Ashes Ashes is a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we’re unlucky the end of the world. The name is borrowed from the nursery rhyme “Ring a Ring o’ Roses,” a song that children sing while spinning in a circle before collapsing on the floor in heaps of laughter. Some claim that the lyrics were written in response to England’s Great Plague and Black Death, and the line Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down is interpreted as death and the cremation of bodies. Although apocryphal, this interpretation is fitting for our times. While human civilization owes its existence to the unimaginable wealth that nature freely provides, our current growth trajectory is increasingly being fueled by the direct erosion of biodiversity, ecosystem services, cultural heritage, and more, effectively cannibalizing our future for the sake of short-term “progress.” Our show is dedicated to understanding this process, and illustrating its many forms, which includes everything from environmental destruction and unsustainable economic extraction to social atomization and isolation. Although these themes may appear dark, awareness is what can help open the door to collective action through which the strength of our communities can prevent the great falling down of life as we know it.
Episodes, complete transcripts, sources, links, credits, and more for Ashes Ashes are available here.
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Don't know where to start? We love Ep 44, Ep 34, Ep 31, Ep 28, and Ep 23 (but they're all good). Fan favorite: Ep 63
Are these topics giving you existential dread? Go here: Coping With Collapse
Over 100 billion people have died on this planet and been laid to rest through countless burial traditions and customs, and while a majority of these passings simply re-entered natural ecological cycles, many popular burial traditions of today require exorbitant additions of resources that cause dra...
What began as a harmless attempt by the wealthy to escape the poor peasants they were forced to rub shoulders with in the cities turned into the greatest infrastructural nightmare ever to be unleashed upon this world: the American suburb. Countless people and generations of their progeny who got swe...
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 fi...
South Korea is elminating coins and requiring shoppers to upload their cash receipts to a digital database; Indians are still reeling from a 2016 decision that turned 86% of the country's cash worthless in a matter of hours; migrants and refugees are being targeted for new schemes of financial inclu...
Sweeping deregulation of the Airline industry in 1978 brought big changes to air travel. Lower prices, more routes, and consolidation of the market allowed for regional hub-and-spoke models of logistics and greater access to air travel with the associated massive surge in passengers. Now, with the c...
Awareness of the systemic threats to our world comes at a cost. Often, that cost includes feelings of isolation, existential dread, depression, shock, and other uncomfortable realities. But these emotions do not define the final stage of our journeys. This week we read from listener emails, each des...
For once we thought it would be nice to look at a culture of building things up, rather than the slow collapse of everything around us that we normally discuss. We find this culture in a huge variety of different fields from repair in the home to hacking and building in farming fields to careful exp...
The past few decades has seen explosive growth in the number of universities around the world, but it may not be for the noble reasons we would like. Decreased public funding, and new conceptions of universities as engines for economic growth has spurred an intensity of competition for student fees....
Protests around the world in 2011 gave riot-gear dealers a three-fold increase in sales of tear gas. In 2013, Turkey used up an entire year's supply of tear gas in just two days, before promptly ordering more. 2015 was the year Kenyan police fired tear gas into a group of schoolchildren as young as...
The world may be burning, but more and more companies are giving us green alternatives to our favorite products so we can continue to shop and consume the same way we always have, but without hurting the Earth - or so they would like us to believe. Greenwashing, the practice of making bad things see...
Half of America's poor pay at least 50% of their income on rent, while a quarter of them pay over 70%, and this trend is worsening as the number of affordable housing units continues to outpace Americans' abilities to pay for them. How did we get in a scenario where so many Americans are surrenderin...
This week we're trying a new format for periodic updates. Daniel, David, and Moriah King all sit down together to discuss a handful of important articles and texts they selected covering everything from dolphins to tragedies. We go over the key points of each piece and spend a little time discussing...
Some 37% of workers believe their jobs are pointless, and if we include the jobs that exist to serve those pointless jobs in some way, it's possible that half of the jobs in our economy today (mostly residing in the informational sectors of white-collar work) could disappear with no ill-consequences...
A global epidemic of loneliness is spreading rapidly. 20% of the UK population claims to be always or often lonely, 3 out of 4 people fin the US are affected by loneliness, a quarter of Japanese men over 60 don't have a single friend or family member they can talk to, and there is an alarming rise o...
In an age of global disparity and inequity, billionaire philanthropists (dead and alive) are stepping up to the plate with powerful foundations and acts of charitable giving to solve some of the world's greatest challenges. But how much faith should we place in the hands of individuals with concentr...
Invisible, but they define our world. Borders are the lines that limit us as we live our lives and as we increasingly feel the frictions they cause, it brought us to wonder: where did these things comes from anyway? A look back through history shows that what we take for granted may in fact be ridic...
After the US government shutdown of 2018-2019 witheld two paychecks from 800,000 federal workers and countless more contractors and businesses, and with US officials encouraging furloughed employees to simply take out loans, we've got debt on the mind again. Citizens of the US and UK are experiencin...
By now we are used to the idea that every action we take in the world is tracked, but what happens when that all-pervasive panopticon is turned inside each and every one of us? An explosion of personal medical technology, health programs, and terrible data practices have meant that the very records...
It's a new year, and almost exactly one year since Ashes Ashes began, so we're taking a moment to step back and reflect on the question at the end of every episode: what can we do? This special episode features both Daniel and David explaining what they work on outside of the show to make the world...
Much maligned by history, they nevertheless hold a special place in culture and our hearts. This week we're discussing all things pirates. What drove these men and women to a life as enemies of all nations? What went on aboard their ships? Is a pirate's life really for us? We answer these question a...
Amazon created competition between cities to land its HQ2 location, along with hefty tax subsidy packages. While this process garnered significant media attention, businesses and municipalities regularly engage in these types of deal making in which the promise of jobs and economic development all o...
This week we present a short presentation we gave during the Sound Education conference at the Harvard Divinity School. The World Might Be Broken is a summation of some of the topics we cover in this show, the way they are interrelated, and how our approach to solving them will require an awareness...
The final part of our American healthcare series, painKiller brings together everything we've learned the past two weeks and beyond in Ashes Ashes to explore how the opioid crisis was created and how it is perpetuated to fulfill a single ultimate goal: profit. Pharmaceutical companies, the insurance...
Drug prices, shortages, and barriers to access are out of control, prompting hospitals to join forces to make their own, and spurring the emergence of inventors hoping to chart a future in which life-saving drugs can be made cheaply at home. To lock in high prices, drugmakers have learned to game th...
American healthcare is taking a toll on America's health. Costs outpace economic growth, medical debt plagues millions, confusing and surprising bills infect further more, insurance premiums and deductibles are out of control, and at the end of the day we're not even receiving better care as a resul...
Bernie Krause joins us to help illuminate the complexity of natural soundscapes, and the threats to their stability.
The world is waking up to the negative health consequences of noise pollution. The WHO recognizes noise as a health crisis, and the number of places around the world not devastated...
The military exists to engage in seemingly endless war, but the damage doesn't stop during peace time. For decades, the US military (and many others around the world) has been systematically destroying the Earth and the very nations they're sworn to protect. Disregard for the natural world and those...
Despite a plethora of health benefits that sleep promotes, and a host of dramatic consequences when we neglect it, the world is rapidly trending towards fewer and fewer restful hours. 40% of Americans are sleep deprived and on average we get 2 hours less sleep than just a few decades ago. What has d...
Never have as many people been locked up than right now, here in the United States. The US has more prisoners per capita than anywhere else on the planet and that number continues to climb at a terrifying rate. Once within the prison system, inmates are abused and exploited out of sight and out of m...
From the ancient philosophers, to modern day scientists, much has been said about the relationship between human population growth and its effects on environmental destruction, famine, and death. Modern policy makers and political leaders have taken inspiration from these debates to craft initiative...
Last week we explored some of the conditions of the record number of slaves all across our world today. But to really understand the issue, we need to look at the systems that create and depend upon this cheap form of exploited labor - and to do that we turn our conversation to logistics.
No other...
Despite universal condemnation of slavery, there are more slaves than ever before. They are cheaper (and more disposable) than they ever have been. Who are these people toiling without rest and what forces bind them? Can economic expansion find innovative solutions to this age-old problem? Or is sla...
What compels people to throw their money away at a slot machine? In short: design. The design that goes into making a slot machine addicting is deliberate and effective, but restrained in some part by regulation. But what happens when the same tools used to addict people to losing money are released...
Ideas have become property. This is the magic spell that intellectual property has cast across our society. Innovation, art, new ideas, and even our culture can be locked behind the restrictions of the law, protected by armies of lawyers, devastating fines, and the full power of the justice system....
Rescue ships denied; children detained far away from parents; smugglers profiting to the tune of hundreds of millions. As crises across the globe drive people from their homes, the nations of the world are stepping up border security and building walls like never before in human history. While walls...
The depiction of forensic science in popular entertainment is ubiquitous. We might be lead to believe that the field utilizes actual scientific methods of crime scene analysis to bring criminals to justice with irrefutable evidence, but a closer look reveals a very different story. This week we draw...
We frequently hear that this is the greatest time in human history, that we've never had it this good before. And actually that's absolutely true - if you're one of the wealthy few that can take advantage of the system. But for the rest of humanity, and make no mistake it's the vast majority of the...
What do suffragettes, cigarettes, Sigmund Freud, bacon and eggs with breakfast, bananas, and a coup in Guatemala all have in common? We'll explore the answer to that question in this week as we look at the lessons from an important man and contemplate the extraordinary effects he had (and continues...