Remembering I'm an Animal

You ever try to feed a dog something they're not "supposed" to eat? People lose their shit. Yet we feed the same crap to ourselves and our children without a second thought.  At the same time, the question of what we should be eating is so clouded with pseudoscience and fad diets that it's impossible to know who is right. Or if there is such a thing as the "right" die...

Billy interrupts Jody at work to inform him that he is officially walking the Greasy Pole at the St. Peter's Fiesta in Gloucester. Not only that, he's walking on Sunday, the main event, with all the past champions. Jody's response (other than shock): Don't tell my wife.

Spearfishing season has returned to New England, and with it all the excitement and fear that comes from putting a land animal -- in this case, a land animal who has seen the movie "Jaws" -- into an environment where it is ill-equipped and wildly vulnerable.  Or you can just think of it as armed snorkeling, and try to feel all James Bond-y. Either way, a successful hunt yields to all sor...

Is fly fishing the highest form of fishing? Or is it just a bunch of self-indulgent bullshit designed to make “catching a fish as difficult as possible?” And is this all Brad Pitt’s fault for looking so damn hot in “A River Runs Through It?”  These are the questions Billy has been wrestling with during his failed attempts to actually catch a damn fish on a fly, so to help unravel the riddle he spe...

This week we explore the enneagram, an ancient model of the human psyche that breaks everyone into nine different personality types. Billy and Jody establish their numbers, then use them as an excuse to explain all their failures, obviously. Also in this episode, the guys rank the months of the year; Billy tells the story of watching his chiropractor break a world record by doing 21,000 pushups in...

Syd Sydla takes people fishing on the Quabbin. Will Staats hunts for moose antlers in the spring mountains of northern New England. They are great outdoorsmen who are not assholes about their greatness, and as such they are the inaugural class for the Remembering I'm an Animal hall of fame. Also, Billy eventually loses his train of thought about his problems with people who are excessively co...

For the first time, Billy took his young sons bowhunting for turkey, and it was a magical day, soaked in a deep connection to the fathers and sons who have done such things for millennia. Then the cops were called.

Inspired by a recent New Yorker article about the booming Margaritaville retirement community in Florida, a Twitter thread about wealth creations, and his 46th birthday, Billy is on a mission to finally pay attention to wealth creation so that he would at least be able to move to Margaritaville when his time comes. (It all ties in. It really does, and in many ways the most primal urge of adulthood...

William Patrick is an author and editor with a long connection to books that are very relevant to this journey that Billy and Jody are on. So much so that when Billy discovered him years ago, it felt so uncanny that he thought seriously of reaching out to this stranger to say “We have a lot in common and should meet.” Instead, years later, William happened to hear Billy being interviewed on NPR, ...

Billy returns from a two-week road trip to Florida very much convinced that he has uncovered a hidden-in-plain-sight secret: that Florida Man is the most admirably primitive species in modern America. Plus, Jody's emotional day appreciating the gift of human achievement whilst holding a sign atop Heartbreak Hill during the Boston Marathon; a vow to figure out what is meant by "lindy;&quo...

Male friendship is the focus this week, with the paperback release of Billy's book, "We Need to Hang Out," and an invitation to join a legendary crew of older guys who have been gathering in a barn on Wednesday nights for decades. The boys also discuss the pros and cons of "bitch stance" while digging for clams, the "new golden age of wildlife," Jody's attem...

Not to get all Oprah on you, but the guys get a bit Oprah on you today as they discuss the topic of self-compassion, which might just be the missing link connecting the incessantly-forward-thinking modern human to the in-the-moment animal they evolved to be.  The boys continue adding to the list of fundamental human abilities, while trying to figure out what to call the list; discuss how Billy is...

Billy has returned from competing in a swim meet held in a pool cut out of a frozen lake on the Canadian border in Vermont. Jody has become a Forrest Gump-esque running fool, to the point he's now drinking some potion used by an elusive tribe of Mexican distance runners. And the guys try to answer the most important question in life: Should I become a falconer?

At the beginning of the show, Jody declares himself a believer in the theory that the earliest hunters simply wore down large mammals with the human's superior endurance and the almost singular ability to sweat.  At the end of the show, he attempts this live with three deer.  In between, Billy declares himself a believer in the theory that the earliest humans used psilocybin to expand their m...

Winter is a time of preparation, of list-making, and the guys continue working on their list of the fundamental abilities of the human build by discussing all the things this animal can't do.  Also, Jody reveals he has set off running, quite literally, which has led to a big commitment -- the guys are going to train to run up a hill. That hill just happens to be 7.6 miles long, and end at the...

At a base level, this whole misadventure we call "Remembering I'm an Animal" is about trying to crack open the user's manual for Homo Sapiens to figure out how to use this thing correctly. Today on the show, Jody and Billy attempt to identify the signature abilities of the build, from the big evolutionary ones like language, advanced tool-making, and fire-making, to the physica...

Billy thought his little project would consist of a year of beginnings, followed by a year of breakthroughs. Add this to the list of things he has been very wrong about. Year one was certainly "Beginnings." But as they review year two, it was really a story of "Beginning Again." As usual, this is somehow Jody's fault. He's supposed to be the expert. In this episode, J...

The deer rut has come, and the deer rut has gone, and Jody joins Billy to take the blame for everything that went wrong. Also, they discuss the reaction to Billy's front-page article in the Boston Globe about the (alleged) deer overpopulation problem in Massachusetts, and public perceptions of wild game management in a state where less than 1% of people hunt. Special guest appearance by the f...

Billy Baker is trying to remember he's an animal and access the signature abilities of our build, and one of those things is learning to bowhunt. The guy teaching him is Dr. Jody Simones, who claims to know what he's doing and allegedly has a Ph. D in something to do with wildlife. Two years into their partnership, they've yet to bring home dinner.  Will the deer rut finally change...