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Outside Podcast

PRX

Outside's longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will entertain, inspire, and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, which was developed in partnership with PRX, distributors of the idolized This American Life and The Moth Radio Hour, among others. We have since added three additional series, The Outside Interview, which has editor Christopher Keyes interrogating the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and politics, Dispatches, a diverse range of stories on newsworthy topics, and Sweat Science, which explores the outer limits of athletic performance.

Outside's longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will entertain, inspire, and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, which was developed in partnership with PRX, distributors of the idolized This American Life and The Moth Radio Hour, among others. We have since added three additional series, The Outside Interview, which has editor Christopher Keyes interrogating the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and politics, Dispatches, a diverse range of stories on newsworthy topics, and Sweat Science, which explores the outer limits of athletic performance.

Location:

United States

Networks:

PRX

Description:

Outside's longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will entertain, inspire, and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, which was developed in partnership with PRX, distributors of the idolized This American Life and The Moth Radio Hour, among others. We have since added three additional series, The Outside Interview, which has editor Christopher Keyes interrogating the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and politics, Dispatches, a diverse range of stories on newsworthy topics, and Sweat Science, which explores the outer limits of athletic performance.

Language:

English

Episodes

The Climbers Speaking Up About Eating Disorders

10/21/2020
To become an elite climber, you need to get very good at defying gravity. This requires developing extraordinary control of your body while also maximizing your strength to weight ratio. To do that, you train constantly and also pay attention to your diet. At the upper echelons of the sport, where every move counts, there’s pressure on athletes to do all they can to make themselves stronger, while also getting smaller and lighter. For professional climbers Kai Lightner and Beth Rodden, that...

Duration:00:24:31

How the Pandemic Is Teaching Us to Listen to Nature

10/14/2020
One of the defining aspects of modern life is our inability to hear the sounds of nature due to noise pollution. But since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the world have remarked that they’re hearing birds and other creatures more clearly than ever before. This includes professional listeners like Chris Watson, the legendary field recordist who for decades has captured the sounds of wildlife heard in David Attenborough’s films, including The Green Planet, which will premier...

Duration:00:29:37

A First-Time Hunter Gets a Lesson from #WomenWhoHunt

10/7/2020
Of all the people who might end up on a deer hunt in Arizona, Rachel Levin has to be among the least likely candidates. Growing up, her closest connection to hunting was Elmer Fudd cartoons. Today she’s a food writer in San Francisco, where she knows just one person who hunts. But like a lot of food obsessives, Rachel was often curious about how the meat on her plate got there. Earlier this year, she got a chance to find out when she joined a bow hunt for mule deer with two rising stars of...

Duration:00:40:57

Changing How You Breathe Could Change Your Life

9/30/2020
You’ve been breathing wrong your whole life. That’s the message journalist and outdoor athlete James Nestor delivers in his new bestseller Breath, which explains how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and why this is so bad for our health in all kinds of ways. But his reporting also shows that with minor adjustments in how we inhale and exhale, we can dramatically improve on everything from the quality of our sleep to our athletic performance to our posture. Nestor,...

Duration:00:47:22

A Harebrained Dream of Building a Cabin in the Woods

9/23/2020
It sounds like a fantasy: join forces with a good friend to build a sweet little cabin in the woods. And for Bryan Schatz and Patrick Hutchison, that’s exactly how it felt. They took time away from promising careers to pursue a dream of crafting a base camp for adventures in an idyllic spot in Washington’s Cascade Range. There was just one problem: they had no idea what they were doing. Their planned summer project turned into a yearlong saga that drained their bank accounts and stressed...

Duration:00:36:50

What We Really Know About Life in Outer Space

9/17/2020
In recent years, the search for extraterrestrials has been accelerated by a wave of new technologies that allow us to better probe distant reaches of the galaxy. Meanwhile, a pair of events have generated enormous excitement among those who believe that aliens might already be among us. In 2017, when the first interstellar object was detected in our solar system, a highly respected Harvard astrophysicist suggested it might be a probe that was sent by aliens. That same year, the public...

Duration:00:34:45

Why Big Wild’s Songs Feel Like Adventures

9/2/2020
You know how when you listen to certain songs, you feel you feel like you’re being transported to a totally different place? Most of the time, this is exactly what the musician was trying to do—especially if the musician is Jackson Stell, who creates music under the name Big Wild. Stell is a rapidly rising artist in the electronic and dance scene, though his songs don’t fit neatly in that genre. As a producer, musician, songwriter, and vocalist, he’s crafting works that are inspired by...

Duration:00:25:02

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Wants YOU to Save the Planet

8/19/2020
Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has to be among the busiest scientists in the world. She runs a conservation consulting firm, Ocean Collectiv, as well as a think tank focused on the future of coastal cities called the Urban Ocean Lab. She was an advisor to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. In June, she wrote an influential op-ed for The Washington Post that explained to white environmentalists why it’s critical for them to join the movement for racial justice. She’s currently editing an...

Duration:00:32:59

Trapped Underwater and Running Out of Air

8/5/2020
If you were to try to come up with the most outlandish survival story imaginable, you’d be hard pressed to do much better than the tale of Michael Proudfoot, a scuba diver who found himself trapped alone in a shipwreck deep under the sea and running out of air. It’s the ultimate nightmare scenario for a diver, and yet somehow Proudfoot managed to live through it. Or maybe not. Maybe none of it ever happened. This week on the Outside Podcast, we revisit a classic episode from our archives...

Duration:00:45:19

The Dirty Awesome Truth About Summer Camp

7/15/2020
There’s a misguided notion that the ultimate kid’s paradise would look something like a cross between Disneyland and Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. The truth is that for a lot of kids, paradise is nothing like that. Instead it’s sleepaway summer camp—especially a camp that lets you do crazy stupid things and get really, really dirty. In the second installment of our two-part exploration of the specialness and weirdness of camp, we present a collection of stories that capture camps and...

Duration:00:33:17

That Time the Camp Snake Tried to Eat a Counselor

7/8/2020
Amazing things happen when young people spend their days outside and their nights sleeping among new friends—and a week far, far away from their parents. Kids learn to take care of themselves, and each other. But strange things happen, too, like that time a camp’s beloved pet snake chomped down on a counselor’s hand and wouldn’t let go. Or when a moth flew deep inside a camper’s ear and had to be extracted with an ancient and bizarre technique. Then there was the camper who brought her...

Duration:00:36:44

A Close Encounter with the Real Moby Dick

6/24/2020
For a good number of travelers, the ultimate bucket-list experience is swimming with whales. There’s something about the idea of being in the water with these enormous creatures that calls to people. And if you talk to people who have swum with whales, chances are they’ll tell you it changed their lives. This is true even for veteran adventurers who’ve seen it all—people like Outside contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen, whose past assignments include a journey to the Amazon to seek out the...

Duration:00:24:38

A Kayaker’s Brush with Death

6/17/2020
Nouria Newman is one of the best whitewater kayakers in the world. She’s won numerous prestigious competitions and has completed historic first descents of some of the planet’s most dangerous rapids. But it wasn’t until she nearly drowned on a solo expedition in the Himalayas that she was able to truly reckon with the deadly toll of her sport—and discover what matters most. This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Visit Florida, one of the country’s great adventure...

Duration:00:29:27

Running While Black in New York

6/10/2020
There’s been a running boom in the age of coronavirus, with veteran runners and newbies alike lacing up their shoes to get outside. But the experience has not been the same for everyone. Coffey, a well-known figure in New York City’s vibrant running scene as well as a multitalented creative artist, has continued to get his miles in during the pandemic. And like other runners whose skin is black or brown, he has faced the same risks of harassment and violence that were present before the...

Duration:00:33:11

A Love Story Interrupted by a Bison Attack

6/3/2020
It’s an established fact that outdoorsy people have the best stories about dating. Getting to know a potential partner while climbing, paddling, or otherwise exploring an unpredictable environment just offers more opportunities for memorable surprises. Usually, these experiences are shared with friends over beers. Sometimes they make their way into wedding toasts. And then there are the incidents that make headlines. So it was with Kayleigh Davis and Kyler Bourgeous’s encounters with some...

Duration:00:38:42

How Kara Goucher Stood Up to Running's Goliath

5/27/2020
When Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher went public in 2015 with her accusation that her former coach, the legendary Alberto Salazar, had skirted antidoping rules with the elite runners of the Nike Oregon Project, she suffered an onslaught of criticism and harassment. The blowback set her back financially and competitively—and made her wonder if she had made a terrible mistake. Then last spring, Goucher spoke up again, joining former Nike teammates in a New York Times op-ed about the company’s...

Duration:00:37:40

The Filmmaker Who Cracked Open Lance Armstrong

5/20/2020
The first question most people have when they hear about Lance, the new documentary series about the world’s most infamous cyclist, is: Why now? Back in 2013, we watched Armstrong give his first doping confessions to Oprah. That same year, Oscar-winning director Alex Gigney released The Armstrong Lie, a documentary that had the cyclist offering lengthy admissions of guilt and claims of sincere remorse. Since then, there’s been a number of tell-all books by seemingly anyone who had the...

Duration:00:38:03

What Happens to a Cyclist's Body When It's Hit by a Car

5/5/2020
Last summer, 34-year-old Andrew Bernstein, known to his friends as Bernie, was riding his bike alone on a road outside Boulder, Colorado, when he was struck by a vehicle. The driver fled the scene and left him laying in a ditch, where he would have soon died if a passerby hadn’t noticed him and called 911. Bernie was a passionate amateur cyclist who competed regularly in elite track races, but in an instant his body was shattered and his life was forever changed. Unfortunately, his...

Duration:00:38:33

A Half-Baked Trip that Ended with a Magical Eclipse

4/29/2020
As every seasoned traveler knows, the most meaningful trips are the ones where everything goes wrong. Take, for example, climber and longtime Outside contributor Mark Jenkins’s recent quest to witness a total solar eclipse from the top of a 20,000-foot peak. A veteran of historic expeditions including an attempt on the North Face of Mount Everest, a first descent of the Niger River, and a bicycling odyssey across Siberia, Jenkins was in the mood for something different. So he recruited his...

Duration:00:29:01

The Switch in Your Brain That Turns Down Stress

4/22/2020
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a technique that would allow us to vanquish fear and beat back stress? There just might be. In his latest book, The Wedge, bestselling author Scott Carney explains that when humans face challenging situations, our automatic responses tend to make us feel terrible. But the good news is that there are a number of simple methods we can learn to take control of our reactions to stimulus—whether it’s a circling shark or a scary news headline. Over the past few...

Duration:00:50:24

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