If you don’t know who the Outdoor Boys are, you might recognize him as the crazy white guy alone in the middle of the Arctic, rainforest, or island, sometimes even with his kids, you see clips of him on TikTok or Instagram. His real name is Luke Nichols and he ran the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel for about 11 years, from its launch on May 5, 2015, until now with his most recent announcement.

Luke has been a quiet safe place for anybody on the internet. Watching him go out into the very harsh wilderness of Alaska or some other crazy place and thrive with knowledge and technique, as well as some sick gadgets. Almost everybody’s (Including me) favorite part of the videos is the meals, if you weren’t hungry before watching one of his videos you would be by the middle of it. His homemade honey butter bread snacks made fresh on the fire or amazing Steak and Sweet Potatoes, Reindeer and Maple Sausage, or Halibut Tacos in the middle of the forest were mouth-watering.

Not to mention the pure amount of knowledge and tricks that he teaches you, he is really an outdoor teacher. But he’s also more than that, he is a father to 3 kids and a wife. He used to make entire family vlogs with them, showing them exploring the Florida Everglades or camping with his son in rural Alaska.

But with his most recent video and announcement, that all seems to be coming to an end. In the past 18 months, he has gained about 12 million subscribers and 6.8 billion views, the channel is growing at an exponential rate and any person who knows money would ride this to the top but Luke is no regular person, he’s a man with morals. Very similar to Demolition Ranch retiring from YouTube, Luke says that 15 million people are a lot of people to show your family to and that he doesn’t want to be famous. He says that money and fame were never in mind for making YouTube videos, he just wanted to make home videos but now with this sort of attention, it could be hard for his children to live regular lives with all the fans. He talks about how much work it is to go on these trips away from family and then come back home and spend 2 weeks editing, it’s a lot of time away from family that could be spent with them. So he’s decided he’s going to take a hiatus, not saying he will never post again but that he is going to let the attention die down a bit.

To show you how many people truly cared and are affected by his retirement we found some fans around Tahoma. I asked Aidan Stephens “ How does the outdoor boys’ retirement make you feel?” He said “ The videos made me inspired to say inside more because the outdoors is scary.” Daniel Pounce “How did it make you feel like watching someone do something so dangerous like him?” He said “ They mostly just make me hungry, the food looks really good and the shelters look very cozy.”