Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Polar Bear Attack - A Violent Post-Party Polar Bear Encounter

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

In 2013, Erin Greene was on her way home from a Halloween party when she crossed paths with a polar bear. ~~ Miracle Brand: Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made! Go to https://trymiracle.com/TOOTH and use the code TOOTH to claim your FREE 3 PIECE TOWEL SET and SAVE over 40% OFF. Goodr: Go to http://goodr.com/TOOTH and use code TOOTH for free shipping. Rocket Money: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to http://rocketmoney.com/claw today. Ollie Pet Food: Take the guesswork out of your dog's well-being. Go to ollie.com/tooth and use code tooth to get 60% off your first box! Mint: Ready to say yes to saying no? Make the switch at http://mintmobile.com/tooth ~~ 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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So Wes Larson, our bear biologist, and then I'm his brother, Jeff, and Mike is out having fun in the Cook Islands right now. He's doing some diving without us, seeing humpback whales. Wes, this is our first surgery episode where I'm not the one suffering from a surgery. Yeah. I had a surgery last week. It was a gum graft, so I had some bad gum recession because I used to brush my teeth way too hard. And our brother, our older brother, Cyrus, who's a dentist, told me that I finally had to do it. So I did it. And they could either take gums from a cadaver and grafted onto my gums, so like a dead body. Or they could do it. Yeah. I would have asked for his gums specifically. Or they could do it from the top of my mouth. like my palate and they cut your palate open and then take tissue from inside and then graft it. And Jesse said she would never kiss me again if I did the cadaver ones. And I didn't want the cadaver ones anyways. So they had to cut open my palate and my gums are full of stitches right now.

So I've been wearing a retainer, but I took it out just for this. So if I start seeing blood, if you start seeing blood coming dripping down out of my mouth, just know I'm willing to go to that length, Jeff, just for this year podcast. People think podcasting's easy. It's not. Literally bleeding out the mouth just to get you guys this information. Well, and we're doing a spooky episode, so it might as well have some blood leaking out my mouth, right? Be something.

So we were getting ready to record, and I was finishing up my notes, and I look out the window in my shed, and I see Jesse and our neighbor just like running around trying to chase our pigs into a trailer. And Jesse's really good at this stuff, and so is our neighbor. So I was like, I don't need to help them. But then I could see, like, they were in over their heads. And so I went out and I've been trying to, you know, wrestle these hogs into the trailer for a bit. Yeah. We didn't get them.

So they're out in the yard right now, just eating our grass. Oh, you didn't get them. They won. No, no, they won. So we're calling in reinforcements. Yeah, and later we'll try again. But I said I wasn't going to help with the pigs, but here I am helping with the pigs. But it was kind of fun.

And Jesse's worked really hard on them. And they haven't been that bad. So it wasn't. It was fun. You would have liked it. I liked the video she posted of you just shaking your apple tree for them to eat apples. No, it was an imaging footage. Imaging posted it, yeah.

Yeah, I do have to admit they're kind of cute. They are kind of cute pigs. They got big fast. Yeah. Speaking of cute, you got pink hair, dude. Speaking of pigs. Yeah. Pigs are pink.

Pigs are pink. Mine aren't. But yeah. Yeah, you know, I don't have a good. People ask me like, why did I do it? I don't have a good reason. Just felt like... I think it looks great.

Thank you. I like it a lot. Went pink. I'm excited to see how it grows out, you know? I want to see like the whole stage of it. But yeah, went with some pink hair. I'm thinking maybe for Halloween, because I think this is scary. I'll be the pink starburst.

Because I think it's scary to get two pink starbursts in your rapper. So maybe I'll do that. That's really good. Yeah. And you're showing Mike, you're teaching Mike a valuable lesson on what it actually looks like to dye your hair. Because he was supposed to dye his hair purple and he did the weakest attempt ever. I think he's going to go to my guy now. I think he's... He should. Was this Chris that you went to or was it someone else? No, Chris can't do...

Chris doesn't do guys. Yeah, so I just went to someone. It's a lot more expensive than I thought. And they never told me. I was kind of surprised. But I sit down and he was like, did anyone go over pricing with you? I was like, no. He's like, well, it's like $250. I was like, oh. I guess. What were you expecting?

Like 100? Yeah. I guess I would have had no idea either. Yeah. So I don't know if I would have done it had I known that before, but. Well, it looks cool. I'm glad I did it. Yeah, I think it's cool, you know.

Total live now, though. Yeah. You're not. All right. Well, yeah, so the gloves are off because Mike's, not here. We get to do whatever the heck we want. Should we say, because when he's on, we don't want to be nice to him. Should we say our favorite thing about Mike? Yeah, let's say something nice about Mike. Sure. Why don't you go first? Like, I'd never say this to Mike's face type of thing.

Uh-huh. Yeah. But probably the funniest person I know. Yeah. I would have to agree with that. I think Mike's up there with funniest people I know too. I would just say that Mike is, puts on this kind of like prickly demeanor, but he is one of the sweetest people in the world when it comes to like treating how he treats strangers and just people that he just met. I feel like he's very, very kind. I don't know if I agree with that. Maybe not strangers, but like the people that come on our trips and stuff, I think they always immediately do it. I'm just thinking that the airport in India, where those guys are just trying to do their job? And he was getting really mad. But he's really, I think you mean like our travelers on our trips and stuff. He's, yeah.

So nice. Yeah. So much more than I ever would have thought even. Yeah. And I always thought he was nice, but he even surprised me with that. So, all right. Well, now that we got that out of the way. Yeah, we'll never let him know that.

He's not listening to this. He'll never listen to this either. So it is October. Like we mentioned in the Humboldt Squid episode, we tend to do episodes this month that are either spooky or kind of revolve around Halloween. All three of us are big Halloween fans. Have you been having a hard? time getting into the season.

It's been pretty warm here, which makes it kind of harder for me. It just doesn't quite feel. I always get into it like after Halloween. Yeah. Because once Halloween comes, I'm like, oh, yeah, I should watch spooky movies. I've been getting into it because I've been watching a lot of horror movies already, but not as much as some years. And the surgery definitely knocked me back a step too.

Because when I was on my painkillers, I didn't want to watch scary stuff. I just wanted to watch, like, cartoons and whatnot. But, yeah, I don't know. I'll get more and more into it. And I'm coming to Utah soon to hang out with you guys. And that'll get me in the spirit, the Halloween spirit. Yeah. Anyway, so we are going to do a house.

This will get us into it too. Oh, boy. Will this ever? I will say this, this species, so people ask me if I have like nightmares about animals and whatnot, this is the species that I do have the most nightmares about. It's a species I've worked with closely. And when I was doing polar bear work, you know, the bear's in the title. I'm not, I don't need to hide it any longer, but when I was doing polar bear work, they are the bear that they're not as aggressive as grizzly bears, they're not nearly as territorial or whatever. But if one is kind of coming after you, it's, it's probably trying to eat you. So they are the bear that, in my work, at least, we were the most kind of head on a swivel, always looking for them, always being careful in polar bear country. And because of that, that got into my psyche. So when I do have dreams about polar bears, they tend to be dreams where the bear is trying to eat me. And,

I do, I enjoy them often. Like I wake up and had like a really fun dream. But it is always kind of this like immovable force that's coming after me that I can't do anything about. And I do, they are kind of that way in a way. It'd be a lot. There's that hypothetical of like, would you take a million dollars, but a snail is going to try to kill you? And if it touches you, you're dead. I never heard that one, but I like it.

Yeah. Like its whole life is just going to be trying to get you. It'd be crazy to do. that with a polar bear. It's like you get a million dollars, but one polar bear is just going to try to kill you for its whole life. It's just like the kids and weapons. I guess though we would probably figure it out before it got too far south. So it's good. A snail can sneak through you anything. Yeah. I like that though. That's a good hypothetical. No, I, you know, the purpose of the show is to dissuade those myths. And there is that myth out there that like polar bears are one of the

only animals that hunt humans and that, you know, we're part of their food source. And that's not true. But what is true is when they do go after people, it is often based in predation. And that can be kind of scary. So that is something. I got in a Twitter back and forth with someone a little bit recently where they put like polar bears are the one of the only four animals that will hunt humans. I think I saw your post. I was like, well, that's not true in there. Like, oh, actually it is. I was like, well, actually, I think I know more than you. Yeah. It's kind of fun to see you do that because I lost the energy for that online a long time ago, but you still have it.

I like to get into weeds every once in a while, but then I'm always like, I wonder like what tooth and claw listeners just watching this in the background and like, why is he so? Yeah, so adamant to attack this person. Yeah. No, but it's good. And it's good for the animals that people know that. So I'm glad you're doing it. What would you put on the list of animals that, like, hunt people? I would put saltwater crocodiles, and I would put Bengal tigers.

Not lions. And I'd probably put leopards, too. Lions, maybe. Yeah. I'd put lions if you're putting... Yeah, I'd probably include lions. Because they do. I mean, like, usually when they attack someone, that's what they're trying to do, you know?

Yeah. And polar bears, I'm not saying polar bears don't hunt people sometimes. but it's opportunistic and they don't usually, it's usually, we'll talk about that in a minute. We'll get to that. Okay. All right. Let's get into the story, though. Late Halloween night of 2013 in the subarctic community of Churchill Manitoba,

69-year-old William Bill Ayyote had fallen asleep in front of his TV. 69? 69, dude. It's a great year. He fell asleep in front of his TV, but the sound of screams woke him up. And screaming on Halloween night isn't exactly unheard of. Or maybe his TV had drifted to a classic horror movie while he was falling asleep. But as he woke up, he realized the screams were not coming from inside of his house.

They were coming from outside on the street. And they weren't the kind of screams you'd hear from trick-or-treaters trying to scare each other. We're friends at a rowdy Halloween party. They were shrill and guttural. That kind of sounds you hear when prey is being eaten by a predator. So Bill walks to the door and he opens it, not at all prepared for the horror that was unfolding on the road right in front of his house. A polar bear was attacking a young woman

and was shaking her limp body through the air. Bill didn't have a gun, and he knew by the time the polar bear patrol got there, this girl would be dead. So he quickly looks around, and his eyes fall on his heavy-duty metal snow shovel, grabs the shovel, wraps his finger around the handle,

and then just standing in just his pajamas and slippers, he says to himself, well, you're either going to do something or you're not, and then he charges out into the night. Nice. All right. So let's rewind a little bit. It's a tough situation.

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So Aaron... Aaron Green had first come to Churchill in 2012 And immediately she was struck by how different it felt from her hometown of Montreal People would say hi on the street Everyone seemed to know each other There was a strong sense of community built into the fabric of the town And to Aaron it felt like the town of roughly 900 people Was exactly what she'd been looking for

Because Montreal has a bunch of French people Yeah also she doesn't have to speak French anymore Yeah. Well, they just don't say hello to anyone. They're not happy about it. Really? Yeah. They get a little snooty sometimes when you don't speak French.

Sorry to all you Montrealers out there. I've been to Churchill, and I felt the same way about it. It just felt like it was immediately a this really warm, welcoming community. It's really different from anywhere I've been. You have to either fly in or take a train. There's really the only ways to get You could also take a boat But no one really does that

You either fly in or take a train Could you drive a car? You couldn't drive a car in No, there's no roads That's the main thing There's roads like in the Churchill area But no roads leading to the town If you could drive a car

And it pretty much be like everywhere else Yeah, that's what I was trying to get to No And then it's just kind of this It's mostly flat It's right on the shore of Hudson Bay It's subarctic but it does, it gets very, very, very cold.

It feels like the Arctic. There's northern lights. There's really cool wildlife. It's just a really neat place. All right. Put it on the list. Yeah, there's beluga whales, Arctic fox. We'll probably do a tooth and claw trip there sometime.

There's wolves. There's tarmigan. There's all these different critters that call Churchill home. But the town is really famous for one thing, and that's polar bears. Churchill is commonly known as the polar bear capital of the world. and it's likely the easiest or at least the most convenient place in the world to see polar bears. When I visited, I saw probably a dozen to two dozen polar bears in like a five-day stretch. There's a lot of polar bears there during a certain time of the year, and we'll talk about that too.

So basically, and we'll talk about it right now. So, Jeff, there's two kinds of sea ice. There's annual sea ice and multi-year sea ice. So annual sea ice is the kind that's going to be melting and refreezing every year. So this is what Hudson Bay has. Every year the ice completely freezes up to the shore and then it completely melts. And so the bears that are there have to come ashore and then leave back onto the ice as it freezes and melts, freezes and melts. Multi-year ice is ice that's going to spend, you know, it's going to be multi-year.

It's going to stay for a long time. And we're losing most of our multi-year ice. So when they say like we might have an ice-free North Pole at some. point, they're talking about multi-year ice, that ice that's there year after year after year. Sea ice is really important to polar bears. They will go out onto the sea ice to hunt seals. And do you remember any of the different ways that they hunt seals on the sea ice? They'll like wait by a hole for a seal to come up, right? Because like they know that the seals need to breathe and they're under the ice. Exactly. Yeah. So seal's...

I saw a video of someone out on the ice in the Arctic recently. that they were just filming a seal hole just because I thought it was cool. And then a seal came through it and they weren't expecting it at all. Yeah. Yeah. So seals maintain these breathing holes that they scratch with their flippers to get through the ice. And they just keep them open. And that way they can pop up as they're hunting to breathe.

They also make their dens in the sea ice and they'll pull themselves out to just lay on top of the sea ice. So polar bears hunt seals. By, yeah, they make dens for their pups. Seals do? Just for their pups, yeah. Like, how? They kind of just, like, scratch a hole into the sea ice, and then it gets covered up. It's kind of like a polar bear den almost, and their pups will be in that little enclosure.

They scratch it through the bottom and, like, make a little cavity into the sea ice. That's cool. Yeah, so polar bears in the spring especially will cave in those dens to get at the pups. That's their best feeding time of the year. but then throughout the year when there's sea ice, they'll wait by these breathing holes or they'll hunt the seals that have pulled up onto the open ice. So it's really important that they have sea ice because they can't hunt them when they're just free swimming or when there's no ice.

That's what they need to hunt seals. That's why they're so tied to sea ice. It helps seals too, right? Yeah. A lot of little fish will go up to the sea ice and like seals can hunt better or something. The main thing is that it is the base level for the whole. ecosystem and there's algae that grows on the bottom of it. There's little fish that eat that algae. There's bigger fish that eat those little fish. Seals eat those bigger fish and

then polar bears eat the seals. So the sea ice is kind of the base level of that whole food web. So it's really, really important in many different ways. But every summer- It's like a chain of food or something. Exactly. Yeah. Every summer, many of the polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, that subpopulation, will leave the sea ice as it melts and they spend the rest of the summer fasting and waiting for the ice to freeze up again. In the fall, many of them will gather on the shores of Hudson Bay and wait for the ice to refreeze. And due to really specific geography and oceanography, the refreeze often first starts right around Churchill. So when the sea ice refreezes, they can head back out and hunt for seals. But if they don't have that sea ice, you know,

as a hunting platform, they're simply just going to be fasting and burning their fat reserves. So when you visit Churchill in the fall, you're going to find a lot of bears that are simply waiting near the shore and taking advantage of any other food opportunity that might pop up in the meantime. Are they looking pretty thin? They look thin. They look just kind of, they're not moving very fast because they're saving their energy. They're in this state that we often call walking hibernation where their metabolism has gone down and they're kind of just trying to save as much energy as possible until it freezes.

But some of them do look for other sources of food. and that can lead to some conflict in Churchill. These conflict bears are often darted and then taken to a bear holding facility, which is often called polar bear jail, where they spend the rest of their fast in a pretty comfortable cell, and it's a really novel way that they deal with these conflict bears that really can't be blamed for being a little bit hangary, you know? I saw a polar bear jail recently.

It's like a huge warehouse. It looks like a Costco, but it's like for polar bears. It's massive. They have these concrete cell. They give them water, but they don't give them food. Yeah. Because then they start to associate people with food. And they wouldn't be getting food out anyways.

So they're just, they finish their fast in jail. And then they're released as soon as the sea ice comes back. It's pretty neat. So after her first visit to Churchill, Aaron makes the decision she wants to move there and work there seasonally as a waitress in one of the local bars. She would return to Montreal in the colder months and live in Churchill when it thought out. By 2013, she'd already made a lot of friends in the little community, especially among the other seasonal employees, and more and more Churchill was feeling like home. That feeling of community was often strongest on Halloween night. Churchill always went really hard for Halloween, and 2013 was no exception.

Aaron's party hopping with their friends until late in the night, while kids are out trick-or-treating in the small community. In this general, really festive atmosphere was all made possible through years and years of hard work, because, you see, Halloween presents some particularly tricky obstacles for trick-or-treaters and partygoers in Churchill, and those obstacles are big, starving polar bears. Yeah. So decades ago. I respect them still going for it. I know.

Like trick-or-treating. I feel like most places have kind of stopped trick-or-treating for no reason at all. And they're just like, we're going to keep doing it, even with polar bears. This is like in the heart of a polar bear season in Churchill too. Halloween is right when it's about to freeze. There's lots of bears around. I was there on Halloween and we saw lots of bears. I mean, they are around.

So yeah, they could have just easily said, okay, we're not doing Halloween. But instead, what they did is they realized that Halloween specifically, you know, put their kids at risk. And they decided to start an intense polar bear patrol that was created on Halloween night, both polar bear professionals and law enforcement will patrol the town and trucks and even helicopters to make sure that no bears cross paths with residents. They could catch any bears.

Make the kids dress up as like vegetables since polar bears only eat meat. Yeah, what if you had a kid that just like really wanted to wear a seal costume and you're just like, or you hate your kid and you're just like, hey, I got your costume for Halloween. You're going to be a ring seal. Yeah, that's a good point, though. Just put them in like, yeah, you're a concrete block this year. You are a carrot. No, that wouldn't work.

But this polar bed patrol does seem to work really well, and they've done a really good job of keeping bears out of the streets of Churchill on Halloween night. So in Halloween, 2013, Aaron goes pretty hard, and so do her friends. It's possible that by the time she finally, decided to head home on the early hours of November 1st. I mean, this is like 4 or 5 a.m. November 1st, the polar bear patrol maybe had already called it a night. You know, they'd said, okay, we kept everyone out of trouble, all the kids are home, we're going to go to bed, or maybe a bear had just slipped their detection. But whatever the reason, a 250-pound sub-adult

polar bear was quietly walking the dirt roads of Churchill at the same time as Aaron and her friends. and as they rounded a corner about five minutes from her house, the bear spotted them and it charged. Aaron's friend Nikki was the first to see this bear and in a panic she said, oh my God, it's a polar bear. And the whole group started running in blind fear. So we know running isn't great. If I were in this scenario, if I'm with some people in a town

and there's houses nearby and I don't have any deterrent and the bear is already running at me, I might run. I don't know if you have any other options. Yeah, I might try and get to safety because I don't think stopping and trying to be totally, like, dominant with this bear would have probably stopped it. I think it probably would have kept going. I feel like it depends a lot on your surroundings. Like, if there's anything nearby that you could put in between you and the bear, but if you're, like, an open, snowy road, then it's like, I'd still probably stand your ground because, like, like you're not going to out run it totally they don't have any good options at this point is what

i'm trying to say like we always say don't run it's a huge mistake in this one yeah yeah we always say don't run because it's a bad option but all they have is bad options here they don't have anything good so they run and Aaron and her friends who had both you know they'd all seen polar bears lumbering around the area in the past they suddenly realized just how fast they can drop their candy they should yeah that's honestly i probably would but they'd all they'd all they'd They weren't trick-or-treating. They were at a party. They realized how fast these polar bears can be when this bear is on them in seconds.

One of Aaron's friends actually trips and falls, but the bear passes right by her and the other friend because it had already locked in on Aaron. And bears do this sometimes. Sometimes they just get tunnel vision where they pick a target and that is what they're going to go for. And even if there's closer people or people that are more vulnerable, they're kind of just laser-focused on that one target. That's what this bear was. There's another reason that one joke everyone always says doesn't work. That I don't need to be faster than a bear. I just need to be faster than my friends.

Exactly. It's like, well, look at this story. She was faster than both of her friends and it still got her. Yeah. So shut the hell up with that joke. Yeah, that joke's canceled. Yeah. As the bear came up behind Aaron, she knew that she wasn't going to be able to get away.

So she actually stops running. stand still and just braces herself for the attack. The bear runs up behind her, stands on its hind legs, and clamps its jaws down over the back of her head, pulling her off the ground and whipping her through the air. That's crazy. Yeah, she starts screaming, and the screams coming from her body felt unreal, like she didn't know she had the capability to scream like that.

And then she's kind of back on her feet, the bear's paws are on her shoulders, its jaws are still locked around her head, and she could feel the teeth scraping against her skull and the claws digging into her torso. And she starts punching and kicking at the bear. She knew that its snout was probably a little bit more sensitive, but not surprisingly, these punches and kicks don't really do anything. And aside from maybe giving her like a brief pause in the mawling,

but then when the bear starts mauling her again, it pushes her down on the ground, pushes its paws against her shoulders. I think she's on her stomach and it like puts her paws on her shoulders for leverage, bites into her skull and starts peeling her scalp back. So like you can picture it kind of like grabbing her by the head and like peeling it backwards. Yeah, it's not good. Check engine light, Jeff. Yeah.

One of her friends is like frozen in place. The other had sprinted on hopefully to get help. But Aaron felt really alone as the bear continued to bite at her head. and she feels the warm blood spilling over her body in a constant flow on this cold night. You can't make someone faint on this one. Yeah. And she knew, I hope so, it's a Halloween episode. She knew that that much blood meant that the bear was doing some real damage.

And she could feel her strength fading. She'd stopped screaming, she thinks. And she suddenly has this realization that she's probably going to die out there on this icy road. And she figures all of the commotion would probably draw attention and sooner or later the polar bear patrol would show up, but by then the bear would have done enough damage to kill her. But that's when Bill Iyote charges out of his house in his pajamas with his snow shovel. Nice.

Yeah. So Bill had been yelling at the bear, but it was ignoring him as it continued to shake this girl through the air, tear her scalp off. So he made up his mind to use the shovel. And again, like I said in the beginning, he was standing there and he's like, well, you're either going to do something or you're not.

You can't just stand here and think about it. And I think this guy just happened to be that like 0.001% of the world that is willing to charge at a polar bear with a snow shovel to stop it from killing someone he's never met in his entire life. You think I think I would do that. I think you would too. And I think I would because we've talked about it enough. But I don't think most people would.

Who knows? Not to discredit him. It's like incredibly brave, but I just feel like people do want to help other people and give in the opportunity a lot of the time. I think me, like knowing polar bears, and this guy, he's got indigenous blood. I don't know if he's full indigenous or not, but he's from Churchill. I think he probably knows these animals fairly well. Their percentage probably goes way. And I think he probably knows that this isn't enough.

Like a snow shovel's not going to stop a polar bear. it's probably going to piss it off. And you probably, if you know that, like I would know that too. I would know that I'm about to get mauled if I run up and hit a polar bear with the snow shovel. But it might stop this other person from being mauled. Was heavy-duty snow shovel. Yeah, but it's not enough for a polar bear. And sure enough, he runs up and he just pulls this heavy-duty snow shovel behind him as hard as he can

and just brings it down and slams it down on the face of the bear. and this does get the bear's attention. It drops Aaron immediately and turns toward William. Aaron doesn't waste a second. She gets up, she's focused on Williams, or sorry, Bill. I've been calling him Bill, but Bill's open door. His full name's William, but we're going to call him Bill. She runs into his open door, runs inside of his house.

She's leaving a trail of blood the whole way. And when she gets in the house, she pulls out her phone and calls emergency services. there is a recording of her 911 call that we might put in here. There's a bear. Oh, there's a bear? Okay, do you need nabulam? And then she looks up to see Bill's wife coming down the stairs in a towel and seeing just like this strange white woman covered in blood in her entry with.

Like she doesn't know what's going on. She just knows there's a woman covered in blood. She's like, where's my shovel at? Yeah. I was a back to ghost shovel the driver. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

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you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visitpriceline.com. Actual prices may vary. Limited time offer. Aaron pleads for help. She says she's been attacked by a bear,

and Bill's wife, who was a nurse, takes her up to the bathroom. And this whole time Aaron is holding her hand on the back of her head because that's where all the blood is coming from and she's trying to hold the blood in. The despair is mostly scalped her, and what she didn't know

is that several of her arteries on the back of her head had been severed. But she did know she needed to just be kind of holding everything together back there. She said she felt like if she took her hand off, her brains were going to fall out. Yeah. So William's wife, or Bill's wife tells her that she wants to see the damage and that she

needs to take her hand off. And Aaron's like, I don't want to. And she's like, listen, I'm a nurse. I just want to see how bad it is. So Aaron takes her hand off and blood literally sprays all over the back wall of the bathroom. And Bill's wife says, holy shit and tells her to put her hand back on her head. Meanwhile, out in the street, the bear had quickly turned its attention to Bill, and now this shovel is no longer any help.

Bill turned to follow Aaron back into the house, but the bear shot its paws out, grabbed him by the leg, trips him and knocks him to the ground, and then it climbs on top of him and starts biting and clawing at his torso and face. This is another kind of gnarly detail, but at one point the bear bites Bill's ear and starts to tear at it, and he can actually hear the... tongue of the bear as it was moving around in his ear, and then he could hear the ripping tissue of his ear as it was torn off his head. Oh, man.

Yeah, but he wasn't really even worried about it. He was just worried about where the bear was going to bite next. He knew that his ear is, you know, dispens- or what's the word? Why can't I think of it when something is like dispensable, right? Yeah, dispensable. But like if it's biting his throat or somewhere else he might die. Mm-hmm. Non-vital.

Yeah, non-vital. By now, the commotion had woken up some of the neighbors, and some of them are armed, but they're a little too nervous to fire directly at the bear while it's mauling Bill. So they fire into the air, they yell, they throw things at the bear, but nothing's really deterring it. And finally, one of the neighbors drives his truck straight at the bear and at Bill with the headlights flashing and the horn blaring. And Bill actually, like, in one of the interviews I read, he said that he said that he, thought he was about to get ran over, but luckily the truck stops just in time. And the bear does back off and the neighbors rush in to help him.

Yeah. And the crazy thing for me is as soon as they pull him up, his first thoughts go to Aaron, and he's hoping that she got away safely and that she's okay. And then he thought, well, if this bear's going to come back and finish me off, I at least want to be on my feet and die like a man. So he stands up. He tells his friends to help him up. And they're like, no, we're getting you out of here.

they throw him in the back of the truck and whisk him away to the local hospital. It's almost like that Monty Python, the night that's like it's just a scratch. Come at me. Yeah. This dude's cool. He's really cool. Both of them are really cool, actually. We'll talk about it a little bit more.

But he goes to this local hospital. The doctors stabilize him and they put him under. And then the next thing he knows, he wakes up. He's a thousand miles south in Winnipeg in a much bigger hospital. The first thing he asked the doctors is whether or not Aaron was okay. And they say, she's in the next room and she's fine. Bill ends up spending a week in the Winnipeg Hospital where doctors worked on the lacerations to his eyelid, his face, and his scalp, which included a laceration that was seven inches long. He had bite marks to his right shoulder and chest.

And he had lesser abrasions and lacerations to his torso and his thigh. He also underwent a four-hour surgery with a plastic surgeon to have his ear. ear reattached. Kind of like me and my gums, you know, I'd have gums reattached. Yeah. Yours is worse. Yeah. It's definitely making this hard. Sorry if I sound extra spitty this episode, but it's not easy. No, I'd rather have what he had than what you had. Yeah. Yeah, I had it pretty hard. I'm also kind of a hero. Aaron was diagnosed with a concussion. She was treated for puncture wounds to her shoulder, a torn scalp and her ear was also torn.

She had claw tears on her knees and her abdomen. At the time of these interviews that I watched and read, she had mostly recovered, but she was still suffering from a compressed spine and pain in her knees, her knees and her shoulders from the bear shaking her and whipping her through the air. But she was, she fully recovered as well.

Yeah, it hit her pretty hard on the ground. Yeah. That'll do it. The bear was killed that night. It was found to be a 250-pound sub-adult male, which do tend to be the polar bears that cause these kinds of problems. These sub-adults, and especially sub-adult males, are the ones that kind of haven't really figured out yet

that any of the food they get outside of seals or marine mammals isn't really going to be enough to sustain them. So they're the ones that do tend to go into town and kind of look for other food opportunities. they do cause a little bit more problems than the adult polar bears that have kind of learned how to be a polar bear. Well, it's an important stage for them to get a lot of food too, right? Like, you need to get a lot of food to, like, have good mating opportunities and to be

able to get into like a big old bear. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a bear, you want to be big, big as possible. Big old bears. Big old bear. And 250 pounds isn't very big old bear. for a polar bear.

That's, it's really small for a polar bear. Yeah. I mean, we caught black bears. The tank was twice that size. Yeah, exactly.

It's black bear, yeah. Yeah. And Homer, our bear Homer and Grandpa Glenn were both that bigger, bigger. So. Yeah.

Yeah. So Aaron really grew a lot from this experience. She's one of those people that I find really inspirational because rather than like never wanting to be in Churchill around polar bears ever again, her feeling of community in Churchill deepened really greatly. She knows fully that Bill saved her life, and the two of them are friends now. And at least at the time of the interviews, I watched and read, she was living full time in Churchill, and she said that she wanted to live the kind of life that Bill would be proud of,

because he had kind of given her life back. So she wanted to make sure that that wasn't in vain. Kind of like Matt Damon crying, like a little baby at the end of saving Private Ryan, you know? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, he had to live for all of that. Yeah, exactly. He had to live for all of those guys that died. That is crazy.

It's like, I just kill me if that's what I got to live for, you know? Yeah, do you think he has to do everything like 30 times? I think if he messes up, he's got to feel bad for each one of those people that died. That's like, they should have lived. I should have died because they wouldn't. have stolen that apple. Yeah, that's even harder than like thinking of Jesus seeing everything you're doing. Oh, yeah, dude.

I'd rather be him than like 30 Marines. I should say that. Jesus had it hard. Anyway, she does still live in Churchill. I looked it up on Instagram. She owns and runs a stand-up paddleboarding company in Churchill that takes visitors to see beluga whales, which is really cool. Yeah, that's amazing.

So she's part of this community now. She's there full time, and it seems like she's making the most of her life in the wake of a really traumatic event, which I just think is amazing. And then Bill was recognized for his bravery with the Carnegie Medal in September of 2015, along with receiving the Canadian Star of Courage from the then-governor General David Johnston. And he was inducted into the Order of the Buffalo Hunt in 2014, which I think is kind of a prestigious group for indigenous heroes. He, echoed the response. That's why he did it. Yeah. He wanted those awards. No, I was about to say he echoed the response of many of these different heroes by saying, I never saw myself as a hero and I still don't. Your Delta situation, you either respond or you don't do anything. The only thing I could think was, if I don't do anything, she's not going to make it. And I think that's pretty impressive. I like the Dwight Shrewd quote where he's like, I don't see myself as a hero. To me, heroes are the everyday ordinary people who behind the scenes put on a cape and can fly and save people's life. That's great.

Yeah. You know, we've done a lot of these stories. And I'm not going to say that this is the most heroic thing from any of our stories, because I honestly can't remember all of them. Like Cindy Perilyn's one that I think of the woman who fought off the mountain lion for an hour to save her kids. Yeah. We've had some really amazing heroes, but this guy's up there for me. Like running out. Yeah.

I mean, if this isn't heroic, what is, you know. Yeah. Hitting a polar bear with a shovel knowing full well, that's probably going to make it target you instead of someone else that you don't know is like pretty fucking heroic. That's hard to beat. So I really, I really respect this guy a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Good for him.

Good job. Yeah. Good for both of them. Good job, Bill. You know, and I do think we'll go to Churchill at some point, whether it's with the toothy group or just us. So, Aaron, if you hear this, we'd love to meet you and go out on your paddle boards. We should, like, give them a medal from tooth and claw, too. Yeah, we should make toothy medals.

It's a good idea. Like, hey, Bill. Toothy heroes. We saw your story and we just want to give you this tooth and claw medal for bravery. Yeah. Let's call it the old Matt Damon medal. Yeah. You have any questions about the story before we go to categories?

I just thought maybe, I don't know if it's even so much a question, but it was interesting, like, thinking about the black bears we worked with that were the same size or even a little bit bigger and how they really weren't very threatening. And just like how this polar bear is like the same size and still a bear, but just like has that confidence in it or something. It does. I think it gives a little more validity to the argument that they hunt people and that it was not at all afraid of these people it saw, you know? I think, I think like this is a situation where if you bump into a polar bear at night on the streets of Churchill where one shouldn't be, you know, you know that bear's looking for food. And that's a scary situation. That's when this is an animal that's hunting, you know, and it would probably decide to hunt a person. And so this is a really scary scenario. I agree. Like, I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about what my reaction would be for a black bear, a grizzly bear, and a polar bear in the exact same scenario.

A black bear, I'd sit there and watch it. A grizzly bear, I'd probably slowly back away to a safe distance and watch it. And a polar bear, I'd get to shelter as quickly as possible. And I guess part of what I'm saying, too, is it just felt like it knew how to kill a person way better than a black bear. bear that size would like a black bear I feel like a lot of times they'll tackle the person and just start biting wherever and this polar bear it's like I'm gonna bite their freaking heads and like they just seem like good predators is they are I mean this is our only bear that is purely carnivorous like all they do for food is hunt and our other bears hunt opportunistically

and depending on where they live they may almost never hunt in their lives they would get the candy instead of the people before they're still going to get the people and that doesn't mean they don't have that built into their biology they know how to hunt black bears know how to bring down prey they know how to kill prey so do grizzly bears but for polar bears they have to do it all of the time and so yeah you're right they are really good at catching and killing prey and if it's a person you don't have long once a once a polar bear gets a hold of you you're probably not going to survive very long if you don't have a way to intervene. So bear spray does work on polar bears. There aren't a ton of data points out there, but all the ones that that has been used, it's shown to be very effective.

So do carry bear spray in polar bear country. But I also, like I always say, if you're camping or recreating in polar bear country where you don't have immediate access to shelter, you also want to have people with you that know what they're doing and are armed and have ways to deter polar bears. Because if they do, even though it's incredibly rare, incredibly rare, if they do decide to come at you, you have to stop them. Yeah. And bear spray can do that. So, yeah. Transport your senses with Sol de Janado's limited edition perfume mist collection.

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Yeah, let's do it. Cool. So the first one, your favorite unassuming pop culture hero. Because I don't think you would look at Bill and just say, oh, this guy looks like what we see as a hero, but he's very heroic. So your favorite unassuming pop culture hero. I mean, I went with Straw Hat Luffy on this way. I feel like he fits it pretty well. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a really good pick because he's just like a kid, like a gangly kid that you wouldn't think is a hero. And he just kind of like falls into spots where he like has to save the day, but he's not actively trying to. Yeah. I had a lot. I kind of bounced around a lot with this one. I thought of Mad Mad Madagin, is that his name? From Willow, like Val Kilmer's character, how he doesn't really want to be a hero, but he becomes a hero.

But the one that I really just kept coming back to is Han Solo or Cassie and and or either of those two from Star Wars, where they're kind of, they have. They have no business really with the rebellion. They don't really care. They're just kind of doing their own thing. But they get pulled in. And then once they're in, they can't walk away from injustice and a fight. And they're kind of like the biggest, you know, badasses in those universes. So I really like those two for unassuming heroes.

If you haven't watched Andor, go watch Andor. It's so good. Just love it. If you haven't watched Star Wars, you should watch it as well. All of them. Yeah. All right. Maybe not all of them.

But that's something we can say when Mike's not here. Go watch the prequels. All right, Jeff, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you on Halloween night? I didn't have a great one for this. I want to hear your answer more. But my freshman year of college, I did have on my floor there's a Chinese student. And they didn't really like have Halloween over there. So, like, he really wanted to go trick or treating.

And, like, he told us that. And my instinct was just to be like, oh, that's for kids. But then I was just like, yeah, man, we can go trick or treating. And a bunch of us just went trick or treating. And every house was like, I think you guys are a little old for this. And we're like, just give us the treat, lady. You want a trick? I don't think so.

So I have two answers. One is definitely the weirdest thing. And then second's like just kind of a cool weird thing. But when I was probably like nine or ten, we went to our direct neighbor in the house that me and Jeff grew up in. It was the first house we stopped at because we'd left our house to go trick or treating. We went to his house.

And his costume was just like he showed up. I may have told this on the podcast before. He came to the door in just a trench coat. And then after he gave us the candy, He opened his trench coat and he was dressed, but there was this fake dong that like popped out of his trench coat that like came out. And he thought it was really funny. And this was like in the 90s. And that was his costume was like a molester.

And he was doing it to like 10 year old kids. And I was just like, even at the time I was like, whoa. It like scarred me, you know? That's a crazy first house. Yeah. And like luckily I had trick or tree. a lot in the past and kind of knew that it wasn't how going to be like that. I don't think so.

Because I would go swim at their house and they'd just hang out at the pool. But it wasn't like he was just doing that. That was for like every kid that, yeah, which doesn't make it any better. But yeah, I know. I think it was either him or it was him or the next house. But I'm pretty sure it was him. Anyway. And then the other one was I was trick-or-treating one year and I was all the way up on the hill behind us.

There was this huge meteor that came all the way down through the clouds and exploded like above the city that night. And it was the first time I'd ever seen that. And it was really shocking. And it was while we were trick-or-treating. And that was really cool. So that's my other answer, my backup answer, if we have to delete the Dong story. All right. What's your favorite Halloween memory from when we were kids?

This is just a candy for me. I thought it's, yeah. I feel like we were a little sugar deprived or something. We were all three addicted to sugar. And just having a day where, like, you could spill a whole pillowcase of candy on the floor was just the best. Yeah. Our parents were really careful about sugar because they both had sweet tooths. And I think they wanted to make sure we weren't just, like, overloading on it.

So we were a little candy deprived, especially. And I remember that, too, just like the joy of having a pillowcase full of candy bars. and no limits on like they were really good about honestly not a candy i didn't eat because it's just like so valuable to have candy there's definitely an order like by the end i was down to like tussie rolls and those like orange and black candies like those weird ones that only exist for halloween uh-huh yeah that that was a good memory for me it was just seeing how creative mom would get to like make costumes for us that didn't cost any money whatsoever. It's so funny.

Yeah, we had some pretty, I was just a vampire for like four years in a row, but I love vampires, but she would just like draw little things under my teeth and put a little bit of blood makeup and that and then like that was pretty much it. One of my favorite Halloween memories from not being kids was just us, me, you, Mike and whoever else just like sitting at the wall at BYU campus. And just watching the students dressed up because, like, you know, BYU has a high percentage of dorks and they really go for it for Halloween. But, like, I'm saying that to their credit because it was really fun. And, like, they like the attention we gave them is a common, like, you're entertaining us.

We're entertaining you type of thing. My favorite would be if someone had just, like, the most obvious costume in the world. And we'd always be like, hey, what are you? What are you? And they have to like stop and explain it to us. Yeah, that was really fun. It's a good memory. My favorite was just the girl who like didn't really dress up,

but then put like a paper bird beak on her face. Yeah. It's like so silly. The whole day you're just exploiting that to people. All right. We kind of already did this. What costume do you want to be if you're attacked by a polar bear on Halloween night? What would you actually want to be?

We said the seal thing. You didn't want that. But what would you actually want to have on as a costume if you're being attacked by a polar area? I put seal as my answer. So I was mad when you said seal. Because I want to see a bear. You want to go quick. Then they're going to eat quick.

Yeah. I was thinking like a juggernaut from X-Men. You remember him? He's the one of like the big metal helmet that can just run through the walls. That's what I want to have. Just want to have my full juggernaut costume. Like a knight just in chain mail. Yeah.

Or you're just like a concrete block or something. Yeah. Okay. All right. Next category is something you recommend this week, Jeff. Um, you know, I'm going to go with the UFC fighter Alex Pereira. Okay. I just really like watching his fights.

Yeah. And he had one pretty recently. he's the most like electric person for not doing anything electric. Kind of like how Kauai Leonard used to be. Where he's just like the lack of stuff he does is almost like adds to it, you know? Yeah. But his only thing he ever says is Chama. And then his a Chama.

He's Brazilian. He doesn't speak much English. But all he says is Chama. I think it's his nickname. It is his nickname. So he just says chama. And then he'll dress up as like a Brazilian. warrior and do like a bow and arrow

right at someone's face and be like, Charma. And this opponent he fought had beat him in March and this was the rematch and the opponent in their press conference was like, no more Chama and it

made him so mad when he just won, he was like mocking the guy and then when they eventually shook hands after he beat him he was like, Chama! drama. Like he's like the most offensive thing in the world to win was the guy saying no drama.

So it's just very silly. And like his fights are fun though. He's like his whole story total like had nothing in Brazil. Very poor upbringing. And then like he beat one of the best UFC fighters ever, Adasanya in a kickboxing fight. And then Adasanya made it as a UFC fighter. and everyone's like, actually this guy has lost once,

Aud Asana, and it's to this random Brazilian guy, so then they brought him into the U.S. And he's just been dominating. Yeah, that is a cool story. I like that. Cool. Mine, I'm going to pick a sports one as well, actually, sports-related.

Oh, wow. Sports Corner. Yeah. Yeah, Sports Corner. I've been to a few Montana Grizzly football games this year already, and I think there's something. really special about hometown sporting events.

Like if you are living in a place that you have connection to, if you go to one of those hometown sporting events, there's a sense of community there. And there's just like a sense of everyone kind of being excited for the same thing, especially this time of year when it's not too cold yet at most of the places in the U.S. at least. I recommend if you have like a local university team or high school team that you go for that you that you support, go to a football game or go to a local game and just kind of like dip into that community feeling because it does make you realize that a lot of the crazy stuff that's happening in the world is still happening and we don't want to ignore that.

But sometimes it's just nice to remember that you also just have your local community that you can, you know, rely on and depend on. And I really like that. Yeah, the refs with everyone. Yeah. Yeah, you get to get some of that aggression out. Shout out refs for just taking it, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Shout out, Rats. The Grizz went viral this week because their uniforms they're wearing this weekend are so cool. Their throwbacks are so cool. Yeah, their old colors are way better. The Montana Grizzlies, it used to be copper, silver, and gold were the team colors. And it's just like, I miss it. Yeah, they honestly, that their color switch, I think, was one of the worst ones ever for, like, branding.

And I get it, like maroon. and silver is so much easier to sell but copper, silver, and gold is so cool looking. So yeah, look up Gri's throwback uniforms if you're interested in. They are sick. They're so cool. The bear logo on the helmets. Awesome. Yeah. All right.

Some listener questions. I'll grab a couple here from Patreon. This one here is from Iceman TD7. Question for all three of you, but Wes the candy lover in particular. I'm going to be honest with you, Iceman. all three of us are huge candy lovers, not just me. This question is, have you ever tried Albany's gummy bears?

I recall you three deliberating between Black Forest and Haribaut, but no mention of Albanese. They're my favorite by far. Jeff, what do you think of Albany's gummy bears? I think that the bear cubs are delicious. That's like one of my, it's probably my favorite gummy bear is the tiny ones. Okay. But for like normal size ones, I don't think they hold up. Yeah.

I like the interesting flavors. I really like some of the weird flavors the Albanese has come up with. But for me, they're like a special treat every once in a while. But my stalwarts are still Haribo. I like Haribo the most, I think. So I usually go with them. But I do think they're good. Jeff, have you started a great British baking show yet?

Yeah. I'm like two episodes. I haven't. So this question will be directly for you then. Mike's been talking about it, too. What do we think of this season's lineup? What do you think? Mike was just complaining that his favorite person got out right away.

Spoilers. I haven't seen it yet, so don't spoil anything. I don't know if that spoils it too much. But yeah, it may be a little bit. But the cast in general, you're enjoying them? I'm still trying to figure out a favorite for this season. There's no one that's like really stuck out to me as like a, this is the person I look. vibe with the most.

I haven't seen a bake that's really like knocked me off my feet yet either. Okay. I save this show for early December when all the episodes are out. It puts me in the Christmas spirit kind of. So I really, because it's just so nice and like comfortable and warm. So I actually always save it for like the first couple weeks of December. So that's what I'm doing. But I'm excited to watch it.

I love that show. I think it's like one of the purest shows on TV. One more from Holly. Holly says, will we ever get a hyena episode? So just a little bit behind our kind of workflow and how we do things here. We definitely will do hyenas at some point, especially spotted hyenas. We want to do this for a long time. And part of that is like saving animals for down the line because we if we like get through every single animal immediately,

then we're just going to be doing repeats for the rest of the show. And so it's kind of hard to, like, continue to save some of these animals that we haven't done yet. Like, we have yet to do a full main feed episode on elephants on either species. We haven't really done Bengal tigers yet, which are a huge one. We haven't done hyenas. There's a number of animals we haven't done yet because we want to still have them to do in the future. So, yes, we will get to them, but it will be somewhere down the line. I can't say if that'll be this year or five years from now, or who knows, but we will get to them.

Jeff, you asked for some spooky questions on Instagram. You got any for us? I sure did. Let's see. Un-Natley-Favor bat species. It's vampire bats for me. Really? Yeah.

They're not cute enough for me. I don't know which ones are really cute. The flying foxes, like fruit bats, are the cute. Not like a little one. You remember that little flying fox we saw in Borneo, though? That really cute one that, like... Yeah, that's a fruit bat. right?

That Kurt had never seen before. Yeah. Yeah. Still never seen it. Yeah. I remember you're going to get defensive here, but I remember telling you like, oh, there's the bat right here. Come look.

And you came to look and then you want to get a picture really close of it. I was like, don't get too close. It'll fly away. And you're like, it's not going to fly away. And then it flew away. I don't remember. remember it that well, so I'm not going to be defensive, but I can definitely see myself doing that. All right. Conservatory, or wait, conservation Casey. Favorite haunted house or hayride you've ever been to?

It's a really good question. In Montana, we used to drive like 40 minutes to a haunted corn maze that was like, Yeah. It's kind of scary to have just people with ax or with chainsaws hiding in the corn maze. Yeah. There was for a little while that one in Missoula, too, the one where you got hurt. Yeah, that one was a haunted, though. The one in Victor, they had, like, people with... They still do it, I think.

But Utah, so when we all lived in Utah, Jeff and Mike still do, Utah's famous for haunted houses. They do haunted houses really good. And there used to be this one called Rocky Point that was just a... To me, it felt like all of the rooms were like Hollywood-grade kind of haunted house stuff. So that was probably my best one that I'd ever been to. Nightmare on 13th is really good, too. Which one did you say was your best? It was called Rocky Point.

It doesn't exist anymore. But I really like Nightmare on 13th, too. I think they do a really good job. I think it's way too expensive, but I think they do a great job. Here's a good one. Fleabit and Bryn, are you guys scared for when Mike quits the pod? Yeah, we are. I mean, he's, he loves traveling to, like, Asian.

Well, I guess he's not really in an Asian country. No. But I'm just worried he won't come back from his trip right now that he's on. He'll find some way to just stay out there. Yeah. I think, though, we might have too good of a gig for him to ever really leave. Yeah. You know?

I think, I do think if any of the three of us quit, it would really, hurt our momentum and hurt our show. But yeah, Mike's the one that threatens at the most, but he usually is just joking. I don't think he actually ever really wants to quit. Aside from maybe when we're doing normal episodes and the Chimp Crazy episodes, I think he did want to quit during those few weeks.

He got a little. Yeah. C.J. Turner 13 says, do you believe in animal ghosts? Hmm. I guess I kind of have to because I believe in people. people ghosts, so I would have to believe in animal ghosts. So yeah, I think I do. I don't believe in ghosts. I mean, fuck ghosts if they're here. Get out of here. Like, quit.

I already got freaking Palantir spying on me, and now I have ghost spying on me. It's just like, leave me alone. Let me just be by myself. I don't want you guys watching me all the time, if you are, you know? So I hope they don't. I hope they're gone. I hope they're gone. I hope They're gone. Yeah, I hope so, too. And that animal ghosts? Pretty crazy. Like, all animals, they'd be so bored as a ghost, you know?

My allergies would be twice as bad. Yeah, I hope there's animal ghosts, though, because I think, like, everything or, like, every person or animal that I've lost, Bryce would be the one I want to see the most again. So I would love to see her. But don't you think, like, Bryce, as a ghost, would just want, like, scratches and, you know. you can't scratch her. Like, what do you think of Bryce? What's Bryce going to do as it goes? Maybe I'd kill myself then so I could give her ghost scratches.

I don't know. All right. Yeah. You got any more? Let's say, what's the best scare you've ever given someone? Best scare I've ever given someone. I don't know. That's like a hard one for me to think of.

My mind goes to like scaring you as a kid because that was pretty easy and I definitely got you pretty bad a couple times. But just because I was five years older than you, it was like a very like easy big brother thing to do. But that doesn't really, I don't have anything specific. I can't think of one that wasn't a scare as much as just like surprise. But our cousin Brent to me, I was driving and he was in. the back seat of a car that I was driving. And I hadn't looked in my mirrors for like 40 minutes. And I'd just glance in the rearview mirror and he's just like staring straight at me

through the mirror. And he'd been waiting for so long just to like get me to look at him in the mirror. And it really surprised me that he was just staring at me the one time I looked like, It's like, how long have you been waiting to do that? That's the ones that get you are the ones where they, like, really wait for a long time. Yeah. Some of my favorite ones online are the ones where people are driving behind a truck that's, like, dragging another car, and that car's facing forward, and their passengers fall in sleep, and they, like, scream to wake them up because it looks like they're about to get hit by something. Those are really funny.

Those are really funny. I can't think of a better one, a better answer, though. I don't know. All right. Well, should we just call it? Yeah, sure. We're going to do conservation really quick. This is,

so Hudson Bay, Western Hudson Bay is a subpopulation of polar bears. That's where you find these Churchill bears is in that subpopulation. And this is one of the subpopulations that seems to be getting hit the hardest by climate change, because it is really southern as far as. as polar bears are considered. And the sea ice dynamics in Hudson Bay are very, they're kind of very variable. So just for like some quick numbers, in 1987, they thought there was probably about 1,200 polar bears in this subpopulation by 2004 that had fallen to about 935. And then the most

recent survey was in 2022 it was published. And they guessed it was about 618. So in roughly 50 years, we've gone, or less than that, about 40 years, less than 40 years, we've gone from 1,200 bears to around 618 bears. So a 50% loss within my lifetime, which is pretty crazy for a subpopulation of polar bears. And the main thing that's happening there is just as the sea ice becomes less and less dependable, they have to fast longer and longer. And we're not necessarily seeing big die-offs in adult polar bears, but what we are seeing, as much poorer recruitment. And what that means is that they're not really having as many cubs

and their cubs aren't surviving to adulthood. So there's less and less bears every year. And we will get to a point where we'll start to see die-offs in adults as well as we push that fast longer and longer every year. So it is, it's kind of death by a thousand cuts. And you will see that there are years. Like I'm pretty sure 2022 was a really good year for polar bears where the ice kind of changes and there's weird polar vortexes

and stuff that suddenly they have a really good year. But the general trend is that every year they have less and less ice. And that trend continues because of climate change. So this is one of the subpopulations that is at most risk. Are they getting like dumb or two? Like only the dumb bears will have kids. The smart ones know that the sea ice is melting. It's not like an in inocry kind of situation.

No. No. What would you say? Or fortunately, that's not the case. What would you say to someone that says, like, climate, or, yeah, climate change is just a big government conspiracy? To be honest, I don't even engage with those people anymore. I think at this point, if you still got your head in the sand with climate change, like, something that's just been proven to be happening now for decades. Like, there's been consistent good science.

But, like, what source would you send them to? I wouldn't. I would just say, like, I would, they've seen it already. Like, these people that are still. denying climate change have seen plenty of articles and data and everything to prove that it's happening and they choose to ignore it. And so at this point, I don't engage with climate deniers. That's just where I'm at. I don't have the energy for it. I think for me, and this is getting more into my personal views now, I think that as long as we let unfettered rampant capitalism run the

way that it's running, we're never going to be able to tackle climate change. I think we need to get at the source of the problem and that's these huge corporations and billionaires that are kind of destroying our planet so that's that's how i see it well i mean did you know billionaires have donated more money to climate change than any other group of people i'm sure they have yeah but it's not yeah it's not enough they're not doing enough so it's like shooting someone three times and then paying for their medical bill right right Exactly. It's like, yeah, you did pay for my medical bill after you shot me three times.

Yeah. I think the overall, like, people know that it's happening. And if they choose to ignore it at this point, I don't think you're going to convince them otherwise. I really don't. That's just my idea. Too bad polar bears can't talk, you know? Yeah, talk for them. Yeah.

There are one thing that I, if people bring up polar bears specifically, they almost always reference, like, one or two biologists that are like, like on the oil industry's payroll that are purposely kind of saying that polar bears are doing fine and I'm quick to defend you know that science not their science like the science that proves those guys are wrong too but how much would it take for you to get on there I don't have a price for that I wouldn't do it you don't have a price a billion dollars you wouldn't say yeah polar bears are doing fine I don't want to be a billionaire no I wouldn't do what if you could use that billion dollars to save polar bears. Jeff, I could do that.

Like, I could reach out to the, I couldn't use it to save them. But what I'm saying is I could reach out to oil industry right now and probably be a millionaire by doing that and I won't do it. Like, I'm not going to. That's not worth it to me. So. Yeah. But if you ever are a billionaire, we can be like, wait a second.

You'll probably know how. Let's connect some dots here. Yeah, my opinion is that if anyone's a billionaire, they've done something to exploit. someone else or something else to get there. Besides Taylor Swift. I think Taylor Swift also has, but that is also my opinion. All right. Anyway, we're getting the weeds here.

Thank you. Travis Kelsey's penis is as big as she's saying. I'm not talking about that. I'm just not getting into it at all. Jeff can do his own little side podcast to talk about it. Thank you, everyone, for listening if you have been kind of debating whether or not to sign up for our subscription episodes and if you're a fan of all things spooky this is a good time to do it uh me and mike have been

running back some horror movie stuff it we've had some really good recent subscriber episodes mike just did one on amelia airhart jeff what was your last one again it was really good um i did i did uh what's it called the kenya capital uh oh yeah we talked about nairobi and kind of of some of the attacks. Yeah, for our listener that asked about hyenas, listen to that subscription episode. So there's some really fun content coming out. It's $10 a month.

You get access to our whole library of extra episodes, subscriber episodes. So it's really a great deal. And yeah, you can either do it on Patreon or on our Apple Gris Club, whichever you prefer. All right. All right. Love you. We love you.

We'll be back with Mike next time. We miss you, buddy. We'll see it.