Nick Offerman on Woodworking, Technology, and the Delight of Being Human

Nick Offerman is not a fan of self-driving cars.

“Many people would think it’s counter patriotic to suggest that you don’t just go along with what the corporations are suggesting, but instead make your own life. But I’ll be godamned if I’m going to let someone drive my vehicle.”

To Offerman, it’s endemic of a larger trend in the world today. One where, bit by bit, we hand over tasks to machines and let go of the very things that make us human. He’s not going down without a fight though, which is where his latest book, Little Woodchucks, comes in.

“What if I create a book of instructions to try and help people in my community live lives that are self-sufficient because that’s also going to make us better citizens. It’s going to help us think for ourselves so we’re not getting our messaging from some jamok, some machismo guy with a podcast selling us like verility, manliness in a supplement. Telling us that we should vote for people because they’re bullies instead of because they take care of others. It’s insidious. This is my radical seed, trying to do my part to ferment decency in our world.”

Of course, children wouldn’t exactly be thrilled by a straight manifesto on community living and self-sufficiency, so Offerman has neatly packaged the concept into a book on woodworking projects and techniques. It’s an insightful recognition that in order to create the next generation of woodworkers and makers, they need to be engaged young, and understand the joy of creating things with their hands. It’s an issue that is very near and dear to my heart as well, and I was thrilled for the opportunity to talk with Nick about his new book and thoughts on what we should be doing to keep the joy of being alive.

The answers below have been edited for clarity and length. These are just a handful of the topics Nick and I talked about. You can (and should) listen to the entire interview, embedded at the bottom of the article.

You have a new book called Little Woodchucks, which is all about woodworking with children. Where did the idea for this book come about?

Well, I have had very good fortune writing a string of books with my publisher Dutton Books, and I’ve got this great editor named Jill Schwarzman. Once I finished my last couple of outings, we’d just have brainstorming sessions. And there’s a list, there’s a handful of books that I’ve been pitching, for, oh gosh, 15 years now — and this is one of them. I have also always wanted to do a book with Lee who ran my wood shop for 10 years. Her having a couple of boys of her own was part of the reason that she left me in tears. My tears, not hers. I remember her with a very big smile when we shook hands and parted. It was a culmination of all those things. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or months in the year to do all the things I want to do. If I could, I would write a lot of woodworking and crafting texts because, the older I get and the older our civilization gets, the more we are, in my opinion, heading to hell in a hand basket; inviting corporations and tech to control our lives, which I which just abhore. The idea of having a company drive my vehicle instead of me just seems so counterintuitive to what makes me joyful about being a human being. And at the core of what I feel to be my competence in life is being taught by my parents to use tools whether it’s in the kitchen or the wood shop or the garage. When I get mad at the things that I think are national and global failures of morality, instead of getting in an argument with some soft incel online I say, “What can I do? What where can I create some positivity?” I know. Let’s make a book that’s like a secret manifesto encouraging kids and their parents to make things for themselves.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the book is that when you are talking to these kids, you are talking to them almost as a peer — you’re using high-level vocabulary, using words like military-industrial complex, and I think kids like to be talked to that way. With that in mind, is there a certain target age that you wrote for?

Not really, all my books are for anybody who jives with my sense of humor or my sensibility. I’ve had I’ve had fully grown adults who look at stare at me blankly because they don’t get me and they think, “Well, I think you’re a smartass. I’m not sure what you’re trying to get across here.” But then I’ll have eight-year-olds that we can wink at each other and they’re like, “Yeah, sorry. Sorry, my dad’s a square.” So there’s a sense of humor, I think, in addressing it to the little woodchucks of the world, but talking to them as though we’re all living these hard-bitten existences where we might have to be involved in gambling and the consumption of alcohol as well.

We can do things with our brains and our hands to affect improvement around us. Whether it’s building furniture, or homes, or clothing, or it’s making food or giving a massage — it’s unbelievable.

That message of pushing against this intrusion of technology into all of our lives, into kids lives where what some people fear is a tablet generation growing up, and this push against AI that you are encouraging — that’s something that really spoke to me and I’m hoping it’ll speak to other kids and parents as well to get outside, move your body, use your hands, use your mind independently.

Well, something I keep coming back to — one of the most preient pieces of art I’ve experienced in our lives is the movie the great animated film Wall-E, and specifically the depiction of these fat babylike human adults who have allowed everything to be done for them. They’ve softened their lives with luxury. So they just float around on these hover lounges and all of their meals are brought to them in the form of a smoothie, and then suddenly, when they get in trouble they realize oh no we’ve nearly forgotten how to fly a spaceship or how to do anything for ourselves. And that’s the whole joy and magic of being a human is that we are given consciousness. We have coordination. We can do things with our brains and our hands to affect improvement around us. Whether it’s building furniture, or homes, or clothing, or it’s making food or giving a massage — it’s unbelievable. And the fact that we would be so sheeplike to be lulled into the idea from corporations where they’re like, “Put your feet up. Let us give you a robot vacuum, and let’s give you a self-cleaning house. Let’s give you a self-driving car.” It’s taking away our agency of what is delightful about being a human being. Then we might as well just get plugged into the matrix and become like, weird tube feed pods. And I’m personally against that. I think everyone is against that if they stop and think about it. The problem is many of us no longer have the chance to stop and think about it because we’re too busy scrolling through the company’s messaging.

Girls can make furniture and boys can make cupcakes and everything in between. I hope that I will always get to make both of those things.

One of the things I’ve known about you for a long time that this book highlights is that you recognize that for woodworking to be healthy, it’s more important to make woodworking more inclusive and bring new people into it, rather than have more masters of the craft. What led you on that path to realizing this and to becoming a good advocate for diversity in woodworking?

I backed into it — I went to theater school, I wanted to become an actor, and at the time my highest aspiration was to get paid to do good parts and plays in Chicago. Like that was that would have blown my mind. And within a few years after school I was getting to do that. I was a professional actor in Chicago and then things continued to blossom for me to when I moved to LA. I got to work in TV and film as well as theater. 

I started framing houses as a teenager; I loved using my carpentry skills to earn money. It felt incredible, and I thought for a time in my 20s that I was going to make my living as a scenery carpenter in Chicago. Things were trending that way and I was pretty happy about it. But then I figured out naturalism and got people to give me bigger and bigger roles. But I always stuck with my tool skills, which became furniture making once I got to LA.

I never dreamed that my big break in the role of Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation would coincide where they said, “Oh, we actually really want to exploit your woodworking as well. We think that’s a really funny attribute for this guy.” And I said great. In fact, there are a few episodes set in Ron’s wood shop. We shot those in my actual shop. So, it blew my mind that my woodworking became part of my armor as I ascended into the world of a visible and known performer. Once I did, I got to be friends with Asa [Christiana] who was running Fine Woodworking at the time, and Chris Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick who were running Popular Woodworking. I got to go on Martha Stewart and teach her how to make a canoe paddle.  To do these things, like getting to have a jig that I came up with in Fine Woodworking, to me that I think will always be better — like if I ever won like an Oscar or a Tony, I’ll be like, “This is this is the second best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

People began to ask me “So, so you really have a woodworking shop? Well, that’s neat. That’s like for dads in the garage thing.” And that messaging was really prevalent. And I guess by nature of my success, taking a big leap in the hands of Mike Schur and Greg Daniels and Amy Poehler and the sensibility and the writers of Parks and Recreation. It really gave me permission to see the values that my wonderful mom and dad imparted upon me. Mike taught me that I could take that wholesomeness and that affection and aspiration to decency, and channel that into my work. It doesn’t have to be corny or saccharine or square; something as funny as Parks and Rec can have this really loving message.  And I thought, okay, great. I’m clumsy in a lot of ways, so I’m going to try and make clumsy messaging of my own. And part of that’s going to be woodworking. But what the world is telling me is that more people need to hear that, [as opposed to] dads in their garages.

And so just naturally, it was one of the heroic things about Lee, who ran my shop with. I had my shop for about eight years when I got Parks and Rec; I had this shop in LA and I it quickly became apparent that I was gonna have to hire somebody to — I was going to have to expand the shop and make it into an actual working concern or shut the lights off and lock the door while I went and shot a TV show for seven months out of the year. So I put it about to my friends, and a friend of mine named Sam Moyer said, “Hey, I just did an install downtown with this woman named Lee who outworked the other three guys at the install. You should meet her. She’s this cool hippie from Berkeley.”  So, I had her in for a meeting and sure enough, she just immediately was so impressive. And I was like, “Holy cow, if you want to come work here.” So we had this wonderful serendipitous meeting and we just talked about how she had gone to the Krenov school up at College of the Redwoods. And so we began to be a little bit of a pipeline. A lot of the woodworkers that have come through were women or gender non-conforming people, and they also come from the College of the Redwoods, from the Krenov School. This wasn’t something we set out to do, but I love this. I love that we’re communicating to the world that not only should they be making things with their hands and tools and wood, but it’s for everybody. Girls can make furniture and boys can make cupcakes and everything in between. I hope that I will always get to make both of those things.

Nick with co-author Lee Buchanan, who ran his shop for many years.

That’s a really good point there with how connecting with Lee allowed you to connect with other people. Unless you take the time to try and get to know someone who isn’t in your community, you’re missing out on all sorts of great knowledge and stories and experience. 

It’s really been a blessing. It is. It’s a wonderful distillation of a hive mind that the corners of which will never fully be finished exploring, because we’re going to keep getting tricks and tips from around the world. And even as we think we’re exhausting them, we’re still thinking up new ones. In my shop we usually average four to six employees. I think right now I’ve got five people working in my shop and whenever we’re laying out any new project we get everybody around the table and we say okay here’s what we’re thinking, and somebody always chimes in with “how are we going to clamp the glue up”, or “how are we going to do” this and everybody comes from these different disciplines. It’s become a little bit of a broken record, but because of the weird policies going on in our country right now, it bears repeating that nature proves again and again that in diversity is strength. And in homogeneous science, whether it’s planting crops or like racial issues, that is weakness. If you have only one color of thing, you’re inviting nature to like wipe out your crop or your offspring. But in diversity, we find incredible richness and strength. If for no other reason than to get all cuisines into our kitchen.

And with all due respect to whatever is good about the Olive Garden, it’s just bad.

If you’re talking to someone who’s just starting their woodworking journey, is there a particular piece of advice that you would want to give them?

My advice to people is if you can never go to a big box store — Home Depot or Lowe’s or any of those big corporate box stores — if you can never go to those, don’t ever go to them. They’re terrible in way. It’s like Walmart. They are killing off the smaller hardware stores and lumber yards where people care about you and have knowledge to share with you. It’s just like the Olive Garden killing off the mom-and-pop restaurant in your town. And with all due respect to whatever is good about the Olive Garden, it’s just bad. It’s bad to have globalization in that way. I think food, restaurants, all that stuff needs to be local. You need to have a dependable food system. What if the shit goes down and suddenly you depend on just the people in your county to build stuff, or to repair stuff, or to feed ourselves? How will your county fair? What will you be able to offer your community besides getting a high score in a video game?

The advice that I would give to people starting out is to find somebody who gets local wood, because you’re going to end up getting really cheap scraps from them. It could be a firewood dealer. It could be somebody working in construction; drive past construction sites, look in the dumpster, find wood, and just get to know wood. Take a big piece of wood and hammer nails into it. Sand it. Find beautiful wood, find a piece that fascinates you, sand it down, and oil it. Maybe you’re making yourself a coaster, a cutting board, just a little totem that you drill a hole through and wear around your neck. If you find the right wood and you sand it down and oil it, that’s where the magic happens. And you say, “Oh, I want I want to do that now, but I want to turn a bowl or I want to make a table or whatever it is that wherever woodworking leads you.” That’s the magic is just making friends with wood and falling in love with it before you ever start buying tools.