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

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're out there to win that goddamn game [Music] [Laughter] 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 uh 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 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 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 boat talking about ice age you know the ice age hunters yeah and um what the problem there is is we'll never ever ever know i mean barring some like incredibly just embark barring some incredible scientific breakthrough that i can't even understand that would like border into metaphysics uh i don't think we're ever gonna know um 10 000 years ago 11 000 years ago 12 whatever what those people thought about anything yes like what they thought about anything man and even the stuff they left behind carvings and things uh yes you just never know uh i was reading recently about a there's a mammoth hunting culture in siberia they found these two children that were buried with 500 beads made of mammoth tusk ivory uh why right sure there's no one to ask but 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 to have alina one we've never seen a javelina out in central texas um 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 yeah i think so man 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 binds them is like a real reverence for animals a deep desire to understand animals but man 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 way people used to you know people used to imagine that all these animate and inanimate objects had some sort of desires and individuality do you know i mean it's like it's you you feel like you you you feel a connection to it because the discipline is so similar right like they're they are the the animals are have the animals are unchanged right they haven't gone through a cognitive revolution like the animals are unchanged 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 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 uh you know you for some reason it feels good to think that maybe you maybe you can approach that level of understanding that people might have had for their environment but then it's good this might be strained a little too far forward what you're asking but i spent time with amer indians in south america hunting with people who uh hunting with people who hunt 200 hunt fish 250 days a year within a 50-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 the level of understanding they have for their environment far exceeds anything you will achieve living in the united states of america you will not get will not get there 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 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 yes right with only a handful of other things like there's a handful of activities yeah if you're into like stand-up paddleboarding you cannot say the same thing about stand-up paddleboarding it's like you're like it's a new thing that someone recently thought up well but hunting is like is you know it's pardon me but it's just more legitimate epictetus said that philosophy wasn't this dry abstract thing it was a thing he said you should be talking about writing down reading about exploring with other people all the time he said constantly have it at hand that's how i think about philosophy and it's weird for the last five years every single day i've been writing this free email about stoic philosophy it's been not just cool to meet all these fellow practitioners of snow philosophy but in writing about it talking about it reading it for our podcast i have got to internalize these ideas in a way that i never would have been able to under any other circumstances that's the idea philosophy is something you're supposed to engage in not keeping these dusty old books or read once and be done with it's a constant process and i think that's why the email has worked so well for the people reading about it and sharing it and talking about it all of that as well so i'd love to have you join us on this email you can sign up at dailystoke.com daily email it's totally free no spam you can unsubscribe whatever you want i've basically given away a book for free every single year for five years and i'm going to keep on doing it until i drop dead check it out dailystoke.com daily email 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 he manages the um the astros right now no dude that's what they had on sports i got some friends that played special sports and i know about them 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 ace oh he's still the man he's still a manager at 80. that's good yeah yeah but but this is this will blow your mind he got the first high five is that right like yeah like one of his teammates was at the beginning yeah in the 70s like in the in the late 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 if we think that we we will never get that kind of of connection deeper further back than it's weird how it's weird how ancient and then also recent like culture is let me uh do this so far australia you're 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 and they were talking about a waitress or waiter saying are you still working on that yeah there was a time when no one had said that and then somehow right in the 70s 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 but isn't isn't that it actually is not that far of uh afraid 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 uh 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 over 5 000 years right and and we can only guess at it from the uh 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 in uh 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 i mean like it has to be that you're coming back around and rethinking of something you know that's probably true yeah yeah that's probably true you know i was thinking about this i i went to to budapest uh 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 um there's a hot springs that you can sit in there's a cool one in big bend too that we were just at but um you're sitting in this hot springs and you know 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 is coming up and people are like life is dusty and disgusting and it feels good to go from hot to cold and 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 [ __ ] weird that's good that's good you know mark marcus surrealist was uh 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 i think about uh that that 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 uh to be emperor because mark surrealist is not he's not hadrian's son he's adopted so five emperors in a row adopt a male heir to become emperor uh and so what does he see in this young boy i've always wondered if it was something wow they were hunting because hunting the romans hunted them on horses with spears and then they had they had slaves carrying 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 yeah you'd learn a lot about the horse too that's right well so one of the people might think it's weird that i i have my five-year-old watch videos of somebody hunting uh 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 oh you might like this other video and i was like clark i know this person we should watch this one and that's how we got into them but weirdly why i think the the the the netflix show and 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 uh you put in all the work and then you may or may not get rewarded by the end of the episode right yeah 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 um either because you did something wrong which occasionally happens but to me i'm most interested because i'm i'm just working now in 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 gonna like i'm interested in that element 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 um 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 uh is a guy named aldo leopold who uh his most famous work is sand county almanac right which is a which was basically a collection of things that he had written during the sort of dark ages of american wildlife which is around the 1920s um he had once said that you know ethics is doing the right thing when no one's watching um for me it it it was uh that trying to like as hard as you can adhere to the law and adhere to ethics uh was was not that was learned behavior uh we we took a lot of liberties when we were young man you just mentioned like legal shooting light 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 done it anyway and not really even give it any thought and it was funny because that had i had been 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 he hung out with world war ii veterans so these are patriotic people who made tremendous sacrifices for their country right but 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 of the law like they were more interested in capturing like kind of what the law was getting at rather than all these like intricate components of it and so kind of you can't tell me what to do kind of thing sure and it was like if you tell me i'm allowed a deer okay i accept that i'm allowed to dear don't tell me like how to get it and when together right so then it's 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 like i accept that i'm allowed 50 purge a day fine but don't tell me i can't sell them it's like looking back on 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 understand why the 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 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 i do it because it's doing so is you stepping forward and saying i accept this program i accept 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 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 yeah 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 while the 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 but right now in america like we have a we have it's gonna sound but 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 higher obligation to demonstrate a certain behavior because people pay attention to you right like people are paying attention to you well i do imagine the cameras keep you honest in the sense that you you're out you're you're if you're going around breaking the laws you're also filming yourself doing it but like even even though 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 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 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 and so i have been struck by 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 yeah i've had so many you know i've been lucky in that my in that my professional life and personal passions overlap so perfectly um i've had so many experiences now that if you told me that i could did all i could do at this point was just like go relive them all i'd be like man that sounds great right yeah i'd be hap totally happy with that i think that getting to that place like just being able to scratch the itch um so thoroughly get you to a spot where like you become you're a little bit less impetuous you know like the the kind of uh lost for not loss for success but just like the impulsiveness starts to die out in you you know when i was younger man like if if opportunity presented itself um even if it wasn't perfect even if it wasn't what you wanted it just felt like you 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 ever because i was like who am i like who do i really think i am to not do this 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 but i'll do it because who am i not to take this opportunity right you know 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 that i'm not i'd rather just hang tight and work on the stuff that i feel really strongly about and that comes in the outdoors it's funny because my older boy is really he's at age now he'll be 12 a couple days here um he's at age now where he is really like old enough to understand he's very passionate very very passionate about hunting and fishing 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 i'm saying it's just like where he's at mentally man it's so funny to watch right and then you kind of hope he sort of quickly gets over quickly gets over there do you think part of it is something i i think about a lot is obviously the stokes 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 the the money or whatever the thing is the stoics would say you put yourself in a pretty precarious position one because you might not get what you want and then two you you have trouble delaying gratification 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 yeah uh 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'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 uh we're out of view with where the turkey is and i say like i point to my boy i'm like look at the snap turtle i was gonna show them how to sneak up behind and grab when i grab 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 yeah i was like how you doing no way to kill it you know you got to basically shoot it with a shotgun or something um 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 [ __ ] and in that minute he's like leaning toward i'd rather just have this not this isn't even a thing he'd even thought about before yeah yeah 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 getting the turkey and i don't even know that he really i don't even know that he's i don't think he's 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 i don't think he's at 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 bettering a good day working all these right things yeah but but uh 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 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 so in this kind of thing like i j yeah like th there's a in there's the 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 the thing but like i i don't like to [ __ ] myself so much to think that those aren't like intentional thing one learn intentional things one learns in order to drive an outcome and driving the outcome is is like success yes right and it's like it sometimes feels a little dickish to be that no it's like better to get what you're after sure well the stokes would say there there's preferred indifference right like in different ts right so you're like look uh i'm 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 um okay but then because ultimately you don't control 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'd you want it to be successful you wanted to sell a lot of copies you wanted to take the new york times bestsellers you wanted 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 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 what i would worry about is that if you got to a mental place where you were able to if you got to a mental place where you were able to more graciously accept defeat yeah would there be an impact on your performance yeah peter thiel has a good line uh show me a good loser and i'll show you a loser [Laughter] yeah if you get to where it just is like this this preferred yeah i worry about there's a there's a phrase there's a term i didn't come up with it someone said he was described a friend of mine i was describing someone and he said uh he has a lot of ger like g-r-r-r-r-r-r right and what that means is [ __ ] tenacity man sure sure and that's and that is driven by someone who that having a lot of girl is someone who is is outcome focused but i would say gur is a double-edged sword in writing and 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 clock is ticking like you're gonna lose 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 girl can also be you know in golf when you try to hit it really hard that's when you've that's when you oh [ __ ] it up yeah it's it's a okay it's a bracketed gert the girl is a bro within there's like in viable pro there's like parameters to this thing and they're inviable within that and and just in the case we're talking about with hunting in large measure um 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 rule book like like the i'm speaking generally okay generally speaking um ethics as we understand them at this point in time in america are are largely like a product or there's a very tight relationship between our current ethical understanding around hunting and what we have codified into law sure so if one says within that bracket of legality um i'm gonna apply maximum ger 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 yeah yeah yeah no you can't be the zen buddhist who just doesn't give a [ __ ] you're not going to get the you're not going to get the outcome you want it's a 10 it's a tension yeah uh yeah and uh i think about that many 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 so transitioning to the new book which i love one one thought i had about what we're talking about and then transitioning to to uh 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 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 um how do you i imagine that left to your own devices you'd spend a lot of days alone in the woods right and i mean obviously you must travel a lot for the show and for the business that you built how do you how do you balance that like i'm one of the best in the world at what i do 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 man that yeah that's a primary tension in my life and it would be there forget the professional stuff it's a it's a primary attention in my life of being like honoring the honoring my commitment to my family and honoring like the gift like what it is i instinctually feel like like i have to be doing um the only way i've found to really uh like total peace for me is to go do my calling or like what i don't want to 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 because 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 i feel like i'm not paying attention to something 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 because 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 reason you know what i was saying when it was when i was only i know that's not only a writer i writing was my sole source of income like just actually like writing books as my sole source income i was gone a lot doing research like a lot yeah my my the entire time i've been married to my wife for 14 years there's never been a time in our relationship when i wasn't going a lot so this didn't surprise anybody right yeah but that absence i'd be lying if i came and told you that that absence that that frequent absence wasn't the primary tension in my life yeah like that is the primary tension in my life 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's like a real thing and it became when my when i had my first boy uh and i would be leaving for a work trip a couple days wouldn't buy a hunting trip yeah or like yeah hunting trip whatever i had to go away from work for if i was leaving to go yeah typically if i was like going uh when he was a little young i remember sitting well i'll tell you this i remember sitting in the bathtub with my little boy sobbing because i had to leave this is romney's very young was like the first time i had to leave for a couple weeks and my wife's saying you need to pull it together because you're gonna you're gonna like give him like a oh you're going to traumatize him yeah carrying on like this you know and another point we got it 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 yeah 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 no that's well said and it's like when you come home get with the [ __ ] program yeah no because the life continued without you you're the one that that left 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 no it's like peop like kids gotta go in the morning they gotta get breakfast they gotta go to school it's like it's not like a welcome home party yeah yeah no it's it's it's really hard uh i went through this uh with the pandemic because i travel a lot for for speaking 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 like we took like the camera away from your family yeah yeah yeah just by let's say we we went to like i put my kids to bed 500 plus times in a row yeah 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 i'll spend an extra day in new york i'll meet some people do now i'm like now i'm like what is the fastest i can be in and out because uh the opportunity cost 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 that's also not sustainable right and it's it's so it's a it's a tension i'm thinking about a lot myself lately 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 is waking up making coffee i started to think there's got to be like another way because i felt like every morning walk into that coffee pot for that many weeks in a row felt weird [Laughter] what's weird too though is like you're like i gotta be home i feel guilty when i'm gone so like late 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 doing the administrative [ __ ] 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're 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 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 got to get the [ __ ] out of here because yeah we can feel that energy we can feel the pent-up-ness 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 uh on we or pain or you know like 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 yeah that's the thing i like to tell myself to uh make me feel better about everything is i tell myself well 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 the word me and my boy tony and all of our kids go clam digging but one thing that needs to learn it's a school night one thing leads to learning 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 yeah 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 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 guy's laugh but 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 [ __ ] untrue she's like that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard but it's true it's definitely true it's definitely true i used to want to write a book we used to laugh about it i was going to call it whipped but i think now i'd call it homebody because i wanted to stay home for a whole year like not going anywhere for a whole year then it'd be like a book that only i would enjoy but uh yeah look about what it's like to sleep in the same bed 365 nights in a row well no i understand that i was like am i really standing here brushing my teeth again whatever you were saying about not being uh being home for six weeks like i don't think i'd not gone a couple months without traveling since i myself was a kid right because 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 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 [ __ ] 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 uh 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 uh busy life uh that's fulfilling and challenging but also there is something to be said about being still for a minute um uh i saw a new friend of mine very recently he was we're having the same conversation about the impacts of the pandemic and how it changed things and he's he's talked about all the the also he's working from home and doing all his phone calls from home yeah he's like the things i learned about my yard like i never really looked at my yard yeah totally he said i 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 my uh 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 uh there's absolutely no scorpion and uh 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 a hundred percent of the time even if that thing is like literally or physically 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 uh which is to me a reminder i 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 managed 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 yeah oh yeah yeah yeah the the scorpion thing was funny because we had recently you know i was talking about being a bob so when the panda hit um it they had someone had given them a black light okay and i didn't even know this but scorpion is luminesce yes it's terrific it's terrifying uh like like it's like it looks like a like a man-made creation you know what i mean yeah like a robot walking along all these trails out in the desert with this black light and i mean these freaking scorpions man they 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 the south but yeah wound up being the northern uh the northern scorpion so i learned a lot and that and i was talking about in the book on that same trip i had never found like a big block of ochre which uh indigenous people used for dyes and all kinds of things and it's a cave paintings too right common artifact yeah they mix it with animal grease so mixed 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 nelson's like there's a weasel and i'm like james knock it off now looking like right there's a weasel [Music] yeah at this point like you're right at this point he says he saw something i'm like okay where 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 this 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 uh you know we we read some book and it was like you know owls don't poop or something and uh 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 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 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 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 be like there's a youtube video uh my 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 well you know i think uh what i liked about the book is that okay first off the idea of outdoor kids in an 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 into our world um but i think they the two feed off of each other like part of the reason we went on this big bend trip even though we'd just been a year ago is that he'd watched a video where you were in big bend right and so i think one of the things we've tried to do is like you can sort of instinctively be a pr opposed to screen time which would be ironic for people like you and me that make things that go on screens but like provided 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 street car 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 yeah i think what one one you know in naming the book outdoor kids in an inside world i was like promo i was it's like an acknowledgement it's not like 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 with the prevalence of screens it's just they are powerful right like like media has a powerful pull and this has come from a person that's like i make it for a living there is no it's processed foods versus natural foods one is yeah exactly more addictive than the other uh 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 right yeah and then you gotta be like well no because i'm actually was while i was googling you know the han dynasty but now i'm watching people have airsoft wars like like you know like but you know it really it relates you know whatever like it's just like it never ends it never ends yeah but i uh like the approach i take rather than in 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 yeah great idea right so what that means in 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 you know um i don't like them to just get on like i don't like them to to go to youtube and just start consuming what's served yeah 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 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 yeah what's the bird book you mentioned uh bird song bible bird song bible that's the most important book we own 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 birds 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 what's funny is i have the book it's hardcover robert mcclumm you cannot find this book i've looked because i wanted to gift it to people it tells the story i i tell i i like give a synopsis of this book in outdoor kids in an inside world i give a synopsis book and why i like it it tells the story of a possum mother who's pregnant and she sets off with her young and there is terrible attrition 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 she meets a male they spend one night together she then has 13 babies she only has 11 nipples two of the babies starved to death and then the book ends and great for kids dude it is man it's the cycle of life in there because 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 i think 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 ever ever right they'll eat anything they'll weigh it by what it tastes like they do not weigh it by what it is sure there's no there's no like you could tell them anything i i could be like uh it's a house cat maybe okay see how it tastes 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 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 you know we just did as funny man as uh my wife went and found like it's like the 13 most important table manners yeah and she printed it off and it lives on the dining room table and there's that's a good idea well here's the thing instead of every night trying to arbitrarily half-ass like enforce certain manners she's now like fifty percent of the nights like last night was not it was not a manners night tonight is a manners night man lay that printout 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 to new restaurant it's manners night yeah can you turn it on and off as opposed to blindly blindly follow it because we realize 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 yeah 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 no that's great i love that always kind of on i got one last question for you um one of the things that one of my favorite passages when i was rereading 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 uh 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 stoke thing you're like am i being pragmatic or am i being a candy ass and uh 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 uh things that are stupid at the same time i don't want to be a wuss you know uh and so how do you think about that balance and what's that voice that's running through your head even now from from what you got from your dad uh i i still i i have a version of it still i i could think of just you know a few days ago making a decision like that where there was a thing you know out where uh i was out hunting in the wilderness area and there was two options and they were they they were like uh at face values like six and one and a half dozen in the other right potential outcome one was four miles more away yeah 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 because i'm going to make myself do the one that's that way do the harder one yeah i don't want to be the kind of person that subconsciously is like ruling out labor with my kids what i the primary thing i find it is i want them to learn things but it's harder to have them help yeah cleaning fish cleaning fish i can do it faster and better right it'll take three times as long and all the flavors will be messed up if they do it sure if you're like a person that's like kind of like a perfectionist and [ __ ] that shit's hard but like i forced 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 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 for my dad are not like positive like life building up things they're unfortunately naked 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 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 uh i'd like to say that i i'd i like to think that i am bringing to my kids those good things that i learned from him and i like to think that i am intentionally filtering out the bad things though i understand every impulse that must have been driving him yes 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 [ __ ] is frustrating it's hard to raise kids you know yeah yeah yeah 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 yeah i do it all the time man i me you know i'll lay in bed at night and i'll be like you know what like parenting [ __ ] i'll be like that that's gotta end you cannot do that anymore you can't freak out on everybody like that yeah you're gonna yeah 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 that was the right thing to do yeah no i've always oh my god when anytime i'm frustrated or rushed afterwards i'm like i cared about that like what you or you know what i mean like you're like uh like you you walk into our garage it's all covered they 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 hard is it gonna be to cover up some crayons but i took it you know at the time inheriting from my parents like you know you can't drink that in the car you're gonna spill it all over the place who gives a [ __ ] you know in retrospect who gives a [ __ ] yeah it's it's uh it's vaccine and i'll tell you that uh i think about this book um the minute we found out my wife was pregnant 12 years and nine months ago whatever my agent uh who i've been with a long time he knows mark right yeah yeah uh mark gerald he's like man you got to write a book about how you're going to sort of like handle your kids and and your relationship with nature like how will you impart that on them how you give them what you got you know yeah so i think it's a little premature right now right like 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 twelve-year-old i've landed in a spot where i'm not gonna come and say to someone i would never present myself as a parenting expert or something but when it comes to like kids in nature um i have racked up a level of subject matter expertise about like the the hands-on practical aspects of it right and a lot of lessons learned and um and i definitely present the the 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 would never act like i am i would be very uh suspicious of anyone that claims otherwise they're probably the worst like you know what i mean oh you know what's funny about that is whenever someone tells me how bad their kids are i always i'm always like i bet your kids are pretty great yeah yeah yeah the parent who's like oh dude my kids are nuts i'm like i bet they're all right no i think about that when 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 you're doing fine like you're doing great that's fine the dehydration thing yeah it's hilarious 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 it's not because you raise an [ __ ] yeah 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 uh the the two hunting books are great and i've used them both and uh cooked many things from them great well i appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk about it man i really it's kind of you to do it all right we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 13,421

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: Gz4FTWNLAbo

Length: 69min 59sec (4199 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022