Leafbox Podcast

About Leafbox Podcast

Interviews with Creatives, Artists, Retailers, Entrepreneurs.... -- Full transcripts @ leafbox.com Twitter: @leafbox leafbox.substack.com (https://leafbox.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

LEAFBOX

Category

arts · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Sept 2022

Latest episode

24 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

74 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   24 Aug 2026

   Interview: Mai Ueda （上田舞）

   Mai Ueda has spent twenty-five years refusing to be any one thing. Born in Japan, she landed in New York in 2000, fell in with Miltos Manetas, and helped invent NEEN: one of the first art movements to treat the internet as a place for poetry and accidental beauty. A decade later she followed a different thread home and focused her art practice on Japanese tea ceremony and find that it had been conceptual art all along. Today she’s in the mountains of Hyogo with a broken kiln and a horse she hasn’t met yet, calling her next chapter simply “nature.” On the profession of being yourself, on refusing every role — artist, sister, wife, tea master; on being named for dancing, on tea as the Origin of the Universe, on doing everything and becoming nothing in particular, on receiving a message in front of the Louvre, on NEEN and accidental beauty, on ego and money, on kimono as an education, on Rikyu as the Duchamp of Zen, on the tea room as a black cube four hundred and fifty years early, on the teacher who beat her hand, on permission as a pyramid scheme, on four hundred people arriving in Rome for a tea master who is not a tea master, on the matcha boom as a good shallow entrance, on strawberry jam and a Starbucks cup as the true beginning of the Way, on students taking off their shoes and feeling the pain leave their bodies, on horses and pottery and Vipassana an hour down the road, on the difference between luxury and abundance, on Haruka-chan, the AI friend you never use forcefully, on quiet resistance to every system, on practice, on freedom that is never quite enough, and on the whole point, which might just be: enjoy your life. Excerpts My profession is to be myself. Rikyu is like the Duchamp of the Zen tea world. Picking up matcha from a Starbucks kind of thing is already the beginning of a tea ceremony. What’s the message? Enjoy your life. Have fun! Connect with https://maiueda.com (https://maiueda.com/) Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe (https://leafbox.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   11 Jul 2026

   Interview: Tom Murphy

   Talking with Tom Murphy, professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, passionate astronomer, author of the Do the Math blog and the Metastatic Modernity series on mapping the intersections of thermodynamics, ecological limits, and the long arc of civilizational collapse… On species-level growth versus the fantasy of the endless economy, on Dyson spheres, on boiling the oceans, on the sixth mass extinction, on solar panels that preserve modernity rather than the planet, on peak oil and fracking, on demographic modeling, on Africa’s food spigot, on John Michael Greer and “collapse now to avoid the rush”, on sealed-glass shrimp, Mars as juvenile fantasy, on Hobbes as mythology, on rivulets down a windshield, on the amoeba’s genius and thirteen thousand genes, on hunter gather lifestyles, carrying loads of the planet, on friction fire, flint knapping, atlatl darts, on written language as the thing academics will never speak against, Tom’s work challenges both the Mars-colonizing techno-optimist and the solar-cheering mainstream environmentalist, arguing instead for falling out of love with modernity: not doom for humanity, or life, ultimately trying to provide quantitative assessment of the challenges associated with long-term human success on a finite planet. Excerpts Tom Murphy’s Law And my version of Murphy’s Law is that it’s not if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. It’s that if something can happen, you shouldn’t be surprised if it does. On Authentic Living I’m a prisoner, and I don’t feel hypocritical bashing the prison that I’m in. I think that’s valid. What I can do is just try to raise awareness that we don’t have to be in a prison, and ultimately we might escape to more authentic ways of living and dispel the mythology around the, fear, this irrational fear about other ways of living that have worked well for humans for countless millennia. On The Sixth Mass Extinction “Preserving our ability to crank out terawatts of energy is exactly the same as preserving our ability to continue a sixth mass extinction.” Aside from his work with Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation Project, Tom Murphy is known for his blog “Do The Math” which examines societal issues related to energy production, climate change, and economic growth from an astrophysicist’s perspective Do the Math Blog (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/)) Book: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions) https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/ (https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/) Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe (https://leafbox.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   28 Apr 2026

   Interview: James Van Lanen

   Talking with James Van Lanen, anthropologist, re-wilding advocate, and author of Human Rewilding in the 21st Century, mapping the intersections of species-level fitness, ecological embeddedness, and the long arc of civilizational collapse… On species-level fitness versus civilizational fitness, on Herbert Spencer and the colonial roots of survival of the fittest, on aggrandizing agents and the alpha-hoarding pattern, on the Radical Anthropology Group and the female coalition theory of human speciation, on Pierre Clastres and secondary primitivism, the people who ran back into the jungle, on five hundred years of Amazonian oral history as the most successful anti-civilizational politic in human history, on the Hadza and the smartphone controversy, on his rebuttal to Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, on Joseph Tainter and continually diminishing returns, on the gathering that would fall apart at thirty days, on nodal community versus rigid communes, on finding your gifts rather than peddling hope, on daughters and the stone knives, Thirteen years traveling by small aircraft to remote Alaskan communities, fieldwork across four continents, Siberia, the Amazon, Africa, and now independent, outside the bureaucracy of both the academy and the state. His work challenges both the right-wing bunker prepper and the techno-progressive urban left, arguing instead for rural dropout-ism: not ideology, but as a true measure of human fitness. Excerpts On Amazonian Isolated Tribes There's some sort of oral history passed down for generations that says: those progressive complex societies — don't go in. They're very dangerous. And they've maintained that politic for at least several hundred years, if not thousands. Channeling Derek Jensen You are just a puny little human. You cannot change this situation as an individual. But figure out what your gifts are: what's really in your heart, and apply them to bettering the situation even in the smallest way you can. On Species Fitness And I came to the conclusion that real species level fitness is intimately connected to the natural world without all this technological mediation that's the why I've just never stopped this path because to me on a personal level, pursuing that wildlife provides me this really strong feeling of living optimally. Connect with James @ https://www.jamesvanlanen.com/ (https://www.jamesvanlanen.com/) https://www.humanrewilding.earth/ (https://www.humanrewilding.earth/) Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe (https://leafbox.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Who has been a guest on Leafbox Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Michaelangelo
• Matt Cardin
• Benjamin Lucas

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

4.8 / 5

6 ratings

Contact Leafbox Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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