Collapse Chat is back and it's here to stay. This is the first of a new period for Ashes Ashes. To keep up our high levels of research, we're going to need a little more time per episode and will be transitioning to an every other week schedule for our deep dives. But fret not, collapse chat will fill in the gaps and educate you on what's happening in our immediate worlds as well as our thoughts on everything going on in the larger world around us. This week we cover Daniel's new career shift, how both of us came to our current thinking, what media we're currently consuming, some talk about salmon, and a whole bunch of other interesting tidbits. We hope you enjoy this and stick around for our deep dive back next week!
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(This transcript is automatically generated and sucks. We'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Alexey for crafting this wonderful transcript.
[0:00] Alright, David, cue the music, let's get this show on the road.
[0:07] Daniel, I don't do the music, you cue the music, that's your job, it’s like your only job here.
[0:14] Well, I left the music button at home, David. What are we going to do? We have to start the show with the music, David, that's what we always do.
[0:21] And there's no possible way to add the music later, just not, we don't have the technology yet, it's like fusion power.
[0:27] Maybe someone will come up with it though.
[0:31] If they send us billions of dollars of research money than we might be onto something.
[0:35] Well, you know, David maybe it works out because this is an unusual episode. I mean, it's not that unusual but we're trying out a new format.
[0:44] You're right it's another terrible cold open of Ashes Ashes.
[0:47] That's because there's no research associated with this episode. That's right, we did no research, this is not a show where we dive deep on some existential crisis that the world faces analyzing it from every different angle and then coming up with what can we do – no, this is just a casual chat between you and me, David.
[1:09] Yeah, that's right, we are trying something totally new here. So if you only listen to this show because of the research: stop now, come back next week because this is not going to be fun for you. But we are getting to a point where some of the show topics that we have left that we want to hit are so in-depth and so massive that we need a little bit more time to prepare it; plus Daniel here is about to start a new job that is going to take a lot of time. If anybody's in Massachusetts and has pro tips about living in Massachusetts, give us a ring, I'm sure Daniel would love to hear those. He's going to be, it's going to be his first Northeastern winter after years of Georgia winters, so he's in for a surprise there. But all this stuff is adding up and we’re no going to have as much time to do this show and all the research that we feel like we really need to. So we're going to try, and bear with us, to transition into a sort of chatty catch-up week where we talk about things in the news, what we're currently thinking about, working on and then the following week will be one of our typical deep-dive episodes. And we’re going to alternate this going forward unless this system just doesn't work or people hate it. But also I think another thing that is positive about this that you mentioned Daniel, it gives listeners a chance to actually catch up, because as tedious as our episodes are to research, it's a lot to also consume. We don't want you all binging those and getting depressed so I consider these like sort of more lighthearted alternatives to those.
[2:36] Yeah and I think a lot of our episodes are evergreen in a way. We try to present the topics in their entirety, at least as much as we can, come at it with as many angles as possible to really lay that foundation. So there’s a lot of previous episodes that if you haven't listened to yet we encourage you to catch up on that end. You're right, David, I'm moving to Massachusetts, I'm starting a new job and it sounds like we are trying to make up for the fact that we just don't want to do as much work. But I want to assure everybody that that that is exactly the case.
[3:08] It was just something we were thinking about, cause I’m about to start in a new field, I'll be working with farmers and community health networks to not just grow produce, not just improve community health gardens but also figure out how best to organize people around food access. we're going to be managing some farmers' markets. And this is something David that I've been thinking about for a long time, you know, it was a year ago when we interviewed Ian McSweeney of Agrarian Trust on this podcast and that interview, as well as our interview with Chris D’Alessandro from episode 16, really got me thinking about what I want to do on this planet. And I want to be a part of movements that are implementing ways towards sustainability and, more importantly, getting communities involved in that sustainability. And I see the work I'm going to be doing this year as one side of a two-sided coin where you have land conservation and stewardship. Conservation being the, I guess, more legal process of conserving land through a variety of mechanisms so that you can prevent a developer from coming in and tearing down all those trees, ripping that habitat apart for some shopping mall or some residential lot. And then the other side of that which is what I'll be focusing on this year is the stewardship and community organizing side of that coin: where once that land is conserved or once you have access to land or the people on that land are farming it or want to start farming it, how do you organize people such that it's egalitarian so that it respects human dignity and it respects the soil in such a way that you can really be productive well into the future. So, I have no experience gardening, I have no experience growing anything. And that’s a large reason I chose this position.
[5:02] Well, I mean, maybe this is actually a good way to start this episode and in fact start this whole series of things in that I think it's really interesting how this show that we set out to do, to educate, inform and ultimately we hope to inspire doing exactly that just to you. And I know I find it inspiring and maybe some of our listeners will too. But, I mean, over the course of your career, Daniel, over the many, many years I've known you, I mean, you’ve graduated college with business degrees, with economics, education, you went into commercial real estate, you were briefly a landlord, I'm sorry to out you in front of everybody on that. You are now very radically changing the direction of your life, you're starting over new, you’re taking this big risk moving halfway across the country to jump into this field you have no experience in for what basically no pay: that's a lot of drastic life choices and decisions. And that’s sort of inspiring because you decided: hey, I'm not comfortable with what I'm doing, I want to make the world a better place. This is a way that I see it possible to do that. So maybe you can share some of that process and how you got to here.
[6:19] Well, it was about, I don't know, two years ago, a little bit before that, I'd say 6 months before we started this podcast, where I kind of had a very dramatic shift in my perspective. Up until that point, I was reading a lot of books, I was searching knowledge but where this path led me down most often were books that focused on self-improvement, on entrepreneurship, on how to build a business, how to be successful in this world and that really fell perfectly in line with my business education and just the way I had come to see the world.
[6:51] Yeah, I mean, I remember us having arguments over things like effective altruism and these like very tech-bro way of seeing the world and disagreements. It was all very cordial but it was interesting seeing where you were coming from at the time versus where you are now.
[7:07] Yeah, that that was a thing. We were, we didn't talk that much, but you know we had kept in touch, we've known each other for a long time. And I was actually traveling the world for a year and I remember we were exchanging emails and...
[7:19] Which, by the way, everyone, if you search Daniel's name on YouTube he made travel logs of his travels backpacking across Europe and they're kind of funny, so should you check those out.
[7:33] It's funny, actually a listener found those independently and reached out and said: it doesn't make sense to me, you know, Daniel and David, they talk about this anticonsumption and the greenhouse gas emissions of traveling, yet Daniel seems to be just like celebrating the international travel lifestyle, I don't understand!
[7:53] We are very guilty people, we’re trying to work towards better things and we're always trying to improve ourselves and become less and less hypocritical. And unlike a lot of podcast hosts in the left field without naming any names we at least do engage in forms of activism besides just preaching about champagne socialism or whatever. So that's me dropping the mic on some people who I'm sure some of the listeners are familiar with.
[8:19] Yeah, I certainly need to catch up, all right. I certainly could do more and trying to do more. But yeah, back to my travels, so we were exchanging emails because I was reading books, I was reading biographies and just really buying into this entrepreneurial narrative of that like: not only can anyone be successful if they just implement the right strategies but those are the people changing the world for the better. And I remember we even had an email I think the one you're referring to about effective altruism or something, but I remember saying: look, how can you criticize someone like Bill Gates who, you know, he was able to amass such a great fortune and now he's in a position where he can use that fortune to better the world?
[9:08] And so what's wrong with working towards building wealth in your early life so you then can be a great philanthropist? And if anyone is curious about the change in perspective, then just look up episode 61 Owning Change. But anyway, so we were exchanging these emails and you know you were recommending some books to me and I read them, and a lot of my yearning for this knowledge came out of frustration, David, because in a lot of the conversations we had you would say things that I not only had never heard before but really challenged the way I saw the world. And it didn't make sense to me and to be quite honest it made me angry, you know, I would come away from some of our discussions thinking: I know David's wrong, you know, how can he say these things? But I just don't have the knowledge to combat him so let me find out more. And eventually, this led me to such books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. And that book really shattered my worldview, you know, I hate to say it but I'm very privileged, I did not experience really any racial stress growing up, I very much suffered from something called White Fragility, if you don't know what that it is, just look it up, there's a paper written about it that kind of explains how being privileged insulates you from the racial and class oppression that's all around you. And this is something I had to realize and come to terms with. And then in this process, as I was reading more and I had this changing perspective where I said: look, I don't know why I was reading so much before, if it was just to accumulate some kind of knowledge, I don't know, but I don't want to live on this Earth if I can't face the reality of what's going on around me and, if I can't adapt to that reality, to change the way I live my life. And that was a decision I came to and I said: I'm going to find out as much as I can about what's going on around me, I'm going to start from scratch, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that everything I was taught in school, including, especially college – I'm just going to throw that out the window and start fresh and I'm just going to take what's come to me and figure how to adapt my worldview to that. And that’s what I did, and it’s where a lot of my values and principles came from. And I realized that before this time I actually didn't have values, I didn't really have principles to stand on because I didn't really have a view of the world other than what was just handed to me. I think this is a big reason why I had so much stress in my early work because I didn't really know why I was doing what I was doing. Anyway, to close this long story about me, this podcast just continues to be a source of knowledge for me to adopt my worldview too. And learning about industrial agriculture, learning about not just how our industry harms our social relationships but is quite literally destroying the Earth really impacted me and I wanted to change the way I live and I'm still working on that. But, you know, one of the things we're doing, David, is we’re preparing a show on the immigration crisis, things going on at the border but also things going on in our backyard. And just today I interviewed somebody for that episode and this is a topic that's also having a really big impact on me and just seems to be one of the major crises of our day.
[12:14] I want to circle back to that show that we're working on right now about the border, about these camps, about detention, about migration. But there's one thing you said a second ago that I really connected with and I had a very similar experience and I feel compelled to share it. And you said that in this process of getting to where you are now you decided one day basically to unlearn everything you know and started fresh, started from scratch. And that was very similar to what I did a few years before you got to that point. And that's the exact same phrase that I used: start from scratch. I had this moment, I guess, shortly after I graduated from college and I was reading something, I don’t even remember what it was at the time, it wasn't anything earth-shattering, I would find those books later. And I've always sort of held a lot of beliefs I do now, they are a lot more refined and then developed than they were at the time. But at some point I realized: I didn't know why I believed any of the things that I did, that they just seem to have collected themselves over the years. You know, there's a lot of influence from your parents, there's a lot of influence from your peers growing up.
[13:23] And it just coalesced into this like a blob of, yeah, you know, this is what I think I believe or this is what I define myself as. And I had this moment of like panic when like – I don't actually know where this came from, I don't know why I believe the things I do. And so, I just decided I was going to rip it all down and start over. And I actually enrolled in some online classes, those massively online educational courses that are free unless you pay like a little bit more to get a certificate. I don't member which university it was through, maybe it was MIT or something. And I took some on, one on surveillance law.
[13:59] Interesting.
[14:00] And I took one on specifically the foundation of government and what is government, what is the larger philosophy behind government. And part of the course was sort of design your own system of government as you went through it. You know, walk us through this what is traditionally seen as the progress of successive new types of government developed over time as they evolved from each other and, you know, that idea that history always progresses and we get more refined a time goes: blah blah blah. And looking at it now, knowing much more than I did at the time, it's a problem out, of course, there's a lot of things left out, there are a lot of presumptions that were made in order to push a specific type of view that it was very clear that they wanted to achieve. But unfortunately for them, it like pushed me in a very different direction, I found a lot of literature that I would have never found before and I started really developing all of my beliefs once again from scratch going back to the sources, reading the original philosophers who came up with this idea and even some people who get a weird reinterpretation of their work today: so people like Adam Smith who is talked about as this hero of capitalism when really he cautions against it quite a bit in this texts – they're actually very interesting and there's lots of passages that, if you told people that he said that, they’d think it was Karl Marx.
[15:15] This sort of reworking, it's a never-ending process. But so many people that I’ve talked to that get to this point where they're trying to make big differences in the world, big differences in their lives, had a very similar experience where they say: they reach something, some sort of event in their life, something happens to them, they just all the sudden reach a breaking point and say, wait a second, I need to restart or I need to figure things out, I'm ready for change. And I think that moment is so important and I wish I knew how to create that in people. And I hope that at some point sort of this show does that for some people, it gives them a chance to say: oh, I never knew about this, and if I didn't know about this, what else don't I know about? And it goes from there. It’s one of the explicit goals we laid out when we try to do this which is why we do so much research and offer so many additional sources so people can jump back down that rabbit-hole themselves.
[16:04] That moment that clicked, that willingness to redefine everything, to shift your worldview I think is a really important but universal experience in arriving at, I guess, radical views but view where you want to do something about it. And it's not just something that you believe in that is an amalgamation of however many years of living your life, but actually, you know, a way to live your life, something to live for, something to work towards. And I think that's a difference between a lot of people who believe something and then the people who try and work towards that thing. And it excites me and, like I said, it inspires me to see you doing that, chasing that redefining of your worldview and actually putting it into action.
[16:47] But I didn't know you were like legit signed up for college courses and just sat down and dedicated your time to just.
[16:55] I have notebooks full of notes like after I already graduated from college. I'm not getting any credit for these things, I was just like, okay, well you know, I got to restart cause I clearly took the wrong classes in college, so let me start over here. And I'm interested in you, listeners, if you have similar stories, we'd love to hear these. Email them to us, contact at ashesashes. org, give us a phone call and record it. And at some point, we will get to that call-in show which we’re really excited about. That number, by the way, is 31399-ashes, that’s 313-992-7437. Or find us on Reddit on ashesashescast or just type it out in our Discord Community which you can find a link to on the website. It’s a great group of people, we love hearing from you there. But to twist back, Daniel, I mentioned that I’m going to circle back to this, we are working right now on a large show which is part of the reason why we switched this format.
[17:53] We’ve been working on it for weeks and we have at least another month or two of more work ahead of us. But it is covering all things to do with the detainment facilities all around the country with the migrants, how they got there, what they're doing now; with the people who work in these places, with the people who are actively trying to shut down the systems, who are trying to work for migrant rights. Daniel has been basically jam-packing his schedule, traveling around interviewing lawyers, interviewing activists. We will be traveling down to the border in the near future to talk to some people there, I don't want to go into too many details. And this is sort of returning once again to the point I was making earlier which is that we're really trying to turn this show into something useful, something that is, on one hand, evergreen but also, on the other hand, inspirational and actively uses whatever small platform we've developed here for something good, for something that can split off from here, can be spread virally, can be spread through the actions of others who are inspired by this. And we really hope that this show and what we’re working towards with it will be something like that because, you know, listening to all this stuff that we talk about, there’s a lot of things here that I feel extremely helpless by what we're doing with this shows. The one that really wrecked me was the one where we’ve talked about ocean acidification, deoxygenation and the general warming of it. I mean, that episode really wrecked me, I felt so helpless.
[19:22] That's Ocean Death.
[19:24] Yeah, Ocean Death, whichever one that is, way back. A lot of these have similar things: Irreplaceable, where we’re talking about this mass extinction that's going on. And, you know, we can do little things, and I know you found inspiration in these farming episodes which is why you've made his dramatic change in your own life. But one of these things recently that's been affecting me is all these camps, the plights of migrants, the flights of my neighbors in my neighborhood who I know have worries about this stuff. And this feels like a little way that we can do something. And all these shows that exist anywhere and I don't want just to limit this to podcasts. But anybody who has a platform for whatever reason, I feel like those things should be used for good, not for selling things, not for advertising. We have such little time and attention these days that anything that's not actively using that resource to try and build a better world is a waste of time for everyone involved. And yeah, you know, like I consume trashy media, TV which is something I actually want to talk about. Have you heard of Love Island?
[20:31] No, David, I have not heard of “Love Island.”
[20:33] It is the trashi…
[20:34] I'd like to go there though.
[20:36] No, no you don't. It is the trashiest reality show I've ever witnessed. And I want to talk about it briefly and the panopticon that created it. So I consume crap just like everyone, you can't be on all the time it's exhausting. But, you know, these platforms should be used for good and that's what we're trying to do here. And if you think of any way that we can be improving our reach, if you can think of ways that we can develop this border show, this content about this, make it as great as possible or if you just have great resources of like: oh, you have to talk to these people; hey, my neighbors are migrants or refugees, or whatever, you know. Once again, get in contact with us, let us know, this is a very long-term active project, we’re actively developing it, it's still very much in an amorphous form, we're collecting all this information, resources. And we love everyone helping.
[21:22] If you have a couch in El Paso [ el pas-o ] or Tucson.
[21:26] El Paso [ el pas-oh ].
[21:27] El Paso, shoot, I should probably figure that out.
[21:32] If you can help us with pronunciation.
[21:34] Oh yeah, I get those all the time wrong. Yeah but if you have a couch in one of those places, wouldn't mind hosting your favorite podcast hosts, let us know.
[21:44] Whatever it is. We love any and all help and we love even people just letting us know if we're doing things right or wrong cause we appreciate both, we love publishing corrections because it shows that at least we got some stuff right and people are bothering to correct stuff that we didn’t.
[22:00] Yeah. And it's interesting you talked about how immigration control in this country has been something that's been a weight on your mind, David because it has with me too. I've lost sleep just feeling powerless in the face of these terrible news. And we actually, again, this podcast is as much for ourselves as it is for you, to listener because, you know, we called each other up one day and you were super depressed, I was super depressed, you were like: just these concentration camps, man, you know.
[22:30] Was? Was super depressed?
[22:32] That's what Love Island is for.
[22:36] Yeah, and I'll get to that, I'll get to that, don't worry.
[22:39] Okay. So we were both on the phone just like: yeah, so what do? I don't know. And then one of us was just like, well, why don't we go down? Why don't we do a show on it, you know, document something, talk to some people and then we started getting revitalized by that idea and it gave us a purpose again, you know. And I think that's so important in these dark times like okay, read the news – fine, but then get off, get off the news and go find an organization, volunteer with it. And that's something that surprised me: just there's so many things around you, I guarantee you there's an organization doing something that you can be a part of. And yeah, preparing for this show on immigration, I've already learned so much, I've learned that, you know, people who get stopped at the border, they don't get detained right there all the time – they usually get detained there and then they get sent randomly across the country. You can get detained at the border and then find yourself in New York, you can get detained at the border and then find yourself in Georgia. Which by the way, I've been doing some interviews in Georgia, David, because we have one of the worst situations for immigrants in the whole country. So, for those seeking asylum in this country, who are running away from violence, who are running away from persecution – the national average that we accept asylum-seekers is around 40-something percent.
[23:57] If you just happened to land in Georgia and, again, this is just a roll of the dice, your chance of being admitted into this country on an asylum process falls dramatically to just 5% or 2%.
[24:10] And, of course, there's a whole lot more atrocities being carried out in Georgia. But yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this, David, but it's depressing and we should do something about it.
[24:19] Which we're trying to do. So I don't want to hang on this too much and give too much of the show away. But I guess that's all I'm trying to say is that something we're actively working on and if you feel like you have anything that could be useful: let us know, we would love to hear from you and we would love your help and involvement and participation. And that's one of the coolest things that's been going on with the show is how willing people are, Daniel, to jump in and help and contribute and offer links and suggestions and advice. And if you go back to the very first episode, which nobody should do because it's not so great and the audio is terrible, but one of the first things I say, like immediately out of my mouth, is how much I dislike podcasts, right?
[25:02] Yeah, why did you say that? Is it just a Brooklyn thing?
[25:04] I don't like podcasts. Everyone in Brooklyn loves podcasts.
[25:09] Well, that's what I'm saying like you hate what everyone else loves, and everyone in Brooklyn loves podcasts, so.
[25:15] So like I'm doing it to be contrarian? No, I mean, I used to listen to podcasts more when I lived in Atlanta and I drove a lot, I liked to listen to them while I drive. But I don't drive anymore and I don’t own the car so I.
[25:26] Let me stop you right there, David, while you're talking about how much you hate podcasts. I remember this was years ago: we were going on a caving trip, you know, driving 4 hours to a cave somewhere in Alabama and you showed up to the carpool with a CD of This American Life episodes that you had downloaded, burned to a CD and then put it into the disk drive so we could have something to listen to on the way there.
[25:51] Well, to be fair, it was like half This American Life and half Radiolab. And at the time those were basically the only podcasts worth listening to.
[26:09] But yeah, I did enjoy them. And Brooklyn definitely did turn me against them slightly because there's a lot of bad podcasts here, and there's a lot of bad podcast people. Everyone is like ‘oh, have a podcast’ and you’re like ‘oh, okay.’ But, you know, I've sort of come around to them and enjoy them a lot more and I value them much more than I did. And not only just for the content but also just the fact that, I don’t know, it's kind of cool that in this age of all this media and in terms of like short consumption, in terms of video, of streaming as somebody who works in these industries, I mean – everything is so focused on catching those eyeballs; and then for some reason, people are willing to put an hour, hour and a half of their time to sit there and listen to two people ramble. And I think that's really special and it's a throwback to the oral traditions which was the predominant way of storytelling and sharing information for basically all of human history. And in that sense I really enjoy this, we're just carrying on this ancient torch. And I think it's kind of cool to look at it like that. So I'm coming around, I'm coming around the podcasts and all the people in this community have really helped to bring me there. And I had a larger point here and I think it's escaping me: I'm not so good at this format, but it’s a work in progress.
[27:18] We'll work it out David, while you think about that, I agree with you that it is cool that people are willing to take time out of their day to just sit down or, I don't know what they're doing: maybe they're working, maybe they're gardening – but just listen to something that hasn't been packaged into this, you know, junk-food-style dopamine-hit form of entertainment. But I also wonder if there's a reason people are craving that type of thing. And, you know, we talked about isolation at one point on this show, we had an episode on that. And I was thinking about this because recently I went to a Lights for Liberty vigil in Atlanta which occurred in multiple cities all around the world as a way of showing solidarity for those, again, in detention, immigrants being abused and all this. And someone posted about these vigils online and, of course, in this forum, someone said: look, these types of things are useless, you're not going to change anything by these types of protests or gatherings or whatever it is. And I was thinking about that and I really do not agree. And I might have agreed with that in the past before I was more trying to get involved in the real-life version of this type of things. And the reason I don't agree is because what we lack in this world, in our society so much are public gathering, we lack spaces where people come together and talk about the things that are on their minds, talk about the things that give them stress and anxiety, things that there are afraid of, things that they are angry about. And that's really all this was, it was a vigil for people to come together, to express their anger, their frustration at what is cruel policies being implemented in this country.
[28:56] And yeah, we didn't change anything necessarily, but again, I don't know if that's always the point. Because for me it was a way of meeting new people and reaffirming the idea that we're not alone in the challenges that we face so often. And I was able to go away from that feeling more energized to then go do something. And I think that's what we're missing so much in this world: a way for us to come together, grieve, express our emotions and then feel empowered to go do something. And maybe that relates to the way our cities and our suburbs have been laid out: we're probably going to do a show on Suburbia soon, David, and, you know, ever since this country was founded our property laws have encouraged individuals to kind of section them off from everybody else, and our development has followed suit, and as a result, we don't have very many public spaces, we don't have a civic life in this country. And so I think because we lack that, people necessarily have to turn to some of these mediums like podcasts, which again, I don't think it's a bad thing in of itself, but I would like to see a world where we can get back to a more public and active life where we can share these ideas in person.
[30:03] Yeah, that sounds so amazing. And I think part of the problem with that is just lack of public spaces which we’ve talked about before, which I'm sure will hit again in this suburb episode coming up, where there aren't just places to hang out and have these conversations to meet people, there's no public space, everything has been privatized: if you want to go somewhere to talk to people you are expected to purchase things in that process. The only places that were semi-public were malls which had this overwhelming sense of consumerism and all the mall are now disappearing as well. So it's almost like the world is being designed to prevent this, there's a group of people people who are conspiring to prevent these types of thoughts and interactions. Buy the resistance that really is actually a resistance and not just a hashtag, I think, is trying to push past this stuff and finding these human connections and these human activities, these activist organizations, these people. And activism is such a loaded word, but I mean, this is ultimately people who are concerned about something so much that they're willing to put time into trying to fix that problem. And that's all we need. We need a lot of that, we need much more cause we have some very big problems as we love to talk about on this show. And I know I sound like a pessimist all the time but I think in my heart I'm an optimist because you can't do any of this, you can't continue on, you can’t put all this work in this stuff, talk about all this problems and things without at some level believing that something better is possible, believing that they can be fixed. And some days it seems more impossible than others but it's not going to be easy, it's not going to be clean and it's definitely not going to be a perfect solution, but I think there are solutions to all this stuff, and I think if we crack down then we might get to someone.
[31:49] Yeah, well, and you know everyone talks about how do we fix these things, how do we solve these things and, of course, it has to be that aim of everything we do. But there was a time, David, where I came to the decision and I have to constantly remind myself of this that maybe we'll never see things fixed the way we want them, maybe there will never be a day where we can look back and say okay, everything solved. Maybe it's the struggle itself that is worth doing regardless of whether we are victorious or whether we are defeated.
[32:18] Yeah, of course, there's that maxim when you go camping, right, like you know the silly things like Leave No Trace, blah blah blah. But there's a larger one that's: leave things behind better than when you got there. I think it’s things with camping, it’s things with stewardship, and I think for a lot of human history, there were groups of people, large groups of people who were doing just that. And, of course, there were also large groups of people doing the opposite of that. But if we could get back to these ideas, where if I'm going to live my life in the world, I'm going to put more back into it than I take out of it. Then we're well on our way to actually making things better, but of course, that's going to require much less extraction from each and every one of us and a lot of the lives that we try and look up to will not be compatible with that kind of living, with that kind of world. This is a lot of my mind right now because I'm reading some books which, I guess, maybe I should mention what I'm reading. Does that sound interesting?
[33:13] Yeah, okay yeah, tell me what you're reading, David.
[33:16] Well, let me tell you in general what I'm consuming. No podcasts, for starters. Though I do have a list of podcasts that I need to listen to, there's the episode on the Roma that we talked about in the Cashlessness episode last week from AnthroPod which is supposed to be great, it’s been recommended to me several times. The podcast It Could Happen Here keeps coming up and that is the number one podcast on my list to listen to, I'm excited to get to that.
[33:41] Isn't that about the possibility of Civil War occurring in the United States?
[33:45] Yeah, I think that's the hook but I think it's a more appropriately explained as the look at, you know, sort of what we're doing here, the systemic problems that are really deeply rooted in American way of living, in the way that we constructed our country that manifests itself in this increasing polarization that could lead to, you know, potential Civil War.
[34:04] But I haven't listened to it, so I might be off base, but I think it's the red herring to look at this kind of stuff. So I'm excited to listen to that and reading-wise though, I'm one of those people that reads like a bunch of books and jumps in between them and never finishes anything because of that. So, I've got two books right now that I'm really focusing on: one that I just started and is great so far, it's called Against the Grain by James C. Scott which is about an alternative anthropological view at early state formation. And I know that sounds super boring and you're dying and rolling your eyes, but it's actually really great, super fascinating look at the transition from our hunter-gatherer lifestyles which you, probably heard at this point, we worked like 20 hours a week, we were healthier, you know, things were more egalitarian – it was pretty great, and so asking the question: why would anybody then settle down and create agriculture? Which made us short and unhealthy and fucked up our teeth, and then live in cities which were unhealthy and like had tons of epidemics, wiping people out. So why would anybody make this transition? And he really tackles that question, and traditional anthropology and conversations about economics and history say: oh, yeah, it’s a natural progression. First humans were wandering around the world like animals and then they figured out: oh, if I leave some of these seeds here they grow and then if I can control the growing then I've invented agriculture, and now that I have a culture I want to live right by here and be sedentary. And now I have a city and now my city's a nation-state, and then now we’ve invented democracy and here we are.
[35:42] And now I can sit around and create Love Island.
[35:45] Love Island, now I can binge Love Island on Hulu. And we’ve really been building up to that – no. It t really throws a wrench in all of that in the same way that David Graeber’s Debt rewrites early economic history and the presumption that the way that things evolve is, of course, the way that they should be and that everything, as it is now, is inevitable. And I highly recommend this book, it's really one of these earth-shattering worldview-shifting types of books. It's in my top five already, I'm like halfway through. So that's one thing I'm reading and on the other side I'm also reading another book that I've already put in my top five earth-shattering books, and this is called The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram, and this is a beautiful text, it's really well-written by another anthropologist who is also a magician, as a side note.
[36:38] And his experiences wandering around some cultures in East Asia and other places, communicating and learning from groups of people out there and reconnecting to nature in this process, and what it means for his experience and relating to the world, to the natural world especially, but also making him completely rethink language which is something I've been hooked on for a long time. I've been trying to work on a language show for this podcast slowly, and this book is really helping me pull a lot of my ideas in together and it's giving me words for things that I felt but haven't found the research and bits and pieces for. Excellent book, I highly recommend it, please check it out. And if you have any books that are like these two that you think I would also love, send them my way. And also, if you have any good like Intro to Linguistics text, I'm looking for some of those because I have no idea what I'm doing. And please recommend them, I would love to hear what you all have. So those are what I am reading nonfiction-wise. I'm also reading Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund which is okay-good-okay, I'm not quite done with it. And then binging Love Island, Daniel.
[37:47] No one really cares about the books you're reading, David, tell us about Love Island.
[37:51] Love Island is the perfect creation of surveillance and capitalism and the spectacle. It is like the perfect combination of 2000s, I guess, the first episode was 2015, and everything that's going on in the world and everything that is going wrong with the world. So they take these, there's like five or six hot women and five or six hot guys, it’s the British show, and they put them on this island, on this villa and they have like 80 hidden cameras all over this island and they make everybody wear a microphone. And this microphone is literally just like hangs on the necklace and they have a fanny pack that it is like plugged into. But apparently, everybody just forgets they have this ridiculous looking microphone hooked around their neck and then they all try and fall in love with each other. But the thing is that it’s a game show in addition to this. The goal is to fall in love with somebody, and if you make it to the end of the show and you can be voted off and stuff, I'll explain in a second, you find yourself in a prisoner's dilemma in order to win the money at the end. Or at least this is how it's been explained to me, I haven't seen the last episode yet.
[38:56] Is it because you have to vote the person that you fell in love with off the island?
[39:01] Well, sort of, so it's like you have to decide: do I take the love, you know, do we both want love? In which case, if you both say you want love, then you win some amount of money. And if you say: I want love, but they want the money then they get all the money instead of splitting it.
[39:17] And if they both say they want the money, no one gets the money.
[39:20] Yeah, no one gets anything. So it's there's a lot of like manipulation and betrayal and all the like juicy drama that everybody wants. But what's crazy is the production schedule: it’s six weeks and they do an episode every single night, six nights a week. So, Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday or whatever. And then they get one day off and then they keep doing it. But the whole thing is all remotely manned, it's all like filmed with no cameramen for the most part. And it's just these people trying to throw each other under the bus for money while also desperately looking for some sort of human connection, all the while being surveilled by these people who are profiting off of this. And it's just, it's just like this perfect amalgamation of these, all these horrible practices but wrapped up in this like weird British reality show. And I'm still grappling with it and I feel like I should, there's definitely like a Debord’s essay in it somewhere. But that’s the media I’m consuming right now.
[40:19] It sounds like it's trying to concentrate the greatest contradictions of living in modern society. Someone mentioned on our Discord how when you're a child and you're playing with friends, everyone teaches you the importance of sharing and to be kind to everybody, but then as you grow up the world basically tells you: ok, now throw that out the window, screw everybody and acquire money for yourself, right?
[40:42] Yeah, I think that was me. I think I might have been the one who said that.
[40:47] Really? Well, thanks for your valuable contribution to our Discord Community then.
[40:52] Come hang out with us! No, it totally is. But I don't think that that was what they were trying to do, I don't think this is like a biting satire of our world today, I think it's just like a machine-generated: oh, of course, this episode television show exists. I wish there was like a sharper observation there.
[41:12] Well, that’s the other weird thing about modern society like everything that would have been a parody like 50 years ago becomes reality. But today we have examples of like Nestle with their slogan enhancing quality of life while protecting life for the future or whatever it is while like dramatically destroying the environment. You know, life itself becomes worse than an Onion article.
[41:34] Or like straight-up poisoning babies with their like poison baby formula that they were shoving down everyone's throat in Africa. Like a company that is actively that as evil as you can get, but pull up their Twitter page and you see like a mom hugging like a little kid with this like beautiful tree in the background and that slogan you mentioned, Daniel, enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future, when like literally everything they do is opposite that, where the CEOs is like: oh yeah, water is not a human right, sorry. Like oh, come on. But I digress, what are you reading, Daniel?
[42:06] I told you I was watching that anime Fullmetal Alchemist. [42:19] But to be honest, David, every single episode, like 90% of them is just them talking and I’m like: wait, is this it? Is this really going to be this drama the whole time? So it's not as compelling to me as like Attack on Titan or like even like One-Punch Man where there is like a very kind of compelling story that kind of like: okay, well, what's going to happen next, you know?
[42:30] So what you're saying is you're not here for the human relationships, you only care about the action, I get it.
[42:36] So it's always about the action. What else we want to talk about?
[42:39] I don't know, I'm about ready to wrap it up. Oh wait, I got to before we start wrapping this up, Daniel, I've got an actual piece of news I feel like it's worth mentioning. It's sad though, I don't know if we want to close on a sad note.
[42:52] Well, say your sad piece of news and then, I don't know, we’ll say something to lift people up and close out.
[42:59] Okay. The reason I am mentioning this now is cause I don't think it fits into an episode particularly in any place. And maybe this is something that we'll develop and expand in this type of episode going forward if you like this, you know, maybe we can do more of it. But it's been hot in Alaska, I mean it's been hot everywhere, this the hottest June ever recorded. But it's been very hot in Alaska. The July, 4th they actually canceled the fireworks in Anchorage or Juneau, one of these cities, because it was too hot for some reason, I don't know. But not only has the terrestrial land been hot but the rivers and things have been hot too. So, in Alaska and in Canada up there, the Yukon River, which is an important river for salmon runs: going back up the river to, you know, follow their biological imperative, to go back to the spawn points, lay their eggs, breed an entirely new generation of salmon and then ultimately die in the pointless circle of life – is being disrupted by the extremely high temperatures in the river itself which is reached up to 70°F (21°C) and above which is very hot for that far north. And salmon metabolism apparently, because they're so active, because they have so much muscle, when it starts getting that hot they have to slow down, otherwise they overheat and cook themselves.
[44:17] And that means they can't make some of these runs and things and they can't get back to their spawn points, and if they don't make it back to their spawn point then they don't lay the next generation of salmon which, of course, devastates the future of salmon. But it also causes this cascading trickle-down of ecological effects because ecosystems themselves are always interconnected with everything else. And so, without the die-off of these salmons, without this vast insemination process, all these things that would normally be trickling down this river: decaying carcasses of salmon, the salmon roe that's everywhere that feeds a huge amount of life, it causes algal blooms which eventually spin off and feeds whales and then other animals. Some wolves and things eat this roe, lots of scavengers and predators eat the salmon themselves – all these things are now being destroyed because the salmon, who are fundamental core of this large ecosystem because they're just so calorie-rich and there's so much of them, are now all failing because this salmon run is being interrupted. A marine biologist was tweeting the other day that they've been looking at these whales that depend on the salmon for their consumption right up the coast, and because the salmon aren't coming in, because they're not participating in this process correctly, all the whales are either not showing up or dying. And that's why we’re starting to see so many beach whales, more than any other time in the recent recorded history off East Coast in addition to probably, you know, like weird Naval testing and stuff. And the whole ecosystem is exploding and falling apart because of this temperature thing and just because the water is getting too hot.
[45:54] And nobody thought about this, no one thought this would be a problem, no one expected this to be a problem, certainly not this early, maybe at some point. And I think it really highlights these unforeseen interconnected ways that everything is tied together. And it's not just the salmon, this insect apocalypse, it has a very same chance of doing a similar thing to ecosystems all around the world. Salmon are a fundamental part of ecosystem up there, insects are a fundamental part of the food chains all around the world, everything builds up from that. In the oceans, of course, krill, plankton – these are the fundamental parts of it, and they're being interrupted. And so the very basis of the food chains all around this Earth are being destroyed by climate change already. And we're barely getting close to 1°C right now above the IPCC numbers, 1.2 °C for pre-industrial numbers. But we're well on this process to wrecking the fundamental chains that tie us all together, that tie life to each other. And who knows what'll be the case when that happens and that’s really not written into the IPCC, it is barely written to the IPBES report. So hold onto your butts, I guess.
[47:03] Yeah, that seems to be the two most difficult things about understanding climate change, I mean, this is not something that's taught enough, I don't think. But maybe it's just because we don't understand it but it's the unpredictability, and the way the foundations of ecosystems are destroyed. And that itself carries a bunch of unpredictability like we simply cannot possibly model or predict how disruptions, major, major disruptions to some many of the interconnected systems of our Earth result in these dramatic consequences. And it’s terrifying. But you asked me what I was listening to earlier, I have been listening to a podcast called Encyclopedia Botanica, it’s all about home gardening, David, it’s all about how to grow a garden, how to take care of it, how to introduce native species. So listen to that. Take your mind off some of these larger existential crises and grow some tomatoes.
[48:03] I actually started to listen to that after you mentioned it the other day, Daniel, I listened to episode on beets and some on tomatoes and container gardening. So I'm actually, I'm thinking about maybe I should put a window box up in my window and grow little things. But I got to check with my landlord and stuff.
[48:22] Yeah, they're actually really good episodes. Each one is usually on a specific gardening technique whether that's the ones you mention, or there's a good one I listened to on cover cropping and how it's not always useful for home gardens.
[48:35] Oh yeah, I listened to that one too. Best of. I’m hitting the best of episodes right here.
[48:42] Interesting, wow, we’re on sync with this is at this podcast here.
[48:47] We didn’t ever talk about this, y'all, this is just us vibing. Good vibes.
[48:51] I'm actually surprised you listened to the cover cropping one because I had to go back like a year in their show list to just find that, like find one. I think I was like their 17th one or something.
[49:00] Yeah, well, I went back and I started on some of the original ones and I was like oh, a cover cropping, that sounds interesting.
[49:08] Yeah, check it out, remind yourself that you can experience diverse habitats right where you are and watch it play out.
[49:17] And you can work to end that insect apocalypse by ripping out your lawn. But you already know how I feel about that.
[49:24] Well, thanks for sticking with us on this new format. Hopefully, if you're contributing to the Patreon, you say: oh, I didn't sign up, I signed up for one highly-researched show every single week and I'm not getting that – so you decide to adjust your pledge, we understand. If you decide: you know what? I'm tired of listening to a deep dive every week, I want more conversational shows, I want to increase my Patreon pledge or, you know what, I'm going to become a Patreon pledger for the first time – all of those decisions are fine, whatever works for you, we encourage you to do that, help us out if you want to. It's patreon.com/ashesashescast.
[50:04] And if you decide that you need a desperate deep-dive right this second to hit that itch, well lucky for you, we have a giant backlog, in fact, there's 97 hours I think of episodes that we have recorded so far and are released on our website which you can find, including the full sources and transcript of everything at ashesashes. org. You can also find the link to this episode and find a link to that paper Daniel mentioned, links to the books I brought up and the podcast, so everything will be there. Click around, see what you can find.
[50:39] We'd like to thank our associate producers, John Fitzgerald and Chad Peterson. If you'd like to reach out to us, give us some comments, criticisms, feedback – again that email is contact at ashesashes. org, and what's that phone number, David?
[50:56] That phone number which we're going to use these recordings for a call-in show at some point. And if not, we are just like listening to them. But 31399-ashes, that's 313-992-7437. Or if you don't like talking on the phone, because let's face it – who does? You can reach us on basically every social media network at ashesashescast, we have awesome Instagram, we have a mediocre Facebook, we have an awesome Twitter, our Reddit community is killer, ashesashescast. But best by far is all of our homies on the Discord which you can find a link to and join. A 100 something, 200 people of your closest friends that you've never met yet but are just waiting for you. And that link is on our website, just click the Community button, find the invitation link to Discord and then you can too join this chat. There's apps for your computer, there's apps for your phone or you can interface with just a web browser. We are there all the time and we'd love to have you join us. Next week, we’ll be back to a regular deep dive episode so don't worry, this is not a permanent switch and we've got a lot to talk about. And a lot to read before we finish wrapping this one up, Daniel.
[52:13] Yes, we do. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes. Bye.
[52:18] Bye-bye. Boom. Done.