Bear Grease - Ep. 329: Render - “Tennessee“ Jones and Lake Pickle

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease Render, host Clay Newcomb along with Bear Newcomb, and Josh “Landbridge” Spielmaker welcome Lake Pickle and author and pastor Tracy “TL” Jones from eastern Tennessee. Tracy Jones shares some short stories from his book, The Old Men and discusses the influence that key mentors and men made on his life. Lake Pickle talks about his new podcast on the Bear Grease feed Backwoods University. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware Gear at firstlight.com. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual Bear Grease podcast. Presented by FHF Gear, American Made, Purpose Built, Hunting and Fishing Gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. So this is, this is the offspring.

I'm holding about a six-week old puppy. This is the offspring of a very sought-after cross of dogs. This is Tim, the famous singing squirrel dogs, pup, and Osage, which the registry of squirrel dogs. I've been in squirrel dogs for a fair number of years. I hadn't had squirrel dogs my whole life, but probably for the last six, seven years. And I still don't completely understand the way they register and talk about squirrel dogs. Because these dogs actually could be registered as tree and curs. But they're also considered feasts because a feist is a category of dog.

Okay. Okay. It's not a breed. It's handled as a breed. Like you say, it's a feist. But there's a lot of different kinds of fice. There's mull in fice. There's tree and feist.

There's mountain feasts. And they all look slightly different. But a fist is a, as I understand it, is a category of dog that's under 18 inches, under 30 pounds, and will tree. Really? Like, that's the only classification? Yeah. So technically, as I understand it, and somebody could correct me, and we're going to have a Somebody can. Somebody will.

Yeah, yeah. We're going to have at some point a real good squirrel dog man that I know that had a lot to do with breeding these dogs, guy named Tyler Asbury. At some point, we're going to have Tyler on here, and he can describe it. But as I understand it, if you had a dog that met those qualifications, he could be considered a feist. But these, I call them tree and feasts. So if that dog were to be registered, it would be a feist or would be a current? It could be registered as a tree and feist. And it could also, well, Tim and Tess could have been registered as tree and curs.

But they qualify as feist. Is one title more prestigious than the other? Feist. See, going off those rules, though, I got a neighbor at home. He's got a fyshe that looks an awful lot like a Yorkie. Will it tree? Yeah. That's what I mean.

That's where I kind of lose, like, knowledge of it. But welcome to the Bear Greas Render. Yeah, I've got a very cute little pup, a little brindle pup here in my hands. I'm excited about today. I've got the one and only Dr. Lake Pickle here from Mississippi, straight out of Mississippi, Arkansas's favorite state. The only state that we have any right to pick on for any statistic you want is Mississippi. Thank you, Lake, for that. Yeah, I've enjoyed my time here, and I'm going to leave now. No, you know I love Mississippi. And then we have Josh Landbridge Spillmaker here.

I'm here again. I've been learning more and more about the Land Bridge. I'll share with you at some point. Wonderful. I'm excited about that. But our guest have honored today is my friend, been a friend for about a decade or so. We decided Tracy Jones from East Tennessee, Greenville. And he's also known as T.L.

What do you prefer people call you? It's been a weird thing my whole life. Tracy's on the birth certificate, but my family just always called me trace. Trace. Yeah, anybody that was close, mom, dad, grandparents, it was always Trace. Okay. Then when I began to pastor and put my name on the signs and the brochures, some people would get confused and think it was a lady pastor in the church, which some people wouldn't come in the building.

Because you said Tracy Jones. Yeah. I understand. I went to preach a meeting for a pastor who had brochures printed up, and he didn't want to use the name Tracy. So he put Tennessee Jones on it. He made it up out of thin blue hair. He said he went to one house and invited a woman to come, handed her the brochure, said,

Tennessee Jones, she said, yeah, I've heard of him. It's Indiana Jones cousin. Tennessee Jones. Man, if you'd told me that 10 years ago,

you would have never had another name. You'd have a career in country music, man. So what I did is I just started using my initials, T.L. For, you know, Facebook, social media. It's like your stage name. Yeah. I guess so, yeah.

It's weird. but well people would know you if they follow along on bear grease they might not well they they wouldn't know it but so we did Tracy was a part of a series that we did two years ago that started out as plot hounds but the second the second part of the series was essentially about your grandfather and your family and Houston Valley plots yeah and so so Tennessee Tennessee Jones is

to me in an elite class of people that are longtime plot breeders bear dog breeders from East Tennessee for real.

Yeah. I mean like you guys would have heard me talk about Roy Clark who's in the Hall of Fame Bear Greas Hall of Fame and I was introduced to the kind of the plot world of southern Appalachia, which plots aren't just in Southern Appalachia, but the epicenter

of the universe for the plot hound, which is a, it's like being a big fish in a very small pond. I'm glad Brent's not here to talk about his walkers and everybody in the world that has one. The plot world is very small comparatively. And there's these, it's actually hard to describe, but their families over in Appalachia that can go back generations of having plot dogs. And Tracy's family is one of those. And to this day, they have a line of dogs called Houston Valley Plots

and Tracy's grandfather, father, him, and then Tracy's son, Ben Jones, young man, his 30s, is as tough a mountain bear hunter as I've ever been around. So anyway, Tracy's a good friend. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah. And so we're going to end up talking about a book that Tracy has written.

So that will get to that. We'll get to that later. But anyway, I was going to introduce Tracy as, as the only man more paranoid to me that he is involved unknowingly in an underground wildlife sting when i when i uh when i first met brent reeves i honestly in back deep in the recesses the back of my mind brent was just way too available yep way too generous yep way too nice it's suspicious and way too like hey I'm done with my I mean it was like yeah I used to be a in in law enforcement not anymore yeah

and at that time I don't know why but I was like very paranoid for someone who doesn't break the law on purpose yep which I'd say that to anybody in the world I mean like I have a lifetime record of not trying to break the law on purpose okay I mean like I've broken the law but not on purpose and to this day, I'm pretty sure Brent's still working on cover. I'm pretty sure T.L. probably thought I was an undercover agent when I first reached out to T.L. Well, in my defense, first of all, I'm a stickler about trying to keep the law for obvious reasons. Yes. But I grew up during what I would call the outlaw error of hunting and outlaw.

Appalachia and most people who would hear this podcast would never be able to come to an understanding of that culture where a lot of them would have been viewed from the outside as outlaws, but they didn't see it that way. That was their home. They lived there. They settled the place. And then people come in from the outside and all of a sudden said, no, you're going to go by these rules now. And they just didn't see a need for it. Right. And I'm not justifying it or saying right or wrong. I'm just saying that there's a perspective of difference of having people come in from the outside and all of a sudden give you a new set of rules you've got to go by and then calling you an outlaw if you don't keep it. And it took several decades for people to

transition. Yeah. And for the most part, all that stuff is a thing in the past. But when I was growing up, there was a lot of undercover agents that was sent into the area to try to find find people violating the law. Laws. Yeah. So we were taught early. You know, of course, Appalachia is a suspicious place. You know, historians say that Appalachia was actually opened up after the West.

They say the West was settled before Appalachia or tamed before Appalachia was. And so, you know, the general rule was everybody you don't know is a Fed and everybody you do know is a possible informant. Yeah, yeah. That's just how you're taught to operate. You know, you weren't sat down told that, but you understood that to be the way it worked. Interesting.

And it's, I have mixed feelings on a lot of the undercover stuff just because of the deception that has to be a part of it and the lies. And I especially hate the part of it that involves building friendships under the guise of something that's eventually going to break you. Yeah. And I'm not here to say it's right or wrong. I'm just saying there's areas there that I think are not as black and white as we make them out to be. Yeah. You know, I know, I mean, I knew a deal where a guy had to come in to do undercover work and that married a man's daughter.

Oh, my goodness. And I thought that was one of the most horrific things I'd ever heard of. You and you The story is told as he married the girl just to get in I don't know all the details of it And I certainly wouldn't share him if I did But he came in to try to set a guy up to bust him And ended up marrying his daughter

And then followed through with Nellin the guy Wow wow wow And I could not imagine what you'd feel like as a dad knowing your daughter had been... Or as a wife. Yeah, as a wife, knowing your family had been used that way. I mean, to me, that's far beyond the pale of acceptance,

no matter what you're trying to catch a guy at, really. Yeah. Especially in wildlife-related things, which are serious, but not to the degree of seriousness of catching somebody in sex trafficking or something like that. That's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's... You know, the last couple of years, with some of the stories that we've told, you know, I've interviewed some undercover people and learned more about it.

And I think that's the conflict that a lot of us have felt is that, you know, especially with R.T. Stewart, that original Secret Agent Man series we did back in the 90s in Ohio. There were no, there were less rules. They were some of the first wildlife undercover agent. And, I mean, they were just kind of like turned loose, you know.

That's the way it felt anyway. And it's definitely a catch-22. But yeah, back in the day, there was a lot of, there were a lot of stings, or maybe not a lot, but there was the bear gallbladder stuff that went on over in Appalachia where they decided the bear hunters were selling gallbladders. And there were some people who needed to be caught. I mean, there were some people, you know, just killing the bear for no other reason than to sell the gallbladder,

and you can't sustain a bear population if you're just slaughtering them for sale. So, I mean, my family was the law. My grandfather was a constable. My dad eventually was the sheriff of our county, so I'm not anti-law enforcement. Yeah. But I was caught in that crux of my family being the law and also understanding at the same time there was other law, you know,

that would come in and try to set you up. give you an example. My grandfather and a group of men had a guy come in and made friends with them and invited them to think it was New Mexico that they went to. I was already out of going away to college when this happened, I think. They drove all the way to New Mexico to go bear hunting. And when they got out there, the guy changed the plans on them and said that they couldn't hunt where they were going to hunt. But he had an all turn to plan. Well, they all turned. turned to plan was entirely illegal. My grandfather was a pretty wise fella. He said, well, we've been set up. Let's go home. And ever turned the dog loose. So they turned around in

New Mexico and drove all the way back to Tennessee. And to me, that's the kind of thing that's unacceptable. You know, those guys were not sitting in Tennessee thinking, let's go to New Mexico and violate the law. Right. But somebody comes and invites them to go out to get them to violating the law. And do you think this guy was working under cover? For sure. Wow. Yeah.

So like an entrapment scenario. Yeah, that was absolutely entrapment. But the problem with entrapment is the people who get to decide whether it's entrapment or not are the same people who get to decide to do it to begin with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, good luck in court. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Tracy, you talked about that area. I got to go with Clay over there. Gosh, it's probably been almost probably nine months ago.

And it is a mysterious feeling country. I mean, you're driving down those curvy roads. You've got all that kudzu growing up on the side, and it feels like you're almost entering another world. You know, it's like, yeah, it's, it's pretty, pretty unique place. Yeah. Well, the, it was so neat doing the story on, on T.L's grandfather, who was this plot man.

I'll tell you what I remember that just stands, it kind of stands out. I don't know why. But when you described the daily routine of Barry Tarleton, I'll never forget that. If that were in a book, in the way you described it, if that were in a book,

that's what people would remember. Because it painted a picture of that generation of people so powerfully. And basically, you know, he talked about his grandfather worked at a pet milk plant. I mean, basically an industrial, I mean, a big plant. Yeah. And basically he described his daily routine and how he, his wife did stuff for him. And anyway, it was unique. She would like set his breakfast out at night.

I remember, like that was such a great. great, such a great picture of what their relationship was like. I loved that story. Well, without drawing it out too long, I mean, I could rehearse it. Let's do it. I was, I was, she was a, she was a stay-at-home wife and wanted to be, and he wanted her to be at home. And he would leave for work in the mornings around 4 o'clock or so.

I think he had to be at work, like, around 4.30, and he would get off around 2.000. and when he would come home, you could hear him coming down the road. He had great big, what they called, co-op, grips spur mud tires on his truck. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, and the dogs could hear him, you know, for half a mile. And they'd go crazy. Well, that was Memo's sound. You know, she knew he was coming then when the dogs were wild. So when he pulled in the driveway, he'd go up into his apple orchard where his dogs were and begin to feed them.

she would have supper already cooked and she'd set it on the table for him. And he'd come in from feeding, sat down at the table, begin to eat his supper. She would go draw his bathwater. When he got up from the supper table, he'd go get in the bath and clean up. And while he was doing that, she'd get his pajamas and his underclothes and everything and bring them to him. He'd come out of there, he'd go sit in his chair, he watched the news religiously. He was a news fanatic.

In fact, the only spanking he ever gave me my whole life was for interrupting the news. And he wanted to know what was going on in the world. And while he was watching the news, she'd go turn his bed down, his covers down for him. Like unfold the covers so that you could just like get right into the back. And when the news was over, he went to bed about 8 to 8.30 to the latest. And after he went to bed, she'd go back to the kitchen, and she would pour cereal in a bowl, put sugar on it, covered up with aluminum full, set it on the table. So when he got up the next morning, all he had to do was pour milk in his cereal.

And then she would pack his lunchbox for him for work. He had an old metal lunchbox. She'd put that in the refrigerator for him already packed. So he got up, ate his cereal, picked his lunchbox up, and went back to work. And she didn't want very much in life. She was not a materialistic person. But the one thing she wanted was a good car. So he kept her with a nice car all the time.

She loved great big and long cars. She had a 74 Ford Galaxy 500. Oh, man, that's a big old car. Yeah, drove like a maniac. And, you know, my cousin races. race cars. And he will still tell you that one of the only times he was really ever scared in the vehicle was riding with Memo down the Houston Valley Road. She'd white-knuckle you in that car. It's like crazy. She's the only person I know that drove so fast you hit a cubby of quail.

You need to put that in here. This will be a great segue into late stuff later. Drop so fast, she hit a cubby and quail. You had to be moving free face to do that. I was with her. That's a really good point of reference. Oh, I'm going to use that from now on. Anyone that knows the cubby of quail is going to go, man, that's pretty fast. You know what? I appreciate it about that story.

That story could be taken out of context as like a glorification of like a wife like servant or husband hand and foot, but that was not the point of what you said. No. If you knew her, you would know that there was no. nothing about her that was, you know, the like doormat mentality that she was being run over. I mean, if he got out of hand, she'd light him up. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, she'd light him up good and let him know exactly, you know, she was a, I called her a pistol.

I mean, when I was a little kid, I was in the bathtub one day, like in the middle of the day, Tarzan was a thing. I was in the bathtub in my underwear with a plastic knife playing Tarzan in the bathtub because it's only place I could have water. Yeah. And the little kid. And I heard, boom.

And, of course, I want to know what happened. Somebody had stopped in front of the house to gawk at deer, and she didn't like them parking in front of the house. So she lowered a double-barrel 12 gauge over the roof of their car and set her off. And sent them on the road. And she would drive the liquor cars to town after he had pulled them over and arrest who was in the liquor car. He'd take the criminal to town and put them in jail. she'd drive the liquor car on in so they'd have the evidence.

So she was, she, it was a relationship that I say this. She loved him with all her heart. And her care for him wasn't subservient. It was love. But his care for her was the same way. He adored her. Yeah. So.

Yeah. Yeah. What a great story. That's, yeah, that's cool. On Blood Trails, the stories do. don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper.

From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, go ahead and tell, again, this was on an episode two years ago about plot hounds.

We had to put it in the show notes of which episode it was. You can hear these stories. But tell us about when they blew up Barry Tarleton's car. Yeah. My mom, my mom and Patball had two daughters. My mom is Jane, had a sister named Sandy. mom i think was like two or three and sandy was a baby and papa had made life pretty rough on the moonshiners because they had uh he had two brothers killed in relation to liquor one brother

had his head blowed off of the shotgun and his other brother had his throat cut and left him for left him dead in a creek up on the mountain you've i've taken you up there yeah and uh he said he was going to have to get revenge either legal are illegally, so he ran for constable, hated liquor. It wasn't about revenue. You know, nobody in the mountains is for taxes, you know, had nothing to do with revenue. The moonshine trade then, to me, was very similar to what meth does to people today. It was wreaking havoc in the mountains. There's nothing funny about moonshine. Right. And people's lives and families were being destroyed by it. And their community was dangerous community. So he just said, I need to put

stopped to it. And he had wreaked so much havoc with the moonshine people, they decided to kill him and tried two or three times. They ambushed him one time with a Tommy gun, and he came out with a shotgun and leveled things down. And then when they tried to blow him up, they snuck up to his house one morning in the early hours of the morning and killed his dog. It was in the yard. and then packed a car full of dynamite that was set beside the house. And he packed it full of dynamite and set it off. And it blew up, but it blew up instead of out. So it didn't blow the house up.

And he was up making a baby bottle for his youngest daughter. Your aunt. Yeah, my aunt. They heard the dogs barking. And he was going to go out and check, see what the dogs were barking. about and Mamma told him no to go ahead and finish making the baby bottle. He was leaving for work. And then Cablui.

Well, they had just taken the wood stove out of their house and put in an oil stove. My great-grandfather, who lived across the road, had warned them that that newfangled old stove would blow up and kill them all, not to get it. So when the dynamite went off, he ran out into the highway and his long johns yelling, I told you that old stove would blow up and kill you in a hall. Could I ask you a question related to that? Yeah. Because you said, this is a very specific question, but I've never thought about this before.

You said there's nothing funny about moonshine? Yeah. So I grew up watching the Andy Griffith Show. Yeah. And in the Andy Griffith show, like, Andy's always busting steals, and there's Otis that's always, you know, drunk from drinking moonshine. It's always, like, made very light of. Yeah.

Would someone from, I guess, from where you're talking about, your relatives or whatever, would they watch something like that and be like, that's not funny at all? Or could they see the humor in it? No, Abilatian people live such hard, scrabble lives. It's incredible to sense of humor they have. Okay. No, everybody loved the Andy Griffith show. I never heard anybody say anything about it.

But if you notice, the only married person on that show is Otis. The town drunk is the only one. married. Interesting. Is that right? I never thought about that. Yeah, I'd never thought about that either. That's true.

Yeah. So there's a lot of things that were suddenly taught through the Andy Griffith that were really contrary to a good family culture. Huh. Yeah. But, I mean, but it's funny. You know, Barney Fife, you know, my dad was an extremely serious guy. I mean, deadpan serious.

But he thought Tim, Tim Conway and Don Nott's were the two funniest people to ever live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. So, no, I never heard anybody say anything negative about Andy Griffith and the Moonshine deal, whatever they just laughed. Yeah. But if you lived in a home where your husband was an extreme alcoholic and he laid drunk all the time and you were already poor and you were living in a rundown house and he was buying liquor instead of buying shoes and food, it's totally different context. Yeah, sure.

I appreciated what Tracy. said, which I wouldn't have articulated the same, though I would have felt the same way. Like, today, Appalachia kind of celebrates liquor and moonshap. I mean, you drive through

and there's big billboards about come to the distillery and see it, and it's just like this playful thing. And I mean, his point is that, hey, this actually wrecked a lot of homes. And still does to this day. And it's interesting. Oh, shoot.

I had something right on the tip of my tongue that was leading. I just appreciate the little different perspective on it. Sure. You know, just about how lightly that we handle alcoholism. I mean, honestly. Yeah. And like with popcorn Sutton and stuff, like this Appalachian guy that got real famous who, you know, was not a guy that you would want to be around.

Right. I mean, that's like you wouldn't want him to be your neighbor. I wouldn't. Well, just imagine 30 years from now, them doing a sitcom on meth. Yeah. Right. We would know better,

but the people watching it in the next generation wouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate that perspective a lot. That's interesting.

Oh, man. There's so many directions. I didn't even want to get into it with Tracy until I introduced why Lake is here today. Oh, Lake's here. Lake's here. Lake Pickle. Our friend Lake Pickle. I'm scared.

I mean, he came out the gate with like some really good stories. Yeah, heavy hitting stuff. You got nothing. You got nothing now. It's good seeing y'all. I'll be here. Well, Lake is, Lake has a new podcast produced through meat eater that is going to be on the bear

grease feed. We got here. Heck, yeah. We made it. So maybe you've heard this by now because Lake has been on the meat eater podcast by the time this comes out. But June the, what day? 9th. June the 9th, 2025.

If you're listening to this in 2030, you're five years behind. Better listen to all the back episodes. But if you're listening to this before June 9th, 2025, you could hear the inaugural episode of the Backwoods University on the Bear Grease feed. So the Bear Gries feed continues to get more. complex folks. And we have a lot of trust in you guys as listeners. You need like a Venn diagram so they can know how to connect. So there's the Bear Grease podcast, which is our documentary style podcast.

We have the Bear Greece Render, which is this, where we sit around and talk about the Bear Griece podcast. We have Brent Reeves This Country Life, which is a monologue kind of comedy. Storytelling. Storytelling podcast that we all love. Well, there's a new one. The Backwoods University. Bringing a little class.

Tell us what the backwood university is like, man, it is, it's like a deeper understanding or seeking out a deeper understanding of wildlife, but also when it started out, it was just like a deeper understanding of wildlife and wildlife biology. The further that I got into it, and you and I talked about this way, you know, when we were first starting to put episodes together. It's like I can't talk about a single species, a single wildlife process, a single piece of habitat. I can't talk about any of it without mentioning the influence that we as humans have on it. Positive or negative. Could go either way. And so that's the kind of look at it so far. It's very, very wildlife biology based. I try to find perspectives where you get, you'll get

to hear from biologists, but you'll also get to hear from hunters, anglers, you know, people, that are out there doing what we like to do so you can kind of get an introspective look from both views but then also the influence that we as humans have on it because whether we like it or not we have an influence on all of it and more after than not it's the most powerful influence yeah so it's it's a wildlife biology podcast and it's it's done really well it's it's a documentary style podcast so it's built in a way like the structure of a bear grease proper podcast. And so essentially what that does is that Lake is going to biologists,

the people who's interviewing whatever expertise they have. And he's having in-depth conversations with him. And rather than being there for the whole two-hour conversations, he's telling a story in less than 30 minutes. Typically, yeah. Typically less than 30 minutes, you'll have a concise. Yeah, it's a, it's a efficient listen, but where you're going to get all the information. And what are some of the topics?

Run us through the topics, even stuff maybe you hadn't even done yet, but you're maybe thinking about. Right. Yeah, so we're doing bison, but bison in the eastern United States. Yeah, that's episode one that you can listen to. Bison in the east. It's really interesting. When we're going to Bob White Quill, history of Bob White Quill, the first part of it is learning why we lost our Bob White Quill, which there's a lot of reasons, one of which might have been running down cubbies with a car. Yeah, one of which may have been, Mamaw.

And then the other one that I'm really excited about, which you've heard me talk about it a lot, because again, talk about the animal, and then we talk about the animal, and then we talk about. human influence we also focus on people that you know have dedicated their lives to learning these animals conserving them and so we're doing a look at the first wildlife biologist in the state of Mississippi was a woman named Fannie Cook and without giving too much away because it's an incredible story she pretty much single-handedly saved the natural resources of Mississippi. Wow wow in in the early 1920s at the time Mississippi was the only state left that did not have any wildlife laws or infrastructure.

Wow. So if you can go and look, and the fame talk about is Aldo Lupold actually traveled down to Mississippi and did a report on the state. And you can read his report from 1929. And he's basically like, this is dismal. So to put it in context, like now in 2025, our white-tailed deer population in Mississippi, our wildlife department is imploring begging hunters to shoot more deer. They're like, please kill more.

We have an estimated thing. It's a little bit over 1.5 million white-tailed deer population in Mississippi. When Lupal did his report in 1929, there was an estimated 1,200 deer in the state. Are you kidding me? 1200? 1,200? Wow. He said the wild turkeys have been wiped out in all their upland ranges.

Basically he was saying the only wild turkeys we had left were in the swampy, regions and the only reason we had turkeys there is because that's where humans could not get to as effectively and kill them wow so it was it was bad that's amazing yeah so the fanny cook i'll tell you what i want to know in the fanny cook episode i have a feeling she drove fast she did i know i did how do you know that she did there's stories so there is a story i got so there's there's ladies that have these uh the the two ladies that i interviewed about it uh uh there was an interview with Fannie's sister, and she's telling this story that, like, Fannie had, she was notorious, like, fast driver. I knew it.

I plucked that out of the air. And the story was that Fannie was driving, and it was her sister and two of the friends in the car. And she's driving, the statement she said she would put you over in the gravel in a minute. And they're driving to the store to, like, a fabric store. And all of a sudden, Fannie just pulls off on the side of the road and goes, got to have that bird because she was she was making she basically like fanny laid down the groundwork for the first you know you could go on google right now and go what kind of birds are in arkansas and you hit search and it'll and it'll tell you what species of birds you have where's that come from you know

like where's the baseline of all that and so fanny was working on at the time what would be the first basically catalog of what species of animals were in the state of mississippi and she pulls over the side of the road, shoots this bird, because that's how she was collecting specimens, shoots this bird, goes, swims out into the pond, gets the bird, swims back, and then all the girls are mad at her because now they can't go to the store. She has to turn around and tend to the bird and get dried off. And her sister said, I was so mad at her, I didn't talk to her for two days. Oh my gosh. What a good story. Yeah. That's hilarious. Wonder if she ever hit a cub of a quail. Probably. Probably. Well, that sounds awesome, man. I'm looking forward to it.

Man, I'm really excited about it. Yeah, I tell, I was talking to my wife, Lacey, about it. I was like, doing this podcast and having the opportunity to do it. It's a curveball I did not see coming, but here we are. And that'll come out every week, biweekly, biweekly. By every other week. Okay. Yeah.

Come out on Mondays. Okay. On the bear grease feed. Awesome. Yeah. I am absolutely pumped. Well, congratulations. That's a big deal.

Yeah. I'll tell you, one. One more important fact toy that I couldn't fit into either podcast because it just kind of worked out this way. So you said it before, when did Gerstocker kill the bison in Arkansas? In the 1840s. Okay.

And then that's like mid-1800s is when they were like bison were pretty much pushed out of the east. Right. So one of the things I learned in the bison episode, and we all know this is like bison have these very like noticeable impacts on the landscape, right? So, and part of things they studied is, like, they were basically maintaining some, like, systems of vegetation. And when they got pushed out, there were some vegetation that they were, like, basically keeping at bay that were allowed to, like, just kind of explode because they weren't being grazed anymore. And so when I was talking to the quail guy, they were, like, in the early, like, deep times back in that, or not deep times, but, like, 1800s, like, quail would have thrived in some of those environments because of bioccurts.

because of bison grazing. I see. So bison pushed out in the mid-1800s. The first, what do you know when the first node declines of Bob White Quill were? Let me guess. 1890. Hmm.

Interesting. So it was connected. It was this ecological web. Yep. And bison were probably tromping, tromping stuff down, keeping successionary forests, and woodlands from growing up.

Is that what you're saying? So much so that I was talking to Jeremy French from the southeastern Grasslands Institute. He said that he has even pitched the idea to some quail biologists that have contacted them. They contact them about like botanical questions, right? But they're talking about like building a habitat for quail and, you know, trying to restore quail in a certain area. And he said so much so that Jeremy has been like, have you thought about reintroducing bison? Wow. as a way to hashtag bring back the bison bring back the bison bring back the quail last spring

clay newcomb and i collaborated with jason phelps at phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts now i'm going to tell you i love mine because it's easy to use i'm not going to go i'm not going to win a turkey calling contest it's just not going to happen but when i run this call i get the sounds that gobblers are looking for i have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make

those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an

easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. You know, I can envision a scenario where you had a huge property. And I mean, obviously you'd have to have a fence, which has its own problems. But like if you had a big 5,000 acre property that you're trying to make habitat for quail, turn loose a herd of 2030 bison, isn't that crazy? I mean, I would imagine bison trails would be, you know,

create like edge habitat, like bisecting big fields where, you know, Quail could travel real quick, but then ducking the cover and then, you know, dispersalists. That's pretty fascinating. It's crazy. Like, and I really didn't expect that. Like I picked Quill because I had an interest in Bison because I had an interest, but figuring out that there was some sort of link there between them being pushed out, potentially was like the reason that first noted declines of quails in 1890.

I was like, this is wild. So on this stuff, you're going to learn, you're going to learn some stuff, you know, and it's, the cool thing about the format is that it's, it's,

it's, it's efficient, listen. And, I mean, you could have a podcast where you just did like long form interviews with biologists, you know,

for two hours. A lot of people do that. This is that with all the information just handed to you in a nice, wonderful little bundle of communication. That's entertaining, like does a good job. And you might, I might not know this offhand, but when I say it, you're going to be like, you know what, Clay, you're right,

is that Lake's way ahead in the podcast game because his name is Lake Pickle. The things, Tracy. You were kind of behind a little bit in the Appalachian pastoral game by your name being Tracy Jones. Yeah, yeah. He was ahead. He's way ahead. Yeah, nobody's going to forget Lake Pickle. I've always said, man, like my career in the industry basically kicked off at Primos.

Yeah. And part of the reason I got that job is I'd been emailing Brad Farris for like a year and a half. And when I met Brad Farris finally in person, I said, I'm Lake Pickle. And he was like, you're that kid that's been emailing me because like everything about me could be forgettable. But I have such an odd name that people are like, oh, yeah. Isn't that the truth? Well, name recognition in media is like the old location is everything with storefronts, right?

Yeah, yeah. Well, when I hunted with Lake this year, killed the turkey, I messaged a friend of mine that I'd kill the turkey. I said, I killed a turkey with Lake Pickle. And he said, where's that? People, typically, they either know who I am or they hear it and they think it's a good spot to catch a walleye or. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Lake Pickle. I hear the bite's hot right now.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, well, that's going to be exciting. One other thing I got to point out because Steve Ronella asked me about it. He's like, because with the first two topics being bison, the eastern United States, and then quail, it's like, are you keeping it eastern or southeastern base? It's like, absolutely not. Like, I mean, that's because while I was up at the media office last week, I was interviewing some guys about grizzly bears. So. Yeah.

So what is the region? North America, United States, or, I mean, are we going to talk about hyenas? We're worldwide, baby. All right. I love it. Anywhere we want to go. I like it. Pandas.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I'll do pandas. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah. The only thing that I told Lake today over breakfast is I said I leaked some information to him that I've learned about the Arctic. And I was like, hey, just stay away from the Arctic for a little bit until I get my bear grease on the Arctic.

Yeah. I'm working on a, I'm working on something. A little foreshadowing there. A little bit, man. Golly, the Arctic. You have no idea, Josh. It was the podcaster version of taking a guy to a spot on public and going, don't let me catch you back here.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No Arctic. Got it. I mean, for now, I mean, just give me a little bit of time. I mean, that'll be a time when, you know, we'll turn you loose on the Arctic, but just give me a little bit of time.

That's fair. Now, Blake and I, when we're together, we're kind of nerdy. Like, he has a turn, then I have a turn, and we talk about, like, this nerdy stuff. Tell them what your wife said the other day. I was led, well, it was, I was led to talk about this because Misty was making fun of Clay and I. And then I said, this was like, I think it was this week. I was just talking, because when I get on, like, a particular subject, and I'm excited about it.

Oh, yeah. So, like, we had just gotten the final, like, the first, like, cut of this Bison episode back. And so I was, like, back on Bison again. I was super excited to talk about Bison. And I'd probably been talking about it for way too long. And I mean, like, days on end. And my wife, Lacey's like, like, I'm so happy for you that you have found this. And I love that you're excited about Bison.

Can we please talk about something else? I was like, that's fair. It's true. That's true. Yeah. Well, the topic at hand, and the reason T.L.'s here is he wrote a book. When did you publish this book, T.L.? Last year. Last year. Last spring, it's about a year old. A year old. A book called The Old Men, Conversations that help boys become men. And so the book is, is it 87? 84. It's 84 short stories.

Yeah. Collection of short stories. Collection of short stories that are, they're short. I mean, some of them are like a page long. Some of them are maybe two or three pages. But you can read it like really short little chunks. And it's, I'll let you talk about it, but it's 84 things that T.L. has learned from men in his life.

and it's it's a variety of topics from bear hunting stuff to buying trucks to spiritual stuff it's a unique assortment of just wisdom

and it's it's really it's really good it's funny I don't know what most people's process is for writing a book. I know what mine is because I've been in the process of writing a book. And I think yours was like a more of like a Hemingway style approach. You were like, I'm going into the cave to write a book. I'll be back in a couple of months. And how long did it take you to write this? About six weeks. And I mean, you just worked on it. Holy smoke. Just like every day.

Yeah, pretty much. And then you were just like done. One day you were just like done. And you were like, All right, going to publish it? Yeah, I'd had a lot of friends, especially pastors who had asked me to put some of the things that we had discussed in the writing, that I was reluctant to do that because there are just so many books out there. And I think a good philosophy is life is to do things that add value to other people's lives. But one particular pastor friend of mine called me like in December, Tom Hattley, and he said, I really want this year for you to set aside some time to write, put some of the stuff we talk about in private and writing.

And I said, well, Tom Watt, write about what? And he said, well, I was talking to my assistant, Kevin, and he said, if you would write something on manhood, we would read it. But only a moron would write a book and say, you know, this is manhood. You know, do it. Right. Yeah. So I thought, well, if we're going to do that, how?

How would you do that? And I thought, you know, I've had so many really good, high quality men in my life that have said things. And if I have a conversation with you, I will often, you will say one thing that I won't forget. Or if I watch a TV show, I will hear somebody say something that I won't forget. Like I was listening to a guy from Hornady the other day talking, and he said, a bullet never goes anywhere by accident. Well, I was done with that podcast at that point because I could only think about that particular statement.

And I sat down and I took out a legal pad and I wrote down about 150 things that old men had told me that had really mattered to me. I don't mean just trite things, things that had on a daily basis, this may come to my mind to help me. Like my dad would always say, if you're going to do something right, do it right the first time. And he lived that.

He was a perfectionist. And I can be getting ready to do something sort of slipshod. And my dad's words will come back to me. You know, do it right. So I wrote those like 150 things down. And I narrowed it down to 84 because my grandfather was probably the primary influence of my life. and he died at 84. There you go.

Barry Charles. Yeah. So I cut it off at 84 because that was symbolic to me that the primary influence I had my life was cut off at 84. So I cut the book off at 84. You know what? You are, I think it's a, I don't know if you'd call it a gift or just a way that someone organizes the world. but you you remembering stuff that people say in compact ideas is unique and a powerful thing. Like, because when you say that process, like, I don't know that I could write down 150 very poignant sentences of things that people have taught me that are like your book.

I mean, so I mean, like, that's a powerful thing. I describe Brent Reeves in the same way. It's different. His is different. But Brent has an uncanny ability to be somewhere and capture a story and a little ball and put it in his pocket and never forget it. Like he just can do that. But what you've done here is really cool. What would...

Take us through a couple of the stories, T.L. Just like, if you could, if you could even just tell us, like, well, there's a chapter about this and this was the story. Well, when I wrote the book, it was to try to fill in the gap of what we were doing with our young men today. You know, a lot of feminization of young men not actually developing into what a man ought to. to be in the historical sense of manhood. And so I sort of wrote the book that if there was a boy out there who was being raised without a dad or good influence, that he could pick the book up and read in a few hours the things that dads and grandpas give to their sons and grandsons over a lifetime.

But in a way that could be read, the whole book can be read in a couple hours by anybody. Yeah. and I wanted to be written so that it wasn't for, I didn't want to write it for preachers and that kind of thing. I just wanted to write it for the average guy, you know, out there. A lot of people who don't even like to read, you know, have said, I read it, I read it up and couldn't put it down. I read the old thing.

Yeah. And I've had a lot of young men call me, but the story I think that probably epitomizes the book is the one I start out with. My grandfather was Barry Troughton. His dad's name was Hunter, Tarleton, Spencer Hunter. Spencer. And there's an old schoolhouse beside the church where my grandfather was a deacon that's defunct, and it's just sitting there today deteriorating.

We were out riding around one day, and my grandpa said, he said, when I was going to school there, he said, I was a little boy, and he said it began to snow. And he said it was going to be a good snow. and they decided to send the kids home from school. And his dad walked to the school to get him and put him on his shoulders and carried him home. So he didn't want him to have to walk in the snow

all the way back to their house. And when he told me that, I thought, that is really what, that's what fatherhood and sonhood is about. It's you putting the boys on your shoulders and carrying them until they can walk themselves. Then they carry their sons until they can walk on their own. And your goal is a dad is not to have to carry your son his whole life.

You just carry him when he needs it. But your goal is for him to be able to walk on his own and then for him to be able to carry his son until he can walk on his own. So the success of stories after that are things in my life or my dad or grandfather or some other guy sort of put me on their shoulders and carried me with some bit of wisdom through life.

When I was a teenager, I won my own vehicle. My dad told me, he said, well, your mom's going to buy a new car, and she's got her old car. We'll give it to you. It was a 74 Pontiac Lamont's, but I didn't want it because it wasn't cool. you know, I wanted something besides my mom's old car. So I decided I'd go find something better than that. And I found the 81 Nissan four-wheel drive pickup truck is all jacked up, had big tires on it. And I thought, man, that'll look, that'll be great.

Dad went with me to look at it. He looked at it over. He said, some kids had this. He's jacked it up. He's put all this stuff on. He said, it's a piece of junk. Don't buy it. And so I bought it.

And I had like 1,500 bucks in the bank. I've paid that down on it, drained myself dry, and then had payments to make. And the truck actually turned out to be a piece of junk. Left me stranded all the time. Had to have rides caught on fire. I mean, it was a complete, absolute train wreck of a deal. And that to me, that's another just illustration. of how when you're young in life,

you, I mean, you start out like the one old boy said, I was born ignorant and I've been losing ground ever since. And we're born ignorant, no matter who you are. And you have to acquire wisdom. And that should be the chief aim of life is to acquire wisdom,

according to Proverbs. And my dad and grandfather and other men invested so much in my life that dad said to me one day, And dad wasn't one to set you down and teach you. He didn't do that. He just said things off the cuff that would stick with me. He said, do you know, if just one generation would learn from the previous generation, it would change the world. Yep.

And when he said that, I held on to it. And then when I was about 24, I got my life turned around. I'd become a Christian. I was actually trying to live right. Previously, I, you know, wasn't. And I said, you know what, for the rest of my life, I'm going to try to learn from the mistakes and successes of other people and limit the mistakes that I personally make. I'm going to pay attention. So dad had said that years ago, but it didn't catch on for probably 10 or 15 years after he had told me.

And that's sort of what the book's about. It's like, you know, everybody says experience is the best teacher, but it's also the cruelest. Yeah. That's really good. I want to I want you to keep telling me a couple more of these little stories like if what's another one that just comes to mind? Well.

Yeah, feel free to look through it. It's funny that you brought up the truck one because I was going to, that was one that was one that I remembered. Yeah. I'll tell you one that has helped me in my, you know, I'm in the ministry. And I was going to move out to. west somewhere in planted church from scratch. And in the process of doing that, an old preacher called me named John Halsey.

And John Halsey said, I want to talk to you for a little while about an opportunity that's going on in Alaska and ask you to pray about it. There was a pastor in Alaska, I think he was in Juneau, that had a heart to reach the Aleutian Islands. And of course, you know, they're strung out for miles in small pockets of populations, It's never a pocket really big enough to have its own church. But he was going to take a boat and go from island to island to island on different days and share the gospel with people.

And they actually raised money to buy the boat. And then the guy was out jogging and had a heart attack and died, the pastor. And Halsey said, I want you to move to Alaska. He said, you pastor this church up here. And he said, they were, there were. going to have to send me to nautical school, become a boat captain. There's a large boat. And he said, then you'll pastor the church, and then you will maintain a ministry on the Aleutian Islands. And in the process of that conversation, he said there was pastors when we

were trying to raise money to buy the boat that didn't have the vision for it. And he said they would say to me, well, the pockets of people on those islands are not large enough to have a church. Why do it that way? And Halsey said, I would tell them we can do something or we can do nothing. And everything in life's not idealistic. You can have idealistic goals, but then there's life. And you have to constantly modify the way you're functioning in life, you know, be willing to be adaptable.

And when Halsey said that, I never forgot it. You know, there's lots of things that you want to accomplish that are not just perfect, but you can do something or you can do nothing. and that was important to me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. You can do something or you can do nothing.

That's true about... It is true. It's true. How about this one? $3, this chapter, titled $3. What's it say on it? Oh, yeah. Papa and I, we had an ongoing back and forth.

He grew up out of the Depression, born in 1928, and they were poor. I mean, they were so poor. They would catch a possum and put it in a cage and fatten it up until it was big enough for a meal. And the first time he went to town, he was 13 years old. He thought town was just a larger country store. He thought when they got to town, they took a wagon. When they got there, it would just be a bigger store. He couldn't believe all the buildings.

It was unfathomable all those buildings to him. And he was a penny penny. because he was so poor. He didn't want to be poor anymore. So anything he spent money on, I mean, he, he waited. So he didn't waste. And we were at the farm and we were pulling old planks off of a building. And he had pull, you know how a plank on a barn will rot at the bottom where water splashes on it?

He pulled those planks off and saw the rotten bottom off and save them. And then he'd dry the nails out of it. them and straighten them and kept them to use again. I hated using those nails. Because to get one to go straight, it's very difficult to straighten a nail and then drive it straight again. It wants to bend all the time. So in my mind, let's just go to town and get nails.

Right. And we were going back and forth. And I was never a smart elect to my dad or grandfather because they wouldn't have tolerated. you know, back talk was, that was unacceptable in our outfit. Strictly predicted. That was not, you don't do that. Yeah. You can have a different opinion, but you express it appropriately.

Right, right, right, right. But I would go back and forth with my grandfather about stuff and express my frustrations with him. And I told him, I said, if you counted up the time that we were spending doing all this, you wouldn't make $3 an hour. Well, I thought it was sound logic. I had him. Yeah, you thought that was pretty. Yeah, I had him. He just, he was driving.

He never even phased him. He said, that's $3 I wouldn't have made today. Yeah. He turned it into $3 he was making. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A penny saved is a penny earned. Yeah. Yeah.

So the, the structure of the book, which is so simple, you know, the title of the chapter is $3. And it has the quote from your grandfather that says, that's $3.00. $3 I wasn't going to make. And you tell that story and just honestly less than a page. Yeah, it's a great book. I read it and passed it on. I appreciate that. It's greatly got some great words of wisdom in it.

And I really enjoy, it is an easy read, but it's got some profundity to it. You know, you just read that story and there's lots of great one-liners. Is this okay if I just kind of like pointed a chapter? and have you tell the story. Yeah, that's fun. Okay, how about this one called laziness? And the title is, did you ride that three-wheeler to the mailbox? That's one of my least favorite stories.

Oh, really? Yeah, I was terribly mistreated in that story. I actually don't remember it. Well, it... I remember that one. Dad had bought a three-wheeler. It was a 1985 Honda Big Red. Any story that starts with that, I'm all in.

It was the first year they had reverse on them. Oh. So this was, I mean, this is big time, big time. 110 Cs. Well, no, this was, what was the, uh, 250s, I think the big reds were. Yeah, I think the big reds were 250s. Yeah. Well, I was 15 years old, 14 or 15, depending on how my birthday was.

And, uh, it'd come a big snow where our mailbox was only 50 yards from the front porch. And dad told me, said, go down the mailbox and get in the mail. So I walked outside and that brand new three-wheeler sitting there and I thought, man, this snow. So I jumped on it and started having some good time, you know, fun, went down and got the mail and come back up and I came in. My dad was like, did you drive that three-wheeler down the mailbox? I said, yes, sir.

Man, he was mad. I mean, ticked mad. He said, that's lazy. She said, I can't, you know, I can't believe you're that stinking lazy, that you can't go down to the mailbox and back because, you know, laziness with a lot of them old mountain men, that's, you know, yeah. That's like that's like the worst insult.

You call them out, you can do a lot of things, but if you're lazy. But I didn't do it because I was being lazy. I did it because I was 15 and there was snow on the ground and there was a red, and three-wheeler. And you wanted to ride the three-wheeler. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it didn't matter because in a dad's mind, You know, as a father, if you're not careful, the things your kids do right now, you project for the rest of their life.

It's true. That's very true. And if you're not real careful, you will overcorrect for something that's just a now thing that you think it's going to get out of hand. See, to me, I just go in the mailbox. But to him, I was, you know, 45 years old and a wino out on the street who never held a job. Yeah, yeah. He was projecting, like, this is going to be a problem. Yeah, this is going to be a problem.

problem. So he told me, he said, well, I'll tell you what, you're grounded. And I don't remember it's a week or two. I can't remember. I mean, but I got hammered over it. And I think it's the only time I was ever grounded. Really? Yeah. Yeah. What did that produce? And like, did it make you mad? Bitterness, probably. I mean, I was not guilty. I was not guilty. Yeah. Because you were just like, man, I just want to ride the three wheeler in the snow. Yeah. But looking back as a dad, though, I can now understand why that was an issue to him as a dad. Yeah. Because his eyes are what's his son going to be when he's 30, when he's 40.

Yeah. And he wanted to, you know, stamp it out. So what's the lesson that you learned from that? Yeah, yeah. Maybe not even in the moment, but now. Because as you tell that story, I am envision in a conversation I had with one of my sons this week. That probably was a little unfair to them. But at the same time, in the big picture, I was right, but in the small picture, it probably was a little unjust.

Well, one of my favorite stories in that book, I'll use that to illustrate. It took place when I was very young. and when I was probably four, I was right at four years old, dad and I were out at the farm. When I say, we always come, you live here and the barn's out here

and out there's the farm. The farm's where the barn's at, you know. And we were out there next to the barn, and dad, he smoked. And, you know,

he had him a cigarette and looked cool to me and said, can I have a cigarette? and dad said, I'll tell you what I'll do, make a deal with you. He said, you can have a cigarette. But if you can't smoke the whole thing, you better never ask for another one. So he had me the cigarette, and I got the puffing on it, and I couldn't take but just a few puffs.

I said, no way, man, I cannot handle this. So I handed it back to Dad, and he looked at me and he said, never let me catch you with another one. And Dad was a man of his word. If he said it in 1920, it would still be good in 2020. And, well, just maybe a few months or a year passed. And, you know, my family was a little rough. And one day, dad and them, if I remember, right, him and one of my cousins was sitting on the front porch.

And they was shooting at the mailbox with a pistol. Just hurrah. And. Welcome to Appalachian. I was on the front. She did their own mailbox. I was at, I was on the porch air with them, and Dad said, I've got to run over to the store for a few minutes. I'll be back.

Well, I was on the porch with my cousin. He's older than I am. He was closer to dad's age. And his name was Johnny. And Johnny was smoking, and dad pulled out a driveway, and Johnny said, you want a cigarette? And, I mean, I'm like five. And I said, I said, no.

I said, dad told me if he ever caught me with another cigarette, he had beat my braces off. So when you first had that first cigarette, you were under five? Yeah, it was like four. Wow. I'm thinking eight or ten years old. This is important context. Yes. So I'm like five, and Johnny, he said, don't worry about it.

He said, I'll take it for you. I won't let you daddy whip you. So I took the cigarette. A few minutes, dad come rolling back in the driveway. stepped out of the car, looked at me up on the porch. And here's a five-year-old laid back. Never said a word. Walked right up on the porch and got me by the hand.

We went in the house and kept his word on the matter. And Johnny never lifted a finger to help me at all. Oh, that's a sorry, stucker. Sorry, dog. I've told him since he ought to whip him still over the matter. And never helped me at all. But fast forward that dad was, he was a heavy smoker. But when he didn't want me to be a smoker.

And it was a cat and mouse game because when I got older, I started chewing the back and I loved it. I hated smoking, but I love chewing. He didn't want me to chew. He didn't want me to be on the back at all. Now, a lot of people say, well, your dad was a hypocrite. And I said, no. What you got to understand life as a child when you reach a certain age is, your parents love you, but they're imperfect.

And if you hold their imperfections against them, you'll never learn from them. And it wasn't a matter of hypocrisy with dad. It was a matter of he was addicted to nicotine, and he couldn't stop. He wanted to quit, but it had a hold on him, and he couldn't let go of it. He didn't want that for me. It wasn't hypocrisy. It was love. And having issues as parents that you don't want your children to have,

A lot of kids grow up and despise the imperfections of their parents and call them hypocrites and say, well, my parent didn't live what they preach and all that kind of stuff. But parents need to be good to their children, and their children also need to reach a material level where they're good to their parents. And you need to understand that the, we, it's the unfortunate thing of life is you start raising your children when you don't know how to raise them. Yep. And by the time you do, they're grown. Yep.

You don't know, nobody knows exactly what they're doing parenting. I don't care who you are. Yeah. You just do, you do the best you can with what you have, and then the kids need to grow up and be merciful to their parents. And pray to God that your kids will grow up and be merciful to you. Yeah. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed, and there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. he doesn't have a head. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce,

and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. because out here there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. That is such insightful, insightful. look on it. We have four children. My youngest is set now 17. Oldest is 23. My oldest daughter is married now. And people, I often feel like when people talk to me, they think, oh, Clay, you've been, you know, young parents. And they're like, you've done this before.

How do you feel you've got some wisdom to give? And I tell you, the, the thing that I feel most right now is humility in terms of man. I look back. We were young when we had kids. It was exactly what you described. We did the best we could. We really tried to apply the value systems that we had into our kids, but man, we made a lot of mistakes. Absolutely. And then you come into parenting often with a very idealistic view of how to be a parent. And then at some point, a lot of your doctrine and the way you did things, you're probably going to realize you didn't execute it exactly right. Like if you had written down on a paper, if I'd written down on a piece of paper, everything that I intended to do with my kids when I was 22, probably I would still agree

with that list. But if you actually took that list and compared it to the replay video of actually what happened, you would see that I was not great at really executing. And, and, but, but, And I sure tried. Yeah. And yeah, man, right now, that's the thing I hope my kids give Misty and I is empathy. My wife, Christy, has this theory. She calls it the curve of criticality. She says, when you first become a parent, you find everything wrong that your parents did.

You know what I mean? And you're so unbelievably critical. Then as you get older, you know, you get into your 40s and you start thinking about your parents. and you're like, you know, maybe I kind of understand why they did that or, you know what I mean? And you start having a lot more compassion and understanding for your parents as you see the errors in your parenting years later. Yeah. You know, I'll try to take a big spin here that I think will be relevant. Identity is so powerful.

Like, essentially, when you're raising a kid, you're trying to tell them who they are. You're trying to let them discover who they're supposed to be inside of a context. You know, you may, you may live in Africa, you may live in Appalachia, but you have a context for your life. The parent knows that context and how that child can be successful more than that child. You, and much of identity is perceiving things that already have a very strong identity around you and then triangulating and calibrating to figure out who you are. And I think that parents act as that, like when, when you're, A kid becomes an adult and gets married and starts having kids.

And then they go, well, mom and dad sure did it wrong back here. We're going to do it right. I mean, they triangulate. And basically the parent or the grandparent, or it could be society or a church you went to or some reference point that has strong identity becomes something, even if you're critical of it, becomes important for you to build identity. Does that make sense? So it's almost like as a parent now, I recognize the natural tendency and even the, it's probably healthy for my kids to be a little critical of me.

And as a parent, I kind of just have to be okay with that to some degree. I mean, you know, like. Well, I got a feedback off of that story there from a guy and I would never give names or details, but a guy sent me an inbox and he said, a lot of churches have bought these books in bulk and give them out for Father's Day. And he said, our church gave me your book. He said, I read it, and I wanted to let you know that he was raised in one particular state, moved to a more southern state, got in church, got his life straightened up, but he had an extreme amount of bitterness toward his dad. His dad was very abusive when they grew up. And I don't consider my dad. I don't consider my

dad abusive at all. But this guy considered his dad very abusive and had a hard time. He said, but he read the story about the cigarette and the explanation of you got to be merciful to your folks and get over some things. And he said, I'll tell you what I did. He said, I've tried for years, but I decided to forgive my dad. He said, I forgave him. I wanted to thank you because his life is now better because he's not walking around with the burden of hating his dad the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah. That's good.

That's cool. Yep. Oh, man. I mean, you've got 84 stories in this book like that that all have a point. I'd like to comment on your writing style, which is, they say, they say Hemingway wrote, and I'm not a Hemingway expert. I've read a couple of books, but that he wrote like very short, very, like, just like very direct. Like when I first started reading Hemingway, I thought it would be this like big grandiose descriptions and stuff. But he's actually known for just being like the ocean was blue.

To the point. The wind hit us in the face from the east. The old man's wrinkles look like the ocean. I mean, like it's just like, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-da. And as you get into it, you realize how clear it is as compared to someone who might be like the ocean sparkled like diamonds in the, in the nether world and dolphins. I mean, you know, there's different ways to do it. When I read your book, I liked how simple and profound it was inside of like a very restrained style of writing. that was like very clear very to the point short but but poignant if that's the right word

I've used that word a couple times I think that's the right word but anyway well there's a story in there about that that very thing I think that I don't know I haven't I haven't read the book since I've published it I didn't go back and read it yeah but it's I think it's called talk less I remember that story yeah and it may seem strange because I'm a preacher and I talk all the time from the pulpit. But in in private life, I don't talk a lot. Ben doesn't talk a lot. My dad didn't talk a lot. Now, in private conversation, we might have a long conversation, but I can also ride from here to Idaho with you and don't have to say nothing. And that goes back to my dad, um, bear hunting. And he would say the reason some people

don't kill bear is because they're on the radio too much. You say, stay off the radio and kill the bear. Because trying to get out ahead of the bar, if the dogs is after, you know, takes focus and movement and action. And there was times when we would, I would ride with, I'd stay the week ago with my grandpa and we would go up on the mountain to hunt. We wouldn't even know dad was hunting that day. Somebody had found a track, turn the dogs loose on it. the race could go on all day long and you still wouldn't know he was there. And then the dogs may get treed.

And then you'd hear, it was back in the old CB days. You could talk maybe a couple miles if you were lucky. Yeah. But you could hear the truck drivers for 40 miles, you know. Yeah. So, but you'd hear that thing start crackling the way it would when somebody would key down on their mic. And dad would carry this great big radio.

I'd be in the truck with my grandpa and you'd hear that crackling. And dad would say, how about it? Barry. It's all over. And that's it. I mean, this is the race been going all day. I mean, it was wild and chaotic and a huge big day. And dad's comment was, I've killed it.

And y'all didn't even know he was there. You wouldn't even know he was hunting. It's saying about it, Barry. It's all over. Well, one of the things that gave him an advantage he didn't run his mouth all the time. Yeah. That's tough. That's tough counsel to a podcast.

Yeah. Coming from a preacher. I know. A preacher on a podcast talking about talking less. The next bear grease is going to be two minutes long. Yeah, exactly. Next barre grease. No, no, it's going to be 55 minutes long like all the rest of them.

And we're going to have some silence on there. I'm going to be like, guys, I really want y'all to think about this for about 10 minutes. Just music. Man, that. Yeah. that's good man that's really good um it's been when you when i first i ordered this book off amazon when you when you when you uh printed it and when you published it um i remember i don't remember the details i remember a story of tobacco stealing tobacco i don't remember

Was there, wasn't there a story about, and I think it was you, that stole tobacco from a country store? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you mind telling that story? Oh, my goodness, yeah. There was a country store there. It was called Cove Creek. And, I mean, I just, I know it sounds weird for a kid, but I just love tobacco. I mean, I liked it.

And so, voodoo, as we call it. He did try a cigarette at four. Yeah, exactly. So the hunters would meet at Cove Creek in the mornings real early and sort of formulate a game plan, then go up on the mountain and try to execute the game plan. Well, that particular morning I was with my papaw, and there was only me and him and the guy that owned the store

in the building at the time. And we were standing here at the counter, and the tobacco aisle was not behind the counter. Then it should have been for kids like me, I guess. But the tobacco was all over here. here and I thought, boy, I'd like to have that today. I'll be out in the mountains by myself. And so I just eased around the side, got down on my... How old are you? I don't know. 10, 12. Yeah. Got down on my knees and I just crawled over there,

reaching my hand around, got me a pack, and eased my way back to the store bathroom, concealed it, just walked out like nothing that ever happened. Well, the sorry thing about that is, the man that owns the story is a family friend, a personal friend of my grandfather. If I had got caught red-handed, my grandpa would have been destroyed. I mean, it was entirely self-centered, selfish thing.

Not to mention this, the penalty in my family for getting caught being a thief. And so years went by. I became a Christian. I went to Bible College. I was out in Montana, planting a church, and we'd come home to visit.

We didn't get home very often. I drove down the Houston Valley Road on the way down to Papas and passed the old man's house and on the store. He had sold it by then, but he was still alive. And when I passed that house, the Lord told me you stole from him. And now it's time for restitution. You claim to be a Christian, and you stole from him, and you take care of it. I turned the car around. I drove back down this house.

You know, it was shame. And then I walked up, knocked on his door, and he came up the door, and he said, well, you know, he knew me. And I said, I got to talk to you about something. He said, all right. I told him what had happened. And I wish you to just hit me in the face. But instead, he said, Tracy, I never would have thought that of you. Good night.

That was hard. It was like being poleaxed Because dad wouldn't have done it And Papa wouldn't have done it But their boy did And I ask him to forgive me And then I ask him what I owed him You know, Zach Yis was told to pay back four times

Or offered to pay back four times What he had stole And I didn't know what the interest was On a packet of tobacco from the 70s And the old man told me, He said, no. He said, you don't owe me a thing. He said, don't you worry about it.

He forgave me. But cleared my conscience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Man, what a good story. It is a good story. That stuff is powerful.

I think people, people that don't understand the way the spirit realm works, which the spirit realm is as real as the physical realm. Don't understand the power of stuff like that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Truly. I mean, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, I, that, that's a great story. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, uh, that was a good, that was a good man. And, uh, I was glad to have that out of the way. Yeah. But the Lord will do that after you, after you get saved and become a Christian and the Holy Spirit lives inside of you.

The Lord, uh, I tell, I tell, I explain this to my church. in my church a few weeks ago with an illustration about turkey calls. When I make a turkey call, people ask me, how do you make one? I said, I just take a piece of wood that's got turkey in it. Then I remove everything that's not turkey. And because some woods don't really have turkey in them. They're just not good for a call. And I liking that to being saved.

You're never going to be a Christian until God's in you. When you get saved, God moves in you. now you've got something for God to work with. And then after Christ moves inside of you, then God spends the rest of your life taking everything out of you that's not Christ. Yep. And I think when I chip away at those turkey calls and move a piece here, and if you ever make a box call, it's very intricate in the sound,

the slope of it, the hollow of the inside, the shape of it. I mean, you can be so close, and it's still not sound like a turkey. then you almost get it, and then you go too far, and there's no going back. So you're trying to hit that just right with a removal of that wood because you can't add it back

to where it sounds like a turkey, and it's better to stop too soon. And I think that's discipleship. Is God taking everything out of you that's not Christ? That's good. It's good. Man, this has been fantastic.

We've been talking for an hour and a half almost. Hour and a half. That has been fantastic. Blake, what about that silly podcast you've got? What's it called? It doesn't matter anymore. No, this has been so good. Yeah, so you can order this online.

Yes, sir. You can order it on Amazon. Order it on Amazon. Called the old man. And Tracy, Tennessee is... Tennessee Jones. Tennessee Jones. He fulfills these orders himself. I mean, you got, is that correct?

Or no? No. You can order them straight for me. People do that if they want them signed. Okay. They can just, you know. So Amazon is printing them on demand. Amazon's print on demand.

And, yeah, when they first started doing, you know, when that first dropped, it went to an Amazon, what do they call it, for a new, there's some category. they have that's a new publication that went to number one. Gotcha. Right away. Yeah. Well, then Amazon throttled it. They had a AI that I guess read the book and it was not politically correct.

So Amazon throttled it. Well, my state representative and the mayor of Knoxville got a hold of Amazon said, in Tennessee, we don't allow discrimination. We believe in free speech. And Amazon, the very next day gave me a positive review. I didn't know AI could be so bendable. Yeah. And one of the coolest things I've had happened is I got a card from J.D. Vance.

That somebody had give him a copy of it. State representative had given him a copy, and he had read it, and he sent me a card. Wow. And that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's great. So the old men, the conversations that help boys become men,

by T.L. Tennessee Jones. Tennessee Jones. T.L. Tracy, Tennessee Jones. Man. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Lake, Backwood University, June the 9th.

June 9th. June 9th. It'll be biweekly. Byweekly show. And, yeah, you'll be hearing more from Dr. Lake Pickle on the bear grease feed. Looking forward to it. Happy to be here. We've got a nice.

robust feed. We're going to have to start, I talk to Brent about this. I think we're going to have to start some episodes with like a description of the channel. Because Bear Greas started as just like the podcast,

the Bear Greene's podcast. That's just what all it was. It actually started with one bi-weekly show, which was Bear Grease podcast. After a few months, we were like, let's take it the weekly and do this thing called the render, which is this.

Roundtable, a little bit more of a traditional style. podcast conversational long form stuff and then we added this country life yep and then now we've added backwoods university so basically monday wednesday friday just packing them in you got something you've got no more room for any other podcast and that's what we want listen that's right unsubscribe from those other ones we need to we need to find a way to like service all the category i guess we just got to figure out what fields we're playing in i mean we're now the wildlife biology field. Brent's in the, I don't know what Brent's doing.

I mean, I don't know how you'd even describe it. When I try to describe what Brent does, I'm just like, ah, just listen to it. I bet you'll like it. And I'm always right. Yep. I'm always right. I can't believe how many people that I run into that listen to Bear Greece.

I mean, it surprises me. I mean, I'll go somewhere to preach. And like there was a, I was in Chesapeake, Virginia. And I was going to preach a sportsman's banquet for a church over there. And a little kid probably, I bet he was like 8, 10 years old, walked up to me and he said, now you were on Bear Greas, right? He didn't care if I was there. It was the association.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that kid, and it's all, and as people, you wouldn't even think listen to podcasts. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, cool.

Well, thank you, T.L. for coming. Yep. Really appreciate it. It came all the way from East Tennessee. Like, all the way from Mississippi. Thank you for coming. Happy to be here. Yep.

And anything else we're supposed to talk about? I don't think so. I think you're covering it at all. Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end

when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast, born in the outdoors.

Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and. and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.