Crazy Town

What does a livable future look like 100 years from now? If we unlocked unlimited green energy, what would we actually do with it? And are our dreams of a renewable-energy utopia sometimes just as delusional as the old fossil-fueled, drill-baby-drill mentality?

Alex Leff of the Human Nature Odyssey podcast hosts this special Crazy Town highlights compilation. Alex revisits some of the most thought-provoking moments from Crazy Town, weaving in new commentary and context. Together, we explore energy literacy, the promises and pitfalls of a renewable-energy transition, and why toasting a simple slice of bread is much harder than you might think.

Along the way, we meet an Olympic athlete trying to toast bread with nothing but a bicycle. We also step inside a billionaire’s latest invention—a time-travel device designed to fling us one hundred years into the future.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we take the full leap into the time machine and imagine what life a century from now could really look like in a post high-energy future.

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There’s the book club, the Rotary Club, the Mickey Mouse Club, and the club sandwich. Whatever your preference, you might want to think about joining a club. Social clubs, fraternal orders, and the like have had a storied and critical role in public life. That is, until government programs and technology gave us an out from having to deal with each other. But with modernity failing, will clubs and community organizations make a huge comeback? In this episode we explore club life – past, present, and future, if there is one. Originally recorded on 11/6/25.

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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.

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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).

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.

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