Fight Like An Animal
Episodes
No Option but Sabotage: Interview with Thomas Zeitzoff
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Zeitzoff's No Option but Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis explores the tumultuous past and uncertain pr...
The Visitors: Tangles of Strangeness
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do...
The Visitors pt. 1: Story War
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, you will find the only valid interpretation of the UFO phenomenon in the world. It involves: how psychological experiments conducted ...
Without a Shot Fired
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we examine a simplified scenario—that of a total social revolution without a single shot fired—to illustrate real dynamics at wor...
We Are Alive!
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We introduce the new Fight Like An Animal-adjacent project Defending the World Tree: A Journal of Animist Awakening, from Severed Branches Press, and ...
Survival Revival
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
All social change is ultimately biological change. We present a framework, called an alliance of phenotypes, for thinking concretely about societies i...
Survival Ecology
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What would a truly resource-minimum, viable human ecology—viable in the sense that we are fed, warm, and dry—look like? What proportion of the cur...
A Body with Many Selves
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Those of us who understand the world cannot exercise power, while those who exercise power cannot understand the world. We have all fractured, but in ...
A World with Many Centers
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We celebrate the following three things: One, the animist revival currently sweeping the land. Two, a completed book with a tangible publication traje...
Love to the Fighters
21 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes, we just have to stop fighting and ask if it's really worth it. Or wait: I guess we won't know unless we fight. In this episode, w...
REVBIO201: Four in-person classes
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On four consecutive Sundays, beginning April 27, Arnold will teach some of the fundamentals of revolutionary biology. Classes take part in Kenilworth ...
The Story Is the Way
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode returns to the question of how to escape the freeze response so many of us are having to the world's many horrors. We live in storie...
Tree Worship Revival
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is it a coincidence that the authoritarian system currently being imposed is fundamentally an outgrowth of religion? And what does that mean? Is relig...
Revolutionary Mythology: The War for the Vision Space
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The fog of collective resignation we are stumbling through has changed the stories we tell. As we perceive, with increasingly painful clarity, that ou...
Embodied Politics
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Now that the first book deriving from this podcast is complete, it feels less ridiculous to say it. The purpose of this project has always been to cre...
Primitive Permaculture: Interview with David Lauterwasser
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Arnold talks with David of Feun Foo Permaculture and Rewiliding and An Animist's Ramblings. An anarcho-primitivist, David has been making a case ...
FLAA 2050: Patrolling the Wasteland (preview)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Looking back from 2050, this episode examines a core communications strategy revolutionary movements began to employ in the late 2020s: the production...
How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sust...
Taming the Apocalypse with Dr. Shane Simonsen
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Shane Simonsen returns to talk about his new book Taming the Apocalypse, a vision of humanity's potential as “the universal symbiont,” fa...
We Are Fighting a War to Keep Our Hearts Alive
25 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is it time to give up? Was it already time to give up in 2020, or 2012, or perhaps even 1999? We usually justify our answers to these questions purely...
Vivimancer pt. 2: Brain Waves
25 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015, Thorstein Grunwald began a mythic undertaking. He sought extreme states of consciousness for the purpose of making scientific discoveries abo...
Sub-Self, Meet Meta-Self: Notes on The Emerging World Mind
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You've heard a million times that the history of life on earth is one of systems tending toward ever-increasing complexity, but in this episode, ...
Jesus of Nazareth and the Biology of Defeat
31 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does it say about a society if it venerates the image of someone being executed by the state for sedition? In this episode, we trace the improbab...
The Biological Singularity Is Near pt. 1
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are clearly reaching the end of this phase of human civilization. Does that mean that evolution's broad trend towards increasing complexity, s...
Social Complexity after the Machines: Interview with Dr. Shane Simonsen
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rejecting both the empty promise of a future of magically sustainable resource extraction and a return to what has already been, Dr. Shane Simonsen ex...
Metanoia: How Worldviews Change
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fight Like An Animal has engendered a group, and that group has in turn engendered a new podcast called Metanoia: How Worldviews Change. Metanoia, w...
Vivimancer pt. 1: The Water Carrier (excerpt)
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Perpetually replenishing his organs by inducing his cells to behave like those of an early embryo, Arnold continues the 100th year of his podcast. In ...
Seeds of the World Tree: Programs of Revolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Politics
22 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fight Like An Animal has generated an incredible audience consisting of rigorous thinkers who possess deep empathy. These traits, which are too rarely...
Social Cohesion vs. the Internet vs. the Establishment vs. the Earth
19 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A wide-ranging conversation between Arnold and Daniel of What Is Politics? concerning the prospects for social transformation in this dreamlike age of...
#66: A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light (excerpt)
29 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before this podcast began, a nascent version of Fight Like An Animal 2050 was called A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light, broadly following the same...
The Ashes of the World Tree: On Grieving and Fighting
07 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our worldviews emerge from our psychologies, from embodied states of being. In an effort to describe my framework for understanding social possibility...
Metamorphosis pt. 3.3: Your Body Is a Map of the Sky
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We examine the neurobiological changes that brought archaic Homo sapiens into behavioral modernity, despite negligible changes in brain size. We see h...
Metamorphosis pt. 3.2: Integration across Landscapes and Brain Regions
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We continue the story of humanity's journey to modern thought and behavior, examining how a mosaic of both cultural and anatomical traits existed...
Metamorphosis pt. 3.1: The Rupture in the Fabric of Reality Model of Human Cognition
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We continue to assess our future evolutionary prospects, this time picking up the story of the human journey where Homo sapiens emerges. Anatomically ...
Metamorphosis pt. 2: The Cognitive Evolutionary Avant-Garde
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We assess the future of our evolutionary journey by asking what it was like, experientially, to be at the forefront of ancestral human cognition. We e...
Metamorphosis pt. 1: The Age of Mutual Incomprehension
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This series examines the future of the human evolutionary journey. Can we adopt behaviors other than the ones that are driving us to chaos, misery, an...
The Incompetent Authoritarianism of Vladimir Lenin
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Having grown up in a time when anarchism was the ubiquitous form of revolutionary politics, Daniel of What Is Politics? and Arnold talk with bewilderm...
Revolutionary Biology pt. 2: The Development and Evolution of Sasquatch
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As an illustration of the extraordinary plasticity of our species, we examine the story of Zana, whose genetics, described in a 2021 paper, establish ...
Revolutionary Biology pt. 1: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Synthesis
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nature vs. nurture thinking simply makes no sense: an entity can only respond to its environment via evolved capacities. Nonetheless, this binary reas...
The Raven Politics of Terra Incognita
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A uniquely stand-alone episode of the Fight Like An Animal 2050 fictional series usually reserved for Patreon, here we describe a future in which insi...
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 2
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
(01/01/2022) Why are states incapable of navigating the ecological crisis? We progress to the third of our six explanatory levels for comprehending an...
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 1
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We examine a scientific case for revolution: the claim that modern societies are forms of dominance hierarchy that grant power to people with extremel...
Glitching Is the New Tweaking (excerpt)
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
(12/05/2022) This episode of Fight Like An Animal 2050 tells the story of the initial meetings, in 2025, at which a strategy was conceived for disma...
Myth, Science, Power
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
(11/17/2022) Why is it that apocalyptic cults have been such a common aspect of the human experience, but are largely absent from our apocalyptic pres...
Red Sky, Black Snake: Eight Strategic Theses from Standing Rock
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In celebration of the anniversary of the killing of Custer, to prepare for revolutionary efforts against the theocratic authoritarian regime which has...
#52: Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 2
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In order for scientists to start a revolution, the case for revolution must emerge from the scientific process. But that process is heavily influenced...
#51: What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 2 (preview)
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
(05/22/2022) The story of the epochal changes of the 2020s, told in 2050, continues. This episode tells the story of west coast forests in the 2020s a...
Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 1
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The year is 2250, and the participation of humanity in the global ecosystem is shaped by a council of scientists contemplating, with considerable reve...
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 2
09 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the many determinants of hierarchy and equality, and many other aspects of social form, in the cross-cultural record over time. We examine ...
What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 1 (preview)
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2050, weary beyond reckoning but not quite dead, Arnold recounts the crises of the 2020s and the revolutionary changes they gave birth to: the synt...
What Is Left Authoritarianism?
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we examine the relationship between psychological variation, social role differentiation, and power, presenting a tripartite scheme o...
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 1
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's easy enough to use exquisitely rarefied, niche terminology to talk about politics, but do we even have a foundation of shared definitions ...
Return to the Circle
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If last episode described how we become trapped in a suicidally destructive feedback loop between biology and technology, this one is devoted to escap...
Philosophy or Schizophrenia?
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why is the world looking more and more like the paranoid delusions of 19th century mental patients? Why do political systems of disparate ideologies c...
Prison and Other Stories (excerpt)
22 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Arnold's father, George, comes to visit, and tells stories of hanging out with a revolutionary pachuco poet, covering himself in tattoos at age e...
Life Is Holy War pt. 2: Asymmetries of Aggression
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We continue our mashup of political psychology, the biology of aggression, and left-right brain hemisphere differences, in the latter case guided by I...
Life Is Holy War pt. 1: Two Stories about a Mountain
31 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this, the most wild journey we have undertaken thus far, we examine the notion that reality consists of a tension between opposites reflected at an...
The Life and Death of Radical Environmentalism
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As grief and terror about the ecological crisis intensifies, it seems increasingly curious that for many years a radical environmental movement—base...
Destroying the World Destroyers
27 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Because it couldn't possibly be more clear that existing political systems are committed to behaviors that will cause our extinction, one has to ...
Ethnogenesis pt. 4: Becoming a People in Terra Incognita
20 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we conclude our broad sweep of human history, venturing fearlessly into the truly tangled wilderness of variables mediating the relat...
Times I Got Stuck in Albuquerque
30 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Just for fun and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, a very high, very post-surgical Arnold relates a youthful tale of desert, night and madnes...
Ethnogenesis pt. 3: Sacrificial Child Gods and Social Complexity
10 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the p...
Ethnogenesis pt. 2: Evolutionary Anarchism
19 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by milli...
Ethnogenesis pt. 1: Hill Tribes Are Like Street Kids
07 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When we speak of revolution, aren't we are ultimately speaking of the creation of a different culture? And if so, how plausible or meaningful is ...
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 3: Despair
30 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
But seriously: is there any point to doing anything at all? Or is the world truly just going to end so soon we really might as well just kind of reach...
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 2: Madness
16 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o...
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 1: Addiction
07 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a na...
Heal Like An Animal: Interview with Joshua Sylvae pt. 3
27 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Arnold asks Joshua a series of truly fundamental questions to which no one has decisive answers: questions about whether large-scale ...
Believing You're Trapped in a Simulation Is the New Punk Rock (preview)
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We continue our examination of the revolutionary period of 2032-3, relying heavily on the psychographic researcher Sarah Kessler's book The Inter...
Group Mind pt. 6: Suburban Holy War
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We continue the examination of the post-materialist shift, and the emergence of increasingly niche subcultures, that we began in The World Is a Lot Li...
Scientific Militant pt. 3 + Aggression and Specialization pt. 2 (preview)
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, a 72-year-old Arnold reflects on how our species and the global ecosystem managed to survive to 2050. We discuss the Interstate 5 Sec...
Group Mind pt. 5: Everybody Loves a Narcissist
06 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we take a rollicking journey through the minds of narcissists, the emergence of states, and the seemingly intrinsic relationship betw...
Group Mind pt. 4: The World Is a Lot Like the Internet
12 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we examine the way the internet is changing us through the lens of evolved group psychology. We follow the trajectory of increasing s...
Heal Like An Animal: Interview with Joshua Sylvae pt. 2
06 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our last discussion, Joshua described cross-species uniformities in responses to traumatic experiences, and how he works to help people access thei...
Aggression, Specialization, Dysregulation, and Power pt. 1 (preview)
31 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Unlock the entire episode at https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity The year is 2050, and I have been making this podcast for 30 years. In thi...
Group Mind pt. 3: Oxytocin Atrocities
20 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We use religious cults as an example of extreme group psychology to make generalizations about the group dynamics that determine sociopolitical possib...
Heal Like An Animal: Interview with Joshua Sylvae pt. 1
07 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Sylvae practices and teaches Somatic Experiencing, an approach to trauma recovery based on a cross-species understanding of behavior and its ev...
Group Mind pt. 2: Concerts, Riots, Cults
27 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We continue to describe extreme aspects of group psychology, delving into phenomena like death from social exclusion. We examine cross-species similar...
Scientific Militant pt. 2
06 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How scientific is science? In this episode, we further the argument that "science communication" about the ecological crisis is based on an ...
Scientific Militant pt. 1
29 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Here, we try out a somewhat dreamlike new format. We will describe a problem in terms of the present day, but we will also describe the resolution of ...
Group Mind pt. 1: Dancing Epidemics
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We begin a series on evolved psychological mechanisms for group participation, evaluating the wild variation in behavior and belief that groups exhibi...
The Nine Elders and the Ancient Scroll: A Constitutional Crisis Comedy Special
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In these difficult times, it is important to remember that no matter what we do, it should be entirely based on what the Very Powerful Magi wrote on t...
GHG Removal and the Worldviews That Consider It
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Movements for climate and ecological survival have largely eschewed talk of taking CO2 out of the sky. For good reason. We don't know if it will ...
A model political program for ecological survival
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Start by reading climate plans, then write your own. Get a zoning map, change it in Photoshop, and release it to the media. Blockade something. Establ...
What Elephants Can Teach Us About Civil War
05 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Elephants are changing. The various traumas of extermination—witnessing the deaths of their companions, developing in atypical social structures—a...
Do Not Worship the Deities That Came Before the Fire
27 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"Climate denial" has the specific connotation of outright denial such a thing exists, but what about all the other forms of denial? The huma...
Nature-Nurture Death Spiral pt. 4: Academic Gibberish vs. Life on Earth
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Academic constructs, valid or otherwise, tend to diffuse into our culture at large. How has this impacted social and political conflict? Quite a lot, ...
Nature-Nurture Death Spiral pt. 3: Foucault Ruins Your Meeting
27 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we trace the journey of 20th century social sciences through innumerable versions of the nature vs. nurture debate, talk about how th...
Nature-Nurture Death Spiral pt. 2: The Universal People
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Because anthropology describes the observed range of human variation, as well as constants in human life, it is inextricably linked to the project of ...
Nature-Nurture Death Spiral pt. 1: Margaret Mead Goes to Samoa
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What kind of societies are ultimately possible (i.e. within the range of variation our biology allows)? Why are social movements so prone to division ...
The Wilderness of Mirrors
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A CIA counterintelligence chief once described his world as a wilderness of mirrors. In this episode, we ask how ecological and egalitarian movements ...
Genocidal Mystics
02 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We've looked at some of the psychological traits that correlate with ideology, but what about those that don't? Considering the tendency for...
The Psychology and Politics of Collapse: Interview with Ken Ward
21 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Having described innate psychological tendencies associated with other political perspectives, in this interview we examine what makes an environmenta...
It Isn't Nonviolent To Let People Hurt You
13 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Having described the right-left spectrum in psychological terms, we will now examine the psychology of the liberal, an entity sometimes described as m...
The Biology of the Right-Left Divide part 3
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Here we conclude our discussion of the biology of the right-left divide. We discuss how developmental delay shaped human evolution and how aggression ...
The Biology of the Right-Left Divide part 2
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Having described the idiosyncratic collection of traits associated with variation in political outlook in humans, we will now look at the biology of a...
The Biology of the Right-Left Divide pt. 1
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We will explore the science of political difference, the cross-cultural durability of the right-left divide, the idiosyncratic collection of traits th...