Eric Brende, a Yale/MIT-educated former tech enthusiast, spent 18 months with Old Order Anabaptist Minimites—rejecting cars, refrigerators, and even indoor plumbing—to critique modern technology’s societal costs. His experiment revealed manual labor strengthens community bonds but warned abrupt abandonment would collapse civilization; gradual shifts could reshape culture without disaster. While Mennonites filter global news through direct communication, they still use phones for trade, proving selective tech adoption persists. Brende’s book Better Off and his pedicab work in St. Louis show how limited technology can coexist with practicality, yet he admits its moral framing risks ostracization. The debate suggests Forster’s 1920s dystopia The Machine Stops wasn’t fiction—sedentary habits erode health—but minimalism may offer a counterbalance, even if full-scale rejection is unrealistic. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, when you may be in the world 25 minutes and we come to the moment by myself.
I bid you a good darkness.
It's great to be here.
It's great to be here.
I guess I've got a note.
The woman I love so much is not Lord Blanc in dead at 47 years of age.
I play her record frequently self-control because I love the message.
And I love the music.
And she went, I guess, instantly in her sleep with a brain aneurysm.
And that's awfully early, but if you gotta go, I would imagine that's one of the better ways.
It's relatively instant, and you just never see it coming.
And you're asleep on top of that.
So sad, but there probably are worse ways to go.
Goodbye.
Laura, you are one hell of a singer.
That's for sure.
Now, we're going to do all kinds of interesting things tonight.
In the next hour, I think this is going to be a blast because it's so foreign to me.
Eric Brendi will be here.
And he is a real tech type at Yale, it looks like.
National Science Foundation, McMellon Foundation.
You know, this guy has tech written all over him.
Well, he decided to just flip off the switch and go live a life with a group called the Minimites.
It's a good name, right?
Minimites, as in minimum.
In this case, less in minimum.
In other words, he threw away all technology, television, I guess, and radio and the internet and everything.
I'm so into technology.
He and his wife went and lived with the Minnamites.
And they, you know, the Mennomites, I guess, make those in Pennsylvania who drive a horse and carriage around look like tech people.
So try and imagine what it must have been like.
Coming up in a moment, in the first hour, a surprise for you.
Whitley Streeber is here, author of War Day, co-author actually of War Day, co-author of The Coming Global Superstorm, which became, as you know, the incredible hit movie.
And boy, it was about 28th, I believe it is now, in international earnings of movies of all time.
The day after tomorrow.
28th, can you believe that?
And the DVD will come out next month.
No, no, no, no.
In October, actually, early October.
Also, of course, Communion, I think he's probably best known for Communion, is Whitley Streeber.
And we're going to talk about several things.
Last week, I was totally blown away by La Pama.
Remember that?
This incredible thing that could occur out in the Atlantic Ocean that would put 300-foot waves on shore?
We'll talk a bit about it.
And the Elmendorf beast.
Now, strange beasts are always fun to talk about.
This, though, is a real one.
Real in that it existed.
Now, whether it was a product of Mother Nature or a product of a lab somewhere may be in contention.
And it may be one of the most prophetic movies of all time, too.
There have been some just literally moments before we got on the air.
I found a story that has been apparently posted on Space Daily within the past hour, or maybe two, to the effect that temperatures in the high Arctic Ocean have risen more in the past year than is to be believed.
It really means that there is a significant Arctic melt going on.
And you know what that means.
It means those ocean currents are going to get weaker.
If you look on Unknown Country and you see this, go to the Quick Watch section and you click on the part about the Gulf Stream, it doesn't even look like a Gulf Stream anymore.
A rancher down in South Texas began to notice that his chickens were being attacked by something.
And he began looking for it and soon began to see around his ranch a rather strange animal.
It was hairless, had a long tail, had very exaggerated rear haunches, shorter front legs, and a coyote-like head, but with very big canines, very fang-like teeth.
He got a shot at this animal, and it fell over.
And he thought that the creature was playing possum.
Because there's any number of different animals which shocked like that will just literally fall over.
So he walked up on it closer, shot it three more times, and then left the area to do other things on his ranch.
And I might say, just at the outset, we have been encouraging ranchers in the area not to shoot these animals, but rather to try to trap one.
And there's a lot of concern down there because other people are finding goats and chickens and so forth are being destroyed.
And these fellows are not, you know, they're not animal rights activists.
they're gonna shoot it if it eats their farm animals.
In any case, we're hoping to stop the shooting, but to go back to the story, he couldn't find any You better go back and take pictures.
So he went back and he took pictures of it.
And he was surprised to see there was no bullet holes in it.
It was in, I think it was a couple of months before Well, if you went down to South Texas, you'd find out why.
First of all, the fire ants got the thing before he buried it within hours.
Then he buried it.
It's not quite as fast as the middle of the Matto Grosso in the Brazilian jungle, but it's definitely up there in terms of speed.
This is very humid and very hot this time of year, so yeah, the decomposition was profound quickly.
In any case, he buried the creature in sand and eventually realized that there was something more here than just another annoyance and the loss on his ranch.
And the story began to get out.
The local media picked it up, and Linda picked it up.
It came onto Dreamland.
And I was immediately fascinated.
My brother is a, Richard Streeber is an amateur naturalist, but more than an amateur.
He's a very advanced amateur naturalist.
And I told him about it.
He was immediately fascinated.
Gathered together a team, including a biologist and some other people.
He lives in San Antonio, and he's quite capable and has access to all of the right kinds of scientists who would be able to go down there and gather samples properly at a scientific level of recovery.
And what you're looking at is really quite remarkable.
The chief biologist at the San Antonio Zoo has seen the skull.
The rancher has taken him the skull.
And they immediately thought the same thing our biologists did, that this is a canine skull of some kind, but these teeth are not only not canine, they're not even mammalian.
I take it, Whitley, that the sample you provided is, I mean, it's deteriorated, obviously, but it's going to be very good, fresh, relatively fresh DNA, right?
Well, in some of the brief material you sent me, you seem to indicate that you might be speculating or leaning toward the possibility that this could be a designer animal or a lab animal?
The biologists who have looked at that jaw, looking at, if you go to the website and you click on the third picture, I guess, on the story, if you click on the full story, you see a blow-up of the skull itself.
And you look at those canines.
The thing is that this is not, it's not really well-formed.
It's not a deformity.
Because if it was a deformity, it would be a repeat of some other part of the animal.
But dogs, canines, don't have the genetic encoding for this type of tooth.
Really, the structure of the jaw is not an immelion, as the biologist from the zoo pointed out.
It's something else.
And that does suggest some kind of genetic manipulation, yes.
And whether the animal had sarcoptic mange, which is full-body mange, or was just hairless, we don't know.
But it was observed eating mulberries as well as killing chickens, which means it's omnivorous like canines are.
We're fairly sure that there's something in the dog family in this animal.
But there's something else in it, too.
You know, there have been some other pictures.
There's some pictures from Maryland that we feel is not the same animal.
It's a creature with sarcoptic manes, probably a fox or a coyote.
But there are a couple of other pictures that were taken, oddly enough, up near the NIDS Ranch, which are too blurry to really be sure, but they do have this same pronounced rear haunch where the creature almost looks kangaroo-like when it's standing up.
And it seems possible, I mean, the NIDS Ranch, as you know, is the ranch owned by Bob Bigelow up in Utah, I guess, which is a place.
And among the people who have seen the animal up there is John Alexander, none other than Colonel John Alexander, whom I'm sure you've had on your show before.
Unfortunately, the two snaps that we have of the animal that was taken up in Utah are so blurry and from so far away, there's just absolutely no way to be sure.
As far as releasing breeding pairs into the wild in ranchland in South Texas, I think they'll try hard to find a law that has been violated because the rancher feels that this was a female and that it was pregnant.
And therefore, these creatures are breeding down there.
And if that happens, obviously there's going to be a considerable amount of trouble.
You know, that's the so-called punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution and we can see instances of it in the past, yes, where it now appears from the s from the fossil record that new animals do occasionally show up very abruptly.
And it uh that's always a possibility.
But I I have a feeling that with this strange jaw that the it doesn't look like a good jaw, it doesn't look like a jaw that's gonna really be a very effective tool for an animal.
The Elmendorf Beast, a new or old thing, but certainly never before seen.
The testing is going on now.
unidentified
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Music Can you hear my heartbeat in this house?
Nothing matters in the night.
Doesn't matter in the night, no control through the wall.
Something like me, wearing white as I'm walking down the street of the soul.
Take the time to take a look at home.
You got me living only for the night before the story.
You take it down, take a top control.
Another night, another day.
I never stopped myself to wander wild You have to forget to play my role You take that, you make myself ungrown I, I live among the creatures of the night I haven't got the will to try and fight Against a new tomorrow So I guess I'll just believe it But tomorrow will never
come I said, night I'm living in the forest of a dream I know the night is not as if it seems I must believe in something So I'll make myself believe it This night will never go Oh, oh, oh Laura Brannigan, born at 47 years of age.
Want to take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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from coast to coast and worldwide on the internet this is coast to coast a m with art bell So sorry, she's gone.
La Palma Since Whitley and I were the genesis of what became the day after tomorrow, whenever there's a reference to it, you know, in the media, I obviously, you know, something like that, the baby.
So I noticed right away.
And there was this story last week about La Pama.
And basically, it said, if there's another eruption, the west side of La Pama falls into the ocean, it'll create waves that'll make, I think the reference was the day after tomorrow look like, you know, a day in the bathtub or something.
And I'm going, what?
What?
And so apparently it's true.
And I mentioned it to Whitley, I don't know, very early in the week.
And it is now at the point where it's possible that another eruption might either cause the cliff, which underwater is just this enormous, precipitate cliff going down at vast distances into the deep, to fall in part, or the whole thing could collapse.
And if the whole thing collapses, you're going to see a vast tragedy, and we need to know what is going on down there.
Somebody had better get down there and get looking at that.
Almost all of China was inundated by a wave about 15,000 years ago, so much so that there are areas in China that are called ivory mountains where they mine ivory from animal tusks.
These enormous quantities of animals were swept up into this area in central China like seaweed is swept up at the edge of the beach when the tide comes in.
The Bahamas, I mean, we wouldn't get that far, but down in the central and eastern Caribbean, they'd have eight or nine hours, and Canada would have seven about also.
And that wave could range anywhere from 50 or 60 feet to 300 feet in height.
As the volcano collapsed, as the cliff undersea cliff collapsed, it would come again and again and again.
And there would be waves of various heights involved.
It would be absolutely devastating.
And it seems clear that we need to do a lot more study of that volcano and above all, to get analysts down under the water to see exactly what the state of the cliff is.
Well, the first thing we need to do is find out the degree of likelihood, and that we certainly can do.
We can analyze the state of the cliff.
We can look at the likelihood of, we can monitor the volcano, very effective volcano monitoring these days.
We can get it to the point where we have an idea of what's going to come down.
Now, what if they find out the worst case scenario, and they figure out that the volcano could go off at any time, and when it does, it's going to cause essentially the destruction of the entire East Coast of the United States.
You know, I think, Whitley, that I may have seen one, you know, like 60 Minutes or one of those programs did something on it a long time ago, and I sort of remember going, oh my God, how come none of us know about this?
And it hit me exactly the same way last week.
How come we're not, I don't know, monitoring, testing, talking about it?
And everybody will immediately say, don't give them ideas.
Well, you know, they're thinking of nothing else but.
So this kind of stuff has already crossed their mind.
It just crossed mine suddenly, you know, if somebody were to set off that western cliff.
Anyway, time is short, and there is one other thing I definitely want to cover with you, but I hope people will take what we just said to heart, please, and learn more about it.
The Earth's magnetic field, fascinating topic all by itself.
A lot of stories lately, Whitley, of birds, you know, large flocks of birds flying weirdly in circles, not knowing where to go, found dead because they couldn't migrate to their normal places.
The last time it did this was 750,000 years ago, and it has definitely been confirmed that it is in the process of doing it now.
Now, we don't know how fast this takes place.
Some scientists feel that the magnetic field will immediately reconstitute itself because the solar wind will cause that to happen.
And others feel that it will remain in chaos for quite a period of time.
If this happens, and there's a solar flare, and a lot of gamma radiation and so forth comes towards Earth, it would be conceivably like an electromagnetic pulse atom, series of electromagnetic pulse atom bombs going off.
Shields are down, and we would experience a mess, actually.
And there would be effects.
There already are effects like this.
For example, satellites in the southern hemisphere were damaged a few weeks ago during a solar flare because they were inside the Earth's magnetic field.
And I think, I can't prove this, but there was a period of time in a town in Sicily where there were a lot of very bizarre electromagnetic effects.
Car doors were suddenly locking for no reason.
A similar thing happened in Utah.
A similar thing happened in England.
In India, there were these spontaneous electrical fires erupting where people would be sitting in their house and all of a sudden the refrigerator would burst into flames or something.
In Sicily, and there were other types, slightly different types of fires in India where they don't have refrigerators.
Well, yeah, if there was a lot of static in the air generated, because these effects all happened during periods where there were apparently the magnetic field above these areas was weak, and also there were solar storms taking place, and high levels of electromagnetic energy were reaching the ground.
But it gets much worse than that.
If there was a gamma-ray burst, every part of the planet that it touched would be sterilized.
Do you think that the birds, the butterflies, the weird things that we're chronicling now in modern day really do indicate, is that part, is that a symptom of the magnetic field beginning to get fluxy and changey and getting ready to move?
I think there would be extinctions among those species probably that have committed themselves to the magnetic field being this particular direction.
I'm not so sure that they would.
It would depend if they ended up being sent to places that were viable, their migrations might continue.
But those migratory animals, the migrations all came up in the last ice age or the last two ice ages when there were animals flying animals and some some creatures like elk and so forth that evolved migratory patterns to get away from the extremely harsh winters and their bodies made use of the Earth's magnetic field and if the magnetic field changes I don't think they're going to work right I wonder
is that something somebody is studying somewhere i mean yet to do the best scientists know what would happen what would go wrong with our electronics and uh...
maybe would be computers in ourselves we would we would have a complete electronic failure uh...
that we would uh...
every exposed electronic device would be would be overwhelmed and you would have power grids going down worldwide because there would just be too much electromagnetic energy being poured in into them from above.
This would not survive even a few hours without a magnetic field.
If there was 24 hours without a magnetic field, the world would be in complete chaos.
In your view, Whitley, here's an interesting question for everybody and you too.
If everything got wiped out, let's say we remained alive, but all computers, all records, all control, all electronics, all communications suddenly ceased, would we survive it?
Well, you know, back in the in the toward the end of the Roman Empire, people were sick and tired of taxes.
They were sick and tired of all of the order of the laws, etc.
and so forth.
And they kind of walked away from it.
200 years later, there were no roads.
There was not even any money in use.
Most people couldn't read or write.
The lifespan had declined from 45 years to 26 years.
It was not fun.
And that would be the sort of thing that was on the cards if we had a collapse that profound and that sudden, because we would not have the infrastructure available to fix it.
Clearly, countries like the United States that are, I guess we're the most dependent on technology of any country on Earth, we would be the hardest hit.
Ironically, the people that would be the least affected would be like in Africa where they probably wouldn't even miss, unless there was a gamma-ray burst that hit the planet, they wouldn't even know it was happening.
The question of when it will happen, of course, one of the troubles with the scientific community is nobody wants to say anything that's too controversial.
It establishes a kind of mood for what's about to happen or what just did happen.
And that's why Bumper Music is so much fun.
Anyway, we're going to talk about technology tonight.
Or maybe it's an anti-technology show.
I'm not sure.
But you know how wrapped into technology I am.
It's all around me.
My whole life is technology.
And that's not an exaggeration.
Anyway, one of my best friends here in town runs the best internet company here in town.
I guess I could give its name, couldn't I?
Air Internet.
And so as a result, you know, running a company that is an internet provider, he's incredibly immersed in technology all the time.
That's his business.
Computers every minute of his day.
He's the kind of guy who goes around with a headphone, earpiece combination, and is talking on the cell phone all the time.
It's totally immersed in technology.
He and I run various experiments.
We're techno buddies.
And he just got back from Bermuda.
Bermuda is a very unusual place.
It doesn't allow VHF radio, so you can't take a radio with you.
While there is internet, barely was he able to connect with the regulated situation they've got going.
There's something about Bermuda, and you're only allowed one car if you live in, if you're a Bermudan, you can only own one car.
Can't have that many on the island.
And they've got import taxes and restrictions and all kinds of things.
And it's like he suffered for a whole week.
Paul suffered.
And he got back tonight, just about an hour before the program.
I said, hey, Paul, how'd you do?
Well, it was all right.
We had fun.
I said, well, how long was the withdrawal?
And he said, well, it was just the first day.
He said, I went nuts the first day, and then I was all right.
And I said, well, I don't know.
I don't know if I believe that.
I don't know how you decide how you're going to buy a book.
I read the inside cover, you know, when I go to the bookstore, and this one really sounds good.
What happens when a graduate of MIT, the bastion of technological advancement, and his bride move to a community so very primitive in its technology that even Amish groups consider it antiquated?
Eric Brendi conceives a real-life experiment to see if, in fact, all our cell phones, widescreen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better, or whether life might be preferable without them.
By turns, the query narrows down to a single question.
What is the least we need to achieve the most?
This in mind, the Brendes ditch their car, their stove, refrigerator, running water, everything else motorized or hooked up to the grid in any way, and begin an 18-month trial run, one that dramatically changes the way they live, I guess, and proves entertaining and surprising to readers.
So this is the name of the book, Better Off, Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brendi.
And Eric is here, and in a moment we shall talk to him.
This should be quite an experience.
If you're half as involved in technological stuff as I am, you might want to listen very carefully.
Well, here's what I was really supposed to read.
Eric Brendi has degrees from Yale, Washburn University, and MIT.
He's received a citation of excellence from the National Science Foundation and a graduate fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in the Humanities.
His book, Better Off, Flipping the Switch on Technology, describes the journey that he and his wife took from a fast-paced life of high technology at MIT Evol to a richer, more leisurely and savory existence, living in the country with an old-order Anabaptist group that he calls the Mennonites.
Mennamites.
Mennamites.
That's it.
Here they learned practical knacks and principles of technological selection that they now apply in their urban home.
The Brendes have recently relocated to Old Town section of St. Louis, I guess, where Eric makes his living as a soap maker and rickshaw driver.
Well, actually, if you had seen me in my early days where I grew up at Topeka, Kansas, you would have probably found me most of the time lying around the house watching television or lying around the house reading science fiction.
And Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer.
I looked forward to a future of almost complete roboticization of human life, and I could hardly wait to float around in the little glass bubbles.
And so I would say I was technologically as fanatical, if not more so, than you are, at one point.
Well, as I grew older and got into my middle and later teens, I think I did start to become disillusioned.
And although I can't really pinpoint an exact date, it might have been possibly the time my father went out and got one of the first word processors ever made.
And of course, the idea of this was to save the time and trouble of writing and make it a lot faster and easier.
But my dad spent so much time with that device, I almost never saw him again.
And there's something kind of eerie about having your father physically present in the room with you, but mentally a million miles away.
And I think, although I was not able to articulate it to myself at the time, for myself, I think I began to have the first inkling that maybe our time-saving devices are not so much saving time as gobbling up our time and maybe even gobbling us up.
but they also create a different i mean it's a it's completely different lifestyle from what you This began for you very young, and kind of with the loss of your father, in a way, right?
I set out to try to get some concrete data to do my own personal experiment.
And that's what most of the book is about.
I was very lucky.
I was kind of swimming around at MIT at first.
I won't say that I had everything fell together at once.
But on one of the trips from Topeka to MIT, I took a Greyhound bus.
And by the way, I took it even though the airline price was the same in order to walk the talk.
For me, it was a very primitive form of technology.
And I kind of gritted my teeth, took the bus, and actually enjoyed it.
But the reason I mention it is that partway through the country on this trip, a man with a big black hat got on the bus and solid black colored clothing, and I assumed he was Amish.
The wheels started turning in the back of my head, and I sidled over to him the next time we had a rest stop and struck up a conversation.
And before you know it, I was getting along great with this guy.
I was very surprised.
He was actually much friendlier than I was expecting.
But I got more than I bargained for.
This gentleman came from one of those rare Old Order Anabaptist sects.
And I don't specify its name in the book because I'm trying to protect their identity.
But anyway, a very rare group, one of a handful, that not only prohibits the use of electricity and motor vehicles, which most Amish groups do, but also did not allow the use of any motorized or automated equipment whatsoever.
And this is very different from most Amish groups.
You may not realize this, but most Amish groups use a whole lot of machinery that's motorized.
It's gotten so prevalent that in Lancaster County they can do with a substitute device almost everything that we can do with our electronic devices.
They have figured out a way to hook up pressurized air hoses and in their kitchen they can use different appliances on pressurized air which they plug into a socket.
It's just not an electric socket.
It's a pressurized air hose socket.
So anyway, it's very extensive among the Amish to use chainsaws, pumps, stationary farming equipment.
And for most Amish, the people in this group, the man that I met, were so far back in the past that it would be like for us going back to what most Amish are like.
So it was a very unusual group.
And my heart went pure Pat when I found out about this.
Well, I don't know if it was anything specific because it was a very sketchy conversation, but there's something about the twinkle in his eye and his somewhat jovial manner that made me think, wow, this is something intriguing here, and I want to find out more.
Do you think the reason, I'm sure you investigated to some degree that the other outside groups who were with these folks had made the decision, did it correlate with yours?
There had to be a very strong religious dimension for people to actually join the group.
I mean, formally join.
We never formally joined because, of course, we were there to look at the technology and how that affected their way of life, and only for a limited time were we there.
And, you know, I mean, that gets to the whole heart of everything.
One of the things that I found is that it's often very hard to distinguish between what is work and what is recreation, or what is work and what is festivity.
And to understand why I say that, maybe I should get to maybe the central feature of my findings, if you will.
And that is, as we talk here, would you like me to maybe read something from the book to give you a taste of it?
Well, what happens is when you're doing the manual labor, which of course is very prevalent when you don't have automated machinery, and you're doing the manual labor for your daily bread or your livelihood, whether it be in the house, in the kitchen, or out in the fields, what happens is manual labor has this curious property of becoming self-automating.
You start to forget you're doing it.
And if you're working with other people, you start to talk.
He's here, and he went to live with this group called the Minnemites who virtually don't have anything.
I mean, nothing that you and I use.
No internet, no refrigerator, no flushing John.
That one's really over the top.
But I mean, all the rest of it, too, everything that you use and do just about every day, they didn't have any of that stuff.
And he went and lived there with his wife.
that we're about to ask about We're going to withhold the name of the village that Eric and his wife went to, but we are going to learn some more about this village.
And one thing I really want to ask you, Eric, my wife, I'm asking on behalf of my wife, by the way, your attitude about technology and so forth is pretty apparent, maybe even antagonistic or worse toward technology.
But I mean, when you made the decision finally to do this, did you go to your wife and say, listen, hon, I got this idea.
Or did you, how did you, how did you approach that?
Or was she already in every step of the way toward this decision?
And she had a tenth-story office with a little window overlooking the utility shaft, and she had one potted plant in her office to remind her of the country.
So in one sense, she was primed for a change.
She had so much stress from her job and from the monotony of it and from grinding those numbers day in, day out, that she actually was grinding her teeth away, and she had to have an orthodontic kind of harness put on her mouth at night so she wouldn't grind her teeth.
Well, and I think that in my wife's case, or she was my fiancé at the time, it shows that the lack of physical exercise is actually stressful in a way because she couldn't move, her body had to make up for that by grinding something.
And I think that, you know, today they talk about carpal tunnel syndrome.
One of the factors behind that is the lack of physical resistance that a keyboard offers your fingers.
I think our bodies and our fingers crave to be used and the fingers crave to squeeze something.
How antagonistic toward, I don't know, things like television and computers and the internet, that sort of thing, how really antagonistic are you toward it?
I mean, they're not bad in themselves, but I think that especially any kind of device where you sit in front of a screen and see only a two-dimensional image while your body is motionless is a very inefficient use of your time.
Not to say that you can't achieve certain things that might be necessary and valuable during that time, but it's a very inefficient use of your time because very little is happening.
I mean, if you're on the Internet, conceivably, you know, unless you're cruising porn or some such, then otherwise you may be getting educated or I'd say that that's sort of single-dimensional as opposed to a kind of an experience that's many-layered.
And it's the many-layered experience that we found working with these people we call the minimites, where you have the physical exercise at the lowest level, the lowest layer that becomes unconscious.
And then you have the social experience, another layer, and then you're experiencing nature.
You're feeling the breeze.
You're hearing the birds at another level.
And then you might be sort of half pleasantly daydreaming.
So you have this multi-level, oh, and then you're exercising a certain amount of physical skill and know-how.
So at several levels, your body and your mind are being gratified, they're being used.
And it's a very compressed, much more efficient use, I think, of time so that at the end of the day, you don't say, oh, now I've got to run to the gym to do my workout, or now I've got to hunt down my kids so I can create some quality time with them, because you've been getting that, you've been getting it all along.
But, you know, with this attitude, which, you know, I'm not positioned to judge.
I guess maybe it's fine.
But you did, after all, degree from Yale, Washburn University, and MIT.
Now, I can't imagine that you made it through to a degree with your attitude about these things because you would have had to been using these things to a great extent to even make it through.
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but it seems I'm getting the vibration that your attitude about technology was so radicalized, stick with me on this, that you were out to perhaps sabotage it, in some way stop the march forward of civilization altogether and to turn the clock way back.
Well, I would say it's just a little bit of a mischaracterization in that I don't see progress as something moving in a linear way.
And that, you know, if you go back in time, it's worse, and if you go forward in time, it's automatically better.
I think that there have been periods of time in history when culture was in a state of balance and harmony, and we've had periods of time in history when it was very discordant.
And I'm just aiming for a balance.
Whether you call it backwards or forwards, it doesn't really matter.
And I just think it's pretty apparent that we're out of balance right now, that we are spending more time meeting the needs of technology than our own needs.
And that we're chasing, running around, trying to always play catch-up because our technological responsibilities seem to outweigh our own personal responsibilities so often.
I don't have a computer, although I write out the stuff longhand, and I do put on a word processor.
But, you know, let me say, too, that as wary as I am of technology and specifically our modern labor-saving devices, I never say that any particular thing is bad in itself.
And all of them do have a legitimate use.
I can't think of it.
Even a nuclear bomb, if you take the scenario in that one movie about, was it, Armageddon?
What do you think would happen if suddenly this country, for whatever reason, just go out on a limb here and imagine it suddenly embraced everything the Minnamites did and it threw off all its technology, a country as dependent on it as we are, but we all somehow came to this great understanding of the better way to live, the one you've been describing tonight.
I mean, it would be a cataclysm because everything would fall to pieces.
Technology is the pillar that supports our society.
If you pull the pillar out right now, it would cave in.
But, on the other hand, if there were a gradual change in consciousness, I do think that our economy is simply the expression of a multitude of individual economic transactions.
And as individuals gradually change their habits and their spending habits and how they get around and what kinds of technologies they use, then the economy would just change accordingly.
I mean, the economy exists to serve us, not we, the economy.
And so I think that's a more plausible scenario because I don't really think that suddenly everybody after reading my book is going to rush out and throw away all their technology, as much as I might fantasize about that.
Well, no, I'd have to say, I mean, I might fantasize about it, but I don't think that realistically I would want it because, as I said, it would be cataclysmic.
Well, as I mentioned, the Mennonites are part of the larger Anabaptist movement that dates back to the early 1500s.
And there is a couple of things that go together to make them predisposed to less technology.
One is that unlike other Protestant religions, they place a real premium on community interaction, and they always have.
In their theology, the salvation of an individual is partly dependent on the salvation, on the efforts of the group.
You're partly accountable for your neighbor's salvation.
So they became very sensitive, especially in modern times, to technologies that undermined the cohesion of their community, such as the automobile, which spreads people out and dilutes the quality of your interaction with your next-door neighbor.
Why couldn't you argue that the automobile allows more interaction among individuals that otherwise geographically would be prevented from interacting?
Well, I think you could possibly argue that, but what first comes to mind is that you can only enlarge the radius of your mobility by diluting the quality of your interaction.
You have a less intense but broader kind of interaction.
And I think that's the intensity of the interaction among neighbors, next-door neighbors, that's so critical to the vitality of these communities.
Well, I think if you looked at them, first of all, first I should say that it's hard to generalize amongst these Anabaptist sects, and some of them are much worse in that respect than others.
Some are more enlightened than others.
And there's a whole patchwork of these groups.
But the group that I was with, I would say that perhaps from a distance, a modern observer might say, oh, this is Antediluvian.
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is an eric brindy and by the way it's home how much more technological can you i'd like to I mean, I'm just absolutely fascinated with this because I'm struggling, really struggling, to get it.
And I don't exactly get it yet.
I mean, why would anybody, anybody throw away everything that's modern?
The internet, television, radio, even electricity, light, I mean, all the very basic things that we used to live today.
Just totally toss them and start a completely different lifestyle.
And maybe I've got one answer to that myself.
anyway back to eric randy and all of this in a moment so Absolutely fascinating.
I really mean that.
And you would have to understand the lifestyle that I lead.
I mean, I am absolutely 100% admittedly immersed in technology.
In fact, tomorrow night, I just can't wait to tell you about something that's going on in the hambans.
These mysterious, long-delayed echoes that cannot possibly be because radio goes at the speed of light.
So you can't have an echo that comes back to you 20 seconds later.
It's impossible.
But let me tell you, it's happening.
And so I'm dying to tell you about that.
That's the kind of thing I'm immersed in, right?
And my wife, well, Ramona spends a lot of time these days watching her favorite reality TV series on the net streaming video, Big Brother.
And, you know, so we're just so deeply involved in the technological world that you might as well cut off our right arm if you took all that away from us.
And so I just, you know, you went into a world that I can't even comprehend, Eric.
Listen, what would you say are the three key inventions of the last century that have radically impacted America?
I think those three alone, if we scale back drastically on those, I think that so many social problems would just go away on their own, and so many of our personal psychological problems or problems of lack of contentment of various kinds would also go away on their own.
So much of the time, it's hard to trace the symptoms that we experience in day-to-day life to the actual technologies that may be at the root of those symptoms.
Well, as you get older, Eric, life seems to speed up.
I'm not exactly sure what it is, you know, what that's all about, but these days, and especially with the technology, I do acknowledge that it causes the days to blur together, sort of, in the sense that they're so filled and active with all of these things that you're sort of denouncing that they blur together.
And I wonder if you go live the Minnamite life like you did, whether life slows down.
I doubt that the last time you were on Google will flash before your eyes.
You're going to consider perhaps the very rare moments of life, living this technological life, that had a lot of social interaction or, I don't know, important moments in life one way or the other.
And I knew one, well, not a minimite, but I knew an Amish lady who did that, and she wasted time, and then by the time she finally got around to what she really needed, it was too late.
And that, of course, is in keeping with a very radical minimization of technology.
I'm not quite so radical, because my whole complaint is not that we should get rid of technology so much.
It's just that our technology isn't interfering with the good life.
And the point is to achieve the good life.
So when technology promotes the good life, I'm all in favor of it.
But there is kind of an Achilles tendon here.
If you're trying to live a simple life with less technology, as we do, say, in St. Louis now, our health care costs and our insurance have become very burdensome.
And for many people, it seems to prohibit them from trying to get off the treadmill.
They think they need to earn the money to pay for the health insurance costs.
But what I say is that the biggest component today of our high health insurance is our sedentary lifestyle.
It's so unhealthy to be sitting all day at a computer or sitting in a car and not getting the exercise.
That explains so much of our high costs of medical care, all the heart operations.
They've now reclassified obesity to be an illness covered by Medicare.
That all goes into the kitty and explains our high health insurance costs.
Well, but, you know, actually, if you look at it closely, and this is something I did while I was at MIT, the biggest reason why health, why lifespan has increased, it has to do with things more like sanitary water supply.
And, you know, maybe you talked your wife into everything else, but when you took her there to live with the Minnamites and she found out it was basically a hole in the ground, how did she handle that?
Well, actually, the spring water that we got was very good.
It was wonderfully tasty, and it was perfectly sanitary.
I think when you run into really serious problems with drinking water, it's oftentimes in cities.
That's why typhoid 100 years ago, 150 years ago, was concentrated in industrialized cities because you had large amounts of people working in these factories and they didn't have good enough water and there was raw sewage overflowing.
And that was actually a bad technological side effect.
Well, one thing that was a little different from our house, our house was a little bit different from the ones around us.
It was a cottage that the Mennamite farmer next door had just bought from English people, namely American outsiders like us, and it had a toilet in it.
We didn't have running water because we didn't have the electricity turned on, and it was run by an electric pump.
But we did have a toilet, and there was no outhouse.
So what we did was we would pump water up from the cistern outside and use that water in a bucket to flush the toilet.
Now, there's a whole chapter in my book about this.
It's not we were going to too much work to have to pump the water up from the outside because most of them had indoor pumps or they had water that flowed directly into the house from a spring, sometimes pumped by what they called a ram pump, which is a non-motorized pump that converts the downward pressure of water into upward lift.
So you can get for every 10 feet that goes downhill, you can get 100 feet of upward lift.
And so our next door Minnamite farmer generously offered to install a ram pump so that we could get water from our spring directly in the faucet and into the toilet in our house.
And that astounded me.
I was resisting at first because I thought that would compromise my experiment.
But then I realized that many or most of the other minnamites in the community use that kind of method.
And so that illustrates an important point, that these people were not about trying to create back-breaking labor or joint-wrenching kind of bucket lifting and hauling.
They saw that there was an important place for certain kinds of labor-saving technology.
So there again, I guess the point is to enhance life using the right selection of technology, not simply to get rid of technology altogether and suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.
But even the Minnamites would have to have dealed with the outside world for various reasons, for basic trade and getting hold of things they need.
There would have been payments and probably, I don't know, any household has to run on some kind of budget, maybe mortgages, maybe rent, that sort of thing, right?
Because the biggest problem in that community was to coordinate produce sales with grocery stores, because these people, of course, grew a lot of fruits and vegetables, and the grocery stores in the area loved them because they were the best around and very fresh and pretty much organic.
But the problem was to coordinate the shipments, because these are large grocery store chains, and they were on a timetable.
And so the only way to do that was by telephone.
And there was a big discussion in the community because it was getting out of hand.
Although the Minnemites did not have telephones in their homes, they did use telephones at payphones, at convenience stores, sometimes neighbors' phones that they would just pay the neighbor to use the phone as if it were a payphone.
And that created tension, and there were discussions going on when I was there about whether it was a breach of a very closely held belief.
Well, not that they believed, again, that telephones were evil in themselves, but that because people were running back and forth to use the telephone, it was becoming a kind of rat race.
And they were always very critical of what they called the rat race.
But anyway, I find that the movies are more candid about what the future holds in technology than our modern uh scientists are.
I really think that some of the um what I've seen in uh in the theaters um give us a pretty good glimpse of the way things may may happen in the future.
Uh I think they're only reporting, they're only projecting into the future the kinds of research that are that's currently going on today, say at MIT.
People like Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil are actively looking forward to the time when we can download our minds into hardware.
Well, the critical thing about that to me is that Ray Kurzweil in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I read, equivocated at a critical juncture in his discourse,
when it came to the point where he had to say whether our minds will actually survive the transition from our body into the computer, he kind of said, well, it doesn't matter just so long as it simulates our mind when it's on the other end.
And I kind of thought, wait a minute, isn't that the all-important question?
it is indeed i wonder if the minimize i wonder if their ideas So I wonder if they've minimized their own flow of not just information, but ideas that flow from that information as well.
So the whole topic is absolutely fascinating.
Eric Brindy is my guest.
He lived that way for 18 months.
He'll be right back.
The End In modern society, I know my friends and I are constantly debating what's going on in the world.
You know, we've got the presidential race and a lot of sharp differences and things to talk about.
And I wonder if being a minimite doesn't mean that to some degree you're minimized, your worldview is all local and no global.
In other words, the flow of ideas must be very minimal indeed, Eric, isn't it?
Well, I think you've latched onto something there.
And I wouldn't go necessarily to the extent that the Minnamites do in this regard.
But let's look for a second, though, at the value of it.
I think there's a drawback to being ultra-aware of everything around the globe, because you have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of awareness space in your brain.
And it's going to inevitably take away from your awareness of your immediate local community to some extent.
I mean, there's the paradox that most of us today know a whole lot more about what's happening on the other side of the globe than we do about what's happening with our next-door neighbors.
And they certainly don't have this problem among the Mennonites.
And she made a very serious mistake very early on in her stay when a neighbor donated to her a jar of green beans that she'd canned to tide her over until they could get their own stuff going.
And she made a comment that was a little bit disparaging about the flavor, that she preferred the flavor of the kind of green beans that she got in the cans at the store.
And this, I don't know how it came out.
I'm sure she didn't mean it to be not nice, but this spread like wildfire throughout the community, that our food was not good enough for her.
And I don't think she ever quite recovered from that.
She had to be really careful because things were, it was like a megaphone.
Well, that's, you know, and that's one reason why I don't think we would have ever conceived of joining in a formal sense and, you know, being baptized in the community.
Ironically enough, even though the deal that I finally did strike with my wife before coming, now this is backtracking in time, before leaving Boston...
The deal I'd struck with her was that if she agreed to join me for the first 18 months of our marriage, and we did get married just shortly before arriving, if she agreed to join me, then at the end of the stay, she would have a deciding vote in where we would move after that.
But, ironically enough, she was the one who was more reluctant to leave than I was.
And I'd appreciate it if you could throw in $3 shipping, but if you're poor, I'll even send it to you without the shipping charge because I get it at a somewhat of a discount from the publisher.
If you're in Missouri, I'm sorry, so what is the price of the book?
You know, you pretty much now, I mean, tonight must be a big exception.
I mean, let's think about this, Eric.
Not only are you on a telephone, but you're hooked up to me, which means that you're on satellite, which means that you're on 500 radio stations radiating all this RF, FM and AM alike, in the giant mass coverage of the United States, in fact, the whole world.
And that's, you know, at the end of the book, I do mention there are some things that we would do differently than the Minnamites because it was an experiment to try out what they did and see what would be the right level of technology.
Not to decide in advance that this must be the level of technology.
And one of the things we do differently is we would have a telephone, and we do have a telephone.
And one problem with not having a telephone was when we had our child, we did give birth to a child during the stay there in the first year.
We had a real snafu because my car broke down and I had to retrieve the minimite midwife.
And there's a harrowing account of what happens there.
So your wife then is in labor and you're probably having a sort of a panic and you're thinking, I'm going to call a hospital or I'm going to call a doctor or something, right?
But we had planned for this well in advance, that I would drive to the midwife's house, and she lived about six miles away on the very opposite side of the community.
The problem was that my wife's labor was not very typical.
It was a sudden, stabbing labor, and her contractions within a few minutes were only 30 seconds apart.
And we were told, oh, they'll be 20 minutes apart for hours before they start to get closer together.
Well, I went into a real panic and dove into my car, drove it too fast, hit a bump on the road, and unbeknownst to me, I triggered the fuel shutoff valve.
Well, that's not quite true because in this community, if there were urgent reasons, they would allow somebody to borrow a neighbor's car, or at least not borrow the car, but ask the neighbor to take them somewhere and then, you know, make an offering, pay for the trip.
Plus, there was a doctor in town who backed up the midwife, and that doctor had screened Mary, by the way, to make sure she was not a high-risk pregnancy.
He also was available if you could phone him up, and then he could run out and to the rescue in his car.
Well, it's just amazing to even think about this for me.
I can't say that I've properly absorbed enough, you know, I guess, I don't know, emotion from you about why this kind of a lifestyle would be in any way preferable so that I can understand it.
Maybe it's so foreign to me and so, just so completely foreign, you know, that I can't imagine, I just can't imagine doing it, Eric.
How many people do you think listening, from a percentage point of view this morning, who've listened to what you've said are thinking to themselves right now, you know, in my heart I know he's right.
I've longed for this, and I would love to give it all, everything up, and go and live that life.
Well, you know, I thought, crazy as he was with respect to the bombing and the killing and all of that, that parts of the manifesto somehow made sense.
This is a really interesting reaction to Eric Brendi tonight is really interesting.
A lot of extremely positive comments are coming in, you know, fast-blasted and otherwise.
And people are assessing Eric as absolutely genuine and, you know, a true believer in what he's saying and what he did and all the rest of it.
A lot of people are agreeing with it, too.
Here's something from the back of the book: one of the reviews: This calm and unjudgmental account of living a little more lightly on the earth will do readers more good than a thousand of the self-help books crowding the bestseller lists.
It'll make you think about your own life more than you've thought about it for years.
And for that service, we can be deeply grateful to the talented Eric Brindi.
and it goes on and on and that's kind of the for the most part now i i do have one here i want to read in in a moment by you'll never guess who okay
Remember I told you about my friend Paul, who owns the internet distributor here in town, one of the best.
Paul fastblasted me, and he makes a very good point that Eric might want to try and answer.
I mean, the Minnamite lifestyle is one thing, but Paul fastblasts, hey, try being a Minnamite here in our Nevada desert heat.
Without air, air conditioning, you could die.
Now, there's an interesting conflict potentially, Eric.
I mean, if you applied that lifestyle out here in the middle of the desert where I live, oh, about 20 miles from Death Valley, in the middle of the summer, you'd probably be deader than a doornail.
And so the only alternative would be air conditioning or some facsimile thereof, or you're dead.
I mean, if global population pressures get to the point where people will be forced to live in otherwise inhospitable areas, then of course, by all means, bring in the technology that will make that possible if we have to colonize other planets, for that matter.
Well, I mean, I think that's the short practical answer.
But, I mean, if I really wanted to address what he's getting at, is, you know, if we have to live in a place that is very inhospitable to the human anatomy and we have no other option, then, of course, bring in the technology that'll make it habitable.
If we ever have to colonize other planets, if we run out of room here, I'm sure we're going to have to make technological adaptations.
But, you know, let me address, too, the issue of air conditioning, if I might.
You might.
I do think that not that there aren't times when air conditioning may be a very good idea, but I do think that in general its use is greatly overrated because what it does is it overrides the body's own natural air conditioning system.
I mean, all other air conditioning systems just borrow this idea from the body that by evaporating a liquid from a surface, it draws heat from that surface and therefore cools it off.
And that's what the liquid on our bodies use is sweat, and the liquid that the air conditioning uses is Freon.
But if you have air conditioning, your body never makes the adjustment.
It never acclimates to the ambient temperature.
That is true.
And that is a physiological process.
It takes about two weeks.
The body has to sweat differently, has to reroute the blood flow differently.
It takes about two weeks for that to take place.
And if you don't allow, if you are always in an air-conditioned environment, you never allow the body to do that.
I think by here in St. Louis, we haven't turned on the air conditioning at all this year or last year.
The group that I was with was a part of the larger Anabaptist movement, which has three main branches we know today as the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Hutterites.
That's correct.
There is a spectrum among the Mennonites.
You have Old Order Mennonites that still drive horse and buggies, and then you have a more mainstream Mennonites that are very similar to everybody else.
The other things I had to let go with TV and a lot of other things, though, like TV entertainment, computer net, things that go along with technology that your guest has been speaking about.
For my part, Eric, frankly, I don't like people that much.
In other words, this requires, that's a very harsh statement to make, I understand, but this requires a very harsh interdependence, and it is a very community-oriented, I don't want to say communistic, because that wouldn't be fair at all, but certainly communal, I don't know, kind of living, right?
Where all for one and one for all, that sort of thing.
But I think that one of the reasons why it is so inviting, the community is so inviting, is that, as I put it in the book, that manual labor craves collaboration.
When you're working together, or when you're working, there is something about working physically that draws out of people their personalities.
And I think it's partly because since you're there to work and not necessarily in order to get to know people, but the purpose is the work, it actually paradoxically frees up your social self to get out of its shell.
But there was a rule of thumb that one of the women in the community said, told me, that helps their community succeed, which is that whenever you get a comment or a reaction that strikes you the wrong way and you think you feel offended, never assume that it was the way the person intended.
Always go back and make sure you understood what they said.
And nine times out of ten, you misconstrued what they were saying.
Well, Eric, that's a pretty good question in a way.
As the Mennonite children grow, do they reach a stage in, oh, I don't know, maybe their teen years or just beyond, where suddenly they rebel and go out and taste the world?
Well, unlike the Amish in Lancaster County that have a wild Rumspringer and run around all over the place and drink a lot of beer and go crazy, these people did not.
These adolescents, and one reason was that the people in this community had congregated in this remote part of the country where we were precisely to get away from that wildness that was in a lot of other of these settlements.
And I will have to say that the results were pretty successful.
I found that the youth there were extremely mature and self-possessed at a young age.
There was an 11-year-old boy, 11 years old, mind you, living next door to us, one of the Miller children.
And he would come down and monitor our activities and make sure we were picking our beans at the right stage.
And he had this air of authority, of a seasoned experience about him that I've never seen even in kids a lot older than he.
Okay, but again, most Mennonite children don't go through that kind of rebellion and go out and become part of the world and say, I just, there's more of a world out there.
All right, so, ma'am, it sounds like that's the answer to your question.
unidentified
Can I ask another quick one?
Sure.
What about the outside people that emerge into that type of setting?
Don't you feel that's kind of a regression?
And I understand that every once in a while we need to step back and take a look at the big picture before we can move forward, you know, if we've got a certain problem that we need to work through.
But to me, it almost seems like you're regressing.
Is there a specific reason or was there something that possibly you felt like you missed out on as a child that might have brought you to this curiosity?
Well, I missed out on a lot of things as a child because I was in such a televisionized environment growing up, and my father was so preoccupied with his technology and his profession that, yes, I did crave to have real human contact and do something real with my body and not feel cut off.
And for that very reason, for me, it was not a regression at all.
It was a way to progress and recover things that technology had deprived me of.
But Eric, I'm sure any psychologist would just have a field day with you with regard to your father.
Wouldn't he?
In other words, you probably have an incredible amount of suppressed anger at technology for what it took away from you in terms of your relationship with your father.
And that could manifest itself.
Well, in your case, I guess it's cathartic.
You wrote a book for the Unibomber.
The Unibomber might have experienced something like you did, Eric, only it manifested itself in a different way.
Well, even if it's true that there's a really powerful psychological motive for what I wrote, I don't think that takes away from the actual substance of what I wrote.
I wonder if it's fair to say that leading this lifestyle, as Eric led it, would lead automatically, or maybe even it would be preceded by, a very large turn among anybody to,
oh, I don't know, religious, embracing some very deep religious belief, some very personal, very strong belief that all of this is the way human beings should be living and that what we're doing in society right now, particularly American society, is so out of balance.
Well, I do think there is a natural compatibility between religion and living less technologically, because in both cases you're pursuing a goal that's intangible.
And so there's a natural affinity.
A person conceivably could go without a lot of technology for other reasons, you know, for humanitarian reasons or for ecological reasons.
So it doesn't have to be, but there is a natural compatibility between the two things.
Downtown St. Louis has a lot of restaurants and hotels, and there's a lot of conventions, and there's two major sports stadiums For the Rams and the Cardinals.
So there's a lot of activity going on down there, and the distances are far enough that people don't necessarily want to walk, or they don't want to necessarily take a regular cab.
And I wanted to say that, first of all, I'm an ex-computer programmer, and I started programming in 1963 and retired from the Harvard Computing Center in 1967.
And I hate the direction that computers took.
I still don't have a computer.
I'm going to break down and get one.
But I do think that the direction computers took has really dumbed down our society.
Well, in business, what's happened is that employees are trained to use the computer screen, and they're trained to use it exclusively, to not go outside the box of that computer monitor frame.
And they're not trained to know what their company does.
So whereas it used to be that one could talk to somebody in an organization, and this includes like our legislators' offices, for instance, and get information, but now they don't know anything and they've lost their natural curiosity.
They've accepted the situation.
They've become passive and apathetic.
And then with TV, now I haven't watched TV in four years.
So in other words, you're charging that with email and computer contact, there's no more human contact, even though it might be by phone or in person or whatever.
unidentified
Well, actually, I wasn't thinking of email and contact by computer when I finally reached the point where I can no longer be effective in doing research other than by computer because everything's on websites now, be it whether or not it's good information, it's the only information.
The World Wide Web, I agree that a lot of it's trash, but it's like anything else, depending on how you use it, it can also be a treasure trove.
unidentified
Well, I hope that'll be true because I'm going to get a computer soon.
But I think the average person because they're not learning things from other sources, including the classroom, the average, and, well, there's not as much conversation going on at home, but that's for a lot of reasons.
Well, I encourage her to read the short novella by E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops.
It's a wonderful, wonderful piece.
And even though it was written way back in, I think, the 1920s, it accurately forecasts our modern work and home environment in which people sit in front of this video monitor all day long and never leave.
And all of their limbs have atrophied to the point where they can almost no longer walk or go anywhere.
Of course, that's not quite how it's turned out.
But I do think that there is something very insidious.
Kind of a general comment just about tying in, you know, the minimalists, the minimites with the things that are happening globally as far as the whole planet kind of dying here, supposedly?
I'm struck by two things by your guest this evening.
One is it's kind of a throwback to the ancient Greeks where you had wanting a blend of the physical and the mental to have a perfect kind of a person or human.
And also, I'm struck by the fact that, if Professor Kaku and others are correct, that as we connect more as a planet, as a world of peoples through communication, that to survive in such large numbers as on the planet today, it simply cannot be that we go back to living in this kind of situation.
It simply, as the earlier caller said, the lady talking about computers, that's a bell that cannot be unrung.
I think there's always room for us to do less than the powers of be would have us do.
I don't think that I think there, even if somebody has a job that they're locked into for one reason or another, I think that they can find ways to minimize the technology in their daily life without necessarily quitting their job.
I think there's always room for that.
And I think to the extent that we make intelligent choices like that, our economy will change, and in turn, the kinds of jobs we have will change.
It's reciprocal.
So I think we're the participants, and if we change our lifestyles, then everything else will change accordingly eventually.
Well, I don't even know if they have a rule against going into a computer cafe because it never happens.
But if there were a rule against that and they had vigilant people watching around to make sure people weren't doing it, then they would get reported and then get in trouble.
But let's say if somebody does violate a rule in their community, then assuming that the person was a member who joined the community and made the vow to observe all of the rules in the community, then that person would be asked to repent of that.
It's a religious thing for them, so it would be something they repent of because it was something that implicitly they promised.
And I mentioned that in my book, that perhaps I wouldn't put it that way.
That's one of the reasons why we wouldn't have ever joined the group formally because we don't put it in terms of sin to use or not use a certain kind of technology.
And that's where we might have differed with them.
Luckily, our landlord who rented us, the house that we were in, was an affiliate of the community, but he was not a member.
And for that very reason, he was a little bit reluctant to tie those two things together.
but i i must say this has been incredible and amazing And so that's going to make it a really interesting book for a lot of people.
And you just wouldn't believe, I don't believe how many people are fastblasting me on a computer, mind you, that, oh, you know, I've been thinking about that, and that kind of lifestyle actually appeals to me, and I'd like to know more.
And therefore, I think your book probably will sell.
Oh, wow.
It doesn't take much.
Well, anyway, I'm glad you're happy, and I think you got your ideas across just fine.
Eric, thank you for being here tonight.
Good luck with your book, and I don't know, keep it minimized there, buddy.