Earlier this year, a PR rep from Fox News asked if I’d want to review the conservative network’s upcoming docuseries on the history of Yosemite National Park. Called Yellowstone to Yosemite with Kevin Costner, the three-part series is the brainchild of the Academy Award-winning actor, and the follow up to his 2022 series . As I stared at the email, I wondered: What can Fox News teach me about the importance of the national parks? As it turns out, a lot. But their approach delivered a few surprises.

Yellowstone to Yosemite, which airs Saturday, February 8 on Fox’s streaming service, Fox Nation, tells the often-repeated story of a 1903 camping trip that then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt took with naturalist John Muir through Yosemite. Over four days and three nights, theĢżtwo men yukked it up around the campfire, admired the soaring monoliths and waterfalls, and became friends. Similarly, Costner, now 70, embarks on his own camping trip within Yosemite as he narrates the story.

In the first episode, Costner quickly establishes the significance of Roosevelt and Muir’s campout. It’s May, 1903, more than 30 years since Yellowstone was established as the first national park. Five other parcels of land have become national parks, but the designation has done little to actually protect their ecosystems. Loggers are plundering giant sequoias in Yosemite and poachers are decimating bison herds in Yellowstone. The federal government, meanwhile, lacks the teeth to stop them. “Congress saw the national parks as a zero-cost initiative. Each park has an unpaid superintendent responsible for enforcing regulations,” Costner says. “It’s not working at all.”

Muir, the famed naturalist, believes the only way to save America’s parklands is by harnessing the power of the president. He invites Roosevelt to Yosemite to show him the wonders of the park up-close, before pitching him on the bold idea of actually protecting the six natural wonders.

And we’re offā€”over three 45-minute episodes Costner tells the story of the camping trip while weaving in other historic anecdotes and ecological tidbits about Yosemite National Park. Yep, there’s a heroic mini-biography of Teddy Roosevelt. There are Nature Channel-worthy segments about the lifecycle of a Sequoia and the geologic forces that carved the valley. Costner name drops Lynn Hill as the first rock climber to free climb the Nose of El Capitan. There’s even a reenactment of the massacre of Miwok tribespeople that preempted their forced removal from Yosemite in 1851.

But as the docuseries unfolds, Costner also performs some rhetorical jiujitsu that muddies the current political divide around a few topics. He frames the conservation movement as inherently patriotic, and funding the national parks as part of our American heritage. He presents the corporate interests of industry as evil, and the seizing of land from Tribes as cruel. He even tells the viewer that the reintroduction of grey wolvesā€”a wedge issue in many Western statesā€”is something that Roosevelt, a Republican icon, would have supported.

Costner presents these perspectives with a sincere tone that lacks any hint of cynicism or moral superiority. After praising John Muir for advocating on behalf of Yosemite’s trees and rivers, Costner lays down in his sleeping bag as the temperature plummets. “God I love this country,” he says. “Everything about it. Even the cold.”

Costner’s melding of these conceptsā€”patriotism, conservation, American heritage, and honoring Indigenous tribesā€”helps him sell a contemporary vision to his audience: national parks are worthy of our protection and our tax dollars.

Sure, Costner’s sincerity and mythical retelling of a camping trip may inspire some eye rolls. Still,ĢżI couldn’t help but admire his approach. Perhaps somewhere in Yellowstone to Yosemite is a playbook for bridging the political divide when we debate protecting National Monuments from drilling, or the reintroduction of apex predators, or why we should save endangered species. I don’t watch Fox News, but my parents do, and I firmly believe that they would love Yellowstone to Yosemite, even though it’s essentially a three-hour pitch for the environmental movement.

Costner’s story concludes on a high note. Roosevelt is inspired by Muir, and after he’s reelected he signs the Antiquities Act of 1906, which grants him the power to protect federal lands. He sends the U.S. military to defend the national parks, and he establishes a series of national monuments to honor the legacies of indigenous tribes.

I recently asked Costner about the balancing act in Yellowstone to Yosemite, and whether it was challenging to blend so many disparate socio-political themes in an hour-and-a-half programĢż He brushed the question aside with a laugh. You can read my interview below.

Why Kevin Costner Wanted to Tell the Story of Yosemite National Park

OUTSIDE: Why did you want to tell this story in 2025?
Costner: I was not waiting for the right year to tell this story. I recently did the film Horizon and I thought of it back in 1988. With Yellowstone: One Fifty, I realized that we just don’t know our history and the intricacies of the routes we drive and the mountains we look at. With Yosemite, we all think we know the park. But I knew there was a story to tell about Roosevelt and Muir. In this 30-year span after the creation of Yellowstone, there was nobody who could actually protect the parks. Nobody took into account that it would would take manpower and a governmental body to actually protect them. I like these parts of history that seem obvious, but aren’t. And this story had plenty of these elements, so I had a sense that I wanted to share it. I wanted to start with the Native Americansā€”even if we’re going to highlight Roosevelt and Muir, it was important for me to go that distance and to talk about original inhabitants. I wanted to tell viewers just how tragic things were for them. They’re always in our history and we somehow forget them. They are a part of Yosemite as much as any story we tell.

But I also wanted to show how these two men, of like minds, each had a level of poetry in them that helped them understand that saving the parks was the right thing. I wanted to tell this story without beating people on the the head. I wanted to educate them.

Your story navigates more than a few political topics that are still debated today, such as funding the NPS, reintroducing apex predators, and the constant tug-of-war between protecting federal lands and opening them to drilling or logging. How did you navigate these without seeming partisan?
Ha. I don’t care where the chips fall, and I’m honestly not that careful. I’m not looking to present a side here, I’m just looking to tell the story of who was doing what, who was saying what, and what actually happened. This project isn’t catered to any crowd. It had to get above my bar in terms of its intellectual literature. And I felt like we told the version of the story that I set out to tell. I don’t talk down to my audience or around them. I honestly don’t see the world as being dangerous when I’m telling historical truth. You have to tell the story with all of its warts. Other people might be worried about what I’m going to say. But I didn’t ever worry about it. I never had a single thought about this.

This is your second project around the U.S. National Parks. What about the Parks has attracted your interest in storytelling?
I’m really pleased that national parks are an American idea. Today there are like 1400 national parks around the world, but we set the tone. We came up with the idea that the land could have a higher economic use than just exploiting itā€”that some day, people would come and visit. But when I think of environmentalism, it isn’t just about the fish in the streams, and the trees. It’s also about the connection to the past. That I can walk where other people walked 100 years ago. And also, to know that a place like Yosemite will be the same forever. And to know that these places aren’t just enjoyed by the wealthy, that everyone can enjoy them. Setting aside land for a national park is such a simple idea, but in reality it takes a fierce attitude to move an idea to being practical, especially when money is at stake.

You’ve spent several decades telling stories about the American West, fromĢżDances With Wolves toĢżYellowstone.ĢżWhat is it about the West that continually sparks your imagination?
I stumble on these stories, and I know that I’m only going to be able to tell so many of the in my lifetime. Right now I’m flirting with a very historical project that I’ll probably do, and it’s right in the vein of what you’re talking about, but I can’t discuss it here. As Americans, we think we know our history, but you never really know that much about it until you dig down. We read about the Native Americans somewhere in the fourth grade, like one chapter in one book, and that’s it. All of Yosemite was on the backs of people who were exterminated. This great park came on the heels of shipping them off to a river where they would die in anonymity. And they’re not even on a sign anywhere.

We rarely get down to what is human about them. I think that Yosemite gets down to what is human about John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. People can be touched by the truth. They can be affected by lies, but they can be truly touched by the truth.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.Ģż

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I have run and bicycled a certain one-mile section of the paved riverfront multi-use path in my hometown probably at least 200 or 300 times. A handful of times, I have thought to myself, ā€œI should really stop and read some of these historical plaques along the trail.ā€ I believed there to be two or three of them, and in four years, I never made the minuscule effort to pull off the trail even once for the 60 to 90 seconds required to read them.

A few weeks ago, though, I finished reading what I think is now one of my favorite adventure books, and I got inspired. Because books can do that.

Dean Karnazesā€™s Ultramarathon Man inspired hundreds or thousands of people to try ultrarunning, Colin Fletcherā€™s books inspired probably thousands of people to take up backpacking, and Cheryl Strayedā€™s Wild inspired a generation of thru-hikers. My friend Alastair Humphreysā€™ new-ish book was the catalyst for one of the least epic, but most satisfying adventures of my recent life.

The book is called Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness, and the concept is this: A guy who lives in the suburbs of London looks for adventure on the 400-square-kilometer map with his house in the center. This particular guy has bicycled 46,000 miles around the world for four years, rowed a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, and walked across the Empty Quarter Desert towing a giant homemade cart. Itā€™s no Into Thin Air, or story of survival in Antarctica, or tale of the first human forays into some unexplored corner of Earth. But Al got this map, decided to spend a year essentially ā€œstaying home,ā€ exploring one randomly-selected square kilometer per week, whether or not it looked interesting on the map.

Here is one of my favorite paragraphs in the book, on page nine:

ā€œWhat if where I live, this bog-standard corner of England, which had held no surprises for me, was actually full of them, if I only bothered to go out and find them? Not known, because not looked for. This was an opportunity to get to know my place for the first time and to search closer to home than ever before for things Iā€™ve chased around the globe: adventure, nature, wildness, surprises, silence and perspective.ā€

I imagine having to write a book about the experience pushed Al to try to dig up interesting things about each grid square he exploredā€”which, in my reading, often resulted in me looking up from the book and saying to Hilary, ā€œDid you know ā€¦ā€ And it reminded me of some of the best tour guides Iā€™ve met on trips, who remain enthusiastic after repeating the same facts and figures hundreds of timesā€”or my sister-in-lawā€™s father, John, who has lived in the same town in Wisconsin for almost his entire life and seems to have a million pieces of local trivia ready at all times. And how last year I traveled to a spot very close to my hometownā€™s , but still hadnā€™t read the goddamn signs on the riverfront path Iā€™m on five times a week.

So Tuesday morning, after riding my bike to drop off our little guy at daycare, I pedaled down the section of path Iā€™ve traversed so many times on foot and on skinny tires, and I stopped at every single plaque. There are 10 of them in the span of that one mile, detailing the human and geologic history of the valley here dating back 16,000 years: the lumber baron who built a mansion near the mouth of the creek (and whose widow, more notably, donated the land for the cityā€™s first park), the bridges that washed away in floods, the glacial lake that flooded and carved out the valley several times in ā€œone of the most significant geological events in the history of the world,ā€ and did you know we used to have a streetcar here? I mean, I guess not really ā€œwe,ā€ but the people who lived here a century ago.

Several years ago, at an American adventure film festival, I saw a film of an expedition to climb a mountain in a country halfway around the world. In one scene, as the team of climbers slogged onward and upward through the jungle under ridiculously heavy backpacks, they passed through a village and a few local children and adults watched them. The characters in the film were of course far from home, very ā€œout thereā€ in many ways, and struggling against great odds for a goal and a story about trying to reach that goal. But to the people who lived in the village, it was just Wednesday. Maybe a notable Wednesday, since these weird people with colorful clothing and backpacks were passing through, and that didnā€™t happen every Wednesday. But I found myself thinking more of the contrast: Eight people having a capital-A adventure within ten feet of other people sitting in their front yards. Which is something that never happens in my neighborhood, because people donā€™t fly halfway around the world to climb the mountains near my house.

But should you have to spend several days and thousands of dollars traveling to have an interesting experience? Seems a little elitist, doesnā€™t it?

My friend Forest and I have spent time together in many beautiful places, usually as photographer (him) and writer (me). I have picked up a handful of camera tricks from him over the years, but have no illusions about switching careers to photography. I asked him one time to tell me how I could improve my photography, based on what heā€™d seen, and he gently suggested that I should try to get closer. Of course he was rightā€”I always default to the ā€œtiny person in huge landscapeā€ shot, which is easy for me to see and feel (weā€™re so small out there!), but hard to replicate without a long lens. Being able to look closer, to zoom in, is something I still struggle with, literally in photography and metaphorically in life. Isnā€™t it harder to experience wonder the closer you are to where you live and work and get stuck in traffic and take out the trash, or is that just me? I aspire to be someone who can find wonder anywhere.

Iā€™m not saying that reading a handful of plaques has now made me some sort of expert. But it did send me to the library, and to Google some thingsā€”which I wouldnā€™t have Googled without having my interest piqued by what was on those plaques (the environmental disaster behind the old dam) and what was not on those plaques. (Okay, but what about the history of indigenous people in this area?) Which is something we are lucky to have the ability to do nowadays, to follow up on our interest(s) .

Another paragraph from the introduction of Local:

ā€œIā€™d imagined this would be a year of poking around rabbit holes in the countryside, but it became a year of falling down internet rabbit holes about hundreds of obscure topics, as well as reading dozens of books about history, nature, farming, and the climate emergency. Anything clever you read in the following pages, and almost every fact and figure, was new to me when I began this book. Do not make the mistake of thinking Iā€™m a clever person who can stand in an empty field and see biology, geology, and every other ā€™ology, while you merely see a field. I, too, saw only the fields before I started, but paying close attention unveiled so much.ā€

Of course I love to travel, and some of my favorite places in the world are special because the first time I visited, a friend who lived there showed me around. And tour guides are great, but nothing beats someone who is enthusiastic about where they live, because theyā€™ve paid attention to it and donā€™t mind sharing it with someone else. Now if youā€™ll excuse me, I have to do some research on this streetcar we used to have here in the early 1900s, so I can tell visiting friends about it for the next decade.

If youā€™d like to read Local (which has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize!), hereā€™s where you can find it:

ĢżĢżĢż

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Paige McClanahan, a journalist and travel writer, is much too diplomatic to phrase it this way, so allow me to be the grump: youā€™re the reason locals so often dislike tourists.

ā€œTravel has become a consumerist exercise where the goal is to get our moneyā€™s worth out of a place,ā€ McClanahan says in a phone interview from her home in France. ā€œWe need to wake up. Paris owes you nothing.ā€

The tourist-local tension has been around since before Marco Polo, but in her debut book, , McClanahan shows us just how bad things have gotten. Globally, travelers will log some 1.5 billion trips abroad by the end of 2024ā€”the largest movement of people the planet has ever seen. In a handful of years, that number could reach 1.8 billion. Closer to home, Americans are on track to take almost two billion domestic leisure trips annually by 2025. Despite the buzz around mindful experiences and sustainable travel, locals from Athens to Zermatt have had enough of us. Some Hawaiians have requested that we stay home. Romans fine tourists up to $280 for clogging the Spanish Steps. In July, an annoyed mob roamed Barcelonaā€™s boulevards dousing visitors with squirt guns.

McClanahan, who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, has plugged her journalistic pen into this bursting dike with empathy, not by shaming or lecturing anyone. Nor does she ask people to stay put, which would be detrimental to conservation work, prosperity, and cultural bridge building. Instead, McClanahan uses the voices of locals adversely affected by tourism to inspire us to travel with more curiosity, humility, and appreciation for how our holiday can be hell on the climate and local residents. Above all, she wants us to know that we have the power to make travel a force for good.

This elevated mindset is the hallmark of the new tourist. Becoming one isnā€™t hard. It means visiting Iceland in the off-season or trading the line at the Louvre for a Paris Noir walking tour to soak up the cityā€™s Black history. You can control your partying in Amsterdam and stay behind the fence at the Grand Canyon. You can insist on supporting local guides and locally owned hotels, restaurants, and food carts. (The Barcelona mob targeted people eating at a Taco Bell, among other spots.)

ā€œEven if youā€™re a low-budget traveler, you can still be a high-value visitor,ā€ McClanahan says.

McClanahan, who left the United States at age 26 and has spent the past 17 years writing from Africa and Europe, admits that she has made plenty of old-tourist mistakesā€”like posting a self-serving Instagram reel from Angkor Wat that barely showed Angkor Wat. ā€œI live in a glass house,ā€ she says.

McClanahan casts no aspersions on the types of trips you like but does bristle at people who consider themselves ā€œtravelersā€ and not tourists. ā€œI donā€™t deny that people travel for a huge range of reasons, some higher-minded than others,ā€ she writes in The New Tourist. ā€œSo, sure, call yourself a traveler but never forget youā€™re a tourist, too.ā€ What matters is that we make informed decisions on how to travel in ways that put places and the people who live there first.

ā€œOne of the most constructive things we can do in our flickering moment of life is to embrace the chance to leave our comfort zonesā€”those dangerous lairs where we learn to languish,ā€ she writes. She adds to me: ā€œNone of us can wave a magic wand and change the behavior of millions of other people, but each of us can be that change.ā€

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I started watching the hugely popular TV series Yellowstone in 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic. By then, there were multiple seasons available, and my husband and I had nothing but time. We were hooked.

Weā€™re not the only ones. The second half of Season 5, which came out on November 11, saw more than . Only NFL football had than Yellowstone last season. Character names like Rip and Dutton have seen exponential increases in their use for newborn babies. And, as the recently reported, Americans really want their own piece of the Yellowstone landscape, and the show may be partly to blame.

Which got me thinking: How much of the show is based in reality, and is it really affecting what’s happening in the West? The show is over-the-top melodrama, but writer and co-creator Taylor Sheridan obviously chose real-life conflicts in Montana and other western states to base the plot on. Here are four ways the show bears more resemblance to reality than a casual fan might realize.

1. The Series Suggests Big Developers Will Stop at Nothing to Broker Land ā€œDealsā€ā€”That May Be True.

In Yellowstone, the Duttons are constantly navigating nefarious plots to seize their ranch by out-of-state land development interests. Some, it seems, will stop at nothing to dispossess the family in order to capitalize on the value of their land, creating ridiculously violent scenes.

In real life, there is example after example of complicated land deals in Montana and the West in which developments for the wealthy take up premier land. The Yellowstone Club, which is just north of Yellowstone National Park in Big Sky, Montana, has been a bastion for the ultra-wealthy since it opened in the late nineties. Boasting ā€œprivate powderā€ and ruthlessly protected privacy for its members, among other features, the Club was created through swaps with the Forest Service, which turned a checkerboard of public and private land into consolidated acreage for the Clubā€™s founder, Tim Blixseth.

While the Yellowstone Club is already controversial among Montanans (few of whom can afford the steep costs of membership, which involve a , annual club dues of $36,000, and annual property owners association dues of $10,000), itā€™s also trying to expand into a contentious area of the Crazy Mountains. As Ben Ryder Howe reported in New York magazine’s , a group of billionaires associated with the Club has been maneuvering to privatize contested swaths of land that yield access to the Crazies for some time. The Forest Service, ranchers, the Native Crow, the general public, and the Yellowstone Club all seem to have a stake in the outcome.

2. Places Like Bozeman, Montana, Really Are Becoming Overrun with Furs and Fancy Cars.

I know folks who live in Bozeman, and Iā€™ve read plenty of the reporting weā€™ve done here at ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų (and elsewhere) related to life in mountain towns like Bozeman, where affordable housing shortages, the aftermath of a global pandemic, remote work, and the glamorization of mountain lifestyles have created a rich broth of income inequality that is apparent as you navigate the city.

Writing in 2022 for ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, Maggie Slepian, who has been based in Bozeman for more than a decade, noted the visual changes on the town and the landscape that were being wrought by the influx of new, wealthy, second-home residents. Watching Yellowstone, some of the fashions my beloved Beth Dutton opted for on her runs to town struck me as a bit much even for her unparalleled character. (Silky sheaths beneath a luxe full-length fur coat, anyone?)

Sartorial considerations aside, affordability remains a major issue, and Yellowstone focuses primarily on the more glamorous troubles a family that owns the largest ranch in the area would face, not on the person being priced out of their apartment or the family acknowledging that theyā€™ll never be able to swing it for a single family home.

3. The Duttons Struggle to Afford Their Ranch. So Do Many Real Families.

In the years since Yellowstone premiered, a number of outlets have interviewed real generational ranchers in Montana to get a sense of their view of the show. The dynamics among the family itself often get highlighted as one of the most believable elements. In an Variety from 2023, a third-generation rancher from Idaho, Jesse Jarvis, highlights the familial dysfunction as one of the most realistic elements of the show.

The Duttonsā€™ interpersonal conflicts are largely driven by the struggle to afford their 700,000-acre ranch. In real life, the total number of farms and ranches in Montana is down 10.3 percent from 2017, from 2022. And with continued interest from developers to obtain large tracts of land in the area, it seems likely land and home prices will continue to rise. Recent data from the indicates a consistent increase of cropland value in Montana from 2012 on. And this is to say nothing of the capital needed to operate a large-scale ranch.

4. Indigenous Land Is Being Acquired and Compromised by Development.

Fans of Yellowstone see complex dynamics of power and history at play in the dealings of the Duttons and others with the fictional Broken Rock Indian Tribe. As the screw twists and turns, the Broken Rock, led on the show by the Chairman Thomas Rainwater, find themselves on both the dealing and receiving ends of bad land deals and villainous behavior from local and out-of-state actors. This contemporary dispossession of Indigenous people fits into the long and violent history in which legal and extralegal measures are taken by those in power to forcibly remove Indigenous inhabitants from their land.

To cite a recent real example, you can look again to the Crazy Mountains in Montana. The Crazies are filled with significant and sacred sites for the Native Crow. In the current proposal for there, private land prevents the Crow from visiting many of these sites without permission from the landowner. °æ³Ü³Ł²õ¾±»å±šā€™s reporting on the Yaak Valley offers another illustrative example of these dynamics.

Thereā€™s likely much more to say about the real power dynamics in the Mountain West and the fights for public lands that overlap with some of what you see on the small screen in Tyler Sheridanā€™s fantasy universe. As they say, truth can really be stranger than fiction.

Ryleigh Nucilli got a master’s degree and half of a PhD in literature and culture from the University of Oregon before leaving to pursue a career in digital media. She loves reading and writing about the intersection of popular media and culture.

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My new book, Ultra-Something, explores humansā€™ weird proclivity for endurance, and how we express itā€”including, but not limited to distance running, factory work, benign masochism, improv comedy, and rooting for football teams that will never win a championship. I ran thousands of miles and explored dozens of rabbit holes of research, athletics, and storytelling, then built it into a narrative, with more than 90 illustrations I drew. The final product is a 285-page book and itā€™s out now.Ģż (Buy it at Bookshop , or at Amazon in paperback , and on Kindle .)

Hereā€™s the book trailer:

The below is excerpted from the book’s prologue.

At the finish line of the 2015 Western States Endurance Run, arguably the most famous and most prestigious American ultramarathon, the crowd suddenly became energized. A runner was coming, entering the Placer High School track, where the 100-mile race ends after winding up and over Californiaā€™s Sierra Nevada mountains from Olympic Valley Ski Resort.

Spectators cheered, clapped, and frantically rang cowbells, as the runner, Gunhild Swanson, rounded the track. A group of runners who had joined her peeled off at the start of the straightaway, clearing the way for her finish. The sides of the track were lined with people anxiously yelling ā€œCome on, come on!ā€ and other words of encouragement which sounded more like worried hope. More spectators ran across the infield, and a few paralleled her on the other side of the barrier fence set up on the track. Dozens of cameras and phones recorded her as she chugged toward the white finish arch, her strides shortened by 99-plus miles of mountain running and hiking over the previous day and a half. As she crossed the timing mat at the finish, the crowd erupted, hundreds of arms popping up into the air in a coordinated burst of emotion. Three feet past the finish line, the runner bent at the waist, hands on her knees, exhausted but grateful to be finished. Online videos of this minute of running would be watched hundreds of thousands of times.

Gunhild Swanson had finished dead last, 254th out of 254 runners. When she crossed the finish line on the track, the clock above her head read:

She had beaten the final 30-hour cutoff time by six seconds.

When that yearā€™s winners, Rob Krar and Magdalena Boulet, crossed the same finish line hours earlier, in 14:48:59 and 19:05:21, respectively, the scene was almost serene in comparison: some applause, some cheering, but with the overall energy and volume turned down.

The climax of Sylvester Stalloneā€™s 1976 movie Rocky, when boxer Rocky Balboa finally squares off with the defending champion, Apollo Creed, only lasts about nine minutes, but might be the most famous boxing match in film history.

Apollo, who had been scheduled to defend his title against a boxer who was injured, needs to find a new opponent, and decides to put on a show: As the original fight was scheduled to take place during Americaā€™s bicentennial year in 1976 in Philadelphia, Apollo says heā€™ll fight an up-and-coming boxer. Rocky Balboa, a Philly club fighter with more heart than skill, is chosen.

When the fight begins, everyone, including Rocky and Apollo, is surprised that Rocky actually lasts more than a few rounds, even landing some good punches, and as the fight drags on, ends up making it longer in the ring than any other boxer has against Apollo.

After Apollo knocks Rocky down during the 14th round and he battles to pull himself back up, the camera cuts to two people who we believe have much better judgment as far as Rockyā€™s well-being: First, the trainer, Mick, who growls from just outside the ropes to Rocky, ā€œDown. Stay down.ā€ Then, Rockyā€™s girlfriend Adrian, who has just entered the arena to see Rocky at his worst, writhing in pain on the canvas. She looks away.

Rocky staggers in his corner like a drunken man trying to get back up on a barstool. Apollo stands in his corner with both arms raised.

Rocky gets up at the count of nine. Apollo drops his arms and his jaw in disbelief. Just before the bell, Rocky lands a shot to Apolloā€™s ribs.

When both fighters are in their corners, Apolloā€™s trainer says to him, ā€œYouā€™re bleeding inside, Champ. Iā€™m gonna stop the fight.ā€

Apollo replies, ā€œYou ainā€™t stopping nothing, man.ā€

Rockyā€™s team cuts the swollen skin around his eye so he can see again, and Rocky stands up, saying to Mick, ā€œYou stop this fight, Iā€™ll kill you.ā€

The two haggard fighters trade punches throughout the 15th and final round, mumbling promises to each other that there will be no re-match, and the bell rings, both men barely upright, but having survived. A bloodied Rocky calls out for Adrian, who finds her way to the ring, where she and Rocky profess their love for each other.

In the 1979 book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, Syd Field laid out what would come to be known as ā€œFieldā€™s Paradigm,ā€ or the Three-Act Structure. Every screenplay, or actually, the story that forms a screenplay, Field argued, has three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. The three-act structure is often drawn as a diagram, in various levels of complexity. A simple version might look like this:

Rocky went on to be a surprise box office success, and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three, including Best Picture. The film spawned eight sequels over the next four and a half decades.

One scene in the original film, in which Rocky goes on a training run and ends by sprinting up the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, became famous, inspiring tourists to run up the stairs, and prompting tributes and parodies of the scene in other films and TV shows. The 72 steps themselves became known colloquially as the ā€œRocky Steps,ā€ and before the premiere of Rocky III, Stallone commissioned an eight-and-a-half-foot statue of Rocky to be built and placed at the top of the steps. Philadelphia City Commerce Director Dick Doran welcomed the statue and said Stallone had done more for Philadelphiaā€™s image ā€œthan anyone since Ben Franklin.ā€

Rocky Balboa did not win the fight in Rocky. As the closing theme music builds, the ring announcer calls the fight ā€œthe greatest exhibition of guts and stamina in the history of the ring,ā€ and then announces the split decision in favor of Apollo Creed.

The plot of Rocky, as well as the plots of all eight sequels, per the three-act structure, might look like this:

At almost any marathon race in the United States, there is a solid chance you will hear, played on a sound system near the starting line, or on a spectatorā€™s stereo along the race route, one of two songs, if not both: The song ā€œGonna Fly Now,ā€ also known as ā€œTheme from Rockyā€ (a version of which appears in the first five Rocky movies), and the Survivor song ā€œEye of the Tiger,ā€ commissioned by Sylvester Stallone for Rocky III.

Every year around the world, about 1.1 million people run a marathon, an organized race thatā€™s 26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers. The story of why we do this dates back to 490 BC: During the first Persian invasion of Greece, a heavily outmanned Athenian army defeated the Persian forces in battle near the town of Marathon, Greece. A herald named Pheidippides was chosen to deliver the news of the victory to Athens. He ran the entire distance of 26.2 miles/42.195 kilometers, addressed the magistrates in session saying something like, ā€œJoy to you, weā€™ve won!ā€ and then died on the spot.

The Greeks also created the tradition of the Olympic Games, held every four years, or each Olympiad, from 776 BC to 393 AD. The ancient Olympic Games never had a marathon raceā€”the ā€œlong-distance race,ā€ or dolichos, introduced in the 15th Olympiad, was somewhere between four and nine kilometers (approximately 2.5 to 5.5 miles). The last recorded ancient Olympic Games were held in 393 A.D., after which they took a 1500-year hiatus.

When the Olympic Games were revived in 1896 in Athens, the first marathon race was held, celebrating Pheidippidesā€™s legendary (and fatal) run from Marathon to Athens. A few months later, the Knickerbocker Athletic Club organized a marathon race from Stamford, Connecticut to The Bronx, and in March 1897, the Boston Athletic Association held the first-ever Boston Marathon. From there, the marathon race spread all over the world.

If you signed up to participate in a running race, such as a marathon or a 10K, your personal journey could also be seen as three acts:

No one, from the fast runners hoping to win the race to the people just hoping to finish, has any idea how their race is going to go. As the race day draws near, tension builds, whether you feel it or not, and the only thing that releases all that tension is the actual running of the race. When itā€™s over, whether youā€™re happy with the result or not, itā€™s over.

The first time Ray Yoder ate at a Cracker Barrel, he wasnā€™t that impressed. He was in Nashville in 1978, helping to set up an RV show at the Opryland Resort and Convention Center, and there was a Cracker Barrel nearby. So he ate there, and it didnā€™t exactly blow his mind. But he had a job delivering RVs across the country from a manufacturer in his hometown of Goshen, Indiana, and he spent a lot of time on the road. So he found himself in a lot of places with Cracker Barrel restaurants. He kept eating at Cracker Barrels, and they started to grow on him.

He was almost always on the road by himself while his wife, Wilma, was at home raising their four children. When all the kids had finished school and moved out of their house, Wilma started to join Ray on the road. Around 1993, they realized they had eaten at lots of Cracker Barrel restaurants, and decided to try visiting all of them.

By August of 2017, the Yoders had both turned 81, and had visited almost all of the 600-plus Cracker Barrel restaurants in the United States, Ray mostly eating blueberry pancakes if it was breakfast time, meatloaf if he was there for lunch or dinner, and pot roast if it was Sunday. Cracker Barrel caught wind of Ray and Wilmaā€™s quest and flew them out to Portland to visit the newly-opened restaurant in Tualatin, Oregon, Number 645. A line of applauding Cracker Barrel employees greeted them at the door, with a bouquet of sunflowers and roses for Wilma, and custom aprons for both of them.

Their journey had taken them to 44 states, and Ray estimated they had driven more than 5 million miles. ā€œWell, everybody does something, usually anyway,ā€ Ray said. ā€œSo we thought we would do this and it would be fun.ā€

At the 2017 Run Rabbit Run starting line at the base of Coloradoā€™s Steamboat Ski Resort, 314 runners stood in the corral, every one of them hoping to finish the 102.5-mile race. Only about 58 percent of them would actually make it to the finish line.

The Run Rabbit Run is not typically mentioned as one of the hardest ultramarathon races in the United States, and 2017 wasnā€™t an abnormally hot or difficult year. Generally, about one-third of people who start the race each year donā€™t finish for one reason or another: injury, gastrointestinal distress, dehydration, exhaustion.

No one standing in that starting corral believed it was impossible for a human being to travel 102.5 miles of mountainous terrain in 36 hours. Everyone was aware that it was something humans did. They had heard of these types of races before, maybe knew someone who had completed one, or maybe theyā€™d even run this one in a previous year and had fun doing it. They believed they could be one of the people who earned a Run Rabbit Run 100 finisher belt buckle, and thatā€™s why they were standing just inside the red start/finish arch, pacing, chatting with other runners, shaking out their nervous legs.

I was there too, standing in the corral, anxious and jittery, with a race number pinned to my running shorts, as the morning sun started to warm the high-altitude air. Like everyone else, I knew that people, arguably ā€œnormalā€ people who had day jobs and families and credit card bills, were perfectly capable of running a 100-mile mountain ultramarathon in 36 hours. It was something that had been done plenty of times before by human beings just like me.

Well, maybe not like me. I wasnā€™t sure if Iā€™d be just like them, a finisher. And Iā€™d been unsure for eight months, since Iā€™d paid my entry fee.

I was still unsure when the gun went off and the crowd of runners started shuffling forward through the starting arch. I started jogging with them, and no one tried to stop me, so I just kept going.

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In 2020, Kevin Kelly wrote a post on his website titled ā€œ68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,ā€ which heā€™d put together for his 68th birthday. I read through it, found myself nodding along with his Tweet-length recommendations, loved it, and shared it in . This one was the second bullet on his list: ā€œBeing enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.ā€

The post was shared widely, first by people who were fans of Kevin Kelly, and I imagine later by people who hadnā€™t heard of him before but found the list to be insightful. I knew Kevin Kelly as the founding executive editor of WIRED, and the guy who came up with the back in 2008, and an avid backpacker and traveler. (TLDR; lots of people think heā€™s a pretty wise person.)

In a scenario that every online writer dreams of, a publisher decided the 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice would make a good book, so Kevin Kelly removed them from his website, added 150 more bits of advice, and in May 2023, the book was published.

My friend Mario mailed me a copy of the book back in April, and of course I blazed through it in a couple hours. But in reading it, I started thinking that many of the bits of advice are applicable to adventure, whether itā€™s a big-A, expedition to some faraway mountain range ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, or a little-a, letā€™s bike or hike to a new place this weekend adventure. So I started flagging them with Post-It notes, in order to compile a list. Here are 25 of them, with a few of my illustrations.

Tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than by mountains.

Taking a break is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.

A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

If a goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream.

A major part of travel is to leave stuff behind. The more you leave behind the further you will advance.

Experiences are fun, and having influence is rewarding, but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.

The greatest teacher is called ā€œdoing.ā€

Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. This is 100 percent true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need.

Always read the plaque next to the monument.

Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.

Looking ahead, focus on direction rather than destination. Maintain the right direction and youā€™ll arrive at where you want to go.

In preparing for a long hike, old shoes of any type are superior to brand-new shoes of any type. Donā€™t use a long hike to break in shoes.

For every good thing you love, ask yourself what your proper dose is.

Purchase the most recent tourist guidebook to your hometown or region. Youā€™ll learn a lot by playing the tourist once a year.

Should you explore or optimize? For example, do you optimize what you know will sell or explore something new? Do you order a restaurant dish you are sure is great (optimize) or do you try something new? Do you keep dating new folks (explore) or try to commit to someone you met?

The ideal balance for exploring new things vs. optimizing those already found is ā…“. Spend ā…“ of your time on exploring and ā…” on optimizing and deepening. As you mature it is harder to devote time to exploring because it seems unproductive, but aim for ā…“.

Hikersā€™ rule: Donā€™t step on what you can step over; donā€™t step over what you can walk around.

To have a great trip, head toward an interest rather than a place. Travel to passions rather than destinations.

Your flaws and your strengths are two poles of the same traits. For instance, there is only a tiny difference between stubbornness and perseverance or between courage and foolishness. The sole difference is in the goal. Itā€™s stupid stubbornness and reckless foolishness if the goal does not matter, and relentless perseverance and courage if it does. To earn dignity with your flaws, own up to them, and make sure you push on things that matter.

The big dirty secret is that everyone, especially the famous, are just making it up as they go along.

The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.

You choose to be lucky by believing that any setbacks are just temporary.

Measure your wealth not by the things you can buy but by the things no money can buy.

If you are stuck in life, travel to a place you have never heard of.

When making plans, you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didnā€™t know you were looking for.

The post 25 Bits of Excellent Advice for Living a Life Full of ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

This story update is part of theĢżŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶųĢżClassics, a series highlighting the best writing weā€™ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read ā€œThese Pants Saved My Life,ā€ by Natasha Singer here.

She had us at ā€œangry walrus attacks.ā€ The vision of hardy frontier folk stepping up to the mic to regale friends and neighbors with gonzo tales of death-defying rescue by outerwear was too good to pass up. So we sent Singer back to Talkeetna to cover the annual event. (Which is still going strong, despite a COVID-19 interruption in 2020.) At the time, the ball consisted of locals modeling Carharttā€™s spring line at the VFW hall, followed by a storytelling competition at a nearby bar. Not only was it sponsored by Carhartt, but the clothing manufacturerā€™s main man in Anchorage served as the eventā€™s emcee (decked out in a ā€œbespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels,ā€ natch). Singerā€™s story ran in the magazineā€™s 25th anniversary issue, in October 2002, under the rubric ā€œRevelries of the Rustics.ā€

This wasnā€™t the first time Singer had traveled to a remote locale for ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, and it wouldnā€™t be the last. As a roving correspondent for the magazine in the early 2000s, she documented a cockeyed attempt to return Keikoā€”the killer whale star of Free Willyā€”to the sea off the coast of Iceland, hopped a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempting to break through the ice-choked Northwest Passage, and slogged through the jungles of Thailand in pursuit of a group of WildAid activists trying to halt an illicit trade in endangered species. (ā€œOh, my God,ā€ she said, recalling that reporting trip, ā€œdid I tell you about the anti-leech socks?ā€) These days, she writes about technology and education for the New York Times business section. Stowe recently caught up with Singer about her globe-trotting experiences.

OUTSIDE: Maybe I shouldnā€™t say this, since I wrote it, but your story ran under my favorite headline: ā€œThese Pants Saved My Life.ā€ Itā€™s straight to the point, prominently employs the word ā€œpants,ā€ and has the added value of being true. How did you discover the Carhartt Ball?
SINGER: Thereā€™s this saying about Alaskaā€”if youā€™re a woman looking for a guy, the odds are good but the goods are odd. And in Talkeetna especially, the odds are better but the goods are odder. I had been sent there to do a story on the bachelor auction, and I started to hear these really interesting stories, episodes where people got into trouble and their Carharttsā€”miraculously, like the Shroud of Turinā€”seemed to have magical properties that were healing or lifesaving. People were telling real stories, like: This tree fell on me, but I was wearing my double-knee Carhartt pants, so I didnā€™t get hypothermia. I survived for three hours. This was normal discourse, and the pants were the common denominator.

Iā€™ve always thought thereā€™s a reason people go to live in Alaska, and itā€™s mainly to get away from the rest of us in the lower 48.
We all have tribes, and we all have things that distinguish who gets in the tribe and who doesnā€™t. The Carhartt epic is a way of saying, ā€œOK, we have a shared lived experience, even if yours is, you know, dropping your lighter on your pants and flaming out the crotch.ā€ Itā€™s a common thread that binds people and demonstrates their Alaskanness.

Was it easy to get people talking?
One of the things I love about being a reporter is when people share their passion for the things that matter to them, whether thatā€™s expertise about the bearded iris or how to butcher a roadkill deer. So even in standoffish places, I find that if youā€™re authentically interested, people will show you something, and then it will be super cool. And youā€™re naturally going to say, ā€œOh, thatā€™s amazing.ā€ And theyā€™ll say: ā€œWell, you want to see the next thing?ā€ And then itā€™s three hours later, and theyā€™ve shown you every single pair of Carhartt pants in their closet.

At one point you meet Ted Kundtz, a ā€œjack-of-all-tradesā€ in Talkeetna, and over eggs and reindeer sausage he scoffs at the tourists whoā€™ve tried to buy his Carhartts right off him. He says: ā€œThey called the years of wear and tear I put in them ā€˜authentic character.ā€™ā€‰ā€ Heā€™s very perceptive. Like, these Alaskans know theyā€™re being ogled just as much as the grizzlies.
Essentially, he was saying: These are real. The tourists want the veneer of reality, but they donā€™t want to live our lived experience. Whichā€”itā€™s tough to live in Alaska, right? Itā€™s cold. And the winters are harsh. And itā€™s still our frontierā€”that is, if you donā€™t live in downtown Anchorage. I got what he was saying. People want frontier cred without actually putting the years into the effort.

How did you get your start?
I studied Russian in college and wanted to go off to Russia. Even though I was not fluent, I ended up going to Moscow and staying for a decade. This was in the 1990s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and it was inexpensive to travel because everything was in rubles. So I was going all over. I was covering human rights for The Forward, business for USA Today, and fashion for Vogue. It was this crazy decade. You know: If itā€™s Monday, this must be Siberia! If itā€™s Tuesday, Iā€™m doing a segment on Good Morning Kazakhstan! And then I was asked to help start Vogue Russia. Iā€™m grateful I was able to cover those former Soviet republics, but at some point you have to either decide to stay forever or go home. Then I went back to New York and nobody wanted me to write about New York. I was Ms. Strange Places.

One of your first ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų stories was about an American billionaireā€™s attempt to release Keiko back into the wild. In another you hitched a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker as it busted through the Northwest Passageā€”a trip made possible by climate change. When you think of those pieces along with the Carhartt Ball, the range is impressive. Ridiculous, sublime, dauntingā€”you were able to do it all.
The various stories I did with ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų had an adventure quality, but they also had a quality of observation. Itā€™s what we now call lurking, right? Watching whatā€™s happening and then explaining it. I felt lucky to be in that position.

We have this romantic notion of icebergs, but the Northwest Passage, itā€™s just miles and miles of bumpy, ugly ice. As I wrote: ā€œUnlike freshwater icebergs, sea ice is not romantic. It is neither majestic nor soaring. It does not give off that otherworldly spectral glow of pure whiteness born of glacial snow. Its verticality does not threaten ocean liners with a predatory, awe-inspiring loom. It is not prehistoric in origin. Quite the contrary, most sea ice is younger than a decade. It is flat and flawed. It is often pockmarked, dirty with algae, and lumpy with protruding hummocks.ā€

I love that paragraph, and I still donā€™t know how I got away with writing it, or how anybody signed off on it. Iā€™m working at the Times now, and I donā€™t get to write paragraphs like that very often. So the other thing Iā€™m grateful for is that ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų pushed me to write at the top of my range.

I was very happy to sign off on that.
We still have to talk about my friend from high school who wrote a letter to the editor of ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų. She was like: I read the story by your writer Natasha Singer. I went to school with a Natasha Singer, and Iā€™m wondering if itā€™s the same person. Because in high school, we didnā€™t think of her as an ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų girl. We thought of her as an inside girlā€”as in, inside the house.

Iā€™m glad we were able to help you defy the opinions of former classmates. Youā€™ve been able to report on a lot of amazing things that go on in the world.
Itā€™s like when we said that those pants saved Alaskansā€™ lives. In a way, ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų changed my life. To be able to write those stories, report them, and meet all those people and get to do all those thingsā€”real stories, where there were people telling us real things that really matteredā€”it was a gift to be able to do that.

The post I Went to Alaska to Learn How Carhartt Pants Save Lives appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

The world’s most interesting video game designer just hid a treasure in the woods. What’s he up to? Jason Rohrer has been pushing the limits of game design for 20 years, but his latest creation takes players into the forests of New England in search of a sculpture made of solid gold. The catch? He says there isn’t one. But people familiar with his past work aren’t so sure.

The post A Suspiciously Straightforward Treasure Hunt appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

When Ada Limon, Americaā€™s first Latina poet laureate, was tasked with bringing poetry to people who otherwise might not be exposed to it, she knew just where to put it: National Parks. The celebrated poet talks to ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų about her inspirations for the You Are Here project, and how nature and poetry can help us rethink wild places, and our place in them.

You can find a list of National Parks for the You Are Here project .

The post Ada LimĆ³n Wants Picnic Tables to Make You Feel Something appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

This story update is part of theĢżŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶųĢżClassics, a series highlighting the best writing weā€™ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read ā€œThe King of the Ferret Leggers,ā€ by Donald Katz here.

The author of this tale was Don Katz. Forty-two years later, heā€™s recounting the legend of this piece to me while sitting inside a majestically repurposed church in Newark, New Jersey, global headquarters of the company he founded: , the worldā€™s leading creator and seller of audiobooks and other original content. Katz recently stepped back from his longtime position as CEO, but he remains active and keeps an office in town. He also remains close to Newark Venture Partners, a social-impact early-stage investment fund, and Audibleā€™s Global Center for Urban Innovation; he established both to focus on solutions to urban inequities, after moving Audible to Newark in 2007.

Hold on a minute: the guy who wrote a piece about ferrets gnawing a manā€™s privates is the same guy who created Audible? Yes, and a common thread runs through °­²¹³Ł³śā€™s writing career and the business he built: a love of story.

In late 1982, Katz submitted the ferret-king piece to John Rasmus, then °æ³Ü³Ł²õ¾±»å±šā€™s editor in chief. This was back in the magazineā€™s primordial days, when it was still finding its voice. Rasmus loved it. Then the artwork came inā€”a graphic image by , the famous Rolling Stone artist, showing Reg on the field of battle, clad in baggy pants that appear to be spraying blood.

Rasmus: ā€œI said, ā€˜Uh-oh.ā€™ā€‰ā€

Katz had talked Steadmanā€”his good friend and colleague from their days as Rolling Stone contributors in England, where Katz had moved to study at the London School of Economics before getting started as a writerā€”into illustrating the piece. Delicately, Rasmus nestled the article and its vivid depiction into the issue, running it with a brief subhead (ā€œA True Storyā€) under the rubric ā€œRevelries of the Rustics.ā€

Itā€™s not an exaggeration to say that this piece became talismanic for the magazine. ā€œIt gave us all kinds of good reasons to do stories like ā€˜Ferret Leggers,ā€™ā€‰ā€ says Rasmus, who in 2017 wrote a tribute to it for °æ³Ü³Ł²õ¾±»å±šā€™s 40th anniversary issue. It also helped establish that an ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų story could be literary, visceral, and funny at the same time, often involving a protagonist who must do a particular thing because, to paraphrase George Mallory, it is there to be done.

ā€œFerret Leggersā€ is so good that it was stolen many times, even before the internet made that easy to do. People typed it up, put their name on it, and got it published. Katz, who for years worked as an award-winning magazine writer and author, spent more time than he wanted to cease-and-desisting these thieves.

°­²¹³Ł³śā€™s decision to write for a living, and in particular his ability to hear and employ the oral traditions of storytelling in his work, was born in the early 1970s, when he studied at New York University under , the author of the classic novel Invisible Man. The idea of what Ellison called the ā€œmusicalityā€ of the spoken word surely was lodged in °­²¹³Ł³śā€™s head while he labored to bring Audible to life. It wasnā€™t easy. The company would eventually become a huge success, but after the dot-com bust of 1999, Audible traded for as little as four cents a share. It took a decade to make a profit.

°­²¹³Ł³śā€™s two career arcs reminded me of something he wrote about ferrets back in ā€™83. This creature, he observed, has one very good trait: ā€œa tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts.ā€

OUTSIDE: As a character, Reg Mellor is hilariously over-the-top, and I think some readers today may wonder if he treated his athletes with the respect and care they deserved.
KATZ: Well, Reg would have said that the real athletes were the tiny cohort of humans who subjected themselves to ferrets being put in this uncaring and potentially cruel situation. My story set out to be a literary satire, pitting legendarily tough Brits from a specific county against equally tough animals, which, as few readers would have known, had been raised and deployed for generations to chase other animals out of holes for the benefit of hunters. Thereā€™s no doubt that there were plenty of people around England more than 40 years agoā€”when there was a movement to outlaw ferrets as pets due to various attacks that happened inside homesā€”who gave me statements and assertions that became my description of exaggerated ferret fury. But ferret legging was a clearly unacceptable treatment of sentient beings. From my viewā€”as someone whoā€™s aware of emerging science about animals and the father of a vegan animal-rights activistā€”itā€™s good that this is no longer a thing, which leaves my literary excursion into irony as a cultural artifact of another time and place.

How did you get the idea to write ā€œThe King of the Ferret Leggersā€?
When I got to England in the mid-seventies, there was this satirical, couched-in-gossip magazine called Private Eye. I saw a squib in there about someone named Reg Mellor, who had retired in disgust from a competition called ferret legging because he was able to do it for so long that everyone in the stands got bored and left.

I pulled the page out of the magazine and thought: That is so weird. Someday, Iā€™d like to find out what that is.

I bounced the idea off Ralph Steadman, who was already famous in the United States for his Rolling Stone work with Hunter S. Thompson. I kind of put us together as a package. For whatever reason, I got the OK from ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų to do it.

The story was published, and it fairly immediately became a cult thing. People passed it around at cafĆ©s, as if we were living in the days of Victorian poetry. Writers sent it to each other, and it started to have, you know, buzzā€”and all sorts of unintended consequences for me.

Such as?
Right around that time, I had this idea of trying to write a big story about Nike. The head of Nike, Phil Knight, had never given interviews. I sent him ā€œFerret Leggers.ā€ He loved it. I got the OK to enter Knightā€™s world, and that experience grew into my 1994 book, Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World.

Iā€™ve read that ā€œFerret Leggersā€ was stolen a bunch of times.
The story comes out, and I go back to writing books and other magazine articles. Then I get a phone call from a friend who was talking to another friend in Germany who was raving about this hysterical article in a major German magazine, about a man in Yorkshire, England, who puts ferrets down his pants.

ā€œYouā€™ve been plagiarized,ā€ he said. I lawyered up and was paid triple damagesā€”which wasnā€™t that much because of how small my ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų fee was. But at the time I needed the money!

In the late 1990s, when the Unix-based Internet was becoming the World Wide Web, I became aware that the story was available online with other peopleā€™s bylines on it. I remember writing to some person at Carnegie Mellon University who was trying to publish it under his name.

I said, ā€œYou might not know the concept of intellectual property, but I wrote that. I basically live on that story being republished.ā€ And the kid wrote back, saying, ā€œYou old fart, you should be happy that anyone even cares about a story you wrote in 1983.ā€ He attached various manifestos that said information should be free, which was one of the early ideas defining the Internet: to wipe out professional-grade content in favor of the crowdā€™s content.

Later, when Audible was designing the first download service for contentā€”and inventing the first digital-audio player, which came out almost five years before the iPodā€”I asked our engineers to create an encryption system that would at least cow the people who wanted to steal othersā€™ work. I said at the time: ā€œIf weā€™re going to sustain the professional creative class through this digital transformation, there have to be some protections. Otherwise, no oneā€™s ever going to get paid.ā€ That was key to Audibleā€™s formation, and a focus on powerfully composed and artfully performed words was fundamental during the 27 years I ran the thing.

For many people the writer-to-tech-CEO trajectory might be confusing at first, but it makes sense that the common link is a love of words.
Thatā€™s right. Audible was an idea and a company culture led by a writer. And the truth is, I daydream in prose.

How did you get the elite venture capitalists who backed you to believe in a writer who wanted to create a media category based on technologies that didnā€™t yet exist?
Well, some of them didnā€™t believe. But because Iā€™d studied and written about businesses large and small, I knew that getting a business going required capital, and I would need to deploy language and stories that would overcome perceived risk. I discovered, for instance, that 93 million Americans sat in traffic jams driving to and from workā€”which meant there were hundreds of millions of hours per week that Audible could fill with a premium service offering self-selected entertainment, education, and information. This was a key point in the original business plan. Consumers could ā€œarbitrageā€ their time, I argued, by programming their own listening time. They could make dead time come alive and get to work smarter than the person in the next cube.

Thatā€™s a daunting leap.
The technology-invention risk, on top of the market risk, was real, but I used my journalistic training to be honest about what I didnā€™t know, and to find expert fellow pioneers and employees to supplement that. The realities of financial and cultural success took much longer to achieve than I expected, but from the beginning I thoughtā€”and preachedā€”that digital technology could create an Audible-spawned media category alongside music, books, and other printed material, along with all permutations of film and video. I didnā€™t go so far as to attribute this to what I learned as an English major mentored by Ralph Ellison, or go on as I did later about why Stephen Crane and Mark Twain wrote like Americans because of their ability to listen to the polyglot sound of Americans talking. But these things were never far from my thoughts.

You also had to invent the technology and the hardware to make it happen. You had to invent the Audible MobilePlayer and a way to download encrypted files. And last but not least, you had to persuade the book publishers to license the rights to books.
Despite the efficiencies of never being out of stock in digital, and the price benefits of no physical packaging, resistance from the publishing establishment was intense. There remained an aristocratic strain within the publishing elite that did not want this change.

This seems like the right time to tell you that, by studying your vast oeuvreā€”magazine pieces, books, and Audible itselfā€”Iā€™ve identified themes that run through your work. May I try them out on you?
I love that you did that.

My first theory is that youā€™re drawn to peopleā€”you may be one of those peopleā€”whom the mainstream considers to be, uh, crazy. People who have outrageous ideas and pursue them. Reg Mellor is such a person.
Definitely true. I also think of them as relentless people who just donā€™t give up on ideas. In my case, the shift from writing to creating Audible was, even to myself, something of a mystery.

Two more themes: youā€™re drawn to endurance and domination. Both apply in ā€œFerret Leggers,ā€ but also in ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų stories like your profile of the father of fitness, Jack LaLanne, which was memorably called ā€œJack LaLanne Is Still an Animal.ā€
Jack was such a fascinating, bloody-minded character. He was 80 when I spent time with him, and I think of him often now, as I navigate the realities of aging alongside continued aggressive physical activity.

And, obviously, in the story of Audible, which hung by a thread several times between 1995 and its sale to Amazon in 2008. By 2023, according to one statistic I saw, Audible dominated the U.S. audiobook business, with nearly two-thirds of the market.
There are many ways to define business success, and Audible has clearly achieved a startling level of it by traditional metrics. But what has always mattered to me are the lives that Audible touches in so many ways across listeners, writers, actors, and employees. But thereā€™s no question that if you want to pursue ideas that others may view as unlikely, you better need to win and fear failure in ways most others do not.

Do you have any regrets?
That I was never good enough to be an NHL player. Iā€™m a lifelong hockey player. I would have traded in any of it to be a professional.

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