Crazy Town
Crazy Town
Escaping Growthism: Wendigo Economics, Mystery Houses, and Becoming the Bear
Grow or die. It's the governing principle of companies, investment portfolios, national economies, and even philanthropic foundations. Oh, and cancer. Asher, Jason, and Rob lay bare the stats on everything from human population, energy consumption, global GDP, greenhouse gas emissions, and the size of cars and cruise ships, before concluding that the global economy should be named after the Wendigo from Algonquian folklore. They turn to the natural world for examples of self-regulation, along with promising new economic frameworks and on-the-ground models, for how to end Wendigo economics before it ends us.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- Timeline of Sarah Winchester's story
- Timeline of the largest passenger boats
- Parks and Rec clip on soda sizes
- Kaitlin Smith, "More Than Monsters: The Deeper Significance of Wendigo Stories"
- Winona LaDuke discusses Wendigo economics in a Yes! Magazine online conversation.
- Hannah and Kevin Salwen, The Power of Half: One Family's Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back
- CBS news story about a family giving away half their income
- SparkToro, an unusual tech company that doesn't believe bigger is better
- Report: Resilient Biocultural Heritage Landscapes for Sustainable Mountain Development, which contains information about Peru's Potato Park
- Krystyna Swiderska, "Here's why Indigenous economics is the key to saving nature"
- Al Bartlett lecturing on exponential growth
Rob Dietz
I'm Rob Dietz.
Jason Bradford
I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where the population of delusional ass clowns is only growing at 7% a year.
Melody Allison
Hi, this is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in season six, we're exploring escape routes, pathways that just might get us out of Crazy Town. In today's episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher are escaping growthism. 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, onto the show.
Asher Miller
Hey, guys, Rob, Jason. How are you?
Jason Bradford
Good afternoon. I'm doing well. Doing well.
Rob Dietz
I think I'm doing pretty well, too. We'll see at the end of this episode.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, we'll see how this goes. We'll check in.
Asher Miller
Alright. Okay so, I want to start today by asking a hypothetical question, which may be not actually that hypothetical, you never know what happens.
Jason Bradford
Sure.
Asher Miller
So let's just say you were to inherit $600 million -- half of the shares in a company that makes billions of dollars every year from people getting killed. And then a bunch of your loved ones die in a matter of years. So yeah, just curious. You know, what would you do with all the money you had?
Rob Dietz
That's a weird hypothetical. I thought you would just stop at what if I inherited money. But it has to be in a company that kills people and then all my loved ones die?
Asher Miller
Exactly. Yeah. So just channel that for a minute.
Rob Dietz
Well, I think I'm buying an island. I mean, I've been listening to Crazy Town. This is the sixth season. It's clear that you gotta get a bunker somewhere down in the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific maybe.
Asher Miller
Can you get an island for $600 million?
Jason Bradford
I think the Indian Ocean might get too hot. So something else.
Rob Dietz
I own a bunch of shares in a killing company.
Asher Miller
Oh right. If you hold onto the ships you can keep going.
Rob Dietz
Well, and maybe they got like warships, and I can get one all right, and it can defend my island.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you can be one of those sea-steaders, or whatever, and outfit a survivalist ship or something. Alright. Well, I think I would stay closer to home because I have existing relationships. I have friends here, you know. So if I'm missing my family, because they're all dead, I would probably want to hang on to close to friends. Rob will be gone on a ship somewhere, but I have others.
Asher Miller
I didn't say you both get the money.
Jason Bradford
Okay. But anyhow, I'd send him off on a ship? I'd have plenty to do that too.
Asher Miller
That's nice of you.
Jason Bradford
But I also want to kind of feel better after what just happened. So I d build grass and clay tennis courts here at the property. I'd hire a full-time bird guide.
Asher Miller
So you're really feeding the local economy?
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah. And they would help me develop the place to be a bird sanctuary, kind of heaven. I'd probably build one of those giant biodomes, you know? Have you ever been to one? You go to these at, like, Academy of Sciences?
Asher Miller
You'd have your own Arboretum.
Jason Bradford
And tropical plants and birds and little marmosets in it.
Rob Dietz
You'd have lorikeets landing on your shoulder to drink nectar.
Jason Bradford
And heliconias and all this sort of stuff.
Asher Miller
That's nice.
Jason Bradford
I would probably have this business that someone would run for me of like a like doggy camp. Like people show up and there's like doggy spa day and there's playthings. I'd just go out and I'd hang out with the dogs whenever I wanted to. I'd do that. I'd hire a full-time chef to cook food for me, but of course it'd be food coming from the farm. And it all be seasonal and stuff and organic. And the farm would be like this permaculture blitzed out place, you know. 100 acres of just incredible, you know, orchards, and grains, and beans.
Rob Dietz
See, this is why you're our visionary. I'm more misanthropic. I'm like Tom Hanks in Castaway, living on an island by myself.
Asher Miller
It also seems like you've given this a lot of thought. Like maybe it isn't hypothetical. Maybe there's something in your backstory we're not aware of because you've put a lot of thought into it.
Jason Bradford
I would like that to be. You know, if anyone's thinking about like leaving some fortune to somebody, I've got a plan as you can tell. I'd raise those pigs for you, and I'd hire an entire staff to deal with those thyroids.
Asher Miller
Yeah, so our billionaire listeners, we've got a proposal for you here.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Okay, so here I thought you guys are just gonna say that you take like an already gigantic house and you'd just spent decades building and building like weird rooms and dead end hallways on end until you died.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so I know this place.
Asher Miller
You know what I'm talking about.
Jason Bradford
Uh huh. Because I grew up in Cupertino, California.
Asher Miller
Home of Apple.
Jason Bradford
Home of Apple, yes. I was actually programming when I was 11 on an Apple.
Asher Miller
So this is where you got the $600 million. You invested early in Apple.
Jason Bradford
Yes, I invested early. Uh huh. Yeah, BASIC -- that's as far as I went. Anyhow, but this is the Winchester Mystery House. And it's about 15 minutes from my house, right next to a bunch of movie theaters. So I would go see like "Indiana Jones" and "Star Wars." I remember "The Empire Strikes Back." I'd be in line and the Winchester Mystery House is right next to these movie theater complexes in San Jose. Right off of 280.
Rob Dietz
I like that it's not just the Winchester house, you've gotta add the mystery history to it.
Jason Bradford
Well, so the history was in the 1800s, this woman inherited the Winchester Rifle fortune.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Jason Bradford
And she moved from Connecticut to San Jose, which at the time was a paradise. This is in the mid-1800s.
Asher Miller
Orchards, right?
Jason Bradford
Oh, I mean, the weather there is incredible. And it was just bucolic as can be. And there's this big old farmhouse she inherited, or she bought to get better weather. But she just started a building. I guess she was into architecture. And her husband died and her sister died.
Asher Miller
Yeah. A bunch of family members died.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so she just started building, building, building, and it just went on and on.
Rob Dietz
It took me till just now to understand your hypothetical question. So she inherited $600 million.
Asher Miller
The equivalent of $600 million, yeah.
Rob Dietz
And then she inherited her money from all the people getting shot by Winchester Rifles.
Jason Bradford
Yes. And that place --
Rob Dietz
And a bunch of her family died.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it's a weird place because it's -- I mean, at one point, I think there were 500 rooms in the house, but part of it burnt down during like the earthquake of 1906, or whatever. And so now it's down to 160 or something. So, it's not all there but it's plenty.
Asher Miller
And it's nonsensical. That's the whole point. It's that there literally are hallways that dead end. There are stairs that go nowhere.
Jason Bradford
Right. So, the idea was that she was completely insane, and that she believed in ghosts and that if they stopped building, she would die. But maybe she was just thinking about future additions. So the hall ends now, but it's gonna keep going later.
Rob Dietz
It almost sounds like the mentality of a hoarder, but instead of putting a bunch of stuff in your house, you're just adding more house.
Asher Miller
But maybe she's just doing what you were just describing Jason, which is employing a lot of people in the local community. She was just, you know, she was trying to spend her money on local families.
Jason Bradford
Think about the craftsmanship. And the wood in this place, like the redwood and all this -- amazing.
Rob Dietz
So did you ever go there, Jason?
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah. Of course.
Rob Dietz
You went inside?
Jason Bradford
All kids did.
Rob Dietz
So you can just run around and find the dead ends? Or what happens?
Jason Bradford
No, there are tours. You're like with 20 people shuffling through these dark hallways and stuff.
Rob Dietz
That's sad. It would be awesome if it was a free-for-all, and you'd just get lost.
Asher Miller
Get lost. Like a maze.
Rob Dietz
They find somebody who's been there for 32 years.
Asher Miller
Yeah, right, a skeleton.
Jason Bradford
This wing is a very large escape room.
Asher Miller
Right. Anyway, the reason I thought about the Winchester Mystery House is it's not so much about her, Sarah Winchester, or her story. It's thinking about that house as kind of a metaphor for the global economy. You know, like the need to just keep growing, which leads to a bunch of dead ends, illogical rooms.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, why are we doing this?
Asher Miller
Just a ton of absurdity, right? And that is the topic of today's episode. We're talking about escaping growthism. So we've talked a lot about growth on this podcast. I mean, it's kind of like the underlying, in some ways, the underlying driver of all the stuff that is the expression of Crazy Town. So I don't necessarily think that we should spend a lot of time talking about growth in the unsustainability of it and our dependence on it. But you know, maybe we just wanted to do like a quick, just a quick jaunt through growth town.
Jason Bradford
Is anyone here an expert on this?
Rob Dietz
Well boy, howdy! Did you guys come to the right place?
Asher Miller
You tee'd him up.
Rob Dietz
Thanks for that. So yeah, I've done my deep dive into ecological economics and the ravages of economic growth. And we've actually got a buddy here in Post Carbon Institute, David Hughes. He's on our board of advisors. And he is excellent at compiling stats.
Jason Bradford
He loves spreadsheets.
Asher Miller
He loves spreadsheets. He told me.
Jason Bradford
And graphs.
Rob Dietz
So we just grabbed a few to let you know how the scale of things is increasing here on home planet Earth. So global human population has grown eight-fold since 1800. That seems a long time ago, but it's really not that far back. From 1 billion to 8 billion people today.
Asher Miller
Thank God it's decreasing, according to Marc Andreessen.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. It might soon
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, we'll see. Global GDP or gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services, is estimated to have grown over 11,000% since 1800.
Asher Miller
That's a big number.
Rob Dietz
We had an eight-fold increase in people and an 11,000% increase in GDP.
Jason Bradford
11,000% would be 110 times. Is that right?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Anyway, we went from $1.1 trillion worth of goods and services to 126 trillion. Pretty crazy. Global energy consumption has grown over 3,000% during that same time. So, using a whole bunch more energy to do all of this stuff.
Jason Bradford
So 30 times.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Jason Bradford
Okay. See, you started with eight times for the population. So I'm trying to homogenize.
Rob Dietz
Sorry.
Jason Bradford
Of course you are.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, we should give our stats in a consistent format.
Jason Bradford
800% in population. Okay, keep going. Sorry about this.
Rob Dietz
Well, that's enough of the stats. I think, though, we do want to talk about the underlying mathematics of growth. And in particular --
Asher Miller
Which can just keep going. That's the math, right? No problem.
Rob Dietz
That's kind of the idea. I mean, let's look at exponential growth for just a bit. And I remember when I was young, like, right out of college, I got this job. And you could join the 401K, where some of your salary gets invested into stocks and bonds, or whatever. And I was really at the edge of being able to afford daily living expenses because the job didn't pay that much, rent was high, student loans were high. But I was talking to an older co-worker, and he gave me this dressing down. He's like, "You have to join the 401K."
Jason Bradford
Figure it out, yeah.
Rob Dietz
"Whatever it takes. Let me show you exponential growth. If you just invest $10 as a 20-year-old versus starting as a 30-year-old " He was just showing me how much wealth I would amass because of exponential growth. And I'd say a patron saint of Crazy Town is a professor named Albert Bartlett, who died a few years back, but he went on the academic lecture circuit talking about growth. And his insight, his famous quote is, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Jason Bradford
What is that? An exponential function?
Rob Dietz
So the exponential function means a continuously increasing amount. So you can think of something that's growing at 5% a year. Let's say your bank account is growing at 5% a year. That doesn't sound like much, but what it means is that there's a doubling time of 14 years. So every 14 years, your bank account doubles. And pretty soon, it's just skyrocketing. It goes literally off the charts.
Asher Miller
So first of all, there's great recordings of lectures that Al Bartlett did with students at the University of Colorado when he was teaching there that are worth seeing. They're on YouTube. We'll add a link in our sources. But you can also see why the rich, people who have money to invest, just get wealthier and wealthier. And part of it is this exponential function.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly. So, now, this is also an important concept in biology, because it's related to what's called population biology. So the idea that if you have a population of organisms, let's say, you've got a population of rabbits, or whatever. And they're growing at a clip. And maybe they can double every year. And so the rabbit population go from 10 to 20, and then from 20, to 40. So you can do this math. It's called the intrinsic population growth capacity of a species. So I used to have this exercise when I taught ecology at Washington University in St. Louis where I had students do the math on, take a bacteria, or take a pair of elephants. And calculate how long it takes that population, given an intrinsic growth rate, to reach the mass of the Earth. So they had to just take the equations from the book and start with the mass of the bacteria, the mass of the elephants, and then the mass of the Earth, and solve for it.
Rob Dietz
And you're using real --
Asher Miller
You're using the real rate of their growth.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Dietz
Like bacteria takes like a could hours, or whater.
Jason Bradford
30 minutes, or whatever, to double.
Rob Dietz
And elephants take months and months, or even years.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Years to double. So anyway, it would take about 500 years for elephants to equal the mass of the Earth, and bacteria was like three and a half days. Yeah.
Rob Dietz
Wow. That's scary. So we've only got a few days left here before the bacteria take over.
Jason Bradford
Well, the point was, of course, that it doesn't matter what you're talking about. Something always stops growth from happening. And this is sort of the study, then, of ecology. It's: what are the things that are regulating growth? What are the feedback loops that keep growth from running amok?
Asher Miller
Ecology, that's, you know, that's just the -- Okay, it's a science. Fine. But let's turn to another science, economics. Which is a truly a science. Because they have equations and everything.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, they do. They have their very complex equations. I can't understand them.
Asher Miller
So you know, they figure out doing their equations, how to just put aside everything you just said about there being limiting factors. There are no limiting factors to growing the economy.
Rob Dietz
Well, and recall, it used to be known as the dismal science. But they didn't like that. So now we just make it the science of progress, hope, and joy.
Jason Bradford
Well, this is what's ironic, of course, is that they'll say to themselves, like, "Yeah, economics is all about these painful tradeoffs between allocation of resources for different ends." And you know, "We're just letting the market sort out what the highest and best use is." And at the same time, it's like, Yeah, but we can do this forever. Like we can keep growing forever. So it's just weird.
Asher Miller
And here's the thing. We are actually dependent upon that growth. So if we're looking at the economic system, it s not just an aspiration that we decided to tether ourselves to. It's actually something that is embedded in the entire economy. So for example, you know, when money is created, brought into the world, out of thin air, it's debt, right? So that debt requires growth. It requires it to grow in order to pay back the initial capital, but also the interest on that capital. Right? And that is our monetary system.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And well, think about when I was talking about my coworker dressing me down to invest. Investing in the way our economy works, and investment requires growth too. We're all aligned, I shouldn't say we all, because I don't think the three of us are. But many, many, many people are aligned with this whole system of, I put some money into stocks, into real estate, into investments, and I expect it to be worth more in the future.
Asher Miller
And it's not just money. It's actually this requirement for growth, or perception of requirement for growth, of even human population. And we're seeing a lot of debate right now about the human population question. There are a lot of people sounding an alarm about what they see as declining birth rates, particularly in heavily industrialized, quote unquote, "advanced economies." And they're deeply concerned about that. And the reason they're concerned about that is because we've also created a system that requires more people coming into the workforce. So you know, population -- there is constantly either maintaining itself or growing in order to pay into provide tax revenue, to provide social services for an aging population. Right? So there's this like, basically, a system that requires it -- it certainly can't decline. And growing populations often have led to growing economies.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there's a few things that are weird happening that I didn't foresee, related to the finance side of things. And one is that there's this incredible ability to sort of like refinance. So the idea being like, say you have so much debt on your books, and it's at 5%, but it's obvious that you can't pay that off. The financial system has gamed this so that it's like, well, we're going to recapitalize you at a lower percent, and we're going to restart. It's almost like you refinanced your house, right? It's like, the 30-year mortgage never gets paid off. Your house is worth more and 10 years down the line, you get a bigger loan and you start spending more money. Because now you've got home equity, and you're paying a lower interest rate, or something.
Asher Miller
The people who really benefit from that are the wealthy because they have so many assets.
Rob Dietz
I like that you're always 30 years away from actually owning a house because you refinance, start the clock over, another 30 years.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. But this is what's happening in nation states. So like, you know, you see, like Japan or whatever, and the European Union. This is what's happening for government debt too. It keeps getting refinanced at lower and lower rates.
Asher Miller
There's an expectation that things will grow. So eventually, it will get paid off.
Jason Bradford
Yes, and they're just extending, extending. Now, the other thing about the population, now, of course, the dream is that we'll have robots do the work when everyone's old. So, you know, there's ways around this.
Asher Miller
Well we better get those robots, otherwise
Rob Dietz
Well, as long as those robots can pay into Social Security.
Asher Miller
Sure. We just write that into the code.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. So you're talking about growth imperatives and why it's such an important foundational concept of economics today. Economists from old were kind of debating this, and there was a pretty famous American economist and head of the Central Bank named Henry Wallach. And way back in the day, he said, "Growth is a substitute for a quality of income. So long as there is growth, there is hope. And that's what makes large income differential tolerable." You think about that for a second, and you're like, yeah, we don't have to worry about how to divide up the pie at all.
Jason Bradford
Make the pie higher.
Asher Miller
George W. Bush, "Make the pie higher."
Jason Bradford
That's my favorite.
Asher Miller
I like the one: he knows how hard it is to put food on your family. That was a good one too.
Rob Dietz
Make the pie deeper. Make the pie longer. But yeah, you don't even have to ever worry about the distribution. And that's a real problem. I mean, probably the biggest critique of capitalism today is that the inequality of wealth grows so large, and there's so many good studies that show how bad that is for society across all kinds of measurement.
Asher Miller
Well, and it's not just, you know, within societies. It's across societies, right? And one of the things -- You ran those numbers that Dave Hughes provided about energy consumption and GDP and all that. That's been disproportionately in certain countries and not others, right, who have benefited from this growth.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. One thing that you could think about with that equality and growth is you could turn that around. We'll get to this in a bit, but you know, you could have greater equality instead of more growth.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Okay.
Asher Miller
You heretic.
Jason Bradford
Now, yes, we've seen this exponential growth in economic activity, which is all basically human centered, population, resource, consumption. The decline has happened, of course, with other creatures. So, the biodiversity crisis. There is in some sense, even though the claim is it can go on forever, there's actually a zero-sum game happening with the Earth itself.
Asher Miller
Because we live on a finite planet.
Jason Bradford
Yes. This is also happening in cultures, in human cultures. And so, the number of languages is crashing around the world because there's this sort of homogenization that's happening. We've talked about this when we talked about globalism.
Asher Miller
Alright, so here we did a probably longer than I had anticipated kind of run through sort of the macro situation with growth. But let's just talk about examples of growth that we see in everyday life.
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah. This is fun.
Asher Miller
It's all well and good to talk about the bigger picture. But like, the growth imperative shows up, you know, in the world around us, and sometimes in really, really stupid ways. So in the examples --
Rob Dietz
I've got the stupidest way, probably.
Jason Bradford
Let's do a competition here. I have a stupider way.
Rob Dietz
Maybe you will. Let's see. Let's see. I want to talk about cruise ships, because that's part of my everyday life.
Asher Miller
Of course you do. You love cruise ships.
Rob Dietz
I'm on cruises daily.
Jason Bradford
This is a pretty stupid one. That's good. I'll hand you one.
Rob Dietz
So I looked up the length of various cruise ships from history. So I looked at the Lusitania, which was 787 feet long. And this is from 1907. That's still really long.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
But then in 1912, five years later, came the Titanic. 883 feet long.
Jason Bradford
Wow.
Rob Dietz
Now, I don't know if all these things end up on the bottom of the ocean or not, but I think those two did.
Jason Bradford
They did. Both of them. Geez. Why don't we hear about the Lusitania?
Asher Miller
There's a great book about Lusitania. kay. Well, and it got shot down. Not shot down. It got torpedoed.
Jason Bradford
Oh my God.
Rob Dietz
I was gonna say, I didn't know it could fly. Incredible boat.
Asher Miller
That's really incredible.
Rob Dietz
Then I skipped ahead a few years to modern times with the Icon of the Seas, which is the new grand champion. It is 1,198 feet long. So over time we are growing our really important resources.
Asher Miller
Well look, they have to keep making them bigger so they don't sink.
Rob Dietz
That's right.
Asher Miller
I mean, eventually, they'll just turn them into islands.
Jason Bradford
I kind of want to do this tour where I go see like the worst things in the world.
Asher Miller
Do you?
Jason Bradford
I kind of do. And this would be one of them.
Rob Dietz
So we're going to Winchester Mystery House tomorrow.
Jason Bradford
That's quaint compared to this shit.
Asher Miller
So I mean, here's a way to do that. Get on one of these cruise ships, cruise around to horrific places.
Rob Dietz
I think you've just invented a business. We get the cruise ship that takes you to the worst things. We're gonna go to that bar at the top of the Dubai Hotel.
Jason Bradford
Get the margaritas.
Rob Dietz
Greenland ice.
Asher Miller
See, most cruise ships take you to places that are fast disappearing because you're destroying the environment. You want to see the product of our great genius.
Rob Dietz
It's a zero sum game. You're like, instead of being able to see a tiger in the wild, you can mix your drink in Dubai.
Asher Miller
So not everyone gets to go on a cruise ship.
Rob Dietz
Thank God.
Asher Miller
But let's bring it closer to home and in terms of other vehicles of transport. And let's look at size of cars and trucks. So we've seen a massive shift in the United States.
Jason Bradford
That's good, shift.
Asher Miller
Thank you. Most people are like, shift? What's a shift?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, what's a manual?
Asher Miller
Nobody is shifting anymore.
Jason Bradford
I do in my little Toyota.
Asher Miller
That's true. Yeah, it's beautiful. A real shift from like sedans which used to be the typical American passenger vehicle to now SUVs like trucks, right? That shift has enormously increased the size of the average vehicle the road, but even certain makes of cars. Like the car that I have, Toyota RAV, has grown almost a foot longer, and half a foot wider since it was first seen.
Jason Bradford
It to be kind of cute, like your kids.
Asher Miller
Now it's a huge friggin' beast which is why I liked it to drive it.
Rob Dietz
I know. You ran me over when I was biking out there.
Asher Miller
I did. Unfortunately, I just clipped you.
Jason Bradford
I thought it was a Highlander. It's a RAV, huh?
Asher Miller
We have a RAV. We got it because it's a plugin hybrid.
Rob Dietz
It's what a Highlander used to be.
Asher Miller
That's right. That's progress.
Rob Dietz
You guys, have you seen a really old Honda Civic in recent times?
Jason Bradford
Oh, they're just adorable.
Rob Dietz
It was tiny, tiny.
Jason Bradford
They get like 30 clowns in it in the circus.
Asher Miller
You can pick it up with one hand.
Rob Dietz
Spin it on your finger like a basketball.
Asher Miller
Yeah, it was so nice.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Okay, I don't know if this is better than yours. Those are good. But the example that came to mind for me was, I'm a college freshman. And I'm at UC Davis, and I'm in the dorms and Davis, And not that far, walking distance from our dorms was his AM/PM Mini Mart. Right? It's a gas station, but they sell hot dogs.
Rob Dietz
Slurpees?
Jason Bradford
Yeah. So they had come out, this is in 1987, okay? They came out with the 32-ounce Big Gulp. And you bought your own cup. You know, you spend an extra 50 cents on your first beverage, and you get your own like plastic insulated mug with a cap and the straw that sits through. And so you go in, and you go and you serve self-serve ice.
Asher Miller
You could reuse it
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you get some ice. I would blend stuff sometimes. I would blend flavors. So anyways . . .
Asher Miller
That's nothing. That reminds me of "Parks and Rec." Have you ever seen that show?
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah.
Asher Miller
There's a great clip talking about soda sizes. Maybe I can play that for you.
Parks and Recreation
Well, Paunch Burger just recently came out with a new 128-ounce option. Most people call it a gallon, but they call it the Regular. Then there is a horrifying 512-ounce version that they call Child Size. How is this a child-size soda? Well, it's roughly the size of a two-year-old child if the child were liquefied.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. So I think, right? This is what's happened. The 32-ounce would be like, it's just small.
Asher Miller
They're so quaint.
Jason Bradford
Just a baby beverage. In fact, they probably give sodas to babies nowadays.
Asher Miller
You gotta get them started young.
Rob Dietz
Okay, I can't resist. I've got one more area of growth that I was thinking of. And this goes to the amount of stuff that you can view on TV or stream nowadays. So I remember in, I guess it was 1980, maybe 1979, Pink Floyd came out with their album, "The Wall."
Jason Bradford
I remember that. I was in like third grade, or something. It was great.
Rob Dietz
Of course. But there's a song on that called, "Nobody's Home," where the singer's lamenting, "I've got 13 channels of shit on the TV choose from."
Jason Bradford
Well, that's all I had after school back then.
Asher Miller
13 channels? That's a lot, actually.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, yeah, Jason would come home with his Big Gulp and drink that while surfing through the 13 channels of shit. Well, then in 1992, so a little bit over a decade later, Bruce Springsteen has this song called, "57 Channels and Nothing On." So you get this, you know, exponential growth. I mean, how many things can you access today?
Jason Bradford
Oh my God. Hundreds.
Asher Miller
Well if you go on YouTube, I mean, think about YouTube channels, right?
Jason Bradford
But sometimes I'll go to the local bar and I'll say put on the Tennis Channel. Okay? And they're like, "What channel is that?" And I'm like, "I don't know. 700 or something."
Asher Miller
Exactly. Yeah, so this growth thing, I was thinking about it. I mean, we've talked about a sort of dependency on it. We've talked about assumptions that exist that don't question its sustainability. But it is kind of like, this sort of like hunger, right? And it made me think of the myth of the Wendigo. Are you guys familiar with that?
Jason Bradford
I've heard about it, yeah.
Rob Dietz
I've only seen it in brief circles and economic discussions of endless growth.
Asher Miller
So the Wendigo is Algonquin folklore in an indigenous community here in what's called Turtle Island, North America. And it's a mythological creature, an evil spirit, sometimes depicted as a creature with human like characteristics which possesses human beings .It's said to cause its victims a feeling of insatiable hunger.
Rob Dietz
So pretty much, the Wendigo has inhabited the souls of our bankers, our economists, our business leaders,
Jason Bradford
The consumer, you know. Like people addicted to that unboxing video.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and actually, that, I think, is a key thing. The Wendigo has been caricatured in American popular culture in different ways, like horror movies, or things like that. But really, it's a parable, you know, and it is a kind of warning. So there's a piece actually about the Wendigo that I thought was really interesting. It's written by a woman named Caitlin Smith for the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves. And she kind of summarized this really well quote, "In most traditions, the Wendigo is human in origin and becomes a monster through a process that results either from acts of starvation, induced cannibalism, or from possession by spirit. In the course of the transformation from human to Wendigo, the person exhibits increasing selfishness, violence, hunger, and greed, particularly for human flesh. This is a story shared not merely for entertainment, but to reinforce the communal values that allow the communities in which this practice occurs to live well with one another, and within their environments." So it's a warning about that selfish, you know, selfishness, the greed, that tendency that I think all humans can have. But it's sort of a corrective on that to put the community above the individual.
Rob Dietz
It's pretty clear if you embrace on ending exponential economic growth, it ends in cannibalism.
Jason Bradford
It reminds me of the character from "Lord of the Rings," Gollum. "Precious. My Precious."
Rob Dietz
Oh, that's your best one.
Jason Bradford
I did a good imitation?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I think so. I'll put a stamp of approval.
Jason Bradford
Thank you. That's the one I can do, I guess I'm pretty lousy on most of those things. Well yeah, you can totally see how this growthism is like a Wendigo, consuming and exploiting people on the planet. This impossible quest to satiate this insatiable hunger for more infects us in all our victims, and "I want the ring. I want the ring. My Precious."
Rob Dietz
Geez. You praise the guy
Asher Miller
Everyone just got totally creeped out, and they turned this podcast off.
Rob Dietz
We're going to have 60 more minutes of Jason saying precious, and then we'll stop. Well, I've been bringing up friends of PCI. We have in the past worked a little bit here and there with Winona LaDuke, who is an Ojibwe leader. She has talked about the Wendigo and she said, "If you spend all your time making a civilization, which transforms Mother Earth, instead of transforming to be with Mother Earth, it just doesn't work out, and you end up kind of in what I call Wendigo Economics. That's like the economics of cannibals." That's what she said. And yeah, that's probably where I heard of this in the past. I was like, Wow, yeah, we are basically consuming ourselves.
Asher Miller
I think we should adopt that. So when people talk about economics, modern economic theory, we should just call it Wendigo economics. Call it what it is.
Jason Bradford
That's pretty nice.
Rob Dietz
That would be cool rebranding in universities. Like, I'm taking Wendigo Economics 101.
Rob Dietz
This is a message to all you Crazy Townies out there. Sometimes Jason, Asher, and I wish he could be here in the room with us when we're 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 --
Asher Miller
Or you have any suggestion of escape route stuff.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. 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.
Jason Bradford
How's this? "I'll be back! Is that any good?
Rob Dietz
Oh my God. That's terrible.
Jason Bradford
You try it, You try it. "Get to the chopp-ah!"
Rob Dietz
Time for listener feedback. We got a comment from Willpowers13. In Apple podcasts, he says, "Loving the theme of the new season." That's the title of his review. And he said, "I really enjoyed the first episode about industrialism. Since much of it was about industrial agriculture, it would have been nice to hear more about local escape routes in terms of creating food sovereignty, and regional food shed resiliency plans." He goes on to talk more about agroecology, permaculture, hopes that we might talk about ecovillages a little bit, but his final statement is, "This continues to be the best podcast out there."
Jason Bradford
Well, that part's true.
Asher Miller
The rest of it, yeah . . .
Jason Bradford
Well, I appreciate it. And you know, I realized that we're -- and this is something we'll get better at during this season is getting more into the escape routes and less on sort of bashing the ism du jour.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, yeah. And I should say that I've had some correspondence with Wil in the past. He's a fan of what we do at Post Carbon Institute, and he's a fellow traveler out there trying to do good things on the landscape. So, way to go, Will!
Jason Bradford
Thanks Will.
Jason Bradford
Alright, this is a section on the Marvin Harris Memorial Lens of Doom. So Marvin Harris, anthropologist, the theory of cultural materialism, basically saying that to understand a society, you need to understand three levels. You need to understand the infrastructure, sort of the physical world. How do they acquire food, energy, the built environment? Structure, so there are laws, there are basically their social norms. And then the superstructure. So what that leads to that are their major belief systems and mythologies. Okay, so let's look at this growthism, through this lens of cultural materialism, starting with the physical infrastructure, right? And the usual suspects for these foundational drivers of growth are the materials, right? So the idea that you have the fossil fuels that you can mine more, you can build more equipment and machinery. And this causes a positive feedback loop that supports now a growing population of humans, right? So expanding the machines that can harvest more energy, more cement, more grains, etc., and build out cities.
Asher Miller
Well, like you said earlier when you were talking about elephants and bacteria, whatever. Everything needs energy to grow, right? So in this case, we've been burning ancient sunlight primarily.
Jason Bradford
We keep saying this, I know, on this show. But it's basic. Fundamental.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
One piece of the infrastructure that I want to zero in on a little bit is technology writ large. And the reason I'm thinking about it is, whenever an economist or somebody who's a growth booster comes along and waxes poetically about technology, they're always talking about it as it's our path to being more efficient, right? Like, we can use technology to do the same thing with less materials and less energy. But that's not what we see happening in the real world. And an example I could give you is buildings. It's like over time, we've gotten better and better about how to make a building without requiring as much energy, or we can make it stronger with material advances. But instead of just building the same size building with less material, we end up building the taller and taller skyscraper. And we make more and more buildings -- kind of a rebound effect that's pretty well known, but ignored by most mainstream economists.
Asher Miller
I mean, we talked about that with cars. It's the same thing, right? They become more fuel efficient.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, they're a little lighter per size.
Asher Miller
Turn that into a bigger car One of the things around infrastructure, it sounds weird to call people infrastructure, but we talked about it before, which is a growing population being needed to feel growthism. So the infrastructure of having more humans.
Jason Bradford
The labor force.
Asher Miller
To provide the labor and the consistent tax base is sort of part of the infrastructure of growthism. Let's talk about the structure, sort of the rules and the human systems that we created that reinforce growthism. We already spoke about the existence of debt-based currency driving growth. In fact, requiring growth. GDP is the primary measure of the wellbeing of an economy, right? And we're looking for growth in GDP. It's one of the main measurements that governments use. It's how people gauge the health of the economy. You see that being true for businesses as well. The growth imperative is absolutely embedded in corporations, particularly publicly traded corporations. People buy shares, because they want the value of the share to grow, right? But you also see even things like federal tax credits, right? So there are federal tax credits in the United States for every kid that you have, you know. Which is not to say, like, people are having 8,000 kids because of the federal tax credits, but you look at the rules that are being put in place, the incentives that exist, and it's definitely towards growth in every direction.
Jason Bradford
Sure. Okay. So then this all leads to belief systems, mythologies, that reinforce and essentially, like, justify what already exists, right? So this is the superstructure. And I run into this a lot when I start to have conversations with say, city officials or you know, kind of mucky mucks in the community, maybe. Like a banker, or whatever, a professor. And you start asking questions like, "Hey, what's the optimal size here? Have we thought about the size of our, of our city or town in relation to the broader environment?" And we have goals, for example, of reducing our environmental impact with you know, greenhouse gases is the one that everyone cares about a lot. But most are really going to push for a bigger is always better philosophy. You run into this all the time. Like, well, an ideal sized city would have more law firms that can do more specialized work to help our businesses thrive, or more medical facilities, so we don't have to go as far to get the operation.
Rob Dietz
I'm not even sure that most folks would understand your question. You say, "What's the optimal size?" And the answer is bigger.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. It's almost always that. It's absolutely amazing. And you try to say, "Well, you know, when you get bigger, you actually have more of a footprint." And you try to break down ecological footprint. It's like playing a pinball machine and you tilted it. You just tilted it. So the game is over, you know. You gotta put another quarter in.
Asher Miller
And this is also how you see we get completely locked in, right? Because you think well, we have to grow our tax base in this community. We have these problems we need to solve. If we had more tax revenue that we could generate then we could solve those problems. Not thinking that maybe growth could be potentially exacerbating these problems?
Jason Bradford
The problem. Yeah, right.
Asher Miller
On the superstructure side, it was funny. Like, I did a quick Google search, right. I just typed in, "Examples of businesses that refuse to grow." And let me just share with you the first page of results because they're all negative. So, these are some of the results: "50 brands that failed to innovate." "10 businesses that failed to adapt." "10 companies that failed to innovate." "10 Great companies that lost their edge." It's all like, you know, as soon as you ask the question . . . You know, I was like, they refuse to grow. Like I was thinking about it as like a positive.
Rob Dietz
I like that your last one didn't mention failure, at least. Your first ones were all, it failed, it failed, it failed.
Jason Bradford
You were trying to find a positive for our show.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Jason Bradford
And it was almost impossible.
Asher Miller
It was all negative.
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry.
George Costanza
Every 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. And every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
Rob Dietz
Okay, let's look to some other species to think about how to do the opposite. Jason earlier, when you were talking about the work you did to teach classes at Washington University, I think you started that talking about rabbits and doubling their population.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
Well, you know, if we think about the term quote, "breeding like rabbits." It's sort of a common phrase. And the the idea, of course, is that as long as there's food around, and there's not that many predators, rabbits just have a party, and cute little fuzzy bunnies are popping out everywhere, right? The problem with that is it turns into a boom-and-bust cycle. They multiply so much that they eat through all the resources that they're dependent upon. And they end up dying in kind of horrible ways really. And this is something we're hoping, you know, not to experience as humanity. So there are other creatures out there that do something different. I was recently listening to an episode of the "Tooth and Claw" podcast, and they were talking about bears, grizzly bears, and how they can self-regulate. I didn't know this. It's pretty fascinating. But when a pregnant grizzly bear develops an embryo, it floats around inside her uterus. It sounds kind of relaxing, like it's in a swimming pool, or something. But it can stay there for months. And then when that potential Mama Bear goes to the den to bed down for hibernation, how much body fat she has actually determines whether that embryo is going to implant in her uterus or not.
Jason Bradford
Oh, interesting.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. So it's like, oh, she didn't eat enough. There's not enough resources. Let's just put a hold on this, and the embryo never goes anywhere. But if she does have enough resources, you know, she was eating BLTs all fall long, or whatever.
Jason Bradford
Big Gulps
Rob Dietz
Yeah, she had the child sized Big Gulp, then yeah, she will have the offspring.
Jason Bradford
That is interesting. So yes, you're talking about these dynamics of what are called, you know, overshoot and collapse as a potential. And so the ability to not do that,, there's a regulation process. And the regulation could happen externally, because of events that are not that nice. Or there's an internal regulation. So the bear has a natural internal regulation, it sounds like. I know kangaroos do as well. There's lots of examples of this. And I would not be surprised if humans have that. There are stories, for example, of like female athletes. Like I had friends who were like in college, female athletes, and it's like, they stopped menstruating kind of thing. You know, they're just working so hard that their body just sort of shuts down that part, which is fascinating. Maybe that's a sign that you're too stressed out. But there's ways then maybe of regulation of what's going on and reproductive cycles. But it also could be cognitive, right? Like, if you're sensing that there aren't enough resources in your environment, then maybe you hold off on having kids. And that seems to be what's happening maybe now.
Asher Miller
Well with economic pressures things are, you know, I think people feel a lot of economic difficulty. The cost of housing and, you know, maybe student loans or whatever has definitely led some people to hold off on having kids because of a financial thing. But you know, in these cases, we're talking about sort of individual forms of self-regulation amongst humans. But the truth is, we've blown past otherwise, I mean, you talked about external limits, right. And typically, when you have healthy ecosystems there is that dynamic right. And we've just said, fuck that, basically. You know, we're the apex predator or apex species on the planet, and we've found ancient sunlight as a form of energy for ourselves and we've just gone crazy for a while. And have not so self-regulated. In fact, we've created a system that says, just keep growing.
Jason Bradford
Now this is the do-the-opposite portion of our show.
Asher Miller
Oh, sorry.
Jason Bradford
So what we're suggesting --
Rob Dietz
Yeah, act like a grizzly bear.
Jason Bradford
Maybe act more like the grizzly bear, and we impose regulations on ourselves in spite of what the Supreme Court might want us to do. That we take care of the situation and impose a slowdown and maybe a reversal.
Rob Dietz
This may be our best do-the-opposite ever. It's to stop acting like rabbits. That's pretty much what we're saying.
Asher Miller
Be the bear. So let's talk about visions for -- you know, let's look through a Marvin Harris lens, but a positive one.
Jason Bradford
Okay. Good luck.
Asher Miller
What are visions for different infrastructure, structure, and superstructure?
Jason Bradford
Right. Okay. Infrastructure -- You know, what drives me crazy is the buildings that go up like, you know, Corvallis is growing like crazy. And I lived in California for a long time. And I remember being there during the build out of the latest housing bust, right? And just the neighborhoods that would spring up overnight. And I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, and that, you know --
Rob Dietz
All the way to Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, LA.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Oh my God. I want to sing right now. But anyhow, I'll save our listeners. But what we do, the building materials we use . . . Like the fact that we had these industrial building materials that quickly just put up this shit housing. And of course, people need housing, I understand that. But what if our infrastructure was aligned with like, materials that were locally sourced, biodegradable, and all we could build was with what we could gather, you know, locally, and maybe semi=regionally? Wouldn't that be an amazing -- It would look beautiful. It would look like these towns that you go visit in Europe from like the 1500s that you think -- Or Italy, right? They're gorgeous, right? Or the architecture in the southwest. You go to like the Taos Pueblo and you see these places. It's not like they're not gorgeous, beautiful places.
Rob Dietz
They're built with quality and built to last.
Jason Bradford
They're built with quality and care and the people know how to do it themselves.
Rob Dietz
So the first thing I'm doing when we finish this episode is to pull the metal roofing off your house and replace it with straw.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, if we can make good straw. We gotta do a good job.
Rob Dietz
No smoking is allowed near your house. Well no, I love that idea. I've been to the Taos Pueblo. It is a sight to behold and a --
Asher Miller
Well, and obviously it'd be appropriate for the environment that you're in. The materials that you're using, you know, whether you're building for heat, or cold, or a combination, or whatever. Climate might kind of fuck with that a little bit.
Rob Dietz
Well let's turn to the structure. And there are a lot of things afoot right now that are kind of going against the policies of growth, especially in Europe and look at the degrowth movement. I've studied steady state economics. There's also now donut economics. So you've got these ideas coming up with new policies, and there are actually hubs, academic hubs around the world. You've got the Universitat Aut noma de Barcelona has a lot of degrowth action going. University of Vermont here in the United States. Leeds University over there in England. And we've got allies that have done really well with pushing ideas. I, of course, go back to Herman Daly. And he's got his predecessors where he talked a lot about uneconomic growth. The notion that economic growth at some point turns a corner. It's like, maybe it was producing benefits faster than costs. But at some point, the costs, like you were talking about Jason, the biodiversity loss and habitat destruction, we were basically undermining ourselves.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. The Big Gulp causes diabetes.
Rob Dietz
Right. Uneconomic growth. So yeah, just shout out to Jason Hickel, who's been doing a bunch of work on degrowth. Kate Raworth and her donut economics, where she's looking at how do we meet people's needs without undermining the life support systems of the planet. All of this stuff comes down to pretty straightforward policies. I'll mention a couple, but you know, you can go back to our slew of former episodes and get a lot of this stuff. But we need limits on throughput. We should distribute income and wealth in fair ways. We should definitely re-regulate financial systems, my God. You know, we should use different measures of progress. GDP was never meant to be a measure of progress, and somehow we've done that. In our globalism episode, we talked about the rules of trade, and those need to be overhauled. So a whole slew of literature and invite you to dive into the degrowth.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there are lots of ideas for new structures, that's for sure.
Asher Miller
Both with what you talked about, Jason, for infrastructure, and Rob, what you talked about structure, these are forms of self-regulation in a sense, right. And that really comes down to the superstructure. And this is the paradox that we've talked a lot about on this podcast, which is, we've talked about how infrastructure typically drives structure and superstructure, right? And we know that the infrastructure is going to change. We've talked about, there are limits. And we're experiencing those limits now. But if we want to kind of get ahead of it, if we want to try to soften the blow of that, then we need to be working on superstructure as well. And so when you think about, what is a vision for a different superstructure instead of more and more, grow and grow, it's a vision and a value set around enoughness. And if that is the mindset that we have, if it's enoughness, or self-sustainability, or sustenance, then it's a shifting of what we're seeking. And you can want more. But you know, people have talked about decoupling. We can decouple the consumer economy from material resources or carbon emissions, or whatever, which we've talked about before as being essentially bunk. But there are areas where we can grow and we can seek more. But maybe they're more about knowledge or more about wisdom. They're more about connection.
Jason Bradford
They're new skill sets.
Asher Miller
Things that don't require, you know, necessarily more resources, or growth and material consumption to achieve.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, it's the unknown Wendigo that you're talking about.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
I wonder if we could decouple economics departments from bunk. Would that be possible?
Asher Miller
I think we should just decouple them, put them on. . . We could take the entire economics department of one of these top prestigious schools, University of Chicago, for example. Let's put it on that cruise ship, seal it off, you guys have just enough bunker fuel, or whatever you burn to get out there, and then you're on your own.
Jason Bradford
My whole life actually.
Jason Bradford
That'd be great.
Asher Miller
Yeah. I love it. Okay, let's talk about escaping. Like, if we're talking about escaping growthism, how does that apply in the real world for us. And maybe let's start at the household level. When we were prepping for this this episode, the first thing I thought about was this book that my wife had read, which I'll admit, I had not read myself. But I remember her talking about it and being actually inspired by quite a bit. It was called, "The Power of Half." And it was about a family that sold their Atlanta home back in like 2006, I think it was. And they donated half of the profits of their home sale to a group called The Hunger Project, which was a charity that worked to lessen the hunger of about 30,000 rural villagers in over 30 villages in Ghana. And it helps them gain self-reliance. It's a beautiful vision. And they downsized to a much smaller home. People don't know this, you know, our listeners don't get a peek behind the curtain too much, but we've had wonderful people supporting us and researching what we do --
Asher Miller
Yeah, you stand on the shoulders of great women, primarily.
Jason Bradford
Yes. Mostly. Yeah.
Asher Miller
So do I. Well, we've had wonderful people helping us research and prep for shows over the years. And in this season, we've had our colleague at Post Carbon Institute, Cassady Thomas, helping us a little bit. So I asked Cassady, do you mind just like doing a little digging into this Power of Half story? And she found, I just have to share this. She found maybe not quite as beautiful of a story as I was imagining. I mean, they did what they did. They downsized. But they downsized from a house that was 6,500 square feet, five bedrooms, eight fireplaces, four bathrooms and a private elevator into their teenage daughter's bedroom. They sold it for $2 million. This is a huge mansion, right? They gave away half their proceeds, $850,000. Wonderful. And they downsized into a house half the size, but that was still 3,000 square feet. So Cassady was like well, there must be better examples of people doing this. And she found a lot. And I just wanted to share one with you, which is, the Wises, a couple who gave away, or probably are still giving away nearly 50% of their income every year. Over $100,000. And there's, you know, we'll share a link to this interview that was done with them. You know, it's very much around this idea of enoughness. Like we don't need more money. We're fortunate enough to have fairly high paying jobs. We have all this access. It's a joy for us. It's like a no brainer. The way they talk about it is almost just like, why are we even having this conversation. They're interview for like a local news station, or whatever. And they're like, why are we having this conversation? This is like a like a no brainer thing to do. We don't need this much money.
Asher Miller
Well, and I would invite our listeners too to go back, I think it's all the way to Season One when we had Chuck Collins in this very studio who came to the same realization at a quite young age. And he's got a book called, "Born on Third Base" where he inherited a bunch of money as a 21-year-old. And he was like, I don't deserve this and I don't need it. And he gave it away. Incredible
Jason Bradford
Pretty amazing. Now, I know you did this search to try to find businesses that -- What was the term again you used?
Asher Miller
Examples of businesses that chose not to grow.
Jason Bradford
Right. Now, you did find one eventually. And it's called --
Rob Dietz
On the 17,000th page of Google results,
Asher Miller
I had to use the Wayback Machine!
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Well, it turns out there is a business in Washington called SparkToro. And they're kind of a software marketing company. And it's interesting, because if you look at them, they seem like a pretty small company. And they're very explicit upfront about the fact that, you know, we're not trying to get bigger at all, and we're fine as a small company. And they basically profess that monopolization is bad. And trying to get out, you know, with some sort of venture capital idea of the 10x returns is bad. You're probably not serving your customers well. So they have this really interesting sort of page that contrasts their approach with sort of the standard approach for businesses trying to just like, capture their largest share of the market and outcompete everybody else. And they want businesses to be small and midsize. They want sector competition, and they want to be able to focus on quality and relationships. So there are some examples out there, probably more than this one.
Asher Miller
They have a cool visual on their website comparing what they think of themselves as a zebra company to unicorns. I mean, unicorn is a term in the business world for a company that just takes off, like a Facebook or whatever.
Jason Bradford
You put in 10 bucks and become a millionaire.
Asher Miller
Yeah exactly. And they're just contrasting the purpose, the outcomes, the how, the approach, and the who. And I think it's really helpful. I will say, you're right, my Google search was disappointing. But there are many companies that are, you know, you look at the B Corp movement. There is no shortage. I mean, it's definitely not the norm. But at the margins, and I think as we see, I already think you see younger generations questioning like the career path that they might take and what's the purpose. Like, is it worth taking on debt to get a high paid job I only get an order to buy shit and pay off that debt. So people are looking for alternatives, and there are definitely companies out there that are helping.
Jason Bradford
Yes. And a lot of people want to work for them. They don't want to work for a company that they think is just awful and has a bad mission.
Asher Miller
I mean, I would, but nobody wants me unfortunately.
Jason Bradford
Not anymore. You're not hirable anymore.
Rob Dietz
You're not gonna get a job at that company because they're not growing. So forget it.
Asher Miller
Dammit. I never thought about the downside.
Rob Dietz
So in thinking about how to escape growthism, we've got the household, we've got the business. If we scale up to something like a community initiative, there's a really cool one that's going on in Cusco, Peru, which I'm excited about. Because right now, as we're recording this, my stepdaughter is on a study abroad and is actually on her way to Cusco, Peru.
Jason Bradford
Nice Unbelievable. I've been there a few times, and it's one of the most spectacular places I've ever been to.
Rob Dietz
Well, so what's happening there is something called -- it sounds a little trite, the Potato Park.
Jason Bradford
Potatoes are very important in the Andes.
Rob Dietz
But it is really cool.
Asher Miller
That's where the potato comes from.
Jason Bradford
That's right.
Rob Dietz
I'm psyched about this. So what's happened is they've established what they've termed a biocultural heritage territory. And it's governed by six Quechua communities, that's the Indigenous folks that live there. And what they're doing is, they're teaming up to work on micro enterprises in food and farming in ecotourism and the development of crafts. And they figured out that they're gonna guide this Potato Park by principle that are important to them, and they're gonna have goals for wellbeing. And so, kind of similar to what you guys were talking about. They take a percentage of the revenues that they get from these micro enterprises, and they invest them in communal funds, and it gets redistributed to everybody. So, everybody in the community is benefiting. And there's kind of like side effects from this. Because they're doing this heritage with potatoes, they've increased food security. So like during the pandemic, a lot of people in Cusco were starting to face food shortages. And they were able to share their surplus and kind of put their communal values into work and to practice.
Jason Bradford
That is a fantastic story. And so, I think it's important for us to probably recognize that if you look around the world, the things that you can find on a Google search are often limited to people who have the technology, the reach, and the interest in sharing all this stuff on social media or wherever we're publishing a lot. And you go to these other places, and it might be harder to find, but there's probably way more interesting things happening in places like this. Remote areas like this where people are forced to face these challenges and are just as creative as anyone you've ever met probably.
Asher Miller
I mean, think about it, a lot of these traditional cultures, if their dominant operating system was growth, they probably wouldn't still be around, right? It was around sustainability and reciprocity and being in community with one another in the natural world. I'm not trying to, you know --
Jason Bradford
Romanticize everything.
Asher Miller
Paint an idyllic picture. Right.
Jason Bradford
Most of them had histories of like, perhaps, you know, empire building.
Asher Miller
They were dealing with real limits, right? And now they're being faced by Wendigo economics coming for them. You know? So one of the things that -- It's a weird dynamic. We don't want to be exploiting and extracting from them models for how to do things differently. But learning from them in some ways helps protect them from the ravenous you know, rapacious economic system that we and our listeners are still a part of.
Rob Dietz
Well, I wonder if we can go down to the Wendigo market, like the one you went to, Jason, get us a Wendigo drink, shove that Wendigo drink down our Wendigo gullets.
Asher Miller
It makes you thirstier and thirstier is the problem.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you'll never be satisfied.
Melody Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you liked 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.
Jason Bradford
Today's year of high energy, modernity, economic growth, globalization, and political stability has elevated finance to a position of paramount importance. But this is all about to change. Don't get caught as an unskilled buffoon during the Great Unraveling. Instead, attend Finance Finishing School, a beacon of adaptability that prepares financial professionals for a future where everything they know now is worthless. Our curriculum is meticulously designed to include practical skills, such as subsistence farming, landfill salvage and tool fabrication, primitive medicine, and cooking with dried dung, essential for survival during times of financial and social collapse. Additionally, we prioritize soft skills, like nonviolent communication and mediation strategies, fostering empathy and community building. Because odds are, you're kind of a dick right now. Our mission is to transform finance professionals into well rounded individuals, capable of thriving in a world where sociopathic norms no longer suffice. Join us and start counting friends instead of just counting money.
