Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - The Grizzly Deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, Part 1: Timothy Treadwell's Rise to Prominence

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

After 4 years of waiting, Wes finally takes us through our most requested story: the tragic story of Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, and Amie Huguenard, who met their end when they were killed by an Alaskan Brown Bear in 2003. In this episode, we learn about Timothy's upbringing, how his passion for bears had its genesis, and how he was viewed by both people in the bear world and the public at large. We follow him at both the idyllic Grizzly Sanctuary and the chaotic Grizzly Maze, where he would spend 13 summers living with huge brown bears. We also hear about his motivations for being there with the bears, some completely fabricated and others relateably genuine. Finally, before ending episode one, Wes takes us to another location on the Alaska coast, where in the year 2000, a man is killed by a coastal brown bear and many people in the bear world feel as though Timothy might be racing toward a similar end.  Watch here: The Grizzly Deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard - Part 1 ~~ 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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Register today at Richfield, Utah.com. It's good work. I feel good about it. I feel good about myself doing it. And I want to continue. And I hope I can. I really hope I can. But if not, be warned. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. Be worn, guys. I'll die for this podcast. I will die for this podcast. I will die for this podcast. Welcome back to Tooth and Claw, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. We are really excited for today's episode. I'm Wes Larson. I'm, Wes Larson. I'm I'm a bear biologist. I've been working with bears since about 2012. And I'm here with my two co-hosts. My little brother, Jeff. Jeff, you want to introduce yourself? Hi, yeah. I'm Jeff. I'm Wes's little brother. I've worked with bears a little bit with Wes, black bears, and I'm just excited to be here. And Mike, our best friend. Hey, I'm the producer of the podcast. I've worked with Wes in helping him move into his apartment a couple of times. It's really about it as far as our professional. Yeah, I gave you a coat.

Wes was like, who's that guy who helped me move into my apartment? Maybe we could get him as like our third person. Let's do a podcast together. Yeah, anyway, we're tooth and claw. On this podcast, we talk about animal attacks. We talk about why they happen, what we can learn from them, and how often the media gets them wrong. And today, we're talking about probably the biggest story that we've done so far,

the one that we've definitely been recommended the most. And I'm really excited for it. Are you guys excited? You found this story through listeners sending in it, right? Never, never heard of this guy before now, but really was fun to learn about him. No, actually, it's funny you should say that because when I started my career as a bear expert, I was doing office work for Tom Smith because he like wasn't promising me anything, but he gave me kind of an office job.

And me and him would just talk about bear attacks all the time. and over time that conversation naturally drifted to the most famous bear attack probably of all time. And the more I spent around Tom, the more I learned about Timothy Treadwell. And when he was doing his years living with the bears, Tom was working for the USGS and Katmai as a bear biologist. And he had lots of run-ins with Timothy. And he has like personal correspondence between him and Timothy. And he would like call him Timmy or Timmy the bear when we talked. It was really funny.

That's great. But I think Tom finally realized he wasn't getting rid of me. He decided to bring me on as a student. And when he did that, he was like, hey, I want to show you Treadwell's autopsy photos. And for me, that was something I was very excited to see. For sure. It was the stepbrothers meme where it's like, did we just become best friends? Yeah, exactly.

Looking at like the worst photos in the world. Yeah. And I'll admit, like I was excited to see him. And the mortician that you see in the film Grizzly Man, which we're going to talk about a lot. No, I got some thoughts on him. Yeah. He sent these photos to Tom and to a bunch of other bear biologists. They contain a lot of different attack photos, but Treadwell's highlighted in them.

And I don't know if it was like Tom's way of trying to give me respect for bears or if he just saw like a kindred spirit in me. But either way, he was right. So in these photos, you can see Timothy and Amy's faces just like locked in agony. Timothy's been mostly consumed. His head and his spinal column and both arms are pieced together on the table. And they look fake. They look like a horror movie set. The skin on his head is split open down to the bone.

He's mostly scalped. There's very little that's left of him intact. And I think even less of Amy. And they're like truly horrific. Jeff, you've seen them. Mike, have you seen those photos? Yeah, when you posted them on Instagram a couple weeks ago, right? I did not post him on Instagram.

No, I've never seen them. Maybe I don't want to. You're going to. I'm going to show them to you in the next episode. They're pretty bad. And they're truly horrific. And for me, they actually did change the way that I view bears. Like it gave me a whole new respect for them.

And I've thought about Timothy more than I can quantify since that day. It's definitely been the attack that I've thought about them. most. It's been the number of the most requested story for our podcast. And I really hope we can do it justice. It's really complicated and really simple all at once. So the wait's finally over. You already spoiled it. Yeah. This guy doesn't survive, but we're finally going to tell. I do think, too, there are probably like a small amount of people who don't know who he was or anything. So that would be. Yeah, sure. They're about to learn a lot more about him than they ever bargain for. Yeah, this is the tragic story of Timothy Treadwell and Amy Huginard. All right. So,

not only is this the story that was most requested for us, but it also probably is the story that we've covered that has the most information out there about it. There's books, TV shows, articles, and of course, the documentary Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog, which may be my favorite documentary ever. I love this documentary. It's so good. I consulted all of them. I consulted all of lot of different sources. There was two that I used the most that I read multiple times. One is this book, The Death in the Grizzly Maze by Mike Lipinski. And then the second book is on my iPad, but it's the grizzly maze, Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears by Nick Jans. Well, you also personally consulted with Werner, right? Which is pretty sweet. Yeah. I had a one and a half,

or about an hour long car ride with Werner Herzog where me and him got to talk about Timothy the entire time. That's so cool. Yeah, it was the most interesting car ride of my life. And he was just everything I ever expected him to be. He gave me like a two-handed handshake afterwards and just said it was like such a fun car ride. It was...

Oh, wow. Yeah. I'll always remember it. I gave his wife a hug. Can you imagine if Paul Hollywood gave a two-handed handshake? Oh, man. Someone's head would explode. In the most recent season, he gives a handshake and the guy grabs it with his other hand.

And I could tell. Yeah, that's right. Just sucking up that handshake. Yeah, so there's a lot of information. I really dove into it. I've been thinking about this and researching this one for weeks. Definitely the most time I've put into one so far. But I would recommend those two books.

If you want to learn more, there's a lot we're going to have to leave out. And if you want just the whole complete story, those two books are going to. great. I got time if you want to just put it all in. Just read the books. Should I just read them? Just don't leave anything out. Yeah, first tooth and claw five-parter. Let's go. I didn't leave out a ton. And this is going to be two parts. There's a chance it'll trickle into three. And we'll definitely have a subscriber episode or two based around this. I think I might try and get Tom on the phone and see if he's willing to be on an episode with us, talk about Timothy. But one other thing I wanted to bring up is the art for these. episodes was done by Alyssa Gonzalez. It's been really fun working with Alyssa on this particular art, really thrilled with how it turned out. So thank you, Alyssa, for helping us. Her ad is, yeah, her ad is Gons artist on Instagram. So check her out. Okay, so we're going to start on episode one, and episode one is about Timothy Treadwell's rise to prominence. So in 1989,

Timothy Treadwell was a 32-year-old bartender in California, whose main possession was probably his substance abuse problem. He was trying and failing to break into Hollywood, he had hit rock bottom, and a friend suggested that he'd take a trip to Alaska and reconnect with nature. Specifically, this friend said that he should try to see some grizzly bears in the wild. So this sounded like just a ticket for Timothy, a road trip up to Alaska. So in the summer of 89, he hopped on a motorcycle.

packed with a cheap tent, a cheaper sleeping bag, and a point-and-shoot film camera, and he rode all the way up to Alaska. I will say, like, we're going to say a lot of things about Timothy in these episodes. One thing that I don't think anyone can really cast too much doubt on is he was really tough. Like, he did really hard stuff and didn't really complain about it at all. Like, I think this is one of the tougher people that we've covered, and not in, like, a macho kind of, like, wearing it on their sleeve way, like just innately, very, very tough. For sure. Yeah, riding a motorcycle to Alaska really highlights that.

So he actually saw his first bear while he was hiking in Rangel St. Elias National Park, which is this really big, large, sprawling park. It's just southeast of Anchorage. And it was a pretty typical sighting for an inland grizzly bear. The bear saw him, looked at him for a few seconds, sniffed the air, and then sprinted away into the brush. And Timothy had this impression like, oh, this is an animal. that has a really healthy fear of humans. And it left him really excited but kind of underwhelmed because he really wanted to like connect

with the bears. He needed the bears to understand that he wasn't like other humans, that he wasn't a threat. And he felt like if he could just get close to one, it would understand that he wanted to be its friend, that he wanted to like live among it. He almost like felt bad that he scared the bear. He did understand. Yeah, that's exactly how he felt. Like he felt like the bear misunderstood his.

intentions. So he left for Catmai National Park on that trip, and he had heard that it was one of the best places in Alaska to see giant grizzly bears or brown bears up close. And on a rainy afternoon in 1989, Timothy walked a well-used bear trail in Katmai, and he started seeing tons of piles of bear scat. So he's like, okay, I'm in the right place. He sits down and he waits, and he's sure that a bear's going to pass it any minute, and he sits there for hours in the rain, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, and by 11 p.m., it's Alaskan summer, it's starting to get kind of dark, and he's so frustrated that he's on the verge of tears, that he hasn't seen a bear. But he's about to get exactly what he wanted, maybe a little bit more than he wanted.

As he's walking back along the trail toward his camp, he looks up to see two large Alaskan brown bears ambling down the trail toward him, and his adrenaline spikes, he starts shakily kind of singing to these bears. And then he's backing away slowly while he's doing this. And he's thrilled that both of these bears just kind of veer off into the bush. It works.

He realizes like, oh, I got really close to them, but they wanted nothing to do with me. So he's really excited. And then suddenly some movement catches his eye. He looks back up in the trail and there's a huge 1,000 pound male coming down the trail toward him. And it's getting dark.

It's raining. he gets nervous again he starts singing and backing up but when a bear's this big just them walking slowly they still move at a pretty good clip and so he can't back up as fast as this bear is walking toward him

and he stumbles in this wet mud and falls face first into the mud and immediately just curls up into the fetal position and you just have to imagine he's just waiting for this bear to tear into him pretty scary.

Tucker keeps singing in that circumstance. But instead of feeling claws and teeth tearing into him, what he actually felt was the coarse hair and the soft belly of this bear as it brushes on his shoulder as it carefully steps over him and continues down the path. Oh, wow. That bear did not give a fuck. Did it?

No. Just like, I'm not even going to like veer off my path at all. Just walking straight over you. Yeah. That's great. So he rises to his feet a different person. He felt like this hypothesis that he had that bears would be able to recognize his good intentions and accept him was proven correct. And as he walks back to his camp, he's feeling euphoric and he starts repeating the mantra, thank you bears, thank you bears.

So I can't help but think had this bear swatted him or bid into him or just clawed him up a little bit, this whole story might have never happened. he might have realized like, oh, bears are pretty dangerous. I need to be pretty careful around bears. Yeah. But it didn't. It's an interesting thought. Exema is unpredictable.

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We are going to go back to 1957 to Timothy's birth and childhood. There'll be plenty of time to go back to whenever he will. was born and murder him. But right now we got other fish to... Priorities, I guess. Yeah. Bad ones, but priorities. So I want to mention here, I didn't read Timothy Treadwell's book that was written by him and his longtime friend, Jewel Pelovak. I have a few reasons for that. One of the main ones... Maybe we could use the time machine so you can read it before we do the episode. Go back a couple days and read his book. Now, one of the main reasons I didn't read it is because he's

actually an unreliable narrator and I didn't really want to mix up facts with a lot of the tall tales that he told yeah I think you get that impression from watching grizzly man like yeah concocted we're gonna get into that there's a scene where he's like Australian persona like with his girlfriend and he just emphasizes how alone he is being alone out there like five times yeah yeah he also was famous for creating like personas he was pretending to be British for a long time, like a cockney accent or Australian. He said that he was born in the Australian bush as an orphan. So much so that when he died. Born as an orphan. Wow. Yeah. That's tough. I didn't say that right. But you know what I mean. Immaculate, some might even say.

So much so that when he died, a lot of the articles that were published about him, like kind of weren't sure if he was Australian or what. So I bring this all up just to say there's a fair amount of doubt about what we can actually believe about Timothy's life, especially his early years and his time in California. But Mike Lipinski, who wrote Death in the Grizzly Maze, did talk to Timothy's mom, Carol, Dexter, in his book, and I do think that represents one of the more factual sources for information on his early years. So he was born in 1957, and he was born Timothy Dexter in Long Island, New York, into a typical middle-class neighborhood. He's the third. He's the third. He's the third of five children. And I felt a lot of kinship with young Timothy learning about him because he was

by all accounts just completely obsessed with animals. And from an early age, he'd pretend to be different animals or like live among different animals nonstop. He had pet squirrels. He had pet all sorts of things. He also got his hands on pretty much any animal he could catch, but he never wanted to harm any of them. He just wanted to like be around them. It made him happy. He was really hyperactive. He had a hard time paying attention in school. So, Jeff, you could have some, you know. I can relate there for sure. Yeah, I can ship with him too.

But he got decent grades and he excelled athletically, especially when it came to diving. He really didn't have many friends or girlfriends when he was young. And a lot of the people that did know him say that was probably because he had this habit of being really explosive with people and getting into lots of fights over just about anything. Mike, you can relate to that part. Yeah, exactly.

No girlfriends. Oh, well, I mean. Burn. Actually, I think Mike's only one of us who had a girlfriend in high school. Yeah, I didn't have one. Truly peaked. Those demons would follow him into his teenage years, and he started drinking a lot. He got arrested a few times, and he ended up crashing the family car while drunk.

But he was so good at diving that he still ended up getting a scholarship to Bradley University in Illinois. And there's actually a lot of fake news out there, fake articles that say that his family cut ties with him after crashing the car, but that's not true. He loved his family. They loved him, even though he's kind of a tricky kid. And I'm sure they were really hopeful that this scholarship to a really good liberal arts university would straighten him out. Unfortunately, he was injured and he lost his scholarship. And then not long after he dropped out of university in his third year. When that happened, he moved to Long Beach, California.

So he's lived in Long Island and now Long Beach. Loves places that are long. Long places. Yeah. Right. And he started working as a bartender and a struggling actor. In 1987, he changed his name to Timothy Treadwell. He liked the alliteration, and Treadwell was a family name on his mom's side.

I think it's a great rebranding. It's much better than Timothy Dexter. especially for what he ended up doing. According to him and some close acquaintances, he got pretty heavily into drugs. There's this tale out there. Who knows if this is true? Because he's the only one that really has told it.

He says that he lost the role of Woody Boyd in cheers to Woody Harrelson. The bartender, yeah. His dad says that in the documentary. Yeah, because Timothy told them that. And he said that the role was his, and then it was given to Woody Harrelson. But also, like, the character's name is Woody, you know. You got to get to be Haroldson.

Woody Harrison was, like, a perfect choice. Yeah, and that is what, like, launched his career. To back Timothy up in his claim, I think the dad seemed like one of the most skeptical people of stuff Timothy says. And he kind of believed that one. Totally. But like I said, a lot of this stuff from this time period is all, you have to rely on Timothy to know. know if it's true or not. But there's no big reason to doubt that.

And that would suck if you're trying to be an actor and you got really close to like the huge break and just doesn't fall your way. Biggest shows of all time. Yeah. And he's very obviously, he's got a screen presence and a charisma that is very conducive to like a Hollywood persona like that. Without a doubt. I can buy it.

But yeah, come in second place to Woody Harrelson still. Nothing to sense that, you know. But he handles it pretty well, right? Losing that part. He doesn't. So he drops into a deep depression. He really hits rock bottom with drugs and alcohol. In the late 80s, he's working in this like Renaissance-themed restaurant or medieval restaurant.

And he meets Joel Polovac, yeah, who also works there. She turns into a lover and a girlfriend for a few years and then just a friend, a really close friend. And they share a small apartment in Malibu. And a really key thing about Timothy during this part of his life, and really his whole life, is that he can't accept people thinking that he's ordinary. He feels like he has something special inside of him, so much so that he would put on this cockney accent or an Australian accent when he met people and spin these crazy tales about fighting with drug dealers or growing up in the Australian bush, just because he wanted people to see him as extraordinary.

And he's constantly reinventing himself. Sometimes it's better just to be ordinary. Yeah. Ask me than to give yourself a cockney accent. Totally. He probably watched Mary Poppins and was like, oh, that Dick Van Dyke guy, I want to sound like him. That's some real niche reference. Oh, come on.

Are you kidding me right now? That's like the most mainstream. It's not unbelievable. He doesn't pull it off very well. I know what you're talking about. Oh, my gosh. Anyway, as he's constantly reinventing himself, one thing remains constant. And that's his deep love for animals and the natural world.

This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Ronda 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 Lens. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. All right, so we're going to hop back in our time machine.

Seems like we forgot to do something, but whatever. We'll get back in next time. We're going to go back to 1989 and back to Timothy getting stepped over by this bear. He goes back to California and he doesn't drink for a month. He's changed. and he starts planning a summer trip for the next year back to Catmai. So that comes up. The next summer comes along.

He's just kind of working as a bartender and everything, just saving money for these expeditions to Alaska, living really on a budget so you can spend the money to go to Alaska and see more bears. And this time, in 1990, he flies into the middle of nowhere in coastal Catmai, sets up his camp in a huge green field where dozens of bears are regularly seen graze. on these green grasses and sedges and waiting for salmon. And Timothy discovers that he's actually pretty good at reading bear behavior and really good at getting super close to them,

like close enough to touch them. And that first summer camping alone in this huge field, he makes a promise to God. And he says he'll stop drinking and devote his life to those bears. So there's a really tolerant female bear that he meets pretty early on. Well, the first half was great. Anyway, there's this really tolerant female bear that seems to just completely accept his presence. And he gets so familiar with this bear that he names her boobel.

And she becomes, that's funny that that was his first name. Yeah, yeah. She becomes 30 bear names. I know. I know. He's got some great names. We're going to talk about that later. But this is one of the better ones in my opinion.

She becomes one of the dozens of bears that he would name during his 13 summers in Catmai. He also calls this area that he found, in quotation marks, the grizzly sanctuary, and he decides that it's his life's mission to protect this area and protect these bears that call it home. All right, we're going to do a little biology, history, and geography here. First of all, Timothy repeatedly calls these bears grizzlies. He's known as the grizzly man. This was the grizzly sanctuary. He would go on to form a non-profit with Jewel that is called grizzly people.

And technically, these bears can be considered grizzlies. They're the same species as what we commonly call grizzlies. But just about any bear biologists in the world is going to refer to these bears as either Alaskan Peninsula brown bears or just coastal brown bears. Don't they also call them Codyak? We're going to give them that in a second. So a Kodiak, or actually we might as well just do it now. A Kodiak brown bear or a Kodiak grizzly is this animal that lives in Kodiak.

And they, because they're on this separate island from all these other bears, and there's so many of them, they're actually the only accepted subspecies of brown bear in North America. They are Ursus Archdoz Midendorfi. And all the other bears, even though people say grizzlies are Ursus Arctos Horribes. Willis, that's not an accepted subspecies. The rest of them are all saying. Everyone's always saying that to me. Yeah. It's a great subspecies name, but it's not one that's accepted.

And they're typically like larger than other bears, right? Exactly. It's like Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. Like Hulk Hogan was big, sure, but Andre the Giant was just bigger. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, so that's great that you bring that up, Jeff. But really quick, just to like nail this in.

The rest of the world calls these animals brown bears. Grizzly is just a North American nickname. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. We're going to get into like the difference between grizzlies and brown bears, interior grizzlies, and coastal brown bears in a second. We don't want to get two in the weeds here,

but it's really important to know that inland grizzlies behave much more differently than coastal brown bears. And that's a big reason that Timothy was able to get so close to these bears. and spend so much time around them before he was killed. I think he liked using the name Grizzly because it sounds really like dangerous and ferocious and he played off of that. But if he was actually around Grizzlies,

as we know them, it would be a different story, I think. Well, he can't really call himself like the brown man either. Brown man. Yeah. Brown people is the name of his. Yeah. Not a great name.

So in the Grizzly maze, the book by Nick Jans, there was something I really liked that he said, and he compared inland grizzlies to coastal brown bears, and he said it's like comparing a Labrador with a pit bull, because they are the same species, but behaviorally they're very different. And a big part of that reason is food. Coastal brown bears have a plethora of good food options.

They have tons of resources. The ocean brings them clams, there's dead marine mammals, salmon runs, this really thick sedges and grass, berries, and vegetation. And with that much food available, bears really don't have to compete at the same level. So they're able to share space and kind of all access these different resources. And that makes them much more tolerant of other bears and much more tolerant of other animals in general, including humans.

They're just really well-fed and happy. It's the hangary concept. Yeah, it is. If everyone's just getting plenty of food, like why fight for it? You know, like, why risk anything if you have everything you need? So that's kind of how these bears operate. So Katmai, where Timothy was, in the 80-something years before him, that that place had existed and been known as Katmai, he, no one had been killed by a bear. This was like probably the highest density of brown bears in the world and no one had ever been killed by one there.

That's interesting. Yeah. So interior grizzlies have to spend a lot more time searching for and defending their food, and it makes them much more cantankerous and unpredictable. So if Timothy had tried to do what he did among like the grizzlies of Brooks Range, Alaska, or in Tom Minor Basin in Montana, he probably would have seen a lot of bears running away and then been charged a lot more than he was. So I think he would have had a whole different view of what grizzlies are.

Even though these bears are really tolerant and really well fed, they're still wild animals. They're still powerful predators. Just this year, can either of you tell me what happened right before Fat Bear Week that tons of people saw on a live camera? Yeah, that one fat bear killed the other fat bear. Yeah, not a good display of sportsmanship. Yeah, and I mean, there was plenty of food.

The Sandoron wasn't bad this year. Double up its size right before the contest. Just eating another bear. I can't remember if that one won. I don't even know who won this year. But I doubt they gave it to that one. I think it lost a lot of its steam when that happened. Yeah.

So, yeah, like you said, Jeff, a bear got killed this year at Brooks Falls. They have some pretty intense fights, and sometimes it leads to dead bears. And Timothy saw this. He saw cannibalism. He saw all sorts of stuff while he was there. But I think the thing... But he handled it very rationally. Yeah, he always.

He always just saw it through a completely scientific lens. Over the years though one thing that he did learn and he learned this really well was that dominance is everything to these bears And then when he acted dominant and stood his ground or even advanced on a bear that was acting aggressively It was almost always enough to stop the interaction oh he would try to stop it Yeah because the bear would be charging him or whatever and oh yeah yeah yeah when he acted dominant like ran at the bear often these bears are like oh I didn't expect that's surprising to me I don't know because a lot of times if a bear. bear does that to another bear. Like they still end up like kind of

wrestling a little bit I feel like but when it's Timothy they would like not engage. Yeah. I think he knew like where to stop it you know like if the bear kept coming then he would back down but yeah those bears sometimes they're like no let's fight you know

and Timothy never wanted to fight with them so I think when the bear pushed him then he would back off and that's usually enough to stop it too. Occasionally I am challenged and in that case the kind warrior must, must, must become a samurai, must become so so formidable, so fearless of death, so strong that you will win. You will win. Even the bears will believe that you are more powerful.

So he, I mean, he's not wrong about this. Like being dominant with the bear like this that's pretty conflict diverse, it's kind of like the same strategy as a black bear. They don't really want to fight. They have plenty of food. There's not a good reason to engage. So it can be really effective. Do you think samurai is the right choice of a warrior to, like, summon? I think it's the nerdiest choice to summon.

So I think it fits pretty well. I feel like whenever anyone compares themselves to a samurai and they're, like, white, I'm always like, oh, my God, okay, here we go. You weren't. Didn't like the last samurai very much? I like the last samurai, but anyway. Okay, so this is his strategy and it works because why fight if you don't need to fight, especially some strange animal that you don't really even know how it works?

And in the early years, he actually did carry bear spray just in case things got a little crazy. But one of his favorite bears, Cupcake, who often charged him, so that name's a little ironic, charged in and he thought it was going to make contact with him and he sprayed cupcake. And the effect that it had on this bear broke his heart. He felt like he had injured the bear. He had caused agony to this bear and he vowed never to use bear spray again. And to be honest, like he gets a lot of hate for this decision among bear biologists. I kind of agree with it because I think if you're going to put yourself among bears and live with them

and constantly kind of harassed them, you shouldn't just be spraying them. Like, you're putting yourself in that position. I don't think it's fair to spray a bear at that point. Because you're... Like, if you're asking a bear to get close to you, then you spray it. It's kind of like, well, you're asking it to get close to it.

Exactly. Not even asking, but, like, actively approaching and touching them yourself. Right. Like, it probably, he should have carried it, but I don't think he should be spraying bears. And they're, fine after they get sprayed, but it does hurt for a bit. So I don't think it's really fair.

So I actually kind of agree with him on that. I do think he should have had an electric fence around his camp, which is something else. A lot of people said he should have done. Yeah. As the Krispy Chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no.

Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 3-62326 participating stores only well supplies last the app for full terms. So let's talk a little bit about Timothy's Grizzly Sanctuary or this huge green meadow of sedges that he found that's full of bears. This is actually Hallow Bay. It's a really well-known spot among bush pilots, wildlife guides, and Catmine National Park. staff, and it's known as being one of the best places in the park to see bears.

In fact, after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, a lot of the different boats and planes that were helping with the cleanup were noticing, like, oh, there's a hell of a lot of bears in this huge green meadow in Hallow Bay. And that's kind of part of what kicked off the bear viewing industry in the area. So it's good that that oil spill happened. You made that discovery? No, it's not good. But it is kind of cool that more of Catmai was kind of put on the map because of that.

It's a silver lining is what I would say, Mike. Okay. Uh-huh. Kind of like the way the oil lined the surface of the ocean and killed all those animals. It's an oil lining to this story. Right. It's like the rainbow and the oil. Yeah.

Oh, there you go. I like that, Jeff. That was clever. This is all happening kind of at the same time that Timothy is discovering these areas. And a little bit of history. Katmai National Park was first. established as a national monument in 1918 because there had just been this huge explosion of two volcanoes like the biggest volcano explosion ever recorded in north america or in alaska and

there's this high level of volcanic activity so they decided to kind of set this area apart because it was so geologically significant there's six active volcanoes in cap my and then it was set aside as a national park and a preserve in 1980 so jeff we've been to catmai we actually flew there I have you. Yeah. No, we have together. We flew there with Timothy Treadwell's pilot, Willie Fulci. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

So can you just kind of describe what it's like coastal catmai? Yeah, I mean, I think it is probably the most beautiful day in my life. Like Glacier National Park I often think of for like most beautiful places, but flying in the planes through Katmai, like, I don't know. It's just, it felt like you were somewhere. tropical. Like the water was so light blue that like the water looks warm even though it's freezing cold because it's just so clear. It's so like light blue. There's like green trees everywhere and then like waterfalls everywhere. I was in the B plane. West was in the A plane. But it's also really cool having two planes because you could like have a little more perspective seeing the planes like

switch positions and stuff as we were flying there is the only time i've ever seen humpback whales but there's humpback whales breaching and we like flew over them and then like as soon as we landed at catmai we saw two bears um doing some pretty r-rated stuff to each other yeah it was hot uh yeah i i would agree with you like i've been a lot of places catmai is top three prettiest place I've ever been in my life. And flying in there on a float plane is something I'll never forget. It's really, really amazing. And like Jeff mentioned...

That pilot, too, was so cool, like the guy from the documentary. Did you still have that sweet mustache? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Oh, it's so great. That's an all-timer. He's like, he became a friend. He's so down to earth and love Timothy.

We'll talk about him a little bit more, but just a really cool person. Well, it was funny, too, like, they flew me and Wes out. It's Philson. No free ads, but there's a free ad for Philson, but they flew me and Wes out and, like, had us in their clothes and stuff. And then they just, like, gave one to the pilot randomly, and he just made it look so much cooler than, like, anyone else could make their clothes look. A million times better than us.

Yeah. All right. So it is important to note that before this place was, like, discovered, in quotation marks, The Aleutic people had been living there for about 7,000 years before it was set aside as a national monument. I really like the part in Grizzly Man documentary where Herzog talks to the Aleutic Museum operator. And he pretty much just says, oh, yeah, we don't with bears. Well, it's interesting, too. Like, I feel like the wildlife biologist kind of were a little forgiving to Timothy.

And that dude was the least. Like, he was like, no, that guy's kind of an idiot. I don't like that he did that. Yeah. So one question a lot of people might have is how did Timothy just go camp in a national park and get so close to bears without getting in trouble? And this is something we're going to dive into a lot more in episode two. But just briefly, he did actually get cited six different times for violations, everything from improper food storage to harassing other visitors. And during his 13 years in the park, they would actually go on to create a rule that some people called the Treadwell rule. and that rule was that you had to move your campsite at least one mile after camping in a given spot for seven days. And that made things a lot harder for him.

So he had to get like a boat and he would actually break that rule quite a bit. And the other rule that he was just constantly breaking is that you're not supposed to approach bears in the park closer than 50 yards. And females with cubs get at least 100 yards. So he's constantly breaking rules, but it's a big park and one where access is really limited. to boats and planes. So there's not really a ton of patrolling, and he gets away with a lot. And the next episode, as I mentioned,

we're going to really get into his relationship with the leadership of the park. So beginning in 1990, oh, go ahead. I think that's a good point, though, just like, it's such a, like, people do wonder a lot, like, how did he get away with all this? Right. Well, like, there's not really rules

when there's no people around, you know? Right. Like, when we flew in, we didn't see a single other person, and like there was no one checking or permit or anything, you can just kind of go there. So beginning in 1990, he makes annual trips to the Grizzly Sanctuary. He spends time in Kodiak for a bit,

but bears are a little bit harder to get access to in Kodiak, especially with a lot of other people around, and more and more he just focuses on Kappmai. And while he's in Kappmai, he also forms close bonds with foxes. And his tent, he tends to position really close to fox dens. He's feeding these foxes. They're smart critters. And they learn to tolerate him touching them and patting them and whatnot

because he's constantly giving them food. Timmy the fox is his favorite. He names it Timmy. And essentially is his companion in Catmide during all 13 years that he's there. And I do have to admit it's kind of cool watching him constantly being followed by foxes. I love it. Foxes are so cool. And like, I don't know.

What was he? feeding them. Where was he getting food? Was he living off the land too or did he? What was that all about? He would have food drop-offs like every few weeks by his pilots, but he really ate, he ate like peanut butter and tang and power bars and then like candy corn and Coke. Like he was just eating like tons of sugar just to kind of power him through. I feel some derision in your voice. I just want you to know that's kind of what I live off of. No, that's pretty much what I eat when Jesse's not around. Me and West too when we work with bears. that I was like, oh yeah, right up our alley. Yeah, Jeff would be like, what's for lunch? And I'd be like, this granola bar. Well, what are we baiting the traps with?

Yeah. I loved when the fox stole his hat. And like, I remember that part. We watched it in my wildlife biology class in high school. And like, that part was like the funniest part to us. Because like at first he's kind of like, oh, that's cute. And then when the fox like keeps going and takes the hat to the den. And he flips a switch and it's just like, oh my God.

That's important to the next couple weeks. When he suddenly sounds like butters from South Park too. Let's play that clip really quick. Yeah. Hey, who's stealing that hat? Let me see that hat. Ghost, I want that hat. Man.

Ghost is a man. Ghost, what are you doing with that hat? Ghost, that hat is a very important hat. Drop it. Hags! Oh, god damn it! I can't believe this! Ghost!

Where's that fucking hat? That hat is so friggin' valuable for this trip! Ghost, you come back here with that friggin' hat! If it's in the den, I'm gonna f' explode. Ghost, where's that hat? But it's not okay to steal it. Oh man. Oh man

It's a freaking dead It really does sound like butters It does It's so good I think it kind of aged well For him almost though Because like I saw that pre Like social media

I was like This guy is absolutely insane Like he wasn't upset And now he's so upset Yeah But like having made a little bit Like I'm like an amateur content creator Whatever you want to call me

Like having taken some pictures with bears and had some cool experiences where I have my picture with something cool. If you look stupid, it sucks. Like, if you, like, have your underwear popping out or, like, your belly, your hair looks dumb, it's like, oh, damn it, this is such a cool picture and I look like such an idiot. So I kind of get it now. He's, like, out there filming all this stuff with bears and, like, he just wants his hat to keep his freaking hair out of his face.

Totally. Sure. Totally. And it's not like he can just go get another hat, you know? Yeah. So he does obviously have his video camera with him. And over his 13 years, he records over 100 hours of video. And in my opinion, I think the video camera kind of becomes a Wilson to him, like castaway Wilson.

Yeah. Where he just is spending a lot of time talking to it. And it is like almost like it's his friend or his therapist. And something I want to mention here is that. Aside from him, like, always having this fascination with animals, he doesn't really have any experience in the outdoors prior to going to Alaska or any practical knowledge whatsoever when he starts. Like, he didn't go to school as a biologist, any of that stuff.

He really just views nature through these rose-colored glasses. And when something unexpected or violent happens, it really shakes him. And Werner talks about this in his film, but in my opinion, like, Those moments make for some of his best commentary. And one of my favorite parts is where he finds this dead bee that died, and it's on a flower, and it's just so funny to me. So I want to play that really quick, too. So sad.

This is a bumblebee who expired as it was working at doing the pollen thing on this Alaskan fireweed, and it just is just, it's really touched me to no end. It went, it was doing its duty He was flying around Working busy as a bee And it died Right there It's beautiful, it's sad, it's tragic

I love that bee Well the bee moved Is it sleeping? Is that sleeping? That's probably my favorite scene I just love it Yeah I do think it

It illustrates like This guy wasn't a scientist Like, he's just commenting on what he's... That's exactly why I wanted to bring it up. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity,

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Okay, so when Timothy goes back to California, he's armed with these incredible photos and videos of him around bears. He sells some of these photos. He starts doing presentations around the state for young children in schools. And he and his friend Jules sit up a lot of nights talking about how they can turn this passion into something bigger. And sometime in the early 90s, they come up with the idea of starting grisly people.

which is a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to protecting brown bears. But what are they protecting them from? Well, since pretty much the... Isn't that what they say? Yeah. So he has a dual-fold mission pretty much. He asserts that he's there to both study and protect these bears. So let's start with that first one really quickly.

We're not going to spend a lot of time on this because it's pretty clear cut for me. he claims that he was studying the bears and that his proximity to them gave him insights that no one else had. But bear biologists pretty much immediately refuted this claim because there had been decades of research on these bears. Even while Timothy was there, my mentor, Tom Smith, was doing a study on electric fences with these bears and what substrates work best for electric fences. So they were saying, listen, this guy isn't studying bears, He's just naming them and kind of talking about their relationships.

And there's a really good quote from Tom in the book Grizzly Maze where he talks about like reading Timothy's book. Because Timothy wrote a book about his studies with Brown Bears and the culmination of his years of study. And Tom says, there's not one thing, not one single thing in that book that I didn't already know or that I couldn't look up in five minutes. Which is harsh, but it's true. And I do want to play a quick clip of one of like a typical observation from Timothy. Well, here I am at the scene of the fight. It looks as if tractors tore the land up, raked it, wrote it, tilted, tossed it about. There's fur everywhere.

And in the camera foreground, excreted waste in the middle of the fight so violent, so upsetting that Sergeant Brown went to the bathroom, did a number two during his fight. extremely emotional, extremely powerful. So, you know, some real hard-hitting science there. Basically, though, the stuff that Timothy was collecting was akin to the kind of stuff that the first people from like Western civilization that arrived there to document coastal brown bear activity would have said, you know, like, oh, you know, Bubel likes hanging out with Mr. Chocolate, you know.

It's just like very, very basic stuff. And I, and so I don't, I'm not trying to like shit on him too much, but he wasn't a bear biologist. He wasn't coming up with any hypothesis, hypotheses. He wasn't testing anything. He was just observing bears and talking about their relationships. And that's not really anything ground. He didn't really break any ground in the bear.

Exactly. Exactly. You might get to this later. but was the footage that he captured significant or important in any way scientifically? Not scientifically, but I think his cinematography, he captured stuff that a lot of people hadn't seen in that bear biologists, sorry, I shouldn't say that they hadn't seen, that they hadn't recorded. Bear biologists had all seen this stuff, fishermen, guides, all sorts of people have seen

all the stuff that he had seen, but they hadn't captured it from such close range. So his video and his photos are quite spectacular. Like I think Timothy Treadwell was a great documentarian. Even just his camera presence is really impressive, I think. But he wasn't a scientist. He wasn't a bear biologist. Can I... One thing that I think...

You can say I'm wrong. One thing I think he might have taught us about bears is that with like these Codiac Grizzlies or whatever you want to call them, like a person could walk up and touch. Yeah. Yeah. A person can walk up and touch them.

without getting attacked. Like, I don't know if that was really, like, proven until he did it. There was precedent for it already. Like, Charlie Russell had lived in Kamchakka with brown bears. There's other people that had already done this stuff. And bear biologists knew that they were really tolerant bears, but they also knew that constantly being around them and constantly being this close to them is a form of harassment.

You can see in his videos, these bears are never... It's not like beneficial information. No, they're never fully comfortable around him either. Like they're constantly looking up at him. They're constantly kind of checking him out. And that bear otherwise would just be focused on fishing, focused on relaxing. So it is a form of harassment. He was harassing these bears.

And I do feel that pretty strongly. And I don't want to, again, I don't want to be too hard on him. I'm going to talk about some of the good stuff about Timothy. But the claim that he was studying them isn't true. And then even more so, the claim that he was pretty. Protecting them by just being there isn't true. Yeah. I understand why he said that because it's like if he wanted to be out there,

it's kind of like he has to have some type of purpose. Totally. And we're going to get into this quite a bit. So he refines that message finally by saying he's protecting them from poachers. And basically that these poachers are going to know that he's there, that he has eyes on these bears, and that they'd be taking a big risk to kill them. and he constantly asserts that he would take a bullet for Tabitha or that he would die for these animals.

And it makes sense on paper, and I think it works in a place like Africa, like East Africa, where rhinos are given bodyguards to protect them from poachers, but it's not really necessary in catmite. Not only is it not necessary, it's completely unnecessary. I have a hard time thinking of bears somewhere in the world that are better protected than these bears.

And there actually hadn't been a case of bear poaching in catmise since 1970. And when they're poached illegally anywhere in Alaska, it's somewhere where people aren't going to be seen. And Hallow Bay and Cathlia Bay, which he was going to use later, are located in some of the most used parts of Katmai, and the thread of poaching there is pretty much zero. But it's the message he's selling to the public

and to the donors of Grizzly people, and he sells it really well. Documentaries are made about his work. He's featured in People Magazine, on Dateline, on the Tom Snife. show. He writes a book, which Jule helps him with pretty extensively. And in all of that media, he claims that without his presence in the grizzly sanctuary and the grizzly maze, people would be killing these bears for their gallbladders, for their hides, and just for what he calls a thrill kill. And this is all bullshit. And he knows it. And this is actually where I lose a lot of the little respect that I had for Timothy, because he could have just been honest and said that he

loves the way that the bears make him feel. He loves taking photos and videos of them and teaching people about them, but that's not his message. He has to invent this mission, and he makes it a lot easier to raise money, and they raise a lot of it. He has wealthy private donors, celebrity donors, like Leonardo Caprio, Pierce Brosnan, give him a lot of money. Not Leo. Yeah, Leo gives him 25K. And then he has corporate donors like Patagonia. And all of this is based on this guy is that he is there Detecting endangered grizzly bears from poachers, but they're not endangered and there are no poachers In the 13 years that he lives in Katmai, he never produces a single video or photo or even piece of evidence suggesting there's poachers in the area In 19th. Yeah, that one guy was like throwing a rock at that one bear. That was a guide. Yeah, that was a guide. He could have killed that bear less with that rock. Yeah, and that wasn't good bear behavior from that guide, but still wasn't a poacher. Yeah, for sure. And, and

Also, the Treadwell had been like super close to that grizzly bear. Right. So like that bear was habituated to people because of Treadwell. Right. That's why it's getting so close to those people. Exactly. Perfect. Yeah.

So where was that money being directed towards that? What was just to support his lifestyle or mostly these expeditions? Okay. It's expensive to fly out. Yeah. I mean, he didn't have an expensive lifestyle back in Malibu. And this is where I think he gets a lot of credit to. He, he was.

Well, the bears is expensive, I'm saying. Like, those planes and stuff. Yeah, he was funneling all this money into, like, better gear, into, you know, more trips, all of that. Like, he still just lives in this little apartment in Malibu when he's home. He's not, like, living the high life off of this money. Timothy, you can say a lot of things about Timothy. He, one thing I would argue to my death, he loved these bears. He did care about them probably more than anything else in the world.

So in 1998, he does finally take a photo of someone approaching Tabitha the bear with a shotgun over his shoulder. And Patagonia actually produces a pamphlet that they distribute that calls for an end to brown bear poaching in Katmai with this photo on it. It looks like a poacher that's about to kill Tabitha. And the person in this photo is actually a bear guide that knew Timothy really well that was taking photos of Tabitha. and he is very surprised to see himself in a photo talking about poachers. That's crazy. Yeah. So he and his boss get really mad at Timothy.

Yeah. And Timothy immediately apologizes. Patagonia quits distributing these photos and they even cut off their money for a little bit. But later Timothy would actually go back to using that photo in his presentations when he's talking about poachers. Oh, that dog. Yeah. Which makes me think like if Timothy Treadwell had AI. he would have created so much shit about poachers.

It would have been wild. All right. One final quick thought on this. Even if there were poaching in this park, there was something like 35,000 brown bears in Alaska at the time. So many that there are legal hunts for brown bears. Throughout the world, brown bears are an IUCN species of least concern.

In the lower 48, they are on the endangered species list. Their list is threatened. But they're not listed in Alaska. And Katmae's thought to have the highest density of brown bears Of anywhere in the world So what I'm getting at here is that it's not like he was in the sea of Cortez Risking his life for the last remaining of Akita Which is a little porpoise

He he was saying these bears needed protection It's kind of like saying elk and Yellowstone need protection Like there are a lot of them You know and they're gonna be okay Even if a couple were killed which they weren't These bears didn't need his protection He was using bears to scam people a little bit to get money.

He was, I think he was more so than that. I don't think he was so much trying. A lot of money and bears. Yeah. He was trying to get money, but it was to give him access to these bears. He just wanted to continue doing what he was doing, and he needed a message to sell to the public. So I do think he kind of was starting to buy,

he was drinking his own Kool-Aid in a way. Makes sense. Well, and like, I think if you're going to spend that much time out there just with bears, you got to come up with some reason you're there, you know? Exactly. Or at some point it's like, what am I doing? Well, this is, and this is maybe something better suited to part two, and I don't want to play armchair psychologist too much, but I think he definitely found God in a way

out in that wilderness to overcome his struggles back home. And when something has helped you in that kind of a capacity in your life, well, like, what more justification do you really need, you know? Totally. I love bears as much as Timothy, I would say, in a different way, though. It's like not, I think my passion is manifested differently. But I get it. Like, I get the feeling that they give you when you're around them.

And I understand his passion and I understand how it changes you. But I don't understand why he had to lie to kind of further that, you know? Yeah. So to this day when people on YouTube or in the media talk about Timothy, they still always kind of mentioned that he dedicated his life to protecting bears. And I really just want to emphasize that that message needs to change because he didn't protect these bears. How would you say it? I would say he dedicated his life to being close to bears, you know.

Loving bears. Yeah, he had a passion for bears. I think we can talk about mental illness. We can talk about using nature to overcome addiction, passion for wildlife, for education for wildlife. but it wasn't protection. It just wasn't. And I don't think it's fair to say that it was because there were people that were protecting them.

They were doing it the right way. And Timothy wasn't. So, all right. So his star is growing, but Hallow Bay, or this Grizzly Sanctuary, is starting to become a bit more crowded with tourists and fishermen. And he starts looking for other locations in 1994. And a couple bays down from Hallow Bay is Cathlia Bay.

It has much more difficult times. It's really wild and bushy, and there's this great little shallow salmon stream that leads from the end of a lower lake up to a higher lake. That stream is full of big flat boulders, and it's really only ankle deep, but these red salmon have to run up the stream in the fall to get back to their birthplace in the upper lake. So it's really easy. Salmon are so dumb. Just quit, like traveling to fresh water that kills you to breathe. just do it. I think it's maybe a little bit like exhibitionism where it's like the thrill adds to the

experience of mating, you know? Yeah. Like that's why people do it in the office sometimes. Kind of like danger of getting caught. They don't even like touch each other. Think about how fun, how fun having sex would be if you're maybe going to get eaten by a bear while you're doing it. I can't even imagine.

Oh, man. And if like your sex was like just looking for an egg to like. Do your business on when you're walking around. Yeah, it'd be pretty easy. Okay. This stream is some of the easiest pickings for brown bears in the area because of the way it is. And there are tons of bears there in the fall when the red salmon are running. These bears aren't very habituated to humans.

So to Timothy, this is a perfect new location. He starts there by making camp near the lower lake, which is somewhat accessible. He's going to get some great research. Yeah, his research is going to be top-notch. And when he gets there, he realizes, like, this is all alders. There's no clearings. It's just thick alders and head-high grass. And the bears make actual tunnels through the vegetation to get around.

And he's, like, really excited by this. He calls it the grizzly maze. And he starts spending every fall there. And then starting in 1998, he'll make his camp up by the upper lake on a small knoll. And that's actually where he and A. are killed in 2003. This place is a very different vibe. He isn't just laying in a field with brown bears that act like cows.

He's literally running into them in dark tunnels through alders and bumping into them on this narrow stream. And there's a lot of big wild males that challenge him a lot more often. And you get a feel for this by the names he starts giving these bears. He's calling them like demon, the red machine. And it's kind of like, it's a suicidal. place to hang out in camp, but he loves it. All of a sudden, I think a lot less of you in that one picture in the National Geographic. Timothy was doing that on like a daily basis. With grizzly

you did it like once. With brown bears. Yeah. Yeah, you and Jeff. That's fair. Uh, so Willie Fulton, his pilot has a good quote in the book, The Grizzly maze about how Timothy was when he was there. And I want to read that to you guys really quickly here. Okay, he says, he was a different guy at Allo Bay. Over there, you could just lay in the grass and relax. Caffley is a totally different place. You have to pay close attention. When the bears are ripping, it's wild. Bears popping in and out of the brush, fighting over fishing spots, some pretty crazy stuff. Timothy admitted as much to him. Oh, yeah, Fulton continues. He was always amped up when he came out of there. He knew exactly how dangerous it was, especially in the fall. That's one of the reasons I don't have any problem with what he did, because he knew the risk and he took it on. So Timothy had really found this peaceful Eden in the grizzly sanctuary and now an addictive new drug in the grizzly maze. And both of these places are changing him. People that saw him during those years often saw him running away from them, sometimes on all four like a bear,

and occasionally stopping to stand and look back like a bear. Like bears will stand up and check you out and Timothy would do the same thing. When we went to Cap Mai, the pilot I was with. was like, yeah, that Treadwell guy did some interesting stuff. And he's like, pretty weird guy, though. He'd, like, come out and swim naked when I brought people in our plane and act like a bear. I was like, wait, what? There's a lot of really funny anecdotes in these books about that kind of behavior.

And maybe we'll do more of them in episode two. But he would charge out at bear viewing people. He would swim naked, like Jeff said. He would curse. Or sometimes he would just be really. pleasant and like guide them around. And everyone just kind of describes him as a bit of an odd duck. And there's a good story again from Tom, Tom Smith, my mentor in the book Death in the

Grizzly Maze that I want to read really quickly. Biologist Tom Smith reported that he often saw Timmy the Bear, as he called him. He says he wouldn't come to me. He'd run away like a bear. He was a nut, but there's lots of them out there. I kind of like the guy. I'd seek him out whenever I saw him, whether he wanted it or not. One time there were two of us, bear biologists, walking along the beach and we found a dead brown bear cub.

Its mouth was full of porcupine quills. Timothy's camp was only about 100 yards away, so we walked over to it and I called his name. I knew he was in there, but he didn't respond. He was strange that way. I finally shook the tent pole and yelled, I know you're in there, Tim. Come on out. One of your bears is dead. Well, he shot right out of the tent, and I told him with tongue and cheek,

Tim, you're supposed to be protecting these bears, but you're not doing a very good job of it. I just found a dead cub 100 yards away from your tent And Tim got all serious Spread his arms and said hey that's nature Really good story Tom's funny guy Tom hits he's one of the funniest people I know Interesting the porcupine killed a bear too

Yeah a cub I could see how that would happen for sure But a cub learned Caged match porcupine beats grizzly Yeah A cub So even with all these quirky oddities and seemingly harmless interactions between Timothy and other people, pretty much everyone agreed that he's on a collision course with tragedy.

Coastal brown bears, however well-fed and docile, are still incredibly powerful predators, and sooner or later, every bear professional knew that Timothy was going to meet the wrong bear, and it would result in horrific consequences for him and for the bears which he devoted his life. Something happened in 2000 that really solidified the danger posed by coastal brown bears. So Hyder, Alaska is what essentially amounts to a mini version of Katmai. There's this beautiful stream that comes out of a glacial-fed mountain. It pours into a large coastal bay.

That stream is chock-full of running salmon during different times of the year, and bears descend on the stream to get nice and fat during those times. There's roughly 60 annual residents in Hyder, which means there's probably more bears than there are people there. So all three of us have been to Hyder. Mike, do you want to describe Hyder really quickly? Yeah. Trying to remember if I like that place or not.

No, I mean, you kind of touched on all of it, just kind of an idyllic river system, little ghost town almost, with like some saloons and a one big famous hotel, not even big, but that's kind of like the landmark of the town itself. But it really is defined by the nature around it. It's a really small, very remote place from what I remember. I think I remember that the way we got into it from BC, Canada, that's the only way to get there by road at least yeah it's right on the border with bc yeah and the glacier there's a massive glacier one of the biggest in that canada north america area couple glaciers are in there yeah a couple of them you have to feel about that just an overwhelming sense of boredom mostly disinterest i guess you could say glaciers glaciers are cooler the closer you can get to them and that one you don't get

very close to you're like but it's so big it's kind it is it's amazing the movie in son There's like one guy at the glacier parking lot selling like his music CDs. Yeah. Just like, this is the worst business idea I've ever seen in my entire life. To the 60 residents there. The Christopher Nolan movie Insomnia was filmed there. Yeah, it's like glaciers, fishing, bears, and trapping are the main things there. But the bear viewing there is so good that the state of Alaska built a platform to watch bears as they feed on salmon.

And it really is spectacular. But in 2000, George Toulos, who's from Ketchikan, Alaska, had decided to spend the summer in Heider working at a local restaurant. At times, he would camp in the nearby Run Amok Campground, which is really located at the end of the town and about three miles from the bear viewing platform. And when he would camp, he would just use like a pole with a tarp on it. It was really basic. It didn't offer much protection from the elements or from bears. And he understood that there was bears around, but everyone in the area knew that the bear. bears were well-fed and really benign as far as brown bears go. There had never been an attack in the

area. But what George didn't know was that in the summer of 2000, a particularly aggressive and unpredictable 300-pound sub-adult was showing up at the viewing platform, charging other bears, stealing fish, and then was seen in town at the dump, and not long after it even chased some campers out of the campground and ate some of their food. So wildlife officials placed a trap. They wanted to capture and probably euthanize this bear, and on July 13th, 2000, it showed up at the trap, but it didn't trigger it. On July 14th, George Toulos was laying in his makeshift tent when some noise outside got his attention during the night. He stuck his head outside to investigate, and the 300-pound brown bear immediately lunged forward and grabbed George by the head.

It shook him, removing his scalp and most of his face from his head. The bear then ripped open a lot of his left arm from the elbow up and tore into his right hip and thigh. He died sometime in the quiet of that night. The bear consumed some of his butt and thigh and then moved on. Oh man. In the morning, some passerbyes found his tent empty,

and they inspected the scene and saw his body lying near the tent. Some local sawmill workers came together to inspect the commotion, and they immediately knew which bear was responsible. So they organized a little posse. they found the bear which was back in the dump eating and they shot it and killed it.

And when it was inspected later by wildlife officials, they did find human remains in its stomach and it was the first person to be killed by a bear in the hider area. So I mentioned that the coroner in Grizzly Man sent Tom a bunch of autopsy photos from bear attacks and Georges were part of those autopsy photos. So I am going to show you guys those photos. Can I like opt out?

Remember when you used to have to get your like mom's signature to watch the rated R movie in high school. Well, you're not going to get your moms, so that's not fair. Well, that's exactly what I'm trying to do here. This is George Toulos. Good, golly. That doesn't look fun. No.

So just to describe this for people that can't see it, he pretty much had all the skin removed off his head. There's nothing else there. Covered in grass and his skull and stuff. Pretty bad. I would say at least eight out of ten outgies. Yeah, I would say ten out of ten. An easy time. So just so you guys know, these photos don't really even hold a candle to the Treadwell ones. But I don't know if Timothy ever really heard about this attack or the handful of other Alaska attacks. I think there was like eight people. Why do you think it attacked him if it was getting salmon?

This bear just was acting differently from any other bear in the area. and it was, for whatever reason, I think it was having a hard time getting typical natural food sources, so it was investigating other food sources. I think it was a subadult, and there are often bears that just haven't really figured out

how not to take risks yet. So just really unfortunate, but what happened was it was just the wrong bear, wrong time. I don't think Timothy had any idea about this. Maybe he did. There was probably eight or nine other people that were killed by brown bears in Alaska

during the time that Timothy was operating there. I think he was already so convinced of his powers as a bear whisper and felt so strongly about the bears and that they had accepted him to a level that they would never hurt him, that he felt kind of invincible. And next week in episode two, we're going to learn that this delusion of Timothy's was very, very, very wrong.

Yeah. Okay. I almost feel like he has a little bit of him that almost wants to get eaten. Yeah. Just not a happy person. Well, when you watch Grizzly Man, especially, or his other videos, he does constantly say, like, I might die out here. This might be something, I might, this might be my last season.

But I kind of think he was saying that to increase the drama, I don't think he actually thought the bears would ever hurt him. I think he really had convinced himself that he had figured out how to be a bear, how to avoid conflict. and I think he was kind of just saying that to make people feel like he was, you know, living really dangerously, which he was. Sure. Wes, do you remember the stupid thing we did on our hydrogen? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, we did a few, I think. You weren't a very biologist. Well, for me, the number one was going to be, I, like, slept on the road outside the car because we didn't rent a hotel. Yeah. And it was like a sedan car.

So it's like I either had to like sit up all night after like driving all day So I just like laid out in a sleeping bag But the other dumb thing is we went in the river they were fishing in and caught salmon and it's actually Kind of crazy like it's hard to catch them But like they are decaying a bit from the fresh water so if you're like kind of sneaky You can pick up one of these huge salmon with your hand Yeah and there was like carcass of salmon everywhere.

We'd just seen big bears down the river. It was pretty dumb. We were being dumb. We were being little, we were being Timothy's. I'm not saying Timothy's dumb. I don't think Timothy's a dumb person. I actually,

I do think he's really brave. Yeah, but he was taking some huge risks and he was doing it in, I think in my mind, in my opinion, he was doing it because of the way it made him feel. And in that process,

he was putting bears in harm's way and he was putting other people in harm's way, which we're going to talk about a lot in an episode two. So I do think his actions were bad for these bears. He's abituating them. Jeff, you brought up that great point that they approached those photographers to the point where they had to throw rocks at the bear because it was getting too close. And he was harassing them. He was stressing them out.

So no part of me is ever going to be able to say what Timothy did out there was good for bears. I will defend that to my dying breath. But I do think there's an argument that like what Timothy did out there was good for Timothy. And that's true. I think it changed him. And he had a really, really strong passion for bears. And I can identify with that. It's admirable.

But I don't think he approached it the right way. The thing I could say is like is really impressive. It is. He's brave. And he's tough. In my opinion, though, the worst thing that he did, was that he was broadcasting this bad behavior to the entire world. Over and over again in his videos, he says, don't do this.

Like, don't do what I do. I'm special. And he's not. Like, there wasn't anything that separated him from anyone else. And I can tell you, there's, like, tons of bear guides today that do this. Like, they can get super close to these bears too. He didn't have a special ability. He was really good at reading bear behavior.

So he'd lasted a long time. But he wasn't, there's nothing that separated him. He wasn't a bear biologist. He didn't have formal training. And it feels very much, there's a quote in Grizzly Mays, the book by Nick Jans, where he said, it's like a dad that has a marlblower, how do you say, a cigarette on his lip telling his son don't smoke. That's what this feels like.

It's very much, do what I say, don't do what I do kind of thing. And it's a bad example. Okay, that wraps it up for part one. I'm really excited for part two. we're going to talk a lot about Amy, her background. We're going to talk about the attack, the aftermath. We're going to talk about Timothy's relationship with the park service. And we're really going to dive in more about our feelings about him because he is complicated.

And there's people that really care about Timothy to this day. And I do want to do justice by him. So we're going to talk a lot about that. Sweet. Can't wait. Can't wait. All right. We've got a couple categories and some listener questions to get to.

And then we're going to wrap this up. Our first category, your favorite Timothy from pop culture. And I want to do a quick shout out to listener Adventure Parks, who also asked this question. I'm just going to go with Timothy Chalame. I really like that guy. I loved his, you know what? Actually, I'll go with his, like, person who won the New York City,

Timothy Chalmei look alike. Because that is funny. And he showed up, but he didn't win. You got to know these actors. Just love these things because it's got to just be like the craziest ego boost to see thousands of people. What's your favorite Timmy movie, Timothy Shalamee? Probably the first Dune. I love that movie.

That's a good pick. I'm going with Timothy Mosley, aka Timbaland, specifically his work with Missy Elliott, just an all-time duo. Some of the best music to ever be made through the 2000s, late 90s. Work it, you know the song Work It West. Can you do the little reverse part? I don't know if I know it, but he's got my favorite song on Beat Sabre. I like his Nelly Furtado stuff too. I just, oh yeah, for sure. I mean, he is a legendary producer. So he is. Mine was Timothy Oliphant, who I just, every time he pops up in a movie, I'm excited. I just feel like he brings a certain kind of like playfulness and fun to any movie or show that he's in. Um, so I just, Yeah, I really like Timothy Olyphant. Do you have a favorite role of him? Yeah, I really like the movie The Crazies that he was in. It's like a zombie movie where he's like a sheriff.

That was kind of when I really started getting into Timothy Olofant. And then I really like Deadwood, too. We recently watched the fourth Die Hard together. And it was not nearly as good as I remember actually kind of really liking it back in high school. But his performance, if there's anything about that movie that holds up, it's him. He's so good in it. He's also, this is a random one, but he's also like a really good podcast guest.

Oh. Oh, yeah, he's like, Conan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Conan, they're like genuinely, like, really good friends. And then, like, I've heard him on part of my take. He's funny. Rich Eisen Show. Like, he kind of takes over.

He's a lot more, like, charismatic and funny than the hosts, usually. Yeah, he would be able to take in. of our spots. Yeah. All right. My next question is your favorite scene from Grizzly Man. And I already said mine.

Mine's the B scene, both because of like the reversal where he's like, is asleep? And just where he says, the beast died. So good. So fun. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. What's your best? I, I rewound and watched it like eight times in a row yesterday while preparing was when the coroner or, uh, I guess that's what you would call him with the big metal casket.

He just keeps like slapping it and like rustling the lid around. And you almost can't even hear him speak. He's just like jostling this thing around so much. And he has just almost like this uncanny valley stare at the camera when he's speaking. It's so bizarre, but it made me laugh so hard. No, I want to talk the coroner for me too is just like, my thought was like this guy is like very open and very like willing. to say like everything and very honest and it comes off so creepy to me but then i was like thinking like how can a corner like not come off creepy like i feel like if they don't talk at all they're

creepy if they just like are completely normal it's like well that's creepy yeah i don't think they can win yeah but whatever the answer to that is like this guy's not doing it yeah like he This is His powerpoint that he's sent to Tom It's just it's a hundred and nine pages Most of them with really graphic Malling victims on him And he's really jockey throughout the entire thing

He's just like Like you can kind of sense Like a sense of giddiness As he's talking about all these things And it's kind of it's very disconcerting I'm sure it's a little necessary Maybe in that line of work Totally

Like it's a defense mechanism Against all the terrible things you probably sees every day. If you felt bad about everybody, it'd be like... Right. All right. Our next category is going to be something you genuinely enjoy so much that you'd camp near it for months just to be closer to it.

Oh, this one, it's hard for me to answer this because there's nothing I'd want to spend outside. Nothing like natural like that that would want, like, necessitating me camping for it. But if there were like an amazing use... book store out in the middle of the cat my wilderness and like for some reason that's the only place it existed and you had to like camp there that's it would get me because I love leafing through just hours and hours just going through every shelf of a used bookstore looking for old favorites or like new potential favorites or something like that so that'd probably be my answer you could like

I feel like you'd be the manic pixie dream girl and like a romantic comedy mic that's the nicest thing you've ever said. My answer that I came up with was a drive-in movie theater. I feel like I could just live at a drive-in movie theater for like all of June and July and be really happy. Yeah. So that's my answer. I think I'll go with, I want to say Taylor Swift, but then I was like too creepy.

The heirs tour behind her. Yeah. It's kind of bears. Yeah. Like animals. Like I would camp out. a long time to see like specific animals you know and it makes it cooler to like to be camping out there and be part of their environment yeah I thought you're going to say this sphere oh yeah I would

get a well like that's a hard one to camp out because you need to be in it yeah but like I would buy a house inside the sphere if I could yeah all right next question someone else that became famous in a field that they had no business being in. I'll go first. I'm going to go with Ted Bundy. All right. Became like one of the most famous serial killers ever. But like he's like too good looking.

He's too charming to like be in that line of business, I feel like. You know? Okay. I would leave that line of business to like the dudes who like can't talk to another person. and like, I don't know, they're just like, we know that guy's weird. I don't want, like, my serial killers being, like, charming, good-looking guys. Yeah? Yeah, like socially well-adjusted.

Well, I did it in most parts of their life. He did excel in that field, didn't he? Yeah. Mike, what's your answer? I'm going to go with gray ghost or tag. You tell people who he is because. Yeah, I will. So my favorite team, obviously, through the next.

90s was Michael Jordan on the Bulls. And the jazz were kind of their nemesis for a small little stretch there. And he was a significant player on the Utah Jazz for a long time. And he averaged something like four points over the 10 years. And he's just like the biggest most out of shape, uncoordinated dude. Like think Rudy Gobert, but like times 10 almost. And that's kind of what you're getting with him. He could barely catch a basketball.

I remember there was like one time. in like a close game coming down to the wire last minute he like shot a three-pointer which I'd never seen from him and it like was literally the worst shot I think I've ever seen until Ben Simmons maybe recently with his layup and it's funny because he's like a jazz legend he's one of the people that you always hear about yeah it's a military haircut this little hair cut dude my answer is and this is all politics aside Donald Trump

I just feel like this is a dude who was not a politician and has managed to probably become the most powerful politician in the world and has no business doing it so I like how you tried to pull the politics aside move

on that. Yeah. Literally just politics. Yeah. No but I mean I'm not going to talk about my personal my personal politics. But I feel like it's like the like no offense But no politics, but I'm going to name a full-on politician. It's just crazy.

I get what you're trying to say, though, because like 10 years before he ran, he was he was like a game show host on TV. He's the star of Home Alone 2. Home Alone 2, the star. It's crazy. First building. Really weird timeline. All right. Next one.

Best bear name Timothy came up with. And if your answer isn't Sergeant Brown, please explain why. I can't believe anyone would pick anything other than Sergeant Brown. That's just the best. It's clearly Sergeant Brown for me. I will say, though, when I first heard him say Cracker, called the One Bear Cracker, or kind of turned my head. I was like, wait a minute, what?

What's he doing? What's that all about? But it's Sergeant Brown. I like freckles a lot because, like, bears don't have freckles. They're, like, covered in hair. Like, how did you come up with that name? Yeah. That's so funny.

I really like squiggle. Squiggle is a good one. I'm just going to read through the ones that I noted down while I was researching. We have Mr. Chocolate, Bumble, thumper, squiggle, Zarr, Warren, Beacon, Hulk, hefty, holly, Mickey, windy, Comet, Sergeant Brown, Saturn. Sergeant Brown is so funny. I don't know why.

All right. I got to get control of myself here. Downey, Tabitha, Melissa, freckles, Quincy, Oli, which is probably the bear that killed him. Rowdy, the Grinch, Cracker, demon, Red Machine, Bubba, Satan, and Hatchet.

Some great names. Satan's a funny one, too. Yeah, didn't love that bear. Yeah. All right. Jeff, do you have a quick animal fact for us? Yeah. This week I'm going with one just like from my brain didn't look it up

Okay So my fact is cheetahs don't outrun lions And I think that's a cool fact because cheetahs are literally the fastest animals in the world So like Fastest mammals, yeah Yeah fastest mammals so like logic would make you think like this can outrun any animal But lions have much better endurance So like even though the cheetah is faster at the start

lions are like one of the top five fastest animal land mammals on earth so like they can keep up to stay in eyesight of the cheetah and they can run for much longer and eventually kill it. The cheetah wins the 100 but the lion wins the 400 kind of thing. Got it. Cool. Really quick correction corner in the Buffalo episode, I don't know if it was me or Jeff, but one of us said something about white and black rhinos being. subspecies. That's definitely not what I meant by that. I think I meant like

Eastern White Rhino or Southern Black White Rhino or whatever. Black and white rhinos. I didn't say that because I didn't. Yeah. They're a little advanced for you. They're fully different species. We knew that. I just misspoke. I actually have one from that episode too. Yeah. Jeffrey told me I said one of the stories I said happened in 2028. Yeah. Oh yeah. Future. That's wrong.

Unless they got that time machine West has been using. Yeah. And I do think something we did in that episode too really quickly that we are working on being a lot better about is often I think people in the West say Africa when they're talking about a specific region of Africa. And it is a massive place with so many different cultures and countries and geography and everything. And it really is kind of diminishing just to say Africa for those things. So we are going to work on that. That's something we definitely are guilty. I spend myself for doing that.

There is a lot of countries with Safari in Africa, so it's kind of hard to know. Because I'm not going to list like 10 countries every time I want to talk about the area too. Yeah, but we'll work on not just like generalizing Africa because it is a problem. All right. So now let's get into some listener questions. We asked specifically for questions involving Timothy Treadwell. We got a lot of responses. So at some point I might just film kind of like a solo video answering a lot of the ones we didn't get to.

But here are a few that we're going to squeeze in on this episode. A few people asked this, but two people that I noted down, Edagrub and Jeffrey Ward, who just mentioned, they asked if Timothy was a real bearologist or bear biologist. And we mentioned this on the episode. He wasn't. He had no formal training. He didn't publish any of his research. He did write a book.

but that book was very, like Tom said, very basic when it comes to bear biology. So no, he was not. That's pretty easy to answer. All right. Cooper 5280. Are there any important pieces to the story that you think are missing in the documentary? What do you guys think before I answer this for myself? Do you think there's anything the documentary really misses after hearing episode one?

Maybe just like, I think it shorts, to Amy's part a little bit too much. Like she also died and if you just watch the documentary, it's kind of easy to forget about her. Yeah. I actually think something that should have been done differently in the documentary, but I totally get why they did it. So I feel like they really used his most outrageous moments in it.

And you kind of have to do that to make it a really successful documentary. But there's this show called Diary of the Grizzly Man or something where it's just a lot of footage that Timothy put together. And he seems a lot more normal when you watch that show versus when you watch Grizzly Man. Because Werner... They're making it crazy. Yeah, they kind of handpicked the outbursts and the like parts where he's being like

kind of silly, you know? And I understand why they did that. But I do think when you dig deeper into Timothy, he, there does seem like some underlying mental illness maybe. We'll talk about that more. But he seems a lot more balanced. when you watch that show. Yeah.

And that's like a lot of years of footage. So like there's going to be a few moments that you can highlight to paint a picture that's not really accurate. Right. Totally. You should see some of the stuff we cut from our show. Oh, just ask me. All right. Wes, he pulled his pants down once.

Wes is a little Treadwell Jr. Olivia Biasetti asked if you could live alongside a type of animal. like Timothy did and not die, what would you pick? No bears. Tigers. Yeah, for me it would be a big cat too. Probably lions or jaguars. Whale sharks?

Yeah, whale sharks is a great answer. That's one I considered too. Mysanthrope 2018, was he incredibly stupid or incredibly brave? I think it's a combo. Those go hand in hand. Yeah, yeah. I'd give it like an 80-20 split, though. I don't think he was a super.

stupid person. I think he kind of misallocated his passions in some dumb ways. Misguided. But I also, when I watch, especially when I watched the documentary, I don't get the vision of like an idiot, just someone who is obsessed and addicted. We're going to talk about this in episode two, but he was, people were kind of starting to point him in a more healthy direction right before his death. He was kind of starting to channel his passion into better outlets and there was bear biologists and professional working with him on kind of improving his messaging. So I don't think he was stupid.

I think he was really misguided. And I think he was incredibly brave. I do. Not in like it just in a camping in the grizzly maze or constantly walking up to huge animals like that. It's it is very brave. I do think there's like stupidity and oh without a doubt. Bravest people though.

Oh yeah. Like jackass. Or like even, but like even smart people who are brave. Like Alex Harnold is very smart. But like it's stupid that he free solos like these cliffs. Yeah. When he could use ropes. Like that is a stupid choice.

But like. Totally. I think. So I read an ask me anything with Jewel, like his closest friend and long time companion. And someone, she says she constantly references those kind of adventure athletes when people say Timothy was stupid. She says like, well, these people died doing what they love to, like professional surfers or rock climbers or whatever. I think the really big difference there is they weren't harming anything else. And Timothy was doing some harm to these bears.

He did end up, you know, Amy died because of this. I do think there's a pretty big difference between those comparisons. Yeah. Okay. The Haley asked, do you think Timothy would have been able to learn to ride a sandworm from Dune? And would you all be able to? Shai Hulud. No.

You guys writing Shai Hulud? I don't think. Timothy could. Like the way he... I think he'd be brave enough to try. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. I don't understand how your arms aren't just getting ripped out of their sockets and then you die in like a sandy, bloody death.

Also, like the only reason Paul could do it is because he's like Lisan Gaibe, right? Like, I don't think anyone else that's not Frimin can do that. I mean, the whole concept of Lisan al-Gaibe is a manoebe. is a manufactured pseudo-religious construct. So it doesn't really mean anything. But there is a kind of competence that comes with like that kind of false belief in yourself, I guess. So that's why I think Timothy could do it. Treadwell became a bear.

If Timothy Treadwell can become a bear, he can become a fremon. Yeah. I don't think I could do it, but I think Timothy would at least try. Sure. Yeah. Great question. All right, this one's from Lindsay Kulow. Do you think what he tried to do or wanted to do is possible for a trained professional?

And I wanted to put this one in there because it is possible. There are trained professionals that do this. Tom Smith camped with those exact same bears with an electric fence, and he did it for years at the same time Timothy was doing it. Bear guides do this every single day in the summer in Katmai. They get close to these bears. There's tons of videos out there of coastal brown bears walking right. in front of groups of photographers.

Reading bare behavior is something that professionals can train to do and get really good at. And I do think Timothy was good at it, but it wasn't something that only he could do. A lot of people... So why is he so much more famous? Because he was one of the first to do it

and because he went out there for months at a time alone. He wasn't like guiding groups and then going back and sleeping in a hotel. And it's not like Tom is video recording himself doing these experiments and then like publishing it or going on you know the on date line to talk about it Timothy wanted to be famous for this uh this one is from dino slugs 6666 great name

was he just a silly little guy what do you guys think little guy I think he's kind of a big guy he's a little silly though yeah he's a guy who is a little silly I'll say that like foxes are kind of silly and once he like saw some foxes he's like yeah i get along those are my people yeah and i agree silly little guy misa mirith says do you think the bears actually recognized him and i would say yes they did i think they recognized him as like timothy too i don't think it was just like oh here's the human i think they knew timothy they knew his voice interesting that's a good question And the reason I think that is because I know there was bears that I've worked with that recognized me, you know, and I wasn't nearly as connected to them or as close to them as he was. And you don't have as distinctive a voice and you don't sing nearly as much.

And I don't have the little page boy haircut, too. Prince Valiant or whatever they called it. Yeah. Or the Oakleys, which were super cool back then, actually. Oh, man. Yeah. We could only inspire to be so cool. I was just going to ask, when you were working with bears, were you able to recognize?

I as which bear was which as quickly and easily as he was able to with all the different names. Not all of them. And like, like for example, in Yellowstone, I didn't know all the bears. You know, they're much more spread out. They roam much bigger areas. But people that work in Catmayan, like in Hallow Bay, get to know all the bears really well. Like Tom for sure got to know the bears by their personalities. Did he know?

I want to ask Tom if he knew Sergeant Brown. Sergeant Brown. I'm sure he did. We got to get Tom on. Oh, man. We are. We're going to talk to Tom probably during this series. Giving them people names too. It's not like, it's a little taboo for bear biologists, right? But it's like, it does, like me and Wes named the black bears we worked with. And it does make it really easy to communicate like, this is this bear. This is this bear. Like it's hard. It does. It's a harder to remember a number.

But I think like Timothy's story really illustrates why it's not great for a biologist to do it. Because if I went up to someone, one and I was like yeah I was studying these bears and this is boobble you know or this is squiggles they would kind of be like oh I don't really buy this guy as a serious scientist you know and it might lead also to kind of a dangerous level of comfort and familiarity does exactly wait Wes I want to ask you one Lisa Lyons said is Wes mad that Tim is grizzly manned and you're just gris kid I you know I have people constantly saying. Grizzly man, you know, and you're a kid.

Yeah, I need to change my name to Grizz Man. And I like kid. I feel like it's playful like Billy the Kid or, you know, something like that. So, no, it doesn't bother me. But I kind of, I think Grizzly Man is a great title for a movie. I think Werner nailed it with that title. Yeah. So, yeah.

Okay. That's it for questions. That's it for the episode. Again, thanks so much, guys, for being patient on this one. I know I promised it this year. Delivering it right at the finish line. So that's part one. Part two, we're coming back.

Yeah, part two is going to be really interesting. I already talked about it. But a couple quick business things. We still got merch for sale. Great merch. You can gift Patreon subscriptions to people now. So check that out. It's a really kind of different type of gift to give someone.

And then me and Jeff are both on cameo. So if you want to request a cameo, you can ask me a Timothy Treadwell question on there. Or ask Jeff a Timothy Treadwell question. We'll be happy to answer him. So that's it. Perfect. Thanks, Wes. That was really good.

And one, I guess one tiny final thing, too. Well, it's a big deal for us. We're going weekly in 2025. So I think this is like a couple really good episodes to usher in a new era for tooth and claw, which we're really excited about. All right. Weekly. What?

That's a lot of tooth and claw. I know. I'm going to get sick of you guys. Checkay. Love you guys. See ya. I love you.