What is wilderness when seven billion people share the planet and nowhere remains truly untouched? Author and journalist Cal Flyn discusses her book The Savage Landscape with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, weaving together journeys to some of Earth's most remote places, including a live volcanic eruption in Iceland she hiked toward despite the danger. Flyn rejects the myth of pristine, unpeopled wilderness, revealing that the wildest-looking landscapes have been shaped by humans for centuries. She explores spiritual quests at Mount Sinai, the return of predators to Europe, the uncomfortable economics of trophy hunting, and why we secretly crave discomfort in an age of endless comfort.

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days? In this second episode of the EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad, Dwayne Betts and EconTalk host Russ Roberts trade their impressions of the Iliad, discovering it's less about war than about fathers, friendship, and the stubborn dignity people find inside fates they can't escape. Betts connects Achilles's rage and grief to his own experience of incarceration and depression, while Roberts marvels at Homer's cinematic style and the strange tenderness between enemies. Together they unpack the shield of Achilles, the ransom of Hector's body, and how an ancient poem about war still cracks readers open today. It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world. Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master and co-creator of Paw Patrol, talks about his book No Experience Necessary with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Harary traces his journey from selling grass-growing novelty heads at 23, through Devil Sticks and Air Hogs, to building Bakugan and Paw Patrol into global franchises touching the lives of millions of children. Along the way, he reflects on the artistry of commercial creation and what it means to build something that outlives its founders. The conversation closes on the eternal magic of toys and our childhoods.