Human Nature Odyssey

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis is our instruction manual to colonization and exploitation. We explore how dominant countries rise and fall, the dance between capitalism and the state, and the unexpected truth about what real power looks like.

Gather around the campfire for a ghost story about the most destructive monster in history: civilization. Through the book “Against His-Story, Against Leviathan,” we’ll explore how authoritarianism first took root in the world’s earliest cities—and how those ancient systems still shape modernity.

In the spring of 1992, twenty-four-year-old Christopher McCandless left society behind, hitchhiking 3,000 miles into the Alaskan wilderness. We’ll explore McCandless’s legacy, the conflict between self and society, community and solitude, and the concept of “wilderness.”

In this very special episode, author Daniel Quinn’s wife Rennie Mackay Quinn joins us for her first ever interview: sharing untold stories, new insights, and reflections on her life and journey with her beloved late husband Daniel Quinn.

In this climactic culmination of the Ishmael series, we ask the question: How do we transform an entire society? We’ll meet the fantastical Prince who first concocted the criminal justice system, have a final reckoning with our Taker Mythology hat, and return to the abandoned land of Ashbourne.

Is it possible to build a civilization that flies? (Metaphorically speaking of course.) How did we first learn to fly in the first place? It wasn’t by defying gravity and disobeying aerodynamics but by learning how to work with them. This is an episode of short stories, cinematic sound effects, and wacky voices. Strap in for liftoff.

The story of the Garden of Eden has been told and retold for thousands of years. Why do we keep telling it? With insight from modern biblical scholarship, we investigate the origins of this ancient story and what warning this active myth still has yet to be heeded today.

When we use the term “civilization” who do we include and exclude? Who is civilized and what does that mean? In this episode we take a step back from Ishmael to better view the context it was written in, discussing noble savage theory, romantic-primitivism, and the rise of the identity “indigenous.”

When do kids stop playing imaginary games? Ishmael the telepathic gorilla believes they never do and theorizes our culture is held captive by a story we’re all enacting. In this episode we explore the mythology that’s leading to the destruction of the world.

In this second episode of the podcast, Alex Leff invites you on an adventure through a landscape of ideas. You’ll scrape through a dystopian future where Nazi Germany won the war, attend a family reunion with our long lost furry and feathery cousins, and conduct an investigation into a planet-wide crime scene.