Episode 168 with Damien Cave
Nature Holds Mostly Rewards With a Few Hazards, Too
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168 DAMIEN CAVE
Ginny Yurich All right, here we go. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I'm so excited to have an author with me today that I just recently read his book and really got so much out of it. Damien Cave, welcome.
Damien Cave Thank you. Happy to be here.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, happy to have you. So you just wrote a book that came out here in the States in May. It came out a little bit earlier in Australia. It's called Parenting Like an Australian One family's quest to fight fear and dive into a better, braver life. And I got my question answered. If you're still in Australia and yes, you are. So I just finished the book and it's a lot about risk and fear and overcoming and courage and just parenting. So your parenting in America, a lot of busy, a lot of high stress, a lot of missing work deadlines or just feeling flustered, that kind of thing. And then you move to Australia and I think it's super interesting. The culture is different. So can you tell us just a little bit of that story of how you went from one place to another and how long did it take for you to realize that things were fairly different?
Damien Cave Yeah, good question. I mean, I think when the idea of Australia came up, I was a correspondent at the New York Times for most of my career, but at that point I was an editor and I was in New York and I was having coffee with a friend of mine who happened to be in charge of the New York Times global expansion program. And I knew that they were expanding in Australia, and I didn't really think of it because I assumed they wanted someone Australian. And my friend said, No, actually it's so far away from New York and we're looking for someone who understands the times and would be up for it. You should think about it. And so it was quite a surprise. That night I went to dinner with my wife and we'd been in New York just for two years at that point, which wasn't a super long time as far as even for those of us who move around a lot. And I kind of expected her to shoot, shoot it down. But she had studied in Australia when she was in college and really enjoyed it. And so that night we kind of agreed to at least go for it and see what happens. And so, you know, we threw our lot in. I came out for a couple of weeks to find a place to live, to find a school, all that sort of fun stuff. And at that point I don't think I did kind of feel like the culture was that different. I was only here for two weeks, but when we moved back, there were a couple of things that I noticed right away. One is that neighborhoods still had neighborhood stores like butchers. Every neighborhood had a butcher still, and there were tons of kids walking to school, like more than I'd seen in my neighborhood anywhere, either in Miami where our kids were born or in New York. And those were sort of early signals of a community ethos. There was a little bit different than what I'd been used to in the United States. There just wasn't as much theater, and there seemed to be an effort to kind of protect local culture, I would say. And so those were the things that sort of jumped out at me at first, and then that very quickly expanded with how kids are treated. And, you know, in the public school that they went to, my son was encouraged to play a sport Australian rules football that he'd never played before, even though he'd been a lover of soccer. And when I asked the teacher, you know, are you sure about this? I mean, he's not very good at this. And she said, Oh, it's fine. And if they lose, it's no big deal. And so they were just like again and again the signals of something that were a culture that was different than the sort of what I sometimes call the perfectionist culture of America that sort of expects you to only do what you know you're going to be excellent at, and only if it's going to be productive and gets you where you need to go. And I'm sure it's just seemed to have a more playful but also more comfortable sense of risk as well, that you can try things and fail and no one would hold it against you. And in some ways you expected to be drawn into things that you didn't know anything about, and that was just the way the place works. And so to some degree around that time, a few months in, we decided to just embrace it. And to a certain extent, the book is kind of the story of us embracing that culture of Australia that surprised us. You know, there were some scary moments along the way, but at the beginning I don't think we knew that was coming. It was just, hey, this is more different than we thought. Let's go for it.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm. It's a good story. It's interesting. I've always thought that kind of thing is fascinating because most people don't have the opportunity to ever experience that. Maybe you read about it through a book like yours. And I had read a book years back called The French Kids Eat Everything, and they talked about that. The culture there was that no one snacked. And if you were in line at the grocery store and your kid was crying and you handed them a bag of goldfish, they basically said you would get scolded in some sort of way by the other people in the grocery store. And so it really created this culture where you assimilated to what everyone else was doing and then the kids eat better. That was the whole point because they hadn't snacked and then they're hungry or when the mealtime comes back. Just interesting to think about living in a place where, well, first of all, you went to another hemisphere, super interesting and where just cultural norms are different and you have to learn how to adjust. In some ways so that you can fit in and have friendships and be part of the community. And in this case, and I think in the snacking case, I think it would be interesting. There's a lot of benefits there.
Damien Cave Yeah, it's true. And I also think I mean, one of the things that I think Americans see when they move overseas or when they live in other places is that there are lots of cultures that are not as obsessed with kind of the individualism of the United States, where in the US the idea of imposing to some degree and saying, Hey, this is the cultural norm, don't give your kids snacks or hey, throwing your kids deep into the ocean and is scaring them a little bit is part of the culture. You just have to participate. I would feel almost defensive, like, how dare you tell me what I need to do with my kids? But in a lot of these cultures that have a certain sense of confidence about their social norms, they're okay with forcing. They're not forcing. But, you know, I call it sort of positive peer pressure where I'm trying to include you within those social norms because they really think there's something to learn there. And, you know, this was an experience for us where we weren't so much ex-pats as just kind of incorporated into a neighborhood. I don't run into very many Americans. We sort of live in a very Australian neighborhood, and I think that let us kind of see the value of that inclusion of that force, peer pressure that Americans sometimes. And even when I was researching the book, I would talk to experts and they would say, Oh, well, I mean, I wouldn't want to say that this is, you know, what works for everyone, whereas Australians will say, no, you have to get behind the grill and cook, even if you don't know how to do the barbecue or you know, you have to play Australian rules football even if you don't know how. And you know, there's just this comfort with being bad at things, frankly, until you become good at things. And that's something that I think as parents in particular, we could probably learn from other cultures.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, I mean, I think so. I was thinking when I read that book that we tried it, we tried to not snack and my kids were pretty young. We did not last very long, but we only lasted a few days. And what I thought was this would be a whole lot easier if everyone was doing it and, you know, otherwise. And it's like, well, that kid got a snack and our kids are crying and it's a total mess. But you could see that and how the kids would eat so much better. That book had to mean that, like hunger is the best seasoning. You know, things like that. And I think it's true. So I like that idea of positive peer pressure. You're right. We don't really have that here. It's more focused on accomplishments and accolades. And and you talk about that in the book even for kids and things. So you talk so much in this book about risk and fear, which is a huge topic for parents, both for how they parent and then also for themselves. And so I loved that in this book, you dealt with both. You dealt with risk and fear, dealing with your kids and what you were going to allow them to do. And then you dealt with your own risk in fear in many different ways. So it started with Nippers Nippers. So never heard of that until I read your book. Can you tell people what nippers is?
Damien Cave Yeah. So Nippers is this. I never heard of it. We moved to Australia either, but, um, and people just referred to it as if I were supposed to know what it was. And so basically what it is is this kind of a junior lifesaving program. And no one explained this to me by the time I signed them up. And all I knew is that it was kids in the ocean. So I thought it was like kids camp. You know, they're going to play in the ocean, they're going to build sandcastles. My kids were like six and seven at the time. And it turns out that even from that young age, they're really being trained to get better at mastering the ocean, because at some point they're going to be able to save lives of other people. That's the goal, right? None of which was clear to me at the time. But what that means is that kids are expected to be swimming a couple hundred meters out into the Pacific. In our case, at a beach that was pretty dangerous, the second most dangerous beach in Australia. And it was possible because the kids were together and because there were tons of parents in the water. And so the whole idea of it is not just that, okay, we're going to it's not boot camp, we're just going to make these kids deal with it. It's this whole idea of confronting something scary together with guardrails and comfort zones built in with adults and with the community there to support you. And so every week the kids were really scared, my kids included. And not just my kids. You know, sometimes the waves would be bigger than they were comfortable with. Sometimes the rip currents would be stronger, but they learned they could be so much more capable than they thought. And if they got in trouble, there was someone there to help. And so the lessons I started to see pretty early on were not just about the water, they weren't just about the beach. They were lessons for life that I think could really transfer hopefully for the rest of their lives. But also for me as a parent. I think there were a lot of things I needed to learn, too. You know, maybe sometimes you don't have to have a total control of your children. Maybe sometimes you can trust that your kids are actually going to be fine, even if they're scared. Maybe it's okay to suppress some of the emotions of fear and just focus on the behavior. You know, all these were things that I think I hadn't really thought of until I was forced into Nippers in Australia.
Ginny Yurich And then you stepped out and did something very risky for yourself in you talk about the power of modeling and truly that it does make. More empathetic. I think you talked in the book about growth mindset and like, why aren't we talking about growth mindset for adults? You have childhood and you grow, grow, grow, and you're sort of pushed in different ways into new experiences, things you haven't done before. And then basically it stops and you forget what that's like. So you can't really empathize with your kids. So then you did something, which I was thinking the whole book, like, would there be something like this in America? And I really could. I mean, maybe like a triathlon, but like this is something like with a purpose. So can you talk about then what you joined?
Damien Cave So I'll tell you about after my experience and then I do and I've thought about this too. And then I'll tell you what I how I think it could be apply the United States. So for me, like, I thought I sort of understood risk. I'd covered wars. I've been in dangerous situations and I thought it was just one of those things where either you were good at it or you weren't. And what I discovered coming to Australia and being really scared of the ocean and scared of my kids going in the ocean, is that a lot of it is actually more valuable than we think. It's based on our experiences, based on what we're exposed to. It's based on the people around us and what they teach us about risk and what our society and culture tells us about risk. We've been taught for a long time that safety is the ultimate goal for our kids. And so I was forced to kind of confront my own fears when my son, after doing Nippers for a couple of years and necessarily didn't really love it and said to me, okay, I'll do it again. Only if you do the bronze medallion, which is the basic life saving thing to get in the water with me. Like, I'll only do it if you do it, Dad. And so having thrown him into this thing, I felt like I had to do it. And again, kid.
Ginny Yurich Our kids are great.
Damien Cave I know.
Ginny Yurich That sometimes they force growth for us, which is it's.
Damien Cave Such a.
Ginny Yurich Cool thing.
Damien Cave Yeah, totally. So he totally did that for me, and it was much harder than I anticipated. The first thing I had to do is this like 400 meters swim, which to people who swim all the time, that's nothing. And I've literally never gone that far in the water until that point. And so but I was relatively fit and probably thinking it was going to be fine. And I did do it in under 9 minutes and I could barely do it at all and finished in like ten and a half minutes. And so they were like, Sorry, you failed. You have to keep trying. Try again. So then my son got to watch me try to work at getting better and trying to improve and just pass the test, which I did eventually, after, you know, a few months. And then the process of actually becoming a lifesaver was, again, more intense than I anticipated. You know, you're dragging people out of the waves. You're learning first aid and you're doing it with people watching you and testing you to make sure that you're proficient in Australia. That's another thing that I think is a real emphasis is proficiency, which is just being skilled and doing it doesn't mean perfect, doesn't mean you have to be able to save every life because you're going to be doing it with others. And sometimes someone's going to be better at one part of it and you'll be better at another. So all of that was something that I had to overcome. And frankly, probably the hardest part for me was just dealing with the joining of this thing. You know, like as a journalist and as an American, I've always sort of stepped back from things and observed, and I've never been a joiner. Maybe it's because I had parents who joined too many things, I don't know. But it was really hard for me to sort of just accept the closeness that comes from doing first aid with a bunch of strangers where you're pumping on their chest and you can smell what they had for breakfast and then you're in the water dragging them out of the waves with your chin on there. But as you're like strolling, as you're paddling in, and there's just a level of intimacy that was totally uncomfortable for me and a risk in its own right. You know, social risk is another kind of risk that I think we often overlook. And that sort of brings me along to sort of how can you imagine applying this in the United States? One obvious thing that I think the country actually is really needing, needing more assistance are things like volunteer fire departments and volunteer emergency services. You know, for a long time these were very well staffed. Benjamin Franklin founded the first one in Philadelphia, and the decline in participation in the United States has just been really, really bad. Like in Pennsylvania was like 300,000. Then it went to 30,000. And so there is a need for people to be equipped to deal with crisis, whether it's first aid or emergency services that we can all do in our community. So that's one small thing. But I actually also think that it can be even simpler than that. I was saying I was talking about social risk. Sometimes it means just pushing yourself into a community group where you don't feel comfortable. It feels a little bit out of your comfort zone and maybe it's something where your kids can either observe or be participants in that thing. You know, like it doesn't have to be something as formal as Boy Scouts can be almost anything. It can be a pottery class. It can be any place where you're putting yourself in a position where you might fail and you might feel embarrassed and you have to deal with social risk, I think is a way to build strength and to build a way to model this kind of behavior for our children. It's really not that complicated. We just have to be willing to break out of our comfort zones as we are to push our own kids out of their comfort zones.
Ginny Yurich MM Yeah, those are really good ideas. And we glossed over a little bit. I mean, talk about failure, you know, ruins as a fail forward and fail in building. People talk about failure in a way that's good. This is going to be good for you. You're going to grow. But when you really experience it, it does not feel good. And you talked about that in the book when you failed the test. So you swim the laps. You fail the test. I mean, it was funny. You're like, these people think they're going to see me again, but they're not. You know, you're having to deal with all that.
Damien Cave Oh, I was so embarrassed. Yes, indeed.
Ginny Yurich Which I think is an important thing to point out, that if you put yourself in a position where you might fail, you probably will fail. It's not going to feel good at the time. Can you talk us through the process of getting to the end and actually succeeding at that particular life saving? I mean, you do. You did it.
Damien Cave Yeah. Yeah. No, I did it. And it was you know, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of, like swimming on cold days and cold to join.
Ginny Yurich The the mermaid school.
Damien Cave Yeah, I swim lessons from the same swim instructor that taught my kids, which is also was also quite, you know, I'm willing to say the least. But that's in some ways that's the beauty of failure, right? Is it is it humbles us and then we build we work through it and to get to the other side. And so for me, it was like a lot of months of doing things that ultimately I didn't really enjoy. Like I didn't love swimming. I still don't love swimming, but I do it and I find a way to enjoy it because I do see it in service of something bigger and better. And that's just being part of a community and being able to deal with the risks for myself and others. But the process was difficult. I mean, it was a lot of it was a lot of mornings. And then I went through it. I made sort of made friends with this weird subculture of like cold water winter swimmers in Australia, which I didn't even know existed and earned some respect from some characters at a at an outdoor pool called Icebergs appropriately. And eventually I got to the place where there was another test. And again, I still was not totally confident that I was going to pass and I was really nervous about it. But this time my daughter came with me. I figured my son was a bad luck charm, so she came with me and was very upbeat along the way because she had just done a test in her morning and she had failed. She had tried to do her nippers tests and didn't succeed. So I was like, All right, well, if I fail this, they'll be the two of us. It'll be fine. So but I got in the water and, you know, and I just I swam faster than I've ever done before and ended up doing it. And I'm doing it under and got out. And I was like, still so winded that I thought I was going to, like, throw up. That's how hard I it had been dry. And that woman, the same woman who saw me fail, smiled at me and said, Oh, well, I can see you've been training. And just that little sense of satisfaction and that sense of like, Oh my gosh, I got there was such a relief. And that was before I started the course, which was like another set of challenges. But for that very brief moment, I felt like I had accomplished something. And walking home with my daughter, who was excited to have seen me succeed, was really such a such an enormous reward. And so, you know, after that, swimming became something I did regularly and I found a way to sort of enjoy it and to do it with her sometimes, usually not timed and not in a pool. I've discovered I enjoy it more. So, you know, you don't totally ever I guess, over totally changed from those failures and those things you like. Like I didn't go from like hating swimming to loving it. I became comfortable with it and found a use for it. And maybe that's part of the lesson, too, is that sometimes it's not this sort of transformative, perfect Hollywood narrative. Sometimes you just have to endure and find the value in things. And maybe that's a lesson for kids sometimes, too.
Ginny Yurich MM Yeah. And it just is such a cool thing about modeling and you talked about, which I don't think most parents ever think of, should we be modeling failure to our kids and resilience, basically. And you talked about Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book Grit, which I'm sure a lot of people have read, and how she basically was like, I hate writing. You throw her laptop in the water. I mean, really hit the end of a rope with that part of her career and her kids. So, yeah.
Damien Cave It was not it was actually really nice for her to reveal that story to me. Like I didn't you know, you sort of imagine someone who writes a book like Grit to just be perfectly gritty, right? And as we were chatting, you know, you forget that even the people who seem to have it all figured out have lots of mistakes and errors and trials and tribulations along the way. And and so did she. So she had this moment where she was trying to finish the book. And her kids, they were supposed to be on vacation and she just couldn't figure it out and she just couldn't work through the book. And she wanted to throw the computer away. And her husband said, well, you can't that actually doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the university, which helped her calm down a bit. But, you know, she said to me what she felt like that did for her kids was model imperfection and show her kids that she could be imperfect and then sort of get through it. And, you know, I think that was, you know, no one knew at the time, her or her family, that that book would be the success that it was. And so for her and them to sort of see that come out of that moment of challenge and difficulty, I think was really important. And for her to I think in some ways she seemed to really relish telling that story and an understanding of sort of imperfection and the value of it can be so important for our kids to see and also for the stories that we tell about how we get to the places we end up. You know, it's sometimes it's easy to gloss over those things, but you need those moments of imperfection to get to the satisfaction at the.
Ginny Yurich I love that said, no one knew at the time what a success it would be. I mean, that's that's what the risk is. You don't know. You don't know what's at the other end. And you talk about that. And here. You also talk a lot about safety. Exactly. That we're safety obsessed. And there was this really good question in here that said, why are we assuming that a feeling of safety is good? What is it about safety that we're assuming is a positive value? This is definitely something that in American culture, for sure, there is some safety obsession. So kids are not walking to school, they're not playing in the neighborhoods. And things are different in Australia.
Damien Cave That's correct. I mean, here kids are out all the time. I mean, during COVID lockdowns, there was just kids running all over everywhere without any parents or any adult supervision. And it was like paradise as far as they were concerned. Not so long ago there was a rope swing in the park near where I live, where every day all the kids would gather on this totally makeshift rope swing. And then at some point, some kid broke his arm. Not a huge surprise, but the rope seem to be taken down and then someone would put it back up. And, you know, the kids just loved this rope swing. And the thing is, I know this sounds crazy to people. I know this sounds like just bonkers. But when you actually look at the research, there's a lot of research that shows that kids who experience these kinds of challenges, especially physical challenges at that age, actually do have more courage and bravery later in life. Like, there was this great study that I love from Scandinavia, which talks about how kids who climb trees or jungle gyms or anything really tall and even if they fall off and hurt themselves, they're less likely to have a fear of heights when they become older. And so there really are benefits to this kind of risk seeking behavior, and it's totally natural for kids to do it. You just have to figure out how to manage it and how to trust both their instincts and the community instincts, too. And that's that's the thing that I think stood out for me in Australia is part of the reason this works is it is a less litigious society. There's less suing when things go wrong or people get hurt and there is more of a sense of taking care of each other when things might go wrong. Whether you get a flat tire and everyone stops to help or, you know, a year ago my son broke his arm skateboarding in the middle of the city and he was 11 years old with a bunch of friends. And they called me and said, Oh my God, Bas hurt himself. And they couldn't really put together where they were or what happened. And then suddenly this dad, a total stranger I've never met him, gets on the phone and says, Hey, listen, I'm with your son. He definitely broke his arm. He's going to need to go to the hospital. I don't think he needs an ambulance, but I'll stay here with him until you get here. And so this stranger sat with my son with a horribly broken arm until I got there. And so this is safety works in a way where that's common and that's normal and that's expected. And one of the things I often wonder about the Unites States is how do we get back to that? I mean, there are definitely communities where that is the case, but it does feel like it's something that's slipped over time. And part of the reason I wrote this book is in part to remind Americans that there's other ways to behave, there's other ways to organize ourselves. And maybe it starts with kids. Maybe the easiest way to kind of get the country back to a place where there's more civic participation and agreement around things is just to figure out how to help each other's kids.
Ginny Yurich Hmm. Well, that's how it started with you. Yeah, because you come to this other country and it started with Nippers, and then it grew from there. So to have this cultural thing where a lot of people come together around the kids. And you talked about how in a lot of countries there are these things that they do as a whole country. So one of the examples was somewhere everyone is first aid trained in Norway.
Damien Cave Yeah, mandatory.
Ginny Yurich Mandatory since the sixties. Same thing. They no one really likes mandatory things. But then on the other hand, you have a whole country of people that are trained and can help people with heart attacks and drowning and car accidents and whatever.
Damien Cave And and the thing is like that training alone helps people deal with stress and challenges totally unrelated to first day. Like, one of the really fascinating things about the research shows that if you deal with a little bit of moderate stress and risk in any area, you can transfer it to other areas. So there's this like one study, for example, that shows that these Israeli paratroopers, right after they do a jump out of a plane, if they take a written test, they do better on the written test than they would when they didn't jump out of a plane. And so there's something in our brain that actually knows to sort of transfer the training from one thing to another. And so to me, that's just super exciting. And it gets to that point of this idea that, well, safety, you know, safety is good to a degree. But, you know, a lot of the experts I talked to said, listen, if you find that you don't have any risks in your life, you need to go seek some out. You know, like it's actually dangerous for you to just put yourself in a bubble or put your kid so much in a bubble because that's not how life works. At some point, there's going to be something that doesn't go the way you want it to, and you need to be able to be prepared. So yeah, there are lots of countries I think, that do this differently that really indoctrinate people in a way of sort of dealing with risk and dealing with community. And I think that those too often go together. And that's an important point too. You know, sometimes it's it's not just you're not just. Climbing a mountain, climbing Everest to show that you can do it. A lot of what you're dealing with is the big risks in life. The big dangers in life require more than one person. And so putting yourself in a situation where you have to learn how to work with others is, again, great modeling for your kids. But it's also just great preparation for how the world actually works. It's just one of those things that sometimes we forget as we get older.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, none of us are very isolated. We're all dealing with people.
Damien Cave We're all interdependent, and so you might as well embrace that.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, and this the concept of social risk is a huge one. And really interesting because there is a lot of ways to avoid social risk through our screens. And from what I read, especially during the well, especially during, but it can start during the teen years or even younger if you turn to your phone instead of pushing through the conversation. So Sherry Turkle it's she talks about that that it's 7 minutes or something is about when a conversation goes deep and if you turn to your phone, you're not ever going to get there because you're communicating that you just don't really want to be a part of the conversation. And so you have to risk moving through those awkward times. So I love that that even social risk does a lot for us. And then you talk about injury as being a normal part of childhood. An arm break or something like that. And this push toward ultimate safety, you know, no risk, zero risk. It started a little bit with the insurance companies.
Damien Cave Yeah. Yeah. So this when I started to dig back into the word and its history, like, one of the first things I found is that risk has always been kind of related to the ocean, actually, you know, like it was started with maritime shipping and that sort of thing. And so there were the first sort of elements of insurance were related to that, to shipping. And then it grew into life insurance, which for a long time wasn't life insurance. As we think about it now, it was like betting on whether or not the guy who owed you money was going to die before he gave you the money back. It was basically gambling. But then at some point, as British society in particular became more class oriented, as a merchant class emerged as as a striving, aspirational middle class emerged, This idea of protecting your children even after you die as parents became the norm and became something to shoot for. And so to some degree, this idea of like parents need to pursue safety for our children even after we die, I think actually sort of started to help us think of risk is something that we need to avoid at all costs. And this was around the same time or a little bit after. This was also the time where there was this sort of era when there was the cult of the child. This is sort of the era of romantic poetry for anyone who was an English major, as I was. And this idea that kids are these perfect innocent beings and we just need to protect them, it's everything around them is horrible. And our goal needs to be sort of to preserve and protect childhood. Never mind that a lot of these poets were like had abandoned their own kids and didn't spend any time with their children. So especially these male romantic poets in England at the time. But that was sort of the idea. And so these two things, I think, really combined to give us this idea that safety and just total protection and preservation of children is the cultural not necessarily norm, but aspiration. If you're a good parent, if you work hard and you have enough money, then this is what you need to do. And sometimes I think you see it in the United States where you see all this judgment among for parents who let their kids go play in the park when they're nine or ten or they go to work. Right. And so there's this judgment is also class oriented. And this really started with life insurance in the cult of the child that basically said if you're successful as a citizen and as a parent, you need to be able to protect your children at all costs. And this to me, is like the root of parental judgment around safety. And it started hundreds of years ago. But it is something.
Ginny Yurich You die even after you die. Yeah, it is so interesting. It's an illusion of control.
Damien Cave It is. And you understand it. I mean, parents, we all want what's best for our children. We want to be able to protect and preserve them. I don't have any judgment on that idea. It's just a question of managing it. Sometimes I think we tell ourselves that what we're doing is best for our children when in a lot of ways it's actually just what makes us most emotionally comfortable. I can tell you from when my son did break his arm, I think I was more traumatized than he was. Like we were talking about it just the other day and he was laughing about it. And like, I'm scarred from seeing him go in the emergency room and see him go through surgery. So sometimes we think we're protecting our children, but really it's kind of selfish. We're just protecting ourselves.
Ginny Yurich There was a really good quote in here that said a high need for certainty can be a dangerous thing. It prevents us from learning to face the uncertainty pervading our lives, and it makes life mind numbingly dull.
Damien Cave Yeah, that was a great quote. Yeah. He that was about a German psychologist who had this great story. He is he studies risk and his wife does, too. She's she's one of the people who I learned about the insurance industry from. And she's American, he's German. And they had a daughter who they raised in Germany, and they had all these great stories about how they had these conflicts over safety and risk and their relationship because. The mom who is American, just wanted to make things easy for their daughter and their father, who had grown up after World War Two and just dealt with like, you know, climbing over piles of rubble with bombs and all that sort of thing, just felt like that was unnecessary. So they made her do things like ride a bike with a cello on her back through traffic, just things that to him were normal into her were crazy. And yet it just shows the differences in all of these things. And at some point I reached out to their daughter and said, Ah, well, what do you make of how this worked out? And she said, Well, I don't really think about it as risk, but, you know, maybe it did help me discover a certain sense of boldness that sort of followed me the rest of my life. And so now she studies like a bunch of different interesting sociological things in India and has and often puts herself in difficult, distinct situations herself. So I don't know. She turned out okay and seemed to think it worked out well, but her parents thought about it quite a bit.
Ginny Yurich Well, there was a really great phrase in here, the positive of negative experiences. That's a great phrase.
Damien Cave Yeah. Thanks. There's a lot of stuff like that. I mean, some of these researchers who I talked to to try to help me put my own experience in perspective, where you learn about things like toxic positivity or the power of small amounts of pain to really concentrate our mind and to help us. And I know this again, this all sounds sadistic and crazy, but there is something to it if you just find a way to look at it through a lens that sort of steps outside your own and just looks at the science and you know, there's interesting stuff in there to be had. And like I said, it's about balance. If you have plenty of risk in your life and you're already dealing with danger, this is you know, you don't need to go out there and jump off tall buildings just for fun. But for a lot of us, we've become more comfortable. And as we've become more comfortable, we might have lost some of that.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, well, the experiment, which was an interesting one, if you put your hand in ice water and then you eat a cookie, the cookie tastes better. If you had had your hand in ice water. And I think that goes to the point of in order to feel really good, you can't just always be at this homeostasis. You also have to maybe feel a little uncomfortable and then that makes the feeling good feel even better. Linda McGurk talks about that in her book The Open Air Life. And we were just whitewater rafting in West Virginia. We went on the 4th of July and our youngest daughter, seven. So we're whitewater rafting. It's not that hard. It's a easy a river for the littler kids. But we were hit in the end and just a squall came out of nowhere. It's just raining really hard. Everybody's soaking wet. And she's you know, she was pretty upset about it. But then we talked about how much better it feels to get near warm clothes after you've had an experience like that than if you just want to sit in your warm clothes all day. So I like this. The positive of negative experiences and how the stressors like you said, a hot shower feels like a dream after probably you've been in the what was it called? The icebergs.
Damien Cave Yeah. Yes, exactly. Icebergs. Which was the cold pool. Yeah. I never appreciate those hot showers as much as I did then.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, right. And so it's really something to think about. Why are you assuming that the feeling of safety is good? You know, why are we assuming that that's the positive? So there's a lot in here about risk in fear if, I mean, I think most parents could get a lot out of reading about that. And then you talk about how it relates to self-esteem, that there was this huge self-esteem movement basically, of just saying to kids, you're amazing, but really that our self-esteem grows out of action. Can you talk about that and how it relates to parenting in terms of, Yeah, sure, our kids have a high self-esteem.
Damien Cave Yeah, I mean, I know I like I said, I sort of was raised this idea that, you know, it's about how you communicate. And if you say the right things, then you'll feel better, right? So if I say that you're brave and strong, then you'll go do brave and strong things. And what Martin Seligman, who's sort of the guy who really came up with this, found, is that that's actually totally backwards. The idea is that if you do things that show that you're strong and brave, then you'll feel good about yourself. And if you exert a little bit of control in one area, then you'll build on that and want to do it in other areas. You'll build toward mastery. And so to some degree, this idea and I see it as kind of this emphasis on feelings overall as opposed to behavior that I think sometimes various cultures, including American culture, have gotten wrong or just gotten the balance wrong over time. And so applying that to parenting sometimes means it doesn't mean you don't say nice things to your kids. What it means is that you give them opportunities to show that they're capable and to prove to themselves that they have the ability to develop mastery and to improve and to get better at things that they may not be good at right away. And so if you're only choosing activities for kids that they're already likely to be good at, you know, if you know that they're talented at the piano from the moment they started and you just give them piano lessons, but you don't tell them to play soccer or go swimming, if that's something that's uncomfortable for them, then in some ways you're taking away confidence from them. Like, well, it seems counterintuitive. The way we build confidence, the way we build self-esteem is actually getting better at things that, you know, you're not naturally good at right away to some degree. And so that's the. I think that is important for parents to remember is that in a lot of ways, that area of discomfort for your kids where they really they're not very good at it. And so you can say they're very good at it yet because they're not. And that's okay. You know, that doesn't mean that they're not going to be good at it or that they're not going to find enjoyment at it, even if they're not the best at it. You know, and I think that's part of it, too, is you don't have to be the best at everything. You can still show improvement and get better at things and get to a place where it builds confidence and self-esteem. And so it's interesting to me to see how much the self-esteem movement grabbed hold of American culture in the eighties and early nineties. And, you know, there was a scene where it was on Oprah was everywhere that this was the solution. And it turns out it often doesn't work. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that a lot of the kids who sort of came up that way are actually more insecure, struggle with depression because they can see that people aren't telling them the truth. You know, someone saying they're great at math and they know that they're struggling. And so they see a degree of dishonesty in that. And what they really want to see is proving to themselves and to others a more honest assessment of them. Hey, you've gotten better. Hey, you've gotten really good at this. And so that's one of the things I think is important, too, is action is more important than words.
Ginny Yurich Right? And then when you become an adult, no one else is doing that for you. No one else is pumping up your self-esteem in a false way. And so that can be a little bit of a an awakening and something that would be really hard to deal with if you spent your entire childhood in a certain way and then all of a sudden the adult world that you enter is not that way. I like to you talking about just getting better for the sake of getting better, not for the sake of a career or anything like that. And you had told a story about joining in on a sports game, which I don't remember what it was. It was was a football or soccer. It wouldn't have been football.
Damien Cave It was I guess it was basketball. And I still play with these guys and we just lost another game on Tuesday.
Ginny Yurich They'll play with them. As you showed, you went with a friend and weren't expecting to play. That's why you ended up wearing the smelly clothes, right?
Damien Cave Oh, this is a different example. See, there's so many failing sporting events in this book that it's hard for me to imagine.
Ginny Yurich That what this was, that.
Damien Cave This was Australian Rules Football, which I think my family.
Ginny Yurich Is soccer in America. Yeah. No, it's no, it's.
Damien Cave Like this weird hybrid of, like rugby and soccer and it's played on a cricket oval. It's this totally Australian thing.
Ginny Yurich So yeah, you have no idea. You show up as an American. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't even know what that is.
Damien Cave Yeah. And like, you got to, you got to come play. And I was like, well, I'm in boots and jeans. Like, I mean, it's fine. I appreciate the offer. So then this guy goes and like, calls a bunch of people to get a bunch of like, yeah, stinky uniforms and old sneakers from somebody else to bring down for me so that I can play. Next thing you know, I'm like in the middle of Tasmania under the lights, like kicking this odd shaped football. It looks like an American football, except it's bigger and fatter, which again, maybe should make for some people easier to kick. But yeah, I was terrible. And yet even within like a half an hour you start to see you're making some improvements and next thing you know, because it's Australia, I'm like training with these guys and I've got my arms around these guys like total strangers. And again, I'm being dragged into this world where everyone, everyone is tolerating my incompetence and encouraging me to just, you know, improve a little bit. And it's just for fun. It's just for a laugh, as the Australians always say, You just got to give it a go. You know, it doesn't matter how it goes, but you have to give it a go, You have to try.
Ginny Yurich And you talk about how it ends up being fun.
Damien Cave It was super fun. I mean, again, not very good at it, but just to be a participant, it's a lot more fun than just being an observer. I mean, that's the other thing, too. I mean, there's a quote in there about the book or the quote that you said to about it being dull, you know, like putting yourself in these kind of frightening situations and finding that they're not as bad as you thought they would be. It's actually a lot of fun.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. You had a sentence that said this wasn't even dealing with that sport, but it was dealing with the swimming. You said it was dealing with the surfing because that was another piece too, was trying to get up on the surfboard. And you said I was happier as a beginner than I would have guessed. That's a big statement.
Damien Cave Yeah. You know, I think I don't know and maybe this is just me, but I feel like you get to a place where you you're not a beginner anymore at very many things. Once you sort of, you know, and you have kids, you're tired, you're just trying to manage. And so the idea of like trying something new that's hard feels impossible. But as your kids get older, or if you happen to be lucky and have an opportunity to throw yourself into something as I did and again in this case, I was lagging. Like my kids had started doing it. My wife had started surfing, so I was just trying to keep up with my very active family and falling and falling and falling until you get that like one second on a board is a pretty amazing thing and surfing's accessible to a lot more people than it would seem. You know, when you're on vacation somewhere, it's one of those things that it's worth looking around for because it is it is a fun thing to try to be a beginner at. And there's a long history of this is, as I quote Jack London, the great writer in my book who was wrote this amazing essay in 1907 about learning how to surf in Hawaii and being a total beginner. And, you know, he was a pretty competent guy, but it was another example of just being intimidated and amazed and enthralled by beginner. Adam.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, you wrote. There's something humbling but also thrilling about being terrible. That's just what it says. Yeah. You know, there's a being the the positive of negative experience is that how could something that terrible be thrilling? But you see that all throughout your book. I mean, it's really woven all the way throughout the stories, both for your kids and for yourself. And one of the topics, too, that really encompasses a lot of it is that nature itself helps to facilitate all of this because you don't know what to expect. And the ocean is different every day, and sometimes you're out in a squall. And one of the things that you talked about was a stone fish, and I hadn't heard of that, but can you tell me what that is and how it just they let the kids play near them?
Damien Cave So, I mean, first of all, you're totally right about nature. Like, I'm so glad that I know you know this from your own experiences, but it's such an important point. Part of the reason we get into nature is because it's it's the place where we learn how to deal with uncertainty. You know, whether it's the rain squall for your daughter or or anything, they're surfing for me or anything else. But, you know, there are degrees, right? And levels. And so I push it to the you know, to number 11. And in this case, it with the stone fish is the most venomous fish in the world, which of course, I'd never heard of when I got here earlier. But it turns out it plays in these rock pools like the rock pools down at the beach where my kids do nippers right. So one day they're doing nippers and the waves are too big to go in the water. And I'm like, Oh, they're being careful. Finally, this is great. And so they go over to this Little Rock pool and they bend down the water, and the instructor from my son's group starts talking about the stone fish. And again, the venom in this fish is so bad that people compare it to crucifixion. Like on a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is like that severe, right? And so what he's saying, though, is, yeah, this is where the stone fish plays in these rock water pools where you guys are always here. But just keep an eye out for it and just be careful. And this is what it looks like and this is just you have to keep an eye out for and this is what you do if it happens to you. And so what I found so fascinating about that moment is they weren't saying don't go in the water. They weren't saying don't go over here because the stone fish is here. He was saying, listen, this is really fun over here by the rock pools. Like, I see you guys out here all the time. I know that we're not going to try to stop you from having fun. And in the end, the fun outweighs the risk. And so just be aware that there's this really painful fish that you could step on that. Oh, yeah, of course. By the name. As the name implies, it just looks like a stone. So it's actually hard to find and see too. So that's the environment that you're in. But good luck with that. Have a great time and hope you remember this next time you're here. And that was basically the town and all the kids were just like nodding like, Oh, okay, thanks. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, we'll be careful. And that was it, you know, And for me, it was just like one of these mind blowing experiences where I just couldn't picture that happening anywhere else. Partially because the stone fish probably doesn't exist anywhere else. But also just this idea that here's this super painful thing that is close to where kids are playing and we're not telling the kids to stay away. We're telling them to manage the risk, not avoid the risk, learn how to manage it. So that to me, it was like the epicenter of Australia's sort of risk approach that and this isn't even in the book, and this is just to give you a sense of how common this attitude is. After that, I went hiking with some friends at some point and they were stomping around down the trail and they were saying like, Oh well, this is how Australians hike at the beginning of any trail you have to stomp to get the snakes away, to keep the venomous snakes away. And then, oh, when you get back to the house where we were staying, if you put the trash out, be careful of the spiders behind the bin. So you have to make sure that before you lift the ban, you just look around it to make sure there's no deadly spiders. So this is just nature, right? And this is, you know, extreme Australian nature. But there's a normalcy to it and in every case it's not. We're going to run away from it. It's we're going to manage it. And that to me is what's so inspiring about how the place works.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. Wow. Is it really interesting to hear how other people live, isn't it? I mean, snakes are one of those things that a lot of people would say they're very afraid of and would maybe cause them to stay inside. Bugs, whether and you write, nature holds mostly rewards with a few hazards, too. And that's true.
Damien Cave Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is the truth.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, I really like that.
Damien Cave And the thing is, it can be. It can be any kind of nature, right? It can be like the park in your neighborhood. It can be the mountain that you drive to or fly to, and it can be the ocean or, or really just, just anything. And I don't know, it's one of those things that, again, for me at least, maybe just speaking for myself, I'd sort of forgotten the power of nature, you know, living in cities and thinking so much about work. I sort of forgot how beautiful it can be and profound it can be.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. So you had started the book by talking about how you were rushing, rushing not enough time and not knowing how to stop. You were I didn't know how to stop doing what I'd always done work. Hard. Ignore everything else. Always rushing. And you said all I wanted to do was loosen up. And it seems like you loosen up if you really feel that.
Damien Cave My bosses may not like quite how much I've loosened up, but that's okay.
Ginny Yurich So, you know, is this is something that you're working on, on a regular basis to sort of stay in this spot? Does it creep back in or do you feel like you can get to a point where you have enough experience living in a certain way that you can stay there?
Damien Cave That's a really good question. You know, I don't know. I think I think I'm still trying to figure that out, to be honest. Like, there are definitely times when work is intense. I mean, in the news business, sometimes you just have periods of where is you're just working 18 hours a day for a couple of weeks straight, and then it sort of comes back and it takes me a little while to unwind from those moments. But I think the difference now is that it takes me less time to unwind and I kind of recognize that I need to unwind, that that's not the normal that makes me happy. And so, you know, I think there's ups and downs of intensity with work. So and I think sometimes I still worry about whether or not I'm just going to slip back into that. And I think in some ways I came out of COVID feeling like really work ambitious again in a way that surprised me. So I think it will always be a risk, frankly, to to, to to, like, fade back into that normalcy. I think, you know, we all get routines, you know, affect us in all kinds of ways. And human adaptability means that sometimes you can get used to things that feel very different from what they are. So right now I feel like I have a pretty good balance. But I do think it's something that requires maintenance. And, you know, it's one of those things where I think my wife and I and my kids and I are constantly trying to figure out that balance of how much time do we sort of focus on this, this idea of productivity or accomplishment or whatever it is that the society tells us to do, and how much do we just play and how much do we just enjoy and try to figure out how to do that too. So yeah, it's an ongoing struggle. I don't know. I don't know if anyone's figured it out, but I don't feel like I have just yet.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, I have a friend named Erin who wrote a book called Chasing Slow, and I thought it was such a great book and such a good title because I think it is.
Damien Cave Time for all.
Ginny Yurich Of us. Yeah. That we have to consistently chase it. Have you thought much about what you think your life would look like if you hadn't moved to Australia?
Damien Cave You know, I have and you know, we've talked about it a little bit as, as you know, sometimes we look back at how much we've changed in the process of being here, and I think we would have just in some ways stayed the same in that regard. But, you know, honestly, I'm not sure my wife and I would still be together. You know, like, I think I think we were on a path that was not a healthy path for us or our kids. And so, you know, I feel very, very fortunate just to have had this strange opportunity thrown at me. And I think my kids and my wife do, too. I mean, I think we all feel like something about this experience maybe saved us, and I think it changed us, that's for sure. But I think otherwise we would have been you know, we would have had some other fork in the road and I don't know what we would have done at that point, but I don't know that we would have learned what we learned here because it was just so particular to the experience. And there's something about being immersed and immersing yourself in another place, in another culture that in some ways opens your eyes. And so, you know, maybe we would have gone somewhere for a few weeks and maybe that would have done it. But I kind of doubt it. I think we would have been in trouble, frankly, if we hadn't ended up here.
Ginny Yurich It's so interesting. And you say in the book, and this is dealing with your swimming experience and you say you weren't sure whether your pushing would actually do any good in the long run, which I think is such a huge statement because we just don't know. You don't know if you need to. Australia is the right one. You don't know. And then here it is, you do this really big move and a book comes out of it and growth for your family comes out of it. And so I think the book itself is such a great reminder in so many different ways that there's a lot of good at the end of the unknown and pushing through that can give yourself a lot of benefits and can also model a lot to your children. So the book Parenting, like in Australia now, are you staying in Australia in perpetuity? Is it up in the air?
Damien Cave Good question. I don't know. I mean, I think we're still, as the book says, which is the bigger adventure, and it's possible that we'll go somewhere else for a bit. I think we'll always have a relationship to Australia. I feel like this has become a second home and we've become citizens now, so we're both Americans and Australians officially and so we'll always have a relationship to Australia. But you know, we might have another big adventure in us that might send us somewhere else and I think we're ready for that. I think, you know, we we don't want to stop taking risks, but we want to stop pushing ourselves. And in a weird way, now that we have come to love and appreciate Australia so much, it almost feels like the next big risk is we have to leave or else we're going to get too comfortable.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, sure. And take what you learned there and see if you can hold on to it. You wrote Grit grows from managing what we aren't sure we can handle, and so just a lot of reminders and encouragement to take chances and to try things. And I love the part in the book where I was like. If you have no risk in your life, go find them. Figure it out. And you gave some great ideas. Even the social excuse is something that could be applied in a lot of situations. So parenting like an Australian, one family's quest to fight fear and dive into a better, braver life. The book literally came out of you making big changes and taking risk. So it's fantastic. Just came out this year in 2023. So Damien, thank you for being here. We always end our podcast with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside?
Damien Cave Favorite memory from my childhood that was outside. This is going to sound like a strange one, but my my parents used to take me hiking. I lived in Massachusetts at the time. We used to go to this one hiking spot all the time. And at the base there was this park that had kind of like a lake, but it was a manmade lake with like a brick wall along the side. And I was walking along the brick wall. I was probably eight or nine. We had just done this hike, and I was feeling exhilarated and very confident. And then my foot slipped and I fell in the lake. And so it was like this muddy algae lake. And I remember like I started to cry. And then I looked up and my dad was laughing and, you know, reached in to scoop me up and pulled me out. And in is for some reason, that's the first memory that came to mind. I have lots of lots of great memories of being outside as a kid, but that one and maybe it's because of the discussion about the book. I messed up and somebody came in and reached me, reached in and grabbed me and it was still a great day.
Ginny Yurich Wow. There was a quote that said, The line between fear and laughter is razor thin.
Damien Cave There you go. That one. That would be a perfect example.
Ginny Yurich Awesome. Well, Damien, thank you so much. I really loved reading your writing. Obviously can tell you're a writer. It's a page turner, for sure, reading your stories and I learned a lot and was really encouraged to continue to add risk to our life and even to add more fun. You said fun like fear is contagious, which is an interesting thing. I always think about fear as being contagious, but I think when people are out doing really fun things, it makes everyone else think, Hey, you know, maybe I should do that too. So I just got so much out of it and really appreciate your time.
Damien Cave Thank you so much. I really appreciate the chat. It was wonderful.
