Steven Rinella On Rockhounding, Stoic Wisdom & Controlling The Process

0:00I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is Eight Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

0:38It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. and then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, head over to eightsleep.com slash Daily Stoic and use code Daily Stoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it, but I know you will.

1:20Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in BetterSleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash DailyStoic. My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore.

1:52Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

2:30Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:20Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm down here by the gulf with my family spending a little time at the beach putting the finishing tushes on the Justice Book before that goes into production. It's been awesome. It's very, very hot. We're escaping the heat dome in Texas, slightly different heat dome here in Florida, but at least we've got the ocean. It's amazing. Funny story, I was picking up some food for everyone and my wife and I swung by Books A Million, which is a chain we don't really get where we are. It's always good. I like to check out different bookstores.

3:55And I pop in and I see there's a huge doicism section, which is pretty cool. And my wife says, congratulations on popularizing the school of philosophy. Did you ever think that would happen? because trust me, when I used to go to Borders, right, where I bought my first copy of Meditations, they didn't have anything like that. And they had a bunch of my books right near that section. It was actually in like the self-help or something like that. But anyways, I went over to one of the store employees and I said, hey, this is kind of awkward, but you have like a ton of my books. Do you want me to sign them?

4:26And the guy goes, not really, which was embarrassing. And we had to slowly back out of the store. always good to be to be humbled the next day we went to sundog which is one of the great indie bookstores in the south and signed a bunch of my books a couple days later went back they'd sold out all of them and they had new ones so always love supporting the folks at sundog anyways that leads me to today's guest which is a book we have been reading every night as a family from one of my son's favorite authors and my favorite authors. The fact that we can already share one is pretty cool. Talking about the one and only Steve Rinella.

5:08Steve Rinella wrote this amazing book called American Buffalo, which is about this hunt. And he goes on for American Buffalo, tells great story of the American West and megafauna in the United States. One of my favorites. We sell that in the painted porch. He also wrote, he is also the creator of Meat Eater, which is a great podcast, a great YouTube channel, a great Netflix series. My son and I watch those videos together all the time. We used to watch them before he would go to bed. He wanted to FaceTime with Steve before we started the interview, so you might hear a pop of that for a second.

5:42But I really love Steve's last book, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, which I have raved about. I have told a million people about it. I would carry that at the Painted Porch, too. You'll definitely like it. But the new book, Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars, fun project skills and adventures for outdoor kids. There's a ton of stuff in here for families and kids alike. I am a huge Steve Rinella fan. I've raved about his stuff many, many times for very good reason. You can follow Meat Eater on YouTube. You can follow Steve Rinella on all social platforms. Listen to his podcast. Watch the Netflix show.

6:21Get Outdoor Kids in an Indoor World. read that first love it then with your kids read catch a crayfish count the stars if you don't have kids you're just an outdoor person uh grab his meat eater series books and then uh if you're just looking for a great book of narrative non-fiction one of my all-time favorites do check out american buffalo which is just one of my all-time favorites i had steve on the podcast for outdoor kids in indoor world so you can listen to that also and uh without further ado here's my interview with the one and only Stephen Rinell. This isn't in the studio. We did it over Skype.

6:55There was a little bit of lag here and there, so you might hear some slight strange edits, but we had a great time, and it's always a pleasure talking to one of my favorite people.

7:19so i thought we'd start with um i thought we'd start with rock hounding which uh was an unexpected favorite in the book in our household i don't think they like obviously you you love rocks as a kid and I don't think you anticipate once you get older and you stop liking rocks that suddenly rocks are going to become part of your life again yeah um we used to use them primarily to to huck at stuff right yes uh skipping throwing at signs whatever but I didn't grow up you know it's funny I didn't grow up in a great rock area here well I grew up in Michigan I'm in I'm actually in the house I grew up in right now because I'm visiting my mother and um it's sand you know very few artifacts around uh just a big glacial deposition of sand here so I like to be honest with you I didn't grow up with a huge enthusiasm for them because there's just not a lot of cool stuff to find in this little corner of Michigan where I grew up um there was a petoskey stone which is a state stone and it's a fossil you could find way north but then i've spent so much of my adult life out in in the rocky mountains where fossil hunting is prime man like prime prime rock hunting um some of the you know i feel like some of the best rock hunting around is around our area so i've gotten really into it i'm trying to turn my kids on to it as well well it's it's um It's a reminder of sort of how simple the thing has to be for a human to manage to get excited about it.

9:00We're in Texas, so it's kind of a good rock area, I guess, in some sense. But we live on this dirt road. And the amount of excitement that my kids will get about what is essentially ordinary gravel is pretty remarkable. Or, oh, hey, this rock, you know, water's clearly fallen on this rock, so part of it's worn away. Or this rock is in a weird shape. I mean, they'll come home from school some days and I'll be like, why is your backpack so heavy? And it will be because it's filled with rocks, you know, just rocks that they've decided are special. When, of course, they're, you know, they're not aside from the fact that they have decided they're special.

9:38And then that's one of, I think, the amazing things about having kids is because they get excited about it, it helps you develop a habit that gets you excited about seemingly ordinary stuff. yeah one of the coolest things i wrote about this in a in one of my books the coolest kind of rock things that happened is we were out turkey hunting one time and my kids were messing around on this hillside and they came down and uh their their faces were all yellow and they had found some ochre and ochre was historically used by various Native American groups as a face paint and as a dye and it struck me as really funny that they would and they didn't have any awareness of the historical uses of ochre but that they would find it and very quickly hit upon this ancestral use for the thing and wind up using it as this face coloration.

10:50Right, that they would intuit the historical use of a thing that goes back thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, it would hit them the same way. And another funny incident we had is my daughter, who's standing to the left of me right here. We got a metal detector. Yeah. and one day we were digging down to um trying to unearth an object that we had struck with metal detector and we found a stone projectile point okay so what you know traditionally be known as an indian arrowhead and the amount of times i explained not to their satisfaction that the metal detector had not flagged that. It was coincidental.

11:49It was like a collateral find on the way to a piece of rusty metal. I'd be like, no, no, no, you don't understand. This wasn't what the metal detector was talking about. No, it's funny. I'm reading this biography of Thoreau right now that's really interesting. And I marked this passage. I was going to talk to you about it. So he's walking in the woods in Concord. And he says, how often have they stood on this very spot at this very hour? Here he went on, stood Tatawhan. Or what is it? Tatawhan. He said, and there is his arrowhead. He said, it was a mere rhetorical flourish, the gesture of a boy playing Indians.

12:34But when he impulsively stooped to complete the scene, and picked up the nearest bit of rock, it turned out to be, quote, a most perfect arrowhead as sharp as if it just came from the hands of the Indian fabricator. And he goes on to say that his whole life, Thoreau has this almost magical luck of always being able to find the best arrowheads, which, you know, in his time, obviously he's a tad closer to, you know, people actually using them in those very spots. but I just you know we think of Thoreau as this philosopher which he was and then there is this other part of him that's just like a boy who likes to play in the woods and that's what comes through in the philosophy so much um the real heyday of of arrowhead you know arrowhead picking the real heyday was during the 30s the 20s and 30s people developed this fascination with picking up projectile points um you can imagine like how good it must have been back then but i mean things are so picked over now but i had i had the experience one time of going up to the brooks range the north slope of the brooks range on the arctic slope and we were actually in an area that you know it would be sort of mathematically the most the remotest place in in north america in terms of distance to high distance to roads distance to towns um and you can get a glimpse into what it was like at one point in time because when you go to a likely place like the confluence two streams it would have a good flat bench uh the ground would be littered with it littered with it like no it just hadn't been picked up yet and uh so yeah the fact that throw was doing good i mean yeah because people hadn't flagged yet that they were of interest you know but what contradicts that a little bit interesting way is they there's some cliff dwelling sites where they have found in the cliff dwelling sites they had found ice age projectile points um the supposition being that even these much later people right these archaic aged people would look at those projectile points and recognize in them something unusual you know like something that warranted collection because diagnostically it wasn't their technology right but so you had people who would you know you had people who made who worked in stone points picking a thing up and being like, you see that?

15:22That's really old. That's old, man. It is funny, right? Yeah, because to us, the past all kind of blurs together. Ancient is ancient. We forget, I've been talking about this recently, but we forget people in the past lived in the present, right? So their technology, they would have seen in some ways as superior or newer, right and so they would have been fascinated by things that to us you know cutting the arrowhead this way versus this way doesn't seem like a radical technological invention or you know doing it this way or that way but yeah they would have noticed that that was old and and yeah why would human beings in the past have not been interested in things that were from far away then that that's just the basic sense of human wonder and a connection to tradition that of course we share Yeah, there's a lot of amazing, you know, it's funny to use the word technology, but there's a lot of these technological achievements in the creation of stone tools that would progress and regress, you know, in cultures that would use abrasion to shape things.

16:38and then other cultures would come later on that same landscape and use a different style of thing and then it'd go back. It's interesting, man, in terms of trying to turn, you know, dealing with children is it gives you this, like you said, it's this thing that have this natural movement toward sharp rock, you know, anything capable of destruction, and then use it as this kind of launch way into talking about these really complex things. and discussing that these places where we live were occupied by entirely different people with entirely different religious structures and entirely different sense of what it means to own property, entirely different sense of family dynamic, like completely different.

17:29Culture has just walked right here and killed shit with stones. It blows their mind, man. Yeah, my kids went to this camp not far from us in Texas a couple of months ago. And, you know, it's this old ranch, right? It's like the original, it's one of the original settlers with Stephen F. Austin or whatever. So, you know, it dates back to early 1800s. This guy gets a land grant, builds this cool ranch. You can go, there's a mill, you know, that he had. You can see his old stone house. You know, I'm sort of walking along. It's all, you know, you're sort of on one historical timeline, you know, 200 years.

18:10It feels very old. You know, this waterfall he's using as a gristmill, you know, his house, which is in ruins, made out of these blocks. It looks exactly the same as this, you know, a cinder block house going up in construction now. I'm sort of struck by this. And then I'm walking along and my kids had told me there was this cave there. They were at the camp and I was exploring the area after I dropped them off. And I'm walking and I find this cave they've been talking about. I'm reading the sign next to the cave. Well, the cave has been a host to Native peoples, it says, for 8 ,000 years, right?

18:46And so suddenly the scale of the history that I'm sort of soaking in goes from like this to like, you know, and you realize 200 years is nothing and that the people have been hunting and lighting fires and getting out of a storm in this overhang, slaughtering animals, whatever, for 8 ,000 years. Yeah. Yeah. It stretches the limits of my imagination, let alone the imaginations of little kids who you're trying to get them to embrace some of the complexity of the planet, right? Yeah. I mean, you even see this in literature, right? Like, I think all these, all these writers with names that are hard to pronounce seem like they came from roughly the same period.

19:33I was, I remember in Mark Surreale's Meditations, you know, he talks a lot about Euripides, the playwright. And I'm like, okay, so he must have been like, I don't know, like a contemporary playwright. Or, okay, no, he's Greek. So that's like a couple hundred years back or whatever. I'm looking it up. you know, Euripides has been dead for like six, 700 years by the time Marcus Aurelius is getting around to quoting him. So first off, just that a single piece of literature in the ancient world is 800 years. Like in ancient Rome, this guy is quoting from memory in his journal, a piece of literature, like a play that's, you know, multiple centuries old.

20:15And then, And some of those plays survive in their totality to us. In some cases, all we have are these little fragments. But you're just like, this playwright that he's quoting is older to him than Shakespeare is to me. And so the sense of the past that people in the past had, I think we don't spend a lot of time trying to put ourselves in those shoes. But yeah, what must a hunter in the year 500 AD have thought of a stone age hunter? How could they have conceived of that? Just like when those same hunters and then later people discovered the dinosaurs, they couldn't comprehend millions of years ago.

21:02They were thinking these things must be a couple thousand years old or that these animals must still be alive. You know what I wanted to, I keep wanting to back you up because I want to, why you read, I'm curious what drew you to reading Thoreau, why you read Thoreau? Well, I, I weirdly, I read this fascinating biography of Emerson first, uh, and then I wanted to read Thoreau next. Um, but I, I mean, these are probably the two greatest American philosophers, uh, who, who have, who have an interesting connection to the Stoics too. And so, I don't know, I'm just, I'm just always interested in people who are interesting.

21:40uh thoreau's famous line which i think i quote in the obstacle is the way he says um you know the purpose of philosophy is not to have subtle thoughts it's to solve the problems of life not theoretically but practically and uh that's the kind of philosophy that that gets me really excited the the famous line from thoreau that i quote in the obstacle is the way he says um the the purpose of the philosopher is not to have subtle thoughts it's uh he says it is to solve the problems of life not theoretically but practically and that's the kind of philosophy that gets me really excited he he got i had an interesting kind of a funny thing happen around through always you know i've you know i studied literature in school and did a graduate degree in writing so I'd always been brushing up against Thoreau you know your whole life my whole education career and then long ago I read a piece in Harper's I think it was in Harper's back when like Harper's Magazine was kind of at its like ascendant position and there was a guy talking about basically arguing and I can't remember the full thing arguing about what a phony Thoreau was and how his whole like going to spend all this time at Walden pond, you know, he was kind of down the road from his mom's house and what a mom was boy.

23:07He was, and he's always back and forth from his mom's. And basically the, he did, I can't, I had to go revisit the thing. He basically just, uh, did a version. You can imagine someone today of, of writing a nonfiction book and then having it be like, it was like, well, you know, not quite, not quite sure. went down so i mean what's it i'd made some comment on my show i'd made some comment about thoreau being a candy ass and that's just i was just like making a stupid comment you know then later i read this article and and my candy ass is a term my dad always used as like a derision for for someone who was weak and uh the other day someone used the term candy bucket which I liked a lot but so I see this like headline in a magazine and it's sort of like battle cry of the candy ass or whatever it was I was like that's weird because that's like a word that I like you just don't see that word yeah I know it well and I want to be in this criticism of this blowhard podcast host who would dare call Thoreau a candy ass I mean the the couple of the crazy things about the row i mean number one his dad owns a pencil factory which seems you know sort of incomprehensibly modern you know like like that that's where he would make his money his dad he worked in his dad's uh pencil factory and then the other i mean he he writes this he goes to walden he writes this great book at walden obviously he also writes this book of this river cruise that he does uh which i've read parts of um and uh you know he was a school teacher as far as i understand yeah i don't think he's some you know courageous mountain man necessarily but i yeah he clearly he clearly was a guy who enjoyed the outdoors more than the average person you know what i mean uh sure and he's he's endlessly quotable yeah he was writing about stuff that people weren't writing about at the time um and like i said it was just like a stupid offhanded remark, you know, but just kind of just funny how it's funny how there are for all these figures, you know, there are people, the thing that blew me away.

25:30I don't know if you really admire them and you can't be casual. You can't be casual. The thing that blew me away, one of the sort of throwaway lines in Walden is he talks about how they would come out to Walden Pond every winter and cut ice, right, from the pond, which they would ship as far as Calcutta. So like, you don't think of - Really? You don't think of, yeah, you don't think of global trade in the 1830s or 40s, but yeah, they would boston was cold they would cut ice from walden pond pack it with sawdust in ships and it would go all over the u.s if you had a mint julep in new orleans in 1840 you know you're probably sipping ice cut from you know somewhere like walden pond but but the shit yeah that's something i had that's something i didn't retain yeah you think of this triangle trade you know the guys trading ice with a british ship which is heading to you know british india and uh you're drinking the same ice that uh you know that that that thoreau watched freeze over from from the windows of his cabin yeah that's cool that's pretty cool all right i got i got one other quote for you i wanted to get into that that uh i i was thinking about um the throat one of my favorite no no this is a theodore roosevelt quote uh which i thought you might like he's talking he's on this long hunt He was hunting after a bull caribou, I think.

27:01He ends up getting it, right? But he says it was one of those moments that repay the hunter for days of toil and hardship. That is if he needs repayment and does not find life in the wilderness pleasure enough in itself. How have you, are you an outcome guy when you're out there or are you a process guy? i'd say both in equal measure um if it wasn't if it wasn't really fun if hunting wasn't really fun i wouldn't do it you know but if it didn't yield tangible result i wouldn't do it either i i don't you know my kids and my wife they like to go skiing i just i don't get it i don't get it there's no thing that you bring home in the end um i have a very i'm very extractive you know i'm very you know there's even a term i've heard this when people are trying to lump outdoor activities there's this term you hear more and more where you have consumptive and non-consumptive users and hunters and anglers are lumped under consumptive users and then hikers bikers skiers whatever would be your non-consumptive users i don't really like where that's going but it's pretty true um there's a consumptive element that you can get into obvious considerations around it being sustainable.

28:49Sure. Ultimately helpful, right? It's not destructive. Yeah. But it's consumptive. But if I have to enjoy the process, you know, if I hated to be out in the woods and I hated the act of hunting but i just love to eat wild game um i would probably just settle i would just fall into some different eating habit you know sure but the fact that it produces the fact that it produces something that i really really want and i really really like to do it it's like what more can you ask um but if you pulled either of those away it would lose all of it for me also besides just the tan the tangible usable part of that we eat a lot of fish and game um last night for dinner we had halibut and lingcod and shrimp that we caught we had green beans that we grew we had tomatoes that my mom grew um that's our diet right uh even beyond the edible part, I like the other parts, you know, I, I keep all kinds of skulls around and antlers around as a, as things, well, there was a big wildfire that was not really, but there was potentially a threat to our home a few years ago.

30:27And I was out of town and I instructed my kid we have this little kiddie swimming pool you know i told him if you got a split i want you to throw all those skulls into that pool um i didn't advise him on how to salvage anything else in the house you know it's like the thing i want like i wanted it i don't want it to go away because all that stuff means a lot to me so i'm very result you know very result but i'm It's a real process. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck.

31:18What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. and by we I mean not just my wife but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck.

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34:00Are you a results guy in the rest of life also? Like I have tended to find that as a writer, I've gotten better the more process oriented I am and the less outcome oriented I am in the sense that the process is something I control and the outcome is somewhat dependent on things outside of my control. No, I only like things after I've made them. I don't really enjoy any part of the things I make. I just like them a lot when they're done. I like them a lot when they're done. I feel like shit when I'm not doing them, but I don't like doing them. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, there's a writing...

34:45There's a writing quote, painters like painting, writers like having written. Yeah, no, I'm familiar with that. I've misquoted that a bunch of times. And it's like, I feel if I'm supposed to be writing something or need to write something, I can't be, I'm miserable when I'm not doing it. Even though I'm trying to entertain myself in other ways, in the back of my head, knowing that I need to do it is ruining whatever I'm doing. then when I'm doing it I resent what I'm doing because if I was get if I had it done I would be able to go do the thing I was trying to do but couldn't enjoy because I hadn't done what I'm doing and then when I'm done done then I love it then I love it but is is your sense of pride in having done it intrinsic or is it in some way dependent on reception or appreciation or success?

35:45No, not entirely dependent. I could do something that's unsuccessful. We're working on a project right now. I don't know. It might be unsuccessful. I could picture it being unsuccessful, but I'll be very glad we did it. Yes. If I'm doing a thing that I'm not even like, if if I wind up working on a thing that I have doubts about whether it's really the best thing I should be working on and then I do it and it's not received well then it seems like a real blow if it's a thing where I'm like listen if you don't if people don't like this that's their problem they're stupid because this is this is fascinating right um then I'll still I'll I'll I can suffer a lack of success on it.

36:34Yeah. You know, and I can be like, listen, man, that thing is totally cool. Um, I've always wondered about that. I'm so glad we got, I got to spend time learning all about that. And if people aren't interested in it, screw them, you know, and I can go on, but it's just those things that you kind of aren't wholly committed to, but you then do them real well. And you kind of in the back of your head, you're like, I don't know if I should, is this really what I want to be working on right now? And then no one likes it. Then you're like, well, I knew I should have seen something in the back of my head told me, you know, the disorienting ones are, you know, that you, you come in and they're like, okay, today we need you to shoot X or, Hey, we want you to write a piece about this, right?

37:18Or your publisher's like, what about something like this? And there's that part of you that's like, I don't no, that doesn't really get me excited. But you know, you know that you're not always right. So you do it, then you sort of have these feelings as you're going along. Are you, are you phoning it in? Are you being phony? You know, all this. And then it, then it like, then it crushes. That's almost the worst, right? Like then it does well, because then you're like, now I don't even know if I can trust my gut on what I should be doing or not. And then, and then you're like, should I like it because other people like it or was my own internal reticence or uh you know doubts about this was that actually like the voice of conscience in some way and then you're just like you know what I don't fucking know I'll just I don't know nobody knows anything I've had I've had some examples like that one but when I first started out as a magazine writer um

38:19i would get you dream of getting an assignment you know and i established myself as a magazine writer but it's doing work sure and submitting it you know like submitting self-assignments yeah yeah be like i'd write a thing and shop it around yeah and eventually i got where i'd get assignments and the assignments were never quite what i would have shopped around and I found myself in this position of needing to try to be like okay let's say I was interested in this how would I approach it I would pretend I'd pretend to be interested in it sure you know like let's say a guy was interested in this subject he probably would and I felt like going through that and I can't think of anything I ever was assigned that, that did that.

39:15I never got an assignment and I thought to myself, I don't feel like doing this. And then it wound up working or wound up being a great hit for me. So that kind of reinforced in me, not that, not that, uh, other people's ideas aren't good just that i'm not good at i'm not good at the pretending part i'm not good at pretending to be interested i i have a lot of respect for these writers that have this huge breath and just can go do anything and they can always find a way to make it their own i work with a collaborator savannah ashure we we do these we do these series called campfire stories and it's we we do them for random house audio and they're these audio originals we've done some called close calls and it's people telling near-death experiences sure in people telling near-death experiences in um you know mountaineers wildland firefighters hunters whatever and there's like interstitial narration but Savannah's great strength is that of the lifestyle she really couldn't give a shit yeah um and when we're all hung up on you know someone saying a tree would have been a certain kind of tree but if you think about it it couldn't have been that kind of tree because of where he was you know this is not her thing um um And she's able to just focus on, like, outside of this personal understanding, just focus on, like, quality and merit.

41:01Yeah. Without the noise of subject matter expertise. And she learned that because she used to work at a trade publication. And they did a lot of, like, enthusiast publications. And she, over the years, got to where, like, oh, okay, I don't know, cross-stitching? Sure. How do we do the best project possible on cross-stitching? I'm not a cross stitcher, but I know how to put stuff together. And that just become like an expertise she has is to be able to apply a really good editorial sensibility, a good producer sensibility, and just apply it and do it without needing to have personal passion. Yes.

41:45In the space. And that's a great skill, man. It's a great skill. And I just like, I, I, I lack it. I lack it. No, I probably, I've written hundreds and hundreds of press releases over the years, like for different people, for clients and stuff. And that's a weird one. Cause like, first off, it's almost always boring, but that person is excited about it, right? They're announcing this thing that by definition they are excited about. It's news to them. Right. And the ability to sort of try to figure out how to come up with some voice of excitement about this thing that is not news. Because if it was news, someone would be asking you about it.

42:28Instead, you're announcing the thing. And I also just see that as just simple hours doing the thing. Those were just reps that I got over the years writing stuff. And yeah, there is this tension between you're shaped in your life by all the things you had to do that you didn't necessarily want to do. Like you probably took some of those assignments because you just plain needed the money, right? Oh, yeah. You're just trying to provide for yourself. And then as you get successful, right, there's less and less that you have to do that you don't want to do. And so how do you continue to be shaped and get your hours and develop and get better when you have a certain amount of control and discretion over your choices?

43:14Like I think about this in the sense that Like, I basically don't do anything. Like, people invite me to go to stuff I like never attend. I don't like going to parties. I don't like going to events. Like, I'm out of the scene. There's so many things that I would like to do before I voluntarily attend this conference that I'm not being paid to speak at, right? Right. And so yet when I look back on my life, how many of my relationships and friendships and business things that how many have come from things that I went to that I didn't necessarily want to go to, but I had to go to. Right. And so I go, you know, what am I sometimes I think about what I'm missing out on by the fact that now I have the option to not go and I choose not to go.

44:01yeah i uh i have a similar thing that happens and it's it's it's convenient where i'll now and then want to go do something but it's not really justifiable from a from a business perspective you know and i'll feel a little bit guilty about going to something or doing some activity that's pulling me away from more pressing issues yes but then i'll make some i'll meet some guy or hear some story yes and then that story will wind up in however minor however minor way that story will find its way into my work or i'll learn about some little thing you know like homet yeah you had you have a cattle rustling problem and then a year later right i'll be doing a thing on livestock fab and i'll say to myself you see just goes to show yes yes anytime i'm out screwing around it's good it was good that i i i think about stuff that i've like you know it's like i should be reading a book.

45:16And then I think of something and it's like, where did I learn that again? Oh, I was flipping through an in-flight magazine on a Southwest flight nine years ago, you know, or whatever, like, like this random stuff that you, you found when you weren't looking. And then, you know, I think as you get more control and you, you know, suddenly things revolve around you a little bit more, maybe you're missing out on some of those, those opportunities and you don't even know what you're missing um i just i lost my train of thought there uh say that again real quick because i missed you don't even know what you're missing you know you don't even notice the random connections you're not making or the things you're learning you know i used to uh have a thing i would wonder about when when i was gone and traveling and people would say to me oh you're so lucky you make your living x y or z you make your living you make your living hunting you make your living fishing um and i you know i used to be really eager to correct them and be like no it's not true it's not what happens um like I make my living as a writer, right?

46:42I make my living doing a thing where the, the, the, the work I do is app is outside of that. Sure. Right. The thing I bring to the table is an ability to go do a thing to do some activity, adventure, whatever, and then translate it into words, whether it's on a page or recorded, that's the work. and and i say that in a little way because it was kind of like defensive a defensive posture to say that to clarify there's more to the story than that sure but really um the older i get more i think about it i think that there actually is some truth to that because especially when in considering artificial intelligence and some of the things we're talking about now would be you imagine that you have an object and then you have the object's shadow right in written word recorded word is the shadow of an object meaning you've you've experienced the thing beheld the thing whatever and that's the thing and then the material you make about it is that thing's shadow, it's captured some way.

48:04As we see that words and styles can be just captured, can be created

48:20by computers, you realize that what you are bringing to the table perhaps is that you're having a set of experiences or a set of thoughts that hasn't been put down yet to be harvested that hasn't been put down yet to be harvested by computers sure right like everything that they have to work with is stuff that we've put down yeah so when you're doing a thing that hasn't even been captured by anyone yet that's the ip you're creating the material yeah you're like you're beholding the object you know and then and then if if the ability to put words down becomes cheapened over time because we can create machinery to make to construct sentences what you still hold is the thing like what you can't harvest my thought i haven't had it yet when i have it i'll be the first person to put it down.

49:24I'll be the first person to put it down. So when I'm out doing what would be like my research or my experiences or going on that trip to look for projectile points on the North Slope or whatever I'm up to, in that moment, I'm having the... That's where the... That's the origination. Right. That's what will become something that's captured forevermore digitally. The creative act is the creation of a new combination of experiences. The fact that your DNA has never been in that place, witnessing that thing, doing whatever it is. All of that is the singular genesis of something that hasn't existed.

50:23and actually detailing what's happened or what was seen is is not the skill the skill is making the thing exist for the first time yeah so i used to clarify oh no i don't go on trips for a living i write for a living but maybe in the future i'll be like no no no i think for a living i think for a living well it's funny like i do a lot of talks and the the the joke is um you know they're not paying you to deliver the talk they're paying you to get on the plane yeah yeah to go ahead they're paying you to go there and be in the place right um to go that's that's that's the scarce thing um i think about do you ever um when you maybe early on in your writing career did you ever did you ever get any pleasure satisfaction of like writing down things that other people had written like like copying down quotes or oh you mean transcribing when you write something that like Hemingway or something had written have you ever done that I'm trying to understand what you mean do you mean that I'm sorry have you ever typed up you know like somebody else's writing and kind of felt like Hemingway go through your fingers or oh no but I hear people doing that and I can't remember what writer I was reading about that was writing another writer's writing just to get a sense of the cadence.

51:45Yeah. No, man, I've never done that. I don't. No, no, I've never done that. And I never would do that. I it gave me an interesting insight into AI because I do that whenever I like so I here's your book, right? I have like little things that I marked that were interesting to me, right? I was reading it to my son. And I was like, Oh, I'm gonna go back and look at that. This is a row book, right? I'm not that far into it. So I'll go back through and I'll type up the stuff that I liked, right? That I then keep for research or stuff that I'm writing in the future. And sometimes I'll just write it in a Gmail, like in Gmail, write in an email to myself.

52:24So I'm not opening a Word document, saving it. I'll just type it in an email. And so this is, obviously there's AI. If you've ever written an email in Gmail, right? It suggests how you want to finish that sentence. You know, yeah. Yeah. And so even when they're right, I changed my mind. Yes. Well, but what was interesting to me is so AI is supposed to be this collection of basically all the insights of all literature, everything ever made. So you'd think, right, if there is a quote unquote, right way to finish a sentence, if I am writing a sentence that has already been written, right, a classic sentence from Hemingway or Thoreau or Steve Rinella or whatever, right, You'd think AI would be able to guess the end of that sentence properly, but it not only never guesses it, what it suggests is never better than what this great person suggested.

53:20You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. No, that's a good point. So I'm not saying AI is worthless, but I am saying that I totally agree with the premise that going and having the experience is 90 % of it. But the decision of where to go, the unlimited options of how a sentence could go or how an experience could be detailed, that taste, that taste is still worth something. And it's very, very difficult to replace. It's probably easy to replace someone who's not very good, but if you're great, one of my favorite expressions from the economist Tyler Cowen, who's talked a lot about AI, he says average is over.

54:03Basically, it's really hard to be mediocre in the world we're going into.

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55:34I uh what do you call that when you have a book I always use them what do you call that when you have a little quote in the beginning of your book from some other writer an epigraph yeah an epigraph do you ever look at like of all the stuff I've written and I've written a lot of pages I sometimes worry that I haven't, that I'm not, I don't have any like Twain, Oscar Wilde, all these people that just get quoted again and again and again. They got quotes on all this shit, you know, Aldo Leopold. Like, I've never generated, I can't think if I've generated a sentence yet that would ever turn up as someone else's epigraph.

56:16And that always kind of bums me out, man. Like, I don't think I have, like how did Twain or Oscar Wilde, I mean, every paragraph these guys have, there's some shit that's like quoted everywhere. And then people can't remember who they're quoting. They mess up the quotes. You know, like, uh, I never let schooling get in the way of my education. Right. Twain. I haven't generated any of that shit. See, I bet you have. I just pulled up. I just pulled up your name on Goodreads. Ultimately, they're not that great, right? See, I just pulled up your quotes on Goodreads, and I can see all the chunks of your writing that people have highlighted over and over and over again.

57:03And it's definitely there. Well, when you find one, no, when you find one in an epigraph to another writer's book, you let me know, man. Or on a t-shirt, let me know. it i would i would disagree in the sense that if i'm have you ever picked an epigraph from a still living writer how do you cut out say that again sorry have you ever picked an epigraph from a still living writer you got to go further back you know what i mean no man i use still living writers dude i used uh the hell's his name in my buffalo book i used a still living writer and it was a guy i had met i just can't remember his name as the epigraph for for american buffalo oh wow he wasn't even that terribly i mean he was older than me what was his name man i met him because he kind of like he was an avant-garde short story writer of some sort and he kind of rolled through the missoula literary community I would say epigraphs favor the dead so you can only evaluate someone's quotability as a writer after at least several decades right it's you got you got to have a you gotta you're too early and it's like you're not you're not even eligible for the hall of fame yet no no but I just like I just don't know yeah maybe I'm maybe I'm alarmed and I don't need to be alarmed yet but I just think of of of of all the shit i have written that i haven't thrown off like a real gem a free like a freestanding a freestanding you know something on par with i never let schooling get in the way of my education like i how would i have not have thrown that off you know it's it's It's troubling to me, man.

59:03It's a real problem. I need to start thinking in terms of quotes and not thinking in terms of books. Well, I love the new book. I was going to ask you a couple of questions on it. It feels like even from the title, at the core of it, I mean, you see it in the cover also, but it feels like at the core of it, it's about wonder, right? It's about the stuff that kind of blows your mind. I mean, obviously, there's little pedestrian things in the book, like little fun projects. But I think what's so wonderful about kids and nature, and then maybe what nature lets us recapture as adults, is the sense of being immersed in, subsumed in something so much bigger than you can even comprehend, or more powerful than you can ever even imagine.

59:54that's what I think it's very important to establish in in young kids my oldest kid is 13 so I've been a dad for that you know that long I have an eight-year-old a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old the main thing I care about right now is instilling in them

1:00:18a sense of wonder and respect and adventure around nature and the natural world. That's what I care about. I am not yet interested in the doom and gloom. In fact, two nights ago, I had a conversation with my 13-year-old where at school, he's getting fed so much doom and gloom that he's almost in tears about how it's all over yeah and needing to um undo that i think that he can mourn if he's going to be told that it's all over the earth is ruined it's all over if he absorbs that at 13 i i i think there's a very good chance that you're going to wind up with a very apathetic 20 year old.

1:01:25I'm not there yet. Kids aren't, in my view, it's not time yet. Time right now, even if you had, even if you were just looking at future generations as being the potential saviors of the planet um make them love it first sure let up like not make let them love it first yeah we will soon begin talking about challenges but right now we're in the we're in the um you know like the cycles of like a romantic relationship we're in the infatuation phase and that's where i i think kids need to be for a long time is in the infatuation phase was it's also the phase of of having agency that that things can be improved and changed like to go back to this thoreau thing uh you know when we think of new England, we think of New England as a place with lots of trees, right?

1:02:38It's like this beautiful, dense wooded area. Well, one of the things he talks about in the book is that was not Thoreau's New England. The reason he goes to Walden Pond is to get into the forest because almost all of New England has been clear cut. The average person needed like 25 quarts of firewood to get through a single Boston winter. His dad owns a pencil factory. They had cut every imaginable tree in the 200 years that settlers had been in New England at that time. So that's all new. When you go to New England and you see trees now, that's not what it looked like not that long ago, right?

1:03:21Because they've all grown back because people realized, hey, this is a bad thing to do. So that's not to minimize where we are with the climate crisis or anything. But it is to say that, you know, the moment that you're in now is not how it potentially will always be. That human history has been a cycle of overuse and fallow, overuse and fallow, and improvements and breakthroughs. And that, yeah, the idea that we are past the point of no return, even if that were true, I'm not sure that's what a 13-year-old needs to be told.

1:04:03yeah it's a it's it only struck me the other night that how alarmed i was about how um

1:04:15how alarmed i became and i'm gonna i'm gonna think about it more and probably do things about it more and concentrate more on it is the sequencing of of how we kind of roll out to our kids the challenges we face and the trend line and the trend lines because they're not good at I made the mistake years ago several years ago I made the mistake of telling all three of my kids that in four billion years the sun would be burned out yeah and i just told that in passing it's just like an interesting little tidbit the sun would burn out in four billion years and man we didn't talk about anything else for weeks as i tried to backpedal and explain like well i need to try to i'm gonna try to explain what four billion years means but dude they had it that like shit really you know grandma's gonna die grandma's gonna die so it's like there's a there's a

1:05:32they're just they're they're they're we need to create room we just need to create room for kids to um

1:05:44nature is dynamic and the natural world is incredibly dynamic but we need to create room for them to see some kind of sense of uh of rhythm and in in a sense of staticness right because if not there's just there's so much upheaval culturally but to create in them an idea that nature, like I said, wild dynamic. There's all these things, populations going up and down. Lilypad beds that were there last year, but then you go and they're not there now. And seasonality. You go to Grandma's one June and there's like bluegills spawning a lower place. You go to Grandma's the next June and you can't find a bluegill.

1:06:33It's dynamic in a way that they can live and see, but I, but I hesitate to, I hesitate to overcomplexify, uh, natural environments and natural places. Cause I want them at first just to see it as something that's fairly inviting and soothing. Yes. Well, and that it, uh, that it abides, right. That, that, you know, things are always happening and to with few exceptions this stuff will always be there that you know this tree not only uh is older than the united states but it's older than the mona lisa you know it's older than uh uh you know shakespeare you know that it goes that far back and that that again it sort of gives you that zoom out perspective.

1:07:32It also gives you that sort of humility. It also gives you the sense that like, yeah, that sort of nature and the world kind of has its own pace and that its own rhythms. And that, yeah, the beautiful thing about going out in nature is to be able to tap into that and to ride along it for however long you can be in it until you have to go back to the crazy real world. The other thing that what I what I like about this, though, like in the title, especially right, there's catch a crayfish, right, which is as minor and little and silly as it gets. And then there's it's consultive, which is it's consult.

1:08:13Sure, sure. But then count the stars, which is beautiful and majestic as it gets right. When I grew up, we would catch them off the pier in Lake Tahoe. We call them crawdads. But it's a hot dog on the end of a coat hanger. It's as unmajestic as you can get. And then that same night you're watching the stars come up over the lake, it's as beautiful as it gets. But they're sort of two sides of the same coin. Yeah, that was intentional. and we you know in thinking of good titles it always becomes kind of a communal project with people i live with and talk to and friends and stuff i'll usually start with some really unwieldy subtitle i'm a big like a working subtitle uh but yeah i think i wanted to capture that and I also wanted to have a nod toward that consumptive use because again the way I go with my kids is we catch a lot of stuff to eat and we grow a lot of stuff to eat and there are forces and people that try to push in them an idea that they're doing something wrong by not getting with the program in terms of buying your food, buying your protein.

1:09:47People really want you to buy your protein from stores. And even in elementary school, there are a lot of kids and teachers and things that are unhappy with someone that would not do that. These aren't people that don't eat meat. They're just unhappy that you would go get your own. It seems very barbaric and wrong to them. Sure. So one of the things in the book is introducing this idea, which I've gone through great pains to introduce to my kids, of responsible, responsible, consumptive use and well-considered consumptive use. And that's in there. And also a lot about danger. in risk, you know, you got like, when I start out in the book, I talk about, you're going to find hatchets and drills and machetes and blow guns in here.

1:10:54I learned while writing the book, there's a, how to make a blow gun thing. And I learned while writing a book that in California, even if you made the blow gun in the book, you would be in violation of the law uh so there's a lot of like kind of naughtiness you know around danger around dangerous stuff and making bows and it's not just nostalgia for one we were kids and would play with fireworks and shoot bows all day but i think that there's like a little bit of risk taking and being smart about risk um and learning how to work with a hatchet you know with with parental supervision learning how to drill holes in something with preventable parental supervision so that stuff was real important to me too is just developing mechanical skills you know tool use right uh because you could grow up now just the way things are so specialized you can grow up now without getting a lot of tool use in sure and then later it can feel very clumsy to you to work with your hands and so by introducing tool use and fabrication and learning how to MacGyver shit together like learning how to do that and play is like a great substitute for the days when you used to have to put your five-year-olds to work out in the fields and they would learn tool use but also have a real limit on their imagination right but so I think that that was important to me too and putting it together is just to start, you know, finding ways for kids to like kind of make stuff, you know, and figure things out and cut things and put holes in them and fasten them together.

1:12:40All that stuff is, I think, really strong for kids cognitively, right? Well, and it's, it creates, I think, an awareness that is really important. Like my, my, one of my kids goes, they both went, but one of them still there goes to this sort of out outdoor nature school that is amazing. The classroom's outside. You know, they go on hikes every day. They learn about plants and animals and wildlife and all this stuff. But like, there's a fire at the school every day. There is a open fire at the school every day, right? And in one sense, it's kind of terrifying, right? I think you wouldn't want, you know, kids fire is not a great combination, which is why they all have to learn how to be around a fire.

1:13:27Like, you know, kids are so sort of clumsy and not in control or command of their bodies. And it's good for them to learn awareness of like, hey, the stakes of the stuff that we're doing are high. You're not just sitting in a desk and nothing bad can happen to you. Like if you're not listening, if you're not paying attention, you could get hurt. They were fishing at the school the other day and the kids weren't following, the kids weren't listening to the instructor or to the teacher, they were splashing around throwing stuff in the water. So of course, they weren't catching any fish, right? So they're learning the lesson of why you have to listen, because listening is contingent, or the outcome they want is contingent on following the instructions.

1:14:10These aren't made up behavioral rules. These are rules that, hey, if you aren't responsible in the water, you're not going to catch the fish that you want. in my writing I've used a few times I've used a term called you know arena making an arena of consequence and that's one of the things I like about nature and bringing kids into nature is uh that you do enter into that that that place of confidence you know if you're sneaking up on a fish to catch uh if you're like creeping up on a cutthroat trout in a creek to catch him and you spook him he's gone man he ain't coming back you know right you can reboot all you want but it's over and i and i like that kind of stuff and i also like that little bit of physical risk around fire making and other things yeah it's like it it and it creates a need to to be aware and also i think is really important is a beginning to develop a way to be cool-headed and not and not excitable um and the way you develop cool-headedness and the lack of excitability is being in a lot of positions where not being cool headed and being excitable cause trouble.

1:15:39That's what I see. That's the people who I see overcome that stuff is it's overcome through exposure. Yeah, right. Why doesn't a fireman's or a firefighter or a police officer or special, why don't they freak out in a high stakes, dangerous situation? It's because they've been in that situation in real life a bunch of times, and they've trained themselves in that situation. You know, nature is wonderful and beautiful and fun. It's also incredibly frustrating. And you have to, it teaches, it forces you to figure out how to contain and manage that frustration or it'll rip your heart out. unfortunately i haven't found that management skill to be transferable outside of nature because i can tolerate i can avoid frustration with natural systems um you know bad weather streaks like it's frustrating uh weather events that you know stop you from doing something you wanted to do outside and I can cope, but, uh, problems with my laptop problems with my phone.

1:16:51I cannot bring that same level of, you know, I've developed the skill in some areas of my life, but it's not wholehearted. And, and it's, you know, ironically, because we're talking about kids, I have, I struggle and I've always struggled to, um, not sometimes just want to pull my hair out. Yeah. And dealing with kids, you know, like even last night, I'm like, why has it been bedtime for about an hour and a half? Like, yeah, I haven't said to him, you guys, you have taken up much more of my time tonight and this whole getting into bed thing. Then I was planning on giving this. I'm going to lose my mind if you don't get in that bed.

1:17:40Right. But I would never talk that way to a bluegill. Well, I think the key is, I mean, the number one source of frustration in life is other people. And if we can start to see people traffic, you know, politics, et cetera, as a function of nature as the human species doing what it does i do find that a bit more tolerable i hope maybe it would all be way worse if i hadn't learned to deal with it and if i hadn't learned to deal with it in nature but what's funny is just these universals yesterday my boy got his fishing rod so tangled up he was almost in tears dude and it was funny because it happened like i said i'm at my mom's house and i remember being his age and being in tears about a tangled up fishing rod and just waiting for my dad to come home and untangle my rod and here he was you know yeah 40 40 years later whatever the hell some 30 some years later like on the same shoreline with the same kind of tangle and the same like but that's the best that's also just so the best that's that's that's amazing that's just so that's so beautiful and perfect and uh probably the perfect place to uh to wrap up the full circle of it 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 i'll see you next episode.

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