Asher Miller

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.

In this first episode of the podcast, Alex Leff takes you back in time to a fateful childhood summer when the world was a magical place to explore, yet seemed like it was ending just as he was getting to know it. It was then that Alex first read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, the book that begins the quest of Human Nature Odyssey.