I just rented a bicycle and I biked the five miles to where the birds had been seen the day before

and I saw them. And as I'm riding back, I was like, man, that was a lot of fun. I've definitely

chased rare birds all over the country and kind of all over the state before. But this feels really

different. What's different about this? It kind of registered that it was the bicycle.

Dorian Anderson was more than a decade into a career as a neuroscientist and geneticist

when he had a wild idea. In 2014, he left a prestigious lab job to embark on a year-long

birding trip around the U.S. His goal was to see more than 600 species.

Instead of using cars or planes to get from one location to another, Dorian opted to ride his bike.

He ended up pedaling almost 18,000 miles around the country. As he traveled, the trip grew into something much more than a birding project.

It became an unforgettable adventure that deepened his connection to nature,

strengthened his newfound sobriety, and completely reinvented his life.

I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an R.E.I Co-Op Studios production,

presented by Capital One and the REI Co-Op MasterCard. Dorian Anderson, welcome to Wild

Ideas Worth Living. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have this really

impressive academic career, Stanford, Harvard. I want to get into that, but I'm just curious.

You birded as a kid. Like, were you always outdoorsy? Where did you grow up? How did you get

into birding? So I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. I lived downtown in Philadelphia in kind of the concrete

jungle for the first five or six years of my life. And when I was six slash seven, we moved to Chestnut Hill, which is kind of this ritzie area of the city. But all of a sudden, we had a backyard. And as you can tell, I'm very high energy. And so my mom would kick me out of the house and lock the door and be like, dinner's at seven o'clock, you're out until then. And so I'd be stuck in the

backyard. Like, what the hell am I going to do with myself? And besides throwing house and locked the door and be like, dinner's at seven o'clock, you're out until then. And so I'd be stuck in the

backyard. Like, what the hell am I going to do with myself? And besides throwing rocks at the commuter train that ran behind our fence, I just started to notice birds. And I'm like, what the hell is this redbird? And what is this bluebird? And so I found some binoculars. And my mom bought me a bird book book and I just started kind of looking at everything that

was in the yard and getting super stoked to know well is that a house sparrow or a house finch or is that

a Carolina rent or a house red and I'm a geek I'm a geek at heart and so I needed to know what

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