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We’ve reached the end of the drive with Hat Creek Cattle Company. What a ride! Can’t wait to dig in with you guys. But before we do, some business.

Submit Your Questions for Larry McMurtry Expert Steven Frye by Thursday July 30, 2026

Want to ask a question about Lonesome Dove to a Larry McMurtry expert? Well, pardner, now’s your chance.

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It’s been a while since my last Dying Breed Field Trip. Figured it was time for another one.

Today we’re leaving T-Town and heading north on State Highway 11, up into the Osage Hills of northeastern Oklahoma, to visit one of my favorite places in the whole state: the Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve.

Got your permission slip signed? Then hop on the bus and let’s go.

If you asked me to pick the most quintessentially Oklahoma place in Oklahoma, I’d pick Woolaroc. It’s an amalgamation of oil money and Old West culture sitting on 3,700 acres of beautiful, rolling hills in the Osage Nation.

Not only is it home to one of the best collections of Western art and American Indian artifacts in the world, but it’s also a wildlife preserve and a shrine to one of the great oil tycoons of the early 20th century: Frank Phillips of Phillips 66 fame.

I’m a big fan of staying in touch with the past, and have always enjoyed visiting historical museums to facilitate that kind of contact. For some reason, Woolaroc helps you viscerally feel the presence of the ghosts of the past more than any other museum I’ve been to. Maybe it’s because the place wasn’t only a museum but was visited by real-life historical figures (and is also an actual graveyard; Frank Phillips is entombed in a mausoleum on the property). Maybe it’s because it’s so eclectic and non-stuffy; it doesn’t have the more formal, antiseptic, super scholarly feel of some museums; rather than trying to lay out strict history, Woolaroc preserves the narrative of the Old West. There’s plenty of factual stuff, but it also captures the myth of the period. The feel is refreshing, imagination-spurring. And there are lots of photographs that you find yourself staring at, as you think about how all the people in them are dead and have a Dead Poets Society, carpe diem moment.

Whatever it is, Woolaroc does what contact with the past does best: it reminds you of your own mortality and the fact that the present moment, while it feels like the apotheosis of history and culture, will, just like every era, one day pass away.

The McKays recently made the trip up to Woolaroc, which is about an hour’s drive from Tulsa. I took some pictures so I could try to capture some of its coolness and share it here with the folks on Dying Breed. Those who have been reading Lonesome Dove with me this summer will likely find this field trip relevant. Maybe it will inspire you to make the trip to visit. Or to seek out some weird historic spot in your neck of the woods.

Note: This article is very image heavy, so it’s going to get truncated in the email. To read the whole thing, be sure to click on the title above to visit the site for the full experience.

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Back when I was a student at Edmond North High School in the late ‘90s, weeks before every school dance, I’d shut my bedroom door and practice dance moves in front of the mirror hanging on my closet door. I’d put on a CD burned with music that would likely be played in the cafeteria annex at school (Beastie Boys, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Will Smith, along with a smattering of Eurodance) and rehearse the same move over and over until it looked smooth as heck.

Then, at the dance, the moment would arrive. A circle would form on the dance floor, and guys would take turns jumping in the middle to strut their stuff and experience a moment of teenage suburban glory. When my turn came, I’d bust out the move I’d been drilling in my bedroom all week.

As far as anyone at that dance knew, I had come up with it on the spot. Pure improvisation. It looked effortless.

It was not effortless. I had practiced it dozens of times in front of a mirror like a doofus.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit all this. But I bring it up because it reminds me of a profound idea that I’ve thought about a lot: the ancient Chinese principle of wu-wei.

Effortless Action

Wu-wei (pronounced “ooo-way”) literally translates as “no doing” or “non-action,” but I don’t think that fully captures what ancient Chinese philosophers meant by the concept. Scholar Edward Slingerland, who wrote a whole book on the subject called Trying Not to Try, translates wu-wei as “effortless action”: the state of being active, while feeling and evincing no strain.

When you’re in wu-wei, you know what to do before your conscious mind has a chance to weigh in. The right action just flows right out of you. To people watching you do the thing, it looks completely effortless.

If wu-wei were only about personal performance, it would have a lot in common with what we now call “flow,” the state psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi made famous. You’ve probably experienced flow before. It’s that feeling when you’re in the groove while you’re doing some repetitive manual task; you know exactly what tool to grab and exactly what the next step is without thinking about it. Or maybe you’ve experienced flow while playing a sport or a video game. Everything just feels intuitive.

Wu-Wei Gives You Aura

But Chinese thinkers were after something bigger with wu-wei than flow — it’s about more than peak performance. Wu-wei can also be displayed in virtuous, moral living. When a person does the right thing at the right time without having to think about it, that’s wu-wei.

Chinese philosophers believed that a person acting with wu-wei radiates a quality called de (pronounced “duh”), which gets translated as “virtue” or “charismatic power.”

De is the glow that emanates from someone who is completely at ease and completely themselves. They instinctively know what the right thing to do is in any moment they find themselves in, and they do it and make it look easy while they’re doing it. My teenage kids would say de is “aura.”

And according to the early Chinese philosophers, de affects those around you. Folks trust the man with de. They relax around him. They want to follow him without being threatened or bribed into it. The ancient texts claim that a ruler with enough de could order an empire without issuing a single command.

I think these guys captured something about human nature: we’re attracted to people who make the difficult look easy. Think of the jazz musician who tosses off an improvised solo on the spot. Or the speaker who gets asked a question he didn’t prepare for and delivers an answer so smooth it sounds like he rehearsed it the night before. Or the athlete who casually makes a play that looks like it should be physically impossible. Or the guy at a party who’s charming and funny without visibly straining to be charming or funny. Or the kind old lady at church who makes you feel in your bones that God loves you because she naturally radiates Christ-like love.

Warring States Chinese philosophers would argue that we’re drawn to these people because they’re expressing effortless action, or wu-wei, and thus have de.

But why do we find people who make right action look easy so dang compelling?

Why We Trust the Guy Who Makes Things Look Easy

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When Ulysses S. Grant successfully took Vicksburg during the Civil War, no one could have been more surprised than the Union army’s commander-in-chief. Lincoln had wanted Grant to play it safe and considered the general’s audacious campaign — cutting loose from his supply lines, running his gunboats past the fortress’s batteries in the dark, and marching his army into enemy country — to be foolhardy.

Once the victory was won, the president could have simply sent his congratulations. Instead, Lincoln wrote Grant a letter that confessed the doubts he had held, detailed each turn where the general’s judgment had bested his own, and closed with: “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”

Such a frank admission still hits us like a clean gust of air. It’s rare these days (and perhaps always has been) for a leader (or anyone, in fact) to admit they messed up. What we get instead — whether in politics, business, or our personal lives — is silent avoidance, stubborn denial, or vague hand-waving: “Mistakes were made.”

Why is admitting mistakes so uncommon?

Beyond issues of liability in the corporate context or concerns about reelection in the political one, much of people’s reluctance to own their errors comes down to shame and embarrassment. They fear that in confessing a mistake, they will seem less-than in other people’s eyes.

This is one of the stranger impulses of human nature, because typically admitting mistakes actually engenders respect; it strengthens relationships. How refreshing it is to hear someone say: “I regret that choice.” “I was wrong.” “I’m sorry.” It shows that the person possesses humility, and, perhaps even more importantly, self-awareness. What a relief it is for someone to say: “Yes, I can see the same thing that you can see: I goofed.”

Hard as it is to admit a mistake to someone else, people often don’t even reach the point where they wrestle with that disclosure, as they can’t admit their mistakes to an even more fundamental party: themselves.

Today I’ll unpack the deep and fascinating reasons why we have a tendency to shirk responsibility, an understanding of which unlocks the capacity to get better at owning, and learning from, our missteps and blunders.

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Happy Independence Day to our American book club members! Hope you have a good one.

Get On Your Horse and Kick Tees Are a Go

We were able to move forward with the Get on Your Horse and Kick Tees. T-shirts are being printed right now. As soon as they arrive at my place, my kids will be packing and sending them out. I’m hoping we can have them shipped out here in two weeks. If there are any big delays, I’ll keep you posted.

I did order a few extras in each size, so if you’d still like to order one, you can.

Buy Get on Your Horse and Kick Tee

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Welcome back to my series on our history of making a living online. My aim with this series is to offer a behind-the-scenes tour of how the online economy has and does work, which also provides a fascinating window into how and why the internet has changed and looks the way it does today.

So far I’ve covered the rise and fall of banner ads and affiliate links. Today I’ll be getting into the wax and wane of another revenue model: sponsored content. Admittedly, this one hasn’t had as broad an impact on the overall landscape of the internet as the previous two, but I wanted to cover it because, of all the revenue models we’ve used, I actually think it was one of the best and is worthy of a revival.

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My son Gus is fifteen, and college has started coming up in conversations. He’s not prepping for the SAT or touring campuses yet, he’s just talking about it. I know he’s my kid and all parents think their kid is exceptional, but Gus is honestly pretty dang smart. I think a prestigious college is in the realm of possibility for him. He’s brought up possibly going to one of them, and we talk about what he needs to do to make that happen. I give him the standard advice: get good grades, do well on the SAT, and do extracurriculars.

But then I also add this addendum: you could do everything right — get a 4.0 and max the SAT — and still not get accepted to any of those top-tier schools.

Every spring, an article will appear on the interwebs about some kid who jumped through all the hoops and still didn’t get an acceptance letter to any of the Ivies they applied to. Straight A’s. A near-perfect SAT. A stack of AP classes. Founded a club, captained a team, sang in the choir, and started a non-profit. Still, rejected.

One of these kids, a girl in Texas named Kaitlyn Younger, had a 1550 SAT and a 3.95 GPA and eleven AP classes and a long list of activities, and she got turned down by Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Penn, Brown, Cornell, and a handful more. The headline on the story called her extraordinary. Her college counselor said she didn’t know what else the girl could have done. And she was right. There was nothing else to do. The kid had maxed out everything.

So what happened? How do you do everything right and still strike out?

Well, there’s a name for what’s going on. It’s called “the paradox of skill.” And it can not only help explain why genius kids can’t get into Harvard, but why Ted Williams was the last baseball player to hit above .400 and you got passed over for a promotion.

Today, as I continue my series on the nature of luck, I’ll get into this phenomenon and how to work it toward your good.

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This Week’s Reading: Chapters 43-55

We’ll be reading chapters 43-55 this week.

Last Week’s Discussion

Brett: Before we get into this week’s reading, anything stand out to you from the discussion from last week?

Jeremy: A handful folks really related to Pedro Flores dying and Call being moved by that. A lot of folks talked about Newt and relating to him, wh…

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A few months ago, Kate wrote about why some groups thrive while others fizzle, and one of her examples of the former phenomenon was the philosophical and intellectual hotbed that sprang up in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcotts, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other lesser-known lights all rubbed shoulders and shaped one another’s ideas — and ultimately American culture up through the present day.

What’s interesting about the Concord community is that most of the influential literary scenes everybody remembers came out of big cities like Paris, London, and New York. Concord was a quiet farming town. How does something like that develop out in the sticks? And once it does, how does it survive a room full of big egos and bigger ambitions?

Bruce Nichols has thought about these questions for a long time. He grew up in Concord in a Unitarian household where Emerson and Thoreau were basically saints. Then he spent thirty-eight years in publishing, a career that included reissuing some of the aforementioned writers’ works.

Bruce’s new book, The Emerson Circle, takes a step back to give a group portrait of the members of the Concord community — many of whom were Transcendentalists and formed that influential movement. Bruce explores how these folks found each other, and both leaned on and competed with each other.

We talked about why Concord sparked an incomparable flowering of thought, why the community worked, what tensions grew up between its members, and whether you could ever build a group like this on purpose — or whether it just happens by dumb luck.

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This Week’s Reading: Chapters 24-42

We’ll be reading chapters 24-42 this coming week.

Last Week’s Discussion

Brett: Before we get into this week’s discussion, let’s talk about the discussion from last week. I was really impressed with the engagement — people chiming in with what stuck out to them, lines they highlighted, whether they related to Call or Gu…

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