Billionaires. They should be objects of scorn rather than envy. While they ride around in their super-yachts and private jets, producing the climate-damaging pollution of entire nations, they’re doing things to extract even more wealth, harm your health, diminish democracy, and rig the whole system in their favor. How did this happen? Why do we tolerate it? How can we stop the billionaires? And can we get a hold of our own super-yacht for Crazy Town pleasure cruises? Chuck Collins returns to Crazy Town to offer insights from his new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. Originally recorded on 10/3/25.

• Chuck Collins, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, The New Press, October 2025.
• Chuck Collins, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2016.
• Chuck Collins, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Polity, January 2022.

• Episode 10, "Tackling Inequality, One Pair of Lederhosen at a Time"
• Episode 43, "Overproduction of Elites and Political Upheaval, or... the Story of Rich People Doing Stupid Things"

The “maximum power principle” may sound like the doctrine of an evil supervillain, but it actually applies to all living creatures. The principle states that biological systems organize to increase power whenever constraints allow. Given the way humans adhere to this principle, especially by overexploiting fossil fuels, we often do behave like supervillains, wielding power in wildly irresponsible ways and triggering climate change, biodiversity loss, and other aspects of our sustainability predicament. Sometimes it seems like we’re using a backhoe to dig our own grave. Fortunately, once you understand efficiency and its different flavors, you can see opportunities to optimize power rather than maximize it. While considering the outlook for humanity, the Crazy Townies ponder a weird question: are we smarter than reindeer? Richard Heinberg, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, joins the team to share his research on how people can optimize power. Originally recorded on May 6, 2021.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Richard Heinberg’s book is Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.
• John DeLong’s definition of the maximum power principle is that biological systems organize to increase power whenever the system constraints allow.
• DeLong also wrote: “The maximum power principle predicts the outcomes of two-species competition experiments“.
• Statistics on the Bagger 293 bucket-wheel excavator
• Dams powered airplane and ship building in the Pacific Northwest (Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams).
• The cross-Atlantic sailing voyage of Greta Thunberg
• Short comic with the story of reindeer on St. Matthew Island
• Episode of the Radiolab podcast with a wild story about mTOR

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Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. When Bhutan embraced “Gross National Happiness” and a sane notion of progress, environmentalists and social reformers rejoiced. They spotlighted Bhutan as an example of how we can build a better economy. But now it seems that no one can escape the gravity field of techno-capitalism’s black hole of cryptocurrency and bullshit investments. In today’s episode, we explore Bhutan’s dark turn and go on the hunt for other examples of nations doing things to curb overexploitation of people and the planet.

Originally recorded on 7/21/25. Visit Crazy Town on the web.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• To be fair, Bhutan is still working on Gross National Happiness. In fact, there's a Global GNH Forum being staged November 7-12, 2025 in Dungkar Dzong, Paro, Bhutan.
• Steven Anderson, "Bhutan Uses Bitcoin to Boost Salaries and Curb Brain Drain," The Currency Analytics, April 15, 2025.
• The creation of Nunavut

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

• Episode 37, "Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos"

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