This is the outside podcast.

What are the outside podcast? One of the highest forms of praise here at Outside is to have a story called a classic.

It doesn't have to be an old story. It just has to invoke the spirit and rigor of the stories that defined the magazine.

Made its name in the early days.

A few years ago, outside started republishing those old stories, calling them outside

classics, and giving a little backstory on how they came to be, what made them so special. And maybe no story in outside history is more special than the

king of the Ferret Leggers, by Don Katz. It is maybe the most famous funniest story in the magazine's history.

Ferret legging is a lesser known sport from the UK. A competition in which a competitor

willingly and of sober mind stands before an audience, ties his pants at the

ankles, Ferret Lakers were almost always men, and then stuffs two live hungry ferrets than his waistband before stinching it closed. The goal is to simply

see how long you can withstand the carnage before giving up. No underwear allowed.

It's a hilarious piece, and it became an instant classic, elevating the burgeoning magazine and helping set the stage for outside writers to take risks

and have fun for decades.

Don Katz went on to do other admirable things as well.

Besides writing many, many articles for outside, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. He also wrote the book Home Fires

about post-World War II America. And a book about Nike. Just Do It, which was the first book

Phil Knight agreed to do an interview for.

He then went and created Audible, the largest audio bookseller on the planet,

and ran the company till just a few years ago.

And this had always been kind of a fun fact. The

founder of Audible used to write for Outside, crazy. Until recently, former outside

editor Lisa Chase sat down with Dawn at Audible's headquarters in New Jersey

...