Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Black and Brown Bear Attacks - Bearanoia in Alaska

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

In 1992, two Alaskan communities were shaken by two different encounters with bears that ended in tragedy. Wes sheds a a light on how things went wrong, and then goes over the best things to do should anyone find themselves in a similar situation. Three things to remember in the event of a bear encounter: 1. Group up (safety in numbers!) 2. Get your bear spray out and have it ready to use 3. Slowly back away ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tooth and Claw podcast. We are a wildlife attack stories podcast or encounters, and we have our wildlife biologist to explain what the animal was thinking when it attacked us, and that's Wes Larson. What the heck are these animals thinking? What the heck are you doing? And then we got me, Wes's little brother, to kind of wrongly a lot of times guess what they were thinking and then we got our best friend Mike to even more wrongly guess what they were thinking yes he's dabbing yeah sorry you think dabs are cool again yeah they've never not been cool in my opinion but sorry for a second there i forgot that podcasts are primarily an oral medium they can't really see me dabbing so i should have said something that's my bad they can feel it though everyone out

there felt you dab you did it so that's all that matters interesting i think it had a moment where it wasn't cool. You don't think that. I agree with that, but I think it's back. I think now it's like ironically funny and cool. It is very funny if you just think to dab when you do something cool, remarkable. And then you just dab.

It was Cam Newton, right? He was the most famous for it. He started it. I've never seen a baseball player do it after like a home run. Oh, yeah. That is kind of a missed opportunity for it. I'm just wondering how far back it goes. Did a caveman throw like a sick javelin into a,

a woolly mammoth and it's just kind of like programmed into our DNA to dab when we do something cool. I don't think it goes back that far. You know who's missing out on it is Lewis Hamilton or like an F1 driver. Win a race and just finish the, like go across the finish line in the dab. Got to keep your hands on the wheel. It's dangerous. They put their hands up sometimes. That's true.

They never dab, though. It's at the level right now where like if I got in one of my friends' cars and they suddenly played like gungum style on their radio i would think it's really funny and like would like listening to it and i feel like dabbing is kind of there now too where it was really dumb for a while and now it's kind of whenever mike does it it makes me laugh it makes it sound like i do it a lot i kind of do i guess you do relatively we played a minigolf we did walk about minigolf with one of their team members this week and we all dabbed in the vr space Yeah, in the Metaverse.

Someone got a hole in one. We dabbed. It's true. We're dabbed friendly here. Wes, how's Montana been this year? Great. Better? Sure.

What do you mean? You think it's better? Better than what? Just better than last year? The other years? It's been a great year. I wouldn't say better than all the other years. We had like a pretty dry summer and yeah, it's been hot, but it's crazy.

Because you introduced, Montana introduced Dung Beatles. Oh, yeah. Like pretty recently. I saw one. Yeah. Remember I sent you a video of it? Yes. I was just wondering.

Yeah, I think it's great. Noticed yet. I have noticed them. I don't know if it's increased. No, like, notice that Montana's better. Yeah, I don't know if it's made me like overall think the state's better now. But it's my favorite state. So it's already like a high bar.

No elephants. They do tend to follow Dung beetles though. I think any day now, our elephants will be back. How many did they release? How did it work? Do they just like toss a bunch out into the wind? I hope for the best. Or was it like a big ceremony?

they cut some tape and let them go. I don't know why they introduced them or where or how. Jeff, do you know? Good for the earth. Yeah, no, I'm happy they're there. In my Dung Beetle episode, they were like experimenting with it in different places just because they are like so good at fertilizing the soil. So I'm sure that's just like where it came from is just Montana thought it'd be good for their ground. Good for Montana, you know?

Well, speaking of Dung Beetles, my topic has nothing to do with them whatsoever. A nice segue. Yeah. You're getting good at those. It's funny. Sometimes, you know, we've been doing these trips with listeners that have been really fun. We got another one coming up this week. But a question that I feel like we often get asked on those trips by people to listen to podcast is how we schedule our episodes, how we come up with our episodes, how I decide to pick certain animals or you guys decide for subscription or main episodes.

And there is like a little bit of method to that madness. and I do want to kind of outline that really quickly because it speaks to why I picked the episode that I picked for today. And generally, we kind of view those episodes in like blocks where every fourth or fifth episode we're going to have a news one where we go over the news stuff from the past few weeks, which we just did. Generally, in that block of four or five episodes, there's going to be a new animal that we haven't talked about yet.

And then some repeat animals that we've already talked about. So this week is a repeat. but it's bear stories. For me, by far the most material that I have, my specialty is bear related. So there's a lot and a lot of stories about bears. I do think there's some of our episodes that people tend to kind of connect with the most

because a lot of people spend time out in places where there might be bears. And they're often like really interesting stories. So we are going to continue just mixing them through. Yeah, they're good stories. That's a smart idea too, We just did the HBO Tim crazy. So we probably have a lot of new people that have only heard Mike's weird main and then

the news and they're probably gone already. This is a last chance. I like we mess that up. I like to do a bear story from time to time. And we are still owing everyone the Timothy Treadwell story, which is, trust me, it's on my mind. It's just that's one that I'm going to have to read. I'm going to have to read a lot of books for that one.

I'm going to have to talk to a lot of colleagues. That's going to be a lot of work. To specify, though, you're the real bear expert. I'm kind of like the ghost bear expert of the show. You are. You just did a ghost bear subscription. Oh, so can you talk with like the ghost to treadwell when we do treadwell? No, I can only talk with ghost bears, not ghost humans.

So talk to the bear that killed him. Be like, kind of feel like you messed up now? Oh, we've been talking a lot. Yeah. Perfect. I mean, I always feel like I've messed up. It's kind of my default state. To Treadwell be like, when you're alive, you're very confident that you were doing the right thing.

You still feel that way? No. If he's anything like me, he'd be beyond the grave just still defiant that he was like, no, I was totally right. He's not going to back down. Still like pet and ghost bears in the wild. Yeah. Anyway, Jeff introduced me as a wildlife biologist, which I am, but my specialty has always been bears. I've worked with polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears, sloth bears.

And most of my... I thought you were going to say modeling. No, it's not modeling. Most of my background is in human wildlife conflict, specifically revolving around bears. So this is something I know a fair amount about, and I'm also connected to people that know a lot more than me. So with this episode, I did consult one of those people,

which is Tom Smith. Oh, nice. The guy that helped me do my master's. Tom's great. Yeah, he's one of the leading voices in human bear conflict, especially when it comes to bear spray and a really smart guy and a good friend and he was in Alaska when these incidents happened. Oh, wow.

He's one of the only people that like, if you get him talking about bears, will go longer than Wes. Oh, he can go for hours. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah. It's great. It's like that's the biggest compliment I can give someone.

Yeah, right. He's amazing. How long can you talk about bears a long time? That's a compliment. So the source that I'm using for these stories today, the main one is this book by Larry Canuit. It's called Some Bears Kill. We've heard from this guy before, right?

We have. It's maybe my favorite cover of any Bear Attack book. It's just like a great color, a great font. Miami Vice color scheme. Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, she's yelling. You know what's cool about bear biologists? What?

I feel like saying bear. biologist works better than most in the other specific animal biologists. The alliteration. I agree. It's got a nice ring to it. Both of these are tragic stories. The second one being very tragic and involves a child. So I do think if you are like highly susceptible to stories involving children or maybe if your kids are listening and you don't want them to hear that, the second story, I'll give you a warning when I'm about to start it, but it is a little bit of a rougher, rough story. Just so you know.

So summer 1992, what were you guys doing? Sucking on your mom's teeth. Me and my... I was four. Oh yeah, three. You're right. Yeah. Sucking on your mom's teeth. I don't think so.

But in the summer of 1992, like today, Alaska had a lot of bears. For most residents, dealing with bears, or at least thinking about bears, was part of Alaskan life. And even though almost everyone at least knew someone, that knew someone that had had a scary bear encounter, there was this relative kind of live and let live sentiment among Alaskans and bears. And up until that summer, only 27 people

had officially on record been killed by bears in the state since 1900. So for 92 years, only 27 people, that's pretty crazy. Like that's, I don't know, like one every three or four years. Like a third of the years? Yeah. That's not that many, considering that Alaska had about 140,000 bears at the time and about 560,000 residents, human residents. So you would expect more encounters and more fatal encounters. These are pretty low numbers, all things considered. But the summer of 1992 would change how many Alaskans felt about bears and it would all happen in a two-day stretch in early July. Do you think if there was a Matthew McConaughey bear out there doing like, you got to get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Doing that.

or just like one bear went into like a church and killed 27 people yeah that's artificially inflating that's stat padding yeah and then the rest it's just no deaths in the other years that one bear really gave them a bad name all right so this is july 1992 which is one bjp which is of course my method of time before Jurassic exactly that's stat patting that's By that. Before Jurassic Park. While I used that book, Some Bears Kill, extensively, I found a lot of different news articles for these stories.

And as mentioned, I talked to some personal friends and colleagues, specifically Tom Smith. Okay. 33-year-old Darcy Staver loved taking trips to their family cabin in remote Alaska. It's a cozy two-bedroom cabin that sat on a small lake near the Glen Highway, about 150 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska. and Darcy, who was originally from Fort Lewis, Washington, was with their husband Michael. Michael's an army captain, I think he was just on a little break. They're currently living in Palmer, Alaska, and they're looking forward to some time at their cabin.

Darcy's brother had visited the cabin a few weeks prior to Darcy and Michael's visit, and he had a really nice time during the short little time that he was at the cabin, and he had given Darcy a full report and said that he did not see a single bear while that he was at the cabin. It was just something they would ask about. Did you see any bears? And he said, no, no bears. So although bears were never really a surprise in the area, Darcy and Michael weren't really expecting to have any problems

because her brother had said that there really wasn't anything there. But that all changed when Darcy woke up to a noise on the porch on the morning of July 8, 1992. She immediately knew what was happening, and she woke her husband, Michael, up. There's a bear on the porch, she whispered to him. her and Michael got up and looked through the window. Sure enough, there's a relatively small cinnamon black bear on the porch

actively looking for food. It's a new bear that they had never seen during their previous visits to the cabin, and later when they would talk to neighbors, none of their neighbors reported ever seeing this bear before either. It's a new bear, as far as we can tell. Darcy and Michael are both pretty active in the Alaskan outdoors, like Darcy was a hunter, she had killed Caribou, She had done all these crazy things out in Alaska.

So these aren't people that are like people that are just traveling to Alaska and spending a few days up there that had never been before. They spent a lot of time in Alaska. They knew what they were doing. So they'd been around bears before. I think it stands to reason they knew a bit about bears. And they knew that black bears especially were often really shy and risk averse. So if you guys are in a cabin, see a black bear's rooting around on your stuff on the porch, what are you going to do? probably film it. Yeah, besides take a picture or video. Like let's say you got something out there

that you don't want it to get into. What are you going to do to try and get it to leave? If it was a black bear knowing what I know, I'd probably crack the window a little bit and start like yelling at it, trying to make some noise and commotion. But if it's a cinnamon bear, you can't give it a little lick. I love those things, dude. Like the chocolate covered cinnamon bears? It's not one of those. This is a cinnamon phase black bear. But yes. If it's like getting in my car, I'd probably go outside and start throwing stuff at it. Yeah. So like we've talked about being dominant, being loud, being aggressive, generally that's what

you have to do to scare off a black bear. And usually that's more than enough. So that's what Michael and Darcy did. They gathered up some pots and pants and started banging on them inside the house, thinking that a loud noise would probably scare off the bear, that they'd look out and see the bushes moving where the bear to run off. But that's not what happened. The bear didn't budge.

And while they're making this noise, it actually looked through the window straight at them. And as they tried to scare it more and more, it still didn't move. And instead of running away, it actually moved toward one of the windows of the cabin that was only covered up by plastic sheeting. So all they had was like this thin kind of plastic sheeting over this window. And before they could really even register what was happening, the bear tore through this thin plastic and started crawling inside the small cabin with Darcy and Michael. No way.

Jesus. So they took off running. It probably thought it is like a dinner call. Yeah. Don't people do that when dinner's ready? Rip through the plastic window? You definitely could have thought that. Yeah.

It's just excited for dinner way. The Kool-Aid man type bear. Well, unfortunately, Jeff, you're not going to be completely wrong. They took off running to get away from this bear. And as they're running out, the bear actually swiped at Michael, but missed by inches. Well, Darcy gets out first. She immediately runs to a ladder that was leaning against the cabin. she climbs up quickly onto the roof and then pulls the ladder up behind her, which I thought

was interesting. So Michael ends up. That's kind of smart. It's smart, but Michael's not on the roof yet. Right. So you kind of think you'd lay for him. Yeah. But I think he maybe went a different direction or something.

He climbed a railing and got up on top of the roof as well. So as they stood on the roof, they see as the bear then busts through a screen door and walks out in front of the cabin. and it goes back into the cabin then and starts tearing it apart. It's trying to look for food, whatever it can find. And as they sat on the roof, it then comes back out and starts circling the roof and looking at them on top of the house, the cabin. Wow. That's really, that's strange behavior.

It is. So Michael has a 22 caliber pistol with him. And he thinks, okay, I don't necessarily want to hit the bear with this pistol because it might just enrage it. So I'm going to start shooting around it and try and scare it with the sound of this pistol. And Jeff, you've shot a 22 before. How much noise does a 22 make? It's not super loud. It's not like quiet, though.

They're not quiet, but they're not very loud. It's kind of just like a phew. Like, it's not much of a report. I don't know either. They're not the loudest guns. Like, your pots and pans would have been louder than what the noise this gun makes. But he starts shooting around. He's trying to get like a dancing bear.

Yeah. Shooting at its feet doing the Yosemite Sam thing. Same dance. Yeah. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all.

In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. But he was worried about making it angrier. I just want to take a quick break here and say, this is not a bear that seems angry.

This isn't a bear that's mad at them trying to get them. This seems like a very food-motivated bear. The fact that it broke into their cabin, that it ramshacked the cabin, that it's going after them and it's a black bear. It's not angry. It's hungry. hungry. So you have to convince it to leave. And if you were in this position with just the

small caliber pistol with a black bear, I would shoot it at the bear. I would try and hit it because or maybe I'd shoot one or two shots to try and scare and if that doesn't work, I'd shoot at it. Because then that might be enough to convince it like how this hurts. Even if you're not going to kill it with the 22, you're probably going to get rid of it. It would probably end the encounter. Like 22s will do some damage. So that would they can. Could kill the bear. Yeah, if you hit it in the right spot, it for sure could kill it. Do you think it'd be totally inaccurate to say that a bear could be, it's going to sound like I'm making a joke, but I'm really not. But like, you know, how we describe people as getting hangary sometimes?

Yeah. Does being hungry make a bear like, I mean, they're more risk prone to risk, but are they, does that actually affect their anger levels even? Yeah, it's really, I mean, that's like such a hard thing to measure in an animal is something like anger. But it does seem that way. I guess the explanation that kind of proves that a little bit is the Codiac Grizzlies. The grizzlies that just eat salmon all day and black bears, they're a lot more docile. Coastal bears, yeah. Those are the ones Treadwell could like walk up to because they're just like full.

Yeah. No, that's what they told me when I was talking to, their ghost. Coastal brown bears that have really great food sources like salmon and stuff. That's a great point, Jeff. They're not going to be nearly as aggressive because they don't have to worry about. protecting their food or anything. But as far as like hunger, whether or not hunger can really influence them, I think they would have to be pretty drastically hungry to be willing to take really big risks and get

kind of like more upset. But it's an interesting question. Anyway, if it were me in this position and of course hindsight's 2020, I think I would have shot at this bear. The fact that it's breaking into a home and everything, he's well within his rights to try and kill this bear and I think the pain of the gunshots would be at least enough to get it to stop. But he shot around it and that didn't work. The bear didn't leave and Michael and Darcy then took a little bit of time to talk about their options.

They knew that if they could climb on this roof, the bear certainly could get up there as well. So they knew that they couldn't just simply wait it out. So they talked for a little bit and then they decided that Michael would sprint to their outboard boat and take it about a half a mile to their nearest neighbor where he would be able to to get a bigger rifle and come back and kill the bear. So the bear finally gives him a little window and Michael scrambles down off the cabin, sprints for the boat, pushes it out in the water before firing it up, and then takes off for the neighbors. And as far as he knows, the bear never followed him, because it was now completely focused on his wife, Darcy,

who was still on top of the roof. Uh-oh. So around 9 a.m., Michael got to his neighbor's place and he met 23-year-old Gregory W. Talley, who was a guide who worked for his neighbor, and as soon as he heard what was going on, he loaded his 375 hunting rifle, hopped in the boat with Michael, and tossed him a second hunting rifle as well.

Michael and Gregory raced back to the Staver cabin, and Michael's trip had only been about 15 minutes round trip when they jumped out of the boat on the dock and they run up the shore toward the house. It only took Gregory a few seconds to see the bear at the southwest corner of the house, but it was no longer staring up at the roof or circling. It was standing still and it was feeding on something.

The bear casually looked up at Talley and then bent back down and started feeding again. Gregory raised his 375 and fired a single shot, dropping the black bear immediately and it fell where it was standing. Michael ran up the hill and looked frantically for his wife on the roof, but she wasn't there. He called out to her hoping to see her come out of the cabin or the woods. Got no answer. Then he slowly approached the bus.

body of the dead bear. As he walked up, he could see the hand of his wife sticking out from under the bear. The bear had been eating his wife when they shot it. No way. Oh, no. So, when Michael had left, Darcy had watched as the bear immediately went to a spruce tree next to the cabin, where it climbed up and then stepped out on the roof with Darcy. Again, this is kind of all what they've pieced together. Who knows exactly what happened, but this is what they think happened. With nowhere to run, she either flung herself from the top of the cabin or the bear engaged with her and they tumbled off the cabin because she had injuries that were consistent with a fall. And then on the ground, the bear either climbed back down or attacked her as they fell off together and killed her. So Michael could see that Darcy wasn't moving, that her arms and legs had been severely mauled and that the bear had been feeding on her torso.

so, so he pulled the bear off his wife and fired another shot into its head. He was unwilling to leave the scene, so he told Gregory to go get the troopers, and the troopers received a call around 925 in the morning, reporting the death of Darcy. The troopers met Gregory at the workplace, and then about 50 minutes later, they left in a boat to go to the Staver cabin. When they arrived, Michael was still clutching the rifle and was in shock, so they told him to leave, and they started their investigation. They didn't find any food attractants outside that might have attracted the bear to the cabin.

It didn't seem underweight, starved, or injured, and it was tested for rabies and came back negative. She had a lot of defensive wounds from fighting the bear, but unfortunately, none of those wounds would have led to her immediate death, so it's likely that she died from this bear feeding on her and her bleeding out. So something that's kind of crazy about this is some of the, chatter afterward. Oh, I'm sure. Even among law enforcement, there was a lot of suspicion on Michael.

Oh. There are people out there who think that he killed his wife and then fed her to the bear as a way to cover up the murder. To me, when I first read that as kind of like, okay, the more I thought about it,

the more preposterous it sounded, because a lot of things would really have to line up perfectly in that 15 minute window or whatever for that to be a convincing thing. So essentially, like, he would have had to kill his wife, attract a bear, get it to feed on her, and, like, eat whatever marks he had left, all in that 15 minutes that he left to go get his neighbor. You know, and I guess that doesn't have to be 15 minutes. But, I mean, all of that would have had to have happened and it would have had to have been

convincing when they came back that the bear had killed her. It just seems like a lot. It seems like a very... One, like the defensive wounds. It's not like she was dead. It was like... Exactly. When the bear started feeding on her, you know?

Right. Yeah. If a bear just found a dead body, it wouldn't scrape up her arms and her legs first. Right. It would just start eating. Personally, I don't believe it, but they did investigate him. And Tom told me that too. He said that he was investigated for murder.

And like one of the forums I found said he went to prison, but I don't think he did. This was not a murder, in my opinion. I think they both messed up a lot, but it wasn't malicious. They made some big, yeah, they made some big errors, but yeah, I don't think either of them. I just think they panicked is what happened. Like a 22 isn't nothing. Don't just like shoot all the bullets into like the dirt. And also leaving, like they should have left together if they left.

Yeah, that was my biggest question. Or like leave her with the gun with some boys. bullets or something, you know. Because we've talked about this, and we're going to talk about this later. Bears really don't like attacking groups of people. So even two people is a much more intimidating thing for a bear, especially a black bear, than it would be otherwise. When this happened, it really upset a lot of people, especially because it was a black bear.

This is the bear that's in a lot of backyards in Anchorage. It's the bear that people see all over Alaska. And it's kind of just seen as like the bumbling cousin to grizzly bears. It's not really seen as much of a threat. and when this happened, it was out in the news. This wasn't a person that was like, again, a tourist. This is someone who knows Alaska very well, and she was eaten by a black bear. So it was all over the news and people were pretty upset.

But two days later, something else would happen that would send the whole state to full-blown baranoia. Okay. You made that word apple years ago now. Nice. Callback. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event.

Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavy weight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. So, King Cove is a tiny town nestled in the middle of the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. When you picture Alaska, there's that little chain of islands that goes off to the left state. Those are the illusions. They were really pivotal for World War II, actually.

They have a really interesting history behind them. But they're super rugged. There's extreme weather, harsh conditions, and all of that together has led to them being very sparsely populated. and only a few hundred people lived in King Cove in 1992, a lot of them working in the fishing industry, and a large percentage of them being Alouet, and I might be saying that wrong, and I'm sorry if I did, indigenous people who have called that place home for thousands of years.

Little Anton Bear was one of those indigenous residents, so his last name's Bear. Even at six years old, Anton was used to the very unique challenges posed by living in such a remote place. But on July 10th, and again, sorry everyone, this is the story that does involve a child, so just so you know. On July 10th, 1992, two days after the death of Darcy Staver, Anton was walking with his mom, Lillian Bear,

and his three-year-old sister, Janet Bear, on a road near the coast in King Cove. It's around 6 a.m., and as they walked, a large brown bear ambled away from the city dump and down the same street where the small family was walking. The brown bears, we've talked about this before on the podcast, but if you're new, this is a grizzly bear. They're the same thing, brown bear, grizzly bear. They're both Ursus Arctus.

We just call them grizzly bear in North America. What about the brown black bear? That would be a brown-faced black bear. It's a black bear, but it's brown-colored. But brown bear, ursusis-arctus, the same thing as a grizzly bear, same species. Black-grisly bear? That would be a grisly bear or a black-brown bear. It gets a little confusing.

as Jeff is illustrating. Because it had spent time in the town dump, this bear was somewhat used to people, its food conditioned, but it still took advantage of early morning and late evening to look for treasures among the trash. And as it walked down that small road that morning, it realized it wasn't alone,

but far enough away from these people that it didn't have to immediately make a decision. So rather than run away or charge, it simply kept moving forward. Anton heard something behind the family again. He's six years old, and he turned around to see a bear walking out of this early morning dim light and following his small family. He started screaming, and his panic alerted his mom and his sister to the bear. And then the three members of the family made a choice that would actually end in tragedy.

They ran. The bear who had clocked the family but was relatively uninterested, suddenly became much more engaged as these three people ran. picked up speed and watched as a group separated, with two heading in one direction and another in a separate direction into some high grass. The bear chose the solo target and sprinted, easily closing the distance. So when Lily and Bear, the mom had heard her son scream and saw the bear behind them, she panicked. She grabbed her three-year-old and ran to a nearby house, thinking that her son Anton was by her side. But when she got to the house, she discovered that he had separated from her in the long grass where the bear was now standing.

The chase was already over and Anton was at least mercifully killed in an instant by the 450-pound grizzly bear. He was almost completely consumed when the bear was shot by two villagers, not much later. Wow. So super tragic. Both Darcy and Anton were loved members of their families, their communities. Both died in predatory attacks by two different species of bears within two days of each other. So the fact that these attacks occurred so close to each other really led to a ton of news coverage and a lot of distress among the population of Alaska.

So one of my favorite headlines that I found about all this was paranoia is Bruin. And they spelled it Bruin like a bear. After Bears killed two, which was the LA Times. Good work by that editor. Yeah. Because of this, people started shooting a lot of bears in Alaska. That's crazy. He wrote it like right afterwards.

in like the community. No, this was LA time. He's just like this pun is too good to be like sensitive. It is like. I mean, we know what that's like. Yeah. It is interesting the gut check that each of these gave me

because the Darcy one I was reading and I was just thinking about how horrible it would be to be stuck on that roof and have the bear coming up toward you with like no real course of action. But that was followed by this Anton one, which I hadn't really even been on my radio. Radar is just going to do the Darcy one, but these were connected in like every article I found because they're so close together.

So I thought, okay, we have to do this story too. And I hesitated to do it because it like destroyed me. Thinking of like a six-year-old boy running from a grizzly bear and like thinking of my niece who's pretty much that age, it just, there's nothing more tragic than that. It's like hard to comprehend how tragic it is. Yeah, especially just, I mean, I know living out in that kind of a place. you live with that inherent risk, but it's not like anybody chose that life

or like chose. It's just, I don't know, it's another level when I think about like children, of course, but just the fact that they're innocent little kids. It was a totally innocuous little stroll down the street. And any other day it could have, and probably does happen without any kind of incident. But it's just so sad.

Yeah. And speaking of innocent loss in these stories is all the bears that had to die as a result. A lot of people in Alaska got really paranoid and you're allowed to legally kill bears in defense of self and property in Alaska. So if you feel threatened by a bear, if it's breaking into property or if you feel like it might hurt you,

you can legally defend yourself. And people started kind of running with that a little bit more. You know, I think before when like a black bear was maybe in your tree or something, you would give it a little bit more leeway, but some of these people were pretty terrified after this. So a lot more bears got shot. And even these two bears, even though they're acting, especially the black bear, acting outside of the norm, I think that one's a really good story

just to illustrate that no matter how much we understand about black bear behavior, no matter how much we understand about the certain things that can fall into place to cause a bear to do something, they can still deviate from that if they want. You know, you never know fully what this animal might decide to do, and that's why it's so important to be prepared when you go out in bear country. It's a free country. It's a free country, especially for bears.

Yeah, right to bear arms. Probably more so for them than us. What's the population like in the Chena Islands that you're of Alaska? Human population or bear population? Bears, because like does every island have bears? No, but there are places where there's more like a pretty, like a pretty decent population of bears. I can't say for example.

I doubt it. But King Cove, I think the reason there was so many there is because they had an open dump. This was like a common fishing port and commercial fisheries would come by. And so they definitely dumped a lot of waste and probably a lot of seafood waste into this dump. And I think it was a really good spot for bears. Yeah. I guess I'm more wondering there's just like populations on each island that just that's the, island's population or if they kind of intermingle a bit.

I don't know. I'd have to look into that more. But from talking to Tom and he, I kind of flew this out there and he totally agreed because he remembers both of these stories very well, both of these bears were likely food conditioned. And food conditioning means that the bear has come to see humans as a source of alternative food. Not us like our bodies necessarily, even though these bears did, but they see that, you know, whether it's trash or something, you know, in your cabin.

Like they're benefited by being close to humans. Right. They're eating anthropogenic food sources, which means food that comes directly from humans. Twinkies. Yeah, sure. All sorts of stuff. Right. So for, you know, when bears get that, it gives them so many calories.

It gives them so much sugar. It gives them a lot in such a small package that they're then willing to take risks to get back and get access to that food again. and they often become a bit more unpredictable than a totally wild bear might be. They're willing to kind of put aside some of those natural things that are saying, hey, this isn't worth the risk

because the reward is actually worth the risk to them. That's why food conditioning is so dangerous. Box of twinkies, and there's like 20 twinkies, and each of them are wrapped up in plastic. Mm-hmm. What would they do? They'd just eat them. Right, but like how, I guess.

they'd just tear through it. I mean, they'd eat a lot of the plastic. Plastic and all. Open up the box and then they would just eat the plastic with... They'd probably eat a lot of it. But I have seen bears that can like open things with a single nail even. Like they're very good at peeling and whatnot. So if you had a bear that knew it had all the time in the world,

my guess would be that it would actually open the individually wrapped Twinkies and eat them. Interesting. If that bear knew that it had to go quickly, my guess is it would just eat them. It would open the box. and just eat the Twinkies and then poop out the plastic later. Didn't the guy, so the guy who assassinated Harvey Milk, didn't his defense attorney? It was the Twinkie defense, right? He's like my, he started eating Twinkies.

We can't blame him. And it actually kind of worked, right? I was actually just reading about that because we, uh, we have no idea what you talk. Oh, really? Oh, that's funny. Yeah, we synced up on that, but. So Harvey Milk was like a famous politician that was a huge champion for the LGBTQ community. community.

Oh, yeah. And he was killed. And his killer argued that he, because he ate Twinkies, they like made him crazy. And that was like his defense. It's like a sudden change to his diet. He got a manslaughter case or a manslaughter decision instead. Yeah, exactly. Interesting loophole.

Yeah, these bears, if they had the chance, they could have defended themselves pretty well. Maybe that's why the black bear killed her. The Twinkies. The God of Twinkies. Yeah. I wonder how many Twinkies are happening in Kings Cove. All right. So really quickly, what we're going to do is a bear safety recap.

We've done this before, but I want to do it because it's been a while since we've talked about this. Even our subscribers have sent us some questions recently where I'm kind of like, huh, maybe we need to go over this again because it seems like maybe the message has gotten lost a little bit. So we're going to do a quick bear safety recap for both of these species. First of all, there are three things that I always say and that Tom taught me that make a lot of sense and work really well with both grizzly and black bears. Do you guys remember those three things?

Not stop, drop and roll. That's good three things, though. What are the three things that almost always work and should be the only three things that you keep in your mind, like forefront of your mind? And for what? For grizzly and black bear encounters. I'm just going to say them because you guys aren't getting to- Traveling groups, bear spray. Group up?

Bear spray Oh, what's the third? Back away slowly. Back away slowly. Group up. If you are in a group of even two people or three people or whatever, grouping up and getting together makes you a much more intimidating target for that bear. They don't like attacking groups of people because it's harder to focus on one person

and it just makes you more of a threat if there's two of you. So grouping up is really important. So no matter the size of your group, get together. Get your bear spray out and get it ready. The question, you know, we always talk about, what if I don't have bear spray? What's the metaphor I like to use for that? Do you guys remember it? Check engine light?

Driving your car without gasoline. Without a seatbelt. There you go. It's kind of like saying, what if I get in a car accident without a seatbelt? Sure. Like, you cannot use your seatbelt if you want, but you're taking a big risk. And if you're going to. I mean, George would do that.

George, who? He worked at Alpine Eventmentals with me. Okay. 300. He told him you got in 400 accidents. In 400 accidents. 400. Just to like see, just to train himself how to react when he gets in an accident.

Okay. Yeah. So you can do that too if you want. Might be the biggest lie I've ever heard. I'm very goalable. And that one just immediately is like, what? The wording flags went out. No, but the idea there is why take a huge risk, especially in Grizzly country, if you don't have to.

There's a product that exists. that can save your life. It's been proven to be really effective. So carry it with you. And then the third thing is slowly back away. There are situations where it's better to stand your ground, but it can be really hard to understand the dynamics of those situations. And in general, backing away will always work.

So I just tell people slowly back away. Group up, get your bear spray out, slowly back away. Now let's get into a little bit more nuance. You guys ready? I'm ready. Remember those three. things. Those are the three things that should be in the front of your head. Here's a couple extra things for people that want to get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty. Black bears

rarely make contact with humans unless they're investigating us as food, so they're thinking about eating you, or if they're really, really aggravated. We just did the story about a bear that had been shot that then decided to attack the people that were pursuing it. So if it's aggravated from an injury or dogs or something like that, they might make contact with you, but generally they only make contact with people if they're trying to eat them. So, playing dead won't work with a black bear if it makes contact with you. You have to fight back. So that's like throwing punches, throwing rocks, doing whatever you can to convince that bear

that you're not worth the trouble, being loud, aggressive, and dominant. You have bear spray, you should use it when the bear gets with the bear. within 20 to 30 feet. That's what you should do with the black bear. Never play dead. Always fight back. That's just kind of the rule. Don't try climbing a tree or anything like that.

It can climb a lot better than you can. It can run a lot faster than you can. And running might trigger that predatory response like it happened in our grizzly bear story today. Okay. They're probably not used to like run in straight at him and like a double drop kick. Yeah. If you run at a bear, often that'll stop it.

Like, that is generally enough to scare it. Like, things don't often run at these animals. So when they do, it's very shocking to a bear. Particularly black bears. But you think that would even work with a grizzly? It can. It's not something I'd ever recommend, but it can work. I've done it in Yellowstone.

Grizzlies where you just kind of do a quick run out of a minute. You've done a drop kick? Not a drop kick. No. All right. Grizzly bears do often make contact with people just to neutralize a threat. So they are much more dangerous in a surprise encounter. So for that reason, it's really essential that you have some kind of deterrent when you're in grizzly bear country and that you know how to use it properly.

So we recommend bear spray because it's easy to use, it's effective, and both the human and the bear get to survive that encounter. So with grizzlies and black bears, you want to do the three things we listed. Group up, get your bear spray ready, back away. There are cases with grizzlies where you might not be able to have the time or the ability to, do those things. So this is if, and a big if, you encounter a grizzly and you don't have bear spray or any other deterrent, you still want to group up and back away. But if the bear does decide to charge you, you then want to stand your ground. You want to be loud, you want to be aggressive, and hope that it's just bluffing. If it makes contact with you, then you can then go into the

fetal position, protect your head, your neck, and your abdomen. So that's the only time you play dead with the grizzly is if you don't have spray and it knocks you to the ground and starts mauling you. Then you protect your head, your neck, and your abdomen, and you play dead. But what are you giving the bear at that point? Full control of the situation. Yes. The bear then has full control over how that's going to end.

If it wants to kill you, it's going to kill you. So I don't like being in that position and that's why I carry bear spray when I'm in grizzly country. You could climb a tree, but there's stories where grizzlies have pulled people out of trees. That's a huge nightmare of mine. But if I didn't have a deterrent, I'd probably try to climb a tree too with a grizzly. Okay, all this to say, don't spend time outdoors in grizzly country without a deterrent that you know how to use and you trust. Keeping that power and the control and those interactions can save your life. It gives you the confidence to enjoy the great outdoors without being too

paranoid or bar annoyed. So like to sum it up, the grizzly bear, you're a lot more likely to get attacked by one and there's a lot more reasons that they'll attack you and a lot of those reasons aren't to eat you so that's why like playing dead can work once it's engaged with you yes but a black bear there's a very high likelihood it's going to try to eat you and that's why you don't play dead right fight but with with either bear playing dead should be way down your list of options what about polar bears climate a little bit are a little bit more complicated, but you need a deterrent with polar bears. That's the main thing.

Don't go into polar bear country without a lot. They'll kill you. They will. And it's very rare. They don't do it very often. They're not nearly as aggressive or territorial as grizzly bears. But when they do decide to go after people. Is that true though?

Or is it just that there's less people around them? No. If they saw us as a food source. Because I feel like if I was like walking by any bear, polar bear is like the last bear I'd want to just like walk by without expecting anything to happen. Yeah. I think it would be a grizzly bear for me. Okay.

I mean, you know better than me, but I still think I'd choose polar bears the last bear I'd want to walk in front of it. I don't think that's a bad decision because if a bear, if a polar bear does come after you, it's probably going to try and eat you. And that's a terrible thing. And a grizzly bear might just knock you down and rough you up. But I think it's much more likely that the grizzly bear does that than the polar bear tries to eat you.

They don't, we're not a great source of food for them. Like usually it's just young males that kind of haven't figured it out yet that attack people. Tom always says, I've heard him say this in talks before. I don't necessarily agree with him. But he says of the three North American bears, if he had to be on an island with one of them, he would pick a polar bear. I'd pick a black bear, but he says he'd pick a polar bear. That's interesting.

Yeah. Because I saw a TikTok and they were saying polar bears are the most dangerous bears. Yeah, the whole, if it's white, good night. Yeah. I want everyone out there listening, if you've heard the, if it's black fight back, if it's brown lay down, if it's white, good night. I want you to stop that right after if it's black fight back.

That's the only piece of advice in that that's good. The rest of it is like not necessarily wrong, but it's not true in the way it's presented. I don't know. This guy had a hat with like alligator teeth going around it. Okay, so never mind. You can trust that guy. He knows what he's talking.

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Saturday. Bring it on. All right. Let's get to our categories. First category, favorite movie from 1992. I have a few, so I'm going to kind of clean up. I'm going to clean up after you guys go. Mike, you go ahead first. I have one, and it's the biggest slam dunk of a category of my entire life. It's hard-boiled, and it's not even close.

John Wu's absolute masterpiece, 1992, the greatest action movie, except for maybe the raid redemption, but it's real close for me. Hard-boiled is just one of the most entertaining breakneck-paced action films I've ever seen. Unbelievably violent. So many bullets.

So much death. A clarinet opening. A little baby peas on a guy's leg. It's awesome. It's a great movie. So my seventh favorite movie was in 92. A river runs through it. I thought you'd pick that one.

Yeah. That's a great movie. Yeah, great movie. A lot of people would push back, say, Legends of the Fall. I would say best Brad Pitt's ever looked. It was great in it. If you want me to do, though, in 1992 when I was three years old, it would be three ninjas or Mighty Ducks.

Okay. Three ninjas, that basketball scene is so freaking good. You love that movie. All right, I was actually surprised when I looked up movies in 1992, how many great movies came out that year. Like classics. I think of all the ones I saw, I knew Jeff would say River Runs through it,

so I didn't do that one. I really liked Batman Returns. I think it's, of all the Batman movies, it might be my favorite even. I think it's the most Tim Burton of all the Batman movies, and it's just so kooky. Who's the Batman in that? It's Michael Keaton,

but it's the one with Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito as Catwoman and Pinkin. Christopher Walkins. It's just really so atmospheric. Yeah, I like that. Some runners up, though. Bram Stoker's Dracula, one of my all-time favorite horror movies, and River and Strud, obviously, and then Aladdin came out in 92 as well, which I think is like

Peak Disney. But also, I was nine years old. Jasmine, you were a time for. Yeah. Exactly. I know why you were. Yeah, like that one. All right.

Our next category is least convincing murder cover up. So a murder that just did the worst job of covering up their crime. And then this can be from real life or from media, whatever you decide. I mean, mine's O.J. Simpson. And, like, he got away with it. So it's, like, kind of a bad pick, but still, I feel like he just shouldn't have, you know? Especially where you just did, like, a five-hour police chase afterwards, too, and, like, wouldn't let him pull him over.

And it's just, like, wrote a book, if I did it, all these different things. It's just like, okay. That's something that probably needs to change in our justice. system that like if a murder pretty much confesses to it after they've been you know declared innocent that we should be able to retry them they should be able to go back into court for it then they won't do it you know this way this way they at least we get to know i didn't really i didn't pick up on like the cover-up aspect of this category but it kind of works with the one i picked anyway just trying to get away with murder i asked it differently to you guys it's fine

But at the end of over the top, when Tupac just, like, shoots a guy in a very public basketball court at the end of a tournament. Above, or not over the top. No, above the rim. No, what is it? Above the rim. Over the top is the arm wrestling. The arm wrestling. Sly.

Sly still in. And it's not Tupac. It's like Tupac tells Barclays. Oh, yeah. No, it's a barks. Wood Harris. Okay. So that's what came to mind first.

But my actual pick is in the first John Wick when she tries to kill John in the Continental and then just gets like owned by four people. It's like the rules are pretty well established. She had to know what was going to happen, right? But she just kind of like blatantly went in there and tried to kill him. It's her name. I forget her name in the movie and the actress. But she's in Friday Night Lights.

What's her name in Friday Night Lights? Tanya. That rings true to me, but I'm not sure. But yeah, but like the super hot, bad assassin lady tries to get John. It's a bad choice. I, when I asked you. I like you're above the rind pick. Yeah, that's a good one.

Like they lose wreck basketball and he's just like, you got to shoot him. Yeah. I didn't have one that was on the top of my head, so I did some research into this. And I learned about this guy named Hans Reiser. He was a programmer and he was like, he did, he wrote some program for like, some stuff that we still use to this day, like a pretty famous programmer. And he got like a Russian mail order bride. And then he fell in love with the translator that he was using for this,

this mail order bride. And he got married to the translator. And they were married for a while. And then they divorced. And she even got like a restraining order and stuff. And then she wound up dead. And he was the obvious culprit. He strangled her to death.

He like removed his passenger seat of his car. and washed his whole car and did all this stuff that was like very obvious that he was trying to get rid of evidence. But when they finally took him to trial, the thing that's the craziest to me is they used this like geek defense where they just said he actually didn't do all of this stuff because he was guilty. He just did it because he's like a total nerd and doesn't know how the world works. And then he submitted a thesis to prove that he hadn't killed her. And he said they'd been so wrapped up in coding that he didn't even know what he was doing. And then his lawyers claimed that only geniuses could understand his thesis so that the judge and the jury would have to just take his word for it

that his thesis proves him innocent, but they can't understand it because they're not smart enough. Unsurprisingly, this didn't work. And he was convicted of second degree murder, but still is in prison, I believe. I want to read that. thesis. I'm not smart enough though probably. No, no. Might just be a waste of time. No one is. Just Hans. Thanks for your other contributions though, Hans. Sounds like you did a lot of work for us. I think they've been like really active trying to remove his code from things and replace it with something else just because of who he is.

It's wild. So we talked about how Alaskans may be overreacted a bit to these two attacks. So I also wanted to ask you guys an example from humanity, from society, where you think humans really overreacted to something. I have a controversial. Okay. Let's go. I'm going with America when we got bombed at Pearl Harbor. Okay.

And then that's like a military base. Yeah. Not where they bombed us during like a during the world war. And then we just dropped two nuclear bombs on two civilian cities and Germany. Yeah. I'm 100% behind you there. That's a tough one. You know, maybe it worked out even, but it's like, it's an overreaction.

I mean, Josh Hartnett died. His wife, his girlfriend. He left him for his best friend. She left his best friend for him. Is that how it happened? I've been trying so hard to forget that stupid movie. Yeah, because she's dating Ben Affleck, and then he gets shot down, and she starts dating Josh Hartman.

His girlfriend. He does seem a little crazy that they would decide to bomb us. But also they probably weren't thinking like, oh, this country is going to put all its scientists together to create a world-ending bomb that they're going to drop two of them on us. Oh, Hirohito. Didn't think that one through. I'm going to go with,

mine are relatively tame in comparison, it turns out. Well, Wes hasn't done his either. That's true. I'm going to go with the Janet Jackson Super Bowl. thing. In terms of overreaction, I think it's one of the biggest because it was such a stupid little thing. And then it turned into like a global conversation of puritanical ideals that need to be upheld all of a sudden. And it was really, really crazy because I was watching it live and it kind of just passed by so fast I didn't even recognize. I was mad because I didn't realize what

happened. And then there was a boob. Right. And then it just became like this whole. thing and like all the parents were up in arms about it. It's like a pasty right? I know. People had their whole careers and lives destroyed because of that. It's so stupid. Who did? I mean Janet were like stage managers and stuff. Janet Jackson was like a pariah the rest of her career. Like people blamed her for that. I don't know. I don't necessarily feel bad for the celebrities involved. Yeah, I also, I really flirted with picking some more political ones for this, but I decided to play it safe and go with the Salem on witch trials. I think, you know, it's October.

That's a really interesting one. I think it really says a lot about human nature that when things that are unexpected start happening, we tend to blame it on people close to us. And often people that are kind of in the most vulnerable positions. And at that time, women were really regarded as less than and especially as being more susceptible to the devil than other people. So a lot of women, like not, I mean, not a ton by like other standards. but like dozens of women lost their lives in the Salem witch trials because of some religious

fervor and men that just wanted to assert even more dominance. I mean, can you prove they weren't witches? No, but I don't think they were. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Might have been in under an underreaction, if anything, you know. Yeah, they were actual witches.

Yeah. And some of them got away. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. It's a good counterpoint. to that. All right, let's go to an oldie, but a goodie one we haven't done in a while.

True fact and a lie. So this is a category where Mike and Jeff have talked without my knowledge. One of them has a true animal fact and one of them has a false animal fact. And I have to suss out who's the dirty liar, the witch, and who's telling the truth. Do you want to go, Jeff? You go. The orange hair gene for, like, people who have redheads, humans, is the same gene that orangutans have to make them orange hair. Armadillos almost always give birth to sets of identical quadruplets. I don't know. Oh, we got.

You got a good one. And I don't really have. Sounds so dumb right now. I know. Even if you guess, right, you're going to, we still consider this a loss. I'm willing to admit to that, though. And I don't really have anything that's pointing me in either direction. So I'm going to go with Jeff telling the truth and Mike telling the lie.

We got him. Oh, Wes. Are you kidding me right now? You didn't know that? I didn't know that. No. Me neither, actually. I can't dab.

Because of that, I'm not allowed to dab for the next week. The orangutans have had that gene for longer than humans. And then it's, no, like the humans one, it's like a, defective. But is it the same gene? You said it was the same gene and that was it. Yeah, I know. Right.

The MC1R gene is responsible for the production of red hair in humans when it's like has like a problem with it. Yeah. And orangutan, it's not that, but it's, they don't know why they're orange. Yeah. So turns out nine banded armadillos pretty much always give birth to four quadruplets. Isn't that weird? That is weird. It's really strange to me.

And they're identical. huh? Yeah. All right. Well, you guys stump me. I have to flog myself after this. Yeah. Which, you know, I don't eat.

Just get Jesse to do it. Good flogging. Okay. Just like any other night. Okay. Next category. Something overrated or underrated about October. Try choking yourself.

I can try. Talked about that already today. Overrated or underrated about October. Dealer's choice. You guys can pick what you want if you want to do something overrated or underrated. I'll go first this time. Go West. My overrated thing, and I brought this up on Mike's subscription episode, pumpkin flavor.

I feel like October is when people really start going hard on like the pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin cookies and muffins and bread. I don't like it. You're forgetting, dude. You asked us this and I said this was the most underrated part of fall. We've said this before. I chose this as my most underrated. And you were like, I kind of think it's the most overrated.

Overrated and I was like so many people think it's overrated that I now find it underrated We think that's true We're talking more flavored drinks than just in general, but well I'm gonna back off then I'm not gonna do that one as my pick I will say the thing I hate and maybe we talked about this before are like how Pumpkin cookies are always like cakey and they're not like cookie Like when someone gives me a pumpkin cookie. I don't even want it and I love cookies Really? All right yeah, yeah, I think they're so good I like it.

I'll focus on that. But it's fun to have like a little bit of that. My answer is going to be pumpkin cookies because I don't like how cakey they are. Sure. Overrated. I'm doing an overrated thing as well. Also having to do with pumpkins, but it's more pumpkin patches. I think the tradition of going to a pumpkin patch, it's like just mind-numbingly boring.

And it's so stupid. There's always a bunch of like shrieking kids drooling all over the pumpkins everywhere. And sometimes you even have to like pay to get into the patch, which is insane. And then they overcharge for the pumpkins themselves. And it's just like, I'm just going to go to the grocery store and grab one real quick. How about that? You're like paying them to do the labor they were going to do for you. Right.

Originally. That makes sense. I don't care for pumpkin patches. I think that's overrated. I thought of mine. I think it's more based on my region though. But in Utah, there's a ton of like haunted houses, haunted mansions type thing. Yeah.

And like I do think they're cool, but I think they're overrated. Because I don't think they're scary. You kind of like have to wait in line if you go to like a big night event one and you're waiting in line. You're like waiting in line. Yeah, I do. It ruined the last one. I haven't been to one in a while. Maybe I'd like it if I went again.

All the haunted corn mazes or I don't know, it's just some employee with like a chainsaw. And I'm kind of like, all right. It always ends a little awkward for me because I don't get scared. Have I ever told you guys? So me and Rory, my good friend Rory, we used to, we did this thing through the International Rescue Committee where you could mentor refugee kids. And for like a few months, we mentored these two Somali kids, eight and ten, I believe. And each week we'd go do something fun with them where we'd take them out into the community

and kind of teach them about American life and everything. It was going really well. These kids at first were really kind of they had these walls up and we were slowly breaking them down. But there's a point to this. We were almost done with like our assignment and both of us were thinking, you know, we want to keep going with these kids because we'd form these nice little friendships with them. They're both Muslim. They're both from Somalia. And we made the terrible decision one night to take them to a haunted house.

And it was like one of the scarier haunted houses. Oh. And they were just terrified. just being in line as like the characters were coming through the line and stuff and scaring them and so we didn't go in because of how scared they got and like the employees love that like yeah and i'm not once they see someone like genuinely scared like they all want to scare them and they were shrieking and running in fear not like like like kind of scared like full on panic attack and so we took them back to their house and they completely stopped contact with us like we

weren't able to get in touch with them. Wow. It was really sad. That's not. I felt really bad. Great kids, though. Okay. Let's move on to our next and final category.

We're going to do some listener questions. So I've got a few from our subscribers, and then Jeff has a few from Instagram. I got some good new questions. New content. All right. This one goes along with the season. It's from Liz. Liz says, what's your favorite and least favorite Stephen King adaptation?

I mean, my favorite's The Shining, but it, like, changes a lot from his book. And he doesn't like that one, which makes it even better. I'd shout out another one if no one does it. Miser. I think MISO is so good. That's a great pick.

I'm going with the MIST. Perfect. It's the best. It's a great movie. Yeah. Improves upon the source material. I'm going to go with It, like the Mouschetti, the one that came out a few years ago. I really liked it, the first chapter especially.

I just had a really good time with it. And I've read a lot of Stephen King books. I kind of have changed my tune on him, though. I don't really like him anymore. Oh, really? I love Stephen King. My least favorite I'm going to go with the Under the Dome TV miniseries. It was awful.

Like one of the worst TV shows I've ever seen in my life. That's mine too. But it's like, because the book was so good, I think they could make a really good movie or show until the end. And the end was awful. Yeah. Okay.

Mike, you didn't say your least favorite. Yeah, I'm not sure. I feel like this is a bad question for me just since I'm not a big Stephen King fan to begin with. So. Do you have like a Stephen King movie you don't like?

I don't care for the Green Mile at all. I think it's, I actually don't hate the book, but the movie just takes it a step too far into kind of, and I know it's a little bit horror and it's very tragic, but it's very like saccharine and a little, I don't know, a little too emotionally manipulative or something. Something about it just puts me off. I like the movie and I love the book.

I think that one's like, it's like a crazy situation. Yeah, it's a beautiful. You had to just kill someone who's like making miracles. Michael Clark Duncan is maybe, I mean, he's the best casting maybe ever in that movie. But other than that, I don't care for it. Well, and it's Sam Rockwell in that movie too. All right, this one's from Onika.

Onica says, I frequently see small birds chasing much bigger birds through the sky. For example, some redwing blackbirds harassing what looked like a hawk. Are the little birds exclusively doing this to defend their nests? Are there any non-bird animals that do this fairly often? This is a behavior called mobbing. And it's not exclusively to defend nests, but it's to defend territory, breeding opportunities, nests. It's just defense. And this happens with a lot of species of birds where they're,

they'll mob a potential predator just to get it out of the area. They're trying to get it away from whatever they're trying to protect. I don't know if there's any non-bird animals that really do it. I'm sure fish do it. Dogs, like chihuahuas. Yeah. You would like gang up on a bear. Yeah, there's for sure other animals that do it.

Yeah. This is from Ashley. This will be the last subscriber question. A twist on the cage match category. What animal would win one of those god-awful slap fights? Okay. I don't think they're God awful personally, where you're essentially trying to knock,

you know those slap battles that they have like a whole league now? Yeah, like Dana White's slap fight. Yeah, exactly. You like them. I like them. She doesn't. Ashley doesn't. Oh,

I don't like them really either. I think they're really interesting to watch. Like, I'm not a fan, but when I see him, I'm just like, I'm just surprised that you're like, yeah,

depending. You're like on the other side of it. I think it's interesting. Yeah. No, I like it. I like it when you. ever watched like a full episode.

Yeah. Ashley says, what animal would win one of those slap fights where you were essentially trying to knock the other guy out with one swat? A swat of the tail and a swat of the paw would be two different categories. I'd have to go with the grizzly on the paw swat and a crock for the tail. They might not be able to hit a home run with their tails, but I bet they could knock you out. So what do you guys think?

Sorry, what was the question? We need to say who would be the best in a swat fight and we need to do one. And one for a paw and one for a tail. I'm going pistol shrimp for the paw category, I guess. They're just going to immediately. What is it, the heat of a million suns or whatever they generate? You keep saying that. For the tail, shoot, this one's a little tougher, huh?

A blue whale. Oh, yeah, like a killer whale. Don't they like flip up seals a million feet in the air? That's good. So I'll go killer whale. I'm with you on both of those answers. So I'm just going to hold in behind you on that. I can't get past.

bear for the slap like a polar bear and then for the tail i'll go with a yellow anaconda that it's all tail hmm yeah okay all right okay jeff do you have some questions from listeners yeah so it's almost halloween we're getting kind of close you got to start thinking of your costumes now right so marijuana marijuana what animal would look the cutest in onesie pajamas mike mike has a frog that's kind of cute. You wore it to the Chargers game? Oh, like, yeah, I have a onesie frog. Yeah, that's a different question, though.

But like a frog in a onesie wouldn't look that cute. Oh, yeah, they're asking which one would look the cutest in the Jan? What animal would look the cutest? Yeah, I think so. Of like another animal. I'm thinking maybe like a koala bear in the frog onesie. That's what I'm thinking too. A koala bear is hard to be in a onesie.

Or maybe like a wombat. Yeah, like a tiger one. You need something just with like a real cute face is what we're thinking. Like a sloth would be good. Yeah. Axelotto is a good thing. Axelotto's a good answer. Coalada.

Maybe a snake and a big puffy onesie, just like one long sock that's real squishy and fluffy. Is there anything you do differently if you were directly covering the Tonka story? So like if we're the ones making the documentary, Maybe. For the chimp crazy one we partnered with. I don't think so. I'm not a filmmaker. I don't really know what I would have done differently.

I thought they did a really good job of telling the story and getting you to feel nuanced about Tanya and about a lot of other things. So I don't think there's anything that I really would have done differently. Yeah. The only thing I was a little more curious about was the actual reserve that Tanka ended up in just to see a little bit more. That's what I was going to say. of there and maybe an interview or like some segments with someone from there talking a little bit more. But I don't know. Again, not filmmakers here.

I maybe would have pushed a little harder on like how bad things actually were for the chimps and like talk about how some of the stuff the chimps were doing. Their behavior was actually like distress behavior, not like play. But I do think you walk a like a fine line of bumming people out with those kind of documentaries too. So I thought they did a great job. I'd get Joe Exotic's like thoughts on. Get it back in the mix. On Tanya, yeah. Make it like a multiverse of animal.

Yeah, they should have had like an after-credit stinger of him showing up on Tanya's doorstep. Megan F's ass. So this one, I feel like it just depends on how we answer. It might be a bad question. It might be good. Thoughts on Cleveland, Ohio. Ohio's for lovers is all I know. I'm pro.

I always think of that once when they tried to release like 10 million balloons on the same day. And it's like it's like one of the biggest disasters. I love it. Don't release balloons if you're out there. You can kill animals by releasing balloons. It's really bad. 10 million. Don't do that.

I like Cleveland teams, like sports teams. I always feel. I feel like they're underdogs, so I always like rooting for them. So I feel like I've always kind of had a soft spot for Cleveland because of that. LeBron versus the Warriors, you were always pulling for LeBron. I was. I will say that every time I visited Ohio, I found that I like the cities I visit more than I thought I would. But I've never really been, I haven't spent that much time in Cleveland.

But I really like Cincinnati a lot. So I'm just going to say I'm pro Cleveland. I like that they didn't kill her on Bay in Cleveland. They didn't have him. but they didn't kill him. That's true. Janelle Trinette's ass. Do you have any moments that made you realize you're getting old?

Yeah, I think just every time I look in the mirror, I feel like I'm getting old. Or like my back is starting to hurt. The back's a tough one. My like memory being bad is getting me a bit. I just saw this video where they were interviewing, I think, hockey players and they were saying what they saw as being old, like what year. if you're born in what year are you considered old and a lot of them were saying like anything younger than 2000 they consider old and I was just like oh man

it is like a weird age too where it's like athletes at our age are like starting to like not really be able to be the best anymore compete yeah they're seen as like aging out step curry once he's like washed I'm you're like oh man he was when I started getting some like gray hairs on my temples. They started showing up slowly at first.

And it's not like I'm going gray. And I wouldn't even mind. I actually kind of like it. But it was right around the time that I promised Jeff that I was going to dye my hair. I was like, well, now I can't do it because it's going to look like I'm trying to, you know, cope with it. But now I waited like a year after that started. And then I started, I still have to go black and purple like the anime picture Jeff sent that one day. That's happening soon.

Yeah. Nice. It's weird seeing friends. my age have kids that are like graduating high school and stuff that's weird yeah really weird all right is that it for questions now i got one more Emily j Cody wants to know mudang or pesto let's add in the hogo zoo snow leopards too you like pesto more what's pesto like pesto like the sauce i like food pesto's the giant penguin the penguin in australia i'll go pesto i thought we're talking the food it's like this baby penguin that has to

It still has like the baby fluff, but it's like way bigger than his parents even. The huge baby penguin. I'm picking the snow leopards if they're in the mix. I definitely, if I could see any of them, the snow leopards are who I want to go see. I'll be team pesto. I think Moudang's like the cutest baby animal that's ever like gone viral. So you're picking Moudang. Pick for each.

Oh, Moodang. I think I might have to bring back like the cutest baby animal bracket this year. Just for Moodang. Maybe like keep half our entries that we'd use before and put in like a new half to make it interesting or something. I don't know. I will say there's been some information that's come out recently that says that conditions of the zoo Moudang is kept aren't all that great. I mean, she looks happier than our baby hippos and our zoos. She probably is.

Because of all the celebrity and stuff, they're probably taking really good care of Moodang. I have noticed like the zookeeper just goes into this. hippo area with like the adult hippos in there and stuff so but you know each country does things their own way all right thanks everyone for listening thanks so much for sending in questions for subscribing for those of you that subscribe we do have a subscription channel both on patreon and one on apple where you get access to all of our bonus content that we produced and we produced two bonus episodes a month what's your favorite episode i don't know I honestly don't know if I have a favorite.

Well, it's just a good bear one on there. Yeah, I just did a grizzly bear attack on it. By far, the best episode he's ever done. One that's coming out soon, for those of you listening to this, a ghost bear episode,

which is great. And yeah, there's great content on there. It's 10 bucks a month. You believe in ghosts? To the bonus episodes. I do. Yeah.

I don't know. Why won't they do anything? I don't, I don't like firmly believe in them, but it seems fun to believe in ghosts. It is fun. you can subscribe there if you want more content and thanks as always for listening. Mike, yes?

Do you think the Padres are going to win? No. All right. All right. We'll see you guys. Love you. Love you guys. See ya.