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.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
• John Michael Greer, "Secret Handshakes," The Archdruid Report, January 21, 2010.

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

Episode 65, "Why the Polycrisis Is a Statistical Anomaly: The Willful Delusions of the World’s Leading Pseudointellectual"

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.