Brown Bear Attack - Death and the Guilt of the One Left Behind

Wes shares the horrifying story of Katie Evans' violent encounter with a brown bear in the Carpathian Mountains and just how heavy the guilt can be for those who live on. For more information on the attack, read Young Widower: A Memoir by John W. Evans. Watch here: https://youtu.be/uvv9LeVBYxY ~~ 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Jeff Larson?

  Hello everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our wildlife biologist, he's on a grizzly bear board for all the grizzly bears.

• 0:25Mike Smith?

  For all the grizzly bears.

• 0:27Jeff Larson?

  He's on a board with bears. And then I'm his little brother Jeff. I've had one ass surgery and a few other surgeries and we have our tech guy Mike.

• 0:39Mike Smith?

  10 game winning streak, baby.

• 0:41Jeff Larson?

  He labeled himself tech guy.

• 0:43Mike Smith?

  10 game winning streak.

• 0:45Wes Larson?

  A little joke.

• 0:46Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I feel like the past 10 episodes, I've really been doing great work.

• 0:49Wes Larson?

  Oh yeah, sure. Jeff, are you wearing, is that shirt a fan shirt for me?

• 0:53Mike Smith?

  Not really, no.

• 0:54Jeff Larson?

  What?

• 0:55Wes Larson?

  Is your shirt a fan shirt for me?

• 0:56Jeff Larson?

  Griz, yeah. Grizkid, we need some Grizkid merch.

• 1:02Wes Larson?

  Have you two, who's had the most surgeries?

• 1:05Jeff Larson?

  I would put money on me.

• 1:07Mike Smith?

  Jeff clears pretty easily, yeah. I haven't had that many. I had my ankle, I had my app-

• 1:13Jeff Larson?

  I had that same ankle surgery.

• 1:15Mike Smith?

  Appendectomy. Does wisdom teeth, do those count?

• 1:19Wes Larson?

  Sure.

• 1:20Mike Smith?

  So that's like eight. I don't know, how many wisdom teeth you have, like eight?

• 1:25Mike Smith?

  So I might be winning.

• 1:27Wes Larson?

  Jeff had his too, though. I've only had my wrist outside of my wisdom teeth.

• 1:31Mike Smith?

  Too much wanking.

• 1:32Wes Larson?

  Yeah. I just broke my wrist.

• 1:36Jeff Larson?

  We were in a really strict religious family, so that's the only way we could get him to stop.

• 1:45Jeff Larson?

  There was nothing wrong with it, we just did the surgery.

• 1:49Mike Smith?

  The cornflakes failed. Your parents tried giving you cornflakes, which is supposed to stop you. Or no, was it graham crackers? I forget which, like, one of those products was designed.

• 1:59Wes Larson?

  It was cornflakes. Yeah, we talked about this not long ago.

• 2:01Mike Smith?

  That's right.

• 2:02Wes Larson?

  Well, Jeff, I'm glad that you're kind of out of the woods on your surgery for the most part.

• 2:07Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, we'll see. They told me it was like a 50/50 chance that I have to get another surgery from coming back. So I was like, that's kinda high.

• 2:16Mike Smith?

  I like those odds.

• 2:17Jeff Larson?

  No, I don't like that at all.

• 2:19Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's not great.

• 2:20Jeff Larson?

  But yeah, you know what? I'm in a much better mood than I've been in for a while.

• 2:26Wes Larson?

  Great, maybe we won't fight as much this episode. I wouldn't count.

• 2:30Jeff Larson?

  I'm still not a good move.

• 2:32Wes Larson?

  I'm still ready to rumble. Well, I love you both dearly.

• 2:36Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Wes Larson?

  All right. Well, I think we're just gonna get into it this week.

• 2:39Jeff Larson?

  You don't love me.

• 2:40Wes Larson?

  I do. I probably love you more than just about anyone else in this world.

• 2:45Jeff Larson?

  Nope.

• 2:45Wes Larson?

  I don't know. I think I do.

• 2:47Mike Smith?

  Are you saying that no one loves Jeff like you love him, or you love Jeff more than you love anyone else?

• 2:53Wes Larson?

  I love Jeff as much as I love anyone else.

• 2:57Mike Smith?

  So tied for first. That's not bad.

• 2:58Wes Larson?

  I would say.

• 2:59Jeff Larson?

  Well, I'm gonna argue it.

• 3:01Wes Larson?

  That's. Mike, you're up there too.

• 3:04Mike Smith?

  Hey.

• 3:04Wes Larson?

  You're top five.

• 3:05Mike Smith?

  I'll take that.

• 3:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Well, it's a good thing we're talking about love, because today's story really gets into some interesting quandaries when it comes to loving a person and what you would do for love. And it's kind of a tough story. It's maybe the one that I've read where I think the most mistakes were made.

• 3:25Jeff Larson?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:26Wes Larson?

  I'm gonna do my best to be. We've had some big mistakes.

• 3:29Jeff Larson?

  Lions are savo. They definitely should have killed those lions.

• 3:33Wes Larson?

  Yeah, you know, I should, I should quantify for a bear story. This is the one where there's been the most mistakes, maybe.

• 3:41Mike Smith?

  I'm gonna say rubbing a jellyfish on your nine-year-old boy is a mistake.

• 3:45Wes Larson?

  That's a big mistake.

• 3:47Mike Smith?

  I guess.

• 3:47Wes Larson?

  Bear story, bear story.

• 3:48Jeff Larson?

  Well, I was gonna say Timothy Treadwell. If you count like every bear he touched, that's a lot of mistakes.

• 3:55Wes Larson?

  That one's like in a different league almost. I think this one's more kind of just mistakes that were made because the people didn't have any education.

• 4:03Jeff Larson?

  I'm not letting you say anything without pushback.

• 4:07Wes Larson?

  Okay, that's fair. And I'm not gonna argue at all with your pushback this time. I'm just gonna be super placid and agree.

• 4:15Jeff Larson?

  Well, that's, that's just not true.

• 4:16Wes Larson?

  I think this is a good story, though, because it's one that's gonna help people learn from these mistakes. And I do want to quote my sources before we get started. One of them is an article in Slate that was written by John Evans, who's our main person in this story. It was adapted from his book called Young Widower, a memoir. There's a Wondery podcast called This Is Actually Happening, where he was interviewed.

• 4:39Mike Smith?

  Title of that memoir?

• 4:40Wes Larson?

  It's not. I added that. You guys are really gonna challenge my patience today.

• 4:47Wes Larson?

  A Wondery podcast, this is actually happening where he was interviewed. If I recommend that podcast, if you want more on this story, especially if you really want to get into like his feelings and what this whole event did to him mentally. And then I found a lot of little articles too, that were just kind of one paragraph articles about the incident.

• 5:06Mike Smith?

  Dude, do you know what I've been thinking? So you're a published writer. You've written papers, peer reviewed, published. You're, you're a scientist. That means you could, you could quote yourself and no one would be able to really take exception to that. I think you should start doing that.

• 5:20Wes Larson?

  It's generally not like great practice in the scientific community to be citing yourself a lot. But there's some scientists where they can't help it because they're so prolific.

• 5:30Mike Smith?

  I was so, I watched the movie Ip Man 2 starring Donnie Yen. You know, at the end of the movie, he's losing to the boxer, like the Western hemisphere boxer guy.

• 5:40Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 5:41Mike Smith?

  And he inspires himself by recalling a speech that he himself gave to somebody else.

• 5:48Wes Larson?

  That's sick. That's a good move.

• 5:50Mike Smith?

  It's awesome. I think you should start doing that.

• 5:52Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Speaking of love, I love your sweater that you're wearing right now, Mike.

• 5:56Mike Smith?

  Oh, thanks.

• 5:56Wes Larson?

  It looks very cozy and nice.

• 5:58Mike Smith?

  It's super, super cozy.

• 5:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Mike Smith?

  I'm entering my cozy arc.

• 6:01Wes Larson?

  I love that. Weird time of year to be doing that in spring, you know, it's more of a fall, a fall thing for most people, but you always marched to the beat of your own drum. So. All right. You guys ready for the story?

• 6:13Mike Smith?

  Yes.

• 6:15Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Wes Larson?

  Okay. All right. So John Evans spent his earliest years in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a small suburb of Kansas City. And like a lot of kids that grew up in the Midwest in the eighties and nineties, he grew up with a big, loving family. They played a lot of games together. They watched movies as a family. They went to church together every Sunday. Jeff, sounds pretty similar to our family. Mike, probably yours too. Aside from that, we, we weren't in the Midwest.

• 6:39Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, we had a pretty big dad.

• 6:41Wes Larson?

  A big dad? Yeah, sure. He always seemed big.

• 6:44Jeff Larson?

  He said it was big, loving.

• 6:45Wes Larson?

  Big, loving family. Yeah. Like a large family with more members than, than average, probably.

• 6:50Jeff Larson?

  I mean, you weren't that big.

• 6:52Wes Larson?

  No, I'm the smallest of the boys in our family, without a doubt. All right. Uh, John went to Catholic school. He loved sports, which came pretty naturally to him because he was big for his age and he was highly competitive. He was confident and happy in his life at Overland Park. But when he was 14, his dad got a job in New York City and his family moved to the suburbs just outside of New York. It's a pretty big change for John. He lost a lot of his confidence. He felt like this huge corn-fed country boy in the big city. And he did everything he could to fit in. He wore a magnetic earring. He styled his hair like Zack Morris, uh, from Saved by the Bell.

• 7:30Mike Smith?

  Sweet.

• 7:31Wes Larson?

  Yeah, but ultimately he felt like a fish out of water. And I, I had a magnetic earring for a couple of weeks in fourth grade. And they're pretty sick. Mine was just like a metal stud. I think it's a good way to decide if you want an earring or not. I didn't want one afterward.

• 7:45Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I wholly encourage it.

• 7:47Jeff Larson?

  You would have done great in New York City.

• 7:49Wes Larson?

  I think so. I think in Missoula was a bit much.

• 7:52Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Wes Larson?

  For all my friends. Uh, John really did lean into this lifestyle in New York, though. He got into theater, jazz band, cross-country, just really worked on reinventing himself. But it was pretty hard and he felt really alone. So then, rather than trying to fit in, he started trying to just fit in the least possible. Like push against the flow as hard as he possibly could.

• 8:15Jeff Larson?

  That's a good move.

• 8:16Wes Larson?

  Yeah, he, he wore a trench coat and a fedora to school.

• 8:23Mike Smith?

  What year was this?

• 8:24Wes Larson?

  I'm not sure. I, I think it was like probably early 90s.

• 8:29Mike Smith?

  Okay, then we're still in the safe trench coat.

• 8:32Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Jeff Larson?

  Dude, a fedora, if you can pull it off, like.

• 8:37Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's true. Most people can't though.

• 8:40Jeff Larson?

  It can go both ways, but man, when it's good, it's good.

• 8:44Wes Larson?

  If it has safari flaps on it is when it's the best.

• 8:48Jeff Larson?

  He's the only guy who could pull it off.

• 8:51Wes Larson?

  So John's feeling a lot of feelings, especially in high school. He's desperate also to have a girlfriend. But whenever someone would try to get close to him, he would find reasons not to like them. Does this sound familiar to either of you?

• 9:04Jeff Larson?

  That does sound very familiar.

• 9:07Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I think both of you can probably relate with that quite a bit.

• 9:11Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Wes Larson?

  All of this led to a feeling that followed John throughout his adolescence, where he just wished he was someone else. And when he got to college, he discovered creative writing and it really changed his life. Poetry hit especially hard for him. And when he left his undergrad, he was determined to get an MFA, which is a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. As he was leaving college, a trusted advisor pretty much told him that as soon as he got his MFA, he'd be chained to academia forever and that he should go live his life first and experience the world. So John joined the Peace Corps.

• 9:43Jeff Larson?

  I think that's pretty good advice, probably.

• 9:45Wes Larson?

  I do too. So I'm in a five-star hotel right now in Thailand. I'm sitting on the bed. It's a great bed. It's amazing. I'm still dreaming of my bed back home. And that's because it's a Brooklyn Bedding bed. I have the Sedona Elite from Brooklyn Bedding. I absolutely love it. Every night I look forward to just climbing into bed and going to sleep because it's such a good mattress. And that's because Brooklyn Bedding has been assembling top-tier mattresses for over 30 years in their Arizona factory. There's no middlemen, there's no gimmicks, just top-tier quality, honest pricing and real American craftsmanship for a better night's sleep. Brooklyn Bedding knows that sleep isn't one size fits all. And that's why they offer 15-plus different mattress models

• 10:27Wes Larson?

  for every body, every sleep style, even in the hard-to-find sizes. And if you sleep hot, they use Glaciotex covers, copper-infused foams and temperature-regulating materials to help keep you cool and comfortable all night long. Me and Jesse actually had a really, really nice mattress prior to this. And it was hard for me to give it up because I just didn't think that Brooklyn Bedding could possibly be better. And it is. I'm really happy. I'll never look back. I just love my mattress. So go to brooklinbedding.com, use our promo code TOOTH at checkout to get 30% off sitewide. During the Black Friday sale exclusively with our code, that's brooklynbedding.com and promo code tooth for 30% off sitewide. Let them know that we sent you in the survey after checkout.

• 11:13Wes Larson?

  Brooklynbedding.com promo code tooth. Tooth and Claws brought to you by Quince. For me recently, I've just kind of felt I've had the same clothes my entire life, at least my entire adult life, getting really tired of them. I feel like they're all kind of aged and not that great anymore. And I've really wanted to update my wardrobe and us partnering with Quince came at perfect time for me because everything I've been ordering for them, I've just absolutely loved. And when we first started working with them, I was getting stuff for the fall. And now I'm really excited for their stuff for spring and for summer. They have lightweight shirts and shorts for $30. They have pants for any occasion. They have comfortable lounge sets. Mike, you love being comfortable in your lounge sets.

• 11:57Mike Smith?

  Sounds like my speed.

• 11:59Wes Larson?

  And then also we've been doing a lot of traveling and they have really great luggage options, durable duffel bags, all sorts of different things you can put in your house. It's really a one stop shop for everything. All of their stuff is really high quality and luxury and they're priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And the way they can do that is by cutting the cost of the middleman and passing those savings directly on to us. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices. And they use premium fabrics and finishes, which we absolutely love. Everything I've gotten from them has just become a favorite thing in my wardrobe. And I'm excited to try some of their home stuff and, and their luggage too. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxury upgrades you deserve from Quince.

• 12:43Wes Larson?

  Go to quince.com/ tooth for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash tooth to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash tooth. So John decides to join the Peace Corps. You know, we've all been there, right?

• 13:08Mike Smith?

  No, literally, I don't think any of us have.

• 13:11Wes Larson?

  In June of 2000, he leaves for Bangladesh and he immediately finds a lot of kindred spirits in the Peace Corps. However, he's 6'6" and he's one of the only white people in his village. So, once again, he does feel like he really sticks out and he's kind of isolated and alone during his time in Bangladesh. But he thrives professionally in the Peace Corps and during this time, there's a really big bright spot and that was Katie Lepant. John had always

• 13:36Mike Smith?

  I thought you were gonna say the sun.

• 13:39Wes Larson?

  Which wouldn't be a bright spot for you. Be a terrible... would be bright, I guess.

• 13:44Jeff Larson?

  It'd still be bright, yeah.

• 13:46Wes Larson?

  I really walked into that one. Walked into that trap.

• 13:49Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Wes Larson?

  So, John had always thought Katie was really cute and fun and when she came up to him drunkenly finally at a party about a year into their assignment, she asked him why they had never gotten together. And then, within a few months, the two of them are dating, mostly because Katie was pretty aggressive about letting John know she was interested. And then, in fall of 2001, something pretty crazy happened. Jeff, what was it? Fall of 2001?

• 14:16Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, that was when Timothy Treadwell died, right?

• 14:20Wes Larson?

  It's not. September 11 happened in fall of 2001 and John and Katie had to go home. They traveled through Asia for a bit first and then they went back to the US and they moved together, moved in together in Chicago. And Katie was really the perfect match for John in a lot of ways. She was really fun and beautiful, but also incredibly kind and she was one of those people that always was taking care of like the misfits. If you went to a, he said if you'd go to a party and there'd be someone that wasn't talking to anyone, Katie would go talk to them and not just for like a couple minutes, she would spend a lot of time talking to them.

• 14:56Mike Smith?

  Like if Glenn Danzig were at the party, she'd just be with him all night?

• 14:59Wes Larson?

  Oh, yeah. She would love Glenn Danzig. Sure.

• 15:03Jeff Larson?

  I'm just saying.

• 15:04Wes Larson?

  Misfit.

• 15:05Mike Smith?

  Hanging out with the misfits.

• 15:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Jeff Larson?

  The band?

• 15:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Jeff Larson?

  I got you.

• 15:09Wes Larson?

  So, the other thing that I thought was really endearing about her is when people would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would always just say, "I want to be happy." And I really like that. I think that's like a nice thing to want to be when you grow up.

• 15:22Mike Smith?

  I don't know.

• 15:23Wes Larson?

  John, you don't think so?

• 15:26Wes Larson?

  I have a hard time thinking of a better answer.

• 15:29Mike Smith?

  It's vaguely aspirational, but it's like, make some bullet points on how you're gonna attain that goal, kinda thing, you know?

• 15:36Wes Larson?

  Fair enough, yeah.

• 15:37Jeff Larson?

  I mean, and like, to be honest, whenever I like, meet someone who's just always happy nowadays.

• 15:43Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Jeff Larson?

  I'm just kinda like, there's something wrong with this guy.

• 15:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 15:47Jeff Larson?

  There's something wrong with this person.

• 15:49Mike Smith?

  Something wrong, or they're lying, they're pretending.

• 15:52Jeff Larson?

  No, you're right, that's a good, that's a good thing to say.

• 15:56Wes Larson?

  He also just talks about how great she was at living in the present, which is something that I wish I could do a lot better, just being really present instead of always thinking about what comes next.

• 16:05Jeff Larson?

  You're always thinking about the future.

• 16:06Wes Larson?

  I am. So they end up getting engaged in 2003, and then married in 2004, and they moved to Florida and go to graduate school. Katie gets an internship in Romania, and they end up moving then to Romania, and John's teaching, teaching English in Bucharest, Romania. And I forget what Katie was doing, I think something in health, but um, they both love Romania. For them, it's like their favorite country they've ever been to or lived in, and they're really thriving on weekends.

• 16:34Jeff Larson?

  I just said, that's cool, that seems like a-

• 16:36Wes Larson?

  It is cool.

• 16:37Jeff Larson?

  Where, what would you guess this story's going towards, Mike?

• 16:41Mike Smith?

  Uh, Dracula, right?

• 16:43Wes Larson?

  Vampires?

• 16:43Jeff Larson?

  That's what I would say.

• 16:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah, just wait.

• 16:47Mike Smith?

  Maybe some like, Colosseum battles, that happened in Rome, right?

• 16:51Wes Larson?

  We're not talking Rome, we're talking Romania.

• 16:54Mike Smith?

  What?

• 16:55Wes Larson?

  Rome-mania.

• 16:57Jeff Larson?

  Is that just like, that's like, Rome on steroids, right? Like, mania, like, Rome-mania.

• 17:04Mike Smith?

  Yeah, right. That's for, like, when people were asked how often they thought about the Roman Empire, and it's like, every day, they had Rome-mania.

• 17:13Wes Larson?

  Alright, how much, how much juice do we have left in this joke?

• 17:17Mike Smith?

  We started at zero.

• 17:19Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 17:20Mike Smith?

  Failure launch.

• 17:21Wes Larson?

  On the weekends, a thing they would do is they'd traveled to different parts of the country and just explore, go on hikes, do different cultural things. They just really loved seeing every corner of Romania. And that's what they were doing on June 23, 2007. So they got up early that Saturday. They met their good friend Sarah at the train station and they took a train to the city of Bucăten in the Carpathian Mountains, which is where Dracula lives in the Carpathian Mountains. Their plan was to take a cable car to the top of a mountain and stay in a hostel or a guest house where they had made reservations. But when they got off the train, it was pouring rain and the cable cars had closed as a result. They weren't running. There was another couple there.

• 18:04Wes Larson?

  It was a doctor and her husband, as well as a Romanian guy, and all six of them were trying to figure out what they could do because they're all going to these guest houses at the top of the mountain. So John has an idea. He says, why don't we just hike up there? It's not that far. We can do it. We're all looking pretty healthy and surely it wouldn't be that bad of a hike. So they all agree and they start off in the rain and it ends up being a really beautiful hike. They hike through this Carpathian forest, which is just really dense, beautiful pine forest. Then the trees thin out and they get up into this more alpine area and it's just these wide open vistas, really beautiful. And they get to the end of the trail into this first guest house, the one where they're hoping to stay. But because this cable car wasn't working, the

• 18:49Wes Larson?

  people at the top also couldn't get down to the bottom and they had all just kind of rebooked their rooms for the night. So there weren't any rooms for John, Katie, Sarah, this couple, and the Romanian guy.

• 19:02Mike Smith?

  Oh, I know another story that started this way. No room at the inn.

• 19:06Wes Larson?

  Yep. Yep. So they ended up giving birth to Jesus.

• 19:12Mike Smith?

  The Immaculate Conception Part Two.

• 19:14Wes Larson?

  That's the end of the story.

• 19:16Jeff Larson?

  I thought that happened in Rome.

• 19:20Wes Larson?

  Here we go. We're back on it.

• 19:22Mike Smith?

  It's in Romania, right?

• 19:23Wes Larson?

  Squeeze it some more.

• 19:26Wes Larson?

  So all the rooms are full and the people at this first guest house say, listen, you guys can sleep on the floor if you want, but we really don't have any food. So go up to this other guest house. It's just like a kilometer away. And they have a full kitchen. They're a bit bigger. They might have rooms for you. At the very least, you can eat dinner there and then come back here and sleep on the floor. So they decided to do it. On the way to the second guest house, they run into some other hikers. And one of them was actually a student that John had taught in Bucharest. And they're really excited to see these other hikers, but that excitement quickly turned to anxiety. When these hikers told them that they needed to be very careful. And the reason they had to be careful was because earlier that day, they'd seen a large bear on the trail.

• 20:10Jeff Larson?

  Oh, what type of bears do they have in Romania?

• 20:14Wes Larson?

  So they have brown bears in Romania and we're going to do a little bit of biology. So.

• 20:18Jeff Larson?

  Like a hundred percent going to be a brown bear?

• 20:22Wes Larson?

  Yes. This is Ursus arctos. This is the same animal as our grizzly bear. The subspecies over there is the Eurasian brown bear, which is Ursus arctos arctos. But really it's just, it's the same animal. If you were to put this bear in a cage with our bear, you'd have a hard time telling them apart and they could mate if they wanted to.

• 20:41Jeff Larson?

  Oh, they would have sex. But I mean, polar bears and grizzly bears have sex.

• 20:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah, because they're also closely related, but this, these two, that doesn't happen that often. These two, if it was like male, female, and they were feeling it, you know, there'd be nothing weird about it. Yeah.

• 20:58Mike Smith?

  I'm just now deciding.

• 20:59Wes Larson?

  There's nothing weird about it, Mike. Okay?

• 21:01Mike Smith?

  Would they let us watch?

• 21:03Wes Larson?

  Uh, probably. Me and Jeff watched some bears hump for a while.

• 21:07Mike Smith?

  No shame. Yeah.

• 21:08Jeff Larson?

  Is it like if we went to Romania and had sex with a Romanian type of thing?

• 21:14Wes Larson?

  Exactly. It's exactly like that. Nothing weird about that unless, you know, you make it weird. Yeah. Okay.

• 21:21Jeff Larson?

  Why would they make it weird?

• 21:23Wes Larson?

  I don't know, dude. I don't know why you would, but.

• 21:25Mike Smith?

  Weird's not necessarily bad either. I'll just say that. I'm realizing now, the term Eurasian is pretty interesting to me. It's just like the two continents. Honestly, you get a little more geologically specific, you know, it's like.

• 21:38Wes Larson?

  I think the reason, I think that's a great question, but I think the reason they use that term with wildlife quite a bit is because often these species are found throughout both continents.

• 21:48Mike Smith?

  Like the same exact genus and stuff.

• 21:51Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I've actually always had a problem with those being separate continents. Cause each of the other continents are like more divided, you know?

• 21:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Jeff Larson?

  This one.

• 22:00Mike Smith?

  Where do you draw the line?

• 22:01Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, they just made one.

• 22:02Wes Larson?

  And Romania, Romania is pretty close to Asia. I mean, you're right on the boundary.

• 22:07Jeff Larson?

  Russia is like half, they're like European, but they're also in Asia, you know? It doesn't make any sense.

• 22:14Mike Smith?

  Yeah, what the heck?

• 22:14Wes Larson?

  But yeah, I think the reason, Mike.

• 22:16Mike Smith?

  What the heck, Putin?

• 22:17Wes Larson?

  Like we saw Eurasian lynx.

• 22:18Mike Smith?

  I hate that guy. I'm just gonna come right out and say it.

• 22:22Wes Larson?

  We saw Eurasian lynx in India, in Asia.

• 22:27Mike Smith?

  Right.

• 22:27Wes Larson?

  But you could see that exact same animal in like Sweden or Finland.

• 22:30Mike Smith?

  That same one?

• 22:32Wes Larson?

  That, not that same individual, but the same species.

• 22:36Mike Smith?

  Hmm.

• 22:36Wes Larson?

  But way to keep me on my toes. All right, there's a lot of brown bears in Romania.

• 22:42Mike Smith?

  I think I just broke my winning streak. I think I'm, I'm losing this one.

• 22:47Wes Larson?

  You're 10 and 1 now. The actual number of brown bears in Romania is a point of some contention. The Ministry of the Environment in Romania says there's around 8,000 bears, which is a lot. But lots of bear biologists and environmental organizations claim that the methods they use for these population estimates are flawed and the number is much lower. And honestly, just based on ecological carrying capacity, I think it's pretty impossible that Romania would have that many bears.

• 23:18Jeff Larson?

  You think they counted the same bears a few times?

• 23:20Wes Larson?

  They, that's honestly part of their, their flaw is they recounted bears a lot. Like they would count it and then they would.

• 23:26Jeff Larson?

  Big circle and they keep counting it.

• 23:28Wes Larson?

  Honestly is exactly that.

• 23:30Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's a Mario Party game. You have to count the shy guys, but they like mix and match and stuff.

• 23:36Wes Larson?

  It's hard, yep. So I think it's probably like more on the order of 4,000 to 6,000 bears.

• 23:43Jeff Larson?

  How much does the lower 48 have?

• 23:46Wes Larson?

  Great question. We're gonna get to that in just a second. That's perfect timing. We're not quite there yet. All right, so pin that Jeff. You got, you got a pin in that? Okay.

• 23:55Jeff Larson?

  Pinned it.

• 23:56Wes Larson?

  That tiny noise you just heard was Jeff pinning it.

• 24:00Mike Smith?

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• 24:42Mike Smith?

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• 25:21Jeff Larson?

  It's brought to you by Hungry Root. When it comes to grocery shopping and meal planning, I've got this problem where I'm a little bit lazy. I don't always choose the healthiest items and like, I'm just getting to a point where I'm really tired of just running errands in general, you know? My room's a little messy right now and I just feel a little overwhelmed a lot of the time and I don't like shopping for groceries. So, enter Hungry Root. It's like having your own personal shopper and nutritionist all wrapped in one. They take care of the weekly grocery shopping, recommending healthy groceries and meals tailored to your taste, nutrition preferences, and health goals. I love Hungry Root.

• 26:03Jeff Larson?

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• 26:36Wes Larson?

  They all flap. They're so good. Hand on my heart. I'm just gonna say Hungry Root, stamp of approval.

• 26:42Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, we love Hungry Root as a sponsor just because it's something we really enjoy. So honestly, if you're gonna try one of our recommendations, try this one, please. It's delicious.

• 26:52Wes Larson?

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• 27:16Jeff Larson?

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• 27:43Wes Larson?

  So we're gonna say there's 6,000 bears in Romania.

• 27:46Jeff Larson?

  They probably know, do they know your Dior model?

• 27:50Wes Larson?

  I, I, they must if they listen to our podcast because you bring it up every episode.

• 27:56Wes Larson?

  Alright, so 6,000 bears, if that many really are in Romania, they have one of the highest densities of brown bear anywhere in their range, with roughly 67 bears per 1,000 kilometers squared. That's about three times higher than the brown bear density in Alaska. They're built very similar to our grizzly bears in the lower 48. So when we talk about brown bears, there's a big kind of Variation in how they look and how big they are. So like a coastal brown bear in Alaska, you know, often it's kind of a uniform color and very large. These ones look similar to a grizzly bear in Montana. They have that kind of grizzled, beautiful coloration of their fur. They weigh generally between two hundred and fifty and seven hundred pounds.

• 28:38Wes Larson?

  And they have really similar behaviors, the interior grizzlies too. And that they don't have a super plentiful food source like salmon and they have to be a little bit more territorial and aggressive in their search for food.

• 28:50Jeff Larson?

  That's like the range your mom weighed, right?

• 28:52Wes Larson?

  My mom?

• 28:53Jeff Larson?

  Given time, Mike.

• 28:54Wes Larson?

  Two hundred fifty to seven hundred?

• 28:58Wes Larson?

  She's a, she's a big, beautiful woman, Mike.

• 29:01Mike Smith?

  Yeah, what's the acronym? That's like a popular acronym I've heard on certain websites.

• 29:06Wes Larson?

  I don't know. She honestly, she was really small.

• 29:10Jeff Larson?

  She would hide in it. She would lose a lot of it.

• 29:13Wes Larson?

  She was eighteen inches tall. She was tiny, but in the fall, boy, was she big. All right. So there's a study I love. I've consulted it a lot for episodes on brown bears. And it's called Brown Bear Attacks on Humans: A Worldwide Perspective. And it's an analysis of all the brown bear attacks on people from two thousand to two thousand and fifteen. It's this really big collaborative work between dozens of bear biologists. And it's one of the more complete data sets that shows trends among brown bear attacks.

• 29:43Jeff Larson?

  Professor Tom Smith on there?

• 29:44Wes Larson?

  He wasn't, but a lot of the, a lot of the brown bear biologists that I really respect were, were on this, this one. I do wish Tom was on it because he is one of the leading voices in attacks. But one of the things that they highlight in this paper is attack rate by country. And all of the countries with brown bear attacks, Romania had the most. And I'm not even talking per capita, they had the highest number of attacks. So Jeff, earlier you asked about how many bears they are, there are per country.

• 30:14Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Wes Larson?

  Russia is definitely the most. They have like roughly a hundred thousand of the two hundred thousand

• 30:19Jeff Larson?

  Huge.

• 30:20Wes Larson?

  Brown bears. After that, I think it's North America with around fifty thousand and then I'm not sure. But what we are going to get into, what I am sure about is how many attacks there are by country.

• 30:30Jeff Larson?

  If we're unpinning my question, are we unpinning it?

• 30:33Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Jeff Larson?

  I said lower forty eight because Alaska has a ton of ours.

• 30:38Wes Larson?

  Yeah, so lower forty eight, there's like maybe twenty five hundred bears.

• 30:42Jeff Larson?

  Okay, so Romania has more than

• 30:45Wes Larson?

  than the lower

• 30:45Jeff Larson?

  the United States without Alaska.

• 30:48Wes Larson?

  Without a doubt, by a good margin. Okay.

• 30:50Jeff Larson?

  But now without Alaska and Hawaii.

• 30:53Wes Larson?

  Yeah, yeah, you can also keep Hawaii out of that. We're gonna look at attacks by country and between two thousand and two thousand fifteen. So this gives you a good kind of look at what these attack rates look like. So Romania had a hundred and thirty one attacks during that fifteen year window, which is the highest of any country.

• 31:14Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Wes Larson?

  The US, the US was next with one thirteen. And then I'm curious if you guys can guess.

• 31:20Jeff Larson?

  We're not first in anything.

• 31:22Wes Larson?

  We're not, we're, we're losing our, losing our way.

• 31:25Mike Smith?

  Aren't we doing, we're pretty good with obesity, right?

• 31:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah, we're good at obesity, probably suicide.

• 31:30Jeff Larson?

  Violence.

• 31:30Wes Larson?

  Gun violence without a doubt.

• 31:32Mike Smith?

  Number one, baby.

• 31:33Wes Larson?

  No medical coverage, cost of medical coverage.

• 31:36Mike Smith?

  Yeah, hell, yeah.

• 31:39Jeff Larson?

  Olympics, we won.

• 31:40Wes Larson?

  Super Bowls. Yeah. All right. So now I want you guys to guess the next four countries. And if you guess them in order, I'll donate some money.

• 31:52Mike Smith?

  It's very generous of you.

• 31:53Wes Larson?

  Plan. I'll donate for, for every country you get right of these next four, I'll donate twenty dollars to the Grizzly Bear Foundation. For every country you get right and in the right order, I'll donate fifty.

• 32:09Mike Smith?

  Holy mackerel.

• 32:10Wes Larson?

  So you

• 32:10Mike Smith?

  This is not per capita, right?

• 32:12Wes Larson?

  No, so this is the most, the number of attacks between two thousand and two thousand fifteen. Romania was number one with one thirty one, US number two with one thirteen. What do you think is number three?

• 32:24Jeff Larson?

  I'm with, I, can I guess?

• 32:26Wes Larson?

  Yep.

• 32:27Jeff Larson?

  Canada.

• 32:28Wes Larson?

  Mike, what do you guess? If either of you get it right, I'll donate the money.

• 32:31Mike Smith?

  Oh, that's such a good guess. I'll go with Japan.

• 32:34Wes Larson?

  Both of you are wrong. Number three was Russia with 111.

• 32:37Jeff Larson?

  Uh, yeah.

• 32:38Wes Larson?

  What do you think number four is?

• 32:41Jeff Larson?

  I know Canada's gonna be on.

• 32:43Mike Smith?

  It's gotta be, right?

• 32:44Jeff Larson?

  For brown bears, Mike. Japan doesn't have brown bears, I don't think.

• 32:48Mike Smith?

  They do, up north.

• 32:49Wes Larson?

  They do.

• 32:50Mike Smith?

  I was thinking, they have a lot of black bear attacks. I confused them.

• 32:53Jeff Larson?

  I, you know what? I'm wrong. You're right.

• 32:56Wes Larson?

  Okay, so number four, what are you guessing?

• 32:59Jeff Larson?

  Um.

• 33:00Mike Smith?

  I'll guess Canada this time.

• 33:01Wes Larson?

  You got it. Jeff, you don't even have to guess. Mike got it. $50 to Brown Bear or Grizzly Bear Foundation. Uh, what do you think number five is?

• 33:10Jeff Larson?

  What's the time period?

• 33:11Wes Larson?

  This is between 2000 and 2015. I don't think you're gonna get five or six.

• 33:16Jeff Larson?

  I'm gonna say Slovenia.

• 33:18Wes Larson?

  No.

• 33:18Mike Smith?

  Bulgaria?

• 33:19Wes Larson?

  No. Slovakia is number five.

• 33:22Jeff Larson?

  Ooh.

• 33:23Mike Smith?

  That's what Jeff meant that. That's what he meant.

• 33:25Wes Larson?

  And number six? I'll give you a hint. You haven't named this country yet.

• 33:30Mike Smith?

  Italy?

• 33:30Jeff Larson?

  Hmm.

• 33:31Wes Larson?

  It's not Italy. I wanna, I wanna give you one more hint, Jeff. This is another country that part of it is in Europe and part of it is in Asia.

• 33:39Jeff Larson?

  China?

• 33:40Wes Larson?

  Think about that answer.

• 33:42Jeff Larson?

  That's in Asia all the way.

• 33:43Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 33:44Wes Larson?

  I'm gonna give you one more try.

• 33:48Jeff Larson?

  Ukraine? That's all the way in Europe, I feel like. Uh, Mongolia?

• 33:54Wes Larson?

  No. Turkey. Turkey is the last one. All right, so $50 to Grizzly Bear Foundation. You know what? Let's just round it up.

• 34:01Jeff Larson?

  You know what Turkey's most famous for?

• 34:03Wes Larson?

  What?

• 34:04Jeff Larson?

  Hair transplant.

• 34:05Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Also, bear attacks. Okay. So, let's get back to our story.

• 34:11Jeff Larson?

  All right.

• 34:12Wes Larson?

  John, Katie, Sarah, the doctor and her husband, the Romanian guy, arrive at this nicer guest house where they eat a nice meal, but they're told there's no extra rooms and that they would have to return to this other one and sleep on the floor. These guest houses aren't that far from each other, a kilometer or two, so it's not that bad of a walk. But it is starting to get dark and they wanted to get back to where they'd be sleeping as quickly as possible, so they leave in a hurry. Now, all three of us have had some ankle problems, right?

• 34:40Jeff Larson?

  Yes.

• 34:41Wes Larson?

  And what happens when you sprain your ankle a couple times?

• 34:45Mike Smith?

  Those ligaments get all loose.

• 34:47Wes Larson?

  Yep, they get super weak and loose and it sprains really easily. You kind of just start having a bad ankle. Katie had a weak ankle and as they were leaving the second guest house, she rolls it really badly. She sits down, she's crying, she's struggling to move on and as she's doing this, it's getting darker and darker. This doctor and her husband are starting to get a little worried. They don't want to hike back in the pitch dark, so they tell the rest of the group that they're going to keep on hiking and at least get closer to this first guest house.

• 35:16Jeff Larson?

  Well, and that bear can probably smell the extra blood in her ankle.

• 35:21Wes Larson?

  Definitely can't. Without a doubt, it can't. I shouldn't say without a doubt, but it can't.

• 35:28Wes Larson?

  So Katie tells John to go ahead and go with this doctor and her husband and that Sarah and the Romanian guy would stay back with her and they would catch up when the pain in her ankle had subsided. So John leaves with this couple. He leaves his wife behind, goes down the trail with this couple and they start getting pretty close to the guest house where they hit this stream that they decide they should all cross as a group. So they decide they're going to wait there for Katie, Sarah and the Romanian guy. They're really close to the guest house. They can see the light and everything. They're like, we'll wait here, we'll wait for them to catch up. And they wait and wait and wait and no one shows up. What had happened was back near the second guest house where Katie had been hurt. They were starting to move and they're passing a small lake

• 36:13Wes Larson?

  when suddenly a dark shape moving along the trail on the side of the lake makes them freeze. It's the bear. The bear's there. It's moving slowly but confidently in their direction. And that's when they make another mistake. So I think their first mistake was separating. Here's where they make their second big mistake. Katie tells them that the bear isn't interested in them. It just wants food. They throw all their packs to kind of try and distract the bear and then she says they should lay down and play dead. It's not good advice.

• 36:44Jeff Larson?

  That's about as bad as you can do.

• 36:47Wes Larson?

  Especially with three people. You have enough people to discourage this bear, but instead they kind of separate, they throw their packs and they all three lay down.

• 36:55Jeff Larson?

  They kind of bait it. Yeah, I feel like they throw their bags and like bait the bears in and then...

• 37:02Wes Larson?

  It's, it's never a good idea to throw your bag.

• 37:05Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Wes Larson?

  The reason being is that if, say this bear does make contact with you, it's helpful to have that bag on your back to give the bear something to tear into. Maybe if you're being mauled and you can leave your bag and then get out of there, that's an op- an option, but you don't want to throw your bag. The bear was not at all interested in their bags. They threw them, they laid down, and it just walked right up to them.

• 37:28Jeff Larson?

  Didn't touch their bags?

• 37:30Wes Larson?

  No.

• 37:31Jeff Larson?

  Sorry, go ahead, Mike.

• 37:32Mike Smith?

  No, I was just wondering, like, if they did have food in their, it's not, this is not ideal action to be taking. But if they did have something to eat that would attract the bear, is that absolutely the worst thing you could do?

• 37:44Wes Larson?

  If, if you know that that's what the bear wants, then no, it's not the worst thing you could do. But you don't know that. Most people aren't gonna know that, you know? And if, if it's not what it wants, and then it does go and eat that, you've just food conditioned a bear. You've taught that bear, though, when it approaches people, they throw food out for it. And maybe it was just gonna walk right past you, and you've essentially killed that bear at that point. You've taught, you've taught it a lesson that it's not gonna be able to forget. Right? So it's not a good idea. And a worse idea is just to simply lay down when a bear's approaching you. It's a very, very bad idea. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast. At the end of the story, I'm gonna get into like a bullet point list of everything they did wrong, but for now, we're just gonna move past it.

• 38:27Jeff Larson?

  Hearing this, I know you always say like, the worst thing you can do is run away.

• 38:31Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Jeff Larson?

  But like, I, I kind of feel like they did the worst thing they could have done by just laying down.

• 38:37Wes Larson?

  They're comparable, for sure. Yeah. So I couldn't find a good account or transcript of exactly what happened in that next moment. But I know the bear jumps on the Romanian guy, it bites him once in the thigh. He fights back, he kicks at the bear, he punches it, and then it, it surprises the bear enough to where he has room to get up. And when he does, he runs. The bear changes its attention to Sarah. She's starting to get up to also run, and it knocks her down. But then it's almost immediately distracted by large rocks that are hitting its body. Katie, who's still injured, the least mobile of all these people, is standing alone, throwing rocks at the bear in a desperate attempt to stop it from killing it. Killing her friend. Once again, the bear changes direction and charges at Katie,

• 39:20Wes Larson?

  knocks her down and immediately begins jumping on her. Her screams cut through the dark mountain air and these other two people run to the guest house in a blind panic. Meanwhile, John's getting a little irritated that Katie and Sarah are taking so long, calls out to both of them, calls them on their phones, he leaves, he leaves voicemails for them. There's no answer. They'd only walked a few hundred yards away from them, so they definitely should have caught up by now. And he's just thinking Katie's being Katie, she's taking her time and they just need to catch up with us. So he decides to walk back up on the trail to where he left them. And as he's walking, he's realizing it's really dark. I can't see anything. I don't see them anywhere. But then he does see something that makes his irritation immediately turn to fear.

• 40:05Wes Larson?

  And what that is, is on the ground, he sees what looks like a clump of white feathers. But when he gets closer, he realizes it's actually the Lonely Planet guidebook that they'd been carrying. And pages were ripped out of it and the book was in tatters and just kind of scattered to the wind. So he knows something's really wrong. He starts yelling for Katie and finally he gets an answer. And that answer was a shrill scream that's cutting through the air. And she screams that she's being attacked by a bear, that he shouldn't come any closer. He needed to get help and get a gun. So he runs back to the first guest house, the one that told them they could sleep on the floor. And to be completely honest, like I'm just saying what he said. He's having some pretty selfish thoughts as he runs back. He's feeling tired. He's talking about his feet hurt.

• 40:51Wes Larson?

  He's thinking about how bad it's gonna suck to call Katie's mom to tell her that her daughter died. And then he realizes like, this is not what I should be thinking about. He snaps out of it. And starts running as fast as he can back to the guest house. He was like slowing down because he was so tired. Yeah. It reminds, so when Jeff and I were in Rome together, he accidentally locked himself out of his room one night and I honestly got, I was so annoyed. I was like more annoyed than he was that he had done this. It's just reminding me, it's like, come on dude, this isn't that big of a deal, especially to you. But it is kind of a funny, funny way of thinking. Like you're still kind of just annoyed, even though something pretty terrible is happening to someone else.

• 41:36Jeff Larson?

  I think what I did was worse, honest.

• 41:39Wes Larson?

  These, no, these are, are on a very different magnitude. And I do, I kind of wanted to just do a quick aside. In his interview, he is very honest with like his feelings of how he handled this whole thing. And I found it refreshing.

• 41:54Jeff Larson?

  Hard on himself.

• 41:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I found it refreshing. I also had a hard time not agreeing with him with some of the things he was hard on himself about. So I'm gonna try my best not to like dive into that too deeply. If you want to listen to that interview, again, it's on, this is actually happening. Okay. So when he gets to the first guest house, this Romanian guy who had been attacked was already there. He told him that he had punched the bear and escaped. And then suddenly Sarah comes running up too. Somehow he had missed them both on the trail, like they hadn't crossed paths. But they confirm what Katie said, that a large brown bear was attacking her and that they needed to get help. John immediately asked the guest house owner if he had a gun and he said that he did, but that John couldn't

• 42:38Wes Larson?

  have it because if it was discharged without permission, he would have to pay a huge fine. He could lose his guest house and his entire means of income.

• 42:47Jeff Larson?

  That's great.

• 42:48Wes Larson?

  Why have a gun if you can't go shoot a brown bear that's attacking someone?

• 42:53Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Wes Larson?

  John argues with them. He offers them money. He offers them his passport, everything he can to get the gun, even though John has no idea how to fire a gun. And this guy says no.

• 43:04Jeff Larson?

  The guy should just go with it.

• 43:05Wes Larson?

  I know. I know. Again, lots of mistakes are made on this one. Then John turns to the group. He says, who will go me, who, who will go back with me to try and help Katie? And no one volunteers. So John grabs his flashlight, which is like one of those little wind up mechanical flashlights and runs back out into the dark and up the trail.

• 43:23Mike Smith?

  That's crazy that no one was willing to help.

• 43:26Jeff Larson?

  They have a gun.

• 43:27Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's tough.

• 43:29Wes Larson?

  A full guest house of people. So he gets back to where he had last heard Katie. And at this point, he can only hear two things. Soft grunting and breathing from the bear. And then a high pitched gurgling scream from Katie. Periodically, she would also say things like no and help. John points his flashlight at the bear and he's shocked by how big it is. He's about 15 yards away and it turns and looks at him. So he runs back further from the bear. He starts throwing rocks at the bear, but it has absolutely no effect. And then he just watches helplessly as this bear's head keeps kind of moving down back and forth along her body. And he just assumes it's eating her. It's been about 25 minutes now that she's being attacked by this bear.

• 44:11Wes Larson?

  And at this point, her screams are reduced to kind of just a raspy, wordless sound. Almost inhuman, like an animal that's being killed by another animal. He tries to get closer to the bear a few times, but his fear would take over and he would back up again. And was resigned to simply watch and throw rocks and hope this this bear would leave. He watches as its head dips down over and over again. He can hear her clothes ripping. He hears sounds that he thinks are the bear eating and he can hear Katie screaming.

• 44:41Mike Smith?

  Oh, man.

• 44:42Wes Larson?

  So John hears this voice telling him to do something, to intervene, to save his wife, to be the hero. And then he hears another voice telling him what a coward he was for not intervening. And he feels this deep.

• 44:56Jeff Larson?

  The angel and the devil on his shoulders are like teaming up. That's always bad when they're like saying the same things.

• 45:04Wes Larson?

  Yeah. He feels this really deep sense of failure. Like, I think we've talked about this before. We've all imagined these kind of scenarios where you could be the hero. And he probably had to. But when he's confronted with a bear that's actively killing his wife in the darkness. He feels too scared to intervene. He doesn't want to take it any further than he already has. And he imagines Katie feeling this great sense of disappointment. Because she hears him arrive and then he doesn't do. Anything and her primal like deep screams are just washing over them and he's just sitting there frozen in inaction and he knows that she's either gonna die or be so severely mauled

• 45:45Wes Larson?

  that her life is gonna be changed forever. So he continues to call out to her, tell her that he was there and then just stand there. He knew that he wasn't willing to really sacrifice himself, so he owed it to her to at least stand there and witness the attack.

• 46:01Mike Smith?

  Dude.

• 46:02Wes Larson?

  I know. It's so rough.

• 46:03Mike Smith?

  That is heavy.

• 46:05Wes Larson?

  So then he looks down the trail at the hostel and he sees a small group armed with flashlights and like pans and stuff and they're moving slowly but making a ton of noise and they're just slowly moving up the trail toward him. They're banging these pots and pans, they're yelling, they're screaming and he watches them move closer and closer and he runs back down to them and this group now has a bunch of Romanians as well as this doctor and her husband and he leads them to where Katie was and when they get there, the bear's gone. She's alone, they can see her body, she's completely silent at this point and the bear left. Again, like a united group of people making a lot of noise was more than enough to scare this bear off. Immediately, one of the things they noticed was there wasn't really

• 46:49Wes Larson?

  any blood on Katie. Her face was muddy but untouched. When this doctor bends down to shine the flashlight on her pupils, they're unresponsive. So she's not, you know, reacting to the light. She's completely white and she had a faint heartbeat that was almost impossible to hear. But because they didn't know where the bear was, they decided they needed to move Katie to safety. They carry her down to the guest house where they could lay her down on the dining room table. When they lay her down, she has no pulse, she wasn't breathing and everyone knows that she had died.

• 47:23Wes Larson?

  So they spend the night doing a bunch of different tests just to confirm that she was dead, to really figure out, you know, what had happened. Uh, this group of like bear specialists in Romania show up, but they're essentially just hunters and they like make dinner and kind of get drunk. Um, there's this whole thing that's going and John's just kind of sitting there dealing with the fact that his wife had just died, but also dealing with the fact that he had, uh, reacted to it in a more cowardly way than he had ever imagined he would. He makes some hard phone calls, he calls Katie's mom, she immediately asks John what she can do for him, which was a really hard pill for him to swallow. And then when some medical professionals arrive, the reason they say she died was something

• 48:07Wes Larson?

  called gross thoracic trauma. And what that is, is it means that her internal organs had been crushed. So the bear had spent pretty much this entire like half an hour just jumping on her and pressing its weight on to her and had crushed her rib cage and a lot of her internal organs. And she died from the resulting trauma and essentially like bled to death internally.

• 48:30Mike Smith?

  Oh, gosh. So were there any like claw or bite marks or anything on her body?

• 48:36Wes Larson?

  There for sure were, but that's not why she died.

• 48:39Jeff Larson?

  She didn't get eaten at all?

• 48:42Wes Larson?

  No, which is crazy. And that's, I think that's the first one we've had on the podcast where that was the cause of death was just essentially blunt force trauma from a bear, which is pretty wild. Yeah.

• 48:53Jeff Larson?

  No, that's interesting. I wonder like if it changed at the start, it seems a little bit more like predatory where it bit the guy's thigh. But then like when she was throwing rocks at the bear, maybe it's just like, I'm going to neutralize this threat.

• 49:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I really don't know. It didn't have cubs.

• 49:11Jeff Larson?

  No, I'm just like, I'm not saying that's what happened.

• 49:14Wes Larson?

  I went through the same thought process.

• 49:16Jeff Larson?

  Hypothecizing.

• 49:17Wes Larson?

  I think the fact that it made such a slow deliberate attempt on them, like that it just kind of went right for him, does make me think that it was investing in them as food. And I do think had this bear had more time with her without being interrupted because kind of pretty consistently through this attack, people were showing up, even if they were just watching or whatever, it probably didn't feel totally comfortable. I do think it probably would have fed on her, but it's hard to say. This is a hard one to say for sure. All of the interviews I read with John, he talks really openly about this feeling of cowardice, feeling completely frozen. It does make him feel a little detached when you're listening to it. He talks about it in like kind of a very casual way. And he talks about how a lot of the feelings really only hit him after

• 50:02Wes Larson?

  he got back to civilization. And then he broke down. He had these feelings of panic, of terror, of depression. Lots of different feelings hit this guy throughout his. Like the resulting time. One of the main feelings he felt, though, was a sense of loneliness and a sense of kind of wanting to move on past this. And the following year, he started dating a friend named Kate. They were married about a year and a half following Katie's death, and he had a few kids with her, and then they ended up getting divorced. But he wrote this book called Young Widower, a memoir.

• 50:33Jeff Larson?

  Then he dated someone named Kat.

• 50:35Wes Larson?

  Yeah, serious.

• 50:36Jeff Larson?

  Just kept getting short.

• 50:37Wes Larson?

  Variations. Yeah.

• 50:41Wes Larson?

  But he wrote this book, Young Widower, a memoir. I didn't read the book, but I did read this excerpt from it that was in Slate Magazine. The book is kind of supposed to be about grief, but he says it's really a lot of it about guilt, because he just felt really terrible that he didn't intervene. And again, is really honest about his feelings, which I think is impressive, but also kind of a hard pill to swallow.

• 51:04Mike Smith?

  Yeah. I know it's, it's hard to, from especially like armchair psychology, to really understand what all is going through his brain, or like actually what literally did happen over there. But do you think it's justified the way he was feeling? Because I know a lot of times survivor's guilt, people feel that way, even though they don't really have a compelling reason to like wartime survivors, stuff like that. Do you think his guilt is legitimate?

• 51:29Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I do. But I don't think it's his-

• 51:32Jeff Larson?

  A lot of the wartime survivors' guilt is legitimate, too.

• 51:35Wes Larson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 51:37Mike Smith?

  Well, like, if you, okay, I mean, if you get like blown up in a car and you survive for whatever reason, like it wasn't-

• 51:43Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. Oh, and it's like your friends died and-

• 51:45Mike Smith?

  Exactly.

• 51:46Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. No, that's a bad joke.

• 51:48Mike Smith?

  No, it's funny. It's, no, you should make more of those.

• 51:51Wes Larson?

  There's a tweet I saw recently that was like, only the US will go invade a country and then later make a movie about how sad it made them feel. Which I thought was pretty good. Anyway.

• 52:03Mike Smith?

  Gotta make that money.

• 52:04Jeff Larson?

  I would say, I would say my, my two cents on it, I think John, he definitely has things he can blame himself for, and things like he could have done to save Katie. But I, he was like, probably like fourth on my list of blame.

• 52:20Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Jeff Larson?

  I'd say like number one is the guy with the gun. Who wouldn't give him the gun like that's just insane.

• 52:25Wes Larson?

  That's wild.

• 52:25Jeff Larson?

  If I was John, I mean, you can't, you can't like say what you would do because what would you actually do? But I'd be like, let me borrow your knife then. And then I would hold the knife to him and be like, give me your fucking gun or I'm gonna stab you. And then you have to get that gun if there's a gun.

• 52:45Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Jeff Larson?

  And then, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of culpability just to like, the education of brown bears in that area.

• 52:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Jeff Larson?

  Sounds like people felt way too afraid of this one bear. And everyone thought maybe they would die if they went to go help Katie. So like, that's just bad education.

• 53:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Jeff Larson?

  And then that second cabin should just let him stay there, you know?

• 53:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah. In a way, there's a lot of parallels between Night of the Grizzlies. Cause if you guys remember when some of those women, I forget, I think it was um, Helgeson. Forget her first name, when she was being attacked, like no one wanted to go help because they didn't, they thought the bear was like gonna eat them or kill them or whatever. And it took them a while to go help as well. And I agree with what you said just a second ago, Jeff, that education was the main thing that was lacking here. And I don't want to say in Romania, I want to say in this group of people, like, they were not well educated about what to do with the bear. And had they just had.

• 53:46Jeff Larson?

  Some of them were like the homeowners of those homes in grizzly bear country?

• 53:51Wes Larson?

  Yeah, and but that was people they encountered. That was people they encountered after the attack had already started and this attack should have never happened in the first place. So Mike, to your question, I do want to go through a couple of things really quickly. Just to say, yes, I, I think John is culpable for some of this. But not because of like stuff that he knew and didn't do. It's because of stuff he should have known and didn't do. So first of all, I think the number one thing here is they were hiking without any kind of deterrent in brown bear country. And I don't think bear spray is legal in Romania. If I were to go hiking in the Carpathian Mountains.

• 54:32Wes Larson?

  I would probably figure out a way to smuggle some in or figure out a way to get some bear spray. If I didn't have it, I would make sure that I had something, a flare gun, a gun gun, something to make sure that I had some sort of deterrent. Because this is a place where a lot of bear attacks happen. And this is a bear that you can't always discourage by just being loud and yelling and throwing things. So having a deterrent. Second, they were hiking at night when someone had told them that they had just seen a bear. That's very high risk behavior. If you bump into that bear, there's a good chance it's not going to know what you are. And it's going to be very territorial or aggressive. It might just run away, but it might decide, charge in and hit you.

• 55:16Wes Larson?

  Next, I think their biggest mistake they made that would have stopped this entire encounter from happening is them splitting up when Katie got hurt. Had they, like they, at that point, they knew there was a bear around and they split up. And if you stay in large groups, bears do not like interacting with large unified groups of people. They just don't do it. When that group came up from the guest house, they stopped it. The bear left because a large group of people was approaching it. So that was where I think that was the fatal mistake, in my opinion. Next, the other biggest mistake, I would say number two, was them playing dead when this bear approached them. It could have gone fine. Maybe the bear would have sniffed them and just walked off.

• 55:59Wes Larson?

  But you're giving the bear all of the control at that point. You're saying you get to decide how this interaction ends. Uh, running was a big mistake. And then not grouping up again, once they knew that she was being attacked. John not just saying, listen, you guys are coming with me. We're gonna go scare this bear and stop this attack. Cause that's what I would, I would say, listen, we need as big a group as possible. We're going to be as loud and as unified as possible. It is going to leave if we do that. And it would have. It did.

• 56:29Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Wes Larson?

  Had that guy and Sarah not ran away, they could have stopped it from killing Katie. Like they ran and they left her behind. And and had the two of them just stayed unified like they would have been able to just with those three people to discourage that bear. But they broke off and then it just kind of hit them one at a time. And so that running, running.

• 56:50Jeff Larson?

  They they might have been able to like the bear had already bit one of them with three people there though.

• 56:55Wes Larson?

  Yeah, but like when when you look at the data, there's really no bad maulings that have ever happened in groups of three or more. It just doesn't happen.

• 57:04Jeff Larson?

  I would.

• 57:05Wes Larson?

  When the people are grouped up.

• 57:07Jeff Larson?

  That's normally, I I know you're right, and I'm not trying to, you're the bear biologist, but like.

• 57:12Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Jeff Larson?

  That situation is normally like the bear doesn't engage the people because there's three people standing up, making noise, making it so the bear doesn't want to come in. I feel like once a bear engages and like bites someone, its mindset has already switched a little bit, you know?

• 57:30Wes Larson?

  Yeah, but not necessarily like not with this bear like you're right, you know, we the.

• 57:34Jeff Larson?

  But it was with this bear.

• 57:36Wes Larson?

  The the hot springs bear, I forget the name of the river.

• 57:39Jeff Larson?

  Because Katie was stayed and was throwing rocks at it and trying to get it away.

• 57:44Wes Larson?

  Once that black bear in that story like locked into someone, you're right, like it switched on a predator mode and there was nothing you could do to discourage it. That wasn't the case with this bear. It bit this guy and then it went to someone else and then it went to Katie like it was kind of just thinking, oh, I had these three different targets. That are all totally submissive and I can just kind of take my time and explore each of them. And if they had all three stood up, even after being bitten or knocked down or whatever, had they stood up and grouped up and yelled and thrown things and presented a unified threat against that bear. I really, really, really doubt it would have continued that attack. I think it would have left. So any other questions before we get under our categories?

• 58:27Mike Smith?

  I might I might interrupt you in a little bit and ask a question.

• 58:30Jeff Larson?

  What is like the best bear deterrent available in Romania?

• 58:34Wes Larson?

  I honestly don't know, probably like dogs, a gun. They don't, they don't have.

• 58:39Jeff Larson?

  Hard to get though, right? Like they couldn't have got a gun.

• 58:42Wes Larson?

  Yeah, so the best deterrent is just big groups of people at that point, you know, and education. But they really need, someone needs to figure out a way to get bear spray broken into Europe because they would have far less attacks in Romania if they had bear spray and if they had education on how to use it.

• 59:01Mike Smith?

  How often, is it tracked how often bear spray is deployed in a given year? That's probably really hard to track, but is it pretty frequent in the States?

• 59:09Wes Larson?

  It's not tracked on large, but it's tracked in individual places. Like in Yellowstone, anytime it was deployed, we tracked it. And then there's like, again, there's papers, the one I just referenced, Tom's paper, where he analyzed pretty much every time it had been deployed in Alaska and compared it to firearms deployments against bears and looked at the differences.

• 59:30Mike Smith?

  If you had to guess how many times bear spray was used, say in 2024, would you have a number, a ballpark? Or does it vary pretty widely?

• 59:39Wes Larson?

  Like used on a bear?

• 59:40Mike Smith?

  Yeah, sure. Or just towards any threat?

• 59:44Wes Larson?

  I would say on a bear like a couple dozen times.

• 59:46Mike Smith?

  Oh, okay.

• 59:47Wes Larson?

  Wow, yeah, probably not a lot, but.

• 59:50Mike Smith?

  No, I mean, that's still, that's, that's enough to, you know, sway the stats.

• 59:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I would probably guess like 40 to 50 times actually, but yeah, I can't say for sure.

• 1:00:00Mike Smith?

  I mean, that's 50 potential attacks that were converted. So that's, that's a good, that's a good number in my uneducated opinion.

• 1:00:06Wes Larson?

  But I don't, you know, don't quote me on that because I really don't know. That's, yeah, I've never asked that before. Okay, well, let's get to our categories.

• 1:00:14Jeff Larson?

  Will you quote yourself? Yeah.

• 1:00:19Wes Larson?

  All right. First up, I want to hear your favorite Romanian, can be real, can be an actor, can be a character, whatever you want.

• 1:00:27Mike Smith?

  Yeah, so I have kind of a strange one that my mom, really into this Romanian gymnast named Nadia, Nadia Comanici, she's, she was the first gymnast ever to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. I think it was at like the Montreal games or something.

• 1:00:43Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Mike Smith?

  And for some reason, my mom talked about her more than you would think. I mean, no one really knows my mom, I guess. So that doesn't, that's a weird frame of reference. But like, the fact that she brought it up enough for me to remember without even having to like, look up whether Nadia wrote Comaneci was Romanian. I think that's enough maybe to put it in your brains how often she was talking about this weird little 14 year old gymnast from Romania. It was great though. She's, she is an awesome gymnast.

• 1:01:08Wes Larson?

  All right. Uh, Jeffrey, you still looking yours up? You want me to do mine?

• 1:01:11Jeff Larson?

  I kind of forgot to do this one. Who are some good Romanians?

• 1:01:15Wes Larson?

  Uh, Sebastian Stan's Romanian.

• 1:01:17Mike Smith?

  Is he?

• 1:01:17Wes Larson?

  He's born in Romania. Yeah.

• 1:01:19Mike Smith?

  Huh.

• 1:01:20Wes Larson?

  He's like the Winter Soldier actor.

• 1:01:22Mike Smith?

  He was born there?

• 1:01:23Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Mike Smith?

  Whoa, interesting.

• 1:01:26Wes Larson?

  Uh, my pick is Vlad, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, you know?

• 1:01:30Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Wes Larson?

  He's, I like, I have a hard time picking a Romanian I like more than Dracula, who's probably my favorite monster of all time. So.

• 1:01:38Jeff Larson?

  He's kind of a bad guy though.

• 1:01:40Wes Larson?

  Yeah, but it, you know, made for some good stories, good movies.

• 1:01:43Jeff Larson?

  Like he's got like women slaves. You like that?

• 1:01:46Mike Smith?

  Makes for good stories.

• 1:01:47Wes Larson?

  I don't like that, but I don't think, I don't think that's necessarily what his like mistresses are.

• 1:01:54Mike Smith?

  Doesn't he kind of like bite them and enslave them? I don't know what the, you've, you've read the original book, I think.

• 1:02:00Wes Larson?

  It's been a while.

• 1:02:01Jeff Larson?

  It's kind of like a cannibal, like mass.

• 1:02:05Wes Larson?

  He's not a good guy. I'm not arguing that Dracula's a good guy. I don't. I'm not trying to build my life like his, but he's my favorite Romanian character.

• 1:02:16Jeff Larson?

  Here, will you guys give me a few other choices?

• 1:02:20Wes Larson?

  I don't know many others.

• 1:02:22Mike Smith?

  Was the guy from Harry Potter, the Victor Crum, was he Romanian?

• 1:02:25Jeff Larson?

  Oh, I'll take him. Yeah, I'll take Crum.

• 1:02:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Mike Smith?

  I'm not sure if he's Romanian. He's somewhere.

• 1:02:29Wes Larson?

  I think he is. Yeah.

• 1:02:30Jeff Larson?

  He's the idiot though, who scored the snitch when his team was down 150 points, right?

• 1:02:37Wes Larson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:38Mike Smith?

  Oh, hold on. He's Bulgarian. Sorry.

• 1:02:40Jeff Larson?

  Ah, shoot.

• 1:02:41Wes Larson?

  But that, but their school is in Romania, isn't it?

• 1:02:45Mike Smith?

  Is that what I'm thinking? That could be it.

• 1:02:46Wes Larson?

  I think so. So we will count it. Let's just count that.

• 1:02:50Mike Smith?

  That's okay. I mean, I doubt we have any Romanian listeners we'll offend by.

• 1:02:55Jeff Larson?

  I feel like they got, they got some good tennis in Romania.

• 1:02:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I think just like the Roma people, like Romani people are just really, I think it's an interesting culture. The music, I just think there's a lot of really interesting things about Romania. I really want to visit Romania.

• 1:03:12Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. You know what, though? I don't, I don't like people who keep women as slaves. So I'm gonna disagree with Wes.

• 1:03:21Wes Larson?

  I don't either. I don't like them either. I'm gonna go ahead and just make sure everyone knows my position on that is I'm anti. But I do like Dracula.

• 1:03:29Mike Smith?

  You're sending mixed signals. I don't know about all that. The Romanian deadlift, whoever invented that, he's probably a pretty.

• 1:03:35Wes Larson?

  All right, we're gonna move on from this category.

• 1:03:38Mike Smith?

  All right.

• 1:03:39Jeff Larson?

  Probably a WWE guy.

• 1:03:41Wes Larson?

  The next category is movie you wish you could give the main character a gun. Because I think we all wish that John could have had a gun. So a movie that you wish you could go back and give them a gun.

• 1:03:54Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I'll go first this time. We just mentioned it, but I would love some guns in Harry Potter.

• 1:04:01Wes Larson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:04:03Jeff Larson?

  I don't know. I feel like guns exist in the muggle world and like the way, like it takes a while to say a spell. Like a lot of times I feel like a gun would work way better.

• 1:04:13Wes Larson?

  Or you can just do that like push thing where you got the different colors coming out and pushing against each other. And you pull your Glock out with your other hand and just fire a few rounds.

• 1:04:22Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, and like I think the best wizards like Dumbledore, he doesn't say his spells. So I think he could, you know, evaporate the bullets or whatever. But I mean, you start getting like, nukes and bazookas and stuff. I don't know what Dumbledore is gonna do to a nuke.

• 1:04:37Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I didn't say nuke. I said gun. For the purpose of this, we'll say like a machine gun.

• 1:04:42Jeff Larson?

  Well, like a nuke gun.

• 1:04:44Wes Larson?

  No, not a nuke gun. All right.

• 1:04:47Mike Smith?

  A wizard dude with a gun, Harry Potter, if you like miss your shot, you just do that spell that you like recall the bullet to you.

• 1:04:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah, and just like throw it back in.

• 1:04:56Mike Smith?

  Waste a shot.

• 1:04:57Jeff Larson?

  I see a bullet.

• 1:04:58Mike Smith?

  That's the one. So I'm gonna go with-

• 1:05:01Wes Larson?

  And then just stand in the line of the person.

• 1:05:03Mike Smith?

  I'm going with Neo from The Matrix. I think he could have used a gun. In that one part, when he and Agent Smith are fighting in the subway and they both run out of bullets at the same time, just give Neo another gun. He's got some more bullets and he wins. I think that would have been really handy for him.

• 1:05:17Wes Larson?

  I love that you picked a movie where it's like famous scene where they get the most guns ever in any movie.

• 1:05:23Mike Smith?

  Yeah, well, not enough, apparently.

• 1:05:26Wes Larson?

  Uh, I'm gonna pick Home Alone. I think just give Kevin like a submachine gun and that ends very tight.

• 1:05:31Jeff Larson?

  Family guys.

• 1:05:32Wes Larson?

  I'd give Marv the gun. Yeah, kinda ruins the movie, I guess, but-

• 1:05:37Jeff Larson?

  It makes it a lot shorter.

• 1:05:39Wes Larson?

  Give Braveheart a gun, you know?

• 1:05:41Jeff Larson?

  You know, it'd be interesting in Hunger Games to have like one gun in the center where everyone goes.

• 1:05:48Mike Smith?

  It's a good point.

• 1:05:48Jeff Larson?

  Everyone else has like spears and stuff and one guy has-

• 1:05:51Mike Smith?

  Do guns exist in that world?

• 1:05:52Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. The guards have guns.

• 1:05:55Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:05:56Jeff Larson?

  Like, the third one is like a whole civil war, just-

• 1:05:59Mike Smith?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of guns in that one.

• 1:06:00Wes Larson?

  That's right.

• 1:06:01Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:06:02Wes Larson?

  All right. Jeff, you got a random animal fact for us?

• 1:06:05Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go with one, I think we've mentioned it before, but people, people forget. On our last trip, people didn't know this, and I'm gonna need an assist from you because I didn't look up the word. But I'm just gonna describe the difference of spots between cheetahs, leopards, and jaguars.

• 1:06:24Mike Smith?

  Great.

• 1:06:25Jeff Larson?

  So cheetah spots are just dots, right? There's no like real shape to it. It's just like dots, like a dalmatian almost, like you got dots.

• 1:06:34Mike Smith?

  They would be considered spots.

• 1:06:35Jeff Larson?

  Spots, yep. And then on a leopard, you get circles. Sometimes it's-

• 1:06:41Mike Smith?

  Rosettes.

• 1:06:41Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. So those are rosettes.

• 1:06:43Mike Smith?

  Rosettes.

• 1:06:44Jeff Larson?

  And it's just a circle, okay? Then a jaguar is a circle with a dot in the middle of the circle.

• 1:06:52Wes Larson?

  And when you're saying circle, you mean, you mean like a circle that has an, an empty middle too. Cause a dot is a circle, or spots a circle too, right? Like a Cheerio circle.

• 1:07:03Mike Smith?

  Leopards are Cheerios.

• 1:07:06Wes Larson?

  And the dot, the dot in the middle, I don't know if it has a name, but Jaguars have rosettes.

• 1:07:12Jeff Larson?

  Rosette.

• 1:07:13Wes Larson?

  Yes. Jaguars have rosettes with dots in the middle. Leopards have empty rosettes. And not all of Jaguars rosettes will have a dot in the middle, but a couple of them will.

• 1:07:23Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. So if you see a picture of a leopard and a jaguar and you can't tell which is which, just like look at every single circle of their spots and look for a dot in the middle. And if you see any dots in the middle, it's a jaguar.

• 1:07:39Mike Smith?

  Yeah, it's barely let you qualify that as a Jeff fact, but Wes really did. It was like a 55, 45.

• 1:07:45Wes Larson?

  He knew what he was saying. I was just, I was just explaining it a little more clear.

• 1:07:49Jeff Larson?

  I was, yeah.

• 1:07:50Wes Larson?

  He knew what you were saying. Sure. I would say there's probably been leopards out there that have spots inside of their rosettes. But as a general rule, you can use it. Okay. Great. Great fact. Uh, we're gonna do some nice advice would suffice. Jeff, did you find someone that needs advice?

• 1:08:09Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, it's more just, well, okay, yeah, let's start. I'm gonna do two. Because one's quick and one's just like a layup. Alright, this one's from Lisa. Please help settle a family dispute. We were headed to a location in Mexico for spring break that has dolphin attractions. Specifically swim ride dolphins. Without anthropomorphizing what the dolphins like and dislike, is this enjoyable for them? Is this akin to trained circus animals? Do you think the dolphins are treated well at these attractions? We are split as a family and greatly appreciate your input. Thanks so much. We love the podcast. Cheers.

• 1:08:48Wes Larson?

  Uh, you shouldn't ride dolphins, ever. I can't say exactly like what they're feeling or experiencing, but I do know that. Any place that lets you like hold on to a dolphin and ride it, the dolphins aren't being treated well. You have to.

• 1:09:02Jeff Larson?

  There is one right by us in Cosmo when we were just there and I had my ass pain. The ass pain's irrelevant to that, but uh, I think the dolphins might like it when you're like swimming with them and they're like pushing you or whatever, because they probably get fed, they probably get rewarded, they're interacting. But their living situation isn't a good situation. They shouldn't be in a pool just having to do tricks with humans.

• 1:09:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I would say they might have liked it the first few times, but like that's what those dolphins have to do every day, day in, day out. That's the only thing they do is drag people around in the water. And you're right, Jeff, I think they've like come to associate it with the reward and they like the reward they get. But there's a reason dolphins don't really do that in the wild, because it's not part of their natural behavior. And when they do, it's interesting and that's fine. If you're ever out in the wild and a dolphin decides to come up and bump you and swim around you or whatever, great. But those places are not ethical. You should never ride a dolphin.

• 1:10:02Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, and my point's more just like, even if it feels like the dolphin enjoys your company, it's not a good situation for the dolphin, you know?

• 1:10:11Wes Larson?

  Dolphins, there's something very unfortunate for dolphins is that they always look happy. And so people think they're happy when they're not, and those dolphins in those places are not happy. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:10:22Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I seem happy, you know? But he wasn't.

• 1:10:25Wes Larson?

  I always sense the sadness behind those eyes. Alright, you're very perceptive, Mike.

• 1:10:30Jeff Larson?

  What's that like poem or whatever where the clown is the one who's depressed at the bar?

• 1:10:36Wes Larson?

  Yeah. But Doc, I am the clown.

• 1:10:39Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Wes Larson?

  That's a nice joke. What's number two?

• 1:10:45Jeff Larson?

  Okay, this is from Alicia. This is a long one. Okay, Wes, my question is kinda long, so I hope you bear with me. It's about wolves and their conflict with cattle ranchers in California. My husband grew up on a large cattle ranch in Northern California where his dad was the cow boss manager. They didn't own the ranch, it belonged to a rich dude with many businesses, but they lived there. And spend every day on horseback ranching. They were honest to God cowboys and cowgirls. Now the ranch is owned by a different rich dude with many businesses and my husband's sister has taken over as manager. So here's where the wolves come in. As I'm sure you know, wolves have made a comeback in California in recent years. There's currently seven separate California wolf packs in the state.

• 1:11:27Jeff Larson?

  And ranchers are starting to get pretty pissed about the wolves killing calves and other young cattle. Mike, you're probably mad about that, too.

• 1:11:36Wes Larson?

  Don't do that.

• 1:11:37Jeff Larson?

  The ranch where my sister in law works has lost four or five head in the past year. And when they went to California Department of Fish and Wildlife to make claims via the wolf livestock competition. Con- constipation pilot program. They were told that there's no money left over for constipation after the administrative costs. I cannot confirm this, but it's what I've been told. While I too come from agriculture, family and community, I'm of the mindset that when you farm and have a ranch, you have as much responsibility towards the wildlife that share the land that you are on, if not more so than the livestock you're raising. I think Wes said your Hawaiian cousins call it a tax when a shark or something gets the fish they're fishing.

• 1:12:21Jeff Larson?

  I'm inclined to feel the same way and I'm even more inclined to get not give a shit about the bottom line of one rich dude's many businesses, like just fucking fold that into your cost of doing business or whatever. But to be fair, my sister in law, it's not about the money. She just loves and cares about each calf that's killed. And it's hard for her to lose these cows. And she goes on to say, like, there's also ranchers who aren't rich, who have cattle, who like kind of surviving at low costs and kind of just getting by and they lose cows. So what's your advice, Wes?

• 1:12:57Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I think first of all, from what I understand, most of those compensation programs are run through the federal government, not through state governments. So I I'd be surprised if if this rancher isn't able to get some compensation for losses to wolves, especially because wolves in the lower forty eight in California. Californians are still protected. There's places in other parts of the country where you can shoot them. But in California, I believe you can't shoot a wolf that's deprecating your livestock. So I'd be shocked if they're not able to find compensation.

• 1:13:29Jeff Larson?

  Doge is probably like, we spent like five hundred million dollars on wolf compensation with like no evidence or anything, just a blank statement.

• 1:13:40Wes Larson?

  It might be harder than ever to get that money. I agree with the author of this question that I think part of you running your cows in wilderness in places where there's predators is you accept some risk that there's a chance that there's going to be animals that kill this like essentially helpless animal that you're putting out right in front of them. That's just part of the deal. In my opinion, if you want to ranch in wolf country or places that were even traditionally wolf country that are becoming wolf country again, that's just part of what you have to deal with. I do think there's a level though where that line gets crossed. Like there was a while ago where two wolves in Montana killed like a hundred and forty sheep in one night.

• 1:14:22Wes Larson?

  And didn't eat any of them even just kill them. And I do think in that situation, you probably need to eliminate those wolves, those two, and you probably need to compensate that farmer because that's a whole loss of like an entire year's worth of of animals. So I it's nuanced. I don't think there's one answer that fits all for this. But personally, I do believe that ranching inherently comes with some risks. And if you ranch in a place that has predators like wolves or grizzly bears or mountain lions, you just have to accept that you're going to have some losses.

• 1:14:54Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I agree with that. It's kind of insane actually to just think you can have cattle roaming such large areas and not have like any animals interact with them at all.

• 1:15:05Wes Larson?

  Right.

• 1:15:06Jeff Larson?

  It's a lot of range. And I'll just say too, we were just in Ladakh, India, and there were ranchers there that were ranchers in America who you think are poor, like these guys were definitely way more poor. And in our week there, we saw a horse that was killed by wolves and we saw a Cow that was killed by a snow leopard and like they're dealing with it and like their government, we have the richest, one of the richest governments in history, like they should be taking care of that. Like in India, they're able to take care of these farmers losing animals. So I think our government should be able to take care of that as well.

• 1:15:47Wes Larson?

  Yeah. And over there, they've realized the value of keeping those, those animals alive, the wildlife. So it's a great question and we'll definitely talk about it more in other episodes. Okay. Uh, let's do two more quick ones. First of all, something you'd recommend recently. I'm gonna go first. So I can beat Mike to it again.

• 1:16:06Jeff Larson?

  No.

• 1:16:06Wes Larson?

  Uh, I'm gonna recommend the band Sophie Tucker, which

• 1:16:10Jeff Larson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:16:11Wes Larson?

  is the combo of a woman and a guy. It's kind of, it was introduced to me and Mike at the same time by some guests on our last trip. Shout out Chantel and

• 1:16:19Mike Smith?

  I actually heard about them like 24 hours in advance.

• 1:16:22Wes Larson?

  And, uh, we both listened to it on a long drive to, to Doba. And there's one song, the vocalist Sophie speaks fluent Brazilian Portuguese and so do I. And so it really hits for me. And there's one song called Jacare, which is pretty much means Cayman. And I just is one of those songs that just lifts my mood every time I listen to it. Just really been listening to it a lot lately. So I like Sophie Tucker quite a bit. So that's my shout out.

• 1:16:52Jeff Larson?

  You speak fluent Portuguese?

• 1:16:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Jeff Larson?

  Say the crocodile swallowed a black cat and the black cat crawled out.

• 1:17:00Wes Larson?

  Jacare comeo o gato negro y o gato negro saiu o bolo do jacare.

• 1:17:05Jeff Larson?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:17:05Wes Larson?

  He's good.

• 1:17:06Jeff Larson?

  That's per, that was perfect. I'll go. Mine is, we normally do like pop culture. I normally do just sports. I'm gonna just say going on a walk during or right after a snowstorm because we had a big snowstorm in Salt Lake the other day and I was the only one walking and it's like one of the most beautiful days I've been on a walk this entire year. And it's just weird to me that like, you know, once it gets sunny and it's just like blue sky and sun, everyone's outside. But after like a snowstorm, like everyone just stays inside and it's really nice time to go on a walk.

• 1:17:44Wes Larson?

  The whole time where you're just like, I'm just built different than all of these people.

• 1:17:49Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Wes Larson?

  It's it.

• 1:17:51Mike Smith?

  Earth is just so much better. Without anyone else out there to bother you, this place is actually pretty amazing.

• 1:17:57Wes Larson?

  And so quiet after a snowstorm, which we all love, a little bit of peace and quiet.

• 1:18:01Mike Smith?

  I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out the podcast I just did a guest appearance on. I genuinely think they're a great group of guys over at Lost and Found and Rewound, so they have two ampersands in their name. We only have one, so let that tell you what it will. But what they do is they they talk about usually the older, more esoteric or forgotten movies that is kind of right down my alley, if that sounds nice to you. They're just like a super chill group of three friends. And we talked about the movie Sorcerer. I'm not telling you to go listen to the episode I was on because I.

• 1:18:34Wes Larson?

  Sorcerer is on my shortlist right now of movies to watch.

• 1:18:36Mike Smith?

  It's it's unbelievable. It's actually, I picked that movie for us to watch and it's an all-timer. Kind of a forgotten classic from Friedkin, director of movies, The Exorcist, French Connection.

• 1:18:48Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Mike Smith?

  The guy from, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:18:49Wes Larson?

  Jaws is in it, right?

• 1:18:51Mike Smith?

  Roy Scheider, my guy, Roy Scheider, holy cow.

• 1:18:53Jeff Larson?

  Did you plug?

• 1:18:54Mike Smith?

  So good.

• 1:18:55Jeff Larson?

  Did you plug Tooth and Claw when you guested?

• 1:18:58Mike Smith?

  I did not personally talk about the show. But.

• 1:19:02Wes Larson?

  You were the worst guest.

• 1:19:03Mike Smith?

  I, yeah, I really am. Chris did a good job of introducing me, much better than Jeff's ever done. Go figure. But. No, they're they're awesome.

• 1:19:12Jeff Larson?

  He probably lied. He probably said you're like an equal member of Tooth and Claw.

• 1:19:17Mike Smith?

  Yeah, he was like a co-host. And I was like, whoa, don't put that responsibility on me.

• 1:19:22Jeff Larson?

  He's just the tech guy.

• 1:19:24Mike Smith?

  I'm just the tech guy. No, but they they have a great vibe and I just, I really want to shout those guys out. I feel like I probably went on and rambled, just like I'm doing right now, and kind of ruined the energy of the show. Because usually it's just like three dudes that are just chilling together. And I went on there and started yelling out much, the Sorcerer is like better than The Exorcist and stuff, which I actually, I believe, but.

• 1:19:46Wes Larson?

  Did you get mad at them like you got mad at us last episode?

• 1:19:49Jeff Larson?

  Sorcerer is better than that. You know what? You're an equal member. I shouldn't have said that.

• 1:19:54Mike Smith?

  Nah, won't stop you.

• 1:19:55Wes Larson?

  All right, our last, our last category. I do today is conservation. I want to talk about brown bears in Romania quickly. It's actually an interesting story. Romania prior to 1965 probably had far less brown bears than they have now. But a dictator gained power and kept that power until 1989, and there was an unlikely benefit for the bears. This guy's name was Nicolae Chausescu, and he loved shooting bears. In fact, he loved it so much that he wouldn't let anyone else shoot bears, just him and his buddies. And he, he said that there was a decree that he issued that everyone else had to protect bears.

• 1:20:36Wes Larson?

  And they even had to feed bears and that only he and his buddies were allowed to hunt them. So. In a way, the fact that he loved killing bears so much actually protected bears in Romania as a whole. And they really did well during this period.

• 1:20:51Jeff Larson?

  That's interesting. That's like the like trophy hunters going to Africa who are like, well, we actually give more money to conservation than anyone.

• 1:21:01Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's a whole, we'll get into that at some point, but um. We're probably going to do a whole episode on this Nicolae Chausescu at some point because it's a really interesting story.

• 1:21:12Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Wes Larson?

  But um, bear hunting in Romania was outlawed in 2016. Over the past few years, after some highly publicized attacks. Yeah, some highly publicized attacks, including one we covered in a news episode where a girl was thrown off a cliff by a bear. The Romanian government introduced a cull on their bears, C U L L. Uh, and the quota in 2024 was almost 500 bears that they wanted to cull. I don't know how many they ended up killing. That's pretty aggressive. The year before, I think it was like 250 to 300 bears. Last year they wanted to kill 500. So it's a pretty aggressive cull against these bears. They're facing some other threats, loss of habitat and general conflict with humans.

• 1:21:54Wes Larson?

  Cause they're increasingly forced to interact with communities, ranchers and farmers. And they're losing more and more habitat to human expansion. I think there's always going to be some habitat for brown bears in Romania. But it does seem like a place where there's a lot of concern about bears. And they're facing a lot of negative public opinion right now. So it is kind of a hotspot for brown bear conservation. All right. Uh, we've done claws a million times for this animal.

• 1:22:19Jeff Larson?

  Wait, I have a question going back to Mike's thing. So that podcast has two emperor stamps?

• 1:22:26Jeff Larson?

  Or what are they called?

• 1:22:26Mike Smith?

  Ampersand.

• 1:22:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah, ampersand, yes.

• 1:22:29Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30Wes Larson?

  We have two of them.

• 1:22:31Jeff Larson?

  What would ours be if we added something else? Tooth and claw and bones?

• 1:22:36Wes Larson?

  Tooth, oh, that's probably what it would be, right?

• 1:22:40Jeff Larson?

  Should we be tooth and claw and bones, Wes?

• 1:22:42Wes Larson?

  No, I don't want to add anything.

• 1:22:44Mike Smith?

  Tooth and horns and bones?

• 1:22:45Wes Larson?

  Tooth and claw and horns.

• 1:22:47Jeff Larson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:49Wes Larson?

  Tooth and horns and bones. No, we're good. Tooth and claw is fine. We don't need another ampersand. I'm, I'm happy.

• 1:22:55Mike Smith?

  I think two ampersands is as many as a podcast will ever have. I can't imagine a three ampersand pod out there. That'd be unwieldy.

• 1:23:05Wes Larson?

  All right. Well, with that, I think we're gonna end this episode. Thanks so much, guys, for listening. Thank you, everyone, for subscribing, those of you that have subscribed. Oh, actually, a quick announcement. Recently, just so everyone knows, Apple has changed their policies on Patreon. And if you subscribe to our show through the Patreon app, they're gonna charge you more. Apple's gonna charge you like an extra thirty percent. So if you're thinking about subscribing, do it on your web browser, do it outside of the app, and then you can get the app and port in your subscription and you'll be fine. But if you download the app and then subscribe, you're gonna pay extra. Um, it's like an extra four dollars or something.

• 1:23:48Mike Smith?

  Like on Apple devices, like an iPhone if you have the Patreon app?

• 1:23:52Wes Larson?

  If you get the Patreon app and then subscribe to us through that app, Apple's charging thirty percent. Stupid.

• 1:23:59Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's, that's pretty amazing to me.

• 1:24:02Wes Larson?

  So there's really nothing we can do about it. What you can do, though, is just subscribe through like your web browser or any other way, and it'll still be ten dollars. All right, I think that's it. Thanks, guys. Love you both, love you all, and we'll talk to you later.

• 1:24:20Mike Smith?

  Bye.