Christopher Ryan joins the odyssey to discuss human nature; shouldn’t be surprising – it’s in the name! What’s universal, what’s cultural, and what’s personal? Can we really change the culture we live in? And are some societies better suited to human well-being than others?
Christopher Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships as well as the book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. He also hosts the long-running podcast “Tangentially Speaking,” which has been downloaded over 30 million times.
Credits
Theme Music is “Celestial Soda Pop” (Amazon, iTunes, Spotify) by Ray Lynch, from the album: Deep Breakfast. Courtesy Ray Lynch Productions (C)(P) 1984/BMI. All rights reserved.
Featured image: Photo courtesy of Christopher Ryan.
Join storyteller Alex Leff, creator of the podcast Human Nature Odyssey, on a search for better ways to understand and more clearly experience the incredible, terrifying, and ridiculous world we live in.
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In this week’s Frankly, Nate looks at how aggregate human behavior changes as groups scale from small tribes to large and complex societies. He uses the framing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde throughout the episode to illustrate how traits that once helped small groups survive can serve to destabilize complex societies when expanded globally.
Building an inclusionary common sense will take an understanding of the relationship between our social history, our experience of inclusionary social policies, and the opposing psychosocial dynamic that promotes a readiness to scuttle the gains those policies produced through a belonging based on fear and threat.
February 20, 2026
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