Thanksgiving Special: The Wild, Weird, and Sketchy World of Truffle Hunting
Something funky this way comes. All over the world, deep inside dark forests, hunters tip toe in secret for a wildly expensive delicacy: truffles. The aromatic fungi grows underground, tethered to tree roots, and is exceptionally difficult to find—which is why specially trained dogs are needed to sniff them out, and they’re worth their weight in gold. As it turns out, the truffle business is not too dissimilar from the illegal-drug business, filled with shady deals and even shadier characters. Back in 2022, host PaddyO interviewed Outside contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen about his journey into the mob-like underbelly of truffle hunting, from old world European forests to, very unexpectedly, the hills of Appalachia.
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What Rock Climbing Teaches Us About Balance in Real Life, with Kai Lightner
If you’ve ever been bucked off your mogul line, stuffed a front bike tire, caught a toe on a rock, or collapsed the leg of a camp chair, you know that to go outside is to have an intense relationship with balance. But recovering physical balance is a lot easier than emotional balance. Just ask climber and balance Jedi Kai Lightner. Kai has been a climbing savant since he scaled a 50-foot flagpole at 6-years-old. He then went on to casually win 10 youth national championship titles, five youth world championship medalist, then evolved from an indoor climbing phenom to an outdoor climbing force. Along the way, Kai had to deal with physical and emotional stress and pressure that outsized his abilities, but climbing provided a cathartic way through it all. In Kai’s view, the physical demands of climbing—having to embrace fear and doubt—provides a kind of balance that can carry us through whatever life throws our way.
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The Ancient Roots of Exploration, with Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi
Have you ever wondered why you feel a pull to go for that grueling trail run or long bike ride or demanding backcountry ski? We have an innate need for adventure, but why? According to paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Ella Al-Shamahi, it’s in our DNA. Ella’s years of Paleolithic study focuses on the first humans and how they behaved—everything from community building to tool evolution to the world’s first sea crossing, which populated Australia. Her research has helped uncover a bonkers “Lord Of The Rings” era, when our foremothers and fathers existed alongside other human species that she calls things like “Hobbits” and “Dragon Men”…seriously. Ella believes that we have a genetic predisposition for adventure, which explains why homosapiens populated the earth and the Hobbits and Dragon Men did not. More importantly for our purposes, it helps explain why we still love to sleep in the dirt, climb mountains, and seek out the next big adventure.
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Why You Might Consider Jumping Out of a Plane, with Alexey Galda
They say it’s not the fall that gets ya, it’s the landing. Fear of falling, or smacking one’s face onto the cold hard earth, is an innate human emotion. Even for athletes who’ve spent a lifetime climbing mountains, traversing sheer cliffs, balancing on knife-edge ridgelines, this fear never disappears. And that’s why folks who paraglide, speedfly, and skydive are both fascinating and confounding. What do they know that the rest of us don’t? Well, champion wingsuit pilot and quantum physicist, Alexey Galda knows a lot about it. Alexey spends his weekdays in quantum computing at the pharmaceutical giant Moderna. And his weekends are spent jumping out of perfectly good airplanes donning a “squirrel suit” that lets him move horizontally through the sky at speeds exceeding 200 miles an hour. Even if these worlds seem drastically different, they both impact the other and allow Alexey to, ahem, fly through fear.
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Why Adventure is a Form of Art, With Ski Touring Legend John King
In 1978, skier and kinetic artist John King, along with two pals, set out on a singular and epic adventure: a backcountry ski tour from Durango, Colorado to the Medicine Bow Range near Fort Collins. Over six weeks, the trio skied 490 miles, climbed 65,000 vertical feet. They finished gaunt and sun cooked, with boots held together by tape. Their route influenced the design of the Colorado Trail and the locations of the 10th Mountain Division hut system, but the journey has never been repeated. It’s not an overstatement to call this one of the most audacious wintertime feats of endurance in the history of skiing—a new documentary called Moving Line captures all of that beautifully. And for John King the true triumph was the artistic merit of the pursuit itself. John believes that his tracks on that trip sketched lines that extend into his present day and beyond toward his future. In John’s estimation, movement is creation, expedition is art, and all of it guides him every step of the way.
Outside’s longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will both entertain and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, and have since expanded our show and now offer a range of story formats, including reports from our correspondents in the field and interviews with the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and the outdoors.
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