This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael are joined by applied anthropologist Jeff Greger to ask a deceptively simple question:

Why do utopias always fall apart?

From Silicon Valley hackerspaces to Danish communes to the U.S. Constitution itself, the episode explores humanity’s enduring obsession with building perfect systems—and our equally durable tendency to break them.

Inspired by everything from communal farming dilemmas to sci-fi dreams of Starfleet, the conversation moves across scales: from chore wheels to constitutional design, from co-living conflict to cosmic hope.

Topics include:

Why utopian communities struggle with shared labor
The anthropology of communes and why chores are destiny
Hackerspaces and the illusion of politics-free governance
Constitutional “bugs” and the slow drift toward executive power
Gatekeeping vs algorithms: who should decide what matters?
Why fandom, sci-fi, and Star Trek still shape moral imagination
Hopepunk, dystopia, and whether the future can still be better

Along the way, listeners ask about commune freeloaders, collapsing faith in American institutions, and whether it’s naïve to still believe in a better world.

As always, the anthropologists attempt to fix society—this week by bringing back gatekeeping.

Remember: we’re anthropologists, and we know stuff about people.

That’s it for this week’s People Stuff — the show where two anthropologists try (and sometimes fail) to make sense of people.

If you’ve got a question, a dilemma, or just something deeply weird about humanity you’d like us to unpack, send it our way at people-stuff.com

Credits

Produced by Gabe Bullard
Music by The Endless Bummer
Art by Siobhan Henegan
Marketing by Bryan Haut
Legal support by The Law Office of Matthew Shayefar, the one true business uncle.

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So go to people-stuff.com

Dan and Michael Glimpse Paradise (feat. Jeff Greger) | Utopias, Communes, Gatekeeping & Why Perfect Systems Fail