Dorian Anderson was a neuroscientist and geneticist with a promising academic career when he made a radical shift: in 2014, he left the lab to pursue a year-long, cross-country birding adventure—on a bicycle. Pedaling nearly 18,000 miles across the U.S., his goal was to spot over 600 bird species while deepening his sobriety, and reconnecting with nature.
Dorian Anderson was a neuroscientist and geneticist with a promising academic career when he made a radical shift: in 2014, he left the lab to pursue a year-long, cross-country birding adventure—on a bicycle. Pedaling nearly 18,000 miles across the U.S., his goal was to spot over 600 bird species while deepening his sobriety, and reconnecting with nature.
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Dorian Anderson:
I just rented a bicycle and I biked the five miles to where the birds had been seen the day before, and I saw them. And as I'm riding back I was like, "Man, that was a lot of fun." I've definitely chased rare birds all over the country and kind of all over the state before, but this feels really different. What's different about this? And it kind of registered that it was the bicycle.
Shelby Stanger:
Dorian Anderson was more than a decade into a career as a neuroscientist and geneticist when he had a wild idea. In 2014, he left a prestigious lab job to embark on a year-long birding trip around the US. His goal was to see more than 600 species. Instead of using cars or planes to get from one location to another, Dorian opted to ride his bike. He ended up pedaling almost 18,000 miles around the country. As he traveled, the trip grew into something much more than a birding project. It became an unforgettable adventure that deepened his connection to nature, strengthened his newfound sobriety, and completely reinvented his life.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Dorian Anderson, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have this really impressive academic career, Stanford, Harvard. I want to get into that, but I'm just curious, you birded as a kid. Were you always outdoorsy? Where did you grow up? How did you get into birding?
Dorian Anderson:
So I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. I lived downtown in Philadelphia in kind of the concrete jungle for the first five or six years of my life. And when I was six/seven, we moved to Chestnut Hill, which is kind of this ritzy area of the city, but all of a sudden we had a backyard. And as you can tell, I'm very high energy. And so my mom would kick me out of the house and lock the door and be like, "Dinner's at 7:00 o'clock. You're out until then." And so I'd be stuck in the backyard like, "What the hell am I going to do with myself?" And besides throwing rocks at the commuter train that ran behind our fence, I just started to notice birds. And I'm like, "What the hell is this red bird and what is this blue bird?"
And so I found some binoculars and my mom bought me a bird book and I just started kind of looking at everything that was in the yard and getting super stoked to know, "Well, is that a house sparrow or a house finch, or is that a Carolina wren, or a house wren?" And I'm a geek, I'm a geek at heart, and so I needed to know what everything was. And so I just got totally sucked into this on my own. My parents thought I was insane, which is partially right, but it just kept me busy. And then my mom, she met this woman in her gardening group and the woman's like, "Oh my God, I have this bird-obsessed husband." My mom was like, "Oh, I have this bird obsessed son." And so they're like, "Ah, problem solved." So I got hooked up with this dude and this guy turned out to be Robert Ridgely, who is one of the foremost experts on South American birds. So he would take me out birding each weekend, so he was kind of my birding mentor because my parents were completely ill-equipped.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So you also went to a birding camp as a kid, just quickly. I didn't know that that even existed.
Dorian Anderson:
Yeah, it's where all the cool kids went, I promise you. It was like all the ballers were at. So, yeah, I went and hung out with, I don't know, 10 or 12 other bird-obsessed kids when I was 12 years old, and it was awesome. I was the youngest person there. I was such a hot mess, but it was the first time I'd birded with people my age, and so I did that for four summers at a row.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you remember the first bird you saw that just really hooked you in?
Dorian Anderson:
So a lot of people have what's called a spark bird where they're out in their yard and a pileated woodpecker comes and lands on the tree and they're like, "What the hell is that giant woodpecker? It looks like an ivory build." Then they go in and look it up. I don't have a spark bird, so to speak. I think that there's some things about my personality that I'm very curious, and I also like categorizing and listing and accounting. And so keeping track of everything that I see in every county and in every state, it's therapeutic for me. It's my way of imposing a bit of order on an otherwise chaotic world.
And I think that in this technological age and in this time and point in the 21st century where so much is known, the whole world is mapped. There's never going to be the first person to sail to South America again. There's never going to be the first person to round the Cape of Good Hope, or the Cape of Good Horn, there's never going to be a new island discovered. I think that there's something very basic, something very animalistic about going out into the natural world and looking for things and searching. I think that we've lost this in the human capacity where searching these days is getting online and looking something up. It's not going into the world and physically interacting with everything that you see. And so it's awesome to walk outside and see all the birds that live in your neighborhood and appreciate them for their life histories and their beauty and their behavior. But it's even more exciting when you walk outside and you find a bird that you know shouldn't be there.
A good example of that is a dusky warbler. I found a dusky warbler when I was living in Los Angeles. Dusky warbler is a bird that usually lives in Europe. And you walk out there and you're like, "Oh my God, I've got this thing in front of me that nobody else around here knows about. I found this amazing bird." It's like you found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in that respect. And so that you get that feeling periodically. Sometimes you find something that's rare within your county, sometimes you find something that's rare within your state, and sometimes you find something that's lost from the other side of the world, and that's just the best feeling in the world.
Shelby Stanger:
Birding was an endless scavenger hunt that Dorian could do every time he went outside and it was a perfect outlet for his energy and curiosity. In his late teens though, life pulled Dorian in other directions. He went to college at Stanford. And like some kids who are suddenly free from parental supervision, Dorian was distracted by partying and booze.
You were a big birder all through growing up your childhood, but then there was a time when birding wasn't part of your life. Just curious, what pulled you away? Was it just being a teenager or an adult, young adult?
Dorian Anderson:
I think there were several things. I think the first thing was once I got to Stanford for my undergrad and I really delved into the world of molecular biology, I was so enthralled with how cells function that I kind of forgot about the organismal side of the spectrum. So that was part one of the story. Part two of the story is I started getting hammered my junior year of high school and I fell in love with alcohol the first time I got drunk. And after that, it was just like one blackout after another. And fortunately, I just tell people I'm good at school. I was just able to get through high school without any problems. I went to one of these high-powered prep schools in New England, and even once I got to Stanford, I was just good at school and I didn't have to do a lot. And so I got wasted all the time.
And one of the things I realized is that if I wanted to go and do organismal and evolutionary biology, that meant sitting at a field station in Ecuador where there were no drugs, no dance music, because I got involved in DJing, and no girls. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be in a city, I wanted to party. So my birding interest evaporated while I was at Stanford. I spent some time studying. The rest of my time, I spent drinking beer, playing Ultimate Frisbee, and doing research in my lab. And then when I left Stanford, I kind of figured I'd go get a PhD, but I went and lived in Boston for three years and I worked at Harvard doing molecular embryology. So I spent three years doing that.
And then I went to NYU, I specifically chose NYU because it had a great program and it was in New York, and my drug and alcohol problem had gotten so bad that it was like, "I never have to drive." So I joke with people that I got a PhD, and my PhD was in developmental genetics and molecular cell biology, but I got that PhD in the background of partying, figuring that I could go on and be a college professor because academia tolerates eccentric people like me. As long as you can produce data and you get the job done, there isn't the same buttoned up bullshit that you have to deal with in these other professions. It's personality and results and that's all that matters. And I could do those things. So birding just evaporated from age like 17 to 30.
Shelby Stanger:
I mean, you were really high-functioning alcoholic, which I think is tricky for people who are really high functioning to get sober. Did you have a rock-bottom moment or what made you decide to maybe not party as much as you were?
Dorian Anderson:
Yeah, so I didn't have a rock-bottom moment. I was in a relationship that I thought was very serious, but I wasn't taking it seriously because I was still lying to this woman. Every time she'd go away for work, I'd be like, "Oh, I'm just going to lounge around and get some work done." I'd go on these week-long benders. And I eventually got caught one too many times and I had this emotional breakdown where I was like, "I just lost the one person in the world who loved me more than I loved myself." And that was tough. I mean, that was a soul-searching moment. And so I hadn't lost my job, I hadn't been kicked out of school. School and job at that time were kind of the same thing because I was a paid graduate student.
I beat the hell out of myself, my health had taken a hit, I had alienated some friends, I angered my family. But fortunately I was good enough at science and I skated on a lot of shit. Had I not had the success that I had at every academic level, and people did pull me aside, but at the end, they had to shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, what can we do?" But it wasn't until I lost this woman that I thought like, "Damn, I need to do something." The math kind of clicked in my head. I had done all the wrong things. I had driven drunk, I had put myself in so many compromising positions both physically and legally, and I eeked through and I just looked at the math and I was like, "I can't keep doing this. I'm going to lose it all if I keep doing this." And so that was ultimately what motivated me to go and get sober when I was 30.
Shelby Stanger:
Getting sober gave Dorian his life back, but he threw himself into his career with the same drive that had fueled his addiction. He was publishing research, working in prestigious labs, and building an impressive resume at places like Harvard and Mass General. Outside the lab, he started going on long runs. Eventually, birding reentered the picture. The time Dorian spent outside gave him joy and a connection to the natural world. One day, a small adventure to find a rare bird left him feeling so energized that it sparked his wildest idea yet.
Dorian Anderson:
The genesis of the idea dates back to 2012. I was working as a postdoctoral fellow at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. And in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this very rare bird, called a northern Lapwing, showed up in Nantucket. And I had to go see this bird from my North American life list, which is kind of the collection of birds I've amassed over my lifetime. And so I orchestrated this complicated plan in the wake of the super storm to drive to Hyannis and then take a ferry out to Nantucket, but there was no transportation on the island at that time of year and in the wake of the storm. So I rented a bicycle and the guy's like, "If you're crazy enough to ride your bike out here in the wake of this effectively hurricane, I'll rent it to you." So I rented this bike and I biked the five miles to where the birds had been seen the day before, and I saw them. And I biked back to the ferry after celebrating my victory and got on the ferry.
And as I'm riding back to Hyannis on the ferry, I was like, "Man, that was a lot of fun." I've definitely chased rare birds all over the country and kind of all over the state before, but this feels really different. What's different about this? And it kind of registered that it was the bicycle. And so I started thinking, "Well, has anybody used a bicycle to pursue birds in any kind of formalized context? Are there bike birding clubs? Are there bike birding field trips?" And then there's this crazy project called a big year, which birders often undertake, and I can explain that in a second, but I said, "Has anybody ever done a bicycle big year? Because that would be the coolest project ever if somebody were to do that."
I should just tell you that a big year is this year-long scavenger hunt whereby a birder tries to maximize the number of species seen within any given geography. So some people do a county big year, other people do a state big year, some people do country big years, and some people even do world big years. But up until I showed up on the scene, people universally relied on planes, trains, automobiles, boats, chartered helicopters to get to places where they could see birds that other people couldn't, and there's a very competitive aspect to this. And so the genesis of this trip was this thinking that I don't have a lot of money and I don't like the associated environmental degradation that flying around the world or driving across the country or renting a helicopter causes, so a bicycle would solve for both problems. A bicycle would level the playing field on the money and also kind take out the petroleum-based emissions. So that's the genesis. It's a long story.
Shelby Stanger:
I love this story. And also, thank you for explaining what a big year meant because I just thought it was always country. I didn't know that you could have a big year just in a county or a city. So you have this experience right near Hurricane Sandy, you see this bird and it flies into your life. The metaphor of that is just absolutely so beautiful. But you have all these things going for you. You're this big research fellow and you decide to leave it all to go chase birds. That on paper or telling your parents must have been kind of a hard thing to say.
Dorian Anderson:
Yeah. So the lapwing story episode, whatever you want to call it, happened in November of 2012, and this idea immediately germinated, as I said on the ferry ride home. And I kind of kicked it around to my then girlfriend at the time, and she kind of laughed off. She's like, "That's kind of cool, but you're not ready to leave your career in science." And I wasn't, there was still meat on that bone, so to speak. But as my research kind of fell apart through no fault of my own, it just the negative results kept coming in, the data was really ambiguous. It wasn't pointing to anything interesting. And I had this choice, "Do I restart with a second postdoctoral project?" Which could be another five or six years of time invested, "Or do I leave now and do something different?" But then to think about surrounding the academic side of my existence, my being, my personality, my soul was gut-wrenching.
And as my research crumbled, eventually my girlfriend, now wife, sat me down. She's like, "This idea is really good. And if you don't take this bike trip now, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life. You need to do this so that you can experience something beyond the lab. You need to do this so that you can see what else is out there." And so she gave me the strength to quit my job. I don't know if I would've been able to do it without her.
And it's funny, every time I tell this story, I end up in this same state of bawling my eyes out, whether it's in public on a podcast, but I mean, this is the woman that I ended up marrying because she understands this. And it was a big risk for her. When people go off and do big years under a normal circumstance, the only threat is really to their bank account. It's not to their body when you're flying around and driving around. For me, to propose with no cycling experience besides biking to and from frat parties drunk at Stanford and my lapwing chase on Nantucket, no cycling experience beyond those two adventures in air quotes to then propose this 15,000 mile year long bird pursuit around the country was insane. But she has this trust in the universe that I didn't have at that moment that she could surrender me to the open road and that I'd come back a better person and hopefully come back alive. But it was a huge risk on her standpoint as well.
So, yeah. I mean, there was a lot that went into this. I mean, leaving my career, leaving my girlfriend, leaving my identity, like going and doing something so nutty and crazy and potentially dangerous to go look for birds. And what it was, it was like this, I needed to reconnect with the bird-obsessed child that I had left when I got involved with alcohol and when I got involved with academic science. I needed to reconnect to that wide-eyed child. And that's kind of what the bike trip, I don't want to say promised, but the opportunity that it presented.
Shelby Stanger:
When Dorian Anderson took off on his big year, his goal was to spot 600 types of birds. He'd been in the birding game for long enough that he had a sense of exactly where to go. There are regions in the US where you can see species that are typically only found in other countries. For example, you can see European birds on the East Coast, Central and South American birds in Texas, and you can often see Asian birds on the West Coast. Dorian sketched out a path that would largely take him along the outer edges of the country. He set off from New Hampshire on January 1st, 2014, and ended up biking through 28 states. How many miles did you ride about a day and then total?
Dorian Anderson:
So when I originally did this, I could run 10 miles on demand at any point. And so my calculation was if I can run 10 miles any day at any point, I can bike 40. And so I thought that over the course of 365 days, I would bike about 15,000 miles. Well, that was an underestimate, and I ended up biking about 18,000 miles, which if you then divide that by 365, it ends up being almost exactly 50 miles a day. So that's what it ended up being. Unlike a traditional or a pure cyclist, I spent at least half of my time bird watching. So if I had ridden to Junction Texas to look for black-capped vireo, I had to spend the morning hiking around looking for black-capped vireo. And then once I found that bird, then I could get on the bike and ride the 60 or 70 miles to the next town.
Shelby Stanger:
Where did you stay? It'd be expensive to stay at hotels every time, but it sounds like you just did a lot of different things.
Dorian Anderson:
So, yeah, at the outset I relied a lot on friends. I had a good social network in the Northeast, so I was able to find places to crash a lot. Once birders got wind of this project, they're like, "Oh my God, this guy sounds insane. I have to meet him." So birders would contact me from all over the country being like, "Hey, if you come through here, you're welcome to stay." So it kind of snowballed. Finding lodging at the outset was a bit difficult, but once more and more people found out about the project, more and more offers came in. And I'd be remiss. Also, my wife, then girlfriend, now wife, her name is Sonia. Sonia has always worked in corporate travel. And Sonia had a pipeline to some higher ups at Best Western, and they kind of have branded themselves as the environmentally responsible hotel chain brand.
And so she went to them and said, "Hey, look, my boyfriend is about to do this, and it's this green eco adventure, and you guys are branding yourself this way. Put your money where your mouth is." And they said, "We love this idea. This is great." So they gave me 6,000 bucks to use at their hotels. I think I spent 58 nights with Best Western. So that was a nice reprieve because otherwise I would ride into a small town in Texas and I'd ride to the gas station and buy a soda and a candy bar to fuel up, and I'd be like, "Dude, what is the worst motel in town?" And he'd be like, "Well, there was a murder at that motel last week." And I would be like, "That sounds perfect," because I had to keep the costs down as you said, so I would stay in these terrible motels.
And then there's this network called Warm Showers, which is traveling cyclists who are willing to exchange lodging with one another. And so I spent probably 100 nights with warm showers hosts that I had not met. I couldn't plan a month in advance because you don't know what the weather is going to do. You don't know how your body is going to feel. If you're looking for black-capped vireo in the morning and you don't find it, you have to spend another afternoon at that spot, then you can't ride to where you wanted to spend that night, so you can only really organize things about 24 hours in advance. But warm Showers is an awesome community. I host here now in my place for Warm Showers. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have a memorable guest you stayed with? I'm reading your book right now. You are a great storyteller.
Dorian Anderson:
What I tell people is the birds are the Christmas tree, the birds are the shape to the story, but the people that I meet along the way, the ornaments that kind of give it its character. I was in New Iberia, Louisiana as red part of the country as you can get, as a religious part of the country as you can get. I am not religious at all. These people were Warm Showers hosts, and I had dinner with them and references to Jesus were so frequent during dinner, I swear to God, I thought he was going to walk through the door and join us for dessert. And so at some point, I asked these people, I'm like, "Guys, I got to know I'm this liberal dude from Boston. I'm not religious. Why are you guys Warm showers hosts?" And they're like, "Honestly, we have our way of life here, but we realize that there aren't a lot of outside ideas or different types of people who come into this community. And so we don't know who's going to show up on the bike and what ideas they're going to bring. And even if they're not the same as mine or as ours, there's something different."
And so I went from thinking like, "God, these people are so close-minded and backwoods" to like, "Man, these people are actually really aware as to what they know and don't know, and they're craving interaction with people who aren't like them." And so that was really, really refreshing because like I said, I'm not a religious guy and the whole thing weirds me out. I'm a scientist and experimentalist, a realist so to speak, but it was such a great interaction. But like all the people, it was amazing. The number of people who I'd never met around America who opened their doors to me and took care of me as if I was a relative was amazing. And the best people hands down were like the empty nesters who their kids were out. But I showed up and I was like this tender 30-something out wandering the world on his bike, and all the maternal and paternal genes got turned back on.
So they made me this elaborate meal and they'd come and turn my bed down and they'd be, "Do you want a glass of warm milk?" I felt like somebody's going to read me Goodnight Moon. But they were so attentive and so wonderful when I would stay with these folks. It was just awesome, the people. It was a really cool commercial for America. I think that at a divided time like this, I think that my story of staying with people in red states and blue states and of walks, A, B, C, D and sexual orientations, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, everybody took care of me and we were all able to put our differences aside. And I think that that's a really uplifting story.
Shelby Stanger:
Dorian spent his days pedaling from one spot to another with his binoculars and camera close at hand. Oftentimes though, he had to ditch his bike and hike several miles from the road to find whatever species he was looking for. Because he was outside all day, Dorian was able to spot more than 600 species of birds. Each one gave Dorian a new thrill, but the trip was also exhausting and difficult. There were many near-miss accidents on busy roads, encounters with aggressive dogs, and frequent threats of unpredictable weather. Let's talk about some of the things that went terribly wrong.
Dorian Anderson:
Fortunately, I will say that most of the things that went wrong were isolated. Because of my time in science, I'm very good at logistics and planning because when you run a scientific experiment, you have to be an eternal pessimist. So everything that you do, you assume it's going to fail. The one thing that no matter how much you plan, you cannot control is the weather. And that is where most of my frustrations would be revealed. For instance, I needed to know the weather, not just for the three days ahead of me. I needed to know the weather the three days behind me. And you'll say, "Why the hell would you need to know the weather three days behind you or three days ago?"
Well, because if I'm riding a road from point A to point B, and that road is 100 miles long and the last 50 miles of it are dirt, if it rained three inches two days ago, that's not a dirt road, that's a mud road, and those 50 miles are going to feel like 500. So I needed to know what had happened previously so that I could manage the conditions. And if I didn't know that and ended up on a muddy road, then that was a lesson I learned the hard way. If I didn't research, if a bridge was out, that was a lesson I learned the hard way ,and then would have to ride 100 miles to find another bridge.
I think more so than rain, wind was the devil, wind was the worst. You couldn't prepare for it, you couldn't plan for it, and it felt like the universe was actively conspiring to prevent me from doing what I wanted to do on those days. I had several notable roadside meltdowns, and it was all at the hands of wind. When I would throw my bike off the side of the road and be like, "I'm done." I'm almost in tears. I'm walking away from my bike. I'm like, "I can't believe I threw my career away for this. I can't believe this is where I am." And then you take some deep breaths, you get yourself together, and then you realize the only way out of this is to get back on the bike and start pedaling again. There's no other way out of it.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me about the birding. What was the most meaningful bird that you found?
Dorian Anderson:
Yeah, I think as in all things in life, the things you work hardest for are the most meaningful. So white-tailed ptarmigan was a particularly protracted battle. White-tailed ptarmigan is a bird about the size of a pigeon. It's a small grouse that lives up on the alpine tundra, so above, at least at Colorado's latitude, above 12,000 feet. And so there's no place to stay up there. So the nearest places to stay would be like 758, 200 feet. So each time I wanted to look for ptarmigan, I'd have to climb 3,000 or 4,000 vertical feet, which would take two or three hours on the bike, and I'd have to throw the bike and all my possessions into the bushes and cover them up, put on my hiking boots, and then hike up anywhere from 500 to 2,000 feet to go look for this bird. And so I kept yo-yoing.
Every time I'd go up to do this, I'd miss and then I'd come back down, and then two days later, I'd have to go over another high mountain pass and I'd look again. So I missed it five or six times before I finally found it. And so that was one of those like, "Hell, yeah, I earned this." I biked from sea level to get here.
It's the same thing as anything in life, when you lay out your options or you lay out what's in front of you, the right decision is almost always the one that you like least. It's the hardest one, but when you take that path, it's that much rewarding once you're finished it, setting goals and having long view and delayed gratification and working hard towards things and building things. And as I said, I used that word synergy earlier where you achieve step A and then you build, and then you can do step B and step C. That's satisfying. And so those birds that I missed over and over and over again, but kept after were ultimately the most memorable in the course of the whole year.
Shelby Stanger:
When he finally finished his journey, Dorian realized that he wasn't interested in going back to the lab. He wanted to keep birding and biking. He was invited on international birding trips to places like Honduras, Spain, Belize, and Taiwan, and eventually he became pretty well known in the field. Then in 2023, Dorian published a book about his big year called Birding Under the Influence. The process of writing the book helped him reflect on the trip in new ways.
Dorian Anderson:
The number one thing that I learned from this adventure is that crazy ideas are good ideas. Everybody I talked to before taking off on this, it's like, "Dude, you have a sweet gig. You've done so well at Stanford and Harvard and NYU that even if your postdoc doesn't go perfectly, somebody is going to offer you a lab. You're going to land somewhere. You're going to be a great mentor to future generations of scientists. You're not going to be destitute. You're going to have purpose." My parents went ballistic when I told them about this trip. Everybody's like, "Dude, this is crazy." And so what I tell people is that you need people to tell you that you're nuts. You need half the people in the room to tell you that you're foolish because any idea, where everybody in the room says, "That's an awesome idea," doesn't move the thought needle that far away from what we're already experiencing.
If I would've just said, "You know what? I'm not going to drive more than 40,000 miles, or I'm only going to use 20 flights, or I'm only going to spend $25,000," which is way more than I ended up spending. If I'd put those kind of conventional regulations on the big year, it wouldn't have been that different. It wouldn't have been that interesting. But by saying, "I'm not going to use petroleum for the entire year and I'm going to do this on a bike," it's crazy enough that people tell you that it can't be done, and that's worth doing. Safe ideas suck. Safe ideas suck. You need to have something different. You need to have something that's scary.
Shelby Stanger:
Dorian shares many more stories from his big year and his book Birding Under the Influence. I read it and loved it. Special thanks to longtime listeners, Riley Daniels and his dad, Kyle, who are also amazing birders for the recommendation. I'm personally not a birder, but the way Dorian talks about humanity, his love story, and birds is really beautiful. To keep in touch with Dorian, follow him on Instagram at dorian.anderson.photography. You can also find him at doriananderson.com. That's D-O-R-I-A-N-A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N.com.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paola Motilla and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.