Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks The Dire Wolf "De-Extinction" Situation - News Stories Including Dire Wolves(?), the Algae that Turns Sea Lions Violent, a Bear Swipe to the Face, and More About this episode The guys talk about some of the more notable animal news stories to hit the mainstream during the past month or so.
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Transcript 17,305 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:13 Jeff Larson? Hello everyone, welcome to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our lovely wildlife biologist Wes Larson with us.
0:21 Mike Smith? Give me all your money.
0:22 Jeff Larson? And then we have our provocative co-host Mike Smith.
0:27 Wes Larson? Hey.
0:27 Jeff Larson? And I'm Jeff Larson.
0:28 Wes Larson? Oh wait, that wasn't provocative enough. Do you mean provocative like sensually?
0:32 Jeff Larson? Nah, like you bring the heat.
0:33 Wes Larson? You do.
0:34 Jeff Larson? Like you stir shit up.
0:36 Wes Larson? What? Yeah. Sometimes I forget this is an audio format. I had my shirt over my nose like a, like a bendito.
0:45 Mike Smith? You looked like the, what was the friend's name in the Bazooka Joe comics? He always had the turtleneck like pulled all the way up over his nose. That was always a weird look.
0:53 Wes Larson? I don't know, Mike. No one else is as tacked into 1930s culture as you are.
0:58 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's true.
0:59 Jeff Larson? Wes is on a grizzly bear Facebook group?
1:02 Wes Larson? Board. No.
1:03 Jeff Larson? Board?
1:03 Wes Larson? It's on the board, on the board of directors for the Grizzly Bear Foundation.
1:07 Jeff Larson? He met with like a bunch of Ents yesterday?
1:10 Mike Smith? Sounds like that was the case, yeah.
1:12 Wes Larson? We're not, we're not kidding. We had our board meeting yesterday and
1:17 Jeff Larson? How long was it?
1:17 Wes Larson? It's a great, it's a great board. It's really fun being in those meetings, but sometimes we get into stuff that I'm not that good at, which is more like discussing like budget and stuff like that. And in those moments, to me, a simpleton, it can kind of feel like the meeting of the Ents in Lord of the Rings. My eyes go a little glazed over, but it's important stuff. That's, that's what board members are for.
1:42 Mike Smith? And then when they choose to eradicate the entire bear population in Montana, you're like, how can that be your decision? And then they carry you off back to the Shire.
1:51 Wes Larson? And then I trick them. I tricked them.
1:54 Mike Smith? Yeah, you did.
1:55 Wes Larson? No, it's great.
1:55 Mike Smith? Tipping, a mastermind.
1:57 Wes Larson? They, they more added me to the board to be a voice on kind of more on the ground kind of decisions. So the, the budget stuff sometimes is a little hard for me, but it's important stuff. So, you know, if you're looking for a good bear organization to donate to, the Grizzly Bear Foundation's a great one. Well, it's our, um, semi-
2:16 Jeff Larson? Annual.
2:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, every-
2:18 Jeff Larson? News episode.
2:18 Wes Larson? Six weeks news episode.
2:22 Mike Smith? Bi-monthly? Or does that mean twice a month? I always get that mixed up.
2:26 Wes Larson? I think that's twice a month.
2:27 Mike Smith? We don't do it that often.
2:28 Wes Larson? Semi-monthly? I don't know. Anyway, it's kind of been a slow, a slow couple of months for a tax. I feel like there hasn't been a ton, which is kind of nice. We definitely found some good stories and there were some interesting science stories and, and wildlife stories that people really wanted to hear us talk about. And I figure I'd lead off with one of those.
2:47 Jeff Larson? They're tiring to hear.
2:48 Wes Larson? They're tiring to hear it.
2:50 Mike Smith? I don't think that's how that's said, but-
2:52 Wes Larson? Dire-ing?
2:53 Mike Smith? You guys ready?
2:54 Wes Larson? Di- yeah, dire-ing, like a dire wolf.
2:57 Jeff Larson? You'll get it.
2:58 Mike Smith? Okay.
2:59 Wes Larson? Just wait one second.
3:00 Mike Smith? Oh, they're dying to hear. Okay, I see. No, sorry.
3:04 Wes Larson? Yeah.
3:04 Mike Smith? I'm a little slow.
3:07 Jeff Larson? It was a multi-layered joke.
3:10 Mike Smith? Yeah.
3:10 Jeff Larson? In your defense.
3:11 Mike Smith? Expertly crafted, yeah.
3:13 Wes Larson? All right, so I'm going to call this segment, "Welcome to Jurassic Bark: The Colossal Sciences Dire Wolf Story."
3:20 Jeff Larson? You might need to explain that to Mike.
3:25 Wes Larson? I think I need to trademark that because everywhere I looked for stories about this, no one was using that. And it's crazy to me that I hadn't seen it anywhere else yet. Maybe I did and it is incepted into my brain, but I was thinking real hard about a good tagline for this and that's what I came up with. All right, so this really made the news a lot recently and it's because of a Time Magazine cover that it said like extinct and then it was crossed out. And it was talking about how this group called Colossal Sciences had de-extincted the dire wolf. It was due to some crazy new technology that they had. They used CRISPR, they used a bunch of different things. Genetically, and they proudly displayed these three dire wolves, Remus, Romulus, and
4:08 Wes Larson? Khaleesi, and said that they had achieved de-extinction through genetically modifying the DNA of a gray wolf to change certain genes to those of a dire wolf. And I think, for a lot of people, the most surprising-
4:20 Mike Smith? I like my jeans made out of denim, personally.
4:22 Wes Larson? You don't want them made out of dire wolves. I think one of the more surprising things for a lot of people here was realizing that dire wolves are actually a real animal, and not just like a George R.R. Martin creation.
4:36 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
4:36 Wes Larson? They lived in the Americas during the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene, so that's about 125,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. They're roughly the same size as the biggest gray wolves, so I think in pop culture, like in Game of Thrones, they've exaggerated how big they were.
4:53 Jeff Larson? Yeah, so they're not even that big.
4:54 Wes Larson? They're not. They were bigger, especially like their skulls and their teeth, but they're as big as our biggest gray wolves. So this is a bigger wolf-
5:04 Jeff Larson? But the biggest dire wolves are bigger than our biggest gray wolves.
5:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, but it's like in GoldenEye when you turn on Donkey Kong mode and everyone's head gets huge. Their skulls were just giant.
5:16 Mike Smith? I don't think it was that, that exaggerated.
5:19 Jeff Larson? It's like lions and tigers. Lions get close to as big as tigers, but then some tigers get huge.
5:25 Wes Larson? It is a slightly larger canid. And, so yeah, that has been a little exaggeration in pop culture, which we love to do. And it's impossible to say exactly what this animal looked like, but a lot of paleontologists think they looked kind of like big dingos.
5:39 Jeff Larson? Had feathers.
5:41 Wes Larson? What? So, in pop culture, like if you were to ask someone, what does a dire wolf look like, just a layperson, what do you think they would describe it as?
5:51 Mike Smith? Odd job, dude. In GoldenEye, you turn on Donkey Kong mode and his head gets all big. It's the only way you could kill him, he was too short otherwise.
5:58 Wes Larson? I know. Whenever anyone picked Odd Job, I was like, okay, come on.
6:01 Mike Smith? Ridiculous.
6:02 Wes Larson? Yeah.
6:03 Mike Smith? Especially when they go slapping only. My gosh.
6:05 Wes Larson? Jeff, explain what a dire wolf looked like, looks like from the common pop culture perspective.
6:11 Jeff Larson? Yeah, just, well, I don't know. I I don't feel like it's too different from what they are like it just looks like a really big wolf.
6:18 Wes Larson? Right, exactly. So that's like in Game of Thrones. That's how they had them portrayed. It's just massive wolves and really from the paleontological record. They probably look different than that. They probably looked more like like.
6:31 Mike Smith? Antological?
6:34 Wes Larson? Probably more like a large jackal or a really big dingo, something like that, but it's impossible to say. Back to the science project.
6:41 Mike Smith? It's a better description than what I've been trying to all all stop. Doing the golden I thing.
6:46 Wes Larson? Basically. Yeah, is it working? Should we keep going with that?
6:51 Mike Smith? I'm done.
6:52 Wes Larson? Basically, what they did here, though, is they analyzed the entire genome of dire wolf. They got this from a tooth that they had and ear bone. And then they looked at the entire genome of a gray wolf and they looked for differences. There's about nineteen hundred genes to compare and they made about twenty changes in fourteen different genes. To essentially turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf. And the word essentially is really doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Because personally, what I think they're doing here is making a gray wolf look more like a dire wolf. But it isn't recreating a dire wolf or de-extincting a dire wolf. Because from what I understand, doing a basic amount of research to actually recreate or de-extinct.
7:35 Wes Larson? An extinct animal, you need fully intact DNA. You essentially need like a a an embryo and they just don't have that. Like they had fragments. I read this article by an expert in this and he said essentially fossilization does like if you put DNA into a an oven, a five hundred degree oven overnight and then tried to use those fragments to create something. It just really degrades the DNA and you can't have a perfect copy from like fossilized DNA. It's just impossible.
8:05 Mike Smith? Is that tooth in the ear bone? Is that all they had of it? Or is that they just selected those for a specific reason?
8:11 Wes Larson? I think they selected those two fragments because they had the best material for them to analyze the genome with.
8:18 Mike Smith? Okay.
8:19 Wes Larson? Quickly, a lot of people wanted us to talk about this. A lot of people wanted my opinion as a biologist on this, and I'm happy to give it. And I want to start with what I think is really cool about this. And what I think is cool is that companies are pushing forward this technology that in the future, we could potentially use to bring back animals that became extinct due to human factors. I'm glad we have that technology as kind of a failsafe. And unfortunately, I do think there's probably going to be a lot of practical use for this in the future. So I do think it's interesting technology, and I think they have some really talented scientists working for them.
8:52 Mike Smith? Yeah, the science behind it, it's really cool. I, from my uneducated view, really the issue is kind of like the sensationalization, sensationalizing of the story. And maybe a little bit of like ethical concerns, of course, but I feel like the actual science and the people that are working on the project themselves. It's pretty cool. It's something that I can support and maybe you can help me feel one way or the other that way. But yeah, it's cool. I think it's really cool.
9:18 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think it's great science and bad PR, essentially, and we'll get into that. Jeff, did you have something you wanted to say before I get into what I don't like about it?
9:26 Jeff Larson? Well, I was gonna say like with Walt Disney, he froze himself when he died, right?
9:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
9:33 Jeff Larson? I think we should get some of these like critically endangered animals and start freezing them. I think we should do it before they die.
9:40 Wes Larson? They're doing that, but not the whole animal. They're freezing their, they're freezing their intact DNA, like there's these storage places in like Norway and Svalbard, where they have essentially every plant and a lot of animals' DNA like on ice as kind of a failsafe.
9:56 Jeff Larson? That's cool.
9:56 Wes Larson? It is.
9:57 Mike Smith? How long do you think it'll take for Walt to just get canceled once we bring him back? Like he had some pretty uncoothe beliefs.
10:04 Wes Larson? Didn't we just talk about this?
10:06 Mike Smith? Did we?
10:07 Wes Larson? I think so.
10:08 Mike Smith? Like before the rest of his body is even unfrozen, his mouth just starts like talking about how much he hates certain people.
10:15 Wes Larson? The first black person he sees, he's probably getting canceled.
10:18 Mike Smith? Yeah. All right. Let's freeze him again. Let's put him back in the freezer.
10:22 Jeff Larson? You got rid of Splash Mountain?
10:26 Wes Larson? All right. So here's what I don't love about this dire wolf story. I think a lot of time and energy and money that went into creating a gray wolf that resembles a dire wolf, and again, I want to say that's what this is. This isn't a dire wolf. This is a gray wolf that they tweaked to look more like a dire wolf. I think a lot of that money could have been better spent on coming up with ways to invest in current conservation crises. Crisis is to me, it feels like people making plans to go to Mars when we already have a wonderful planet that we need to fix. And I've already seen posts from politicians that aren't very conservation friendly, saying that this is the kind of technology we need to make it so we don't have to worry about
11:07 Wes Larson? endangered species anymore, because we can always just bring them back if they go extinct, which is terrible. It's a really bad way to think about this, because when you lose a species over time, that the ecosystem that it's in also gets degraded. You know, when you, when you take out a key component of an ecosystem, a lot of other things start happening to that ecosystem. And it can be really hard just to plug that species back in and hope that things go well. They often don't. It's often really hard to reintroduce an animal.
11:37 Jeff Larson? Well, like even with this example of dire wolves.
11:41 Wes Larson? Right.
11:41 Jeff Larson? Like it is a gray wolf, but it's kind of different too. But it's like, there's nowhere to really put them in the wild.
11:48 Wes Larson? Exactly. Exactly. And that was my next point, that this isn't an animal they're planning on like re-releasing onto the like plains of North America. There aren't mammoths and giant sloths for them to hunt anymore. This is an animal that was selected for extinction. And so these are going to be sides, so like sideshow attractions in a zoo. Like that's what, that's what its entire life is going to be. And I would love to see them like, I think it's interesting, but that's what they're de-extincting in quotation marks, these animals for as like, look at what we can do. They don't have any practical place in an ecosystem anymore. They've been, they've been extinct for 10,000 years. Also, I don't like, Mike, you kind of mentioned this earlier.
12:30 Wes Larson? I don't like the clickbaity kind of headlines that they're creating around this saying. Stuff like de-extinction, because they know that's not true. It's not a true de-extinction. And it makes it harder for people to then trust science and scientists when they learn that. Because you see this on the cover of Time Magazine, and then suddenly you learn that's not true. It makes you kind of second guess a lot of science information. And I think we really need concise, clear science information.
12:57 Jeff Larson? It makes us second guess you, because you're telling us it's not true, but it's like, I saw it in Time Magazine.
13:03 Wes Larson? And George was holding one. Yeah, that's fair. You know, I do think you have to figure out who you trust and then try and trust them.
13:10 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
13:11 Wes Larson? If you don't trust me, that's okay.
13:12 Jeff Larson? I'm like, it was in the news. What are you talking about?
13:14 Wes Larson? Yeah.
13:15 Jeff Larson? They're de-extinct.
13:17 Wes Larson? You just said like, George R R Martin was holding one. I think it was very tactful of them to make these wolves white. I think they had full control over that gene. And they said, yeah, we're gonna make them white, because the most famous dire wolf in Game of Thrones was white. And that's what people see when they see a dire wolf. So they made three white dire wolves. And that just speaks again to me how this is kind of a big PR stunt, in a way. All right. To sum up all my feelings, there's a great quote in Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm's monologue, where he says, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. And I agree that this is amazing technology. I think it's cool they did this.
14:01 Wes Larson? But I don't really understand why make a dire wolf that just has to be in a zoo for the rest of its life. That's not actually a dire wolf. I will say I'm a hypocrite, because if they had a real pathway to bring back dinosaurs, even though I think it would be ecologically wrong, I'd be all for it. Like, I would be reading every news release from this company.
14:22 Jeff Larson? What is like our closest animal to like a cool dinosaur?
14:27 Wes Larson? Like a cassowary or a chicken or something like that?
14:29 Jeff Larson? Dude, what if we just like juiced up cassowaries, you know?
14:32 Wes Larson? I know. Like make them look like an overraptor or something. They're probably gonna do that.
14:36 Jeff Larson? We gotta start juicing them.
14:38 Wes Larson? I don't think that's far. I know they're already talking about like woolly mammoths, the thylacine, which that one I'm really interested in. That's the Tasmanian tiger. That one was eradicated because of humans, and it would be interesting to see what they could do to bring them back.
14:53 Mike Smith? Do you think there's a possibility that, say, we do bring those back and we just reinsert them into their old territory? Has enough time gone by that that would be kind of ecologically damaging as well? Or do you have any thoughts on kind of like the time that passes?
15:09 Wes Larson? I don't know enough about Tasmania to say for sure, but I think that's one you could probably reintroduce and it would be okay. I'm not really sure, though, and I don't know if we have intact genetic information for a thylacine anywhere either. Like, this might be, they might be going down the same path with that, where they create an animal that's very similar to what a thylacine would have been like, but it's not a true thylacine. So, I don't know. It's tricky, but I feel very conflicted about it. I wish their messaging was better, though.
15:37 Jeff Larson? I feel like we could put them all in Florida, since they already have, like, every animal there is anyways.
15:43 Mike Smith? That's just our big, our big testing area for any new animal now.
15:47 Wes Larson? And that's a great idea, actually.
15:49 Mike Smith? I like that idea. This episode is brought to you by Beam. For my whole life, I've had a really hard time falling asleep. I have to have the perfect room temperature, the perfect bedding, the perfect white noise. Everything just has to be perfect. But you know what's made it so much easier for me is Beam. Beam's Dream Powder is made with clean, natural ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, apigenin, and melatonin, formulated to help you fall asleep fast, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. Try it and see why Dream by Beam has improved over 30 million nights of sleep for people across the country. And yeah, Beam does help me fall asleep easier, deeper, and better. But you know what's even nicer than that is drinking it in the first place.
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17:11 Wes Larson? You know what? It's allergy season. And for those of you that suffer with seasonal allergies, you're probably getting geared up for the upcoming season. For me, I have pet allergies. I live with a dog and a cat, and we have horses. I even built this studio that I'm in just so that I could have a break from the pets sometimes. Allergies really dictate a lot about my life. And that's why I'm so excited to tell you guys about Allermy. Allermy has the first and only custom nasal spray to treat your specific symptoms. Standard allergy meds don't work for everyone, and specialists are hard to find. And Allermy gives you accessible, affordable, and effective care. That means you're free to do what you love all year long without allergies getting in the way. For me, I just
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18:34 Wes Larson? and use code TOOTH for 60% off your order. Once again, that's A-L-L-E-R-M-I.com/Tooth for 60% off. Make sure you use our code TOOTH so that they know that we sent you. Yeah, so they, they did, I know they have a paper coming out, like a peer-reviewed paper, that's going to talk about their whole pathway to doing this. And I'm excited to read that, because I know some people that have seen that, and they said that it's actually quite interesting, and that the PR team didn't do a great job explaining the brilliance of the science behind all of this. So, cool. When I lived in Georgia, I met a dog that had a really big head.
19:18 Wes Larson? And that, he was a mean dog. So that's what I'm imagining these dire wolves were like. Just like a wolf, though, with a big head, right?
19:24 Mike Smith? He really stuck on this big head thing.
19:26 Wes Larson? It's funny, it's thought to me, because this dog, it's just, the head was like twice as big.
19:30 Mike Smith? Big for its body than you would think it should be. And it was funny. It was kinda funny to look at.
19:35 Wes Larson? I think their skulls and teeth were just slightly larger. Sorry to pop your, your massive head on this, but um.
19:42 Mike Smith? Shoot.
19:42 Wes Larson? Yeah.
19:43 Mike Smith? God, that dog. What a jerk.
19:44 Wes Larson? Who wants to go next?
19:46 Mike Smith? Uh, Jeff, you want me to go?
19:47 Jeff Larson? Yeah, sure.
19:48 Mike Smith? Okay, so, this one, it's a little topical just because of what we all went through together recently. That makes it sound like something bad happened. Not really at all. Nothing bad happened to us. In fact, it was something pretty special when we were down in the Galapagos. We were seeing a whole lot of sea lions, all over the place. It was really fun. They're pretty cute, all things considered. They have some really interesting behaviors, especially when they're accustomed to humans being around. They'll just flop down anywhere they want and just lay there till, uh, they're forced to move.
20:18 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
20:18 Mike Smith? People will just clap at them. It turns out that's like, the sound that gets them going.
20:23 Jeff Larson? Universe. They can clap too, right? I wonder why they don't ever clap back.
20:27 Mike Smith? Clap back, right? Well, I was reading a really interesting news report, and this is something we actually touched on in an episode. We, we talked about a long time ago in a bonus episode I did about pinup heads. And it's about sea lions in this weird, toxic bloom of algae that can get them misbehavin', we'll just say. And I'll, I'll just relay a couple of experiences people have had with them recently, and then we'll get into maybe the science about what's happening. In San Diego, recently, just these past few weeks, SeaWorld, their animal rescue team received a call about a sea lion that needed some help. It was kind of this thick, uh, jiggly, waddly sea lion that made its way downtown into San Diego on like a four-lane highway.
21:09 Mike Smith? And it was, it was looking pretty bad, and people were just like, "That shouldn't be here." So, let's get some people in here to, um, maybe transport it to safety and see what its deal is. And Jeff, speaking of us being around sea lions, what kind of sound do you think a sick sea lion is gonna be making?
21:26 Wes Larson? I feel like we heard a fair number of, like, we were watching a big colony of them, and all of a sudden one would just be like, "Ugh, ugh."
21:35 Wes Larson? Oh geez, get rid of that one.
21:37 Mike Smith? It's like another vector for COVID or something. Well, anyway, so this was just another sea lion on a long list of sea lions that have been recently reported by people all over Southern California. This response team that I alluded to earlier, it's led by a woman named Jenny Smith. She works at the SeaWorld in San Diego. And other reports include a sea lion that appeared dead in Coronado. There's a sick pup laying by a lifeguard stand in Encinitas, a couple in Pacific Beach and Oson Beach, like, you know, north of downtown San Diego. But it's become such a problem and not just in San Diego, actually. There's been like a bunch of this happening up in the Los Angeles area as well.
22:16 Mike Smith? But roughly 100 calls every single day for this past several weeks were made to the SeaWorld team about sea lions, just kind of having seizures or exhibiting behavior that's just really, really abnormal. So people have a lot of questions. And Jenny actually said about it that the team kind of went from zero to 60 in two seconds, which I thought was a pretty fun little metaphor.
22:41 Wes Larson? A quick, a quick aside too. I think a lot of people out there that saw blackfish or whatever, when they hear SeaWorld, their hackles kind of go up.
22:48 Mike Smith? Yeah.
22:49 Wes Larson? And just so everyone knows, SeaWorld has probably the best marine mammal rescue team in the world. Like they, they do an insane amount of marine mammal rescue in the places where they have facilities. And they are very quick, like you said, zero to 60, very quick to get out there and deal with these kind of situations.
23:08 Jeff Larson? Two seconds.
23:09 Wes Larson? Pinupeds, cetaceans.
23:10 Mike Smith? Oh, I guess Nick Cage was gone in 60 seconds. That's a little different. Anyway, sorry.
23:15 Wes Larson? So yeah, just so you know, they, they do a lot of good. They do a lot of conservation work too. They do definitely have their skeletons, but.
23:22 Jeff Larson? I do, yeah, I wonder how the orcas feel about SeaWorld having like a great like marine animal rescue team. They're just kind of like, hey, guys, like we're sitting here right next to you.
23:35 Wes Larson? I want to clarify that with, I don't think they should have orcas or dolphins in captivity, but that is slowly getting phased out.
23:42 Jeff Larson? Big blind spot.
23:44 Mike Smith? Well, anyway, like I was talking about, this has also been a problem and it's actually turned a little violent up in Los Angeles. So there was a surfer recently, RJ Lamandola. He was out surfing when a sea lion lunged up and bit at him and dragged, he dragged him off his board. And he later described the animals looking possessed, like nothing he'd ever seen. Quote, "With a feral, almost demonic look devoid of the curiosity or playfulness he usually ascribed to these animals."
24:09 Wes Larson? That's what he said, the surfer?
24:11 Mike Smith? He said, the surfer, and he like kinda-
24:13 Wes Larson? Is he a poet too?
24:14 Mike Smith? Like made his way back to shore and his wet suit was all shredded up and he was all bloody and he had to go to the hospital, of course. Yeah, it's crazy because I don't know if you guys, of course you have, I literally saw you do it, but you're swimming with these sea lions. And they're really nice, they're really social, and I was never at any point like afraid that they would do anything to me. So to have that like flipped around real quick is a really scary thought.
24:34 Jeff Larson? It's always like a little bit in my mind, like, well, if this thing just bit me right now.
24:39 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think, and I think when people talk about that, like, there are certain colonies of sea lions that have become very used to swimming around people. And so there, there's that kind of habituation. But there are a lot of people that have gone bit by wild sea lions too. And they're probably in colonies where they aren't very, or rickeries or whatever, where they're not very used to people, so. Or they have this toxic algae poisoning.
25:02 Mike Smith? Yeah, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit. So according to the CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center in Los Angeles, these sea lions are suffering from domoic acid toxicosis, which is a neurological condition that happens when these sea lions are eating the smaller marine life, who are in turn eating this toxic algae bloom. And it's naturally occurring, there's not like a, I don't think we can totally say this is like caused by any malfeasance on the humans parts, although it could be exacerbated by things like climate change, stuff like that. But so these sea lions eat these smaller fish who are eating this algae. And they start kinda going into fits, they'll have seizures.
25:42 Mike Smith? Or conversely, they'll turn like extremely lethargic and not move at all and just kinda like slump there and not move. And then there's of course like disorientation generally and a head tilting behavior known as stargazing, which is uh, kind of a nice term for something that's not super, super cool, I'm sure.
26:02 Wes Larson? It's like shoegazing.
26:03 Mike Smith? Uh, this, these toxins actually often lead to sea lions dying. So the care center has been admitting and caring for these sea lions. And the problem is this year, it's been a lot worse than in previous years. Cause again, this is something that annually occurs, but forty-seven sea lions in SeaWorld alone had been admitted this year. While in the previous two years, there were, I think, eleven in two thousand twenty-four and like thirteen or something in two thousand twenty-three. So it's a huge increase in number, a lot more sightings. And of course, it's hard to say exactly why it's so much worse this year so far. A lot of scientists are thinking maybe it's caused by the LA fires that occurred recently, or generally just the climate change stuff.
26:46 Jeff Larson? Fires didn't happen in the ocean.
26:50 Mike Smith? That'd be super hard.
26:51 Wes Larson? I will, I'll say, I've read about this a fair amount and like, this, like you mentioned, this is something that was natural to these systems. But the frequency that it's happening and the extent to which it's happening is becoming much like more often and much larger. And they do, I think most marine biologists or oceanographers or whatever do agree that that is because of changing climate and currents and whatnot. So warmer water for longer periods of time allows this algae to get a much bigger foothold than it used to have. And it's, it's creating a lot of problems on the west coast, especially where entire fisheries are affected. Marine mammals, all sorts of different animals are being affected by this. So it is a big problem.
27:35 Jeff Larson? The fires could have warmed the water up, too.
27:39 Wes Larson? They could. That's true, Jeff. Yeah, we need to get Jeff on the case.
27:43 Mike Smith? Yeah. Well, and I think this is particularly interesting, just with the human element involved. Like people are getting attacked. There was one case, the surfer, but there was also a fifteen-year-old girl who was training to become a lifeguard. She got attacked. Like, this is something that is affecting humans and it's becoming a pretty big story. So like, I'm not trying to say like, it's more important that we care now because a couple more humans are being attacked, but it is a thing that if it gets worse, this could really turn into a a weird situation happening all along the coast. Yeah, right.
28:14 Jeff Larson? It could end up like Jaws where the mayor won't close the beach in San Diego.
28:19 Wes Larson? It paints a negative view of these animals, too. Like, when you look at the headlines about this story, it's like demonic sea lion, possessed sea lion, you know? And it's not, these are, they're wonderful animals, so it, I don't know.
28:32 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I like sea lions. I bonded with them.
28:34 Wes Larson? Yeah.
28:35 Jeff Larson? I have a quick story on that about just how bullying every once in a while it kind of works. So the surfer's name was RJ. When I was in elementary school, I thought the coolest kid in school, he was a year older than me. His name was RJ. So then I came home from school once and I told my whole family, "From now on, I want to be called BJ." And Wes and Mike laughed really hard.
29:01 Wes Larson? Oh, I would.
29:02 Jeff Larson? I didn't say Mike. Wes and Cyrus laughed really hard at me. And they said, "What's that stand for? Big Jeff?" And I was like, "No, doesn't stand for anything."
29:13 Wes Larson? Yeah, we inadvertently saved you from a very embarrassing nickname.
29:16 Jeff Larson? They teased me out of going by BJ, so that's good.
29:20 Wes Larson? I'm glad you brought that up. It's good that we have some pro bullying content every once in a while.
29:25 Mike Smith? Yeah, my older brother definitely helped me out. Wasn't always nice, but I appreciate it.
29:31 Jeff Larson? Maybe there's a better term for sibling just teasing, I guess? All right, so I got a story.
29:37 Wes Larson? Okay.
29:38 Jeff Larson? Mind the actual attack happened last year, but the news stories are coming out very recently about it.
29:45 Wes Larson? Great.
29:45 Jeff Larson? So Wes, to start us off, what type of bear could do the most damage with a single swipe to a human's face?
29:53 Wes Larson? Uh, my guess would be, I would probably say a polar bear.
29:56 Jeff Larson? Oh, you want to guess once more?
29:58 Wes Larson? Uh, grizzly bear.
29:59 Jeff Larson? No, sorry. Uh, it ends up an Asiatic black bear can do the most damage with a single swipe.
30:07 Wes Larson? I strongly disagree with that, but, uh, where'd you get that info from?
30:13 Jeff Larson? Let me just tell you this story then.
30:15 Wes Larson? Okay, all right.
30:16 Jeff Larson? So here, I'm gonna share my screen. Look at this guy.
30:20 Wes Larson? Oh, that's a lot of damage, yeah.
30:22 Jeff Larson? That's from one swipe. Look at this one. That was right afterwards.
30:27 Wes Larson? Holy cow. His face is pretty much gone.
30:30 Jeff Larson? Yeah, so.
30:31 Wes Larson? Like, not trying to be funny, but it looks like a Picasso. Like, that's how much damage has been done to the face.
30:38 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's funny.
30:40 Wes Larson? I didn't, that says more about you than me, Jeff. I, I will, like, I'll admit that there's a five or six species of bear that a single swipe is enough to take off a face.
30:52 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
30:53 Wes Larson? They still wouldn't be my number one.
30:55 Jeff Larson? Well, yeah, maybe you're right, but a sixty year old, still unnamed man in Thailand was fishing.
31:04 Wes Larson? Parents gotta get on that.
31:05 Mike Smith? Taiwan?
31:06 Jeff Larson? Yeah, you're gonna live in Taiwan your whole life?
31:12 Jeff Larson? He was fishing when an Asiatic black bear went up, swiped him one time in the face, and it ripped off the top half of his lip, ripped off his nose completely, and really, really strongly damaged his eye. Then it continued to attack him, and it got his throat and stomach a bit, and he was in a lot of trouble. There is like a really good chance he's gonna die, but he was rushed to a hospital. They gave him life-saving care, but then where the story like reaches the United States is after that, he was taken to a specialist for some pretty incredible facial reconstruction, and that was Dr. Akarun Chat, uh, who kinda was able to puzzle his face back together, like Mike said, Picasso style.
31:57 Jeff Larson? But yeah, it's always the thighs. They took a bunch of skin from his thighs, and the thighs went over like his forehead and a few other spots, and then they had to take.
32:07 Wes Larson? I think that's just kind of where you have the most extra skin that they can pull from.
32:12 Jeff Larson? They took a little bit of something from like someone's rib and then, uh, skin from his forehead.
32:19 Wes Larson? Wow.
32:20 Jeff Larson? To like reconstruct this person's nose that had been like completely ripped off. And pretty amazingly, two months later, he was able to breathe through his nose again, so also.
32:33 Wes Larson? Was he a woman then? Because they took from his rib, someone's rib?
32:37 Jeff Larson? That's how God did it, yeah.
32:41 Jeff Larson? Way to get the Bible in here, dude.
32:42 Mike Smith? Yeah.
32:45 Jeff Larson? But also, from the Thai news article I got this from, here's three paragraphs that they went like really hard, just a lot of adjectives for all of this. And I just want like read straight from them a bit.
33:01 Mike Smith? Let's go.
33:02 Jeff Larson? So it starts out, "Many fishermen cast their nets into serene waters, dreaming of a bountiful catch. But for one sixty-year-old Thai fisherman, a fishing expedition turned into an unimaginable ordeal. A harrowing tale of survival against the ferocity of nature itself. Picture a calm day that unexpectedly erupted into chaos when the peaceful solitude of his fishing spot was shattered by an encounter, as chilling as it was unexpected."
33:32 Mike Smith? I like peaceful solitude. Not redundant at all. This sounds like a paper I wrote a lot in college.
33:39 Jeff Larson? Dude, this is like one of your episodes where you...
33:41 Mike Smith? Like you have a thesaurus in front of you. Yeah.
33:45 Jeff Larson? "A vicious attack by an Asiatic black bear, a beast known to wield fury when feeling threatened." Is that true, Wes?
33:54 Mike Smith? It's true, you know?
33:56 Jeff Larson? "The result of this encounter was both horrific and life-altering. With a single swipe, the bear clawed away not only the fisherman's peace of mind, but also most of his face, nose, and upper lip."
34:08 Mike Smith? No way.
34:10 Jeff Larson? "Leaving him grotesquely disfigured. An animal attack of this magnitude would spell doom for many, yet this courageous man defied the odds to survive such a devastating mauling. His neck and stomach bore testament to the bear's wrath, yet his spirit remained unbroken." Like that book?
34:31 Mike Smith? Yeah, I remember that book.
34:32 Jeff Larson? And then I'll skip ahead a little bit to when they put his face back together. "The next phase was a testament to both medical ingenuity and sheer tenacity. The intricate rebuilding of a functional nose, composed partly by rib cartilage from a donor, using a forehead skin flap. It was science and art merging in to resurrect life."
34:56 Jeff Larson? Aided by the industrious resolve of Dr. Akaran Chat, who revealed a tale of indomitable spirit matched by unparalleled skill. So yeah, this person.
35:08 Wes Larson? Did the surfer from Mike's.
35:09 Jeff Larson? Went real hard in the article. It was like every paragraph was like that. So it's pretty good.
35:15 Wes Larson? That's amazing. That is amazing. I wish, if I ever get mauled, I hope that guy writes my story about it.
35:22 Mike Smith? That's crazy. Not only did his face get horribly disfigured, he lost his peace of mind, his peace of that wild.
35:29 Wes Larson? First thing it stole from him.
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36:14 Wes Larson? It's just made for every moment of mountain life. And those are people that are living through Wyoming winters. So they really know warm. The hometown down jacket is 800 fill down, but it feels more like your favorite hoodie than it does a puffy. And for me, I am really excited about the men's Furnos Max Insulated Jacket. I'm constantly looking for a jacket that just ticks all the boxes and this one really does. It's stretchy, it's breathable, it looks great. It keeps me super warm. It's just amazing. I just absolutely love this jacket. So ski season's almost here. Gear up now the way that the locals do. Go to stio.com/tooth for 20% off your order. That's S T I O dot com slash tooth.
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38:31 Mike Smith? This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money. So if there's one thing that I've struggled with the most as I've grown older, it's being in control of my finances. I'm not irresponsible. I'm just a little disorganized. I don't have a spreadsheet for all my budgets. I was definitely one of those people that lied during job interviews when I said I was proficient with Microsoft Excel. Don't know how to use it at all. And that's why I've really come to love and appreciate Rocket Money. We all know by now, you've heard us say it a million times before, we'll keep saying it. It's an amazing tool to help you cancel all your unwanted subscriptions or the ones that are a little tricky to get out of, or the ones that you forget about. All that information's right there. But on top of all of that, they help you know where you're spending maybe too much money or where your spending habits are. And they make starting a budget super, super easy and intuitive.
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39:58 Wes Larson? We'll share, we'll share at least one of those photos to Patreon. We'll see about Instagram, but Patreon people will get it.
40:04 Mike Smith? Rough.
40:05 Jeff Larson? Since this happened in Thailand and White Lotus, which we referenced there, just finished up. I want to ask you guys, which White Lotus hotel of the three locations would you most want a week vacation to?
40:17 Wes Larson? A week vacation? I really love Hawaii, but I'd say Thailand. The Thailand one really. I don't know, though. The Italy one's probably the one that's like worth the most. Like, you're probably getting the most expensive stay there.
40:30 Jeff Larson? It's kinda cool, like in the cliffside?
40:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
40:33 Jeff Larson? I think I'd take Italy.
40:35 Mike Smith? I've only seen season one, so I guess it'll be.
40:38 Jeff Larson? I could go Hawaii then.
40:40 Wes Larson? Hawaii. It's, it looks pretty nice. All right. My next one's titled Hawk Run Amok, or Amok, if you want to try and get that to rhyme.
40:51 Wes Larson? All right. A trained Harris Hawk got loose in Flamstead, Hertfordshire. Which, just based off that name, where do you think that little village is located?
40:59 Mike Smith? Middle Earth, west side.
41:02 Wes Larson? Pretty much. It's in the rural UK, place where, you know, it immediately threw the town into total chaos because that's what happens when you live in a place where there's no dangerous wildlife and there hasn't been dangerous wildlife for 500 years.
41:16 Mike Smith? Yeah.
41:16 Wes Larson? This hawk, which had probably been loose for years, it was a captive Harris Hawk. They don't live in the UK. They're more like southern US, South America. Had taken up residence in the small village and it started swooping down on people and using its talons to rake their heads. It swooped on about fifty people over the last few weeks.
41:35 Jeff Larson? Oh geez.
41:36 Wes Larson? Drew blood on a couple of them. One of these people who had blood drawn was super bald. And there's lots of pictures of him with blood running down his face and him saying stuff like, I'm not gonna get beaten by a poxy bird. And he was the only confirmed bald victim that I could find. That didn't stop the New York Post from running this headline. Hormonal hawk terrorizes bald men for weeks in English Village. Which is funny, even though the New York Post is a worthless rag, in my opinion. This bald guy got owned, people were afraid to walk the street or let their kids play in their yard. They weren't delivering mail, like people were on hawk alert and the town was pretty fed up.
42:18 Wes Larson? And I just imagine they were like, Harris hawk, you say? Well, we've got a guy named Harris. This forty year old guy named Steve Harris somehow becomes the like hawk catcher for the village. And I honestly wonder if it's just because his last name was Harris. And he started following this Harris hawk around with the big trap he borrowed from a falconer. Which is also funny to me because it means there was falconer living there, but this Steve Harris guy was like the guy that was gonna catch this hawk.
42:45 Jeff Larson? Yeah, like with all the other guys' equipment.
42:48 Wes Larson? Yeah, so finally one day it landed on his shed and he managed to like use this trap as protection. Throw it over the hawk, he called to the falconer who was nearby and he came and secured this hawk. Experts think that maybe it was hormonal and that's why it was so aggravated. But I think it's also really important to note that while they're trying to catch this hawk, they were feeding it a lot. And it had likely become very confident and kind of associating people with with food, food conditioned. So I think that's probably a big part of the reason it was swooping on people as well.
43:19 Jeff Larson? Nice one.
43:20 Wes Larson? Bald people.
43:22 Mike Smith? It's nice they're only drawing blood on those guys, though. It's not like real blood.
43:26 Wes Larson? Alright, who's up?
43:27 Mike Smith? I'll go. So this happened in Suriname. You guys are familiar with that, familiar with that country?
43:32 Wes Larson? Yeah.
43:33 Mike Smith? South America, a surname? Yeah, that's, I don't know how to pronounce the country's name and I, I know even less about-
43:39 Wes Larson? I think you said it right.
43:40 Mike Smith? Is it Suriname?
43:40 Jeff Larson? I didn't say it right.
43:41 Wes Larson? Suriname, yeah.
43:42 Mike Smith? Okay, well, there's a city in Suriname I also don't know how to pronounce, right? Raishdik?
43:47 Wes Larson? I don't know.
43:48 Mike Smith? So, Suriname's a little interesting. They, they've got some, uh, I mean, they speak Dutch there. They used to fly the Dutch flag. Uh, Netherlands. I'm not sure exactly what all that's about, but it made a little more sense to me, this story, when I learned all that, because this actually happened to a 63-year-old tourist from the Netherlands, and he actually was attacked by a jaguar recently.
44:07 Wes Larson? Ooh, wow!
44:08 Mike Smith? Which is really, really-
44:09 Wes Larson? It's a rare attack.
44:10 Mike Smith? Abnormal, yeah. So, it took place while he and his wife, and just, this is a, a translated article. I'm guessing there was some kind of like automated or even AI involved in translating this to English. It was written a little weird, but I tried to sort through it and I get to the bottom of exactly what all was being said. But, I bring that up because I don't know exactly what this means and maybe it'll help elucidate. But, "The attack took place while he and his wife were laying tracks in the forest to lure wild animals." Is that a phrase that makes sense to you?
44:41 Wes Larson? Tracks?
44:41 Mike Smith? Laying tracks? That's what I saw in all the aggregated articles about this.
44:45 Wes Larson? It could have been-
44:46 Mike Smith? Traps, maybe?
44:47 Wes Larson? Like, camera traps, too. They might have been like putting out remote cameras to get photos of wild animals.
44:53 Mike Smith? Sure.
44:53 Wes Larson? It also could have been someone that was poaching, who knows?
44:56 Mike Smith? Yeah, okay. Well, whatever the case was, he was jumped out of nowhere by the jaguar on the day of the attack, at 1:30 PM, who wanted to bite him from behind, is how the article reads.
45:08 Wes Larson? Okay.
45:09 Mike Smith? And, what do we know? We know, I, we know very little about jaguars, right, Wes? There's, they're a huge mystery to us still, right?
45:16 Wes Larson? No, we know quite a bit about jaguars.
45:18 Mike Smith? Yeah.
45:19 Wes Larson? They're a pretty well-studied animal.
45:21 Mike Smith? Yep. But particularly, I think every, the one thing that people probably associate with them, other than the spots, is their jaw strength, right?
45:28 Wes Larson? Yes, that is a, a commonly associated fact. Them for sure.
45:32 Mike Smith? Right. They can crack skulls. I kind of forget what we decided or determined the skull cracking capacity of their jaws when you did that episode last. Do you remember?
45:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, we really got into like the difference between total bite force and bite force quotient. And there's an argument that this cat, a jaguar, has the strongest bite force quotient of any cat. But like a big African lion is gonna have a stronger bite, pound for pound. Yeah.
46:00 Jeff Larson? Interesting. You choose lion and not tiger.
46:03 Wes Larson? Yeah, I should have said tiger. That was interesting.
46:07 Mike Smith? That is interesting. Well, this article speculates that this man was actually, he was tall enough that the jaguar wasn't quite able to jump up all the way to his head to bite it, which is pretty lucky. I don't know how tall he was.
46:21 Wes Larson? Untrue.
46:21 Mike Smith? It seems like jaguars can jump pretty well.
46:24 Wes Larson? It easily could have gotten up to his head.
46:26 Mike Smith? Unless he was like thirty feet tall.
46:28 Jeff Larson? We don't know much about him though.
46:30 Mike Smith? Right.
46:31 Wes Larson? Was this Slender Man?
46:32 Mike Smith? Yeah. So anyway, maybe because the man was tall or maybe the jaguar just had bad aim, it actually missed the man's head and instead started biting on his shoulder and his arm and digging its claws deep into the flesh all over, kind of like his torso area. He started screaming, which lured his wife over to the scene and she picked up a gun and started just kind of firing into the air to scare away the predator. Assume she didn't want to take the chance and hit her husband on accident. So I think that's the right move and it worked. The jaguar took off and the guy, he thinks that if the fight had lasted long enough for it to go to the ground, the jaguar would have killed him.
47:10 Wes Larson? I agree with that sentiment.
47:11 Mike Smith? You do? Okay.
47:12 Wes Larson? Yeah.
47:13 Jeff Larson? I think too, like biting its shoulder, cats will do that with deer and ungulates sometimes to like make them fall down. So it's maybe.
47:21 Wes Larson? Yeah.
47:21 Jeff Larson? Trying to make them fall down.
47:23 Wes Larson? That like their first bite isn't always their kill bite. Like sometimes they kind of just grab on and then situate a kill bite. So I don't think that was like the jaguar missing. It was more just like it jumped on him and was probably about to try and kill him.
47:38 Jeff Larson? Like an animal that walks on all fours, that would like knock it down if he bite their shoulder a bunch, you know?
47:44 Wes Larson? It might, yeah.
47:45 Mike Smith? Yeah. I don't think he was on all fours. I think he was doing the two footed walk thing.
47:50 Wes Larson? Yeah.
47:51 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's why I failed. That's why I'm saying, that's why I didn't follow.
47:55 Wes Larson? This happened recently, right?
47:57 Mike Smith? Very recently.
47:58 Wes Larson? Not a few million years ago?
47:59 Mike Smith? No, right.
48:00 Wes Larson? Yeah, then he was probably walking bipedal.
48:02 Mike Smith? Bipedal.
48:03 Wes Larson? Yeah.
48:03 Mike Smith? Yep. So he was taken to a nearby hospital as quickly as they could manage to get him there. And this is the, this is an interesting part. After assessing the wounds, the doctors concluded that no damage had been done that would require any major operation or specialized treatment. So they just, they're like, you're good.
48:20 Jeff Larson? Oh, no way. They have the strongest bite there.
48:22 Wes Larson? Or these are really bad doctors.
48:24 Jeff Larson? Give this guy stitches.
48:26 Mike Smith? Maybe this is like a baby jag. I don't know.
48:28 Jeff Larson? I could bite someone hard enough. They need like stitches.
48:32 Wes Larson? Maybe it was an awesome lot.
48:34 Mike Smith? So I think the point of this little part of the story is that there was a pretty major dereliction of duty on the part of these doctors because what do we know about animals who are exhibiting strange behavior, especially mammals? Like what could the aftermath of this attack actually be?
48:51 Wes Larson? Rabies.
48:51 Jeff Larson? Rabies.
48:52 Mike Smith? Exactly.
48:53 Wes Larson? Yeah.
48:54 Mike Smith? But they're like, nah, you're good.
48:55 Wes Larson? In a big cat, though. Not likely at all.
48:57 Mike Smith? Sure, but it's still something you'd want to investigate.
48:59 Wes Larson? You'd want to check for it.
49:01 Mike Smith? And the son of, well, this is a funny detail too. So they just left the hospital. They're a little nonplussed. They're like, well, I guess if the doctors say it's cool, then I guess it's cool. So the, the wife went to a store and bought like a bunch of iodine and bandages. And she dressed the wounds herself. Like they didn't even do that for him. They were, they'd like looked at him and they're like, you're good.
49:21 Jeff Larson? Insane.
49:22 Mike Smith? Go. And this, and the pictures of this attack are actually, it's not the worst attack you'll ever see, but there's some good, a good amount of lacerations and like bite wounds on this guy's arms and body, you know?
49:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:33 Mike Smith? So she dressed the scratches. His wife dressed his scratches and bite marks according to quote Dutch standards. I don't know how that's different from other places, but makes me kind of interested to see what that's all about.
49:45 Wes Larson? Yeah. She dressed them with tulips.
49:47 Mike Smith? Right. And uh,
49:48 Wes Larson? Is that the Netherlands?
49:50 Mike Smith? I think so. Yeah.
49:51 Wes Larson? Okay.
49:52 Mike Smith? And like a little windmill.
49:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:54 Mike Smith? Pattern bandage. Their eldest son picked up on what had happened eventually and he's like, whoa, hold on. Maybe the Chances are low, but we should probably get you checked for rabies. So a second visit to the hospital in Suriname showed that rabies vaccination wasn't available there, which is maybe why those first doctors were like, can't really do anything for you anyway. So maybe just get out of here. So they, uh, they contacted the, the couple contacted their travel insurance agency and they actually arranged for them to get back to the Netherlands quickly in order to get that side of the equation addressed, just in case, you know?
50:26 Wes Larson? Yeah.
50:26 Mike Smith? So thankfully the sun and this travel agency, uh, travel insurance agency, they were putting two and two together for them. And it looks like this incident is gonna get closed without any major complications post the attack. But still just a really strange.
50:42 Wes Larson? Tested negative for rabies.
50:44 Mike Smith? That's what we're guessing too.
50:45 Wes Larson? Okay.
50:45 Mike Smith? There was no follow up on this just yet.
50:47 Wes Larson? I think we would have heard about it had it. A rabid jaguar would be a really crazy thing.
50:53 Mike Smith? Yeah, right.
50:54 Jeff Larson? Oh, it's kinda like when jaguars attack someone.
50:58 Wes Larson? Me too. It's really interesting. When you said you were doing a jaguar story, I was, I was excited to hear it. Less excited now that it's over.
51:05 Mike Smith? Yeah.
51:06 Jeff Larson? It's crazy. She just had a gun.
51:08 Wes Larson? Yeah.
51:08 Jeff Larson? Suriname, it'd be hard to like get a gun, right?
51:11 Mike Smith? She might be.
51:11 Wes Larson? Yeah, she must have been American.
51:12 Mike Smith? We know he's from the Netherlands, but we don't know specifically where she's from.
51:16 Wes Larson? When we were in Ecuador, Jeff just asked every single person that we met if they owned a gun or if they'd ever shot a gun.
51:22 Jeff Larson? For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about guns.
51:27 Wes Larson? You're a gun guy.
51:28 Jeff Larson? Yeah. All right. I got a story. I took this from our guide when we were in India, Nahal. Just his Instagram story he shared the other day.
51:37 Wes Larson? All right. Digging deep.
51:40 Jeff Larson? But in Karala village in India, there was a sparrow that was freed from a lockdown textile build, uh, textile store. And the building was locked down on court orders, uh, due to like a legal dispute between store owners. And it had been locked down for like six months. When a sparrow went down a pipe and got trapped inside of like this clear box inside of the store. So then the next day, the villagers could. See the sparrow stuck in like this clear box in the store, but the store was locked down. So there's no way to like, release it. So they could just like, see this bird trapped in there trying to get out.
52:23 Jeff Larson? And it really like, pulled on all their heartstrings and they felt really bad. And they like contacted authorities, but no one had legal precedents to like, open the store that was judge's orders closed down. So they started dropping in water and bird food through the pipe to get it to the bird to keep it alive. And it went on for three days of them just feeding this bird that was like stuck on display for everyone to see. Until it finally got to the local judge, Nasar Ahmed. And he had to tell two judges above him that like, hey, we got like, big trouble down here in this town. We got a bird, we gotta get it.
53:05 Jeff Larson? So the judges told him like, they honestly told him to do whatever is needed to get the bird out. So then the next day, he traveled all the way to the village. It was like, uh, 50 kilometers away to like oversee it himself. That he is there, that it's gonna like, open the store up and we'll get the bird out. And they got it out and it flew off and the whole town like rejoiced. So I don't know.
53:32 Wes Larson? I love that. That's a nice story.
53:34 Jeff Larson? It's a good one of just showing, you know, we should have compassion for all living things. And that, they were quoted saying that a lot, you know? Even if it's something as, that seems as insignificant as a sparrow. Like nothing should be trapped and tortured and all living things should be treated with respect.
53:54 Wes Larson? Yeah, like ants or beetles or whatever.
53:58 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
54:00 Wes Larson? Alright.
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55:53 Wes Larson? I got one more. This one I titled April Fool Circus Worker Loses Arm to a White Tiger. This happened on April 1st. Something that I know Jeff and Mike already know, but a lot of people out there might not. There are no white tigers in the wild. A white tiger in the wild would be a lucistic tiger. It is possible. So there's a difference between that and albinism. When you're lucistic, it's like you are missing melanin. I forget what it is exactly, how to explain it, but those two things are different. Albino things usually have like pink eyes. They're completely white. Lucism or when you're lucistic, you're still gonna have like normal eye color and stripes and stuff. I don't know.
56:31 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
56:31 Wes Larson? Again, I'm stumbling.
56:32 Jeff Larson? They're not albino. They're just like white.
56:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, exactly. So while it is possible.
56:38 Jeff Larson? Interesting though, because all the dire wolves in the world are white.
56:43 Wes Larson? Yeah, they're all lucistic. While this isn't impossible for it to happen in the wild, having that trait would be really disadvantageous to a tiger because it would make it far less camouflaged. That tawny like orangish color of their coat really helps them camouflage into their environment. And a white tiger would stick out much more. So that's my guess.
57:04 Jeff Larson? Bright orange sticks out, dude.
57:06 Wes Larson? When we watched them in the bush in India, they were like, they were hard to see, I thought personally. When they're like in the grass and stuff. And that's my guess is for why this hasn't been selected for more often. And why you don't really see them in the wild. So there are a lot of them in captivity. And that's because breeders think they look cool. So while I'm not trying to paint with too broad of a brush here. If you go to a zoo or something that has white tigers, there's a pretty decent chance it's not a very responsible zoo. Your alarm bells should go up. Okay. It's a short story, but basically during a circus performance in the city of Tanta, Egypt, a worker put his arm through the bars, the performance area, while the big cat performance was ongoing.
57:48 Wes Larson? One of the white Bengal tigers immediately broke off, bit his arm and started pulling him through the bars. Um, there's a video of this and the tiger's going really hard trying to rip this guy's arm off. And it's not even registering that there's people like hitting it with whips and stuff, trying to get it to stop.
58:05 Jeff Larson? Wow.
58:05 Wes Larson? The video is pretty crazy. And at some point it does release the arm. The man was taken to a nearby emergency hospital, but his arm was so shredded and destroyed that it had to be amputated above the elbow.
58:16 Jeff Larson? I've always thought that sound sounded bad.
58:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's not. That's not good.
58:23 Wes Larson? What part of it?
58:24 Mike Smith? Like a tiger bites your arm and they have to amputate. I just, I've always felt like that's like, something I would not want to have happen.
58:31 Wes Larson? I think you can trust your feelings on that one.
58:35 Jeff Larson? You feel vindicated?
58:37 Mike Smith? Yeah.
58:39 Mike Smith? Well, I want to hear what this guy has to say.
58:42 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
58:42 Mike Smith? Before I make up my mind.
58:44 Jeff Larson? And even then, that's like a sample size of one.
58:47 Mike Smith? Exactly.
58:48 Jeff Larson? Cause sometimes it might be like, you know, I was in sales and I was doing bad, but then when the tiger bit my arm off, I like refocused me and I became the best salesman in the office.
59:01 Mike Smith? Yeah. Or like that Harrison Ford movie where he like, a bullet gets lodged in his brain and he turns into like a wholly different person. He's like a way better guy after the bullet.
59:11 Wes Larson? Maybe he used to like hate his kids and he can't hate his kids anymore and becomes a better dad.
59:16 Mike Smith? Right.
59:17 Jeff Larson? I played a guy in basketball who only had one arm and he was like better than everyone. Maybe he'd get good at basketball.
59:24 Mike Smith? See?
59:24 Wes Larson? You know what? You guys have convinced me. I'm gonna chop my arm off after this episode.
59:30 Wes Larson? I will just say, and I think this probably goes without saying at this point, we've talked a lot of, about a lot of the good that, you know, accredited good zoos can do. Circuses are a whole different animal. If you have, if you go to a circus where they have like trained animals that are performing, it's very, very likely that those animals are being abused, that they're not being treated well. You should avoid circuses with animal performers unless domestic animals are kind of a different situation often, but wild animals are not treated well in circuses. So don't, don't give them your money. Don't go to them.
1:00:02 Mike Smith? I won't.
1:00:03 Wes Larson? That's my last story. Yeah. What else do you guys have?
1:00:06 Mike Smith? That's all I've got. I saw a couple of interesting headlines. Nothing, I don't know. I thought it was really, really interesting and kind of cool, if I'm being honest, that there's that huge pod of killer whales that killed a pygmy blue whale recently. I didn't know that was a thing that could happen. Yeah. It was like 60 killer whales all teamed up. Yeah. I just, you think about blue whales, even the pygmy. I know that word's like kind of a misnomer sometimes in nature, but that's a pretty, pretty wild thing that a bunch of killer whales just coordinated that kind of an attack.
1:00:34 Jeff Larson? I have a few headlines. This one is just, I, it's, the news needs to do a better job. In Colorado, a woman died like a few months ago. And it was like reported a bunch of times that like they didn't know what had killed her. It could have been a wild animal. They think it's some type of canine and uh is like this big ongoing thing. And it turns out it's just like her neighbor had like a ton of really vicious dogs. And one of them killed her. And but like they just reintroduced wolves to Colorado and they're doing this whole like wolf thing. Like wolves killed, might have killed this lady and it was like pretty obvious they'd had it.
1:01:13 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:01:13 Jeff Larson? So do a better job news. I have a couple of other headlines. An orangutan bit a worker in the Seattle Zoo this March. Bit him really hard. They had to go to the hospital. So, you know, whenever I see an orangutan bit someone, I'm gonna bring it up. A Cody Mooney attack.
1:01:30 Wes Larson? Quodamundi.
1:01:31 Jeff Larson? Quodamundies be wildin'. They attacked someone in Tucson and he went on a little hike. And then when he got back to his car, it was just like waiting on the hood of his car. They're really cute little animals. You should Google.
1:01:45 Wes Larson? Raccoon family.
1:01:46 Jeff Larson? Coda moon die.
1:01:47 Wes Larson? Quodamundi.
1:01:49 Jeff Larson? Quodamundi. But if you wanna spell it the way it's.
1:01:53 Wes Larson? People often call them quodis if that's easier for you.
1:01:57 Jeff Larson? But when he got back to his car, it just like tore his windshield wiper off of his car. I'm thinking maybe it had some road rage, like maybe this person like cut it off or something. Cause that's a total road rage move. And then it like scratched and bit him and he had to get rabies shots.
1:02:14 Mike Smith? Well, aren't they just like raccoons kinda a little bit?
1:02:17 Wes Larson? They're very similar, like a raccoon with a long nose and a skinny tail.
1:02:21 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:02:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah, so that's, that's my headlines. I think next news episode, I want listeners, if you see any, send them to me. But I think it'd be funny to have one where it's just like complete fake news. How like social media has been doing that a lot recently. Just like the fake news. Creighton sent me one of like a turkey that it said traveled from. Orata to Alaska and then he's like, oh, sorry, that's fake.
1:02:50 Mike Smith? Yeah, I'm happy to do that, but we are going to let you know which ones are fake. Just so everyone knows, you can trust us with that. All right, you guys good? Should we move on to our categories?
1:03:01 Wes Larson? Let's do it.
1:03:01 Mike Smith? First one is your favorite mad scientist from pop culture because of those crazy mad scientists at colossal biolabs. I'm gonna go with Viktor Frankenstein. I know it's probably a little predictable and boring, but it's one of my favorite books. I think he specifically as a character in that book, like it's very romantic, not like love. There's some love going on in that story, but like romantic era, kind of overly emotional outbursts from Viktor himself. And it's just a really fun read if you kind of put your, get yourself into the mood of like people just being overly dramatic about everything. But again, timeless tale, all kinds of philosophical, religious themes going through all that text. It's just, it's beautiful. It's great. I love it.
1:03:43 Wes Larson? Okay, I'm gonna go with Seth Brundle from The Fly, played by Jeff Goldblum in the Cronenberg masterpiece.
1:03:50 Mike Smith? That's so sad.
1:03:51 Wes Larson? Probably the best body horror movie in my opinion, but uh, yeah, he, you know, he creates this teleporter and then a fly gets in there with him and things go really, really poorly for him and, and his love interests. So.
1:04:04 Mike Smith? Gina.
1:04:04 Wes Larson? Great movie. Yeah. And a great mad scientist.
1:04:07 Jeff Larson? Yeah, somehow I prepped for these and I forgot to do this one. So the first person that came to mind was Boris from GoldenEye, Alan Cumming.
1:04:17 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:04:18 Jeff Larson? Where he's like, oh, he's like, I'm invisible.
1:04:21 Mike Smith? Yeah. Clicking the pen.
1:04:23 Jeff Larson? Yeah. I don't know if he counts as a scientist. He is a scientist.
1:04:27 Wes Larson? Like a programmer or coder.
1:04:28 Jeff Larson? He's like more of a coder.
1:04:29 Mike Smith? Yeah, computer scientist, what we could say.
1:04:32 Wes Larson? We'll count it.
1:04:33 Jeff Larson? Throw out a couple others that you thought.
1:04:35 Mike Smith? Pinky or the brain.
1:04:36 Wes Larson? Pinky and the brain.
1:04:37 Mike Smith? Yeah. Dexter from Dexter's Lab.
1:04:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:04:40 Jeff Larson? Is there any in one piece? That's always like a.
1:04:42 Mike Smith? Vega Punk. Vega Punk is the guy.
1:04:44 Jeff Larson? I don't really know him enough yet. I haven't watched the newest ones.
1:04:47 Mike Smith? Is Frankenfurter from Rocky Horror Picture Show? That's always fun to think about. I have a lot more fun thinking about that movie than watching it personally. That might be blasphemous, but.
1:04:57 Wes Larson? Dr. Moreau, um, Dr. Heckle.
1:05:00 Jeff Larson? Sure, I'll just take one of those.
1:05:02 Mike Smith? Dr. Heckle.
1:05:03 Jeff Larson? Is there any in The Simpsons?
1:05:04 Wes Larson? Doctor Evil. Oh, yeah. Um, Doctor Frank from The Simpsons.
1:05:08 Jeff Larson? I'll take Doctor. Yeah, I'll take that guy.
1:05:10 Wes Larson? That's a great pick. I like that. Good job, Jeff.
1:05:15 Wes Larson? All right. Uh, next one is just a pretty open-ended one. Something you recommend this week. I, you know, I think sometimes it's just fun to be able to recommend something we're, we're liking. I'll go first. I had been watching the newest season of The Righteous Gemstones, which I kind of think might be the funniest show ever. It just really gets me on so many different levels.
1:05:37 Jeff Larson? It's just like, no one's ever talked that way, but it kinda works.
1:05:41 Wes Larson? It's so funny. And the more it goes on, the more I like the characters. Like Jeff, I think it was last season was like Judy Gemstone is the funniest. And I didn't think so. And now that I think about it, like she really is. She's so funny. And it's just a great show. So I'm gonna recommend that.
1:05:59 Jeff Larson? Oh, I was, I had one that's more like a, I don't recommend doing this, actually.
1:06:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's good.
1:06:05 Jeff Larson? The Blue Origin space trips?
1:06:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:09 Jeff Larson? Like if you're, if you're a celebrity looking for some buzz, I think it's a bad idea, actually. You know, Katy Perry's getting a lot of hate right now. She like made it a whole marketing thing too, where she revealed her like set list for her tour. And then kissed the ground right when she got down and stuff. And you know what? I would just recommend not going into space if you're off it. Because like, it's kinda, it's kinda cringy.
1:06:36 Wes Larson? Yeah. Have you guys read that William Shatner quote? No, what is it? So when he went to space with Blue Origin and it just made him insanely depressed. Cause he just was like, I expected it to be this beautiful thing. And it was just this massive void that felt cold and alien. And it made him realize like how wonderful the earth is and how like poorly we're treating the earth. Uh, he said, "It was among the strongest feeling of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day we're confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of earth at our hands." And he goes on and on.
1:07:16 Mike Smith? That makes me think we should all go.
1:07:17 Wes Larson? I know. Yeah, serious. Anyway, I like that one. It's a good one, Jeff.
1:07:22 Mike Smith? It's a little cringey. I'll agree with Jeff on that.
1:07:29 Jeff Larson? Going to his face is cringe.
1:07:31 Mike Smith? It's cringe. Kind of cringe, dude. I don't know. I'm gonna go with a YouTube channel I discovered recently. Stevo, what is it? Stevo32Drums. It's the original drummer for Sum 41, made his own YouTube channel. And he does like a lot of cool song breakdowns and he plays along to the old songs and just has like a ton of fun stories. And I know, I think we're all three real big fans of the band. I'd recommend anyone else who is. I think a lot of our listeners are too. He's just a funny dude. Anyone who knows, like has watched a single music video from them, he's the guy you think is the funny one. And he just hasn't lost a step since, so.
1:08:05 Jeff Larson? Are you still practicing drums, Mike?
1:08:07 Mike Smith? Not actively. Not as much anymore. I'll sit down at the kid every once in a while.
1:08:11 Jeff Larson? After your concert, he retired.
1:08:13 Mike Smith? Yeah, I got embarrassed by a bunch of seven-year-olds. I did pretty good. But those guys, they were like a prodigy in that group. I didn't, it was crazy.
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1:10:16 Mike Smith? All right, next we got sports with Jeff. Jeff wants to talk about sports.
1:10:28 Jeff Larson? All right.
1:10:30 Jeff Larson? All right. So yeah, I just want to do a quick minute on sports because I think it's interesting right now. This is kind of getting to the dead season a bit, but you know, the Warriors just won their playing game the other day. And Steph Curry is just so fun to watch and I'm gonna have a hard time watching NBA once he's done. Uh, Jokic has made like three full court shots this year, which is always fun. And it's just, I don't know, NBA is gonna be fun. I think it's like the first time in a long time where like nine teams could win the championship. So that's always fun. We got F1 going.
1:11:03 Mike Smith? Love F1.
1:11:04 Jeff Larson? F1 and uh, McLaren's dominating for the first time in a while. So that's kind of interesting.
1:11:10 Mike Smith? Is that expected? I haven't been following really at all.
1:11:13 Jeff Larson? I don't know. It's, I don't think they're expected to like dominate until like right before the season. And then Mike.
1:11:19 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:11:19 Jeff Larson? Your favorite team is like leading baseball.
1:11:22 Mike Smith? My guys, the pods. I didn't want to talk about it, but we actually lost last night. So I feel like I'm not jinxing anything. We're here, we're uh, back on the uphill climb right now, but we are somehow. Like our division, Padres, Giants, and Dodgers all have the three best records in the league right now. And it's really stressing me out, but it's fun. I'm gonna enjoy it while it lasts. I love the team.
1:11:42 Wes Larson? Drinking that, that toxic algae.
1:11:46 Mike Smith? Hit dinger after dinger off that. I gotta get some of that algae. Make me a better podcaster, maybe.
1:11:52 Jeff Larson? Oh, and also Rory McIlroy won the Masters and there's like.
1:11:56 Mike Smith? Golf clap for Rory.
1:11:58 Jeff Larson? Became like the fifth golfer ever to win all four majors and is just like
1:12:02 Mike Smith? Sixth.
1:12:03 Jeff Larson? One of the biggest like monkeys off monkey off their back moments in sports. So that was kinda fun. He started like yelling at the ground as loud as he could.
1:12:15 Jeff Larson? Thank you for catching my golf balls.
1:12:19 Mike Smith? Is that what he was saying?
1:12:21 Jeff Larson? You got anything Wes?
1:12:22 Mike Smith? From sports? Not that good. Thanks.
1:12:26 Wes Larson? I saw Steph Curry got on stage with Paramore the other day. That was cool. That's it. That's all I got.
1:12:31 Jeff Larson? What'd he do?
1:12:32 Wes Larson? He sang.
1:12:33 Jeff Larson? Just like stood there?
1:12:34 Wes Larson? Part of a song with with Haley.
1:12:36 Jeff Larson? Oh, Steph Curry did?
1:12:37 Wes Larson? One of my top celebrity crushes. Yeah.
1:12:39 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Huh, that's kinda interesting.
1:12:41 Mike Smith? Alright, we gotta check that song out. I wanna know if he hit those notes. Haley's a singer? She's she's got a voice. She's got pipes.
1:12:49 Jeff Larson? Do you have a favorite NBA player Wes?
1:12:51 Wes Larson? Currently, probably Donovan Mitchell.
1:12:54 Jeff Larson? Oh no.
1:12:54 Wes Larson? Speaking of big heads.
1:12:55 Jeff Larson? Number one in the East.
1:12:57 Wes Larson? Yeah, good guy. I liked Curry a lot. Curry's probably.
1:13:00 Jeff Larson? His head's not that big.
1:13:03 Mike Smith? It's like a dire wolf. It's like a little bigger than usual.
1:13:06 Wes Larson? Okay, let's do an old favorite of mine. We're gonna do truth and flaw, which was renamed thanks to a great suggestion by a listener. This is a category where one of the boys has come up with a true truth about an animal, a fact, and the other one has a fake fact that's been cleverly disguised to look like it's true. And I have to suss out which is the truth and which is the flaw.
1:13:30 Mike Smith? Okay, do you want me to kick things off Jeff? I'm ready.
1:13:34 Jeff Larson? I gotta look mine up again.
1:13:37 Mike Smith? Okay, so common knowledge, starfish, they have eyeballs at the end of each of their arms. They also have primitive smelling olfactory senses at the base between each of their arms as well.
1:13:48 Jeff Larson? Like at their shoulders?
1:13:50 Mike Smith? I guess you could call them shoulders, yeah.
1:13:52 Wes Larson? Stems.
1:13:53 Jeff Larson? Uh, turkeys, so they're not known for like being able to fly much, but the furthest they can fly before they just get like way too tired out is like about a thousand three hundred twenty feet.
1:14:07 Mike Smith? A thousand three hundred and twenty feet?
1:14:09 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:14:11 Mike Smith? I know starfish have like olfactory organs or like receptors at least, but I don't know exactly where they are, but I would guess they're on their feet. So I'm gonna guess that Mike's is true and Jeff's is the flaw.
1:14:27 Jeff Larson? We got it on record, yeah.
1:14:30 Wes Larson? Shoot.
1:14:30 Mike Smith? Face palm.
1:14:32 Wes Larson? What was yours, Mike?
1:14:33 Jeff Larson? Turkeys can fly a quarter mile, which is a thousand three hundred.
1:14:38 Mike Smith? That's a good way to, yeah, throw him off with a specific number.
1:14:42 Wes Larson? Did you look up to make sure yours isn't also true, Mike?
1:14:45 Mike Smith? Yeah, they don't have noses. They don't have smelling sensors at all.
1:14:49 Wes Larson? Okay, but they do have receptors, right? I'm gonna type this.
1:14:53 Mike Smith? Not from, if you, I'll, I'll wear this gladly if you can prove me wrong, but in any case, that's not where they're located.
1:15:00 Wes Larson? They have specialized receptors primarily on their tube feet to detect chemicals in the water. Okay, alright.
1:15:09 Mike Smith? So you lost, Wes.
1:15:09 Wes Larson? It's pretty close to true, but yeah, I lost. I lost. I'll, I'll take my L. Thank you for truth and flaw. And let's do some listener questions. I've got some from Patreon here. First of all, this one's from Abby Rose. Who would each of you be in the Jedi Council? P.S. I like how Jeff and Wes say grandma instead of grandma. Do you like that, Mike? How we say grandma?
1:15:33 Mike Smith? I think that's a pretty normal thing, right?
1:15:35 Wes Larson? I think so too, yeah.
1:15:36 Mike Smith? I think that's how I say it, grandma.
1:15:38 Jeff Larson? People say grandma?
1:15:40 Wes Larson? I guess, I don't know. Who's in the Jedi Council?
1:15:45 Mike Smith? You know what's weird about grandma and grandpa? And then you pronounce that one city Tulsa, even though it also ends in an A? Why don't we say grandpa or Tulsa?
1:15:56 Wes Larson? I'd be that dude with the big cone head or the super long neck. Yeah, I want the cone head guy. He seems like he's kind of, actually, he seems like he's a buzzkill. I'll take the really long neck guy. That's who I want.
1:16:08 Mike Smith? He's the only one I could think of that isn't Yoda and Mace Windu. I'll just go cone head guy. He's just chilling.
1:16:15 Wes Larson? Yeah, there's, there's one of the ones that has like the little things, the little tubes on the side of their head.
1:16:21 Mike Smith? Can you pick Anakin? Cause he's on the council, but he's not granted the rank of master. I'll pick Anakin.
1:16:27 Wes Larson? You wanna kill some young wings?
1:16:28 Mike Smith? Right. Oh, yeah, I do. There's that one kid in Ecuador. Oh my gosh.
1:16:34 Wes Larson? There's a kid that cried for like ten seconds.
1:16:37 Jeff Larson? It wasn't even ten seconds.
1:16:41 Wes Larson? Jeff, you got a pick or you just?
1:16:43 Jeff Larson? I'll have a couple.
1:16:44 Wes Larson? Someone on the Jedi Council that you would pick?
1:16:47 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah. One of the ones with like the big, long, like, tentacles for hairs.
1:16:53 Wes Larson? Yeah, I like those.
1:16:54 Mike Smith? Those guys are cool.
1:16:55 Wes Larson? Okay. This one's from Ally. Ally says, question, I think I remember at one point hearing Wes collected bones. How does that work? Is any dead thing fair game? Like vultures specifically? No. You have to be very careful when you're collecting animal parts of any kind. Certain animals, you can collect their bones, their hides, whatever, without any kind of repercussions. But anything that's protected, you can't. So if you found like a grizzly bear skull out in the wild, you can't just take it home and keep it. And then they said vultures specifically was in this question. Birds, you really, there's very few birds that you can collect anything from because they're protected under the migratory bird act.
1:17:36 Wes Larson? So you can't collect feathers from most birds. You can't collect bones, any kind of parts whatsoever. You're not allowed to collect unless you have a permit for it. So you need to be really careful with that. Okay. This one's from Dylan. Dylan says, I love the crossover episodes. Just curious to hear what kind of podcasts you guys listen to? What kind of podcasts are you guys into?
1:17:57 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I mean, I think we've done this a few times, but it's always nice to shout them out. I mean, I love National Park After Dark. They have a new one that's called Watcher Cook. That's great. All about like women history. And then one that all three of us love is the Rewatchables.
1:18:12 Mike Smith? Yeah, great show.
1:18:13 Wes Larson? I feel like I usually listen to podcasts only on long road trips and I tend to go for ones that have a really strong story and are often true crime. So the one that I've shouted out a lot on the podcast is In the Dark, which is one of my favorite long form ones. Another one I want to shout out though is Blowback, which is a podcast that's all about kind of, like this is gonna kind of show my leanings again, but just kind of like messed up stuff that the US has done in interventionism, like the Iraq war, a few things like that, where they really dig into kind of the history behind those conflicts and how like the CIA's involvement in all those kinds of things. The thing. So blowback is a really good, interesting pod that I, I recommend for everyone, especially the, the season on the Iraq war.
1:18:57 Mike Smith? I've been getting into more long form video essay content on YouTube as opposed to podcasts recently. A couple of like really good video game ones. You don't necessarily need the visual element to, you can just listen to it. From, uh, Action Button has some amazing stuff. Tokimeki Memorial Retrospective is maybe the best long form video I've ever seen on YouTube. Just incredibly entertaining and just a fun thing about something I'm not really that interested in. But, you know, you, you hear about something and you get interested in and that's, that's what learning is all about, you know? Another guy I like is your favorite son. And there's another content creator. She's a trans woman named Contra Points.
1:19:36 Mike Smith? I don't know. She just gets me thinking about really interesting new things that I would never otherwise have like a good perspective on. If not for someone like that, who has a completely different point of view on life than me. And I think she's done a pretty amazing job of just uncovering and talking about sensitive things in a way that really works for me. So, yeah.
1:19:55 Wes Larson? We definitely need that more than ever right now. So, yeah, that's great. All right. I got one more from a patron. Uh, Mike, this one I picked specifically for you. You might want to pull up your list of things you hate. This one's from, this one's from Abby. Abby asks, what's something you hate? Where you feel like your hate is very justified, but other people don't understand or don't think it's justified. Like a hot take, but specific to hating something. Mine's golf. That's not mine. That's Abby's. Yeah.
1:20:23 Mike Smith? Interesting. Something that I hate that I feel is actually justified?
1:20:27 Wes Larson? Yeah, that you feel is very justified, but you think maybe other people won't understand.
1:20:31 Jeff Larson? I mean, golf works for Mike.
1:20:34 Wes Larson? Yeah, or disc golf.
1:20:36 Mike Smith? I like watching golf a lot.
1:20:38 Jeff Larson? Okay.
1:20:39 Mike Smith? So one, this is maybe a little too specific, but I genuinely hate the song. I love the band MGMT, one of my favorite bands. I hate the song Kids. I can't stand it. I freaking hate that song. It's dinky little like lead synth line. It's so basic and it's so dumb. It sounds like a two-year-old wrote it. And I actually think that's kind Of the point, the two musicians, Andrew and Ben, and they just kind of happened to have one of the biggest hits of the 2000s kind of thing. All of their other music is incredible, especially their second album, Congratulations, one of the greatest albums ever put to wax. But that song specifically pisses me off. The way like his voice strains when he says, "Take only what you need from it."
1:21:21 Mike Smith? Oh, my gosh, please, take me now. I hate it. People love it, too. That's like, everyone knows that song. That's like their song, you know? And it's easily their worst. Kind of like Marcy Playground and Sex and Candy, their worst song. I can't stand that song. The rest of their catalog's great.
1:21:38 Wes Larson? I love that song. Jeff, what's something you hate that a lot of the people might like?
1:21:42 Jeff Larson? I think maybe texting as like the main form for like a actual conversation. If it's like something you like, need to kind of work out a bit with someone and have like multiple things said back and forth. Texting, I just kind of hate. I much prefer a phone call. And I think most people prefer texting.
1:22:05 Mike Smith? That's a good one, because I know you're right, and I still disagree.
1:22:08 Wes Larson? I know.
1:22:11 Wes Larson? I was thinking about picking phone calls for my answer, because I just really don't like talking on the phone. I'll go with, actually now I'm drawing a blank on what my answer was. I've got a good one that is a recent thing for me. And ever since kind of having pets that I really care about, I hate personal fireworks. I really like a good fireworks show when you go to like a place where it's been planned and everyone knows there's going to be a fireworks display and everything. I really don't like when people in their yards do a ton of fireworks for the 4th of July or whatever. Because it really, really stresses out animals a lot. And don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that hates fireworks. I actually really enjoy a good fireworks show.
1:22:56 Wes Larson? But I think personal ones are just never fun enough or good enough to like justify the stress that we're giving animals and the fire danger and all of that. So, kind of makes me feel like a curmudgeon, but I don't like personal fireworks anymore.
1:23:09 Jeff Larson? Well, I have one. I don't know if it works or not, but I want to say it.
1:23:13 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:13 Jeff Larson? The TSA, I feel like most people are glad it exists because it's like, remember like nine eleven and stuff?
1:23:20 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:20 Jeff Larson? But for me, it's like, whenever someone's like, let's get rid of TSA, I'm like, yes. I hate all of that. Just, it feels so fake to me and you can't have like a travel sized anything. My sunscreen every time gets taken away.
1:23:36 Wes Larson? All right, uh, Jeff, you got a couple of listener questions for us?
1:23:39 Jeff Larson? I do. So this is from our Instagram and I just asked it, so I'm going off the cuff a little bit here. Okay, from, okay, from Vanilla Bryce ninety-eight. Scariest face you've seen? I did it face themed. I don't know. I was kind of just like, what should I theme this? Just went with faces.
1:24:01 Wes Larson? Scariest face you've seen?
1:24:03 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Maybe should we do like animals or just ever?
1:24:07 Wes Larson? Just from anything. One that stands out for me is a horror movie face. Can I do that? Can it be a fake face or does it have to be a real face? Uh, there is this series on Netflix that I don't think many people watch. It was French. It was called Mary Ann. And there was a jump scare in that of like a woman that turns over and she had a horror movie like face unlike anything I've ever seen. And it really, really got me. And I think about it all the time still. It's a really scary costume. And that's one of my scarier ones.
1:24:40 Jeff Larson? Not ghost face and scream.
1:24:42 Wes Larson? Smile two, no, no, it doesn't get me. The movie Smile two had a really scary like demon face too. So, yeah.
1:24:50 Jeff Larson? Uh, for me, it's a rattlesnake. If I stare at a rattlesnake too long, I get freaked out.
1:24:56 Wes Larson? This is, this is a really personal one. It's not, it's a little weird, but I had a dream when I was little. Uh, that I walked in on my sister who had died from drowning. And her face is all like contorted and like discolored and stuff. And that, her face stuck with me for years after that. And I had nightmares about it for like, probably for five years. After having had that dream. So that's like a weird, specific one to me.
1:25:25 Jeff Larson? Yeah, your sister's face in your dream.
1:25:27 Mike Smith? Yeah, scary. You should have seen it. But here's one you guys can check. It's a De Goyer painting Saturn devouring his sun. I just think that's a really haunting, scary face.
1:25:37 Wes Larson? He was so hungry, just had to eat his own sun.
1:25:39 Mike Smith? Eating him. It's bad to do. I've always thought that's bad.
1:25:44 Jeff Larson? Andrey Ellis asks, what's your favorite face feature? Uh, I can start us off. So, we're just in Galapagos and I really liked with the marine iguanas. They have like a little thing inside their face that just like stores up the salt from when they're diving. And then they sneeze it out. And I actually saw a couple of them sneeze and is really cute. So I like that facial feature.
1:26:08 Wes Larson? I like noses. I feel like more and more I've come to really appreciate how unique noses can make people really beautiful in a very distinct way. And it's always-
1:26:18 Jeff Larson? Did you like Michael Jackson's nose? More like-
1:26:21 Wes Larson? His fake nose?
1:26:22 Jeff Larson? Before or after?
1:26:23 Wes Larson? I liked his early nose. I was about to say, I think it's kind of a tragedy that a lot of people with really unique noses feel like they need nose jobs. Cause I think, uh, I appreciate a, a nice nose. So-
1:26:35 Mike Smith? Don't change that nose. It never works out. Like the Dirty Dancing girl, Jennifer Grey, is that her? Or Barbra Streisand? Don't do it. We like you. We like you just fine.
1:26:44 Wes Larson? Keep that schnoz.
1:26:46 Mike Smith? Your schnoz, your original schnoz. I like teeth, especially sharp teeth. Like a good canine. When humans have like some vampire teeth going on, Wes has got some good bottom ones especially. Those are great. That's exactly the kind of teeth that gets me going, Wes. Thanks for showing me those.
1:27:00 Wes Larson? You're turned on.
1:27:03 Jeff Larson? Sick.
1:27:03 Mike Smith? But yeah, I don't know. I think, I think not abnormal is a weird word to use, but just unusual teeth are fun for me to look at.
1:27:11 Wes Larson? Our brother's a dentist and I asked him how much I'd have to pay him to shave my teeth into points and he said he wouldn't do it. But then I found his number. He was lying. So he would do it. Thirty thousand.
1:27:25 Mike Smith? That's not bad.
1:27:26 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Alright, last one from Kate D. Polio. Uh, Pa- Polio. Probably not Polio.
1:27:34 Wes Larson? That's an interesting last name, but I won't say anything.
1:27:37 Mike Smith? I thought we got rid of Polios.
1:27:39 Jeff Larson? I don't know if it's supposed to be Kate or Kate D or Katie or Kate D. Because it's like Kate D E.
1:27:47 Mike Smith? Just say every De Polio, De Polio, it's probably like an Italian name, Kate De Polio.
1:27:52 Jeff Larson? Best facial scar in pop culture.
1:27:55 Mike Smith? For me, it's Omar from The Wire.
1:27:57 Jeff Larson? Oh, that's a good face scar, man.
1:28:02 Mike Smith? His real scars too, which makes it even cooler.
1:28:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's a good one. I have a hard time not doing One Piece. I'm gonna have to say Zorro, his eye scar is so cool.
1:28:13 Mike Smith? Oh, you think that's cooler than Shanks though?
1:28:15 Jeff Larson? Shanks is cruel, dude.
1:28:17 Mike Smith? Sweet. Uh, mine's from an anime too. It's Tokiko from Busaranken. She's got like a perfect scar right across the bridge of her nose. I just think those are so cool, like that perfect, I kinda want one. If anyone wants to give me one, I give you permission. Toshiro from Busaranken.
1:28:32 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I want like a cat. I want a Shanks scar.
1:28:36 Mike Smith? We should give each other the scars we want, because I think it's lame if you do it yourself. You know?
1:28:41 Wes Larson? We should start doing physical stars and scars instead of emotional ones.
1:28:45 Mike Smith? Exactly.
1:28:46 Jeff Larson? Buy that bear costume that they like destroyed their car with and give yourself the face scar with it.
1:28:53 Wes Larson? Just perfect. Four lines.
1:28:57 Jeff Larson? I can't really think of, Luke has, Luke's is interesting in Star Wars where he like crashed a car in real life. And then they like had to make that scene with the yeti, so that he gets a face scar.
1:29:12 Mike Smith? I like how they, um, Harrison Ford's scar on like below his lip. They gave that a backstory in Last Crusade when young Indy whips himself in the face.
1:29:22 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah, that is cool. All right. Uh, is that good? We good with listener questions? Okay, I, one thing I just wanted to add to these news episodes, since we don't have like a conservation corner for these. I just thought it'd be kind of fun to bring up a nonprofit that we really like. I already brought up Grizzly Bear Foundation earlier, but we recently were in the Galapagos and we toured the Charwood's, the Charles Darwin Research Station where they're doing. Doing a lot of cool work with giant tortoises with trying to figure out different ways to fight invasives on the Galapagos. It seems like kind of a one stop shop for doing a lot of different research and conservation around the Galapagos, which are such an amazing pristine
1:30:04 Wes Larson? set of islands with so many interesting wildlife species. And I was really impressed by their work. So I think if you are someone who is interested in maybe donating some money toward something like that, Charles Darwin Research Station got gets my stamp of approval.
1:30:19 Jeff Larson? Looking to like make their they're looking to improve their setup right now. So it'd be like a good time to donate and Tooth and Claw, how much are we going to donate Wes?
1:30:31 Wes Larson? I don't know. How much?
1:30:33 Jeff Larson? Two thousand?
1:30:34 Wes Larson? Sure.
1:30:35 Mike Smith? I'll match you anywhere up to $50,000 Wes.
1:30:38 Wes Larson? We're coming up with the better way to do this.
1:30:39 Jeff Larson? Tooth and Claw has some money set aside for donations. So yeah, I think we're gonna donate a couple of thou- or a thousand, two thousand bucks to it.
1:30:49 Wes Larson? I think the best way for us to do it too is we might be doing like matching donations. We're working on the best way to do this, but I think we'll probably do a matching thing where we'll match donations up to a certain.
1:31:01 Jeff Larson? Thank you to our listener Molly. Molly sent us some money to help us like with donations. And like we've been giving money to attack victims. We can increase that and probably start doing some more to get them help with medical bills and stuff. So yeah.
1:31:16 Wes Larson? Yeah. But personally, I'll send him a hundred bucks. Mike?
1:31:19 Mike Smith? I'll give I'll give what you give Wes because you seem to have good a good tack on that.
1:31:24 Wes Larson? And then Tooth and Claw, we'll get we'll get that sorted out. I think we really like the idea of donating to places that we visited, places that we've taken trips to. We're going to come up with a really good way to do that. And Jeff, I think your number that you threw out is definitely fair and we'll figure out a way to motivate people to also donate. Great. Alright, thanks guys. Thanks for listening, everyone.
1:31:46 Jeff Larson? Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you want to subscribe, Mike just did an Eagle Ray episode that, you know, it was, it was pretty good.
1:31:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:31:55 Mike Smith? It gets good by the end. I'll say that.
1:31:57 Jeff Larson? It was a really fun ending, I thought. A really fun game we played at the end. It was a great episode. We have a lot of fun on those, so, you know, if you like having fun, join us for as long as you can. And if you run into financial troubles, just cancel it, you know?
1:32:13 Wes Larson? Yep. It's 10 bucks a month. You'll get access to a lot of extra content. I think over 100 episodes at this point, probably well over 100. A quick note that we've said this in the last few episodes, if you are signing up, do it on your browser, do it through Google or wherever, and then download the app. Because if you sign up through the app on Apple's App Store, they're going to charge you an extra 30%.
1:32:37 Jeff Larson? Alright. Thanks, guys. Love ya.
1:32:39 Wes Larson? Bye. See ya.
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