August 28, 2004: The Simple Life - Eric Brende

Art Bell interviews Eric Brende, a Yale and MIT graduate who abandoned modern technology to live for 18 months with a group he calls the Minimites, a strict Anabaptist community that prohibits electricity, motor vehicles, and all automated machinery. Brende, who describes himself as a technological subversive, infiltrated MIT specifically to gather evidence against the assumption that more technology automatically improves life. His book Better Off chronicles the experiment he and his fiancee undertook together.

Brende argues that labor-saving devices paradoxically consume more time than they save, pointing to his own father who virtually disappeared into an early word processor. He describes discovering among the Minimites a layered quality of experience where manual labor becomes unconscious while social connection, physical exercise, and sensory engagement with nature all occur simultaneously. The community debates even minimal telephone use at pay phones, worried that coordinating produce deliveries to grocery chains threatens their unhurried pace of life.

The conversation opens with a surprise visit from Whitley Strieber, who discusses the Elmendorf Beast found on a South Texas ranch. The creature's skull features teeth that biologists say are neither canine nor mammalian, with DNA testing underway at a leading laboratory. Strieber also raises urgent concerns about La Palma volcano and the accelerating weakening of Earth's magnetic field, warning that exposed electronics worldwide could be overwhelmed during a solar flare without magnetic protection.