The Hunting Party

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The updated Second Edition of The Hunting Party, now with a new foreword from a very special guest: the person who has known me most intimately for the last two and a half years. I wrote this book in six days. It took me 51 years. It began with three establishments near my home. They were separated by a few dozen metres, drawing from essentially the same people, the same weather, the same economy and the same supply of late-night idiots. Yet they behaved like completely different social systems. I wanted to know why. The Hunting Party is what happened when I kept pulling at that question. It moves through childhood, fifty years of watching people, building companies, games and technology, relationships, cancer, neurodivergence, organisational culture, propaganda and artificial intelligence. Along the way I began questioning assumptions I had treated as obvious. What if there is no best human brain? What if characteristics we describe as deficits are sometimes strategies suited to a different environment? What if some people are naturally better at searching uncertain terrain while others are better at taking something valuable and making it stable? I call those strategies Hunters and Farmers. Neither is better. The more interesting question is what happens when they become afraid. Scarcity changes behaviour. People do this. Relationships do it. Organisations do it too. This isn't a tidy theory of human behaviour. I distrust tidy theories. It is a collection of observations tested against one another, from pubs and games studios to Socrates, Vladislav Surkov, ferry companies and generative AI, asking the same question I've been asking for most of my life: Why are they doing this? I ended up somewhere I didn't expect. Human beings may be powerful precisely because we are different. There is no best human brain... More information at thehuntingparty.net and kemptand.co. Duration - 6h 10m. Author - Chris Kempt. Narrator - Digital Voice Elizabeth E. Published Date - Saturday, 03 January 2026. Copyright - © 2026 Chris Kempt ©.