Steven Rinella on Hunting, Self-Discipline, and Finding Balance

Ryan talks to Steven Rinella about his new book Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch), the temperance that is required to be a great hunter, how to find the right balance between pursuing your purpose and spending time with family, and more. Steve Rinella, from his books to his groundbreaking show MeatEater, has made hunting and nose-to-tail wild game gourmet cooking popular from New York City to Hollywood. Thanks in large part to Steve’s humor and extensive historical and anatomical knowledge, MeatEater is one of the top “reality” shows not just in outdoor media, but arguably across all media combined. As a writer, TV host, and now podcaster Steve and the MeatEater crew are as trail blazing as they come. We carry one of Steve’s books, American Buffalo, here at the Painted Porch Bookshop. His most recent book, released just this week, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, offers practical advice for getting kids radically engaged with nature in a muddy, thrilling, hands-on way, with the ultimate goal of helping them see their own place within the natural ecosystem. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to Babbel.com and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc/stoic to receive 15% off your purchase. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Steven Rinella: Homepage, Instagram, See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Speaker 00

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone whose books I just adore. I am a huge fan. I reread one of them earlier this year. We sell like five different of them in the Painted Porch. And I met him, as we talk about in today's episode, at a coffee shop in New York City. We were linked by a book agent we both know. And I've more recently become not just a huge fan, but it's like his work's become an integral part of my daily routine because my five-year-old son, who you will hear at the beginning of this episode,

• 1:38Speaker 00

  is obsessed with Stephen Rinella. YouTube suggested one of his videos. It's also a show on Netflix called Meat Eater. And he's just one of the great hunters. Like, you wouldn't think you could be like the LeBron James of hunting, but that's what Steve Rinella is. But he's also like America's great philosopher of hunting and outdoors and conservationism, and also an incredible entrepreneur. There's a great New York Times piece about him recently, which you can check out. Anyways, my son watches one of these videos. He picks one every night and we watch it together. He usually almost always falls asleep before it ends, so it might take three nights to get all the way through. But he just loves Stephen Renauld's stuff. There's one where he hunts a javelina. There's one where he hunts a buffalo.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  There's one where he hunts a mountain lion. There's some where he hunts doves, turkeys, squirrels, grizzly bears, anything you can imagine, he is hunted. I know hunting isn't for everyone. I happen to live out in the country. I hunt on a regular basis. Nothing exotic, just, you know, whitetail or rabbits sometimes or hogs. But I think there's a ton of Stoic lessons in Steve's work. And I think you're gonna like this interview because I was just reading his new book. Sorry, the first book I mentioned that I love, his book, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, is, I think, one of the great books ever written about America, about the West, about hunting, about nature.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  It's just an incredible story, excellently written. I reread it earlier this year. I love it. We carried the pain to porch. You have to read American Buffalo. Seriously, one of my all-time favorite books. But his new book was perfect. We were just on a trip to Big Bend. We took the kids out there for four nights, just did some hiking and swimming and observing nature. And we went to this ghost town out there called Terlingua and just spent some time in one of America's great national parks. I think one of the most underrated of the national parks, the only national park in Texas. And it's incredibly huge, incredibly far away. Also, as it happens, the scene of one of my son's favorite Steve Renauld videos, where he hunts javelina,

• 3:52Speaker 00

  by Bo, and we talked about this a little bit in today's episode. Anyways, his new book, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engage with Nature, is a fantastic book. It so perfectly encapsulates what I'm thinking about as a parent. It's not that I'm anti-screens. It's not that I need my kid to be a rough-and-tumble whatever. But I want them to be an outdoor kid, to like the outside more than the inside, to know how to handle themselves outside, to spend time outside. It's why we go on our walks every day. It's why I live out in the country. It's why we take trips like the ones to Big Bend. It's why I let him watch these videos, right? Because they are cultivating his love of outdoors. We went on the trip because he watched a video about it. So.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  I love Steve Rinella's work, all of which I'm gonna say, and I cannot recommend American Buffalo, Outdoor Kids in an Indoor World, and then his two cookbooks, The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game. Volume one is about big game, and then the other one's about smaller game. Also a fantastic book, very highly recommend it. We've used a bunch of the recipes over the years. Okay, I'm gushing now. Huge Steve Rinella fan. You have to read these two books. Read the other ones, too. Watch his TV shows. The Meat Eater podcasts are great. Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, though, is the new one. It's timely. I think you're gonna like it. You can follow him on Twitter, @StevenRinella. You can follow him on Instagram, @StevenRinella.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Pick up the books at the Painted Porch, anywhere books are sold. It was so wonderful to have this conversation. You're gonna, I brought my son in to say hello very briefly, and I'll let you listen to that as well. Thanks to Steve for coming on, and thanks to Mark Gerald, the book agent, for setting this up. I appreciate it, and I appreciate you connecting us all those years ago.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  How are you?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Good, what's going on?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Not much. This little guy wanted to meet you because he has watched, like, literally every one of your videos.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  All right, man. How you doing, buddy? What's your name?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Clark.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Tell him what your favorite video is. What's the favorite hunt that he went on that you like the most?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  I like to have a lina one.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  You like havealinas? Man, that's cool.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Where did we just go? Where you wanted to see a havealina?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  We went to Big Bend.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Oh, you went to Big Bend National Park?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  But you didn't run into one?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Can you do your havealina cry?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  I can do havealina cries.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  No, that's pretty good. Were you, when you went, were you looking hard or not really looking that hard for him?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I looked out John's window and my window.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Oh, you looked out both everybody's window, huh?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Do you have anything you want to ask him before you go back to school?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Do you want, are you excited to go hunting sometime? What do you want to hunt for?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Deer? Alright.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  What are you, what are you in home, you in homeschool or what are you bud?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  I'm in, um, virtual school and outdoor school.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Why are you, not because of the pandemic or something, right?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  He does virtual school at home a couple of days a week because we travel a lot and then one day a week he goes to like an outdoor school that's like, they learn like campfire skills and hiking and all the plants and stuff.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Got you. So you're in a school that lets you travel around a bit?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  That's pretty sweet.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Alright, do you have anything else you want to say?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Alright, you want to go? Alright, bye. Shut the door, okay?

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for that. He is an enormous fan, no joke. Like, literally every night before bed, uh, we read a story and then he chooses one of your videos to watch. So, uh, it's funny because, uh, I just reread, uh, American Buffalo, which I told you is one of my favorites. But even though I hadn't read it in probably 10 years, I think about a line in the book, like probably once a week. It's the scene, you, you find this buffalo skull and, uh, you pick it up and you start sort of asking yourself these questions about, like, who shot it first? Like, who found it first? Like, I think you have a, you're like, what did this person think about this? What time did they wake up in the morning?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  What did they think about God? I think about that question all the time. Whenever I come across something really old, like this is a, this building I'm talking to you and it's like a hundred and something years old, I think about like the person that sat in this room before me and like what went through their head, what their understanding of the world was like. And that, that line in the book has always struck me as a, as a very beautiful encapsulation of that idea.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's, uh, it's, it's particularly vexing around when you get back into, deep enough into history. Like, I spent a lot of time in that Buffalo book talking about Ice Age, you know, the Ice Age hunters.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And, um,

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Well, the problem there is, is we'll never, ever, ever know. I mean, barring some like incredibly, just in bar- barring some incredible scientific breakthrough that I can't even understand, it would like border into metaphysics. Uh, I don't, I don't think we're ever gonna know 10,000 years ago, 11,000 years ago, 12, whatever, what those people thought about anything.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Like what they thought about anything, man. And even the stuff that they left behind, carvings and things. Yes, you just never know. Uh, I was reading recently about a, there was a mammoth hunting culture in Siberia.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  They found these two children that were buried with 500 beads made of mammoth tusk ivory. Why, right?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  There's no one to ask.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  But do- but don't you think when you do an activity that is somewhat timeless, it's the closest you get to that? For instance, in the javelina video, which I have probably watched 30 times now, because it's the favorite one for some reason. Even though where we live, there's boars, like wild boars. So you'd think he'd be into those hunts, but he likes the javelina one. We've never seen a javelina out in central Texas. But you're, you're like looking for shelter in that video, and you just stumble across cave paintings in this like little cave by someone who almost certainly was doing the exact same thing that you were doing. So you don't really know what they think, but it couldn't have been that different than what you're doing, which is like walking around looking for an animal to kill.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, man. I, I think that, that you're bound, like one thing that binds hunters over time, at least the really dedicated ones, is, uh, with notable exceptions, is what, what binds them is like a real reverence for animals, a deep desire to understand animals. But, man.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  You know, like, growing up, you know, coming from a, like, a theist culture, right? And having that upbringing, it's so hard to understand animism, you know, like, Yeah. The, the, the way people used to, you know, people used to imagine that all, all these animate and inanimate objects had

• 11:36Speaker 01

  s- some sort of desires and individuality, do you know what I mean? It's like, it, it's, you, you feel like you, you, you feel a connection to it because the discipline is so similar, right? Like, there's, they are, the, the, the animals are have, the animals are unchanged, right? They haven't gone through a cognitive revolution, like, the animals are unchanged, that, that, their sensory perceptions are unchanged, their habits are largely unchanged. So you're, you're engaging, you're engaging with something that, that, that half of the equation is unchanged, right?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  And a big part of, like, the big part of the, a big portion of the human equation is unchanged too, like, the things you need to do, right? The, the physicality of it, like, that's unchanged, but the, the spiritual component, whatever that was, man, I marvel about it, you know? It, you know, you, for some reason, it feels good to think that maybe

• 12:40Speaker 01

  you, maybe you can approach that level of understanding that people might have had for their environment. But then, this could, this might be straying a little too far for what, what you're asking, but I spent time with Amerindians in South America, hunting with people who, uh, hunting with people who hunt two hundred, hunt fish two hundred and fifty days a year, within a fifty mile radius of not only their home, but their father's home, grandfather's home, great grandfather's home, on and on and on and on and on. And the level of understanding they have for their environment. Far exceeds anything you will achieve living in the United States of America.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  You will not get, will not get there.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  It's, it's sort of like looking at the stars. You feel both like really small and really big at the same time. Right? I think when you, when you think about like the past, you get these moments of connection to this unbroken chain of human beings. And at the same time feel totally removed from whatever their conception of the world and the tradition that they came from at the same time.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. One, and one of the beauties of hunting is that it's a continuum. However, you define the beginning of history, it's been going on uninterrupted for that long.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Right?

• 14:09Speaker 00

  With only a handful of other things.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you're like-

• 14:12Speaker 00

  There's a handful of activities.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you're into like stand up paddle boarding, you cannot say the same thing about stand up paddle boarding. It's like, you're like, it's a new thing that someone recently thought up. But, but hunting is like, is, you know, pardon me, but it's, it's just more legitimate.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  You know, I was thinking about that recently. I was telling someone, uh, you know who Dusty Baker is, like the baseball player and the manager manages the, um, the Astros right now?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  No, dude, I'm so bad on sports. I got some friends that play special sports and I know about them.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Well, so he's like, he's like 80. He's the manager of the Astros right now. He was a great baseball player for the A's.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Oh, and he's still the manager, he's still the manager at 80? That's good.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But, but this is, this will blow your mind. He got the first high five.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I didn't know that high five had a beginning.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. In the seventies, like in the, in the late six, so like, yeah, some of these things we think are so old are really super new. But you're just like, that guy, his, his, his teammate was coming in from a home run. He had his hand up in the air and so Dusty Baker like put his hand up in the air and then boom. And then this thing that we think is a ubiquitous part of like human culture and connection, like this one guy was there when it happened. So yeah, like we think that we, we, we- We'll never get that kind of of connection deeper, further back than it's it's weird how it's weird how ancient and then also recent like culture is.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Let me uh do this so far astray, but I you taking interest in that makes me want to tell you a thing. I heard a linguist talking about this linguist was explaining their work to someone and they were saying how they were giving a for instance of the kind of thing they're interested in.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And they were talking about a waitress or waiter saying, are you still working on that?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  There was a time when no one had said that.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  And then somehow, right?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  In the seventies, people were not saying, are you still working on that? But somehow it like, right? He's like, this linguist was saying, where did that begin? And how did it do what it did?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  But isn't isn't that it actually is not that far of a of a of a fray? Because like, that's what memes are, right? Like, right now, we think of memes as like funny graphics that spread on the internet. But memes in the Richard Dawkins sense are like ideas that spread, right? Someone comes up with an idea and then people copy it. You think about all these techniques in hunting that at one point did not exist or tools that did not exist. And then someone was like, hey, if you do it this way, you know, it's much better. And then because it actually is better, it beats out the old way of doing things. And that could have, that could have happened over five years. It could have happened to over 5,000 years, right?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  And and we can only guess at it from the art, the archaeological history. But like, all these things were invented by ingenious humans at some point. And now monkeys are picking up on some of them, which is also terrifying.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  In a in my lifetime, I have seen uh things that are now like dominant, sort of the dominant hunting practices. I have seen them emerge. Strategies that have become like adopted by like a large margin of people who are really into a certain discipline. And I always wonder like, but did they really? Do you mean like, it has to be that you're coming back around and rethinking of something? You know.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  That's probably true.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's probably true. You know, I was thinking about this. I went to Budapest right before the pandemic and I sort of knew vaguely that Marcus Aurelius had written chunks of meditations there. And so sort of walking around, you can go in this old Roman camp, you're walking around. And then there's a hot springs that you can sit in. There's a cool one in Big Ben, too, that we were just at. But you're sitting in this hot springs and you know, you're the hot, the cold, the hot and the cold. And you're like, oh, man, this is also something human beings have been doing for thousands of years, like from the same germ, geothermal, like freakish occurrence, hot water's coming up and people are like, life is dusty and disgusting, and it feels good to go from hot to cold. And

• 18:46Speaker 00

  that like, whatever the feeling experience I'm having right now, the most powerful person in the world had in this spot 2000 years ago. That's fucking weird.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  That's good. That's good.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  You know, Marcus Aurelius was talks in meditations a handful of time about hunting boars. And they think he was a hunter that he hunted with the Emperor Hadrian, who was himself a pretty big hunter. I think about what I've read is that like, as a young man, they hunted together, and that this was partly where Hadrian gets the sense that Marcus Aurelius might have what it takes to be emperor. Because Marcus Aurelius is not, he's not Hadrian's son, he's adopted. So five emperors in a row adopt a male heir to become emperor. And so what does he see in this young boy? I've always wondered if it was something while they were hunting, because hunting boar, the Romans hunted them on horses with spears.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  And then they had, they had slaves carry nets also. And I just think about how terrifying and stressful, like, hunting boars with a rifle is not the, the, the least scary thing in the world. I can only imagine chasing them on a horse with a spear, and what you would learn about someone watching how they do that.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd learn a lot about the horse, too.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Well, so one of the people might think it's weird that I have my five-year-old watch videos of somebody hunting. And it came because he likes watching these videos. A friend of mine lives in this ghost town in California, and he makes videos about like going into the mines and doing stuff. And YouTube was like, you might like this other video. And I was like, Clark, I know this person. We should watch this one. And that's how he got into them. But weirdly, why I think the Netflix show and then and the YouTube episodes are so good is that ostensibly, you're hunting an animal. But really, each episode is you going on a journey. You're trying to figure something out. You're trying to do something hard. And then you put in all the work, and then you may or may not

• 20:54Speaker 00

  get rewarded by the end of the episode. Right? And to me, to me, though, the main lesson that I talk to him about over and over again, is actually the episodes where you don't get the animal. Either because you did something wrong, which occasionally happens. But to me, I'm most interested because I'm just working now on this book about temperance or self-discipline. I'm always amazed at the episodes where you have a shot, but it's not quite the shot you want. And then you choose not to take it. Or like, you have two minutes of daylight, like legal daylight left. And then you go, no one would actually see if I waited five minutes longer. But I'm not like, I'm interested in that element

• 21:36Speaker 00

  of your sort of hunting persona, because it seems, it seems like a very cultivated part of who you are. And you talk about it in the outdoor book, and you talk about in the American Buffalo book, that like, the sort of rules that a hunter enforces on themselves are kind of the most important thing.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  There's a, you know, one of the people we regard as sort of one of the fathers of modern wildlife conservation, and also, in some ways, you know, a person who's deeply influential to me, though, he, you know, we never crossed paths, is a guy named Aldo Leopold, who

• 22:18Speaker 01

  His most famous work is Sand County Almanac, right? Which is a, which was basically a collection of things that he'd written during the sort of dark ages of American wildlife, which is around the 1920s.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  He had once said that, you know, ethics is doing the right thing when no one's watching.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  For me, it was a that trying to like as hard as you can adhere to the law and adhere to ethics was, was not, that was learned behavior. We, we took a lot of liberties when we were young, man. You, you just mentioned like legal shooting like, you know? When we were in high school, uh, we would go in and hunt wood ducks in a place where the wood ducks didn't start coming into this pond until after legal light, you know? And we'd hunt it anyway and not really even give it any thought. And it was funny because that had, I had been

• 23:23Speaker 01

  brought up that way. Like I had been brought up where people I grew up around. My dad was a World War II veteran. He had me very old when he was old.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  He hung out with World War II veterans. So these are patriotic people who made tremendous sacrifices for their country, right? But

• 23:44Speaker 01

  they had a very strange relationship, a very selective understanding of like what laws were for and what they were meant to do. They were interested in sort of the spirit

• 23:58Speaker 01

  of the law, like they were more interested in capturing like kind of what the law was getting at.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Rather than all these like intricate components of it.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Also kind of a you can't tell me what to do kind of thing.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Sure. And it was like,

• 24:16Speaker 01

  if you tell me I'm allowed a deer, okay, I accept that I'm allowed a deer. Don't tell me like how to get it and when to get it. Right? So that is like really like, or I'm allowed to catch X number of fish. I'm not allowed to sell them, but how is that your business?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Like, I accept that I'm allowed fifty perch a day, fine. But don't tell me I can't sell them. It's just like, I, I, looking back on it, it's like so hard to understand the mentality, you know? But over the years, um, over the years, I, I became, for, for a variety of reasons, man. I understood why the, I, I understand why the game laws are there. Um, I have faith in and accept how they're, how they're arrived at. Okay? Like, I understand the system and I understand what it's going for. Even things that strike me as like, not a good idea. Or, you know, came about in ways that the laws that are now largely feel obsolete to me.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I do it because it's doing so is you stepping forward and saying, I accept this program. I accept this, this, this mission that we're on. And I'll give blind allegiance to it because I agree with like, the principle of the whole thing. Right? And until that's, i- if something were to happen in the future. Where I would lose that sense, and I could see this being a thing that happened, depending on like socio-political things. That I could see all of a sudden feeling like I was thrust into. You know, like, like forced into like being an outlaw. Right?

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  If, if hunting all of a sudden became because of, because of cultural, social, stuff like hunting became categorically illegal. But I still felt that the wildlife, um, that, that the wildlife management aspect, that, that, that wildlife populations were sustainable and all that. I would have, we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Well, I probably wouldn't be talking to anybody. I'd probably be very, very quiet.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  But right now in America, like we have a, we have, it's gonna sound, yeah, I guess I'm an American, I am an American exceptionalist. We have the best system in the world for managing wildlife. And I, uh, support it. And when you're filming things and distributing media, I think you have on top of that even a, a, a higher obligation to demonstrate a certain behavior.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Well, I do imagine the cameras.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  People pay attention to you, right? Like people are paying attention to you.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Well, I do imagine the cameras keep you honest in the sense that you, you're at, you're, you're, if you're going around breaking the laws, you're also filming yourself doing it. But like, e- even, even the, the legality of it aside, I've always been struck by, you're like, you know what? I know I just tracked this bear or whatever for three days, but I can't quite tell if it's a male or a female, or it's just not the one that I want, right? Like, human beings are really bad at being almost close to what we want. And then say, like, this is what the marshmallow test is, right? Do you want one now or two later, but you gotta wait for the other two? Human beings are incredibly bad at delayed gratification.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  And so I have been struck by the, the virtue of temperance in hunting. It's like, okay, you're there and an okay deer shows up. You don't know if a better one is coming later. Can you say like, I'm comfortable miss, I'm comfortable getting nothing as opposed to rushing this one that I know isn't really what I want?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had so many, you know, I've been lucky in that my, my professional life and my personal passions overlap so perfectly. Um, I've had so many experiences now that if you told me that I could, that all I could do at this point was just like go relive them all, I'd be like, man, that sounds great. Right?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I'd be ha- totally happy with that. I think that getting to that place, like just being able to scratch the itch so thoroughly.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Get you to a spot where like you become you're a little less impetuous, you know, like the, the kind of a lust for not lust for success, but just like the impulsiveness starts to die out in you. You know, when, when I was younger, man, like if, if an opportunity presented itself, even if it wasn't perfect, even if it wasn't what you wanted, it just felt like you're kind of like, who am I to like turn away an opportunity? Yeah. At success. Same way, if I think about being a writer, you know, when I was coming out of graduate school, I took every assignment thing I had every, cause I was like, who am I, like, who do I really think I am to not do this?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  It seems arrogant. Yeah. So someone assigned me a book review of an author that I was intensely jealous of, right? And they wanted a positive review. I'd be like, okay, this is a bitter pill, but

• 29:54Speaker 01

  but I'll do it. Cause who am I not to take this opportunity, right? And uh, and then later you get where you're like, you know what, man? I just got other stuff I'm able to do that I'm more excited about.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I'd, I'd rather just hang tight and work on the stuff that I feel really strongly about. And, and that comes into outdoors. It's funny, cause my older boy is really, he's at an age now, he'll be 12, a couple of days here. Um, he's at an age now where he is really like old enough to understand. He's, he's very passionate, very, very passionate about hunting and fishing.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  I never thought I would say this almost annoyingly, so, um, he does not want to pass up opportunity. Right? It's like, like marshmallow now. He'd take a mini marshmallow now over a bag of jumbos in five minutes. See what I'm saying? It's just like where he's at mentally, man. It's so funny to watch, right? And then you, you kind of hope he sort of quickly gets over, quickly gets over that.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Do you think part of it, and this is something I think about a lot, as obviously the Stoics talk about it, is like detaching from outcomes, right? So if like you really love the opportunity to go hunting, if you really love the tracking, the being outside, the doing the stuff, or if it's writing, or working, or whatever you do, then like you've already succeeded before you've even really started, right? But then if it's really like, no, I'm in this for the hardware, I'm in this for the cash, I'm in this for the fame, I'm in this for the money, or whatever the thing is, the Stoics would say you've put yourself in a pretty precarious position. One, because you might not get what you want, and then two, you have trouble delaying gratification

• 31:48Speaker 00

  because the only reason you're doing this is to get the outcome, and it feels like profoundly painful to pass up a certain outcome now for a better outcome later.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a great point, and one of the things I struggle with as I like sort of like train my kids up in this stuff too, is that in terms of delayed gratification, in terms of like, let me give you for instance. So we were one time calling, we were working a turkey, okay? We're working a wild turkey, and there's a turkey, he's gobbling a lot, we can't call him in, but he's still gobbling a lot, we're kind of moving around, trying to like call him into us, and we come across a snapping turtle, okay? And we're down in his creek bottom, where we're out of view of where the turkey is,

• 32:44Speaker 01

  and I say like, I point to my boy, I'm like, look at this snapping turtle, I was gonna show him how to sneak up behind it and grab one. I grabbed it up, there's two of them, they're coupled, mating in the spring. He wants desperately to keep one of these snapping turtles to eat it, you know? But, I was like, how, you know, you had no way to kill it, you know, you'd have to basically shoot it with a shotgun or something.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  And what about the turkey, right? And in that moment, man, he's totally like, he's ready to be like, well, screw the, the whole thing we've been talking about for weeks. You know? And the whole point, we're here and all like licenses and shit. And in that minute, he's like leaning toward, I'd rather just have this, not even, this isn't even a thing he'd even thought about before.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  It's just like a totally impulsive, right? Opportunistic. We didn't mess with the turtle. We put the turtle back and he went up and getting the turkey. And I don't even know that he really, I don't even know that he's, I don't think that he's even put it in his head yet where he's like, passed up the turtle. Got the turkey. There's a life lesson for you.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  I don't think he's had it. But here's the deal, man, about all this, like, just good being out there mentality. And it is, it's like, it's a, it's a trope in the outdoors. Oh, it's just good being out there. Just good being on the water. Any day fishing, good, bad day fishing, better than a good day working, all these, right?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Things. Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  But,

• 34:17Speaker 01

  but there's a lot to be said about going out and being successful at something. And being willing to like sacrifice about it. So as much as we, as much as people in, in the kind of things I like to do, and I'm sure there's other cases as well. I can't think of, oh yeah, like, you know, you lose a baseball game, I guess. And then you're like, wow, you know, camaraderie and, you know, but listen, man, be honest with yourself. You were out there to win that goddamn game. You know? And, and, and so in this kind of thing, like I, yeah, like the, the, there's a, in, there's an end. In like, there's a thing like in and of itself, there's a thing, like the pursuit is a thing, the skill set is a thing. But like, I, I don't like to bullshit myself so much to think that

• 35:01Speaker 01

  those aren't like intentional thing one learned, intentional things one learns in order to drive an outcome. And driving the outcome is, is like success.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Right? And, and it's like, you, you, it sometimes feels a little dickish to be that, no, it's like better to get what you're after.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Sure. Well, the Stoics would say there's preferred indifference, right? Like indifferent TS, right? So you're like, look, I'm just out here. I'm out here to enjoy myself, but I'm gonna have more fun if I get the outcome than if I don't. Right? Because ultimately, you don't control, right? You don't control what the animal does. You don't control what the weather does. You can adapt to those things. But it's like, look, when you write a book, you want it to be successful. You want it to sell a lot of copies. You want it to hit the New York Times bestseller list. You want it to reach people. But at the end of the day, you better also be happy with what you wrote and be proud that this was the best possible thing you could have done in the part of it that was up to you.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Because ultimately, there could be a hurricane the day it comes out. You could die before it comes out. It could be rejected because it's too far ahead of its time. All these other things could get between you and that outcome. So you do have to find contentment in the process while still trying to follow the process in such a way that you set up your outcome as likely or probable.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  What I would worry about is that if you got to a mental place where you were able to more graciously accept defeat.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Would there be? Would there be an impact on your performance?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Peter Thiel has a good line. Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you get to where it just is like this preferred indifference. Yeah, I worry about there's a phrase, there's a term, I didn't come up with it.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Someone said, he was describing, a friend of mine was describing someone and he said, uh, he has a lot of grr, like G R R R R R R, right? And what that means is, fucking tenacity, man.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Sure, sure.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And that is driven by someone who that having a lot of grr is someone who is is outcome focused.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  But I would say grr is a double edged sword in writing, in golf, probably in hunting, because I've seen you where like when you want it really bad, or you're rushed, or you feel like you don't have like the the clock is ticking, like you're gonna lose your, when you force it, you're never as good as when you're coming from a place of wholeness and patience and uh self mastery, right? So, so that grr can also be, you know, in golf, when you try to hit it really hard, that's when you, that's when you fuck it up.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a, okay, it's a bracketed grr. The grr is a bracketed grr. Within, there's like inviable, there's like parameters to this thing and they're inviable. Within that, and, and, and just in the case we're talking about with, with hunting, in large measure, um, in, in, in this country, in large measure, if you want to know what the right thing to do is, you can 90% of the time find the answer by consulting your state's rulebook. Like, like, the, I'm speaking generally, okay?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Generally speaking, um, ethics as we understand them at this point in time in America are, are, are largely like a, a product, or there's a very tight relationship between our current ethical understanding around hunting and what we have codified into law.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So if one says, within that bracket of legality.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Um, I'm gonna apply maximum gur. And I'm not gonna feel like, I'm not gonna feel like I'm uh too base to say that I really would like to find success here.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you can't be the Zen Buddhist who just doesn't give a shit. You're not gonna get the, you're not gonna get the outcome you want. It's a ten, it's a tension.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. And uh,

• 39:55Speaker 01

  I think about that many, I, I think about that as a parent. I think about that as a person who works. I think about that as a person who fishes and hunts. Sure.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  So transitioning to the, the new book, which I love, one, one thought I had about what we're talking about, and then transitioning to, to that, like you, I also am incredibly blessed in that like my passion and my career are completely overlapped. Like I get to do the thing that I would be doing for free if I didn't get paid for it. I get to read books for a living, write about what I care about. And then I get paid even more money to go talk to people about those things or do this or make videos. Like I get to do what I love. I imagine that left to your own devices, you'd spend a lot of days alone in the woods, right? And I, I mean, obviously you, you must travel a lot for the show and for the business that you've built. How do you, how do you balance that? Like I'm one of the best in the world at what I do.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  I feel very fortunate that I get to do what I, I, I love to do. I'm also paid well for what I do and the like, I should be around at home with my family.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Man, that, yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  That's a primary tension in my life that it would be there. Forget the professional stuff. It's a, it's a primary tension in my life of being like honoring the, honoring my commitment to my family. And honoring.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  The gift.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Like what it is that I instinctually feel like, like I have to be doing. Um, the only way I've found

• 41:36Speaker 01

  to really uh like total peace for me is to go do.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  My calling, or like what I, I don't wanna call it calling, that's not right, to go do my, my discipline, you know, as an outdoorsman, but to do it with my kids.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  He said, I don't have, I don't have the thing, I don't feel like I'm missing out on something. And I do feel like if I don't get out in the woods, like I feel guilty about that. Like, like, I feel like I'm not paying attention to something that needs to be paid attention to. So I get a sense of guilt for that. Um, I get a sense of guilt for not being with my kids. So, the greatest thing, that's what I'll be doing this coming weekend, is like, to be out in the woods with my kids. And then I'm at total peace, cause there's no part of me being like, that I'm not doing either of the things that I'm supposed to do. But in terms of professionally, like traveling, when I was a writer and, you know, one of the same when I was, when I was only, I don't know, that's not only a writer.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  I get it.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Writing was my sole source of income, like, just actually like writing books as my sole source of income. I was gone a lot doing research, like a lot.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  My, my, my, the, the entire time, I've been married to my wife for fourteen years.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  There's never been a time in our relationship when I wasn't gone a lot. So this isn't surprise anybody, right?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  But, that absence, I'd be lying, if, if I came and told you that that absence, that, that frequent absence wasn't the primary tension in my life.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Like, that is the primary tension in my life.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Um, what makes it particularly complicated, is that much of what we have uh, in life, is born of that absence, right? So it, it, it, it's like a real thing. And it became, when my, when I had my first boy,

• 43:43Speaker 01

  uh, and I would be leaving for a work trip, a couple of days wouldn't bother.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  A hunting trip?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Or, or like, yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  A hunting trip, whatever, I had to go away from work for him. If I was leaving to go, yeah, typically if I was like going, uh,

• 44:01Speaker 01

  When he was a little young, I remember sitting, I'll tell you this, I remember sitting in the bathtub with my little boy sobbing.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Cause I had to leave. This is when he was very young. It was like the first time I had to leave for a couple of weeks. And my wife saying, you need to pull it together because you're gonna, you're gonna like,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  give him like a, oh,

• 44:22Speaker 01

  you're gonna traumatize him.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Carry on like this, you know? And another point we got at about this was my wife also saying to me one day. She's like, when you come back and you come home, you expect a certain reception, you know?

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And she said, if it's gonna be that it's not a big deal when you leave, it's not gonna be a big deal when you come home.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And it's like, when you come home, get with the fucking program.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, because the life continued without you. You're the one that, that left. The, the train kept going. You got off the train. Now you're trying to jump back on the train. It can't stop for you.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  No, it's like, people like, kids gotta get up in the morning. They gotta get breakfast. They gotta go to school. It's like, it's not like a welcome home party.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's really hard. Uh, I went through this, uh, with the pandemic because I, I travel a lot for, for speaking, I, my, my, my trips are probably a little shorter than yours. But I was just gone all the time. Whenever an opportunity would come up, I would take it because this is my job and how long are the opportunities going to be there, right? It feels arrogant to say no to them. Then the pandemic happened and I spent like 550 days, like in a row, not gone, right? Like we went, we went places, like we, yeah, like we, we drove, we took like the camper.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Away from your family. Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Just let's say we, we went to like, I put my kids to bed 500 plus times in a row.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  And you're just like, wow, okay, this is something, it's made it so much harder to be gone now. Like I just was in New York and Florida and Chicago. And like, whereas before I'd be like, oh, spend an extra day in New York. I'll meet some people. Now I'm like, now I'm like, what is the fastest I can be in and out because uh, the opportunity costs of being gone became so much more vivid and real to me. It's been, it's hard to shake it, but you do like, you, you, that's also not sustainable, right? And it's, so it's, it's a tension I'm thinking about a lot myself lately.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we uh, well, when the pandemic hit, we were coming back from a family trip in Baja. So I'd already been with my kids for a week, came home, had to do two week international travel quarantine. Then everything kind of was chaotic and I didn't have to travel. And uh, and at six weeks, we were like, there is like, absolutely. I have never spent six consecutive weeks with any of my kids. And dude, I loved it, man. The only thing I got sick of, the only thing I got sick of was waking up making coffee. I started to think there's gotta be like another way.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Cause I felt like every morning walking to that coffee pot for that many weeks in a row felt weird.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  What's weird too, though, is like, you're like, I gotta be home. I feel guilty when I'm gone. So like, I like, I finished a book in like January and now I'm just going through the, the page proofs of it now. Uh, and, and so I'm, I'm not writing, writing, right? Like I'm not in the creative writing space. Like I'm, I'm doing the administrative bullshit that goes into like finishing a book, which is, which is not creatively fulfilling, right? And I can actually feel like when, when you do, when you have like a calling or a gift at what you do, there's also a cost to not doing it, right? So if you were like, you know what? My kids need me. I'm going to stop hunting. I'm going to stay at home for the next year and see what happens. I imagine you'd be a lot less fun to be around and a lot less you,

• 48:01Speaker 00

  because you don't have the outlet, you don't have the thing that's fulfilling you and giving you purpose outside of the home. Like I, I know I need to start a project soon. Or my wife's going to be like, you gotta get the fuck out of here. Uh, because yeah, we can feel that energy, we can feel the pent upness inside you. Because I think part of the reason people become really good at a thing is to, to solve some sort of, you know, ennui or pain or, you know, but you, you get good at a thing and it becomes kind of therapeutic. And then if you don't do the thing, then whatever that untreated part of you, it comes bubbling back up. You know what I mean?

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing I like to tell myself to uh, make me feel better about everything is I tell myself that, well,

• 48:50Speaker 01

  one day, one day, I shouldn't have gotten in trouble for this, but I did, is uh, Me and my buddy Tony took his kids and my kids, so we're me and my buddy Tony and all of our kids go clam digging.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  But one thing that leaves you know, it's a school night. One thing leaves you know, we're out like way late, right? So I'm thinking though that like, how could like, if you take one thing, as you know, if you're a parent with kids, the one way you can always win is take the kids to do something like, there's no way anyone's gonna get mad at you.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  It's like, the it's the greatest gift you can give anybody to take everybody and leave. Like, no one's gonna get that, or so you think.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  But we wind up, uh, I get, I'm on the phone, my wife, she's not happy with me. Um, about the time. And my buddy Tony says, and I told my wife, this is why I always laugh about, my buddy Tony says, if we were the way they wanted us to be, they wouldn't like us. And my wife's like, that's so fucking untrue.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  She's like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  But it's true. It's definitely true. It's definitely true.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  I used to wanna write a book. We used to laugh about it. I was gonna call it whipped, but I think now I'd call it homebody. Cause I wanted to stay home for a whole year, like not go anywhere for a whole year and write it like, it'd be like a book that only I would enjoy. But uh, write a book about what it's like to sleep in the same bed 365 nights in a row.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  We were saying that you're saying, like, am I really standing here brushing my teeth again?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  What were you saying about not being, uh, being home for six weeks? Like, I don't think I'd not gone a couple of months without traveling since I myself was a kid, right? Cause like, we would go on trip, like, like never in my life had I been like, not on an airplane for, you know, at least a couple of times a month. And then to not do that, you're like, well, like, so we live on this small ranch outside of Austin. And it was like, for me, what I do spring is like one of the busiest times. And so I've lived there seven, eight years. And it was like, oh shit, we've been missing most of blackberry season like every year. And we just like, we're not aware of it, you know? And, and because we were just physically not there.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  And and you you don't full you don't fully realize what you're missing when you've internalized a sort of a nomadic busy life that's fulfilling and challenging, but also there is something to be said about being still for a minute.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I saw a new friend of mine very recently. He was we were having the same conversation about the impacts of the pandemic and how it changed things. And he's he's talked about all the all of a sudden, he's working from home and doing all of his phone calls from home.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  He's like, the things I learned about my yard, like, I never really looked at my yard.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  He said, spent so many hours every day, like, walking around, looking at my plants and looking at my garden and like contemplating one of my trees. He's like, man, like, I just immersed in it, you know, and it was great, right?

• 52:15Speaker 00

  My my favorite part of the the Outdoor Kids book is the story you're telling. This actually kind of pertains to exactly that. Your kids are playing on some mountain and they're like, oh, like, I almost got bit by a scorpion. And you were like, there's no scorpion. There's absolutely no scorpion. And and and of course, this made them upset. And so you said, well, fine, find me the scorpion, which they promptly did, which is one of my rules, which is like, whenever my kids, they're like, I just saw a monkey riding a bicycle by the side of the road. I never go like, no, you didn't, because they're right like 100% of the time, even if that thing is like, literally or physically

• 52:55Speaker 00

  impossible. Somehow, that's like, they never lie, they always, but they're just so much more present than I am. They notice the most absurd things, which is to me a reminder. I thought that was great. Your kids, your kids see something, don't instinctively tell them that it's not there. Get them to prove to you that it's there, because you'll be surprised by what they manage to find being like, your kids are never like, oh, I had no idea what my yard looks like. They know exactly what your yard looks like.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the the scorpion thing was funny, because we had recently, you know, something about being a baha. So when the pandemic hit, they had.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Someone had given them a black light. Okay, and I didn't even know this, but scorpions luminesce.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yes, it's terr- it's terrifying.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Oh, like, like, it's like, it looks like a, like a man-made creation, you know what I mean?

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, like a robot thing or something.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  All these trails out in the desert with this black light, and I mean, these friggin scorpions, man, they're like, right? Looks like a glow-in-the-dark toy laying there. Uh, I didn't know that about scorpions. So they were real keyed up on scorpions. I had never, ever, ever seen a scorpion in Montana, um, and thought they were very far in the south, but yeah, wound up being the northern, uh, the northern scorpion. So I learned a lot, and I'll talk about the book on that same trip. I had never found like a big block of ochre, which indigenous people used for dyes and all kinds of things, and it's a,

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Cave paintings too, right?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Common artifact, yeah, they mix it with animal grease, so mix it with animal fat to make paints and skin dyes. Uh, they found a big block of ochre and independently arrived at the idea that it makes a good skin pigment, you know? Uh, so yeah, you do, you do need to give a lot of credit. There's a story we always laugh about, my, my older boy, where one day we walked out of a friend, we were staying at a friend's place, and we walked out and he's like, there's a coyote, and I look up, I don't see a coyote. I'm like, Jimmy, what are you talking about? And also it's like, there's a weasel. And I'm like, James, knock it off. I'm looking like,

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  There's a weasel.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  At this point, like, you're right. At this point, when he says he saw something, I'm like, okay, where?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Well, and, and it's like, are you a person who encourages the curiosity or you shut the curiosity down with your jaded cynical, I've seen it all before-ness? Right? So like, like, I think it's better to go like, oh, tell me about it. What is it? You know, I do the same thing when, when they tell me like random facts, you know, that they heard on a video or something. I'm like, really? Is that true? And then we Google it and probably eighty percent of the time, it's like, Like, you know, we read some book and it was like, you know, owls don't poop or something. And, and he's like, that's not true. And I was like, if it says it in the book, it's probably true, you know? And then he was like, well, I think we need to Google it. And we Google it and it turns out the book is wrong and he's right. And it's like, this is exactly

• 56:00Speaker 00

  what you want. You want them to challenge things. And you want to, you want to go get the information as opposed to shutting it down and being like, I know more.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  It really, I'm bad. I'm good about natural observations. I'm bad when they're relaying videos to me. It's, it's just like, it's a, it's a real, that's one of my weaknesses as a parent is taking in information picked up from videos. But I've got them trained up good where I'm like, do not ever come to me and say, there's a video where? It needs to be, where was the video? And how did you become aware of the video? Then tell me the story. So now they'll come up and be like, there's a YouTube video. Uh, my

• 56:52Speaker 01

  friend Teddy sent it to me. And then they'll tell me the story. I'm like, okay, now I'm tracking, but I just gotta know, is it school? Is it like a friend? Like, what are we talking about?

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think what I liked about the book is, okay, first off, the idea of outdoor kids and indoor world. Great title. Even if people don't read the book, like, buy the book and be like, I got 90% of what I need from the title itself. Like, to me, that's a great mantra as a parent, right? Like, great book, a great idea, outdoor kids, indoor world. But I think the two feed off of each other. Like, part of the reason we went on this Big Ben trip, even though we'd just been a year ago, is that he'd watched a video where you were in Big Ben, right? And so I think one of the things we've tried to do is like, you can sort of instinctively be opposed to screen time, which would be ironic for people like you and me that make things that go on screens. But like, provided

• 57:52Speaker 00

  That the screens are stimulating interest in the outside world. That's great, right? So we try to think about stuff that way, like, like. Let's watch videos about places that we're gonna go, or let's watch videos about things we're gonna do. So we took a trip to LA and it's like, we watched all these travel vlogs about going to LA. And then he wanted to do a bunch of things like go on this streetcar and go to this and this and this. That like, frankly, if I just said, we're going to LA, he'd have been like, what is that?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yep. I think what one, one.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  You know, in, in naming the book, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, I was like, I was.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  It's like an acknowledgement.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  It's not like, I don't, I don't imagine it so much as it's not meant to be like a condemnation of the inside world. It's more like to say that like, there is an intense gravity, an intense gravity that pulls kids inside now. And as I bring up again and again in the book, that gravity is made much greater.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  With the prevalence of screens. It's just, they are.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Powerful, right? Like, like media has a powerful pull. And this comes from a person that's like, I make it for a living.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  There is. What's processed foods versus natural foods? One is.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  More addictive than the other.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  It is a daily conversation in my house. There's a daily conversation, often a daily argument about. Use of screens, right? It could be this, it could be like, that doesn't look like your homework to me.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Right?

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  And then you gotta be like, well, no, because I'm actually was, while I was Googling.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  You know, the Han dynasty, but now I'm watching people have airsoft wars like, like, you know, like. But you know, it really relates, you know, whatever, like, it's just like, it never ends. It never ends.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  But I, uh, like the approach I take rather than, than, than this naive idea that I'm gonna raise kids unaware of it. Not that I even have any desire to, because one of my kids. Thinks he wants to be a writer. And I'm like, that's a.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Great idea, right? So what that means in the, the, the present day is like, you know, you're involved in media. I'm not gonna act like it doesn't think, but I do, like you're saying, encourage a deliberate. Consumption of it.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  You know, um, I don't like them to just get on like I, I don't like them to, to go to YouTube and just start consuming what's served.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Right. It's like, is there an objective? Like, what is the objective right now? Like, what, what path are you going down and take some control like, like, remember the path, take some control about the path you're on. We do it very much with, we do it very much with books when, when my kids were young. I, man, our books were about natural, like, we had a lot of kind of books. The ones that we went out and deliberately got, I got books about natural history, animals, dinosaurs, evolution, right? Hunting.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's the bird book you mentioned? Uh, Bird Song Bible?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Bird Song Bible. That's the most important book we own.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  It's a large format bird book that has an audio player in it. I'm sure at this point it's probably gone to an app, maybe. I don't know, but you just type, man, my kids love it. You type in the number and it gives you the bird's vocalization. I'm on my second one. It's a phenomenal book. The other most important children's book, uh, my brother in Alaska sent it to me many years ago. It was called Possum. Um, well, as funny as I have the book, it's hardcover, Robert McClum. You cannot find this book. I've looked because I wanted to gift it to people. It tells the story. I, I, I tell, I, I, I like give a synopsis of this book in Outdoor Kids and an Inside World.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  I, I give a synopsis of the book and why I like it. It tells the story of a possum mother who's pregnant.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  And she sets off with her young and there is terrible attrition

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  of the offspring. A snapping turtle, an owl, a car, a snake. Meanwhile, they're eating baby mice. They're stealing bird eggs from birds. They're the bane of my existence. In the end, there's one female left.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  She meets a male. They spend one night together. She then has thirteen

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  babies. She only has eleven nipples. Two of the babies starved to death. And then the book ends.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Great for kids. Dude, it is, man. It's the cycle of life in there. Cause my kids are like, I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna come tell anybody my kids are perfect. They're far cry from perfect. My kids, the thing that's important to me is my kids are pretty tuned in to the fact that there's life and there's death. Yeah. And it does, they do not live in fear of it. And they do not think that they can somehow avoid that reality. And when you put something in their hands, they never say ew.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Ever. Ever.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Right? They'll eat anything. They'll, they'll weigh it by what it tastes like. They do not weigh it by what it is. There's no like, you could tell them anything. I, I could be like, uh, it's a house cat. And they'd be, okay. See how it tastes.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  We've been dealing with that because like from the pandemic and then living out in the country, like our kids are like feral animals. We've been having to work on some civilization. Like, look, hey, at this pool, you have to wear a swimsuit and you can't just pee wherever you want. It's not like other people have rules. Like, sorry, you know, you can't, you can't do that here.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  You know what we just did as funny man is uh, my wife went and found like, it's like, the 13 most important table manners.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  And she printed it off and it lives on the dining room table. And there's

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  That's a good idea.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. Instead of every night trying to arbitrarily half ass like enforce certain manners, she's now like 50% of the nights, like last night was not, was not a manners night. Tonight is a manners night. Lay that print out on the table and you need to abide by these 13 rules. The goal being, the goal being, when we're going into a thing, we're going into a restaurant, it's manners night.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Can you turn it on and off as opposed to blindly, blindly follow it?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Because we realized that we cannot get out of them, blind, universal adherence because it doesn't work because of this reason. You're all of a sudden at a picnic and everybody's you're like running around playing frisbee with a hamburger in your hand. And their minds don't work that way. So then you go like, well, don't eat, like, don't get up without being excused. But, but last night I was running around playing frisbee with a hamburger in my hand. You know, so it has to be that it's on or off. We're going to try that now. That's what we're trying right now.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  No, that's great. I love that.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Rather than always kind of on.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  I got one last question for you. One of the things, one of my favorite passages when I was rereading it, because I read American Buffalo before I had kids, then I read it, it hits you differently. As they say, you can't step in the same river twice. You talked about your dad quite a bit in American Buffalo, but you talked about this thing that goes through your head every time you're hunting, this test, which to me is an interesting stoic thing. You're like, am I being pragmatic or am I being a candy ass? And how do you think about that in life? And then also with kids, because it is, it's like, I try to be expedient. I try to be smart. I do, I try not to do things that are stupid. At the same time, I don't want to be a wuss, you know? And so how do you think about that balance?

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  And what's that voice that's running through your head even now from, from what you got from your dad?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I still, I have a version of it still. I can think of just, you know, a few days ago, making a decision like that where there was a thing, you know, out where I was out hunting in a wilderness area. And there was two options and they were, they were like at face value was like six in one and a half dozen in the other. Right? Potential outcome. One was four miles more away.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I like, in the end, I was like, I have to do the four mile away one. Because why is it in my head that I'm leaning toward the other one? Like, am I allowing that? Like, is there some reluctance to walk over there? And so then I'm like, I'm just going to dispatch the, and I'm going to do that one. Cause I'm going to make myself do the one that's that way.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Do the harder one?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to be the kind of person that subconsciously is like ruling out labor. With my kids, what I, the, the primary thing I find it is that I want them to learn things. But it's harder to have them help.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Cleaning fish, cleaning fish, I can do it faster and better.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Right? It'll take three times as long and all the flakes will be messed up.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  If they do it. If you're like a person that's like, kind of like a perfectionist and shit, that shit's hard. But like, I force myself to be like, I'm gonna do the longer, less perfect version. Because if they don't learn this now, they'll never learn it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Do you think about that voice in your head? There's a great Bruce Springsteen thing where he says like, are you an ancestor or a ghost to your kids? Right? Like, are you, what voice, what voice in your head are they? And I think about, unfortunately, a lot of the things I have from my dad are not like positive, like life building up things. They're unfortunately negative. How do you think about, because ultimately, we are the voice in our kids' heads, right? How do you think about the voice that you put in their head?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Man, my dad did a lot of great things. My dad did a lot, as a dad, he did a lot of great things. He did a lot of horrible things. I'd like to say that I, I'd, I'd like to think that I am bringing to my kids

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  those good things that I learned from him.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  And I like to think that I am intentionally filtering out

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  the bad things, though I understand every impulse that must have been driving him.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Right? I'm like, man, I know why you did what you did. I can see it now. I don't like it. You shouldn't have. But I understand. This shit is frustrating. It's hard to raise kids, you know?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  That's where that self-discipline comes in, right? The like, I could do this. I could probably get away with this. It's not illegal to do this. But it's not right to do this.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I do it all the time, man. I may, you know, I'll lay in bed at night and I'll be like, you know what? Like parenting shit. I'll be like, that, that's gotta end. You cannot do that anymore. You can't freak out on everybody like that.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  You're gonna fuck it up.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  I, I, there's not a single time I've ever lost my temper around my family that afterwards I was like, proud of myself. You know, it never ages well.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Oh, no, like, why God, that was the right thing to do.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  No, I've always, oh my god.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  When anytime I'm frustrated or rushed afterwards, I'm like, I cared about that? Like what? Or you know what I mean? Like you're like, uh, like you walk into our garage, it's all covered. They were drawing all over the garage. And I remember I was upset the first time I saw it. Now every time I walk by, I see the crayons on the garage. It makes me happy, right? And so why couldn't I, why couldn't I have been there? You know what I mean? I have no plans to sell this house. And even if I do, how, how hard is it going to be to cover up some crayons? But I took it, you know, at the time, I inheriting from my parents, like, you know, you can't drink that in the car. You're going to spill it all over the place. Who gives a shit? You know, in retrospect, who gives a shit?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's vaxing and, and I'll tell you that, uh, I think about this book.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  The minute we found out my wife was pregnant,

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  12 years and nine months ago, whatever. My agent, uh, who I've been with a long time, he knows.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Mark, right?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, uh, Mark Gerald. He's like, man, you gotta write a book about

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  how you're gonna sort of like handle your kids and, and your relationship with nature. Like, how will you impart that on them? How will you give them what you got? You know? And so I think it's a little premature right now, right? But he, like, and it gradually became my own idea. I became to own the idea. But it took, rather than, uh, you know, it took me this many years to land in a spot where now I have a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, a 12-year-old. I've landed in a spot where I'm not going to come and say to someone, I would never present myself as a parenting expert

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  or something, but when it comes to like kids and nature, um, I have racked up.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  A level of subject matter expertise about like the hands-on, practical aspects of it. Right? And a lot of lessons learned. And I definitely present the, in the book, I present the ways and where I feel like I've messed up, where I've fallen short, what I've learned that I think would be good for parents to know who, parents who do want their kids to feel at home, at eye level with nature, right? Like, I feel that there's a lot in there, but man, I am not perfect as a dad, I'm not perfect as a husband. I've never act like I am.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  I would be very suspicious of anyone that claims otherwise. They're probably the worst. Like, you know what I mean?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what's funny about that? Is whenever someone tells me how bad their kids are, I'm always like, I bet your kids are pretty great.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  The parent who's like, oh dude, my kids are nuts. I'm like, I bet they're all right.

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  No, I think about that whenever, like, my wife's like, am I doing enough? Am I screwing up? Like, are we depriving them of something? I go, you know who's not thinking about that? The people that are actually not doing enough and depriving their kids. Like, that you're even thinking about the question. You're like, my parents weren't thinking about that question, right? And like, like, my parents didn't, didn't think about if I was getting enough water or not. You know, like, I was just asking my mother-in-law. I was like, ever once did you think about whether Samantha was hydrated? And she's like, I've never considered that in my life. And I'm like, and yet you probably got upset when she threw a temper tantrum or she was acting weird. It's like, there's just the things that they weren't even aware to care about. You know, you're doing fine. Like, you're doing great.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's funny, the dehydration thing. Yeah, that's hilarious.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  I think 90% of the time, they're hungry, they're tired, or they're dehydrated. That's why they're acting like a crazy person. Not because they're shitty.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Not because you raised an asshole.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  You've forgotten that, man. It's on you. Well, dude, this is amazing. I love, I love the new book. This one, I think, is an all-time classic. And the two hunting books are great, and I've used them both and cooked many things from them.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Great. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk about it, man. I really, it's kind of you to do it.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  All right. Well, I'll talk to you soon.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.