Kay, the Bear Lady: North Carolina's Answer to Timothy Treadwell

Now there are two of them (this is a reference to a Star Wars meme, which I am using to communicate the idea that Wes introduces us to a woman whom he likens to Timothy Treadwell, in that she grew a little too comfortable around bears for her own good)!? Watch here: https://youtu.be/3pNrnEvgbMo ~~ Quince: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince at https://quince.com/tooth for free shipping and 365-day returns, now available in Canada. Smalls: For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to https://Smalls.com/TOOTH. LMNT: Receive a free LMNT Sample Pack with any order when you go to https://drinklmnt.com/tooth Ollie Pet Food: Go to https://ollie.com/tooth and use code TOOTH to get 60% off your first box! ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/c/toothandclawpodcast ~~ 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 to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We're a podcast about bears, sharks, and snakes. And we have our wildlife.

• 0:24Wes Larson?

  Not wrong.

• 0:25Jeff Larson?

  I guess we've done leopards once, huh?

• 0:27Wes Larson?

  We've done big cats, we've done bugs. Oh, boy. Have we done a lot of stuff on this show?

• 0:33Jeff Larson?

  We got our wildlife biologist Wes Larson. Holla if you hear me.

• 0:38Wes Larson?

  Holla.

• 0:40Jeff Larson?

  We got our sound guy, Mike Smith. Holla if you hear me.

• 0:44Wes Larson?

  Holla.

• 0:46Jeff Larson?

  And I'm Jeff Holla. Wes's little brother.

• 0:50Wes Larson?

  Jeff, can you put, does that shirt allow you to put that little bread through that mouth of that shark?

• 0:55Jeff Larson?

  Let's see.

• 0:59Wes Larson?

  Yep, it does. Hey, look at that. That's great. I love that. Just wearing a shirt that has a shark on it and a piece of bread and you can push it through.

• 1:08Jeff Larson?

  Don't forget about the milk.

• 1:09Wes Larson?

  And there's milk too. Is the milk, is that play withable? The milk looks static to me, but.

• 1:15Jeff Larson?

  The milk is, no, you can't. You could like, put actual milk on it.

• 1:21Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Can I ask you guys a question about milk? That got me in some trouble recently. I think after, we're gonna have some listeners that don't like this. I think that milk goes really well with certain things, like a chocolate chip cookie, or Oreos, or a few other things. But the one thing that I think is controversial, that I really think milk is just great, is a bowl of spaghetti. Like, some cold milk after a bowl of spaghetti just hits so hard. You meant like pour it over the meat? No, no, no, no, no. No. Like after you eat some spaghetti, you drink some cold milk. I just feel like pasta in general, it like just kind of cuts through it really well. I don't know.

• 2:03Jeff Larson?

  It goes well with the with the spaghetti.

• 2:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Mike Smith?

  Sure. Like a, yeah, a white sauce kind of is always paired, often paired with pasta.

• 2:13Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Mike Smith?

  I can kind of see the connection going on.

• 2:15Wes Larson?

  Jessie hates that. Like when she.

• 2:17Jeff Larson?

  Really?

• 2:18Wes Larson?

  Yeah, she thinks like wine is the only pairing with spaghetti. And like, we've gotten in multiple fights about it. And now her sister's on board because she tried it and she's like, it really hits. So I'm slowly.

• 2:31Mike Smith?

  Nice.

• 2:31Jeff Larson?

  It's one of my favorite times to have milk, honestly, is with spaghetti.

• 2:35Wes Larson?

  All right. Mike, you should try it sometime.

• 2:36Jeff Larson?

  Not in the bowl like you do it.

• 2:39Wes Larson?

  No, that's not what I mean at all. The worst use of milk is Brent with just like a piece of bread, like a soggy piece of bread.

• 2:47Mike Smith?

  Yeah, that's, that's great depression level meals.

• 2:50Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Mike Smith?

  Um, I like the idea of Jessie just pairing all of everything she eats with spaghetti, not wine. This would go great with a nice spaghetti.

• 3:03Wes Larson?

  She probably would love that. Anyway.

• 3:05Jeff Larson?

  Like she only drinks wine because of how much she loves spaghetti.

• 3:09Wes Larson?

  Spaghetti. She does love spaghetti. It's one of her favorite foods for sure. You have a good spaghetti too, Jeff. Yeah.

• 3:18Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. Whenever dad's like, Jeff, you can have whatever you want. That's, that's like comes to mind first.

• 3:24Wes Larson?

  I think they're the, the perfect type of noodles for pasta.

• 3:28Jeff Larson?

  Mike had a good idea in our, uh, last subscriber episode too, about spaghetti.

• 3:34Wes Larson?

  What was that?

• 3:35Jeff Larson?

  A two mile long noodle that you slurp up.

• 3:39Wes Larson?

  That's right.

• 3:39Mike Smith?

  Yeah. Oh yeah. The eating con- instead of doing just like a big plate full of spaghetti eating contest, just make it one long one. You have to slurp it all the way down the boulevard.

• 3:48Jeff Larson?

  That'd be tough because you couldn't like bite it off and drink milk halfway through, you know?

• 3:53Wes Larson?

  Oh yeah, that's true. There's no breaks.

• 3:56Jeff Larson?

  Well, you could coil it up for two miles. You don't need to put it on the road.

• 4:00Mike Smith?

  No. Yeah, you can, you can get it to you however you want. If you're just like spinning the fork like Tom Hanks in Cast Away trying to light a fire.

• 4:11Mike Smith?

  Coil it up real quick. I actually got in a fight with, I thought I had made really good friends with Skylar when we were in Antarctica. And then we had a really big falling out because she said, um, I don't think she said bow ties were the superior pasta, but she was like, oh, they're top three. And I'm like, that's a bottom one pasta.

• 4:29Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I like both.

• 4:30Mike Smith?

  But I'm ready to be wrong.

• 4:31Wes Larson?

  Give me your top and your bottom pasta. For me, top is spaghetti, bottom is angel hair.

• 4:37Jeff Larson?

  Wow, they're very similar.

• 4:39Wes Larson?

  Hate angel hair.

• 4:40Mike Smith?

  Oh, angel hair is so good. That might be my number one. Oh.

• 4:44Jeff Larson?

  I like Orzo.

• 4:46Mike Smith?

  I like Penny.

• 4:47Wes Larson?

  Penny's a good pick. That's number two for me. All right. Of all of our subjects we've done, what was kind of the, the number one on my list? The biggest one that I, you know, was always kind of-

• 4:56Jeff Larson?

  Timothy Treadwell.

• 4:57Wes Larson?

  Timothy Treadwell. Exactly. And today, we're gonna talk about a female counterpart to Timothy Treadwell with black bears.

• 5:06Jeff Larson?

  I thought you were gonna do a retread.

• 5:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, we're just gonna retread. Retreadwell. Uh, no, this is the not so mysterious, mysterious death of Bear Lady Kay. And I do just want to mention that my main source for this was an Outside Magazine article, uh, written by Brandon Sneed. But there were a lot of articles that I read, um, a few different things I watched and listened to. But that was a, a source that I used pretty extensively. So first of all, I think, um, if you ever find that your name is preceded by like Bear Man, or Bear Lady, or Bear Child, or whatever, uh, and yeah, and you're not a professional working with bears, it seems like there's

• 5:50Wes Larson?

  probably a high likelihood that there's going to be some articles published about your death.

• 5:55Mike Smith?

  Wes moving the goalposts like he always does.

• 5:58Wes Larson?

  Well, we're actually gonna talk about that, too.

• 6:01Jeff Larson?

  Grizkid?

• 6:02Wes Larson?

  About, about like responsibility, uh, ethical responsibility of, of professionals with bears. We're gonna talk about that. Okay. That's exactly the moniker, though, that Kay Grayson had earned by 2015. For the past 28 years, she'd been living in some trailers off of a rough dirt road near Alligator Marina in Columbia, North Carolina, which is a tiny town of less than a thousand people and kind of considered the gateway to the Outer Banks. Jeff, you love Outer Banks.

• 6:33Jeff Larson?

  I like, I don't like pogs, though.

• 6:35Wes Larson?

  Yeah, you hate pokes. Pretty much all of those people knew Kay as the bear lady. And she definitely earned that nickname. And that's because Kay Grayson was always surrounded by bears. She'd been feeding the local bears that called the surrounding 5,000 acres of swampy pine forest home. And then in the 90s, residents of Columbia would come to her homestead, which she had lovingly titled Bear Song. And they would watch as this tall, white haired, kind of stately looking 67 year old woman would walk out into a clearing and start singing. And it wouldn't take long before the sounds of crunching leaves, breaking twigs, they're going to be heard all around her.

• 7:17Wes Larson?

  And then large black bears would come ambling out of the woods. These are some of the largest black bears that we have in the country in coastal North Carolina.

• 7:26Mike Smith?

  Like Hank, Hank the tanks.

• 7:28Wes Larson?

  Yes, Hank the tanks out there, but naturally even.

• 7:31Mike Smith?

  Wow.

• 7:32Wes Larson?

  So Kay had named all of these bears. She would call them by name. She'd make them stand. She'd feed them human food from her hands while her friends and, you know, visitors would watch just totally entranced. It was kind of like this famous show in town. And it wasn't like a, an actual show that she performed, but when people would go there, sometimes she would call her bears for them to see.

• 7:55Wes Larson?

  She was known as somewhat of a recluse. She did have friends and they did their best to take care of their kooky bear lady friend in the woods. And Kay, she often didn't take care of herself, especially toward the end of her life. In early January of 2015, one of her friends, Sharon Pledger, had stopped by her house and had left a meal at Kay's gate. Several days later, Sharon came back with another drop off and the original meal was still sitting there by the gate untouched.

• 8:23Mike Smith?

  Uh oh.

• 8:24Wes Larson?

  After looking around a little bit and not finding her on the property, he contacted authorities to report that Kay was missing. And on January 27th, 2015, two Tyrell County sheriff deputies went to Kay's house with an emergency management coordinator, a canine handler and a search dog.

• 8:42Mike Smith?

  They probably ate the food, right? Those dogs?

• 8:45Wes Larson?

  The dog was like, wait, I gotta eat this meal first. I'm ready to work, but I need to do one thing.

• 8:51Mike Smith?

  Do we know what the meal was? Because maybe it just wasn't, wasn't very appetizing and that's why she.

• 8:56Wes Larson?

  Dog food.

• 8:58Mike Smith?

  See?

• 8:59Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Mike Smith?

  Kind of questions you gotta ask.

• 9:02Wes Larson?

  Uh, the dog was given some of Kay's clothing to pick up her scent and then they followed this dog down the swampy wet road and it didn't take them long to start finding evidence of Kay. They found a maroon coat, a black turtleneck and a bag of unopened purchases like some batteries, some socks, cigarettes and Tylenol. As they looked around, they spotted more clothing across a ditch and further into the forest. And as they began to search around this area more closely, they started to find human bones, all of them picked completely clean and then a piece of human flesh with long white hair attached to it. And then, on a small knoll that had been formed by the roots of a fallen cypress tree, they found a human skull with

• 9:46Wes Larson?

  all of the skin peeled off and the brains inside had started to rot and the smell was so bad that it made these searchers gag. They had found the last remains of Kay Grayson, the bear lady.

• 10:00Wes Larson?

  All right, Jeff.

• 10:02Jeff Larson?

  Freeze her brain real quick in case in the future we can bring her back.

• 10:06Wes Larson?

  Bring her back. If it's rotten, though, she might, there might be problems.

• 10:09Jeff Larson?

  It's probably too far gone.

• 10:11Wes Larson?

  Too far gone. Uh huh. But if any of us die, listeners, freeze our brains, please. Put them on ice.

• 10:19Mike Smith?

  We've got some brain rot going on too. I don't think we're gonna be much better off.

• 10:23Jeff Larson?

  I know, I might need to freeze my brain.

• 10:25Mike Smith?

  Yeah, let's get, let's just get you taken care of now, Jeff.

• 10:28Wes Larson?

  Eat a bunch of ice cream.

• 10:30Jeff Larson?

  It's funny, like.

• 10:31Mike Smith?

  That's a good call. Drink a slurpee too fast.

• 10:33Jeff Larson?

  When I went to Antarctica, I had someone named Jared come watch my dog Shanks.

• 10:40Mike Smith?

  Oh, not Subway Jared, right?

• 10:42Jeff Larson?

  No.

• 10:43Wes Larson?

  Hopefully not.

• 10:44Jeff Larson?

  And there's like a guy.

• 10:45Wes Larson?

  Talk to Shanks.

• 10:46Jeff Larson?

  At my apartment who I had met, whose name is Darren. And then when I got back, I was like, I saw Darren and we were hanging out. He's like, hey, I actually met your dog. He was with like someone else though. I forget the guy's name. I was like, oh yeah, that is Darren. And he's like, no, I'm Darren.

• 11:06Wes Larson?

  And then did you kind of just like droop for a second and then reboot?

• 11:10Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Mike Smith?

  Uh, it's amazing.

• 11:14Wes Larson?

  Jeff, don't ever let Subway Jared come to your house, okay?

• 11:17Jeff Larson?

  I was all proud that I remembered the guy who watched my dog's name and I was just saying the guy who I'd like hung out with four times name.

• 11:27Wes Larson?

  All right, Jeff, gas is pretty expensive right now, but Depends what type, helium? All of, sure, just

• 11:35Mike Smith?

  Noble?

• 11:36Wes Larson?

  Petroleum, gasoline.

• 11:40Wes Larson?

  Have you fueled up our time machine lately, though? It doesn't run on gas. Okay. It's nuclear. Yeah.

• 11:48Mike Smith?

  Nuclear.

• 11:49Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 11:50Mike Smith?

  Is that different from nuclear?

• 11:52Wes Larson?

  Yes. Well, that's great, because we're gonna need it to learn a bit more about Kay Grayson. We're actually gonna have to go back a little bit further than you might think, because Kay Grayson wasn't actually telling people her real age or her real name. She wasn't 67 at the time of her death, she was actually 73, and she's born in 1941. And personally, I can't think of anything more important to do in 1941 with our time machine than to visit middle-class home of Karen Gray, a tiny newborn baby that would one day be Kay Grayson, the bear lady.

• 12:27Mike Smith?

  That's a good call.

• 12:28Wes Larson?

  We're gonna go back to 1941, we're gonna ignore everything else. All right, we don't know a lot about little Karen's family, because both of her parents were dead at the time of the article, and her brother was estranged from her at the time of her death. But we do know that in high school, she was already pretty rebellious and just kind of already the free spirit that she would remain her whole life. She would cut class, she aggressively pursued guys that she liked, and when she moved out and she was on her own, she seemed to kind of live her life one relationship at a time, kind of like Dom Toretto lives his life a quarter mile at a time. Oh, yeah. This is, yeah. One relationship at a time. Yeah.

• 13:09Mike Smith?

  Monogamous, yeah, that's crazy.

• 13:11Wes Larson?

  So basically, no, she would, she would form a new relationship in a new city that she moved to, and then when that relationship ended, she would move to get a fresh start, and she would go into another relationship. Oh, she's like, I gotta get out of here. Yeah, she just kept moving.

• 13:26Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 13:26Wes Larson?

  She was really pretty, and she ended up spending most of her twenties in Vegas. How pretty, one to 10? I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do it. She said she was a showgirl for that era of her life, but many of her friends do think that she was maybe a high-end call girl. And whatever she was doing, she seemed to be making decent money and she spent a lot of time hanging out with much older, very wealthy men and she traveled all over North America with them. So a little bit of evidence toward.

• 13:55Mike Smith?

  That could be anything.

• 13:56Wes Larson?

  Girl thing. Yeah, exactly. She got married to a wealthy businessman in 1965, but about six months into the marriage, she woke up and thought to herself, is this it? And she realized it wasn't it. And she abandoned her new husband. In the seventies, she dated the operator of a dude ranch near San Diego, helped him run it. And then toward the end of the seventies, she moved to DC and trained attack dogs for a few years.

• 14:21Mike Smith?

  Is it Blink 182's dude ranch? They're from San Diego.

• 14:25Wes Larson?

  Don't think so, but that is a good, that is a good poll.

• 14:29Jeff Larson?

  She's like a reverse DiCaprio.

• 14:32Wes Larson?

  Dating older guys.

• 14:33Jeff Larson?

  Dating, she only dates older guys.

• 14:35Wes Larson?

  Old rich guys. Yeah.

• 14:37Jeff Larson?

  Than her. Leah only dates younger women who are poorer than it.

• 14:42Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Wes Larson?

  I guess I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna weigh in on that. All right. So in the eighties, Karen, now probably going by Kay, so we're gonna stick with Kay from now on, moved to South Florida and she started selling boats and organizing semi-professional sailing races and living on a boat with a yacht broker. She even got really good at sailing and won an 800 mile race from Daytona Beach to Bermuda.

• 15:08Jeff Larson?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 15:09Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Mike Smith?

  Nice.

• 15:10Wes Larson?

  So basically by 85, she'd been like a Vegas showgirl, a dude ranch operator, trained attack dogs, was a professional sailor and sold yachts for a living. So really by 85, she'd packed, yeah, more excitement and adventure into her 40 something years than most people would do in a lifetime. But she still hadn't started her journey.

• 15:31Jeff Larson?

  Probably more sex too.

• 15:33Wes Larson?

  Probably. I would say most likely.

• 15:35Jeff Larson?

  Than like 10 people do in a lifetime.

• 15:38Wes Larson?

  Certainly so. Yeah.

• 15:40Mike Smith?

  Like 10 of me, sure.

• 15:42Wes Larson?

  But yeah, like a thousand of you, Mike.

• 15:45Mike Smith?

  Oh.

• 15:45Wes Larson?

  So she still hadn't started her journey though, that would make her famous or infamous, however you choose to look at it. But that would all change with a phone call in the summer of 1985.

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• 16:58Mike Smith?

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• 18:23Wes Larson?

  Albert Brick, who is a lawyer from DC, called Kay to tell her about a piece of property that he owned just inland from the Outer Banks in North Carolina. It was roughly 2,000 acres of beautiful pine and oak forest, and he wanted Kay to help him either sell or develop this land. In 1986, she takes a trip out to North Carolina, and this piece of land was just as beautiful as Brick had described it, and Kay immediately signed a contract to help develop the land for a percentage of the profits. She leaves the yacht broker, she moves to North Carolina. Initially, she's living on a houseboat on the Little Alligator River on the northern edge of the land that Brick had purchased. And then he buys another chunk of land that has an old logging road that's pretty much impassable.

• 19:08Wes Larson?

  It's called the South Shore Road. And Kay moves close to that road. She has like some old trailers that she lives in. And she has this road rebuilt well enough that they could have better access to the land and start smelling, or start selling some small sections for logging or developments. Smelling would be cool, too. Just smell some of that land, you know?

• 19:28Mike Smith?

  That'd be hard to make a living off of.

• 19:30Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Hey, come smell my land.

• 19:33Mike Smith?

  It's kind of like a sommelier, but instead of for wine, it's just land, I guess? Yeah. This land, good vintage.

• 19:40Jeff Larson?

  That's a big part of sommelier.

• 19:42Mike Smith?

  This rock is 4.5 billion years old.

• 19:44Wes Larson?

  You gotta kind of stick your nose in that cup and look all stupid. All right.

• 19:49Mike Smith?

  I wasn't gonna say that.

• 19:50Wes Larson?

  I'm sorry, that's been a point of like, I've been watching cooking videos lately, and every single one of them, they like don't show their faces until they pour a little wine in there, and then they have to do the cup and be like, it's like, come on, get out of here.

• 20:04Mike Smith?

  And you have to spit out the first sip. You can't, for some, you can't swallow the first sip.

• 20:08Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I hate it.

• 20:09Mike Smith?

  That's a 10.

• 20:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah. I love ice cream sommeliers.

• 20:14Jeff Larson?

  I make them pour out my first glass of wine just because the first glass tastes too much like the cup. I need, I need them to pour me a cup and get that wine taste in the glass, pour it out, and then use that remnant still.

• 20:31Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's so good. I love that. You'd love smelling this land. Anyway, so it wasn't long before Kay meets a local resident that would change her life forever. One night, not long after moving to North Carolina, she comes home to a large black bear on her bed, eating a pastry.

• 20:51Mike Smith?

  Bear claw?

• 20:52Wes Larson?

  Yeah, who knows? I think it was a sweet bun, actually. She screams, runs away, and so does this bear. And as it runs away, Kay notices that it's limping pretty, pretty heavily as it ran. And she goes inside to look for damage, but all she found were big, muddy paw prints on her mirror. Paw prints that she reportedly never cleaned off because she was so enamored by this bear. The bear comes back the next day, and Kay could see that it was in really bad shape. It was skinny, it had a bullet hole in its hip, and it seemed to also have a dislocated hip. She immediately feels really sorry for this bear, and she feeds it, and then she continues to feed it every day. After a while, she decided to

• 21:34Wes Larson?

  name this bear Highway 64, because they were really close to Highway 64, and she thought maybe it had gotten hit by a car. And it wasn't long before, yeah, I know.

• 21:44Mike Smith?

  The bullet hole.

• 21:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Mike Smith?

  Makes me think, ah, whatever.

• 21:48Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Mike Smith?

  I guess both could have happened.

• 21:51Wes Larson?

  She names it like Remington or something. Thirty Yacht Six. Okay.

• 21:56Mike Smith?

  Rolls off the tongue.

• 21:57Wes Larson?

  But it wasn't long before other bears start showing up, and she names this land Bear Song. She becomes really obsessed with these bears. She would drive to the closest library regularly to check out any books on black bears and learn as much as she could. And she also starts visiting local grocers and store owners to give her any of their older stuff that they were going to throw away. And she would leave town with her pickup bed full of bread, pies, rolls, peanuts, dog food, just anything that she could find that she could potentially feed to these bears.

• 22:31Wes Larson?

  As soon as people in Kay's orbit caught wind of what she was doing, they told her to stop. Her friends would tell her that sooner or later, if the bears got hungry enough, they would eat her. And wildlife and law enforcement officials told her to stop what she was doing and that it was illegal to feed the wildlife. But for whatever reason, it seems like they kind of stopped short of actually fining her or punishing her in a formal way. And to be honest, it seems like a pretty big fumble on the part of these agencies. Like this is someone you need to come down on pretty hard.

• 23:02Jeff Larson?

  But that's like something people say to like make you stop having fun. Like, it's not like they're really gonna eat her ever.

• 23:10Wes Larson?

  Uh, no, they will eat people. So, yeah.

• 23:15Mike Smith?

  What is, what is the standard sentencing for like a first time offender? Or even like a repeat offender, if they do it once, get caught and then do it again? Is it jail time they would be facing or is it just fines?

• 23:26Wes Larson?

  It really depends on the severity and the place. Like if you got caught feeding a bear in Yellowstone, you could be looking at some jail time and a pretty hefty fine because there's like so much literature, so many warnings. Everyone that enters that park has been warned in multiple different like formats on how like you shouldn't feed or harass wildlife. But if, I think if you were like living in a forest in North Carolina, in a really rural area and you fed a bear, you're probably just gonna get a warning first and then you're gonna get fined afterward. But you never know, it depends on like the officer that responds and, and all of that. So.

• 24:03Jeff Larson?

  Crazy.

• 24:03Wes Larson?

  There's not a set standard.

• 24:04Jeff Larson?

  We got people in jail for feeding bears and no one from the Epstein list is in jail yet.

• 24:10Wes Larson?

  I know, we need to trick them all into feeding bears so they'll finally go to prison.

• 24:16Wes Larson?

  Let's briefly talk about black bear feeding. And this is where I want to talk about kind of where the line is drawn. I think when it comes to what bear professionals should be able to do with bears too. And I want to compare Kay to someone who's pretty controversial in the bear biology world. And that person is Lynn Rogers. Uh, at some point, I'll probably do a whole subscriber episode on Lynn's work and the controversy around it. But today, we're just gonna get a real surface level comparison. And I'm just letting all you know that that's going to be for subscribers and it's, you know, putting that out there. Okay. Dr. Lynn Rogers. You hate everyone listening. I don't. I love all of our listeners.

• 24:56Mike Smith?

  Greed.

• 24:57Wes Larson?

  Shut up. That's not true.

• 25:03Wes Larson?

  Oh, man. Okay.

• 25:06Mike Smith?

  That whale being named Grizz kid went to your head, dude, hubris. Pride cometh before the fall is all I'll say.

• 25:14Wes Larson?

  Okay. Dr. Lynn Rogers is a bear biologist in Minnesota who, early on in his career, decided that American black bears were mischaracterized and actually highly adaptable to human presence. And he started the North American Bear Center and a lifelong research project where he would habituate and food condition bears to a high level and then spend time in close contact with them to learn more about their behaviors, their tolerances, and their natural life history. So this guy like got bears super used to him, so much so that he was able to collar them without any sedation or drugs. Like, he can walk up to his bears and put a collar around their necks.

• 25:56Wes Larson?

  He goes on hikes with them. He feeds them by hand. He is a bear biologist doing all of this. His research, I've been in multiple conferences where he spoke or where there was talks from people in his research group. They've pulled some really fascinating insights about black bears, about their tolerances around humans, but he also really heavily food-conditioned a lot of bears. And some of those bears would go to the nearest towns and whatnot, and they get into trouble because they're already used to getting handouts from people. And if you're used to that and you're a bear, you know, professional, it's not that scary. But if you're not and a bear shows up in your yard begging for something, it can be kind of intimidating. Yeah.

• 26:38Wes Larson?

  This happened so much that the State Wildlife Agency in Minnesota descended, decided to suspend his permit in 2014. And he was still allowed to kind of work with the bears that were grandfathered into his study and do more of his work, but he was no longer allowed to formally conduct his research with state approval. And honestly, I have really conflicting feelings about Dr. Rogers and his work, but mostly I don't agree with what he's doing. I don't think that like bear biologists should be able to kind of do this. Like I can do this thing, but you can't, you know? And I know that I'm guilty of that and that I like have gone into bear dens and stuff. But that I'm still leaving those animals wild. I'm still, you know, I'm not changing their natural behavior.

• 27:21Wes Larson?

  And the main reason I want to bring up this comparison.

• 27:24Jeff Larson?

  And you always encourage everyone to go into bear den.

• 27:27Wes Larson?

  I definitely don't encourage anyone to ever go into a bear den. The comparison is that even with the formal research background, a PhD and the necessary permits, there was a lot of controversy surrounding Rogers. And, uh, and I think he pushed it too far. I think he kind of got a little bit lost in this really intoxicating feeling of having a big, potentially dangerous animal that trusts you. I think that can like really pull people into this weird kind of black hole of just like, of feeling special, you know?

• 28:01Jeff Larson?

  Sure.

• 28:01Wes Larson?

  And feeding these animals, this kind of food conditioning, it forever alters a bear's behavior. It's kind of like, like Jeff with McRibs, you know? If there's a McRib around, he's going to do whatever he needs to do to get it. Even though he knows it's risky and puts him at danger, he'll get that McRib, you know?

• 28:21Jeff Larson?

  It's more dangerous for the McDonald's workers.

• 28:25Wes Larson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:26Jeff Larson?

  Like, you know, if they're like, we ran out.

• 28:29Wes Larson?

  Full Karen if they ran out.

• 28:31Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Wes Larson?

  Full K.

• 28:33Jeff Larson?

  Oh, I'll get one. I know you have some.

• 28:36Wes Larson?

  Deep into a K-hole, a Karen-hole.

• 28:40Wes Larson?

  That's a weird way to say that, Wes. All right. The thing though, other, the other thing aside from that, aside from making these animals potentially more dangerous and less risk averse. The thing that really impacts me is it makes them less wild and less special. Like, we don't need to turn these animals into pets. Like, we want them to be wild. We want them to be different, you know? And I think even though there are, there's interesting lessons that can be learned from conditioning these animals like that. Like with K, it was just being done to essentially create pets out of these bears. And in that case, I see it as being really selfish. And it always comes with some really huge consequences for the bears and typically the humans too.

• 29:23Wes Larson?

  Kay would brag like, oh, bears are much better than dogs. You should get a bear, not a dog, you know, and it's just for me, I, yeah, it would be really fun. Like, I've dreamt about having a pet bear. Yeah, a tripod bear would be sick. But it, it does like, it changes them. And I don't think it's fair to do that to a wild animal. All right. The 90s were really the golden years for Kay and for Bear Song. And she has a lot of home videos of her playing with the bears, feeding them, even like getting really close to their cubs. She would even sleep with the bears sometimes and let them inside of her trailer and whatnot. Um, there's a story about how the bears were having a hard time passing some new guardrails that were put on

• 30:07Wes Larson?

  Highway 64 to get to Bear Song. And she went and taught them how to like climb over them. Um, I don't know if I fully believe that one because I think they would have figured that out, but um,

• 30:18Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, you don't need like a person to teach a bear how to climb.

• 30:21Wes Larson?

  It's also a dumb thing to teach a bear to do. Like, hey, here's how you get on to this highway, you know, like, it's not very smart. But during this time, she really reminds me of a certain kind of Mickey Mouse voiced, uh, Alaska bear fanatic that we've talked about, Timothy Treadwell. So I just want to play a quick clip from one of her videos, just so you guys can kind of get a sense of what she sounded like.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  Welcome to Bear Song. Bear Song is about bears. This is my sixth year with these animals. The animals may leave or they can stay. If they choose to stay, we protect them against the poachers in the area that would, uh, kill them. Any time of the year, day or night, these animals have been hunted, slaughtered, for fun.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  We're losing our American black bear because of them.

• 31:28Wes Larson?

  You guys can see she's kinda has that same like sing songy dreamy quality that Timothy Treadwell had when he was talking to his bears. And there's just a lot of comparisons between them. And another comparison is that she gave them names. Highway 64, Munchka, Travis, Rusty, Angel, Judson, etc., etc. Lots of names for these bears.

• 31:55Mike Smith?

  And two of them were etc. That's interesting.

• 31:57Wes Larson?

  You did that? We did name our bears. Our bears though were only named for our kind of our ease of knowing who we were talking about. Within my papers, they were just given numbers. So. You let me name one bear and I named after a girl who like would not communicate with me. Yeah, that's why I only let you name one.

• 32:20Wes Larson?

  All right. They would have all been named after her had I let you name them all.

• 32:27Wes Larson?

  So while Kay's learning about black bears, she learns a little bit about their history in the state of North Carolina and how like lots of populations of black bears around the country, they hit a low point during the predator control problems, programs, predator control programs of the early and mid 1900s. But due to their adaptable nature, they did really bounce back quickly in North Carolina. And by the time Kay was running Bear Song, there was thought to be around 10,000 black bears all along coastal North Carolina, which is a lot.

• 33:00Mike Smith?

  North Carolina. Petey Pablo's got to get involved in this story, right?

• 33:04Wes Larson?

  Sure. Yeah, he'll be in there. Why not?

• 33:07Mike Smith?

  Take his shirt off and spin around his head like a helicopter, probably.

• 33:10Wes Larson?

  So really, just in the eastern third of the state, they had about 10,000 bears. And one day in the early 90s, when little prepubescent Wes Larson joined most of the country in theaters to see a science fiction prehistoric masterpiece that Steven Spielberg had just released. Kay was feeding the 20 bears regularly and was taking a little hike with one of them. This little bear was named Mikey and it was spelled the way that a Mormon millennial mom might spell Mikey, M Y K E E. When some gunshots rang out distantly in the forest. And in her own words, she looked at little Mikey and she said, "The look in his eyes asked me if the guns we heard on the land nearby were shooting at him or me.

• 33:54Wes Larson?

  And I told him, 'They're shooting at both of us, but we are going to change that.'" This is where the story gets a little bit more interesting because bear hunting was really big business in coastal North Carolina. The season only lasted a few weeks in the last little bit of November and the first part of December, but during that time hunters would flock from all over the country to the forested parts of the state, like the forest where Kay had established Bear Song, and they would shoot a lot of bears. For example, in 2023, 2,696 total bears were killed in the Coastal Bear Management Unit of North Carolina, which comprises 37 counties and pretty much the eastern third

• 34:39Wes Larson?

  of the state. There's thought to be now about 12,000 total bears in that unit, so they killed over 20% of the total population, which is a pretty big number. They kill a lot of bears every year because they're big bears, they're pretty easy to find. So bear hunting is big business in this area. There's a whole discussion to be had about hunting as a management tool and a way to fund conservation. Personally, I could never shoot a bear, but we all know people that are black bear hunters that are really passionate wildlife professionals. So there are plenty of people that also do it for the wrong reasons.

• 35:16Jeff Larson?

  But you could shoot a person?

• 35:21Wes Larson?

  Depends on the person.

• 35:23Jeff Larson?

  Right.

• 35:23Mike Smith?

  What's the penalty for that in Yellowstone?

• 35:25Jeff Larson?

  But you could.

• 35:26Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I could shoot a bear too. I just don't want to ever. Yeah, but I would much rather shoot a bad person than a bad bear.

• 35:33Jeff Larson?

  Right. So you do care about bears more than people?

• 35:37Wes Larson?

  That's not true. I just think, I think, uh, bad people are a lot worse than bad bears.

• 35:43Jeff Larson?

  Hmm, that's a good point.

• 35:45Wes Larson?

  So, there are people that hunt bears unethically and they do it for the wrong reasons. And Kay was about to meet a group of those people and they would become her main enemies for the rest of her life. She called them the BKB or the Bear Killing Bunch. And she suspected that this little group of good old boys was breaking the rules and taking more than the allowed one bear per season per permit. And her suspicions were probably correct. Uh, some of these men were charged but never convicted of killing bears out of season or killing multiple bears during the hunting season. So they were poachers. And this is really the big difference between Kay and Timothy Treadwell and that her bears actually were at risk of being poached.

• 36:30Wes Larson?

  But I think what she refused to accept is that her food conditioning these bears and getting them highly habituated to human presence in a place around towns and highways and stuff was the worst possible thing she could do in an area where they could be hunted. If you're food conditioning bears that might be hunted, you're really putting them at higher risk of being shot because they're losing a lot of that natural fear of people. So it's, it's a bad thing to do to these bears. And this is the lesson she would end up being taught the hard way. And we're going to get to that in a bit. It's pretty sad. It's sad, Mike.

• 37:06Mike Smith?

  Boo.

• 37:08Wes Larson?

  All right.

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• 38:11Wes Larson?

  I just spent pretty much 24 hours in my car with my cat on a big road trip, and I love him more than ever. He's just the best travel buddy. He's so calm in the car, and I just want to do everything possible to make him happy. And that's why I really love Smalls. Smalls Fresh Cat Food is protein-packed recipes made with preservative-free, 100% human-grade ingredients that you'll find in your very own fridge, and it's delivered right to your door. Since switching to Smalls, we've noticed an improvement in Toad's energy, and just his excitement to eat, his coat. It just seems like he's happier in general. And I think a big part of that is when you're just feeding your cat, like, kibble, it's kind of dry and boring, but if you're just feeding them wet food, too,

• 38:56Wes Larson?

  it's often packed with a lot of fat and terrible stuff. And Smalls Fresh Gently Cooked Food is made without preservatives, but it's also really delicious. They use real food that tastes great. And Forbes actually ranked Smalls the best overall cat food, Forbes Magazine. For real, like, cats do love Smalls. And after switching to Smalls, 88% of cat owners reported overall health improvements. And for me, even more important than that is just happiness improvement. So stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of processed shortcuts. And for a limited time, because you're a Tooth and Claw listener, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life. For your whole entire life that you have this cat, you get free shipping and free treats.

• 39:41Wes Larson?

  You just go to smalls.com/tooth. That's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com/tooth.

• 39:52Wes Larson?

  All right. The worst of the BKB is a man we're gonna call Cooter, because his real name wasn't given in the articles I read. So we're calling him Cooter.

• 40:02Jeff Larson?

  Dude, you're just like this lady.

• 40:05Wes Larson?

  Yeah, naming people, weird stuff. Should I spell it weird?

• 40:09Jeff Larson?

  Naming everything.

• 40:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Jeff Larson?

  Naming bears.

• 40:12Wes Larson?

  That's true. I'm, I am pretty much K the Bear Lady. He's 6'1", he's almost 300 pounds with thick shoulders, scruffy facial hair, and hands like catcher's mitts.

• 40:23Mike Smith?

  That's exactly Jeff's measurements.

• 40:26Wes Larson?

  6'1", 300 pounds. Big old hands.

• 40:31Jeff Larson?

  Yeah. Everyone comments about how strong and tough my hands are all the time.

• 40:37Mike Smith?

  Handsome, right.

• 40:39Wes Larson?

  He is really good at killing bears.

• 40:41Jeff Larson?

  Is that what they mean by handsome? Just big hands?

• 40:50Wes Larson?

  He's really good at killing bears. It's like his favorite thing to do in the world. He gets his bear every single year. And a lot of people, including some of the other members of the BKB, suspected him of killing a lot more than his legal bear. He's like addicted to bear hunting. And he's persona non grata to K. He, she hates Cooter. He's well-known to law enforcement too, because he had once spent 14 months in prison for shooting someone right in front of a sheriff's deputy.

• 41:21Wes Larson?

  I have to imagine that person survived, and that's why he didn't go to prison for longer.

• 41:26Jeff Larson?

  Still.

• 41:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah. That's not long enough, in my opinion.

• 41:30Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Wes Larson?

  Maybe there, there's had to been some extenuating circumstances.

• 41:34Jeff Larson?

  Maybe he did that one in season.

• 41:36Mike Smith?

  He had a tag.

• 41:37Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, he had a tag.

• 41:39Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 41:41Wes Larson?

  Okay, so once Kay learned about Cooter, she decided all of the bears at Bear Song were probably so keen to hang out with her because they wanted a refuge from Cooter and his bear dogs. And this is another thing that these people who feed and like think they're protecting wildlife always convince themselves of. They think that these animals are coming to them because they're a safe place and not just because they're giving them reliable food. You know, they start to kind of build this own narrative. And it's really just like they're giving them food. That's what they want and they're coming back for it repeatedly. The true conflict starts when Kay learns that Cooter and the BKB were using the South Shore Road, the road that she and Brick had restored and been using for logging,

• 42:26Wes Larson?

  to access the forest and access the bears. She immediately puts up a big sign that says, "Private property, no hunting." And the men continue to use this road and take their dogs and their illegal bear bait into the woods. So this is kind of a big clash between two people that are doing illegal things with bears in very different ways. And the bears are kind of caught in between and they're being harmed by both sides of this equation. Kay would call the police or wildlife officials when the BKB would show up, but she would have to travel to the Alligator River Marina to use the phone. And if the officials responded, the men were almost always gone by the time they got there. She spoke with a lawyer who said he couldn't do anything,

• 43:09Wes Larson?

  but he suggested that Kay buy a gun to defend herself. And she wrote in her journal, "Living on the land alone, I now realize my life could be in serious danger."

• 43:20Wes Larson?

  So what she decides to do is try and get the public opinion on her side. So she starts selling videos and newsletters to the public about her bears. And she's thinking this public pressure on the hunters might make them stop. She even jokes in her newsletter about how they should shoot and kill the hunters instead. She does TV and print interviews, but all of this was in vain. These hunters are not about to stop hunting just because some of the general public that already didn't like bear hunting is just gonna like him, you know, dislike him more. That's not gonna be enough to stop them.

• 43:53Wes Larson?

  Meanwhile, this relationship with Brick, the owner of this land, has turned really sour. He's a terrible businessman. He's messed up a lot of these development offers they'd gotten. He's constantly changing on his mind on what was best to do with the land. And he actually terminated the contract with Kay in 1991 and left her with nothing. She sues him for $2 million and the 18 acres surrounding her trailer on the South Shore Road. And then he dies in June of 1993, which I have to assume is a heart attack from seeing Brachiosaurus on the screen for the first time. And his estate continues to battle Kay in the lawsuit.

• 44:36Wes Larson?

  She would go on to win $20,000 and 937 acres, which included the South Shore Road. But this change does nothing to slow down the BKB. So she starts putting locks on the gate of the South Shore Road, which the hunters would just cut. Then she starts dragging trees into the road, which they would move. Interesting. They would cut her locks, huh? They'd cut her locks. And then finally... That, you can't do that. No. Finally, in 2003, Cooter and the other hunters take Kay to court. And the reason they do this is because they had learned that Brick, the Brick family, had actually failed to include the South Shore Road in the land that had been awarded

• 45:21Wes Larson?

  to Kay. And meanwhile, two of Cooter's friends had purchased the road. So they now own the road. And they're suing Kay, saying that she can't put locks on it, she can't stop them from using this road, and that she's preventing them from accessing their property. And this judge, kind of seeing what had happened, rules that they have to share access of the road because she lives there, she owns all the surrounding property. And she's pissed. So she leaves this ruling and immediately puts another lock on the gate. And the judge sentences her to 30 days in jail for contempt of court. And this is where things get pretty bad for Kay.

• 46:02Wes Larson?

  She does her 30 days, and as soon as she gets out, she goes to the Alligator River Marina to use the phone. And these hunters knew that this was kind of a base of operations for Kay. And while she was in jail, they'd done a little redecorating. You see, one of the things that Kay failed to realize she was doing to these bears was creating really predictable routines for the bears. They would continuously use the same routes to access her property and to get fed. And the hunters knew this too, and they'd just been waiting for the opportunity to take advantage of it, and Kay being in jail was the perfect opportunity.

• 46:43Wes Larson?

  So as Kay entered the alligator marina, all over the walls were pictures of hunters with dead bears, grinning and mocking Kay. She's staring in shocked horror at all of these photos, and she realized a lot of the bears were ones that she recognized, that she had named. And among them was the bear with the limp, Highway 64. Oh, no. The very first bear that she'd befriended. She starts screaming in just pain and rage, and she continues screaming until the deputies actually had to come to the marina and escort her back to her trailer. So this is a real changing point for her.

• 47:23Wes Larson?

  She becomes despondent, her overall grip on reality starts to slip away, she starts to tell her friends about really far out there conspiracy theories, that the government was coming to get her, that the few bears... I believe that. Yeah, I know you do. That they're conspiring with the hunters to kill her and her bears. Her living conditions start to get really bad, like really bad. Her trailer just looks totally squalid. She's hoarding, she's spending more and more time alone at Bear Song. She loses all of her teeth and refuses to put dentures in because she doesn't want the bears to think that she's like being aggressive with her teeth. Just some, some kind of wild stuff.

• 48:06Wes Larson?

  She also buys a machete and she would swing it at people that came down the road, everything from wildlife officials to bird watchers to the BKB. And some of these wildlife officials actually take a lot of pity on her, and they also knew that Cooter is out there poaching bears, and they also wanted to do something about it. So in the 2000s, a team of wildlife officers and the ATF, they launch an investigation into Cooter. Mike, you've launched some investigations into Cooter before, haven't you? Not many, Wes, not many. All right.

• 48:43Jeff Larson?

  It's funny because you made that name up.

• 48:51Wes Larson?

  I did. And then I looked it up because I was like, Cooter means something, doesn't it? And I was like, you know, I'm just, I'm just gonna stick with it.

• 49:03Wes Larson?

  I just thought it was a type of turtle at first, and then I realized that it's also something else. All right.

• 49:09Mike Smith?

  You're thinking of box turtle, which is another euphemism for.

• 49:12Wes Larson?

  No, Cooter, Cooter is also a type of turtle. Okay. During these investigations, they find dozens of illegally killed bear skeletons on the land directly north of Bear Song. They arrest Cooter, they charge him with poaching bears, with killing bears over bait, and illegal possession of a firearm because he was a felon and he wasn't allowed to have a gun. Some of the BKB even gives testimony against Cooter. And while they couldn't get these hunting charges to stick, they do get him, sorry. Such a dumb name. I should have picked a better name. Cletus. They couldn't get these hunting charges to stick. They do get him with the ATF and the firearm charges.

• 49:55Wes Larson?

  And in 2008, he's convicted and would go on to spend 6.5 years in federal prison. So they do get him on the gun charges, which is a big win. And for Kay, this essentially ends the battle with the hunters. But she continues to deteriorate mentally, physically. She becomes increasingly aggressive and volatile with her friends. There's this little anecdote.

• 50:19Jeff Larson?

  Outdoor magazine, right? What did they call the guy? Outside magazine?

• 50:24Wes Larson?

  They called him, what did they call him?

• 50:27Jeff Larson?

  Like, shouldn't it be public record if he went to jail for six years?

• 50:30Wes Larson?

  I think, I like, I kind of wonder if they just didn't want to like, get on this dude's bad side. Uh, Crockett. They called him Crockett.

• 50:40Wes Larson?

  I like Cooter better.

• 50:42Mike Smith?

  Me too.

• 50:42Wes Larson?

  All right. So there's this anecdote about her being in the car with one of her friends and her friend's dog. And the dog was barking really loud. And this friend remembers Kay saying, shut him up or I'll slit his throat. Like, she's getting very aggressive.

• 50:59Wes Larson?

  She would also continually ask her friends and her niece Susan for money. And when they finally refused to give her any money, she would just stop talking to them. Um, that's like me with our unpaid listeners, right?

• 51:13Wes Larson?

  She would also go long periods without eating and she wouldn't see any doctors for health problems. Uh, people that saw her would generally just see her in this long white nightgown, often talking to herself or to her bears. But she even seemed to be more volatile with the bears as well. She was less patient with their antics, um, and just kind of yelled at them a lot more. So she's distancing herself from her community. And because of that, she had less and less food to give to these bears. Certain people though are still very compassionate to Kay, including Sharon Pledger, who would often drop off meals for Kay on his travels to and from town. And the meals were always gone when he would pass by the next time.

• 51:54Wes Larson?

  Until January of 2015, when that meal was still sitting outside the gate several days later. We're going to go over two scenarios of what might have happened to Kay. And then we can kind of discuss at the end, which one we think is most likely. The first one is kind of the official scenario that's put forward by the officials and investigators following the investigation into her death. They think that Kay may have died from a health condition or possibly even hypothermia because it had been a really cold winter and her single wide trailer has broken windows and holes in the flooring. It was really drafty and cold. And they think maybe after her death, the bears dragged her body into the woods and consumed it.

• 52:39Wes Larson?

  They don't think she was killed by the bears because her bones didn't show signs of trauma. And there wasn't an obvious kill site with the big pool of blood.

• 52:50Wes Larson?

  A couple of problems I have with that really quickly. These bears are very comfortable eating around her trailer in this area. So I don't see why they like a bear that had been doing something that had normally done a million times there would feel uncomfortable just eating there. I do think it would feel uncomfortable killing in that spot. I think that would feel very unique and different to it. So the other scenario that I that could have happened, in my opinion, is that while Kay was at home and the bears who are used to like, they're not used to a cold, difficult winter too. They're also getting restless. And previously she had fed them all these sweet rolls and peanuts and bread. Now they're just getting dog food.

• 53:34Wes Larson?

  They're also dealing with someone who's becoming increasingly aggressive with them. And one evening, one of the bears in the yard just has enough of these meager feedings, only getting dog food when it's used to a lot better stuff. And it snaps. It reaches out a paw. It slaps Kay, easily tearing its claws into her paper thin skin. She turns to scramble away from this bear. And this triggers a new response in this large predator. It jumps on the woman in her early seventies, shakes her, knocks her unconscious, or possibly even kills her from the shaking. There's other bears around, so rather than try and kill and eat then and there, it drags her outside, down the road and into the woods.

• 54:17Wes Larson?

  The force of this dragging removes her clothes as it goes. That's why they find these clothes in the road and in the bushes. And then with other bears around, we've talked about how bears don't always do like a killing bite to kill something. But if they feel like they have to kill something quickly, they can do it. So bears sometimes will go for the throat or something if if they feel like they have limited time. So with other bears around, it might have opted to quickly bite her throat to kill her and further remove the chances of like losing this prize to other bears.

• 54:50Jeff Larson?

  Wouldn't that be like, couldn't you find a blood spot of that then though? If it bit her throat?

• 54:56Wes Larson?

  It, you definitely could, um, but it's not like a given to me. Like I, if I'm an investigator on a bear attack, I don't necessarily expect to just find one spot where the bear kills and eats everything. They might drag them around a fair amount, especially if there's a lot of other bears around and they have to keep moving to kind of get to a secluded spot.

• 55:17Jeff Larson?

  Sure, but I'm saying like, if it does go for the throat to kill someone, I feel like that is something you could normally find.

• 55:24Wes Larson?

  Yeah, it's possible.

• 55:26Jeff Larson?

  Cause there's a lot of blood in your throat.

• 55:29Wes Larson?

  Yeah, uh, out in the woods, it could stop and feed occasionally though, and then just continue dragging this body deeper and deeper into the bush. This bear would tear the skin and the flesh from her scalp and her face. And ultimately it left the skull of Kay Grayson on a tiny mound made by these old Cypress roots. So I agree, Jeff, it could be either of these scenarios. Uh, it could also be that Cooter, who had just gotten out of jail, killed Kay and left her body for the bears.

• 55:58Jeff Larson?

  Oh, he had just gotten out of jail?

• 55:59Wes Larson?

  I think so. Like I did the math. What I can say though, is they found a lot of human bones in a lot of bear scat. So those bears definitely ate her, like they ate Kay. Also, these investigators, I can almost guarantee you that they had never looked into a bear fatality before. And I think it's highly likely that they missed some of the signs that would have been present had a bear killed her. They can look like a lot of different things, so they kind of, they ruled it out, but I, I personally.

• 56:33Wes Larson?

  Think the bears probably killed her. That's my opinion.

• 56:36Mike Smith?

  Oh, wow.

• 56:36Jeff Larson?

  It's another possibility because she was just in like kind of a trailer. I'm sure she spent a lot of time outside, like she could have like died outside of her trailer.

• 56:47Wes Larson?

  It's totally possible. Yep. There's, there's a lot of things that could have happened, but looking at the story.

• 56:53Jeff Larson?

  Interesting to me about like her dying in the trailer is the guy that left the food that the bears didn't eat that.

• 57:01Wes Larson?

  Yeah. I mean, it was just a bag of dog food, though. Oh, you mean the meal like by the gate?

• 57:06Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah. But like for me.

• 57:09Jeff Larson?

  Oh, that's by the gate.

• 57:10Wes Larson?

  Yeah, it's, it's not like a place they're normally going for food. And just because a bear, a bear kills and eats someone doesn't mean there were like wasn't any other food source around. I think what probably happened, in my opinion, is her deteriorating like that, especially mentally. I think she had kind of lost her edge on how to respond to these bears and she probably pissed one off. And then when, like when they kind of enter into that mode, we've talked about this before. It's kind of hard to turn it off. It's like a light switch gets flipped. And if she pissed it off and then she like ran from it or anything when it reacted to her. I could totally see it just switching into predator mode and killing her and eating her.

• 57:53Wes Larson?

  I just think if you find a bunch of human bones and bear scat, there's a pretty good chance that those bears killed and ate that person.

• 58:00Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, no, that's.

• 58:01Wes Larson?

  You know?

• 58:02Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Jeff Larson?

  And like that could have been on cocaine.

• 58:04Wes Larson?

  They could have been on cocaine? You never know.

• 58:07Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Mike Smith?

  Not Ozempic.

• 58:09Wes Larson?

  Yeah. This is the bayou kinda not a, why, why do you say that?

• 58:13Mike Smith?

  Right, they're eaten.

• 58:14Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's true. What do you guys think? What do you think's most likely? The official like kind of report or that she was killed by these bears?

• 58:22Mike Smith?

  If I, if you hadn't weighed in as a professional yourself, the thing that seems more likely to me, just as the layperson on this show. I don't know much about beha- bear behavior compared to you guys. That first explanation made a little more logical sense to me. How, how many times have there been bear fatalities in North Carolina? Is it probably single digits? Like it's probably very rare, right? At least in recorded history.

• 58:49Wes Larson?

  I think I, but I think their stats kind of just are similar to black bear stats throughout their range. You know, you're going to have the occasional bear that gets into trouble. But we've, we've learned this on the show, food conditioning greatly increases your chances of having

• 59:05Mike Smith?

  True.

• 59:06Wes Larson?

  A dangerous bear.

• 59:07Jeff Larson?

  I'll say.

• 59:08Wes Larson?

  This was food conditioning to a high degree.

• 59:10Mike Smith?

  For sure.

• 59:10Jeff Larson?

  I like, I like what they decided because that kind of protects the bears a bit more. Like if they had decided the bears killed her, then people might want more bears killed. So I kind of like their narrative, but I think it's a little bit hard to say the bears didn't kill her, you know?

• 59:31Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Jeff Larson?

  It's like, you can't prove they didn't kill her. Like you can prove they did eat her.

• 59:36Wes Larson?

  Yeah. And I kind of like, to be honest, I kind of disagree with that being the better narrative. Cause in my opinion, I think if you feel like she died because she ended up feeding these bears and they killed her because of it. It kind of tells people like, oh, I can't get away with feeding bears, you know? And yeah, for like a few of the specific bears that might've been implicated, sure, that could have been worse for them had they said these bears killed and ate her. I don't think they would have tracked down those bears in this case.

• 1:00:07Jeff Larson?

  But you've always.

• 1:00:07Wes Larson?

  I think they would have been like, she was asking for it.

• 1:00:10Jeff Larson?

  You've always been BKB too, so.

• 1:00:13Wes Larson?

  I'm not BKB at all.

• 1:00:15Mike Smith?

  Bunch of, what is it?

• 1:00:17Wes Larson?

  Bear killing bunch. Yep. But I do think overall, the number one lesson that we should take home from this story is that wild animals deserve to be wild. And if you do feed bears, especially a big, potentially dangerous animal, there is almost always going to be a disastrous outcome, both for the animals and for the people. And there definitely was in both cases on this. A lot of these bears were shot because she had food conditioned them. Just like how Timothy Treadwell, you know, some of those bears that he loved ended up getting killed because of his, his actions. So that's, it's a cautionary tale for all of you.

• 1:00:58Jeff Larson?

  It's a bear-y, bear world out there.

• 1:01:00Wes Larson?

  It's a bear-y, bear, a bear-y K world out there. All right.

• 1:01:05Mike Smith?

  I think that's what's happening with Shanks right now, Jeff. He's starting to munch you a little bit, right? He's keep feeding him.

• 1:01:10Jeff Larson?

  He was biting the hell out of me yesterday.

• 1:01:14Wes Larson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:15Jeff Larson?

  And then some guy walked by and he like bit the guy's hand.

• 1:01:19Wes Larson?

  Was it Darren?

• 1:01:19Jeff Larson?

  No, it was a random guy, but he nipped the guy's hand.

• 1:01:22Wes Larson?

  Oh, that's not good.

• 1:01:24Jeff Larson?

  And the guy was like giving me a death stare.

• 1:01:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Jeff Larson?

  I felt really bad, but then I just convinced myself that guy was a really bad person. And Shanks is a hero.

• 1:01:34Wes Larson?

  Was it Jared from Subway?

• 1:01:35Jeff Larson?

  But then that kind of means I'm a bad person too.

• 1:01:38Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Jeff Larson?

  If Shanks suddenly bites bad people.

• 1:01:42Wes Larson?

  Oh, cause he really catch 22 there. Huh. Maybe we'll do an episode on it sometime. Get him to bite someone bad enough, we can do an episode on him. We're running out of stuff.

• 1:01:53Mike Smith?

  Yeah, we've got so few stories left to cover.

• 1:01:57Wes Larson?

  No, we got a lot left.

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• 1:02:59Jeff Larson?

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• 1:03:42Jeff Larson?

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• 1:05:57Wes Larson?

  That's O-L-L-I-E.com/tooth, and enter code TOOTH to get 60% off your first box. Ollie, feed the obsession. All right, let's get into our categories. I wanted to ask you for a memorable pop culture hunter that kind of reminds you of Cooter.

• 1:06:16Mike Smith?

  So this one, I'm stretching the boundaries of hunter a little bit, maybe, the definition. So I'm going with Robert Mitchum's character from The Night of the Hunter. I know you saw this maybe fairly recently, right, Wes?

• 1:06:27Wes Larson?

  I love that movie.

• 1:06:28Mike Smith?

  Big, overpowering kind of guy, uses religion as a means to kind of infiltrate this innocent family's house and terrorize these two children, completely brainwashes. An amazing movie, it's really, really good, but he's just relentless. He gets, you know, they escape from him, but he's always finding a way to manage to come back into the picture and haunt these little kids to...

• 1:06:51Wes Larson?

  He's super scary.

• 1:06:52Mike Smith?

  Oh, he's so scary. And he's so like, just intimidating and big when they're like in the same frame. Amazing movie, amazing actor, and he's hunting them kids.

• 1:07:05Mike Smith?

  Jared.

• 1:07:06Wes Larson?

  Like Jared from Subway.

• 1:07:10Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 1:07:12Wes Larson?

  I'll go since Jeff needed to kind of prepare this one a little bit since.

• 1:07:16Jeff Larson?

  Look up the guy's name real quick.

• 1:07:18Wes Larson?

  I picked Percival C. McLeach, who is the hunter from Rescuers Down Under, portrayed by George C. Scott.

• 1:07:26Mike Smith?

  Oh, man.

• 1:07:27Wes Larson?

  Just like, one of the best cartoon movie villains ever, in my opinion. And him and like the combo of Joe, the Joanna.

• 1:07:37Mike Smith?

  So good.

• 1:07:37Wes Larson?

  It like, he is a scary villain. And I miss those days where Disney movies and stuff just had villains that were outright evil. Like, there was no kind of redemption arc or like, you know, we didn't have to see into their motives or anything. It was just like, no, this is just like a force of evil that's bad, you know? And he definitely felt like that to me.

• 1:07:57Mike Smith?

  I'm not sure I knew that that was George C. Scott until right now. I don't think I had ever known that.

• 1:08:02Wes Larson?

  That's yeah.

• 1:08:04Wes Larson?

  Good portrayal.

• 1:08:05Mike Smith?

  Yeah, brings a whole lot of baggage to that character. No, I mean, I don't know much about George C. Scott personally, but just the characters he plays. And I know a little bit of his personal life involved a lot of alcohol. Just thinking about the guy that's in like Hardcore or Patton, all of a sudden playing like this weird outback hunter. Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:08:24Wes Larson?

  Just like totally sadistic hunter. Yeah. Jeff, who you got?

• 1:08:29Jeff Larson?

  A book and a movie that I enjoyed both of them, The Running Man. So like the newest Running Man with Glenn Powell is more true to the book than the Schwarzenegger one. The Schwarzenegger one's a little more fun, but I like them both. But the concept of just like a game show where you're like hunting someone down. And then the hunters just seem to love hunting people and killing them. Yeah, kind of just bad guys, the hunters.

• 1:09:00Mike Smith?

  Okay, next category.

• 1:09:01Jeff Larson?

  The guy's name was Lee Pace. He plays the elf in Lord of the Rings.

• 1:09:05Wes Larson?

  I love Lee Pace. We are familiar with.

• 1:09:08Jeff Larson?

  He's the hunter, I think.

• 1:09:09Mike Smith?

  I think he's like the hottest male actor, up at least, top five.

• 1:09:15Wes Larson?

  Okay, so Kay put something into her life that ended up being really bad for her, which was feeding bears. So I wanted to ask you guys, what's something you've inserted in your own life that's definitely not good for you?

• 1:09:27Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, I had a few. Covid vaccine.

• 1:09:33Wes Larson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:09:36Jeff Larson?

  The Little Caesar's app, and then a three-legged dog that pees on his own foot and then doesn't let me wash his feet.

• 1:09:44Wes Larson?

  And bite you.

• 1:09:45Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, and also my new couch, but I got one that's like four inches too small to lay down all the way. So then I have to like bend my knees and it's like, sometimes I have to put my legs up. I'm like, I should have just got a little bit bigger couch, you know?

• 1:10:01Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Wes Larson?

  All right, those are all good picks.

• 1:10:05Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I might actually go with the couch if I were to pick just one of those.

• 1:10:09Wes Larson?

  For Jeff?

• 1:10:11Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go with a double-sided waffle iron. Like, just having one, an iron to make one waffle is probably was good. But now that I have one that can make two at the same time, it's like, well, I might as well just like make two. And now I'm eating like, instead of whatever, 600 calories, it's the double. How much is that, Wes?

• 1:10:32Wes Larson?

  1,200 calories.

• 1:10:33Mike Smith?

  Geez.

• 1:10:34Jeff Larson?

  Are you just putting Egos in it?

• 1:10:37Mike Smith?

  Yeah, and then squish them out, flatten them all the way out. They're kind of like tortillas at the end.

• 1:10:44Wes Larson?

  All right, uh, mine, mine, you guys both had better answers than mine. Mine's Twitter. I just feel like my, or X, you know, I feel like my life would be so much better if I didn't have that app because.

• 1:10:57Jeff Larson?

  If you didn't know what was going on in the world?

• 1:10:59Wes Larson?

  I feel like I'm too into it now, you know? I want to know what's going on in the world, but I could have gotten that from other spot, like just from Instagram or just from like, somewhere else. Twitter's too much. Like, it's bringing down my quality of living.

• 1:11:15Jeff Larson?

  I will say too, like, now that I've kind of dove into some conspiracy theories on Twitter, especially.

• 1:11:23Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Jeff Larson?

  Like, for conversations, it's really hard for me to just like have like standard conversations anymore. I'm one of those people who's just like, oh, this pizza's good. I was like, well, you know where pizza started.

• 1:11:37Wes Larson?

  Have you heard of Pizza Gate?

• 1:11:38Jeff Larson?

  You know about Pizza Gate?

• 1:11:41Wes Larson?

  I yeah, it's weird. I hadn't noticed that about you, Jeff.

• 1:11:47Wes Larson?

  There's, I do think there's this thin line between like being informed in a really turbulent world and like knowing what's going on and being an advocate for people and like things that need it. But then also like, like doom scrolling and just getting like into a black pit of despair. And lately, that's been what's happening to me. So I really feel like I need a, a disconnection from, from my phone in general.

• 1:12:11Jeff Larson?

  Go look at the ocean, dude.

• 1:12:13Wes Larson?

  I did. I went, I went the other day. Went to Disneyland, which made me feel great.

• 1:12:18Jeff Larson?

  You need to dig into Disneyland.

• 1:12:22Wes Larson?

  I know. There's also, everything is bad. I'm like, I'm sure Disneyland has terrible, and Disney in general, but you know, I have a fun time there. I'm not a Disney adult, but I do enjoy going.

• 1:12:35Jeff Larson?

  You love Mickey Mouse.

• 1:12:37Wes Larson?

  I don't love Mickey Mouse. I did finally ride that Mickey Mouse ride that you guys loved.

• 1:12:41Mike Smith?

  I liked that ride. Yeah, it's charming.

• 1:12:43Jeff Larson?

  Yeah, we probably oversold it by now.

• 1:12:46Wes Larson?

  A little bit, for sure. But I liked it. I liked it.

• 1:12:49Jeff Larson?

  It's like one worth going to.

• 1:12:52Wes Larson?

  For sure. Okay. Next category, and I think we may have done a version of this before, but um, when I first went to North Carolina, I was amazed by it. Like the Outer Banks, the Smoky Mountains, just the whole vibe there. I just really connected with it. It ended up being the state that surprised me the most. And I, when I went to all 50 states. So I'm curious if you guys have like a big surprise state that you want to shout out?

• 1:13:21Mike Smith?

  New Mexico was a big one for me recently. Shout out Javi and EJ. I went down, visited a couple of friends of the show. And just immediately upon crossing the border, I could just sense there was like something different happening. And the people are really nice. I know they're everywhere. There's going to be weird, rude people, but I just found on average, the people were nice. The food was very like idiosyncratic.

• 1:13:45Mike Smith?

  I don't know, it's just like a really chill place.

• 1:13:48Jeff Larson?

  Where you're like, I know not every single person there is nice.

• 1:13:51Mike Smith?

  But that thing is like, I ran in only nice people. Every single person I met, they're like, hey, man, how you doing? They all talk kinda like Mickey Mouse.

• 1:13:59Jeff Larson?

  Because you're famous now.

• 1:14:01Wes Larson?

  You should read about that killer in Truth or Consequences. He's a bad guy.

• 1:14:05Jeff Larson?

  He's probably nice to people though, when he met him.

• 1:14:08Wes Larson?

  The zebra dude, that little demon that they burn every year in Santa Fe?

• 1:14:12Jeff Larson?

  You don't think if you bumped into Mike at a gas station, you'd be nice to him? That killer?

• 1:14:17Mike Smith?

  Maybe.

• 1:14:18Jeff Larson?

  I bet you would.

• 1:14:19Mike Smith?

  Okay, shout out Albuquerque's gay parade. I showed up just randomly on the weekend that that was happening. It was lit.

• 1:14:25Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Mike Smith?

  Damn, they shut down like a whole like city for it and I was, I was not getting involved in that way, but I got kinda involved in, like on the, in the background.

• 1:14:35Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Jeff Larson?

  I can't believe you, dude. I shouted out the gays, that I respect them. And now you're just like getting in on my corner.

• 1:14:43Mike Smith?

  I'm usurping your throne, yes.

• 1:14:47Jeff Larson?

  I picked Minnesota.

• 1:14:49Mike Smith?

  Minnesota.

• 1:14:50Jeff Larson?

  Minnesota.

• 1:14:51Wes Larson?

  That was too much. I went too far, too hard.

• 1:14:53Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Wes Larson?

  Overreached.

• 1:14:55Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Jeff Larson?

  It's just like, it's.

• 1:14:56Wes Larson?

  Woke up the Balrog.

• 1:14:57Jeff Larson?

  I shouldn't have been surprised because it's, whole advertisement is 10,000 lakes or whatever.

• 1:15:03Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Jeff Larson?

  And I went there and it's just like a lake everywhere you look. And it was crazy. There's just so many lakes, I couldn't believe it.

• 1:15:12Wes Larson?

  There was once that Mike said he wanted to move to like Wisconsin or Minnesota, I don't remember which. And I gave you a hard time for it and I think you were right. I think everyone that lives out there loves it.

• 1:15:24Mike Smith?

  It's still on the table?

• 1:15:25Wes Larson?

  Either of those states.

• 1:15:26Mike Smith?

  Right.

• 1:15:27Wes Larson?

  Let's move there.

• 1:15:28Mike Smith?

  Okay.

• 1:15:28Wes Larson?

  Let's go.

• 1:15:29Jeff Larson?

  They got wolves.

• 1:15:30Wes Larson?

  Yeah. Okay, I want each of you to assign a.

• 1:15:33Jeff Larson?

  L.A. had a wolf.

• 1:15:34Wes Larson?

  That's true.

• 1:15:35Mike Smith?

  Hey.

• 1:15:36Wes Larson?

  Close to L.A.

• 1:15:37Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Jeff Larson?

  We could move there.

• 1:15:39Wes Larson?

  I want each of you to assign a moniker to the other, like Jeff the Blank Man.

• 1:15:44Jeff Larson?

  Mr. Peanut's I think?

• 1:15:46Wes Larson?

  Yeah, no, that's a monocle, a moniker, like Kay the Bear Lady.

• 1:15:52Mike Smith?

  Mr. Peanut? Is that his name?

• 1:15:54Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Mike Smith?

  It is his name, huh?

• 1:15:56Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Mike Smith?

  What the heck?

• 1:15:57Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Mike Smith?

  That's a little on the nose, right? On the nut.

• 1:16:00Wes Larson?

  It is a little on the nose.

• 1:16:02Jeff Larson?

  I'm on the nut.

• 1:16:03Wes Larson?

  All right. Do you guys understand the rules? Like Jeff the Blank Man or Mike the Blank Man?

• 1:16:09Mike Smith?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:16:10Wes Larson?

  If you feel like doing one for me, you can. Mr. Peanut, that's not.

• 1:16:13Mike Smith?

  Mr. Peanut, that's a pretty good one for me.

• 1:16:15Wes Larson?

  Follow my format. Mike the Blank Man. Yeah.

• 1:16:18Jeff Larson?

  Oh, yeah, it'd be Mike the Peanut Butter Pretzel Man.

• 1:16:22Mike Smith?

  Okay, that's a good one.

• 1:16:24Wes Larson?

  He does love those.

• 1:16:25Mike Smith?

  Jeff the Honest Man.

• 1:16:27Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Jeff Larson?

  To a fault.

• 1:16:28Mike Smith?

  I think a little bit to a fault sometimes, but I'd rather you be that way than the other.

• 1:16:32Wes Larson?

  That's true. I agree with that. Okay.

• 1:16:34Mike Smith?

  The Blunt Man. That's like a double, because you can be straightforward, but also you like lighten up, dude. You like sparking, boo boo boo, pass it. And he never does. He hogs the whole thing for himself. Blunt Man, that's Jeff.

• 1:16:47Wes Larson?

  Jeff the Blunt Hog Man?

• 1:16:49Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Jeff Larson?

  You wouldn't want, like, dream blunt rotation, I'm the worst choice. I'll just.

• 1:16:56Wes Larson?

  Right. There's no rotation.

• 1:16:59Mike Smith?

  You just eat it.

• 1:17:01Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 1:17:02Jeff Larson?

  Once it's like going out at the very end, I'll be like, here, hit this.

• 1:17:05Wes Larson?

  Something you recommend this month? Uh, I think friends of the show know that I'm a big fan of Survivor. I watched it when it first came out, stopped for a long time, and then during the pandemic, got like really into it again, and so did all my friends. Australian Survivor is my recommendation for you. I've done it before, I think, too. But man, this current season is really good, and their show is just so much better than the US version. So if you have access to it, if you can figure out how to get it.

• 1:17:33Jeff Larson?

  That's the thing. I've had listeners be like, Wes keeps saying Australian Survivor, and I can't watch it.

• 1:17:38Wes Larson?

  I think you can get it on like Paramount Plus, but honestly, uh, you might just have to torrent it, you know? Just torrent it. That's the way to do it.

• 1:17:47Jeff Larson?

  Ask Wes, he'll give it to you.

• 1:17:48Wes Larson?

  I can't give it to you, but, uh, but you can find these things if you're willing to look for them.

• 1:17:55Jeff Larson?

  How'd you get yours?

• 1:17:56Wes Larson?

  I get mine through a service called Plex.

• 1:17:59Jeff Larson?

  Who got you on there?

• 1:18:00Wes Larson?

  Someone does the torrenting for you on there.

• 1:18:03Jeff Larson?

  Who got you on Plex?

• 1:18:04Wes Larson?

  You got me on there, but the guy, the person that, that we get Plex from no longer is signing up new people. So you gotta find your own Plex Plex person. Yeah.

• 1:18:14Mike Smith?

  Is this something that's like of the day? Or is this just anything that we recommend someone do this month?

• 1:18:20Wes Larson?

  Just, just something you recommend this month, anything you can go whichever direction you want.

• 1:18:24Jeff Larson?

  Hmm. I'm ready.

• 1:18:27Wes Larson?

  Jeff, you go.

• 1:18:28Jeff Larson?

  Put me in. Alright, so Jared, who watched my dog and his friend Max invited me to the show last night. And it was like walking distance from me. So I was like, you know what? I'll go. And it's called Red Leather. So it's this guy who wears like a cowboy hat. And it's all these strings all over covering his face. And then he has a ski mask. Nobody knows what he looks like. Like no one knows what he looks like. And he put on a great show. I liked his music.

• 1:18:58Wes Larson?

  Are you just talking about Orville Peck?

• 1:19:00Jeff Larson?

  Huh?

• 1:19:01Wes Larson?

  Orville Peck does that.

• 1:19:02Mike Smith?

  Is that who Red Leather is?

• 1:19:04Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Jeff Larson?

  No one knows who he is.

• 1:19:06Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:19:07Mike Smith?

  This is a real Banksy situation. Except for we just recently learned.

• 1:19:10Wes Larson?

  There's another guy that does that. Look him up. He does the same thing. Orville Peck.

• 1:19:15Jeff Larson?

  With Red Leather?

• 1:19:16Wes Larson?

  Sorry, continue.

• 1:19:18Jeff Larson?

  This is Red Leather.

• 1:19:20Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:19:21Jeff Larson?

  He's different. He almost killed himself.

• 1:19:24Wes Larson?

  Different. Okay.

• 1:19:25Jeff Larson?

  Red Leather did because he's addicted to drugs and alcohol. He's like a thousand five hundred days sober now. And he sings for Tahoe. And, uh, you know what? It's really funny. He put on a good show. His last song, he went in a crowd and just like moshed people while he's singing.

• 1:19:43Wes Larson?

  I like that.

• 1:19:45Jeff Larson?

  And I think it's cool that no one knows what he looks like. And I think his gimmick works. And it's like half the show, he comes out as black leather. And that's like his demon self that almost killed himself and he'll like get real negative and stuff. And then he kills black leather, his red leather. It's cool.

• 1:20:06Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Mike Smith?

  Wow.

• 1:20:06Wes Larson?

  That is cool.

• 1:20:07Jeff Larson?

  You gotta listen to him, Wes, today.

• 1:20:09Wes Larson?

  I love some showmanship like that. I'll listen to him. Rockabilly? That sounds fun. Yeah, I'll listen to him today.

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• 1:21:15Mike Smith?

  Who's your favorite musician or artist in general who no one really knows what they look like? Do you have one of those, Wes?

• 1:21:22Wes Larson?

  Like, it was the Gorillaz for a long time.

• 1:21:24Mike Smith?

  That's a good one.

• 1:21:25Wes Larson?

  But now, I think that the monkey's out of the bag there. Do you have one?

• 1:21:30Mike Smith?

  That's a funny joke, Wes.

• 1:21:32Wes Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Mike Smith?

  Probably Daft Punk. Like, of course, we always end up figuring out what these people look like eventually, and it always dispels the myth a bit, but Daft Punk, like, their helmets and the way they light up is just the coolest thing in the world.

• 1:21:48Wes Larson?

  You don't want to know who my least favorite, like, artist was in that? Was Banksy.

• 1:21:53Mike Smith?

  Banksy?

• 1:21:53Wes Larson?

  Never got into Banksy, stupid, in my opinion.

• 1:21:56Mike Smith?

  I didn't really get into him either.

• 1:21:58Wes Larson?

  Yeah, I just thought it was like pop art, boring. All right.

• 1:22:02Jeff Larson?

  Well, that's what's really fun about red leather, too, is like, they're not that big still. So like, it's still in that beginning phase of like, no one knows, like, I feel like he's getting famous enough, too, that he could like, use the celebrity to his advantage, but then it's like, he can't. So it's like, kind of funny, and like, I don't know.

• 1:22:24Wes Larson?

  That is fun.

• 1:22:26Wes Larson?

  Mike, you got your recommendation?

• 1:22:28Mike Smith?

  Yeah, I guess if we need to do something of that's more recent, like of this month, there are two metal albums that came out that I was really into. One by Neurosis and one by Converge. Converge long, well, if you guys know, you know, the awesome albums, though, that I found to be a great gym-going music. But if it's something more general, I highly recommend writing a handwritten letter to somebody. If you really want to like round out the experience, light a little candle, turn on some classical music and just bang one out. Draft up a nice letter and send it to someone. I just found it to be like a really pleasant experience. I hadn't done that in so long. And now my wrist is sore, my forearm. Holy cow. I thought I'd been working that out enough. I have not.

• 1:23:10Wes Larson?

  Your wrist is sore from lighting a candle and banging one out.

• 1:23:15Mike Smith?

  Banging one out.

• 1:23:18Jeff Larson?

  You know what I did on my most recent letter that I sent out that was fun was I stamped a panda stamp on there.

• 1:23:26Wes Larson?

  Dude.

• 1:23:27Jeff Larson?

  That's my new mark.

• 1:23:27Wes Larson?

  You should get the wax stamp, like the seal with the panda.

• 1:23:31Jeff Larson?

  Danielle does that. It's cool.

• 1:23:33Mike Smith?

  I actually just ordered a custom one for myself, so I'm gonna start wax stamping closed envelopes.

• 1:23:39Wes Larson?

  Count of Monte Cristo, that's another, the PBS Count of Monte, or I think it was PBS, Count of Monte Cristo series with Sam Claflin. I just watched it. It's so good. I love, any Count of Monte Cristo stuff you give me, I'm gonna watch. Yeah.

• 1:23:54Jeff Larson?

  I still like the guy Pierce and Jesus is the best.

• 1:23:57Wes Larson?

  That one's the most satisfying, I think, but this one really nails kind of the conundrum, like the ethical.

• 1:24:07Mike Smith?

  It's a really good anime adaptation of the story too. I forget what exactly it's called, but it's really, it's really good. It's really interesting, like artistic direction too. Oh, yeah, of course.

• 1:24:18Wes Larson?

  Dumas.

• 1:24:19Jeff Larson?

  I love like a prison escape, like Shawshank, Count of Monte Cristo. The thing that's scary about Count of Monte Cristo is like he was so wronged. He's in prison for a really long time in a terrible prison. And then he gets like all the most resources in the world. And it's just like, oh, let's go.

• 1:24:38Mike Smith?

  Now we're talking.

• 1:24:39Jeff Larson?

  Let's kill.

• 1:24:40Mike Smith?

  Boy, does he ever go. All right.

• 1:24:44Mike Smith?

  Okay, let's do a quick, uh, you know, let's, let's spread the love a little bit. Let's do a content creator shout out. Shout out a content creator that you've lately been enjoying their content.

• 1:24:55Jeff Larson?

  Okay, I have Luigi Primo. Uh, he's a small time wrestler and he's Italian and he, his thing is to spin pizza dough. And then throw it at his opponents. And you know.

• 1:25:09Mike Smith?

  Do like.

• 1:25:09Jeff Larson?

  I, you would think you can only go so far with that one, but he's been pretty innovative. And he's been like adding new elements to it. So, um, he's the only professional wrestler I follow on Instagram right now.

• 1:25:26Mike Smith?

  High honor. He'll be happy to hear that. I'm sure he's listening.

• 1:25:30Wes Larson?

  Mike, who's your content creator?

• 1:25:32Mike Smith?

  And we go with a YouTube channel I found recently called storied, all caps storied. It's a channel that covers the history of some of the most significant events and skaters and skateboarding's past. And they're just as a kid of the nineties, it's almost inescapable that at some point we were all really, really into skateboarding. And it comes and goes in waves for me, but right now I'm on, I, I'm really riding it. And, uh, having a great time watching just like Chris Joslin just, uh, three sixty flipped the El Toro stairs. And that was like a big lifelong quest that he's been on. And it's, I just like all these different little videos, very digestible chunks. And it's fun to watch people do really cool, crazy stuff.

• 1:26:14Wes Larson?

  All right, mine is an Instagram account. It's M X R I Y U M. Mixryum, it's a Palestinian cook that I've been following for like five years. And, uh, finally bought her cookbook that just came out. It's on the New York Times best, bestseller list. And I feel like a lot of people that I've followed that do like cooking channels on Instagram or whatever. When I cook their stuff, it just doesn't turn out the way I want it to, or it's like, not very good. And I've cooked a few of her recipes and they are so good. Like her brownies I made, and they were just like the best brownies I've ever had. And a few other things, so, um, highly recommend. Her account and her cookbook. She definitely doesn't need the love because she has like a hundred,

• 1:26:58Wes Larson?

  a million and a half followers, but um, I really like the stuff that she makes. So,

• 1:27:04Mike Smith?

  Nice.

• 1:27:04Wes Larson?

  And the cookbook is great. I bought it. All right. Uh, let's do a couple of listener questions real quick. We got one from Kelly. Kelly says, Jeff, are you interested in creating a fanfic of your dog Shanks and the whale named Grizzkid? Shanks the dog pirate gets a leg bitten off by the whale Grizzkid. Maybe they become pirate friends and the whale helps find the lost treasure of the dog piece. Would you do that fanfiction, Jeff?

• 1:27:31Jeff Larson?

  I'd like where her head's at. I don't know about, yeah, we might have to workshop it a little bit.

• 1:27:38Wes Larson?

  Okay. All right.

• 1:27:40Jeff Larson?

  But I do like where her head's at.

• 1:27:41Wes Larson?

  So maybe we'll put a, we'll put a pin in it.

• 1:27:44Jeff Larson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Wes Larson?

  Uh, Mike, this one's from Michelle. Mike, can we get a reading update? Maybe your favorite books from the last year or a favorite so far this year? Why don't you do a favorite so far this year? Um, I, I read The Tainted Cup after you mentioned it and loved it. I also added Rainbow Troops to my list.

• 1:28:00Mike Smith?

  Oh, okay. Yeah. Uh, favorite so far this year, I doubled up on a book called Roadside Picnic by the Strugowski Brothers. And that was famously adapted by Tarkovsky into his maybe most celebrated film Stalker. So that's like a fun double feature. If you're looking for some hard sci-fi that gets adapted into more philosophical space in the film. And I would consider it essential reading if you're really looking to get deeper into science fiction. It's a pretty seminal touchstone of the genre. Can be a little inscrutable at times, but just really an amazing, ahead of its time piece of literature that I think y'all should check out.

• 1:28:39Wes Larson?

  All right. This one's from Elijah. Elijah says, what's going on, Mike, Wes and Jeff? I asked this question about a year ago and wanted to leave some time before asking it again. Who would win between a Siberian tiger and an inland brown bear? My stepbrother and I have been debating this for some time and I'm coming you to seek all your opinions. Love the podcast. This is actually one that you don't have to debate about because inland brown bears actually are a prey item for Siberian tigers. They find them in their scat somewhat regularly. So, um,

• 1:29:09Jeff Larson?

  Oh, no, are.

• 1:29:11Wes Larson?

  Are. Yeah. Like there are.

• 1:29:13Jeff Larson?

  Well, there's I think.

• 1:29:14Wes Larson?

  I don't know.

• 1:29:15Mike Smith?

  Tajmanian tiger?

• 1:29:16Wes Larson?

  You were, you were thinking of saber-toothed tiger.

• 1:29:19Mike Smith?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Wes Larson?

  Now, this is Siberian tiger or a moor tiger.

• 1:29:25Wes Larson?

  They are prey for them. Those brown bears are that you find in inland Russia are very similar to our inland brown bears. And Siberian tigers do occasionally kill and eat them. And the opposite is true.

• 1:29:38Mike Smith?

  Tiger.

• 1:29:38Wes Larson?

  Saber-toothed tiger would also make pretty easy work of an inland brown bear, I think. So, yeah. All right, one more. This is from Eric C. Lee. A new subscriber, so forgive me if this has already been covered. I've heard the theory that everyone has a certain size of body water, certain size body of water in which they would be comfortable swimming, knowing that there's a dead body in the water with them. For me, I think it would have to be a decent sized lake. My wife says it would have to be the ocean. My kids say that it would be comfortable if it were a large swimming pool. Got to get new kids, Eric. Those ones are rotten. Uh, for me, I think it would have to be a decent sized lake. Oh, yes, sorry. What about you three?

• 1:30:21Wes Larson?

  What is the smallest sized body of water you'd swim in if you knew there was a dead body?

• 1:30:25Mike Smith?

  Bathtub.

• 1:30:26Jeff Larson?

  That's interesting. Cause like when you're in the ocean.

• 1:30:32Wes Larson?

  And not only comfortable.

• 1:30:33Jeff Larson?

  That doesn't count. You can't swim in a bathtub.

• 1:30:37Mike Smith?

  What? Are you kidding me right now? I do, I do flip turns in my bathtub.

• 1:30:42Wes Larson?

  Especially if there's a dead body in there with you.

• 1:30:44Mike Smith?

  We barely get any water when I have it. When I have that body in there, there's like eight molecules of water between me and him or her.

• 1:30:51Jeff Larson?

  Now, whenever I'm in the ocean, I'm gonna have to think like, there's a dead body in there.

• 1:30:56Wes Larson?

  That's the thing, like probably most big lakes you're in have a dead body in there too.

• 1:31:01Jeff Larson?

  Well, I guess, what counts as a dead body too?

• 1:31:04Wes Larson?

  Yeah, like a skeleton. Right?

• 1:31:07Jeff Larson?

  I'll take a bath with a skeleton.

• 1:31:10Wes Larson?

  I would say like.

• 1:31:13Wes Larson?

  If it were a smaller lake, I'd be comfortable, especially if it was really cold water. I feel like that makes it better. Like if it was really like warm and pondy and swampy, it would feel grosser to me. But if it's cold water, I'm feeling pretty comfortable. So, yeah.

• 1:31:28Mike Smith?

  It's lucky that President Taft didn't die in that one tub he got stuck in. I like that there's a president, the only thing we know about him is that he was like,

• 1:31:36Wes Larson?

  Stuck.

• 1:31:36Mike Smith?

  He got stuck in a bathtub because he was a little too big for it. I'm sure, I might, he might have been good, he might have been terrible. I don't know anything about him other than that.

• 1:31:45Jeff Larson?

  Maybe like, if it's like the body is floating on the surface, I don't want to be able to see the body.

• 1:31:52Wes Larson?

  Yeah, that's true. I just want to know that it's under the water. Yeah.

• 1:31:56Jeff Larson?

  Like if I see a body floating in the water, I'm not swimming.

• 1:32:00Wes Larson?

  Okay.

• 1:32:00Mike Smith?

  Good rule of thumb.

• 1:32:00Jeff Larson?

  Second they fish him out of there, I would.

• 1:32:03Wes Larson?

  I'm getting it. Yeah.

• 1:32:06Wes Larson?

  All right. Okay, that's it for listener questions. Those are all from some Patreon subscribers. Thank you, everyone. All right, a quick conservation corner. I did look at harvest data for the last 10 years in North Carolina, coastal North Carolina for black bears. And those numbers did increase year after year. So they're getting, they're getting like,

• 1:32:28Mike Smith?

  I'm glad you asked, Jeff. I think he was about to just not.

• 1:32:31Wes Larson?

  I was just gonna leave it. They tick up every year, and that either means that bear numbers are going up, so they're issuing more tags and hunters are having more successful hunts. Or it could mean that they're simply trying to reduce the population. I know in a lot of these counties, they do have like a zero population growth target, which is understandable if you have enough bears to where they're starting to cause problems or getting into like issues. You don't want to taint the, uh, the perception of that species as it, as a whole. So you do have to kind of make those decisions sometimes. I think it points toward black bear populations in North Carolina being pretty robust. I hope they're managing them well.

• 1:33:12Wes Larson?

  I hope they're taking into account the fact that there are natural controls for those levels too. But as far as, you know, we've learned in other black bear episodes, they're very adaptable animals. Population wide, they're doing great. Much better than any other bear species in the entire world. Uh, there's, you know, 800,000 plus black bears, American black bears. So.

• 1:33:36Wes Larson?

  We don't have to worry about them.

• 1:33:36Jeff Larson?

  I'd like to see, I'd like to see how much those numbers spiked up when Kuder was in prison.

• 1:33:42Wes Larson?

  Yeah, spiked down?

• 1:33:45Jeff Larson?

  Uh, well, when the population went up.

• 1:33:48Wes Larson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So anyway, uh, you don't need to protect black bears. You don't need to make it your personal mission to like, to feed them and protect them. They're, they're doing great.

• 1:33:59Mike Smith?

  That is a load off my mind.

• 1:34:00Wes Larson?

  Yeah. All right. All right. And that's all I got. Um, a couple, a couple of quick announcements. Um, we do have some new trips that are going to be coming up soon. Uh, we're, we're doing another trip to India that's going to be culture and wildlife, uh, with Trova Trip. And then soon we'll probably be doing, announcing a Uganda trip as well, uh, with Serpentine.

• 1:34:24Mike Smith?

  You got to come on that one with us, Jeff?

• 1:34:28Jeff Larson?

  You got to sign up quick.

• 1:34:31Wes Larson?

  All right.

• 1:34:33Wes Larson?

  Uh, we do generally offer those first to our Patreon and then if there are extra spots. Yeah, yeah, we always do. So that is, I'm not, we're not getting into this. It's not because of me. We can't throw me under the bus for that. That was a group decision.

• 1:34:52Wes Larson?

  Anyway, so that'll be, those will be coming up soon and we love you all, all of you. And, uh, we'll see you soon.

• 1:35:01Jeff Larson?

  Love you.

• 1:35:01Mike Smith?

  See ya.

• 1:35:02Wes Larson?

  Bye.