We'll be looking for systemic solutions and talking with Matt Simon, author of the book A Poison Like No Other.

Originally recorded on 7/10/25. Visit Crazy Town on the web.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Matt Simon, A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies, Island Press, October 27, 2022.
• Katie Okamoto, "Microplastics Are Everywhere. Here’s How to Avoid Eating Them." New York Times, April 21, 2025.
• Ocean Cleanup (large organization with a popular, but frustrating, ecomodernist approach to plastic pollution).
• Jen Fela, "Global Plastics Treaty Delayed, but Not Defeated," Earth Island Journal, December 11, 2024.

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

• Episode 84, "Escaping Technologyism"

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