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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 462: Don’t Miss the Magic Right Outside Your Door | N.D. Wilson, The Riot and the Dance
01:01:19
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- [00:01]
Ginny Urich
Hello friends. Welcome Back to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. I'm Ginny Urich. I'm so glad you're here and today I have some really exciting news to share. I have written a brand new book. It is called Homeschooling.
- [00:16]
Nate Wilson
That's it. No one had taken that title yet.
- [00:19]
Ginny Urich
Homeschooling. You're doing it right just by doing it. And it is coming out in just over a month. This is the book I wish I had when we were starting out. It's encouraging, practical, and full of reminders.
- [00:31]
Nate Wilson
That you are doing doing better than you think.
- [00:33]
Ginny Urich
Whether you're brand new to homeschooling, considering homeschooling for the first time, or you've.
- [00:38]
Nate Wilson
Been at it for years, I think.
- [00:40]
Ginny Urich
It will breathe some fresh air into your journey. If you want to support the launch, you can pre order a copy today or grab one for a friend who could use a boost. And if you'd like to go a step further, you can join the launch team and help spread the word. I'll drop that link in the show Notes now. Today's episode is a fantastic one. We're heading into a season of reflection and wonder, and this conversation with Author and filmmaker N.D. wilson is the perfect way to kick things off. He's the mind behind the Riot and the Dance, a breathtaking nature series that celebrates the wild beauty of our world. Whether your family celebrates Holy Week, enjoys springtime rituals, or simply loves being outdoors, this is an episode that invites you to see the world with fresh eyes. We talk about water, bugs, whales, storytelling, wonder, and the sacred gift of noticing what's right outside your door. It's such a good one. Let's dive in.
- [01:30]
Nate Wilson
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- [01:33]
Unknown
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- [01:39]
Nate Wilson
Boulevard sees you. You transform days, lift spirits.
- [01:42]
Unknown
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- [01:45]
Nate Wilson
At Boulevard, they see you.
- [01:47]
Unknown
That's why they built the first and.
- [01:49]
Nate Wilson
Only complete client experience platform that works as beautifully as you do. See for yourself@joinblvd.com Bulldog Spotify Boulevard software for self care businesses. Okay. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have something so exciting to tell you about. It's so exciting. You may already know about it, but I got a chance to watch this new nature series called the Riot and the Dance. It is absolutely incredible. It is available through Angel Studios and the writer. I don't even know what I would call you. I mean, you have done so many things.
- [02:25]
N.D. Wilson
Say writer creator.
- [02:27]
Nate Wilson
Writer creator. Andy Wilson. Nate Wilson, who has also written some of the most phenomenal books. One of my favorite books ever is Death by Living. And also Notes from the Tilta Whirl and then all of the 100 cupboards and all of the kids fiction that you do. My goodness, you've done a lot.
- [02:45]
N.D. Wilson
It's a problem. It actually is a problem.
- [02:49]
Nate Wilson
Well, welcome back.
- [02:51]
N.D. Wilson
Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.
- [02:53]
Nate Wilson
So I thought that we would just be talking about Notes from the Tilt a Whirl. This is like, you know, the world like the earth spinning in space. It's a fantastic book. And we've been communicating with your wife. And she was like, oh, well, there's also this nature series. So I have watched one of the features. So there's six things right now that you could watch. Water, Earth, or these four shorter ones. And I watched Water, and I was blown away. So can you just give us a little backstory, Nate, about when was this idea birthed? Your dad is the narrator. I mean, it's so cool.
- [03:28]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah, it's a. It's. It's actually my uncle is the narrator.
- [03:32]
Nate Wilson
Your uncle is a narrator?
- [03:34]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah, my dad's little brother. It goes back a long ways for me because my family was always very literary and into books and into reading. Greg grew up around books, constantly with stories read aloud, expectations that we were all reading. We loved it. But my uncle was this outdoorsy science guy. And of course, he also loves reading as well. But he was the guy out catching bugs and fossil hunting and hiking, trekking, this, you know, the scientist, the biologist. So I had this. These kind of like two influences in my life where it was very literary, very indoors, you know, just reading, which is wonderful. But then this go outside and hunt for crawdads in the creek influence, that was also there all the time. And as I. As I started to build my fantasy novels and my own career as a fantasy novelist, it was really important to me that I bring those two things together and that I. I try to communicate to readers, to kids especially, I could say, uniquely in the Western hemisphere, uniquely in America, because that's where I'm from, that we live in a fantasy world. We live in an actual magical world. When I started on my very first book tours, I would ask big groups of kids. I would have hundreds of kids in a room. I think the biggest crowd I asked was maybe 900 kids at a time. And I asked them, hey, if you Want to have a magical adventure? Where do you need to be? And all these kids yelled, England. I was like, what? You know, I grew up running through the wheat fields of Idaho and floating the creek, the creeks with my friends and chasing the crop dusters and, you know, just exploring the outdoors, old barns and all that kind of thing. It's a really. It's a magical world. And so I wanted to write fantasy that basically brought the magic of this world to bear on kids. I wanted kids to be excited to go out their back doors, like, to run out their back doors and just, like, see this burning ball of fire in the sky and to understand the amazing weirdness of a caterpillar turning into soup and then turning to a brightly colored flower that knows the way to Mexico, that can fly. You know, it's just. It's really absurd how much we take for granted in our own world. And I would also challenge kids and say, hey, if I could pick any magical world to live in, Narnia, Middle Earth, you know, just list them all off, I would choose this one. This is the one I would live in. And so as part of that, I'd always wanted it all the way back to, you know, 23 some years ago when I was first taking my wife out on our first dates. I told her one of the things I want to do, I know I want to write fantasy novels, but I want to write fantasy novels that supercharge kids with excitement to explore this world and the history of this world and the natural world, instead of fantasy novels that make them resent this world or wish they live somewhere cooler. I want to write those kind of fantasy novels, but I also want to make nature documentaries. I want to make nature documentaries a that don't attack the Christian viewer because there's a lot of beautiful. There's a lot of beautiful documentaries in the world. We have to sit there and listen to them explain away the beauty and attack the God who made them. It's like going into a museum to see the great masterpieces of the Western world. You're looking at these gorgeous paintings and there's somebody standing there saying, there is no artist. None of this was intentional. This was all an accident. We found it after an explosion. And you're sitting here looking at a Rembrandt and they're just. All they're doing is insulting Rembrandt. The whole time you go look at Van Gogh and they're trying to explain how this just happened. Don't go thinking there was someone talented behind this. Don't you dare think that there was some genius behind this painting. So every nature documentary was like that to me. Like, you're showing me this gorgeous masterpiece, you're showing me this amazing, incredible engineering, beauty, art, magic, and then you're just attacking it, blaspheming it, and insulting the artist. And so I really, really wanted to make nature documentaries that would do the same thing that my fiction is doing, which is to try to help take families and children out into this amazing world God has given us and show them how ridiculous it is, how glorious it is, but do it the entire time, giving credit to the artist behind it and also representing it as a way to get to know the artist. So if you want to get to know God, pay attention to what he said, pay attention to what he wrote, pay attention to what he made. So many Christians say they want to be like God and then don't look at anything that actually shows them his personality. They ignore everything about his personality, his creativity, his engineering ability. All of this while saying with their mouths they want to be like him and then doing nothing to get to know him at all. And so the two pieces for me, one is this Magic in America fantasy project that I pursued with 100 cupboards and now with the Ashtown Burial series, which I'm finishing finally. So after 12 years, I'm finishing the Ashdown Burial series, but also with Riot in the Dance, where I want to take kids to Tasmania. You know, let's go look at an echidna. Let's go. Let's go catch a platypus. But also, let's. Let's see what's amazing. Close to home, too. There's amazing things in your own backyard. It's really been a blessing to do. I'm so grateful to Angel Studios for making it possible to keep on making these episodes. We did feature. One was Earth. I directed that one. I wrote and directed that one feature. Two was Water. I wrote that, didn't direct it, but I did swim with sharks. I was underwater. I was with the sharks. I was doing all the crazy things. And then now we have this series that's going to be half hour episodes that we're doing a whole season of these little adventures. And we've already. We've already shot in the Amazon in Komodo and kind of all over the place. So it's an exciting time and I'm grateful to still be kind of like on my mission, but on one of my very first dates with my wife, I told her the things I wanted to do and it's fantasy novels, like Magic in America. Like, I want magical realism. I want fantasy that reinforces the craziness of this world that we've been given. And I want to make nature documentaries. I want to go after institutional Darwinism. I want to take back the natural revelation for the Christian family especially. So that's. That's the mission of the riot and the dance.
- [09:58]
Nate Wilson
Nate. Wow. 23 years in the making. I mean, this was your idea from decades ago. So Dr. Gordon Wilson is your uncle?
- [10:07]
N.D. Wilson
Yes.
- [10:08]
Nate Wilson
I don't know why I thought he was your dad. I think because it said Wilson, and.
- [10:11]
N.D. Wilson
I just thought, yeah, yeah, and he's the right age, but it's. He's the one who took me out of Catching snakes. And all the amazing things I got to do as a. As a kid with my uncle, it was pretty fantastic. So a little extra gem is I had this amazing, I would say amazing avuncular experience where I had this uncle who was dragging me out on all these awesome adventures. And that's also part of what I wanted to give to kids. It's like, okay, I'm actually, literally take my uncle, who I loved doing this with, and it was amazing. He's so familial and warm and just loves it so deeply and loves the viewer deeply. I want them. I want millions of kids to actually get this experience of having this familial, older, avuncular figure taking them on these adventures. So it's worked. People loved it. They love him. He's a very. He's a very lovable guy.
- [11:01]
Nate Wilson
Wow. Do you know what I love? It's like, you never know the seeds you plant. You never know where they're going to grow. And so for him investing in you as a nephew and getting you outside, and this is something that we talk about, not ton on here. People listen from Different Face, but definitely some that kids are outside for four to seven minutes, but they're on screens for four to seven hours. And that. That is a spiritual issue.
- [11:25]
N.D. Wilson
Massive.
- [11:25]
Nate Wilson
As well as many other issues. That was such a good analogy about the Rembrandt. I think that all of this stuff. Well, you said it, too. It all goes together. So, like, we're heading into the summer here. There's going to be like, you know, people do summer learning and what is our summer going to be about? And I say, like, it should be about this. Have it be about this. Get the angel. Studio membership is not expensive. I was blown away. Like, I didn't know about it ahead of time. So your wife was like, oh, yeah, there's a documentary. I was like, okay, a documentary, whatever. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. And I've been telling all of my friends, and it goes along with these books, Notes from the Tilta World, as well as Death By Living. So, like, it could be, like your family thing for the summer. And there are new, stunningly gorgeous editions of Notes from the Tilt A World and Death By Living. And I wanted to read this from the Notes from the Tilta World so people can see it all goes together. So the riot and the dance could be, like your summer thing that you do with your family. In Notes from the Tilt A World. You wrote this was. Was anyone surprised that the explosion. To talk about the big bang, the great big boom. Was anybody surprised that it invented llamas? That's a great question. It's a really good question. You're like, if it's fundamentally an accident, what are the ramifications? And I have thought about that in so many different instances. Like, how did a gecko. How can it climb a wall? I mean, how do you evolve that? And I had heard sometime when I was in high school, actually, someone said that the chances of this happening are that you would put a bunch of things into a paper bag and you would shake it and it would give you a microwave. And I was like, that's really good, right? You're like, you know, you talk about the digestion factory and, like, people can't even. They can't even recreate hardly any of the stuff. So that's in Notes from the Tilta World. All of this stuff goes together so well. I want to talk about the water one, because this is the one I saw. This is where you talk about. I never thought about this. These are things that possibly, like, no one would have ever seen, or for hundreds or thousands of years, no one ever saw. And yet God put His creativity even in the depths of the ocean. Can you talk about that?
- [13:50]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah. So God is fundamentally an artist. He is a creator. He is fundamentally creative. And when he creates and he's crafting things, he's ultimately crafting it for his triune glory. It reflects Him. And so we think of ourselves. We're so. I would just say selfish, self absorbed. It's so easy. We're living our own lives, but we. We think of humanity as the center of the universe. And so the idea of there being gorgeous museums and amazing art on Jupiter that no human will ever see, ever, like, that there are these crazy landscapes and incredible sunsets and amazing vistas that exist only for his creative pleasure. And we will never, like, he being infinite and we being very, very finite, we will never fully explore this museum of his art. It's not impossible for us to ever fully explore every corner of this museum. But there are all these things that he's laced in and knows, like, it's there for us to discover. And it's a surprising moment. And so if you think about the complexity that is involved in chocolate and, you know, in Arisa's peanut butter cup, that you need them. You need the Mayans discovering, you know, cacao. You need sugar cane, these big. These big grasses with a high concentration of sugar. And you need George Washington Carver to figure out peanuts and all these different things. And then finally somebody says we should put some peanut butter inside of some chocolate. You know, like, there's all these combinations we've never seen, we've never found. Like, we've discovered ice cream, you know, but that took quite a bit. I mean, all the way back at the beginning, somebody had to say, you see that big animal, it's kind of smelly, and it's got that sack underneath it. Like, I'm going to go squeeze that sack and see what happens. You know, it's like, how are we going to milk this thing? And behind and the vanilla bean and every. Every single thing that we had to find everywhere and discover these combinations. That's just us exploring this world. And he has all of it there already. But when you go to the bottom of the ocean and you find things, living and living out narratives, like living out stories, and that he is caring for them, crafting them, and giving them these arcs and existences that have nothing to do with whether or not we can see them. Just nothing. These gorgeous, you know, honestly, amazing gardens that are just outside of light, these gorgeous flowers that are living outside of light in the deeps. And we finally figured out how to compress air in a tank and go down and see what God is doing down there. But he's doing stuff everywhere. We're not going to find anywhere where ill what went blank because he forgot, like, the edge of a video game or something. Like, oh, they just didn't make stuff over here. Like, you're running into the wall. It's like, no, it just goes and goes and goes. So he's phenomenally creative, very funny, loving, intentional. Like all these things you see in one ant hill, you know, you can. You can get down there and get to know God, just getting on your knees and watching ants. And the thing that was amazing to me is when I started, when I finally got to the place where I was ready to do the right of the dance. And I'd wanted to do the right and the dance for decades. When I finally got to that place, I was writing narration for the first feature. And it was right when I found out that I had a brain tumor. And I was going through this whole health saga, and I thought I should read Job. I think I'm supposed to read Job when you're going through something hard. So I was. And I was mostly just realizing that Job went through things that were much, much harder, you know, than I was facing. I was facing a very junior varsity trial. But I get to God's grief counseling, and when he's counseling in grief, he tells Job, go look at my animals. Like, go look. Like, have you. Have you seen my animals? And like, Job sitting here in devastation, and God is saying, look. Like, go look. Like, go take a look. And it really shocked me because I was in the middle of writing narration for the ride in the dance. I was in the middle of looking at the animals, and it kind of transformed what I was looking at. I'm seeing his intentionality, his care, his craftsmanship, and it's just reassurance upon reassurance upon reassurance that he knows what he's doing. Like, you can trust God. Like, he knows what he is doing. Like, it's just amazing. And so as he's telling Job, go to the animals. Like, go pay attention when Solomon saying that, like, go learn wisdom. Like, go look at the animals. It's not just a cliche. It's not an empty platitude. It actually changes how you live. It changes the way in which you exist, the way in which you relate to your own life, to your maker, and to the world around you. It's truly profound. So it was massive. And it was a weird experience to go through. Writing the narration for the very first feature while going through a health trial, it was so reassuring. But I also had bounced into Job and just felt like, okay, this is what God says to do. This is what God says to do when you're. When you're up a creek, when you're in hard times, go look at what he's made and how you relate to him and how you feel about his craftsmanship and his care changes, you know, completely. So we do. And obviously, we live in a fallen world. So the title itself, the Riot and the Dance, is meant to reflect both of those things. Like we see the riot, we see the fall. Like we see the consequences of the fall in the natural world, but we also glimpse Eden. Like there's all this dance, there's all this amazing choreography and beauty all over the place. And we see the two. So we see kind of like a glimpse of what it was, a glimpse of how it could be. And we also see this, you know, creation. GROANING so we see both. But I really. The ride, the dance is not this. A lot of people think of it for me because I've done cartoons on Netflix. I've done, you know, live action stuff, just general Hollywood stuff. I've written my fantasy novels. They think of nature documentaries. Why also nature documentaries? So you write the Ashdown Burials, this big fantasy series for kids, and they're exploring history and weird quirky things in the natural world. And then you're just going to go film in Sri Lanka and you're going to film in Komodo and the Amazon and go find all these weird creatures in our world. How? Just a distraction that really is not a distraction at all. It's absolutely central to everything that I'm doing. It's central to my mission kind of professionally on this earth. And so when I, when I hear from kids or we see kids who are waking up to their father in heaven and waking up to his craftsmanship and waking up to just the intricate artistry that he's put everywhere and also to his joy and his laughter and the pleasure he takes in his creatures. Having kids wake up to that and not just be sciency and to watching a nature documentary and listening to somebody insulting Rembrandt the whole time, but actually getting to watch it and enjoy it the way my uncle enjoys it as a believer, getting to enjoy it as a child of God. And your father made these things and he made these things in part for us to care for and to steward and so on. So it's all. It is really all central to what I'm doing. And like you said, notes from the Tilt World. People think of it as an apologetics, you know, philosophy of religion book, top level. It's like, yeah, but it's also just kind of my manifesto of faith, my personal manifesto of faith. And that is absolutely what's fueling my nature documentary work as well as everything else.
- [21:11]
Nate Wilson
This is the foundation.
- [21:13]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah.
- [21:13]
Nate Wilson
This is what it all stems from.
- [21:16]
Ginny Urich
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- [25:06]
Nate Wilson
Wow, I got so emotional when you said, go look at my animals. I actually don't, I can't even think about that from the story of Job. Like, that's not in my mind. So that's something that you picked out and read in your reading, you know, in this time of trial. Like, I don't remember that. I could think of, you know, look at the birds. Your heavenly father knows where they all are. I could think of in Proverbs where it says, go to the ant and consider her ways and be wise. But I didn't know that was in Job.
- [25:33]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah, we kind of skim over it because it's sort of, a lot of, it's rhetorical questions. It's things like, can you harness the unicorn and make him plow your field? And then of course, we translate it as wild ox. I actually think it was probably a single horn rhino. And because we, we can actually harness a wild ox. So the modern translations that say that, but we've never really domesticated the rhino. And also he talks about feeding the young lions. He talks about his kindness to the ostrich. And this is in our, one of our Africa episodes. His kindness to the ostrich is that he made it stupid. And so making it stupid, of course, centuries after, many thousands of years after he, he brags about how dumb he made the ostrich, scientists discover that the ostrich's brain is smaller than its eyeball. Like its eyeballs are bigger than its brain. But he brags about his kindness to the ostrich is that she's unworried about her young, even though they could be trampled on the ground. Her ignorance is a, is a grace. And like he makes her kind. So she's not just stressed out and worried all the time and then talks about, well, you know, when she raises her plumage and runs with horses and, you know, it's like all this stuff about the ostrich and feeding the young lions and listening to the young of the ravens cry out to him all day long. Like we can be annoyed by crows, by ravens. And he's talking about, I hear the young of the ravens all day. And it brings him pleasure all day. Never gets annoying that his care for his creatures. So he basically takes Job and points at animals that are so far beneath Job and says, do you see my care for them? Like, my love for them, how much I care for these animals? And then that's, you know, comes back to Job with how much more, you know, do I know what I'm doing here? So it is. It is interesting, though, because we kind of fly by that we try to get to the Sunday school moral quickly. And it had. It hadn't really impacted me ever. I hadn't really noticed that that was the structure of God talking to Job in trial until I was in trial and writing the narration for the rat and the dance at the same time when I went and read Job. And it really. It just kind of jumped off the page and in a new way. So it's. Wow, you know, it is interesting. But if you look at the. Like I mentioned the butterflies, if you look at the migratory patterns of. Of monarch butterflies, it's just overwhelming. Like, it is absolutely overwhelming. And the fact that it's. You can take multiple generations for the monarchs to successfully get to Mexico, that the different caterpillars know their place in the migration, that they're like the third generation on the way to Mexico. And they're all going to get there eventually, but maybe they won't, but their children or their grandchildren will. But they're heading there and then the rhythm of them re expanding back out of that place is truly incredible. And I had a. I know a weird moment on a road trip once, crossing the country where I was exhausted and pulling off in the upper Midwest somewhere just to eat something and sit in the back of my truck and just not be driving for a minute. And so I just pulled off the highway and kind of wandered aimlessly to find a shady spot to pull off and ended up under a bunch of trees kind of out nowhere with a friend of mine. We get in the back of my truck, we sit down, we're chatting for a while, and then we lean back and realize that we've been under tens of thousands of monarchs on their migration. We've just been sitting here looking down and chatting, and the trees above us were just an absolute cloud of butterflies. That kind of thing is the way we are. All the time we're looking down, we're very, very busy. And then the instant we pull our eyes up and look around, there's something amazing going on that we just are too busy or too distracted to really appreciate. And it's funny how often I think God is. Is trying to get our attention, you know, or is at least amused at our lack of attention while he's doing something phenomenal right next to us. So, I mean, that's every day. Every single day, there are things like that going on. I mean, if you. I talk about it until in Notes from the Tilt of World, but if you think about the artistry that goes into every single snowflake. And it's a joke, because we couldn't possibly even look at all the snowflakes in one cubic foot of snow, let alone all the snowflakes and all the hills, you know, in all the corners. And yet he has crafted every one of them to be a miracle. So it's like every one of them is. Is phenomenal. And we couldn't even begin to look. You know, we could. We could look at 1, 2, 3, 4, and be amazed, amazed, amazed. But I really have to. I really have to go. I've got carpool, I've got whatever. Like, I don't have time. So you kind of look at it broadly and like, yeah, it's all amazing. And you just. You run off and so there's echidna and, you know, platypus is doing their thing on the other side of the world. We don't really have time to stop and be amazed by the God who does have time. And he has time to do every single one of these snowflakes and every single ant and every single termite and every moth and every monarch butterfly and to craft all of those journeys and all of those narratives. And I could get through maybe six snowflakes before I'm bored. Right. Like, we just. Our capacity isn't just. Isn't there.
- [30:39]
Nate Wilson
Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. When you talked about all these things that are, you know, in the depths of the ocean. It's there, and it's just there because that's who God is. And, yeah, he's a God of fun and creativity. And I was. I talked to this man earlier today named Will Acuff, and he has these Adopted kids. And it's sort of in this, like, tricky situation. The kids have some health problems. And you know, he's talking about finances and he. They talked about finances. You got kids, they got health problems. You know, you're. You're nervous. Are you going to have enough? And then they're like, yard gets infested with rats. And apparently it's a really big problem and you have to like, dig this moat around your house. And it's just like this multi week, the whole thing. And, you know, he's already like, well, we got to pay for these bills and that bill. And I've. We've got these rats now. And he said that he went out to the mailbox and he opened it up and he's like, rh. Like, he's like an adult man. You know, he's got, you know, older kids. And he said there was a check in his mailbox from his third grade Sunday school teacher paid for the rat removal. And I thought, well, like, God could make money grow on trees, right? Or whatever. It could rain from the clouds. But how much more fun is it that some. Your random third grade Sunday school teacher puts a check in the mail and it shows up the day that you have to pay the rat guy? And, you know, this sort of thought and, and you've always just been so wonderful about that. This thought of what does this say about God and what does it say about us who are made in God's image? And so I loved this documentary. I mean, I was floored. And I think what you're saying too, about this, I've never really thought about it. It's like a. It's an action word. Like, go look at the animals. Consider. Consider the lilies of the field. Go to the ant, you sluggard. I mean, you're supposed to do it.
- [32:31]
Ginny Urich
You're supposed to see.
- [32:32]
Nate Wilson
And that's why I say that when we are inside and on screen, that this is primarily, I think, a spiritual problem. I mean, first and foremost, because kids are. They're not connected. And so what an incredible thing that you're doing with these nature documentaries, the first nature series that glorifies God. So I want to talk about. Okay, so what you do in these, they're so good, you have to get the Angel Studios and you have to watch them. You go from location to location. And so I love that you're showing different parts of the country. You're in Hawaii, but then you're also in a muddy pond by your home. And you're in, you know, The. The north in the cold water. You're in Monterey Bay. You're in the Florida Springs with the manatees and the crocodiles and the whirly beetles and the largest salamander in the U.S. but there was one part, and I don't know, because I would imagine there's so much filming and you've done so many, and there's five more coming out. But there was this one part that I was like, oh, whoa. And it was in the muddy pond. So this is just like. This is what's going on right outside. You got a little muddy pond by your house somewhere.
- [33:34]
N.D. Wilson
This is what's happened.
- [33:35]
Nate Wilson
And it was the water bug assassin.
- [33:38]
N.D. Wilson
Yes.
- [33:39]
Nate Wilson
Can you explain?
- [33:41]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah. So the water bug is a. It's. It's. You're gonna find it. Like you said, go to a muddy pond, you're gonna pretty much find this. And it's one of the rare insects that preys on animals. It's not like a spider that's eating insects. It's an insect that's hunting frogs. And this. This insect will grab a frog. It kind of just sits on a stick and waits. And then it will, you know, grab onto one, hook onto it. It's got a beak, and it drinks frogs. So if it successfully bites the frog, the frog is knocked out and then liquefies inside the frog skin, and then it drinks the frog, and the frog skin ends up kind of flat, like a Capri sun. You know, it's like it just drinks the frog down, and then it just throws off the empty frog skin that will just kind of float down to the bottom. And it's one of those things where, as a fantasy novelist, I can say that no person has ever made up stuff that is more striking or more vivid or more creepy than God has made up. As he tells these weird stories and funny stories, and you meet a water bug. And that was part of the goal of don't go thinking that everything exotic and amazing is on the other side of the world. Realize that there's craziness just outside your back. Your back porch. So we had gone. We'd all gotten scuba certified, and we'd done our diving in Oahu, and we'd done our diving all over the place. And then I really wanted to go do a dive in a cow pond. Like, just a little cow pond not far from here. Like, let's be in my uncle's. These are such a good sport. And he was so excited to do it. So he gets all his sweatsuit in his tank and he's going to scuba dive in a cow pond, and there's not deep enough to scuba, but it's. Let's just go sit down there, like, really check it out. And so the, the things in that murky cowbond are incredible. It's really, really crazy. And so if you find a water beetle somewhere, you know, tow biter, some people call them, where they can be decent sized, but they've got this nice beak that is designed to, you know, puncture an amphibian skin and then get it a juice box. Basically it just lives off of amphibian juice boxes. And it's, it's incredible. I mean, it really is. And who, who thought of this? And one of the things that, that I have kind of embraced, I would say, is discovering how often people will say, I love this part of God's creation, but not that part of God's creation. I like kittens. I like bunny rabbits. I like the soft and the fluffy. And he does the soft and the fluffy. No one does soft and fluffy better than God does. Like, he does just puppies are puppies for a reason. And bunny rabbits are so incredibly soft, and it's just remarkable. But he also did do spiders. He did spiders and mosquitoes. Yeah. And Solomon talks about the weirdness of how the snake, the mobility of the serpent and how it moves. And, you know, he did the water beetle, he did the, you know, the water bug, the giant water bug that can drink a frog. And he did your adorable bunny rabbit. And his engineering and his creativity are visible all over the place and all of these things. And he didn't make something and then say, man, I hate that thing I made. Like, no, he's proud of it. He loves it, he feeds it. So he's, he's making sure he provides for it. He feeds the young. He feeds the young lions, he feeds the ravens and that, you know, it's like that's something he takes pleasure in doing. And so if we want to be like him, then we need to try to like what he likes. We need to try to love what he loves. And importantly, in terms of sanctification on the spiritual walk, hate what he hates too. So we want to align our displeasure with his displeasure and our pleasure with his pleasure. So if he loves an animal, we should love that animal. It's that simple. We should try to be as like him as we can be.
- [37:40]
Nate Wilson
Wow. And it all goes together because in Notes from the Tilted World, you're talking about the platypus and the skunk and the Mayfly. Its adulthood will last 30 minutes. The male has no stomach and no mouth. You're talking about work bees. An anteater consumes more than 30,000 ants per day. You wrote, it is easy to be numb to the world's marvels. And so that water bug is. Anthony, it's so cool that you said that, because you are. You're in Oahu and you're looking at whales and you're diving with sharks, and, you know, The Whale nurses 150 gallons of milk a day, and you're talking about all of these incredible. The coral. You're like, nothing like that exists on the ground, like, only in the water. It's not a plant. It's not a fungus. It's not a rock. It's alive and grows and expands. It's actually an animal, like the coral and these eels. And there's 80 different types of the. More. I mean, it's thing after thing after thing. But the most shocking part, to me.
- [38:34]
N.D. Wilson
Oh, not just to you, to everybody.
- [38:36]
Nate Wilson
Whole documentary was that water bug is the acid. I was like, when the skin just.
- [38:42]
N.D. Wilson
Drops down, floats like a leaf down to the bottom of the water. It's incredible. And the thing it's. That was so amazing to see, and it's so vivid. And it came home to people, I think, so much because it is so domestic. It is so nearby. It is just overlooked. It's right there. And it's not. It's not a human pest. It's not a leech. So we don't really know about it. It's just eaten frogs, and that's what it's doing, which is truly profoundly incredible. And I felt the same way. So when I got into the water with sharks, I also got. I think I got to know sharks a lot better and the image of God a lot better, because the people who took us out diving, we were not in a cage.
- [39:22]
Nate Wilson
We went with them. We've done the thing with ocean, Ramsey. Oh, isn't that so cool? With one ocean.
- [39:29]
N.D. Wilson
Yep. It was pretty. It was pretty amazing. So we get. Getting out there with sharks and how we were in the water for three hours with them and had a ton of sharks come by. I kicked one. It was like kicking a log. It was so. So much muscle and so strong. And then the water bug, still, for me is. I am entranced by it. Like, just like, whoa. Like, yeah, the shark has all the teeth and it's moving like a torpedo, and it's incredible. But the. The water bug, that's just kind of overlooked that's truly stunning, stunningly amazing and I, I feel that way. Everybody knows there's weird animals on, you know, the far corner of the world. But the, the Tasmania and the Australia episodes on the series on angel, you know, like this. So there's four there now there's to Africa, both in the Serengeti and around the Serengeti and then Tasmania and the part one of Australia will be another, another Australia episode. But seeing the hilarity of an animal that has a pouch looks like a little hedgehog and it's just so adorable, would be an amazing plushie. But it's got the little hedgehog quills and it's walking around, it's got this long beak but it's not its mouth. So it's not a beak that you can open. It's got a long beak and its mouth is just stuck on the end of it. So the mouth is very, very on the end of this long beak. And he's eating little ants and termites, lays an egg and then has to collect the egg and put the egg into its pouch where it's young will hatch and then nurse inside the pouch. So you know, and here, here it is just wandering around in Tasmania where you know, only God cares for it. Like we're just so, so few people can actually pay mind to it. There are, there are people paying their scientists watching and so on. But it's just going about his daily life and has for thousands and thousands of years and God's cared for every one of them and you know, they have unique maternal struggles. You know, it's this awkward little hedgehog thing with its back legs, it's got a rear facing pouch so the pouch is facing the wrong way so that it doesn't fill up with dirt while it's walking. And it's got to get the egg up into the pouch and then nurse the, you know and it's, the baby is called a puggle. So how adorable is that? Like the platypus baby and the echidna babies are puggles, which is phenomenal. And the, the platypus, when it nurses its young it actually uses its belly fat and just kind of like does a little like chubby belly and the milk pools and rolls through the fat rolls and the little platypus bills, they just, they slurp up the, the milk out of a little trough, little belly trough. So it's, it's absurd. And of course the platypus is venomous too. The male platypus has spurs that can sting you. But all the, all these things, whether it's far, far away, whether you're watching a lion. And one of the things in the Africa episode that I was talking about is when God makes artistic choices and he's making artistic choices for a reason. And you look at the lion and the majestic nature of the lion and then you look at the hyena and it's not arbitrary. So when God crafted the lion, he was also crafting a metaphor for the lion of Jud. And he talks about the lion of Judah. And so he, he's made, he's like invented both sides of this. He has the story going and he has a special creature that he's made just to be the metaphor, to be the image here. And it's powerful and, and noble and terrifying and dangerous. But he couldn't have said the hyena of Judah. The hyena is nice and nasty, you know that it's awkward, it's angry, it's got brutal bite force. It's the arch rival of the lion. But the metaphors he chooses to describe himself, to describe particular heroes that, to describe his son are in the natural world. Like they're, they're out there and it's, it's really healthy to go see the other half of the metaphor, to really look at it. When he says the lion of Judah, what is he talking about? But it's, it's powerful. It really is powerful. So anybody who's. These are, if anybody has Canon plus we have license the episodes onto Canon as well. Angel Studios has the water feature. I think Amazon has the Earth, the original Ride in the Dance Earth feature. Then now there's currently four episodes on Angel. The first four, Africa one, Africa two, Tasmania and Australia. And the next five of that season are all in production. I think at least four of them are shot already. It's pretty amazing. It's a real joy to send my uncle around the world. Like it's. His dream has been to do this. He's been a biologist. So to send my uncle around the world doing these things, it's really, really phenomenal. And he actually he's has as many. So there's like you were talking about provision, you know, provision in the mailbox when you're third grade Sunday school teacher. God caring for people, caring for his preachers. When he was young, he broke a windshield or something with a buddy and his dad, my grandfather was in evangelism, was just a minister and they were, they were not well off scraping and they, he broke this window. And his buddy said, man, we're going to have to get jobs to pay for this. And my uncle, who was quite young at the time, didn't understand. And he said, why? He said, when we need money, we sit down and we pray. That's how you get money, right? So now he's this, you know, this guy traveling the globe, introducing kids to some of the wildest creatures there are.
- [44:49]
Unknown
Hey, friends, I'm Annie F. Downs, author, speaker, podcaster, and part of the that Sounds Fun Network, and I'm a big fan of seeing God move in our everyday lives. Can we talk for a second about what it really means to be a person of faith? It's waking up every day and choosing to trust him. Even when life feels uncertain. It's standing firm in truth, walking in grace, and knowing that God is always with us. But I know staying rooted in faith is not always easy. At least it isn't for me. And that's why I love Glorify, the number one Christian devotional app designed to help you start, grow and strengthen your relationship with God every single day. One of the things I love about Glorify is the amount of options available to me through the app every day. Not only does it help me kick off my time with God with their daily devotional, but there's a song of the day to listen to and a community of other users available to engage with. It's really cool. With Glorify, you can begin your morning in scripture, reflect with a daily devotional, and end the day with the daily walk with God, this immersive experience that quiets your heart and refocuses your spirit. It's one of my favorite hacks, something simple but powerful that keeps you anchored when life gets busy. Join me and over 20 million believers who have found encouragement through Glorify. Download the app today@glorified app.com podcast and let's keep walking in faith together again. That's glorified app.com podcast.
- [46:16]
Ginny Urich
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- [47:44]
Nate Wilson
That's why I love Thrive Market.
- [47:46]
Ginny Urich
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- [48:59]
N.D. Wilson
And we are not the BBC. We've got very very tight budgets, very very lean budgets. And so it's fun to go with cameras and see what God gives us because we could make a list, we can make a list of what we want to try to see. But ultimately we're going to some corner of his museum and these are his creatures. And if he wants us to capture these particular scenes, we will. He'll bring the cast, he'll bring the Cast that's going to be on camera. So we, we go places, we send crew. We don't have time to stake out for three or four months to get a single shot. We don't have the inside track with researchers, with massive secular institutions where they have radio tags on their animals and we can just go find them immediately. We're going to a place and then we're seeing which of the animals God chooses to show us. It's been really, truly phenomenal. So the Australia episode, the guys were telling us, like, don't really, don't expect to see a platypus. You know, it's like it's a bad time of year. This is when we can get there. They're hard to find in the wild, you know. Yeah, don't expect it to. Well, God said, sure. Like, he's like, yeah, we're gonna have a great, we're have a great platypus segment. Same thing in the water feature that you saw when we went to the Monterey Bay. Like, we want to get these breaching whales. But it was ultimately up to God whether we got that. And it was a phenomenal experience. So we, we have been extremely blessed to wander the globe, send crew around the globe and then have him provide the stars.
- [50:29]
Nate Wilson
I mean, it is, it is unbelievably good. And even you talked about, when you talk about the whales, you're like, they launched themselves and they're playing. Why do they do it? They do it for the joy. Just like how we would do a cannonball.
- [50:42]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah, it looks awesome. It's amazing. I'm sure it feels great blowing the barnacles off their bellies. But they love to do it. They clearly love to do it because they do it a lot.
- [50:52]
Nate Wilson
Wow. And you will learn so, so much like when you're talking about the sharks that, you know, they have this extra sense, the electro receptors that can detect even the very smallest disturbances in the water, like a single leaf that lands on the surface. I mean, all of this, you're going to learn all of these different things. I mean, all sorts of animals and fish that maybe you'd never heard of. You're talking about Australia. I talked to this guy recently who lives in Australia and they're, they like save wombats and I don't know why, what's happening. I think like here they talk about, like, if you save opossum babies or. I don't know. So they are saving wombats, apparently. And they poop in a cube.
- [51:32]
N.D. Wilson
Yep.
- [51:33]
Nate Wilson
And they poop in a cube. And then they stack them. They stack them up. They stack up their poops. And I was like, what? You know, talking about the creativity and like, like, did that. Boom. Did it create the digestive tract for cube poops that you can use to mark out your territory?
- [51:53]
N.D. Wilson
Yeah, it's. It's in Tasmania. We got some great wombat stuff. And marsupials in general are so incredibly fun and so strange and so different. And I'll. I'll say that one of my. I'll end with this one, and this is very simplistic version, but I think it is fun to play with. When we've been filming before, we've had people interrupt or disrupt or try to stop us from saying things. You know, some scientist is there saying, this is incorrect. You know, we're filming javelina in the southwest and their babies are called piglets and they've got piggy noses and they run around like little pigs and they snort. But if you call them pigs, you'll get scolded because they're on the alleged evolutionary tree. They're closer to cows than the pigs. It's like, but it's a pig. Look at. It's a pig. It's like, no, but that doesn't make sense. They have the soul complex thing they gotta. They gotta solve. But the concept of convergent evolution is the. The idea of the same thing evolving twice separately. And so take your odds of the explosion making llamas, and then you have to like, square that, square those odds, you know, like, because now it's happened two times. And so you will find marsupials on the other side of the world that are identical in quotes to the ones we have, a little mole or something. And you're wondering, but why did this one have a pouch and two wombs? Why does it have two wombs and a divided. Like, the brain lobes are not connected. And it's kind of like looking at a car sitting next to another car, but one of them is a diesel and one of them is an electric vehicle where they're obviously the same thing. You see the four wheels, like, they're obviously the same thing, except for every single thing on the inside. All of the inside systems are totally different. And so you have a mole and a mole, except for they obviously are the same thing. It's a Tesla and it's a Lexus. But everything inside is different. Like two wounds, like double womb, divided brain. So the brain activity is different. The entire reproductive system is different. All the internal engines are different. So you have this. You can you can understand that they're related to each other when you understand they're related by means of a common creator, by means of a common engineer who is using ideas and systems differently than going different directions. And it's such a joy, I mean, it is such a joy to watch just animals you won't see in your backyard. And it's such a joy to watch animals that you would see in your backyard, but you're going to see differently than you've ever seen them before. And like, and realize that the whole globe is populated. Down to the bottoms of the ocean, the whole globe is populated. This entire museum is jam packed with sculptures and paintings and amazing landscapes. And God wants you to see it. He wants you to get out there and to explore it. And we are so spoiled. And I, I could change spoiled to blessed. We're so blessed. In our day and age, that numbness is a huge temptation. It's just an enormous temptation to be numb. And so we have all these things that protect us from what's going on outside. Keep the weather out, keep the wind out, keep the animals out. We have our little spaces, then we have synthetic realities on screens and so on that we just stick with. And so we've been blessed, we've been tremendously blessed by God to live right now in our time with our technologies and our medical care and so on. But the danger of all that is to lose track of just the wonder, the incredible wonder that's outside the door. So like you were saying, summer challenge, like, what are people gonna do? It's like, well, like, get out there, get out there.
- [55:27]
Nate Wilson
This is what you're gonna do.
- [55:28]
N.D. Wilson
Go out there and wander God's museum, learn how to explore his museum, and really appreciate every single thing you can find. There's so much, and some of it, you know, he's just laughing. It's just a joke. It's hilarious. And it's like these really comic looking animals or some of it's. You might not be laughing initially, but you know, he is. As a land leech comes inching towards you. You know, it's those things, man. I, I met them in the cloud forests of Sri Lanka and I was not, I was not fond of them. They just track CO2. And so you look down and there's all these little leeches just inch worming across the ground to come get you. But at least they're not nose leeches. So the nose leeches that hang in underbrush in South America, they give off an anesthetic so you can't feel them when they touch you. So a nose leech could get on your face and you would not feel it at all. And it will go up your nostril and your sinus, and you will not feel any of it because it's. It's like simultaneously numbing you while it moves. So there's just no neural sensation. You will not feel anything. And then it just wants to live in your sinus. So I'm really grateful not to have encountered a nose leech yet, but they're out there.
- [56:35]
Nate Wilson
Wow. I would imagine you learned so much and got to experience so much. It is just absolutely phenomenal. I want to read a couple things. I'm going to post this just right heading into Easter.
- [56:45]
N.D. Wilson
Perfect.
- [56:45]
Nate Wilson
And these are from Notes of the Tilt A Whirl. You say true atheism is nonsense. Now what you say is, look, if you're going to serve the big boom, we can still get along. We just see things differently. You wrote an atheist can tell us he is a good person, that he's never stolen a lawnmower or murdered his wife. I believe him. What he cannot tell me is what is fundamentally wrong about lawnmower theft and wife killing. So, you know, just talking about, especially as kids get older, like, these things that they really make sense. And I had experiences like that in high school where people came in and talked about, does it really make sense like that? The. That it made the llama or the giraffe or the fish in the ocean that's way down and has a light. I mean, how did that evolve? You know, they come in and talk about. And I think these are such good things to do with your kids. And you have resources for kids of all ages, like the whole family and for the parents. Death by Living is one of my very favorite books. I told you the last time that we talked that out for, like, years and years. I was quoting one of your quotes and hadn't actually read the whole, whole book. And then I read the whole book and I was like, this is one of my favorite books I've ever read as an adult. So you have things for all ages. But I'm going to end with this. Heading into Easter, Christ walked from insult to insult, from filth to filth. Lepers, prostitutes, tax men, the dead. He chose fishermen to stand closest to him. And from among the educated, he chose one great man, a murderer who didn't want to come and had to be knocked off his donkey. How would he conquer? When would he leave this path of uncleanness? He came to be stripped naked. He came to be lashed. He came to have his beard ripped out and the thorns rammed onto his head. He came to be mocked. To have his body pierced with rough forged nails and a Roman spear, to be severed from his father and experience hell as Adam for man. He came to live in the trough and die on a pole. The word has shown how far he can stoop. You're doing really powerful things.
- [58:39]
N.D. Wilson
Thank you.
- [58:41]
Nate Wilson
Really, really powerful things. You know, in a world where, like, it's very dark and people are against all of these things, I mean, it's incredible.
- [58:48]
N.D. Wilson
Thank you. I mean, I, I, I'm very grateful to be here. I'm very grateful to get to do this stuff. And the thing is that if you, if you go out there, you see Christ and you see his humility and you see his love and his care in every single thing, down to the ants. And there's a scene in Tilt a Whirlwind, because this is dropping near Easter. There's a scene there where I talk about mowing my grass, and I pull a rock up and I expose this anthill. You know, I gotta throw the rock out. I'm like, why did you build your civilization right here? I gotta move this rock. So I'm thinking, I'll give you a minute. I'm gonna let you move the babies. I'll come back over with the lawnmower later. So I leave and I do the rest, and I come back and the ants have not moved out. Weirdly, they haven't taken this amazing opportunity I gave them. They've instead, they've gathered some earwigs and they are decapitating earwigs in the middle of the nest. And I'm sitting there staring at them, and I felt like I was looking at a human civilization, you know, some ancient civilization where it's like, oh, no, the eclipse or some natural disaster. And, like, we have to make the blood sacrifice. We have to do this to placate the God and save our civilization. So get the airwaves and kill the earwigs real quick. And I'm looking at this decapitation of earwigs, and in that moment, and I talk about this in the book, it just kind of hit me just how bizarre, how incredibly bizarre and humble Christ was to descend down into this anthill, to go down into our anthill and be sacrificed and be willing to be sacrificed for a bunch of idiotic ants. Like, we're just, you know, we're all down here, like, his care and the depth of his Love is so much more profound than we can, we're capable of. That humility and that stooping was incredible. And so I'm standing in my backyard looking at this anthill, and I can't help but think about Christ, you know, the infinite creator word, taking on flesh and taking on flesh for exactly one reason. To be despised, mocked, brutalized and murdered. That's why. And I'm looking there thinking, would I be willing to do that for these ants? I'm like, no, of course not. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. Of course not. His grace is incredible and his care is visible in every single corner of, of his creation. His care is there. So. Well, thank you so much for having me on and having the chance to talk about this stuff. You know, Easter is coming and it's, it's that morning, but it's on the other side of a lot of darkness. You know, it's a lot of, a lot of dark first. But the light, the light always wins. And Easter morning is coming.
- [61:19]
Ginny Urich
It is.
- [61:20]
Nate Wilson
It is. You talk about those earwigs you had written after the empty skin of the frog sinks to the bottom. The world is rated R and no one is checking IDs. It's so good, all this stuff. I'm gonna end with this one little paragraph from Notes from the Tilt A Whirl. Like I said, I'll put a list of all the resources. I just think heading into the summer, heading into this Easter season, I mean, these are the things that will just add so much to your family and I cannot recommend. I mean, I was one of the best things I've ever seen in my ent. I was slack jawed and I already love all your books. So of course I'm just like it, just adding onto it this incredible canon that the word people use of work that you've created that just displays God's glory. Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change the world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discard and replaced it. I don't know. I said that wrong. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded and replaced.
- [62:26]
Ginny Urich
Better every life you touch.
- [62:28]
Nate Wilson
That's what you've done. Thank you, Andy Wilson. What an honor. What an honor. I'm so glad, I'm like so glad to have watched that documentary. We're going to watch the other ones with our family. We can't wait for the new ones to come out and thank you so much for doing all that you do and for taking this time with us today.
- [62:43]
N.D. Wilson
I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [62:49]
Nate Wilson
Are you looking for your new favorite podcast that's both entertaining and will challenge you in your walk with Jesus?
- [62:55]
Ginny Urich
Hey, we're Mac and Kenz from the.
- [62:56]
Nate Wilson
For the Girl podcast.
- [62:58]
Ginny Urich
Every Tuesday we break down everything that.
- [63:00]
Nate Wilson
We wish someone had told us in our 20s. From faith and relationships to wild career transition, we're getting real about all of our mess ups and the things God has taught us along the way. Think of us as your hilarious weekly dose of honest conversation with your Internet besties who've been exactly where you currently are. So come check out for the Girl on Apple, Spotify or wherever you love to listen to podcasts. And make sure to click Follow on our show so that each new episode is dropped right into your personal feed.
- [63:36]
N.D. Wilson
Foreign.
- [63:39]
Unknown
Let'S Be Real Talking about intimacy.
- [63:41]
Nate Wilson
Can be awkward, even with your spouse. But it doesn't have to be.
- [63:44]
Unknown
We are Alana, Kyle and Tira, hosts.
- [63:46]
Nate Wilson
Of the Kingdom Sexuality Podcast and we're all about keeping it real and helping.
- [63:49]
Unknown
You add some spice and deeper connection into your marriage.
- [63:53]
Nate Wilson
Specifically, when it comes to what happens.
- [63:54]
Unknown
In the bedroom, we don't shy away.
- [63:56]
N.D. Wilson
From the tough conversations that often get missed in Christian circles. With us, you'll get laughs, tips, fresh ideas and challenges to strengthen your relationship and bring it to the next level.
- [64:06]
Nate Wilson
Because, let's face it, navigating intimacy as a Christian can be confusing and finding safe, wholesome resources can be tough. So subscribe now on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and join us each week on the Kingdom Sexuality Podcast.